KINDERHOOK, NY.- Jack Shainman Gallery is presenting Modus Operandi at The School, on view from May 30 through November 28, 2026. Bringing together work by nearly twenty artists across painting, sculpture, textile, photography and video, the exhibition considers method not simply as process but as a way of thinking. Its title, drawn from the Latin phrase for ‘mode of operating,’ reflects how an artist’s method becomes inseparable from meaning. Over time, recurring decisions, materials and forms of attention do more than produce an image or object. They establish a logic of their own. Modus Operandi brings together historically significant work by artists whose methods have shaped the course of their careers.
Rooted in long-running conversations between Jack Shainman and Angela Westwater, the exhibition treats several works as emblematic of its core themes, including Bruce Nauman’s All Thumbs (1996), a major sculpture constructed from life casts of the artist’s hands. The work renders the hand, an instrument of skill, touch and control, as a form at once comic, exact and estranged from itself, turning the artist’s own means of making into the subject. In Walk with Contrapposto (1968–2003), the body submits to a simple but punishing rule. Balance gives way to awkwardness as repetition becomes structure. In both works, method becomes the form of the idea.
Throughout the exhibition, artists unsettle what seems given in different ways. Richard Mosse’s monumental photograph Everything Merges with the Night (2015) transforms a landscape shaped by conflict, seen through military-derived infrared and thermographic technologies, into a surreal image of visual force and complexity. Rose B. Simpson approaches presence through a different kind of compression, using form, surface and scale to give figuration unusual stillness and authority. Susan Rothenberg brings that pressure into painting and drawing, from early seminal works on paper such as Untitled (Study for Triphammer Bridge) (1974) and Untitled #48 (1977), where the horse is subject to revision and cancellation, to later paintings Pillow (1984) and Dog Underfoot (1991). Her marks do more than describe. Rothenberg’s practice unfolds through a weighty give and take, marked by correction and alteration…