Nino Mier Gallery is pleased to present Dedicated to the low in heart, an exhibition of new paintings by Alexandria Tarver, on view at the gallery’s TriBeCa location from February 20 through March 28, 2026. The exhibition marks Tarver’s first solo presentation with the gallery.
This body of work is a continuation of Tarver’s flower painting series, which she began following her father’s terminal cancer diagnosis in 2013. At that time, painting deli bouquets became a means of survival for Tarver, a way to process her grief through repeated practice. Tarver’s work has since evolved, with her paintings now largely consisting of found flowers in neglected urban spaces, growing out of concrete and barbed wire. The prevailing meditative quality of her work owes in part to the resilience and spontaneity of her subject matter. Like the flowers themselves, the exhibition will grow organically as Tarver adds paintings throughout its duration.
Dedicated to the low in heart is a culmination point within Tarver’s oeuvre, showcasing the refined palette and atmospheric sensibility she has developed over the last decade. In her nights series, Tarver floods the canvas with electric blues reminiscent of the twilight sky, upon which darker colors are layered for a sense of infinite depth of nightfall. Looking further across the local landscape, the deep sea greens of north Atlantic waterways inform the fathoms paintings. Across the exhibition, the floral subject emerges with a luminescent quality achieved through the combined application and erasure of paint and forceful gesture. The resulting images reward sustained looking, asking the viewer to slow down and meet the work with humility.
The exhibition’s title takes after the dedication page of Frederick Newlin Price’s original 1932 edition of Ryder: A Study of Appreciation, a catalogue of American painter, Albert Pinkham Ryder. Ryder was a great American maritime and landscape painter working at the turn of the twentieth century. That Ryder’s paintings of murky, turbulent waters served as a point of reference may contradict the seeming preciousness of Tarver’s works. However, there is an almost oceanic grandeur to Tarver’s expansive use of rich, saturated tones. As is true in Ryder’s work, beneath the surface of Tarver’s paintings is her sensitivity to the world: its violent histories, current political turmoil, and their resultant uncertainty.
This exhibition features a significant number of larger-scale paintings that have pushed Tarver to question routine and force the audience to engage in a bodily confrontation with the work. The magnification of the floral forms draws attention to Tarver’s dynamic brushwork; winding, concentrated gestures that lend wilted petals a tense vitality reminiscent of Egon Schiele’s twisted limbs. In these moments, the flowers take on an expressive charge, containing grief, yearning, and rage in equal measure. Indeed, the works in this exhibition function as a form of self-portraiture, with this show requiring more transparency and vulnerability than Tarver has previously offered.
Tarver describes the phrase Dedicated to the low in heart as providing solace to the feeling of isolation she felt throughout her upbringing and into adulthood in an age of unfolding crises. This isolation is reflected in the flowers themselves; rendered in bodily hues, their compositional suspension accentuates their inherent ephemerality. Accessible yet emotionally charged, the works remain open-ended, inviting projection rather than prescribing narrative.
Accompanying the exhibition is a series of playlists titled Dedicated to the low in heart. Tarver began curating these playlists during the COVID-19 pandemic as a way to maintain connection with her friends from NYC’s underground music scene, from which she made her painting debut in the early 2010s with a series of drum kit still lives taken from attending live shows. Like the act of sharing of music itself, the playlists extend the exhibition’s ethos outward, serving as an invitation into slowness, reflection, the shared experience of solitude, and the reach towards connection.
Alexandria Tarver (b. 1989 Houston, TX; lives and works in New York, NY) graduated with a BFA from New York University in 2011. Tarver has held solo and two person exhibitions with Deli Gallery, Cooler Gallery, and Et al. gallery. The artist has also participated in group exhibitions with all of the above galleries as well as Alexander Gray Associates, Germantown, NY; GRIMM, London, UK; Marinaro Gallery, New York, NY; Public Gallery, London, UK; Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Arsenal Gallery, New York, NY; Alter Space, Mexico City, MX; Danziger Gallery Project Room, New York, NY.