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Oolong Gallery New York
Adam Rabinowitz GONGGONG
May 15 – Jul 4, 2026
4 Cortlandt Alley NY, NY 10013
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Oolong Gallery is pleased to present GONGGONG, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Los Angeles–based artist Adam Rabinowitz, inaugurating the gallery’s Tribeca location.
The exhibition takes its title from Gonggong, a distant dwarf planet orbiting beyond Neptune at the outer reaches of the known solar system. Named after the ancient Chinese deity associated with floods, chaos, and the tilting of the Earth, Gonggong occupies a territory where astronomy and mythology converge. Vastly remote yet visible, scientifically mapped yet largely unknowable, it exists at the threshold between fact and imagination. That threshold has long been the habitat of Adam Rabinowitz’s work.
For more than two decades, Rabinowitz has constructed pictorial worlds governed by uncertainty, transformation, and wonder. His paintings are less concerned with depicting reality than with revealing the instability of seeing itself. Forms emerge and dissolve. Images hover between presence and disappearance. Desert and coastal horizons open onto mirages, visions, and graphic signs. The familiar becomes strange, and the strange becomes unexpectedly intimate.
Built through processes of screen printing, staining, bleaching, and layered applications of color on linen, the works occupy an unusual territory between painting, printmaking, and textile. Images appear embedded rather than applied, as though absorbed into the fabric itself. Color migrates through the surface like weather, light, or memory. The resulting paintings possess an uncommon combination of material fragility and optical intensity.
Born in Israel and based in Los Angeles since 2008, Rabinowitz draws from a constellation of influences that includes the Sinai desert, animation, postwar abstraction, psychedelic music, science fiction, and the mythology of Southern California. Yet these references rarely settle into quotation. Instead, they circulate through the work as atmospheres, producing images that feel at once ancient and futuristic, intimate and cosmic.
Throughout his career, Rabinowitz has returned to recurring forms: floating eyes, mouths, clouds, rain, celestial bodies, radiant horizons, reflections, and mirages. These motifs function less as symbols than as transmissions. They suggest languages that can be sensed before they are understood. Works such as Alien Alphabet and Gonggong Music propose systems of communication that remain tantalizingly beyond translation, as though arriving from a parallel reality or a forgotten future. The paintings often resemble messages whose sender has disappeared. Like memories recalled years later, they remain vivid while resisting certainty.
The cosmological dimensions of this work have surfaced repeatedly throughout the artist’s career. In 2019, Rabinowitz collaborated with Friedrich Kunath in The Last Perfect Day, presented in A New Age: The Spiritual in Art at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, where themes of wonder, apocalypse, and cosmic imagination converged around references to Carl Sagan’s Cosmos. Those concerns persist here, though less as subjects than as conditions of thought.
Underlying the exhibition is an interest in realities that exceed immediate recognition. The paintings do not illustrate mystical doctrines, but they often inhabit a territory familiar to traditions of contemplation, where visible reality is understood as one layer of a larger and more elusive order. Looking becomes a form of wandering. Perception becomes a form of inquiry.
The works emerge through labor-intensive processes of printing and layering translucent color fields onto thin linen supports. Their gradients recall both atmospheric phenomena and the visual language of subcultural screen-printing traditions—from psychedelic concert posters and surf graphics to handmade garments and artist multiples. Rather than treating these histories as separate from painting, Rabinowitz allows them to intermingle.
In GONGGONG, color becomes atmosphere. Space becomes elastic. Narrative gives way to drift. The paintings encourage prolonged looking, unfolding slowly rather than all at once. Their surfaces seem illuminated from within, as though governed by laws slightly different from those of ordinary reality. Like the distant dwarf planet from which the exhibition takes its name, these works occupy the edge of the known world—not beyond it, but just far enough away to allow us to see it differently. They ask not to be decoded but inhabited.
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