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About the Exhibition
Salon 21 is pleased to present “Vignette,” a group exhibition, opening to the public on September 12, 2025. This exhibition will be Salon 21’s first in its new location at Water Street Associates (WSA) in the Financial District. The group show includes works by Ben Cowan, Allyson Keehan, Thérèse Mulgrew, and Carly Owens Weiss.
“Vignette" brings together four contemporary painters whose practices embrace the materiality of paint while reimagining the quiet power of stillness, symbolism, and personal narrative. Through hyperrealism, art historical references, and investigations of the body, the works in this exhibition elevate the overlooked, such as objects, gestures, textures, into richly constructed vignettes that confront the complexities of identity, memory, and representation.
About the Artist
Ben Cowan is a painter based in Brooklyn, NY. He received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from Indiana University. His series of framed paintings (created with hand-built, window-like frames adhered to the canvas made from aqua-resin) feature isolated hands, eyes, and symbolic ascensions, examining how personal objects and religious iconography form poetic systems of meaning within daily life.
Cowan’s paintings exist at a playful crossroads of object, illusion, and the transcendence that arises from devoted observation and perception. His work explores the mystical concept of a paracosm: an imagined world rendered so vividly that it feels real. Drawing inspiration from urban landscapes and Gothic architecture, Cowan handcrafts sculptural framed surfaces, merging observed locations, personal artifacts, and references to art historical abstraction. These elements come together to create paintings that blur the line between reality and illusion, embodying both the interpersonal and the supernatural.
