Morning Glory, 2026
Oil on linen
36 x 45 inches
Steven Steinman works where sensation gathers before it becomes thought. His paintings resonate within the lineage of Abstract Expressionism and Color Field painting, where gesture and atmosphere replace depiction, and the surface becomes an arena for internal time. Color arrives, breaks apart, and returns in altered form. The work also echoes later process-based practices, in which accident and structure coexist as equal forces. The surface becomes a field of listening, where gesture follows something just ahead of it, always arriving slightly late. Accidents open doors rather than interrupt them. From this continual unfolding, the work takes shape not as image, but as atmosphere—something felt before it is understood.
Barbara Davis Gallery is pleased to present INVISIBLE TERRAIN, an exhibition featuring the work of Yizhak Elyashiv, Ruth Shouval, and Steven Steinman. The exhibition opens Friday, June 26, 2026, from 6:30–8:30 PM.
There are places that do not announce themselves. They arrive softly—like remembered weather, like a name just out of reach. They are made not of ground alone, but of what gathers beneath it: memory, drift, residue, and the quiet weight of time passing through things. INVISIBLE TERRAIN traces these unseen places, where three artists move without map or compass, guided instead by what flickers at the edge of recognition.
Here, a line is never only a line. A field is never only a field. Each gesture becomes a listening device; each surface, a place where something once living continues to breathe. In conversation with postwar abstraction, process-based practices, and expanded drawing traditions, these works extend a language shaped as much by absence as by form. The exhibition unfolds as if the world were still forming—softly, unevenly, without conclusion.
For Yizhak Elyashiv, the earth is a memory that has not yet finished speaking. His practice echoes the lineage of cartographic drawing and conceptual landscape, where artists from Land Art traditions to contemporary diagrammatic practices have treated terrain not as image, but as a record of shifting perception. Between geographies, he moves through spaces that hold both arrival and departure at once. Fields carry the echo of those who worked them, left them, returned only in thought. In his drawings and mappings, observation becomes a kind of touching-at-a-distance—an extension of the conceptual impulse to make seeing itself unstable. What remains is not a view, but a presence: faint, persistent, almost like breath held in soil.
Ruth Shouval begins with what appears certain—circles, squares, edges, enclosures—and allows them to loosen, as if form itself were remembering how to dissolve. Her work enters into dialogue with the history of geometric abstraction and minimalism, where artists such as Sol LeWitt and Agnes Martin transformed structure into a site of contemplation rather than control. Yet here, geometry is not resolved but unmade. Stability drifts. Order softens. What once held becomes something briefly held, then released. In this quiet undoing, her work aligns with post-minimal strategies of repetition, erosion, and perceptual doubt. Memory does not stay still long enough to be fixed; it lingers instead as interval, hesitation, return.
Together, these works form a terrain that cannot be seen all at once, only entered. It reveals itself in fragments: a pressure here, a drift there, a rhythm that seems to belong to no single origin. The exhibition moves like a slow passage through what cannot be held—only sensed, crossed, and briefly known.
INVISIBLE TERRAIN is a quiet geography of what slips past naming. A place where seeing becomes a form of wandering, and wandering becomes a form of remembering.
About Barbara Davis Gallery
For 43 years, Barbara Davis Gallery has brought groundbreaking contemporary art to Houston. Driven by her intuitive sensibilities and perennially fresh vision, Barbara Davis has championed a generation of significant contemporary artists. In the process she has challenged a generation of art collectors, both seasoned and aspiring, to see the beauty and value in their work through dialogs and panel discussions with prominent museum curators and artists from across genres. She has launched the careers of international artists such as Julie Mehretu, one of the most important contemporary artists of our time, and Andrea Bianconi, who has become an international figure in the contemporary art scene, having given Mehretu her first gallery exhibition and Bianconi his first U.S. exhibition. She was also one of the first to bring to Houston the influential names of Joseph Beuys, Kiki Smith, Louis Bourgeois, Jonathan Borofsky, Günther Förg, Allan McCollum, Gilbert & George, Chuck Close, Robert Longo, Sally Mann, Jenny Holzer, Sam Gilliam, Jessica Stockholder, John Baldessari and Elizabeth Peyton among many others. She brought progressive international exhibitions such as Leipzig Select, artists from the New Leipzig School, and exhibitions for Beijing East Village artists Zhang Huan and Li Wei. Barbara Davis Gallery was one of the first Texas galleries to be included in the influential and prestigious Art Basel Miami Beach art fair. The gallery’s exhibitions have been reviewed in international publications such as ArtForum, Art in America, Art News, Flash Art International, The Art Economist, and The New York Times among many others. Her passion for exhibiting innovative contemporary art and her commitment to educating her collectors and the community has driven the focus of the gallery for 43 years.
Barbara Davis Gallery | 4411 Montrose Blvd | Houston, TX 77006 US
