PATRON Gallery announces our participation in EXPO Chicago with a two-artist presentation of Chicago-based artists Alice Tippit and Miao Wang. Representing distinctly conceptual approaches to painting, each artist addresses the gulf between what we see and its interpretation.

Our presentation highlights Wang’s recent watercolors on paper, expanding on her innovative approach to painting as a document of place and time. Wang’s delicate watercolor paintings are developed through the repetitive physical engagement with sheets of synthetic YUPO paper, water, and pigment. The layers upon layers of nearly translucent washes, capture minute shifts within the physical conditions and environment of the studio, traces of dust, light, temperature and humidity. Created in Wang’s Chicago studio over the winter of 2025-2026, the paintings’ nearly-photographic surfaces are created from their physical interaction with frost and ice, or in some, the still, barely shifting environment of the studio. Each painting oscillates from crystalline panes to richly archaeological landscapes, tender abstractions of the environment and physical conditions in which they were developed. Documents of the artist’s experience of a specific time and place, Wang’s works capture the incremental accumulations that impact our lives, in the way that our bodies bear the residue of personal emotions, memory, and experience. 

Alice Tippit’s graphic, intimately scaled paintings likewise reward close viewing. She relies on her own lexical storehouse of imagery pared down to essential shape and color, trading definition for ambiguity so as to allow for leaps between concepts similar to those that occur metaphorically in language. Deliberate, accidental, and incidental readings of the image are all possible. In this presentation, Tippit notes an unintentional theme in that each work could be seen, starting with Cavity, as something or someone to be consulted, through which a prediction may soon pass. Though each image appears ready to impart knowledge of some value, each still begs the question of its meaning. Clouds part, stars wink, blood sheds: throughout, each image picks at the silken strands of understanding.

Evocative and mysterious, Tippit, and Wang’s works belie gesture in favor of surface, yet bear the evident traces of their production. Careful not to reveal their immediate processes, both artists allow the edges of the works to reveal moments of human touch, settling their work as the direct result of material and physical experience with the world. Concurrent with Tippit’s first major institutional solo exhibition, Rose Obsolete at the DePaul Art Museum, and following Wang’s first solo exhibition with PATRON, our dual EXPO presentation signals moments of expansion and growth in both artist’s careers.