“Park Life,” a solo exhibition of paintings by Sage Schachter inspired in part by Tompkins Square Park on the Lower East Side, will open at the Tripoli Gallery in Wainscott with a reception Saturday evening from 6 to 8 and run through May 11.
The main exhibition space of the gallery was turned into a studio space where Schachter, the gallery’s current artist in residence, has worked daily since March 4, creating some of his largest paintings to date.
“I’ve done more in the past month than I did in my four years at S.V.A.,” he told a visitor to the gallery, which was cluttered with tables, paints and brushes, and tar paper taped to the floor.
After moving to the Lower East side, Schachter observed and photographed the worn surfaces of the park and its surrounding neighborhood — cracked pavement, peeling paint, and stained walls and streets. He then had the images enlarged and used the image transfer process to turn the photographs into the ground of the paintings.
“Throughout the process, the image degenerates a little,” he said.
© Sage Schachter, Zev Starr-Tambor Photo, Courtesy of the Artist and Tripoli Gallery
With the image as a foundation, Schachter then painted figures from the park over the image with “earthy tones that evoke weathered materials, oxidized surfaces, and the interplay between artificial and natural light,” he said in a statement. The result is complex and layered images. In one as yet untitled painting, a hooded figure sitting on a bench with a dog at his feet has been painted over the somewhat degraded image of a paint spill on the street.
“I’m really inspired by cave paintings and what the passage of time does to them,” Schachter said, pointing to a photograph in a book of a cave painting on which blue mold had accumulated over time.
Schachter and Tripoli Patterson, the proprietor of the gallery, had known each other for years, but it was when they connected recently in Costa Rica that the residency idea emerged. “I want to be able to enable artists. I feel like the job of a gallery is to create a platform and a space in which artists are not interfered with and their creative process is pure,” Patterson said.
Schachter’s original idea for the show was to recreate the Tompkins Square dog park in the gallery with benches and little ceramic dogs. “I realized that was impossible to do,” he said, “so I thought why not create some new paintings.” For a solo show in November he took the images from the streets and made them the subject of the paintings. “I wasn’t done with that concept yet. This feels like a real evolution from what those were.”
“Schachter invites the viewer to look at what is often overlooked with a newfound sense of wonder,” according to the gallery. “His subjects inhabit Tompkins Square Park, home to a wide range of personalities, energies, and modern day narratives.”
Schachter grew up in London and earned a B.F.A. from the School of Visual Arts in 2025. His November exhibition, “Mineral Spirits,” was at Walker Art Projects in TriBeCa. That same year his work was presented by Jeffrey Deitch and organized by American Art Projects in Miami. He has also shown in Italy, Switzerland, and London.
