Rhythm & Movement

Nicholas Grassi & Leo Psaros

November 3 – 13, 2025

Opening Reception Friday, November 7, 6-8pm

A camaraderie instantly formed between Nicholas Grassi and Leo Psaros when they were assigned to share a corner of the Robert Lehman Studio, aptly nicknamed “Big Painting,” during their second semester at the New York Studio School.

Working from the figure every day, the pair’s studio floor quickly became slippery with oil paint as their practice entered a dialogue with one another. Ever-growing in size, both artists slathered more and more paint on their canvases with wide, rectangular marks of rich color, which they referred to as “blocky” brushstrokes. These blocks, or slabs, of oil paint became in tune with the rhythms traveling through the two artists’ surroundings. Ending the semester with six and seven foot-wide paintings with a staggering amount of paint on their canvases’ surfaces, energy and rhythm solidified as essential focuses of both Nicholas’s and Leo’s practices.

Now sharing a private studio, the pair are developing complementary, yet distinct bodies of work. As Leo works and reworks representational and non-objective paintings, he builds geometric space and form through planar shapes and rhythmic motion. Meanwhile, Nicholas paints Leo as he moves around his studio, capturing his studiomate mid-gesture over and over on the same canvas. The rhythms of Leo’s body movements as he works on large-scale paintings find their way into Nicholas’s expanded observational practice, while Nicholas’s large night paintings inspire Leo’s dark, subtle color worlds.

Both of their works dance with rhythms found from personal and shared experiences that inform one another’s work. United by a love for movement and energy, Nicholas’s and Leo’s paintings share a sensitivity for how form and color can create relationships and tension on the canvas.