Published by Lehmann Maupin on the occasion of the exhibition The City Lights Can't Shine Quite like the Stars: Got So Far From My Raising I Forgot Where I Come From at Lehmann Maupin New York (March 14 – April 13, 2024).

Including some of his largest canvases to-date, the exhibition marks the artist’s second major solo exhibition in New York and constitutes a turning point for the artist. Known for his colorful paintings that capture the daily, yet intimate moments of contemporary life through figuration and portraiture, Niles’ new works embrace landscape, depicting the artist’s own inner world through a series of immersive, place-based compositions.

In this exhibition, Niles meditates on personal loss through an exploration of landscape, drawing inspiration from the colorwork of both contemporary painters like Kerry James Marshall and Richard Mayhew and Old Masters like Caravaggio. In these new works, rendered in vibrant, technicolor hues that construct a signature kind of chiaroscuro, Niles finds himself immersed in nature—in the trees of a remote field, near the shore of the sea, bathed in crisp light peeking through bare trees on a sunny winter’s day. “I paint what I know,” states the artist. In this body of work, Niles confronts our personal and collective lived experience during the years following the Covid-19 pandemic, at once emotionally nuanced and overwhelming. Through 11 paintings and a single sculpture—the first of its kind in his oeuvre—viewers encounter intimate spaces and memories.