Calida Rawles’ “Parallax” at Lehmann Maupin, New York: One Moment in the Water, Painted Three Ways

Stand at the edge of a pool and watch someone float. Take one step to the left and the light bends differently across their face; another step and the ripples hide an arm and reveal a shoulder. That small, everyday optical shift — parallax — is the subject of Calida Rawles’ “Parallax” at Lehmann Maupin in New York, on view in Chelsea from 15 October to 14 November 2026, with a reception with the artist on Wednesday 28 October.

The painter of water

Born in Wilmington, Delaware, in 1976 and based in Los Angeles, Rawles has become one of the most distinctive figurative painters of her generation by returning, again and again, to a single element. Her canvases show Black figures submerged or floating in water, rendered with a hyperrealist precision that dissolves, at the edges, into shimmering abstraction. Water in her work is never neutral. The gallery describes it as both a central material and a historically charged space, and her paintings hold those meanings together with themes of identity, memory, healing and belonging.

Institutional recognition has come quickly. Her first solo museum exhibition, Away with the Tides, opened at the Pérez Art Museum Miami in 2024 and travelled to the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, the Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens in Jacksonville and the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art in Atlanta. Her painting Like Other Gods with Ancient Rage (2023) is in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.

Inside Parallax: three paintings, one instant

The exhibition is built around a deceptively simple experiment. Rawles photographed her youngest daughter in a pool, taking pictures only seconds apart while she herself moved through the water. Each photograph records essentially the same moment from a different position. From these she made three paintings that differ in scale, structure and composition — less a sequence than a conversation between viewpoints.

In the gallery’s text, Rawles describes the project as considering “the relationship between perception and position,” and how proximity, distance, angle and movement can transform what we see. Other new works on the exhibition page, including Axis of Paradise, Call Me Back and The Geometry of Origins (all 2026), extend the same concerns.

What to look for in front of the canvases

• The edges of the figure. Notice where realism gives way to abstraction — where a limb becomes a band of refracted colour. That transition is where Rawles’ technique is most visible.
• Scale as viewpoint. Because the three central paintings differ in size, your own distance from each changes how intimate or expansive it feels. The show quietly makes you perform parallax yourself.
• Stillness. The gallery emphasises quiet and slowness. These are paintings that reward a long look rather than a phone snapshot.
• The mother’s gaze. The sitter is the artist’s child. Protection, attention and letting go are implicit in every angle.

Lehmann Maupin and a long relationship

Rawles and Lehmann Maupin have worked together across several cities. Her New York solo shows On the Other Side of Everything (2021) and A Certain Oblivion (2023) were followed by CURRENTS in Palm Beach (2023) and This Time Before Tomorrow in London (2025). Parallax returns to the gallery’s West 24th Street space in the heart of Chelsea, surrounded by the densest cluster of major galleries in the United States.

Why it matters

For painters, Parallax is an unusually transparent demonstration of how a photographic source can be transformed into something photography alone could not achieve: three paintings from three near-identical frames, each with its own logic. For collectors, it represents a new chapter from an artist whose museum profile now includes a touring solo exhibition and a National Portrait Gallery acquisition. And for anyone interested in how art handles representation, it offers a gentle but serious argument: that how we see someone depends on where we stand.

Visiting information

Lehmann Maupin, 501 West 24th Street, New York, NY 10011. 15 October – 14 November 2026. Reception with the artist: Wednesday 28 October, 5–7pm. Open Tuesday to Saturday, 10am–6pm. Telephone +1 212 255 2923, email [email protected].

See the official exhibition page and the artist’s page at Lehmann Maupin, our Parallax listing, and more New York and Los Angeles openings on Upcoming Art Exhibitions in Leading Galleries.