Donyel Ivy-Royal at Jack Shainman Gallery, New York: Layered Paintings Between Graffiti, Poetry and Landscape

Some painters begin with a sketch. Donyel Ivy-Royal begins with a photograph he took of a street he once lived on, a friend’s face, a wall that has been painted over a dozen times — and then sets about burying it. By the time a canvas is finished, the source may be almost unrecognisable. That process of building up and tearing down drives Donyel Ivy-Royal’s “By the time the rain comes, we will be home” at Jack Shainman Gallery in New York, his first exhibition with the Chelsea gallery, on view from 5 November to 19 December 2026.

From Portland to Brooklyn

Ivy-Royal was born in Portland, Oregon, in 1993 and now lives and works in Brooklyn. His practice runs across painting, drawing, photography, sound, music and poetry, and he comes to painting by way of graffiti — a background visible in how he treats a surface as a place where marks accumulate and compete. He often works on found supports such as cardboard and yard signs, and studio sound recordings can be as much a starting point as images.

His rise has been quick. After a solo show, “Ceremony”, at Hide and Seek Gallery in Portland in 2024 and group exhibitions including “REGISTERED” at White Columns the same year, he had a solo presentation, “A flower in the ending”, at David Peter Francis in New York in early 2026. In January 2026 Jack Shainman announced that it would represent him; he had already appeared in “GENERAL CONDITIONS”, a 2025 group show at the gallery’s upstate space, The School, in Kinderhook.

Paintings that refuse a single reading

The press release describes work rooted in places he has lived and travelled through: weathered walls, urban sprawl, trees, mountains and open country, including the landscape of the Pacific Northwest. Photographs of cities, street life and time spent with friends are the raw material, but the finished paintings drift far from their sources. Figures, buildings and landscapes slide between the legible and the abstract; images are broken apart and reassembled; surfaces carry the history of everything that was painted and removed.

Writing in Independent HQ earlier this year, critic Joseph R. Wolin observed that his pictures “toggle between representation and abstraction” — a fair summary of the experience of standing in front of them. You think you see a figure in a doorway; a moment later it is a smear of enamel over a scraped ground.

A tag, a poem and a layer of paint

One of the most interesting claims in the gallery’s text is about equivalence. Laying down a layer of paint, filling in a graffiti tag and writing a poem are presented as acts of the same importance. The work grows through repetition of gestures rather than through a plan. That flattening of hierarchies connects Ivy-Royal to the underground music, poetry and art scenes he moves in, where making things together matters more than the boundaries between disciplines. It also recalls a long line of New York painters who absorbed street language into the studio, from the downtown scene of the early 1980s onward — though Ivy-Royal’s palette and pacing are quieter and more introspective.

The wall in the middle of the room

The exhibition’s most ambitious element is architectural. At the centre of the gallery a dividing wall becomes a façade, combining a fresco with materials drawn from the studio and the street. The gallery links it to the walls he drew on as a child, and it changes how visitors move through the space — you have to walk around it, as you would a building on a corner. Alongside the oil paintings and ink drawings, it turns the show from a hang of pictures into a place.

The title, which the gallery leaves unexplained, has the cadence of a line of verse: a promise of shelter, said before the weather turns.

Why this debut matters

Jack Shainman Gallery has built its reputation on long relationships with artists such as Nick Cave, Hank Willis Thomas and Toyin Ojih Odutola, and a first solo show there is a significant marker for a painter in his early thirties. For collectors, this is the stage at which a body of work can be followed closely from the start. For painters, the show is a case study in how a found image can be a beginning rather than a destination.

Visiting information

Jack Shainman Gallery, 513 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011. 5 November – 19 December 2026; opening reception Thursday 5 November, 6–8pm. Open Tuesday–Saturday 10am–6pm or by appointment; phone +1 212 645 1701. See our Donyel Ivy-Royal listing and the official exhibition page, and browse more openings on Upcoming Art Exhibitions in Leading Galleries.