Opening reception: Thursday, June 11, 2026 – 6:00 - 8:00 pm

Gallery 14BC is pleased to present Pentimento, the first solo exhibition by New York-based painter Zelda Cherner, opening Thursday, June 11, 2026, with a public reception at 6:00pm. The show remains on view Friday and Saturday and closes Sunday, June 14

Cherer’s paintings hold the engineered line of the architect and the wandering hand of the gestural painter. Raised in Alphabet City by two generations of architects on both her mother’s and father’s side, she later attended an interdisciplinary program in Madrid, and currently works in her Brooklyn studio. 

Cherner builds her surfaces through alternation, working in oil and charcoal. Deliberate, ruled drawings give way to instinctive brushwork; biomorphic forms emerge from layered planes of high-value color. The works are then partially unmade: pigment is rubbed to expose what lies beneath. The result is a body of work where structure and intuition agree, paintings that feel both planned and discovered, engineered and happened upon. A charcoal line resurfaces. An earlier decision ghosts through. 

This is the logic of pentimento, the Italian term for the trace of an artist’s change of mind, a prior image refusing to disappear beneath the next. It is also the logic of the city that shaped her eye: cracked sidewalks, concrete, mosaicked street signs and weathered posters layered onto the city’s billboards. New York’s surfaces are pentimenti themselves, recording every hand and weather that’s touched them.

Cherner extends that vocabulary into oil and charcoal. Forming surfaces built to be undone, where the painting that arrives reads more like discovery than construction; something present in the material, exposed rather imposed. Each canvas becomes its own pentimento, a record of what was made, unmade, and what remains.

For press & sales inquires:contact@zeldacherner.com