Paul Chaleff at SWPK Gallery in New York — Solidity and Assemblage April 29 – June 13, 2026

Some artists you encounter once and never stop thinking about. Paul Chaleff is one of those. I first came to know Paul's work while making The Art of Joy Brown — a film in which he appeared as a fellow artist and a genuine voice on the relationship between sculpture, material, and meaning. His presence in that project was characteristic of everything I have come to associate with him: considered, unhurried, rooted in a depth of practice that takes decades to build.

Paul Chaleff is one of the pioneers of wood-fired ceramics in America — among the first to build an anagama kiln on American soil, returning from Japan in the late 1970s with a practice shaped by ancient traditions and a sensibility entirely his own. His work is held in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Renwick Gallery at the Smithsonian, and the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, among many others. In 1980, his ceramics were exhibited at the White House.

He works from his home-studio in Ancram, New York — Upstate, close to the land, close to the material — and his sculptures carry that proximity. Mass, balance, restraint. Clay shaped into structures that feel as though they have always existed and have simply been waiting to be found.

This spring, Paul exhibits alongside Sylvia Wald at SWPK Gallery in New York in an exhibition called Solidity and Assemblage — a pairing that is as intellectually precise as it sounds. Where Chaleff works with a single material brought to its fullest possible density and presence, Wald — a pioneer of Abstract Expressionism and assemblage who lived to ninety-six — built her works through accumulation: plaster, wire, string, fish bones, feathers. Weight against gesture; permanence against delicacy. The exhibition runs April 29 through June 13, with an opening reception on Wednesday, April 29, from 6 to 8 PM.

If you are in New York, go. Paul Chaleff is an artist whose work rewards time and attention. This is a rare opportunity to see it alongside a sculptor of Wald's historical stature, in a gallery dedicated to precisely the cross-cultural and cross-generational dialogue that makes art worth following.

SWPK Gallery — The Sylvia Wald & Po Kim Art Foundation More information: swpk.org

That is the post. Clean, personal, grounded in your history with him, and generous with the institutional context without turning it into a catalogue entry. Shall I add focus words and metadata?