August 22 - September 26, 2026

Galleri Urbane is thrilled to welcome Japanese artist Shinya Azuma to Texas for an upcoming residency at the Augustus Owen Foundation, and solo exhibition at the gallery. This marks the artist’s first solo show with the gallery, in partnership with Cohju Gallery based in Kyoto, Japan.

Fresh off a successful showing at Art Basel Hong Kong—and the launch of his new monograph and solo show that opened July in Tokyo—Shinya is bringing his vision to the Lone Star State. Shinya’s work is deeply inspired by his immediate surroundings, as well as current political and social climates. Coming right off the energy of the recent World Cup games, it will be fascinating to see how he interprets his environment here.

Watch:

Meet Your Art discusses Shinya’s artwork and practice

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A group of new abstract paintings pushes further into that uncertainty. Looser and more freehanded— arrived at without the projector and elaborate preparatory drawing that govern other bodies of D’Onofrio’s work—they present square-format compositions of fallen petals, as though a breeze had stirred them up and scattered them, disturbing what was once ordered. Brushstrokes quiver and

arc; smears of pigment form a blur of movement. The language approaches Abstract Expressionism in its vigor, but the spirit is more reminiscent of the whorls and arabesques of Persian miniaturist illumination. In these more abstract works, with their increased movement, energy, and dynamism, the viewer is allowed to teeter on the boundary between entropy and order. If we take the risk we remain alive to what might happen.

Underlying all of this, as in his earlier work, is the memento mori—the acknowledgment that splendor and decay are not opposites but phases. The bloom that erupts from the bucket is already, in some sense, doomed, falling. D’Onofrio does not belabor this; the paintings are too full of the pleasures of color and form to read as elegies. But a quiet wisdom emanates: the nadir is present in the zenith; the lushest things are also the most fugitive. The florist knows this. So does the painter.

Stephen D’Onofrio is a contemporary visual artist focused on painting. He received his BFA and MFA from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago in 2013 and 2016, respectively. In 2018, D’Onofrio was a finalist for the prestigious Hopper Prize. He has exhibited extensively in venues across the country, including galleries in Dallas, Boston, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Philadelphia. His work can be found in numerous private and public collections including Fidelity Investments, Estée Lauder, and the Clements Collection at UT Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas. D’Onofrio has lived and worked in Philadelphia since being awarded an artist residency in the city at Jasper Studios in 2017. His work is represented in the United States by Galleri Urbane, Dallas.

In this new body of work, the artist continues to draw from the subject matter of traditional still lifes, but with shifted focus from fruit to flora. The show, titled The Florist, looks to the abundance and rich detail found in 17th–19th century European stil lifes for inspiration. The work retains the shallow space and stark contrasts associated with that lineage, while exploring new compositions inspired from the color-rich displays of urban flower stands.

Some of these new paintings follow the still-life structures D’Onofrio often uses, while others move toward abstraction, where color, surface, and texture become more important than clearly defined subject matter. This shift gives him room to push the compositions in new directions and allows the color and visual texture that have always been part of his work to take on a larger role.

A clear example of this progression is a series of painted concrete vessels. These pieces resemble the containers seen in my flower stand paintings, but instead, the vessels themselves serve as the canvas. They function as decorative flower containers and as independent abstract objects. By turning this practical object into an art piece, I highlight and transform a subtle but foundational subject matter in my paintings.

Overall, this body of work feels like an entry point, a moment of change. It holds onto the quiet, formal language of centuries-old still lifes, while opening that structure up — allowing florals to become a way to explore color, visual texture, and form, and to move the work toward new kinds of composition and depiction.