Jack Shainman Gallery presents Modus Operandi at The School, a large group exhibition that brings together nearly twenty artists working across painting, sculpture, textile, photography and video. On view from May 30 to November 28, 2026, the show centers on method as a form of thinking, arguing that an artist's recurring choices in material, process and attention become inseparable from the meaning of the work itself.
The exhibition includes historically significant pieces that have shaped the careers of their makers. Bruce Nauman appears with All Thumbs, a sculpture made from life casts of his own hands that turns the instrument of making into the subject, and Walk with Contrapposto, a work built on a simple but physically demanding rule that transforms repetition into structure. Richard Mosse contributes a monumental infrared photograph of a conflict zone, while Susan Rothenberg brings early works on paper and later paintings where the horse is revised, canceled and reworked through pressure and correction.
Other artists explore structure, display and narrative through their own repeated languages. Elizabeth Neel builds paintings through layered gestures and dragged paint, while Amy Lincoln narrows her visual vocabulary to stylized motifs that gain meaning through refinement and repetition. Alexis Rockman and Mark Dion show how accumulation and classification shape environments, with Rockman's new panoramic work Inherit the Wind and Dion's Packrat condensing their shared interest in the consequences of human presence.
Memory and historical experience surface in the work of Faith Ringgold and Radcliffe Bailey, who use textile and object-based forms to connect material and narrative. Wolfgang Laib offers a meditative installation of wax towers, photographs and drawing, while El Anatsui's bottle-cap tapestries and Nick Cave's Constellation elaborate repeated elements into dense, luminous surfaces. Barry McGee builds rhythm and density through signs and symbols that recur across his practice.
Modus Operandi treats method not as a hidden process but as visible thought, where meaning emerges through presence, repetition and material decision rather than through explanation.
Image: 747 Heathrow. 72 × 96 inches, Digital c-type, 2008 © Richard Mosse
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