Image: Richard Saltoun Gallery, London
Richard Saltoun Gallery will present 'Practices of Uncertainty', a group exhibition curated by Samira Abbassy, in New York from 9 July to 21 August 2026. The gallery describes the exhibition as beginning from the premise that the making of art starts without guarantees, bringing together four established artists whose work spans painting, sculpture and video. The show opens with a private view on Tuesday 9 July, 6–8pm, at Richard Saltoun Gallery in New York.
Abbassy, an Iranian-born, British painter who has lived and worked in New York City since 1998, frames the exhibition around uncertainty as a condition of artistic practice. In the gallery’s statement, she writes that artists develop methods, habits, rituals and forms of knowledge, yet making remains fundamentally uncertain, with the studio functioning as a place where intention meets accident and meaning emerges through discovery rather than execution. The exhibition uses that idea to connect four artists whose practices do not share a single style or medium, but are linked by sustained inquiry.
The installation includes works by John Dubrow, Sara Rahbar, Anahita Vossoughi and Abbassy herself. According to the gallery, Dubrow’s paintings usually begin without sketches or source material, allowing the process to shape the image and sustain a tension between figuration and abstraction. Rahbar’s work is grounded in what she describes as fracture, including the body, nationhood and memory, and the exhibition presents cast bronze limbs that the gallery says expose the normalization of violence in human experience. Vossoughi’s 'Exoskeleton' series began from books she read with her young son about arthropods and the idea of an exoskeleton as a form of protection.
Abbassy’s own practice in the exhibition is represented by intricately detailed figurative paintings and works on paper. The gallery says her work explores the human figure, animals and scenes of war through a visual language that merges European and Iranian-Persian artistic traditions, Christian iconography, Persian and Indian miniature painting, Chinese painting and Qajar court painting. It also notes her engagement with Jungian psychoanalysis and matriarchal lineage, and her interest in connections between individual memory and collective history.
Richard Saltoun Gallery situates the exhibition within its New York programme, while the gallery’s website lists locations in London, Rome and New York. The gallery’s newsletter also identified 'Practices of Uncertainty' as a New York presentation in its August 2026 mailing. The exhibition is one of the gallery’s current and forthcoming projects for the season, alongside 'The Studio of Felicity Powell' in London.
The works listed on the exhibition page include Abbassy’s 'Floral Mortal Coils' (2016), Rahbar’s 'The Victor / Confessions series / (legs)' (2014), Vossoughi’s 'Exoskeleton 4 Protection: Time Machine' (2021) and Dubrow’s 'Marty' (2024–2026). Richard Saltoun Gallery states that the group show runs from 9 July to 21 August 2026 at its New York space, with the private view scheduled for 9 July.
