June Kelly Gallery will present a memorial exhibition for the painter Sandra Lerner, who passed away in November 2025, opening Friday, February 6, 2026. Sandra Lerner was one of the earliest artists to be shown by June Kelly Gallery, beginning in a group show in 1988, with nine subsequent solo exhibitions, the last one held in 2023. Her large-scale paintings have, additionally, been used as backdrops and drop cloth-like floor surfaces for New-York-based Japanese dance performance pioneers Eiko and Koma, including at an event held at the June Kelly Gallery. In 1991, the dancers’ work, LAND, which premiered in the 1991 Next Wave festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, employed sets designed and painted by Lerner. Lerner’s spare, slow-to-unfold paintings of the time meshed with the earthy, almost glacial movements of the performers.
