SOPHIE KITCHING

Finding Beauty
Adler Beatty
curated by Erica Samuels
24 September - 25 November 2026
Adler Beatty, 34 E 69th Street, New York, NY 10021

Erica Samuels, in collaboration with Adler Beatty, is pleased to present Finding Beauty, an exhibition inspired by the human impulse to discover Beauty in the visual world. Beauty is often subjective and disparate, and ancient definitions of Beauty - as relating to harmony and balance - have long been upended by artists. Philosophers famously struggled to define beauty, thwarted by its dual abilities to entice both the eye and the mind.

Building on this long tradition of reinventing the “ideal”, advisor and curator Erica Samuels presents Beauty as the moment when color and form, self and other, memory and present experience come together.

Samuels posits that Beauty is an aesthetic experience that can be triggered by many different types of art, each of which offers a psychic reverie that can transport the viewer. One undercurrent of the exhibition is the collection of American artists on view, all of whom engage with ideas of beauty in unique ways. Samuels examines varying definitions of beauty and rejects the idea that there is one singular type of beauty that can be classified as “American.”

Across multiple works, Beauty becomes a force that is understood as an expression of the impulse to seek pleasure fulfilling the fundamental human need for intimacy. Beauty is what makes connection possible. These works assembled suggest that an aesthetic experience can become an act of care.

Finding Beauty invites visitors to reflect on the role of beauty in their own lives - the necessity of it, the longing for it, and the quest to define it for ourselves.