The Armory Show 2026: Bernard Childs

BANK is excited to return to The Armory Show with a solo exhibition of Bernard Childs’ (1910 - 1985) distinctive body of paintings from the 1970s, a pivotal decade in the artist’s career that saw Childs shuttling between Paris and New York’s legendary Hotel Chelsea. This presentation offers an opportunity to rediscover an artist whose work occupies a singular position within postwar American art, rooted in abstraction, yet animated by curiosity and a deeply imaginative engagement with nature, light, space, movement, and the unknown.

Childs work from the 1970s emerged within the context of geometric abstraction, yet consistently resisted the formal and conceptual orthodoxies of the movement. Rather than treating geometry as a closed system, he approached it as a means of exploring perception, sensation, and the unstable phenomena of the natural world. Geometry becomes fluid and atmospheric: planes shift, forms appear to expand and contract, and luminous fields of color seem to generate their own spatial logic. His idiosyncratic visual language oscillates freely between representation and non-representation, never fully settling into either. The result is a body of work at once rigorously composed and radically intuitive.

Childs’ paintings from this period are saturated with a surreal sense of cosmic energy, effervescence and transformation. Soft-edged geometric forms drift through fields of saturated, often unexpected color, producing spaces that seem simultaneously microscopic and planetary. Sherbet hues, optical fuzz, and unexpected juxtapositions introduce a distinctly playful dimension, while the underlying structures suggest deeper preoccupations with nature, science, and cosmology. In works such as Black Star and Progeny, color becomes both subject and architecture, creating depth and movement across the picture plane and drawing the eye through a constantly shifting spatial field. Childs’ paintings occupy an unusual territory between the cerebral and the hallucinatory, where formal investigation becomes a vehicle for speculation about the unknown.

This tension between order and unpredictability was rooted, in part, in Childs’ experiences during World War II. He served as a quartermaster aboard the destroyer escort USS Wesson in the South Pacific, spending long hours on the ship’s bridge meditating on the constantly changing relationships between horizon, sea, sky, and light. He survived a Kamikaze attack and, following the war, spent two years in intermittent hospitalization. These experiences left a lasting imprint on his understanding of space and movement. The horizon, with its simultaneous promise of infinite expansiveness and imminent peril, became an enduring point of reference, while light could suggest both transcendence and danger. His later encounters with the Northern Lights during summer visits to Stockholm further deepened his fascination with atmospheric phenomena, interplanetary life, and the mutable nature of perception.

After the war Childs’ career unfolded across the artistic centers of New York and Paris, where he maintained an active exhibition practice and developed a body of work that moved fluidly across painting, printmaking, and light sculptures. His institutional recognition began early, with a solo exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and participation in Documenta II in 1959. His work brought him across Asia and Europe with stops in Tokyo, Bangkok, and Mumbai.  In 1969, Storm King Art Center presented a major solo exhibition bringing together his paintings, prints, and pioneering light works, followed by a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1971. His work is held in the prestigious collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Moderna Museet, and the Smithsonian Institution among many others.

This presentation continues BANK’s exploration of artists connected to the Hotel Chelsea, following the gallery’s 2022 Armory Show exhibition of Ching Ho Cheng, whose estate BANK represents. A notorious and vital site of artistic exchange throughout the 1960s,1970s and 1980s, the Chelsea formed part of the cultural ecosystem in which Childs’ work flourished.