Jaqueline Cedar: Wave

March 20 – April 18, 2026

Opening March 20, 2026

The Empty Circle presents Wave, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Brooklyn-based artist Jaqueline Cedar (b. 1985, Los Angeles, CA). Bringing together a focused group of intimate acrylic paintings on panel, the exhibition considers how everyday images—glimpsed in passing or half-remembered—can shift between sincerity and interruption, capturing the fragile, dreamlike logic through which memories and perceptions take shape.

Working at a small scale, Cedar constructs scenes that feel both familiar and slightly estranged. Restaurants, highways, landscapes, and urban intersections appear as if recalled from memory rather than observed directly. Figures move through simplified spaces while architectural elements, signage, and fragments of landscape emerge with the clarity of a passing detail suddenly brought into focus. In these paintings, visible reality is not presented as stable or continuous, but as something subject to slippage, humor, and quiet emotional resonance.

Across the works in Wave, Cedar explores the tension between stillness and movement. Repetition of forms produces subtle visual echoes that suggest motion unfolding across time. In Dance (2026), a group of figures stretch across a luminous landscape, their gestures overlapping like frames of a slowed-down sequence. In Action (2024), lines of traffic recede beneath a web of glowing paths overhead, evoking the sensation of movement through space while simultaneously suspending the moment in an abstracted stillness. These compositions treat time not as a linear progression, but as a layered experience where perception drifts between observation and recollection. 

Throughout the exhibition, Cedar’s compositions maintain a careful balance between restraint and emotional charge. Her flattened spaces and pared-down figures evoke a calm, almost detached visual language, yet within this quiet structure moments of vulnerability surface. A rider and horse in Go (2026) lean forward with a sense of anticipation; a railway scene in Wait (2025) centers on the sudden burst of light where tracks converge, transforming a mundane environment into a site of suspense. By allowing subtle disjunctions to emerge within otherwise ordinary scenes, Cedar creates paintings that oscillate between the recognizable and the uncanny.

In Wave, Cedar approaches painting as a space where perception, humor, and emotional memory coexist. Rather than offering fixed narratives, her images invite viewers to linger in moments where meaning feels suspended—where a passing observation, a fleeting joke, or an inexplicable detail might suddenly carry the weight of a remembered experience.

About the Artist

Jaqueline Cedar (American, b. 1985 in Los Angeles, CA) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She received her MFA from Columbia University in 2009 and her BA from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2007. Recent solo exhibitions include Andrew Rafacz, Chicago, IL (2025); Shelter Gallery, New York, NY (2023, 2021); and Platform x David Zwirner (2022). Cedar’s work has been featured in recent and upcoming group exhibitions at Hollis Taggart (2026) and White Columns (2026) in New York, Blah Blah Gallery in Philadelphia (2025), and Serious Topics in Los Angeles (2024), among numerous others nationwide. She has exhibited at NADA New York and Miami, and her work is held in numerous private collections. Press features include Hyperallergic, Artnet, The Huffington Post, New American Paintings, and The Boston Globe.