NEW YORK, NY.- kaufmann repetto announces Not So Still (1984-2026), Billy Sullivan’s seventh solo exhibition with the gallery.

Billy Sullivan emerges from a defining era in New York’s cultural history. Moving in close orbit with the likes of Andy Warhol and Nan Goldin, Sullivan is witness to a dynamic assembly of artists, poets, writers, and fashion models that shaped the 1960s-1980s. Known for his compulsive, almost devotional recording of his surroundings, Sullivan has built an expansive diaristic practice spanning over five decades. Across oil paintings; drawings in pastel, watercolor, and ink; and photographs and slideshows, his work resists hierarchy.

Sullivan invites us through his perspective, time is caught in suspension, slippery and sudden, both fluid and abrupt. These “still lifes” —a term hard to apply to the restless vitality of his mark— are never still but rather accumulations of frenetic gestures and vibrant pigments that parallel life’s unwieldiness. As Sullivan has noted, the speed of the mark mirrors the inevitability of decay: flowers wilt as they are painted, time collapses into gesture. These works become incidental monuments—intimate, unassuming, yet insistent—they bottle the ephemeral momentum underlying every instant, drawing together these intimate perspectives carefully woven over the years, a manifesto of life’s fleeting pleasures.

The two large paintings, completed this year, bookend the show’s memorializing themes even as they circumvent the still lifes’ allusive, indirect portraiture by putting the artist himself on prominent display. Billy, Max, and Sam, August 1976 (2026) features the earliest memory in the show, his sons, who were then nearly four and two years old playing together on Fowlers Beach in Southampton. Here, memory is not fixed but reanimated—revisited through the accumulated weight of time. Not So Still (1984-2026) becomes a reflection on the architecture of a life: how its meaning accrues not only in grand events, but through the dense constellation of fleeting, seemingly minor encounters. A galaxy of moments, each orbiting the next. The exhibition looks back without nostalgia, attending instead to the humble, persistent material of living. It offers a window into time as it is felt—uneven, luminous, and always slipping forward. As poet René Ricard once wrote in a 1978 review for Art in America, “It’s as if a whole life could be distilled into that afternoon when we had such a good time.”

Billy Sullivan (b. 1946, New York) has been exhibiting nationally and internationally since 1971. His work will be included later this summer in The Bowery: The Devil’s Mile at the New Museum, New York. Sullivan has had recent solo exhibitions at kaufmann repetto, New York (2023); The Madoo Conservancy in Sagaponack, NY (2021); kaufmann repetto, Milan (2019); Rental Gallery, East Hampton, NY (2018); Monteverdi Art Gallery, Sarteano, Italy (2016); kaufmann repetto, New York (2016); Ille Arts, Amagansett, New York (2015); Galerie Sabine Knust, Munich (2014); Freymond-Guth Fine Arts, Zurich (2014); Nicole Klagsbrun, New York (2012); Baldwin Gallery, Aspen, Colorado (2011); Salomon Contemporary, East Hampton, NY (2010); and Regen Projects, Los Angeles (2008). His work has been featured in many significant group exhibitions, including: Lithos/Lethe (Stone/Oblivion) at Hydra School Projects, Greece (2025); Friends & Lovers at the FLAG Art Foundation, New York (2023); The Minotaur’s Daydream, organized by Anthony Cudahy for Semiose, Paris (2023); Drawing 2020, Gladstone Gallery, New York (2020); Pastel, organized by Nicolas Party at the FLAG Art Foundation, New York (2019); Ugo Rondinone’s I © John Giorno at White Columns, New York (2017) and the Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2015); GLAM! The Performance of Style, Tate Liverpool (2014); Open Windows, Addison Gallery of American Art, curated by Carroll Dunham (2012); and Whitney Biennial: Day for Night, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2006). Sullivan’s work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Parrish Art Museum, Detroit Institute of Arts, Norton Museum, Portland Museum of Art in Maine, Denver Art Museum, and the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College, among many other public and private collections.