Palm Beach Modern + Contemporary 2026: Booth C1
Overview
Dean Borghi Fine Art is pleased to present Ladies of “The Club”, a focused selection of works by Mary Abbott (1921–2019) and Mercedes Matter (1913–2001) at Palm Beach Modern + Contemporary 2026. The exhibition brings together two painters who worked within the inner circle of Abstract Expressionism and whose careers developed along parallel but distinct paths within the Postwar New York art world.
Thinking through the well-documented social pedigree of its artists, the exhibition title borrows its prefix from the language of Anglo-American society writing to consider lineage, belonging, and legitimacy within the professional and discursive canon of Modernism. Seen together, Abbott and Matter offer complementary approaches that complicate narrow definitions of Abstract Expressionism, expanding our understanding of the movement’s origins, influences, and working practices. Spanning the years 1934 to 1988, the presentation traces both artists from early training to mature abstraction, situating these closely connected painters within the broader genealogy of the New York School. It teases out social terms of inheritance and belonging, displacing them into the history of Modernism to address the place of women within the selective, masculinist culture of downtown New York and its historicization, reified most clearly in the language, conventions, and discursive legacy of the Abstract Expressionist institution-turned-metonym, The Club. This March at Palm Beach Modern + Contemporary, Dean Borghi Fine Art formally introduces two of its principal ‘Ladies’.
