James Cohan has opened The Brain is deeper than the sea, an exhibition of new work on paper by Spencer Finch, at its Lower East Side space in New York. The show runs from 2 November to 21 December 2026.

The title comes from Emily Dickinson, whose poem measures the mind against the sea and the sky. Finch has long worked with light, colour and perception, translating fleeting natural effects, the colour of a particular hour, the quality of remembered light, into painting, drawing and installation.

The new works on paper continue that enquiry at an intimate scale. Finch's practice often begins with a precise observation, a colour noted at a specific place and time, and then rebuilds it through layers of pigment and mark-making, so that the finished work holds both the observation and the memory of it.

The exhibition is the gallery's second New York opening in a week, following Tuan Andrew Nguyen's Sacred Forest / Rừng Thiêng, which opened on 30 October. Where Nguyen's show is built from the heavy matter of war, Finch's is built from almost nothing: paper, pigment and the light that falls on them.

Works on paper suit Finch's way of working. The format is direct and immediate, a place where a colour observation can be tested without the apparatus of a large painting or installation. The Dickinson title is a measure, not a metaphor: the brain set against the sea, the mind against the natural world, and the small scale of the drawings keeping that vast comparison close and quiet.