Press
Undercurrents: The Quiet Power of Depth & Detail
In the All About Nothing podcast, host Will Knight highlights Nathan Brad Hall’s Undercurrents at Gallery Victor—an exhibition captivating Chicago’s River North art scene with its layered textures and emotional depth. Knight praises Hall’s sculptural use of light and shadow, where every glimmer feels deliberate, revealing quiet beauty beneath the surface.
All About Nothing Podcast
Hosted by Will Knight
In the heart of Chicago’s River North district, inside the refined walls of Gallery Victor, a summer exhibition titled Under Currents has drawn critics, collectors, and art lovers alike. The show, filled with layered textures and emotional nuance, has become one of the most talked-about exhibits of the season.
Hall’s fascination with light feels almost sculptural. In one unfinished piece, he describes a deep blue damask wallpaper playing against the rich tones of a model’s skin. In another, a stark darkness frames a glowing face — each shadow intentional, each glimmer precise.
In a world saturated with images, Nathan Brad Hall’s work stands apart for its restraint, precision, and humanity. His paintings remind us that beauty often hides in the details, just beneath the surface — where the real undercurrents flow.
New Art Examiner: Figure of a Gentle Gay Manifesto: “Undercurrents”
Michel Ségard’s New Art Examiner review explores Undercurrents, Nathan Brad Hall’s exhibition at Gallery Victor, as a quietly powerful statement on identity, beauty, and emotional truth. Blending classical technique with contemporary realism, Hall’s male figures affirm queer experience not through provocation, but through tenderness and humanity.
By Michel Ségard
Throughout history, figuration in art has almost always been the carrier of a message—religious, political, or social—beyond the immediate appreciation of the human form. This dual content is what makes studying the depiction of the human figure so interesting, even in our post-modern era. Gallery Victor is known for showing figurative works that have roots in historical realism yet have a contemporary punch. This exhibition of works by Nathan Brad Hall is a prime example. Hall uses all the techniques of realism developed during and since the Renaissance-particularly chiaroscuro, the careful shading of skin to achieve precise modeling or the meticulous rendering of hair. But he mixes these techniques with subtle areas of impasto—to him, a nod to expressionism—to call attention to certain parts of a painting. The results are a series of large dramatic images of nude male figures that speak to much more than the beauty of the male body.
Read Full Review on New Art Examiner
Chicago Fine Art: NATHAN BRAD HALL - “Undercurrents” at Gallery Victor
In his Chicago Fine Art review, Chuck Gniech praises Nathan Brad Hall’s Undercurrents at Gallery Victor—a stunning exhibition of large-scale figurative works that blend Caravaggio-inspired light with raw emotional intimacy. Gniech highlights Hall’s ability to capture the human form with precision and vulnerability, creating cinematic compositions that reveal the quiet power of introspection.
By Chuck Gniech
I recently received an email from an old friend who wanted to make sure I knew about an exceptional exhibition that just opened at Gallery Victor in Chicago. He thought I’d be interested, given a series of large-scale male figurative paintings I created in the early 2000s—meditative works exploring the moments between sleep and waking. In those paintings, I used dramatic contrasts of light and dark, “chiaroscuro” inspired by my passion for the paintings of the Italian master Caravaggio. Naturally, I was excited to see the exhibition. So, this past weekend, I ventured out to the River North Gallery District to view the large-scale paintings and charcoal drawings of Nathan Brad Hall.
I wasn’t disappointed. The exhibition is visually stunning—filled with atmosphere, nuance, and a sensitivity to the human experience. Each painting offers a bold and emotionally defenseless rendition of the figure, inviting the viewer into a space of raw vulnerability. Hall paints human emotion—capturing quiet moments of introspection—the moments when we consider possibilities or confront our fears. Through subtle gesture and expression, Hall paints not just the human body, but the emotional undercurrents that run beneath the surface of the flesh.
Read Full Review on Chicago Fine Art
Undercurrents: Gallery Victor
Gallery Victor presents Undercurrents, a powerful exhibition of Nathan Brad Hall’s large-scale figurative paintings exploring the emotional energy beneath the surface of human experience. Known for dramatic lighting and expressive brushwork, Hall captures both intensity and vulnerability, blending realism and expressionism to reveal the charged stillness of the human form.
Nathan Brad Hall's work comes together in this show to build an undeniably jaw dropping experience for viewers. “Undercurrents,” says Hall, “is about trying to find a way to capture the underlying layers of emotion and have that emotion resonate outwards. It’s the hum of electricity just below the surface, pulsing and cracking that influences the way we move about in the world.” Based in New York and known for his large-scale figure paintings, Hall’s work offers glimpses into the intensity and vulnerability of being human. He says, "working at a sizable scale allows the viewer to become enveloped in the figure's deep humanity."
Hall's monumentally scaled work is defined by his use of dramatic lighting. In each work, he illuminates specific areas of the figure and their surroundings as the rest fades away into deep shadows. While his work displays Hall's knowledge and technique with realism painting, bits and pieces of texture pop out throughout the body of work. Highlights of selectively placed thick paint marks bring his work to a whole new level of depth. The selective marks reward viewers as they view the work up close, until they fade into the image from afar. Hall states, "Using both expressive and refined brush strokes of various thickness, my work uses the physical nature of oil paint to explore the balance of energy and stillness that can make the human figure come alive."
Nathan Brad Hall lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. With a background in both abstract and figurative studies, his focus today is on figurative oil painting, attempting to capture the light that illuminates us all. He has shown his work extensively in group and solo exhibitions in NYC and beyond and can be found in private collections across the U.S. and internationally.
Gallery Victor Artist Page (with Undercurrents Preview Book)
Gold Dust: Zillman Art Museum
The Zillman Art Museum introduces Gold Dust, a solo exhibition highlighting new large-scale paintings by New York–based artist Nathan Brad Hall. Renowned for his luminous realism, Hall reveals the tension between light and darkness, intimacy and distance. His richly textured surfaces and commanding figures invite viewers into quiet moments of vulnerability and human connection.
Gold Dust features a series of recent works by New York City-based artist Nathan Brad Hall. The artist is known for his realistically rendered portraits and figures. The majority of the paintings and drawings were created in 2022 and 2023 and are being exhibited for the first time in this solo-exhibition. Hall’s on-going preference for painting large canvases is demonstrated in Gold Dust, with the largest composition, King, spanning 80 x 120 inches. Hall states that he wishes to offer “glimpses into the intensity and vulnerability of being human. Working at a sizable scale allows the viewer to be enveloped in the figure’s deep humanity”.
Hall’s use of strong directional light is a hallmark of his paintings as his subjects seem to emerge from darkened environments. For instance, in the recent 2022 large-scale portrait, Wait for Me, the facial features of his red-haired subject are partially obscured in shadow. Hall states, “This interplay of light and shadow, paired with the complexity and illusion of color, drives me to capture these temporal moments with the fluidity of paint”. When the painter’s intense light source rakes over his subjects, the results are dramatic. In Kingdom Come, a shard of diagonal light illuminates the hair and forehead of his handsome sitter, while the remaining facial features, neck, and tattered t-shirt are shrouded within the shadow.
Lost, Love: Artist Statement
The Woodman Shimko Gallery features Love, Lost, a new collection by Nathan Brad Hall that reflects on moments when light, memory, and emotion intersect. Hall captures the fleeting space between shadow and illumination.
As artists, there are moments when the landscape shifts, and how we see the world— how we view ourselves—is fundamentally altered.
It can be the way a thin ray of light falls over a face, or how a body appears to descend into shadows while emerging into the light. It is these unexpected moments that can suddenly bring up emotion, stirring something deep and untethered. Sometimes it is memory, other times it is hope, and often still it is melancholy.
In Lost, Love, I strived to render these fleeting moments with a glimpse beyond the composition. Using both expressive and refined strokes, I explored the balance of energy and stillness that can make the figure come alive.
This interplay of the illusion of color with the illusion of light, drives me as an artist to capture it with the fluidity of paint. When two strokes of varying hues create depth and shape, it moves me to continue to add to this illusion. The physical world and the physical paint, juxtaposed against the inner world we carry with us.
Light Transcended: The Emotional Interplay of Light and Form Across Canvas & Print
In this artistic collaboration, photographer Brooke White and painter Nathan Brad Hall in a collaborative exploration of how light shapes emotion and perception. Through photography and painting, they reveal fleeting moments where shadow and illumination meet, creating a shared meditation on presence, transformation, and the search for meaning through light.
With Photographer Brooke White
How does an artist evoke the emotion that these words carry? And how do the different mediums of paint and photography each capture these fleeting thoughts while being firmly rooted in the present?
Photographer Brooke White and painter Nathan Brad Hall set out to find a common thread through their respective disciplines, using the commonality of light, space and environment to build a visual and emotional bridge across their individual work. At the heart of their collaboration is the desire to invoke and capture the mysteries that light can reveal, both physical and existential, and how the interplay of encroaching and receding shadows allow these brief moments and forms to exist. Light Transcended describes these fleeting moments, defined by light and time,that we carry with us.
Light Transcended’ consists of both small and large-scale works of photography and oil painting, with each artist bringing their own unique sensibilities and perspective to the challenge while being informed by the others discoveries and insights. All decisions related to the exhibition have been collaborative, allowing the show to grow into a reflection of not only the work, but the artists joint experience as well.