Magenta Plains

Right off the grand plaza and the entrance to the Manhattan Bridge, where Gilded Age grandeur meets the honking, churning energy of Chinatown, Magenta Plains sits in a freestanding, three-storey building. The scale matches the ambition.

Inside, you’ll find painters, mainly abstract, who came up in 1980s New York — the ones who lived through the AIDS crisis and nuclear anxiety back when rent was still cheap. They’re showing alongside a younger generation arriving with their own urgencies: identity, justice, climate, the politics of the body. They may be decades apart, but they’re speaking the same emotional language.

Freedom isn't just a subject here — it's a practice. The work is ambitious, physical, and full of what paint can do when artists revel in it. Walk through the mix of rooms, intimate to cavernous, and you'll feel the pulsing spirit of downtown, past and present.

Magenta Plains was founded in 2016 by three artists: David Deutsch, an LA-based painter who made it big in the 1980s; Chris Dorland, a Montreal-born artist who'd been Deutsch’s studio assistant in college; and Olivia Smith, a gallerist with an art historian’s eye for contemporary painting. The gallery started as a storefront on Allen Street before relocating in 2022 to its current 4,500-square-foot, multi-floor Chinatown space at the corner of Canal Street and Bowery.