Daniel Nuñez's 'Misfits' Exhibition Debuts in NYC, Celebrating Nonconformity and Creative Freedom

GR gallery is pleased to present ‘Misfits’, the first New York City solo exhibition by Daniel Nuñez. The exhibition brings together a new body of work comprising paintings on canvas and drawings, offering an in-depth look at the artist’s most recent explorations.

In 'Misfits', Nuñez examines the subtleties of everyday life through a lens of irony, freedom, and quiet rebellion. His works transform ordinary situations into spaces of creative tension, where personal expression emerges against the constraints of social norms. By amplifying the overlooked and the familiar, Nuñez reveals the wild, instinctive energy that often lies beneath the surface of the commonplace. The exhibition is dedicated to those who exist outside prescribed systems of conformity: individuals who choose independence over acceptance, who bend rules without crossing into transgression, and who embrace solitude as a form of freedom. ‘Misfits’ celebrates the untamed spirit of artists and thinkers who follow their own path, resisting the pull of the mainstream in favor of authenticity and self-determination.

The opening reception will take place on Friday, January 16, from 6:00 pm to 8:00 pm (Exhibition Dates: January 17 – February 14). Press members may contact GR gallery for a private viewing  and/or interviews with the artist before the exhibition officially starts. Visitors who wish to attend the opening reception may RSVP by contacting the gallery. The artist will participate in the opening reception.

For an extended period, Nuñez’s practice has engaged with the complexities of everyday social experience, articulating both the tension inherent in the pursuit of individual autonomy and the affective dimensions of liberation. In ‘Misfits’, the artist departs from this focus to examine and formalize the internal conditions of such a process. The work seeks to register intangible forces—psychic energy, emotional states, memory, and both physical and metaphorical sites—that contribute to the formation and realization of  this liberation. The conceptual shift is accompanied by a significant transformation in visual language. The pictorial approach becomes increasingly intense, visceral, and primal, as figuration progressively dissolves and gives way to abstraction. While the smaller works and drawings still retain a connection to a recognizable realism and Nuñez’s signature style, this anchoring begins to dissolve in the exhibition’s most representative series.

The four large-scale canvases that constitute the core of ‘Misfits’ maintain the fundamental elements of the artist’s visual lexicon while radically reconfiguring compositional structure and spatial organization. These works advance a design freedom that is simultaneously forceful and controlled, achieving a balance between expressive intensity and formal restraint. As such, the series marks a decisive moment in Nuñez artistic evolution and possibly an initial step toward a more profound and transformative reorientation of his practice.