fate machine
May 23 - June 27, 2026
Moskowitz Bayse is pleased to present Fate Machine, an exhibition of new paintings by Los Angeles-based artist Noah Schneiderman. This presentation marks the artist’s first with the gallery, and will be on view May 23 - June 27, 2026. A fate machine is not an engine that predicts the future. It is a device that subjects matter to pressure until its latent image appears. In the alchemical imagination of Temperance, opposites are not reconciled by compromise, but by ordeal: fire enters water, water answers fire, and the vessel receives their contradiction until a new substance begins to form. Painting, for Schneiderman, proceeds through a similar operation:it is a furnace, a retort, a weather system, and a wound. It does not illustrate fate so much as manufacture the conditions by which fate might become visible.
The paintings begin before the image fully declares itself. Fabrics are cut, sewn together, stained, dyed, and joined into irregular fields, each seam carrying the memory of an incision and a repair. This sewing together is not merely preparatory; it is one of the work’s first acts of divination. Meaning is not placed on a passive surface, but pulled through a body already divided, sutured, and altered. In another body of work, oil is applied to oxidized copper, whose surface has first been subjected to fire, drawing out blooms, burns, stains, and mineral apparitions in the metal. . As with the sewn and dyed fabrics, Schneiderman does not impose an image upon inert material so much as enter into a pact with a surface already charged by transformation. The painting slowly becomes an instrument for extracting what was hidden in the weave, the seam, the oxidation, and the burn.
A skull drifts through an orange field of heat and dust and moons hover like coins. An angel gathers itself from soot and ash, beckoning you to meet their gaze. A volcanic mound smolders beneath a rainbow-bruised sky. Elsewhere, a cosmic train appears to move through a corridor of night, its rails descending into something at once carnival, pilgrimage, and dream.
These are pictures of exchange. Purification and putrefaction. Their surfaces carry the evidence of repeated transformation: vegetal dyes and pigments rubbed, lifted, buried, revived; forms appearing and withdrawing; images passing through color as if through vapor. The seams remain visible like fault lines or constellations, reminding us that each work is an assembled thing.
In this sense, Schneiderman’s paintings belong to the strange logic of the vessel. They hold incompatible elements together long enough for them to alter one another. Fate Machine proposes the painting as an apparatus of transformation: part loom, part altar, part cauldron, part oracle. Its purpose is not to reveal destiny as fixed, but to show fate in the act of being made.
Noah Schneiderman (b. 1996) is a visual artist based in Los Angeles. He has previously had solo and duo exhibitions at EUROPA in New York, NY; Solito in Naples, Italy; Gene Gallery in Shanghai, China; and The Valley in Taos, NM. He has also shown internationally at Kutlesa Goldeau in Switzerland; Soho Revue in London, UK; and Cabin Berlin in Berlin, Germany. Other group shows stateside include the host, the guest, ATLA, Los Angeles, CA; Slow School: Ten Years of Moskowitz Bayse, Moskowitz Bayse, Los Angeles, CA; Back to Earth, Roberts Projects, Los Angeles, CA; Arcadia and Elsewhere, James Cohan, New York, NY; Unseen Orchestra, Make Room, Los Angeles, CA; and New American Paintings Review, Steven Zevitas, Boston, MA. Schneiderman has been featured on Artsy as one of 10 Artists to discover. Schneiderman was included in NADA Miami with Moskowitz Bayse and EUROPA, and participated in residencies at Jana Koya, in Landers, CA, and La BiBi + Reus in Mallorca, Spain.