Take the edge off the chill of winter with some vibrantly colored art that uses the environment to explore experiences.

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1. Inspired by Edouard Manet’s late series of flower paintings, Roland Reiss began his new “floral paintings” in 2008 as a meditation on the impact of color on our consciousness. Here, Reiss deploys roses, lilies, and sunflowers as color delivery devices; they float in large-scale compositions layered with collaged stencils and cutouts that reference cityscapes, modernist painting, and forms found in his early sculptural tableaus at Diane Rosenstein Fine Art
2. Sherie’ Franssen has long been preoccupied by abstraction’s power to interrogate the contours of our world, fragmenting and reordering them so as to distill something essential about that world and our experiences within it. Her latest body of work pushes Franssen’s interest in fragmentation—both as an aesthetic and emotional condition—to a new level at Dolby Chadwick Gallery
3. Zachary Keeting’s paintings are improvisational, yet each image refers to a specific life-situations, to specific people. His is striving for an art of realistic complication, of crosscurrents and contradictions, group energy at FRED.GIAMPIETRO Gallery
4. Elements depicted in the individual works within Friedman’s Happy Place series are snapshots of the artist’s life, reduced to their simplest forms at Joshua Liner Gallery
5. Nineteenth century German Biologist Ernst Haeckel‘s illustrations of sea creatures,17th century Japanese erotic woodblock prints from the Edo Period, and the mathematical drawings of recent astrophysical developments in the detection of the Big Bang, all serve as a visual point of departure for Jennifer Nocon’s latest show You See Ocean I See Sky at Tracy Williams, Ltd
6. Robert Kushner fuses plant forms with references to the global history of ornament to extend his exploration of the conceptual and political implications of the decorative at DC Moore Gallery