Soulios Gallery Announces Grand Opening in Downtown Nashville

Dedicated to advancing classic modern and contemporary art, Soulios Gallery cultivates dialogue between postwar movements, Nashville’s  creative community, and the global cultural landscape

(left) Arthur Robins, Krazy Kitchen, oil on canvas, 24x30, 1972, (right) Steven and Ana Soulios at Soulios Gallery

Soulios Gallery is pleased to announce its grand opening in Nashville’s historic Cummins Station on November 12, 2025. Founded by Steven and Ana Soulios, Soulios Gallery is dedicated to advancing both classic modern and contemporary art, with a particular focus on the multiplicity of postwar artistic movements, including American Expressionism, the revival of artists often overlooked by previous generations, and video, media, and performance art. The gallery seeks to contribute to the continued growth and nourishment of Nashville’s artistic community. 

Soulios Gallery will open with a focused survey of New York-based artist Arthur Robins, whose paintings illuminate the psychological undercurrents of urban life. Soulios has represented Robins since their chance meeting on the corner of 42nd and 5th in New York in 1992, making his work a natural choice to inaugurate the gallery. Soulios and Robins have built a long and successful partnership and an enduring friendship. It was Robins' paintings, among others, that inspired Steven to become an art collector and dealer. 

Forthcoming exhibitions will feature artists such as German-American Neo-Expressionist Mattias Duwel, German modernist Ewald Platte (1894-1985), and renowned Chinese painter Ma Kelu. 

An attorney by training and a longtime collector and private dealer, Steven Soulios has been engaged in the cultural sector for decades. In the 90s, he promoted and managed bands in New York while directing SoHo’s John McEnroe Gallery, co-curating a solo exhibition of Emil Nolde and Lyonel Feininger, and bringing prominent contemporary British painters to New York in collaboration with the Flowers Gallery in London. Soulios has also organized exhibitions at the Neuberger Museum of Art, the National Arts Club, and the Museum of the City of New York. 

As the managing partner of a boutique Manhattan law firm for 25 years, Soulios has advocated for artist’s rights, vindicated the claims of employees who suffered illegal discrimination, successfully tried complex securities and commercial cases in federal and state courts across the country, and represented private equity funds, start-ups and entrepreneurs in the tech, social media, music and film, retail and global sports sectors.  

Together, with his wife and partner Ana Soulios—a dancer, actress, and teacher of dramatic arts—the couple has established a gallery committed to cultivating and advancing the careers and legacies of artists whose practices are defined by authenticity, experimentation, originality and excellence, and whose work engages with the nature of existence and meaning. Indeed, as a young, disaffected agnostic lawyer, it was fine art that played a pivotal role in Soulios’ search for truth and meaning, and facilitated his journey to faith. The profound effect art has had on him, and can have on others, and the joy of collecting fine art, are the inspiration for the establishment of the Soulios Gallery. 

As the parents of a child with a disability, and believers in the power of art to inspire, reveal and heal, enlighten and connect people, and build community, Steven and Ana plan to develop an art program geared toward teaching art to the disability community in Nashville alongside their current roster of artists. 

Arthur Robins City of the Mind 
November 12, 2025 - January 9, 2026 

Soulios Gallery’s debut exhibition will feature a diverse selection from Robins’ oeuvre covering 50+ years, including his unique expressionist representations of New York City, abstract Tunnel Paintings, never-before-shown biblical pieces, and new work. 

Known for his depictions of New York’s street scenes, parks, pool halls and subterranean worlds, Robins paints from the unconscious, where memory, dream, and lived experience converge. Bridging the atmosphere of postwar New York with the fractured realities of the present, his figurative and abstract expressionist works capture the charged space of in-between, where the intensity of existence meets the ordinariness of everyday life. 

In reviewing Robin’s work in 1986, art critic Donald Kuspit said of the paintings, “They are a remarkable development in the history of Expressionism, and the imaging of modern life in New York, bringing both to a kind of ironic conclusion.” Kuspit goes on to say, “He does more: he restores Expressionism to the intimate scale and human purpose it lost with the mural-sized Abstract Expressionism—the scale and purpose it had in German Expressionism.”

A panel discussion with Arthur Robins and Steven Soulios will take place at the gallery later this fall. 

ABOUT ARTHUR ROBINS
Arthur Robins (b.1953; New York, NY) has long been a fixture in New York City’s public consciousness and is the leading painter of New American Expressionism. Robins pioneered this movement along with artist Fred Schuback (1949 - 1992), pulling many ideas and concepts of the early Expressionists, such as focusing on the individual human psyche through the use of vibrant colors, distorted perspectives, and thickly applied paint (ie. Van Gogh, the Fauvists, Soutine, and the German Expressionists). The movement also combined the surrealists’ belief that art should come from the subconscious mind (Ernst, Dali, Magritte), the social realists’ commentaries on modern urban life by the Ashcan artists (Bellows, Sloan, Henri), and the New York School’s Abstract Expressionists’ focus on action painting, spontaneity and improvisation were organically synthesized, expanded on, and advanced into a new, uniquely  “Robinsian language.” 

Robins’s work also incorporates elements of film noir and, consequently, is palpably cinematic. His paintings depict landscapes (figurative and abstract), pool halls, interiors, parks, subways, science fiction, biblical subjects, the human figure, and creates one-of-a-kind sculptures made entirely of solid oil paint. His work is held in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of the City of New York. 

In 1993, Robins was one of the founding members of A.R.T.I.S.T., a group that successfully litigated a Federal landmark case extending the First Amendment right of free speech, allowing artists to show and sell their work on the streets of New York City without a permit or license.