Your Art FOMO Cure

Things in New York City are slowly opening back up and the gallery scene is hopping on this as well.  Many galleries are exhibiting new shows and allowing visitors with appointments and small numbers.  You’ve been itching to know what is new one the scene and so below are five gallery shows that are going to fill all your gallery FOMO.  

How Bout Them Apples at Ross + Kramer Gallery

The show speaks to the resilience and toughness of the artists whose work is featured in this exhibition, New Yorkers who persevered through one of the city’s most trying periods.  The show presents fourteen new works that embody the vibrancy of the city itself, the Big Apple.  The Joe’s Pizza sculpture in the middle of the show room adds little inside jokes that only New Yorkers would appreciate.  Nina Chanel Abney and Erik Parker are some of the more name recognized artists, Abney’s sneaker design was recently promoted by Kamala Harris.  Anna Park’s large scale works are compact with energy that embodies the hustle and bustle of usual city life.  The gallery will be giving 10% of the proceeds from this exhibition to Project Sunshine, an international nonprofit, harnessing the power of play and human connection to help children facing medical challenges.

It was great to see artists that I’ve been following individually in the same room.  It was also encouraging to see how easily the gallery life bounced back and is the backbone of the culture in NYC.  The size of the paintings defiently commands a presence and it felt great to be surrounded by such amazing art once more.    

Vortex at the Kravets Wehby Gallery curated by artist Allison Zuckerman

This show features another megaload of talent in one room.  Allison Zuckerman has recently been a new superstar in the art world, collaborating with fashion brand Moschino and most of her paintings sell quickly.  The paintings don’t have a central theme, but show the unique vision of the artist behind it.  The cool versus warm color palettes of the different works do play off of one another.

Allison is an artist whose own personal work is a culmination of different styles, so curating palys to her strength of having a diverse, yet unifying eye.  I am looking forward to see how and if she expands her curation role in the art world.  

Cerberus at GR Gallery

Cerberus is the first solo exhibition of Adam Lupton who is showing 18 new oil and acrylic paintings.  This body of Lupton’s work grows out of his need to seek assurance and repeat mantras; mediating between himself and an unyielding “otherness”. Through this lens, the work weaves together individual and societal rituals, spiritual schizophrenia, and self-defining myth, thereby showcasing humanity's various attempts at and desires for certainty. These overlaps spill into narratives that play out on the canvas.  Lupton borrows from Greek myths, religious rituals, rock lyrics, modern dating plights, domestic routines, history, introspection, sexuality, and compulsions, evocatively casting the contemporary world of individual and societal anxiety and isolation.

The feelings of routine and going through the motions of life is something that definitely relates with people.  It is also fascinating how people channel their emotions into different outlets and how the same feelings can have such different creative ends. 

Paper Relics at Pace Prints

Paper Relics  is Arsham’s first project with Pace Prints.  It is a set of three cast cotton paper pulp works with embedded quartz crystals. The edition of twenty includes artist-designed frames with built-in LED lighting.  Daniel Arsham’s work exists in the realm of the “Future Relic”—a distant, yet inevitable, time in which our world and our objects have become the subject of history. Arsham takes easily recognizable items emblematic of our recent past, such as the Walkman, the Kit-Cat Klock and re-contextualizes them as if discovered on a future archeological site.

Arsham’s previous work was crystalizing the direct object, the aidditon of the paper pulp takes his art in a more independent and individual manner.  He is also recreating the object and therefore becomes a personal relic as well as one that is reflected through society.  I would like to see how he expands the use of the paper pulp and continues to use it in the future. 

Pedestrian Profanities at Simon Lee Gallery 

Pedestrian Profanities is a group exhibition of interdisciplinary artists, designers and polymaths curated by Eric N. Mack.  It explores the relationship between fine art, design and fashion, and the ways in which they are activated by a participating body.  

“This show is about the event of walking down the avenue.  The role of a mannequin in a storefront is to elicit a direct relationship between the consumer, their body and the garment; to engender a sense of its structure. In a similar way, the role of the viewer in the act of observing, or consuming, an artwork bestows value and radiant spirit: the art object, at its most sacred, should reflect altered systems of value, especially in observation of our world's brutalities. In contemplating either artwork or clothing, the viewer enacts a sense of embodiment outside of their-self – an act of transference.  This exhibition imagines a case for the painted object to flee its support structures and need the body. To cling to the body, worn as smuggled modernity.”

- Eric N. Mack

One aspect of New York life that is iconic, is that the streets are a runway.  Street fashion is always up to the nines and makes New York one of the fashion capitals of the world.  It is interesting to put a gallery framed setting around the culture of fashion being free and individualistic.