I share the elevator to Spring Break at 625 Madison Avenue with a dapper older man who looks like he works in the building. He sees me and others and asks, “Is there some kind of fashion event happening upstairs?”
I tell him it’s an art exhibition, and the work is always excellent in this one – he should see it.
“I don’t think I’ll have time,” he said, stretching out the word “time.” As he got off the elevator, he said lightly over his shoulder, “…unless Anish Kapoor watch.
It’s a more low-key preview day at the Spring Break Art Show than in previous years.
Maybe it’s the rain? It’s certainly not for lack of good art. In addition to the daytime colors of haute couture visitors, there are dazzling colors in every corner of the artists’ stands, insistent and lively.
Well, above all. When I visit booth 1118, I ask if the flowers in the booth are the same ones used in painter Tracy Morgan’s energetic still lifes.
Nearby booth 1120 is full of ceramic sculptures by Dasha Bazanova, which walk a tightrope between humor and devastation. Some characters live the high life in spas, sipping rum; others watch you from their perch on a wooden installation built by Dasha; and some, like his brilliant “Pietà Laptop” (2022), fall from a ceramic MacBook screen.
One of his figures, who can be seen in a video installation gorging on Hot Cheetos and Takis before passing out and peeing in his own bathtub, appears to have done just that.
I ask him if the rapper-kid’s 2012 hit music video “Hot Cheetos and Takis,” by Da Rich Kidzz, inspired the use of these two particular snacks. She says she’s never seen him.
I ask artist Jess Bass how she created two large 2D pieces at the entrance to her booth, 1129.
“Did you know that many people try to get rid of old, used sails? she said. “I find them on Ebay.”
While painting balloons for her sculptural work, she collects her excess dried paint. She glues these paint spots onto the sails, painting faces on the spots when she sees a silhouette.
Artist Anne Spalter created her own Floral Bacchanals and Picnics through the use of AI combined with keywords from the artists’ prompt, Naked lunch. Spalter worked with artist and curator Coco Dolle on the booth, which looks like a poppy version of Manet’s “Déjeuner sur l’herbe” — and features bouquets of artificial flowers to pose with.
Longtime Spring Break attendee Jeff Bliumus shows me around his “magic carpet” structures, all of which can rotate on their base.
“I like sculptures that you can touch and feel, and not (feel distant),” he tells me.
There is also a collection of wall sculptures, oblong like coins after passing through a coin press. In them, Bliumis depicts public and political trauma, from the assassination of JFK to 9/11 and the attack of 6 January.
“We travel in our minds, through music, through art, through cinema, to escape these horrible realities but ultimately we must always return to them.”
Some women, old friends of Jeff, visit him at the stand. They highlight a pointed nose and glasses protruding from one of his sculptures.
“Jeff, it’s definitely your nose!” they say. “You put yourself in your own sculpture!” » Then they gather it up for a photo with it.
As I wander from stand to stand, I come across a group of booths. There is a man working intently on his laptop and three devil-horned statues nearby.
