DOWNTOWN—Every two decades is a response to the previous two. After decades of irony, the purposeful ugliness of the 80s and 90s (“Anything that’s beautiful is suspect.” Jenny Holzer. “I never had a message. My message was the beauty of the blank.” Richard Prince), the art world may be ready to accept beauty again.
One space exploring that question is Slip House, a new gallery housed in a repurposed 19th-century building on East 5th Street. Launched during New York Art Week by Ingrid Lundgren and Marissa Dembkoski, the gallery draws inspiration from the legacy of Coenties Slip—once home to Agnes Martin and Ellsworth Kelly—while rejecting the commercial chill of the white cube. Their aim is to make room for intimacy, history, and atmosphere.
Ingrid Lundgren and Marissa Dembkoski
The debut exhibition, As if a line, spreads across three floors and brings together a cross-generational roster of artists engaged...
DOWNTOWN—Every two decades is a response to the previous two. After decades of irony, the purposeful ugliness of the 80s and 90s (“Anything that’s beautiful is suspect.” Jenny Holzer. “I never had a message. My message was the beauty of the blank.” Richard Prince), the art world may be ready to accept beauty again.
One space exploring that question is Slip House, a new gallery housed in a repurposed 19th-century building on East 5th Street. Launched during New York Art Week by Ingrid Lundgren and Marissa Dembkoski, the gallery draws inspiration from the legacy of Coenties Slip—once home to Agnes Martin and Ellsworth Kelly—while rejecting the commercial chill of the white cube. Their aim is to make room for intimacy, history, and atmosphere.
Ingrid Lundgren and Marissa Dembkoski
The debut exhibition, As if a line, spreads across three floors and brings together a cross-generational roster of artists engaged with form, myth, and material. Former Sprüth Magers director Jessica Draper co-curated the show, which features works by Claude Viallat and Jack Whitten alongside emerging voices such as Lizzy Gabay, Jill Tate, Max Guy, Noelia Towers, and Katharina Schilling. The result is a quietly reverent dialogue between precision and sensuality, gesture and grid.
The building is extraordinary: as all of its three floors appear to be a living space. A tiny staircase from the second floor will lead you to a small upper floor overlooking 5th street with a literal bed in the middle of the room (we will not include photos, so you have to see it for yourself). The building once belonged to artist Charles Kritsky, whose handmade mosaic remains on the façade.
Elsewhere: Three More Contemporary Artists Exploring Elegance
Aliya Abs, originally from Kharkiv and now based in Munich, creates faceless figures in vintage interiors—images that feel both personal and universal. Working in acrylic, oil pastel, and collage, her paintings suggest memories just on the edge of recall. One standout piece, Revelling In Memories, captures a kind of suspended time, a hush.
Victoria Glinkina, from Siberia, takes an equally quiet approach. Her light-washed canvases depict domestic spaces and portraits with a palette that seems to glow from within. Glinkina’s strength is restraint—emotion expressed through absence rather than saturation.
Luca Giovagnoli, painting in Rimini, Italy, builds up surface using earth-based pigments and fine layers of acrylic. His subjects—often solitary—feel like echoes from half-remembered dreams. They aren’t nostalgic, exactly, but they feel anchored in a world where emotion moves slower.
L’escalier by Victoria GlinkinaNue by Victoria Glinkina
Select Upcoming and Current Shows
As if a line, Slip House 246 East 5th Street, East Village. May 9–June 14, 2025.
Brush and Pixel Ballet, Braw Haus 52 Walker St, Tribeca. June 6–30, 2025.
Pools of Enchantment, Private Gallery, Chelsea. July 25–August 18, 2025.
Close-up: Clara Holt & Sasha Epshtein. Opens concurrently, July 25.
Things happening in New York this Winter. See the newly restored Frick, now open. Sotheby’s presents Icons: Back to Madison from 13 to 21 December... Text by Cici Thompson. Read More
Venere de Medici, 2022, pink onyx. Edition 1/1. Photo by Nicola Gnesi. Courtesy of Galerie Bayart, Paris.
What appear to be imperfections in the material are stimulating elements for me because they become a kind of challenge, in being able to transform them into virtues on the final work. Text by Madina Tulakova. Read More
Corita Kent, “Untitled, Red Shoes, Los Angeles” (1967), 35 mm slide, Corita Slide Collection (photo courtesy Corita Art Center) from Corita Kent: The Sorcery of Images in Los Angeles.
NEW YORK—To remember that photography was even once a fresher medium than it is today. I mean, jolting. In the last century, when photo stories... Text by Pina Lomb. Read More
Raphael, Self-portrait (1506–08). Florence, Uffizi Galleries, Gallery of Statues and Paintings. Photographic Cabinet of the Uffizi Galleries – Courtesy of the Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism.
UPTOWN—In spring 2026, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art will present the most extensive U.S. exhibition ever dedicated to Raphael, according to Artnet, offering a... Text by Marguerite de Ponty. Read More
Auguste Renoir, Study for The Great Bathers (1884 to 1887). Photo: The Morgan Library & Museum.
UPTOWN—A large show of works on paper by Pierre-Auguste Renoir is being organized for this October by Colin Bailey, the Morgan's new director, according to... Text by Dannik. Read More
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Photograph by Erich Höhne. Courtesy of Deutsche Fotothek.
Wassily Kandinsky, a painter of color and form, once envisioned a future where dance would shed its ornamental constraints and move toward abstraction. In Concerning... Text by Marguerite de Ponty. Read More
BASEL—Going to Art Basel is always a unique experience. For the majority, the art on display is merely entertainment; after all, any work, whether mighty... Text by Madina Tulakova. Read More
Franco Maria Ricci in 1984, at the launch of FMR U.S.A. at the New York Public Library.
Caverns were probably the first labyrinthine structures human beings came into contact with, in a distant past. And I, too, rummaged through my own past, finding a version of myself as the guise of a young amateur speleologist, equipped with the right clothes, flashlights, ropes, and climbing-irons. I was a second-year student at the Faculty of Geology and, with some friends, I had founded a so-called Cavern Society. My weekdays moved along on the surface, in the sunlight, while my weekends were usually devoted to the dark bowels of the earth. Text by fmr. Read More
