Art Focus: Elegance in a Post-Ironic Era

Slip House, the brand new gallery opened at the base of a 19th-century, three-story former carriage house at 246 East 5th Street.

19 -

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.

The debut exhibition, As if a line, spreads across three floors and brings together a cross-generational roster of artists engaged...

Keep reading, quickly sign in.
SAVE ARTICLES, ACCESS FULL ARCHIVES, MEMBER PROFILES

Continue with Google

Create Account

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.