Abstract
- Plato Gallery is presently presenting Exaltation, a gaggle exhibition of 18 artists, now via August 16 in New York.
- The exhibition reimagines mannerist artwork via a recent lens, taking cues from its embrace of extra as a way of survival in a world characterised by social, emotional and cultural upheaval.
In response to an period outlined by collapse and reinvention, artists are turning up the dial on extravagance and extra. This response is the middle focus of Exaltation, a brand new 18-person group exhibition at New York’s Plato Gallery, now on view via August 16. The present explores what it means to make mannerist artwork at the moment, framing our second as a form of beautiful distortion, one the place historical past loops again on itself and emotional depth turns into an act of survival.
Mannerism is characterised by an embrace of aptitude over kind, drama over stability, and Exaltation builds on this concept to envelope our current second. Simply as artists in Sixteenth-century Italy grappled with the fallout of the Sack of Rome, or creatives in pre-revolutionary France responded to decadence with Rococo frills, at the moment’s makers are channeling emotional ambiguity into wealthy, dissonant types, clashing colours, baroque textures and surreal gentle.
Curated by gallerist Elena Platonova, the present takes inspiration from final 12 months’s return of Neo-Rococo, and the broader motion of artwork created within the face of collective instability. Intervals of disaster have at all times seeded inventive transformation: from the tip of the Roman Empire to the daybreak of World Warfare I. Platonova names Doechii’s 2025 Gotye-Kimbra remix, “Anxiousness,” as a becoming title observe for the present: “Anxiousness is maybe the principal sentiment of mannerist artwork, which proclaims an finish of an period of concord and bursts with asymmetries, diagonals, surprising colours, precarious compositions and all types of emotion-stirring textures and results: fireworks, sweat, reflections, lights, neon glow and shine of fluorescent material.”
Showcasing a bunch of works throughout portray, mixed-media works and sculpture, Exaltation renders artwork historical past and its traditions via a kaleidoscopic modern gaze: Alic Brock brings us again to Teresa de Lempicka’s Paris and Historical Rome, Jacob Rochesters’ sitting boxer channels Caravaggio’s meditative and dramatic chiaroscuro, whereas Takura Suzuki emblazons an ode to Dutch still-life with Mandarin gentle indicators.
“On this planet the place each information is breaking information and everybody will be well-known for 3 seconds, artists try to know onto the comforting permanence of the previous with a well-spirited exaltation of post-postmodernism,” Platonova wrote. “If the tip is perhaps close to and one needs to stay on the peak of their feelings, in hopeful reverie and ideally in model, who’re we to evaluate?”
Plato Gallery
202 Bowery,
New York, NY 10012
