Adam Cohen is pleased to announce VANITY
DAVID MIRETSKY’S first solo exhibition at A Hug From The Art World
The exhibition will be on view from September 5th, 2024, with an opening reception from 6-8 pm and will run through October 19th, 2024 at A Hug From The Art World, 515 West 19th, New York, NY 10011.
This time last year—on Thursday September 7th to be precise—and in the midst of my packed fall season exhibition opening of Marc Dennis’ Three Jews Walk into a Bar, as I was celebrating a mix of art historical folly accompanied by Marc himself and half of Williamsburg’s Hasidic community, I was approached by Anna Katsnelson who turned out to be a professor of Russian literature at Columbia University.
She introduced herself and simply asked: “Can I show you an image of an artist I think you might like?”
In my experience, ninety-nine times out of a hundred this sort of question leads absolutely nowhere. Half out of politeness and half out of really fresh season-opening curiosity, I took a look at the image, expecting to quickly dismiss her and move on.
My response to the image, however, was immediate and gut-wrenchingly visceral. And I just said, “You are right I do!” I tried to humorously explain to Anna this never happens, and that it was going to be hard for me to focus right now as the flow of Hasidic and secular Jewish communities, along with multiple art world characters, were still entering the gallery in a state of unified celebratory delirium.
But such was my intrigue that I told her I wanted to come to the studio as soon as humanly and immediately possible. “How’s this Tuesday?”
On Tuesday, September 12th, 2023—coincidently my mother’s birthday—I wandered excitedly out of my apartment into the street to the car park and raced to the intersection of East Second and Fort Hamilton Park Way in Brooklyn’s Windsor Terrace neighborhood (if you continued down Ocean Drive a few miles you would hit Brighton Beach).
I was buzzed in and through the microphone a crackled accented voice directed me to the elevator on the left and to the 5th floor. Upon entering, the apartment’s patina made it obvious David had been living here for some time.
I was offered water and coffee after walking through a short corridor crowded with the kinds of art books I had imagined might be present based upon seeing the images on Anna’s iPhone. Along the way exhibition posters and reproductions of works I could only assume were David’s covered the walls.
The living room and kitchen area had multiple paintings hanging right side up and others leaning in verso. Among their subjects were a women staring out a window, a woman standing at her vanity table in her bedroom negligee, and a dressed-up couple walking under a boardwalk restaurant’s marquee.
We quickly went to another room, which was David’s studio. Here he showed me masterpiece after masterpiece all of which he removed from handmade painting sleeves and placed on a hand-made easel. I was offered David’s bed as a place to sit whilst viewing the paintings. The bed, easel and paintings’ frames all shared the same wood type and color. It became obvious this was all David’s own handiwork.
The first painting in the studio that grabbed my attention and which I included in the upcoming exhibition was Family (Father Holding little Rebecca) painted in 1990. Compositionally, it brought me right to Velázquez’s Las Meninas: I had the same sense of light entering the painting, yet from the opposite side.
In Velázquez’s painting there is the suggestion of a window as a light source; Miretsky gives us a window. In both paintings the painting’s protagonist is on the left side. They are both looking outward beyond the pictorial space, gazing directly at the viewer. In Miretsky’s painting the father is holding his very own Margaret Theresa in the person of Rebecca.
Miretsky’s Self-portrait, 1999, also included in the exhibition, conveys the same influence and feeling of Velázquez’s Las Meninas in a more literal sense. In Las Meninas, Velázquez depicts himself painting at the easel in the Royal Palace; it’s ultimately a self-portrait amongst other things. Miretsky borrows from this in his self-portrait, capturing himself painting at the easel in his own living room.
During that first visit, a couple of hours passed rather quickly in looking at masterpiece after masterpiece. We sat down for some coffee, persimmon fruit, and his homemade rye bread along with homemade pickles; at this moment, Anna Katsnelson herself buzzed up to join and see how we were getting on.
After the short pause, back to the easel we went and Date at the Brighton Beach Restaurant, 2011 is pulled out. Then came Woman with Dog on her Lap, 2010 and Street Gathering, 1997.
Upon seeing these works my mind was immediately pulled toward Otto Dix and George Grosz and how I imagined the roaring twenties of Weimar Germany. David captures a very potent juxtaposition, the concept of a perceived hardship being greeted in the form of a scene of complete elation, his colors creating a sense of ecstasy. Miretsky’s paintings show a horror and a dream-like luster in a satirical sense similar to Neue Sachlichkeit artists such Dix and Grosz—specifically their Metropolis paintings from 1927 and 1917, respectively. Perhaps a shared caricatured realism or urban surrealism is at play; yet Miretsky’s softer and lighter color palettes are all his own. In a way Miretsky creates his own movement or is his own movement. A Brighton Beach Impressionist, I would like to call him.
Shortly after my first visit I brought over my photographer Jenny Gorman to shoot all I had seen. After bringing each painting from the studio to hang on our designated photography wall a theme started to develop. And it was at this moment I decided upon “Vanity” as an exhibition title.
Vanity: reflected vanity, auditory vanity, self-conscious vanity, voyeuristic vanity, gazing vanity, literal vanity and observing vanity as men and women frequently look through windows and gaze at something or someone beyond the frame.
The coincidence of visiting David’s studio for the first time on September 12th and it being my mother’s birthday maybe has more to it than meets the eye. My first reaction to David’s work was for sure from the gut, a kind of intuition or unconscious cognition.
I think whatever I saw inside of David’s paintings unearthed something in my unconscious.
I think my entire upbringing prepared me for this encounter. Art is a shared passion for me and my family of origin. I could relate to the cultural identity, the soul from within that I sensed in the pictures which triggered my initial visceral reaction. I could see the historical reference within the content and it made me experience the soul of the subjects in that deep sense.
I took both my mother and father to David’s studio for my most recent visit. I wanted their take as I grew up looking at the British Vorticists with them and shared their ideas of how the urban environment created feelings of alienation and dislocation. I wanted to see if my family saw what I saw. After the visit my father said the building David lived and worked in reminded him of his own mother and father’s apartment in Manchester in England. We all loved the paintings and for the same reasons, I was satisfied by this, and was able to confirm that the subjects of David’s paintings were our/my people.
In many respects the prevailing atmosphere of the 1920’s has parallels with this current moment. In David’s paintings the feeling of optimism within the context of fear and alienation are oxymoronic. I identify these aspects in David Miretsky’s paintings and they seem to be completely relevant to how we are placed now as an overall society.
David’s paintings are optimistically dislocating, and I can now articulate, it is this that I love about them.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Born in Kiev, Ukraine on May 18th, 1939
1965-1969 Studied in Kiev Art Institute
1972-74 Solo exhibitions in Kiev, Moscow and St Petersburg
1975 Immigrated to the United States for artistic and political freedom
Miretsky’s works have been widely exhibited in the United States from Chicago to Cincinnati and Tulsa to New York and in the collections of the Zimmerly Art Museum at Rutgers University. His works are also found in the Cincinnati Museum of Art, the Tucson Museum of Art and the National Art Museum of Ukraine.
Miretsky was the subject of four solo exhibitions at Ivan Karp’s OK Harris Gallery, New York City 1999/2000, 2001, 2005 & 2010. Ivan Karp was a legendary gallerist. He founded OK Harris in 1969, after having been co-director of Leo Castelli’s gallery from 1959-1969. He was instrumental in launching the careers of artists such as Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, Tom Wesselmann, and John Chamberlain. The historical documents concerning the exhibitions and artists of OK Harris can be researched through the archives of the Smithsonian American Art Institute.
This will be Miretsky’s first solo exhibition since OK Harris’s closure due to Ivan Karp’s death in 2014.
I am so fortunate to inherit this wonderful artist from Ivan Karp and I can’t explain the new-found friendship between David and myself in terms of anything other than “beyond spiritual.”