It shouldn’t (and didn’t) surprise me that when when I found this season’s most original art exhibit in any gallery neighborhood in the city – which will of course be the featured stop on my Sat. March 22 gallery tour – it turned out to be in the Lower East Side.  That’s because the L.E.S., New York’s most rapidly-growing gallery neighborhood, with over 125 gallery spaces, is now the go-to place for innovative art.  On average, the artists and gallery owners in the Lower East Side are a good 15 or more years younger than in Chelsea, which is still by far the world’s largest gallery neighborhood.   And while Chelsea, with its 300 galleries from which to choose, is still the most extraordinary gallery tour I lead, the L.E.S. is catching up quickly and is now my “favorite” gallery tour destination.

I don’t want to give away too much, but this “most original art exhibit of the season” is a young European artist’s “mind-blowing” installation, unlike anything you’ve ever seen.  The inspiration for the work came when the gallery owner invited this artist to show and sell new work at an important art fair.  The artist, knowing he’d be competing for attention with dozens if not hundreds of world-renowned galleries and artists at this art fair, wanted to do something completely off-the-charts in order to stand out.  That he did, causing a sensation at the fair.  Now, for his gallery installation in the Lower East Side, he has brought back the original piece, and expanded it to cover three times the area, deepening the piece in both a physical and conceptual sense.

And that’s not all we’ll see on this tour.  We have at least one artist speaker confirmed: Doug Young, a fascinating young man who will talk to us about his photo-realistic paintings on glass sheets.  Plus, we’ll see an Israeli artist’s controversial and beautiful painting/ video/ sculpture exhibit about his country.  And if that’s not enough, the tour will include a marvelous painting-on-video hybrid that a critic from the New York Times called “among the more uncanny, unexpectedly arresting pictorial experiences to be had in New York.”  All told, we’ll visit 7 exciting shows.

It’s going to be a knock-out tour.

Rafael Risemberg, Ph.D., Director
New York Gallery Tours