My Skyscrapers gallery tour in Midtown is an event I lead only around 3 times a year, and when I do it’s a winner.  In the case of my Sat. Oct. 8 tour, I visited over 100 new gallery exhibits in Midtown, Upper East Side, Soho, West Village and Tribeca, pit the neighborhoods up against each other, and this time the Midtown skyscrapers region took the prize for the most fascinating art.  Highlights of this Skyscrapers gallery tour will include: (1) a world-renowned Mexican artist’s pointilist paintings made by using Q-tips, not brushes, and (2) a walk-in bus inside a gallery containing life-size sculptures of colorful, quirky transit riders.  These are just 2 of 7 exhibits we’ll visit.

Contemporary artists rarely attempt Pointilism, a beloved art form in which artists dab colorful dots of paint onto canvas, invented by Georges Seurat in the heyday of Impressionism in late 19th century France.  How delighted I was when I discovered in the Midtown galleries brand new Pointilist paintings by a Mexican artist so esteemed by the art world that he once had a major solo exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art.  In this artist’s first exploration of Pointilism, he updates the genre by foregoing the paintbrush and using only Q-tips (did they even exit in the 1800s?) to dab the paint onto canvas.  The result is dozens of exquisitely intricate paintings that the gallery is selling for $275,000 to $400,000 each.  Who knows how many years it will be before another NYC gallery shows new Pointilistic paintings?  The time to see this show is NOW.

Another highlight of the Skyscrapers gallery tour will be an American artist known for his humorous depictions of urban life with his life-size sculpture/ painting combinations.  In his current show, he has produced what I believe is his largest, most complex piece to date: an enormous bus – that he built – populated with a couple of dozen oddball characters, made of painted papier mache, who will be familiar to anybody who takes public transportation.  We’ll get a chance to actually climb INSIDE the bus and witness the delightful spectacle within.  And this is just one of the artist’s several large scale exhibits we’ll see on this stop.

The Midtown Manhattan skyscrapers area is historically the oldest gallery neighborhood in New York City.  And yet, the galleries there are teeming with fresh, inventive contemporary art.  If you attend the tour, you’ll see for yourself the most original and exciting works of the bunch.

Rafael Risemberg, Ph.D.
Founder and Director
New York GalleryTours