Art and Relationships as Mirrors of Transcendence
True to World Series form, the last week in October was the most exhilarating, most difficult, yet most rewarding I’ve experienced in years.
What follows is just one of several important lessons I took away from it.
Relationships are at the core of how I practice art advisory — both with people and with the art itself. This means creating consciousness through connection while contributing to beneficial forces of change in the world.
Recently I had been cultivating a very promising relationship that completely and utterly fascinated me.
Gazing upon the subject in the present and looking to the future, the transcendence I felt was the perfect trifecta of math, poetry, and art all at once — a compelling proposition.
I experienced the sum of an encounter that could amount to far more than its parts; the lyricism of fascinating stories imbued with music; the promise of creation of new stories and life, and more.
Yet as it turns out — and to make a long story short — last week the relationship abruptly ended, and I was left wondering what had happened to that feeling that had been cascading over me.
Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929), Let’s Survive Forever (2017), an installation in the collection of the Rubell Museum, Miami. I believe this particular artwork reveals something essential about the nature of seeing and being seen in both art and relationships.
Soon I realized that I had, throughout the relationship, actually been looking into a mirror. And the art and poetry I saw was not, in fact, really part of the object of my fascination, but rather a reflection of my own energy and deep fascination with life.
Stories about art, about music, my curiosity, my playful energy, my other relationships and friends. In short, the best of everything I love and how I create magic in the world.
And conversely, I had been the mirror for the other half of the relationship, whose own image reflected back from my side something totally different, which that had nothing to do with me and that I wanted nothing to do with.
Presaged by an encounter with Yayoi Kusama’s Let’s Survive Forever (above), the reflection eventually forced an energetic shift in ‘the subject, for whom it eventually it became too confusing, too scary, or too painful to look into the mirror any longer.
This was very sad and disappointing, but at the same time, a supreme lesson on the power of art and relationships.
Lesson learned: the transcendence I sought wasn’t in the relationship or even in the art itself — it was within me. I own the transcendence — it is an unalienable part of my being.
This is the mantra behind why I practice building relationships around art that leads one towards transcendence and teach my clients that they can own a piece of the same.
Anastasia Samoylova’s Floridas Takes the Met Museum by Storm
Floridas: Anastasia Samoylova and Walker Evans, headlined by Gatorama (2020), opened in mid-October at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. A wonderfully curated show, the work explores the contrasts, contradictions, and painterly elements on the U.S. state that is a microcosm of the nation itself and lies on the front lines of culture wars, politics, and climate change.
Anastasia Samoylova (b. Russia, 1984) is Florida’s leading contemporary fine art photographer, previously mentioned in this newsletter. She is currently at an apex of her career, having just opened the Met show, and looking forward to opening a show at London’s prestigious Saatchi Gallery next week.
I highly recommend anyone visiting New York before May 2025 to see this show of Ana’s work. Charting Transcendence also happens to be curating 25 of Anastasia’s photographs for a benefit auction for the Global Climate Design Awards on November 7 in the Design District in Miami.
Although not open to the public, these framed and museum-glazed photographs (ready-to-hang) from the series FloodZone are all for sale and may be purchased by registering for the auction online.
What follows is a selection of images from the Met’s show. For a catalogue of available works for sale at the GCDA benefit auction, please reach out to me!
Chain Link Fence, Miami (2018) from Samoylova’s series FloodZone is one of the images that is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s show Floridas: Anastasia Samoylova and Walker Evans.
Anastasia Samoylova, Rusted Car (2020), featuring her fascination with iconically Floridian elements such as breezeblocks, the color pink, and constructivist imagery in cityscapes.
Regarding Florida as “a kind of microcosm of America,” teeming with contradictions and peculiarities, the artist headed off on a series of road trips, crisscrossing from Key West to the state’s northernmost borders. Recognizing the similarities between her own practice and that of Evans—whose 1938 Museum of Modern Art exhibition “American Photographs” has been called “the first masterpiece of the road-trip genre”—in 2022 Samoylova published a photography book with Steidl under the title Anastasia Samoylova & Walker Evans: Floridas.
— Vogue
In her paintings there are echoes of David Hockney, in the muted colours, and Peter Doig, whose work she loves, in the often semi-hallucinatory landscapes. At the Met, they will sit alongside Evans’s paintings from Florida. “I love that he moved freely between photography and painting,” she says. “For me, it’s not that I consider myself a great painter, it’s more: why not? Plus, I found myself missing the sheer joy and sensuality of painting.”
The Met show establishes Samoylova as only the second woman to present such a sizable photo show at the museum during her lifetime; the last was in 1992 when the Met presented a retrospective of Helen Levitt — a mentee and friend of Evans — who was also relatively unknown then.
— The New York Times
Selections from NYC Galleries & The Art Show
This mold of a fox, used by taxidermists, forms the basis of a poignant sculpture by Bruce Nauman (b. 1941) guarding the entrance to Sperone Westwater.
One of the most interesting shows currently on in New York, Bruce Nauman: Begin Again, contains some of Nauman’s best new work in decades, all of which refers back in one way or another to his earliest practices of drawing and exploration of the body and language.
Three days in New York City this week was enough to thoroughly impress and exhaust me — even beyond the excitement of Anastasia’s vernissage at the Met.
I dove into some deeper exploration of artwork for clients, managed to breeze through nearly 30 galleries as well as The Art Show, sponsored by the Art Dealers Association of America.
It was exhilarating and gratifying to be able to see as much as I did and feel so deeply into what is shaping up to be an impressive fall art season.
I’ll be back in mid-November for auction previews and will likely be leading some gallery tours as well. Please reach out for details!
A breathtaking show of paintings by Cecily Brown (b. 1969), one of the most sought-after luxury items of our time, noted for their sublime blend of figuration and abstraction, is currently on view at Paula Cooper Gallery in Chelsea.
The Hill Art Foundation in Chelsea is currently showing portraits by Jordan Casteel (b. 1989), a prominent portraitist of ordinary people in her community in Harlem. Her work is already well represented in museum collections across the country.
Overtly political and powerful to encounter in October of an election year, New Yalta (2017), is a constructed photograph by Vitaly Komar (b. 1943), one half of the former Soviet non-conformist / Sots-Art duo Komar & Melamid. It is currently on view in a political art show at Soho’s Ronald Feldman Gallery.
The art world’s most notorious jokester, Maurizio Cattelan (b. 1960) had this piece, Ghosts (2021), apparently elegiac of 9/11 but with a tinge of irony given the stuffed pigeons on top, included at the inauguration of Marian Goodman Gallery’s new flagship, three-level space in Tribeca.
The Art Show in particular was tightly curated and filled with interesting discoveries spanning modern and contemporary favorites.
Held at the Park Avenue Armory, it was also a place where I ran into many colleagues, with whom I’m proud to have been forming relationships in recent years.
The work of Chase Hall’s (b. 1993) has recently garnered attention. This Minnesota-born artist’s monoprints are made with jigsaw-puzzle plates and ink derived from coffee grounds. Hall has an upcoming show with David Kordansky and also shows with Pace Prints.
ACA Galleries put on a lovely booth of abstract colorful paintings by Washington Color School painter Leon Berkowitz (1911-1987) at The Art Show.
Ringai Chase (1979) by Japanese-American abstract painter Kikuo Saito (1939-2016) was a lovely find at James Fuentes Gallery’s booth at The Art Show. The gallery is currently showing a whole show of Saito’s paintings in Los Angeles.
Georgia Engelhard (1906-1986) was a niece of Alfred Stieglitz and better known as a mountaineer, painted when she was younger and left behind a small but exceptional oeuvre. This lovely 1930s-era painting The White Church was shown by New York’s Schoelkopf Gallery at The Art Show.
Recent Press on Nov. 19 Presentation on Collecting
“Art is not just about acquisition; it’s about creating experiences that connect us to deeper meanings.” Matthew Blong, Founder, Charting Transcendence
