There is a burgeoning constellation of Lower East Side venues nestled around Henry Street, making the corridor a must-go for Saturday art crawls. Now the formerly Berlin-based gallery Cabin is joining the ranks and making its stateside debut.
“We’re interested in creating environments where the art lives,” said Cabin founder Lawrence Hazen. “Definitely not white cube.” Maybe brown cube then? With it’s freshly stained walls, the cozy space is darker than a boutique hotel’s hallways. Its first show, “Scotopia,” just opened and runs through November 8. It’s a fabulously melancholic affair, a strange somnambulant sleepwalk, and the title is a term that describes the “ability to see in low-light conditions.”
Ted Gahl, Light Sleeper (2024). Courtesy of Cabin.
Last week, Hazen was setting up the vernissage with his show collaborators the London-based curator Hugo Alcantara and Raja Umar Jamalullail of MENĀEA Collection, a nontraditional gallery that specializes in Asian antiquities and contemporary art, on the mystical, brooding, assemblage. Buckets of beer and stools were outside the gallery and the sun was setting. The first guests began to arrive. “There’s such a nice sense of community with the other galleries on Henry Street,” Hazen said.
“It was a very unique creative process,” Hazen said of putting the exhibition together. “We were sharing works and we were like, what is connecting this? Because there was definitely a subconscious link to everything. There was something about darkness and seeing in the dark.”
An installation view of “Scotopia.” Courtesy of Cabin.
Artworks range from a red sandstone Indian relief from between the 10th and 12th century, a 1935 Henri Matisse drawing Lydia au Chapeau, to paintings from this year. But it is hard to place a time period upon anything, and a sense of the ancient pervades. Yes, the cabin-like feel is certainly singular, but the curation and inclusion of antiquity and a late period Impressionist drawing sets a tonal shift from nearby galleries like Situations, Elliott Templeton Fine Arts, and Fierman.
Phil Davis, Child Actor in the Sun (2024). Courtesy of Cabin.
The Danish painter Christian John Munks has two standout works in the show, and he channels his master forebears in his brooding scenes. “He’s a young artist that produces five to eight works a year,” Hazen said. “He places people in domestic scenes that have ethereal, otherworldly qualities to them.” Jamalullail stood next to the relief he sourced and explained the narrative.
Red Sandstone Relief of a Scene of the Ramayana India (10th-12th century CE). Courtesy of Cabin.
“They are the human incarnations of the god Vishnu and his wife,” he said. “They’re brought into this world to destroy evil and along their journey they meet a lot of interesting characters. One of them is this monkey God.”
Nearby was an abstract squall by Swiss painter Raphael Egil. “It feels very dystopia, like someone looking and emerging through the darkness,” Hazen noted, “and then almost like a sailor finding this Medusa.”
Cabin is located at 93 Madison Street, New York, NY 10002.