Anton Ginzburg’s Quarantine Paintings Pay Homage to a City Seen From the Inside Looking Out—See Images of the Colorful New Works Here

Artnet Gallery Network December 23, 2020 ShareShare This Article

During quarantine earlier this year, the artist Anton Ginzburg embarked on a new body of work that explores the tensions and rhythms of being on the outside looking in, and being on the inside looking out.

These new works—geometric, hard-edge paintings on wood and paper—are currently on view in “Translucent Concrete” at New York’s Helwaser Gallery and can be read as a pictorial montage of the city.

Installation view "Anton Ginzburg: Translucent Concrete,"2020. Courtesy of Helwaser Gallery.

Installation view of “Anton Ginzburg: Translucent Concrete” 2020. Courtesy of Helwaser Gallery.

The Russian-born artist took a first-person perspective, looking out from his apartment in Chatham Towers—a concrete, brutalist building constructed during the Cold War in 1969 in Manhattan’s Chinatown neighborhood. In origami-like images, Ginzburg folds together multiple points of perspective—glass towers emptied of people are doubled against the planes of public spaces, patterns of brickwork, concrete structures, and large window panes to create a kaleidoscopic view of both interior and exterior paintings.

For Ginzburg, the works are not meant to be simply perceptual composites of views of the city, but records of varied emotional states experienced throughout this past year, what he calls psychogeographical situations. The works’ grid-like frameworks inevitably bring to mind Piet Mondrian, an earlier chronicler of the city’s structure, while pyramidal planes harken to the city’s glass towers, and to the metaphysical forms seen in work by Hilma af Klint. Looking at the works is an experience akin to a memory of a city, and how all its elements connect to one another, and to the experiences lived by so many of us.

See images from “Translucent Concrete” below.