Ubu Gallery presented Behind the Surrealist Curtain in association with private dealer Timothy Baum, and paralleling the exhibition Surrealism: Desire Unbound at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. This exhibition explored Surrealism’s erotic side. Influenced by the Freudian notion that sexual instinct was fundamental to the development of the psyche, the Surrealists saw erotic desire as important to self-awareness and the …

Ubu Gallery presented a collection of rare, vintage photographs taken by Eugène Atget between 1910 and 1913 in the no-man’s land of trailers, fortifications, gypsies and ragpickers at the edge of Paris known as the Zone Militaire, or more simply, “The Zone.” Focusing on the embankments of Porte d’Ivry and Porte d’Italie, these eighteen photographs were part of two album …

Ubu Gallery and Janos Gat Gallery presented collaborative exhibitions of two exceptional bodies of work by Théodore Brauner: Solarfixes—Photographic Paintings (exhibited for the first time since 1952 at Ubu Gallery) and The Masks—Photographic Anthropomorphisms (exhibited for the first time ever at Janos Gat Gallery). Born in Vienna in 1914, Brauner and his family moved to Romania that same year. As …

H. Th. Wijdeveld’s publication, Wendingen, first appeared in Amsterdam in January 1918, just three months after the first issue of Theo van Doesburg’s more formalist and abstract de Stijl. Founded as a monthly publication devoted to architecture and ornamentation by Architectura et Amicitia, a group of architects and designers loosely referred to as the “Amsterdam School,” Wendingen grew to become …

Best known as the founder—in 1947, along with his wife, Judith Malina—of the itinerant, avant-garde performance ensemble known as The Living Theatre, Julian Beck dropped out of Yale in 1943 at the age of 18 to paint and write in New York City. Alongside Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, William Baziotes, Willem de Kooning and other members of the New York …

Wols (the pseudonym of Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze, b. Germany 1913, d. France 1951) occupies a mythic position in post-war European painting as an emblematic figure of the Informel movement, which, like its American counterpart, “Abstract Expressionism,” was a bridge between Surrealist-inspired automatism and gestural abstraction. When Wols arrived in Paris in 1932, he was already practicing photography. It is …

This exhibition presented a remarkable collection of performance documentation and original photoworks of and by the seminal body/performance artist, Vito Acconci. Notorious and revered, Acconci was an enormous influence on both the American and European art scenes during the period of these profound and, at times, outrageous performances, most of which occurred in the compressed time frame of 1969 through …

László Moholy-Nagy was a complex, charismatic and highly influential artist whose multifaceted career defies classification. This exhibition presented a broad variety of the media in which Moholy worked, bringing together many rare pieces which express Moholy’s polymathic approach to art and life. Moholy originally became fascinated with the issues posed by light, transparency and kinetics in painting. These issues continued …

Between 1966 and 1972, Yoko Ono conceived of, produced and directed more than 16 films, a body of work which comprises a general assault on film conventions and occupies a unique place in the history of the American independent film. Highlighting her achievements in film and coupling it with a recent work, Ono’s exhibition at Ubu Gallery was comprised of …

Ubu Gallery presented an exhibition consisting of photographs by unknown photographers, most of which were extracted from family photo albums, dating from the early part of the 20th Century through the 1960s. In this exhibition, the process of extraction, selection, collection and presentation have, of course, profoundly changed the way in which these photographs were perceived. When presented in these …