Visit the Horripilation online viewing room here

Aks Misyuta, Alic Brock, Ariane Heloise Hughes, Charline Tyberghein, Hunter Amos, Jackson Shaner, Joseph Parra, Kelly Shami, Ken Nurenberg, Rita Maikova, Tim Brawner, Vilte Fuller and Will Thornton.

The Hole is proud to present a hair-raising group show Horripilation on the Bowery for the winter. During these darkest months we highlight the sinister edge of surrealist impulses in emerging art of the moment.

The chill down your spine or the raised hairs on your arm or back of the neck provide the title of the show, and this animalistic physical response to fear unites the works. A spatter of blood, the look in someone’s eye, a muffled scream: the works in the show go darker.

Greeting you at the entrance is the above painting by Tim Brawner whose terrible grinning red visage is lit from below just as all good horror story raconteurs should be. Going deeper we encounter Vilte Fuller’s fragmenting reality where the atmosphere is thick with suspense hung near Hunter Amos’ fragmented figure unraveling before us. Ariane Heloise Hughes’ piercing gaze is hard to hold, and her use of swan imagery ups the psychological intensity. Aks Misyuta and Charline Tyberghein play w shadows from Aks’ black-eyed shadow figures lit like a Legier to hammers, boots, rope and other not quite innocuous items at low relief from Tyberghein.

Ukrainian artist Rita Maikova has a more traditionally surrealist approach with an assortment of inscrutable shapes laid out in a plain expanse. They are alternately sharp or fuzzy but all creepy crawling, skittering around the canvas. Meanwhile Will Thornton offers us three suggestive little perverts that seem poised for sucking and squeezing and the Copper Escape Jar by Jackson Shaner with howling, trapped figures inside is the stuff of nightmares.

Also in body horror we have Alic Brock take on Maurizio and Pierpaolo’s Toilet Paper which was itself a take on perhaps Buñuel’s Chien Andalou and gives new ick to the ick phrase “eye teeth”. We have Kelly Shami pierced bouquet, puncturing the delicate, and Ken Nurenberg’s painting—somehow both meaty and necrotic—a Greek torso erupting with rococo decorative flourishes. Joseph Parra’s pointilistic topography of the human torso is straight from the tube and already electrically on-end.

If this show is creepily familiar it has strong overlap with Second Smile (2020), our pandemic show that we installed but nobody got to see. Looking at surrealism and feminism from classical artists to emerging, the show’s wall colors were borrowed from international museum shows of female surrealists and we preserve those colors here, see images of the exhibition HERE. Copies of the exhibition catalogue are available.

For sales inquiries email sales@thehole.com