Summary
- Plato Gallery is currently presenting Exaltation, a group exhibition of 18 artists, now through August 16 in New York.
- The exhibition reimagines mannerist art through a contemporary lens, taking cues from its embrace of excess as a means of survival in a world characterized by social, emotional and cultural upheaval.
In response to an era defined by collapse and reinvention, artists are turning up the dial on extravagance and excess. This response is the center focus of Exaltation, a new 18-person group exhibition at New York’s Plato Gallery, now on view through August 16. The show explores what it means to make mannerist art today, framing our moment as a kind of exquisite distortion, one where history loops back on itself and emotional intensity becomes an act of survival.
Mannerism is characterized by an embrace of flair over form, drama over balance, and Exaltation builds on this idea to envelope our present moment. Just as artists in 16th-century Italy grappled with the fallout of the Sack of Rome, or creatives in pre-revolutionary France responded to decadence with Rococo frills, today’s makers are channeling emotional ambiguity into rich, dissonant forms, clashing colors, baroque textures and surreal light.
Curated by gallerist Elena Platonova, the show takes inspiration from last year’s return of Neo-Rococo, and the wider movement of art created in the face of collective instability. Periods of crisis have always seeded artistic transformation: from the end of the Roman Empire to the dawn of World War I. Platonova names Doechii’s 2025 Gotye-Kimbra remix, “Anxiety,” as a fitting title track for the show: “Anxiety is perhaps the principal sentiment of mannerist art, which proclaims an end of an era of harmony and bursts with asymmetries, diagonals, unexpected colors, precarious compositions and all sorts of emotion-stirring textures and effects: fireworks, sweat, reflections, lights, neon glow and shine of fluorescent fabric.”
Showcasing a host of works across painting, mixed-media works and sculpture, Exaltation renders art history and its traditions through a kaleidoscopic contemporary gaze: Alic Brock brings us back to Teresa de Lempicka’s Paris and Ancient Rome, Jacob Rochesters’ sitting boxer channels Caravaggio’s meditative and dramatic chiaroscuro, while Takura Suzuki emblazons an ode to Dutch still-life with Mandarin light signs.
“In the world where every news is breaking news and everyone can be famous for three seconds, artists are trying to grasp onto the comforting permanence of the past with a well-spirited exaltation of post-postmodernism,” Platonova wrote. “If the end might be near and one wants to live at the height of their emotions, in hopeful reverie and ideally in style, who are we to judge?”
Plato Gallery
202 Bowery,
New York, NY 10012
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