Around, Above, Below

Group exhibition bringing together artists selected through an open call, featuring painting, printmaking, mixed media, and sculpture exploring space and perception. About Van Der Plas Gallery is pleased to present Around, Above, Below, a group exhibition bringing together artists selected through the gallery's recent open call. Located in New York's Lower East Side, Van Der Plas Gallery continues its commitment to providing a platform for emerging and independent artists and introducing new voices to its program. Bringing together painting, printmaking, mixed media, sculpture, and other approaches, Around, Above, Below reflects the individuality of each participating artist while finding common ground in a shared curiosity about space and the ways physical surroundings intersect with perception, sensation, memory, and emotion. Rather than presenting a single point of view, the exhibition embraces contrast. Precise craftsmanship sits alongside loose, dreamlike intuition, while artists push materials and genres in unexpected directions. Across the exhibition, space becomes more than a physical setting: it can be compressed, layered, remembered, imagined, or emotionally charged, shifting alongside the figures and objects that inhabit it. Shanghai-born artist Marcia Liu constructs a surreal landscape in The Other Side through delicately layered monotype impressions. Translucent textures and flattened areas of color establish depth while simultaneously disrupting it, creating a tension between space and surface. Human and animal figures appear among fragments of landscape and architecture, occupying an environment that feels familiar without belonging to any particular place. Through the monotype process, forms overlap, disappear, and leave traces of what came before, allowing multiple moments and spaces to coexist and blurring the boundaries between the observed, remembered, and imagined. Margaret Koval's Boundary Condition (Red) places a partially obscured figure within dense foliage and flowers, while a chain-link fence compresses the foreground. These physical and visual barriers complicate the relationship between viewer and subject, creating an atmosphere that feels simultaneously enclosed and secure. Koval paints from behind loose-weave linen, pushing oil paint through the fabric so that the image emerges on the opposite side, transformed by the surface through which it passes. The work explores the uncertain boundary between protection and confinement, bringing the built and natural worlds into a compressed space and leaving the figure suspended between them. In Daisy or Dorothy, Kadushin combines screen print collage, oil, mulberry paper, and construction paper to build a fragmented environment around the image of her late grandfather. The figure, with the quality of an old newspaper clipping or photograph, stands in contrast to a loosely constructed landscape of bold color, flattened architecture, and tactile, assembled surfaces. Interior and exterior become indistinguishable, giving the work the feeling of a place reconstructed through memory rather than observed directly. The piece reflects Kadushin's ongoing response to the loss of her grandfather and his longing for her grandmother, Daisy, near the end of his life. Through its mixture of materials, perspectives, and visual languages, Daisy or Dorothy turns personal memory into a space of its own, where home, absence, grief, and comfort can occupy the same image. Read more Toggle Prints Mixed media Sculpture Painting