Sebastian Gladstone is thrilled to present “432 Park Ave”, a solo presentation at The Armory NY of new paintings by conceptual artist Nick Angelo. 432 Park Ave is a Manhattan luxury condominium building which was briefly the tallest residential building in the world. Located along a stretch of skyscrapers near Central Park known as “Billionaire’s Row,” the properties within the building are amongst the city’s highest priced real estate. The building’s residents and owners include mega-celebrities and corporate mavericks, and at one point, a majority of the buyer’s identities were concealed by Shell companies. Despite its opulent veneer, 432 Park has been plagued by malfunction. Claims from residents include millions of dollars of water damage and frequent mechanical malfunctions, with research indicating fundamental issues with the building’s materiality, engineering, and construction.
Portraying the conundrum of 432 Park as a cultural metaphor, the presentation will traverse the architecture of the building, framing fragments of it as stage sets. The condominium walls and floors become platforms, the steel beams that support the building become the stage’s legs. The leaking and cracking interiors become synonyms for scenes characterized by malfunction, in part due to failing systems haunted by their own outgrowth. While the scenarios displayed in the paintings may appear at times whimsical, and at others ominous, the totality of the series leans on the cultural absurdities, perversions, depletions and withdrawals of a cultural environment plagued by disinformation, reaction, and dissent.
