Gallery Profile: West Street Gallery

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West Street Gallery, installation view
Courtesy, Matt Moravec, Alex Gartenfeld and the artists

Gallery Profile: West Street Gallery

West Street Gallery

395 West Street, #2

New York, NY 10014

West Street Gallery feels like a glutton’s languid belly rub after a dank meal, encouraging fantasies of the next taste. Matt Moravec and Alex Gartenfeld have done quite a bit with their first four shows, capturing both conceptual and formal pieces in harmony with Gartenfeld’s surprisingly enduring apartment. The venue opened in June 2010 and strives to generate dialogue among a young generation of artists, curators, critics, and enthusiasts. The three-bedroom apartment on the outskirts of the West Village is refreshingly detached from the bulk of art showcases. The layout summons the white-box format they’re trying to separate themselves from only to be saved by striking views of the Hudson, the informal air, and the purr of the West Side Highway. The living room/kitchen is the main arena, but work has also graced Gartenfeld’s bedroom, bathroom, and hallway. Two or three artists have shown at a time in the space, inciting discussions of thematic and technical juxtapositions. Straying away from exhibition titles for the most part, the space has been an open forum for curated confrontations. The foundation of West Street Gallery is a solid community of New York’s unrepresented resident artists beyond digital degrees. Jo Nigoghossian’s concrete sculptures currently occupy West Street Gallery, attacking the daintiness of embellishment, simultaneously vituperating and embracing texture in our mind’s taste-buds. David Scanavino’s linoleum installation, foot-by-foot squares of Mad Hatter hues, contradicts the solemnity of Nigoghossian’s sculpture and implants them within a psychedelic trek toward complete disintegration or absorption. It is participatory without being cheesy, all-encompassing but not (thus far) tasteless.