It was a blustery day when I walked into Adam Cohen’s A Hug From the Art World, a Chelsea townhouse at 515 W 19th St, previously home to London-based gallery Timothy Taylor. The show on view, Thomas Grünefeld’s Misfits, a collection of taxidermy animals with intentionally mismatched heads and bodies, couldn’t be better suited to the gallery’s unexpectedly domestic setting.
A woman in her late twenties sat at a round wooden table with a freshly brewed pot of tea and two mugs. At her feet was a furry creature with a cat’s face and a body of some other, unidentifiable mammal. As I walked around the ground floor space, a man came downstairs and joined her at the table. I overheard him mention that she’d been late several days in a row, and as he poured himself a cup of tea, he asked her why that was. The woman explained she was in an in-between stage of her life and trying to balance several things at once. She was still figuring it out and would try not to be late again. He nodded, leaning back in his chair and sipping his tea. He said something like, “Well, if that’s the phase of life you’re in, okay.”
On the second floor, I found a cow with a pug’s head curled up in the foyer, its head raised, ears pointed forward, attentively. Perched on the bookshelf was a ferret/duck mix, its furry tail dangling off the edge of the furniture. Surrounded by Grünefeld’s amalgamations of household pets and barnyard creatures, in a space that felt more like a living room than a Chelsea gallery, the name A Hug From the Art World suddenly seemed fitting.
A woman in her late twenties sat at a round wooden table with a freshly brewed pot of tea and two mugs. At her feet was a furry creature with a cat’s face and a body of some other, unidentifiable mammal. As I walked around the ground floor space, a man came downstairs and joined her at the table. I overheard him mention that she’d been late several days in a row, and as he poured himself a cup of tea, he asked her why that was. The woman explained she was in an in-between stage of her life and trying to balance several things at once. She was still figuring it out and would try not to be late again. He nodded, leaning back in his chair and sipping his tea. He said something like, “Well, if that’s the phase of life you’re in, okay.”
On the second floor, I found a cow with a pug’s head curled up in the foyer, its head raised, ears pointed forward, attentively. Perched on the bookshelf was a ferret/duck mix, its furry tail dangling off the edge of the furniture. Surrounded by Grünefeld’s amalgamations of household pets and barnyard creatures, in a space that felt more like a living room than a Chelsea gallery, the name A Hug From the Art World suddenly seemed fitting.