With February 8th fast-approaching as a closing date for many gallery shows, one needs to set aside time this week to visit Elza Kayal Gallery in Tribeca to see their current exhibition, Ambrus Gero: All My Thirties. As the gallery’s first show for 2025, All My Thirties is a solo exhibition focusing on the most recent paintings of the Brooklyn-based artist, Ambrus Gero (Hungarian, b. 1986), who is known for his colorfully saturated compositions exploring the deepest emotional vulnerabilities that we all encounter in life - isolation, social (re)adjustment, the anxieties of overthinking, and a fervent desire for community.
Before moving to the United States, Gero’s Hungarian upbringing ultimately influenced his resolve to pursue a career as an artist. His father was a painter who provided a young Gero with a thorough education in traditional painting and drawing techniques, with an extra dose of hands-on learning from a local arts school. However, Gero’s first-ever independent work as an artist was neither through oil paintings nor draftsmanship, but graffiti tagging, as he recounted in a 2018 interview: “When I became a teenager I started working as a graffiti artist. My father, who was a painter, encouraged me not to do graffiti, but nobody could distract me from the path I wanted to take. Well actually, a police officer distracted me once.”
Painting later became the prime focus for Gero’s artistic energies, which led to his enrollment in the Painting program at the University of Pécs, one of Hungary’s most prestigious and oldest universities whose roots extend back to the 14th Century. Along with his degree, Gero participated in a Spring semester course at the University of Hertfordshire in England where he created silkscreen prints on fabric. Like many artists, another layer of Gero’s arts education entailed the countless independent trips made to museum and gallery shows all over Europe, the Middle East, and the United States as a way to study works in situ.
Eventually, Gero relocated to Brooklyn and enrolled in the MFA in Painting program at the Pratt Institute. It was during this career milestone that Gero became acquainted with Eniko Imre, the Director of Elza Kayal Gallery who was then in the process of completing her Master’s in Art Market Studies at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT). In 2019, Imre and her peers organized a group exhibition at FIT, Beyond Species, which included Gero as one of the participating artists. Following this exhibition, a robust professional relationship was solidified between Gero and Imre (who, like the artist, is also Hungarian).
And now, Gero’s art has come back into the curatorial sphere of Imre at her Tribeca gallery, Elza Kayal (established in 2023). Since Gero will turn 40 next year, he created a series of 12 paintings as visual meditations on life in his 30s, which also doubled as a personal reflection on his acclimation to the New York art scene. Following an autobiographical narrative, All My Thirties is the artist’s painterly musings on social alienation and the ensuing sense of anxiety or boredom that emerges, the in-your-face presence of mass media and consumer culture in one’s private life, and the socio-cultural idiosyncrasies involved in navigating adulthood. For the latter theme, sexual desires, love & intimacy, microaggressions, and insecurity are key topics that pervade Gero’s paintings.
Given the multilayered complexities of these interrelated themes, the formal elements of Gero’s paintings are just as eclectically manifold. He makes use of a swath of colors from both ends of the spectrum - the coolest and the warmest - to a powerful effect reminiscent of the color-centric paintings of the German Expressionists and the French Fauvists in the early-20th Century. And in terms of materiality, his paintings are a mixture of oil, acrylic, tempera, and spray paints. Heterogeneity reigns supreme in the working methods of Gero.
There is a rawness to Gero’s style as seen in the ways he depicts his figures in the intimate confines of mostly bedroom settings. That rawness is both literal and metaphorical for the characters of these scenes are shown in their most private moments in semi-abstracted depictions: lying in bed (Nude No. 2, 2024), on a date (Champagne, 2024), and in romantic embraces (Pink Room, 2024). As direct as these narratives may seem, there is a deliberate interplay between explicitness and ambiguity that leaves ample room for visitors to develop their own interpretations of what these paintings communicate. Since color is the formal building block of Gero’s compositions, the energetic thrushes of paint blurs the subjects in such a way that certain figures come across as either human, animal, or, perhaps, something hybrid.
Take Chicken (2024) as just one example. The entire canvas is occupied with a semi-amorphous representation of what seems to be raw chicken with its headless body mass and upwards-facing splayed legs before a darkened background. Yet, there is also something quite human about its portrayal as the crispy reddish-brown legs give way to light blue tips that look like shoes (possibly high-heeled shoes?). Returning to the mass, the admixture of brushstroke upon brushstroke upon brushstroke could very well be a human, rather than a headless opening towards the bottom right. This conceptual challenge is taken a step further when seeing the ambiguous subject in another painting, Neon (2024). This time, the “chicken” rests on a giant, cozy bed in a lush, neon red and pink bedroom. Suddenly, the humanness of the “chicken” seems to become more evident. But yet, it is never made clear as to who or what the subject is in question. Considering the paintings in All My Thirties are Gero’s personal reflections on a range of human behaviors, the use of animal subjects and titles could very well serve as an allegorical device. Having spent much time with these two particular paintings, I could not help but think of how the American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald used animal-like descriptions to construct entire personalities for the characters in his famous novel The Great Gatsby (1925).
Although the paintings in All My Thirties are largely autobiographical reflections of Gero’s recent life, the opaque representations of subjects, indirect narratives, and cryptic titles encourage viewers to not only interpret the images for themselves, but to also forge a connection with the works much in the same way as Gero. One element is certain and is, so to speak, the moral of this exhibition: despite the visual rumination on certain vulnerable topics in the “fractured reality” of life in the 2020s as seen through the eyes of Ambrus Gero, the artist’s engagement with universal themes that affect each and every one of us is a reminder of our common humanity and the artist’s “persistent aspiration for human unity.”
In addition to his long-standing engagement with painting, Gero also produces kinetic sculptures and installations that further explore the themes of social isolation and unity. Outside of New York, Gero’s works have been exhibited in his native Hungary, Denmark, Slovenia, and Germany.
Ambrus Gero: All My Thirties is on view through Saturday, February 8, 2025. The gallery is located at 368 Broadway, Suite 409 and is open to the public on a Wednesday through Saturday schedule from 1 - 5pm. The gallery is co-owned by Vinny & Eniko Imre, and the gallery is named after the mothers of the gallerists as a tribute to the enduring legacy they imparted on their lives.
Bibliography
Brady, Daniel. “Ambrus ‘Brush’ Gero: Between Reality and Fantasy.” Jackson’s, November 30, 2018. https://www.jacksonsart.com/blog/2018/11/30/ambrus-gero-artist-interview/.
Elza Kayal Gallery. “Ambrus Gero - All My Thirties,” 2025. https://elzakayal.com/gero.
FIT Newsroom. “Art Market Studies Exhibition: Beyond Species,” 2019. https://news.fitnyc.edu/event/art-market-studies-exhibition-beyond-species/.
Saatchi Art. “Ambrus Gero Bio.” Accessed February 4, 2025. https://www.saatchiart.com/AmbrusGero?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_id=20269835001&utm_campaign=C3_2650_Catch-All_Google_US_Brand+Nonbrand_Purchase_PMax_Search_Saatchi_06-13-23_High_Priority&utm_term=&utm_content=&gad_source=1&gclid=CjwKCAiA74G9BhAEEiwA8kNfpYBkY44yD8ZzsKAnmCE_-YdQkMxC5pvBnOySlBQu_JnAqqCskFtmIRoC720QAvD_BwE.
Yaniv, Etty. “A Glimpse into Elza Kayal Gallery: with Eniko Imre.” Art Spiel, December 3, 2024. https://artspiel.org/a-glimpse-into-elza-kayal-gallery-with-eniko-imre/.
Wish I could see this exhibition in person. You piqued my interest.
Wow! Really exciting work. And, fyi, I never saw the chicken…