Plato Gallery's Latest Shows Rewrite the Rules of Female Portraiture
‘Heart Left in the Bag’ and ‘Here’s Looking at You’ are now on view until February 8.
Plato Gallery in New York is currently presenting Heart Left in the Bag, a solo exhibition by Katya Muromtseva, and Here’s Looking at You, an all-women group exhibition, both on view until February 8, 2025. Grounded in ideas of identity, memory and self-representation, the two concurrent shows reimagine the personal and collective narratives of women from around the world, turning to art as a tool for reclamation while offering poignant meditations of power along the way.
In the ground floor gallery, USSR-born artist Katya Muromtseva makes her New York solo debut with a series of lush watercolor portraits in Heart Left in the Bag. Taking the form of shadowy blooms, each work was created during interviews with female immigrants that now reside in the U.S., as each participant is asked: “When did you feel that you live in history?” In this evolving body of work, Muromtseva laces personal accounts with a larger historical framework, capturing memory as shaped through migration. Like a lava lamp in liquid flux, the portraits mirror the constant adaptation and shifting selfhood necessitated by life between cultures, embodying the strength and truth of her subjects in figurative and abstract shapes.
Traveling downstairs, Here’s Looking at You summons a diverse lineup of eight women painters – Sanié Bokhari, Darina Karpov, Opal Mae Ong, Katya Muromtseva, Laura Sanders, Natalie Terenzini, Summer Wheat and Jesse Zuo – whose work challenges traditional modes of representation – a sans-male gaze – to invite a self-defined voice that firmly places power in the hands of its makers. While the works, spanning the hyperreal to surreal, stand as powerful assertions of autonomy and personal expression, each artist divinely subverts the very presence of a gaze, offering unfiltered visions of vulnerability, transformation and leisure when no other is watching.
Head to Plato’s website for more information about the shows.
Plato Gallery
202 Bowery,
New York, NY 10012
