Pablo Benzo Brings 'Time Traveler' to The Hole in Tribeca

Summary

• Pablo Benzo debuts in New York at The Hole Tribeca with ‘Time Traveler and Other Fragile Detours’
• His cubist-inspired works merge figures, plants and objects in layered, surreal interiors

The Hole launches Time Traveler and Other Fragile Detours, the first New York solo exhibition of Berlin-based Chilean painter Pablo Benzo, opening next Friday at the gallery’s Tribeca location. The show features five new paintings and six works on paper that draw inspiration from Peggy Guggenheim’s legendary 1940s gallery Art of This Century, which introduced Surrealism and Cubism to New York.

Benzo’s work channels that avant-garde lineage through a muted palette of greens, yellows, magentas and blues. His brushy, stippled oils form volumetric shapes that blur the line between abstraction and figuration. Interiors become stage-like settings where figures, plants and furniture fold into one another. A recurring motif is the “pancake plant,” its rounded leaves punctuating scenes with rhythmic balance.

Highlights include a canvas where a woman gazes from her living room beside a painting-within-a-painting of a Modigliani-style nude, and works where sofas and figures merge into playful, curving odalisques. Across the series, Benzo plays with perspective, layering “pictures within pictures” in ways that echo early Cubism while reframing it as what he calls a “sensory inheritance.”

The exhibition is on view through October 11.

The Hole
86 Walker St.
New York, NY 10013