Flesh&flowers works of shura skaya and jean weissglass
OPENING RECEPTION: Thursday, July 9th,2026 6-8 pm
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Thursday July 9th 2026
Flesh&Flowers:Shura Skaya and Jean Weissglass
On View: July 9th – August 9th, 2026
Opening Reception:
Thursday, July 9, 2026
6-8 PM EST
Crossing Art Gallery
559 West 23rd st.
New York, NY 10001
New York, NY — Crossing Art Gallery is pleased to present Flesh & Flowers, a group exhibition of works by New York City-based artists Shura Skaya and Jean Weissglass. This upcoming show marks the first convergence of their respective artistic practices. On display at Crossing Art are oil and small-scale porcelain paintings by Skaya, alongside oil paintings and drawings by Weissglass, representing the past decade of both artists’ oeuvres. The exhibition's title is borrowed from a poem by the British-American writer Maxx Blagg.
Writing on the exhibition, Christina Kee observes:
"The earth spirits of What Happens Underground When No One is Watching (2023), despite being mostly eyeballs, mustaches, and kiss-shaped lips; the mythically lovely nymphs of Tree Lovers (2023–2025); and, in Breakthrough with Cats (2026), the creatures who scratch and dangle at the edges of a composition torn apart—Skaya treats these characters with a kind of indulgent tenderness. This theme is picked up in the Living Doubles series, executed in Skaya’s alternate format of small-scale porcelain paintings, which by the very necessity of the medium capture the speed and flourish of a fleeting thought.
Far from neutral or decorative, Weissglass’s blooms run like a minor-key leitmotif through paintings like Boudoir, in which their vivid colors are moored in dark shadow, or extinguished through a fierce working of the surface, as in Lavender Table, where a floral shape stripped to the wood support below hovers above a painter’s table like a taciturn muse. In her works on paper, Weissglass similarly vies between depiction and negation, almost obliterating the flowers and figures of her charged scenes behind scribbles, smears, and cascades of charcoal. In Pushy, a partially obscured woman literally presses against the compositional edge of the drawing, as though seeking an exit from the jagged, red-petalled garden of her surroundings."
About the Artists
Shura Skaya
Shura Skaya (b.1979) holds an MFA from New York Studio School. She is a multimedia artist whose practice spans music, painting, film, and performance. Navigating the irrational space of dreams, her work blends slapstick humor, surrealist play, and psychological drama, all driven by musical impulse. Skaya has exhibited internationally at venues including the Brooklyn Museum; Open Gallery and Roza Azora Gallery in Moscow; CandyLand Gallery in Stockholm; and BDry Goods in Brooklyn. She has also presented two independent street exhibitions in Red Hook, Brooklyn. Her public art projects include two large-scale murals in Staten Island, New York. The artist lives and works in New York, NY.
Jean Weissglass
Jean Weissglass (b.1961) holds an MFA from University of Michigan Ann Arbor. She continued her education at L’Ecole des Arts Decoratifs in Nice France and Fashion Institute of Technology and New York Studio School. She is a painter whose practice is grounded in drawing. Her interest in gesture, movement, and storytelling has led her to improvise with free-form stop-motion animations. Weissglass’s work has been the subject of numerous reviews over the years, including a recent Art & Object article by Barbara MacAdam, “Lyrical Brutalism,” in the May/June 2026 issue. Her work has been shown internationally at Topographie de l’Art, Paris; Patiala in India; and the Mykonos Biennale, Greece (2017). Her work is currently included in Public Pool at Ethan Cohen Fine Arts, New York. The artist lives and works in New York.
Christina Kee )contributing writer)
is an artist and writer who has worked at The William Louis-Dreyfus Foundation since 2011, assisting with public programming and exhibitions of the works of artists such as George Grosz, James Castle, Stanley Lewis, and Graham Nickson. She has written on the work of numerous modern and contemporary artists and was a regular speaker on the Artcritical Review Panel. Originally from Toronto, she is a Studio School alumna (MFA 2006) and past assistant to the Dean.
Media Inquiries / RSVP:
Crossing Art-June Dong
(646)488 8950
June@crossing-collective.com
info@crossingart.com
