Upcoming EXHIBITIONS
Shura Skaya and Jean Weissglass: Flesh & Flowers
OPENING RECEPTION: Thursday July 9th,2026 6-8PM
Coming soon Location Artists
Opening July 9th, 2026 559 West 23rd Street Shura Skaya
New York NY 10011 Jean Weissglass
Crossing Art is pleased to present Flesh and Flowers, a two-person exhibition featuring the work of Shura Skaya and Jean Weissglass. These two very different artists are linked in this show by an attitude of sheer unruliness towards image making. Their large-scale paintings and drawings are constructed from a profusion of parts, whether recognizable or fantastical, abstractly gestural or delicately articulated. The resulting scenarios could only ever exist within the fiction of two dimensions, but suggest a host of embodied sensations nonetheless: textures and tastes (fur, claws, a lover’s grip, a dinner burnt) an abundance of scents (flowers growing into blossom, or falling into rot) and color everywhere: deep and shadowed, or glowingly radiant, like sunshine through water or glass.
In Skaya’s large paintings we sense a dream story just as it unfurls into a place of near recognition. Somehow we feel we know the figures she calls up: The earth spirits of What happens Underground when no one is watching, despite their being mostly eyeballs, mustaches and kiss-shaped lips; the mythically lovely nymphs of Tree Lovers; and in Breakthrough with Cats, the creatures who scratch and dangle at the edges of a composition torn apart. Skaya treats these characters with a kind of indulgent tenderness, they are beings allowed to extend and express themselves as needed, existing in states of seeking and having. The theme is picked up in the Living Doubles series, which is done in Skaya’s alternate format of small-scale porcelain paintings, that by the necessity of the medium capture the speed and flourish of a fleeting thought. Composed in clusters of fluidly rendered imagery, Skaya’s paintings convey a vision of her medium as a place from which anything might appear, where there is adventure in its possibilities, and sheer pleasure in its infinity.
If a dominant force in Skaya’s paintings can be described as expansion, in Weissglass’s work it is instead compression: a powerful contraction of imagery and energy that make the settings of her works scenes of quiet crisis. The effect is all the more striking because Weissglass’s central subject in this exhibition is flowers. 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 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. The contrasting dynamic Weissglass establishes between the settings of her images, and the application of their medium - between constraint and destructive force – defines a visual world that acts simultaneously as a trap and a means of escape.
The range and variation in the work of both Skaya and Weissglass is almost theatrical in its generosity. In their work they conjure situations that fascinate, invite, and push up against what is in their medium, the fourth – and only – wall.
Media Inquiries / RSVP:
Crossing Art - Jun Dong
(646) 488 8950
Jun@crossing-collective.com
About the Artists
Shura Skaya
Shura Skaya is a multimedia artist whose practice spans music, painting, film, and performance. Her practice continues to navigate the irrational space of dreams, blending slapstick humor, surrealist play, and psychological drama, all riding on the impulse of the music. Skaya has exhibited internationally, including Brooklyn Museum, Open Gallery and Roza Azora Gallery in Moscow, CandyLand Gallery in Stockholm and BDry Goods in Brooklyn. She 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 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.
About the Contributing Writer
Christina Kee 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.