Known for his work across a variety of mediums, including texts and curatorial projects, Sanya Kantarovsky’s multifaceted approach often results in artworks that seem forced to reckon with their own embarrassment. The dark humor consistent in Kantarovsky’s work pits the sumptuous against the abject and thrusts private space—be it physical or psychological—into public view. Kantarovsky’s figurative paintings contain drastic shifts in scale, paint application, and stylization. Similarly, the artist probes his art historical predecessors: both canonical and relatively unknown painters, writers, and illustrators. The presence of these muses, which dot Kantarovsky’s compositions, simultaneously questions and indulges in a lineage of painterly impulses.

Art historian and editor based in New York City, Benjamin Carlos Clifford received his Ph.D. from NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts in 2019, writing his dissertation on the controversial status of painting and its relation to a rhetoric of postmodernism that developed in the late 1970s. He has worked at the Jewish Museum and in MoMA’s Department of Photography, and has taught at NYU, Adelphi University, and Christie’s Education. Currently, he serves as an ArtSeen for the Brooklyn Rail, and is revising a chapter of his dissertation for publication.