This Monday night, French artist Nicolas Pol will bring his bold, abstract paintings stateside for the first time in his career. The month-long show, titled “The Martus Maw,” will be open to the public from November 10 through December 10, and will include 16 never-before-seen works from Pol. Exhibited at 80 Essex Street, in a structure that was formerly an old meat market, the locale immediately points to the show’s fledgling curator, Vladimir Restoin Roitfeld, who has, in his short career, shown a distinct penchant for abandoned and/or off-the-beaten path exhibition spaces. But the transience of the space services the conceptual rigors of the paintings with equal fortitude. As Restoin Roitfeld, who met Pol (a graduate of the Ecole des Beaux Art) 8 months ago in Paris as a result of a mutual friend’s introduction, muses, “You can look at his work for hours or even for a lifetime and you will always see something different.”

Lupus Gutus
2009, Oil on canvas
210 x 390 cm

The jewelry designs of Stockholm-based artist Hanna Hedman walk a fine line between fantasy and reality, art and function. Conceptually, her highly sculptural necklaces are constructed with the intention of offering their wearer a sense of escape; an entrance into an alternate universe. Hedman follows somewhat in the footsteps of sculptor Alexander Calder’s forays into jewelry, but the work she produces is something else entirely. Ultimately, Hedman, who exhibits her work globally in galleries, has the intention to provoke, as well as to provide solace and a sense of escape. More armor than accessory, Hedman’s works occupy the dark space between literal and figurative, where nothing is quite what it seems. This is what Hedman calls “The grey area,” where everything is “beautiful, but also melancholic and malevolent.”

Photography by Sanna Lindberg