#artcake – Art Spiel

April 19, 2025April 19, 2025

Beauty is a Blast: a tribute to Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe

Featured Exhibition

Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, installation view, *Beauty is a Blast* at Art Cake

The exhibition Beauty is a Blast, on view at Art Cake in Brooklyn, brings together the work of more than 200 artists in a posthumous examination of the life and influence of Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe (1945–2024). It documents a network of relationships, of pedagogy, of influence. Conceived by artist and curator Christian Haub in 2021 as a modest acknowledgment of Gilbert-Rolfe’s legacy, the project was paused, then resumed in late 2024 in collaboration with Gilbert-Rolfe’s family and the Art Cake team. As word spread, the exhibition grew, not by design, but by response. The scale—over 250 works—became a measure of the reach of an individual who spent decades thinking through the terms and implications of contemporary abstraction.

February 11, 2025February 11, 2025

Judy Pfaff Taught Them to Break the Rules—Now They’re Sharing the Stage

A room with art pieces on the wall

AI-generated content may be incorrect. — Installation view

Judy Pfaff has never played by the rules—her art bends them, her teaching breaks them, and her career is proof she never needed them. A MacArthur “Genius” who reshaped installation art, she has spent five decades throwing order out the window in favor of energy, movement, and sheer creative force. That ethos is on full display at Art Cake in Brooklyn, where Pfaff and three former students have reunited—not in a classroom, but as equals in a space that refuses to sit still.

June 1, 2023June 1, 2023

Jim Condron: Collected Things at Art Cake

A picture containing indoor, art, wall, museum

Description automatically generated — Installation view, Jim Condron: Collected Things at Art Cake, photo courtesy of Etty Yaniv

Collected Things, Jim Condron’s terrific solo exhibition at Art Cake in Brooklyn prompts us to question our relationship with the objects we interact with—objects that we use, discard, and transform through memory and art process. At the heart of this exhibition are Condron’s recent series of sculptures, which brings together everyday objects and ephemeral materials he has collected from artists, writers, and thinkers who participated in the project—these individuals include personal acquaintances like Graham Nickson, Lucy Sante, Rebecca Hoffberger, Carl E. Hazlewood and Cordy Ryman. Among them is the pioneering painter Grace Hartigan, who was Condron’s teacher and for whom he also worked as a graduate assistant in 2004, four years before her death. This body of work highlights how Condron’s process of collecting, editing, and adding other materials, activates the lineage and history of everyday objects, transforming them into playful art objects with renewed vitality and psychological presence.