Alina Bliumis
Situations | 515 West 20th Street, 3rd Floor On view through May 3, 2025
HomeGoods kitchen wall décor meets Magritte meets emoji slang in the dusky, dreamy still-lifes of Alina Bliumis’s show “Gut Feelings” at Situations. Food-themed visual double-entendres abound—an eggplant arcs upward behind a plump peach; a corn cob stands erect, like a bioluminescent monolith with two apples at its base; oysters on the half shell and bananas are motifs. But sexual metaphors are just the beginning, their winking allusions playing off the artist’s more subtle, or encrypted, content.
The small and medium-scale oil works, in which gracefully depicted arrangements populate indistinct interiors and landscapes, or float in strange skies (sometimes a berry soars solo), are installed on the small gallery’s white walls and expanses of worn brick. This latter, rust-hued backdrop coordinates queasily with the earth-tone and chalky pastel cornucopia of grapes, greenery, and happy snails in Fruit and Cigarette Butts via Drone, 2024, making the jarring, hidden items of the canvas’s title even harder to spot. They’re there, though, if you look: This vision of plenty (which might otherwise be at home on a wallpaper border or tea towel) is mixed with ashtray contents, and a mosquito-like aircraft hovers in the distance. The surreal composition of Mess, 2024, lends eerie geopolitical significance to another display of produce. Its pile of watermelons evokes the symbol used on social media in lieu of the Palestinian flag to evade trolls and censors. (In some feat of dystopian engineering, it seems, the melons here no longer take an ovoid form; they’re cubes.)
Deploying the still-life tradition to her own ends, the New York-based Bliumis, who moved to the U.S. from Belarus after high school, reveals her attunement to art’s fate and function under authoritarian rule. If, in the Dutch Golden Age, the genre spoke to colonial, mercantile wealth through its tabletop orgies of exotic food, in her work, images of opulence give way to commentary on war, global trade, and climate change, whispering in the lingua franca of dirty jokes and hunger.—Johanna Fateman
