Intimate Planet

Curated by Babette Rittenberg

The Bogart Salon is pleased to announce the first annual Bogart Invitational summer exhibition, a yearly season ending event that allows for the 56 Bogart building to highlight itself as a creative hub of art making in Bushwick. Curated by Babette Rittenberg, and including over 21 artists, the work has been selected from numerous working studios in this landmark building that sits at the heart of the emerging Bushwick art scene.

Intimate Planet is the curatorial theme around which Rittenberg has organized her show, and refers to her concept of a “post-ironic” world view that eschews the omnipresent digital “distancing” universe in favor of a more analog belief in actual connectivity in a physical space. The works selected centers on deeply personal ideas of the “self” as an artistic ideal. This exhibition presents a fully engaged model of the artist as a human engaged with other humans in a problematic, but unembarrassed “dance of unity.” This is a theme that might make the fully initiated art-speaker cringe with the profound lack of appropriate detachment. This art event celebrates the actual joys of art making and the connections those acts are intended to engender in us. As the artist herself puts it …ultimately this show IS meant to be a feel good show, but I don’t want it to border on the blissfully ignorant. I want it to address our life in the present. … I believe it is through building relationships and helping others that real intimacy is formed and this is what I want the viewer to be able to connect to and feel motivated by when they leave the show.