FusionArts Museum is pleased to present Toxic Paradise and Amerika, two solo exhibitions of work by multidisciplinary artist Shalom Neuman.

Before Al Gore’s academy award winning documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” about the detrimental effects of pollution there was Shalom Neuman’s darkly compelling, eerily prescient Surreal series Toxic Paradise. Created during the years 1984 – 1989 these large sculptural paintings depicting man’s inhumanity to planet earth are particularly relevant to today’s times in light of the new momentum gained by the ever growing Green Movement. This timely series of oil paintings on plywood, all of which use found objects, artificial lighting effects and sound tracks will be presented with an installation in the main gallery.

The title of Shalom’s Amerika is a nod to Amerika, the early unfinished novel by Franz Kafka. This series of faces, described by international art critic and lecturer Robert Morgan as “... less portraits than archetypes – composites of much of the weirdness that the artist encounters in human beings who hang-out around the vicinity of his studio in Brooklyn” are created from modeling paste, acrylic paint and found objects surrounded by little plastic figures. There is the added dimension of sound in this series as each piece (save one) has a set of sound chips, giving each “Amerikan” a voice of his or her own.

Shalom Tomas Neuman was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia. He is the last surviving male of a large Jewish family, most of whom perished in Nazi Germany’s Holocaust. His family escaped from Prague towards the end of the war and emigrated to Haifa, Israel where he spent his childhood. When he was 12 Shalom, his sister and his parents emigrated to Pittsburgh, PA. He has lived in the United States ever since and has made New York City his home since the early 1980s.

Shalom received dual BFA’s and MFA’s in painting and sculpture from Carnegie-Mellon University. He won the Damrosch Scholarship to study in France where he received The Beaux Arts painting prize. Shalom did his post graduate fellowship in painting and sculpture at Indiana University.

Shalom resides in New York and works out of his studio in Fort Green, Brooklyn. He has taught at The Cooper Union, Parsons School of Design and has been a visiting lecturer at The School of Visual Arts and Yale. He currently teaches at Pratt Institute of Technology. He exhibits in the United States, South America, Asia and in Europe.