Installation view, Tyler Ballon: Flying High at Deitch Gallery, NYC, 2025Tyler Ballon: Flying High
March 8–April 19, 2025
18 Wooster Street, New York
Images courtesy of Deitch Gallery
Tyler Ballon’s Flying High, on view at Jeffrey Deitch, operates in the charged space where history, race, and sports collide. The exhibition’s centerpiece paintings, monumental in scale and richly saturated, depict Black high school athletes and marching band members with an almost ecclesiastical reverence. These aren’t just portraits of young men and women in uniform; they are a counter-history in oil, a reclamation of the American pastime as an arena of Black self-determination. The paintings hum with a near-photographic clarity, but it’s the artist’s subtle distortions—elongated limbs, exaggerated expressions—that shift these compositions from mere realism into something closer to mythology.
At first glance, Ballon’s subjects are ensconced in the familiar iconography of high school sports: players standing at attention, musicians mid-performance, postures disciplined yet electric with latent energy. But beneath this veneer of order is an unease that lingers. The marching band of Malcolm X Shabazz High School, a visual echo of military regiments, evokes the fraught historical relationship between Black bodies and American nationalism. In Bear Arms/Second Amendment (2024-25), Ballon deftly transposes the composition of Manet’s Execution of Emperor Maximilian onto a contemporary scene, where young Black men stand armed—not as aggressors, but as defenders. In doing so, he destabilizes the prevailing narratives of who holds power and who is allowed to bear arms in America.
Sharif Farrag: Hybrid Moments
March 8–April 19, 2025
76 Grand Street, New York
Images courtesy of Deitch Gallery
Sharif Farrag’s Hybrid Moments at Deitch Gallery explodes with a raucous visual language that feels both deeply personal and culturally omnivorous. Best known for his ceramic sculptures—wild, mutant fusions of Islamic decorative traditions, California car culture, and Saturday morning cartoons—Farrag here turns his maximalist impulses toward painting with exhilarating results.
Farrag’s ceramic works, which punctuate the exhibition like unruly totems, push the medium to exhilarating extremes. They are grotesque yet playful, collapsing historical and pop-cultural references into tangled, hyper-detailed assemblages that defy traditional notions of form and symmetry. His sculptures often feel as though they are growing before your eyes—organisms in a perpetual state of mutation, sprouting cartoonish faces, miniature cars, or winding freeway overpasses. The surfaces, thick with glazes that drip and pool unpredictably, reinforce a sense of movement and transformation. Here, the meticulous craftsmanship of Islamic ceramics collides with the improvisational chaos of street culture, resulting in objects that feel both ancient and utterly of the moment. In Farrag’s hands, ceramics become a vessel for hybrid identities—an art of both defiance and celebration.
This embrace of chaos, cultural collision, and unexpected adjacency is what makes Farrag’s work so compelling. His influences are vast—ranging from Homi K. Bhabha’s theories of hybridity to the DIY aesthetics of punk—but he transforms them into something entirely his own. In Hybrid Moments, painting, like ceramics, becomes a space for radical reinvention, for disrupting and remaking visual hierarchies. What emerges is an art that feels defiantly contemporary—at once deeply informed by history and gleefully irreverent toward it. If this is Farrag’s first solo in New York, it certainly won’t be his last.
