A New Exhibition Pays Tribute to the ‘Style Guy’ and Man-About-Town Glenn O’Brien—See a Preview Here

At Off Paradise, a
new Tribeca gallery, an exhibition pays homage to the late, great
impresario of downtown cool, Glenn O’Brien.

Curated by Natacha Polaert, the show
includes works by Walter Robinson, Dash Snow, and Martin Wong,
among others, who together defined the era that O’Brien embodied
and lived in.

He “was a great many things to a great many
people,” Polaert writes in a short essay accompanying the
show, adding that O’Brien—an editor, TV personality, screenwriter,
critic, and dandy—was “a formidable creative director who elevated
advertising to the realm of art.”

“I can’t help but feel like my ads are better than Barbara
Kruger’s,” he once famously declared. “Although hers are art and
mine, well they are just ads. They have a logo. But I think art has
logos now, too, so maybe there is no difference.”

Polaert has assembled an impressive group of artworks by artists
whose work captured in carious ways the qualities O’Brien
appreciated. Some are by artists with whom he he rubbed shoulders
in Andy Warhol’s Factory, or whom he met met as the editor
of Interview magazine. Others, such as examples
of poetry by Eileen Myeles inspired by a conversation she had
with O’Brien, are directly inspired by his life.

Polaert says the exhibition is a portrait en
creux, a literary tool used to describe a character by
“focusing our attention on the background, on the company he keeps,
as well as his actions in the world.”

Take a look images from the show below.

“Glenn O’Brien: Center Stage” is on view at Off Paradise
from September 17 through November 2. Off Paradise is located at
120 Walker Street, New York

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