Time Travel

Time travel, in this catalog, is less a conceit than a method: hang a Canaletto near a Cindy Sherman and watch four centuries collapse into a single conversation.

Published on the occasion of the two-part exhibition at Petzel's Upper East Side townhouse (November 15, 2023 through February 10, 2024), the catalog records an unusual collaboration between the New York contemporary gallery and DYS 44 Lampronti Gallery, the London dealership in Italian Old Masters. The parlor floor held works from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries, among them Artemisia Gentileschi's Bathsheba at her bath, Canaletto's The Prisons of St Mark, Domenico Remps's trompe-l'oeil Cabinet of Curiosities, and canvases by Guercino, Ribera, and Cagnacci, while the third floor gathered contemporary responses from John Currin, Cindy Sherman, Jeff Koons, Jutta Koether, Roe Ethridge, Emily Mae Smith, and Emma Webster.

The pairings argue that the Baroque's cinematic drama, its oscillation between sacred and profane, remains a living vocabulary. Koons's Gazing Ball and Sherman's history-portrait photography read here not as quotation but as continuation, mapping the masters' stylized theatricality onto the present moment.