Tops Gallery is pleased to announce Cognitive Dissonance or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Stop Worrying and Stop Worrying and Stop Worrying, a solo exhibition of six new paintings by Michele Abramowitz. This is Tops’s first show with Abramowitz, and it will take place at the Front Street gallery.
The title of Abramowitz’s show is taken from Kubrick’s 1964 film, Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, a dark comedy that satirizes the nuclear bomb anxieties of the Cold War and the absurdity and paradox inherent in the concept of “mutually assured destruction.” Abramowitz’s new, abstract oil paintings are, for her, a response to the current political turmoil with similar emotional bifurcation. By employing a variety of painters’ spatial conventions and uneasy figure-ground relationships, they reflect the cognitive load of living in multiple simultaneous and conflicting realities, presenting a new landscape.
Abramowitz’s paintings for this exhibition address the figure-ground relationship through her technique of priming, with gesso, different areas of each painting’s surface. This creates and accentuates the appearance of cut-outs of positive and negative space. Abramowitz uses traditional painting methods and hand painted trompe l’oeil treatments to highlight the interfaces between illusion and physicality thus linking concepts of reality and the self.
Michele Abramowitz (USA, b. 1984, Berkeley, California) received her BA from Pomona College (Claremont, CA), her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design (Providence, RI), and her MFA from the Milton-Avery School of the Arts at Bard College, (Annandale-on-Hudson, New York). Abramowitz has held solo exhibitions at A.I.R. Gallery, Brooklyn, NY (2022) and Kate Werble Gallery, New York, NY (2022, 2025). Her work has been exhibited at venues including the North Loop Gallery, Williamstown, MA (2022), UBS Gallery at Bard College, Red Hook, NY (2016), Falcon’s Nest, Los Angeles, CA (2016) and Hart Street Studio, Brooklyn NY (2011). She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
