Beneath the Surface: How "Public Pool" Finds Common Ground Through Water

NEW YORK — Bringing together artists from different countries, generations, and artistic traditions, Public Pool opened June 11 at Ethan Cohen Gallery in Chelsea, offering a rare group exhibition in which a single subject — water — yields an unexpectedly wide range of responses. Through painting, sculpture, photography, and installation, the show explores how one of the world's most universal materials can simultaneously inspire hyperrealism, pure abstraction, quiet meditation, and bold formal experimentation, and how those differences can coexist on the same gallery walls.

The exhibition features work ranging from meticulous underwater figures that seem to breathe beneath layers of paint to spare canvases where movement, reflection, and fluidity are rendered through color alone. Rather than imposing a single interpretation of water, Public Pool highlights the diversity of approaches artists bring to a shared subject, treating that diversity not as tension but as the show's central argument.

For gallerist Ethan Cohen, the exhibition is ultimately less about water than about how art itself works. "One of the exciting themes of the exhibition is beauty and artistic technique," he said at the opening reception. He added: "I want art galleries to be fun. In a good exhibition, you have to discover." That sense of discovery — of encountering something unexpected around each turn — gives the show an unusual lightness for a group exhibition organized around a conceptual premise.

Among the show's most recognized participants is sculptor Carole Feuerman, whose hyperrealist swimmers have become central to her practice and, more broadly, to contemporary water imagery. Feuerman is also the subject of a concurrent solo exhibition at the gallery, making her presence in Public Pool both a counterpoint and a complement. For Feuerman, the choice of water as a subject has always carried a philosophical dimension. "Water unifies everyone," she said. "It's like a universal language. You don't have to know who made the work or what country they're from."

That claim resonates throughout the exhibition, where artists from disparate backgrounds approach the same subject through markedly distinct visual vocabularies. Some focus on the human body in water — its buoyancy, its vulnerability, the way light distorts and transfigures it. Others turn inward, using water as a vehicle for exploring memory, perception, and the unstable boundary between the seen and the imagined. The result is a show that feels simultaneously cohesive and open-ended, anchored by a theme capacious enough to accommodate everything it holds.

Art critic Richard Vine offered a broader cultural framing at the opening, situating the exhibition within a longer arc of contemporary art's relationship to bodily experience. "One of the things that's interesting about Carole's work is that it takes us back to the fundamentals," he said. After decades of artistic experimentation and retreat from figuration, he argued, audiences continue to respond to work grounded in physical reality. "Something in us wants to return home to our own experience and our own experience in the flesh," Vine said.

That hunger for the immediate and the tangible may explain why water, despite its familiarity, retains such potency as an artistic subject. It is everywhere and endlessly changeable — still or turbulent, transparent or opaque, a mirror or a void — making it available to virtually any artistic intention. Public Pool takes that availability seriously, resisting the impulse to organize the works into a tidy thesis and allowing viewers to move among them as they might move along a shoreline: finding their own footing, following their own attention.

Public Pool runs through late July at Ethan Cohen Gallery, located in the Chelsea art district at 18 West 26th Street. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.