Adam McEwen is opening two new shows in New York starting next week. The first, opening on January 22nd at Petzel Gallery’s Upper East Side location at 35 East 67th St., will show new work like the image above. The second is a show at Lever House, where 200,000 people pass every day:

Lever House Art Collection is pleased to launch its 2019 programming with a large-scale installation by Adam McEwen. The exhibition, titled 10, FEELS LIKE 2, opens Wednesday, January 30 at Lever House, 390 Park Avenue, with a public opening from 6 to 8 pm.

McEwen‘s installation will transform the first floor of Lever House into an environment that evokes an icebox, arrayed with graphite sculptures of banal objects and paintings depicting icons of Americana. The floor will be covered in a translucent white surface that creates the appearance of an ice rink, and the entire installation will give an uncanny and unsettling cast to the optimism embedded in the modernist architecture of a Park Avenue skyscraper. 10, FEELS LIKE 2 is on view through May.

Petzel Gallery is pleased to announce a show of works from a new series by the New York-based Adam McEwen. Opening January 22 and on view through February 16, the series represents an evolution for McEwen, expanding his practice into more prosaic, but also more challenging, territory. McEwen’s signature graphite sculptures are here mounted on rough plywood faced with aluminum and coated with an image of the subjects of the sculptures themselves.

Banal, familiar, verging on the outdated and abject, the objects—a thermostat, a hotel door handle with card reader, a Styrofoam food tray— are nonetheless freighted (differently for each viewer) with the charge of recognition. Shifting moments, captured under the flash of an iPhone, are reduced to halftone transparencies and layered in vibrating triads of reds, violets and acid greens.