Hansi Fuchs: SUGAR CRASH

Somewhere between the Sonny Angels at the register and the Labubus dangling from downtown tote bags, the blind box became the defining purchase of the moment: you pay for the high of not-knowing.

SUGAR CRASH is a little like this. It’s filled with blind boxes: stacked, nested, painted, turned into grids, built into an entire city. And it runs on two contradictory feelings: wonder at what might be inside, and the nagging suspicion that the boxes might be Pandora's.

A shelf of primary-colored felt boxes greets you at the door. One holds a felt orrery, complete with a little sun, Saturn, and Earth on sticks, plus an actual Milky Way bar and a pack of Orbit gum. The solar system has become the candy aisle. Adorable.

Then there are the paintings, cheery and bright on the surface, with a touch of sinister bubbling up from below. A Monopoly board awash in hot pink. Cartoon figures smothered with red gingham checks. Alphabet blocks falling on black next to shadowy silhouettes of Santa, scissors, and… handcuffs?

On cot-like tables, vintage Viennese chocolate boxes decorated with tiny castles rest on pillows. It's a nod to the Betthupferl, the little sweet given to Austrian children before bed. The "chocolates" inside are creepy, however: a cancerous rabbit, a zombie dragon, a brain that resembles excrement. Here, at least, you know what’s inside.

All this leads to the show’s centerpiece: a metropolis made of gray felt storage boxes, with a toy train running through the center. Joseph Beuys's material of warmth and survival, run through IKEA and held together with what looks like children's Band-Aids.

And it dawns on you, with Canal Street loud and cantankerous outside the gallery, that the show is a mood board for the now-trembling fairy tales of capitalism: toys, candy, condos, life on Mars. All we can hope for is a soft landing.

Hansi Fuchs (b. Linz, Austria, 2000) lives and works in Berlin. She recently graduated from Hamburg’s Hochschule für bildende Künste, where she studied with painter Jutta Koether. Her work has appeared in group shows in Berlin, Cologne, Düsseldorf, Hamburg, Ljubljana, and Vienna. She also co-runs the curatorial project Galerie Klein with artist Milena Langer. SUGAR CRASH is her New York debut.