Miguel Abreu

There’s room to breathe with art in this gallery. Located on the 3rd floor, in a vast, airy space that stretches from Eldridge to Allen Streets, it’s the perfect setting for work that asks your brain to fire up and your thoughts to expand.

To navigate a show here is to move through a maze of unfolding ideas—less about what you’re looking at and more about how you’re looking at it. The curatorial vision is grounded in theories of minimalist cinematography, where space, pacing, and sequencing are as important as the individual works themselves.

Displays unfold in deliberate sequences that carry you, and your eye, along on a deliberate journey. The art is refined, elegant, and stripped down to deceptively simple compositions that reward close attention and patience. Beneath the surface, though, it’s anything but simple; it's dense, cerebral, and often concerned with how context, history, and power structures mediate our world views.

Sometimes you’ll find one piece hanging peacefully in its own room, stripped of distractions. That quiet focus makes you want to linger, to let it wash over you—worship it, even. These are the kind of “ah-ha” moments that keep us coming back.

Miguel Abreu was born in New York City and raised in Paris. In 1991, he co-founded Thread Waxing Space with Tim Nye, an alternative venue that anchored the downtown art scene for more than a decade. He opened his namesake gallery in 2006 in a modest storefront at 36 Orchard Street, when fabric warehouses still lined the neighborhood. In 2014, he expanded to a lofty Eldridge Street space.

Abreu is also the co-founder, with Robin Mackay, of Sequence, an art and philosophy press. We highly recommend picking up a book (or two) while you’re here—it’s a perfect way to deepen your experience of everything you’ve just seen.