Fun
Ethan Greenbaum + Sun You
Geary Contemporary, Millerton, New York
By Ian Cofre
New York, December 10, 2025
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Fun, the recently closed two-person exhibition at Geary Contemporary in Millerton, NY, was the last in this space (save for some performances in the new year to be curated by the founders and gallery assistant Tara Foley) before the gallery moves to a new building in Connecticut about ten minutes away. Featuring New York-based Sun You and Ethan Greenbaum, who are described as “a longtime couple” in the press release, this is the first time they are showing together in this manner. You is represented by Geary and this is her third show with the gallery, which makes Greenbaum the special invitee. This is not to imply that the works in the show are collaborative. There is a photo album-cum-wallpaper installation that is—and it helps to embellish both sides of a quirky dividing wall—but the artists do not appear to be dependent on each other to articulate an overarching thesis of art making. A special edition set of prints and objects made available by the gallery is also notably compartmentalized. Acknowledging the insistence on autonomy, we can assess each artist on their own merits as they collapse the working space between them by showing side-by-side in this exhibition space.
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Greenbaum’s chunky puzzle-like paintings trace the lines of a non-specific urban landscape. In the first work, Set (2024), a bright blue electrical panel with a white halo and branded with a reversed Verizon logo is inserted awkwardly into a rough-textured, rusted and yellow “sprayed” rectangular frame. This frame is made of the same aqua resin and EVA foam that serves as substrate for all of Greenbaum’s works in the exhibition, to which he directly applies photographic elements. This treatment creates a duality that locates the objects in a perspectival game that demands close observation. The paintings are pedestrian, in the literal sense, where slabs of sidewalks, manhole covers, and crosswalks become protagonists and whose out-of-placeness is amplified when transposed into the small-town feel at Geary. Here, the density and sounds of never-ending construction seem like a distant memory, such that there’s space to indulge the interplay between urban semiotics and ardent pigments. Interspersed bright veins break apart the pictorial space, yet merge the irregular rectangular objects into unified wholes. In Helping (2025), the neon-colored skeins that divide a concrete sidewalk look like dancing glyphs, and in another, Sticker (2024), a repeating yellow and orange pattern swiftly strides across to animate an electric blue manhole cover. The villain, if there is one, is in the literalism of Projection (2025), a scene ripped from a construction wall covered in torn advertisements and petty vandalisms. Among Greenbaum’s near-abstract works, the specific reference to the Hudson Arts Building—a development in Manhattan’s Chelsea that, ten years after plans to build were first filed, is still a massive hole in the ground—punctures the separation from the reality of the Big City’s capital flows and empty promises. The remaining works, then, as corollaries to this process of constant change, can be reread as snapshots of illusory levity.
Sun You, No Title (Yellow #3), 2025
Polymer clay, acrylic canvas on panel in the artist’s frame, 49 x 49 x 3 in.
You’s works are intuitive, collaged, and heavily layered to create dense visual fields within artist-made frames in yellow and white, the three most exciting of which are the untitled variations denoted Yellow #1, #2, and #3 (all 2025). Strips of canvas, stained and dotted with black acrylic, reminiscent of early Yayoi Kusama, are cut, folded, and rolled into the yellow boxes to create a simultaneity of surging, swirling, and sinking movement. These configurations are only interrupted by rolled black and white polymer clay dowels and subtle splashes of color, some on canvas, but primarily through Jonathan Lasker-esque flourishes also in clay. In You’s recent solo shows, including Fabulous You (Lafayette College, Easton, PA, 2024) and Melodramatic Soul Crushing Saturday Morning (Ditch Projects, Springfield, OR, 2024), these Lasker morsels were the main event, but they’re subordinated here, disappearing into the folds and creases of the larger compositions. Backed by white clay, the tiny assemblages effectively pockmark the canvases with momentary pauses of frenetic squiggles, dots, and strokes of color. Closely related is No Title (Blue) (2025), which overlays the canvas contours with an aqueous shape that transforms the tendrils into underwater rock formations or coral. Painted orbs float in and out of an energetic scribble in the lower half of the work, untethered from any restrictive backing. Although the genealogy is clear in No Title (Blue+Yellow) and No Title (Green+Orange), these two recent works feel overwrought and confused, a maximalist urge unleashed that amounts to expending too much effort to replicate a slice of incidental graffiti. Over three exhibitions with Geary, You has evolved immensely, shedding the twee vocabulary of childlike grids, containers, and wire miniatures to create expansive works that are barely held back by their frames. The Yellow series shows one of the more productive ways forward.
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For any grouping of people, if they spend significant time together, influence will seep between them, albeit in subtle and indirect ways, perhaps unacknowledged. The restless colors both You and Greenbaum wend and embed throughout each of their paintings compress and redirect a nervous energy. Both Greenbaum and You operate at a register of visual and material overload, but to differing ends, the former seizing on digestible pictorial fragments, the latter flowing into painterly excess. Normally, this puts the onus on the viewer to refine their signal-to-noise ratio, shown together, however, You and Greenbaum may balance each other out enough to help pluck the finer details in each set of works.
Ethan Greenbaum, Set, 2024
acrylic, pigment, aqua resin and EVA foam on aluminum, 51 x 41 in.