Curated by Izzy Nova
Featuring Sandra Cavanagh, Giustina Surbone, Robin Tewes, Jonathan Torres and Patrick Webb
PS122 Gallery
150 1st Ave
New York, NY 10009
Open Wednesday — Sunday, 1 — 6 pm
Born from a desire to reach beyond the visible world, Romanticism still reverberates through contemporary art. Held at PS122 Gallery, the exhibition Aromantic takes the exploration of deep emotions and the human experience held by the Romantic traditions as a starting point to address current societal issues and offer a more nuanced, unsentimental worldview.
It features work emphasizing personal and collective feeling, individualism and the sublime in a critique of the struggles and complexities of contemporary life. The selected artists depict narratives and themes drawn from the present, including queer identity, female might, diaspora, animosity, the grotesque and the persistent relevance of mythology and martyrology. Within its thematic critical strength, it formally maintains a focus on the elements of artistic beauty as sustained by the Romantic tradition, such as lush textures, dramatic contrast and evocative compositions.
Through this lens, Aromantic seeks to provide a holistic and authentic representation of life’s multifaceted nature.
Artists
Sandra Cavanagh was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Her early life was pitched on a growing awareness of the prevailing political instability, an overbearing patriarchal society and the dangers of state sanctioned brutality and censorship. Cavanagh read Social Sciences at the
University of Belgrano, emigrated to California and later to the UK. She is a Fine Art graduate
from the Kent Institute of Art and Design, UK. Since 2010, she’s worked and resided in New York City.
Cavanagh’s work has been exhibited at various venues, including the Hudson Valley Museum of Contemporary Art, Pen & Brush, Gallery 14C, and Westbeth Gallery in New York; Miami National Fine Arts in Florida; and Museo Limen in Italy. In November 2025, she had a solo exhibition at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. From January to April 2026, her work will be shown at The Susquehanna Art Museum, the National Liberty Museum, the University of Bridgeport Art Gallery and the 2026 Every Woman’s Biennial.
She has participated in notable exhibitions such as Aqua Art Miami and the Every Woman Biennale at La Mama Galleria. Her art has received recognition, including the Waave New York
Women’s Art Month Award in 2025 and being a finalist for the Women United Art Prize in 2023. Most recently, she has been awarded the 2025 Jackson Art Prize Oil Award and Homiens Art Prize. Cavanagh’s practice has been featured in several publications, including the covers of Create! Magazine and Feminist Space Journal, as well as interviews with Women in the Arts Network, Contemporary Art Collectors, and the Women United Art Prize. Additionally, her work has been highlighted in publications such as The Jersey Journal, Jackson’s, White Hot Magazine, Contemporary Art Collectors and Canvas Rebel.
www.sandracavanagh.com | @sandra_cavanagh_artista
Giustina Surbone is a painter, video, performance, culinary artist and curator living and working in Brooklyn, NY. Her paintings are an exploration of unfamiliar beauty within the construct of portraiture and the narrative. Her paintings epitomize certain aspects of humanity: ageism, body image, and sexual identity, often with a nod toward art’s historical symbolism. Surbone designs her paintings to deliver a direct impact by virtue of size, style, and the expressive force of her subjects. “My subjects confront themselves and their audience in terms of their inner emotional being to communicate truth and the poignant and transitory nature of life and beauty.”
Venues where Surbone has exhibited in both solo and group shows include McCaig-Welles Gallery, Exit Art, Tribes Gallery, Tabla Rasa Gallery, Gallery Korea, The Flux Factory, Sideshow Gallery, Lascono Gallery, and El Barrio’s Artspace PS 109, Art House Gallery and Pen and Ink Gallery, to name a few. Her work has been published and reviewed in the NY Times, the NY Daily News, Hyperallergic, and Time Out NY, and is in private and Kentler International Drawing Space collections.
In addition to her practice as a painter, Surbone created and produced the Hungry Grlz Project, an ongoing series of works using the table as a focal point for absurd dining experiments and decadent artistic presentations, including painting, performance, installation, video, and photographic works. In 2012, she was commissioned by the Flux Factory to create a public performance work entitled A Bacchanalian Banquet for the Banquet of America Experiment, which was influenced by Greek and Roman saturnalia and Filippo Marinetti’s Futurist Cookbook. Her most recent project, entitled “RAGE,” is based on a global feminist ideology that was initially inspired by the 2016 Women’s March in Washington and the #MeToo movement.
www.giustinasurbone.com | @giustina_surbone_art
Robin Tewes is a New York City-based artist known since the early 1980s for her representational paintings of frozen, narrative-like moments. She paints everyday people and domestic interiors in a precise, almost deadpan style that Artforum critic Ronny Cohen called “searingly direct” in its presentation of information and emotional impact. Another review by critic Roberta Smith of the NY Times states, “Robin Tewes paints small, meticulously rendered interiors in which disturbing details regularly define the balloon of domestic normalcy.” Tewes often incorporates subtle, graffiti-like text into her paintings, suggesting pointed or disquieting thoughts, conversations, or social commentary on the scene portrayed. Or, as ARTnews Barbara Pollack describes Tewes’ work as maintaining “an edgy balance between surrealism and soap opera.” In addition to her art practice, Tewes has worked as an educator, lecturer, curator, and activist.
www.robintewes.com | @robinjtewes
Jonathan Torres (b. 1983, San Juan, Puerto Rico) is a Brooklyn-based artist whose work spans painting and sculpture. He received his BFA from the Escuela de Artes Plásticas in San Juan in 2009 and his MFA from Brooklyn College in 2012. Since 2010, Torres has lived and worked in Brooklyn, NY, and was recently a resident at the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program in DUMBO.
Torres’ practice delves into themes of otherworldliness and the experience of living in the diaspora. Over the past 15 years, his work has evolved through an exploration of emotional and mental states that shape interpersonal dynamics. His imagery often reflects a mix of crisis and anxiety, imbued with dark humor. Torres’ works are part of numerous public and private collections, including the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) in Boston and the Museo Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico (MACPR) in San Juan.
www.jonathantorres.net | @torres__jonathan
Patrick Webb paints Punchinello’s story. He is a figure co-opted from the Italian Commedia del’Arte improvisational theatre reformed to explore contemporary queer experience. As both I and not I, Punchinello occupies a zone of doubleness that can never be reduced to an “either/or” opposition? For as much as the uncanny speaks to what frightens and unnerves with its queer familiarity, it is also, as the literary theorist Nicholas Royle puts it in his book The Uncanny, “never far from something comic: humor, irony and laughter all have a genuinely ‘funny’ role in thinking on this topic.” To speak of Punchinello as radically individuated vis-à-vis the crowd is to invoke another great thinker of uncanniness, Martin Heidegger. Writing in his uniquely existentialist language, Heidegger argues in Being and Time that moments of uncanniness, always accompanied by Angst, signal an opening of self beyond the mundane, the habitual, the easily known. Heidegger holds open the time and space of possibility, the possibility of an uncanny self not preoccupied with familiar conformity or alienated dislocation, but rather strangely connected to and differentiated from the world. In his own words, from the 1996 translation by Joan Stambaugh, “What could be more alien to them than the self individualized to itself in uncanniness?” Patrick Webb is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, Ingram Merrill Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Art Matters, and Collex. He has had over 30 solo shows in the US and participated in over 70 group shows. His works are in many corporate and museum collections.
www.patrick-webb.com | @patrickwebb115
Curator
Izzy Nova is a mixed-race (Southeast Asian, Germanic, Ashkenazi) artist, independent curator, and artist representative. Born in Atlanta, GA, they lived the first quarter of their life in the Arabian Peninsula before returning and participating in the BFA program at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY, where they received a solo thesis show. In 2018, two years after their graduation, Nova founded the NYC Group Crit, presenting critiques and artist talks. In 2021, they received the Caroline Lowndes grant to curate Straight Forward, Image Driven at The Painting Center in New York, NY. Nova’s curatorial resume also includes Westbeth Gallery, New York, NY; Tabla Rasa Gallery and Thames Art Center, Brooklyn, NY; and Art House Gallery, Jersey City, NJ.
www.izzynova.com | @izzynova
Gallery
PS122 Gallery is a not-for-profit alternative exhibition space in the East Village, operating since 1979. The organization gave first exhibitions to artists such as Peter Halley, Keith Haring, and Amy Sillman, among many others; and exhibited hundreds more artists throughout the years like John Ahearn, Michael Ashkin, Lutz Bacher, Louise Bourgeois, Co-Lab, Petah Coyne, Karen Finley, Nan Goldin, Joanne Greenbaum, Arturo Herrera, Alfredo Jaar, Deborah Kass, Byron Kim, Larry Krone, Barbara Kruger, Glenn Ligon, Vik Muniz, Thomas Nozkowski, Mira Schor, Dread Scott, Arlene Shechet, Kiki Smith, Nancy Spero, Denyse Thomasos, and David Wojnarowicz; and writers and curators such as Allen Frame, Ellen Handy, Lucy Lippard, Saul Ostrow, Calvin Reid, and Raphael Rubinstein.
It is an ongoing program of Painting Space 122, the grassroots, artist-run cooperative that helped foster the vibrant cultural community at the City of New York-owned 122 Community Center (122CC). The Gallery’s programs are interdisciplinary and inclusive, highlighting artistic practices and practitioners regardless of age, race, gender, ability, geographic and ethnic origin.