Palo Gallery (New York, NY) presents Time Takes a Cigarette, a solo exhibition by New York based multidisciplinary artist Yuval Pudik. Working across drawing, sculpture, and installation, Pudik’s new work reflects on memory, monuments, and the impulse to hold onto beauty as it fades. Historical painting, literary, and pop culture references intersect with personal iconography and gestures of desire, tracing the fragments that linger in our collective unconscious and returning to a central question: how do we hold onto a feeling once it begins to disappear?
At the center of the presentation is a large, to-scale, pencil drawing of Eugène Delacroix’s tomb in Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris. Floating above it are the words “Time takes a cigarette / put it in your mouth,” lyrics from David Bowie’s 1972 song Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide. In Bowie’s song, the phrase suggests a fleeting pause—a gesture that momentarily suspends time—an idea that also lends the exhibition its title and central premise. While the words are rendered in a delicate, stylized script that appears almost weightless, the black stone underneath it is drawn in dense graphite, conveying weight and permanence. A quiet tension emerges between the fleeting gesture of the song lyric and the gravity of the funeral monument, evoking an artistic afterlife in which the work endures beyond the life that produced it.
This interplay of historical references and contemporary culture extends throughout the exhibition. Passages from The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli and literature by Edmund White appear alongside Bowie’s lyrics and visual motifs recalling the paintings of Jacques-Louis David and Albrecht Dürer. References to Rick Owens’ designs, found internet images, and photography recur throughout the works. Rather than separating these influences, Pudik lets them coexist within the same pictorial field; different genres and artistic traditions overlap and unexpected connections emerge.
The exhibition also includes a series of handmade light boxes dedicated to historic and culturally significant East Village gay bars, Pyramid Club, Wonder Bar, Easternbloc, and Club Cumming, sites that have long served as stages for avant-garde nightlife, artistic performance, and queer community in downtown New York. Elsewhere, a miniature paper installation inspired by Yukio Mishima’s autobiographical essay Sun and Steel appears alongside a group of sculptures and framed drawings that place contemporary bodybuilding culture in dialogue with the sculptural ideals of ancient Greece and Rome, revealing how the muscular male body has long functioned as both aesthetic ideal and eroticized form. Together, these works consider the afterlife of art and antiquity, and the traces that artists leave behind.