Dali	Fini	Bachelier	Nowak	Parkes	Hart	Rops	Fields	Lichtenfels	Bubacco
Von Bayros	Andrei	Apocalypse	Individual Work	Jewelry	Objet	Perfume Factice	Books	Posters	Exhibitions

Beyond the White Cube and Through the Looking Glass:
CFM Gallery Comes to Chelsea

Leonor Fini

Felicien Rops

Lisa Lichtenfels

The work on setting up the gallery may not be completed, but the magic is already there," Jeannie said on the way down in the elevator, after we had visited Neil Zukerman, the owner and director of CFM Gallery, in his new space on the fourth floor at 236 West 27th Street.

"It's already a cabinet of wonders," I agreed, using our old term for the gallery's former space at Soho. "Well, just because he moved to Chelsea, we didn't expect Neil to create a typical white cube, did we?"

"No way!" my wife declared. "Everywhere I looked, fascinating objects seemed to peeking out from behind the packing crates and from different corners and crevices like little creatures in a garden at twilight. It was as though they were all waiting to take their proper places. A bronze lizard, I think it was, by Ailene Fields was already comfortably ensconced on a brocade pillow, and there were so many other things scattered around on boxes, on the floor, and on shelves that, if it wouldn't have been rude, I would have loved to just go rummaging among them."

Of course, we should have known that CFM Gallery would turn out to be "a moveable feast," to borrow Hemingway's memorable phrase, since the kind of contemporary surrealist and symbolist art that Neil Zukerman both exhibits and collects is inseparable from his life. After all, the rambling apartment that Zukerman shares with his longtime partner, the innovative jewelry designer Tom Shivers, whose pieces in precious metal and stone are on permanent display in vitrines at CFM, has always been an extension of the gallery, filled with room after room of treasures.

Salvador Dali

Frederick Hart

Ailene Fields

Lucio Bubacco

Paintings, drawings, and prints by gallery artists like Leonor Fini, Salvador Dali, Anne Bachelier, Michael Parkes, and Aleksandra Nowak, as well as by older masters such as Felicien Rops, Franz von Bayros, and numerous others that Zukerman collects and sometimes exhibits, cover the walls salon-style. Pedestals, tables, shelves, and floors boast a dazzling profusion of fanciful and sensual bronzes by Ailene Fields and Frederick Hart; fantastic glass sculptures by Lucio Bubacco; and eerily lifelike figures fashioned from fabric by Lisa Lichtenfels, among so many other diverse works as to be impossible to take in during a single visit -- or even several, as Jeannie and I have learned over the years. The couples' elegantly cluttered home is a place of constant discovery, since Zukerman is forever discovering new things to add to it in the course of a life that, as my perceptive wife puts it, "is a life inseparable from art -- a veritable work of art in itself."

Aleksandra Nowak Andrei

Even his annual trips to Carnival in Venice with his partner -- most recently in the company of Anne Bachelier and Ailene Fields and their husbands -- for which they have opulent new costumes custom-made every year, seem to be extensions of the art that he exhibits and collects. Most serendipitous in this regard is the 2009 oil "La Fiesta Miracolosa II," by a neo-surrealist known as Andrei, a relative newcomer to CFM, meticulously depicting an orator addressing a festively costumed throng in Venice, while the sky above peels back to reveal a supernatural vision. For one of the things that distinguishes Neil Zukerman from run of the mill gallerists is that he actually seems to believe in magic, visions, and miracles. Indeed, he has retained a sense of wonder that is reflected in a personal library filled with books of fairy tales, as well as in such professional

ventures as his creative collaboration with Anne Bachelier on deluxe, lavishly illustrated editions of "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" and "Phantom of the Opera," among other classics published under the CFM imprint.

He has also written and published monographs on Leonor Fini, his friendship with whom and the collection of whose work launched his career as an art dealer. So in celebration of the recent publication of the first English language biography of the artist, "Sphinx: The Life of Leonor Fini" by Peter Webb (which is being offered for sale by the gallery at a special price), CFM will be presenting a major show of her work in March, immediately following its inaugural Salvador Dali exhibition in the new Chelsea space in February.

Michael Parkes

Featured along with other original works from the Fini estate and important private collections, including Zukerman's own, will be the large oil "Rasch, Rasch, Rasch...Mein puppen werten," in which five Lolita-like nymphets, one nude, others in various states of dishabille, lounge around languorously in what appears to be the anteroom of some sort of surreal sensorium, while a woman behind a glass partition kneels to adjust the puff-shouldered garment of a petite androgyne who may be a young lad in drag.
Through the looking glass, indeed!

–– Ed McCormack,
Gallery & Studio Magazine.
September-October 2009