I recently had the opportunity to learn about Upsilon Gallery and its latest exhibition entitled Kaleidoscope. The art gallery is a fine and print publisher specializing in international postwar and contemporary art. On February 25th, the organization opened a new location in New York-on the Upper East Side at 23 East 67th Street. Kaleidoscope, an exhibition exploring the artwork of artist Osvaldo Mariscotti, will be on display from February 25th to April 16th, 2022. If you would like to contact the art gallery please give them a call at 646-476-4190, visit upsilongallery.com or email info@upsilongallery.com.
Upsilon Gallery was founded by Director Marcelo Zimmler in 2014. In addition to New York, the organization has office locations in Miami and London. Since its inception, Upsilon Gallery has presented many successful physical and online exhibitions currently by appointment only.
“Our vision for this new flagship gallery in the Upper East Side is to create an outstanding and unique home for our artists and our team, and a vibrant cultural destination in the heart of NYC,” said Marcelo Zimmler in the gallery’s official press release.
One goal of the art gallery is “rediscovering a roster of accomplished artists that have been forgotten or overlooked within a historical scope.”
According to his official website, mariscottiart.com, Mariscotti grew up in Piedmont (Italy) and demonstrated talent for visual arts at an early age. He’s traveled many places throughout his life including Europe, South America and the United States. These experiences influenced his artistic expression. After gaining a degree in Engineering and working on many real estate projects, Mariscotti decided to work on art fulltime. His first solo exhibition was displayed at Artopia Gallery (New York) and then he began a four-year exclusive contract with Artsforum Gallery (New York).
Kaleidoscope focuses on the artist’s study of the symbol in the development of language. It includes the following artworks:
After observing many of his works, I appreciate Mariscotti’s art for a variety of reasons. In Origins, I appreciate his use of form and color on the three panels. The perception creates an asymmetrical image that creates a visual balance on the three panels. In Firenze, I appreciate the use of shapes, color and form to provide multiple perspectives of the art through the symmetrical use of squares. In Spar, I like how Mariscotti uses two panels and lets the color of the art gallery wall fill in the space between the left and right panel which I find unique and innovative. In Infinity, the artists use wood as a means of depicting form and interconnectivity. In Melody, I appreciate the pattern of colors and shapes forming a perception.
If you are interested in getting more information about the artist or would like to discuss purchasing a piece of art, visit mariscottiart.com.
Marcelo Zimmler Interview (2022):
Dominic Richardson: What was the inspiration behind the founding of Upsilon Gallery?
Marcelo Zimmler: I started in the arts when I was still in college. I never pursued an education in the arts. I did computer science and math. The arts were always my personal interest. It was something that I was always very passionate about. And then, well, after I graduated, I became acquainted with one of the artists that’s currently in the roster of the gallery and whose first show is now on display at the gallery. That’s Osvaldo Mariscotti with his show Kaleidoscope. So, we got acquainted here in New York right here when I when I finished school because I went to Pace university, which is in downtown Manhattan. I had a bit of a stunt in London because I did a study abroad, and that’s when I started to think of changing directions in a way, because up until then, I was really thinking about going for some kind of role in academia because I studied math, so I was thinking of actually doing applied math, a master’s degree. Being surrounded by all of these, like entrepreneurial kind of people in London, made me change direction.
I started to consider it a lot more seriously. And that’s what happened. I started working with these artists and I got to really like it. I got to apply some of my computer science skills. I built a website for him. I started doing all kinds of things because I had a lot of connections by that time with the School of Computer Science at Pace. We did all kinds of projects, crazy things at the time. We would pass some of his paintings through synthesizers and make kind of electronic music out of some of his paintings, because all of his paintings are very abstract and some of it is very good to be applied in that way. So. we did that. And then while we kept going and after about two years of me traveling around I ended up traveling around quite a bit here in the US and in Europe, attending shows, exhibitions, group shows at museums all over the place. As I said, after about two years I decided I needed a little more of a business background because I was thinking of taking the whole project, whatever that was up until then to the next stage. And that’s how I decided to go to London. And I got a master’s in business, and while I was doing that degree, I started the gallery, I started like officially the gallery. And after that I came back to New York and just registered the business with the state of New York and just started trading from the get go.
We’re bringing new faces, overlooked faces. For the most part, these are older fellows and gals, who already have their careers and they’ve been really good and successful at it, but they never quite hit it off, especially with the commercial side of things. I mean, they were recognized and all of that by critics, but now we want to complement them with market recognition. And we want to add the commercial aspect of it. Now we’re bringing them in, we work, we’re getting them out of the closet in a way, presenting them in a brand-new stage in Manhattan’s Upper East Side, which historically has been one of the most established art districts in the US. And still is surrounded by institutions of all sorts. It’s very well respected. We’re hoping that by doing that, we will be able to tap into an audience that hasn’t really been catered to so far.
Dominic Richardson: In Kaleidoscope, the exhibition focuses on postwar art. Is that just for Kaleidoscope, or is it apart of the gallery’s mission as well?
Marcelo Zimmler: Our focus is really on postwar and contemporary arts, and those terms really refer to a time period. Postwar is really from 1960s onwards and contemporary takes it all the way to the present day. That’s the time period we would like to focus on. That’s where our strength is. And within that, we tend to focus in specific movements. There are different kinds of abstraction that we like to focus on. There’s abstract expressionism, which is the New York school. First and second generation, people like Jackson Pollock.
Abstract expressionism, minimalism, geometric abstraction, some conceptual art, and even some pop. The work that’s represented in this exhibition is both a geometric abstract and minimal. You can say that that’s very much postwar and contemporary. Some of the work is very recent. I think our most recent painting in the exhibition was produced in 2022-earlier this year. So it’s very, very recent.
Dominic Richardson: Does Kaleidoscope display artwork from other artists or is it exclusively focused on Mariscotti?
Marcelo Zimmler: It’s a solo show. Kaleidoscope is meant to be a mini retrospective in a way of his work. So we are spanning the last 10 years of his career, and we made a special effort to get a very good sampling of his work, some representative from different kinds of work that he produced during that time period, roughly the last 10 years of his career.
Dominic Richardson: What kind of art galleries will you be displaying in the future? Are you going to continue to focus on postwar through contemporary? Or do you think the gallery will try something else?
Marcelo Zimmler: For the time being, we will keep working in this sort of niche, which is really not that niche because there’s quite a few galleries who tend to do a lot of work within postwar because it is really one of the most interesting art time periods available. Some people go a little further back to the late 1800s, early 1900s, and that’s where you have impressionism and modern art, people like Joan Miro or Salvador Dali or Marc Chagall. All of them are modern. So that’s early 1900s. Every now and then we do some of those things, but still like to stay within the postwar. It’s not unlikely that as we open up new locations, most likely in Europe, the next gallery that’s planned to open will be in London because I already have a director there and we have a pretty strong presence from where we do a lot of business within the region and also with Asia. Most likely when we open those, we will need to adjust our programming to cater to that region. Because this this kind of makes sense, but as you move from the Americas to Europe to Asia or Africa, you need to tailor it somewhat because the interests and the styles of people are different, obviously.
When we go to the UK, we will probably have things that are probably closer to the earlier part of the 20th century-early 1900s, because that’s also when abstraction came about a few years ago, they had this amazing retrospective show at the Museum of Modern Art here in New York, and it was about the invention of abstraction. And it was a very comprehensive show because it shows you the origins of abstraction from the early 1900s. So it was roughly around 1910, 1911, that the first examples of abstraction came about in Russia, in Europe, and it gave you like a chronological view of how all of that came about from the different schools of thought. You have suprematism in Russia and then you had this thing in the Netherlands, people like Piet Mondrian. So you know about how schools in Germany combined industrial design with formal fine art. It was very interesting, and all of that was from the earlier part of the 1900s all the way to 1967 onwards. So, yes, definitely. As we move on to any new locations, we will think about tailoring our program to include things other than just the post work. We will. It will most likely be pre-war.
Dominic Richardson: What has been the public response to your gallery so far?
Marcelo Zimmler: It’s been awesome. It’s been amazing and we’ve only been open for two weeks. A big part of it is the work that the guys here have been doing for us. This collaboration has been really good so far, and I’m very happy with it. We’re getting the word out and we are trying to appeal to publications and people from all walks of life. We’re choosing on purpose not to focus on just the arts circle, but expand it to other kinds of design related spheres. We are opening it up because there’s usually a lot of overlaps between different kinds of creative arts in a way. We want to also make it available to people coming out of real estate or music or dance or high fashion, jewelry design, those kinds of things, because of the overlaps. We’ve had very good press coverage with the open reception. We had quite a bit of people from press publications, a New York one also sent a crew to cover the event. And that’s supposed to air, I think, later this week or maybe next week.
They interviewed me during the opening reception. And that was great. We’ve already had a really nice review of the show, which I can certainly share with you. It came out in a local publication, online publication called Eastside Feed, and I got to meet with one of the writers. He spent almost an hour, I think, going over the show and going over each thing. It’s a very well written review and it’s written in very accessible language because many of these art show reviews, tend to be written in very, inaccessible language, very abstract, very heady, very out there. And usually it’s kind of useless because after you’re done with it, you don’t really feel like you’ve learned anything from reading that. Absolutely not at all informative. I don’t know what the purpose of those things are, but in any way this review is very accessible, which makes it very interesting and very valuable also as far as spreading the word. We’re also getting a story, and that’s coming out in the Park Avenue magazine later this month. I think it’s scheduled to go out in their March issue on the 15th.
And then there was another Q&A that we did for another publication called New York Undressed. So that was very interesting. And yesterday we recorded a Q&A with the artist. We have a clip that we’re currently editing, polishing, and we’re going to make that available to our press people. And then a New York one also showed interest in that. And they’re going to be combining some segments of that recording with whatever they already have, whatever footage they already have of the interview they did at the gallery. It’s been terrific. I guess that it’s been really good and overwhelming because we get a lot of visits every day. We get people from the neighborhood traveling and they all say the same thing. They read about the opening or the show in some of these other publications. Sometimes they bring me newspaper clippings. And we have a folder now with folio. So we just put everything in there.