"Too Personal Stay Away" by Candyass Cary Leibowitz at TSL

June 27–July 26, opening reception Saturday, June 27, 5–7pm | Hudson, NY

Time & Space Limited opens "Too Personal Stay Away," a solo exhibition by Cary Leibowitz, on June 27. The show kicks off with a public reception and runs through July 26.

Leibowitz, who has worked under the moniker "Candyass" since the early 1990s, makes art that is hard to categorize and easy to recognize once you've seen it: text-based paintings, sculptures, ceramics, and multiples covered in self-effacing, confessional, often very funny handwritten lines.

The name itself came from a friend's joke decades ago—a rubber stamp made as a birthday gift that Leibowitz started using as a signature on his drawings, and which stuck once people began responding to it. His work takes on the art market, kitsch, Jewish identity, and queerness, frequently turning the same critical eye on himself that he turns on the institutions around him. Pieces in this show include lines like "Self-absorbed Self-absorbed Self-absorbed" painted on a circular wood panel, and "Rocking Chairs are a Buyers Market."

Since the early 1990s, Leibowitz has built an interdisciplinary practice that takes a critical eye to identity, modernism, the art market, queer politics, and kitsch, working across painting, multiples, works on paper, and fabric. Critic Robert Atkins once called him "a Jeff Koons for the rest of us."

His first full museum survey, featuring more than 350 works from 1987 to the present, opened at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco in 2017 and later traveled to the ICA at the University of Pennsylvania. His work belongs to the permanent collections of the Hirshhorn Museum, the Jewish Museum, and the Peter and Eileen Norton Collection, among others.

Leibowitz also has a notable double life: he is Worldwide Co-Head of Editions at Phillips auction house, a job he has said keeps him financially independent from his art-making and gives him the freedom to make exactly the work he wants without worrying about whether it sells.

He and his partner Simon Lince, founder of the Hudson and Harlem-based design firm Virtue and Hot Sauce, have a well-documented house upstate that the New York Times once described as something visitors mistake for a restaurant.

Time & Space Limited, 434 Columbia St., Hudson, NY. More at timeandspace.org.