Zohar Lazar’s Riotous “UTOPIA PKWY” at LABspace in Hillsdale
The colorful show convays whimsey, moment and angst in captivating ways.
As a teenager growing up on suburban Long Island, anything cool required a drive out of town. I fondly recall the seasonal shopping pilgrimage to an exotic store on the South Shore named Utopia, a place filled with every variety of potent incense, psychedelic tie-dyes, Grateful Dead paraphernalia, and the like. Hence the notion of “driving on the parkway to utopia” was a perfect preface to seeing Zohar Lazar’s solo show “UTOPIA PKWY” at LABspace in Hillsdale (through August 24).
The two-woman team at LABspace, Julie Torres and Ellen Letcher, consistently present enchanting exhibitions, and this one is yet another joyful show bursting with freestyle-arty-fun, even with its traces of existential anxiety. Working with both fine art and illustration techniques, Lazar’s self-described “stylistic hopscotch” is outrageously entertaining—he fills every canvas with bright colors that pop and please. Lazar’s cartoon-like characters with a punk ethos occupy richly hued environs with great gusto as they wrangle within quasi-melting spectacles, and Cosmic Dancer (2025) is an amusing example of this. In this painting, a blue-haired figure with a long thin nose and yellow sunglasses clutches the green handlebars of a BMX bike with skinny pink fingers while speeding through a suburban patch of neighborhood puffing on a hefty joint that billows—a zany happy scene.
Seemingly, the next frame in this ‘adventures of a blue haired figure’ narrative is I Can’t Hardly Stand it (2025). In this painting, the BMX has flipped over, and both the figure and the bike are jumbled together in a multicolored blow-out wreck that is equally startling as it is uproarious, especially the facial expression of this figure as they face-plant into a dust cloud. As described by the artist, “A rotating cast of characters are deployed to act out the scenes and daydreams” of his youth.
I Can't Hardly Stand It by Zohar Lazar, acrylic on canvas.
Portrait works including The Dark Dark (2025) and The Total Surrender Tour (2025) feature figures that appear aloof and alone in their teenage boredom (we cannot see their faces), while in other works such as Between Worlds (2025) we encounter a cheery smiling character whose vibe lifts our spirit. Still a whole other section of this show includes paintings overloaded with familiar creatures in wacky worlds reminiscent of the Looney Tunes, and I’m Sticking With You (2025) and Up, Up and Away (2025) are the predominant of these.
In A New Kind of Kick (2025), we encounter the artist lying flat on his back sporting an enormous toothy grin amid a wild liquefying landscape, an autobiographical vision of Lazar’s life-changing moment of personal awakening during his first visit to the Hudson Valley as explained to me by LABspace co-director Julie Torres. While perusing the work together, Torres indicated that Lazar completed the entire show in eight months, and it all started with No Fun (2025). In this pink saturated painting, a female figure is visibly panicking as she bites her own hands while her eyeballs fly off her face, a work that Lazar created in response to the November election. Indeed, this no fun vision wholly embodies the Lazar-ian edge, equally silly as it is slightly eerie. “UTOPIA PKWY” is a riot—don’t miss the chance chuckle alongside this compelling cast of characters who win us over with their comical warmth.
