In his second solo show at 56 HENRY, which occupies both gallery spaces, Ohad Meromi examines what it might mean to take a pause. He approaches this question, first, with a series of small watercolors that he began making in the past year, after quitting cigarettes. Smoking provides the ultimate moment of respite—the most minimal of actions with which, for a brief while, one can stop and observe the world without as well as within. In the absence of smoking, Meromi treated the drawings as literal and metaphorical placeholders. These intensely colorful, quasi-surreal geometric abstractions that all feature cigarettes, always hovering just within hand’s reach, serve as an embodiment of reflection, but also of imagination—an attempt to build a world.

There is a strong connection in Meromi’s works between what the body is doing—smoking, not- smoking, drawing, living—and what the mind gets up to. The sculptures he presents in the show—largely figurative, and made of a variety of materials, from bronze to aqua resin, from steel to polyurethane—attempt to puzzle out this mind/body link. Sculptures, of course, are almost definitionally in a state of pause; but the bodies Meromi depicts seem particularly caught in this liminal circumstance. A girl with her arms raised lifts her hair up from her nape; a nude man reclines on his back, his penis resting snugly but uncertainly on his thigh; a gargantuan woman, her braid like a rope, props herself up on one elbow as if to study the world around her better. These figures are captured in repose—that moment between actions in which fancy can take flight.

The body of the visitor to the gallery, too, is made to take a pause in space, ushered into the act of observation by Meromi’s installation. A dance-studio bar installed waist-high on the gallery’s wall is marked, at its end, with a bright-pink circle of color, as if to indicate: your journey in this space begins here. The pedestals on which the sculptures rest sport rounded corners, to suggest a sense of flow among the figures on display. The figures themselves, too, are pointedly and variously tactile. Hairy, rough, shiny: all bear the mark of the artist’s hand. Touch and texture anchor the viewer, allowing her to slow down and inhabit a newly utopian space: that of art as possibility.

– Naomi Fry, 2025