Voloshyn Gallery Debuts Janet Sobel at Art Basel Miami Beach, Features Aneta Grzeszykowska Solo Show
- camilarosiaz
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Voloshyn Gallery will present the gallery's first exhibition at Art Basel Miami Beach 2025 (Survey, Booth S3, December 5–7), featuring a solo project of over 25 works by the Ukrainian-American artist Janet Sobel. Concurrently, the gallery’s Miami space will debut DISORDER, a solo exhibition by Polish photographer Aneta Grzeszykowska.
Janet Sobel: Rediscovering a Forerunner of Abstract Expressionism
Born Yevhenia Olechovska in Katerynoslav, near Dnipro, Ukraine, Janet Sobel moved to New York in 1905 following her father’s death during a Russian Army pogrom. A self-taught artist, Sobel took up painting in her late forties (around 1937 or 1938), inspired by the folk art and traditional iconography of her homeland.
Despite being a housewife with no initial connections in the art sphere, her unique style, which combined traditional and modern elements, quickly attracted the attention of artists like Marc Chagall and Max Ernst. She is recognized as an early innovator of "all-over" abstraction, a technique that led critic Clement Greenberg to position her as a forerunner of Abstract Expressionism and of Jackson Pollock in particular. Sobel is celebrated for her mastery of color and multilayered compositions, with works currently held in collections such as the LACMA and the MoMA.
For its inaugural presentation at Art Basel Miami Beach (Preview Hours: December 3–4, 11:00 AM–7:00 PM; Opening Hours: December 5–7, 11:00 AM–6:00 PM), Voloshyn Gallery focuses on Sobel’s series reflecting on American society and her mounting anxieties about World War Two. The selection includes somber works in hues of brown, yellow, and red, depicting soldiers, refugees, and cannons, revealing the emotional turmoil Sobel felt upon hearing about the German occupation of her Ukrainian hometown.
These wartime paintings heavily draw on her distant Ukrainian childhood memories, orthodox iconography, and folk art traditions. The works, which incorporate both American and Ukrainian figures, juxtapose the familiar and the unfamiliar, creating a compelling visual statement on the global war and mirroring the experience of immigrants who visit their ancestral land only in memory.
The early canvas Disappointment, c. 1943, exemplifies Sobel’s challenging approach, collapsing figure and ground as motifs inspired by Ukrainian folk art meet an expressive, humanoid landscape. The canvas features gnarled tree branches twisting into proto-drips and fields of flowers claustrophobically enrobing haunting faces, incorporating oil and sand on canvas.
Sobel continued to create and exhibit until the late 1940s, when health issues, including paint material allergies, forced her to stop. She died in Plainfield, New Jersey, in 1968. Now, her work is being rediscovered and studied, ensuring that her legacy of artistic innovation and cross-cultural expression is recognized in the art historical canon.
Aneta Grzeszykowska: Unsettling Domestic Hierarchies in DISORDER
Concurrently, Voloshyn Gallery will present the solo exhibition DISORDER by Polish photographer Aneta Grzeszykowska at their Miami flagship (802 NW 22nd St.), on view from November 30, 2025, through January 10, 2026.
In DISORDER, Grzeszykowska engages with her immediate domestic environment—family, animals, and her own body—to challenge conventional household hierarchies. Through staged scenarios, she unsettles categories such as human/animal, life/death, and youth/age by introducing shifts in roles and identities. The work explores the intersections of control, kinship, and subjectivity.
The exhibition features several series, including:
THE DAUGHTERÂ (2025):Â A new body of work where Grzeszykowska wears a hyperrealistic mask of her own face at the age of fourteen, reconstructed from archival family photographs. Used in performative photographs with relatives, the mask enables her to reframe her place within domestic dynamics, highlighting themes of memory, identity, and temporality.
DOMESTIC ANIMALS (2022): Photographs where pigskin masks of the artist’s face are fitted onto her dogs, examining ideas of recognition, projection, and estrangement.
MAMAÂ (2018):Â Features a hyperrealistic silicone replica of the artist, created with professional fabricators. Photographed alongside her daughter, the figure functions as both surrogate and object, raising questions about representation and the unstable boundary between person and image.
Grzeszykowska continues her investigation into selfhood, mortality, and the shifting relationships among human, animal, and object through these uncanny juxtapositions.