Feb 12 - Feb 28 2025

141 CANAL STREET, 3RD FLOOR NEW YORK, NY

Fugue Gallery presents “Future Forward,” a new exhibition series that examines the future of art and our place within it. Curated by Zoe Ogle, this first edition transforms the gallery into a prism of perspectives, spotlighting emerging artists who are shaping new directions in contemporary practice.

NEW YORK – Fugue Gallery presents the inaugural edition of “Future Forward,” a new exhibition series that explores the future of art and our role within it. This edition turns the gallery into a prism of perspectives, unbound by direction or linearity. Spotlighting twenty-two emerging artists (students and recent graduates), the exhibition space becomes a battleground for ideas where artists express their contemporary practice. Overcoming geographic and spatial boundaries, “Future Forward” takes place both physically within the gallery and digitally on fuguegallery.com. 

Future Forward blends traditional and new media with inventive ideas featuring sculpture, painting, drawing, photography, digital work, installation, video, and performance. “Future Forward" not only showcases works made with new technologies such as 3D printing and AI, but also reveals how these are not our only future. It is in the re-thinking and re-inventing of everyday objects—vapes, family photos, kiddie pools, distressed shoes, dishes—as well as noticing how power structures surface in seemingly trivial moments through memes, surveillance, bodily fluids, borders, and struggle. By looking at the familiar, its strangeness wears on us, and reality keeps becoming weirder and weirder.

These works were chosen not because they point in the same direction, but because they refuse to. Their works give us a chance to imagine the possible futures not only for art, but for ourselves and our world. What is our place here? What are our relationships with people and technologies? What are our limits, and when is it necessary to move beyond them?

“Future Forward” becomes a moment for concepts to meet, connect, and contrast with each other; a space where artists envision, enact, and create with intention and curiosity. Just as we can only see the movements of the past and the trends of the present, this exhibition is neither an answer nor a forecast of the time ahead. Instead, it is a human portrayal of each artist’s beliefs about what is to become of their future.

Curated by: Zoe Ogle

Assisted by: Ella Chang

Featuring: Unzillah Azhar, Lee Caulfield, Elvys Chaves & Carlo Schiavini, Raimondo Coppola, Isabella Covert, Eona Gao, Olympe Gautier, Gigi Giovanelli, Otis Gordon, Grace Flinchbaugh, Chaeyeon Kang, Preksha Kothari, Aya Lam, Jayden Liu, Chloe Luterman, Maria Mosier, Alex Philbrook, Bar Plivazky, Grace Ullman, Juana Vargas Moreno, Isaac Wheatley, Ava Xi