Union Sushi & Steak Debuts First Art Show with UEast75 Gallery

Upper East Side’s UEast75 Gallery has arrived in the Hamptons with Musing and Mastering: The Ordinary, a new pop-up exhibition at Union Sushi & Steak, the Southampton restaurant’s first-ever art show. The show features work from six world-renowned Latin and American artists—Juan Lazaro, Renelio Marin, Rodrigo Pedrosa, Lane Rudder, Carlos Rafael Vega Pérez and curator Alysha Marko.

“As this year descends ever so bittersweetly, we can all agree it has been one that has been far from The Ordinary,” says Marko, owner of UEast75 Gallery. “We have all been forced, to some degree, to experience what we have right in front of us much clearer. Artists have done it for centuries—being stuck inside their mental and physical spaces, giving birth to works, beckoning the word ‘ordinary’ to [come to light]. These moments are expanded here [in this moment].”

The art featured in Musing and Mastering: The Ordinary is available for purchase at price points ranging from $400 to $18,000. A portion of the proceeds benefit the National Organization of Rare Diseases (NORD). Now is the perfect time to pick up some amazing pieces for yourself or for the art lover on your Christmas shopping list. The exhibition is on view through January 18.

“I’m thrilled. A lot of my clients who have second homes in the Hamptons haven’t been able to see my new work because they haven’t been coming into the city as much lately,” Marko says. “This new location is what I’ve wanted for a long time. The gallery in NYC, which is street level on 75th Street off Madison, has seen much less foot traffic and walk-ins lately. Now, I’m just thrilled because this is the perfect market to have a pop-up gallery in Southampton.”

Union Sushi & Steak owner Ian Duke adds, “Ultimately, Alysha and I saw an opportunity for us to work together, which we haven’t had the chance to do before, nor has it ever been done at the restaurant. There are a number of people out on the East End who can’t go in or won’t go into Manhattan to visit galleries, so we thought this would be a great opportunity to bring the gallery to them. Plus, we thought this would create a very unique environment for people to experience art as well as a unique dining experience.”

Learn more about the featured artists below.

Alysha Marko, born in New Jersey, graduated with a B.A. in Psychology from Seton Hall University. She is a painter, performance artist, curator and gallerist. While an actress living in Los Angeles, she worked for James and John Cameron, who first introduced her to painting. She continued her studies in New York, taking courses at The Arts Students League while working for The Switzer Group, an architectural interior design firm. Design is a major influence in her conceptual works, and the methods of expression and communication that she learned as an actor allows her to build narrative and construct scenes as a painter.

Renelio Marin graduated from San Alejandro School of Fine Arts in Havana in 1993. He received his Master’s in Media, Culture and Communication from New York University in 2011 and his Bachelor’s in Studio Art from the City University of New York’s Hunter College in 2009. Marin’s work is in prominent collections internationally, and has had pieces in The Rubin Foundation collection and New Mexico Museum of Art. He was recently mentioned in Forbes and The Times UK for his five mural designs designed for Arthaus Gemmayze hotel in Beirut, Lebanon.

Juan Lazaro lives and works in Havana, Cuba. His body of works throughout his 25-year career have focused on the tangible world on his island. Spanning from eclectic, potent portraits of his native people; bountiful, vital bouquets of local fruits; and most recently the process he refers to as “meditations” of the beloved universal object—the bicycle. Lazaro refers to them as bicycle transformers, which explores the many feelings and intersections of life, energy and rediscovering the whole object by its connections and motives.

Rodrigo Pedrosa is a painter and sculptor working in Rio de Janeiro. Among his public works are the monument to Zumbi dos Palmares in Caminho Niemeyer museum in Niterói, Brazil. In his diptychs, he seeks to investigate the relationship between the relationships and possibilities, or lack of, that pose a challenge for the future. His work stands side by side with contemporary artists, such as the British Banksy or the Turkish Ugur Gallenkus in the construction of images that confront utopias and dystopias, chronicles of a liquid, and uncertain time, while consistently imposing the question, “How do we live together?”

Carlos Rafael Vega Pérez is a Cuban painter born in Havana, who lives and works from Orlando, Florida. His work began in 1987 when he won the first prize of Graphic Humor of the Young Cuban Caricaturists. He then went on to graduate from the prestigious Academy of Fine Arts San Alejandro in 1993. His paintings have a surrealist style in which he melts the landscape of his city with the characters that inhabit them. This movement, which appears as if it will dissipate if we watch a few more seconds, shapes the physicality and imagination of the transparent performers the city intends to keep on display. He uses the classical technique from the study and inspiration of the great masters such as Antoni Gaudí and Raphael. He continues to publish his cartoons in newspapers.

Lane Rudder is an emerging artist based in New York City. Creating surreal depictions reality, the primary topic throughout Rudder’s work is his personal encounters of addiction and loss. Expressing chaos and trauma through a whimsical lens is signature and his means of reconstructing dependence and grief into a pillar; onto which he now lays the foundation of his life.

To learn more about UEast75 Gallery, visit ueast75.gallery. And for more info about Union Sushi & Steak, visit dineatunion.com.