On Thursday, November 20, 2025, in the very heart of New York’s gallery scene — Chelsea — the exhibition “Desires of the Boulders” opened, presented by a duo of two strikingly distinctive artists.
About the artists
Emil Silberman is a New York–based sculptor working in contemporary plastics, installation, and site-specific art. He is also the creator of the well-known annual exhibition Art +Factory, held on the grounds of a former brewery in the legendary town of Paterson, New Jersey.
Dmitriy Alekseyev is an artist working in painting and decorative arts, as well as a co-founder and art curator of “Art-Ovrag” (now Vyksa Festival). He has extensive experience in theater and film as a production designer. He currently lives and works in Atlanta, Georgia.
About the exhibition
This exhibition is a rare opportunity to see, within one space, not only two strong, independent artists with more than thirty years of creative history, but also two curators whose approaches unexpectedly align at a single point.
The Crossing Art Gallery turned out to be an exceptionally fitting environment for their collaboration. The gallery’s high ceilings create a special spatial rhythm, allowing Dmitriy Alekseyev to work on a grand scale: his large canvases don’t simply hang on the walls — they set the pulse of the entire room, shaping a kind of painterly corridor. Emil Silberman’s sculptures, placed against these landscapes, enter into a dialogue with them, producing an almost theatrical effect and transforming the show into a dynamic installation.
Alekseyev’s landscapes are more than metaphor: each painting depicts the life of stones in nature. Some show the birth of stone from magma — a bright, intense, hot, and thrilling moment. Others present an immobile fragment of rock that, despite its petrified stillness, continues to breathe and change shape over thousands of years under the influence of ocean waves.
Silberman’s sculptures in this exhibition are never just objects — they are experiences and emotions. They are born not from abstraction but from specific human states. One piece, for example — an untitled work whose backstory touched me personally — was created during a moment of deep confusion, when the artist didn’t know what his next step would be — creatively, professionally, or personally.
He recalled walking through a park when an image, caught somewhere between intuition and emotion, simply “came” to him. The sculpture became a way to translate inner tension into physical form. As the artist explains, when a person has nowhere else to pour their state of mind, art becomes an outlet — and through this act, he regained his sense of grounding.
Ultimately, Desires of the Boulders turns out to be an exhibition not about stones themselves, but about what lies behind them. A boulder — dense, heavy, silent, unchanging — becomes a starting point for a conversation about the human being, who is quite the opposite: fragile, vulnerable, fluid, emotional, constantly shifting. In this contrast — between the stone’s immovability and the human’s inner liquidity — the exhibition reveals its central theme: how experiences that cannot be held in words can find form in art.
And while these works continue to inhabit the space of Crossing Art Gallery, the gallery is already preparing its next project: from November 25 to December 11 it will host an exhibition by Lana Malakhoff — a vivid representative of the new visual wave, working with color, corporeality, and intuitive painting. Her project will be a natural continuation of the gallery’s autumn season, but will offer a completely different rhythm and emotional lens.
If you haven’t visited Crossing Art Gallery this fall — now is the perfect time.
📍 Crossing Art — 559 W 23 St, New York, NY 10011
📸 Instagram: @crossingart
More photos from the exhibition:
