The energy in the art world and beyond has disappeared, especially this summer, when an uneasy weight is hard to ignore. From exhibition reviews and funding art organizations to closures and unpredictable trade restrictions on international galleries, every aspect of art manufacturing and art trade is always felt in the crisis. Therefore, the summer exhibition from Tribeca to Sag Harbor is appropriate, one of the oldest frames of uncertainty: the Apocalypse. Talk to artists who attend and curate these shows that this point of reference is more than just trying to deal with the contemporary collapse. It is also a means of studying how the entire historical artists metabolize the metabolic of the end of the world into a way forward.
Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych reflects today’s siege state
One way to navigate this unstable moment is to look backwards. The group showed off “The Garden of the Earth” in Grimm, New York until August 8, 2025, using Hieronymus Bosch’s eponymous Triptych as its theme host. The painting has long invited competitive explanations, including as an object of religious allegoricals and secret cults, but what makes it lasting is the ability to reflect tensions in any era.
“It almost feels like a person is looking for what we should do in an emergency,” art historian Joseph Leo Koerner said in an interview with the Harvard Gazette, Koerner, whose recent book The art of siege (2025) examined image production at moments of coercion, describing Bosch as “the current password and a harbinger of the future.” Similarly, Green’s spokesman told Observer, “The deceptive positivity in the title of the original Bosch work, the painting’s own description of heaven and hell seems to be the appropriateness of the New York summer performance, especially in the current socio-political climate of the United States.”
Several artists in the exhibition have direct conversations with Bosch to create new works. Two artists, Matthew Day Jackson and Anthony Cudahy, provide a different but complementary reading of the contemporary siege state: one macroscopic and geology, the other intimately embodied.
Jackson’s Human world (2025) Consider the belief system of image production. He updates the titular Christian worship apparatus by adding to the sculpture of the presumed sanctified remains a sample of what he calls “a material believed to be Trinitite,” a glass-like waste product of the US’s first atomic bomb test in 1945. This move ties back to the outer wings of Bosch’s triptych, which depict the Third Day of Creation in grisaille.
As Jackson said, this moment was not a break. “We are part of the continuum – our moments are punctuation for longer geological sentences,” he said. “But we are also animals, both with extraordinary ability to adapt and with miserable tendencies to catastrophe, which is achieved by defining our creativity.”
Cudahy’s contribution to the show echoes the inevitable ability of this fate: the artist’s self-portrait leans against the table, his hands holding the spiders towards the chain of animals that are swallowing each other. This work sees the cycle of consumption and catastrophe in Bosch’s vision as a metaphor for hatred of humanity and nature.
“We consider ourselves different, separate and moral, allowing us to act on others, other species and our world in a destructive, irrelevant way,” Kudashi explained. Meanwhile, the acceptance cycle may be the way forward. He shared: “Every time there is a small comfort.”
The 19th Century Illusion of Resurrection Empire and Redemption
For Los Angeles-based painter Chad Murray, similarities to contemporary moments can be drawn to the earlier times of the Revelation—especially in the 19th century, when state construction collided with Christian cosmology. In “John of Patmos” in Sebastian Gladstone’s gallery, a name that quotes the traditionally recognized author of Revelation, Murray introduces a series of paintings that investigates the Historical Descent of the Apocalypse.
These works were inspired by Thomas Cole The process of empire (1833-1836), a series of five paintings that depict the cycle of human culture from the Garden of Eden to the end, and John Martin’s The final judgment (1851-1853), a triptych inspired by inspiration. “Cole watched the world around him develop rapidly to an uncertain future and reflected this anxiety The process of empiredepicting the rise and fall of a fictional society as he witnessed his empire expansion firsthand,” Murray said: “Martin witnessed similar changes in England, but interacted with uncertainty through redemption. ”
Murray’s interest in the Christian apocalypse was not accidental. In the words of the artist, “Because of its ubiquitous influence in American society, it seems appropriate to use Christian language and images.”
However, exhibitions are far from religion. Instead, it elaborates on the trajectory of the apocalyptic image over time. Cole and Martin’s paintings ultimately explore sublime in the context of American and British industrialization and empire construction. Murray’s work draws on this art history lineage, positioning fictional civilization as an eternal placeholder when one era of disaster borrows visual vocabulary from another.
“This story is both engaging and mysterious enough to last throughout history, hanging generations in the near future,” Murray said.
Floods are a blueprint for creativity and community
At Sag Harbor, another group performance explores a story that has lasted for hundreds of years: the flood of the Bible. The Church’s “Ark” As of September 1, 2025, over forty artists from the last century have provided various animal sculptures by curated by Eric Fischl, a renowned artist and co-founder of the nonprofit exhibition space. The maritime theme of the show resonates deeply in this historic whaling village and its fired Methodist worship home. However, for Fischl, the exhibition focuses on two concepts in particular: the original flood is a fable of the creative process and selects specific themes to invite the community and dialogue.
“There are many cultures that share the archetype of God, or that God is aware of their disappointment with man and hopes to start over with a flood or a plague, hoping to transfer the anger of nature to them and reset the clock,” Fischl said. “What is implicit in these myths is that there is a positive future, namely the harmony between man and nature, and that their God’s vision of a perfect union is worth reviewing and mistaken… How can you respond to this as an artist?”
In Fischl’s view, the show responds to the wider divisions in public life by returning to ecology. “Our country is breaking itself apart because we can no longer find the subject and belief that is so important to us as a community,” he said. So why in this case the animals? “Simple. No one talks to each other in the elevator until the dog shows up.”
By organizing a performance of intercultural symbols, such as the Ark, Fischl hopes to open up space for reflection without doctrinalism. “I firmly believe that art is crucial to healing our fears, anxiety and collective wounds because art makes everything we share visible and concrete,” he told Observer. “The experience of art creation opens up our channels of empathy and strengthens what brings us into our common space rather than taking us out of the herd.”
It is tempting to think of Revelation as a strange event. But these exhibitions suggest that the Apocalypse is a vibrant archive, a lively archive that artists mined in various periods, often in order to investigate whether the same images that scared us for centuries might also contain clues about how to fix the present.
As Jackson puts it, “We find ourselves in a strange moment – facts and novels often feel like dystopian fantasies in the social, political and economic landscape. But it’s just a moment. It’s just a moment, not the end of anything. I resist the narrative of collapse and anxiety, the anxiety surrounding the concept. I’m still on the right path – we’re still unquestionable, we may be unquestionable, or a tough, or a good thing, or a good thing, and a good thing.
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