Paintings 1977-81

“Canvases punch hardest, with operatic scenes of the beautiful and damned rendered in vibrant colors, hard lines, and sumptuous patterns,” writes art critic Tim Schneider on artist Lee Brozgol’s paintings.

From May through July 2025, the first posthumous survey of Brozgol’s paintings LEE BROZGOL 1977-81 took place at New York City landmark site Keller Hotel in collaboration with New Canons and Foreign & Domestic.

The exhibition brought together seven previously unseen paintings from an incandescent early chapter in the late artist’s practice. Made between 1977 and 1981, these works chart a vanished New York—erotic and violent, sacred and profane—across personal and mythic registers.

Installed inside the former Keller Hotel, this is the only large-scale art exhibition to grace this space in over 100 years. Built in 1898, The Keller has seen infinite iterations of New York history, from its beginnings as a stop for booming transatlantic trade at the turn of the 20th Century, to becoming an SRO and the city’s oldest queer leather bar, occupying the space from 1956 to 1998, with famed patrons such as Robert Mapplethorpe.

Discovered in his studio by Brozgol’s family after his death, these paintings and Brozgol’s unique, vivid style have since captivated a fresh generation of creatives, with The Brooklyn Rail writing, “these paintings look like they were made yesterday; brightly colored, cartoonish depictions of the violence and erotica of a long-disappeared New York. The charge of these works is only heightened by today’s neighboring brunching grounds and running clubs, the contrast amplifying the absence of an older New York and the artists who haunted the same piers, among them Wojnarowicz, Hujar, Baltrop, and Haring, swept away by a tidal wave of AIDS and gentrification.”

LEE BROZGOL 1977-81 unfolded in dialogue with the long-erased Christopher Street Piers, a site frequented and photographed by Brozgol, and once Manhattan’s queer sanctuary just beyond the walls of The Keller, and mere blocks from Brozgol’s Greenwich Village Murals, located in the Christopher Street-Stonewall subway station.

The Estate of Lee Brozgol is honored to present these seven paintings, which represent a slice of Brozgol’s larger canon. Select exhibition and painting photography by Dario Lasagni and Francis Louvis.