An unlikely tourist destination has sprouted in Brooklyn: Psychedelic painter Alex Aliume’s East Williamsburg home studio.
The 32-year-old artist estimates he’s hosted thousands of visitors since building out his Seigel Street live-work loft gallery in 2023. Many are fans of his work — colorful, glow-in-the-dark canvases created using a proprietary phosphorus-based technique that, for some (including one Wired reporter), elicits quite a spiritual experience. Others come upon his Instagram or TikTok, where he’s collectively accumulated more than 350,000 followers, or his website, where tickets starting are available for tours of his studio-cum-exhibition-space-cum-living-room.
After stepping through a cramped new construction lobby, visitors round the corner into a large, high-ceilinged room split by a movable mirror wall covered in Aliume’s kinetic art pieces. The non-moving wall space is dedicated to his non-moving work: trippy, brightly saturated depictions of cats, Hindu deities and optical-illusion-like patterns galore. Even to the uninitiated, it’s pretty obvious the canvases are probably going to glow, or something, when the lights cut. And Aliume will most certainly cut the lights, provide you with 3D glasses and share his story, his inspirations, his obstacles and his accomplishments, while leaving the actual technicalities of how he gives these solid canvases so many different layers of light-activated incarnations something of a mystery.
“I receive calls all the time. 'Hey, we are around, we would love to visit,'” said Aliume, a Ukrainian refugee who immigrated to New York in 2014 and started painting in 2017.
After coming upon Aliume’s gallery online, one woman even decided to throw her birthday party there.
“I just found it. I didn’t have a vision in my head to go have my birthday at an art gallery,” said Lauren Katzen, who was perusing the internet for somewhere “out-of-the-box and memorable” to host her 35th this past November when she randomly came upon Aliume’s space.
Her friends still talk about the party with reverence. “It was definitely one of the most unforgettable things that I’ll probably ever do in my life,” Katzen said.
“We’re kind of like a hidden gem,” said Carolina Franccesca, a creative consultant and Aliume’s live-in partner. The pair met at a business conference for those in the psychedelics industry and started dating after Franccesca toured one of Aliume’s previous studio-gallery spaces (he’s had four to date). “ I think the most common [reaction] is that, ‘Oh, I've never seen anything like this.’”
Alex Aliume's gallery
Indeed, the dedication of Aliume’s growing following to schlep out far from Manhattan’s gallery districts to a notably dreary residential side street represents an impressive level of enthusiasm in an age of particular attention deficit — and when it’s always been fairly true that, as Franccessca puts it, “it’s hard to just sit with an art piece.”
But sit with Aliume’s art fans do, generally while Aliume and Franccessca hospitably stand by, emanating warmth and a reciprocal appreciation for those who appreciate the work.
“The first time I went to the gallery I stood in front of the art for almost like three hours,” said Jeffrey Zhang, a buyer of Aliume’s worker.
To some, the colorful creations may look like Alex Grey imitations or dorm-room-appropriate black-light art, but the sense of awe others get from observing them is undeniable. And, once displayed, the multidimensional light chemistry aspect is quite mind boggling to anyone without a graduate STEM degree.
For Blue Man Group cofounder Chris Wink, the paintings give a “sense of, like, a portal. A connection to the outer world.” Wink loves that most of Aliume’s work is currently all together in the Seigel Street space, “like a museum retrospective.”
The Seigel Street space, however, will soon be no more: Aliume feels he’s ready for a more formal gallery, one where he doesn’t also live. Also, the lease was expiring and the rent was going up.
“We are conceptualizing it as an ‘experiential night gallery,’” Aliume said of the new space for which he has freshly signed a contract, at 41 Porter Ave. in Bushwick — a much more central location than his current one. He plans to paint the ceiling black and is exploring the idea of having a self-guided “sound journey” tour available. He’s excited at the prospect of having set hours and hopes to open in mid-May.
It’ll surely be far from Manhattan’s frequently stuffy gallery scene, not just in distance but also accessibility and crowd with its offering of an “immersive” modern art experience that is not just highly Instagrammable but almost screen-like itself: A glowing display that contains multitudes but, unlike technology, does not purport to have any answers beyond a cosmic whisper for those open to hearing it.
