DAN WITZ & RYAN BOCK
Blumka Contemporary and Ki Smith Gallery
The Armory Show 2026 | Booth 227
NEW YORK, NY — Blumka Contemporary and Ki Smith Gallery are pleased to present a two-person exhibition of new works by Dan Witz and Ryan Bock at The Armory Show. Bringing together two artists of different generations, the presentation considers the persistence of historical visual languages in relation to contemporary conditions of conflict, surveillance, and technological control.
Witz and Bock approach these concerns from distinct positions. Witz looks to the conventions of nineteenth-century history painting to depict the physical realities of contemporary public life, while Bock draws from the fractured geometries and psychological atmosphere of early twentieth-century art and cinema. Across both practices, historical form becomes a means of examining the structures visible and invisible that shape the present.
At the center of the presentation is Dan Witz’s History Paintings, a new body of work that adopts the scale, oil glazing, dramatic illumination, and extreme foreshortening of nineteenth-century academic painting to depict scenes of contemporary public conflict. Rather than treating the conventions of history painting as historical quotation, Witz returns them to their original function: giving pictorial form and consequence to the events of his own time.
This approach culminates in La Grande Machine, a diptych comprising roughly seventy-five battling figures. Bodies overlap, disappear, and reemerge within a tightly compressed field, transforming the crowd into both subject and structure. The technical vocabulary of French Salon painting its theatrical scale, compositional density, and heightened illusionism—is redirected toward the disorder of contemporary street-level confrontation.
If Witz describes conflict through the accumulation of bodies, Ryan Bock approaches it through fragmentation. Bock’s monochromatic paintings draw upon German Expressionism, Czech Cubism, and Film Noir, breaking the human figure into silhouettes, shadows, and unstable architectural geometries. Figures become entangled with the spaces they occupy; perspective shifts; repeated forms suggest structures that are at once mechanical, architectural, and psychological.
Underlying these works is what Bock terms “dusty futurism,” a methodology through which recurring historical patterns and mythic archetypes are examined in relation to contemporary technological and political systems. The future, within Bock’s work, does not arrive as rupture. It appears instead as recurrence: inherited forms of authority, anxiety, superstition, and control resurfacing through new technologies and new architectures. The distinction between the two practices is consequential. Witz depicts the event; Bock examines the structure surrounding it.
In Witz’s paintings, conflict becomes corporeal. Light, color, gesture, and the density of the crowd give physical form to public unrest. In Bock’s work, the body is reduced and reorganized within systems of geometry, shadow, and architecture. One locates instability in the collision of individuals; the other in the structures through which individuals are organized. Their works consequently move between two registers of contemporary anxiety: the spectacle of disorder and the architecture of control. This relationship develops the central opposition already present in the original presentation Witz’s exterior, physical chaos against Bock’s more interior and institutional terrain.
Neither artist approaches art history nostalgically. For Witz and Bock, historical languages remain useful precisely because the conditions embedded within them have not disappeared. The theatricality of nineteenth-century painting and the distortions and shadows of early twentieth-century modernism emerged alongside periods of profound social and technological transformation. Reintroduced into the present, these languages register a different moment of instability one shaped by surveillance, political polarization, technological acceleration, and an increasingly uncertain relationship between the individual and the systems surrounding them.Presented together at The Armory Show, Witz and Bock reveal history not as a fixed sequence of styles, but as a set of forms that continue to recur under changing conditions.
Dan Witz & Ryan Bock
Presented by Blumka Contemporary and Ki Smith Gallery
The Armory Show 2026
Booth 227
Javits Center, New York
September 2026
