Notes ·
Matthew Grabelsky Turns the Subway Into Modern Mythology
Joshua MorrisI love these paintings.
At first they are just funny. A leopard sits beside his girlfriend on the subway. A giraffe bends its neck beneath the ceiling of a train car. Bears, foxes, horses and other animals ride around New York dressed like completely ordinary commuters. The paintings are rendered so realistically that the absurdity takes a moment to register.
Then you start looking at the people around them, the advertisements, the clothes, the reflections in the metal walls and all the little details Grabelsky has put into the scene. The animal stops feeling like a joke and starts feeling like a character.
That is what makes the work so interesting to me.
Grabelsky grew up in New York and had ridden the subway countless times, but the idea didn't occur to him until he had moved away. While living in Paris, he came back to New York for a visit and photographed an interesting couple sitting across from him on the train. Looking at the photograph later, he imagined one of them with an animal head.
That became the idea he had been looking for.
He had spent years studying traditional drawing and painting techniques in Florence, including the methods used by Renaissance painters, and had been thinking about how to bring his love of mythology into something contemporary. The subway gave him a way to put those two worlds together.
Instead of placing an Egyptian god or mythological creature in some distant landscape, he puts one on the 1 train.
I think that works because the New York subway is already such an interesting little cross section of humanity. People who might otherwise have almost nothing in common sit a few feet apart for twenty minutes and then disappear back into completely separate lives. You don't know where the person across from you is going, what happened to them that morning, who they love, what they are worried about or what kind of person they become when they get off the train.
Grabelsky describes mythology as a way of getting beneath that surface. As he puts it, there can be a hundred people in a subway car and "everyone has their own particular world they're living in."
The animals become a window into those worlds.
I like that interpretation much more than simply reading the paintings as people transformed into animals. The human body is still there, dressed appropriately, sitting beside a partner or holding something familiar. The animal head reveals another layer of personality while leaving enough unexplained that you have to invent the story yourself.
Grabelsky deliberately doesn't provide that story. He treats the painting more like a stage, giving us the setting, characters and props and allowing us to decide what is going on.
We already do this constantly with strangers.
You see two people talking at another table and unconsciously invent something about their relationship. You notice what someone is reading on the train or what they are wearing and build a little story about who they might be. Grabelsky exaggerates that instinct by giving us one enormous additional clue, except the clue is a leopard.
The realism makes the surrealism work
I also love how technically serious the paintings are despite how playful the premise is.
Grabelsky trained in traditional academic painting and works through underpainting, glazing and the other techniques he learned studying the old masters. He uses photographs, models and even 3D models in SketchUp to work out perspective and reflections inside the subway cars.
He is particularly obsessive about light.
The stainless steel walls of an older New York subway car reflect light differently from plastic seats, windows, clothing and skin. Grabelsky spends an enormous amount of time getting those differences right, sometimes modeling parts of the scene because the reference he needs doesn't actually exist.
There is a nice reason for that attention to detail: before becoming an artist, he studied astrophysics.
He says that background still influences how he paints. Reflection, refraction and scattering aren't just artistic effects to him. They are physical behavior that he understands and then reconstructs in paint.
I really like that intersection between art and science.
A painting of a leopard-headed commuter is obviously imaginary, but everything surrounding the leopard is being treated almost like an engineering problem. The perspective has to work. The light has to behave correctly. Reflections have to appear where your brain expects them to appear.
The more convincing the ordinary world becomes, the easier it is to accept the impossible thing sitting inside it.
If the subway looked dreamlike too, the animal would just be another surreal element. Instead, the train looks completely real, which somehow makes me willing to believe that of course there is a giraffe riding downtown.
There is a lot of joy in these
The other thing I appreciate is that Grabelsky doesn't seem particularly interested in making the work difficult to enjoy.
There is mythology underneath it. There are ideas about identity, psychology and the private worlds people carry around. There is an enormous amount of traditional technique and careful composition involved.
But they are also funny paintings of animals riding the subway.
Grabelsky says that if an idea makes him laugh while he is working on it, that is usually a sign he wants to pursue it. I like that.
Art doesn't have to become less serious because it makes someone smile.
His recent work continues the same idea. He has painted everything from pandas and werewolves to crows, cats and rats, often with titles that add another little joke to the scene. His 2026 Kiddos exhibition takes the animal-headed characters out of the subway and applies the idea to childhood, placing children into environments connected to the animal representing them.
The paintings have evolved, but the thing I like most about them remains the same.
They make ordinary people seem mysterious again.
It is easy to sit in a crowded place and reduce everyone around you to background scenery. Grabelsky's paintings remind me that every one of those people is carrying around an entire life I know nothing about.
Maybe imagining the person across from me with the head of a tiger isn't the worst way to remember that.