Georges Bergès Gallery presents The Future He Already Made — Shalom Neuman: Fifty Years of Fusionism, a major survey of the Czech-American artist who broke the picture plane open long before the rest of the art world understood why it needed breaking. The exhibition opens with a public reception on Thursday, September 10, and marks the beginning of the gallery’s role as the institutional home of the Fusionism movement.

Neuman did not arrive at Fusionism as a style. He arrived at it as a necessity. Painting alone could not hold what he needed to say, so he fused it with sculpture, sound, light, projection, found objects, performance, and eventually digital media — not as accompaniment, but as one indivisible language. Where his contemporaries were making objects for walls, Neuman was making environments that surrounded, addressed, and implicated the viewer. He was building the immersive, multisensory, media-collapsed art experience that museums now stage at enormous expense and call innovation. He was doing it in a building he bought himself on Stanton Street, decades before there was a market for it, and largely without institutional permission.

That is the argument of this exhibition. What the art world is currently congratulating itself on discovering, Shalom Neuman already made.

The exhibition brings together works spanning five decades of Fusionism — the sculpturally painted figures, the motion-triggered sound works, the light and projection pieces, the fused assemblages that refuse to sit in any single category a curator might reach for. Seen together, they trace an unbroken line of thought rather than a career of stylistic pivots. The figure never leaves. The classical draftsmanship never leaves. What changes is how much of the world Neuman insists on fusing into the frame.

Neuman’s biography is inseparable from the work. Born in Prague in 1947 to a Jewish family, most of whose members were murdered in the Holocaust, Neuman carries both a European classical training and firsthand knowledge of what happens when a culture decides certain human beings do not count. His work has never been decorative and has never pretended neutrality. Its excess, its noise, its refusal to be quiet or singular, is a moral position: the insistence that art addresses the whole of a person rather than the eye alone.

“Shalom is not a footnote to any movement — he started one, and he has been carrying it largely alone for fifty years,” said Georges Bergès, founder of Georges Bergès Gallery. “This gallery exists to put consequential living artists in front of the world while they are still living. Shalom is the clearest case I know of. Our commitment does not end when the show comes down. The gallery is the institutional home of Fusionism, and I intend to carry that movement forward with him and after him.”