Plato Gallery in New York is hosting two concurrent solo exhibitions from June 4 to July 11, 2026: Cindy Bernhard: Broken Vessels, and Vadim Pugin: The Walled Garden. Broken Vessels, a solo exhibition by Chicago-based artist Cindy Bernhard, features a new body of paintings that explores spiritual rupture, transcendence and the relationship between the human body and the divine. At the center of the exhibition is the metaphor of the vessel: the body as a container for spirit and belief. In The Walled Garden, New York–based artist Vadim Pugin presents a new body of work exploring the contours of subjectivity in an era shaped by commodified attention and engineered desire. The exhibition brings together ceramics, sound, video, and fabric installation within an environment the artist describes as Cyber Baroque: a logic of excess in which surveillance has learned to disguise itself as seduction.
Plato is a contemporary art gallery founded by Elena Platonova with the goal of cultivating intercultural dialogue. It mainly focuses on the work of artists with diverse cultural, ethnic and national backgrounds, who maintain continuity with the traditions of art history while creating new ones. Plato particularly welcomes the mixed types, the misfits, multihyphenates, immigrants, hybrids and those who can see the world through the eyes of the other. The gallery is housed in a ground-level space on the historic Bowery, half a block from the New Museum in New York.
Cindy Bernhard: Broken Vessels, and Vadim Pugin: The Walled Garden. Two solo exhibitions at Plato Gallery New York. Impressions from the opening, New York City, June 4, 2026.
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Press texts (excerpt):
Cindy Bernhard: Broken Vessels
PLATO is honored to present Broken Vessels, a solo exhibition by Chicago-based artist Cindy Bernhard, featuring a new body of paintings that explores spiritual rupture, transcendence and the relationship between the human body and the divine. It will be on view in the gallery’s ground-floor space from June 4 through July 11.
At the center of the exhibition is the metaphor of the vessel: the body as a container for spirit and belief. Drawing from archetypal associations between gold and divinity, Christian mysticism and contemporary existential anxiety, Bernhard’s monumental six-foot paintings depict fractured golden forms that stand in for humanity itself — wounded, imperfect, yet still capable of transformation.
The exhibition emerged after what the artist describes as a profound spiritual awakening, an experience connected to the concept of the ‘Dark Night of the Soul,’ articulated by the 16th-century Spanish poet and theologian St. John of the Cross. During a period of emotional hardship, Bernhard underwent an intense feeling of joy and “unity with the cosmos.” “I was flooded with images of these gold vessels reminiscent of the body,” Bernhard explains. “Seven paintings representing the seven deadly sins, and one that stands for this feeling of wholeness.” The eighth painting, reminiscent of an overexposed photograph and devoid of the colorful exuberance that defines the others, was inspired by the Shroud of Turin, which many believe to be the burial cloth of Jesus.
Throughout Broken Vessels, the metal functions as both a spiritual symbol and cultural critique. Across civilizations, gold has signified enlightenment, sacred ritual and immortality — from Christian icons and gilded chalices to Tutankhamun’s funerary mask and the golden light of higher consciousness in yogic traditions. Bernhard places these associations against the backdrop of contemporary materialism, where greed, spectacle and the pursuit of power increasingly replace or corrupt spiritual inquiry.
The vessels themselves bear razor-thin fractures and weathered surfaces, referencing both bodily vulnerability and psychic erosion. Bernhard describes these cracks as “microfractures in our souls.” The relentless pace of the news cycle, political extremity and collective anxiety become invisible pressures acting upon the spirit. Despite this atmosphere of rupture, the paintings also suggest the possibility of redemption. Light, water, fire and smoke recur throughout the exhibition as symbols of purification and divine presence.
Technically, Broken Vessels marks a new development in Bernhard’s practice. The artist built luminous surfaces by preserving exposed areas of raw canvas beneath translucent glazes, allowing light to emerge through the paintings. The new sanding techniques and razor-incised fissures heighten the sense of fragility and wear. Inspired in part by filmmaker Terrence Malick and his juxtaposition of intimate human experience with cosmic imagery, Bernhard introduces constellations throughout the exhibition as reminders of humanity’s relationship to a larger universe.
The works embrace a distinctly contemporary visual language. Ultra-precise astronomical imagery fuses with the aesthetics of Hollywood cinema, music videos and digital effects — all rendered painstakingly through traditional painting techniques. Dramatic lighting, theatrical compositions and monumental scale recall Baroque painting while speaking to a contemporary moment equally shaped by excess and the search for meaning.
Broken Vessels invites viewers into a contemplative encounter with brokenness and the possibility of spiritual renewal. The exhibition asks what remains sacred in an age defined by spectacle, consumption and fragmentation, suggesting that transcendence can still perhaps emerge through the cracks.
Cindy Bernhard (b. 1989, Illinois) lives and works in Chicago, IL. She received her MFA from Laguna College of Art and Design in 2014 and her BFA from the American Academy of Art in 2011.
Recent and upcoming solo exhibitions include PLATO, New York, NY (2026), Volery Gallery, Dubai, United Arab Emirates (2025), Andrew Rafacz, Chicago, IL (2024), Richard Heller Gallery, Santa Monica, CA (2024), Long Story Short, New York, NY (2024) and Monya Rowe Gallery, New York, NY (2023). Bernhard’s work has been shown in group exhibitions at numerous galleries, including Harper’s Gallery, New York, NY (2024), The Bunker Art Space, Palm Beach, FL (2024), De Boer Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2024), PLATO, New York, NY (2024), Andrew Rafacz, Chicago, IL (2024), Steven Zevitas Gallery, Boston, MA (2024), Casa Santa Ana, Panama City, Panama (2024), Monya Rowe Gallery, New York, NY (2023), Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art, Chicago, IL (2022), Carlye Packer, Palm Springs, CA (2022), Richard Heller Gallery, Santa Monica, CA (2022), Field Projects, New York, NY (2021) and Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago, IL (2020), among many others.
Bernhard’s work has been written about in various publications, including Bad at Sports, Broccoli, Hypebeast, Juxtapoz, Newcity, New American Paintings and New York Magazine. Her work is in the collections of several institutions, including the Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum in Madrid, Spain and Zuzan’s Collection at Zuzeum Art Centre in Riga, Latvia.
PLATO is excited to announce the opening of Vadim Pugin’s solo exhibition at PLATO, The Walled Garden, on Thursday, June 4, from 6–8 pm. The show will be on view through July 11.
In The Walled Garden, New York–based artist Vadim Pugin presents a new body of work exploring the contours of subjectivity in an era shaped by commodified attention and engineered desire.
The exhibition brings together ceramics, sound, video, and fabric installation within an environment the artist describes as Cyber Baroque: a logic of excess in which surveillance has learned to disguise itself as seduction. Ceramic mascarons — architectural masks historically embedded in Baroque facades — establish the exhibition’s spatial order, functioning as autonomous agents that guide the viewers’ movement while simultaneously returning their gaze.
The exhibition’s title, The Walled Garden, is borrowed from advertising technology — the industry in which Pugin worked for nearly two decades. The term describes a closed digital ecosystem where user data is collected, contained, analyzed, and monetized. Drawing on the artist’s firsthand experience with targeting infrastructures, bidding markets, and behavioral modeling, the exhibition aims to reveal the systems that make platforms feel as though they have read your mind. That uncanny precision becomes an inverted panopticon: a structure extending across urban and personal space, endlessly hungry for data.
In creating The Walled Garden, Pugin turned to the allegory of the historical Baroque garden, which was never truly a sanctuary, but a machine for observation. Its rigid geometries, forced perspectives, and unnatural symmetries offered no retreat to those who wandered through it. From the highest palace window, the sovereign watched. Similarly, Pugin reconstructs the architecture of control embedded within online platforms: the curated feed as endless folds of illusory abundance, the recommendation engine as a maze of garden paths, and the algorithm as a sovereign force that has already determined the direction of our movement.
Several ceramic works embody these mechanisms. Engagement is one such piece: glazed in reptilian green, with a network of spikes surrounding a striking trefoil centered around a small circle, it resembles an overgrown biohazard sign. The algorithm does not reward what is truthful; it rewards what is reactive. Social media feeds are an echo chamber where the loudest impact is amplified and placed in the center. This Engagement creature was bred in and thrives within that kind of toxic environment.
Another ceramic, Attachment, is adorned with a glowing red lens that quietly watches the viewers as they move through the space. The digital red dot — the “unread” count in the corner of an application icon — is not merely a signal, but a lure, refined across billions of interactions until it bypasses deliberation entirely and reaches directly into the nervous system. The notification is any platform’s most domesticated visual cue and its most predatory. Here, it blooms into an ominous plant: armored, deep-sea-like, curled protectively around the glowing eye it uses to find you.
For Pugin, ceramics function as a high-technology medium with its own agency. His approach to it mimics his experience in music production: forms are constructed through additive and subtractive gestures analogous to sound synthesis; glazed surfaces, fired at 2,200°F, emerge through chemical processes in which rare-earth elements and metals fuse and crystallize into outcomes the artist can guide but never fully control. Once fired, ceramic carries the potential to outlast its viewer. A material directed but never completely commanded, a duration that exceeds the human — the medium itself rehearses the conditions of the systems the exhibition seeks to expose.
What grows inside this garden is no longer fully legible even to its gardeners. AI cannot be understood simply as something engineered; what is built instead is the infrastructure and the environment in which it takes root, growing with a speed and invasiveness that even its architects cannot predict. Increasingly, even developers enter a state where it is no longer clear who is curating whom.
And if those who built the walls are losing that clarity, what of those who merely tend their own digital spaces — pausing, scrolling, lingering, desiring? Are they cultivating a garden, or simply serving as its fertilizer?
The exhibition does not answer this question so much as transform its terms. Pugin refuses both the fantasy of escape and the comfort of resignation. The central operation of Cyber Baroque is to render the garden’s hidden agents visible — targeting systems and surfaces that watch back — so they may be understood as infrastructure rather than fate. Pugin’s wager is that political imagination cannot remain the privilege of those who design the walls. It must instead become the practice of those who inhabit them so they can learn to move through the garden on their own terms.
Vadim Pugin (b. 1986, Moscow, Russia) is a New York–based multidisciplinary artist working across ceramics, video, and sound. His sculptures and installations combine handmade materials with computational systems to create objects that appear to sense, gaze back at and respond to the viewer. Moving between the tangible and the digital, Pugin investigates how contemporary perception is shaped by platforms, surveillance, feedback loops, and algorithmic systems of control.
Vadim Pugin holds a Master’s degree from the Russian State University for the Humanities. He studied contemporary art through the Learning Environment program in Moscow, where he worked in the studios of Dmitry Morozov (::vtol::), Alexander Povzner, and Arseny Zhilyaev. Pugin’s recent exhibitions include Exaltation, PLATO, New York, NY (2025); The New Uncanny at The New Uncanny Gallery, New York, NY (2025); IX Moscow International Biennale of Contemporary Art, the State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Russia, and Everything Counts, Ground Solyanka, Moscow, Russia (2022). Pugin was the winner of the Vyksa Festival Open Competition for Urban Sculpture as part of Resitor Group in 2023.
