Cindy Bernhard and Vadim Pugin at Plato Gallery, New York

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.