Howie Michels

A Hug From The Art World is thrilled to present Howie Michels' Night Club Under the Covers.

"When I was a child, I had the crazy idea that when sleepytime approached, I would get comfortable under my covers, where I ran a nightclub, as Humphrey Bogart did in the late-night movies. As a matter of fact, he would be there, with the likes of Lauren Bacall, Veronica Lake, Dean Martin, Loretta Young, and others. Also under the covers, mingling with the Hollywood stars, were some cartoon characters: Popeye, Olive Oyl, Betty Boop, Wimpy and Koko the Clown. My playmate who lived down the road, Patty Shady, could also make a fantasy appearance. Insects, turtles, fish, salamanders, snakes and all sorts of wildlife from nature would be at the nightclub too. I would get pleasantly drowsy and content--and fall asleep."

—Howie Michels

For his third exhibition at A Hug From The Art World, we present a sculpture for the first time alongside recent paintings. Inside Man is a multifaceted sculpture, to be viewed in the round. Carved out of wood, the work brings Michels’ fantastic cast of mythological, hybridized subjects into three dimensions. They call to mind an unlikely pantheon: R. Crumb, Max Beckmann, Gustave Courbet, and especially Hieronymus Bosch, in whose paintings you can lose yourself and feel a gravitational shift. Over the last few years, the images that had always been lurking around the barn and the 17th century cabin where Howie Michels works, depending on the season, suddenly exploded across these larger, wilder, more ambitious works.

Following his 2023 solo show, The Elephant in the Room, in Los Angeles, Nightclub Under The Stairs marks Michels’ return to New York since his debut with the gallery, Epic, in 2022.

Howie Michels’ first painting was done, in the 1950s, in his mother’s lipstick, on the pink wall of their house on a strawberry farm in Middletown, New York. It was an image of a gun, which his parents mistook for a penis, and he was punished. After that he had nightmares of glowing snakes chasing him down an endless set of dark stairs.

He attended Pratt Institute, where Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe were among his friends. After college, he worked as the clinical director of a home for schizophrenic children and taught grade school art. In 1978, he and the writer Francine Prose had the first of two sons and moved to the Catskills.

Michels has illustrated five books of poems: Witt, (Gotham Book Mart, 1973)by Patti Smith, Aunt Lettuce, Let Me Look Under Your Skirt, (Bloomsbury, 2005) and Night Picnic, eRides, (Penguin, 1999) and The Porcupine’s Kisses, (Penguin, 2002) both by Stephen Dobyns, also a limited edition of Peter Straub’s Koko (Centipede Press.) He has shown at the 55 Mercer Street Gallery (1990); at the Bowery Poetry Club “On the Wall”, curated by Elizabeth Murray; Rental Gallery, group show, 2020, curated by David Salle.