Artist profile
Samuel Abelow
Executive Partner at Current Arts
Painter, curator, and writer based in Crown Heights, Brooklyn
Samuel Abelow (b. 1991, New York City) is a Brooklyn-based painter raised in Connecticut. He studied at the Sonic Arts Center of the City College of New York.
Since 2022, Abelow has been based in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, where his practice has developed through sustained engagement with Jewish mysticism and daily religious life. His recent work emerges from lived experience - integrating ritual, study, and contemporary culture into a visual language that is both symbolic and immediate.
His paintings are held in private collections across the United States and Europe, including New York, East Hampton, Los Angeles, and Berlin.
Samuel Abelow, Executive Partner at Current Arts.
At Current Arts
Samuel Abelow is an artist and advisor to Current Arts. A true generalist, he contributes across production and high-level consulting, bringing a broad creative and strategic perspective to projects from early development through execution.
In the gallery, his September 2026 solo show Say to Wisdom, Thou Art My Sister filled 17 Essex Street with vase and face paintings; this fall his work returns in Translations: The 613 with the Jewish Art Salon.
Say to Wisdom, Thou Art My Sister
Solo exhibition, September 3-9, 2026, Current Arts Gallery, 17 Essex Street, New York.
"Say to Wisdom, Thou Art My Sister is a series of vase and face paintings.
The vase paintings refer to women's names. Each painting is a meditation on a quality of my psyche: Tranquility, Wisdom, Song. These vessels are in me, as well as containers for the mystery of paint and canvas.
The titles of the paintings are translations, or literal meanings of women's names, while the face paintings portray the relationship between spiritual master and student.
My artistic approach is intentionally spontaneous, related to joy as it is animated through the body; this is all centered around the mysticism of a lived life in the material world - the union of which is alluded to in paint, canvas and the painterly soul."
- Samuel Abelow, artist statement. More about the show on samuelabelow.com
Original works
Original paintings by Samuel Abelow.
Prints and catalog
The exhibition catalog and signed limited-edition posters from the September show, through the Current Arts store.
Exhibitions & projects
Say to Wisdom, Thou Art My Sister (solo) - Current Arts, 17 Essex St., New York, 2026
Samuel Abelow & Rabbi Aaron L. Raskin: Art Exhibit & Kabbalah Lecture (solo) - Hadas Gallery at Chabad Clinton Hill & Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, 2026
Jewish Consciousness (solo) - Maor Art Gallery, Brooklyn, 2026
Behind Closed Doors (group) - HOM Gallery, Bushwick, Brooklyn, 2026
Current Mystics (group, curator) - Current Arts, 17 Essex St., New York
OCEAN (group, curator and exhibited artist) - Ezra Gallery, The Hamptons, 2025
Summer Solstice, Concrete Myths (group) - Van Der Plas Gallery, New York, 2025
The Orphic Dance & Persephone's Eyes of Water (solo) - St. Thomas Aquinas College, 2019, curated by Timothy Hull
Writing & publishing
Fruition in Ecstasy, Portraits and Other Paintings - exhibition catalog, 2025; second edition 2026. Essay by Johannes Böckmann, artist statement by Samuel Abelow.
Artist Catalog - monograph, 2022-2024, three editions. Essays by Christina Bickel, PhD; Johannes Böckmann; Kendra Terry, PhD.
Art critic, ArtCritique.com (Paris), 2018-2019 - essays on exhibitions and cultural themes.
Portrait: Current Arts. Poster and catalog images: Current Arts store.