This painting depicts the view from 432 Park Avenue, a 1,396-foot-high luxury condominium completed in 2015. While the tower has been heralded as a marvel of contemporary engineering, it has also sparked an outcry over its impact on New York’s skyline and the stratospheric cost of its apartments. Leidy Churchman based his canvas on a computer rendering by DBOX, which the artist located on the building developer’s website, that juxtaposed a luxurious bathroom interior with the sprawling mass of lower Manhattan beyond. Churchman’s dizzying composition is at once inviting and disconcerting, hinting at the building’s controversial status as a symbol of the glaring divide between the ultra-rich and ordinary New Yorkers.
