Inside the Art Show atop the Tallest Penthouse in New York

In the painting The Tallest Residential Tower in the Western Hemisphere (2015) by Leidy Churchman, a bathtub faces a floor-to-ceiling window that overlooks the skyscrapers of midtown Manhattan. The pastel pink tones of the bathroom clash with the steel and muted grays of the city below, where once-towering buildings like the Empire State Building now seem quaint. The view creates a tension where the intimacy of the bathroom is unthreatened by the private, public-facing view of the window: The room is so high that the outside world cannot see in.

The Tallest Residential Tower in the Western Hemisphere is based on the floor plans of a penthouse bathroom at 432 Park Avenue, a 1,396-foot-tall residential tower completed in 2015, located between West 56th and 57th Streets in Manhattan. It resides alongside several other ultra-slender skyscrapers that make up what is colloquially known as “Billionaire’s Row,” in reference to the socioeconomic status of the residents.

When Churchman completed the painting, 432 Park Avenue was the tallest residential tower in the Western Hemisphere. Nearly a decade later, 432 Park Avenue’s status has been usurped by the completion of Central Park Tower on West 57th Street, which is the second-tallest building in Manhattan and the tallest residential tower in the world.

With its exclusive view and limited access, Central Park Tower, then, might be the last place one would consider staging an exhibition. Yet art advisor Natasha Roberts has made its penthouse the site of a show that foregrounds women in abstraction. “Central Park Tower: Horizons” features seven New York–based artists from around the world: Lindsey Brittain Collins, Verdiana Patacchini, Federico Solmi, Kamiesha Garbadawala, Vicky Barranguet, Bianca Abdi-Boragi, and Bridgette Duran, with work selected to complement the design of the penthouse and its impressive views. The appointment-only exhibition opened on February 20th and closes April 21st.

“Central Park Tower: Horizons” strategically places work to interact with the viewscape of the city—namely Central Park—allowing the various abstract styles to be transformed by natural sunlight and the artificial lighting of Times Square below. The emphasis on abstraction makes a great fit for real estate, said Loy Carlos, who is the penthouse’s co-broker along with Ryan Serhant. It allows potential buyers to create their own narrative of the space—unlike, for example, figurative works, which can feel too personified, he informed Artsy. From the vantage point of the grand salon that faces the western view, Barranguet’s Persuasive Rhythm 1 (2022) is adjacent to, and overlooks, the iconic 432 Park Avenue, and the painting’s color palette favors that building’s distinctive concrete palette of white, gray, blue, and green.

“This project was very unique for me because it challenged me to curate with a ‘corporate client mandate’ so to speak, but with the mindset of an individual collector, who may also be the potential buyer of the property,” Roberts told Artsy. “I took color and texture cues from the interior finishes, and also endeavored to select works that told a story in alignment with one another, and as a part of the sensory-spatial experience of this one-of-a-kind space.”

This “sensory-spatial experience” is certainly felt as one walks through the vertigo-inducing spiral staircase that allows inhabitants to navigate its three floors. Flanked on one of the walls of the staircase is Garbadawala’s Alpha + Omega II (2021), a black and navy abstract painting that serves a functional purpose of “grounding” the viewer’s senses while traversing across floors. The unique conditions of the exhibition, designing for a space that is so distinctively singular, opens the audience’s perception of other functions that can exist for the home display of a personal art collection, like combating vertigo. The exhibition makes the sensory element of art extremely palatable insofar as the works on view demonstrate how one can feel art in a personal space.