Michele Abramowitz

Cognitive Dissonance or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Stop Worrying and Stop Worrying and Stop Worrying

October 11th – November 15th 2025

Opening reception Saturday October 11th 5:00-7:30 pm

Tops Gallery 400 S Front street (entrance on Huling, basement level) Memphis, TN 38103

Tops Gallery is pleased to announce Cognitive Dissonance or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Stop Worrying and Stop Worrying and Stop Worrying, a solo exhibition of six a new paintings by Michele Abramowitz. This is Tops’s first show with Abramowitz, and it will take place at the Front Street gallery.

The title of Abramowitz’s show is taken from Kubrick’s 1964 film, Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, a dark comedy that satirizes the nuclear bomb anxieties of the Cold War and the absurdity and paradox inherent in the concept of “mutually assured destruction.” Abramowitz’s new, abstract oil paintings are, for her, a response to the current political turmoil with similar emotional bifurcation. They reflect the cognitive load of living in multiple simultaneous and conflicting realities, presenting a new landscape. 

Abramowitz’s paintings for this exhibition address the figure-ground relationship through her technique of priming, with gesso, different areas of each painting’s surface. This creates and accentuates the appearance of cut-outs of positive and negative space. Abramowitz uses traditional painting methods and hand painted trompe l’oeil treatments to highlight the interfaces between illusion and physicality thus linking concepts of reality and the self. 

Tops Madison Avenue Park

Claudia Keep

Waves

September 18th – November 14th 2025

Tops at Madison Avenue Park 151 Madison Avenue (viewable on Maggie H. Isabel St) Memphis, TN 38103

On view 24 hours a day

Tops is pleased to present Waves, Claudia Keep's painting depicting a panoramic slice of the East River. This work is an outtake from her current exhibition New York at March, NYC. Presented at our Madison Avenue Park gallery, a venue that never sleeps, and parallel to a different and muddier river, Waves is an extended rendering of the ever-changing nature of sun reflecting off moving water. A view that is common, but hard to see.