Shalom Neuman is an unprecedented artist, with a career that spans over 5 decades. He is the creator of “Fusion Art,” a multidisciplinary enterprise having its roots in assemblage, constructivism, expressionism, surrealism and new technology. His hyperactive production of in-everybody’s-face artworks has long been one of the most singular projects on the contemporary artistic landscape; he has adapted traditions ranging from painting to assemblage, from installation to performance art.

His works bring the classical into the contemporary by using traditional methods and artifacts in combination with new media for a maximalist approach, combining sound, smell, text, moving image, painting, sculpture, sound systems, digital loops, motion detectors, dimming systems, video projection and myriad technological methods that enable the artist to communicate with the spectator.

Neuman, whose Czech parents were Holocaust survivors, was a victim (if at one generation remove) of European destructiveness. He and his family escaped the horrors of World War II, and later arrived in New York in the late 50’s, when Abstract Expressionism was reaching its climax and peaking in redundancy. Simultaneously, the city was turning into an art shelter for the avant-garde generation of artists, where they established and influenced a new generation of American artists, bringing about new movements such as Pop Art, Minimalism, Conceptual Art, Earth Art, Installation Art, Happenings, Protest Art, blurring of the boundaries between art and life that began with the Duchampian found object. What makes Neuman’s Fusion Art special and distinctive is that it uses the ruins of avant-gardism and identity into a grand synthesis.

For Art Expo’s 2026 edition, GALERIA AZUR brings a selection of Neuman’s sculptural pieces, most notably, his (Mini) Amerika Series, consisting of a series of portraits bearing simple titles of everyday names like Evelyn, Norman, LuLu, or Fred. These faces constitute imaginary individuals, created not just from paint, but from everyday objects discarded as useless by their original owners, then appropriated by Neuman for his art. In an artist’s statement written in 2012, Neuman explained: “I use detritus and garbage because they are artifacts of our society, comprise our environment, speak to who we are as a culture and place in our time.” the objects are not just found but determinedly chosen. In other words, what filters through the Capitalist system as junk”.

Although these portraits at first glance appear colorful and playful, even to the point of speaking or producing music, a more careful examination shows something darker. Constructed from the waste of our society, intrinsic to the excessive capital that reverberates through our global culture, they reach beyond the individual to comment on a culture where rampant consumerism threatens to engulf us all and our collective humanity.

These works also speak on the overstimulated, technological world in which we live in. “If our world is composed of overlapping stimuli which create constant sensory overload,” writes Neuman, “then why should visual art limit itself to any one discipline such as painting, sculpture, print, video or computerized digital images? Is it not true that imagery is inseparable from sound and evolution in time? And if this is the case, shouldn’t art be a mirror which accurately reflects our environment, society and culture?” 

Artworks