Rob Pruitt's 'The Last Panda'

Thirteen years ago, OC friend and collaborator Rob Pruitt debuted the glitter panda paintings he is perhaps most famous for at Gavin Brown's gallery, on West 15th Street. (Check out our interview with Gavin from some time ago if you haven't already.) Adjacent to the space was a bar called The Passerby, which New Yorkers who've held it down in the art world for the past decade or so talk about with fond wisps of nostalgia. Sometime between then and now, the space went from cherished clubhouse to derelict construction site, and it currently––and very symbolically––houses Pruitt's latest show The Last Panda, a farewell to the panda motif in his art. The damp, dusty, and gutted space is, as one visitor who shall remain unnamed put it, "apparently a shithole." (Legitimately. You won't be let into the crumbling space without signing a form of consent for safety.) But it provides the perfect post-apocalyptic backdrop to the works, which, despite their sparkling surfaces and ecstatic Lisa Frank color palette, eerily reek of memento mori. Here's to hoping it's a Jay-Z-style "retirement."

Through May 18th, 2013.

436 W. 15th Street
New York, NY 10011
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Bachata music played from these speakers, in between a container of salt and Hellman's mayonnaise.

Remnants of The Passerby bar

These sketches on slabs of plaster were up for grabs at the private opening

Cecilia copped one on her way out.

Rob