1241 Ave of The Americas

Tibor Babos

Midtown Collection

Paradox Constructivism / Constructive Unrealism

2023

60 x 50 cm (23.6 in x 19.6 in)

Oil on 3D+ Canvas

Budapest

In Private Collection

In 1241 Ave of The Americas, Tibor Babos distills the psychology of vertical ambition into a crisp, geometric paradox—rendering the city not as a skyline, but as an illusion. Four rectilinear towers hover in impossible balance, their forms shifting between three and four depending on the viewer’s gaze. At once stable and uncertain, they stand as monoliths of perception, mirroring the contradiction at the heart of every metropolis: solidity built on ambiguity.

The painting is a cornerstone of Babos’s Midtown Collection, his ongoing study of the urban psyche and its architectural grammar. Here, Constructive Unrealism transforms concrete towers into optical riddles. The void between each prism becomes as meaningful as the structures themselves. The composition’s visual logic appears to collapse and reassemble with every glance—just as modern cities oscillate between grandeur and alienation.

The title grounds the work in a specific location: 1241 Avenue of the Americas, a real skyscraper in Manhattan’s corporate corridor. Yet the image does not depict that building—or any building. Instead, it evokes the anonymous repetition of form that defines global capitalism’s aesthetic language. The forms are cool, silver-green skeletons floating against a deep violet ground. That violet, textured and uneven, reads as both night sky and artificial glow. It suggests mood, mystery, and synthetic depth—a curtain of abstraction that swallows context whole.

Technically, the execution is deliberate and painstaking. Babos’s signature 3D+ canvas format ensures that the forms extend around the sides, reinforcing the illusion that these are not simply painted objects, but structures in space. Each silver edge is brushed with a hint of oxidized green, evoking metal aged by time, or ambition touched by decay. The linear perfection of the towers contrasts sharply with the painterly atmosphere around them—scraped, blended, stained—where texture resists clarity and permanence.

What begins as minimal form soon reveals maximal inquiry. The paradox of perspective—three or four? ascending or vanishing?—reflects a broader philosophical tension: how many truths can coexist? The painting seems to ask whether there is a limit to vertical expansion, to abstraction, to ambition itself. If so, the answer is not here. Babos gives us no sky, no ground, no people—only repetition, rhythm, and the seductive emptiness of engineered desire.

Within the artist’s broader body of work, 1241 Ave of The Americas functions as an architectural allegory. Like Cashflowor War in Progress, it engages systems—financial, political, psychological—through the grammar of form. But here the affect is one of stillness rather than struggle. It is a kind of quiet surrender to the grid, an acknowledgment of structure’s cold seduction.

As a curatorial object, the piece thrives in minimalist display environments that heighten its architectural qualities. Proper side-lighting will bring out the canvas’s depth and emphasize the metallic edgework. Conceptually, it lends itself to exhibitions on urbanity, abstraction, and the existential logic of late capitalism. It is an ideal anchor for institutional settings or art fairs interrogating spatial power and contemporary mythologies of control.

In 1241 Ave of The Americas, Tibor Babos has not painted a cityscape. He has painted the idea of one—a city distilled to its skeletal ambition. It is a visual contradiction that resists resolution and invites reflection: How many towers does it take before they blur into one? Or disappear into none?