Evan Karas blurs the line between gallery and party at Spielzeug, embracing spectacle, irreverence, and a little chaos.

In November 2024, just months out of college, gallerist Evan Karas found himself far from his Brooklyn apartment, locked inside a Cold War-era atomic bunker in the Czech Republic and overseeing 13 international artists, each tasked with creating an original, site-specific work from scratch in just 10 days— without leaving the compound. "I was running around trying to be curator, therapist, confidante, collaborator," says Karas. "Whenever someone was in a rut, it was my job to talk them out of it." It was a test of endurance, creativity, and the sort of raw passion necessary to bring a sensational idea to fruition. Led by Karas, the group's efforts culminated in a four-day opening, with newly finished swirling murals, eclectic multimedia installations, and unsettling videos transforming the bunker into an immersive exhibition. "It was my first foray into that insane, multi-hyphenate role where you're doing everything and nothing simultaneously, and then something happens," says Karas of the experience. The void of the bunker also led to an epiphany: "Between too little sunlight and my circadian rhythms being shot to bits, I had this moment where I was like, I love this; I'm good at this," he recalls.

Photos courtesy Evan Karas and Spielzeug Gallery

The day Karas flew back to New York, he took the first steps toward opening his own gallery. He named it Spielzeug, the German word for plaything—an apt moniker for what has&nbsp;become an arena for riotous play and queer-centric, freewheeling experimentation. In less than two years, the roving project has traveled from his Bushwick apartment to Basel, Switzerland, then to various spaces on Manhattan's Lower East Side, and, most recently, a Porfirian-era mansion in Mexico City. Each sprawling group show is united by one overarching theme: Toys! Toys! Toys!, which opened in September 2025, skewed the subject toward a nightmarish psychosexual quality, such as with Amanda Ba's "Bloody Lamb Chop" paintings (2025) of a maimed sock-puppet character; just two months later, "The End" channeled a sort of post-apocalyptic museum of curiosities, like a misshapen "Spiraling Chariot" (2024) by Rosalie Smith made out of a walker, rocking chair, and beach chaise. These concepts frame the type of artwork to which Karas is drawn: bold, kitsch, and a touch hedonistic, while also tied to an unfiltered, sometimes chaotic, sense of expression. "There is this hot mess thing going on," Karas acknowledges. "Then it comes together in these really tight, thrilling exhibitions. It's not [actually] a hot mess, but we're intentionally playing with potential perceptions of that." To be sure, the shows are grounded in philosophical and aesthetic arguments (like the clearly Freudian threads of Toys! Toys! Toys!). Meanwhile, in bringing community and revelry to makeshift venues beyond the art world establishment, Spielzeug continues a New York lineage pioneered in the 1970s by figures like Alanna Heiss, who founded P.S.1 (pre-MoMA takeover) in a public school, and Anita Contini, who started what would become the public-art nonprofit Creative Time in an empty Financial District office building. "I want Spielzeug to be distinctly New York—sexy, ridiculously fun," says Karas. "And the ecstatic moments of social convergence really inject energy into the work."

Embracing Spielzeug's position on the unorthodox fringes, Karas devised a fitting reveal of his brainchild to the mainstream New York art world. During Frieze Week in May 2025, Karas, with a close circle of friends and collaborators, gathered for the opening of the group show Who Wants To Be Paris Hilton's Best Friend? on a party bus filled with paintings. For a period, the bus parked across from the entrance of the relatively prim Independent art fair at Spring Studios in Tribeca. Standing outside, Karas, wearing a skintight red-orange dress, and the Spielzeug gang gently heckled people to hop on. Inside, viewers discovered a selection loosely inspired by MTV's aughts-era competition reality show Paris Hilton's My New BFF. Pieces by artists such as Liza Jo Eilers, Catherine Mulligan, and Ruby Zarksky had common ground in self-aware portrayals of sexualized female tropes (think porn stars, cheerleaders, and aging party girls). An accompanying text by David Boss, consciously written in over-the-top academic parlance, counterbalanced the seeming frivolity while excavating a pop-culture artifact: "Hilton, here, is both sign and syntax, operating as a recombinant semiotic engine whose flows of attention, aspiration, and artificiality produce not meaning, but passing momentum," reads an excerpt.

Installation view of 'Who Wants to Be Paris Hilton’s Best Friend?', 2025. Courtesy of Evan Karas and Spielzeug Gallery.

A bright-eyed, talkative 25-year-old, Karas shows up to our meeting wearing a white polo emblazoned with the words HAUSER &amp; GIRTH-a piece of Spielzeug merch parodying the mega Swiss gallery (there's also GAGOSHE/HIM and DAVID ZWIRNHER, playful riffs on Gagosian and David Zwirner). Such irreverence runs deep. As a teenager in Chicago, Karas imagined working in hotels and initially enrolled in an undergrad hospitality program. When the pandemic hit during his freshman year, he took a pause to reconsider what he wanted. "This was a traditional program, not about crazy destination storytelling," says Karas. "We were learning management, like how to run a housekeeping calendar." He headed west, interning first at a luxury hotel in Utah and later for Los Angeles-based designer Kelly Wearstler, where he found himself increasingly drawn to the aesthetic and storytelling aspects of her work. When he returned to college, it was to Gallatin, New York University's design-your-own major school. Through his courses, the downtown locale, and an internship at Marc Straus, Karas got his first taste of the contemporary art scene. He soon began curating exhibitions out of his Bushwick loft. Around the same time, he met Hungarian painter Diki Luckerson and gave her a solo show that included a 40-by-20-foot canvas, painstakingly installed in his building's garden. Luckerson then recommended him to curate the Czech bunker project. "I had met energetic, enthusiastic people before, but what was unique about Evan was his ability to be profound even at that speed," says Luckerson. In the bunker, "I knew he would go all the way.”&nbsp;

That appetite for the audacious has continued to define&nbsp;Karas's curatorial practice. This past summer, he tapped the absurd, politicized pageantry of the present moment with Mar-a-Lago Face, staged across three floors of an unfinished Lower East Side building. The basement represented a toxic foundation, with works like Cameron Patricia Downey's "Palace" (2026), an unsteady-looking tower of glass and gold tables. The ground floor explored capitalist production, such as with Guerreiro do Divino Amor's "Mineral Cosmogony Triptych" (2022), a lightbox with phantasmagorical, sci-fi scenery symbolizing the extraction of natural resources in Brazil. Upstairs, portraiture considered the artifice of the body, seen in Ivana Vladislava's thermal sublimation prints on velvet and fur, revealing the trans artist's hyper-modified blond-bombshell physicality. Looking back, it all cohered: the enhanced visage of the American ruling class as a symptom, another level of embellishment with the body as its vessel.

In a parallel consideration-about the vanity of the powerful-Spielzeug took over Mexico City's Casa de Tabasco&nbsp;Carlos Pellicer this fall for Reiterinnenstandbilder, German for equestrian statuary. In the early 20th-century neoclassical building, provocative and subversive art objects stood where one might expect to find traditional monuments (namely, of old white men)—like, say, at the end of a grand hall. Take a giant soft doll by Thomas Liu Le Lann, resembling a nearly 12-foot-long joker or rag doll, which sharply contrasted with lifelike heroic effigies in bronze and marble.

As Spielzeug has evolved, Karas now more deliberately angles his curatorial efforts toward the goal of everyday transcendence. "There's always some severance between physical reality and the exhibition we're trying to create," he says. "I want a space for people to purge, whether that's through an art encounter, or partying, or an intellectual conversation. Whatever someone needs to loosen up and have a wonderful moment." So take a look into Spielzeug's box of toys—and consider what resonates.

Evan Karas Explores the Art of Sensation

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