This summer and fall, “B” Dry Goods is excited to present KILLERS, a wide-ranging two-part exhibition bound to be one of the most controversial NYC gallery shows of the year. KILLERS: Memento Mori, is on view from July 10th through September 26th, 2026. Opening reception: July 10, from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m.

According to a well-known anecdote, a German officer visited Picasso in his Paris studio during the Second World War. There he saw Guernica and, shocked at the modernist "chaos" of the painting, asked Picasso: "Did you do this?" Picasso calmly replied: "No, you did this!”

Oppression and violence are nothing new to America. And, of course, many artists - in particular those from marginalized and/or brutalized communities - have long grappled in their work with these awful forces. In the terrifying moment in which our nation now finds itself, we find renewed urgency to this project. This 2-part exhibition explores the large twin themes of violence and death, both fertile realms for artists past and present. In some cases, they are related, in others, possibly not, but it is the burden of the art in this exhibition to probe the connections. Is all art at bottom an effort to explain, fend off or come to terms with death; to commemorate, or communicate with, the dead; or to defy death by making something that lives on? The works assembled here embody the ongoing preoccupation of artists with some of the irresolvable mysteries that stir them to make art.

Can art that seethes with intensity, opening up very dark corners of our common experience, somehow seem appealing? Is the by now familiar determination to provoke or astonish necessarily at odds with the determination to produce an aesthetically impressive artifact? Our conviction is that the works we’ve assembled for our exhibition do justice to these concerns.

Both installments of this exhibition will includes a broad selection of art from Old Master paintings and drawings to Contemporary works in various mediums, spanning more than 600 years and including, among others, works by: Jan Lievens, Jennifer Bartlett, Andy Warhol, George Grosz, Stanislao Lepri, William Burroughs, Sebastian Stoskopff, Paul Gachet, Paul Gauguin, Barbara Morgan, Man Ray, Philippe Perrin, Leon Golub, Marco Zoppo, Hendrik Goltzius, Albrecht Durer, Dana Schutz, Michael Mazur, Giovanni Castiglione, Stephen Shanabrook, Jeannie Weissglass, Doug Henders, Jeff Quinn, Shura Skaya, Suzanne Scott, Silky Shoemaker, Ilua Hauck da Silva, Lowell Boyers, Jonathan Podwil, Violet Frances, and Machine Dazzle.

Other featured items include such rarities as a 6th-century Persian “Demon Bowl”, a collection of improvised shanks obtained by a Warden of Folsom Prison ca. 1920s - 50s, and an early 20th century “talking skull” used in seances.

Over the course of Part I, the gallery invites artists to submit images of their sculptural interpretations of the guillotine for possible inclusion in Part II of the exhibition: Pictures at an Execution.