On Wednesday night (13 May), the Spielzeug gallery’s pop-up show MAR-A-LAGO FACE had barely opened before a line formed to get in. Its opening night blurred the line between exhibition and party, with a bouncer checking bags and an intern stamping wrists at the door. Inside, a DJ bobbed along to his set and the bar served on-theme drinks. One, called Botched, listed the ingredients as “the enzyme that made Lauren Sanchez Bezos allergic to serving” and “a gun”.
Spielzeug (the German word for toy) was founded in 2025 in Evan Karas’s Bushwick apartment and is already famous for bringing a much-needed touch of energetic chaos to the New York art scene. But Karas, 25, along with associate director Eleanor Hicks, 23, match that energy with equally serious programming.
Across three floors of what was once a restaurant (O’Flaherty’s took over the same space on Allen Street in 2024), Karas and Hicks have curated a show that speaks back to “neo-Rococo MAGA crash out aesthetics” and, in particular, the plastic-surgery aesthetics popular among Republicans these days. The “Mar-a-Lago look” is defined by an overtly artificial sensibility—the point is to look like you have had work done. Matt Gaetz, Laura Loomer, Kimberly Guilfoyle and Kristi Noem are textbook examples.
“Scrolling on Instagram and seeing what government officials are posting while doing research for this show began to feel uncanny—is this real life?” said Hicks, a feather boa wrapped around her shoulders and a martini glass in hand.
Spielzeug brought in works by artists who were for the most part queer, trans and/or Latin American. Body modification and the power dynamics of gender and sex, in the hands of these artists, invert the suppressed and essentializing elements of the far-right’s sensibility around femininity. Work by Ivana Vladislava is emblematic of this.
A trans artist based in Berlin, Vladislava received botched plastic surgery during her transition. Her body is the subject of self-portraits on view at the show. As Hicks described it, instead of making this a point of shame, “her body became a site of pride and a lifelong performance”. For Karas, the works make clear that right-wing plastic-surgery aesthetics and the body modification that queer artists embark on do not represent two opposing ends of gender performance but rather the kissing edges of a horseshoe.
“Mar-a-Lago face is gender-essentialism-affirming care for these Palm Beach, Trump-loving glambots,” Karas said. “On one side of this horseshoe, you have people who recognise that gender is a performance and use body modification to break out of constraining norms. Whereas, on the other end, it’s people who use it to maintain the status quo.”
