About this Event
I Want to Know, I Need to Know, Andrius Alvarez-Backus's first solo exhibition with Eli Klein Gallery, reflects on a series of health incidents experienced by the artist and his family over the past year, examining the intersection of the artist’s primal pursuit of self-knowledge and the denial of a fully transparent answer in its process. Through a mix of multimedia sculptures and works on panel, Alvarez-Backus translates surgical processes into surrealist compositions, creating a space where rupture and repair exist simultaneously.
Panelists: Andrius Alvarez-Backus, Baseera Khan, Eli Klein
Moderator: Phil Cai
About Andrius Alvarez-Backus
Andrius Alvarez-Backus is an interdisciplinary artist working across sculpture, drawing, and painting. Through the transformation of everyday objects, he amplifies their poetic connotations to evoke personal allegories of intimacy, embodiment, and memory. Using mixed media assemblage, his practice interrogates how desire bridges beauty and abjection, and how the semiotics of materials convey cultural meanings.
He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art (2023), and his Master of Fine Arts from Columbia University (2025). His work has been shown internationally at the Wallach Art Gallery, Gallery Vacancy, Eli Klein Gallery, Fragment Gallery, Latitude Gallery, SK Gallery, Plato Gallery, MAMA Projects, Black Brick Project, Nguyen Wahed, and The Blanc, among others. His first museum solo exhibition, 'Desastre!,' was on view at the Fitchburg Art Museum from June through August 2023, where his work is also included in the permanent collection. Recent honors include the Richard Lewis Bloch Memorial Prize, the Martin A. Rothenberg Travel Fellowship, the D'Arcy Hayman Scholarship, and the Quinta Carolina Scholarship. His work has been featured in The Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic, Whitehot Magazine, and The Boston Art Review. He was the inaugural Nicholas Dahl Visiting Artist at the Provincetown Art Association & Museum in 2025, and is an artist-in-residence at Smack Mellon from 2025-2026. Alvarez-Backus currently serves as the Communications Director at Queer|Art, the New York City-based nonprofit empowering LGBTQ+ artists across generations and disciplines.
About Baseera Khan
Baseera Khan is a New York-based visual artist interested in materials, color, and their economies. From public art installation to sculpture, painting to performance and music, Khan collages the effects of these relationships to labor and family structures, religion, and spiritual well-being. Khan has performed and exhibited at several locations in the past years sharing this diverse practice.
Their public art commission for The High Line was installed from 2023-24, and a permanent public art commission was installed for Help USA in 2025. Khan has mounted institutional solo exhibitions at the Hirshhorn Museum, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Mass Art Museum, and a solo touring exhibition at Moody Arts Center for the Arts and the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, OH. Other recent solo exhibitions were at Simone Subal Gallery, 10 & Zero Uno, and Niru Ratnam Gallery. Recent group exhibitions include Paul Robeson Gallery, 12 Gates, Patel Brown, Ruttkowski;68, Jupiter Gallery, and North Carolina Museum of Art. Over the years Khan has shared work at the Wexner Center for the Arts, New Orleans Museum of Art, Munich Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism, Jenkins Johnson Projects, Sculpture Center, Aspen Museum, and Participant Inc.
Khan's performance work has premiered at several locations including the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Art POP Montreal International Music Festival. Khan has completed residencies at Plop, Lux Art Residency, The Kitchen, Pioneer Works, Abrons Art Center, and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Recent honors include the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC) Michael Richards Award for Visual Art, the Hirshhorn Museum 2023 Gala Artist Honoree, the UOVO Art Prize, BRIC Colene Brown Art Prize, and the Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Grant. Their works are part of several public permanent collections including the Solomon R. Guggenheim, Whitney Museum of American Art, Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Walker Art Center, and the New Orleans Museum of Art. Khan received an MFA from Cornell University and a BFA from the University of North Texas.
About Eli Klein
Eli Klein has an international reputation as one of the foremost experts specializing in Chinese contemporary art. Open to the public for over 15 years, his Manhattan-based Eli Klein Gallery has published more than 40 books and has been instrumental in the loan of artwork by Chinese artists to over 100 museum exhibitions throughout the world. Mr. Klein has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Newsweek, and has been on CNN and countless other international broadcasts and publications.
Eli Klein Gallery is located in a historic, landmarked Federal-style row house carrying special cultural and aesthetic value to the City of New York. It occupies 3 levels of the building with approximately 3,000 square feet boasting 13-foot ceilings on the street-level. As America’s leading dealer of Chinese contemporary art, Eli Klein actively promotes cross-cultural awareness at the highest level amongst some of the world’s most influential nations.
About Phil Cai
Phil Zheng Cai (American, b. Shanghai) is a curator and writer based in New York. He holds a BA in Social Science from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and an MA from Sotheby’s Institute of Art. He has held positions at Mary Boone Gallery and Phillips Auctioneers, and is currently a partner at Eli Klein Gallery.
The exhibitions that he curated at Eli Klein Gallery have received critical attention in Hyperallergic, The Brooklyn Rail, Artnet News, WhiteHot Magazine, Musée Magazine, Cultbytes, Art Asia Pacific, and Impulse Magazine, among others. The catalog for exhibition (In)directions: Queerness in Chinese Contemporary Photography is held by institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, ICP, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Leslie-Lohman Museum Library, and over thirty university libraries worldwide. He has participated in panels and lectures at the Asia Society Museum, SCAD Museum of Art, Columbia University, and Sotheby’s Institute of Art, and has served as a visiting critic at NARS, Residency Unlimited, Parsons, SVA, UNC Chapel Hill, and EFA Studio Program.
His writing includes catalog essays such as “Nomad Photography” (Parsons MFA Photography Thesis Catalog, 2024), as well as exhibition reviews and critical essays published in IMPULSE Magazine, T Magazine China, WhiteHot Magazine, and Widewalls, among others. He translated The Story of Philosophy by James Garvey (Shanghai Yuandong Press, 2020). Most recently, he developed and curated Residency Unlimited’s 2026 New York artist residency and exhibition, Working Conditions, which examines how artists’ labor, precarity, and day-job economies shape contemporary art production in New York. Phil Zheng Cai currently works and lives in New York.
About the Gallery
Eli Klein Gallery is one of the foremost galleries specializing in contemporary Asian art, and has been instrumental in the loan of artworks by Asian artists to over 100 museum exhibitions throughout the world. Based in Manhattan, Eli Klein Gallery has been open to the public for almost two decades -- it has published over 40 books/catalogues and organized more than 75 different exhibitions in New York City.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Eli Klein Gallery, 398 West Street, New York, United States
USD 0.00
