Cheaper than Groceries from the collection of TAG Gallery

Cheaper than Groceries

Digital Collage and New Media on Acrylic; Augmented Reality

20 x 30 x 1.5 in (50.8 x 76.2 x 3.81 cm)

$2,500

Available

Cheaper Than Groceries depicts a glitched portrait of a woman in a grocery store, caught mid-bite as she eats dollar bills. The digital distortion fractures her face and body into unstable bands of color and noise, as if the image itself is failing under the strain of the scene. The glitch functions as both aesthetic and diagnosis: a visual language of breakdown, compression, and system error.

Around her, shelves and displays overflow with food she cannot afford. Abundance becomes a taunt rather than a resource, transforming the grocery store into a showroom of exclusion. The act of consuming money is absurd on its surface, yet painfully logical within the work’s premise: when the currency meant to secure survival is insufficient, the only thing left to ingest is the symbol of value itself. The dollar bill becomes a substitute for nourishment, a bitter commentary on how financial systems can demand sacrifice without providing sustenance.

By placing the figure in a space designed for choice, the piece highlights the violence of constrained options. Cheaper Than Groceries critiques inflation, wage stagnation, and the psychological toll of living inside a marketplace where necessity is priced like luxury. The woman’s glitched presence suggests an identity eroded by constant calculation, where hunger is not only physical but structural, and the cost of living is measured in what must be swallowed to endure.

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From TAG Gallery

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About the artist

Austin Lubetkin

b. 1996

Austin Lubetkin is a visual artist and software engineer whose work is shaped by his experiences of autism and synesthesia. He sees language, sound, and emotion as colors and patterns, and translates this sensory crossover into bold, graphic compositions. Using the visual language of advertising, social media, and luxury branding, his work explores how identity, beauty, and neurodivergence are packaged, judged, and sold. Lubetkin is a member of the international artists association. Lubetkin's work has been exhibited at galleries and museums across the United States including recent exhibits at the Sasse Museum and Awita Gallery and in international exhibitions at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Art and Red Dot in Basel, Switzerland. He has also served as both curator and featured artist for an exhibition at the Orlando Science Center, focusing on the intersection of technology and perception. In May 2026, Lubetkin will be curating a group show exploring the experiences of artists with autism at TAG Gallery

Additional Details

Additional Artworks

Les Ondines

Leonis Adobe

East Beach

The old seabird and the sea

Radiance 9, Gold

After Dorothea Lange #59

Small Oak Tree 3

Beginning, Middel, End

About the artist

Austin Lubetkin