Shopping Mall Fantasy from the collection of TAG Gallery

Shopping Mall Fantasy

Digital Collage and New Media on Acrylic; Augmented Reality

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

$3,000

Available

Shopping Mall Fantasy stages desire as an architectural system. A rising escalator is presented as a double exposure that climbs directly into a pop art mouth, framed by glossy red lipstick. The composition turns a familiar retail mechanism into a metaphor for appetite: ascent becomes consumption, and the promise of “going up” is re-coded as being swallowed by the experience you are chasing.

The double exposure collapses interior space and body into a single circuit, suggesting that the mall is not only a place you enter, but a script that enters you. The escalator reads like a conveyor of attention and longing, moving the viewer upward with no clear endpoint beyond the mouth itself. In this logic, progress is not expansion, it is intake.

By using pop art language, the work borrows the visual grammar of advertising: bold, seductive, cleanly packaged. The lipstick is both invitation and warning, signaling glamour while masking the transactional nature of the fantasy. Shopping Mall Fantasy examines how consumer environments reshape intimacy and identity, turning aspiration into a loop where desire is manufactured, escalated, and then consumed.

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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

New Lines (015)--Mindscapes and New Lines of Inquiry

Hope

Oasis

The garden of life

Figure in Pastel #9

Sitted Woman

Johnny, Artista de la Granja

LAX#1

About the artist

Austin Lubetkin