Skarstedt is presenting 14th Street Madonna, an exhibition of paintings by Cristina BanBan, at its Upper East Side gallery in New York. The show opens with a reception on Friday 7 November 2026 from 6 to 8pm.

The paintings put women at the centre, recasting the devotional figure of the Madonna through contemporary life on one of Manhattan's great crosstown streets. The title pairs a sacred image with a specific New York address, and the works follow that collision: women pictured with the directness and scale of portraiture, set against the city that surrounds them. The Madonna has been painted for centuries; BanBan's version keeps the pose and the tenderness, and changes almost everything else.

According to the gallery, the show's saturated, high-key colour looks to the cinema of Pedro Almodóvar and Sofia Coppola, whose films BanBan treats as a palette as much as a mood. Its format looks to Willem de Kooning's narrow, upright canvases, a shape that suits BanBan's full-length figures and lets a single body fill the picture from edge to edge.

The exhibition is BanBan's second presentation with Skarstedt in New York this autumn, following Jaque Mate, which opened at the gallery in September. Where that show staged its figures in charged, close contact, 14th Street Madonna sets its women against the city itself and lets the street do the talking. The Madonna of the title is no longer a figure of the altarpiece but a woman on a Manhattan sidewalk, and the show asks what that old image still carries when it is brought down to street level.