Apelles

In her catalog essay, she wrote that Mr. Komar and Mr. Melamid anticipated the advent of “fake news” with an installation of paintings, alongside photographs and a handmade book, that they claim were created by an 18th-century abstract artist they had discovered named Apelles Ziablov.

Ensconced in her childhood apartment in the monumental Apelles co-op, a full-block palazzo unmistakably modeled on the Apthorp at 78th Street and Broadway, Hazel methodically recounts a catastrophic concatenation of events during a city-smothering blizzard in 1978.

Amid a drug-fueled bacchanalian blowout that night, untold pieces of furniture and one naked body were tossed off the terrace of an Apelles penthouse apartment.

While Hazel begins with a carnival of interconnected characters rattling around in the Apelles, her story ultimately flies out in all directions, spanning generations and continents as it explores the challenge of understanding one’s place in what might be called real life, while schlepping around others’ painful pasts as well as one’s own.

Alof de Wignacourt made the proclamation, comparing him to Apelles, the greatest painter of ancient times.