Greg Mike opens A Better View in Studioplex

Atlanta’s newest gallery is the brainchild of artist and designer Greg Mike. Tucked into a crisp new loft in the Old Fourth Ward’s Studioplex neighborhood, A Better View is a multipurpose space, housing a gallery on the ground floor and Mike’s creative design agency upstairs.

The gallery’s first show, a group exhibition of comic-inspired works by Marks Mothersbaugh, Mitch O’Connell, and Anthony Ausgang among others, opened this past weekend during Studioplex’s art walk. The show is a sign of good things to come, updating Roy Lichtenstein’s half-tone paintings into a fresh, contemporary context. Judging by this and their upcoming calendar, the gallery is tapping into West-Coast-styled, lowbrow aesthetic that’s been largely missing from Atlanta’s art scene, though it would fit right in with something like San Francisco’s Fecal Face.

Mike is an accomplished artist in his own right (he has a solo show, Popstars and Cokeheads, opening at Butter Gallery in Miami later this month), but he was happy to talk about his role behind the scenes and getting this new gallery put together.

How did A Better View come about?

I used to do a lot of fashion design and I had a company called Carpe Denim. We grew and sold that about two years ago.  After that, I owned a tradeshow that started in Atlanta and moved to Miami called Trafik Tradeshow. It has, like, 300 contemporary apparel clothing lines.

Through all the connections that I made through the tradeshow, people started asking us to do consulting work. So, that’s how I got into the consulting side of things, but I was doing consulting and working these other guys, my three other business partners at the time. They ended up moving to New York and they got focused on other projects, so we all went our own ways.

I went to school for visual art and I’ve always been a visual artist. So I wanted to go in that visual art, creative lane than just being strictly fashion and, you know, high end runway crap. So, we split then and that’s when I formed ABV to do consulting under that name. We’ve been working under that name for probably about a year, just doing commission-based client work and putting on shows, but now we finally have the space to do the storefront and gallery.