Baby, It's Vegas: Gaegan & Escobar's "Sophisticated Boom Boom" @ Lomex Las Vegas

DeSe Escobar
ULTIMEYES SS04 YFKE, 2026
Calfskin, Italian leather shearling
and metallic lambskin, wood, and
acrylic leather paint
66 1/4 x 60 1/2 x 6 inches
courtesy of artists and Lomex Las Vegas

text by Max Kopelowicz

The glitz, kitsch, doom and sagging va-voom of Sin City is on full display at Sophisticated Boom Boom, Joseph Gaegan and DeSe Escobar’s show on view at Lomex Las Vegas. Situated on a golf course in the Paradise Palms neighborhood, an infamous enclave for entertainers and mobsters alike, the artists stage their works in the painstakingly restored mid-century residence-turned-gallery. The lime green shag carpeting, pink silk circle beds, and rockwall fireplace facade provide the set and setting for Gaegan’s paintings and Escobar’s sculptural furnishings in a full embrace of Lomex Las Vegas’s escapist ethos.

Gaegan, known for his tableaus depicting recognizable members of LA and NYC social scenes, brings his Ensorian sensibility to the Vegas set. His “Welcome to Fabulous” and “Seven Deuce Off Suit” both channel the grotesquerie and eschatological humor of Christ’s Entry Into Brussels in 1889 wherein the artist composes a cattle call of personalities all vying to be seen even as they blur into the distance. Gaegan features himself prominently at the forefront of “Seven Deuce”, with a mutation of “Welcome To Fabulous” framed behind him, in a sort of reversal of Ensor’s Hitchcockian hiding of Christ. The artist wears a worried expression and purple pinstripe suit while holding the worst possible Hold’Em deal as a black cat looks on, but there’s no other cards visible to show whether it’s a winning or losing hand. 

The frames become less crowded with his other offerings including an homage to Bob Fosse’s Sweet Charity entitled “Fun, Laughs, Good Times”, where ten marfanic men pose along a cabaret club’s rail, and “The Royal Hawaiian”, featuring Lomex Las Vegas’s interior designer Carlotta Champagne squatting-in-wait as a young man in Gaultier stripes photographs a decrepit showgirl posed on a naked mattress with other Lynchian figures dotting a stretch of desert. Two of Escobar’s colorfully striped shearling and iron wrought dining chairs (“Minimally Baroque and Ashley” and “Minimally Baroque and MK”) frame “The Royal Hawaiian” in the gallery’s bedroom where, through the glass doors, one can see several of her calfskin and leather painted screens leering around the house and backyard. Inspired by Prada and drag icon Divine, the changing screens invite the viewer to gawk at whoever might be swapping costumes behind them—embracing the never-shy atmosphere of the exhibition. 

Sophisticated Boom Boom is the third show at Lomex Las Vegas, the brainchild of art advisor Ralph DeLuca and Tribeca gallerist Alex Shulan, after Heji Shin and Mathieu Malouf’s inaugural NYE blowout and an exhibition of Karen Kilimnik’s models and paintings. Founded with a David Hickey-esque sensibility, the pioneering gallery operates like an HVAC, designed to clear the unctuous air of the culturati seeking the next Marfa or Aspen. What DeLuca and Shulan offer, like Bugsy Siegel’s Flamingo before them, is an alternative oasis amidst the aridity of the art world where artists are free to embrace their kitschy whims and fans can arrive in showgirl costumes, seemingly stepping out from either behind one of Escobar’s screens or Gaegan’s frames. Together they create an atmosphere that harkens back to the halcyon decadences of early art fairs, inviting people from near and far to embrace and indulge in the worlds that artists and gallerists create.

To this effect, the evening became a great Stefan, Bill Hader’s SNL club reviewer, monologue. This opening had everything: a DeLorean parked in the driveway, waif CSM students leaping over the bow tied pool like Nureyev, LA’s nightlife impresarios fresh from last night’s bender wearing odes to Liza and Liberace, and New Yorkers taking turns posing Las Vegas locals in front of the artwork. In summary: pure, unadulterated, seldom-seen, often-nostalgically romanticized fun, and as the troupe banded off to Ichabod’s, a piano bar and restaurant where the spirit of Sinatra is served in chilled glasses, one can feel the promise of the house DeLuca and Shulan built always winning. 

Sophisticated Boom Boom is on view by appointment only at Lomex Las Vegas through October 10th. 

Museum Pieces: Art Historical Excavation & Attaining Material Persistence Beyond the Contemporary

Mixed-media sculptor Skylar Haskard reprocesses the ‘lost and found’ of greater Los Angeles into labile statements of hybrid corporeality.

Skylar Haskard
detail of Kid-Nap-eee, 2025
photo by Hannah Bhuiya

text by Hannah Bhuiya

“We have not found a dozen reliefs, but a whole artistic period that lay buried and forgotten!” —Alexander Conze, 1878 (archaeologist and director of the Berlin Museums) upon the rediscovery of the Pergamon Altar.1

“Never retrieve a dirty tennis ball before breakfast.” —Snoopy’s Philosophy, Charles M. Schulz, 1977. 2

As a child, I always wanted to be an archeologist. (I became a writer instead.*)

A ‘midden’ is the archeological term for a repository of the discarded remnants of past human settlement. These inadvertently preserved trash piles are heaped full of evidence of our quotidian existence: cracked mollusk shells, their soft valves devoured. Animal jaws with teeth attached, once prized cutting and scraping tools. Food scraps: split seeds, gnawed bones, peeled skins. Broken pottery, fingerprints still pressed in the clay. Bodily excretions hardened into stony coprolites. The layers of accumulated refuse become revelatory strata, which, like those in which fossils are found, deliver telling clues. By digging through what has now crumbled into dirt, the diet, trade-route access and labor division of the location’s long-dead inhabitants can be reconstituted. The irony, of course, is that a midden pile or pit was never meant to be preserved—it’s just there. Wholly unlike a carefully dug burial chamber or proud hilltop temple, precisely laid with sacred objects and precious offerings symbolically placed, these common waste dumps only survived because no one ever thought to move them. These heaps of cross-generational refuse that grew without plan, before the cities they served were abandoned or obliterated by a cataclysm. This uncontrived origin means that the stories it offers up are raw, bare, honest. A midden tells the truth. 

The Pergamon Altar, 2nd century BCE, Pergamon Museum, Berlin via Smarthistory/Flickr

The Pergamon Altar, 2nd century BCE, Pergamon Museum, Berlin via The Museologist

The Pergamon Museum in Berlin is one of a series of monumental structures built by the order of a succession of Prussian kaisers from 1830 to 1930. It is a central edifice of ‘Museuminsel,’ an unstable artificial island protrusion reclaimed from the muck of the Spree River. It houses, as its name suggests, the “Pergamon Altar”. ‘Pergamum’ (now Bergama, Türkiye) was an important outpost of Alexander the Great’s empire, and the majestic marble friezes were transported block by block to Germany upon their rediscovery. The endeavor can be construed as either a rescue mission or an opportunistic theft.3 Also housed inside the museum are life-size reconstructions of the Ishtar Gate of Babylon in bull-and-lion embossed blue glazed brick (circa 575 BCE), and the imposing Market Gate of Miletus (2nd century CE). Despite the goals of kings and later, the State, to enshrine imperial and then national strength in great architecture, the grand idea to set buildings full of weighty ancient stones upon a 40-meter-deep mud layer was not at all practical. Visitors to modern Berlin notice the large pink pipes in the area, through which the groundwater gush is pumped upwards; it is a constant hydrological battle to keep the reclaimed land claimed. The museum’s walls and the gargantuan, transplanted urban infrastructure they house are calculated powertecture, both ‘restored’ in a patchwork of ‘original’ and impersonated elements. A museum does not tell the truth.

When I first moved to LA, I read a quote about Aldous Huxley’s own late 1930s relocation from Europe, which set up a direct correspondence between golden California and the Golden Age of Ancient Greece. I remember that the paragraph was in a book and on the left-hand side of the page and although I did not note the exact words, the idea they conveyed has never left me. It went something like, “with its abundant sunlight, ocean, and year-round Mediterranean climate, Los Angeles possesses all the essential factors to become a new Athens on the Pacific;” that the city-states shared a rare set of natural conditions and latitudinal band (34° N and 37.9° N, respectively) that had already proven their potential as a crucible for intellectual flowering. This was a place with endless toga weather, where the body and mind could resonate in peak health. Where those attracted to dwell here could lead the planet into a glowing new age of philosophy and peace. While the City of Angels has undoubtedly made massive contributions to global creative culture, we all know that’s not what happened. At all. Whatever glimpses there are of any Utopian ‘harmonic order’ are quickly eclipsed by the eyewitnessed reality of life at street level. The lost quote that I never wrote down is merely a tantalizing ideation of ‘what might have been.’

 

Skylar Haskard
Ran$om, 2025
photo by Paul Salveson

 

Ten years later, the fecund, roiling miasma that is the Los Angeles contemporary art scene delivered a way to integrate the fascinations above. This came in the form of a chance encounter with Skylar Haskard at a screening at Emma Fernberger Gallery on Western Avenue of T.S.O.Y.W. (2007), a dual-screen, over three-hour-long film by Drew Heitzler and Amy Granat. Patterned after The Sorrows of Young Werther by Goethe. Playing protagonist in the atmospheric literary-art film was not ‘an actor,’ but in fact, an(other) artist. Mainly silent, Haskard delivered a brooding young Werther for the 21st century, wending over Southwest roads on a Harley-Davidson. His singular passage was followed by two cameras capturing the real-time monotony of dry desert highways, punctuated by American monuments, landmarks such as Spiral Jetty, Roden Crater and the Hoover Dam. I was soon to discover that Haskard, a practitioner of what he has described as the ‘humorous conceptualism’ of Los Angeles, is a bricoleur extraordinaire. A closer look at his recent work opens up a conversation about how ‘the city’ functions to generate art that reflects itself. And into the powerful urge that, across time and space, compels independent artists to continue to create it.

A tall international American with a layered British-West Coast timbre, Skylar was born in LA in 1977. Being raised partly in London, he later completed his BFA at Glasgow School of Art in Scotland, a renowned incubator of aesthetic rebelliousness. The young graduate was then lured back to the USA to enter the ‘New Genres’ MFA program at UCLA, where instructors included California’s finest boundary-pushers Chris Burden and Paul McCarthy, as well as Swiss eccentric Pipilotti Rist. “At the time, I was very much invested in the performative, particularly in terms of materials, and of course, ‘The Body.’ I was building sprawling maximalist installations, then setting them up in different locations, mainly outside. Modular, architectural things that would then find their way into the gallery space, in whatever state they were in.” 

Skylar Haskard
The Man Who Works, 2025
photo by Paul Salveson

Visiting We Blue It, Haskard’s most recent solo show at Chapman University’s Guggenheim Gallery, I am confronted first by four major works built on circular trampoline bases set at an angle to the floor, with truncated body parts and sliced furniture emerging from their blue-painted discs. One figure, sporting a Pepto-Bismol pink canine snout, wrists bound, is splayed astride a generic white Monobloc-pressed plastic chair, sliced in half. A chopped-up odalisque with a ratty Powerade-blue wig is titled “The Melancholy of a Beautiful Day,” after de Chirico, suggesting that she is reeling, overcome with beauty. “Ran$om” is a Froot-Loops cereal bag-clutching man, encircled by a plush snake. Details: a toy gift heart, the protruding pink tongues, oversized joke-store teeth, tease and surprise. Around the walls are set smaller works depicting everyone’s favorite cartoon dog, Snoopy, drifting out to sea upon an incongruous wire cage, and another dog, strapped with a hobo bindle. Most are sketches on paper, with one distinct in blue biro, Sharpie, and flat paint on thick plywood. An Absurdist fusion of cannibal slaughterhouse and a defunct Toys ‘R’ Us, it’s all somewhat deranged, but the bright, friendly colors make it fun and ‘funny’ too. 

Skylar Haskard
The Melancholy of a Beautiful Day, 2025
photo by Paul Salveson

Haskard devised a rough-and-ready method to more quickly birth his life-size humanoids, several of whom are also missing arms or legs. “I’m always trying to work with things that already exist. I’d bought a set of mannequin-makers molds from a guy who had gone into retirement—I liked the idea that these bodies were not only sculpted, but also ‘found.’ Then I came up with basically the shittest way possible of casting them, and the quickest, using plaster and detritus from around the studio.” The result was that the ‘bulk’ of the figures is formed using expanding polyurethane foam. It’s a very flexible technique, in stark opposition to those necessary for hefty marmoreal constructs of similar proportions. “Say I need an arm here, or a part of a torso, I take the mold in two parts, and spray a very thin layer of plaster into that, and then I’ll build it up, let the plaster dry, put bits of cardboard in, some wire. Everything is material to me. I sometimes go to Costco and collect all the cardboard there, ’cause then I don’t have to spend so much on the foam. Because I’m not dealing with stone, this is detritus and waste, and it’s about employing strategies to try to make that stable.” The semiotic language of the show is in continuum with motifs Haskard has been circulating for several years (the hobo dog, the upturned thumb sconces, and reworked chairs are a longtime obsession), but lent a new orientation: “The current pieces were originally weird assemblages of figures and dogs and other stuff, and they just weren’t working. Then I started sawing everything in half. I realized that this profile, or ‘relief’ form was really freeing me up—I was getting two sculptures out of one, and I could also put them on the wall.”

A panoply of art history’s greatest hits stepped up to inform the progression from Eureka moment to actualization. “You’re not really aware of the intricacies of reliefs until you’re actually making them. So I looked at the Pergamon Altar, which brings along with it the complexities surrounding how the stones were recovered by German archeologists and reconstructed in the museums of Berlin. At that time, the marble of the friezes was being crushed and burned to make lime mortar, or had been used to build other local structures—they dug it out of walls. I also looked to Trajan’s Column, and also Marcus Aurelius’ ‘Snail Column.’ Both have scenes of battle and war set around in a spiral, which ties in to what we’re living through now.” When what we’re living through now is to bear witness to a UFC ‘Octagon’ fighting cage being built right outside (what is left of) the Neoclassical White House (soon to have gaudy Corinthian capitals tacked onto its elegant Ionic columns) and a current President of the Republic who longs for his own Triumphal Arch, the assertion holds. The stuffed serpent twisting around one dismembered figure can also be linked to the fractured masterpiece ‘Laocoön and his Sons,’ currently on display in the Octagonal Court of the Museo Pio-Clementino at the Vatican Museums. Arguably the finest marble carving ever made, the composition derives from a Greek original of around 200BCE, but we only know it through this Roman copy made a couple of centuries later, lost and then unearthed again in 1506. The amputee of circumstance is currently again fitted with his original right arm, which only came to light in 1906, and was affixed in 1957.

Skylar Haskard
Untitled“ (Just Because), 2025
courtesy Guggenheim Gallery 

Skylar Haskard
Untitled (Tis Not Too Late), 2025
courtesy Guggenheim Gallery

The install dextrously offers an immediate antidote to the horror factor present in the central pieces via the comforting and familiar figure of Charles Schulz’s Snoopy, who features in multiple works set along the gallery perimeter. In one, Charlie Brown’s best friend floats on a wavy ocean in a cage with the line “Tis not too late to seek another world” from Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s Ulysses emblazoned above him. So, why Snoopy? “I really like to draw with ballpoint on plywood; you can be quite scribbly and expressive.” With this particular series, “these blobby shapes were coming out; I was like, “What are these things?” Then I realized that they all looked like Snoopy. That was the first time he popped up, completely unconsciously.” The enigmatic philosopher-pup has been included in this show, Skylar continues, because: “We blew it. It’s not working anymore. So now let’s trust the animal, let’s listen to him.” The Odyssean pups lead on to Haskard’s sensitively drawn ‘Hobo-Dog’ character in “Untitled (starburst fellow).” Dogs also deliver us to the street-level origin point of Western philosophy. In tandem with their remarkable sculpture, Ancient Greek culture produced distinct philosophical schools—their appreciation for the refinement of the physical form in sport and art was matched by pursuit of intellectual refinement via inquiry and debate. While the later Stoics taught from the shade of the ‘Stoa Poikile’ (the painted porch) in the center of Athens, insouciant pioneer Diogenes of Sinope willfully lived in a discarded wine amphora out on less-traversed streets. He lived like, as his contemporaries observed, a stray dog. He had nothing and wanted less, rejecting social mores, money, and grooming standards. Through him, our term ‘cynic’ derives from kynikos, ‘doglike.’ With his dry wit and practical wisdom in the face of numbing suburban inertia, Snoopy, or Peanuts creator Schulz, can be construed as one of the most influential modern cynics.

Skylar Haskard
Untitled (Lost at Sea Empty), 2025
photo by Hannah Bhuiya

Just as artifacts are dated from the carbon-bearing items found nearby them, I decide to pull back and examine the wider strata around Haskard. I deduce that Haskard is very much an artist’s artist; after all, I had met him in an art gallery flickering on the dual-screen, the avatar within the art. Wife Nevine Mahmoud is a sculptor of amorphous forms, mainly using marble, showing at the latest Frieze LA with Sebastian Gladstone, with whom Skylar exhibited his Rickle Works (chair-component assemblages and vitrine collages) in 2023. Not only did he study under Burden and McCarthy, around the time he left UCLA, he also became John Baldessari’s gardener. “We would sit around and have drinks. He didn’t have a green thumb much.” Gardening then, and now, reinforced Haskard’s dedication to the circular economy, on the most basic level. “I feel that composting is foundational for people to be educated in that whole cycle of reuse—holding nutrients and organic matter to feed into the cycle that exists beyond our control. There is a parallel there with reusing objects in art.” Baldessari then asked Haskard to collaborate on a piece that was a reinvention of an Allen Kaprow work, Apple Shrine, as part of the Art as Life retrospective at MOCA LA. “John didn’t really want to put that much energy into it, so he was like, ‘Why don’t you do this?’ I think the curators were a bit pissed. I spent a solid month at the Getty Research Institute in Allen Kaprow’s archives, and we’d meet every two weeks and go over ideas. Kaprow’s legacy is tied to the ‘happenings’ he did, but to me, he’s an incredible materialist. I’m far more into his use of materials, the elaborate installations he made out of found things.” This approach is evident in Haskard’s Squaresville Pio Pico solo in spring 2025, which brings to life the adventures of heroic Hobo Dog ‘Souperman,’ sceptred with a broomstick and seated in an upended wheelbarrow throne, anchored by a stack of gravy cans.

 

Skylar Haskard
Souperman (seated with stick), 2025
photo by Charles White

 

In 2016, Haskard was brought in to coordinate the landmark Rick Owens furniture show at MOCA LA. “I have to say that I keep my own work and my work for other artists quite separate. But here, I was injected into this world where design, art, and fashion were all one, and that to me was fascinating. For Michèle [Lamy], everything is ‘one big thing;’ there’s no separation between art and life. I think it really helped me approach my own art practice from a different place, like ‘Let’s get back to what your vision is,’ and I did. I started making work again, objects that could be categorized, formally, as ‘furniture,’ but were also about the body; I was trying to create a new, ergonomic relationship using furniture as sculpture.” Uncovering imagery of his work from this era, I am reminded of a statement by Robert Horvitz, found within one of the first critical reviews of the work of Chris Burden in 1976, wherein he claimed that the work resembled “isometric exercise equipment more than sculpture.”4 Rick and Michèle appreciated the series, selecting for their private collection Haskard’s tubular-chair-integrated-with-grey-hoody-guy “Body Object 1” (2017) as debuted at London’s DOMOBAAL gallery in a duo-show with his also-an-artist brother, Aubrey Haskard.

Skylar Haskard
Untitled (Body Object 1, ii), 2017
photo courtesy the artist

Skylar Haskard
Untitled (Body Object 2, ii), 2017
photo courtesy the artist

Continuing to sift through his extant digital footprint, I discover the time Haskard put in as Raymond Pettibon’s studio assistant, and also that he was part of the team which constructed French artist Vincent Lamouroux’s arresting Projection installation on Sunset Boulevard in 2015. I locate an Instagram post of the art worker up on a fully extended boom-lift, applying the obliterating whitewash to a palm tree. Everyone in LA remembers the strange ‘permanent snow-storm’ effect, which blanked out the entire 4301 Sunset Boulevard plot and was visible all the way up until 2023 when the old motel was finally demolished. The continuous actions of tireless ‘makers’ like this, even the smallest, has causal impact; the countless other jobs that support a dedicated contemporary practice are the connective tissue of the enmeshed ecosystems that sustain this boom-bust, rise-fall, but ultimately entropic, metropolis. 

On the subject of his city of birth, Skylar observes: “If you look at it on a map, LA’s on the edge of the world, and people here live like there’s nothing beyond it, you know? I’ve always felt where we’re decades ahead, here, is in the devolution of the world we live in. In one way or the other, it’s ever-present in all of our peripheral vision, and this manifests in a lot of the things you can see out on the street.” So, as I also often stop in my tracks in wonder at random compositions of street-side detritus, I ask Skylar about an amusing anthropomorph posted on his Instagram, wherein bare wooden slats tacked to a municipal post sprout fingered arms to reach out and ‘hug’ another shorter post. “I saw those in Frog Town. I don’t know who made them, but they’re just brilliant. They say pretty much what I want to express with my own work … I’m on the verge of trying to come up with some kind of ‘manifesto’ for myself. It’d have points like, “You will not show in galleries.” “You will make work and leave it where you make it.” Not exactly that, but something like that. And that piece, whoever did it, represents my feelings towards showing in galleries, or defined ‘art’ spaces. A lot of times, I’m trying to fit work into those more defined spaces to be able to show it. I’ve made so much work outside of those, a bit more guerrilla, because I firmly believe that my works are ongoing, and the only way that they come to appear ‘resolved’ is purely because time’s run out and they need to get into wherever they’re being shown. It’s hard for me to resolve things.… They’re all really collages. Ongoing collages.”

 

 Los Angeles, February 2026, photo by Skylar Haskard

 

And that contingent nature is what allows Haskard’s Pergamene contortions, which he chooses to craft from the brightly-colored matrix of our condition of consumer overload, to offer a biting snapshot of the conflict-molded contemporary psyche and our position at the End of (Art) History as digitized and virtual remixes take over from more corporeal formalism. When we discussed references, Skylar had noted Giovanni Anselmo’s Struttura che mangia (1968), literally, “structure that eats,”  as a key conceptual touchstone. The hinge of the seminal Arte Povera work is a head of lettuce set between a smaller and larger granite block, ‘secured’ with a copper wire. As the lettuce withers, it must be replaced by a human hand to stop the smaller block from falling, and potentially shattering. The city is that structure which eats. Work like this spits back what grows from its accumulated compost. Haskard’s rough-hewn hybrids tell the chaotic truth of life in our times, especially in Los Angeles, a place where grotesque imbalance is to be observed everywhere. The unholy tension of begging amputees passed by others with plastic-augmented bodies and lips pumped up to ideals uncanny. Bound into our own frameworks of comfort, we walk past persons making the street their philosophical pulpit, just like Diogenes, but we have become too cynical to stop and listen to what they have to say. 

 

Giovanni Anselmo
Sans titre, (granit, laitue, fil de cuivre), 1969
image via Centre Pompidou

 

Every era gets the art it ‘deserves.’ Commissioned by kings and conquerors, paid in war booty gold, artists of antiquity used valuable, durable stones cut with strenuous effort from the calcified cliffs of mountains formed millennia before as the seabed rose, because that is what they had access to. We have more access to more materials than ever imagined; global supply chains end in our laps. Because, whether cave painters or frieze carvers, artists have never truly worked alone. Each is dependent on access to supply chains and the alliance of commerce to material systems for their work to exist, just as each human being is. But we’re no longer reliant on Silk Road camels or buccaneers’ raids for access to the novel and exotic. It’s all only one click away. If the Ancient Greeks had discovered plastics, I do not doubt they would have used them to create colorful, vivacious art—spectral imaging has detected traces of bright-toned paint on the pale stone and even bronze of both their sculptural figures and architectural decor indicating that in their own time, this statuary was closer to department store mannequins than the austere purity we have received via blanched ruins and Renaissance mimicry.5 More than any time in history, this is a moment of ‘civilization’ versus environment. Froot Loops will revert to sugar, but their petroleum-derived LDPE plastic bag and the woven polypropylene of the trampoline mats will remain revenants much longer. Those billions of Monoblocs made so quickly, so cheaply, will overtake several human lifespans before they crack and warp. Still, they’ll never truly disappear, degrading into minute microplastics that last virtually forever. Even when the install has left the gallery on the back of his truck and been disassembled into constituent parts, on a molecular level they will last longer than marble, which began as seashells crushed into limestone, and will return to such, following the natural cycle. The elegant arms of the Vatican’s Laocoön will disintegrate long before we lose these spray-foam limbs. 

If the artists of antiquity had cracked the alchemy of petrochemical conversion, museums worldwide would be full of glass jars of plastic dust, not resonant masterpieces. The greatest artworks of our time are perhaps our vast landfill sites, our great middens. Trash heaps that encapsulate telling clues, and will allow researchers to time travel back to investigate our predilection for obsolescence after all digital communications are erased in a colossal Coronal Mass Ejection or solar EMP. And what of our museums, and their contents, that we set so much store by? In the far distant future, will the heavy angles of the Zumthor-Govan LACMA concrete bunker be dug out of the tar pit into which they will sink? Transported to another city as a prized possession, will its Brutalist style be fetishized and gloated over, walled inside another museum’s walls? With none of us left alive to defend the remnants of our material culture, would this be an act of theft, or preservation? Locked into a perpetual cycle of wonder-to-waste, and back again, what we create will inevitably come up against systems of rigorous re-evaluation, either as recovered beauty, dusted off to be prized again, or crushed to powder to make way for new shapes to reign.

As a child, I had always wanted to be an archeologist. I became a writer instead. *I’ve discovered that it’s almost the same thing.

“Scene 24” (The First Battle) from Trajan’s Column, 113 CE. Source: National Geographic / Direct reconstruction based on casts from the National Museum of Romanian History or Museum of Roman Civilization, via “Trajan’s Column — Reading an Ancient Comic Strip,”

1 Alexander Conze, “Greek Relief Sculpture”, 1887. ↩

2 Because we should always remember: “Whenever your spirits sag, or your day seems droopy, you can always cheer things up with a gem of thought from Snoopy!” by Charles M. Schulz, Hallmark, 1977. Snoopy’s Philosophy ↩

3 As discussed in the documentary Pergamon Altar – A Looted Monument?, 2023, Medea Film Factory, part of Who Owns History? The Battle Over Cultural Heritage. ↩

4 Robert Horvitz, ‘Chris Burden,’ Artforum, Volume XIV, No. 9, May 1976, pages 24-31. ↩

5 See Gods in Color: Painted Sculpture of Classical Antiquity, Vinzenz Brinkmann, Stiftung Archäologie, 2007; and Gods in Color: Polychromy in the Ancient World, issued in connection with the exhibition held October 28, 2017–January 7, 2018, at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco’s Legion of Honor. ↩

The New Museum Reopens with a Century of Speculative Futures

Exhibition view: New Humans: Memories of the Future, 2026. New Museum, New York.
Courtesy New Museum. Photo: Dario Lasagni

text by Hank Manning

Reopening after two years of construction, the New Museum inaugurates its 60,000-square-foot expansion with New Humans: Memories of the Future, a gargantuan museum-wide exhibition, hosting more than 700 works by 150 creators—artists, writers, scientists, inventors—from the last 120 years, providing a brute force summary of what humanity might or might have become. 

The exhibition is organized into thirteen sections, many of which have ominous sci-fi adjacent names like “Automatic Women” and “Postapocalyptic Creatures.” We begin in “Reproductive Futures,” which, in addition to focusing on human births and new eras of humanity in general, quickly establishes the museum’s maximalist mentality and its attempts to illustrate through juxtaposition. It contrasts the 20th and 21st centuries, artistic and scientific impetus and responses to change, realism and abstraction, utopia and dystopia.

Exhibition view: New Humans: Memories of the Future, 2026. New Museum, New York.
Courtesy New Museum. Photo: Dario Lasagni

The show also frequently joins well-known artists with newcomers. The first section’s perimeter has familiar pieces: LIFE magazine’s 1965 photographs of an embryo growing into a fetus hang alongside Dalí and Picabia paintings that consider, respectively, globalization and American dominance, and the merger of man and machine. Our eyes naturally veer, though, towards the largest and most animated display in the room: Out of Body, a film by Lucy Beech commissioned by the museum that depicts waves, factories, and other phenomena that may evoke birth. In the center, Tamara Henderson’s Language of Mud, a two-meter-tall sculpture, seemingly embodies Picabia’s conception, reconstructing the female form with ceramic limbs and a faceless tube-filled head.

Replete with spinning gadgets and flashing lights, “Dream Machines” is the most overstimulating room, as well as the one that, on first impression, feels the least human. Its explanatory text (the exhibition demands substantial reading) reminds us that all machines contain some trace of humanity; after all, humans made them. They reflect our goals and thereby reorient the human condition, creating a form of traction in our ongoing development. Typewriters and computers come from the desire to transcend limitations and complete tasks more efficiently. So do slaughterhouses and weapons of war. Hito Steyerl’s film Mechanical Kurds emphasizes that even the most horrifying pseudo-autonomous machines—AI-powered drones—depend on hidden human labor for the most basic of tasks—distinguishing people, vehicles, buildings, and so on.

Exhibition view: New Humans: Memories of the Future, 2026. New Museum, New York.
Courtesy New Museum. Photo: Dario Lasagni

World War I, the start of the exhibition’s timeline, served as a signifier of and catalyst for “new humans.” Technological developments enhanced our capabilities, enabling us to systematically dehumanize one another. Of course, other developments healed bodies and rebuilt cities. Technology facilitates both destruction and renovation, forming something of a feedback loop of rapid change. 

New art movements also developed in response to the horrors of war. Artists needed new modes to elucidate and process unprecedented levels of destruction. The Dadaists, understanding war as inherently irrational, created intentionally irrational art. Surrealists, influenced by Freud, looked inwards, exploring dreams, desire, and the unconscious mind. Bauhaus focused on rebuilding society through functional designs. Throughout New Humans, these movements appear not only as aesthetic developments, but as competing attempts to imagine what humanity could and should become after catastrophe.

Exhibition view: New Humans: Memories of the Future, 2026. New Museum, New York.
Courtesy New Museum. Photo: Dario Lasagni

Our erratic journey ends in the “Hall of Robots,” which would resemble a haunted house if not for its bubblegum-pink carpeting. Even here, in the final room in an exhibition on humanity’s thoughts about its future, we immerse ourselves in a collection of decidedly obsolete automatons, inspiring nostalgia more than anything else. Most familiar is the animatronic skeleton of the alien from Spielberg’s E.T. We also meet Bruce Lacey’s Superman, looking like a man-cabinet hybrid, with detached spinning eyes and hands; a robot called Jogging Lady plays three videos: two on its chest and another on its belly. And there’s a third robot with a television that projects a dancing clock for its head. Somehow, the oldest design is the one that would blend in most naturally in our present day, perhaps in a biology classroom: Franz Tschakert’s Glass Man, an intricate anatomical model of the human body’s inner workings. Otherwise, this room serves as a reminder that predictions of the future generally prove inaccurate, oftentimes humorously so. Imagined futures reveal more about the fears and desires of the times of their creation than about what eventually arrives in reality.

In recent years, headlines about artificial intelligence, climate disaster, and war have continued to stoke apocalyptic fears worldwide. New Humans neither confirms nor calms any of our current anxieties. One walks away only with an acceptance that the possibilities are endless. 


New Humans: Memories of the Future is on view at the New Museum, 235 Bowery, New York

Exhibition view: New Humans: Memories of the Future, 2026. New Museum, New York.
Courtesy New Museum. Photo: Dario Lasagni

Noguchi’s New York Envisions an Ideal City

 

Isamu Noguchi at the debut of Unidentified Object (1979)
Photo: Donna Svennevik. The Noguchi Museum Archives, 04144.

 

text by Hank Manning


In celebration of its 40th anniversary, the Noguchi Museum presents Noguchi's New York, highlighting the artist’s attempts—many of them unsuccessful—to beautify and improve the city. The exhibition presents more than 50 works, including sculptures, photographs, and plots for landscape architecture; and celebrates the museum and sculpture garden, situated in Noguchi’s former home and studio, as one of his gifts to the city. 

Installation view. Photo: Nicholas Knight

Noguchi saw cities as inseparable from their people, particularly enjoying the feeling that, like him, every New Yorker came from somewhere else. In the 1920s, after dropping out of Columbia, he befriended a diverse group of artists. To fund his world travels, he sculpted busts of these friends in various materials meant to represent their personalities—Claire Boothe Luce in marble, Buckminster Fuller in chrome, Suzanne Ziegler in wood. As a central figure in New York’s intelligentsia, he even testified as a character witness at John Lennon’s immigration hearing.

Noguchi’s oeuvre grew to be as diverse as his social circle. After voluntarily spending time in a Japanese American internment camp as a means of protest, he produced more abstract statues, including the geometric Red Cube, installed outside an architecture firm’s office, and Unidentified Object, an eleven-foot monolithic piece reminiscent of a totem. He designed set pieces for Martha Graham’s Broadway production of Phaedra. Noguchi’s first retrospective took place at the Whitney in 1968. He worried that he might be pinned down by the museum’s framing of him as a “throwback modernist carver” more so than a “vital contemporary artist.” This experience strengthened his opinion that “Sculpture is no good if it’s just put in a gallery—It must be a part of daily living.”

 

Isamu Noguchi
News (Associated Press Building Plaque), 1940
Photo: Miguel de Guzman

 

In spite of—or possibly because of—his frequent travels and long periods away from the city, Noguchi defined himself as a New Yorker. He saw his public works as attempts to make the city more interconnected, thought-provoking, and playful. His first-implemented sculpted environment was Sunken Garden, which contains seven large stones extracted from the Uji River in Japan. He described it as “a turbulent seascape from which immobile rocks take off for outer space.” News, a stainless steel plaque depicting a team of heroic journalists, adorns the former Associated Press Building, now 50 Rockefeller Plaza.

Isamu Noguchi
model for United Nations Playground, 1952 (cast 1963)
bronze

Unfortunately, dozens of Noguchi’s most ambitious designs fell victim to political fights and were never realized. He had a strong desire to enhance playgrounds so that children could find their own creative paths. To this end, he both redesigned the particulars—slides, swings, and jungle gyms—and planned to reshape large sections of public parks. In 1933, he unveiled his first public proposal for the city—Play Mountain, which would have occupied an entire block and included steps in the shape of a pyramid’s side, an amphitheater, a summertime water slide, and a winter hill for sledding. These and similar rejected proposals for redevelopment at Washington Square Park, Riverside Park, and United Nations Plaza are now brought to life through animated films at the exhibition. Rejected as well were playscapes at the Bronx Zoo’s Great Apes House, a totem greeting visitors at Kennedy Airport, and MoMA’s sculpture garden.

The exhibition envisions a world where idealists like Noguchi had triumphed, unlike the real city, overly sanitized by powerful urban planners like Robert Moses, who focused on building new highways rather than revitalizing existing communities and at times laughed Noguchi out of his office. Although some of the park plans do seem fanciful—reminiscent of landscapes out of a Dr. Seuss book—we can certainly appreciate the consistent vision, as well as his adaptive spirit—when critics worried children would fall off his playground equipment, Noguchi designed the curved, hilly but not steep parks that made serious falls impossible. He felt equally proud of his unrealized works as of the five public pieces currently standing in the city, understanding that rejection need not be permanent. His work reminds us of New York’s potential to continue improving and serving as a beacon for the rest of the world. 

Noguchi’s New York is on view through September 13 at the Noguchi Museum, 9-01 33rd Road, Queens

A Psychic Language: Louise Bourgeois's "Gathering Wool" @ Hauser & Wirth

Louise Bourgeois
Gathering Wool
1990
Metal, wood, and mixed media
243.8 x 396.2 x 457.2 cm
© 2026 The Easton Foundation/VAGA at ARS, NY
Courtesy the Foundation and Hauser & Wirth

text by Arlo Kremen

The story goes something like this: Bourgeois was born in Paris to parents who operated a tapestry business. As young Louise grew up, her father met and began an affair with another woman, Sadie Gordon Smith. In 1922, eleven-year-old Bourgeois would find that Smith would move in with her father and mother as her governess. The affair continued, and young Louise’s mother would remain silent about the matter. Mrs. Bourgeois, as young Louise’s mother, would lose her role in the house, that of the moral instructor, replaced by her younger counterpart, relegating Mrs. Bourgeois to that of a worker in the house. Young Louise felt betrayed by her father. In fact, she felt betrayed by her mother too, betrayed by her mother’s abandoning her in her meekness.

In 1982, Bourgeois was the first woman to have a major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In press for this exhibition, Bourgeois spoke publicly for the first time about the trauma of childhood as a well of inspiration, sparking the reading of this early narrative into all corners of her extensive oeuvre. Gathering Wool at Hauser & Wirth continues this reading, bringing sculptures, reliefs, and works on paper, some of which have never seen the light of day, into the psychoanalytic dimensions associated with the artist. Interested in Bourgeois’s relationship to abstraction, the show focuses on her later works. Shown in juxtaposition with early works, Gathering Wool aims to demystify the evolution of her symbolically charged visual lexicon.

The titular work, Gathering Wool (1990), finds its title from an expression concerned with freedom from active, conscious thought. To ‘gather wool’ is to daydream and ruminate, caring for a form of thinking that is intuitive and fleeting. Spherical, wooden sculptures, seven in number, sit in a small circle. Behind, a four-panel metal divider haunts the collections of forms. In an interplay between light and dark, organic and industrial, and curved and linear, the precious sumptuousness of these works, shown vulnerable through the cuts and splits of wood, is underscored through juxtaposition. Bourgeois cherished the ‘gathering wool’ in her creative output, shoring up traces of her unconscious and sublimating her mysterious mental artifacts into her work.

Louise Bourgeois
Twosome
1991
Painted steel, electric light, and motor
190.5 x 193 x 1244.6 cm
© 2026 The Easton Foundation/VAGA at ARS, NY
Courtesy the Foundation and Hauser & Wirth

Gathering Wool does not begin the show; that honor is belongs to Twosome (1991). A mechanical sculpture where a smaller cylinder routinely leaves and re-enters a container only slightly larger. This work continues Bourgeois’s preoccupation with child psychology, particularly psychoanalysis. Here, the viewer seems to witness the point at which a child enters the symbolic stage; however, the presence of a male-charged form is entirely absent. The title, Twosome, and the continual entering and exiting of the mother-form allude to the constant back-and-forth in the identification of the daughter to her mother. In a displacement of the father, the figure who, for Lacan, initiates the division of child from mother, the abandonment of the mother seems to have thrust Bourgeois into the symbolic stage instead. A video projection in the same gallery seems to concur, where Actress Suzan Cooper sings “She Abandoned Me,” a track that accompanied Bourgeois’s 1978 performance A Fashion Show of Body Parts.

The show makes note of Bourgeois’s interest in protruding forms. Untitled (With Hand) (1989) has a child’s arm shooting out of a sphere that was sculpted out of the raw pink marble on which it rests. Mamelles (1991) spits water from the bronze breasts fixed to the wall. The aforementioned Gathering Wool offers fertile material for mushrooms to sprout from the wood spheres. Twosome, as well, engages in an act of protrusion in its cycle of exiting and entering. In a slightly different gesture, Le Défi II (1992) bounces light off and through its glass vessels, resulting in a soft illumination across the work. In all of these works, there is a borderless quality. Pre-established divisions between container and contained, raw and mediated, one form and another form, and conscious and unconscious all undergo complication at the artist’s behest. In her treatment of abstraction as often a source of figuration and of forms of representation more broadly, Bourgeois elucidates her pathologically encoded visual language, affirming her status as one of America’s most prolific artists.

Louise Bourgeois’s Gathering Wool is on view through April 18 @ Hauser & Wirth, 22nd Street, New York City.

Making Things You Can Feel: Read An Interview of Larry Bell →

Larry Bell with Pacific Red II. Photography by Matthew Millman, San Francisco

For over six decades, Larry Bell has skillfully molded contemporary art in America. Born in Chicago in 1939, Bell moved to the West Coast to study at the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles, the historic precursor to CalArts. 

There, Bell became a member of Los Angeles’s Cool School, a rebellious group of artists, largely represented by Walter Hopps and Irving Blum of Ferus Gallery in the 1950s and ’60s, who brought modern-day avant-garde to the West Coast. Alongside Ed Ruscha and Robert Irwin, Bell is one of the last living members of the School. As a foundational figure in the Light and Space movement, Southern California’s take on Minimalism, which often employed industrial materials and aerospace technology to explore the ways that volume, light and scale play with our sense of perception, Bell made innovative work that experimented with the interconnections of glass and light and their relations to reflection and illusion. 

His most notable works involve his creation of semi-transparent cubes made out of vacuum-coated glass to form an immersive experience as the art melts into space. Recently, six of Bell’s cubes have been installed in Madison Square Park, where they will be on view until March 15, 2026. Improvisations in the Park carries on Bell’s legacy, but with a twist. Instead of their typical white cube environment, they have been placed outside to interact with the constantly changing elements, causing a new perception almost every hour. 

This idea, related to the flexibility of perception, is also highlighted in Bell’s recent series of collage works, Irresponsible Irridescence, on view now at the Judd Foundation in New York. These collages poured out of Bell after the passing of his wife two years ago, sharing a more emotional side of his work with audiences. They also subtly allude to the close friendship between Bell and the late Donald Judd. It was Bell who convinced Judd to build this now-historic organization in Marfa, Texas, rather than El Rosario, Mexico, impacting American art history forever. Read more.

Read Our Interview of Marianna Simnett on the Occasion of Her Solo Exhibition 'Charades' @ SOCIÉTÉ, Berlin →

Marianna Simnett
Leda Was a Swan (production still), 2024.
Courtesy the Artist and Société, Berlin.
Photo/ Leander Ott

How we present ourselves and what we aspire to project is in an everchanging relationship with those around us. It is a story we’re telling about ourselves, to ourselves. In Marianna Simnett’s Charades, her second solo exhibition with SOCIÉTÉ, the inherent masquerade of existing in a society is examined from the ancient allegories that undergird our collective worldview to the personal histories we replay in our minds. It is a power play where nothing is ever fixed. Undermining the very foundation of Greek mythology’s Leda and the Swan, she contends that the swan was never Zeus in disguise, it was actually just a hand puppet. The subject of the story thus shifts from that of rape to masturbation when the subjects of the story exchange their masks. Persistent obfuscation is an everpresent quality within the work. In this way, she is asking you to decide whether the charade is just a playful game amongst friends, or if it is indeed an act of mockery. Read more.

Suburban Atmospherics: Read Our Interview of Olivia Erlanger →

 

Olivia Erlanger
Prime Meridien, 2024
Aquaresin, aluminum, LEDs, drivers, cord
59 1/2 x 71 x 36 inches
(151.1 x 180.3 x 91.4 cm)
Image Courtesy of Soft Opening, London. Photo: Daniel Terna

 

Multimedia artist and filmmaker Olivia Erlanger is a suburbanist in multiple senses of the word: her oeuvre, a combination of sculpture, scale miniatures and shadow boxes, furnishings, short films, performance, as well as vernacular and technical histories of the home, takes its inspiration from American suburban geographies and the domestic interior that form its primary mise en scène. But Erlanger’s work also explores the world of margins, thresholds, and coulisse implicit in the etymology of the sub-urb—a space that, by definition, is beneath or outside of a physical and discursive center. Hers is a work that often eschews the stabilizing components of characterization, materiality, and setting for what, absent a sturdier, more easily translatable, descriptor, might be called a suburban atmospheric.

But what precisely is a suburban atmospheric? Beyond its seeming interest in combining the milieu of the suburb with a study of speculative environments, the term remains labile and fugitive, as atmosphere tends to be. The topic of suburbanism is itself obscured in a certain kind of epistemic veil, enforced by an enduring urban-centric ambivalence toward its historical or cultural import that says indignantly, “I’d prefer not to.” The suburb has long been the subaltern to its urban hegemon. Equally, the notion of an atmosphere is resistant to any center. It is neither material/spatial nor strictly rhetorical or conceptual, but more like an environmental “mood” accompanying these objects or categories. Peter Sloterdijk, the great thinker of atmosphere, describes it as an affective envelope that shelters self, other and world in various existential interiors. Its ur-space is the home, whether hut or tract house, though the feeling of at-homeness is as much an architecture of familiarity as it is materiality. Atmosphere, however, will always retain some essential mystery or exoticism. Appearing in disguise under designations like “the sensorium,” “the spectral,” “interiority,” “microclimate,” and “the nobject,” it haunts the world of people and objects from its dark purlieus, much like the suburb haunts the city and thrives in the nooks and verges.

Erlanger’s works hover in this same elusive topology with its outré images of possessed housewares, adolescent bedrooms in miniature, deteriorating snow globes, manic realty agents, piscine nymphets, and trompe l’œil terraria. Evoking the sort of Gothic unheimlich that emanates from a landscape of empty cul-de-sacs, dead shopping malls, and vacant ranch ramblers, they play in the interstices of the quotidian and the storybook. The result is a spiritist practice that is simultaneously an “anthropology of the near,” in the words of Marc Augé, and a “space of elsewhere,” in those of Gaston Bachelard. And, perhaps, most of all, Erlanger’s works echo Longfellow’s observation in “Haunted Houses” (1858) that “All houses…/Are haunted houses/…The spirit-world around this world of sense/Floats like an atmosphere…”

On the occasion of Erlanger’s new exhibit, Spinoff, at Luhring Augustine Tribeca, the artist spoke on a variety of topics, including the mysteries of the suburb, the pleasures of the miniature, Last Year at Marienbad and the haunted house genre, Nabokov and the “final girl.” Read more.

Basquiat Serenades a Venus of Antiquity @ Gagosian in Paris

Gagosian’s exhibition, Venus, sees a pairing of two rarely seen masterpieces from different millennia: Untitled (1982), a significant painting from Jean-Michel Basquiat’s acclaimed Modena series, is shown in dialogue with an Imperial Roman sculpture of the goddess Venus loaned from the Torlonia Collection in Rome, the world’s largest private collection of Roman art. This is Gagosian’s eleventh exhibition dedicated to Basquiat and demonstrates the gallery’s ongoing commitment to the artist’s legacy.

Untitled is one of eight large-scale paintings that Basquiat made in Modena, Italy, in the summer of 1982 at the age of twenty-one. Produced at the invitation of collector and art dealer Emilio Mazzoli for an exhibition that never came to fruition, the works were not shown together until they were reunited last summer at Fondation Beyeler in Riehen/Basel, more than four decades after they were made.

Highlighting how Venus has been a muse across centuries, the exhibition is on view through December 20th at Gagosian’s gallery at 9 rue de Castiglione, Paris.

Materiality is the Impetus of Perrotin's Pacific Abstractions in Los Angeles

text by Mia Milosevic

Materiality lays at the center of Perrotin’s Pacific Abstractions. The use of material fluctuates between artists, but the physicality of abstraction remains distinctly intact. 

Lee Bae uses five different forms of wood to construct his charcoal ink on paper. An ode to movement embodies the work, where motion is inextricable from risk. Each charcoal stroke is entirely reliant on the mobility of Lee’s artistic hand—no gray-hued ribbon is ever erased or redone. The movement of material is the final product. 

Naotaka Hiro’s corporeal paintings are imbued with a kind of where-the-wild-things-are sexual innuendo. The work’s technicalities deconstruct the body, and then reinstate it with a phallic abstraction that is just discernible enough to make the body knowable. Two perfect, symmetrical holes perforate the bottom of his Untitled (Uproar). These circular lesions mark the negative space the artist inserted his legs into as a processual requirement. The alteration of the canvas threatens prescribed limitations of material—Hiro’s anatomical segmenting shatters the fourth wall of space. 

Kazuo Kadonaga’s Wood No. 5 Cl is an intricately constructed log made from paper-thin slices of real wood. The veneer slicer he used to create these vellums pays homage to his upbringing in forestry. The trunk’s growth rings explicitly mimic the surreality of Earth’s extraordinary constructions, made with the caliber of precision and detail generally credited to the hands of the divine. Alas, we may come to question Kadonaga’s mortal statehood. The portrait of an axed tree excavates a visceral reaction: Should we mourn the losses wrought by Big Paper or must we instead celebrate post-natural invention? By virtue of materiality, reincarnation is imminent. 

Pacific Abstractions is on view through November 9 @ Perrotin in Los Angeles, 5036 W Pico Blvd

Devon Dejardin's Pareidolia Is A Reflection of Your Inner Psyche @ Carl Kostyál in Stockholm

 
 

Devon Dejardin’s new solo exhibition of paintings and sculptures takes its name from the strange and universal phenomenon wherein we see faces in abstract imagery. In a broader sense, pareidolia is the perception of scrutable objects in any kind of nebulous stimulus. We see animals in cloud formations and hear voices in white noise. From Rorschach’s inkblot tests, to hidden messages in a record played backwards, to Jesus Christ on a piece of toast, there are endless examples of our unconscious tendency to discern meaning and order in the face of chaos. For Dejardin, these works are guardians. They draw together elements of various faiths and belief systems. What you see when you look at any of these pieces may differ depending on your own belief systems, your relationship to art history, the conversation you were just having, and your emotional wellbeing. You might find that when you step away and come back to any given work that you can’t remember if you’ve seen it before or if you’re in fact looking at a new painting. Layer by layer, the works reflect aspects of our inner psyche back at us, like mirrored building blocks that reveal the ever shifting unconscious mind as it wanders around in real time.

Pareidolia is on view through July 21st @ Carl Kostyál Hospitalet, Sjökvarnsbacken 15, 131 71 Nacka, Stockholm

SPY Projects Presents Unrequited Group Show: An Eternally Recontextualized Assemblage of Works @ the Former Brooke Alexander Gallery in New York

Pietro Alexander’s SPY Projects, a Los Angeles-based gallery that has developed a reputation for recognizing young, emerging talent both local and international since its inception in 2021 hosts their Unrequited group show at 59 Wooster Street. Not just another SoHo loft, the building—the very floor, in fact, once housed the Brooke Alexander Gallery, which opened its first exhibition in the space nearly forty years ago and worked with a number of artists who have gone on to become legends, influencing the art scene in New York and beyond. It’s a natural meeting place between East and West coasts, and a fitting home for SPY Projects’ New York debut, since the eponymous gallerist Brooke Alexander’s brother was the artist Peter Alexander, a pioneering figure of the Light and Space movement in California.

As much as we should know what an artwork is—what’s placed in front of us, contained within a frame, defined by a title and tombstone—there’s always something that seems to escape, an uncontrollable excess of meaning beyond what anyone, even the artist could predict. Because ultimately, the substance of it all is continually created anew and brought into being through every encounter between the viewer and the work itself. As a result, even the most rigorous or tightly structured artwork remains porous and in flux, incorporating shifting social contexts, feelings, and personal histories.

So, if it can’t be controlled, why fight it? Curator Sara Apple encourages you to let go of the Sisyphean struggle to reconcile vision and meaning with the murky, malleable world. The exhibition is not an endpoint, the final realization of a concept, but an embarkation, an embrace of the unrequited to welcome the larger possibilities of experience. This extends from the artists—selected less because they fit an aesthetic mold or illustrate a particular idea, but out of organic connections—to the structure of the show itself, which hosts events and performances throughout its duration. By opening up the exhibition while supporting its full potential, all these disparate strands can be brought together, encouraged to develop into the unknown and unexpected, and become something more in the process.

Unrequited includes works by Peter Alexander, Malik Al Maliki, Katherine Auchterlonie, Stefan Bondell, Cristine Brache, Sasha Filimonov, Chris Lloyd, Kay Kasparhauser, Alison Peery, Raymond Pettibon, and Montana Simone. The show is on view through May 31 @ 59 Wooster Street, New York

 
 

Read an Interview of Cammie Staros on the Occasion of Her Exhibition @ SCAD Museum of Art →

Image courtesy of the artist and SCAD.

Cammie Staros’ Sunken City featured at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) Museum of Art through June 24 reinvents our relationships to the traditional historical narrative. Referencing antiquities against the expansiveness of time, Staros positions iconic relics as vessels with which to unite history and the present moment. Her aquarium virtines, which house seemingly anthropomorphic vases, are manifested as self-sustaining biomes aptly referencing the nuances of the lifetime. Staros’ exhibition uniquely encapsulates the passage of time, while simultaneously illuminating the role of the object in the context of human systems. Her modernization, yet simultaneous preservation, of the iconic relic speaks to the primal instinctual basis of a commodity-driven culture and the modern conceptualization of value. Read more.

Sunken City is organized by SCAD Museum of Art curator Ben Tollefson and presented as part of SCAD deFINE ART 2024.

Read Our Interview of Paris-Based Artist Ladji Diaby →

 
 

April 11th marked the opening of Preservation, a group show curated by Paige Silveria and Paul Hameline at CØR Studio in Paris. The exhibition brings together a disparate group of artists (including Ladji Diaby, Alyssa Kazew, Mark Flood, Gogo Graham, Jordan Pallagès, Anthony Fornasari, Bill Taylor, Caos Mote, Ron Baker, Cecile Di Giovanni, Simon Dupety, Gaspar Willmann, Wolfgang Laubersheimer, and the late, great Gaetano Pesce) whose work ranges from photography, collage, video, design, sculpture, and more. These works explore the original purpose of our human intellect before it became aware of itself and started to ask the unknowable. They reflect on a time when the self wasn’t yet conscious and only concerned itself with preservation in the most existential sense of the word. On the occasion of the opening, Paige Silveria spoke with artist Ladji Diaby to learn more about his roots in Mali, his creative process, and his relationship to the art scene in Paris. Read more.

Read Our Interview of Holly Silius on the Occasion of Her Solo Exhibition @ Central Server Works in Los Angeles →

 

Holly Silius. George Clinton, 2023. Stone and gold leaf.

 

“I don’t have to sell my soul, he’s already in me” read the lyrics of The Stone Roses’ groundbreaking hit track “I Wanna Be Adored.” Perfectly salient in their minimal simplicity, they defined a generation who watched their idols on television with a yearning desperation for recognition. Los Angeles-based sculptor Holly Silius was in her youth living in Manchester at the time. It was the end of Thatcher’s era of neoliberal deregulation with its flagrant embrace of conspicuous consumption that made so many of her peers feel a hollow ennui; a listless lack of purpose that left them looking ahead to the next millennium without the slightest clue of where they fit in. Thirty-five years later, Generation X finds itself in an era of social media where everyone can build a virtual platform from which to project their image and ideals. Silius now finds herself adorning and casting the faces and bodies of countless people—some with humble followings, some with household names—studying their every angle to capture the elusive essence that makes them so alluring as subjects. Read more.

Izumi Kato's Not-Quite-Human Figures Are Apparitions of Coexistence in Perrotin's Inaugural Los Angeles Show

#6
Untitled, 2023

Photo by Kei Okano
Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin ©2023 Izumi Kato

Perrotin inaugurates their new Los Angeles location with an exhibition of work by Japanese artist Izumi Kato.

Imagine, for a moment, that Izumi Kato’s figurative subjects have a life of their own. From the artist’s studio in Tokyo, his subjects have traversed the ocean, crossing the Pacific to emerge in Los Angeles. Making their way to Pico Boulevard, they appear utterly at home in Southern California—a place where one can encounter the extremes of both prehistoric geology and urban modernity, where tar pits coexist with gleaming new buildings, where eternal ocean cliffs abut concrete highway. These binaries of ancient and modern, geological and man-made, are dualities that also coexist in Kato’s work, making his exhibition a fitting choice for Perrotin’s inaugural exhibition in Los Angeles.

Izumi Kato’s exhibition is on view through March 23 @ Perrotin in Los Angeles, 5036 W. Pico Boulevard

Non-Specific Objects Carves Niches for Difference from Universality @ Capitain Petzel in Berlin

The title of Non-Specific Objects acts as a counterpoint to the ideas expressed in Donald Judd’s canonical 1964 essay Specific Objects. Seeing as Judd characterized specific objects as separate from either sculpture or painting, they were precisely themselves, emphasizing the very materiality of a specific object that lacked expressive or symbolic content, especially to embodied subjectivity. This universal space, which aimed to be all-encompassing, did not make room for gender, racial, and sexual difference. The artists in this exhibition work against the hegemonic universal, creating space for difference in their works by means of abstraction, referencing bodies both literally and metaphorically.

The selection of works collectively embodies the contemporary lived experience of those who occupy spaces outside the normative. While they often do not overtly mirror the human form, the works represent humanity through a lens of abstraction and resistance, inviting viewers to confront themselves and experience bodily otherness. From alienation and embarrassment to intimacy and desire, the artists offer both the possibility of self-reflection and shared moments of humor.

In focus is the abstracted body – be it the intimate nature, materiality, and particularities of the individual human body, the collective body that is built on shared historic experience, the extended and amplified body in an age of relentless augmentation, or the body that eschews realistic painterly modes of representation, opting for formally abstract or heavily stylized, sometimes nostalgic renditions of humanity. The diverse set of artistic practices does not adhere to strict principles of representation, but continually references the human, sometimes clearly and often obliquely. It highlights objects that refuse human form but relate to the human by embracing abstraction.

Non-Specific Objects is on view through February 24th at Capitain Petzel, Karl-Marx-Allee 45, 10178 Berlin.

Irony and Intimacy Intersect in Lovers in the Backseat @ FeldbuschWiesnerRudolph in Berlin

“‘Lovers in the Backseat’ refers to romantic and intimate relationships. Everything we do happens because we can't help it: Breathing, living, loving and creating art, these are our common elementary needs." (A.N. & R.S.)

The connection between the works of Robert Schittko and Anna Nero lies in the exploration of identity, playfulness and irony, as well as a slight sexiness that resonates in both artistic practices. They take the exhibition visitor on the "back seat", behind their shoulders, on the motorway, country road or overtaking lane - always on the way, but where are they actually going...? Both Nero and Schittko harbor an aversion to self-referential art. Instead, they explore the self in their studios and transform their lives into a vivid artistic practice. Each in their own way: Schittko's sculptural and photographic art focuses on the development of their own identity. Nero provokes with her abstract-representational paintings and ceramics.

Lovers in the Backseat is on view through January 6th at FeldbuschWiesnerRudolph, Jägerstraße 5, 10117 Berlin.

"Portraiture as Social Commentary" Showcases the Genre's Explosive Social Capital @ Persons Projects in Berlin

 

Zofia Kulik
Land-Escape I (2001)
silver gelatin print, 180 x 150 cm

 

Persons Projects’ latest group exhibition, Portraiture as Social Commentary, not only highlights the different aspects of the genre but also links together a variety of artistic perspectives. A portrait is a painting, a photograph, a sculpture, or any other representation of a person in which the face and its expressions are predominant. They reveal the presence of the subject viewed from the perspective of the artist – a merger of contrasts between what’s projected by one and perceived by another. These images become mirrors of many faces that reflect both the political and cultural undercurrents relevant to the time period in which they were conceived.

Portraiture as Social Commentary is on view through January 27th, 2024, at Persons Projects, Lindenstr. 34–35, 10969 Berlin.

Hugh Hayden Examines the Prosthetics of Power in Hughman @ Lisson Gallery

text by Tara Anne Dalbow

Upon entering Hugh Hayden’s Hughman exhibition at Lisson Los Angeles, you’re confronted by three interconnected rows of metallic stall doors, the same as you might find in a public restroom. The doors simultaneously invite you toward entry and expel you, intriguing as they are impersonal and ominous. Before you glimpse an object resembling art, you’re implicated in the hidden meaning, an active participant in its revelation. You’re immediately made aware of the physicality of your body, your relationship to the space, and the identity you present to the unknown system of order. Questions arise: Is this a gendered bathroom? Do I belong here? Who am I sharing the space with? The interactive element of opening and closing each door, maneuvering in, out, and between the confined, private spaces, renders engaging from a disembodied perspective nearly impossible. As the exhibition's title implies, there’s no leaving one’s hughmanity at the door.  

My initial impression of imposition and interest follows me into the first stall, where a carved commode sprouts a bramble of thorny fir tree branches. The protrusion of sharp limbs obstructs further inspection; the effect is claustrophobic and disconcerting, and I back out cautiously. Behind the next door, a baby’s crib constructed from barbed wire and chain link fencing; behind another, interlocking wedding rings with Descovy pills [HIV antiviral] where the solitaire would be; and behind yet another, a classroom desk consumed entirely by abrasive white nylon bristles. Each object offers participation in a facet of contemporary American life under conditions as unwelcoming, uncomfortable, and caustic as the specular toilet seat. 

The visceral materiality of the various textures, though not physically touched, commandeer the senses as the bristles scrape, the barbs prick, and the branches snag against your skin. Prongs, spurs, and skewers disrupt movement and threaten physical confrontation while also poking metaphorical holes in expectations and illusions. Here, the most fundamental promises of the American dream, like the right to an education, are rendered onerous, animating the question: for whom were these institutions made? If the skin you’re in determines your experience, and the object's surface or skin reflects the relative ease or distress of the encounter, then certainly not for the artist, a Black queer man, and by association, those like him. 

Hugh Hayden
Cleanse, 2023
High density polyethylene bristles, cast resin
66 x 38.1 x 35.6 cm
26 x 15 x 14 in
© Hugh Hayden, Courtesy Lisson Gallery

Hugh Hayden
Start 'Em Young, 2023
Chain link fencing and hardware
142.9 x 141 x 81.3 cm
56 1/4 x 55 1/2 x 32 in

© Hugh Hayden, Courtesy Lisson Gallery

Hugh Hayden
Brainwash, 2023
PVC and nylon bristles
83.8 x 66 x 73.7 cm
33 x 26 x 29 in
© Hugh Hayden, Courtesy Lisson Gallery

 
 

As I continued around the room, the stalls began to feel more like dressing rooms with various identities available for perusal inside. Within one, a suit jacket and pants sewn from the rough and rigid bark of a cherry tree hang from a clothing rack. Elsewhere: a football helmet encompassed by boar hair, and still elsewhere: a bronze strap-on harness with a gun protruding from the crotch. The striking contrast between organic materials and those that are artificial and mass-produced recalls the antagonistic relationship between what’s natural and instinctual and what’s a consequence of sociopolitical structures. For whom are these spaces made? 

Those capable of comfortably wearing the prosthetics of power appear as idealized, neoclassical male torsos carved from white silicone. They wear their means for control where their sex would be; for two, cocked pistols; for another, an abject skyscraper. A fourth iteration sees the male body replaced by a miniature basswood model church whose phallic steeple hangs limply across the shingled roof. In a nod to the dominant enterprise in Los Angeles, a director’s chair projects tapered wood penises in every direction. The appendages appear to both protect the seat of power and stage an assault on the unendowed who come too close. Their audacious vulgarity tempers the violence of the cultural implications and satirizes familiar tropes like toxic masculinity and the male impulse to think with an organ south of the brain.  

When that door closes with a bang—emphasized by the acoustics of the room and made ominous by the presence of so many firearms—another door opens onto a bronze and acrylic sculpture of the waist and thighs of a man in navy uniform pants sporting a flashy leather belt, holstered gun, and handcuffs posed atop his white pedestal. Only when you move around the sculpture or are so moved by it do you see where the right side is sliced open to reveal beneath the uniform, armor, weaponry, beneath even the skin, the internal organs, veins, and bones within. The same veins in him that carry the red-blue blood between my heart and feet, the same stomach as the one that rumbles, hungry to be filled full when empty in Hayden, in him, in me. The man is twinned by another sculpture in the exhibition of a tree trunk spliced open to expose the biological contents of a womb carrying a luminous carved baby. 

Hugh Hayden
Real Tree, 2023
Cherry bark on Zegna Suit
Suit: 99.1 x 91.4 x 17.8 cm
Suit: 39 x 36 x 7 in
© Hugh Hayden, Courtesy Lisson Gallery

Hugh Hayden
Eve, 2023
Cherry Bark and acrylic on resin, Black Walnut
63.5 x 38.1 x 25.4 cm
25 x 15 x 10 in
© Hugh Hayden, Courtesy Lisson Gallery

Their combined effect illuminates how stripped of societal status, we are of the same nature and origin and made from the same stuff. As intricately connected to one another as we are to the trees, the earth from which the trees grow, and the animals, like the stuffed buffalo in another stall, roam. Hanging together in a red-flocked closet, two raceless, genderless, crimson rib cages tenderly embrace—as the only forms made from material gentle enough to hold and be held. The fellow feeling carries me out of the closet, the stall, the gallery, and I re-enter the world a little more human than I was only an hour before.

Hughman is on view through January 13 @ Lisson Gallery, 1037 N. Sycamore Avenue, Los Angeles

 

Hugh Hayden
The Audition, 2023
Bald cypress, steel hardware and canvas
149.9 x 188 x 154.9 cm
59 x 74 x 61 in
© Hugh Hayden, Courtesy Lisson Gallery