Perrotin New York is pleased to present A Strange Familiar, a group exhibition curated by Nick Doyle which asks us to step back and consider new perspectives on what is assumed to be known. Through sculpture, video installation, painting, and photography, the exhibition explores the slippery terrain between fact and memory.
The phrase A Strange Familiar evokes the eerie nostalgia of déjà vu or the uncanny recognition of something once intimate that is now foreign. Doyle brings together artists whose practices disorient the viewer by shifting scale, context, or meaning. Across varied mediums and sensibilities, the artworks on view, alter, rework, or construct new experiences of history, memory, and pop culture.
Daniel Arsham’s (born in 1980, lives and works in New York, NY) uchronic aesthetic revolves around his concept of fictional archaeology. Working in sculpture, architecture, drawing and film, he creates and crystallizes ambiguous in-between spaces or situations, and further stages what he refers to as future relics of the present. While the present, the future and the past poetically collide in his haunted yet playful visions between romanticism and pop art, Arsham also experiments with the timelessness of certain symbols and gestures across cultures.
Leonard Baby (born in 1996, lives and works in Brooklyn, NY) is an American multidisciplinary artist whose work encompasses painting, installation, and performance. His practice interrogates themes of sexuality, gender, and emotional identity, often combining personal experience with broader cultural commentary. Baby’s bold and provocative works have been exhibited nationally and internationally.
Maurizio Cattelan (born in 1960, lives and works in New York, NY) is one of the most popular as well as controversial artists on the contemporary art scene. Taking freely from the real world of people and objects, his works are an irreverent operation aimed at both art and institutions. His playful and provocative use of materials, objects, and gestures set in challenging contexts forces commentary and engagement.
Julie Curtiss (born in 1982, lives and works in Brooklyn, NY) focuses on the relationship between nature and culture in her figurative painting, sculpture and gouache on paper, exposing and reworking female archetypes through a surrealist sense of the uncanny. In a similar manner to Post-Impressionist painters, Curtiss mines her subjects from contemporary, everyday life, representing its curious, small details in cropped and ambiguous compositions that are erotically charged, and cinematic and dreamlike in feel, interweaving the general and specific in ways that are at once fantastical, precise and unsettling.
Wim Delvoye (born in 1965, lives and works between Ghent, Belgium and Brighton, United Kingdom) appropriates and diverts art-historical styles and motifs to sublimate trivial yet unconventional objects, and sometimes even living subjects. Constantly oscillating between antagonistic realms, such as the sacred and the profane or the local and the global, he sarcastically confronts the various myths that feed our contemporary society, from religion to science and capitalism, via unexpected hybridizations.
Nick Doyle (born in 1983, lives and works in Brooklyn, NY) is keenly aware of the legacy of the American notion of Manifest Destiny. Known best for sculptural wall works made from collaged denim, Doyle infiltrates the vocabulary of Americana to examine greed, excess, and toxic masculinity. Through a series of mechanical miniatures, theatrical scenery, and satirical prop-like denim works, the artist foregrounds the dangers of nostalgia and our evolving relationship to consumerism. By employing materials that hold cultural significance, the artist both reflects on and critiques social and political agendas that are often at play in contemporary life and visual culture.
Leslie Hewitt (born in 1977, lives and works between New York, NY and Houston, TX) isolates personal effects and the residue of material culture to consider the fragile nature of everyday life. Whether discreetly arranged in conceptually entangled layers or presented plainly, Hewitt often includes or is inspired by mementos such as family pictures, as well as books and vintage magazines that reference the Black literary and popular-cultures of her upbringing. Her practice as an artist points to the mechanisms of the construction of meaning and memory through decisively challenging both by unfolding formal, rather than didactic, connections in her contrapuntal compositions and distinctive take on spatiality.
Gregory Kalliche’s (lives and works in Brooklyn, NY) practice manifests the operations of infrastructural systems that are often unobserved or invisible. In particular, he is interested in the role of electricity, both as an immaterial force that powers virtually every aspect of daily existence, and as a potent space of metaphor-making. In his computer animations, installations, and sculptural work, Kalliche slyly entangles imagery drawn from stage magic, the supernatural, and pop culture with the operations of real-world systems we continually rely upon but often don’t fully consider or understand.
MSCHF (conceived in 2019, works in New York, NY) is a conceptual collective developing elaborate interventions that expose and leverage the absurdity of our cultural, political, and monetary systems. MSCHF provokes widespread public response as a means of performance, directly within the environments it critiques. Ultimately, the collective itself represents an intricate subversion of corporate structure, that seeks to challenge every sphere with which it comes into contact.
Elsa Hansen Oldham (born in 1983, lives and works in Louisville, KY) creates embroidered fiber works with an eccentric array of mini characters extracted from pop culture and history. Her works often portray provocative comparisons of public and religious figures, offering an artistic take on popular events, politics, and contemporary society. Using cross-stitching as a means of communication, Hansen Oldham's pieces intertwine tradition and pop culture.
Cate Pasquarelli (lives and works in Brooklyn, NY) Cate Pasquarelli’s sculptures depict desolate environments that take on the qualities of their inhabitants: their traditions, nostalgias, and unease toward the future. Steepled churches, colonial-style houses, and white picket fences – the loaded imagery one associates with pastoral American life – becomes distorted and deformed in her work. Pasquarelli’s recent sculptures center around small town life, drawing inspiration from New England landscapes and the stories of people who live there. They consider how collaborative memory and a pervasive herd mentality can stretch our version of the truth to form impossible histories.
Alex Prager (born 1979, lives and works in Los Angeles, CA) is known for her uncanny images and films that blur the line between artifice and reality to explore the human condition. Her distinctive use of archetypes, everyday objects, humor, and allegory allow her to explore dark and complex topics. Existential concerns are central to her practice, including collective and individual identities and the impact of technology on society. Like the psychological works of artists including Alfred Hitchcock, Edward Hopper, Pipilotti Rist, August Sanders, and Bill Viola, Prager’s work invites the viewer to contemplate the human experience by revealing that the extraordinary lurks within the ordinary.
