The first American survey of Sarah Lucas leads the season, joined by solo exhibitions by Marguerite Humeau, Marianna Simnett, Aslı Çavuşoğlu, and Chris E. Vargas, and a window installation by Dan Herschlein.
Sarah Lucas: Au Naturel
September 26, 2018–January 20, 2019
Second, Third, and Fourth Floors
The New Museum will present the first American survey of work by British artist Sarah Lucas. Over the past 30 years, Lucas has created a distinctive and provocative body of work that subverts traditional notions of gender, sexuality, and identity. She transforms found objects and everyday materials including cigarettes, vegetables, and stockings into absurd, confrontational tableaux that boldly challenge social norms. This presentation, occupying the three main floors of the Museum, will bring together more than 150 works in photography, sculpture, and installation to reveal the breadth and ingenuity of her practice. The exhibition will address the ways in which Lucas’s works engage with crucial debates about gender and power along with the legacy of Surrealism—as with her explorations of sexual ambiguity and the tension between the familiar and the disorienting or absurd. The exhibition is curated by Massimiliano Gioni, Edlis Neeson Artistic Director, and Margot Norton, Curator, and is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue copublished by the New Museum and Phaidon Press.
Marguerite Humeau: Birth Canal
September 4, 2018–January 6, 2019
South Galleries
The New Museum will present the first US solo museum exhibition by Marguerite Humeau, debuting a new installation of sculpture, sound, and scent. For Birth Canal, Humeau investigates the origins of Venus figurines, prehistoric female goddess statuettes found throughout the world; she also expands on the idea that early modern humans may have ingested animal brains for their psychoactive effects. The exhibition will feature ten digitally rendered sculptures realized in cast bronze and carved stone, which beckon the viewer into a dark space that smells faintly sweet and mineral-like, its odor inspired by bodily liquids associated with birth. Seen and heard in an ominous state of polyphonic trance, the figures prophesy the future extinction of their offspring, humankind. With allusions to animism, totemism, and spiritual travel, Humeau’s installation creates a forum for these imagined voices and premonitions, and underscores the brevity of human existence relative to cosmic and geologic time. The exhibition is curated by Natalie Bell, Associate Curator.
Marianna Simnett: Blood In My Milk
September 4, 2018–January 6, 2019
South Galleries
Blood In My Milk, a new film and sound installation by Marianna Simnett, is the artist’s first institutional solo exhibition in the US. Featuring new multiscreen edits of four of Simnett’s most important works to date—The Udder (2014), Blood (2015), Blue Roses (2015), and Worst Gift (2017)—the exhibition surveys her filmic universe and explores her ongoing preoccupation with anxieties around the body and the self. Experienced as one continuous narrative across five screens, this presentation chronicles Simnett’s close look at bodies and infection through the lens of medical procedures and treatments. The exhibition is curated by Helga Christoffersen, Associate Curator.
Aslı Çavuşoğlu: The Place of Stone
September 18, 2018–January 13, 2019
Lobby Gallery
The Place of Stone, Aslı Çavuşoğlu’s first US solo museum exhibition, comprises a mural-like grid of fresco panels painted with ultramarine pigments. With this new work, realized for her New Museum presentation, Çavuşoğlu extends her ongoing research into the histories of specific colors, focusing on the origins and history of lapis lazuli, a semiprecious blue stone sourced primarily from Afghan mines. Çavuşoğlu’s use of fresco, a medium that has traditionally incorporated lapis pigment, calls upon traces of this history: to this day, frescos yield information about the trade of lapis lazuli and its symbolism across centuries and cultures. Çavuşoğlu’s exhibition is curated by Natalie Bell, Associate Curator, and will be accompanied by a catalogue featuring contributions by Bell, artist Mariana Castillo Deball, anthropologist Michael Taussig, and independent curator and writer Amy Zion.
MOTHA and Chris E. Vargas: Consciousness Razing—The Stonewall Re-Memorialization Project
September 26, 2018–February 3, 2019
Fifth Floor
MOTHA and Chris E. Vargas: Consciousness Razing—The Stonewall Re-Memorialization Project will be the exhibition and residency presented through the Department of Education and Public Engagement’s Fall 2018 R&D Season: Generation. Vargas is the founder and executive director of the Museum of Transgender Hirstory & Art (MOTHA), a semifictional institution that serves as a malleable platform for exhibiting transgender art and hirstory. This iteration of the project will consider Stonewall as a geographically, demographically, and historically contested site. Throughout MOTHA’s four-month exhibition, Vargas will question what we know about the 1969 Stonewall riots in New York, often cited as a formative event for gay liberation and the modern LGBTQI rights movement in the US. In order to expand the way this history is memorialized, MOTHA has invited an intergenerational group of artists to propose new monuments to Stonewall. The exhibition is curated by Johanna Burton, Keith Haring Director and Curator of Education and Public Engagement, and Sara O’Keeffe, Associate Curator, with Kate Wiener, Curatorial Assistant.
Dan Herschlein: The Architect
September 4, 2018–January 6, 2019
Storefront Window
Dan Herschlein will present a new installation that invites viewers to peer through false window frames behind the New Museum’s Storefront Window. Herschlein meticulously constructs life-size sculptural and relief works using cast plaster and common carpentry materials such as wood, joint compound, and wax. The fragmented spaces he creates suggest the uncanny atmosphere of nightmares, merging markers of domesticity—sofas, tables, recliners, and windows—with human figures or severed limbs. The Architect alludes to the architectures of the mind and explores how bodies and interior spaces can serve as vessels of memory, symbols of longing, or witnesses of loss. This project is curated by Natalie Bell, Associate Curator.