Wild Strawberries

Group Exhibition

September 30 – November 19, 2022

Lucas Samaras, Untitled, 1965. Mixed media. 18 × 18 × 18 in. © Lucas Samaras. Courtesy Pace Gallery.

Wild Strawberries is an intergenerational exhibition featuring 17 artists whose works traffic in the dreamlike exchange between threat and seduction.

Inspired by Ingmar Bergman’s 1957 cinematic masterpiece, the exhibition brings together sculpture, painting, photography, and film by a wide range of artists, including Lynda Benglis, Lee Bontecou, Julie Curtiss, Alex Da Corte, Doreen Lynette Garner, Robert Gober, David Hammons, Deana Lawson, Shahryar Nashat, Brandon Ndife, Kathleen Ryan, Lucas Samaras, Max Hooper Schneider, Kiki Smith, Paul Thek, Hannah Wilke, and Zhang Huan.

Hannah Wilke, S.O.S. Starification Object Series (Curlers), 1974. Gelatin silver print. 40 × 263/8 in. Private Collection, Courtesy Acquavella Galleries. © Scharlatt, Hannah Wilke Collection & Archive, Los Angeles/VAGA at ARS, NY

Wild Strawberries cultivates a garden of widely divergent practices, which germinate and transform the body. Probing the power of sensation, the works investigate art’s capacity to stimulate pleasure and incite horror in the same gesture. The exhibition is grounded in the work of key figures of the post-1960s generation who mobilized the aesthetics of bodily abjection toward fascinating, disturbing, and political ends.

The nightmarish forms of Bontecou are juxtaposed with the exquisite formlessness of Benglis, and the corporeal poetry of Wilke contrasts with the cruel delights of Samaras and Thek. Engaging the viewer on a visceral level, these works are brought into dialogue with sculpture and photography from the 1980s and ‘90s by Hammons, Smith, Gober, and Zhang in which the language of abjection has become infused with struggles of power, politics, race, and gender.

Deana Lawson, Portal, 2017. Inkjet print. 43 × 53 in. Courtesy of the artist, David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles and New York, and Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York

Oscillating between feelings of repulsion and attraction, Wild Strawberries traces this dialogue further in the work of an emerging cohort of contemporary artists, including Da Corte, Curtiss, Garner, Lawson, Nashat, Ndife, Ryan, and Schneider. Their practices draw on earlier precedents while forging new cross-pollination between painting, sculpture, film, photography, and installation.

Artists in the Exhibition

Lynda Benglis (b. 1941)

Lee Bontecou (b. 1931)

Julie Curtiss (b. 1982)

Alex Da Corte (b. 1980)

Doreen Lynette Garner (b. 1986)

Robert Gober (b. 1954)

David Hammons (b. 1943)

Deana Lawson (b. 1979)

Shahryar Nashat (b. 1975)

Brandon Ndife (b. 1991)

Kathleen Ryan (b. 1984)

Lucas Samaras (b. 1936)

Max Hooper Schneider (b. 1982)

Kiki Smith (b. 1954)

Paul Thek (1933 – 1988)

Hannah Wilke (1940 – 1993)

Zhang Huan (b. 1966)

The exhibition also includes a selection of excerpts from feature films, curated by Vito Adriaensens, by the following filmmakers: Ingmar Bergman, Luis Buñuel, Maya Deren, Georges Franju, Peter Greenaway, Mati Diop, Céline Sciamma, and Clive Barker.

The exhibition will remain on view through November 19, 2022.

Paul Thek, Untitled (detail) (from the series Technological Reliquaries), circa 1966–67. Wax, wood, metal, hair, plaster, paint, and Plexiglas with wig and fabric. Photo: Richard Grey © Estate of George Paul Thek, Courtesy Alexander and Bonin, New York

Selected Works

Selected Works Thumbnails

Paul Thek sculpture "Untitled (Hand with Ring)" from 1967. Wood, plaster, paint, and metal.

Paul Thek. Untitled (Hand with Ring), 1967.
Wood, plaster, paint, and metal.

Kathleen Ryan's sculpture Bad Melon (Rainbow) from 2022, made from beads of Calcite, serpentine, prehnite, rhodonite, amazonite, aquamarine, onyx, jasper, ruby in zoisite, turquoise, labradorite, rose quartz, agate, carnelian, magnesite, marble, acrylic, steel pins on coated polystyrene, Volkswagen hood; with dimensions of 21.5" H x 90" L x 29" W

Kathleen Ryan, Bad Melon (Rainbow), 2022.
Calcite, serpentine, prehnite, rhodonite, amazonite, aquamarine, onyx, jasper, ruby in zoisite, turquoise, labradorite, rose quartz, agate, carnelian, magnesite, marble, acrylic, steel pins on coated polystyrene, Volkswagen hood. 21.5" H x 90" L x 29" W