Wild Strawberries

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.

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.

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.