Matthew Marks is pleased to announce Rebecca Warren: Metropolis, the next exhibition in his gallery at 522 West 22nd Street. The exhibition includes thirteen new hand-painted bronze sculptures.

Ten of the works are life-size female figures. Naked except for fragments and suggestions of clothing, their surfaces are wrought and pummelled. Features and expressions are in flux. Limbs multiply or dwindle, taking on unexpected shapes. Hands become a single digit or expand cartoonishly. Sometimes there's a twist of the hip and an angle to the head that occurs only when posing. Three appear to be nearly identical, two are engaged in some sort of duet, and the rest are solitary. Warren conceived of the figures as a group. “If they have a common enterprise,” she says, “it is the striving towards certainty, against slow-motion, uphill, dreamlike odds.”

Some of the figures are holding lengths of wood, variously cast in bronze or painted to look like other materials. Warren explains, “They appear to be tools or parts, but they also form and invade their bodies, perhaps they are attributes of resurrected saints holding the implements of their martyrdoms.” Another work, a large wooden construction, “might be a possible destination for or source of these pieces of timber,” she says. “These shifts point to the peculiar, uncertain territory that these uncannily animated figures occupy.”

Two assemblage works, cast in bronze, are also on view. In one sculpture, a length of timber joined with a sliver of board extends from an upturned plinth filled with clay. In another, a glass jar and a clay sausage sit on a painted cast bronze plinth. In these works, the artist has written, “individual elements clustered together gather a strange purpose, a kind of shadow-presence.”

The etymology of the show's title, Metropolis, breaks down as something like “mother city.” “The mood,” Warren describes, “is that of the creaking, detaching ice floe, the satellite broken out of its orbit, a hard to place, hard to name zone of viscous, displacing, iterating, and dissolving consciousness.”

Rebecca Warren (b. 1965) lives and works in London. Her work was included in the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011 and she has had one-person exhibitions at numerous museums, including the Belvedere 21 in Vienna, Dallas Museum of Art, Institut Giacometti in Paris, Tate St. Ives in the United Kingdom, and Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles in France.

Rebecca Warren: Metropolis will be on view at 522 West 22nd Street from May 9 to June 28, 2025, Tuesday through Saturday, from 10:00 AM to 6:00 PM.

For additional information please call 212-243-0200 or email inquiries@matthewmarks.com.

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