The New Museum Fall 2018 Season Line-Up

New York | United States

The bustling city of New York has always been a great source of inspiration, appreciation and cultivation for contemporary art. With its popularity growing daily, thanks to the help of the current pop-culture met with a new generation seemingly obsessed with art and self-expressionism, the movement is stronger than ever. Therefore the New Museum Fall 2018 season’s line-up is expected to attract a great number of art appreciators from around the country.

The New Museum Fall 2018 season’s line-up will see the Museum present the first US museum solo exhibitions of Marguerite Humeau and Marianna Simnett along with the exhibitions of Asli Cavusoglu and Chris E. Vargas as well as a new window installation on the Bowery by Dan Herschlein. Sarah Lucas: Au Naturel has been announced as the lead exhibition for the New Museum Fall 2018 season.

4 September 2018 – 6 January 2019

“Blood In My Milk” is the title of a new film, sound, and light installation by Marianna Simnett (b. 1986, Kingston-upon-Thames, United Kingdom) and the artist’s first institutional solo exhibition in the US. Bringing together new multi-screen edits of four of Simnett’s most important works to date—The Udder (2014), Blood (2015), Blue Roses (2015), and Worst Gift (2017)—this exhibition is a survey of her filmic universe and an exploration of 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 female organs, body parts, and infection through the lens of medical treatment and procedures.

In her film, light, and sound work, Simnett uses storytelling and fables of children and animals to guide a cast of characters through events that expose the subtle layers of violence and control that surround us. In “Blood In My Milk,” narratives bleed together: medical experts and scientists perform routine injections and operations that play out alongside paranoid tales of sickness and transformation, often with Simnett herself as the protagonist. Accompanied by a new soundtrack and choreography of lights that invade the space in moments when the storyline recedes, “Blood In My Milk” channels a discomfort with sterile environments and the invisible alien substances in our bodies, which medical and industrial procedures aim to conceal.

“Marianna Simnett: Blood In My Milk” is curated by Helga Christoffersen, Associate Curator.

4 September 2018 – 6 January 2019

The New Museum will present the first US solo museum exhibition by Marguerite Humeau (b. 1986, Cholet, France), debuting a new installation of sculpture and sound. Humeau’s work often centres on the origins of humankind and associated histories of language, love, spirituality, and war. Each of the artist’s projects is prefaced by a period of intense investigation during which she engages diverse authorities on her chosen subject, including historians, anthropologists, palaeontologists, zoologists, explorers, linguists, and engineers. Through her interdisciplinary, speculative inquiry, she enriches her own thinking as an artist and researcher and refashions historical quests to reflect the information age in which we live.

Humeau’s New Museum exhibition follows her recent solo presentations at Tate Britain and Palais de Tokyo and will feature a new body of digitally rendered sculptures realized in cast bronze and carved stone. The forms and scale of these works reflect the artist’s research into correspondences between the shapes of prehistoric Venus figurines and the contours of animal brains. In a darkened gallery space, a group of ten Venus-like figures will prophesize the extinction of their offspring—humankind—in an ominous scene of polyphonic trance. These sculptures will appear formally ambiguous, resembling brains, figures, or spirits of different ages and statuses, and will evoke mediums or visionaries engaged in a conversation that is part convocation and part choral lament. With allusions to animism, totemism, and spiritual travel, Humeau’s installation offers a forum for these imagined voices and premonitions and underscores the brevity of human existence relative to cosmic and geologic time.

Following its debut at the New Museum, Humeau’s exhibition will travel to Kunstverein Hamburg in February 2019, and Museion, Bolzano in September 2019.

The exhibition is curated by Natalie Bell, Associate Curator.

18 September 2018 – 13 January 2019

The New Museum will present the first US solo museum show of Aslı Çavuşoğlu (b. 1982, Istanbul, Turkey), featuring a new body of work realized for the exhibition. In her research-driven practice, Çavuşoğlu takes up questions of history and belief by examining objects, images, and cultural symbols that have endured over time. National identity and the mechanisms through which political projects are constructed are recurring concerns. Many of her works address narratives of the past and suppositions of the present through oral histories, archives, artifacts, and raw materials, such as those used for color pigments.

For her forthcoming New Museum exhibition and residency, part of a partnership with the Istanbul-based SAHA Association, Çavuşoğlu expands her ongoing research into the histories of specific colors, exploring the origins and trade history of lapis lazuli, a blue stone exported primarily from Afghan mines since the seventh century b.c. In her new body of work, Çavuşoğlu will create a wall of fresco panels, an artistic form that has traditionally incorporated lapis pigment; to this day, frescoes yield information about lapis lazuli’s trade and distribution, as well as its cultural symbolism. In her installation, Çavuşoğlu will trace the history of the color blue across centuries and diverse geographies—from Central Asia to Africa to Europe—following its transitions and shifting associations, from the sacred to the political to the emotional. Çavuşoğlu’s exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue featuring contributions by New Museum Associate Curator Natalie Bell, artist Mariana Castillo Deball, and independent curator and writer Amy Zion.

The exhibition is curated by Natalie Bell, Associate Curator.

4 September 2018 – 6 January 2019

In his performances, figurative sculptures, and drawings, Dan Herschlein (b. 1989, Bayville, NY) stages psychological tableaux that evoke feelings of isolation, anxiety and a fracturing of the self. His often life-size sculptural and relief works are meticulously crafted using cast plaster as well as common carpentry and furniture-making 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 wandering body parts to underscore how furniture, architecture, and bodies can all serve as vessels of memory and witnesses of loss.

Herschlein will present a new installation in the window of the New Museum’s 231 Bowery building. His project joins a new series of window installations that relaunches a program the New Museum originally mounted in the 1980s.

This project is curated by Natalie Bell, Associate Curator.