Tschabalala Self

Petzel is pleased to present the third installment of The Viewing Room, a series of presentations and events bringing together artists, curators, and historians in a rare encounter with new and seminal works. This iteration features three new paintings by Hudson Valley-based artist Tschabalala Self.

Coinciding with this presentation, Petzel is pleased to announce representation of the artist, in joint collaboration with Pilar Corrias, London and Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich.

Self’s presentation speaks to the artist’s recent investigations into repetition, pattern, and abstraction as they relate to both the individual and the collective subconscious. Self is an artist who builds a singular style from the syncretic use of painting, printmaking, and sculpture to explore ideas surrounding figuration. She constructs depictions of predominantly women using a combination of sewn, printed, and painted materials, traversing different artistic and craft traditions. The formal and conceptual aspects of Self’s work seek to expand her critical inquiry into selfhood and human flourishing.

Across this new suite of works, the fashioning of each figure reflects their imagined emotional, physical, and psychological states. In each painting, there exists a tension between foreground and background. Silhouettes emerge and disintegrate into the pictorial plane. Narratives arise and assumptions shift. Shown in unison, the characters, articulated through stitch and textile assemblage, engage varied iterations of a shared experience.

Heroine No. 2 depicts a female figure in a powerful pose, borrowed from the Virabhadrasana II yoga posture. This stance is named after Virabhadra, a mythological warrior avatar of the Hindu god Shiva, who is said to have a thousand arms and a body as dark as storm clouds. This protagonist exists in a liminal space of cascading flowers, speaking to her blossoming growth. She is depicted as transcendent, elevating forward into a new state of being, unmoved by the viewer.

In her practice, Self both accepts and rejects the fantasies and attitudes surrounding the Black body, and through this disorientation, new possibilities arise. Self imagines a cultural vacuum in which these bodies can exist for their own pleasure and self-realization, free from the othering gaze. Self’s figures do not aspire to show, explain, or perform, but rather to be.

The Viewing Room series spotlights specially curated works across media and genre by gallery artists, open to the public for a limited time. The series continues this fall, with presentations coinciding with programming such as book signings, artist talks, and screenings, featuring artists Stefanie Heinze, James Little, Seth Price, among others, to be announced.

Tschabalala Self (b. 1990 Harlem, New York) lives and works in the Hudson Valley, New York. Recent solo exhibitions and performances include Longlati Foundation, Shanghai (2025); Espoo Museum of Modern Art, Finland (2024); Kunstmuseum, St. Gallen (2023); Le Consortium, Dijon (2022); Performa 2021 Biennial, New York City (2021); Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore (2021); ICA, Boston (2020); among others.

Self’s work is included in collections such as Albertina Museum, Vienna, Austria; The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, USA; Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, USA; Consortium Museum, Dijon, France; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, USA; The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC, USA; ICA Boston, Boston, USA; Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, USA; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, USA; Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, Paris, France; Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, Los Angeles, USA; New Museum, New York, USA; Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, Germany; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, USA; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, USA; Stedelijk Museum Collection, Amsterdam, Netherlands; Studio Museum Harlem, New York, USA; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, USA; among others.

Shanekia McIntosh is an interdisciplinary artist rooted in poetry, performance, and installation. Her work explores memory and archives, guided by an insatiable curiosity and interest in philosophy and history. McIntosh uses her work to explore themes of time, dislocation, trauma, climate, passivity and action, and connectivity through the lens of digital culture, probing the stories we tell ourselves and interrogating who gets to tell them.

Her work has been in the New Museum, Second Ward Foundation, Charim, Portland Institute of Contemporary Art’s TBA Festival, Hudson Hall, NY Live Arts, and many others. In 2021, she released her debut chapbook, Spiral as Ritual, published by Topos Press. In 2023, McIntosh was an artist-in-residence at the International Studio and Curatorial Program in Brooklyn, NY, and the inaugural recipient of The Spark of Hudson Foundation Creative Arts Fellowship. Her first full-length poetry collection, A New Sense of Luxury, was published by Eureka! Press in April 2025.