Anna Uddenberg

Meredith Rosen Gallery presents White Noise, a solo exhibition by Anna Uddenberg.

For her highly anticipated exhibition at Meredith Rosen, Anna Uddenberg has converted the gallery into a site of workroom depravity. In midtown Manhattan, the epicenter of corporate skyscrapers, female figures in grey skirt suits and stiletto heels are merged with office chairs whose ergonomic design has been extended to hold each body in extreme positions of submission. A grid of acoustic hush panels is arranged to contain seven new sculptures in semi-isolation. Conflating the modular logic of the contemporary “openfloorplan” office and Minimalist sculpture, Uddenberg divides the space in a flimsy, almost imaginary way—performing the feeling of privacy without actually providing it.

Instead, space becomes an environment for intense supervision. Invested in the economic systems that produce the objects which furnish utilitarian environments on a mass scale, Uddenberg’s sculptures are agglomerations of deeply familiar surfaces of public life. The starting point for this exhibition was the infamous Herman Miller Aeron office chair, whose designer Bill Stumpf said “I work best when I’m pushed to the edge. When I’m at the point where my pride is subdued, when I’m innocent again.” Uddenberg folds these morally encoded design principles back on themselves into hypersexualized objects whose functionality has been exhausted.

Building on her previous exhibitions wherein sculptures were activated through live performance, in White Noise Uddenberg integrates the performance into objects suspended in a state of unending production. Mirroring back our rapid appetite for consumption and our willing submission to its machine, Rem Koolhaas’s conception of the Junkspace is brought to its extreme—architectures which finally invade the body and reconfigure it in an increasingly incoherent amalgamation. Functionality as a means for control is contorted here into a fantasy which has no exit.

Anna Uddenberg (b. 1982 Sweden) is a Berlin-based artist known for her sculptural and performative practice, which explores the merging of the body and self with technology. Recent exhibitions include Kunsthalle Mannheim (2023); Perimeter, London (2023); Taipei Fine Arts Museum (2023); Mendes Wood DM, Sao Paolo (2023), Plato, Ostrava (2023), Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin (2022), Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin (2021); Berghain Panoramabar, Berlin (2020); Marciano Foundation, Los Angeles (2019); Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn (2019); Museum Folkwang, Essen (2019); Powerlong Museum, Shanghai (2019); 14. Fellbach Triennale (2019); the 33rd Biennial of Graphic Arts in Ljubljana (2019); Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin (2019); Migros Museum, Zürich (2019); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2018); Spazio Maiocchi, Milan (solo; 2018); nGbK, Berlin (2018); Centre Régional d’Art Contemporain Occitaine, Sète (2018); Splendid Cleaners, New York (2018); Athens Biennale, Athens (2018); Evoluon, Eindhoven (2018); Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, Sankt Gallen (2018); House of Gaga, Mexico City (2017); Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne (2017); Kiasma–Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki (2017); Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw (2017); Kamel Mennour, Paris (2017) and at Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin (2017). Uddenberg was the 2020 artist fellow for Black Cube Museum in Denver, CO. This is Uddenberg’s second exhibition at Meredith Rosen Gallery, New York.