A Strange Familiar

Daniel Arsham, Leonard Baby, Maurizio Cattelan, Julie Curtiss, Wim Delvoye, Nick Doyle, Leslie Hewitt, Gregory Kalliche, MSCHF, Elsa Hansen Oldham, Cate Pasquarelli, Alex Prager

Perrotin New York is pleased to present A Strange Familiar, a group exhibition curated by Nick Doyle which asks us to step back and consider new perspectives on what is assumed to be known. Through sculpture, video installation, painting, and photography, the exhibition explores the slippery terrain between fact and memory.

The phrase A Strange Familiar evokes the eerie nostalgia of déjà vu or the uncanny recognition of something once intimate that is now foreign. Doyle brings together artists whose practices disorient the viewer by shifting scale, context, or meaning. Across varied mediums and sensibilities, the artworks on view, alter, rework, or construct new experiences of history, memory, and pop culture.

Daniel Arsham’s (b. 1980, lives and works in New York, NY) uchronic aesthetic revolves around his concept of fictional archaeology. Working in sculpture, architecture, drawing and film, he creates and crystallizes ambiguous in-between spaces or situations, and further stages what he refers to as future relics of the present. While the present, the future and the past poetically collide in his haunted yet playful visions between romanticism and pop art, Arsham also experiments with the timelessness of certain symbols and gestures across cultures.

Leonard Baby (b. 1996, lives and works in Brooklyn, NY) is an American multidisciplinary artist whose work encompasses painting, installation, and performance. His practice interrogates themes of sexuality, gender, and emotional identity, often combining personal experience with broader cultural commentary. Baby’s bold and provocative works have been exhibited nationally and internationally.

Maurizio Cattelan (b. 1960, lives and works in New York, NY) is one of the most popular as well as controversial artists on the contemporary art scene. Taking freely from the real world of people and objects, his works are an irreverent operation aimed at both art and institutions. His playful and provocative use of materials, objects, and gestures set in challenging contexts forces commentary and engagement.

Julie Curtiss (b. 1982, lives and works in Brooklyn, NY) focuses on the relationship between nature and culture in her figurative painting, sculpture and gouache on paper, exposing and reworking female archetypes through a surrealist sense of the uncanny. In a similar manner to Post-Impressionist painters, Curtiss mines her subjects from contemporary, everyday life, representing its curious, small details in cropped and ambiguous compositions that are erotically charged, and cinematic and dreamlike in feel, interweaving the general and specific in ways that are at once fantastical, precise and unsettling.

Wim Delvoye (b. 1965, lives and works between Ghent, Belgium and Brighton, United Kingdom) appropriates and diverts art-historical styles and motifs to sublimate trivial yet unconventional objects, and sometimes even living subjects. Constantly oscillating between antagonistic realms, such as the sacred and the profane or the local and the global, he sarcastically confronts the various myths that feed our contemporary society, from religion to science and capitalism, via unexpected hybridizations.