The Shape of What You Lived

Francesco Clemente, Todd Gray, Hayv Kahraman, Jitish Kallat, Byron Kim, Guillermo Kuitca, Richard Long, David Lynch, Christopher Myers, Bruce Nauman, Peter Sacks, Kyungmi Shin, William Wegman

Sperone Westwater is pleased to present The Shape of What You Lived. Borrowing its title from Rainer Maria Rilke's poem Remembrance, the exhibition brings together artists who transform diaristic practice and personal record into visual form through text, texture, material and mark.

In the main gallery, the works examine memory and reflect the artists' interior worlds. Through fragmented imagery in the composition, Guillermo Kuitca's monumental Untitled (2008) creates an indecipherable map evoking absence, disorientation and drift. In Flower (2020), David Lynch assembles a wounded face and scattered text that conjures a dreamlike state. Hayv Kahraman's HyperInvisible 3 (2019) presents a contorted, abstracted female figure - an avatar for consciousness shaped by colonial violence. In Spirit Marker (2023), Peter Sacks constructs a sculptural relief from fragments of clothing, electronics and jewelry. These layered materials evoke a psychological terrain shaped by loss and survival, where the detritus of daily life become vessels for remembrance.

In the east gallery, works by Todd Gray and Kyungmi Shin consider how individual narratives are shaped by historical forces. Shin's to be appetite of your own appetite (2024) layers archival family photographs with painting to explore myth, ornament and the legacy of empires, reflecting her experience as an Asian diasporic artist in the U.S. In Other tellings (Sedabuda, Florence, Paris) (2024), Gray assembles photographs of a sculpture in Le Jardin des Tuileries flanked by self-portraits of the artist covered in shaving cream, questioning whiteness and notions of self. He continually collects and mines his own image library--a process he describes as "appropriating his own archive"--to create sculptural constructions that fuse personal and institutional memory. On the second floor, Christopher Myers's textile work reinterprets the myth of Telemachus, offering a parable about the search for origins and identity. As Myers writes: "History is the story of where you have come from, mythology is the story of why and where you are going."

Also on the second floor, Bruce Nauman and William Wegman capture everyday rituals as metaphors for artistic practice. In Setting a Good Corner (Allegory & Metaphor) (1999), Nauman documents the building of a fence on his New Mexico ranch, transforming a practical chore into a meditation on the art of living: patience, preparation, laying a foundation, taking advice, thinking in stages and doing what's necessary. Wegman's Three to Four (1971-72) presents 81 permutations of three men engaged in mundane actions - listening to the radio, drinking a Coke, reading the newspaper - transforming routine gestures into a study of variation, sequence and habit.

On the third floor, the exhibition shifts focus to the self in relation to landscape and the passage of time. Richard Long's Houston Circle, originally created for a 1996 exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston from local materials, reflects a core tenet of his practice: "every work in the landscape is absolutely a meeting place of who I am and the topography." Installed nearby are three panels from Byron Kim's Sunday Paintings series; since 2001, Kim has painted a square of the sky each week paired with handwritten notes--brief reflections that form an ongoing record of time, weather and mood. In Wind Study (Hilbert Curve) (2017), Jitish Kallat overlays graphite drawings with flammable liquid and ignites the surface, allowing wind and smoke to mark the page. The resulting images, shaped by invisible forces, echo his interest in patterns that repeat across nature and history.