Oculus

Stan Buglass, Jake Hasapopoulos, David Linchen, Phoebe Nesgos, Charlotte Seux, Banks Violette

“The protest against mortality, the hunger for immortality and resurrection, bestowed an initial impulse to human creativity. [Nikolai] Fedorov remarks that it was out of a feeling of loss, out of protest against death that the first artistic monuments appeared. They were intended to recreate the image of the deceased through painting or sculpture, to restore his or her likeness at least as a representation.

Among the diverse, always aphoristic and figurative definitions that Fedorov gives to art, there is the following: art as “a countermeasure against the Fall.” Fedorov illustrates this definition with the example of architecture. Its creations are extended vertically, visibly demonstrating defiance of the law of gravity. This law embodies for Fedorov the force of nature’s necessity, which leads all organic and inorganic bodies towards decay, sin, and death. Architecture gathers and artistically organizes natural matter and creates out of it a new, perfect, and harmonious world. Architectural space is ruled by different laws—the laws developed and applied by humankind itself.”

—Anastasia Gacheva, “Art as the Overcoming of Death: From Nikolai Fedorov to the Cosmists of the 1920s”, e-flux , March 2018.

Sam Smith has worked at the gallery since 2023. Jake Hasapopoulos is an artist based in New York. This is their second curatorial effort together, and their first show with Lomex.