© » KADIST
Sable Elyse Smith
Sable Elyse Smith’s Pivot III resembles playground equipment uselessly reconfigured. The stainless-steel asterisks, assembled from prison visitation-room seating, are painted 2K black and blue: colors evoking the US criminal justice system, its racist enforcement, and the heavy-duty finish of finance capitalism with which the culture industry is enmeshed. The work consists of six long rods, affixed via plate to each of the faces of a central cube, from which they radiate in perfect symmetry.
© » KADIST
American Artist
From suicides, to gang violence, to the epidemic abuse of force by police departments (predominantly against Black men), to school and mass shootings, there is perhaps no more urgent issue in the United States than gun control. The color blue is a proxy for both sadness, and a color that is emblematic of American law enforcement services. I Am Blue, 1 by American Artist is a sculpture that fuses a school desk with a ballistic shield.
© » KADIST
Cynthia Gutiérrez
Estratos II by artist Cynthia Gutiérrez features a large white plinth with a transversal cut through the lower half, revealing a collection of archeological objects. These pieces of history have seemingly been lost to time and have lived covered under a sterile exterior. To create the ceramic objects for this project, Gutiérrez worked closely with an artist that creates Mesoamerican replicas.
© » KADIST
Marina Rosenfeld
The installation Music Stands: Free Exercise 7, 8, and 9 by Marina Rosenfeld consists of music stand-like structures and a corresponding set of panels and acoustic devices that direct, focus, obstruct, reflect and project sound in the gallery. Together the components play on the connection between aural and social relations signified by the music stands. An episodic score emanates from the work’s sound system, momentarily interrupting the atmosphere with brief eruptions of electronic sounds and vocality.
© » KADIST
Adriana Lara
Lara uses things readily at hand to create objects and situations that interrogate the processes of art and the spectrum of roles that art and artists play in society. To these ends, she has used furniture, projections, photographs, clothing, and even people as her materials. A reflection on how the production of meaning itself takes place in the manufacturing of things is embodied in wooden hand chairs, a crafty Indonesian version of the iconic Pedro Friedeberg 1960s Pop design.
© » KADIST
Taiyo Kimura
Haunted by You documents Taiyo Kimura’s struggle to use a record player, satirizing the normal actions of everyday life in order to question the meanings that underlie ordinary modes of living. The performance narrative unfolds upon the circular movements of the turntable. A chicken’s leg replaces the turntable’s arm.
© » KADIST
Benoît Maire
The piece consists of sculpture of 10 elements, among them: a globe, a picture of a gorilla, a chair, scrabble letters, 3 glasses of black ink, a book whose title is illuminated by the beam of a 8mm projector, a pair of boots, etc. The display is a collection of selected objects chosen in response to the reading of a text by Alain Badiou (the first chapter of the seminar “Le réel est l’impasse de la formalisation; la formalisation est le lieu de passe en force du réel” from February 4, 1975). The elements are a visual way to question the transposition of an idea into reality.
© » KADIST
Jiri Kovanda
This ephemeral installation by Jirí Kovanda, documented in the same way as his performances with a photograph and a text, belongs to a body of works that took place in his apartment/studio. During an interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist, the artist highlighted that he had never had a studio and that this work space blended with his apartment. A piece of string cuts across the room in a diagonal; it functions as a scale to measure time and space.
© » KADIST
Frieda Toranzo Jaeger
This triptych is based on a Tesla whose interior the artist customized on the Tesla website. The width of the work when the panels are closed is the exact width of a Tesla, thus one designed to hold two bodies side by side. In Mexico City the car is used as a social space and, for young people, one not controlled by parents.
© » KADIST
Cameron Rowland
Rowland’s minimal installations require a focus not on the objects themselves, but on the conditions of their creation, use, and distribution. Who controls the services that contemporary citizens take for granted—like power, water, heat? Who makes these objects that deliver these services?
© » KADIST
Vaclav Pozarek
Concerning his objects, Pozarek often relies on chance to guide him. He uses scraps of wood, boxes, hinges and doors, keeping a close eye on what position each object will assume later in the space. Although it suggests the opposite at first glance, Zwillinge is autonomous and functionless.
© » KADIST
John Menick
The theme of the end of the world, of the last man on earth, recurs in our literary and cinematographic culture and in our imaginary: “we had this dream before, the dream that we’re alone.” In The Secret Life of Things , the narrator presents himself as an enthusiast and expert on films announcing the end of the world and those staging someone waking up to discover that they are the only survivor on earth. Like in some works by Mario Garcia Torres (like The Transparencies of the Non-Act , a slide projection about the artist Oscar Neuestern, Kadist Collection), the artist lends his discourse to a stranger. Mastering the montage, he intersperses a monologue and images.
© » KADIST
Matt Mullican
Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)
Mullican’s Stick Figure Drawings depict characters reduced to their most basic graphic representation. Glen is a simple silhouette, genderless and inspired by a found photo of a crime scene, in whom we recognize the generic sign of the universal symbol of a self-portrait. Mullican continually projects himself, sometimes physically, into the silhouette that he has created, allowing the artist to pass from one reality to another.
© » KADIST
Orion Shepherd
Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)
Ballad of the Unabomber Part I is a painting by Orion Shepherd that features several manila folders stacked in order according to their size, resting atop a grainy hardwood pattern. The painting refers to Theodore John Kaczynski, most commonly known as the Unabomber, and depicts the seemingly innocuous manila envelopes, which through his hands became fatal explosive weapons. Despite the deplorable actions that earned Kaczynski a life sentence, the manifesto that he demanded to be published has been regarded by many as a sane and highly intelligent work, correct in several of his ideas.
© » KADIST
Oscar Tuazon
Oscar Tuazon‘s sculptural oeuvre is situated at the border of art, architecture and technology. Engaging different methods of construction, he frequently uses wood, concrete, glass, steel, and piping as materials to create his structures and installations. Tuazon’s works have roots in minimalism, conceptualism, and architecture, and have a direct relationship with both the site in which they are presented, as well as with their viewer, often through physical engagement.
© » KADIST
Alejandro Almanza Pereda
This still life falls apart, or rather floats apart as the composition is proved unstable and constantly morphing. An impossible attempt at achieving a fixed state, some objects remain buoyant and some objects sink, constantly tilting the overall scale and arrangement. Properties of weight, mass and shape have their own will but a hand appears in the scene, pushing back on these mysterious forces.
© » KADIST
Yuji Agematsu
Each day, Yuji Agematsu smokes a pack of cigarettes and wanders the streets of New York City looking for trash. Needless to say, he finds it everywhere: bottle caps, gummed hair, translucent miscellany, sick feathers, hot pink plastics, unknown, and more. The varied bits are then constellated by the artist in cellophane cigarette wrappers—modest vitrines for his steady collecting habit.
© » KADIST
Jiri Kovanda
Kovanda’s street interventions are always documented according to the same format as the actions: a piece of A4 paper, a typewritten text giving a precise location and date, and a photograph. Contrarily to the actions, he took the photographs himself. One of the rules he stuck to in his artistic practice was to always use material at his disposal, a real economy of means.
© » KADIST
Marlon de Azambuja
Following a series of related works, Brutalismo Americano by Marlon de Azambuja is a site-specific sculptural installation produced during the artist’s residency at Kadist, San Francisco in 2017. Treating the city as an object of attention, de Azambuja collected building materials from the surrounding area over a period of ten days to conceive of an architecture in situ. The work is not meant to mimic any of San Francisco’s own architecture, or to be a maquette or portrait of the cityscape, but instead a singular, constructive gesture.
© » KADIST
Zai Kuning
Justice (2014) presents viewers with a curious assemblage: a wooden gallows with slightly curved spindles protruding from the topmost plank, which in turn is covered with rudimentary netting, the threads slackly dangling like a loose spider’s web or an rib cage that’s been cracked open. A bundle of small red rattan balls hang from the front end of the plank, precariously knotted to a single thread hanging from the gallows’ edge. A book hangs from similar red threads at the plank’s rear, its surfaced wrapped multiple times over with the thread to hold it in place, the red thread resembling blood vessels or connective tissue.
© » KADIST
Dale Harding
Dale Harding’s installation Body of Objects consists of eleven sculptural works that the artist based on imagery found at sandstone sites across Carnarvon Gorge in Central Queensland. Mouth-blown with ochre on sandstone, these extraordinary stencilled images depict weaponry, domestic tools, and ceremonial objects that are specific to the region and that relate to Harding’s own ancestry. In response to these enduring indexes of Indigenous material culture, Harding produced a suite of cast objects using the stencilled imagery as a guide, along with objects that relate to his family history: boomerangs, spears, clubs, and whips are all part of the display.
© » KADIST
Marcelo Cidade
This series of photographs reflects Marcelo Cidade’s incessant walks or drifting through the city and his chance encounters with a certain street poetry like the Surrealists or Situationists before him. He captures incongruities or everyday simplicity and highlights their suggestive power. The composition and framing of these interventions specially emphasizes the object of interest and the humor of the context.
© » KADIST
Haegue Yang
A steel clothing rack adorned with turbine vents, Moroccan vintage jewelry, pinecones and knitting yarn, these heterogeneous elements are used here to create an exotic yet undefined identity within the work. Following Haegue Yang’s 2010 anthropomorphic series Medicine Men, this sculpture appears as a shamanic objet or being. It is mobile and can be activated.
© » KADIST
John Houck
Houck’s Peg and John was made as part of a series of photographic works that capture objects from the artist’s childhood. In this image, drafting materials (pencils, compasses, and protractors) are laid out next to shotgun shell casings. Presenting these objects in juxtaposition but without commentary, Houck offers a partial but interesting glimpse into his own biography.
© » KADIST
Erin Shirreff
Erin Shirreff’s A. P. series of prints investigates how objects are “constructed” at the level of the image. For each composite photograph, Shirreff fabricates two sculptural forms from what appear to be metal or plaster, although the precise materials are unidentified. Her sculptures resemble miniature architectural models or renderings of buildings as-yet-to-be fully conceptualized, both elemental and elegant in their use of sharp angles and clean lines.
Jiri Kovanda
- location: Praha, Ceská Republika
- year born: 1953
- gender: male
- nationality: Czech
Matt Mullican
- location: Santa Monica, United States
- year born: 1951
- gender: male
- nationality: American
Abraham Cruzvillegas
- location: Mexico
- year born: 1968
- gender: male
- nationality: Mexican
- home town: Mexico City, Mexico
Orion Shepherd
Orion Shepherd is a Los Angeles based artist working across drawing, collage, painting and sculpture...
Cameron Rowland
Cameron Rowland bases his practice on re-contextualizing everyday objects in ways to highlight the economic and political forces that influence our immediate surroundings, exposing dynamics that are often overlooked, hiding in plain sight...
Haegue Yang
- location: Berlin, Germany & Seoul, South Korea
- year born: 1971
- gender: female
- nationality: Korean
- home town: Seoul, South Korea
Li Ming
- location: Beijing, China
- year born: 1979
- gender: male
- nationality: Chinese
- home town: Sichuan Province, China
American Artist
American Artist makes experimental work in the form of sculpture, video, and software that comments on histories of race, technology and forms of knowledge production...
Mateo Lopez
- location: Bogota, Colombia
- year born: 1978
- gender: male
- nationality: Colombian
- home town: Bogota, Colombia
Marlon de Azambuja
Based on ideas of architecture, and by means of appropriation of public space and studio-based material operations, Marlon de Azambuja’s work creates new idioms for thinking and inhabiting the built environment...
Yang Xinguang
- location: Beijing, China
- year born: 1980
- gender: male
- nationality: Chinese
- home town: Hunan Province, China
Frieda Toranzo Jaeger
Many of Frieda Toranzo Jaeger’s works take the triptych format, employed by artists over many centuries to represent religious devotion...
Pratchaya Phinthong
Pratchaya Phintong’s works often arise from the confrontation between different social, economic, or geographical systems...
Marina Rosenfeld
Marina Rosenfeld is a New York-based composer and artist working across disciplines...
Martin Creed
- location: Wakefield, United Kingdom
- year born: 1968
- gender: male
- nationality: British
Yuji Agematsu
Yuji Agematsu is an artist who works across various media, including sound, photography, and the arrangements of objects—not exactly sculpture...
Adriana Lara
Adriana Lara is fascinated by how a single thing (an object, a photograph, a song, a text) can be transformed into a work of art...
Alejandro Almanza Pereda
Alejandro Almanza Pereda has a heightened understanding of the essence of objects...
Pio Abad
In his practice, Pio Abad looks into the social and political significance of objects usually consigned to the sidelines of history...
Sarah Conaway
- location: Los Angeles, California
- year born: 1972
- gender: female
- nationality: American
- home town: York, Pennsylvania
Sable Elyse Smith
Sable Elyse Smith is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and educator based in New York and Richmond, Virginia...
Heman Chong
- year born: 1977
- gender: male
- nationality: Singaporean
- home town: Muar, Malaysia
Vaclav Pozarek
Growing up in Czechoslovakia, Vaclav Pozarek experienced political aggression, spying and ludicrous impediments...
Gabriel Orozco
- location: New York City, Paris
- location: Mexico
- year born: 1962
- gender: male
- nationality: Mexican
- home town: Jalapa, Mexico
John Menick
Rather like the narrator in the video belonging to the Kadist collection, The secret life of things, the artist John Menick is a ‘professional spectator’...
Zai Kuning
- year born: 1964
- gender: male
- nationality: Singaporean
- home town: Singapore
Engel Leonardo
Working with various mediums, from sculpture to installation, site-specific interventions, and readymades, Leonardo Engel addresses issues related to the climate, nature, traditional crafts, architecture, and popular culture of the Caribbean...
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1970-1979
Jiri Kovanda
1979This ephemeral installation by Jirí Kovanda, documented in the same way as his performances with a photograph and a text, belongs to a body of works that took place in his apartment/studio...
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1980-1989
Jiri Kovanda
1980Kovanda’s street interventions are always documented according to the same format as the actions: a piece of A4 paper, a typewritten text giving a precise location and date, and a photograph...
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1990-1999
Gabriel Orozco
1994Charco portátil congelado (Frozen Portable Puddle, 1994) is a photographic record of an installation of the same name that Gabriel Orozco made at Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam for the group exhibition WATT (1994)...
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2000-2009
Alexandre da Cunha
2005His Deck Painting I recalls the simplistic stripes of conceptual artist Daniel Buren, or the minimal lines of twentieth century abstract painting, but is in reality a readymade, fashioned from repurposed fabric of deck chairs...
John Menick
2006The theme of the end of the world, of the last man on earth, recurs in our literary and cinematographic culture and in our imaginary: “we had this dream before, the dream that we’re alone.” In The Secret Life of Things , the narrator presents himself as an enthusiast and expert on films announcing the end of the world and those staging someone waking up to discover that they are the only survivor on earth...
Benoît Maire
2006The piece consists of sculpture of 10 elements, among them: a globe, a picture of a gorilla, a chair, scrabble letters, 3 glasses of black ink, a book whose title is illuminated by the beam of a 8mm projector, a pair of boots, etc...
Marcelo Cidade
2006This series of photographs reflects Marcelo Cidade’s incessant walks or drifting through the city and his chance encounters with a certain street poetry like the Surrealists or Situationists before him...
Heman Chong
2009With a habit of reading eight to ten books at the same time, Chong paints his two-foot tall novel covers through referencing an extensive reading list (accessible on Facebook) he has kept since 2006...
Yang Xinguang
2009Although seemingly unadorned at first glance, Yang Xinguang’s sculptural work Phenomena (2009) employs minimalist aesthetics as a means of gesturing towards the various commonalities and conflicts between civilization and the natural world...
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2010-2019
Orion Shepherd
Drawing & Print
2010(Drawing & Print) Ballad of the Unabomber Part I is a painting by Orion Shepherd that features several manila folders stacked in order according to their size, resting atop a grainy hardwood pattern...
Taiyo Kimura
2010Haunted by You documents Taiyo Kimura’s struggle to use a record player, satirizing the normal actions of everyday life in order to question the meanings that underlie ordinary modes of living...
Dineo Seshee Bopape
2012Interested in the collection of object and their potential to evoke various emotional reactions in the audience, Bopape’s “Why do you call me when you know I can’t answer the phone” is an invitation into the limitless netherworld of the unsaid and unspoken...
John Houck
2013Houck’s Peg and John was made as part of a series of photographic works that capture objects from the artist’s childhood...
Adriana Lara
2014Lara uses things readily at hand to create objects and situations that interrogate the processes of art and the spectrum of roles that art and artists play in society...
Zai Kuning
2014Justice (2014) presents viewers with a curious assemblage: a wooden gallows with slightly curved spindles protruding from the topmost plank, which in turn is covered with rudimentary netting, the threads slackly dangling like a loose spider’s web or an rib cage that’s been cracked open...
Oscar Tuazon
2014Oscar Tuazon‘s sculptural oeuvre is situated at the border of art, architecture and technology...
Cameron Rowland
2014Rowland’s minimal installations require a focus not on the objects themselves, but on the conditions of their creation, use, and distribution...
Alejandro Almanza Pereda
2015This still life falls apart, or rather floats apart as the composition is proved unstable and constantly morphing...
Yuji Agematsu
2015Each day, Yuji Agematsu smokes a pack of cigarettes and wanders the streets of New York City looking for trash...
Haegue Yang
2016A steel clothing rack adorned with turbine vents, Moroccan vintage jewelry, pinecones and knitting yarn, these heterogeneous elements are used here to create an exotic yet undefined identity within the work...
Marlon de Azambuja
2017Following a series of related works, Brutalismo Americano by Marlon de Azambuja is a site-specific sculptural installation produced during the artist’s residency at Kadist, San Francisco in 2017...
Frieda Toranzo Jaeger
2017This triptych is based on a Tesla whose interior the artist customized on the Tesla website...
Matt Mullican
Drawing & Print
2018(Drawing & Print) Mullican’s Stick Figure Drawings depict characters reduced to their most basic graphic representation...
Dale Harding
2018Dale Harding’s installation Body of Objects consists of eleven sculptural works that the artist based on imagery found at sandstone sites across Carnarvon Gorge in Central Queensland...
Pratchaya Phinthong
2018Untitled (Ring) consists of two prominent elements contained in water filled glass sphere...
Mélanie Matranga
2018My Shape (2018) is the final work of the exhibition “Sorry”, taking the form of a Levi’s denim jacket pattern, expanded three or four times larger than its original shape...
American Artist
2019From suicides, to gang violence, to the epidemic abuse of force by police departments (predominantly against Black men), to school and mass shootings, there is perhaps no more urgent issue in the United States than gun control...
Marina Rosenfeld
2019The installation Music Stands: Free Exercise 7, 8, and 9 by Marina Rosenfeld consists of music stand-like structures and a corresponding set of panels and acoustic devices that direct, focus, obstruct, reflect and project sound in the gallery...
Cynthia Gutiérrez
2019Estratos II by artist Cynthia Gutiérrez features a large white plinth with a transversal cut through the lower half, revealing a collection of archeological objects...
Rometti Costales
2019Canción para un fósil canoro (Song for a chanting fossil) by Rometti Costales is inspired by the history of the building that currently hosts the Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende (MSSA) in Santiago, Chile...
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2020-2029
Sable Elyse Smith
2020Sable Elyse Smith’s Pivot III resembles playground equipment uselessly reconfigured...
Oren Pinhassi
2020Oren Pinhassi’s work examines the relationship between the human figure and the built environment...
