Nayland Blake at Matthew Marks Gallery
Through October 25, 2025
522 West 22nd Street & 526 West 22nd Street, New York
Images ©Nayland Blake, Courtesy
Nayland Blake’s exhibition at Matthew Marks Gallery is a time capsule of queer identity, desire, and vulnerability, unfolding across two Chelsea spaces. The artist’s signature mix of sculpture, installation, and ephemera retains its raw charge while opening itself to new readings in 2025. Pieces such as Mirror Restraint (1988–89) and Negative Bunny (1994) reassert the erotic humor and tenderness of Blake’s practice, while recent works like Entrance (2025) and the “Charm” series push into sculptural maximalism.
The show’s range is dizzying—fur-covered objects, VHS transfers, makeshift bondage devices—all radiating what the gallery calls Blake’s “investigation into desire, race, gender, and power” (Matthew Marks Gallery). The artist’s ability to reframe personal artifacts as cultural critique feels urgent in an art world still grappling with representation. If the early works read like confessions, the newer ones land as declarations: unruly, excessive, and impossible to categorize.
There’s also a sense of communal dialogue. Works by Frederick Weston, Judith Scott, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and others appear alongside Blake’s, creating an intergenerational chorus of voices. The curatorial gesture underscores Blake’s role not only as artist but as connector, situating their practice within a lineage of queer and outsider resistance.
This work, 50 Minutes (2025), transforms the language of therapy and BDSM into a site of self-examination. The black leather bench—part shrink’s couch, part dungeon furniture—anchors the room, its chains and locks suggesting both restraint and safety. A dangling microphone and mirror add a sense of surveillance and introspection, as if the viewer were implicated in a conversation about desire, shame, and control. Around the perimeter, objects hang like relics of intimacy—masks, cuffs, feathers—each one suspended between pleasure and discipline. The piece encapsulates Nayland Blake’s ability to turn vulnerability into architecture, collapsing the distance between confession and performance, between body and object.
That dialogue extends beyond the objects themselves. Blake’s installations invite viewers to inhabit spaces that feel at once private and public—a bedroom, a club, a studio, a cage—sites where identity is both performed and dismantled. The tension between safety and exposure, humor and hurt, keeps the work alive. Each room feels less like a gallery than a living body breathing, sweating, remembering.
Walking through, the viewer is alternately seduced, unsettled, and disarmed. One is reminded that Blake’s art has never been about easy answers but about holding contradictions—pleasure and shame, intimacy and performance—in the same breath. This show reaffirms their position as one of contemporary art’s most uncompromising truth-tellers.