Rebecca Warren: Metropolis at Matthew Marks Gallery
Through June 28, 2025
Images courtesy of Matthew Marks Gallery and the artist
In her latest exhibition, Metropolis, at Matthew Marks Gallery, Rebecca Warren presents thirteen new hand-painted bronze sculptures that continue her exploration of form, materiality, and the human figure. Ten of these works are life-size female figures, their surfaces deliberately rough and pummelled, with features and expressions in flux. Limbs multiply or dwindle, hands become single digits or expand cartoonishly, and poses suggest a striving towards certainty against dreamlike odds.
Warren’s sculptures often incorporate lengths of wood, either cast in bronze or painted to resemble other materials. As Rebecca Warren puts it, “These elements may appear as tools or parts, but they also form and invade the bodies of the figures, perhaps serving as attributes of resurrected saints holding the implements of their martyrdom.” She also notes that a large wooden construction in the exhibition “might be a possible destination for or source of these pieces of timber, pointing to the peculiar, uncertain territory that these uncannily animated figures occupy.”
The exhibition also includes two assemblage works cast in bronze. In one, a length of timber joined with a sliver of board extends from an upturned plinth filled with clay. In another, a glass jar and a clay sausage sit on a painted cast bronze plinth. For Warren, “These works gather a strange purpose, a kind of shadow-presence, as individual elements cluster together.”
The title Metropolis evokes the concept of a “mother city,” and Warren describes the mood as that of a creaking, detaching ice floe, a satellite broken out of its orbit—a hard-to-place, hard-to-name zone of viscous, displacing, iterating, and dissolving consciousness.
Rebecca Warren’s Metropolis is on view at Matthew Marks Gallery, 522 West 22nd Street, New York, through June 28, 2025.
