LONDON.- Maureen Paley presents an exhibition of new sculptures by Rebecca Warren in both Bethnal Green gallery spaces.
“I imagined this show as a retrospective being made by a slightly different version of me. Like making your work now, in the usual way, but also oddly in the mode of a retrospective, so that each thing shifts between two time frames. Everything seems familiar but strange somehow, right but not quite right. Like there’s another version of you who’s doing it simultaneously...” -- Rebecca Warren, 2026
There Will Be Another You (2026) is a bronze life-size reclining nude female, dropped or resting, limbs melting or morphing, exposed sinews and wires, two right arms, no left arm, a mix of blur and focus in the rendering. The paint is dripped, striped, pooled. Far more like an effigy on a sarcophagus lid than a woman on a bed. Lying in state, lying in wait. So, mortality? Something like that, but more Hellenic in tone than Christian. The swirling uncertainties of the underworld are at play rather than any definitive final score.
Human imagination used to be the only way into these zones. But very likely, sooner or later, will come the practical reality of self upload where your entire brain’s contents and operations are faithfully copied to a new (and vastly longer-lived) container in which you still feel like you. Yet even now, the futuristic scenario where you’re replaced by another version of yourself might be a fair and realistic description of the current life of the artist.
And how much more shifty does the ground under this get as you progress through the decades and your art begins to look at earlier incarnations within its family, so that forms and meanings echo up and down its genealogical lines. There is something ghostly in the artist as an incarnation of many former incarnations of her own mental life. There is something of a sliding equation in that for the duration of one being more real, the other is more ghostly.
Cue the votive participants and accoutrements of the scene: various wall-mounted vitrines, and bronze and raw clay sculptures including two haughty or nonchalant life-size female Voyagers; a pair of bathetically purposeful torso-less legs; a winged form like an excavated relic; and several pretty figurines, caryatids on hold, lounging or landed on rocks. In another room, The Totality (2026) is a two-tiered wind-blown diorama, a dustbowl landscape of neon shapes and memories of forms and odd little items and fragments, serenely distributed – with the two levels recursively imitating each other according to a poignant scheme of wild approximation.
Weird viewpoint displacement, bodysnatching, underworldly upload immortalities, tiers of fresh incarnation always looking back and folding in. A summary of this might be a mausoleum whose elements, including the living maker of them, sit in pools of attention regarding each other’s perilous solidity.
text by Fergal Stapleton, 2026
Selected solo museum exhibitions include Giacometti / Warren – ASensitiv, Giacometti Institute, Paris (2023); The Now Voyager, Belvedere 21, Vienna (2022); Muse National Eugne Delacroix, Paris (2018); All That Heaven Allows, Tate St Ives, St Ives (2017); Foundation Vincent Van Gogh Arles, Arles (2017); The Main Feeling, Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas (2016); The Living, Kunstverein Mnchen, Munich (2013); Museum Dhondt, Dhaenens, Ghent (2012); The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago (2010); Serpentine Gallery, London (2009).
Rebecca Warren was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2006, and in 2014 was elected as Royal Academician. In 2020, she received an OBE for her services to Art.
Her work is represented in public collections including: Arts Council Collection, London, UK; Muse d’Art Moderne de Paris, France; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Canada; Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, USA; Tate Gallery, London, UK; Kunsthaus Zrich, Zurich, Switzerland; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA; The Artist Institute of Chicago, Illinois, USA and The Royal Academy of Arts, London, UK.
