With rising temperatures and technologies that are increasingly usurping human capabilities, our environment is changing in ways at once pronounced and elusive. As a result of this crisis point, a new kind of materiality in art has emerged and with it a rededication to forms and objects. The artists in this group exhibition respond to the material transformations of our surroundings by exploring the hidden roots and underlying mechanisms – the substrate – beneath the surface of things.

The exhibited works – in sculpture, photography, and video – capture the permeation of technology and the artificial into every aspect of our lives, down to our biological makeup. They engage new means of artistic control that result in a quivering, hybrid kind of materiality. Some artworks change form over time. Others seem to be plucked out of time entirely, appearing as artifacts suspended between an imagined primordial past and a projected future.

Lucie Stahl

Goo 4, 2019

Hahnemühle museum etching paper, wooden frame, polyurethane, 53×76 cm

Courtesy of the artist and dépendance, Brussels