Lynn Hershman Leeson: About Time

Altman Siegel is delighted to present About Time, Lynn Hershman Leeson’s third solo exhibition with the gallery. A radical and visionary artist, Hershman Leeson has challenged conventional definitions of art for over six decades, consistently shredding the boundaries of technology, identity, and psychology. At the center of Hershman Leeson's latest exhibition is an antibody engineered to reverse aging. Developed by Hershman Leeson alongside Dr. Tomas Huber and a private pharmaceutical lab in China, the serum serves to reverse aging one day at a time, each time it is administered. The genetic makeup of this protein-based antigen has now been adopted by the lab Hershman Leeson contracted for the project, and is currently being offered commercially throughout Asia as an antidote to aging. As with previous bodies of work, Hershman Leeson has preempted foundational advancements in technology that go on to become ubiquitous facets of everyday life.

In addition to several syringes full of the refrigerated injectable, stored at 38 degrees, and titled Eternally Yours, this presentation includes a suite of new framed works on paper and digital prints on aluminum. The digitally manipulated collages feature a palette steeped in a cyberpunk visual register: glowing iridescent pastels, radioactive hot pink, neon greens, and icy blues. These assemblages channel a chaotic, proto-digital minimalism fused with both futuristic optimism and dissonant cultural fragmentation. The DNA sequence of the antibody gene used in the serum and the artist’s own image, revisited consistently across Hershman Leeson's career, appear throughout these 2D works. On one such haunting digital construction, tinged with Hershman Leeson’s characteristic wit and sardonic humor, a portrait of the artist as a young girl is overlaid upon an image of a medical vial atop an all black ground. Utilizing a pre-Internet, Y2K aesthetic, reflective of the artist's early adaptation of the medium, this work positions the artist’s progression from a poster-child of youth to a pioneering mad-scientist amidst an abyss of uncertainty, a possible advertisement for or outcome of this novel intravenous shot.

Hershman Leeson typically begins a new body of work by rather analog means, perhaps a DIY holdover from her countercultural beginnings as a UC Berkeley college dropout. Snapshots cut up and glued onto graphite drawings, often sporting comical vignettes of flawed human relationships with technology, serve as an immediate and raw window into the artist’s subconscious. The phrases and texts jotted down on these sketches reveal compulsive fascinations from which the artist can refine into advanced, research-based projects. This is the working method that initially led to the sequencing of the anti-aging serum.

 

The raw physicality of these drawings indicates a certain primal immediacy or urgency. Similarly, the act of speaking freely into a video camera until recurring themes emerge recalls early psychoanalytic techniques, where unfiltered expression was used to access the unconscious.

Lynn Hershman Leeson’s work is currently featured in major exhibitions worldwide, including at The Whitney, New York, NY (forthcoming); The 36th Bienal de São Paulo, Sao Paulo, Brazil; ΕΜΣΤ, Athens, Greece; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, San Diego, CA; ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Karlsruhe, Germany; DREI, Cologne, Germany; and Le Pavillon, Namur, Belgium.

 

Lynn Hershman Leeson’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, NV; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY;Momenta Biennale de l’image, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal, Canada; TeTuhi, Auckland, New Zealand; Simian, Copenhagen, Denmark; Altman Siegel, San Francisco, CA; the New Museum, New York, NY;  Julia Stoschek Foundation, Düsseldorf, Germany; Musée d'Art moderne et contemporain, Geneva, Switzerland; Bridget Donahue, New York, NY; KM Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Germany [Civic Radar retrospective]; House of Electronic Arts, Basel, Switzerland; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA; Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France; KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, Germany; Kunsthaus Graz, Graz, Austria; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Canada; Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH; bürobasel, Basel, Switzerland; Thoma Foundation, Santa Fe, New Mexico; Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA; and Modern Art Oxford, Oxford, UK. Group exhibitions include Espoo Museum of Modern Art, Espoo, Finland; Fotograf Festival, National Gallery Prague, Prague, Czech Republic; Francisco Carolinum Linz, Linz, Austria; Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, CA; Kunstmuseum Solothurn, Solothurn, Switzerland; Shenzhen Museum of Contemporary Art and Urban Planning, Shenzhen, China; GAMeC Bergamo, Bergamo, Italy; the Whitworth, Manchester, UK; Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, Geneva, Switzerland; Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei City, Taiwan; The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Fort Worth, TX; the 59th Biennale di Venezia, Venice, Italy; Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Kunsthaus Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland; 13th Gwangju Biennale, South Korea; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, Spain; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; Serpentine Galleries, London, UK; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, France; Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, TX; Tate Modern, London, UK; and MoMA PS1, New York, NY.

 

For more information, please contact Altman Siegel at info@altmansiegel.com or 415-576-9300.