The Same Room: Julie Becker in dialogue
With works by Julie Becker, Jesse Darling, Win McCarthy and Ima-Abasi Okon


08.02.2020 – 14.03.2020

Galerie Neu is pleased to present The Same Room: Julie Becker in dialogue — an exhibition exploring the singular vision of American artist Julie Becker (1972 - 2016) through a selection of photographs, drawings and a video alongside recent works by Jesse Darling, Win McCarthy and Ima-Abasi Okon.

Deeply rooted in the mythology and economic realities of the city, Julie Becker, who grew up, lived and worked in Los Angeles, produced a remarkable, yet underrepresented body of installation, sculpture, drawing, photography and film constantly oscillating between reality and fiction, truth and fantasy.

Reflecting on her own personal experience of precarious living, Julie Becker investigated the psychologically charged spaces of architectural interiors, where built scale models, staged photographs and mystical drawings of interiors turn into sites of refuge and fantastical escape.

Her powerful aesthetic visions articulating the fantasies, nightmares, and dispossessions underpinning late capitalism, with particular emphasis on the loneliness and estrangement that result from social inequity, vividly resonate in the different approaches and visual languages embodied by the recent works of Jesse Darling, Win McCarthy and Ima-Abasi Okon.

Through the narratives of history and counter-history, the work of Jesse Darling addresses the vulnerability, fallibility and adaptability of being a body caught in the structures of the social and material world.

Haunted by the financial and psychological precarity of city life, Win McCarthy’s work reflects on the complex construction and representation of the self within New York’s ever changing and gentrifying landscape.

The aesthetic of administered scarcity of this economic and political landscape finds itself further exposed in the works of Ima-Abasi Okon who uses industrial objects and “repurposes” them by removing their function in order to raise questions relating to value, productivity and excess.

The four artists of the exhibition cast light, all in very personal ways, on the language and constraints imposed by the architectural, social and economic structures of our urban reality.

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