2024/04/26 – 2024/06/29
On the occasion of Gallery Weekend Berlin 2024, Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers are pleased to present territory, a group show of works by Mire Lee, Liu Yujia, Gala Porras-Kim, Tan Jing, and Zhang Ruyi, curated by Shi-ne Oh. It will be Sprüth Magers’ first group exhibition focusing exclusively on female Asian artists. The title, territory, naturally associated with aggressive political policies and behaviours, questions the vast definitions of borders and boundaries and how they both limit and liberate our transgressive desires on physical as well as psychological terrain.
In the gallery’s Window, Zhang Ruyi (b. 1985, Shanghai; lives and works in Shanghai) examines China’s accelerated urbanization in the 1990s, interrogates the contradictions of city life, and reimagines public space. Her sculptures and paintings are based on common construction materials found in large cities, such as cement, tile, plastic film, graph and grid paper, and detritus from building sites. Employing the cactus as a central image, the works explore the tension and coexistence between the organic and the inorganic. Take Submerged Landscape (2019), an aquarium which contains two identical concrete cacti sculptures, each skewered with two pieces of rebar, and two suckermouth catfish which swim in the artificial environment. Over time, the water causes erosion and moss growth on the objects’ surfaces. In other places, the prickly plants thrive despite the inhospitable conditions: cement cacti grow out of cement PVC pipes in Modern Fossil (Pipe)-3 (2022–23) and Perishable Modernity-2 (2023), while Planter-5 (2018) and Planter-8 (2022) have the desert flora’s spines sprouting on rubble.
