English
Deutsch
until 08.08.| #5030ARTatBerlin | neugerriemschneider (Christinenstrasse) shows from 2. May 2026 the exhibition by the artist Pae white.
pushmi-pullyu, Pae White’s seventh solo exhibition with neugerriemschneider, features a flourishing cosmos of creatures including crabs, snails, flies, butterflies and other bugs, molded in resin-encased thread, textile in relief or resplendent ceramic. These new works grow from White’s career-long investigation of tradition-rich materials and legacies of craft, and her predilection for expanding their possibilities. Here, bringing together indigenous handwork, Jacquard weaving and experimental technologies, she places her subjects under a magnifier, creating magnetic scenes that invite conscious inquiry of the worlds from which they are culled. Assembling the conditions for introspection, these works are pedestals for the underobserved: Beings seen in fleeting glances or hidden from view are held, savored and brought into focus, heralded as wonders – sources of revelation.
In her practice, White seizes upon an inquisitive impulse to capture the splendor of the ephemeral. In an increasingly fragile present, her act is a radical one, slowing and concentrating attention, imparting her fascination with the minutiae and the monuments of the world around her. Spotlit by the artist’s transformative gestures, everything from tendrils of smoke and crumpled foil to popped corn, glistening water and passing time are placed before the looking glass, their properties and connotations cast in new frameworks. Dualities are integral to these operations, coming to light as inverted hierarchies, propulsive negotiations between craft and technology, and navigations of at-odds expectations. Opposing, often arbitrary systems of value assigned to techniques or objects are regularly upended as White explores the quotidian, tweaking perception and, with it, the multifaceted act of seeing.
pushmi-pullyu, named after the fantastical double-sided, two-headed animal from Hugh Lofting’s “Doctor Dolittle” books, evokes in White a bewildering infinitude – an unexpected subversion of the social and material order that irrevocably impacts how a being and that around it is viewed and communicated with. This inclination features in White’s series of digitally assembled arrays of butterflies, realized as Wixárika yarn compositions, on view here. Employing a method pioneered by the indigenous Wixáritari people of western Mexico, these studies in intricacy see countless cotton threads laid atop a resin-covered wooden panel. Traditionally used in service of mythological or shamanistic scenes, this practice here continues White’s investigation of the natural world, overlapping and flattening her butterflies akin to an entomologist’s pinned specimens. White and the Wixáritari craftspeople with whom she collaborates enter measured exchange as their approaches and propensities meld – as in all partnerships that have shaped her work from its outset – and their apprehensions of what textiles can achieve become manifest. These yarn works leverage the constitution of their materials to tease out detailed depictions, seeing threads spun from a palette of colors give rise to a distinct tonal depth and structural complexity witnessed fully only on close inspection. These tableaux suspend time, holding it still in the pursuit of pensive understanding.
Also central to this operation are the results of White’s extensive research into the sculptural potential of textiles, expanding the medium into a third dimension. At the base of these tapestries stand backgrounds in dynamic, vibrational, multicolor monochromes. Enlarged wildlife imagery, detailed and amplified, takes shape as its contours and features are made voluminous as a reaction to heat applied in a fabrication process developed, much like the yarn works of pushmi-pullyu, in tandem with highly skilled artisans. A relief erupts, urging a once two-dimensional facet of her practice into a spatial, architectural realm. This gesture grows as her works hang suspended, inviting them to be viewed in the round. With this comes discovery, as the reverse of each work, typically kept concealed, is revealed, along with the tapestry’s skeletal underpinnings and drawing-like linework. The weaving’s mechanisms and history too come to light: Crafted at extraordinary scale on a Jacquard loom, the punch card-fed origins of which laid the groundwork for modern computing, White’s textiles tell an alchemical story of imagemaking and analysis.
These subjects reappear broken, stacked and strewn in a new series of intimately sized ceramic tiles in relief. Huddled within a composition’s bounds, White’s fragmented protagonists intertwine. When arranged around its circular – and thus unending – perimeter, they frame negative space that allows her media to take center stage. The works’ otherworldly, uncanny sheen is the product of coating by physical vapor deposition, or PVD – a highly laborious, aerospace-grade finishing method in which a compound, placed under high heat and pressure, is brought to transform from a solid to a gas and back again. When the glaze is deposited in a microscopically thin layer on White’s ceramics, it possesses an internal structure reconfigured such that it acts as a prism, breaking light into its component parts in an effect that shifts restlessly with viewing angle, refusing resolution. Its coloration, paired with textured, earthy subglazes, resists definition, its iridescence evoking the natural shimmer of abalone shells and conjuring synthesized visions of the future.
The yarn compositions in pushmi-pullyu were realized in collaboration with Wixárika artisans of Jalisco, Mexico: Guillermo López Carrillo, Carlos Eduardo Castro de la Cruz, Santa Bárbara Nayarit, Érika de la Cruz Montoya, Zulma Daniel Salas, Isaías Sotero Carrillo and Claudia López de la Cruz, led by Manolo Castro Montoya. The exhibition’s tapestry works were developed and fabricated in collaboration with the TextielLab, the professional workshop of the TextielMuseum, Tilburg, Netherlands.
Pae White (b. 1963) has been the subject of solo exhibitions at museums and institutions, including Plataforma de Arte Contemporáneo, Guadalajara (2025); the San José Museum of Art, San José (2019); Saarlandmuseum, Moderne Galerie, Saarbrücken (2017); MAK – Österreichisches Museum für angewandte Kunst / Gegenwartskunst, Vienna (2013); Langen Foundation, Neuss (2013); South London Gallery, London (2013); The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto (2011); Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago (2011); Saint Louis Art Museum, St. Louis (2010); Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. (2007); Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester (2006); and Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2004). White lives and works in Los Angeles.
Opening: Saturday, 2. May 2026, 6–9 pm
Exhibition dates: Saturday, 2. May until Saturday, 8. August 2026
To the Gallery
Image caption: Pae White, Untitled, 2026, cotton and resin on panel, ⌀ 150 cm. © Pae White. Courtesy the artist and neugerriemschneider, Berlin. Photo: Santiago Vega, Guadalajara.
Exhibition Pae white – Galerie neugerriemschneider | Contemporary art in Berlin | Contemporary Art | Exhibitions Berlin Galleries | ART at Berlin
