Swallow the Moon

Amanita is pleased to present Swallow the Moon, a group exhibition curated by Reilly Davidson featuring works by Turiya Adkins, Ellen Berkenblit, Cosima von Bonin, Michaël Borremans, Sophie Calle, Sarah Charlesworth, Isabella Ducrot, Olivia Erlanger, Andrew J. Greene, Cynthia Hawkins, Lauren Anaïs Hussey, Thomas Nozkowski, Paul Pfeiffer, Ed Ruscha, Richard Tuttle

Swallowing the moon is taking full stock of the night, and being completely wrapped up in it. One minute you’re dancing in the club, the next you’re with a stranger, between some sheets; or the evening turns inward, and you spend it floating through dreams and nightmares. There are the stars above, bodies below. It’s also difficult to grasp a thing without understanding its opposite. The night is nothing without the day, the moon nothing without its sun. A flexible focus is paramount, as the works on view toggle across states, spaces, positions, and timeframes. From inhabiting the nocturne, to anticipating its arrival, all of these shades color the exhibition, which unfolds as such…

Ellen Berkenblit’s Branch sees a woman drifting through the dark, on her own private mission. The limb she clutches distorts the image's left frame, fragmenting it into Cubist shards. A parallel figure appears in Isabella Ducrot’s portrait of Amina, the female protagonist of Vincenzo Bellini’s opera La Sonnambula. The sleepwalker—built out of fabric, paper, and pigment—is seen here alighting among the cosmos. Under Bellini’s auspices, nighttime is driven by precarity, contradiction, and eventual restoration. Nearby, Michaël Borremans’s composition gathers a confluence of disappearing children in a shallow, stage-like arena. These five figures are curiously lit, the whole scene shaped by a deceptive edge—allegorical, oneiric, interstitial. This situation remains wide open, unfolding just beyond the Real.

The ground is dominated by Cosima von Bonin’s lone streetlight and lit cigarette, with smoke that glows in comic linework. The whole form overwhelms the space, heroic in scale. Andrew J. Greene’s revolving ashtray beckons from across the floor: meet me at the Carlyle! Resting elsewhere, too, is a spinning China Chalet matchbook—a relic of New York City after-hours. This city is one built on the sabotage of rest.

Several abstractions appear as vague constellations dashing across varicolored skies. Lauren Anaïs Hussey’s calligraphic marks dance and disappear, playing between shadows and light like stars. Cynthia Hawkins’s iteration, meanwhile, catches the breach of day and night, loosely bisected by a yellow mass that becomes a curtain separating the two registers. Then, the orbs expand: Turiya Adkins’s celestial disc, large and lime green, floats in a confounded space, wrapped in lines that suggest motion; Thomas Nozkowski’s sphere apparently folds into a muted blue landscape—at least by conjecture. In a more dimensional register, Richard Tuttle’s largely wall-bound assemblage treats evening as apparatus. Black plastic sets the mood—a cutout of darkness. A small stone at the base acts like a chunk of moon rock, anchoring the system by exerting a gravitational pull. Strings function as semi-legible axes, linking suspended and grounded elements and producing momentum across coordinates. Tuttle’s compatible material formation amounts to a star cluster, built from orbic grids. A trio of spiked circles sits at the top, too, reinforcing the astral sentiment. His works stage an associative game, much like an abstract painting. How does line play off of shape, and how might color participate? In their present habitat, associations would suggest their nocturnal orientation.

Cut to January 26, 1880, the eve before Edison’s lightbulb patent was issued. A world still capable of near-darkness, poised on the brink of the electronic age; a final gasp of breath before light pollution takes hold. Shutter to the present day. In this room Olivia Erlanger’s arrow quartet punctures the wall, its configuration mimicking a stellar grouping from that night. Hanging on the other end, Sarah Charlesworth’s photograph is a lunar body in black and white. Its blank ground alludes to the void of space while also symbolizing dominance or death. The moon here is supercharged with desire and fear. Split the difference between the two and one finds Paul Pfeiffer's pedestal-bound monitor, which displays yet another celestial mass: it rises from the ocean’s edge, then the image spins counterclockwise, the horizon line mimicking the hands of a clock.

Sophie Calle’s sequence unfolds as a set of photographs. The artist’s bed is a stage, its characters multifarious and temperamental. The fourteenth sleeper arrives well before sunset and remains until just before the moon reaches its full position—a prolonged buildup to a crepuscular takeover. Daylight barely registers; instead, captions scrawled along the lower edges mark time’s passage. As the moon first reveals itself, this visitor departs, replaced by a newly sexed-up actor.

Finally, Ed Ruscha’s rooster heralds the night’s end. The shadowy form stands before a diffused sunrise, its beak open and blaring like a habitual alarm clock. This moment draws everything together, completing a temporal loop. All of these works resonate in concert, establishing a particular mood while offering individual perspectives on night’s multifarious situations. Romance, science, anticipation, and mundanity are on full display.

— Reilly Davidson

Turiya Adkins (b. 1998, New York, NY) is a multidisciplinary artist living and working in Brooklyn. She received her BA in Fine Arts from Dartmouth College in 2020 and has participated in numerous international group exhibitions. Her work explores Black bodily motion, flight, movement, and histories of resistance, drawing on influences from Black athletics, African folklore, and historical narratives. Adkins’s practice combines painting, collage, and abstraction to articulate visual languages of motion, myth, and speculative futures.

Ellen Berkenblit (b. 1958, Paterson New Jersey) is an American painter. She graduated from the Cooper Union in 1980. She received an Arts and Letters grant from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2013, and a Guggenheim Fellowship in the following year. She has exhibited at the Anton Kern Gallery. The Brooklyn Museum holds examples of her work. Often working in large-scale and in oil paint, a recurring motif in Berkenblit’s work is a magical female protagonist, frequently depicted as a cartoonish women in profile, with long lashes, rosy cheeks, and wild hair. She is represented by Anton Kern Gallery in New York, Contemporary Fine Arts in Berlin and Corbett vs Dempsey in Chicago.

Cosima von Bonin (b. 1962, Mombasa, Kenya) came of age in Cologne during the 1980s where she was part of the booming art scene; she still lives and works in the city. Most well-known for her sculptures and installations created from fabric and readymades, she often uses comedy and pop culture to question social constructions and relations. In 2024, the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt and Mudam Luxembourg opened major exhibitions of her work. In 2022, her installation on the façade of the Giardini’s Central Pavilion welcomed visitors to the Cecilia Alemani-organized The Milk of Dreams at the 59th Venice Biennale. She has also participated in Skulptur Projekte Münster (2017), Glasgow International (2016), and Documenta (2007 & 1982). One-person exhibitions have taken place at CCS Bard, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York; Fridericianum, Kassel, Germany; Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis, Missouri; Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne; Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam; Kunstverein in Hamburg; Magasin III Jaffa, Tel Aviv; mumok - Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna; Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain, Geneva; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and SculptureCenter, Long Island City, New York, among others. In 2016, Thomas Borgmann donated over a dozen major works by von Bonin including panels, sculptures, a room-sized installation as part of his gift to the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam – the second largest in the institution’s history. Her work is also a part of the Boros Collection, Berlin; Bundeskunstsammlung, Germany; Dallas Museum of Art; Deichtorhallen Hamburg; Metropolitan Museum, New York; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; mumok - Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and Museum of Modern Art, New York, among others.
Michaël Borremans's (b. 1963, Geraardsbergen, Belgium) innovative approach to painting combines technical mastery with subject matter that defies straightforward interpretation. His charged canvases address universal themes that seem to resonate with a specifically contemporary relevance The present work belongs to a series collectively titled Fire from the Sun, which features toddlers engaged in playful but mysterious acts with sinister overtones and insinuations of violence. The children are presented alone or in groups against a studio-like backdrop that negates time and space, while foregrounding the theatrical atmosphere and artifice that have come to characterize the artist's work. Reminiscent of cherubs in Renaissance paintings, the toddlers appear as allegories of the human condition, their archetypal innocence contrasted with their suggested deviousness As Michael Bracewell argues, the paintings in this series portray psychological states that are not intended to be decoded. Viewers of Borremans's work are “caught in a strange time loop, in which the nobility of execution ascribed to Old Masters...is placed in the service of vertiginous modernist vision...the scenes depicted by the majority of paintings comprising Fire from the Sun show a state of being or society in which the primal is uncontrolled, without bearings, in a state of anarchy—the Id of Freudian primary process run riot, with no Ego to mediate between instinctual behavior and ‘reality’...The art of Michaël Borremans seems always to have been predicated on a confluence of enigma, ambiguity, and painterly poetics—accosting beauty with strangeness; making historic Romanticism subjugate to mysterious controlling forces that are neither crudely malevolent nor necessarily benign.”

Sophie Calle (b. 1953, Paris) is known for her provocative investigations into emotional and psychological life. Since the late 1970s, her work has explored the boundaries of intimacy, romantic love, absence, and mourning, often through sleuth-like strategies. Notable projects have included following strangers through city streets and secretly photographing the personal belongings of hotel guests, blurring the line between observer and participant in human Relationships. Calle represented France at the 2007 Venice Biennale and received the prestigious Hasselblad Award three years later. In 2019, her work was celebrated with Cinq, a five-part retrospective across Marseille, France. In 2023, Calle took over the Picasso Museum, Paris, changing the museum’s permanent collection to transform it into a space where themes of visibility and invisibility, and personal narrative collided with Picasso’s legacy. In 2024, she was honored with the prestigious Praemium Imperiale Award, presented by the Japan Art Association. That same year, her first U.S. retrospective, Overshare, opened at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, traveling the UC Irvine Langson Orange County Museum of Art in January 2026. In March 2026, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebaek, Denmark, will exhibit recent works by the artist. And in November, Berlin's Hamburger Bahnhof will present a major exhibition of Calle’s work, including a new commission for the museum's 30th anniversary. Calle’s work has been exhibited internationally at venues including the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Whitechapel Art Gallery, London; Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Netherlands; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Santiago, Chile; and the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo. Her work is held in numerous public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Tate Collection, UK; the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art,; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, among other institutions.

Sarah Charlesworth is considered a key member of The Pictures Generation, Sarah Charlesworth (b. 1947, East Orange, NJ, d. 2013, Falls Village, CT) is known for her conceptually-driven and visually alluring photo-based works. Through her exacting forms, assiduous process, and subjective interventions, Charlesworth aimed to subvert and deconstruct cultural imagery. Charlesworth’s work has been the subject of one-person exhibitions at a number of institutions, including the major survey, Sarah Charlesworth: Doubleworld, at the New Museum, New York (2015), which traveled to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2017); Stills at the Art Institute of Chicago, IL (2014); a retrospective organized by SITE Santa Fe (1997), which traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (1998); the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC (1998); and the Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art (1999). Her work is in important public collections such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Charlesworth taught photography for many years at the School of Visual Arts, New York; the Rhode Island School of Design; and Princeton University.

Isabella Ducrot (b. 1931, Naples, Italy) is an artist and writer with a career spanning four decades. Ducrot’s oeuvre is deeply rooted in an extraordinary and enduring interest in fabrics, that is central to both her pictorial works and writings. Sourced during extensive travels over the course of her life, Ducrot has amassed an exquisite collection of fabric that spans centuries and bear origins from across Asia and Eastern Europe—including Russia, Turkey, China, India and Tibet. She considers these fabrics as an art form in and of themselves, to which she has dedicated herself to many years of focused study and views essential to her education. Employing diverse media—including pencil, pastel, ink and watercolor, which she applies to rare papers—her works compress an array of cultural references, ranging from philosophy to folklore and textile weaving. At both intimate and expansive scales, her work reflects a fascination with repetition, form, and color, informed by the rare textiles in her collection. Ducrot’s work was the subject of a recent solo exhibition, Profusione at le Consortium Museum, Dijon and her installation, titled Big Aura was featured at the Dior Haute Couture SS 2024 runway show at the Musee Rodin, Paris. Ducrot has presented solo exhibitions at Petzel, New York, Gisela Capitain, Cologne, Sadie Coles, London and Standard (Oslo), Oslo. Ducrot lives and works in Rome.

Olivia Erlanger (b. 1990, New York) works across sculpture, film, writing and performance to examine American dreams and delusions. Mining the myth of suburbia affords the artist a focus on the semiotics of the periphery, analysing its architecture, infrastructures and ecosystems. Erlanger was awarded the 2024 Fondazione Henraux International Sculpture Prize and was recently nominated a finalist for the CIRCA Prize (2025). Selected recent exhibitions were held at Luhring Augustine, New York (2025, solo); Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Texas (2024, solo); ICA London, UK (2024, performance); Kunstverein Gartenhaus, Vienna (2022, solo); Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles (2023), Company Gallery, New York (2023); Soft Opening, London (2023) and at Del Vaz Projects, Los Angeles (2022). Erlanger is the author of Appliance (Wild Seeds, 2022) and the co-author of Garage (MIT Press, 2018) with architect Luis Ortega Govela. Her writing has appeared in publications including Tank Magazine, PIN UP, Flash Art, and Harvard Design Magazine. Her work is in the collection of CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco; CAPC Musée d’art Contemporain de Bordeaux, Bordeaux; The Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas; KADIST, San Francisco and X Museum, Shanghai. The artist lives and works in New York

Andrew J. Greene (b. 1988, Chicago, Illinois; lives and works in Los Angeles), studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Selected Solo Presentations include: The Modern Institute, Airds Lane Glasgow (2026); ‘Taste’ Cheruby, Shanghai (2025); ‘Umbrella’, GEMS, New York (2024); Balenciaga, Milan Montenapoleone (2024); ‘Hope’, The Modern Institute, Glasgow Osborne Street, (2022); ‘Unconditional Surrender’, The Modern Institute, Glasgow Airds Lane Bricks Space (2019). ‘Make New York Better’, 83 Pitt Street, New York (2016); ‘Big Apple Logistics’, Tomorrow, New York (2016). In 2020 Greene’s book Unconditional Surrender was published. In late 2025, Greene launched Matinée, a two year exhibition project in Los Angeles, focused on art produced in the 1980s and early 1990s. Cynthia Hawkins (b. 1950, Queens, NY) has consistently painted since 1972, abstractly and in series, exploring diverse literary, philosophical, and scientific influences within a delineated structure. Hawkins’ work utilizes a highly developed vocabulary of symbols and signs to investigate color, movement, and light, and her work is dense with richly evocative meaning. She received a BA in painting from the Queens College, City University of New York in 1977 and an MFA from Maryland Institute College of Art in 1992. She has exhibited widely in New York and the United States throughout her career, and her one-person exhibitions include Cynthia Hawkins, Just Above Midtown, New York (1981); Cynthia Hawkins, Frances Wolfson Art Center, Miami (1986); New Works: The Currency of Meaning, Cinque Gallery, New York (1989); Selected Works: 1990–1996, Queens College Art Center (1997); Clusters: Stellar and Earthly, Buffalo Science Museum, Buffalo (2009); Natural Things, 1996–99, STARS, Los Angeles (2022); Gwynfor’s Soup, or the Proximity of Matter, Ortuzar Projects, New York (2023); and Cynthia Hawkins: Maps Necessary for a Walk in 4D, Paula Cooper Gallery, New York (2025). In 2025, Hawkins was included in the 36th Bienal de São Paulo and the inaugural exhibition at The Studio Museum in Harlem. Hawkins’s work is in numerous public collections, including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Studio Museum in Harlem and The Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York; Kenkeleba Gallery, New York; The La Grange Art Museum, Georgia; and the Department of State, Washington, D.C. She has received numerous awards, including the Helen Frankenthaler Award for Painting (2023); the Black Metropolis Research Consortium Fellowship (2009); The Herbert and Irene Wheeler Grant (1995); and the Brooklyn Museum Art School Scholarship (1972).

Lauren Anaïs Hussey (b. 1990, Jacksonville, US) is an artist based in Brooklyn, US. Hussey earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting Drawing & Printmaking from the University of North Florida (Jacksonville, US) in 2014 and Master of Fine Arts in Painting from Cranbrook Academy of Art (Bloomfield Hills, US) in 2017. Hussey’s work has been the subject of selected exhibitions at the following venues: “Textine” Tara Downs, New York, US (2025); “Retinal Loop”, Chart Gallery, New York, US (2024); “Meet Me By the Lake”, CLEARING, New York, US (2024);“The Principle Cause of Serial Monogamy,” Tara Downs, New York, US (2024); “Chapter One: Extrinsicality,” Woaw, Wan Chai, HK (2023); “Abstraction Show,” Taymour Grahne Projects, London, UK (2023); “Solidarity,” Nexx Asia, Taipei, TW (2023); “Sunsets,” Underdonk, Brooklyn, US (2022); “FIFTY,” Museum of Contemporary Art, Jacksonville, US (2022). Lauren is a co-director of Underdonk Gallery in NYC.

Thomas Nozkowski (b. 1944, Teaneck, New Jersey; d. 2019, New York) arrived in New York after the first wave of Abstract Expressionism and during the rise of Pop Art and Minimalism and completed his undergraduate degree in 1967 at Cooper Union. He defied the dismissal of painting at the time, embracing the medium and dedicating himself to an inventive and focused body of work attuned to his subjective experience of the world. His prolific oeuvre reveals an ability to shift between various media, ranging from ballpoint pen and pencil to gouache and oils. Eschewing large-scale formats and resistant to established styles or recurrent motifs, Nozkowski developed a varied and influential artistic practice.

Paul Pfeiffer (b. 1966, Honolulu, HI), known for his highly sophisticated use of digital technologies and new media, has created celebrated works of video, photography, installation and sculpture since the late 1990s. Editing iconic images or found footage of sporting events, concerts, or Hollywood films, Pfeiffer explores our culture’s obsession with spectacle to uncover its hidden psychological cost. Starting in 2023, a critically-acclaimed retrospective of Pfeiffer’s work entitled Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom traveled from the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles to the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Previous one-person exhibitions were presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art (2001); the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2003); the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (2005); MUSAC León, Spain (2008); the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2009); Sammlung Goetz, Munich (2011); Honolulu Museum of Art, Honolulu (2016); and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2017). Pfeiffer’s work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Inhotim Museu de Arte Contemporanea, Brazil; the Pinault Collection, Venice; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; K21, Dusseldorf; Julia Stoscheck Foundation, Dusseldorf and Berlin; and Pinothek der Moderne and, Sammlung Goetz, Munich, among others.

Ed Ruscha has lived and worked in Los Angeles since 1956. His adopted city and its film industry are at the core of his visual language. At the start of his artistic career, Ruscha called himself an “abstract artist . . . who deals with subject matter.” Abandoning academic connotations that came to be associated with Abstract Expressionism, he looked instead to tropes of advertising and brought words—as form, symbol, and material—to the forefront of painting. Working in diverse mediums with humor and wit, he oscillates between sign and substance, locating the sublime in landscapes both natural and artificial. “I just happened to paint words like someone else paints flowers,” Ruscha told Fred Fehlau in an article in Flash Art in 1988. Ruscha moved from Oklahoma City to Los Angeles in 1956 to attend the Chouinard Art Institute. After graduation, he began to work for ad agencies, honing his skills in schematic design and considering questions of scale, abstraction, and viewpoint, which became integral to his painting and photography. By the early 1960’s Ruscha was well known for his paintings, collages, and photographs, and for his association with the Ferus Gallery group, which also included artists Robert Irwin, John Altoon, Larry Bell, Ken Price, and Edward Kienholz. The first retrospective of Ruscha’s drawings was held in 2004 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. He continues to experiment with form and make use of the American vernacular, reflecting on its evolution as online technologies alter the essence of human communication. Ruscha represented the United States at the 51st Biennale di Venezia (2005). ED RUSCHA / NOW THEN opened at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 2023 and traveled to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2024, the artist’s first comprehensive retrospective in more than twenty years.

Richard Tuttle’s (b. 1941, Rahway, New Jersey) direct and seemingly simple deployment of objects and gestures reflects a careful attention to materials and experience. Rejecting the rationality and precision of Minimalism, Tuttle embraced a handmade quality in his invention of forms that emphasize line, shape, color, and space as central concerns. He has resisted medium-specific designations for his work, employing the term drawing to encompass what could otherwise be termed sculpture, painting, collage, installation, and assemblage. Overturning traditional constraints of material, medium, and method, Tuttle’s works sensitize viewers to their perceptions. His working process, in which one series begets the next, is united by a consistent quest to create objects that are expressions of their own totality.