Miles Greenberg, Rick Owens, and Takuro Kuwata Electrify Salon 94

Fountain II went on to inspire “Desire Path,” Greenberg’s new exhibition at Salon 94 and his first Stateside solo show dedicated to his sculptural practice, which sees moments from the performance translated into a series of figurative works by means of clever digital manipulation and scanning techniques. Working with the Mount Vernon stone fabricator Monumental Labs, and with support from the fashion label Marni, Greenberg hacked a hand-held 3D scanner to reduce its ability to self-correct in capturing movement. That process, Greenberg explains, informed the exhibition’s title, referring to when people intuitively walk the same trajectory many times over, finding the shortest distance between two points. “It’s an obsessive process which I have limited control over,” he tells Galerie. “When there’s room for error and room for the spirit to take over, that feels like performance to me.”

Each scan was subsequently machine-carved into blocks of pink, black, and white marble before being hand-finished by Greenberg, resulting in otherworldly figurations that appear to glitch forth from Fountain II while gesturing to classical sculpture. Despite only standing a few feet tall, “each possesses an intense concentration of pathos, tenderness, and gesture, as if Greenberg hacked and compacted Rodin’s The Burghers of Calais into pairs, each a one-third-size futurist jigsaw,” notes Salon 94 founder Jeanne Greenberg-Rohatyn. Their hands gently wrap around each other’s backsides, waist, and wrists while the bodies appear to bear each other’s weight. “[They] have an electrical current,” she says, “and the sound of a scanner.”

Greenberg’s sculptures aren’t the only new works at Salon 94 with electric qualities. In his largest New York City exhibition to date, the Hiroshima-born ceramist Kuwata unveiled a host of vessels accented with gold and platinum, some dotted with a menagerie of yellow faces depicting the electric mouse Pikachu, the official mascot of Pokémon. Ceramics that nod to his home country’s cultural heritage are common for Kuwata, who keeps a studio in the Gifu Prefecture and often imbues his rough-hewn vessels with traditional techniques dating to feudal times. Thanks to their candy-colored palette and embellishments of metallic shards, the design scholar Glenn Adamson has even described Kuwata’s vessels as “hyper pots”—ceramics that unfailingly command attention. 

Owens, meanwhile, revealed the latest from his fashion label’s furniture arm, produced by his longtime partner and muse Michèle Lamy. They channeled natural shapes, Romanian sculptor Constantin Brâncuşi, and California’s skateparks into one-of-a-kind furniture crafted from rare earth materials like porphyry and bois de marais (swamp wood) alongside unexpected adornments like moose antlers. The duo also revealed a never-before-seen version of Tech Glade, a modular recording studio developed with Travis Scott for the backstage area of the rapper’s sold-out Circus Maximus tour. The expanded ten-piece structure includes a large-screen TV room and recording studio kitted out with mixing equipment and a cocoon-like sofa.

Scott, who was present for the opening, was joined by a lively group of high-profile attendees including Marina Abramović, Derrick Adams, Moses Sumney, Huma Bhabha, Yvonne Force Villareal, Lyle Ashton Harris, Ryan McGinley, Klaus Biesenbach, Karon Davis, Julio Torres, and Tom Sachs. Below, scroll for more images from the opening.