Lehmann Maupin is pleased to present Losing Face, a solo exhibition of new works by New York-based artist Oren Pinhassi, on view from September 10 through October 12, 2024 in New York. Losing Face marks Pinhassi’s first presentation with Lehmann Maupin since joining the gallery in May 2024. The exhibition features new large-scale sculptures made from sand-based material, constructed using the artist’s signature technique.
Pinhassi creates sensuous sculptures and large-scale installations that explore the politics of architectural spaces as they relate to the human body. His anthropomorphic sculptures, often standing up to eight feet in height, examine individual vulnerability within the built environment, probing new possibilities for coexistence. Pinhassi’s haptic and immersive spaces redefine the relationship between viewer and environment, provoking a visceral interaction with the art object that yields a heightened awareness of humankind’s place within an ecosystem of co-creation, where we in turn are shaped by the objects and architecture around us.
In Losing Face, Pinhassi harnesses the logic of the eponymous idiom and turns it on its head, making it a positive proposition: what happens when we strip away our ego and individuality? The works on view gesture towards a willingness to relinquish one’s familiar perception of the world—to “lose face” would be to lose access to the sensory organs—and in this way, Pinhassi allows for transformation and vulnerability in the construction of the works. Against the rapid-fire spread of information and the speed at which new events unfold in contemporary society, Pinhassi’s new work asks the viewer to slow down and consider the interdependence necessary to imagine possible collective futures.
Pinhassi is drawn to organic materials for their shape-shifting potential and works primarily with sand and plaster. He repeatedly applies these materials in layers over burlap and welded steel skeletons; the mark of the artist’s hand is a key component throughout the work. In Losing Face, a group of 5 new sculptures stand erect, themselves in states of fluidity and transition. Pinhassi also returns to the ongoing motif of feet in his work. Referencing medieval horizontal tomb effigies and augmenting the work’s anthropomorphic nature, each claw-footed sculpture stands atop a rock. With the feet of the sculpture clinging to the heavy rock bases, Pinhassi’s totemic sculptures suggest at once a vulnerable figure on the cusp of succumbing to gravity and a monument standing vertically erect.
Across Pinhassi’s body of work, queerness is an essential logic of construction in that the artist’s objects themselves generate queer space. For Pinhassi, queer spaces are areas of potential—areas where objects generate a slight friction between one another, allowing the individuals in that space to become porous and open in ways not always possible in mainstream society. In Losing Face, this logic is apparent in the holes that traverse the surface of each work, drawing parallels to the vital cavities in the human body that function as loci of passing, puncture, or penetration. These negative spaces directly suggest eyes, mouths, genitals, and pores—a formal gesture that imbues each artwork with a distinct eroticism, allowing ideas and objects to enter into and move through the sculptures.
Architectural motifs such as awnings and windows are recurring motifs in Pinhassi’s work, and in Losing Face, these aspects conduct a formal investigation into the perforations present in the exhibition. Widows and doors are vital components of architecture, as they allow the body to pass through space. In this sense, such openings allow bodies to merge with architecture in ways that invite a new understanding of our relationship to others and to the built environment. Similarly, awnings and vents protect the human body from the elements. Pinhassi folds these architectural reference points into the works in Losing Face, inviting viewers to reflect on systems of dependency and protection between ourselves and the environment around us.