Opening – 26 APR 2024, 6-9 pm

Société is pleased to announce Contact, Trisha Baga’s fifth solo exhibition with the gallery. In this new body of work, Baga combines personal imagery with dazzling starscapes culled from deep space photography. Their paintings zoom outwards into the depths of space, a dizzying abyss brought dramatically “closer” through advanced technology, while simultaneously turning inwards toward the minutiae of their daily life. Intimate traces of beings, objects, devices, and spaces bound to earthly gravity appear throughout these works: Baga’s studio, the back of their sleeping child’s head, knick-knacks, and the various accoutrements used to tend to an infant. “Through hand painting these high-tech images,” Baga says, “I’m behaving as yet another layer that re-enacts and interprets the information generated from that whole sublime global project, and all the personal imagery and studio reflections are just the local aberrations of my own particular lens.” Within the context of outerspace, the term “contact” typically refers to communication or interaction with extraterrestrial intelligence or civilizations, to making connections with entities beyond Earth. In Baga’s case, it also refers to radical intimacy—to the care and closeness necessary for the reproduction of our species.

Trisha Baga (b. 1985, Venice) lives and works in New York. Baga’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan; CCC, Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard College, Cambridge; Zabludowicz Collection, London; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Their immersive large-scale painting installation BODY CLOCK—a constellation of painting, light projections, staged objects, and sculpture—was exhibited at Art Basel Unlimited in 2021. That same year, their video installation HOPE illuminated the façade of Kassel’s Fridericianum on the United States election day. Their work was recently included in the exhibition HOPE at Museion, Bolzano curated by Bart van der Heide and Leonie Radine; and they recently participated in Louisiana Museum of Modern Art’s group exhibition entitled The Irreplaceable Human in November 2023. They have also participated in group exhibitions at ARoS Aarhus Art Museum, Aarhus; Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna; Biennale für aktuelle Fotografie, Ludwigshafen am Rhein; PS1, New York; Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva; European Biennial of Contemporary Art, Zurich; and Julia Stoschek Collection at ZKM, Düsseldorf, among many other venues.

For further information and high-resolution images please contact Olga Boiocchi at:
olga@societeberlin.com or call +49 (0) 30 2610 328 3.

Opening – 26 APR 2024, 6-9 pm

Société is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of the late conceptual artist Helen Chadwick. One of the most influential figures in British contemporary art, Chadwick was known for groundbreaking, visceral work that explored sexuality, identity, and the body.

A central work in the exhibition is Chadwick’s early video performance Domestic Sanitation (1976). Clad in latex body casts adorned with tufts of fake pubic hair or appearing as female-furniture hybrids, Chadwick and a group of friends enact absurd domestic and beauty rituals while a voice in the background hawks beauty products. The video is presented alongside a photographic series from the following year entitled In the Kitchen, which feature the artist inhabiting wearable soft sculptures of “gendered” household appliances like a stove, washing machine, or refrigerator. Similar to contemporaries like Martha Rosler’s Semiotics of the Kitchen or Mierele Laderman Ukeles’ Maintenance Art, Chadwick’s offbeat tableaux draw attention to the complex and often unspoken structures that shape women’s experience.

Helen Chadwick was one of the first women artists to be nominated for the Turner Prize in 1987. Most recent exhibitions include Sculpture Park at Compton Verney, Warwickshire, UK (2024-27); Women in Revolt! at Tate Britain, London, (2023); Bloom at York Gallery, York, UK, (2023); Helen Chadwick at The National Museum, Oslo, Norway, (2023); Body Poetics at GIANT, Bournemouth, UK (2022); and The Horror Show! at Somerset House, London, UK (2022). Important solo exhibitions include Wreaths to Pleasure, Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, UK (2012); Helen Chadwick: A Retrospective, Barbican Art Gallery, London, UK (2004), which travelled to the Manchester City Art Gallery, Manchester, UK; Kunstmuseet Trapholt, Kolding, Denmark and Liljevalch Konsthall, Stockholm, Sweden; and Bad Blooms, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY (1995), which travelled to Norrköpings Konstmuseum, Norrköpings, Sweden; Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, IN; and Uppsala Konstmuseum, Uppsala, Sweden. Chadwick’s 1986 exhibition Of Mutability, which opened at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, is considered a seminal point in the breakthrough of the YBA movement. Chadwick’s work is included in the Arts Council Collection; British Council Collection; Tate Collection; National Portrait Gallery; Victoria & Albert Museum and MoMA, NY, amongst many others.

For further information and high-resolution images please contact Olga Boiocchi at:
olga@societeberlin.com or call +49 (0) 30 2610 328 3.