The Secret History of Everything 

Perrotin always puts on some of the best group shows, with the best emerging artists. The Secret History of Everything is no exception, on view at Perrotin’s East Village location July 9th through August 14th, 2020. 

“The Secret History of Everything presents work by seven artists who are to varying degrees meticulous observers. Together, the work on view reckons with the sprawl of mass media’s infinite image bank, the obfuscation of source material, and the unceasing advance of a slick advertorial aesthetic. The artists in the exhibition — as semioticians, record keepers, and provocateurs — offer us truthful stories in a post-truth world.” (source) 

“The exhibition’s title is a nod to Adam Curtis’s pivotal 2016 documentary HyperNormalisation, which proposes a new cultural narrative and societal portrait through assembling three decades of BBC’s broadcasting archives” (source) 

“Comprised of historical works, as well as new works, this exhibition explores the impulse to understand visual culture as a collective narrative and challenges notions of individuality and authorship.” (source) 

Artist’s in the Show are the following: 

Daniel Arsham

Katherine Bernhardt 

Mauro Bonacina 

Cosima Von Bonin

Nick Doyle 

Sayre Gomez

Julia Wachtel 

Daniel Arsham

Daniel Arsham’s work, Quartz Eroded Eroded E.T. Video (2020), is a crystallized VHS tape from Blockbuster, “continuing his exploration into the timelessness of certain symbols and gestures through the haunted yet playful appropriation of cultural objects.” 

Katherine Bernhard

Katherine Bernhard’s work, The Beach, My Kind of Sandbox, highlights the famous comic character, Garfield. 

Mauro Bonacina

Mauro Bonacina is an Italian artist who “combines and transforms images through the use of digital software, and prints the final iteration onto canvas.” It may be hard to spot at first glance, but the artist mixes different cultural objects like puffer jackets and iPhone accessories with American and Dutch painters of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. 

Cosima von Bonin

You can’t miss Cosima von Bonin’s work, Total Produce (Morality), 2010, at the center of the exhibition.

“Their ironic anthropomorphism is very adult: There’s nothing cuddly about them, and many look exhausted by modern, that is, human — life.” - Cosima von Bonin

Nick Doyle

Nick Doyle is best known for his works created from denim. 

“Doyle infiltrates the vocabulary of Americana to examine greed, excess, and toxic masculinity” (source) 

Pictured below is a work from 2020 titled Wherever I Look All I See Is the Past, 2020, that serves as “a metaphor for the narrow lens through which we view our own status quo historical narratives.” 

Julie Watchel

Julie Watchel “has utilized silk-screen as a method to examine mass media and the proliferation of the digital image throughout the last five decades.” (source) 

“Wachtel’s work draws from image sources such as greeting cards, commercial posters, infomercials, daytime talk shows, tabloid magazines, and clip art illustrations.” (source) 

Sayre Gomez

At the front of the gallery is a work by LA artist Sayre Gomez. Gomez’s paintings are so realistic looking, like an out of focus photograph.

Pictured above is Gomez’s work In Coming Soon: Luxury Condominiums! Starting in the Low 800’s (2020), which challenges “the viewer’s perspective, and incites concurrent feelings of both familiarity and distance, attainability and futility.”

Another work (above) the artist created recently is this one in response to the ongoing fight for racial equality. 

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