Elle
May 21st – July 4th 2026
May 21 to July 4, 2026
Vernissage: Thursday, May 21, 5PM to 8PM
David Altmejd’s exhibition Elle carries an irrefutable sense of momentum, of energy travelling and transforming. Centered on manifestations of feminine energy culled from the artist’s inner depths, this ambitious new body of work sees Altmejd manipulating and multiplying matter with renewed intensity, through new life-size figures, heads and bronze sculpture, and drawings. These creations insist, above all else, on their own vivid existence—a vitality born from the hands that formed them. The resulting lifeforms are both wild and exacting, mortal and cosmic, made and alive.
Throughout the exhibition, ethereality is made into flesh, where the corporeal self and its immaterial essence converge. As with Altmejd’s larger practice, unlikely combinations of organic and non-organic elements—plaster, resin, hair, quartz—are manipulated to great ends, revealing moments of surprise and delight, even to the artist himself. Recurring mythical motifs like the werewolf, the swan, and the rabbit underscore notions of unpredictability and transformation central to Altmejd’s ethos. This all-consuming attention to detail and intuitive process enacts the artist’s great reverence for the makeup of both inner and outer worlds, as if moulding, carving, and assemblage were gestures towards unpacking the mysteries of the psyche to the great expanse of earthly and celestial realms. A towering, stoic figure stands with arms outstretched, like an all-knowing deity from a speculative future or ancient past, her stomach containing a deep, dark cavity, an entrance to the origins of the world. Clad completely in silver, the result of an experimental chemical process, her surface also comprises complex patterns akin to pathways or channels; she appears energized by conduits connecting part to part.
Though movement and repetition have long factored into the artist’s process, here multiplication as a technical and conceptual tool takes heightened prominence; sculpted beings are erected from accumulated, repeating rows of nipples, ears, and other armatures, both handmade and machine-made, growing outwards and upwards with uncontrollable and supernatural fortitude. Throughout, these chains of repeated body parts ripple and shift almost imperceptibly from one iteration to the next, until, at a certain threshold, they glitch. Order eventually erupts. This perfect matrix accumulates pressure until rupture, revealing a chaotic energy latent all along. One great figure, balancing on rows of cloned legs and heeled shoes, cackles at the moon with a distorted wolf head, seemingly gaining strength as she grows and multiplies. This palpable coexistence of chaos and order mimics the building blocks of matter itself, tending simultaneously toward organization and dissolution.