For decades, Josiah McElheny has created formally stunning and technically perfect artworks, mostly of glass, in a modernist style derived from mathematical ordering systems. His last, colorful period was a crusade against Viennese designer and convicted pedophile Adolf Loos. McElheny’s sprawling new show, Geometries for an Imagined Future at James Cohan Gallery in New York, announces a radical aesthetic break. Gone are the colors, the precarious towers of precious things, the experiments in form for perfection’s sake. Now, the glass is transparent, and it boasts of its own imperfections.
The show is anchored by two black panels bisected horizontally by a darkened ledge that cradles a polished glass object. “The Double Centered World” (2023) holds a triaxial ellipsoid, whose geometry is premised on a two-part center, while “The Shape of Melancholy” (2023) holds the mysterious polyhedron of Dürer’s 1513 “Melancholia I.” These reflect essential qualities of the human condition: one is intensely relational, the other melancholic, and the markedly distinct objects are subtly but ineluctably flawed.
The quiet powers in the show are eight painterly works of geometric forms that glow white against black backgrounds. Modeled on polyhedra, each form is cut from glass and set into mirrored wells, the glow a result of refracting light within. The almost pained specificity of the objects’ mathematical names (“Giroelongated Square Bipyramid,” for example) echoes naming in other systems, like those used to order bodies by race or gender. But the ever-shifting light within, which is subject to the movements of both the viewer and the external light, undermines the claims to objectivity to which such systems pretend.
Two wood displays containing glass polyhedra placed on glass cones recall mid-century trophy cases, but because the objects within are non-specific meditations on form and emptiness rather than specific totems to particular events, they oppose the attainment of dominance that a trophy represents. These polyhedra, as well as those in Prismatic Refractive Geometry I (2023), a series set into a case of angled mirrors, reject traditionally idealized forms like platonic solids and sacred geometries in favor of the imperfect. In reminding us that such systems are a human invention — and thus both flawed and fallible — McElheny suggests that a future built on more relational and collaborative systems demands not only a clear-eyed reckoning with what has come before, but also actively correcting imbalances of power that exist.
Josiah McElheny: Geometries for an Imagined Future continues at James Cohan Gallery (52 Walker Street, Tribeca, Manhattan) through December 22. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.
