Rachel Harrison's Stage Fright

From Duchamp to Bourgeois, Harrison’s curation of 20th-century sculpture looks at the study of the human body Guided by a desire to illuminate and inspire reflection on the sculptural form, Dominique Lévy of LGDR invited American artist Rachel Harrison (born 1966) to curate a presentation of 20th-century sculpture. The exhibition that emerged comprises a group of works that consider Modernism’s devotion to that most fundamental of subjects: the human figure. Stage Fright features works by Louise Bourgeois, Constantin Brâncusi, Marcel Duchamp, Marisol, Alberto Giacometti and Alina Szapocznikow that represent the body in extremis—shown ruptured in pieces or pared down to the essentials. The individual pieces act as surrogates that stand in for the whole. Taken together, the works on view embody various conceptions of personhood as routed through objects, whether rendered with aching specificity, as in the clefts and folds of Szapocznikow’s plaster Ventre (Belly) (1968), or invoked as a generic type, as in Marisol’s totemic couple The Blacks (1962). Richly illustrated with installation views from the exhibition, Stage Fright features a new text by Harrison—framed as a dialogue between filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock and figure skater Peggy Fleming—that critically examines the presentation and the artist’s own practice and approach.