Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami’s Current Exhibitions on View: Lucy Bull, Marguerite Humeau, Ding Shilun
Ding Shilun, “Man in a Shell,” 2024. Oil on linen. 90 ½ x 74 ¾ in. Courtesy of the artist and Bernheim Gallery, London and Zurich. Photo credit: Eva Herzog
“Ding Shilun: Janus” comprises newly commissioned paintings and a site-specific installation in the artist’s first solo US museum exhibition. Shilun’s ethereal and at times ominous works feature idiosyncratic mythologies inspired by his everyday life. Each painting acts as an individual vignette, depicting self-contained and often ambiguous scenes that utilize figuration to convey rousing emotion and simple anecdotes rather than elaborate narratives.
Shilun refers to this storytelling as a “personal fable”; the protagonists of his paintings are avatars of the artist, which he refers to as “projections and embodiments of my inner self, reflecting my confusion living across different cultures and ideologies, as well as my desire to construct my own reality.” The show takes its title “Janus,” from the Roman god of beginnings and endings, chosen by the artist to evoke this paradox in his works.
Installation view: “Marguerite Humeau:\*sk\*/ey-” at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, Dec 3, 2024 - Mar 30, 2025. Photo: Oriol Tarridas
ICA Miami presents “\*sk\*/ey-,” the first major solo exhibition for artist Marguerite Humeau. This immersive installation comprises newly commissioned sculptures and video that sees the artist experiment with form through the abstract narratives of alternative worlds. The exhibition takes its title from the antiquated, proto-Indo-European term for shedding or splitting, “sk-ey,” alluding to a mysterious mutation of the Earth. Humeau creates a world gripped by metamorphosis, in which soil is peeling off the Earth and transmuting into flying nomadic beings.
The exhibition opens with a video that relays the cosmology of a human-made eternal sun, a great migration, and the transformation of earthbound life forms into rootless, nomadic inhabitants of the sky. The video’s soundtrack echoes a transforming landscape through evocative melodies that, at times, break into visceral, rhythmic noises. The installation evokes a desert landscape with sculptures throughout the space that appear to have torn themselves from the ground wrought from organic material like 150-year-old carved walnut, cast rubber, handblown glass, and semi-translucent embellished silk.
Lucy Bull, 16:23, 2024. Oil on linen, 86 x 68 x 1 ¼ inches (218.4 x 172.7 x 3.2 cm) Courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery. Photo credit: Elon Schoenholz
Lucy Bull’s first U.S. museum exhibition, “The Garden of Forking Paths” includes sixteen paintings produced between 2019 and 2024. A singular voice in contemporary abstract painting, Bull’s dynamic practice explores the formal and experiential concerns of the medium. Through a dynamic application of paint, Bull choreographs energetic gestures into eruptive fields of pictorial activity. In her works, exuberant colors and elusive forms, reference and atmosphere, density and transparency are in constant tension. These expansive works inaugurate a new field of exploration for the artist and are brought together for the first time here. Alongside these, the exhibition includes a number of vertical paintings that continue the artist’s pictorial research over the last decade.
Bull’s works sit at the edge of language. In them, the macroscopic and the microscopic tend to swap places, as landscapes often morph into depictions of internal psychic spaces. Worlds congeal momentarily in her paintings, only to surrender again to a dynamic of constant transformation. Bull’s works are enlivened by modulating emotional temperatures and by the courting of far-reaching associations. Ultimately, they push viewers’ awareness of looking to the forefront: optical overload and disruptive dissonance move typical perception into a hypersensitive mode.
In parallel to the exhibition, Bull will create the next stairwell commission at ICA Miami, which will be on view through September 2025.