The Secret History of Everything, Perrotin, New York, USA, 2020
July 9 - August 14, 2020
Installation Views
Individual Works
Press Release
Perrotin is pleased to present the group exhibition The Secret History of Everything, featuring paintings by Katherine Bernhardt, Mauro Bonacina, Sayre Gomez and Julia Wachtel, as well as sculptures by Daniel Arsham, Cosima von Bonin and Nick Doyle. 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.
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. 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.