Purpose

July 9-August 21, 2025

Alexander Berggruen is pleased to present Purpose. This group exhibition will open Wednesday, July 9 with a reception from 5-7 pm at the gallery (1018 Madison Avenue, Floor 3, New York, NY).

Included within Purpose are works by:

The group show Purpose traces how contemporary and historic artists approach image-making with deep intention. This exhibition explores two primary approaches: repurposing culturally recognizable images and meticulously constructing imagery. These artists breathe new life into found imagery, employ digital manipulation, and/or use intricate craft techniques. Purpose surveys how images shape our identities and cultural memory, individually and collectively. The included works—paintings, sculptures, photography, and textiles—challenge the boundaries between creator and conductor, between viewer and consumer, and between process and product.

The artists of the Pictures Generation pioneered a new mode of artmaking. Their compelling critiques emerged through the appropriation of sensationalized mass media and overtly commercial imagery. Their work reminds us that where we direct our time and attention reflects who we are—a particularly relevant concern in today’s attention economy. Iconic representatives of the Pictures Generation in this group show include Sherrie Levine, Robert Longo, Richard Prince, and Cindy Sherman. Their works span advertisements, consumer goods, homages to canonical artists, and other incisive mimicry of mass media. The show also features Andy Warhol, who laid the groundwork for the Pictures Generation. Chris Burden, a contemporary of the group, is also included, with a sculpture that transforms a 19th-century child’s shotgun into a model ship. The examples presented here repurpose and critique advertisements, consumer goods, and stereotyped tropes in the media.

Mauro Bonacina, Pauline Shaw, and Kyle Thurman similarly reference existing imagery, often abstracting it in the process. Like Warhol—who reimagined a flower advertisement into a stylized image with Kantian formalism for his Flowers series—these artists distill source materials to their essential visual components (1). Working with imagery rooted in today’s digital landscape, these artists explore how we navigate life online. Bonacina manipulates a personal and internet-sourced image library through cryptic digital and painterly processes, producing singular compositions. Shaw transforms imagery sourced from museum archives and NASA’s Jupiter-focused Junocam into felted landscapes, reflecting our attitudes toward desire and value through what we choose to document. In Thurman’s Dream Police series, he repurposes images of body armor present in popular culture into highly saturated near-abstractions that challenge the original source’s machismo and point to the ways we hide behind masks or sculpt our identities in virtual space.

Other artists abstract imagery beyond immediate recognition using craft-based techniques and unconventional materials, including Sula Bermudez-Silverman, Jacqueline Humphries, Patricia Orpilla, and Rosemarie Trockel. Bermudez-Silverman’s sculpture Elephant’s Foot I & II references the shape and nickname of a nuclear mass formed by the Chernobyl explosion, using blown uranium glass—a once consumer-friendly material associated with atomic weapons and extracted by Navajo labor under a federally backed colonial project. Jacqueline Humphries’s painting features reflective silver paint evoking chrome, glass, screens, and cinematic space. As Humphries states, “The paintings seem to switch on and off” (2). Orpilla’s works use textiles as both reference and tool, echoing string figures, woven patterns, and microcosmic systems. Orpilla stated, “I see culture as encoded in its media and materials, or its visual and tactile languages.” Trockel’s Studie zum Fleckenbild juxtaposes machine-produced imagery on knitted fabric, contrasting a “manly” industrial process with traditionally feminine craft. These artists’ careful techniques stand in stark contrast to the speed and disposability of mass production.

What unites these diverse practices is not medium or style, but purpose: a deep intentionality behind how each image is sourced, shaped, and shared. Whether through appropriation, abstraction, or craft, the labor behind these works is not incidental but integral: each gesture resists passive consumption and asks a viewer to consider how images shape, obscure, or transmit meaning. In doing so, these artists actively participate in constructing culture. When images circulate with outsize speed and volume, the decision to slow down— to repurpose, to interrogate, to labor—is a powerful one.

(1) Peter Schjeldahl, quoted in Tony Sherman and David Dalton, POP: The Genius of Andy Warhol, New York, 2009, pp. 236-237.
(2) Exhibition text for Jacqueline Humphries (March 25-April 24, 2010) at Modern Art, London., October 29, 1980-October 2, 1981.

Press Release by Kirsten Cave

Purpose will run at Alexander Berggruen (1018 Madison Avenue, Floor 3) from July 9-August 21, 2025. The exhibition’s preview is available upon request. For all inquiries, please contact the gallery at info@alexanderberggruen.com.