Zack Hatfield
Atop pedestals, plinths, and perches, makeshift monsters suspended between object and subject.
Rachel Harrison: The Friedmann Equations, installation view. Courtesy the artist and Greene Naftali. Photo: Júlia Standovár. Pictured, left to right: Coral Corridor; Painter Hangs Own Paintings; Scepter; Your Favorite Artist’s Favorite Artist, all 2025.
Rachel Harrison: The Friedmann Equations, Greene Naftali, 508 West Twenty-Sixth Street, New York City, through June 21, 2025
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There’s a strange wrinkle, or lack thereof, in the history of space-time. In 1922, when the Russian physicist Alexander Friedmann derived from Einstein’s theory of relativity a pair of equations proposing that the universe is expanding, he laid the groundwork for the Big Bang model and, therefore, modern cosmology. Statistically speaking, the Big Bang should have, over eons, resulted in a universal topography that is convex, like a sphere, or hyperbolic, like a Pringle. And yet, observations from the turn of our century suggest that the curvature of space-time appears to be zero: the universe is remarkably, even miraculously, flat. Scientists call this “the flatness problem.”
Rachel Harrison’s exhibition at Greene Naftali—her first considerable showing of new sculpture in New York since Rachel Harrison Life Hack, her 2019 survey at the Whitney Museum—is titled The Friedmann Equations, a reference to the math but also to China’s 2022 A4 Revolution, whose participants brandished signs with those equations as a way to protest the country’s severe pandemic-lockdown measures (“Friedmann” is a homonym for “free man” in Chinese, as well as English). The sculptures here are echt Harrison: loosely anthropomorphic, kitchen-sink agglutinations comprised of hand-molded polystyrene lumps slathered with garish acrylic and accessorized with everyday objects or photographs.
Rachel Harrison: The Friedmann Equations, installation view. Courtesy the artist and Greene Naftali. Photo: Júlia Standovár.
Chained to a shelf at the front of Greene Naftali is a rollicking hundred-plus-page “exhibition guide” filled with lo-res screenshots. The book whips up a frenzy of citation, pinballing between Friedmann’s equations, the A4 Revolution, and English monarchs, as well as medieval maps, the legendary angsty dash in Kierkegaard’s diary, an eagle sinking its talons into a drone, commentary on ChatGPT’s Studio Ghibli filter, David Lynch’s specifications for projecting Mulholland Drive, a listing for a Burger King sign ($500), and on and on. (During my second visit to the exhibition, I noticed that a page with an email, dated May 12 and subject-lined “OMG,” had been added to the guide post-opening. “What a brilliant show,” the anonymized admirer writes. “The Rose [sic] Selavy series blows me away . . . I wanted to run out of the gallery in delight.”)
The guidebook’s infodump plays a kind of joke on Harrison’s sparse, slapdash constructions—it takes a lot of intertextuality to look this cheap. Some sculptures lean precariously against the wall, like the red-hot inbut of a Cor.ner, a lopsided faux-Flavin that seems to have broken off at the middle. At its crook is a silk-screen photograph of a young Queen Elizabeth applying lipstick in public—reputedly a signal to her ladies-in-waiting that she was ready to leave. The Land of Gog and Magog features a wobbly table with a vitrine showcasing an orange “Savage X Fenty Show Vol. 3 carpet fragment” (per the show’s checklist) cut into what resembles a crude map of the United States; the final touch is a Chase Manhattan Bank pen dropped under the table.
Rachel Harrison: The Friedmann Equations, installation view. Courtesy the artist and Greene Naftali. Photo: Júlia Standovár. Pictured, left: Scepter, 2025.
As usual, Harrison dotes on pedestals, plinths, and other sculptural perches dispensed with by the Minimalists of the 1960s. See A Scholar Treads on a Market Woman’s Basket of Eggs (all works cited, 2025), whose xanthic mass rests on a metal folding chair atop a white pedestal (it’s titled after some jocular marginalia by Holbein the Younger); and Scepter, a gravity- and adjective-defying aubergine tower with a circular base teetering on a Uline dolly and topped with Converse shoefiti. The checklist notes a Panasonic KX-TG5431 telephone with answering machine, and there it is: a silver landline secreted underneath the handcart and only visible at an oblique angle, like Holbein’s anamorphic skull. It just so happens that the exhibition opens with a drawing titled Your Favorite Artist’s Favorite Artist, an homage to his Self-portrait of ca. 1542. Harrison’s piece commences a bravura suite of drawings riffing on the Northern Renaissance master, re-rendering his Tudor court portraiture in lysergic, layered colored pencil.
Rachel Harrison: The Friedmann Equations, installation view. Courtesy the artist and Greene Naftali. Photo: Genevieve Hanson.
In addition to structures of support, Harrison is uncommonly attuned to art’s other epiphenomena: installation shots, checklist materials, catalogs, titles. She has called exhibitions If I Did It, Asdfjkl;, and Prasine. The name of her first one-person show, in 1996, hurtles the daunted art critic toward their word count: Should home windows or shutters be required to withstand a direct hit from an eight-foot-long two-by-four shot from a cannon at 34 miles an hour, without creating a hole big enough to let through a three-inch sphere? Ripped from a New York Times article about hurricane proofing, the title sparkles with an absurdity and domestic malice native to Harrisonburg. Her exhibition The Help (2012) was a nod, perhaps, to the period drama The Help (2011), but also to a photograph by the artist depicting the maintenance workers’ entrance to Marcel Duchamp’s Étant donnés at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. “Every sculpture should have a trapdoor,” she once told Peter Schjeldahl—a maxim that, in 2017, was recycled as a title for one of her bizarreries.
What to make of all this desultory, laughter-in-the-dark chaos? As John Kelsey wrote in a 2004 Artforum review, “Harrison’s best works seem to sculpturize an ambivalence about the job a work is meant to do: I show myself, you see me, value is in question, now what?” A screenshot of this cliff-hanger appears in the show’s exhibition guide (Harrison’s name is redacted), the next paragraph vanishing beneath the lime-green hedge of a paywall banner alerting the reader that she’s reached her limit of complimentary articles. Now what?
Rachel Harrison: The Friedmann Equations, installation view. Courtesy the artist and Greene Naftali. Photo: Genevieve Hanson. Pictured: Black Box, 2025 (detail).
That Harrison’s rise in the mid-1990s overlapped with that of the internet is no coincidence. Citation, remediation, the circulatory flux of images—she understood early that these must be the contemporary sculptor’s tools, too, especially as the implacable advance of digital reproduction created another “flatness problem,” imposing photographic frontality upon three-dimensional objects with indiscriminate force. Amid the discarnate hyperreality of digital media and its failed democratic promise—and amid the cruel sloptimism that threatens to subsume aesthetic experience—the informe of The Friedmann Equations finds Harrison’s sculptures still clinging, post-post-internet, to a gothic sapience, her makeshift monsters suspended between object and subject, online and off.
Beautiful equations don’t always add up. Against all odds, our universe appears to be remarkably flat. And against all odds, Harrison’s densely layered show—I’ve only scratched the iceberg in this review—feels bracingly empty. This is her achievement: to fathom strange forms that, when arrayed within a complex, ever-expanding system of referentiality, manage to skirt the blandishments of “meaning,” to remain wonderfully open. A motif in the exhibition guide is a blank piece of paper, which Chinese dissidents have, along with the Friedmann equations, recently embraced as a symbol of, and precaution against, state censorship. Harrison transforms their transformations by including them here, making something out of nothing, nothing out of something. And so I left the gallery feeling that Harrison is an artist of profound and perpetually misunderstood largesse—a writer of blank checks, so to speak, that we’ll never know how to cash.
Zack Hatfield is a writer and editor living in New York.