New Grotesque, 2026. Installation View.

Management is pleased to present New Grotesque, a group exhibition re-examining the nature of grotesque art in the second quarter of the 21st century. The exhibition features emerging, established, and rediscovered artists with a selection of works representative of the grotesque genre as we understand it today.

In aesthetic terms, the grotesque is that which violates classical rules and hierarchies: it blurs boundaries and defies authority, favouring the eccentric and chaotic over the ideal and orderly. It merges humor with horror, offering insight through hyperbole and provocation. From Bosch to Goya to Bocklin to members of the New Objectivity, artists have long understood that in times of rupture, conventional ideas or classical forms are simply not enough to capture the instability and dissonance of lived reality.

In nearly all ages, some form of grotesque art has been a salve and an outlet for critical sentiment toward society and its institutions, and also a reflection of humanity’s carnal fears and desires. When war, suffering, and poverty became the shared lived experience, grotesque art became the defining form of expression of the age in Western culture. In the 2020s, a convergence of crises, including political upheaval, climate emergency, pandemic, rampant inequality, and the dizzying rise of artificial intelligence, has led to a proliferation of new grotesque imagery. However, a fundamental difference between the past and the present demands a reconsideration of the grotesque as a response to our time. It is not the case that the common human experience in Western societies has reached past levels of precarity. A defining characteristic of the second quarter of the 21st century is that human suffering and conflict are hyperbolized and amplified by the mediated, online reality, experienced primarily through apps like Instagram, X, and TikTok. The grotesque reflection of this reality is thus also amplified, taking on a form that is qualitatively different from the grotesque art of the past.

Bringing together voices from multiple geographies and generations, the New Grotesque series of exhibitions maps these sensibilities of distortion, exaggeration, absurdity, abjection, satire, and moral and intellectual decay deployed not just for provocation, but as a means of confronting a reality that polite forms cannot.

With thanks to David Kordansky Gallery, Galerie Jocelyn Wolff, Sprüth Magers, Matthew Brown Gallery, Luhring Augustine, Kukje Gallery, Blue Velvet Projects, Droste Galladé, and Pequod Co.