Kaari Upson
Artist Spotlight
Kaari Upson: The Body Remembers Everything
When the New Museum mounted its survey of Kaari Upson's work, visitors encountered something that felt less like an exhibition and more like an exhumation. Objects that resembled furniture, skin, and domestic debris were suspended in states of collapse and becoming, pressing hard against the boundary between the psychological and the physical. Upson, who passed away in 2021 at the age of fifty, left behind a body of work so singular in its materials and emotional intelligence that the art world is still absorbing its full implications. Her legacy is not merely that of an artist who made… Continue reading
Artists in conversation
Mike Kelley
Kelley similarly used abject materials and domestic objects to excavate repressed memory, trauma, and the unconscious with psychological intensity comparable to Upson's approach.
Paul McCarthy
McCarthy employs visceral materials including latex and silicone in sculptural installations that probe desire, bodily excess, and psychological disturbance in ways that closely parallel Upson's practice.
Kiki Smith
Smith shares Upson's preoccupation with the body as a site of vulnerability and psychological meaning, using unconventional materials to create sculptures that evoke fragility and intimate experience.
Artists who inspired them
Louise Bourgeois
Bourgeois pioneered the use of obsession, sexuality, and domestic memory as sculptural subject matter, laying conceptual groundwork that Upson directly built upon in her psychologically charged installations.
Eva Hesse
Hesse's radical use of latex and rubber to create sculptures emphasizing fragility and bodily connotation was a foundational influence on Upson's own material experimentation and formal sensibility.
Cindy Sherman
Sherman's investigations of identity, fantasy, and the uncanny through constructed imagery shaped Upson's own explorations of desire and psychological projection onto objects and spaces.