Spring program 2023: Martin Wong, Win McCarthy, Karen Lamassonne

KW Institute for Contemporary Art is pleased to present its Spring Program of 2023 with a focus on interiority and exteriority. These reflections on the physical and psychological conditions of architecture and city planning inform the work of Martin Wong, Win McCarthy, and Karen Lamassonne, in which notions of “the self” are being constructed.

Martin Wong: Malicious Mischief
February 25–May 14, 2023

KW Institute for Contemporary Art is proud to present the first extensive exhibition of the work of the US-Chinese artist Martin Wong (1946–1999, US).

Martin Wong is recognized for his depictions of social, sexual, and political scenographies from the US in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. Poetically weaving together narratives of queer existence, marginal communities, and urban gentrification, Wong stands out as an important countercultural voice at odds with the art establishment’s reactionary discourse at the time. Heavily influenced by his immediate surroundings, the artist’s practice merges the visual languages of Chinese iconography, urban poetry, graffiti, carceral aesthetics, and sign language. His work offers rare insight into decisive periods of recent US American history as told through its changing urban landscapes, unfolding hidden desires, and complexities.

Martin Wong: Malicious Mischief is initiated by KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, curated by Krist Gruijthuijsen and Agustín Pérez Rubio, and produced in collaboration with Museo Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo (CA2M), Móstoles, Madrid; Camden Art Centre, London; and Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.

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Win McCarthy: Innenportrait
February 25–May 14, 2023

With Innenportrait, KW Institute for Contemporary Art presents the first institutional solo exhibition of Win McCarthy (b. 1986, US). In his work, McCarthy explores the dialectical relationships between subjects like city and citizen, friend and the stranger, and present and past. McCarthy’s work often testifies to the paradoxical emptiness experienced in a metropolis. Taking the city’s map as a metaphysical topography, the confluence of real estate, architecture, and urban planning become vocabulary for the construction of a self.

Besides working with photography and text, McCarthy makes associative installations. His works appear to be images from memories, meeting viewers with a torrent of different emotions, ranging from amusement and admiration to aversion and fear. Innenportrait focuses on a collision between opticality and intellect. If subjectivity has been pivotal in McCarthy’s previous work, its main juncture has been at how the self struggles to find reconciliation with the phenomenological and ontological: where the ‘I’ ends, is where the world begins.

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Karen Lamassonne: Ruido / Noise
February 25–May 14, 2023

Ruido / Noise is the first solo exhibition by the Colombian-American artist Karen Lamassonne (b. 1954, US) in Europe and is collaboratively presented with Swiss Institute, New York, and Medellín Museum of Modern Art—MAMM. The exhibition brings together paintings, drawings, collages as well as videos that Lamassonne created between 1974 and today.

The works of Lamassonne are often situated in domestic spaces like bathrooms, bedrooms, kitchens, and hallways. As a woman, she playfully questions notions of self-portraiture and self-representation by concealing and revealing the self. In later works, she would move towards depicting the tension between the intimacy of sensual and sexual bodies in public urban spaces.

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Press contact
Anna Falck-Ytter, press@kw-berlin.de
Press preview: February 24, 2023, 11am. Register via press@kw-berlin.de,

The exhibitions and projects in the spring program 2023 take place in collaboration with and/or are supported by: