New installation by artist Giulia Cenci now on view on the High Line

Giulia Cenci, secondary forest, 2024. Photo by Liz Ligon.

Opening the park’s Spring 2024 art season

The Spring season’s public artworks include works by Giulia Cenci, Tishan Hsu, Tschabalala Self, Teresa Solar-Abboud, and Chloe Wise

The High Line announced that Giulia Cenci’s installation secondary forest is now on view, the first in the slate of artworks that will debut along the length of the park in Spring 2024. Each year, High Line Art, the arm of the High Line responsible for commissioning and producing public art installations and performances, collaborates with an international array of artists both emerging and established—to create new artworks inspired by the unique setting of the park.

The spring art season begins in April with Giulia Cenci’s sculptural installation secondary forest, followed by Teresa Solar-Abboud’s Birth of Islands, and, in May, Tishan Hsu’s car-grass-screen-2 and car-body screen-2. Each artwork will be on view on the High Line for a full year. Also in April, two works by Tschabalala Self will be displayed on the High Line Moynihan Connector Billboard.

“Giulia Cenci’s transformative installation kicks off a season of artworks on the High Line that explore and challenge humans’ relationships to technology, wildlife, and their own bodies,” said Cecilia Alemani, the Donald R. Mullen, Jr. Director & Chief Curator of High Line Art, who commissioned the artworks for the High Line. “We look forward to seeing how the park’s horticulture and visitors alike engage with these artworks.”

In addition, in May, Chloe Wise will premiere two new films as part of the exhibition But Wait, There’s More! for the High Line Channel film program, curated by Taylor Zakarin, Associate Curator of High Line Art.

Giulia Cenci
secondary forest, 2024
On view April 11, 2024 – March 2025

Giulia Cenci creates elaborate sculptures and installations by fusing industrial elements and organic forms, arranging them into jarring compositions that invite viewers to question human’s relationship with nature. Cenci’s work features animals, plants, and human appendages cast from melted down scrap metal, reusing found objects, agricultural tools, old machinery, and car parts. These seemingly disparate elements are then hung, suspended, or pierced together like pieces of meat, morphing into a wild habitat void of hierarchy where a human bone is treated with the same care as the branch of a tree or a wolf’s face.

Cenci presents a new production titled secondary forest on the High Line at 24th Street. The sculptural installation is composed of animal, human, and plant forms cast from aluminum, sprouting out from a steel grid armature. Dismembered wolf heads sit atop bundles of branches that seemingly stand in for their bodies, and cast tree roots hover above the ground, as though they’ve just been pulled and unearthed. Masks of human faces, their eyes squeezed shut, peek between branches. Their visages appear throughout the work, upside down and sideways, as though they’ve been frozen in place while falling. The work also features the limb of a tree girded with metal, seemingly wearing a human face. This amalgamation of organic and industrial materials reflects the history of the Meatpacking District’s meat trade and the High Line’s former role as an industrial conveyor. Cenci also reflects on the blurred line between humans and all other forms of life. The work’s title, a term used in botany to describe a forest or woodland area that has regenerated through largely natural processes after human-caused disturbances, allows viewers to reconsider their own impact on and relationship to the cycle of life.

Giulia Cenci (b. 1988, Cortona, Italy) lives and works between Amsterdam, Netherlands, and Tuscany, Italy.

Tschabalala Self
Patience, 2022
Loosie in the Park, 2019
On view April –July 31 2024

Tschabalala Self is an interdisciplinary artist known for her evocative portrayals of Black female figures. Through a fusion of painting, printmaking, and sculpture, Self highlights the tension between foreground and background, distorting traditional expectations of space, shape, and form. This distortion speaks to the nuanced complexity of Black femininity, mimicking stereotypical and exaggerated depictions of gendered and racialized bodies.

Self reproduces Patience (2022) and Loosie in the Park (2019) on the High Line Moynihan Connector Billboard, adjacent to the park at Dyer Ave and 30th Street. Patience depicts a Black female figure, within a flat yellow interior. The work explores the psychological significance of the home, domesticity, and gendered labor. Loosie in the Park portrays a female figure in a moment of leisure, sitting on a park bench smoking a “loosie” — a single cigarette sold at neighborhood bodegas. Both works navigate the intersection of identity and cultural and societal expectations, together presenting a commentary on the contemporary Black woman’s experience.

Tschabalala Self (b. 1990, New York, New York) lives and works in Hudson Valley, New York.

Tschabalala Self artworks courtesy of the Artist, Pilar Corrias, and Galerie Eva Presenhuber.

Teresa Solar-Abboud
Birth of Islands, 2024
On view May 2024 – March 2025

Teresa Solar-Abboud creates sculptures, drawings, and videos characterized by an interest in fiction, storytelling, natural history, ecology, and anatomy. In her work, she alludes to forms in states of transformation and the tension between the organic and synthetic, interior and exterior, gestation and birth, and embryonic and advanced. Solar-Abboud wields these tensions as a tool to suggest a constant flow state of evolution. This is articulated in her work through an interest in and re-imagination of life’s diverse and sophisticated networks — cultural, geological, industrial, and anatomical — and how these systems overlap or sometimes clash.

On the High Line at 20th Street, Solar-Abboud presents Birth of Islands, a new sculpture in her series of zoomorphic shapes inspired by animals and prehistoric life forms. Birth of Islands is composed of slick, blade-like foam-coated resin elements that emanate outward from the pores of a muddy, gray ceramic stump. When visiting New York, Solar-Abboud was struck by the landscape — building after building, rising from the soil in a fight for prominence, just as vegetation in the forest combats for sunlight in order to survive. Birth of Islands refers to this competitive ecosystem, while also evoking human anatomy: two yellow, tongue-like emanations have seemingly tunneled their way from underground onto the High Line. The forms are spoon-like in their appearance, concave or convex, depending on one’s vantage point. The result appears simultaneously post-human and primordial; sophisticated and elementary — a representation of our own unending transformation alongside nature’s ever-evolving state.

Teresa Solar-Abboud (b. 1985, Madrid, Spain) lives and works in Madrid.

Tishan Hsu
car-grass-screen-2 and car-body-screen-2, 2024
On view May 2024 – April 2025

A pioneer of the digital art movement, Tishan Hsu examines the cognitive and affective impact of transformative digital advances on our lives. Through the use of unusual materials and innovative fabrication techniques, his work confronts how technology has become an extension of the human body, and proposes a new form of existence for our species.

On the High Line under the Standard Hotel at Little West 12th Street, Hsu presents car-grass-screen-2 and car-body-screen-2, two biomorphic forms constructed out of resin-wrapped foam. The cars’ shapes, with their soft edges and curved surfaces, appear entirely organic but for their glitching, screen like skins. The sculptures hover above the ground in a space of endless possibility, where the hybrid body could be anywhere and anything, like the cars, devices, and virtual worlds that we increasingly inhabit and surround ourselves with. Hsu’s work blurs the line between our physical bodies and technological interfaces, suggesting a new way in which we experience ourselves and the world around us.

Tishan Hsu (b. 1951, Boston) lives and works in New York.

Chloe Wise
But Wait, There’s More!
On view May 7–July 8, 2024
Screening evenings beginning at dusk

Chloe Wise’s work grapples with the commercialism and consumerism that has permeated every facet of our lives, such that consumption has become intrinsically tied to the creation and construction of the self. In her kaleidoscopic video works, Wise blurs the line between fiction and reality, toying with our traditional expectations of advertising, fashion, and branding. Her video practice takes precise care to subvert and manipulate these sectors to the point of parody, using a familiar language that brings the audience “in” on the joke.

The short film exhibition But Wait, There’s More!, replicates the sensation of channel surfing at the mercy of some unknown remote control holder. Told a Vision (2023) features fragments of commercials with uncanny similarities to those found on cable television, though the audience is never able to grasp what exactly is being sold. “No problems, just savings!” one commercial states, “Call Now!” asserts another, “side effects may include experiences,” a pharmaceutical spoof cautions. In addition, Wise will premiere two new films that continue in this vein for the High Line’s exhibition.

Wise’s films presents a poignant critique on postmodern consumer culture, and the fallacy that consumption can provide fulfillment or happiness. In each broken scene, the audience is advised and spoken to directly, but even the figures on screen take care to remind us repeatedly, “I do not know you.” The program screens evenings in the covered passage at 14th Street on the High Line.

Chloe Wise (b. 1990, Montreal, Canada) lives and works in New York, New York.

ABOUT HIGH LINE ART
Founded in 2009, High Line Art commissions and produces a wide array of artworks on the High Line, including site-specific commissions, exhibitions, performances, video programs, and a series of billboard interventions. Led by Cecilia Alemani, the Donald R. Mullen, Jr. Director & Chief Curator of High Line Art, and presented by the High Line, the art program invites artists to think of creative ways to engage with the unique architecture, history, and design of the park, and to foster a productive dialogue with the surrounding neighborhood and urban landscape.

For further information on High Line Art, please visit thehighline.org/art.

ABOUT THE HIGH LINE
The High Line is both a nonprofit organization and a public park on the West Side of Manhattan. Through our work with communities on and off the High Line, we’re devoted to reimagining public spaces to create connected, healthy neighborhoods and cities.

Built on a historic, elevated rail line, the High Line was always intended to be more than a park. You can walk through the gardens, view art, experience a performance, enjoy food or beverage, or connect with friends and neighbors all while enjoying a unique perspective of New York City.

Nearly 100% of our annual budget comes through donations. The High Line is owned by the City of New York and we operate under a license agreement with NYC Parks.

For more information, visit thehighline.org and follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram.

SUPPORT
Lead support for High Line Art comes from Amanda and Don Mullen. Major support is provided by Shelley Fox Aarons and Philip E. Aarons, The Brown Foundation, Inc. of Houston, and Charina Endowment Fund.

Giulia Cenci, secondary forest is supported by the Mondriaan Fund, the public cultural funding organization focusing on visual arts and cultural heritage.

Project support for the High Line – Moynihan Connector Billboard is provided by Suzanne Deal Booth. Additional support for the High Line – Moynihan Connector Billboard is provided by Neda Young.

Tishan Hsu, car-grass-screen-2 and car-body-screen-2, is funded, in part, by a Support for Artists grant from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.

High Line Art is supported, in part, with public funds from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature, and from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the New York City Council, under the leadership of Speaker Adrienne Adams.

@HighLineArtNYC @giulia.cenci @tschabalalaself @tere_solar @tishanhsu @chloewise_