Fabric, bronze, fake flowers, feathers, wire, wood—sculptor Nick Cave has wielded a host of materials to build monuments to resilience. Now, he’s turning to a new medium, unveiling his first virtual reality work as part of an exhibition in Detroit.
“Seen/Scene” is now running at the Shepherd, a new arts center housed in a former Romanesque-style church. With V.R. glasses, visitors to the show will get to take in Cave’s massive sculpture, which is perched 26 feet high, underneath the church’s dome. Its presence in the venue, he told me over a video call, offers “a nice shift in medium within that space.”
The sculpture is part of Cave’s 2024 “Amalgams” series, a run of bronze sculptures that merge human and natural forms. In one, a host of branches sprouts out of a seated figure, while another sees a garden plot blooming atop two prone individuals. They embody growth and perseverance even, and especially, amid oppression.
Nick Cave at the opening of “Until” at Carriageworks in Sydney, Australia, 2018. Photo: Mark Metcalfe / Getty Images.
His new V.R. work, Amalgam (Inflate), depicts a pair of crouching legs holding up a cornucopia of biotic elements, their surfaces rendered to look like shimmering bronze. At first glance, the human half seems weighted, almost burdened, but Cave sees “inflated opportunity” in it too.
“I was thinking about how the body takes up space, how the body becomes this abstract form that feels like it could inflate and then float and elevate within air,” he said. “It’s this idea of elevation and how do we rise above it all.”
The piece anchors the larger exhibition at the Shepherd. Co-curated by Cave and Laura Mott, “Seen/Scene” draws from the private collection of philanthropist Jennifer Gilbert; it also offers an echo of “Here Hear,” Cave’s epic 2015 solo show at Michigan’s Cranbrook Art Museum, which Mott curated (the artist is a graduate of Cranbrook Academy of Art). “It was a really wonderful moment to honor that project,” Mott told me.
Installation view of “Seen/Scene” at the Shepherd. Photo courtesy of the Shepherd.
This time round, Cave and Mott have homed in on portraiture, gathering works by 36 artists, including Henry Taylor, Jeffrey Gibson, Helen Frankenthaler, Olafur Eliasson, and Rashid Johnson, to explore ways of seeing. The pieces, while centered on the act of looking, also urge us to look.
“The portraits are seeing each other, you’re seeing yourself, and you’re seeing the audience as well,” Mott said. “What’s really amazing about the exhibition is this dynamic act of looking at each other and looking at oneself and looking at community.”
Barkley L. Hendricks, (1975). Photo courtesy of the Shepherd.
Here, Barkley L. Hendricks‘ dynamic dual portrait Yocks (1975) hangs out alongside Tom Wesselmann‘s Great American Nude #9 (1961) and Ewa Juszkiewicz‘s Untitled (after Anton Einsle) (2016), which individually challenge the traditions of female portraiture. Doug Aitken‘s EVERYTHING (flag) (2015), with its fractal mirrored surface, offers an opportunity for reflection, while a self-portrait by Kerry James Marshall shares the same space as Cave’s VR piece.
Installation view of “Seen/Scene” at the Shepherd. Photo courtesy of the Shepherd.
Cave’s sculptures, of course, are nothing if not portraits of individual identity and collective strength. His celebrated Soundsuits proposed “suits of armor,” crafted out of found objects, that shield their wearers from surface judgements; his 2024 series of assemblages, “Graphts,” captured the labor and aesthetic of the Black community in its evocation of needlepoint and quilting techniques (a Graphts piece is included in “Seen/Scene”). Amalgam (Inflate), meanwhile, surfaces a rare interiority.
“You can walk into it and be on the inside,” Cave explained of the work. “That feeling of what it’s like to be inside of a form or a body was very interesting.”
Nick Cave, (2024). Photo courtesy of the Shepherd.
It’s a view that came in handy as Cave planned his first public sculpture, newly installed at the Frederik Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The bronze, titled Amalgam (Origin), is modeled on his own body, its skin textured with vegetation and its head replaced with a growth of bare branches occupied by birds. The artist had originally intended for the statue to stand 15 feet tall, but working with V.R. forced him to rethink scale: “This is not big enough,” he thought. The sculpture was raised to 26 feet, the same height as Amalgam (Inflate).
“There’s a bigger force that I believe in. In looking at something at this grand scale allows me to think about optimism in this vernacular way that is just bigger,” he said. “It takes all of us to be proactive when we envision ourselves at this capacity.”
“Seen/Scene” is on view at the Shepherd, 1265 Parkview St, Detroit, Michigan, through January 10, 2026.
Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com
