260 Madison

An artist-run group exhibition of more than fifty artists across a vacant Duane Reade storefront and 23,000-square-foot former office floor in Midtown Manhattan. About 260 Madison is an artist-run exhibition occupying a crevice in the machinery of Midtown Manhattan: a vacant Duane Reade storefront and the entire 23,000-square-foot former office floor above. Working across sculpture, new media, and video, more than fifty artists intervene in a site shaped by the spatial condition Rem Koolhaas diagnosed as Junkspace. On the lower level, art takes the place of discount makeup and off-brand painkillers, set against toxic-green paint and under surviving lightboxes reading "WHAT I NEED NOW" and "HOW I LOOK," echoing the propaganda revealed by the sunglasses in John Carpenter's They Live. To access the upper floor, security escorts visitors through the storefront to the 14th level—a post-cubicle necropolis marooned amid the nine-to-five racket of fully operative office towers. Exposed HVAC, ripped-out toilets, and corporate-logo wallpaper house art that examines the systems organizing contemporary life—from control, surveillance, AI, and extraction to the material and architectural structures that shape how we work, move, and live. Across the floor, familiar materials, objects, and technologies are dismantled, reconstructed, or made strange, while social-media interfaces dice human life into users, consumers, gig workers, and data. Against these systems of control remain spirituality, the body, and animal instinct. 260 Madison holds two scenarios in tension: systems becoming autonomous from human life, and life stubbornly hacking and breaking these systems in a relentless act of love and self-preservation. The opening is co-produced with Spielzeug Gallery and features a performance by Verbal Animal. Read more Toggle Installation Sculpture Film / Video Digital Mixed media