COLLIER SCHORR: PROBLEMS AND OTHER STORIES
MODERN ART is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of work by Collier Schorr. This is the fifth solo exhibition with the gallery and her first exhibition in Paris. To visit the exhibition, please click here to make an appointment.
March 5 - April 4, 2026
Over the past four decades, Collier Schorr’s work has rearticulated ideas of gender, sexuality, nationhood and masculinity, countering orthodoxies of desire, complicating queer cultural codes, and inviting viewers to speculate on what is permitted or constrained within a given image. Schorr’s recent work continues to centre kinships, exuberances of physical expression, and the lives of those who have, as she describes, ‘walked around in a body for years’.
Schorr’s new exhibition Problems and other stories brings together photographs, collages, notes, drawings and video produced over the past seven years that reconsider who an artwork is for, the multitude of places people belong and the way Schorr encounters different worlds. The title is drawn from John Updike’s collection of short stories written over the 1970s. For Schorr, the ‘problem’ opens out into a place of resistance and exploration, rather than a limitation or constraint. In the titular story, Updike employs schematic, hypothetical situations that invite readers to adopt shifting subject positions – moving between characters labelled ‘a’, ‘b’ and ‘c’ – across multiple scenarios. This open structure parallels Schorr’s approach to portraiture. Formed through the post-appropriation aesthetics of 1980s New York, Schorr’s work assembles and recontextualises the lives of artists and performers within her community, reclaiming pleasure, feelings of aliveness and queer experience as modes of political address.
Schorr’s approach, closer to long-term studies of the subjects she depicts (including her seminal 2005 work Jens F.), centres intimacy and collaboration to exceed or shift the weight of the ‘problem’ of representation. In 2018, Schorr began training in ballet and modern dance in preparation for a full-scale adaptation of Chantal Akerman's seminal film je tu il elle (1974). The resulting collages and photographs included in Problems and other stories are drawn from Schorr’s multichannel video installation, Akerman Ballet – an ensemble performance work of seven dancers, including Schorr. Here the literary subject of ‘adaptation’ includes how one’s body changes to survive, and is further found in the drawings of other friends and artists such as Nicole Eisenman made over three years, and which span the pandemic, later published as Cosmos, (2024); the writer Constance Debreve and Milo Cassidy, a trans man that Schorr has been working with the past two years; and the performer and artist Tosh Basco. Taken together, these figures articulate Schorr’s sustained interest in the relational and overlapping conditions of being an artist, including the communities that hold these lives together – as if echoing Updike’s observation: ‘If we were crystal, we would shatter’.
The subjects Schorr works with each bring their own subjective view of the world, generating a spectrum of pleasures and terrors. The problem of being an artist – and of representing others – has long been a source of anxiety for Schorr, who took up fashion photography in the late 1990s, in part to work within a framework of consent and mutual benefit. But Schorr was also drawn to this world because it offered another way to problem-solve female and queer presence in the media landscape. When pleasure becomes a problem, the problem becomes the site of new language and new relational possibilities.
Collier Schorr was born in New York City in 1963, and she continues to live and work there. Her photographs have been the subject of solo exhibitions at KOW, Berlin (2021); Alice Austen House, Staten Island (2019); Modern Art, London (2018); 303 Gallery, New York (2014); Le Consortium, Dijon (2008); Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver (2008); and Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe (2007). Schorr has participated in recent group exhibitions at International Center of Photography, New York (2026) ; Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris (2022); Barbican Art Gallery, London (2020); Aperture Foundation, New York (2019); Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson (2019); Nottingham Contemporary (2018); São Paulo Museum of Art (2017); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2017); and The Jewish Museum, New York (2017). Her works are held in collections including the Art Institute of Chicago; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; MoMA, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford. Schorr is also a writer, and has contributed texts to publications such as Artforum, Parkett, and Frieze.