IVÁN ARGOTE: BREATHINGS

Perrotin New York is pleased to present a special solo exhibition with Iván Argote, which marks his third show at Perrotin New York and over fifteen years of collaboration.

April 23 – May 31, 2025

Offering a narrative arc of Argote’s work across almost twenty years, Breathings is realized on the heels of three significant exhibitions: Descanso, the central outdoor installation of the Venice Biennale’s Giardini (2024); Dinosaur, his prestigious award of the High Line Plinth commission (2024–2026); and Air de Jeu, his installation for the Centre Pompidou in Paris, part of the Prix Marcel Duchamp exhibition (2022–2023). These projects encapsulate Argote’s concerns with monuments as markers of power both historical and present, while their concurrence enforces his critical relevance for this moment.

With Breathings, Argote follows the global impact of these exhibitions with a selection of artworks that articulate the longstanding ambitions of his practice. He guides us the throughline he has followed like breadcrumbs over the past two decades. Here, the artist links crucial previous bodies of work with new interventions that offer tender protest to the bombast of the world around.

In this exhibition, Argote’s first gesture is one of critique, wherein he dismantles, topples, and pokes fun at monuments and their contingent histories, using humor and fiction to spark conversation and encourage us to imagine other possible worlds. His second gesture offers a generative force, one of poetry and tenderness, love poems to the public to soften the hard histories etched into the built environment.

In previous Perrotin exhibitions, Argote has directly addressed the dictators looming in the room; here, in a different scale gesture, he calls for us all to remember our capacity for dignity and respect for one another when we are at risk of losing it.