The Brooklyn Rail

To maintain the appropriate decorum in any review, there are two specific words one should want to avoid. One is “swell” and the other is “lousy,” like the old I Love Lucy sketch.¹ Such propriety is, however, confounded when confronted with a body of work that is unmistakably both, as Rachel Harrison’s invariably is. Her uncannily skilled de-skilling of Western unified form in sculpture could be termed “post-gestalt,” as evidenced by the unexpectedly mutating dolmens and the exquisitely nerve-addled line and fractious forms in her current drawings, which invoke imagery from both ignoble and refined sources.

In her tenth solo show at Greene Naftali, Harrison mashes both her three and two-dimensional works into a grandly abject narrative. She constructs a bricolage of both abstruse and overt manifestations of hacked systems and reengineered codes, fully inhabiting the layered implications of the exhibition’s title, The Friedmann Equations. It references theories of an expanding universe postulated by the Russian physicist Aleksandr Friedmann in 1922, in a response to and elaboration of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Importantly, Friedmann’s ideas differed from Einstein’s of a static universe and instead proffered an equation that proposed the “possibility of a world in constant negative curvature.” A century later, Friedmann’s equations were reappropriated as encrypted protests against the Chinese government’s COVID lockdowns by students at Tsinghua University in Beijing. “Friedmann” became a homophonic cipher: “free man,” with the expanding universe reimagined as a metaphor for political liberation. Harrison’s adoption of this reference, and the loosely associated grouping of works around it, seems bent on telegraphing resistance through a kind of activist reprogramming—of aesthetic codes, political signals, and social etiquette. Her works are not illustrative of resistance, but procedurally instructive, resisting decorum as a mode of making. Meaning emerges not through direct expression, but through contradiction, opacity, and layered misdirection.

In an era when both art and politics are saturated with spectacle and the rapacious repetition of spurious certainties, Harrison’s practice insists on a different kind of legibility. She makes a case for the value of obfuscation, noise, and errant signals. Rather than offer coherence, she enacts a glitchy complexity. Take, for instance, A Scholar Treads on a Market Woman’s Basket of Eggs (2025), in which a generic, putty-colored folding chair serves as a precarious base for a towering hunk of yolky yellow concrete, wood, and polystyrene—an ersatz “scholar’s rock.” The elegant poetic affectation of that association is powerfully undercut by the ungainly physicality of the assemblage, which includes a crowbar jammed into the chair’s diagonal support. The title’s broken eggs idiom feels at once absurd and loaded, alluding perhaps to inflation anxieties during the last US presidential election, while that cliché collides with assumptions of intellectual authority seen as destructive rather than constitutive of social progress.

Nearby, The Land of Gog and Magog (2025) features a tilted plywood tabletop supporting a Plexiglas vitrine “bonnet,” inside of which sits a ragged cut of shag carpet, approximating a map of the US, reportedly salvaged from Rihanna’s “Savage X Fenty” runway set. The biblical title, which references an epic battle between good and evil, hovers ironically over the sculpture’s scrappy, unstable form. Beneath its janky legs lies a Chase Manhattan Bank pen subtly underscoring the collision of prophecy, pop, and capital. The Excavator (2023) offers a moment of relative calm: a gray, cubistic stack propped by a worn concrete mixing shovel. It feels more classically modernist yet less hieratically formal like Isamu Noguchi, and more provisionally slapdash like Jessica Stockholder. In Scepter (2025), a lumpy, polychrome column atop a Uline dolly is crowned by a wand-like tube, from which dangles a pair of battered Converse sneakers. Beneath it, an outmoded answering machine skulks like an ancestral warning of communicative obsolescence. These touches are classic Harrison: wickedly tactile, socially pointed dialectics of detritus. Also included is a suite of frenetic yet graceful drawings inspired by Hans Holbein’s portraits of the Tudor court. Lined along one wall and interrupted only by a monumental facsimile sketch of Henry VIII himself, these drawings are all titled viii Drawing (all 2025), except for Your Favorite Artist’s Favorite Artist (2025)—a rough translation of Holbein’s 1542–43 self-portrait. Harrison renders him with a flaming red beard and, as in most of the portraits, with Picassoid double or triple eyes and jittery outlines in saturated colored pencil. Art-historical echoes abound. One drawing loosely based on Holbein’s Jane Seymour (1537) evokes Willem de Kooning’s Seated Woman (ca. 1940). Another that seems to riff on Holbein’s Sir Thomas More (1527) channels the fragile linear intimacy of Vincent van Gogh’s portraits of his friends and neighbors. Harrison’s ability to conjure Holbein, Picasso, de Kooning and Van Gogh in one suite speaks to her technical virtuosity. Perhaps “your favorite artist’s favorite artist” is Harrison herself. Elsewhere, a cryptic series of photographs of Duchamp’s Rrose Sélavy are meshed with garbled computer translations of his invented name, haunted by Harrison’s own reflection in the (small) glass. An adjacent installation refers to Queen Elizabeth II’s discreet lipstick signal to her entourage that it was time to move on. Such royal motifs—along with the Tudor and Holbein references—lay bare inherited codes of privilege. In the current US political climate, they read as cryptic prompts of resistance to a creeping obeisance to power. But perhaps that’s too clear a reading for an artist so invested in aesthetic misdirection and formal blind alleys. One thing in this show is certain given this particular cultural moment: the imperfect is the enemy of the no good.