The Brooklyn Rail

The cardboard box has long been a ripe and paradoxical object for artists to toy with: a faux-minimal form that is simultaneously humble and an icon of global trade and mass manufacturing. It offers a radically simple primer on spatial evolution—a two-dimensional surface that, when folded, creates three-dimensional space—and a seemingly endless supply of referents, from corporate logos to the wear-and-tear of past lives to the peripatetic relocations of art and artists. In Dear John, Lina McGinn’s first solo exhibition at Europa, the artist pushes this material and metaphoric mutability toward its limits.

A dozen sculptures, cast from cardboard boxes and dolled-up in various shades of high-gloss enamel, pose in states of torque across the gallery. They are leaned against corners, splayed across the floor, tacked on walls, and delicately balanced on their own. Their choreographies are distinctly emotive, and McGinn amps up their personalities by giving each a name—Scott/Brian who used to work at a bar in north Brooklyn (2025), Drummer from Florida (maybe in another life) (2025)—that evokes the confessional narrative of a personal ad. The exhibition’s title is its own reference to the epistolary form, borrowing from a Nicholas Sparks romance novel-turned-blockbuster and a niche World War II-era genre of letter writing in which soldiers were dumped by mail (“Dear John, …”). It’s also an address to John Chamberlain, the patron saint of crushed industrial sculpture. His brilliantly colored, glistening contraptions of fenders and hoods and automotive leftovers are a clear starting point for McGinn. Although Chamberlain gave his sculptures lyrical and cheeky titles, he also described them as self-portraits. For Chamberlain, balances, rhythms, spaces, areas, and attitudes were conditions that signaled a kind of identity, as he explained in a 1972 Artforum interview with the critic Phyllis Tuchman. Dear John isn’t simply an homage, however; it’s McGinn’s challenge and counter, and here she dramatically magnifies the ambiguity between object, portrait, and authorial presence.

There’s an immediate appeal to understanding these works through narrative. Take Phone rapport (2025), two fry-shaped forms, one beige and the other millennial pink, hunched over each other and shoved up against a back column in the space as if caught mid-coitus. Seen from another angle, these busted-up objects—all wrinkles and very literally bent—share a glowing, pink-cherry interior. The reveal adds a romantic note to their frenzied exhibitionism; the couplet would be crass if it wasn’t so beautiful. Interior/exterior duality is a tactic McGinn employs across the series, with peeled corners and unfurled tops offering dramatic tonal contrasts. This strategy is an obvious allusion toward bodily orifices and speaks to the highly associative nature of the works. Titles suggest individual histories (whether the sculptures are the authors, the recounted story, or the imagined reunion) and shapes point toward the erotic and expressive underbelly of minimal forms (like that of the particularly elegant ISO straight in suit and tie [2025], which seems caught in the bound-and-splayed ecstasy of a sultrier Christ on the Cross). Dear John at times reads like a carnivalesque display of social life, and the space itself informs this sense of social performance.

The exhibition is housed in the gallery’s anterior, likely first conceived as an office considering the four glass-walled rooms of varying size that introduce hierarchies of visibility and distinction. This environment operates to different effects for McGinn’s work, accentuating the supply-closet ubiquity of the cardboard box, conjuring an additional social setting akin to a corporate freak-show, and directly informing how the sculptures can be navigated and seen. The pieces are highly reflective, with enameled surfaces that emphasize a wide range of textures (stripes, dots, veiny creases and folds) and mirror other works, viewers, and the room. The glass walls prompt their own doubles and reflections while providing auxiliary spaces. The main room is packed densely, and the relative seclusion granted in a side office to the corner piece Looking for Fabien Blue (2025)—an achingly tender, baby blue work that is among the exhibition’s stand-outs—suggests that other pieces may have benefitted from a sparser installation. Close quarters offer playful dialogue, but the sculptures are powerfully evocative unto themselves.

Dear John provides an abundance of associative references, narrative cues, and formal hints to read these sculptures, but it is McGinn’s hand—and very literally her body—that remains inescapable, if seemingly invisible. The artist not only hunts down used and discarded materials—a time-worn strategy for a New York sculptor—but also attends to their form herself. In a poetic sense it seems a duet, but it’s really a confrontation. McGinn crunches, squeezes, and wrangles these objects; the bottlenecks and crushed cores of Equally detested and adored (2025) and Tall and French in Cafe Bilboquet (2025) attest to the artist’s physical pressure and the material’s resistance to it. Where Chamberlain’s crushed cars suggest domination and limp machismo, McGinn’s process appears far more tactile and collaborative.

The notion of these sculptures as elegies to an encounter is further underscored by the loss and regeneration at the core of McGinn’s process. After casting, McGinn discards the original cardboard. She does not present the copies as hyperrealist dupes but relishes in the open-ended potential of difference via reproduction, granting them absurdist titles, slick surfaces, and exuberant colors in their second life. But ultimately these character studies are not indicative of the true stakes at play. Cardboard may be a fertile and allusive material on its own, but McGinn makes clear it is only a starting point. Dear John is a double portrait of the artist and her material, revealing how they wield and relinquish authority over each other in ever-surprising ways.