The Brooklyn Rail

Various clusters of cells between the brain and eyes are organized in specific hierarchies to process complex external information. Antonia Lucy Gehnrich’s sole work on view, Variable Floor Sculpture (Das Parfum) (2026), in her exhibition at Alex Berns, features 231 glass mirrors arranged in a rectangle on the gallery’s black carpeted floor with 2,000 individual vintage perfume bottles placed on top, taxing our vision at a cellular level. The crystalline vessels are difficult to grasp visually, their multitude doubled in the reflections that stretch for more than 17 feet across the room. The challenging yet compelling form makes the show one of the strongest gallery shows by a living artist that I’ve seen this spring, but its conceptual underpinnings are less developed.

The press release calls the work a metonym for both Robert Smithson’s Corner Mirror with Coral (1969) and Rob Pruitt’s Cocaine Buffet (1998). Whether and how an artwork can be a metonym is a broader issue; however, likening it to Smithson and Pruitt is not appropriate for how Gehnrich’s work actually functions. Smithson’s “Non-sites,” which he began in 1968 and sometimes feature mirrors on the ground with objects taken from the natural world, are indoor earthworks, abstract mappings of places outside the gallery. After conducting a search for Pruitt’s Cocaine Buffet to refamiliarize myself with the work, I discovered it merely looks like a line of cocaine across a 16-foot mirror.

The presence of a mirror on the floor in Smithson’s and Pruitt’s artworks is not an apt comparison for Variable Floor Sculpture (Das Parfum) (2026), which uses mirrors with greater potency. Gehnrich’s work is wonderfully systematic, emphasizing modularity and fetishization of the bottles atop her reflective surfaces. These older flacons are tiny, pinky finger-sized vessels that appear more precious en masse. Gehnrich’s conceit aligns more closely with artists like Walter De Maria, whose highly finished artworks, especially “The Equal Area Series” or 360˚ I Ching/64 Sculptures (1981), also extend multiples of similar, but not identical, fetishized objects outward into space. Unlike De Maria, though, Gehnrich’s implementation of mirrors expands space by creating an inverted pool below, littered with a variety of perfume bottles.

When thinking beyond art historical comparisons and what the artwork does in the gallery, a logical question is, “Where else do we find meaning?” or “Why these vintage objects specifically?” The bottles’ purpose is overshadowed by the novelty and variety of their appearance. I kept grasping for even a vague reason to explain this scene, other than its arresting appearance, but nothing came, which is disappointing for something so visually composed. It seems that Gehnrich was enamored of collecting and arranging objects, but not interested in going beyond that formal interest.

And the meaning does not have to be given, nor should it even be easily attained. Artists can always leverage ambiguity. The issue with Variable Floor Sculpture (Das Parfum) is that it lays everything bare immediately, leaving an absence beyond itself. What is present, though, operates so curiously that, like good perfume, it’s difficult not to be seduced. That seduction, however, does not alleviate a longing for more once you get acclimated to the scent.