For SUTTON 78, Kimsooja presents the site-specific installation To Breathe (2025), reimagining the architecture of the Sutton Tower penthouse through her signature exploration of the horizontal and vertical fabrics of life and human condition.

By covering the glass surface in a unique optical film, she transforms the physical architecture into a dynamic spectrum of light and color. The film features thousands of vertical and horizontal scratch lines, functioning like a prism, pigment or painting abstracted into light, enveloping the space and the viewers. As daylight moves across the space, the installation changes continuously. In the morning, bands of color stretch subtly across the walls and floors. By afternoon, the spectrums intensify, filling the space with spectral glow. At night, the installations no longer interacts with sunlight, but with the glittering Manhattan skyline, reconstituted as part of the installation’s iridescent pattern.

To Breathe (2025) draws on Kimsooja’s concept of “non-doing”, wrapping body, space and time, to serve both as an observation and an invitation to attune oneself to the interplay between materiality and immateriality as fundamental elements of existence.

Kimsooja, To Breathe (2025). Installation view SUTTON 78, Sutton Tower, New York. Photo by Kate Glicksberg. Courtesy Gerber & Stauffer Fine Arts.

With his series ”Eyes”, Francisco Sierra turns his attention to a profoundly human subject—the eye—while simultaneously opening a layered discourse on identity, perception, and representation. The small 6.5 x 6.5 cm paintings on wood, sourced from old wine crates, depict human eyes at life-size. Each work is a fragment of a face, a detail of a body— yet together, they represent the diversity of human appearance. Skin tones range from very dark to very light, with various iris colors and shapes: the series celebrates difference while confronting us with the categories society itself has constructed.

Inspired by the aesthetics of global advertising campaigns—such as those by Benetton—the works subtly explore questions of diversity, representation, and visual language in the media. Painting itself plays a central role here: its use of color, its materiality, and its impact in a small format.

A particularly striking aspect of this work lies in its creation: the eyes depicted are drawn from an image database. The source images show facial fragments, some enhanced by artificial intelligence—never entirely real, never entirely fictional. The portrayed individuals remain anonymous, their identities elusive. They are at once projections and mirrors.

In the exhibition, this perspective expands: the actual view outward becomes part of the work. It contextualizes the painted eyes in the present moment, linking inside and outside, image and world, observation and movement. In this way, ”Eyes” becomes an invitation to reflect on the act of seeing—not merely as a physiological process, but as a cultural, social, and deeply personal experience.

Francisco Sierra, Eyes (2025). Courtesy the Artist and Von Bartha, Basel/Copenhagen. Photo by Kate Glicksberg.

The glass sculptures by Raphael Hefti are the products of a manufacturing error—of a process extrapolated far beyond the dictations of function or use. More specifically, the series, Subtraction as Addition, is a reductio ad absurdum of the manufacturing process for antireflective museum-grade glazing—the kind that lines art galleries and institutions, inconspicuously safeguarding masterpieces from sticky fingers and UV radiation. At a seemingly conventional manufacturer, Hefti uncovered discarded shards of this glass—mostly perfectly clear, yet slightly colored along the edges—which prompted him to intervene directly in the chemical processes of museum-glass production.

Deep in Switzerland’s Emmental Valley, on the factory floors of Glas Trösch—one of the few sites worldwide where museum glazing is produced—its techniques are closely guarded as trade secrets. Here, the “invisible” antireflective oxide coating is applied, disrupted, and reapplied until the process collapses in on itself, effectively inverted beyond recovery. What was once transparent glass now blooms with iridescent fields of shifting hues and fluctuating opacities. Light waves are caught and refracted between layers, bouncing across mirrored, dichroic surfaces composed not of pigment but of light itself. Though born of an industrial procedure, each pane defies the uniformity of commercial manufacturing: originally engineered for perfect repetition, the method—subverted by the artist’s hand—produces singular, irreproducible surfaces.

Raphael Hefti, All Systems Fail (2025). Installation view SUTTON 78, Sutton Tower, New York. Photo by Kate Glicksberg. Courtesy Gerber & Stauffer Fine Arts.

For SUTTON 78, a slightly adapted version of the installation ‘Simmering Shields’ at the Kunstmuseum Aargau has been realized. While no video is projected, the deep red neon glow of the cocoons floods the space, casting a warm yet unsettling light. The atmosphere hovers somewhere between a photo lab and an incubator – uncertain, ambiguous. It’s a space where comfort and discomfort coexist, leaving viewers unsure whether to feel safe or strangely exposed.

The installation shifts constantly with the changing light outside. By day, the cocoons appear almost cold – bright and translucent, their transparent surfaces reflecting the clear daylight. But as the sun sets, they begin to glow from within, slowly taking over the room. At night, their red light pulses against the glass, mirrored by the darkness of the Manhattan skyline – extending the installation as reflections onto the windows and hence into the city. It’s a transformation that unfolds by the minute – fluid, unpredictable, and intimately tied to its surroundings.

Victoria Holdt, Simmering Shields (2024). Installation view SUTTON 78, Sutton Tower, New York. Photo by Kate Glicksberg. Courtesy Gerber & Stauffer Fine Arts.

Zoë Buckman’s installation Every Curve combines vintage lingerie with hand-embroidered rap lyrics, tracing the complex relationship between femininity and hip-hop. The garments — delicate, intimate pieces worn by women now long gone — become carriers of both memory and cultural critique. Buckman stitches in lyrics by Tupac Shakur and Notorious B.I.G., whose words shaped her adolescence in East London, where hip-hop was the dominant cultural language. The selected lines range from misogynistic to deeply empathetic and pro-choice, reflecting the contradictions she grappled with as a young feminist growing up in a world saturated by these voices.

By working with embroidery — a medium rooted in female labor and craft — Buckman ties her work to a lineage of feminist art-making. The juxtaposition of soft, antique undergarments with the rawness of 90s rap creates a charged tension: sensual yet political, vulnerable yet confrontational. Installed in the Sutton Tower penthouse, the work resonates on another level — its quiet presence amplified by the vastness of the surrounding skyline, the absent bodies it invokes mirrored by the towering city outside.

Zoë Buckman, Every Curve (2016). Installation view SUTTON 78, Sutton Tower, New York. Photo by Kate Glicksberg. Courtesy Gerber & Stauffer Fine Arts.

The work The Bese Flöht US can be read as a distillation of Francisco Sierra’s artistic practice.
Reminiscent of a ready-made, the artist makes use of a humble everyday object, transforming it through painterly means into something that appears to belong to the realm of high culture.

The depicted flute itself carries rich interpretive potential. It is the beginner’s instrument—one that has traumatized generations—yet it is, in essence, a highly virtuosic instrument with remarkable capabilities. As a trained violinist who, as a child, refused to start with the recorder, Sierra explores the painterly possibilities as well as the questions of representation and illusion. The flute holes are drilled into the broom, but it remains an obvious prop.

This fusion of high and low, fantasy and reality, of our entire value systems, is encapsulated in this work—quietly and unpretentiously leaning against the penthouse wall, as if it had simply been forgotten there.

The The and the US in the title, a neologism coined by the artist himself, refer to the new version he painted specifically for the exhibition in New York.

Francisco Sierra, The Bese Flöht US (2025). Courtesy the Artist and Von Bartha, Basel/Copenhagen. Photo by Kate Glicksberg.

Subcurrent Lilies is a series of thirteen illuminated ceramic sculptures inspired by the resilience and quiet strength of lily pods. Emerging from the depths of muddy waters, these organic forms navigate unseen currents before blossoming into striking, resilient presences. This interplay between fragility and endurance, nature and transformation, is at the heart of this series.

Each piece carries the surname of an influential woman who defied the odds, serving as a tribute to their lasting impact. From Marie Curie’s groundbreaking research in radioactivity to Hedy Lamarr’s innovations in wireless communication, the installation honors these figures as symbols of resilience, intellect, and transformation by bearing their names.

Through form, texture, and illumination, Subcurrent Lilies invites contemplation on growth, adaptation, and the unseen energies that shape both the natural world and artistic creation.

Victoria Holdt, Subcurrent Lilies (2024). Installation view SUTTON 78, Sutton Tower, New York. Photo by Kate Glicksberg. Courtesy of Gerber & Stauffer Fine Arts.