The End of the World as They Know It

Unfolding as a visual novel, After Nature depicts a future landscape of wilderness and ruins. It is a story of abandonment, regression, and rapture—an epic of humanity coming apart under the pressure of obscure forces and not-so-distant environmental disasters. This exhibition brings together an international and multigenerational group of contemporary artists, filmmakers, writers, and outsiders, many of whom are showing in a New York museum for the first time. Organized by Massimiliano Gioni, director of special exhibitions, the show spans three floors and includes over 90 works.

After Nature is on view at The New Museum from July 17 to September 21.

Maurizio Cattelan, Untitled, 2007. Taxidermied horse skin, fiberglass resin, 118 1/8 x 66 7/8 x 31 1/2 inches. Courtesy of Marian Goodman Gallery, New York.

Unfolding as a visual novel, After Nature depicts a future landscape of wilderness and ruins. It is a story of abandonment, regression, and rapture—an epic of humanity coming apart under the pressure of obscure forces and not-so-distant environmental disasters. This exhibition brings together an international and multigenerational group of contemporary artists, filmmakers, writers, and outsiders, many of whom are showing in a New York museum for the first time. Organized by Massimiliano Gioni, director of special exhibitions, the show spans three floors and includes over 90 works.

Part dystopian fantasy, part ethnographic museum of a lost civilization that eerily resembles our own, After Nature brings together artists and artworks that possess a strange, prophetic intensity. Departing from the fictional documentaries of filmmaker Werner Herzog, the exhibition is an anthology of visions and epiphanies—a hallucinated panorama of a world on the verge of disappearance. When seen in this context, Zoe Leonard’s giant sculpture of a crippled tree, Maurizio Cattelan’s fallen horse, Reverend
Howard Finster’s delirious sermon cards, and Eugene Von Bruenchenhein’s apocalyptic finger paintings resonate like a requiem for a vanishing planet. Fikret Atay, Roger Ballen, Robert Kusmirowski, Diego Perrone, and Artur Zmijewski seem fascinated by mystic apparitions, arcane rites, and spiritual illuminations, while artists as diverse as Allora and Calzadilla, Nancy Graves, and William Christenberry depict a universe in which the traces of humans have been erased and new ecological systems struggle to find a precarious balance.

The works of Huma Bhabha, Berlinde De Bruyckere, and Thomas Schütte share an archaic quality. Their magical realism transforms sculpture into myth-making and gives birth to a cast of fantastical creatures, including sylvan beings, totemic figures, and neo-primitive idols. These elements find life in Tino Sehgal’s intricate choreographies and living sculptures: for the duration of the exhibition, interpreters and dancers carry out gestures that could be described as mysterious rituals and states of ecstasy. Recuperating ancient techniques, PaweÅ‚ Althamer uses grass and animal intestines to produce vulnerable sculptures and puppets for a new form of storytelling. Other works, like the animations of Nathalie Djurberg, the imaginary maps of Roberto Cuoghi, or the video confessions of Erik van Lieshout, guide viewers to the edge of the Earth, taking us for a walk in the fictional woods of our near future, while expressing a sincere preoccupation for the world as it is now.