MSCHF: MATERIAL VALUES

NANZUKA is pleased to present the Brooklyn-based art collective, MSCHF’s solo exhibition of new works “Material Values.”

February 1 - March 22, 2025

This exhibition showcases new works in three different media: paintings, installations, and sculptures integrated with devices connected to an online system.

“MATERIAL VALUE SCULPTURES,” from which the exhibition takes its title, is a series of work that humorously redefines the relationship between art and material value within the context of today’s highly capitalist society. The work features strangely posed human sculptures whose bases are fitted with devices that track the real-time market value of the raw material indium. Indium is a type of rare metal that continues to be in increasing demand for its semiconductor-related applications including its use in the production of LEDs, and its prices are prone to significant volatility.

The works are set up so that the fitted device raises the temperature of the sculpture to its melting point the moment the market value of indium exceeds the price of the work, thus causing it to melt and self-destruct, cynically calling to attention the discrepancy between the intrinsic value of art and its material value. This fleeting self-destruction seems to reveal the fact that not only the value of art as a simulacrum, but also the inflation of material values is merely part of a system based on the simulation principles of the capitalist society in which we live.

The three different endeavors in this exhibition bring to mind historical debates about the definition and value of art such as those surrounding Marcel Duchamp’s readymades and Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box and Campbell’s Soup Cans. MSCHF, however, sublimates these debates into artworks imbued with an air of humor and mischief against the backdrop of contemporary economic structures and technology.