CHIFFON THOMAS: RIBBON SHARP

Perrotin is pleased to present Ribbon Sharp, Chiffon Thomas’s first solo exhibition in Europe and with the gallery.

November 23, 2024 – January 18, 2025

The show features a dozen new sculptures and an immersive installation, examining the fusion of anatomical forms with architectural structures. His multifaceted practice—often composed of reclaimed wood, concrete, bronze and stained glass—explores the self as split, fractured, and transforming.

Sculpture, in its fixed, mostly rigid, form rarely expresses doubt to its audience. In an exhibition, a viewer is presented with a set of choices labored over by an artist and the space the works have been given. In his preternatural transformation of materials such as iron and concrete— materials intended for permanence, to unequivocally support and protect bodies in architecture, Chiffon Thomas reframes these materials and structures into a lineage of doubt, and its counterpoint, faith.

These works allow us to question the roles and intentions of both bodies and buildings, each with their own expectations and inherent qualities of durability and malleability. Perhaps we are all made to be broken down and remade in response to the structures which provide us belief—a belief that survival is possible even in the places that continuously cast us out and deem us as unworthy.

Thomas’s sculptures ask us to reckon with the “real”—casts of the human body, salvaged architectural elements with evident historical and symbolic lineages—and determine where individual bodies may begin and end when only fragments exist.