DAVID ALTMEJD: THE SERPENT

White Cube New York is delighted to present ‘The Serpent’, a new large-scale installation, alongside a series of busts and bronze sculptures by Canadian artist David Altmejd.

March 14 – April 19, 2025

Entering the first floor of the gallery, we are met with The Serpent (all works 2025) – a monumental, winding serpent, composed of a chain of conjoined human heads, its own head lifting to meet that of its conjurer, Snake Charmer. The reciprocal relationship between these two sculptures enacts a dialogue between creation and creator, between matter and design – a tension that Altmejd both interrogates and exalts. During the process of creating The Serpent, Altmejd found Snake Charmer to be a guiding presence – a quiet master of order, without which The Serpent, with its generative chain, might have continued evolving toward limitless ends.

Though initially uniform, The Serpent’s heads gradually diminish in size and morph into the heads of rabbits further along the sequence. In recent years, animal entities have featured with increasing frequency in the artist’s oeuvre, particularly the rabbit, a manifestation of the Trickster archetype in Jungian psychology – a shapeshifting disruptor, a playfully subversive force, a messenger of the subconscious. The Serpent, with its chthonic ties to the underworld, here functions analogously to Trickster, its very genetic code entwined with it.

Working through a process of discovery, Altmejd navigates what he describes as the shifting temperaments of ‘chaos and order’ both aesthetically and materially. A tension that pervades his practice, the work embodies a dialectic of control and surrender freighted with unconscious import, resulting in formal qualities of alternating precision and roughness. Altmejd has long been attuned to these dual forces existing within his work, yet his relationship to them has evolved. ‘It has its own intelligence, its own reason, its own desires, its own will’, he acknowledges, relinquishing control to become a guide.

They speak to the reflexive nature of his practice, underscoring that Altmejd’s work is not only an exploration of material and matter but also a discovery of the self – he himself both an observer of his work’s self-generative existence and an inextricable participant within it, enmeshed in the life he has set into motion.