Zio Ziegler: The Tesseract at Almine Rech New York

Almine Rech New York is presenting The Tesseract, Zio Ziegler's fourth solo exhibition with the gallery, through October 21, 2026. The space is at 361 Broadway in Tribeca.

The show moves between four distinct modes of working. There are the monumental, densely patterned maximalist paintings; skeletal monochrome canvases built from exploratory mark-making; the layered, visceral "Essential Figures"; and totemic three-dimensional figures cast in bronze. In an essay by Jeffrey Richmond-Moll of the Peabody Essex Museum, these are described as four variations on one theme, each generating and pressing on the next. The center of the system is not a single point but an open window onto an unnamed future.

Ziegler began the series after reading some of humanity's oldest narratives: Ovid's Metamorphoses, the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Bible. He calls the maximalist paintings "illuminated manuscripts" and the works as a whole "relics," pictures meant to act on the nervous system as much as the intellect. Art-historical echoes run throughout: Masaccio's expelled Adam and Eve, the slumped body in Rubens's Descent from the Cross, Memling's ring-like rainbows, and nods to Picasso, Pollock, Jasper Johns, Rauschenberg and Robert Ryman. The monochromes draw on black- and red-figure pottery of the ancient Mediterranean, which Ziegler sees as distilling epic history into linear allegory.

Expulsion is the central theme. Ziegler sets the story of Eden beside present questions about AI, machine learning, labor and climate, and the show proposes that transformation lies on the far side of expulsion. Flaming figures appear throughout, some consumed and others changed by the fire. One painting shows a face resembling the artist's against a gold ground, his hair tousled like a crown of thorns, recalling the "Man of Sorrows." Elsewhere Ziegler appears at his easel or seated in thought.

Works on view include the 2026 oils Synthetic Expulsion 1 and 2, the large canvas Anatta and Eden, The Descent From The Cross (2021–26), the Mind's Eye series, and the cast bronzes Figure In The Garden: Temptation and Those Who Go. A suite of small hand-printed copper-plate etchings, each in an edition of 10 plus 5 APs and 3 HCs, distills each facet of the exhibition into graphic form.