Anthea Hamilton: Comfort Zones at Salon 94

Salon 94 on the Upper East Side is presenting Comfort Zones, Anthea Hamilton's first solo gallery exhibition in the United States. It runs through October 24, 2026.

Hamilton was born in London in 1978 and still works there. Of Jamaican and Filipino parentage, she moves across sculpture, installation, image, architecture, fashion and design. In 2015 she had her first US solo museum show, Lichen! Libido! Chastity!, at SculptureCenter, where she built an eighteen-foot version of Gaetano Pesce's unrealized 1972 proposal for a Manhattan skyscraper entrance.

The new show returns to the forms that have become her signatures (legs, boots, pumpkins, butterflies and bricks) and pushes each somewhere else. Its starting point is the idea that origin need not determine destination: for Hamilton, London, Jamaica, the Philippines and New York are not separate or fixed places.

The pumpkins are carved by hand in London, clad in leather and painted. Two are giant and green, while a third, yellow one is small enough to carry. Two red boots are covered in thousands of eggshell fragments using rankaku, a technique normally reserved for small decorative details; Hamilton worked on them with Alice Rivalta in Rome. Two leg-shaped chairs are clad in tiny bricks. One uses laser-cut aluminum units, each sanded and glued by hand. The other has yellow bricks alongside studio ephemera and cylinders filled with lentils. Further leg chairs are based on Pesce's Airport Lamp and operate as both chair and lamp.

The fabric butterflies are digitally printed on the front, while the labor of making them builds up on the back, largely hidden once installed. Each depicts a species found in New York; she considered butterflies from Britain, Jamaica and the Philippines and set them aside. A selection of historical Art Nouveau objects sits alongside, pointing to how styles travel and are absorbed elsewhere.

Hamilton describes the right scale for viewing the show as that of model-making. Work that once happened at the scale of architecture now happens at the scale of material.

Two related exhibitions run in the same building. A Chair Is A Nest, Is A Foot, Is A… on the first floor is Hamilton's curation of Pesce's archive. Gaetano Pesce Studio: Continued on the third floor is built from Pesce's own Navy Yard workshop.

The gallery is at 3 East 89th Street and is open Wednesday to Saturday, 11am to 6pm.