Charles Atlas
Luhring Augustine is pleased to announce an exhibition of works by Yasumasa Morimura and Charles Atlas that will open in our Chelsea location on January 29, 2026, and remain on view through March 21. The show will highlight two artists whose practices explore distinctive and vibrant views related to gender and identity.
On display in the main gallery will be a selection of new and exemplary works by Morimura that span the artist's over four-decade career. The presentation will highlight his signature approach to reinventing and reimaging iconic imagery, largely pulled from the Western cultural cannon — references ranging from artistic masterpieces and historic photographs to film and pop-culture. Gender and cultures coalesce and conflate in Morimura's ingenious transformations of himself, creating subversions to assumptions related to these subjects. Through his depiction of female stars and characters, Morimura subverts the concept of the “male gaze”; within each image he both challenges the authority of identity and overturns the traditional scope of self-portraiture.
In the back gallery Atlas will present a new 30-minute program of portraits that focuses on drag and gender play. Culled from material that the pioneering film and video artist shot in the 1980s and 1990s, the portraits feature many of Atlas's frequent collaborators, such as performers Leigh Bowery, Hapi Phace, and John Kelly, among others.
ARTIST BIOS:
Atlas’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at institutions around the world, most recently in 2024 at the ICA Boston, which hosted the first U.S. museum survey devoted to his work; the presentation was accompanied by a major new publication. Other recent solo shows include Charles Atlas: Painting by Numbers, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, St. Louis, Missouri (2024-2025); Charles Atlas: Selected Videos 1987-2015, Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia (2023-2024); The Mathematics of Consciousness, a 100-foot long video installation commissioned by Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, NY, and supported by a grant from the VIA Art Fund (2022); Charles Atlas: Ominous, Glamorous, Momentous, Ridiculous, Fondazione ICA Milano, Italy (2021); and Charles Atlas: The past is here, the futures are coming and The Kitchen Follies, The Kitchen, New York (2018). His work is included in the permanent collections of major institutions worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Art Institute of Chicago; San Francisco Museum of Art; Tate Modern, London; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin; Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zürich; and De Hallen Haarlem, The Netherlands, among others. In 2024, The Getty Research Institute acquired the archive of Charles Atlas.
Morimura has presented solo exhibition internationally at institutions such as the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Kyoto City KYOCERA Museum of Art, Kyoto; Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Japan Society, New York; National Museum of Modern Art, Osaka; Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow; and Sammlung Friedrichshof in Zurndorf, Austria, among others. His work is in numerous prominent public and private collections including Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, among others. His work was recently part of a two-person exhibition, Yasumasa Morimura and Cindy Sherman: Masquerades, on view at M+ in Hong Kong (2025).
