'Josh Kline Asks, ‘Is This the Future You Want to Live In?’' – Ocula

17 September 2024

In a clear plastic bag abandoned on the cold concrete floor of Lisson Gallery is a male body curled up in the foetal position, dressed all in black, arms crossed over his chest, eyes staring dully ahead. Titled Mid-Career Artist (2024), the sculpture is a likeness of American artist Josh Kline, 3D scanned and printed in full colour.

Kline works the question of the relationship of the part to the whole. His work adopts the incisive and intrinsically convincing aesthetic logic that lives at the intersection of science and consumer culture—the look of holistic wellness in the digital era.

He organises this work into distinct groupings, allowing him to construct projects and chapters that build on and riff off each other, lending an increasing gravity to his overarching positions as he matures into the status of an artist who's been at the centre of the contemporary art world long enough to see a mid-career survey at the Whitney Museum last year and, this year, simultaneous solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and Lisson Gallery in New York. Across the intricate webs of suggestion and meaning he lays out, Kline describes smaller, one-off projects as 'short stories', and longer, more interconnected pieces as 'novels'.

Read the full interview with Robin Peckham in Ocula here.

Josh Kline, 2024. Courtesy the artist and Lisson Gallery. Photo: Isabel Asha Penzlien.