Edgar Arceneaux – Shards

68projects by KORNFELD is proud to present Shards, a solo exhibition by acclaimed American artist Edgar Arceneaux (*1972, Los Angeles), opening on September 10, 2025, as part of Berlin Art Week. The exhibition marks Arceneaux’s debut with the gallery and is the culmination of his summer residency at 68projects, organised in collaboration with Villa Aurora & Thomas Mann House. From early June through July, Arceneaux immersed himself in Berlin’s art scene, creating new work that will be presented in Shards. A special performance by the artist will take place at the gallery at the opening on Wednesday, September 10.

At the core of the exhibition are Arceneaux’s skinned mirrors, a series that fuses visceral materiality with existential reflection. The works emerge from a radical process: Arceneaux strips the reflective metal layer from used mirrors and transfers it onto raw canvas. The result is not a clean imprint but a fractured, unstable surface marked by cracks, distortions, and chemical reactions. The original mirror, traditionally an object of self-recognition, is dismantled, stripped of its function, and transformed into something raw and unresolved. Broken glass substrates leave behind ghostly traces, and the surfaces shift between shimmering silver, oxidised copper, toxic green, and sooty black. The effect is one of organic remnants, suspended between beauty and horror.

Arceneaux likens the process to skinning an animal, revealing the “chemical entrails” of the mirror beneath. The canvases take on a corporeal, haunting presence, evoking both sacred relics and the remains of a post-industrial autopsy. They hang like shrouds, bearing the imprint of an image no longer alive. The artist raises a central question: what remains of the self when the mirror no longer reflects? In these works, the mirror, as an extension of human perception and a tool for self-assurance, is stripped of clarity and reduced to uncertain, unstable matter.

The Berlin presentation focuses on works dominated by blue, red, and violet hues—colours associated with blood, power, dignity, and vulnerability. The new works, developed specifically for the exhibition, engage directly with political and social rupture, particularly in the United States. Arceneaux references the practices of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which detains, deports, and disappears individuals, as well as the ongoing reality of racially motivated police violence. These themes find echoes in Berlin and resonate globally.

Through this site-specific dialogue, Arceneaux creates a counterpoint between his ongoing practice and questions of identity, power, and visibility within the urban sphere. His work moves beyond formal experimentation, binding material gesture, historical reference, and memory into charged narrative structures. Spanning drawing, sculpture, installation, performance, and film, Arceneaux’s practice explores tensions between past and present.

The exhibition raises questions of urgent artistic and cultural relevance: what becomes of the self when the mirror no longer functions? How do we respond to an image that does not offer clarity but instead deepens uncertainty? These works become manifestos for contemporary self-positioning in an age of global instability. Through their material intensity, historical resonance, and formal radicality, the skinned mirrors evoke artistic traditions of vanitas and the aesthetics of ruin, while simultaneously pointing forward. Arceneaux’s practice interrogates not only material presence but also the performative and political role of art in societies undergoing transformation.