The Armory Show: Sanford Biggers | Mirror

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Marianne Boesky Gallery is pleased to present Sanford Biggers’s monumental Mirror (2024) for the Platform section of The Armory Show 2024. Curated by Eugenie Tsai, the Armory Platform section presents a selection of large-scale works and site-specific installations that speak to the fair’s overarching theme of art-historical reverberations echoing in the present. 

Throughout his practice, Biggers (b. 1970; Los Angeles, CA) examines the inherent tensions of history and culture, of language and symbol, of myth and narrative. Operating across diverse mediums—including painting, sculpture, collage, mixed media, music, video, and performance—Biggers emerges as an artistic intermediary. Continuously interrupting established narratives, intervening into historical forms, and remixing recognizable cultural signifiers, Biggers complicates, questions, and ultimately fosters new understandings of collective histories. 

At more than eight feet tall, Mirror is Biggers’s largest marble sculpture to date. A continuation of his ongoing Chimera series, Mirror merges elements of traditional African masks, European busts, and classical figures to explore historical representations of the body, along with their myths, archetypes, and power dynamics. Biggers’s method, which he terms “conceptual patchworking,” entails transposing, combining, and juxtaposing ideas and forms to challenge historiography, provenance, and official narratives. Through this process, Biggers elegantly balances form, gesture, beauty, and tension. The Chimera sculptures challenge embedded cultural and aesthetic assumptions, acknowledging the complex origins of the forms they reinterpret while envisioning a future ethnography that questions historical narratives.