In 1992, Jeffrey Deitch lifted the veil on Post Human, his monumental group show. The exhibition explored the role of technology in everyday life, foregrounding the tech-riddled existentialism that would continue to undergird our society today. Blurring binaries to make anew, the exhibition looked for answers in the prim and plastic.
More than 30 years later, Post Human returns to Jeffrey Deitch Los Angeles in an iconic renaissance. The exhibition features the work of 36 artists including Hajime Sorayama, Kiki Smith, Damien Hirst, Pippa Garner, Jordan Wolfson, Cindy Sherman, Urs Fischer and more. Together, key figures from the show’s original run join forces with fresh faces in contemporary art to embark on new frontiers of bodily transformation, challenging the value of Realism in the age of Ozempic.
These works channel multiplicity and metamorphosis under a biometric big top. Josh Kline’s plastic-wrapped white-collar workers contemplate the automation of labor, meanwhile the ergonomic eroticism of Anna Uddenburg’s chair examine performance and comfort in the Instagram era. Encased in the gallery’s white walls, Paul McCarthy figures a scene of lost humans in a patch of lush forest, pushing the limits of “natural” life.
At the core, Post Human is quintessentially cyborg, fragmented and chimeric in form. “Cyber-futuristic, surgically inclined, commodified and politicized, the “cultured body” lends itself to reflect on a variety of concerns that define our age,” the gallery says in a recent statement. Mediating the fears and fascinations of an imminent virtual reality, the exhibition embraces a departure from a fleshy human form.
The exhibition is now on view in Los Angeles through January 18, 2025.
Jeffrey Deitch Los Angeles
925 N. Orange Drive,
Los Angeles
