But what of the larger implications of the topic, what of that sense of social, psychological, even metaphysical fragmentation that so seems to mark modern experience - a loss of wholeness, a shattering of connection, a destruction or disintegration of permanent value that is so universally felt [...] as to be often identified with modernity itself? - Linda Nochlin
Body Fragment brings together a wide-ranging group of works spanning from antiquity to the present, examining a persistent and provocative motif throughout the history of art: the human body in pieces. The exhibition considers how fragmentation has shaped the representation and understanding of the body across centuries—transforming loss, rupture, and incompleteness into an aesthetic and political force.
Nochlin argued that the fragment is not merely a remnant of destruction but a powerful modern metaphor—an image of violence, desire, mortality, and the instability of the self. Fractured torsos, heads isolated from bodies, and cropped limbs—anchor the exhibition in the material reality of the erosion of time and the dislocation of the fully realized form. These works, isolated from the figure, now stand as autonomous forms, the subtracted status activating questions around the implications of their fracture.
Throughout the exhibition, fragmentation can be seen not as a deficiency but as generative. The partial figure can heighten the awareness of vulnerability and the necessity for human decency in our modern world. It can resist idealization and disrupt classical notions of unity and sameness. As Nochlin observed, the fragment is central to modernity itself—embodying both trauma and the poetics of incompleteness with the potential for living in a world experienced as discontinuous.
Placed in dialogue with objects from antiquity are works by: Kelly Akashi, Michael Borremans, Eugène Delacroix, Eliza Douglas, Tracey Emin, Claire Fontaine, Robert Gober, Jana Euler, Sean Landers, Sarah Lucas, Victor Man, Mark Manders, Calvin Marcus, Jill Magid, Seth Price, Cindy Sherman, Joan Semmel and Michael E. Smith.
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