Public Pool: 225 West 17th Street

Ethan Cohen Gallery is pleased to present Public Pool, a group exhibition bringing together works by Emil Alzamora, Frédéric Bruly Bouabré, Hans Breder, Ethan Aloe, Stanley Casselman, Renée Cox, Thomas Deininger, Ron English, Fang Lijun, Nick Farhi, Carole Feuerman, Zhen Guo, Frank Hyder, Jeffrey Spencer Hargrave, Katinka Huang, Salomón Huerta, Sacha Ingber, Vitaly Komar, Li Daiyun, Liu Xiaohui, Joan Lebold Cohen, Paul McDowall, Donna Mikkelsen, Yigal Ozeri, Jim Peters, Shi Chong, Larry Sultan, Jeannie Weissglass, and Zhang Huan. Curated by Lara Birgit Kamhi and Ethan Cohen.

Named after Public Pool, a collaborative exhibition platform established within Ethan Cohen Gallery to support experimental and curator-driven projects, the exhibition takes as its point of departure from one of modern life's most peculiar spaces: the swimming pool. Neither fully public nor fully private, the pool is a place where bodies become visible. It is a site of leisure and performance, intimacy and observation, solitude and gathering. At its side, strangers share space, identities are negotiated, and everyday rituals unfold in full view.

Spanning painting, sculpture, photography, installation, and performance documentation, the exhibition examines the many ways artists have used water and aquatic environments to explore the body, memory, desire, transformation, and collective experience. While diverse in medium and approach, the works share a fascination with moments of suspension: floating, bathing, diving, reflecting, emerging, disappearing.

Throughout the exhibition, the swimmer and bather emerge as recurring figures through which artists examine the public body. In Carole Feuerman's sculptures, moments of bathing and swimming become meditations on vulnerability, discipline, beauty, and self-possession. Frank Hyder's swimmers and divers transform the pool into a stage where leisure, spectacle, and community converge, while Larry Sultan's photographs observe swimming as a distinctly social ritual. Fang Lijun's bathers dissolve individuality into larger currents of collective experience, and Renée Cox’s Soul Culture works fracture swimmers into rhythmic, kaleidoscopic patterns of movement and energy.

Elsewhere, water becomes a threshold between appearance and disappearance. Hans Breder's experimental photographs merge body, reflection, and landscape, collapsing distinctions between figure and environment. Shi Chong's submerged forms hover between visibility and obscurity, while Yigal Ozeri's floating figures and Katinka Huang's dreamlike compositions invite viewers into states of suspension where realism gives way to memory, psychology, and myth. Liu Xiaohui's Holiday paintings similarly transform scenes of leisure into fleeting impressions, capturing the fragile boundary between observation and recollection.

The exhibition also considers the quieter rituals that surround water. Salomón Huerta's pools evoke longing, absence, and contemplation through their uncanny stillness. Nick Farhi approaches bathing through cinematic intimacy and domestic care, while Sacha Ingber's ceramic works draw upon the visual language of beaches, swimwear, sand, and summer recreation. Thomas Deininger's sculptural bass introduces another dimension of aquatic life, reflecting on the relationship between human experience and the natural world. Frédéric Bruly Bouabré's depictions of bathers transform everyday encounters with water into intimate expressions of shared humanity.

At the exhibition's furthest edges, water becomes a site of collective imagination and transformation. Zhang Huan's landmark performance To Raise the Water Level in a Fishpond turns a body of water into a social and political medium, demonstrating the power and limitations of collective action. Along with Vitaly Komar’s Actaeon, Jeannie Weissglass’ and Jeffrey Spencer Hargrave’ sirens invoke the enduring mythology that surrounds water, desire, and metamorphosis, reminding us that aquatic spaces have long occupied a place between reality and imagination.

Across generations and geographies, the artists in Public Pool return to water not merely as subject matter but as a condition. Water reflects and distorts. It conceals and reveals. It separates and connects. Whether encountered in a public swimming pool, a private bath, a fishpond, or the imagination, it becomes a medium through which the body is seen anew.

At the height of summer, Public Pool invites viewers into a space where the boundaries between public and private, self and other, surface and depth become momentarily fluid.

 

Emil Alzamora, Frédéric Bruly Bouabré, Hans Breder, Stanley Casselman, Ethan Aloe, Renée Cox, Thomas Deininger, Ron English, Fang Lijun, Nick Farhi, Carole Feuerman, Zhen Guo, Frank Hyder, Jeffrey Spencer Hargrave, Katinka Huang, Salomón Huerta, Sacha Ingber, Vitaly Komar, Li Daiyun, Liu Xiaohui, Joan Lebold Cohen, Donna Mikkelsen, Paul McDowall, Yigal Ozeri, Jim Peters, Shi Chong, Larry Sultan, Jeannie Weissglass, Zhang Huan.

 

Special thanks to Sacha Cohen, Harper’s, Uffner & Liu, Yancey Richardson, and Phillip Blond.