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Photo by Liz Ligon

Giulia Cenci

secondary forest

April 2024 – March 2025
Location

On the High Line at 24th Street

Giulia Cenci creates elaborate sculptures and installations by fusing industrial elements and organic forms, arranging them into jarring compositions that invite viewers to question human’s relationship with nature. Cenci’s work features animals, plants, and human appendages cast from melted-down scrap metal, reusing found objects, agricultural tools, old machinery, and car parts. These seemingly disparate elements are then hung, suspended, or pierced together like pieces of meat, morphing into a wild habitat void of hierarchy—where a human bone is treated with the same care as the branch of a tree or a wolf’s face.

For the High Line, Cenci presents a new production titled secondary forest. The sculptural installation is composed of animal, human, and plant forms cast from aluminum, sprouting from a steel grid armature. Dismembered wolf heads sit atop bundles of branches that seemingly stand in for their bodies, and cast tree roots hover above the ground, as though they’ve just been pulled and unearthed. Masks of human faces, their eyes squeezed shut, peek between branches. Their visages appear throughout the work, upside down and sideways, as though they’ve been frozen in a tumbling motion. The work also features the limb of a tree girded with metal, seemingly wearing a human face. This amalgamation of organic and industrial materials reflects the history of the Meatpacking District’s meat trade and the High Line’s role in that industry. Cenci also reflects on the blurred line between humans and all other forms of life. The work’s title, a term used in botany to describe a forest or woodland area that has regenerated through largely natural processes after human-caused disturbances, allows viewers to reconsider their own impact on and relationship to the cycle of life.

Artist bio

Giulia Cenci (b. 1988, Cortona, Italy) lives and works between Amsterdam, Netherlands, and Tuscany, Italy. Cenci has presented solo exhibitions at institutions internationally, including Centre d’art de Saint-Fons, Lyon, France (2023); Centro Cultural Recoleta, Buenos Aires, Argentina (2023); Museo Blanes, Montevideo, Uruguay (2022); MUDAM, Luxembourg, Luxembourg (2021); Museo Novecento, Firenze, Italy (2021); and Kunst Merano Arte, Merano, Italy (2019). Recent group exhibitions include Unruly Bodies, Goldsmiths CCA, London, UK (2023); Reaching for the stars, Palazzo Strozzi, Firenze, Italy (2023); Face to Face, MUDAM Luxembourg, Luxembourg (2022); Strange – Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Collection, Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Sevilla, Spain (2022); and Shapeshifters, Malmö Konstmuseum, Malmö, Sweden (2020). She has participated in major international group exhibitions and biennials including The Milk of Dreams, the 59th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy (2022); and Jeune création internationale, the 15th Lyon Biennale, Lyon, France (2019).

Read a Q & A with the artist

Support

Lead support for High Line Art comes from Amanda and Don Mullen. Major support is provided by Shelley Fox Aarons and Philip E. Aarons, The Brown Foundation, Inc. of Houston, and Charina Endowment Fund.

This program is supported by the Mondriaan Fund, the public cultural funding organization focusing on visual arts and cultural heritage.

High Line Art is supported, in part, with public funds from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature, and from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the New York City Council, under the leadership of Speaker Adrienne Adams.

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