Danh Vo

Vo’s attention to materials and their relationships is a vital aesthetic experience within the White Cube New York exhibition. The artist works with the classical materials of sculpture – timber, marble, bronze – and also brass, glass, paper, plants, water, bones and mushrooms. He uses pine wood constructions to exhibit sculptures made from religious relics, classical fragments and organic materials. Vo acquires many of the objects at auction and typically brings them to Güldenhof, where they live for a time amid the flowers and trees. Occasionally he casts the objects in bronze or otherwise replicates them. These new works retain the physical evidence of trauma and decay, as well as the contours crafted by their original makers. Ranging from Christian iconography to statues of Roman Gods, the objects conjure fever dreams of art and empire. They also show the resilience of artistic labor and its survival through generations and states.

In recent years, Vo’s work has had a degree of interiority, at times reflecting on structures that have shaped him as an artist. One such work, Shove it up your ass, you faggot! (2025), features two Roman-era marble fragments hanging from the ceiling: a boy’s lower torso on top and beneath it, attached by brass, the upside-down head of a Roman youth. The artwork’s title is a line spoken to a priest by Regan, the demonically possessed child in William Friedkin’s 1973 film The Exorcist. Possession is a theme throughout the exhibition. The Roman-era fragments, for example, have been passed down through various regimes. Christians likely cut off the boy’s penis and the youth’s nose to exorcise them of their Pagan Gods. Catholicism was at the vanguard of colonialism in Vietnam and shaped Vo’s emergence as a queer child in Denmark. Though the youth’s stoic face seems unbothered by whatever time and contemporary art has done to him, there is also the boys’ damaged body, laid bare for all to see.

A related work, πνεῦμα (Ἔλισσα) (2025), features a 19th-century German torture device for the leg and the 1st-century CE head of a male Roman sex slave. The work is Vo’s portrait of his long-time friend and collaborator Julie Ault, an artist and founding member of artist collective Group Material. Ault invited her mother, a medium, to title the piece. The darkness of the portrait suggests a psychic intimacy between the artists – an ability to understand each other in a way that others might not. Some have suggested the work might be better suited as a portrait of Vo, a (once) young artist constrained by the torture boot of Berlin’s contemporary art world. Yet, as Ault stated, “He doesn’t spend much psychology on himself.”  Group Material showed that there is an artistic attitude beyond the object. Vo’s curated realms adopt the spirit of this approach, examining private and collective histories in new and evolving contexts. At auction, Vo acquired a limewood sculpture of the Madonna and Child, one attributed to the workshop of Late Gothic sculptor Tilman Riemenschneider from south Germany, created circa 1490. The work had previously been restituted to the heirs of Ernst and Agathe Saulmann, German Jewish collectors dispossessed by the Nazis in the 1930s. Vo cast the work in bronze for this exhibition – the heavily-robed Madonna and her slender-limbed child look out with an intriguing directness. The original has been retired to Vo’s gardens at Güldenhof, where it rests some 400 miles from Pfullingen where the Saulmann’s held their collection.

In Untitled (2026), Vo exhibits rare Vietnamese ceramics rescued from the bottom of the ocean. His father Phung Vo writes out the English names of various plants and animals, so they are visible on the bowls. Phung Vo’s calligraphy has evolved into a personal and near-opaque Gothic script that serves his own artistic ends. The drawings and ceramics are framed or mounted on black walnut wood gifted to the artist from the Northern California farm of Craig McNamara. Now a friend of Vo’s, Craig McNamara is the son of Robert McNamara, one of the principal architects of the Vietnam War. At White Cube New York, as in all Vo’s exhibitions, these elements – past and present artisans, diverse materials, narratives and intimacies – collect, palimpsest and redirect. Rather than keys to understanding, they are points of access adding texture to experience.

This presentation is a continuation of, and includes a number of works featured in, Vo’s recently closed exhibition ‘πνεῦμα (Ἔλισσα)’ at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (February 14 – August 2, 2026). Vo’s exhibition is on view at White Cube New York from September 10 through October 16, 2026. Concurrently on view in New York is ‘Danh Vo: Rebuilding Liberty’ at the Vilcek Foundation, which presents three sculptures from his ‘We the People’ series (2011–16) alongside Live Free or Die (2026), a piece commissioned specially for the Vilcek Foundation’s gallery. This presentation is on view at East 70th Street through June 25, 2027.