Preview: 8 July 2026, 6–8pm

White Cube Mason’s Yard is pleased to present a solo exhibition by artist duo TARWUK, debuting a major new site-specific installation alongside paintings and works on paper.

In the spirit of Richard Wagner’s mid-1800s concept of gesamtkunstwerk, the ‘total work of art’ or ‘all-embracing art form’, TARWUK look to the hallmarks of theatre as principles within their practice. Structured through ideas of theatre, fragmentation, collaboration and transformation, the exhibition expands the duo’s ongoing investigation into the unstable nature of selfhood, memory and the shared unconscious.

In the ground floor gallery, TARWUK unveil a sprawling sculptural installation that functions as a mise-en-scène: an environment composed of modular theatrical elements, including fragments of stage architecture, a costume, three chairs acting as surrogate performers and television monitors presenting video works. Marking the first time the artists have separated out mediums within an exhibition context, highly textured paintings are exhibited in the downstairs gallery. Escaping the specifics of time and geography, the works reveal a new chromatic palette, with layered compositions comprising dreamlike scenes, ornamental vegetal forms, spectral architectures and fragmented bodily traces.

Foregoing their individual identities to inhabit a single artistic entity since 2014, TARWUK’s practice refers to the 1960s and ’70s avant-garde collectives of their native, former Yugoslavia, for whom collaboration was both method and ideology. Their move from the Balkans to New York City in the early 2010s – and the marked change in social tenor and political timbre that accompanied it – may account for TARWUK’s existential enquiries into the boundaries of the self: an experimental union that strains the limit of what artmaking can be.

Further information about the exhibition, including installation images and featured artworks, will be available ahead of the opening.