At Almine Rech New York, Zio Ziegler brings monumental paintings, monochrome abstractions, mythic figures, and bronze sculptures into a volatile conversation about humanity in the age of AI.
What happens to human stories when the systems we build begin to reshape the way we see, think, and create?
That question pulses through Zio Ziegler’s The Tesseract, the artist’s fourth solo exhibition with Almine Rech, now on view at the gallery’s Tribeca location at 361 Broadway through October 21, 2026. The exhibition brings together four distinct but interconnected modes of Ziegler’s practice, creating an environment where mythology, abstraction, figurative imagery, sculpture, and contemporary anxieties collide.
Rather than presenting a single visual language, The Tesseract deliberately moves between extremes. Monumental, densely patterned paintings sit alongside skeletal monochromes; visceral “Essential Figures” meet totemic bronze sculptures. The resulting exhibition behaves less like a linear progression than a constantly shifting system, with each body of work exerting pressure on the next.
Four Languages, One Unstable Center
The title The Tesseract evokes a four-dimensional geometric object, and Ziegler’s exhibition similarly operates through multiple dimensions of visual thought.
At one end are the artist’s maximalist paintings, surfaces crowded with intricate patterns, symbols, figures, and references. At another are pared-back monochrome works in which gesture and mark-making become the principal subjects. Between them are Ziegler’s “Essential Figures,” biomorphic forms distilled from human bodies, and bronze sculptures that translate some of those ideas into three-dimensional, almost ritualistic objects.
The effect is intentionally destabilizing.
A viewer may encounter a densely populated image and then move toward an almost empty monochrome surface. A painting may appear deeply rooted in religious imagery before another work transforms that same visual vocabulary into something abstract and bodily.
Rather than resolving these differences, Ziegler makes their friction the engine of the exhibition.
Myth as a Contemporary Technology
Mythology provides one of the exhibition’s deepest structures.
Ziegler conceived The Tesseract after engaging with foundational narratives including Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the Epic of Gilgamesh, and the Bible. These texts become more than historical references. They function as repositories of stories about transformation, catastrophe, exile, death, creation, and renewal.
The paintings also draw upon a wide range of art-historical sources.
References to Masaccio’s Expulsion from the Garden of Eden, Rubens’s Descent from the Cross, and the imagery of Hans Memling’s Last Judgment coexist with echoes of Picasso, Jackson Pollock, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg.
This collision of historical languages is central to Ziegler’s method.
The past is not treated as something static. Instead, images migrate, mutate, and acquire new meanings as they pass between periods and cultures.
That process mirrors the way contemporary digital systems continually remix and reorganize existing information.
The Expulsion Myth in the Age of AI
One of the exhibition’s most significant themes is expulsion.
Ziegler repeatedly returns to the biblical expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden as a metaphor for moments when humanity is pushed out of a familiar world and forced into an uncertain one. The story becomes especially resonant when placed against contemporary questions surrounding artificial intelligence, machine learning, labor, and climate change.
The exhibition does not present AI simply as an enemy.
Instead, it asks what happens to subjective human experience when increasingly powerful technologies begin generating images, language, and ideas at extraordinary speed.
Ziegler’s position is embedded in the diversity of his own visual practice. His paintings resist a single consistent style. They embrace contradiction, imperfection, historical quotation, bodily gesture, and individual intuition.
In this sense, The Tesseract becomes an argument for artistic difference at a moment when algorithmic systems can encourage visual homogenization.
The question is not simply whether machines can make images.
It is what remains distinctly human in the act of making them.
From the Sacred to the Skeletal
Ziegler’s treatment of religious imagery is particularly striking because the works do not depend on conventional declarations of faith.
The artist approaches religious narratives through their ability to generate emotional and sensory responses. Images become instruments capable of activating memory, anxiety, desire, and identification.
That approach can be seen in the exhibition’s recurring crucifixion imagery.
The crucified body appears not only through recognizable historical references but also through Ziegler’s “Essential Figures.” These monumental biomorphic forms abstract the tilted head, twisted torso, and bent legs associated with Christ on the cross, translating religious iconography into a language of geometry and bodily tension.
The transformation is important.
An image that once communicated a specific theological narrative becomes a more ambiguous symbol of vulnerability, suffering, and metamorphosis.
Painting Between Chaos and Control
Ziegler’s maximalist canvases can initially feel chaotic.
Their dense surfaces are filled with patterns and forms that demand prolonged attention. Yet the apparent disorder is counterbalanced by moments of structure and repetition.
That tension recalls Pollock’s paintings, where controlled gesture and unpredictable movement coexist.
Ziegler similarly treats mark-making as both conscious construction and intuitive discovery. His paintings seem to emerge through an ongoing negotiation between planning and surrender.
The monochrome works take the opposite route.
Here, visual information is dramatically reduced. What remains is the physical evidence of the artist’s hand—the trace, gesture, and rhythm of making.
The contrast makes the exhibition’s larger proposition clearer: complexity and simplicity are not opposites. They are different states within the same artistic system.
Bronze Bodies Frozen in Motion
The exhibition extends these concerns into sculpture.
Among the works presented are bronze figures including Figure In The Garden: Temptation and Those Who Go. Their physical presence introduces another dimension to Ziegler’s exploration of myth and transformation.
Bronze traditionally carries associations of permanence and monumentality. Yet Ziegler’s figures often retain a sense of psychological instability.
They appear like bodies interrupted during transformation—mythological beings temporarily frozen between movement and stillness.
This relationship between motion and suspension echoes the exhibition’s larger structure. Everything seems to be changing, but the artwork captures one moment within that change.
A Self-Portrait Inside the Myth
The artist also enters the exhibition directly.
Works such as Self Portrait: Felix Culpa and paintings containing recognizable versions of Ziegler place the artist inside the mythological and historical structures he is examining.
This is significant because The Tesseract is ultimately not an abstract meditation on civilization from a safe distance.
It is also about the artist trying to locate himself within a rapidly changing world.
In one painting described by the exhibition text, Ziegler’s likeness appears against a golden background, with his hair recalling the crown-of-thorns imagery associated with the traditional “Man of Sorrows.” Elsewhere, the artist appears within the activity of his own studio practice.
The artist becomes both observer and participant.
Tribeca as a Meeting Point for Past and Future
At Almine Rech’s Tribeca gallery, The Tesseract arrives at an especially fitting moment for New York’s art landscape.
Tribeca has become a significant destination for contemporary galleries, bringing together established international programs and younger artistic practices. In that environment, Ziegler’s exhibition occupies an unusual position: it looks backward toward ancient stories while confronting one of the defining technological questions of the present.
The gallery is located at 361 Broadway, and the exhibition is open Tuesday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.
The exhibition’s relevance lies precisely in that temporal collision.
Ancient myths were once technologies for understanding an uncertain world. Today, artificial intelligence has introduced another transformative system whose consequences remain difficult to predict.
Ziegler does not attempt to offer a definitive answer.
Instead, The Tesseract suggests that artists may need to preserve ambiguity, subjectivity, and contradiction precisely when technological systems increasingly reward consistency and efficiency.
What Do We Carry Through the Transformation?
By the end of The Tesseract, the recurring story is not simply one of collapse.
Expulsion leads to transformation.
Fire can destroy, but it can also change matter. A body can become an abstraction. A religious image can become a psychological symbol. A historical painting can be rewritten through contemporary experience.
And an artist confronting AI can return to something remarkably old: the human impulse to tell stories.
Ziegler’s exhibition ultimately leaves viewers with a question rather than a prediction.
As images become increasingly easy for machines to generate, what will humans choose to make, remember, and believe?
