The latest show by Gedi Sibony continues the artist’s practice of making enchanting assemblage sculptures out of the most minimal means, and of making paintings that rely on such restrained gestures that they’re barely there.
The press release for “The Invisible Point,” his eighth show at New York’s Greene Naftali since 2008, consists of just four sentences, explaining that his process is “powered by an intuitive momentum,” that the show includes “objects drafted from remnants and castoffs,” and that landscapes depict “interacting beings.”
And then it goes cosmic: “The extended space of objects and the imagined realm interact by offering confirmation across the divide,” it concludes, “gesturing toward the mystery that humbles us.” The strength of Sibony’s work is the way that he can make magic out of nothing materials—including, in this case, wooden bookshelves found at trash dumps or on the street, broken plant stands, scraps of wire, and a broomstick—thereby extending a tradition stretching from Cubist collage to assemblages by artists like Louise Nevelson, Robert Rauschenberg, and Richard Tuttle.
I first got familiar with Sibony’s work in 2012, when I wrote for Art in America about the show “In the Still Epiphany,” which he curated at the Pulitzer Foundation, in St. Louis, Missouri. Rather than just an artist-curated exhibition, the institution called it “a large-scale, temporary work of art” comprising objects from Emily Rauh Pulitzer and Joseph Pulitzer’s collection, ranging from Neolithic stone figures to a 1957 Philip Guston painting, often combined in unexpected, funny and profound ways. When I asked him whether there was a source for the show’s title, he revealed that there was none: “The source? The amazing… mind… word… jumbling… process,” he said, breaking into a high-pitched laugh.
Installation view of Gedi Sibony’s show “The Invisible Point,” at New York gallery Greene Naftali.
Courtesy the artist and Greene Naftali, New York.
Some of the artist’s past outings at Greene Naftali have gone big, for example 2018’s “The King and the Corpse,” whose massive titular work consisted of “a disposessed, prefabricated building,” namely one that had had housed a White Castle franchise. Others have been far more understated, for example a 2013 show that Art in America’s editors (I was on staff then, so possibly me) described as offering “his usual admixture of abjection and precision,” with an “alchemy” that combined things like thrift-store paintings into “frighteningly exact and seemingly cosmic ciphers.”
An untitled 2014 show offered paintings—of a sort. It consisted of large found metal panels from decommissioned semi trailers that had had their branding painted over, which the artist professed to show as found, though the finesse of the painting in some cases raised my doubts. Those works came in the wake of much debate about both zombie formalism, a term coined by critic-artist Walter Robinson, and provisional painting, coined by critic Raphael Rubinstein, but fit into neither category. Such work has earned Sibony a berth in in institutional collections worldwide, including those of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.
Installation view of Gedi Sibony’s show “The Invisible Point” at New York gallery Greene Naftali.
Courtesy the artist and Greene Naftali, New York.
“The sculptures have been generated in the studio over the last three years,” said the artist during a recent visit; the lights were deliberately left off, letting the gallery’s large north-facing windows provide muted light, lending a sense of quietude. Pointing to the six-and-a-half-foot sculpture Using Its Own Resources (2024), he said, “These shelves were ripped out and had this paint pattern on the back, drippy paint on the unseen side that creates a kind of sparkly surface effect, a shivering border. I started looking for and collecting pre-built shelves that were being thrown away that I thought could have this nice treasure on the back if I ripped off the back piece of plywood or whatever.” It’s just like Sibony for ideas to stem from such slight phenomena.
This time around, Sibony acknowledged that the sculptures aren’t all displayed exactly as found. Atop the main bookshelf in Using Its Own Resources, with the detail of the paint on the usually unseen back side, he placed a smaller white bookshelf. But that one didn’t have the same chance effect on the back, so, hilariously, he faked it and painted on the back side a central strip of brown, mimicking untreated wood. Elsewhere, in In the Quadrant of Primary Characteristics, fist-size pieces of wood in assorted colors (painted by the artist) rest on bookshelves painted dark green (presented as found).
Gedi Sibony, Endowed with Inexhaustibility (2025).
Courtesy the artist and Greene Naftali, New York.
The arrangement of the sculptures, with titles like In the Quadrant of Primary Characteristics (2023), Distributive Forms of Order (2024), and Endowed with Inexhaustibility (2025), roughly recreate the relationships that formed between the pieces in the artist’s Brooklyn studio, he said.
Given the world’s endless number of objects, what characteristics make Sibony’s finds sculpture-worthy?
“If I were to try to guess,” he said, “I would say it has something to do with a distinctive expression, a human manifestation of something.”
Once the sculptures were done, months ago, the artist could relax, and then he started painting. “It was winter, it was cold, and I didn’t have to worry about the show, so I started making the paintings, just because I had this realization that I could make what I wanted to see. Tropical landscapes, that’s where I wanted to be, so I just made it in front of me.” The colors in the paintings echoed some of those in the sculptures, he pointed out, and he got the idea to combine the paintings and the sculptures. “I thought, okay, putting them in a white room is simple, so what about the space that they could emerge from?”
Gedi Sibony, Made of Jewels (2026).
Courtesy the artist and Greene Naftali, New York.
He didn’t have such ambitious plans for the canvases at first. His goal was to reproduce Henri Matisse’s Luxe, Calme, et Volupté (1904), which resides in the collection of Paris’s Musée d’Orsay, for his living room. “I was making them for my apartment,” he said, “and then it got very involved.” Involved as the process may have been, the paintings are minimal, with large expanses of white; Sibony has removed the figures from Matisse’s original, and left, in some cases, just twinned versions of the sparse tree that stands at one edge, and just the slightest indication of a horizon line.
Rather than mixing paint, Sibony created the works, on which he has bestowed titles such as In a Quadrant with Shivered Outline, Eternally Engendering Disparate Powers, and From the Waves of a Honeyed Sea (all 2026), one mark at a time with oil stick, with the canvases all lined up next to one another in the studio, working on all at the same time.
Gedi Sibony, Gathering Its Own Air (2026).
Courtesy the artist and Greene Naftali, New York.
“This is the first time I discovered working that way, and then with practice I realized that I could get what I wanted to see more easily, so it very much rewarded a repetition, which I’m sure every painter knows,” he said. “But the experience of getting better at making your mark faster and practicing, practicing—I like that process.”
He recalled an event from his youth, when he and a number of other contestants simultaneously went up against a chess champion who rotated among them, making one move at a time against each opponent, until he mated every contestant. “That’s what I felt like with all these little paintings. I was just moving fast with the oil, not really thinking about it, just, like, ‘mate, mate, mate.’”
But then he corrected himself. “It’s not really ‘mate,’” he said. “What it is, there’s a point, if you’re lucky, where all the marks work perfectly, and it’s easy to go beyond that point. So actually it becomes about going fast, fast, fast, but also putting on the brakes. It can be a really fun process.”
Sibony pointed out that the visitor, coming down a long hallway from the elevator into the gallery, has a particular experience of one painting, framed by one particular sculpture. A visitor started to wonder aloud whether some of the sculptures themselves could take the role of visitors moving from one place to another.
Sibony demurred.
“No, it’s very still, there’s no ‘from’ or ‘to,’” he said. “I think the stillness of it is the sense that it is, rather than it’s coming from or going to… I mean, that’s just what art lets you have—this frozen moment.”
“Gedi Sibony: The Invisible Point” is on view at Greene Naftali, 508 West 26th Street, 8th floor, through June 20, 2026.
