"the hands behind the line"
Updated: 4 hours ago
On Thea Djordjadze "A Well Of Night, Sprüth Magers, New York
September 18th - December 19th, 2026
By Venetia Kapernekas
October 28th, 2026
The title, A Well of Night, speaks of darkness, a well so deep that no light reaches it. Yet the rooms of Thea Djordjadze's first solo exhibition at Sprüth Magers New York are full of light. The show fills the second floor of a neo-Renaissance townhouse at 22 East 80th Street. The house was built in 1889, and in 1922 the architect Isaac Newton Phelps-Stokes added its bay front. Today its dark hardwood floors lie under pale vinyl, and the rooms seem to lift a little off the ground. The mahogany doors and carved frames remain, dark and familiar, standing against the pale floor as old furniture stands in a freshly whitewashed house.
The title holds two images at once, the lightless well and a night with no edge. Djordjadze arrives at a space with a stock of earlier works, hangs one, and wanders. “I listen to the void, listen to the building, to the pieces,” she told Elephant in 2024, while installing a show in London, where she hid the floorboards under a platform coated in canvas and painted the same pale gray as the walls. Djordjadze trained as a painter, in Georgia, Amsterdam and Düsseldorf, until in Rosemarie Trockel's class the painting left the canvas and she began to paint floors in a performance. “I treat space as a big canvas,” she said.
Standing before the plywood fireplace surround, an opening in a slab of pale wood, I thought of Richard Artschwager, whose bookcase of books that cannot be read and piano reduced to a slab with a strip of keys sit between furniture and sculpture. Sprüth Magers shows the Richard Artschwager Estate, and this spring, from April 15 to May 22, these same rooms held his work in dialogue with the paintings of Gary Hume, two artists asking, in the gallery's words, "what an object, or an image, becomes when its surface is the subject."
So many exhibitions now come and go in four or five weeks. Sprüth Magers has given this one three months. The gallery and the makers of this quiet reset of its architecture took their time, and now the exhibition has time to breathe.
Along a corridor, next to a tall wooden door, a white plane projects from the wall like a desk or a shelf that forgot what it was for. Above it hangs a panel of deep navy. Two thin edges, one red and one navy, cut diagonally through the air to join them, and a single steel line runs along the floor toward the door frame. In another room a cream panel stands on a thin black shelf held by angled wire supports, and on the shelf sits one small frosted glass jar, on a pale plywood bench. This work is called A well of night, like the exhibition itself. “The sculpture is making decisions,” Djordjadze has said, “it's telling me where to go, how to be positioned.”
By the tall windows, where the old wooden shutters fold back into their casings, a drop of blue glass about eight feet tall stands on a slender steel stem, catching the light from East 80th Street as if it had been lowered down a well. In a doorway, a plywood niche sits inside a dark mahogany frame, and in it stands a single folded plane of aluminum, white and silvery, like a page half turned or a sheet of metal paused in the act of bending. Each object is placed where the building already had something to say: a window, an alcove, a door. Nothing here is finished for good; every arrangement stays open to the next room. Djordjadze cannot picture a room before she enters it. “It is always this moment of performance in the space,” she said, “my body in the space.”
Djordjadze was born in Tbilisi and lives and works in Berlin. She has long made environments that she reworks for each space they enter, drawing on modernist design, architectural logic and the memory of her Georgian roots. Her husband is an architect, as is his whole family, yet she keeps her distance from the discipline: “I am very far from the architectural approach. I appreciate the inner rules of the space.”
Steel vitrines lean against the walls on plywood plinths. Behind the acrylic glass of one rests a print of a small dark bottle; in another, a small photograph of a bookshelf lies against the metal. Djordjadze first made the form in 2017 for the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, and it returned two years later in her solo show at Sprüth Magers in Los Angeles. The gallery traces its lineage further back, to the mid-century display cases designed by the Georgian anthropologist Alexander Javakhishvili (1875–1973) and the painter Avtandil Varazi (1926–77) for the archaeological museum in Tbilisi, the city where she was born.
When the show opened in mid-September, New York Fashion Week had just closed, and the city was still carrying its afterglow of runways and invitations. In that mood, a few days later, I found myself reading Wallpaper* on Simone Bellotti, creative director of Jil Sander since 2025, and watching his autumn/winter 2026 show online. As the models walked the long, quiet rooms of the Milan headquarters, I kept seeing Djordjadze's rooms.
The resonance begins with architecture. In the 1990s Jil Sander asked the architect Michael Gabellini to insert planes of limestone and light into historic shells, first a Beaux-Arts building in Paris, then a palazzo in Milan facing the Castello Sforzesco. Bellotti describes discovering the house there on his first day: the modern interior on one side, the classical castle through the windows on the other. He understood that Jil Sander lives in that tension, masculine tradition made light and open. Djordjadze's pale floor inside a neo-Renaissance townhouse performs the same gesture.
Jil Sander has always preferred to call her work pure and modern rather than minimal. Both Sander and Djordjadze reduce, but neither empties. What they take away is only what stands between the eye and the thing, the body and the room. Not emptiness, but care: a room cleared so that a line can be seen.
As I finish writing, I am reading Kate Zambreno's Foam, published by Semiotext(e) the week the show opened. The book returns again and again to Eva Hesse, who wove industrial and artificial materials into soft, domestic forms. In the Chicago Review of Books, Maeve Barry describes foam itself working in the book like a soft sculpture, a container that holds its separate threads close together. Djordjadze's rooms hold their works in the same way. Steel, aluminum, glass and vinyl enter the rooms of a family house and stand beside its fireplaces and carved doors. Like Hesse, Thea finds each form only by working inside the space, moving and trying until the room settles. “By changing and trying and moving you wait until you have this tension between the building, object, painting,” she told Elephant. “It's one special tension and then everything fits together. I cannot visualise it.”
Installation realized under the artist’s direction with Aaron Miller, artist and carpenter, with thanks to Ryan Muller, Director of Sprüth Magers New York, and the gallery team.
Written By Venetia Kapernekas
28th October, 2026
All caption photos by Genevieve Hanson provided by Sprueth Magers, New York in respect of the reproduction agreement.
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