Solo Exhibition Altman Siegel Gallery, San Francisco, U.S.A.
Altman Siegel is delighted to present About Time, Lynn Hershman Leeson’s third solo exhibition with the gallery.
A radical and visionary artist, Hershman Leeson has challenged conventional definitions of art for over six decades, consistently shredding the boundaries of technology, identity, and psychology. At the center of Hershman Leeson's latest exhibition is an antibody engineered to reverse aging. Developed by Hershman Leeson alongside Dr. Tomas Huber and a private pharmaceutical lab in China, the serum serves to reverse aging one day at a time, each time it is administered. The genetic makeup of this protein-based antigen has now been adopted by the lab Hershman Leeson contracted for the project, and is currently being offered commercially throughout Asia as an antidote to aging. As with previous bodies of work, Hershman Leeson has preempted foundational advancements in technology that go on to become ubiquitous facets of everyday life.
In addition to several syringes full of the refrigerated injectable, stored at 38 degrees, and titled Eternally Yours, this presentation includes a suite of new framed works on paper and digital prints on aluminum. The digitally manipulated collages feature a palette steeped in a cyberpunk visual register: glowing iridescent pastels, radioactive hot pink, neon greens, and icy blues. These assemblages channel a chaotic, proto-digital minimalism fused with both futuristic optimism and dissonant cultural fragmentation. The DNA sequence of the antibody gene used in the serum and the artist’s own image, revisited consistently across Hershman Leeson's career, appear throughout these 2D works. On one such haunting digital construction, tinged with Hershman Leeson’s characteristic wit and sardonic humor, a portrait of the artist as a young girl is overlaid upon an image of a medical vial atop an all black ground. Utilizing a pre-Internet, Y2K aesthetic, reflective of the artist's early adaptation of the medium, this work positions the artist’s progression from a poster-child of youth to a pioneering mad-scientist amidst an abyss of uncertainty, a possible advertisement for or outcome of this novel intravenous shot.
Hershman Leeson typically begins a new body of work by rather analog means, perhaps a DIY holdover from her countercultural beginnings as a UC Berkeley college dropout. Snapshots cut up and glued onto graphite drawings, often sporting comical vignettes of flawed human relationships with technology, serve as an immediate and raw window into the artist’s subconscious. The phrases and texts jotted down on these sketches reveal compulsive fascinations from which the artist can refine into advanced, research-based projects. This is the working method that initially led to the sequencing of the anti-aging serum.
The raw physicality of these drawings indicates a certain primal immediacy or urgency. Similarly, the act of speaking freely into a video camera until recurring themes emerge recalls early psychoanalytic techniques, where unfiltered expression was used to access the unconscious.
Commissioned for the 2026 São Paulo Biennale, the latest edition of The Electronic Diaries video series, About Time (2025), which is the seventh diary in the series, focuses on the topic of aging. First started in 1984, The Electronic Diaries are self-recorded confessionals edited by Hershman Leeson to reveal the locus of her predominant obsessions.
Whether videotaped, rendered on paper, or constructed digitally in Photoshop, this process consistently yields an objective index of the artist’s dominant preoccupations, which in the case of Hershman Leeson, frequently anticipate and illuminate major cultural themes bubbling just under the surface of our broader social zeitgeist. Lynn Hershman Leeson’s newest body of work, along with her decades-long oeuvre, stands as evidence of her razor-sharp instincts, unrestrained appetite for risk, and enduring relevance, anticipating major societal shifts through the lens of personal, psychological, and scientific exploration.
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