Mark Whalen, Twin Sconce, 2025, oil on aluminum, bronze, pink onyx, and glass, 20 x 15 x 9 inches

Mark Whalen
Night Lights

May 15 through June 21, 2025
Opens Thursday, May 15, 6–8pm

Harper’s Chelsea 534
534 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011
Tuesday–Saturday, 10am–6pm

Harper’s is pleased to announce Night Lights, Los Angeles-based artist Mark Whalen’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. The presentation features new works by Whalen and opens May 15, 6–8pm, with a reception attended by the artist.

Throughout Night Lights, Whalen captures the complexities of human emotion across seven heads juxtaposed with assorted materials and forms. Whalen incorporates glass, aluminum, bronze, and marble within these freestanding and wall-hanging sculptures. Often, the artist conjoins these figures, staging intimate tableaux that emulate human connection. Other times, he isolates them: here, they appear to grapple with personal monologues. Through use of vibrant color and whimsical fixtures, these works gesture towards the spectrum of affects that bedeck everyday life.

In works like Twin Sconce, for example, shimmering light bulbs engulf two heads with solemn faces, joined ear-to-ear. The multi-colored bulbs balloon from these figures like thought bubbles, mirroring complicated webs of interiority. A hand curls gently beneath the chin of the figure on the right—a quiet gesture of ponderance. Compositionally, the fusion of these heads elicits a meeting of minds: Whalen encapsulates the inextricable bonds that shape our inner worlds and inform such modes of inquiry.

Whalen emphasizes the delicate nature of relationality through his use of hand-blown glass and fragile materials. The crystalline heads featured in Calling party are positioned slightly apart from one another, linked only by a winding telephone cord. Like a never-ending conversation, the cord nearly suffocates the figure on the left, coiling around an otherwise restful disposition in a disorderly labyrinth. And adding to the turbulence, brilliant bulbs distend again from this face—subtle reminders of the kinds of ruminations that can balloon beneath the surface. Whalen distills this ritual of internal processing into one single pensive figure in Color field. Here, Whalen’s figure is bound in a web of string lights, its mouth agape yet silenced by a tenuous grip holding its bindings in place.

Repeatedly across these striking assemblages, Whalen renders connection not as a linear pathway but as a dynamic entanglement—an endless choreography of reflection and feeling. The sculptures that comprise Night Lights each hum with the frenetic buzz of interior life, wherein fantastical idiosyncrasies take center stage. Whalen reveals that relationality cannot be reduced to proximity across these meticulously assembled works; instead, he invites viewers to experience the interpersonal realm through its knots, loops, and tensions—a fickle balancing act indeed.

Mark Whalen (b. 1982, Sydney, Australia) received a degree from Martin College, Sydney; he currently lives and works in Los Angeles. Most recently, his work has been the subject of presentations at Galerie Saenger, Mexico City (2023); Over the influence, Bangkok and Hong Kong (2022, 2020, and 2019); Centro de Arte Contemporáneo, Málaga, ES (2021); Sophie Gannon Gallery, Melbourne (2019); and Edwina Corlette, Brisbane (2018, 2015, 2012, and 2010). Whalen’s work has been acquired by institutions, including Artbank; Mainland Art Fund, Melbourne; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; and National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.

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Detail: Mark Whalen, Twin Sconce, 2025

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