50 Varick Street New York, NY 10013
March 8–10, 2019

Steffen Bunte
Manuel Solano

Peres Projects is pleased to present works by Steffen Bunte and Manuel Solano at Independent New York, 2019.

The work of both these young artists contain a sense of futurity, they work to destabilize the power relations rendered invisible in our society, and envision the possibilities for future worlds.

Steffen Bunte is an artist working in Germany whose work is helping us understand the intersection between humans and technology. Technological singularity is defined as the point after which humans begin serving the very technologies which we initially created and developed to serve our aims. In some aspects we have already reached this point, seeking new experiences largely in order to digitize and upload them to servers. Bunte’s work explores the question of what makes us human and at what point does technology become sentience? Will we finally find ourselves in this future of convergence?

Manuel Solano’s work similarly approaches the impossible problem of what makes us human. Autobiographical works are inherently vulnerable, intimate, and proximate. They demand a double vision, which overlay the artwork with the experiences of the artist themselves. In Manuel Solano’s practice, the personal is the work, as the artist allows us tremendous access to their experiences in exploring the shifting and flexible position of their identity. Their paintings explore the relationship that memory and the imaginary share, how sincerity and camp operate together, and how popular culture is a container for our personal and shared histories. Whereas Manuel Solano is known for their portraiture of pop-cultural icons to express facets of their identity, these new works do an act of translation – using the form of portraiture to depict a place. Again we are asked to perform this double vision, to see the artist in the intimate spaces they have depicted.