‘I see 'Duo' as a material manifestation of a certain struggle between lovers. The backs of the two figures are connected barely by thin and sensual seam, or crack, and its sculptural moment is both the desire to separate, and the impossibility of it. The work for me fills with both the pleasures and pains of losing one’s borders into the other and sometimes for the other in the form of care or empathy. It’s also about what I see as a very tempting, but essentially dangerous delusion, which is the aspiration to be one, oneself independent and not in relation to the other, whether it’s your lover, a friend, an imagined enemy, the big Other, as the identity that is the not me.’
- Oren Pinhassi

Oren Pinhassi’s tactile sculptures, rendered in plaster and sand, deal with states of ambiguity and simultaneity. Bodies appear implied and at the same time disavowed in the reworked familiar shapes of an umbrella, a tree. Readymade elements like toothbrushes sprout out of a tree - neither natural nor artificial, but rather some herald of a futuristic hybridity. An awning, a walker, an umbrella: whispers of care, support, and shelter imbue the works with a tenderness. At the same time, holes and protrusions hint at lascivious desires, a trickster incongruity. This borderless polyamory among bodies, objects, and categories carries an erotic thrust - a sensual and expansive logic that guides the formation of new understandings, for a queer futurity.

Oren Pinhassi (b. 1985) graduated from the Yale School of Art in 2014. Recent solo shows include Castello San Basilio, Basilicata, 2019; Palazzo Monti, Brescia, 2019; One in the mouth and one in the heart at Skibum MacArthur, Los Angeles, 2018; Springs at the Petach Tikva Museum of Art, Israel, 2017; Nature Calls at RIBOT Gallery, Milan, 2017; Hanging Gardens at New Capital Projects, Chicago, 2016. Group exhibitions include For Mario at Tina Kim Gallery, New York, 2019; Four at Yossi Milo, New York, 2019; This Is Not A Prop at David Zwirner, New York, 2018. Completed residencies include Outset Contemporary Art Fund’s Bialik Residency, 2017, the Shandanken Project at Storm King Sculpture Park, New York, 2016 and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine, 2014. Pinhassi has been awarded numerous prizes including The Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, 2018; Fannie B. Pardee Prize, Yale School of Art, 2014; The Art Slant Prize, 2014; Shlomo Witkin Prize, 2011 and the Excellence Program Scholarship, Israeli Ministry of Education, 2011. Pinhassi lives and works in New York City.