Thomas Houseago is making his New York comeback.
A new exhibition this fall, taking over three floors of Lévy Gorvy Dayan’s Upper East Side townhouse, will mark the artist’s first presentation in the city in 10 years. Calling from Tokyo this summer, he readily acknowledged the weight of the task at hand. He has never felt seen by the New York art world, although it witnessed watershed moments in his career, like the inclusion of his hulking Baby in the 2010 Whitney Biennial and his foray into the architectural realm with “Moun Room” at Hauser & Wirth in 2014.
“New York has never really been an easy audience for me in terms of the critical establishment,” Houseago admits. “It’s not a place where I’ve felt comfortable or safe.” He recalls a particularly unsparing review of a 2013 show at Storm King, in which a New York Times critic suggested he might need therapy. “He was right,” Houseago says. “In a way, what he was picking up from the work was correct.”
The Leeds-born, Los Angeles-based artist made his name in the late aughts with mammoth sculptures of mangled humanoid and animal forms whose weary stoicism often betrayed an unflinching vulnerability. Houseago’s self-described “fuck-it” behavior and high-octane ascent—accompanied by its fair share of name-brand collectors, mega-gallery drama, and celebrity friends—made him impossible to ignore. He was seemingly everywhere—until he wasn’t.
In 2020, Houseago left his practice behind. He was in the midst of a mental breakdown, battling preverbal trauma resulting from sexual violence he experienced as a child. “When I went into treatment, I was like, Sculpture is gone. I’m so relieved,” he remembers. “I’m never going to do that again.” He saw his sculptural output up to that point as a constant cycle of retraumatization. “I wasn’t in control [of the work at all],” he recalls. “I didn’t make it. It was making me.”
But with the help of an interventionist and care manager—Danny Smith, who died this past spring—he began to make his way back to art, first with ink drawings of visions he’d had at an Arizona treatment center, then with painting, and finally, and most reluctantly, with sculpture once again. The Lévy Gorvy Dayan show charts this “dark night of the soul.”
The journey begins on the ground floor, with the heaviest work—both conceptually and literally—including a bronze minotaur that will greet visitors at the entrance. “The minotaur is the perfect metaphor for trauma, right?” Houseago notes. “Born out of perversion. Half man, half beast. Stuck in a maze it can’t get out of.”
The second floor sees Houseago sculpting on a smaller scale: His signature eggs populate one room at varying degrees of brokenness and a series of three-dimensional still lifes memorializes his gradual re-enchantment with the quotidian. The path to recovery is punctuated by a turn toward the celestial on the fifth and last floor, with a skylit mural depicting the phases of the sun and moon. “No matter how triggered or fucked up I am, I always find the dawn beautiful,” Houseago concludes. “The whole show in a nutshell is: There’s hope. How do you become an ambassador of hope?”
"Thomas Houseago: Night Sea Journey" is on view at Lévy Gorvy Dayan, 19 East 64th Street, from September 9 through October 19, 2024.
