Exit Interview
David Muenzer
Concept Art Gallery
1031 South Braddock Avenue
Pittsburgh
18 April - 13 June, 2026
Panel discussion with David Muenzer, Aliza Shvarts, Liz Magic Laser, and Domenick Ammirati hosted by The Brooklyn Rail
How does the recent past thicken into history? In a world where “all media is training data” (1), seemingly at hand, what becomes of historical distance?
During the 2008-2015 zero interest rate period, speculation overtook actual production as the central economic force. These years also saw the adoption curve for social media dramatically shift towards ubiquity. In our resulting media landscape, algorithms construct closed information-worlds for each user. As these feeds produce subjects with increasingly disjunctive views of reality, finding one’s place in history is more urgent than ever.
Exit Interview considers these questions through sculpture, performance artifacts, and drawings, each a distinct core sample of images from the year 2011.
These include new works in Muenzer’s Goyna series (2024– ). This ongoing project, named in Bengali after a maternal heirloom, consists of ritual objects that mediate past and present. These are architecturally scaled, handmade paper reliefs, embodying otherwise immaterial archives through a novel drawing-like process.
Alongside these new relief sculptures are artifacts from Muenzer’s 2010-2013 performance, Artist as Interface. In 2010, Muenzer left his studio and part-time job to become a full-time receptionist at Latham & Watkins LLP, a corporate law firm in midtown Manhattan. In the artist’s words: “At the time, it felt more productive to leave my traditional painting studio–an architecture of withdrawn contemplation and controlled production–and instead look to the office as a site connected to culture. The workstation, constructed for predictable efficiency, became my studio, a zone for volatile trials.”
In one notable aspect of the performance, Muenzer negotiated with his employer: in exchange for an installation on two floors used for storage since Morgan Stanley vacated in 2008, Latham could host events in the resulting exhibition, 14 & 15, located below Bernie Madoff’s offices (3) (4) (5).
This 2011 exhibition included work by Rachel Harrison and Trisha Baga, as well as Muenzer’s own sculptures: cast-chocolate tulip tables connecting desire and viscosity. Exit Interview will present these chocolate tables, shown here for the first time in fifteen years.
The varied time signatures between Muenzer’s artifacts, sundered site-responsive sculpture, and ritual reliefs are as much a compositional gesture as articulations within discrete artworks. A new collage print, Firm Values, 2026, is similarly attuned to translation between formats, comparing the graphic design of 14 & 15’s Latham-designed invitation and the Twilight fanfiction PDF cover of E.L. James’ Master of the Universe, later revised and self published as 50 Shades of Grey in 2011.
The final element in Exit Interview are new pencil drawings in Muenzer’s globehead series. Drawing, portable and agnostic to context, is the throughline in Muenzer’s work. In a complement to the emergent forms in many of his other investigations, the globeheads use a preexisting visual language, cartooning, shifting focus to the headspace of the drawn figures.
As artist Paul Sietsema has noted, Muenzer’s drawings “come laced with inherited aesthetic value, owing to both the classical studies of artists such as Ingres and Daumier, as well as the preparatory drawings for graphic novels and comics. The aesthetic is as delectable as it is dismissible in a contemporary art context, enhancing the utilitarian nature of the drawings—they do conceptual work” (6).
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David Muenzer (b. 1987) has presented solo exhibitions at Final Hot Desert, London; Soldes, Los Angeles; Parapet Real Humans, St. Louis; Dracula’s Revenge, New York City; Jan Weenix, Los Angeles; Lord Ludd, Philadelphia; and Reserve Ames, Los Angeles. Recent group exhibitions include C.C.C. Gallery, Copenhagen; The Drawing Center, New York City; Lubov, New York City; Night Gallery, Los Angeles; Bel Ami, Los Angeles; La Maison de Rendez-Vous, Brussels; MOCA, Los Angeles; Park View / Paul Soto, Los Angeles; Balice Hertling, Paris; San Diego Art Institute, San Diego; and M+B, Los Angeles. Muenzer has organised events and performed at venues including Soldes, Los Angeles; The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and at The Lipstick Building, New York City.
David Muenzer
Concept Art Gallery
1031 South Braddock Avenue
Pittsburgh
18 April - 13 June, 2026
Panel discussion with David Muenzer, Aliza Shvarts, Liz Magic Laser, and Domenick Ammirati hosted by The Brooklyn Rail
How does the recent past thicken into history? In a world where “all media is training data” (1), seemingly at hand, what becomes of historical distance?
During the 2008-2015 zero interest rate period, speculation overtook actual production as the central economic force. These years also saw the adoption curve for social media dramatically shift towards ubiquity. In our resulting media landscape, algorithms construct closed information-worlds for each user. As these feeds produce subjects with increasingly disjunctive views of reality, finding one’s place in history is more urgent than ever.
Exit Interview considers these questions through sculpture, performance artifacts, and drawings, each a distinct core sample of images from the year 2011.
These include new works in Muenzer’s Goyna series (2024– ). This ongoing project, named in Bengali after a maternal heirloom, consists of ritual objects that mediate past and present. These are architecturally scaled, handmade paper reliefs, embodying otherwise immaterial archives through a novel drawing-like process.
Alongside these new relief sculptures are artifacts from Muenzer’s 2010-2013 performance, Artist as Interface. In 2010, Muenzer left his studio and part-time job to become a full-time receptionist at Latham & Watkins LLP, a corporate law firm in midtown Manhattan. In the artist’s words: “At the time, it felt more productive to leave my traditional painting studio–an architecture of withdrawn contemplation and controlled production–and instead look to the office as a site connected to culture. The workstation, constructed for predictable efficiency, became my studio, a zone for volatile trials.”
In one notable aspect of the performance, Muenzer negotiated with his employer: in exchange for an installation on two floors used for storage since Morgan Stanley vacated in 2008, Latham could host events in the resulting exhibition, 14 & 15, located below Bernie Madoff’s offices (3) (4) (5).
This 2011 exhibition included work by Rachel Harrison and Trisha Baga, as well as Muenzer’s own sculptures: cast-chocolate tulip tables connecting desire and viscosity. Exit Interview will present these chocolate tables, shown here for the first time in fifteen years.
The varied time signatures between Muenzer’s artifacts, sundered site-responsive sculpture, and ritual reliefs are as much a compositional gesture as articulations within discrete artworks. A new collage print, Firm Values, 2026, is similarly attuned to translation between formats, comparing the graphic design of 14 & 15’s Latham-designed invitation and the Twilight fanfiction PDF cover of E.L. James’ Master of the Universe, later revised and self published as 50 Shades of Grey in 2011.
The final element in Exit Interview are new pencil drawings in Muenzer’s globehead series. Drawing, portable and agnostic to context, is the throughline in Muenzer’s work. In a complement to the emergent forms in many of his other investigations, the globeheads use a preexisting visual language, cartooning, shifting focus to the headspace of the drawn figures.
As artist Paul Sietsema has noted, Muenzer’s drawings “come laced with inherited aesthetic value, owing to both the classical studies of artists such as Ingres and Daumier, as well as the preparatory drawings for graphic novels and comics. The aesthetic is as delectable as it is dismissible in a contemporary art context, enhancing the utilitarian nature of the drawings—they do conceptual work” (6).
-
David Muenzer (b. 1987) has presented solo exhibitions at Final Hot Desert, London; Soldes, Los Angeles; Parapet Real Humans, St. Louis; Dracula’s Revenge, New York City; Jan Weenix, Los Angeles; Lord Ludd, Philadelphia; and Reserve Ames, Los Angeles. Recent group exhibitions include C.C.C. Gallery, Copenhagen; The Drawing Center, New York City; Lubov, New York City; Night Gallery, Los Angeles; Bel Ami, Los Angeles; La Maison de Rendez-Vous, Brussels; MOCA, Los Angeles; Park View / Paul Soto, Los Angeles; Balice Hertling, Paris; San Diego Art Institute, San Diego; and M+B, Los Angeles. Muenzer has organised events and performed at venues including Soldes, Los Angeles; The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and at The Lipstick Building, New York City.
- Herndon, Holly & Mathew Dryhurst. All Media is Training Data. Walther Konig, Cologne, Germany: 2024.
- Sietsema, Paul. “David Muenzer: Twin Study.” The Brooklyn Rail. Dec/Jan 2024-25.
- Quinlan, Adriane. The New York Times. “The Cubicle is a Canvas at Midtown Show.” 2011.
- Vogel, Wendy. Flash Art International. “‘14 & 15’ At the Lipstick Building: An Interview with David Muenzer.”
- Russeth, Andrew. Gallerist New York. "When is a Cat Not a Cat? When it's a Sculpture?"2011.
