Building — Spine

“Building” names both object and action. Bringing together Jamie Nares and Samuel Kern, Building emerges from this doubling, channeling the material constitution of the city itself as something continually made and remade. The paintings, objects, and films on view—most made over the past decade—echo rusted surfaces and glinting fixtures, mottled sidewalks and elaborate scaffolding. Though primarily non-representational, these works retain the visible seams and indelible traces of human contact, physical labor, and material transformation. The exhibition is titled after Nares’s 64-minute film, Building (2020), which quietly observes the construction of a highrise condo from the artist’s 25th-floor window until it exceeds the frame, recasting abstraction as a negotiation of perspective relative to scale.

Where Nares’ films record labor as an embodied, durational language of movement, her painted and sculptural abstractions likewise retain the physical intelligence of their making—treating bodily effort as both an essential action and an ornamental event. In parallel, Samuel engages with and pushes against the conventions of painting, allowing the relationship between materials to shape his work. Through iterative processes of making and unmaking, his compositions retain seams, stains, and other signs of labor. In both artists’ practices, abstraction thus emerges as a reorganization of relations—between figure and ground, support and embellishment, body and surface, material and other material—made visible as a result of contact.

Building is staged within Suite 210 of the landmarked Bennett Building. Completed in 1869, it remains the tallest cast-iron building in the world. The ten-story Second Empire office building is is recognized as a major monument to the art of cast-iron construction and to the post–Civil War boom in speculative commercial development in the Financial District, embodying the era’s intertwined histories of industrial capital, working-class labor, and urban growth.

Jamie Nares (b. 1953, United Kingdom) has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and a career-spanning retrospective at the Milwaukee Art Museum in 2019. In 2024, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, organized a five-decade film and video retrospective of Nares' work. A career-spanning survey of her film and video works was presented in 2008 at the Anthology Film Archives, New York, and in 2011 at the IFC Center, New York. Her work is included in public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo, NY; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. In 2014, Rizzoli published the most comprehensive monograph on Nares' career to date. Nares has lived and worked in New York since 1974.

Kern Samuel (b. 1990, Mount Hope, Trinidad and Tobago) lives and works in Hudson, NY. Recent institutional exhibitions include The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT (2026); MoMA PS1, Queens (2024); Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn, Germany (2022); The Africa Center, New York (2022); and White Columns, New York (2022). Other solo and group exhibitions include Derosia, New York (2026, 2023, 2022, 2021); Soft Opening, London (2025); Bad Water, Knoxville (2025); Croy Nielsen, Vienna, Austria (2024); the bunker, Santa Monica Mountains (2022); Gallery Aferro, Newark (2019, 2018); Theresa A. Maloney Art Gallery, College of Saint Elizabeth, Morristown (2018); and Jeffrey Stark, New York (2017). Samuel lives and works in Hudson, New York.

Kern Samuel’s solo exhibition of new works, IM, is concurrently on view at Derosia through October 10.

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EXHIBITION PRESS

Artforum “Must See”
Sacred and Profane: a writer’s pilgrimage through New York’s Armory Week—Qingyuan Deng for Artforum

JAMIE NARES
Block, 1975
Video
2:34 minutes

KERN SAMUEL
Two Circles, 2024
Steel, magnets
24 x 48 inches

KERN SAMUEL
Two Circles, 2024 (detail)
Steel, magnets
24 x 48 inches

KERN SAMUEL
MrMr, 2025
Artist’s socks with welded steal support
30 x 35 inches

KERN SAMUEL
MrMr, 2025 (detail)
Artist’s socks with welded steal support
30 x 35 inches

JAMIE NARES
Memory Two, 2026
Oak, nails
Variable

JAMIE NARES
Memory One, 2025
Oak, nails
Variable

KERN SAMUEL
Between Day and Night, 2023
Drawing ink and rust on steel
24 x 24 inches

KERN SAMUEL
Between Day and Night, 2023 (detail)
Drawing ink and rust on steel
24 x 24 inches

JAMIE NARES
Building, 2020
Video, sound
64:04 minutes

JAMIE NARES
Wooster II, 2019
22k gold leaf on evolon
105 x 53 inches

JAMIE NARES
Wooster II, 2019 (detail)
22k gold leaf on evolon
105 x 53 inches

Installation view, Building, September 18—October 31, 2026
Photo: New Document

Building Jamie Nares and Kern Samuel September 18—October 31, 2026Suite 210, 139 Fulton St, New York

Building
Jamie Nares and Kern Samuel
September 18—October 31, 2026
Suite 210, 139 Fulton St, New York