Tools of Worship

"Tools of Worship" is a solo exhibition by artist Tschabalala Self at Petzel Gallery, her first with the gallery and her first New York gallery show since 2020. It brings together new paintings and her first sculptural works in concrete, continuing her investigation of the human figure as both object and site of exchange through which meaning, desire, memory, and belief circulate. Her figures are built from found and repurposed textiles and conceived as characters in a theatrical world, with identity treated as a mutable material rather than a fixed fact. The exhibition proposes that both art and the human body are conduits of reverence and projection, asking what it means to encounter an artwork as something alive.