Laurent Grasso Opens Largest Metaphysical Maze at MASS MoCA This Weekend

Saturday, November 7, talk at 4pm and reception at 5:30pm | North Adams, MA | Free for members; $10 talk and $20 reception for non-members

MASS MoCA opens Laurent Grasso: Metaphysical Maze, the largest U.S. exhibition devoted to the French artist, on Saturday with two events. Grasso discusses the show with guest curator Denise Markonish at 4pm in the Hunter Center, and the opening celebration follows at 5:30pm in Building 5.

The exhibition fills Building 5 with films, paintings, sculpture, and neon. It brings together five of Grasso’s films for the first time: OttO (2018), Anima (2022), Orchid Island (2023), Geophonia (2024), and the new Cosmic Drive (2026). The structures that house the films are rotated 45 degrees so that, as visitors move through them, they evoke the hands of a clock. Works are shown without titles, dates, or labels, and the museum says time seems suspended. Grasso compares walking in to entering a forest, “an imaginary landscape where you wander without trying to identify every species of tree.” Markonish calls the show the culmination of 10 years of conversation, going back to Grasso’s inclusion in MASS MoCA’s 2016 exhibition “Explode Every Day.” The show also puts his work in dialogue with historical figures of American landscape painting.

Cosmic Drive came out of Grasso’s residency at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, which named him winner of its Algorithmic Imaginings art and AI residency in late 2024. He worked with institute scientists who study how life emerges in extreme environments and beyond Earth. A companion show, Metaphysical Maze: Laurent Grasso at Frederic Church’s Olana and the Thomas Cole Site, opens November 22 at the two historic artist homes and runs through March 28, 2027.

Grasso was born in France in 1972 and works with electromagnetic energy, radio waves, and natural phenomena. His awards include the Marcel Duchamp Prize, and his work has been shown at the Hirshhorn Museum, the Musée d’Orsay, and the Palais de Tokyo. His sculpture group Roots of the Future was installed at the 2024 Paris Olympic Village.

MASS MoCA, 1040 MASS MoCA Way, North Adams, MA. Tickets at massmoca.org.