The French conceptual artist's largest US exhibition opens at MASS MoCA November 7, with satellite shows at Olana, the Thomas Cole Site, setting his work in dialog with the historic homes of two icons of American landscape painting.
Pictured: Laurent Grasso "Cosmic Drive." Film HR, 2026 (in progress). Courtesy of the artist, Sean Kelly, Perrotin and Pedro Cera. © Laurent Grasso / ADAGP, Paris, 2026.
Beginning November 7, MASS MoCA in North Adams opens “Metaphysical Maze,” the largest U.S. exhibition to date devoted to French conceptual artist Laurent Grasso, filling the museum's humongous Building 5 with an immersive installation of films, paintings, sculpture, and neon. Two weeks later, on November 22, a companion exhibition opens inside the historic homes of Frederic Church and Thomas Cole, the founding figures of the Hudson River School, at Olana in Hudson and the Thomas Cole National Historic Site in Catskill. A third satellite presentation follows in February at Burlington City Arts in Vermont. Grasso describes the four-site arrangement as "a constellation," each location developing a different facet of the same underlying project.
The MASS MoCA exhibition, curated by Denise Markonish, gathers five of Grasso's films together for the first time: OttO (2018), Anima (2022), Orchid Island (2023), Geophonia (2024), and the new Cosmic Drive (2026). The installation is built around three X-shaped structures spanning the length of the former industrial gallery, each one angled 45 degrees from the next so that visitors' sightlines keep shifting as they move through the space, a design the museum says draws direct inspiration from Sol LeWitt's “Wall Drawing Retrospective,” installed permanently in the adjacent building since 2008. "Entering my exhibition is like walking into a forest," Grasso says, "an imaginary landscape where you wander without trying to identify every species of tree."
Cosmic Drive, the newest film, grew out of a two-year research residency Grasso completed at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, where he worked alongside astrobiologist Nathalie Cabrol, director of the organization's Carl Sagan Center for Research. The film follows a character, played by French actress Megan Northam, driving a vintage car across a desert that gradually transforms into an experimental receiver, its dashboard and windows pulsing with light patterns meant to evoke possible extraterrestrial signals.
The soundtrack comes from Warren Ellis, of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, and Nicolas Godin of the French duo Air. Markonish calls the whole project "the culmination of 10 years of conversation," tracing back to Grasso's inclusion in MASS MoCA's 2016 show “Explode Every Day.”
"Grasso's exhibition is like a call and response between forms and symbols” MASS MoCA museum director Kristy Edmunds describes. “Drawing visitors into an exploration of metaphysical time from prehistory to imagined futures."
The Olana and Thomas Cole presentations will hang in the historic homes among the original furnishings and paintings. At Olana, Grasso's film Orchid Island, shot off the coast of Taiwan and built around an enigmatic black rectangle inserted into an otherwise pristine landscape, will screen within the picture gallery and dining room. Alongside it, new, never-before-exhibited paintings from Grasso's ongoing “Studies into the Past” series, a body of work deliberately executed in historical styles to produce what he calls "a false historical memory," will hang among Church's own paintings.
The new paintings draw specifically on Church's own compositions and fascination with the Prussian naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, whose multivolume Cosmos argued for the interconnectedness of science, nature, and spiritual inquiry, a thread Grasso's own work picks up a century and a half later. "This process of infiltration creates a new experience," Grasso says, "while remaining attentive to the density and character of its original hanging."
Maggie Dimock, associate curator for the Olana Partnership, ties the collaboration directly to this year's Frederic Church 200 bicentennial. "The Olana Partnership is honored to collaborate with Laurent Grasso on this unique installation,” she says. “That speaks to the continued relevance of artists who urge us to examine our role in the natural world."
At the Thomas Cole Site, six miles across the Hudson River from Olana (into the fabled land west of the RI region’s coverage area known as Catskill) the exhibition centers on a direct pairing: Cole's 1846-47 painting Landscape with Clouds juxtaposed with Grasso's film Anima, alongside his neon works “Projection and Eternal Flame,” a red marble sculpture called Panoptes, and another new “Studies into the Past” painting made specifically in response to Cole's work.
Grasso describes the pairing as an inquiry into "how the perception of landscape has shaped our relationship to the world, between contemplation, exploration, and the power of representation." Maura O'Shea, the site's executive director, calls the collaboration a way of showing that "landscape transcends time periods and is a subject more relevant today than ever."
The north star of the “Metaphysical Maze” constellation, opening in February at Burlington City Arts, will show ARTIFICIALIS (2021), a film built from LIDAR scans and hyperspectral imaging that blurs the line between untouched wilderness and landscapes already reshaped by human activity.
Born in France in 1972, Grasso has spent his career working following paths of scientific inquiry and older, pre-scientific belief systems, producing films, paintings, and public installations that treat invisible phenomena, electromagnetic fields, radio waves, atmospheric disturbance, as transcendent power. He's the recipient of the Marcel Duchamp Prize and France's chevalier de l'ordre des Arts et des Lettres, and was the subject of a 2024 Rizzoli monograph, Time Travel. His public commissions include “Roots of the Future,” a group of sculptures installed for the 2024 Paris Olympic Village, and a permanent ceiling installation for the new Châtillon-Montrouge train station outside Paris.
MASS MoCA, 1040 Mass MoCA Way, North Adams, MA. “Metaphysical Maze” opens November 7, with an Opening Celebration at 5:30pm and a conversation between Grasso and Markonish at 4pm the same day. On view through January 16, 2028.
Olana State Historic Site, 5720 Route 9G, Hudson, NY, and the Thomas Cole National Historic Site, 218 Spring Street, Catskill, NY. “Metaphysical Maze: Laurent Grasso at Frederic Church's Olana and the Thomas Cole Site” opens November 22, 2026, through March 28, 2027.
Burlington City Arts, Burlington, VT. ARTIFICIALIS on view February 5 through May 8, 2027.
