Salon 94 to present Desire Path, a solo exhibition of new works from artist Miles Greenberg (b. 1997 in Montreal, Canada). The exhibition is the first US solo show by Greenberg dedicated solely to his sculptural practice and debuts his new work in marble.
With a decade-long career spanning from Beijing to Paris and now New York, the presentation at Salon 94 marks the artist’s inaugural presentation with the gallery. On display are figurative sculptures in Carrara marble, created by digitally mapping the bodies in movement in the artist’s durational performance, Fountain II, debuted at New York’s Pace Gallery in 2023. Building on the artist’s deep connection between performance and permanence, this new series of sculptural works explore notions of time and its preservation—be it of heartbreak or euphoria. While different in its mode of display, the romanticism of classical sculpture, the rigor of modern architecture and the nuanced understanding of how energy flows through a body, constitutes the foundation of Greenberg’s sculptural practice much as it does his movement work.
Greenberg’s new sculptures are fabricated using digital manipulation and scanning techniques: he hacks his hand-held 3D scanner to reduce its ability to self-correct in capturing movement. Each scan is then machine-carved into blocks of pink, black and white marble, before being handfinished by the artist.
The result is a series of otherworldly sculptures which appear to glitch forth from the performance work – itself offering drawings as artist study; figures embracing, distorted chests, hands and body parts, rivulets of quartz tracing down surfaces like hemorrhaging blood or tears.
Greenberg worked at Monumental Labs in Mount Vernon to produce the new series, marking the first time he’s worked at this scale. His continued fascination with marble—both in its historical context and as a contemporary medium expanding the opportunities of 3D imaging—is central to the exhibition.
Accompanying the sculptures are new 9-hour long video-based works of the artist’s recent performances including SEBASTIAN (2023) first performed and debuted at the 60th Biennale Arte in
Venice and RESPAWN (2024) from the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. Rigorous and ritualistic in its methodology, Greenberg’s universe relies on slowness and the decay of form to heighten the audiences’ sensitivities. The work follows self-contained, nonlinear systems of logic that are best understood in relation to one another.
Discussing the title, Miles Greenberg comments:
‘A ‘desire path’ is an unofficial route that occurs naturally when people intuitively walk the same trajectory many times over; it’s often about finding the shortest distance between two points. Onstage, I often feel when two performers synchronize, we trace desire paths of sorts together, over and over – we find a common resonance, intuitively finding shortcuts for maximizing our sensorial output. There’s something deeply sensual about the idea behind a desire path –– not just in name, but in nature –– the act of building on someone else’s intuition, blindly; you leave behind the memory of your touch, and a stranger then remembers you through their own body, again and again, until the shape of the world around you changes, like a river carving through a continent.’
Miles Greenberg, Desire Path, January 9th, 2025 – February 22nd, 2025, Salon 94
About the artist
Miles Greenberg (b. 1997 in Montreal, Canada) is a New York-based performance artist and sculptor. His work consists of large-scale, sensorially immersive and site-specific environments revolving around the physical body in space. These installations are activated with often extreme durational performances that invoke the body as sculptural material. These performances are then captured in real-time before the audience to generate later video works and sculptures. Rigorous and ritualistic in its methodology, Greenberg’s universe relies on slowness and the decay of form to heighten the audience’s sensitivities. The work follows self-contained, nonlinear systems of logic that are best understood in relation to one another.
At age seventeen, Greenberg left formal education, launching himself into four years of independent research on movement and architecture. He has worked under the mentorship of Édouard Lock, Robert Wilson, and Marina Abramovi? and has been an artist in residence at Fountainhead Arts, Miami (2023); La Manutention at Palais de Tokyo (2019), and The Watermill Center Residency, NY (2017 & 2018) among others. In 2023, Greenberg was featured on the Forbes 30 Under 30 in the Art & Style Category.
He has exhibited and performed internationally at museums and galleries, including The Louvre (Paris), Neue Nationalgalerie (Berlin), The New Museum (New York), Arsenal Contemporary (Toronto), Jeffrey Deitch Gallery (New York), Galleria Continua (Les Moulins) and more. Greenberg’s work has also been included in numerous international art surveys, including the Athens Biennial, BoCA Lisbon, and the Bangkok Art Biennale.
