Cosmic Flush : Images of Scuffle

16 October 2025 – 29 November 2025

Opening reception: Wednesday, October 15, 6–8:30pm

Featuring works by: Alan Vega, Andrew Durgin-Barnes, Eloïse Van der Heyden, Erró, Germaine Richier, Henry Moore, Isaac Soh Fujita Howell, Madelyn Kellum, Mathis Gasser, Michael Hilsman, Natalia Gonzalez Martin, Peter Saul, Purvis Young, Rammellzee, Tali Lennox, Todd Bienvenu, Walter Robinson.

& Treasures of Ancient Art 

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For its new exhibition, Galerie Sébastien Bertrand takes us into the fray. Under the title “Cosmic Flush: Images of Scuffle,” which borrows the title of a legendary album by Rammellzee, it brings together works that play on our fascination with physical confrontation, head-on opposition, heated and bloody, the paradoxical bond of our human history.

Indeed, if discord leads to confrontation, this confrontation has, almost unfortunately, been transcribing our human essence for artists for several centuries. We are those bodies that enemy spears try to strike. We feel the blood growing cold, the metallic taste of anxiety, and the intense throbbing of our fears. We are children playing at fighting, just like the Greek infantrymen forming a phalanx under the sun. We are wounded and defeated soldiers, just like the victorious horsemen making one with their mounts. But why, again and again?

Perhaps because art is also a battle and a struggle. It is not simply a matter of producing an object or an image and then abandoning it to the vagaries of fate. For a work of art to reach us, like an archaeological object, it must bring together its own reality with that of the viewers, their visions, their desires, and their projections. The object, the image, the painting, the sculpture, becomes the reflection of a moment suspended between two peaceful states. But it is also on the brink, frozen in that moment of extreme intensity. Their voices are therefore inevitably those of those who are in the fight. 

It features works by Alan Vega, Andrew Durgin-Barnes, Erro, Germaine Richier, Henry Moore, Isaac Soh Fujita Howell, Madelyn Kellum, Mathis Gasser, Michael Hilsman, Natalia Gonzalez Martin, Peter Saul, Purvis Young, Rammellzee, Tali Lennox, Todd Bienvenu, Walter Robinson, and includes pieces of ancient art.

— Samuel Gross

 

 
 
 

ERR0, Miss Gedda, 1968

Oil on canvas, 54 x 104 cm. / 21 . x 41 in. / (ER-6801)

Michael Hilsman, The Other Side of the Fence, 2016
Oil on linen, 213 x 96 cm. / 83 ¾ x 37 ¾ in. /(MH-1602)

 
 

 
 
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