Whitney Oldenburg: hardening the braces

CHART is pleased to present hardening the braces, Whitney Oldenburg’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. Featuring new sculptures and drawings, the exhibition will open on Friday, April 17, with a reception from 6–8pm, and remain on view through May 30, 2026.

Whitney Oldenburg’s work considers how material accumulation reflects psychological, economic, and environmental conditions. In this new body of work, she reframes materiality through the lens of survival, considering the footprint of progress. She examines how cycles of consumption, disposal, and obsolescence soothe present anxieties even as they participate in the gradual unraveling of the future they are meant to stabilize.

The sculptures are constructed from cut and reassembled boat hulls, horse collars, and water jugs and seed bags, materials that carry associations with leisure, transport, and self-sufficiency. In their reconfiguration, Oldenburg reflects on a growing preoccupation with survival, as well as the human tendency to accumulate objects as a response to uncertainty, shaped in part by the commercial production of preparedness goods.

Large, upright and anthropomorphic, the forms suggest monuments, though their surfaces are punctured with openings that disrupt any sense of permanence or solidity. What appears stable can also be seen through, held together through reassembly rather than fixed construction. In these works, water is held in attached storage containers, an element that may leak or evaporate over time—a reminder that we are never inseparable from the natural world.

Oldenburg’s colored charcoal drawings develop alongside the sculptures, presenting forms that recall fossils, skeletal systems, and organic growth. Together, the works reflect on life cycles and the instinct to ‘hold on to’. Preservation becomes an attempt at stability, even as the uncertainty that drives it persists. ◆