Jack O'Brien

Cue the Cue

With Cue the Cue, Jack O’Brien is presenting his first institutional solo exhibition in Germany, exploring the intersections of consumer culture, desire, and queer identity within capitalist power structures. By transforming found objects such as magazines, pianos, streetlights, and industrial materials like plastic films and mesh fabrics, O’Brien creates sculptural rearrangements whose surfaces and tactile qualities evoke a latent desire within the objects themselves.

His new site-specific, large-scale installation features a grandstand with 65 wooden chairs from a disbanded dance company, balanced by semi-transparent spheres. The installation references processes of deconstruction, minimalism, and the shifting relationship between stage and audience. O’Brien strips the grandstand structure of its function as a stable space of representation, opening it to a reading in which identity oscillates between hyper-presence and invisibility.

The exhibition title refers to a cycle of staging and repetition: the design of everyday objects evokes desire and influences identity by shifting between visibility and withdrawal—a mechanism that O’Brien exposes. He shows how queer identities are incorporated into advertising, fashion, and everyday objects—sometimes adapted, sometimes altered, or completely reimagined.

Alongside the exhibition, the first catalog of Jack O’Brien’s work will be published by Bierke Verlag.

Curator: Alexander Wilmschen