liliya lifanova, lucas samaras: THE ESTRANGEMENT SET

January 29 - April 26, 2026

consultório project room
Rua Mascarenhas Pedroso 7, 2140-133 Chamusca, Portugal

Thursdays 12 - 7 pm or by appointment

Finissage: Sunday, April 26, 2 - 7 pm

There are striking parallels and resonant affinities between the practices – and even the biographical trajectories – of Liliya Lifanova and Lucas Samaras (1936–2024), despite the formal differences and temporal distance that separate them. The polyhedral nature of both artists’ work – a quiet, singular protest and an assertion of the self as misfit and outsider – resists classificatory logic and prevailing artistic narratives. At the core of each practice lies an exploration of selfhood, pursued through carefully constructed spatial environments shaped by light, handcrafted objects, and attire, conditions essential to their work though rarely foregrounded.

Lifanova’s THE ESTRANGEMENT SET occupies the entire gallery via a tilted platform populated with disparate sculptural elements, reshaping the space to constellate conditions of estrangement – an environment deliberately dissonant, a suspension of the ordinary, designed to dislocate the viewer from habitual perception. The installation recalls Samaras’s Room #1 (1964), which reconstructed his New Jersey studio as both setting and material for his work. Like Samaras, Lifanova presents an inventory of objects from her TO FOLD series; however, where Room #1 insists on presence and psychic immediacy, THE ESTRANGEMENT SET emphasizes distance, threshold, and mediation. Its objects are pared down, polished, and austere, reflecting a contemporary condition in which interiority is formalized and displaced. Together, these approaches frame the archive not as a static repository, but as a charged and unstable site in which the self remains perpetually in formation. Nested within this environment are Samaras’s Photo-Transformations (1973–76), Polaroid self-portraits altered with chemical reagents to produce psychedelic, uncanny images.

Extending the interplay between the psychomaterial space of creation and the public realm, Addenda II from Samaras’s story Dickman (1961–62) is positioned to be read at the exhibition entrance. The text sets the psychic tone of the installation: a visceral allegory of artistic inheritance in which history must be absorbed, digested, and endured, the act of swallowing both necessity and burden.

An artist book will be released by esculápio artist editions.

In the End, Everything Gives: Women Sculptors Group Exhibition at Silver Art Projects
Curated by Sarah Walko

January 23 – April 3, 2026

Silver Art Projects
Four World Trade Center, 28th Floor
150 Greenwich Street
New York, NY 10007

Opening Reception: January 23, 6 - 8 pm
visit on Thursdays, Fridays, or Saturdays with RSVP

“I shall create! If not a note, a hole. If not an overture, a desecration.”

— Gwendolyn Brooks

The Women Sculptors Group (WSG) was founded by artist Sarah Bednarek as a series of intimate gatherings of female-identified and non-binary sculptors in New York City. Created to foster connection, support, and exchange, the group grew through collective convenings centered on dialogue, shared learning, and community-building. Today, WSG is a network of more than 350 members across New York City, the tri-state area, and upstate New York. Following Sarah’s passing in 2019, the group has been stewarded by members Alta Buden, Dena Paige Fischer, and Heidi Norton, who continue to sustain and expand its founding mission.

In the End, Everything Gives presents a selection of works by thirty-one WSG members responding to turbulent political, ecological, and social conditions. The exhibition takes its title from a line by Ada Limón, which names both material and emotional states of yielding: “Everything gives way—the shorelines, the house decaying and becoming shrub and moss and haunt, the body that gives and gives until it cannot give anymore.” Here, giving way is not framed as collapse alone, but as a condition that calls making into being. Creation becomes a form of muscular hope—first for oneself, then extending outward—through which artists hold, shape, and reckon with the complexities of the present moment.

In this context, making emerges not as a search for answers, but as an urgent act in itself. “A bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer; it sings because it has a song.” First appearing in Joan Walsh Anglund’s 1967 book A Cup of Sun and later taken up by Maya Angelou, this idea finds resonance in Brooks’s declaration above. Together, these voices point to art as something born not only of inspiration, but also of grief, rage, and injustice. I shall create! becomes the shared cry of this exhibition. Across the works on view, materials range from watercolor, clay, plaster, steel, paper, and canvas to vintage prayer books, horsehair, eelgrass, antelope hide, and horns. Through varied materials, gestures, and forms, these artists insist on the necessity of creation itself. The works do not offer resolution, but they do offer care—affirming making as a collective act of attention, endurance, and survival.