21c Unveils Exciting New Art Exhibition, Hosts Community Celebration

The SuperNatural, 21c Cincinnati’s latest exhibition, opens to the public with a reception on Thursday, September 14, 2023 from 6pm to 8pm. The community is invited to celebrate with hors d'oeuvres and cocktails crafted by Metropole, an introduction to the exhibition by 21c’s Chief Curator Alice Gray Stites, a performance by Revolution Dance Theater at 6:30pm and a presentation by featured artist, Lars Jan, at 7pm. Following the reception, the community is invited to attend an after-party at The Rooftop at 21c from 8:00pm-11:00pm. The reception and after party are free to attend.

The exhibition, which remains on view through August 2024 throughout the 21c Cincinnati gallery spaces, presents a thematic group exhibition of 85 multi-media artworks by 42 artists from across the globe exploring how the natural world is now experienced and understood as both organic and artificial. As images of the post-industrial world transform into the bytes and pixels of the digital age, the sublime is becoming the supernatural. Landscape, once the realm of the bucolic and pastoral, now appears alluring and alarming, fantastical, threatening, and threatened, reflecting the earth’s evolution toward an Anthropocene: a planet whose contours and contents will be defined by human activity. During periods of significant concurrent economic, technological, and socio-political change such as the current time, the concept of hybrids proliferates, embodying fear and desire, the known and the unknown. They and the territories they may inhabit belong to the uncanny, a place eerily alien and familiar at once. In these still and moving images of land and cityscapes, and in the fabricated figures of The SuperNatural, nature meets technoculture, and the new natural is both organic and artificial.

“Invoking past and future in a critique of the present, these paintings, photographs, sculptures, videos, and installations document observed, current realities while referencing the aesthetic traditions of the 19th and 20th centuries,” says 21c Chief Curator Alice Gray Stites. “Influenced by Romanticism and Surrealism, science and commerce, these visions narrate how the dreams and detritus of the industrial era generated the promise and peril of the digital age and explore the potential for adaptation to the visceral and virtual realities of the future.”

21c’s museum is free and open to the public 24/7, 365 days a year. The SuperNatural exhibition will be on view through March 2024 and features works by Albano Afonso, Edward Burtynsky, Elena Dorfman, Chris Doyle, Lars Jan, Richard Mosse, Patricia Piccinini, Colleen Plumb, Jakob Kudsk Steensen, and many more.

To learn more, visit https://www.21cmuseumhotels.com/cincinnati.