Petzel is pleased to present Tools of Worship, Tschabalala Self ’s first solo exhibition with the gallery and her first gallery exhibition in New York since 2020. The show brings together new paintings and the artist’s first sculptural works in concrete. Following her monumental public sculpture for the New Museum’s façade in New York and the unveiling of her Fourth Plinth commission in London, Tools of Worship develops Self’s sustained investigation of the human figure, considering the body as both an object and a site of exchange through which meaning, desire, memory, and belief circulate.
In these new works, Self explores bodies as mediums between the immaterial and the physical. Her figures are conceived as characters that inhabit a theatrical world where everyday gestures and interactions become forms of performance. Rather than acting for an external audience, they move through the ongoing drama of their own lives, assuming roles, inhabiting identities, and shifting between different states of being. Here, identity is not treated as a fixed fact but as a mutable material that is continually reconstructed.