Uri Aran, Untitled (I love you) in Naples

Uri Aran (Jerusalem, 1977), American artist based in New York whose research has found space in some of the most significant institutions on the international scene – from the 2013 Venice Biennale curated by Massimiliano Gioni to the Whitney Biennial in 2014 – is at the protagonist of his first institutional retrospective in Italy. The exhibition, Untitled (I love you), installed on the third floor of Museo Madre in Naples and curated by outgoing director Eva Fabbris, brings together over 170 works made from the early 2000s to the present day, distributed across approximately eight hundred square meters in an itinerary conceived by the artist as a complex ecosystem in which each work echoes the others, sometimes through imperceptible details, inviting the visitor to construct their own interpretive path.

Uri Aran, “Untitled (I Love You)” curated by Eva Fabbris (12 February – 18 May 2026), installation view at museo Madre, Napoli, © Uri Aran. Courtesy the Artist and and Fondazione Donnaregina per le arti contemporanee – museo Madre. Photo: Amedeo Benestante

Uri Aran, “Untitled (I Love You)” curated by Eva Fabbris (12 February – 18 May 2026), installation view at museo Madre, Naples, © Uri Aran. Courtesy the Artist and Fondazione Donnaregina per le arti contemporanee – museo Madre. Photo: Amedeo Benestante

At the center of Aran’s practice there is language – understood not as a transparent instrument of communication but as a system that accumulates, archives and confounds meaning. Words, objects, images and gestures are treated as unstable materials, subject to slippages and delays of meaning that the artist, who grew up in Israel with Hebrew as his mother tongue before moving to the United States, describes as a biographical experience before an aesthetic one: «I see a delay of meaning. I see things as mediated, almost everything is quoted». From this condition of marginality with respect to the dominant language arises a practice that works precisely in that interstice where words appear credible before they are even understood, revealing their intrinsic fragility. Instructions, lists and classifications promise clarity but produce ambiguity, transforming language into an instrument stripped of the authority that habit tends to confer upon it. In the video Untitled (Baryshnikov) (2008), for instance, Aran pronounces the same statement with slight variations and increasing emphasis, until the point where meaning empties out and only the gesture remains: the viewer is not called upon to decipher a message but to confront the limits of language, accepting that meaning is not a stable given but a temporary and mutable condition.

The exhibition itinerary is divided into five thematic sections – animals, language, studio, emotion and acting – which traverse the artist’s entire production without overlapping or excluding one another, generating a network of references and resonances between works from different periods and media. Animals occupy a privileged place in this constellation: excluded from functional language, they are for Aran an instrument through which to analyze the mechanisms of affection and projection that regulate human relationships. In the video Untitled (2006), one of the artist’s earliest and most moving works, in which Aran embraces his dog in a scene of three minutes and twenty-four seconds, the relationship with the animal stages a form of bond that makes visible the limit of saying without replacing it with any other certainty. The video Untitled (I love you) (2012), from which the exhibition takes its title, proposes variations on this same question: what does it mean to love, and to what extent does language manage to contain that experience without reducing it?

The most recent works Teachers (2025) and Tenants (2025), which classify animals in two-dimensional compositions, continue this reflection: taxonomic systematization appears in them as a gesture laden with cultural implications, in which to order and to name means to assign a value, to establish a hierarchy, to transform what is living into a compartmentalized and manageable category. The recurring presence of biscuits is connected in this context to a reflection on education as a repressive system, in which merit is consecrated through undeclared gestures of training.

The table is a recurring formal support in Aran’s installations, many of which present themselves as aggregations of found objects, notes, drawings, sculptural materials and obsolete technologies arranged on work surfaces. What the artist calls «bureaucratic formalism» takes concrete form in compositions in which heterogeneous objects coexist according to a «democracy of materials» that calls into question the processes of organization and classification. In the sculpture Close (2020-2025), in metal, wood, wax and leather, and in compositions on paper such as Two Studios (2024), the work surface becomes a place where time, discipline and imagination meet. The accumulation of these objects, apparently chaotic at first glance, is never random: «I put two things together in the studio, I let them age. I move them every day, I revisit them. In this sense the practice is about how to resolve the day in the studio, how to make sense of things».

Among the works on display, Untitled (Bread Library) (2025) stands out for its environmental breath. It is a bookcase composed of loaves shaped like letters of the alphabet that transforms language into a physical and olfactory card index, alluding at the same time to the fragility and perishability of every archive. Painterly works such as Mine, mine, all mine (2025) and Yours and Mine (2025) may surprise those who know his work primarily through installation and video: the dense and layered surfaces produce scenarios in which the familiar and the unexpected coexist without resolving, and in which the gesture retains a provisional quality, almost that of a sketch, consistent with the idea of a process always open. Time From Memory (2020–2025), deployed in a vertical format of almost two and a half meters, is one of the most imposing paintings in the exhibition and synthesizes many of the recurring themes in the artist’s research: the stratification of time, memory as an unstable archive, form as the result of a continuous negotiation between intention and chance.

Emotions, in these works, are never represented directly nor named as explicit content. They emerge instead as side effects of situations, gestures and materials capable of activating memories and sensations that are often ambiguous and not traceable to anything precise. The objects that return in the installations with the constancy of an obsession function as catalysts of affective accumulation, since they carry upon them the specific weight of what has been touched many times, desired, consumed, forgotten. They all belong to that category of things which in childhood carry a gravity disproportionate to their physical scale, and which in adulthood continue to exert an emotional pull that we are often unable to account for. Aran arranges them in the space with the same provisional logic with which a child organizes their toys on the floor, according to an order that makes sense only to the one who built it, yet which communicates something recognizable to anyone. Works such as the glazed ceramic Affection (2023) and drawings like Keeper (2024) share this same quality, concealing within their small scale an emotional density willing to reveal itself only if the viewer accepts to entrust themselves to their own free associations, contributing to maintaining them in a state of openness in which what is perceived remains partial, unstable and for this reason profoundly human.

Claudia Perrone

Info:

Uri Aran, Untitled (I love you)
Curated by Eva Fabbris
Museo Madre — Fondazione Donnaregina per le arti contemporanee
via Settembrini 79, Napoli
www.madrenapoli.it

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