Resisting Death: Glitches and Ornaments brings together works by Ull Hohn, Bod Mellor, and Bruno Pelassy around a central concern:
how can artworks respond to the vulnerability of the body, its exposure to threat, illness, erasure, or domination? The exhibition does
not seek a single resolution; rather, this tension is embedded in the works’ dense, labored surfaces, sometimes fractured or distorted.
Against the modernist denunciation of ornamentation articulated by Adolf Loos in Ornament and Crime (1908), these practices
reclaim ornament as a tool of resistance and critical disclosure. For its part, the glitch, originally a digital error producing pixelated
or fragmented images, signals a machine’s slip. Beyond this technical definition, the glitch has become an aesthetic and political
concept, designating the moment when a supposedly stable structure, such as an image, cracks. The glitch makes visible what is
normally hidden: codes, hierarchies, mechanisms of power. Transposed into painting and objects, glitches operate as visual disruptions,
rendering images porous and unstable. In the work of Hohn, Mellor, and Pelassy, such gestures register both an acute attachment to
life and a sustained confrontation with illness, pain, and mortality. Rather than hierarchizing these experiences, the works stage their
coexistence, making painting and sculpture profoundly physical spaces, inseparable from the body—desiring, fragile, and exposed.
It is through technical mastery that Hohn and Mellor articulate their painterly strategies, constructing images that unfold on multiple levels of reading. Hohn’s Untitled (1988–93) exemplifies this approach. The pastoral landscape, rendered in saturated lime-yellow tones, evokes the Hudson River School, the televised visions of Bob Ross and the spectral blurs of Gerhard Richter, with whom Hohn studied in Düsseldorf, Germany. At first glance, the painting reads as a conventional landscape, yet its hyper-saturated palette renders it hallucinatory, suspended between ecstasy and disappearance.Veiled and overcharged, itseems already on the verge of fading.Thesurface is punctuated by subtle impastos and painterly anomalies that operate as glitches within the pictorial field. They are not failures of execution but deliberate interruptions that fracture visual coherence and produce a double register. Together with the saturation, they expose the artifice of the painting and destabilize the representation of nature within collective dreams and inherited narratives, the pastoral cracking under its own ideological weight.
This logic of doubling takes another form in Mellor’s portraits. The works from the Maids series (2015) presented at Castle focus on female characters in domestic roles, drawn from a larger body of paintings that includes other genders. In this selection, a first layer depicts the faces of recognizable actresses—Carole Bouquet, Nicole Kidman, or Sandrine Bonnaire—in the maid roles they have played on screen. These figures emerge from a filmic landscape that has historically overrepresented white female domestic workers, revealing how classed and gendered labor is mediated through cinematic convention. Yet a second layer of paint disrupts this legibility. Thick, often scribbled marks, glitches that sometimes coagulate into ornamental forms such as stars or clocks, fracture the surface. The smooth beauty of the faces begins to crack. The gestures do not simply degrade the image; rather, they complicate its reading. Many of the characters depicted (murderers, manipulators, saboteurs) already exceed the roles assigned to them. Mellor’s painterly interventions amplify this instability, refusing a fixed victimhood. Submission coexists with resentment, dissociation with latent aggression. The portraits oscillate between constraint and revolt, between imposed identity and its sabotage. Glitches and ornaments thus operate as fissures within representation itself, exposing both the violence embedded in domestic hierarchies and the instability of the cinematic images that sustain them.
Pelassy extends this logic of disruption to the object, sustaining a similar fascination with doubling and instability. Trained as a goldsmith, he approaches each medium—jewelry, painting, or object-making—with acute attention to execution and craft. In his work, ornament, composed of pearls, gloves, boxes, or wax, charges form with desire while subtly signaling the precarity of its material condition. The double portrait of Brad Davis (Untitled, 1996), executed in colored pencil and encased in wax, achieves a ghostly translucency while acquiring a material density.
Irregularities in the drawing—a white stain crossing one of the actor’s eyes, scattered marks, and areas where red tones fade across the face—convey a sense of gradual disappearance. Davis, the emblematic figure of Midnight Express, who died of AIDS in 1991, like Pelassy (2002) and Hohn (1995), emerges as a fractured and troubled image, held within a substance that both preserves and exposes the body’s fragility. Here, the object is infused with a tension that oscillates between portrait, relic, and apparition.
In all three artists’ work, materials are never neutral. They are charged, worked, made almost organic. In Hohn’s Untitled (Tan Enamel Series) from 1990, the canvas is layered with thick beige latex and modeling clay, suggesting chocolate, earth, and excrement all at once. Fingerprints streak the surface, shattering the idea of purity associated with minimalist monochromatic painting. The work ceases to offer a smooth, perfect surface, becoming a malleable matter that confronts the viewer with a corporeality that is dirty, damaged, yet playful and sensuous. To touch this material is to engage in an ambivalent act, one that oscillates between tactile pleasure and confrontation with what is usually repressed.
Mellor emphasizes the body through the very vitality of the brushstroke. Thick marks of a second layer collide with the soft precision of the faces beneath. The brush, like a scratching finger, disrupts the surface, literally messing up the image. This partial degradation, sometimes tinged with the absurd humor of ornamental shapes, is not merely formal, it enacts the violence internalized by those constrained by social, sexual, or class norms. In the Maids works shown here, this tension courses through figures positioned within asymmetrical gendered and classed relations, figures constrained by exploitation yet capable of disruption. When self-expression or self-acceptance is obstructed, violence does not disappear; it turns inward or erupts sideways. Here, self-destruction is enacted in the paint itself, at once intimate and political, and inseparable from the structures that produce it.
Finally, Pelassy engages the viewer’s body directly with Viva la Muerte (1995). The curtain of glass beads, like a materialized glitch, invites passage. One can imagine the beads clacking together as the viewer passes through, transforming ornament into sound and the gesture into ritual. Death is not depicted but lived as crossing. The work defuses solemnity without denying it, situating mortality within a festive movement, where celebration and extinction brush against one another. It creates a dialogue with Félix González- Torres’ Untitled (Blood) (1992), placing Pelassy within a genealogy where ornament carries memory, mourning, and desire.
Through glitches, ornaments, and excess, Hohn, Mellor, and Pelassy conjure forms where beauty is inseparable from pain, where the dramatic and the comical coexist, and where uncanny and outrageous deformation becomes a tool of revelation. To resist disappearance is not to erase the wound, but to give it form—intensely, excessively, with both political and sensory lucidity.
- Oriane Durand
Ull Hohn (b. 1960, Trier, Germany – d. 1995, Berlin, Germany) studied at the Hochschule der Künste, Berlin, and the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf under Gerhard Richter, where he completed his Meisterschüler in 1986. He participated in the Whitney Independent Study Program, New York, in 1987, and was awarded a grant by the Philip Morris Art Sponsoring International Atelier Program, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, in 1995. Selected solo exhibitions include Revisions, Haus am Waldsee, Berlin (2025); No Great Mysteries, Greene Naftali, New York (2023); Ull Hohn, Kunsthalle Bern (2016); Ull Hohn, Galerie Neu, Berlin (2010); Ull Hohn, Algus Greenspon, New York (2010); AFA – American Fine Arts / Colin De Land Fine Art, New York (1993). Recent group exhibitions include The Oak of Flagey, GEMS, New York (2024); JOCHEN KLEIN: After The Light, MACRO, Rome (2023); The Animal Within, Mumok, Vienna (2022); Question the Wall Itself, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2016); Painting 2.0, Mumok, Vienna and Museum Brandhorst, Munich (2015); Painting Now and Forever, Part II, Greene Naftali Gallery and Matthew Marks Gallery, New York (2008).
Bod Mellor (b. 1970, Manchester, UK) lives and works in London. Selected solo exhibitions include People Who Knock On The Door, Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin (2024); SCATO, Neuer Essener Kunstverein, Essen (2024); The Trials and Tribulations of Wet Horse Hair, Studio Voltaire offsite at 27 Cork Street, London (2020); Sirens, Team Gallery, New York (2017). Recent group exhibitions include DIX UND DIE GEGENWART, Deichtorhallen, Hamburg (2023); Sixty Years, Tate Britain, London (2019); On the Wall, Bundeskunsthalle Bonn (2019); Lyric on a Battlefield, Gladstone Gallery, New York (2017); Painting Evil, Kunstverein in Hamburg (2015); The Crime Was Almost Perfect, PAC Pavilion of Contemporary Art, Milan (2014); Defamation of Character, MoMA PS1, New York (2006).
Bruno Pélassy (b. 1966, Vientiane, Laos – d. 2002, Nice, France). Selected solo and two-person presentations include Bruno Pelassy & the Order of the Starfish, Haus am Waldsee, Berlin (2023); Bruno Pelassy: Song Cycle, 55 Walker Street, New York (2018); Tears Shared – Marc Camille Chaimowicz featuring Bruno Pélassy, Flat Time House, London (2016); MAMCO, Geneva (2016); Crédac, Ivry-sur-Seine (2015); La Passerelle, Brest (2015); Néo Laos, MAMAC, Nice (2004). Recent group exhibitions include Presque partout, FRAC Lorraine, Metz (2024); Aux temps du sida, Musée d’art moderne et contemporain, Strasbourg (2023); VIH/sida. L’épidémie n’est pas finie!, Mucem, Marseille (2022); Still I Rise: Feminisms, Gender, Resistance, Nottingham Contemporary (2018); Un nouveau festival, Centre Pompidou, Paris (2012); Le sort probable de l’homme qui avait avalé le fantôme, La Conciergerie, Centre Pompidou, Paris (2009).
It is through technical mastery that Hohn and Mellor articulate their painterly strategies, constructing images that unfold on multiple levels of reading. Hohn’s Untitled (1988–93) exemplifies this approach. The pastoral landscape, rendered in saturated lime-yellow tones, evokes the Hudson River School, the televised visions of Bob Ross and the spectral blurs of Gerhard Richter, with whom Hohn studied in Düsseldorf, Germany. At first glance, the painting reads as a conventional landscape, yet its hyper-saturated palette renders it hallucinatory, suspended between ecstasy and disappearance.Veiled and overcharged, itseems already on the verge of fading.Thesurface is punctuated by subtle impastos and painterly anomalies that operate as glitches within the pictorial field. They are not failures of execution but deliberate interruptions that fracture visual coherence and produce a double register. Together with the saturation, they expose the artifice of the painting and destabilize the representation of nature within collective dreams and inherited narratives, the pastoral cracking under its own ideological weight.
This logic of doubling takes another form in Mellor’s portraits. The works from the Maids series (2015) presented at Castle focus on female characters in domestic roles, drawn from a larger body of paintings that includes other genders. In this selection, a first layer depicts the faces of recognizable actresses—Carole Bouquet, Nicole Kidman, or Sandrine Bonnaire—in the maid roles they have played on screen. These figures emerge from a filmic landscape that has historically overrepresented white female domestic workers, revealing how classed and gendered labor is mediated through cinematic convention. Yet a second layer of paint disrupts this legibility. Thick, often scribbled marks, glitches that sometimes coagulate into ornamental forms such as stars or clocks, fracture the surface. The smooth beauty of the faces begins to crack. The gestures do not simply degrade the image; rather, they complicate its reading. Many of the characters depicted (murderers, manipulators, saboteurs) already exceed the roles assigned to them. Mellor’s painterly interventions amplify this instability, refusing a fixed victimhood. Submission coexists with resentment, dissociation with latent aggression. The portraits oscillate between constraint and revolt, between imposed identity and its sabotage. Glitches and ornaments thus operate as fissures within representation itself, exposing both the violence embedded in domestic hierarchies and the instability of the cinematic images that sustain them.
Pelassy extends this logic of disruption to the object, sustaining a similar fascination with doubling and instability. Trained as a goldsmith, he approaches each medium—jewelry, painting, or object-making—with acute attention to execution and craft. In his work, ornament, composed of pearls, gloves, boxes, or wax, charges form with desire while subtly signaling the precarity of its material condition. The double portrait of Brad Davis (Untitled, 1996), executed in colored pencil and encased in wax, achieves a ghostly translucency while acquiring a material density.
Irregularities in the drawing—a white stain crossing one of the actor’s eyes, scattered marks, and areas where red tones fade across the face—convey a sense of gradual disappearance. Davis, the emblematic figure of Midnight Express, who died of AIDS in 1991, like Pelassy (2002) and Hohn (1995), emerges as a fractured and troubled image, held within a substance that both preserves and exposes the body’s fragility. Here, the object is infused with a tension that oscillates between portrait, relic, and apparition.
In all three artists’ work, materials are never neutral. They are charged, worked, made almost organic. In Hohn’s Untitled (Tan Enamel Series) from 1990, the canvas is layered with thick beige latex and modeling clay, suggesting chocolate, earth, and excrement all at once. Fingerprints streak the surface, shattering the idea of purity associated with minimalist monochromatic painting. The work ceases to offer a smooth, perfect surface, becoming a malleable matter that confronts the viewer with a corporeality that is dirty, damaged, yet playful and sensuous. To touch this material is to engage in an ambivalent act, one that oscillates between tactile pleasure and confrontation with what is usually repressed.
Mellor emphasizes the body through the very vitality of the brushstroke. Thick marks of a second layer collide with the soft precision of the faces beneath. The brush, like a scratching finger, disrupts the surface, literally messing up the image. This partial degradation, sometimes tinged with the absurd humor of ornamental shapes, is not merely formal, it enacts the violence internalized by those constrained by social, sexual, or class norms. In the Maids works shown here, this tension courses through figures positioned within asymmetrical gendered and classed relations, figures constrained by exploitation yet capable of disruption. When self-expression or self-acceptance is obstructed, violence does not disappear; it turns inward or erupts sideways. Here, self-destruction is enacted in the paint itself, at once intimate and political, and inseparable from the structures that produce it.
Finally, Pelassy engages the viewer’s body directly with Viva la Muerte (1995). The curtain of glass beads, like a materialized glitch, invites passage. One can imagine the beads clacking together as the viewer passes through, transforming ornament into sound and the gesture into ritual. Death is not depicted but lived as crossing. The work defuses solemnity without denying it, situating mortality within a festive movement, where celebration and extinction brush against one another. It creates a dialogue with Félix González- Torres’ Untitled (Blood) (1992), placing Pelassy within a genealogy where ornament carries memory, mourning, and desire.
Through glitches, ornaments, and excess, Hohn, Mellor, and Pelassy conjure forms where beauty is inseparable from pain, where the dramatic and the comical coexist, and where uncanny and outrageous deformation becomes a tool of revelation. To resist disappearance is not to erase the wound, but to give it form—intensely, excessively, with both political and sensory lucidity.
- Oriane Durand
Ull Hohn (b. 1960, Trier, Germany – d. 1995, Berlin, Germany) studied at the Hochschule der Künste, Berlin, and the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf under Gerhard Richter, where he completed his Meisterschüler in 1986. He participated in the Whitney Independent Study Program, New York, in 1987, and was awarded a grant by the Philip Morris Art Sponsoring International Atelier Program, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, in 1995. Selected solo exhibitions include Revisions, Haus am Waldsee, Berlin (2025); No Great Mysteries, Greene Naftali, New York (2023); Ull Hohn, Kunsthalle Bern (2016); Ull Hohn, Galerie Neu, Berlin (2010); Ull Hohn, Algus Greenspon, New York (2010); AFA – American Fine Arts / Colin De Land Fine Art, New York (1993). Recent group exhibitions include The Oak of Flagey, GEMS, New York (2024); JOCHEN KLEIN: After The Light, MACRO, Rome (2023); The Animal Within, Mumok, Vienna (2022); Question the Wall Itself, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2016); Painting 2.0, Mumok, Vienna and Museum Brandhorst, Munich (2015); Painting Now and Forever, Part II, Greene Naftali Gallery and Matthew Marks Gallery, New York (2008).
Bod Mellor (b. 1970, Manchester, UK) lives and works in London. Selected solo exhibitions include People Who Knock On The Door, Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin (2024); SCATO, Neuer Essener Kunstverein, Essen (2024); The Trials and Tribulations of Wet Horse Hair, Studio Voltaire offsite at 27 Cork Street, London (2020); Sirens, Team Gallery, New York (2017). Recent group exhibitions include DIX UND DIE GEGENWART, Deichtorhallen, Hamburg (2023); Sixty Years, Tate Britain, London (2019); On the Wall, Bundeskunsthalle Bonn (2019); Lyric on a Battlefield, Gladstone Gallery, New York (2017); Painting Evil, Kunstverein in Hamburg (2015); The Crime Was Almost Perfect, PAC Pavilion of Contemporary Art, Milan (2014); Defamation of Character, MoMA PS1, New York (2006).
Bruno Pélassy (b. 1966, Vientiane, Laos – d. 2002, Nice, France). Selected solo and two-person presentations include Bruno Pelassy & the Order of the Starfish, Haus am Waldsee, Berlin (2023); Bruno Pelassy: Song Cycle, 55 Walker Street, New York (2018); Tears Shared – Marc Camille Chaimowicz featuring Bruno Pélassy, Flat Time House, London (2016); MAMCO, Geneva (2016); Crédac, Ivry-sur-Seine (2015); La Passerelle, Brest (2015); Néo Laos, MAMAC, Nice (2004). Recent group exhibitions include Presque partout, FRAC Lorraine, Metz (2024); Aux temps du sida, Musée d’art moderne et contemporain, Strasbourg (2023); VIH/sida. L’épidémie n’est pas finie!, Mucem, Marseille (2022); Still I Rise: Feminisms, Gender, Resistance, Nottingham Contemporary (2018); Un nouveau festival, Centre Pompidou, Paris (2012); Le sort probable de l’homme qui avait avalé le fantôme, La Conciergerie, Centre Pompidou, Paris (2009).
Resisting Death: Glitches and Ornaments
Ull Hohn, Bod Mellor, Bruno Pélassy
Curated by Oriane Durand
March 21 – May 2, 2026
Ull Hohn, Bod Mellor, Bruno Pélassy
Curated by Oriane Durand
March 21 – May 2, 2026