Suzanne Treister: HEXEN 5.0 and Museum Paintings

 Annely Juda Fine Art is delighted to announce an exhibition of work by Suzanne Treister.  In advance of a major solo show at Modern Art Oxford, UK in Autumn 2025, this exhibition will bring together a new series of works, Hexen 5.0, with a curated selection of her visionary Museum paintings.  It will be in our fourth-floor galleries from 20^th March - 3^rd May 2025.  

 

HEXEN 5.0 is a collection of tarot cards, diagrams and AI-prompted works that reimagine the visual language of alchemical drawings of the 13th - 18th centuries.  Building on her earlier series - HEXEN 2.0 (2009-2011) - which critically analysed government programmes of mass control, HEXEN 5.0 addresses the climate emergency and looks at fields which may lead to better solutions for returning the planet towards a self-regulating system. 

 

Initially recognized as a painter in the 1980s, Suzanne Treister became a pioneer in the digital and new media art landscape.  Making work about emerging technologies, developing fictional worlds and international collaborative organisations, her work ranges from video, photography, drawing and watercolour to augmented reality and interactive games.  Engaging with eccentric narratives and unconventional bodies of research to reveal structures that bind power, identity and knowledge and often spanning several years, her projects comprise fantastical reinterpretations of given taxonomies and histories that examine the existence of covert, unseen forces at work in the world, whether corporate, military or paranormal. An ongoing focus of her work is the relationship between new technologies, society, alternative belief systems and the potential futures of humanity.

 

A recurrent thread in recent projects has been the museum itself.  Treister's museums are imagined, hypothetical or speculative museums unbound by conventional notions of time and location.  This exhibition gathers a series of her museum paintings from series such as Kabbalistic Futurism and SURVIVOR (F),  envisioning institutions from the Museum of Machine Telepathy to the Museum of Quantum Gravity. 

 

The exhibition will be accompanied by an online catalogue with an essay by Lars Bang Larsen. A number of prints in the exhibition which take the form of tarot cards  will also be published as a working tarot deck. Designed as a tool to inspire group dialogue and the envisioning of positive alternative futures, the deck will be available from www.Cosmogenesis.world from October.  Annely Juda Fine Art will present a selection of Treister's early videogame paintings and software box works at Art Basel Hong Kong art fair in March 2025. 

 

Suzanne Treister studied at St Martin's School of Art, London (1978-81) and Chelsea College of Art and Design, London (1981-82). She is now based in London having lived in Australia, New York and Berlin. Treister's work is held in private and public collections including Tate, London; Science Museum, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź, Poland and Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna. Recent solo and group exhibitions include: The Warburg Institute, London (2025); Tate Modern, London; Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna; United Nations, New York (2024); 14th Shanghai Biennale; Museion Bolzano, Italy; Centre Pompidou-Metz; Helsinki Biennial, Finland; ARoS Kunstmuseum, Denmark; P.P.O.W. Gallery, New York (2023-4).