At Faurschou, a time-hopping exhibit that’s also an embrace

By Vittoria Benzine

You look like you could use a hug. You’re in luck: Come get a squeeze from Yoko Ono, Louise Bourgeois, and Miles Greenberg starting April 1 at the Faurschou New York in Greenpoint.

No, it’s not an April Fool’s prank. It’s “Embrace the World from Within,” the fourth exhibition to grace the free, private museum since it opened in December 2019. And it opens on Saturday.

“We need to stick together,” Jens Faurschou, the foundation’s namesake founder, tells Brooklyn Magazine. “I think these works all talk to us in an existential way — they are very welcoming, taking you in.”

The Danish art collector first established his foundation in 2011, culminating a decades-long career selling international contemporary art. The foundation opened its first private museum in Beijing in 2011, and their Copenhagen headquarters the following year, with a mission to bridge cultures, time periods, and interdisciplinary media through their programming. Jens Faurschou owns and funds the endeavor alone — it’s more of a passion project than a profit generator, even if the foundation does increase its founder’s clout. More importantly, each exhibition gets Faurschou’s huge, historic collection out of storage for the public’s enjoyment, presented in a curated setting meant to enhance each piece’s impact.

“In this constellation,” Faurschou says in the show’s release, “the embrace becomes the thematic outset to foster new dialogues between three prominent artists and extraordinary voices that feel timeless and poignant.”

“Embrace the World from Within” shares several storylines across its nine total sculptures. Two installations by Yoko Ono, who turned 90 last month, appear: “Ex It” and “We Are All Water.” The former features earth and living saplings, the latter has jars of water labeled in Japanese with the real names of artists, dictators, freedom fighters and more, all lined up on one minimalist shelf.

Detail of ‘Ex It’ (photo by Sean Davidson)

Though both artworks feel very different at first glance, they contain a similar message: We are all the same, and heading to the same place, where life begins anew. Regardless of each jar’s identity, it’s a water vessel like all the others. The greenery in “Ex It” grows out of disaster relief caskets.

Six sculptures by Bourgeois, who died in 2010 at 98, interpret the notion of interiority through abstract forms including both small and tall self-contained forests like “C.O.Y.O.T.E.” and “Forêt” (sculpted in 1953, the year Ono moved from Japan to New York). Alongside are standalone bodily forms retreating into themselves like “Fée Couturière” and “Nature Study” (which was sculpted the same year Faurschou met Ono’s agent John Hendricks in the city.)

‘C.O.Y.O.T.E.” (1947-49) (Photo by Olympia Shannon)

Greenberg, the baby in the batch at 25, brings the exhibition to life with a durational artwork — one where the construct of time is critical to its meaning — titled “The Embrace.” In it, two blindfolded performers perch and hug atop a rock within a glass cube while brackish water beneath them reflects their forms.

‘The Embrace’ (courtesy the artist and Farschou Foundation)

“All of my work has always been made to be viewed as sculpture,” Greenberg tells Brooklyn Magazine. “Showing a live performance in this context, alongside such historically significant non-performance-based work, feels important because it says that performance art is not marginal; it isn’t at the fringe of art history, it isn’t parallel to art history, in many ways, it’s right at the center of art history.”

The foundation’s artworks are mostly private stock. Faurschou first visited Bourgeois’s studio in a former jeans factory close to the present-day Barclays Center in 1997. He’d moved from studying economics into art after a critical first visit to New York in 1984, where he met Hendricks. Faurschou asked the spitfire what characteristic makes something art.

“Art is anything that moves your borders,” Faurschou recalls Hendricks saying. Later that evening, Faurschou saw a visceral performance where an artist swung, suspended on hooks pierced through flesh, against the Lower East Side sunlight. That moved Faurschou’s borders, he says.

Faurschou New York organized “Embrace the World from Within” to tap into just such border-moving potential — harnessing it instead to offer hugs. Faurschou himself thinks society is accumulating trauma without shedding any of it. He opened the Greenpoint space in 2019, and it was shuttered within months due to lockdowns and travel restrictions. Their reopening in 2022 coincided with Russia’s war on Ukraine. Climate change continues, and the planet is fighting back with quakes.

In turn, Greenpoint is welcoming the Danish transplant. Faurschou has regarded New York as the world’s stage ever since his first visit — he only opened their Greenpoint location once he was sure it could compete on the whole city’s scene. Back when he was looking for a building, Faurschou narrowed his options down to one space in Harlem, and this one in Greenpoint, a neighborhood he’d never visited — but has come to love for its cafes, community, and convenience.

“The biggest success,” Faurschou says, “is that the exhibitions we’ve made here have attracted the local community alongside art lovers in general, both professionals and non professionals from the whole New York area, but also from abroad.”

Those visitors of all stripes are welcome to be enfolded into “Embrace the World from Within” while it remains on view, through September 17.