Matthew Brown is pleased to present Compression, a group exhibition featuring works by Uri Aran, Huma Bhabha, Nat Faulkner, Kenji Ide, Mark Manders, Yu Nishimura, and Julia Yerger.
Spanning drawing, collage, sculpture, photography, and painting, the exhibition investigates the formal and conceptual possibilities of compression. Examining compression as both a method and a framework, each of the artists condenses form, collapses space, and distills materials as they explore its influence on imagery, materiality, and spatial construction. Whether through sculptural density, visual abbreviation, or the spatial flattening of bodies and symbols, Compression explores the tension and limits of containment, and considers how the various modes of compression can yield distinct forms of expression.
Uri Aran (b. 1977, Jerusalem, Israel) works across various mediums, including painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, video, performance, and photography, blending abstraction with universally recognized symbols to explore the nuances between communication and interpretation. Familiar tropes in his work—such as childhood television characters, chips ahoy cookies, flowers, googly eyes, and animals—are often integrated into or contrasted with abstraction. Across his two sculptures and the work on paper, Aran compresses diverse materials and marks into constrained formats, distilling each composition into a calibrated balance of logic and sensation.
Huma Bhabha (b. 1962, Karachi, Pakistan) is known for her monumental sculptures and works on paper that reimagine the figure and its expressive potential. In her two-dimensional work, she combines drawing, collage, and photography, weaving together references to ancient, modern, and cross-cultural art traditions to evoke both the human and the otherworldly. In her works on paper, Bhabha compresses photography, gesture, and collage into a single plane, generating a dense surface and a heightened sense of proximity.
Nat Faulkner (b. 1995, Chippenham, England) works across experimental sculpture and analogue photography, treating his studio darkroom as a darkroom and laboratory for photographic chemistry. Embracing imperfection, chance, and chemical slippage, his hand-printed works—often on plywood, aluminium, or glass— photography’s uncertainty, malleability, and tactile presence. Though working in a large format, Faulkner scales his photographs down, positioning them within expansive black margins. These margins preserve marks from his singular studio process, in which photographic negatives are handled and printed as objects.
Kenji Ide (b. 1981, Yokosuka, Japan) creates wooden sculptures that give form to intimate settings, recollections, and daily wonders. Shaped from materials that hold personal significance and reflect his local surroundings, the sculptures often begin with walks alongside his family, during which his children point out landscape features, architectural details, and collect small objects that may later find their way into the works. Ide’s two sculptures, The Circulation of Unconscious and Lively Shades of Things, are signature examples of his ability to take expansive ideas—rooted in memory, narrative, and cultural reference—and compress them into intimately scaled forms.
Mark Manders (b. 1968, Volkel, The Netherlands) has developed an endless self-portrait, titled “self-portrait as a building," in the form of sculpture, still life, and architectural plans. Consisting of the totality of his practice, this ongoing self-portrait consists of writing, figuration, everyday items, invented forms, and architectural elements, His timeless and distinctly non-linear body of work deliberately distorts reality, challenging any straightforward, chronological understanding of his oeuvre. Combining disparate elements such as paper, wood, iron, and glass, Manders’s sculpture enacts physical containment and compression, freezing manipulated, ephemeral information into a dense, enduring object.
Yu Nishimura’s (b. 1982, Kanagawa, Japan) multilayered paintings are steeped in everyday sources such as street photography, anime, and the diverse landscapes and built environments of the artist’s home country. His dreamlike portraits and urban scenes achieve a stark sense of contemporaneity through their evocative palettes and spare and graphic compositional approach—yet at the same instant, they appear to exist in a nebulous realm of melancholic reminiscence that documents the passage of time. Featuring multiple figures stacked at varying scales, Nishimura’s painting collapses space and time, using compression as both a physical condition and a psychological force.
Julia Yerger (b. 1993, Rockville, Maryland) creates paintings and collages characterized by dense, layered compositions that explore the interplay between digital and physical realms. Influenced by screen-based imagery and animation, she calibrates a tension between legibility and obscurity, blending traditional and digital techniques to abstract her subjects from their material origins. In her two collages, Yerger distills her materials into fragments, assembling them into compact, textured compositions that reflect her interest in both animation and the natural world.
Uri Aran (b. 1977, Jerusalem) lives and works in New York. He received a Bachelor of Design from Bezalel Academy, Jerusalem in 2004, studied at Cooper Union and graduated with an MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University, New York in 2007.
Aran participated in the 2014 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2014); A Needle Walks into a Haystack, Liverpool Biennial 2014, Liverpool (2014); and The Encyclopedic Palace, 55th International Art Exhibition, Venice Biennale, Venice (2013).
Select solo exhibitions have been held at Matthew Brown, Los Angeles (2025); Sadie Coles HQ, London (2024, 2021, 2019, 2016); Andrew Kreps, New York (2023, 2021); The Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin (2023); The Club, Tokyo (2021); Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York (2020); Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne (2016); Sant’Andrea de Scaphis, Rome (2015); Peep Hole, Milan (2014); Disjecta Contemporary Art Center, Portland, OR (2014); South London Gallery, London (2013); and Kunsthalle Zürich, Zurich (2013).
Aran’s work is included in the public collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; ICA Miami, Miami; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas; Fundació Es Baluard Museu d’Art Modern i Contemporani de Palma, Palma de Mallorca, Spain; Israel Museum, Jerusalem; KADIST, Paris and San Francisco; American University, Washington DC; and RISD Museum, Providence, RI.
Aran has a forthcoming solo exhibition at the Madre Museo d’arte contemporanea Donnaregina, Naples.
Huma Bhabha (b. 1962, Karachi, Pakistan) lives and works in Poughkeepsie, New York. She moved from Karachi to the United States in 1981 to pursue her studies at the Rhode Island School of Design in 1985, and then Columbia University, where she completed her MFA in 1989.
Bhabha currently has a solo exhibition at David Zwirner, Paris; and she is featured in Encounters: Giacometti with Alberto Giacometti at the Barbican Centre, London through May 2026.
Select institutional exhibitions include Brooklyn Bridge Park, Public Art Fund (2024); M Leuven (2023); Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, England (2020); Sydney Biennale (2020); ICA Boston (2019); The Metropolitan Museum of Art (2018); 56th Venice Biennale (2015); MoMA PS1 (2012); Whitney Biennial , New York (2010); and the Gwangju Biennial (2008).
She has presented solo exhibitions with David Zwirner, Paris, New York (2025, 2024); David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles (2023, 2020); Xavier Hufkens, Brussels (2021); Salon 94, New York (2021, 2018, 2015, 2010, 2007); and Gagosian, Rome (2019); among others.
Select public collections include Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Ekebergpark, Oslo; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art in New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Tate, London; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
Nat Faulkner (b. 1995, Chippenham, UK) lives and works in London.
Recent exhibitions include ZERO..., Milan (2025); Wschód, Warsaw (2025); Brunette Coleman, London (2024); Ginny on Frederick, London (2024); Final Hot Desert, London (2024); Roland Ross, Margate, UK (2024); and Mackintosh Lane, London (2023).
He has an upcoming solo exhibition at Camden Art Centre, London.
Kenji Ide (b. 1981, Yokosuka, Japan) lives and works in Tokyo. He received a master of fine arts from Tama Art University, Tokyo, Japan in 2006.
Solo exhibitions include Matthew Brown, Los Angeles (2025); Art Basel Paris with KAYOKOYUKI (2024); organized by Wschód, Adam Mickiewicz Museum of Literature, Warsaw (2024); Adams and Ollman, Portland, OR (2024); KAYOKOYUKI, Tokyo (2023); curated by Matt Jay, Portland Japanese Garden, Portland, OR (2022); GOYA Curtain, Tokyo (2021); Art Center Ongoing, Tokyo (2020); See Saw Gallery, Nagoya (2018); Art Center Ongoing, Tokyo (2018); Art Center Ongoing, Tokyo (2015); and Art Center Ongoing, Tokyo (2012).
Mark Manders (b.1968 Volkel, The Netherlands) currently lives and works in Ronse, Belgium.
Manders represented the Netherlands at the Venice Biennale in 2013.
Solo institutional exhibitions of his work have been presented at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin (2024); Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (2021); The Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas (2012); The Aspen Art Museum, Aspen (2011); The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2011); The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2010); Kunsthaus Zürich, Zürich (2009); S.M.A.K. Municipal Museum of Contemporary Art, Ghent (2008); The Art Institute of Chicago and The Renaissance Society, Chicago (2003); The Drawing Center, New York (2000); and more.
Select solo exhibitions include Modern Art, London (2025); Xavier Hufkens, Brussels (2024); Gallery Koyanagi, Tokyo (2024, 2018, 2015); Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York and Los Angeles (2023, 2019, 2015, 2009, 2007); Zeno X, Antwerp (2022, 2016, 2012, 2010, 1997, 1994); among others.
He was commissioned by the Public Art Fund to create a large public sculpture for the Doris C. Freedman Plaza in Central Park, New York in 2019. Other large-scale outdoor sculptural installations are on display at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis and at the Rokin Square, Amsterdam.
Public collections include The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Kunsthaus Zürich, Zürich; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; among others.
Yu Nishimura (b. 1982, Kangawa, Japan) lives and works in Kanagawa Prefecture. In 2004, he graduated from the Department of Fine Arts at Tama Art University, Tokyo.
Solo and two-person exhibitions include David Zwirner, New York (2025); Castle, Los Angeles (2024); Sadie Coles HQ, London (2024); ARCH, Athens (2024); Echigo-Tsumari Satoyama Museum of Contemporary Art (MonET), Niigata, Japan (2023); La Società delle Api, Monaco (2023); Crèvecœur, Paris (2022); Dawid Radziszewski Gallery, Warsaw (2021); King’s Leap, New York (2021); Crèvecœur, Paris (2020); KAYOKOYUKI, Tokyo (2020, 2017, 2016); 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan (2018); Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery (2015); Tokyo Wonder Site Hongo (2013); and Kiyosu City Haruhi Art Museum, Aichi, Japan (2010).
Julia Yerger (b. 1993, Rockville, Maryland) lives and works in Los Angeles. She received a Bachelor of Fine Art from Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore.
Select solo and two person exhibitions include Château Shatto, Los Angeles (2024); Kings Leap, New York (2024); CLEARING, Brussels (2023); PAID, Seattle (2023); New Low, Los Angeles (2022); and Johannes Vogt, New York (2018). Select group exhibitions include Sebastian Gladstone, Los Angeles (2024); Bel Ami, Los Angeles (2023); The Wolford House, Los Angeles (2023); Paul Soto, Los Angeles (2023); Harawik, New York and Los Angeles(2021); and Apartment 13, Providence (2019).