Troy Brauntuch: Rodeo

September 27, 2025 - January 31, 2026

In 2022, The Warehouse launched the WAREHOUSE:01 project, an annual exhibition of a single artist. The project offers an artist the opportunity to create a new body of work and to experiment with the display of their work in the spaces of The Warehouse. In our fourth iteration of WAREHOUSE:01, American artist Troy Brauntuch debuts a new series of works juxtaposed alongside older works from The Rachofsky Collection that span his decades-long career.

Brauntuch was a seminal member of the historic “Pictures Generation,” a group of artists who emerged in New York City in the late 1970s and early 1980s and shared a broad interest in investigating the slippery relationship between images and meaning. Since then, Brauntuch has continued to produce works in which images seem to emerge from a void of darkness, hovering in a haunting space of semi-recognition. His works often take time for the eye to decipher, if it is even possible. They exist in the deep threshold between perception and cognition, between I see and I understand. It is in this conjuring, or conjurable, space where the viewer lingers, left to create new meanings out of this ever-shifting, ever-vibrating realm where history, truth, time, information, and perceiver are in flux.

For Troy Brauntuch: Rodeo, the artist created thirteen new paintings—the first true oil paintings of Brauntuch’s career—exhibited alongside three works from The Rachofsky Collection made between 1980 and 2016 that showcase his versatility across mediums, including pencil on paper, pigment on cotton, and photography. Ten of these new works continue Brauntuch’s practice of mining photographic archives of Germany during WWII, in this instance documentation of the Great German Art Exhibitions (Die Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen [GDK]). These exhibitions of government-sanctioned artists, staged annually by the Nazi regime between 1937 and 1944, were counterpoints to the regime’s Degenerate Art exhibitions (Die Ausstellung "Entartete Kunst").

In his 2020 solo show at Petzel Gallery, A Strange New Beauty, Brauntuch re-examined display cases from the Great German Art Exhibitions that held sculptural works. Using historical and digital photographic techniques, Brauntuch altered this archive to unsettle assumptions about documentation, truth, and the virtues of beauty. The paintings on view at The Warehouse build upon this work with a series based on photographs of display cases holding small figurines, mostly animals. Rendered in dim shades of silver and copper, these paintings unfold as a procession of snapshots that offer only fragmented views. Miniature horses, rabbits, and sheep disappear and emerge from behind the armature of the display case and reflections on the glass. Small sculptures resting on higher levels of display, often of human figures, are cropped from our view, offering only legs or feet. Devoid of context, these works resonate with a dark ambiguity, raising prescient questions about the power of curation, display, and omission in relation to memory and history.

As he has done for many years, Brauntuch also draws on his personal archive with three new studies of his dog, Rodeo. Painted in color, these works retain the quality of an afterimage rather than a faithful representation. They reside in a spectral domain, challenging us to slow down our process of looking. In doing so, these works, like much of the work throughout Brauntuch’s career, encourage us to look anew at our world and the images that both create and reflect it.

Installation Views

Artists

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Artist Talk with Troy Brauntuch

Artist Troy Brauntuch discusses his WAREHOUSE:01 exhibition Troy Brauntuch: Rodeo with Thomas Feulmer, Curator at The Warehouse.

Exhibitions

Artist Talk with Troy Brauntuch

Checklist