Collage |Justine Kurland

To open its 2026 fall season, Galerie Miranda presents a two-person exhibition by contemporary artists Justine Kurland (1969, American) and Mariah Robertson (1975, American), both known for challenging the photographic status quo. In the exhibition Antiphoto, Justine Kurland and Mariah Robertson do not just challenge the photographic canon, they lay it to siege, by cutting up, painting over, photocopying and repurposing its founding pillars. Justine Kurland contributes two distinct bodies of work to the exhibition. 99 Nudes on the Wall (2026) is a collage in ninety-nine parts. Installed as a sprawling mural, it evolves in real time as transactions are made: Individual works are removed upon purchase, generating dynamic compositions that reflect the demands of the market. Three paintings from Kurland’s recent series Bad Hand (2025) are also on view. In these works, the artist copies her late father’s still lifes in oil paint applied over collaged canvases made from the same source material, Lee Friedlander’s Nudes. These paintings are insurgent acts of radical re-authorship wherein the still life’s allegory of life and death takes on a political dimension; they ask us to consider precisely whose lives are held to be valuable and whose are not. In both bodies of work, Kurland critiques paternal inheritance and the myth of male artistic genius and originality. The nude and the vanitas—one subjugating women, the other transmuting everyday objects into symbols—belong to different worlds. By combining the two genres, Kurland intentionally contaminates the purity of both and asserts the embodied experience of her own hand. Yet the careful craft of her painting reveals her enduring affection for her father. Kurland presents these two bodies of work within the context of her wider series SCUMB, a disruptive, tactile reimagining of the photographic canon. The artist initiated the project as a purge, extracting the raw photographic-corporeal material from her personal library of photo books and using it to make collages as an act of excision and reclamation. Collage has long been associated with women’s labor and the domestic at large, making it a formidable feminist strategy in life and in art. Each work in the series presented by Galerie Miranda is at once a literal dismemberment of the patriarchy and a gendered inversion of the usual terms of possession.