Must-See: Nancy Lupo’s Intimate Glaciers

This review is part of a series of Must-See shows, in which a writer delivers a snapshot of a current exhibition

The light at Kunstverein Kevin – emanating from small night lamps mounted close to the floor (all works Untitled, 2025) – is so harsh that, if you stare too long, colourful spots start dancing before your eyes. It is dizzying, irritating even, but this sensory jolt cannot undo the sense of enchantment that fills ‘Disko’, Nancy Lupo’s new solo exhibition. The space glimmers with wonder: chandelier crystals scattered across the floor catch and refract the light, resembling pools of liquid while also evoking fantasies of elegance and bubbling champagne. They encircle nine amorphous floor sculptures: tent-like wooden structures draped in paper towels, pigment and glue, bent and compressed almost brutally into irregular, wretched shapes. At times spiky, at others hollowed or collapsed, their shimmering surfaces of iridescent blue, pearl and silver transform them into something otherworldly: alien topographies, the shells of unknown creatures or the wings of fallen bats.

Lupo calls these sculptures ‘tellers’ – a recurring form in her work since 2018. This time, they stand in for icebergs. During a trip to Greenland this summer, Lupo visited Disko Bay, where the Sermeq Kujalleq glacier produces an unusually high number of icebergs. In an email exchange with writer Tosia Leniarska commissioned for the show, she reflects on the absence of private landownership in Greenland, compares the stratified structure of icebergs to tree rings and traces how they calve from the glacier to drift freely across the ocean. Still, she admits that no words can capture the overwhelming feeling of standing at the bay.

‘Disko’ approaches this experience not through ironic distance but with an earnest sense of longing that lingers in the space. Rather than translating the uncontrollable vastness of the bay – beyond the limits of human perception – directly into objects, the show rethinks how landscape and emotion can be materialized in sculptural form. Lupo, whose practice often circles around questions of desire and value, combines the luxurious notion of a crystalline, fairy-tale world with banal materials, pushing them into unfamiliar states. The installation does not overwhelm its audience with scale or illusion. Instead, by refusing the monumental, it repositions the iceberg not as sublime icon but as delicate form, touching in its fundamental strangeness.

Nancy Lupo’s ‘Disko’ is on view at Kunstverein Kevin, Vienna, until 15 November 

_{Main image: Nancy Lupo, Untitled, 2025, chandelier glass, dimensions variable. Courtesy: the artist and Kunstverein Kevin, Vienna; photograph: Flavio Palasciano}