Pablo’s Birthday x rent free project

Pablo’s Birthday, New York
Curated by rent free project (Yuna Cabon and Claire Zehnith)
6 March – 18 April 2025

With Valentina Attolini, Lauren Noelle Oliver, Armand Simon and Mai Ta

View the exhibition at Pablo’s Birthday

Organised by rent free project, the curatorial collaboration between Yuna Cabon and Claire Zehnith that began in their East Village apartment, this exhibition brought together four artists across generations whose work explores intimacy, surrealism and heightened emotion. The body appears here not as something fixed but as unstable, absurd, vulnerable and in constant change: a place of closeness and of estrangement at once, reflecting desire and unease back at the viewer. Drawings by the Belgian surrealist Armand Simon, a member of the 1930s group Rupture, were shown alongside the photography and performance of Lauren Noelle Oliver, the paintings of Mai Ta and the work of Valentina Attolini, inviting a renewed look at the human form.