Edgar Arceneaux: SHARDS

From early June through July, Los Angeles-based artist Edgar Arceneaux immersed himself in Berlin’s art scene, creating new work that will be presented in SHARDS.

At the core of the exhibition are Arceneaux’s skinned mirrors, a series that fuses visceral materiality with existential reflection. The works emerge from a radical process: Arceneaux strips the reflective metal layer from used mirrors and transfers it onto raw canvas. The result is not a clean imprint but a fractured, unstable surface marked by cracks, distortions, and chemical reactions. The original mirror, traditionally an object of self-recognition, is dismantled, stripped of its function, and transformed into something raw and unresolved. Broken glass substrates leave behind ghostly traces, and the surfaces shift between shimmering silver, oxidised copper, toxic green, and sooty black. The effect is one of organic remnants, suspended between beauty and horror.

Arceneaux likens the process to skinning an animal, revealing the “chemical entrails” of the mirror beneath. The canvases take on a corporeal, haunting presence, evoking both sacred relics and the remains of a post-industrial autopsy. They hang like shrouds, bearing the imprint of an image no longer alive. The artist raises a central question: what remains of the self when the mirror no longer reflects? In these works, the mirror, as an extension of human perception and a tool for self-assurance, is stripped of clarity and reduced to uncertain, unstable matter.

The Berlin presentation focuses on works dominated by blue, red, and violet hues, colours that conjure associations with blood, power, dignity, and vulnerability. The new works, developed specifically for the exhibition, engage directly with political and social rupture, particularly in the United States. Arceneaux references the practices of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which detains, deports, and disappears individuals, as well as the ongoing reality of racially motivated police violence. These themes find echoes in Berlin and resonate globally.