"The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me." — Meister Eckhart (c. 1260 – c. 1328)

Meister Eckhart was condemned by the Church in the fourteenth century for arguing that God is not out there - not in the icon, the cathedral, the law, the sacrament, the institution - but in the ground of the soul. The apparatus of devotion, he suggested, had become the point. The eye turned so long toward the external that it had forgotten what it was originally looking for.

What is our master?

How do we serve it?

Who gets to be called a “master” at all?

In an effort to answer these questions, Shin Gallery is pleased to announce the new exhibition, MASTER.
MASTER is a collaborative show bringing together works dating from the early nineteenth century to the present day. Artists range from Andres Serrano, Balthus, and Man Ray, to Rebecca Horn, Natalia LL, and Congo the chimpanzee. With featured mediums of photography, painting, sculpture, and tapestry, the show creates a dynamic dialogue between forms, periods, and questions that refuse to stay in their respective centuries.

As the viewer enters, Piss Christ is immediately visible hanging next to a Balthus. One is accused of degrading an icon. The other of elevating a subject many would prefer not to look at directly. Both have been targets of public outrage. But while the nature of what each is accused of is entirely different, the questions they leave behind are not.

Andres Serrano's Piss Christ (1987) reveals a small plastic crucifix - mass-produced, commodified, drained of meaning long before Serrano touched it - submerged and photographed. It becomes something luminous, golden, transcendent in the most traditional sense of the word. The outrage that followed had everything to do with the object. The image kept asking something quieter: what about the actual spiritual experience the icon was always only ever pointing toward?

Balthus painted adolescent girls in languid, dreamlike interiors and claimed the tradition of the Renaissance — explorations of innocence, beauty, and mystery that modern viewers, in his estimation, had nearly lost the ability to receive. He rarely spoke of his intentions and never resolved the question his work poses. The discomfort remains. So does the painting.

Ai Weiwei's Gambler (2025) closes a different kind of trap with the same elegance. A signed New Jersey lottery scratch-off ticket — the hope of value, the dream of the system paying out — becomes, under Weiwei's signature, an object worth far more than its face value. But the moment you use it as intended, the art dies. Who is serving whom? The system the ticket was designed for, or the meaning the artist imposed upon it? The trap is already closed.

Congo the chimpanzee is in the same room as Victor Brauner. He created paintings - genuine ones - with compositional awareness, with a sense of when a work is finished. He served nothing but the impulse. He died at ten from tuberculosis, having never read a theory of art, having never needed to. The question his presence poses is the oldest one in this room: what is mastery and authorship really? And what were we protecting when we decided those were human properties?

What mastery looks like when it exists outside the system that named it is a question this room keeps turning over. See Portrait of a Woman (1810) by Joshua Johnson, the earliest documented professional African American painter, who spent his career mastering the painting of faces of wealthy white families. Sonja Ferlov Mancoba’s Bird and Chick (1935) is another example; as the only female member of the CoBrA avant-garde group, she was no stranger to operating outside the mainstream, to inadvertently homaging alienation. Likewise, Gerda Wegener’s icon worship is blatant in her oeuvre, as she paints images using her wife Lili Elbe - one of the first recipients of gender reassignment surgery - as a muse. See Provincial Wedding (1927) for instance, the eye that sees clearly is its own form of mastery. Meister Eckhart would have recognized it.

These artists in conversation beg the question we found ourselves asking — and hope you might consider too. They pushed. And in their pushing, left a mark.
We invite you to consider what you serve.

List of artists: Ernest Mancoba, Joshua Johnson, Balthus, Andres Serrano, Lorenzo Viani, Elaine de Kooning, Victor Brauner, Man Ray, Paul Jenkins, Congo (The Chimpanzee), Sonja Mancoba, Rebecca Horn, Roberto Matta, Einar Wegener/Lili Elbe, Gerda Wegener, Ai Weiwei, Natalia LL, Richard Hambleton, and Leonora Carrington.

Written by Dani de la Fe