A beneficiant bundle of completely yellow bananas crowds an intricately crafted crimson basket; a military of mammoth hippos pile on high of one another with dramatic roars. Look extra carefully and you will additionally discover, amid Pablo Bronstein’s new drawings in his solo exhibition ‘Clocks’ at Olney Gleason gallery in New York’s Chelsea, narratively deviant mantel clocks brimming with historic allegory and technical class. Leaving time-telling functions behind, the Buenos Aires-born and London-based artist’s clocks in acrylic tease with references to historic grandeur and nationalist dominance; some fully devoid of arms or too miniature to even discover, they declare dramatic footings in every of his detailed compositions.
(Picture credit score: Picture: Garth Gardner. Courtesy of the artist, Herald St, London, and Olney Gleason, New York)
Infused with historic references that vary from colonial greed to land extraction, Bronstein’s ornamental illustrations on paper act out historical past’s bond between energy and ornamentation. ‘The clock as an allegory ties with my curiosity in ornamental arts and in speaking about historical past and geography,’ Bronstein tells Wallpaper*. He considers clocks as ‘objects that talk greater than they’re presupposed to’ and finds ‘a variety of content material about empires’ in them.
For the artist who beforehand exhibited 4 vintage clocks on pedestals in his 2024 present at Palazzo Bentivoglio in Bologna, such timepieces all ‘have historical past crammed into them as allegory’. Bronstein, whose fascination with mantel clocks can also be embodied in his private assortment of Nineteenth-century French examples, is drawn to their ornamental abundance somewhat than their potential to trace time.
As a former collector of antiques – significantly silver sugar casters, a ardour that began with a present from his Argentine grandmother – he believes clock design has a uniqueness that’s missing in different ornamental arts. ‘There’s a flat symbolic clarification of the second after which there’s the ornate case,’ he says and factors out the ‘jog between the allegorical sophistication and the numbers that go round’.
Pablo Bronstein, Banana Basket, 2026
(Picture credit score: © Pablo Bronstein. All photographs courtesy of Olney Gleason, New York)
This waltz between the globally accepted but summary movement of time and a want for beautification echoes in Bronstein’s complicated reference system within the present’s eight drawings. Banana Basket, for instance, has one bigger banana raised from the beneficiant feast basket with its curvy peels revealing the ripe fruit. Amid the dramatically arched peels and the phallic supply, a central clock reveals what Bronstein explains because the Boston time. Your entire composition is a reference to the operations of the United Fruit Firm and the historical past of the pejorative time period ‘banana republic’, used for nations that, in the end, have been exploited by different nations and firms.
Pablo Bronstein, Coal Mine, 2026
(Picture credit score: © Pablo Bronstein. All photographs courtesy of Olney Gleason, New York)
In Classical Triumphant, a grand Greek Revival constructing spreads throughout the drawing’s practically 2m width and sits over a pedestal adorned with intricate patterning and three clocks, of which the center is left clean. The referenced architectural interval speaks to many world leaders’ inclination in direction of Classicism and makes an attempt to redecorate their residences in glorifying style. ‘Within the context of tradition warfare,’ the artist says, ‘the presence of purity and perfection signifiers is all of the extra aggressive.’
In different drawings, a clock-biting alligator climbs a constructing impressed by Decrease Manhattan’s windowless AT&T Lengthy Traces constructing, and a lion-riding angel hauls a cart filled with coals, based mostly on an ornamental object on the artist’s personal hearth.
Pablo Bronstein, Rusticated Arch, 2026
(Picture credit score: © Pablo Bronstein. All photographs courtesy of Olney Gleason, New York)
Architectural, historic, or diaristic, the present’s visible cues stems from Bronstein’s personal wealth of titles in his private library. He typically begins with a pencil define whereas surrounded by quite a few books with open pages and lets instinct usher him by means of the method, together with including the shading with ink. The twisted elaborations and blurred hyperboles rub shoulders with Bronstein’s inquiries about queering the facility buildings of aesthetics. ‘Queer tradition is sweet at pulling extremes collectively, comparable to making an unlimited drama out of nothing and subverting traumatic components with humour,’ Bronstein says, and provides that this duality lets him ‘worm my means into two completely different locations on the identical time’.
‘Pablo Bronstein: Clocks’ is on view at Olney Gleason in New York by means of 17 October 2026
