Elizabeth Xi Bauer is excited to share that Oswaldo Maciá’s olfactory-acoustic sculpture Requiem for the Insects (2026) is currently on show at the eighty-second Whitney Biennial: the longest-running survey of contemporary art in the United States.
Requiem for the Insects immerses visitors in a symphony playing from speakers hidden inside glass megaphones that spiral down from the ceiling against a backdrop of painting loosely modelled after eighteenth-century naturalists’ field sketches. The composition combines resonant sounds of chirping insects and shattering glass across sixteen audio channels. An extension of the artist’s longstanding commitment to the natural world, Requiem for the Insects builds on the aesthetics and ethos of his recent solo exhibition, Migratory Movements (2025-26), at Elizabeth Xi Bauer, Exmouth Market.
For the Whitney Biennial 2026, Maciá joins a distinguished group of 56 artists, duos, and collectives from across the globe whose work speaks to the complexities of the modern world and charts new developments in contemporary art.
In conjuncture with this year’s Biennial, the Whitney released an extensive catalogue edited by curators Drew Sawyer and Marcela Guerrero. Each exhibiting artist was asked to invite a figure in the art world with whom they share a personal connection; these distinguished professionals then joined the artist for a one-on-one interview. Maciá chose former Director, now director emerita, of Tate Modern, Frances Morris CBE, thanks to his longstanding relationship with the museum (Maciá’s seminal work Something Going On Above My Head entered the Tate collection in 2010 and has since been exhibited at Tate Modern and Tate Britain).
“My research took me into the expansion of the visual element. I took volumes of sound and volumes of smell you try to get at the discourse of sculpture from another sense because, well, visually we’re bombarded; we’re ocularcentric. But vision is just one of many senses, many ways to get inside the brain.”
– Oswaldo Maciá in interview with Frances Morris CBE
The Whitney Biennial 2026 is co-organised by Whitney curators Marcela Guerrero, the DeMartini Family Curator, and Drew Sawyer, the Sondra Gilman Curator of Photography, with Beatriz Cifuentes, Biennial Curatorial Assistant, and Carina Martinez, Rubio Butterfield Family Fellow.
The exhibition continues until 23rd August, 2026, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
Read more here:
The 2026 Whitney Biennial Delivers American Art for a Fractured Age | Observer
The Polycrisis Sublime of the Whitney Biennial | Hyperallergic
Whitney Biennial 2026 Review: The Revolution Will Be Cute | ArtReview
