Uri Aran arranges objects and images the way one might spatially illustrate a scene with whatever is on a dinner table, letting a salt shaker stand for a person and a napkin for a museum, for example.
His sculptural materials often evoke the home and the schoolroom—pompom fringe and floral upholstery, banal keepsakes, fish food, craft supplies and sticker sheets, children’s cartoon figures—and his formal gestures of repetition, quotation, and misalignment allow ordinary things to take on the air of characters, acquiring an artifice that is tender, elusive, abject, and humorous.
The exhibition’s title is the refrain in Aran’s new video work: this line is rehearsed until its meaning loosens and the instruction to “look” becomes a rhythm. Learning—and the effort and reward that sustains it—has long run through his work. Here, classroom desks heaped with googly eyes and a sculpture bearing “Look mum” in its title recall a child’s eagerness to be seen and praised. Sheets of animal stickers, a micro-currency of approval, are enlarged to the scale of tapestries. Presiding from monitors hung high, Duolingo’s cast of cartoon people and animals brighten at correct answers and slump at wrong ones. Filmed through screens, the videos’ clips loop and bounce like a lesson repeated until it sticks.
The artist has observed that animals and children, as “outsiders to language,” are those we train and project onto, and so become screens for the feelings and lessons we bring to them. Aran populates his work with other such stand-ins: On twelve vintage televisions, a Muppet who can only speak in sound effects is barely audible, and in the drawings, painterly layers build up until the face of each figure becomes, in his words, “a mask on a mask on a mask.”
Aran has also described sentimentality as “an exaggeration of emotional conventions,” and he courts it openly, whether through the pathos of a musical phrase or in home-décor word signs, their looping cursive cut apart until only the look of sentiment remains. His devices announce their intentions plainly, and yet they work all the same, leaving viewers to catch themselves responding on cue.
Uri Aran lives and works in New York. He studied at Bezalel Academy of Art and Design and Cooper Union and received an MFA from Columbia University. Recent institutional exhibitions include Madre Museo d’arte contemporanea Donnaregina, Naples, IT (2026); The Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin (2023); Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne (2016); South London Gallery (2013); and Kunsthalle Zürich (2013). Aran’s work is included in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, ICA Miami, Dallas Museum of Art, and RISD Museum, among others.
Uri Aran: Look How Hard They Work is organized by Natalie Bell, Chief Curator.
Uri Aran: Look How Hard They Work
Oct 23, 2026 – Feb 28, 2027
MIT List Visual Arts Center
Cambridge, MA, USA
