Contributed by Lucas Moran / Making sense of art is not easy. You can’t pin down meaning when it keeps moving. Darren Bader’s new show “Youth,” now on view at Matthew Brown Gallery, vividly illustrates the point. Bader has been called a prankster and an absurdist, elevating the ridiculous into high art. His earlier projects included injecting lasagna with heroin, stuffing a brass instrument with shrimp, and giving away live kittens. He provides bits of text that hint at deeper meaning while refusing to settle into it. Filling a gallery with art that plays conceptual games with history and humor and still looks good is no easy trick. But Bader pulls it off.
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He is often compared to Duchamp, and there are parallels with Dieter Roth, Maurizio Cattelan, and certainly Lawrence Weiner. But what has set Bader apart is his ability to make art about what it means to be human, with all our strange ways and contradictions. If his work were music, “Youth” would be pop. It includes a doctored album cover titled Flossing the Minnow. Instead of giving away kittens, he is offering socks. Instead of letting goats loose in the gallery, he has placed metal coils across the floor that roll and clatter when people trip over them. While this is a bit disconcerting, Bader’s work has become more accommodating. The shift may have come from fatherhood; he has two young sons now. Or perhaps it is just part of the natural evolution of someone getting more comfortable in his own skin. The work feels confident and uncluttered.
Many of the pieces are quasi-sculptures made from objects he buys through online auctions or estate sales of famous figures. CS25 includes Sylvester Stallone’s chaise longue, Mary Tyler Moore’s drill round, Shelley Duvall’s hat, Elgin Baylor’s cufflinks, Ellen Burstyn’s book, Tom Petty’s cake knife, and Elvira’s quilt. CS26 encompasses Amy Winehouse’s weight machine, Shirley MacLaine’s shoe, Ray Bradbury’s posters, Richard Petty’s globe, Mae West’s hat, Christine McVie’s wall art, and Pat Morita’s décor object. In the context of an art show, these groupings are both wacky and strangely moving. They make you think about legacy and ownership, about what happens to the objects that once surrounded someone’s life.
These tableaux give the show a kind of structure, something to hold onto while the rest of it spins and jokes and teases. Bader often includes text or illustrations made by others. One work features the lower half of a mannequin wearing slip-on suede sandals scrawled on with a Sharpie pen. Another, greeting visitors mid gallery, is an illustration of a diverse crowd that looks like corporate stock art from an HR brochure about inclusivity. It is unframed, pinned directly to the wall, with bits of dental floss woven through it where piercings might be.
On a plinth sits an old New York Post with the headline “Darth Bader” above a picture of Ruth Bader Ginsburg wearing a Darth Vader helmet. Another plinth holds a Stephen King novel with a small pool of raspberry preserves at its center. It should not make sense, but somehow it does. When I told Bader I liked the moment it conjured, he smiled and said, “Jam on it.” That remark captures what this show is really about: how we decide what something means. What are the threads and habits that hold culture together? Why do we value one thing over another? Bader’s art keeps asking those questions, reminding us that meaning is built on absurdity and randomness as much as rationality and intention.
We floss our teeth in the bathroom, yet somehow that private act can turn into a viral dance performed by a teenager beside Katy Perry on SNL. That mix of sincerity and absurdity is exactly where Bader lives. Every piece here is a small reminder that art is not about the answers. It is about the questions we keep asking, preferably while laughing.
“Darren Bader: Youth,” Matthew Brown Gallery, 390 Broadway, New York, NY. Through January 10, 2026.
About the author: Lucas Moran is an artist and writer based in Brooklyn. His paintings have been included in many shows in the United States and Canada, and he has had several solo shows in New York City.
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