Facial is Paris-based artist Mimosa Echard’s first solo exhibition in the United States and the debut of a new body of work that follows extended periods of research in New York. Drawing inspiration from her own experiences of walking the city as a flâneur, Echard considers the city as both machine and surface, continuing her research around Walter Benjamin’s unfinished Arcades Project, a literary monument previously explored in her 2024 exhibition Lies.

Encompassing work across various media and formal languages, Facial points towards a myriad of meanings, from self-care to pornography, facial recognition technology, and surveillance via cameras and screens. The icky slipperiness of the exhibition title relates to the overwhelming presence of surfaces in the artist’s work, where images are both materialized and dissolved through elements as diverse as hair-removal wax, bodily fluids, anti-radiation fabric, aluminum foil, Plexiglas, and acrylic transparent varnish.

An acute observer of the circulation of femininity in the city—whether as body, image, or ornament—Echard has systematically photographed beauty salons across Manhattan, an inherently masculine cityscape characterized by steel, glass, and phallic skyscrapers. By extrapolating and exacerbating the binary nature of these visual systems (a dépassement), the body becomes an ambivalent assemblage of images and matter within a broader interpenetrating machine: eyes, hands, lasers, and pollution, all governed by the continuous ticking of parabolic clocks.

This logic extends to the non-human, sexed body of the Gingko tree, one of the few organisms that survived the 1945 atomic bomb explosion in Hiroshima. Ubiquitous in New York and notorious for the acrid smell of rot that accompanies the “eggs” (not seeds) dropped by female Gingko trees, Echard bathes the environment of Facial in the yellow of the Gingko’s fallen leaves. The color also suggests a diffuse presence of urine, used elsewhere in Echard’s works, and conjures the production design for Alexander McQueen’s 1998 Golden Shower runway show.

Cognizant of the legacies of the so-called “Late Modernist avant-gardes”—a period, in contrast with our enervated present, when aesthetics felt invested with a radical newness—Echard revisits the belief systems attached to aesthetic strategies, rather than the aesthetics themselves. Filtering the “freedom of expression” associated with flatness and literalism in mid-twentieth century painting, Echard examines the aesthetics of the present: plastic surfaces, Zara minimalism, Facetuning, and scattered paranoia.

If, inwardly and outwardly, Facial evolves around and transmits from Echard’s cast aluminum sculpture Lady’s Glove (melted heart) (2024)—a pendulum-like cellphone charm turned wrecking ball—it concludes with Tide (2025), a new video that absorbs and projects consumer images like a belly charged with digestion. Tide relays human impotence in an era of technology and AI-ridden capitalism where our lives and desires have been flattened into images on our phones, a form of aesthetic seduction that we remain powerless against.