SER SERPAS

Ser Serpas has exhibited at leading contemporary art institutions and galleries worldwide, including Kunsthalle Basel, the Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection, the Rubell Museum in Miami, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.

Early years and Background

Ser Serpas grew up in the working-class, largely Latinx neighbourhood of Boyle Heights in Los Angeles, an environment that informs the artist’s attention to the politics of space, displacement, and urban infrastructures. After initially enrolling at Columbia University in New York, Ser Serpas completed a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts at HEAD – Genève (Haute école d’art et de design, Geneva) in 2017, while developing an emerging practice of sculpture, performance, and writing.

Following studies in Geneva, Ser Serpas undertook residencies and fellowships, including at Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, which helped anchor an increasingly international presence. Ser Serpas now lives and works between Paris and New York, continuing to develop sculptural, painterly, and textual projects across European and American institutions and galleries.

Ser Serpas Artworks

Ser Serpas’s art brings together sculpture, installation, painting, and poetry in an experimental practice that often uses found materials and provisional display structures to explore value, decay, and the social meaning of objects and bodies. Across artworks and exhibitions, Ser Serpas frequently engages discarded furniture, industrial detritus, and everyday items gathered near exhibition sites, arranging them into precarious assemblages that foreground the politics of visibility, trans identity, and the afterlives of things.

Improvised Sculptural Assemblages

Ser Serpas is widely recognised for improvised sculptural installations composed of locally sourced, often bulky or damaged objects that are lashed, stacked, and wedged together without permanent fixings. Works such as installations for Made in L.A. 2020: a version at the Hammer Museum and assemblages at institutions including the Bourse de Commerce and Kunsthalle Basel foreground ideas of risk, precarious balance, and the potential future disposal of the works back into the urban environment.

These sculptural environments often occupy thresholds, corners, and circulation spaces in galleries, subtly obstructing or re-routing visitors while asking how bodies marked by class, race, and gender move through institutional architectures. The temporary nature of many installations, which can be dismantled and returned to the street, challenges conventional notions of permanence and collectability in contemporary art.

Painting, Language, and Extended Practice

Alongside sculpture, Ser Serpas has developed a painterly practice using gestural marks, textual fragments, and diagrammatic compositions that stretch the distinction between painting and notation. Works like the editioned piece Alice (Language) Practice 5 (2022) for Texte zur Kunst extend an ongoing interest in writing, translation, and the materiality of language across canvas, print, and publication.

Poetry and autofiction play a central role in Ser Serpas’s practice, with texts appearing in artist books, readings, and exhibition contexts that parallel the sculptural work’s concern with intimacy, memory, and speculative futures. Interviews and features in publications such as BOMB Magazine and Flash Art emphasise how the artist uses narrative and voice to reflect on trans experience, family histories, and the logistics of living and working between cities.

Institutional Projects and Major Installations

Ser Serpas has been the subject of major institutional showings, these include the exhibition Of my life at Kunsthalle Basel (13 June–21 September 2025), which unfolded large-scale sculptural constellations and painterly works across five galleries and the foyer. The exhibition presented doubled and near-figurative canvases from 2023–25 alongside new installations that suspended found materials and framed works at oblique angles, so that motifs and supports echo from room to room and respond to the changing proportions of the museum’s architecture.

At the Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection in Paris, Ser Serpas realised the project I fear (J’ai peur) (22 May 2021–30 January 2022), turning Gallery 3 into a dim, attic-like environment filled with shrouded sculptural assemblages and draped oil paintings inspired by Alejandro Amenábar’s 2001 film The Others. Performances under the title BASEMENT SCENE in 2021 produced modular sculptures that were later incorporated into the installation, in which second-hand furniture, textiles, and domestic debris from the Paris region formed uncanny “landscapes” of bodies, ghosts, and commodities.

Ser Serpas has also attracted international attention for participation in Whitney Biennial 2024: Even Better Than the Real Thing (20 March–5 September 2024) at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, debuting the installation taken through back entrances subtle fate matching matte thing soiled ... (2024) in the first-floor lobby gallery. Constructed from scavenged debris, vegetation, and oil-painted plastic sheeting laid over unstretched canvas, the work clusters at thresholds and along blocked routes, extending the artist’s long-standing interest—since around 2017—in access points, back-of-house circulation, and how institutional architectures control who and what passes through them. Across these projects from 2021 to 2025, Ser Serpas continues to test how contemporary art can hold and redistribute ‘unease’ as a productive affect within the gallery by keeping objects, bodies, and narratives perpetually unsettled.

At the Rubell Museum in Miami, Ser Serpas presents a focused exhibition as part of Solo Presentations (1 December 2025–1 November 2026), drawn from the Rubell Family Collection and new commissions. Installed within the museum’s former warehouse spaces, the presentation brings together assemblage sculptures first developed in Miami in the mid-2010s—when the artist began working with debris from foreclosed homes—with more recent works from 2022–25 that translate this approach into large, gridded constructions and floor-bound constellations built from furniture, building materials, and domestic remnants.

Select Awards and Accolades

• Laureate, Reiffers Art Initiatives Prize 2023, recognising emerging contemporary art practice in France
• Recipient, Junger Ankauf prize with acquisition and presentation at Art Cologne, highlighting Ser Serpas’s work within an institutional collection context
• Residency fellow, Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris

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Ser Serpas Exhibitions

Ser Serpas has been the subject of both solo exhibitions and group exhibitions at important institutions and galleries. Below is a selection of important exhibitions. To be kept up to date with upcoming exhibitions featuring Ser Serpas follow them on Ocula. You can also view her exhibitions on Ocula.

Select solo exhibitions

• 2025, Of my life, Kunsthalle Basel, Basel
• 2024, institutional solo presentation at Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection, Paris
• 2024, solo exhibition with LC Queisser, Tbilisi
• 2023, solo exhibition with Maxwell Graham, New York
• 2022, solo exhibition with Karma International, Zurich
• 2021, solo exhibition with Balice Hertling, Paris

Select group exhibitions

• 2024, Whitney Biennial 2024: Even Better Than the Real Thing, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
• 2023, group exhibition at Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection, Paris, featuring a major sculptural installation by Ser Serpas
• 2021, Made in L.A. 2020: a version, Hammer Museum and The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, Los Angeles
• 2020, group exhibitions with Karma International and Balice Hertling in Europe

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Ocula | 2025