The Playfully Cerebral Excavations of Paz Sher’s Dumb Luck
Exhibition Review for Dumb Luck, Paz Sher’s Solo Exhibition at 29 Henry Street - Curated by Fanfan Yuxuan Fan
Installation view of Dumb Luck, New York. Artist: Paz Sher. Curated by Fanfan Yuxuan Fan. Courtesy of the artist and FanFlus.
Paz Sher (b. 1988) transformed an empty basement-level gallery into a helter-skelter installation defined by ruptures, disruptions, and convergences. Sculptural works seem to emerge from or retreat into the walls, while more deconstructive interventions involve the literal stripping away of a wall or part of the ceiling. Dumb Luck sabotages the notion of the white cube gallery as a sacrosanct cultural space in preference for a more open-ended, breaking-the-fourth-wall kind of conceptual chutzpah.
Installation view of Dumb Luck, New York. Artist: Paz Sher. Curated by Fanfan Yuxuan Fan. Courtesy of the artist and FanFlus.
Gambler’s Run (2025) and Untitled (wall) (2026) are the two most striking works in the exhibition because of their shocking presence as soon as one enters the space. The former being a sculpture that resembles an extended ceiling tile that looks to have crashed into the gallery space, yet remains attached to the ceiling as if it were a dead mobile. Meanwhile, the latter is a vertical section of cut drywall that has been removed from its original section, yet is horizontally placed before the hole while supported by a durable blue strap. Sher’s structural transformation of the space here conveys the power of creative authorship through the artist’s alterations of an entire space.
Gambler’s Run, 2025. Installation view of Dumb Luck, New York. Artist: Paz Sher. Curated by Fanfan Yuxuan Fan. Courtesy of the artist and FanFlus.
Untitled (wall) also serves as a container for one of Sher’s sculptures; a closer look reveals the presence of Head Birth (2026), a split aluminum-like sculpture inspired by an Ancient Greco-Roman portrait bust whose left eye is pierced by a pole. Suddenly, the space takes on a more archaeological atmosphere with Sher’s deliberate positioning of works that are meant to be discovered or visually excavated by the viewers. Similarly, the low-relief cast aluminum Antihelix (2023) quietly protrudes from another wall like a detail of a sideways-facing figure where only an ear and a slight hairline are revealed.
Untitled (wall), 2026. Installation view of Dumb Luck, New York. Artist: Paz Sher. Curated by Fanfan Yuxuan Fan. Courtesy of the artist and FanFlus.
The floor-based Paralyzed (2023) is one of those works that operates as several things at once: a pair of disembodied eyes gazing up at the viewer, twin mountain ranges separated by a slight chasm, or dug holes that once contained a highly coveted item. While perambulating the gallery and taking in the other works, these ocular sculptures have a bit of a Mona Lisa effect in their capacity to seemingly not take their gaze off of you when in their field of vision.
Paralyzed (Left and Right), 2023. Installation view of Dumb Luck, New York. Artist: Paz Sher. Curated by Fanfan Yuxuan Fan. Courtesy of the artist and FanFlus.
Cross Tied (2023), the sole video work in Sher’s exhibition, continues the theme of looking through a looped video of a horse in a stable who stares directly into the camera and, therefore, at the viewer. With hardly the slightest movements, the horse remains
calm and trusting of the viewer’s presence, with no suggestion of hesitancy or trepidation. Again, Sher merges the horse and looks once more through a more meta piece, Tondo (2026). Here, Sher works from a photograph of a horse that has since been expanded through the speculative, mechanistic hand of an AI-generative program, which the circular image is then contained by a blue-netted cage placed above it. Unlike the video piece, the work feels more antagonistic in having the horse appear trapped in a cage while hung on a wall in a gallery, a kind of panopticon.
Cross Tied (video), 2023. Installation view of Dumb Luck, New York. Artist: Paz Sher. Curated by Fanfan Yuxuan Fan. Courtesy of the artist and FanFlus.PNG
Sher’s Dumb Luck is a complex exhibition fitted with a series of disparate parts that challenges one’s sense of familiarity. This intentional disorientation betrays the narrative by instead asking viewers to immerse themselves in a disorderly environment where each part may possibly be fitted together like a puzzle for a much bigger picture, similar to how archaeologists try to comprehend an excavated site as a portrait of another time or place. Or, equally valid, the exhibition wields the same degree of uncomfortability and strangeness that one expects from a field of crash-landed objects of extraterrestrial origin.
Installation view of Dumb Luck, New York. Artist: Paz Sher. Curated by Fanfan Yuxuan Fan. Courtesy of the artist and FanFlus.
About Artist
Paz Sher (b. 1988, Netherlands) is an installation artist and sculptor based in Brooklyn. New York. Sher holds an MFA (2024) from the Sculpture and Extended Media Department at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA, and a BFA cum laude (2017) from Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem. Sher has exhibited his work in group shows in Jerusalem. Tel Aviv, Leipzig. Richmond, VA, Washington D.C., and New York. He had one collaborative dual show at Atelier Shemi Gallery and significant solo shows at Hamidrasha Gallery in Tel Aviv (2020) and, as part of his MFA thesis show, at The Anderson Gallery in Richmond. VA.
About Curator
Fanfan Yuxuan Fan is a curator based in New York City. Her curatorial approach is grounded in artist-practice–driven methodology, examining the shared challenges and aspirations of her generation. She had curated exhibitions that include: He Spoke To The Birds (AAIE, Rome), To Elongate, To Entwine (Gallery 456 | China American Arts Council, New York), Soft Instructions (Art Cake, Brooklyn), Threshold in Relations (Nguyen Wahed, New York), and Subcurrents (Shanghai). Her curation has been featured in ARTFUSE, Art Spiel, Whitehot Magazine, Hot Coffee Conversations, DART Magazine, and TUSSLE Magazine.
