One Fine Show: ‘June Crespo, Danzante’ at Secession

Welcome to One Fine Show, where Observer highlights a recently opened exhibition at a museum not in New York City, a place we know and love that already receives plenty of attention.

There are no two ways about it: it’s a Thomas Pynchon fall. The greatest living American novelist has dropped a new book, and Paul Thomas Anderson has released a second film that riffs on his work and offers suggestions for fighting fascism while goofy. It’s all appropriate; these are heady times, rife with references. During a Thomas Pynchon fall, it’s de rigueur to throw on some tunes, ride the paranoia to its illogical conclusion and recognize the personhood of inanimate objects.

The new exhibition by June Crespo at the Secession, “Danzante,” offers some advice on the last part. This collection of new and recent sculptures sees the artist treating “her materials as agents, understanding herself as an assistant to her work rather than an authority figure,” per the press release.

The release also says that the inspiration for these pieces lies in the forms of the iris and the strelitzia, or bird of paradise, but this really only extends to their standing, stalk-like attitudes. The materials are, at first glance, industrial, not biological—metals, textiles, chains and resin. Comparing them to flowers is, on the face of it, as ridiculous as calling them dancers: a few of the works are strung from the ceiling, inert like a prize fish.

And yet they are alive. All of these works have holes, or perhaps it would be more correct to say orifices, and they all seem to yearn. The mouths gape with expectation. This is most impressive in pieces like The dancing Column II (2025), where she doesn’t seem to have done anything to the steel tubes that comprise it, but still granted them with personality. The cushion at the bottom of the work might be there to support the sculpture’s feet, or there accidentally.

This is post-post-minimalism, where you’ve done a lot but don’t want to make it seem like you’ve done anything. Vascular X (2024) seems to stand on a plinth that might be a wall piece by Donald Judd, but that’s just my interpretation. This is not art about art; that would be too clever and not immediate enough. The sculptures are self-sufficient and assertive without being offensive.

The works of lesser dimensionality are no slouch either. TW, TG (2025) is a wall piece made from truck canvas and ventilation pipes. It’s big and long and hardly looks like an artwork at all, aside from how attractive it is. NIKI (2025) is a digital print on the floor that looks like a giant T-shirt that’s been run through a scanner. It’s yet another distorted and humanized aperture. It draws attention to how everything in this show is approximately human scale, but these are clearly artifacts from a world that has long since passed the need for people.

“June Crespo: Danzante” is on view at Vienna’s Secession through November 16, 2025.

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