Renée Green’s Secret at 55 Walker, New York

Artist and Professor Renée Green’s solo exhibition Secret opened in New York on April 10th and will be on view at Bortolami’s 55 Walker until May 16th, 2026.

In 1993, Green was invited to participate in “Project Unité,” a pioneering group exhibition featuring artists and architects organized by Yves Aupetitallot in Le Corbusier’s Projet Unité in Firminy, France, with the intention of “going beyond the confines of art and culture.” As her contribution, Green chose to inhabit an apartment in Le Corbusier’s semi-abandoned structure.

Taking its title from a volume of Le Corbusier’s private drawing studies of female nudes, Secret simultaneously references Green’s own “secret” occupancy of a semi-deserted apartment in the architect’s iconic housing block. Through a formal assembly of black-and-white photographs, a sculptural three-channel video device, and two multilingual soundtracks narrating Green’s observations, the artist investigates this “modern ruin” via the dual lenses of the document and lived memory as an active participant in a group exhibition and as a distanced observer enmeshed in both private and social sites. By juxtaposing her own diaristic observations with the socio-political realities of the building’s permanent residents—many of whom were immigrants—and of an early 1990s international art exhibition, Secret engages with the frictions of inhabitancy and travel, utopia and reality in a significant architectural site.

As ACT Research Affiliate and Associate Professor of Contemporary Art History at Northeastern Gloria Sutton writes in the accompanying brochure published for the exhibition, “More than three decades after its initial conception, Secret remains acutely resonant. Its attention to mobility, translation, and the politics of occupancy speaks directly to contemporary conditions in which questions of belonging are increasingly contested. At the same time, its formal strategies—its refusal of closure, its layering of voices, and its insistence on partial knowledge—offer a model for engaging such conditions without flattening them into reductive narratives.”

The exhibition also includes a new two-dimensional artwork, produced specially for this iteration of Secret at Bortolami’s space at 55 Walker.

More information: Bortolami, New York