Exhibition · Art Intelligence Global · Hong Kong
Art Intelligence Global is pleased to present “The Uncanny”, an exhibition opening on 21 March 2026 at Art Intelligence Global’s exhibition space in Hong Kong. Coinciding with Art Basel Hong Kong, the exhibition explores how artists render the familiar strangely unsettling. Assembling historic artworks by nine twentieth-century artists, “The Uncanny” interrogates the self as a site where desire, memory, and anxiety converge. At the heart of the exhibition is Yayoi Kusama’s landmark Driving Image (1964-66). Initially exhibited as a three-part series staged at galleries in New York, Milan, and Essen between 1964- 66, key original elements – Infinity Net mannequins, furniture, kitchen crockery – are here reunited. The installation will be displayed alongside original video footage of a performance staged by Kusama in 1967, during which she painted live models in polka dots. Kusama’s household tableau vivant underscores the frequent experience of uncanny sensations in domestic spaces or through everyday objects. Exploring this further, the exhibition includes two significant early sculptures by the American artist Robert Gober. The eerie Dollhouse 4 (1978) stems from Gober’s very first series, while the dislocated form of Pitched Crib (1987) materializes the trauma that has haunted the artist since childhood. This will be one of the most significant presentations of Gober’s work in Asia to date. A group of iconic assemblage sculptures by Salvador Dalí – including his renowned Vénus de Milo aux Tiroirs (1936/64) and Lobster Telephone (white aphrodisiac) (1938) – trace Surrealism’s early engagement with Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis of the uncanny. The Surrealists’ fetishization of the everyday is extended in Domenico Gnoli’s hyperreal representations of household furniture, exemplified here by an important canvas from the 1960s, the decade in which his mature style fully emerged. The exhibition also assesses the uncanny as a critical tool, employed by writers and…