Overview
Carolyn Lazard's first solo exhibition at Berlin's Trautwein Herleth gallery offers a deceptively subtle meditation on illness, pharmaceutical culture, and the overlooked objects that populate medical spaces. Running from September through October 2025, Corpus presents a carefully curated selection of found materials—pharmaceutical promotional pens, repurposed medical light boxes—arranged with the precision of a conceptual artist who understands that meaning resides not in spectacle but in sustained observation.
The exhibition's title itself signals Lazard's interest in the body as a site of systemic examination. Working primarily through what they describe as "iteration," Lazard mines the vernacular detritus of healthcare systems to expose the hierarchies, aesthetics, and power structures embedded within them.
The Artist
Carolyn Lazard (born 1987) is a Philadelphia and New York-based artist whose practice spans video, installation, sculpture, performance, and writing. In 2023, Lazard received the MacArthur Fellowship, recognizing their innovative approach to accessibility as a creative tool and their centering of disability within artistic discourse. Their work has appeared in the 2019 and 2024 Whitney Biennials, the 2022 Venice Biennale, and major institutions including MoMA, the Museum Ludwig, and the Walker Art Center.
Lazard's practice is rooted in chronic illness experience and the labor of care. Rather than treating disability as a limitation, Lazard describes their approach as "the most disabled way of making"—one that appropriates existing materials and relies on "the labor of others as a structural element of the work." This philosophy animates everything they create, challenging ableist assumptions about productivity and artistic autonomy.
Key Works to Look For
Portrait I–V presents rows of pharmaceutical promotional pens arranged along the gallery walls like a chromatic inventory. White with accents of violet, turquoise, blue, and orange—colors that dominate pharmaceutical branding—these mass-produced objects bear the names of medications: Relpax, Wellbutrin XL, Viagra, Lipdor. Lazard acquired these pens from auctions as bundles salvaged from closed medical practices. Organized by brand, they become an unexpected archive of prescribing trends, corporate influence, and design history. The artist forces viewers to confront what they typically overlook: the visual language through which pharmaceutical companies infiltrate clinical spaces, and by extension, how corporate aesthetics shape our experience of medical care.
Into the Wild Blue Yonder anchors the exhibition's center. Lazard has installed repurposed medical light boxes—the kind mounted above examination chairs in doctors' offices—flat on the floor. The panels display an impossibly serene image: a brilliant blue sky dotted with white clouds, maple leaves extending from the margins as if the viewer were gazing upward into a mirror-still pond. The effect is disorienting and poignant. By inverting the viewer's perspective, Lazard simultaneously positions them as both the examining physician (looking down) and the examined patient (looking up toward the sky, that eternal metaphor for transcendence or escape).
Why It Matters
Corpus exemplifies Lazard's distinctive method of making illness and medical systems visible through carefully selected found objects. In an era when contemporary art often pursues visual spectacle, Lazard's work demonstrates the radical potential of restraint and specificity. The pens don't announce themselves as "art"—they're pharmaceutical detritus, the sort of thing any patient has pocketed from a waiting room. Yet arranged in meticulous grids, they become a genealogy of treatment, a testament to the intersection of commerce, health, and design.
The exhibition also reflects Lazard's broader commitment to accessibility and the politics of perception. By working with objects that reference the medical gaze—light boxes designed for clinical scrutiny—Lazard inverts the power dynamics of examination. The viewer becomes simultaneously caregiver and patient, observer and observed. This doubling mirrors the experience of living with chronic illness: the constant shift between selfhood and objectification.
In Berlin's art context, Corpus finds a fitting home at Trautwein Herleth, a gallery known for its "enduring concern for conceptually informed and feminist positions." Lazard's work aligns perfectly with this curatorial philosophy: it interrogates systems of power through careful material analysis, resists easy narratives, and centers experiences typically marginalized in mainstream discourse.
Visitor Info
Exhibition Title: Corpus
Artist: Carolyn Lazard
Venue: Trautwein Herleth
Address: Regina-Jonas-Straße 41/43, 10999 Berlin
Phone: +49 (0)30 26 24 284
Dates: September 13 – October 18, 2025
Gallery Hours: Contact the gallery for current hours
This was Lazard's debut exhibition at the gallery, making it a significant moment in their relationship with the Berlin art scene. The work rewards close looking—bring your patience and prepare to see the overlooked objects of medical life transformed into monuments to systemic critique.