“It Smells Like Girl,” a joint show by Jeffrey Deitch and Company Gallery, opening September 6 and featuring thirty artists confronting hysteria.
This September, Jeffrey Deitch and Company Gallery will open It Smells Like Girl, a joint exhibition co-organized by the two spaces that revisits the fraught and often misread idea of female hysteria. Through painting, video, sculpture, performance, screenings, and installation, the show looks at hysteria not as outdated diagnosis but as cultural signal.
Featuring thirty artists including Nadia Lee Cohen, Martine Syms, and Juliana Huxtable, the exhibition invites viewers into an emotional and atmospheric space where intensity is not pathologized but reimagined as artistic method.
Cohen’s photographs, lacquered in technicolor varnish, offer tableaux where glamour tilts toward unease. Syms responds with video vignettes carved from everyday social performance; the rhythm is clipped, the humor stealthy. Huxtable’s figures stand close by, their elongated forms lacquered like icons, neither wholly ancient nor entirely futuristic. Works by Nora Turato, Tala Madani, and Meriem Bennani continue the conversation, each trading precision for atmosphere.
Curators Violette Bory and Cecilia Alemani arrange the galleries as a sequence of moods. A corridor reverberates with amplified breathing. Another is perfumed with artificial rose, staining the air in faint disquiet. Wall text quotes nineteenth-century treatises opposite contemporary manifestos, underscoring how suspicion of female emotion lingers even now.
Yet the prevailing note is not indictment but reclamation. By positioning hysteria as strategy rather than symptom, the exhibition asks what new forms of expression emerge when feeling exceeds etiquette. The answer arrives in media that shimmer, pulse, and at times shout, making the case that excess can be clarifying.
It Smells Like Girl is on view September 6 through November 1, 2025, at Jeffrey Deitch, 925 North Orange Drive. Reserve an afternoon; the show rewards unhurried attention.
