"You Must Change Your Life": Inside GRIMM's New Painting-and-Sculpture Show

♦ ♦ ♦ JULY 01, 2026 | 3 MIN READ "You Must Change Your Life": Inside GRIMM's New Painting-and-Sculpture Show At a Glance Verdict: cross-town — GRIMM's thirteen-artist show, hung under a line from Rilke about a sculpture that stares back, forces painting to answer a challenge usually reserved for sculpture alone. Walk into 54 White Street this week and the first painting waiting there is hung at exactly the height of a face. Not the usual gallery centerline, pitched to please a room of standing adults in general, but close enough to a specific human head that it registers as a look before it registers as a picture. That is deliberate, and it is the entire argument of GRIMM’s new group show, “You Must Change Your Life,” curated by Tom Morton and running through August 7. Why a headless sculpture and a flat painting are asking the same question The title comes from the final line of Rilke’s 1918 poem “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” addressed to an ancient sculpture with no head, no arms, and, strictly speaking, no eyes, that nonetheless seems to look back at whoever stands in front of it and demand a life reconsidered. The gallery’s own curatorial text names the stakes directly: the show “is concerned with how the past speaks to the present; the animation of materials and art objects by the numinous; the fragment as synecdoche… and how the human psyche is shaped by the act of seeing, and being seen.” A headless torso still occupies a body’s volume; a viewer can circle it, and the missing head reads as a kind of held breath, presence implied by absence. A painting never had that excuse. It was flat and edged from the first mark, a fragment of a world that was never whole to begin with, so setting canvases beside sculptural fragments in one room asks whether a rectangle of paint can hold a stare on its own terms, without a torso’s alibi of a body still somewhere nearby. Sara Rossberg’s own canvas in the show, also titled “You Must Change Your Life” (2021), acrylic medium and pigment on canvas at 200 by 200 centimeters, hangs inside the exhibition that borrowed her painting’s name for its own. How the hang turns looking into being looked at Painting inside this argument only works if it is hung to be met rather than glanced past: low enough and close enough to break the polite remove a gallery usually gives a canvas, tight enough between its thirteen artists’ worth of neighbors that walking the room starts to feel observed rather than observing. The reason that hang matters more here than in an ordinary group show is structural. A sculpture’s stare shifts as a viewer moves, offering a different partial face from every angle, its incompleteness renewed at each step. A painting supplies exactly the same look from any position in the room. Fixed rather than fragmentary, it is the one object here that cannot be walked into a kinder angle. A sculpture’s stare can be walked around. A painting’s stare has to be met head-on, or not at all. Mahesh Baliga’s small cas