Ryan M. Pfeiffer presents ORGANGRINDER

Ron Athey | Richard Hawkins | Robert Mapplethorpe | Paul McCarthy | Pierre Molinier | Fakir Musafar | Hermann Nitsch | Breyer P-Orridge

July 18th - August 29th 2026

ORGANGRINDER exposes what's typically hidden: blood, orifices, excrement, offal, genitals, immolating desire, insatiable spiritual hunger. The artworks in this exhibition locate authenticity not in transcendence but in the debased, the damaged, and the obscene. These artists turn the body inside out, transform intestines into surfaces, making the abject visible. They offer what cannot be consumed or commodified, while highlighting the most base of sacred acts: blood sacrifice, ritual intoxication, sexual ecstasy, transformation through destruction, expenditure without return.

        This is a convocation of sacred monsters - flesh as scripture, violation as liturgy. The artists in this exhibition do not represent the body; they expend it, burning sovereign selfhood in rituals that Western propriety cannot metabolize. Mapplethorpe's eye of eros, Nitsch's blood-theater, Athey and Musafar's punctured and penetrated ordeal-flesh, Molinier's fetish-altars, the pandrogyne dissolution of Genesis-Breyer, McCarthy's abject carnival, Hawkins' demonology - all circling the same inner experience: the annihilation of the bounded subject at the threshold where excess meets ecstasy, where the individual body cracks open into the continuity it was always forbidden to remember. Each work courts the impossible gift - pandemonic-obliteration not for utility but for the pure glory of ruin, an immanentized chaos-oblation, useless expenditure raised to the pitch of the sacred. What persists after this sacrifice is flesh remade as an uncharted surface: organs stripped of their assignments, hierarchies of function dissolved into raw intensity, a trembling field of desire that knows no destination, organized by nothing, flowing everywhere at once.

Finally planting the seeds from the last dribbling emissions of this sperm-cult - this is art as Dionysian contagion, as wound-cult recruitment, as holy bone-war propaganda, as a check from the anti-economy of the sun; spending without return, desiring beyond survival, exploding in order not to explode, touching Death while Death touches everything else, life exuberated while life extinguishes itself. The base materials are not incidental: blood, semen, excrement, urine, the body's rejected overflow. These are the true currencies of sovereignty, what the upward aspirations of idealism cannot commodify and must expel, yet what returns as the very medium of the sacred. The low is not opposed to the holy; it is the holy, the excremental as ultimate expenditure, the abject fluid as that which culture voids precisely because it carries us - heterogeneous matter that destabilizes and putrefies every clean system of meaning.                   - Ryan M. Pfeiffer         

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This exhibition would not be possible without the support of The Kinsey Institute at Indiana University, Nitsch Foundation, The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, and The Estate of Genesis Breyer P-Orridge. Special thanks to Ben Tischer at New Discretions, Adam Boxer at Ubu Gallery, Greene Naftali, and Hauser & Wirth Zurich. .

Biographies

Ron Athey (b. 1961) Ron Athey was born in Groton, Connecticut, and raised in a Pentecostal household in the Inland Empire of Southern California—an upbringing he has described as a fundamental influence on his subsequent performance practice. He came up through the Los Angeles punk and queer underground of the late 1970s and 1980s, developing a performance practice centered on ritualized cutting, piercing, and body modification drawn from both religious iconography and BDSM culture. He has been HIV-positive since 1986, and his work frequently engages directly with mortality, contagion panic, and bodily vulnerability. A 1994 performance in Minneapolis became a flashpoint in debates over NEA funding and censorship. Athey continues to perform internationally.

Richard Hawkins (b. 1961) Richard Hawkins was born in Mexia, Texas, and studied at the University of California at Berkeley and Los Angeles. His work—collage, painting, ceramics, and installation—proceeds through an obsessive accumulation of images drawn from horror film, classical antiquity, celebrity culture, Japanese aesthetics, and queer visual history. His practice has been described as simultaneously archival and entranced: a sustained meditation on the erotic charge of images and their capacity to produce unexpected meaning through proximity and repetition. Hawkins is based in Los Angeles.

Robert Mapplethorpe (1946–1989) Robert Mapplethorpe was born in Floral Park, New York, and studied at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. Over the course of his career he produced an extraordinarily cohesive body of work in photography—portraits, flowers, male nudes, and images from New York's leather and S&M subcultures—distinguished by formal precision and an unflinching equality of attention. His work gained wide public notoriety following the 1989 retrospective The Perfect Moment, which became the center of landmark debates about arts funding and censorship in the United States. Mapplethorpe died of AIDS-related complications at age 42.

Paul McCarthy (b. 1945) Paul McCarthy was born in Salt Lake City, Utah. Since the early 1970s his work—performance, video, installation, sculpture—has mounted a sustained assault on American mythologies of innocence, drawing on the imagery of consumer culture, fairy tales, television, and pornography to produce work of extraordinary transgressive force. His studio practice is enormous in scale; his exhibitions often include monumental sculptural installations alongside video works and performance documentation. McCarthy has taught extensively at UCLA.

Pierre Molinier (1900–1976) Pierre Molinier was born in Agen in southwestern France and spent most of his life in Bordeaux. He worked initially as a commercial painter before developing the photographic self-portrait practice for which he is known—assembling his own body, corseted and heeled and merged with images of other bodies, into photomontages that construct impossible architectures of desire. André Breton championed his work in 1955 and wrote the preface to his 1956 Paris exhibition. Molinier's work remained largely underground in his lifetime and has gained substantial critical recognition since his death. He died by suicide in Bordeaux at age 76.

Fakir Musafar (1930–2018) Roland Loomis, who took the name Fakir Musafar, was born in Aberdeen, South Dakota. He is widely credited with founding the modern primitive movement, a cultural phenomenon that reclaimed and adapted body modification practices from non-Western traditions for spiritual and personal purposes. Musafar worked as an advertising executive for much of his career while conducting his body practice in private; he later became a central figure in the tattooing and piercing community and taught extensively. He founded the Body Play and Modern Primitives quarterly.

Hermann Nitsch (1938–2022) Hermann Nitsch was born in Vienna and studied at the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts. He began developing the Orgien Mysterien Theater in 1957—a total artwork incorporating painting, performance, music, theater, and ritual in events involving animal blood, offal, and large numbers of performers. Nitsch understood the OMT as a form of collective psycho-spiritual therapy derived from Dionysian ritual, Catholic liturgy, and the theories of Freud and Artaud. He was arrested multiple times and faced significant censorship throughout his career. Full-scale actions were conducted at his Austrian estate, Schloss Prinzendorf, over periods of up to six days. Nitsch died in April 2022.

Genesis Breyer P-Orridge (1950–2020) Genesis Breyer P-Orridge was born in Manchester, England. As co-founder of Coum Transmissions, Throbbing Gristle, and Psychic TV, Genesis was a central figure in industrial music, mail art, and transgressive performance. Coum Transmissions' 1976 exhibition Prostitution at the ICA London prompted a Member of Parliament to call the artists 'wreckers of civilization.' Later work increasingly focused on the pandrogyny project undertaken with partner Lady Jaye Breyer P-Orridge—extensive body modification aimed at the mutual dissolution of individual selfhood into a merged third entity. Genesis died in New York of leukemia in 2020.