NEW YORK, NY.- Behind the anonymous storefront of a dispossessed upholstery shop near the Inglewood Oil Fields, a scientist-scavenger works frenetically amid glowing uranium glass mushrooms, electric aquarium specimens, mangled dollhouses and transmuted bonsai. 125 Newbury is proud to present his findings in Max Hooper Schneider: Scavenger, the artist’s first solo exhibition in New York. Based in Los Angeles, Hooper Schneider cultivates a polyvalent practice, fusing a poetics of sculptural assemblage and material technology with a critical examination of ecological, philosophical and social systems. Trained in both art and science, Hooper Schneider fashions intricate sculptural habitats, weaving together scientific principles and facets of everyday culture to explore dynamics of transformation, hybridity, decay, and succession. The exhibition opened at 125 Newbury in Tribeca on Friday, September 12th and runs through October 25th, 2025.
Treating the studio as a laboratory, Hooper Schneider orchestrates synthetic ecosystems and novel, unborn ecologies at both monumental and intimate scale. He constructs dense microcosms teeming with coral, teeth, crystals, plasma gas, craft store detritus, and fictive life forms—all contained within vitrines or made habitable in outdoor environments. At 125 Newbury, a giant Oreo cookie oozes oil into an archipelago of cadaverous, copper-plated stuffed animals. Nearby, an agglomerated mass of barnacles and dollhouse furniture is embedded with miniature LED screens playing videos of burning sculptures. A nocturnal forest of bricolaged waste is populated by glowing, lantern-like opioid capsules, while burned and mutilated aquaria are reborn as fossilized reefs of coruscating copper dendrites. These works evoke natural history displays altered by speculative fiction and post-human aesthetics, challenging traditional boundaries between the natural and the artificial.
The artist describes his exhibition at 125 Newbury as a “set of conditions without a plot, or an anthropology museum set in the distant future.” Recombining new and pre-existing works, the exhibition is a means for investigating loss, the passage of time, and the artist’s signatory procedures of material evolution and preservation. For Hooper Schneider, art functions as a space for breaking down binaries between nature and culture, between the living and the dead. Operating in multiple registers simultaneously, from absurdity to melancholia, from environmental breakdown to ethereal regrowth, Hooper Schneider leads us on a “guided misinterpretation” of our present moment, interrogating how imaginary artefacts produce a fantasy of a bygone Anthropocene.
At its core, Hooper Schneider’s practice challenges the dualistic thinking that underlies the conventional categories in which we classify artworks. His works operate in liminal and interstitial zones, the in- betweens where life and death, nature and culture, order and entropy intersect. There stands Max Hooper Schneider. Empathically undidactic, the artist describes his work as “a living, phantasmatic landscape” composed “of niche material technologies and the aleatory structures of wastelands and destroyed environments.” At 125 Newbury, Hooper Schneider immerses viewers in these unsettling, otherworldly biotopes and vistas of endless seeing, speculating on questions of resilience, mutation, and the futures of ecological and cultural systems in an age of planetary collapse.
Max Hooper Schneider is also included in the 12th SITE SANTA FE International, “Once Within a Time,” curated by Cecilia Alemani and on view through January 12, 2026.
Max Hooper Schneider (b. 1982, Los Angeles, CA) received his Master’s degree in Landscape Architecture from Harvard Graduate School of Design and his Bachelor’s degrees in Urban Design and Biology from New York University, with additional studies in Marine Biology and Entomology at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and Santa Monica College. He has shown in solo exhibitions at prominent museums and institutions internationally, including UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, MO.CO Montpellier Museée Contemporain, and the Hammer Museum. His museum group exhibitions include Centre Pompidou-Metz, Schinkel Pavillon, Leeum Museum of Art, Kistefos Museum, and Musée d’art moderne de Paris. Hooper Schneider has been included in a number of international biennial exhibitions, including the 15th Gwangju Biennale, 16th Istanbul Biennial, 13th Baltic Triennial, and the Mongolia Land Art Biennial.
Hooper Schneider’s works are held in major public and private collections, including the Hammer Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, Musée d’art moderne Paris, Rubell Museum, Fondation Lafayette, and Fonds d’art contemporain de la Ville de Genève, among others. He was awarded the BMW Art Journey Prize in 2017 and the Schmidt Ocean Institute Prize in 2023. He lives and works in Los Angeles.
