Bring Me Men

Bring Me Men

Gray Wielebinski

28.05.26 - 04.07.26






Bring Me Men is the first solo show by London-based, American artist Gray Wielebinski (b. 1991, Dallas, TX) at NıCOLETTı. The exhibition follows the gallery’s solo presentation of Wielebinski’s work at Frieze London 2025, and is part of the official programme of London Gallery Weekend (5–7 June 2026), for which it was selected by both author Alice Hattrick and Missy Flynn in their respective curated routes.

 

Examining the cultural scripts and contradictions through which masculinity is produced, performed, and contested, Bring Me Men takes its title from a phrase formerly inscribed on the façade of the United States Air Force Academy – where the artist’s father undertook military training in the 1970s. Removed in 2023 following an extensive investigation into a major sexual misconduct and harassment scandal at the Academy, the sign reappears above NıCOLETTı’s entrance as a slogan that Wielebinski uses to pose a set of questions: who is a man, how to become one, and through which institutional and affective regimes this condition is sustained?

 

These themes are addressed through a series of sculptural assemblages composed of collected materials such as boxes, shopping bags, athletic accessories, rulers, leather and latex gloves, as well as fragments of printed matter. Foregrounding accumulation, citation, and displacement, the works evoke the aesthetic of teenagers’ bedrooms and decorated school lockers – formative spaces of adolescence, where identity emerges through a charged mixture of desire, social bonds, and prohibitions around queer intimacy.

 

The sometimes contradictory imagery embedded within these pieces also hints how individuation unfolds through the assimilation or rejection of pre-existing identities. References to the twin forces of glorification and abjection encoded in the ‘star system’ of celebrity culture shows us how an exaggerated individuality can be used to dehumanise. Here, figures such as the jock, the son, the lover, or the loser appear as culturally encoded positions to be inhabited, performed and reinvented. Marking a turning point in the artist’s practice, text also plays a central role in the exhibition, with words and phrases functioning as found objects pregnant with multiple and unstable meanings.

The sculptures are accompanied by two-dimensional collages that explore idealised depictions of white American masculinity. Abercrombie & Fitch shopping bags – a recurring motif in Wielebinski’s practice – are deconstructed into camp, quasi-religious icons, presented in custom cross-shaped frames. Underscoring the entanglement of consumer culture with the production of masculine ideals, these works use branding as a site of affective investment, where identity is mediated through images that are at once aspirational and regulatory.

 

This logic extends into the spatial organisation of the exhibition. While the main gallery space evokes the atmosphere of a workshop – with works displayed on wooden planks set across trestles, alongside decorated rulers left scattered on the floor or leaning against the walls –, the back room suggests the intimacy of a bedroom, where objects gathered in wooden drawers are mounted on the walls and storage boxes accumulate across the floor.

 

Wielebinski has also decommissioned one of the gallery’s bathrooms, which contains a two-channel sound and scent installation. Whereas one channel diffuses a scent evocative of bodily musk and secretions, the other gestures toward the denial of bodily reality through classed and gendered aromas associated with aspiration and luxury. Marked by layered smells and the low, continuous hum of a looped electric bus engine, this enclosed space is accessible only through two holes pierced into one of the gallery’s walls, placing the viewer in a position suspended between voyeurism and exclusion.

 

Building on Wielebinski’s exploration of bunkers and semi-public space in his 2023 exhibition The Red Sun is High, the Blue Low at the ICA, London, Bring Me Men is structured around a tension between exposure and withdrawal. Taken together, the works on display outline the silhouette of a collector, someone whose identity is formed through accumulation, concealment, and display.

 

The juxtaposition of highly stylised commercial imagery with intimate or incidental materials collapses distinctions between public and private, sophisticated and banal. Here meaning emerges through association rather than resolution; objects are simultaneously offered and withheld, producing a field in which masculinity appears as an unstable assemblage –continuously constituted through repetition, regulation, and disavowal.

 

Credits: Scent developed by Gray Wielebinski and Fahad Mayet. Sound Design by Ivor Talbot



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