Post-Fair 2025

Chris Sharp Gallery is pleased to present a solo booth of the late German-Iraqi sculptor, Lin May Saeed (b. 1973, Würzburg, Germany; d. 2023, Berlin, Germany) at Post-Fair.

Since her untimely death at the age of 50 in 2023, Saeed's visibility and reputation as one of the most important European sculptors of her generation has only grown. This has been thanks in large part to a recent spate of solo surveys including: GAMeC, Bergamo, Italy (2024); The Snow Falls Slowly in Paradise. A dialogue Renée Sintenis, Georg-Kolbe-Museum, Berlin, Germany (2023); along with group exhibitions including Manifesta 15, Barcelona (2024) The Lifes of Animals, M HKA, Antwerp, Belgium; The Parliament of Marmots, Biennale Gherdëina 9, Ortisei, Italy; For Margot, Etablissement d’en Face, Brussels, Belgium, among others. She will have two solos this year at Sapieha Palace, Vilnius, Lithuania (October, 2025) Buitenplaats Kasteel Wijlre, Holland (May, 2025) and be featured in a number of group exhibitions at major institutional venues including Wiels, Brussels; Salt, Istanbul; and the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens. This presentation represents a rare opportunity to see significant pieces in the US.

Lin May Saeed made sculptures, sculptural reliefs, drawings, works on paper and video. Known to use non-traditional materials, such as and especially styrofoam, Saeed’s work is directly linked to and thematically informed by her interest in animals and her commitment to animal activism. Her work deals with the exploitation of animals, their depiction, liberation, and potentially harmonious relationship with human beings, and the self-seeking meanness of the latter. Saeed’s iconographic frame of reference is rich and varied. It includes Egyptian statuary, Greco-Roman sculpture, and scientific and natural history museum displays, among other things. She was a sculptor in the truest sense of the term. By which is meant that her work critically interrogates what a sculpture can be, both materially and conceptually, and how it relates to three-dimensional representations of orders of knowledge. Generally eschewing noble materials, such as marble and wood, she was drawn to styrofoam precisely because it is an essentially ugly and difficult material, which she sought to aesthetically redeem, despite and because of its essentially ruinous use of and impact upon nature. Generally speaking, the work becomes especially relevant in our post-enlightenment, anthropocene paradigm, where the relationship between the so-called natural world and humanity is being radically re-evaluated. Apparently naïve and enchanting, her colorful representations of animal life are nevertheless suffused with a scientific understanding of her subject and aim for an identifiable likeness. Hers is a sculpture in which there is virtually no gap between her political convictions and the formal and conceptual considerations of her medium.