| June 18, 2025 [Houston, Texas] — The Moody Center for the Arts announces its fall 2025 exhibition Bio Morphe, featuring seven international artists who evoke forms and patterns inspired by nature, as well as employ biological materials, to explore constructs of society, science, and technology. On view from September 5 – December 20, 2025, the exhibition includes works from Tishan Hsu, Lucy Kim, Berenice Olmedo, Christina Quarles, and Louise Bourgeois, as well as site-specific sculptural installations by Eva Fàbregas and Sui Park.
“At the Moody our mission is to connect disparate disciplines through the arts, and in so doing illuminate critical questions shared by artists, scholars, and scientists,” said Alison Weaver, Suzanne Deal Booth Executive Director of the Moody Center for the Arts. “Bio Morphe is an exciting exploration of fields ranging from biology and bioengineering to cognitive neuroscience, and we’re eager to invite our guests to be a part of these ever-evolving conversations.”
Offering intersecting and diverging approaches to biomorphism as a formal and conceptual focal point, the exhibition explores how the representation of organic forms can add nuance to questions around gender, disability, mass consumption, and the ethics of technological innovation. For example, Berenice Olmedo’s sculptures incorporate materials from the medical field meant to mimic human forms, such as prostheses and orthotics, to draw attention to the political dimensions of disability, illness, and care. Likewise, the commissioned work of Sui Park responds to the Moody’s architecture by creating tension between the synthetic and the organic with specific media—mass-produced industrial materials constructed to evoke cellular structures—to allude to the parallels between natural social interactions and coded patterns in technology. The inclusion of The Couple by Louise Bourgeois similarly echoes a contrasting interplay between the engineered material, cast aluminum, and the earthly curvilinear form.
“The artists in Bio Morphe share a specific preoccupation with organic life, from Christina Quarles’s paintings of fluid bodies to Eva Fàbregas’s organ-like sculptural forms to Tishan Hsu’s works that conflate the digital with the physiological,” said Frauke V. Josenhans, curator of the exhibition, “Combined with a through line that brings attention to the manipulation of biological systems, as embodied by the works of Lucy Kim, the exhibition presents a timely reminder of the importance of scientific research and the various ways in which it fuels creativity and civic engagement.”
To that end, the Moody will present a series of programs organized in conjunction with Bio Morphe including an interdisciplinary dialogue with Berenice Olmedo, presented in partnership with the Medical Humanities Program at Rice University and a dance commission by choreographer Gabrielle Lamb who works at the intersection of art and science to translate scientific phenomena into creative movement. Additional programming details are provided below.
At a time when scientific research is subject to increased public scrutiny, Bio Morphe foregrounds the ways in which artists can generate wide-ranging conversations about evolving relationships between the human body and the natural world by making visible findings that impact daily life.
The exhibition is curated by Frauke V. Josenhans. Graphic design is by Omnivore, Inc.: Alice Chung, Julie Cho, Karen Hsu.
Bio Morphe is made possible by the Libbie Rice Shearn Moody Fund for the Arts and the Thomas D. and Pamela Riley Smith Endowment for the Moody Center for the Arts. Major support is provided by the Elizabeth Lee Moody Excellence Fund, the Moody Center for the Arts Founders Circle, and the Institut Ramon Llull. |
