Carrie Mae Weems

Galerie Barbara Thumm is delighted to present its fourth exhibition with the outstanding American artist Carrie Mae Weems (born 1953 in Portland, Oregon), one of the most influential voices in contemporary art today. Over a career spanning more than four decades, Weems has built a complex, multifaceted body of work across photography, film, installation and other media, engaging consistently with the social and political questions that continue to shape our world. The exhibition opens alongside Weems's touring exhibition Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter at C/O Berlin during Berlin Art Week 2026, as part of a series of events celebrating her work. In the series Seaside, Weems returns to her now-iconic strategy of self-portraiture as witness. Photographed from behind on a single stretch of beach, the artist appears in moments of quiet reverie, facing the horizon of the ocean. Seated at an easel, she attempts to capture the vast, unknowable scale of the Atlantic passage. Across the sequence – seated, then standing, and finally unable to contain the immensity before her – pages from her sketchbook are caught and scattered by gusts of wind, underlining the limits of representation in the face of histories of displacement and trauma. The Law of Diminishing Returns consists of five oval-framed photographs that evoke, in miniature, the passage of human bodies across the ocean. Recalling early photographic portraiture in their intimate scale, the works reflect on the enormity of global migration, from the transatlantic slave trade to present-day economic displacement. Their modest size demands close viewing, inviting contemplation and an act of bearing witness to movements of profound historical consequence. The works shown at Galerie Barbara Thumm are in dialogue with The Long Goodbye, a film commissioned for the opening of V&A East in London (April–October 2026). In the film, Weems traces how bodies of water – from sweeping currents to gentle tides – have shaped us, enabling transatlantic migration and continuing to affect communities in east London and beyond. The work explores the new identities and artistic forms created by those who have crossed oceans, whether by choice or by force. Weems celebrates the cultural diversity that connects and underpins the foundations of contemporary cities. Transcending fear and adversity, water and the networks of migration it carries become the fuel of global creativity. Weems has presented numerous solo and group exhibitions at institutions including Kunstmuseum Basel, the Völklinger Hütte, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the LUMA Foundation, Fondazione Prada, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Frist Art Museum. Her many awards and fellowships include a MacArthur Fellowship and, most recently, the National Medal of Arts in 2024. She was recently commissioned to create work for the Obama Presidential Center, and her work is held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the National Gallery of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, Tate Modern and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. She lives and works in Syracuse, New York.