Public Gallery is pleased to present Gut Friendly, a duo exhibition of painting and sculpture by artists Victor Bengtsson and Umico Niwa, whose individual practices uniquely trace cycles of decay and renewal, together meditating on digestion as a poetic framework for processes of transformation. From this dialogue emerges a meditation on friendship – a porous exchange through which individual forms are metabolized into hybridized wholes, conjured through mythical acts of excavation and preservation.
Umico Niwa’s practice moves between sculpture and installation, creating worlds where myth and animism intertwine. Often fashioned from scavenged or organic materials – electroplated branches, fruit rinds, dried flora – her hybrid beings appear both mischievous and tender, inviting viewers to project memory and fantasy onto their delicate frames, blurring the boundary between play and ritual. From intimate objects to site-specific installations, Niwa resists binary definitions, suggesting that selfhood is an ongoing metamorphosis – a process of disintegration and recombination that yields new, often unruly forms of kinship.
Victor Bengtsson approaches painting as a stage for corporeal transformation. Working in undiluted oil on raw jute, Bengtsson’s work engages with the construction and reconstruction of narrative – the deformation of information as it circulates. His works destabilize distinctions between competing systems of knowledge, exploring how language and image become reshaped and obscured over time. The mill, a repeating motif across this new body of work, serves as a central analogy for Bengtsson, symbolizing the processing, digestion, and transformation of material culture. His compositions oscillate between light-hearted humor to dark and disturbed, reflecting on the hybridization of empirical data and myth, producing a fragmented, speculative history.
With humor both gentle and absurd, Gut Friendly stages Niwa’s and Bengtsson’s shared interest in hybridized bodies and metamorphic kinship – cultivating a space where digestion serves as metaphor for metabolizing difference and transforming in the act of exchange.
Victor Bengtsson (b. 1997, Copenhagen, Denmark) lives and works in Copenhagen, Denmark. Recent solo exhibitions include Town Squares, Andersen’s, Copenhagen (2025); Horse droppings are not figs, O—Overgaden, Copenhagen (2025); Når den hvide rod rejser sig / When the white root rises, Public Gallery, London (2024); The Gardener’s Son, Mendes Wood DM, Brussels (2023); and Proscenium, Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo (2021). He has participated in group exhibitions at dépendence, Brussels; Someday Gallery, New York; East Contemporary Gallery, Milan; and Den Frie Centre of Contemporary Art, Copenhagen. Permanent collections include the Fuglsang Kunstmuseum, Toreby, Denmark and the Danjuma Collection, London, UK.
Umico Niwa (b. 1991, Nagoya, Aichi, Japan) lives and works between the USA and Japan. Recent solo exhibitions include Memory Palace, Asia Society, Houston (2025); The Harbinger of Luck: Made of Kisses and Clovers x+x+, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Texas (2024);
My Life Inside A Shoe (the phantom cricket), Fig Gallery, Tokyo (2023); Mortal Afflictions, Final Hot Desert, Salt Lake City (2022); The Quantified Elf (and how it came to love itself), Someday Gallery, New York (2022); Neighborly Pest, Tilling, Montreal; Solar Coochie, Holding Contemporary, Portland (2020); and Fruiting Bodies, American Institute of Thoughts and Feeling, Tucson. She has participated in group exhibitions at the Sculpture Center, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Towada Art Center, Towada; Foreign and Domestic, New York; and Simone Subal, New York. Recent residencies include the CORE program at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2025); the NARS Foundation, New York (2023); and Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Omaha (2022).
