Alongside his participation in exhibitions in NFT.NYC in June 2025, HERSOID organised a solo show at Temple Gallery. The show was a collaboration with New York crypto performance art outfit METABETTIES, with whom HERSOID had worked for the Interstellar Overdrive show at Canvas 3.0 in the World Trade Centre. The show featured paintings, drawings and prints that deal with HERSOID’s ongoing themes of societal decline, technological invasion of private life and the existential crises facing humanity.
The performance by METABETTIES concluded the events of the evening, a unique choreography that drew on the themes of the show but added the Betties unique twist on the crypto environment, feminism and digital society.
A beautiful curation of a diverse selection of artists by Kei Gowda for Linda Global. The event featured Linda Global’s trademark ‘sculptural’ hanging style, with screens suspended in dynamic combinations to showcase the selections by various artists.
As part of the NFT NYC conference 2025 HERSOID was curated by Linda Global and Mallow.art as part of a group show hosted at Crypt gallery – an exclusive NFT gallery inside the remarkable and luxurious Dream Hotel NYC. The curation – a team effort between Mallow’s Kaya and Linda Global’s Kei Gowda was a selection of square format pieces from around 30 artists, to reflect the unusual but beautiful square screens in the Hotel lobby. Crypt gallery curates these screens as well as a standalone gallery space at the hotel, where at this time an exhibition by Russian rooftopper Angela Nikolau was opening.
We had a wild time with the marvellous meta betties, whose outlandish performance combined perfectly with the hang in the gallery and utilised all the little spaces that were available.
This piece from Hersoid’s current exhibition pulls no punches. It’s a sharp visual pivot from the lethargic stillness of the seated quartet to something far more cinematic and brutal: an ambush, a collapse, or maybe just the final act of late-stage capitalism played out on a sun-bleached pavement. Three suited figures lie splayed in contorted positions, briefcases and limbs flung outward like punctuation marks in a Kafkaesque sentence that’s just lost coherence.
Where the previous piece bled out slowly—drip by drip—this one explodes in eerie silence. The drawing is stark, graphic. That humble building in the background, signposted “PRIMA” (a name laced with both optimism and sinister bureaucratic overtones), is rendered with care and texture, creating a tension between place and event. It could be a rural post office, a café, a travel agency—anything mundane enough to feel plausible. And that’s the point. In Hersoid’s world, horror hides in plain sight.
This scene reads like a still from a paranoid political allegory—something out of Costa-Gavras or The Trial reimagined in tropical decay. The specificity of the suits and briefcases links these fallen men to the machinery of systems—administration, finance, law. Yet their dramatic sprawl feels closer to Ionesco or Pinter: the aftermath of a violence no one heard, in a town that’s already forgotten.
Within the broader themes of the exhibition, this piece reinforces Hersoid’s fascination with the breakdown of order—both social and perceptual. The linework is crisp but claustrophobic. Perspective subtly collapses, especially where the building seems to warp into abstraction, unmooring the scene from any clear geography. This echoes earlier drawings in the show where figures or buildings teeter on the edge of disappearance, or where drips and distortions suggest memory overwriting reality.
Importantly, this work also deepens the show’s interplay between place and displacement. That fragile vernacular architecture—ramshackle, improvised, barely standing—mirrors the mental and institutional collapse embodied by the fallen men. These are not assassinated bodies; they are expended ones. The system they represent has chewed through them and spat them out like worn cogs.
Hersoid’s ability to conjure this kind of quiet devastation—half noir, half folktale—is what gives the exhibition its unsettling power. Nothing screams. Everything seeps. This drawing is a rupture, but a contained one. Like a fable told after curfew, it warns us in whispers.
Would you like a press-release style overview tying the exhibition together as a whole?
Hersoid’s new piece from the latest exhibition—seen here with its melancholic quartet slumped in a loose, purgatorial waiting room—draws a direct line from the existential dread of Kafka to the psychological dislocation of Beckett. The figures, rendered in fragile linework and bleeding washes of orange-red ink, are not so much seated as suspended—dangling somewhere between bureaucratic inertia and metaphysical exhaustion. The drips are particularly arresting. They run like time, or blood, or bureaucratic ink—slow, inevitable, indifferent. Aesthetically, they echo the controlled chaos of Egon Schiele’s stained edges, but narratively they’re closer to The Trial or Waiting for Godot: no arrival, no explanation, just a long wait and slow decline.
This painting, like others in Hersoid’s current show, leans heavily into that visual grammar of existential malaise. Across the exhibition, Hersoid has been building a lexicon of weary figures: bent, liminal, often caught mid-collapse. Where other works in the show play with more abstract voids or surreal architectures, this one is unusually direct. The chairs are chairs. The bodies are bodies. Yet something remains untethered—as if even the furniture can’t quite agree to reality. This grounding in the recognisable makes the bleeding pigment all the more violent—a wound not just in the body, but in the fabric of the social.
Literarily, there’s also a trace of Bruno Schulz here: the way the figures feel half-dreamt, slipping in and out of coherence. Schulz’s “sanatorium” logic applies—the idea of time folding inward, of characters condemned to loop through gestures that might once have meant something.
Hersoid’s genius here is that they don’t overplay it. The composition is spare. The background is blank. The colour is sparse but potent. The ambiguity is generous. This is storytelling in the syntax of silence, fatigue, and ink.
Hersoid‘s latest artwork continues his signature approach of blending the mundane with the surreal, echoing themes of routine, alienation, and quiet absurdity. This piece builds on his existing oeuvre by juxtaposing everyday activities—such as using an ATM—with an intricate, almost hypnotic background pattern.
Composition & Themes:
The two figures, rendered in a semi-sketchy yet precise linework, seem almost lost in an environment that overpowers them visually.
The background, with its repetitive geometric pattern, disrupts spatial perception, creating a sense of disorientation—perhaps a commentary on modern life’s monotony or an allusion to the Kafkaesque bureaucracy of financial transactions.
There’s an interplay between the rigid structure of the figures (their gestures suggest quiet introspection or mild frustration) and the almost pulsating, undulating background, which adds an element of the uncanny.
How It Fits with HERSOID’s Oeuvre:
Recurring Subjects: The depiction of anonymous, everyday individuals engaged in ordinary activities aligns with Hersoid‘s previous works, which often capture fleeting yet strangely significant moments.
Pattern as Reality Distortion: The hyper-stylized background is a hallmark of his style, blurring the boundary between realism and abstraction, much like the way Borges’ fiction transforms reality with a touch of the infinite or the impossible.
Muted Color Palette & Graphic Contrast: The limited but effective use of color—contrasting the subdued, cool tones of the figures with the vivid background—creates a layered effect, reinforcing the sensation of separation between people and their environments.
In 9 to 5, HERSOID turns his sardonic gaze on the slickest tragedy of late capitalism: the corporate man—suited, salaried, slumped. This new series is a bruised ballet of unconscious bodies, each figure finely rendered and floating in negative space like discarded icons of a failed religion. These are not portraits of power, but of collapse masquerading as leisure—high-functioning dysfunction draped in Italian wool.
The businessmen depicted are faceless, slack-limbed, and exquisitely overdressed. Their bodies suggest both victory and ruin. Some appear to have fainted mid-celebration; others seem to have simply stopped functioning, like corrupted office equipment. HERSOID paints them with an almost forensic delicacy, the shadows under their knees as carefully modelled as the folds in their silk ties. The absence of background is deafening—it places the men in a conceptual purgatory, floating somewhere between a corporate retreat and a moral void.
This is Wolf of Wall Street post-mortem. The suits are still pressed, the watches still ticking, but the human engines have failed. Beneath the polish is something closer to horror than humour. The series echoes the grotesque contradictions of Egon Schiele’s figure studies and the performative weariness of Francis Bacon’s suited men, but it’s reframed for our present era of burnout, offshore banking, and disappearing pension funds.
Here, HERSOID leans into one of his core themes: complicity. These aren’t villains, exactly—they’re avatars of a system that rewards recklessness and calls it ambition. Each painting is a quiet indictment of a class that is always falling, yet never seems to land. The series speaks to a broader cultural hangover: the cost of letting the high-functioning drunk pilot the economy.
Within the broader exhibition, 9 to 5 forms a sly counterpoint to Collapse and Mismanaged Consent. Where the former showed the physical failure of structures, and the latter exposed the illusions used to uphold them, 9 to 5 places the human instrument at the centre—the polished, exhausted figure who signs the papers, swallows the lie, and wakes up in the wreckage.
This is not a moral tale, but it might be a warning. Or a eulogy. Or just Tuesday in the boardroom.
