FELIX BEAUDRY

Malleable Young Men

OPENING RECEPTION: Thursday, February 19, 6–8 PM

EXHIBITION DATES: February 19 – March 28, 2026

HOURS: Wednesday – Saturday, 11 AM – 6 PM

SITUATIONS

515 W 20th Street, Floor 3, New York, NY 10002

SITUATIONS presents Malleable Young Men, a solo exhibition by Felix Beaudry, exploring new ways of imagining and sculpting the human body in the age of artificial intelligence. The works in the exhibition are informed by Beaudry’s experimentation with knitting machines, digital tools, and AI programs, creating structures that suggest forms of human consciousness yet to emerge.

At the center of his practice is a series of head-sculptures made from continuous knitted fabric, sewn and draped over substructures or filled to allow natural forms. Each piece acts as a vessel for a networked intelligence, flexible and self-supporting, yet full of potential for movement. Beaudry approaches these forms as experiments in material, structure, and agency, asking what type of consciousness could inhabit bodies created for the future. 

Beaudry’s interest in artificial intelligence intersects with research on human collaboration and complex systems, inspired in part by historical galleons (large, multi-deck sailing ships from the 16th-18th centuries) and the organization required to navigate the open ocean. Like a ship’s construction and crew working in concert, the artist’s knitting machines, yarn feeders, needle beds, and computer-controlled carriages encode material into intricate, self-supporting structures. These vessels are both familiar and strange—human in reference, but designed to hold or interact with intelligences that are still emerging.

In Malleable Young Men, Beaudry grapples with questions at the intersection of human and artificial consciousness: how humans share complex knowledge, how intelligence can be embodied, and how new forms of agency might be realized physically. His sculptures point toward an expanded definition of what a body can be, exploring forms that are at once human, technological, and speculative.

This latest body of work is the result of human creativity channeled through the digital interface of software programming, matched with the production capacity of the knitting machine– roughly 300-1,000 times as efficient as a human. The Stoll machine activated by Beaudry’s vision is redeployed to build a man-made world not entirely unlike our own. Nearing the natural world, this simulation through knitwear represents the perennial desire to reshape our social and physical realities, as is already expressed through various kinds of software: textile engineering, design tools, and online spaces and channels where communities can congregate virtually. From concept to execution, the artist’s process begins as an idea of a three-dimensional object, its inherent properties, and functionality, which gets translated into two-dimensions, and back to three-dimensions as the final colorful and flexible sculptures take shape in real space. This process of mapping with the knitting machine, recalls the linkage of between mapping and exploration - as people travel further and more knowledge of an environment is gathered, the map becomes more complete.

Acting as pawns or avatars, Beaudry’s beings represent a complex network of interconnected concepts. At large, the exhibition draws inspiration from maritime history, in particular the physics and rigging of sailing ships, as well as the social history of sailors and its contemporary pop culture echoes in both boyhood and male-dominated spaces. Rippling muscle fibers, tense rope lines, and repeating bodily forms cohere into a social environment that’s both strange and familiar, inviting gallery visitors to sit, converse, and engage with each other and the works over time, where one’s physical form is in a continual state of flux, recombination, and reinvention. 

FELIX BEAUDRY (b. 1996 Berkeley, CA; lives and works in Kingston, NY) Beaudry graduated with a BFA from RISD in 2018. Beaudry has held solo exhibitions at SITUATIONS, New York; A Hug from the Artworld, New York; and Tatjana Pieters, Gent, Belgium. Group exhibitions include the Kortrijk Triennial, Belgium; The Bunker, West Palm Beach, FL; Mighty Real, Queer Detroit Biennial, Detroit; Club Rhubarb, New York, NY; Foreland, Catskill, NY (curated by New Discretions); Salon94, New York; Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York, NY (curated by Kory Trolio), David Lewis Gallery, East Hampton, NY, FIERMAN, New York, NY, Kravets Wehby Gallery, New York, NY, Margot Samel, New York, NY, and the RISD Museum, Providence, Rhode Island. Public collections include The Bunker, Palm Beach, FL, The Hall Art Foundation, Reading, VT and Kunstmuseum Schloss Derneburg, Holle, Germany.