Nari Ward, Milan review — Harlem detritus turned into supermassive sculptures

The stench of fish fills my nostrils. Salt crunches under my feet. Plantains are dangling above my head. I’m surrounded by dozens of depictions of the Madonna and Child, catalogue pages mounted into the walls of a greenhouse-like structure. The pungent smell soon becomes stifling — looking down, I realise a mosaic of granite tiles laid out on the floor is, in fact, a tessellation of chunks of cured cod, the tiny fins still visible.

The pungent installation is a new iteration of Nari Ward’s “Super Stud”, a work the artist first made in 1994 and which he has recreated as part of Ground Break, a Herculean retrospective at the Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan, a sensory overload that deftly handles the protean nature of Ward’s 30-year practice.

The Madonnas and Children that adorn the walls of “Super Stud” come from the catalogue of Robert Lehman’s hefty art collection — which the investment banker bequeathed in its entirety to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1969 on the condition it be put on permanent display. The piece makes me ponder the flimsy line between preservation and pompousness. Knowledge, when forced upon us, is oppressive. Yet it’s the smell of the cod that stays with me.

Ward, by his own account, was “produced by that boilerplate of Harlem in the Nineties”. Born in Jamaica, he moved to the neighbourhood in the 1980s and still resides there. Some of his best-known works — mostly shown, until now, in the US — are installations he made in the 1990s out of discarded items from Harlem’s pavements, cacophonous masses that reflected the vibrancy and the crises of the neighbourhood, turning everyday trash into liturgical treasure.

Among his 1990s hits on show is “Carpet Angel” (1992), a glorious reincarnation of rolled-up carpets (left in the studio he was subletting at the time) bound with plastic bags and suspended to resemble the wings of a celestial spirit. Beneath this floating form is a pile of melted plastic bottles, screws, rope — daily detritus now protected by this guardian.

Metaphors for transformation and regeneration arise directly from Ward’s way of working, wresting objects from the flux of life and freezing them in time and space. The spectacular entry point to this exhibition is “Hunger Cradle” (1996/2024). The woven work contains fragments collected from a historic building in Harlem, an abstract document of its different uses over the decades, constructed in 1916 and serving as a fire station, then a piano moving company, and later a limousine service.

Travelling under a magnificent, suspended net, constructed from intricately intertwined, colourful threads (strings once used in moving pianos), we bear witness to the remnants of the building’s life: crushed Budweiser cans, bits of houses, tyres, broken piano parts. There are new, site-specific additions too — an old maquette of Ward’s work, breeze blocks borrowed from an artwork by Ann Veronica Janssens. These vestiges are held, as the title suggests, in the comfort of this cocoon, but also they are also entangled in the insatiable, unstoppable churn of consumerism.

Emerging from this beast, the work gets yet more monumental and staggering in size — and less on the nose. The colossal industrial space, once used to manufacture trains and aircraft, is windowless and dimly lit; Ward’s works, which employ tin cans, glass bottles, Plexiglas and caramelised sugar, glitter and glisten and seem to emit their own light. Many of them float, suspended in the air — inviting you to look up, and out. The whole space vibrates, with sounds bleeding into each other from installations and video pieces. It’s like being in outer space or deep under the ocean (both the cosmos and water are important motifs for Ward). Certainly, the feeling is beyond time and place.

While previous US surveys foregrounded Ward’s connections to the Caribbean and Harlem, this retrospective also brings attention to his long relationship with Italian Modernism. A motif of glass bottles is in part influenced by Giorgio Morandi’s still-life studies; “Home Smiles” references Piero Manzoni’s “Artist’s Shit” (1961), though Ward’s offer of canned smiles has a more positive spin. So much of Ward’s approach chimes with Arte Povera in his search for raw, immediate material expressions using heavy-duty, readily available materials.

Ward’s is the vision of a “liquid modernity” — the Polish philosopher Zygmunt Bauman’s idea that “change is the only permanence, and uncertainty is the only certainty.” Ward’s engulfing installations are still growing and evolving, swallowing up and macerating contemporary life — until they spill out, glorious, mysterious and unresolved.

Later, a crowd gathers around a new floor installation, also titled “Ground Break”, an 18 metre by 18 metre construction made up of 4,000 bricks (again borrowed from Janssens’ exhibition). Laid on the bricks are sheets of copper, a material Ward has returned to for many years — a material alter-ego for the artist, a resilient substance that can be a conduit or used to heal. On the copper, Ward has spray-painted a composition of spirals, using prayer beads and the bricks as stencils. The patina of purple and blue inks on the vast surface evokes telescopic images of galaxies, the swirling patterns creating their own kind of cosmos. Also visible are footprints, left by Ward’s Timberland boots and Air Jordans while making the work — a rare trace of the artist’s body in the universe he has created.

“There’s something within me, that I can’t seem to explain,” a man sings in a beautiful and sorrowful timbre as he walks slowly around “Ground Break”, beating a battered tin bucket. The installation becomes a stage for musicians, who tinker with instruments, improvising, conjuring, teasing out sounds that evoke drops of water swelling into thrashing waves. In the crowd, Ward, dressed in a black baseball cap and tinted glasses, looks on. The performance, “Water Spirits”, led by Florence-based artist Justin Randolph Thompson, is part of a programme to be held in response to the works, heightening the multisensory experience. All around, Ward’s huge works shimmer and scintillate. “Ground Break” reminds me of another artist — Leonardo — by harnessing the enormity of and wonder at the secret codes and symbols that structure and shape our worldly existence.

In the simplest terms, Ward gives us metaphors for possibility and change: one person’s nothing can become another’s everything. But there are so many levels to Ward’s ambitions. Ground Break presents Ward as one of the best material storytellers of our time.

To July 28, pirellihangarbicocca.org