A black-and-white photo by Katherine Hubbard shows her elderly mother on a bed, leaning forward. A mirror by the window reflects them gently touching a child's face. The room has patterned curtains, a headboard, a stuffed animal box, and soft daylight from outside.

Katherine Hubbard

The Great Room

A major new photography and sculptural installation by Katherine Hubbard (b. 1981, Philadelphia, USA), the artist’s first institutional solo exhibition outside the US. Spanning photography and sculptural installation, the exhibition centres the shifting relationship between a mother and daughter, photographer and subject, to reflect on experiences of visibility, grief and illness.

Katherine Hubbard engages photography, performance, installation and writing to reflect on the enduring importance of the photographic image. For this new commission, the artist will expand on her series, The Great Room (2020–present). At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Hubbard’s mother, Antonette Berger, began to experience the effects of LATE, a progressive brain disease. Over several months, working with two 4×5 large-format film cameras, Hubbard and Berger moved through Berger’s home in Philadelphia, navigating the emotional experience of packing up a family home for a move into residential care. The exhibition will feature an architectural installation and newly commissioned photographs from the series, in conversation with existing images, extending across the six years that Hubbard has been working with Berger. 

Deeply embedded in photography’s materials and processes, Hubbard’s practice is concerned with the ways the camera and the body inhabit space. Understanding the photograph and our encounter with it as a live, ongoing process, the artist’s work questions what the power and procedures of analogue image-making might reveal about social politics, history and narrative.

The Great Room marks a departure in Hubbard’s practice. Responding to the compulsory confinement of a pandemic and the proximity that came from providing her mother with care, the series marks the first time the artist has consistently photographed another person. Using everyday objects and daily rhythms such as bathing and watching television, Hubbard and Berger created images amidst the boxes and the out-of-place objects of a dissolving domestic life.

Realising her largest sculptural installation to date, Hubbard will transform the gallery at Studio Voltaire into a labyrinth of thresholds that reference the partition wall Hubbard’s mother used to turn 'the Great Room' of her Philadelphia home into a make-shift bedroom, reshaping the architecture of the house. Orienting and framing the photographs – and altering visitors’ sightlines as they move through the space – the installation reflects on the act of viewership, collapsing the space between photographer and subject, viewer and viewed.

Alongside these intimate portraits, Hubbard will exhibit a series of experimental contact prints created when the artist brought her mother into a traditional black-and-white darkroom to make images. Coated in vaseline, Berger touched, leaned and pressed onto photographic paper, making marks from the heat and pressure of skin directly against paper. Capturing the proximity of the two women on the surface of the prints, the resulting images offer distorted glimpses of Berger; the texture of her skin, the outline of her body, the impression of a thigh. 

The Great Room draws on architecture, physical touch and gesture to reflect a bond shaped by love but complicated by the shifting landscapes of identity, memory and loss. Enabling these experiences to become tactile, Hubbard considers how perspective – where we stand in relation to what we see - indelibly shapes us and the worlds we inhabit. 

The exhibition has been developed in partnership with Secession, Vienna where an extended chapter of the exhibition will be presented from 12 June to 30 August 2026. Through this collaboration, the partners have co-commissioned new works by the artist.

Opening preview: Tuesday 6 October 2026, 6–9 pm. Free, all welcome.

  1. Katherine Hubbard (b. 1981, Philadelphia, lives and works in New York). Recent solo exhibitions include The great room, Company Gallery, New York (2023); Avoid glancing blows, Company Gallery, New York (2020); Katherine Hubbard, Higher Pictures, New York (2018); stages, Baxter St. Camera Club of New York, New York (2017); and Bring your own lights, The Kitchen, New York (2016). Group exhibitions include Time Management Techniques, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2022); Ecstatic Land, Marfa Ballroom, Texas (2022); A Collection of Slow Events, The Luminary, St. Louis, Missouri (2017); The Artist’s Museum, The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2016); and Greater New York, MoMA PS1 (2015). 

    Hubbard’s performances have been presented at the Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas; Konstfack, Stockholm, Sweden; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Her work is included in the permanent collection at the Whitney Museum of American Art. 

    Hubbard is a 2024 Guggenheim fellow in photography and received her MFA in 2010 from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College and is currently an Associate Professor and MFA Program Faculty Director at Pratt School of Art.

  2. Katherine Hubbard, one fifty one (hand-to-face), 2022. Silver gelatin photograph. Image courtesy of the artist and Company Gallery, New York.

A bright art gallery with high, dark wood vaulted ceilings, arched windows, white walls, paintings by T. Venkanna on display, and two wooden benches centred on a grey polished floor. Natural light streams in from the large windows at the far end.

T. Venkanna
Sculpture Garden

Exhibition