David Altmejd describes himself as a medium—an interpreter and channel for the energies already embedded within the materials with which he works. It took years, but sculpture gradually revealed itself to him as a vehicle for both transcendence and inquiry—moving in and out of science and the physical structure of materials, in and out of human creativity and artistry. Those energies, he maintains, can be shaped into forms that echo existing symbologies and archetypes drawn from a collective unconscious. Observer met with the visionary Canadian artist during a whirlwind Los Angeles Art Week and ahead of his major solo exhibition at White Cube New York (his first in the city in over a decade) to discuss the sources behind his work and how his process leans toward alchemy, Jungian excavation of the unconscious and allowing forms and symbologies to surface on their own terms.
It all comes down to particles, he says—those elemental units that arrange themselves into remarkably ordered structures, shaping our perception of what we call reality, only to be retranslated into symbolic forms and figures. Creation is about becoming a catalyst or a conduit for the new circulation of matter and energy. “There is a connection between matter and mother,” the artist says as we discuss the show’s central piece, which is still in his studio, waiting to be completed before following his other works to New York. “My hand has the potential to give what is invisible a form. I’m just at the intersection between the invisible and physical reality, and all I’m doing is letting those invisible energies work through me. I’m not really the one deciding what form they’re going to have. They decide what form they’re going to have. That’s something that I’m becoming more and more aware of.”
While the traditional notion of sculpture often centers creation as a deliberate, human-driven act, Altmejd has learned to relinquish that control. “Every choice that I make comes from me; I’m controlling all my decisions. Then I realized that was probably very difficult. I was battling with something else, and I didn’t even realize it. I thought it was me having a difficult time, forcing order on chaos.” In this exhibition, he is consciously letting both forces—order and chaos—manifest fully, alive and brimming in the creative tension between them. “Then, somehow, by accident, something happens, a form reveals, the original sculpture mutates, and I then really have the feeling like that’s what the work wants to become.” In other words, Altmejd stopped trying to impose his will on materials and began instead to facilitate the movement of matter toward its next form. “I’m sort of trying to seduce it, influence and accompany it.”
SEE ALSO: What’s in a Name? Mao, Margaret Thatcher and Marie Antoinette Offer Answers at MONA
As we converse, I’m not surprised to find our talk drifting into Jungian psychoanalysis—a framework that has long intrigued Altmejd. “I started my career as a sculptor, making sculptures of decapitated wild wolves. Just now, reading Jung and thinking about archetypes, I realized I was just dealing with the shadows.” In many of his works, Altmejd allows the grotesque, uncanny and informal to emerge freely—summoning creatures that exist in states of transition and metamorphosis. Archetypes don’t precede the work; they arise through it as he molds material as part of yielding to its inner forces. “It’s usually not at the moment of sketching that the idea starts,” he explains. “For example, I can work on a very masculine piece, I can have an idea of a very masculine piece, and as soon as I manipulate the material, I become aware of feminine energy. Sometimes, it’s because I keep making mistakes, as the material suggests a different type of form. I just have to surrender, listen to it and conduct it to become what it wants to be next.”
And yet, no matter how hybrid or mutational these beings become, Altmejd insists that they are always reaching toward something recognizably human. “I want to relate to them, I want to have a relationship with them. I want to look at them in the eyes,” he says, emphasizing how these uncanny presences serve as confrontational mirrors—for himself and for the viewer—summoning the monsters from our collective subconscious and forcing us to face what lies hidden.
At the same time, there is something unmistakably alchemic in Altmejd’s process. As he explains, crystals can emerge from plaster and concrete because a slight shift in the atomic configuration of particles—just enough to realign carbon—can transform the blackest matter into something perfectly clear. When life burns down to its elemental state, he says, it becomes pure carbon—completely black, absorbing all the light. “Its atomic structure is extremely chaotic. Because all the carbon atoms are are misaligned and placed chaotically, that’s what gives it its black aspect. But if it’s compressed enough, all the carbon atoms become perfectly aligned and transparent to the light.”
This duality—between light and dark energies, between order and chaos—cycles through a sculpture he has conceived; one that, like much of his past work, suggests an endless metamorphosis of form and energy. “I’m just feeling those energies inside the material and giving them an outlet. I’m connecting with it through the material.”
The resulting figure is vast and serpentine. Fragments of heads and faces, shifting between human and something else entirely, accumulate into something that resolves into the body of a giant snake. Yet even in its formal structure, the sculpture refuses linearity. It moves through brisk, unexpected curves and sharp breaks, leaping from generation to decay, from death to rebirth—in an eternal flow of primordial forces: eros and thanatos, creation and destruction, collapse and becoming. “It is both terrifying and completely seductive. That’s what also life is,” Altmejd reflects, describing how this monstrous figure evolves into something symbolic, existential and deeply spiritual… a kind of ancestral deity composed of many ancestral visions, the serpent holds multiple heads, each one representing a moment in the cycle—a powerful totemic presence reminding us of the ongoing rhythm of fall and rise, birth and death, and the vital transformations in between.
This ominous, shape-shifting presence dominates the gallery space, juxtaposed with a sculpture far more harmonious in tone: a snake charmer, seated cross-legged, playing a pipe or ancient flute. Where the serpent spirals with chaos, the final sculpture advances through a precise multiplication of forms—calculated and numerically exact—evoking the highly ordered patterns of atomic or molecular structures.
While order and chaos manifest on the gallery’s ground floor, Altmejd stages something far more fluid upstairs: the vibrant, swirling dance of particles and atoms that sustain the universe’s continuous transformation. Here, his iconic bronze sculpture takes the form of elegant, sinuous nymphs—figures the artist sees as metaphors for the generative force of feminine energy. They move as if caught in wind, their rhythm guided by male figures playing hybrid flutes, all set within a space populated by swans.
Drawing once again on Jungian analysis and archetypal imagery, Altmejd shares his fascination with the swan—a creature he views as spiritually resonant, gliding with ethereal grace across the water’s surface. “I was really interested in the swan as a sort of symbol of this sort of spiritual order. It just spends most of its time on the surface of a lake, so it’s very connected to the unconscious: sometimes, it dips into the water to feed itself and into the psyche’s abysses. In that sense, I feel it is very close to my condition as a sculptor. I also want to be in between those dimensions.”
More than in any previous exhibition, Altmejd’s White Cube show fully embraces his awareness of the deep, inescapable connection between his role as a sculptor and the unseen forces that shape the material world. The work navigates the interplay of invisible cosmic and psychic energies, forces that animate a universe in perpetual flux: between growth and decay, order and disorder, harmony and chaos. “Recently, I’ve started to think about the connection between chaos and order,” he concludes. “I always thought my job as an artist was imposing order on chaos. This is the very traditional notion of art I was raised with. But I realize now that chaos has its own intelligence, will and desires, and I cannot control it. It is, instead, the very source of creation. Everything that comes out in the world comes from chaos. All I can do is play with it.”
“David Altmejd: The Serpent” opens at White Cube New York on March 14 and runs through April 19, 2025.
<