Twenty-eight pipes salvaged from a decommissioned church organ glow neon green from within at Galerie Neu in Berlin, where Jeremy Shaw's Half-Life of Grace wires radioactive glass to sound.
Jeremy Shaw works across many mediums to explore altered states, and the cultural and scientific practices that try to chart transcendental experience. Half-Life of Grace, his first solo exhibition with Galerie Neu, extends those sculptural investigations into belief with a new body of work that pulls together scientific propositions, decommissioned spiritual artefacts and materials with toxic properties. It is on view until 7 November 2026, and spreads across two rooms.
The first room holds three wall-mounted sculptures strung together from interconnected Klein bottles. The Klein bottle is a four-dimensional idea forced into three, the model of a single-sided surface that, as the gallery writes, “folds in on itself without end.” The sculptures are flame-worked from borosilicate glass. Inside the chamber of each one sits the residue of vaporized freebase dimethyltryptamine (DMT), a psychoactive compound that can trigger intense psychedelic experiences.
The second room gives over to a single wall sculpture that carries the show's name, Half-Life of Grace (1958). It is built from 28 facade pipes taken from a recently decommissioned Christian church organ, made of a zinc-based metal alloy and marked, as the gallery writes, by “bends, dents, fingerprints, scratches, discolouration, engravings, repairs.” Each pipe holds a custom-fitted sleeve of hand-blown uranium glass, a radioactive material once common in decorative glassware before its production all but stopped after 1942.
Ultraviolet lights hidden inside the pipes run on programmed circuitry. Switched on, they make the uranium glass glow a neon green at the mouth of each pipe, while transducers set inside release sound timed to the light, what the gallery calls “an animated pattern of light and sound.” The title does the reasoning: a church organ pulled out of service, a decorative glass that is radioactive at its core, a psychoactive compound reduced to residue. Grace, given a half-life, measured out across all three.
