A Night with MSCHF and King Solomon’s Baby

July 17, 2025

It’s hard for a poster to catch my eye these days in New York City, what with the overwhelming number of them everywhere you turn. But when you walk past one depicting a statue of a baby sliced into several pieces, you have to stop and ask, What in the world is this all about?

Plastered around the city these past few weeks were posters advertising King Solomon’s Baby (2025), a 15-foot styrofoam sculpture of a giant baby created by the Brooklyn-based art collective MSCHF in collaboration with Pioneer Works, going for sale on July 10 for $100,000—but with a catch. If more than one person purchases the sculpture, the cost will be equally divided between the number of buyers, and the artwork itself will also be sliced live at Pioneer Works into up to 1,000 pieces and distributed at random to them.

The artwork is based on the parable “Judgment of Solomon” from the Old Testament, in which King Solomon had ordered that a baby—which two women had both claimed to be the mother of—be cut in half, so that each woman would receive a piece of him. While the first woman agreed with the ruling, believing it to be a fair compromise, the second woman pleaded to the king that he give the child to the first woman and let him live, even if it could not be with her. Having proven herself to be the baby’s true mother through her selflessness, the second woman was given the child by the king, a showing of immense wisdom by Solomon.

Words by Rana Alsoufi
Images courtesy of MSCHF and Pioneer Works

But MSCHF’s interpretation of the parable finds new meaning within the story. The act of cutting the sculpture into 1,000 pieces directly contradicts the original ending of the “Judgment of Solomon,” but falls directly in line with MSCHF’s ongoing mission of accessibility within the art collection world, and exploring the complexities of collective ownership of art. The blending of religion and art in this circumstance creates the unconventional vessel for this experiment. One of MSCHF’s creative directors Lukas Bentel tells me that part of the uniqueness of King Solomon’s Baby (2025) is that it provokes a discussion on what constitutes a piece of art’s worth.

“ Normally an artwork is something that we all appreciate, generally in a museum where many people could see it or in a private collection, but the image is something that we all kind of collectively own,” he says. “This is an interesting experiment to try to make as many people see if they would want to own this thing together, but together they all kind of destroy the actual piece.”

King Solomon’s Baby (2025) pokes fun at the idea that art collection is an investment—that authenticity and monetary value precede aesthetics and creative expression in importance. In 2020, MSCHF purchased an original Damien Hirst print for $30,000, only to meticulously cut out each spot on the artwork and sell them individually for $480 a piece—yet another callout of today’s art collection culture.

Like the Hirst print, cutting the baby into a thousand pieces makes it more accessible to a more diverse group of buyers, but simultaneously destroys the original artwork. “That's the tension with art ownership,” Bentel says on the matter. “And when you're making something in an art-world-specific context, often one person ends up technically owning it or stewarding that piece.”

I had no expectations for how quickly the sculpture would sell, or how many buyers there would end up being. A few minutes before it went up for sale, I pulled the website up and watched the countdown as it reached 2 p.m. Within eight seconds, the buyer counter had shot up from one to 12. It had reached 20 buyers after just a minute, and over 60 in five. At nine minutes and 16 seconds, the sculpture had broken 100 buyers, the counter gradually continuing to climb until all 1,000 pieces had been sold by 5 p.m.—three hours after the sale had officially begun. For just $100 plus shipping, one thousand people had become the proud owners of a slice of King Solomon’s Baby (2025).

“ The buying experience is more interactive than an acquisition usually is,” Creative Director Kevin Wiesner tells me. “I think there's more to explore for what MSCHF does in a gallery, which should be fun. It sort of points in an interesting direction.”

At the opening reception for King Solomon’s Baby (2025) at Pioneer Works in Red Hook, Brooklyn later that night, hundreds of people gather inside the spacious gallery to see the sculpture in person and to watch the inaugural slice live. The crowd is made up of diehard MSCHF fans clad in custom MSCHF gear, curious art lovers who heard of the event from a friend of a friend, and people who had wandered in completely clueless to what was going on alike. They circle the styrofoam sculpture in awe and total confusion, excitedly discussing among themselves what it could possibly mean. Some of them take selfies with the baby, while others squat around it, admiring the detail in the styrofoam.

The baby is a feat in itself. Etched on his face is a soft, tranquil smile, completely oblivious to what is inevitably to come, and I can’t help but to almost feel bad for the child, just for a moment. In the Bible, Solomon spares the baby’s life and allows him to live happily with his true mother—in this version, his body is divided into a thousand pieces and distributed all over the world. I ask some of the other guests what they think of the whole installation and the turnout. “MSCHF is a cult,” one person tells me with a shrug.

Veronica Bivas, a 21-year-old photographer wearing a skeleton mask and a black dress, was one of the first people to arrive at Pioneer Works for the opening reception. As she sits in a corner in the outside garden for a quick vape break, she opens up to me about her theories about the installation. “ I thought, maybe we’re the art project—maybe we’re the baby getting sliced,” she says. “This is MSCHF, to have people photograph us standing in this really long line for a closed warehouse in the middle of Red Hook. That's a cool concept, but also that's not the concept, but it's maybe part of the concept.”

As the D.J. plays an upbeat medley of Travis Scott, Snoop Dogg, and Doechii, Bentel, Wiesner, and a handful of other MSCHF-makers prepare to make the first slice into the sculpture. Donning their matching “MSCHF Refrigeration” black coveralls, Bentel inserts a hot wire (aptly shaped into a sword) through the stomach of the baby, making several passes through the styrofoam before the crew pulls the two halves of the sculpture apart, revealing a red interior with a white core, sort of resembling sliced ham. The crowd roars as they record the action on their phones, though the sight of a 15-foot baby cut in half is shocking and slightly grotesque—but perhaps MSCHF knows that. “Well, the baby’s dead,” Bivas says to me over the sound of cheers, “and we didn’t even know his name.”

After the slicing, Wiesner admits to me that large-scale performances that aren’t digital are still new to MSCHF, and that King Solomon’s Baby (2025) opened up a door to new possibilities for the art collective. “ I feel like the performance of doing that cut was a little bit of a last-minute thing,” he says. “Performance is this weird intangible thing that also kind of scales infinitely, which isn't necessarily something that I was thinking about in the pre-cut world, but I'm thinking about it in the post-cut world.”

The rest of the sculpture would continue to be sliced up while being livestreamed for the remainder of the weekend, with the final stack of slices staying on display on wooden pallets at Pioneer Works on July 13 before being shipped out to the 1,000 buyers. As the MSCHF crew passes the hot wire through each body part, the styrofoam squeaks and sizzles against the heat, and the red interior glitters under the Pioneer Works lights.

The depiction of a Biblical parable as the medium for this experiment is sure to garner mixed reactions, however MSCHF is no stranger to controversy. Who can forget the “Big Red Boot” that took social media by storm a couple of years ago, or the “Satan Shoes” made in collaboration with musical artist Lil Nas X that sparked all sorts of outrage and debates that ended in a lawsuit? Wiesner tells me that viral internet moments are never a goal at MSCHF, but rather a natural outcome that the art collective takes advantage of to allow for deeper, more widespread conversations. “It can be a tool for some of the concepts that we're working with, and also sometimes it just happens,” he says.

MSCHF continues to be an antihero within the capital-A Art World, and with 24 new projects planned before the end of the year, it’s safe to assume that they will continue along the trajectory of creating a spectacle while potentially exploring the possibilities that exist with doing more physically interactive installations.

“ I think we're interested in doing more IRL stuff, so it's sort of tangibly an exploration of that,” Wiesner says. ”I'm sure when we sit back with all of us after this, we’ll have a lot of takeaways based on how this went.” He pauses for a second before adding, “I don't think that everyone should start chopping up their sculptures now.”

Art

Form Without Formula: Ruth Asawa At Guggenheim Bilbao

May 01, 2026

Ruth Aiko Asawa believed that every minute attached to the earth should be spent doing something. That mantra is breathed into life into a new exhibition celebrating her work, Ruth Asawa: Retrospective, now open at the Guggenheim Bilbao.

The first major coverage of the artist’s work on the European continent, it comes alongside a wider appreciation of her craft and attention to space and form, coinciding with the 100th anniversary of Asawa’s birthday. Organised in partnership with the Museum of Modern Art, SFMOMA, and Guggenheim Bilbao, it is the first major museum retrospective to fully examine her six-decade practice containing 240 of her works, opening her practice up to a new generation and reaffirming her place as one of the defining American artists of the postwar period.

Words by Christine Ochefu

Bilbao’s Guggenheim is maybe an ideal setting for an artist so deeply concerned with space, movement, and form. Asawa’s work sits among other legendary names: Jenny Holzer, Yayoi Kusama, Rothko, Richard Serra’s gargantuan steel structure hovering nearby. Yet her sculptures feel entirely their own; her signature hanging forms, made from brass, copper, and bronze wire appear almost weightless. Often untitled, unnamed, and without obvious formula, they move with light and air despite their industrial materials. Still, there are repeated motifs: visually emulating woven baskets and craft weaving, her suspended forms use endless loops of wire to create “forms within forms,” often resembling cells, fruit, flowers, or planets suspended in space.

And in the exhibition there is a deeper appreciation of Asawa’s life and artistic principles. Born to Japanese American farmer parents, Asawa was busy from childhood, balancing schoolwork with life on the family farm whilst holding a strong work ethic from youth. During World War II, her family was forcibly placed in Japanese American internment camps under the Roosevelt administration, she and her siblings becoming separated from their father during the process. But even in the midst of her detainment she kept making, and her creativity was never separate from labour; she took life drawing classes and was inspired by the practice of fellow detainees, some of whom had worked as animators for Disney. She sourced any materials she could find— discarded rubber sheets, leaves even— to make her art.

It was only in later years she would become introduced to the looped wire technique she is widely known for, spending a summer in Toluca, Mexico, where she would take to traditional woven baskets sold at a craft market. But what makes the retrospective especially powerful is its attention to Asawa beyond the now-iconic wire sculptures. The exhibition offers a vision of Asawa as a woman whose private life was intimately reflected in her art, speaking to the age-old tussle between art, womanhood and motherhood and how she overcame it

For Asawa, the two were never separate. Her work was not made despite domestic life, but through it, with family, children, and home forming as part of the practice itself. Pieces drawn from her later years in San Francisco intimately bring her private life into focus and reveal the breadth of her multidisciplinary practice: paintings, drawings, prints, and notably clay and bronze casting. There are children’s feet cast in bronze, such as that of her grandson Henry, as well as casts of her own tools, her hands. Asawa famously plaster cast the faces of people in her home studio at the kitchen table, usually taking to a subject if she thought they looked interesting. And littered across the exhibition are some selections of those thousands of faces she cast in her lifetime. The artist once said that “an artist is someone who can take ordinary things and make them special.” It feels like both an artistic principle and a metaphor for her life.

Asawa spent much of her career defying the boxes placed around her— racism, wartime incarceration, discrimination, and the tendency to overlook women artists whose work was seen as too domestic or decorative. At the Guggenheim Bilbao, Ruth Asawa’s work feels both delicate and radical in reminding us how she turned those assumptions inside out. It reminds us that form does not need formula, and that the most powerful art can come from repetition, domesticity, and the refusal to stop making.

Art

Barbara Kruger: The Supreme Collager

April 30, 2026

Participating in the annual New York Antiquarian Book Fair, Harper's Books will exhibit acclaimed artists, including the legendary collager, Barbara Kruger. The collection of her original paste-ups encapsulates the artist's early transition from editorial design to contemporary art. As such, the collection feel more like an act of construction. Her blocky cut-outs of Futura are carefully assembled, tested, and positioned in order to simplify intense messages. Based on her time as a designer from both Mademoiselle magazine and leftist book publisher Schocken, Kruger masters how to strategically synthesize words and images in a way that is minimalistic yet riveting.

The work foregrounds her artistic methodology that defines her reputable portfolio today. This developmental phase reflects on how images circulate, how authority is established, and how meaning is shaped through the pairing of text and imagery. The pieces are from the 80s, when the voices answering these questions were still forming, meek and fluid. There's something so compelling about artwork from that past that so accurately portrays the present, reminding us that time exists on a spiral rather a linear line.

From April 30th to May 3rd, visit booth C23 at Park Avenue Armory to catch her work on display and for sale.

Art

Paul McCarthy: Power in the Provocative

I do what I want—what I believe in. We’re living in a pretty extreme time, and when people say my work is getting more extreme, I think that just reflects the world around us. I’m simply moving with the current.

Born in Salt Lake City, Utah, McCarthy’s beginning in the art world stems from proximal radicalization. After moving from Salt Lake City to study in San Francisco, McCarthy's work as an artist has always embodied this radicalization. Street-wise, known for being one of the most

“dangerous” artists in Los Angeles, this exhibit encapsulates that at its forefront. The artworks present provocative, scattered drawings and paintings that promote freedom from systematic censorship in the exchange between creator and receiver. His art style is distinctive in its intention of visibility over technicality, as seen in his limited color palette and intentionally imperfect techniques, but radical imagery.

McCarthy speaks about his artistic process as though the outcomes are inevitable and incredibly natural to him, given the current state of the world. Living in times of constant uncertainty has blurred the lines of media censorship; almost everything we consume is shaped by it, raising questions such as: Why was this said? Why was this created? Who is this for? Paul McCarthy’s work deconstructs this. His drive to create authentically and follow what feels natural to him results in art that inhabits the visual extremes of human experience, with the spirit of contestation serving as an added layer to the experience.