Ellie Rines Gallery (formerly 56 HENRY) presents Waterloo!, its inaugural exhibition at 46 Walker Street and Christopher K. Ho’s third solo show with the gallery. The exhibition features twenty new hand-wrought candelabra sculptures that examine the shift from the Napoleonic Wars to the Biedermeier era as a lens for the present. Drawing on T. J. Clark’s The Absolute Bourgeois, the works consider authority, censorship, and withdrawal into private life.The sculptures combine decorative-arts forms with Brutalist, Futurist, and Cubist references. Metallic armatures, counterweights, and embedded everyday objects (golf balls, plumb bobs, light bulbs) create a tension between utility and assemblage. Arranged in triangular groupings, they turn the gallery into a candlelit setting reminiscent of a Schubertiade. White pedestals wrapped in Biedermeier motifs stand on a custom rug reproducing Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People and Vernet’s 1848 barricade scene.Titles come from Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin. The installation juxtaposes domestic objects with revolutionary imagery to ask how private space and public upheaval intersect today. Ho (b. 1974, Hong Kong) lives and works in New York and Hong Kong.
Christopher K. Ho: Waterloo! Ellie Rines Gallery, New York. September 9, 2026.
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