You Must Change Your Life: Curated by Tom Morton
GRIMM is pleased to present You Must Change Your Life, a group exhibition curated by Tom Morton on view at the New York gallery from June 26 to August 7, 2026.
Featured artists: Alexander Tovborg, Elinor Stanley, Sophie Ruigrok, Sara Rossberg, Jhonatan Pulido, Ken Kiff, Matthew Day Jackson, Ted Gahl, Gabriella Boyd, Anderson Borba, Kinga Bartis, Mahesh Baliga, Charles Avery
The group exhibition You Must Change Your Life takes its title from the final line of Rainer Maria Rilke’s extraordinary poem Archaic Torso of Apollo (1918), which has puzzled and inspired readers for more than a century. In this work, written at a time when Rilke was employed as secretary to the sculptor Auguste Rodin, the poet gazes lingeringly at a headless and limbless fragment of Classical statuary, which suddenly and without warning addresses him with the words: ‘For there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life’.
Bringing together an international group of painters and sculptors, the exhibition does not seek to illustrate Rilke’s poem, but rather to trace its multiple preoccupations, and channel its enigmatic atmosphere and orphic energies. Accordingly, You Must Change Your Life is concerned with how the past speaks to the present; the animation of materials and art objects by the numinous; the fragment as synecdoche; the persistence of the metaphysical impulse in our material age; the tranquillity, erotics and violence of visual contemplation; and how the human psyche is shaped by the act of seeing, and being seen.
For Rilke, an encounter with an ancient statue, a broken effigy of a no-longer-worshipped god, not only alerted him to his inextricable connection with the wider world (‘For there is no place that does not see you’), but also prompted him to re-examine his existence.
You Must Change Your Life is perhaps ultimately an exhibition about how works of art address us at a level beyond the eye or the mind, calling on us to embrace our capacity for transformation, and to remember the parts of ourselves we are so often persuaded to forget.
About the curator
Tom Morton is a British curator, writer, and regular contributor to frieze magazine, ArtReview, and Art Basel Stories. He has curated over 70 exhibitions, both as a curator at the Hayward Gallery, London (UK) and Cubitt Gallery, London (UK) and as an independent curator. His major shows include A Room Hung With Thoughts: British Painting Now, the Green Family Foundation, Dallas, TX (US), 2025; The Kingfisher’s Wing, GRIMM, New York, NY (US), 2022; Äppärät, The Ballroom, Marfa, TX (US), 2015; British British Polish Polish: Art from Europe’s Edges in the Long ‘90s and Today, co-curated with Marek Goździewski, CSW Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw (PL), 2013; and British Art Show 7: In the Days of the Comet, co-curated with Lisa Le Feuvre, Hayward Gallery, London (UK) and touring, 2010-11. Morton is the author of numerous monographic catalogue essays, on artists including Glenn Brown, Rashid Johnson, Pierre Huyghe, Christian Marclay, Tal R, Tschabalala Self, Tino Sehgal and Rose Wylie, among many others. He is based in Cambridge (UK).
