Pequod Co. is pleased to announce its participation in Art Basel Miami Beach 2025 with a solo booth by Renata Petersen.
The project features a series of five ceramic panels produced specifically for the fair, presented alongside an installation of more than 80 chrome-blown glass elements and a set of vases.
The presentation extends from Petersen’s recent solo exhibition at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, where she executed a 25-meter-long mural—her most ambitious installation to date. That project constructed a narrative moving between the chronological and the anachronistic, the real and the fictional,exploring new forms of religiosity, particularly in the United States and Latin America, in parallel with certain passages from the Old Testament. The work,titled The Secret Gospel Church of Phallic Worship, served as an homage to the popular knowledge embedded within a variety of movements that often exist at the margins of conventional religions.
Petersen’s visual universe involves a pastiche of infamous characters, incendiary scenes,dark humor, and striking phrases drawn from sects, schisms, and groups of thekind. Her drawings—seemingly without a conventional, legible structure—move across different vessels of display: murals, pots, plates. Suddenly, the negative space between these objects locates the viewer in the middle of a chaotic universe in which principles and ideals of multiple origins coalesce into a stereotypical, commonplace cloud of evangelizing fervor.
Her work is not a sensational critique of religion. Instead, it invites us, as a society, to reflect on how the collective management of spirituality and faith can become distorted in the hands of structures closely intertwined with power,politics, and money—structures that often culminate in the consolidation of messianic figures, typically masculine and patriarchal.
At the center of the space, Tere’s a New World Coming plays with the notion of the megalomaniacal consummation of such figures: it is a city /temple / phallic sculpture in which the deepest and darkest ambitions of the human psyche are reflected, fantasizing about transcendence through the monumental architecture that so often accompanies the most “successful”spiritual factions.
Petersen’s research draws from anecdotes of both well-known and obscure groups that have permeated different strata of popular culture through the magnitude of their reach and the scale of their transgressions. She illustrates these accounts with a mixture of irreverence, vulgarity, astonishment, and disbelief.
Renata Petersen (Guadalajara, 1993) holds a degree in Visual Arts from the Escuela Nacional de Pintura, Escultura y Grabado “La Esmeralda.” In 2025, her work entered the permanent collections of the Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil and the Colección Yuyito in Mexico City, and the Omnilife Collection in Guadalajara.
Her work has been exhibited at the Museo Tamayo and Museo de Arte de Zapopan inMexico, as well as at the Hammer Museum, the Dallas Contemporary, and the Oklahoma Contemporary Museum in the United States, among other venues.
