“Heji Shin: The Big Nudes”

Photography

Surrealism is alive and well and getting better all the time in “Heji Shin: The Big Nudes,” a wonderful show at 52 Walker, through Oct. 7, that’s not just about its subjects—brain scans, a pig (a detail of “Reclining Nude,” from 2023, pictured here)—but about photography itself. Working from a palette that includes Irving Penn grays and calling to mind body-scan photography by artists like Kurt Hoerbst, Shin shows and tells what makes a sensibility. The forty-seven-year-old German balances the often self-serious “art” photography of the past fifty years or so (the exhibition’s title refers to the late Helmut Newton’s large-format series of big nude women) with an outstanding sense of humor that takes the piss out of the concept of the nude. Are pigs naked? Are they showing us their emotions? And are emotions a landscape that a brain scan can convey? These are among the many questions raised by the very distinctive artist.—Hilton Als