Alex Yudzon: Pied-à-terre
June 4 – August 25, 2025 at The Gallery at Ace Hotel Brooklyn
Opening reception: June 4, 7–9 PM
Alex Yudzon has spent the past decade transforming hotel rooms into temporary studios, sculptural playgrounds, and photographic stages. Known for his idiosyncratic approach—constructing elaborate installations using only the furniture and objects found within each room—Yudzon captures these ephemeral compositions in a single photograph before dismantling the evidence and checking out. The resulting images are part still life, part performance relic, part architectural hallucination. They reflect his fascination with transience, privacy, and the absurd theater of American interiors.
Pied-à-terre, his exhibition at Ace Hotel Brooklyn, extends this practice in new and unexpected ways. Granted an unusual luxury—time—Yudzon spent a full month inhabiting two rooms (two weeks each) as part of the hotel’s Artist in Residence program. This pause allowed him to slow down, break his own rules, and explore the edge between improvisation and intention. Where his earlier work obeyed strict constraints (no outside objects, no adhesives, no assistance), Pied-à-terre embraces leakage. Yarn, tape, a ceramic parrot, a poster of the universe: objects from the outside world sneak into the frame, complicating the sealed logic of the room.
Some photographs were made impulsively in the span of a few hours; others evolved over days of careful adjustment. Together, they form a portrait of the room as both container and collaborator, a space in which personal ritual, visual play, and existential reflection coexist. “No room, no matter how sealed,” Yudzon writes, “can keep the outside world completely out.”
Alex Yudzon: A Room for the Night
Alex Yudzon (b. 1977) began photographing in hotel rooms in 2014, when a trip abroad found him stranded in a foreign city with an abundance of free time and a dearth of creative outlets. He began assembling the furniture in his room into a series of installations, photographing as he went along. Since then, his fascination with the hotel room as both a laboratory for creativity and a zone of transgression has only intensified.
In the intervening years he has developed a stringent approach to making the work: he uses only the furniture found in the rooms he occupies; he works in secret; he works alone. Using this approach, Yudzon stacks, leans, and balances furniture in configurations that transform these generic interiors into hallucinatory worlds where the laws of physics are suspended and dormant emotions released. After the installations are documented, they are dismantled and the rooms returned to their original condition. The resulting photographs, shot in a style reminiscent of crime scene photography, remain the only existing evidence of what transpires during his stay.
Initially conceived as a series of journeys, A Room for the Night focuses exclusively on American hotels. The aim of this book is not to present a comprehensive overview of hotels in America. Rather, the images and text contemplate our uneasy relationship to the hotel as a liminal space operating beyond the codes and conventions that govern the outside world. Combining dark humor, loneliness and creative obsession, this work tells the story of not just the installations, but of the hotels themselves, the people that own and operate them, the communities in which they're based, and the journey through which they are connected.
Learn more and order your copy here.