Amy Bravo

"Like A Horde Of Living Beings, We Gradually Covered The Earth”

Swivel Gallery is pleased to present Like a Horde of Living Beings, We Gradually Covered the Earth, Amy Bravo’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition brings together two new floor sculptures and six large-scale multimedia wall works, marking a deepening of Bravo’s mythic, materially dense practice into a meditation on survival, collectivity, and the strange persistence of life in inhospitable conditions.

January 24th - February 24th, 2026

555 Greenwich Street, New York City

Bravo’s work has long operated through accumulation—of objects, stories, bodies, memories—building worlds that feel at once ancient and speculative. In this exhibition, that accumulation becomes bodily and cosmic: flies, ants, butterflies, constellations, organs, heavens. The individual dissolves into the collective; the self becomes a system. One could ascertain from these new elements demanding entry into the work, a departure from the artist’s previous characteristics which often featured nature's most inherently powerful beings, bulls, horses, snakes, and the like that they are a stand-in for our current social and political climate. Ultimately, conveying the suggestion, and fact, that there is power in numbers, a denial between the distinction of predator and prey, a hard study of the characteristics that we hold as a collective and the power in that.

January is not a neutral setting in Bravo’s cosmology. It is a season of refusal. In her writing Alive in January, the artist conjures a speaker who rejects dormancy, and insists on movement when movement is least expected: a fly in winter, nearly undetectable, already gone by the time it is perceived. Her figures, part insect, part daughter, part afterimage, thread through the exhibition as both audience and narrators, suggesting not a triumph over death so much as an intimacy with it: choosing “the little deaths,” the blink, the hum after the television clicks off, the gasp between snores. Life persists not loudly, but sideways.

Bravo’s wall works embody this persistence through excess and accumulation. Built on irregular supports and composed of drawing, painting, collage, found objects, fabric, and organic material, the works behave like living systems rather than static images. Figures multiply or dissolve, edges flatten and split, scenes spill outward beyond their containers. Architectural motifs bend and soften. Bodies become environments. The paintings function less as windows and more as membranes.

Throughout the exhibition, the individual subject gives way to the collective. Flies cluster at ceilings. Ants build civilizations inside the body. Constellations form in negative space. Bravo’s writing describes a universe maintained by unseen labor: gears clicking, pistons sighing, switches flipped on and off beneath the skin. In this vision, existence is a shared task. “We grease the wheels, we turn the knobs,” Bravo insists. Meaning is not assigned; it is maintained. Recognition is unnecessary. Survival is communal. Bravo’s engagement with mythology, inheritance, and transformation remains central, but it is refracted through a broader, more cosmic lens. Her longstanding interest in Cuban folklore, familial memory, and psychopomp figures, guides between worlds, expand into a distributed cosmology in which guidance is collective rather than individual. If earlier works centered on figures who mediated passage, Like a Horde of Living Beings imagines mediation as a shared function: many bodies holding things in place, together.

Amy Bravo 

ALIVE IN JANUARY

when i zoom down the street, there i am zooming, a fly in winter, last of my kind. i reject the diapause, and choose the cold. i can be built for it, if i only can will it. should snow fall on the grounds of my land, i will slice it like a steak and eat it with a fork. and so be nourished. i was born in September, which was an empire that has fallen. because i am the last of my kind, i do not need to impress. all attractive mates are dead. i saw my first ex smacked with a rag, we had gotten into some kitchen. i realized it was not smart to do everything your love does. because i am the last of my kind i am nearly undetectable. i am a night moverrrrr. i am a daughterr. i am the hum after you click off the tv. the afterimage. the eulogy. when i zz-t paszt your head in January of all god given times, you could almost laugh. what was that? she’s already gone. diving down the street. catching my own little jet stream off the steam grate. she’s not supposed to be here! i am here, and so what? i’m already gone. i am always already gone. the second you think you have me under your palm, i am in your rafters. you will never catch me spread eagle on your countertop with X’s for eyes and a tongue lolling out. I’ve seen it and it’s pathetic. death is not for me, at least not through those means, i choose the little deaths. the place you see when you blink an eye. the going, gone. the gasp between snores. the place between stars. if dead people go to heaven then where do my kind go? it’s not a question, i know the answer, we are the place between stars, the whole big thing of it a swarm of us, and all kinds, we never discriminated like that. holding everything in place, my father told me there are trillions of dead ants up there, and they are the ones who hold up the planet Jupiter. a perfect job for them, some of our strongest, i’ve always respected them, honestly. it does seem nice, that i would go there too at the end. but since i am the last of my kind i must make my claim while i’m here. a speck of dark matter on your screen door. it’s not so disgusting, really. Why don’t you try looking up tonight, tilt that chin skyward. What about that is worth killing? I didn’t think so.