Blouin Division is pleased to present Long Live the New, Sean Weisgerber's third solo exhibition with the gallery, marking the launch of NEW MFG CO. and its inaugural London Collection 2025/26.
Newness runs the contemporary economy: every launch, every drop, every refresh of the feed. It is the most disposable feeling there is, gone the instant it arrives. NEW MFG CO. distills that feeling and bottles it. A nomadic manufacturing company with one product: "NEW" itself, working in collections, one city at a time.
In fall 2025, Weisgerber moved to London, sold a decade of studio equipment, and reset. Research into Claes Oldenburg's The Store (1961), run as Ray Gun Mfg. Co. and parodying the shops around it, collided with his new neighbours in Mayfair and Pimlico, where galleries and luxury retail share a postcode. What if a store like Oldenburg's launched here instead, sixty-five years later? NEW MFG CO., and its inaugural collection, evolved in response, stripping away the artist's identity, style, and geographic monogamy. A nomadic vehicle for examining how commercial structures shape cultural production, collection by collection.
The London Collection 2025/26 is its first capsule: twenty-four paintings that take On Kawara's Today series (1966 - 2014) - made across 137 cities over forty-eight years - as their starting point. Where Kawara painted the date as quiet proof of existence, this collection asks a different question. Commodity time: when does something stop being new, and to whom? Each painting begins as a single colour harvested from the city, every shade seeded by the residue of the last. "NEW" is painted over it, freehand, in semi-gloss white against the matte ground. The colour changes. The word does not.
Each painting is bound to a moment. Within one hour of being finished, a single object is bought on impulse: an empty jar, a packet of prawn cocktail crisps, a bottle of British sparkling mineral water. Caught at peak newness, consumed, gone. The item and its date of purchase become the painting's title, the till receipt filed behind the canvas. The painting is the only record the object ever existed. Tucked into its bespoke box, its peak newness is stored, frozen there: subject to the same conditions the moment it enters the market. Twenty-four objects, one still life: a year of London, recorded through the small things bought and forgotten across it.
In Long Live the New, the London Collection is brought to Toronto as a trunk show, installed across two rooms as archive meets luxury showroom. The visitor enters the Centre Gallery, its walls painted 'Old Forest', a deep desaturated green drawn from the collection itself, the room deliberately dim, lit to the low grey of a London late-autumn afternoon. A single fixture picks out the Douglas fir shelf holding the boxes, lit like stock. From there, the visitor crosses into the white glow of the East Gallery, where all twenty-four paintings hang as a single horizon, one continuous line wrapping the room: the colour changing, the word holding.
The new is dead. Long live the new.
