Ace Artist-in-Residence: Pied-à-Terre by Alex Yudzon

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.”

The exhibition is on view in The Gallery at Ace Hotel Brooklyn from June 4 – August 25.

ABOUT —

Alex Yudzon (b. 1977, Moscow) is a multidisciplinary artist working at the intersection of photography, sculpture, and performance. His debut monograph, A Room for the Night (Radius Books, 2023), explores American hotel culture through thirty-four site-specific installations made across the United States. Yudzon’s work has been exhibited at the Miami Museum of Contemporary Art, the China International Photography Biennial, Arles Photo Festival, and the Florida Museum of Photographic Arts. He is a 2019 NYFA Fellow and was a resident at the Headlands Center for the Arts.

Byline is the culture magazine at the forefront of new media in New York, was conceived of as a place for contributors to be themselves. It was founded in 2023 by editors Gutes Guterman and Megan O’Sullivan, who have chosen the theme “art as play” for their curatorial throughline, presenting four artists for their insights into this paradox of pleasure and productivity.

Ace Artist in Residence program, curated in partnership with collectives and institutions that inspire us, provides time to think and space to create. Every quarter, we invite artists across the globe to turn one of our hotel rooms into their studio for a month, then showcase the resulting body of work with the Ace community.