Pablo Bronstein Turns Mantel Clocks Into Allegories of Empire

Pablo Bronstein calls clocks "objects that speak more than they are supposed to" — and his new drawings prove the point. The British-Argentine artist's solo exhibition 'Clocks' opens at Olney Gleason gallery in New York's Chelsea with eight acrylic works on paper that use mantel clocks as vehicles for histories of colonial greed, land extraction and nationalist dominance.

Many of the clocks in the compositions abandon time-telling altogether. Some have no arms at all. Others are too miniature to notice. Each still claims a dramatic footing within Bronstein's intricately detailed scenes.

The show's visual world is crowded and strange. A bundle of perfectly yellow bananas fills an intricately crafted crimson basket. An army of mammoth hippos piles on top of each other with dramatic roars. A clock-biting alligator climbs a building inspired by Lower Manhattan's windowless AT&T Long Lines building. A lion-riding angel hauls a cart full of coals, based on a decorative object on the artist's own fireplace.

Ornament as political instrument

Bronstein frames the exhibition as an extension of his long-standing interest in decorative arts. "The clock as an allegory ties with my interest in decorative arts and in talking about history and geography," he tells Wallpaper*. In clocks he finds "a lot of content about empires."

This is not his first engagement with the timepiece. In 2024 he exhibited four antique clocks on pedestals at Palazzo Bentivoglio in Bologna. He also collects 19th-century French mantel clocks personally. What draws him is their decorative abundance, not their ability to track time. Such objects, he says, "have history crammed into them as allegory."

As a former collector of antiques — particularly silver sugar casters, a passion that began with a gift from his Argentine grandmother — Bronstein argues clock design holds a uniqueness lacking in other decorative arts. "There is a flat symbolic clarification of the moment and then there is the ornate case," he says, pointing to the "jog between the allegorical sophistication and the numbers that go around."

Reading the drawings

In Banana Basket, one larger banana rises from a generous feast basket, its curvy peels revealing the ripe fruit. Amid the dramatically arched peels and the phallic offer, a central clock shows what Bronstein explains as Boston time. The composition references the operations of the United Fruit Company and the history of the pejorative term 'banana republic' — used for countries that, ultimately, were exploited by other nations and corporations.

Classical Triumphant spreads a grand Greek Revival building across nearly 2m of paper. The building sits on a pedestal adorned with intricate patterning and three clocks, of which the middle one is left blank. The referenced architectural period speaks to many world leaders' inclination towards Classicism and their attempts to redecorate their residences in glorifying fashion.

"In the context of culture war," Bronstein says, "the presence of purity and perfection signifiers is all the more aggressive."

Working method and queer aesthetics

The show's architectural, historical and diaristic visual cues stem from Bronstein's personal library. He often starts with a pencil outline while surrounded by numerous books with open pages, letting intuition guide the process — including the shading, which he adds in ink.

The twisted embellishments and blurred hyperboles serve his broader inquiry into queering the power structures of aesthetics. "Queer culture is good at pulling extremes together, such as making an enormous drama out of nothing and subverting traumatic elements with humour," Bronstein says. This duality lets him "worm my way into two different places at the same time."

'Pablo Bronstein: Clocks' runs at Olney Gleason in New York through 17 October 2026 — a long run for a body of work that insists the most conventional household object can carry the weight of empire.