Royale Projects is pleased to announce Primary Objects, a solo survey of sculpture by Michael Todd, opening January 24th, 2026.

Through two stages of creation, Todd examines material and human connection in Primary Objects. While developed in Paris and then New York, these works were meant to translate the ineffable quality of humanity. Mortality, sensuality, and the nature of being alive are compounded and neutralized in rounded planes and angled surfaces. Todd draws from early surrealist appropriation of found objects and, through clustered forms, gives them new meaning. In the third act of his career, Todd returns to these objects, which he calls fetishes, and reexamines the echoes of their original intent. The intimate totems assembled in 2025 oscillate between the surreal and the carnal. Blurring the lines often asserted in contemporary art.

This exhibition seeks to draw a line between two distinct moments in Todd’s 60-year career. “Now in my late eighties, I have returned to a small, intimate scale…they are certainly my most personal and perhaps most creative works.” Primary Objects opens on the heels of Sixties Surreal at The Whitney Museum– a revisionist survey “looking beyond now canonical movements to focus instead on the era’s most fundamental, if underrecognized, aesthetic current”. With nearly half a century’s worth of sculpture, Primary Objects seeks to recontextualize these works not just as snapshots in a spanning career but rather as monuments to the artist's most personal, intimate sculptures.

Michael Todd was included in historically important exhibitions such as “Primary Structures” at the Jewish Museum in 1966 and “Sculpture of the Sixties” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1967. This set him on a path of notoriety for his sculptures overshadowing his rigorous and simultaneous painting practice. His work is in permanent collections throughout the world including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Whitney Museum in New York City, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Norton Simon Museum in Los Angeles and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

PRIMARY OBJECTS