Fifteen artists across five rooms at Management in New York, and the first thing you find on the floor is a Pelican case, open, a tattooed silicone arm resting in the foam: Andrew Roberts's Remake, reshoot, reprise, the body rendered as prop, as evidence, as something to be checked in and transported.

The grotesque has a long administrative history. Bosch itemized hell the way a clerk itemizes a ledger. Goya treated the disasters of war with the same methodical attention. What the curators at Management are proposing with this exhibition, now spanning multiple iterations, is that the 2020s have produced a grotesque of a different order: not the grotesque of direct suffering but of mediated suffering, a distortion amplified and circulated through platforms optimized to make horror scroll smoothly. As the press text frames it, “a fundamental difference between the past and the present demands a reconsideration of the grotesque as a response to our time”: the common experience of crisis arrives now primarily through Instagram, X, and TikTok, and the image of catastrophe arrives before its weight does.

Jon Rafman understands this precisely. His three inkjet-and-paint canvases carry parenthetical titles, image-board syntax: (Jacob in the Backyard), (Shedim), (Heist). Each begins as a found or generated photograph (a child running in a suburban yard, a riot scene flooding green with a flare) then receives a layer of synthetic polymer paint that scratches the surface like a corrupted file. The result is an image that has passed through too many hands, been cropped, shared, screenshotted, and captioned before it reached the canvas. The violence is already secondhand when it arrives. Rafman does not add horror to these scenes; he surfaces the horror that the mediation was already performing.

Aleksandra Waliszewska operates at the other end of the same frequency. Her nine gouaches on paper are small and exact, the scale of a book illustration or a postcard from somewhere you would not want to go. A faceless white head with a single red wound where the eyes should be. A portrait whose grin has widened past what a face can hold. A cat's spirit rising from a menorah like incense. A pale figure crawling from the dark gap of a shed door. Each image is completely legible and completely wrong, the wrongness so precisely calibrated that the eye keeps searching for the error it has already found. This is the grotesque as folk knowledge: the knowledge that the ordinary world contains thresholds, and that some figures have already crossed them.

Miriam Cahn's two pencil drawings from 1994 and 2005 provide the exhibition's oldest intelligence. In the 1994 work, a figure with no face and swollen, hatched breasts sits in a dense field of mark-making, the body built entirely from pressure and repetition, refusing classical proportion with the patience of someone who has been refused classical proportion. Cahn, whose practice spans decades of war, body, and refusal, does not need the 2020s to have a grotesque; she has been drawing the grotesque since before it trended. Her presence here is a corrective: a reminder that the exhibition's argument is not new, only newly urgent, and that some artists have been keeping this ledger since the last time.

Willehad Eilers's Das rote pferd sits in the large room like a counterweight. The horse is red, enormous, seated on the ground like a drunk; wine bottles are scattered around it; the sky behind is the color of a bruise at its most lurid. The painting is absurdist in the precise sense: it refuses the hierarchy between the noble and the abject. The horse is neither majestic nor pathetic, only excessive, occupying more space than its situation warrants. This is the grotesque as comedy, and the comedy is not gentle. Across the room, Jang Pa's Gore Deco: Grinning Viscera #1 tears open the body entirely: organs with eyes, teeth in organs, a red field that might be flesh or might be paint or might be the same thing, Arabic lettering across a pastel bust with dragonfly wings and human hair. Jang Pa, based between Seoul and New York, works inside internet aesthetics the way Bosch worked inside manuscript illumination: the decorative surface is where the theology lives.

The exhibition title carries a qualifier that matters. “New” is not a sales term. David Altmejd's Smoking with Oneself, a silver-metallic creature of expandable foam and epoxy coiled on a tartan cushion, does not look new; it looks like something that has existed longer than the materials that constitute it, something dreamed in a fever about taxidermy and jewelry and the desire to touch your own face. Sibylle Ruppert's 1978 charcoal Le Chant de Maldoror, monumental and dark as soot, was made decades before any of the crises named in the press text. Yet both works are fluent in the exhibition's current language because the grotesque is not a period style. It is a structural response: what images become when the social contract between beauty and order has been suspended.

Igor Simic's Martyr Mouse (or The flame, not the wick) is a beeswax candle in the shape of Mickey Mouse, small and golden-amber, the wick emerging from the crown of the head. The Annie Dillard quote in the title refers to a moth that flew into a candle flame and became, in burning, part of the wick: fuel and vessel at once. Simic's mouse will burn from the head down, the icon consuming itself in the act of giving light. The joke is exact and the joke is unbearable. This is what the exhibition finally proposes: that the grotesque is not the failure of culture but its most honest instrument, the form that tells the truth when the form is the truth.

You leave past the Pelican case. The arm inside it is tattooed: a circuit-board pattern, the skin mapped like a motherboard. Roberts has spent years working with silicone as a skin surrogate, and here the body part arrives pre-archived, pre-packaged for transport, the case foam custom-fitted the way a case is custom-fitted for a camera or a weapon. No origin, no destination. The body as asset. The grotesque, in 2026, does not exaggerate. It itemizes.