Jeffrey Deitch and Company Gallery are pleased to announce It Smells Like Girl, a thematic group exhibition co-organized by the two galleries that revisits the charged and often misunderstood concept of female hysteria through painting, video, sculpture, performance, screenings, and installation. Historically dismissed as a medical diagnosis, hysteria was less a pathology than a social mirror reflecting the anxieties, fears, and fantasies projected onto women’s bodies. Weaponized to silence and contain, this machination persists today, not as a medical term, but as an undercurrent in the contemporary cultural psyche. Its echoes can be found in the emotional labor demanded, the expectations imposed, and the subtle systems that still seek to regulate affect and embodiment.

Femininity now stands at a paradoxical crossroads, caught amidst self-expression and the pressure to conform. It lingers in the tension between autonomy and expectation, impulse and propriety, visibility and erasure. We celebrate the ‘bad girl’ archetype yet demand she still play nice. Within this volatile state, identity is shaped less by authenticity than by navigation. This contradiction breeds a schizophrenic femininity, where desire twists against decorum, and performance becomes inseparable from reality. In an image-saturated world, the female form is always in motion — flailing, screaming, running naked through symbolic forests of repression. She is both theater and enigma, her so-called “hysteria” a visceral language when words fall short.

The works in It Smells Like Girl embrace this disturbance, revealing states of rupture where the body speaks, when it refuses to be contained. Across mediums, the artists channel a sensorial vocabulary of refusal, one that resists clarity in favor of sensation, mood, and unease. Rather than pathologizing emotional excess, the exhibition proposes hysteria as a radical strategy that exposes the fractures beneath the surface. It is both an homage and a provocation; a call to witness, to question, and perhaps, to unravel. Here, the unruly becomes necessary and a method of survival that transforms instability into a form of presence, even power. As society continues to oscillate between revering and rejecting female strength, It Smells Like Girl asks what choice is left but to embrace the spectacle?

The artists participating in It Smells Like Girl are:

Kelly Akashi, Isabelle Albuquerque, Danica Barboza, Tosh Basco, Stefania Batoeva, Meriem Bennani, Jibz Cameron, Janiva Ellis, Liz Craft, Eunnam Hong, Juliana Huxtable, Nadia Lee Cohen, Tala Madani, Jeanette Mundt, Naudline Pierre, Roksana Pirouzmand, Jessi Reaves, Bunny Rogers, Gabriela Ruiz, Bárbara Sánchez-Kane, Diane Severin Nguyen, Flannery Silva, Marianna Simnett, Connor Marie Stankard, Frances Stark, Jordan Strafer, Martine Syms, Frieda Toranzo Jaeger, Nora Turato, Michelle Uckotter, Cajsa von Zeipel, Ambera Wellmann, Aleksandra Waliszewska, K8 Hardy, Women’s History Museum