“PARABLES OF FRIENDSHIP” was the first comprehensive retrospective dedicated to the work of David Medalla (1938–2020), who signed off on early plans for the show but died just months before it opened. Viewers could enter the main exhibition space by mounting and descending a seemingly functionless staircase. The first artwork visible from the top of the stairs was a family of five Plexiglas tubes of varying height, all emerging from a low round pedestal on the floor. Depending on factors like the day’s temperature and air pressure, the humming and gurgling contraption spewed soap bubbles in shapes and consistencies ranging from firm, twisty cylinders to feathery clouds. Dating from 2020–21, the piece is a reimagination of the “Cloud Canyon” series of sculptures that Medalla first created in London in the early 1960s. The cheap wooden boards that made up early versions were prone to mold and rarely survived their first exhibitions. At Bonner Kunstverein, the single “biokinetic” piece represented just one of many bodies of work, but its location at the visual center of the retrospective suggested its value as a primer for appreciating the hidden profundity of this seemingly lighthearted oeuvre. In a 1964 publication on the original “Cloud Canyons,” Medalla hinted at those deeper layers when he replaced his artist’s statement with lines from a 1914 poem by Vladimir Mayakovsky: “If you like I shall grow / irreproachably gentle, / not a man, but a cloud in trousers.” The verses seem to propose a charming, anthropomorphic reading of the bubble sculptures. However, someone as conversant in Russian Futurist poetry as Medalla would have known the part of the stanza the artist winkingly left out: “If you wish / I’ll rage on raw meat like a vandal / Or change into hues that the sunrise arouses.” The “cloud in trousers,” on closer inspection, turns into a “vandal”; a hedonistic foam party becomes a monstrous evocation of industrial waste and pollution. If there’s just one takeaway from “Parables of Friendship,” it is that the undeniable joy and lightness of Medalla’s work could not exist without its masterfully captured moments of darkness.

Throughout his life, Medalla took creative license with the details of his own biography. Born in the Philippines in 1938, he managed to move to New York by claiming a later birthday and styling himself a child prodigy. By 1954, he had enrolled at Columbia University to study classics and philosophy. Over the following decades, he built up a vast network of collaborators and traveled as mercurially across spheres of culture as he did among regions of the world, honing a cosmopolitanism he both embraced and endured as a Philippine citizen on a never-ending series of short-term visas. Medalla read avant-garde poetry as voraciously as he did porn magazines, and he identified as seriously with hippie communalism (in particular, a group called the Exploding Galaxy) and the Maoist politics of the Artists’ Liberation Front as he did with a sui generis philosophy he called “Transcendental Hedonism.” This eclecticism was on full display in Bonn, where the painting The Death of the Poet Arthur Rimbaud, 1969, hung alongside an undated ballpoint drawing appropriately titled MY PRICK. Elsewhere, works ranged from a set of activist posters protesting Filipino dictator Ferdinand Marcos, to a brigade of large-scale oil paintings exploring aspects of tropical agriculture, to a selection of outrageous handmade fetish and theater masks.

The paradox of organizing a retrospective for an inherently ambulatory practice like Medalla’s was not lost on curators Steven Cairns and Fatima Hellberg. To counteract the format’s stabilizing effects, they commissioned the artist and stage designer Michael Kleine to fill the kunstverein’s oversize halls with heavy industrial shelving and subtly tinted plywood walls that carved the space into smaller rooms. This solution suggested a hybrid of an upper-tier art fair and a commercial loading dock, inflecting the works with the transience that characterized their creator’s life. Only one piece seemed specifically at home in Bonn, a town that recently spent two years celebrating the 250th birthday of its erstwhile inhabitant Ludwig van Beethoven. The photograph Psychic Self-Defense, 1983, shows Medalla in front of London’s Big Ben wearing the cover of the eponymous book as a mask. In his hands are small busts of Beethoven and Mozart. The image was taken at a time when the artist was living in various London squats that were under constant threat of attack from crews of hired thugs. Medalla later recalled, “I could only think of psychic survival in terms of the arts. I wanted Mozart and Beethoven to be like gloves, boxing gloves.” As in other works, an image that seems at first a lighthearted send-up of two paragons of Western culture actually encapsulates the artist’s uniquely earnest and existential need for art beyond the pale hagiographies of the museum.

“David Medalla: Parables of Friendship” travels to Museion, Bolzano, Italy, April 9–August 8.

Gregor Quack is an art historian and curator based in Berlin.