Covet Thy Neighbor

The Locker Room is pleased to present Covet Thy Neighbor, a solo exhibition by Paris-based artist Marguerite Wibaux. In this show, Wibaux examines the charged threshold where desire becomes devotion and the body turns into a site of belief. Wibaux once believed she had a religious calling—until she realized what truly captivated her was not faith, but the body and its image. Raised in Rome where her father worked for the Vatican, she grew up steeped in incense, iconography, and baroque ritual. Writer Kathy Acker once described herself as "a limitless series of natural disasters and all of these disasters have been unnaturally repressed". Wibaux's work channels that same energy—devotional intensity redirected into desire, unfiltered and unapologetic. Covet Thy Neighbor is a collection of new paintings and sculptures where the sacred and the sensual share the same temperature. At the center of the exhibition is a stoneware fountain with a nude figure collapsed into the basin, body arched and exposed, becoming both vessel and offering. The form recalls holy water receptacles—church architecture repurposed for flesh. Across the body of work, Wibaux shapes a visual language of the hot, the holy, and the horror, referencing masters of biblical paintings such as Caravaggio. Figures kneel, cradle, lean, and waver—gestures that echo religious imagery while carrying unmistakable contemporary heat. Nightclub reds, bedroom violets, and hints of half-remembered altars frame bodies entering new, ambiguous relationships: neighbors, lovers, disciples, strangers.