Art of the Vine - "The Past is an Essential Ingredient"

Abigail Lucien, Wrought x Moritz Kissinger Winzersekt No.4

Abigail Lucien is a Haitian-American artist based in New York, and their recent solo exhibition Wrought, at Nicola Vassell Gallery is one of the most quietly powerful shows in the city right now. Sculpture and mixed media moves through themes that Lucien has been building toward across their practice. Belonging, grief, placemaking, and the concept that memory isn’t a fixed thing you retrieve but a fluid process you move through.

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L: Abigail Lucien; M: When Day and Night Come, 2024; R: Sound of the Fluid Controlled by the Heart, 2026

Lucien uses what they call an “architectural vernacular”. The word itself makes you sit up straighter, but it what does is mean? It is forms borrowed from structures, from the built environment, from inherited materials, all with the purpose to ask what it means to carry a place inside you, long after you’ve left it, or long after it’s changed beyond recognition.

Wrought is a word doing a lot of work.

• Wrought iron: something shaped by force, by heat, by sustained pressure over time.

• Wrought as in the past tense of work: something made, labored over, not produced quickly or easily.

• Wrought as charged emotions: overwrought, fraught; the feeling of something that holds more than it looks like it should.

Lucien’s sculptures carry those meanings and a bit more. They might look standoffish and formal on the outside, but the interior logic is filled with grief and love; they are the complicated architecture of what we inherit.

So what Bubbles should you pair with this?

Recently I was at a tasting with Moritz Kissinger. As a 4th generation winemaker, Moritz has a serious passion that he puts in his vineyards but also knows how to have fun. I do believe that he intentionally wants to have a conversation with your palate that is filled with thought and emotion. Read more about him and his wife Jasmin here.

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L: Moritz Kissinger; R: Winzkert No.4 at Theodora in Brooklyn

Let’s get back to the pairing. I would choose the Mortiz Kissinger Winzersekt No. 4. It is “wrought” in a way that makes it the perfect choice because it has been been biodynamically farmed, traditionally made, and quietly aged in a solera¹ . There is nothing casual about how these Bubbles came to exist, yet what you get in the glass feels almost effortless. The limestone mineral backbone is structural in the same way Lucien’s architectural forms are structural. It’s more of a feeling than the actual physical weight.

It has depth and layering that a straight vintage wine can't replicate. The older wine brings a kind of earned richness that young wine simply hasn't had time to develop yet. It's part of why the No. 4 tastes more complex because there's genuinely old wine living inside it.

Both the Bubbles and the sculptures ask you to sit with something that has been shaped at a time you weren’t present for.

In this way, the past is not a footnote; it’s an essential ingredient.

The Details

• Artist: Abigail Lucien

  • Exhibition: Wrought, Nicola Vassell Gallery

  • 138 Tenth Avenue, Chelsea, NYC; runs through April 18, 2026

• Bubbles: Moritz Kissinger Winzersekt No. 4, Extra Brut

  • Region: Rheinhessen, Germany

  • Grapes: Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, Pinot Blanc

  • Method: Traditional method with perpetual solera reserve (vintages from 2018-2023)

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1. Solera: A blending system where a fraction of older wine is periodically combined with newer wine, rather than bottling a single vintage on its own. The idea is that a portion of wine is always held back and refreshed with the next year’s production. So the blend that is bottled at any given time contains traces of every vintage going back to whenever the solera was started.