Breaking the Mold: Brooklyn Museum at 200

Installation view, Breaking the Mold: Brooklyn Museum at 200, February 28, 2025–February 22, 2026. Brooklyn Museum. (Photo: Paula Abreu Pita)

The sweeping exhibition, presented in three parts, marks the Museum’s anniversary year by exploring the collection’s rich history and evolution.

From groundbreaking early acquisitions to striking new additions, the Brooklyn Museum’s collection has long championed artists and artworks that catalyze imaginative storytelling and brave conversations. As the Museum commemorates its 200th anniversary, Breaking the Mold: Brooklyn Museum at 200 celebrates its unique legacy. Comprising three sections that boast long-time favorites and brand-new standouts, the exhibition brings fresh narratives to the fore while exploring the collection’s rich history and evolution. Breaking the Mold is organized by curators across the institution, featuring works from all collection areas.

Tony Velez. Entrance Gates to Greenwood Cemetery, Sunset Park, (5th Avenue and 23rd Street), Brooklyn, NY, 1990.Gelatin silver print.BrooklynMuseum,GiftofVictorH. Kempster, 1991.306.9. © Tony Velez. (Photo: Brooklyn Museum)

“This exhibition is a celebration of everything the Brooklyn Museum represents,” says Catherine Futter, Director of Curatorial Affairs and Senior Curator of Decorative Arts. ”As we mark the Museum’s 200th anniversary, this exhibition contextualizes the current moment in our long, remarkable history as a premier cultural destination in Brooklyn, New York City, and beyond.”

Alex Katz. Ada, 1950s. Oil on board. Brooklyn Museum, Gift of the artist, in honor of the Brooklyn Museum’s 200th Anniversary, 2023.44.1. © 2024 Alex Katz / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. (Photo: Brooklyn Museum)

Three chapters—Brooklyn Made, Building the Museum and Its Collection, and Gifts of Art in Honor of the 200th— examine foundational aspects of the Museum’s story. Through works spanning time, geography, and medium, the exhibition introduces viewers to Brooklyn’s artistic communities, the history of the Museum’s building and collection, and recent gifts made in honor of the 200th anniversary.

Installation view, Breaking the Mold: Brooklyn Museum at 200, February 28, 2025–February 22, 2026. Brooklyn Museum. (Photo: Paula Abreu Pita)

Brooklyn Made pays homage to the borough’s artists and designers from the seventeenth century to today. Beginning with a pair of Delaware Lenape youth moccasins to acknowledge the land’s original inhabitants, this section journeys through time to spotlight works by contemporary Brooklyn-based artists such as KAWS, Duke Riley, and Tourmaline. Some works speak to the diversity of artists and manufacturers who have called Brooklyn home, while others consider outsiders’ fascination, documentation, and exploration of the borough as a place with a provocative history and the subject of popular imagination. Spanning the Museum’s vast collection, from decorative arts and design to painting, photography, and works on paper, as well as its immersive period rooms, these works illuminate the borough’s rich histories, including those of its many immigrant communities. Presented throughout the space are historical and contemporary images of Brooklyn, depicting its performances, protests, architecture and design, landscapes and waterways, and, most importantly, its people.

N. Jay Jaffee. Kishke King (Pitkin Avenue, Brownsville), 1953, printed 1995. Selenium-toned gelatin silver print. Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Paula W. Hackeling, 1997.164.33. © The N. Jay Jaffee Trust (Photo: Brooklyn Museum)

Building the Museum and Its Collection features transformational artworks and archival materials that trace the development of the collection as well as the rich history of the Museum’s famed Beaux-Arts building. This section highlights the acquisitions, people, and programs that exemplify the Museum’s trailblazing engagement with the borough’s communities and the daring vision that has made it a cultural touchstone. Through works from across collection areas, including pieces rarely on view, set alongside materials from the Brooklyn Museum Archives, visitors will deepen their understanding of the Museum’s 200-year history.

Peter Halley. Plus One, 2019–20. Acrylic, fluorescent acrylic, and Roll-A-Tex on canvas. Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Sasha and Edward P. Bass, in honor of the Brooklyn Museum’s 200th Anniversary, 2024.26. © Peter Halley. (Photo: Brooklyn Museum)

Gifts of Art in Honor of the 200th Anniversary showcases extraordinary pieces of contemporary art, including painting, photography, video, and sculpture, given to the Museum by valued donors in honor of the 200th anniversary. Exemplary artworks by Robert Frank, Coco Fusco, Antony Gormley, Julie Mehretu, and Alex Katz are joined by contributions from influential artists working today in Brooklyn and beyond. The works in this section reveal how the collection continues to evolve to reflect our changing world, and new gifts will be added over the course of the exhibition.

Stephen Salmieri. Coney Island, 1969. Gelatin silver print. Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Edward Klein, 82.201.4. © Stephen Salmieri. (Photo: Brooklyn Museum)

Additional gifts are on view throughout the Museum, including selections from the Dennis Freedman collection on the fourth floor, Mark di Suvero’s sculpture Sooner or Later (2022) on the Plaza, and Liza Lou’s Trailer (1998–2000) in the Pavilion. Find out more about the Museum’s 2024 acquisitions, including those presented in this exhibition

Huastec artist. Life-Death Figure, 900–1250. Sandstone and pigment. Brooklyn Museum, Frank Sherman Benson Fund and the Henry L. Batterman Fund, 37.2897PA. (Photo: Brooklyn Museum)

CREDITS

Breaking the Mold: Brooklyn Museum at 200 is organized by Meghan Bill, Coordinator of Provenance; Abigail Dansiger, Director of Libraries and Archives; Catherine Futter, Director of Curatorial Affairs and Senior Curator of Decorative Arts; Liz St. George, Assistant Curator, Decorative Arts; and Pauline Vermare, Phillip and Edith Leonian Curator of Photography; with Kimberli Gant, Curator, Modern and Contemporary Art; Carmen Hermo, former Associate Curator, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art; Michael Gibson-Prugh, Curatorial Assistant, Arts of the Americas and Europe; and Imani Williford, Curatorial Assistant, Photography, Fashion, and Material Culture.

Delaware artist. Youth Moccasins, ca. 1900. Hide, cloth, and beads. Brooklyn Museum, Gift of the Edward J. Guarino Collection in memory of Edgar J. Guarino, 2016.11.3a-b. (Photo: Brooklyn Museum)

The Brooklyn Museum gives thanks to the Curatorial Division for their collaboration on the development of Breaking the Mold: Brooklyn Museum at 200.

Significant support is provided by the Hooper Family—Dana Hooper and Alicia Swanson; John P. and Rebecca Hooper Cavanaugh; Gary W. and Abigail Hooper Conrad; and E. Bickford and Virginia Hooper Hooper—in honor of their late ancestor Professor Franklin William Hooper, who served as Director of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences (1891–1913) and the Brooklyn Museum (1897–1913).

Installation view, Breaking the Mold: Brooklyn Museum at 200, February 28, 2025–February 22, 2026. Brooklyn Museum. (Photo: Timothy Doyon)

The exhibition is opened on February 28, 2025, and will be on view through February 22, 2026. Please visit the Brooklyn Museum’s site for more information about the exhibit. The Museum can also be found on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and Facebook.

Marta Spagnoli: Fantasmata

Installation view: Marta Spagnoli. “Fantasmata,” Galleria Continua San Gimignano 2025 Courtesy of the artist and Galleria Continua Courtesy: the artist and GALLERIA CONTINUA, Photographer: Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio

GALLERIA CONTINUA is pleased to host a new solo exhibition by the promising young contemporary artist Marta Spagnoli. Fantasmata, the title of the exhibition, features a cycle of never before seen works created in 2024. These works stem from an in-depth exploration of the image and its potential for movement and transformation.

Building on key themes from her recent research such as the influence of natural and social environments on human beings, dance, and the symbolic presence of organic and animal forms the artist centers her reflections on the concept of Fantasmata.

Marta Spagnoli Algae V 2025 acrylic and oil on canvas 45 x 55 cm 17.71 x 21.65 in Courtesy: the artist and GALLERIA CONTINUA Photographer: Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio

The word Fantasmatabelongs to Western philosophical discourse and is also found in the world of dance. It describes a sudden pause between two consecutive movements, moments that virtually encapsulate the past, present, and future memory of an entire choreographic sequence. The concept of choreography is particularly central to the large-format canvases presented in this exhibition, where the arrangement of elements follows a logic of movement, hierarchy, and interaction between forms.

Simple organic forms, such as algae, are depicted at times with sharp clarity and at other times transformed through continuous layers of paint and markings. These algae float, suspended between potential and realization, contributing to the formation of a sentient landscape. Their collective, swirling motion extends that primordial movement from chaos to order, creating a scene that is not merely natural but also deeply emotional and psychological.

Installation view: Marta Spagnoli. “Fantasmata,” Galleria Continua San Gimignano 2025 Courtesy of the artist and Galleria Continua Courtesy: the artist and GALLERIA CONTINUA, Photographer: Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio

In the work Fantasmata II, a grid emerges as a system of lanes. It not only suggests a structural interpretation of the image but also defines a space where movement can be organized and managed, while simultaneously being interrupted or distorted.

Marta Spagnoli Fantasmata I 2024 acrylic and oil on canvas 160 x 230 cm 62.99 x 90.55 in Courtesy: the artist and GALLERIA CONTINUA Photographer: Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio

The works never fully submit to order or structure; there is always room for the accidental and the unexpected. Erratic elements such as a yellow devil, clawed creatures, or a milky veil of liquid paint poured onto the canvas act as agents of cohesion or disruption. These elements create an experience that oscillates between form and formlessness, figure and disfiguration. Their sudden and surprising appearances serve as witnesses to the choreography unfolding within the work, revealing the canvas itself as a field of forces, trajectories, movements, and complex relational entanglements.

For more information about this exhibition and others at the Galleria Continua, please visit their site here. The magazine also did an interview with the artist, which can be found here.

Samadmasa Motonaga and Etsuko Nakatsuji: Afterimage of Memory

Sadamasa Motonagaand Etsuko Nakatsuji: After image of Memory Installation view, 2024 BLUM Tokyo © Etsuko Nakatsuji and the Motonaga Archive Research Institution Ltd.; Courtesy of the artist, the Institution, and BLUM Los Angeles, Tokyo, New York Photo: SAIKI

Tokyo—BLUM is pleased to announce the representation of the estate of Sadamasa Motonaga and the artist Etsuko Nakatsuji coinciding with their two-person exhibition, Afterimage of Memory, at BLUM Tokyo opening Friday, February 14. Solo exhibitions for the artists will follow in Los Angeles and New York.

Etsuko Nakatsuji Afterimage—Shape of Human, 2013 Acrylic on canvas 51 3/8 x 38 3/8 x 1 1/8 inches (130.5 x 97.4 x 2.8 centimeters) © Etsuko Nakatsuji; Courtesy of the artist and Blum Los Angeles, Tokyo, New YorkPhoto: Kentaro Takahashi

Partnered from 1960 until Motonaga’s passing in 2011, husband and wife pair Motonaga and Nakatsuji have jointly and individually made strides in the advancement of the postwar Japanese avant-garde practices for the better part of a century. A long-revered original member of the 1950s Gutai group, Motonaga is best known for his unique ability to express life’s pathos through the playful tenor of his vibrantly colored paintings, his experimentation with found materials, and his work on illustrated children’s books. Though Nakatsuji studied art, for much of her adult life she supported her family as a graphic designer in the advertising department at Hanshin Department Store to allow space in their home for her husband’s practice. She did, however, consistently maintain an artistic practice of painting and making fabric objets called poco-pin. While both artists’ painting practices are primarily abstract, each engages human perception and the body in a profound manner. Motonaga’s later work, in its graphic orientation, possesses strong resonances with searching for an “ambivalent illusion of vision,” a theme that Nakatsuji also grappled with for decades.

Sadamasa Motonaga The Shapes Above are White, 1993 Acrylic on canvas 24 1/8 x 20 x 7/8 inches (61.2 x 50.8 x 2.3 centimeters)© Motonaga Archive Research Institution Ltd.; Courtesy of the Motonaga Institution and BLUM Los Angeles, Tokyo, New York Photo: SAIKI

In 1957, Nakatsuji attended classes at Nishinomiya Art School, studying under Suda Kokuta and Waichi Tsutaka. It was through school that Nakatsuji met Motonaga who was already a member of Gutai, and Nakatsuji became inspired by the ideas of the group’s leader, Jiro Yoshihara. “Do something no one has ever done before,” Yoshihara famously said about artmaking. In 1960, Motonaga and Nakatsuji moved in together. Their first son was born two years later.

Having created his well-known installation Work (Water) (1956), which was featured in the Outdoor Gutai Art Exhibition at Ashiya Park in 1956, Motonaga’s career was already taking off when he met Nakatsuji in 1957. In 1962, with the opening of the Gutai Pinacotheca, a gallery exhibiting work by Gutai artists, the Gutai movement gained an international presence with global artists and critics such as John Cage, Clement Greenberg, Isamu Noguchi, Yoko Ono, and many more. At a time when abstraction was thought to have taken painting to its logical conclusion, Gutai’s pioneering installations and performative experimentations onto the canvas were unprecedented, unafraid of violating sacred boundaries. Motonaga’s own multidisciplinary oeuvre benefited from this with features in Assemblages Environments and Happenings by Allan Kaprow in 1966 and museum exhibitions such as The New Japanese Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York also in 1966.

Etsuko Nakatsuji Untitled, 2024 Acrylic on canvas 64 x 51 3/8 x 1 3/8 inches (162.6 x 130.5 x 3.4 centimeters) © Etsuko Nakatsuji; Courtesy of the artist and Blum Los Angeles, Tokyo, New YorkPhoto: Kentaro Takahashi

While working as a designer full-time, Nakatsuji began sewing objects from leftover bedspread fabric. The result were objets in human-like shapes, and by hanging them from the ceiling of their apartment, she created the first poco-pin. Nakatsuji’s work was discovered by Takashi Yamamoto of Tokyo Gallery while he was visiting Motonaga. Nakatsuji had her first-ever exhibition at Tokyo Gallery in 1963, comprised of an installation of poco-pins. It was well received, grounding and defining the artist’s creative position for years to come. The figures from this exhibition evoke the immersive Surrealist installations of the 1920s that defy childish charm and, instead, possess an organic mysticism that lies between the threshold of life and afterlife. Nakatsuji notes, “I’m always thinking about objects that reflect someone who is filled with a strange and interesting quality. . . One’s form, color, line, and shape are tied to the changes in one’s brightness, humor, and peaceful image.”

In Nakatsuji’s later series, when she returned to painting, the artist echoes and expands upon the investigations behind her early poco-pins. Her 1983 group exhibition at Sogetsu, Toward Space, comprised an installation of suspended cloth with eyes paired with actual geta sandals, exuding psychological symbolism and corporeality. The work Running Works 3 x 6 #1 (1990) deals with exactly this—simple marks to indicate eyes, a single camouflaged rope along the painted red surface, and the geta sandals on the floor below the plywood, unified as effective signals of personification, together projecting the mind and body. Likewise, Nakatsuji’s [Aizu]—eyes— and hitogata (human form) series convey part objects and geometric silhouettes with bold, exuberantly winding lines that form a human image, and unmistakable cartoonish legs that appear to walk without a torso atop them. Nakatsuji’s signature eyes accompany these, at times possessing a halo-like glow.

 Sadamasa Motonagaand Etsuko Nakatsuji: After image of Memory Installation view, 2024 BLUM Tokyo © Etsuko Nakatsuji and the Motonaga Archive Research Institution Ltd.; Courtesy of the artist, the Institution, and BLUM Los Angeles, Tokyo, New York Photo: SAIKI

Comparing Motonaga’s early work with his later periods, the viewer will note a transition from abstraction alongside installation work, into using more fluorescent colors and gradients after his residency in New York from 1966-1967, to his late works which often feature large, hard-edge, color- gradated shapes and forms. Yellow Veil and Group of Shapes (1993), for instance, includes many personified shapes with distinctive portions for a body with limbs beneath it to hint at that which is alive.

While Gutai was a major presence through Motonaga’s involvement, it was Nakatsuji’s graphic design practice including her own illustrated books and collaborations with Motonaga as a producer of illustrated children’s books, that ultimately integrated their styles. With Motonaga’s evolution into the representational and Nakatsuji’s return to painting, the two produced undeniably resonant work around the turn of the century. As Nakatsuji said, “As I had been imprinted with the spirit of Gutai, it was impossible for me not to be aware of Sadamasa Motonaga. Although each of us worked in different formats, our sense of values did not differ significantly.”

Sadamasa Motonaga (b. 1922, Mie Prefecture, Japan; d. 2011, Takarazuka, Japan) was a key figure of the Gutai Art Association (1955–71), renowned for its radical contributions to performance, painting, and sculpture. Rejecting the somber tone of postwar existentialism, Motonaga embraced a playful, vibrant approach, producing works that fused tradition with innovation. Motonaga’s practice evolved from early experiments with cartoon-like forms to his groundbreaking Water Sculptures, which used vinyl bags filled with colored water to create dynamic installations. By 1957, he began exploring abstraction, using poured and dripped pigments in fluid, luminous compositions that defined a new relationship between artist and materials in global modernism. In the late 1960s and 1970s, particularly after a residency in New York from 1966 to 1967, his style incorporated airbrush techniques, graffiti- like forms, and spray paint, blending postwar avant-garde aesthetics with contemporary sensibilities. In addition to his visual art, Motonaga authored beloved children’s books, cementing his legacy as an artist whose creativity transcended disciplines and generations.

Motonaga’s work has been the subject of numerous retrospectives, including at the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX (2015); Mie Prefectural Museum of Art, Tsu, Japan (1990 and 2009); Nagano Prefectural Shinano Art Museum, Nagano, Japan (2005); Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Hiroshima, Japan (2003); and the Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art, Kobe, Japan (1998). His work is represented in public collections worldwide, including the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates; The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; The National Museum of Art, Osaka; Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Hiroshima, Japan; Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art, Kobe, Japan; Mie Prefectural Museum of Art, Tsu, Japan; Museu de Arte do Rio, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, Japan; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Pinault Collection, Paris, France; The Art Institute, Chicago; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT; among many others.

Etsuko Nakatsuji (b. 1937, Takaishi, Osaka) began her career working in graphic design while simultaneously pursuing her passion for art. In the early 1960s, she gained recognition for her unique human-shaped forms, which became a recurring motif in her work. Her creations, often playful yet peculiar, have appeared in various mediums, including paintings, sculptures, and illustrations. These works invite viewers to reflect on the essence of humanity and the body as a functional vessel. At the same time, they evoke the limitless nature of human consciousness, suggesting a boundless capacity that transcends physical form.

Nakatsuji’s work has been the subject of numerous retrospectives, including at BB Plaza Museum, Hyogo, Japan (2022); Takarazuka Arts Center, Hyogo, Japan (2021); Hyogo Guest House Prefectural Government Museum, Hyogo, Japan (2017); Otani Memorial Art Museum, Nishinomiya, Japan (2000); and Itami City Museum of Art, Hyogo, Japan (2002). Her work is represented in the permanent collections of the Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art, Kobe, Japan; Hyogo Guest House Prefectural Government Museum, Hyogo, Japan; Osaka Contemporary Art Center, Osaka, Japan; Otani Memorial Art Museum, Nishinomiya City, Japan; Toyama Prefectural Museum of Art and Design, Toyama, Japan; among others.

About BLUM

BLUM represents more than sixty artists and estates from seventeen countries worldwide, nurturing a diverse roster of artists at all stages of their practices with a range of global perspectives. Originally opened as Blum & Poe in Santa Monica in 1994, the gallery has been a pioneer in its early commitment to Los Angeles as an international arts capital.

The gallery has been acclaimed for its groundbreaking work in championing international artists of postwar and contemporary movements, such as CoBrA, Dansaekhwa, Mono-ha, and Superflat, and for organizing museum-caliber solo presentations and historical survey exhibitions across its spaces in Los Angeles, Tokyo, and New York. Often partnering with celebrated curators and scholars such as Cecilia Alemani, Alison M. Gingeras, Sofia Gotti, Joan Kee, and Mika Yoshitake, the gallery has produced large- scale exhibitions focusing on the Japanese Mono-ha school (2012); the Korean Dansaekhwa monochrome painters (2014); the European postwar movement CoBrA (2015); Japanese art of the 1980s and 1990s (2019); a rereading of Brazilian Modernism (2019); a revisionist take on the 1959 MoMA exhibition, New Images of Man (2020); and a survey of portraiture through a democratic and humanist lens (2023); among others.

BLUM’s wide-reaching program includes exhibitions, lectures, performance series, screenings, video series, and an annual art book fair at its base in Los Angeles. BLUM Books, the gallery’s publishing division, democratically circulates its program through original scholarship and accessible media ranging from academic monographs, audio series, magazines, to artists’ books.

Across the three global locations, BLUM prioritizes environmental and community stewardship in all operations. In 2015, it was certified as an Arts:Earth Partnership (AEP) green art gallery in Los Angeles and consequently became one of the first green certified galleries in the United States. The gallery is also a member of the Gallery Climate Coalition, which works to facilitate a more sustainable commercial art world and reduce the industry’s collective carbon footprint. BLUM is committed to fostering inclusive and equitable communities both in its physical and online spaces and believes that everybody should have equal access to creating and engaging with contemporary art.

 The exhibition is located at BLUM Tokyo, which opened on February 14, until April 4, 2025 there was an opening reception on Friday, February 14th, from 5 to 7 pm. 

For more information about this exhibition and others, please visit Blum’s website here. The gallery can also be found on Instagram. 

Hadi Falapishi: Edge of the World

Hadi Falapshi: Edge of the World Installation views, 2024 BLUM Los Angeles ©Hadi Falapshi Studio; Courtesy of the artist and BLUM Los Angeles, Tokyo, New York Photo: Evan Walsh

Los Angeles, CA—BLUM is pleased to present New York-based artist Hadi Falapishi’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, Edge of the World.

Exhibiting Falapishi’s new body of shrewdly deskilled panels alongside photorealistic paintings and bold ceramic sculptures, Edge of the World demonstrates the remarkable range inherent to the artist’s practice as he examines the widely varying possibilities for visual representation. Falapishi’s works cannibalize a vast quantity of reference material—from the Surrealists to Spaghetti Western films—to create a carefully selected composite of signs and signifiers. Deconstructing the vulnerabilities within both the act of viewing and of being viewed, Edge of the World is insightfully humorous, art historically allusive, and stylistically multifaceted.

Hadi Falapishi Professional Painter in a False Mirror, 2024 Oil on canvas in walnut artist's frame 25 1/2 x 31 3/4 x 2 inches 64.8 x 80.6 x 5.1 centimeters

Growing up in Tehran as the son of two photographers and later studying photography at Bard College, Falapishi’s now interdisciplinary practice has a unique and expansive approach to the mechanism as medium. For Falapishi, the mechanism that he now activates to make work is the art and cultural historical canon. Deploying imagery from this pool of reference material, the artist situates his and other bodies therein. In his photorealistic paintings in Edge of the World, such as Professional Painter in a Tree on the Sixteenth of September (2024) or Professional Painter in a False Mirror (2024), for instance, Falapishi inserts his likeness into famous compositions by René Magritte while facetiously giving himself the title of “Professional Painter” as both a rebuke and an assessment of the painting style.

Hadi Falapishi Edge of the World #1, 2024 Glazed ceramic 20 3/4 x 15 x 15 inches 52.7 x 38.1 x 38.1 centimeters

Stemming from the photorealistic paintings, Falapishi’s ceramic sculptures and panels with cardboard allow the artist to playfully explore the psychological state that drives his practice. Rendered in a loose style—with flat colors, crude shapes, and blocky horizon lines—these works borrow from the ethos of the CoBrA art movement in their hue and sentiments prioritizing spontaneity and experimentation. Simultaneously, in a gesture reminiscent of Mike Kelley, Falapishi grants new intellectual and emotional depth to that which might otherwise appear childlike, embedding art historical references in his faux- naïf scenes for those that know to look. Still Life with Cat and Mouse (2024), for example, adds a cartoonish cat and mouse to a still life with a bottle that clearly alludes to the oeuvre of Giorgio Morandi.

Hadi Falapshi: Edge of the World Installation views, 2024 BLUM Los Angeles ©Hadi Falapshi Studio; Courtesy of the artist and BLUM Los Angeles, Tokyo, New York Photo: Evan Walsh

Falapishi leverages the humor that is intrinsic to an unlikely pairing to great effect. Transposing his face onto the bosom of a Roman statue in Professional Painter in a Roman Statue (2024) or inserting a lamppost referencing artists’ artist Martin Kippenberger into a work with simple depth and imprecise lines, Falapishi asserts a truth that has echoed through time with other great storytellers such as William Faulkner. Complex thoughts on the grand nature of existence can sometimes come from the most uncomplicated or unexpected places.

Hadi Falapishi Smoke Break, 2024 Oil paint, cardboard, resin on wood panel 44 x 88 1/4 x 2 1/4 inches 111.8 x 224.2 x 5.7 centimeters

Hadi Falapishi (b. 1987, Tehran, Iran) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. His work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including SEARCHERS in Three Acts, ART&NEWPORT, Newport, RI; Almost There, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY (2023); As Free As Birds, Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art, London, UK (2022); Young and Clueless, The Power Station, Dallas, TX (2022); and In Practice: Total Disbelief, Sculpture Center, New York, NY (2020) ), among others. His work is found in public collections such as the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY

 About BLUM

BLUM represents more than sixty artists and estates from seventeen countries worldwide, nurturing a diverse roster of artists at all stages of their practices with a range of global perspectives. Originally opened as Blum & Poe in Santa Monica in 1994, the gallery has been a pioneer in its early commitment to Los Angeles as an international arts capital.

The gallery has been acclaimed for its groundbreaking work in championing international artists of postwar and contemporary movements, such as CoBrA, Dansaekhwa, Mono-ha, and Superflat, and for organizing museum-caliber solo presentations and historical survey exhibitions across its spaces in Los Angeles, Tokyo, and New York. Often partnering with celebrated curators and scholars such as Cecilia Alemani, Alison M. Gingeras, Sofia Gotti, Joan Kee, and Mika Yoshitake, the gallery has produced large- scale exhibitions focusing on the Japanese Mono-ha school (2012); the Korean Dansaekhwa monochrome painters (2014); the European postwar movement CoBrA (2015); Japanese art of the 1980s and 1990s (2019); a rereading of Brazilian Modernism (2019); a revisionist take on the 1959 MoMA exhibition, New Images of Man (2020); and a survey of portraiture through a democratic and humanist lens (2023); among others.

BLUM’s wide-reaching program includes exhibitions, lectures, performance series, screenings, video series, and an annual art book fair at its base in Los Angeles. BLUM Books, the gallery’s publishing division, democratically circulates its program through original scholarship and accessible media ranging from academic monographs, audio series, magazines, to artists’ books.

Across the three global locations, BLUM prioritizes environmental and community stewardship in all operations. In 2015, it was certified as an Arts:Earth Partnership (AEP) green art gallery in Los Angeles and consequently became one of the first green certified galleries in the United States. The gallery is also a member of the Gallery Climate Coalition, which works to facilitate a more sustainable commercial art world and reduce the industry’s collective carbon footprint. BLUM is committed to fostering inclusive and equitable communities both in its physical and online spaces and believes that everybody should have equal access to creating and engaging with contemporary art.

At the BLUM Los Angeles location, the exhibition opened on January 18 and will be on view until March 22, 2025.

For more information about this exhibition and others, please visit Blum’s website here. The gallery can also be found on Instagram.

Yoshitomo Nara: My Imperfect Self

YoshitomoNara: My Imperfect Self Installation views, 2025 BLUM Los Angeles ©Yoshitomo Nara / Courtesy of the Yoshitomo Nara Foundation and BLUM Los Angeles, Tokyo, New YorkPhoto: Hannah Mjølsns

Los Angeles, CA—BLUM is pleased to present My Imperfect Self, Yoshitomo Nara’s tenth exhibition with the gallery, commemorating thirty years since the artist’s first US show, entitled Pacific Babies, at Blum & Poe in 1995.

A standout piece from that first exhibition, titled There is No Place Like Home (1995), employs dark humor to explore the complexities of belonging for a young Japanese artist living in Germany on the cusp of international acclaim. Today, that restless uncertainty has given way to a deep-seated sense of connectedness, including attunement to remote places that remind him of growing up in Northern Japan. It was in Sapporo, Hokkaido, when Nara first started using remnants of unused clay to deconstruct his iconic image of the child into misshaped forms that bear traces of his hands, reestablishing his connection to the material and his sense of place. This process culminated in a new series of bronze sculptures, eleven of which are presented for the first time in this latest exhibition. Seen together, these works highlight how far Nara has transformed the kawaii aesthetic into an alternate realm of beguiling misfits.

Yoshitomo Nara: My Imperfect Self Installation views, 2025 BLUM Los Angeles © Yoshitomo Nara / Courtesy of the Yoshitomo Nara Foundation and BLUM Los Angeles, Tokyo, New York Photo: Josh Schaedel

My Imperfect Self: Yoshitomo Nara

This exhibition highlights Nara’s evolving sculptural practice, featuring eleven mid-size heads exuding a quirky strangeness and dark charm that defines the artist’s work. These heads, presented for the first time, are integral to Nara’s exploration in clay, intertwining ideas and techniques developed since 2011, but also express a poignant return to his roots. The exhibition also includes paintings and drawings that resonate with the sculptures, inviting deeper reflection on his ongoing experimentation throughout a career that gained international acclaim with his seminal work, The Girl with the Knife in Her Hand (1991).

This collection of heads is full of contradictions that lean toward the peculiar and anomalous. Although cast in bronze, they were first made in clay as palm size pieces, and then enlarged and cast in bronze. In their transformed state, the malleable nature of the clay’s original form remains evident, enticing viewers to retrace Nara’s touch across its pillowy surface. Many feature a flattened face on which Nara cleaves lines, pokes holes, and scratches indentations on their matte white planar surfaces, wrapped within marshmallow globs of hair. However, these markings are not aggressive inflictions but rather embedded scarifications that lend the figures a raw, carefree quality of oddity. The overall effect is of a child, but one who we have never seen before in Nara's oeuvre. Gone are the rounded cheeks that we expect from his stylized depiction of the child motif, instead Medusa bears a shy smile with gouged eyes, and retreats into deep folds of imperfect hair; while Long Tall Peace Sister, the largest of the sculptures in the show, has flowers in her hair formed by using traditional tile molds. She smiles with delight, even with the five skeletal lines that form each eye.

The awkwardness of these heads embraces the possibilities of mischance and imperfections. They form their own gang of misfits. For Nara, this reflects a renewed engagement with the praxis of making—the dynamic interplay between hand and body, craft and object—which directs his curiosity toward possibilities of incompleteness.

Yoshitomo Nara 12 Girls on the Board, 2024 Pen on paper mounted on wood 28 3/4 x 20 3/8 x 1 1/8 inches 73 x 51.8 x 2.9 centimeters Photo: Hannah Mjølsnes © Yoshitomo Nara / Courtesy of the Yoshitomo Nara Foundation and BLUM Los Angeles, Tokyo, New York

The artist’s turn toward this more embodied practice is shaped by three significant sources. The first comes from his response to the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami, which left an indelible mark on Nara, whose natal home was close to this site. Struggling to paint, he took a large block of clay and threw his entire body against the solid mass of grayness, attacking it as if he were a sumo wrestler.

It was a method of freeing himself to paint again, while also rekindling his interest in clay. The intensity of his bodily approach left imprints that, when cast in bronze, became permanent traces on his figurative heads—a contrast to the impermanence of life so clearly brought home by Fukushima’s fate.

Yoshitomo NaraSketch for the Sculpture, 2021 Colored pencil on paper 16 1/2 x 11 3/4 inches42 x 29.7 centimeters Framed Dimensions:22 1/4 x 17 3/8 x 1 1/2 inches 56.6 x 44.1 x 3.7 centimeters Photo: Hannah Mjølsnes © Yoshitomo Nara / Courtesy of the Yoshitomo Nara Foundation and BLUM Los Angeles, Tokyo, New York

A second source, from around 2016, is drawn from Nara’s time spent in Northern Japan, including Tobiu, a remote village with Ainu roots in Sapporo. It was there that he began making his palm-size heads, initially as something playful where he would mindlessly give in to the material. These small, more spontaneous, heads speak to his wandering spirit, where forested landscapes and remote settings deepen his sense of being in the world. By working at a small scale, he sculpts with a gentler touch, shifting his bodily energy to reconnect with nature, rather than fighting with the clay as he had done in 2011. Scaling up, however, affords the artist a chance to experiment even more with the paring down of the figurative into quirkier forms of existential inelegance.

A third, less direct source, is a return to Nara's earliest paintings and drawings, especially of works that may have received less attention, such as figures with elongated almond-shaped bodies or squashed circular heads. It demonstrates a practice of Nara’s where he retrieves older works that may have once been considered imperfect, finding the open potential yet to come from that which is flawed.

Yoshitomo Nara Blurry Mind, 2024 Acrylic on canvas 94 5/8 x 86 3/4 x 2 3/8 inches 240.3 x 220.3 x 6 centimeters Photo: Hannah Mjølsnes© Yoshitomo Nara / Courtesy of the Yoshitomo Nara Foundationand BLUM Los Angeles, Tokyo, New York

There is a strong connectivity across Nara’s works—evident when considering the paintings and drawings as a spectrum from the meditative to the spontaneous, exploring the potential of the unformed and of returns. The iconic figure in his large painting Blurry Mind draws viewers in to see the many layers of radiant colors that dance and glimmer across the canvas. This painting is a testament to Nara’s deep interest in the painterly effects of color, and its ability to hold viewers’ attention. This work is, however, also an iconic image of the “Nara-child, ” one which the artist is seeking to deconstruct with these eleven sculptures, to find a new form that can push him into different directions. His process of taking apart his own pictorial language or returning to earlier, perhaps forgotten, drawings and paintings as inspiration also underscores the theme of this show.

In the past decade, while continuing to exhibit in major museums worldwide, Nara has embraced a slower, more reflective approach to his work. He enjoys the tactile nature of his materials and the connective charge between hand and mind—elements that are evident in his latest paintings and sculptures. Notably, Nara aligns these methods with his own way of being in the world—where attentiveness to small, seemingly imperfect acts can yield a deep sense of freedom.

– Yeewan Koon

Yoshitomo Nara (b. 1959, Hirosaki, Japan) graduated with an MFA from the Aichi Prefectural University of Fine Arts and Music, Nagakute, Japan, in 1987, he completed his studies at the Kunstakademie, Dusseldorf, Germany from 1988 to 1993. Nara began his career during the decade he spent in Cologne, and from the mid-1990s, he exhibited widely in Europe, the United States, Japan, and all over Asia. His return to Japan in 2000 coincided with a surge of global interest in Japanese pop culture, particularly in the United States. While he is primarily a painter, his practice encompasses drawing; sculptures made of wood, FRP, ceramic, and bronze; installations that incorporate scrap materials; and photographs that document everyday landscapes and the encounters he has during his travels. Influenced by music, literature, and his own life, Nara's works transcend cultural and linguistic barriers, touching people globally.

Nara’s numerous solo exhibitions include Yoshitomo Nara, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Spain; traveling to Frieder Burda Museum, Baden-Baden, Germany; Hayward Gallery-Southbank Centre, London, UK (2024–25); Yoshitomo Nara: The Beginning Place, Aomori Museum of Art, Aomori, Japan (2023); Yoshitomo Nara: All My Little Words, Albertina Modern, Vienna, Austria (2023); Yoshitomo Nara, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; traveled to Yuz Museum, Shanghai, China; Kunsthal Rotterdam, Netherlands (2021–23); Yoshitomo Nara for better or worse, Toyota Municipal Museum of Art, Aichi, Japan (2017); Life is Only One: Yoshitomo Nara, Asia Society Hong Kong Center, Hong Kong, China (2015); NARA Yoshitomo: a bit like you and me…, Yokohama Museum of Art, Japan; traveled to Aomori Museum of Art, Japan; Contemporary Art Museum, Kumamoto, Japan (2012–13); Yoshitomo Nara: The Little Little House in The Blue Wood, Towada Art Center, Aomori, Japan (2012); Yoshitomo Nara: Nobody’s Fool, Asia Society Museum, New York, NY (2010); Yoshitomo Nara + graf, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Newcastle, UK (2008); Yoshitomo Nara + graf: A to Z, Yoshii Brick Brew House, Aomori, Japan (2006); Yoshitomo Nara: Moonlight Serenade, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Ishikawa, Japan (2006); Yoshitomo Nara— From the Depth of My Drawer, Hara Museum of Art, Tokyo, Japan; traveled to Kanaz Forest of Creation, Fukui, Japan; Yonago City Museum of Art, Tottori, Japan; Yoshii Brick Brewhouse, Hirosaki, Aomori, Japan; Rodin Gallery, Seoul, South Korea (2004–05); Yoshitomo Nara: Nothing Ever Happens, Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, OH; traveled to Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, PA; San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA; Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, MI; The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu, HI (2003–05); I DON’T MIND, IF YOU FORGET ME, Yokohama Museum of Art, Yokohama Japan; traveled to Hiroshima Museum of Contemporary Art, Hiroshima, Japan; Ashiya City Museum of Art and History, Ashiya, Japan; Asahikawa Prefectural Museum of Art, Hokkaido, Japan; Aomori Museum of Art, Aomori, Japan; Hirosaki Yoshii Brick Brewhouse, Hirosaki, Japan (2001–02); Walk On: Works by Yoshitomo Nara, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, IL (2000); and Yoshitomo Nara: Lullaby Supermarket, Santa Monica Museum of Art, Santa Monica, CA (2000), among many more.

 About BLUM

BLUM represents more than sixty artists and estates from seventeen countries worldwide, nurturing a diverse roster of artists at all stages of their practices with a range of global perspectives. Originally opened as Blum & Poe in Santa Monica in 1994, the gallery has been a pioneer in its early commitment to Los Angeles as an international arts capital.

The gallery has been acclaimed for its groundbreaking work in championing international artists of postwar and contemporary movements, such as CoBrA, Dansaekhwa, Mono-ha, and Superflat, and for organizing museum-caliber solo presentations and historical survey exhibitions across its spaces in Los Angeles, Tokyo, and New York. Often partnering with celebrated curators and scholars such as Cecilia Alemani, Alison M. Gingeras, Sofia Gotti, Joan Kee, and Mika Yoshitake, the gallery has produced large- scale exhibitions focusing on the Japanese Mono-ha school (2012); the Korean Dansaekhwa monochrome painters (2014); the European postwar movement CoBrA (2015); Japanese art of the 1980s and 1990s (2019); a rereading of Brazilian Modernism (2019); a revisionist take on the 1959 MoMA exhibition, New Images of Man (2020); and a survey of portraiture through a democratic and humanist lens (2023); among others.

BLUM’s wide-reaching program includes exhibitions, lectures, performance series, screenings, video series, and an annual art book fair at its base in Los Angeles. BLUM Books, the gallery’s publishing division, democratically circulates its program through original scholarship and accessible media ranging from academic monographs, audio series, magazines, to artists’ books.

Across the three global locations, BLUM prioritizes environmental and community stewardship in all operations. In 2015, it was certified as an Arts:Earth Partnership (AEP) green art gallery in Los Angeles and consequently became one of the first green certified galleries in the United States. The gallery is also a member of the Gallery Climate Coalition, which works to facilitate a more sustainable commercial art world and reduce the industry’s collective carbon footprint. BLUM is committed to fostering inclusive and equitable communities both in its physical and online spaces and believes that everybody should have equal access to creating and engaging with contemporary art.

At the BLUM Los Angeles location, the exhibition opened on January 18 and will be on view until March 22, 2025.

For more information about this exhibition and others please visit Blum’s website here. The gallery can also be found on Instagram.

TAVARES STRACHAN: Starless Midnight

Tavares Strachan The Birth of Exuma (Eagle Talon), 2024 (Partial Installation view) Ceramic, rice field installation Ceramic: 72 7/8 x 26 ¾ x 15 in. (185 x 68 x 38 cm) Rice field: 533 ½ x 189 in. (1355.1 x 480.1 cm) Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery Photo credit: Tom Powel Imaging

Marian Goodman Gallery New York is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of Tavares Strachan titled Starless Midnight. This immersive presentation will feature several new and existing bodies of work across seven diverse and site-specific environments. Through an interconnected array of works comprising painting, sound, robotics, neon, marble, and hair, Starless Midnight is a testament to Strachan’s multifaceted artistic practice, structured by a visual language of storytelling. Strachan’s boldly inventive and ambitious work summons historical and cultural references, expressing the affinities, contradictions, and dependencies within oft-untold stories of historically marginalized individuals, places, and events, and finding the interstices between the disciplines of art, science, history, exploration.  

Tavares Strachan A Map of the Crown (Fulani Red), 2025 Marble, flocked hair 24 3/4 x 16 1/8 x 13 3/8 in. (63 x 41 x 34 cm) Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery Photo credit: Jonty Wilde

The first floor opens on to an immersive landscape with a near life-size ceramic of the musician and artist Exuma commanding the space from the center of a ‘meadow’ of rice grass. Viewed from above, the installation takes the shape of the Ghanaian Adinkra symbol Okodee Mmowere, which directly translates to “eagle’s talons,” metaphysically denoting bravery. Able to transgress the limitations of a phonetic writing system in its expansive interpretations, Okodee Mmowere pulls rice as the wefting thread of universal culinary staples, spanning across civilizations, space, and time. Adjacent in the same gallery, and an anchoring point of the exhibition, is a quote by James Baldwin that begins, “You could be that person…” Transcribed in Strachan’s neon calligraphy, the words flash in time with a dissonant sound work. Throughout this sensory parcours, Strachan assembles fragmented components of cultural and historical significance into rich visual, olfactory, and sonic allegories. The themes within this bricolage landscape call upon a poetics of being, to build on new relational capacities between individuals and the world.  

Tavares Strachan Stubble Field for Anubis, 2025 Handmade drum, fiber, electrical components Diameter: 10 1/2 in. (26.7 cm) Height: 14 3/4 in. (37.5 cm) Drum plank: 108 x 9 x 2 1/2 in. (274.3 x 22.9 x 6.4 cm) Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery Photo credit: Tom Powel Imaging

In the second-floor gallery, Strachan introduces a new body of paintings consisting of hand-tiled and painted word searches that speak to the artist’s focus on visibility and invisibility. Overwhelmingly detailed, meticulously painted bits of paper and fiber absorb the viewer into labyrinthine inquiries of storytelling, star gazing, and exploration. While serious in their content, they simultaneously evoke a playful nostalgia of CRTs and television static. A manifestation of electromagnetic noise, the English language is reduced to tactile fragments, the letters nearly feeling debris-like in their fragile organization.

Installation view: Tavares Strachan “Starless Midnight,” Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, 2025 Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery Photo credit: Tom Powel Imaging

Each work in this exhibition features infinite references to years of research from Strachan’s ongoing project The Encyclopedia of Invisibility—an encyclopedia of his own construction to house lost stories. Offering a multitude of interpretations on subjects from galactic clusters to the fragility of digital data in the information age, Strachan imaginatively maps the unknown and the process by which we attempt to conquer knowledge.

Tavares Strachan Self Portrait (King Kuba), 2023 Ceramic, thatch cape 35 x 48 1/2 x 40 in. (88.9 x 123.2 x 101.6 cm) Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery Photo credit: Tom Powel Imaging

Strachan was born in 1979 in Nassau, Bahamas, and currently lives and works between New York City and Nassau. He received a BFA in Glass from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2003 and an MFA in Sculpture from Yale University in 2006. He draws on both the resources and community of his birthplace, dividing his time between his studio in New York and Nassau, where he has established an art studio and scientific research platform B.A.S.E.C. (Bahamas Aerospace and Sea Exploration Center) and OKU, a not-for-profit community project encompassing an artist residency and exhibition spaces, a scholarship scheme, and after-school creative programs.

Most recently Strachan’s work has been featured in the solo exhibitions Between Me and You, at the University of Texas, Austin, and Tavares Strachan: There Is Light Somewhere, at the Hayward Gallery, London (both 2024). Other solo exhibitions include You Belong Here, Prospect 3. Biennial, New Orleans (2014); The Immeasurable Daydream, Biennale de Lyon, Lyon (2013) ; Polar Eclipse, The Bahamas National Pavilion 55th Venice Biennale, Venice; Seen/Unseen, Undisclosed Exhibition, New York; Orthostatic Tolerance: It Might Not Be Such a Bad Idea if I Never Went Home Again, MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge; among others. 

Upcoming exhibitions include a solo show at Kunsthalle Mannheim this spring, opening in April 2025, and a major presentation co-organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and Columbus Museum of Art (CMA). The exhibition will premiere at LACMA this fall and travel to CMA in spring 2026.     
 

He has been the recipient of numerous awards including the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation fellowship (2022), 2019-20 Artist in Residence at the Getty Research Institute, 2018 Frontier Art Prize, and the Allen Institute’s inaugural artist-in-residence in 2018, 2014 LACMA Art + Technology Lab Artist Grant, 2008 Tiffany Foundation Grant, 2007 Grand Arts Residency Fellowship, and 2006 Alice B. Kimball Fellowship.

The exhibition opened on 7 March and will be on view until 19 April 2025 at the New York location at 385 Broadway, New York, NY 10013. There was an opening reception held on Friday, 7 March, from 6 to 8 pm. For more information about the exhibit, please visit the Marian Goodman Gallery’s site. The gallery can be found on Instagram and Artsy, too.

Miquel Barceló | Flores, peces, toros

Installation Views: Miquel Barceló | Flores, peces, toros, All images: © Courtesy of the artist and Galería Elvira González

“Painting is linked to childhood. It is probably true that we learn what is important before we are ten years old. I have the impression that, in painting, at the age of ten I had already done almost everything I have done and continue to redo. In Mallorca I learned the names of trees, fish, birds. learned to whistle, throw stones, fish, kill and gut hares and lambs, and cook them. I usually paint what I kill or what I eat”.

Miquel Barceló, Tropicalismo, 2024, 235 x 235 cm, técnica mixta sobre lienzo

Galería Elvira González is pleased to announce the fourth exhibition of Miquel Barceló in the gallery which opened on Wednesday, January 29. Flores, peces, toros will feature paintings, ceramics and watercolors with marine topics, bullfighting themes, still life and nature.

Miquel Barceló, Vanitas au melon, 2024, 160 x 240 x 4 cm, técnica mixta sobre lien

The first room revolves around bullfighting. The art of bullfighting is a constant subject for Barceló, who painted his first bullfight in 1980; since then it has been a theme he has obsessively used and worked with in detail. From a bird's eye view or as a spectator in the bullring, Barceló's bullfight paintings capture passes and moments that only those who know the universe around bullfighting in depth can describe. Or paint. Continuing with the exhibition, ceramics with various types of masks and fishes will be on display; masks that may look like the portrait of the artist himself. The sea is another theme widely depicted in his work. “My day-to-day life is summed up in painting, swimming and reading” the artist says. Interested in the organic life and the passage of time, Barceló considers ceramics an extension of his painting.

Installation Views: Miquel Barceló | Flores, peces, toros, All images: © Courtesy of the artist and Galería Elvira González

The third room in the gallery displays still life paintings, flowers, marine and under the water fauna as well as works on paper and ceramics of all kinds, where once again, the toros, the marine theme, animals, fauna and flora are intermingled. The artist acts like the prehistoric cave painter who paints out of an imperious need to transmit. In the studio, Barceló cannot refrain from painting what he sees and captures in his daily life and transforms it into art reflecting what surrounds him and the universe in which he is immersed.

Miquel Barceló (Felanitx, 1956) first exhibited in the mid-1970s and quickly gained international recognition. He started his art studies in Barcelona but ended up quitting in order to start an independent pictorial career. In 1974 he had his first solo exhibition at the Picarol Gallery in Mallorca bursting onto the international scene at the Sâo Paulo Biennial in 1981, and at Documenta VII in Kassel (Germany) in 1982.

Miquel Barceló has had exhibitions in major museums such as the CAPC (Bordeaux), the IVAM (Valencia), the Jeu de Paume, the Centre Pompidou, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and the Museé du Louvre (all five in Paris), The Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna (Rome), the Museu d'Art Contemporani (Barcelona), the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid), the Museo Nacional de Arte de Osaka (Japan) and recently the Küppersmühle Museum in Duisburg (Germany). He has also made major interventions in public spaces such as the ceramic covering in the Chapel of Sant Pere in the Cathedral of Mallorca or the dome of Room XX of the Palais des Nations Unies in Geneva. Throughout his career, Miquel Barceló has received awards such as the National Prize for the Arts in Spain 1986 and the Prince of Asturias Award for the Arts in 2003.

 For more information about this exhibition and others, please visit the Galería Elvira González’s website. The gallery can be found on Vimeo, Facebook and Instagram.

Beatriz Milhazes: Rigor and Beauty

Installation view, Beatriz Milhazes: Rigor and Beauty, March 7, 2025 – September 14, 2025, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Photo: David Heald © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York

(NEW YORK, NY) The Guggenheim New York presents the first museum exhibition in New York devoted to the work of Beatriz Milhazes (b. 1960, Rio de Janeiro), a global contemporary artist who engages with her Brazilian cultural heritage and identity through the language of abstraction. This focused exhibition features a group of fifteen paintings and works on paper from 1995 to 2023, drawn from the museum’s permanent collection and augmented by key loans, which together contextualize the broader narrative of her artistic evolution.

Renowned for her bold, colorful abstractions, Milhazes’s complex body of work spans four decades, from the 1980s to the present. Her practice encompasses sculpture, collage, print, textiles, public art, and especially painting, all featuring intricate patterns and dynamic forms grounded in geometry.

Beatriz Milhazes, In albis, 1995–96. Acrylic on canvas, 72 1/2 × 117 7/8 in. (184.2 × 299.4 cm). Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Gift, The Bohen Foundation 2001.219. © Beatriz Milhazes. Photo: Ariel Ione Williams, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

Milhazes’s work is deeply rooted in Brazilian history and tradition, drawing from colonial art and architecture, decorative arts, and the vibrant celebration of Carnival—a week-long festival in Rio de Janeiro that showcases Brazilian culture through parades, music, performances, and elaborate costumes. She is also influenced by Tropicália, a 1960s cultural movement that blended art, music, and literature to celebrate Brazilian identity while protesting the repressive military regime. The rhythms and colors of bossa nova, a musical style born in Rio de Janeiro in the late 1950s, also echo throughout her work. Beyond these influences, she engages with the work of artists like Henri Matisse, Piet Mondrian, and Tarsila do Amaral, whose creations were fundamental to the visual and aesthetic developments of Brazilian Modernism.

Beatriz Milhazes, Santa Cruz, 1995. Acrylic on canvas, 76 1/4 × 120 1/4 in. (193.7 × 305.4 cm). Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Gift, The Bohen Foundation 2001.220. © Beatriz Milhazes. Photo: Ariel Ione Williams, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

“The Guggenheim is thrilled to present the first New York museum exhibition of Beatriz Milhazes. Her colorful abstractions interweave references to art history and the natural world while merging Brazilian cultural motifs with modernist influences. The show offers a rare opportunity to engage with her unique creative process and see how she reinforces her Carioca roots, creating an elaborate lexicon of allusions and symbols within a vernacular Brazilian context, ” states

Geaninne Gutiérrez-Guimarães, Curator, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation, New York.

Beatriz Milhazes, O cravo e a rosa (The Carnation and the Rose), 2000. Acrylic on canvas, 94 1/2 × 95 in. (240 × 241.3 cm). Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Gift, The Bohen Foundation 2001.223. © Beatriz Milhazes. Photo: Ariel Ione Williams, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

In 1989 Milhazes developed an innovative technique she calls “monotransfer, ” inspired by the monotype printing process, in which a painted image is transferred from a plate to paper, producing a mirror image. The artist’s methodical process begins with painting motifs onto clear plastic sheets with acrylic paint. Once the acrylic dries, she layers and adheres the painted films to canvas one by one, constructing her abstract compositions through the careful arrangement of these distinct motifs. She then peels away the plastic sheets, revealing the forms in reverse. Since the painting process is unpredictable, her canvases often contain incomplete or faint structures formed by residual traces of paint from previous works, as she reuses the same plastic sheets over many years. Milhazes embraces these elements as acts of chance and improvisation, integrating them into new pieces as fortuitous inclusions. The result is a densely textured composition in which vibrant colors, organic shapes, and geometric patterns interact harmoniously on a surface imbued with the memory of the artist’s actions.

Beatriz Milhazes, As quatro estações (The Four Seasons), 1997. Acrylic on canvas, 101 1/2 × 112 1/8 in. (257.8 × 284.8 cm). Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Gift, The Bohen Foundation 2001.222. © Beatriz Milhazes. Photo: Ariel Ione Williams, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

The early paintings in this exhibition, primarily from the museum’s collection—such as Santa Cruz (1995), In albis (1995–96), and As quatro estaçōes (The Four Seasons, 1997)—draw inspiration from the opulence of 18th-century Brazilian Baroque colonial churches and ornamental garments. Milhazes synthesizes these influences into abstract and representative motifs, with circles and arabesques, delicate crochet and lace, flowers and floral patterns, decorative ruffles and ribbons, and ornate pearls and ironwork emerging throughout her compositions. By 2000, Milhazes began exploring optical effects in her paintings, using linear repetitions to create undulating patterns and visual rhythm, as seen in Paisagem carioca (Carioca Landscape, 2000), O cravo e a rosa (The Carnation and the Rose, 2000), and O Caipira (The Caipira, 2004).

Beatriz Milhazes (b. 1960, Rio de Janeiro), Carioca Landscape (Paisagem carioca),2000. Acrylic on canvas, 67 × 79 in. (170.2 × 200.7 cm). Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Gift, The Bohen Foundation 2001.224. © Beatriz Milhazes. Photo: Ariel Ione Williams, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

The works on paper in this exhibition, spanning 2013 to 2021, demonstrate Milhazes’s continued experimentation with the medium, particularly since she began formally creating collages during a 2003 residency at the Centre d’art contemporain du Domaine de Kerguéhennec in Bignan, France. Combining mass-produced elements like branded shopping bags, chocolate bar wrappers, and patterned paper with cutouts from solid-colored screenprints, Milhazes creates patterns with recurring motifs such as arabesques, stars, leaves, flowers, circles, squares, and rectangles. Her collages function like personal journals, reflecting fragments of the artist’s reality and her commitment to color and inventive form.

Her recent paintings, including Mistura sagrada (Sacred Mixture, 2022), mark a shift toward exploring the spiritual power of nature in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Although references to the natural world have been present since her early career, here she delves into cycles of renewal—life and death—through colorful, angular forms and intricate patterns. Organic elements, reflective of Milhazes’s proximity to Rio de Janeiro’s Botanical Garden, Tijuca Forest, and Copacabana Beach, are echoed in the harmonious geometries, conceptual systems, and chromatic universes that span her oeuvre.

Installation view, Beatriz Milhazes: Rigor and Beauty, March 7, 2025 – September 14, 2025, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Photo: David Heald © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York

“With almost thirty years between the earliest and most recent works in this exhibition, the pieces interact in remarkable ways, creating a strong and distinctive visual confrontation while offering a valuable opportunity to observe their evolution. I would especially note the convivial relationships between abstraction, figuration, geometry, and free forms in these works, as well as the superposition of their paint layers. The colorful compositions diverge from dark and melancholic to bright and intricate, creating a dynamic atmosphere in the exhibition ”

— Beatriz Milhazes

This exhibition is the second installment in the exhibition series Collection in Focus, which highlights the museum’s permanent collection. The series is part of a reinvigorated effort to make the Guggenheim New York’s world-renowned holdings more accessible to the public. Beatriz Milhazes: Rigor and Beauty is organized by Geaninne Gutiérrez-Guimarães, Curator, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation, New York.

Programming

On the occasion of the exhibition, Beatriz Milhazes will participate in a public program on May 20, 2025, as part of the museum’s Conversations with Contemporary Artists series. Additional educational activities will include gallery talks within the exhibition, which will be free with museum admission.

Beatriz Milhazes in front of her painting The Four Seasons (As quatro estações, 1997) in 2024. © Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Photo: David Heald, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

About the Artist

Beatriz Milhazes was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1960 and continues to live and work there. She earned a degree in journalism from Faculdades Integradas Hélio Alonso in 1981 and attended open courses at the Escola de Artes Visuais do Parque Lage (EAV) from 1980–82. In 1984, she participated in Como vai você, Geração 80?, a seminal exhibition marking the return to painting in Brazil. In 1986, she became a teacher at EAV, where she taught for ten years. In 1989, she developed her signature “monotransfer” painting technique and dedicated herself fully to her artistic practice.

Milhazes has a longstanding relationship with the Guggenheim New York, dating back to 1992 when curator Richard Armstrong (former director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2008–23) and Fred Henry, president of the Bohen Foundation, visited her studio in Rio de Janeiro at the recommendation of Brazilian art critic and curator Paulo Herkenhoff. Milhazes later participated in Armstrong’s Carnegie International 1995 exhibition at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, in 1995—her first major show outside of Latin America—earning international recognition. In 1998, Herkenhoff included her work in the São Paulo Biennial, while Armstrong continued to follow her career. Moreover, Fred Henry became an avid collector of her work and eventually acquired five of Milhazes’s paintings for the Bohen Foundation. In 2001, the Bohen Foundation donated a sizeable collection to the Guggenheim Museum under former director Thomas Krens (1988–2008). This significant bequest, primarily consisting of film, video, new media, and installation art, also included six works by Milhazes, along with pieces by other Brazilian artists.

In 2002, Milhazes had her first museum solo show at the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, Rio de Janeiro. Since then, she has held numerous national and international solo exhibitions and received several artist commissions, including at Pinacoteca de São Paulo (2008); Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris (2009); Fondation Beyeler, Riehen, Switzerland (2011); Pérez Art Museum Miami (2014); the Jewish Museum, New York (2016); Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP) with Itaú Cultural, São Paulo (2020); Long Museum, Shanghai (2021); Turner Contemporary, Margate, England (2023); and Tate St Ives, Cornwall, England (2024). She also participated in the Biennial of Sydney (1998), São Paulo Biennial (1998, 2004, 2013), Shanghai Biennial (2006), Mercosul Biennial (2015), and the Venice Biennale (2003, 2024), with a special project at the Pavilion of Applied Arts at the most recent Venice Biennale

Support

Visionary support for Collection in Focus is provided by Aleksandra Janke and Andrew McCormack.

The Leadership Committee for Beatriz Milhazes: Rigor and Beauty is gratefully acknowledged for its generosity, with special thanks to Laura Clifford, Peter Bentley Brandt, Christina and Alan MacDonald, Cristina Chacón and Diego Uribe, Alberto Cruz, Ilva Lorduy, Karina Mirochnik and Gaby Szpigiel, Pace Gallery, White Cube, Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel, and Galerie Max Hetzler. Additional funding is provided by the Guggenheim New York’s Latin American Circle.

About the Guggenheim New York

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation was established in 1937 and is dedicated to promoting the understanding and appreciation of modern and contemporary art through exhibitions, education programs, research initiatives, and publications. The international constellation of museums includes the Guggenheim New York; the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice; Guggenheim Bilbao; and the future Guggenheim Abu Dhabi. An architectural icon and “temple of spirit” where radical art and architecture meet, the Guggenheim New York is now among a group of eight Frank Lloyd Wright structures in the United States recently designated as a UNESCO World Heritage site. To learn more about the museum and the Guggenheim’s activities around the world, visit guggenheim.org.

Beatriz Milhazes: Rigor and Beauty will be on view at Guggenheim New York, 1071 Fifth Avenue, New York in Tower 5. From March 7 to September 14, 2025

To learn more about the museum, this exhibit, past exhibits, current exhibits, upcoming exhibits, and the Guggenheim’s activities around the world, visit here.  The museum can also be found on YouTube, TikTok, X, Facebook, and Instagram.

SOPHIE CALLE

SOPHIE CALLE Calle-Joconde (Wrong turn), 2025 (detail) text panel in artist’s frame, two pigment prints in artists frames, thread, pigment print in cardboard frame © 2025 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

Fraenkel Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition by Sophie Calle. For more than forty years Calle has made work that draws from her life, transforming elements from her public and private relationships into intimate narratives. The exhibition features several series exploring questions about legacy and loss, topics Calle approaches with her typical humor and candor. Making its U.S. debut, Catalogue Raisonné of the Unfinished focuses on projects Calle previously conceptualized but didn’t pursue. Each piece pairs fragments from the project with Calle’s text about its failure. Another series, Picassos in Lockdown, comprises photographs Calle made at the Musée National Picasso in Paris during the pandemic. Each shows a painting covered for protection while the museum was closed. The exhibition also features a selection of works looking at death and remembrance through the lens of Calle’s relationship with her parents. This will be Calle’s fifth exhibition at Fraenkel Gallery since 1994. A public reception with the artist will take place on Saturday, March 1, from 2- 4pm.

Catalogue Raisonné of the Unfinished collects photographs, handwritten notes, comic books, and other documents, each paired with a short text describing the artwork Calle had originally imagined and how it came to (not) be. A red stamp across each text pronounces her reason for rejecting the work. The projects range from Calle’s request for museum visitors to propose ideas for her to enact (“Not exhilarating”), to an attempt to insert herself into a Mexican comic book collection that included the word “Calle” in the title (“Anecdotal”). Together, the series presents a sort of self-imposed salon des refusés, revealing glimpses of Calle’s process and celebrating the transformation of many dead ends into a final positive form.

SOPHIE CALLE Shiner, 2020 pigment print mounted on aluminum, in wooden box © 2025 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

In 2023, Musée National Picasso presented a solo exhibition of Calle’s work, timed to the 50th anniversary of the death of Pablo Picasso. The deliberately retrospective exhibition, titled À toi de faire, ma mignonne, (“It’s up to you, my darling”) included photographs Calle made while the museum was closed during the pandemic, recording the cloth and paper coverings that shielded Picasso’s paintings from light and dust. Calle has described her encounter with the paintings: “The Picassos were under protection, wrapped up, hidden. Underneath — a ghostlike, less intimidating presence,” she writes. Titled after the works they conceal, the photographs in Picassos in Lockdown encourage the viewer to recall the original painting.

SOPHIE CALLE Portrait de Marie-Thérèse, 2022 pigment print © 2025 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

A third gallery presents selections from Autobiographies and other elegiac, family-focused works, pairing photographs and texts in frames or urn-like wooden boxes. In Autobiographies (Morning), Calle awaits her father’s last words, while Autobiographies (My Mother Died) reproduces notes about death from Calle’s diary and her mother’s. A glass-fronted box titled Unforeseen presents the obituary Calle commissioned for herself, hidden behind pinned butterflies to remain unreadable. The piece incorporates Calle’s commentary about her decision to obscure the writing: “So as not to attract too much attention from death, I decided it was best to cover up what I did not want to read,” she notes. In these and other works, Calle addresses her own mortality with characteristic honesty and wit, taking on the question of how we remember and are in turn remembered.

Sophie Calle was recently featured in Sophie Calle: Overshare at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and Absences: Sophie Calle & Toulouse-Lautrec at the Mitsubishi Ichigokan Museum, Tokyo. Her work was presented in the solo exhibition Finir en Beauté (Neither Give Nor Throw Away), held in the cryptoporticus at Arles as part of the photography festival Rencontres d’Arles in France. Her work has been shown in museums around the world and is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Centre Pompidou, Paris; and Tate, London, among many others. Calle is the recipient of numerous awards, including most recently the Praemium Imperiale Award in 2024, as well as the Royal Photographic Society’s Centenary Medal, an Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography, and the Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography, among others.

The exhibtion opened on Februrary 27th and will conclude on April 12, 2025 . A public reception with the artist will take place on Saturday, March 1, from 2- 4pm. Please visit the Fraenkel Gallery's site for more information about Sophie’s exhibit.

Francis Picabia. Éternel recommencement / Eternal Beginning

Installation view, ‘Francis Picabia. Éternel recommencement / Eternal Beginning,’ Hauser & Wirth Paris, 2025. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Nicolas Brasseur

In collaboration with the Comité Picabia, Hauser & Wirth Paris will present an exhibition of over 40 post-war artworks by Francis Picabia. Curated by Beverley Calté and Arnauld Pierre, this will be the first major solo exhibition exclusively exploring Picabia’s unique final period, created after his return to Paris in 1945 until the year before his death in 1953. Often overshadowed by other periods of his oeuvre, Picabia’s last series saw the artist abandon his famous wartime Nudes, coupled with a particular interest in surface texture and new sources of inspiration. Characteristic of Picabia’s restless artistic talent, these paintings represent his own definitions of nonfigurative art, creating a new visual language which distinctly sets this bold group of works apart from anything he had done before. This exhibition will travel to Hauser & Wirth New York, 22nd Street from 1 May – 25 July 2025.

The final phase of Picabia’s work, whose prolific career was marked by a ‘complex alternation of styles and techniques’ (Arnauld Pierre), is reflective of an unprecedented visual language and a singular approach to abstraction. This period testifies to the artist’s unwavering commitment to a core principle, a method that has persisted through all his transformations: the use of pre-existing visual material. This material was drawn either from a vast collection of images or from his own earlier paintings, which he continued to revisit.

Installation view, ‘Francis Picabia. Éternel recommencement / Eternal Beginning,’ Hauser & Wirth Paris, 2025. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Nicolas Brasseur

In 1945, Picabia returned to Paris, facing challenging economic and artistic circumstances and needing a fresh start. The painter appeared to return to the Dada ‘anti-painting’ ethos of the past. The most striking examples of this resurgence are found in his Points series, which were controversially reviewed by critics. Works include ‘Silence’ (1949) or ‘Six points’ (1949), in which a handful of dots—resembling a constellation—is set against a monochrome background subtly clouded by surface effects, resembling turbulent currents or signs of wear and tear.

Francis Picabia Colloque (Colloquium) 1949 Oil on canvas 97 x 130.5 x 2 cm / 38 1/4 x 51 3/8 x  3/4 in 116 x 150 x 4 cm / 45 5/8 x 59 x 1 5/8 in (framed) Photo: Nicolas Brasseur

During this period, Picabia was far from a recluse. On Sundays, he regularly opened his studio to artists like Henri Goetz, Christine Boumeester, Raoul Ubac, Jean-Michel Atlan and Georges Mathieu. These figures sought to forge a third path, particularly at the Salon des Surindépendants, between the legacies of Surrealism and the rigors of abstraction. While Picabia resisted being confined to group labels, he was nonetheless willingly associated with the ‘informels’ in the post-war period. This connection is perhaps best justified by his distinctive treatment of the material, the very substance of the painting. This can be seen, for example, in ‘Rapport avec les vertus (In Relation to the Virtues)’ (1949), with its dark colored areas that defy the uniformity of a flat field, or in ‘Colloque (Colloquium)’ (1949), with its sharp folds and textured impasto.

Francis Picabia, Cherchez d’abord votre Orphée ! (First Seek Your Orpheus!), 1948 Oil on canvas, 170 × 70 cm / 66 ⅞ × 27 1/2 in. Musée-bibliothèque PAB, Alès, France Ó Musée-bibliothèque Pierre-André Benoît (PAB), Alès, France. Courtesy Archives Comité Picabia, Paris

Picabia remained steadfast in following his own path and the post-war period was no exception. He continued to employ his tried-and-tested technique of sampling, borrowing and assimilating. Notably, the exhibition highlights the role that prehistoric artistic sources had in Picabia’s paintings during the time. This inclination towards mythologized origins can manifest as an expected engagement with the forms and teachings of the African continent or Oceania. Masks became one of Picabia’s particularly favored motifs, as seen in ‘Niagara’ (ca. 1947), where a cranial form swells into a bulb and is divided into three sections by a Y-shaped groove. The mask motif reminds us that this final phase of Picabia’s work, often labelled ‘abstract,’ was not entirely so. Alongside the masks, the exhibition features ‘Villejuif [I],’ an oil on wood from 1951. Its evocative power and emotional resonance remain undeniable.

Francis Picabia Symbole (Symbol) 1950 Oil on plywood in original frame 100 x 85.5 cm / 39 3/8 x 33 5/8 in Musée - bibliothèque Pierre André Benoit, Alès, France Photo: Mercatorfonds, Belgium and Archives Comité Picabia, Paris

Picabia’s collection of imagery was not restricted to distant geographical sources. Catalan Romanesque art, along with prehistory, were among the artist’s favorite inspirations. His borrowings also included ‘self- borrowings,’ as seen in his repainted works, such as ‘Elle danse (She Dances)’ (1948). Picabia also appropriated words, often drawing on Nietzsche for his titles. Examples include ‘Cherchez d’abord votre Orphée ! (First Seek Your Orpheus!)’ (1948) and ‘Le négateur du hasard [?] (The Denier Of Chance [?])’ (1946), both inspired by ‘Le Gai Savoir.’ This approach is hardly surprising—until the very end of his life, Picabia made his own rules when it came to aesthetics.’

Installation view, ‘Francis Picabia. Éternel recommencement / Eternal Beginning,’ Hauser & Wirth Paris, 2025. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Nicolas Brasseur

An exhibition catalogue, released alongside the exhibition, illustrates Picabia’s visually imposing works and contextualizes his very personal position within the vibrant post-war Parisian art scene and the rise of art informel. This bilingual publication by Hauser & Wirth Publishers includes essays by Arnauld Pierre and Candace Clements, with an introductory preface from Beverley Calté, President of the Comité Picabia.

About the Artist

Francis Picabia (1879–1953) was born François Martinez Picabia in Paris, to a Spanish father and a French mother. After initially painting in an Impressionist manner, elements of Fauvism and Neo-Impressionism as well as Cubism and other forms of abstraction began to appear in his painting in 1908, and by 1912 he had evolved a personal amalgam of Cubism and Fauvism. In 1915—which marked the beginning of Picabia’s machinist or mechanomorphic period—he and Marcel Duchamp, among others, instigated and participated in Dada manifestations in New York. For the next few years, Picabia remained involved with the Dadaists in Zurich and Paris, but finally denounced Dada in 1921 for no longer being “new.” The following year, he returned to figurative art, but resumed painting in an abstract style by the end of World War II.

About Hauser & Wirth Publishers

In keeping with Hauser & Wirth’s artist-centric vision, Hauser & Wirth Publishers works to bring readers into the universe of artists and behind the scenes of their practices. From publishing artists’ writings and exceptional exhibition-related books to commissioning new scholarship and pursuing the highest levels of craft in design and bookmaking, Hauser & Wirth Publishers creates vital, lasting records of artists’ work and ideas, forging critical gateways to the cultural discourse they inspire. Through its Oral History Initiative, Hauser & Wirth Publishers is building an enduring record of artists’ voices for future generations. Additionally, the imprint publishes Ursula magazine, a bi-annual print and digital periodicathat features essays, profiles, interviews, original portfolios, films and photography by thought-provoking writers and artists from around the world.

The exhibition opened on 18 January – and will conclude on 12 Marchl 2025 at the Paris location, This exhibition will travel to Hauser & Wirth New York, 22nd Street from 1 May – 25 July 2025.. Please visit the Hauser & Wirth Gallery site for information about upcoming exhibitions. Also, follow the gallery on Instagram, Facebook,  X, and YouTube.The magazine did a book highlight, which can be found here.

RENÉ WIRTHS : I CAN’T GET NO

Toutes les images / All images: © Courtesy of the artist and TEMPLON, Paris - Brussels - New York

Berlin artist René Wirths unveils his series “I CAN’T GET NO” at Templon in Brussels, a collection of fourteen new paintings created over the course of the past two years.

A virtuoso painter, René Wirths is renowned for his still lifes, which are both objective and meditative, and where each object represented — a sneaker, a coffee pot, a pair of headphones, a spray bottle — is treated in an hyper-realist manner that captures every detail and texture. Far beyond a mere imitation of reality, Wirths bestows upon everyday objects an almost sculptural presence, revealing their symbolic weight and silent essence. Representation gives way to reflection, resulting in a physical and metaphysical experience. With the new series, however, René Wirths, for the first time, places his subjects at the centre of a prism of light with divergent rays. His gaze oscillates between accessible reality and subjective vision, focusing on the role of the image in our experience of the world — a perspective fully dedicated to the art of painting.

Toutes les images / All images: © Courtesy of the artist and TEMPLON, Paris - Brussels - New York Video © José Huedo

René Wirths offers a highly personal homage to the great masters of art history, from Édouard Manet’s “Fifer” to “Wanderer above the Sea of Fog” by seminal German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich. “I am finally liberating myself from the process that forced me to reflect the outside world solely through the prism of my own observation,” the artist explains. “I have developed a new vocabulary, more inward-looking, inspired by my readings, music and discussions. My subject has shifted: I allow myself to stage my great masters of art history through a new perspective, freed from the material universe that surrounds me.”

Toutes les images / All images: © Courtesy of the artist and TEMPLON, Paris - Brussels - New York

The “I Can’t Get No” exhibition — its title a discreet nod by this discerning music lover to the famous song by legendary group The Rolling Stones — underscores the importance of rhythm in René Wirths’ oeuvre and interrogates the mysterious, sometimes elusive, aura of a work of art. What knowledge, what memory or personal experience allows one to reveal the profound meaning of a work of art?

Portrait © Jungwook Hwang

Born in 1967, René Wirths grew up in West Berlin where he still resides. He has exhibited his work in several international galleries, including Galerie Michael Haas in Berlin. He also took part in the 2000 Geneva Biennale in 2000. His work has featured in several solo exhibitions including at the Rotterdam Kunsthal in 2011, Kunsthalle Bremerhaven in Germany in 2016 and Haus am Lützowplatz in Germany in 2016. It has also been included in numerous group exhibitions, such as at the Villa Manin di Passariano in Italy in 2002, Galerie im Parlament/Preussischer Landtag in Germany in 2003, Museum Gegenstandsfreier Kunst in Germany in 2008, Zoya Museum in Moldova in 2009, Olbricht Collection, La maison rouge - Fondation Antoine de Galbert in Paris in 2011, Museum Maulbronn in Germany in 2014, Centre of Contemporary Art in Poland in 2018, Museum für Aktuelle Kunst in Germany in 2018, Haus am Lützowplatz in Germany in 2019, Studio im Hochhaus in Germany in 2020 and Museum für neue Kunst in Germany in 2023. He is taking part in a group exhibition at the Arthena Foundation in Düsseldorf, Germany, in 2025.

The exhibition opened on January 11th and will conclude on March 1, 2025. For more information about René Wirths’ s artwork and his exhibition, please visit Templon’s site. The gallery can also be found on Instagram, artnet, Facebook, YouTube, and Artsy.

Caroline Coon & Francesca DiMattio: Snapdragons

Stephen Friedman Gallery presents Snapdragons, a two-person exhibition bringing together four decades of paintings by British artist Caroline Coon, alongside new ceramic sculptures by American artist Francesca DiMattio. The exhibition highlights the radical and rebellious ways in which both artists take on the histories and conventions of their mediums, using them as springboards to bend, modify, and challenge representations of women, femininity, and desire. 

Caroline Coon’s career has been defined by unbridled creativity, experimentation, and an unwavering commitment to challenging societal norms. Her journey includes fighting for the rights of women, drug offenders, and sex workers; documenting the London punk scene of the 1970s through photographs and interviews (she also managed the seminal punk band The Clash); and authoring several books, including the autobiographical Laid Bare – Diary – 1983–1984, which inspired her Brothel series. Throughout it all, she has remained dedicated to her painting practice. Although artistic recognition came later in life, she is now celebrated for her figurative paintings, which blend feminist revisionist histories with a distinctly contemporary urban vision.

In her painting Sunday Afternoon - Backgammon Players (1985), Coon creates a homage of Manet’s Olympia (1863) and Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres’ Grande Odalisque (1814), subverting the traditional male-female power dynamic by positioning the unclothed Adonis figure as the object of the viewer's gaze. Set in contemporary London, the painting reveals two reclining nudes at leisure, reveling in their freedom and erotic play. In other works, such as Self-Portrait with Model (1993), Coon places herself at the center. She portrays herself as an artist, pencil in hand, ready to draw her lover, who lies in a state of heightened sexual arousal. “This is a bold statement of my identity as an artist,” wrote Coon, “who has, both socially and sexually, transgressed the sexist restrictions imposed on women by respectable society. Not only am I naked, but I am standing beside my canvas before my model who is as elegantly erect as I am. There is no polite illusion here—rather a factual, liberatory contradiction to those in the past who have denied the power and purpose of female sexuality.”

Installation: Caroline Coon and Francesca DiMattio, 'Snapdragons', Stephen Friedman Gallery, New York (2025). Courtesy Stephen Friedman Gallery, London and New York. Photos by Grace Dodds.

In her 2005 painting Self-Portrait: In My Cock Hat, Coon appears naked and statuesque, wearing a crown of penises. Set against a black background, her name is emblazoned across the canvas like a marquee. She meets the viewer’s gaze with a look that is direct and confrontational. In Cunt (1999), a precursor to her 2005 self-portrait, she creates a theatrical stage set inspired by British Pop artist, Pauline Boty’s last extant painting, BUM (1966). “I decided to make a front/cunt sister painting to Boty’s back/bum as a celebration of women’s ‘sex’—the part of women’s anatomy most commonly derided as disgusting, forbidden and used as the worst of insults,” Coon explained. “Following Boty’s theme, I ‘staged’ my Cunt in an archaic temple of sexual pleasure and fecundity. In the pediment are two goddesses of Liberty, beside the birth shell of Venus. Above them is a wild English Dog rose, for love and romance. The torso is framed by two strips—Corinthian columns representing Vitruvian architectural principles that could be read as symbolising patriarchal masculinity, and beside them is a crush of roses to represent female sensuality.” 

Flowers take center stage in a series of still-life paintings created between 1988 and 2008. Paying homage to the floral works of Gluck (1895–1978), a pioneer of gender fluidity, Coon’s paintings similarly reject conventional femininity. Her compositions are animated, bold, theatrical, and unapologetically sensual.

New York-based artist Francesca DiMattio operates with a similarly insurgent spirit, dismantling traditional boundaries between high and low, art and craft, masculine and feminine, history and the present. Straddling the worlds of art, architecture, and design, DiMattio’s work is non-hierarchical, eclectic, and teeming with ideas. Her pedestal sculptures riff on 18th-century French Sèvres porcelain, German Meissen ware, English Staffordshire pottery, and Ming Dynasty vases, while her vertiginous Caryatid figures draw inspiration from the draped female columnar supports of the Acropolis. DiMattio’s work is a symphony of historical and cross-cultural references. “I examine difference in each piece by putting opposites in conversation with each other,” the artist explains. “Through the making of each piece, similarities begin to bridge the gap of difference, and it all becomes sewn into a new hybrid language. Cultural time and place, gender, beauty, and value become scrambled and presented on equal footing.” 

DiMattio takes her exploration further by incorporating everyday utilitarian items—detergent bottles, Chiquita banana boxes, sneakers, high-heeled shoes, and an old teddy bear—into her work. In a somewhat absurd reversal of mass production, she hand-sculpts and glazes each of these objects, then sutures them onto her more traditional ceramic forms. In sculptures such as Meissen Tide (2025) and Meissen Pump (2025), highly ornate porcelain vessels adorned with flower petals, rosettes, and floral vignettes take on Frankenstein-like proportions as they collide with a large Reebok high-top sneaker, bottles of cleaning spray, and a container of Tide. Each sculpture is punctured by wound-like fissures that contrast sharply with the delicate floral patterns spreading across the surfaces like a virus, even extending to the pedestals below. The result is a playful tension: sneakers transform into vessels, laces become ornamental details, and high art meets streetwear.

Francesca DiMattio, Attica Pump, 2025. Glaze on terracotta, glaze on terracotta pedestal, Sculpture: 88.9 x 50.8 x 45.7cm (35 x 20 x 18in) Pedestal: 91.4 x 34.9 x 34.9cm (36 x 13 3/4 x 13 3/4in). Copyright Francesca DiMattio. Courtesy the artist and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London and New York and Pippy Houldsworth, London. Photo by Karen Pearson.

In another pair of terracotta pedestal sculptures, the artist juxtaposes ancient Greek amphoras with contemporary fashion accessories. In Attica Pump (2025), a vessel inspired by Athenian red-figure pottery from the 6th century BCE becomes host to four precariously tall high-heeled shoes that push through and pierce its clay surface. Similarly, in Attica Cowboy (2025), an oversized cowboy boot adorned with depictions of gods and goddesses is grafted onto an amphora standing on a matching tiled base. The vessel appears to sag under the boot’s weight, resembling a deflated belly. By playing with the morphology and nomenclature of ceramic forms—such as the lip, neck, shoulder, mouth, and foot—DiMattio’s sculptures take on a humanoid quality, simultaneously adorned and disfigured by gender-coded, mass-market symbols of beauty.

Francesca DiMattio, Chiquita Caryatid, 2025. Glaze on porcelain and stoneware, 218.4 x 77.5 x 77.5cm (86 x 30 1/2 x 30 1/2in). Copyright Francesca DiMattio. Courtesy the artist and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London and New York and Pippy Houldsworth, London. Photo by Karen Pearson.

DiMattio’s two monumental porcelain sculptures, Chiquita Caryatid (2025) and Teddy Bear Caryatid (2022–25), represent the culmination of the artist’s madcap experimentation. In the first, a massive female figure rises from her base like Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus (c. 1485). Her body morphs and bulges with the imprint of cardboard boxes and plastic bottles adorned with blue floral patterns, barcodes, and Chiquita banana logos. Her companion, named for the teddy bear she stands on, appears as a hyper-ornamented conqueror dressed in a porcelain-mosaic bikini. DiMattio’s figures evoke warrior queens, clad in the armor of contemporary domesticity and transcultural hybridity.

Francesca DiMattio (b. 1981) is known for her dynamic approach to sculpture and painting, where she collapses boundaries between historical and contemporary influences. Her work weaves together an eclectic mix of references—ranging from English Rococo and Islamic Fritware to mass-produced kitsch and domestic patterns—blurring distinctions between high and low culture. In her sculptural practice, she transforms porcelain into unpredictable, fluid constructions, subverting the tradition of ceramics with an explosive sense of movement. Similarly, her paintings layer diverse visual languages, creating compositions that feel both intricate and unruly. DiMattio’s work has been exhibited internationally, and her sculptures are included in prominent public and private collections.

DiMattio has exhibited at Wellin Museum of Art (2022) and Art Omi, Ghent in New York (2019).

Caroline Coon (b. 1945) is a British painter whose vibrant figurative works challenge societal norms and patriarchal values. Deeply influenced by feminism and the politics of sexual liberation, her paintings reject binary notions of gender while celebrating subjects ranging from sex workers and intersex individuals to cityscapes and still lives. A pioneering figure in London’s counterculture, Coon has been a vocal advocate for women’s rights since the 1960s, co-founding the legal-aid organization Release and managing The Clash during the punk movement. Her distinctive style characterized by crisp-edged lines and saturated color draws inspiration from artists like Paul Cadmus and Tamara de Lempicka. Coon’s work has recently gained widespread institutional recognition, with pieces entering Tateâ’s permanent collection and featuring in major exhibitions, including Women in Revolt! touring the UK from Tate Britain.

This is Coon’s first significant exhibition in New York and coincides with her inclusion in the group show ‘Women in Revolt!’, touring the UK from Tate Britain, London. 

Stephen Friedman Gallery

Stephen Friedman Gallery is a contemporary art gallery that was founded in 1995 with a focus on representing exceptional artists from around the world. Since its inauguration, the gallery has been based in Mayfair, London. In October 2023, the gallery expanded and relocated to Cork Street. In November 2023, the gallery opened its first location outside the UK at 54 Franklin Street in Tribeca, New York.

For more information about Stephen Friedman Gallery, this exhibition, and others, please visit their site here. The gallery can also be found on Facebook and Instagram. The magazine did an interview with both artists which can be found here.

Catherine Goodman. Silent Music

Installation view, ‘Catherine Goodman. Silent Music,’ Hauser & Wirth New York, 22nd Street 30 January – 12 April 2025 © Catherine Goodman Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth Photo: Sarah Muehlbauer

New York... The exhibition opened in January, ‘Catherine Goodman. Silent Music’ presents a series of new, large-scale paintings by the British artist, where her characteristically expressive brushwork yields animated surfaces that pulse with the dynamic energy of their making. For Goodman, the studio is a place of spiritual meditation. Each painting represents an act of intimate transmutation—a way for her to turn closely held memories and personal vulnerabilities into newfound stability. As the artist trustee at the National Gallery in London, Goodman has spent hours drawing from the collection and has developed a particular affinity for Old Master paintings, which she describes as her ‘only real teacher.’ Inspired by the intensity and drama of Renaissance masterworks by artists such as Titian and Veronese, and influenced by the poignantly psychological work of such groups as the London School, Goodman’s highly personal paintings transcend her individual experience, opening outward and inviting us in.

Catherine Goodman Lago 2024 Oil on linen 180 x 210 x 4 cm / 70 7/8 x 82 5/8 x 1 5/8 in © Catherine Goodman Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth Photo: Eva Herzog

For decades Goodman has maintained a daily practice of drawing from observation. Through this she has\ constructed charged pathways between the physical world she observes and her own inner landscape. In these most recent abstractions, she often begins from landscapes and portraits that hold meaning for her. She then obscures these figurative grounds, building up evocative and densely layered compositions that invite sustained attention. ‘Lago’ (2024), a whirlwind of crimson, cobalt and lush green is one of many works named for a meaningful location or loved one whose spirit they embody. Other compositions, like the exuberant ‘Pahari Picnic’ (2024) or ‘Echo’ (2024)—monumental in scale and bursting with energy—give form to poignant memories. The substantial physical presence of these paintings, with their thick impasto and richly layered pigments, materialize intangible impressions of moments, places and people alike, as well as the psychological terrain encountered during the creative process itself. As the artist has confided to writer Jennifer Higgie, her artmaking ‘was never about problem solving. It’s about releasing something.’

Catherine Goodman Pahari Picnic 2024 Oil on linen 200 x 220 x 4 cm / 78 3/4 x 86 5/8 x 1 5/8 in © Catherine Goodman Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth Photo: Eva Herzog

Though rooted in the personal, Goodman’s oeurve uses the intimate act of painting to address the expansive macrocosm of collective experience. Her paintings act as a form of silent communication, resonating beyond the written or spoken word. Persistently forward-looking, Goodman’s latest body of work continues her tireless pursuit of art’s unique capacity to nurture connection.

 Installation view, ‘Catherine Goodman. Silent Music,’ Hauser & Wirth New York, 22nd Street 30 January – 12 April 2025 © Catherine Goodman Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth Photo: Sarah Muehlbauer

In conjunction with the exhibition, Hauser & Wirth Publishers will release ‘Catherine Goodman,’ a richly illustrated monograph focused on Goodman’s new paintings. Featuring an illuminating essay by writer and curator Jennifer Higgie, alongside revealing reflections from Goodman herself, this volume sheds light on how drawing and painting are inextricably intertwined in her deeply intuitive practice. On 1 February, Hauser & Wirth Publishers will celebrate the release with a conversation between Catherine Goodman and Lynne Tillman.

Catherine Goodman Echo 2024 Oil on linen 196 x 214 x 4 cm / 77 1/8 x 84 1/4 x 1 5/8 in © Catherine Goodman Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth Photo: Eva Herzog

About the Artist

Born in London in 1961, Catherine Goodman CBE lives and works in London. Goodman studied at Camberwell School of Arts & Crafts and the Royal Academy Schools, London, where she won the Royal Academy Gold Medal in 1987. Goodman’s lifelong commitment to social justice through education forms a critical aspect of her artistic identity and approach to making. In 2000, Goodman established The Royal Drawing School with HM King Charles III to deliver subsidized and free education to thousands of young and disadvantaged people in the UK. Today, she continues in her role as Founding Artistic Director and Academic Board Member. For many years, Goodman corganized drawing classes for individuals dealing with homelessness and disabilities, and she continues to offer refuge classes to young people with mental health issues on a weekly basis. She is also the primary caregiver of her sister, Sophie, who was born with multiple health conditions and has always been a subject of Goodman’s practice. In 2014, Goodman was awarded Lieutenant of the Royal Victorian Order (LVO) for services to The Royal Drawing School, and Commander of the Order of British Empire (CBE) in 2024 for her services to art in the UK. Goodman has served as the Artist Trustee at The National Gallery, London since 2019. Her paintings are held in significant private and public collections internationally.

Carbon savings: The artwork in this exhibition was shipped by sea from the UK. Transporting by sea versus air resulted in a carbon saving equivalent to 20 economy flights between London and New York.

The exhibition opened on 30 January – and will conclude on 12 April 2025, at the Hauser & Wirth New York, 22nd Street location. Please visit the Hauser & Wirth Gallery site for information about upcoming exhibitions. Also, follow the gallery on Instagram, Facebook,  X, and YouTube. The magazine highlighted the accompanying book with the same title, which can be found here.

Geppy Pisanelli: Hidden Lights

Exhibition Views, Geppy Pisanelli "Hidden Lights", GR gallery, 2025 , Courtesy the artist and GR gallery.

New York, NY – GR gallery is proud to announce the opening on February 14th of Hidden Lights, a solo exhibition by Italian visual artist Geppy Pisanelli. Building on the success of his 2023 group exhibition Dreaming Awake at GR gallery, Pisanelli's latest series emerges from both a narrative and compositional need to explore the dynamic interplay between nature and artifice. Specifically, the artist's interest was the visual formalization of works that contrast natural elements (like water beds, trees, mountains, and waterfalls) and artificial elements (such as minimal structures, shelter and artificial lighting). This juxtaposition highlights the relationship between nature and human-made artifice, placing artificial objects in unexpected natural settings.

Luminous Dusk - oil on linen - 2023-24 measures 45 x 60 x 1.5 inches Courtesy the artist and GR Gallery

These compositions trigger a sense of alienation both visually and intellectually, which is also reflected in the exhibition's title Hidden Lights, immediately presenting itself as an oxymoron: light, typically associated with visibility and illumination, is described as hidden, creating a contrast right in the title itself. These pieces generate a layered effect of visibility and obscurity, achieved by the artist through a carefully balanced pictorial composition of shapes, subjects, and content in relation to each other.

Regarding the contents, the theme of interplay between light and darkness was explored by the artist, not just as a retinal perception but also as a reflection of the human inner condition. Indeed, despite the references to nature in these paintings, the works can be interpreted as depicting an intimate state. They portray an external space that simultaneously mirrors an internal one, a space of human existence that is both conceptual and theatrical.

Exhibition Views, Geppy Pisanelli "Hidden Lights", GR gallery, 2025 Copyright James Welling Courtesy the artist and GR gallery.

These "threshold images" , like Pisanelli uses to call them, draw the viewers into a theatrical landscape, exploring human nature and societal conflicts. These narratives, oscillating between abandonment and hope, solitude and community, resonate deeply amid global challenges like pandemics, migrations, wars, and climate change.

"It is in fact emblematic that in my last series of works, the events that come to life depicted in the paintings visually quote the incipit that David H. Lawrence prophetically composed in 1928, " says Geppy Pisanelli. Reflecting on our tragic era, he adds, "Lawrence suggested resilience and new beginnings amidst devastation with his words: 'Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. ' These words deeply resonate with me, encapsulating the spirit of renewal amidst tumults that I aim to capture in my work.

"

A hallmark of Pisanelli’s artistry lies in his creation of archetypal images. His paintings may initially appear as realistic depictions but gradually unveil layers of metaphorical and mental associations. These works act as conduits for contemplation, inviting viewers to delve into the expressive potential of painting as a medium for analyzing human existence and the multifaceted nature of reality.

Hidden Lights offers an immersive experience that challenges perceptions and inspires reflection. The exhibition will run through March 15, 2025.

Exhibition Details:

“Hidden Lights”

February 14 - March 15, 2025

Opening public reception: February 14

GR gallery

255 Bowery, NYC

Courtesy the artist and GR Gallery

About Geppy Pisanelli

Geppy Pisanelli (b. 1971) is an Italian visual artist who focuses on researching and exploring painting as a communication medium. Starting from his Italian Pictorial Cultural Identity, Pisanelli aims to constantly push and reformulate the boundaries of pictorial narration and formal composition. Through a dynamic interplay of tradition and innovation, he crafts a distinctive visual language that resonates with contemporary audiences. Solo exhibitions in the U.S. include: Chelsea West Gallery, New York, (2010), Kips Gallery, New York, (2011), (2013), Casa Italiana Zerrilli-Marimò at New York University (2015), Mizuma & Kips Gallery (2021). Solo exhibitions in Italy include: Royal Palace of Caserta, Caserta (2010), Galleria studio legale, Naples (2014) PAN Palazzo delle Arti Napoli (2016) Palazzo Ponte dei Pegni, Caserta, (2017). He lives and works between Naples and New York.

About GR gallery

Established in 2016 and located on the Bowery, downtown Manhattan, GR gallery contributes to the New York contemporary art scene as a partner to international artists and an artistic destination for visitors in New York City. The gallery is dedicated to showcasing multigenerational artists who explore various media with a dynamic approach to chromatic vibration and borderless figuration. With support from GR gallery, artworks across diverse media are featured in public events and collections. GR gallery began as a partner of Studio d’Arte GR, founded in Venice in 1979. Today, the gallery independently hosts an average of ten exhibitions annually and participates in several art fairs. By carving out its own path in New York, GR gallery invites artists to unfold their artistic expressions and supports them in expanding their work globally.

For more information about the exhibition, the GR gallery, and other exhibitions, please visit their site here. The gallery can also be found on Instagram and Artsy.

HENNING STRASSBURGER: KÖPFE

No pun intended, 2014

KÖNIG GALERIE is pleased to present KÖPFE (en: heads), the first solo exhibition for the gallery by Henning Strassburger, located in the Nave of St. Agnes. The exhibition includes new paintings and, for the first time, sculptures that powerfully embody Strassburger’s dynamic visual language. With bold colors and gestural compositions, the artist explores the multi-layered intersections of identity, media, and social narratives. His works offer lively commentary on today’s fluid existence.

Exhibition View: Henning Strassburger, Köpfe, 2025, Berlin, Nave, Photo by Roman März, Courtesy of the artist & KÖNIG GALERIE

Happy Happiness,2024.

A delight in the image is perhaps the most prominent feature of these new works: a playful exhilaration that turns away from pure abstraction and toward the flesh of painting, its figures, colors, and stories. Strassburger was initially praised as an abstract painter, but in recent years, his relationship to abstraction has become increasingly critical. As a result, Strassburger’s paintings engage with figuration, with specific formal allusions to German painters. He has a particular affinity for a genre popularized by Georg Baselitz, which the older painter calls “Heldenbilder” (hero paint- ings) – a cycle of works from the 1960s – which Strassburger refers to as the “Happy” series. With his “Happy” paintings, Strassburger reinvents himself as a figurative painter in the best German tradition and says “I” in an emphatic sens

Alphakenny, the artist’s doppelganger, appears in many of these works, a moniker that is designed to introduce a biographical anecdote in an ironic manner. When Strassburger ordered a coffee in a New York Starbucks, he – like everyone else – had to say his first name so that it could be written on his cup. However, the phonetic challenge of “Henning” proved too difficult for the Americans, and the employee wrote “Kenny” on the cup instead, which of course led to confusion on Strassburger’s part. “One Americano for Kenny! Kenny! Kenny!” Strassburger didn’t feel addressed, but then quickly realized: “Kenny, that’s me!” The extension to Alphakenny refers to the schoolyard-famous Alphakevin, a mocking name for the biggest loser in the class, or “a modern-day anti-hero”, according to Strassburger.

 Exhibition View: Henning Strassburger, Köpfe, 2025, Berlin, Nave, Photo by Roman März, Courtesy of the artist & KÖNIG GALERIE

Strassburger accepts that there can no longer be any heroes in the modern age, because a hero is someone like Aeneas, who founded the Roman Empire; or someone like Prometheus, who brought fire to mankind (against the will of the gods); or Odysseus, who carved out the eye of the Cyclops Polyphemus. The hero is someone who says “I” in an emphatic sense. He creates a new reality by violating an existing law in order to establish a new one. Heroes can only be defeated by other heroes or by the gods, but not by just anyone. With bourgeois society, however, which distributes sovereignty among many and binds it to a dense network of business relationships, the possibility of saying “I” in the emphatic sense is increasingly restricted. So, whoever plays the hero today is no longer condemned to an odyssey and is no longer shackled on the Caucasus by the gods. They simply die, or the police take them away.

Nevertheless, we are still left with two smaller forms of heroism in the classical sense: saying “I” and making art. Both are structurally related to heroism – at least if we understand it philosophically rather than in purely practical terms. For heroism is a special form of negation. The hero does what they want. In doing so, they sometimes break the law. But their actions create a new order – just like a revolutionary who destroys an existing state only to found a new one. The hero transforms their arbitrariness into a law and thereby bestows their actions with exemplary significance. What the hero enacts is law, It is very similar with works of art. They establish a reality and grant themselves a form of law

Großer liegender Kopf (Happy Alphakenny), 2024

But with the performative act of establishing the law, the hero also demonstrates what it means to be a human being and to say “I”. The hero is the human being par excellence. For just as establishing the law is a negation that produces a right by doing wrong, saying “I” is also a negation in which I distinguish myself from myself and relate to myself. I divide myself and then form a new unity with myself. Strassburger’s Starbucks scene demonstrates this performative act once again. “Kenny, that’s me!”

The exhibition opened on January 17th and will conclude on February 23rd, 2025. For more information about this exhibition and others, please visit the gallery’s site here. KÖNIG GALERIE can also be found on YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook. The magazine did an interview with Henning which can be found here.

CY TWOMBLY

Cy Twombly, 2025, installation view Artwork © Cy Twombly Foundation Photo: Maris Hutchinson Courtesy Gagosian

NEW YORK, —Gagosian is pleased to announce an exhibition of paintings, a sculpture, and works on paper by Cy Twombly. The presentation opened on January 23, 2025, across two floors of the galleries at 980 Madison Avenue. Organized in association with the Cy Twombly Foundation, it includes key bodies of work from 1968 through 1990, including pieces that have never been shown before and loans from the Twombly family.

The installation on the sixth floor features a series of paintings that Twombly made from 1968 through 1971, representing a more austere approach than do the canvases of the prior decade. Produced during the era of Minimalism and Conceptual art, these canvases have often been interpreted as “blackboards”—their gestural flux breaking down distinctions between painting, drawing, and writing.

Cy Twombly, Paesaggio, 1986, oil and acrylic on wood panel, 69 1/4 × 50 1/2 inches (175.7 × 128.1 cm) © Cy Twombly Foundation. Photo: Peter Schälchli

One work from 1968 features nested loops that cascade down and across the canvas. Inscriptions and numbers give the work a diagrammatic quality, while its dynamic composition recalls Leonardo da Vinci’s Deluge drawings (c. 1517–18). An untitled painting of nine panels from 1971 forms a sequence linked by accumulated diagonals and curves.

The installation on the fifth floor includes a series of verdant green paintings that Twombly made in Bassano in Teverina, Italy, from 1981 through 1986. Marking the artist’s exploration of color and the liquidity of paint, these layered, atmospheric works abstract elemental meetings of water, earth, and air. A group of these paintings is rendered on barbed quatrefoil panels, their format, palette, and evocation of landscapes echoing Rococo art.

Cy Twombly Untitled, 1985 Oil and acrylic on wood panel 71 1/2 × 71 1/2 inches (181.7 × 181.7 cm) © Cy Twombly Foundation Photo: Maris Hutchinson Courtesy Gagosian

Condottiero Testa di Cozzo (1987) refers to Titian’s portrait of the Grand Duke of Alba (c. 1570) with vibrant passages that paraphrase the Renaissance commander’s red sash, ruffled collar, and black armor. Twombly’s emblematic treatment of natural forms is furthered in a series of vibrant floral abstractions from the Souvenir of D’Arros series (1990), while a sculpture from 1983 exemplifies his engagement with materiality and gesture in three dimensions.

Cy Twombly Untitled (Souvenir of D’Arros), 1990 Acrylic on handmade paper 30 1/4 × 22 1/8 inches (76.7 × 56.1 cm) © Cy Twombly Foundation Photo: Maris Hutchinson Courtesy Gagosian

Five Day Wait at Jiayuguan (1980) is a suite of works on paper first exhibited at the 39th Biennale di Venezia and publicly reunited here for the first time in over forty years. Made in Rome, it was inspired by Twombly’s travels the previous year through Russia, Afghanistan, and Central Asia, and is titled after the city in northwestern China, on the edge of the Gobi Desert. Through gestural forms and poetic inscriptions, these works evoke observations of life, history, and culture in the desert landscape. The exhibition is accompanied by two Gagosian publications: an illustrated two-volume catalogue with essays by Suzanne Hudson and Jenny Saville, and a facsimile of the artist’s book of Five Day Wait at Jiayuguan, originally published by Gabriele Stocchi in 1981 for the Biennale di Venezia presentation.

Cy Twombly Untitled, 1971 Oil-based house paint and wax crayon on canvas 80 x 134 5/8 inches (203 x 342 cm) © Cy Twombly Foundation Photo: Maris Hutchinson Courtesy Gagosian

Cy Twombly was born in 1928 in Lexington, Virginia, and died in 2011 in Rome. Collections include the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Menil Collection, Houston; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museum Brandhorst, Munich; Tate, London; and Louvre Abu Dhabi. Exhibitions include Cycles and Seasons, Tate Modern, London (2008, traveled to Guggenheim Bilbao, Spain, 2008–09; and Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Rome, 2009); The Natural World, Art Institute of Chicago (2009); Sensations of the Moment, Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna (2009); Paradise, Museo Jumex, Mexico City (2014, traveled to Ca’ Pesaro, Venice, 2015); Treatise on the Veil, Morgan Library and Museum, New York (2014–15); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2016–17); Making Past Present, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles (2022, traveled to Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 2023); and Morocco, 1952/1953, Musée Yves Saint Laurent Marrakech, Morocco. Twombly received numerous accolades during his lifetime, including the Praemium Imperiale, Tokyo (1996), and the Golden Lion award at the 49th Biennale di Venezia (2001). In 2010, Twombly’s permanent site-specific painting The Ceiling was unveiled in the Salle des Bronzes at the Musée du Louvre; on that occasion he was named Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur by the French government.

#CyTwombly

CY TWOMBLY exhibition opened on January 23 and will be on view until March 22, 2025 at the 980 Madison Avenue, New York location. There was an opening reception on Thursday, January 23, 6–8pm.

For more information about this exhibition and others presented by Gagosian please visit the gallery’s site here. The gallery can also be found on Pinterest, X, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Artsy.

Jean-Michel Basquiat. Engadin

Bruno Bischofberger and Jean-Michel Basquiat ,Galerie BrunoBischofberger, Zurich, 1982© Galerie Bruno Bischofberger, Männedorf-Zurich, Switzerland.© Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Licensed by Artestar, New York, Photo: Beth Phillips

Jean-Michel Basquiat / Andy Warhol / Francesco Clemente, In Bianco 1984 Acrylic, silkscreen, and pastel on canvas 122 x 168 cm / 48 x 66 1/8 in © Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Licensed by Artestar, New York © Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz Picasso -- FABA -- 2024

Exploring various artistic motifs that combine the natural and cultural landscape of the Engadin with the metropolis of New York, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s first solo exhibition dedicated to the paintings he created in and inspired by his visits to Switzerland opens on 14 December at Hauser & Wirth St. Moritz. ‘Jean-Michel Basquiat. Engadin’ traces the renowned artist’s connections to the country, which began in 1982 with his first show at Galerie Bruno Bischofberger in Zurich, returning over a dozen times to St. Moritz, Zurich and Appenzell, as well as other places in Switzerland. The Engadin region in particular continued to fascinate Basquiat long after his return to New York, resulting in a body of work that captures his impressions of the Swiss Alpine landscape and culture through the lens of his highly distinctive and personal artistic language.

‘Jean-Michel Basquiat. Engadin’ will be accompanied by a catalog from Hauser & Wirth Publishers, featuring a foreword by Bruno Bischofberger and a text by Dr. Dr. Dieter Buchhart to give visitors a unique insight into this specific chapter of one of the most important artists of the 20th Century. The exhibition is supported by Dr. Dr. Dieter Buchhart and Dr. Anna Karina Hofbauer, internationally renowned curators and Basquiat experts.

All images: ‘Jean-Michel Basquiat. Engadin’ at Hauser & Wirth St. Moritz, until 29 March 2025. © Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Licensed by Artestar, New York. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Stefan Altenburger Photography Zürich.

About the exhibition

Born in Brooklyn, New York in 1960 and coming of age in the downtown, post-punk artistic scene of the late 1970s and early 1980s, Basquiat drew on the diversity and intensity of New York City within his multi-disciplinary practice. His expressive paintings combined bold text and imagery from his expansive references across art, film, history and music, as well as his experiences of everyday racism as a young Black man in the US.

Jean-Michel Basquiat The Dutch Settlers 1982 Acrylic and oil stick on canvas 183 x 549 cm / 72 x 216 1/8 in © Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Licensed by Artestar, New York Nicola Erni Collection. Photo: Reto Pedrini Photography

After his first exhibition with Galerie Bruno Bischofberger in 1982, the same year Basquiat became one of the youngest ever artists to participate at Documenta in Kassel, the influences of the disparate cultural landscapes of New York City and Switzerland began to take shape in his work, incorporating the motifs of ski lifts, fir trees, mountains and German phrases into his expansive visual lexicon. ‘From then on, Jean-Michel Basquiat often visited me in Switzerland, where he particularly liked it. About half a dozen times in Zurich and exactly seven times in St. Moritz, four of them in the summer’, says Bischofberger. Basquiat was captivated by the Engadin’s vast natural landscape, cultural history and the hospitality of the Bischofberger family. Perhaps what drew Basquiat most to this part of Switzerland was, as Dr. Dieter Buchhart writes, ‘the contrast between the pulsating life, the clubs, the street noise, and the breakneck speed of the metropolis New York and the ‘discovery of slowness’ in the unique, overwhelming landscape of the Engadin.’

Jean-Michel Basquiat Big Snow 1984 Oil, acrylic, felt-tip pen and oilstick on canvas 168 x 151.5 cm / 66 1/8 x 59 5/8 in © Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Licensed by Artestar, New York Private Collection

One of the earliest works on view in the exhibition is the monumental painting ‘The Dutch Settlers’ from 1982. Composed of nine canvases, the painting is a prime example of Basquiat’s innovative approach of marrying William S. Burroughs’ ‘cut-up’ technique with a method akin to sampling technology used in hip hop. The montage of nine canvas panels enabled Basquiat to assemble, combine and recombine different image fields – creating a multi-layered work that emanates a visual rhythm described as an ‘Eye Rap’ by art historian Robert Storr. The artist paints powerful motifs which reference the African Diaspora and slavery (evoked through words such NUBIA and TOBACCO) alongside images of the Engadin, depicting fir trees, a mountain road, as well as an ibex, the heraldic animal of the canton of Graubünden and native to the region. This mountain iconography can also be seen in the playful works ‘Skifahrer (Skier)’ and ‘See (Lake)’ on view in the exhibition. The former depicts a comic-like figure on a bright red background and the latter the local landscape at night, both painted in St. Moritz a year later. These works were part of a series that Basquiat made for a dinner with collectors in Bischofberger’s ‘hunting lodge’ as the artist called it, meaning the family’s home in St. Moritz. Beside photographs of the Engadin by Albert Steiner, there was no modern art hanging in the dining room that season.

Jean-Michel Basquiat, Brook Bartlett and Bruno Bischofbergerat the Cresta Klubhaus in St. Moritz on January 30, 1983 Photo: Christina Bischofberger© Galerie Bruno Bischofberger, Männedorf-Zurich, Switzerland

In the winter of 1983/1984, during one of Basquiat’s visits to the Engadin, Bischofberger and the artist began discussing the idea for a collaboration between Basquiat, Andy Warhol and Francesco Clemente. The three artists each created four paintings and a drawing, which were subsequently transported between them to complete. ‘In Bianco’ (1983) showcases the clearly distinguishable artistic contributions from all three, demonstrating how each artist reacted respectfully to the parameters of the others. As Buchhart notes, ‘the cornerstone for this important collaboration was laid in St. Moritz’, marking a turning point in Basquiat’s artistic practice and proving Switzerland to be of great historical significance for the artist in more ways than one.

Integrating the immediate world around him with his varied encyclopaedic knowledge, ‘Big Snow’ (1984) sees Basquiat once again processing his impressions of the Engadin in conjunction with themes relating to race and Black history, combining motifs of the Swiss mountains, snow and skiing with the Berlin Olympic Games of 1936 and Jesse Owens’ win of four gold medals. In 1985, Basquiat would go on to be part of a group show at the Segantini Museum in St. Moritz, showcasing his work ‘See (Lake)’ (1983) in an exhibition titled ‘The Engadine in Painting’. The latest body of work on view includes a group of monochrome paintings titled ‘To Repel Ghosts’ which Basquiat created in 1986 during his time in Zurich and St. Moritz, exploring themes of emptiness as well as spirituality in relation to the African Diaspora. Musing on what kept drawing the artist back to Switzerland, Buchhart writes, ‘For Basquiat, the Engadin meant work, inspiration, friendship, and rest and relaxation, all at the same time.’

The exhibition opened on December 14th of 2024 and will conclude on March 29, 2025, at the Hauser & Wirth St. Moritz Via Serlas 22 7500 St. Moritz Gallery location. The gallery’s hours: Tuesday – Sunday, 11 am – 7 pm. Please visit the Hauser & Wirth Gallery site for information about upcoming exhibitions. Also, follow the gallery on Instagram, Facebook,  X, and YouTube. The magazine highlighted the accompanying book with the same title, which can be found here.

GERARD & KELLY: Bardo

GERARD & KELLY E for Eileen, 2023 (film still) 4K video, color, sound; 22 min. Edition of 3 plus 1 artist's proof Copyright Gerard & Kelly Courtesy the artists and Marian Goodman Gallery

Marian Goodman Gallery Paris is pleased to announce the first major exhibition in Paris devoted to the work of Gerard & Kelly. Entitled Bardo, the exhibition features new sets of works by the duo that collectively illustrate the hybridity and multidisciplinarity of their practice, which is rooted in an ongoing investigation of history, architecture and sexuality. The exhibition is imagined as a time-based and multi-sensory experience, and the title, inspired by Tibetan Buddhism, refers to the transitional state between death and rebirth, during which consciousness undergoes profound changes. Through the evocation of three saintly historical figures, openly or symbolically queer, Gerard & Kelly create a space for reflection and resonance between past and present, shadow and light, the profane and the sacred.

GERARD & KELLY Défense de rire, 2025 Lamp (Pailla Wall Lamp, design by Eileen Gray, 1927), bulb, stencil, acrylic, illumination program Dimensions variable Lamp: 4 3/4 x 3 3/8 in. (12 x 8.5 cm) Edition of 3 plus 1 artist's proofs Copyright Gerard & Kelly Courtesy the artists and Marian Goodman Gallery Photo credit: Rebecca Fanuele

Eileen Gray (1878-1976), a Paris-based Irish architect and designer, was the author of a fundamental work of architectural modernism: villa E-1027, built in the bay of Roquebrune-Cap-Martin. Completed in 1929, the villa is one of France's three national monuments of the modern era, and the only one built by a woman. Inspired by the layout and volumes of an ocean liner, the house's vast windows open onto the sky and the Mediterranean.

GERARD & KELLY Glyphs VII, 2024 Monotype silkscreen and gold leaf on metallic paper Image: 11 1/4 x 18 7/8 in. (28.5 x 48 cm)
Frame: 15 5/8 x 23 5/8 x 2 in. (39.6 x 60 x 5 cm) Copyright Gerard & Kelly Courtesy the artists and Marian Goodman Gallery Photo credit: Rebecca Fanuele

A self-taught architect, Gray meticulously designed every detail of E-1027, including the furniture within the villa, to create a functional living space. Upon entering the gallery, the flickering of Défense de rire, 2025, which combines the Pailla lamp with a stencil conceived by Gray for E-1027, guides visitors to the lower level for the start of the film. Downstairs the 22-minute film E for Eileen, 2023, shot entirely in situ, is shown every half- hour. A seating module renders the negative space of the solarium in the villa’s garden, and is covered in cork— a material frequently used by Gray. The Pailla lamp reappears in Solarium ensoleillé, 2025, to illuminate a wall- mounted scaled model of this sunbathing platform constructed from layers of mat board.

Exhibition Views, Gerard & Kelly: Bardo, Galerie Marian Goodman, Paris, 2025 Copyright Gerard & Kelly Courtesy the artists and Marian Goodman Gallery Photo credit: Rebecca Fanuele

The film—part visual essay, part speculative fiction—magnifies Gray's talent by emphasizing the living dimension of her architecture, which is designed to facilitate the circulation of bodies and natural light. As in Gerard & Kelly's previous films, E for Eileen questions the ways of living and moving in a given construction by featuring historical characters linked to the site: Eileen Gray (played by Nikki Amuka-Bird), and two of her lovers, architect and critic Jean Badovici (played by Colin Bates) and the famous music-hall singer Damia (Flora Fischbach). With this film, Gerard & Kelly subtly evoke the inner life and social world of Eileen Gray, an openly bisexual woman, who frequented the pre-war Parisian lesbian literary circle and launched her own design gallery in Paris in 1922 under a male pseudonym. From her limited personal archive, Gerard & Kelly have designed four light boxes; Portrait Recto/Verso, Monsieur Gray, Eclipse, and Souvenir (after a photograph by Eileen Gray), 2025 are fragments of memory and clues that lend new insight to Gray’s elusive personality.

GERARD & KELLY Solarium ensoleillé, 2025 Mat board (passe-partout), lamp (Pailla Wall Lamp, design by Eileen Gray, 1927), bulb, acrylic, illumination program 14 1/8 x 18 1/2 x 2 3/8 in. (36 x 47 x 6 cm) Copyright Gerard & Kelly Courtesy the artists and Marian Goodman Gallery Photo credit: Rebecca Fanuele

In the gallery's vaulted space, another forgotten artist, Francesco di Stefano, known as Pesellino (1422-1457), emerges from the shadows. Like Eileen Grey, Pesellino was prolific during his lifetime, receiving commissions from the Medici in Florence and collaborating with the leading painters of his time. He died prematurely of the plague at the age of 35. Gerard & Kelly’s sculpture Glory Hole, 2025, inspired by Pesellino's painting of St. Francis of Assisi receiving the stigmata now in the collection of the Louvre Museum, transforms the space into a postmodern sanctuary. The saint, wearing his cassock, half-reclines on the floor; a mirror ball has penetrated his flesh and replaced his head. An emblematic symbol of the disco era, this ball bridges the gap between the worlds of nightlife and the sacred, and its perpetual spinning evokes the wandering of the bardo.

GERARD & KELLY Souvenir (after a photograph by Eileen Gray), 2025 Transparency, gouache, light box Hand-painted print: 5 3/4 x 8 1/2 in. (14.5 x 21.5 cm) Frame: 12 x 14 3/4 x 1 3/8 in. (30.6 x 37.6 x 3.4 cm) Copyright Gerard & Kelly Courtesy the artists and Marian Goodman Gallery Photo credit: Rebecca Fanuele

The final chapter of the exhibition unfolds in the gallery's showroom, with new works that enter into a subtle dialogue with Julius Eastman (1940-1990), a queer, black American composer active in New York in the 1970s and 80s. In the Glyphs series, Gerard & Kelly applied fragments of musical notation onto silk screened images of dancers, captured in glyph-like gestures and shimmering like holograms. Reminiscent of medieval illuminated manuscripts, the artists’ process of pressing gold leaf is an act of devotion: a transcription of Eastman’s handwritten score for Gay Guerrilla (1979). Gerard & Kelly’s engagement with his oeuvre, which was largely lost at the time of his premature death, dates back several years. His music featured in their film Panorama , 2021, shot in the Bourse de Commerce in Paris, and in their performance Gay Guerrilla, 2023, created at the Centre Pompidou. In new large-format works rendered in silkscreen, stencil and neon, Pompidou Pulse, 2025 and Disco Saint, 2025, the artists integrate images of the emblematic architecture of the Centre Pompidou with disco dancers captured in ecstatic states. Gerard & Kelly transform the dancer into a saintly figure, evoking a bardo in which the sacred and the profane cohabitate and where buildings and bodies dissolve.

GERARD & KELLY Pompidou Pulse, 2025 Silkscreen, acrylic and neon on canvas 59 x 86 5/8 in. (150 x 220 cm) Copyright Gerard & Kelly Courtesy the artists and Marian Goodman Gallery Photo credit: Rebecca Fanuele

The cycle of three films made by Gerard & Kelly in emblematic architectural sites in France—Bright Hours at Le Corbusier's Cité Radieuse in Marseille, Panorama at the Bourse de Commerce in Paris and E For Eileen at villa E-1027—will be broadcast on February 9 on France 2 and available for streaming for a limited time on France.tv.

GERARD & KELLY Glory Hole, 2025 (DETAIL) Polyester resin cast, automobile paint, gold leaf; disco ball, chain, motor Dimensions variable
Sculpture: 69 3/4 x 48 3/8 x 30 1/4 in. (177 x 123 x 77 cm) Copyright Gerard & Kelly Courtesy the artists and Marian Goodman Gallery Photo credit: Rebecca Fanuele

American artists based in Paris since 2018, Gerard & Kelly have collaborated for two decades on performance, film/video, and installation, among other formats. Having collectively studied ballet, visual art, literature, and gender studies, Gerard & Kelly use conceptual strategies in art to examine broader themes of memory and history, sexuality and subjectivity. Their questions are often set against a particular architectural space, pushing the related sociocultural and political precedents of the site into an open engagement with their work. Brennan Gerard was born in Ohio in 1978, and Ryan Kelly was born in Pennsylvania in 1979. They were Van Lier Fellows of the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program and graduated with MFAs from the Interdisciplinary Studio at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 2013. Ruins, their first solo show in a European\ institution, was presented at Carré d'Art - Musée d'art contemporain de Nîmes in 2022-2023. Solo exhibitions and performances of their work have been presented by Fondation Maeght, Saint-Paul de Vence (2024), Centre Pompidou, Paris (2023), MAMCO, Geneva (2020), MOCA, Los Angeles (2020), Festival d’Automne, Paris (2017 and 2019), The Getty Museum, Los Angeles (2019), Pioneer Works, New York (2018), Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2016), New Museum, New York (2014), and The Kitchen, New York (2014).

GERARD & KELLY Disco Saint, 2025 Silkscreen and neon on Dibond aluminum 39 3/8 x 78 3/4 in. (100 x 200 cm) Copyright Gerard & Kelly Courtesy the artists and Marian Goodman Gallery Photo credit: Rebecca Fanuele

They participated in the 2023 NGV Triennial at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, the 2017 and 2023 Chicago Architecture Biennial, and the 2014 Made in L.A. Biennial at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Their work has been included in group exhibitions at Collection Lambert, Avignon (2024), FRAC Franche- Comté, Besançon (2022), High Line, New York (2023), and Solomon R. Guggenheim, New York (2015), among others. Gerard & Kelly have received numerous awards and grants, including the VIA Art Fund (2024), Mondes nouveaux program of the French Ministry of Culture (2023), Graham Foundation (2014), and Art Matters (2013). Their works are held in the permanent collections of Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; LACMA – Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; FRAC Franche- Comté, Besançon; Carré d'Art, Nîmes; and National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.

Marian Goodman Gallery champions the work of artists who stand among the most influential of our time and represents over five generations of diverse thought and practice. The Gallery’s exhibition program, characterized by its caliber and rigor, provides international platforms for its artists to showcase their work, foster vital dialogues with new audiences, and advance their practices within nonprofit and institutional realms. Established in New York City in 1977, Marian Goodman Gallery gained prominence early in its trajectory for introducing the work of seminal European artists to American audiences. Today, through its exhibition spaces in New York, Los Angeles, and Paris, the Gallery maintains its global focus, representing some 50 artists working in the U.S. and internationally.

The exhibition opened on 17 January and will be on view until 8 March 2025 at the Marian Goodman’s location in Paris at 79 & 66 rue du Temple, 75003. For more information about the exhibit, please visit the Marian Goodman Gallery’s site. The gallery can be found on Instagram and Artsy, too.

The Monster

Huma Bhabha Untitled, 2024 WORK ON PAPERink, pastel, acrylic, charcoal, and collage on paper53-1/2" × 52"(135.9 cm × 132.1 cm)Framed: 59 1/8 x 57 5/8 x 2 1/4inches (150.2 x 146.4 x 5.7 cm)© Huma Bhabha, courtesy the artist and David Kordansky Gallery

Los Angeles – Pace is pleased to present The Monster, an exhibition curated by artist Robert Nava, at its Los Angeles gallery. The exhibition opened on February 1  and will be on view until March 22, 2025, this presentation will bring together paintings, sculptures, and works on paper by an intergenerational group of artists—including several LA-based artists—within and beyond the gallery’s program and will coincide with this year’s edition of Frieze Los Angeles.

 The Monster Curated by Robert Nava 1201 South La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90019 February 1 – March 22, 2025 Photography courtesy Pace Gallery

Inspired in part by Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, this exhibition, organized by Nava in collaboration with Pace’s Chief Curator Oliver Shultz, will celebrate monstrous bodies and fabulations of monstrosity in contemporary art—not the everyday monsters of waking life, but rather the fantasy monster, the monster of childhood, the mythical beast, the shapeless creature of the unconscious. This monster is a pre-image, an inchoate nightmare, a being neither human nor animal with the power to both terrify and enamor.

The Monster Curated by Robert Nava 1201 South La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90019 February 1 – March 22, 2025 Photography courtesy Pace Gallery

The Monster will feature works by Huma Bhabha, Louise Bourgeois, Willem de Kooning, Jean Dubuffet, Nicole Eisenman, Ficre Ghebreyesus, Thomas Houseago, Rashid Johnson, Li Hei Di, Robert Longo, Tala Madani, Paul McCarthy, Ugo Rondinone, Lucas Samaras, Peter Saul, Cindy Sherman, Kiki Smith, and Paul Thek, alongside other significant figures of the 20th and 21st centuries. With a focus on modern and contemporary figuration, the show will reflect Nava’s sensibility and include work by Nava himself, as well as other contemporary and emerging painters. A special presentation of works by Thek will anchor the exhibition.

Lucas Samaras Untitled, January 6, 1985 PAINTING acrylic on canvas36" × 24" (91.4 cm × 61 cm) 38-1/8" ×26" × 1-5/8" (96.8 cm × 66 cm × 4.1cm), framed ©Lucas Samaras, courtesy Pace Gallery

Populated by a cast of hybrid and chimaeric bodies, at once mythic and everyday, Nava’s paintings and drawings navigate the space between the raw and the refined. Often imbued with a sense of philosophical and psychological charge, his figures suggest a dark, contemplative, and existential mood despite their vibrancy, liveliness, and humor. Nava takes inspiration for his distinctive lexicon of characters and forms from a diverse range of sources, from ancient art to mythology and religion to horror films, science fiction, video games, and cartoons.

The Monster Curated by Robert Nava 1201 South La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90019 February 1 – March 22, 2025 Photography courtesy Pace Gallery

Many of the artists in The Monster have impacted Nava’s point of view. Trafficking in the language of the uncanny and the grotesque, the figures that proliferate in these works are formless monstrosities of the imagination. Horrifying as they may be, they help us understand that a monster might, in the end, be the most human being of all.

A full artist list and further programming details will be announced in due course.

Pace is a leading international art gallery representing some of the most influential contemporary artists and estates from the past century, holding decades-long relationships with Alexander Calder, Jean Dubuffet, Barbara Hepworth, Agnes Martin, Louise Nevelson, and Mark Rothko. Pace enjoys a unique U.S. heritage spanning East and West coasts through its early support of artists central to the Abstract Expressionist and Light and Space movements.

Since its founding by Arne Glimcher in 1960, Pace has developed a distinguished legacy as an artist-first gallery that mounts seminal historical and contemporary exhibitions. Under the current leadership of CEO Marc Glimcher, Pace continues to support its artists and share their visionary work with audiences worldwide by remaining at the forefront of innovation. Now in its seventh decade, the gallery advances its mission through a robust global program— comprising exhibitions, artist projects, public installations, institutional collaborations, performances, and interdisciplinary projects. Pace has a legacy in art bookmaking and has published over five hundred titles in close collaboration with artists, with a focus on original scholarship and on introducing new voices to the art historical canon.

Today, Pace has seven locations worldwide, including European footholds in London and Geneva as well as Berlin, where the gallery established an office in 2023. Pace maintains two galleries in New York—its headquarters at 540 West 25th Street, which welcomed almost 120,000 visitors and programmed 20 shows in its first six months, and an adjacent 8,000 sq. ft. exhibition space at 510 West 25th Street. Pace’s long and pioneering history in California includes a gallery in Palo Alto, which was open from 2016 to 2022. Pace’s engagement with Silicon Valley’s technology industry has had a lasting impact on the gallery at a global level, accelerating its initiatives connecting art and technology as well as its work with experiential artists. Pace consolidated its West Coast activity through its flagship in Los Angeles, which opened in 2022. Pace was one of the first international galleries to establish outposts in Asia, where it operates permanent gallery spaces in Hong Kong and Seoul, along with an office and viewing room in Beijing. In spring 2024, Pace will open its first gallery space in Japan in Tokyo’s new Azabudai Hills development.

For more information about this exhibition and others, please visit the Pace Gallery’s website here. Pace Gallery can be found on Instagram and Artsy, too.

WON JU LIM: An Artificial Place

Installation Views: An Artificial Place, Sidecar Gallery, December 14, 2024-February 8, 2025 Photo Credit: Ed Mumford

Sidecar is pleased to present An Artificial Place, a presentation of new and recent works by 2024 Guggenheim Fellow Won Ju Lim, organized in collaboration with Parapet/Real Humans, St. Louis.

The title of this exhibition sets the scene for the audience in a seemingly straightforward manner. Galleries, it reminds us, are unnatural places, reserved for artifice. But there is more to those words, which in fact derive from literature, specifically the writings of Marcel Proust. They are resumed inside via a series of “magic lanterns” that Won Ju Lim has produced over the past three years, and which form the bulk of this show. When their titles are read in sequence, the textual fragment is rounded out:

Installation Views: An Artificial Place, Sidecar Gallery, December 14, 2024-February 8, 2025 Photo Credit: Ed Mumford

That sense of the complexity of the Bois de Boulogne which made it an artificial place and, in the zoological or mythological sense of the word, a Garden, I captured again, this year, as I crossed it on my way to Trianon, on one of those mornings, early in November, when in Paris, if we stay indoors, being so near and yet prevented from witnessing the transformation scene of autumn, which is drawing so rapidly to a close without our assistance, we feel a regret for the fallen leaves that becomes a fever, and may even keep us awake at night.

Installation Views: An Artificial Place, Sidecar Gallery, December 14, 2024-February 8, 2025 Photo Credit: Ed Mumford

This meandering sentence comes from the novel Swann’s Way (1913), the first volume of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. A monumental feat of remembrance, it looms large over the proceedings, plunging every work on view into the febrile uncertainty of the past tense. Arranged on gently rotating platforms are items of various sorts—handmade architectural models, hobby kit renditions of environmental details, and a wide assortment of domestic bric-a-brac gleaned from thrift-stores, swap meets, and estate sales—all pertaining to episodes from Proust’s grand adventure in introspection. Accordingly, one could say that these are things summoned from another time, infused with a mental atmosphere, perhaps mere figments of reverie. And yet, unlike the words that appear on the author’s pages and are so readily translatable into thought, these things constitute a phenomenal reality, available to our eyes here and now. Moreover, raked by the light of the small desk lamps at their side, they gain an uncanny sense of agency, projecting past their given form as shadows and reflections—images.

“In Casting II (2023), a 39-minute single-channel video also featured in the show, a voice-over narrator once again takes us to the novelistic scene of a garden. This work could be slotted into the “making of” category. In it, we observe Lim working on one of her shadow-play lightboxes, a genre she began exploring in 2003. An example hangs on the opposite wall, dominated by Man Ray’s famous portrait of Proust on his deathbed. One might wonder if he is still dreaming of his childhood; the video suggests as much. Throughout, the lights flicker on and off. At the extreme, a white screen suddenly turns black, but which is more full or empty from the perspective of memory? Hands move small objects across a tabletop stage where, caught up in a play of brightness and obscurity, they occasionally lock into virtual tableaux, only to again decompose into the stuff they actually are. In the drawn-out finale, which amounts to a kind of credit sequence, each “takes a bow.” These diverse things, already so steeped in memory and storytelling, double down on their illusionistic aspect, effectively representing “themselves” as imaginary entities, the flora and fauna of an artificial place.”

— Jan Tumlir

 Installation Views: An Artificial Place, Sidecar Gallery, December 14, 2024-February 8, 2025 Photo Credit: Ed Mumford

Won Ju Lim is a recipient of the 2024 Guggenheim Fellowship. Lim’s work has been exhibited worldwide in 40+ solo and 70+ group exhibitions, including those at the Elzig Museum, Istanbul; University Galleries, California State University, Sacramento; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Yerba Buena Art Center, San Francisco; the St. Louis Art Museum, St. Louis; the Hood Museum of Art, Hanover; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Kunsthalle Detroit, Detroit; the Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Museum of Art, Seoul; the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing; Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt; DA2 Domus Artium, Salamanca; Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus; ZKM Museum fur Neue Kunst, Karlsruhe; Wilhelm-Hack-Museum, Ludwigshafen; Museum Haus Ester, Krefeld; Museum der Moderne, Salzurg; the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami; Casino Luxemboug – Forum d’Art Contemporain, Luxembourg; Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Siegen; and Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin. Her biennale exhibitions include the International Incheon Women Artists’ Biennale; Architecture, Art, and Landscape Biennial of the Canaries; the Gwangju Biennale; Snapshot: New Art from Los Angeles, the Hammer Museum; and the Müenster Sculpture Biennale. Her work is included in international public collections such as those of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, Davis; Elzig Collection, Istanbul; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; San Jose Museum of Art; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; M+, Hong Kong; Guy & Myriam Ullens Foundation, Orsières, Switzerland; La Colección Jumex, Mexico City; and the Vancouver Art Gallery among others. She is the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships including the 2016 C.O.L.A. Individual Artist Fellowship, the Henry L. and Natalie E. Freund Fellowship, the Creative Capacity Fund, the Tribeca Film Institute Media Arts Fellowship (funded by the Rockefeller Foundation), the Korea Arts Foundation for Visual Arts Grant, and the California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists.

This exhibition opened on December 14, 2024 and will be on view until February 8, 2025 There was an opening reception: Saturday, December 14, 6-8PM, featuring a DJ set by KCHUNG's Godspeed Radio (Jan Tumlir, Eric Wesley, Erica Redling)

For more information about this exhibition and more please visit Sidecar Gallery site here.