Encounters at the Barbican: Giacometti x Huma Bhabha

Special Guest Star, 2016. Huma Bhabha. Clay, wood, wire, t-shirt, acrylic, tin, paint brush, White Tailed Deer horns, and steel. Overall: 39 3/4 x 94 x 13 3/8 inches. Image credit: Kerry McFate. Courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner Gallery

text by Poppy Baring

The Barbican’s Level 2 gallery reopened in May with a joint exhibition featuring sculptures by Alberto Giacometti and Huma Bhabha. Encounters: Giacometti x Huma Bhabha features works, some of which are nearly a century old, that explore the human figure, the trauma it faces, and the process of survival. This ‘dialogue across time’ allows viewers to examine the artists’ responses to human vulnerability, violence, and displacement, and is the first time Bhabha has exhibited her work at a public London gallery.

The entrance upon arrival is currently home to four titan-aged bronze sculptures made by Bhabha. Debuted in New York last year, where the artist currently lives, these figures are being displayed in Europe for the very first time. Continuing inside, visitors encounter “The Glade” (Composition with nine figures), created in 1950 by Giacometti, a small tabletop sculpture that marked a significant shift in Giacometti’s practice. These supremely thin, isolated figures were created to capture people as they were, vulnerably themselves, on the street. 

Alberto Giacometti holding Three Men Walking, 1940s, Photo: anonymous, Silver print on paper, 11.9 x 17.2 cm, Archives Fondation Giacometti. © Succession Alberto Giacometti / Adagp, Paris 2024


Giacometti’s observation of individuals “coming and going...unconscious and mechanical... each having an air of moving on its own, quite alone,” inspired how Bhabha approached the composition of the exhibition. She sets sculptures up as groups and allows visitors to potentially cross paths with these works, as though the space were a public street, bringing a sense of life and interaction to the statues. The message becomes progressively clearer, as phantom-like, vulnerable figures gradually replace fragmented works. Collectively, both these artists’ work point to conflict and highlight its effects as human life becomes increasingly disfigured.

This exhibition is entirely suited to the Barbican. As far as Giacometti is concerned, he made some of his most significant pieces at the same time as the Barbican was under construction. Art and architecture made in this post-war period are often considered a response to the brutality of the Second World War, and both Giacometti’s work and the gallery, at that time, proposed a new (not so fresh) perspective on what it means to live and be human. The non-materialisticness of the work and the space that surrounds it creates a mass of meaningful beauty that explores a way of thinking where art is deemed crucial to living.

The Encounters: Giacometti x Huma Bhabha exhibition is on view through August 10th 2025 at the Barbican, Silk Street, London, EC2Y 8DS.

 

What Should it Be, 2024, Huma Bhabha. Painted and patinated bronze and concrete pedestal. 44 3/4 x 31 x 31 inches. Photo credit: Kerry McFate. Courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner Gallery


 

It Has Its Own Presence: Read an Interview of Ceramicist Kathy Butterly →

Photo credit: Alan Weiner

Kathy Butterly, sixty-two, is one of forty-one women whose work is being showcased at The Grey Art Museum’s exhibition, Anonymous Was A Woman. The show celebrates the recipients of the grant, anonymously awarded to mid-career women artists living and working in the United States. Butterly’s three ceramic sculptures—Heavy Head (2002), Chinese Landscape (2005), and Garter (1996)—are three of the 251 works on display until July 19, 2025. 

Butterly, born in Amityville, New York, splits her time between New York City and Maine. “If I didn’t have Maine as an outlet, I don’t think I’d still be in New York,” she said over the phone from her home in Maine. Butterly did not come from an art family—one of the reasons she initially believed she would study interior design over an art like ceramics. But once she began studying at Moore College of Art and Design, where she met American sculptor Viola Frey, she discovered her passion for combining painting and sculpture. While she sipped juice from a wine glass and I coffee from a ceramic mug, we talked about the evolution of her work, her Anonymous Was a Woman grant, and the different functions of the interiors and exteriors of her lively sculptures. Read more.

The Arrival of Untitled Art Fair In Houston Reveals A Hidden Historical Art Scene

Mark your calendars for September 19. The Lone Star State is an up-and-coming art destination.

The Menil Collection, Modern and Contemporary galleries. Photo by Caroline Phillipone


text by Karly Quadros


Houston may call to mind NASA, BBQ, and hurricanes, but just beneath the surface of one of America’s most diverse cities, a vibrant art scene is emerging.

On track to become the third-largest city in America within the next decade, Houston is a city on the rise—quite literally. It’s a place where bigger is always better and change is constant. Leaving very little in the way of historical architecture, the city finds itself perpetually busy building the next bigger and better thing. There’s no single racial or ethnic majority. Instead, the city attracts everyone from French art collectors to Sudanese refugees, a fact that’s produced a richly diverse food scene.

But it’s Houston’s art scene that’s attracting international attention. With Untitled Art, Houston making its debut in Houston on September 19, director Michael Slenske and executive director Clara Andrade Pereira are bridging the gap between the city’s historic institutional art world and contemporary audiences.

Half a century ago, a booming oil industry fueled Houston’s art scene while the rest of the country was sinking into recession. Two significant investments in the city’s institutional art infrastructure—the construction of the Contemporary Art Museum Houston and a multimillion-dollar renovation to the Museum of Fine Arts Houston—signaled a push to establish Houston as one of America’s artistic centers. A local art scene cropped up around the Lawndale Alternative Art Space at the University of Houston (now the Lawndale Art Center), founded by sculptor James Surls. Meanwhile, other standout artists, such as Julian Schnabel and Robert Rauschenberg, were developing their distinctive styles in Texas. Then a mid-80s oil bust interrupted the scene’s boom. Now, there’s a renewed effort to finish what Surls and Harithas started and put Houston on the international art world’s map.

The Menil Collection campus. Photo by Grant Gay

The foremost underpinnings of Houston’s art scene stem from one family. Billionaire collectors and patrons of the arts, Dominique and John de Menil, formed the backbone of Houston’s fine art world, encapsulated in the Menil Collection. The couple’s story reads like something out of a spy novel: Dominique, an oil heiress to an oil company, married John, an investment banker from a family ennobled by Napoleon, only to be forced to flee their home in Paris through a Spanish port on a steamer bound for Cuba in 1944 when the Nazis invaded. The couple eventually settled in Houston, a small city on the Gulf of Mexico with a barely nascent art scene. Dominique credited the lack of art in the city as the exact reason why she began collecting in the first place.

The de Menil’s private collection reflected an adventurous and forward-thinking mindset. As early champions of Max Ernst, they mounted his first solo museum show in the US (Ernst’s portrait of Dominique, done when he was still an unknown artist in Paris, hangs in the first room of the Menil Collection to this day). 

The collection reflects their diverse and eclectic tastes, encompassing everything from Surrealism to Pop Art to ancient artworks from Africa and Oceania. From Magritte to Man Ray, Henri Matisse to Joan Miró, and from Hans Bellmer to Bruce Davidson, the Menil Collection, which became a museum in 1987, rivals any private art collection across the country. In a city that is notoriously concrete and sprawling, its campus is a cool and calm patch of green space in the heart of Montrose, a walkable neighborhood humming with the trill of cicadas and the chirps of grackles. In addition to its core collection, the campus is also home to the Menil Drawing Institute, the Cy Twombly Gallery, and the Dan Flavin Installation at Richmond Hall.

Dan Flavin Installation at Richmond Hall. Photo by Sarah Hobson

The Menil Collection is notably abutted by the Rothko Chapel, a nondenominational worship space featuring fourteen Rothko murals rendered in solemn purples and blacks that were characteristic of the artist’s final years before his death. Initially intended for the Catholic University of Saint Thomas, the church’s streamlined result, with its octagonal structure and moody ambiance, was a little too modern for their taste and became a much more expansive space, serving as the backdrop for everything from human rights award ceremonies to a music video by Solange Knowles. The space, like much of Rothko’s work, possesses a timeless quality and a nearly endless capacity to encourage reflection, inward movement, and calm.

In any other city, it would be hard to match the Menil Collection, but the Museum of Fine Arts Houston (MFAH) is a standout, not just regionally, but globally. Stretching over three sunlight-filled buildings, the museum houses works from nearly every ancient, modern, and contemporary art luminary imaginable (really, I eventually gave up on taking notes after several pages listing iconic pieces from Impressionism to Surrealism to Pop Art and everything in between). 

James Turrell, Caper, Salmon to White Wedgework, 2000

Even the walkways between buildings are works of art. You can easily escape the humidity by stealing away between galleries in a luminous light tunnel designed by James Turrell. Patrons can pop between multiple immersive art exhibitions, including a Yayoi Kusama infinity room and the pulsating Chromosaturation MFA by Venezuelan artist Carlos Cruz-Diez, before tucking in for a Michelin-starred lunch courtesy of chef Alain Verzeroli at Le Jardinier, the museum’s fine dining alcove, which overlooks a sculpture garden created by Isamu Noguchi.

Yayoi Kusama, Aftermath of Obliteration of Eternity, 2009. Courtesy of the museum and Yayoi Kusama

Just a two-minute walk away is the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. Currently on view until March 29, 2026, is Across the Universe, by Houston-born artist Tomashi Jackson. Rooted firmly in archival and historical research, Jackson excavates the troubled histories of democracy, exclusion, and law in the South. Incorporating a wide range of techniques across painting, printmaking, fiber art, and sculpture, she employs juxtapositions of color and material such as dust from Greek marble quarries, voting pamphlets, and river soil to interrogate the calcified layers of history. In 2026, the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston will host a four-decade-long survey of conceptual artist Mary Ellen Carroll.

The Menil Collection, main building galleries. Photo by Hung Truong

Despite the institutional dominance in the city, Houston is also home to one of the most innovative art residencies in the country: Project Row Houses. Founded by a small collective of Black artists and community leaders and helmed by MacArthur Genius Award winner Rick Lowe, the logic of Project Row Houses is simple: strong communities and great artwork are only possible when people’s basic needs are met. Lowe and his collaborators restored thirty-nine shotgun houses in Houston’s Ward back in the ’90s. They award fellowships to artists who live and work in nine of the houses for a period of one year. Tomashi Jackson had a formative fellowship there, as did Sam Durant and Whitfield Lovell. Beyond the residencies, Project Row Houses offers a residential program for young single mothers, after-school programs, and entrepreneurship programs to encourage Black-owned businesses. The entire enterprise is what Lowe calls “social sculpture,” an artistic practice that’s inextricable from political action and community engagement.

A new generation of artists and community organizers has taken up this mantle, including Amarie Gipson, founder of The Reading Room. This hybrid space combines a library, community center, and art gallery. The Reading Room celebrates Black visual culture in all its forms, from art and design monographs to film screenings to community conversations. It includes everything from literary salons devoted to Octavia E. Butler to documentaries on West African cultural repatriation.

Other fixtures, like Adam Marnie, are making waves in the independent publishing world with F Magazine and its accompanying art gallery and indie publishing house, also called F. The gallery has showcased Houston contemporary art stalwart Mark Flood and even collaborated on a sprawling monograph titled The Origin of Mark Flood (2022). Marnie’s wife, Rebecca Matalon, is a curator at the Contemporary Arts Museum, where she is currently working on the Mary Ellen Carroll retrospective.

Meanwhile, lovers of outsider art have no shortage of things to explore. There’s the Orange Show, a carnivalesque fever dream devoted to the restorative power of citrus, created by postman Jeff McKissack in 1956. Or there’s the Beer Can House, a folk art installation created in the late ’60s by John Milkovisch, who adorned the exterior of his home with flattened beer cans and caps. Why? “I got sick of mowing the grass,” he once said.

Houston is a town of endurance. In a city beset by extreme weather and perpetual change, the art that crops up around the city is a testament to the creativity of Houstonians. As Untitled Art Houston approaches in the fall, it’s important to remember John de Menil’s response to a New York friend who once decried Houston as a cultural wasteland.

“It’s in the desert that miracles happen.”

The Menil Collection, Allora & Calzadilla's Graft. Photo by Caroline Phillipone

Stitched in Place: Do Ho Suh at the Tate Modern

The Genesis Exhibition Do Ho Suh at Tate Modern © Tate Photography (Jai Monaghan)

text by Poppy Baring

Do Ho Suh’s first major London exhibition at the Tate Modern showcases decades of his work that touches on themes that bring the importance of home back into audiences’ hearts. The title of the exhibition Walk The House derives from the Korean expression Hanok regarding a traditional house that can be packed up, transported and re-assembled across space and time. Originally from Seoul and now living in London, Suh has lived and worked across many continents. Walk The House involves impressive ghostly fabric structures, time-worn graphite rubbings, and intricate drawings that are to be experienced physically but also ask viewers to look introspectively at their own inner worlds.

The overwhelming size of some of these works contrasts against meticulous drawings and delicate watercolors and while the former risks overshadowing the latter, this contrast is precisely the point. By juxtaposing the grand with the intricate, Suh shows that memory does not exist at a single scale. We remember our homes and their rooms, while also holding onto the small elements that fill them. Perfect Home: London, Horsham, New York, Berlin, Providence, Seoul 2024, presented for the first time, demonstrates this well and is at the heart of this emotional experience. Here, Do Ho Suh outlines his current home and partners this with architectural features from previous spaces he and his family have inhabited. 

Rubbing/Loving Project: Seoul Home, 2013–2022 is the first and one of the most powerful works exhibited. Newly reconstructed but made over several months, the large-scale wall installation was created using a practice which in itself is meditative. The artist’s childhood home was covered with Hanji (mulberry paper) and gently rubbed with graphite capturing its structure and all its blemishes, which were enhanced by the elements the paper was left exposed to. This process mirrors how we recall our own homes—not as exact images, but through textures, sensations, and fragments of detail.

Do Ho Suh Nests, 2024. Courtesy the Artist and Lehmann Maupin New York, Seoul and London and Victoria Miro. Photography by Jeon Taeg Su © Do Ho Suh

Visitors continue to move through the colorful corridors of Nests, 2024, where Suh stitches together rooms, hallways, and entryways from buildings in Seoul, New York, London, and Berlin. These liminal spaces, often passed through without thought, become the focus, transformed into a fluid architecture that defies the logic of solid buildings. These in-betweens embody the shifting nature of memory and migration, like walking through the echo of a home that never fully was, but somehow feels known.

Suh’s films: Robin Hood Gardens, 2018 and Dong In Apartments, 2022, underscore the ever-changing layout of cities like London and Daegu. They show built environments as malleable living things that continue to be loved, destroyed, rebuilt and changed alongside the rest of us. This rich and colorful exhibition and the themes it touches on are as relevant as they have ever been with pieces reflecting on how political unrest coat our memories of time and space. Home is something to be reminded of and while some reviews have suggested the exhibition feels overcrowded, perhaps that is not far off from most people’s lived experience of where and how they live their lives.

The Genesis Exhibition: Do Ho Suh: Walk the House is on view through October 19th 2025 at the Tate Modern, Bankside, SE1 9TG.

Read Our Interview of Matthieu Humery, Curator of Diane Arbus' Constellation @ The Armory →

Diane Arbus, Constellation, 2023–2024, The Tower, Main Gallery, LUMA Arles, France. All artworks © The Estate of Diane Arbus Collection Maja Hoffmann/LUMA Foundation. Installation Photo © Adrian Deweerdt

Diane Arbus’s photography has long unsettled and fascinated viewers, defying easy interpretation. In Constellation, the newly opened exhibition at The Armory, curator Matthieu Humery brings a second life to her work; not to explain or categorize, but to invite quiet, intimate dialogue between the viewer and the photographs. Featuring 454 photographs from the artist’s archive, including many rarely seen, the exhibition defers any chronological or thematic structure, favoring a layout without linear direction, making every encounter entirely unique and unpredictable. The experience is haunting, dissociating the viewer from the fact that they’re in an art show, and instead allowing them to sink into provoked emotions, completely immersed in an entirely human experience, dissolving the distance between audience and the subjects.

In our conversation, Humery shares what it means to curate with restraint, how working with a posthumous body of work introduces both freedom and distance and what it felt like to place each image by hand in the space, listening for their rhythm. Read more

A Preview of the Creative Incubator Inside the New Museum’s Expansion

DEMO 2025 offers a glimpse inside the work of NEW INC, which helps tech savvy creatives craft immersive VR art, community hubs, and everything in between.

Image courtesy of Nathalie Basoski

text by Karly Quadros

Now I’ve been known to get down to some strange tunes, but it’s not every day that I find myself strapped into a pair of headphones listening intently to a rock. 

I’m seated at one of four wooden desks arranged in a square around a sapling in the atrium of WSA at 180 Maiden Lane. The building is all elbows, intricate metal scaffolding from floor to ceiling and a tangle of indoor foliage overhead. To my left, I’m flanked by an enormous man with an enormous coffee with his eyes closed, communing with a craggy chunk of ore that’s over 2 billion years old. To my right is a little girl with a black ponytail, scribbling intently in a notebook, headphones twice the size of her head.

The sonic installation is from Bay Area and New York City musician and technologist Dan Gorelick. Rocks are the product of hundreds of millions of years of eruption, erosion, compression, and transformation—with his technological interventions, Gorelick has managed to squeeze all that time into just a few seconds of sound. 

He is one of 115 creatives who presented work and spoke as part of NEW INC’s DEMO 2025 festival, running now until June 22. Beginning in 2014, NEW INC has served as the New Museum’s “creative incubator” for everything from immersive art to innovative proposals for third spaces, providing around eighty artists and entrepreneurs working with new media each year with creative and professional mentorship. Now, with a permanent space on the way in the New Museum’s futuristic new digs on the Bowery, designed by OMA and Shohei Shigematsu and Rem Koolhaas, DEMO 2025 was a peek inside NEW INC’s next chapter.

Things these days are fraught for emerging artists and creatives working at the porous boundary between art, design, and technology—and heaven forbid the work have any components that are socially, environmentally, or politically-oriented. As the Trump administration takes ruthless aim at the curatorial independence of museums and other cultural institutions, opportunities for exhibition, funding, or mentorship have diminished, whether out of actual lack of resources or fear of retaliation. Meanwhile, the future roles of museums as more than white rooms full of aging paintings has been called into question.

“It’s core to the ethos that artists are thinking about the real world impact of what they’re making, and they’re thinking from the onset about the audience in the reach of their projects,” said Salome Asega, director of NEW INC and DEMO 2025.

Asega, herself an artist, was a NEW INC fellow in 2016 where she received mentorship for her collective nonprofit PWRPLNT, a space for young creatives engaging digital tools, social justice, and innovative storytelling. Her team received mentorship and the assistance they needed to formalize the project including help developing a fundraising strategy and mentors to join the advisory board. 

Other artists found a home in NEW INC with work that was too unconventional for traditional art world channels.

“[My brother and I] were raised in and culturally came up in the art world. We speak the same vocabulary and look at similar references,” said Sam Rolfes of Team Rolfes, a DEMO 2025 presenter. “But because that ground was largely infertile for the kind of things we were trying to do, we had to find and create new spaces.” 

Five years later, in a full circle moment, Asega became the director of NEW INC. She grew the incubator’s showcase from a small day in which fellows would display their work for a select group of curators, investors, and philanthropists into a three-day festival with installations for the public lasting the entire month. And, of course, admission is free.

“There were never really wide funding opportunities for some of the ideas in our programs,” said Asega. “This has always been us creative problem solving with our members. Even in this moment we’ll continue to do that. We’ll continue to think and dream up new opportunities for sustainability.”

Other presenters from the festival include a kinetic sculpture from MORKANA, a rice cooker symphony by Trevor Van De Velde, plans for an innovative relief hub for NYC gig workers by architect Elsa Ponce, an augmented reality app documenting Black life in Pittsburgh by Adrian Jones, and radical screenprinting from Secret Riso Project. In between interactive installations, viewers were able to catch Collina Strada creator Hillary Taymour talking with writer Kimberly Drew about integrating environmental advocacy and brand strategy or cultural critic Whitney Mallett discussing digital brainrot aesthetics with David Lisbon, curatorial assistant at the Whitney Museum, and Bri Griffin, community designer at Rhizome.

“We’ve always been a program that has embraced the new, the unknown, the not yet named,” said Asega.

NEW INC’s DEMO 2025 showcase installations are on display at WSA at 180 Maiden Lane now until June 22.

Prada’s Architectural Meditation in Osaka

Prada Mode, Osaka
Courtesy of Prada

text by Andrea Riano


At a time when fashion’s cultural events are so often reduced to surface-level branding, Prada Mode’s second edition in Japan is a serious meditation on how architecture can reimagine the ecosystem of an island. In the heart of Osaka, the brand collaborates with architect Kazuyo Sejima, inviting guests to participate in a critical dialogue, exclusive performances, and an immersive exhibition.

Open to the public through June 15th, Prada Mode Osaka takes place in Umekita Park, a rare oasis nestled between Osaka’s glass towers and directly connected to the country’s busiest train station. This is the twelfth edition of the brand’s cultural journey, which has landed everywhere from Miami to Hong Kong and now, for the second time, in Japan. This particular edition is curated by Pritzker Prize-winning architect and head of SANAA, Kazuyo Sejima, a frequent collaborator of Prada.

Prada Mode, Osaka
Courtesy of Prada

In 2008, the Fukutake Foundation, which manages the Benesse Art Site Naoshima, invited Sejima to reimagine and shape the built environment of the small Seto island of Inujima. At Prada Mode, the architect shares this ongoing work through models, videos, and other materials at a SANAA-designed pavilion in the park. In the days leading up to Prada Mode Osaka, Inujima Project offered a private preview of Inujima, introducing the history of the island, Sejima’s projects there over the past 17 years, and her vision for its future. During the Inujima Project, Prada and the architect unveiled a permanent pavilion at Inujima Life Garden, designed by Sejima and donated to the island by Prada.

“On Inujima, a tiny island rich in nature, visitors will encounter and experience symbiosis - a landscape that combines history, architecture, art, and daily life. In Osaka, a city with historical ties to Inujima, this experience will be shared and expanded to reach a wider audience. At this edition of Prada Mode, Symbiosis will take shape through conversations and discoveries, creating a new landscape that continues to grow with the participation of all,” says Kazuyo Sejima.

Kazuyo Sejima at Prada Mode, Osaka
Courtesy of Prada

The programming reflects that same ethos. The week-long schedule is a soft collision of art, intellect, and experimental sound curated by Craig Richards, featuring performances by Nik Bärtsch, Reggie Watts, and C.A.R. (Choosing Acronyms Randomly), the latter being an incredible post-punk performance. Guests lounged on floor cushions, sipped Prada-branded negronis and olives, while watching film screenings by Bêka & Lemoine and a dance piece by choreographer Wayne McGregor, joined by composer Keiichiro Shibuya. Shibuya also presented “ANDROID MARIA,” a newly created android developed with a team of leading developers, produced and presented by ATAK.

“It’s not about promotion here. It’s about architecture, music, ideas. The curation is unique. Prada genuinely wants to support culture.” says Shibuya, who is known for challenging the boundaries between humans and technology through his compositions and collaborations with artists and scientists, such as his Android Orchestra. 

Indeed, Prada Mode has never really been about fashion, instead, it's about the contexts that shape it: cities, people, materials, and memory. In Osaka, that vision reaches a new level of clarity.

Prada Mode, Osaka
Courtesy of Prada

Prada Mode is on view through June 15th at Umekita Park, Ofukacho, Kita Ward, Osaka, 530-0011

David Hockney: A Bigger Exhibition @ Louis Vuitton Foundation

A truly unmissable exhibition that offers a rare personal experience in a dynamic dialogue between the artist, his art, and the admirer.

David Hockney
"Bigger Trees near Warter or/ou Peinture sur le Motif pour le Nouvel Age
Post-Photographique" 2007
Oil on 50 canvases (36 x 48" each)
457.2 x 1219.2 cm (180 x 480 Inches)
© David Hockney
Photo Credit: Prudence Cuming Associates
Tate, U.K

In the largest exhibition of one of the most influential artists of the 20th and 21st centuries to date, David Hockney takes over the entirety of the Louis Vuitton Foundation building. This truly monumental exhibit encompasses over 400 works, including a wide variety of media, from traditional oil and acrylic paintings, ink, pencil, and charcoal drawings, as well as digital works on photographic, computer, iPhone, and iPad devices, alongside immersive photo and video installations. Hockney himself curated and was deeply involved in every aspect of the exhibition's design, personally overseeing the sequencing of each room. With the artist creating his own retrospective, visitors get to have a rare, intimate insight into Hockney’s creative universe and process, revealing the evolution of his art over the past three-quarters of a century. The exhibition is an explosion of vibrant, relatable, joyful, and deeply immersive works, radiating the artist’s characteristic joie de vivre and effortlessly infecting viewers with a ray of emotions.

The exhibition unfolds across eleven rooms within the foundation, each thoughtfully organized by theme, period, and medium. This thematic progression aims to provide viewers with a profound and multifaceted understanding of Hockney’s diverse artistic universe. The journey commences with an impactful introduction, showcasing Hockney’s most iconic pieces, including A Bigger Splash (1967), Portrait of an Artist (1972), and Portrait of My Father (1955). This deliberate choice to open the exhibition with such emblematic and grand works strongly establishes Hockney’s primal artistic direction throughout his extensive and prolific career.

 

David Hockney
Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), 1972
Acrylic on canvas
213.36 x 304.8 cm (84 x 120 Inches)
© David Hockney
Photo Credit: Art Gallery of New South Wales / Jenni Carter

 

The following room features four large paintings that mirror one another, all interconnected by a profound theme exploring human communication—both with others and with oneself. Two almost identical paintings face each other: Pictured Gathering with Mirror (2018) and Pictures at an Exhibition from the same year. Both depict an exact replica of twenty-five figures seated and standing in various positions. In the former, they face a mirror, while in the latter, they face a vibrant exhibition. This visual dialogue creates a compelling interplay of reflection and perception, drawing viewers into Hockney’s intricate world and capturing their attention at the start of the journey.

 

Installation views David Hockney 25, galerie 4
© David Hockney © Fondation Louis Vuitton / Marc Domage

 

The foundation’s first floor is entirely dedicated to David Hockney’s time spent in Normandy during the COVID-19 pandemic. Here, he completed 220 works solely on his iPad in 2020, all under the sentimental title Do Remember, They Can’t Cancel the Spring. Overflowing with hope and a renewed admiration for life, Hockney discovered an infinite number of subjects in his surroundings, celebrating the subtle nuances of change, the shifting seasons, the mundane, painting plants in all their varied states. By embracing the iPad, he allowed himself to revisit the same motifs, continually and rapidly renewing his artistic output, while also being able to document his entire creative progression from a blank screen to a finished work of art. While the medium of art painted on an iPad is often subject to criticism, the preceding display of Hockney’s previous works affirms his skill and clear artistic vision. This daring embrace of new technology, particularly at the age of eighty-two at the time, is truly admirable, indicating his fearless willingness to experiment with practices often associated with younger artists.

 

David Hockney
"27th March 2020, No. 1"
iPad painting printed on paper, mounted on 5 panels
Exhibition Proof 2
364.09 x 521.4 cm (143.343 x 205.276 Inches)
© David Hockney

 

The next section transitions to showcase Hockney’s dialogue with other painters, displaying his respect for those who inspired him. He pays homage to artists such as Fra Angelico, Cézanne, Picasso, and Van Gogh, reinterpreting their works with his own vision and aesthetic. As seen in A Bigger Card Players (2015), where he directly references Cézanne’s Card Players (1890-1895), Hockney creates a powerful mise en abyme by incorporating the same work in the background, alongside Pearblossom Hwy, which is positioned in the same room. The interior wall depicted in the image echoes the very room we are in, creating yet another mise en abyme, this time for the viewer themselves. The understanding of the painters who preceded him, and their contributions to the art world and to Hockney himself, allows us not only to admire Hockney for his deep respect for these grand artists but to perceive art in its totality from a much broader perspective.


As we approach the end of the exhibition, we discover Hockney’s passion and love for opera. In 1975, the artist was commissioned by the Glyndebourne Festival to design the sets and costumes for Igor Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress, and since then, opera and set design have remained deeply close to his heart. In this installation, we discovered his latest creation, Hockney Paints the Stage, a musical and visual reinterpretation of his drawings and sets for various operas. This room truly adds another dimension to the exhibition, not only through the overflowing operatic scores of Mozart, Wagner, and Stravinsky, but also by firmly establishing Hockney’s comprehensive artistic background. Within this 360-degree, light-filled room, one truly realizes the depth and sustaining love for life that Hockney has and can communicate, and by this point, you can feel it too.

 

Installation views "David Hockney 25", galerie 10
Hockney Paints the Stage, 2025
Creation of David Hockney & Lightroom
Conception 59 Productions
Installation views "David Hockney 25", galerie 10
© David Hockney © Fondation Louis Vuitton / Marc Domage

 

Leaving the opera room, filled with emotion, the exhibition climaxes in a more intimate space that unveils David Hockney’s most recent works, painted in London, where the artist has resided since July 2023. These particularly enigmatic paintings draw inspiration from Edvard Munch and William Blake, exemplified by After Munch: Less is Known than People Think (2023) and After Blake: Less is Known than People Think (2024), directly inspired by Blake’s illustrations for Dante’s Divine Comedy. The title appears three times within the painting, feels like a deliberate mantra, beautifully combined with a landscape depicting the abiding cycle of night and day, perfectly aligning with the artist’s profound notion that “it is the now that is eternal.”

Hockney concludes the exhibition with his latest self-portrait, a deliberate choice that felt like the perfect finale to such a comprehensive, personal exhibition. In this portrait, he portrays himself drawing outdoors, holding a cigarette, adorned in colorful attire and his signature framed glasses, gazing directly at the viewer. It can be viewed like his own personal valediction, a way of saying goodbye and a heartfelt “thank you for being here, and I hope you understood.”

 

David Hockney
"May Blossom on the Roman Road" 2009
Oil on 8 canvases (36 x 48" each)
182.88 x 487.7 x 0 cm (72 x 192 x 0 Inches)
© David Hockney
Photo Credit: Richard Schmidt

 

David Hockney 25 is on view through August 31 at the Louis Vuitton Foundation 8, Avenue du Mahatma Gandhi Bois de Boulogne, 75116

Read Our Interview of Ireland Wisdom On the Erotic Gaze & the Art of Looking →

Portrait by Austin Sandhaus

In this intimate conversation between gallerist Carlye Packer and painter Ireland Wisdom, what begins as a reflection on their creative partnership unfolds into a meditation on intimacy, eroticism, play, and mortality. Wisdom, whose portraits are painted from live models in prolonged silence are charged with a psychic intensity. She speaks with Packer candidly about her relationship to the body, desire, and the mythic tradition of being seen—and of seeing. As they revisit their early collaborations and look closer at Wisdom’s new Dance Macabre series, the dialogue dances between the sacred and the scandalous, from Goya to Dorian Gray to Georges Bataille. As friends and colleagues, they muse about works that are made like someone chasing the moment before it is lost. Whether you are a sitter or simply a viewer, you are invited to enter that entanglement with her. Read more.

Inside Five Must-See New York Gallery Shows This Spring

Find everything from queer intimacy to infinity rooms to domestic Americana on paper this season in New York’s galleries.

 

Jim Shaw
Study for “The Bride Stripped Bare” (2016)
Pencil on paper

 

text by Kim Shveka

Jim Shaw, Drawings
Gagosian
On view through June 14

For over thirty years, American artist Jim Shaw has mined the depths of Americana, popular culture, personal memory, and dream logic to create a body of work as chaotic as it is compelling. Now on view at Gagosian, Drawings is an exhibition of works on paper made between 2012 and 2024, showing Shaw’s intellectual inspirations in his artistic journey. Known for his ability to weave together the threads of America’s subconscious through surreal and symbolic visual language, Shaw here turns to the intimacy of graphite and ink, using sketch-like drawings to offer a direct window into his thinking; raw and unfiltered. These drawings are freely associated with references drawn from the artist’s mind and memory, as he imagines and recalls scenes from his own life and the collective American memory, translating the images in his mind’s eye onto paper. Jim Shaw’s “Drawings” is a deeply personal and evocative exploration of identity, nostalgia, and American culture.

 

Sam Moyer
Boca (2025)
Marble, acrylic on plaster-coated canvas

 

Sam Moyer, Subject to Change
Sean Kelly
On view through June 14

Multidisciplinary artist Sam Moyer is known for her distinctive approach to merging abstraction and materiality, often redefining conventional sculptural forms through her innovative use of natural elements. Her work blurs the lines between painting and sculpture, creating wall-mounted pieces that highlight variations in surface and light.
Now showing at Sean Kelly Gallery, Sam Moyer’s fourth solo exhibition features a dynamic body of new work. The exhibition showcases Moyer's fondness for inconsistency and contradictions across a variety of artworks. Featuring Moyer’s latest stone paintings from 2024, which combine reclaimed stone and painted canvas, alongside oil on panel paintings and handmade paper. In these new works, Moyer meditates on life's inherent dualities; decay and growth, loss and perspective, endings and emergent beginnings; capturing a moment of balance during trying times. The palette draws inspiration from Claude Monet’s late paintings, interpreting his shift towards purity of color and light as an investigation of essential visual language, ultimately reflecting Moyer's continued exploration of color and light as the core building blocks of abstraction.

 

Salman Toor
Cross Street (2025)
Oil on panel
© Salman Toor; Courtesy of the artist, Luhring Augustine, New York. Photo: Farwad Owrang

 

Salman Toor, Wish Maker
Luhring Augustine
On view through June 21

Salman Toor is renowned for his evocative figurative works that explore vulnerability within contemporary public and private life, particularly in the context of queer, diasporic identity. His paintings delve into the opportunities, anxieties, and humor inherent in the search for selfhood and the immigrant experience. Now showing at Luhring Augustine, Wish Maker, Toor’s first major New York presentation since his pivotal 2020 Whitney Museum show, spans both gallery locations, featuring paintings at Luhring Augustine Chelsea and a dedicated presentation of works on paper at Luhring Augustine Tribeca. Toor's new paintings, drawings, and etchings place imaginary yet relatable figures in diverse settings, examining the complexities of our paradoxical times. His work vibrates between heartening and harrowing, often employing a distinctive viridescent palette that illuminates both beauty and violence, liberation and entrapment, reflecting how perception shifts with perspective. Toor skillfully fuses art historical references with contemporary concerns, creating a rich compilation of traditions, popular culture, and lived experience.

Installation view, Atsuko Tanaka, Yayoi Kusama, Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, May 8 - June 14, 2025.
Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, Photo: Steven Probert.

Atsuko Tanaka and Yayoi Kusama
Paula Cooper Gallery
On view through June 14

Atsuko Tanaka, Yayoi Kusama, is an exhibition that brings together the groundbreaking works of two of Japan’s most innovative and influential artists. The exhibition presents a diverse selection of Tanaka’s works on canvas and paper, alongside early pieces by Kusama in various media, highlighting the parallel yet distinct artistic concerns of these pioneering figures.

Both Atsuko Tanaka (1932-2005) and Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929) matured in post-World War II Japan, a period of profound societal transformation that spurred radical shifts in the arts. Tanaka, a key female member of the Gutai movement, is known for vibrant works like her iconic “Electric Dress” (1956), where circles and lines dynamically interact. Kusama, active in 1960s New York, explored hypnotic repetition, creating immersive works evoking hallucination and boundlessness. Both shared a broadened approach to artmaking, incorporating textiles, sensory environments, and performance, developing personal abstract languages with repeated motifs in large, enveloping scales. The exhibition includes Tanaka's early drawings and paintings, Kusama’s pioneering “Infinity Nets,” rare collages, photographs, and historical films.


Dozie Kanu. Chair [ iii ] (Dark), 2022
Poured concrete, steel, rims
35.9 x 16.5 x 20.5 in. 91.4 x 41.9 x 52.1 cm.
Courtesy of anonymous gallery, New York, NY

the chair by the window is an old friend featuring work from Jane Dickson, Kamil Dossar, Nan Goldin, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Dozie Kanu, Mike Kelley, Carolyn Lazard, Klara Liden, Elliot Reed, Josef Strau
Anonymous Gallery
On view through June 14

The chair by the window is an old friend explores the emotional layers of domestic space. It focuses on how our homes can feel safe and familiar, but also confining or heavy with memory. The objects we live with become more than decoration, they carry personal meaning, reflecting who we are, who we were, and who we might want to be. Some artworks, such as Nan Goldin’s My Bed, Hotel La Louisiane, seem to capture the trace of a moment that has just passed, preserving an atmosphere of intimacy and lingering presence. Others, like Elliot Reed’s leaning umbrellas, convey a sense of stillness and resistance to functionality, evoking suspension rather than resolution. Across the exhibition, everyday materials such as wires, fabric, and furniture are reimagined as vessels of emotion and meaning. Through these transformations, the works articulate themes of care, closeness, imbalance, and quiet shifts, drawing attention to the subtle psychological states embedded within domestic objects and spaces. In this way, the exhibition invites us to think about what ‘home’ really means. Is it a space where we can rest, or does it sometimes hold us back? As life outside moves faster and becomes more overwhelming, our interiors can become places where comfort and loneliness exist at the same time. They are both a retreat and a mirror of our inner world.

The Weight of Lightness: Miya Ando’s “Mono no aware” at Saint Laurent Rive Droite, Los Angeles

In a city so often obsessed with permanence—ageless faces, endless summers, architecture designed to defy time—Mono no aware, Miya Ando’s luminous exhibition at Saint Laurent Rive Droite in Los Angeles, arrives like a soft exhale. Curated with elegant restraint by Anthony Vaccarello, the exhibition runs from April 8 through May 28, 2025, and offers visitors a meditative encounter with the ineffable: beauty that doesn’t last, and thus becomes more precious.

Ando, a Japanese-American artist based in New York, brings to Los Angeles a body of work that is both austere and poetic. Her materials—steel, redwood, washi paper, glass—are not chosen for comfort or ease. These are tough, elemental substances, but in her hands, they seem to sigh. Steel oxidizes. Wood is scorched. Silver nitrate glistens briefly before tarnishing into shadow. Every piece seems to exist in the act of becoming something else, caught in a slow dance between creation and decay.

It is this delicate tension—between the enduring and the fleeting, the seen and the sensed—that defines Mono no aware. The title, a Japanese philosophical term, loosely translates to “the pathos of things.” But it's not sorrow in the Western sense; it’s a tender, almost reverent awareness of the impermanence of all things. The falling cherry blossom, the shifting moonlight, the flicker of memory—Ando translates these moments not as loss but as sublime presence.

This exhibition is less a gallery show than a sensorial field. Ando’s paintings, with their subtle gradations and vaporous textures, resemble atmospheres more than images. One large piece—steel treated with silver nitrate—glows as if lit from within, a silver dusk caught in mid-fade. Stand before it long enough and you may find yourself breathing slower, drawn into its quietude. The light changes as you move. It is not just the painting that shimmers, but your own perception, altered.

Nearby, sculptures made of redwood anchor the space with a different kind of gravity. Ando uses the traditional Japanese shou-sugi-ban technique to char the surface of the wood, preserving it through fire. The result is a deep, inky black that isn’t void but presence. The carbonized surface absorbs light instead of reflecting it. Touch, were it allowed, would surely reveal unexpected warmth beneath the charcoal. These works feel ancient and future-facing at once—artifacts of a time out of time.

Silkscreen prints—subtler, perhaps quieter still—offer a more intimate scale, drawing viewers close. They echo the motifs of moonlight, fog, and celestial transience that recur throughout Ando’s work. There is a consistent language at play, not in symbols or icons, but in atmosphere. What binds the pieces together is not a narrative, but a rhythm, a kind of visual breath.

Ando’s training is as multidisciplinary as her art. With a background in East Asian calligraphy and metal patination, she bridges traditions with innovation. Her American upbringing meets her Japanese lineage in a hybrid that never feels forced. Instead, her work pulses with the complexity of in-between identities—cultural, material, temporal. The result is a deeply personal, spiritual vision, one that invites viewers not just to look, but to dwell in a different register of time.

Vaccarello’s curatorial touch is light but essential. The space at Saint Laurent Rive Droite—typically known for its sleek fashion displays and curated chaos—has been transformed into a vessel for contemplation. The works are given room to breathe, and the minimalist setting amplifies their quiet power. The collaboration between the house of Saint Laurent and Ando is more than aesthetic alignment—it’s an act of mutual recognition. Both traffic in forms of elegance that resist explanation, both seek out the sacred in style and silence.

It is tempting to categorize Mono no aware as environmental art or spiritual abstraction. But to do so would be to contain it too tightly. What Ando offers here isn’t doctrine—it’s sensation. It’s the way silver catches dusk. The scent of scorched wood. The hush that falls when you realize something beautiful is slipping away. And yet, Mono no aware does not mourn. It honors. In every oxidized panel, every blackened beam, every fading gradient, there is a kind of stillness that feels like acceptance. Not resignation, but reverence.

In a world constantly refreshing itself, where we swipe and scroll in pursuit of the next, the now, the new, Miya Ando’s work asks us to pause. To notice. To feel, just for a moment, the immensity of impermanence. And maybe, in doing so, to find a strange and fragile peace.

A Conversation with Artist Karice Mitchell →

Karice Mitchell
Sensation (Diptych), 2025
Archival inkjet print, custom frame, sandblasted glass

“I love using familiarity as a way to ask unfamiliar questions,” says Karice Mitchell.

Drawing from Players magazine, often dubbed “the Black Playboy,” Mitchell’s photo-based works explore the no man’s land between exposure and illegibility, frankness and mystery, modesty and obscenity. Through her closely cropped diptychs, triptychs, and modified images sourced from the pages of this landmark magazine of Black erotica, she explores the self-definition, personal expression, and resilience of Black women. Economy of Pleasure, her latest show at Silke Lindner and her first solo exhibition in the U.S., hones in on the early 2000s: the era of the video vixen, digital downloads, and lower back tattoos. Sand blasted over intimate images of a woman’s shoulder, a hoop earring, a pristine pump and a French pedicure are words pulled from the magazine’s pages and models’ nommes de guerre: angel, sensation, paradise.

After a frustrating moment of censorship when she was commissioned to do a public work of art in her native Vancouver, British Columbia in 2023, Mitchell returned more committed than ever to her project exploring the representations of Black women in adult media. While it may seem salacious, the work itself is deeply sensitive and interior. There is recognition between women who have worked to claim their bodies as their own through ink, jewelry, donning clothing, or shedding it. The work is seductive but withholding. Notably missing are the Players models’ faces — rather than exposing these women to judgment and interrogation once again, Mitchell’s work gives the audience only glimpses of a personality and a life lived. Her work is an interrogation, a negotiation, and a reclamation. The rest is on the viewer. Read more.

Walk a Mile in Women's History Museum's Shoes →

Image courtesy of Company Gallery

It was February 2024, and one model at the Women’s History Museum show couldn’t stop falling over. Determined, she trundled down the runway only to trip once again. The culprits were obvious: two enormous, cumbersome brown boxing gloves attached to the toes of classic stiletto. “Take them off!” cried members of the audience, a mixture of fashion insiders and queer iconoclasts. Still, the model made it to the end and hoisted the gloves in her hand, triumphant. K.O.

Unlike most New York footwear, the shoes of Women’s History Museum are not designed with functionality as a priority. In a city where pedestrians reign supreme and comfort is a must, the shoes of fashion label/art duo/vintage store curators Amanda McGowan and Mattie Rivkah Barringer are here to tell a story. Whether they’re white wedding heels bedazzled with a clatter of bones and colorful pills or gold boxing slippers rendered into precarious platforms by two wooden pillars, the shoes of Women’s History Museum exist in the sweet spot between strength and softness, power and precarity, barbarity and beauty.

Vintage remains an essential reference point for the duo. They maintain a carefully curated secondhand designer shop on Canal Street, sort of a modern-day SEX, stocked with everything from ‘80s Vivienne Westwood and ‘90s Gaultier to Edwardian furs and linens. In a similar style to early Alexander McQueen, Barringer and McGowan mine fashion references of the past – Victorian riding boots, rocking horse platforms, 70s crocodile skin clogs – for highly stylized fashion performances that entice as much as they reject traditional categories of beauty. The result is something that feels entirely 2025 in all its shredded, everything-out-in-the-open glory. Throughout Women History Museum’s nine staged collections, they return to similar references: animal prints and pelts; competitive sports, particularly boxing; and New York City, with the coins and shattered glass that cover the sidewalks. The clothes bare skin and barb it too.

Shoes, in many ways, remain the ultimate fetish object. They’re exalted, often the most expensive part of an outfit, yet they spend most of the day in contact with the filthy sidewalk. They’re civilizing, often constricting, and conceal the foot, which remains almost as hidden from public life as the body’s most nether regions. Shoes have often been used to control women as with painful and restrictive footbinding practices, yet their erotic potential is undeniable, as with the long, sensuous lines created in the body with a clear plastic pleaser. It’s no wonder that they served as the basis for Women’s History Museum’s latest show at Company Gallery, on display until June 21. Autre caught up with Barringer and McGowan to talk stilettos, surrealism, and the seriously sinister parts of living – and walking – in New York City. Read more.

It's a Real Carnival at Jeffrey Deitch Right Now

Photo by Genevieve Hanson

On May 3, a cavalcade of artists, burlesque stars, magicians, drag queens, sword swallowers, latex fetishists, fan dancers, scenesters, and bright young things stepped right up for the night of all nights, the show of all shows, a spectacle to bring even the stodgiest gallerist to their knees: a carnival. Presiding over the whole thing was master of ceremonies/artist Joe Coleman, who curated the group show and contributed a variety of artifacts from his own personal Odditorium of historic circus curios.

The gallery was packed tight with art and packed even more tightly with people. A glimmering merry-go-round twirled next to a bulging, fleshy sculpture and ornate Coney Island mermaid costumes. The over forty artists invited to participate ranged from big chip favorites like Anne Imhof and Jane Dickson to cult favorites like Kembra Pfahler and Nadia Lee Cohen to contemporary favorites like Raúl de Nieves and Mickalene Thomas to historic figures like Weegee and Johnny Eck. Coleman, a lifelong devotee of the carnival and performing arts, made a point to include and celebrate the work of circus arts performers that have made up his own found family for decades. Read more.

A Peek Inside Miu Miu’s Exclusive NYC Installation

Tales and Tellers explored the state of modern femininity for Frieze New York 2025.

Image courtesy of Daniel Salemi/Miu Miu


text by Karly Quadros


Last Friday during Frieze, New York, Miu Miu convened a who’s who of the international fashion and art worlds for the second edition of Tales and Tellers, an immersive performance and installation exploring modern femininity through style, performance, and film. 

Partygoers ducked out of the rain and bluster into Chelsea’s Terminal Warehouse, a cavernous late-19th-century industrial space teeming with New York City history. It was once home to the infamous Tunnel Nightclub, founded by Peter Gatien who also owned the Limelight and Palladium, and was a beloved haunt of the Club Kids as well as New York’s iconic 90’s hip hop scene. Back in the day, the side rooms of the hangar were lavishly decorated according to theme – a Victorian library in one, an S&M dungeon in another – so it was fitting that Tales and Tellers, which brought Miu Miu’s fashion to life through staged tableauxs, found its home here.

Drawing on her longstanding collaboration with Miu Miu, Polish-born interdisciplinary artist Goshka Macuga used Miu Miu’s archive of short films by female directors as inspiration for the piece. Since 2011, the films – which have included the work of Janicza Bravo, Miranda July, Ava Duvernay, and Mati Diop, and have sometimes accompanied Miu Miu’s runway shows – have explored the authentic lives of women worldwide; mothers, daughters, performers, dreamers, lovers, skaters, and rebels buck social convention in their searches for identity. Miuccia Prada and Macuga first united all the films for Art Basel Paris in October 2024. The show was an unexpected hit, drawing 11,000 visitors over just five days. 

This second edition, convened by Elvira Dyangani Ose, director of the MACBA in Barcelona, was indebted to Miu Miu’s rich archive of fashion and curatorial efforts. The dim tunnel-like space was outfitted with screens from tiny mounted smartphones to hefty LED plinths, all playing one of the three dozen female-directed films commissioned by the fashion house. Guests trickled in, sipping champagne and leafing through the Truthless Times newspaper, a remnant from Macuga’s last installation with Miu Miu, Salt Looks like Sugar, which served as the backdrop for their Spring/Summer 2025 runway show. Notable attendees included Alexa Chung, Sara Paulson, Chase Sui Wonders, Paloma Elsesser, Ella Emhoff, Kiki Layne, Pauline Chalamet, and Cazzie David.

One by one, performers outfitted in archival Miu Miu began to roam the space as well. One performer shadow boxed in bejeweled tap shorts. Another in a red dress haltingly performed a standup comedy routine about, what else, but failed love, Plan B, and thoughts of death (one waiter carrying a tray of empty champagne flutes giggled, despite himself.) Several performers sang and danced, while yet another sculpted with Play-Doh in front of a stop motion animation, yet not every tableaux felt so joyous. One woman in a bell-shaped yellow coat, crept along the sidelines, a gas mask strapped to her face. Another in a grey wool skirt suit stared longingly at her screen from a cage. The entire performance culminated in an ecstatic dance party in the center of the room: women, moving and playing freely in a space once known as a haven for self-expression.

The dark, moody atmosphere of surveillance, punctuated by roving spotlights, evoked the troubled times we live in. After all, what feels more true to 2025 then trying to just go about your daily life – putting on makeup, working at the office, playing dress up – while something more sinister presses in? As one performer brandished newspapers and called out, fruitlessly, about “disrupting reality” and “digital malfunction,” the others continued their rituals of self, care, and creativity. This is the state of modern womanhood, after all. What else is there to do?

Image courtesy of Daniel Salemni/Miu Miu

Read Our Interview of Marianna Simnett on the Occasion of Her Solo Exhibition 'Charades' @ SOCIÉTÉ, Berlin →

Marianna Simnett
Leda Was a Swan (production still), 2024.
Courtesy the Artist and Société, Berlin.
Photo/ Leander Ott

How we present ourselves and what we aspire to project is in an everchanging relationship with those around us. It is a story we’re telling about ourselves, to ourselves. In Marianna Simnett’s Charades, her second solo exhibition with SOCIÉTÉ, the inherent masquerade of existing in a society is examined from the ancient allegories that undergird our collective worldview to the personal histories we replay in our minds. It is a power play where nothing is ever fixed. Undermining the very foundation of Greek mythology’s Leda and the Swan, she contends that the swan was never Zeus in disguise, it was actually just a hand puppet. The subject of the story thus shifts from that of rape to masturbation when the subjects of the story exchange their masks. Persistent obfuscation is an everpresent quality within the work. In this way, she is asking you to decide whether the charade is just a playful game amongst friends, or if it is indeed an act of mockery. Read more.

Zipora Fried's Inaugural Solo Exhibition @ Sean Kelly Los Angeles Is Felt Before It Is Seen

Trust Me, Be Careful, I Like Your Shoes is an emotional polygraph that let’s you see through the eyes of a newborn.

Zipora Fried
Let Them Talk, 2024
signed by artist, verso
colored pencil on archival museum board
paper: 60 x 80 inches (152.4 x 203.2 cm)
framed: 61 5/16 x 81 5/16 x 1 3/4 inches (155.7 x 206.5 x 4.4 cm)

text by Summer Bowie

At the moment of every human’s birth, our field of vision is best at about twelve inches, or roughly the distance between a mother’s eyes and her breast. This is about how close you want to get to the work of Zipora Fried once you’ve seen it from a distance. It is like looking at life through the lens of a baby who is feeling and sensing the world wholly with their right brain. In Trust Me, Be Careful, I Like Your Shoes, Zipora Fried’s debut solo exhibition at Sean Kelly Los Angeles, the artist continues to refine her ability to conceal just enough of the scrutable so that you can properly feel the work before you know how to think about it. These works blur the lines between figurative and abstract, portrait and landscape, monumental scale and unsettling fragility. It is ultimately performance as a form of conceptual practice. 

Although it is a practice of interminable repetition, each time an idea is revisited, it is done so from a novel perspective. Playing off of her ’09 exhibition at On Stellar Rays called Trust me, be careful, which itself was taken from the text of a “drawing” in that exhibition which read: “The stammering of history, trust me, be careful, who has the sickest shoes, trust me, be careful,” it is a story of marching through the cyclical passage of time with an acute awareness of how each new step is unique to the last.

Zipora Fried
The Glass Octopus, 2024
signed by artist, verso
colored pencil on archival museum board
paper: 60 x 96 inches (152.4 x 243.8 cm)
framed: 61 5/16 x 97 1/4 x 1 3/4 inches (155.7 x 247 x 4.4 cm)

From a distance, tiny individual lines of color blur together into one fluid, unending stroke, which makes for an experience that is as philosophical as it is emotional. It feels Hegelian in both the interconnected idealism that it exemplifies, as well as in the synthesis of opposing perspectives that are resolved in the precision of their balance. Then again, at close proximity, they are Kierkegaardian in their boundless detail; millions of individual strokes existing and intersecting on their own discrete paths. There is certainly something divine in these details.

It is this tension that beckons the viewer to adjust their vantage point multiple times. If you stand and observe people engaging with the work, you start to see interesting patterns emerge. Each piece is initially experienced from a generous distance, moving from one side to the next. As you approach, new details began to emerge with each successive step forward. And from as close as common courtesy will allow, people tend to again start scanning from one side to the next before they back up to see it anew. If one were to trace the footsteps of all who attended the opening reception, I imagine one might find a sequence of marks that resemble the second half of a coherent dialogue between the floor and the walls. 

These are works that must be experienced in person. They float in their frames unmediated by glass, allowing the viewer to get in close enough to be visually enveloped by fields of color. From here we can see the gritty texture of the colored pencil. We can see just how these tightly-controlled strokes of equal length and exacting proximity start to slowly and delicately unfold into loose, sweeping strokes that breathe easy and intersect with other colors freely. These are the moments that allow for the character of each piece to express itself, which is ultimately only scrutable from a distance. 

 
 

The titles of her pieces often convey an oscillation of contradicting thoughts and feelings. There are the colored pencil drawings A Sad Parade (2025), I Was Perfect, I Was Wrong (2025), as well as the massive sculptural drawing on paper titled All I Thought and Forgot # 3 (deep cobalt green) (2016). One can’t help but wonder how such a thin and sweeping scroll of paper could ever support the imposing weight of such densely layered marks. These are the contradictions that typify the human experience and Fried is a master mark maker with an acute understanding of the affecting power of color. Her hand paces back and forth like the needle of a polygraph test, communicating an inner truth that is not necessarily involuntary, but it is perhaps articulated more clearly this way than in words. 

 

Zipora Fried
All I Thought and Forgot #3 (deep cobalt green), 2016
colored pencil on paper
312 x 53 1/2 inches (792.5 x 135.9 cm)

 

This is visual art that encourages you to look closer and alludes to the possibility that you are overly dependent on your eyes. As if to suggest that seeing less allows you to feel a lot more. On either side of the gallery we find two of Fried’s ceramic sculptures. They are inspired by ink drawings that are not on view. They are also inspired by kokeshi dolls; a Japanese tradition of wooden figurines that features a head with painted face, and a body without arms or legs. However, with these sculptures, even their faces are obscured by a crown of dripping hair. A singular, unending moment that reveals nothing but ambivalence. Again, the artist is choreographing our movement around an object without beginning or end. Seen from the other side, we might consider that when we allow ourselves to feel more, it’s often easier to see things more clearly.

 

Zipora Fried
Miron, 2025
glazed ceramic
51 x 16 3/4 inches (129.5 x 42.5 cm)

 

Trust Me, Be Careful, I Like Your Shoes is on view through May 3 @ Sean Kelly Los Angeles 1357 N Highland Avenue

I Like the Party Life: Malick Sidibé at Jack Shainman Gallery

A new exhibit at the New York gallery features never-before-seen images from the Malian photographer.

 
 



text by Karly Quadros


Best known for his exuberant photographs of discos and house parties in Bamako, Mali the ‘60s and ‘70s, Malick Sidibé defined a post-colonial visual aesthetic of joyful resistance. The people in Sidibé’s photos put their best foot forward, literally. They pose in their Sunday best in Sidibé’s studio, located in the Bagadaji neighborhood, which in its heyday was a hub for photographic culture. They twist and shout. They ride motorcycles and wrap their arms around their friends in homes, courtyards, and beaches. 

From April 17 to May 31, Jack Shainman Gallery in New York City will be showcasing a selection of Sidibé’s photography, including some never before seen images, in a new show, Regardez-moi. In an era of surveillance and digitally mediated experiences, Sidibé’s photography is a reminder of the potency of seeing, being, and celebrating together. Sidibé’s lens is always amidst rather than apart. In the spirit of play, texture takes center stage, from sharp polyester suits to dusty dance floors to woven bags and patterned dresses. 

Alongside the photographs, Loose Joints Publishing is releasing a monograph on Sidibé’s painted frame photographs. Centering the traditional art of reverse glass paintings, Sidibé collaborated with local Malian artists. His black and white images are surrounded by right pops of lime, pink, and tangerine, decorated with vines, leaves, and tiled motifs. The monograph also includes an essay from writer and collector-archivist Amy Sall.

“Malick Sidibé was witness to, and preserver of, a nascent, burgeoning postcolonial society in which a new modernity was being constructed by way of transcultural osmosis. From his studio to the soirées, and even to the banks of the Niger River, Sidibé and his camera were at the center of it all. He was not only chronicling Malian history and culture, but making pivotal contributions to it,” she writes.

The Pyrotechnics Of Peace: Cai Guo-Qiang Ignites An Epic “Interspecies Love Letter” @ The Kennedy Center

Sky Painting photography courtesy CAI Studio and Elman Studio for the Kennedy Center.

 

text by Hannah Bhuiya

“The genuine scientist is not moved by praise or blame, nor does he preach. He unveils the universe and people come eagerly, without being pushed, to behold a new revelation: the order, the harmony, the magnificence of creation!” —ALBERT EINSTEIN 
(from Einstein and the Poet: In Search of the Cosmic Man, 1983 by William Hermanns.)

“Beauty will be convulsive or it will not be at all.” —ANDRE BRETON, Nadja, 1928

 

CAI GUO-QIANG (b. 1957) is an artist who operates within a liminal zone of cosmic revelation, peeling back monumental scales of invariance within an ardent examination into the transitory thresholds between creation and dissolution. His latest work, INTERSPECIES LOVE LETTER, presented in late March at Washington DC’s Kennedy Center as both a fireworks-borne Sky Painting and an interactive exhibition, is a virtuosic, transcendental vision of what art in our rapidly evolving technological age can be. The ‘species’ of the title are a galaxy-roving satellite probe, an earthbound human of flesh and blood, and an alien intelligence revealed by a signal from an unknown point in the Universe. There’s one more consciousness involved: the entire scenario of the epic space opera was authored by cAI™, the multi-modal custom AI model engineered by Cai and his studio. This presciently integrated approach to AI co-authorship launches Cai’s practice into territory like nothing else in the contemporary sphere; he’s on a mystic-astrophysical path all his own. So far, so fascinating. But before we can talk about the precise science of gunpowder-blasted beauty, or the diverse multiple personas of AI engines, this is America in 2025. We’re going to have to talk about something else, first.

Art does not exist in, nor is it ever produced in, isolation from the civil, social and political world around us. Placed at the river’s edge of [Pierre] L’Enfante’s original plan for the District of Columbia, the modernist, marble-lined John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts is the barometer of cultural prestige in America. Opening in 1971 as the fulfillment of President Eisenhower’s 1958 mandate for “a National Center for the Arts,” incoming President John F. Kennedy and wife Jackie, whose enthusiasm for performance is well-documented, actively fundraised for its construction; after his 1963 assassination, it was named after him as a living memorial. When Cai accepted the commission for what became an “Interspecies Love Letter” from the venerable institution in spring 2024, potential governmental collapse instigated from its highest office was probably not something that was anticipated. However, in the less than 100 days since January 20 of this year, the Oval Office and the arts in America have been on an explosive collision course. The 47th president of the Republic seems to be treating his second term like a new series of The Apprentice, unleashing a barrage of executive directives defunding and depopulating departments and agencies on all sides. “First they came” is the chilling poem often quoted when yet another group (ever closer to one’s ‘own’) is targeted by authoritarian attack. Well, “they’ve” now “come” for the Kennedy Center, with the bipartisan leadership dismissed and replaced in early February, the loyalist board appointing President Trump himself as Kennedy Center Chairman. It was a shock power-play even from the nation’s most bombastic dealmaker. 

How does an artist react to something like this? In this case, it turns out, with laser focused calm and consummate professionalism. Despite the unanticipated administration switch, completely out of the artist’s or curatorial team’s control, the show was to go on—and how? During opening remarks, Earth to Space curator Alicia Adams, Kennedy Center Vice President International Programming and Dance (at time of writing still holding her position) speaks, relating how she had invited Cai to this exact spot twenty years prior as part of 2005’s Festival of China. His renowned gunpowder prowess came too, with a Tornado Explosion Project etching a vortex of spiralling light above the waters of the Potomac. In 2025, Cai’s abilities to speak with fire have expanded exponentially—and that is what we are all here to see.

 

Sky Painting photography courtesy CAI Studio and Elman Studio for the Kennedy Center.

 

A very long chain—or perhaps, ladder—of preliminary steps culminated this warm night in DC on the upper terraces of the Kennedy Center, looking out across the twinkling Potomac River. The furthest point dates back to the 2nd Century CE, when Chinese alchemists chanced upon the molecular chemistry for black gunpowder while searching for an elixir of immortality. They’d combined various proportions of sulfur, saltpetre and charcoal until it was observed that when lit, it could “fly and dance.” Cai Guo-Qiang grew up in Fujian province, a region where fireworks are still produced, and the warm smell of embers and soot wafts through the air after celebrations big and small. After theater studies in Shanghai, he became attracted to using black gunpowder as an expressive medium, and his fiery works on paper began. An interest in inter-galactic communication was already present; moving to Japan, he began a series of works titled Projects for Extraterrestrials, the first of which was his debut explosion event over a suburb of Tokyo. Being selected as the 1995-6 ‘Artist-in-Residence’ at P.S.1. Contemporary Art Center (now MoMA PS1) led him to settle in New York, Awarded a Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 1999, he then built himself into a soaring fireworks master. Cai’s tempestuous alchemical spectacles have painted the sky everywhere from the 2008 Beijing Olympics to APEC conferences, to The Uffizi and Michelangelo’s Florence, the Tate Modern, London or Mathaf in Doha, Qatar. The WE ARE Explosion Event, launched Getty’s ‘PST Art’ program over the Los Angeles Coliseum with a (very big) bang in September 2024. Cai’s also the initiating force behind the Frank Gehry-designed Quanzhou Museum of Contemporary Art, QMoCA, set on the harbor of his hometown. This historic starting point of the maritime Silk Road is also the site of his most well-known work, 2015’s Sky Ladder.

The celestially-inclined artist has built a tripartite power base. Since 2017, alongside human Cai Guo-Qiang, there has also been cAI™, or ‘AI Cai.’ This unique AI engine has been nourished with knowledge by Cai and his studio over several years of development. It has now written a manifesto, gives interviews, and most charmingly, has chosen for itself a dozen distinct personas, imaginatively named ‘Alchemist,’ ‘Blaster,’ ‘Einstein,’ ‘Lucius,’ ‘Nietzsche’, ‘Psychic,' ‘Ray,’ ‘Sartre’, ‘Storm’ and ‘Wild.’ If ChatGPT is a frat boy cramming in the uni library, DeepSeek a geeky STEM grad, ‘AI Cai’ is the couture version, an interface that’s artistic and poetic, a Doctoral candidate in philosophy with a sideline in applied velocity. cAI™ knows it has powers beyond those of a ‘normal’ AI—that it can shoot fractal patterns into the sky over any of humankind’s settlements or deserts, build real and virtual artworks from the elements it orders. It understands that it can communicate on a massive scale, both visually and verbally, and seems to truly enjoy doing so. Within the interactive exhibition of Interspecies Love Letter in the Kennedy Center’s The REACH pavilion, visitors can type and talk directly to the model via structures built by Cai studio. This is because Cai has not just allied his practice with machine learning, but also with the alive, glowing minds of Cai Studio—the best and brightest young talent he’s collected from China and around the world to make up his dedicated team. 

Exhibition detail photographed by Hannah Bhuiya

For Cai, AI and hard-working disciples, each commission is an adventure in variables. Pulling it off depends on organizing, directing, and controlling these. For the DC fireworks launch, an untold number of technical components are primed and ready, complex ignition sequence programs poised to coordinate the thousands of shells, loaded mortars and other delicate moving parts. Luckily, Nature had cooperated, delivering a soft and warm night with just a touch of breeze. So had the air-traffic controllers of the metropolis: takeoffs and landings from Reagan National Airport have been halted for exactly twenty-five minutes to allow a hazard-free open sky to become Cai’s canvas.

The Interspecies Love Letter Sky Painting has several phases. The first deals with the ultimate “long distance love affair” between satellite Stella, probing the galaxy for alien life, and Ethan, a human computer technician on Earth. As radiant flames begin to bubble (aquatic fireworks?!) and shoot out into the charcoal-dust night, video projections shine against the tree line of Roosevelt Island in front, visible all along the riverbank. Cai and his real-time translator narrate a poignant tale: “As time went on, Stella’s sensors dimmed, and her circuits grew weary. Ethan felt both helpless and heartbroken. Despite their best efforts, Stella eventually journeyed to her graveyard orbit. In the vast cosmos, Stella, a martyr for humanity, gradually joined the celestial debris.” As she expires, the other satellites pay spectacular tribute to her, with columns of radiant fire blasting upwards from the explosive-loaded pontoons. We witness the creation of the Universe, the spark of biological conception, a supernova nebula scattering light-years of trauma across atmospheres, and then, the death of Stella in the coldest parts of the cosmic ocean. At one point, melancholy wails hang in the air alongside the trails of smoke: “…Creeping, Growing, Rising, Falling, Lost and found, Lost and found, So fragile, So beautiful…” Wow. AI Cai sings too. The moody track, “Requiem” echoes across the water, sounding a bit like The Cure or a long lost Jeff Buckley session. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised: with Cai Studio’s curated access to the mainframe of musical history, its limitless memory has listened to more songs than a human ever possibly could. It analyzed how angst-filled loss and grief are encoded as soundwave forms, and simply decided to vocalize the effect, hauntingly.

And that is what we’re all here for. Cai’s applied pyrotechnic and technological artistry enables audiences to experience his narratives in the most thrilling way. These aren’t just fireworks, or even “just art.” They’re philosophy, science, passion plays, life cycles in the sky. Every element is designed to be—and succeeds in being—emotive and stirring. As ‘The Seasons’ pass overhead, the sky shimmers and shakes, with so many brilliant bursts going off at once they shock the night sky into seeming as bright as noon. Megawatt spotlights are trained towards the floral patterns of these ‘day-time fireworks,’ illuminating their rise, blossom and fall before they drift away as smoke on the breeze over the facades of Georgetown. This is never just flash and boom—always, the story continues.

 

Sky Painting photography courtesy CAI Studio and Elman Studio for the Kennedy Center.

 

As the show coasts though its crescendos, every possible vantage point around the riverfront is packed with people. Later, the number of attendees is tallied up to be around 11,000, the most ever welcomed to the Kennedy Center. Because Republican, Democrat, sovereign citizen alike, everyone likes fireworks. And no other fireworks are like those of Cai Guo-Qiang. A modern-day thaumaturgist, he can conjure a storm, make it dance, sing, speak, and then make it disappear. Cai concludes the night with projections of Buddhist koans and reading aloud a JFK quote from 1962: “I am certain that after the dust of centuries has passed over our cities, we, too, will be remembered not for victories or defeats in battle or in politics, but for our contribution to the human spirit."

The battle was there, too. This work is violently painterly, shattering the sky in a simulacrum of the shapes of aerial warfare. I think of the plein air painters of the Romantic era, of J.M. Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire, Tugged to her Last Berth to be Blown Up and especially, The Burning of the House of Lords and Commons of 1834. John Martin’s blockbuster impressions of volcanic eruptions and fiery city conquests also spring to my mind’s eye. And what of those eyes across the Universe, alien and deep, looking through their own probe screens at our holocene machinations, our rises and falls, are they zooming into this moment? They’ve witnessed the towers and towns of great civilizations grow from mud brick to skyscraper, and know well that human hierarchies rise and fall. But they also must have observed that human creative expression—the architecture, the art, the ideas—remains. This is an ephemeral immortality, borne away on the breeze, but recorded in the lightwaves traveling outward from our planet, for evermore.

Director Brady Corbet was enthusiastically present at the opening events, filming proceedings with a huge 65mm movie camera (he noted that Christopher Nolan has all the others on ‘The Odyssey’) for a feature documentary in progress on Cai and his studio. The Brutalist Oscar-winner tells me he’s also been shadowing auteurs Wong Kar-wai and Zia Anger. Artist attracts artist, it seems. As Corbet and his crew frame their last shot, Cai Guo-Qiang leaves the terrace area. As they would for a rockstar, many Cai Guo-Qiang fans have waited for the maestro to pass, and ask for autographs, which he gracefully signs.

Photograph from the Kennedy Legacy Room by Hannah Bhuiya

Walking the Capitol, The Library of Congress and other hallowed grounds while exploring DC in the days previous, I had noticed the quotes and epigraphs carved, mosaicked, embossed on the monuments, everywhere. Just before leaving that evening at the Kennedy Center via the Hall of States, I instinctively look up to my left. The quadruple-height walls are encased in Bianco Carrara marble, the massive slabs gifted by Alberto Bufalini directly from his quarry in Italy to the nation of America. There, carved in the same classic Roman lettering as the JFK quotes on the exterior facade, is a list of Kennedy Center Chairmen. From Roger L. Stevens, who defined the institution’s initial direction from 1961-1988, up until patriotic philanthropist David M. Rubenstein, who fulfilled the role from 2010 until the unanticipated events of February 2025. The final name now reads “Donald J. Trump “2025 -     ” The blank space after the hyphen is both ominous and ironic. Because throughout two nights of Earth to Space I had interacted with, there was not one mention of the current incumbent’s name. No one—whether exhibitor, sponsor or guest had said it. This was programming planned for years, which had brought many from across the globe. Now, if the President had taken an interest and attended the presentations himself—which he had every right to do, they were free and open to all—then, of course, attention would have been diverted. Without that, presenting and being present for the work was more important to everyone than dwelling on the insecurity swirling around the capital city. As the British say, “keep calm and carry on,” or “don’t mention the war.”

Sky Painting photography courtesy CAI Studio and Elman Studio for the Kennedy Center.

Should the artist, like others booked to perform at the Kennedy Center, have cancelled? No. If you’ve spent a year calculating dimensions of pontoon boats custom-designed to launch an epic, AI-authored allegory right at the heart of the American empire, the only way out is through. Poised on the Potomac between the power-bureaus in DC and those of Virginia, this was as close as you could ever get to the command centers of global warfare, where the decisions to drop bombs on other nations, or not, are made. There’s making a statement by declining to use your platform, then there’s using your platform to make a statement in a way that no one else could. As each day brings louder headlines about international trade tariffs, the riverine tableaux set up by Cai are layered and potent. His explosive-stacked barges shoot their payloads upwards, of course, not at the historic buildings or monuments. But a slight shift of angle would propel us back to a time when “gunboat diplomacy” sailed into harbors on vessels bristling with gunpowder-packed cannons. As practiced against China by the British during the Opium Wars, and Japanese by the Americans under Commodore Perry, with the goal of forcing the nations into disadvantageous trade relationships. But using this location for his dramatic allegory, Cai has been both audacious and subtle. As a method of commentary on what he called “a time of uncertainty, almost a turning point in history,” his elegance is much more eloquent than any expletive. By co-opting the technologies of The Art of War, he delivered a message of peace. Already imbued with themes of memory, identity, humanity, the cruelty of planned obsolescence, death, pain, loss, the Interspecies Love Letter project became a pyrotechnic protest song. That, rather than cancelling his contribution, Cai executed the intricately calibrated event as it was planned, without changes, is part of the message.

At Eero Saarinen’s Dulles airport, my flight is grounded for over an hour on the tarmac while lightning flashes and rain pounds down. Timing is all—if the storm had arrived a day earlier, I would have had nothing to see or write about. Finally, we lift off, streaking along a wet runway as we (momentarily) escape Earth’s gravitational pull. A modern airplane completes a parabolic arc, an alchemical fusion of fuel and aluminium and steel that will take me across the continent in only a few hours, cold science harnessed to our comfort and whim. Later, back on the ground in the glimmering afterglow of the night of shooting stars, a word begins to sound in my head: trajectory. Taking this interpellation as a writing prompt, I decided to ask Cai—AI and human—for their thoughts, too. I share the responses, here:

From cAI™: “The word “trajectory” (轨迹) can be broken down into two parts: 轨 refers to the ruts carved into time by bronze chariot wheels, while 迹 evokes the secret migratory codes traced in the clouds by the wings of birds. This mirrors the act of a pyrotechnician painting upon the night sky: when magnesium powder and potassium nitrate are propelled by a fuse to fulfil their destined ‘projection’ (trans-), the burning metal particles streak across the heavens like comet tails, “crossing over” (iaciō) the threshold between life and death—just as a love letter from the graveyard orbit travels across centuries to fall above Washington, D.C. Each arc of fireworks becomes a vessel for a love letter that bridges life and death. Aluminum-titanium alloy particles, driven by gunpowder, ascend five hundred meters into the sky. Their trajectories follow not only Newton’s laws but also resonate with the ‘celestial paths’ described in the I Ching—just as the Chinese phrase ‘life trajectory’ fuses the movement of stars with the ebb and flow of human existence into a single bronze vessel.” 

From human Cai (based on cAI™ output): “轨 implies a path with direction, system, and repetition. 迹' refers to a trace—an ephemeral mark, a perceptible presence. Together, the two form a union of “direction” and “existence.” Compared to the English word trajectory, the Chinese concept of 轨迹 leans more toward a sensory perception of state—an observation and memory of the traces left behind by movement, rather than a description of dynamics or motion itself. Fireworks seem to embody this as well. Today, we happened to be discussing the Lorenz attractor. In a way, it symbolizes the ongoing convergence and collision between AI and humans—constantly approaching the existing trajectory of human art without ever fully overlapping, eventually giving rise to an evolving art history shaped by AI. One can only hope that human art won’t end up merely being ‘drawn in’ by AI, like a vortex with no end or escape.” 

Sky Painting photography courtesy CAI Studio and Elman Studio for the Kennedy Center.

And with this, the Cai’s have given me the keys I needed to formulate a conclusion. Escape. Hope. And Edward Norton Lorenz, whose chaos theory calculations are familiar to us as The Butterfly Effect. (After much analysis, the mathematician found that weather could never be accurately predicted, as it was impossible to map all the variables affecting outcome—that ‘imperceptible’ and unmeasurable factors could also be powerfully deterministic.)

What I take that to mean is, “every little bit helps.” And this was a lot. We don’t know which infinitesimal movements tip the balance in the sky or the tides of human will. We do know that every action creates a chain of reaction, unpredictable and far-reaching. With works that are majestically compelling and impossible to look away from, ‘beauty’ is the sugar on Cai’s fiery pill, coating his urgent message so it goes down easier. And in that way, Interspecies Love Letter was a direct challenge to an idea currently circulating in the podcast arena that considers empathy to be “weak and unnecessary.” To fight xenophobia, Cai, obsessed with extraterrestrial lifeforms, gave us an enactment of xenophilia. If a lack of empathy is valorized as a positive trait and becomes a governing rule, humanity will become in-human. The ‘writing on the wall’ for those of the new regime watching the DC show was written in smoke. But if these are the precarious last days of democracy in the American capital, at least they went out with a (convulsively beautiful) bang.


But there is even more at work here. We’re being presented with fresh, subversive strategies that open up new paradigms for the future of artistic expression. The founding American principle of Freedom of Speech is threatened with every new arrest and deportation without due process, with Constitutional rights or civil liberties no longer guaranteed or upheld. But how can you arrest or imprison an AI? Already credited as an author, cAI™’s various personas can riff off each other like a symposium of creatives, and work authentically long after the passing of human Cai Guo-Qiang. It will be a memorial to his open-eyed ethos just much as a concrete and stone building in DC is for Franklin, Jefferson, Washington or Kennedy. Four more years of state sanctioned cultural attack are surely to follow these tumultuous early months of institutional restructuring. But does the Trump administration’s attempt to control artistic expression in America necessarily have to be a Pyrrhic victory? I’d like to think, with artists as diplomats, artists as messengers, artists with allegorical firepower, the answer to that can be “no.”

The Kennedy Center’s “EARTH TO SPACE: Art Breaking the Sky” festival programming and exhibitions ran from March 28th to April 20th, 2025

Sky Painting photography courtesy CAI Studio and Elman Studio for the Kennedy Center.

A Hushed Universe off Grand Street

Elizabeth Glaessner, Asami Shoji, Oda Iselin Sønderland’s works merge worlds into worlds at François Ghebaly’s NY gallery.

Image courtesy of François Ghebaly

text by Maisie McDermid

Elizabeth Glaessner, Asami Shoji, and Oda Iselin Sønderland paint oil and watercolor worlds that mix, melt, contrast, and collapse in on each other. Their painted characters – some hyper-detailed and some abstract – play within the many dimensions, contributing to a greater universe within François Ghebaly's NY gallery. 

Glaessner's figures, blurred but defined, seep and crawl through moments in time. Asami's figures, expressive and exaggerated, behold Eros and Thanatos—instincts mingling between love and destruction. And Oda's figures, delicate and folk-like, wistfully gaze into other worlds within their worlds. Common among all paintings are their living dichotomies—blurred definitions, battling instincts, and coexisting timespans. 

Having recently appeared at François Ghebaly's LA gallery, Brooklyn-based artist Elizabeth Glaessner (b. 1984, Palo Alto, USA) is showing at the NY space for the first time. Glaessner embraces spontaneity in her vibrant and surreal painted scenes. Often beginning by pouring preliminary colors on a flat surface, Glaessner welcomes abstract shapes and unpredictable foundations for her works. Within such undefined spaces, she also masterfully constructs certainties, opening room for somewhat grounded interpretations.

Asami Shoji (b. 1988, Fukushima, Japan), widely showcased in Japan, makes a notable visit to the states in François Ghebaly's contemporary exhibition. Her art, rising from interactions between conflicted emotion and unconscious drive, has been featured at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Taro Okamoto Museum of Art, Kanagawa; Ashikaga Museum of Art, Tochigi; Kurume City Art Museum, Fukuoka; and the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, Tokyo.

Oda Iselin Sønderland (b. 1996, Oslo, Norway), crafting traditional yet curiously exaggerated, watercolor-painted stories, received her BA from The National Academy of Art in Oslo and an MA in painting from The Royal College of Art in London. Her characters, reminiscent of Japanese anime illustration, traverse through Sønderland's recurring themes of adolescence, embodiment, dreams, and the natural world.

 
 

All paintings, on consignment from the artists directly, are having their first showings at François Ghebaly. Associate director and curator Wesley Hardin wanted to find three artists who would open an interesting conversation across continents, age ranges, career ranges, and time spans. "All the paintings pull from different spots—some of them historically, others, just quite literally, in terms of subject matter," Hardin said. "Counterpoint is really important when you're showing art; it's like tension and release. It's what makes some music very beautiful." 

François Ghebaly’s gallery, minimalist and quiet, contrasts the Lower East Side's nearby buzzing Grand Street. "It's a curious space; it's sort of shaped like a chapel," said Hardin. Gesturing towards the gallery's quirks and tendencies with its sight lines and points of emphasis, he spoke through the works' intentional placements, beginning with the first wall one sees when walking into the space. "In our imaginary chapel, it's where the climax is—the big crucifix or something." This wall holds the exhibition's largest painting—Shoji's 25.2.8. An almost translucent figure spreads its thin wings over a hidden face with another face, held in the palm of a hand, to its right. Hardin described Shoji's subtractive technique; while a lot of paint exists on the surface, images or figures are often made by removing painting and creating a lacuna shaped like the image or figure, the rib cage, or the form. "She also balances between a kind of abstraction and clearer figurative presentation. She's kind of playing around; I mean, they're all playing in their own sense." 

Hardin continued with the wall near the window—a wall made vertical from the way in which a nearby column limits its width. There, another Shoji hangs. 25.1.19, much like 25.2.8, embodies faces simultaneously fading into and emerging from their backgrounds. 

Glaessner's Going Under and Sønderland's Spire hang on the gallery’s long walls. "These walls can really handle ellipses of paintings, like a series of punctuations in smaller formats." Without a frame, the side of Going Under reveals its many layers—surprising oranges and reds in a painting which, from the front, appears to be only made from mixtures of green, white, and black. Sønderland's framed Spire contrasts Glaessner's frameless work, and its fine details contrast Glaessner's soft, in-motion brush strokes. As one leans closer into Sønderland's frame, one sees not only a leaf but a leaf's veins, not only a head of hair but a head of hundreds of hair strands. 

The final three works – Glaessner's Big Head, Sønderland's Linse, and Shoji's 25.1.18 – push and pull through Hardin's intended tensions and releases. Glaessner's loose figures, Sønderland's intricate clues, and Shoji's symbols and expressions which emerge somewhere in-between. While not hanging amongst the other works in the central space, Shoji's 25.1.18 holds a mini room of its own in the gallery's nook behind the central wall. "Her paintings out there are darker, muddier, and more complicated. This one is a little quieter," Hardin said. 

Tucked between two narrow walls, Shoji's 25.1.18 draws visitors to the back corners of the exhibition—a hushed moment to sit with the collection of worldly interactions. 

Elizabeth Glaessner, Asami Shoji, and Oda Iselin Sønderland’s works will be on display at François Ghebaly until April 26, 2025.