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Installation view of Disruptive Reflexivity in the Flux of Becoming (2024) in the Write a convoluted exhibition title for Alexander Reben’s show in the basement of the Charlie James Gallery exhibition. Courtesy of the artist and Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles. Photo © 2024 Yubo Dong; photo credit @ofphotostudio Yubo Dong.

interview by Mia Milosevic

Alexander Reben is a multidisciplinary artist and engineer whose work investigates the intersection of technology, humanity, and creativity. Known for his provocative explorations of artificial intelligence and automation, Reben challenges the boundaries between the artificial and the real, prompting philosophical inquiries into human identity and technological evolution. As the first artist in residence at OpenAI, he developed tools that expand artistic expression and explore AI’s potential in reshaping creative practices. His latest exhibition at Charlie James Gallery, Write a convoluted exhibition title for Alexander Reben’s show in the basement of the Charlie James Gallery, showcases a diverse range of work, from AI-generated musings to intricate sculptures created with robotics, each piece reflecting Reben's fascination with the dialogue between human ingenuity and machine autonomy. Reben’s latest artistic innovations, including some created during his residency at OpenAI, are on view until December 7 at Charlie James Gallery in Los Angeles. Read more.

American Artist Reimagines Rocket Science Origins Using Octavia Butler’s Futuristic Lens through the LACMA Art + Technology Lab

American Artist: Earthseed is the second in a three-part film series from Hyundai Artlab spotlighting the Art + Technology Lab at LACMA—a pioneering program revitalized through Hyundai Motor and LACMA’s partnership since 2015. The series highlights the Lab’s commitment to fostering bold, cross-disciplinary projects that challenge conventional boundaries in art and technology. 

In this short film, American Artist brings a multi-year collaboration with the Lab into focus providing an in-depth, behind-the-scenes look at the making of The Monophobic Response, a two-channel film and sculptural installation inspired by Octavia E. Butler’s speculative narratives. 

This film takes a closer look at how American Artist’s creative process incorporates historical events and imaginative storytelling to interrogate modern societal structures. Reimagining a 1936 rocket engine test through Octavia E. Butler’s lens, American Artist transforms archival material into a critique of societal and technological dynamics. Together the film and the work challenge perceptions of progress and underscores the role of inclusive storytelling in shaping our understanding of the future.

Watch the full film on Hyundai Artlab

Roberto Matta's Surreal Dreamscapes Prove Themselves Ageless @ Galerie Mitterrand in Berlin

Galerie Mitterrand is opening its very first exhibition at 95 rue duFaubourg Saint-Honoré, History is round like the Earth by Chilean artist Roberto Matta. In collaboration with the Matta family and Paradiso Terrestre gallery, the exhibition brings together some thirty works – paintings, sculptures and drawings – covering each decade from the 1930s to the 1990s. An original text by American art historian Terri Geis will also be published for the occasion.

Affiliated with Surrealism, Matta began producing drawings in the 1930s that were freely inspired by the landscapes he discovered during his travels in Latin America. With André Breton’s encouragement, he worked between Europe and the United States, where he met the pioneers of Surrealism and became associated with the Abstract Expressionists (Arshile Gorky, Robert Motherwell, etc.).

In addition to his historical relationship with different movements of modern art, this exhibition intends to revisit the abundant work of the Chilean artist and examine its singularities. Matta’s illuminated, almost psychedelic aesthetic, halfway between esotericism and anticipation, makes him a forerunner of science fiction in the field of plastic art. Combining futuristic architecture, technological-industrial constructions and biomorphic figures, these compositions are in turn reflections on the historical-political context (authoritarian regimes of the twentieth century) and a more metaphysical projection of the human condition. Through its freedom, its great pictorial diversity and its insight into society, Matta’s work appears now more relevant than ever.

History is round like the Earth is on view through December 21st at Galerie Mitterrand, 95, rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, Paris VIII.

The Post Human Urge: A Review of Post Human at Jeffrey Deitch in Los Angeles

 

Image courtesy of Pippa Garner and Jeffrey Deitch.

 

review by Mia Milosevic

IA anguille sous roche [A.I. eel under the rock] is a contemporary adaptation of the French idiom Il y a anguille sous roche [There’s a eel under the rock], which indirectly translates to something is simply not right here…. The transformation speaks to society’s fears surrounding technological advancement, where man-made innovation upends the traditional and replaces it with a futuristic permutation of what once was. The metamorphosis of this fixed expression speaks to the evolution of humanity, to the post human body, which is colloquially characterized by its unconventional additions and subtractions.

Thirty-two years ago, Jeffrey Deitch curated an exhibition called Post Human, which included the work of thirty-six artists. On September 12 of this year, Post Human made its second Earth-landing, opening at 925 N. Orange Drive in Los Angeles. The 1992 exhibition revolutionarily summoned new frontiers surrounding post humanism to the foreground, and entrenched the term into contemporary vernacular. The body became ostensible, and so did much of what is naturally embedded within it. 

The current showing of Post Human is a supersaturated, chaotic amalgamation of work, which revolves itself around the most up-to-date understanding of our corporeal tendencies. 

Paul McCarthy’s The Garden showcases a practice of ecosexuality, adopting a radical form of environmental activism rooted in the optimization of nature’s glory holes. What appears to be a forest oasis houses the mechanical effigies of nature’s erotic lovers. The applicable law on consent as it relates to this kind of sexual engagement has not yet been sorted out. Interestingly, Jana Euler’s The Judge is positioned some ways across from the greenery, staring up disapprovingly at the orgiastic jardin.

Josh Kline’s Aspirational Foreclosure (Matthew/Mortgage Loan Officer) and MAOI Inhibitors Can’t Fix This (Elizabeth/Administrative Assistant) are life-size 3D-printed plaster characters who are crouched in fetal position, laying on their sides, wrapped in an over-sized plastic bag which is politely knotted at the top. Matthew and Elizabeth have been presumably consumed by the microplastics we are thought to ingest on a daily basis. This inversion unfortunately lends an exceptional amount of perspective to the inextricable link between plastic and the 21st century body.

Charles Ray’s Family Romance is a mixed media installation and sculpture of four people holding hands. The piece absolutely levels traditional conceptions of the classic family dynamic, and does so quite literally. Ray makes the mom, dad, son, and daughter all the same height, removing the power dynamics generally associated with typical familial roles and further embracing the Freudian sexual awkwardness which invites any and all incestphobic viewers to reveal themselves. Ray says that you can find the meaning of the sculpture where the figures’ hands come together. 

In Post Human’s original catalogue, Jeffrey Deitch wrote about how people would one day be able to expunge their family histories and create an identity entirely devoid of family ethos and genetics. The idea is an intriguing one, especially in the context of Ray’s Family Romance.

Pierre Huyghe’s Idiom is a golden LED screen mask integrated with a real time voice generated by Artificial Intelligence. The anthropomorphization of metal by way of shape makes the facade recognizable, but it’s still not human. IA anguille sous masque?

Pippa Garner’s Human Prototype is best described as a literal intersection of the modern body. A Barbie-esque character and a Black man sporting a fedora are forced into one corpus. The arm of an inscrutable third person serves as the head of the being, its hand clutching an iPhone. The creature is an eerie, cyborgian rendition of our technological reliance. In Human Prototype, the artificial implies plurality and multi-beingness; the extent to self-identity may not always know bounds. The culprit behind X says that he thinks we are already cyborgs. Jeffrey Deitch probably agreed with the statement a few decades before it was made.

Post Human is on view through January 18 @ Jeffrey Deitch in Los Angeles, 925 N. Orange Drive

Basquiat Serenades a Venus of Antiquity @ Gagosian in Paris

Gagosian’s exhibition, Venus, sees a pairing of two rarely seen masterpieces from different millennia: Untitled (1982), a significant painting from Jean-Michel Basquiat’s acclaimed Modena series, is shown in dialogue with an Imperial Roman sculpture of the goddess Venus loaned from the Torlonia Collection in Rome, the world’s largest private collection of Roman art. This is Gagosian’s eleventh exhibition dedicated to Basquiat and demonstrates the gallery’s ongoing commitment to the artist’s legacy.

Untitled is one of eight large-scale paintings that Basquiat made in Modena, Italy, in the summer of 1982 at the age of twenty-one. Produced at the invitation of collector and art dealer Emilio Mazzoli for an exhibition that never came to fruition, the works were not shown together until they were reunited last summer at Fondation Beyeler in Riehen/Basel, more than four decades after they were made.

Highlighting how Venus has been a muse across centuries, the exhibition is on view through December 20th at Gagosian’s gallery at 9 rue de Castiglione, Paris.

Absorb the Color of Late Capitalism in Baby Blue Benzo @ 52 Walker

David Zwirner at 52 Walker in New York City announces its thirteenth exhibition, Baby Blue Benzo, which features work by Canadian-born, New York–based artist Sara Cwynar. This presentation focuses on a new film—for which the show is titled—shot on both digital video and 16mm and projected at monumental scale. To complement Baby Blue Benzo, a series of related photographs will be installed throughout the gallery space.

Engaging with vernacular photography and the moving image, as well as their attendant technologies, Cwynar’s practice—which also includes collage, installation, and performance—explores how pictorial constructs and their related systems of power feed back into real life. Such projects as Rose Gold (2017) and Baby Blue Benzo consider color—namely, how its use and value are constantly renegotiated by the shifting conditions of consumerism, technology, and desire. Drawing from her background in graphic design and a lineage of postwar conceptual photography, Cwynar tampers with visual signifiers to deconstruct notions of power and recontextualize image culture in late capitalism.

In her new film, Cwynar combines newly produced video and photographs with found images amassed in her archive. The principal scenes for Baby Blue Benzo were filmed at a studio in Los Angeles, where Cwynar staged a surrealistic shoot—featuring two sets of circular camera tracks—with massive props and elaborate historical costumes that became a kind of stand-in for the artifice and arbitrariness of composing images. The artwork’s central visual pillar is a replica of the titular 1955 Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR, which is to date the most expensive car to be sold at auction.

Baby Blue Benzo is on view through December 21 @ 52 Walker Street, New York City

Highlights From The Inaugural Art Basel Paris @ The Grand Palais

Art Basel Paris 2024 at the Grand Palais. Courtesy of Art Basel


text by Sammy Loren

Beneath the majestic light shining through the glass roof of the Grand Palais, Art Basel Paris could almost be mistaken for a religious gathering. Nearly 200 galleries and more than 65,000 congregants made the pilgrimage to the 8th arrondissement for one of the art world's most important fairs. A celebration of art and wealth, prestige and power, the Paris iteration of Art Basel isn’t the most thrilling (Miami), nor the biggest (Basel), yet it has an unmistakable allure and a more humane scale.

It’s the fair’s first year at the Grand Palais, a glorious Beaux-Arts exhibition hall. The palace features ornate steel railings and soaring plate glass ceilings, which flood the space in a luminous light. When it opened for the 1900 Universal Exposition, the Grand Palais served as the site for France—then at its cultural and political zenith—to peacock its prowess for all the world to see. Over a hundred years later, France finds itself much diminished: Paris no longer the capital of the world, French abandoned as the lingua franca. Hosting an art fair as illustrious as Art Basel inside the Grand Palais therefore felt charged with meaning, at least for me. The French government had just completed a major restoration on the building and I couldn’t help but hear them, as well as the elite art world saying, Don’t count us out yet! 

Walking through the maze of lanes, I was drawn into My House by American artist Tschabalala Self at Eva Presenhuber. Self remodeled the entire booth into a sort of home, the white cube’s floors and walls painted in vivid blue and lined with gold and ivory accents. The space could be a richly wallpapered bedroom—or a cage surrounded by the sky. This transformation creates an unsettling “home” for the artist’s colorful, darkly complex paintings and sculptures. My House references historic figures such as Sarah Baartman and Josephine Baker. In the early 19th century, Baartman was trafficked to France from present day South Africa whereas Baker fled the segregationist era United States for Paris. In France, Baartman faced trauma while Baker found a sense of freedom. My House suggests that a similar dynamic endures for many today, in France and beyond.

Installation view, Txchabalala Self, My House, Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Art Basel Paris, 2024

Around the corner I found pieces by Tursic & Mille, a French artistic team made up of Ida Tursic and Wilfried Mille. Their works at Galleria Alfonso Artiaco showcase the duo applying oil paints onto engravings, giving the work a textured, collage-like effect. Tursic & Mille’s paintings blend the abstract with the figurative, the mundane with the mythic. In one a woman seemingly cut from the pages of a fashion magazine flashes her eyes at the viewer, her wave of blond hair swelling into yellow paint that crests and breaks over the entire painting. In another beside it, pink flowers sprout against an inky sky with clouds of paint hanging low and ominous. Tursic & Mille create an interior frame within the paintings and colors bleed all over as if to comment on the very origin of images in a world saturated by them. 

Upstairs with the emerging and medium-sized galleries ringing above the main floor, LambdaLambdaLambda, the only gallery ever from Kosovo, showed pastels by Nora Turato. The Zagreb-born, Amsterdam-based artist’s highlight was the Freudian triptych, anyone has some mom? with the text “Where’s my mom?” drawn across the three panels. The word ‘mom’ is an alarming shade of red and stands alone on its own white panel. The piece reflects on everyone’s sense of neediness, dependency, and infantile desire for emotional security. It seemed to echo everyone’s wish for simpler times when the burden of our decisions—and their subsequent fallout—fell on someone else’s shoulders.

Nora Turato
anyone has some mom?, 2024
Oil pastel on paper and Dibond, framed
installation size: 220 × 254,5 × 5,2 cm

I get Turato’s point. Regression seems more and more en vogue. While in Paris, gallerists lamented the market’s softness, a few whispering to me how they suspected collectors were waiting for Trump to win before throwing money around again. For the past couple years gallerists unloaded a lot of works by buzzy young artists, a speculative boom that has since largely gone bust. In response, programs showed not just established names, but also more historic ones: de Chirico, Kandinsky, Dalí, Giacometti.  

One striking example of this swing was LA’s Hannah Hoffman Gallery who along with New York’s Candice Madey jointly exhibited works by Darrel Ellis. The suite of photographs, portraits and paintings, though produced in 1980s New York, seem more in conversation with the European Modernists and present a singular vision. Ellis’s father came of age during the Harlem Renaissance and photographed the optimistic spirit of booming, post WWII New York City. After he died, his son inherited his archive. The younger Ellis mined that trove of images to inspire his work. Yet Darrel Ellis lived in a different New York City than his father. By the 1970s, New York City faced financial ruin, Vietnam unmasked the American Empire and the Civil Rights era ended in the assassinations of MLK Jr. and Malcolm X. Ellis’ eerie, disjointed works reflect that darker, more critical strain of American art. Whereas many of his downtown NYC contemporaries retreated into minimalism, Ellis developed a visual language that feels poetic and sharp, poignant and unsentimental. The works often portray intimate and domestic scenes, and show how time and memory shape our reality.

And what is our reality? That's the central question. How some of us wander around snapping up paintings and others figure out what to say about them. Over the weekend the wider world—the one absent from the fair, the one spiraling towards the abyss—felt muted and distant. I encountered optimism, enchantment and a healthy dose of nihilism at Art Basel Paris and like the many thousands of beguiling art works I saw, the fair itself resists providing any tidy answers, which is both its great challenge and even greater charm.

Art Basel Paris 2024 at the Grand Palais. Courtesy of Art Basel

LACMA Art + Technology Lab grant recipient Sarah Rosalena Uncovers the Contributions of Women in Astronomy Through the Lens of Indigenous Cosmology

Sarah Rosalena: In All Directions is the first of three films from Hyundai Artlab centered around the Art + Technology Lab at LACMA – one of the museum’s unique programs that was revitalized through a long-term partnership between Hyundai Motor and LACMA beginning in 2015. This series showcases bold experimentation and cross-disciplinary innovation fostered by the Lab through the eyes of three artists. 

This first film delves into how Rosalena’s groundbreaking projects, Exit Points and Standard Candle, were enhanced by research opportunities provided through the LACMA Art + Technology Lab. Collaborating with NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory allowed Rosalena to investigate the historical contributions of women "computers" in astronomy, examining their crucial roles in early measurements of celestial bodies. 

This experience enabled her to reproduce their labor, further exploring the intersection of technology, gender, and the influence of data and Indigenous lands in shaping our understanding of the cosmos. By bridging these realms, she invites viewers to reconsider how we perceive space and our place within it.

Watch the full film on Hyundai Artlab

Miu Miu and Art Basel Paris present 'Tales & Tellers,' a project by Artist Goshka Macuga

Miu Miu collaborates with Art Basel Paris’ Public Program to present Tales & Tellers, an innovative project envisioned by artist Goshka Macuga and curated by Elvira Dyangani Ose, with exhibition design by OMA. Presented at the historic Palais d’Iéna and running until October 20th, 2024, the project dig into women’s narratives and experiences, using a mix of film, video installations, and live performances. Actors reenact moments from Miu Miu’s past film collaborations and runway shows, blending these stories with real-life perspectives to craft an immersive narrative. The project underscores the Italian brand’s commitment to exploring femininity through the intersection of fashion, film, and art.

Building on Miu Miu’s Women’s Tales initiative, which since 2011 has provided female filmmakers a platform to express diverse ideas of womanhood, Tales & Tellers incorporates various media to highlight women’s stories. The performances, enhanced by video works, bring past collaborations to life as actors embody characters from earlier Miu Miu films, transforming the space into a living, multi-dimensional narrative. These reinterpretations offer the audience a fresh view of memories and experiences, breathing new life into familiar stories.

In addition to these performances, Tales & Tellers screens the complete collection of films from the Women’s Tales series, accompanied by panel discussions featuring directors and artists like Chloë Sevigny, Meriem Bennani, Laura Citarella, and others. These discussions not only explore the themes in their films but also delve into the creators' personal histories and artistic inspirations, offering insights into the storytelling process and celebrating women as the keepers of their own stories. The event fosters a dialogue about how these narratives shape and reflect the world.

Materiality is the Impetus of Perrotin's Pacific Abstractions in Los Angeles

text by Mia Milosevic

Materiality lays at the center of Perrotin’s Pacific Abstractions. The use of material fluctuates between artists, but the physicality of abstraction remains distinctly intact. 

Lee Bae uses five different forms of wood to construct his charcoal ink on paper. An ode to movement embodies the work, where motion is inextricable from risk. Each charcoal stroke is entirely reliant on the mobility of Lee’s artistic hand—no gray-hued ribbon is ever erased or redone. The movement of material is the final product. 

Naotaka Hiro’s corporeal paintings are imbued with a kind of where-the-wild-things-are sexual innuendo. The work’s technicalities deconstruct the body, and then reinstate it with a phallic abstraction that is just discernible enough to make the body knowable. Two perfect, symmetrical holes perforate the bottom of his Untitled (Uproar). These circular lesions mark the negative space the artist inserted his legs into as a processual requirement. The alteration of the canvas threatens prescribed limitations of material—Hiro’s anatomical segmenting shatters the fourth wall of space. 

Kazuo Kadonaga’s Wood No. 5 Cl is an intricately constructed log made from paper-thin slices of real wood. The veneer slicer he used to create these vellums pays homage to his upbringing in forestry. The trunk’s growth rings explicitly mimic the surreality of Earth’s extraordinary constructions, made with the caliber of precision and detail generally credited to the hands of the divine. Alas, we may come to question Kadonaga’s mortal statehood. The portrait of an axed tree excavates a visceral reaction: Should we mourn the losses wrought by Big Paper or must we instead celebrate post-natural invention? By virtue of materiality, reincarnation is imminent. 

Pacific Abstractions is on view through November 9 @ Perrotin in Los Angeles, 5036 W Pico Blvd

Craig Richards' 2024 Houghton Festival Pays Homage to Andrew Weatherall

Tantrum Stage



text by Lara Monro
photographs by Khroma Collective


Since the 2000s, Houghton Hall, an expansive Georgian residence built in the 1720s for Britain’s first Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole, has gained international renown as a world-class sculpture park, featuring permanent works by Richard Long, Ryan Gander,  Rachel Whiteread, and James Turrell, to name a few. 

The Hall’s sculpture park is further accompanied by an annual solo exhibition program showcasing esteemed artists such as Damien Hirst and Anish Kapoor. This year, Sir Antony Gormley’s Time Horizon places 100 sculptures across 300 acres, with Dame Magdalene Odundo’s artworks simultaneously positioned within the state rooms. 

Stephen Cox “Interior Space”
copyright Houghton Hall

In 2017, Houghton Hall complemented its art collection by adding Houghton Festival, the underground dance music festival established, crafted and curated by Craig Richards. It instantly earned acclaim for its five-star lineup, sound systems, lighting, and reputation as a hedonistic playground (thanks to its rare 24-hour license), with Mixmag hailing it as “a festival the UK is lucky to have” and The Independent calling it a “utopian retreat like no other.” As a result, each August, discerning music enthusiasts of all ages, nationalities, and backgrounds converge to immerse themselves in a musical Valhalla that knows no pause.

However, Houghton is so much more than just a musical odyssey. The festival and its music stages, impressive as standalone sonic and visual installations, also coincide with a rich visual arts program that is integral to the Houghton experience. For Richards, the intention behind the 24-hour festival is not merely to host a round-the-clock party, but to create a space where the interplay of sound, art and the shifts of dawn, dusk and all things nature can be profoundly appreciated. He explains, “it’s about the beauty of sunrise and sunset, experimentation, and savoring the festival’s diverse offerings at any hour of the day or night."  

Now fifty-seven, Richards reflects on his impressive career as a DJ, which he describes as accidental. After spending a year in Los Angeles at nineteen years old, where he immersed himself in the vibrant Downtown LA music scene at iconic parties like Dirt Box and Power Tools, he moved to London in 1987 to study illustration at Central Saint Martins and went on to an MA at the Royal College of Art.

“It was during my time in the States I bought a lot of records. I had always collected soul, funk, disco, and reggae records from before I moved to London.” During his time at Saint Martins there was a coffee bar at the Charing Cross Road building—incidentally, the first place the Sex Pistols ever played. “Naturally, it was the perfect spot to organize parties, as was Soho, where it was easy to acquire a hundred-person basement for the night to have a party, Soho was a very different place then. Before long, I was getting paid to DJ instead of just earning a taxi fare home, and that was it, really.” Richards’ ‘accidental’ career quickly gained momentum, establishing him as a key figure in the global music scene. Yet, even as his sonic reputation flourished, he remained committed to creative pursuits beyond the decks, with a deep engagement in painting, drawing, photography, and silkscreen printing. 

Craig Richards "Untitled"

This dual commitment to both music and visual arts has become a defining characteristic of Houghton. Blending auditory and visual experiences, the festival has become Richards’ canvas, allowing him to explore his artistic creativity in dynamic and innovative ways. His imprint is everywhere, from the festival’s poster designs that feature his original artwork, to a number of visual installations at a selection of the music stages, to the lineup penned in his unmistakable handwriting. 

But the creativity doesn’t stop there. Richards has also commissioned a series of site-specific installations over the past eight years. Large, steel sculptural pieces have been created from his drawings, none more poignant than the 8-meter-tall sculpture dedicated to the late Andrew Weatherall. This iron structure, birthed from a series of sketches Richards created in 2017, stands proudly at the festival’s epicenter, paying homage to Weatherall’s immense talent and influence in the contemporary music world; 

 

Craig Richards "Andrew"

 

“Andrew was one of the first people who inspired me to become a DJ,” Richards reflects. “Everything he did, from Sonic Blood Sugar to his presence at gigs, left a mark. Many of us in this industry find ourselves asking, ‘What would Andrew do?’ It’s a tragedy that the captain of our ship was taken from us. The sculpture’s grandeur reflects his lasting impact and the fact that he will always be a part of this festival and the music scene.”

For Richards, this sculpture embodies the depth and breadth of Houghton’s offerings, which he is proud to have extended far beyond music. Its diverse program includes talks and installations that truly enrich the experience. The Armadillo, a timber arts pavilion commissioned for Houghton 2024 in partnership with the architectural firm Unknown Works, hosted an array of talks and performances such as London based DJ Anna Wall’s ambient music set. The Pinter stage, nestled amongst an idyllic orchard, was graced by Swiss pianist and composer Nik Bärtsch who shared a mind-sound and soul-altering performance while American beatboxer, comedian and musician Reggie Watts, performed a light-hearted yet exceptionally crafted sketch, perfect for a Sunday afternoon and slightly tired and tender festival crowd. The Warehouse, a repurposed barn, was transformed into a digital art space by UVA who showcased Present Shock II, a mind-bending installation created in collaboration with Robert Del Naja. Deep within the forest, Natural Symphony’s interactive festival forest design; a sound and light installation that uses the natural biorhythms of plants to create music and visuals, offered a moment of wonder, grounding and tranquility. Meanwhile, a quaint ‘noddy train,’ accompanied by art historians, would transport the more adventurous to James Turrell’s Skyspace, an immersive sculpture positioned in an elevated oak box that encourages visitors to sit at dusk or dawn and enjoy the Norfolk sky cycles of blues and purples. 

 
 

While Houghton has evolved into a celebrated festival, its journey has been anything but linear. The festival has managed to face and overcome significant setbacks, including a last-minute cancellation in 2019 due to extreme weather and two subsequent years lost to the pandemic. That it has endured without government or commercial funding is a testament to its resilience and the strong community it fosters. For Richards, the pursuit of something meaningful far outweighs the lure of profit. “When you prioritize significance over financial gain, creativity naturally flourishes,” he explains. Richards’ determination and perseverance may also be attributed to his enduring optimism, a quality he credits to his parents and their appreciation for the art of presentation; “my parents were both cabin crew in the 1950s, they instilled in me a deep understanding of how to do things properly—how to create an experience,” Richards reflects. “They were products of a pivotal era, epitomized by events like the 1951 Festival of Britain, which celebrated art and embodied a spirit of optimism. This outlook has profoundly shaped me; I’ve inherited their belief in making things as exceptional as possible, and it continues to drive me forward.”

Richards’ meticulous attention to detail, coupled with his passion and craftsmanship, are clearly influenced by this familial legacy of hard work and dedication. And, Houghton’s authenticity is undeniably an extension of this. Although Richards acknowledges that the visual arts program has yet to reach the level of its musical counterpart, his optimism assures him that it is only a matter of time. “With patience, I am confident this will be achieved,” he says. “It will happen organically as we gradually build a bigger community—a group of believers who share in this vision.”

 

Reggie Watts at Pinters Stage

 

Highlights From The Inaugural Aspen Art Fair At The Historic Jerome Hotel

In the former silver mining town of Aspen, Colorado, art week brings an exotically curious international crowd. Billionaire collector home tours, dinners, exhibitions, activations, and art fairs take over the tiny, quaint city nine-thousand feet in the Rockies. The air is thin, rare, and rich in this alpine ecosystem of nature that meets the nostalgia of the American West with the hyper-commerce of the 21st century. A newcomer on the scene, The Aspen Art Fair, feels like it's been there all along. Ideally situated at the historic five-star Jerome Hotel, which opened in 1889 and is now part of Auberge Resorts’ portfolio, the fair presented thirty international exhibitors and curatorial projects from more than twelve countries. Cozily tucked into bottom-floor bungalows, the fair follows the grand tradition of hotel art fairs, like the Gramercy International Art Fair at the Gramercy Hotel in New York and Felix at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel.  Co-founded by art world veterans Becca Hoffman and Robert Chase, the Aspen Art Fair included a stellar list of galleries, including Galerie Gmurzynska from Zürich, Perrotin, and Southern Guild from Cape Town, South Africa. With the general art market in a post-pandemic slump, Hoffman, who is also the founder of the women-led 74th Arts, which organizes global art fair experiences in cities around the globe, knows full well the power of boutique. “We need to rethink how we connect on culture, in citywide environments. How do we have more intimate opportunities for engagement, education, connection, and commerce?” Hoffman—tough as nails and ultra-savvy—told us on the third to last day of the fair. With Aspen being 1,390 times smaller than the population of New York and a super concentration of centimillionaires, Aspen is the perfect environment for art and commerce. With works ranging from Picasso to Paola Pivi to Fairfield Porter and Richard Diebenkorn, the Aspen Art Fair is both refreshing and exhilarating.

HOT AND BOTHERED GROUP SHOW COMES TO AN END

Marielle Chabal, 'QUEENS project. Moodboards #1 and #2', 2024, 'Hot and bothered (Nightmares in a bed full of pillows)' group show, 2024, Galerie Alberta Pane, Paris

Completing their exhibition July 20th, The Alberta Pane Gallery presents the group show Hot and bothered (Nightmares in a bed full of pillows), featuring the work of three international artists: Guendalina Cerruti, Marielle Chabal, and Davide Sgambaro. Gathered together for the first time in a group exhibition, the works of Cerruti, Chabal, and Sgambaro focus on the young generation’s existential concerns. Through various media the artists investigate similar issues, trying to unveil doubts and anxieties linked to an uncertain future. With their practices they attempt to propose new solutions to contemporary society’s disillusions, while using an absurd and sarcastic approach. Each art piece is unique and varies in execution, yet clearly displays their unified message through multiple different artistic approaches that manage to convey the evolution of self, starting at the absurdity and wonder of childhood to a more hollow and bitterly aware adulthood. The group exhibition is an exploration of identity and the growing pains that come with leaving your youth while still managing to carry that sense of creativity throughout your journey.

Hot and Bothered is on view until July 20th @ Alberta Pane Gallery 44-47, rue de Montmorency 75003, Paris, France, for more information, visit their website

Sharon Stone's Eternal Failure Is An Eternal Success

Courtesy Gallery 181 Fremont Residences San Francisco/Moanalani Jeffrey Photo Agency

John Steinbeck once said, “San Francisco is a golden handcuff with the key thrown away.” Indeed, San Francisco is a beautiful prison of imagination—a city so unusual it seems unreal. For the inimitable actress and now esteemed painter Sharon Stone, San Francisco was a place to die and be reborn as an artist. In her new exhibition, “My Eternal Failure,” on view at Gallery 181 at San Francisco's 181 Fremont Residences until August 31st, these days of vulnerability are explored in a series of large-scale, abstract paintings that exemplify Stone’s adeptness at shape, color, and composition.  Heartbreak and a 2001 brain injury in San Francisco allowed Stone to see colors in a whole new way—her prismatic kaleidoscopic palette is like a psychotropic wellspring. “I want this exhibition to serve as a vehicle for self-forgiveness, and I hope it can help others do the same by letting go of societal stigmas and imposed perceptions,” says Stone. “In this way, failures become sources of strength, and to face them is to keep growing. The exhibition’s title My Eternal Failure is freeing for me.”

 

Jester, by Sharon Stone, 2023 (acrylic on canvas), 36” x 18”

 

Each Person Is A Portal: Read Our Interview of Seffa Klein on the Occasion of Her Solo Exhibition @ Galerie Poggi in Paris →

 
 

The human race has been gazing at the stars with a sense of wonderment since time immemorial. These cogitations have inspired the creation of everything from religious mythologies to monumental earthworks to marine navigation, space navigation and innumerable inventions in between. It is a universal human experience where most of us encounter our first existential ponderings and Seffa Klein is no exception. What is exceptional about her experience is that she comes from a family of artists whose careers have been dedicated to exploring universal truths in the realms of art, science, and spirituality, which has afforded her the unique opportunity to engage with these profound questions further in the light of day rather than extinguishing them. While most of us are told to invest our time and energy in more realistic endeavors, the Klein family is deeply rooted in the belief that this is as real as it gets. Gallerist Jérôme Poggi recognized this unique quality of the Klein family as one of artists who foster each other’s practices rather than competing with one another, which inspired him to curate a solo exhibition of Seffa Klein’s works alongside selected works from Yves Klein, Rotraut, Marie Raymond, and Günther Uecker, who are respectively her grandparents, great-grandparent, and great-uncle. See the exhibition before it closes tomorrow, July 13. Read more.

Devon Dejardin's Pareidolia Is A Reflection of Your Inner Psyche @ Carl Kostyál in Stockholm

 
 

Devon Dejardin’s new solo exhibition of paintings and sculptures takes its name from the strange and universal phenomenon wherein we see faces in abstract imagery. In a broader sense, pareidolia is the perception of scrutable objects in any kind of nebulous stimulus. We see animals in cloud formations and hear voices in white noise. From Rorschach’s inkblot tests, to hidden messages in a record played backwards, to Jesus Christ on a piece of toast, there are endless examples of our unconscious tendency to discern meaning and order in the face of chaos. For Dejardin, these works are guardians. They draw together elements of various faiths and belief systems. What you see when you look at any of these pieces may differ depending on your own belief systems, your relationship to art history, the conversation you were just having, and your emotional wellbeing. You might find that when you step away and come back to any given work that you can’t remember if you’ve seen it before or if you’re in fact looking at a new painting. Layer by layer, the works reflect aspects of our inner psyche back at us, like mirrored building blocks that reveal the ever shifting unconscious mind as it wanders around in real time.

Pareidolia is on view through July 21st @ Carl Kostyál Hospitalet, Sjökvarnsbacken 15, 131 71 Nacka, Stockholm

Read A Conversation Between Artists Darius Airo and Jon Pylypchuk on the Occasion of Airo's Solo Exhibition →

 
 

Between the minutia and the mirage of our fragmented contemporary existence, artists Darius Airo and Jon Plypchuk both create work imbued with a humorous and ironic darkness masked by playfulness. An inside joke, a half forgotten dream, a song lyric, abstracted figures caught between the waveforms of television static or the rain-drenched glass of a car windshield—our brains continually try to make sense of the world like an undecoded cypher. In Airo’s recent paintings and pastels, presented in the exhibition Mickey’s Mirror (opening May 25 at Abigail Ogilvy gallery in Los Angeles, curated by Josh White—whitebox.la), making sense of the world requires clever conceptual conceit of internal mirrors and the abstracted visages of iconic cartoon characters. In the following conversation, Airo and Plypchuk discuss how the world around them is absorbed into their work. Read more.

MSCHF Presents Art 2 @ Perrotin in Los Angeles

MSCHF presents Art 2, their latest exhibition and second solo show with Perrotin, which is being featured at their Los Angeles location. A compilation of some of their most prominent works, what stands most strikingly at the center of the gallery is the 2004 PT Cruiser which made its way across the United States. An understandable $19.99 could earn the average citizen rights to the car’s keys, prompting an all-american car chase which found its end in Truckee, California. MSCHF’s notorious, oversized shoes make a recurring appearance throughout the exhibition, which the product’s founders claim to “haunt the gallery.”

An Ikea-esque contraption stands assumingly amidst the chaos–it’s a sink made from standard hardware. One of the sink pieces was installed in the bathroom of the MET in New York City–so, MSCHF now has a permanent installation in one of the most renowned museums in the world. Lining one of the gallery walls are 249 copies of Picasso’s infamous La Poisson, which is a small wooden sculpture of a fish. The original stands among them, but the viewer may never know which one really laid in the hands of the great Spanish painter. Regardless, buyers receive an official bidding certificate which directly replicates the one MSCHF founders received when they successfully bid for the wooden object at a Christie’s auction. There’s no need to sue for copyright infringement. Near the entrance of the gallery is a Botero–once a portrait of a jarringly corpulent businessman has been visibly edited into a skinnier version. MSCHF retitled the work Ozempic (Botched Fumador de Cigarillos). 

Art 2 is on view through June 1 @ Perrotin, 5036 West Pico Boulevard Los Angeles

SPY Projects Presents Unrequited Group Show: An Eternally Recontextualized Assemblage of Works @ the Former Brooke Alexander Gallery in New York

Pietro Alexander’s SPY Projects, a Los Angeles-based gallery that has developed a reputation for recognizing young, emerging talent both local and international since its inception in 2021 hosts their Unrequited group show at 59 Wooster Street. Not just another SoHo loft, the building—the very floor, in fact, once housed the Brooke Alexander Gallery, which opened its first exhibition in the space nearly forty years ago and worked with a number of artists who have gone on to become legends, influencing the art scene in New York and beyond. It’s a natural meeting place between East and West coasts, and a fitting home for SPY Projects’ New York debut, since the eponymous gallerist Brooke Alexander’s brother was the artist Peter Alexander, a pioneering figure of the Light and Space movement in California.

As much as we should know what an artwork is—what’s placed in front of us, contained within a frame, defined by a title and tombstone—there’s always something that seems to escape, an uncontrollable excess of meaning beyond what anyone, even the artist could predict. Because ultimately, the substance of it all is continually created anew and brought into being through every encounter between the viewer and the work itself. As a result, even the most rigorous or tightly structured artwork remains porous and in flux, incorporating shifting social contexts, feelings, and personal histories.

So, if it can’t be controlled, why fight it? Curator Sara Apple encourages you to let go of the Sisyphean struggle to reconcile vision and meaning with the murky, malleable world. The exhibition is not an endpoint, the final realization of a concept, but an embarkation, an embrace of the unrequited to welcome the larger possibilities of experience. This extends from the artists—selected less because they fit an aesthetic mold or illustrate a particular idea, but out of organic connections—to the structure of the show itself, which hosts events and performances throughout its duration. By opening up the exhibition while supporting its full potential, all these disparate strands can be brought together, encouraged to develop into the unknown and unexpected, and become something more in the process.

Unrequited includes works by Peter Alexander, Malik Al Maliki, Katherine Auchterlonie, Stefan Bondell, Cristine Brache, Sasha Filimonov, Chris Lloyd, Kay Kasparhauser, Alison Peery, Raymond Pettibon, and Montana Simone. The show is on view through May 31 @ 59 Wooster Street, New York

 
 

Andrés Anza Chosen As Winner of the 2024 Loewe Foundation Craft Prize

 
 

Awarded for his work “I only know what I have seen,” 2023. Andrés Anza was chosen from thirty finalists by a distinguished jury composed of leading figures from the worlds of design, architecture, journalism, criticism, and museum curatorship, including Magdalene Odundo, Minsuk Cho, Olivier Gabet and Abraham Thomas.

This year’s edition of the LOEWE FOUNDATION Craft prize presents a selection of works that feature organic and biomorphic forms that push materials to their physical limits. Many of the works repurpose found or recycled materials and there is a focus on the elevation and transformation of the everyday. All thirty of the shortlisted works will be exhibited at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris from May 15th through June 9th. The exhibition will also be available to view online and documented through an exhibition catalogue.

Andrés’ life-size ceramic sculpture has an arresting and almost human presence in the exhibition. Its anthropomorphic form – allowing it to seem at once figurative and abstract – is intricately constructed using thousands of individual ceramic protrusions. These tiny spikes make up five puzzle pieces, which have been assembled with an almost architectural intention and precision.

The jury observed that this work defies time and cultural context, drawing upon ancient, archaeological forms but also tracing a post-digital aesthetic that sees ceramics absorbing the most defining influences of our time.