Last Chance to See R.L. Greene: A Black Hobbyist Painter Whose Work Now Hangs at Ventura County’s Government Center

 
 

text by Maisie McDermid

LA-based artist and photographer Rossellini Harris did not find a stained chair or finicky electronics at an estate sale last year; he found nearly 100 original oil paintings by an unknown black artist, Robert Lee Greene. After realizing their cultural importance, he moved quickly to acquire the remaining work from Greene’s family. Paintings that had been growing dust now hang proudly in the Ventura County Government Center, celebrating both Greene’s life and Black History Month. 

Robert Lee Greene (RL Greene) was an Oxnard-based artist who, as a hobby, captured the legacies of historical Black figures in a large series of portraits. The exhibition of his work, “Gallery of Heroes,” commemorates Black cultural innovators, authors, civil rights pioneers, and more. His abstract and landscape paintings, too, accompany the personal commemorations, boldening the exhibition’s cultural heritage sentiments. The show features private collection pieces and represents the first public display of his artwork in decades.

 
 

Born in Charlotte, N.C., Greene served in both the Korean War (1953) and Vietnam War (1963) before ending up in Ventura County for over five decades. He earned a B.S. in psychology and behavioral science from La Verne College and an M.S. in sociology and psychology from the University of La Verne. In addition to his paintings, Greene was a published poet, religious educator, and humanitarian, dedicating his life to community service and personal spiritual development. Ventura County seeks to recognize Greene’s many community-oriented contributions. 

The Ventura County Arts Council invited Harris to display Greene’s paintings in their Hall of Administration. The large building accommodates the entirety of the work. “Gallery of Heroes” primarily displays Greene’s many portraits of Black legends— James Baldwin, Maya Angelou, and Matthew Henson, to name a few. Collectively, the art stimulates a power that has also spread on social media. 

 
 

Accompanying their public viewing, Harris has also creatively showcased individual compositions from the collection on his Instagram. As videos zoom into small details of Greene’s paintings– Angelou’s charm necklace or Baldwin’s grin– Harris’ voice and the voices of special guests share insights on the pieces and their subjects. Here, too, Harris shares notes on the exhibition. 

In one video, he tells how Greene’s son arrived at the exhibition with one more of Greene’s paintings tucked under his arm– an extraordinary portrait of Malcolm X. Harris had been aware of its existence, but he thought someone else had bought it at the estate sale. Now, it hangs amongst the other acclaimed portraits. In another video, Harris showcases vibrant posters for the exhibition, available for purchase through his Instagram, with all proceeds going to Black families impacted by the wildfires in the historic Black neighborhood of Altadena.

Amidst the current political climate, the celebration of R.L. Greene’s work feels all the more significant. This show may be the last of its kind in a government building for a while, as Black History Month and DEI initiatives and programs remain under threat. On Instagram, Harris expresses his many hopes that people visit and experience the golden eye of R.L. Greene. “DM me. If I’m available, I’ll give you a private tour!”

R.L’s Greene work will be displayed at the Atrium Gallery of the Ventura County Government Center through February 28, 2025. Monday – Friday, 8:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. 

Lisa Yuskavage Looks Back

text by Karly Quadros

It’s no secret Lisa Yuskavage has a bit of a fetish. If not a sexual one then certainly an artistic one. She’s best known for her paintings inspired by hippie dippie Penthouse porn featuring buxom white girls licking lollipops and lounging around in nothing but beaded panties and rainbow striped socks. For a long time, these girls occupied imaginary spaces like wild fields and technicolor dreamscapes, fantasy worlds where the body bounces and drips and nipples are always pointed to the heavens. But her latest show, 21 new large and small scale paintings on display now at David Zwirner in Los Angeles, has a new preoccupation: the artist’s studio.

The exhibition was inspired by, in part, an ongoing effort to archive every painting in Yuskavage’s more than forty year career. With the help of a few Zoomer assistants, Yuskavage has meticulously catalogued and cross referenced her paintings on her website, tagged with an exhaustive taxonomy of recurring motifs. Gallerist David Zwirner, moderating the artist’s talk back in the absence of curator Helen Molesworth, spoke about what initially drew him to Yuskavage’s paintings. “The work was always complicated,” he said. “The work always looked back at you.” Now Yuskavage is looking back at the work.

There is a looming reflexivity to the show. Consider Painter Painting (2024), in which the artist portrays herself clothed in a white lab coat at work in a studio bathed in the warm glow of a red light district. She’s dwarfed by her creation, a large-scale grisaille based on a 1995 black-and-white photograph that Yuskavage took of her sculpture titled “The Motherfucker” (today, the photograph lives in the MoMA.) The artist from the painting works from a reference photo taped to the wall while the original “Motherfucker” sculpture is tucked in the corner on a pedestal. In the studio, mediums and ideas echo and reflect off of each other, unbound by time.

Yuskavage is a contrarian at heart, and the real-life paintings referenced in the exhibition are often her most controversial. In the Company of Models (2024) features the artist’s iconic Rorschach Blot (1995), a rendering of a rubbery and gaping sex doll, leaning against a wall in a stack of canvases. Other paintings in the fictional artist studio feature the artist’s ‘Nel’zeh’ motif, little peasant women most prominently featured in the artist’s output in the 2010s, looking on disapprovingly like so many puritanical critics. 

The previous paintings hidden in the new ones are often rendered in the thin lemony-yellow of a cadmium underpainting, the technique that gives Yuskavage’s paintings their distinctive candy-tinged glow. This layering, technically and thematically, animates the show. Expect Yuskavage’s many hallmarks – juicy color palates, rotund bellies, and perky breasts – but these are not her usual subjects. Instead, they’re models, memories, recurring ideas unearthed from the clutter, like a painting tenderly pulled from a stack in the attic.

In 2025, the shock of Yuskavage’s pliant sex kittens isn’t what it was in the mid-90s when she last exhibited in Los Angeles. After all, OnlyFans has gone mainstream and some contemporary fashion editorials make Penthouse seem all but quaint. Instead of a sexual guilelessness as her subject, Yuskavage has returned to a creative innocence: the artist in her studio, the student at her easel, and the model on her pedestal. For Yuskavage, the creative act is like a well-loved sexual fantasy – it’s a well she can return to again and again.

Lisa Yuskavage is on display through April 21 at David Zwirner in Los Angeles.

Jeremy Scott and Katherine Bernhardt's exhibition brings Pop, Play and Pure exuberance to Kansas City

 
 

text by Poppy Baring

“It’s F-U-N—that’s it, that’s all it is”

These are the words rapper A$AP Rocky once used to describe fashion designer Jeremy Scott. This sentiment naturally extends to contemporary artist Katherine Bernhardt’s work, but are these artist’s works merely playful or do they carry greater significance? In their new exhibition “A Match Made in Heaven,” Scott’s designs are partnered with their Bernhardt equivalent, producing a maximalist fun-filled world full of exuberant color and pop culture references. Although the pair were both born in Missouri in 1975, they met for the first time in November 2023 when the Executive Director of the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, JoAnne Northrup, noticed their commonalities. This exhibition, taking place in Overland Park, Kansas near where both of these artists grew up, is the first to explore the shared references in Scott and Bernhardt's work. 

Thirty-five of Bernhardt's energetic paintings are punctuated by one hundred of Scott’s looks from his archive, including those made under his namesake brand and those designed during his time at Moschino. The use of consumer and popular culture symbols in these works act as vessels for the artist's shared sense of irreverent humor which leaves audiences questioning whether they are examples of sophisticated satire or just dramatic up-endings of today’s cultural standards. For Bernhardt, the use of iconic symbols like McDonald’s golden arches, the Pink Panther, cigarettes and Doritos simply comes down to their shape and color. They allow her to fill canvases with combinations of these shapes making infinite paintings that all feel like a complete thought made in a stream of riotous consciousness. Starting with spray paint, Bernhardt first outlines her composition before taking her canvas to the floor where she uses watered-down acrylics to freely cover her characters and shapes; creating vibrant patterns. 

Jeremy Scotts has also been known to avoid over-complication. Often letting emotion guide his practice, it is not that his work is anti-intellectual but that ‘rational’ is not part of his creative vocabulary. Whether Scott’s work has loftier inspirations than Coca-Cola, for example, or not, his success in the fashion industry is undeniable. So much so that his work is now weaved into many celebrity moments including Britney Spears's “Toxic” music video and the video for Lady Gaga’s song “Paparazzi;” showing that his love for pop culture is very much mutual.

Both Scott’s and Bernhardt’s works are also inspired and reflective of their environments. In Bernhardt’s case, she grew up in a home filled with color and throughout her career, having completed residencies across the globe, has picked up imagery from her vicinity. The use of coffee and cigarettes in her work, for example, is heavily influenced by the New York delis that surround her where she currently lives and works. In terms of Jeremy Scott’s designs, his fanboy take on pop culture seemed increasingly spot-on as social media exploded. So while they may both be fully immersed in an unapologetically vibrant world, inspired by nostalgic Americana, Scott and Bernhardt’s work can tell us a lot about our current climate while also providing a much-needed escape.

A Match Made in Heaven is open through August 3 at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art in Overland Park, Kansas. 

Fuck Art Let's Dance: Read Our Interview of the Iconic Colette Lumiere →

Fuck art, let’s dance.

It’s the attitude that Colette Lumiere had become known for, immortalized in a mural that she painted on the wall of iconic ’70s downtown New York nightclub and art scene haunt Danceteria. She’s celebrated for her bold personas and expansive multimedia projects from street art to installations to fashion collaborations, yet her later evolutions have received less attention. A new show at Company Gallery, Everything She Touches Turns to Gold, running until March 1, explores the artist’s career in the ’80s as she ventured off to Berlin under the guise of a new persona, the mysterious Mata Hari and the Stolen Potatoes.

Lumiere always had a surprisingly contemporary attitude toward blurring the boundaries between the public and the private, between art and commerce. She began by painting cryptic sigils on the SoHo pavement at night and has shown art everywhere from the MoMA to Fiorucci shop windows to German nunneries to nightclubs. Her longest running piece was a 24/7 installation in her own apartment, stuffed from floor to ceiling with champagne and blush-ruched fabrics, a polymorphous punk rock Versailles. Lumiere took that louche crinkling of fabric from her Living Environment and translated it into harlequin frocks that she wore like a uniform. Her influence reverberates widely from Vivienne Westwood and Madonna’s ragged, spunky takes on period clothing to the elaborately staged personas of Cindy Sherman and Nadia Lee Cohen.

Growing frustrated with the limitations put on a young female artist, in 1978 Lumiere staged her own death in a performance at the Whitney Museum. She emerged a few days later at PS1 Contemporary Art Center, beginning an ongoing dynasty of artistic personas and eras. Everything She Touches Turns to Gold features the artist’s under-celebrated paintings, mostly from the early ’80s, “metaphysical portraits” exploring herself, her friends, and the subconscious. While her ’70s works recall historical reclining nudes including staged photos and durational performances in which she napped in poses modeled after classical paintings such as Manet’s Olympia. Her Berlin period, instead, foregrounded motion. The figures in her portraits wave. They evade. They drift and dream and run away.

I recently met up with Lumiere at Company Gallery to explore the new collection. Now in her  seventies, Lumiere is as true to herself as ever in a ruffled white blouse beneath a hot pink Victorian riding coat. Tunisian-born and French-raised, her accent is caught somewhere between her native French and a dry German lilt. We spoke about Berlin before the wall came down, resisting categorization, and, of course, potatoes. Read more.

Fierce Cuts: Linder’s Timely Retrospective

Linder, The Sphinx, 2021. Photomontage. 35.5 x 34.5 cm. 14 x 13 5/8 ins. © Linder. Courtesy the artist & Modern Art, London.

text by Poppy Baring

Arriving at a time when women's rights are being increasingly called into question, Danger Came Smiling takes London through Linder Sterling's eminent fifty-year-long career for the very first time. Exhibiting her iconic photomontages as well as her more recent unseen works, the Hayward Gallery underscores the enduring relevance of her feminist art, while showcasing the vibrancy and variety in Linder’s practice.

Often aiming to make viewers interrogate stereotypical gender narratives, Linder uses scissors and scalpels to liberate images that were often produced to perpetuate traditional gender roles. The use of sexualized and commercialized images of the female body, contrasted against clippings of seemingly banal bourgeois household objects manufactures a playful mockery that is characteristic of Linder’s style. By repurposing these found images to tell a radically different, less restrictive narrative, she restores agency on the page and across prints thanks to the ‘violent power of the cut.’ These anarchic collisions powerfully highlight the similarity in pressures felt by women today and those felt when the works were first created; inviting viewers to question the then and now.

Installation view of Linder: Danger Came Smiling. She/She, (1981). Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery.

Born in Liverpool in 1954, Sterling was part of the 1970s punk scene and created art and music alongside some of the most famous British voices of that period. In the 1980s, she formed the band Ludus and performed at nightclubs such as Manchester's famous Hacienda. One of the most remembered aspects of this performance was Linder's choice of costume, where her 'meat dress', which came 20 years prior to Lady Gaga’s similar unexpected look, and black dildo commented on the heavily macho culture of the venue at the time. This same spirit can be found in all of Linder's subsequent work and is arguably what has led her to be viewed as a truly unrelenting and rabble- rousing British art hero.

This exhibition includes a photomontage reminiscent of one of her most famous works, the cover art for the single “Orgasm Addict” made for the punk band, the Buzzcocks in 1977. This work shows a woman’s naked body covered in oil with an iron as a head and perfect smiles placed strategically on her breasts. While this, along with Sterling’s other early works, relied on found images from local magazines and newspapers, her post-2006 montages matured in imagery. In the ’70s, she sourced material from men's pornographic magazines and women's homeware catalogues, later expanding to more diverse sources, creating richer juxtapositions.

Throughout the years, Linder’s process has evolved but she has continued to investigate the shifting trends in lifestyles, sex, domesticity, and fashion that propel feminist conversations and inspire necessary rebellion.

Danger Came Smiling opens today and is on view through May 5 at the Hayward Gallery,  London.

 

Linder Untitled, 1976. Tate, purchased 2007. © Linder. Photo: Tate.

 

Ellen Carpenter's “Hair Care:” Devotion and Responsibility in the Hands of a Caretaker

Lovingly, in a starch white nightgown, Ellen Carpenter tended to a wooden chair dressed with synthetic hair in her two-hour-long performance at John Street Gallery.

text and photos by Maisie McDermid

Minutes before Ellen Carpenter's 2-hour-long performance of "Hair Care" began, Chair II sat below a spotlight at the end of a white hallway doubling as a staircase. The levels leading down to the curious furniture piece showcased twenty other art pieces contributing to John Street Gallery's latest collection, "Misery's Child" – a black rubber-coated rocking horse, an oil painting of two swans on a lake, and various stoneware pieces. But Chair II, the result of 40 hours of tedious sewing, stood proudly, awaiting Carpenter's adoring hands.

"I know the chairs very intimately," Brooklyn-based multimedia artist Carpenter said, describing the many hours spent at the legs of these chairs sewing. While joining individual locks of synthetic hair onto polyester stretch fabric, she tended to the chair in front of an intimate group of viewers seated amongst the gallery steps on the show's February 6 performance. Dark skies outside contrasted sharply with the white, fluorescent lights illuminating Carpenter's acts of devotion: combing, shampooing, conditioning, blow drying, and braiding the hanging hair. 

Carpenter's cleansing and styling of Chair II contributes to a two-part performance: "Hair Care" and "Ruining My Life In Public." Both explore emotional extremes that occur within Carpenter's body and domestic space. One inhabits devotion and tenderness, while the other exposes rage and violence. The idea for "Hair Care" came to Carpenter while untangling, brushing, and braiding Chair I's hair before routinely putting it into storage. "It's a laborious process that often feels simultaneously thankless and required of me. After a while, I felt like this labor was a piece in and of itself," she said. 

Carpenter had not performed "Hair Care" live before this evening (her first performance of “Hair Care” was virtual.). "I think I practice the performance every time I take a shower," she said, laughing. Carpenter, either kneeling or seated with her legs crossed, catered to individual sections of Chair II's hair at a time, not one strand going unnoticed. The chair took several different forms: straightened after brushing, droopy after sponging, fluffy after blow drying, and twisted after braiding. Carpenter's hands matched a rhythm, not of sound, but of obsession. Carpenter, at times, appeared under a spell, surprising even herself when the chair called for a new demand. 

Carpenter fetched water from outside the tall, cloudy glass door beside her leading into a hidden portion of the gallery. The sounds from behind the door, amongst no other, provoked a confronting familiarity. The door's hinges sounded like ones from one's own home, and the dumping and refilling of water buckets reminded one of their own bathroom sink. "I loved the idea of ‘fetching water’ in service of the chair, especially since I could incorporate the use of opening and closing the gallery door as if it was my own apartment… Leaving the room also helped me incorporate short visual pauses into the piece without impeding my actual progress."

Her departures from the chair were brief but felt much longer. As the chair began to assume characteristics of both power and powerlessness, the absence of Carpenter created a feeling of uneasiness. Viewers wondered what would happen if Carpenter left and never returned, therefore leaving Chair II in a permanent state of incompletion. Carpenter's dependence on Chair II (the need to care for another) and Chair II's dependence on Carpenter (inherently incapable itself) oscillated throughout the performance – their interdependence the central theme. 

Carpenter's work pecked and pulled at living contradictions. "In 'Hair Care,' I inhabit the role of a caretaker in service to something outside myself, but in 'Ruining My Life in Public,' I inhabit the role of antagonizer or perpetrator of violence, and both roles are equally possible, equally true of almost anyone," she added. As much as Carpenter displayed relaxation and intention, she also exuded exhaustion and fatigue. When Carpenter stood to grab a hairbrush or rubber band, she stretched her back and wiped her bangs to the side of her face. Every now and then, a sigh slipped from her focused composure. Beyond devotion, this piece is about the heavy undertones of responsibility. 

For Carpenter, this, too, is a piece about agency. "Something about enacting performance with my body, with my full agency, is really powerful to me." As a multimedia artist, performance art is only one of her several other forms of expression. Notably, it is one she exercises the least. Nonetheless, she owns it, literally. "I can't be separated from the piece; in fact, the piece doesn't exist if I'm not there to perform it. That lack of separation feels like shouting 'I claim this thing!!' to everyone watching."

“Hair Care” is part of a group show titled, “Misery’s Child.” Ellen Carpenter’s live performance took place on February 6th, 2025. Chair II and the twenty other contributions are on display at John Street Gallery through February 12th, 2025.

Zoe Chait's 'What Dream' Is An Exploration Of Grief and Loss @ Micki Meng In Paris

 

Zoe Chait
cheeky, 2019
Archival pigment print
23 x 17 x 1 1/2 inches
Edition 1 of 3 + 2AP

 

Grief is unpredictable. It doesn’t follow a pattern, but it often brings us back to the same memories, searching for answers or comfort. We turn to photos, notes, and objects, trying to find meaning in them. Over time, both our perspective and the materials change.

Zoe Chait’s exhibition, What dream, revisits images first shown at Ramiken, New York, in 2021. These thirteen works document Chait’s relationship with music producer Sophie, capturing moments from 2017 to 2020 as Sophie transitioned from a private individual to the public figure SOPHIE. While the photos are intimate, they also highlight a sense of distance—the gap between personal connection and public persona. Chait’s work reflects an effort to reconcile the Sophie she knew with the one the world saw.

Sophie died in an accidental fall on January 30, 2021, six months before the exhibition opened. Nearly four years later, Chait revisited these images, altering them in response to her grief. She worked with printed positives and negatives, abstracting the images to explore themes of presence and absence. Sophie’s influence—her rituals, worldview, and music’s distinctive texture—continues to shape these works, which remain both unfinished and complete.

In Mexico City, Chait collaborated with a master printer of photogravure, a 19th-century printing process using etched copper plates and a gelatin resist. Chait was drawn to the unetched plates, mid-process, where the gelatin resist formed ghostly images on the copper. What dream features two pairs of such works, each showing a positive and negative version of the same image. The exhibition’s title comes from the first, a still from a video shoot where Sophie appears poised under dramatic lighting. The second image shows Sophie lying nude on a bed, open and serene. These works are material and painterly, presenting images that feel incomplete and vulnerable to time.

Chait also reimagined her video installation, projection reflected (2017–2020). Projected onto aluminum panels with varied grain alignments, the videos capture intimate moments between the artist, Sophie, and the camera. One video shows Sophie adjusting her hair before a shoot, focusing on her public image. Another captures Chait gently moving Sophie’s chin in soft afternoon light. Ambient sounds—breathing, pauses, background noise—create a sense of continuity. The videos loop at different lengths, offering endless opportunities to revisit and reinterpret these moments.

What dream is on view through February 20 by appointment only @ Micki Meng 2 Rue Beaubourg Paris 4e

Mathilde Denize's Sound of Figures Reverberates Through Perrotin in New York

The melodic sensibility of Mathilde Denize’s visual style is at the center of Sound of Figures at Perrotin in New York. Reused from film sets, her materials are born-again into an environment that is altogether new. Denize’s combination of painting, sculpture, and figure feels almost archaeological—we are transported to a retrospective that is not actually of the past. 

Her use of color and form might match stereotypical notions of femininity, but her finished products are anything but. Denize’s paintings are akin to faces printed with makeup—picture a cheek coated in blush. There’s a corporeality to her two-dimensional work that makes it feel as though it’d be warm to the touch.

The entrancing and other-worldly nature of her work speaks to a certain feminine mystique contemporarily neglected in favor of a testosterone-centric mainstream. Using an impressive amalgamation of material and medium, Denize plays the song of a nuanced female experience without having to produce any noise.

Sound of Figures is on view through February 19 at Perrotin, 130 Orchard Street, New York, NY, 10002

Lauren Halsey "emajendat" @ Serpentine South Gallery In London

Lauren Halsey’s three-room exhibition at London’s Serpentine South Gallery showcases miniature worlds within her world of South Central Los Angeles. The rooms are entry points into Halsey’s equally youthful and sharp mind, demonstrating, in material excess, what should never be lost from a neighborhood vulnerable to gentrification.

Text and photos by Maisie McDermid

LA-based artist Lauren Halsey installs a South Central Los Angeles universe within Kensington Gardens at South Serpentine Gallery. She advances the essence of one of her greatest passions, architecture, by constructing the central ideas of her first UK solo exhibition: funk fantasy, South Central backyard culture, maximalism, and technicolor transcendence. From the books about funk stacked onto clouds to the palm branches standing in spray-painted neon pots, emajendat is a garden of dreams, literally. 

Her characteristic power of materializing systematic issues confronting people of color, queer populations, and the working class is ever present in this space. Having only recently completed her MET roof garden commission in October 2023, the eastside of south central los angeles hieroglyph prototype architecture (I), and her 60th Venice Biennale exhibition, keepers of the krown, in 2024, Halsey brings commendable energy to three rooms in London. 

The first room, tiled with animal-print carpets and enclosed with galaxy wallpaper, feels like a psychedelic living room. At the center of the room, a rainbow joins two of emajendat’s most iconic objects, “funk mounds” (hardened white clouds scattered throughout all rooms). Just below the clouds, a carpet depicts five children praying. Cut-outs of Egyptian pyramids lined with sparkles stick to the walls, hinting at Halsey’s fascination with ancient Egyptian architecture in a contemporary context. Curiously, the only prominent object left unpainted in the exhibition exists in this first room: a luxurious modern house with Black figures holding each other and swaying on the roof. 

Halsey’s interest in objects as symbols is loud between these three rooms; dime-sized ballerina figures and palm-sized palm trees fill the corners of emajendat. Her mementos from years of collecting speak to visors. Like the symbols within Hieroglyphs, each of Halsey’s mementos means something new when put beside each other in thoughtfully curated scenes. Her collection of items becomes her own language, singular items that, when brought together, add life to the crevices of her imagined universe. The exhibition is far from what may casually be understood as hoarding; it is instead a demonstration of lovingly categorized remembering. 

The following room opens the exhibition view to Kensington Gardens, much gloomier behind colorfully tinted windows. A monitor projects a video of two South Central locals dancing on a loop, prompting one to wonder why Halsey refrains from including sound in any of the rooms. The rhythm and tunes seem to instead vibrate through the many cut-out photographs of legendary Black singers and dancers joining together on the floor-to-ceiling photomontage. Halsey’s collages are where her artistic mastery radiates. She bridges time and space by positioning an Egyptian pharaoh beside a group of Black men from the 80’s and a line of kids hand-in-hand before ancient pyramids. 

Palm trees made out of mirrors stand before this lively wall, reflecting the layered photos. But one differs from the others. The tallest tree model in the room commemorates several Black women who were murdered by a serial killer in South Central in the early 2000s. Their photographs appear on the branches and trunk, reminding visitors of their collective story, while a mirror at the base reflects both the women in the palm tree and the faces on the collage wall behind them. 

The windy, silver path through purple mounds of sand eventually ends at the opening of the third and final scene. CDs overlap in rows on the four walls like fish scales, and the glass flooring exposes items below: photos of friends, three-dimensional clouds, local high school graduate certificates, and more and more and more. The contents of Halsey’s mind wrap visitors above, below, and all around. There is even a carved-out seat within one of the rainbow, spray-painted mounds where one can look and wonder about the central figure in the room. 

A life-size figurine of a young Black girl dressed in all the animal patterns and neon tints shown in the first two rooms crouches over a circle of concrete with a pencil in hand. She holds a focused face similar to the faces of children praying on a carpet in the first room. Only, rather than praying, she is creating. The statement piece centers Halsey’s themes taped, layered, and squeezed into the three connecting rooms. This is an exhibition about desperately creating to preserve. It is about making what is old new again, “remixing,” as Halsey would put it. 

Halsey’s strength is in channeling a young mind at play with her neighborhood’s confrontation with gentrification. Visitors feel her presence in the rooms, envisioning her seated before the collage wall with piles of cut-outs beside her, making thousands of decisions on placement. To imagine all items within emajendat standing in a line before a white wall shows just how much Halsey creates by picking up a cut-out book on funk and taping paper hands in prayer at its book seam. 

Lauren Halsey’s emajendat will be open from 11 October 2024 - 23 February 2025 at Serpentine South Gallery. Free entry.

Pro Tips For Navigating An Art Fair: Getting the Most Out of Your Shopping Experience at Art Basel Miami Beach

Moffat Takadiwa
Zuva/Sun, 2024
toothbrushes, computer keys, bottle caps and nail cable clips
68 7/8 x 61 x 3 1/8 in 175 x 155 x 8 cm
Courtesy of the artist and Nicodim

text by Janelle Zara

“How’s the fair this year?” an Uber driver asked me during Art Basel Miami Beach last week. Although, this edition was less sensational than others, I told him every year can be described in more or less the same way: out of a couple thousand works, maybe a couple hundred are good, and a few dozen might be great—the trick is just knowing how to find them. 

 
 

Think of an art fair like a high-end shopping mall. The anchor tenants are major blue-chip galleries—David Zwirner, Pace, Hauser & Wirth, Gagosian, etc…—that offer brand name works at luxury prices while feeling increasingly mass produced. The Anish Kapoor disc for example, sold at Gagosian, Lisson, Kukje, Regen Projects and more, was the “it” bag of artworks for many years, being instantly recognizable, ubiquitous, and available in many colorways. These days that’s Alicja Kwade’s rock-and-chair sculptures like Binding Finding (2024) in Pace’s booth: offered in different variations of heights, rocks and styles of chair, this body of work is meant to evoke the weight and texture of nature in contrast with the quotidian and manmade. Having seen some version of them at every edition of Art Basel this year, I find something unconvincing in their finishes; mostly they feel like a product line manufactured specifically for art fairs. Another art fair staple is the Kusama pumpkin, available in bronze at David Zwirner or stainless steel at Victoria Miro. There’s also Jenny Holzer’s silkscreen paintings of redacted government documents coated in gold leaf, including irregular (2024) in Sprüth Magers’ booth. Formally inert and made of fine materials, they’re everything you want in quiet luxury. 

 

Jenny Holzer
irregular, 2024
Text: US government document
24k gold and red gold leaf and oil on linen
61 x 46.2 x 3.8 cm | 24 x 18 1/8 x 1 1/2 inches
© 2024 Jenny Holzer, member Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Courtesy Sprüth Magers
Photo: Sveva Costa Sanseverino

 

The blue-chip galleries also carry vintage treasures, like David Hammons Rock Head (2000) in White Cube’s booth, part of a body of work where the artist arranged the sweepings from a Harlem barbershop floor on an actual stone. This one in particular evinces a barber’s precision, where neat parallel incisions gesture toward cornrows. If you’re specifically seeking vintage, a whole corner of the fair specializes in the secondary market; you can always find a few Picassos at Helly Nahmad or Acquavella. If you’re seeking trends at lower price points, middle-tier gallery offerings can range from high quality dupes to fast fashion copies. Let’s say Joan Mitchell or even Oscar Murillo are out of your budget: this year I saw plenty of derivative scribbly abstraction that was pretty much indistinguishable from one canvas to the next. 

 
 

For the less commercial, more challenging, conceptual, one-of-a-kind stuff, the indie boutiques are in the curated sections around the edges. The fair’s Survey sector is for historical presentations, like Parisian gallery Eric Mouchet’s booth of South African artist Kendall Geers’ works from before 2000. Each piece resonates with either explicit or implicit violence, where an example of the former is Suburbia (1999), first seen in Okwui Enwezor’s Documenta 11. The grid of photographs of apartheid-era Johannesburg walls threatening potential intruders with barbed wire, electric fences, and armed security signage. Bible Belt (1988) carries an implicit violence, but maybe the good kind; the sculpture features a holy book bound by a leather strap in a way that evokes S&M. Next door in the Daegu- and Seoul-based gallery Wooson’s booth was a solo presentation of Choi Byung-so, whose subversions were decidedly more subtle. Taking pencil and ballpoint pen to newsprint, the South Korean artist developed a practice of drawing as many lines as his material could physically bear, producing illegible, blackened pages sliced into rhythmic patterns. I was particularly mesmerized by Portia Munson’s Bound Angels (2021), shown by PPOW in the Meridians sector of large-scale works. It was a table covered in lamps with uncovered bulbs among angelic figurines methodically tied in white string; a little on-the-nose in its symbolism—the artist describes the piece in terms of the social bondage of womanhood—but beautiful and luminous in a way that attracted viewers like moths to a flame. 

JORDAN NASSAR
Song of the Flowers, 2022
Hand-embroidered cotton on cotton
130 x 245 x 3 in.
330.2 x 622.3 x 8 cm.
© Jordan Nassar 2024. Courtesy the artist and James Cohan, New York.
Photo by Mel Taing.

Trending this year were textile works, and some of them were good. The not good ones used the medium as a literal and uninspired translation of a painting or photograph, rather than exploring fiber’s formal potential or really anything beyond baseline technique. These include Erin M. Riley at PPOW and Sanford Biggers at David Castillo. The good ones leaned into the qualities that distinguish fiber from other materials, like Do Ho Suh’s Myselves, 2013, a Nude Descending a Staircase-style self portrait drawn in tangled and layered threads at STPI. Jordan Nassar’s landscapes of traditional Palestinian embroidery were shown by both Anat Ebgi and James Cohan. Not advancing the craft in any particular way, they were decidedly decorative but undeniably, even profoundly beautiful. My favorite weaving actually wasn’t made of textile at all; in Nicodim’s booth, Moffat Takadiwa’s wall-mounted assemblage Big Brother Africa, 2024, was made of toothbrushes and computer keys. Under the artist’s direction these materials somehow change their physical properties; hard, discarded plastics become fibrous tendrils or glossy porcelain. Every time I see Takadiwa’s work, I utter my highest compliment: “Now that’s a fucking artist.”  

Do Ho Suh
Myselves, 2013
Thread drawing embedded in STPI handmade cotton paper
167.5 x 131 cm.
© Do Ho Suh. Photo courtesy of the artist and STPI – Creative Workshop & Gallery, Singapore.

Moffat Takadiwa
Big Brother Africa, 2024
toothbrushes, computer and laptop keys
98 3/8 x 55 7/8 x 2 in 250 x 142 x 5 cm
Courtesy of the artist and Nicodim

Gala Porras-Kim Reimagines Museums to Rethink Traditional Cataloging Systems in her LACMA Art + Technology Lab Project

Gala Porras-Kim: Expansive Data Fields is the third and final film from Hyundai Artlab centered around the LACMA Art + Technology Lab—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 film focuses on Expansive Data Fields, the 2023 LACMA Art + Technology Lab project developed by Los Angeles-London-based artist Gala Porras-Kim. In this project, Porras-Kim worked closely with the museum to address gaps in its cataloging systems, proposing new database fields that expand how cultural artifacts are registered, conserved, and displayed. By introducing methods that go beyond traditional frameworks, her intervention allows for a richer and more multifaceted understanding of these objects, opening up possibilities for alternative narratives about their historical significance and ongoing functions.

Porras-Kim’s multidisciplinary practice incorporates meticulous research, drawing, and collaboration with museum professionals to question how institutions shape the stories of the objects they preserve. The film delves into her creative process, highlighting her ability to bridge art, history, and technology to rethink how museums define and display cultural heritage. Gala Porras-Kim: Expansive Data Fields explores the evolving roles of objects within collections ultimately demonstrating how cultural artifacts can be understood in more inclusive and dynamic ways.

Watch the full film on Hyundai Artlab

The Mythology of the American West: An Interview of Sol Summers →

 

Image courtesy of Untitled and Sol Summers.

 

interview by Oliver Kupper
intro by Mia Milosevic

Experimenting with concepts of extremism, Sol Summers manifests the mythology of the American West in a way that refuses to compromise its own convictions. Channeling the human propensity to accept the bizarre without further questioning, Summers fuses synthetic pigments into his work which traditional landscape paintings would fervently exclude. Using the desert as a respite from the entrapments of capitalist requirements–ambition, success, renown–Summers opens up a space for honest introspection and lends a sincere sense of dignity to solitude. His admiration of Russian Realism fuses seamlessly into his appreciation for the cactus–according to Summers, limitation, hardship, and scarcity are truly fertile grounds for creativity. Sol Summers will bring his surrealist manifestations of nature to Untitled Art in Miami this December. Read more.

Fall into a crevice of the human mind @ Perrotin in New York

text by Mia Milosevic

Jesper Just’s surrealist film, Interfears, is an eerie dreamscape documenting the neurological manifestation of emotion. The film, alongside an accompanying series of MRI prints, is currently on view at Perrotin in New York until December 21. 

On the second floor of 130 Orchard Street, positioned in a dark enclave to the left of the hallway, is Jesper Just’s neuroscientific pursuit into the emotional mind. Starring Academy Award nominee Matt Dillon, the film on display documents his character in a state of relative turmoil. He recites a monologue from the discomfort of an fMRI, which highlights the entrapment of the mind in its own neural net. As Dillon endeavors to portray an invented character, Interfears logs his authentic response, dismantling the separation generally accredited to the actor and his assigned role.

Breaking from conventional narrative structure, the film leverages MRI technology to aesthetically analyze emotional processing. The utilization of the clinical, private space strategically enunciates the natural paranoia our own minds force upon us in moments of solitude. Broadcasted on the ceiling of the otherwise sterile environment is a blue sky and a collection of palm trees. This illumination, amidst the otherwise corporate ceiling, starkly contrasts the internal neural processing of the character lying beneath it. Our own ironic sense of confinement, in contrast to the abyss which remains consistently above us, becomes jarringly apparent.

Facing the film, alongside the viewers, are three MRI prints which display brain activity via coloration of varying human emotions–terror, joy, and sadness. To witness movement on the MRI when someone is organizing their memories and thoughts is separative in a way that is abstractly terrifying. It doesn’t feel like we should be able to see the sensations which we might already doubt the legitimacy of. Further, the assignment of a region on the brain to one emotion or another actually does the opposite to demystifying the concept of our own emotional sourcing. Just’s propensity to provoke further inquiry is writ large. 

The cinematic musical composition is dreamlike for the entirety of the film, its resonance reminiscent of the distance we generally feel between action and volition when in the thick of a bad dream. Gustave Mahler’s Fifth Symphony Adagietto both activates and follows Dillon’s affective voyage throughout the piece, exploiting the role of sound in emotional exploration.

At one point in the film, Dillon recounts what appears to be a distant and potentially aversive memory.

“I’m outside the concert hall on the stairs.

My face, numb and freezing.

I hear laughter.

Golden light.

Red velvet seats.”

The image is vivid, and the description relatable. The dimly lit hue of Dillon’s memory is grounded by the environment it’s recounted in.

Installation view of Jesper Just’s Interfears at Perrotin New York, 2024. ©Jesper Just 2024. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin.

Interfears is on view through December 21 @ Perrotin, 130 Orchard Street New York, NY 10002

Read an Interview of OpenAI's First Artist in Residence →

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