Sixties Surreal Reconceives Postwar Social Upheavals @ Whitney Museum of Art in New York

text by Caia Cupolo

photography by Matthew Carasella

Women walking by Peter Saul's Saigon painting

Installation view of Sixties Surreal (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, September 24, 2025–Jan 19, 2026). Peter Saul, Saigon, 1967. Photograph by Matthew Carasella

When you step off the elevator onto the 5th floor at the Whitney Museum, you enter a scene of three life-size camels against a bright orange-red wall. This feels almost misplaced  as a leading work in the exhibition, but it’s only at the end  when viewers find their way to a didactic that describes the illogical nature of camels—from four stomachs to a dislocating jaw—but they still exist. Reality is strange.


Sixties Surreal, currently on view at the Whitney Museum of Art, is a compelling argument that Surrealism was far from dead in the era of Pop Art. An argument that takes form in the shape of sculptures made from “junk,” otherworldly paintings, and haunting photographs. The curatorial team brilliantly positioned this collection not as a nostalgic look back, but as a critical examination of how the classic movement, built on Freudian theory, mutated into a politically-charged, media-saturated, and truly American force during the decade of cultural upheaval.


The exhibition’s core power lies in its unflinching focus on the era’s social and political injustices. This is exemplified in Noah Purifoy’s “Untitled (66 Signs of Neon),” made following the Watts Rebellion. Purifoy walked the streets of litter and so-called junk, where he aimed to give new life to these found objects. Taking the objects out of a negative context to put into his art brings a new, empowering meaning and reclaiming of the events. The rubble that made its way into the piece has a darkness that emulates a haunting past, but is put into a new environment surrounded by stamped symbols and words. Surrealism emerged as the ultimate tool for protesting the unspoken contracts of the era.

Installation view of Sixties Surreal showing Camel VI, Camel VII and Camel VIII by Nancy Graves

Installation view of Sixties Surreal (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, September 24, 2025–Jan 19, 2026). Nancy Graves, Camel VI, Camel VII and Camel VIII, 1968–1969. Photograph by Matthew Carasella

This strain of Surrealism is deeply intertwined with the proliferation of television. The medium didn’t just report the news of upheaval to the American public; it delivered the chaotic images of war and protest directly into their living rooms, fusing reality with performance. The curatorial choice to present the exhibit in highly contrasted environments—sudden walls of hot pink interrupting stark, institutional grey—serves the subject matter well. It forces a jarring, non-linear experience that mimics the sensory overload and fractured perception delivered by the blinking, often distorting, television screen. The consistent use of small, scattered screens looping avant-garde animated shorts throughout the galleries is a clever tactic, effectively tying the artwork to the rise of mass media and demonstrating how artists were already diagnosing the medium that would eventually dominate culture.


The consumerist boom could not be left out when discussing the post-World War II era. Martha Rosler’s “Kitchen I, or Hot Meat” was a piece that stood out in its portrayal of this phenomenon. Female body parts appear on appliances, leaving the greater message that women’s bodies were readily commodified and contorted to fit within their economically prescribed domestic roles. Rosler reminds us that the human body was not meant to fit onto an appliance, so women should not be forced to conform to any specific role. 


On a similar note of early feminism, Martha Edelheit’s “Flesh Wall with Table” is a breathtaking, large-scale repudiation of the male gaze. Edelhait depicts almost two dozen naked women lounging across the canvas. She did not use any models, opting instead to focus purely  on her perception. The women vary greatly in position, shape, and skin tone, most having non-flesh-colored skin, like shades of green and blue. As a female artist, there was a particular pride in painting female nudes, especially so many for such a large piece, when you consider how much of the canon is filled with nude women rendered by men. Lastly, near the center of the work, lies a white rectangle wherein a woman is painting. This is Edelheit including herself in the work, further empowering herself in the building of a utopia where women can relax.

Installation view of Sixties Surreal showing Claes Oldenburg's Soft Toilet sculpture and Alex Hay's Paper Bag sculpture

Installation view of Sixties Surreal (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, September 24, 2025–Jan 19, 2026). From left to right: Karl Wirsum, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, 1968; Claes Oldenburg, Soft Toilet, 1966; Alex Hay, Paper Bag, 1968; Lee Lozano, No Title, 1964. Photograph by Matthew Carasella

While the show occasionally leans into the obvious tropes of the era, its central thesis holds firm: Surrealism became the ultimate protest art of the 1960s. It provides a necessary historical correction, proving that the decade’s artistic legacy is not merely defined by Abstract Expressionism’s final bow or Pop Art’s slick surfaces, but by the messy, urgent, and deeply subconscious cries of the artists who tried to make sense of a world where domestic dreams were exposed by televised violence. It’s an essential, if disquieting, tour.

Sixties Surreal is on view through January 19, 2026 @ Whitney Museum of Art in New York 99 Gansevoort St, New York.

Judith Godwins’ First European Solo Exhibition Expressions of Life @ Pippy Houldsworth Gallery

Pippy Houldsworth Gallery presents American painter Judith Godwin's first European solo exhibition, Expressions of Life. The exhibition comprises an overview of the artist's work from the early 1950s - the period in which she was associated with the Abstract Expressionist movement - to the end of the century. The opening exhibition truly illustrates the artist’s lasting influence over the landscape of American art, despite the challenges she faced as a result of both her sex and sexuality.

Long underappreciated, Godwin’s contribution to the New York avant-garde has undergone recent revision following her inclusion in landmark exhibitions at the Denver Art Museum, Whitechapel Gallery and Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles, that offered a reappraisal of women abstractionists of the 20thcentury. Her thesis was – and remained – one of liberation from the conventions of a movement anchored in a language of masculinity and heteronormativity. Starkly aware of the limitations imposed on her by the milieu in which she practiced, Godwin sought to redefine such ‘masculine’ values by way of gestural abstractions that brought a loose geometry into dialogue with nature, dance and Zen philosophy. Her innovative reorientation of the language of modernism remains a radical statement today.

 

Godwin’s interactions with the New York art world began early in her career. As a student at the Mary Baldwin College in her native Virginia, she sought the acquaintance of the modern dancer and choreographer Martha Graham. Godwin’s invitation to Graham to perform at her college laid the foundations for a lifelong friendship between the two, and Graham’s trailblazing path in a world dominated by men became a touchstone for Godwin. The diaphanous washes of colour, colliding forms and sensuous arcs which characterise Godwin’s works from the early 1950s are indebted to Graham, whose performances she frequented on arrival in New York, often watching from the wings.

 

By 1953 Godwin had settled in New York and was continuing her artistic education under Hans Hofmann, whose influence can be seen in her dynamic approach to composition and colour. Provincetown Summer, 1953, exemplifies Godwin’s facility for translating depth and volume into two dimensions. Introduced to Zen Buddhism by Abstract Expressionist painter Kenzo Okada, such philosophies began to play a larger role in her painting, encapsulated by calligraphic brushwork, redolent too of Franz Kline, another close friend of Godwin’s. As the 1950s continued, the artist’s work took on larger proportions and a darker palette, all the while maintaining an organicism and proclivity for light and space in her evocation of the spiritual in nature. Her vigorous abstractions caught the attention of influential art dealer Betty Parsons, who included Godwin as the youngest artist in the inaugural exhibition at Section Eleven Gallery in 1958 alongside artists including Agnes Martin, and went on to present solo exhibitions of her work in 1959 and 1960.

 

During the 1960s, as Pop Art and Minimalism began their ascent, Godwin distanced herself from the New York art world, retreating instead to Connecticut where she worked restoring 18th-century homes and trained in masonry, carpentry and landscape design. Her return to New York in 1974 saw a change in her paintings, which demonstrated a robust communion with the outdoors and a physicality that invoked the power of nature. With its assertive cardamom red palette and esoteric iconography, Elegy to a Slain Deer, 1975, captures Godwin’s investigation of the relationship between the physical and metaphysical. As in her paintings of the 1950s, her keen appreciation of the corporeal form is palpable in the material presence of her body on the canvas, in body-length arcs of the brush that express her movements with agency. The liberation of the body and its inherent sensuality continued to play a central role in Godwin’s works of the 1980s and 1990s, as articulated by the flesh-inflected palette of The Nest, 1994. Godwin died in 2021 at the age of 91, just as her work began to reach new audiences worldwide. Her lasting legacy is in the transformative nature of her practice, which successfully recalibrated the masculine language of gestural abstraction, shifting representations of womanhood and sexual identity on the canvas.

Expressions of Life is on view through March 9 @ Pippy Houldsworth Gallery 6 Heddon St, London W1B 4BT, UK

Frank Bowling @ Tate Britain in London

Frank Bowling’s first major retrospective at the Tate Britain offers the chance to experience work created throughout all six decades of the artist’s career. Bowling has relentlessly explored the properties and possibilities of paint, experimenting with staining, pouring, layering, as well as a variety of materials. The exhibition includes paintings from his respectively more personal and abstract series in which Bowling has investigated the tension between geometry and fluidity. At 85 years-old, the artist continues to paint everyday creating work that relies on technical skill while embracing change and the unpredictable.

Frank Bowling is on view through August 26 at Tate Britain Millbank, Westminster, London. photographs courtesy of Tate Britain

Oscar Murillo: Manifestation @ David Zwirner London

A new series of paintings by the Columbian artist, Oscar Murillo, are on view for the first time at David Zwirner’s London gallery. Murillo’s manifestation paintings, in particular, represent a marked evolution in the artist’s engagement with process. These paintings explore a considered approach to mark-making, and when viewed together, highlight the artist’s inventive and engaging studio practice. The exhibition also includes a new installation building on Murillo’s sustained interest in travel and questions around labour and the geographical flow of humanity. The artist’s body of work demonstrates a nuanced understanding of globalization, and the multiple ways in which ideas, languages, and even everyday items are displaced and increasingly intermingled. Manifestation is on view through July 26 at David Zwirner 24 Grafton Street, London. photographs courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner.

Joan Mitchell: "I carry my landscapes around with me" @ David Zwirner New York

Joan Mitchell’s “I carry my landscapes around with me” is the first exhibition to focus on the artist’s multi-paneled paintings created across four decades. Mitchell established a singular approach to abstraction over the course of her career through her inventive interpretation of the traditional figure-ground relationship and synesthetic use of color. Her emotionally charged compositions evoke individuals, observations, places, and points in time. The horizontally oriented, panoramic expanse of Mitchell’s polyptych panels is ideally suited for landscapes—a poignant subject for the artist that she linked directly to memory. The exhibition features paintings from both public and private collections, as well as works drawn from the Joan Mitchell Foundation. “I carry my landscapes around with me” is on view through July 12 at David Zwirner 537 West 20th Street, New York. photographs courtesy of David Zwirner New York.

Bernhard Buhmann's 'My Automatic Me' @ Nino Mier Gallery In Los Angeles

Informed by a background in sociology, Vienna-based painter Bernhard Buhmann’s hard-edged, abstracted works speak to larger issues concerning the figure in a modern-day environment and therefore, humanity, as it engages with a society that is technologically advancing at an accelerated rate. The exhibition title, My Automatic Me, suggests themes which belong to today’s world of cyborgian post-humanism, digital avatars, virtual reality and artificial intelligence but with a sense of friendliness that is either uncanny or intimate - or both. As the world advances, forcing our animal behaviors to evolve towards Buhmann’s Automatic Me, the artist examines what it means to be human in this newfangled, spectacular landscape.

Buhmann’s whole body of work eventually fits together to form an integrated aesthetic matrix, capturing performative remnants of a sociological body, the crux of human condition disguised as a computer game, even attempts to calculate consciousness – each work a colorful, geometric portrait of our quickly evolving selves. My Automatic Me is on view through November 17 @ Nino Mier Gallery Two, 7313 Santa Monica Blvd., Los Angeles.

Opening Of Metamorphosis, Lightly (Intimacy Of Form) Group Show @ OOF Books

In a quest to challenge our perceptions of materiality, objectivity, gender identity and medium, Alex Rojas has curated a group show that pushes the individual boundaries of self.  Featured artists include Nasim Hantehzadeh, Carolyn Janssen, Larissa Lockshin, Erica Mahinay, Sophia Narrett, and Sarah Ann Weber. These works highlight the perennial and intimate connection with chaos inherent in human existence. Speaking to a desire for reason, these works provide intimate outlets for exploration and clarity through identity and physicality. The exhibition is on through July 1, 2018 at OOF Books 912A Cypress Ave. Los Angeles, CA 90065. photographs by Lani Trock