Gabriel Orozco Recontextualizes Albert Einstein's "Why Socialism?" Through the Lens of Contemporary Art & Politics @ Kurimanzutto New York

Installation View Why Socialism? by Albert Einstein curated by Gabriel Orozco, kurimanzutto New York, 2025. Photo: Zach Hyman.

text by Poppy Baring

Albert Einstein’s 1949 essay, “Why Socialism?” is as relevant now as it was almost seventy-five years ago. Featuring numerous artists’ responses to the essay, artist and curator Gabriel Orozco opens the show with a refined version of the text, presented as a collage of modest photocopies. Themes that are still eerily close to those that swell in today’s discourse are included, such as “private capital tends to be concentrated in few hands,” “legislative bodies are selected by political parties largely financed by private capitalists,” “production is carried on for profit not for use,” and “an exaggerated competitive attitude is inculcated into the student who is trained to worship acquisitive success.”

Installation View Why Socialism? by Albert Einstein curated by Gabriel Orozco, kurimanzutto New York, 2025. Photo: Zach Hyman

These brief summaries of Albert Einstein’s contestations of capitalism are still echoed in media today. In a recent interview with comedian Marc Maron, Barack Obama spoke about how our culture is geared toward consumption, material goods, and fame. The author Scott Galloways, when speaking with Piers Morgan, notes that innovation has somehow excused depravity, citing Elon Musk as a clear example. Geoffrey Hinton, one of the pioneers of modern AI and winner of the 2024 Nobel prize, warned audiences of the danger of digital beings created by companies motivated by short-term profits. The answer to these issues suggested by Einstein in “Why Socialism?” is a socialist economy and an educational system orientated towards social goals.

Installation View Why Socialism? by Albert Einstein curated by Gabriel Orozco, kurimanzutto New York, 2025. Photo: Zach Hyman.

While visitors are left with political thoughts ruminating, they enter the almost all black-and-white main room of the exhibition and approach large grayscale flags of United Nations members, made by Wilfredo Prieto in a piece called “Apolitico.” Their loss of color strips away any signs of allegiance or patriotism and presents these flags as interchangeable. Other works, such as Ariel Schlesinger’s “Burnt Newspapers,” show the fragility of historical records, which is brought up again in the final and most shocking part of the exhibition, “The Pegasus Stories” by Forensic Architecture. 

This video on digital violence reveals the terrifying real-life experiences of international human rights defenders, journalists, lawyers, and activists whose devices were infected and monitored by corporations using Pegasus, a destructive software developed by the Israeli cyber-weapons manufacturer NSO Group. Initially developed as just one part of Israel’s mass surveillance of Palestinians, Pegasus is now being used to target individuals across forty-five countries. In the passage for visitors to read before watching the film, they explain the American government’s public rejections of the software, as contrasted with its private acquisition of some of its tools from the NSO group’s U.S affiliate, epitomizing American hypocrisy and depravity at its finest.

This exhibition exposes visitors to an array of artists’ responses to Einstein’s essay. The stories reported in the final film are enough to leave you speechless, and overall, this display provides a dark and scary reflection of our current reality, which indeed supplies an answer to the question being posed.

Installation View Why Socialism? by Albert Einstein curated by Gabriel Orozco, kurimanzutto New York, 2025. Photo: Zach Hyman.

Featured artists include Ariel Schlesinger, Forensic Architecture, Minerva Cuevas, Petrit Halilaj, Robert Longo, Roman Ondak, Wilfredo Prieto, Zoe Leonard, and special guests.

Why Socialism? By Albert Einstein is on view through October 18 at Kurimanzutto 516 W 20th St, New York

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.

Inhuman Failures: Kennedy + Swan's "The Red Queen Effect" @ Schering Stiftung

Kennedy + Swan
The Red Queen Effect, 2025
Photograph


text by Arlo Kremen
images by Kennedy + Swan

The Schering Stiftung is both non-profit and gallery. Its mission: to bring artists in to make work that engages the cross-section of art, technology, and education. This is particularly true for its residency program at BIFOLD, the Berlin Institute for the Foundations of Learning and Data, titled Art of Entanglement, where selected artists become entrenched in the discourses of data management and machine learning. The residency culminates with a show at UNI_VERSUM at TU Berlin, which went up for collaborating artists Kennedy + Swan this past May. This show, THE NEVERENDING CURE, was adapted for its new display at the Schering Stiftung Project Space, now titled The Red Queen Effect.

The Red Queen Effect has two parts: Lung Portraits, lightboxes shining through chemical-treated ink on glass, and the titular work, a four-channel video installation. In the first, twelve lightboxes hang from a wall, forming a circle that climbs nearly to the top of its fixed support. Each work mimics bacterial landscapes of different lungs, albeit in a highly colorized fashion, from the perspective of a health professional’s microscope slide. Laser cuts in the glass identify potential health risks, such as cysts or melanoma, even identifying a rare subtype of breast cancer in one painting.

Kennedy + Swan
Lung Portraits, 2025
Ink on glass in a lightbox
60 x 60 cm

The artist duo merely painted these works, leaving the diagnoses to an AI model built on the study of lung tissue scans to recognize regional cancers and other cellular defects. In response to the AI model’s given diagnoses, the artists cut into the glass to write the identified issues and marked areas in the colorscape that the model had defined as problematic. This work proves rather didactic, for it poses an experiment to prove that current medical AI models have a crucial failing. They are quicker to misdiagnose than admit confusion or uncertainty, a remarkable tool for the kind of risk assessment required to treat anything from cysts in the lungs to micropapillary breast carcinoma.

The four-part video installation bears an architectural exoskeleton, holding each screen in white-tile structures, emblematic of the lab in which ALICE works. ALICE is the name of a new AI-based medical practice boasting an ambitious promise similar to that of Elizabeth Holmes’s Theranos, that with suitable samples, ALICE can identify all current and potential health risks. The installation stages a pilot run, inviting volunteers to apply for the first clinical trials. Through a series of rotating videos and images, twenty-two volunteers speak. Animated through red watercolor, each represents the variegated facets of the public debate around AI’s role in medicine. Activists, technocrats, transhumanists, skeptics, rebels, a twelve-year-old girl, and many more positionalities make up the volunteer base.

Kennedy + Swan
The Red Queen Effect, 2025
Video stills in a grid

The most common reason for applying among the participants is the general distrust of doctors, reflecting the frequent sentiment of distrust among people, positing AI as a non-human, transcendent entity. However, through the visualization of the laboratory, ALICE’s code, and the AI’s visualization as a doll-like baby, the human gesture is present. There is nothing transcendent or neutral about AI—it is of the human imagination, learning from human data and human language. Kennedy + Swan refuse to dislodge AI models from the pre-existing social systems that begot them, which are the very same systems from which many of the volunteers are trying to escape.

The Red Queen Effect is presented by Schering Stiftung and is on view through December 12 @ Schering Stiftung, Unter den Linden 32-34, 10117 Berlin.

Hank Willis Thomas' I AM MANY Implicates Us All in the Making of History

Hank Willis Thomas
Roots (After Bearden), 2023
screenprint and UV print on retroreflective vinyl, mounted on Dibond
97.625 × 122 × 3 inches (framed)

text by Hank Manning

Truth is black and white–or is it? In I AM MANY at Jack Shainman Gallery, Hank Willis Thomas invites us to consider how perspective changes our understanding of art, nationhood, oppression, solidarity, and the relationship between the past and present.

In direct reference to the 1,300 identical “I AM A MAN” signs carried during the Black sanitation workers strike of 1968, I AM MANY proposes itself as an antipode to the famed rallying cry. It was this demonstration where Dr. Martin Luther King delivered his speech, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop.”

As guests enter, the words “LOVE OVER RULES” blink in neon blue. To the left, one black and one white arm stretch towards the heavens, their hands grasped. This marble sculpture is titled Loving Day, in honor of Richard and Mildred Loving, the aptly surnamed couple whose legal battles enshrined the right to interracial marriage in America. 

Hank Willis Thomas
Community, 2024
Polished stainless steel
33.25 × 33.5 × 11.8125 inches

Upstairs, hands continue to feature prominently in the exhibition’s bronze and stainless steel statues. Hands impart the toll of one’s work, reach out for help, link together, call for action, but also violently apprehend. Hands direct actions from the aesthetic–grooming hair–to the existential–resisting or abetting violence.

Hank Willis Thomas
America (gray), 2025
mixed media including decommissioned US prison uniforms
68 x 159 x 1.25 inches

Each piece of Thomas’s visual art demands a second viewing: from a closer distance or a different angle, with more light or more context. Upon first glance, a wall work made partially from decommissioned prison uniforms spells out “AMERICA,” but as we approach, the letters become a dizzying maze. “EVERYTHING” on a lenticular print actually consists of innumerable small “NOTHING”s. Op art prints shift as we walk from left to right, challenging our understanding of the black-white dichotomy. In each of these works, our first impressions are betrayed by unexpected paradoxical interpretations. 

Hank Willis Thomas
Until Ex parte Endo, 2024
UV print on retroreflective vinyl, mounted on Dibond, decommissioned US flag
78.5 x 57.5 x 9 inches (framed and assembled)

With written instructions, the exhibition invites us to use a camera flash to uncover the palimpsestic nature of the work, revealing images that are often lost to history. Under an American flag and an old portrait of the US Capitol building, light reveals children of varied races pledging allegiance. Numerous faces of protestors, those who came together to fight and build our current world, appear etched into UV-printed retroreflective vinyl. In the final room upstairs, prints of the pamphlet “Black Survival Guide, or How to Live Through a Police Riot” hang. When illuminated, they unveil photographs of protesters, armed police, and smashed windows. One multiple mixed-media quilt is described as “reminiscent of a QR code,” emblematic of the way that the incarcerated are treated like “faceless numbers on a spreadsheet.” 

The late King’s presence and guidance are felt throughout the exhibition. But it is not his face hidden within the works. Rather, we see the thousands of people who listened to him declare, “I Have a Dream” at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Thomas forces us to reconsider not just how we understand our world today, but how we read history, from the slave trade to the Civil Rights movement to our present day. It is the story of not just a man, or any person, but many. The exhibition’s continuous and multifaceted interactivity nudges us: we too are part of the story and must move, shed light, think critically, and use our voices. 


Hank Willis Thomas: I AM MANY is on view until November 1 at Jack Shainman Gallery, 46 Lafayette Street, New York

From Giza to Memphis: Christelle Oyiri's "Dead God Flow" @ CANK Berlin

Christelle Oyiri
Hauntology of an OG, 2025
Video still
Courtesy of the artist, the LAS Art Foundation, Amant, and the Pinault Collection

text by Arlo Kremen
photography by Jacopo La Forgia
images by Christelle Oyiri and Neva Wireko

For Berlin Art Week, artist Christelle Oyiri teamed up with CEL, a freshly formed Black, female art collective, and Las Foundations to bring Berlin her first installation in the city at CANK in Neukölln, a retired 1950s mall turned event space. The exhibition shows alongside an event series by CEL called “Foundations.” One such event transformed the space into a nightclub of sorts, bringing several DJs to perform with Oyiri, who performs under the stage name Crystalmess, to headline. Unfortunately, Oyiri could not make it due to flight issues beyond her control, but its impact on the installation site remained palpable.

The installation sees CANK’s spacious second floor emptied. On one side, CEL projects a short film of their own; the other hosts two films of Oyiri’s, Hyperfate (2022) and Hauntology of an OG (2025). Between the two ends, darkness fills in the gap, with green and blue overhead fluorescents bleeding in and out to choral-like, electronic waves. Obscure darkness swells, not just with light, but also with something else, a numinous effect common to nightlife—a world in which, ideally, freedom is sovereign and individuals can collect into a symbiotic ecosystem, where, as Oyiri put it in an interview, music produces “unspoken connections.”

Christelle Oyiri
Dead God Flow, 2025
Courtesy of the artist, the LAS Art Foundation, Amant, and the Pinault Collection

Born and raised in the Paris region to Ivorian and Guadeloupean parents, Christelle Oyiri brings much of herself to her art practice. As an artist who occupies the nightlife world, she demonstrates great care for the poetics and politics of music and musicians, especially those of rap and rappers, the subject of her two films in Dead God Flow, where music brings her to look upon herself and her history in relation to these figures in Hyperfate and to adventure to Memphis, Tennessee, to look up close at one of southern rap’s capitals in Hauntology of an OG.

Hyperfate studies systems of power and surveillance within rap culture. Oyiri traces the culture’s relationship with death, noting how a rapper’s trajectory can significantly affect the probability of their death. The figure of the rapper, a sign of wealth and success, often becomes a target of envy and ridicule, particularly for rappers who come from gang-affiliated backgrounds. Such a dynamic only becomes exacerbated by constant self-surveillance online. It is through her reflection that Oyiri posits that the rap industry became so bloodied, thinking of rappers like Tupac, XXXTENTACION, Pop Smoke, and Takeoff as figures drawn to their premature deaths as prophecy, which is horrifically par for the course of their trade, dying by the same hand that gave them glory.

Oyiri ties in her own biography into the narrative, discussing her older brother’s path to winning the European championship inThai boxing and sharing footage of her childhood apartment building. Her filmed documentary footage, whether in Paris or driving around Pop Smoke’s neighborhood, Canarsie, Brooklyn, cuts between rappers’ IG lives and stories, images and videos of her and her family, and a supernova, grouping personal narrative with the historical to sublimate it. The question of prophetic deaths and material realities of racial capitalism becomes enlarged, cosmic questions with existentially urgent consequences.

Developed alongside photographer Veva Wireko in Memphis, Tennessee, and narrated by poet-rapper Darius Phatmak Clayton, Hauntology of an OG positions Memphis as a reference to ancient Egypt, with one pyramid serving as a parallel to the other. Oyiri understands the pyramid as a symbol of “death, continuity, and hierarchy,” looping the pyramid on the Mississippi River into a symbolic lineage that speaks directly to the contexts in which Memphis rap emerged—namely, the end of the futurity expressed by Martin Luther King Jr. after his death in 1968. Giving his last speech in Memphis, Oyiri sees the city’s rap culture as somewhat of an elegy to this snuffed-out dream. A since-past desire for an alternative future tormented by the vitriolic racism Black Americans endure, particularly in the poor, Bible Belt city of Memphis, where this past April, Clayborn Temple, a Black church community center and the historic organizing point for King Jr., was intentionally burned down. 

Christelle Oyiri
Hauntology of an OG, 2025
Courtesy of the artist, the LAS Art Foundation, Amant, and the Pinault Collection

The pyramid’s construction was completed in 1991 and was intended to serve as an entertainment venue for concerts and sports. However, today, the structure is a shopping center, housing the Bass Pro Shop megastore, among other commercial enterprises. Rather than a theological monument to a deceased pharaoh, Memphis’s pyramid memorializes and upholds the economic episteme that produced it, liberal capitalism; thus, Memphis rap produces a different monument, a sonic architecture dedicated to histories of struggle. The show’s title, Dead God Flow, refers to Nietzsche’s “God is Dead” concept, where Oyiri witnesses Nietzsche’s epistemic utterance in Memphis’s rappers, hearing in their flows a call for a new future.

Dead God Flow is presented by LAS Art Foundation and is on view through October 19 @ CANK, Karl-Marx-Straße 95, Berlin-Neukölln

Theo Bardsley’s Renderings of Sunday: Between Irony and Affection

 
 

text by Emma Grimes

At Court Tree Collective, a family-run gallery devoted to emerging artists, the London-based painter Theo Bardsley is on view with Two Sides of Sunday, a series of new works in azure blues, forest greens, and autumnal browns. His paintings capture the many ways people spend a Sunday—binge-watching Netflix, bathing, fighting a hangover—with a gaze that floats between affection and irony.

In Hair Of The Dog, a dapper, lonely man nurses his hangover in a stylish pub. Two pints of Guinness rest on the table, one full, one empty and nudged to the side. The outline of the drained glass looks as if it could have been drawn in chalk, the paint appearing coarse and granular.

In another work, The Late Rise and The Early Smoker, Bardsley employs the same technique on an ashtray. Behind a sleeping woman tangled in a blanket, a man smokes. On the table beside him sits an ashtray, rendered only in outline. His work stops just shy of completion, as if these tableaus are a faint memory from a dream. 

Theo Bardsley
The Late Rise and The Early Smoker, 2025
Oil on canvas
44 × 32 in
Courtesy of Court Tree Collective

Both these scenes and his other works carry a distinct melancholy. Even when the figures aren’t physically alone on the canvas—and many are—there is distance and isolation even in shared moments. Everyone in Bardsley’s world appears preoccupied and never fully present, like the incomplete renderings of the pint and ashtray.

Like his Naive art predecessors, Bardsley flattens space and eschews practical details. The smoker’s hand, for instance, is an oblong blob that’s legible as a hand only by its placement. The smoke drifts out of the man’s mouth in cloudy, gray-white flecks. Each is a small, deliberate stroke. There’s a tension between these static, almost tangible bits of smoke and the movement they imply. Bardsley makes such a fleeting moment feel graspable. 

In A Face Mask and Leftovers for Breakfast, a figure in a red robe and green face mask sits lost in thought. On the table before them sits a takeout box, a moka pot, and an orange Penguin Classics edition of Pride and Prejudice. Behind the figure, an open window frames leafy trees, and beside it hangs a solemn portrait. Bardsley seems to wink at artistic conventions—the idealized landscape, the serious portrait—while guiding our gaze instead toward a figure in a face mask eating from a box of leftovers. His humor lies in this elevation of the mundane and his self-aware pleasure in painting it.

His works are titled with a blunt literalness, as if to dissuade anyone from searching for deeper meaning. In one work, the title itself is a joke. A brunette woman is draped across a velvety red bed, her head resting in the crook of her elbow with a remote control at her side. The painting is called Are You Still Watching, referencing Netflix’s familiar notification to viewers who’ve been watching a show for hours.

Theo Bardlsey
Are You Still Watching, 2025
Oil on canvas
32 × 44 in
Courtesy of Court Tree Collective

Rather than painting picturesque landscapes or serious portraiture, of which he references within his own paintings, Bardsley paints the quotidianness of domestic, modern life with both a solemn melancholy and a deadpan seriousness that’s impossible not to find humorous. And he’s laughing too.

Two Sides of Sunday is on view through October 11 at Court Tree Collective, 51 35th Street, New York.

Sasha Gordon: A Gaze Cutting Inward

 

Sasha Gordon
Flame Like Blush, 2024
Oil on linen
60 x 60 1/4 inches
Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York

 

text by Emma Grimes

On an unpleasantly hot and humid September evening, unfazed and well-dressed New Yorkers filed into David Zwirner Gallery, where the latest work from Brooklyn-based artist Sasha Gordon is on view.

Last year, David Zwirner and Matthew Brown announced that they would co-represent Gordon. While still a student at the Rhode Island School of Design in 2019, she showed some work with Brown and began her rise to prominence. Most recently, she had a solo show at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami. 

Haze consists of seven paintings that turn inwards, probing Gordon’s complicated relationship with herself. Her hyperrealist self-portraits, often using neon hues, almost seem to glow. And she includes surreal splashes: a chain of tiny, floating rocks tethered to the one she sits on or the straps of her LED-lit tank top floating off into the canvas. The effect sometimes evokes science fiction, as if a UFO might just drift into the next canvas.

Gordon brazenly pushes past the surface of her image, instead foregrounding the cruel and varying personas of her psyche. That these works are on exhibit and available for an audience to view feels incidental to their purpose.

Sasha Gordon
It Was Still Far Away, 2024
Oil on linen
72 1/4 x 96 1/8 inches"
Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York

In It Was Still Far Away, a figure in Gordon’s likeness, wearing a white tank and mesh shorts, sits on a picnic blanket as a neon-orange mushroom cloud bursts behind her. As the bomb explodes, she clips her toenails, headphones on. 

On the subway, waiting for a coffee, and before closing our eyes at night, our screens bring every global disaster to our door. And it seems that even our language has fallen behind; words like catastrophe and tragedy imply an anomaly, but what if watching war and famine and genocide unfold has become as quotidian as eating, working, and sleeping?

In Trance, a close-up of Gordon’s distorted face, painted in fluorescent gray, shows her eating a nail clipping. Below, a hand that’s speckled with more nail clippings is held out like an offering. In some ways, this painting of a hard-to-break habit feels more revealing than any of her nudes.

In the following room, the paintings turn increasingly self-lacerating. In Whores in the Attic, three nude women with oblong breasts, sturdy legs, and skin dimpled like the texture of the moon, stand insolently in front of the other Gordon, peeking out from behind a door. One of the antagonists haughtily smokes a cigarette while the other two gaze with scorn. 

 

Sasha Gordon
Whores in the Attic, 2024
Oil on linen
96 1/8 x 78 1/4 inches
Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York

 

Her thorny relationship with herself turns even more torturous. In Pruning, one of the antagonizing personas is holding another Gordon underwater inside a glass box, her skin illuminated a brilliant green-blue. The underwater Gordon stares straight ahead, directly confronting the viewer, while her knees have cracked the corners of the glass. Some air bubbles, rendered with stunning technical precision, float up to the surface. 

In the exhibit’s final painting, Husbandry Heaven, set against a mint-green and grey swirled backdrop, one version of Gordon forces food into the mouth of another, hands bound behind her back. Ashes float down from somewhere, smoke drifts across in swirls, and fragments of other selves are perched on floating rocks. Unlike the former paintings, this one has a distinct tenderness. For all her looks of scorn and ridicule, Gordon never abandons herself, and one is left wondering what love and care for oneself might look like.

Haze is on view through November 1 at David Zwirner Gallery 537 West 20th Street, New York.

Making Things You Can Feel: Read An Interview of Larry Bell →

Larry Bell with Pacific Red II. Photography by Matthew Millman, San Francisco

For over six decades, Larry Bell has skillfully molded contemporary art in America. Born in Chicago in 1939, Bell moved to the West Coast to study at the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles, the historic precursor to CalArts. 

There, Bell became a member of Los Angeles’s Cool School, a rebellious group of artists, largely represented by Walter Hopps and Irving Blum of Ferus Gallery in the 1950s and ’60s, who brought modern-day avant-garde to the West Coast. Alongside Ed Ruscha and Robert Irwin, Bell is one of the last living members of the School. As a foundational figure in the Light and Space movement, Southern California’s take on Minimalism, which often employed industrial materials and aerospace technology to explore the ways that volume, light and scale play with our sense of perception, Bell made innovative work that experimented with the interconnections of glass and light and their relations to reflection and illusion. 

His most notable works involve his creation of semi-transparent cubes made out of vacuum-coated glass to form an immersive experience as the art melts into space. Recently, six of Bell’s cubes have been installed in Madison Square Park, where they will be on view until March 15, 2026. Improvisations in the Park carries on Bell’s legacy, but with a twist. Instead of their typical white cube environment, they have been placed outside to interact with the constantly changing elements, causing a new perception almost every hour. 

This idea, related to the flexibility of perception, is also highlighted in Bell’s recent series of collage works, Irresponsible Irridescence, on view now at the Judd Foundation in New York. These collages poured out of Bell after the passing of his wife two years ago, sharing a more emotional side of his work with audiences. They also subtly allude to the close friendship between Bell and the late Donald Judd. It was Bell who convinced Judd to build this now-historic organization in Marfa, Texas, rather than El Rosario, Mexico, impacting American art history forever. Read more.

Virgil Abloh: The Codes Preview At Grand Palais In Paris

Tickets are now available for Virgil Abloh: The Codes, the first major European exhibition devoted entirely to the visionary’s multidisciplinary legacy. Running September 30 through October 9, 2025 at the Grand Palais in Paris, the show—curated by Chloe Sultan and Mahfuz Sultan—will showcase hundreds of objects, sketches, prototypes, and personal pieces that trace the “codes” uniting Abloh’s work across fashion, architecture, music, and more. All ticket proceeds benefit the Virgil Abloh Foundation (VAF), continuing Abloh’s mission to empower emerging creatives and drive systemic change in creative industries. photographs by Flo Kohl

Living Vicariously Through Paintings: Read Our Interview of Alison Blickle →

In Alison Blickle’s work, viewers are invited to witness a glimpse of a world just as realized off the canvas as it is on it. The figures at the heart of her painting—sometimes based on elaborate photoshoots, sometimes an amalgam of disparate body parts from various sources—are characters who signal larger narratives reflecting our modern world, or concocted visions that live outside of time. Her latest collection, Future Ruins, on view at the Kravets Wehby Gallery, invites attendees to inspect a future that infuses a nostalgic melancholy for nature with a glimmer of the beauty still accessible in her perhaps pessimistic view of what lies ahead. 

Blickle has effectively been painting her whole life, but went on to study Political Economy when plagued with the feeling that “it felt too impractical to pursue as a career.” After working for Diane Feinstein for six months, her realization that “whatever your job is is what your life is” would send her back to get her MFA at Hunter College and embark on the creative path that sees her work on display in New York City now, over a decade later. As we prepare to discuss her new collection, she reflects to me how she first made the leap into pursuing painting: “I have to pursue what I know fulfills me and what I love.” Read more.

Avant Arte Hosts a Maurizio Cattelan Scavenger Hunt Across New York, London & Amsterdam

Maurizio Cattelan, Untitled, 1999, photo Zeno Zotti, Courtesy: Maurizio Cattelan Archive

“If you never thought you would be able to hang my effigy in your home, that makes two of us.” —Maurizio Cattelan

Known for his irreverent humor and incisive social critique, Maurizio Cattelan is often described as both an art-world prankster and one of the most influential artists of his generation. In a first-ever collaboration with Avant Arte, Cattelan has reimagined his revered work Untitled (2000) to create We are the Revolution (2025). The work is the latest of Maurizio's revered miniatures—perhaps the most famous of which, La Rivoluzione Siamo Noi (2000), nods to German artist Joseph Beuys and his canonical felt suit.

Maurizio Cattelan, We Are the Revolution, 2025, image courtesy of Avant Arte

Cattelan’s motto, “I am not really an artist,” playfully inverts Beuys’ famous declaration that “every man is an artist.” The statement encapsulates the tongue-in-cheek sentiment of this sculpture: at once a parody of Cattelan’s own role as creator and a reflection on the place of the artist in society.

Each resin sculpture is handcrafted, and meticulously hand-painted by a team of specialized artisans. Limited to 1,000 editions and priced at €1,500 each, We Are The Revolution (2025) is set to be released via a randomized draw. Entries for the draw are now open exclusively on Avant Arte’s website and will close on October 24. Successful entrants will be notified within 24 hours of the draw’s closing.

In anticipation of its launch, Avant Arte is introducing a global scavenger hunt, Where’s Maurizio?, giving collectors the chance to acquire an edition ahead of the official release.

Inspired by Cattelan’s enduring interest in value, context, and power structures—most famously highlighted by Comedian (2019), when the artist’s duct-taped banana fetched $6.2 million at auction last year, sparking global media interest and public fascination about its cost and origins—this treasure hunt will place his sculptures in unexpected, everyday locations, from market stalls to bodegas, across major global cities spanning New York, Amsterdam and London.

From September 30 to October 7, Avant Arte will release two clues per location on their dedicated microsite for the scavenger hunt, inviting the public to join the search and track down the hidden sculptures across the three cities. New York will host a physical scavenger hunt, while London and Amsterdam will offer digital-only hunts, with participants submitting their answers via the microsite.

Cattelan’s sculpture edition will be playfully priced according to its location—ranging from $0.99 at a bodega to €9,999 at an antiques dealership—exploring how context shapes value while offering a whimsical twist on the conventions of the art world. Each location becomes both stage and gallery, bringing Cattelan’s humor directly into the public space.

Otherwise Part II: Art & Power; The Professional Managerial Class, Administrative Aesthetics, and the Big Data Sublime

Philippe Parreno, Anywhere out of the world, Pinault Collection 2022

text by Perry Shimon

The development of art as a category in Western thought has historically unfolded alongside shifting regimes of power. The Pinault Collection in Paris, housed in the historic Bourse de Commerce building, embodies three centuries of such shifts, providing a palimpsest of ideological progression. Built in the 1760s as a circular grain hall, its form symbolized the monarchy’s role in securing bread supplies and maintaining social order. In the 19th century, it was transformed into the Commodities Exchange, trading sugar, coffee, cocoa, and other goods, capped with an iron-and-glass dome, and encircled by murals romanticizing France’s colonial ambitions—while simultaneously obscuring histories of dispossession, slavery, and genocide. By the late 20th century, the building’s economic function had faded, and in the 21st century it reemerged as a cultural landmark under the Pinault Collection, marking the shift from mercantile and industrial power to finance and cultural capital.

Architect Tadao Ando was commissioned to erect a massive concrete silo in the rotunda, the most ubiquitous material of capitalist infrastructure. Within, artists such as Philippe Pareno staged interventions articulating a Silicon Valley ethos of big data capture and biosensing. 2022’s group exhibition Une seconde d’éternité featured a Pareno “bioreactor” that controlled lights, sounds, and movement in the rotunda, with a “brain” conditioned by externally captured data—temperature, noise, humidity, and light—effectively turning the space into a responsive, sensing environment. The iron-and-glass dome itself now reads as a kind of observing eye, reinforcing the aesthetic of surveillance and technological governance.

Bourse de Commerce - Pinault Collection

The neoliberal age, and its technologies of administration, are the primary object of study in this collection of essays. The valuation and management of social, attentional, and affective energies—enclosed and expropriated by platform capitalism—are fundamentally restructuring life and producing a distinct aesthetic regime. This regime is administered by what Barbara and John Ehrenreich termed the Professional-Managerial Class (PMC): “salaried mental workers who do not own the means of production, and whose major function in the social division of labor may be described broadly as the reproduction of capitalist culture and capitalist class relations.” The Ehrenreichs noted that this class is increasingly vulnerable to the very systems it sustains, a vulnerability amplified by AI automation of administrative duties.

The Professional-Managerial artist today devotes much of their labor to evaluative, data-centered activities: producing statements, obtaining credentials, developing proposals, submitting applications, building CVs, applying for grants, professional networking, producing social media content, sending and receiving emails, designing PDFs, producing promotional videos, and filling in spreadsheets. Artistic production is often dictated by institutional mandates; demands explicit rhetorical framing, measurable “impact,” and quantifiable metrics. While these tasks have become de-facto expectations for the professional artist, many artists reflexively engage these same practices in their work, while interrogating the logics that govern them.

Taryn Simon, A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I – XVIII, Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, 2011

Some of the most compelling examples emerge from artists who deploy these practices with fluency while maintaining criticality. Taryn Simon’s A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I–XVIII (2008–2011) explores eighteen family lineages across 25 countries, addressing genocide, genetic engineering, human trafficking, and state propaganda. Simon employs a poetic variation of social-scientific methods to comment on how knowledge and institutional systems are structured.

Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler, Anatomy of an AI, 2018

Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler’s Anatomy of an AI is a massive data visualization that functions across galleries, a dedicated website, and contextual texts. The project maps the production of an Amazon Echo in a systemic, planetary-scale cartography, extending beyond supply chain analysis to reveal labor exploitation, material extraction, and ecological impact. In the gallery context, the immersive scale evokes Kantian awe: a sense of sublime cognitive overwhelm as viewers confront global networks of extraction, labor, and data capture. The work highlights the social and ecological implications of corporate superpowers while reflecting the epistemic and administrative protocols of the neoliberal PMC subject.

Forensic Architecture, website homepage, September, 2025

Forensic Architecture describes itself as “a research agency developing and disseminating new techniques, methods, and concepts for investigating state and corporate violence,” comprising architects, software developers, filmmakers, investigative journalists, scientists, and lawyers. Their work employs compelling evidentiary aesthetics toward counter-hegemonic social justice in legal and cultural contexts, representing an expanded notion of multi-authored juridical poetics and political intervention. Investigations address state violence, human rights abuses, environmental destruction, and corporate complicity, using tools such as 3D modeling, satellite imagery, open-source video analysis, and architectural reconstruction.

Jonas Staal Court for Intergenerational Climate Crimes, 2022

Jonas Staal explores intersections of art, politics, and ecological-social systems, expanding democratic practice through experimental public architectures and civic platforms. His projects examine how political ideologies, institutions, and infrastructures shape collective life, engaging with broader concerns of planetary governance and more-than-human agency. Collaborative and ongoing projects include The New World Summit, The Court for Intergenerational Climate Crimes, and The Interplanetary Species Society: a large-scale installation and series of assemblies in a former nuclear facility challenging neocolonial and extractivist logics in space exploration and political organization, while proposing cooperative and multispecies approaches to governance.

These artists, through explicitly political and socially engaged practices, adopt the aesthetic and administrative protocols of the Professional-Managerial Class. Their work of resistance, however, risks structural affirmation, echoing Audre Lorde’s caution against attempting to dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools.

A 360-Degree David Attenborough Experience @ the Natural History Museum

text by Poppy Baring

Often described as a national treasure, David Attenborough acts as a grandfather figure to those who have watched his explorations across our planet, a wise adventurer who always talks with warmth and kindness while discussing a subject that is ever-growing in its melancholy. Our Story is a fifty-minute, immersive cinematic experience that takes visitors through the start of human life, to our present, and ends with a hopeful prediction of our future that can be achieved if we are willing to work together.

As summers pass, natural disasters persist, and the world’s balance seems so completely off-kilter in more ways than one, this experience, which explains the development of life and the continuous redevelopment of our world and its inhabitants, leaves your chest tight and heavy with emotion.

Audiences take their seats in a room full of stars projected onto the surrounding walls. The Hunger Games effect of a room made out of pixels is only felt while waiting for the show to begin. Once it does, you no longer feel surrounded by computers, but are traveling through space with the spark of life fully ignited. Stars begin to pass you, as do galaxies and planets, until we pass over the moon and reach our planet.

What is our significance? Attenborough asks. We are significant because the Earth is significant and the Earth is significant because of us, he answers. Earth is the only planet we know of that thrives in the way it does. Once unable to support life because of its unstable climate, Earth changed when temperatures became predictable and microbes expanded in their complexity. With every asteroid attack, to which Attenborough explains there have been at least six that have led to mass extinction, the last of which was 66 million years ago, our planet rebuilds, and with it so do new biospheres.

After coming face to face with gorillas, being immersed amongst hunter-gatherers, and being told the hopeful story of how great blue whales were saved from extinction, we are brought back up into space with humans’ first mission beyond the atmosphere. This was the moment we gained perspective and the first time humans saw Earth from afar, allowing us to see our home as vulnerable and finite.

Somehow, this perspective, described by astronauts as “the overview effect,” has not been enough to create an adequate change in our behaviors, and today we ourselves are responsible for disrupting Earth’s balance. The show, however, ends with a hopeful message: we can make a difference. We are all important, and there has never been a more exciting time to exist on this planet. David Attenborough sits in a chair to talk face to face with visitors, and there is a feeling that when he is no longer here, the hope that he brings to this conversation will fade, and we will all be left fully responsible, with no grandfatherly comfort to soften our fate.

Our Story is on view through January 2026 at the Natural History Museum, Cromwell Rd, South Kensington, London SW7 5BD

Between Puppeteer and Prop: Kaari Upson’s Dollhouse—A Retrospective @ The Louisiana Musuem

Kaari Upson, Courtesy of Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark

text by Kim Shveka

Kaari Upson, one of the most significant and versatile artists of her generation, was notable for her ability to merge various media, exchanging textures and techniques from one work to the next. Her boundary pushing complexity is one main motif of Dollhouse - A Retrospective at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, the artist’s first career retrospective spanning the last two decades of her life.

Upson wove her own life in and out of her work, clawing at the walls of domesticity, memory, and identity, to re-inscribe herself between body and psyche, fact and fiction.

At the center of the exhibition is The Larry Project (2005-2012), her most discussed work. “Larry” was born when Upson passed an abandoned house in her hometown of San Bernadino, back in 2003. She formed a fictional character based on the abandoned belongings of her unknown neighbor, whom she named “Larry,” basing his appearance on Playboy mogul, Hugh Hefner.

Photo Kim Hansen/Courtesy of Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark

Larry and his shadows are shown throughout the exhibition, encapsulating the entirety of Upson’s approach to her creation—blurring sentience and the conspicuous into a mirror of self, home, and American culture. Larry might be viewed as a catalyst, accessory, or supplement. He might also be seen as a prop, mirror, or vessel. Whatever he is, he is not the “center,” she said.

Her performance with a life-sized Larry doll, her manic drawings littered with scrawls and body fluids, her forensic adherence to his archive—none of it was really about him. He is not the center.  

The center, if there is one, is the house. Kaari Upson has stated that San Bernardino had become the landmark of her art making practice, always circling back to her origins in an attempt to untangle the knot of subject and memory, of desire and trauma. Upson understood viscerally that her core memories cannot be erased, so she found herself looking forward and backward in an attempt to recreate her own neighborhood, in the time and place of its situational trauma, and created her art from that place. In THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS OUTSIDE, first shown in Venice in 2019 and now reinstalled at Louisiana, overlapping models of domestic spaces are obscured from any coherent scale. We peer into corners, stumble through projections, eavesdrop on voices. The effect is both theatrical and intimate, claustrophobia disguised as play, a look inside Upson’s childhood, or perhaps her memories from it. The show’s title, Dollhouse, is an open metaphor: architecture as anatomy, art as a vessel to her soul. Here, the artist was once the puppet, but now she’s the puppeteer.

Photo Kim Hansen/Courtesy of Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark

By the end of the exhibition, we meet Untitled (Foot Face), a series of 140 drawings repeating the same wide-eyed head and the same severed foot. Her mother’s. A symbol, a scar, the last image Upson left us before she died. Like everything else in her work, it’s both singular and serial, intimate and estranged. She traps us in the loop that she orbited from her early beginnings to her untimely passing.

In Dollhouse, Kaari Upson doesn’t offer resolution, only recursion. Her work doesn’t ask to be understood, it insists on being felt, like a bruise you can’t remember getting. She left behind no manifesto, just fragments, skins, splinters. And yet what emerges is a radical form of autobiography: not a story told from the outside, but one lived from the inside out.

 

Kaari Upson, Untitled, 2007
Courtesy of Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark

 

Dollhouse - A Retrospective, is on view through October 26th at The Louisiana Museum, Gl Strandvej 13, 3050 Humlebæk, Denmark

Why Look at Animals? at EMST Athens

Ang Siew Ching, High-Rise Pigs, 2025


text and images by Perry Shimon


At EMST Athens, curator Katerina Gregos has staged an ambitious year-long group exhibition, Why Look at Animals?, that insists on confronting the urgency of human-animal relations in an age of ecological collapse. Bringing together over sixty artists across all four floors of the museum, with an extensive public program and a duration that resists the usual velocities, Gregos opens space for more-than-human perspectives, ecological commitments, and sustained engagement.

Perhaps the most haunting image, from my several visits, came from Ang Siew Ching’s quietly devastating film High-Rise Pigs. In a long shot resembling grainy security footage, two pigs in a vast, automated slaughterhouse attempt to communicate across the brutal architecture confining them. Their enspirited distress is unmistakable, magnified by the mechanical indifference of the setting. The film examines one of the largest pig-killing operations in China, exposing the violence hidden in industrial agriculture’s scale and automation. I first saw it in the basement galleries of EMST, and later at its rooftop screening that paired the film with a BBC4 documentary inspired by John Berger’s titular essay “Why Look at Animals?”

Paris Petridis, Eye Witnesses, 2006-2022

The rooftop crowd, gathered under a balmy night sky with the Acropolis glittering in the background, constituted its own form of public assembly—though one seemingly far removed from what might constitute a public discourse, or agora, today. The juxtaposition underscored a recurring tension: the urgency of animal and ecological suffering often being sequestered within esoteric institutional spaces. Precisely for this reason, a show of this scale and depth feels all the more urgent—insisting that such questions not remain peripheral but be brought into sharper collective view.

Sammy Baloji, Hunting and Collecting, 2015

Sammy Baloji’s Hunting and Collecting confronts visitors early in the exhibition with an archive of disturbing colonial images documenting the hunting and display of animals, often in the name of science. Arranged around a minimal architectural structure recalling natural history dioramas, the images are paired with a massive wall listing foreign NGOs operating in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It is a pointed gesture, implicating museums and nonprofits alike in the colonial and neocolonial abuses that shape human-animal relations. At the center sits a book of abstracted cartography, suggesting how gridded systems of spatial control—once used to seize land and wildlife—continue today in the biopolitical regulation of lives, human and non-human.

Janis Rafa, from We Betrayed the Horses, 2025

Janis Rafa, The Space Between Your Tongue and Teeth, 2023

Power is the explicit subject of Janis Rafa’s multi-channel film and installation on equestrian cultures. Horses—long symbols of strength and nobility—are here subjected to a BDSM-inflected mise-en-scène that renders them debased, humiliated, and instrumentalized. Red lighting, metallic soundscapes, sexualized accoutrements, and statistical neon signage produce a disturbing reckoning with the ways power and libidinal desire entwine in histories of domination. If Rafa’s staging verges on spectacle, it does so to force viewers into confrontation with the brutalities often masked by cultural mythologies of the horse.

Wesley Meuris, Enclosure for Animal (zoology), 2006 - 2021

Wesley Meuris offers a quieter but equally scathing indictment: minimal watercolors of architectural typologies designed to contain absent animals. Their bureaucratic banality is chilling, exposing the violence encoded into the very blueprints of zoos. The work resonates with James Elkins’ recent experimental novel Weak in Comparison to Dreams, in which a microbial ecologist is assigned to assess stereotypical behaviors of caged animals worldwide. Both suggest how rationalized, institutional systems quietly normalize the suffering of captive beings. Meuris’s watercolors also recall the paintings of Gilles Aillaud, the philosopher-painter and close friend of John Berger, whose 2022 Pompidou retrospective broadly surveyed his decades of images of animals suffering in modernist captivity.

Radha D’Souza & Jonas Staal, Court for Intergenerational Climate Crimes (CICC), 2021

On the top floor, a reimagined setting of Jonas Staal and Radha D’Souza’s Court for Intergenerational Climate Crimes (CICC) anchors the exhibition’s political horizon. Documentation of previous trials accompanies a speculative tribunal that indicts states and corporations for climate crimes, expands legal subjectivity to non-human witnesses, and frames justice as intergenerational responsibility. Rooted in D’Souza’s critique of neoliberal legal systems in What’s Wrong with Rights?, the work demonstrates how law itself must be reimagined if multispecies flourishing is to become possible.

David Claerbout, The Pure Necessity, 2016

Annika Kahrs, Playing to the Birds, 2013

Across its many registers, Why Look at Animals? insists that the treatment of animals today—whether in factory farms, zoos, laboratories, or postcolonial landscapes—will be remembered as one of the most barbarous chapters in human history. Visitors will find their own affinities among the sixty works, but what matters most is that each piece, in its own way, speaks to the ghastly urgencies at stake: the systematic and exploitative abuse of sentient animals and the ecological implications for all life on Earth. In insisting that these realities not be confined to the margins, the exhibition models how institutions can play a vital role in amplifying what is too often silenced or sidelined.

Acropolis view from the roof of EMST

Oussama Tabti, Homo-Carduelis, 2022

Ang Siew Ching, High-Rise Pigs, 2025

Capitalocene Ikebana: The Animist Assemblages of Yuji Agematsu

text and images by Perry Shimon

Fleas, lice,
a horse peeing
near my pillow

— Bashō

There is a friendliness towards the abject, a distinctly Shinto, open and capacious reverence in Yuji Agematsu’s daily practice: meditative walks and the gathering of small bits of detritus to make delicate, ikebana-like assemblages inside cigarette-cellophane vitrines.

New York, Agematsu’s chosen home, has been given the rare privilege of seeing two full years of his unwavering practice on view: one vitrine—or ‘zip,’ as he calls them—from each day of 2023 and 2024, shown respectively at Gavin Brown’s house in Harlem and Donald Judd’s former studio in Soho, where Agematsu worked for twenty-five years doing building maintenance and art handling.

The vitrines of 2024, displayed in the airy Judd Foundation gallery, place the two artists in a fascinating conversation. Judd’s cold, machinic, monolithic forms assert and insist on themselves, while Agematsu’s works embody a fluid becoming: daily meditations on the plural forms encountered during his sensitive perambulations.

Donald Judd Foundation, Soho, August 2025

In Absence (2007; trans. Polity, 2023), Byung-Chul Han contrasts the Western concept of essence—identity, duration, inwardness, permanence—with an Eastern notion of absence, which precedes and “gathers” an ever-changing relationality or becoming. One could see this as a fundamental difference between Judd’s paradigmatic modernist objects and the fleeting, friendly assemblages of Agematsu, however stylized and reductive these contrasts may be.

In Shinto thought, there are eight million kami, or spirits, each worthy of consideration and respect. The number is shorthand for the infinite and ever-growing. When Buddhism arrived in Japan in the 7th century, Buddha was welcomed simply as another kami among the rest. Agematsu’s practice can be read through this animist disposition: a reverence for the infinite pluralities of the world, even in its discarded fragments.

At the risk of overdetermining the work, I experienced it as profoundly ecological, illustrative of a disposition that might serve us well in imagining what Anna Tsing calls “the possibility of life in capitalist ruins.” Agematsu’s practice suggests a clear-eyed willingness to look closely, to re-enchant the detritus of our shortsighted and economically ravaged world.

One of the great challenges of our time is to find a balanced, reciprocal relationship to the earth—and especially to our waste. Agematsu’s careful, sublimative approach offers one model, resonant with political ecology, discard studies, and circular-infrastructure thinking. His work reminds us of the need to reorient our relationship to the abject itself, and to transform our systems toward more stable, regenerative ecologies. Our very survival may depend on it.

Power in Vulnerability: Jenny Saville’s Anatomy of Painting

Drift by Jenny Saville, 2020-2022 © Jenny Saville, Courtesy Gagosian.

text by Poppy Baring

Before you have time to fully enter Jenny Saville’s The Anatomy of Painting retrospective, you are faced with a colossal painting of the artist and her sister towering over you, not in an oppressive way, however. Hyphen, made in 1999, is mesmerizing and bright. Light pinks dominate the huge canvas, presenting two fresh-faced, marble-eyed young girls. The composition makes for an interesting opening piece. With one face facing towards you as you enter, but with the subject's eyes looking away, the other looks up, meeting visitors with huge open eyes. You are instantly aware of the emotion and intimacy, although her eyes meet yours, her head is occupied and nestled, resting in her sister's neck.

With a few more steps, you are opposite Propped. A painting again made with pink, red, and brown tones that add brightness to works that are seemingly conveying dark emotion. This painting shows a woman perched on a stall, wearing only a pair of silk shoes. The work at first feels overpowering. The strength of her body is apparent, and her face, only slightly visible at the very top of the canvas, looks down at the viewer, but there is also vulnerability in the subject. Her fingertips cling to her thighs, and there is a feeling that her balance is not completely secure. Lopped writing from an essay by the French Feminist, Luce Irigaray reads, “if we continue to speak in this sameness - speak as men have spoken for centuries, we will fail each other.” It is clear that the power of these pieces comes from their vulnerability, as (Luce suggests) is true of women. Saville considers this piece to be her most succinct of her early works. Early indeed, Propped was exhibited in her graduate collection at Glasgow School of Art, which led to Charles Saatchi buying her work and commissioning new works for his gallery in London.

Reverse © Jenny Saville. All rights reserved, DACS 2025. Courtesy Gagosian

Anatomy of Painting is presented, for the most part, in chronological order, showcasing the development of her practice. As you leave the first wing of the show, a timeline of Saville’s career explains her time studying in Glasgow and her fascination with artists of the Italian Renaissance. An inspiration that is clear as you enter the next room, which is full of detailed charcoal and pastel drawings that dance around the room. They are rich and intimate studies showing the bones behind her mountains of painting, but they are indeed beautiful works in their own right. In Pieta 1, Saville is responding to Michelangelo’s marble sculpture of The Deposition, made in the 1500s to depict three figures supporting Christ after the crucifixion. As with many of her works, when you begin to walk away from the drawing, feeling you have analyzed all the different figures consuming the canvas, you are brought back, realizing you have missed a hidden element.

In the final section of the show, visitors enter back into a room full of paintings, this time more colourful than the works that welcomed you. The end of the exhibition feels just like that, a full stop to her exploration of portraiture so far. Through these works, she explains, “ I wanted to see if I could make an almost abstract portrait,” and whether you interpret that in these works or not, they are truly mesmerising, with eyes and lips showing enormous emotion that somehow seem more real and important than the viewer's own.

Hyphen by Jenny Saville, 1999 © Jenny Saville, Courtesy Gagosian.

Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting is on view through the 7th of September at The National Portrait Gallery in London, WC2H 0HE

Inside the Fantasies of Grayson Perry’s Delusions of Grandeur

Grayson Perry: Delusions of Grandeur at the Wallace Collection.© Trustees of the Wallace Collection.

text by Poppy Baring

Delusions of Grandeur is the Wallace Collection’s largest exhibition of contemporary art to date and Grayson Perry is fully involved in every aspect of this display. From narrating the audio guides, writing the object labels, curating the exhibition from his favorite pieces in the museum’s collection, to creating a new body of work that responds to that selection, Sir Perry is threaded through this complex exploration of identity and mental health.

Through Shirley Smith, an imaginary artist created by Perry, the English artist uses ceramics, painting, textiles, and even wallpaper to bring visitors through a corridor of his mind. “The Story of My Life” tapestry shown in the second room of his exhibition extends this sentiment to museum visitors. It captures how Perry interacts and how he suspects other people to interact with artwork they see at a museum. The large tapestry includes fragments of paintings from the collection that mainly include female characters scattered throughout the canvas. These figures phase into Netherlandish landscapes that also bop and weave throughout the piece, and overall, this tapestry comments on how viewers relate artworks back to themselves and their lives.

 

Grayson Perry © Richard Ansett, shot exclusively for the Wallace Collection, London

 

The idea for the fictional Shirley Smith was influenced by the artist Madge Hill. Having navigated traumatic experiences in her early life, Hill challenged her trauma into her art and, surprisingly, considering she was an outsider artist who had no formal training, exhibited her work at the Wallace Collection in 1942. Sir Grason Perry, a title which somewhat dilutes his anti-establishment stance, then invented his own ‘outsider artist’. He envisioned Shirley to be obsessed with the Wallace Collection so much so that she saw herself as the heiress of Hertford House, home to the collection.

Complicating the exhibition even more, Perry brings in yet another identity, the Honourable Millicent Wallace, the alter ego of the alter ego (Shirley’s imagined persona). Delusions of Grandeur follows Shirley’s delusions, delving deep into her emotions and her fantasies of wealth and friendship. This exhibition underscores mental illness throughout the three rooms. For example, in the piece titled ‘A tree in a Landscape’, all the characters that are present in the Wallace collection miniature series have been compiled together into a family tree. Each of these miniature portraits has then been given a DSM-5 (the UK’s standard classification of mental illnesses) diagnosis.

Grayson Perry: Delusions of Grandeur at the Wallace Collection.© Trustees of the Wallace Collection.

Perry admits that these imagined characters were created to somewhat distance himself from the creation of the pieces presented, explaining that Shirley’s existence gave him the freedom to play with colors and pattern that you wouldn’t naturally associate with the museum. However, not all of the new work on view is made by Shirley Smith. Some of the works are that of Grayson Perry, some by Shirley, and even some by Shirley as Millicent Wallace. It’s not usual for Perry to rely on a central fantasy figure when creating an exhibition, but the identities present in Delusions of Grandeur leave you doubting who is real and, indeed, where the fantasy begins and ends.

Delusions of Grandeur is on view through October 26th at the Wallace Collection, Hertford House, Manchester Square, London W1U 3BN

Grayson Perry. I Know Who I Am, 2024. Cotton fabric and embroidery appliqué. 234 x 234 cm
92 1/8 x 92 1/8 in © Grayson Perry. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro