Triangle of Rebellion: Niki de Saint Phalle, Jean Tinguely & Pontus Hulten @ Grand Palais in Paris

NIKI DE SAINT PHALLE, Repainted photo of 'Hon,' 1979, NIKI CHARITABLE ART FOUNDATION, Santee, California. Courtesy of 2025 NIKI CHARITABLE ART FOUNDATION / ADAGP, PARIS


text by Kim Shveka

Artistic couple Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely were bound by a rare creative chemistry that defied rules and norms. They were known as the rebels of the ‘60s art scene who ambitiously pushed back against a world too eager to impose order. When the couple met curator Pontus Hulten, the three formed a rare triangle of trust and mutual vision.

Presented at the Grand Palais, this exhibition traces the rich journey of these two artists through the lens of Hulten, sharing their conception of a disruptive, multidisciplinary art in a profound historical approach.

Presented in ten chapters, blended and forming a complete journey through the intertwined lives of the three protagonists, the exhibition truly feels like a voyage. Swaying through the rooms, one cannot escape being washed by a ray of feelings: joy, frustration, freedom, injustice. The experience is curated with such intention that, if you allow the feelings to linger with you, the deeper truths within the art unravel.

 

View of the exhibition at Grand Palais, in collaboration with Centre Pompidou.

 

The first room of the exhibition tells the story of Impasse Ronsin in Paris, an artists’ colony in the Montparnasse district that was known to be an international melting pot of creativity. In 1956, Saint Phalle and Tinguely both lived and worked there, although each had been married to their previous partners at the time. Both marriages eventually came to an end, and by 1960, Tinguely and Saint Phalle embarked on a love affair that would intertwine their artistic paths. Tinguely had already known Pontus Hulten, an early believer in rebellious visionaries, and so he introduced his new partner. Hulten was immediately captivated by the young artist and encouraged her to pursue her career as an artist. After gaining traction with her Tirs (Shootings), Saint Phalle embarked on a new series depicting female stereotypes through grotesque, disturbing sculptures, establishing her artistic path and vision, which she followed until the end of her career.

Jean Tinguely, impasse Ronsin
Courtesy of Grand Palais, in collaboration with Centre Pompidou

The next rooms hum and clang with the energy of Jean Tinguely’s machines, creations of rusted steel and chaos, many of them still in active form, bursting with sounds of screeching and rattling. Hulten greatly admired Tinguely’s ability to include movement in his works, eventually setting aside his own art to focus on bringing Tinguely’s art center stage. Hulten aimed to offer artists a place in a society marked by liberty of thought and action. He imagined a world where art isn’t hiding in a museum or a studio, but shouted from the streets, quite literally. This took the form of art that refused passivity; it was uncomfortable and rebellious, taken out to the streets of Paris to address the public directly, offering them new art forms that were interactive and dynamic.

 

L’Accouchement Rose, Niki de Saint Phalle, 1964
Courtesy of Grand Palais, in collaboration with Centre Pompidou

 

Scattered like secrets throughout the exhibition are handwritten letters, correspondence between the two artists and Hulten that reveal a high degree of intimacy. Small drawings and sketches crowd the margins: filled with humor, inside jokes, and mostly love. They are love letters, and in reading them, we understand that this isn’t another collaboration between artist and curator. It was a family they formed, held together by a visceral, wild vision and belief in one another. Hulten didn’t just support their work—he adhered to it completely, with a rare kind of loyalty and conviction. Through him, their art found the space it needed and deserved; he created a space for them to grow, to experience, to see themselves without limitations. And through them, he found his true desire and ultimate purpose. From the safety of this nurturing nest, the three were capable of flight.

Niki de Saint Phalle, Pontus Hulten and Jean Tinguely.
Courtesy of Grand Palais, in collaboration with Centre Pompidou

Niki de Saint Phalle, Jean Tinguely, Pontus Hulten is on view through January 4th, 2026 at Grand Palais, Square Jean Perrin - 17 Avenue du Général Eisenhower 75008 Paris

A World With No Safe Word: Read An Interview of Nicolette Mishkan

Nicolette Mishkan
Lethe's Harem, 2024-2025
Oil on linen
48 x 60 in121.9 x 152.4 cm

What if death were just a blackout between this life and the next? With its memories wiped clean in a cycle of spiritual cleansing, your soul might carry only faint notions of who you once were, like a SIM card with a brand new hippocampus. Such is the gist of the River Lethe, an underworld tributary from ancient Greek mythology whose waters wash away all remembrance of one’s existence. In Lethe’s Tavern, the fabled Greek river becomes a watering hole where painter Nicolette Mishkan’s ego goes to slosh around, bifurcate, and eventually sing its swan song. Informed equally by Sufi mysticism wherein wine is used to symbolize the intoxicating effects of divine love, she annihilates her sense of individuality by eliminating any distinction between herself and others. Together, these figures revel in the ultimate surrender to their fate, a resplendent transcendence into the unknown where who she once was lies buried without even an epitaph. The following interview took place at Megan Mulrooney on the occasion of the exhibition’s closing and has been edited for length. Read more.

A Deep Dive into a Century of Swimming and Style @ London’s Design Museum

Exhibition Photography © Luke Hayes for the Design Museum

text by Poppy Baring

Walking into this Design Museum exhibition doesn’t feel too dissimilar to walking into an indoor leisure center. After stepping down a wide white staircase and through a small corridor, you approach Splash!, a show investigating a century of swimming and style, together with the social and cultural impacts of the sport. This exhibition was designed, unsurprisingly, with swimming environments in mind. The central plinths, located in each of the rooms, which are divided into Pool, Lido, and Nature, are scale models of the three separate swimming spaces.

In the first room, Pool, these islands are models of the London Aquatic Centre and have been made from Storm Board, a recycled plastic waste that can later be remolded into different shapes. Entering this room, you are greeted by a large, bold lithograph poster that speaks to a poolside chicness that is often associated with the sport. The late 1920s poster was one of the first attempts to ‘brand’ the seaside as fashionable, bold, and modern. Seen next to this is a 1984 poster by David Hockney for the Los Angeles Olympics. A symbol of affluence and leisure, the poster celebrates California life and shows a swimmer immersed in a pool, with a pattern that mimics the one painted on Hockney’s own pool.

Overall, this room features interesting swimming treasures, namely Olympic and Paralympic swimsuits of medal winners past. The costumes and stories of Tom Daley, Yusra Mardini, and Ellie Robinson guide you down the room, where you then meet 1920s and 30s knitted swimsuits and swimwear catalogues. Labels explain the history of wool swimmers, starting in the 1920s, initially with the intention of promoting hygienic clothing, as well as magazines that advertise the “suit that changed bathing to swimming.”

Exhibition Photography © Luke Hayes for the Design Museum

Blue arrows painted on the floor then bring you into room two, Lido, which opens into a show of swimsuits and clothing. Aiming to include an extensive range of themes and topics, from architecture to fashion, politics, and fabric development, the exhibition can feel slightly overwhelming at points and sometimes, because of its broad objectives, fails to dive fully into one topic or another. The rise of mass tourism, sun protection trends, ‘homosexual activity,’ and changing beauty ideals are all discussed before you have had a chance to fully feel like you’ve entered the room. These weighty topics are paired next to swimwear-clad light blue mannequins, which don’t naturally transport you to the beach.

 

Rudi Gernreich, Monokini, around 1964. Jersey, Tricot. Courtesy of Fashion Museum Hasselt.

 

There are, however, a few iconic pieces that are thrilling to see in person. Pamela Anderson’s iconic 1990s red Baywatch swimsuit, seen by roughly 1.1 billion viewers weekly, is one, and a 1964 Monokini by Rudi Gernreich, which was designed in a statement about liberating women from hyper-sexualisation, is another. As visitors continue, swim caps from the 1970s and from Miu Miu’s 2016 collection also stand out, and the line-up of accessories from ‘bathing shoes’ to Speedos brings a sense of charming nostalgia to the show.

The third and final section of Splash! is Nature, which touches on folklore and myths associated with the sea. Century-old tales of Merfolk are addressed before discussing the niche and unexpected contemporary trend of mermaid-core. Finally, a fascinating film about the haenyeo-women of South Korea finishes the exhibition. This film brings visitors underwater with a woman who follows her mother twenty meters below sea level with no help from a breathing apparatus. This historic exploration for seafood and seaweed has been conducted by women for centuries, and is an intense but extraordinary end to a fact-filled summer exhibition.

Exhibition Photography © Luke Hayes for the Design Museum

Splash! A Century of Swimming and Style’ is on view through the 17th of August at the Design Museum, 224-238 Kensington High St, London, W8 6AG

“Under Shadows” With Tamara Kvesitadze and Shunxiang Hu at KORNFELD Galerie Berlin

In Under Shadows, KORNFELD Galerie Berlin unveils not just a duo exhibition, but a reckoning with the unseen forces that shape us. Tamara Kvesitadze and Shunxiang Hu — artists born worlds apart — meet in a shared terrain of exile, resilience, and refusal. The result is haunting and quietly revolutionary.

Kvesitadze, from Georgia, has long used sculpture and painting to explore the female body as a site of memory, fragmentation, and myth. Her work carries the imprint of a nation on the brink — caught between past and present, repression and revolt. Shunxiang Hu, born in China during the One-Child Policy, offers an intimate counterpoint. As a second daughter, she was forced to relinquish her identity to survive. Her portraits, hushed and uncanny, hold this rupture close to the surface. Faces emerge like ghosts — fragile, luminous, searching.

The artists met in Berlin in late 2024, sharing not only a space but a sense of displacement. The dialogue that emerges is profound: two women from vastly different geographies tracing parallel lines through shadow — political, cultural, psychological. Their work does not offer answers. It offers atmosphere. Texture. A choreography of what’s left unsaid.

The shadow in this exhibition is not absence — it is narrative. It holds the things that were never meant to be seen: buried selves, censored memories, forgotten bodies. Kvesitadze’s sculptural forms resist coherence; they are part relic, part dream. Hu’s portraits flicker between presence and erasure, shaped by a history that deemed her existence illegal. And yet, here they are — visible, intentional, luminous.

Under Shadows is not concerned with spectacle. It doesn’t scream. It hums, low and steady. It reminds us that survival often takes the shape of quietness, that transformation can occur beneath the surface, where light barely touches.

In a moment where visibility is commodified, this exhibition argues for the power of what lies beneath — for the right to complexity, ambiguity, and opacity. Kvesitadze and Hu don’t just make art. They reclaim space. They make the shadow speak.

This is not just a show. It is a testimony — to lives lived in margins, and to the radical act of emerging from them.

Under Shadows is on view through August 23 @ KORNFELD Galerie Berlin Fasanenstr. 26 10719 Berlin

AYA TAKANO'S World Comes to Los Angeles

AYA TAKANO’S “how far how deep we can go" exhibition at Perrotin in LA invites visitors into a mystical world which offers an escape and hope for a brighter existence.

AYA TAKANO 地球上のすべての生物のスピリット  | the spirit of all life on earth, 2025. 130.3 x 162 x 3 cm | 51 5/16 x 63 3/4 x 1 3/16 inches. Oil on canvas. ©2025 AYA TAKANO/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved. Courtesy Perrotin.

text by Poppy Baring

Inspired by all art forms from Expressionism to the erotic art of Japan's Edo period, from manga artists such as Osamu Tezuka to Gustav Klimt, AYA TAKANO has been creating her own intimate fantasy since the age of three. Born in Japan in 1976, the painter, illustrator, and highly recognised Superflat artist welcomes LA residents to her new exhibition titled “how far how deep we can go”.

TAKANO presents otherworldly nymph-like characters that are extraterrestrial and yet still connected to and reflective of our reality. Drawing from the past and thinking to the future, she creates a limitless existence where time, gender, and age are undefined. Through various mediums, the Japanese artist investigates our inherent consciousness, exploring what it means to be marked by the past and connected to all life that occurred before us and will exist after us. Held in LA, home to spiritual seekers as well as recent environmental catastrophe, the exhibition offers a universe where all souls prosper as equals, a space where compassion prevails. In this interview, TAKANO provides insight into her worldview and her day-to-day life, asking visitors to look inwards and reconnect with the “radiance of all life.” Read More.

Simin Jalilian Solo Exhibiiton at 68projects by Kornfeld in Berlin

Simin Jalilian, Installation view, 68projects by KORNFELD, 2025, Photo: Andrea Katheder

At 68projects by KORNFELD, Simin Jalilian’s solo exhibition is less a show and more a visceral confrontation. Marking her debut presentation of new paintings in Berlin, the Hamburg-based Iranian artist delivers works that are both urgent and introspective — a searing combination of the biographical and the political, filtered through a painterly language that resists containment.

Jalilian’s brushstrokes do not seek perfection; they pulse with immediacy. Her canvases feel alive, caught in a moment of transformation, where figures and emotions blur into a current of expressionist intensity. The visual tension is palpable: one moment teeters on the brink of despair, another radiates fleeting transcendence.

In Please Don’t Deport, the artist places herself at the heart of a haunting tableau — a deportation scene at an airport. “That’s me,” she says, directly implicating her own fears and the shadow of displacement that haunts many immigrants. Jalilian moved from Tehran to Germany in 2016, and her work speaks directly from that liminal space between belonging and exclusion. The painting is not a plea for pity but a fierce assertion of freedom — artistic, personal, and existential.

Her painting Refugees evokes another fragile threshold: a child being passed across a divide between land and sea. The moment is suspended in light, but not safety. Danger looms, and the ambiguity of survival is never resolved. In Integration, the political becomes intimate. A casual act — opening a beer bottle — becomes a coded ritual of assimilation. The moment is undercut by blood-red fractures beneath the figures, revealing how easily identity and land can break open.

Despite their rootedness in realism, Jalilian’s paintings reject photographic precision. She conjures bodies and landscapes from memory and emotion, not from reference material. The result is work that feels fiercely personal and painterly, drawing on the legacy of German Neo-Expressionism but evolving it with a distinctly female and diasporic urgency. Her mentors may include Werner Büttner, but her voice is unmistakably her own.

In The Wow Effect, even cinema-goers are caught between rapture and blindness — a metaphor for our digital age, perhaps, but also for the dissonance between spectacle and truth. Jalilian’s paintings offer no easy conclusions. Instead, they demand we remain present — alive to instability, beauty, and the enduring human will to remain free.

On view until August 23

Simin Jalilian, Installation view, 68projects by KORNFELD, 2025, Photo: Andrea Katheder

Atlas Loved: Slava Mogutin's Photographic Curation of Queer Romance @ The Bureau of General Services—Queer Division in New York

“What is ‘My Romantic Ideal’? If there were just one, I’d have been able to stop making images searching around the borders of yearning, imagining, and lusting, many years ago. These are some recent attempts at mapping those.” – Robert Flynt

Robert Flynt. Untitled (NPCG; NYC 41), 2023 Unique inkjet photograph on found atlas page (additional image on verso) 11 x 16 inches 

text by Summer Bowie

Like Lee Oscar Lawrie’s sedulously brawny statue of Atlas lunging interminably under the weight of the world in Rockefeller Center, Slava Mogutin has taken on the ambitious charge of defining Queer romance in all of its variegated multitudes. Drawing from the work of twenty-eight artists, his curation coalesces into a comprehensive cohort across the generational and gender spectrums with searingly vulnerable takes on romanticism. Such an endeavor seems only natural considering Mogutin’s personal history of putting himself on the line for the sake of his community. Working in a plurality of media, he has always questioned and prodded the boundaries of sexual freedom, from his early Queer activism and writings for the political weekly newspaper Novy Vzglyad to making the first attempt to register for a same-sex marriage in Russian history with his then-partner, Robert Filippini. As the first Russian citizen to be granted exile in the United States for reasons of homophobic persecution, his commitment through legal and artistic means to broaden our understanding of love and its ultimate liberation remains steadfastly on the frontlines. 

In Mogutin’s “Stone Face (Brian), NYC” (2015), we see an outstretched arm holding almost identical copies of a photograph containing a man’s face partially buried in rocks. More than just a nod to David Wojnarowicz’s “Untitled (Face in Dirt),” we see lower Manhattan’s skyline at sunset on the horizon. Where Wojnarowicz quietly mourns the violent isolation of ultimate abjection, Mogutin’s figure is rendered in print and then literally held by another man in the city of his exile—a photo taken almost a quarter century after Wojnarowicz’s untimely death from AIDS at just thirty-seven years of age. In Stanley Stellar’s “Cherry Grove Kiss, Fire Island” (1990), the man’s entire face emerges from the sand in anticipation of an impassioned kiss. Where Mogutin trades dirt for pebbles, Stellar trades it for sand, making the burial feel elective and impermanent. Made at a time when the AIDS crisis was still looming large, it effectively sublimates the unthinkable trauma of carrying such an insidious burden into not only erotic, but manifestly romantic pleasure.

Slava Mogutin
Stone Face (Brian), NYC, 2015 Offset print, 20 x 27.5 inches Edition of 10 

Stanley Stellar
Cherry Grove Kiss, 1990
Archival analog tinted silver gelatin print
15 x 15 inches, 16 x 20 inches frame
Artist Proof 

Held both literally and figuratively by the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division, My Romantic Ideal implores us to define romanticism on our own terms, knowing that in the process of queering the heteronormative parameters, we normalize our queerness. He is glitching the hegemonic system, à la Legacy Russell, with an unabashed proposal to reexamine our assumed notions of tenderness, intimacy, and beauty. These images represent a disparate yet equally valid selection of possibilities for romantic encounters, both with others and with self. They are safe spaces that are not safe for work, and at times, I can’t help but blush at the thought of sharing them. Some of them are too risqué even for the press kit, like Quil Lemons’s “Untitled (Penetration)”—which is reason enough to see the show in person if you live in New York. Others, like Carter Peabody’s “Bastian Floating,” lean into dreamy ecosexual escapism with an Adonis-like figure floating in sea grass-lined, turquoise waters. “I have only known shame when it comes to love” says Peabody, “For me, romanticism is freedom from heteronormative oppression. The bodies floating in my pieces are unattached to the strict norms of our world and free to feel, explore, and play with the sensuality of the sunlight and water surrounding them. There is an innocence and wonder that takes hold when we become our inner child in search of love, and the judgement of our subconscious just melts away.” Here, romance is imbued in everything surrounding the act of love, rather than in the act itself.

 

Carter Peabody
Bastian Floating, 2025
C-print on Metallic Paper
23.5 x 31.5 inches
Edition 1/12 

 

Benjamin Fredrickson’s “Self-Portrait with Lillies” features the artist sitting nude in a brutalist wooden chair, peering out of a floor-to-ceiling window that reveals a verdant forest. He props his feet on the identical chair facing him with an enormous vase of lilies placed tightly between his legs. If we deign to inquire, we cannot help but notice that he is gently indulging himself with just the tips of his fingers. This sensual, autoerotic moment feels utterly unimpeachable. 

Benjamin Fredrickson
Self-Portrait with Lillies, 2019
Chromogenic print
15x19 inches image, 16x20 inches sheet
Edition of 3+2APs 

Bruce LaBruce’s “Hunk with Sneaker” might be having an autoerotic moment of his own. Then again, he might just be testing that theory about guys with big feet. Berlin-based American photographer Matt Lambert presents us with two new pieces from his forthcoming book If You Can Reach My Heart You Can Keep It. Luridly graphic in content, these images leave us only to imagine what kind of tantric infrared technology he is patenting in his dark room/dungeon. Pierced and penetrating, his figures find themselves interlocked in full coitus with mysteriously luminescent erogenous zones. Berlin-based Spanish photographer Gerardo Vizmanos says, “I have a complicated relationship with the term ‘Romanticism’—I see it as both something we enjoy and something that restricts us … which is why I focus on love and desire instead. They offer a more radical, utopian force—one I strive to capture in my photography.” His dancer performs a preposterously blasé hamstring stretch, his entire body giving rise to the kinds of questions often inspired by an ample-when-flaccid endowment.

Bruce LaBruce
Hunk with Sneaker, 2008
Digital C-print
11 x 14 inches
Edition of 1/5 

Gerardo Vizmanos
Dancer, 2024
Archival Pigment Print
8 x 10 inches
Edition of 7 

Matt Lambert
Warm Amour, Paris, 2017
Thermal Imaging C-print
20 x 24 inches
Edition 1/5 

Of course, no collection of photography on the subject of Queer romance would be complete without the work of Paul Mpagi Sepuya. His intimate studio portraits meditate on the vulnerable interplay of sensuality and performativity between artist and subject—that ineffable power dynamic inherent in every nude portrait since time immemorial. In all of these artists, we see an earnest motion to decouple our fantasies with any notions of shame or fear—to let them not only be conspicuous but copyrighted in our names. 

 
 

My Romantic Ideal is on view through August 31 @ The Bureau of General Services—Queer Division 208 West 13th Street Room 210, New York

A Democratic Eye On London: Dennis Morris @ the Photographers’ Gallery

 

Dennis Morris, Johnny Rotten, backstage at the Marquee club, London, 1977 © Dennis Morris.

 


text by Poppy Baring


Known mainly for his celebrity portraits and coverage of stars like Bob Marley, Oasis, the Sex Pistols, and other early punk and reggae icons, Dennis Morris’s new solo exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery in London also features his lesser known reportage work. Music + Life is a three-floor presentation of Morris’s life documenting everything from the pride and resilience of post-war Black British culture to the rarefied inner sanctum of the music industry. 

These pictures don’t have an angle they’re attempting to make plain. Instead, they provide us with a rare and personal glimpse into the lives of mega music stars in their youth. They are candid images taken between friends. Morris thereby reveals naturally occurring gems of moments that are refreshing, intoxicating, and remarkably at ease. His approach was nothing more than knocking on a door; the door would open, and he would go from there. 

 

Dennis Morris, Oasis Backstage in Tokyo, 1994 © Dennis Morris.

 

Starting at the age of eight, and landing his first cover on London’s Daily Mirror at just eleven years old, it is clear that Morris had a strong passion for photography early on, as well as the determination to take it places. His remarkable career started when St. Mark’s church in Dalston, where he sang in the choir, started a camera club. Influenced heavily by reportage photography, which was a favored style at the time, Morris began photographing his environment in East London. In 1973, this progressed into skipping school so that he could take photos of Bob Marley as he entered sound check. Almost straight after, when Morris was just fourteen, Marley asked him to join and document the Catch a Fire tour. Young Dennis Morris accepted and, as they did for several artists, his photographs became key to the marketing and making of Marley’s career.

Dennis Morris, The Abyssinians, outtake from the photo shoot for the album Arise, 1977 © Dennis Morris.

While these authentic photographs of famous musicians provide a behind-the-scenes look into the lives of stars past, his exploration into London’s Hackney in the 1970s surveys another fascinating world. Although areas like Dalston and Hackney are now sought-after places to live, the pictures taken in his early career show just how much London has changed in the last fifty years. Morris explains his approach, saying in his interview, “If I’m in the studio, it’s like I’m on the street; if I’m on the street, it’s like I’m in the studio.” Overall, this creates a nice balance to the exhibition—one which raises East London to stardom and renders celebrity as rather quotidian.

Music + Life is on view through September 28 at the Photographers’ Gallery, 16-18 Ramillies Street, London, W1F7LW

Dennis Morris, Untitled, 1970s © Dennis Morris.

Bogotá Rising: Notes on Resilience, Conviviality, and Experimental Art

San Felipe neighborhood skies

text & images by Perry Shimon

Colombia’s art scene is in the midst of a dynamic resurgence. After a prolonged lockdown that temporarily stalled the country’s cultural momentum, activity is ramping up again in anticipation of the fall season, anchored by Bogotá’s ARTBO fair, and two biennials in Bogotá and Medellín. Despite longstanding infrastructural and political challenges, the country has maintained a vibrant landscape of artist-run spaces, project-based initiatives, and strong public engagement.

In this mountain-wreathed brick city with a breathtaking theater of clouds, I had the great pleasure of seeing and meeting much of Bogotá’s cultural ecosystem. In May of this year, I attended a curatorial intensive organized by Mahazabin Haque (All About Curating, Berlin) and The Art Dome (Miami / Bogotá), which brought together artists, curators, and researchers, with warmth and conviviality, for a tightly packed itinerary of visits across studios, institutions, collections, archives, and impromptu social spaces. What emerged was a portrait of a cultural landscape with unique presence, community, improvisation, and resilience.

Telecom Building, student graduate show

One of the most memorable visits was to the dilapidated Telecom Tower—a relic of privatization now reimagined as a vertical commons. After organizing a group exhibition in the building in 2024, Linda Pongutá, William Contreras Alfonso, and Maria Leguízamo went on to occupy several floors, establishing studios, residencies, site-specific exhibitions, and performances. They also began developing an initiative to create a rotating museum showcasing works by the building’s members. During our visit, one floor hosted a student show, several artists graciously welcomed us into their studios, and independent publisher David Medina was at work on a new book project. In the elevator, the partisan resistance anthem Bella Ciao played on loop.

Gloria Sebastián Fierro Castro

Artist and teacher Ana María Montenegro gave a tour, describing a conceptual performance in which she was visiting each of Bogotá’s eighty notaries to have officially notarized a simple and rather philosophical promise: that she would be someone different tomorrow than she was today. Artist Juan Betancurth, who administers the artist residency program, gave an impromptu tour of his studio where he sculpturally assembles found objects into disquieting meditations on power, desire, and art. Nearby, Gloria Sebastián Fierro Castro showed us their haunting textile and tar works, drawn from a family archive that traces their transition from rural life to running a gas station—a stark emblem of modernization in a sepia-toned desert landscape.

Curator Nicolás Gómez Echeverri at Museo de Arte Miguel Urrutia

The archive loomed large in other ways. At the Museo de Arte Miguel Urrutia, curator Nicolás Gómez Echeverri walked us through a collection tour that will soon be dismantled and rethought under his guidance. The planned rehanging will confront the colonial scaffolding of the existing display, seeking ways to integrate Colombia’s extensive institutional holdings into a narrative that accounts for omissions and regionalism. Among the exceptional paintings of Fídolo Alfonso González Camargo, Obregón, and Cárdenas Arroyo, was a series of anonymous 18th-century convent funerary portraits: powerful images with uncertain authorship, quietly haunting and unsettling the canon.

Hadra Waheed’s Hum in Doris Salcedo’s counter-monument

At Fragmentos, artist Doris Salcedo’s “counter-monument” to Colombia’s armed conflict, we walked across a geographic-feeling topography of thirty-seven tons of hand-hammered metal tiles made from weapons turned in after the FARC peace agreement. In the adjacent courtyard, a deteriorating colonial ruin serves as the setting for Hum, a multi-channel sound installation by Canadian artist Hadra Waheed, which gathers protest songs from across the world into a reflective, almost devotional field. 

Juan Cortés Studio Visit

Memory was also the subject of a project we encountered in the studio of Juan Cortés, who shared a recent collaboration initiated by the Colombian president: a digital map of “houses of memory”—community archives, cultural centers, and alternative institutions preserving regional histories. The ambitious and exemplary project is part oral history, part visual archive, part social cartography, and a model for a new possible infrastructure for collective memory.

María Adelaida Samper giving a tour of Gabriel Zea’s Mystic Capital at the Al Romero gallery

Elsewhere, in San Felipe, Gabriel Zea’s Mystic Capital, at the Al Romero House Gallery, staged capitalism as a religion. Tarot-inspired AI works illustrated symbolic systems of belief in the market, as well as its impoverished aims and overdetermined meanings. An accompanying video installation collaged cartoonish bull and bear imagery into frenetic and tumultuous booms and busts. Zea’s collective, Aliens, curated the show with María Adelaida Samper. It both estranged the givenness of our cosmologically proportioned faith in markets and situated it in a longue durée continuum of numerology, mysticism, superstition, power, and grave consequences.

Tienda de Esperanza, San Felipe

Chuco Candela in Lavamoa Tumba

Tienda culture emerged as one of the more poetic and socially alive throughlines of the trip. These ubiquitous corner stores often moonlight as salons, exhibition spaces, and places of convivial gathering. Artist Chuco Candela’s intervention at Tienda de Esperanza turned an already beloved Macarena landmark into an exhibition space for his and his friends’ often meme-themed ceramics. Later, in San Felipe, his second location hosted a massive street party with fireworks for its opening. He later invited us to visit his most recent exhibition in his ongoing Lavamoa Tumba project—enormous, sprawling group shows in condemned buildings, this edition featuring 150 artists, and overflowing with energy, humor, and street-rooted practices.

Trepesitos fashion show at Odeon

After a fashion show by Trepesitos at the majestic theater-turned-exhibition space and artful community center Odeón, we ended the night in a tienda playing bolirana, a barroom sport that fuses pre-Columbian tradition with contemporary nightlife, popular with both Reggaeton and contemporary artists. It is perhaps to bowling what ping pong is to tennis and invites loud and playful sociality. Odeón’s Tatiana Rais and Juan Sebastián Peláez, formerly of the Miami Gallery and Carne Collective, began sharing insights about Colombia’s commitment to public art funding and the system of rotating independent art professionals who administer allocations for artist projects and spaces. While there is not a strong enough local market to support the many practicing artists, this type of public funding supports the scene to some extent and underwrites less commercially oriented works. 

María Morán at Cooperates

Charlie Mai exhibition and talk at Plural

We visited artist-run Cooperates studios and residency in Chapinero, anchored by the painter and teacher María Morán, and the communal Plural project—part art space, part kitchen—where Chinese-American artist Charlie Mai was showing an installation with a series of performances reflecting on Chinese capital, North/South American labor, transportation infrastructure, and hybrid identity. We were sad to miss the closing party with a durational cowboy performance, Chinese dragon dancing, and DJ set by underground club hero DJ Bclip.

José Darío Gutiérrez at Espacio El Dorado

At Espacio El Dorado, José Darío Gutiérrez gave a highlights tour of his impressive collection of overlooked political Colombian art and their marginalization through Cold War-era collecting policies imposed by major Western foundations. During our visit, a young scholar from Buenos Aires working on a curatorial project about political photographers and left-wing conferences overheard the conversation and joined our group, offering a recently published dissertation called “The Cultural Cold War in Colombia: Oil and Washington’s Policies for ‘Pacification’ of Art in Conspiratorial Times” by Christian Padilla Peñuela that Jose was coincidentally trying to place with a publisher. As we were leaving I noticed the young man and Jose in a deep thoughtful conversation, Jose generously retrieving books from his collection to give as gifts. 

Taller Arte Gráfico

Subachoque

Perhaps the most moving experience of the trip was a pair of visits to Taller Arte Gráfico and Sextante, founded by Luis Ángel Parra and María Eugenia Niño fifty years ago. They welcomed us warmly to their Bogotá gallery and country atelier in Subachoque and let us marvel at the breathtaking collection amassed over a lifetime of artful collaboration. They described their printmaking and publishing practice as a ‘love story’ and shared how they met fifty years ago, moved in on that very same day, and have been together ever since. We learned a few days after our visit that sculptor Hugo Zapata—a dear friend of theirs, whose works were on display in the gallery—had passed away, making the visit a poignant and beautiful parting gift.

Subachoque

Hugo Zapata

There were countless other stops: Liz Caballero’s impressive three-story SKETCH Gallery, La Casita’s misleadingly named sprawling intergenerational and dialogic collection, Casa Hoffmann’s austere kinetic and music themed program, NC-Arte’s gorgeous design villa, Desborde Gallery’s anarchic installation and performance works by Alfonso Aguas Negras, a tour of artist duo Eduard Moreno & Andrea Marín García studio and upcoming works for the Medellín biennial, perhaps the world’s most significant pre-Columbian metalwork collection at the Oro Museum, and a very moving studio visit with the young Bogotá-born-and-raised painter Angie Vega, whose extraordinarily skillful intimate portraits of her Tunjuelito neighborhood familiars had garnered her invitations to apprentice with master painters in Europe and Saint Petersburg. The lingering impressions from this vibrant and flourishing art ecosystem were its warm hospitality, generous sociality, and a sense of experimentation that felt neither reactionary nor utopic, rather present, responsive, and open.

SKETCH Gallery

Daniela Acosta Parsons and Danilo Roa’s studio

Jeronimo Villa at La Casita

Angie Vega

Lia García in her studio

Camilo Bojaca at Galería El Museo

Miller Lagos in his studio

Studio of Andrea Marín García & Eduard Moreno

Mauricio Gallego in his studio

.

Alfonso Aguas Negras at Desborde Galería

Hugo Zapata at Sextante

Theatron

Cloud theater

Put On A Face, Any Face: Read An Interview of Kenny Scharf & Curator Shai Baitel

Courtesy of Roger Davies

It’s not often that an artist and a curator connect the way Kenny Scharf and Shai Baitel do. Emotional, the biggest show of Scharf’s career, didn’t come out of a typical museum timeline or curatorial trend. It came from Baitel’s urgent feeling of injustice that the art world hadn’t given Scharf the recognition he deserved, and he wanted to change that. When we spoke, Scharf joined the Zoom call straight from his studio, answering questions with a paintbrush in hand. It felt intimate and telling: Scharf doesn’t separate art from life. His world is constantly in motion, fueled by color, feeling, and spontaneity.

The dynamics between Scharf and Baitel set the tone for a conversation that highlighted the reverent partnership between them, whose collaborative spirit is at the heart of the exhibition. What initially started as an interview about an art show quickly turned into a rhythmic conversation about friendships, personal stories, timing, and how things can easily fall into place when two people believe in the same thing.

Scharf came up in the late seventies and early eighties in New York, rubbing shoulders with Basquiat and Haring, bringing a psychedelic, cartoon-fueled energy that set him apart. He paints like he’s channeling something from another planet, but also something deeply familiar and simple. Emotional is more than a retrospective—It’s a long-overdue celebration of a singular voice in contemporary art. Read more.

BHAKTI—Krishna’s Grace Celebrates the Transformative Power of Devotion @ NMACC in Mumbai

Bhakti opens an immersive and enlightening dialogue between the viewer and devotional art. It showcases artworks made in reverence of Krishna.

 

Shreenathji in Divine Adornment – A Pichwai painting capturing the grace and splendour of Krishna in his Govardhan-lifting form, resplendent in intricate jewels and devotional symbolism.

 

text and photographs by Parrie Chhajed

In a world where devotion often lives quietly—in morning rituals, household shrines, whispered prayers, and temple bells—Bhakti elevates it to a form of collective artistic expression. It draws from the everyday but expands into the eternal. This summer, the Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre (NMACC)—a multidisciplinary arts space dedicated to preserving and promoting India’s artistic heritage across visual art, performance, design, and culture—presents Bhakti—Krishna’s Grace. The exhibition reflects on the divine power of Krishna and the devotional path of bhakti through the evolving lenses of art, history, and lived spirituality. It explores how the transformation of humankind and landscapes has unfolded through sacred narratives. Perspectives from artists, devotees, and storytellers converge to honor the enduring presence of Vishnu in Indian spiritual and artistic traditions.

Chennai-based art historian Ashvin E. Rajagopalan’s curation brings together myth, memory, and material practice. As Director of the Piramal Art Foundation, he helped establish the Piramal Museum of Art in Mumbai and founded Ashvita’s, a cultural platform for emerging and established Indian artists.

Ananta Shayana Vishnu – A sculptural depiction of cosmic repose, where Lord Vishnu lies on the serpent Ananta as creation begins, watched over by Brahma and Lakshmi in celestial harmony.

The journey begins with Vishnu’s Dream, a specially commissioned centerpiece anchoring the exhibition’s cosmological vision. A visual timeline follows—moving from early human settlements and cave dwellings to ancient temple architecture, culminating in a sensorial reconstruction of Tamil Nadu’s Vaikuntha Perumal Temple, highlighting sacred geometry and cosmic design in early Indian architecture.

One of the more thought-provoking parallels often drawn in this context is between Vishnu’s Dashavatar and Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. Though rooted in mythology and science respectively, the progression of the avatars appears to echo the arc of life—from Matsya (fish) to Kurma (tortoise) to Varaha (boar) and Narasimha (man-lion), symbolising transitions from aquatic life to mammals to early humans. The later avatars—Vamana, Parashurama, Rama, Krishna, and Buddha—map onto stages of human development, from survival and order to emotional and spiritual evolution. Kalki, the final avatar, possibly hints at a future transformation—ecological or spiritual. Whether coincidental or intuitive, the parallel adds another dimension to the global relevance of these spiritual and religious perspectives.

This theme continues in the Crafts Village, where master artisans from across India demonstrate traditional techniques—sculpting, weaving, painting—that keep devotional practices alive. Over forty rare artworks and sculptures, many publicly displayed for the first time, celebrate diverse expressions of Krishna devotion through literature, performance, and material culture.

Among the highlights is a Pattachitra painting, created on a long scroll using the traditional storytelling technique from Odisha and West Bengal. Known for its delicate linework, vibrant natural pigments, and decorative floral borders, Pattachitra was historically used by chitrakars (scroll painters) to narrate epics and myths door-to-door—functioning much like what we today call storyboards. This particular scroll illustrates the birth and early life of Lord Krishna, beginning with the divine prophecy that he would end the tyranny of his uncle Kansa. The narrative unfolds as Kansa imprisons his sister Devaki and brother-in-law Vasudeva, and kills their first seven children. When Krishna is born, divine forces intervene—the prison gates open, the guards fall asleep, and Vasudeva carries the newborn across the stormy Yamuna River to safety in Gokul, where he is raised by Yashoda and Nanda. Each sequential panel captures a moment of this miraculous tale, blending devotional intensity with visual rhythm and artistic finesse.

Raas Leela – A celebratory textile painting capturing the divine dance of Krishna and the gopis, where love, rhythm, and surrender unfold beneath celestial trees and blooming devotion.

Another striking work uses the Rajasthani miniature painting technique, likely inspired by the Kishangarh or Mewar school of thought. With detailed landscapes and a radiant saffron sky, it portrays Radha and Krishna in a divine forest encounter, reflecting the tradition’s romanticism and spiritual subtlety.

In contrast, a painting in the Tanjore style celebrates Krishna’s childhood as Nandkishor and Makhanlal. This South Indian form is known for its bold colors, raised relief work, and gold leaf detailing. The depiction captures Krishna’s playful charm and the devotional love surrounding his early years in Vrindavan.

Tying these expressions together is the philosophy of idol worship in Hinduism, where God is both formless (nirguna) and with form (saguna). Idols become focal points of devotion after rituals like prana pratishta, inviting divine presence into sacred forms. Spiritually and psychologically, they anchor memory, imagination, and connection, serving as both mirror and portal for inner transformation.

Bhakti is more than an exhibition—it is a multi-sensory invitation to witness how art, myth, and memory intertwine to express the sacred. It reminds us that devotion is not static;it evolves, adapts, and continues to offer grace in ever-new forms.

Bhakti—Krishna’s Grace is on view through August 17 at the Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre (NMACC), Mumbai 

 

Installation view of BHAKTI—Krishna’s Grace at Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre, Mumbai.

 

Rick Owens' Retrospective Is A Paean to the Designer's California Roots @ Palais Galliera in Paris

Rick Owens, Temple Of Love is a meditation on romance, beauty, and diversity. It archives one of today’s leading designers, transforming the museum into a shrine to creativity.

 

Courtesy of Palais Galliera

 

text by Kim Shveka

Rick Owens, Temple of Love is the first exhibition in Paris dedicated to fashion designer Rick Owens, which he creative directed himself. The massive retrospective features collections from his beginning in Los Angeles through his most recent theatrical runways in Paris’s Palais de Tokyo.

With his radical fusion of Gothic Romanticism, Brutalism, and Minimalism, which often provokes social and political themes on his runways, Rick Owens has long been known as fashion’s avant-garde designer. His aesthetic challenges conventional notions of beauty, gender, and form, often occupying a space between fashion, performance art, and architecture.

In the exhibition, we gain rare insight into the designer’s creative inner world, understanding how his references come to life and the ideas that lie behind his work. Gustave Moreau, Joseph Beuys, and Steven Parrino were among Owens’s sources of inspiration, resonating with his embrace of destruction as creation, the usage of art as a vehicle for criticism, and the glorification of beauty through excess. The exhibition also focuses on the central role played by his lifelong wife and muse, Michèle Lamy, whose presence is always felt through Owens. We get an intimate glimpse into the couple’s private world through a recreation of their California bedroom, designed using pieces from Owens’ furniture line. Just beyond the wall, their closet room is unveiled, with dark garments loosely folded next to a packed bookshelf. This section of the exhibition feels like a genuine invitation into their daily lives, where we are meant to truly feel their presence. The air itself is infused with Rick Owens’ signature scent, activating all five senses for a complete journey through their rituals.  

 

Courtesy of Palais Galliera

 

In another room, plastered with “No photos please” signs, stands perhaps the most Rick Owens-esque piece in the exhibition: a towering statue of Rick himself, mid-urination. It reads as the most cynical, provocative fountain since Marcel Duchamp.

The exhibition is extended throughout the entirety of the Palais Galliera campus, as well as the outside garden, wherein California-native plants and vines surround thirty brutalist cement sculptures. Above the garden is the building of the exhibition, whose windows display three colossal statues of Owens covered head to toe in gold. Owens saw the importance of finishing his retrospective with his origin, California. As a designer whose presence casts a looming glunge shadow over the City of Light, it’s easy even for him to overlook his roots in the Sunshine State.

Courtesy of Palais Galliera

Rick Owens, Temple of Love is on view through January 4, 2026 at Palais Galliera, 10 Av. Pierre 1er de Serbie, 75116 Paris

Encounters at the Barbican: Giacometti x Huma Bhabha

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

text by Poppy Baring

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

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

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


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

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

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

 

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


 

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

Photo credit: Alan Weiner

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

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

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

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

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


text by Karly Quadros


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

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

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

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

The Menil Collection campus. Photo by Grant Gay

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

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

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

Dan Flavin Installation at Richmond Hall. Photo by Sarah Hobson

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

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

James Turrell, Caper, Salmon to White Wedgework, 2000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stitched in Place: Do Ho Suh at the Tate Modern

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

text by Poppy Baring

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image courtesy of Nathalie Basoski

text by Karly Quadros

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Prada’s Architectural Meditation in Osaka

Prada Mode, Osaka
Courtesy of Prada

text by Andrea Riano


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

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

Prada Mode, Osaka
Courtesy of Prada

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

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

Kazuyo Sejima at Prada Mode, Osaka
Courtesy of Prada

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

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

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

Prada Mode, Osaka
Courtesy of Prada

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

David Hockney: A Bigger Exhibition @ Louis Vuitton Foundation

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

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

text by Kim Shveka

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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


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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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