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

Rooted, Relevant, and Evolving: Read an Interview of Curator Rajiv Menon →

 

Suchitra Mattai, Set Free, 2024. Courtesy the artist.

 

With each new generation of immigrants from South Asia making their way to the various corners of the world, so too does their culture and unique interpretation thereof. With the context of comparison, they offer perspectives on their homeland that challenge the idea of authenticity deriving from one’s geographic placement. Thus is the crux of Non-Residency, a group show that comprises sixteen artists of South Asian diasporic identity curated by Rajiv Menon. Bringing the work of non-resident South Asian artists directly to Jaipur is a first for the young gallerist and curator who opened Rajiv Menon Contemporary in Hollywood, California, in his quest to bolster representation of the Indian diaspora within the United States. He refers to these artists as the Non-Resident School, effectively defining a voice of Non-Resident Indian (NRI) taste that is both united and richly diverse by way of its orientation. Read more.

Lumière sur la Place: Reflections from This Year's Les Rencontres de la Photographie in Arles

text and images by Perry Shimon

It was hard to locate the disobedience in this year’s theme of disobedient images at this extremely pleasant festival, in the extremely charming UNESCO city of Arles, in the extremely agreeable Provence region. The works on view this year spanned the familiar preoccupations of affluent liberal audiences: conflicted zones, colonial histories, marginalized identities, and trauma narratives. It evokes a peculiar, perhaps Catholic, sequence of hedonism, sermonizing, and repentance. As though wandering through an artful overabundance in the palimpsestic old city, pausing for long leisurely meals on la place, must be atoned for by encounters with images of intense suffering and historical prejudice. 

The opening week coincides with the Fête du Costume, where locals dressed in 17th-century finery perform elaborate processions around the city, simulating past rites into less-violent echoes of themselves; bullgames replacing bullfights. Such transformations invite broader comparisons. One could make a case for this as a cultural evolution: perhaps the collection and trophy-like display of images, many from formerly colonized and marginalized peoples, is a less violent enactment of the collection and domination of lives, labor, and time. Is this an incremental improvement, a continuum, a contestation, or a symbolic order? The answer may shift depending on one’s vantage.

Adam Ferguson, Église Sainte-Anne

Arles has long been a seat of power: from the Celto-Ligurians, through Roman emperors, to today’s LUMA Foundation with its €150 million Gehry-designed castle and landscaped pleasure ground. The unpopular-with-the-locals architectural folly is a striking distillation of neoliberal values; the imperial and the cultural entangled through architecture, objects, history, and spectacle. Inside, exhibitions with titles like #metime, slide installations from Carsten Höller, and accounts of early industry-led collaborations between tech companies and avant-garde artists sit comfortably together: all an expression of a technocratic, individualistic, neoliberal worldview.

Wael Shawky, I am Hymns of the New Temples, LUMA

Ho Tzu Nyen, Hotel Aporia, LUMA

Also on at LUMA was Wael Shawky’s I Am Hymns of the New Temples, an immersive film installation of cosmological marionette theatre set in Pompeii, which filled La Grande Halle; and a significant retrospective of Singaporean artist Ho Tzu Nyen, offering a broad survey of his technologically situated engagements with Asian history, including a particularly haunting and fascinating work commissioned for the Aichi Triennial—Hotel Aporia—which explores wartime visual cultures and philosophical currents in Japan.

Lumière des Roses, Cloître Saint-Trophime

Some of the highlights of the photo fair this year included selections from Marion and Philippe Jacquier’s Lumière des Roses gallery in Grenoble, whose collection of anonymous, often amateur photography was installed in the cloister of Saint-Trophime. Within the austere, devotional architecture of the cloister, the effect was wondrous; small, strange pictures suggesting unknowable interiorities of past lives lived below the usual interests of history.  

Retratistas do Morro, Croisière

The Retratistas do Morro presentation, subtitled João Mendes and Afonso Pimenta: Reflections from Serra Community, Belo Horizonte (1970–1990), offered selections from a massive archive focused on two key photographers who, over half a century, documented residents of the Serra community—one of Brazil’s largest favelas. The work resists exoticization, intimately contouring the kin and cultures of this supremely syncretic, culturally vibrant era. What emerges is a celebration of quotidian life, a revealing counterpoint to the structural violence imposed upon its subjects. 

Diana Markosian, Father, Espace Monoprix

Diana Markosian’s Father was a complex, exquisite rendering of the Moscow-born artist’s reconnection with her estranged father, building on her earlier Santa Barbara project, which detailed her mother’s abrupt departure from post-Soviet Russia to marry a Californian farmer—taking both children and leaving the father behind in the middle of the night. In Father, the artist enlists her father, now living in Armenia, to participate in a staged reenactment of their reunion. The carefully lit, highly-stylized scenes stand in stark contrast to a vitrine filled with his actual, voluminous, and desperate correspondence: letters scrawled in Armenian to anyone he could think to contact in America, trying to locate his family. All above an open and bustling Monoprix grocery store.

The Louis Stettner presentation in the Espace Van Gogh showcased the underrepresented work of a resolutely twentieth-century photographer. It carried an affirm-the-canon sensibility, offering more-or-less poignant takes on familiar humanist themes and modern alienation, with highlights throughout, particularly a somber series depicting New York train commuters.

Batia Suter, Octahydra, Cryptoportiques

Batia Suter offered a hypnotic meditation on spatial resonance, projecting architectural affinities onto thin, overlapping muslins suspended within a 1st-century BCE Greco-Roman crypt. The work resisted explication, asking instead for a kind of intuitive attentiveness to form. For me it evoked underground server farms, circulating images, and a kind of visual associative learning and recombination characteristic of the age of AI. Nearby at LUMA foundation, the artist Tino Sehgal hung selections from their collection of photographs in a like fashion, determined by a surface-level visual similitude—inviting the question: after like is grouped with like, what remains outside of the data and dictates that determine them so? 

Augustin Rebetez, Primitive Manifesto, Croisière

Augustin Rebetez’s Primitive Manifesto presented an unhinged, accelerationist, Rube Goldberg machine of anarchic play, mental illness, and attention economies, unfolding noisily through the Croisière. The cursed AI images and hyperbolic memes, produced at Trecartinesque velocities, were a humorous and upsetting break from the other more measured and polished official offerings.  

Lisa Sorgini, Église Sainte-Anne

Lisa Sorgini’s sensitive and intimate family portraits shot during the ‘Black Summer’ immediately preceding the COVID lockdowns were a highlight from On Country: Photography From Australia in the Église Sainte-Anne; the beauty and terror of raising a family in troubling times. Letizia Battaglia’s Always In Search Of Life in the Saint-Martin du Méjan Chapel exhibited a powerful survey of the committed photographers' unsparing work, centered on midcentury Palermo; dark clouds of Christian passion and mafia violence tinged with quietly sublime silver linings. 

Letizia Battaglia, Saint-Martin du Méjan Chapel

This Rencontres wasn’t so much disobedient as familiar, and that which was verging on disobedience felt more like a performance to please the structures of power and privileged audiences. The title suggests simply that art is subordinate, should know its place—and if it steps out of line, it can be easily controlled, domesticated, and put back to work in service of its owners. On the whole, though, Rencontres is a marvelous, superabundance of thoughtful and beautiful images in-and-around the official presentations. There are ample opportunities to revel and wonder together in the slow plazas, myriad exhibitions, Mediterranean light, and historically rich surroundings. À la prochaine.

Libraire Du Palais

Le Sauvage

Sophie

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