Michael Rider continues to reinvent a new language for the house of CELINE through a unique tempered elegance that borrows gently from the past and looks deeply to the future, as evidenced in the Summer 2026 presentation during Paris Fashion Week. photographs by Jody Rogac, courtesy of CELINE
On October 1 in the Jardin des Tuileries, Dior presented its 2026 RTW collection by Jonathan Anderson, which brilliantly reimagined the House’s heritage through an empathetic, deeply humanistic lens.
Drawing from the archive, Anderson wove familiar codes into new forms. The bow—an enduring Dior signature—appeared everywhere, reinterpreted in pinch-front coats, draped cotton drill miniskirts, airy lace dresses, and the new Dior Cigale top-handle bag. Shrunken Bar jackets took on sculptural proportions, while rippling capes and voluminous shorts echoed both his June debut and the House’s couture lineage. The result was a study in tension and transformation, offering a spectrum of attitudes and self-expressions.
The show space, conceived by Luca Guadagnino and Stefano Baisi, blurred the line between digital and physical realms. A specially commissioned film by documentary auteur Adam Curtis unfolded across an inverted LED pyramid—Dior’s past flickering in fragments before collapsing into the form of a Dior shoe box. It was a poetic gesture: memory as something preserved, contained, and perpetually open to rediscovery.
photographs by Adrien Dirand
Sasha Gordon
Flame Like Blush, 2024
Oil on linen
60 x 60 1/4 inches
Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York
On an unpleasantly hot and humid September evening, unfazed and well-dressed New Yorkers filed into David Zwirner Gallery, where the latest work from Brooklyn-based artist Sasha Gordon is on view.
Last year, David Zwirner and Matthew Brown announced that they would co-represent Gordon. While still a student at the Rhode Island School of Design in 2019, she showed some work with Brown and began her rise to prominence. Most recently, she had a solo show at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami.
Haze consists of seven paintings that turn inwards, probing Gordon’s complicated relationship with herself. Her hyperrealist self-portraits, often using neon hues, almost seem to glow. And she includes surreal splashes: a chain of tiny, floating rocks tethered to the one she sits on or the straps of her LED-lit tank top floating off into the canvas. The effect sometimes evokes science fiction, as if a UFO might just drift into the next canvas.
Gordon brazenly pushes past the surface of her image, instead foregrounding the cruel and varying personas of her psyche. That these works are on exhibit and available for an audience to view feels incidental to their purpose.
Sasha Gordon
It Was Still Far Away, 2024
Oil on linen
72 1/4 x 96 1/8 inches"
Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York
In It Was Still Far Away, a figure in Gordon’s likeness, wearing a white tank and mesh shorts, sits on a picnic blanket as a neon-orange mushroom cloud bursts behind her. As the bomb explodes, she clips her toenails, headphones on.
On the subway, waiting for a coffee, and before closing our eyes at night, our screens bring every global disaster to our door. And it seems that even our language has fallen behind; words like catastrophe and tragedy imply an anomaly, but what if watching war and famine and genocide unfold has become as quotidian as eating, working, and sleeping?
In Trance, a close-up of Gordon’s distorted face, painted in fluorescent gray, shows her eating a nail clipping. Below, a hand that’s speckled with more nail clippings is held out like an offering. In some ways, this painting of a hard-to-break habit feels more revealing than any of her nudes.
In the following room, the paintings turn increasingly self-lacerating. In Whores in the Attic, three nude women with oblong breasts, sturdy legs, and skin dimpled like the texture of the moon, stand insolently in front of the other Gordon, peeking out from behind a door. One of the antagonists haughtily smokes a cigarette while the other two gaze with scorn.
Sasha Gordon
Whores in the Attic, 2024
Oil on linen
96 1/8 x 78 1/4 inches
Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York
Her thorny relationship with herself turns even more torturous. In Pruning, one of the antagonizing personas is holding another Gordon underwater inside a glass box, her skin illuminated a brilliant green-blue. The underwater Gordon stares straight ahead, directly confronting the viewer, while her knees have cracked the corners of the glass. Some air bubbles, rendered with stunning technical precision, float up to the surface.
In the exhibit’s final painting, Husbandry Heaven, set against a mint-green and grey swirled backdrop, one version of Gordon forces food into the mouth of another, hands bound behind her back. Ashes float down from somewhere, smoke drifts across in swirls, and fragments of other selves are perched on floating rocks. Unlike the former paintings, this one has a distinct tenderness. For all her looks of scorn and ridicule, Gordon never abandons herself, and one is left wondering what love and care for oneself might look like.
Haze is on view through November 1 at David Zwirner Gallery 537 West 20th Street, New York.
Larry Bell with Pacific Red II. Photography by Matthew Millman, San Francisco
For over six decades, Larry Bell has skillfully molded contemporary art in America. Born in Chicago in 1939, Bell moved to the West Coast to study at the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles, the historic precursor to CalArts.
There, Bell became a member of Los Angeles’s Cool School, a rebellious group of artists, largely represented by Walter Hopps and Irving Blum of Ferus Gallery in the 1950s and ’60s, who brought modern-day avant-garde to the West Coast. Alongside Ed Ruscha and Robert Irwin, Bell is one of the last living members of the School. As a foundational figure in the Light and Space movement, Southern California’s take on Minimalism, which often employed industrial materials and aerospace technology to explore the ways that volume, light and scale play with our sense of perception, Bell made innovative work that experimented with the interconnections of glass and light and their relations to reflection and illusion.
His most notable works involve his creation of semi-transparent cubes made out of vacuum-coated glass to form an immersive experience as the art melts into space. Recently, six of Bell’s cubes have been installed in Madison Square Park, where they will be on view until March 15, 2026. Improvisations in the Park carries on Bell’s legacy, but with a twist. Instead of their typical white cube environment, they have been placed outside to interact with the constantly changing elements, causing a new perception almost every hour.
This idea, related to the flexibility of perception, is also highlighted in Bell’s recent series of collage works, Irresponsible Irridescence, on view now at the Judd Foundation in New York. These collages poured out of Bell after the passing of his wife two years ago, sharing a more emotional side of his work with audiences. They also subtly allude to the close friendship between Bell and the late Donald Judd. It was Bell who convinced Judd to build this now-historic organization in Marfa, Texas, rather than El Rosario, Mexico, impacting American art history forever. Read more.
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
“Civilians” is the inaugural music video release from Clark’s latest album, Steep Stims, which drops November 7 on gatefold double vinyl, CD, and streaming with Throttle Records. This new album is the latest in Clark’s long, illustrious, and varied career, which has seen everything from becoming a Warp Records mainstay alongside fellow luminaries Aphex Twin and Squarepusher, to headlining Royal Albert Hall for a reinterpretation of Bach, to composing multiple significant scores. Judging by this initial teaser, which opens with gyrating gelatin as inspiration for the dancers’ movement and devolves into increasingly debaucherous deportment, we can only presume that the rest of the album has a cadre of sinuous surprises in store.
We are living through a time when the worst human suffering imaginable is both televised and ignored, when disorientation is used as a tool of control. In direct response to this intractable cognitive dissonance, Simulacra, choreographed by Megan Paradowski, insists on the urgency of embodied memory. Paradowski’s 30-minute choreographed piece premiered this September 11 at LA Dance Project’s LAUNCH, featuring dancers Jessy Crist, Maddie Lacambra, Travis Lim, Nadia Maryam, Jonah Tran, and Marco Vega. Paradowski’s choreography unfolded alongside a 40-pound ice sculpture by Heidi Ross, with a soundscape by Ian Wellman, costumes by Gabrielle Kraus, and lighting by Caleb Wildman—each element contributing to a fully immersive environment. What emerged was a work both haunting and hopeful, one that situates itself within a global landscape of suppressed truths and performative power.
Referencing Alexei Yurchak’s Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More—a study of the Soviet Union’s descent into “hypernormalisation,” where repetition transformed falsehoods into reality—Simulacra responds to the collapse we are currently living through: the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, mass deportations, the digital fog of misinformation, and the slow, aestheticized demise of the climate.
The stage was intentionally configured in the middle of the audience, dissolving any hierarchy of perspective and forcing viewers to confront the work from every angle. Ross’s monumental ice sculpture, carved from frozen beet juice, stood at the center, steadily bleeding onto the stage, staining the floor, and eventually the dancers’ garments. The sculpture became both a visual anchor and sonic participant, as Wellman incorporated the crackling and fracturing of the ice into the score. Its gradual dissolution mirrored the choreography’s central theme: that violence leaves a stain. The red liquid’s gradual seeping into fabric and skin became a quiet insistence that history persists in the body.
Paradowski transforms the performance space into a site of collective witnessing. Her choreography doesn’t merely present movement—it reveals what we might otherwise refuse to see. The dancers’ bodies are both medium and message, extending and releasing with a tension that exists even in levity. Watching them push and pull, fall and catch, resist and support—this continual ebb and flow—called to mind the properties of water: its ability to buoy, to drown, to hold, and to erode. Grief, care, and survival are traced in gestures that feel both urgent and inevitable.
Having worked with Paradowski in the studio over the past few months, I’ve seen how she uses choreography as a tool for inquiry—how movement can reshape ideas and give form to what is otherwise unspoken. Simulacra is the fullest articulation of that philosophy. Her performance positions the body as both vessel and witness, capable of absorbing violence and preserving truth long after the events have passed.
Because she sees the world through movement, each phrase of choreography is like trying on a garment. In rehearsal, I might move a certain way and she’ll say, “Yes—that looks good on your body.” I thought about that often while witnessing Simulacra evolve—how certain gestures don’t strive for beauty, but for truth. Some are erratic, others jarring or uncomfortable, but each one fits. Each one says exactly what it must.
The more I’ve come to know Megan—both as a choreographer and as a person—the more I’ve come to deeply admire this work. Simulacra holds space for a world that feels as though it is unraveling, and in its insistence on movement, it seems to hold the threads together. As Pina Bausch once said, “I’m not so interested in how they move as in what moves them.” Megan’s work embodies that sentiment completely.
Dance has always felt like one of the most powerful tools we have for understanding the world—its violence, its tenderness, its chaos, its grace. Simulacra ends not with resolution, but with an image: of time slipping, collapsing, staining everything it touches. It reminds us that the world is changing faster than we can process—but that memory, like pigment in water, lingers.
Even in the aftermath of destruction, there is room for collective care. Amid dissolution, there is still buoyancy—a possibility for reforming, softening, and holding. Because the body—bearing trauma, rhythm, and breath—may be the last site of reality. And because in times like these, consciousness itself becomes an act of rebellion. We must move to keep ourselves whole.
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.
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.
Philippe Parreno, Anywhere out of the world, Pinault Collection 2022
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.
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
Creative Directors: Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons Talent: Scarlett Johansson Film Director: Yorgos Lanthimos Campaign Creative Director: Ferdinando Verderi
jewelry: uncommon matters
jacket: MSGM
earrings: uncommon matters
jacket: Balenciaga
jewelry: uncommon matters
top: Magliano
bag 1: Jerôme Dreyfuss
bag 2 & belt: Acne Studios
skirt: Our Legacy
earrings: uncommon matters
skirt & jacket: Balenciaga
earrings: uncommon matters
skirt, jacket & pumps: Balenciaga
jewelry: Saskia Diez
top & shorts: Ferragamo
jewelry: uncommon matters
top & jacket: Our Legacy
shorts: Diesel
boots: David Koma
earrings: Bottega Veneta
top & jacket: Magliano
Binx on a bike. Photographed by Stef Mitchell, 2025 Binx Walton, a model and artist, captured by Stef Mitchell. Renowned for her arresting and intimate portraits of independence and youth, connecting with the irreverent and youthful attitude of Versace.
This week, Chief Creative Officer Dario Vitale unveiled “Chapter One” of his new vision for the House of Versace, founded by Gianni Versace in 1978. Described as a “force of expression,” it connects the present with the brand’s historical DNA of unbridled creativity, with a clear path for the future. The project will take shape as a series of visual chapters, “fragments of people, places and emblems that embody its values.” Chapter One includes work from Camille Vivier, Steven Meisel, Eileen Myles, Collier Schorr and more. Photographs, poetry, art, music, and film, alongside objects from the Versace archive capture the house’s “uncompromising strength, rigour and sexuality” and a celebration of pure freedom. Click here to see more.
‘Untitled’. Illustrations by Collier Schorr, 2025 Collier Schorr, an artist and photographer, whose intimate portraits cast a confronting lens on the subjects of her work, responding to the intimacy and sexuality that defines the House with a series of original illustrations.
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In the bustling streets of Bandra, nestled in a quiet corner, Polite Society is something new, innovative, and revolutionary. A label doesn't just sell clothes; it builds identity while being honest to itself, its consumers, and the earth. A brand that says” Be rich in your ways,” Surmai Jain, the Founder and the creative mind behind the label, has a diverse take on everything, having lived through different cities and worked through equally different fields; her approach to everything blends her stories seamlessly. In this conversation, Surmai shares her journey of building a label that is more of a community, her cross-cultural influences, and perspectives on sustainability. Read more.
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
Ang Siew Ching, High-Rise Pigs, 2025
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
