Installation view: Sterling Ruby’s “Atropa” at Sprüth Magers in New York. Photo: Genevieve Hanson
American artist Sterling Ruby has long engaged not only with the chaotic condition of our human present but also, more broadly, with that primordial chaos from which everything originates. His work engages with entropy, expressed both through physical and organic decay and as a social, psychological and institutional condition. Ruby has consistently embraced abrasion, erosion and chance in his artmaking, allowing images and forms to emerge through processes that follow or evoke the organic evolution of matter itself.
This fundamental dimension of his practice is particularly evident in “Atropa,” his latest exhibition at Sprüth Magers in New York, which presents a new body of work shaped by his ongoing engagement with transformation, fragility and dissolution. Drawing its title from Atropos, the Greek Fate who cuts the thread of life, the show places vegetal life at its center, reflecting on the paradoxes it embodies. Plants exist in a state of constant tension: delicate yet resilient, parasitic yet generative and often lethally toxic yet medicinally valuable. Their existence unfolds at the convergence of destruction and restoration, at least from a human perspective, revealing the inseparability of decay and renewal.
“The idea of entropy is a good way to describe what I’m trying to do with the work,” Ruby told Observer shortly after the exhibition’s opening. “I keep attempting to construct that in-between space: I want the art to represent that tension between expression and repression, law and lawlessness, reality and fantasy, and of course the industrial and the natural.”
Sterling Ruby. Courtesy Sterling Ruby Studio
It is within this liminal terrain, between human and nature, construction and collapse, that Ruby locates his practice. For him, the most generative space is not stability but instability: the indefinable zone where collapse becomes inevitable and transformation begins. His new body of work embraces an even more fluid conception of matter, shaped by forces and energies that remain only partially visible. The works on paper, which span graphite drawings, pen-and-ink gestures and expressive watercolor collages, depict flora in various states of emergence and dissolution. They feel at once delicate and raw, like traces of a direct and unmediated exchange between mind, hand and material that arises equally from memory, imagination and embodied experience.
The origin of these works lies in a flower garden Ruby began cultivating in his studio years ago. Nurturing a space of botanical life within an industrial architecture exposed the fragile and improbable possibility of coexistence between organic and constructed environments. “As things grew, died off and grew back again, it became something I observed constantly while working,” he recalled. “It reminded me of the history of symbolism in still life and of memento mori—remember you must die…”
Located in Vernon, an industrial zone outside downtown Los Angeles, Ruby’s studio exists in a landscape defined by heavy manufacturing and environmental contamination. “Yet here I am, with this garden that has attracted bees, hummingbirds, finches, butterflies,” he said. Over time, it evolved into an ecosystem, and with the addition of water and food sources, even coyotes and hawks began to appear. “It feels like the studio is a place of transformation, not only for me as an artist, but for all of these other living things. It is inspiring to think of it as a habitat.”
Over time, Ruby’s studio has become a habitat not only for artistic production but also for other living forms. Courtesy Sterling Ruby Studio
While his works on paper are largely drawn from memory, Ruby often incorporates photographic documentation into his collages, as well as dried flowers that he scans or translates into cyanotypes, collaborating directly with natural processes and allowing matter itself to participate in image-making. In SPLITTING (2025), the fluid distortion of these monochromatic collaged images of nature evokes the endless cycle of natural transformation, a continuous metamorphosis into new states as part of a vital and necessary process. Flowers and the vitality of vegetal life are suggested in delicate watercolors, where stains unfold into blooming fields of energy, like buds emerging from winter dormancy to renew the landscape.
The bronze sculptures represent perhaps the most lyrical articulation of this inquiry. Installed within the intimate domestic architecture of the townhouse, they appear less as monumental objects than as spectral residues, ghostly relics that quietly evoke mortality and impermanence. Each originates from a living flower cultivated in his studio garden, cut, dried and directly cast in bronze through a process that borders on the alchemical. The burnout stage incinerates the organic matter entirely, leaving behind what Ruby describes as “a bronze ghost of the original.” In this transformation, from living specimen to ash to enduring metal, the subject is not annihilated but transformed into another order of being. “The bronze flowers feel the most delicate and raw to me; it’s like the process of cremation.” The geometric bars, gates and funnels function as conduits through which molten bronze enters the flower, infiltrating its structure before solidifying. “What I’m left with, if the cast survives and the detail remains true, is this object that’s organic and fragile, like a memorial being held up by an armature.”
While earlier in his oeuvre Ruby’s practice extended toward broader institutional and societal critique, confronting the structural violence, alienation and systemic “ugliness” embedded in American life, “Atropa” feels more intimate. It is a deeper meditation on his own position as a time-bound, earth-bound entity existing within larger cycles of gestation, decay and transformation.
Across drawing, collage and sculpture, Ruby allows organic processes to shape form, positioning matter itself as an active collaborator in image-making. Photo: Genevieve Hanson
After more than 20 years of art-making, Ruby’s relationship to his work has changed. “Everything tends to be more elegiac now,” he said, reflecting on how his practice has become quieter and more introspective. “The notion of truth—whether constitutional, scientific or data-driven—has ceased to be a stable marker by which fundamental rights and sovereignty are upheld. In the past, I needed to project the ugliness of America onto the work to expose the oppression, alienation and violence that this country conceals. But now I can’t imagine what I would do to mirror the everyday distress and ongoing hatred that is so unmistakable.”
Instead, he seeks to create work that responds to the present condition without becoming didactic: “I want my work to respond to the world at large, to the human condition, to time itself, without prescribing meaning. I don’t believe these things are simple—they are complex and abstract.” Yet he remains convinced that art still offers something distinct from political discourse, a different kind of truth, one that operates through metaphor, sensation and form. “That’s my dilemma,” he said. “What does that look like? How do I make something sincere, abstract, or almost spiritual that can capture the time in which we are living?”
Ruby’s latest works articulate a quiet but profound reflection on mortality and the evolving condition of being. Genevieve Hanson
Rahaal unfolded across three pavilions (an exhibition space, a salon and a library) in the historic nature reserve of Zekreet, Qatar, just miles from Richard Serra’s monumental East–West/West–East. Photo: Sebastian Boettcher
Sometimes there are stories so extraordinary they feel more like a romance. The one we’re about to tell, in particular, closely mirrors what Paolo Coelho described in his memorable book The Alchemist, where the protagonist leaves the Western world to embark on an improbable journey into the desert in a process of unlearning and rediscovery. As in Coelho’s narrative, this journey is less about the destination than about attunement and finding meaning through movement, disorientation and pause.
In Qatar, in a tent in the middle of the desert—yet not far from Richard Serra’s monolithic installation East–West/West–East (which became an Instagram must for Art Basel Qatar visitors) and only about an hour’s drive from Olafur Eliasson’s monument for cosmic connection—an unexpected exhibition invites visitors to rediscover a contemplative relationship with nature. It posits the universality of this need across cultures and latitudes through work by a diverse group of artists from different parts of the world. They speak very different visual languages, yet all draw inspiration from the earth.
At the heart of the initiative is Sheikh Mohammed Rashid Al-Thani, one of the youngest member of the ruling Al-Thani family, who now resides in New York, where he founded the Institute of Arab and Islamic Art (IAIA). He, along with acclaimed designer William Cooper founder of William White, conceived Rahaal, a temporary nomadic museum unfolding across three pavilions erected in the historic nature reserve of Zekreet, Qatar, and mounted the show, which is on through February 21, 2026.
“It was very important to be in a place that genuinely speaks to the idea of community-building around nature,” Mohammed Rashid Al-Thani told Observer when we met in the desert. Getting to Rahaal is no simple matter—our driver got lost a couple of times, despite having been there a few days earlier, as the desert itself is in continuous motion. When we finally arrived, more than an hour late, Rashid Al-Thani welcomed us casually, smiling, inviting us into the majjii pavilion to sit on colorful cushions covered in Moray textiles he had arranged to create a large, welcoming sofa. Almost immediately, his staff served coffee and tea with dates.
William Cooper and Mohammed Rashid Al-Thani. Photo: Sebastian Boettcher
The idea for Rahaal came to Rashid Al-Thani after seeing William Cooper’s New York studio—a room entirely wrapped in shirting fabric and cotton, creating an atmosphere both contemporary and deeply resonant. That use of fabric carried a powerful sense of familiarity for Rashid Al-Thani, evoking regional traditions in which textiles aren’t confined to interiors but extend outward, most visibly in tents covered in wool. The shared aesthetic inspired a playful imaginative exercise between them in which they envisioned a traveler from New York journeying to the small nation of Qatar. “Imagine they take this journey by water through Europe, via Istanbul, and onward toward the Gulf, culminating in a desert crossing,” Rashid Al-Thani illustrated. Passing through the Saudi border at Zekreet, the travelers pause to rest, asking if they can stop there. “Of course,” an Arab answers.
“That’s what Arabs do; we build community around nature,” Rashid Al-Thani explained. “That’s how the idea came together. As you drive here, you see encampments everywhere. It doesn’t matter who you are—every single person I know in this country understands that instinct.”
He added that many families in Qatar still keep a tent in the desert, and people are accustomed to driving out to gather and meet there on weekends. “If you know that someone has a tent, you know you can go there—you can join anytime, without formal invitation.” While today permits are required to build one, the desert itself is still largely understood as a shared space. There is no absolute ownership. The project takes its name from the Rahaal (رحّال), which translates as traveler or nomad—someone who moves across land rather than settling in one place, a desert figure accustomed to crossing vast, open landscapes. “When they saw a tent, they saw a community. They saw a place to rest, a place of refuge. That is what we wanted for people coming to the country: to feel there is a temporary place of connection.”
Qatar, now one of the world’s major global stopover hubs, still embodies this idea of continuous transit. What often gets lost, however, is the opportunity to connect with the place itself while passing through. “People arrive, visit the major museums and leave without sensing it,” Rashid Al-Thani reflected. “What we wanted was for visitors to experience what you’re experiencing now—the same feeling you would have in my parents’ home or any other tent or family home in the desert.”
Traditionally, those tents were always open, welcoming people and expanding into temporary communities. “It creates a deep sense of connection. It can be formal or informal, private or public—it depends on the person and the occasion,” he said, noting how in the Western world, that dimension often doesn’t exist anymore, as hospitality has become something separate, often associated with spaces outside the home. This is particularly felt in big cities, particularly after the disappearance of “third spaces” that once facilitated fluid transitions between private and social life.
Rahaal was conceived as a site where nature, culture and art converge. Photo: Sebastian Boettcher
Drawing from the traditions of Qatar’s essentially nomadic culture and the heritage of the majlis, Rahaal was conceived first and foremost as a platform for human connection and multicultural encounter, both between people and with nature. It is a site where nature, culture and art converge as part of a single, transformative experience that reflects centuries of Arab rituals rooted in community-building, shaped around natural cycles and rhythms.
That sense of openness—of arriving without announcement—is what Rashid Al-Thani and Cooper sought to capture with Rahaal. He recalls that just earlier, Perrotin had stopped by and asked whether he knew they were coming. The answer was no, but they were welcomed all the same. “What mattered was that people were received generously. That was the core idea,” he said, noting how different this is from the cultural paradigm in the U.S. In New York, hospitality exists, but Rashid Al-Thani misses the immediacy of hospitality in his culture, where it’s not a courteous performance but deeply embedded in ancient traditions.
For this reason, he has tried to recreate it in his own home in the West Village. “I tell my friends, ‘Just call me. I’m there. My coffee is ready. My tea is ready. My dates are ready.’ And now they actually do it every weekend,” he shared. “They call and say, ‘We’re in the West Village—can we come by?’” For him, the answer is always yes. “I wake up, prepare the coffee and tea, set out six cups, and whoever comes has a home—a place of refuge, even if just for that moment. That’s what we hoped to translate here.”
The central pavilion, Al Ma’rad, hosts the inaugural show, “Anywhere Is My Land,” curated by Rashid Al-Thani with work by contemporary artists from diverse geographies, all imagining landscape not as a depiction of place but as fragments of memory carried within the traveler—seen, altered and remembered in motion. The notion of constant movement informed the exhibition’s title, inspired by Antonio Díaz’s series Anywhere Is My Land, created while he was in exile in Italy. “The idea of land, and where you find it, becomes very powerful—especially here, where land is understood as a common space,” Rashid Al-Thani reflected.
Al Ma’rad served as the central pavilion of Rahaal, hosting its inaugural exhibition “Anywhere is My Land.” Photo: Sebastian Boettcher
Featuring both established and emerging artists, the exhibition leaves viewers with a sense of feeling at home—even in the desert—through the possibility of reconnecting with natural scenes that resonate differently with each person’s background and memories. Collectively, the works affirm the universality of humanity’s need for contemplation of nature as a way to reattune to the most primordial truths of our existence within a broader cosmic order. All hanging, Salon-style, in a vibrant constellation against the fabric-lined walls, the works on view range from the poetic, endless starry night of Vija Celmins and material collaborative connections with the prime elements of Arte Povera masters Giuseppe Penone and Pier Paolo Calzolari, to the lyrical, more abstract, synthetic visions of artists from the region such as Etel Adnan and Huguette Caland, and the archaic, archetypal reappearances of Simone Fattal, among other names.
“Everything in life feels so linear. Even museums are linear: you move from one point to the next,” Rashid Al-Thani explained. “The desert interrupts that. It forces you to think differently. Sometimes it gives you a moment of reflection. Sometimes you find yourself only when you’re lost. I know it sounds very poetic, but every time I come here—except maybe once, when I went straight through—I feel like I lose my way, but I find something else.” It is from this specific relationship with the desert—one that requires humility and receptivity in the face of nature’s infinite and overwhelming force—that the development of astronomy in Islamic civilization emerged. It was born from the need to locate oneself and find direction, because Arabs were always on the move.
In this sense, Rashid Al-Thani may have found an even more resonant interpretation of “Becoming,” deeply rooted in a place and its traditions, but openly encouraging all those in transit through Qatar to exit their Western culture-shaped comfort zone and “get off the road,” get to the desert and embrace the culture.
The response, not only from people visiting Art Basel Qatar but also from locals, has been incredibly telling. “Someone messaged me and said, ‘I’ve been here for 15 years, and I’ve never experienced something like this.’ That kind of response is exactly what we were hoping for,” he said. “If anything is going to change how people perceive one another, it has to be through connection.” It was that search for connection that brought him to art in the first place, and it’s a deeply humanist approach that he has embraced.
Despite the fast paced development of modern architectural hubs in the Arab world, ties to past traditions remain strong. Photo: Sebastian Boettcher
Since its founding in 2017, his Institute of Arab and Islamic Art has been focused on changing the perception people have of Islamic and Arab culture by creating occasions for meaningful encounters through the showcasing of contemporary and historical art from the Arab and Islamic worlds. “I felt a growing exhaustion being boxed in as ‘the Arab.’ I wanted people not to be scared when they encountered someone like me,” Rashid Al-Thani said, recalling how, when he moved in 2014, fear and misunderstanding toward Islamic culture were very present in the U.S., fueled by a political agenda.
“It is about normalizing what it means to be Arab or Muslim by placing it within a broader contemporary practice, whether that’s design, art or architecture,” he said. “Without those moments of connection we shared, my perspective might never have reached a wider audience, and the same is true for his. But connection is absolutely central to both of us. It’s what we’re deeply invested in, and I believe it’s precisely what has made this project successful.”
Over close to a decade in New York, the IAIA has helped facilitate broader international recognition of several key figures of Arab art, including Ibrahim El-Salahi, Behjat Sadr and the now-rising Huguette Caland, among others. The IAIA presents both exhibitions and site-specific interventions, each thoroughly researched and curated to open up complex narratives about art from the Arab and Islamic worlds. The institute highlights historically significant artists who have been underrepresented in global contemporary art discourse and aims to challenge stereotypes about Arab and Muslim cultural production.
To encourage spontaneous encounters with Islamic culture, the IAIA launched its inaugural Public Art program last fall with Big Rumi, a sculpture by Ghada Amer, marking the artist’s first public art installation in the United States. On view through March at 421 6th Avenue in New York, its latticework is shaped in space by the repetition of the Arabic quote attributed to the 13th-century mystic poet Rumi, which, translated into English, reads: “You are what you seek” or “What you seek is seeking you.”
As U.S. institutions increasingly turn their attention toward the Islamic segments of America’s multicultural population, works previously exhibited by the IAIA have entered the collections of major museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In a world—and a country—ever more divided, Arab culture, from the rise of the Gulf to the election of New York’s first Muslim mayor, is increasingly central to public discourse, the IAIA’s mission and Rashid Al-Thani’s welcoming approach to exhibiting art feel not only timely but deeply resonant.
IAIA recently launched its inaugural Public Art program with a sculpture by Ghada Amer, Big Rumi, on view on 421 6th Avenue in New York through March 2026. Courtesy Institute of Arab and Islamic Art
Mia Westerlund Roosen’s Heat (background) and Conical (foreground), both from 1981, on view at Nunu Fine Art. Photo: Martin Seck, courtesy the artist and Nunu Fine Art
Multidisciplinary artist Mia Westerlund Roosen’s early career unfolded against the backdrop of Minimalism’s heyday, but her work diverged sharply from the austere, industrial ethos of contemporaries like Donald Judd and Robert Morris, whose machine-informed processes and commitment to art for art’s sake. Where their work was polished, rigid and cold, hers, while similarly monumental, was organic, sensual, tactile and emotional, referencing or evoking geological forms, flesh and other earthly materials.
For another week, you can see some of her work at Nunu Fine Art in New York (including pieces first shown in 1982 at the Leo Castelli Gallery, where she was shown alongside Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, and Bruce Nauman). Most striking are the monumental horns arching up from the floor at the back of the gallery: Conical (1981), the smaller of the two, appears to have been excised, perhaps violently, from its source, and Heat (1981), which seems to protrude intact from the floor, as if heralding the arrival of some massive beast. Postminimalist to the extreme, both exude a viscerality that invites one to imagine where these objects have been and what their purpose might be now.
The same is true of Sac (2019), a smaller-scale piece that resembles nothing so much as a deflating penis on first glance, hinting at the fragility of humanity. Yet the sagging flannel and resin are only a conduit into a dense concrete cave-like core. What, one wonders, is this thing; why is it here and what is it for?
Mia Westerlund Roosen, Untitled Drawing 2, 1975. Oil stick, pastel, and charcoal on paper, 13 x 7 in. / 33 x 17.8 cm., Framed: 17 1/4 x 13 1/4 in. / 33.7 x 43.8 cm. Courtesy the artist and Nunu Fine Art
Westerlund Roosen’s practice, of course, encompasses more than sculpture. The exhibition includes rarely shown drawings that offer a glimpse into the artist’s ongoing exploration of materiality. Some of the most compelling appear at first to be preliminary sketches of her large-scale works but were actually rendered after the sculptures they reference were complete—portraits of the material properties of her three-dimensional pieces. Similarly, the drawings in her Gray Series I–V explore asphalt, concrete and fiber, capturing the physical realities of these materials in two dimensions with profound depth. “For her, it’s kind of like building something,” Nunu Hung of Nunu Fine Art told me during a tour of “Mia Westerlund Roosen: Then and Now.” “She has chalk or a pencil, and she just keeps putting layers on, and building out the work just like making a sculpture.”
Now in her 80s, Westerlund Roosen continues her material experimentation, splitting her time between a home upstate near the Massachusetts border and a studio in New York City that I was lucky enough to visit after walking through the exhibition. There, I was able to see more of her work: Column I and II and the vulvular Marble I from 2019 and pieces from her striking and unsettling Box series. Much like her creations, the artist is equal parts engaging and inscrutable, telling me she prefers to let her pieces do the communicating. “After all,” she said, “if you could talk about it, you wouldn’t make it.” But talk we did, and she was gracious enough to answer my questions about her early experimentation, her process and her newest work.
You emerged as a sculptor in a period dominated by Minimalism. What compelled you to resist the prevailing industrial, geometric norms to pursue a more organic, embodied visual language?
For me, rigid geometries and perfectly straight lines resist emotion, while I was in search of a more emotional response, albeit through reductive form. I felt that my process-based works were, in a way, antithetical to Minimalism, because they were more expressive. My work seeks to engage the senses directly, rather than the intellect.
Your pieces often evoke tension between presence and absence or weight and collapse. What is it about these contrasts in particular that fascinates you?
The paradoxes inherent in those pieces are always exciting to me. The interplay between the blatant and the poetic, or the aggressive and the humorous, sparks curiosity that keeps them continuously intriguing. For example, Heat is simultaneously aggressive and humorous; humor plays a huge role in my work, and it is the unexpected combination of those two qualities that I hope engages the viewer, as well.
Mia Westerlund Roosen, Maquette for Baritone, 1983. Concrete and lead, 12 x 15 x 6 in. / 30.5 x 38.1 x 15.2 cm. Photo: Martin Seck, courtesy the artist and Nunu Fine Art
Many of the drawings in the show aren’t preparatory studies but two-dimensional renderings of sculpture already brought to life. How do you approach the relationship between sculpture and drawing in your practice?
I think in three dimensions first. My preparatory studies are in clay, and those are often later translated into larger pieces, while my drawings are generally a separate yet related practice. Sculpture for me is the investigation of different densities in terms of material and perception, as well as trying to endow the material with a sense of aliveness or agency, and I often am looking for the same qualities in my drawing. Whether through encaustic, charcoal or pastel, I’m attempting to capture depth and layers beneath the surface.
You’ve sometimes resisted being overly explanatory when it comes to underlying themes in your work. Why?
My personal feeling is that over-explanation from the artist can come across as heavy-handed or didactic, and suppress the mystery and poetry of a work. I would rather the viewer feel what I’m trying to get across, rather than think it.
Looking back on your long career, what do you hope contemporary audiences take away from seeing works from different decades in dialogue with one another?
I feel that my practice is very generative in the sense that many works will come directly from the previous one. While I’m varying the forms, one idea will often come from another, and I hope that viewers can sense the common threads between those differing bodies of work.
Are there particular themes or materials you plan to explore more deeply in future work?
I’m working on new pieces that push the idea of absence and presence via process or chance-based expression, in a similar vein to my sculpture Sac from 2019, which is in the exhibition. I think the combination of the translucent skin of the resin-soaked flannel and the weighty concrete is an area where I can push scale further and bigger. This new series is large-scale and rooted in the earth, but it still utilizes translucent materials that play with light and allow light to penetrate the surface. I’m very inspired by Richard Serra, and often think of how I can use that method of engaging with the body and space, but make it a little bit softer.
Installation view: “Nothing Still About Still Lifes” at the Deji Art Museum in Nanjing, China. Courtesy of the Deji Art Museum
Welcome to One Fine Show, where Observer highlights a recently opened exhibition at a museum not in New York City, a place we know and love that already receives plenty of attention.
Late last year, I had the privilege of being a guest of Shanghai’s West Bund Art & Design, the most important fair on the Chinese mainland. It was the first edition in the futuristic and newly constructed West Bund Convention Center, and alongside strong sales—Perrotin reported 40 percent of its high-end booth sold out on day one—there was an array of excellent and sophisticated art, particularly in its curated xiàn chǎng section, the equivalent of the Untitled section at Art Basel in Switzerland. But I spent the days prior to the fair at a venue no less tony with art no less impressive: the Deji Plaza luxury shopping mall in Nanjing, atop which sits the Deji Art Museum.
Deji was a revelation on several levels. As with the West Bund fair, sales at the shopping mall were nothing to sneeze at: $3.5 billion in 2025, which, according to the Economist, may make it the highest-grossing mall in the world. The museum on the top floor was open until midnight, an idea more museums should embrace because it remained popular throughout the night. Its best-loved exhibition, “Nothing Still About Still Lifes,” reopened in October and is one of those great shows that showcases the surprising depths that can be explored through artworks on a single subject: flowers.
Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Edvard Munch, Henri Rousseau, Andy Warhol, Yayoi Kusama, David Hockney and Anselm Kiefer are all on display, paired with works by numerous Chinese luminaries. The boldfaced names featured in this show from Deji’s extensive and distinguished collection might make it sound straightforward and even dull, but the exhibition is not. Almost everything on display is experimental in some way, an unexpected offering from the artist or an unusual take on this ancient subject. This is announced in the very first room dominated by a monumental Jeff Koons sculpture, Pink Ballerina (2009-2021), composed of delicate lace-like white marble and fresh-cut roses—real ones in deep red. Like the pink of its title, the piece’s intense florality exists mostly in the mind of the viewer.
The blockbusters on display are incredible and expensive, to the point that going through the show can feel like going to a really good preview at an auction house. I found myself especially attracted to the stranger works that display the depths of the collection. The false-looking painterly vegetal mass surrounding yellow buds in Corbeille de Fleurs would have led me to think the work was made in the 2010s or maybe the 1980s, but in fact it was made in 1925 and by Georges Braque of all people.
Not that the blockbusters aren’t just as fun. Renoir’s Fleurs dans un Vase (1878) is displayed alongside the original Majolica vase depicted in the painting. The exhibition rewards deep looking and offers threads to be followed. That first room with the Koons includes two works by Picasso, both titled Vase de Fleurs from 1901 and 1904, that demonstrate, with economy, the transition from his Blue to his Rose period. The threads between West and East are no less satisfying to explore. Wu Dayu’s Untitled 128 (c. 1980) merges the bursts of color found in European modernism and the distinctly Chinese philosophical ideas of inner energy and resonance. Sanyu’s Vase of Flowers in Blue (1956) is meanwhile sui generis. The vase is a sketch compared to the intense details of the flowers, and the background is so rich that it could be an astounding abstract painting without anything else in it.
But each work in this show is a gem. Shanghai’s West Bund Art & Design for 2026 is sure to be as well attended as this past edition, and if you’re in the region, a day trip to Nanjing to see this show at Deji would be time well spent.
“Homecoming shows” might be a phrase more associated with Bruce Springsteen or Adele, but this time it’s the works of 20th-century sculptor and painter Alberto Giacometti returning to an area the artist rejected and inspired in equal measure. We use the expression only quite loosely, however. Giacometti was born in 1901 in Stampa, situated in the Bregaglia Valley, 20 miles from ultra-chic St. Moritz, itself around 35 kilometers from the Italian border. Seeing as “the village” (as it is referred to around these parts) has a Hauser & Wirth, it’s only apposite that it should be the venue for this most evocative of exhibitions.
Indeed, the gallery has made it a tradition to highlight the artists and works that have had a connection with St. Moritz and the local area, the Engadin Valley. In the past, it has shown Gerhard Richter’s overpainted vistas of the nearby Alps and displayed artworks by Jean-Michel Basquiat that he produced when he stayed at the hunting lodge of his agent Bruno Bischofberger.
This exhibition, curated by Giacometti authority Tobia Bezzola, is a neat encapsulation of the artist’s work that foregrounds the dichotomies that punctuated his life. On view is a display that manifests the contrasts and conflicts between the professional and the personal; the style and themes; form and execution; public and private; inspiration and influence; Paris and Stampa; and, most of all for Giacometti, the choice between sculptor and painter.
Amid such sturm und drang, though, are early paintings such as Silsersee (1921-1922) and Monte del Forno (1923), which instill a calming serenity with their deft post-Impressionist execution and pastoral vistas. These embody the fascination and awe-inspiring power of the natural beauty abundant in the area and have had a lasting impact on creatives over the years, from the historical reflections of Nietzsche (who vacationed in nearby Sils) to the contemporary output of Not Vital. These early pieces still exude a distinctly sculptural quality, and his Self-Portrait (1920) is a subtle signpost to his later fascination—not only with capturing form, but also with the inspiration that Stampa and his home provided throughout his career.
With Giacometti’s move to Paris in 1922 (turning his back on his family and his father’s influence as a former landscape painter), he embraced the panoply of philosophies and movements that were coalescing in the French capital. Here, he was not only speaking another language but also attempting to find his own artistic one, as Bezzola explains. “There, he learned to speak the language of the international avant-garde, and that of Surrealism fluently and eloquently. During his annual returns to his rural homeland, however, he reverted to the Italian dialect of the valley in which he had grown up, and his artistic forms of expression adjusted accordingly.”
One look at Tête de Diego (1947) on show bears this out: the sketch lines of his brother’s head fuse the painterly with the out-of-proportion oval shape of his later sculptural works. It’s what Bezzola terms “an increasing formal and methodological dissolution of this divide” between painter and sculptor. While Giacometti made the sketch in Paris, Diego was clearly still in the artist’s mind from an extended visit back to Stampa to see his family only the year before, which may have renewed his artistic fire. Just a year later, in 1948, came Giacometti’s celebrated solo exhibition in New York featuring his trademark elongated figures.
This period marked a particularly fruitful time for Giacometti, which this exhibition captures in paintings such as Bust (1948) and Seated Man (1950), as well as Head with Long Neck (c. 1949, cast 1965). It’s the juxtaposition of these works that, rather than showing division, actually emphasizes the unity in Giacometti’s oeuvre. His figures—whether sketched, painted, or sculpted—continue to intrigue and command attention with their subjects and execution.
Another unique facet of “Faces and Landscapes of Home” that serves to augment the works on show is the lesser-seen photographs of Giacometti by the photographer and trusted friend Ernst Scheidegger. Other photographers captured the artist in his Paris studios, but it was Scheidegger who was able to transgress into the more personal, behind-the-scenes aspects of his home life in Stampa, particularly in the 1950s when Giacometti returned to the valley to escape the Parisian bustle. “In his letters, he often complains that in Stampa he did not relax or recover at all, but was instead completely absorbed in his work the entire time,” Bezzola says of this period.
Scheidegger’s delightfully tender shot, Alberto with his mother Annetta (1959), is trumped only by Alberto Giacometti at his Worktable in Stampa (1965). Here, in the last year of his life, he can be seen sitting at his desk strewn with apples, some half-made miniatures beside him, as he remains immersed in fashioning a sculpture, while a cigarette burns louchely in an ashtray beside him. How rock’n’roll is that?
“Henri Rousseau: A Painter’s Secrets” is on view at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia through February 22. Courtesy of the Barnes Foundation
Henri Rousseau is primarily known for his vivid, lush paintings of forests, which are often described as naïve fantasies of exotic places he imagined during his years as a customs officer in Paris—hence his nickname, Le Douanier Rousseau. He never left his home country, despite rumors that he participated in the Mexican War as part of the French Army. In Paris Salons, his playful, often childlike style and dreamlike compositions—with their extreme simplification of forms, flat perspective and unnatural proportions—were frequently ridiculed.
But as Rousseau’s reputation grew in the final years of his life, demand for his work increased, and young artists and writers began acquiring his more affordable paintings. Painters like Picasso were among his most avid collectors, suggesting his visual language—and the acute social analysis it carried—was ahead of its time. Still, full market and institutional recognition only truly arrived over a century after his death. In the wake of his poetic Les Flamants (1910) fetching $43,535,000 at Christie’s in May 2023, a new survey, “Henri Rousseau: A Painter’s Secrets” at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, finally reveals him as he truly was: an astute, self-taught artist who consciously constructed his own myth, shrewdly navigating the new circuits of the modern art world.
With 18 works from the Barnes’s own holdings—the largest Rousseau collection in any museum, first acquired by Albert C. Barnes in 1920—and major loans from the Musée d’Orsay, the Musée de l’Orangerie and private collections, the exhibition (the most comprehensive to date) spans the full breadth of Rousseau’s practice. It reveals an artist at once autobiographical and allegorical, oscillating between the intimate and the epic, between fairy-tale reverie and sharp social commentary.
As the title suggests, the show offers a comprehensive yet non-chronological overview of his oeuvre, inviting visitors to explore the key strategies and motifs behind the myth and enigma he so deliberately crafted—tapping into some of the most compelling layers of his personality as well as the depth of his seemingly naïve imagination and symbolism.
What emerges from the very first rooms is Rousseau’s lesser-known professional ambition. While he struggled throughout his life with financial insecurity and an uneasy fit within the formal structures of the art world, he understood its dynamics and played his hand with remarkable calculation. Despite being self-taught and maintaining a highly original visual language, Rousseau was not a naïve outsider but a sharp and deliberate operator, attuned to the cultural and political climate of his time.
Here, his allegorical and patriotic paintings share the same visual language favored by Salon conventions, emulating the elaborate personifications that celebrate France as one of the world’s two great republics, alongside the United States. These themes were designed to appeal to the cultural preferences of public institutions. Yet flashes of political critique break through, as in War, where Rousseau does more than engage with art-historical precedent—he questions the authority of official narratives, using ambiguity to lay bare the trauma of conflict. By pushing the real and the fantastical to their extremes, Rousseau casts France as “a force for Peace.”
The playfulness and surface naïveté of his style are deployed to chilling effect in War (1894), an apocalyptic allegory that scandalized the Salon des Indépendants. A spectral female figure—part goddess, part demon—soars over a scorched battlefield littered with corpses, leaving, in the artist’s words, “despair, tears, and ruin in her wake.” The painting openly references earlier depictions of combat, from Paolo Uccello’s Renaissance battle scenes to the Romantic catastrophes of Goya and Delacroix, yet it strips them of grandeur. There is no heroism here—only psychic devastation, rendered with a childlike clarity that intensifies the horror. For viewers in 1894, the painting evoked recent national trauma, including the Franco-Prussian War and the violence of the Paris Commune, both of which Rousseau had witnessed firsthand. His symbolic vision already transforms collective memory into myth, reframing political catastrophe as a timeless allegory of destruction.
Rousseau found a warmer reception when he presented traditional portraits of Parisian bourgeois figures that the public could recognize and relate to. The Wedding (1905), a strange and mesmerizing group portrait, was described by art critic Louis Vauxcelles—who coined the term “Fauvism”—as “amazing” at its Salon des Indépendants debut. Arrayed in stiff procession before a dreamlike backdrop, the figures appear both real and spectral, their expressions suspended somewhere between pride and unease. In their well-done new condition, they attempt to document and display. Though Rousseau never delivered the painting to the commissioners—who likely rejected it—it almost certainly portrays specific individuals, perhaps acquaintances of the artist, yet he renders them with the frozen composure of marionettes. The bourgeois performance of respectability is exposed as a kind of theater in which ritual and artifice blur.
A similarly innocent image, Child with a Doll (c. 1905–06), distills that same tension into the single figure of a young girl, stiffly posed against a patterned backdrop, holding her toy with a solemnity that feels at once tender and uncanny. The work epitomizes Rousseau’s ability to slip from naïve to grotesque in a single gesture: his figures appear simple, even clumsy, yet every detail—from the lace on the dress to the floral border—reveals obsessive precision and near-virtuosic control. This friction between innocence and artifice is what gives his portraits their hypnotic, psychological charge, building the mystery that renders them timeless.
Seen through this curatorial lens, Rousseau no longer appears as a simple visionary but rather as a lucid participant in the modern spectacle—someone who, knowingly or not, understood the performative mechanics of the art world. He constructed an identity that blurred the lines between art and persona, truth and legend: the humble customs clerk who, through painting, conjured entire worlds of innocence and terror, parody and prophecy.
Henri Rousseau, Child with a Doll, c. 1892. Oil on canvas. Photo Franck Raux | Courtesy of the Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris
Even in the seemingly delightful Child with a Doll, Rousseau reveals a deliberate engagement with the decorativism and Japonisme that captivated fin-de-siècle Paris. The flattened perspective, ornamental patterning and rhythmic repetition of forms echo Japanese prints and Art Nouveau design. But where contemporaries like Bonnard or Vuillard used these devices to conjure domestic intimacy, Rousseau transforms them into instruments of estrangement. The child, framed as though inside a stage set or tapestry, becomes less a portrait than an icon—an image of modernity’s uneasy balance between sentiment and spectacle. Rousseau appeals to his contemporaries’ eyes (hoping to sell), yet keeps a critical gaze trained on the social performance unfolding around him.
This duality becomes even more apparent in Père Junier’s Cart (1908), which expands the frame to capture the modest, eccentric theater of community life. Based on a photograph from an outing to Clamart Woods, the painting turns a bourgeois family picnic into a tableau of social masquerade. The white mare, Rosa—deliberately outsized—pulls a cart that appears both literal and symbolic, its passengers proud, awkward and faintly absurd. When the American painter Max Weber teased Rousseau about the scale of the dog, the artist replied simply, “It must be that way.” That quiet insistence captures Rousseau’s poetics: the logic of dreams overtaking the logic of sight, the illogic of humans staged in a scene that subtly reorders power among its figures. In some works, Rousseau even paints himself as well-dressed and successful, fully participating in the social theater where each figure performs conventional hierarchies of age and gender.
At this point in the show, it becomes clear that Rousseau’s blend of the playful and grotesque often edges into comedy, even as it reflects a sharp understanding of human psychology. His humor is dry but tender, faintly Baudelairean—a clear-eyed, parodic vision of modern life as a “grumpy parade” of aspiration and self-importance, not unlike the poet’s portraits of Parisian ennui. That is Rousseau’s quiet genius: beneath the surface charm lies a subtle dismantling of respectability—an art of gentle rebellion against perbenismo, the polished façade of a society convinced of its own moral and rational superiority, and increasingly blind to the primal imagination it sought to suppress.
A room filled with small domestic landscapes—a steady stream of “little pictures” of gardens, riverbanks and suburban parks destined for the walls of the Parisian petite bourgeoisie—reveals how well Rousseau understood the new rituals of middle-class life and how to sell into them. As his first biographer, Wilhelm Uhde, recalled, Rousseau regularly sold these modest works to neighbors to support himself between exhibitions. At the Salon des Indépendants, he would discreetly hang a few beside his more ambitious canvases, balancing survival with self-belief.
If Rousseau’s portraits staged bourgeois life as a masquerade, and his conveniently decorative landscapes catered to the tastes of a rising class of collectors, his forest scenes turned nature itself into a theater of mythic allegory—a visual language of moral instruction akin to fairy tales. Seeing them together makes it immediately clear that, as in Aesop’s fables, the animals stand in for human impulses—predation, desire, fear, vanity—rendered with the same mix of naïveté and cunning that animates his portraits. Rousseau’s gift, and perhaps his secret, was to recover in art the wonder of childhood while using that apparent simplicity to smuggle in allegory, encoding timeless observations about recurring patterns of human behavior and psychology within the fantastical.
In Fight Between a Tiger and a Buffalo (1908), based on a 1906 illustration from a popular art journal, Rousseau transforms borrowed imagery into something unmistakably his own. The dense explosion of foliage—bananas, blossoms and tangled leaves rendered in countless shades of green—creates a claustrophobic Eden where beauty and brutality coexist, much like the Parisian âge d’or he inhabited. The composition feels almost cinematic: every leaf glows like a stage light, every animal gesture choreographed for maximum tension and visual pleasure. Though the press dismissed the work for its violence, one critic, admiring “the wild animal’s eyes, green and ferocious,” already sensed that Rousseau’s symbolic depth and surface innocence concealed a masterful control of pictorial drama.
Henri Rousseau, Fight between a Tiger and a Buffalo, 1908. Oil on canvas. The Cleveland Museum of Art. Gift of the Hanna Fund
As a caption confirms, these forest paintings also reveal Rousseau’s sharp awareness of the market. Only after Gauguin’s posthumous rise around 1903—when exotic subjects became newly desirable—did Rousseau, ever strategic, begin a cycle of jungle scenes (between 1904 and 1910). Yet unlike Gauguin’s escapist Tahitian reveries, Rousseau’s works are mythic allegories confronting the modern world. In them, war, desire and colonial anxiety converge. The struggles between predator and prey represent not only primal instinct but also the violence of empire. Having lived through France’s colonial expansion and worked part-time as a newspaper vendor, Rousseau understood how mass media sensationalized the “savage” and the “exotic.” His Tropical Landscape and Jungle with Setting Sun intentionally play with—and subtly critique—these racial stereotypes. The anonymous Indigenous figures facing the overwhelming power of nature reflect the fears and fantasies of an audience comforted by its distance from the “untamed.”
In these works, Rousseau’s allegorical language surfaces a latent awareness of the very idea of “civilization and progress” that surrounded him—and of the deeper truths preserved in those faraway, imagined worlds. His jungle scenes are never caricatures of “the other.” Instead, the epic grandeur he grants these symbolic battles offers dignity to the untamed, suggesting admiration for a world unspoiled by modern life. In his vision, the forest becomes a metaphor for the unconscious—fertile, terrifying, alive.
Through these painted forests, Rousseau affirms his belief that art can still access a mythic dimension—a space where innocence and insight coexist within a fantastical symbolic lexicon. It’s a quiet defiance of a rational, industrial world increasingly shaped by productivity, functionality and market logic.
Whether Rousseau encouraged the rumor of his supposed Mexican adventures hardly matters; he understood its narrative value in a cultural economy fueled by myth. In the industrializing, colonial France of the early 1900s, the figure of the “valiant soldier-painter” or “dreaming douanier” returning with visions of tropical lands aligned perfectly with the public’s appetite for exotic spectacle. Rousseau transformed that fantasy into a brand—and in doing so became both the subject and the author of his own legend. His supposed naïveté functioned as armor, masking deeper political and spiritual intuitions and, more pragmatically, shielding him from the system. When he was tried in 1908 for unwitting involvement in a bank fraud scheme, his defenders even cited one of his monkey paintings as evidence that he was too innocent to be duplicitous.
Few artists have blurred the boundary between art and persona with such poetic precision. For Rousseau, myth was not just a subject but a mode of existence: he painted, lived and performed with the same sincerity of invention. The Barnes exhibition ends on this note of deliberate mystery, bringing together for the first time three of his most elusive masterpieces—The Sleeping Gypsy (1897), Unpleasant Surprise (1899–1901) and The Snake Charmer (1907)—each suspended between fear and fantasy. In The Sleeping Gypsy, a woman lies in a moonlit desert as a lion hovers protectively—or perhaps predatively—above her. Ridiculed at its debut, the painting now reads as a vision of disarmed wonder, the unconscious laid bare under the gaze of the animal world.
In Unpleasant Surprise, a nude startled by a bear becomes a study in ambiguous violence—erotic, mythic, faintly colonial. Renoir admired its “tonal loveliness,” seemingly indifferent to its baffling subject. And in The Snake Charmer, commissioned by Berthe Delaunay and nearly rejected by the Salon d’Automne as a “tapestry project,” Rousseau conjures a hypnotic moonlit Eden, where the Eve-like figure seduces both serpent and viewer into a trance of light and shadow—calling us back to something far more primordial, to a realm of ritual and myth capable of restoring a more authentic connection with nature beyond the material ambitions of modern life.
Seen together, these paintings are less naïve fantasies than open invitations—to imagine, to dream, to reclaim the primordial act of myth-making that Rousseau practiced with unwavering conviction. Like the visual storytelling of a children’s book, they function as portals meant to spark imagination in its most direct, intuitive and unfiltered form, before the mediation of modern codes. His “painter’s secrets,” as the exhibition title suggests, are not techniques of deception but gestures toward a lost capacity for wonder—the ability to see the world as both real and enchanted, primal and poetic, earthly and transcendent. In an age just beginning to idolize progress, reason and order, Rousseau offered something quietly radical: the right to remain childlike, to believe in the marvelous and to access those deeper truths linking the human soul to nature and the timeless logic of myth.
Henri Rousseau, The Snake Charmer, 1907. Oil on canvas. Courtesy of the Musée d’Orsay, Paris
Transitions (2012) by Joan Semmel at the Jewish Museum in New York. Photo: Fred Voon for Observer
In 1973, when no gallery in New York would show her vivid paintings of bodies in various configurations of sex, Joan Semmel created her own space. She poured her savings into renting a unit on 141 Prince Street, called it a gallery and mounted her first solo show in the city. “I believed in the work, and I wanted it to be seen,” she said in a recent conversation at the Jewish Museum. Her new exhibition, “Joan Semmel: In the Flesh” (on through May 31 and one of our picks for must-see exhibitions), presents 16 oil paintings across five decades that engage with nudity and sexuality on a woman’s terms. Each work is unabashed in its frankness and its proportions. The largest, Skin in the Game (2019), is 24 feet wide and 8 feet tall. It’s as if Semmel always paints as far as her arm can reach.
Semmel was born in the Bronx in 1932, and her studio is located in SoHo. In the ’60s, however, she spent seven years as an abstract expressionist in Madrid, with solo shows that traveled to Buenos Aires and Montevideo. Though Francoist Spain was more conservative than America—marriage could not be legally dissolved, and the newspaper would announce a Catholic saint of the day—she enjoyed some degree of freedom there as a foreigner. In 1970, Semmel was back in New York as a single mother of two. She had left because of her husband’s work; now she had returned to divorce him.
In those days, the sexploitation of women in magazines and pornography to satisfy male fantasies was rampant. As John Berger wrote in Ways of Seeing (1972), “Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.” Semmel was shocked at how lopsided the sexual revolution was, and she longed for equal participation. Thus followed her erotic paintings, which retain an abstract expressionist palette that gives her subjects an otherworldly glow of pink, orange or green.
Painting naked women—from Sandro Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus (c. 1485) to Gustave Courbet’s The Origin of the World (1866) to Tom Wesselmann’s Great American Nudes (1961–73)—has long been the province and prerogative of men. Semmel’s depictions of sex defied the taboo against women broaching the topic, and she sought to correct the power imbalance, sometimes in literal ways. In Flip-Flop Diptych (1971), a couple takes turns to be on top. In Intimacy-Autonomy (1974), lovers lounge side by side, neither dominating the other.
After returning from Spain to New York in 1970, Semmel switched from abstract expressionism to painting nudes. Photo: Fred Voon for Observer
Then came her iconic series of “self-images”: paintings of her body from her perspective, often wearing nothing but a signature turquoise ring. These aren’t “self-portraits,” Semmel insists, since she is unconcerned with producing likeness, capturing character or conferring status. Rather, her self-images are a direct assault on the male gaze—by asserting her own. One is titled Through the Object’s Eye (1975). Another, Sunlight from 1978, shows her tenderly caressing her calf and sole, untethered from male validation.
In the triptych Mythologies and Me (1976), she sandwiches a self-image between parodies of a Playboy centerfold and Willem de Kooning’s Woman I (1952). In the former, the female figure is sexualized by the commercial media; in the latter, it is disfigured by a pre-eminent contemporary artist. Semmel’s response is to insert her viewpoint and desecrate the two great cultural forces, sticking lace and feathers onto the Playmate and attaching a nursing nipple to the abstracted monstrosity.
As an artist and a curator, Semmel was among the second-wave feminists who resisted censorship and objectification. This places her earlier paintings in the company of landmark works such as Carolee Schneemann’s short film Fuses (1967), Betty Tompkins’ Fuck Paintings (1969–74), Tee Corinne’s Cunt Coloring Book (1975) and Judy Chicago’s installation The Dinner Party (1979) with its vulva-inspired plates, now on permanent display at the Brooklyn Museum.
Accompanying Semmel’s works is a mosaic of 42 thematically related pieces she selected from the Jewish Museum’s collection. Photo: Fred Voon for Observer
Over the decades, Semmel’s self-nudes began to take on a new dimension and question our impulse to hide or dismiss aging bodies. It’s remarkable that Skin in the Game (2019), in full Technicolor glory, is her largest work to date. Rather than shrink from the canvas, Semmel continues to push back on prevailing prejudices. Her work today is as confrontational as ever, asking us: What arouses you? What disgusts you? And, most importantly, why?
Baring it all in full view of the public is confronting, too, for the artist. In Parade (2023), Semmel’s naked body seems to shy away from observation. Alice Neel took five years to complete a nude self-portrait in 1980, at the age of 80. “The reason my cheeks got so pink,” she said, “was that it was so hard for me to paint that I almost killed myself painting it.” Similarly, Semmel admitted in a 2016 interview with the Brooklyn Rail, “It shakes me up a little sometimes, putting that out there. But it’s what I chose to do, so I have to go through with it.” And so the art must go on. “My work has been dedicated to empowering women,” she said recently. “And in order to empower women, I had to empower myself first.”
Installation view: “Aiza Ahmed: The Music Room” at Sargent’s Daughters. Photo: Nicholas Knight, courtesy of Sargent’s Daughters, New York
In a year defined by market calibration—especially on the ultra-contemporary front—very few young artists have truly emerged. One of the rare exceptions is 28-year-old Pakistani and New York-based artist Aiza Ahmed, who in 2025 achieved rapid, sustained recognition across two key regions: the art world’s center in New York and the rapidly expanding cultural ecosystem of the Gulf. Her enthusiastically received debut solo at Sargent’s Daughters closed only weeks ago, yet she is already preparing for the inaugural edition of Art Basel’s Qatar in February, where she will be one of the youngest artists featured in the fair’s curated exhibition format led by artist Wael Shawky. Although she completed a year-long residency at Silver Art Projects, Ahmed has temporarily traded her downtown Manhattan studio views for the MENA region’s most prestigious residency at the Fire Station in Doha, also directed by Shawky. She spoke with Observer from that studio, where she is working on the major installation she is preparing for her next milestone moment in Doha.
This continual movement between countries and cultures is not new to Ahmed, whose life has been shaped by constant geographical crossings. Her grandparents were originally from Calcutta but left India for Pakistan after the 1947 Partition, beginning a migratory trajectory that has threaded through the family ever since. Born in 1997 in Lahore, she spent a brief period in Karachi before relocating to London with her family at a young age. Ahmed spent her adolescence in Dubai before moving to the U.S. for her undergraduate studies at Cornell, followed by an MFA in painting at RISD. Now a decade into living in the States, she acknowledges that her life—and by extension, her art—has been defined by inhabiting the in-between, switching between cultural contexts governed by different social codes. That instability has sharpened her acute spirit of observation of the humanity around her, from which all her work originates.
Upon entering her solo at Sargent’s Daughters, what stands out is not only the maturity of her visual lexicon but also the clarity of her world-building instinct. Ahmed moves fluidly and inventively across mediums, shaping entire narrative spaces from the moment she traces a face or draws the psychological contour of a figure, then expands that gesture outward into the room as a potentially ever-evolving story.
Aiza Ahmed in her studio. Photo: Leo Ng
“I’ve been drawing and working with my hands for as long as I can remember,” Ahmed tells Observer. Her parents say she was always making things or engaged in some kind of craft. But it was around year seven or eight—early in high school—that her interest began to take real shape. “I had a favorite art teacher who I credit so much—she supported me from the beginning and would leave little notes in my journals, encouraging me. They were just drawings I used to do, but she really saw something in them,” she recalls. “I also recently found these caricatures I made when I was about ten, these political cartoons, and looking at them now, I can see the threads. The seeds were already there—this instinct for humor, for drawing the line.”
Ahmed’s style, in fact, isn’t straightforwardly figurative. Her figures remain suspended in an unfinished state—between dimensions, between figuration and something surreal or even abstract—rooted more in the emotional and psychological space of her characters than in the synthesized volume of their bodies. At the same time, her sharp, confident line work grounds the compositions in a tradition that evokes comics, political satire and caricature. As seen in the work of French satirical artist Honoré Daumier or the German George Grosz, Ahmed’s caricatural style exaggerates posture, expression and behavior with a few quick, incisive strokes, distilling personality or social type into its most telling gestures. She readily acknowledges her connection to this lineage. “I’m really drawn to the face. I feel like I’m a keen observer of people, especially having lived between so many worlds and having to assimilate—from Pakistan to London to Dubai to the U.S.” she reflects. Across all those moves, she adapted in an ongoing process of code-switching—first observing, then imitating, learning to fit in without losing sight of who she was or where she came from.
Drawing gives Ahmed a space for unfiltered, intuitive expression—a way of seeing that precedes the expectations of society or culture. “When I draw, it’s quick and raw,” she explains. “It’s the first mark that comes out. I don’t erase. It’s whatever is coming through me in a stream-of-consciousness way.”
Ahemed’s practice contends with borders, migrations, public histories, and private archives within diasporic identities originating from the Indian Subcontinent. Photo: Nicholas Knight, courtesy of Sargent’s Daughters, New York
Notably, most of the characters Ahmed brings to the stage are men—often exaggerated in their grotesque appearances and postures, whimsically distorted in their grinning or perverse expressions, or revealed in moments of fragile vulnerability beneath a masculine performance of power.
The artist admits she only recently realized that, over time, she has consistently drawn or painted male figures. “I didn’t notice it at first, but recently I was like, okay, in my studio it’s just all these men of different types and me,” she reflects. Earlier in her graduate studies at RISD, she had been thinking a lot about uncles, she adds. “My whole practice is me trying to trace where I come from, the ancestry I didn’t know, the histories and displacement of my own country that I wasn’t taught until really late in my upbringing.” In more recent series, however, something has shifted—or perhaps she has simply become more aware of the deeper reasons behind her recurring male subjects.
Growing up, and even after she left Pakistan, she returned every summer to visit grandparents, aunts and cousins. During those visits, she became attuned to what she calls the grammar of men. “In public spaces, all you see are men. Women are usually inside, or covered,” she recalls, noting how her visual field was filled with authority, corruption and performance. Even after moving to New York, she found the dynamic not so different—only more indirect. “I can’t walk from point A to point B without feeling the male gaze. It’s uncomfortable. It’s charged. At first, I thought it was just Pakistan, but it’s everywhere I go.”
Portraying men, then, becomes a kind of role reversal. “As a young woman, I’m looking at men. In art history, it was usually the opposite: men looking at women, and no one questioned it,” she reflects. Still, she admits she sometimes feels sorry for her subjects. “The way I draw these border guards, they look clunky, short, stout, almost fragile. And then I’m like, wait, why do I feel sorry for them? It’s all very layered,” she acknowledges.
Ahmed enacts, through her art, a sharp human and cultural diagnosis—exposing the hypocrisies and paradoxes embedded in socially coded, gendered behaviors. With her cartoonish figures, she deciphers patterns of authority and performance. Aiza Ahmed observes society as a system shaped by power dynamics—and claims art as a space to imagine different ones.
Ahmed constructs theatrical narratives that unsettle fixed ideas of nationhood, masculinity, and belonging. Photo: Nicholas Knight, courtesy of Sargent’s Daughters, New York
When asked if she remembers being particularly drawn to political satire in newspapers or to the language of comics more broadly, she says she probably was not looking at anything specific. “I used to read the newspaper because my father would tell me to—just to know what was happening in the world,” she says, recalling how she often found it difficult and would flip straight to the illustrated sections. “It’s funny—I never connected that until now. Maybe that planted something,” she acknowledges, adding that she loved Roald Dahl and Quentin Blake and grew up watching a lot of Disney. “The Disney aesthetic really shaped me,” she reflects, describing how she recently discovered a Disney encyclopedia series in an antique shop in Doha. “One volume was called Great Leaders. It listed all these men and maybe two women—like Queen Victoria. It was fascinating, and the illustrations were unlike anything I’d seen,” she says. The find feels serendipitous, almost luminous, given the direction her work is now taking.
The fact that Ahmed constantly oscillates between caustic social indictment and a playfully theatrical or carnivalesque register pushes the grotesque into the realm of the fantastical and hallucinatory. As James Ensor once did, Ahmed’s line exaggerates expression to the point of derangement, using humor, absurdity and the grotesque to surface moral and psychological undercurrents, as well as the paradoxical fragility at the heart of today’s crisis of masculinity and the masculine-led world these performances of power seek to uphold. Applying the inverse of a more gentle, compassionate feminine playfulness, Ahmed’s work unsettles fixed ideas of nationhood, masculinity and belonging.
After all, it is playfulness and humor that often allow satire to resonate. They soften the critique just enough for the viewer to enter, while sharpening the underlying point. The best satire lets you laugh and wince at the same time.
This is why Aiza Ahmed’s work often takes on a theatrical presence, as she stages human drama within the space, suspended in dreamlike atmospheres. This was particularly evident in her solo debut with Sargent’s Daughters. Drawing its title, “The Music Room,” from Jalsaghar (The Music Room), Satyajit Ray’s mesmerizing 1958 film, Ahmed translated the movie into spatial terms through a multimedia installation of shifting characters rendered in monumental paintings and wooden cut-out figures. An original composition by historian, composer and guitarist Ria Modak further shaped the mise-en-scène, transforming the gallery into both a soundscape and a theater where these narratives unfolded with unsettling resonance in the present.
Evoking the film’s psychological portrait of India’s zamindar class, propped up under British colonial rule before facing dissolution amid land reforms and shifting politics in the mid-20th century, the music room here similarly becomes a stage for hollow rituals of nostalgia and masculine display. Ahmed’s figures appear as ghostly presences, drawn with raw, essential lines that balance humor and pallor, exposing the paradoxes and slow decay of any myth of masculinity. Crucially, in another act of inversion, she imagines a music room authored by women, turning their gaze back onto patriarchal and colonial power.
A similar impulse shaped her Spring Break Art Show presentation last May, where she first drew wider attention with a booth curated by Indira A. Abiskaroon, a curatorial assistant at the Brooklyn Museum. There, Ahmed reimagined the Wagah-Attari border ceremony, a daily ritual established in 1959 that draws thousands to watch soldiers from India and Pakistan march, gesture and parade as mirrored adversaries in a choreography that has long fascinated her for its oscillation between fury and restraint, rivalry and camaraderie.
Installation view: Aiza Ahmed’s “Border Play” at SPRING/BREAK Art Show in 2025. Photo: Leo Ng
In her installation, she amplified the spectacle to expose its built-in theatricality: bugle calls and Kishore Kumar’s bright vocals led visitors through hot pink drapes and onto a red carpet flanked by wooden soldiers, toward an imagined stage where painted and sculpted figures performed their own exaggerated version of the ritual. Within this draped, cardboard mise-en-scène, the soldiers’ postures, uniforms and expressions became social masks—revealing not only the codes through which authority and masculinity are enacted, but also the fragility those performances attempt to conceal. Her presentation at Art Basel Qatar will continue this narrative; she is currently working on new paintings, a suspended muslin work and a series of wooden cut-out soldiers for the installation.
Ahmed’s visual and narrative approach is not far from the narrative strategies used in commedia dell’arte, which established the idea of fixed “characters” representing social types, each defined by a mask and exaggerated behavioral code—or pantomime, which strips these roles even further, reducing gesture to language and expression to narrative. Ahmed’s suspended storylines operate in a similar register. Much like in Pirandello’s work, she uses playful role-playing and seemingly naive humor to generate immediate empathy while simultaneously revealing the fragile, absurd theater of human existence and the drama of identity.
Thus far, Ahmed acknowledges, two main sources have shaped the origins of her work. One is her personal observation of societal rituals—weddings, funerals and ceremonies that exist in a liminal space between the public and the private, where she has been both observer and participant. The other is the India-Pakistan border, which she has studied in depth. Still, she notes, the overarching theme that continues to emerge is the spectrum of masculinity and the attempt to understand its psyche. What is going on in their heads—and how has that interiority hardened into a social rule that has long shaped a shared sense of reality?
When asked if her work is political, Ahmed says that every action can be a political act. “Even if you don’t voice it, you’re making a statement. Being a brown woman is already a political act. There are endless layers you can add to that,” she argues. And endless, too, are the dimensions in which Ahmed’s powerful imagination can evolve, as she continues to translate her both empathic and critical observations of the world around her.
“Minimal” is on view at La Bourse de Commerce — Pinault Collection through January 19, 2025. Courtesy Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection
Minimalism emerged as both an act of resistance and a direct response to the exuberance of mass media and mass production—forces celebrated as progress that fundamentally reshaped how we relate to objects and to material reality itself. Seen from today’s vantage point, works made during the height of the movement in the 1960s and ’70s reveal a radical and strikingly timely philosophical and political interrogation of our modern sense of reality that feels particularly urgent in an era defined by the mediatization and spectacularization of the digital sphere.
Against the promise of endless availability and the relentless cycles of production, circulation and consumption—including the infinite reproducibility of the digital image—Minimalism’s artists embraced an ascetic discipline of reduction, stripping the artwork to its essential terms and events while intensifying its effects. In doing so, they underscored how an object, through restraint, can shape perception and reconfigure the very space and architecture that contain it.
“Minimal,” a major exhibition that opened at La Bourse de Commerce in October, brings together over 100 works, including a core group drawn from François Pinault’s collection, alongside international loans from the Dia Foundation in New York and other institutions. Curated by Dia director Jessica Morgan, it traces, likely for the first time, both the diversity and the global reach of the movement launched by a generation of artists who initiated a radical approach to art that later took on different forms around the world.
The exhibition unfolds as a journey that allows for multiple discoveries and rediscoveries, showcasing how artists from diverse cultural backgrounds across Asia, Europe, and North and South America similarly challenged traditional methods of art production and display. At its core is a fundamental reconsideration of the artwork’s placement in relation to the viewer and within the cyclical flow of energy and matter that underpins the cosmos itself.
Lygia Pape’s Weaving Space. Photo: Nicolas Brasseur/Pinault Collection | Courtesy Projeto Lygia Pape
The works in the show were born out of a shared attempt to stage raw encounters with matter and to engage the most primordial and authentic structures of human experience. Conceived with both conceptual and spiritual rigor, they privilege presence and perception over form, becoming experiential sites of “lived perception”—embodying an entire mode of thinking in an art object that places the physical self at the center of understanding the world.
Philosophically, Minimalist artworks foreground a mature awareness of reality as inherently interrelational, something that arises only in the encounter between object, viewer and environment. A radical manifestation of this interdependence appears in the central installations by American artist Meg Webster, which dominate the Bourse’s scenic, frescoed rotunda. Conceived and realized in collaboration with natural processes, their final form stages a tense resistance to entropy, which inevitably alters their shape and appearance over time beyond any claim to human formal control or perfection. Natural processes are embedded within these seemingly simple structures, which ultimately draw an entire ecosystem into Tadao Ando’s spare architecture. Here, the total choreography matters as much as its individual components, as Webster constructs an interior landscape at the building’s core.
Merging nature and culture, matter and energy, Webster’s process-based sculpture is infused with a prescient ecological consciousness. Poised between the elemental and the formal, between human-shaped material and natural transformation, her work prompts reflection on sustainability and our relationship to the earth—particularly resonant today as she receives long-overdue international attention through this presentation, which runs in conjunction with her year-long exhibition at Dia Beacon.
Meg Webster works at Bourse de Commerce. Photo : Florent Michel / 11h45 / Pinault Collection
If Minimalism has long been interpreted as an aesthetic reaction to the subjective overflow of Abstract Expressionism and the figuration of Pop Art, the global perspective and breadth of this exhibition make clear that the approach often extended far beyond a purely aesthetic exercise. In doing so, it prepared the conceptual ground for a substantial share of contemporary sculpture and Conceptual Art, pushing the logic of economy of means to the point of privileging the idea over its realization. This shift opened up possibilities for many contemporary artistic practices that operate beyond, or are no longer confined to, fixed traditional media.
The exhibition is organized into seven thematic sections: Light, Mono-ha, Balance, Surface, Grid, Monochrome and Materialism. The titles signal the core elements these artists investigated in their inquiry into the most radical ways of translating reality through art reduced to its most essential components. Unadorned by any pretense of figuration or narrative and detached from the biographical identity of its maker, each work functions simultaneously as proposition and question.
Underlying the pieces on view is a shared desire to situate the audience within the same perceptual field, calling for a bodily correspondence between artwork and viewer through scale and proximity. In many parts of the world, this reconceptualization of three-dimensional form and perception led to a dialogue with performance, whether through process-based making, choreographic collaboration or direct physical interaction with the work.
The exhibition naturally includes the early generation of American artists most closely associated with the movement, including Donald Judd, Carl Andre and Dan Flavin, though they do not occupy center stage, reflecting an effort to decentralize and broaden the narrative. As at Dia, the show presents artists from the 1960s who pursued a similarly radical engagement with the canvas, exploring austerity and mathematical rigor through monochrome and grid-based structures. Figures such as Robert Ryman and Agnes Martin are represented by some of the most significant works drawn from Pinault’s collection.
Particularly compelling is the dialogue established with parallel aesthetics emerging from markedly different cultural, philosophical and spiritual contexts outside the United States. Among these, the Japanese Mono-ha group offers one of the exhibition’s most resonant contributions. Pinault’s holdings include one of the most substantial collections of Mono-ha works outside Japan. Artists such as Lee Ufan, Kishio Suga, Koji Enokura, Susumu Koshimizu, Nobuo Sekine and Jiro Takamatsu foreground the interrelation of object, space and viewer, staging “things” together in their natural or industrially fabricated states. By embracing the delicate balance and tension produced by their transitory condition, these artists investigated a form of material intelligence, examining how matter retains identity even as form shifts, prioritizing material presence over sculptural expression and over any symbolic or linguistic framing.
Another compelling perspective included in the exhibition is the organic and participatory reinterpretation of geometric abstraction developed in Brazil through the Neo-Concrete movement, exemplified by Lygia Pape, Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica. A capsule exhibition dedicated to Pape, “Weaving Space,” which opened a month earlier and runs concurrently, served as a prelude to “Minimal.” It traces key moments in her oeuvre, from Max Bill-inspired geometries to an increasingly organic and participatory use of abstraction, presenting works that range from her first abstract engravings to her monumental Livro Noite e Dia III (Book of Night and Day III) from 1963-76, alongside experimental films that emerged in response to Brazil’s sociopolitical context at the time. At the heart of the presentation is her poetic, full-room installation Ttéia 1, C (2003-2017), in which she literally weaves space into a new architectural structure using delicate gold threads, transforming the environment into a luminous and diaphanous site of exchange between physical presence and imagination, light and darkness.
One of her most radical works, Divisor (1968), was restaged during the show’s opening weeks. As in its original enactment in Rio de Janeiro, a hundred participants moved as one beneath an immense perforated white sheet, forming a living metaphor for a shared social fabric. In this gentle merging of forms, hierarchy is suspended, and the work invites a collective, participatory meditation on equality, employing abstraction as a universal language that transcends individuality and binds participants within a shared structure.
Occupying the entirety of the rotunda is On Kawara’s Minimal Chronology of Dated Paintings, forming a minimalist diary and record of personal and collective time. By painting the numbers that denote each passing day, Kawara creates a fragment of space and materiality in which the durational act of painting absorbs the multiplicity of events and meanings implied within a single date, set against the relentless flow of time. By confronting the idea that linear time itself is a conventional and ultimately arbitrary human construction, Kawara’s date paintings distill life to its most essential marker—time alone—aligning with Minimalism’s drive toward radical reduction through their emphasis on the viewer’s direct encounter with the present. Meanwhile, in Europe, movements such as Zero in Germany and Arte Povera in Italy pushed the boundaries of sculpture through minimalist vocabularies and a direct engagement with space as a hybrid, active presence.
The additional perspectives and less expected figures presented in the Light section offer a fresh reading of how Minimalism enabled artists to investigate one of the most phenomenologically charged elements through which we access physical reality. In the 1960s and ’70s, light became a primary material. Artists including Dan Flavin, Nancy Holt, François Morellet, Robert Irwin, Mary Corse, Keith Sonnier and Chryssa worked with fluorescent tubes, neon, black light, projected light and natural illumination, driven by a broader inquiry into perception and immateriality as artificial and industrial lighting came to dominate the urban environment. Flavin’s fluorescent structures redefined spatial boundaries and architectural features, while Holt and Irwin explored the relational, phenomenological nature of light, focusing on how it organizes perception and bodily movement. Corse, meanwhile, experimented with Tesla coils and argon gas, producing works that appear to capture and hold light itself.
It is in these perspectives that we gain further evidence of how, through a minimalist language, these artists were already posing urgent questions that remain, or have become even more timely today. Ultimately, Minimal art, in its various declinations, was already probing the dynamics and structures that shape our relationship to reality and our physical position within a world of things transformed into products and meaning through human-made symbols and systems that often attempt to contain or neutralize, through illusion, the entropic nature of reality beyond human cognitive and sensory grasp.
The emphasis in these works rests on the moment of encounter itself: the phenomenology of seeing before and beyond any process of signification. Form becomes secondary to process, presence and the inherent agency of materials. Through deconstruction and reduction, these works introduce profound existential doubts rather than offering closed propositions, redirecting attention to a pre-linguistic register of experience—the first contact with reality, which already carries its own phenomenological truth. What they propose is an epistemology grounded in dynamic, open-ended relationships with matter. In doing so, the works cultivate a heightened awareness of the sensory core of our experience of the world, our only access within the limits of embodied perception.
In a culture saturated with mediated images and, increasingly, with algorithmic simulations and machine-generated forms, Minimalism restores the body as the primary filter and medium through which the world is apprehended—an insistence on embodied perception that feels newly urgent in a desensitized and increasingly alienated society, where digital mediation and elaboration govern, or can potentially substitute for, much of our experience of reality.
Phong Bui with Meyer and Lillian Schapiro. c. 1994. Photo by Eyal Danieli
Connection was and is of vital importance to both art historian Meyer Schapiro (1904-1996) and Phong Bui (born 1964), a writer, curator and critic, and their influence in the art world is far-reaching. They have integrated art with history, politics, psychology, sociology and social criticism. The two first met in 1986 and quickly became close friends, along with Schapiro’s wife, Lillian. Schapiro, until his death 10 years later, was also Bui’s mentor, including him in his circle of friends and colleagues (a convergence that gave birth to the Brooklyn Rail in 2000). To celebrate that relationship and as a testament to Schapiro, Bui has curated an exhibition featuring works by a number of well-known artists with whom Schapiro had a close bond throughout his life.
“Singing in Unison, Part 13,” now on in the Brattleboro Museum’s two main galleries, showcases brilliantly the scope of the pair’s expansive minds. On one of the large walls of the museum is Bui’s “Shrine to Meyer,” which is usually mounted on Bui’s bedroom wall in Brooklyn. A large full-length mirror is surrounded by works that Schapiro collected over the years and gave to Bui, as well as Schapiro’s own art. Bui said Meyer made art so he could understand art and the speed of execution, building a sensitivity to the making of art. The Meyer Shrine acknowledges Meyer’s enduring intellectual curiosity and clearly demonstrates Bui’s love for his mentor and friend.
Arshile Gorky, Study for the Betrothal, 1940. Graphite and wax crayon on paper, 24 ⅜ x 19 ⅛ inches. Courtesy Jack Shear Collection
Meyer Schapiro was born in Lithuania in 1904 and moved with his family to the United States when he was three years old. Bui was born in Vietnam in 1964 and came to the United States at the age of 16. The exhibition features artists who also emigrated, including Gorky, Guston, Rothko, Hofmann, Samaras, Hélion, Kahn, Vicente, Müller and Seligmann—all in pursuit of greater freedom. Emigration is not easy: assimilating into a foreign culture, learning a new language, making friends and understanding how people think. Artists find one another, just as Bui found Schapiro, and communities are formed, something crucial for foreigners. New York City was a haven for the artists whose works you’ll see here.
What is striking about both Schapiro and Bui is their profound knowledge of history, politics, poetry, literature, psychology and art. Bui continues to this day to be a proud connector of communities, bringing together people from all walks of life. His enduring commitment to the Brooklyn Rail—not only as co-founder but also as artistic director for 25 years—is a testament to his wide-ranging drive to cross-pollinate the arts with history. “How do we keep it alive?” he asks, seeking to unify a divided world. He learned so much from Schapiro, and his passing “left an impossible void. Every day, images derived from his stories would appear and haunt me. What I realized, later, was that the only way I could pay homage to him while relieving my nostalgia for his past was to create my own. When I thought of the more exciting periods of American intellectual life, especially in the 1930s and ’40s as being coincident with the rise of bohemia, the very idea of bringing artists and writers together in their struggle with and for the world became identical to my own longing for an extended family, one that would include individuals who shared the same aspiration.”
In 2022, Bui curated the first “Singing in Unison” in that spirit, showcasing seasoned artists as well as new ones, and then tailoring each subsequent exhibition to its environment. He gathers together musicians, dancers, performers, innovators and artists to celebrate community, optimism and love. An important and necessary dictum for Bui is, “Artists need to create on the same scale that society has the capacity to destroy.” A fitting dictate for an exhibition that features the works of so many immigrants forging their way through history.
This exhibition offers a glimpse into the life of Madame Déficit through the lens of how she chose to look. Peter Kelleher, courtesy Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Welcome to One Fine Show, where Observer highlights a recently opened exhibition at a museum not in New York City, a place we know and love that already receives plenty of attention.
I was in Paris during the Louvre heist, and though my alibi is firm, I never would have predicted the extent to which the robbery would capture the imagination of New Yorkers. The robbery inspired countless Halloween costumes and signage at last month’s marathon. I think people like to imagine an Ernst Blofeld-type figure, awaiting delivery of the gem so that he can admire them in a secret vault or put them on his cat or something. It’s since become clear that this was never about anything more than the skyrocketing price of gold. Still, you can’t blame people for craving a villain who puts style above all else.
Marie Antoinette was certainly one of those, and whether you love her or love to hate her, the recently opened exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum, “Marie Antoinette Style,” is a must-see. It’s a fashion exhibition—not a historical show with a vast number of objects actually owned by her—but it recreates her world well. A facsimile of a necklace from the “affair of the diamond necklace,” for example, sits near other glittering jewelry that did belong to her.
It’s a glimpse into her life through the lens of how she chose to look. Her shoes were so delicate, you can tell she didn’t do much walking. She had so many dominoes that you find yourself wondering how there could possibly be a need for so many. My favorite objects in the exhibition were the gilded satin gardening tools from Petit Trianon, her make-believe Disney village at Versailles.
This is one of those “One Fine Shows” I had the pleasure of seeing in person, and I’m glad I did because there’s no way to convey the innovative exhibition design from a checklist. They don’t shy away from anything, which is first hinted at by a series of plastic busts that invite you to smell Marie Antoinette’s world through a series of holes at the base of the neck. The perfumes that flowed through her court were as bespoke and pleasing as the rest of her existence, but then the last one in the row is intensely foul. Is the machine broken? No, it’s simulating an 18th-century dungeon. This was near a room of pornographic cartoons about her from the time when it all started to go wrong, and it really snuck up on me. Next comes a red room and the last thing she ever wore: a thin prison smock.
So as not to end on a down note, the exhibition finishes with a host of haute couture inspired by her, from Manolo Blahnik, Vivienne Westwood and Christian Dior, with costumes by Sofia Coppola from Marie Antoinette. One risks a tummy ache with all that candy, but it does make you think about the power of a cohesive look. Our wealthiest today pride themselves on how they dress, but so many of them look like absolute shit. Marie Antoinette wasn’t much more villainous than her aristocratic contemporaries and managed to build a vibe that endured across the centuries. It’s hard to imagine many Instagram feeds ending up at the V&A.
Zoë Buckman’s “Who By Fire” is at Mindy Solomon through January 10, 2026. Photo: Zachary Balber
Brooklyn-based Zoë Buckman has made her name through a bold approach to textile and embroidery—a medium long associated with subordinate female labor—transforming it from a vessel of generational memory into a stage for broader sociopolitical commentary and denunciations. In her work, embroidery moves from the domestic sphere into the political, turning traditionally feminized labor into a mode of testimony while also celebrating and crystallizing intimate moments as representations of broader, universal human states.
Buckman’s practice has long centered on gender disparities, challenging representations of women by asserting—through her authorship—not only control over the historically masculine gaze but also the autonomy of expression and self-definition that emerges through an inverted dynamic empowering her subjects in both their physical and emotional realities. With her latest show, which opened during Art Basel Miami Beach at Mindy Solomon Gallery, the artist shifts toward a wider lens, seeking to claim the dignity of—and elevate—the Jewish community she belongs to, moving beyond stereotyped portrayals and addressing the discrimination and isolation it has faced amid the ongoing backlash to the war in Gaza.
Buckman’s background was initially in photography, she explains to Observer as we walk through the show. Photography remains the starting point for these embroideries, allowing her to capture the humanity of her subjects as it manifests in the moment.
Zoë Buckman in her studio. Photo: Abbey Drucker
“I started in photography. That was where I got my art education,” she explains, noting how she still goes everywhere with her little film point-and-shoot camera. “I’m always looking for that genuine, authentic expression beyond any kind of structure—the moment: these authentic moments between people in my life,” Buckman adds. “Sometimes it’s between me and someone close to me, or sometimes it’s just a moment when humanity happens to manifest.”
Drawing its title from Leonard Cohen’s haunting reinterpretation of the Jewish prayer Unetaneh Tokef, the exhibition’s themes of mortality, judgment and spiritual reckoning and reawakening echo through Jewish ritual and lived experience. Each subject is depicted in a moment of inner reawakening—confronting emotional fragility and vulnerability while also embracing the expansive potential of their inner life. They share this richness deliberately, even when such imaginative and psychological responses run counter to the rational systems of productivity and functionality that dominate contemporary life—a society that, in doing so, appears to have lost one of its most profound values: empathy and the awareness that we are all interconnected in a network of vital interdependencies beyond racial, religious or social categories shaping today’s divisions and deepening polarization.
Based on photographs of family and community members in intimate, domestic settings, these works invite us to recognize shared humanity beyond classification. In the process, the artist undertakes a deeply personal exploration of Jewish identity through cultural and material rituals that preserve intergenerational memory and embody collective resilience—while also probing the universality of these private moments and emotional states.
Drawing its title from Leonard Cohen’s haunting reinterpretation of the Jewish Unetaneh Tokef prayer, the exhibition invokes themes of mortality, judgment and spiritual reckoning. Photo: Zachary Balber
Throughout her practice, Buckman employs an original visual lexicon that combines ink and acrylic painting on vintage domestic textiles, which she then hand-embroiders. Sewing and stitching these threads around the images to help those moments materialize with emotional warmth is a time-intensive process—one that inherently reflects the dedication and care required by all genuine and meaningful human encounters.
Combining introspection, tenderness and radical presence, the raw sensual symbolism and materiality of these works operate as both mirror and balm. “When I first started, I was celebrating the tradition itself—the craftsmanship, the legacy of women, the history behind embroidery and appliqué,” Buckman explains. Sewing becomes a way to retrace that thread, reconnect with that legacy and keep it alive, as the textile work regains its ancestral function as an archive—a repository of personal and collective memory and storytelling. The textile and embroidery medium absorbs experience like skin: soft enough to bear wounds, yet strong enough to endure handling, mending and reconfiguration. Still, the way threads come loose or begin to fall away gestures toward a different reading, as Buckman notes. “It’s a question of what exists beyond the tradition. Are these figures emerging, or are they disappearing?”
Thread holds time; becoming presence and figure, each stitch marks a moment, a choice, a return—an accumulative record of presence that resists erasure. Yet Buckman also makes room for disintegration. The undone quality that defines her work allows for imperfection and visible labor, acknowledging and honoring the fragile humility of human history in all its ephemeral, transient nature.
Zoë Buckman, knock on my consiousness, 2025. Courtesy the artist and Mindy Solomon
“There’s this tension in the thread: it looks like it’s holding everything together, but it’s also coming apart,” Buckman observes. “I’m playing with that moment where the image feels like it’s either dissolving or coming together—precisely that space.”
Much of Buckman’s recent work, as she admits, has centered on grief, spirit, and connection, with her artistic practice becoming a means of maintaining bonds with those she has lost. She sews her trauma directly into fabric, as the slower tempo imposed by sewing, stitching, and embroidery allows her to pause and interrogate deeply personal experiences and transitions. Only by entering that space of introspection and meditation—stepping outside the relentless flow of modern life—can one begin to process emotional change and, ideally, find a space for healing. Here, memory becomes something physically and emotionally metabolized through the hands.
For the first time, Buckman includes a work in this show that also depicts a man. “My work about my relationships with men has usually focused on the difficult experiences I’ve had—things that were said or done to me,” she notes, acknowledging the piece as a possible step toward a more tender place of reconciliation, healing her conflict and painful resentment with the masculine. The man in before they became an outline (2025) is actually a gay friend, she explains. The image distills a moment of genuine admiration and affection between two friends, where the feminine side nonetheless remains the center of emotional and psychological attention and tension.
Zoë Buckman, before they became an outline, 2025. Courtesy the artist and Mindy Solomon
The male figure is looking down toward a blonde woman in his arms, the threads flowing around her body. “That’s Katie. She’s the woman who has appeared most often in my work,” Buckman explains, expressing deep admiration for someone who defies stereotypes: a nurse and two-time cancer survivor who has endured countless challenges yet still holds a powerfully seductive and magnetic presence. “She lost her mum when she was 18, so we share that grief of not having our mothers around. She’s been through similar experiences to mine when it comes to power, to assault,” Buckman explains. “She’s the most audacious, so sexy. When you meet her, when she walks into a room, she commands the space. She’s really a muse for me: she’s endured so much, and yet she’s radically attractive.”
The subject of a woman with red hair in trace your ridges (2025) similarly claims, fearlessly and unapologetically, all the attention her energy and beauty demand. One of the very few self-portraits Buckman has made, the piece is based on a photograph taken by her boyfriend, she explains. She had never previously allowed that kind of dynamic into her work. But by doing so now, she reclaims the image, folds her own perspective back into it and reconciles with the memories it carries. The female figure remains at the center, now asserting full ownership of the sensuality that once drew the potentially abusive masculine gaze. She is still the axis everything revolves around.
At the same time, with this show, Buckman appears to shift her focus more toward a broader, collective experience of intergenerational trauma—still unprocessed and once again denied the space for reflection and recognition that true healing requires.
Zoë Buckman, trace your ridges, 2025. Courtesy the artist and Mindy Solomon
“I think it’s also important to note that when I started this series, there were works that were taken off the wall or sent to an art fair and then not exhibited because of the apparently hostile climate in the art world, in the aftermath of the Gaza war,” she notes. “These are my Jewish family and I, and these works were somehow censored just as there was a piece with a little gold Star of David. This raises new questions about who is represented in art today and how entire communities are still erased.”
This question of representation is also what brought Buckman to engage directly with art history in some of her subjects. smells like light (2025), for instance, was inspired by a painting she saw at the Henry Taylor retrospective at the Whitney, which had itself been inspired by a work by Richter and could be linked further back to Vermeer. “That was his interpretation—his version—of a Richter painting and I loved how Henry Taylor was appropriating it to speak about his own community, about who gets left out of the canon of art history,” Buckman notes. Her version shows a woman in profile, her body turned away from the viewer, her head wrapped in a striking golden-yellow headscarf rendered with soft folds and highlights that echo the sinuous movement of her robe, covered in dense, vivid red floral embroidery that creates tactile depth and vital motion. “I wanted to create something that looks at a Mizrahi, modern Orthodox Jewish woman, because I also feel that these are also people and identities that are left out of the canon of art history.”
This is also why all the works are made on repurposed textiles using traditional techniques; her canvases are bed sheets and tablecloths that have often been passed down through generations. “They all already hold stories, carry memories; they revive the legacy of other women for me,” she reflects.
Zoë Buckman, smells like light, 2025. Courtesy the artist and Mindy Solomon
Already embedded in these materials are stories of intergenerational trauma, resilience and resistance. These textiles function as a site of repair, where Buckman tries to pull the threads together again—mending memory without concealing what is broken, allowing the chaos and hardship revealed by the falling strands to remain visible. “I get to build upon the stories that were already there, the ones we don’t know about. Were these textiles treasured? Were they discarded? We don’t know,” she says. “We don’t know who the women were who handled them. Discarded or cherished, they still carry something forward.”
The only text-only work in the show underscores the connection between thread and text, as these textile pieces become vessels for preserving both individual and collective memory. “& still women will tell a woman or what remains of her bones that they are lying,” reads the blue embroidery in crows on the tracks (2025)—a cryptic, poetic allusion not only to the historical tragedy of the Holocaust but also to the ongoing erasure of domestic violence, both past and present. While Buckman has long addressed this denial in her work and public presence, she created this piece during a period of reckoning with how deeply Holocaust denial and the gaslighting of antisemitic experience continue. “One of the most heartbreaking and disappointing things I’ve witnessed in the last two years has been seeing women—feminist women, highly educated women, activist women—denying the rape and sexual assault that happened to people in my community. Immediately, even now, it gets rejected. Jewish women are told they’re making it up.”
In the threads of Zoë Buckman’s dense emotional storytelling, trauma—both individual and intergenerational—is not erased but held. It is rematerialized as witnessed emotion and reconfigured into powerfully dramatic images that affirm the profound humanity within each scene. Through the visible labor of sewing itself, the gesture of repair becomes more than a metaphor—it becomes a vital part of the story.
Zoë Buckman, crows on the tracks, 2025. Courtesy the artist and Mindy Solomon
Throughout her career, French-Italian artist Tatiana Trouvé has explored the psychological, mnemonic and emotional dimensions of architecture and space, creating evocative environments that engage themes of transition, fragility and resistance. Coinciding with the Venice Architecture Biennale, Trouvé is currently the subject of a major presentation at Pinault Collection’s Palazzo Grassi—“The Strange Life of Things”—bringing together a group of works that resonate deeply with many of the Biennale’s core concerns, as architects grapple with the precarious state of contemporary civilization and the failures of capitalism, which have pushed them to conceive buildings not as isolated structures but as integral components within a broader, deeply interconnected system shaped by social dynamics, environmental urgencies, biological rhythms and technological change.
Marking the most wide-ranging exhibition of the artist’s work to date, the presentation is intentionally fragmentary—rejecting any notion of linear time, fixed site or coherent narrative. Instead, it embraces the precarious yet highly malleable nature of human consciousness and experience. Microcosms and macrocosms of physical and psychological states unfold throughout, freely blending urban remnants with classical references and celestial motifs with subterranean, earthbound matter.
What Trouvé stages is an open system—an ecosystem of parts and fragments that stand in for larger wholes. Like a form of contemporary archaeology, we are presented only with traces: fragments of actions, emotions and thoughts that hint at the intelligence behind these material presences. This is the “strange life of things”—the objects and environments that surround us, shape us and contribute to our sense of being and to human development. In this sense, Trouvé’s work becomes a deliberately aleatory exploration of the material world as a state of flux, transformation and continuous metamorphosis. She embraces the fragmented nature of suspended forms and provisional structures that attempt to define and contain our existence, only to expose their inherent instability.
Occupying all three floors of Palazzo Grassi, Trouvé guides us through a continuous, uneasy oscillation between upper and underworlds, between material and spiritual realities. The palace’s marble courtyard becomes a personal constellation, an abstract cosmological chart centered on Hors-sol. Cast from various manhole covers, the different metals take on the appearance of medals, their symbols arranged on concrete as if to map a shared universe that relativizes the supposed limitlessness of human experience. Their fluid positioning across the ground evokes atomic particles drifting on liquid surfaces, echoing the stream of human consciousness and expression. At the same time, they appear to siphon away the failures and distortions that have prevented humanity from recognizing how everything—every thought, form and element—is part of the same current, the same water, the same flux.
From there, Trouvé brings us into the in fieri dimension of her studio. Apparently incoherent assemblages of materials settle into the rooms as inherently symbolic still lifes, frozen in time as a testament to human passage and experience. In the artist’s “Notes on Sculpture” series, each work is titled after a specific moment or a person who occupied Trouvé’s thoughts during its creation, with a diaristic impulse translated into three-dimensional form that captures the unpredictability of events and materials shaping a life. Interior and exterior worlds, past experiences and inherited memories blend seamlessly into sculptures that feel at once personal and collective, suspended between order and entropy.
Trouvé’s Poverista language of raw, humble materials reveals not only their physical properties but also their psychological resonance, transforming them into metaphors of both individual and collective existence. Her sculptural compositions read as a diary of humanity and poetry, staging unexpected encounters between objects that already carry embedded political, cultural and social meaning even before they are articulated into a message. Notes on Sculpture, April 27th, ‘Maresa’, for instance, reassembles a working desk, yet within this palimpsest of everyday gestures one object rises upright, asserting itself like a character claiming presence and individuality. For Trouvé, recycling materials and objects becomes a way of weaving new stories, a means of expressing the persistent urge to blur inside and outside, psyche and form, as if striving toward a more porous mode of perception beyond the strictly visual.
In this process, the low and the high merge seamlessly, memorializing encounters between material forms within the endless cycle of production and consumption, an existence perpetually oscillating between regeneration and decay. The fragility of urban structures collides with the grandeur of contemporary architectural space, exposing the tensions that define today’s urban condition. Throughout the exhibition, Trouvé reminds us that nature inevitably outlasts humanity’s attempts to contain or escape it, revealing a quiet resilience in the face of human constructs. The obsolescence of technology and architecture meets the enduring force of natural environments while confronting the timeless majesty of art from the past. Trouvé ultimately embraces the idea that, in this post-capitalist phase of human development marked by systemic failure, sculpture can only be precious insofar as it is resistant and resilient: a commentary on material survival that acknowledge the inherent fallibility of all human endeavor.
While the human body is never directly depicted in Trouvé’s work, it is frequently evoked through the societal frameworks and constructed roles that shape identity, often overpowering the more authentic call of the soul. In a witty turn, even the room guardian is transformed into an onyx and bronze fetish, a figure as heavy as its symbolic role yet as fragile as the ghostly presence of custodianship itself—mute, isolated, unable to relate or communicate. It becomes a curious object of both artifice and weight, suspended between presence and absence.
In Storia Notturna 30 Giugno 2023, the artist confronts the failures of social systems of control by evoking communal resistance through material traces of shelter and defense. The rough surfaces of two monumental plaster wall casts stand in stark contrast to the richly adorned coffered ceiling of Palazzo Grassi, generating a charged tension between the turbulent reality of earthly existence and the idealized harmony of celestial realms. Embedded within the casts are impressions Trouvé took directly from the streets of Montreuil in the aftermath of the riots sparked by the fatal police shooting of a 17-year-old boy of North African descent in June 2023. Molds drawn from the remains of the unrest—burnt garbage bins, melted plastics, scorched shopfronts—are transformed into an abstracted landscape that channels the volcanic rage of the disenfranchised and maps the volatility of the present.
This unveiling of human psychological and societal constructions as inherently precarious and temporary is echoed throughout the exhibition. An underlying apocalyptic tone permeates the space, as if everything were teetering on the verge of collapse. In more than one installation, such as Navigation Gates from 2024, Trouvé evokes fragile shelters rooted in ancient yet increasingly eroded cultural systems of survival, while also gesturing toward older, more symbiotic relationships with the natural world.
In Somewhere in the Solar System, the artist appears to have already accepted societal collapse, envisioning a world reduced to shelters built from ruins, fragments of navigation maps, cosmic charts, diagrams and codes. These remnants offer a means of searching for a deeper, more ancient meaning of existence beyond the contingency and overwhelm of unfolding events. Along one timeline, inscriptions read “2060 NEWTON END OF THE WORLD” and “2100 ECOLOGICAL COLLAPSE.” Arranged like a camp or a totemic circle, the installation suggests a sculpture that functions as premonition, a contemporary monument in the lineage of Maya structures that likewise sought to mark the end before it arrived.
Throughout the exhibition, Tatiana Trouvé blurs the boundaries between the observed and the imagined, between what may have occurred in the past and what could unfold in the future. The act of artistic creation, informed by both historical memory and imagination, emerges as one of the few tools of resistance and survival amid the speed and confusion of modern life, a way to resist the current of forgetting and anchor oneself in ancient truths while projecting new visions of what lies ahead. As the exhibition text suggests, Trouvé plays with these temporal shifts to mirror the speculative fictions of writers like Dino Buzzati, Italo Calvino and Ursula K. Le Guin, inviting visitors into narratives in which protagonists often find themselves in strange, disorienting circumstances that unravel linear time and logic.
What Trouvé ultimately reveals is a post-truth world marked by profound forgetfulness, where the values and knowledge of the past slip into obsolescence, leaving humanity without stable reference points to confront the recurring cycles of history. Yet she holds onto a belief in the power of artistic creation to imagine and construct alternative scenarios, a way to confront cultural and existential decay through the collective strength and imagination of the community.
An intimate act of both sentimental and poetic resistance is embodied in Trouvé’s Cities (2024), which reflects the endless circulation of bodies and objects across the world. These necklaces, composed of materials gathered in various cities, become a form of personal coding of sensations and experiences that spoke authentically to the soul. By casting them in bronze and preserving them in time, Trouvé invites contemplation of their broader meaning within the economy of social and physical relations. New archetypes emerge as impossible, tactile votive offerings, reviving a symbolic and mythic language as perhaps the only tools left to confront collapse. As Walter Benjamin once suggested, the past “flashes up” in moments of crisis, just as Trouvé gathers fragments, ruins and temporal dislocations to root memory in lived experience, resisting the current of forgetting.
The faculty of deep memory, combined with the force of expansive imagination, becomes, as Michael Meade writes, what continues to flow into the world as ongoing creation. Embracing this vital fluidity of matter and energy, Tatiana Trouvé conceives of her work as an ecosystem, a circulation of elements configured into a community of forms, each capable of generating new and open-ended narratives. The Residents exemplifies this approach, a cluster of sculptures suspended in time and space that invites viewers to move around them and imagine scenarios drawn from their unfinished, suggestive forms.
Yet Trouvé is acutely aware that even deep memory and expansive imagination inevitably confront the boundaries imposed by societal structures that contain and regulate reality. This tension is rendered in L’appuntamento through an intricate layering of glass barriers and walls, transparent yet obstructive. And still, there is always a door, a portal that appears once the viewer shifts perspective, a means of escape from the rigid frameworks through which society seeks to control not only individual behavior but also the inherently chaotic nature of the universe. Trouvé’s composition suggests that reality is, in fact, porous, malleable and multiple, urging us to embrace the fluidity of transformation and the fundamental relativity of all so-called truths.
However, it is in her enigmatic drawings that Tatiana Trouvé most fully explores the tension between the human urge to impose order, to meticulously chart and contain reality within graphic systems and architectural plans, and the opposing pull to surrender to the unbounded torrent of imagination. Within these intricate visual tapestries, real and imagined places, past and future fluidly intertwine, giving rise to impossible, speculative landscapes. These are spaces imbued with a haunting, almost ominous quality, where the spectral outlines of a post-capitalist world begin to take shape.
Yet amid this embrace of boundless imagination, there remains a deep and deliberate attempt to discern order, to safeguard and preserve fragments from the ceaseless flow of time and experience. Like a memory chamber, Trouvé transforms an entire room into a sculptural inventory composed of an extraordinarily varied array of ordinary objects she has found or collected over the years. Far from mere curiosities, these objects form a personal lexicon, a tangible testament to the overlooked “life of things” within the expanding cosmos of her artistic practice. Here, while she yields to the transformative power of imagination and its capacity to envision new political and social futures, she simultaneously anchors her work in the vast, enduring memory of the past and the cyclical rhythms of history. In doing so, she positions her art outside the overwhelming mainstream of contemporary life, with its relentless overflow of temporary truths and disorienting barrage of information.
As a meticulously staged exercise in remembrance, resilience and imagination, the exhibition as a whole resonates deeply with a poignant quote by author and mythologist Michael Meade: “If we lose our natural connection to the deep river of memory and the flow of imagination in our own souls, we can lose the future as well as the past, and we’ll find ourselves losing our footing in the present as well.” Trouvé’s work, through its sustained engagement with memory and the imaginative possibilities of the future, stands as a vivid testament to the enduring human need to preserve these vital connections. Even as we drift within the relentless current of time, disoriented and increasingly detached from the essence of who we are, her art offers a quiet insistence on reorientation, anchoring the self in forms of meaning that resist erasure.
Joseph Wright of Derby, An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, 1768. The National Gallery Photographic Department
A white cockatoo is on the verge of death as air is sucked from its glass trap. Two young girls look on, aghast. Maybe the croaking fowl is their pet? That unfortunate bird is the center of attention in Joseph Wright’s 1768 painting An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump. A beloved artwork in the U.K., the piece is a marquee draw in the National Gallery in London’s new “Wright of Derby: From the Shadows” exhibition. It is not as if Wright did not have alternatives to using the demise of a fine-looking bird for the image. A sealed paper bag would have inflated as oxygen was removed from the glass globe, for example. But that would have been boring, and Wright was a dramatist. Plus, none of this would be happening without the wild-haired pump operator looking out from the canvas. He is in charge. If he stopped the pump and allowed the air back into the glass, the bird would survive. Talk about tension.
Born in the northern English town of Derby in 1734, Joseph Wright was working during the Age of Enlightenment. The air pump was a relatively new invention, a contraption that demonstrated that the atmosphere was something that could be manipulated, a radical idea in the eighteenth century. Until then, religion and ancient philosophy had explained what things were. Air was an Aristotelian element, an unchangeable substance that sat between earth and fire. So, amid the drama, Wright was also documenting the kind of scientific development that characterized the era’s new thinking. His 1771 painting The Alchymist, in Search of the Philosophers Stone, Discovers Phosphorus, and prays for the successful Conclusion of his operation as was the custom of the Ancient Chymical Astrologers shows the German alchemist Hennig Brand accidentally discovering phosphorus while trying to turn a base metal into gold. As with his air pump painting, Wright was laying out a key moment in science. Although Benjamin Franklin had been experimenting with lightning conduction since the 1750s, electricity had yet to become a source of light and power. So Hennig’s incidental discovery—that man could manufacture an artificial light source—was another epochal lightbulb moment.
The theme of light runs throughout the exhibition. There are more than 20 pieces on view, concentrating on Wright’s candlelit work, the period when the artist used single sources of light to build atmosphere and anticipation. And with the light comes the dark. Wright’s dense, flat shadows frame the action, bringing depth and theater to the fore. It is natural to compare his output with artwork by another great dramatist and master of light, Caravaggio. Both artists employed the dark-light schematic of chiaroscuro, although Wright tended toward tenebrism, a more contrast-heavy variation. Where Caravaggio’s sense of tension stemmed from emotional turmoil and social vérité, Wright’s work was more pastoral and less dangerous, unless you are a bird, despite his dramatic leanings. Caravaggio, of course, had painted his last works roughly one hundred years earlier. Nonetheless, Wright’s work is stunning. Earthstopper on the Banks of the Derwent from 1773 is a pastoral case in point. A man is filling in earths, also known as foxholes, to stop foxes from hiding in their dens during the next day’s hunt along the River Derwent. As the digger toils, the night sky looms above. In A Philosopher by Lamplight, painted around 1769, the philosopher stands outdoors, examining human bones in his quest to understand anatomy, lit by a single lamp’s flame.
Joseph Wright of Derby, A Philosopher Giving That Lecture on the Orrery in Which a Lamp Is Put in Place, 1766. Courtesy Derby Museums
Wright’s work is steeped in real-life situations, but it is also rich in symbolism. Completed in 1766, A Philosopher Giving That Lecture on the Orrery in Which a Lamp Is Put in Place shows a scientist demonstrating the solar system’s orbits. At the same time, it stands in for the Age of Enlightenment’s broader epiphanies. Pulsing at the orrery’s center, the sun casts a newly birthed light as science triumphs over religion and superstition. The exhibition’s curators have positioned an actual orrery in a vitrine beside the painting, a careful reproduction of the original machine. Wright’s local connections to figures such as Josiah Wedgwood of Wedgwood pottery, Richard Arkwright, an industrial mechanization pioneer, and astronomer James Ferguson, who frequently lectured in Derby, meant he moved among leading minds in science and industry. In recording genuine experiments, Wright’s paintings function as reportage, documenting the accumulating technological breakthroughs that paved the way toward the Industrial Revolution.
There are more parochial paintings on view as well. Both from 1770, Two Boys Fighting Over a Bladder and A Girl Reading a Letter with an Old Man Reading Over her Shoulder appear kitschy and Rockwell-esque. These are fanciful, sentimental depictions of everyday life that were fashionable at the time. Even so, the composition of the struggling youths is intriguing. From a distance, one of the figures looks like an act of vandalism, a swirling smudge of black paint on the canvas. Closer inspection reveals the boy has his back to us and is rendered almost entirely as a shadowy silhouette. His adversary reels back, clutching his ear in agony. It is clever stuff.
Joseph Wright of Derby, A Girl Reading a Letter with an Old Man Reading Over her Shoulder, 1770. Courtesy Derby Museums
Wright made five versions in his The Blacksmith’s Shop series. The 1771 example on view here, like Earthstopper, is staged in the dead of night. This time, the primary light source is the lump of metal the farriers are hammering into shape. The glowing metal picks out the blacksmiths’ flushed cheeks and beaded brows as the moon glowers through the workshop roof.
Wright’s sense of theater was immersive. The figures in his larger paintings are nearly life-sized. Imagine the reaction when they were first unveiled. This was life in high definition, with viewers cast as participants, absorbing the scenes around them. More than 250 years on, Wright of Derby’s paintings remain an enthralling testament to a master of illumination.
Installation view: “Samuel Sarmiento: Relical Horn” at Andrew Edlin Gallery in New York. Courtesy of Andrew Edlin Gallery
The ability of a given artwork to resist being stripped of meaning over time is most often the result of its link with a continuous heritage of symbolic and archetypal materials that humans have shared across centuries and geographies to explain the complexities of existence. As J. M. Coetzee suggests in his 1991 essay “What is a Classic?,” the works we call classics endure not because institutions protect them, but because they speak across time, finding new interlocutors in each era. A classic has a living presence, retaining dense symbolic meaning and demanding response and re-interpretation even as society changes.
Engaging directly with the rich repertoire of symbols and myths of his native Venezuelan Caribbean and extending to cross-cultural resonances and similar narratives, artist Samuel Sarmiento engages with mythopoiesis directly using clay as a medium. A rich heritage of oral traditions and community storytelling is observable in his seductive kiln-fired ceramic sculptures: articulated, overlapping visual narratives and inscriptions like ancient tablets or natural fossilized traces. In the new works in his U.S. debut show at Andrew Edlin, “Relical Horn,” Sarmiento experiments with the elemental potential of clay, playing with the different transformations ceramics can undergo and embellishing his creations with patinas, glazes, pigments and even gold. His kiln’s searing heat yields kaleidoscopic, granular and liquid surfaces.
Samuel Sarmiento. Photo: Gabrielle Vega
Through these alchemical processes, artists and artisans have collaborated directly with the principle of entropy and the transformation of matter for thousands of years. Clay is fired at temperatures at which any organic substance would be pushed into extinction or fragmentation, but Sarmiento transforms ceramics into living cosmogonies that embody a rich reservoir of ancestral myth and cross-cultural archetypes, layering oral traditions, Caribbean cosmology and intuitive mark-making in fragile yet enduring vessels of memory.
“One of the primary purposes of ceramics is containment,” Sarmiento tells Observer. “Initially, ceramic objects held valuable resources such as water, food and currency.” He recounts an ancient tale about the medium’s origins. According to a Caribbean myth, in the earliest days of humanity, it was nearly impossible to store water because it was both difficult to contain and extremely scarce. “Humans attempted to make vessels from tree leaves or wood, but both materials deteriorated over time. They decided to speak with the Goddess of the Forest, who recommended they dig a large hole next to a river, where they would find a new kind of material.” When humans obeyed the Goddess and dug near the great river, they discovered clay. When they asked what to do with it, “she instructed them to shape the clay into vessels. By firing these vessels, they would be able to store water successfully.”
Samuel Sarmiento, The Origin of the Stars, 2025. Courtesy the artist and Andrew Edlin Gallery
For hundreds of years, ceramics have served as markers of the time they inhabit, Sarmiento reflects. “They have remained one of the principal mediums for deciphering a people’s ethnography because they can withstand the passage of time.” This idea of time—of encapsulating mythological and spiritual heritage in a vessel capable of preserving and carrying it across generations—is at the heart of his practice. His ceramic works function as artifacts of collective memory, shared wisdom and mythical imagination, helping humans better understand their place in the cosmos and within the relentless flow of time.
Sarmiento notes how French writer Roger Caillois, in The Writing of Stones (1970), argues that rocks and minerals, like landscapes themselves, have the capacity to harbor memory. “The artistic exercise of taking clay, which is part of the landscape, shaping it into forms like crowns, shells, nests, or ornaments and simultaneously using it to contain information creates a symbolic refuge,” Sarmiento explains. “Through this alchemy, an artwork can help humanity preserve what little wisdom we have left.”
Examining the dense narratives that adorn the surfaces of his sculptures, it’s almost impossible not to read his practice through a Jungian lens: his work is a conduit through which archetypes and ancestral symbologies—shared across cultures—reemerge from the collective unconscious. “I believe visual artists and writers alike are collectively searching to connect with the invisible,” Sarmiento says, pointing out that this urge becomes even more pressing in periods when truth is most difficult to discern.
“In my artistic practice, I utilize ancestral narratives from the Caribbean and South America, and sometimes Africa—not for exoticism, but simply to exalt the human condition,” he explains, noting that this often takes the form of rites of passage. “We are beings in constant movement.”
Born in 1987 and based in Aruba, Sarmiento investigates the fictional possibilities of history, the force of oral traditions,and the pliancy of time. Courtesy of Andrew Edlin Gallery
A recurring element in his work is the female figure. Whether mermaids or spirit guides, they guard the narratives that appear on the surface. In many cases, these figures can be associated with nature or feminine deities like Yemayá, who represents the sea, Sarmiento says. They are figures of healing, protection and renewal in a world that needs external intervention due to humanity’s inability to resolve itself to the present.
Across centuries and geographies, the female figure has been associated with birth, life and protection, mothering the world in a relentless cycle of generation, transformation, decay and renewal. And it is in times of great despair and chaos that these figures and the mythological world they inhabit can guide us into a metaphorical realm that helps us see beyond the present moment and reconnect with something deeper and universal.
A self-taught artist who has only recently begun to engage with the broader international art world, Sarmiento preserves a raw and primordial visual lexicon that appears to have escaped the influences of both art-historical tradition and contemporary art market trends. The apparent simplicity or naivety of his language results from a spontaneous and intuitive process of channeling, in which ancient symbols, myth and memories emerge from the collective unconscious and are translated into new forms through a contemporary practice.
As Michael Meade explains, to see with mythic imagination is to see metaphorically—referring to the old Greek word metaphor, which means not just to see beyond, but to be carried beyond the limits of linear time and literal thinking. “The new territory or new world only comes into view and becomes conscious to us when a new vision arises from the darkness around us and from the unseen depths of our own unconscious,” he said in a recent podcast, which profoundly resonates with what Sarmiento is pushing with his art: not a new world but a new vision in which past, present and future coexist.
Samuel Sarmiento, Transit (Heraclitus River), 2024. Courtesy the artist and Andrew Edlin Gallery
The sensibility of the work lies in synthesizing and connecting seemingly disparate references to create new poetics, Sarmiento explains, walking us through a richly layered ecosystem of references that idiosyncratically exist in his work, spanning from Jorge Luis Borges’ short story “The Circular Ruins” (1940) to Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970) and the movie Fitzcarraldo. As an exercise in argumentation, he takes these primary ideas and pairs them with Caribbean concepts and mythologies. Some of the show’s pieces reference the legend regarding the origin of the continents, which are said to have emerged from ruins and furrows located on the seabed.
Living for more than 13 years in the Dutch Caribbean has allowed Sarmiento to accumulate a vast library of oral narratives. Having been born in Venezuela, a country with a rich literary tradition and also multicultural connections, Sarmiento was motivated to approach art through universal stories. “All these references converge in a single object—whether a two- or three-dimensional sculpture—which often possesses geomorphic characteristics resembling sea coral or honeycombs,” he explains.
Sarmiento’s encyclopedic lexicon fluidly draws from ancient oral tales as well as more recent books. He mentions Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997) by Jared Diamond and The Invention of Nature (2015) by Andrea Wulf as part of his contemporary references. “One of the fundamental characteristics of oral narratives is their ability to explain complex processes through simple images or stories,” he elaborates. Tropes can be accessible at different levels—what Homer once expressed, Disney later embraced.
As in a geological process of sedimentation and development, found in both natural and cultural realms, “If we look at narratives ranging from the Homeric fables to South American legends, we see that archetypal symbols such as life, death, the journey, the encounter and exile are often repeated,” Sarmiento says. “Part of my artistic exercise is to recontextualize these archetypal and universal symbols in an era of anachronisms.” Although we have information from every time and geography at our fingertips, humans often lack the capacity to recognize historical coincidences or similarities in sociopolitical processes.
Samuel Sarmiento, Untitled (WB, 1973 – 1983 – 1993). Courtesy the artist and Andrew Edlin Gallery
He aims to demonstrate that while authors and languages vary across history, the story of humanity is the sum of a few core metaphors, in a continuous cycling of archetypal tropes. “This process is an exercise I have only been able to refine through reading and building visual archives,” Sarmiento says. Repetition plays a crucial role in his gestures, whether in clay or drawing. “As Hans-Georg Gadamer noted in The Relevance of the Beautiful, we tend to repeat what brings us pleasure,” he reflects. “In many cases, this repetition creates complex languages that lead us toward new interpretations and developments.”
Sarmiento’s process involves a tense yet generative exchange between intuition and control; he embraces the unexpected results that emerge from the interaction between energetic and psychic presence and the unpredictable reactions of clay and glaze. Despite the presence of figures or engravings, his narratives—which cover the entire surface as in a horror vacui without any precise order—form a kind of flow of thought-forms that defy any linguistic or visual codification. Like Surrealist automatic writing, these visual mythologies are the result of an intuitive reconnection with the language of a shared subconscious, to which the artist reconnects through his practice, finding new forms for the invisible. By bypassing rational control, the result is an epiphanic image—a strange revelation of forms carved and crystallized on the surface of the clay.
“Although I am self-taught with only brief experiences in guided workshops, the driving force behind my work is purely intuitive,” Sarmiento explains. “Still, the symbols and figures that emerge are resources drawn from years of researching oral histories, essays, and fantastical stories, driven by an intention to communicate with people from all walks of life.”
Samuel Sarmiento, The Hunt of the Unicorn, 1495 – 1505, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Andrew Edlin Gallery
At one point, Sarmiento shares how, feeling a spontaneous connection with Jung and his thinking, he applied some years ago to a post-academic program in Switzerland. “My goal was to further my artistic research, develop a broader vision of the symbols and archetypal figures in my work, visit Carl Jung’s house, and access the literature and resources offered by the program,” he says. Yet the jury’s response was that there was no reason he needed to visit that specific location, stating that any information I required about Jung could be found on the internet. “My practice was ultimately not considered part of a contemporary discourse,” he points out, noting how one of the greatest challenges for artists from the Caribbean and South America is finding spaces where their artistic languages are appreciated through horizontal dialogue—not as exotic elements meant to fill a program’s minority quota.
Sarmiento’s work is a message of universality, celebrating and protecting the cross-cultural patrimony of stories and myths that might still guide humans toward a better notion of the future. He offers something beyond the Western paradigm of knowledge—ancestral and primordial—that has been suppressed or mostly forgotten but still resonates in the subconscious as something understood by the entirety of humanity.
His symbolic language reminds us how much we share across cultures, and how this universal ancestral heritage can help guide us into the future. “Never before have we lived in an age with more imaginary borders,” Sarmiento concludes. It is art such as his that can help us see beyond them. Never before, he adds, has humanity seemed so fragile, unable to generate collective solutions. “Through my artwork, I am seeking to create classics and objects capable of holding solutions or information for future generations.”
Sarmiento taps into a historical record shared across cultures and communities. Courtesy of Andrew Edlin Gallery
Camille Pissarro, Apple Harvest, 1888. Oil on canvas, overall: 24 x 29 1/8 in. (60.96 x 73.98 cm.), dimensions: 33 1/2 x 38 3/4 x 4 in. (85.09 x 98.425 x 10.16 cm.). Brad Flowers, Dallas Museum of Art, Munger Fund
Their paintings might look like greeting cards from a nursing home, but the Impressionists were 19th century punk rockers. They upended the establishment by presenting what was viewed as rough, unfinished artwork by upstarts bent on subverting tradition. And when the conservative Académie des Beaux-Arts rejected them, this ragtag group of starving artists, including Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, Edgar Degas, Paul Cézanne and Berthe Morisot, among others, set up their own group show, a first, and had the audacity to charge admission.
Their work can be seen in the touring show “Impressionism Revolution: Monet to Matisse,” currently at Santa Barbara Museum of Art, alongside the latter’s “Encore: 19th-Century French Art.” The Dallas show will then travel to the Frist Art Museum in Nashville, Toronto’s Art Gallery of Ontario in the summer and, in late 2026, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.
“They revolutionized museums and how we encounter exhibitions and who art is made for and who gets to see it,” Dallas Museum of Art curator Nicole Myers tells Observer. “A lot of the things they brought to the table, real innovation at the time, stayed as a proto form of modern art making.”
It’s a short-lived but seminal moment in art history that ran for roughly 10 years, but the stylistic and intellectual offshoots that Impressionism spawned marked a sea change, paving the way for 20th-century art. Beginning with Monet’s Impression, Sunrise (1872), and from which the movement got its name from critic Louis Leroy, Impressionism was maligned by the Académie, a government-run arts organization whose annual Salon show determined which artists might have a prosperous career and which would not.
Popular among the Salon were artists like Jean-Léon Gérôme and Antonin Mercié, academicists who produced Orientalist and historical paintings often depicting scenes from Greek mythology. Impressionist paintings, in both style and subject, were decidedly outré, eschewing tradition-bound standards like a brown wash to prep the canvas as well as the requisite coat of varnish as a final step. They elevated rough subject matter like sex workers, manual laborers and industrialization, presenting them through sketchy brushstrokes unlike the clean application of paint favored by the Salon.
“It was political to them to mount their own show and buck the government in that way. It was a battle they were waging and the stakes were extremely high in France in this period, where no art was not political,” offers Myers, noting how critics like Charles Albert d’Arnoux, known professionally as Bertall, characterized Impressionist works as “awkward attempts, crude in color and tone, without contour and modeling, displaying the most complete disregard for drawing, distance and perspective; colors chucked, so to speak, at random.”
Paul Signac, Mont Saint-Michel, Setting Sun, 1897. Oil on canvas, dimensions: 26 × 32 1/8 in. (66.04 × 81.6 cm.), framed dimensions: 33 × 39 1/4 × 3 1/2 in. (83.82 × 99.7 × 8.89 cm.). Dallas Museum of Art, The Eugene and Margaret McDermott Art Fund, Inc., bequest of Mrs. Eugene McDermott in honor of Bill Booziotis
Banning black from their palette, Impressionists depicted shadow by deepening the color tones of a subject, while pointillists like Pissarro, Signac and Seurat placed disparate colored dots side by side, relying on the viewer’s eyes to mix them. Using color as shadow set the stage for Fauvists like Henri Matisse and André Derain and even Vincent van Gogh, a contemporary who called himself an Impressionist even if no one else did. Most important was their use of rough strokes rather than detailed clarity to indicate a shape or figure, again relying on the eye to draw conclusions based on context.
“Fauvism, the idea of Divisionism (Pointillism), taking color and applying it in separate strokes, the Impressionists were doing that intuitively,” notes Myers. “They began to divorce color and brushstroke from being descriptors. What makes your brain read the whole thing together as an image is about relativity, what’s next to what.”
Gauguin, whose only work in the Santa Barbara show is a familiar Tahitian scene, Under the Pandanus (1891), paints the ground in an otherworldly burgundy. It converses with the show’s second of two works by Edvard Munch titled Thuringian Forest (1904), which depicts an area alongside a forest road as pink and meaty, more like raw flesh than earth.
“Everything was about the external, objective world, but it should be filtered through the imagination, the subjective, the thoughts, the feelings of the artist to translate what they see or feel about their time,” says Myers, noting that Gauguin, who exhibited in 5 of 8 Impressionist shows, sensed something was missing from the movement early on and began exaggerating color and line. “He was the first to bring this idea of a different kind of spirituality, a lyrical quality, something more meaningful but harder to find.”
Four paintings by Piet Mondrian from the first two decades of the 20th century include a farm, a windmill and a castle ruin, as well as a stab at Pointillism in his The Winkel Mill (1908). Among them is no sign of his signature minimalism of primary colored quadrilaterals that characterize later works like New York City and Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942-43). Neither looks anything like its title, yet both capture the spirit and feel of the city.
Piet Mondrian, The Winkel Mill (pointillist version), 1908. Oil on canvas, dimensions: 17 × 13 5/8 in. (43.18 × 34.61 cm.), dimensions: 25 × 21 1/4 × 2 7/8 in. (63.5 × 53.98 × 7.3 cm.). Jerry Ward, Dallas Museum of Art, Foundation for the Arts Collection, gift of the James H. and Lillian Clark Foundation
“For Mondrian, it was this spiritual fuzzy religious association with perfect balance and perfect harmony. He felt that if he could just communicate that through lines and grids, you will feel that perfect harmony with the cosmos,” says Myers. “He thought art should convey what cameras can’t capture, because photography had become perfected. What it can’t do is provide mood or thought through color or a line and touch people. It starts with him being exposed and experimenting with Impressionism and post-Impressionism and breaking down these cornerstones of images.”
Most of the Impressionists died before the turn of the century and many didn’t live to see World War I. But Monet, the man who started it all, lived until 1926. While it’s common for artists to do their best work in their youth or prime of life, Monet’s most prescient work came later. The show includes his pre-Impressionist still life Tea Service (1872), highlighting the artist’s technical mastery, as well as two from his decades-long series of waterlilies, which, more than any body of work, best illustrates the transition from Impressionism to Modernism.
The Water Lily Pond (Clouds) (1903) shows the sky reflected in the pond’s surface, disrupted by floating lilies. The far bank of the pond is seen at the top of the frame, helping to orient the viewer (although one critic thought the image was upside down when he saw the sky and clouds reflected in the water). Water Lilies (1908) is a circular composition that has no orienting point. It’s a mass of blue and green, the sky and trees reflected in the pond, with purple patches depicting lilies. It’s not an abstract work but, like the lily paintings that follow, the emphasis is on color and light less on subject matter.
“For Monet, the unifier was the desire to paint light and how it’s interacting with different surfaces,” says Myers. “The circular one, you only have light dancing on the surface of the water or glinting off the plants down below. It is incredibly abstract.”
The other name in the title of the show is Matisse, whose first painting Books and Candle (1890) is the opposite of Impressionism in a way that would have tickled the traditionalist Salon. His one work on display here, Still Life: Bouquet and Compotier (1924), illustrates a drastic departure from his early work, incorporating ideas sprung from Impressionism that stayed with him through his later abstract works before his death in 1954.
“We take it for granted today because it is foundational, the building blocks they set up for different aspects of their production, from color theory to moving away from a kind of illusionistic style, using brushwork to convey more than what something looks like,” Myers concludes. “Feeling and mood, an optical sensation, these are things that artists today are still working with and absorbing.”
Vincent van Gogh, Sheaves of Wheat, 1890. Oil on canvas, dimensions: 20 × 40 in. (50.8 × 101.6 cm.), dimensions: 31 3/8 × 51 1/8 × 5 1/4 in. (79.69 × 129.86 × 13.34 cm.). Ira Schrank, Dallas Museum of Art, The Wendy and Emery Reves Collection
Balkan Erotic Epic is Abramović’s largest performance work to date, with a cast of more than 70 performers. Courtesy the artist
More than two hours passed before I surrendered to the plush black turf underfoot, slumping down against the towering penises rooted in a grove between two performances of Sisyphean end zone celebrations. One stage, entitled “Fucking the Ground/Fertility Rites,” featured five weary, wiry naked men joylessly thrusting into grassy hillocks with the intention of fertilizing the barren soil. A field opposite them, “Scaring the Gods to Stop the Rain,” served as a showcase for a melting pot of Balkan maiden-attired gymnasts of all ages, wearing anguished faces ranging from raging Maori war cry to the teary trepidation of a young Amy Adams. All of them repeated their skirt-hiking rite, jumping and collapsing, contorting and thrusting, while exposing their sex, undress rehearsals for an anti-raindance, a stormy showdown with the heavens above.
That final confrontation is one of two climaxes, one fable, one personal, anchoring Marina Abramovic’s latest work, Balkan Erotic Epic. Performance artist Maria Stamenković Herranz is cast in the role of Abramovic’s late unloving mother, decorated Yugoslavia People’s Army officer Danica Rosic. Here, she navigates her daughter’s tortured psyche, manifested as thirteen stages of Balkan folklore rooted in love, marriage, death, sex and power, dated from medieval times through the Cold War and interpreted in film, animation, music, dancing and milk bathing. The four-hour performance continues long after Danica succumbs to the sexual liberation Abramovic impresses upon her mother’s spirit.
I couldn’t check my phone to be sure of what time I finally settled in among the cross-legged and collapsed—ticket holders were required to lock their phones in a pouch before entering the Warehouse at Aviva Studios, where Balkan Erotic Epic premiered in Manchester this October ahead of Frieze London. The North American premiere will take place at New York’s Park Avenue Armory next December.
Marina Abramovic and Kath Fitzgibbon. Photo: Marco Anelli
Support staff had two jobs. One, spot-checking guests to ensure their phones were locked up and two, making sure no audience members encroached on the steps leading to “The Kafana Complex,” an open-plan “pub, restaurant, music venue and public living room,” where avatars of the late Yugoslavian dictator Josip Broz Tito’s grieving widow, all of them resembling a caricature of Abramovic if she were drawn by The Far Side cartoonist Gary Larson, sat emotionally unmoved and physically paralyzed, clutching their handbags.
There’s no ambiguity about what will eventually take place here before the night is over; the program promises Rosic will find a release she never found in life. “My mother was extremely difficult,” Abramovic told the assembled audience ahead of the performance. “I was forty years old and I asked her, “why do you never kiss me?” She said, “why should I kiss you? I would spoil you.” She wanted to make a warrior of me. She never felt emotions, love, sexual desire. I need to liberate my mother from all this so I can move on after this piece with a different part of my life.”
The problem here, in this show where women whose natural eroticism was trapped across time in ritual, is Abramovic commits her mother to the same fate. No woman here knows liberation and the sexual liberation Abramovic imposes upon her is nonconsensual, an analog Black Mirror moment that brings to mind a new A.I. app that’s made headlines this week—2Wai—which allows for users to record themselves, submitting their voice and body to create a virtual avatar that can be used in the future, per the company’s own example, for a deceased grandmother to speak to their grandchildren. If we wonder what nefarious end these avatars might meet, we only look to Abramovic exposing her mother to endless looping eroticism she chose not to experience in real life.
“No phone,” ushers would shrug when I inquired about the time, before I caught one sporting a wristwatch. She informed me I still had another hour and a half to go before a sudden rainfall started then stopped, after succumbing to the fearsome power of women’s bodies. However, the audience seemed eager to move on. Hundreds of attendees peeled off before the night was over, treating the show as more of a gallery space than a performance space despite Abramovic doing her best ahead of time to assure the conclusion was worth the wait.
Natalia Leniartek and Saskia Roy. Photo: Marco Anelli
“Wait for the rain,” Abramovic said. The night began with the artist occupying a stage in the Aviva lobby, reading the audience into the performance, a cheat sheet for those who didn’t spring for the cost of the program despite the attendees picking bare the gift shop walls of assorted merch—aprons, throw pillows—that didn’t always give the correct impression of a show about Balkan folklore nor embody its intended themes. One bestselling tee shirt featured a program illustration of Abramovic flying on a bridled winged penis, but the show feels devoid of triumph. The show only demonstrates that ritual wears down men and women alike.
“Six pounds for a program is too high a price—it’s not my fault,” Abramovic acknowledged during her pep rally. “I’ll take a look at it, because it’s important for you to see each ritual and what it means. We’re showing thirteen different moments in this space, like thirteen children giving birth at the same time.” And she wasn’t kidding. “A friend told me the other day, you create space that looks like Balkan and smells like Balkan—that’s a big compliment.”
Balkan Erotic Epic won’t always be staged like this however, nor was it intended to be, according to Aviva Studios’ artistic director John McGrath. “[Marina] came to the press night for Free Your Mind,” he told Observer, referring to Manchester native son Danny Boyle’s 2023 modern dance interpretation of The Matrix, which opened Aviva Studios’ inaugural season. “But she’d been looking at the venue even earlier. We’d been in conversation since she visited during the 2019 Manchester International Festival and it was in 2022 or 2023 that she shared Balkan Erotic Epic as a broad idea.”
At that time, McGrath said, Abramovic imagined a seated show. She had just completed The Seven Deaths of Maria Callas on opera stages and considered continuing to explore that format. But after hosting a spring 2023 workshop in Manchester, the scenes evolved, exiting Aviva’s theater for its Warehouse space. In the future, a sequential stage version is planned for Barcelona, while performances in Germany and in New York will receive the multi-stage Manchester production.
Those performances will likely have one site-specific element that defines them. Here, performance artist Elke Luyten plays a Flemish anthropologist outfitted in a white lab coat. She silently holds court in erection alley before intermittently sharing her own takes on “Balkan Magic” while seemingly ad-libbing takes on Manchester’s weather, environment and population.
Rowena Gander and Vanda Hagan. Photo: Marco Anelli
“She doesn’t understand shit about Balkan and she is confused,” Abramovic said of the character, comic relief breaking up the trauma of a nearby grieving bride tasked to marry a dead groom, a mourning dance at times set to opera and instruments that proves the most emotionally and physically taxing of the thirteen performances.
Luyten’s performance meanwhile had the effect of an alarm clock blaring news radio, interrupting Abramovic’s dream with a reminder of when and where we are. She’s trying to wake up Abramovic—a bit player here, coming and going from the pub stage at her leisure—to the reality her mother is dead and this self-flagellating dream of closer intimacy with her mother is long beyond her reach. At the same time, Luyten doubles as a high art Krusty the Klown, ending her insights with the introduction of erotic cartoons.
“The only way to show certain rituals we couldn’t show any other way is animation,” Abramovic explained. “There is no other way to show in our present time with all the restrictions we have in our society.” It’s a statement that comes across as lazy and dishonest.
Animations included recipes for love potions and sexual healing (e.g., the 14th C. Bosnian ritual, “Wedding Day Protection,” in which a man makes three holes in a bridge and penetrates them to ensure he won’t be impotent on his wedding day). It’s an act no more scandalous to recreate than the naked men fertilizing the soil feet away from me. If others come closer to the definition of pornography, that doesn’t preclude the possibility of capturing performers on film. Balkan Erotic Epic also includes a cinematic component, including a wall-length choir of nude men maintaining various states of erection while singing.
The 12th C. Macedonian ritual “Child Delivery” involves a man crossing his erect penis over his wife’s breasts to ease the pain of her childbirth, while a 15th C. Serbian “Love Potion” involves a recipe consisting of hairs extracted from forehead, eyebrow, armpit, nipple and vagina then mixed with menstrual blood and the prick of a woman’s ring finger. A 15th C. Kosovan act of “War Strategy” involves undressing and masturbating before enemy soldiers.
“Everything was created in Manchester, filmed in Manchester, shown in Manchester and one thing about Manchester that’s very important—you’re the bravest, you show new things you can’t show anywhere else in the world. I don’t know if we will finish in prison or in daylight,” Abramovic said with some exaggeration.
Elke Luyten. Photo: Marco Anelli
Maybe she didn’t know where to look. Balkan Erotic Epic proved the highlight of Frieze London was in Manchester, but the roles are reversed this weekend, when London’s Barbican Centre hosts Dirty Weekend, an adults-only weekend of sexual liberation and community outreach, all-gender speed dating and fashion workshops, in conjunction with their new fashion exhibition “Dirty Looks: Desire and Decay in Fashion,” which runs through January 25, 2026. The looks on display, from Alexander McQueen to Michaela Stark, focus on aesthetics impacted by the natural grime of earth and our own bodies. You can even make your own tee shirt.
When I first saw the animations in Balkan Erotic Epic, I immediately thought it a missed opportunity for Abramovic to partner with Four Chambers, U.K. porn performer, producer, director and sex worker advocate Vex Ashley’s decade-old video project that straddles art porn with A24 aesthetics, prioritizes female empowerment and has on occasion been more forthright in pushing the boundaries between sex and maternity than Abramovic’s Freudian wish fulfillment, an artist statement-cum-fetish to unburden herself of some childhood longing to glimpse her parents through a crack in the bedroom door.
In Four Chambers’ latest film, Some Reddish Work, which premiered earlier this month, maidens dressed not dissimilar to the raindancers showed just how well they would have embodied the Balkan Erotic Epic universe. And for their effort, they aren’t shut out of legitimate art spaces but prove a draw. Their participation in the Barbican’s Dirty Weekend this November 29-30 promises to bring their “living archive that blurs cinema, performance, sexuality and fine art,” and Ashley will participate in a keynote panel on intimacy and censorship. Here, only the debate is animated.
Works from “Afrotopias” in Freedom Park Lagos. Courtesy of the AAF. Photo: Ariwodola Ifeoluwa Ayomide
On the rails of a structure in Freedom Park Lagos—situated on what was Nigeria’s first colonial prison—hang several images. Titled “Afrotopias,” the body of work is part of the 15th edition of the international LagosPhoto Festival. The public park is one of the landmark spaces being activated for the event, which marks its inaugural edition as a biennial this year under the theme “Incarceration.” The recently opened Nahous Gallery—located inside the historic Federal Palace complex, where Nigeria’s Declaration of Independence was signed in 1960 and a key venue for the international festival FESTAC77—is also hosting the biennial. But this year, LagosPhoto Festival expands beyond Lagos to Ibadan, with work at New Culture Studios, built in 1970 and designed by renowned architect, painter and sculptor Demas Nwoko, a pioneering figure in Nigeria’s modern art movement.
“There were some specific locations that were quite important to the theme but the spaces had their own charged histories, and so the works showing in them had to be in dialogue with that,” lead curator Courage Dzidula Kpodo told Observer at the offices of organizers African Artists’ Foundation (AAF) in Lagos, which was recently reopened after two years of closure. “That was a very conscious decision, and I think largely comes from my training as an architect and how I think about space and its histories. The works that are exhibited are an activation of the space. People experience it in a very different way than they would if there were no work there. It gave us a very charged canvas for this show.”
César Dezfuli, Amadou S. From the Passengers series. Cesar Dezfuli, Courtesy of the artist and AAF Large
The AAF offices, Alliance Française de Lagos and Didi Museum—founded in 1983 and said to be Nigeria’s first private museum—are also showing work as part of the biennial. The 2025 curatorial team, which includes Robin Riskin, Maria Pia Bernadoni, Vetum Gima Galadima and Kadara Enyeasi under the artistic direction of Azu Nwagbogu, founder and director of AAF, presented the work of around 100 artists speaking to various types and meanings of the “incarceration” theme—be it self-imposed or by others, spiritual, ideological, psychological or political—through solo projects, collaborations, institutional exhibitions and screenings.
The work in the biennial spans photography, film, sound, installation and archives by a wide range of artists—from those who have been practicing professionally for about three decades to emerging artists and those still in school. These include the likes of Shirin Neshat, Ayobami Ogungbe, Cesar Dezfuli, Stefan Ruiz, Nuotama Bodomo, Yagazie Emezi, Fibi Afloe, Jesse Weaver Shipley and Gerald Annan-Forson. The New Culture Studios is activated to examine what the organizers call the urban and architectural dimensions of incarceration. The work on view in the studios also includes commissioned pieces by students at the University of Ibadan.
Gerald Annan-Forson’s photo of Lt. Jerry John Rawlings handing over power to the civilian regime led by Hilla Limann in 1979. Photo: Gameli Hamelo for Observer, courtesy the Didi Museum
The artists whose work is featured in the biennial were selected following an open call, which was “quite successful because we had a very diverse group of work,” shared Kpodo. Previously, the team chose artists primarily through an internal nomination process based on their networks and research, which could be limiting. The open call filled that gap, and they received applications on “projects that we would otherwise not find. [Artists] were able to come to us.”
The 2025 edition of the LagosPhoto extends to the Didi Museum. Courtesy of the AAF. Photo: Ariwodola Ifeoluwa Ayomide
What did they look for in selecting the artists whose work is presented in the biennial? “I think we were looking for works that were layered and not very simple to read or to understand. We were looking for works that were also quite bold in the topics that they chose to examine. I think another big thing we were looking for was experimentation with the medium, and for us it was important to identify it in both established artists or even young and upcoming artists,” Kpodo explained.
The “cross-generational juxtaposition” of work presented in the biennial will be seen as speaking to shifts in perceptions and to the questioning of societies across generations, he added. “I hope people will pay attention to the fact that there’s more to what they are seeing. There’s usually a whole web of stories that gets summed up into what we end up presenting. What you are seeing is actually just a portal into something that’s much more.”
“Eva Helene Pade: Søgelys” is at Thaddaeus Ropac in London through December 20, 2025. Courtesy Thaddaeus Ropac gallery, London · Paris · Salzburg · Milan · Seoul . Photo: Eva Herzog
Hauntingly beautiful… revelatory: these are the adjectives that come to mind when staring at Eva Helene Pade’s paintings. Amorphous bodies move across the canvas like a choreography of spectral dancers, dynamically taking over the elegant architecture of Thaddaeus Ropac’s gallery in London. It’s a spectacle of erotic energy, where the power of attraction and seduction of the femme fatale finds its stage, manifesting through moody, dramatic atmospheres shaped by color sensations and instinctive emotional reactions.
Following the Danish-born, Paris-based artist’s institutional debut at ARKEN Museum of Contemporary Art in Denmark earlier this year and multiple new auction records set at auction (the latest at Sotheby’s Hong Kong in 2024, when A Story to Be Told #14 (2021) sold for $123,417) the exhibition “Søgelys” (on view through December 20, 2025) brings together a new group of paintings in which Eva Helene Pade continues to explore the violent and seductive forces that exist between bodies in space. The body is examined here as both a medium and a filter, a porous psychical, cognitive and emotional membrane through which we negotiate our interactions and relationships with others. Painting becomes a vehicle for a continuous exercise of female embodiment and disembodiment, creating both a dance and a tension that unfolds within the canvas and the surrounding space. “Color is crucial for me; it’s emotional and psychological,” she tells Observer. “The palette often defines the atmosphere of a work before the figures even appear.”
Eva Helene Pade. Courtesy of Thaddeus Ropac.
Pade turns the canvas into a living stage where color and movement try to spontaneously channel and translate the prelinguistic expressions of the human psyche. Her process is deeply intuitive: the figures emerge from the act of painting itself, beginning with an abstract field and moving through a fluid process of identification and alienation. “I start drawing figures into it. At first, they appear as little blobs, and gradually I begin carving them out until the forms start taking shape, only to change again and become something else entirely,” she says. Pade also tunes herself to rhythm, listening to classical music to enter an inner world of narratives and transforming its prelinguistic storytelling into a tool to address universal questions about the human condition.
“I work very instinctively, letting intuition lead. Sometimes it fails; sometimes it surprises me. I rely on that tension,” she says, acknowledging how her influences have shifted over time, though certain painters have always remained with her. The psychological charge of her work recalls the emotional and psychological layering of artists such as Edvard Munch, Amber Wellmann, Nicolas de Staël, Cecily Brown, Marlene Dumas and Miriam Cahn, as well as older masters like Rodin and Rubens, who reveal how much emotion can be conveyed through a gesture or pose.
Still, despite this intuitive channeling through pigment and color, Pade’s works are never autobiographical portraits; they’re personal but not literal. “I don’t paint people from my life, nor do I use photographic references. They’re intuitive, almost dreamlike—images that emerge and shift as I work,” she explains.
Like monsters or ghosts reemerging from the subconscious, these spectral presences probe the porous diaphragm between the inner and outer world, a boundary that painting can reveal. “I’ve always been drawn to painting. I began drawing as a means to process both external reality and my inner world,” Pade says. She never had strict academic training, so she taught herself anatomy, proportion and form, which may be why her figures appear slightly off, existing within her own visual logic. “That wonkiness has become my language.”
In her debut show with the gallery, Pade’s monumental and small-scale canvases are suspended on floor-to-ceiling metal posts, set away from the walls to create dynamic spatial configurations. Courtesy Thaddaeus Ropac gallery, London · Paris · Salzburg · Milan · Seoul . Photo: Eva Herzog
The canvas becomes the stage where the “shadow,” the “removed,” is confronted in a distinctly Freudian and Jungian sense. “I keep molding the surface, working into the face, pulling new elements out of the shadows that I hadn’t noticed before,” Pade confirms. “A dark color might form a symbol or pattern, which I then push back into the composition.” It’s a long, layered process that involves as much waiting and letting the paint dry as it does discovery and transformation.
Still, it’s immediately apparent upon entering the show that this new body of work engages with femininity, sensuality and the position of the female body in space. Painting is for Pade a means of exploring the relationship between self and surroundings, how this dynamic subtly defines and redefines identity between body and soul, between the one and the many. Her figures, often expressionless and featureless, convey emotion through gesture and contortion, resonating with a universality that transcends any autobiographical reading.
What she paints is a potentially cacophonous orchestra of sensations and voices, a confrontation with the chaos of humanity in which the self is continually dissolved and rediscovered. Pade began painting crowds during lockdown, reflecting the strange collective isolation of that time. “They’re images of people together, but not necessarily about any specific moment. They’re more like metaphors of time itself.”
There is always a narrative in her paintings, but it remains open-ended. It’s the drama of human existence in dialogue with the external world that Pade paints. “I don’t want to trap the viewer in a single message. It’s more like a free exploration on the canvas: an emotional and physical response that builds its own logic,” she says.
Once the paintings are presented outside of the studio, they gain new context from the space and from the people who encounter them. In London, Pade wanted to choreograph her own visual rhythm, thinking about how the paintings could occupy the space almost like stage sets. “The exhibition space was so unconventional that I had to respond directly to its quirks—the staircase, the unusual angles—so I began playing with composition almost like orchestration,” she explains. “It all made sense because the project was inspired by a ballet, so I leaned into that theatricality, treating the canvases like backdrops.”
Pade doesn’t have a background in theater but she clearly thinks compositionally, almost like a stage director. The paintings are intentionally life-sized so the figures stand in direct relation to the viewer’s body as they float and dance in these hazy atmospheres, much like in a nightclub or a theater. “I want the experience to be physical, to break the passive distance between viewer and painting.”
Although the works are two-dimensional, they feel animated by their dense atmospheres, where bodies flicker between visibility and occlusion, partially veiled by soft billows of smoke or lit from within by a flaming glow or radiant beams of light. Lifting the paintings off the wall and letting them float through the space isn’t a gimmick; it heightens this emotional rhythm. “For these crowd scenes, it made sense. The figures seem to hover or drift in space, and the installation amplifies that effect,” she notes.
For Pade, the human body is part of a primal, instinctive language, like a brushstroke, a gesture or a dance. Courtesy Thaddaeus Ropac gallery, London · Paris · Salzburg · Milan · Seoul . Photo: Eva Herzog
While staging the paintings outside her studio, she realized that by not hanging them flat on the wall the viewer could see their backs—the wooden stretchers, sketches and raw marks behind the surface. They became living metaphors for the relationship between inner world and external space. “I liked that transparency, that glimpse into process. Light passed through them in interesting ways, giving them a smoldering depth,” she acknowledges. “When people walked around, the paintings seemed to move with them. It became immersive. You could almost walk into the composition.”
In the space, the unified spectral presences of Pade’s choreography found their living essence again, becoming interlocutors with the viewers. And if painting is, first of all, an open conversation, an expansive narrative field where everyone can identify and project their own meanings, the universal power of connection offered by Eva Helene Pade’s painterly storytelling and its endless variations is proof of how her art can still evolve. Even the “failed” works contribute to her evolution, as painting remains for her both a necessity and an urgency, a means to confront and process the multifaceted reality of the world. “You learn technique, rhythm and restraint from them.”
The potentially continuous evolution of the canvases on view reveals Pade’s enduring excitement for painting. “I don’t plan big conceptual changes. It evolves organically with each new piece,” she reflects. “Some paintings fail; I destroy or hide them if they don’t resonate. I think it’s crucial to be self-critical. A work that doesn’t move me won’t move anyone else.”
Installed in the round, fragments of Pade’s images overlap so that characters appear to flit from one scene to another, vanishing and then recurring as in dreams. Courtesy Thaddaeus Ropac gallery, London · Paris · Salzburg · Milan · Seoul . Photo: Eva Herzog
“The World as a Labyrinth” probes how Contreras’s work is attuned to a universal consciousness shared across eras and geographies. Courtesy the artist and Bibliothèque Polonaise de Paris
Different authors converge on the notion of a collective subconscious to explain the recurrence of symbols and archetypes across time and space. The work of Mexican artist Alejandro García Contreras is deeply attuned to that flow of universal consciousness shared by humanity across eras and geographies—a collective subconscious that, as Carl Jung described, is not a static archive but a living field of imagination continually reshaping itself through the “original instructions” already embedded in the human psyche.
The best art often begins with this kind of soul call, transforming creation into a mission. For Contreras, that call came early, through an image he encountered as a child in a book given to him by his grandfather—a mystical man and shaman. The book, an encyclopedia of the occult exploring timeless questions through myth and enigma, became, as the artist describes it, “a kind of guide or amulet for my imagination.” In the chapter on Vampirism and Lycanthropy, Contreras discovered a terrifying yet seductive image: a harpy-like woman attacking a naked man. “That image would never leave me,” he tells Observer. “That erotic undertone—imperceptible to me at the time—was etched into my memory.”
The image, however, bore no signature or caption. Only years later, thanks to Google, did Contreras learn it was a painting by Bolesław Biegas, a visionary Polish artist from the early twentieth century. His connection to Biegas deepened when, during an Art Explora residency in Paris, Contreras found himself—by both chance and intention—at the Polish Library in Paris (Bibliothèque Polonaise de Paris). Walking through the Biegas Museum, he experienced a profound sense of reconnection that would later inspire his latest exhibition.
Contreras spent hours in the museum that day, piquing the curiosity of the staff. After hearing his story, they introduced him to Agnieszka Wiatrzyk, one of the museum’s curators. The exhibition that emerged from this encounter stands as a testament to that journey and the spiritual connections it nurtured—one of those rare stories that renew faith in art’s power to connect the soul to something greater, beyond the confines of individual existence.
Alejandro García Contreras. Courtesy of the artist
With “The World as a Labyrinth,” soon-to-close at the Polish Library in Paris, Contreras presents his ceramic cosmologies, enigmatic bronze narratives and visionary cosmic paintings in a dialogue that spirals through the evocative connections between Bolesław Biegas and the symbolism of Gustave Moreau. Set within the historic Polish Library—one of the oldest and most significant Polish cultural institutions outside Poland, a trove of artifacts and archives celebrating the genius of the fin-de-siècle Polish diaspora from Biegas to Chopin—the exhibition provides a profoundly poetic setting for Contreras’s exploration of spiritual lineage and universal consciousness.
“These artists come from completely different contexts of space and time than me, but that’s exactly where the connection happens,” Contreras reflects as he walks us through the show. “What I’ve been trying to do through my own practice is to explore this idea of non-time—a space where symbols and archetypes resist chronology. It’s something that persists within a kind of collective imaginary, the shared language of the human soul,” he adds. “I love thinking of it that way—what Jung called the collective unconscious. That’s what connects us all. We’re each channeling something ancient and shared, even if we’re doing it from different places, in different eras, or for different reasons.”
Blending contemporary pop culture with Mexican folklore, ancient mythology, occultism and religion, Contreras constructs a syncretic continuum of cultures and traditions as an imaginative attempt to grasp the mystery of the universe’s origin and the soulful essence of human existence. The multilayered narratives alchemically shaped within his intricate glazed ceramics combine the rich symbolic heritage of his homeland with cross-cultural philosophical concepts and the Japanese pop and underground cultures of manga and anime, revealing the timelessness of themes, dramas and questions that accompany human life. His art becomes a living expression of what Michael Meade describes as the mythic realm—something circular rather than linear—a non-chronological space where symbols are not relics but living presences, constantly re-entering the world through imagination.
Though his art draws first from his lived experience as a deeply sensitive soul navigating a terrestrial, time-bound realm, Contreras approaches his practice as both alchemist and shaman, mediating between the visible world and the unseen structures of the spirit. His conjurations of symbolic references span the entire course of civilization, uncovering recurring psychological and narrative patterns. Ancient and contemporary symbols converge to reveal, within the dialectic of time, enduring messages and meanings that embrace the circle of life and the open, deeply rooted relationship Mexican culture holds with life, death and rebirth.
A childhood encounter with Biegas’s painting became the seed of Contreras’s lifelong fascination with the unknown. Courtesy the artist and Bibliothèque Polonaise de Paris
While studying Biegas’s archives, Contreras discovered many of the motifs and forms he had instinctively explored in his own work. A vitrine displaying Biegas’s drawings of dinosaurs is paired with similar early sketches and works by Contreras, creating a play of resonances and echoes that runs throughout the exhibition—a dialogue born not of imitation but of an unconscious, spontaneous connection across time. This mirroring extends beyond formal affinities to a shared cosmology, turning myth into a mirror for the psyche, where divinity and desire, the physical and celestial, the individual and collective coexist. The thread of visionary mystical continuity finds another echo in Gustave Moreau, whose symbolist and allegorical compositions anticipated the mystical sensuality that animates, in distinct ways, both the work of Biegas and Contreras.
Common among all three artists is a timeless fascination with the femme fatale, used here as a cosmic principle exposing, much like the Romantics’ sublime, humanity’s confrontation with its own limits and mortality. The heroines that populate Contreras’s works stand fiercely against subjugation to the male gaze, echoing how Biegas’s androgynous figures often carry a predominantly masculine energy despite their traditional depiction as feminine muses.
Drawing from the vast repertoire of manga and anime—which reinterpret ancient myths and tales—Contreras revives the power of archetypes, celebrating the deconstruction of female stereotypes while infusing them with agency and desire. Aware of their seductive force, as in Biegas’s paintings, these heroines stand in opposition to their male counterparts—often faceless spirits or demons who pursue, crave and depend on them for their own pleasure, becoming ensnared by their desires.
“What I’m trying to do is connect different symbolic universes,” Contreras explains, citing the example of a devil woman conceived by a great manga artist from Japan called Kōna Guy. “Her representation looks almost identical to one of Biegas’s figures: wings sprouting from her head, a sensual, otherworldly presence,” Contreras explains. “I’ve been playing with these connections, linking manga—which I’ve come to understand more deeply after spending time in Japan—and the broader field of contemporary pop culture with ancient myths.” As Contreras notes, manga have become one of the most influential and innovative visual languages shaping our collective imagination today, sharing the same symbolic world-building power that ancient tales, myths and oral traditions once held.
From Moreau’s Parisian refinement to Biegas’s Slavic mysticism and Garcia Contreras’s metaphysical roots in the Mayan jungle, three worlds converge in the exhibition. Courtesy the artist and Bibliothèque Polonaise de Paris
At the same time, in his portrayal of the femme fatale, Contreras intentionally reveals the vulnerability embedded in sexual instinct and its longing for balance and love. His figures often exist within the tension of unresolved emotion, an energy that likewise pulses through Biegas’s paintings. Yet luminous in their esoteric charge, the works of both artists gesture toward a nonhuman, nonterrestrial rhythm—an access point to the collective consciousness, where natural elements and creatures coexist beyond the confines of civilization, society and religious taboo.
In three-dimensional form, Biegas’s bodies are elongated, twisted and torqued—often caught in uneasy postures that suggest ecstasy, suffering, or transfiguration—embodying the soul’s yearning to escape the limits of the physical body and resist strict categorization. Similarly, Contreras’s heroines freely merge references, becoming symbolic figures that appear to belong to another world, one guided more by spirit than by sensory impulse.
At the heart of all three artists’ work lies a meditation on the primordial force of Eros, the vital energy from which all things emerge and to which all things return in the endless cycle of matter and transformation it sustains. Echoing Michael Meade, here Eros transcends romantic love or physical desire and is expressed—through earthly symbology—as a cosmic current of connection, the animating energy that binds life and fuels creation and imagination. In this sense, Contreras, like Biegas, revives the ancient Greek conception of Eros as the principle that draws separate entities into relation, forging unity from multiplicity: the adhesive of the cosmos, the thread binding soul to soul, human to world, myth to meaning—moving toward wholeness, creativity and beauty, not as sentiment but as sacred vitality.
Embracing this shared symbolic language, for Moreau as well as for Biegas and Contreras, figuration is never portraiture or realism—it is a vessel of metaphysical energy, an incarnation of inner states, cosmic forces and psychic archetypes. For all three, art functions as revelation—a bridge between the visible and invisible realms.
The show brings together forty-four works including paintings, drawings and sculptures in porcelain, plaster, clay and wax. Courtesy the artist and Bibliothèque Polonaise de Paris
Animating compositions that oscillate between harmony and chaos, drawn with a line that is at once delicate and forceful, their figures operate on both psychological and spiritual planes: they externalize emotions, instincts and dreams—what both Biegas and Contreras describe as “the invisible life of things.”
The works of these three artists, this exhibition reveals, resonate with Jacobo Grinberg’s Syntergic Theory, which proposes that experience emerges from the interaction between the energetic field created by the brain (the neuronal field) and the energetic structure of the universe—a liminal space where life and destruction converge and where the mystery of creation can be reawakened.
Biegas’s works from around 1900-1910 already envision the human form as a microcosm of the universe: faces dissolve into stars, limbs unfurl into spirals or vegetal motifs in his Cosmic Cycle, depicting figures intertwined with planetary and astral forms. Humanity here is part of a universal choreography—just as in Contreras’s paintings, where texture and brushwork magmatically shape symbolic visions that seem to recreate within the canvas the same formative process governing all existence: matter, atoms, energies and forces converging into new life. In both artists, the physicality of form dissolves into the ceaseless motion of evolution and transformation, as art becomes a liminal threshold between matter and spirit—a portal to other extensions of the human soul.
This connects to another recurring theme in both artists’ work: the Island of the Dead, a motif inspired by Arnold Böcklin’s Symbolist painting Die Toteninsel (1880s), which haunted many European artists of that era. Yet while Böcklin’s island symbolized the passage between life and death—a romantic vision of eternity—Biegas and Contreras reinterpret it as a metaphysical landscape of transformation rather than finality, a site of passage where matter and spirit merge. That island, like the artwork itself, becomes a center of consciousness, embodying the belief that human existence is cyclical—part of a universal rhythm binding life, death and creation into one continuous flow.
This exhibition reveals how the symbolism of Alejandro García Contreras—like that of Moreau and Biegas—is ultimately a holistic, syncretic ode to our potentially infinite individualities, urging us to embrace a renewed spiritual universality that awakens the soul to its place within a greater cosmic whole. Their art becomes an exploration of the invisible territories of transformation, where life, memory, ancient myth and contemporary consciousness converge to uncover luminous truths about what it means to exist, to create and to harness the power of mythic imagination to access other dimensions. That mythic imagination—the primordial act, as Mircea Eliade described it, and the world’s original language, in Michael Meade’s words—remains capable of restoring coherence and meaning in a fractured age.
The show offers a revised history of Symbolism in a single time and place; here, the distinction between modern and contemporary art, with its ambivalences, dissolves. Courtesy the artist and Bibliothèque Polonaise de Paris
