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
For much of photography’s history, male portraiture preserved a degree of emotional distance, presenting men as stoic, authoritative and restrained. Dean Majd has spent the better part of a decade pursuing a more nuanced portrayal of masculinity in photographs that capture men in moments of profound vulnerability and mutual dependence, chronicling friendship and conflict with great candor and empathy. His subjects are his peers and friends, and his images carry the immediacy of lived experience, unfolding in bedrooms, bathrooms, skateparks and other spaces where genuine moments of revelry and collapse unfold.
Born in Queens to Palestinian immigrant parents, Majd is self-taught, and his practice has been deeply shaped by the city that continues to anchor his work. His photographs have appeared in publications including the New York Times, New York Magazine, GQ Middle East, Aperture and Dazed, and he has exhibited at institutions such as the Museum of the City of New York. Editorial commissions—from photographing Zohran Mamdani for Vogue to Kareem Rahma for the New Yorker—signal a growing recognition of his distinct visual sensibility.
Most recently, his debut solo exhibition, “Hard Feelings,” opened at BAXTER ST at the Camera Club of New York—a stunning series of portraits of intimacy, grief, tenderness and pain among young men. Majd’s use of light and shadow recalls the dramatic chiaroscuro of Baroque painting, isolating gestures and faces with theatrical precision while also heightening the humanity of his subjects.
Prompted in part by the sudden death of a childhood friend, the series traces the lives of a tight-knit group of young men as they navigate the full emotional continuum of human existence. Majd allows affection, confusion and fragility to occupy the frame without restraint, expanding the emotional register available to male portraiture, particularly for men of color whose interior lives have historically been flattened or erased. If the exhibition’s photographs feel unusually intimate, it is because they are not constructed from observation alone but from proximity, trust and shared history. In this conversation, Majd reflects on the emotional stakes of that closeness and the visual language he built to contain it.
Your work resists the flattening gaze often directed at men, and men of color in particular. What visual or ethical principles guide your representation of these subjects?
I began making this work with the goal of creating a record of truth, images that would only exist for my friends and me. I had not seen anyone who looked like us in popular media, or even social media, really. I felt like we were outcasts in a way. We built our own world, this special world that no one else had access to. We were everything, so I felt the need to document it in the most authentic manner. Just for us and nobody else. I respect my subjects, and the images were borne out of love. The only way they can be made is if there is trust between us.
I never went in with ideas of what images should be made. I just photographed what I saw and who I spent all my time with. Everything needed to be candid or impromptu. I wanted to photograph the good, the bad, the happiness, the pain and everything in between. I rarely held back, even in the hardest times. And I did the same with myself, too. I documented myself in my hardest times, putting myself on the line as well. It was my life and my story to tell. And the images I did not take are the ones I remember the most; they genuinely haunt me. It’s better to take the photo and discuss if it should go out in the world than to never make it at all.
I never want to present people as perfect. These principles, over time, created a natural, authentic range of the masculine experience, especially that of men of color.
Dean Majd, suba (sunshower), 2020. Archival pigment print, mounted to dibond, framed 46.25 in. x 31.25 in. x 1.75 in. Copyright and courtesy Dean Majd
Has your own identity informed your image-making? Or do you prefer to approach your practice more broadly?
I allow my feelings and my interests to lead my image-making. My work is oftentimes driven directly by what is occurring in my life at the moment. I’m concerned with understanding people, specifically those who have been subjected to violence, state-sponsored or otherwise, because my community and I have been subjected to so much of it.
Being Palestinian, I experienced grief at a very young age and learned that empathy and grief go hand-in-hand. That grief helped me develop an infinite well of empathy, and that empathy has become the foundation of my practice. I resist the notion that I have to make work about my identity because I’m Palestinian-American and Muslim, but being Palestinian is the reason why I can make the work I make, regardless of the subject matter.
What inspired “Hard Feelings”?
I didn’t actively pursue this body of work at its inception. Even the title of the series was named on a whim very early on, and somehow has manifested so much truth in our experiences. There was no real inspiration for the project itself, other than my friends and the people around me. In many ways, it feels like it was given to me. My mother gave me a camera when I was seven, and I still haven’t stopped taking photos. I grew up without parental supervision, so I ended up in the graffiti and skate scene in Queens in middle school and high school, and stepped away from the world to pursue a degree in International Relations. I never believed I could succeed as a photographer, so I began taking it seriously for myself as a teenager, and in 2015, I began seriously attempting to make art out of making images in my life.
In 2016, I reconnected with a childhood friend, James, at our local skatepark in Astoria. I took his portrait, and a week later, he tragically passed away in a subway accident. Through his passing, I became close to his predominantly male friend group who were part of Queens, New York’s graffiti and skate scene. We became close through the grief, and I instantly was thrust back into the world I grew up in. They were the first people to encourage me to take photos and pursue photography, and by the end of the year, they gave me full access to their lives.
In my pursuit of a record of truth for my friends and myself, I would take thousands of photos and reflect on them afterward. I realized I was documenting brotherhood, masculinity, male-female relationships, but really, violence, substance misuse, loneliness and self-destruction, including my own. I created a space of vulnerability for men who are often told they need to be invulnerable to survive, a space for my friends and me to face our own shadows. When the work became more public and attracted more attention from strangers, I realized it had the same effect on viewers. It became a mirror for all of our experiences.
Dean Majd, ivan crying in my bedroom, 2021. Archival Pigment Print, Mounted to Dibond, 31.25 in. x 46.25 in. x 1.75 in. Edition 1 of 3 + 1 AP. Copyright and courtesy Dean Majd
There’s a striking use of light and shadow throughout the series. Can you speak to that—do you feel that builds intimacy from the point of view of the viewer?
The aesthetic nature of the work is defined by the subject matter, specifically the lifestyle of my friends and me. The world of graffiti (and skating) largely takes place at night, and can be very violent, toxic and fueled by drugs and alcohol. I’ve always loved the tableaus of Baroque painters, specifically Caravaggio, and filmmakers who work in a kinetic, raw style like Andrea Arnold and John Cassavetes, as well as surrealists and extremists like David Lynch, Gaspar Noé and Lars von Trier. In many ways that seeped into the images themselves, but really, it was serendipitous. My interests and the lives we were living blended perfectly.
At night, my friends are more free and open with themselves. It was almost as if our emotions and actions reached their highest and lowest points when the sun went down. It was most certainly magnified by our collective grief and the substances we were consuming. I was very non-technical at the time; I only really knew how to make images with point-and-shoot cameras.
I had to learn to take photos with very little light, and only used the on-camera flash in small, specific instances. Because of my constant image-making, the nature of candid, impromptu image-making and our trust, the boundaries between us and the camera melted away. My friends could be the most honest and vulnerable within the images. I find that vulnerability cuts through the viewers, allowing them to be vulnerable as well.
The work is an honest representation of my friends’ lives, but I needed the images to be truer than true. The visual language—the intense shadow and illuminating light—created a surreal nature to the images, which would form “representational truths.” The “representational truth” of the images speaks to something greater; allegories, mirrors, that can connect to viewers to grander subject matters around masculinity, violence and hopefully allow them to face their own shadows, face complicated repressed emotions that my friends were facing through the lens. I studied Flannery O’Connor’s Southern Gothic style and her use of allegory in relation to violence and faith. It deeply influenced how I sequenced and presented my images. At the same time, I really frame “Hard Feelings” around the idea of an odyssey: these masculine rites of passage. I wanted to elevate these unseen, unregarded lives to the place of mythology, biblical stories and high art. I wanted to create a legacy for those who are told their lives don’t matter. If the photos were made in a more hard photojournalism style, they’d be more difficult to connect to and overall less universal.
You’ve described your friends as both subjects and collaborators. How do you navigate trust and authorship when photographing people so close to you?
I rarely call my friends subjects. It’s hard to even consider them that; I really see them as family. I often say that these images were given to me as gifts by the people in them. There is an awareness that I’m the recordkeeper, archiving and constructing the narrative of our lives. In a way, they co-author the images, but also release them to me to do what I want with them, to tell their story accurately and respectfully. It requires immense trust.
That trust exists because of my complete openness with the people who end up in front of the camera. After I make the images, I sit and show them the images, oftentimes in person. There would be many times when I would invite them over to my apartment, and I showed them the work like a slideshow. We have constant conversations about whether and when the images will be shared way before they’re put out into the world. My friends bare their souls to me; it’s the least I can do. Because of my openness, I’ve never been denied making images. Whenever someone is uncomfortable with me sharing an image, I respect that decision, and it’s always the right choice. There have been times in which people told me they weren’t comfortable being photographed anymore, and it made our friendship stronger.
Photography is inherently voyeuristic, but I attempt to have a practice that is anti-voyeurism. This is my story and my people. We have gone through so much together. There’s so much pain, so much happiness and everything in between. We share everything with each other. I’m also photographing myself at the best and worst moments of my life, putting it all on the line just like them. We’re very much in this together.
Dean Majd, bohemian rhapsody, 2017. Archival pigment print, mounted to sintra, framed 37 in. x 25 in. x 1.5 in. Copyright and courtesy Dean Majd
Have you dealt with similar issues when photographing subjects you’re less close to in other series?
For years, I had crippling anxiety around photographing strangers, or even people whom I wouldn’t consider loved ones. When I began to make special editorial projects or be commissioned for editorial work, I forced myself to fight through that anxiety. I have learned to build trust with strangers pretty quickly, even if some people resist opening up. I used to think I could only make good images because I was photographing my friends, and because they’re so special. I realized, through my deeply empathetic nature, that I can connect with strangers on that level as well.
The downside is that I absorb people’s pain. It’s the alchemic exchange I have to make; I get to create these intimate images, but I hold onto their emotions for months, oftentimes years. I’ve learned that I need a lot of time to decompress; a lot of alone time of intense exercise, journaling and meditation, just to release the pain. Even with strangers, it all stays with me. The closer I am to the person, the longer the hurt lingers.
There are images in “Hard Feelings” taken before the pandemic—looking at those now, what feelings do they evoke?
Overall, those images feel way more free, way more uninhibited. Intense, but not burdensome. I yearn for that time when things were simpler. Less complicated and more authentic. I’ve inadvertently documented the change of the city and how men of color have been affected by it. In the spectrum of things, it wasn’t that long ago, but it feels like a lifetime. I was also much younger, still in my 20s. The images after the pandemic began are so much more serious and way more melancholy.
Finally, we have to ask. What was it like to photograph Mamdani?
An absolute pleasure. He’s a consummate gentleman and a real-deal New Yorker.
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.
Those art aficionados who aren’t in Doha this week are likely in Mexico City for ZONAMACO. Every year during Mexico City Art Week, kurimanzutto, the city’s most prestigious gallery, stages an ambitious exhibition at its sprawling space in San Miguel Chapultepec, and this year’s, “oscar murillo: el pozo de agua,” brings together 15 years of work by the superstar painter. We caught up with the artist to hear more about the show, which is a can’t-miss if you’re in CDMX this week.
The press release for this show opens with a poem that makes reference to the “sedimentation of time.” What does that line mean for you, and how does it tie into the rest of the show?
Sedimentation of time references Frequencies as an index, an encyclopedic library, a universe in how I view the world—perhaps a gesture toward how different historical temporalities, experiences and layers of meaning settle and accumulate over time. It suggests history is not linear, but rather a coexistence of multiple, overlapping layers (structures, behaviors, events) that operate at different speeds, like a Flight drawing, the act of drawing at the speed of flight—say, at 600 mph or, differently, let’s say a 14-year-old child in a school in Singapore taking six months to contribute to the Frequencies database in 2014.
This show collects work from the last decade and a half of your practice. What’s it been like to see all of it together at the same time? Did you learn anything about yourself?
Time exists differently; it is not linear. So it is not a survey of time as your question suggests. Like the work, Telegram, it comes together through the sedimentation of time. Or like The water well, which is a moment of pause before you enter the exhibition. I think of it as a container of thought or a library of material and experience; it is not chronological.
How would you describe your relationship to the surfaces of your work? How has that evolved over the years?
These surfaces register marks and energy. I don’t have an obsessive relationship to the surface in the plastic sense of painting, but I do think about intensity both in the physical and psychological sense.
I liked your work at this fall’s São Paulo Biennial, wherein you placed surfaces around the building for others to mark. How did you come to this idea and how does it relate to the rest of your practice?
In many ways, Social mapping is an evolution of Frequencies with a very short performative tempo, as well as a different performative structure for the general public. In the context of a cultural institution and the streets themselves, it is also a device to record the passing of the masses, through the simple act of making a mark. On the other hand, Frequencies is a global network, it attaches itself to the framework and infrastructure of the school, and it collaborates with children as vessels. Social mapping coincides with this moment of censorship and turbulence we are living through, wherein layers upon layers of marks reveal the thoughts that people are freely recording and sharing, however trivial or profound.
Oscar Murillo, manifestation, 2023-2024. Oil, oil stick, spray paint, dirt and graphite on canvas and linen, 240 x 250 cm., 94 1/2 x 98 3/8 in. (detail). Photo: Tim Bowditch and Reinis Lismanis. Courtesy the artist. Copyright Oscar Murillo
When you were first starting out, you fast became a market darling. How does that experience inform the art you’re making today?
Your question is somewhat sensationalist. I am not a star of anything, I don’t recall such a time. I do remember continuous focus and experimentation in the studio.
What are the differences between how your work is received in Latin and South America versus elsewhere in the world?
Ideas in the work are borne out of a shifting global order that is currently under threat. Social mapping is perhaps a response to this. It is my way of being in the street as a witness.
Do you have a favorite work in the show? One that resonates with you for personal reasons?
The installation of The water well in the patio of the gallery space. It acts as a kind of encyclopedia. It contains fragments of material that have occupied space in my studio over the years. They are witnesses to my process. A fragment of material from my show “Espíritus en el pantano” at Museo Tamayo filled with marks from the public occupies one of the walls of the structure, for example. There are also large black canvas flags that I presented more than 10 years ago at the 56th Venice Biennale titled “All the world’s futures,” curated by Okwui Enwezor. There is a sound piece that is an account of my father’s migration from Colombia to London that is recorded in 18 different languages.
In this sense, The water well is a resource from which memories and material are extracted. Like a library, the visitor can come and consult it before viewing the paintings on show.
Morgan Buck, We’re the Only Winners, 2025. Acrylic on canvas, 20 x 31 inches. Photo: Mario Gallucci; Courtesy the artist and ILY2
These days, Morgan Buck doesn’t make paintings that look like paintings. With their airbrushed surfaces and grainy, digitized haze, his canvases look like screenshot shitposts pulled from the weirder corners of the internet—and I mean that in the best way possible. Buck doesn’t do lazy nods to digital culture, and his work is meticulously crafted. His recent solo show, “Instantly & Effortlessly,” at ILY2 in New York—the artist’s second with the gallery—demonstrated just how far he’s willing to go in his engagement with the visual detritus of our algorithm-fed lives, marrying the deliberate labor of painting with junk images in something that shines a light on the promises and the pitfalls of both.
Here’s where I should probably cop to personally loving the weirder corners of the internet, where Buck’s process begins. He scavenges screenshots, video captions, A.I. outputs and stock imagery, manipulates them digitally and uses them as raw material for paintings that are at once funny and deeply uncanny—think deep-fried memes, but more refined. Buck riffs on themes of attention, automation and absurdity while grounding each piece in the technical rigor of photorealistic airbrushing.
It’s shitposting with a twist: conceptually agile, technically sophisticated and, like the best absurdist memes, sneakily moving. There’s humor and a sense of depravity, along with a real tension between image and object, intention and accident, meaning and nonsense. Some of Buck’s paintings draw you in with their oddness and keep you there with an undercurrent of melancholy. Others are just plain fun to look at.
Buck can be as irreverent as his paintings suggest, but while he talks about his practice with a casual bravado, there’s an undercurrent of disciplined artistic self-awareness that comes through when he talks about his work. He is, you might say, serious about not being too serious. His paintings are smart without being didactic, technically impressive without being self-important and prompt questions about how we engage with both art and the internet. His work is the most fully realized—and amusing—blurring of high and low culture I’ve seen in a long time, and I caught up with Buck as “Instantly & Effortlessly” was closing to talk about artificial intelligence in the arts, the allure of the airbrush and painting with a sense of humor.
The title of your exhibition “Instantly & Effortlessly,” which closed at ILY2 late last year, felt like a critique of digital-age gratification. How did you choose it, and what was it meant to signal?
I thought it was a funny and attention-grabbing title that related to the streamlining of art production with A.I. Ultimately, I’m an artist very interested in process and ideas of labor in art. I have an MFA in craft, so it’s part of my background to be interested in these topics. Part of my goal with my process is efficiency, so having A.I. in the mix is a dream come true. Using A.I. as an artist is pretty much like banging creative heroin: it gets you to the best results without trying. Just instant and effortless. No pain, just gain.
You use an airbrush technique that intentionally suppresses brushstrokes and painterly “texture” and also obscures subjects. What motivates that choice, and how does the technique support the conceptual underpinnings of your work?
Honestly, there’s not really much of a “concept” behind it. It’s more of a scam to make people take digital art seriously without them necessarily knowing it’s digital. People seem to want effort from artists for some reason. They don’t want to just see that someone walked up to a machine and pushed the art button. I also think painting translates the digital image into something that reads more human in a more visceral way. Originally, when I started airbrush painting, it was mostly about trying to make the painting look like a digital print.
A few years before the airbrush came into my practice, I was a painter who painted with heavy brushstrokes and a palette knife and all of that jazz. That painterly materiality gets to the point where it’s just a default filter that says, “I’m a painted painting painted by a painter” in every piece of art one makes. It’s a very boring effect when you think about it, and it’s also not effortless either. If anything, it’s trying way too hard.
For this reason, I became tired of painting, and for a year and a half, I didn’t paint. I just thought painting was for poseurs. This is when I started focusing on digital images that I made with my cell phone panorama. I’d pull up Google Images with a bunch of weird thumbnails and do a screenshot with the panorama distorting the images into a surreal, blurry glitch collage. They had cool compositions and really looked like paintings, but weren’t. I’d print the images and exhibit them like photography. Pretty instant and effortless.
Morgan Buck, I Don’t Even Know the Word Philosophy, 2025. Acrylic on canvas, 28 x 22 inches. Photo: Mario Gallucci; Courtesy the artist and ILY2
However, the problem with that work was that people needed an explanation for what they were looking at, which is ultimately what made it a fail for me. In 2017, I did an artist residency in Leipzig, Germany, and didn’t really have much access to a printer, so I began to paint the digital images. I had a relapse. I became a total conformist poseur again. It felt great. All of a sudden, no explanation was necessary. It’s a painting. People get that. I came back home to Portland and wanted to blur the line between the digital prints and the painting materials even more. That’s where the airbrush really clicked. Airbrush, with the atomization, can create photographic effects much more efficiently than the paintbrush. It’s a flat surface like a sheet of paper. I’ve been painting with the airbrush exclusively since 2018, and it’s been my default for so long that I don’t even think about it as a novelty like most people do. I just think it’s the only relevant way to paint, period.
Your paintings often stitch together images sourced from digital overload, from social media debris to A.I. fragments; how do you decide which images deserve to be slowed down and transformed into the physical space of painting?
I think it’s important to mention that it’s not all digital overload, social media and A.I. The captions are always from my rigorous art practice of sitting on the couch watching TV and movies and taking screenshots of captions that I like, usually while drinking beer. I also use some of my own photos from my real life, so it’s more about a full range of visual experience and not quite as solely tech-focused as your question suggests. To answer your question, though, I often decide using tech.
I’ll post the digital images on my Instagram stories, and usually I will already know which ones I want to focus on, but if one I’m on the fence about gets a ton of likes, specifically from followers I know have good taste and know me personally, I will usually focus on those. Mostly, I’ll know because it will already look like a good painting, and the caption frames the image in a way that adds to its narrative in a funny or interesting way.
You’ve spoken about humor, depravity and immediacy in quick-scroll culture; where does your own sense of humor come into play when you’re assembling and recomposing these scenes?
My sense of humor often comes in when I’m choosing which caption to use. Sometimes the picture is the joke, and the caption is the punchline. The best part is the fat is an example of that. I had DALL·E Mini generate a flesh-tone Jell-O, and that weird waxy cube is what it came up with, and then I had that caption that I mentioned in my collection of captions from Iron Chef Japan. Sometimes it’s an idea that happens on site. The painting I mean he’s a genius as far as I’m concerned was like that. I was in Kauai looking at that twin waterfall everyone likes and instantly imagined an Alec Monopoly mural on the wall of the cliff there. I follow him on Instagram, so his luxurious high-roller genius is drilled into my mind daily. I took photos knowing I was going to make that painting. I don’t have a set order of how it happens. It’s all nebulous. The A.I., photography, digital appropriation, etc., it’s essentially just like how a normal artist would draw. It’s just my version of draftsmanship.
Your work engages with the idea of dopamine, reward systems and the psychology of attention; do you think painting can counter or rewire the attention habits shaped by digital culture?
A hundred percent I know it can. My paintings are way more powerful than Mark Zuckerberg. Every time I pick up my airbrush, he starts sweating uncontrollably. He trembles in fear that his reign will all be over soon. Only my paintings can do that. He knows it.
Seriously, though, I embrace social media and all of the dopamine reward systems. I’ve gained so many opportunities and friends from social media. Where would I be without it? The algorithms and filter bubbles are a problem, though. However, if I were to speculate, I’d bet power and money will continue to win at the expense of ethical concerns even long after my paintings hit gallery walls. I doubt any damage to the attention economy directly linked to my art will be reported.
I also want to say that with A.I., it’s easy to get tired of the common, easily prompted A.I. art and deepfakes that we see on our Instagram and TikTok reels. That aspect is super annoying to me. However, people forget we have a once-in-a-species opportunity to reinvent our idea of human creativity. A.I. is a tool that is not human that collaborates with you. It’s hard to understate the significance of that. It will only become more unlimited. You can decide how much or how little, which A.I. model for this part of the image or that part of the image, etc. The artists who don’t want to touch it because they think it’s clip art are really just missing out, in my opinion. Do you really think you’re going to make more interesting art with a piece of charcoal? There are so many unconventional ways of using A.I. I just want to encourage other artists to begin the journey and open their minds more.
How do you hope people will engage with the work that was in “Instantly & Effortlessly” moving forward? Do you want them to laugh, cringe, reflect, feel nostalgia or question their own consumption of images and attention?
I want people to enjoy the work, think it’s funny, interesting and well executed, but really I’m not an artist who is focused on clear communication goals. Each piece is just data from my process that I’m presenting to the audience. There’s a stream of consciousness there that people can certainly draw meanings from: critiques of capitalism, technology, pretentiousness, cringe and so on. What it means all together is simple. Buy all of my paintings right now. That’s it. Easy.
“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.
As New York City continues its relentless march of cultural innovation, a new wave of artists, comedians, and performers is set to emerge in 2026.
From budding comedians to established visual artists, these are the creatives and projects New Yorkers should keep on their radar this year.
A 2026 preview
Corey Bonalewicz
Corey Bonalewicz, known by his stage name, Corey B., stands out by crafting comedy that he says resonates with the modern New Yorker’s fast-paced, skeptical and discerning sensibility. His humor often reflects the chaos of urban life—family, relationships, parenting—and the authenticity that New Yorkers crave.
“I bridge the gap between digital and live comedy in a way that feels seamless and intentional. I didn’t just “go viral”—I built a community,” he told amNewYork. “I’m a storyteller first, a comedian second, and a performer always—whether I’m on a stage in NYC or reaching millions on their phones.”
Bonalewicz is known for seamlessly bridging the gap between digital virality and live performance. His social media presence is built on storytelling grounded in truth, timing and perspective. Corey emphasizes community-building throughout his work, ensuring his comedy isn’t just fleeting but enduring.
“My comedy and energy blends observational humor with real-life storytelling that reflects modern New York: family, relationships, parenting, life and the chaos that comes with all of it. New Yorkers don’t need more noise—they want authenticity, and that’s what I bring every time,” he said.
The new year promises a substantial year for Corey as he continues touring nationally, expanding his NYC stand-up shows and developing longer-form projects, including stand-up specials and scripted comedy. His goal is to craft work that outlasts fleeting trends, resonating with audiences in the long term.
“The end goal isn’t just to be successful—it’s to create comedy that has longevity, evolve into film and television, and build something meaningful that outlives algorithms,” he said.
Casey Balsham
Casey Balsham’s sharp wit and relatable humor about womanhood, parenthood and the messiness of life make her a must-watch in 2026. Her viral joke “Childbirth = Women’s Super Bowl” has over 10 million views, making her a voice for millennial women navigating the chaos.
Balsham unapologetically champions the female experience. Her honesty and humor create a space where women—and anyone who relates—feel seen and heard.
“I want to scream about the things women go through and what it feels like right now to be a woman. I want to be the voice of the millennial girlie. The 40-something who has no savings account, smokes the occasional cigarette, and doesn’t quite have it figured out yet. I want to be a beacon of light to the messy mommies who definitely allow screen time and sugar and are too tired to gentle parent,” Balsham told amNewYork. “I will stand out to them because I am them and them is me.”
Her stand-up offers laughs and healing, often drawing from her own IVF journey, which she explores in her solo show *Inconceivable* which will hit City Winery in March.
Casey’s path to comedy was unconventional—she admits she got into stand-up after a night of cheap wine and a dare in college. Her goal? To keep doing what she loves, making enough money to enjoy good wine and gigs on her terms.
Annabelle Dinda
Annabelle Dinda is a singer-songwriter based in New York whose catchy, emotionally honest songs have taken TikTok by storm. Her viral hit “The Hand” captured millions of viewers and established her as a fresh voice in the music scene. Dinda’s music combines vulnerable lyrics with good melodies, making her a favorite among Gen Z audiences.
Dinda’s ability to craft relatable, heartfelt songs that resonate with younger audiences has already gained her a dedicated fanbase. As she continues to develop her sound and release new material, her influence is makes her one of the city’s most promising emerging artists. In 2026, look out for more of Dinda’s work, which promises to showcase her evolving artistry beyond TikTok clips.
TaTa Sherise
TaTa Sherise’s raw, high-energy comedy reflects her lived experience as a Black woman navigating life in New York. Sherise’s comedy is rooted in her authenticity.
Her physicality and theatricality, combined with her ability to tackle uncomfortable truths humorously, make her performances unforgettable. She’s known for her role as the first Black woman to win Philly’s Phunniest and her appearances on “The Drew Barrymore Show” and Facebook’s “Mastery of Comedy.”
“I bring heart, resilience, and humor shaped by real life. My storytelling cuts across cultures and backgrounds, and my comedy finds common ground in a city where everyone comes from somewhere else,” she said. “I tell stories people recognize themselves in. If I can make New Yorkers laugh, I can make anyone laugh.”
Sherise announces she’ll be filming new roles in 2026, including a lead in an independent film and a project debuting on Netflix. She’s also launching digital series like “Big Girl Small World”, documenting her weight loss journey with humor.
“I say the things people are thinking, including the uncomfortable things, with intention and a touch of shock value—without alienating the room. No group is off-limits, but my comedy brings people together rather than pushing them apart,” she told amNewYork.
Though her comedy was born from personal hardship — loss, heartbreak, and resilience — Sherise aims to become a household name, creating work that not only makes people laugh but also helps them see their own strength reflected on stage.
Stephen Brower
Stephen Brower’s versatility as a Broadway actor and comedian makes him a true Renaissance figure. His recent appearance in “Lempicka” and starring roles in touring productions showcase his range and his social media presence, with over 400K followers, amplifies his influence.
Brower’s background in musical theater combined with his stand-up comedy creates a unique blend of performance styles. His online content is sharp, funny, and relatable, making him a multi-platform star.
This year, Stephen will star in more stage productions and expand his digital footprint with new comedy videos and sketches.
Walter Masterson
Walter Masterson’s satirical man-on-the-street interviews and viral videos have made him an influential voice in political satire and social commentary. His appearances at SXSW and features in The Wall Street Journal underscore his relevance. His fearless approach—questioning power and exposing truths—resonates in a city like New York, where satire is part of the fabric of political discourse.
Alaire Thomas
With over 2 million followers across platforms, Alaire Thomas’ comedic insights into her life, relationships, and social observations make her a rising star in the NYC scene.
“I bring people into my world through my stories, making them feel like they’re living the moment with me,” they told amNewYork. “I’m not just delivering jokes, I’m performing experiences, full of personality and movement, so audiences connect emotionally as well as laugh. My enthusiasm is contagious, and I use it to turn everyday observations into something relatable, memorable, and fun.”
Her debut comedy tour is highly anticipated, and her relatable, heartfelt humor promises to connect with diverse audiences.
‘Proof’ with Ayo Edebiri and Don Cheadle
Broadway’s “Proof” is making a triumphant return with a fresh cast led by Emmy Winner Ayo Edebiri and Golden Globe Winner Don Cheadle. Directed by Tony winner Thomas Kail, this revival reimagines the Pulitzer-winning story of brilliance, inheritance, and self-discovery. Edebiri’s portrayal of Catherine, the brilliant daughter of a mathematician, explores the weight of legacy and the struggle for independence, while Cheadle’s role as her father adds depth and gravitas. The show has garnered rave reviews for its emotional power and stellar performances. It’s poised to be a highlight of the theater season.
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
DENVER — Social media feeds are roaring with prehistoric T-shirt designs from ArtFair Apparel, a Colorado company dedicated to elevating local artists and sharing their unique stories to audiences across the world.
The business came to life in the summer of 2024, when Lydia Kramer and her partner set out on a mission to work with artists and use social media to bring their stories to life.
“So, it’s kind of like the idea of when you go into a small town, you meet an artist in a small art gallery or something like that, and it’s a really cool experience, but if you’re somewhere else in the world, you might not have that opportunity,” Kramer explained.
With her social media marketing expertise, Kramer saw an opportunity to elevate local artists, knowing that social platforms had the unique power to help people connect with creators on a personal level and feel inspired to wear their designs. On Instagram, ArtFair Apparel has more than 50,000 followers, and on TikTok has 41,000 followers.
Maggy Wolanske
“It’s giving people a chance to feel like they’re supporting someone’s story and mission by wearing the art, but also to give these artists more coverage that I think they deserve,” Kramer said. “Clearly, other people also think that as well, with how excited they get about learning, their stories. So with different artists, I’ll ask them about themselves, and they’ll share with the audience on social media, but they’re also experts in what they do.”
Right now, ArtFair Apparel is currently with six different artists based in Colorado and Wyoming and gets their merchandise printed in Denver at Lab Seven. Every three weeks, there is a limited edition T-shirt drop, and the most popular designs turn into classics for sale online.
“We’ve hit a couple million videos, which has been really cool,” said Kramer. “It’s really cool to see the sales come in after that, it’s very correlated to people seeing their stories, artist stories and then connecting with them and wanting to support them.”
Among the featured designs is Gary Raham, a seasoned graphic artist who spent 27 years at a printing company and focuses his work on natural history and paleontology.
Maggy Wolanske
His prehistoric masterpieces are currently roaring to life at Laporte’s Sanderosa Art Gallery, where visitors can step back into the age of dinosaurs.
“It’s kind of an ongoing passion. I never figured I could make a living doing art entirely,” Raham said. “So I went to school to study biology and then got a master’s degree in biology and ended up teaching in high school and middle school for a couple of years.”
His talents extend beyond the gallery into northern Colorado, where he has created the entrance signs for the natural areas in Fort Collins. Over the decades, his work has welcomed visitors with Raham estimating he has completed an impressive 45 to 50 signs.
Watch Gary Raham explain more about his collection of signs for Fort Collins’ natural areas in the video below.
Gary Raham looks over his signs for Fort Collins’ natural areas
Kramer first discovered Raham’s talents when she visited the Sanderosa Art Gallery. Now, his work is on a new type of medium as his designs are featured and sold through ArtFair Apparel.
“I never knew that the T-shirt part of the business would be as good as it has been,” Raham said. “Of course, I’ve had my designs in books and publications and different things like that, but T-shirts — I wouldn’t have expected them.”
Maggy Wolanske
There is a unique business model for ArtFair Apparel, where 10% of every single sale goes directly to the artist, and at the end of the year, the business donates 10% of the total company profits to a nonprofit that each artist chooses.
“I’ve had some ‘This is too good to be true’ kind of responses, because the way that our model works is that we license the art from the artists at no cost to them, of course and then we basically just start taking videos with them and printing the shirts, and then they receive… profit from the sales,” Kramer said.
Raham explained he chose the nonprofit associated with the Sanderosa Art Gallery, which is known as the Northern Colorado Artist Community, to donate proceeds to.
Maggy Wolanske
Nancy Sander Irwin, founder of Northern Colorado Artist Community, expressed her appreciation for Raham and his efforts to support the arts.
“Impossible to do it without people like Gary [Raham] willing to spend their time and give of what they have,” she said. “You couldn’t keep the doors open.”
Having just over a year in business, ArtFair Apparel has built an impressive following while bringing artists like Raham’s talents far and wide.
“I’ve always enjoyed combining my interest in science and art for education, but one of the nice things about Lydia’s business plan is that people get to see the artwork that never would otherwise, and so it reaches a much bigger audience. So, that’s a lot of fun,” Raham said.
Denver7 | Your Voice: Get in touch with Maggy Wolanske
Denver7’s Maggy Wolanske is a multimedia journalist who covers topics that have an impact across Colorado, but specializes in reporting on climate and environment, as well as stories impacting animals and wildlife. If you’d like to get in touch with Maggy, fill out the form below to send her an email.
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
The Truck Trio as shown in “Walter De Maria: The Singular Experience.” Courtesy Gagosian
Earlier this month, Gagosian debuted a stunning show featuring the work of Walter de Maria at its Le Bourget gallery in Paris. “Walter De Maria: The Singular Experience” was curated by Donna De Salvo and featured at its heart The Truck Trilogy, a trio of vintage Chevrolet pickup trucks outfitted with De Maria’s signature stainless-steel rods. The work was conceived in 2011 and completed in 2017, four years after De Maria’s death at the age of 77.
This was the same year that the gallery launched its “Building a Legacy Program,” which marshals the gallery’s extensive resources to ensure that artists remain in the minds of the public in the future, whether they are young, old, or deceased, through educational efforts and ambitious shows like “The Singular Experience.” The program has been spearheaded by Kara Vander Weg, a managing director at the gallery, whom we caught up with to hear more about its origins and processes.
How did the idea for the Building a Legacy Program originate in 2017, and what gaps in artist or estate planning was it meant to address?
KVW: The catalyst was Walter De Maria, an artist who had been close to the gallery since the 1980s, dying in 2013 without a will. The lack of preparation threw his estate into turmoil but, fortunately, the gallery was able to help address a number of immediate practical needs, including preserving and documenting his archives. Nuanced decisions had to be made about his intentions and his work, including how it was displayed. Walter was incredibly precise and exacting, and to go from his presence, a resource that was always there, to nothing was a profound shock, particularly for Elizabeth Childress, who had managed his studio for decades.
Through our work with the Richard Avedon Foundation, which began in 2011, we learned a lot about the challenges and questions they faced when Dick had died suddenly several decades earlier. It has been instructive to learn about their organization, which is impressive, and implemented processes for decision-making as the artist would have wished.
Through our work with artists and with their subsequent estates and foundations—which is inevitable when working together over many years—we have seen that balancing an artist’s legacy with ongoing operational concerns can be incredibly challenging. As much as the gallery, as an entity outside of the family or studio, can be helpful, we want to be. For all artists, it is ideal to have some plans for legacy decisions in place. And as the value of art has grown, it has become even more important to have detailed wishes outlined, particularly when it comes to decisions like posthumous work, as well as planning for the resources necessary to carry an artist’s legacy forward.
A symposium felt like the right way to address some of these delicate topics and provide a space for knowledge sharing between our artists and others. Peer-to-peer support can be an exceptionally helpful resource, and many of the connections that have been made through the symposia continue to be fruitful for the artists and estates.
The team behind Gagosian Quarterly also saw an opportunity to address many of the questions on people’s minds through thoughtful content in the magazine. We launched an ongoing series featuring conversations with experts in the field of artists’ estates and legacy stewardship who offer insights that hopefully prove useful to artists, their staff, foundations and estates, scholars, and others.
In working with estates like Walter De Maria’s or Nam June Paik’s, what have been the most revealing challenges in realizing an artist’s intentions after death?
KVW: Honoring an artist’s wishes and intentions is always the biggest challenge.
With Walter, we’ve had to make decisions about how to install his work at a level he would have permitted. Fortunately, both Larry [Gagosian] and I worked closely with him and have those experiences to draw on. We also owe a great debt to Elizabeth Childress for her constant counsel. For example, Walter was always incredibly precise about the surface on which his floor sculptures rested; it had to be completely unmarked. For an exhibition at our 21st Street gallery while he was still alive, I remember we had to bring in a trompe l’oeil painter to touch up marks on the concrete floor before he would agree to go ahead with the show. And for the current exhibition at Le Bourget, we had to find solutions to address the floor beneath 13, 14, 15 Meter Rows. These might seem like small things, but we know how critical they were to Walter.
He was also very resistant to putting out too much information about his work, because he wanted viewers to have a focused, unmediated experience of it. The downside is that, as a result, people haven’t really come to understand the thinking behind his practice. That’s why, for the Le Bourget exhibition, curator Donna De Salvo has included a number of drawings, some of which have never been seen before, something that would never have happened during his lifetime. Our hope is that this will offer the wider public a way into Walter’s thinking: his precision, a bit of his humor, and the connections between his early work and the later pieces for which he became known. These are things we believe are important, not only for his legacy, but also for the scholarship around his work.
The circumstances of our work on behalf of Nam June Paik are very different, and my colleague Nick Simunovic is best placed to talk about it. [Writer’s note: They wanted Nick to jump in here so I said why not.]
NS: In the case of Nam June Paik, we partnered with the Estate, who had a clear sense of the artist’s wishes, and we worked tirelessly over a decade to realize a number of important goals.
When we began working with the Estate in 2015, they were keen to work with a major gallery as a way to shine a spotlight on Nam June’s work, particularly given that the last exhibition sanctioned by the artist was 20 years prior. Larry [Gagosian] had noted that he felt that the artist was a bit lost in the market, and that was a view shared by the family. There was also a realization that there were gaps in the holdings of American museums.
We laid out a multi-tiered plan that began with that first show in Hong Kong in 2015 and culminated with a major survey in New York planned for 2020. The opening was delayed by the COVID pandemic but eventually opened in 2022.
We brought in noted curator John G. Hanhardt, who also organized the retrospectives of the artist’s work at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1982), and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC (2011), in addition to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2000). We were able to strategize and execute against the artist’s wishes because we had clear direction from the Estate, including Nam June’s nephew Ken Hakuta, and input from partners like John Hanhardt and Estate curator Jon Huffman.
As a result of those efforts, works by the artist from that 2022 exhibition were placed with major museums including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, the Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, and the Bass Museum of Art, filling a crucial gap in the artist’s canon and legacy.
How do you balance market considerations with curatorial or scholarly fidelity when guiding legacy work inside a commercial gallery?
KVW: The two are interconnected and I don’t think that is a bad thing, work needs to be placed with owners to ensure the highest level of scholarly fidelity. And good curatorial work can help to bolster an artist’s market.
The monograph Gagosian published for Walter De Maria is a great example. Little scholarly work had been done on his life, and through our work preserving the archive, we had an opportunity and the ability to take on the project. We had access to rarely seen archival material from his studio and the result is the first comprehensive survey of the artist’s entire oeuvre that explores both his creative career and his personal life.
It was a massive undertaking that was many years in the making, but the publication will support both future sales and exhibitions of his work. It has already served as the catalogue for the Menil Collection’s 2022-23 exhibition, Walter De Maria: Boxes for Meaningless Work.
The recent symposium in London gathered artists, curators, and foundation directors. What insights or points of friction surfaced about the future of legacy stewardship?
KVW: It was our third symposium on the topic of legacy planning, and there was a fascinating session during which I spoke with Mary Dean, Ed Ruscha’s studio director; Waltraud Forelli, Anselm Kiefer’s studio director and board member of the Eschaton–Anselm Kiefer Foundation; and Vladimir Yavachev, director of operations for the Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation. A key takeaway from our conversation was the critical importance of hiring an archivist, ideally while an artist is alive.
Waltraud rightly pointed out that in addition to helping from an organizational perspective, hiring an archivist brought a realization that they couldn’t do everything alone. They needed to plan for a younger generation to continue their work and to take the time now to transfer that knowledge. For Vladimir, who has catalogue raisonné preparations underway, an archivist is particularly important given the volume of material that Christo and Jeanne-Claude retained.
Mary Dean emphasized another important point, the value of openness, even when addressing a sensitive topic like planning for a future one won’t be part of. For Ed, this is a living, evolving process that he actively engages in through the thoughtful placement of his works and archival material with institutional partners. For instance, the Getty Museum is currently in the process of receiving his street photograph archive. All of his films and artistbook archives are housed at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin. He has also made significant donations: Ed was born in Omaha, Nebraska, so the Joslyn Art Museum has a substantial collection of his work, and he has donated work to the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art in Oklahoma City.
Younger artists such as Titus Kaphar are building institutions during their lifetimes. How is the conversation about legacy changing for living artists?
KVW: There is a generation of artists today who are interested in philanthropic endeavors beyond their own artistic practices. Providing space and resources for the creation of foundations and community projects is a big priority and perhaps is an indication of legacy planning taking shape much earlier in artists’ careers.
There is a tradition of artists stepping up and supporting other artists, one example is Theaster Gates, who has devoted the past 15 years to his Rebuild Foundation. It’s a mantle that artists including Ellen Gallagher and Titus Kaphar are taking up with projects like the Nina Simone House and NXTHVN, respectively.
But this process isn’t new, there is a history of artist support with someone like Robert Rauschenberg, who during his lifetime formed an entity to help other artists, as did Roy Lichtenstein.
For galleries, support of an artist needs to evolve to include these priorities, which could be advice around the organization of studio resources or the make-up of a Board of Directors.
With “The Singular Experience” now open in Paris, featuring De Maria’s Truck Trilogy and 13, 14, 15 Meter Rows, what does this presentation demonstrate about Gagosian’s collaboration with the De Maria Estate? What are the lessons there for other artists planning their estate?
KVW: The relationship with Walter has always been very personal, his friendship and working relationship with Larry [Gagosian] stretches back more than 35 years, and it has anchored our long commitment to him and his work.
The approach is methodical and takes time, but the exhibition at Le Bourget is a product of that commitment. It’s his second show in the space and one that we had actually begun discussing before he died in 2013.
Showing Truck Trilogy outside of the United States for the first time is incredibly exciting. It was his last sculpture, conceived in 2011 and completed posthumously in 2017 according to his specific directions, so it touches on a lot of what we have talked about. It’s also wonderful to be showing 13, 14, 15 Meter Rows at the same time as his inclusion in the exhibition “Minimal,” curated by Dia Art Foundation’s director Jessica Morgan at the Bourse de Commerce, Paris. And it’s all taking place in the same month as Walter would have turned 90.
But the exhibitions are just one piece in a broader program that aims to cement and extend his legacy, from placing a group of early sculpture and drawings with The Menil Collection (a family that were early champions of the artist) and working with Dia Art Foundation to help conserve The Lightning Field to working tirelessly to publish his monograph. And the work continues as we try to find a home for his archive.
For artists working today, it can be hard to have the patience to play the long game, but that thought and planning is key. It can also be useful to talk with other artists and studios who are focused on this work. One of the benefits from the symposium was the exchange of ideas and the conversations that happened outside the sessions.
Looking across the gallery’s roster, what qualities distinguish the artists who are most intentional about shaping their own legacies while still alive? What do they have in common?
KVW: They have a clear sense of purpose regarding the direction of their work and its legacy. They like control, either maintaining it themselves or wisely bringing in the right studio leadership. They’ve built strong museum connections and have access to resources in terms of staff and space. It’s a reminder of the symbiotic relationship between the market and legacy, artists need resources to actively plan for the future.
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.
There is a direct line between lip fillers and the techno-apocalypse, and Gretchen Andrew draws that line with her latest Universal Beauty series. This series, recently acquired by the Whitney in New York, reveals the preferences of hidden algorithms that define our current beauty standards. Standards not even Miss Universe contestants can meet. In our conversation, Andrew and I discuss how impossible-to-achieve criteria are flattening people’s relationship to their bodies and homogenizing faces around the globe. What is at stake? “The whole diversity of humanity is lost,” according to the artist.
Gretchen, an ex-Googler, is a Silicon Valley dropout. After becoming disillusioned by the way technology was designed to exploit users and experiencing a culture that penalized her for dressing like Cher from Clueless, Gretchen left tech to pursue a career in art. In the art world, she felt free to use technology subversively and wear short skirts as a form of 3.0 feminism. Her previous projects: Thirst Trap Glitch Gifs, in which she used SEO optimization hacks to make her vision board canvases the top search result for “contemporary art auction record,” capture the artist’s drive perfectly.
There have always been beauty standards, Andrew says, but never before has there been a single, universal, international beauty standard. Courtesy Gretchen Andrew, Heft Gallery
Gretchen could have continued further along this line, using her brilliance to expose technological loopholes while promoting her name. However, Universal Beauty marks a departure. Or perhaps an evolution or maturing. Not in Gretchen’s interests, but in her tactics. The focus is less about her explicitly and more about the technology that traps us all. Making us feel forever inadequate. Forever ugly. While keeping us craving more of this feeling. And Gretchen will be the first to admit that she is not above social media addiction. But admission, be it via her work or her words, is always the first step.
First, congratulations on your acquisition by the Whitney. What can you tell us about the Facetune Portraits project, and about the work that was acquired?
In Facetune Portraits, I look at how A.I.-driven beauty standards are impacting how we experience ourselves and how we experience others. I take what is normally an invisible force—whether it’s digital Facetuning or the way it’s impacting things like lip fillers and plastic surgery—and make it visible so that we can talk about it. In my Universal Beauty series, I look at Miss Universe contestants who are from all over the world—they’re completely gorgeous—and yet they’re not good enough for the algorithms, giving the rest of us absolutely no hope. Not only that, but the contestants are from all around the world. They should look completely different, but we see the homogenizing impact of A.I. when we see Miss Jamaica being given the same body as Miss Finland being given the same body as Miss Philippines. It’s compressing all humanity into a single unified look.
Describe the Facetune aesthetic. What does the algorithm think is beautiful?
We’ve grown so used to seeing each other and ourselves on a two-dimensional screen. And because screens are flat, our expectations of how we’re supposed to look are incorporating efforts to mimic that third dimension within the two-dimensional space of the screen. One example is having absurdly big lips. Some people really like the way that those big lips look from the front, but no one thinks that they look great from the side. That’s why we get memes around “duck lip.” There’s this distinct prioritization of making sure we look good on a screen. It reminds me of ancient Egyptian art. The reason why hieroglyphics have bodies that are contorted is that, within the two-dimensional surface, the Egyptians wanted to convey the three-dimensionality of the body. So they represented each body part from its most recognizable angle and sort of stuck it all together. That’s really what’s happening today with our cameras and algorithms: we are attempting to convey three dimensions in the 2D space of a screen.
Gretchen Andrew, Facetune Portrait – Universal Beauty, USA, 2025. Oil On Canvas, 48″ x 24″. Photo by @larufoto Luis Ruiz
What is lost when we do that?
The whole diversity of humanity is lost. There have always been beauty standards, but never before has there been a single, universal, international beauty standard. We’re also losing connections to our actual bodies. We’re prioritizing how people look over what they do. We’re prioritizing how we look over how we feel. Within that prioritization, we lose a really important connection to ourselves. Another thing we’re losing is the celebration of the individual. I see not just a desire to be beautiful, but a desire to be like everyone else. That feels safer to people today than to actually look like yourself.
How is this different than in the ‘90s, before there was social media, when media was dominated by a couple channels or Vogue, and these Western exports were setting the dominant beauty standard around the world?
I think with A.I., the pace and the uniformity of that has increased significantly. Although there has been this Western beauty standard before, maybe there was a slightly different beauty standard in Japan or Kenya. With A.I., there has been an acceleration of this beauty standard convergence. Anybody—they don’t need massive Photoshop skills—can take their image, process it through a Facetune algorithm, and go to a plastic surgeon and say: Make me look like this, which is increasingly happening.
I read a study out of Cornell that 0.2 percent of the data used to train A.I. comes from Africa and South America. Do you know where most of the data that’s training these beauty algorithms is coming from?
We’re in a feedback loop, especially with social media. I’m sure you’ve noticed that if you post a photo of your face or other people, you’re more likely to get engagement. I don’t think that’s because that’s what people want to see. I think these platforms are driving more engagement in order to get more images of faces and bodies for training their algorithms. I think Instagram, by volume, must be Western. It’s also not so much who is using it as it is about the quantity of images that people are seeing. Influencers, for example, have so many more followers and get so much more exposure. It doesn’t matter how many regular people are using the app, the majority of people are seeing images that look like these influencers.
Gretchen Andrew, Facetune Portrait – Universal Beauty, Puerto Rico, 2025. Oil on Canvas, 48″ x 24″. Photo by @larufoto Luis Ruiz
What made you interested in addressing social media and beauty standards in your work?
I like to find seemingly innocuous, frivolous and feminine things and use them as opportunities to have conversations about technology and its impact on our lives. Beauty standards seemed like a ripe area where a lot of people are not thinking about A.I. or the technological apocalypse, and so it became a very wide doorway to have these conversations. On top of that, I think a lot about the physical and metaphorical shapes that we as women contort ourselves into to meet societal expectations, especially as we age. I’m approaching 40, and my friends are getting Botox or plastic surgery. This project is not about shaming women for these things. It’s about understanding where standards come from and making decisions from there.
Can you talk about your decision to turn these digital images into oil paintings via an oil paint printer?
I wanted to create a portrait that shows both who we are and who we’re told to be at the same time. I wanted to represent this in a way that would be part of the history of portraiture. Portraits have always shown what we value at any given time. Look at me and my big family. Look at my jewels. Look at my land behind me. Within this current world of A.I., I wanted to investigate what is important to us, and I think what’s important to us is fitting in. It’s being accepted by the algorithm.
What do you think about celebrities like Sarah Jessica Parker who refuse to get plastic surgery?
Celebrities like that are really important. They remind us that beauty can exist outside of the algorithm. But also, she’s not coming up today. She’s already a big deal, and she can make that stand now in a way that I think is very important and interesting. What I really want to see is somebody who’s very young make that same decision and succeed. I think it’s going to be a lot harder.
Totally. I read the memoir Careless People by Sarah Wynn Williams. It’s such a damning portrait of Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg. After I read it, I was so worked up, and I was like, ‘I have to get off social media.’ And then, of course, I didn’t. So my question is, what does awareness do? There’s an idea that it changes things. But my question is: does it?
As far as what awareness does, I think it makes us cognizant that we are making a choice, even if we continue to use filters and get lip fillers. Technology has made things so seamless that we have slipped into an absurd world where people are injecting things into their lips that they have bought on Alibaba, and it happens to be cement. This is becoming normal so fast. I really believe social media is going to be the tobacco of our generation, with the impact on mental health. Here we are, knowing it’s bad for us, still smoking. When I hang up on this phone call, I’ll probably get on Instagram for a second. Awareness is not going to win the war, but it is at least a way to see what’s going on and maybe have a little bit more agency as an individual, even if societally we’re totally fucked.
My last question is, if social media is like tobacco and it’s bad for us, why do you still use it?
“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
Through her ceramic sculpture, the artist strikes world-weary sentiment into the eyes of nostalgically precious woodland creatures. Photos by Charles White. Courtesy of Josh Lilley.
Wilshire Boulevard—one of Los Angeles’ most storied and congested streets—yields glimpses of landmarks, billboards and an assortment of Angeleno ephemera, yet none are as faithful to the experience of L.A. driving as the 25-foot-high anthropomorphic bear that has been marooned at the corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Glendon Avenue since October. Suspended in motion, the bubble-eyed bear hurtles forward in a dilapidated car, the tearful faces of daisies lining his path. The whimsically sardonic inflatable sculpture quartered just outside Westwood’s Hammer Museum, Buggy Bear Crashes Made in L.A. is the creation of Los Angeles-based artist Alake Shilling, who—despite her fascination with L.A.’s car culture—does not drive.
Growing up in Los Angeles, Shilling became attuned to the dissonant rhythms and modalities of her hometown—the abject anachronisms, the standardized vanity, the blurry distinction between imagined realities and lived ones. Baptized in the visual legacy of Hollywood, Shilling’s animistic characters—rendered through vivid paints and ceramic sculpture—teem with the wayward sentiment that slips through the cracks of pop culture. In this way, these mawkish woodland creatures are mascots of a new pop culture, conceived by Shilling’s own design. Cuddly, uncanny and wryly melancholic, Shilling’s world of sunshine and rainbows is not always one of smiles and sweet endings.
The Artist reimagined as Turtle Bug (2025) by Alake Shilling. Photo by Charles White. Courtesy of Josh Lilley.
“I think my art is a reflection of everything I experience in the real world,” Shilling told Observer. “It’s like I’m making my own alphabet and… the whole art piece is the sentence.” In this way, Shilling conjugates caricatures of kitsch—moon-eyed ladybugs, purple-furred panda bears, baby-blue bunnies—into totems of human emotion and conflict. Her characters evince depths of emotion and vulnerability that very few people are able to express in their everyday lives. Shilling’s candy-colored garden snakes and speckled-shelled turtles do not conform to any degree of respectability or regulation; they exist in a wonderland of relentless sentiment. Shilling, who confessed that at one point her biggest dream was to become a hermit, said she often struggles to find clarity in a city so caulked with rituals of attention. In many ways, her artistic practice is a coping mechanism.
“I feel like when I speak, people don’t listen, but in my art, I have a voice,” Shilling said. “It’s my world. My characters trust me. They believe in me. They have a conversation with who they are.”
Shilling’s artistry is, to some degree, a practice in magical thinking. Working from the floor of her cozy living-room studio, Shilling mixes unconventional materials—Styrofoam beads, glitter, cotton balls—into her paintings; she leaves her ceramic sculptures pitted with uneven ridges and scored by carving instruments, evidence of her creative provenance. Shilling’s preference for texture and tactility gives her work a certain vitality. Her ceramic sculptures are particularly spirited, appearing as though they have lived—many of them perch talismanically on sculpted landscapes. A pale ladybug and a purple panda sit on a grassy knoll; a blue bunny and a brown bear rest on a mountainous ridge. They present as contemporary parables, slightly discolored by wear and age, bearing titles such as I had a long day please bring me a snack (2025) and Fashion Is a Lifestyle Said the Purple Panda in Pucci (2025). Shilling explained that her characters are portals of empathy, simple and unmuddled by sociopolitical structures or interpretative metaphors; they are affable and candid.
Fashion is a lifestyle said the purple panda in Pucci (2025) by Alake Shilling. Photo by Charles White. Courtesy of Josh Lilley.
Shilling’s work—visually informed by pop culture, cartoons and middle-American kitsch—is in dialogue with the act of interpretation as it exists in the contemporary art world. Like kitsch, the artist relies on audience familiarity and immediate emotional comprehension. Yet Shilling’s work goes beyond the cheap thrills of kitsch by facilitating a sort of psychological transference between the audience and her morose, cartoonish ceramic sculptures.
“I’m still trying to understand why I’m so drawn to animated characters,” Shilling admitted. “I can sympathize and empathize with what they’re going through. It becomes less about me and more about what the actual overarching piece is like. I can separate myself from the issue and see all the moving parts, but I can only do that if it’s cute. The cuteness is what gives me the empathy I need.”
The artist’s practice purposely defies clarity, oscillating seamlessly through the spheres of high and low art. This quality, like much of Shilling’s work, is typified by equal parts reverence toward and friction with pop culture. Shilling playfully referred to Buggy Bear—a recurring character throughout her work and her artistic avatar—as her Mickey Mouse. “He’s my trinket!” Shilling proclaimed.
I followed my heart and it led me here (2025) by Alake Shilling. Photo by Charles White. Courtesy of Josh Lilley.
To a certain degree, Shilling renders all of her characters with episodic intimacy. They embark on new adventures and experience new emotions in each appearance as though they are protagonists in a Saturday morning cartoon. When admitted to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the artist had ambitions of going into children’s animation, yet became quickly disenchanted upon learning of the strict rules and restrictions on character design and the intense competition within the industry. Taking inspiration from the grotesque and irreverent artwork of the Chicago Imagists as well as the various quaint, winsome forms of Afrodiasporic folk art, Shilling made the transition into fine art. She had the freedom to not only design as she pleased but to execute emotions and expressions that could have been diluted by animation censors.
Central to Shilling’s practice is the tender yet indelible belief that complexity can be etched into nostalgic analogs. “It’s like I am writing a really serious, emotional diary entry in Comic Sans,” Shilling joked. “The font is silly, but what I’m saying is real and genuine. And it comes from my heart.”
I’m a bunny and I carrot a lot (2023-2025) by Alake Shilling. Photo by Charles White. Courtesy of Josh Lilley.
