Tag: Artists

Don’t Miss: Alejandro García Contreras in Dialogue with Bolesław Biegas and Gustave Moreau in Paris

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“The World as a Labyrinth” probes how Contreras’s work is attuned to a universal consciousness shared across eras and geographies. Courtesy the artist and Bibliothèque Polonaise de Paris

Different authors converge on the notion of a collective subconscious to explain the recurrence of symbols and archetypes across time and space. The work of Mexican artist Alejandro García Contreras is deeply attuned to that flow of universal consciousness shared by humanity across eras and geographies—a collective subconscious that, as Carl Jung described, is not a static archive but a living field of imagination continually reshaping itself through the “original instructions” already embedded in the human psyche.

The best art often begins with this kind of soul call, transforming creation into a mission. For Contreras, that call came early, through an image he encountered as a child in a book given to him by his grandfather—a mystical man and shaman. The book, an encyclopedia of the occult exploring timeless questions through myth and enigma, became, as the artist describes it, “a kind of guide or amulet for my imagination.” In the chapter on Vampirism and Lycanthropy, Contreras discovered a terrifying yet seductive image: a harpy-like woman attacking a naked man. “That image would never leave me,” he tells Observer. “That erotic undertone—imperceptible to me at the time—was etched into my memory.”

The image, however, bore no signature or caption. Only years later, thanks to Google, did Contreras learn it was a painting by Bolesław Biegas, a visionary Polish artist from the early twentieth century. His connection to Biegas deepened when, during an Art Explora residency in Paris, Contreras found himself—by both chance and intention—at the Polish Library in Paris (Bibliothèque Polonaise de Paris). Walking through the Biegas Museum, he experienced a profound sense of reconnection that would later inspire his latest exhibition.

Contreras spent hours in the museum that day, piquing the curiosity of the staff. After hearing his story, they introduced him to Agnieszka Wiatrzyk, one of the museum’s curators. The exhibition that emerged from this encounter stands as a testament to that journey and the spiritual connections it nurtured—one of those rare stories that renew faith in art’s power to connect the soul to something greater, beyond the confines of individual existence.

Alejandro García Contreras. Courtesy of the artist

With “The World as a Labyrinth,” soon-to-close at the Polish Library in Paris, Contreras presents his ceramic cosmologies, enigmatic bronze narratives and visionary cosmic paintings in a dialogue that spirals through the evocative connections between Bolesław Biegas and the symbolism of Gustave Moreau. Set within the historic Polish Library—one of the oldest and most significant Polish cultural institutions outside Poland, a trove of artifacts and archives celebrating the genius of the fin-de-siècle Polish diaspora from Biegas to Chopin—the exhibition provides a profoundly poetic setting for Contreras’s exploration of spiritual lineage and universal consciousness.

“These artists come from completely different contexts of space and time than me, but that’s exactly where the connection happens,” Contreras reflects as he walks us through the show. “What I’ve been trying to do through my own practice is to explore this idea of non-time—a space where symbols and archetypes resist chronology. It’s something that persists within a kind of collective imaginary, the shared language of the human soul,” he adds. “I love thinking of it that way—what Jung called the collective unconscious. That’s what connects us all. We’re each channeling something ancient and shared, even if we’re doing it from different places, in different eras, or for different reasons.”

Blending contemporary pop culture with Mexican folklore, ancient mythology, occultism and religion, Contreras constructs a syncretic continuum of cultures and traditions as an imaginative attempt to grasp the mystery of the universe’s origin and the soulful essence of human existence. The multilayered narratives alchemically shaped within his intricate glazed ceramics combine the rich symbolic heritage of his homeland with cross-cultural philosophical concepts and the Japanese pop and underground cultures of manga and anime, revealing the timelessness of themes, dramas and questions that accompany human life. His art becomes a living expression of what Michael Meade describes as the mythic realm—something circular rather than linear—a non-chronological space where symbols are not relics but living presences, constantly re-entering the world through imagination.

Though his art draws first from his lived experience as a deeply sensitive soul navigating a terrestrial, time-bound realm, Contreras approaches his practice as both alchemist and shaman, mediating between the visible world and the unseen structures of the spirit. His conjurations of symbolic references span the entire course of civilization, uncovering recurring psychological and narrative patterns. Ancient and contemporary symbols converge to reveal, within the dialectic of time, enduring messages and meanings that embrace the circle of life and the open, deeply rooted relationship Mexican culture holds with life, death and rebirth.

A childhood encounter with Biegas’s painting became the seed of Contreras’s lifelong fascination with the unknown. Courtesy the artist and Bibliothèque Polonaise de Paris

While studying Biegas’s archives, Contreras discovered many of the motifs and forms he had instinctively explored in his own work. A vitrine displaying Biegas’s drawings of dinosaurs is paired with similar early sketches and works by Contreras, creating a play of resonances and echoes that runs throughout the exhibition—a dialogue born not of imitation but of an unconscious, spontaneous connection across time. This mirroring extends beyond formal affinities to a shared cosmology, turning myth into a mirror for the psyche, where divinity and desire, the physical and celestial, the individual and collective coexist. The thread of visionary mystical continuity finds another echo in Gustave Moreau, whose symbolist and allegorical compositions anticipated the mystical sensuality that animates, in distinct ways, both the work of Biegas and Contreras.

Common among all three artists is a timeless fascination with the femme fatale, used here as a cosmic principle exposing, much like the Romantics’ sublime, humanity’s confrontation with its own limits and mortality. The heroines that populate Contreras’s works stand fiercely against subjugation to the male gaze, echoing how Biegas’s androgynous figures often carry a predominantly masculine energy despite their traditional depiction as feminine muses.

Drawing from the vast repertoire of manga and anime—which reinterpret ancient myths and tales—Contreras revives the power of archetypes, celebrating the deconstruction of female stereotypes while infusing them with agency and desire. Aware of their seductive force, as in Biegas’s paintings, these heroines stand in opposition to their male counterparts—often faceless spirits or demons who pursue, crave and depend on them for their own pleasure, becoming ensnared by their desires.

“What I’m trying to do is connect different symbolic universes,” Contreras explains, citing the example of a devil woman conceived by a great manga artist from Japan called Kōna Guy. “Her representation looks almost identical to one of Biegas’s figures: wings sprouting from her head, a sensual, otherworldly presence,” Contreras explains. “I’ve been playing with these connections, linking manga—which I’ve come to understand more deeply after spending time in Japan—and the broader field of contemporary pop culture with ancient myths.” As Contreras notes, manga have become one of the most influential and innovative visual languages shaping our collective imagination today, sharing the same symbolic world-building power that ancient tales, myths and oral traditions once held.

From Moreau’s Parisian refinement to Biegas’s Slavic mysticism and Garcia Contreras’s metaphysical roots in the Mayan jungle, three worlds converge in the exhibition. Courtesy the artist and Bibliothèque Polonaise de Paris

At the same time, in his portrayal of the femme fatale, Contreras intentionally reveals the vulnerability embedded in sexual instinct and its longing for balance and love. His figures often exist within the tension of unresolved emotion, an energy that likewise pulses through Biegas’s paintings. Yet luminous in their esoteric charge, the works of both artists gesture toward a nonhuman, nonterrestrial rhythm—an access point to the collective consciousness, where natural elements and creatures coexist beyond the confines of civilization, society and religious taboo.

In three-dimensional form, Biegas’s bodies are elongated, twisted and torqued—often caught in uneasy postures that suggest ecstasy, suffering, or transfiguration—embodying the soul’s yearning to escape the limits of the physical body and resist strict categorization. Similarly, Contreras’s heroines freely merge references, becoming symbolic figures that appear to belong to another world, one guided more by spirit than by sensory impulse.

At the heart of all three artists’ work lies a meditation on the primordial force of Eros, the vital energy from which all things emerge and to which all things return in the endless cycle of matter and transformation it sustains. Echoing Michael Meade, here Eros transcends romantic love or physical desire and is expressed—through earthly symbology—as a cosmic current of connection, the animating energy that binds life and fuels creation and imagination. In this sense, Contreras, like Biegas, revives the ancient Greek conception of Eros as the principle that draws separate entities into relation, forging unity from multiplicity: the adhesive of the cosmos, the thread binding soul to soul, human to world, myth to meaning—moving toward wholeness, creativity and beauty, not as sentiment but as sacred vitality.

Embracing this shared symbolic language, for Moreau as well as for Biegas and Contreras, figuration is never portraiture or realism—it is a vessel of metaphysical energy, an incarnation of inner states, cosmic forces and psychic archetypes. For all three, art functions as revelation—a bridge between the visible and invisible realms.

The show brings together forty-four works including paintings, drawings and sculptures in porcelain, plaster, clay and wax. Courtesy the artist and Bibliothèque Polonaise de Paris

Animating compositions that oscillate between harmony and chaos, drawn with a line that is at once delicate and forceful, their figures operate on both psychological and spiritual planes: they externalize emotions, instincts and dreams—what both Biegas and Contreras describe as “the invisible life of things.”

The works of these three artists, this exhibition reveals, resonate with Jacobo Grinberg’s Syntergic Theory, which proposes that experience emerges from the interaction between the energetic field created by the brain (the neuronal field) and the energetic structure of the universe—a liminal space where life and destruction converge and where the mystery of creation can be reawakened.

Biegas’s works from around 1900-1910 already envision the human form as a microcosm of the universe: faces dissolve into stars, limbs unfurl into spirals or vegetal motifs in his Cosmic Cycle, depicting figures intertwined with planetary and astral forms. Humanity here is part of a universal choreography—just as in Contreras’s paintings, where texture and brushwork magmatically shape symbolic visions that seem to recreate within the canvas the same formative process governing all existence: matter, atoms, energies and forces converging into new life. In both artists, the physicality of form dissolves into the ceaseless motion of evolution and transformation, as art becomes a liminal threshold between matter and spirit—a portal to other extensions of the human soul.

This connects to another recurring theme in both artists’ work: the Island of the Dead, a motif inspired by Arnold Böcklin’s Symbolist painting Die Toteninsel (1880s), which haunted many European artists of that era. Yet while Böcklin’s island symbolized the passage between life and death—a romantic vision of eternity—Biegas and Contreras reinterpret it as a metaphysical landscape of transformation rather than finality, a site of passage where matter and spirit merge. That island, like the artwork itself, becomes a center of consciousness, embodying the belief that human existence is cyclical—part of a universal rhythm binding life, death and creation into one continuous flow.

This exhibition reveals how the symbolism of Alejandro García Contreras—like that of Moreau and Biegas—is ultimately a holistic, syncretic ode to our potentially infinite individualities, urging us to embrace a renewed spiritual universality that awakens the soul to its place within a greater cosmic whole. Their art becomes an exploration of the invisible territories of transformation, where life, memory, ancient myth and contemporary consciousness converge to uncover luminous truths about what it means to exist, to create and to harness the power of mythic imagination to access other dimensions. That mythic imagination—the primordial act, as Mircea Eliade described it, and the world’s original language, in Michael Meade’s words—remains capable of restoring coherence and meaning in a fractured age.

The show offers a revised history of Symbolism in a single time and place; here, the distinction between modern and contemporary art, with its ambivalences, dissolves. Courtesy the artist and Bibliothèque Polonaise de Paris

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Elisa Carollo

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October 31, 2025
Devin B. Johnson Paints the Space Between Memory and Motion

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Devin B. Johnson, Crossing, 2025. Oil on linen, 80 x 90 x 2 in. Courtesy of the artist and Nicodim gallery

Devin B. Johnson’s paintings emerge on the canvas like ghostly, dreamlike apparitions—visual remnants that withstand the slow erosion of memory. His scenes exist in suspended tension between figuration and abstraction, between the sensory intensity of trauma and the blurred contours of a dream upon waking, when the self begins drifting away from the oneiric realm where the subconscious speaks. In his hands, paint becomes a means of reattuning and reconstructing that space; the white canvas, a stage on which to confront it.

“My interest is in memory and the subconscious; that’s why the paintings feel articulated in fragments,” Johnson tells Observer as we walk through his new exhibition “Crossing,” on view at Nicodim Gallery through November 8. For Johnson, painting is a way to think about nostalgic space. That’s where his muted tonal range comes from: the grays, the desaturated chromatic colors, the atmospheric haze. Blending realism with surreal gesture, his work becomes a poetic act of recollection and reconnection or an attempt to retrieve what lingers beneath the surface of consciousness and the past. With his paintings, he navigates histories of representation, urban movement and diasporic trauma, moving fluidly between the personal and the collective, the remembered and the forgotten. “They evoke that phenomenon of recollection—how remembering actually works,” he says. “When you remember something, especially something emotionally loaded, it’s always fragmented. It’s never a perfect replay of how it happened.”

David Johnson. Courtesy of the artist

Johnson instinctively manipulates both subject and surface, allowing shifts in texture and color to translate psychological and sensory transitions. Yet his scenes are intentionally never fully resolved, either pictorially or narratively. They remain open, as if capturing memory and history still in motion, still forming. Fragmentation becomes a strategy: opening an event or image to multiple readings and avoiding the authority of a single interpretation. “Leaning into that fragmentation is how I like to think about reality itself: how it falls apart or reforms in this hazy, almost musical way. Memory isn’t linear; it dissolves and recomposes,” he explains.

What Johnson evokes in many of the works on view is also something profoundly specific: the daily psychological, cognitive and emotional reality of living in a city like New York: a continuous crossing of narratives, languages, cultures and perspectives that defines the urban condition. The city, always in flux, holds the potential for constant reinterpretation but also the risk of overexposure, where experience multiplies faster than we can process or reflect and meaning slips through the cracks of noise and speed.

“All of us who’ve walked the streets or subway stations can recall how certain walls or corners slowly change over time. That speaks to a kind of kinetic, haptic memory embedded in any metropolitan space,” Johnson reflects. “There are always people moving through it, navigating it. That movement creates a constant layering of memory.”

In this sense—aligned with Situationist thinking, which calls for a creative and critical interpretation of urban space that reclaims agency—the city becomes a palimpsest of visions and sensations. It is a living surface upon which we build our daily reality and our idea of self within and between the interrelational fabric of existence that a metropolis intensifies.

“My work really comes from walking the streets—an observational way of looking,” Johnson continues. “I’m constantly moving through the city with my head turning, watching how the urban environment comes together.” For him, beauty can be found anywhere: in a garage, an alley, a wall. “If you’re open to it, you can glean beauty from the most ordinary places.” His paintings speak to this practice of observation, contemplation and attunement and of locating beauty within the chaos of urban life.

Devin B. Johnson, All Behind, 2025. Oil on linen, 80 x 90 x 2 in. Courtesy of the artist and Nicodim Gallery

At the same time, these works often describe and inhabit a state of transition: a conversation just beginning and left suspended, a movement in the street not yet resolved, a possible encounter merely suggested. The viewer is invited to imagine its unfolding. “The liminality of going from one point to another—that in-between state—is central to my work,” Johnson says. The exhibition title, “Crossing,” speaks directly to that threshold: the moment when there is an A, but the B has not yet revealed itself. “It’s the space of transition, of becoming, and painting becomes a way to simulate that threshold.”

Here, we can also read Johnson’s effort to push against the static nature of painting, suggesting instead a physical and psychological reality of being that is always in flux. “That’s often my entry point: creating figures walking through emotional and psychological space,” he explains. From this interrelational, ever-moving condition arises the universality of his scenes. “These could be New York City, Paris, Africa or anywhere,” he observes. “There’s a kind of universal ‘somewhere’ we all recognize, even if it’s not tied to a specific location.” It is a place where humanity manifests in an epiphanic moment of revelation.

In the two largest paintings in the show, Crossing (2025) and All Stay Behind (2025), this internal tension becomes fully visible: a friction between the precise rendering of figures and the intuitive eruption of sensation, which disrupts any linear narrative and opens the image to the kinds of contradictions that shape our perception of reality: the gap between what we experience, what we are told and what we can articulate within the limits of language and reason.

Johnson explains that these two paintings were the first he made for the exhibition and they set the heartbeat of the entire show. He usually begins by working through ideas slowly, often without fully understanding what he is trying to do, but each painting helps him tease out the direction, the energy and the questions that the body of work will confront. “You can see what I’m speaking about—this navigation through space, this kinetic energy. It’s not only in the dripping of the paint, but also in the way energy clusters across the canvas,” Johnson notes. The painting he refers to, Crossing, is one of the largest he has ever made and the central work from which the exhibition takes its title.

This monumental canvas depicts a vast urban street in flux, traversed by multiple lives, their stories possibly intersecting or weaving together for an instant or missing each other entirely. Several Black men walk past a white car, or perhaps it is one subject duplicated, suggesting motion and psychological multiplicity. White doves hover and drip overhead, producing a layered image that evokes movement, memory and simultaneity within the city. “This painting is also about configuration and tension—pushing paint, pushing material and at the same time allowing the material to act freely,” he says. “Letting the paint drip makes the work feel like it hasn’t fully arrived yet. It’s still becoming. That unfinished quality feels truthful to me, like memory, like movement, like life in the city itself.”

An installation view of David B. Johnson’s “Crossing” at Nicodim Gallery in New York. Courtesy of Nicodim Gallery

Yet Johnson is equally interested in inserting anchors—symbolic presences that connect fleeting urban moments to a larger human history where psychological and historical patterns recur. Unsurprisingly, he has recently been drawn to the thinking of Carl Jung. “What’s been interesting for me lately is using symbols as anchors,” he notes. “Jung talks about iconoclastic symbols or totems—forms that can point to personal, individual meaning. I started incorporating symbols that hold significance to me personally, but can also open the painting to other interpretations.” In the central painting, cars and pigeons serve as archetypal symbols. “Pigeons aren’t considered majestic, but I like linking them back to the Renaissance dove as a symbol of freedom, flight, love,” Johnson reflects. “Here, they become part of these New York scenes, glorifying the everyday things we move through and overlook.”

Although rooted in the daily crossings of a chaotic city like New York, Johnson’s paintings are equally grounded in art history, particularly the Renaissance pursuit of structure, perspective and order within flux. His compositions reveal an impulse to locate balance amid motion, to stabilize chaos through pictorial intelligence and to insert contemporary life into the long lineage of painting as a record of a society in continual becoming. Still, he resists the mathematical precision of Renaissance masters. Blurring the lines becomes his way of acknowledging the imprecision that emerges from psychological experience—the same human clumsiness early painters sought to perfect but that modern thinkers like Freud and Jung compelled us to confront. “It’s more like the flutter of a thought or a memory—something fleeting that can’t be fully held. That’s what the pigeons or doves represent to me: the impossibility of completely capturing memory. I’m trying to strengthen my compositions and see where the work can stretch,” he reflects. For Johnson, the show marks five years of work reaching a sharper vision while opening into its next phase.

“Crossing” is a study of histories of representation, urban movement, and diasporic memory as refracted through the mind, heart, and hand of Devin B. Johnson. Courtesy of Nicodim Gallery

Notably, although Johnson may draw inspiration from both personal and collective archival photographs, he never ties the final painting to a single image. “I use photography as a starting point, but then I shift away from documentation,” he explains. He recently started using A.I. to direct his own visual world instead. “I build scenes from memory, music and intuition. That way, I’m not bound by copyright or another photographer’s vision; I’m building my own. That’s how I begin finding my own narrative,” he says. “The real decisions happen in the painting. There’s always a tension between control and surrender, between structure and improvisation. I think that fight is visible in the work.”

The emotional, often intuitive character that shapes his images and their memories remains far more crucial for Johnson and it emerges through the dialectical tension between elements. “I’m following the emotional logic. The feelings of the figures are essential and that’s where slowness comes in. I want you to eventually read the emotion on the surface of the painting, in how the figures interact.”

Painting becomes a site of discovery—a blank space in which he teases out what truly matters to him: color theory, space, bodies, rhythm, materiality. “I’m always asking, how does the paint feel for the viewer? How do I stay generous with texture, gesture and surface? How do I tell my story?” Movement and blurring in Johnson’s imagery reveal his effort to capture both the sensory and the psychological, the physical world and the inner world, simultaneously. Even when his figures are not overtly interacting, they remain engaged in conversation—with themselves, with their surroundings or with time.

Recently, Johnson has been reflecting on the notion of the subaltern—the voiceless. “How do we give voice to the voiceless?” he asks, revealing his interest in peripheral scenes, people moving through life half-seen. “Those references sit in the back of my mind as I paint. Who gets to speak? Who gets seen? How does a painting hold space for them?” This question—how to choreograph a human moment that is both physical and psychological, interior and exterior—sits at the core of his painterly inquiry. What fascinates him is that even when people are together, they remain alone. “That’s the nature of the city: we move side by side, but internally we’re somewhere else,” he says.

Devin B. Johnson, Doo Wop Thang, 2025. Oil on linen, 36 x 24 x 1 in. Courtesy of the artist and Nicodim Gallery

“You can see her waiting. You can see her contemplating. You can feel that she’s thinking about something,” Johnson says, pointing to the painting Doo Wop Thang (2025), in which a woman sits in profile, head resting on her hand, eyes half-closed in deep thought—a suspended psychological space of introspection. Rendered in muted grays and browns, with soft highlights on her skin, the figure appears both present and distant. Behind her, two other women sit in shadow, silent witnesses to this inner drama yet unable to enter it. “That’s what I love—these paintings are complicated because everyone in them is thinking, everyone is on their way somewhere. They’re not performing for us, they’re not concerned with being seen. They’re in their own space, in their own thoughts. That inner world is what interests me.”

What’s especially notable about this particular painting is that it’s the only one in the exhibition where the figure actually has pupils. “That’s new for me. Usually, I leave the eyes more abstract, more anonymous,” Johnson explains. “But here, I gave her pupils very intentionally, because I believe the eyes hold so much of a person’s soul.”

A pair of smaller works on the same wall—Harmony & Discord (2025) and The Middle (2025)—share the same psychological density as the rest of the show yet stand apart visually. They are the only paintings with a noticeably brighter palette and a more structured, cinematic composition, evoking a scene that could have been filmed in the American South, as suggested by both the light gradient and the subjects themselves. “In these two paintings, the colors have shifted,” Johnson acknowledges, explaining that they were the last works completed while preparing for the exhibition. “The compositions become more tethered to natural light, creating atmosphere. A lot of this is new for me—even the symbols,” he notes.

In one of the paintings, a group of Black men dressed in suits stands in an open field beneath a vast sky, their expressions solemn, introspective, almost ceremonial—as if they are about to play or speak or process together. The entire scene hums with quiet, anticipatory tension, a sense that something is about to happen. “I started thinking about drums—not literally, but as a metaphor for rhythm,” Johnson explains. In the same way, rhythm structures the paintings themselves: sharp, staccato marks like percussive beats and long drips of paint that act as sustained, resonant tones.

Devin B. Johnson, Harmony & Discord, 2025. Oil on linen, 36 x 24 x 1 in. Courtesy of the artist and Nicodim Gallery

Johnson admits there may be connections to the Great Migration and his own upbringing, even if they surface only subconsciously in the work. “My grandparents were from Louisiana. I grew up in the Black Baptist church. I remember sitting in the pews—hearing the piano, the swell of voices, the thump of the kick drum hitting your chest,” he recalls, pondering how those deeply physical sensations of sound might be translated into paint. The question—and the catastrophe—of painting lies in attempting to convert such multisensory, fleeting experiences into image. “Those memories swim through my mind. They shape how the work feels even if I’m not illustrating a specific memory,” he reflects. People often read these scenes as processions, jazz bands and church gatherings, but he resists tying them down. “I’d rather the question stay open,” he says.

Here we understand that the rhythm Johnson describes is not only musical—it is also temporal and psychological. It is the oscillation between past and present, reality and fiction, memory and imagination that animates the surface of his paintings. That constant movement is what keeps the images alive and porous, capable of returning, dissolving, reforming—just as memory does in the mind.

For this reason, Johnson agrees, his work is best understood as a kind of psychological figuration. The figures are recognizable, but the space around them is intentionally fluid. “My interest is in the middle ground between figuration and abstraction—where the painting lives in a state of becoming and undoing,” he explains. “That in-between is the subconscious. That’s where memory, identity and image collide.”

What ultimately emerges from these works is the persistence of memory beyond the present moment: the possibility of archetypal patterns reappearing in open, unfolding narratives. In this sense, Johnson’s paintings are timeless and universal in their ability to acknowledge the fluid nature of existence as part of a vast, interwoven chorus of cyclical forces—emotional, cultural and historical—that shape human life across time and space.

“Crossing” becomes an ode to the presence and opacity of mark-making, the history of painting and Johnson’s lived and inherited experience. Courtesy of the artist and Nicodim Gallery

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Elisa Carollo

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October 30, 2025
In Times Square, Yvette Mayorga’s Candy-Pink Carriage Confronts the American Dream Beyond Its Sparkle

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Yvette Mayorga’s Magic Grasshopper is on display in Times Square, Broadway Plaza between West 46th and 47th Street. Phoyo Michael Hull. Courtesy Times Square Arts

Cuteness is often deployed in contemporary visual culture as a disarming veneer—something that attracts attention, is broadly appealling and quietly conceals harsh truths beneath its polished surface. Fairy tales and toys like dollhouses employ the same strategy, serving as metaphorical devices that prepare children for the inequities and power structures of adult life. This symbolic logic defines the visual lexicon of Yvette Mayorga, a Chicago-based artist who has just transformed Times Square with her commission for Times Square Arts: a 30-foot-long kinetic pink carriage that appears to have rolled straight out of a fairytale. Beneath its candy-colored façade, adorned with Hello Kitty backpacks and lowrider gold rims, lies a far more complex story that confronts U.S. migration policies, feminine labor and the fractured illusion of the American Dream.

The monumental work marks the culmination of two years of development, a period during which both Mayorga’s practice and U.S. politics have evolved, rendering the project all the more poignant. The artist is a first-generation Mexican-American whose family migrated from Jalisco, and the commission is not only a milestone in her career but also a vital moment of visibility for the community she represents. “It feels even more important to have a piece like this in Times Square, such a heavily trafficked site visited by people from all over the world,” she told Observer before the unveiling.

“When I was invited to imagine a sculpture for that setting, I really wanted to play with the idea of Times Square as the ultimate symbolic site—a place so many people first think of when they picture the U.S. and especially New York. For tourists, it stands alongside other iconic American landmarks.” Mayorga sought to engage with that visibility and with the dense layers of commercial imagery that saturate the space and the values of contemporary America.

Yvette Mayorga. Photo Marzena Abrahamik

Camouflaging her work in a candy-pink aesthetic, Mayorga transforms cuteness and innocence into ingenious visual snares—accessible and inviting yet laden with stories of inequality and surveillance she has lived through. Beneath the sugary surface lies diasporic trauma and commentary on the underpaid labor of Latino communities in the United States.

Drawing on her mother’s work as a baker, Mayorga devised a singular technique: using cake nozzles and piping bags to sculpt acrylic paint. This process allows her to weave her family’s narrative into her art while, more broadly, addressing the condition of the Latino working class—so often tasked with strenuous yet poorly compensated labor—through a method that both mirrors and reimagines the artistry of confectionery work performed by her mother and other migrant women.

The fairytale references, especially the carriage, evoke childhood memories and conjure a more magical world, though for Mayorga, they are no escape from reality. “This is also a metaphor for life—happiness and grief happening at the same time,” she reflected. “I’ve always been around that, and I’ve learned to accept it as the reality of life. To stray from it makes us less human, right? These things will always move in tandem.”

Sitting with grief recently—anticipated grief, collective grief, all of it—pushed her toward deeper introspection, nurturing a new maturity that now informs and resonates through her work. At the same time, this archetypal and symbolic imagery transcends the present, serving as a reminder that history moves in cycles and that the ghosts of the past can easily return as the demons of the present if we fail to remain vigilant and allow memory to fade.

Featuring an opulent carriage drawn by carousel-style horses and loaded with ’90s nostalgia, Magic Grasshopper expresses critical narratives of migration, feminized labor, and colonial histories. Courtesy Times Square Arts

The image of the carriage carries multiple layers of meaning, but it first emerged when Mayorga learned that Times Square served as a carriage meeting point in its early days. Further inspiration came from the 19th-century Mexican carriages of the First Empire, which she encountered in 2018 at Chapultepec Castle in Mexico City, their interiors lavishly adorned with Louis XVI decorative motifs. The title of the work, Magic Grasshopper, references Chapultepec (which means “on the hill of the grasshopper”) and draws attention to a place that was once an Aztec settlement and later overtaken. “By combining this history with a carriage fitted with carousel horses carrying backpacks, I wanted to imagine an object that can transcend space and time, tying together histories of decadence, colonial legacy, and Latinx identity, while continuing the investigation and reclamation at the center of my practice,” she explained.

At the core of Mayorga’s aesthetic is a concept she coined, Latinxcoco, which fuses Latinx and Rococo sensibilities—Versailles-inspired grandeur entwined with Mexican symbolism and architecture. Her earliest encounters with Baroque and Rococo came through their Mexican iterations during childhood visits to her family’s hometown in Jalisco. As she recalls, she was particularly captivated by the Churrigueresque, or ultra-baroque, the Spanish Rococo style that emerged in the late 17th and early 18th Centuries and was later reimagined in Mexico. The style was intended to overwhelm the viewer with dense ornamentation like broken pediments, undulating cornices, reversed volutes, balustrades, stucco shells and garlands. Yet in Mexican hands, it evolved further, its exuberance amplified and infused with local symbols, transforming an imported language of domination into a vibrant expression of cultural resistance.

Magic Grasshopper mirrors its site’s spectacle, scale and sense of possibility while transporting us into deeper conversations about identity, immigration and belonging. Phoyo Michael Hull. Courtesy Times Square Arts

This choice carries an unmistakable allusion to the present. Rococo flourished amid excess and opulence, just before collapse and revolution. Likewise, today’s America faces an alarmingly widening economic divide, where the disappearance of any middle ground has deepened the chasm between the extremely wealthy and the poor—now on a global scale. History has shown where that trajectory can lead.

Placing such a message in Times Square—perhaps the ultimate emblem of America’s promise of prosperity through consumerism and media—only sharpens its edge. The carriage looks ready to embark on the so-called American Dream: suitcases strapped to the roof, horses outfitted with Hello Kitty backpacks, and a smiley-face flag fluttering with near-absurd optimism. Beneath it, gold-rimmed, tricked-out wheels turn slowly in an homage to lowrider culture rooted in Chicago’s Mexican-American communities, where Mayorga’s family settled after migrating from Jalisco and still lives today. Across the carriage’s body, painterly scenes of migration unfold, weaving European art-historical tropes with personal and collective narratives.

Yet Mayorga deliberately leaves interpretation open, creating an installation that, like fairy tales or cartoons, shifts meaning depending on who encounters it and how they read the evolving landscape of today’s Americas.

At this stage in her career, after numerous public commissions and gallery and museum exhibitions, Mayorga is acutely aware of the assumptions her work provokes through its pastel palette and seemingly innocent aesthetic. “I already create with that in mind, knowing there are so many different entry points,” she said. “With public work especially, that’s what excites me most: not everyone who sees it is ‘well versed’ in art history, but they can still experience it, and I hope it intuitively does something for them, makes an impact in some way.”

For this commission, scale itself was essential. “The scale is so massive it’s almost impossible to miss, whether you’re commuting to work or visiting New York for the first time. I hope even a passing glimpse catches someone’s eye and offers a moment of joy—just a small pause of color and playfulness in the middle of everything else going on.”

Magic Grasshopper will be on view free and open to the public 24/7 through December 2, 2025. Phoyo Michael Hull. Courtesy Times Square Arts

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Elisa Carollo

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October 25, 2025
Zheng Chongbin’s Dialogue With the Golden State

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Side by side, Golden State (2024) and Turbulence (2024) strike a stunning dichotomy; both are abstracted landscapes, but while one appears composed of sunlight, the other is composed of shade. Courtesy of Zheng Chongbin

Ut supra, sic infra. As above, so below. This is the ethos of Zheng Chongbin’s design philosophy. Based in San Francisco’s Bay Area, Chongbin creates paintings by layering swaths of ink and paint upon one another, transforming canvases into topographic elements. He lets his canvases breathe; he lets them react naturally to the paint—his work is peeling, pitting, cracking, seeping into the canvas. His paintings bear likeness to natural formations from mountain peaks, riverbeds and fault lines to blood capillaries, skin matrices and synapses. They bear witness to the viewer as much as the viewer does to them. Chongbin furthermore embraces the entropic movements of the paint upon the canvas and, in doing so, instills his work with an interiority that, although invisible to the viewer, is instinctually felt by them.

Through his holistic practice spanning painting, light-and-space installation and digital media, Chongbin has graphed ecologies and vitality across his work, muddling our perception of sentience and life. In “Zheng Chongbin: Golden State,” his solo exhibition at LACMA, he casts his eye upon California’s expansive geography. Comprising the artist’s earlier works alongside newer offerings, the exhibition is a systematic symphony of image and composition that privileges experience and temporality over didactic interpretation.

“It’s an environment I’m dealing with. It’s a living thing,” Chongbin told Observer, explaining how his practice revolves around the unique, organic quality behind each subject. “My sensibility—in extension to [art]—is it feels like a part of your body… not in the traditional way, but the habitual way, in a way that you interact with your body extensions. And so you feel like dealing with and collaborating with living things… You’re not the protagonist. You are actually facilitating what happens.”

A still from Chimeric Landscape (2015), which renders a particularly social vision of blood cells as they migrate and mingle. Courtesy of Zheng Chongbin.

Born in Shanghai in 1961, Chongbin was brought up during China’s Cultural Revolution and thus trained in classical Chinese art forms, particularly within the ink tradition. In 1978, China’s Open Door Policy allowed an influx of Western ideas, materials and art forms that had previously been forbidden. Among these Western art traditions, Chongbin was most influenced by Abstract Expressionism, German Expressionism and the Light and Space movements, along with specific artists such as the visceral figuration of Francis Bacon, the conceptual installations of Robert Irwin and the sculptural forms of Larry Bell.

These inspirations are easily perceptible in Chongbin’s work, which shares a visual kinship with modern Western art movements while maintaining dialogue with the ink traditions in which he was classically trained. In this vein, Chongbin intentionally grants his work its own psychology, allowing art to have its own internal world that extends beyond himself, the peripheries of art movements and the borders of countries, and instead arrives directly in front of the audience, whomever and wherever they are. His physical practice, of course, reflects this dynamic—his final pieces, regardless of medium, are often beset with texture and kineticism. They share a palpable lifeblood.

One of Chongbin’s few paintings to utilize color, Golden State (2024), with its bright yellow swaths of color, by strokes of black, gray and white, represents the intense sunlight of California, banded with belts of trees, rain fog, fire scars and earthquake fault lines. For this painting, Chongbin chose to paint on shrimp paper, a light material made from the bark of sandalwood, and in doing so gave Golden State a unique, breathable quality. Chongbin gives his materials agency, allowing the paint to crack and fissure as new layers are applied while still maintaining its bold presence and—in the case of Golden State—its brilliant color.

“It feels like ecologies,” Chongbin said, recalling the effect of the paint penetrating microfibers, coursing color through the paper’s delicate veins. “Everything [that goes] through is my skin… things not only happen on the top, but also happen in the middle of space [and] into the other side. It’s very much a living organism. The space changes and the surface becomes a space… You have this kind of indexical trace of the classic methodology of the work.”

Though, as noted, Chongbin rarely paints with color, his paintings are often in dialogue with one another, not only in form and context but in composition as well. Turbulence (2013) and Golden State are operational foils of one another. While Golden State primarily looks to the skies of California, reproducing its dappled sunlight through elements of nature, Turbulence looks to the earth; its bands of black paint, puddled by various ink blots, resemble mountain basins, rocky ridges, igneous extrusions and cooling magma. Both paintings, as well as most of Chongbin’s work, consider the spatial experience of the environment. Both are monumental pieces, climbing eight, nine or ten feet high, enveloping the viewer in the sublimity of their ecologies.

“I always explore… what’s happened on the surface [and] what’s happened underneath,” Chongbin said. “All of those bold lines are a cast of what’s happening underneath. The water is actually like rushing down through the themes, through the slope and goes underneath and pushes out. I want to instantiate nature rather than depicting it.”

His light-and-space installation Mesh (2018) filters natural, medical and abstract imagery through refracted light. Courtesy of Zheng Chongbin.

Chongbin regaled us with stories of his adventures on hiking trails in the foothills of Marin County and wandering the steely beaches of Northern California. He saw “the dead things come alive.” His installation, Chimeric Landscape (2015), was inspired by one such encounter. Chongbin described looking at a sand dollar awash on the shore and seeing a multitude of lifeways. He remarked with wonder at the creature’s iridescence as it shimmered in the sunlight. He marveled at its respiration—its “millions of little lights flickering” as the sand dollar’s velvety matrix of pores undulated gently.

With Chimeric Landscape, he weaves short clips of water, ink, cell functions and other ephemera into Euclidean geometries that twine and break only to reform again. The installation celebrates the little breaths of life that these inanimate objects take while deconstructing their spatial differentiation. “The structure of Chimeric Landscape is obviously a non-linear narrative,” he explained. “The one visual dominance that we encounter is the ink flow, it’s used as the symbol of the water, but water is reflected in a lot of the formations and the emerging qualities that I think are essential elements for everything—our bodies and the earth.”

This natural essence echoes throughout the work in the LACMA show, invoking atmospheres that range from the monumental to the microscopic. Whether constructing a cosmos out of ephemera or a simulacrum out of geographies, Chongbin places equal emphasis—equal importance—on his art and his viewer. He collaborates with both material and mind, allowing one to inform the other, ensuring that what lies above reflects below.

“Zheng Chongbin: Golden State” is on view in LACMA through January 4, 2026.

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Mya Ward

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October 24, 2025
Izumi Kato’s Hybrid Totemic Forms Trace Possible Paths of Ecological Survival

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Izumi Kato, Untitled, 2025. Oil on canvas, 191.5 x 194.5 cm./75 3/8 x 76 9/16 in. Photo: Ringo Cheung ©2025 Izumi Kato, courtesy of the artist and Perrotin

Japanese artist Izumi Kato’s humanoid hybrid creatures exist in a fluid space between worlds, hovering somewhere between ancient totems, unborn spirits and extraterrestrial beings. They emerge as sudden, epiphanic visions that reveal unprecedented truths about our evolutionary path while profanely suggesting new possibilities for more symbiotic and sustainable survival on this planet.

In just a few years, Kato has risen to international and institutional prominence, building a strong market presence through powerhouse gallery Perrotin and steadily climbing auction results. He has established a global reputation with a distinctive symbolic language and a sense of mystery and magic that unites Japan’s ancient folklore and Shinto spirituality with underground manga aesthetics and a contemporary, saturated visual sensibility that feels attuned to the world ahead.

As the artist further cements his status as one of the region’s most compelling names through his participation in the Aichi Triennale in Nagoya, Japan, alongside the major solo exhibition that opened at Perrotin during Seoul Art Week, Observer caught up with him to explore the meanings and messages behind his fantastical universe and the evolution of his otherworldly creatures.

Izumi Kato. Photo: Claire Dorn, courtesy of the artist and Perrotin

Both in Kato’s soon-to-close show at Perrotin and in his works for Aichi, his biomorphic characters take on watery, fluid forms. Existing somewhere between human and aquatic beings, suspended in a plasmatic or amniotic dimension, they evoke the evolutionary arc from aquatic to amphibious to human life while hinting at a possible reactivation—or even inversion—of this cycle as a path toward ecological survival.

As Kato acknowledges, his painting practice continues to evolve. “Most recently, I’ve begun incorporating living sea creatures into my work,” he explains, noting that it’s been 30 years since he last painted while directly observing his subject. “Now, I paint these forms as I need them, as a way to express what painting means to me at this moment.”

His figures feel both ancient and futuristic, alien and human. Kato’s vivid primary palette heightens this tension. “Colors are sensory for me, and I use them intuitively,” he says. “I don’t begin with a fixed color plan; instead, I decide on each color one by one as I paint.” Balancing primal immediacy with an aesthetic partly influenced by the digital landscape is likely what makes his work so resonant for contemporary viewers.

While his figures do not directly reference evolutionary history, Kato sees the planet itself as a living entity in continuous transformation. “Earth is home to countless life forms, though definitions of life can vary from person to person,” he says. “I see the planet itself as a living entity. It’s something mysterious and deeply fascinating to me, and I find myself thinking about it often.”

An installation view of Kato’s solo exhibition at Perrotin Seoul. Photo: Hwang Jung Wook, courtesy of the artist and Perrotin

Throughout his evolving practice, Kato has constructed an expansive symbolic narrative that envisions hybridization between species as an alternative path for humanity. Moving fluidly across mediums and often incorporating natural materials like wood and stone, his oeuvre feels like a continuous, urgent exercise in worldbuilding—a form of mythopoiesis aimed at imagining new destinies for human society. His work draws unconsciously from Japanese folklore and Shinto beliefs, though he clarifies that he does not intentionally reference any specific motif. Those connections surface organically, shaped by his personal and familial background.

Kato acknowledges that autobiography inevitably seeps into his art. “It’s hard to answer that clearly, but everything I experience in life affects me in some way, and those influences likely appear in my work, often unconsciously,” he explains. Painting, for him, serves as both a pathway and a tool to absorb, process and translate these personal traces.

“I’m definitely influenced by the local culture and upbringing I experienced in Shimane, where I grew up,” he says, recalling how parents would warn children about an imaginary sea creature—a snake with a woman’s face—that appeared at night to scare them away from the water. Kato’s paintings capture the same tension animating most fairy tales: the balance between innocence and menace. His figures appear childlike yet unsettling, gentle yet otherworldly—existing between birth and death, body and spirit, human and nonhuman. These myths, he reflects, ultimately serve as a form of survival wisdom. “I only realized recently how much the environment I grew up in has influenced my work.”

Izumi Kato, Untitled, 2025. Oil on canvas, 37.5 x 116.5 x 5.6 cm | 14 3/4 x 45 7/8 x 2 3/16 in. ©2025 Izumi Kato, courtesy of the artist and Perrotin

It is by inhabiting a symbolic third realm of myth and fairy tales—one that bridges the physical and the psychological—that Kato’s images achieve their universality, subtly conveying timeless messages about the nature of human existence. However, he says that he doesn’t view the recurring motifs in his work as characters, since they lack personalities and are not part of any linear narrative or deliberate storytelling. “I use human-like figures to strengthen the composition of the painting and to spark the viewer’s imagination,” he explains. At the same time, he acknowledges that these otherworldly, symbolic visions of alternative forms of life likely belong to another realm and time—whether future or past—where species coexist in harmonious hybridization before emerging in painterly or sculptural form. Kato admits it is difficult to articulate in words, but his paintings inhabit a memorial, imaginative and spiritual realm that precedes and transcends language, defying conventional categories. They speak both to and beyond the human, offering prophecies of alternative possibilities for cosmic life within and beyond this planet and time.

Kato’s figures often appear suspended in a distinctly plasmatic dimension yet animated by an inner radiance—a kind of energetic aura. “I don’t really know where it comes from, but I believe art itself is energy,” Kato says, responding cryptically when asked what this energy represents. “I’m glad one can sense that energetic aura in my work.”

In a time defined by destruction and chaos, the mythopoiesis underlying Kato’s epiphanic, profane and totemic works offers contemporary viewers a regenerative narrative reminiscent of ancient myth, reminding us that life, evolution, decay and rebirth are part of a continuous cycle. Mapping the liminal space between collapse and renewal, his hybrid creatures inhabit that threshold, carrying the deep knowledge that decay is never the end but a necessary passage. Suggesting a survival code rooted in eternal truths and expressed through symbolic language, Kato’s works—mythological in essence and, in the spirit of Joseph Campbell’s “metaphors for the mystery of being”—bridge our waking consciousness with the vast, enduring mysteries of the universe.

Izumi Kato works at the 2025 Aichi Triennale. ©︎ Aichi Triennale Organizing Committee, Photo: Ito Tetsuo

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Elisa Carollo

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October 24, 2025
Gallery ATARAH Founder Atarah Atkinson On Building a New Exhibition Space With Old-School Ideals

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Atkinson wants to move away from what she calls “the white walls and hushed-tones approach.” Courtesy of Gallery ATARAH

There’s a new garage-fronted gallery in East Williamsburg—one that aims to be more than just an exhibition venue. While Gallery ATARAH is as much a practical endeavor as it is a passion project, founder Atarah Atkinson says she’s drawn to the ethos of early art galleries, where the focus was on creators and their creations rather than the maneuverings of an extractive art market. And so, as legacy dealers reckon with the transactional world they helped create, Atkinson is embracing the gallery-as-salon concept: an exhibition space that doubles as a communal hub, where on any given day she might host portfolio reviews, after-school workshops, mentorship meetups or community happenings.

“Gallery ATARAH represents a chance to establish a curatorial vision that is entirely my own—a creative home where I can channel my passion for connection into celebrating authentic artistic expression,” she tells Observer. To that end, the light-filled 700-square-foot space will also function as her personal studio. She has experience developing hybrid spaces, having co-founded The Atrium, a 2,500-square-foot creative production studio, in 2017. It, too, played host to a range of gatherings, from community events and movie nights to industry networking sessions.

The first exhibition in the new space, “Bright Ruin,” presents 35 new mixed-media works and sculptural installations by Atkinson that explore themes of decay and renewal, beauty and destruction and the cyclical nature of death and rebirth as it relates to the self. She curated the show—her first foray into curation, and putting together “Bright Ruin” was not only a curatorial challenge but also a level-setting exercise. “Leading with my own work was a deliberate choice,” she says. “This is my creative home, and I wanted to establish its foundational energy by modeling the level of care and attention artists can expect when collaborating with me.”

Atarah Atkinson with her exhibition “Bright Ruin.” Courtesy of Gallery ATARAH

We caught up with Atkinson not long after the opening of the gallery’s inaugural exhibition to learn more about her motivations, what it means to have an intentionally porous gallery and how she plans to measure success.

What inspired you to found Gallery ATARAH? Does what you’re creating now build on your earlier work with The Atrium?

Gallery ATARAH definitely builds on The Atrium in some foundational ways. Both ventures grew from a shared impulse: to elevate not only ourselves but our peers—to create infrastructure and resources where artistic communities could thrive. I co-founded The Atrium studio with close friend and fellow photographer Alicia Henderson when we were both finding our footing in New York. We identified a significant gap in Brooklyn for affordable, professional studio spaces that were clean, organized and genuinely client-worthy—something emerging creatives could sustain financially while building their practices. Like Gallery ATARAH, The Atrium was always about more than just the physical space; we invested in cultivating creative community. The Atrium hosted community gatherings, movie nights and organized industry networking. That experience only strengthened my understanding of what’s possible when you build spaces where artists can genuinely support one another.

Having my own gallery has been a goal since studying at the Brooks Institute, but the driving force was always about creating a platform where voices, mine and my peers’, could truly resonate without compromise or external pressure to conform. I’m drawn to the ethos of early galleries, where the focus centered on the work and the makers rather than celebrity or the market. Gallery ATARAH represents a chance to establish a curatorial vision that is entirely my own—a creative home where I can channel my passion for connection into celebrating authentic artistic expression. Where The Atrium was beautifully collaborative, this gallery allows me to expand my own creative practice while bringing other artists into a space designed for mutual growth.

Your inaugural show “Bright Ruin” features your own work—how do you see the gallery’s programming evolving as you bring in other artists?

Leading with my own work was a deliberate choice. This is my creative home, and I wanted to establish its foundational energy by modeling the level of care and attention artists can expect when collaborating with me. When artists work with Gallery ATARAH, they’re not simply engaging with a curator or business owner–they’re connecting with a fellow artist who understands the language of this life, the realities of the commitment and the nature of the work itself. “Bright Ruin” also sets a precedent for what I seek from the artists I represent, not in a stylistic sense but in the thematic undercurrents of their work. I’m interested in creatives, whether self-taught or early in their careers, who are committed to producing authentic works that delve into their unique personal experiences.

As I bring in artists with aligned values and dedication to their craft, I am excited for our programming to evolve and create layered conversations, both literally on the walls and among the people in the space. I’m particularly interested in positioning contemporary work alongside vintage and antique pieces to explore how meaningful art transcends its moment of creation. I want to encourage today’s creatives to consider their work’s longevity. I believe that when something speaks through truth, it never loses its voice, and I am drawn to art whose impact transcends time and outlasts trends. This approach naturally fosters dialogue between different practices and perspectives.

Showing multiple artists together, as we’ll do regularly at the salon nights, creates opportunities for peer connection, for learning about varied processes and for voices to be heard collectively rather than in isolation. It also offers an open invitation for diverse audiences to engage, connect and feel through the work we present together. I am also excited to eventually develop partnerships with other local Brooklyn spaces so that we can cross-promote complementary resources, events and programming.

“’Bright Ruin’ sets a precedent for what I seek from the artists I represent, not in a stylistic sense but in the thematic undercurrents of their work,” Atkinson says. Courtesy of Gallery ATARAH

Will the gallery have an open submission process, or will you curate primarily through relationships and networks?

Both, absolutely. Multiple entry points allow for more dynamic programming. Much of our initial programming features creative peers I’ve admired and collaborated with throughout my career and I’m drawing on relationships cultivated over 11+ years working as a freelance photographer in New York. For example, our winter solo exhibition features my friend and local artist Clara Rae, who will present her mixed-media practice spanning ceramics, textiles and painting.

That said, our website features a comprehensive open submission portal outlining various opportunities—salon nights, exhibitions, workshops, artist talks—and I actively encourage artists to indicate interest in multiple formats. It matters to me that submission carries no financial barrier. I’ve long viewed submission fees to art shows as problematic within the art industry. When artists apply to work with us, I commit to responding with equal care and I personally review every submission because I understand intimately how vulnerable it feels to put forth work for consideration.

I also welcome informal artist meetings—if an artist is curious about showing with us, I encourage them to reach out to arrange coffee at the gallery. We can discuss their practice, explore ideas and talk shop without any application pressure. Given that I’m drawn to personal, emotionally resonant work, I recognize that some artists need time and trust before opening up about their process. Establishing that foundation of safety matters deeply to me.

You’ve mentioned salon nights. Can you tell us more about what formats you’re most excited to pilot first?

I’m genuinely excited about all our winter programming coming together. We have some wonderful events planned that each serve different purposes in building community and supporting artists, including workshops led by various creatives across different disciplines and artist talks that give space to hear directly from makers about their processes and experiences.

I’m particularly excited about a floral workshop we have in the works for October. I think community workshops and hands-on experiences let people create something of their own, connect with themselves through making and learn new skills in a supportive setting.

Even with all these different things in motion, my primary focus is getting our first salon night off the ground; I’m hoping to hold it in November. These gatherings will provide lower-pressure opportunities for multiple artists to show work simultaneously in an intimate setting, sparking creative dialogue and peer connection without the demands of a full solo exhibition.

I believe there is something powerful about the kind of open dialogue where artists can share their journeys and audiences can ask questions in a welcoming environment. What excites me most about all these different formats is the variety of conversations they’ll generate—from the hands-on making in workshops to the reflective discussions in artist talks to the visual dialogue on the walls during salon nights. Each format welcomes different people into the creative conversation in its own way.

So many galleries operate as exclusive spaces. What does it mean for you to create a gallery that is intentionally porous and accessible?

For me, it means returning to what galleries were originally created for: prioritizing longevity and community building over immediate commercial success. Early galleries were hubs of creative conversation where artists could connect with other artists, not just sell work. As a new gallerist, I’m in this to build a sustainable model that places artists’ voices and visitor engagement at the forefront.

I want to move away from the white walls and hushed-tones approach. Galleries shouldn’t feel like spaces where you need to be silent or make yourself as small as possible. I don’t want visitors feeling like they’re an inconvenience because they’re filling the space with their energy. I want conversation in this space. When people walk in off the street, I invite them to talk with me about what they’re experiencing and how they’re feeling about the art.

When I meet with artists seeking representation, I’m more concerned with asking, “What does your work mean to you? Why are you making it? How does it impact your life?” rather than getting caught up in, “How can we market this?” While I absolutely want collectors to visit and acquire work, I’m building on the philosophy that if you create something meaningful, they will come. Authentic work speaks powerfully when given space to resonate on its own terms. By cultivating an intentionally open, welcoming and accessible environment, the focus remains on the work itself—and in that environment, both artists and audiences can build lasting connections.

How will you measure success—sales, attendance, or something less tangible?

I suppose metrics for success will be less tangible. For me, the real measure is whether participating artists feel they’re gaining something meaningful—whether that’s through artistic inspiration or collector interest. If artists engaging with the gallery feel successful on an individual level—that participating in Gallery ATARAH’s programming through an exhibition, artist talk, workshop, or salon night was a positive experience that opened new doors, introduced new ways of thinking, sparked new questions, or inspired new work—then that’s success to me.

Additionally, I truly care about how much the artwork moves people in the community and how deeply it is engaged with. I think about a woman who recently walked in off the street. After experiencing the “Bright Ruin” exhibition, she told me how serendipitous and uplifting it felt to discover the gallery, how much the work resonated with her in that exact moment when she needed it. She felt seen. That, to me, is also success. When people experience the work and carry it with them—when it moves them in a way that stays with them personally—that’s success. And if they then share how the work made them think or feel, that impact ripples outward.

Obviously, financial viability matters—Williamsburg rent being what it is—and business success means maintaining operations, supporting a robust artist roster and hosting well-attended exhibitions where genuine engagement happens. But Gallery ATARAH’s ability to inspire connection remains the primary success metric.

How do you plan to sustain the balance between your own artistic practice and the demands of being a gallerist? Or do you see them as being complementary?

I absolutely see them as complementary. I feel as though this space might hold more value for me than it might for a typical gallery owner because it is also the home of my personal practice. That investment keeps the gallery pointed toward its true north and the best way I can uphold Gallery ATARAH’s mission of fostering connection is by activating it through my own work—serving as a strong curatorial compass grounded in my creative practice.

Being an artist first gives me insight into what other artists are navigating professionally and what they need. I understand the business development challenges because I am working through them myself. I can support others in raising themselves up as business people because I am engaged in that same process. I speak their language—the language of the reality of being self-funded, the sacrifices, commitment and all of the hard work that goes along with being an artist. Rather than being just a curator or gallery owner, artists are connecting with someone who truly understands their journey because I’m walking the same path. This is my creative home, and I’m extending an invitation to others to participate in building it with me.

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Christa Terry

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October 23, 2025
Repeating Patterns: How Artist Eamon Ore-Giron Is Keeping Ancient Deities Alive

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Los Angeles artist Eamon Ore-Giron with his sprawling panoramic piece, Tomorrow’s Monsoon. Courtesy of James Cohan Gallery

When I visited Eamon Ore-Giron’s Talking Shit with Amaru, currently on display in “Grounded” at LACMA, I was struck by the painting’s congenial quality—the vibrant color palette, the bold shapes summoning the eye from one edge to the next. The composition borders on symmetry, though never fully embraces it, and the painting as a whole is animated by a certain verve and versatility. The negative space serves as a visual digestif, arranging itself around the striking motifs and the vivid colors, which open themselves to the viewer’s interpretation. As the title implies, Talking Shit with Amaru is a conversation, albeit a visual one.

The painting, which depicts the transdimensional hybrid creature of Andean mythology, is idiomatic of the Los Angeles-based artist’s half-abstract, half-representational style. In his Talking Shit series, Ore-Giron has conducted an ongoing conversation with the artistic legacy of the ancient Americas, embracing symbols and forms from ancient Andean and Incan textile, architecture, mosaic and ceramic practice. He especially favors the artistic technique of contour rivalry—a visual style rooted in the Chavín culture of the central Andes. Ore-Giron’s own style has cycled through various stages of figuration and abstraction, a process by which he has developed his visual language—one that engages the expectations of contemporary Western abstraction, while communing with the arcana of ancient American artistry.

Talking Shit with Amaru by Eamon Ore-Giron, a painted conversation depicting an ancient Andean deity. Courtesy of James Cohan Gallery

“Depending on the heritage, a lot of abstraction lives side by side with the figure in the form,” Ore-Giron tells Observer. “Nature can provide some of the original forms in abstraction, like the pattern on a snake’s skin or the pattern on an insect.”

Disparate ecologies: Amaru at LACMA

Nature—and its impact—was a core theme of “Grounded,” which mapped perfectly onto Ore-Giron’s 2021 painting. “This idea of nature is not something external. It’s something internal,” he says when asked what excited him about the premise of the exhibition. “This piece, in particular, is internal in the sense that it’s a story that I carry with me—the gods that live here and still live here. Being ‘grounded,’ essentially, can actually be manifested in stories and in imagery and in a rekindling of a personal relationship to these deities.”

Ore-Giron’s work favors the viewer’s personal connection with its subject over impressing a precise intention on its form or meaning. As such, in Talking Shit with Amaru—which appears, at first, as a vivid constellation of shapes, colors and varied opacities—takes on different dimensions the longer the viewer regards it. A body forms out of the multicolored coordinate circles, talons bookend fluid lines, a tongue bolts down the width of the linen canvas. Fittingly, Amaru is a deity with the ability to transcend the boundaries of the aerial and terrestrial worlds, a celestial interloper. He explains that, having very few depictions of this particular creature, he mostly drew from Amaru’s mythographic descriptions. In his depiction of the god, Amaru is not an ancient deity but one that rhymes with the conventions and culture of modern-day Latin America.

“There are so many different ways in which ancient history interfaces with modernity,” Ore-Giron explains, expressing his fascination with the ways in which ancient aesthetics and stories have survived into the modern day, and how our concept of modernity often informs our interpretation of the past. For example, the name “Amaru” carries vastly different implications in today’s Andean culture than it once did, eliciting notions of both divine power and individual identity. Among the Peruvian resistance fighters, “Túpac Amaru” was a name given to someone who fought against colonial powers. In Talking Shit with Amaru, Ore-Giron effects a portrayal that incorporates not only figure, but legacy.

Ore-Giron’s tools of the trade: mineral paints, a careful color palette and stretched raw linen. Courtesy of James Cohan Gallery

“It’s interesting that these deities then can take on these names in a culture,” Ore-Giron continues. “Even as the culture model changes so much. It goes through so many different changes, [but] doesn’t stay fixed. It’s not static. The most fascinating thing is the ways in which these deities and these ideas and the visual language all around it are constantly being reinvented.”

Resistance, reinvention, repetition

This theme of reinvention and resistance is present in every fiber of Ore-Giron’s work, from the subject matter to his preference for painting on raw linen as opposed to pristine, gessoed canvas. (“There’s sometimes little blades of grass that are accidentally woven in the factory,” he says of the linen. “It’s very physical.”) A musician as well as a visual artist, his creative identities often intersect at the very same juncture of reinterpretation and cross-cultural exchange. He lived in Mexico City in the 1990s and found a wealth of inspiration from the city’s DJ culture, which often sampled and mixed Peruvian music. He was fascinated by the subculture’s decision to find its primary inspiration in another Latin American culture as opposed to a Western one. “Instead of being oriented towards the north, toward the United States or toward Europe,” he elaborates. “Their primary focus was the south and to look to the south for inspiration.”

Similarly, Ore-Giron synthesizes Latin American folk music such as Cumbia with the esoteric production techniques of artists such as MF DOOM. “I think it had a profound impact on the way that I approach visual language as well,” he says, “because it made me want to look deeper into the histories of visual language in Latin America. On a conceptual level, that’s where the music and the art really are working together.” As such, on Ore-Giron’s grounded linen canvases, where abstraction meets figuration, antiquity meets modernity and a visual rhythm that rings above all, strong and resonant.

Talking Shit with Amaru is on view in LACMA’s “Grounded” through June 21, 2026. James Cohan Gallery in Tribeca will show “Eamon Ore-Giron” from November 7 through December 20, 2025.

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Mya Ward

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October 16, 2025
Rachel Ruysch’s Tirade of Beauty at Boston’s MFA

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Rachel Ruysch, Posy of Flowers with a Beetle on a Stone Ledge, 1741. Oil on canvas. Courtesy the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Craving ever new varieties in nature for experimentation, Darwin wrote to his good friend and botanist, Joseph Hooker, “I have a passion to grow orchid seeds…for love of Heaven favour my madness & have some lichens or mosses scraped off & sent me. I am a gambler & love a wild experiment.” It seems that Darwin was not the only one to crave exotic flowers. Three centuries earlier, the Dutch were hot on the trail to expand their imperial power by collecting exotic specimens from all over the world. The Dutch East India Company was established in 1602 and the West East India Company in 1621, enabling the empire’s expansion through their maritime fleet. By using enslaved labor, they amassed huge collections of flowers, insects, reptiles and birds from North and South America, Africa, Australia, India and even Borneo. The difficulty in transporting all of these delicate specimens across vast oceans was extreme. There were rats on board ships, and radical changes of temperature going from the tropics to frigid Europe. The Dutch greenhouses on Cape Horn were a stopover for the exotics, before the last treacherous sail home. Cape Horn has the deadliest seas on Earth.

During the 1600s in the Netherlands, hundreds of devoted scientists and artists documented these discoveries. One of the most famous was the painter Rachel Ruysch. Her father, Frederik Ruysch, a renowned collector and artist, was known for his anatomical, zoological and botanical specimens, as well as his embalming technique. This was Rachel’s early laboratory until she went on to study painting, becoming the highest-paid painter in the Netherlands, earning more money than Rembrandt.

Born in 1664, she painted for seven decades, dying in 1750 at the age of 86. She painted 185 known works (possibly 250). She was lauded during her time, internationally famous and the subject of poems. She painted from the age of 15 and well into her 80s. Lest we forget, Ruysch also had ten children. None of the poems mentions that.

And her paintings are downright gorgeous. The vitality of her work, the meticulous accuracy, the fullness of color and the enchanting compositions are a wonder to behold. She painted nature in all its blooming, populated with exotic flowers, fruits, insects, reptiles, moths and butterflies. The paintings are rich in vibrant color, deeply shaded and with exact anatomical precision. She recorded for the ages flora and fauna, insects and reptiles, that may now already be extinct or on their way to extinction.

Michiel van Musscher, Rachel Ruysch, 1692. Oil on canvas. Courtesy the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

The MFA in Boston is displaying 35 of Ruysch’s paintings in all their glory in “Rachel Ruysch: Artist, Naturalist, and Pioneer.” In the floral still lifes, she focuses not just on the blooms but also on the creatures that populated the flowers. From 1686, Forest Recess with Flowers, the blooms are framed in loping, draping milk thistle leaves, almost like reptilian skin. A curling mushroom below, a frog, snail, moths, tree trunk, the clay forest floor—these details lift her far beyond a flower painter into a deep and astute scientific observer.

In 1714, she paints a still life with 25 species from 15 botanical families of flowers and fruit. Still Life with Fruits and Flowers displays a cacophony of pomegranates, peaches, corn, wheat, grapes, squash, pumpkin, along with tulips, peonies, lizard, butterflies and moths. You wonder how long it took her to paint these bounties before decay set in. Everything is fresh, glistening, delicious, fragrant—alive. A sumptuous, irresistible feast, joining the hungry reptiles and insects.

She doesn’t stop there. In 1735, Still Life of Exotic Flowers on a Marble Ledge, she paints 36 species from around the world. Represented are flowers native to North and South America, South Africa, the Caribbean, East and Southeast Asia. She includes in her many paintings 17 species of diurnal butterflies (active during the day), 24 species of moths, spiders and many species of bee beetles, including the mango longhorn beetle from South America. There are lizards and birds and egg shells, and many plants in the cactus family. A painting technique prevalent in nature paintings during her early career was lepidochromy. Butterfly wings were pressed into the wet paint for further authenticity. Ruysch often placed exotic and native animals, butterflies and flowers together—always with an astute eye for composition.

Rachel Ruysch, Still Life with Fruits and Flowers, 1714. Oil on canvas. © Kunstsammlungen und Museen Augsburg / Photo: Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Nicole Wilhelms / Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

She also included frogs and toads. One, Surinam toad (Pipa pipa), gets a portrait all to herself. The entire painting is dark green and brown, hard to see. Does it need cleaning? The toad is accompanied nearby with a specimen in a glass jar, better to see the indentations in her back where the male leaves his sperm. The eggs incubate in these small craters on her back until they hatch, fully formed.

The curator, Anna Knaap, has organized the exhibit into six luxurious sections, highlighted against sumptuously painted dark, rich burgundy and deep green walls. In the sections are specimens in glass jars of reptiles, cases of pinned butterflies and moths, maps of the empire, botanical drawings, as well as paintings by her sister Anna Ruysch and many other Dutch painters of that time. The plant and insect specimens are from Harvard University’s Herbarium and Museum of Comparative Zoology.

Ruysch’s last painting, Posy of Flowers with a Beetle on a Stone Ledge, 1741, is comparatively small with very few flowers. The bowl of the pink peony is flecked with dew and a bee. It is a tender painting and luminous. To see an exhibition including all three giants—Darwin, Ruysch and Emily Dickinson, another lover of botany and flowers—would be exciting. As Dickinson wrote in Flowers – Well – if anybody:

Butterflies from St. Domingo
Cruising round the purple line—
Have a system of aesthetics—
Far superior to mine.

“Rachel Ruysch: Artist, Naturalist, and Pioneer” is at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, through December 7, 2025. An excellent, comprehensive, award-winning catalogue accompanies the exhibition.

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Dian Parker

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October 14, 2025
One Fine Show: ‘This is What You Get’ at the Ashmolean Museum

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Stanley Donwood (b. 1968) and Thom Yorke (b. 1968), Pacific Coast, 2003. Acrylic on canvas, 150 x 150 cm. Collection of Stanley Donwood. Photo: Ellie Atkins © Stanley Donwood and Thom Yorke

With a few glaring exceptions, Radiohead is known to have good taste when it comes to the people with whom its members choose to collaborate. Their music videos have been directed by Jonathan Glazer and Paul Thomas Anderson, for whom Jonny Greenwood has done several soundtracks, and Thom Yorke did the excellent score for Luca Guadagnino’s 2018 Suspiria remake, which had every possibility of being good in other regards as well. And who could forget Yorke and Greenwood’s appearance as themselves in the South Park episode “Scott Tenorman Must Die” (2001), mocking the villain for crying because Cartman had killed his parents?

A new show at the Ashmolean Museum, “This Is What You Get,” celebrates the band’s visual art for their albums and related materials. They have collaborated with artist Stanley Donwood on every album since their second, “The Bends” (1995), the cover of which features a CPR dummy that Yorke and Donwood discovered after they snuck into the basement of Oxford’s John Radcliffe Hospital. Ever since, Yorke and Donwood have been partners in all the band’s visual language, which is vast and complex. This homecoming exhibition features over 180 works—paintings, digital compositions, etchings, drawings and lyric sketches.

Radiohead makes peerless music, but the exhibition demonstrates the extent to which their stirring album covers have wrapped these songs in a universe, a vibe, perhaps even an ethos. Because the band has been so influential, it can be a chicken-and-egg question as to whether their artwork was ahead of its time or simply shaped public consciousness because of how widespread it became.

I would argue that it’s the former. Take the hollow-feeling, glitched-out landscape of OK Computer. This was created from a deep engagement with the moment: Yorke playing Tomb Raider (1996) in the studio with Donwood and noticing that when the scenery blurred due to memory errors, it was “the most beautiful thing we’ve ever seen.” The pair used an early Macintosh to design the cover, setting a rule for themselves that they could not undo any changes they made. The end result is a triumph. Not many people were making art like that in 1997. You’d have to compare it to the contemporary output by luminaries such as Julie Mehretu, Richard Prince and Christopher Wool.

Some like to say they stopped after “Amnesiac” (2001), but “Hail to the Thief” (2003) and “In Rainbows” (2007) can be said of the visuals. Hail to the Thief has a false-naive style of painting—similar to artists who have become wildly popular today, like Jane Dickson and Stanley Whitney—while the spilled wax of In Rainbows recalls Wolfgang Tillmans’s recent efforts to make photography more organic and abstract. In the catalogue, Donwood is most proud of the T-shirts from the In Rainbows tour. Radiohead’s practice is precise and holistic, and the results have proven them to be consistently ahead of the curve in almost every way.

“This is What You Get” is on view at the Ashmolean Museum through January 11, 2026.

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Dan Duray

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October 13, 2025
The Myth of the Lone Creative Genius: Why Collective Artmaking Matters Now

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From Soviet Constructivists to decolonial collectives today, collaboration reveals art as a collective practice of resistance and renewal. Mauricio Hoyos

The art world at large has long championed a myth: the lone creator. From gallery shows to book publishing, film production to music charts, cultural institutions and markets alike celebrate the individual creator, a genius of their chosen vocation, who seemingly creates in a vacuum. In the digital age, this perception of pure individualism has only intensified, reinforced by personal branding, follower counts and visibility as prerequisites for artistic survival and identity. However, the concept of the “lone creative genius” is neither natural nor universal—it is a historical construct shaped by particular cultural, political and economic forces.

Work across film, music and large-scale, cross-continent collaborative projects demonstrates the opposite: creativity thrives in collectivity. Directing films and music videos revealed how supposedly singular artistic achievements depend on the contributions of entire teams of skilled professionals. The prevailing agenda often pushes individuals forward as the front-facing source of creativity, but such recognition rarely reflects the collaborative networks behind the work. This realization has shaped a sustained commitment to building projects through collective authorship and challenging dominant paradigms of creation and circulation, especially those that center the experiences of marginalized communities.

Ndebele beadworkers thread panels for the MiG-21 in Mpumalanga Province, South Africa. Nic Hofmeyr

Recent projects underscore this point. For over ten years, I have been working with an international community of artisans, fabricators and creators to create large-scale works across mediums. The MiG-21 Project brought together more than a hundred participants across two continents—from Johannesburg’s urban center, the rural landscapes of Mpumalanga and the coastal region of KwaZulu-Natal to Downtown Los Angeles. Four teams spanning five nationalities, multiple ethnic backgrounds and five primary languages bridged a 10-hour time difference to create a truly international collaboration. Each participant contributed unique expertise and cultural perspectives, illustrating the potential of global collective action.

Collective artmaking represents a radical reimagining of the creative practice itself—the work as a whole represents the shared narratives of those who contributed to its creation. This carries profound implications for social solidarity and political resistance in an era defined by neoliberal individualism and digital atomization.

The act of creating art together has a rich history as a means of resisting dominant cultural and political systems. From Soviet Constructivists in the 1920s to feminist art collectives of the 1970s, collaborative creation has often emerged during times of social upheaval and political struggle. Movements such as Dada, the Situationists and the Black Arts Movement all adopted group approaches that rejected individual authorship and sought to break down boundaries between art and everyday life, between creators and audiences. Contemporary art collectives build on these historical examples while responding to current conditions of digital capitalism and global inequality.

When centered on marginalized communities, collective art-making practices enable the pooling of resources, skills and social networks, creating pathways to visibility that may have been previously unavailable. Collective processes also surface forms of knowledge and aesthetic traditions that have been historically excluded from Western cultural hierarchies. The Zapatista principle of “walking while questioning” informs many Indigenous and decolonial art collectives, which emphasizes process over product and collective wisdom over individual expertise. These approaches expand the very definition of what art is and who it serves.

Working together, artists reframe authorship as solidarity, a counterpoint to the individualism of the art market. Nic Hofmeyr

Despite its potential, collective artmaking faces systemic barriers within contemporary cultural economies. Funding structures, legal frameworks for intellectual property and exhibition formats remain oriented toward individual creators, making it difficult for collectives to secure resources and recognition. Even when collectives achieve visibility, they often face pressure to designate individual spokespeople or stars, reinforcing the very hierarchies they seek to challenge. Moreover, collectivity itself is not inherently progressive or resistant. The true radical potential of collective artmaking lies less in the final works produced than in the alternative social relationships created through collaborative processes.

In an era of increasingly isolated digital environments and urgent global challenges that require coordinated action, collective artmaking offers crucial lessons about working together across differences, sharing ownership of creative processes and generating meaning beyond markets, hierarchies and borders. As scholar Walter Mignolo argues, such approaches enact “epistemic disobedience” that disrupts the colonial underpinnings of Western aesthetic categories and evaluation systems. These processes remind us that resistance is not just about opposing what exists—it is also about the patient and collaborative work of creating alternatives. In a world that constantly insists that “There is no alternative” to competitive individualism, making art together may be one of our most potent forms of imagining something better.

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Ralph Ziman

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October 10, 2025
Celebration, Resilience and Creative Brilliance: Inside the Museum of the African Diaspora Afropolitan Ball

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Corinne Dixon, Pandora Thomas and Nicole Dixon. Photo: Drew Altizer

The crown jewel of this year’s Nexus: SF/Bay Area Black Art Week was the Museum of the African Diaspora’s Afropolitan Ball—a glittering, high-octane gala that raised more than $1 million for the institution’s programming. The black-tie fête once again drew a mix of power players from art, fashion, entertainment and philanthropy, all converging at the San Francisco Ferry Building to see and be seen while celebrating MoAD’s 20th anniversary.

Spotted in the cosmopolitan crowd were artists Mildred Howard, Zully Adler, Cheryl Derricotte, Mikael Owunna, Marta Thoma Hall, Ayana V. Jackson, Gustavo Nazareno, Ramekon O’Arwisters and Lava Thomas; curators Francesco Dama, Ashara Ekundayo and Yasmin Lambie-Simpson; and gallerist Jeremy Patricia Stone. Also in attendance were San Francisco Director of Cultural Affairs Ralph Remington, political powerbroker Willie L. Brown Jr., arts patron Irwin Federman, multihyphenate creator Joy Ofodu, philanthropist Mary Graham, director and screenwriter Maya Forbes and China Forbes, lead singer of Pink Martini. The latter are sisters, MoAD board members and daughters of board vice chair Peggy Woodford Forbes, founder and former CEO of Woodford Capital Management. (Supporting MoAD, it seems, runs in the family.)

Mary Graham. Jessica Monroy for Drew Altizer Photography

Kicking off the evening’s festivities, event chair Eric McDonnell took the stage to spotlight MoAD’s achievements over two decades before Woodford Forbes honored the museum’s founding board, including Belva Davis, inaugural board president and the first African American woman television reporter on the West Coast. MoAD executive director and CEO Monetta White then unveiled the museum’s new mandate. “We step boldly into the future with a new mission, to place contemporary art and artists of the African Diaspora at the center of the global cultural conversation,” she said. “This is not just a statement, it is a charge. A charge to lift up the voices of artists from the African Diaspora and to make sure their contributions are not at the margins, but at the very center of culture.”

Once the speeches concluded, auction specialist Naomi Lewis rallied the glitterati to raise their paddles for experiences including a Donum Estate wine tasting and a private dinner with White and curator Key Jo Lee. A spellbinding performance by Alonzo King LINES Ballet followed—offering a preview of its upcoming collaboration with Grammy-winning artist Esperanza Spalding—before DJ Novena Carmel took over the balcony, spinning a genre-spanning set that kept guests dancing late into the night.

Eric McDonnell, Monetta White, Ralph Remington and Key Jo Lee

Eric McDonnell, Monetta White, Ralph Remington and Key Jo Lee. Mahelly Ferreira for Drew Altizer Photography

Naomi Lewis

Naomi Lewis. Jessica Monroy for Drew Altizer Photography

Maya Forbes and China Forbes

Maya Forbes and China Forbes. Mahelly Ferreira for Drew Altizer Photography

Mikael Owunna

Mikael Owunna. Jessica Monroy for Drew Altizer Photography

Ayana Jackson, Gustavo Nazareno, Lava Thomas and Yasmin Lambie-Simpson

Ayana Jackson, Gustavo Nazareno, Lava Thomas and Yasmin Lambie-Simpson. Jessica Monroy for Drew Altizer Photography

Robin Washington and Carl Washington

Robin Washington and Carl Washington. Jessica Monroy for Drew Altizer Photography

Toye Moses and Alma Robinson Moses

Toye Moses and Alma Robinson Moses. Mahelly Ferreira for Drew Altizer Photography

Willie Brown and Monetta White

Willie Brown and Monetta White. Photo: Drew Altizer

Luke Liss, Peggy Woodford Forbes and Shana Simmons

Luke Liss, Peggy Woodford Forbes and Shana Simmons. Mahelly Ferreira for Drew Altizer Photography

Brandin Vaughn and Gustavo Nazareno

Brandin Vaughn and Gustavo Nazareno. Jessica Monroy for Drew Altizer Photography

Joy Ofodu

Joy Ofodu. Mahelly Ferreira for Drew Altizer Photography

Chuck Collins, Paula Collins and Ralph Remington

Chuck Collins, Paula Collins and Ralph Remington. Mahelly Ferreira for Drew Altizer Photography

Concepcion Federman and Irwin Federman

Concepcion Federman and Irwin Federman. Mahelly Ferreira for Drew Altizer Photography

Key Jo Lee, Lava Thomas, Ashara Ekundayo and Richard Beavers

Key Jo Lee, Lava Thomas, Ashara Ekundayo and Richard Beavers. Photo: Drew Altizer

Naomi Lewis and Ramekon O’Arwisters

Naomi Lewis and Ramekon O’Arwisters. Photo: Drew Altizer

Charisse Howse and David Howse

Charisse Howse and David Howse. Jessica Monroy for Drew Altizer Photography

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Christa Terry

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October 7, 2025
Shara Hughes’s Luminous Landscapes Open Portals into Life, Death and the Sublime

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Shara Hughes’s “Weather Report” is at David Kordansky Gallery in New York through October 18. Photo: On White Wall Studio, courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery

Shara Hughes is one of those names that surged during the pandemic, when demand for her paintings spiked and prices climbed quickly, culminating in her record sale of $2,940,000 at Christie’s in May 2022. Yet interest in her work has not waned. Her lush, vibrant visions of nature continue to strike a universal chord, speaking to the human condition and our connection to the world in ways that move beyond market trends.

Her new body of work, unveiled in “Weather Report” at David Kordansky Gallery during Armory and New York art week, demonstrates Hughes’s painterly command and the existential weight her practice has taken on. Each of the nine large-scale canvases on view unfolds as a dense world of thought and feeling, of self-reflection and experimentation, the outpouring of an artist confronting a pivotal moment in both her life and her creative path.

“Over the past year or so, I’ve just become more connected to myself, and that kind of growth happens naturally as we get older,” Hughes says when we catch up after the fairs, reflecting on the many shifts in her life recently—her parents aging, her marriage, her friends having children—and how these changes inevitably shape how she sees and makes work. “I’m getting into middle age, and it feels like those kinds of things are becoming more real,” she adds. Questions about the afterlife, about the fleeting and fragile nature of emotions and existence, surface in waves, not constantly but with force when they arrive. “Last summer, I did lose someone in my family, and even though we weren’t especially close, her death jolted me into thinking, what if that were me? It pushed me into those spiritual questions: what is the afterlife, is it really so scary?”

Shara Hughes. Portrait: Mary Inhea Kang, courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery

While Hughes did not set out to make this show a meditation on existential themes, they inevitably shape the works. Her approach to the canvas remains instinctive, driven by an intuitive response to what colors and gestures suggest. Brushstrokes build layer by layer, forming compositions of vibrant tones and painterly currents that resist conventional representation, instead settling into an unorthodox balance.

“The way I work is really abstract. At the beginning, I might just throw down a few colors and then respond to them, letting the painting guide me more than me directing it,” Hughes admits. “In that sense, it’s very intuitive and reactionary to both the canvas and myself,” she adds. “I’m not trying to illustrate anything specific; the painting shows me how I feel.”

Hughes uses dizzying brushwork, vibrant colors and shifting perspectives to make paintings that defy many of the existing conventions associated with the landscape genre. Photo: On White Wall Studio, courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery

For this reason, Hughes often describes her works as psychological and emotional landscapes: the progressive layering of paint and shifting colors mirrors the complexity of how we process and elaborate the surrounding reality through our senses. Her image-making follows and echoes the meaning-making process we all undergo in “being-in-the-world,” something that precedes any linguistic or symbolic codification. “Often I start without a clear goal, and the painting ends up teaching me—showing me I’m thinking about something or still upset about something agitating inside.”

Although these works may appear semi-abstract, they represent something very real for Hughes—the reality of the psyche, and the intricate interplay of senses, emotions, and psychological, even pre-cognitive, experience. “Every single thing I paint feels deeply connected to my own experience,” she clarifies. “I hate when people use the word ‘fantasy’ to describe my work because these aren’t fantastical places; they’re real to me, part of my lived experience. They’re very much grounded in reality.”

Hughes often describes her works as autobiographical, though they are less about recounting events than translating moods and emotional atmospheres. “‘This is how I feel about this event.’ It’s more about filtering my feelings through the idea of landscape,” she explains.

Hughes’s process rarely involves reference images; instead, she transposes the psychological complexity of her interior world into lush and layered compositions. Photo: On White Wall Studio, courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery

Her recurring choice of landscapes and nature as sites to project and reflect her feelings is tied to her upbringing in Atlanta, Georgia. “I wasn’t in wild nature every day—it was the city—but I lived on a lake, so I spent a lot of time outdoors,” she recounts. “My family also had a tree farm about two hours south, and I’d go there often with my brothers and friends. I did a lot of camping and backpacking, so I always felt a connection to nature.” Interestingly, Hughes only began painting landscapes after moving to New York, perhaps as a way of longing for the lush environments that had long shaped her life and imagination.

What immediately strikes viewers in this new body of work is its heightened luminosity, which expands the canvas into surrounding space with an auratic, almost epiphanic presence that extends beyond the physical surface. If Hughes’s paintings have always had the ability to channel the very energy of the landscape, this series feels animated by a deeper animistic spirituality, suggesting an intensified awareness of the need to emotionally reattune with our environment and reconceive ourselves as part of broader ecologies of interdependence and symbiotic relations.

Hughes recalls visiting Niagara Falls last summer and being overwhelmed by the sheer force of nature and the vitality of its primordial energy. That same sensation flows through these canvases, where she seeks to capture the generative power that art-making can unlock. Works such as The Good Light (2025), The Rift (2025) and Niagara (2025) transpose onto canvas the relentless vitality of flowing water and the radiant energy of sunlight colliding with cascading drops that dissolve into air before beginning their cycle anew.

Each of the nine large-scale works on view encompasses a world of thought, feeling, self-reflection and open-ended experimentation. Photo: On White Wall Studio, courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery

For Hughes, these paintings are less about the afterlife than about a larger current of energy that surpasses us. “It’s the cycle of life, for sure, but also the force behind it—something hopeful and exciting we can lean on,” she reflects. In Mama (2025), for example, she sought to express nature as a quilt or a hug—something stable and generative, a maternal presence, the timeless archetype of Mother Nature. “It could be a mound of flowers larger than life, or a rock that transforms into a figure you might go to for stability or even worship, like a Madonna figure,” she explains. “All of these elements are part of nature, but also part of the psychological landscapes I’m always exploring.”

Hughes’s paintings humanize and personify nature, giving it the presence of characters. In Bigger Person (2024), the interwoven visual field between foreground and background becomes the stage for a tension between figuration and abstraction, between human and nature, which ultimately coexist in a generative exchange of forces. “Often I use trees, plants and flowers to suggest a human presence, a self-portrait or even a portrait of someone. In that way, the landscape imagery allows me to connect with everyone,” Hughes reflects. Nature becomes, for her, a platform to contemplate human existence beyond categorization and individuation, reaching instead for universality. “A tree doesn’t need to be labeled as female or male or given a certain skin color or age. It becomes universal.”

Other paintings, like Pearl Gate (2025), appear to inhabit a liminal space beyond both the sensory and human world, evoking an archetypal and magical dimension of landscape, one historically acknowledged and embraced through symbols and rituals, often in opposition to anthropocentric, rational or scientific narratives.

MaMa (2025), an eight-foot-tall forest scene is dominated by a luminous field of red, orange and yellow that cascades down from the sun-like head of a flower anchoring the composition’s top edge. Photo: On White Wall Studio, courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery

In this sense, Hughes’s approach to landscape echoes that of Romanticism, which treated nature not simply as a subject to be depicted but as a privileged arena for probing the essence of the human condition in relation to immensity. For the Romantics, landscape was never mere scenery but rather a stage on which to confront mortality, transcendence and the fragile limits of human power against overwhelming natural forces. Hughes recognizes this legacy, acknowledging that her paintings respond to the same Romantic notion of the “sublime”: a vision of nature that provokes wonder and terror, awe and unease in equal measure.

Ultimately, while Hughes insists on grounding her works in sensorial and emotional human perception, these syntheses of color, light and natural elements—offered to the human eye yet absent of the human subject—gesture toward more-than-human realms and beyond human time. They suggest alternative ways of feeling, perceiving and embracing the vital entanglements of life forms and cosmic phenomena on which our existence depends.

Hughes’s works exist in and are nourished by this liminal space, poised between the sensorial and the psychological, the earthly and the unearthly—a threshold only color and paint can traverse. “I think I’m always contradicting myself in the work, and that’s important,” Hughes says. “What does continue to grow, though, is my connection to the work and my confidence in it, and maybe that comes through in the expansion of approaches and how many different types of painting are in the show.”

Yet these luminous landscapes also function as portals between worlds, suggesting that the longing for transcendence can be satisfied by contemplating nature. In doing so, they invite us to accept both the limits and possibilities of our human position within it while rediscovering nature’s spiritual and energetic force once we reattune ourselves to its primordial powers of creation over destruction.

In open-ended experiments in image-making, Hughes depicts kaleidoscopic visions of flora and fauna in processes of constant evolution. Photo: On White Wall Studio, courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery

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Elisa Carollo

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October 3, 2025
Kathy Ryan On Curating Joy Through Different Artists’ Lenses

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In capturing joy, Mickalene Thomas stayed close to home. Zach Hilty/BFA.com

Those who enjoy photography have had a hard time in recent years. Because it is associated with the apps through which people of all ages communicate, it is taken for background—as that thing that distracts you from your DMs. The art boom caused the medium to be neglected at galleries (because you can’t really see the same ROI on photography that you can with painting), and now that the market is down, the only answer seems to be smaller paintings. It’s always been a little surprising that Apple, which is occasionally the most valuable company in the world, would commission a photography exhibition alongside the launch of its new iPhones. But they’ve done exhibitions for the past two releases, and the latest iteration staged in Chelsea, London and Shanghai simultaneously felt like it could have passed for your average gallery show.

Held at the old Petzel space on 18th Street, “Joy, in 3 Parts” was curated by Kathy Ryan, longtime director of photography at the New York Times Magazine. The show brought together works by Inez & Vinoodh, Mickalene Thomas and Trunk Xu, each tasked with interpreting joy. The result was three bodies of work that were handsome and strange, a credit to Ryan’s flexibility.

Trunk Xu, Untitled, 2025. © Trunk Xu

Inez & Vinoodh used the prompt to tell a love story about their son and his partner over five images. “They saw joy as their son’s love story,” Ryan told Observer, in part because it reminded them of their own meeting at art school. The artists were inspired by Zabriskie Point (1970) and its desert landscape, and so took the opportunity to travel to Marfa, Texas, for their shoot.

There are shades of Badlands (1973), too. In Marfa, the besotted couple is accompanied by a red fabric that becomes its own character—a veil, a flag, a cocoon. Sure, the fabric basically symbolizes the love between the two kids, but in no way does this come off as corny. “Whenever their work goes into the surreal, something magical always happens,” Ryan said. “That red cloth became almost like a character.”

The sequence flanks three vivid color images with black-and-white portraits. One key frame—Charles and Natalie running with the red fabric behind them—was transformed when the sun broke through clouds. “You plan and plan, and then you hope serendipity kicks in,” Ryan said. “Just before the sun went down, we got that terrific rainbow flare.”

Where Inez & Vinoodh looked outward, Mickalene Thomas stayed close to home. She chose Fort Greene Park, her local Brooklyn greenspace, and captured neighborhood life in seemingly candid encounters: dancers, rope jumpers, a couple in a hammock. Initially shot in color, the series turned during editing. “After the first morning, she said, ‘You know what: I’m seeing this in black and white,’” Ryan said. “It strips away unnecessary noise and lets you lean into rhythm, form and emotion.”

It’s a bold move for someone associated with her use of color. According to Ryan, Thomas said politics were behind the choice. She wanted to represent Black people outside of the context of labor. “This work counters that narrative,” Ryan said, “exploring rest as a form of resistance, power, and self-reclamation.” They feel documentary, cinematic and natural all at once.

How Trunk Xu visualizes joy. Zach Hilty/BFA.com

Meanwhile, Beijing-born, Los Angeles-based Trunk Xu staged his contributions in a more obvious way and chose to confront the omnipresence of cameras in daily life. “The whole idea was fine art, not ads,” she said. But he was adamant, in a good way. To him, joy is wrapped up in the process of documenting. “The picture itself and the making of the picture is part of that dance with life.” His tableaux show skaters, beachgoers and couples photographing one another on their phones, but in subtle and unorthodox ways, with tight composition.

Ryan closed our conversation by situating the phone within photography’s long arc: from 8×10 plates to 35mm reportage, Polaroid experiments and now pocket devices with multiple 48MP sensors. My favorite of Xu’s images involved a pool shot that seemed to be captured by several people, but ironically, you can’t see any of their phones.

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Dan Duray

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September 27, 2025
In the Latest Genesis Facade Commission, Jeffrey Gibson Calls for Awareness Beyond the Human

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The latest Genesis Facade Commission, “Jeffrey Gibson, The Animal Therefore I Am.” Courtesy the artist. Image credit: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Photo by Eugenia Burnett Tinsley

Following the explosion of color from his kaleidoscopic takeover of the U.S. Pavilion during the last Venice Biennale, Jeffrey Gibson unveiled his works for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s latest Genesis Facade Commission last week. Titled “The Animal That Therefore I Am,” Gibson’s intervention features a series of monumental bronze sculptures, marking his first time working with the material at such scale within a public institution and platform.

The title of the installation is highly evocative and symbolic, suggesting a move away from a human-centric worldview toward a more fluid, hybrid identification with other species and the environment. It originates from a series of lectures by French-Algerian philosopher Jacques Derrida that Gibson first encountered in the late 1990s, the artist told Observer after the unveiling. Titled “The Autobiographical Animal,” Derrida’s lecture—originally a ten-hour seminar he delivered in 1997 at the Cerisy conference—was later published in French as L’animal que donc je suis (à suivre) and in English as The Animal That Therefore I Am.

Jeffrey Gibson. Photo: Eileen Travell

In his lecture, Derrida argued that animals possess a form of subjectivity and autonomous intellect—certainly more than the Western philosophical tradition has typically allowed—and asserts that, “For the most part, the philosophers … have refused the animal all kinds of attributes that one recognizes in oneself, such as the ability to respond, the ability to suffer, the ability to be aware.” For the philosopher, the relational and existential confrontation with an animal’s gaze provokes a fundamental destabilization of the human subject. “I often ask myself, just to see, who I am—and who I am when, caught naked, in silence, by the gaze of an animal, for example, the eyes of a cat, I have trouble, a bad time overcoming my embarrassment.”

For the French philosopher, the animal gaze already reveals an unsettling glimpse into the abyssal boundary of the human—the inhuman or the ahuman, the ends of man. “I have been aware of Indigenous worldviews and kinship philosophies that honor animals, plant life and other living beings for some time,” Gibson explained. “I find that other animal species are rarely acknowledged as having their own independent intellect and autonomous relationship with the larger world.”

For the artist, Derrida’s lectures offered a vital revelation: humans routinely fail to extend equitable respect to other animals. “This lack of respect reflects a loss of empathy, which ultimately allows for an indulgence in violent behavior toward other living beings,” he reflected, echoing Derrida’s argument that denying animals the capacity to respond reveals a broader failure of respect and responsibility in our relationship with life itself.

Jeffrey Gibson, they are witty and transform themselves in order to guide us nashoba holba / wayaha / coyote. Courtesy the artist. Image credit: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Photo by Eugenia Burnett Tinsley

Rising with an auratic, totemic presence before the Met’s historic facade—rooted in Western ideals of beauty and order, shaped by Classical art and framed by Neoclassicism and Beaux-Arts—Gibson’s sculptures serve as a symbolic call to shift the prevailing paradigm and narrative, challenging the cultural canons embodied by the building itself.

Drawing on the culture, traditions and spirituality of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and his Cherokee heritage, these reimagined monuments summon the power of nature over humans, offering a resonant return to the primordial essence of interconnected existence within a broader, yet increasingly fragile, ecosystem. At the same time, they remain deeply anchored in their immediate context. Gibson pointed out that the animals depicted in the sculptures all live in Central Park—creatures he also encounters in the Hudson Valley. “I began thinking about animals as teachers, or as models for how to engage with the world. These four animals—the hawk, the deer, the squirrel and the coyote—all navigate their ecosystems differently and can offer us, as humans, new approaches to the way in which we navigate our own world.”

Jeffrey Gibson, they plan and prepare for the future, fvni /sa lo li/squirrel. Courtesy the artist. Image credit: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Photo by Eugenia Burnett Tinsley

Gibson’s commission arrives amid a growing institutional and curatorial interest in Indigenous artistic expression—first across museums and biennials, and increasingly within the market. Adorned with sacred vests and ceremonial ornaments and standing with the dignity and solemnity of long-venerated statues of heroes or deities, his animals simultaneously challenge the anthropocentric thinking that those human figures once embodied. Alternatively, they point toward an animistic awareness and spirituality—foregrounded by many ancient cultures but gradually erased in the course of so-called “civilization.” With their potent symbolic presence, the sculptures emerge as shamanic guides, redirecting humanity’s path toward a more sustainable and harmonious future—reconnecting with nature, the primal source of all things.

“Jeffrey Gibson, The Animal That Therefore I Am” is at the Met through June 9, 2026.

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Elisa Carollo

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September 17, 2025
The New Futures Production Fund Links the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation and NYC’s New Museum

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Elisa Carollo

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September 15, 2025
ArtButMakeItSports Continues to Create Epic Content for Jocks and Nerds Alike

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Credit where credit is due. ArtButMakeItSports has cracked the code. The account’s creator LJ Rader has found success beyond just going viral. He has built an audience, and kept it.

Rader spent quite a bit of time in art museums growing up. He now keeps a massive digital folder handy, filled with works of art. So when inspiration strikes in the sporting world, all he has to do is flip through and his memory retention does the rest.

We’ve compiled another batch of sports moments that are completely imitating art. Enjoy!

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Zach

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September 12, 2025
Between Intimacy and Immensity: The Inscrutable Vija Celmins

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Vija Celmins, Untitled (Big Sea #2), 1969. Graphite on acrylic ground on paper, 85.1 x 111.8 cm. Private Collection © Vija Celmins, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery

Over her 60-year career, Vija Celmins has only made a total of 220 paintings, drawings and prints, and for good reason. Much of her work seems impossible because her choices of images—oceans, deserts, galaxies—are vast and impenetrable. She does not paint people. Her preference, she says, is “No composition. No gestures. No artificial color. No distortion. No ego.” And yet, she is present in all of these images, meticulous and animated. There is no mistaking her work.

She also creates sculptures depicting objects like rocks, slate blackboards, a large pencil that sprawls out on the floor and a rope ladder that coils to the ceiling. Each object is realistic, not recognizable as made-sculpture. Similarly, her many paintings don’t read like paintings, but they clearly aren’t photographs either, as one sees in the close-up oil-on-canvas of an antique blue book she found in Japan and painted using fourteen different colors. Her images from the Hubble Space Telescope have no two stars painted the same. She makes paintings of eroded seashells, snow falling, a burning plane, the close-up surface of a vase and the surface of the moon.

Vija Celmins, Clouds, 1968. Graphite on paper, 34.9 x 47 cm. Collection Ayea + Mikey Sohn, Los Angeles © Vija Celmins, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, Photo: McKee Gallery, New York

There are no boundaries to her night sky, desert and ocean paintings that convey the vastness of these places too big to capture. The paintings are tactile, immense yet fragile, with only the edge of the canvas as a stopping point, chopping off the space in mid-air. Sometimes the image is unrecognizable. Without her titles, we would be hard-pressed to see the surface of a plate or the desert floor. Vase, from 2017-18, could be the worn leather of an old satchel, the hide of an elephant, or a leather-bound 19th-century book. Without the titles, we are dropped into the canvas, close-in, examining, seeking recognition. That microscopic view is the mystery and power. Celmins also has the extraordinary technical ability to take a 3D object and flatten it onto a 2D surface. Once you know what it is, there is shock. That is the surface of a shell!

About her Knife and Dish, 1964, she wrote, “No composition… No gestures (deadpan painting) No artificial color No distortion No collage No signs or effort showing No ego NO BIG PAINTING—found this hard to do.” There it is again—No ego. This is hard to do, forgetting the self that is painting the knife and dish, without any personal association to eating with a knife from a dish. The power of Celmins’ works is not that they look so realistic, which they most certainly do, but that the still life is alive with its own self-contained personality. Knife and Dish measures only 16 x 18 inches. Unassuming and beautiful, it is a long consideration.

Her work defies the imagination. How is this possible? The graphite Big Sea, 1969, is an endless ocean, churning, the water wrinkled with waves, seemingly suspended in time. When she painted this, was she in a trance? Celmins said about the painting: “This work is a record of examined + intense looking, something internal from me to it, and something said back to me. A relationship, an opening of some innocence and a disappearance of time in its making. In the work I like best, these qualities remain.” These works are on a grand scale, rendered in a contained area while still feeling vast, without boundary. And she didn’t just do one ocean painting; she did five. How could these have been painted by hand? Is this the ocean or sand dunes from above after a sandstorm? Celmins said she was documenting the surface of the ocean.

Vija Celmins, Night Sky #16, 2000-2001. Oil on linen on mounted wood, 78.7 x 96.5 cm. Private Collection, © Vija Celmins, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, Photo: Katherine Du Tiel

Pencil, oil on canvas with graphite, 1966, feels alive yet perfectly symmetrical and inert. Shadows lift the octagonal end and pointed tip as if it were at the moment of lift-off, rocketing out of the frame. Night Sky #16 used 20 layers of paint. Each layer was sanded off in between, from black mixed with burnt umber, ultramarine blue, or bits of white. Her early Night Skies were graphite changing to charcoal. Circles of different sizes are the stars, filled with liquid rubber and sanded. About Star Field III, 1982-83, she said, “Star fields dense with lead from pencils. Just that. Paper and pencil. A relationship. A dance, remain just paper + lead.” The more you stare at the painting, the more it moves, receding and advancing.

There are her desert floors with shards of bleached rock strewn helter-skelter. The parched landscape under dry, blanching sun gives off, yet again, a boundaryless space. But unlike the ocean paintings, these are lifeless and still. She said the desert “lies somewhere between distance and intimacy… a different kind of space…” Also her snow paintings—white-outs, obscure, also impossible, a chaos of white darkness just as expansive as her deserts and star-blasted night skies. Celmins is a master of timeless space.

Born in Riga, Latvia, in 1938, Celmins became a refugee in 1944. Four years later, she and her family emigrated to the United States, to Indianapolis, where she went to high school and later attended the John Herron Art Institute. She went on to study art at UCLA on scholarship. Today, she lives and works in New York City and Sag Harbor, Long Island.

Vija Celmins, Lamp #1, 1964. Oil on canvas, 62.2 x 88.9 cm. © Vija Celmins, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, Photo: Aaron Wax, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery

A large solo exhibition, “Vija Celmins,” is currently on view at the Fondation Beyeler in Basel, curated by Theodora Vischer, chief curator of the museum, and writer and curator James Lingwood. Ninety paintings, drawings, sculptures and prints showcase the six decades of her work from the 1960s to the present. The 208-page illustrated catalogue accompanying the exhibit is superb. It is poetic and strikingly elegant. There are essays, poems and thoughts by writers and artists: Teju Cole, Rachel Cusk, Julian Bell, Marlene Dumas and others. It is a rare catalogue and refreshing that it can be read for its literary writing. The catalogue was edited by Theodora Vischer and James Lingwood for the Fondation Beyeler and designed by Teo Schifferli, published by Hatje Cantz Verlag, Berlin.

Celmins’s work is a meditation on the natural world. The long looking and deep consideration are in all the paintings. Web, from 1992, is like the grids that describe spacetime in physics books. It could also be fractals, an infinite, never-ending spiral, an event horizon on the edge of a black hole—the perilous journey towards the black center of nothingness. The painting is an inversion of energy. She describes her spider web paintings as “a drawing about small shifts of mass.”

In the catalogue, artist Glenn Ligon said this about the mezzotint, Galaxy, 1985. “The image is made up of tiny dots, applied by hand to a copper or zinc plate with a rocker (a metal tool with small teeth)… This produces, once the plate is inked, a solid black. Scraping away at this blackness with a burnisher uncovers bare metal. Those are the stars.” One can only imagine the tender and intense concentration that the print demanded. Celmins said, “The mezzotint took a long, long time.”

Celmins has also said that her work isn’t political or expressive of anything outside itself. She inspects the subject through “intuition… + rigor… The work remains ‘in the dark’ so to speak, for a long time, until my efforts peter out or become too repetitive, or I can no longer sustain them, or the work no longer seems to need me.”

“Vija Celmins” runs through September 21, 2025, at Fondation Beyeler in Basel, Switzerland.

Vija Celmins, Untitled (Regular Desert), 1973. Graphite on acrylic ground on paper, 30.5 x 38.1 cm. Private Collection © Vija Celmins, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, Photo: Kent Pell

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Dian Parker

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September 9, 2025
Observer’s Top Five Pieces Not to Miss at the 2025 Armory Show

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The Pit Gallery at The Armory Show 2025. Photo by Sean Zanni/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images

The Armory Show is New York City’s longest-running art fair, so it’s a little disappointing that recent years have seen it staged at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center. Originally hosted by the intimate Gramercy Park Hotel, the show now barely inhabits this cavernous glass undulation, which seems more designed to be driven past than entered. Does Frieze stage the Armory Show at the Javits Center because it’s the only building on the island of Manhattan that’s worse than The Shed? It does make the venue for their brand-name fair seem better by comparison. Emily Gould memorably called the Javits “an airport with no scheduled departures,” and despite its absurd proportions, the building can induce claustrophobia if the art is bad. But this year the art wasn’t bad at all—in fact, it may have been the opposite of bad. Below are the five pieces that spoke to me the most, and it’s noteworthy that the five are among many others that I liked quite a bit.

TARWUK, MRTISKLAAH_enecS_laniF_ehT (2025), White Cube

TARWUK, MRTISKLAAH_enecS_laniF_ehT, 2025. Photo: Dan Duray for Observer

Normally, blue-chip galleries organize their art fair booths the way roadside diners organize their menus. They like it dense and diverse, in a way that allows the visitor to know each and every treat that is available to them, from souvlaki to challah French toast. White Cube’s booth at Armory this year was instead given over to Ivana Vukšić and Bruno Pogačnik Tremow, a.k.a. the artist duo TARWUK. It was hard to pick a favorite among them because all were well executed and distinct. In this and other ways, they reminded me of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s recent exhibition “Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300–1350,” which lived up to the title’s promise of explaining the very origins of the medium’s vernacular. Here we see TARWUK using these older dialects to discuss contemporary issues. The painting I selected sees a varied cast of characters sitting around a compelling crater that feels to me like X, a.k.a. Twitter, a.k.a. The Everything App. They have no control over their apocalypse but are each dressed in a very appealing and bespoke way.

Nikita Gale, INTERCEPTOR (2025), 56 Henry

Nikita Gale, INTERCEPTOR, 2025. Photo: Dan Duray for Observer

Two disclosures: I have worked with Bridget Finn and love Ellie Rines, both of whom have been major champions of Nikita Gale. But you don’t need to be biased to love this work; just about everyone lingered near it. I suppose that if I’m going to complain so much about architecture, that’s the angle from which I should first compliment this work—it’s a booth you cannot enter. It speaks to the obvious love-hate relationship we all have with fairs, no matter where they’re staged. Speaking of stages, this work sees Gale returning to the materials and themes that tend to run through her work, which is interested in the technical aesthetics of audio production. You can’t make it out in this photo so well, but dangled up in those meaty wires are empty mic stands at casual and organic angles. The language on the 56 Henry website seems to imply that this work also resonates with the barricades of the French Revolution, but that doesn’t sound right to me. I think recent years have proven that there’s pretty much nothing you could do to modern-day Americans that would ever make them revolt.

RF. Alvarez, We’re Still Here! (2025), Martha’s

RF. Alvarez, We’re Still Here!, 2025. Photo: Dan Duray for Observer

I showed a photo of this work to a friend at an opening, and she asked, “Is that a scene from Sinners?” It’s a fair enough question, but instead of being vampires, everyone’s just secretly gay. The work was inspired by Paul Cadmus’s famous and excellent The Fleet’s In! (1934), “one of the earliest known cases of censorship of a gay artist in the United States,” per the Met. One of the subtly queer elements in that work is the proposition via cigarette, so it’s appropriate that the artist himself appears in the center, lighting that other guy’s cigarette. The light is one of the many things to like about this painting, even if you don’t care about identity politics. Alvarez paints the whole surface black first, then seems to enjoy the challenge of dealing with this. Everyone’s clothes and skin seem to cling to them as they’re explored by the light. Look at that gleam on the edge of the pool table.

Brittney Leeanne Williams, Interruption 8: Integration (2025), Alexander Berggruen

Brittney Leeanne Williams, Interruption 8: Integration, 2025. Photo: Dan Duray for Observer

Red is a difficult color. Beloved by collectors of the more thuggish variety, many painters avoid it because it’s too dominant. Williams doesn’t fight the red’s power, opting to mitigate it with trompe l’oeil. Her folds are so realistic that when you first approach it, you don’t even think of it as surreal. You see the rocks, the clothes and the reflections, and your brain registers this life-sized silhouette as a person. This is a dramatic and cinematic work without any faces in it. It’s suggestive of the cover of a romance novel from the 1990s, or perhaps a stained glass window. The robe does seem like something Jesus would wear, and the light source does seem to suggest that it’s coming from the non-existent head. It’s appealing how dark and shiny this work becomes near the bottom. It seems to suggest that this work could be many different ways, if it wanted to be

Joel Gaitan, Portadora De Ibeyi (2025), The Pit

Joel Gaitan, Portadora De Ibeyi, 2025. Photo: Dan Duray for Observer

This booth featured a number of similar pseudo-Mesoamerican artifacts, which delve into the Miami-based artist’s Nicaraguan heritage, but this should appeal to anyone who likes sculpture, ceramics or the color blue. What I love about the symmetry of this piece is that it breaks, in the folds of fat on the belly, the lower-hanging breast, and in the curious golden snake scarf, which isn’t quite the same on both sides. It adds to this creature’s undeniable charm. The sculpture’s title translates to “Bearer of the Twins,” who are exactly the same and distraught. But the bearer’s smile is the focal point of this. She is unflappable in the face of whatever seems to be happening in this piece. The hues and textures combine well here, best noticed in the way that puckered skin feeds into the golden pastie. It’s a sculpture about order, chaos and how one responds to them.

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Dan Duray

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September 5, 2025
At the High, Kim Chong Hak Shows It’s Not What You Say, It’s How You Say It

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Kim Chong Hak, Fall, 1980. Watercolor on hanji paper. Courtesy of the artist and the Kim Chong Hak Foundation. Photo by Kim Tang- Sae. © Kim Chong Hak

Spring, summer, autumn, winter—few things are more fundamental to how we mark the passage of time. A perennial subject of both casual conversation and art-making, this cycle takes center stage in the exhibition “Kim Chong Hak: Painter of Seoraksan” at Atlanta’s High Museum of Art. On the surface, it appears as a simple journey through the calendar, yet beneath lies something more—the fusion of Korean Dansaekhwa painting and American abstract expressionism. By using a familiar narrative while filtering it through a hybrid style rooted in lived experience, Hak demonstrates that meaning lies less in what you say than in how you say it.

Hak was born in Korea, where he grew up and began his artistic career. Coming of age in the 1960s meant grappling with identity and nationhood in a post-war landscape, struggles that shaped the movement known as Dansaekhwa. This abstract, non-objective practice, though not wholly representative of Hak’s influences, dominated Korean painting at the time and provides crucial context for his development.

Kim Chong Hak, Moon, 2013. Acrylic on canvas. Courtesy of the artist and the Kim Chong Hak Foundation. Photo by Kim Tang- Sae. © Kim Chong Hak

Dansaekhwa, often translated as “monochrome painting,” is defined by physical engagement with material, deceptive simplicity, and destabilizing contrasts. Its influence emerges most clearly in Hak’s winter works. Untitled (Winter) (2017) depicts a forest stripped of its foliage, the ground blanketed in snow. Only bare trunks and branches remain, save for two birds perched on a branch in the foreground. At first glance, the canvas seems nearly all white, but closer inspection reveals a spectrum of grays—from ash to slate—layered into the surface. Thick slabs of paint have been built up and sculpted with a brush, giving the scene a dense materiality. Step back again and the landscape no longer appears void but alive with presence. What seems at first a quiet winter scene becomes instead a meditation on Dansaekhwa’s influence on Hak’s style.

Kim Chong Hak, Untitled (Winter), 2017. Acrylic on canvas. Courtesy of the artist and the Kim Chong Hak Foundation. Photo by Kim Tang- Sae. © Kim Chong Hak

In 1977, Hak moved to New York, where he encountered neo-expressionists such as Julian Schnabel and Anselm Kiefer, along with the legacy of Abstract Expressionism. Characterized by intuitive mark-making and non-objective compositions that cover the canvas edge to edge—so-called “all-over paintings”—this movement was embodied by figures like Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline. Its impact is clearest in Hak’s summer paintings. Green Shades and Fragrant Plants (1998) presents a bed of flowers—sunflowers, peonies, lilies—all bursting upward from an emerald ground to fill the surface without pause. While recognizably a summer scene with its dense greenery and saturated hues, the lack of horizon or pictorial depth flattens the canvas into a single, enveloping plane. As with Untitled (Winter), the true subject is not the image itself but Hak’s painterly practice.

What is most striking is how approachable these works remain. The collision of Dansaekhwa’s rigor with Abstract Expressionism’s abandon might have produced chaotic, unruly canvases. Instead, Hak distills these competing forces into the simple frame of the seasons. Though the stylistic influences are distinct, they never overwhelm; balance and clarity prevail. The exhibition offers a dual entry point: first, the comforting familiarity of seasonal change, and second, the conceptual interplay of styles. One may view it as a lyrical stroll through the year, but these works resist categorization. They are not conventional landscapes but something far more compelling.

“Kim Chong Hak: Painter of Seoraksan” is at the High Museum of Art through November 2, 2025.

Kim Chong Hak, Forest, 1987. Acrylic on cotton. Courtesy of the artist and the Kim Chong Hak Foundation. Photo by Kim Tang- Sae. © Kim Chong Hak

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Leia Genis

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September 1, 2025
Marina Abramović Meets Joseph Beuys: Dialogues of Breath, Gesture and Legacy at Schloss Moyland

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Joseph Beuys’ How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare at Galerie Schmela in Düsseldorf, and “7 Easy Pieces” by Marina Abramović at the Guggenheim Museum. Schwarzweiß-Fotografie Stiftung Museum Schloss Moyland; Für das Werk von Joseph Beuys: © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2025 / Video still: Babette Mangolte © Courtesy of the Marina Abramović Archives

A man enters a hushed gallery, cradling a lifeless hare, its fur soft but cold. His face glistens with sticky honey and gold leaf, casting a faint, sweet scent into the still air. He leans close to the silent creature, his breath warm against its fur, and begins a strange, almost sacred act: whispering explanations of paintings meant for ears that cannot hear.

This haunting performance began as a groundbreaking work by German artist Joseph Beuys, a radical force redefining how we see, feel and experience art. His 1965 piece How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare continues to resonate, inspiring new generations of artists, including Marina Abramović, who re-performed it forty years later at the Guggenheim Museum as part of her “7 Easy Pieces” series.

At Museum Schloss Moyland in Germany, Beuys and Abramović meet in conversation in “Marina Abramović & MAI in Dialogue with Joseph Beuys,” a landmark exhibition running through October 26, 2025. For the first time, Abramović and her institute (MAI) are engaging in an artistic discourse with Beuys’s visionary legacy. Central to the exhibition is the juxtaposition of their performances, inviting visitors to explore the evolving language of art as deeply personal, intuitive and often mystical.

Schloss Moyland as living stage

Schloss Moyland, with its neo-Gothic towers and surrounding parkland, houses one of the world’s largest Beuys collections. This exhibition transforms the archive into a living stage. Alongside documentation of Beuys’ and Abramović’s hare performances, the museum presents drawings, sculptures and archival materials, reactivated through the presence of live performers.

Maria Stamenković Herranz, The Painted Heron. © Kirsten Becken Foto // Photo: Kirsten Becken

In March, thirteen international artists joined a residency led by the Marina Abramović Institute. Immersed in Beuys’s methods and Moyland’s archives, they developed new site-specific works that now unfold daily at the museum for up to ten hours. It is performance as lived endurance, reflecting Abramović’s belief that duration transforms life into art.

The resulting works carry distinct cultural and artistic inflections. Brazilian artist Rubiane Maia links Beuys’s ecological concerns to colonial legacies; Irish artist Sandra Johnston explores Beuys’s connections to Ireland; Italian-German Francesco Marzano turns breath into a collective instrument. The effect is less homage than dialogue, a multiperspectival exchange in which Beuys’ ideas are tested, reshaped and set in motion for a new generation.

Abramović’s golden hour

This ambitious project arrives at a golden hour for Abramović herself. In July 2025, the 78-year-old was awarded the Praemium Imperiale Prize for Sculpture by the Japan Art Association—often called the Nobel Prize of the Arts. “They gave me the prize for sculpture,” Abramović tells Observer, “but my body is sculpture”—a reminder of how performance unsettles conventional classifications. “When you approach 80, receiving an award like this is both an honor and a reminder. It makes you think about the end of life before it actually arrives. But I’m not planning to die anytime soon. I’m still working like hell.”

Abramović began performing in the 1970s before small audiences that questioned whether her work was even art, and the recognition carries profound vindication. “It’s taken me 55 years to get here. It finally means my work is taken seriously. My voice can be heard, and I can promote immaterial art.”

From Rhythm 0 (1974), where the public could use objects on her body, to The Artist Is Present (2010), where thousands queued to sit silently with her, the Praemium Imperiale underscores what the Moyland exhibition makes clear: Abramović is both an individual artist and an architect of performance’s future.

MAI and the Abramović method

That future is embodied in the Marina Abramović Institute, founded in 2007 and now based in a converted hotel in Karyes, Greece. For Abramović, MAI is not a final artwork but a living legacy—a platform to sustain performance art across generations. “The Institute preserves performance art,” she explains, “and while my work keeps evolving, the Institute is my legacy.”

Eşref Yıldırım, Camouflage. © Kirsten Becken Foto // Photo: Kirsten Becken

At Moyland, MAI’s ethos of long-duration art is palpable. Performers, trained in the Abramović Method, undertake demanding works designed to sharpen stamina and presence. The discipline, Abramović insists, grants dignity to performance: “When it’s something very long, the public feels it. Performance becomes life itself, and the audience becomes a supportive community.”

The exhibition is thus a test case for how archives can be made alive, how new performers can be nurtured and how immaterial art can claim equal footing with painting and sculpture.

Old art, new voices

Among the thirteen artists, the Irish Sandra Johnston works with durational performance and archival research to transform historical materials. At Moyland, she engaged with Beuys’s archive, inspired by the visionary works he transplanted to Ireland decades earlier. Using blackboards, newspapers and objects, she developed slow, somatic actions. “Seven days, seven-hour performances. It’s exhausting,” she says of the physical and mental challenges. Many gestures are minute—a stag’s tooth rotated between fingers, a mark traced on the floor, a slow bodily rotation—each movement tuned to the space, the materials and the audience. Confirming Abramović’s insight, Johnston emphasizes that sustained audience attention fuels the performance and reinforces the reciprocity at the heart of her practice.

Luisa Sancho Escanero’s work, co-created with Evan Macrae Williams and Yan Jun Chin, The Loop. © Kirsten Becken Foto // Photo: Kirsten Becken

Complementing Johnston’s somatic intimacy, Francesco Marzano approaches performance from a communal, auditory perspective. Building on his flautist training and studies with Abramović at the Folkwang University’s Pina Bausch Professorship, his Moyland work, Pneuma – Wärmezeitmaschine, transforms breathing into a collective sculpture. Ten microphones amplify performer and visitor breaths, layering rhythms from intimate whispers to full choruses. “Breathing is communication without words. It’s life, soul and connection,” he tells Observer.

He credits Abramović’s Cleaning the House workshop—five days of silence, fasting and endurance—as foundational: “It was life-changing. Without that training, doing seven- to eight-hour days would have been impossible. It taught me how to be present for so long, how to slow down time.”

Young audiences respond enthusiastically to both approaches. Children, school groups and social media visitors are drawn to the immersive, slow experiences Johnston and Marzano create, often returning to engage in shared attention and presence. Abramović frames this intergenerational exchange as reciprocal: “I give them old-school wisdom, but they give me freshness. My generation complains too much—I need fresh minds.”

Reanimating the Beuys archive

At Moyland, this dialogue between generations comes alive. The exhibition demonstrates how archives can be reanimated, how younger artists inherit and transform long-standing practices and how institutions can give immaterial art the same weight as painting or sculpture. For Beuys, art was a social sculpture, and every action was charged with creative potential. For Abramović, art is presence itself: the body as material, the audience as co-creator, time as canvas. At Moyland, these visions converge and evolve.

Francesco Marzano, Emergency Solos. © the artist, Foto: Philip Yakushin

Abramović notes that performance resurfaces in moments of economic strain: “When the economy is going down, performance art comes up because it doesn’t cost much… It creates vitality that can never disappear.” In today’s age of distraction, that vitality feels essential, shaping the exhibition’s insistence on slowness, repetition and communal intensity.

While the echo of the past lingers, the hare of 1965 is long gone, its fur dust. Yet voices, bodies and breath now sustain the performance. What began as one man explaining pictures to a dead animal has become a collective act of attention—proof that in performance art, presence endures and remains the most radical act of all.

“Marina Abramović & MAI in Dialogue with Joseph Beuys” is on view at Museum Schloss Moyland through October 26, 2025.

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Petra Loho

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August 30, 2025