Tag: Arts Interviews

Aleksandra Artamonovskaja On Technology’s Role in Art’s Evolution

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According to Aleksandra Artamonovskaja, the digital art we make today has a long lineage dating back to the 1950s. Tezos Foundation

As the world becomes increasingly digital and technologically integrated, it is harder than ever to draw clear boundaries between analog and digital experiences. Technology is now deeply woven into how we express, communicate, share and process information and ideas, making it nearly impossible to find contemporary art completely untouched by digital tools or platforms. Artists working in traditional media inevitably engage with the digital realm in some capacity—even if only as a platform for sharing or a source of inspiration for works created in more conventional formats.

For this reason, the term digital art can be confusing. Some interpret it broadly to include any work shaped by technology, while others reserve it for “digital-native” practices created entirely within the digital space.

To explore this evolving landscape, Observer spoke with Aleksandra Artamonovskaja, who has worked in the Web3 art space for nearly a decade and now serves as head of Arts at TriliTech, the team behind the Tezos Art Foundation. Artamonovskaja shared her perspective on the current state of digital art, its market and the broader ways technology and digital platforms are reshaping how art is produced and circulated.

“You have both professionals in the broader creative economy or artists whose works are exhibited in traditional institutions such as museums, falling into this category,” she tells Observer. Still, there are some defining parameters. “To me, digital art is a form that relies fundamentally on digital technology, not just the tools, but the medium itself, as the product or the process. Digital art allows experimentation across various areas, such as lighting, texture, movement and interactivity, that traditional media can’t always convey. It’s not just about using a screen as a canvas, but often reinventing what the idea of a ‘canvas’ even means.”

Tezos began actively engaging with the digital art world in 2021. Artists and collectors on NFT platforms like Hic et Nunc, Objkt, and fx(hash) adopted the blockchain for minting and selling works, quickly making it a hub for digital, generative and experimental art.

Established around the same time, the Tezos Foundation formalized its support for digital art soon after, launching major initiatives between late 2021 and early 2022. Since then, it has evolved into an artist-first hub within the Web3 ecosystem. Through high-profile partnerships with institutions like MoMA and Art Basel, it is positioning itself as a vital conduit for Web3 creativity.

Since Artamonovskaja was appointed head of arts at TriliTech in 2024, she has played a central role in ensuring that the Tezos ecosystem maintains an artist-first framework. Priorities like sustainability, affordability and inclusivity are amplified through programming that raises global awareness of digital art while empowering existing talent with meaningful opportunities for growth.

Sabato Visconti, barbie~world~breakdown, 2024. At the Museum of the Moving Image, as part of its partnership with the Tezos Foundation. Photo: Thanassi Karageorgiou. Courtesy of MoMI

“Marketplaces on Tezos like objkt, along with high-profile partnerships with the Museum of the Moving Image, Serpentine, ArtScience Museum and others, help contextualise digital art within broader cultural landscapes,” Artamonovskaja says. She sees contextualization as fundamental to supporting the appreciation and institutionalization of a newly established field like digital art. “Our current programs also encompass a range of activities, including residencies, publications, and exhibitions, nurturing a creative environment that fosters artists’ career trajectories.” One major upcoming initiative she previewed is Tezos’ second participation at Paris Photo, in partnership with Paris-based Artverse gallery, where curator Grida Jang Hyewon will present a group booth featuring work by six artists who originate from, or are deeply shaped by, Asian cultures.

Fostering awareness of these tools and technologies is another key priority. “The Tezos Foundation has supported several educational projects, including WAC Lab, which taught professionals from cultural institutions about Blockchain best practices, as well as artist onboarding programs, such as Newtro, a program focusing on Latin American artists,” Artamonovskaja says. “Through these ongoing initiatives and upcoming projects, it’s no surprise that the Tezos ecosystem serves some of the most respected voices in the digital art space, including bitforms gallery, the Second Guess curatorial collective and the University of Applied Arts in Vienna.”

Just as importantly, Tezos has helped connect and map a decades-long history of relationships between artists and digital media, beginning with early net art and extending back to Nam June Paik’s pioneering inquiry into media and technology as a form of expression. As Artamonovskaja explains, the history of digital art runs from the algorithmic plotter works of Manfred Mohr and Vera Molnár, to Alan Rath’s kinetic sculptures fusing electronics with movement, to Paik’s groundbreaking video art, and to the browser-based experiments of 1990s net artists like Cory Arcangel and Olia Lialina. “Each era redefined what it meant to create and experience art in dialogue with new technologies, shifting from producing singular digital images to building works that exist natively within global networks. I’ve always been fascinated by how forward-thinking some of the artists were. Seeing Nam June Paik’s Electronic Superhighway in person, its glowing map of America alive with moving images, makes you reflect on how foretelling his vision was to today’s hyperconnected, media-saturated world.”

The “Paintboxed Tezos World Tour” exhibition at Digital Art Mile, Basel, 2025. Courtesy Tezos Foundation

The Paintboxed Tezos World Tour paid tribute to this long history, spotlighting the heritage of the Quantel Paintbox—the legendary 1980s commercial computer designed for artists and famously used by David Hockney and Keith Haring. “The digital art we make today most certainly belongs to a long lineage dating back to the 1950s, with interactive systems, initiatives such as E.A.T. and tools like the Quantel Paintbox,” Artamonovskaja points out.

In the past year, the Paintboxed Tezos World Tour has appeared at major art events in Miami, Paris and New York, culminating in a pivotal exhibition at the Digital Art Mile in Basel. The Basel presentation was accompanied by a catalogue of works produced by early pioneers such as David Hockney and Kim Mannes-Abbott—among the first to experiment with the tool—alongside a younger generation of artists like Simon Denny, Coldie and Gretchen Andrew. “Recognizing these histories enriches our understanding and positions Web3 art not as a fleeting trend but as a continuation of decades of creative innovation,” Artamonovskaja says.

She recalls first encountering Olia Lialina’s work in person at her presentation during Rhizome’s 7×7 conference in 2017, an experience that left a lasting impression. “What struck me most was not only her early, both critical and playful approach to the browser as a canvas, but also the nuanced commentary on the word ‘technology,’” she recalls, noting how the artist was vocal in her criticism of how the term had been overused to the point of losing specificity. “This reminded me how in the 1990s, ‘technology’ in an art context often meant something tangible, visible and experimental. In contrast, today it’s so embedded in our lives that we rarely stop to question it, and by doing so, in a way, we lose our power. The work and reflections of early net art artists often underscore the importance of maintaining that spirit of inquiry.”

Creative freedom and new audiences

For Artamonovskaja, the digital realm opens vast possibilities: dynamic experimentation, global reach and direct control. Over the past decade, she notes, social media has reshaped the artist’s role—shifting it away from reliance on galleries and institutions toward a more direct relationship with audiences. “Some artists have become their own marketers, community builders and storytellers, shaping not only how their work is seen but also how it’s valued,” she says. “This shift didn’t just change the market side of art; it influenced the medium itself. Many artists, including those working in traditional media, have begun creating works either conceived for the screen or engaging with it from a conceptual or critical perspective, responding to its formats, visual rhythms and narratives, while reflecting on how these elements shape our ways of seeing and experiencing art.”

The rise of blockchain and NFTs has taken this further by adding new layers of transaction and interactivity. “Within the Tezos ecosystem, for example, sales platforms like objkt.com have nurtured their own curatorial voices and collector bases,” she explains. “At the same time, through our ongoing initiatives like Tezos Foundation-supported open calls, residency programs and partnerships with leaders such as Art Basel and Musée d’Orsay, we’ve created new success structures for artists.” Fully harnessing this potential means embracing both creative and structural possibilities—whether by experimenting with digital-native forms, exploring interactive or generative elements, or engaging with blockchain-native ecosystems to connect with communities and shape how their work is experienced, owned and valued.

Rodell Warner, World Is Turning, 2024. At the Museum of the Moving Image, New York, as part of its partnership with the Tezos Foundation. Photo: Thanassi Karageorgiou. Courtesy of MoMI

The importance of context in curating digital art

Context, Artamonovskaja stresses, is just as important for digital art as for any other medium when it comes to establishing value and recognition. Digital art curation—including art on the blockchain—has evolved rapidly over the past several years, she notes. Having worked in the digital art space for nearly a decade, longer than many of her contemporaries, she has witnessed these shifts firsthand. “It may not seem like a significant amount of time in the grand scheme of things, but in the Web3 world, everything is accelerated,” she observes. “The COVID-19 pandemic forced the traditional art world to embrace virtual environments en masse. In blockchain and digitally-native art, these technological advancements that reshape how the audience interacts and experiences the work happen every few months.”

For this reason, curating digital art already extends far beyond simply displaying work—it is about building trust and transparency with both artists and viewers. “Given the size of the digital art market and its novelty, the curator’s role is often also that of an art dealer helping artists position their work, connecting them with the right collectors and helping them navigate the commercial and technical aspects of selling digital art in a rapidly evolving environment,” she clarifies.

“In many ways, the Web3 market functions as an accelerated mirror to the traditional art world—compressing the cycles of creation, curation, sales and audience engagement into days or weeks instead of months or years,” she continues, noting that this might not apply to every project but that, over time, it makes the discovery of emerging talent more accessible. “The same dynamics of representation and influence exist, but blockchain-enabled provenance, global marketplaces and always-on communities make the process faster, more transparent and oftentimes more efficient.”

Aleksandra Artamonovskaja with a work by Jenni Pasanen. Courtesy Tezos Foundation

Artamonovskaja acknowledges that whether this acceleration is good or bad for artists and the market is still open to debate, but she sees one undeniable advantage: the ability to engage new audiences.

Challenges in collecting and preserving digital art

In May 2022, the Tezos Foundation unveiled its Permanent Art Collection (PAC), curated by Misan Harriman, as its first official high-profile program dedicated to celebrating and elevating digital art created within its ecosystem. This marked the beginning of an ongoing commitment to showcase and acquire works by diverse, emerging artists.

Artamonovskaja has been collecting digital art and NFTs for years. When asked about her criteria for identifying a significant work worth collecting, she says it often comes down to whether the piece moves her or signals that the artist is bringing a fresh perspective to her areas of interest. “Factors such as strong artistic vision, thoughtful use of technology and meaningful cultural context are also incredibly important,” she explains. “Novelty—both conceptual and visual—plays a significant role.” This is a defining feature on sales platforms like objkt, which frequently highlight advanced interactive pieces ranging from minimalist HTML sketches to fully immersive browser-based games and on-chain data experiments. Other platforms, such as EditArt or InfiniteInk, enable interactive co-creation and dynamic experiences.

“As someone who collects the art they love, I find that the resonance within the wider ecosystem often plays a big role,” Artamonovskaja says. “Given that the market was born under the premise that there are no more gatekeepers and each artist can represent themselves, an artist’s approach to self-representation can be as important as how a gallery typically represents its artists.” Today, a community of artists exists with varied definitions of success, some prioritizing reach and community growth over traditional markers of recognition. “Perhaps this is where comparing art on the blockchain to traditional markets is a fallacy.”

Collecting digital art also raises new questions around preservation and conservation, as these works often depend entirely on the technologies through which they are created, circulated, displayed and stored. Preservation begins with recognizing that it’s not just about maintaining the still or moving image as we see it on a platform or as we right-click save it. “If we care about the work’s association with a blockchain, we need to maintain a relationship between the smart contract and the output,” she explains. “We need to care about whether the work has an archival file, a higher resolution exhibition copy, or just the web copy we see in front of us. We also want to safeguard the metadata and the environments in which the work is intended to reside.”

She notes that ensuring a worthwhile chain of documented provenance for blockchain-registered art requires active collaboration between artists, technologists, archivists and node operators. For a work to remain tied to a chain, archival advocates and conservation specialists may need to preserve not only the piece but also its operational context.

Across blockchains, one of the most significant risks in recent years has been the shutdown of marketplaces. “In such instances, it was either the core team’s efforts or the community that preserved the works, ensuring they remained accessible as intended,” Artamonovskaja points out, emphasizing that this was possible only thanks to open-source access and the benefits of decentralization.

On Tezos, for example, every artwork collected on objkt is stored on IPFS, a decentralized network designed for long-term preservation. The team ensures that each asset is pinned and remains accessible, with safeguards in place so that even if the platform were to go offline, the art would remain secure. “Tezos provides a reliable and future-proof foundation for building digital art collections,” Artamonovskaja emphasizes.

Another advantage of NFTs on Tezos is that its self-amending blockchain and formal on-chain governance make contentious hard forks far less likely than on other chains, reducing the risk of the same NFT appearing on two separate blockchains. “Because protocol upgrades are proposed, voted on and activated within the blockchain itself, NFTs remain recorded on a single chain that all participants continue to use.”

Third World: The Bottom Dimension is a multi-part project conceptualised by artist Gabriel Massan in collaboration with artists Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro and Novíssimo Edgar and vocalist and music producer LYZZA. © Serpentine. Photo: Hugo Glendinning

Art, technology and A.I.

When it comes to conversations about technology, the biggest elephant in the room is the A.I. revolution, which is reshaping nearly every aspect of our lives—and, in turn, how artists approach their work and creative process. Increasingly, artists admit to using A.I. not only to refine work but also to brainstorm or seek feedback. This has sparked ongoing debate about the role of A.I. in the creative process—as a tool, an assistant or even a collaborator.

Asked about the opportunities A.I. presents for the art world and the risks it poses, particularly for digital art, Artamonovskaja is convinced that if it is approached as an instrument, it can help extend an artist’s vision. Its value, she argues, depends on how intentionally it is applied—whether to streamline workflow, unlock new aesthetic possibilities, or enable experiments that would be impossible through traditional means.

“Artists like Dr. Elgammal have even credited A.I. as their creative partner. Ultimately, art is subjective, so the idea of improving it is hard to define,” Artamonovskaja considers. “For some creators, A.I. is integrated on a deeper technical level—artists like Ivona Tau or Mario Klingemann write their own systems, shaping the algorithm as much as they shape the final product. Other artists, such as Trevor Paglen or Kevin Abosch, engage with A.I. from a critical standpoint, using it to question the technology’s politics, biases and social implications.”

At the same time, she warns of potential risks: diluting authorship, amplifying biases embedded in training data or reducing the artist’s role to that of a passive editor rather than an active creator. In 2021, she collaborated with Mike Tyka to release his renowned Portraits of Imaginary People on the blockchain, a project that delved directly into these themes. By training GANs on thousands of Flickr images, Tyka generated faces of people who do not exist, exposing how A.I. systems can reproduce and amplify identity biases. “His approach challenged notions of authenticity and sparked dialogue about technology’s influence on representation and trust,” she notes.

With the arrival of more sophisticated tools in recent years, Artamonovskaja observes that the market is still struggling to understand and value generative artistic practices. “For me, the most compelling A.I. art is not simply about the image produced, but about the relationship between human intention and machine capability, and the conceptual story that emerges from that relationship,” she reflects, emphasizing again that it is not about the medium itself but the critical and creative approach to it—the inquiry into its potential—that transforms a work of art into a tool for better understanding, or even anticipating, the broader sociological, anthropological and political implications of these new technologies in our existence.

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Elisa Carollo

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August 25, 2025
Edra Soto On Puerto Rican Art, Public Sculpture and Her New NYC Installation ‘Graft’

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The artist Edra Soto is inspired by Puerto Rican architectural elements that are connected to European colonialism, the U.S. and Puerto Rico affiliation and the Afro-Caribbean diaspora. Maria Burundarena

Last month, the artist Edra Soto debuted Graft, a new installation presented by the Public Art Fund at Central Park’s Doris C. Freedman Plaza. It’s a grand structure that still manages to feel welcoming, with bespoke angular tables built for domino playing. Soto may be familiar to visitors of the Whitney’s excellent “no existe un mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria” exhibition from 2022, and we caught up with her to hear about this ambitious new public project.

The rejas used in your sculptural practice are ubiquitous in Puerto Rico, but may not be familiar to all New Yorkers. Can you explain their significance?

The designs of rejas—wrought iron fences—that I represent in my work are architectural motifs that can be found in working-class homes of Puerto Ricans. My project focuses on representing the rejas and decorative concrete block motifs present in Puerto Rico; not only because I grew up there but also because learning about their cultural significance, I became aware that this information is not a part of Puerto Rico’s populous knowledge. For example, author Edwin R. Quiles Rodriguez relates that the shotgun layout of the working-class residence was adapted from the Yoruba dwellings of African slaves, which were developed in Haiti, and then migrated abroad with hacienda owners after the slaves rebelled. Architect Jorge Ortiz Colom’s monograph, “The African Influence in the Design Build Edification of Puerto Rico,” states that criollo architecture, which incorporates quiebrasoles and rejas, originated from Sub-Saharan Africa through the population brought to Puerto Rico as slaves to work plantations during the rise of colonization. He argues that this influence is largely overlooked by historians due to the impression that ‘Africans could not transplant their ancestral ways of life under the inhumane conditions of their transfer and the lack of freedom in their new home.’

It was previously thought that this decorative architecture was an amalgamation of European features that had undergone transformation through the Western lens. Graft highlights the inextricably intertwined histories of European colonialism, the U.S. and Puerto Rico, and the Afro-Caribbean diaspora through the framework of architectural intervention. I began the Graft series to address the complex sentiments generated from migrating to the U.S. while remaining connected to family on the island—a feeling of dislocation compounded by Puerto Rico’s ambiguous status as an unincorporated territory of the United States. The series Graft, which means to move living tissue from one place to another, to imagine the transplant of my homeland to anywhere on the mainland.

Puerto Rico’s current cultural identity has been intrinsically shaped by its historic affiliation with Spanish colonial military architecture, an alliance that expired 126 years ago. As my traveling to and from Puerto Rico intensified throughout the years, I kept asking myself, “Why does this reference and build identity to the archipelago live in the foreground?” My work proposes to consider the cultural and historical value of residential architecture from working-class Puerto Rico. Understanding the cultural value of the decorative motifs that embody working-class homes can influence Puerto Ricans to consider where they live as something that has value to acknowledge, protect and uplift.

This is your first large-scale public art commission in New York City, though you’ve lived and worked in Chicago since 1998. How did your understanding of this city influence your commission?

New Yorkers are voracious cultural consumers and the New York Latinx communities truly excel at this. I really love and respect their leadership and commitment to uplifting their communities and artists from the diaspora, like me. I believe their commitment’s impact will continue to reform our culture. Paving the way has not been an easy endeavor. The Clemente, El Museo del Barrio, CENTRO, the Latinx Project, U.S. Latinx Art Forum, ISLAA and the Mellon and Ford Foundations are some of the organizations committed to supporting and making visible our stories and communities with rigor and integrity.

Cultural identity shouldn’t rely solely on the past to build community connections. Unfortunately, many cultural institutions in our nation rely on this formula. This form of producing culture is not as palpable in New York as in other cities across the nation. Regarding the past is as important as acknowledging and celebrating the present and reflecting on the future.

SEE ALSO: Olafur Eliasson Tests the Complexities of Our Visual and Psychoacoustic Perception at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery

My participation in the Whitney Museum of American Art exhibition “no existe un mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria” was one of the best experiences I had in my life. I felt as if my presence in the art world was rendered in three dimensions. As an artist, I felt heard, regarded, and celebrated. Brilliant curator Marcela Guerrero has championed the inclusion of Puerto Rican artists in the Whitney’s permanent collection, including my Graft, which has enhanced my confidence in my commitment to the project. It also brings a certain comfort–even relief! It’s always comforting to think that your passion is not misleading.

To me, New York is a melting pot. I think New York personifies what America means to me. I think about it in terms of the people who immigrate or migrate to make a living and live their lives. I can relate to this way of moving through life.

Edra Soto, Graft, 2024; Presented by Public Art Fund at Doris C. Freedman Plaza in New York City. NICHOLAS KNIGHT, Courtesy Public Art Fund

What are your thoughts on Doris C. Freedman Plaza, its home?

The Doris C. Freedman Plaza is an entrance as much as an exit. It is a destination. It is also an impressive and lively hub where many immigrants work. The plaza is their workplace and possibly their second home away from home. What impacts me the most about Central Park is the life happening in that plaza. It is so impressive, sometimes chaotic, sometimes breathtaking. Since the beginning of this project with the Public Art Fund, I have expressed a desire to highlight the life that happens at the plaza, making that as visible as possible. It is important that the documentation of Graft reflects the life at the plaza, which has provided me with the opportunity to interact with a community that has settled there for many years, as much as the sculpture itself.

Central Park is the first public park built in the United States that serves as a refuge from urban life but also as a democratic space for all people, and it is expected that life and chaos will happen every day at Central Park. The horse manure smell is quite pungent at times… another example of the tourist economy in the city–that lives in the plaza—but it doesn’t seem to be perceived as a disruption. The predominantly African-American community of Seneca Village and its history of displacement is acknowledged and will forever be a part of Central Park’s history. The plaza’s overwhelmingly affluent surrounding vicinity and relationship to this history prompted me to think about the working-class home as a grounding point for the people who make their living at the plaza, a “home” that will be inhabited by them, as well as the people who come and go to and from the plaza. I aimed to build a monument representative of working-class communities.

Your sculpture has very clean lines and, though it isn’t imposing, does feel very solid and bold. How did you come to that decision?

Thank you! I really like the way you describe my sculpture. I meditated for many months before coming to my decision and focusing on a direction for this project. I wanted Graft at Central Park to feel monumental yet also approachable and familiar, with simple lines that make space for people to inhabit it and allow those moments to be visible. Graft at Central Park was modeled after a working-class home facade that exists in Puerto Rico. I toyed with the idea of the entrance marker or welcoming structure since the beginning of the project. As soon as you arrive, you can settle, take a moment to regroup, and go about the rest of your day, or arrive after a long walk and settle in to take a break before the end of your day’s journey. Perhaps you have noticed that there are benches bordering the park. My benches and tables—modeled after public seating found at plazas in Puerto Rico—are strategically placed or staged.

The sculpture creates a threshold, with one side representing a home exterior while the other creates the illusion of being inside a lived-in home. I remember being conflicted at some point in the development process with the sculpture looking like a theatrical prop. I reassessed the color and gave it a monochromatic look with its dimensional materials to unify the various parts—to read as a unit—and to contrast with the park’s foliage. The sculpture proportions were modeled in relation to the plaza space. It was important to me to create a sculpture with an adequate height, width, and length. I love simplicity, and sometimes that can be hard to achieve, but I worked with a great team led by Navillus Woodworks, Public Art Fund project manager Hussain Khanbhai and curator Melanie Kress, who were with me step by step throughout the making of the project.

This year’s Venice Biennale featured a whole room about Puerto Rico in the Central Pavilion. Why do you think your diaspora seems to make for such fertile artistic material?

It is impossible to detach Puerto Rico from its political status. All art comes with its political baggage, and Puerto Rico’s is not the exception. Perhaps we excel at it. Pablo Delano’s archive project comes with an explanation provided by Amanda Carneiro and Adriano Pedrosa regarding the 500 years of colonial rule. His work is compelling and determined to map or disclose information through historical artifacts and archival documentation. The heavily didactic approach of the installation is what stayed with me when I saw it online—I haven’t been able to go to Venice. I care about archives and find them compelling and sometimes essential in the crafting of a story that is backed with facts or exudes credibility. As you might know, I have been using my personal photo documentation archive which sometimes makes it to the public, as I integrate it in my sculptures and architectural interventions.

Why do people want to know what Puerto Rico thinks? It is a fair question. Puerto Rico’s political status is the core of its national identity. It has been debated for over 50 years. We are U.S. citizens, but we don’t have the same rights as people born in the fifty states. Besides the political mess, Puerto Rico has tremendous visibility for being such a small island in the Caribbean. I believe Puerto Rico has an outsized influence on American culture. Perhaps that explains the Bad Bunny phenomenon. Like it or not, he is possibly the most influential proponent of the Puerto Rican dialect. A great majority of Puerto Ricans have been, and continue to be, impacted by mainstream media like I was. Local television is relevant in Puerto Rico because people still produce and watch it. People still read the local newspapers. Perhaps it all sounds like minor things, but here we are, being chewed up by ignorant Republicans… even Republican voters deserve much more than what they have to deal with.

How have the duties of public sculpture changed in the last few decades?

I think there’s a lot of expectation from artists and institutions to invest in amending a history of racial oppression and abuse of power that continues to live out in the open in the form of public art. Since the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020 after the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, a second hard look has been placed on existing public monuments. As someone who regards the present with equal importance to the past, I am on board with organizations that instigate conversations, surveys and temporary and permanent projects that consider the future of monuments. Organizations like Monument Lab, the National Monument Audit, Counterpublic and the Creative Time Summit have developed initiatives in the foreground. Public Art Fund has been a pioneer in investing in the diffusion of challenging and thought-provoking work into prominent spaces of national impact for over 40 years. After working with them on this project, I understand why they are so regarded in the field. It has been a magnificent experience.

You’ve created some bespoke dominos that borrow design elements from this work, available at the Chess and Checkers House in the park. What was the thinking behind that activation?

The dominoes are just another form of instigating visitors to convene, sit and play at my sculpture’s tables. The furniture that forms a part of my sculpture’s composition was modeled after existing public plaza furniture commonly found in Puerto Rican municipalities and public plazas. People can use the tables as they please, but I thought it would be nice to provide an intentional component that adds to the nostalgia that the rejas usually exude. The Clemente, to whom I donated a domino table that I designed, collaborated with the Public Art Fund on a “Domino Table Talks” activation as part of a two-year archive initiative titled Historias. The activation consisted of a conversation with artists and activists of all ages from the Puerto Rican community while playing dominoes.

I have been in love with dominoes since I was a kid, and I still have a very old set that belonged to my parents. I always carry a mini traveling domino set, hoping to play with anyone who wants to play with me. I’m surprised by how many people don’t know how to play dominoes. It is an activity that I associate with leisure. I used to travel to Puerto Rico with my husband years ago before my visits to Puerto Rico became dedicated to helping with my mother’s health issues. For each visit, we selected a parador to stay at, where we brought a domino set and sipped rum while playing through the night. Like idiosyncratic aspects of the Puerto Rican language that are such an authentic part of my culture, dominoes carry on as it is very much connected to a tradition that passes from generation to generation.

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Dan Duray

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November 2, 2024
Charting the Legacy of Pop Art in the Work of Derrick Adams, Mickalene Thomas and Tomokazu Matsuyama

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Tom Wesselmann, Still Life #60, 1973; Oil on shaped canvases, 310.5 x 845.8 x 219.7 cm. © Adagp, Paris, 20…[année dautorisation], © Robert McKeever

Pop Art emerged at a pivotal moment when mass consumption and communication strategies were just beginning to take shape, capturing the “inevitable phenomenon” of postwar American pop culture and its persistent and pervasive imagery. Often termed “capitalist realism,” Pop Art reflects a radical acceptance of modern civilization, embracing the ways society communicates, produces and consumes. Unlike earlier avant-garde movements, which aimed to narrow the gap between art and everyday life, Pop Art was the first to fully engage with the cultural landscape as it was—making it democratic and broadly accessible in a way few movements had managed before. This accessibility has helped make Pop Art one of the most inviting and relatable art forms for the general public. Though contemporary critics dismissed its “poverty of visual invention” and even questioned its status as art, Pop Art broke down the walls between art and culture, speaking directly in the language of the everyday society it portrayed.

“Pop Forever, Tom Wesselmann &…” at Fondation Louis Vuitton offers a deeply comprehensive look at Pop Art’s enduring significance. The exhibition centers on Tom Wesselmann, a key figure in the movement, with 150 paintings and other works that highlight and explore the legacy of his approach. It then expands to explore Pop Art through the lens of seventy works by thirty-five artists across generations and nationalities, creating a visual narrative of the ways subsequent generations of artists have engaged critically with the pop culture of their time. The diverse collection of works questions what Pop Art means today and its relevance in the future in an age of hyper-communication through digital media that empowers consumers to act as co-creators, enabling the continuous, global circulation of messages and cultural expressions.

An installation view of “Pop Forever, Tom Wesselmann et…” at Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris. © Adagp, Paris, 2024 Photo: © Fondation Louis Vuitton / Marc Domage

On the occasion of the exhibition’s opening during Paris Art Week, Observer spoke with artists Derrick Adams, Mickalene Thomas and Tomokazu Matsuyama—all of whom have newly commissioned works presented in the show—about their relation to Tom Wesselmann and Pop Art, and what this term means for them today.

“I think that Pop art was the only art movement to date, and the audience that the work that’s made is a response to not only the society that informs it but also the audience that embraces it and communicates to it,” Adams said. The link between this artist and Pop Art, and in particular Wesselmann’s work, lies in how he navigates media culture and discusses consumerism. His relationship with Wesselmann started while studying his archives, as he was interested in understanding more about his process and how it related the material construction of his work to media culture. “I was curious about how he started, finished and collaged things together, whether this was in paintings or sculptural objects. This is something that I also do in my work.”

Adams was particularly drawn to Wesselmann’s Great American Nudes series and the controversial way it portrayed the female figure in American culture, sparking in him a mix of interest, concern and curiosity. His response to Wesselmann is embodied in the series Great Black American/African American Nudes, a set of four new works in the show depicting Black male nudes, whose colors—drawn from the African American flag popularized by David Hammons (black, green and red)—are accented with comic-book-style onomatopoeias. Through these parodies of the American dream, Adams critiques the image of white, heterosexual, patriotic American superheroes, challenging the paradoxical values underpinning this dream and exposing its inherently marginalizing nature, which has long excluded entire segments of the population, at least in media representation. In a conversation with curators Dieter Buchhart and Anna Karina Hofbauer, Adams noted that “they aren’t necessarily counterimages, but more of an offering to assist in the expansion of the notion associated with who and what ‘Great American’ fully represents.” The figures are also partially censored, adding a playful, provocative edge, blending humor with eroticism as they evoke social media’s use of symbols like eggplants and peaches to imply sexual meanings without explicit language.

Derrick Adams, Super Nude 3; acrylic, latex paint, and fabric collage on panel, in artist’s frame, 60 ⅜ × 60 ⅜ × 2 ½ inches (153.4 × 153.4 × 6.4 cm). © Adagp, Paris, 2024 Photo: © Fondation Louis Vuitton / Marc Domage

Adams observed that consumer culture and communication have shifted significantly since Pop Art’s emergence: “I think we are now more self-conscious and aware of our image.” Social media has fundamentally altered the dynamic between media and consumers, making them far less passive, as they now play a critical role in co-creating both media and meaning. “Now you can curate your image and can no longer be objectified, but you can objectify yourself,” he clarified. Rather than imposing fixed models and desires, media industries now cater to a more fluid sense of desire. “It’s more about allowing people to be part of popular culture and contributing in defining what this should be.”

Adams’ work thoughtfully examines how people express themselves through media today, using daily “staging” to shape identity and storytelling, which directly impacts consumer habits. He also noted that the art world and institutions are now much more attuned to what “Pop” signifies for audiences and actively seek ways to connect with it; data allows for a deeper understanding of what people enjoy, desire and respond to, along with insights on viewers—knowledge widely used in marketing across industries. Reflecting on his relationship with Pop Art, Adams suggested that the references to popular culture in his work “allow people to have a direct relationship with it.”

Mickalene Thomas works in “Pop Forever, Tom Wesselmann &…” at Fondation Louis Vuitton. © Adagp, Paris, 2024 Photo: © Fondation Louis Vuitton / Marc Domage

Thomas observed that while the willingness to engage with contemporary culture persists, the very definition of “popular culture” has evolved along with the artistic practices addressing it. “It’s transformed because it’s of that moment,” she said, and art “is about how we define it as a culture and how those artists decide to pull from that particular moment and what they want to present to the world. It’s about the new technology and the new media that are available. Today, it’s more diverse, it’s expansive, it’s global, it’s universal. Art is now amalgamated with different sort of ethnicities in a global society.” Thomas’ own style reflects this shift; her vibrant, engaging works draw from pop culture, particularly in their connection to fashion trends. Bold depictions celebrating the beauty and resilience of Black female bodies challenge historical narratives that have sought to erase or marginalize them.

In her work, Thomas often employs photographic materials, engaging in the hybridization of painting and mechanical reproduction. She fragments these images, adding unexpected materials like rhinestones and glitter to empower femininity and female independence. During our conversation, she shared her longstanding fascination with Tom Wesselmann’s work, noting significant similarities between hers and his. While an undergraduate at Pratt Institute, Thomas discovered Wesselmann’s art, conducting research in his archives—a journey culminating in her current exhibition. What particularly interested her, as she emphasized, was how Wesselmann portrayed both white and Black female bodies on equal terms, exploring how both inspire desire. “When it came to the American nude female body, there was no hierarchy between a Black woman’s body and a white woman’s body,” she said. This was radical for its time and remains so to some degree even today. Thomas, as a queer Black woman creating art that celebrates Black female bodies, still encounters resistance.

At Fondation Louis Vuitton, Thomas presents works that explore Black erotica and delve into themes of sexuality, desire and the female gaze with a boldness akin to Wesselmann’s, similarly challenging societal norms around the representation of the nude female body, especially the Black female body. She highlights a shared element in Wesselmann’s work and her own: empowering women by portraying them as fully aware of their seductive power. This approach invites desire while pushing back against the objectification of female bodies in mass media and advertising. Examining these narratives and the societal dynamics they reflect remains one of Pop Art’s greatest strengths, according to Thomas. “I think most artists today are pop artists. We’re always bringing things to the forefront and bringing attention to what surrounds us, inviting others to question it.”

Tomokazu Matsuyama, Safety Retrospective, 2024; Acrylic and mix media on canvas, 279 x 200 x 3,8 cm. © 20.. [année d’autorisation] Tomokazu Matsuyama

Japanese-born and U.S.-based, Matsuyama offers a unique perspective, highlighting the pervasive influence of American commercial culture worldwide while drawing parallels with Japanese culture. His work examines how these cultural strategies operate within commercial, media, and social media realms, contributing to a global culture that often leans toward homogenization yet thrives on a rich exchange of symbols and elements from diverse backgrounds.

In particular, Matsuyama’s shaped canvases feature densely layered collages that capture the cultural and aesthetic diversity of our global society. The sources for each piece range from traditional art history to contemporary fashion campaigns, along with objects and interiors inspired by popular design magazines. These are often blended with references to Japanese culture, visible in the manga-inspired flatness of his characters and traditional landscape motifs. His art embodies a cultural fluidity that reflects the diasporic experience and the global nature of identity, moving beyond a fixed idea of pop culture. “I was a minority when I got to the U.S., but even in Japan, I was that, as my father was a pastor,” he explained. “Throughout my life, I couldn’t adapt. Now everybody’s trying to adapt to the world. What I’m doing in my work is adapting different influences to reflect us.”

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When discussing his connections to Pop Art, Matsuyama noted that if his work is categorized as such, it’s because his palette is colorful and certain elements align with the genre. He also acknowledged the influence of pioneers like Warhol and Wesselmann, the latter of whom played a key role in his early digital collages, which he later translated to shaped canvas. What intrigues him most, however, is that while Japanese culture has traditionally valued fine objects such as historical ceramics or porcelains, Wesselmann and other Pop artists elevated the everyday object to a similar level. “My way of assembling fictional landscapes from everyday items represents a continuation and transformation of Pop Art,” he said. At the same time, Matsuyama layers his work with additional dimensions, incorporating a final dripping of white paint reminiscent of Pollock’s Abstract Expressionism and treating art and cultural history as a vast, global archive—carefully researched, selected and recombined using digital tools before translating them into painting.

At the same time, while Pop artists like Warhol explored the imagination conveyed through media such as TV, magazines and advertisements, Matsuyama engages with a digital archive of our civilization—one that already fuses traditional and historical, contemporary and vernacular, on a global and multicultural scale. He also draws parallels to today’s cultural disorientation, noting that “back then, in the ’70s, America was going through this huge economic growth, and therefore there was a dark side that was coming.” The quest for idols, for points of reference, for something to believe in is what both pop culture and Pop Art ultimately express. “Now we’re going to this last generation stage, like: Where do we fit? What do we belong to?”

In this light, Matsuyama’s art—and indeed, this entire exhibition—can be seen as a celebration of “Pop” as a model for multiculturalism, which has already permeated today’s global popular culture. This model embraces the complex, multifaceted nature of modern popular culture and offers the potential to move beyond the subtle nationalist undertones of the American Dream that Pop Art once exposed, instead fostering a new sense of belonging rooted in shared global identity and an ongoing, cross-border exchange of goods and symbolic meanings they carry.

Works by Jeff Koons and Tomokazu Matsuyama in “Pop Forever, Tom Wesselmann &…” © Jeff Koons;© 20[année d’autorisation] Tomokazu Matsuyama, © Fondation Louis Vuitton / Marc Domage

“Pop Forever, Tom Wesselmann &…” is on view at Fondation Louis Vuitton through February 24, 2025.

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Elisa Carollo

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October 25, 2024
How Leonardo Drew Plays With Entropy to Prove Chaos Can Transform into Meaning

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Installation view of “Leonardo Drew” at Galerie Lelong & Co. JONATHON CANCRO, Courtesy Galerie Lelong & Co.

Entropy best captures the essence of Leonardo Drew’s work: the randomness that transforms into creation, a level of disorder that permeates all aspects of life but ultimately finds its measure, becoming a force that adds complexity to existence. Fragments of wood, painted in varying hues, overrun the gallery space, which resembles the aftermath of a hurricane. Yet, amidst the seeming chaos, there is a striking harmony in the way the colors interact and some poetry in the incursions of more personal elements in the comics that hint at Drew’s earlier talent in that field.

Drew’s soon-to-close show at Galerie Lelong & Co., “Leonardo Drew,” repurposes material fragments from his previous works and exhibitions into an immersive and explosive site-specific installation of monumental scale. The exhibition remains untitled, with the works represented only by numeric series and codes. The artist deliberately avoids assigning specific meanings to this material composition, leaving it open for viewers to interpret and engage with in a dialectic process of signification.

As Drew explained during our walkthrough, he views himself as a catalyst: his art is about receiving, transmitting and amplifying the flow of energies and particles that define the cosmos. “Within yourself, you have to have some idea of that there’s a synergy between us, and other bigger things in the cosmos, much bigger than ourselves,” he told Observer. By following the movement of particles and atoms on a macro scale, Drew allows these fragments to land and recombine into new material constellations. “Each of those works informs the incoming work. I’m usually working on like seven things, and I’m continuously rotating.”

As with all Drew’s exhibitions and artworks, the presentation remains untitled, allowing viewers to complete the work themselves through their understanding of it. © Leonardo Drew Courtesy Galerie Lelong & Co.

As we delve into his artistic process, it becomes clear that Leonardo Drew’s work is more spiritual than rooted in physics or science. It aligns more closely with Eastern philosophies, which emphasize the continuous circulation of materials and forces that sustain existence and fuel its restless evolution. “The actual physics of creating these things is applied, but it’s not part of our material world,” is how he described it. “You need to have a base from which you’re operating, which is your philosophy, your spirituality, your way of receiving and walking this planet.”

During our conversation, Drew acknowledged the profound influence that Asia, particularly China, has had on his artistic direction. The distinct energy of different places comes through in his work and his attitudes toward it. “When I was in China, I started smashing the porcelain vases that I was creating there,” he said. The artisans there felt it was garbage, so they started throwing it away. I was like, this is not garbage, actually.”

SEE ALSO: These Are the Best Art Galleries and Museums in Budapest, Hungary

At its core, his practice is about perceiving and listening to his materials, maintaining a heightened awareness of his position in space. It’s about “being in tune,” he said, which lets him focus on the piece in front of him. His process is one of intuitive composition, building with the materials at hand. He describes his work as sculptural abstraction. “I come off the wall,” he said, but his practice transcends that definition, pushing beyond boundaries. “People want to categorize and describe you, but all borders are broken through the process.”

For Drew, the moment of artistic awakening came in a library when he encountered Jackson Pollock’s work in a book. This revelation prompted him to abandon a promising career with Marvel or DC Comics. “It was something I was really considering growing up in the hood,” he recalled. “The poison came when I saw Jackson Pollock in a book in the library; from that point, I knew I had to pass the prettified surface. There’s something beyond that surface. So I started to experiment to understand what was all this about.”

Leonardo Drew, Number 414, 2024; Wood, glass, plaster, and paint 120x120x13 in. (304.8×304.8×33 cm.) © Leonardo Drew, Courtesy Galerie Lelong & Co.

The exhibition at Galerie Lelong & Co. also features some new works in which painted plaster blocks form grids, suggesting a return to human-controlled order amidst the chaotic flow of all things. Drew explained that the shift to blocks was born from the practical need to move his work more easily into and out of the studio. Yet these fragments, once seemingly useless and broken, find renewed meaning within the multiplicity of the ensemble, much like atoms, entities and humans do—gravitating toward purpose and significance.

A larger piece on the entrance wall resembles a code, almost like an alphabet, which Drew has developed over the years through various projects. It includes fragments from his Madison Park sculpture, his last show at the gallery and other works, making it a compendium of potential constellations that Drew refers to as “a catalog of materials that comes from a life of living with these actual words.” This work encapsulates a coded set of possible forms, illustrating how matter can find shape and meaning in space. By staging and playing with the rules of the cosmos, Drew’s exhibition demonstrates, both physically and experientially, how chaos can give birth to new forms and meanings. His work reflects the cyclical nature of life and decay, caught in an endless dance of creation and destruction—revealing the universe’s ultimate purpose in the beauty it continually generates.

For over three decades, Leonardo Drew has created contemplative abstract sculptural works that play upon the tension between order and chaos. © Leonardo Drew, Courtesy Galerie Lelong & Co.

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Elisa Carollo

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October 18, 2024
Painter Luke Agada Is Pushing the Boundaries of Representation

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Luke Agada’s work is deeply rooted in the “third space” concept. Photo: Robert Chase Heishman

Since earning an MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago last year, painter Luke Agada’s career has taken off. Early showings at group exhibitions spanning continents—“Collective Reflection: Contemporary African and Diasporic Expressions of a New Vanguard” at Gallery 1957 in Accra, “Unusual Suspects” at African Artists’ Foundation in Lagos and “Where The Wild Roses Grow” at Berlin’s Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery—established Agada as an artist with a knack for expressing cultural identity, ambiguity and introspection in surrealist works rendered in color palettes reminiscent of his native Lagos. His first U.S. solo exhibition at Chicago’s Monique Meloche Gallery in September of 2023 was followed by a standout showing at Art Basel Miami Beach, where Roberts Projects featured his work in what quickly became one of the fair’s most buzzed-about booths.

All this from someone who not terribly long ago was making and selling paintings in his spare time while pursuing a degree in veterinary medicine. But just a year into his veterinary career, the Nigerian-born, Chicago-based artist quit to focus on art full-time—a pivot that involved moving from Lagos to the U.S.

“Far from home, with little familiarity and no family nearby, I experienced a constant sense of longing and nostalgia that eventually permeated my work,” Agada told Observer. “The figures I depicted began to reflect fragments of my memories, reduced to simplified forms, shadows and lines—mere vestiges of my past. I sought ways to navigate this longing and explore how the migrant form adapts to globalized spaces.”

Agada’s style is a confluence of Surrealism and postcolonial theory, and much of his work explores the “third space” concept popularized by Homi K. Bhabha. With earthy tones, shadow and light, he depicts clashes of memory and migration in psychologically engaging landscapes where intersecting cultural identities and shifting power dynamics create tension-filled environs populated by distortions representing not individuals but states of being.

SEE ALSO: Gillian Varney On the Lumen Prize and Its Relevance After Thirteen Years

On the occasion of the opening of “Between Two Suns,” the artist’s first solo show in Los Angeles now on at Roberts Projects, Observer connected with Agada to discuss his influences, how his life’s journey has shaped his work and what he hopes people will take away from the show. With his star on the rise, expect to see more of him.

The surreal distortion in your figures is uncanny—what shaped your visual vocabulary?

In the early stages of my practice, I was heavily influenced by European surrealists such as Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy and René Magritte, which grounded my work in traditional figure drawing. I later became intrigued by various modernist movements, particularly the impact of modernism on American art that challenged conventional representations of the human form. This interest sparked my desire to push the boundaries of representation in my work.

Upon moving to the U.S. for my MFA at SAIC, my approach shifted significantly. Far from home, with little familiarity and no family nearby, I experienced a constant sense of longing and nostalgia that eventually permeated my work. The figures I depicted began to reflect fragments of my memories, reduced to simplified forms, shadows, and lines—mere vestiges of my past. I sought ways to navigate this longing and explore how the migrant form adapts to globalized spaces. My interest in Postcolonial theory grew during a class on the subject, as I found it deeply relatable.

Encountering the works of the New York School painters opened a new avenue for developing the visual framework of my practice. The emotions embedded in their work were palpable; they were invested in infusing meaning into forms that resonate with the entire human experience. Their unique way of freezing moments within the intermediate zones of image-making further fueled my interest. Consequently, I shifted my focus from purely orthodox surrealists to artists like Arshile Gorky and Joan Miró, who employed an automatist approach while drawing on their surrealist influences.

Luke Agada, Therapist. Courtesy of the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles, California; Photo: Robert Chase Heishman

Who are those ghostly figures meant to be? You? An everyman?

Although I deeply connect with the emotional and psychological states of the figures in my paintings, they are not biographical assertions of myself. Rather, they are representations of states of being, some of which are tied to specific stories or events.

What should people know about your approach to painting?

My relationship with painting has gradually shifted or evolved over time. Earlier, I paid more attention solely to the representative image, which had a major focus on the well-defined identity of the subjects. However, I soon developed an interest in how the idea and approach to representation of the figure amongst modernist painters of the 20th century evolved. This made me realize that the theme of identity is not the only foundation or final form that my work can take. I saw the need to go beyond just the reconstruction of identity.

The transformative property of painting, amongst other things, contributed to my interest in the organic and biomorphic forms that sit at the border between the Representative and Prefigurative Image, which accurately reflects my thoughts about some of the conversations I am interested in.

I am interested in challenging the anatomy of forms and the new meaning they assume as they adapt to a new space. Doing this creates tension between them and the space they occupy. The spaces are a mix of memory and imagination, yet they’re not purely autobiographical, as I am sometimes making a space that can only exist in a painting.

“Between Two Suns,” installation view. Courtesy of the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles, California; Photo: Paul Salveson

I desire the paintings to have a life of their own, so there is always an ongoing negotiation between my hand and the material to capture the poetics of the moment as I layer up, add and remove paint to reveal the underpainting. I am gradually embracing the plurality of perspectives because it opens for me an infinite number of possibilities and entry points into the painted picture. Picasso and Georges Braque breaking down the picture plane into the fourth dimension was a good example for me.

Although ideological concepts are important, I do not prioritize them over painterly values. This is because painting often operates beyond the artist’s intentions, especially upon first encounter. The meaning of a picture often reveals itself later. Therefore, I approach my work with an open mind, staying highly observant and sensitive to where the process leads me, even when working through a specific idea.

How has your own cross-continental exposure impacted the evolution of your artistic style and/or narrative?

Learning how to truly “see” is one of the most valuable experiences I’ve gained as an artist. It has enabled me to view the world contextually, through the lens of the human story—understanding that each person’s perspective is filtered through their unique experiences, histories and cultural contexts. Despite the world being incredibly interconnected, with vast diversity among people of different cultural backgrounds and nationalities, the “single story” perspective remains prevalent. This oversimplification reduces complex individuals and experiences to stereotypical narratives. I have taken a keen interest in the subjectivity of forms across borders; recognizing that the interpretation and meaning of forms, as a visual language, are shaped by individual lived experiences and perspectives.

This realization became particularly clear to me when I encountered the work of some modernist painters, such as New York School and abstract expressionist painters. Engaging with their works awakened me to new sensibilities and revealed possibilities I had not previously considered in my own work.

I’ve read that you draw inspiration from both scholarly texts and literary works; what can you tell me about those influences in particular? How, for you, does text translate into the visual?

I recently developed an interest in postcolonial theory and literature, particularly some of the writings of Homi Bhabha that have helped in my understanding of the international and intercultural Third Space of migration, the binary opposition between geographies, between the East and West and how that is impacting the formation of hybridity and complex cultural identities in the globalized space. A part of my work has been derived from some of the lexicons, such as the migrant or alien, used to describe these new identities and their adaptation in the Third Space.

Luke Agada, Vestiges. Courtesy of the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles, California; Photo: Robert Chase Heishman

The paintings actually do resist concrete references to the theoretical part of my influences. They only carry a sensation of my thoughts and imaginations as I sample through visual references that represent the information and feeling I am trying to convey. Hence there is nothing literal about the form of the paintings that directly references my interest in Postcolonial theory visually, the scholars have done great justice in theorizing that thought through text. It’s an interpretation of all the elements that work together in the paintings to evoke the same feeling we experience about the subject.

A direct translation of text to visual information or painting would be an unnecessary and overly illustrative narration of what has already been said. This would be a bit too much to ask of the medium of painting because it cannot have the desired impact that other media like film, animation or montage would have in doing the same thing. Rather than do that as a painter, I focus on the texture of sensations like tension, movement and transition.

Painting is slow, not just as a medium or in the process, but in its ability to become. It has the propensity for not just immediacy but also a prolonged impression or impact that has to be digested over time. Hence, I feel the purpose of painting lies in serving as a catalyst to stimulate feelings or thoughts about a subject, and an effective way of doing that is not by giving you all the visual information or telling you what you already know. Sometimes, a strong painting will not force down on you more information than necessary—that will become “propagandist,” it rather offers you a few essential ingredients to draw you in, and the rest is up to you. That’s why individual interpretations and the meaning we all ascribe to forms can be quite subjective. It’s like taking a Rorschach test- our personalities are revealed in how we see.

What do you hope people will take away from the totality of “Between Two Suns”?

First, I hope that they are able to visually digest, connect with and enjoy the formal component of the works. Through the conversations around it, I hope to invite them to meditate on the notions of displacement and hybridity and offer a visual meditation on the precarious balance between survival and dissolution. And by refusing the structuralist comfort of definitive meaning, I hope to leave space for the audience to confront their own assumptions about identity, migration and shared space.

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Christa Terry

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October 7, 2024
Genesis Belanger Is Staging the Ordinary Surreal in her Debut at Pace London

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Genesis Belanger’s work is coming to Pace London. Fine art documentation for Perrotin, photographed and edited by Claire Dorn

New York-based artist Genesis Belanger has made a name for herself exploring the uncanny and unconscious meanings of everyday objects, crafting mysterious handmade tableaux vivants that blend mass-production aesthetics with exquisite craftsmanship across a range of materials, from wood to porcelain. She’s currently preparing for her upcoming show, “In the Right Conditions We are Indistinguishable” at Pace Gallery’s Hanover Square location, which opens on October 9 to coincide with London Art Week, but hit pause to speak with Observer about the themes shaping her new body of work.

Belanger describes the exhibition as a series of vignettes that challenge our relationships with material objects and the desires, needs and emotions we project onto them. “This idea that something or someone could all be the same, except for the context that makes one different. The context is what changes the person,” she explains. In our conversation, Belanger reflects on America’s polarized state and suggests that many of these perceived differences are actually shaped by external circumstances. In her work, she captures the tension between the homogenization of cultural habits driven by global mass production and the deeply personal stories we attach to the objects that surround us.

Underlying Belanger’s practice is a fascination with how advertising and popular culture shape our perceptions and the value we assign to material goods. Her meticulously crafted replicas of ordinary objects serve as eerie anthropological artifacts of mass consumption, revealing the layered associations and emotional weight we impart onto inanimate items. By inviting us to examine these items as symbols of our collective desires and anxieties, not to mention our deepest fears, Belanger’s installations offer a commentary on the complex interplay between consumerism and personal identity.

Genesis Belanger, Self-awareness, 2024; Veneered plywood, cork, stoneware, porcelain, patinaed brass, oil painted manicure, wooden vanity, 28″ × 61″ × 20″ (71.1 cm × 154.9 cm × 50.8 cm). © Genesis Belanger Photography by Pauline Shapiro , courtesy the artist and Pace Gallery

The surreal quality of Belanger’s art is intrinsically linked to her interest in human psychology, a fascination that both Surrealism and advertising share. “I feel like the surreal character in my work is because Surrealism is interested in human psychology and the subconscious, and so is advertising,” the artist told us. “I came to the surreal or uncanny elements through an interest in the tools advertisement uses to manipulate.” At the heart of her research lies a deep focus on psychology, which then intersects with sociology and semiotics. She’s not necessarily intentionally making work thinking about Surrealism, but she very much is thinking about human psychology.

Belanger’s practice stages scenes that hover between dreamscapes and studio sets, where miniature versions of human daily dramas are enacted through the objects that define those interactions. She examines how these items transform into symbols, becoming part of more intricate narratives. Yet, her characters (the objects) appear transient, embodying a sense of impermanence—as if they are worn-out replicas of a once-meaningful original, shadows of the objective referent drained of value and meaning through repeated remediation.

As for contrasts, Belanger’s ghostly, malleable cartoonist avatars of the real subjects have hilarious yet poetic titles, which transport them into another symbolic universe, already detached from the materialism that characterizes the capitalistic mass production and consumption from which they originate—and by which they would otherwise be condemned to rapid obsolescence. Occasionally, these objects become so malleable that they metamorphose entirely, adopting human-like features and transforming into eerie fantasies or unsettling creatures, evoking a blend of attraction and repulsion. Through synesthetic play, her sculptural creations evoke psychological responses that blur the boundaries between senses, unlocking a surreal, nonsensical realm of expression beyond any conventional linguistic code.

It’s no wonder that some of her pieces are reminiscent of characters from animation, such as those in Disney’s Fantasia. They tap into similar Surrealist imaginings, unveiling hidden aspects of the collective unconscious and conjuring a vibrant symbolic universe that resists the rigid societal frameworks of productivity and rationality.

Genesis Belanger, Sentimental Attachment, 2024; Stoneware with oil-painted manicure 25″ × 13″ × 2″ (63.5 cm × 33 cm × 5.1 cm). © Genesis Belanger Photography by Pauline Shapiro, courtesy the artist and Pace Gallery

“I’m always interested in the element of time and how, if you create a scene or an image that alludes to the presence of a person who’s no longer there, it’s like all the objects left behind are just evidence,” Belanger explains. “The viewer can access and then enter a narrative.” In this way, her works become relics—remnants that evoke human presence and their stories without depicting the actual subjects. By blending beauty, nostalgia and humor with motifs of capitalist consumerism, Belanger provokes specific psychological responses, allowing us to connect with the objects’ narratives and emotional associations. In this sense, they also serve as reminders after the loss and absence, contrasting the restless circle of consumption and destruction by freezing in time and eternalizing the emotional values associated with the original products.

The artist acknowledges that it’s impossible to escape the consumer-driven reality surrounding us. Thus, her primary source of inspiration is the overwhelming flood of products and images she encounters daily. “I live in New York, and I travel mostly by bike,” she says. “I feel like I’m just moving through this center of capitalism and seeing so much all the time. I don’t think you could exist today and not be inundated with a type of delicious image or images made to touch our desires. I’m a visual sponge; I’m absorbing every single thing that interests me.”

During this appropriation, Belanger creates critical friction between the readily available and reproducible mass-produced objects and the laborious craftsmanship behind her version of those objects. Using ceramics, wood and other natural and traditional materials, she highlights the handmade, tactile nature of her sculptures, imbuing them with a distinct material presence that transforms them into “artifacts” and cultural records of contemporary society and of the state of our civilization. This focus on craft interrupts the ceaseless flow of products and advertising, giving these objects a new weight and individuality, allowing them to stand apart from the homogenized world of consumer goods and acquire unique identities.

Genesis Belanger, Husband Material, 2024; Porcelain, stoneware, plywood, raincoat fabric, rubber-coated linen, 18 -1/4″ × 21″ × 16 – 5/8″ (46.4 cm × 53.3 cm × 42.2 cm). © Genesis Belanger Photography by Pauline Shapiro , courtesy the artist and Pace Gallery.

These layers of interpretation add depth to Belanger’s practice, especially considering how, in photographs, her art often resembles digital images created by A.I. based on inputs about our human needs. “I think it’s exciting to make an object that exists in the world, but when it’s photographed, it could just be like the imagination of an artificial intelligence,” says Belanger.

This concept complicates the relationship between her creations and the real-life objects that inspire them, highlighting how Belanger’s artistic process absorbs and transforms these influences into new material forms—similar to how A.I. processes and reinterprets data on human consumer behavior. Thus, her work reflects on the meaning and significance of objects and products, a dialogue that gains further relevance as data itself becomes more valuable than the physical items it represents. Despite these complexities, Belanger’s art ultimately encourages us to appreciate the tangible materiality of the objects we create, interact with, and integrate into our lives.

Genesis Belanger’s “In the Right Conditions We are Indistinguishable” opens at Pace London on October 9 and will remain on view through November 9.

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Elisa Carollo

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October 2, 2024
Monica Bonvicini Sees an Ongoing Need for Feminist Discourse in Art and Life

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“Put All Heaven in a Rage” is at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York, through October 12. Photo by Pierre Le Hors Courtesy the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles

A set of metal chains, black leather and mirrors sets the tone of Monica Bonvicini’s “Put All Heaven in a Rage,” her first solo show with Tanya Bonakdar Gallery. Bonvicini, an Italian artist based in Berlin, emerged from the radical German art scene of the 1990s with a powerful voice, provocative humor and clever use of language. She is widely regarded as one of the most influential artists of her generation, particularly known for her exploration of the relationships between architecture, gender, and power dynamics.

In this exhibition, Bonvicini stages a critical interaction between the viewer, the mirrors and the space, creating an unsettling sense of vulnerability. This interaction critiques the ways specific objects and environments psychologically and sometimes physically influence behavior. In an upstairs installation, an entire room of mirrors overlaid with pink text challenges stereotypes and celebrates female resilience, power and the multiple roles women navigate throughout life. Bonvicini also extends her critique to language, using black-and-white drawings that feature fragmented quotes from literature, poetry and politics to underscore how linguistic structures shape and control meaning.

As the exhibition nears its final weeks, Observer caught up with the artist to discuss how her work addresses society’s increasing polarization, the threat of rising violence and the ongoing need for feminist discourse and celebration despite progress made in the ’60s and ’90s.

Let’s start with the show’s title, which is quite evocative. What inspired it, and what kind of reading of the show would it suggest?

Some years ago, I did a series of works, primarily drawings, related to the concept of rage from a contemporary feminist point of view, which are presented in the catalog “Hot Like Hell” from 2021. The quotation I chose for the Tanya Bonakdar Gallery show is one that I stumbled upon back then but didn’t feel right about using until now. The title comes from the well-known poem by William Blake, Auguries of Innocence.

I like how the sentence sounds, how impossible it is, how sculptural “Heaven” seems to be if you can literally take it and put it somewhere, like an object, a body that you can put in a closet, in a box, in a cage or in wherever or whatever the space is in which rage reigns. It makes me think of rash movements, storms or even hurricanes, and all those associations are in my works, like the pneumatic sculpture Breathing, 2017; the installation A Violent, Tropical, Cyclonic Piece of Art Having Wind Speeds of or over 75 mph, 1998; the ongoing series of drawings Hurricane and other Catastrophes; or the architectural sculpture As Walls keep Shifting from 2019.

Monica Bonvicini in her studio. ALBRECHT FUCHS

For the show in New York City, I wanted to create that tension, the impossible speed I read in the quotation that can be pinpointed down to an immobilized moment of concentration. The show is about that moment, a concentrated change. For that, I created the installation Buy Me a Mirror at the entrance of the main exhibition space, which closes the view to the show while opening it to the street. Once over the edge of the wood and mirror installation, the show displays different works and mediums I work with, from the colored mirror works Gorgeous, 2024, and the large-scale print Marlboro Man Praire, 2021, to the hanging sculptures Latent Combustion, 2015, and Chainswing Rings and Stripes, 2024, or the new black and white drawings.

Your practice has long explored the connections between architecture, gender, and both physical and psychological violence. How do you feel this exploration has evolved, especially with the rise of new surveillance technologies and tools for self-representation?

The roots of the relationships you are talking about remain the same, and what is added around can powerfully alter and improve the core of problems or obstruct them in a kind of endless fata morgans of images.

“Put All Heaven in a Rage” serves as a profound critique of the structures that govern our lives. Photo by Pierre Le Hors. Courtesy the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles

Your work is characterized by a cold, hardcore, almost surgical aesthetic that highlights mechanisms and frameworks of control and suppression. Can you identify particular life experiences or cultural and societal elements that inspired that?

There are, for sure, some experiences that determined the aesthetics of my works and the process I am going through while working on them. I think it is necessary to be as precise as possible in formulating the artwork; contrary to what might be a cliché, you cannot do anything in art and expect it to be good. As an artist, I reflect in my practice what is happening around me, but I do not want my works to be journalistic or moral, didactical, or only personal. I used to do a little climbing when I was younger, and I have been to alpine peaks, where my attention was not on the magnificent views but just about to stay in equilibrium, not to fall, because of the little place you had under your feet. There is so much physical concentration in such moments. I also know, out of experience, the feeling of being powerless in front of injustices and violence. It’s an emotion that stays with you and gets into your body for some time. To be able to distill that into a work that implies all the explosive possibilities and scenarios and make them understandable without teaching about them is what I try to do.

SEE ALSO: Artist Kumi Yamashita’s Punctilious Portraits Are Worth Traveling For

Much of your work functions as a critical device, a nonfunctional machine that metaphorically explores societal and psychological dynamics between individuals and society. How do you define sculpture, and how would you describe your approach to this medium?

I never studied sculpture in the classical sense of the word. I studied painting in Berlin, got into making objects and small models with Isa Genzken while she was a guest teacher there and started making installation and performative sculptures while I was in Cal Arts. Michael Asher and Charles Gains were my mentors, so those places and people greatly influenced my work. I have a conceptual approach to sculpture. I see my works very close to what architecture is; installation art is also a way to define spaces and systems of power, and it can subtly do that. We are all surrounded by walls; we all use doors or look out at windows. There is nothing so universal as the concept of a house.

I understand sculpture and installations as ways to question perceptions of given structures, which makes you think about them from a different angle. I also think art is not there necessarily to cure all the maladies of the world but to point them out, to dig them up and to make them visible.

Bonvicini’s works draw their materiality and imagery from cultural associations and power dynamics, particularly as perceived through sexual stereotypes. Photo by Pierre Le Hors. Courtesy the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles

Your work often intersects feminist and institutional critique. Given that you were one of the few women artists working in a male-dominated European art scene, particularly in Italy and Berlin, how do you see the role of feminist critique today? Do you think gender-based power dynamics are evolving within and outside the art world?

When I did the video installation Wallfuckin’ back in 1995 or Hausfrau Swiging in 1997, I didn’t call it a feminist work because I thought that feminism had won its battles already. I understood the gender theory of the ‘90s as an excellent example of how successful feminism had been. Yet there is still a need for a feminist elaboration and celebration decades later. The battle is never won. There is always a need to define and address existing imbalances; we see them everywhere, in the art world and outside. Europe is still pretty misogynistic. Even if things changed for the better, they didn’t change enough. I want to see more women’s works in museums’ collections, more solo shows by women, identical rages on working places, more equality and less violence.

In Bonvicini’s black-and-white drawings, quotes from literature and poetry become compelling commentary on political concern, division and the pursuit of personal and collective agency. Photo by Pierre Le Hors. Courtesy the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles

Monica Bonvicini’s “Put All Heaven in a Rage” is on view at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in New York through October 12.

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Elisa Carollo

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September 26, 2024
Artist Chitra Ganesh On Bringing Plants’ Regenerative Power to Penn Station

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Chitra Ganesh’s Regeneration at New York’s Penn Station. Photos by David Plakke

Brooklyn-based artist Chitra Ganesh has just unveiled a large-scale public video installation at New York’s Penn Station, part of the “Art at Amtrak” series of rotating exhibitions curated by award-winning public art producer Debra Simon and her team. Known for her distinctive graphic and comic style, Ganesh blends South Asian iconography with science fiction and queer feminist theory. Her work celebrates feminine energies and ancestral symbolism, inspiring a deeper symbiosis between living beings, beginning with a reconnection to the inner self.

For this commission, Ganesh created Regeneration, a highly symbolic video narrative focused on the regenerative power of plants. The immersive video is designed to remind commuters of the vibrant life thriving in nature and reconnect them with, as the artist puts it, elements that transcend humanity’s limitations, encouraging a regeneration of perspective and a reset of both the mental and the physical.

This marks the first time the “Art at Amtrak” series, which previously installed works in the Amtrak Rotunda and 8th Avenue Concourse, has put art in the Hilton Corridor. Observer spoke with Ganesh at the unveiling of the installation, which complements her other video work, Coherence, on view in Moynihan Train Hall through October 14.

Chitra, your video works incorporate many elements of your symbolic and visual language. The flora, along with specific plants and species, seems intentionally symbolic in the narrative you’ve created. For example, the Rose of Jericho and the Welwitschia plant of Southwest Africa symbolize resilience, while others are native to the NYC area. How would you describe the importance of plants in your narrative, and how do they serve as metaphors for broader societal phenomena throughout human history?

I use plants from many regions worldwide to underscore humanity’s consistent recognition and association of plants with healing, regeneration, growth, resilience and remembrance. It seems especially important to remember that we humans are in a symbiotic relationship with plants—as we live through an unprecedented moment of climatic destruction that endangers countless species worldwide to the point of extinction. Plants have forever been at the forefront of human consciousness as a metaphor for life cycles and a scale of life and time in nature that is much larger than we typically think daily.

I was also interested in how specific plant qualities are similarly recognized across cultures, sometimes having multiple and universal resonances. Two examples are the calla lily and the dandelion. Calla lilies originated in South Africa and then migrated around the world. In Greek and Roman symbology, their chalice-like shape represented rebirth and bounty. In Mexican culture, they have been associated with purity and rebirth, often seen in historical paintings depicting Easter. I was also inspired by Diego Rivera’s use of calla lilies in his large-scale murals and paintings, which symbolize rebirth and revolution, as the works between 1920 and 1940 were made during the Mexican revolutions.

Dandelions, to me as a New Yorker, are symbols of resilience, survival and thriving despite the harsh conditions of urban grit such as cement and asphalt. In Scandinavian culture, words in Norwegian and Swedish reference the strength of the dandelion. For example, ”maskrosbarn,” meaning “dandelion child,” refers to someone with a tough childhood and still turns out alright, like a dandelion breaking through asphalt. The Swedes have long spoken of “dandelion” children, namely “normal” or “healthy” children with “resilient” genes who can do pretty well almost anywhere, whether raised in the equivalent of a sidewalk crack or a well-tended garden, as explained in an article by the Atlantic.

As you shared in the press release accompanying this important project, your first encounter with art as a child was in an urbanscape. How do you feel this street language has influenced your artistic style, and how would you describe it today?

There are so many ways in which street art has profoundly impacted my work. My relationship with public transport is long and rich. I started riding the subway to school by myself when I was ten years old, in 5th grade. Before they came to New York, my parents were native residents of Calcutta, India, a vast and bustling city, and lifelong public transport lovers. My mother never got a driver’s license, and my father loved his Senior metro card so much that he continued to ride the Brooklyn buses until his death.

In many ways, street art, such as Keith Haring’s chalk drawings executed on stripped billboards in subway stations and tunnels or the graffiti-covered subway cars that were a hallmark of the 1970s and ’80s, was the very first site-specific art I ever saw. Long before I entered a museum, I was engaging with the vibrancy, maximal color and mark-making energy of such works, which were larger than life scale. They were a massive part of my gateway into incorporating graphic aesthetics and brief presentations of my work.

Public art has a unique and beautiful quality to it that has the potential to offer an even more profound and transcendent experience with visual art than one we might have in institutions such as museums or galleries. Seeing art in a museum or a gallery is more likely (though not always) a one-off experience—you go for a particular exhibition. Experiencing artwork in a place you frequent over and over, perhaps even several times a week or month, is an experience more akin to music. That is, you organically engage work through various moods and mindstates, and depending on your emotional weather, you receive different transmissions from the work and have a deeper relationship with it by being able to look and be with the art repeatedly. It becomes part of both your external and internal landscapes. That is a very profound element of public art that historically was much more aligned with how people experienced religious art in spaces they regularly visited.

As a budding artist in the early 1990s, I was deeply inspired by the works of New York-based artists such as Basquiat, Brazilian artists OSGEMEOS and West Coast artists such as Barry McGee and Margaret Kilgallen, all of whom developed a singular aesthetic that drew from graffiti and freight train hopping culture. I love art in airports, artwork in subways and chalk drawings done by my neighbors’ children on the sidewalks outside my apartment.

Chitra Ganesh’s Coherence at Moynihan Train Hall. Photos by David Plakke.

Most of your work features psychological and spiritual interplay between inner and outer dimensions, between the purely unconscious and a more senatorial world. How do you feel the video allowed you to explore these dimensions further?

Video and animation have been essential media for exploring the interplay between internal and external landscapes in the place where collective and individual or societal and psychic realities converge. Drawing-based animation offers astonishing potential for exploring the intersection of complex worlds. In Coherence, outlined silhouettes of figures are set against a lush landscape, and inside the bodies, we can witness an equally rich and contrasting landscape. In this sense, the bodies themselves become portals into another dimension. Portals have been an essential feature in my work as of late; they are a form that allows the compression of time and space, allowing audiences to traverse vastly different landscapes and temporal zones within the blink of an eye. They also allow us to see how multiple realities, mindstates or universes can coexist simultaneously. This idea of seeing many different landscapes or ways of being simultaneously seems crucial to me at this moment we inhabit—for example, where we are fed information through predetermined algorithms that limit and curate what knowledge we might access and where we are charged with the task of navigating a politically polarized and fraught climate. There are also multidirectional movements within each frame; for example, an expanding cosmos within the body while a unicorn gallops in the background or walking into a forest within the silhouette paired with flora and animals from a painted jungle scene.

The place where those videos are shown is a crossway where so many people from different backgrounds and with many other lives pass by. What narrative and experience did you want to conceive and deliver in this space?

I want to offer harried, preoccupied and anxious travelers a moment of respite that gives them some breathing room from the anxiety-driven process of running from A to B. Unfortunately, that is an ingrained part of the New York City commuters’ lives. Perhaps engaging with some moments of beauty and depictions of natural beauty—in worlds that exist both just outside and far beyond the confines of massive transport hubs like Penn Station—allows some breathing room and a reset that will bring some peace and pleasure into a charged, hectic and challenging space. This is through engaging with moments of respite, such as a figure gazing at hand, offering her a young olive plant, hands reaching for butterflies or a young girl scattering the seeds of a dandelion pod. In coherence, this pause or catching one’s breath becomes more literal as viewers are invited to be in synchronous relation with the figures on the screen.

The installation comprises two different chapters: Coherence and Regeneration. How do those differ or act as a continuation of the narrative?

Both invite the audience to consider a broader arc of time and an environment that can elicit beauty and joy, speaking to the capacity for resilience and survival despite threats of destruction. This feels like a powerful metaphor to access at a time on Earth when there is so much ongoing natural death and actions towards extinction via militarized violence, extractive fossil fuel processes and emissions in places all over the world, as well as right here at home.

Chitra Ganesh’s Regeneration is on view at New York’s Penn Station as part of the “Art at Amtrak” series curated by Debra Simon.

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Elisa Carollo

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September 23, 2024
Titus Kaphar On His Transition to Filmmaking and the Potency of Erasure

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Painter-turned-filmmaker Titus Kaphar. Photo by Mario Sorrenti, courtesy of Gagosian

Last week, the artist Titus Kaphar opened “Exhibiting Forgiveness” at Gagosian Beverly Hills, a painting show that pairs with his film of the same name, which premieres next month and was called a “confident debut” for the painter-turned-filmmaker, by Vanity Fair‘s Richard Lawson at Sundance. Kaphar is the winner of a MacArthur ‘Genius Grant’ whose work has graced the cover of TIME magazine. We caught up with him to hear about his new show and the transition to filmmaking.

The works in this show seem nostalgic in both their techniques and subjects. What do you see as the unifying principles in this new body of paintings?

Every piece in this show is rooted in memory—I started by writing down experiences from my past. I wanted to find a way to have a conversation with my sons about my childhood, which up until that point I had been hesitant to speak about. When I sat down to write, old memories brought new images to mind. This produced an entire body of paintings that were completed before we started shooting the film.

SEE ALSO: Christie’s to Sell Works from Laura Lee Brown and Steve Wilson’s 21c Museum Hotel Collection

You’ve been working with both mediums for some time now. What’s the difference in your creative approach to painting and film?

The process of making a painting is fundamentally different from the process of making a film. Making a painting can be a meditative solitary act, while there’s almost no way to make a film on your own. In the best cases, all of the individuals involved pour themselves into making the film, imbuing it with energy that is greater than the sum of its parts. In my mind, that is the greatest magic that film offers. That said, the editing process felt most similar to my painting practice. As a first-time director, my editor, Ron Patane made the process manageable. It was Ron who helped me see the parallels between the erasure and cut canvases in my paintings. The way we were removing something from a scene in order to come to a more potent statement.

It’s always fascinating to watch a painter turn to film direction. Do you have a favorite film by a painter? Mine would be The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

Basquiat was my favorite movie as an undergrad. Up until then, I had not seen a Black painter portrayed in a film. It had more of an impact on me than you might imagine. Around that time, I decided that I wanted to be a painter. For inspiration, I brought an old television and VCR into my “studio,” a.k.a. the garage, and started playing Basquiat every day. Somehow, it assured me that my dream was lofty but attainable.

You gave a well-known TED talk in 2017 on the question, “Can art amend history?” Have your thoughts on that question evolved in recent years?

No, my feelings have not changed. Having just returned from my family reunion in Mississippi, I am certain that we still need artists to amend the monuments that stand as emblems of injustice in our town squares nationwide.

You were recently honored at the Brooklyn Museum’s Artists Ball. What was that experience like?

Those kinds of things are always very hard for me. I am keenly aware of how much I owe my success to my family and to my team. It’s easy to give credit to the person standing on the stage, but the truth is there’s nothing exceptional I’ve ever achieved without my family and a team around me. NXTHVN, the not-for-profit arts and community incubator I started, would still just be a dream without our staff, and Exhibiting Forgiveness would still just be words on a page without my producers, cast and crew. So as grateful as I am for the honor, it is a truism that great dreams require extraordinary teams. I would have been much more comfortable if I could have had my people on stage with me.

This is your first show at Gagosian’s Beverly Hills space, which brings a unique crowd. Are you ready for them?

The better question is: Is Beverly Hills ready for us?! You know folks travel… in packs!

“Titus Kaphar: Exhibiting Forgiveness” is at Gagosian Beverly Hills through November 2.

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Dan Duray

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September 19, 2024
Julien Creuzet On Water as a Repository of Collective Memory and Place of Reconnection

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Martinique-born Julien Creuzet represented France at this year’s Venice Biennale, transforming the pavilion into a space where a radical and collective imaginary opens up. Photo: Djiby Kebe for CHANEL Culture Fund

Originally from Martinique, Julien Creuzet brought his distinctive French-Caribbean voice to the French Pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale where he reflects on the sea as both a horizon of opportunity and a threat, a place of healing and life as well as death and suffering. In Venice, Creuzet envisioned a pavilion where ‘overseas territories’ and the ‘ultramarine’ merge into a fluid dimension, evoking our embryonic origins in water and humanity’s dependence on this vital element. His work, titled Attila cataracte ta source aux pieds des pitons verts finira dans la grande mer gouffre bleu nous nous noyâmes dans les larmes marées de la lune (or “Attila cataract your source at the feet of the green peaks will end up in the great sea blue abyss we drowned in the tidal tears of the moon”) reads like a poem that connects ancient mythologies and suggests a continuous flow of narratives and spiritualities born from intercultural exchange.

“We need to consider which is the first and oldest memory a child has, as an embryo, before birth,” Creuzet told Observer. “This is an immersive experience inside the liquid—the liquid of maternity and life. Sometimes, when we take a bath and go to the beach, more or less unconsciously, we can feel again and retrieve memories about that, especially when our body is floating inside the water.”

The static visual components of Creuzet’s work are paired with sound and video to create an immersive experience. Jacopo La Forgia

Building on this concept, Creuzet has created an immersive multimedia and multisensory installation that blends sound, video and sculpture to explore the myths of hybrid societies. Sculptural threads hang from the ceiling, rich in texture and pigment, unraveling across the space like an intricate forest of lianas or a coral cluster. These threads capture relics of human civilization entangled in the currents of nature and history. In crafting this sensory confluence of narratives and sensations, Creuzet has forged a radical imaginary that invites connection to the divine, ancestral and, simultaneously, to Venice, with its canals and maritime legacy.

In Creuzet’s work, water—particularly as it manifests in seas and oceans—serves as a vehicle for the continuous flow of history, the movement of people, energies and ideas shaping new forms. The mysterious narrative he weaves within the space embraces water as a repository of collective memories and traumas but also as a realm of initiation, healing and regeneration. As Creuzet recalls, although he was born and raised in the suburbs of Paris, his family took him back to Martinique before he was even a month old to have his first saltwater bath—a ritual of reconnection and the continuation of family heritage.

SEE ALSO: Sotheby’s Hong Kong Head of Modern Felix Kwok On the Growth of the Asian Art Market

His evolving mythopoiesis through video, poetry and sculpture unfolds across media with a boundless flow, where imagination allows him to tap into and reactivate timeless archetypes and symbols in a cross-cultural dimension. This hybridization of traditions results in the creation of new mythological beings. As Creuzet explains, the deities and demons of the sea that fluctuate around the pavilion were conceived through extensive research by him and his studio into various mythological and religious traditions tied to the sea. “We did a lot of research on how different civilizations conceived representations and mythologies about water. It’s a mythology we find everywhere, with different names, as an innate necessity across geographies.”

Creuzet describes the pavilion in terms of form and sound, volumes and lines in movement and colorful encounters that combine in an intense experience. Jacopo La Forgia

Digital animation and new technologies serve as powerful tools in Creuzet’s hands, bringing his envisioned creatures to life as universal hybrids that embody various symbologies and traditions. These traditions have long sought to represent the mysterious forces and energies of the sea. As Creuzet noted during our conversation, monotheistic and polytheistic religions, particularly animism, once attempted to depict these forces as deities or demons. Today, in a society that has largely lost faith in religion, it seems artists are among the few who can still create magical representations. This ability is crucial for helping us visualize the unknown forces of nature and, more importantly, for imagining different futures. Artists hold a unique connection to the ancestral, with the ability to extend the past’s reality into the future.

Building on this idea, Creuzet has reimagined the statue of Neptune atop the staircases at Palazzo della Dogana in Venice. He explained that Neptune has symbolically entered the pavilion, embodying his classical role as the god of the sea and his cosmic connections. Other sculptural elements in the pavilion evoke ancient relics and remnants of a civilization lost to the sea. Yet everything in the pavilion exists in a suspended, liquid, embryonic space where past, present and future converge. The artist’s imagination, manifesting in this multisensory experience, invites visitors to immerse themselves and float between these dimensions.

“Creuzet’s forms stem from a locus of emancipation, which must be felt to see truly,” reads the exhibition description. “It is a moment of learning and unlearning as a reconciliation with our senses and a space to be untranslated and liberated.” Jacopo La Forgia

The artist reflected here that his Caribbean identity allows him to navigate and operate more consciously within these fluid, hybrid dimensions. Édouard Glissant’s concept of “Creolization” illustrates this well—the Caribbean’s history, with its composite population, exemplifies the fertile melting pot of cultures, deities and traditions that arose from centuries of movement, colonization, migration and trade.

“I think to be a Caribbean person is about this universalism,” said Creuzet. “Simply because the Caribbean is a considerable mixing of different civilizations.” Yet at the same time, this hybrid reality seems to be the only viable position for those in exile or distanced from a singular national perspective. Like Ovid writing Metamorphoses while in exile, Creuzet added, this detachment from dominant narratives opens the door to explore broader universal themes.

“Contemporary art is a question of metamorphosis, a potential metamorphosis of society’s vision,” he said, revealing his approach to art and this project. For him, art is an exercise in radical imagination. By drawing on the accumulated heritage of knowledge and symbologies from various cultures and historical moments, it can still shape a new, meaningful universe in a universal language, casting light on a more harmonious future.

Celebrating the boundless imaginative potential of art and poetry, the Biennale pavilion Creuzet conceived embraces a pioneering universalism—one already embedded in the Caribbean—that can inspire a rich and beneficial coexistence among diverse individuals and entities.

Julien Creuzet’s “Attila cataracte ta source aux pieds des pitons verts finira dans la grande mer gouffre bleu nous nous noyâmes dans les larmes marées de la lune” is on view through November 24.

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Elisa Carollo

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September 13, 2024
At Frieze, Do Ho Suh and Brother Eul Ho Suh Explore Intergenerational Legacies in Korean Art

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The project pays homage to the work of Suh Se Ok, a pioneering Korean ink painter who expanded artistic horizons with innovative works from the 1950s to 2020. Courtesy of the artist and LG

South Korean artist Do Ho Suh is internationally known for his ghostly, diaphanous architecture and fabric-made objects, which create imaginary spaces that are physically present yet impossible to inhabit. His large-scale, immersive, but impermanent installations serve as “acts of memorialization,” exploring themes of identity, home, and the tension between personal and public space. These ideas are confronted within the framework of displacement and cultural transition, reflecting the global mobility of contemporary life.

For this edition of Frieze Seoul, Suh has been invited to collaborate with the fair’s main sponsor, LG, on a project exploring the intergenerational legacies of Korean art while spotlighting the country’s drive for technological innovation. He has been working with his brother, renowned architect Eul Ho Suh, on the digital canvas of LG OLED T, paying homage to their father, Suh Se Ok—a vital figure in Korean ink abstraction, a radical genre that opened artistic possibilities for an entire generation.

Observer spoke with the brothers during the unveiling of “Suh Se Ok X LG OLED: Reimagined by Suh Do Ho” at Frieze Seoul, discussing how the project traces a line between generations of Korean art and its potential future development. The project is, first and foremost, an homage to their father, who pioneered a distinctively Korean approach to visual art. This intergenerational conversation reveals how Korean art and aesthetics have evolved over the decades. As Do Hoh Suh told Observer: “This intensely personal project aims to honor our father’s legacy while also considering the evolution of Korean art. We hope this project will allow for a deeper understanding of our father’s work, highlighting the tradition he represents and the vital philosophical principles he explored throughout his life.”

Do Ho Suh and his brother Eul Ho Suh pay homage to their late father’s master paintings at Frieze Seoul 2024 with LG OLED. © The Korea Economic Daily. Photo by Moon Dukgwan

Se Ok’s work embodies a defining moment in Korean art, linking calligraphy and a specific philosophical approach related to the mark-making moment and gesture to the interconnection between body and mind. “Movement is an integral element in our father’s painting, where bodily gestures create ink strokes on the rice paper,” said the artist, “These marks act as a trace of his action, a record of performance. The idea that these marks on the paper carry the artist’s energy is essential in creating his work, which we felt necessary to share with a broader audience.”

The presentation at Frieze intentionally juxtaposes rarely-seen footage of Suh Se Ok in action alongside his paintings and Do Ho Suh’s animations on the innovatively transparent screens of the LG OLED T, positioned in the space according to how Eul Ho Suh has envisioned and conceived the relation between the marks, the viewers, this new technology and the experience of being in the space. “We hope to invite audiences to engage in a dialogue about art, tradition, and innovation,” Do Ho Suh added.

For the installation, Do Ho Suh used the LG OLED T digital canvas to bring memories to life and pay homage to the legacy of his father, Suh Se Ok. Courtesy of the artista and LG

One highlight of the installation is Suh Se Ok’s People series: minimal black marks and signs absorbed by the paper that evoke human figures while remaining external and abstract, as a synthesis of the vital movements that animate our physical existence. Eul Ho Suh explained that before their father’s influence, Korean art was deeply shaped by traditional Chinese landscapes: “He wanted to go lighter, creating abstract paintings with no colors, just black and white.” When Suh Se Ok started to explore this radical new language in the ’60s, he was teaching at Seoul National University, and many students began to follow the new movement. It wasn’t just about the quality of the application of ink, however. He wanted to bring his energy to the works, with marks that could transfer thought and gesture, with porous paper as a transmitter.

However, what is most interesting about this project is how tradition interacts with technology. In Do Ho Suh’s installation, there’s a similar tension—the work is highly tactile and physical, yet the translucent appearance makes them look more like ghosts or digital renderings. “Although my practice is in many ways indebted to the long history of traditional Korean craftsmanship, it is also profoundly contingent upon new technology,” said the artist, who uses laser scanning, 3D printing, CAD and robotics in his work.

The transparency of the screen in the Frieze installation perfectly aligns with Suh Se Ok’s interest in the infinite and space, some of which the brothers have absorbed and adopted in their native practices. Layering allows for an interplay of opacity and transparency, revealing and concealing images and image planes. “The footage of our father making the paintings is presented here, combined with his writing and the animations, which further reenact the process of the paintings. This is a means to explore these critical principles of his work and reveal this intensely private process to inspire a greater understanding of his ideas.”

“Suh Se Ok X LG OLED: Reimagined by Suh Do Ho” is on view at Frieze Seoul 2024. Courtesy of the artist and LG

Layering also serves to underscore the complexity of the work, according to the artist. The layering of the images on the screens recalls the melding of ink and paper. “This leads to the question: is the painting on or in the paper?” said Do Ho Suh. “The properties of the rice paper allow for these layers to be separated to create near copies—something that straddles the idea of uniqueness and edition—an interrogation of the surface hierarchy.”

“You have all the powerful energy within the movement in an interplay between bidimensional and tridimensional space,” added Eul Ho Suh.

There are the technical elements—the layering techniques employed and the interplay of light and shadow—and those more philosophical. As the brothers noted, the display clarifies the principles underlying much of Eastern painting, enhanced by new technology. It also delves into the concept of transparency (a critical component in Do Ho Suh’s work) as a form of absence or emptiness, a theme central to Suh Se Ok’s work and uniquely interpreted by the two brothers. This idea echoes Buddhist teachings, where emptiness (śūnyatā in Sanskrit) reveals the true nature of things: they lack intrinsic existence, are impermanent, and constantly changing, reliant on various causes and conditions. The spaces between, though typically unseen, gain significance through exploration.

SEE ALSO: Highlights and Early Sales from the Armory Show 2024

When asked how the approach and sensibility of Korean artists have transformed over time and how this relates to the rapid societal changes in South Korea, Do Ho Suh said those transformations are a reflection of societal change. “From my father’s time to mine, Korean artists have progressively embraced a more global perspective while maintaining a profound connection to our cultural roots,” he explained. “My time in the U.S. to study in the ’90s proved an essential shift in my appreciation of the differences between Eastern and Western perspectives and exploring the de-mystification of painting—this personal history and my Korean background have been essential themes in my work.”

Suh Se Ok, Dancing People, 1987; 54.6 x 62.1 cm / Ink on paper. Courtesy of the artist.

Ultimately, the project is a powerful statement on the evolution of artistic approaches and languages in South Korea, from the radical innovation explored by Suh Se Ok to the opportunities offered by the digital space and new technologies. In this sense, the installation’s screens both memorialize the past and serve as a portal to Korea’s future.

Memory is, in fact, at the heart of this project, as Do Ho Suh suggests. While art can document, help visualize and help imagine, this particular installation explores how art can also become a tool for oral and cultural memory. The artist calls the interplay of collective and personal memory in his work essential, but there are caveats to that assertion. “Exploring memory, both its fallibility and pervasiveness remains intriguing to me, but not in a nostalgic sense,” he said. “Memory not only helps document our past but also helps visualize our thoughts for the future. Our father’s paintings also act as memories of his actions, snapshots of his movement through time.”

To Do Ho Suh, art is a vessel for memories. “Our unique and privileged insight into our father’s work and the process of its making has led us to this project—it could be seen as an attempt to create a tangible manifestation of our intangible memories, an opportunity to revisit them and share them.”

“Suh Se Ok X LG OLED: Reimagined by Suh Do Ho” is on view at Frieze Seoul from September 4 to September 7.

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Elisa Carollo

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September 6, 2024
Gina Beavers On Targeting Comfort in Consumer Culture in Her New Show

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Gina Beavers in her studio. Photo Macy Rajacich

Artist Gina Beavers is primarily known for her straightforward tridimensional painting objects, or relief paintings, that take their subjects from the endless flux of online commercial visuals that inspire our daily consumption of products and experiences: exaggerated lips, glossy makeup palettes and visually appealing junk foods artfully arranged are among the advertising icons you’ll find in her work. But for her new solo show, which opens at Marianne Boesky Gallery on September 5, Beavers has conceived a far more abstract and comforting body of new works. These new “Comfortcore Paintings” were inspired by the endless variety of sheets and towels available online and their seductive power to activate our senses and desires.

The landscape of online communication has rapidly evolved since the artist started painting social media-derived narrative subjects in the aughts, when users exercised a greater degree of control over what they saw on Instagram, Amazon and elsewhere. “The algorithm has changed a lot, which has changed how we interact with the internet and the kinds of images you can come across,” Beavers told Observer during a studio visit. “I was appropriating food images or makeup tutorials for a long time, but now I don’t receive that content. Everything is tailor-made to offer you what you are looking for. I was looking for new bed sheets and towels when I started to conceive the works in the show.”

The exhibition, titled “Divine Consumer,” relates to Beavers’ way of intuitively reading, appropriating and remediating those digital images of commercial products which, from the flatness of their digital presentation, are brought back to their seductive tactility, sensuality and physicality that communicate the concept of comfort. She explores this in the series by focusing on the comforting range of patterns, textures and colors that function as psychological triggers to encourage us to indulge in a purchase, prompted to buy by the promise of softness.

Beavers translates the concept into simulacra with her signature tridimensional surrogates that, here, are already something more like painting objects: physically molding and reshaping those images, Beavers brings them back to life with uncanny closeups that stimulate our senses. The works in “Divine Consumer,” in particular, engage even more with tactility. They look soft, and one naturally wants to touch and caress them. These new relief paintings also represent an evolution in Bevers’ art-making process. The resulting pieces are less heavy with less paint—she uses foam, braiding it to emulate texture, molding the movements of the fabric and later painting them into an image. Despite being static physical objects, her works activate multisensorial reactions in the same way flat images on screens do as we passively scroll.

Gina Beavers, Knit weighted blanket landscape, 2024; Oil, acrylic, foam and wood stain on panel, 73 1/2 x 107 x 9 inches / 186.7 x 271.8 x 22.9 cm. Copyright of Gina Beavers. Courtesy Marianne Boesky Gallery

Although she does not apply any ready-made technique, the hyperrealism of Beavers’ works directly links her practice with Pop and New Realist artists who similarly commented on consumerism and popular cultures, like Robert Rauschenberg or Claes Oldenburg. She readily acknowledges these direct references and embraces them as continuing a legacy of a practice that is deeply rooted in the American culture of mass production and mass communication. It is, for her, the only way to experience this current reality: “I don’t know how to experience living without stuff,” she said. “I don’t know how to talk about life without everything we consume or the fact that we spend so much of our life in these consumption networks.”

More than that, her hyperrealistic compositions serve as a commentary on an entire cultural attitude. “In America, you go to someone’s house and you get the nice set of towels, which is how they’re marketed—it’s the capitalist kind of system that forces you to get more than one,” she reflected as we previewed the works in the show.

In pursuing her visual and semiological research into the culture of consumerism, Beavers applies the technique of collage, which, as in its cubist and Dadaist origins, combines materials stemming from different contexts to coexist and draws new trajectories of meaning from their dialectic juxtapositions. For the artist, collage is both a way to confront the chaotic, random flow of images we are all overexposed to and to find new vocabularies with which to decode this flux and find some order. It’s how she claims creative agency over a barrage of materials and messages. “It reflects my inability to pick up on a narrative from the internet and social media because it is chaotic,” Beavers explained. “There’s this idea of divine inspiration when you’re collating, as you’re putting things together. I’m creating something independently from this chaos.”

SEE ALSO: ‘Richard Serra, A Film and Video Exhibition’ at Dia Chelsea Celebrates His Cinematic Oeuvre

Scrolling through Google and Amazon, Beavers selects and captures images of comforters, towels and all those textile accessories of a domestic world meant to communicate care, coziness and comfort. She then pulls them out of their online environment and combines them via Photoshop into collages that rework them, mostly through intuition, drawing connections with traditional painting genres, particularly still life and landscapes.

Gina Beavers, Blue gingham still life (pie and casserole covers, crib sheets), 2024; Oil, acrylic, putty, paper pulp, foam and wood stain on panel
60 x 45 1/2 x 7 inches / 152.4 x 115.6 x 17.8 cm. Copyright of Gina Beavers. Courtesy Marianne Boesky Gallery

In translating images into a third dimension for the upcoming show, her signature object paintings appear in fewer works and there are more objects modeled with foam directly on wood panels. Some pieces slated to show at Marianne Boesky Gallery are materially more elaborate than others, depending on the fabric of the subject. For instance, Beavers meticulously braided and weaved foam as fabric to replicate the intricate texture of red wool blankets. “I’ve used linen on my paintings because I wanted them to have a conversation about the history of painting,” she mused, “but for this series, I just started to question why it mattered.”

Beavers has also been experimenting with scale. The larger works seem to envelop the viewer, while the minor works are studies in which it’s easy to get lost in the details of the interplay of light and shadow. There’s something obsessive yet extremely comforting in her precision. Indeed, it’s this precision—her extreme and almost obsessive hyperrealism—that makes Beavers’ work unique. It not only reflects on but also isolates and remediates fragments of the endless flood of digital images, bringing them back to the physical world and the human needs that created them.

Gina Beavers, American Soft towel set in Ruby, 2024; Oil, acrylic, putty, paper pulp, foam and wood stain on panel, 23 1/2 x 23 3/4 x 6 inches/ 59.7 x 60.3 x 15.2 cm. Copyright of Gina Beavers. Courtesy Marianne Boesky Gallery

The new series Beavers is presenting at the gallery represents a new stage of maturity in her work: she appears to be much more confident with her language and choice of subjects, as well as with her artistic research into the contemporary materialist imagery that has invaded our lives, totalizing our experience of the world and promising to heal all our problems with “retail therapy.” Amid the uncertainty of our time and rising political tensions, the artist reflected, ads for home goods can appear “safe,” as they contain no hidden agendas, no misleading propaganda. They ask us to buy, promising some version of fulfillment in return. After all, beyond our desire for transcendence or justice or hope, we all have physical desires that objects can help us satisfy.

Gina Beavers’s “Divine Consumer” opens at Marianne Boesky Gallery on September 5 and remains on view through October 5.

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Elisa Carollo

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September 2, 2024
Tahnee Lonsdale Opens Up About Painting the Spiritual Feminine

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Tahnee Lonsdale, Hears a Distant Trumpet, 2024; oil on canvas, 72 x 96 in (182.9 x 243.8 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Night Gallery. Photo Nick Massey

Tahnee Lonsdale was a name on everyone’s lips during and after last year’s Armory Show. Collectors fought for her work, and Cob Gallery’s booth sold out. A year later, the artist is set to open a solo exhibition at Night Gallery in Los Angeles on September 14. We caught up with Lonsdale, who is finalizing the details of the show, to discuss her work and its evolution over the past twelve months.

Lonsdale’s ethereal compositions are a tool she uses to explore the delicate interplays between consciousness, affection and sorrow. She told Observer that her process is mostly intuitive; the interactions of the colors on the canvas suggesting diaphanous allegorical and symbolical figures that manifest as she works. More recently, her process became even more intuitive as she embarked on a more loosely controlled practice—Lonsdale no longer traces or outlines her figures after spending time at Ceramica Suro in Guadalajara, Mexico. “I had never made anything with ceramics,” she said. “The process is very intuitive. I lost control of it at one point. It was meant to be like a vessel shaped like one of the smoothly curvilinear figures of my paintings, but it just kept growing outwards, with its own life.”

Tahnee Lonsdale in her studio. Photo Katrina Dickson.

Freed from the line, her mystical presences are made of color and light in a nebulous atmosphere, built up in the painting as Lonsdale would mold clay to make a vessel without any preconceived idea or outline. “I’m now building the painting from a central color,” she explained. “I start with a color field, and then I build the figures from the inside out rather than the outside.” Intuition is important, as is having faith in the process.

That process is like an excavation of archetypes hiding in our collective subconscious. Lonsdale’s intuitive paint application oscillates between opacity, transparency and fluorescence, creating auratic figures that emerge like mirages from an interplay between texture and depth, light and pigment. In this back-and-forth between abstraction and figuration—now much more present than before—those spiritual presences reappear.

But while Lonsdale’s process changed, the themes in her work have not. Inhabiting her paintings are her signature mystical and chimerical feminine spirits characterized by curvilinear shapes… the matriarchal presences that reconnect with all the mothers before us or with the Great Mother Earth. As the process has become looser, Longdsale feels an even more profound connection with them. “It’s more like an energetic color field,” she said. “Like some kind of heat coming out of it, then spreading with movements, and the figures will naturally start to emerge.” When she looks at the figures populating her paintings, many of them are traveling somewhere, fleeing or at least running in a defined direction. “They’re heading somewhere I cannot control.”

SEE ALSO: The Brooklyn Museum Will Showcase the Borough’s Talent in ‘The Brooklyn Artists Exhibition’

There are no absolute autobiographical references in her work. Her subjects are universal images of womanhood and motherhood with all its implications: carer, guardian, warrior. During our conversation, Lonsdale admitted that her imagination was deeply influenced by the sculptural language of Henry Moore and his struggle to shape and describe humans at a historical turning point. The British modern master’s work was existential in its questioning, characterized by the postwar period; Lonsdale’s paintings capture the present-day need for reconnection with something profound, spiritual and timeless, both inside and outside us, after the pandemic.

Tahnee Lonsdale, Sandstorm, 2024; oil on canvas, 70 x 55 in (177.8 x 139.7 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Night Gallery

In that vein, Lonsdale’s work engages with an endless back-and-forth between rationalism, physicality and humanness. “I want them to start to be something,” she said. “I want to define that: I can see ahead; I can see a body. And I want to define it. However, every time I get that, it’s about really slowing down. I’m not going to define anything. I will keep this so slow and unintended and unintentional for as long as I can because if I try to define anything too soon, it feels contrived.”

Lonsdale found additional creative nourishment in her reconnection with Leonora Carrington, reading her writing and immersing herself in Carrigton’s rich symbolic imagination, diving deeper into Mexican culture and the mystical atmosphere in her period there. “They’re very fantastical and mystical, and there’s a feeling of transparency,” Lonsdale said. This idea of the veil returns and lives between the painting layers that she creates and the surface of prefiguration she wants to break. “She’s ancient, and you feel like she’s already half in the spirit world and half in the physical realm. Or maybe crossing over.”

Lonsdale’s intuitive paint application oscillates between opacity, transparency and fluorescence, creating diaphanous or auratic figures. Photo by Katrina Dickson

Lonsdale’s figures also cross between dimensions, time and space, tapping into timeless and profound archetypes: not just the mother archetype but the broader maternal archetype, which extends to ancestors, like grandmothers, great grandmothers and so on. As she dove further into the genesis of those images, we learned how they emerged in challenging moments as a form of resistance. “I was having a very hard time, and I remember sitting down with my sketchbook and being like, ‘I don’t want to plan what I will draw, and I’m just going to see what comes out,’” she said. “And I just started drawing these weird figures. They were very much about humanness back then. They didn’t feel celestial. They felt like a representation of emotions.” When she was overwhelmed—by heartbreak, by the pandemic—those figures helped her connect with something deeper inside of herself. When she made her first painting of them, they felt like the idea of protection and deeper spiritual meaning even as they embodied strong emotions. But, she emphasized, nothing about them is menacing, threatening or dangerous. They stand as symbolic reference points to offer this opportunity to reconnect with older traditions and the deeper spiritual meanings they’re embodying. “I have a solid connection to the figures in the paintings… they are very much present with me, and putting them on the canvas is just illuminating them.”

Tahnee Lonsdale, Like breath on glass, 2024; oil on canvas, 72 x 96 in (182.9 x 243.8 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Night Gallery. Photo Nick Massey

Collectively, Lonsdale’s ethereal figures are psychological or emotional shadows marching against the sun… against the light of self-reckoning and personal awareness. “They walk with you,” she said. “They’re just there constantly.” And there with them are the infinite possibilities and potential within women’s identities once they reconnect with a more primordial and wild but still creative feminine energy.

Tahnee Lonsdale’s “A Billion Tiny Moons” opens at Night Gallery in Los Angeles on September 14 and will be on view through October 19.

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Elisa Carollo

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August 31, 2024
Celebrity Photographer Vijat Mohindra On Shooting Plastic Girls in Plastic Worlds

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Tinashe for Gay Times Magazine. Copyright © Vijat M Photography, 2024. All Rights Reserved.

Hollywood’s favorite photographer, Vijat Mohindra, is living the dream. He’s shot Kim Kardashian multiple times since 2009, to market Skims and her scent and just because. You’ve probably seen his photos of Doja Cat, Miley Cyrus, Dolly Parton, Cardi B… the list of his subjects is long and populated by luminaries from across the spectrum of celebrity. He’s shot Pamela Anderson for Paper. Nicki Minaj for Complex.

How can you spot a photo taken by Mohindra? There’s the signature colorful, Pop-ish aesthetic possibly best described as Barbie-esque. But despite the candy pink and blue and yellow plastic fantastic backdrops, Vijat’s subjects are always vibrant, dynamic and very much portraying themselves. Perhaps that’s not surprising, as he learned the ropes from famed celebrity photographer David LaChapelle. In the years since, he’s shot music videos, magazine spreads, album covers and more for some of the world’s top talent.

Machine Gun Kelly for Billboard. Copyright © Vijat M Photography, 2024. All Rights Reserved.

Mohindra is still shooting, but he’s been branching out. Earlier this year, he opened his first studio space in downtown Los Angeles, Powder Room Studio LA, which has a dozen uniquely Mohindra-esque sets in which to shoot everything from stills to reels. The 4500-square-foot space looks like Barbie’s 1990s-era dream house, and Paris Hilton and Christina Aguilera were early fans.

We chatted with Mohindra on a busy weekday morning about the new studio, why he loves polished portraits and his advice for young photographers.

Observer: What’s the story behind the Powder Room?

Vijat Mohindra: I’ve been a photographer—a celebrity photographer—in Los Angeles for the last 15 years, and in those years, I designed and created a lot of different environments for my shoots. Over time, I started collecting all these amazing set pieces that were left over from my shoots. They were just too gorgeous to throw away. I had them in storage at one point and I looked through it all, and I said, oh my gosh, all this stuff looks so great together. Maybe I can put it together in a format that could bring it all to life. And then I realized that could also be a place where creatives, photographers, directors, filmmakers, etc., could come and see all these amazing pieces.

The Living Room in Vijat Mohindra’s Powder Room Studio LA. Courtesy Vijat Mohindra

It looks like a Barbie house to me. Why?

It has that Barbie aesthetic because a lot of my work is very synthetic—very plastic, with a kind of glossy sheen to it. And then it all just sort of happened to have these different elements that coincided with the Barbie aesthetic but with a very ‘80s take on it. Pink is the color I use a lot. In a way, it made sense to create this surrealistic Barbie dream house experience.

Selfie museums are still on the rise—can just anyone come in and take some snaps with the sets?

Honestly, the space is for everybody. I have a lot of people from Instagram and TikTok coming in who just book the space for a few hours to create their own videos.

How common is this type of space in L.A.?

I’ve heard from some other people who have studios with a similar type of setup, with standing sets. They started back maybe around like 2018 or 2019, when there were maybe a thousand or so listings online of places like this throughout the Los Angeles area that could be rented for shoots. Now in 2024, it is up to around 8,000 spaces like this. It’s something that exploded in a way. Not all the spaces listed are aesthetic and design-focused the way mine is. I feel like the Powder Room is a very special category.

Let’s talk about your work. How do you feel about Photoshop?

I’m a big fan of Photoshop. I went to school for photography at the Art Center in Pasadena around 2003—right when film was switching over to digital—and I graduated around 2007. That was when this big debate was going on as to whether film was the future or digital. But when I took a digital photography class toward the beginning of my education, I realized that it was the way of the future.

It was amazing to be able to get all these different pictures and put them on the computer right away. You didn’t have to scan or retouch negatives. Photoshop opened a whole other dimension of creativity that wasn’t there for me with film. So, I’m a huge fan. I think it is beautiful, and it enhances pictures in an amazing way. That said, I still have respect for and really love certain film photography. I think there’s value in it, and I do see a lot of people going back to that nowadays as a trend because so much digital photography is over-saturated.

Paris Hilton for Gay Times Magazine. Copyright © Vijat M Photography, 2024. All Rights Reserved.

How do you feel about representing celebrities in a flawless way?

In a flawless way?

Glossy. That very L.A. aesthetic.

I really love a polished celebrity photograph that is very well-lit and has that glossy, punchy aesthetic to it. I’ve always been inspired by that type of celebrity photography going back to the ‘70s and ‘80s with Andy Warhol and the Interview Magazine covers. I think that it brings that glamor and special sort of sparkle that we kind of associate with celebrities. I like photographing them that way because I think that’s the way I see them in my head. And so that’s the way I want to put them on paper—to show people how I see them. I feel like it’s very powerful and it’s kind of show-stopping.

What’s it like behind the scenes once you actually get to know these celebrities?

For most of my celebrity photographs, there have been a lot of collaborative experiences where I will work with the artist to figure out what their aesthetic is or what drives them. And we build a concept around that and bring it to life from there. I really like finding out more about a celebrity’s personality and their background and what they’re interested in and then pulling that into what we create together.

Shannon and Shannade Clermont. Copyright © Vijat M Photography, 2024. All Rights Reserved.

Who are some of your favorite celebrity photographers and why?

My absolute favorite is David LaChapelle; he’s just one of my icons. I have been very lucky to have been able to assist him at one point during my career, which was a huge highlight. I just love his take on celebrity photography. It’s so different from anything that I’ve seen and is so imaginative and creative. I really look up to the creativity that he brings to the celebrity photography world. He takes celebrities out of their worlds and puts them in this hyper-creative, colorful, aesthetically driven space that I just find so beautiful. I also love the work of Annie Leibovitz, as well as Pierre and Gilles, a French photography duo who shoot creative portraiture that’s aesthetically driven. I love Miles Aldridge, who’s more of a fashion photographer but shoots celebrities in ways that are highly creative and very colorful.

Miley Cyrus. Copyright © Vijat M Photography, 2024. All Rights Reserved.

What is next for you now that the space is open?

I’ve been working a lot on Powder Room Studio LA—trying to get it up and running. It only launched this past January, but I’m happy to say that we are pretty booked up at this point. We’ve been getting quite a few bookings from brands as well as individuals, and we’ve gotten some great celebrities into the studio, too, like Paris Hilton and Cardi B. The space has been getting some great recognition, and that’s still my focus.

Last question. What advice do you have for young photographers entering the industry?

I’d give them the same advice I was given when I was in photography school, which I still think about to this day. One of my professors told me that you should always shoot what you love, and that really left a lasting impression on me. I feel like if you’re not shooting what you love, you don’t really put the same passion behind it. Passion is what really shows in your overall body of work—it’s the thing that people connect with the most.

Check out Vijat on Instagram at @vijatm.

The unassuming exterior of Powder Room Studio LA. Courtesy Vijat Mohindra

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Nadja Sayej

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August 25, 2024
Artsy President Dustyn Kim On Evolving Alongside the Company

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Artsy president Dustyn Kim says art has always been part of her life. Courtesy of Artsy

In 2017, Observer posed this question: As the online art auction space shrinks, is Artsy the heir apparent? In the years since, the art world has had many ups and downs, but the online art brokerage created in 2009 by Carter Cleveland has forged ahead, building partnerships with major institutions and a monumental digital library of for-sale artworks while edging out early challengers like Paddle8 and Auctionata. “Many of our competitors in the early days wanted to disrupt the art industry, so they would either compete directly with galleries by bringing artists on to their online galleries or compete with auction houses by running their own auction sites,” Cleveland told Observer in 2019. “These companies were able to generate revenue a lot faster than us because they went straight to that transactional model. But ultimately, the amount of inventory they could get was very limited because the rest of the industry didn’t want to work with them.”

That, in a nutshell, is how Artsy, which launched as a platform for artwork discovery, eventually became the largest online art marketplace globally by offering auction houses and art galleries a way to pivot to online sales—something the art world could no longer avoid during the pandemic. Today, the company is both a place to buy art and an influential voice in the art world—its industry reports and buyer facing editorial content help shape narratives around what’s hot in art right now.

Overseeing it all is newly appointed Artsy president Dustyn Kim, the first woman ever in the role. She joined the company as chief revenue officer in 2017, and she’s been largely responsible for expanding Artsy’s gallery business and strengthening its secondary market offerings. “It’s amazing to look at Artsy’s progression these past seven years,” she told Observer when we asked Kim about her work at Artsy. From there, she opened up about the evolution of the company and its users, the mechanics of building relationships in the art world and her own art collection.

You’ve been with Artsy since 2017. What initially attracted you to the company? From what I understand, you weren’t always in the art world.

My professional background centered on data and technology companies prior to Artsy, but art has always been a part of my life. My mom is an artist. She had multiple jobs in the art world—from working at a print- and paper-making studio to teaching college courses on painting. She did this while trying to build her practice and art world recognition, and I saw firsthand how difficult this industry can be. When the Artsy opportunity came along, I knew immediately that this was a company and a mission—to expand the art market to support more artists—that I wanted to be a part of. It was one of those moments in life where everything just clicked. All of those years developing an expertise in business finally paired with an industry that I’m passionate about evolving and growing.

What has your progression at Artsy been like in terms of responsibility?

I started by leading our Galleries & Fairs business, helping to grow the number of galleries that partner with Artsy to roughly 3,200 from over 100 countries. After a few years, I assumed responsibility for our secondary market teams, expanding the number of auction houses and benefit partners on Artsy and building our Artsy Auctions and private sales business. Throughout that time, we also built a robust marketplace operations team to handle everything from cybersecurity to customer support. With my most recent promotion, I am now responsible for Artsy’s internal operations as well, including finance, legal and corporate development.

How has Artsy changed since you came on?

It’s amazing to look at Artsy’s progression these past seven years. When I joined Artsy, we were focused purely on aggregation: getting all of the world’s art and art collectors on Artsy and making the process of discovering art easier and more joyful. On the gallery partner side, that meant tackling challenges like the lack of information about artwork pricing and availability. On the collector side, that involved using our data and technology to match people with artists and artworks they may never have otherwise discovered. Next, we focused on making the process of actually buying and selling art easier and more joyful. We’ve spent years building out eCommerce and all of the infrastructure that supports it, from online payment methods to shipping integration to fraud prevention.

We are now in a position to help grow the art market by bringing this all together in what we like to call ‘the art advisor in your pocket.’ Very few people have access to art advisors, but Artsy has all of the data and functionality to fill that gap. We can guide users and help them refine their taste, develop relationships with sellers, acquire works, and manage their collections—all on Artsy.

And how have the collectors who use the platform evolved?

In Artsy’s earlier days, our user base was what I call our “power users.” This is generally a group of people already familiar with the art world. They appreciate Artsy’s ability to connect them to the world’s fairs, gallery exhibitions, and auctions and are engaged in researching and discovering both well-known blue-chip artists and up-and-coming emerging artists. This group includes both newer and more established collectors, but they generally come to Artsy with a sense of what they’re looking for and an understanding of the art world. Now, we have a much more diverse group of collectors. With over 3 million users on Artsy, we have a global audience that ranges from people looking to make their first art purchase to people who have collected for years.

Particularly for these new and aspiring collectors, we’re continuously introducing new ways to help individuals find the art they love. This includes initiatives like Foundations, our online art fair, live now, that features works from small and midsize galleries from around the world that are known for nurturing early-career artists. Works are mostly priced under $10,000, and we invite really fantastic galleries to take part and create lots of storytelling around the featured artists and works. Foundations is an ideal context to find your first (or next) art purchase and discover plenty of new artists and galleries.

A lot of your work involves relationship building—do you see that as a plus?

A fair amount of my job involves relationship building—both now and in my prior roles at Artsy. I’ve always felt that understanding your customer is a core component of any leader’s job, but for an industry as unique as ours it’s an absolute imperative. Artsy’s mission is to expand the art market. We can’t do that without a nuanced understanding and appreciation of exactly what is and isn’t working in both the physical and digital realms of art buying and selling.

Major art world moments, like fairs, are always a great opportunity to see the industry in action. I personally prefer smaller gatherings—lunches with gallery directors or a walk-through of a new exhibition—can solidify relationships while giving me a closer look at how people are using Artsy and what more they want to see from us. I recently had lunch at AP Space, for example, and was able to connect with a few artists, collectors, and gallery directors in a more casual setting. It’s moments like those where I feel like I’m ingrained in this community.

You’re an art collector yourself. What can you tell me about your collection?

With an artist mother, collecting has always been a part of my life. I remember going to a benefit auction with my mom much earlier in my career and using my savings to bid on a vibrant 9-by-9-inch work on paper by Carol Salmanson. I was drawn to the calligraphic flow of the work, overlaid with fine, bright brushstrokes. Over the years, I’ve continued to refine my taste and viewpoint on the type of collection I want to build. At this point, I’m focused primarily on acquiring works by women artists. I also lean more towards emerging artists, partly because they are more likely to be within my budget range but more so because I want to directly support artists who may not yet be in the spotlight.

My most recent purchase was a work by Gabrielė Aleksė, a Lithuanian artist I discovered through Artsy. I initially saw her paintings in one of our “Curators’ Picks: Emerging Artists” collections on Artsy and was immediately drawn to the serenity of her works. I started following her on Artsy and watched as new works became available, eventually finding a work that I couldn’t live without that is now proudly displayed in my home. That’s the beauty of Artsy: I never would have known of this artist living and working over 4,000 miles away from me had Artsy not helped me discover her and then guided me through the international purchase process.

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Christa Terry

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August 19, 2024
Art Athina Director Antonis Kourkoulos On Bringing Contemporary Art to the Cradle of Classical Culture

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The Neoclassical building of the Zappeion Maison in the heart of Athens’ historical center will host the fair. Art Athina

Greece is primarily famed for its ancient heritage, beautiful beaches and delicious food; less well known is the country’s contemporary art scene, which is vibrant and encompasses institutions like the ΕΜΣΤ National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens, leading international and Greek art galleries and a solid core group of local collectors. Greece also has its own art fair, Art Athina, an annual event organized by the Hellenic Art Galleries Association that offers opportunities for locals and visitors to discover new art and artists, creating a dialogue between the Greek and international markets and providing a platform to grow the local collector base.

SEE ALSO: Observer’s Guide to the Best Exhibitions and Gallery Shows in Athens

The September art fair is one of the oldest in Europe and takes place each year in the historical Zappeion Mansion, which occupies an important place in Greece’s national heritage. Located in the heart of Athens, the Zappeion is a stunning Neoclassical building designed by Danish architect Theophil Hansen in the 19th Century to serve as a venue for events related to the first modern Olympic Games in 1896.

Panos Profitis, Sharp Scythe one, 2023; casted aluminum, metal, 220 x 60 x 60 cm. Courtesy The Breeder, photographer: Athanasios Gatos

“As a boutique fair hosting seventy-one galleries, Art Athina creates an intimate storytelling experience linked to the city, its institutions and its urban and social fabric,” director Antonis Kourkoulos told Observer. “An inspiring group of young and talented curators takes over the fair’s program, each with a different focus.” The 2024 edition of the art fair (September 19-23) will include a Design Section curated by Tina Daskalantonaki, Manthos Kaloumenos and Mare Studio that showcases the best design creations from Greece and Europe. Other curated sections of the fair include “Projects,” dedicated to independent art spaces, “Video” and “Performance.” The fair also features a rich program of discussions and a section for children.

SEE ALSO: How Collector Dakis Joannou Helped Turn Hydra into an Art World Destination

When asked about the state of the Greek contemporary art scene, Kourkoulos described it as being marked by a dynamic interplay of local and international influences. “The Greek contemporary art market is resilient and continues to innovate,” she said. “Artists and galleries are exploring new mediums and practices, reflecting global trends while maintaining a unique Greek identity. It is also characterized by dynamic growth, international engagement and a strong presence of both emerging and established artists combined with a new generation of enthusiast collectors.”

Despite the country’s economic challenges, the market has shown resiliency, which supports the fair’s forward-looking approach and embrace of digital innovation. The main strength of Art Athina, however, is the interaction between ancient and contemporary, between the art scene of today and the cultural heritage of the city and between national and international. Among the international exhibitors mounting displays this year are Enari Gallery (Netherlands), GALERIE LJ (France) and xippas (France, Switzerland, Uruguay).

Ioanna Limniou, Party; oil on canvas, 150 x 170 cm. Courtesy the artist and Enari Gallery

“The fair is deeply connected to the city’s vibrant art community, which includes renowned galleries, important cultural institutions and the dynamic creative scene,” Kourkoulos added. “This synergy between Art Athina and Athens’ art scene makes it a significant event for both local and international audiences, contributing to the ongoing development and recognition of contemporary art in Greece.”

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Elisa Carollo

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August 17, 2024
Artist Fawn Rogers On Her Work, Showing at Make Room and the State of the World Today

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An installation entry view of Fawn Rogers’ “Everything is Sacred, Nothing is Precious; Everything is Precious, Nothing is Sacred” at Make Room, Los Angeles. Courtesy the artist and Make Room

As I peer through the large glass window of the new one-room solo installation by artist Fawn Rogers, my eyes scan the dozens of small, colorful paintings that pack the walls from floor to ceiling. Some feature mangled automobiles, cigarette-smoking monkeys and ironic cake icing messages, while others offer glimpses of pure nature: rare avian species, bare feet on lush lawns and adorable copulating ducks. Oh, but there’s also the benevolent Dalai Lama, and how about that close-up of grill-capped teeth saddled by sexy snarling lips? Seemingly dissimilar, these images come across like hyper, comic and wanton flashes of late-night television channel surfing—a place where we relinquish our consciousness and will to the oblivion of shock-value programming. Together, in this small white space, I wonder what they mean. I take it all in and pause.

Then, I approach the doorway to the gallery’s [ROOM] space entrance, lowering my gaze to a dense carpet of living, green sod that runs from corner to corner. An unavoidable, center-seated, large furry chess set, entitled R.I.P., now grabs my strict attention. Hand-hewn, patinaed bronze statues of extinct animals act as playing pieces on top of the board, where the faults and follies of humankind are played out by the very victims of our assault against the planet. Luckily, in this safe space, we’re offered a mere game to play, helping us make light—and maybe gain a small semblance of control—of the woes that add up to the inevitable burden of heavy consumerist life as we know it.

SEE ALSO: Martha Atienza’s ‘Our Islands’ Brings the Seas of Philippines to Times Square

When I ask Rogers, whose show “Everything is Sacred, Nothing is Precious; Everything is Precious, Nothing is Sacred” closes soon at L.A.’s Make Room, about what chess means to her, she mentions dominance and conquest and tells me she was inspired by the works of Jake and Dinos Chapman and Rachel Whiteread… as well as soap chess boards made in prisons.

Dominance, triumph, subjugation, conquest. Whatever happened to strategy—or fun, for that matter? How do we look at games today? I remember a few years ago reading an often-misattributed quote, “Life is just like a game. First, you have to learn the rules of the game. And then play it better than anyone else.” Playing the game of life ‘better than anyone else’ is perhaps the problem. Why? Because we should be in it together reasoning through conflict and attaining harmony, instead of competing for space in the zero-sum fallacy. Of course, our lives can be perceived as an oppositional game-like succession of events—similar to chess—in some ways. Suggesting that “life is a game” might imply that we should approach life—and our obligations to the natural world—as an elective, off-time leisure activity with lesser importance. However, it can also lead to greater investment and interest in responsible living, akin to the ‘flow state’ engagement found in enjoyable games.

So, what might the work of Rogers do? She presents a party-on place to play during our prime-time pop cultural yen for fatal fantasy, meme-making and cosplaying in the virtual land we pay witness to and remotely occupy. But, as she said plainly: “The work hopefully prompts the viewer to appreciate the role they play.” For me, that role means the locked-in-step dance with the real world, the here-and-now, enacting some commitment that will hopefully extend beyond my backyard into the sustainable global realm, a place the artist cares deeply about. So, I decided to look again and engage with Rogers’s objects directly in the real world.

After I get off the phone with the artist, I hop in the car, drive down Hollywood back roads and return to the exhibition space. There’s little conspicuous activity in the area. I see the workaday lineup of whitewashed warehouse soundstages, fast food joints, storage facilities and a gas station. It’s like a no-person’s land between the powerhouse Paramount movie studio and the dying fashion retail sprawl of Melrose Avenue. It’s a fitting location to think about Rogers’s concerns and work. No, it’s not inside an animal sanctuary or a clean energy lobby headquarters on Capitol Hill. Instead, it’s the result of our excess industrial production, the place where motion media stories are generated for dream-drinking audiences, where we fill our cars with fossil fuels and where we store our junk. But the Rogers show—with paintings of mutated but thriving Chernobyl flowers and trees that grow through wrecked car engine bays—is a living, breathing break in it all. It’s sometimes important to pause in the eye of the storm to see where the rapid swirling winds and rising waters might take us.

Rogers’ art encourages both the beauty and the profanity of the past, encouraging us to live, and, engage, in the present. Courtesy the artist and Make Room

Despite the sharp urgency and formal manifest outline of the artist’s quest to reflect our foibles and willful exploits in “Everything is Sacred, Nothing is Precious; Everything is Precious, Nothing is Sacred,” the work seems rather innocent upon second viewing. While deftly made by a seasoned artist, the inner-childlike quality throughout helps represent the installation as a sincere invitation to explore, rather than a cry for help or even a demonstrative lesson. Some art holds a rear view mirror up to our activity at large, some art breaks the mirror into pieces to readjust our perspective and some art creates a new daring path we might take to avoid the pitfalls already experienced. Rogers’ art may well accomplish the first two by examining both the beauty and the profanity of the past, encouraging us to live—and, again, engage—in the present. What about the future, you may ask? It’s uncertain, of course. Until then, we have art to help us out a little.

Observer briefly caught up with Rogers at the exhibition’s tail end to discuss her practice, the show and her thoughts on the world’s current state.

How long have you focused on the many weighty issues central to your work?

I’ve been investigating and creating art about humanity’s demise for over two decades. I don’t have answers about how to ease the suffering caused by the climate crisis, the conflicts of humans versus the unbuilt world, or, of course, humans versus each other. I avoid preaching a dogmatic message and instead focus on capturing the characteristics of our present day—one big end-of-the-world party. When I think about making my work, I feel grandiose piano playing as the ship goes down or party horns blaring as a house burns.

Your Ass is Grass 4J, 2022 (Oil on canvas, 20” x 16” 50.80cm x 40.64cm) and Your Ass is Grass 3K, 2022 (Oil on canvas, 19” x 14” 48.26cm x 35.56cm). Courtesy the artist and Make Room

What influences sharpened your formative awareness of the classic human vs. nature conflict that now seems more pronounced than ever?

I grew up in the woods of Oregon, immersed in the wild. When my family later moved to the city, it was a stark contrast to the world that I knew. My mother is of Cherokee descent, and my stepfather was also Native American, so valuing harmony with the natural world was often part of our family conversations.

As kids, we were made to read several books by survivalist Tom Brown Jr., such as The Tracker, which detailed an incredibly dark and seemingly realistic vision of the future.

Another important influence was Walkabout, directed by Nicolas Roeg, one of the first films I ever saw. Under the pretense of a picnic, a city man takes his two children into the wild and attempts to kill them and then kill himself. The children are saved by an Aboriginal boy who teaches them how to survive in nature. The movie focuses on the disharmony between the unbuilt world and the dangers of modernity. This theme has been central to my practice from the very beginning, in a way, a burden I cannot escape.

At the same time, my alcoholic mother had a severe religious “psychosis” and was constantly discussing the rapture, her god and the end of the world. I felt fear at times but was also very aware of the ironic and real impending destruction of the natural world––versus my mother’s imagined doom where I would be left behind.

Why is this show important for you to mount right now?

With so much suffering in the world and all the overwhelming conflicts, I am interested in their primary sources. Humans are flawed and we have never evolved past the desire to conquer and destroy.

Our world is rapidly changing. I was interested in creating an immersive experience with a macabre, humorous tone where the audience can actively engage with the themes of the work—and possibly participate in the critical thinking process.

Left to right: Your Ass is Grass 21, 2022 (Oil on canvas, 18” x 18” x 1” 45.72cm x 45.72cm x 2.54cm) and a corner view of “Everything is Sacred, Nothing is Precious; Everything is Precious, Nothing is Sacred.” Courtesy the artist and Make Room

Tell me a little about this format and how the show came together.

I wanted to show this series of paintings, Your Ass is Grass, in a more compact space to emphasize their value as an approaching storm, so to speak, and provide a sense of urgency. In the space, audiences are surrounded by one hundred small oil paintings with a bed of real grass below their feet dying over the course of the exhibition. The audience is invited to lounge and play the R.I.P. centerpiece with recently extinct animal chessmen cast in bronze on an oversized board of faux fur. A small army of intently forward-looking frogs serve as pawns and reference the current extinction of half the world’s amphibians. So, players can knock their enemies to the ground but they’re being intently watched—maybe even judged—by paintings of endangered birds, erotic dancers and collaged portraits of other figures that are part human, part animal, part ashtray.

What state do you think we’re approaching today?

I believe the world is one big crime scene and we’re all personally involved. I think a lot about when we become consciously aware that humanity can quickly and intentionally cause the extinction of another species, which we did with the great auk at the tail end of the Industrial Revolution. At the time, that event disproved Darwin’s theory that extinction typically happened over a long period—all because of our distinctly heinous human shenanigans. We became aware of the negative impact of our actions but continued—and continue—in this manner, nonetheless. In my sculpture, R.I.P., the great auk appears as the bishop. That bird was the first casualty of the Anthropocene-Epoch expansion.

Of course, the game of chess has shown up in just about every art medium over the ages—from the paintings of Honoré Daumier to Stanley Kubrick’s classic sci-fi film 2001: A Space Odyssey—as a charged symbol about the clever tacticians who play it. It was also the preferred game of such art luminaries as Marcel Duchamp and Pablo Picasso. What does it mean to you?

Chess is a game of triumph, but triumph is a corollary of conquest. It is notably a game that the harmony-promoting Buddha refused to play. The game’s colonial history, coupled with an emphasis on dominance, finds fresh implications in our current subjugation of the natural world. When making R.I.P., I was inspired by the works of Jake and Dinos Chapman and Rachel Whiteread, as well as soap chess boards made in prisons.

“Everything is Sacred, Nothing is Precious; Everything is Precious, Nothing is Sacred” is at Make Room in Los Angeles through August 3.

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Stephen Wozniak

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July 27, 2024
How Manila’s Silverlens Is Bringing the Philippines to the Global Art Stage

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Isa Lorenzo and Rachel Rillo at Silverlens Manila. Photo by Joseph Pascual. Courtesy of Silverlens (Manila/New York).

While the Philippines might not yet be considered one of the leading centers in the art world, the country has a vibrant and healthy art scene and market. The local art system already presents a mature structure, with long-established galleries and auction houses and regional artists with lengthy waiting lists commanding high prices.

According to most of the Filipino collectors we spoke with, the art scene in the Philippines dates back to even before WWII, despite at the time mainly focusing on memorabilia, religious art and the Philippines’ Masters. When discussing the pre-war era, people mention Roman Ongpin, a Chinese-Filipino businessman and philanthropist who established El 82 in 1882 in Binondo, Manila. The space was originally an art supply shop but later became a significant cultural and social hub, supporting Filipino artists and the Philippine Revolution when Alfonso Ongpin, his son, transformed it into a gallery that showcased important Filipino artworks.

The Filipino art market is very healthy and appears to be continuously growing. Exhibitions in Manila are often sold out, to the point that most galleries and artists don’t technically need to circulate their work elsewhere. The Philippines now has its own art fair, Art Fair Philippines in February, which was founded in 2013 by Lisa Periquet, Dindin Araneta and Trickie Lopa—passionate art enthusiasts and advocates for the Philippine art scene.

Since its beginning, the founder of the gallery Silverlens wanted to do things differently, applying an international gallery business model and aiming to bring Filipino artists abroad. We met with founder Isa Lorenzo, and co-director Rachel Rillo to learn more about their story and the Filipino art system in general.

“Causal Loops” at Silverlens Manila. Courtesy of Silverlens (Manila/New York).

The gallery’s Manila headquarters are in an industrial building in Makati, a financial center and one of the wealthiest parts of the metro city. There are other art galleries nearby, though this isn’t yet what you could rightly call an arts district.

The gallery has a large open space upstairs, meaning they can host two exhibitions simultaneously. When we visited, it was during the last days of a show by Filipino artist Bernardo Pacquing, who, with a similar approach to Arte Povera and Art Informel, mixes found objects to conceive new abstractions dense with memory while playing with notions of “ugly” and “messy.” The artist is quite popular in the Philippines, although he has rarely been shown abroad. In the other room, they had a show of a younger artist, Dina Gadia, who, applying the strategy of Pop art’s burst brushwork and acrylic washes over printing ink, works on the images of school books Americans brought to the Philippines during the occupation, problematizing the imagination created during this time.

In Manila, we met with Rillo, who, after showing us around, invited us to sit at a large round table in the office. She told us that the gallery was founded in Manila in 2004 by Lorenzo, and then she joined in 2007 as co-director. Initially, the gallery focused on photography, then expanded to other media with time and the market evolving. More importantly, since their start, they had the ambition to be an international gallery, able to promote artists from the Philippines and the broader South Asia region to the global contemporary art world.

Rillo recalled that other galleries criticized their model, not understanding why they decided to have a bigger staff and space and participate in the international fairs. Most can easily survive and even do very well just by tapping into the local market, and so other Filipino galleries tend to avoid international fairs as they don’t see the need to invest money in something that will most likely bring more loss than profit. But to Lorenzo, from the very beginning, it was clear that Silverlens had to play a global game.

The gallery opened an outpost in Singapore in 2010, which was open for four years, and they started participating in international fairs. In 2017, they decided to expand their space in Makati to show how they could be the local powerhouse.

According to Rillo, another factor in their stable growth has been their unique approach to the business: being artists themselves, their philosophy is artists first, and their aim is to provide the platform for creatives to build solid careers within institutional settings instead of only thinking in terms of market success. While the market is fueling the careers of many Filipino artists, it’s a short-term strategy.

The institutional interest also pushed the gallerists to consider a big move to open in New York during the pandemic. Lorenzo told Observer that, “it was during the pandemic that we noticed that international curators were interested in the region. Perhaps as a product of art travel restrictions and museum programs halting during that time, we had several conversations with institutions from the U.S., that hinted at an interest in art from our side of the continent.”

“Soft Fantasy / Hard Reality” at Silverlens New York. Courtesy of Silverlens (Manila/New York).

The challenge was significant, considering the prices in New York, but a space came to them as if by fate, Rillo recalled: “We started to ask around and explored, and decided to rely on an agent a friend suggested to us. We gave him the exact street and position where we wanted to be; we said either that or nothing. After a few days, he returned to us with an unreal offer, and the timing was right.” As sometimes happens, chances in life let things flow. After making the necessary arrangements, in 2022, the two opened in a premier position in Chelsea, at 505 on 24th Street, between Kasmin and Marianne Boesky.

The program space in Chelsea clearly shows their target is, first and foremost, institutions: this summer, they have a multimedia show curated by Lorenzo, “Hard Fantasy / Soft Reality,” featuring a group of Filipino and South Asians who stage a multifaceted and futuristic exploration of a body and identity reality that is constantly evolving today, despite the resilience of various conservative social systems that persist in parts of Southeast Asia. Video, sculptures and installation works are predominant in the exhibition, with many of the artists included already boasting institutional recognition and projects in their resumes.

When asked about feedback thus far and if they saw interest growing, Lorenzo responded that since the gallery opened in Chelsea, “interest has become more palpable, not only for art that comes from SEA but from the diaspora. The response and the energy from the Filipino-American and Asian-American community are overwhelming. So yes, there is an internationally growing audience in New York, but this is not something that just happened; it is the result of 20 years of Silverlens and 15 years of being part of several important art fairs.”

Silverlens now regularly participates in international art fairs, including the Armory Show, Art Basel Hong Kong, Art Fair Philippines and S.E.A. Focus, a more curated boutique event dedicated to South Asia art in Singapore during Art Week in January. “It’s more like a curated show or a Biennale,” Rillo explained. “I like the dialogue that this fair also creates with other colleagues in the region.” They used to do other fairs like Frieze London, but there are some regions where Filippino and South Asian art still do not resonate much with the public.

The Philippines has a complicated colonial history that connects it with Spain, of course, but also with Central and Latino America with the Galleons and later with the States for their influence during decolonization. In these geographical and intercultural exchanges, the Silverlens program can function as an essential platform to problematize and explore this history, these interconnections and the unique cultural hybridization that resulted from that.

When asked if there’s something particular in Filipino art today, compared to their Asian colleagues and their international counterparts, Lorenzo commented, “The Philippines’ complicated colonial history is ongoing. Our art history mostly starts and continues from a very European art practice/history via Spain via the Catholic church. Then, our modern and contemporary leans heavily on American postmodernism, politics and pop culture. It is in these interconnections and cultural hybridity (as you said) that make for a very dynamic art language both locally and in the diaspora.”

“Land Poetics” at Silverlens Manila. Courtesy of Silverlens (Manila/New York).

In the deeper analysis we had a chance to undertake while exploring the local art scene and talking with some of its players and patrons, what the art system in the Philippines seems to be now lacking is just a national infrastructure of public and institutional support. Surprisingly, despite the maturity of the system and the growing popularity of contemporary art here, there’s still no national museum or national collection of modern and contemporary art, except the national bank and the university galleries, which are very active. While the market for contemporary Filipino art is growing, challenges such as limited public funding for the arts and the need for more professional art management still need to be addressed.

Various private initiatives, however, are trying to compensate for this gap. One of the first was Pintô Art Museum, founded by Dr. Joven Cuanang, a neurologist and art patron, in 1988 as the first museum dedicated to contemporary Filipino art open to the public. Although the entire system relies on private endeavors, many local collectors, including regional and very established international names, are already planning to create private museums to open their collections to the public.

Meanwhile, Filipino artists are gaining growing international recognition, as we can see in the U.S. from the extensive survey MoMA Ps1 is dedicating to Pacita Abad (which showed at SFMOMA after premiering at Walker Art Center), the video work by Martha Atianza currently presented in ninety billboards in Times Square as part of the historical art program “Midnight moment,” as well as just the many names from the Philippines and the South Asian Region region that are showing this year at the Biennale.

The role of local art galleries in the Philippines like Silverlens is the key to putting the country’s contemporary art onto the world stage—participating in international fairs and bringing it to the attention of international institutions is step one. This will further validate Filipino artists’ careers and establish them within a global art history narrative when the national scene is still struggling to find public support.

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Elisa Carollo

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July 25, 2024
Sheikh Mohammed Rashid Al-Thani On Bringing Islamic Art to New York City

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IAIA’s founder and patron Sheikh Mohammed Rashid Al-Thani. Courtesy of Institute of Arab and Islamic Art

The nonprofit Institute of Arab and Islamic Art at 22 Christopher Street recently opened “Endless Night,” Lebanese artist Nabil Kanso’s debut solo exhibition in New York. Tackling the artist’s upbringing in Beirut during the Arab-Israeli War, it’s the latest presentation from IAIA to offer diplomacy through art. Observer recently caught up with IAIA’s founder and patron Sheikh Mohammed Rashid Al-Thani to hear more about the new show and IAIA’s initiatives since it opened its doors in 2017

What should my readers know about your new show, “Endless Night,” Nabil Kanso’s debut solo show in New York?

Nabil is a seminal figure in protest art, an artist who has developed a unique visual style that stemmed from neo-expressionism and mythical Iconography. He was determined to portray that war, no matter how far or foreign has an impact on our universal humanitarian conscience. His message, as powerful as his style of painting, 50 years later, still resonates, even more so today than ever.

How do you choose your artists?

I tend to look at styles and aesthetics, and go into a deeper reading of those artists, and look into how their works fit into a larger contemporary art canon. Artists whose works we exhibit are seminal figures in art history, but often due to marginalization, they have not been given the platform they deserve. I believe the institute stands as a platform for artists who challenge existing narratives and push us to expand our perspectives on what we understand of art.

IAIA works to promote artistic and cultural dialogue between New York City and the Arab and Islamic worlds. Why do you personally find this cause to be important?

It’s important, in a multicultural city, with representations from across various civilizations that the audience understands that artists from the Arab and Islamic regions are present, and are active participants in contemporary global culture. A space like ours brings in diversity and understanding and normalizes being Arab or Muslim at a time when stereotypes and renewed misconceptions of the region create a deeper divide.

You wrote your dissertation on Fauvism and Cubism. What drew you to those movements?

Those movements were seminal in the development of post-war art and had an undeniable impact on movements that developed in the years to follow. Moving away from the traditional forms of representations, Matisse and Picasso drew so much from Cezanne, thus Favism and Cubaism sit at a crossroads between various movements, which allow us to understand why and how styles often evolve and grow.

An installation view of “Endless Night,” Lebanese artist Nabil Kanso’s debut solo exhibition in New York. Courtesy of Institute of Arab and Islamic Art

You’ve worked as a curator at Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Islamic Art, both in Doha. What are some of the big differences in programming for audiences in New York vs. Doha?

The history of museums in Doha is relatively new and ever-growing, as the great developments in art and culture spearheaded by Her Excellency Sheikha Al Mayassa the Chairperson of Qatar Museums is reshaping the socio-cultural environment in Doha and the Arab World. In a society that has a fresh take on contemporary art, the stakes are higher and our responsibility towards the audiences in Doha is greater, as exhibitions in museums have the power to shape people’s perspective and conventions about art. In New York on the other hand, we are often working with a socio-cultural environment that is more deeply rooted in modern and contemporary art, with knowledge that is informed by Western movements. With that comes the beauty of encouraging our audience in New York to challenge their ideas on existing narratives, and bring together an alternative way of understanding art from a more inclusive perspective.

SEE ALSO: Looking at the Future of the M+ Museum and Creative Freedom in Hong Kong

What are the main differences between artists working in the West and those working in Arab and Islamic parts of the world?

The deep history of Islamic Architecture, Science, and Calligraphy brings a rich and diverse quality to the lives of artists that come from the Arab and Islamic Worlds, as those histories are very present in the aesthetics of cities from the region. Post-war in the Arab world is also defined by conflict. Together there is often an aspect of storytelling in art that comes from the Arab and Islamic Worlds. Western art is a little bit more linear, as certain art movements inspired different waves of styles to develop as a reaction to different moments in history, but also those moments allowed for styles to break away from the norms of classical art and help redefine our conventions of beauty.

What have you learned in the years since IAIA opened its doors?

That art has the power to move people and open their hearts and minds to narratives that otherwise seem foreign and unaccepting. That the power of culture defies war and conflict… that stereotypes and misconceptions collapse in the presence of art and culture. The conversations that develop through seeing and experiencing art have a long-lasting impact on our conscience.

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Dan Duray

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July 3, 2024
Artist Jenny Kendler On Ecology, Oysters and Mounting a Show on Governors Island

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Artist Jenny Kendler with Whale Bells. Julienne Schaer

A couple of weeks ago artist Jenny Kendler opened “Other of Pearl,” a site-specific public art exhibition at Fort Jay on New York’s Governors Island. The show, which is presented by Governors Island Arts and the Natural Resources Defense Council, uses a variety of creative media to explore our planet’s changing climate. It’s the perfect exhibition to visit with the kids during the next heatwave, and Observer recently caught up with Kendler to hear about this ambitious presentation.

How did this show come about? What made you start thinking about oysters?

I was invited by the Governors Island curatorial team to begin contemplating what a commission on the island would look like back in early 2021, so the exhibition has been in development for quite some time.

Regarding oysters, beach combing, shell collecting and appreciating the diverse forms of marine shellfish in general has been a lifelong passion. The central project of “Other of Pearl,” which takes the form of Greco-Roman sculptures grown inside of oysters, is an idea that probably germinated eight or nine years ago. I think it may have begun with a very rare abalone pearl which sat in a shell on a shelf in my California grandmother’s bathroom. The project sat in the back of my mind… I had no idea how to accomplish this somewhat crazy idea… but when I realized the Billion Oyster Project would be a neighbor to whatever exhibition we choose to produce, I knew that I was going to try to figure it out.

It took two years to know it would work, and during that time I conceived of what seems to me to be the project’s logical conclusion: that these precious artworks would be auctioned after the exhibition and the funds “returned to the bay” as a gesture of both wealth redistribution and ecological restoration—creating a new oyster reef with Billion Oyster Project.

Why are oysters so crucial to the ecology of New York?

New York was once the center of the world’s largest oyster population, which contained upwards of one trillion individuals. These bivalves agglomerated into huge reefs and provided tremendous benefits to the ecosystem—from supporting biodiversity and clean water to feeding first the indigenous Lenape and then white settlers, rich to poor.

The over-harvesting, chemical pollution and dredging of beds destroyed the majority of the estuary’s oyster reefs and has left the city much more vulnerable to flooding—as was seen during Hurricane Sandy. Today, efforts to restore the oysters, such as those by project contributor Billion Oyster Project, aim to re-engage these ecosystem benefits as well as to provide important climate resilience to the city.

SEE ALSO: ‘Tulips’ Is a Celebration of Kapp Kapp Gallery’s Fifth Year in Tribeca

What is your research process like?

I am fortunate enough to have access to the scientific team at NRDC, where I have been artist-in-residence since 2014. The project’s scope and ambition to encompass environmental issues from the human and ecological health aspects of chemical pollution to marine mammal protection to climate change were informed by these early conversations. I also read voraciously, following an idea that interests me, rhizomatically, from source to source. And there’s no substitute for direct observation. I am a passionate naturalist, constantly in awe of the diversity and complexity I find in the natural world.

In terms of materials, this show uses oysters, fossilized whale earbones, whale songs, human tears and whale oil. Were any of these harder to work with than others?

They all presented their own unique challenges, to be sure! As an artist who is deeply concerned with materiality, aesthetic and historical specificity and material histories, I often work with highly unusual materials. The earbones are provided by divers I networked with via the internet, who now contact me when they have a new set of fossils. The antique whale oils took, probably, the full three years to source, through eBay and online auction houses. You can draw your own conclusions about the tears, but as we all know, this is a time of many great sadnesses on our planet. The oysters and the whale recordings were provided by our project contributors, Billion Oyster Project and David Gruber of Project CETI respectively. Rarefied “materials” in themselves, I am deeply grateful to be trusted to work with natural objects and sounds with such rich histories, sources and connotations.

The exhibition as viewed from the entrance. Featured in the center is Other of Pearl, 2022-2024, with Whale Bells, 2023, visible in the room on the left and Mother, of Pearl (Nervous System), 2024, visible in the room on the right. Photo by Timothy Schenck

Governor’s Island is a unique place to stage an art show. What are the advantages and disadvantages of working there?

The main disadvantage is also part of what makes it such a special place to show work, which is obviously that it is an island. I hope to soon stop having stress dreams about the traffic backups and getting our van onto the ferry on time each morning. But this is also why this place can provide such a profound experience for visitors. They come to the island hoping to have an adventure, something apart from daily life in the city. We worked hard to really double down on this proposition.

The magazine space under Fort Jay has been transformed with carefully choreographed lighting by our install team from Powerhouse Arts into a magical space for exploration. Here visitors will encounter interactive sound works where they can speak to the whales, bells rung with fossil whale ear bones that I made with my collaborator Andrew Bearnot and a series of intimate treasures to be somatically absorbed. To be able to work in a space and on this island with its palimpsestic history definitely enriched the experience of conceiving and exhibiting the work in immeasurable ways.

Your work is political, but to me feels more obliquely so than a lot of other work that’s being shown today. What’s your attitude about the intermingling of art and politics?

My work as an artist is very political—I’m not shy about that. For example, I am a founding member of Artists Commit, an artist-led group working to raise climate consciousness within the art world. We support the creation of Climate Impact Reports that help artists and institutions understand their impact on the planet and people—I’ll be creating one for this show—and I definitely see this work as an extension of my artistic practice. I believe artists are part of the engine that creates culture—and it is ultimately our culture, and the values we derive from it, that give rise to everything from our government to our economic structures. Art can be important because it can help us approach complex or divisive issues in new ways. I think good political art gets under one’s skin, rather than hitting one upside the head.

What do you hope people get out of your show?

I hope that visitors to the show will have an embodied and emotional experience of the work—and the space itself, which is very mysterious. I’d like them to read the texts that give the conceptual and ecological frameworks for the seven projects and help tell the narrative of the extractive origins of the climate crisis in a new way. Ultimately, I aim to re-enchant and re-awaken people’s relationship with the natural world and with the more-than-humans with whom we share this biodiverse planet.

Detail, Seashell Resonance (Objects for Contemplation), 2024. Timothy Schenck

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Dan Duray

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June 27, 2024

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