Joseph Wright of Derby, An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, 1768. The National Gallery Photographic Department
A white cockatoo is on the verge of death as air is sucked from its glass trap. Two young girls look on, aghast. Maybe the croaking fowl is their pet? That unfortunate bird is the center of attention in Joseph Wright’s 1768 painting An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump. A beloved artwork in the U.K., the piece is a marquee draw in the National Gallery in London’s new “Wright of Derby: From the Shadows” exhibition. It is not as if Wright did not have alternatives to using the demise of a fine-looking bird for the image. A sealed paper bag would have inflated as oxygen was removed from the glass globe, for example. But that would have been boring, and Wright was a dramatist. Plus, none of this would be happening without the wild-haired pump operator looking out from the canvas. He is in charge. If he stopped the pump and allowed the air back into the glass, the bird would survive. Talk about tension.
Born in the northern English town of Derby in 1734, Joseph Wright was working during the Age of Enlightenment. The air pump was a relatively new invention, a contraption that demonstrated that the atmosphere was something that could be manipulated, a radical idea in the eighteenth century. Until then, religion and ancient philosophy had explained what things were. Air was an Aristotelian element, an unchangeable substance that sat between earth and fire. So, amid the drama, Wright was also documenting the kind of scientific development that characterized the era’s new thinking. His 1771 painting The Alchymist, in Search of the Philosophers Stone, Discovers Phosphorus, and prays for the successful Conclusion of his operation as was the custom of the Ancient Chymical Astrologers shows the German alchemist Hennig Brand accidentally discovering phosphorus while trying to turn a base metal into gold. As with his air pump painting, Wright was laying out a key moment in science. Although Benjamin Franklin had been experimenting with lightning conduction since the 1750s, electricity had yet to become a source of light and power. So Hennig’s incidental discovery—that man could manufacture an artificial light source—was another epochal lightbulb moment.
The theme of light runs throughout the exhibition. There are more than 20 pieces on view, concentrating on Wright’s candlelit work, the period when the artist used single sources of light to build atmosphere and anticipation. And with the light comes the dark. Wright’s dense, flat shadows frame the action, bringing depth and theater to the fore. It is natural to compare his output with artwork by another great dramatist and master of light, Caravaggio. Both artists employed the dark-light schematic of chiaroscuro, although Wright tended toward tenebrism, a more contrast-heavy variation. Where Caravaggio’s sense of tension stemmed from emotional turmoil and social vérité, Wright’s work was more pastoral and less dangerous, unless you are a bird, despite his dramatic leanings. Caravaggio, of course, had painted his last works roughly one hundred years earlier. Nonetheless, Wright’s work is stunning. Earthstopper on the Banks of the Derwent from 1773 is a pastoral case in point. A man is filling in earths, also known as foxholes, to stop foxes from hiding in their dens during the next day’s hunt along the River Derwent. As the digger toils, the night sky looms above. In A Philosopher by Lamplight, painted around 1769, the philosopher stands outdoors, examining human bones in his quest to understand anatomy, lit by a single lamp’s flame.
Joseph Wright of Derby, A Philosopher Giving That Lecture on the Orrery in Which a Lamp Is Put in Place, 1766. Courtesy Derby Museums
Wright’s work is steeped in real-life situations, but it is also rich in symbolism. Completed in 1766, A Philosopher Giving That Lecture on the Orrery in Which a Lamp Is Put in Place shows a scientist demonstrating the solar system’s orbits. At the same time, it stands in for the Age of Enlightenment’s broader epiphanies. Pulsing at the orrery’s center, the sun casts a newly birthed light as science triumphs over religion and superstition. The exhibition’s curators have positioned an actual orrery in a vitrine beside the painting, a careful reproduction of the original machine. Wright’s local connections to figures such as Josiah Wedgwood of Wedgwood pottery, Richard Arkwright, an industrial mechanization pioneer, and astronomer James Ferguson, who frequently lectured in Derby, meant he moved among leading minds in science and industry. In recording genuine experiments, Wright’s paintings function as reportage, documenting the accumulating technological breakthroughs that paved the way toward the Industrial Revolution.
There are more parochial paintings on view as well. Both from 1770, Two Boys Fighting Over a Bladder and A Girl Reading a Letter with an Old Man Reading Over her Shoulder appear kitschy and Rockwell-esque. These are fanciful, sentimental depictions of everyday life that were fashionable at the time. Even so, the composition of the struggling youths is intriguing. From a distance, one of the figures looks like an act of vandalism, a swirling smudge of black paint on the canvas. Closer inspection reveals the boy has his back to us and is rendered almost entirely as a shadowy silhouette. His adversary reels back, clutching his ear in agony. It is clever stuff.
Joseph Wright of Derby, A Girl Reading a Letter with an Old Man Reading Over her Shoulder, 1770. Courtesy Derby Museums
Wright made five versions in his The Blacksmith’s Shop series. The 1771 example on view here, like Earthstopper, is staged in the dead of night. This time, the primary light source is the lump of metal the farriers are hammering into shape. The glowing metal picks out the blacksmiths’ flushed cheeks and beaded brows as the moon glowers through the workshop roof.
Wright’s sense of theater was immersive. The figures in his larger paintings are nearly life-sized. Imagine the reaction when they were first unveiled. This was life in high definition, with viewers cast as participants, absorbing the scenes around them. More than 250 years on, Wright of Derby’s paintings remain an enthralling testament to a master of illumination.
Installation view: “Samuel Sarmiento: Relical Horn” at Andrew Edlin Gallery in New York. Courtesy of Andrew Edlin Gallery
The ability of a given artwork to resist being stripped of meaning over time is most often the result of its link with a continuous heritage of symbolic and archetypal materials that humans have shared across centuries and geographies to explain the complexities of existence. As J. M. Coetzee suggests in his 1991 essay “What is a Classic?,” the works we call classics endure not because institutions protect them, but because they speak across time, finding new interlocutors in each era. A classic has a living presence, retaining dense symbolic meaning and demanding response and re-interpretation even as society changes.
Engaging directly with the rich repertoire of symbols and myths of his native Venezuelan Caribbean and extending to cross-cultural resonances and similar narratives, artist Samuel Sarmiento engages with mythopoiesis directly using clay as a medium. A rich heritage of oral traditions and community storytelling is observable in his seductive kiln-fired ceramic sculptures: articulated, overlapping visual narratives and inscriptions like ancient tablets or natural fossilized traces. In the new works in his U.S. debut show at Andrew Edlin, “Relical Horn,” Sarmiento experiments with the elemental potential of clay, playing with the different transformations ceramics can undergo and embellishing his creations with patinas, glazes, pigments and even gold. His kiln’s searing heat yields kaleidoscopic, granular and liquid surfaces.
Samuel Sarmiento. Photo: Gabrielle Vega
Through these alchemical processes, artists and artisans have collaborated directly with the principle of entropy and the transformation of matter for thousands of years. Clay is fired at temperatures at which any organic substance would be pushed into extinction or fragmentation, but Sarmiento transforms ceramics into living cosmogonies that embody a rich reservoir of ancestral myth and cross-cultural archetypes, layering oral traditions, Caribbean cosmology and intuitive mark-making in fragile yet enduring vessels of memory.
“One of the primary purposes of ceramics is containment,” Sarmiento tells Observer. “Initially, ceramic objects held valuable resources such as water, food and currency.” He recounts an ancient tale about the medium’s origins. According to a Caribbean myth, in the earliest days of humanity, it was nearly impossible to store water because it was both difficult to contain and extremely scarce. “Humans attempted to make vessels from tree leaves or wood, but both materials deteriorated over time. They decided to speak with the Goddess of the Forest, who recommended they dig a large hole next to a river, where they would find a new kind of material.” When humans obeyed the Goddess and dug near the great river, they discovered clay. When they asked what to do with it, “she instructed them to shape the clay into vessels. By firing these vessels, they would be able to store water successfully.”
Samuel Sarmiento, The Origin of the Stars, 2025. Courtesy the artist and Andrew Edlin Gallery
For hundreds of years, ceramics have served as markers of the time they inhabit, Sarmiento reflects. “They have remained one of the principal mediums for deciphering a people’s ethnography because they can withstand the passage of time.” This idea of time—of encapsulating mythological and spiritual heritage in a vessel capable of preserving and carrying it across generations—is at the heart of his practice. His ceramic works function as artifacts of collective memory, shared wisdom and mythical imagination, helping humans better understand their place in the cosmos and within the relentless flow of time.
Sarmiento notes how French writer Roger Caillois, in The Writing of Stones (1970), argues that rocks and minerals, like landscapes themselves, have the capacity to harbor memory. “The artistic exercise of taking clay, which is part of the landscape, shaping it into forms like crowns, shells, nests, or ornaments and simultaneously using it to contain information creates a symbolic refuge,” Sarmiento explains. “Through this alchemy, an artwork can help humanity preserve what little wisdom we have left.”
Examining the dense narratives that adorn the surfaces of his sculptures, it’s almost impossible not to read his practice through a Jungian lens: his work is a conduit through which archetypes and ancestral symbologies—shared across cultures—reemerge from the collective unconscious. “I believe visual artists and writers alike are collectively searching to connect with the invisible,” Sarmiento says, pointing out that this urge becomes even more pressing in periods when truth is most difficult to discern.
“In my artistic practice, I utilize ancestral narratives from the Caribbean and South America, and sometimes Africa—not for exoticism, but simply to exalt the human condition,” he explains, noting that this often takes the form of rites of passage. “We are beings in constant movement.”
Born in 1987 and based in Aruba, Sarmiento investigates the fictional possibilities of history, the force of oral traditions,and the pliancy of time. Courtesy of Andrew Edlin Gallery
A recurring element in his work is the female figure. Whether mermaids or spirit guides, they guard the narratives that appear on the surface. In many cases, these figures can be associated with nature or feminine deities like Yemayá, who represents the sea, Sarmiento says. They are figures of healing, protection and renewal in a world that needs external intervention due to humanity’s inability to resolve itself to the present.
Across centuries and geographies, the female figure has been associated with birth, life and protection, mothering the world in a relentless cycle of generation, transformation, decay and renewal. And it is in times of great despair and chaos that these figures and the mythological world they inhabit can guide us into a metaphorical realm that helps us see beyond the present moment and reconnect with something deeper and universal.
A self-taught artist who has only recently begun to engage with the broader international art world, Sarmiento preserves a raw and primordial visual lexicon that appears to have escaped the influences of both art-historical tradition and contemporary art market trends. The apparent simplicity or naivety of his language results from a spontaneous and intuitive process of channeling, in which ancient symbols, myth and memories emerge from the collective unconscious and are translated into new forms through a contemporary practice.
As Michael Meade explains, to see with mythic imagination is to see metaphorically—referring to the old Greek word metaphor, which means not just to see beyond, but to be carried beyond the limits of linear time and literal thinking. “The new territory or new world only comes into view and becomes conscious to us when a new vision arises from the darkness around us and from the unseen depths of our own unconscious,” he said in a recent podcast, which profoundly resonates with what Sarmiento is pushing with his art: not a new world but a new vision in which past, present and future coexist.
Samuel Sarmiento, Transit (Heraclitus River), 2024. Courtesy the artist and Andrew Edlin Gallery
The sensibility of the work lies in synthesizing and connecting seemingly disparate references to create new poetics, Sarmiento explains, walking us through a richly layered ecosystem of references that idiosyncratically exist in his work, spanning from Jorge Luis Borges’ short story “The Circular Ruins” (1940) to Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970) and the movie Fitzcarraldo. As an exercise in argumentation, he takes these primary ideas and pairs them with Caribbean concepts and mythologies. Some of the show’s pieces reference the legend regarding the origin of the continents, which are said to have emerged from ruins and furrows located on the seabed.
Living for more than 13 years in the Dutch Caribbean has allowed Sarmiento to accumulate a vast library of oral narratives. Having been born in Venezuela, a country with a rich literary tradition and also multicultural connections, Sarmiento was motivated to approach art through universal stories. “All these references converge in a single object—whether a two- or three-dimensional sculpture—which often possesses geomorphic characteristics resembling sea coral or honeycombs,” he explains.
Sarmiento’s encyclopedic lexicon fluidly draws from ancient oral tales as well as more recent books. He mentions Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997) by Jared Diamond and The Invention of Nature (2015) by Andrea Wulf as part of his contemporary references. “One of the fundamental characteristics of oral narratives is their ability to explain complex processes through simple images or stories,” he elaborates. Tropes can be accessible at different levels—what Homer once expressed, Disney later embraced.
As in a geological process of sedimentation and development, found in both natural and cultural realms, “If we look at narratives ranging from the Homeric fables to South American legends, we see that archetypal symbols such as life, death, the journey, the encounter and exile are often repeated,” Sarmiento says. “Part of my artistic exercise is to recontextualize these archetypal and universal symbols in an era of anachronisms.” Although we have information from every time and geography at our fingertips, humans often lack the capacity to recognize historical coincidences or similarities in sociopolitical processes.
Samuel Sarmiento, Untitled (WB, 1973 – 1983 – 1993). Courtesy the artist and Andrew Edlin Gallery
He aims to demonstrate that while authors and languages vary across history, the story of humanity is the sum of a few core metaphors, in a continuous cycling of archetypal tropes. “This process is an exercise I have only been able to refine through reading and building visual archives,” Sarmiento says. Repetition plays a crucial role in his gestures, whether in clay or drawing. “As Hans-Georg Gadamer noted in The Relevance of the Beautiful, we tend to repeat what brings us pleasure,” he reflects. “In many cases, this repetition creates complex languages that lead us toward new interpretations and developments.”
Sarmiento’s process involves a tense yet generative exchange between intuition and control; he embraces the unexpected results that emerge from the interaction between energetic and psychic presence and the unpredictable reactions of clay and glaze. Despite the presence of figures or engravings, his narratives—which cover the entire surface as in a horror vacui without any precise order—form a kind of flow of thought-forms that defy any linguistic or visual codification. Like Surrealist automatic writing, these visual mythologies are the result of an intuitive reconnection with the language of a shared subconscious, to which the artist reconnects through his practice, finding new forms for the invisible. By bypassing rational control, the result is an epiphanic image—a strange revelation of forms carved and crystallized on the surface of the clay.
“Although I am self-taught with only brief experiences in guided workshops, the driving force behind my work is purely intuitive,” Sarmiento explains. “Still, the symbols and figures that emerge are resources drawn from years of researching oral histories, essays, and fantastical stories, driven by an intention to communicate with people from all walks of life.”
Samuel Sarmiento, The Hunt of the Unicorn, 1495 – 1505, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Andrew Edlin Gallery
At one point, Sarmiento shares how, feeling a spontaneous connection with Jung and his thinking, he applied some years ago to a post-academic program in Switzerland. “My goal was to further my artistic research, develop a broader vision of the symbols and archetypal figures in my work, visit Carl Jung’s house, and access the literature and resources offered by the program,” he says. Yet the jury’s response was that there was no reason he needed to visit that specific location, stating that any information I required about Jung could be found on the internet. “My practice was ultimately not considered part of a contemporary discourse,” he points out, noting how one of the greatest challenges for artists from the Caribbean and South America is finding spaces where their artistic languages are appreciated through horizontal dialogue—not as exotic elements meant to fill a program’s minority quota.
Sarmiento’s work is a message of universality, celebrating and protecting the cross-cultural patrimony of stories and myths that might still guide humans toward a better notion of the future. He offers something beyond the Western paradigm of knowledge—ancestral and primordial—that has been suppressed or mostly forgotten but still resonates in the subconscious as something understood by the entirety of humanity.
His symbolic language reminds us how much we share across cultures, and how this universal ancestral heritage can help guide us into the future. “Never before have we lived in an age with more imaginary borders,” Sarmiento concludes. It is art such as his that can help us see beyond them. Never before, he adds, has humanity seemed so fragile, unable to generate collective solutions. “Through my artwork, I am seeking to create classics and objects capable of holding solutions or information for future generations.”
Sarmiento taps into a historical record shared across cultures and communities. Courtesy of Andrew Edlin Gallery
Camille Pissarro, Apple Harvest, 1888. Oil on canvas, overall: 24 x 29 1/8 in. (60.96 x 73.98 cm.), dimensions: 33 1/2 x 38 3/4 x 4 in. (85.09 x 98.425 x 10.16 cm.). Brad Flowers, Dallas Museum of Art, Munger Fund
Their paintings might look like greeting cards from a nursing home, but the Impressionists were 19th century punk rockers. They upended the establishment by presenting what was viewed as rough, unfinished artwork by upstarts bent on subverting tradition. And when the conservative Académie des Beaux-Arts rejected them, this ragtag group of starving artists, including Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, Edgar Degas, Paul Cézanne and Berthe Morisot, among others, set up their own group show, a first, and had the audacity to charge admission.
Their work can be seen in the touring show “Impressionism Revolution: Monet to Matisse,” currently at Santa Barbara Museum of Art, alongside the latter’s “Encore: 19th-Century French Art.” The Dallas show will then travel to the Frist Art Museum in Nashville, Toronto’s Art Gallery of Ontario in the summer and, in late 2026, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.
“They revolutionized museums and how we encounter exhibitions and who art is made for and who gets to see it,” Dallas Museum of Art curator Nicole Myers tells Observer. “A lot of the things they brought to the table, real innovation at the time, stayed as a proto form of modern art making.”
It’s a short-lived but seminal moment in art history that ran for roughly 10 years, but the stylistic and intellectual offshoots that Impressionism spawned marked a sea change, paving the way for 20th-century art. Beginning with Monet’s Impression, Sunrise (1872), and from which the movement got its name from critic Louis Leroy, Impressionism was maligned by the Académie, a government-run arts organization whose annual Salon show determined which artists might have a prosperous career and which would not.
Popular among the Salon were artists like Jean-Léon Gérôme and Antonin Mercié, academicists who produced Orientalist and historical paintings often depicting scenes from Greek mythology. Impressionist paintings, in both style and subject, were decidedly outré, eschewing tradition-bound standards like a brown wash to prep the canvas as well as the requisite coat of varnish as a final step. They elevated rough subject matter like sex workers, manual laborers and industrialization, presenting them through sketchy brushstrokes unlike the clean application of paint favored by the Salon.
“It was political to them to mount their own show and buck the government in that way. It was a battle they were waging and the stakes were extremely high in France in this period, where no art was not political,” offers Myers, noting how critics like Charles Albert d’Arnoux, known professionally as Bertall, characterized Impressionist works as “awkward attempts, crude in color and tone, without contour and modeling, displaying the most complete disregard for drawing, distance and perspective; colors chucked, so to speak, at random.”
Paul Signac, Mont Saint-Michel, Setting Sun, 1897. Oil on canvas, dimensions: 26 × 32 1/8 in. (66.04 × 81.6 cm.), framed dimensions: 33 × 39 1/4 × 3 1/2 in. (83.82 × 99.7 × 8.89 cm.). Dallas Museum of Art, The Eugene and Margaret McDermott Art Fund, Inc., bequest of Mrs. Eugene McDermott in honor of Bill Booziotis
Banning black from their palette, Impressionists depicted shadow by deepening the color tones of a subject, while pointillists like Pissarro, Signac and Seurat placed disparate colored dots side by side, relying on the viewer’s eyes to mix them. Using color as shadow set the stage for Fauvists like Henri Matisse and André Derain and even Vincent van Gogh, a contemporary who called himself an Impressionist even if no one else did. Most important was their use of rough strokes rather than detailed clarity to indicate a shape or figure, again relying on the eye to draw conclusions based on context.
“Fauvism, the idea of Divisionism (Pointillism), taking color and applying it in separate strokes, the Impressionists were doing that intuitively,” notes Myers. “They began to divorce color and brushstroke from being descriptors. What makes your brain read the whole thing together as an image is about relativity, what’s next to what.”
Gauguin, whose only work in the Santa Barbara show is a familiar Tahitian scene, Under the Pandanus (1891), paints the ground in an otherworldly burgundy. It converses with the show’s second of two works by Edvard Munch titled Thuringian Forest (1904), which depicts an area alongside a forest road as pink and meaty, more like raw flesh than earth.
“Everything was about the external, objective world, but it should be filtered through the imagination, the subjective, the thoughts, the feelings of the artist to translate what they see or feel about their time,” says Myers, noting that Gauguin, who exhibited in 5 of 8 Impressionist shows, sensed something was missing from the movement early on and began exaggerating color and line. “He was the first to bring this idea of a different kind of spirituality, a lyrical quality, something more meaningful but harder to find.”
Four paintings by Piet Mondrian from the first two decades of the 20th century include a farm, a windmill and a castle ruin, as well as a stab at Pointillism in his The Winkel Mill (1908). Among them is no sign of his signature minimalism of primary colored quadrilaterals that characterize later works like New York City and Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942-43). Neither looks anything like its title, yet both capture the spirit and feel of the city.
Piet Mondrian, The Winkel Mill (pointillist version), 1908. Oil on canvas, dimensions: 17 × 13 5/8 in. (43.18 × 34.61 cm.), dimensions: 25 × 21 1/4 × 2 7/8 in. (63.5 × 53.98 × 7.3 cm.). Jerry Ward, Dallas Museum of Art, Foundation for the Arts Collection, gift of the James H. and Lillian Clark Foundation
“For Mondrian, it was this spiritual fuzzy religious association with perfect balance and perfect harmony. He felt that if he could just communicate that through lines and grids, you will feel that perfect harmony with the cosmos,” says Myers. “He thought art should convey what cameras can’t capture, because photography had become perfected. What it can’t do is provide mood or thought through color or a line and touch people. It starts with him being exposed and experimenting with Impressionism and post-Impressionism and breaking down these cornerstones of images.”
Most of the Impressionists died before the turn of the century and many didn’t live to see World War I. But Monet, the man who started it all, lived until 1926. While it’s common for artists to do their best work in their youth or prime of life, Monet’s most prescient work came later. The show includes his pre-Impressionist still life Tea Service (1872), highlighting the artist’s technical mastery, as well as two from his decades-long series of waterlilies, which, more than any body of work, best illustrates the transition from Impressionism to Modernism.
The Water Lily Pond (Clouds) (1903) shows the sky reflected in the pond’s surface, disrupted by floating lilies. The far bank of the pond is seen at the top of the frame, helping to orient the viewer (although one critic thought the image was upside down when he saw the sky and clouds reflected in the water). Water Lilies (1908) is a circular composition that has no orienting point. It’s a mass of blue and green, the sky and trees reflected in the pond, with purple patches depicting lilies. It’s not an abstract work but, like the lily paintings that follow, the emphasis is on color and light less on subject matter.
“For Monet, the unifier was the desire to paint light and how it’s interacting with different surfaces,” says Myers. “The circular one, you only have light dancing on the surface of the water or glinting off the plants down below. It is incredibly abstract.”
The other name in the title of the show is Matisse, whose first painting Books and Candle (1890) is the opposite of Impressionism in a way that would have tickled the traditionalist Salon. His one work on display here, Still Life: Bouquet and Compotier (1924), illustrates a drastic departure from his early work, incorporating ideas sprung from Impressionism that stayed with him through his later abstract works before his death in 1954.
“We take it for granted today because it is foundational, the building blocks they set up for different aspects of their production, from color theory to moving away from a kind of illusionistic style, using brushwork to convey more than what something looks like,” Myers concludes. “Feeling and mood, an optical sensation, these are things that artists today are still working with and absorbing.”
Vincent van Gogh, Sheaves of Wheat, 1890. Oil on canvas, dimensions: 20 × 40 in. (50.8 × 101.6 cm.), dimensions: 31 3/8 × 51 1/8 × 5 1/4 in. (79.69 × 129.86 × 13.34 cm.). Ira Schrank, Dallas Museum of Art, The Wendy and Emery Reves Collection
“The World as a Labyrinth” probes how Contreras’s work is attuned to a universal consciousness shared across eras and geographies. Courtesy the artist and Bibliothèque Polonaise de Paris
Different authors converge on the notion of a collective subconscious to explain the recurrence of symbols and archetypes across time and space. The work of Mexican artist Alejandro García Contreras is deeply attuned to that flow of universal consciousness shared by humanity across eras and geographies—a collective subconscious that, as Carl Jung described, is not a static archive but a living field of imagination continually reshaping itself through the “original instructions” already embedded in the human psyche.
The best art often begins with this kind of soul call, transforming creation into a mission. For Contreras, that call came early, through an image he encountered as a child in a book given to him by his grandfather—a mystical man and shaman. The book, an encyclopedia of the occult exploring timeless questions through myth and enigma, became, as the artist describes it, “a kind of guide or amulet for my imagination.” In the chapter on Vampirism and Lycanthropy, Contreras discovered a terrifying yet seductive image: a harpy-like woman attacking a naked man. “That image would never leave me,” he tells Observer. “That erotic undertone—imperceptible to me at the time—was etched into my memory.”
The image, however, bore no signature or caption. Only years later, thanks to Google, did Contreras learn it was a painting by Bolesław Biegas, a visionary Polish artist from the early twentieth century. His connection to Biegas deepened when, during an Art Explora residency in Paris, Contreras found himself—by both chance and intention—at the Polish Library in Paris (Bibliothèque Polonaise de Paris). Walking through the Biegas Museum, he experienced a profound sense of reconnection that would later inspire his latest exhibition.
Contreras spent hours in the museum that day, piquing the curiosity of the staff. After hearing his story, they introduced him to Agnieszka Wiatrzyk, one of the museum’s curators. The exhibition that emerged from this encounter stands as a testament to that journey and the spiritual connections it nurtured—one of those rare stories that renew faith in art’s power to connect the soul to something greater, beyond the confines of individual existence.
Alejandro García Contreras. Courtesy of the artist
With “The World as a Labyrinth,” soon-to-close at the Polish Library in Paris, Contreras presents his ceramic cosmologies, enigmatic bronze narratives and visionary cosmic paintings in a dialogue that spirals through the evocative connections between Bolesław Biegas and the symbolism of Gustave Moreau. Set within the historic Polish Library—one of the oldest and most significant Polish cultural institutions outside Poland, a trove of artifacts and archives celebrating the genius of the fin-de-siècle Polish diaspora from Biegas to Chopin—the exhibition provides a profoundly poetic setting for Contreras’s exploration of spiritual lineage and universal consciousness.
“These artists come from completely different contexts of space and time than me, but that’s exactly where the connection happens,” Contreras reflects as he walks us through the show. “What I’ve been trying to do through my own practice is to explore this idea of non-time—a space where symbols and archetypes resist chronology. It’s something that persists within a kind of collective imaginary, the shared language of the human soul,” he adds. “I love thinking of it that way—what Jung called the collective unconscious. That’s what connects us all. We’re each channeling something ancient and shared, even if we’re doing it from different places, in different eras, or for different reasons.”
Blending contemporary pop culture with Mexican folklore, ancient mythology, occultism and religion, Contreras constructs a syncretic continuum of cultures and traditions as an imaginative attempt to grasp the mystery of the universe’s origin and the soulful essence of human existence. The multilayered narratives alchemically shaped within his intricate glazed ceramics combine the rich symbolic heritage of his homeland with cross-cultural philosophical concepts and the Japanese pop and underground cultures of manga and anime, revealing the timelessness of themes, dramas and questions that accompany human life. His art becomes a living expression of what Michael Meade describes as the mythic realm—something circular rather than linear—a non-chronological space where symbols are not relics but living presences, constantly re-entering the world through imagination.
Though his art draws first from his lived experience as a deeply sensitive soul navigating a terrestrial, time-bound realm, Contreras approaches his practice as both alchemist and shaman, mediating between the visible world and the unseen structures of the spirit. His conjurations of symbolic references span the entire course of civilization, uncovering recurring psychological and narrative patterns. Ancient and contemporary symbols converge to reveal, within the dialectic of time, enduring messages and meanings that embrace the circle of life and the open, deeply rooted relationship Mexican culture holds with life, death and rebirth.
A childhood encounter with Biegas’s painting became the seed of Contreras’s lifelong fascination with the unknown. Courtesy the artist and Bibliothèque Polonaise de Paris
While studying Biegas’s archives, Contreras discovered many of the motifs and forms he had instinctively explored in his own work. A vitrine displaying Biegas’s drawings of dinosaurs is paired with similar early sketches and works by Contreras, creating a play of resonances and echoes that runs throughout the exhibition—a dialogue born not of imitation but of an unconscious, spontaneous connection across time. This mirroring extends beyond formal affinities to a shared cosmology, turning myth into a mirror for the psyche, where divinity and desire, the physical and celestial, the individual and collective coexist. The thread of visionary mystical continuity finds another echo in Gustave Moreau, whose symbolist and allegorical compositions anticipated the mystical sensuality that animates, in distinct ways, both the work of Biegas and Contreras.
Common among all three artists is a timeless fascination with the femme fatale, used here as a cosmic principle exposing, much like the Romantics’ sublime, humanity’s confrontation with its own limits and mortality. The heroines that populate Contreras’s works stand fiercely against subjugation to the male gaze, echoing how Biegas’s androgynous figures often carry a predominantly masculine energy despite their traditional depiction as feminine muses.
Drawing from the vast repertoire of manga and anime—which reinterpret ancient myths and tales—Contreras revives the power of archetypes, celebrating the deconstruction of female stereotypes while infusing them with agency and desire. Aware of their seductive force, as in Biegas’s paintings, these heroines stand in opposition to their male counterparts—often faceless spirits or demons who pursue, crave and depend on them for their own pleasure, becoming ensnared by their desires.
“What I’m trying to do is connect different symbolic universes,” Contreras explains, citing the example of a devil woman conceived by a great manga artist from Japan called Kōna Guy. “Her representation looks almost identical to one of Biegas’s figures: wings sprouting from her head, a sensual, otherworldly presence,” Contreras explains. “I’ve been playing with these connections, linking manga—which I’ve come to understand more deeply after spending time in Japan—and the broader field of contemporary pop culture with ancient myths.” As Contreras notes, manga have become one of the most influential and innovative visual languages shaping our collective imagination today, sharing the same symbolic world-building power that ancient tales, myths and oral traditions once held.
From Moreau’s Parisian refinement to Biegas’s Slavic mysticism and Garcia Contreras’s metaphysical roots in the Mayan jungle, three worlds converge in the exhibition. Courtesy the artist and Bibliothèque Polonaise de Paris
At the same time, in his portrayal of the femme fatale, Contreras intentionally reveals the vulnerability embedded in sexual instinct and its longing for balance and love. His figures often exist within the tension of unresolved emotion, an energy that likewise pulses through Biegas’s paintings. Yet luminous in their esoteric charge, the works of both artists gesture toward a nonhuman, nonterrestrial rhythm—an access point to the collective consciousness, where natural elements and creatures coexist beyond the confines of civilization, society and religious taboo.
In three-dimensional form, Biegas’s bodies are elongated, twisted and torqued—often caught in uneasy postures that suggest ecstasy, suffering, or transfiguration—embodying the soul’s yearning to escape the limits of the physical body and resist strict categorization. Similarly, Contreras’s heroines freely merge references, becoming symbolic figures that appear to belong to another world, one guided more by spirit than by sensory impulse.
At the heart of all three artists’ work lies a meditation on the primordial force of Eros, the vital energy from which all things emerge and to which all things return in the endless cycle of matter and transformation it sustains. Echoing Michael Meade, here Eros transcends romantic love or physical desire and is expressed—through earthly symbology—as a cosmic current of connection, the animating energy that binds life and fuels creation and imagination. In this sense, Contreras, like Biegas, revives the ancient Greek conception of Eros as the principle that draws separate entities into relation, forging unity from multiplicity: the adhesive of the cosmos, the thread binding soul to soul, human to world, myth to meaning—moving toward wholeness, creativity and beauty, not as sentiment but as sacred vitality.
Embracing this shared symbolic language, for Moreau as well as for Biegas and Contreras, figuration is never portraiture or realism—it is a vessel of metaphysical energy, an incarnation of inner states, cosmic forces and psychic archetypes. For all three, art functions as revelation—a bridge between the visible and invisible realms.
The show brings together forty-four works including paintings, drawings and sculptures in porcelain, plaster, clay and wax. Courtesy the artist and Bibliothèque Polonaise de Paris
Animating compositions that oscillate between harmony and chaos, drawn with a line that is at once delicate and forceful, their figures operate on both psychological and spiritual planes: they externalize emotions, instincts and dreams—what both Biegas and Contreras describe as “the invisible life of things.”
The works of these three artists, this exhibition reveals, resonate with Jacobo Grinberg’s Syntergic Theory, which proposes that experience emerges from the interaction between the energetic field created by the brain (the neuronal field) and the energetic structure of the universe—a liminal space where life and destruction converge and where the mystery of creation can be reawakened.
Biegas’s works from around 1900-1910 already envision the human form as a microcosm of the universe: faces dissolve into stars, limbs unfurl into spirals or vegetal motifs in his Cosmic Cycle, depicting figures intertwined with planetary and astral forms. Humanity here is part of a universal choreography—just as in Contreras’s paintings, where texture and brushwork magmatically shape symbolic visions that seem to recreate within the canvas the same formative process governing all existence: matter, atoms, energies and forces converging into new life. In both artists, the physicality of form dissolves into the ceaseless motion of evolution and transformation, as art becomes a liminal threshold between matter and spirit—a portal to other extensions of the human soul.
This connects to another recurring theme in both artists’ work: the Island of the Dead, a motif inspired by Arnold Böcklin’s Symbolist painting Die Toteninsel (1880s), which haunted many European artists of that era. Yet while Böcklin’s island symbolized the passage between life and death—a romantic vision of eternity—Biegas and Contreras reinterpret it as a metaphysical landscape of transformation rather than finality, a site of passage where matter and spirit merge. That island, like the artwork itself, becomes a center of consciousness, embodying the belief that human existence is cyclical—part of a universal rhythm binding life, death and creation into one continuous flow.
This exhibition reveals how the symbolism of Alejandro García Contreras—like that of Moreau and Biegas—is ultimately a holistic, syncretic ode to our potentially infinite individualities, urging us to embrace a renewed spiritual universality that awakens the soul to its place within a greater cosmic whole. Their art becomes an exploration of the invisible territories of transformation, where life, memory, ancient myth and contemporary consciousness converge to uncover luminous truths about what it means to exist, to create and to harness the power of mythic imagination to access other dimensions. That mythic imagination—the primordial act, as Mircea Eliade described it, and the world’s original language, in Michael Meade’s words—remains capable of restoring coherence and meaning in a fractured age.
The show offers a revised history of Symbolism in a single time and place; here, the distinction between modern and contemporary art, with its ambivalences, dissolves. Courtesy the artist and Bibliothèque Polonaise de Paris
Devin B. Johnson, Crossing, 2025. Oil on linen, 80 x 90 x 2 in. Courtesy of the artist and Nicodim gallery
Devin B. Johnson’s paintings emerge on the canvas like ghostly, dreamlike apparitions—visual remnants that withstand the slow erosion of memory. His scenes exist in suspended tension between figuration and abstraction, between the sensory intensity of trauma and the blurred contours of a dream upon waking, when the self begins drifting away from the oneiric realm where the subconscious speaks. In his hands, paint becomes a means of reattuning and reconstructing that space; the white canvas, a stage on which to confront it.
“My interest is in memory and the subconscious; that’s why the paintings feel articulated in fragments,” Johnson tells Observer as we walk through his new exhibition “Crossing,” on view at Nicodim Gallery through November 8. For Johnson, painting is a way to think about nostalgic space. That’s where his muted tonal range comes from: the grays, the desaturated chromatic colors, the atmospheric haze. Blending realism with surreal gesture, his work becomes a poetic act of recollection and reconnection or an attempt to retrieve what lingers beneath the surface of consciousness and the past. With his paintings, he navigates histories of representation, urban movement and diasporic trauma, moving fluidly between the personal and the collective, the remembered and the forgotten. “They evoke that phenomenon of recollection—how remembering actually works,” he says. “When you remember something, especially something emotionally loaded, it’s always fragmented. It’s never a perfect replay of how it happened.”
David Johnson. Courtesy of the artist
Johnson instinctively manipulates both subject and surface, allowing shifts in texture and color to translate psychological and sensory transitions. Yet his scenes are intentionally never fully resolved, either pictorially or narratively. They remain open, as if capturing memory and history still in motion, still forming. Fragmentation becomes a strategy: opening an event or image to multiple readings and avoiding the authority of a single interpretation. “Leaning into that fragmentation is how I like to think about reality itself: how it falls apart or reforms in this hazy, almost musical way. Memory isn’t linear; it dissolves and recomposes,” he explains.
What Johnson evokes in many of the works on view is also something profoundly specific: the daily psychological, cognitive and emotional reality of living in a city like New York: a continuous crossing of narratives, languages, cultures and perspectives that defines the urban condition. The city, always in flux, holds the potential for constant reinterpretation but also the risk of overexposure, where experience multiplies faster than we can process or reflect and meaning slips through the cracks of noise and speed.
“All of us who’ve walked the streets or subway stations can recall how certain walls or corners slowly change over time. That speaks to a kind of kinetic, haptic memory embedded in any metropolitan space,” Johnson reflects. “There are always people moving through it, navigating it. That movement creates a constant layering of memory.”
In this sense—aligned with Situationist thinking, which calls for a creative and critical interpretation of urban space that reclaims agency—the city becomes a palimpsest of visions and sensations. It is a living surface upon which we build our daily reality and our idea of self within and between the interrelational fabric of existence that a metropolis intensifies.
“My work really comes from walking the streets—an observational way of looking,” Johnson continues. “I’m constantly moving through the city with my head turning, watching how the urban environment comes together.” For him, beauty can be found anywhere: in a garage, an alley, a wall. “If you’re open to it, you can glean beauty from the most ordinary places.” His paintings speak to this practice of observation, contemplation and attunement and of locating beauty within the chaos of urban life.
Devin B. Johnson, All Behind, 2025. Oil on linen, 80 x 90 x 2 in. Courtesy of the artist and Nicodim Gallery
At the same time, these works often describe and inhabit a state of transition: a conversation just beginning and left suspended, a movement in the street not yet resolved, a possible encounter merely suggested. The viewer is invited to imagine its unfolding. “The liminality of going from one point to another—that in-between state—is central to my work,” Johnson says. The exhibition title, “Crossing,” speaks directly to that threshold: the moment when there is an A, but the B has not yet revealed itself. “It’s the space of transition, of becoming, and painting becomes a way to simulate that threshold.”
Here, we can also read Johnson’s effort to push against the static nature of painting, suggesting instead a physical and psychological reality of being that is always in flux. “That’s often my entry point: creating figures walking through emotional and psychological space,” he explains. From this interrelational, ever-moving condition arises the universality of his scenes. “These could be New York City, Paris, Africa or anywhere,” he observes. “There’s a kind of universal ‘somewhere’ we all recognize, even if it’s not tied to a specific location.” It is a place where humanity manifests in an epiphanic moment of revelation.
In the two largest paintings in the show, Crossing (2025) and All Stay Behind (2025), this internal tension becomes fully visible: a friction between the precise rendering of figures and the intuitive eruption of sensation, which disrupts any linear narrative and opens the image to the kinds of contradictions that shape our perception of reality: the gap between what we experience, what we are told and what we can articulate within the limits of language and reason.
Johnson explains that these two paintings were the first he made for the exhibition and they set the heartbeat of the entire show. He usually begins by working through ideas slowly, often without fully understanding what he is trying to do, but each painting helps him tease out the direction, the energy and the questions that the body of work will confront. “You can see what I’m speaking about—this navigation through space, this kinetic energy. It’s not only in the dripping of the paint, but also in the way energy clusters across the canvas,” Johnson notes. The painting he refers to, Crossing, is one of the largest he has ever made and the central work from which the exhibition takes its title.
This monumental canvas depicts a vast urban street in flux, traversed by multiple lives, their stories possibly intersecting or weaving together for an instant or missing each other entirely. Several Black men walk past a white car, or perhaps it is one subject duplicated, suggesting motion and psychological multiplicity. White doves hover and drip overhead, producing a layered image that evokes movement, memory and simultaneity within the city. “This painting is also about configuration and tension—pushing paint, pushing material and at the same time allowing the material to act freely,” he says. “Letting the paint drip makes the work feel like it hasn’t fully arrived yet. It’s still becoming. That unfinished quality feels truthful to me, like memory, like movement, like life in the city itself.”
An installation view of David B. Johnson’s “Crossing” at Nicodim Gallery in New York. Courtesy of Nicodim Gallery
Yet Johnson is equally interested in inserting anchors—symbolic presences that connect fleeting urban moments to a larger human history where psychological and historical patterns recur. Unsurprisingly, he has recently been drawn to the thinking of Carl Jung. “What’s been interesting for me lately is using symbols as anchors,” he notes. “Jung talks about iconoclastic symbols or totems—forms that can point to personal, individual meaning. I started incorporating symbols that hold significance to me personally, but can also open the painting to other interpretations.” In the central painting, cars and pigeons serve as archetypal symbols. “Pigeons aren’t considered majestic, but I like linking them back to the Renaissance dove as a symbol of freedom, flight, love,” Johnson reflects. “Here, they become part of these New York scenes, glorifying the everyday things we move through and overlook.”
Although rooted in the daily crossings of a chaotic city like New York, Johnson’s paintings are equally grounded in art history, particularly the Renaissance pursuit of structure, perspective and order within flux. His compositions reveal an impulse to locate balance amid motion, to stabilize chaos through pictorial intelligence and to insert contemporary life into the long lineage of painting as a record of a society in continual becoming. Still, he resists the mathematical precision of Renaissance masters. Blurring the lines becomes his way of acknowledging the imprecision that emerges from psychological experience—the same human clumsiness early painters sought to perfect but that modern thinkers like Freud and Jung compelled us to confront. “It’s more like the flutter of a thought or a memory—something fleeting that can’t be fully held. That’s what the pigeons or doves represent to me: the impossibility of completely capturing memory. I’m trying to strengthen my compositions and see where the work can stretch,” he reflects. For Johnson, the show marks five years of work reaching a sharper vision while opening into its next phase.
“Crossing” is a study of histories of representation, urban movement, and diasporic memory as refracted through the mind, heart, and hand of Devin B. Johnson. Courtesy of Nicodim Gallery
Notably, although Johnson may draw inspiration from both personal and collective archival photographs, he never ties the final painting to a single image. “I use photography as a starting point, but then I shift away from documentation,” he explains. He recently started using A.I. to direct his own visual world instead. “I build scenes from memory, music and intuition. That way, I’m not bound by copyright or another photographer’s vision; I’m building my own. That’s how I begin finding my own narrative,” he says. “The real decisions happen in the painting. There’s always a tension between control and surrender, between structure and improvisation. I think that fight is visible in the work.”
The emotional, often intuitive character that shapes his images and their memories remains far more crucial for Johnson and it emerges through the dialectical tension between elements. “I’m following the emotional logic. The feelings of the figures are essential and that’s where slowness comes in. I want you to eventually read the emotion on the surface of the painting, in how the figures interact.”
Painting becomes a site of discovery—a blank space in which he teases out what truly matters to him: color theory, space, bodies, rhythm, materiality. “I’m always asking, how does the paint feel for the viewer? How do I stay generous with texture, gesture and surface? How do I tell my story?” Movement and blurring in Johnson’s imagery reveal his effort to capture both the sensory and the psychological, the physical world and the inner world, simultaneously. Even when his figures are not overtly interacting, they remain engaged in conversation—with themselves, with their surroundings or with time.
Recently, Johnson has been reflecting on the notion of the subaltern—the voiceless. “How do we give voice to the voiceless?” he asks, revealing his interest in peripheral scenes, people moving through life half-seen. “Those references sit in the back of my mind as I paint. Who gets to speak? Who gets seen? How does a painting hold space for them?” This question—how to choreograph a human moment that is both physical and psychological, interior and exterior—sits at the core of his painterly inquiry. What fascinates him is that even when people are together, they remain alone. “That’s the nature of the city: we move side by side, but internally we’re somewhere else,” he says.
Devin B. Johnson, Doo Wop Thang, 2025. Oil on linen, 36 x 24 x 1 in. Courtesy of the artist and Nicodim Gallery
“You can see her waiting. You can see her contemplating. You can feel that she’s thinking about something,” Johnson says, pointing to the painting Doo Wop Thang (2025), in which a woman sits in profile, head resting on her hand, eyes half-closed in deep thought—a suspended psychological space of introspection. Rendered in muted grays and browns, with soft highlights on her skin, the figure appears both present and distant. Behind her, two other women sit in shadow, silent witnesses to this inner drama yet unable to enter it. “That’s what I love—these paintings are complicated because everyone in them is thinking, everyone is on their way somewhere. They’re not performing for us, they’re not concerned with being seen. They’re in their own space, in their own thoughts. That inner world is what interests me.”
What’s especially notable about this particular painting is that it’s the only one in the exhibition where the figure actually has pupils. “That’s new for me. Usually, I leave the eyes more abstract, more anonymous,” Johnson explains. “But here, I gave her pupils very intentionally, because I believe the eyes hold so much of a person’s soul.”
A pair of smaller works on the same wall—Harmony & Discord (2025) and The Middle (2025)—share the same psychological density as the rest of the show yet stand apart visually. They are the only paintings with a noticeably brighter palette and a more structured, cinematic composition, evoking a scene that could have been filmed in the American South, as suggested by both the light gradient and the subjects themselves. “In these two paintings, the colors have shifted,” Johnson acknowledges, explaining that they were the last works completed while preparing for the exhibition. “The compositions become more tethered to natural light, creating atmosphere. A lot of this is new for me—even the symbols,” he notes.
In one of the paintings, a group of Black men dressed in suits stands in an open field beneath a vast sky, their expressions solemn, introspective, almost ceremonial—as if they are about to play or speak or process together. The entire scene hums with quiet, anticipatory tension, a sense that something is about to happen. “I started thinking about drums—not literally, but as a metaphor for rhythm,” Johnson explains. In the same way, rhythm structures the paintings themselves: sharp, staccato marks like percussive beats and long drips of paint that act as sustained, resonant tones.
Devin B. Johnson, Harmony & Discord, 2025. Oil on linen, 36 x 24 x 1 in. Courtesy of the artist and Nicodim Gallery
Johnson admits there may be connections to the Great Migration and his own upbringing, even if they surface only subconsciously in the work. “My grandparents were from Louisiana. I grew up in the Black Baptist church. I remember sitting in the pews—hearing the piano, the swell of voices, the thump of the kick drum hitting your chest,” he recalls, pondering how those deeply physical sensations of sound might be translated into paint. The question—and the catastrophe—of painting lies in attempting to convert such multisensory, fleeting experiences into image. “Those memories swim through my mind. They shape how the work feels even if I’m not illustrating a specific memory,” he reflects. People often read these scenes as processions, jazz bands and church gatherings, but he resists tying them down. “I’d rather the question stay open,” he says.
Here we understand that the rhythm Johnson describes is not only musical—it is also temporal and psychological. It is the oscillation between past and present, reality and fiction, memory and imagination that animates the surface of his paintings. That constant movement is what keeps the images alive and porous, capable of returning, dissolving, reforming—just as memory does in the mind.
For this reason, Johnson agrees, his work is best understood as a kind of psychological figuration. The figures are recognizable, but the space around them is intentionally fluid. “My interest is in the middle ground between figuration and abstraction—where the painting lives in a state of becoming and undoing,” he explains. “That in-between is the subconscious. That’s where memory, identity and image collide.”
What ultimately emerges from these works is the persistence of memory beyond the present moment: the possibility of archetypal patterns reappearing in open, unfolding narratives. In this sense, Johnson’s paintings are timeless and universal in their ability to acknowledge the fluid nature of existence as part of a vast, interwoven chorus of cyclical forces—emotional, cultural and historical—that shape human life across time and space.
“Crossing” becomes an ode to the presence and opacity of mark-making, the history of painting and Johnson’s lived and inherited experience. Courtesy of the artist and Nicodim Gallery
Side by side, Golden State (2024) and Turbulence (2024) strike a stunning dichotomy; both are abstracted landscapes, but while one appears composed of sunlight, the other is composed of shade. Courtesy of Zheng Chongbin
Ut supra, sic infra. As above, so below. This is the ethos of Zheng Chongbin’s design philosophy. Based in San Francisco’s Bay Area, Chongbin creates paintings by layering swaths of ink and paint upon one another, transforming canvases into topographic elements. He lets his canvases breathe; he lets them react naturally to the paint—his work is peeling, pitting, cracking, seeping into the canvas. His paintings bear likeness to natural formations from mountain peaks, riverbeds and fault lines to blood capillaries, skin matrices and synapses. They bear witness to the viewer as much as the viewer does to them. Chongbin furthermore embraces the entropic movements of the paint upon the canvas and, in doing so, instills his work with an interiority that, although invisible to the viewer, is instinctually felt by them.
Through his holistic practice spanning painting, light-and-space installation and digital media, Chongbin has graphed ecologies and vitality across his work, muddling our perception of sentience and life. In “Zheng Chongbin: Golden State,” his solo exhibition at LACMA, he casts his eye upon California’s expansive geography. Comprising the artist’s earlier works alongside newer offerings, the exhibition is a systematic symphony of image and composition that privileges experience and temporality over didactic interpretation.
“It’s an environment I’m dealing with. It’s a living thing,” Chongbin told Observer, explaining how his practice revolves around the unique, organic quality behind each subject. “My sensibility—in extension to [art]—is it feels like a part of your body… not in the traditional way, but the habitual way, in a way that you interact with your body extensions. And so you feel like dealing with and collaborating with living things… You’re not the protagonist. You are actually facilitating what happens.”
A still from Chimeric Landscape (2015), which renders a particularly social vision of blood cells as they migrate and mingle. Courtesy of Zheng Chongbin.
Born in Shanghai in 1961, Chongbin was brought up during China’s Cultural Revolution and thus trained in classical Chinese art forms, particularly within the ink tradition. In 1978, China’s Open Door Policy allowed an influx of Western ideas, materials and art forms that had previously been forbidden. Among these Western art traditions, Chongbin was most influenced by Abstract Expressionism, German Expressionism and the Light and Space movements, along with specific artists such as the visceral figuration of Francis Bacon, the conceptual installations of Robert Irwin and the sculptural forms of Larry Bell.
These inspirations are easily perceptible in Chongbin’s work, which shares a visual kinship with modern Western art movements while maintaining dialogue with the ink traditions in which he was classically trained. In this vein, Chongbin intentionally grants his work its own psychology, allowing art to have its own internal world that extends beyond himself, the peripheries of art movements and the borders of countries, and instead arrives directly in front of the audience, whomever and wherever they are. His physical practice, of course, reflects this dynamic—his final pieces, regardless of medium, are often beset with texture and kineticism. They share a palpable lifeblood.
One of Chongbin’s few paintings to utilize color, Golden State (2024), with its bright yellow swaths of color, by strokes of black, gray and white, represents the intense sunlight of California, banded with belts of trees, rain fog, fire scars and earthquake fault lines. For this painting, Chongbin chose to paint on shrimp paper, a light material made from the bark of sandalwood, and in doing so gave Golden State a unique, breathable quality. Chongbin gives his materials agency, allowing the paint to crack and fissure as new layers are applied while still maintaining its bold presence and—in the case of Golden State—its brilliant color.
“It feels like ecologies,” Chongbin said, recalling the effect of the paint penetrating microfibers, coursing color through the paper’s delicate veins. “Everything [that goes] through is my skin… things not only happen on the top, but also happen in the middle of space [and] into the other side. It’s very much a living organism. The space changes and the surface becomes a space… You have this kind of indexical trace of the classic methodology of the work.”
Though, as noted, Chongbin rarely paints with color, his paintings are often in dialogue with one another, not only in form and context but in composition as well. Turbulence (2013) and Golden State are operational foils of one another. While Golden State primarily looks to the skies of California, reproducing its dappled sunlight through elements of nature, Turbulence looks to the earth; its bands of black paint, puddled by various ink blots, resemble mountain basins, rocky ridges, igneous extrusions and cooling magma. Both paintings, as well as most of Chongbin’s work, consider the spatial experience of the environment. Both are monumental pieces, climbing eight, nine or ten feet high, enveloping the viewer in the sublimity of their ecologies.
“I always explore… what’s happened on the surface [and] what’s happened underneath,” Chongbin said. “All of those bold lines are a cast of what’s happening underneath. The water is actually like rushing down through the themes, through the slope and goes underneath and pushes out. I want to instantiate nature rather than depicting it.”
His light-and-space installation Mesh (2018) filters natural, medical and abstract imagery through refracted light. Courtesy of Zheng Chongbin.
Chongbin regaled us with stories of his adventures on hiking trails in the foothills of Marin County and wandering the steely beaches of Northern California. He saw “the dead things come alive.” His installation, Chimeric Landscape (2015), was inspired by one such encounter. Chongbin described looking at a sand dollar awash on the shore and seeing a multitude of lifeways. He remarked with wonder at the creature’s iridescence as it shimmered in the sunlight. He marveled at its respiration—its “millions of little lights flickering” as the sand dollar’s velvety matrix of pores undulated gently.
With Chimeric Landscape, he weaves short clips of water, ink, cell functions and other ephemera into Euclidean geometries that twine and break only to reform again. The installation celebrates the little breaths of life that these inanimate objects take while deconstructing their spatial differentiation. “The structure of Chimeric Landscape is obviously a non-linear narrative,” he explained. “The one visual dominance that we encounter is the ink flow, it’s used as the symbol of the water, but water is reflected in a lot of the formations and the emerging qualities that I think are essential elements for everything—our bodies and the earth.”
This natural essence echoes throughout the work in the LACMA show, invoking atmospheres that range from the monumental to the microscopic. Whether constructing a cosmos out of ephemera or a simulacrum out of geographies, Chongbin places equal emphasis—equal importance—on his art and his viewer. He collaborates with both material and mind, allowing one to inform the other, ensuring that what lies above reflects below.
Atkinson wants to move away from what she calls “the white walls and hushed-tones approach.” Courtesy of Gallery ATARAH
There’s a new garage-fronted gallery in East Williamsburg—one that aims to be more than just an exhibition venue. While Gallery ATARAH is as much a practical endeavor as it is a passion project, founder Atarah Atkinson says she’s drawn to the ethos of early art galleries, where the focus was on creators and their creations rather than the maneuverings of an extractive art market. And so, as legacy dealers reckon with the transactional world they helped create, Atkinson is embracing the gallery-as-salon concept: an exhibition space that doubles as a communal hub, where on any given day she might host portfolio reviews, after-school workshops, mentorship meetups or community happenings.
“Gallery ATARAH represents a chance to establish a curatorial vision that is entirely my own—a creative home where I can channel my passion for connection into celebrating authentic artistic expression,” she tells Observer. To that end, the light-filled 700-square-foot space will also function as her personal studio. She has experience developing hybrid spaces, having co-founded The Atrium, a 2,500-square-foot creative production studio, in 2017. It, too, played host to a range of gatherings, from community events and movie nights to industry networking sessions.
The first exhibition in the new space, “Bright Ruin,” presents 35 new mixed-media works and sculptural installations by Atkinson that explore themes of decay and renewal, beauty and destruction and the cyclical nature of death and rebirth as it relates to the self. She curated the show—her first foray into curation, and putting together “Bright Ruin” was not only a curatorial challenge but also a level-setting exercise. “Leading with my own work was a deliberate choice,” she says. “This is my creative home, and I wanted to establish its foundational energy by modeling the level of care and attention artists can expect when collaborating with me.”
Atarah Atkinson with her exhibition “Bright Ruin.” Courtesy of Gallery ATARAH
We caught up with Atkinson not long after the opening of the gallery’s inaugural exhibition to learn more about her motivations, what it means to have an intentionally porous gallery and how she plans to measure success.
What inspired you to found Gallery ATARAH? Does what you’re creating now build on your earlier work with The Atrium?
Gallery ATARAH definitely builds on The Atrium in some foundational ways. Both ventures grew from a shared impulse: to elevate not only ourselves but our peers—to create infrastructure and resources where artistic communities could thrive. I co-founded The Atrium studio with close friend and fellow photographer Alicia Henderson when we were both finding our footing in New York. We identified a significant gap in Brooklyn for affordable, professional studio spaces that were clean, organized and genuinely client-worthy—something emerging creatives could sustain financially while building their practices. Like Gallery ATARAH, The Atrium was always about more than just the physical space; we invested in cultivating creative community. The Atrium hosted community gatherings, movie nights and organized industry networking. That experience only strengthened my understanding of what’s possible when you build spaces where artists can genuinely support one another.
Having my own gallery has been a goal since studying at the Brooks Institute, but the driving force was always about creating a platform where voices, mine and my peers’, could truly resonate without compromise or external pressure to conform. I’m drawn to the ethos of early galleries, where the focus centered on the work and the makers rather than celebrity or the market. Gallery ATARAH represents a chance to establish a curatorial vision that is entirely my own—a creative home where I can channel my passion for connection into celebrating authentic artistic expression. Where The Atrium was beautifully collaborative, this gallery allows me to expand my own creative practice while bringing other artists into a space designed for mutual growth.
Your inaugural show “Bright Ruin” features your own work—how do you see the gallery’s programming evolving as you bring in other artists?
Leading with my own work was a deliberate choice. This is my creative home, and I wanted to establish its foundational energy by modeling the level of care and attention artists can expect when collaborating with me. When artists work with Gallery ATARAH, they’re not simply engaging with a curator or business owner–they’re connecting with a fellow artist who understands the language of this life, the realities of the commitment and the nature of the work itself. “Bright Ruin” also sets a precedent for what I seek from the artists I represent, not in a stylistic sense but in the thematic undercurrents of their work. I’m interested in creatives, whether self-taught or early in their careers, who are committed to producing authentic works that delve into their unique personal experiences.
As I bring in artists with aligned values and dedication to their craft, I am excited for our programming to evolve and create layered conversations, both literally on the walls and among the people in the space. I’m particularly interested in positioning contemporary work alongside vintage and antique pieces to explore how meaningful art transcends its moment of creation. I want to encourage today’s creatives to consider their work’s longevity. I believe that when something speaks through truth, it never loses its voice, and I am drawn to art whose impact transcends time and outlasts trends. This approach naturally fosters dialogue between different practices and perspectives.
Showing multiple artists together, as we’ll do regularly at the salon nights, creates opportunities for peer connection, for learning about varied processes and for voices to be heard collectively rather than in isolation. It also offers an open invitation for diverse audiences to engage, connect and feel through the work we present together. I am also excited to eventually develop partnerships with other local Brooklyn spaces so that we can cross-promote complementary resources, events and programming.
“’Bright Ruin’ sets a precedent for what I seek from the artists I represent, not in a stylistic sense but in the thematic undercurrents of their work,” Atkinson says. Courtesy of Gallery ATARAH
Will the gallery have an open submission process, or will you curate primarily through relationships and networks?
Both, absolutely. Multiple entry points allow for more dynamic programming. Much of our initial programming features creative peers I’ve admired and collaborated with throughout my career and I’m drawing on relationships cultivated over 11+ years working as a freelance photographer in New York. For example, our winter solo exhibition features my friend and local artist Clara Rae, who will present her mixed-media practice spanning ceramics, textiles and painting.
That said, our website features a comprehensive open submission portal outlining various opportunities—salon nights, exhibitions, workshops, artist talks—and I actively encourage artists to indicate interest in multiple formats. It matters to me that submission carries no financial barrier. I’ve long viewed submission fees to art shows as problematic within the art industry. When artists apply to work with us, I commit to responding with equal care and I personally review every submission because I understand intimately how vulnerable it feels to put forth work for consideration.
I also welcome informal artist meetings—if an artist is curious about showing with us, I encourage them to reach out to arrange coffee at the gallery. We can discuss their practice, explore ideas and talk shop without any application pressure. Given that I’m drawn to personal, emotionally resonant work, I recognize that some artists need time and trust before opening up about their process. Establishing that foundation of safety matters deeply to me.
You’ve mentioned salon nights. Can you tell us more about what formats you’re most excited to pilot first?
I’m genuinely excited about all our winter programming coming together. We have some wonderful events planned that each serve different purposes in building community and supporting artists, including workshops led by various creatives across different disciplines and artist talks that give space to hear directly from makers about their processes and experiences.
I’m particularly excited about a floral workshop we have in the works for October. I think community workshops and hands-on experiences let people create something of their own, connect with themselves through making and learn new skills in a supportive setting.
Even with all these different things in motion, my primary focus is getting our first salon night off the ground; I’m hoping to hold it in November. These gatherings will provide lower-pressure opportunities for multiple artists to show work simultaneously in an intimate setting, sparking creative dialogue and peer connection without the demands of a full solo exhibition.
I believe there is something powerful about the kind of open dialogue where artists can share their journeys and audiences can ask questions in a welcoming environment. What excites me most about all these different formats is the variety of conversations they’ll generate—from the hands-on making in workshops to the reflective discussions in artist talks to the visual dialogue on the walls during salon nights. Each format welcomes different people into the creative conversation in its own way.
So many galleries operate as exclusive spaces. What does it mean for you to create a gallery that is intentionally porous and accessible?
For me, it means returning to what galleries were originally created for: prioritizing longevity and community building over immediate commercial success. Early galleries were hubs of creative conversation where artists could connect with other artists, not just sell work. As a new gallerist, I’m in this to build a sustainable model that places artists’ voices and visitor engagement at the forefront.
I want to move away from the white walls and hushed-tones approach. Galleries shouldn’t feel like spaces where you need to be silent or make yourself as small as possible. I don’t want visitors feeling like they’re an inconvenience because they’re filling the space with their energy. I want conversation in this space. When people walk in off the street, I invite them to talk with me about what they’re experiencing and how they’re feeling about the art.
When I meet with artists seeking representation, I’m more concerned with asking, “What does your work mean to you? Why are you making it? How does it impact your life?” rather than getting caught up in, “How can we market this?” While I absolutely want collectors to visit and acquire work, I’m building on the philosophy that if you create something meaningful, they will come. Authentic work speaks powerfully when given space to resonate on its own terms. By cultivating an intentionally open, welcoming and accessible environment, the focus remains on the work itself—and in that environment, both artists and audiences can build lasting connections.
How will you measure success—sales, attendance, or something less tangible?
I suppose metrics for success will be less tangible. For me, the real measure is whether participating artists feel they’re gaining something meaningful—whether that’s through artistic inspiration or collector interest. If artists engaging with the gallery feel successful on an individual level—that participating in Gallery ATARAH’s programming through an exhibition, artist talk, workshop, or salon night was a positive experience that opened new doors, introduced new ways of thinking, sparked new questions, or inspired new work—then that’s success to me.
Additionally, I truly care about how much the artwork moves people in the community and how deeply it is engaged with. I think about a woman who recently walked in off the street. After experiencing the “Bright Ruin” exhibition, she told me how serendipitous and uplifting it felt to discover the gallery, how much the work resonated with her in that exact moment when she needed it. She felt seen. That, to me, is also success. When people experience the work and carry it with them—when it moves them in a way that stays with them personally—that’s success. And if they then share how the work made them think or feel, that impact ripples outward.
Obviously, financial viability matters—Williamsburg rent being what it is—and business success means maintaining operations, supporting a robust artist roster and hosting well-attended exhibitions where genuine engagement happens. But Gallery ATARAH’s ability to inspire connection remains the primary success metric.
How do you plan to sustain the balance between your own artistic practice and the demands of being a gallerist? Or do you see them as being complementary?
I absolutely see them as complementary. I feel as though this space might hold more value for me than it might for a typical gallery owner because it is also the home of my personal practice. That investment keeps the gallery pointed toward its true north and the best way I can uphold Gallery ATARAH’s mission of fostering connection is by activating it through my own work—serving as a strong curatorial compass grounded in my creative practice.
Being an artist first gives me insight into what other artists are navigating professionally and what they need. I understand the business development challenges because I am working through them myself. I can support others in raising themselves up as business people because I am engaged in that same process. I speak their language—the language of the reality of being self-funded, the sacrifices, commitment and all of the hard work that goes along with being an artist. Rather than being just a curator or gallery owner, artists are connecting with someone who truly understands their journey because I’m walking the same path. This is my creative home, and I’m extending an invitation to others to participate in building it with me.
Los Angeles artist Eamon Ore-Giron with his sprawling panoramic piece, Tomorrow’s Monsoon. Courtesy of James Cohan Gallery
When I visited Eamon Ore-Giron’s Talking Shit with Amaru, currently on display in “Grounded” at LACMA, I was struck by the painting’s congenial quality—the vibrant color palette, the bold shapes summoning the eye from one edge to the next. The composition borders on symmetry, though never fully embraces it, and the painting as a whole is animated by a certain verve and versatility. The negative space serves as a visual digestif, arranging itself around the striking motifs and the vivid colors, which open themselves to the viewer’s interpretation. As the title implies, Talking Shit with Amaru is a conversation, albeit a visual one.
The painting, which depicts the transdimensional hybrid creature of Andean mythology, is idiomatic of the Los Angeles-based artist’s half-abstract, half-representational style. In his Talking Shit series, Ore-Giron has conducted an ongoing conversation with the artistic legacy of the ancient Americas, embracing symbols and forms from ancient Andean and Incan textile, architecture, mosaic and ceramic practice. He especially favors the artistic technique of contour rivalry—a visual style rooted in the Chavín culture of the central Andes. Ore-Giron’s own style has cycled through various stages of figuration and abstraction, a process by which he has developed his visual language—one that engages the expectations of contemporary Western abstraction, while communing with the arcana of ancient American artistry.
Talking Shit with Amaru by Eamon Ore-Giron, a painted conversation depicting an ancient Andean deity. Courtesy of James Cohan Gallery
“Depending on the heritage, a lot of abstraction lives side by side with the figure in the form,” Ore-Giron tells Observer. “Nature can provide some of the original forms in abstraction, like the pattern on a snake’s skin or the pattern on an insect.”
Disparate ecologies: Amaru at LACMA
Nature—and its impact—was a core theme of “Grounded,” which mapped perfectly onto Ore-Giron’s 2021 painting. “This idea of nature is not something external. It’s something internal,” he says when asked what excited him about the premise of the exhibition. “This piece, in particular, is internal in the sense that it’s a story that I carry with me—the gods that live here and still live here. Being ‘grounded,’ essentially, can actually be manifested in stories and in imagery and in a rekindling of a personal relationship to these deities.”
Ore-Giron’s work favors the viewer’s personal connection with its subject over impressing a precise intention on its form or meaning. As such, in Talking Shit with Amaru—which appears, at first, as a vivid constellation of shapes, colors and varied opacities—takes on different dimensions the longer the viewer regards it. A body forms out of the multicolored coordinate circles, talons bookend fluid lines, a tongue bolts down the width of the linen canvas. Fittingly, Amaru is a deity with the ability to transcend the boundaries of the aerial and terrestrial worlds, a celestial interloper. He explains that, having very few depictions of this particular creature, he mostly drew from Amaru’s mythographic descriptions. In his depiction of the god, Amaru is not an ancient deity but one that rhymes with the conventions and culture of modern-day Latin America.
“There are so many different ways in which ancient history interfaces with modernity,” Ore-Giron explains, expressing his fascination with the ways in which ancient aesthetics and stories have survived into the modern day, and how our concept of modernity often informs our interpretation of the past. For example, the name “Amaru” carries vastly different implications in today’s Andean culture than it once did, eliciting notions of both divine power and individual identity. Among the Peruvian resistance fighters, “Túpac Amaru” was a name given to someone who fought against colonial powers. In Talking Shit with Amaru, Ore-Giron effects a portrayal that incorporates not only figure, but legacy.
Ore-Giron’s tools of the trade: mineral paints, a careful color palette and stretched raw linen. Courtesy of James Cohan Gallery
“It’s interesting that these deities then can take on these names in a culture,” Ore-Giron continues. “Even as the culture model changes so much. It goes through so many different changes, [but] doesn’t stay fixed. It’s not static. The most fascinating thing is the ways in which these deities and these ideas and the visual language all around it are constantly being reinvented.”
Resistance, reinvention, repetition
This theme of reinvention and resistance is present in every fiber of Ore-Giron’s work, from the subject matter to his preference for painting on raw linen as opposed to pristine, gessoed canvas. (“There’s sometimes little blades of grass that are accidentally woven in the factory,” he says of the linen. “It’s very physical.”) A musician as well as a visual artist, his creative identities often intersect at the very same juncture of reinterpretation and cross-cultural exchange. He lived in Mexico City in the 1990s and found a wealth of inspiration from the city’s DJ culture, which often sampled and mixed Peruvian music. He was fascinated by the subculture’s decision to find its primary inspiration in another Latin American culture as opposed to a Western one. “Instead of being oriented towards the north, toward the United States or toward Europe,” he elaborates. “Their primary focus was the south and to look to the south for inspiration.”
Similarly, Ore-Giron synthesizes Latin American folk music such as Cumbia with the esoteric production techniques of artists such as MF DOOM. “I think it had a profound impact on the way that I approach visual language as well,” he says, “because it made me want to look deeper into the histories of visual language in Latin America. On a conceptual level, that’s where the music and the art really are working together.” As such, on Ore-Giron’s grounded linen canvases, where abstraction meets figuration, antiquity meets modernity and a visual rhythm that rings above all, strong and resonant.
Talking Shit with Amaru is on view in LACMA’s “Grounded” through June 21, 2026. James Cohan Gallery in Tribeca will show “Eamon Ore-Giron” from November 7 through December 20, 2025.
Rachel Ruysch, Posy of Flowers with a Beetle on a Stone Ledge, 1741. Oil on canvas. Courtesy the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Craving ever new varieties in nature for experimentation, Darwin wrote to his good friend and botanist, Joseph Hooker, “I have a passion to grow orchid seeds…for love of Heaven favour my madness & have some lichens or mosses scraped off & sent me. I am a gambler & love a wild experiment.” It seems that Darwin was not the only one to crave exotic flowers. Three centuries earlier, the Dutch were hot on the trail to expand their imperial power by collecting exotic specimens from all over the world. The Dutch East India Company was established in 1602 and the West East India Company in 1621, enabling the empire’s expansion through their maritime fleet. By using enslaved labor, they amassed huge collections of flowers, insects, reptiles and birds from North and South America, Africa, Australia, India and even Borneo. The difficulty in transporting all of these delicate specimens across vast oceans was extreme. There were rats on board ships, and radical changes of temperature going from the tropics to frigid Europe. The Dutch greenhouses on Cape Horn were a stopover for the exotics, before the last treacherous sail home. Cape Horn has the deadliest seas on Earth.
During the 1600s in the Netherlands, hundreds of devoted scientists and artists documented these discoveries. One of the most famous was the painter Rachel Ruysch. Her father, Frederik Ruysch, a renowned collector and artist, was known for his anatomical, zoological and botanical specimens, as well as his embalming technique. This was Rachel’s early laboratory until she went on to study painting, becoming the highest-paid painter in the Netherlands, earning more money than Rembrandt.
Born in 1664, she painted for seven decades, dying in 1750 at the age of 86. She painted 185 known works (possibly 250). She was lauded during her time, internationally famous and the subject of poems. She painted from the age of 15 and well into her 80s. Lest we forget, Ruysch also had ten children. None of the poems mentions that.
And her paintings are downright gorgeous. The vitality of her work, the meticulous accuracy, the fullness of color and the enchanting compositions are a wonder to behold. She painted nature in all its blooming, populated with exotic flowers, fruits, insects, reptiles, moths and butterflies. The paintings are rich in vibrant color, deeply shaded and with exact anatomical precision. She recorded for the ages flora and fauna, insects and reptiles, that may now already be extinct or on their way to extinction.
Michiel van Musscher, Rachel Ruysch, 1692. Oil on canvas. Courtesy the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
The MFA in Boston is displaying 35 of Ruysch’s paintings in all their glory in “Rachel Ruysch: Artist, Naturalist, and Pioneer.” In the floral still lifes, she focuses not just on the blooms but also on the creatures that populated the flowers. From 1686, Forest Recess with Flowers, the blooms are framed in loping, draping milk thistle leaves, almost like reptilian skin. A curling mushroom below, a frog, snail, moths, tree trunk, the clay forest floor—these details lift her far beyond a flower painter into a deep and astute scientific observer.
In 1714, she paints a still life with 25 species from 15 botanical families of flowers and fruit. Still Life with Fruits and Flowers displays a cacophony of pomegranates, peaches, corn, wheat, grapes, squash, pumpkin, along with tulips, peonies, lizard, butterflies and moths. You wonder how long it took her to paint these bounties before decay set in. Everything is fresh, glistening, delicious, fragrant—alive. A sumptuous, irresistible feast, joining the hungry reptiles and insects.
She doesn’t stop there. In 1735, Still Life of Exotic Flowers on a Marble Ledge, she paints 36 species from around the world. Represented are flowers native to North and South America, South Africa, the Caribbean, East and Southeast Asia. She includes in her many paintings 17 species of diurnal butterflies (active during the day), 24 species of moths, spiders and many species of bee beetles, including the mango longhorn beetle from South America. There are lizards and birds and egg shells, and many plants in the cactus family. A painting technique prevalent in nature paintings during her early career was lepidochromy. Butterfly wings were pressed into the wet paint for further authenticity. Ruysch often placed exotic and native animals, butterflies and flowers together—always with an astute eye for composition.
She also included frogs and toads. One, Surinam toad (Pipa pipa), gets a portrait all to herself. The entire painting is dark green and brown, hard to see. Does it need cleaning? The toad is accompanied nearby with a specimen in a glass jar, better to see the indentations in her back where the male leaves his sperm. The eggs incubate in these small craters on her back until they hatch, fully formed.
The curator, Anna Knaap, has organized the exhibit into six luxurious sections, highlighted against sumptuously painted dark, rich burgundy and deep green walls. In the sections are specimens in glass jars of reptiles, cases of pinned butterflies and moths, maps of the empire, botanical drawings, as well as paintings by her sister Anna Ruysch and many other Dutch painters of that time. The plant and insect specimens are from Harvard University’s Herbarium and Museum of Comparative Zoology.
Ruysch’s last painting, Posy of Flowers with a Beetle on a Stone Ledge, 1741, is comparatively small with very few flowers. The bowl of the pink peony is flecked with dew and a bee. It is a tender painting and luminous. To see an exhibition including all three giants—Darwin, Ruysch and Emily Dickinson, another lover of botany and flowers—would be exciting. As Dickinson wrote in Flowers – Well – if anybody:
Butterflies from St. Domingo Cruising round the purple line— Have a system of aesthetics— Far superior to mine.
“Rachel Ruysch: Artist, Naturalist, and Pioneer” is at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, through December 7, 2025. An excellent, comprehensive, award-winning catalogue accompanies the exhibition.
With a few glaring exceptions, Radiohead is known to have good taste when it comes to the people with whom its members choose to collaborate. Their music videos have been directed by Jonathan Glazer and Paul Thomas Anderson, for whom Jonny Greenwood has done several soundtracks, and Thom Yorke did the excellent score for Luca Guadagnino’s 2018 Suspiria remake, which had every possibility of being good in other regards as well. And who could forget Yorke and Greenwood’s appearance as themselves in the South Park episode “Scott Tenorman Must Die” (2001), mocking the villain for crying because Cartman had killed his parents?
A new show at the Ashmolean Museum, “This Is What You Get,” celebrates the band’s visual art for their albums and related materials. They have collaborated with artist Stanley Donwood on every album since their second, “The Bends” (1995), the cover of which features a CPR dummy that Yorke and Donwood discovered after they snuck into the basement of Oxford’s John Radcliffe Hospital. Ever since, Yorke and Donwood have been partners in all the band’s visual language, which is vast and complex. This homecoming exhibition features over 180 works—paintings, digital compositions, etchings, drawings and lyric sketches.
Radiohead makes peerless music, but the exhibition demonstrates the extent to which their stirring album covers have wrapped these songs in a universe, a vibe, perhaps even an ethos. Because the band has been so influential, it can be a chicken-and-egg question as to whether their artwork was ahead of its time or simply shaped public consciousness because of how widespread it became.
I would argue that it’s the former. Take the hollow-feeling, glitched-out landscape of OK Computer. This was created from a deep engagement with the moment: Yorke playing Tomb Raider (1996) in the studio with Donwood and noticing that when the scenery blurred due to memory errors, it was “the most beautiful thing we’ve ever seen.” The pair used an early Macintosh to design the cover, setting a rule for themselves that they could not undo any changes they made. The end result is a triumph. Not many people were making art like that in 1997. You’d have to compare it to the contemporary output by luminaries such as Julie Mehretu, Richard Prince and Christopher Wool.
Some like to say they stopped after “Amnesiac” (2001), but “Hail to the Thief” (2003) and “In Rainbows” (2007) can be said of the visuals. Hail to the Thief has a false-naive style of painting—similar to artists who have become wildly popular today, like Jane Dickson and Stanley Whitney—while the spilled wax of In Rainbows recalls Wolfgang Tillmans’s recent efforts to make photography more organic and abstract. In the catalogue, Donwood is most proud of the T-shirts from the In Rainbows tour. Radiohead’s practice is precise and holistic, and the results have proven them to be consistently ahead of the curve in almost every way.
“This is What You Get” is on view at the Ashmolean Museum through January 11, 2026.
Shara Hughes’s “Weather Report” is at David Kordansky Gallery in New York through October 18. Photo: On White Wall Studio, courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery
Shara Hughes is one of those names that surged during the pandemic, when demand for her paintings spiked and prices climbed quickly, culminating in her record sale of $2,940,000 at Christie’s in May 2022. Yet interest in her work has not waned. Her lush, vibrant visions of nature continue to strike a universal chord, speaking to the human condition and our connection to the world in ways that move beyond market trends.
Her new body of work, unveiled in “Weather Report” at David Kordansky Gallery during Armory and New York art week, demonstrates Hughes’s painterly command and the existential weight her practice has taken on. Each of the nine large-scale canvases on view unfolds as a dense world of thought and feeling, of self-reflection and experimentation, the outpouring of an artist confronting a pivotal moment in both her life and her creative path.
“Over the past year or so, I’ve just become more connected to myself, and that kind of growth happens naturally as we get older,” Hughes says when we catch up after the fairs, reflecting on the many shifts in her life recently—her parents aging, her marriage, her friends having children—and how these changes inevitably shape how she sees and makes work. “I’m getting into middle age, and it feels like those kinds of things are becoming more real,” she adds. Questions about the afterlife, about the fleeting and fragile nature of emotions and existence, surface in waves, not constantly but with force when they arrive. “Last summer, I did lose someone in my family, and even though we weren’t especially close, her death jolted me into thinking, what if that were me? It pushed me into those spiritual questions: what is the afterlife, is it really so scary?”
Shara Hughes. Portrait: Mary Inhea Kang, courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery
While Hughes did not set out to make this show a meditation on existential themes, they inevitably shape the works. Her approach to the canvas remains instinctive, driven by an intuitive response to what colors and gestures suggest. Brushstrokes build layer by layer, forming compositions of vibrant tones and painterly currents that resist conventional representation, instead settling into an unorthodox balance.
“The way I work is really abstract. At the beginning, I might just throw down a few colors and then respond to them, letting the painting guide me more than me directing it,” Hughes admits. “In that sense, it’s very intuitive and reactionary to both the canvas and myself,” she adds. “I’m not trying to illustrate anything specific; the painting shows me how I feel.”
Hughes uses dizzying brushwork, vibrant colors and shifting perspectives to make paintings that defy many of the existing conventions associated with the landscape genre. Photo: On White Wall Studio, courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery
For this reason, Hughes often describes her works as psychological and emotional landscapes: the progressive layering of paint and shifting colors mirrors the complexity of how we process and elaborate the surrounding reality through our senses. Her image-making follows and echoes the meaning-making process we all undergo in “being-in-the-world,” something that precedes any linguistic or symbolic codification. “Often I start without a clear goal, and the painting ends up teaching me—showing me I’m thinking about something or still upset about something agitating inside.”
Although these works may appear semi-abstract, they represent something very real for Hughes—the reality of the psyche, and the intricate interplay of senses, emotions, and psychological, even pre-cognitive, experience. “Every single thing I paint feels deeply connected to my own experience,” she clarifies. “I hate when people use the word ‘fantasy’ to describe my work because these aren’t fantastical places; they’re real to me, part of my lived experience. They’re very much grounded in reality.”
Hughes often describes her works as autobiographical, though they are less about recounting events than translating moods and emotional atmospheres. “‘This is how I feel about this event.’ It’s more about filtering my feelings through the idea of landscape,” she explains.
Hughes’s process rarely involves reference images; instead, she transposes the psychological complexity of her interior world into lush and layered compositions. Photo: On White Wall Studio, courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery
Her recurring choice of landscapes and nature as sites to project and reflect her feelings is tied to her upbringing in Atlanta, Georgia. “I wasn’t in wild nature every day—it was the city—but I lived on a lake, so I spent a lot of time outdoors,” she recounts. “My family also had a tree farm about two hours south, and I’d go there often with my brothers and friends. I did a lot of camping and backpacking, so I always felt a connection to nature.” Interestingly, Hughes only began painting landscapes after moving to New York, perhaps as a way of longing for the lush environments that had long shaped her life and imagination.
What immediately strikes viewers in this new body of work is its heightened luminosity, which expands the canvas into surrounding space with an auratic, almost epiphanic presence that extends beyond the physical surface. If Hughes’s paintings have always had the ability to channel the very energy of the landscape, this series feels animated by a deeper animistic spirituality, suggesting an intensified awareness of the need to emotionally reattune with our environment and reconceive ourselves as part of broader ecologies of interdependence and symbiotic relations.
Hughes recalls visiting Niagara Falls last summer and being overwhelmed by the sheer force of nature and the vitality of its primordial energy. That same sensation flows through these canvases, where she seeks to capture the generative power that art-making can unlock. Works such as The Good Light (2025), The Rift (2025) and Niagara (2025) transpose onto canvas the relentless vitality of flowing water and the radiant energy of sunlight colliding with cascading drops that dissolve into air before beginning their cycle anew.
Each of the nine large-scale works on view encompasses a world of thought, feeling, self-reflection and open-ended experimentation. Photo: On White Wall Studio, courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery
For Hughes, these paintings are less about the afterlife than about a larger current of energy that surpasses us. “It’s the cycle of life, for sure, but also the force behind it—something hopeful and exciting we can lean on,” she reflects. In Mama (2025), for example, she sought to express nature as a quilt or a hug—something stable and generative, a maternal presence, the timeless archetype of Mother Nature. “It could be a mound of flowers larger than life, or a rock that transforms into a figure you might go to for stability or even worship, like a Madonna figure,” she explains. “All of these elements are part of nature, but also part of the psychological landscapes I’m always exploring.”
Hughes’s paintings humanize and personify nature, giving it the presence of characters. In Bigger Person (2024), the interwoven visual field between foreground and background becomes the stage for a tension between figuration and abstraction, between human and nature, which ultimately coexist in a generative exchange of forces. “Often I use trees, plants and flowers to suggest a human presence, a self-portrait or even a portrait of someone. In that way, the landscape imagery allows me to connect with everyone,” Hughes reflects. Nature becomes, for her, a platform to contemplate human existence beyond categorization and individuation, reaching instead for universality. “A tree doesn’t need to be labeled as female or male or given a certain skin color or age. It becomes universal.”
Other paintings, like Pearl Gate (2025), appear to inhabit a liminal space beyond both the sensory and human world, evoking an archetypal and magical dimension of landscape, one historically acknowledged and embraced through symbols and rituals, often in opposition to anthropocentric, rational or scientific narratives.
MaMa (2025), an eight-foot-tall forest scene is dominated by a luminous field of red, orange and yellow that cascades down from the sun-like head of a flower anchoring the composition’s top edge. Photo: On White Wall Studio, courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery
In this sense, Hughes’s approach to landscape echoes that of Romanticism, which treated nature not simply as a subject to be depicted but as a privileged arena for probing the essence of the human condition in relation to immensity. For the Romantics, landscape was never mere scenery but rather a stage on which to confront mortality, transcendence and the fragile limits of human power against overwhelming natural forces. Hughes recognizes this legacy, acknowledging that her paintings respond to the same Romantic notion of the “sublime”: a vision of nature that provokes wonder and terror, awe and unease in equal measure.
Ultimately, while Hughes insists on grounding her works in sensorial and emotional human perception, these syntheses of color, light and natural elements—offered to the human eye yet absent of the human subject—gesture toward more-than-human realms and beyond human time. They suggest alternative ways of feeling, perceiving and embracing the vital entanglements of life forms and cosmic phenomena on which our existence depends.
Hughes’s works exist in and are nourished by this liminal space, poised between the sensorial and the psychological, the earthly and the unearthly—a threshold only color and paint can traverse. “I think I’m always contradicting myself in the work, and that’s important,” Hughes says. “What does continue to grow, though, is my connection to the work and my confidence in it, and maybe that comes through in the expansion of approaches and how many different types of painting are in the show.”
Yet these luminous landscapes also function as portals between worlds, suggesting that the longing for transcendence can be satisfied by contemplating nature. In doing so, they invite us to accept both the limits and possibilities of our human position within it while rediscovering nature’s spiritual and energetic force once we reattune ourselves to its primordial powers of creation over destruction.
In open-ended experiments in image-making, Hughes depicts kaleidoscopic visions of flora and fauna in processes of constant evolution. Photo: On White Wall Studio, courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery
Ebony Lewis, Bobby Miller and Kristina Kirkenaer-Hart. Photo: Kaitlin Saragusa
On a recent balmy night, Dallas’s see-and-be-seen set gathered in the industrial-style kunsthalle that is Dallas Contemporary for the institution’s annual gala and benefit auction. Presented by Headington Companies and museum board president Ann McReynolds with John McReynolds, and organized by co-chairs Shayna Fontana Horowitz, Peter Augustus Owens and Robyn Siegel, the glamorous, art-fueled event raised over $1 million—a testament to the important place the DC holds in Dallas’ scene.
A series of Fontana Horowitz’s atmospheric still lifes projected on the walls greeted gala-goers, who fueled up on hors d’oeuvres and specialty cocktails before moving into the auction gallery to preview work by the evening’s auction artists: Chris Wolston, Ali Dipp, Katherine Bradford, Maria Haag, Willie Binnie and Xxavier Edward Carter. Spotted in the crowd were philanthropist and collector Grace Cook, artisan and entrepreneur Rachel Bently, luxury retail merchant Brian Bolke, collector and patron Marguerite Hoffman, artist Vicki Meek (former executive director of the Dallas Contemporary), The Power Station founders Alden and Janelle Pinnell, museum director Jeremy Strick and sundry gallerists and art lovers.
Lucia Simek addressing gala-goers. Photo: Chase Hall
Fontana Horowitz’s final projection—a crystal bell—pulsed as chimes rang throughout the museum, signaling the start of dinner. Tables were set in “You Stretched Diagonally Across It: Contemporary Tapestry,” DC’s spring 2025 exhibition guest curated by Su Wu, with centerpieces part-victual, part-bouquet: an artful collision of moss, sweetgrass, pomegranates and cherry tomatoes. Christina Forrer’s Untitled (on brown background), on loan from Hoffman’s collection, wafted above the crowd, complementing works by Mika Tajima, Marie Hazard and others on the walls.
Between bites of Sassetta’s black pepper Parmesan panna cotta and Joule’s Texas wagyu short rib, benefactors enjoyed a runway of students from Booker T. Washington School for the Performing Arts modeling original designs by Caroline Correa, Kathleen Cusick, Skylar O’Hara, Lily Wilkinson, Maude Williams, Emmanuel Gillespie and artist Sai Sankoh. At the dais, Dallas Contemporary executive director Lucia Simek thanked supporters, declaring that, “it’s the necessary collaboration” that makes each year’s gala “so meaningful.” Christian Vasquez screened a short film featuring Meek, Wu, Simek and publisher Deep Vellum’s Will Evans, among others. Capping off the evening was the live auction, led by Christie’s Brett Sherlock, who had the honor of announcing the Eugene McDermott Foundation’s gift of $100,000 to fund free museum admission through 2026. A surprise donation from painter Francisco Moreno (who will mount a solo exhibition at Dallas Contemporary in spring 2026) kept bidders on their toes.
As always, the gala spilled into the night with an afterparty hosted by soon-to-open hi-fi bar Shyboy. Friends of the museum danced to sets spun by New York DJ GE-OLOGY, alternating between sipping signature highballs and cooling off with soft serve ice cream on what was a near-perfect night.
Rod Sager, Ann McReynolds, Lucia Simek, Robyn Siegel and Shayna Fontana Horowitz
Rod Sager, Ann McReynolds, Lucia Simek, Robyn Siegel and Shayna Fontana Horowitz. Photo: Kaitlin Saragusa
Mark Agnew and Emily Clarke
Mark Agnew and Emily Clarke. Photo: Kaitlin Saragusa
Michael Phelps and Ra Kazadi
Michael Phelps and Ra Kazadi. Photo: Joe Johnson
Ann McReynolds
Ann McReynolds. Photo: Kaitlin Saragusa
Jill Parker and Rod Sager
Jill Parker and Rod Sager. Photo: Kaitlin Saragusa
Rand Horowitz and Shayna Fontana Horowitz
Rand Horowitz and Shayna Fontana Horowitz. Photo: Kaitlin Saragusa
Bryn Stringer
Bryn Stringer. Photo: Joe Johnson
Rod Sager
Rod Sager. Photo: Kaitlin Saragusa
Kelly Mason
Kelly Mason. Photo: Joe Johnson
Faisal Hallum, Ceron and Brian Bolke
Faisal Hallum, Ceron and Brian Bolke. Photo: Kaitlin Saragusa
Elizabeth Hooper O’Mahoney, Ashley Varel, Shayna Fontana Horowitz and Nadia Dabbakeh
Elizabeth Hooper O’Mahoney, Ashley Varel, Shayna Fontana Horowitz and Nadia Dabbakeh. Photo: Joe Johnson
Brad Owen, Peter Augustus Owen and Thomas Fuelmer
Brad Owen, Peter Augustus Owen and Thomas Fuelmer. Photo: Kaitlin Saragusa
Alden Pinnell and Ben Slater
Alden Pinnell and Ben Slater. Photo: Joe Johnson
Sal Jafar and Christina Jafar
Sal Jafar and Christina Jafar. Photo: Kaitlin Saragusa
In capturing joy, Mickalene Thomas stayed close to home. Zach Hilty/BFA.com
Those who enjoy photography have had a hard time in recent years. Because it is associated with the apps through which people of all ages communicate, it is taken for background—as that thing that distracts you from your DMs. The art boom caused the medium to be neglected at galleries (because you can’t really see the same ROI on photography that you can with painting), and now that the market is down, the only answer seems to be smaller paintings. It’s always been a little surprising that Apple, which is occasionally the most valuable company in the world, would commission a photography exhibition alongside the launch of its new iPhones. But they’ve done exhibitions for the past two releases, and the latest iteration staged in Chelsea, London and Shanghai simultaneously felt like it could have passed for your average gallery show.
Held at the old Petzel space on 18th Street, “Joy, in 3 Parts” was curated by Kathy Ryan, longtime director of photography at the New York Times Magazine. The show brought together works by Inez & Vinoodh, Mickalene Thomas and Trunk Xu, each tasked with interpreting joy. The result was three bodies of work that were handsome and strange, a credit to Ryan’s flexibility.
Inez & Vinoodh used the prompt to tell a love story about their son and his partner over five images. “They saw joy as their son’s love story,” Ryan told Observer, in part because it reminded them of their own meeting at art school. The artists were inspired by Zabriskie Point (1970) and its desert landscape, and so took the opportunity to travel to Marfa, Texas, for their shoot.
There are shades of Badlands (1973), too. In Marfa, the besotted couple is accompanied by a red fabric that becomes its own character—a veil, a flag, a cocoon. Sure, the fabric basically symbolizes the love between the two kids, but in no way does this come off as corny. “Whenever their work goes into the surreal, something magical always happens,” Ryan said. “That red cloth became almost like a character.”
The sequence flanks three vivid color images with black-and-white portraits. One key frame—Charles and Natalie running with the red fabric behind them—was transformed when the sun broke through clouds. “You plan and plan, and then you hope serendipity kicks in,” Ryan said. “Just before the sun went down, we got that terrific rainbow flare.”
Where Inez & Vinoodh looked outward, Mickalene Thomas stayed close to home. She chose Fort Greene Park, her local Brooklyn greenspace, and captured neighborhood life in seemingly candid encounters: dancers, rope jumpers, a couple in a hammock. Initially shot in color, the series turned during editing. “After the first morning, she said, ‘You know what: I’m seeing this in black and white,’” Ryan said. “It strips away unnecessary noise and lets you lean into rhythm, form and emotion.”
It’s a bold move for someone associated with her use of color. According to Ryan, Thomas said politics were behind the choice. She wanted to represent Black people outside of the context of labor. “This work counters that narrative,” Ryan said, “exploring rest as a form of resistance, power, and self-reclamation.” They feel documentary, cinematic and natural all at once.
How Trunk Xu visualizes joy. Zach Hilty/BFA.com
Meanwhile, Beijing-born, Los Angeles-based Trunk Xu staged his contributions in a more obvious way and chose to confront the omnipresence of cameras in daily life. “The whole idea was fine art, not ads,” she said. But he was adamant, in a good way. To him, joy is wrapped up in the process of documenting. “The picture itself and the making of the picture is part of that dance with life.” His tableaux show skaters, beachgoers and couples photographing one another on their phones, but in subtle and unorthodox ways, with tight composition.
Ryan closed our conversation by situating the phone within photography’s long arc: from 8×10 plates to 35mm reportage, Polaroid experiments and now pocket devices with multiple 48MP sensors. My favorite of Xu’s images involved a pool shot that seemed to be captured by several people, but ironically, you can’t see any of their phones.
Last week, Brussels Art Week’s inaugural full-city edition, RendezVous, animated the Belgian capital with exhibitions, performances, screenings and talks across more than 65 venues. Founded by curators Laure Decock and Evelyn Simons, the initiative transformed the city into a walkable constellation of art spaces spanning downtown, uptown and midtown neighborhoods. The week pulsed with ambition and wit, balancing international names with local voices and institutional heft with grassroots initiatives. And while many of the art week exhibitions remain open through October, the concentrated energy of the opening days set the tone for the city’s autumn art season, shaking off the summer lull.
Decock and Simons’ manifesto captures the ethos behind the project: “For us and for many, Brussels is a unique place. Conveniently central, discreetly humble—surrounded by big sisters such as London and Paris, but brimming with a creative energy that is ferocious… A city defined by an enriching diversity, a charming chaos, an avant-garde that has been going steady for over 100 years and where new trends inscribe themselves onto a canvas of strong art historical traditions.”
At the heart of the 2025 programming was The Tip Inn, a temporary salon conceived by Zoe Williams as artwork and gathering point. Equal parts dive bar, nightclub and installation, the venue had candlelit tables, satin curtains and an atmosphere pitched between decadence and parody. A monumental print of Jan Sanders van Hemessen’s Prodigal Son (1536) presided over the room, while sausages hung like garlands and a video loop showed a girl casually relieving herself among glasses of champagne. Visitors ordered the artist’s signature whiskey-Montenegro cocktail, pocketed lighters inscribed with “Can I show you my portfolio?” and drifted between conversations, poetry readings, screenings and DJ sets.
The Tip Inn, a salon-style installation by Zoe Williams. Courtesy the artist
Williams, a Marseille-based British artist, has long explored the performative dimension of hospitality. By staging a bar, she foregrounded the dynamics of service, consumption and rebellion, while The Tip Inn itself captured Brussels humor and irreverence, reminding everyone that art weeks need not be confined to white cubes.
RendezVous unfolded across three main zones. Downtown, centered around the city center and Molenbeek, there was a strong mix of historical reflection and contemporary experimentation. At Harlan Levey Projects, Amélie Bouvier’s exhibition “Stars, don’t fail me now!” (on through December 13) examined humanity’s enduring fascination with the cosmos. Working with archival solar images from the Observatoire de Paris-Meudon, the Brussels-based artist transformed deteriorating glass plate negatives into meticulously drawn “photodessinographies.” Graphite and ink captured both celestial forms and the fragile material traces of scratches and fingerprints. Hanging textiles such as Astronomical Garden #1 and #2 extended this investigation into fictionalized landscapes, oscillating between scientific observation and poetic imagination.
Nearby, Galerie Christophe Gaillard opened “Le Contenu Pictural,” Hélène Delprat’s first solo show in Belgium (on through October 31). Borrowing its title from René Magritte’s irreverent ‘période vache,’ the exhibition highlighted Delprat’s own commitment to risk-taking and play. Alongside new works, rarely seen gouaches from the late 1990s testified to a two-decade hiatus in her practice, their intensity sharpened by that rupture. The presentation follows her major retrospective at Fondation Maeght and precedes a forthcoming exhibition at Centre Pompidou-Metz in 2027.
Grège Gallery offered a different model altogether. Founded in 2021 by Marie de Brouwer, the initiative bridges art, design and architecture, and twice annually it hosts site-specific exhibitions in extraordinary locations—from medieval farmhouses to brutalist landmarks—while its Brussels space functions as a showroom and meeting point. For RendezVous, the gallery highlighted this nomadic, cross-disciplinary ethos, underscoring how entrepreneurial visions are reshaping Brussels’ cultural landscape.
Galerie Greta Meert revisited the late career of Sol LeWitt with “Bands, Curves and Brushstrokes” (through October 25). The works on paper from the 1990s and 2000s charted his shift from rigorous geometry to more fluid gestures, balancing spontaneity with systematic logic. Upstairs, the gallery previewed an online viewing room devoted to British artist James White. His forthcoming series “Indoor Nature” features photorealist paintings on aluminum, presented in plexiglass boxes, capturing domestic interiors where plants introduce subtle tension between artifice and vitality.
Kenny Scharf, JUNGLENIGHTZ, 2025. Oil, acrylic & silkscreen ink on linen with powder-coated aluminum frame, 213.4 x 243.8 x 7.6 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Almine Rech. Photo: Hugard & Vanoverschelde photography
Ixelles, the heart of uptown Brussels, was buzzing. At Almine Rech, Kenny Scharf’s “Jungle jungle jungle” (on through October 25) presented the artist’s unmistakable universe of cartoonish ecologies and consumerist critique. Scharf, a veteran of the New York Downtown Scene that saw Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat rise to fame, continues to expand his cosmic pop language. Works such as JUNGLENIGHTZ (2025) exemplified his lush, frenetic engagement with nature, nightlife and dystopian exuberance.
Johanna Mirabel’s “I Wish,” at Galerie Nathalie Obadia through October 25, highlights the tradition of ex-voto painting. Drawing on both European and Latin American precedents, the French artist of Guyanese descent wove together sacred motifs and secular imagery. Scenes of disaster and recovery conveyed gratitude, anchoring her first Brussels solo exhibition in a rich cross-cultural lineage.
Bernier/Eliades Gallery showcased Martina Quesada with “If This Is a Space” (through October 25). Her geometric wall sculptures and pigment-on-paper works established rhythmic systems of variation and resonance. Pieces like The verge was always there (2025) interacted with shifting sunlight in the gallery, blurring distinctions between material presence and atmospheric suggestion.
At Xavier Hufkens, Charline Von Heyl’s debut exhibition in Brussels affirmed her reputation as one of the most inventive painters working today. The canvases danced between exuberance and rigor, improvisation and discipline. Rather than resolving into answers, they insisted on painting as an open-ended inquiry—a dialogue as mischievous as it is profound.
Moving toward midtown neighborhoods like Sablon, Forest and Saint-Gilles, Gladstone Gallery presented “In the Absence of Paradise,” Nicholas Bierk’s contemplative still lifes and portraits. Drawn from personal photographs, the Canadian artist’s oil paintings addressed grief, transformation and memory with understated intensity.
At Mendes Wood DM, Julien Creuzet unveiled “Nos diables rouges, nos dérives commotions,” his first Brussels solo show, on through October 25. Anchored by the figure of the Red Devil from Martinican carnival, the immersive installation combined films, wallpapers, sculptures and sound. Creuzet reimagined the masked body as a fluid, untamed entity traversing mythologies and diasporic histories. Rice, tridents and fragmented limbs recurred as potent symbols, layering ancestral spirituality with contemporary politics. His cosmology was unsettling yet emancipatory, opening unexpected pathways of imagination.
Design also had a strong presence. Spazio Nobile staged a joint exhibition by Kiki van Eijk and Joost van Bleiswijk, curated by Maria Cristina Didero. Celebrating two decades of collaboration, “Thinking Hands” highlighted the duo’s whimsical yet precise approach, rooted in Eindhoven’s design culture. Furniture, lighting and installations demonstrated how their practice resists mass production in favor of intuition and shared invention.
Institutional programming added depth. At WIELS, the group exhibition “Magical Realism: Imagining Natural Dis/order” explored ecological precarity through myth and dream. Curated by Sofia Dati, Helena Kritis and Dirk Snauwaert, it assembled more than thirty artists. Highlights included Gaëlle Choisne’s Ego, he goes, a talking fridge filled with decaying goods that critiqued consumer waste while invoking Creole cosmologies. Works by Marisa Merz, Cecilia Vicuña and Jumana Manna reinforced the exhibition’s call for alternative ways of inhabiting the planet.
Amélie Bouvier’s “Stars, don’t fail me now!” at Harlan Levey Projects. Courtesy of the artist & Harlan Levey Projects. Photo credit: Shivadas De Schrijver
Outside, Sharon Van Overmeiren’s The Farewell Hotel transformed the WIELS garden into an inflatable castle open to children and adults alike. Referencing pre-Columbian motifs, museological displays and Pokémon, the installation invited visitors to bounce, explore and reconsider what art can be. Its playful verticality epitomized the week’s spirit of porous boundaries between seriousness and delight.
RendezVous demonstrated how Brussels’ art scene thrives on contrasts—between the polished and the raw, the historical and the experimental, the institutional and the independent. It unfolded not just as a showcase of exhibitions but as a lived experience of the city itself, weaving fluidly through neighborhoods and communities. Far from another entry in the crowded calendar of art weeks, RendezVous affirmed Brussels’ singular position in the cultural landscape: cosmopolitan yet intimate, grounded in tradition yet insistently forward-looking. With this momentum, anticipation for next year’s edition is already mounting.
“Magical Realism: Imagining Natural Dis/order” at WIELS. Photo: Eline Willaert
Lynn Hershman Leeson, The Infinity Engine, 2014. Multimedia installation, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist, Altman Siegel, San Francisco and Bridget Donahue, New York. Photo: Paris Tavitian
Welcome toOne Fine Show, where Observer highlights a recently opened exhibition at a museum not in New York City, a place we know and love that already receives plenty of attention.
You probably don’t remember a minor interaction in Blade Runner (1982) when Harrison Ford admires a snake at the night market, and asks the seller if it’s artificial. She responds, “You think I’d be working in a place like this if I could afford a real snake?” The film is the story of android slaves run amok, but the vogue for artificial animals is given much more attention in the book that inspired it by Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (1968), which opens with Ford’s character getting into a fight with his wife about the need to save up for an authentic lamb.
The farther we get from animals, the more we want them in our lives. “Why Look at Animals? A Case for the Rights of Non-Human Lives,” a new exhibition at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens, seeks to examine the unique bond that exists between humans, animals and their representations. The show features over 200 works that occupy each floor of the museum, representing over 60 artists from four continents, among them Mark Dion, David Claerbout, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Emma Talbot, Rossella Biscotti and Marcus Coates.
Claerbout’s video piece is representative. The Pure Necessity (2016) is an hour-long version of Disney’s The Jungle Book (1967) that excises the narrative of the lost boy, the dancing and the animals’ anthropomorphism. It took Claerbout and his team three years to hand draw this new version, a worthy project that forces us to consider the extent to which generations of young impressions about animals have been shaped by an animation studio whose founder admired Leni Riefenstahl.
Coates is something of a mystic and has thrown himself into the project with vigor, contributing a digital text piece that examines the life of animals around Athens, a sound piece that traces the sonic connections between sounds made by diverse species, and Extinct Animals (2018), a sculpture series featuring plaster casts of the artist’s hands as he made shadow puppets of animals gone forever. It’s disheartening to see how many have gone in my lifetime—I like to hope I did see a Pyrenean ibex at one point. Biscotti’s contribution also abstracts a long-gone animal of consequence. Clara (2016) is named after a famous rhinoceros who toured Europe in the mid-eighteenth century as an oddity, brought to the Netherlands from Bengal by Douwe Jansz Mout van der Meer, a captain with the Dutch East India Company. Biscotti’s installation recreates Clara via handmade bricks and a pile of tobacco, which was said to keep her calm during her travels.
“The zoo cannot but disappoint,” wrote John Berger in the 1977 essay that gives this exhibition its title. In earlier forms of society, the animal represented not only material needs like warmth and food but also spiritual guidance: “The animal has secrets which, unlike the secrets of caves, mountains, seas, are specifically addressed to man.” Representations of animals are always fraught, as they are laden with baggage about what modernity has both given to us and taken away.
Spring, summer, autumn, winter—few things are more fundamental to how we mark the passage of time. A perennial subject of both casual conversation and art-making, this cycle takes center stage in the exhibition “Kim Chong Hak: Painter of Seoraksan” at Atlanta’s High Museum of Art. On the surface, it appears as a simple journey through the calendar, yet beneath lies something more—the fusion of Korean Dansaekhwa painting and American abstract expressionism. By using a familiar narrative while filtering it through a hybrid style rooted in lived experience, Hak demonstrates that meaning lies less in what you say than in how you say it.
Hak was born in Korea, where he grew up and began his artistic career. Coming of age in the 1960s meant grappling with identity and nationhood in a post-war landscape, struggles that shaped the movement known as Dansaekhwa. This abstract, non-objective practice, though not wholly representative of Hak’s influences, dominated Korean painting at the time and provides crucial context for his development.
Dansaekhwa, often translated as “monochrome painting,” is defined by physical engagement with material, deceptive simplicity, and destabilizing contrasts. Its influence emerges most clearly in Hak’s winter works. Untitled (Winter) (2017) depicts a forest stripped of its foliage, the ground blanketed in snow. Only bare trunks and branches remain, save for two birds perched on a branch in the foreground. At first glance, the canvas seems nearly all white, but closer inspection reveals a spectrum of grays—from ash to slate—layered into the surface. Thick slabs of paint have been built up and sculpted with a brush, giving the scene a dense materiality. Step back again and the landscape no longer appears void but alive with presence. What seems at first a quiet winter scene becomes instead a meditation on Dansaekhwa’s influence on Hak’s style.
In 1977, Hak moved to New York, where he encountered neo-expressionists such as Julian Schnabel and Anselm Kiefer, along with the legacy of Abstract Expressionism. Characterized by intuitive mark-making and non-objective compositions that cover the canvas edge to edge—so-called “all-over paintings”—this movement was embodied by figures like Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline. Its impact is clearest in Hak’s summer paintings. Green Shades and Fragrant Plants (1998) presents a bed of flowers—sunflowers, peonies, lilies—all bursting upward from an emerald ground to fill the surface without pause. While recognizably a summer scene with its dense greenery and saturated hues, the lack of horizon or pictorial depth flattens the canvas into a single, enveloping plane. As with Untitled (Winter), the true subject is not the image itself but Hak’s painterly practice.
What is most striking is how approachable these works remain. The collision of Dansaekhwa’s rigor with Abstract Expressionism’s abandon might have produced chaotic, unruly canvases. Instead, Hak distills these competing forces into the simple frame of the seasons. Though the stylistic influences are distinct, they never overwhelm; balance and clarity prevail. The exhibition offers a dual entry point: first, the comforting familiarity of seasonal change, and second, the conceptual interplay of styles. One may view it as a lyrical stroll through the year, but these works resist categorization. They are not conventional landscapes but something far more compelling.
A man enters a hushed gallery, cradling a lifeless hare, its fur soft but cold. His face glistens with sticky honey and gold leaf, casting a faint, sweet scent into the still air. He leans close to the silent creature, his breath warm against its fur, and begins a strange, almost sacred act: whispering explanations of paintings meant for ears that cannot hear.
This haunting performance began as a groundbreaking work by German artist Joseph Beuys, a radical force redefining how we see, feel and experience art. His 1965 piece How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare continues to resonate, inspiring new generations of artists, including Marina Abramović, who re-performed it forty years later at the Guggenheim Museum as part of her “7 Easy Pieces” series.
At Museum Schloss Moyland in Germany, Beuys and Abramović meet in conversation in “Marina Abramović & MAI in Dialogue with Joseph Beuys,” a landmark exhibition running through October 26, 2025. For the first time, Abramović and her institute (MAI) are engaging in an artistic discourse with Beuys’s visionary legacy. Central to the exhibition is the juxtaposition of their performances, inviting visitors to explore the evolving language of art as deeply personal, intuitive and often mystical.
Schloss Moyland as living stage
Schloss Moyland, with its neo-Gothic towers and surrounding parkland, houses one of the world’s largest Beuys collections. This exhibition transforms the archive into a living stage. Alongside documentation of Beuys’ and Abramović’s hare performances, the museum presents drawings, sculptures and archival materials, reactivated through the presence of live performers.
In March, thirteen international artists joined a residency led by the Marina Abramović Institute. Immersed in Beuys’s methods and Moyland’s archives, they developed new site-specific works that now unfold daily at the museum for up to ten hours. It is performance as lived endurance, reflecting Abramović’s belief that duration transforms life into art.
The resulting works carry distinct cultural and artistic inflections. Brazilian artist Rubiane Maia links Beuys’s ecological concerns to colonial legacies; Irish artist Sandra Johnston explores Beuys’s connections to Ireland; Italian-German Francesco Marzano turns breath into a collective instrument. The effect is less homage than dialogue, a multiperspectival exchange in which Beuys’ ideas are tested, reshaped and set in motion for a new generation.
Abramović’s golden hour
This ambitious project arrives at a golden hour for Abramović herself. In July 2025, the 78-year-old was awarded the Praemium Imperiale Prize for Sculpture by the Japan Art Association—often called the Nobel Prize of the Arts. “They gave me the prize for sculpture,” Abramović tells Observer, “but my body is sculpture”—a reminder of how performance unsettles conventional classifications. “When you approach 80, receiving an award like this is both an honor and a reminder. It makes you think about the end of life before it actually arrives. But I’m not planning to die anytime soon. I’m still working like hell.”
Abramović began performing in the 1970s before small audiences that questioned whether her work was even art, and the recognition carries profound vindication. “It’s taken me 55 years to get here. It finally means my work is taken seriously. My voice can be heard, and I can promote immaterial art.”
From Rhythm 0 (1974), where the public could use objects on her body, to The Artist Is Present (2010), where thousands queued to sit silently with her, the Praemium Imperiale underscores what the Moyland exhibition makes clear: Abramović is both an individual artist and an architect of performance’s future.
MAI and the Abramović method
That future is embodied in the Marina Abramović Institute, founded in 2007 and now based in a converted hotel in Karyes, Greece. For Abramović, MAI is not a final artwork but a living legacy—a platform to sustain performance art across generations. “The Institute preserves performance art,” she explains, “and while my work keeps evolving, the Institute is my legacy.”
At Moyland, MAI’s ethos of long-duration art is palpable. Performers, trained in the Abramović Method, undertake demanding works designed to sharpen stamina and presence. The discipline, Abramović insists, grants dignity to performance: “When it’s something very long, the public feels it. Performance becomes life itself, and the audience becomes a supportive community.”
The exhibition is thus a test case for how archives can be made alive, how new performers can be nurtured and how immaterial art can claim equal footing with painting and sculpture.
Old art, new voices
Among the thirteen artists, the Irish Sandra Johnston works with durational performance and archival research to transform historical materials. At Moyland, she engaged with Beuys’s archive, inspired by the visionary works he transplanted to Ireland decades earlier. Using blackboards, newspapers and objects, she developed slow, somatic actions. “Seven days, seven-hour performances. It’s exhausting,” she says of the physical and mental challenges. Many gestures are minute—a stag’s tooth rotated between fingers, a mark traced on the floor, a slow bodily rotation—each movement tuned to the space, the materials and the audience. Confirming Abramović’s insight, Johnston emphasizes that sustained audience attention fuels the performance and reinforces the reciprocity at the heart of her practice.
Complementing Johnston’s somatic intimacy, Francesco Marzano approaches performance from a communal, auditory perspective. Building on his flautist training and studies with Abramović at the Folkwang University’s Pina Bausch Professorship, his Moyland work, Pneuma – Wärmezeitmaschine, transforms breathing into a collective sculpture. Ten microphones amplify performer and visitor breaths, layering rhythms from intimate whispers to full choruses. “Breathing is communication without words. It’s life, soul and connection,” he tells Observer.
He credits Abramović’s Cleaning the House workshop—five days of silence, fasting and endurance—as foundational: “It was life-changing. Without that training, doing seven- to eight-hour days would have been impossible. It taught me how to be present for so long, how to slow down time.”
Young audiences respond enthusiastically to both approaches. Children, school groups and social media visitors are drawn to the immersive, slow experiences Johnston and Marzano create, often returning to engage in shared attention and presence. Abramović frames this intergenerational exchange as reciprocal: “I give them old-school wisdom, but they give me freshness. My generation complains too much—I need fresh minds.”
Reanimating the Beuys archive
At Moyland, this dialogue between generations comes alive. The exhibition demonstrates how archives can be reanimated, how younger artists inherit and transform long-standing practices and how institutions can give immaterial art the same weight as painting or sculpture. For Beuys, art was a social sculpture, and every action was charged with creative potential. For Abramović, art is presence itself: the body as material, the audience as co-creator, time as canvas. At Moyland, these visions converge and evolve.
Abramović notes that performance resurfaces in moments of economic strain: “When the economy is going down, performance art comes up because it doesn’t cost much… It creates vitality that can never disappear.” In today’s age of distraction, that vitality feels essential, shaping the exhibition’s insistence on slowness, repetition and communal intensity.
While the echo of the past lingers, the hare of 1965 is long gone, its fur dust. Yet voices, bodies and breath now sustain the performance. What began as one man explaining pictures to a dead animal has become a collective act of attention—proof that in performance art, presence endures and remains the most radical act of all.
Installation view, “Your psychoacoustic light ensemble” at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery. Photo by Pierre Le Hors Courtesy the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles
From colors and qualities of light we cannot perceive accurately to frequencies of sound inaudible to our ears, a significant portion of the phenomena in the cosmos remains out of reach to us. Moving between aesthetics and physics and working at the intersection of art and science, Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson is known for exploring ephemeral phenomena in his work with dynamic materials like light, color and frequency, which shape our experience of reality even though their complexity often surpasses the limits of our senses.
In his newly opened show at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, “Your psychoacoustic light ensemble,” Eliasson delves even deeper into the fringes of perception, playing with light frequencies and exploring sounds and vibrations—an often underrated medium in art—as an essential part of human experience and the universe’s composition. Observer enjoyed an exclusive walkthrough of the show with the artist, who shared insights into the processes and themes his new works examine, challenge and deconstruct to create awareness of how we orient ourselves in this world.
The exhibition’s central installation is an immersive spatial soundscape, an engaging synesthetic experience that harmoniously blends visual and sensory elements. This work is the result of a complex orchestration that translates light into sound through shared frequencies that align with the universe. In this way, circles of light move, expand and interlace in the dark room, tracing the wavelength of sound itself.
“This is a piece of music that is made from the light to the sound, not from the sound to the light,” Olafur explained to us. To achieve this effect, he first crafted and adjusted the exact light composition with mirrors, refining the colors and gradients until they created the desired “painting” of this synthetic environment, which he then completed with sound. Once again, Eliasson demonstrates his ability to use waves and frequencies—whether light or sound—as the primary medium for his compositions.
While light and sound operate in distinct ranges of the electromagnetic and acoustic spectra, the invisible factors of wave frequency and length determine whether we hear a particular sound or see a specific color. Sound is a mechanical wave that travels through a medium (such as air, water, or solids), with the frequency determining if it will produce a low-pitched sound (e.g., bass) or a high-pitched one (e.g., treble). For light, however, it is the frequency or wavelength of the electromagnetic wave that determines color, as Eliasson explains during our walkthrough. He elaborated that every “surface and material has its vibrancy, which regulates the relation with the space.” This synesthetic experimentation creates a meditative, harmonious sequence that transports visitors to another realm, allowing them to sense a hidden harmony within the universe. “It is eventually harmonious; it has this beautiful sense of harmony, like an inhaling and exhaling.”
This installation, which engages both the psyche and the senses through frequencies, lends itself to the show’s title, focused on the concept of “psychoacoustics.” This theme addresses Eliasson’s interest in the inherent relativity of perception and how our senses and their psychological processing shape our experience and understanding of the world—despite the inherent limits that keep many phenomena beyond our full comprehension.
At the gallery entrance, one of his suspended sculptures, Fierce Tenderness Sphere, expands into the space, decomposing light into its spectrum across innumerable quadrangles. With every viewer’s movement, the sculpture shifts, creating an interplay of light, color and form that offers a multifaceted and layered experience, revealing new perspectives and meanings within the same shape.
The works on the second floor continue Eliasson’s investigation of color phenomena, a central concern for much of his work across all media. Photo by Pierre Le Hors Courtesy the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los AngelesPhoto by Pierre Le Hors
Upstairs, Olafur continues his exploration of color phenomena and how they are perceived and accessible to us, depending on the wavelengths of light that objects reflect, transmit, or emit. As in many of the artist’s works, and much as with sound, humans can only perceive a narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum due to our eyes’ receptors (cones) that respond to only specific wavelengths, allowing us to perceive only specific colors. However, this does not mean that this is the only way vision might work in the universe—especially when viewed from a different perspective or with advanced tools.
The concept of color as reflection, emanation or transmission is central to the processes from which the artist’s works originate. “Color does not exist in itself, only when looked at,” he said. “The unique fact that color only materializes when light bounces off a surface onto our retinas shows us that the analysis of colors is, in fact, about the ability to analyze ourselves.”
In the first gallery, the artist is presenting a new body of work: a vibrant watercolor piece in which shades of green and yellow expand circularly and fluidly, as though something has collided at its nucleus and spread outward. Olafur explains that this piece results from a partially intuitive process: allowing an ice cube, along with bleach, to melt on a surface treated with watercolor and ink. Over time, the melting ice activates a transformation of pigments, which expand across the canvas in different gradations, transforming black into green and, eventually, yellow. Here, black—the absence of light and wavelength—is symbolically interrupted by the bleach’s aggressive chemical reaction, allowing color to reemerge as the ice melts and alters the composition.
In a nearby dark room, the artist has installed a band of light containing all colors in the visible spectrum, appearing as a reflection—similar to sunlight hitting glass or the rainbow formed by raindrops. By using bright white light on a colorful arc, he creates a flat reflection resembling a horizon or boreal line that shines out of the darkness. “It’s in darkness that you understand the need for some light,” Olafur enigmatically noted. By staging this light reflection, the artist essentially “paints” within the space with a single, precise stroke that captures all the colors contained in any natural light ray, achieving with scientific precision the “illusion of light” long pursued by painters throughout art history.
Large watercolor works conjure the evanescent luminosity of a rainbow on paper. Photo by Pierre Le Hors Courtesy the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles
In Tanya Bonakdar’s main sky-lit gallery, the artist has hung large watercolor works that evoke the fleeting luminosity of a rainbow on paper. Here, the interplay between light, color and paint becomes even more nuanced: ethereal watercolors suggest the hues in the visible light spectrum, akin to sunlight reflecting off a white surface. Bathed in the full range of colors, these works attempt to capture something our senses often struggle to fully perceive. As the artist explained, here he is painting “the impossibility of what we can see, painting something that is beyond vision, or saying something that we almost can’t see.”
The works begin with grey paint underneath; when multiple colors accumulate densely, they blend and return to grey. These watercolors are painted on wet surfaces, applied in delicate, repetitive layers in an almost ritualistic manner, allowing colors to emerge only to fade back to grey. “It’s like white paper bouncing through the middle of the color,” Olafur said. The result is works that have a special glow, as if the colors have absorbed the light spectrum that bathed them and now transmit it to the viewer’s eye. This vaporous, diaphanous effect surrounds the viewer, filling the room with color—like sunlight bathing the paper and translating wavelengths into hues and tones that expand through the space.
By challenging and testing viewers’ perceptions of color and light, and this time incorporating sound, Eliasson has crafted an immersive exploration that allows us to understand how perception of these elements shapes our environments. Highlighting the complex relationship between the senses and psyche, Olafur reveals how we navigate them, consciously or otherwise, within an interplay of frequencies and wavelengths that silently and invisibly surround us. This work links all these experiences to a perpetual cycle of energy and particles governed by the cosmos’s largely impenetrable rules. Acknowledging the limitations of sensory perception, Eliasson offers a glimpse into the vast realm beyond our immediate awareness, emphasizing that our understanding of the world is inherently relative.
Olafur Eliasson’s Midnight Moment
Lifeworld by Olafur Eliasson, presented in Times Square as part of the Midnight Moment series. Courtesy of the artist and Times Square Arts.
In addition to the exhibition at Tanya Bonakdar, Olafur Eliasson will present a work in New York City’s Times Square throughout November as part of the Midnight Moment program. Every night from 11:57 pm to midnight, his piece Lifeworld will transform the iconic billboards with a mesmerizing sequence of floating light forms that mimic the cityscape’s vibrant energy. In this work, Eliasson seeks to capture and abstract the essence of the iconic spot by filming its screens from various perspectives, creating an intentional blur that suspends these light stimuli in time and space. Removed from their usual meanings and messages, these stimuli become pure atmosphere, with shimmering abstract shapes and dancing colors inviting viewers to slow down and creatively reimagine the urban landscape.
“It’s a thrill, but the environment also determines my actions—driving me mostly to spend or to consume,” the artist said in a statement. “Lifeworld shows the immediate site anew, and its hazy qualities may prompt questions. If you are suddenly confronted with the reality of having a choice, you might ask what cities, lives and environments we want to inhabit? And how do I want to take part in them?”
This Midnight Moment marks Eliasson’s first project as guest curator for WeTransfer, which has partnered with CIRCA as an exclusive Digital Screen Partner. “By abstracting the energy of Times Square itself, Eliasson’s Lifeworld offers a rare moment of meditation—a poetic gesture on a monumental scale that holds the potential to ground us in a place designed to economize our attention perpetually and in a political climate that offers little psychic reprieve,” said Jean Cooney, Director of Times Square Arts. “We’re excited to present this timely and distinctive Midnight Moment and join this global collaboration.” Coinciding with the Times Square display, Lifeworld also appears every evening at 8:24 p.m. local time through December 31 on Piccadilly Lights in London, K-Pop Square in Seoul, Limes Kurfürstendamm in Berlin and online 24/7 on WeTransfer.com.
Olafur Eliasson’s “Your Psychoacustic Light Ensemble” is on view at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery through December 19. The show is timed with the November presentation of his work “Lifeworld in Times Square, part of the “Midnight Moment” initiative.
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.
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.
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.
A view of the installation at the Centre des Monuments Nationaux–Hôtel de Sully. Photo: Tanguy Beurdeley. Courtesy of the Lynn Chadwick’s Estate and Perrotin.
British artist Lynn Chadwick was instrumental in liberating modern sculpture from its traditional figurative and celebratory forms, pushing it towards more abstract, innovative expressions. His market remains robust, largely due to the careful management of his estate by his family. Now, “Hypercircle,” a series of exhibitions split into three chapters across two venues, seeks to further cement Chadwick’s reputation and enhance his market standing.
Timed to coincide with Art Basel Paris, the first show, “Hypercircle – Chapter 1: Scalene,” opened at Galerie Perrotin alongside a display of works at the Centre des Monuments Nationaux–Hôtel de Sully. This exhibition focuses on Chadwick’s formative years, showcasing sixty pivotal works produced between 1947 and 1962—a period during which the artist defined his distinct style and gained international recognition. Observer spoke with curator and art historian Matthieu Poirier, who played a central role in orchestrating the show.
Poirier revealed that this exhibition is the culmination of years of dialogue with the Chadwick estate. He first connected with them during research for his groundbreaking “Suspension” exhibition and publication, which looked at artists who pioneered the idea of sculpture beyond the pedestal. Despite some of these pieces not being Chadwick’s most recognized works, the show highlights the artist’s exploration of “Mobiles” in the 1950s. “They are something deeply connected with the history of abstract art,” Poirier said. “It’s about losing boundaries and creating abstraction.”
The Lynn Chadwick exhibition at Perrotin Gallery in Paris was curated by Matthieu Poirer. Photo: Tanguy Beurdeley. Courtesy of the Lynn Chadwick’s Estate and Perrotin.
Chadwick’s fascination with suspension and his intuitive approach to working with unconventional materials were fueled by his diverse background as an architectural draftsman, furniture and textile designer, and later, a pilot in the Fleet Air Arm during World War II. According to Poirier, for the artist, “mobiles were an extension of architecture, moving parts of the architecture. He always had a fascination for flying objects, also for his past as a pilot.”
As Chadwick sought to liberate sculpture from mass and traditional support, his works evolved into more animal-like forms, often featuring angular bodies and delicate, spindly legs. Though deeply abstract and imaginative in their hybrid forms, these sculptures retained some references to the natural world. Poirier noted that Chadwick was fascinated by biology, particularly Darwin’s theory of evolution, with illustrations from those scientific texts inspiring his distinct biomorphic language.
For this reason, the sculptor’s creations often appear more like fossils suspended between present and past, between remoteness and presentness of their forms, evoking humanoid forms figures with anthropomorphic heads and limbs while maintaining their “otherness.” Many of Chadwick’s pieces also resemble insects, particularly referencing the exoskeleton—a concept that fascinated the artist as he explored the idea of a protective shell or carapace encasing the body structure.
These connections to natural forms and geometries became even more pronounced after Chadwick moved to Lypiatt Park, a neo-Gothic castle in the Cotswolds. From the late 1950s onward, he absorbed inspiration directly from the rich flora and fauna surrounding his new studio. Yet even as his biomorphic tendencies became more apparent, his work continued to blend elements of nature with the mechanical, industrial, and even futuristic, reflecting the aesthetic sensibilities of his time.
“Hypercycle” is a series of exhibitions at several sites, each tracing a part of the artist’s career. Photo: Tanguy Beurdeley. Courtesy of the Lynn Chadwick’s Estate and Perrotin.
Chadwick’s work was never tied to a specific narrative or political stance, which is why Poirier avoided categorizing his pieces by “type” in this exhibition. Instead, he wanted to highlight the artist’s abstract approach, allowing the sculptures to transcend direct references. By pairing the works organically and displaying them as if they were occasionally gathering on pedestals, Poirier emphasizes their fluidity. “They’re always highly stylized and maintain only the main lines of the real thing,” he said.
Some of Chadwick’s monumental sculptures are on display at the Monuments Nationaux–Hôtel de Sully. These pieces, which weigh up to 800 kg, are remarkable not only for their scale but also for the artist’s working method—Chadwick often worked alone and created his sculptures without preliminary sketches, relying on an intuitive and automatic process. Poirier likened this method to surrealist automatic writing, noting that his process had “no plan, leaving the materials leading the way.”
At the same time, Chadwick’s work is deeply rooted in the tradition of sculptural pioneers, from Russian Constructivists like Naum Gabo to Henry Moore, and even the existential sculptures of Alberto Giacometti, where bodies are reduced to their minimal forms. “I’ve always seen him as the missing link between Henry Moore, Giacometti and someone like Louise Bourgeois,” Poirier said, emphasizing the broader significance of Chadwick’s practice. “When you look at her spiders, it’s clear that she looked at Chadwick’s work, and she wasn’t the only one.”
Lynn Chadwick was one of the most significant sculptors of the twentieth century, alongside Alberto Giacometti, Henry Moore and Louise Bourgeois. Photo: Tanguy Beurdeley. Courtesy of the Lynn Chadwick’s Estate and Perrotin.
When compared to Moore and Giacometti, Chadwick’s works convey a similar sense of precariousness and fragility, reflecting the uncertainties of the postwar era. He minimized the base of his sculptures, creating a sense of imbalance and instability through the use of triangular shapes, a key element of his sculptural language. As Poirier explained, this instability wasn’t merely aesthetic but also a means to evoke movement: “The idea of the scalene triangle, this irregular triangle, is an unstable shape that is on the verge of collapsing, not symmetrical. It is not orthogonal. There is no symmetry. It’s just on the verge of falling or giving birth to another triangle or tetrahedron—these shapes imagined from this simple structure.”
The concept of the scalene triangle was so integral to Chadwick’s work that it inspired the title of the first chapter of his exhibition in Paris. Poirier added that this formal approach likely stems from his architectural background, where he learned to stabilize structures using diagonal lines, creating a dynamic interplay between gravitational forces. This architectural influence is evident in the way Chadwick balanced strength and instability within his sculptures.
Profoundly enigmatic, Chadwick’s hybrid sculptures seem to foreshadow new possibilities of symbiosis between nature and human creation. His concept of “organic growth” within sculpture offers a visionary anticipation of themes such as interspecies relationships and “alienness,” ideas that have become increasingly popular in today’s artistic and creative realms. As humanity is compelled to reconsider its place on the planet, this sculptor’s work feels more relevant than ever, whether viewed through dystopian or optimistic lenses.
“Hypercycle” will continue with a second chapter in New York focusing on Chadwick’s mature period from 1963 to 1979. The final chapter will be mounted in Asia. Complementing the exhibition series, a monograph set to be published in 2025 will provide a comprehensive overview of Chadwick’s career, offering diverse perspectives on his work and legacy.
The first chapter brings together sixty key works produced between 1947 and 1962, a time when the artist defined his unique approach and achieved international recognition. Photo: Tanguy Beurdeley. Courtesy of the Lynn Chadwick’s Estate and Perrotin.
