Tag: Leonora Carrington

In Its Best Week Since 2021, Sotheby’s Hit $1.173B With a $54.7M Kahlo Finale

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On November 20, Sotheby’s generated a combined total of $304.6 million between the Cindy and Jay Pritzker Collection, Exquisite Corps and Modern Evening sales. Julian Cassady Photography / Ali

Of the $1.6 billion of art expected to change hands during this year’s November sales, $1.1 billion was secured by Sotheby’s when the evening sales concluded on the 20th. When tallied with the Day sales the following afternoon, the auction house’s fall marquee week sales had generated a total of $1.173 billion—the second-highest total ever after the $1.33 billion achieved in November 2021 at the height of the contemporary and ultracontemporary markets.

Following the success of the Leonard A. Lauder sale, which delivered a $527.5 million Evening total and a clean 100 percent sold rate for the $3.8 million Day sale offering (est. $3.2 million), Sotheby’s completed a full white-glove, three-sale marathon. It opened with The Cindy and Jay Pritzker Collection Evening Auction, which totaled $109.5 million, followed by the $98.1 million Exquisite Corpus sale and a $97 million Modern Evening auction. Driving many of the lots was strong participation from Asia, which accounted for 30 percent of total bidding, a reminder that Asian collectors respond enthusiastically when true quality comes to market.

Most importantly, if 2021 belonged to the contemporary and ultracontemporary frenzy, these marquee sales showed a clear pivot. Buyers turned toward art-historical touchstones by the most established names in Modern art or toward figures long overlooked and now undergoing reassessment. Across the November sales, Sotheby’s sold $843 million of Modern works, the highest total ever for the category in a single season. Prestigious provenance and strong storytelling were key in this inaugural auction round at the Breuer building for Sotheby’s, with single-owner collections accounting for 72.5 percent of the week’s total ($828,244,220 of $1.173 billion). And in the contemporary segment, it was the artists with the strongest institutional foundations who rose to the top.

“After years of uneven seasons, this week’s results demonstrate that the often quoted cliche of the three D’s (death, debt and divorce) powering the art market has never been truer,” Mari-Claudia Jimenéz, partner and co-head of Withers Art & Advisory, confirmed. For the industry’s seasoned expert, the abundance of fresh-to-market, extraordinary-quality estate properties inspired buyers to return with gusto to chase the best-in-class works with impeccable histories.

Sotheby’s evening marathon on November 20 began with the collection of Chicago’s Cindy and Jay Pritzker, who are best known for founding the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1979. The sale immediately set the tone of the night, generating $109.5 million across just 13 works against a pre-sale estimate of $73.5 million to $88.5 million.

Leading the auction was Vincent van Gogh’s Romans Parisiens (Les Livres jaunes) (1887), a radiant still life from the artist’s Paris period in which a stack of yellow-bound books becomes a portrait of his voracious intellect and humanist curiosity. Boasting an extensive exhibition history, the canvas was pursued for at least seven minutes by five bidders and sold for a record-setting $62.7 million, well above its estimate of around $40 million and setting a new benchmark for any still life by the artist.

Deep bidding also accompanied the sale of Wassily Kandinsky’s musical watercolor “Ins violett” (Into Violet) from the height of his Bauhaus period, listed as No. 188 in his handlist. Sought by five bidders in a spirited exchange, it more than doubled its high estimate, fetching $2,368,000 (est. $700,000-$1,000,000).

Other Modern masterworks in the Pritzker collection prompted intense competition. Camille Pissarro’s Bords de l’Oise à Pontoise, dating to the beginning of the artist’s second sojourn in Pontoise in 1872, was pursued by four bidders and achieved $2.5 million against its $1.2-1.8 million estimate. Félix Vallotton’s poetic domestic scene, Femme couchée dormant (Le Sommeil), triggered an animated battle between six collectors on the phones and in the room, pushing it above its $1.8-2.5 million estimate to sell for $2.8 million. The canvas had been acquired by the Pritzkers from Wildenstein & Co., New York, in 1985 and remained with them ever since, as did most lots in the sale.

Lot 10, the Cubist Nature morte by Fernand Léger, also sparked back-and-forth bidding from five contenders, driving the work to $2,214,000, nearly double its $800,000-$1.2 million estimate. This was followed by a $9,200,000 result for Max Beckmann’s classics-inspired canvas, sought by five bidders, and Joan Miró’s uncanny sculptural reinterpretation La Mère Ubu, which achieved $5,052,000 after a battle between four bidders, landing near the midpoint of its $4-6 million estimate. The bronze had been acquired by the couple in 1980 from legendary dealer Pierre Matisse in New York.

Another highlight, Henri Matisse’s Léda et le cygne, sold for $10.4 million, meeting its high estimate with fees. One of the very few architectural pieces by the artist—the majority of which are in public spaces or museums—and the first of its kind to appear at auction, the unique work was commissioned in 1943 by Argentine diplomat Marcelo Fernández. Last exhibited publicly during the 1984-85 Matisse exhibition at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, it was acquired the following year by the Pritzkers from Feingarten Galleries in Los Angeles. But Paul Gauguin’s La Maison du Pen du, gardeuse de vache from his Nabis period failed to find enough bidders to meet its $6-8 million estimate, selling instead at its reserve for $4,930,000.

Frida Kahlo’s $54.7 million record

The evening continued with a section entirely dedicated to Surrealism, as the movement continues to gain momentum, further ignited by the major Surrealist show that has just opened at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and as its unsettling aesthetic resonates uncannily with the chaos, sentiments and desire to exorcise it that define our time. In only one night, Sotheby’s placed more than $123 million of Surrealist works, the highest total for Surrealist art ever sold in one evening at Sotheby’s.

Frida Kahlo’s El sueño (La cama) from 1940 achieved $54.7 million with fees, becoming the most expensive work by a female artist. Sotheby’s

The dedicated single-owner sale Exquisite Corpus offered works from one of the most distinguished private Surrealist collections, accumulated over four decades, yet kept rigorously unnamed in keeping with the movement’s aura of mystery. Nonetheless, given that many of the lots appeared in the Guggenheim’s 1999 exhibition “Surrealism: Two Private Eyes,” which celebrated the collections of Daniel Filipacchi and record producer Nesuhi Ertegun—who together assembled the most important grouping of Surrealist art in private hands—we can reasonably speculate that the consignor is most likely the Ertegun estate, especially once noticing that several works list in their provenance that they were acquired from the Parisian dealer Daniel Filipacchi, ruling him out as the consignor. Artnews reached the same conclusion, reporting that the 1940 Kahlo was consigned by the estate of Selma Ertegun, who built the collection with her late husband Nesuhi Ertegun. The session closed with a white-glove result of $98.1 million, with 67 percent of works selling above their high estimates.

The undisputed star of the collection was Frida Kahlo’s masterpiece of mystery and spirituality, El sueño (La cama), which ignited spirited international bidding before hammering at $47 million, or $54.7 million with fees, to Anna Di Stasi, Sotheby’s senior vice president and head of the Latin American art department. The result not only set a new record for the artist but also for any woman artist at auction, surpassing the previous $44.4 million benchmark set by Georgia O’Keeffe in 2014. The mystical canvas had been purchased by the consignor at Sotheby’s in 1980 for $51,000 and remained in the collection since then, marking a return of roughly 107,000 percent.

Depicting a skeleton floating above the artist as she lies in her bed—herself suspended midair as a fragile terrestrial vessel—Kahlo visualizes what art historian Whitney Chadwick describes as the “Mexican belief in the indivisible unity of life and death.” Considered a key work in Kahlo’s career, where she reached the height of her symbolic and psychological resonance, the canvas boasts a major exhibition history, having appeared in “Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti” (1982-83) at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, the Haus am Waldsee in Hamburg, Kunstverein Hannover, Kulturhuset Stockholm, New York University’s Grey Art Gallery and the Museo Nacional de Arte in Mexico City. It also featured prominently in the Guggenheim’s 1999 show “Surrealism: Two Private Eyes,” and in the Tate’s landmark Kahlo survey in 2005, which later traveled to the Walker Art Center and the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2007-08.

We will see this masterpiece again soon in a slate of upcoming exhibitions, including “Frida y Diego: The Last Dream” at MoMA in New York (March 22-September 7, 2026), “Frida: The Making of an Icon” at Tate Modern in London (June 25, 2026-January 3, 2027), “Frida Kahlo—The Painter” at Fondation Beyeler in Basel (January 31-May 17, 2027), and “The Autonomous Gaze” at the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn, Kunstmuseum Basel, the Espoo Museum of Modern Art and BOZAR Brussels (December 2026–July 2028).

Another standout of the evening, Salvador Dalí’s jewel-like Symbiose de la tête aux coquillages, captivated several bidders with its hallucinatory power, reaching $4,198,000 (est. $2-3 million) on the phone with an Asian bidder. With a distinguished exhibition history—from the Hayward Gallery’s Dada and Surrealism Reviewed (1978), to Centre Pompidou’s “Salvador Dalí: rétrospective, 1920-1980 (1979-80),” to the Guggenheim’s “Surrealism: Two Private Eyes (1999)”—the work was acquired from Daniel Filipacchi in Paris in 1977 and remained with the consignor ever since, meaning they were also responsible for these museum loans.

The market for Paul Delvaux also remains strong, with his haunting Composition reaching the high end of its estimate and selling for $3.8 million (est. $2.5-3.5 million).

Female Surrealists remain a bright spot. First exhibited in 1953 as part of her solo show at Alexander Iolas in 1958 and formerly in the collection of William N Copley, Dorothea Tanning’s otherworldly Interior with Sudden Joy sold for $3.2 million (est. $2-3 million), setting a new record for the artist. Her previous record, Endgame (1944), achieved $2.3 million at Christie’s last May.

Dorothea Tanning’s otherworldly Interior with Sudden Joy sold for $3.2 million (est. $2-3 million), setting a new record for the artist. Sotheby’s

Highly coveted among collectors are the extremely rare paintings on masonite by Remedios Varo. Created shortly after Varo fled war-torn Europe, marking a pivotal shift in the artist’s storied practice, her Sans titre from 1943 approached the million mark after fees, landing at $952,500 (est. $500,000-700,000). Her current record, Revelación, was set last May at Christie’s at $6.22 million, surpassing her earlier $6.19 million record for Armonía (Autorretrato Sugerente) in 2020. Reflecting the growing curatorial effort to decentralize Surrealism beyond Paris, the recent major survey celebrating the movement’s centenary dedicates its final room to a compelling dialogue between Varo and Leonora Carrington.

Another striking leap came for the French artist, illustrator and long-underrecognized Surrealist insider Valentine Hugo, whose Le Crapaud de Maldoror climbed to $825,555 after seven bidders pushed it far beyond its $150,000-200,000 estimate. And for those who enjoy the footnotes of Surrealist intrigue, the piece dates from the period when Hugo was also romantically entangled with André Breton.

New attention to Surrealist influences in Latin American modernism also propelled Óscar Domínguez’s La Machine à écrire, which more than doubled its high estimate and sold for $3.7 million (est. $1-1.5 million). More broadly, as institutions work to broaden the canon, overlooked figures outside Surrealism’s Parisian core are gaining the long-overdue recognition they deserve.

One of them is Austrian-Mexican artist Wolfgang Paalen, a member of Abstraction-Création from 1934 to 1935, who joined the Surrealist movement after relocating to Mexico in 1935 and remained a significant figure until 1942. His revelatory, surreal landscape, Fata Alaska, set a new auction record for the artist at $1,016,000 (est. $350,000-450,000).

Another double record arrived courtesy of Hans Bellmer, who broke his auction record twice in one night. First, his uncanny gouache Main et Bras achieved $508,000 (est. $100,000-200,000). Then, a rare and intensely erotic oil on canvas—a medium he rarely used, being far better known for his photographs of dolls—nearly reached the million-dollar mark, fetching a record-setting $942,000 (est. $300,000-400,000). “The starting-point of desire, with respect to the intensity of its images, is not in a perceptible whole but in the detail,” Bellmer wrote in his anatomy of image. “The essential point to retain from the monstrous dictionary of analogies/antagonisms which constitute the dictionary of the image is that a given detail, such as a leg, is perceptible, accessible to memory and available, in short, is real.” It is a reflection that perfectly encapsulates the tension between fascination and horror, erotism and violence that animates all his seductive yet unsettling work.

A $97 million Modern Evening

The evening concluded with the core offering of the Modern Evening auction, which across its 29 lots generated $97 million, surpassing the pre-sale estimate of $71.1-101.9 million. One of the evening’s most anticipated lots, René Magritte’s Le Jockey Perdu, led the sale, achieving $12.3 million after fees. The exquisite gouache encapsulates Magritte’s signature play with visual paradoxes, maintaining the sense of spatial disorientation and uncanniness—alongside the sly playfulness—that runs through his entire oeuvre. First conceived as a papier collé in 1926, the motif was quickly followed by an oil of the same title, which headlined the artist’s first one-man exhibition in 1927 at Galerie Le Centaure in Brussels. Evidently fascinated by the theme, Magritte returned to the image of the lost jockey in multiple gouaches and oils throughout his career. The work came from the collection of the late real estate magnate Matthew Bucksbaum and his wife Carolyn, whose group of works in the sale brought a combined total of $25.2 million.

Despite the nearly three-hour marathon, the Modern session opened energetically with Joan Miró’s oil-on-burlap panel, Personnages et oiseau devant le soleil, also from the Bucksbaum Collection. It prompted a dynamic bidding battle between seven contenders, rapidly pushing it far beyond its $400,000-600,000 estimate to land at $2,368,000. The couple had acquired the work in 1998, when it last appeared at Sotheby’s, consigned by Perls Galleries.

Other top results of the evening included Georgia O’Keeffe’s Large Dark Red Leaves on White, which landed at $7.9 million, just shy of its high estimate. Jean Dubuffet’s Restaurant Rougeit II sat comfortably within its range, selling for $7.5 million. Degas’s pastel of three ballerinas, Trois danseuses, was chased by five bidders and fetched $5.8 million.

René Magritte’s Le Jockey Perdu led the Modern Evening sale, achieving $12.3 million after fees. Sotheby’s

A Modern sale would be incomplete without Monet. One of his famed Impressionistic views, capturing the shifting light around Rouen Cathedral, more than doubled its low estimate, selling for $7.4 million after a lengthy bidding war among six bidders in different geographies. The painting was practically fresh to auction, having remained in the Schlumberger collection for over 60 years, and appeared at auction for the first time last night.

Another artist who inspired strong interest was Childe Hassam, one of the leading American Impressionists and a central figure in what became known as the “Ten,” the group that broke from the Society of American Artists to champion a more progressive, modern approach at the turn of the 20th century. His Newport, October Sundown from 1901 was fiercely pursued by four bidders, achieving $2,002,000 above a $1.8 million high estimate. The painting came from the Sam and Marilyn Fox Collection, two prominent patrons and civic leaders from the St. Louis region, whose group generated a total of $2.7 million, exceeding its high estimate of $2.4 million.

As MoMA finally pays overdue tribute to the work of Cuban artist Wifredo Lam with a show that opened earlier this month, his Ídolo (Oyá/Divinité de l’air et de la mort) drew strong attention in the room, selling for $7.4 million and marking the second-highest auction price ever achieved for the artist. The renewed institutional spotlight clearly reinforced market confidence, positioning the canvas as another highlight of the evening and Lam as a name we will likely see rise further at auction in the coming seasons.

While the Modern section closed with white gloves, several lots still fell below their low estimates. Arthur Garfield Dove’s Rose and Locust Stump, backed by a guarantee and irrevocable bids, sold for $681,000, nearly half its low estimate, despite its extensive exhibition history. Andrew Wyeth’s dark landscape, East Waldoboro, also sold below expectations at $3,588,000 (est. $4-6 million). Jacques Lipchitz’s sculpture Baigneuse assise went for half its low estimate at $381,000, despite its prestigious provenance from the Geri Brawerman Collection, which generated a total of $16.7 million during the night.

Sotheby’s continued with its day sales on November 21, which delivered an additional aggregated total above $51 million, between the $46,404,999 of the Modern Day Sale and the $4,912,868 for the Exquisite Corpus Day session. Sotheby’s Contemporary day sale, held a few days earlier, generated $111.4 million, the highest total ever for a Day sale at Sotheby’s. The white-glove offering for the Lauder day session brought the total for the Lauder collection to $531.3 million.

Ultimately, Sotheby’s was the clear winner this round, generating a solid and unequivocally successful $1.173 billion with its Evening and Day sales. Meanwhile, Christie’s fall marquee sales totaled $965 million, while Phillips brought in $92,139,589 across its various sessions. In total, across all three auction houses, the November marquee sales have generated more than $2.2 billion, a number that suggests the market has rediscovered some of its energy. Miami, however, will be the real litmus test of the season, because what we saw in action and at auction this week was only the very top of the market.

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Elisa Carollo

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November 22, 2025
Frieze Returns to London: Here’s Are This Year’s Highlights

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This year’s Frieze Masters offered a beautiful juxtaposition of the natural and mechanic. Photo by Hugo Glendinning. Courtesy of Frieze and Hugo Glendinning.

London’s art world has come alive once more for Frieze week. The Big Smoke is glittering with new shows, drinks receptions and VIP dinners and along with thousands, I went to pray at the feet of art and commerce at Frieze London 2024. The habitual hum of excitement bordered on anxiety this year as a depressed art market and an expanded Art Basel Paris (due to start in a few days) invited talk about London’s rivalry with the City of Lights. Is this the beginning of Brexit’s wrestling of the European art crown from London’s hands? Frieze director Eva Langret, showcasing a vibrant and varied London art scene, seemed to successfully make the case for why not.

“Frieze was never just a trade fair,” Langret told The Art Newspaper this week, but also an opportunity for “the many conversations that you can anchor around the galleries and the many ways in which they work for the artists.” Indeed, I found much to enjoy—particularly, as is always the case with art fairs, the opportunity to discover exciting artists and galleries I had never heard of. Of course, I would be remiss not to snark that if Frieze truly wishes to be more than a trade fair, they will need to consider adjusting ticket prices to encourage wider participation.

A redesigned floor plan by A Studio Between prioritized the new and emerging galleries in the Focus section, who, rather than sulking somewhere near the back of the tent, were able to greet visitors immediately. Like last year, they impressed with innovative booths. The Focus section is known for being experimental—the galleries in this section are looking to make a name for themselves. Placed along a central corridor, we were able to interact with them repeatedly whilst navigating the fair. I was particularly excited to see Xxijra Hii steal focus with Hannah Morgan’s alabaster carvings, steelwork, pewter casts, frogged clay and soundscape. I’d previously seen a very small show in Xxijra Hii’s boxy garage-like space in Deptford, their strong showing at Frieze is a testament to the breadth and depth of the London art scene even in a struggling art market and amongst omnipresent funding cuts.

SEE ALSO: One Fine Show: ‘Consuelo Kanaga, Catch the Spirit’ at SFMOMA

Other standouts in the Focus section included Eva Gold’s sensitive text-based work at Rose Easton (You were disgusting and that’s why I followed you, 2024), Sands Murray-Wassink’s tongue-in-cheek illustrations at Diez (Culture is not a competition, 2024) and Nils Alix-Tabeling’s camp insectile sculptures at Public Gallery. Further into the fair, the blue-chip galleries presented solid, predictable booths, showing off big names—Georg Baselitz held the fort at the White Cube and Chris Ofili at David Zwirner.

Harlesden High Street’s booth at Frieze London. Photo by Linda Nylind. Courtesy Linda Nylind / Frieze.

For all the talk about Paris and London, Mumbai and New Delhi were the cities at the top of my mind this Frieze London. Indian galleries took pride of place at this year’s fair and ran with breathtaking displays. Vadehra Art Gallery from New Delhi showcased an incredible cabinet of curiosity and banality by Atul Dodiya (Cabinet VI and Cabinet VIII), including pipes, photographs and vaguely animist figurines. Jhaveri Contemporary showcased the textile work of Sayan Chanda (Dwarapalika II, 2024) and Gidree Bawlee (Kaal (Pala) 2023), which blended together into a sublimely sensate and textural experience.

Outside the tent, there were great improvements in the sculpture park this year. Arresting, thoughtful pieces responded deftly to their environment, working with organic forms and pagan imagery to transform a jubilantly sunny Regent’s Park into an other-worldly spectacle. Visitors were greeted by Leonora Carrington’s bronze sculpture The Dancer (2011) upon entering, the figure (half-bird, half-man) melted into bucolic surroundings. Carrington‘s Dancer was swiftly followed by two bronze pillars by Theaster Gates, The Duet (2023). The works in the park were so well integrated into the grounds that the trees that littered the lawn felt like sculptures themselves, blurring the line between the natural and the man-made; one work actually hung from a tree. My favorite by far was Albany Hernandez’s Shadow (2024). This was a shadow painted under a tree in the park using water-based grass paint. The paint marked the tree’s 10:30 a.m. shade; when I arrived around 3 p.m., the tree had two delicate shadows.

Gagosian’s booth at Frieze Masters. Photo by Hugo Glendinning. Courtesy of Frieze and Hugo Glendinning.

At the other end of the sculpture park, Frieze Masters opened with a beautiful juxtaposition of the natural and mechanic. Gagosian’s slick booth of metallic sculpture by John Chamberlain and furniture by Marc Newson stood next to a wooden booth with work much softer in feel at Hauser & Wirth, with broad-ranging paintings from the 19th and 20th Centuries, including Philip Guston and Édouard Manet. In typical showman style, David Aaron followed up last year’s towering T-Rex “Chomper” with an enormous Egyptian sarcophagus from the 7th Century BCE. Thaddeus Mosley at Karma in the ‘Studio’ section—which featured solo shows of living artists and considered their studio practice—seemed like an anchor point in the fair. This is due to the booth’s central placement but also its visual impact. The booth was vast and striking; Mosley’s robust wooden towers, pulling from modernist abstraction and African sculpture, made an imposing statement.

One prominent theme with Masters was the rediscovery of important female artists, with lengthy biographies getting ample space in numerous galleries: Eva Švankmajerová was spotlighted by The Gallery of Everything, Feliza Bursztyn at The Mayor Gallery and Alice Baber at Luxembourg + Co.

All in all, the Frieze fairs were good this year—fun, even. Frieze London celebrated the contemporary art scene in London whilst showcasing talents from across the globe, particularly works by Indian stars. Frieze Masters returned to its rightful place as Frieze London’s drab older sister whilst also reintroducing some unsung talents. The sculpture park, for once, held its own and felt like a destination in and of itself. The stark October sun was shining over an overexcited city, and London, it seemed, was well and truly alive.

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Reuben Esien

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October 11, 2024
Observer’s Guide to the Must-See Shows Opening During Frieze Week

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“Mire Lee: Open Wound” at Tate Modern. Photo © Tate (Lucy Green)

Frieze Art Week has officially kicked off in London with its first openings, as the local community and international visitors gear up for the launch of Frieze London and Frieze Masters tomorrow (October 9). Despite the buzz that some global collectors might skip London in favor of Paris due to the challenge of committing to a full two-week marathon of fairs, the city’s art scene—through its galleries and institutions—has once again curated an impressive lineup that makes a stop in the British capital worthwhile, even if just for a few extra days before heading to the next art week or fair. To help you navigate this year’s Frieze offerings, Observer has compiled a list of the top show openings to check out in London.

Mire Lee’s Hyundai Commission at Tate Modern

Visceral and uncanny, Mire Lee’s art probes the boundaries between the technological and the human. Selected for the prestigious annual Hyundai Commission at Tate Modern, she has transformed the Turbine Hall into a surreal landscape of hanging fabric sculptures and epic mechanical installations, reimagining the space as a living factory populated by alien forms and mysterious processes.

Drawing on the building’s history as a power station, Lee reflects on its monumental scale and how it mirrors humanity’s relentless drive for dominance and control over nature. She has reconfigured the hall into an industrial womb—an environment where human desires and ambitions echo through sprawling mechanical systems. Crafted from industrial materials like silicone, chains, and eerie fluids, her “skin” installations stir a complex interplay of emotions, provoking awe and disgust, desire and repulsion. The work explores horror not merely as fear, but as a gateway to alternative possibilities and future potentialities, as once theorized by Foucault. As Lee expressed in a statement, “Ultimately, I am interested in how behind all human actions there is something soft and vulnerable, such as sincerity, hope, compassion, love and wanting to be loved.”

SEE ALSO: How One Cultural Agency Is Transforming Chicago’s Art Scene

Exploring a non-human concept of the body, the Korean artist’s intricate installations challenge the technological illusion of solidity and permanence, confronting viewers with the inevitable decay and deformation of all subjects over time. By staging this perpetual state of transformation and metamorphosis within a post-apocalyptic setting, the artist engages with a new notion of hybridity—one that blurs the line between the products of the Anthropocene and the unknown entities and processes that will ultimately supersede them.

Mire Lee’s “Open Wound” opens tomorrow (October 9) and is on view at Tate Modern through March 16.

“Hockney and Piero: A Longer Look” at the National Gallery

Detail from David Hockney’s My Parents (1977). Courtesy London’s National Gallery

Don’t miss this rare conversation at the National Gallery, which explores the inspiration David Hockney drew from the enigmatic paintings of Renaissance master Piero Della Francesca. This one-room capsule project creates a space for slow contemplation, juxtaposing two of Hockney’s works—one portraying his mother and father, and the other depicting his friend, curator Henry Geldzahler, alongside the thread that connects them: Piero della Francesca’s The Baptism of Christ. Part of the National Gallery’s Bicentenary celebrations, the project illuminates the connections that weave through art history, highlighting how it’s been a continuous journey of confrontations, inspirations and exchanges, where artists revisit and reinterpret recurring themes and archetypes according to the aesthetics and sensibilities of their own era.

“Hockney and Piero: A Longer Look” is on view through October 27 at the National Gallery in London.

Lygia Clark and Sonia Boyce at Whitechapel Gallery

(l.) Lygia Clark, Revista Manchete, Rio de Janeiro. (r.) Sonia Boyce, Braided Wallpaper, 2023; Digital repeat pattern on tan wallpaper. Courtesy Associação Cultural O mundo de Lygia Clark. / © Sonia Boyce.All Rights Reserved, DACS/Artimage 2024Courtesy of the artist, APALAZZOGALLERYand Hauser & Wirth Gallery.

Opening just ahead of Frieze Art Week, Whitechapel Gallery has set up a compelling dialogue between two artists who, despite distinct geographical and cultural backgrounds, have similarly sought to redefine the relationship between artist and audience by fostering greater interaction and a more participatory approach.

Brazilian artist Lygia Clark, a pioneer of the “Neo-Concrete Movement” (1959-1961), anticipated the notion of Relational Art by developing a new, organic concept of the artwork—one that could fluidly respond to the phenomenological space of the senses. Her creations evolved into “social sculptures” designed to engage and transform through direct interaction, unfolding within the temporal space of community and social cohesion. “Lygia Clark: The I and the You” traces her artistic journey from the mid-1950s to the early 1970s, exploring how her radical approach emerged in response to a turbulent period in Brazil’s history.

In parallel, Venice Golden Lion-winner Sonia Boyce explores similar themes of manipulation and inhabitation, inviting viewers to engage, touch and experience her work in unscripted, immersive ways. “Sonia Boyce: An Awkward Relation” is conceived specifically to resonate with Lygia Clark’s exhibition, showcasing the strong synergies between the British and Brazilian artists’ experiential, participatory practices.

“Lygia Clark: The I and the You” and “Sonia Boyce: An Awkward Relation” are concurrently on view at Whitechapel London through January 12.

George Rouy at Hauser & Wirth

George Rouy’s debut solo exhibition at Hauser & Wirth London, “The Bleed, Part I.” Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

Following the announcement of his representation just a few months ago, the highly sought-after George Rouy is making his debut with Hauser & Wirth in London. The painter’s meteoric rise stems from his ability to resonate with a new generation of collectors, offering a visual language that captures the tensions and contradictions of the body and psyche as they navigate the physical and digital realms.

“The Bleed, Part I” showcases Rouy’s latest body of work, where he delves further into themes of collective mass, multiplicities, and human movement across different modes of existence. Playing between the “void,” where the psyche expands and projects itself, and the “surrounding,” where the physical body is in constant negotiation with external forces, Rouy’s paintings depict the push-and-pull between these realms, producing figures that are simultaneously fragmented and whole. This tension suggests the potential for a new hybrid human experience, oscillating between the linear constraints of the body and the quantum possibilities it can access.

The exhibition will continue with “Part II” at Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles, launching during Frieze L.A. and underscoring the gallery’s commitment to positioning Rouy as “a leading figure of the new generation of painters.”

George Rouy’s “The Bleed, Part 1” is on view at Hauser & Wirth London through December 21.

Dominic Chambers at Lehmann Maupin

Dominic Chambers “Meraki” at Lehmann Maupin, London. Photo © Lucy Dawkins / Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul, and London

Suspended between a dreamlike world, a sentimental dimension, and a poetic space of literary references, Dominic Chambers’s paintings capture moments of joy, leisure, love, and life. His vibrant canvases are defined by intentionally surreal palettes that heighten the emotions and atmosphere of each scene. Since graduating from Yale, the young artist has swiftly risen to prominence, making his debut at Lehmann Maupin in New York soon after. Now, for his first solo show at the gallery’s London location—his U.K. debut—Chambers presents an expansive new body of work, including paintings, works on paper and color studies. His visual language has already evolved into something more allegorical, shifting from human-centered scenes to lyrical or oneiric landscapes where figures often float, yet the mood and feeling remain the true protagonists.

Drawing its title from the Greek word meraki, meaning “to pour one’s soul into one’s work,” the exhibition takes this notion as a springboard to explore how the concept of the soul—or one’s interiority—intersects with devotion and creativity. Rich in both art historical and religious references, the works tap into a more spiritual dimension, expanding beyond the sentimental intimacy that defined his earlier pieces. Deeply influenced by Magic Realism, Chambers’s paintings detach themselves from material reality, moving fluidly between inner, outer and otherworldly realms, exploring symbols, signals and intermediaries that guide us in navigating the layers of human experience.

Dominic Chambers’s “Meraki” is on view at Lehmann Maupin through November 9.

Rirkrit Tiravanija at Pilar Corrias

“A MILLION RABBIT HOLES” marks Rirkrit Tiravanija’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery. Courtesy of the artist and Pilar Corrias

As a pioneer of Relational Art, Rirkrit Tiravanija’s work carries an inherently political charge, as demonstrated by his latest show at Pilar Corrias London. In “A MILLION RABBIT HOLES,” Tiravanija explores the deepening polarization and disillusionment surrounding the U.S. election, touching on globally pervasive sentiments as the world’s balance grows increasingly fragile. Transforming the gallery walls with forest-like wallpaper, he creates an immersive environment reflecting the charged atmosphere of American politics in the lead-up to the election, inspired by his experiences in Upstate New York.

Known for his groundbreaking installations centered around cooking and communal sharing, Tiravanija’s practice emphasizes human connections over traditional notions of art as static objects. His works often subvert societal hierarchies and behavioral norms, inviting audiences to participate actively—whether through interactions with others or through the artist’s facilitation. In his London exhibition, visitors are plunged into a world of paradoxical propaganda, surrounded by an intentionally illusory, pastoral setting that underscores the fiction of contemporary politics and the false promises of a better future.

Rirkrit Tiravanija’s “A MILLION RABBIT HOLES” is on view at Pilar Corrias, London, through November 9.

Tracey Emin at White Cube

Tracey Emin’s “I followed you to the end” at White Cube, London. Courtesy of teh Artist and White Cube.

Since her rise to fame as the queen of the Young British Artists with her unforgettable My Bed (1998), Tracey Emin has captivated international audiences with her provocatively raw yet deeply human art, addressing the peaks and valleys of existence—love, desire, grief and loss—with an unflinching honesty. Her autobiographical approach has laid bare the intensely personal yet universal experience of being a woman, capturing everything from the awakening of sexual desire and the claiming of one’s pleasure to the visceral trials of violence, shame, illness, abortion and menopause. This turbulent inner world of emotions, passions, and sensations is instinctively translated onto Emin’s canvases through bold, unplanned strokes that channel her emotional energy directly onto the surface.

Emin has never hesitated to confront the most profound physical and psychological challenges, chronicling the unique struggles of the female condition in today’s world. Her latest show in London continues the journey she began with her recent exhibition at White Cube New York last year, presenting a powerful new series of paintings and sculptures that delve into themes of love and loss, mortality and rebirth.

Tracey Emin’s “I followed you to the end” is on view at White Cube London through November 10.

Anna Weyant at Gagosian

Anna Weyant’s “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolves?” at Gagosian London. Artwork © Anna Weyant Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd Courtesy Gagosian

Every time Anna Weyant stages an exhibition, it becomes evident that beneath the buzz surrounding her private life, there’s an undeniable technical mastery that continues to evolve while remaining deeply engaged in a dialogue with art history. Drawing as much from the refined elegance of Flemish portraiture as from the dramatic chiaroscuro of Caravaggio, Weyant’s paintings are not only visually captivating but also deeply intriguing. They meticulously uphold the Western canons of beauty and “good painting”—executed with precision—but simultaneously disrupt this perfection with uncanny elements that provoke the viewer to question these very ideals.

Rendered in somber tones and pale hues, her figures often play tragicomic roles, suspended in a dreamlike, timeless space. These doll-like girls move through her canvases with a fierce presence, yet subtly reveal a concealed inner struggle—suggesting a fragile, unspoken vulnerability. They project an image of strength, wielding their allure with confidence, but betray an underlying trauma or insecurity that compels them to seek validation and admiration externally. This tension resonates perfectly with the exhibition’s title, “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” Marking her London debut, the show makes these dynamics of concealment and performance even more apparent. The feminine attributes of her meticulously rendered classical bodies are only glimpsed through small windows, partially obscured by a fabric blind or a newspaper—introducing a fresh psychological layer to her latest body of work.

Anna Weyant’s “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolves?” is on view through December 20.

Alexander Calder at Ben Brown Fine Arts

“Calder: Extreme Cantilever” at Ben Brown London. Courtesy of Ben Brown.

Opening on Frieze Masters Night at Ben Brown Fine Arts, this exhibition reunites Alexander Calder’s three unique cantilever sculptures for the first time, presented alongside a curated selection of oil paintings, works on paper and historically significant artifacts. The centerpiece sculptures—Extreme Cantilever, More Extreme Cantilever and Extrême porte à faux III—are on loan from the Calder Foundation and distinguished private collections, showcasing the artist’s boundless imagination and intuitive genius that firmly position him as one of the 20th Century’s leading innovators. More importantly, this grouping captures a pivotal evolution in Calder’s formal and conceptual approach to spatial abstraction, shaped by the seismic impact of the Second World War. Confronted with a world grappling with collective trauma, Calder responded with sculptures that became strikingly evocative, featuring increasingly complex forms that seem to encapsulate the anxieties of an era—a resonance that remains poignant amid today’s renewed geopolitical uncertainties.

“Calder: Extreme Cantilever” opens tomorrow (October 9) and runs on November 22 at Ben Brown Fine Arts in London.

“Enchanted Alchemies: Magic, Mysticism, and the Occult in Art” at Lévy Gorvy Dayan

Geltrude Abercrombie, Lady with Black Braid; Oil on Masonite, 8 × 10 inches (20.3 × 25.4 cm). Courtesy of Lévi Gorvy Dayan

As interest in Surrealism, now 100 years old, continues to rise, Lévy Gorvy Dayan’s latest exhibition in London delves into themes of magic, mysticism, and the occult through a collection of masterpieces primarily by Surrealist women artists such as Gertrude Abercrombie, Eileen Agar, Leonora Carrington, Elda Cerrato, Ithell Colquhoun, Leonor Fini and Monica Sjöö, placed in dialogue with contemporary figures like Francesco Clemente, Chitra Ganesh, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Bharti Kher, Linder and Goshka Macuga. Blurring the boundaries between spirituality, mysticism, and hallucination, the show provides a sweeping exploration of the human imagination across cultures and eras.

Organized into three thematic chapters—“Occultism and Dreams,” “Magic and Mysticism” and “Alchemy: Enchantment and Transformations”—the exhibition examines how artists over the past century have engaged with occult and esoteric traditions to shape and reshape their personal, cultural and historical narratives. The timing feels particularly relevant as society experiences a renewed fascination with alternative knowledge and spirituality in an era that has “killed its idols” yet still searches for new belief systems amid a pervasive sense of irrationality and uncertainty.

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Elisa Carollo

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October 8, 2024
Tahnee Lonsdale Opens Up About Painting the Spiritual Feminine

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

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

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

Tahnee Lonsdale in her studio. Photo Katrina Dickson.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Elisa Carollo

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August 31, 2024