Installation view: “Nothing Still About Still Lifes” at the Deji Art Museum in Nanjing, China. Courtesy of the Deji Art Museum
Welcome to One 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.
Late last year, I had the privilege of being a guest of Shanghai’s West Bund Art & Design, the most important fair on the Chinese mainland. It was the first edition in the futuristic and newly constructed West Bund Convention Center, and alongside strong sales—Perrotin reported 40 percent of its high-end booth sold out on day one—there was an array of excellent and sophisticated art, particularly in its curated xiàn chǎng section, the equivalent of the Untitled section at Art Basel in Switzerland. But I spent the days prior to the fair at a venue no less tony with art no less impressive: the Deji Plaza luxury shopping mall in Nanjing, atop which sits the Deji Art Museum.
Deji was a revelation on several levels. As with the West Bund fair, sales at the shopping mall were nothing to sneeze at: $3.5 billion in 2025, which, according to the Economist, may make it the highest-grossing mall in the world. The museum on the top floor was open until midnight, an idea more museums should embrace because it remained popular throughout the night. Its best-loved exhibition, “Nothing Still About Still Lifes,” reopened in October and is one of those great shows that showcases the surprising depths that can be explored through artworks on a single subject: flowers.
Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Edvard Munch, Henri Rousseau, Andy Warhol, Yayoi Kusama, David Hockney and Anselm Kiefer are all on display, paired with works by numerous Chinese luminaries. The boldfaced names featured in this show from Deji’s extensive and distinguished collection might make it sound straightforward and even dull, but the exhibition is not. Almost everything on display is experimental in some way, an unexpected offering from the artist or an unusual take on this ancient subject. This is announced in the very first room dominated by a monumental Jeff Koons sculpture, Pink Ballerina (2009-2021), composed of delicate lace-like white marble and fresh-cut roses—real ones in deep red. Like the pink of its title, the piece’s intense florality exists mostly in the mind of the viewer.
The blockbusters on display are incredible and expensive, to the point that going through the show can feel like going to a really good preview at an auction house. I found myself especially attracted to the stranger works that display the depths of the collection. The false-looking painterly vegetal mass surrounding yellow buds in Corbeille de Fleurs would have led me to think the work was made in the 2010s or maybe the 1980s, but in fact it was made in 1925 and by Georges Braque of all people.
Not that the blockbusters aren’t just as fun. Renoir’s Fleurs dans un Vase (1878) is displayed alongside the original Majolica vase depicted in the painting. The exhibition rewards deep looking and offers threads to be followed. That first room with the Koons includes two works by Picasso, both titled Vase de Fleurs from 1901 and 1904, that demonstrate, with economy, the transition from his Blue to his Rose period. The threads between West and East are no less satisfying to explore. Wu Dayu’s Untitled 128 (c. 1980) merges the bursts of color found in European modernism and the distinctly Chinese philosophical ideas of inner energy and resonance. Sanyu’s Vase of Flowers in Blue (1956) is meanwhile sui generis. The vase is a sketch compared to the intense details of the flowers, and the background is so rich that it could be an astounding abstract painting without anything else in it.
But each work in this show is a gem. Shanghai’s West Bund Art & Design for 2026 is sure to be as well attended as this past edition, and if you’re in the region, a day trip to Nanjing to see this show at Deji would be time well spent.
Morgan Buck, We’re the Only Winners, 2025. Acrylic on canvas, 20 x 31 inches. Photo: Mario Gallucci; Courtesy the artist and ILY2
These days, Morgan Buck doesn’t make paintings that look like paintings. With their airbrushed surfaces and grainy, digitized haze, his canvases look like screenshot shitposts pulled from the weirder corners of the internet—and I mean that in the best way possible. Buck doesn’t do lazy nods to digital culture, and his work is meticulously crafted. His recent solo show, “Instantly & Effortlessly,” at ILY2 in New York—the artist’s second with the gallery—demonstrated just how far he’s willing to go in his engagement with the visual detritus of our algorithm-fed lives, marrying the deliberate labor of painting with junk images in something that shines a light on the promises and the pitfalls of both.
Here’s where I should probably cop to personally loving the weirder corners of the internet, where Buck’s process begins. He scavenges screenshots, video captions, A.I. outputs and stock imagery, manipulates them digitally and uses them as raw material for paintings that are at once funny and deeply uncanny—think deep-fried memes, but more refined. Buck riffs on themes of attention, automation and absurdity while grounding each piece in the technical rigor of photorealistic airbrushing.
It’s shitposting with a twist: conceptually agile, technically sophisticated and, like the best absurdist memes, sneakily moving. There’s humor and a sense of depravity, along with a real tension between image and object, intention and accident, meaning and nonsense. Some of Buck’s paintings draw you in with their oddness and keep you there with an undercurrent of melancholy. Others are just plain fun to look at.
Buck can be as irreverent as his paintings suggest, but while he talks about his practice with a casual bravado, there’s an undercurrent of disciplined artistic self-awareness that comes through when he talks about his work. He is, you might say, serious about not being too serious. His paintings are smart without being didactic, technically impressive without being self-important and prompt questions about how we engage with both art and the internet. His work is the most fully realized—and amusing—blurring of high and low culture I’ve seen in a long time, and I caught up with Buck as “Instantly & Effortlessly” was closing to talk about artificial intelligence in the arts, the allure of the airbrush and painting with a sense of humor.
The title of your exhibition “Instantly & Effortlessly,” which closed at ILY2 late last year, felt like a critique of digital-age gratification. How did you choose it, and what was it meant to signal?
I thought it was a funny and attention-grabbing title that related to the streamlining of art production with A.I. Ultimately, I’m an artist very interested in process and ideas of labor in art. I have an MFA in craft, so it’s part of my background to be interested in these topics. Part of my goal with my process is efficiency, so having A.I. in the mix is a dream come true. Using A.I. as an artist is pretty much like banging creative heroin: it gets you to the best results without trying. Just instant and effortless. No pain, just gain.
You use an airbrush technique that intentionally suppresses brushstrokes and painterly “texture” and also obscures subjects. What motivates that choice, and how does the technique support the conceptual underpinnings of your work?
Honestly, there’s not really much of a “concept” behind it. It’s more of a scam to make people take digital art seriously without them necessarily knowing it’s digital. People seem to want effort from artists for some reason. They don’t want to just see that someone walked up to a machine and pushed the art button. I also think painting translates the digital image into something that reads more human in a more visceral way. Originally, when I started airbrush painting, it was mostly about trying to make the painting look like a digital print.
A few years before the airbrush came into my practice, I was a painter who painted with heavy brushstrokes and a palette knife and all of that jazz. That painterly materiality gets to the point where it’s just a default filter that says, “I’m a painted painting painted by a painter” in every piece of art one makes. It’s a very boring effect when you think about it, and it’s also not effortless either. If anything, it’s trying way too hard.
For this reason, I became tired of painting, and for a year and a half, I didn’t paint. I just thought painting was for poseurs. This is when I started focusing on digital images that I made with my cell phone panorama. I’d pull up Google Images with a bunch of weird thumbnails and do a screenshot with the panorama distorting the images into a surreal, blurry glitch collage. They had cool compositions and really looked like paintings, but weren’t. I’d print the images and exhibit them like photography. Pretty instant and effortless.
Morgan Buck, I Don’t Even Know the Word Philosophy, 2025. Acrylic on canvas, 28 x 22 inches. Photo: Mario Gallucci; Courtesy the artist and ILY2
However, the problem with that work was that people needed an explanation for what they were looking at, which is ultimately what made it a fail for me. In 2017, I did an artist residency in Leipzig, Germany, and didn’t really have much access to a printer, so I began to paint the digital images. I had a relapse. I became a total conformist poseur again. It felt great. All of a sudden, no explanation was necessary. It’s a painting. People get that. I came back home to Portland and wanted to blur the line between the digital prints and the painting materials even more. That’s where the airbrush really clicked. Airbrush, with the atomization, can create photographic effects much more efficiently than the paintbrush. It’s a flat surface like a sheet of paper. I’ve been painting with the airbrush exclusively since 2018, and it’s been my default for so long that I don’t even think about it as a novelty like most people do. I just think it’s the only relevant way to paint, period.
Your paintings often stitch together images sourced from digital overload, from social media debris to A.I. fragments; how do you decide which images deserve to be slowed down and transformed into the physical space of painting?
I think it’s important to mention that it’s not all digital overload, social media and A.I. The captions are always from my rigorous art practice of sitting on the couch watching TV and movies and taking screenshots of captions that I like, usually while drinking beer. I also use some of my own photos from my real life, so it’s more about a full range of visual experience and not quite as solely tech-focused as your question suggests. To answer your question, though, I often decide using tech.
I’ll post the digital images on my Instagram stories, and usually I will already know which ones I want to focus on, but if one I’m on the fence about gets a ton of likes, specifically from followers I know have good taste and know me personally, I will usually focus on those. Mostly, I’ll know because it will already look like a good painting, and the caption frames the image in a way that adds to its narrative in a funny or interesting way.
You’ve spoken about humor, depravity and immediacy in quick-scroll culture; where does your own sense of humor come into play when you’re assembling and recomposing these scenes?
My sense of humor often comes in when I’m choosing which caption to use. Sometimes the picture is the joke, and the caption is the punchline. The best part is the fat is an example of that. I had DALL·E Mini generate a flesh-tone Jell-O, and that weird waxy cube is what it came up with, and then I had that caption that I mentioned in my collection of captions from Iron Chef Japan. Sometimes it’s an idea that happens on site. The painting I mean he’s a genius as far as I’m concerned was like that. I was in Kauai looking at that twin waterfall everyone likes and instantly imagined an Alec Monopoly mural on the wall of the cliff there. I follow him on Instagram, so his luxurious high-roller genius is drilled into my mind daily. I took photos knowing I was going to make that painting. I don’t have a set order of how it happens. It’s all nebulous. The A.I., photography, digital appropriation, etc., it’s essentially just like how a normal artist would draw. It’s just my version of draftsmanship.
Your work engages with the idea of dopamine, reward systems and the psychology of attention; do you think painting can counter or rewire the attention habits shaped by digital culture?
A hundred percent I know it can. My paintings are way more powerful than Mark Zuckerberg. Every time I pick up my airbrush, he starts sweating uncontrollably. He trembles in fear that his reign will all be over soon. Only my paintings can do that. He knows it.
Seriously, though, I embrace social media and all of the dopamine reward systems. I’ve gained so many opportunities and friends from social media. Where would I be without it? The algorithms and filter bubbles are a problem, though. However, if I were to speculate, I’d bet power and money will continue to win at the expense of ethical concerns even long after my paintings hit gallery walls. I doubt any damage to the attention economy directly linked to my art will be reported.
I also want to say that with A.I., it’s easy to get tired of the common, easily prompted A.I. art and deepfakes that we see on our Instagram and TikTok reels. That aspect is super annoying to me. However, people forget we have a once-in-a-species opportunity to reinvent our idea of human creativity. A.I. is a tool that is not human that collaborates with you. It’s hard to understate the significance of that. It will only become more unlimited. You can decide how much or how little, which A.I. model for this part of the image or that part of the image, etc. The artists who don’t want to touch it because they think it’s clip art are really just missing out, in my opinion. Do you really think you’re going to make more interesting art with a piece of charcoal? There are so many unconventional ways of using A.I. I just want to encourage other artists to begin the journey and open their minds more.
How do you hope people will engage with the work that was in “Instantly & Effortlessly” moving forward? Do you want them to laugh, cringe, reflect, feel nostalgia or question their own consumption of images and attention?
I want people to enjoy the work, think it’s funny, interesting and well executed, but really I’m not an artist who is focused on clear communication goals. Each piece is just data from my process that I’m presenting to the audience. There’s a stream of consciousness there that people can certainly draw meanings from: critiques of capitalism, technology, pretentiousness, cringe and so on. What it means all together is simple. Buy all of my paintings right now. That’s it. Easy.
Transitions (2012) by Joan Semmel at the Jewish Museum in New York. Photo: Fred Voon for Observer
In 1973, when no gallery in New York would show her vivid paintings of bodies in various configurations of sex, Joan Semmel created her own space. She poured her savings into renting a unit on 141 Prince Street, called it a gallery and mounted her first solo show in the city. “I believed in the work, and I wanted it to be seen,” she said in a recent conversation at the Jewish Museum. Her new exhibition, “Joan Semmel: In the Flesh” (on through May 31 and one of our picks for must-see exhibitions), presents 16 oil paintings across five decades that engage with nudity and sexuality on a woman’s terms. Each work is unabashed in its frankness and its proportions. The largest, Skin in the Game (2019), is 24 feet wide and 8 feet tall. It’s as if Semmel always paints as far as her arm can reach.
Semmel was born in the Bronx in 1932, and her studio is located in SoHo. In the ’60s, however, she spent seven years as an abstract expressionist in Madrid, with solo shows that traveled to Buenos Aires and Montevideo. Though Francoist Spain was more conservative than America—marriage could not be legally dissolved, and the newspaper would announce a Catholic saint of the day—she enjoyed some degree of freedom there as a foreigner. In 1970, Semmel was back in New York as a single mother of two. She had left because of her husband’s work; now she had returned to divorce him.
In those days, the sexploitation of women in magazines and pornography to satisfy male fantasies was rampant. As John Berger wrote in Ways of Seeing (1972), “Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.” Semmel was shocked at how lopsided the sexual revolution was, and she longed for equal participation. Thus followed her erotic paintings, which retain an abstract expressionist palette that gives her subjects an otherworldly glow of pink, orange or green.
Painting naked women—from Sandro Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus (c. 1485) to Gustave Courbet’s The Origin of the World (1866) to Tom Wesselmann’s Great American Nudes (1961–73)—has long been the province and prerogative of men. Semmel’s depictions of sex defied the taboo against women broaching the topic, and she sought to correct the power imbalance, sometimes in literal ways. In Flip-Flop Diptych (1971), a couple takes turns to be on top. In Intimacy-Autonomy (1974), lovers lounge side by side, neither dominating the other.
After returning from Spain to New York in 1970, Semmel switched from abstract expressionism to painting nudes. Photo: Fred Voon for Observer
Then came her iconic series of “self-images”: paintings of her body from her perspective, often wearing nothing but a signature turquoise ring. These aren’t “self-portraits,” Semmel insists, since she is unconcerned with producing likeness, capturing character or conferring status. Rather, her self-images are a direct assault on the male gaze—by asserting her own. One is titled Through the Object’s Eye (1975). Another, Sunlight from 1978, shows her tenderly caressing her calf and sole, untethered from male validation.
In the triptych Mythologies and Me (1976), she sandwiches a self-image between parodies of a Playboy centerfold and Willem de Kooning’s Woman I (1952). In the former, the female figure is sexualized by the commercial media; in the latter, it is disfigured by a pre-eminent contemporary artist. Semmel’s response is to insert her viewpoint and desecrate the two great cultural forces, sticking lace and feathers onto the Playmate and attaching a nursing nipple to the abstracted monstrosity.
As an artist and a curator, Semmel was among the second-wave feminists who resisted censorship and objectification. This places her earlier paintings in the company of landmark works such as Carolee Schneemann’s short film Fuses (1967), Betty Tompkins’ Fuck Paintings (1969–74), Tee Corinne’s Cunt Coloring Book (1975) and Judy Chicago’s installation The Dinner Party (1979) with its vulva-inspired plates, now on permanent display at the Brooklyn Museum.
Accompanying Semmel’s works is a mosaic of 42 thematically related pieces she selected from the Jewish Museum’s collection. Photo: Fred Voon for Observer
Over the decades, Semmel’s self-nudes began to take on a new dimension and question our impulse to hide or dismiss aging bodies. It’s remarkable that Skin in the Game (2019), in full Technicolor glory, is her largest work to date. Rather than shrink from the canvas, Semmel continues to push back on prevailing prejudices. Her work today is as confrontational as ever, asking us: What arouses you? What disgusts you? And, most importantly, why?
Baring it all in full view of the public is confronting, too, for the artist. In Parade (2023), Semmel’s naked body seems to shy away from observation. Alice Neel took five years to complete a nude self-portrait in 1980, at the age of 80. “The reason my cheeks got so pink,” she said, “was that it was so hard for me to paint that I almost killed myself painting it.” Similarly, Semmel admitted in a 2016 interview with the Brooklyn Rail, “It shakes me up a little sometimes, putting that out there. But it’s what I chose to do, so I have to go through with it.” And so the art must go on. “My work has been dedicated to empowering women,” she said recently. “And in order to empower women, I had to empower myself first.”
DORAL, Fla. — When Fernando Dávila was 8 years old in Colombia, he failed a drawing class because he painted donkeys red.
There was a reason for that: He is colorblind.
Now the 72-year-old Dávila is an established and respected artist whose vibrant paintings have been exhibited in South America, Europe and the United States.
“I have the most wonderful job in the world, which is painting every morning,” Dávila said from his studio in a Miami suburb. “To mix colors. To have joy to share with the world, that’s really my passion.”
He started off painting only in black and white until he was around 30 years old because of his colorblindness, a congenital condition which makes it difficult for people to tell the difference between certain colors, particularly red and green, and shades of color. There is no cure for the condition, which for Dávila also makes the colors pink, violet, turquoise and yellow-green confusing.
Since the mid-1980s, Dávila has painted in color through the help of glasses developed by an ophthalmologist in New York, where Dávila was living at the time. One lens is transparent and the other is shaded red, and they help him discriminate between contrasting shades that normally blur together. With the lenses, he can see almost two-thirds of the colors, but without them he only sees around 40% of the colors.
Dávila compared his condition to having a box of chocolates but only being able to eat a sample of the selection. He says he has such a strong desire to see every color.
“It’s something that I miss in my life, that if somebody says, ‘Look at this flower,’ which is bright, bright pink, I want to do it,” he said. “It’s something that comes from my heart so passionately. I can feel the vibration of color.”
Colorblindness runs his family. A grandfather and some great uncles only saw in black and white, while his mother and her three sisters also were colorblind even though the condition is rarer in women. His two brothers also have trouble discriminating between colors.
Dávila has spent his career in Colombia, New York and Florida. He was awarded the “Order of Democracy” by the Colombian Congress in 1999 for his contribution to the arts. He also has published two hardcover books and many catalogues about his paintings, and his work has appeared at major auctions including Christie’s and Sotheby’s.
His paintings include romantic images of men and women embracing and landscapes, often using the color blue as a foundation.
“I think color is one of the most important things in life,” he said. “And especially for me.”
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Mike Schneider in Orlando, Florida contributed to this report.
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.
The painting that introduced “Star Wars” to the world nearly 50 years ago — and was reproduced in an iconic movie poster — sold at auction on Wednesday for $3.875 million.
The acrylic and airbrush painting by the artist and movie poster designer Tom Jung first appeared in newspaper advertisements on May 13, 1977, a little less than two weeks before the space epic created by George Lucas opened. It also adorned billboards, magazine ads and theater programs.
“For most of America, this was the first time they got a glimpse of the galaxy far, far away,” said Charles Epting, the director of pop culture and historical consignments at Heritage Auctions.
“Star Wars” producer Gary Kurtz kept the original painting and hung it on his office wall before passing it down to his daughter. The Kurtz family later put the work up for sale at the Dallas headquarters of Heritage Auctions, where bidding started at $1 million.
The sale set records for highest selling piece of memorabilia from the film franchise, and in general, for any movie poster artwork, Epting said. The buyer, whose winning bid came in through the website, has chosen to keep his identity private.
Prior to this, the highest price for franchise memorabilia was Darth Vader’s lightsaber which sold at auction for $3.6 million.
“Star Wars” is one of the highest-grossing movie franchises of all time since its 1977 debut, starring Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker. The original was followed by sequels and prequels, and spawned offshoot books, movies and other series. Its fans span the globe.
One side of the painting shows Skywalker holding up a lightsaber behind Princess Leia. Darth Vader looms over them in the background. On the other, a team of X-wing starfighters is launching an attack. Han Solo and Skywalker are depicted receiving medals.
In the lower right hand corner are R2-D2 and C-3PO, which were added at the last minute, Epting said. The droids are absent from the early reproductions of the painting and later appeared when the movie poster and the billboard were produced. The exact date of the latter is unknown but it was around June or July 1977, Epting said.
“You can watch the evolution of this piece and how they were figuring out what was important to include, what are we going to represent, what’s going to draw people in,” Epting said.
The painting is not just film memorabilia but is also a cultural artifact and part of American history, Epting said. The emotional connection that people form with “Star Wars” movies also helps explain the sales price, he said.
“Anyone who’s seen these movies or the marketing materials around it — you see this piece, your heart starts racing,” Epting said.
There is a direct line between lip fillers and the techno-apocalypse, and Gretchen Andrew draws that line with her latest Universal Beauty series. This series, recently acquired by the Whitney in New York, reveals the preferences of hidden algorithms that define our current beauty standards. Standards not even Miss Universe contestants can meet. In our conversation, Andrew and I discuss how impossible-to-achieve criteria are flattening people’s relationship to their bodies and homogenizing faces around the globe. What is at stake? “The whole diversity of humanity is lost,” according to the artist.
Gretchen, an ex-Googler, is a Silicon Valley dropout. After becoming disillusioned by the way technology was designed to exploit users and experiencing a culture that penalized her for dressing like Cher from Clueless, Gretchen left tech to pursue a career in art. In the art world, she felt free to use technology subversively and wear short skirts as a form of 3.0 feminism. Her previous projects: Thirst Trap Glitch Gifs, in which she used SEO optimization hacks to make her vision board canvases the top search result for “contemporary art auction record,” capture the artist’s drive perfectly.
There have always been beauty standards, Andrew says, but never before has there been a single, universal, international beauty standard. Courtesy Gretchen Andrew, Heft Gallery
Gretchen could have continued further along this line, using her brilliance to expose technological loopholes while promoting her name. However, Universal Beauty marks a departure. Or perhaps an evolution or maturing. Not in Gretchen’s interests, but in her tactics. The focus is less about her explicitly and more about the technology that traps us all. Making us feel forever inadequate. Forever ugly. While keeping us craving more of this feeling. And Gretchen will be the first to admit that she is not above social media addiction. But admission, be it via her work or her words, is always the first step.
First, congratulations on your acquisition by the Whitney. What can you tell us about the Facetune Portraits project, and about the work that was acquired?
In Facetune Portraits, I look at how A.I.-driven beauty standards are impacting how we experience ourselves and how we experience others. I take what is normally an invisible force—whether it’s digital Facetuning or the way it’s impacting things like lip fillers and plastic surgery—and make it visible so that we can talk about it. In my Universal Beauty series, I look at Miss Universe contestants who are from all over the world—they’re completely gorgeous—and yet they’re not good enough for the algorithms, giving the rest of us absolutely no hope. Not only that, but the contestants are from all around the world. They should look completely different, but we see the homogenizing impact of A.I. when we see Miss Jamaica being given the same body as Miss Finland being given the same body as Miss Philippines. It’s compressing all humanity into a single unified look.
Describe the Facetune aesthetic. What does the algorithm think is beautiful?
We’ve grown so used to seeing each other and ourselves on a two-dimensional screen. And because screens are flat, our expectations of how we’re supposed to look are incorporating efforts to mimic that third dimension within the two-dimensional space of the screen. One example is having absurdly big lips. Some people really like the way that those big lips look from the front, but no one thinks that they look great from the side. That’s why we get memes around “duck lip.” There’s this distinct prioritization of making sure we look good on a screen. It reminds me of ancient Egyptian art. The reason why hieroglyphics have bodies that are contorted is that, within the two-dimensional surface, the Egyptians wanted to convey the three-dimensionality of the body. So they represented each body part from its most recognizable angle and sort of stuck it all together. That’s really what’s happening today with our cameras and algorithms: we are attempting to convey three dimensions in the 2D space of a screen.
Gretchen Andrew, Facetune Portrait – Universal Beauty, USA, 2025. Oil On Canvas, 48″ x 24″. Photo by @larufoto Luis Ruiz
What is lost when we do that?
The whole diversity of humanity is lost. There have always been beauty standards, but never before has there been a single, universal, international beauty standard. We’re also losing connections to our actual bodies. We’re prioritizing how people look over what they do. We’re prioritizing how we look over how we feel. Within that prioritization, we lose a really important connection to ourselves. Another thing we’re losing is the celebration of the individual. I see not just a desire to be beautiful, but a desire to be like everyone else. That feels safer to people today than to actually look like yourself.
How is this different than in the ‘90s, before there was social media, when media was dominated by a couple channels or Vogue, and these Western exports were setting the dominant beauty standard around the world?
I think with A.I., the pace and the uniformity of that has increased significantly. Although there has been this Western beauty standard before, maybe there was a slightly different beauty standard in Japan or Kenya. With A.I., there has been an acceleration of this beauty standard convergence. Anybody—they don’t need massive Photoshop skills—can take their image, process it through a Facetune algorithm, and go to a plastic surgeon and say: Make me look like this, which is increasingly happening.
I read a study out of Cornell that 0.2 percent of the data used to train A.I. comes from Africa and South America. Do you know where most of the data that’s training these beauty algorithms is coming from?
We’re in a feedback loop, especially with social media. I’m sure you’ve noticed that if you post a photo of your face or other people, you’re more likely to get engagement. I don’t think that’s because that’s what people want to see. I think these platforms are driving more engagement in order to get more images of faces and bodies for training their algorithms. I think Instagram, by volume, must be Western. It’s also not so much who is using it as it is about the quantity of images that people are seeing. Influencers, for example, have so many more followers and get so much more exposure. It doesn’t matter how many regular people are using the app, the majority of people are seeing images that look like these influencers.
Gretchen Andrew, Facetune Portrait – Universal Beauty, Puerto Rico, 2025. Oil on Canvas, 48″ x 24″. Photo by @larufoto Luis Ruiz
What made you interested in addressing social media and beauty standards in your work?
I like to find seemingly innocuous, frivolous and feminine things and use them as opportunities to have conversations about technology and its impact on our lives. Beauty standards seemed like a ripe area where a lot of people are not thinking about A.I. or the technological apocalypse, and so it became a very wide doorway to have these conversations. On top of that, I think a lot about the physical and metaphorical shapes that we as women contort ourselves into to meet societal expectations, especially as we age. I’m approaching 40, and my friends are getting Botox or plastic surgery. This project is not about shaming women for these things. It’s about understanding where standards come from and making decisions from there.
Can you talk about your decision to turn these digital images into oil paintings via an oil paint printer?
I wanted to create a portrait that shows both who we are and who we’re told to be at the same time. I wanted to represent this in a way that would be part of the history of portraiture. Portraits have always shown what we value at any given time. Look at me and my big family. Look at my jewels. Look at my land behind me. Within this current world of A.I., I wanted to investigate what is important to us, and I think what’s important to us is fitting in. It’s being accepted by the algorithm.
What do you think about celebrities like Sarah Jessica Parker who refuse to get plastic surgery?
Celebrities like that are really important. They remind us that beauty can exist outside of the algorithm. But also, she’s not coming up today. She’s already a big deal, and she can make that stand now in a way that I think is very important and interesting. What I really want to see is somebody who’s very young make that same decision and succeed. I think it’s going to be a lot harder.
Totally. I read the memoir Careless People by Sarah Wynn Williams. It’s such a damning portrait of Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg. After I read it, I was so worked up, and I was like, ‘I have to get off social media.’ And then, of course, I didn’t. So my question is, what does awareness do? There’s an idea that it changes things. But my question is: does it?
As far as what awareness does, I think it makes us cognizant that we are making a choice, even if we continue to use filters and get lip fillers. Technology has made things so seamless that we have slipped into an absurd world where people are injecting things into their lips that they have bought on Alibaba, and it happens to be cement. This is becoming normal so fast. I really believe social media is going to be the tobacco of our generation, with the impact on mental health. Here we are, knowing it’s bad for us, still smoking. When I hang up on this phone call, I’ll probably get on Instagram for a second. Awareness is not going to win the war, but it is at least a way to see what’s going on and maybe have a little bit more agency as an individual, even if societally we’re totally fucked.
My last question is, if social media is like tobacco and it’s bad for us, why do you still use it?
“Eva Helene Pade: Søgelys” is at Thaddaeus Ropac in London through December 20, 2025. Courtesy Thaddaeus Ropac gallery, London · Paris · Salzburg · Milan · Seoul . Photo: Eva Herzog
Hauntingly beautiful… revelatory: these are the adjectives that come to mind when staring at Eva Helene Pade’s paintings. Amorphous bodies move across the canvas like a choreography of spectral dancers, dynamically taking over the elegant architecture of Thaddaeus Ropac’s gallery in London. It’s a spectacle of erotic energy, where the power of attraction and seduction of the femme fatale finds its stage, manifesting through moody, dramatic atmospheres shaped by color sensations and instinctive emotional reactions.
Following the Danish-born, Paris-based artist’s institutional debut at ARKEN Museum of Contemporary Art in Denmark earlier this year and multiple new auction records set at auction (the latest at Sotheby’s Hong Kong in 2024, when A Story to Be Told #14 (2021) sold for $123,417) the exhibition “Søgelys” (on view through December 20, 2025) brings together a new group of paintings in which Eva Helene Pade continues to explore the violent and seductive forces that exist between bodies in space. The body is examined here as both a medium and a filter, a porous psychical, cognitive and emotional membrane through which we negotiate our interactions and relationships with others. Painting becomes a vehicle for a continuous exercise of female embodiment and disembodiment, creating both a dance and a tension that unfolds within the canvas and the surrounding space. “Color is crucial for me; it’s emotional and psychological,” she tells Observer. “The palette often defines the atmosphere of a work before the figures even appear.”
Eva Helene Pade. Courtesy of Thaddeus Ropac.
Pade turns the canvas into a living stage where color and movement try to spontaneously channel and translate the prelinguistic expressions of the human psyche. Her process is deeply intuitive: the figures emerge from the act of painting itself, beginning with an abstract field and moving through a fluid process of identification and alienation. “I start drawing figures into it. At first, they appear as little blobs, and gradually I begin carving them out until the forms start taking shape, only to change again and become something else entirely,” she says. Pade also tunes herself to rhythm, listening to classical music to enter an inner world of narratives and transforming its prelinguistic storytelling into a tool to address universal questions about the human condition.
“I work very instinctively, letting intuition lead. Sometimes it fails; sometimes it surprises me. I rely on that tension,” she says, acknowledging how her influences have shifted over time, though certain painters have always remained with her. The psychological charge of her work recalls the emotional and psychological layering of artists such as Edvard Munch, Amber Wellmann, Nicolas de Staël, Cecily Brown, Marlene Dumas and Miriam Cahn, as well as older masters like Rodin and Rubens, who reveal how much emotion can be conveyed through a gesture or pose.
Still, despite this intuitive channeling through pigment and color, Pade’s works are never autobiographical portraits; they’re personal but not literal. “I don’t paint people from my life, nor do I use photographic references. They’re intuitive, almost dreamlike—images that emerge and shift as I work,” she explains.
Like monsters or ghosts reemerging from the subconscious, these spectral presences probe the porous diaphragm between the inner and outer world, a boundary that painting can reveal. “I’ve always been drawn to painting. I began drawing as a means to process both external reality and my inner world,” Pade says. She never had strict academic training, so she taught herself anatomy, proportion and form, which may be why her figures appear slightly off, existing within her own visual logic. “That wonkiness has become my language.”
In her debut show with the gallery, Pade’s monumental and small-scale canvases are suspended on floor-to-ceiling metal posts, set away from the walls to create dynamic spatial configurations. Courtesy Thaddaeus Ropac gallery, London · Paris · Salzburg · Milan · Seoul . Photo: Eva Herzog
The canvas becomes the stage where the “shadow,” the “removed,” is confronted in a distinctly Freudian and Jungian sense. “I keep molding the surface, working into the face, pulling new elements out of the shadows that I hadn’t noticed before,” Pade confirms. “A dark color might form a symbol or pattern, which I then push back into the composition.” It’s a long, layered process that involves as much waiting and letting the paint dry as it does discovery and transformation.
Still, it’s immediately apparent upon entering the show that this new body of work engages with femininity, sensuality and the position of the female body in space. Painting is for Pade a means of exploring the relationship between self and surroundings, how this dynamic subtly defines and redefines identity between body and soul, between the one and the many. Her figures, often expressionless and featureless, convey emotion through gesture and contortion, resonating with a universality that transcends any autobiographical reading.
What she paints is a potentially cacophonous orchestra of sensations and voices, a confrontation with the chaos of humanity in which the self is continually dissolved and rediscovered. Pade began painting crowds during lockdown, reflecting the strange collective isolation of that time. “They’re images of people together, but not necessarily about any specific moment. They’re more like metaphors of time itself.”
There is always a narrative in her paintings, but it remains open-ended. It’s the drama of human existence in dialogue with the external world that Pade paints. “I don’t want to trap the viewer in a single message. It’s more like a free exploration on the canvas: an emotional and physical response that builds its own logic,” she says.
Once the paintings are presented outside of the studio, they gain new context from the space and from the people who encounter them. In London, Pade wanted to choreograph her own visual rhythm, thinking about how the paintings could occupy the space almost like stage sets. “The exhibition space was so unconventional that I had to respond directly to its quirks—the staircase, the unusual angles—so I began playing with composition almost like orchestration,” she explains. “It all made sense because the project was inspired by a ballet, so I leaned into that theatricality, treating the canvases like backdrops.”
Pade doesn’t have a background in theater but she clearly thinks compositionally, almost like a stage director. The paintings are intentionally life-sized so the figures stand in direct relation to the viewer’s body as they float and dance in these hazy atmospheres, much like in a nightclub or a theater. “I want the experience to be physical, to break the passive distance between viewer and painting.”
Although the works are two-dimensional, they feel animated by their dense atmospheres, where bodies flicker between visibility and occlusion, partially veiled by soft billows of smoke or lit from within by a flaming glow or radiant beams of light. Lifting the paintings off the wall and letting them float through the space isn’t a gimmick; it heightens this emotional rhythm. “For these crowd scenes, it made sense. The figures seem to hover or drift in space, and the installation amplifies that effect,” she notes.
For Pade, the human body is part of a primal, instinctive language, like a brushstroke, a gesture or a dance. Courtesy Thaddaeus Ropac gallery, London · Paris · Salzburg · Milan · Seoul . Photo: Eva Herzog
While staging the paintings outside her studio, she realized that by not hanging them flat on the wall the viewer could see their backs—the wooden stretchers, sketches and raw marks behind the surface. They became living metaphors for the relationship between inner world and external space. “I liked that transparency, that glimpse into process. Light passed through them in interesting ways, giving them a smoldering depth,” she acknowledges. “When people walked around, the paintings seemed to move with them. It became immersive. You could almost walk into the composition.”
In the space, the unified spectral presences of Pade’s choreography found their living essence again, becoming interlocutors with the viewers. And if painting is, first of all, an open conversation, an expansive narrative field where everyone can identify and project their own meanings, the universal power of connection offered by Eva Helene Pade’s painterly storytelling and its endless variations is proof of how her art can still evolve. Even the “failed” works contribute to her evolution, as painting remains for her both a necessity and an urgency, a means to confront and process the multifaceted reality of the world. “You learn technique, rhythm and restraint from them.”
The potentially continuous evolution of the canvases on view reveals Pade’s enduring excitement for painting. “I don’t plan big conceptual changes. It evolves organically with each new piece,” she reflects. “Some paintings fail; I destroy or hide them if they don’t resonate. I think it’s crucial to be self-critical. A work that doesn’t move me won’t move anyone else.”
Installed in the round, fragments of Pade’s images overlap so that characters appear to flit from one scene to another, vanishing and then recurring as in dreams. Courtesy Thaddaeus Ropac gallery, London · Paris · Salzburg · Milan · Seoul . Photo: Eva Herzog
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
Japanese artist Izumi Kato’s humanoid hybrid creatures exist in a fluid space between worlds, hovering somewhere between ancient totems, unborn spirits and extraterrestrial beings. They emerge as sudden, epiphanic visions that reveal unprecedented truths about our evolutionary path while profanely suggesting new possibilities for more symbiotic and sustainable survival on this planet.
In just a few years, Kato has risen to international and institutional prominence, building a strong market presence through powerhouse gallery Perrotin and steadily climbing auction results. He has established a global reputation with a distinctive symbolic language and a sense of mystery and magic that unites Japan’s ancient folklore and Shinto spirituality with underground manga aesthetics and a contemporary, saturated visual sensibility that feels attuned to the world ahead.
Izumi Kato. Photo: Claire Dorn, courtesy of the artist and Perrotin
Both in Kato’s soon-to-close show at Perrotin and in his works for Aichi, his biomorphic characters take on watery, fluid forms. Existing somewhere between human and aquatic beings, suspended in a plasmatic or amniotic dimension, they evoke the evolutionary arc from aquatic to amphibious to human life while hinting at a possible reactivation—or even inversion—of this cycle as a path toward ecological survival.
As Kato acknowledges, his painting practice continues to evolve. “Most recently, I’ve begun incorporating living sea creatures into my work,” he explains, noting that it’s been 30 years since he last painted while directly observing his subject. “Now, I paint these forms as I need them, as a way to express what painting means to me at this moment.”
His figures feel both ancient and futuristic, alien and human. Kato’s vivid primary palette heightens this tension. “Colors are sensory for me, and I use them intuitively,” he says. “I don’t begin with a fixed color plan; instead, I decide on each color one by one as I paint.” Balancing primal immediacy with an aesthetic partly influenced by the digital landscape is likely what makes his work so resonant for contemporary viewers.
While his figures do not directly reference evolutionary history, Kato sees the planet itself as a living entity in continuous transformation. “Earth is home to countless life forms, though definitions of life can vary from person to person,” he says. “I see the planet itself as a living entity. It’s something mysterious and deeply fascinating to me, and I find myself thinking about it often.”
An installation view of Kato’s solo exhibition at Perrotin Seoul. Photo: Hwang Jung Wook, courtesy of the artist and Perrotin
Throughout his evolving practice, Kato has constructed an expansive symbolic narrative that envisions hybridization between species as an alternative path for humanity. Moving fluidly across mediums and often incorporating natural materials like wood and stone, his oeuvre feels like a continuous, urgent exercise in worldbuilding—a form of mythopoiesis aimed at imagining new destinies for human society. His work draws unconsciously from Japanese folklore and Shinto beliefs, though he clarifies that he does not intentionally reference any specific motif. Those connections surface organically, shaped by his personal and familial background.
Kato acknowledges that autobiography inevitably seeps into his art. “It’s hard to answer that clearly, but everything I experience in life affects me in some way, and those influences likely appear in my work, often unconsciously,” he explains. Painting, for him, serves as both a pathway and a tool to absorb, process and translate these personal traces.
“I’m definitely influenced by the local culture and upbringing I experienced in Shimane, where I grew up,” he says, recalling how parents would warn children about an imaginary sea creature—a snake with a woman’s face—that appeared at night to scare them away from the water. Kato’s paintings capture the same tension animating most fairy tales: the balance between innocence and menace. His figures appear childlike yet unsettling, gentle yet otherworldly—existing between birth and death, body and spirit, human and nonhuman. These myths, he reflects, ultimately serve as a form of survival wisdom. “I only realized recently how much the environment I grew up in has influenced my work.”
It is by inhabiting a symbolic third realm of myth and fairy tales—one that bridges the physical and the psychological—that Kato’s images achieve their universality, subtly conveying timeless messages about the nature of human existence. However, he says that he doesn’t view the recurring motifs in his work as characters, since they lack personalities and are not part of any linear narrative or deliberate storytelling. “I use human-like figures to strengthen the composition of the painting and to spark the viewer’s imagination,” he explains. At the same time, he acknowledges that these otherworldly, symbolic visions of alternative forms of life likely belong to another realm and time—whether future or past—where species coexist in harmonious hybridization before emerging in painterly or sculptural form. Kato admits it is difficult to articulate in words, but his paintings inhabit a memorial, imaginative and spiritual realm that precedes and transcends language, defying conventional categories. They speak both to and beyond the human, offering prophecies of alternative possibilities for cosmic life within and beyond this planet and time.
Kato’s figures often appear suspended in a distinctly plasmatic dimension yet animated by an inner radiance—a kind of energetic aura. “I don’t really know where it comes from, but I believe art itself is energy,” Kato says, responding cryptically when asked what this energy represents. “I’m glad one can sense that energetic aura in my work.”
In a time defined by destruction and chaos, the mythopoiesis underlying Kato’s epiphanic, profane and totemic works offers contemporary viewers a regenerative narrative reminiscent of ancient myth, reminding us that life, evolution, decay and rebirth are part of a continuous cycle. Mapping the liminal space between collapse and renewal, his hybrid creatures inhabit that threshold, carrying the deep knowledge that decay is never the end but a necessary passage. Suggesting a survival code rooted in eternal truths and expressed through symbolic language, Kato’s works—mythological in essence and, in the spirit of Joseph Campbell’s “metaphors for the mystery of being”—bridge our waking consciousness with the vast, enduring mysteries of the universe.
SANTA FE, N.M. — SANTA FE, N.M. (AP) — An auction house plans to sell off a variety of actor Gene Hackman’s possessions in November, including Golden Globe statues, a wristwatch and paintings he collected and created himself.
Hackman died at age 95 at his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico, after transitioning from an Oscar-winning career in film to a life in retirement of painting, writing novels and collecting.
Auction items include a still-life painting of a Japanese vase by Hackman and Golden Globe awards from roles in “Unforgiven” and “The Royal Tenenbaums.” There are annotated books from Hackman’s library, scripts, posters, movie memorabilia — and high-brow art including a bronze statue by Auguste Rodin and a 1957 oil painting from modernist Milton Avery.
Anna Hicks of Bonhams international auction house said the sales “offer an intimate portrait of Hackman’s private world.”
Listings start as low as $100 for Hackman’s everyman Winmau dart board or $600 for a shot at his Seiko diver’s wristwatch.
The catalog includes a likeness of Hackman from portrait artist Everett Raymond Kinstler, who painted U.S. presidents and drew for comic books.
Hackman and his wife, Betsy Arakawa, were found dead inside their home on Feb. 26 — sending shock waves through a high-desert city refuge for famous actors and authors seeking to escape the spotlight. Authorities determined that Hackman died of heart disease with complications from Alzheimer’s disease about a week after Arakawa, 65, died of hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, a rare but potentially fatal disease spread by the droppings of infected rodents.
Hackman made his film debut in 1961’s “Mad Dog Coll” and went on to appear in a range of movie roles, including as “Superman” villain Lex Luthor and as a basketball coach finding redemption in the sentimental favorite “Hoosiers.” He was a five-time Oscar nominee who won best actor in a leading role for “The French Connection” in 1972 and best actor in a supporting role for “Unforgiven” two decades later.
In a brazen, seven-minute strike, thieves used a basket lift to reach the Louvre on Sunday morning and, as tourists were already inside, forced a window, smashed display cases and fled with jewels of “inestimable value,” France’s interior minister said.The world’s most visited museum closed for the day as police sealed gates and ushered visitors out during the investigation.“A robbery took place this morning at the opening of the Louvre Museum,” Culture Minister Rachida Dati wrote on X. The museum cited “exceptional reasons” for the closure. No injuries were reported.Around 9:30 a.m. several intruders forced open a window, stole jewels from vitrines and escaped on two-wheelers, according to the Interior Ministry. It said forensic work is underway and a precise inventory of the stolen objects is being compiled, adding that the items have “inestimable” historical value. Dati and Nuñez were on site with museum leadership.Video from the scene showed confused tourists being ushered out of the glass pyramid and surrounding courtyards as officers shut the iron gates and closed nearby streets along the Seine.Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez called it a “major robbery,” saying the intruders entered from the outside using a basket lift. He said on France Inter radio that the heist took seven minutes and the thieves used a disc cutter to slice through the panes. He said it was “manifestly a team that had done scouting.”The heist occurred in the Galerie d’Apollon, a vaulted hall in the Denon wing that displays part of the French Crown Jewels beneath a ceiling painted by King Louis XIV’s court artist, according to the ministry.French daily Le Parisien reported the thieves entered via the Seine-facing facade, where construction is underway, and used a freight elevator to reach the gallery. After breaking windows, they reportedly took nine pieces from the jewelry collection of Napoleon and the Empress. One stolen jewel was later found outside the museum, the paper reported, adding that the item was believed to be Empress Eugénie’s crown and that it had been broken.Security and staffing at the Louvre in the spotlightSecurity around marquee works remains tight. The Mona Lisa is protected by bulletproof glass and a custom high-tech display system as part of broader anti-theft measures across the museum.Staffing and protection have been flashpoints at the Louvre. The museum delayed opening during a June staff walkout over overcrowding and chronic understaffing. Unions have warned that mass tourism strains security and visitor management.It wasn’t immediately clear whether staffing levels played any role in Sunday’s theft.In January, President Emmanuel Macron announced a decadelong “Louvre New Renaissance” plan — roughly €700 million to modernize infrastructure, ease crowding and give the Leonardo da Vinci masterpiece its own dedicated gallery by 2031 — but workers say relief has been slow to reach the floor.Other European museums have been robbedThe theft, less than half an hour after doors opened, echoes other recent European museum raids.In 2019, thieves smashed vitrines in Dresden’s Green Vault and carried off diamond-studded royal jewels worth hundreds of millions of euros. In 2017, burglars at Berlin’s Bode Museum stole a 100-kilogram (220-pound) solid-gold coin. In 2010, a lone intruder slipped into Paris’s Museum of Modern Art and escaped with five paintings, including a Picasso.The Louvre has a long history of thefts and attempted robberies. The most famous came in 1911, when the Mona Lisa vanished from its frame, stolen by Vincenzo Peruggia, a former worker who hid inside the museum and walked out with the painting under his coat. It was recovered two years later in Florence — an episode that helped make Leonardo da Vinci’s portrait the world’s best-known artwork.Home to more than 33,000 works spanning antiquities, sculpture and painting — from Mesopotamia, Egypt and the classical world to European masters — the Louvre’s star attractions include the Mona Lisa, the Venus de Milo and the Winged Victory of Samothrace. The museum can draw up to 30,000 visitors a day.
PARIS —
In a brazen, seven-minute strike, thieves used a basket lift to reach the Louvre on Sunday morning and, as tourists were already inside, forced a window, smashed display cases and fled with jewels of “inestimable value,” France’s interior minister said.
The world’s most visited museum closed for the day as police sealed gates and ushered visitors out during the investigation.
“A robbery took place this morning at the opening of the Louvre Museum,” Culture Minister Rachida Dati wrote on X. The museum cited “exceptional reasons” for the closure. No injuries were reported.
Around 9:30 a.m. several intruders forced open a window, stole jewels from vitrines and escaped on two-wheelers, according to the Interior Ministry. It said forensic work is underway and a precise inventory of the stolen objects is being compiled, adding that the items have “inestimable” historical value. Dati and Nuñez were on site with museum leadership.
Video from the scene showed confused tourists being ushered out of the glass pyramid and surrounding courtyards as officers shut the iron gates and closed nearby streets along the Seine.
Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez called it a “major robbery,” saying the intruders entered from the outside using a basket lift. He said on France Inter radio that the heist took seven minutes and the thieves used a disc cutter to slice through the panes. He said it was “manifestly a team that had done scouting.”
The heist occurred in the Galerie d’Apollon, a vaulted hall in the Denon wing that displays part of the French Crown Jewels beneath a ceiling painted by King Louis XIV’s court artist, according to the ministry.
French daily Le Parisien reported the thieves entered via the Seine-facing facade, where construction is underway, and used a freight elevator to reach the gallery. After breaking windows, they reportedly took nine pieces from the jewelry collection of Napoleon and the Empress. One stolen jewel was later found outside the museum, the paper reported, adding that the item was believed to be Empress Eugénie’s crown and that it had been broken.
Security and staffing at the Louvre in the spotlight
Security around marquee works remains tight. The Mona Lisa is protected by bulletproof glass and a custom high-tech display system as part of broader anti-theft measures across the museum.
It wasn’t immediately clear whether staffing levels played any role in Sunday’s theft.
In January, President Emmanuel Macron announced a decadelong “Louvre New Renaissance” plan — roughly €700 million to modernize infrastructure, ease crowding and give the Leonardo da Vinci masterpiece its own dedicated gallery by 2031 — but workers say relief has been slow to reach the floor.
Other European museums have been robbed
The theft, less than half an hour after doors opened, echoes other recent European museum raids.
In 2019, thieves smashed vitrines in Dresden’s Green Vault and carried off diamond-studded royal jewels worth hundreds of millions of euros. In 2017, burglars at Berlin’s Bode Museum stole a 100-kilogram (220-pound) solid-gold coin. In 2010, a lone intruder slipped into Paris’s Museum of Modern Art and escaped with five paintings, including a Picasso.
The Louvre has a long history of thefts and attempted robberies. The most famous came in 1911, when the Mona Lisa vanished from its frame, stolen by Vincenzo Peruggia, a former worker who hid inside the museum and walked out with the painting under his coat. It was recovered two years later in Florence — an episode that helped make Leonardo da Vinci’s portrait the world’s best-known artwork.
Home to more than 33,000 works spanning antiquities, sculpture and painting — from Mesopotamia, Egypt and the classical world to European masters — the Louvre’s star attractions include the Mona Lisa, the Venus de Milo and the Winged Victory of Samothrace. The museum can draw up to 30,000 visitors a day.
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.
This undated image shows artist Bob Ross, host of the series “The Joy of Painting.” (Bob Ross Inc. via AP)
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Thirty paintings created by the bushy-haired, soft-spoken Bob Ross will soon be up for auction to defray the costs of programming for public television stations suffering from cuts in federal funding.
Ross, a public television stalwart in the 1980s and ’90s, “dedicated his life to making art accessible to everyone,” said Joan Kowalski, president of Bob Ross Inc. “This auction ensures his legacy continues to support the very medium that brought his joy and creativity into American homes for decades.”
Bonhams in Los Angeles will auction three of Ross’ paintings on Nov. 11. Other auctions will follow in London, New York, Boston and online. All profits are pledged to stations that use content from distributor American Public Television.
The idea is to help stations in need with licensing fees that allow them to show popular programs that include “The Best of Joy of Painting,” based on Ross’ show, “America’s Test Kitchen,” “Julia Child’s French Chef Classics” and “This Old House.” Small and rural stations are particularly challenged.
As desired by President Donald Trump, Congress has eliminated $1.1 billion allocated to public broadcasting, leaving about 330 PBS and 246 NPR stations to find alternative funding sources. Many launched emergency fund drives. Some have been forced to lay off staff and make programming cuts.
The beloved Ross died in 1995 of complications from cancer after 11 years in production with “The Joy of Painting.” His how-to program was shown on stations around the U.S. and around the world. The former Air Force drill sergeant known for his calm demeanor and encouraging words enjoyed a resurgence in popularity during the lockdowns of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Ross spoke often as he worked on air about painting happy little clouds and trees, and making no mistakes, only “happy accidents.”
The thirty paintings to be auctioned span Ross’ career and include landscapes depicting serene mountain vistas and lake scenes, his signature aesthetic. He created most of the 30 on-air, each in under 30 minutes, which was the span of a single episode.
Bonhams sold two early 1990s mountain-and-lake scenes of Ross in August for $114,800 and $95,750. The auctions of the 30 paintings soon to be sold have an estimated total value of $850,000 to $1.4 million, Bonhams said.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced that a long-cherished painting of “Christ on the Water” has been restored and returned to its rightful place of prominence at the Academy in Kings Point, New York.
“I want to thank Secretary Duffy for his continued support of our Academy and the midshipmen who call this place home,” said U.S. Merchant Marine Academy Acting Superintendent Captain Tony Ceraolo. “Our purpose today is to preserve a piece of the Academy’s cultural and historical legacy. We honor the past and the resilience of those who came before us. This painting is about history, remembrance, and hope ensuring that the story of our midshipmen and their wartime experiences remain part of our shared institutional memory.”
The painting depicts Jesus guiding sailors adrift in a lifeboat – safely guiding the through the storm waters – painted some 80 years ago by the famed painter Lt. Hunter Wood.
The Biden Administration removed the historic painting — saying it offended people and was unconstitutional. For years it was left abandoned in a basement room.
Secretary Duffy issued a statement:
“Burying this historic painting in the basement wasn’t just a mistake—it was an insult to the faith and legacy of service that built this Academy and our nation.’ By restoring ‘Christ on the Water’ to its rightful place, we sent a clear message to our midshipmen: their Christianfaith is a virtue to be proud of, not something to be censored.”
Syndicated with permission from ToddStarnes.com– founded by best-selling author and journalist Todd Starnes. Starnes is the recipient of an RTNDA Edward R. Murrow Award and the Associated Press Mark Twain Award for Storytelling.
LONDON — LONDON (AP) — Frida Kahlo’s face is one of the best known in art, thanks to her bold and challenging self-portraits.
A lesser-seen self-depiction by the Mexican artist is going up for auction at Sotheby’s in what could be a record-setting sale.
With an estimated price of $40 million to $60 million, “El sueño (La cama)” – “The Dream (The Bed)” may surpass the top price for a work by any female artist when it goes under the hammer on Nov. 8. That record currently stands at $44.4 million, paid at Sotheby’s in 2014 for Georgia O’Keefe’s “Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1.”
The highest price at auction for a Kahlo work is $34.9 million, paid in 2021 for “Diego and I,” depicting the artist and her husband, muralist Diego Rivera. Her paintings are reported to have sold privately for even more.
“It’s not just one of the more important works by Kahlo, but one of a few that exists outside of Mexico and not in a museum collection,” said Julian Dawes, vice-chairman and head of impressionist and modern art for Sotheby’s Americas. “So as both a work of art and as an opportunity in the market, it could not be more rare and special.”
Kahlo vibrantly and unsparingly depicted herself and events from her life, which was upended by a bus accident at 18. She started to paint while bedridden, underwent a series of painful surgeries on her damaged spine and pelvis, then wore casts until her death in 1954 at age 47.
Painted in 1940, “El sueño (La cama)” shows the artist, wreathed in vines, lying in a four-poster bed floating in a pale blue sky. A skeleton wired with dynamite and clutching a bouquet of flowers lies atop the canopy.
The image is exploding with symbolism and feels like an allegory – but the artist really did have a skeleton on top of her bed.
Dawes said it’s a psychological self-portrait by an artist at her peak.
“Her greatest works derive from this moment between the late 1930s and the early 1940s,” he said. “She has had a variety of tribulations in her romantic life with Diego, in her own life with her health, but at the same time she’s really at the height of her powers.”
Last exhibited publicly in the late 1990s, the painting is the star of a sale of more than 100 surrealist works by artists including Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning. They are from a private collection whose owner has not been disclosed.
A century after Andre Breton’s “Surrealist Manifesto” defined a revolutionary artistic movement characterized by unsettling juxtapositions and paradoxical statements, interest in – and prices for – surrealist art are booming. Surrealism’s share of the art market rose from 9.3% to 16.8% between 2018 and 2024, according to Sotheby’s. Magritte’s “L’empire des lumières” sold last year for $121.2 million, a record for a surrealist work.
Kahlo resisted being labelled a surrealist, but Dawes said her “fascination with the subconscious” and use of otherworldly imagery place her squarely in that tradition.
He said it’s no surprise the genre is undergoing a resurgence.
“There are so many interesting parallels between the 1920s and the 2020s,” Dawes said. “Coming out of a crippling global pandemic, a world that has to confront war on a more graphic and intimate level that had ever been experienced before — and economic and political and social forces swirling in the background that are eerily similar.”
The Kahlo painting is on show at Sotheby’s in London until Tuesday, and then tours to Abu Dhabi, Hong Kong and Paris before the sale in New York.
Tonight, the Dallas Museum of Art will open its doors after hours for a special “Late Night At The Museum” event. Set to be held from 7 to 11 p.m., the event will include cocktails, interactive art-making and demonstrations, live music and an open gallery for the first and second floor exhibitions…
Credit where credit is due. ArtButMakeItSports has cracked the code. The account’s creator LJ Rader has found success beyond just going viral. He has built an audience, and kept it.
Rader spent quite a bit of time in art museums growing up. He now keeps a massive digital folder handy, filled with works of art. So when inspiration strikes in the sporting world, all he has to do is flip through and his memory retention does the rest.
We’ve compiled another batch of sports moments that are completely imitating art. Enjoy!
LONDON — Britain’s National Gallery announced Tuesday that it will use a whopping 375 million pounds ($510 million) in donations to open a new wing that, for the first time, will include modern art.
Founded in 1824, the gallery has amassed a centuries-spanning collection of Western paintings by artists from Leonardo da Vinci to J.M.W Turner and Vincent van Gogh — but almost nothing created after the year 1900. The modern era has been left to other galleries, including London’s Tate Modern.
That will change when the gallery opens a new wing to be constructed on land beside its Trafalgar Square site that is currently occupied by a hotel and offices. An architectural competition will be held to pick a design.
The gallery on London’s Trafalgar Square says money for the projects includes the two biggest donations ever publicly reported by any museum or gallery. It got 150 million pounds ($204 million) from the Crankstart foundation founded by Silicon Valley venture capitalist Michael Moritz and his wife, writer Harriet Heyman, and the same amount from the Julia Rausing Trust run by Tetra Pak heir Hans Rausing.
National Gallery director Gabriele Finaldi said the aim is “to be the place where the U.K. public and visitors from across the globe can enjoy the finest painting collection in the world from medieval times to our own, in a superb architectural setting.”
The gallery said it will build its collection of post-1900 works in collaboration with Tate, which holds the U.K.’s leading collections of British art and post-1900 international art.
Tate director Maria Balshaw said the organization “looks forward to working closely with colleagues at the National Gallery on loans, curatorial and conservational expertise to support the development of their new displays.”
