26/10/25

Otherworldly Journeys: The Fantastical Worlds of Bosch and Bruegel @ Speed Art Museum, Louisville

Otherworldly Journeys: The Fantastical Worlds of Bosch and Bruegel
Speed Art Museum, Louisville
October 17, 2025 — February 1, 2026 

Pieter van der Heyden Art
Pieter van der Heyden
(Netherlandish, about 1530–about 1572)
After Pieter Bruegel the Elder (Netherlandish, about 1526/27–1569)
The Fall of the Magician Hermogenes, 1565
Engraving, 8 13/16 × 11 7/16 in.
Collection Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam
From the estate of Dr. J.C.J. Bierens de Haan, inv. BdH 7580 (PK)

Pieter van der Heyden Art
Pieter van der Heyden
(Netherlandish, about 1530–about 1572)
After Pieter Bruegel the Elder (Netherlandish, about 1526/27–1569)
Big Fish Eat Little Fish, 1557
Engraving, 9 1/16 × 11 13/16 in.
Collection Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam
From the estate of Dr. J.C.J. Bierens de Haan, inv. BdH 8007 (PK)

The Speed Art Museum presents Otherworldly Journeys: The Fantastical Worlds of Bosch and Bruegel, marking the first time that this exceptional exhibition has been displayed in the U.S. Drawn from the internationally renowned collection of the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, the exhibition features 85 rare engravings and etchings. The show offers a fascinating voyage into the most bizarre corners of art history, exploring the visionary and satirical works inspired by Renaissance masters Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel the Elder

Organized by Peter van der Coelen, Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, and locally curated by the Speed’s Curator of Works on Paper Kim Spence, Otherworldly Journeys spotlights 16th-century Netherlandish prints that broke from artistic convention through their focus on everyday people and the absurdities of human behavior Through the media of engraving and etching, these inventive designs reached a wider, urban audience of merchants, scholars, and artists across The Netherlands and beyond. In creating visual art that was satirical, moralizing, and widely accessible, Bosch and Bruegel provided the first modern lens through which the public could view themselves and their world.
“Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen is one of the few museums in the world where the work of Bosch and Bruegel—and the Surrealists they later inspired—are so strongly represented. Otherworldly Journeys is the first exhibition devoted entirely to the prints inspired by Bosch and created by Bruegel and his contemporaries,” said Peter van der Coelen. “These works reveal the imagination and innovation that defined Netherlandish art in the 15th and 16th centuries. Bosch and Bruegel invented new imagery and shared ideas that traveled far beyond their studios, inviting us to see the world in new ways.”
Pieter van der Heyden Art
Pieter van der Heyden
(Netherlandish, about 1530–about 1572)
After Pieter Bruegel the Elder (Netherlandish, about 1526/27–1569)
Summer, 1570
Engraving, from the series The Four Seasons, 8 7/8 × 11 5/16 in.
Collection Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam
From the estate of Dr. J.C.J. Bierens de Haan, inv. BdH 8017 (PK)

Though created 500 years ago, the themes in Otherworldly Journeys feel strikingly contemporary. These intimate prints invite guests to come close and explore every detail. Many images conceal tiny, humorous and even disturbing scenes that turn viewing into a visual treasure hunt through the artists’ imaginations. Teeming with peasants and demons, folly and faith, they transform everyday life, dreams, and nightmares into reflections on what it means to be human. In an age defined by memes and digital sharing, Otherworldly Journeys reminds us that the urge to tell stories through images—and to see ourselves reflected in them—is timeless.
“This exhibition is a celebration of two of the most creative artistic geniuses of the 16th century and a generation of printmakers they inspired,” said Kim Spence. “Hieronymus Bosch completely reimagined familiar subjects, populating them with fantastic creatures never seen before. His vision was so unique that demand for ‘Boschian’ art continued decades after his death. Pieter Bruegel, too, was equally innovative. He developed new genres—such as mountainous landscapes, seascapes, and depictions of everyday life—that laid the groundwork for artists of the Golden Age of Dutch art and later.”
A fully illustrated catalog written by Peter van der Coelen and published by The Speed Art Museum accompanies the exhibition. 

SPEED ART MUSEUM
2035 South Third Street, Louisville, KY 40208

Museum Boijmans

Dutsch Culture USA

Lucy Williams: Radiant City Exhibition @ Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco + Book

Lucy Williams
Radiant City
Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco
November 6, 2025 – January 8, 2026

Berggruen Gallery presents Radiant City, an exhibition of new work by London-based artist LUCY WILLIAMS. This exhibition will mark the gallery’s third solo presentation with the artist

Williams’s works are fastidiously engineered to produce uncanny miniature worlds suspended between the second and third dimensions—facades that are simultaneously industrial and tactile. Drawing on modernist buildings and interiors, Lucy Williams redefines collage through intricately crafted mixed-media bas-reliefs. Her sleek, serene scenes of period architecture ripple with texture and aqueous reflections. She simulates the tiled surfaces of swimming pools, the austere facades of Brutalist buildings, and the regimented rows of libraries and bookcases. Painstakingly hand-crafted, Lucy Williams constructs her works in ascending layers of varying materials such as paper, Plexiglas, wood veneer, fabric, piano wire, and thread.

Beginning with a full-scale pencil drawing, Lucy Williams creates a digital copy from which she laser cuts the structural base and hand-cuts colored paper to form curtains, blinds, books, vases, pots, and lampshades. Each piece is laid on top of the drawing until she is ready to collage within a shallow space, adding paper home furnishings as she builds the work. Panels are over-stitched with thread, and a Perspex layer is used to replicate the windows, all of which have been etched and hand-painted to add further detail. Of her process, she says: “You have to give it as much time as possible, it’s really important, because in time is the transformation.”

Through embroidery and a warm tonal palette, Williams’s work exploits the tension between the humane, intimate spaces she produces and the hard-edge geometric buildings she references. The perceived depth and inherent flatness of the work occupy the liminal space between painting and sculpture. “Her work resonates with the textures and geometries of Anni Albers and Jean Arp, Alexander Calder and Ruth Asawa—not just in their forms, but in the energy, dedication, and intentionality they brought to their work,” said Joseph Becker, Curator of Architecture and Design at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

The exhibition title Radiant City comes from Le Corbusier's unrealized architectural proposal for a utopian megalopolis that would seamlessly integrate humankind with nature and the technological innovations of the twentieth century. The concrete apartments—composed of modular units, imposing towers, and symmetry—were conceived to address urgent housing needs and to use modern architecture as a tool for societal reform. While Radiant City itself was never realized, its principles came to life in the Unité d’Habitation in Marseille. The patchwork play of color and light across the façade of what might otherwise have been a monotonous expanse resulted in one of modern architecture's most iconic designs. In Radiant City, Lucy Williams captures the delicate balance of materiality, shape, and color that made Unité d’Habitation so visually resonant. She does this through multiple iterations, probing the tension between social egalitarianism and a dehumanizing uniformity.

Radiant City features both representational and abstract works by Lucy Williams. During the pandemic, she began experimenting with non-representational compositions to explore the rhythmic, repetitive visual qualities of form. This experimentation allowed her to develop new threading techniques, which she then brought into her representational works, along with miniature versions of the abstractions themselves. “Slate, aubergine and rose triangles float over vertical threads of different colours and thicknesses, adding a lyrical stringed element to the already dynamic forms. In these, Lucy Williams controls space like the modernists Naum Gabo and Barbara Hepworth before her,” said art critic Charlotte Mullins. Though the figure never appears in her work, one need only view it in person to experience the narrative power of her spaces—how they draw the viewer in, both baffled by their fabrication and longing to occupy their meditative worlds.

Lucy Williams was born in Oxford, England, in 1972. She earned her Bachelor of Arts in Fine Art from Glasgow School of Art in 1996 and her Postgraduate Diploma in Fine Art from Royal Academy Schools in 2003. The artist has since exhibited her work internationally, with solo shows including Pavilion at Timothy Taylor Gallery, London (2012), Festival at McKee Gallery, New York (2014) and Pools at Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco (2017). Lucy Williams’s work has also been represented in major group exhibitions, such as Painting the Glass House: Artists Revisit Modern Architecture at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Connecticut (2008), After curated by Marjolaine Levy at Galerie Mitterand, Paris (2013), and Cut & Paste | 400 Years of Collage at the National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh (2019). Lucy Williams currently lives and works in London.

Lucy Williams Radiant City
Lucy Williams – Radiant City
By Lucy Williams
Contributions by Ben Street, Salena Barry, Kathryn Lloyd 
and Charlotte Mullins / Edited by Matt Price / 
Foreword by Joseph Becker
Published by Hurtwood Press Ltd 
Distributed by Simon & Schuster
Book Cover courtesy of  Simon & Schuster
264 pages featuring 160 illustrations (colour and black & white)
Hardback, 290 x 245 mm portrait

Available at Berggruen Gallery or on its Website

The exhibition coincides with Lucy Williams’s new publication, Radiant City. The gallery will host an artist discussion, moderated by Joseph Becker, Curator of Architecture and Design at SFMOMA, and a book release event at 4:30 p.m. on Thursday, November 6, 2025, followed by an opening reception from 5 to 7 p.m. 

BERGGRUEN GALLERY
10 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, CA 94105

Larry Sultan: Homeland Exhibition @ Yancey Richardson, New York

Larry Sultan: Homeland
Yancey Richardson, New York
October 30 – December 20, 2025

Yancey Richardson presents Homeland, an exhibition featuring photographs from Larry Sultan’s series of the same name and the third exhibition of his work with the gallery. In his expansive photographs of Latino day laborers set against the backdrop of a suburban California landscape, Larry Sultan explores the liminal spaces between actions, the moments that exist as time passes. Though he borrows from the tradition of landscape painting, with its presumption of order through perspective, Sultan’s photographs emphasize the indeterminate and the ambiguous instead, revealing the sense of possibility that remains embedded in the act of waiting. 

Over the course of a two year period Sultan drove to lumber yards and hardware stores in the Bay Area and Simi Valley, California, where every day hundreds of men waited for temporary employment. Rather than hire them as laborers, Larry Sultan employed them as actors, working with them to choreograph their movements in landscape on the outskirts of suburbia, rehearsing and doing take after take, creating picture after picture. Just as they originally occupied the marginal and transitional zones within the landscape—those that remain overlooked and passed over—Larry Sultan cast these men in similar roles for Homeland, asking them to carefully pose and sit, to cast their gaze outward from the picture frame. Instead of depicting dynamic motion or dramatic action, Larry Sultan created meticulous tableaux that express the interrelated experiences of looking for, leaving and coming home. The notes of longing and melancholy that are present in these photographs are counterbalanced by one of emergent possibility, where the familiarity of the banal can give way to the unforeseen and unexpected.

It was in the act of exploring truths in storytelling, notions of identity and the influence of home that Sultan returned to time and again in his work, regardless of subject matter or setting. The lasting imprint of his childhood and the spaces that defined it—the empty fields behind strip malls and the borderlands of the LA river that ran behind his home in the San Fernando Valley—were areas that represented a small and diminishing stretch of refuge that existed just outside the boundaries of private property. By investigating these spaces in Homeland, Larry Sultan sought to complicate the stereotype of what suburbia was and can be with pictures suff used with anticipation and a quiet reverence for the ordinary.

LARRY SULTAN grew up in California’s San Fernando Valley, which became a source of inspiration for a number of his projects. His work blends documentary and staged photography to create images of the psychological as well as physical landscape of suburban family life. Sultan’s pioneering book and exhibition Pictures From Home (1992) was a decade long project that features his own mother and father as its primary subjects, exploring photography’s role in creating familial mythologies. Using this same suburban setting, his book, The Valley (2004) examined the adult film industry and the area’s middle-class tract homes that serve as pornographic film sets. Katherine Avenue (2010), the exhibition and book, explored Sultan’s three main series, Pictures From Home, The Valley, and Homeland alongside each other to further examine how Larry Sultan’s images negotiate between reality and fantasy, domesticity and desire, as the mundane qualities of the domestic surroundings become loaded cultural symbols.

Larry Sultan’s work has been exhibited and published widely and is included in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon Guggenheim Museum, the Tate Modern, the National Gallery, London, the Stedelijk Museum, Musée de l’Elysée, Centre Pompidou, the National Gallery of Art, DC, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where he was also recognized with the Bay Area Treasure Award in 2005. Larry Sultan served as a Distinguished Professor of Photography at California College of the Arts in San Francisco. Born in Brooklyn, New York in 1946, Larry Sultan passed away at his home in Greenbrae, California in 2009.

The exhibition will be on view in the project gallery. An opening reception will be held on Thursday, October 30 from 6–8PM.

YANCEY RICHARDSON
525 West 22nd Street, New York, NY

Jane Hammond @ Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco - 'Chocolate Cosmos, String of Pearls' Exhibition

Jane Hammond
Chocolate Cosmos, String of Pearls
Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco
October 23, 2025 – January 8, 2026

Berggruen Gallery presents Chocolate Cosmos, String of Pearls, an exhibition of new work by New York–based artist JANE HAMMOND. This exhibition marks the gallery's third solo exhibition with the artist.

Chocolate Cosmos, String of Pearls features mixed-media botanical assemblages composed of images acquired through a rigorous process of research and collection, yet arranged improvisationally. Hammond's hyper-detailed compositions probe the relationships between ecology, observation, and knowledge. Through a system of images shaped by the poetics of language, Jane Hammond produces lavish arrangements of vivid and fantastical forms drawn from the natural world. Using several printmaking techniques such as relief printing and linocut, as well as combining painting and drawing, Hammond’s compositions employ myriad methodologies. Jane Hammond often prints from hand-made plates on painted and collaged grounds.

Jane Hammond’s works draw on both found and personal photographs she has collected over many years. She recontextualizes these images, often dramatically altering color, scale, and resolution, and builds her arrangements based on symbolic and physical associations. Her botanical arrangements brim with flora and fauna from disparate species across continents and temporalities, resulting in bouquets that exist outside the realm of possibility. While beautiful and meticulously arranged, these are not traditional botanicals. Hammond’s works—made up of both living and extinct flora and fauna—present a plentitude both ravishing and increasingly threatened by ecological destruction.

Shaped by the aesthetics of post-minimalism in 1970s New York, Jane Hammond avoided botanical subjects for decades, though an interest in the natural world was a throughline in her childhood, education, and later life. Of the work in Chocolate Cosmos, String of Pearls, Jane Hammond has said: “It’s a different enterprise to make these botanicals now than it would have been 30 years ago because the environment from which all this plentitude emanates is now intensely jeopardized."

Jane Hammond also has a keen interest in the history of material culture. She mines the traditions of ceramics, glass, and metalwork across the globe for her containers, as well as the world of artisanal papermaking for the handmade grounds she crafts for each piece. These unique compositions are made of many heterogeneous and often conflicting elements, yet ultimately resolve harmoniously. Hammond's rigorous compositional process involves constant readjustments of placement, scale, and color until she achieves a desired “harmony built from tension and difference.” These tensions impart power and vitality to their final resolution. Hammond's works play with language, allegory, and games to invite the viewer into a mythical world blooming with an encyclopedic collection of images, where edification comes from searching and surprise.

Jane Hammond was born in 1950 in Bridgeport, CT. She received her B.A. from Mount Holyoke College in 1972, an MFA from Arizona State University in 1974, and a second MFA from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1977. Her work is in the permanent collections of over eighty museums, including the National Gallery of Art, SFMOMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art. In 2019, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, ARTnews, Art in America, and more. Jane Hammond currently lives and works in New York City.

Jane Hammond’s forthcoming publication, Chocolate Cosmos, String of Pearls, will be released in spring 2026.

*   *   *   *   *

Berggruen Gallery also presents Interiors, a group exhibition of paintings and works on paper depicting interior spaces. The exhibition is on view through January 8, 2026.

The works in Interiors reveal a range of artistic engagement with physical and psychological space. Drawing from distinct painterly vocabularies—realism, abstraction, and Bay Area Figuration—Interiors brings together diverse contemplations of space, light, and memory. Whether probing the spatial drama of the domestic—a place of routine, leisure, and introspection—or conveying architectural tropes such as windows, doorways, and hallways, Interiors offers various contemporary reflections on the inhabited worlds around us, both real and imagined. 

Exhibiting Artists: David Bates | Helen Berggruen | Dean Byington | Bruce Cohen | Nicasio Fernandez | Daniel Cabrillos Jacobsen | Raffi Kalenderian | JJ Manford | Rachel Simon Marino | Tom McKinley | Linda Pouliot | Jillian Shea | Gail Spaien | Seesha Takagishi | Anna Valdez | Lucy Williams | Paul Wonner

BERGGRUEN GALLERY
10 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, CA 94105

Daniel Arsham @ Perrotin Dubai - 'What Remains' Inaugural Exhibition of the New Gallery

Daniel Arsham
What Remains
Perrotin Dubai
October 30, 2025 – January 10, 2026

Daniel Arsham Art
Daniel Arsham
Members of the Future, Cenote Exploration, 2024 
Acrylic on canvas panel 
Unframed: 121.9 × 147.3 × 5.7 cm | 48 × 58 × 2.25 in. 
Framed: 110.5 × 134.6 × 5.7 cm | 43 1/2 × 53 1/2 × 2.25 in. 
Photo: Guillaume Ziccarelli 
© Daniel Arsham. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin

Daniel Arsham Art
Daniel Arsham
Audio Bonsai 003, 2025
Copper wire, wood, speakers
153 × 132.1 × 101.6 cm | 60 1/4 × 52 × 40 in
© Daniel Arsham. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin

Perrotin Dubai presents a debut solo exhibition What Remains by American artist Daniel Arsham. This exhibition marks the first solo show since the opening of the Perrotin Dubai gallery. What Remains features several new series from Arsham's extensive practice, including sculpture, painting and drawing, and a new sound installation, focusing on themes of cultural memory, and the passage of time.

Daniel Arsham transforms the gallery into a sonic installation with his latest sculptural series of copper wrapped bonsai tree sculptures. Doubling as functional stereo speakers, these works will play ambient music throughout the exhibition. This new series pays homage to Japanese Zen Buddhist culture and Arsham’s past presentations of sand zen gardens, which he has exhibited around the world at the Lotte Museum, South Korea and the Musée Guimet, France, among others.

Daniel Arsham Art
Daniel Arsham
Stairs in the Labyrinth, 2025
Sand. 72 × 44.5 × 45.7 cm | 28 3/8 × 17 1/2 × 18 in.
© Daniel Arsham. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin

Daniel Arsham also unveils a new suite of works relating to his recent Labyrinth series. Composed in cast sand, Arsham’s Stairs in a Labyrinth draws influence from artists like M.C. Escher and Renee Magritte’s maze-like works to create a sculptural double portrait. From head-on the work appears as a portrait bust of a sitter, transforming in the profile view into a maze of architectural levels and stairwells. Alongside the sculpture, Daniel Arsham presents a stilllife painting of another labyrinth bust and a selection of charcoal prepatory drawings. In this series, Daniel Arsham beckons viewers to navigate intricate compositions, suggesting an interplay of layers and pathways reminiscent of archeological sites where the past reveals itself in unexpected ways.

Alongside these new series, Daniel Arsham expands his decades-long project of “Fictional Archaeology,” where the artist examines objects from the twentieth century that are containers for collective cultural memory. Cast in his signature materials of geologic crystals and pigmented hydrostone, patinated bronze, and fiberglass, Daniel Arsham presents objects like a Rolling Stone magazine eroded with pink quartz crystals, a NY Yankees hat that appears to be emerging out of the architecture of the wall, and a bronze scaled replica of a 1985 DMC Delorean car - immortalized in the film Back to the Future.

Daniel Arsham has spent over twenty years cultivating an artistic universe that challenges conventional perceptions of time and reality. His works often evoke a sense of nostalgia and imaginative exploration, encouraging viewers to reflect on our collective history and the artifacts that shape our cultural identity. 

Artist Daniel Arsham Biography

Born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1980, New York based artist Daniel Arsham’s work explores the fields of fine art, architecture, performance, design and film. Raised in Miami, Daniel Arsham attended the Cooper Union in New York City where he received the Gelman Trust Fellowship Award in 2003. Soon thereafter Daniel Arsham toured worldwide with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company as the company’s stage designer. The experience led to an ongoing collaborative practice which continues as Arsham works with world renowned artists, musicians, designers, and brands including Moët & Chandon, Tiffany’s, Porsche and Dior, among others. In 2021 Arsham was appoint ed the role of creative director of the Cleveland Cavaliers, becoming the first ever fine artist to hold a position of this nature.

Arsham’s uchronic aesthetics revolves around his concept of fictional archaeology. Working in a multitude of disciplines he creates and crystallizes ambiguous in-between spaces and situations, and stages what he refers to as future relics of the present. Always iconic, most of the objects that he turns into stone refer to the late 20th century or millennial era, when technological obsolescence unprecedentedly accelerated along with the digital dematerialization of our world. While the present, the future and the past poetically collide in his haunted yet playful visions between romanticism and pop art, Arsham also experiments with the timelessness of certain symbols and gestures across cultures.

Daniel Arsham has presented solo exhibitions at the Lotte Art Museum in Seoul, South Korea; Sculpture Center, Cleveland, Ohio; Orange County Museum of Art, Costa Mesa and the Petersen Automobile Museum, Los Angeles, California; Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Leeds, U.K.; Musée Guimet, Paris and MAMO Cité Radieuse Arts Center, Marseille, France; UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Dune, Beidaihe, and HOW Museum, Shanghai, China; MOCO Museum London and Amsterdam; Contemporary Arts Center Cincinnati, Ohio; and the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia, among others.His work has been presented at MoMA PS1, The New Museum and LongHouse Reserve in New York, Norton Museum in Palm Beach, The Athens Biennale in Athens; Musée Fenaille in Rodez, La Defense in Paris, and Carré d’Art de Nîmes in France, and SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah, Georgia, among others.

Arsham’s works are in the public collections of Blanton Museum of Art, Texas; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Georgia Museum of Art, Athens; ICA Miami, Florida; Musée Guimet, Paris; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia; National Museum of Qatar, Doha; Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), Florida; Rhode Island School of Design (RISD); and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.

PERROTIN DUBAI
DIFC, Gate Village, Building 5, Unit 1, Podium Level, Dubai

Philemona Williamson @ Jenkins Johnson Gallery, San Francisco - 'Disproportionate Upheavals' Exhibition of Paintings

Philemona Williamson
Disproportionate Upheavals 
Jenkins Johnson Gallery, San Francisco
November 1 - December 20, 2025

Philemona Williamson Art
Philemona Williamson 
Uneven Terrain, 2025
Oil on canvas, 48 x 56 in (121.9 x 142.2 cm)
© Philemona Williamson, courtesy Jenkins Johnson Gallery

Jenkins Johnson Gallery, San Francisco, presents Disproportionate Upheavals, the gallery’s second solo exhibition with narrative painter Philemona Williamson. The presentation includes eight paintings created between 2024 and 2025, along with a significant piece from 2016.

Philemona Williamson, based in New Jersey, is known for her figurative paintings. Williamson’s narratives of childhood and adolescence create a space of fable and memory investigating the dissonance, possibility, and liminal state of transition. With a career spanning over forty years, she creates an iconography both personal and universal.

Figures are dynamic, passionate, volatile, familiar, and strange—moving through moments of uncertainty and landscapes beyond control. Toys and objects act as repositories of emotion and memory. Poetic and open-ended, the paintings invite viewers to tap into their own stories of change, chaos, and possibility. 

Philemona Williamson Art
Philemona Williamson 
Dwelling in Discord, 2025
Oil on canvas, 36 x 40 in (91.4 x 101.6 cm)
© Philemona Williamson, courtesy Jenkins Johnson Gallery

Dwelling in Discord (2025) interweaves two very different places from her childhood: the upscale Upper East Side NYC apartment where her parents worked and lived, and a small room in a Harlem hotel with a communal kitchen. From a young age, she had to navigate these contrasting worlds. Philemona Williamson affirms that the longing for home, safety, and a sense of belonging in the world never diminishes.

The paintings are visually and technically fluid, with brushstrokes moving through saturated fields of color. The underlying hues in each piece emerge strongly through the figures; ambiguous gestures blur the boundaries between figures and their surroundings. Every plant, animal, object, and landscape feels resonant—as if recalling a half-remembered dream or a return to childhood memories.

Philemona Williamson Art
Philemona Williamson 
A Crooked Line, 2016 
Oil on canvas, 55 x 80 in (139.7 x 203.2 cm)
© Philemona Williamson, courtesy Jenkins Johnson Gallery

A Crooked Line (2016) was inspired by Williamson’s 2015 artist-in-residence experience at the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans. She explains, “I would often witness the Second Line parades held for important occasions, both joyful and somber. Here, I conjured that heightened revelry, both public and private, that seems to burst forth when one is free to be their authentic self.”

Philemona Williamson’s (b.1951, New York, NY) work is in institutional collections including: Baltimore Museum of Art, MD; Montclair Art Museum, NJ; The Kalamazoo Art Institute, MI; the Sheldon Museum of Art, NE; CNAP: The French National Contemporary Art Collection; and Fondation Francès, Clichy, France. Museum exhibitions include the Queens Museum of Art, NY; the Mint Museum, Charlotte, NC; the Bass Museum, Miami, FL; and Contemporary Art, St. Louis, MO. In 2019, a mid-career survey was held at the Montclair Art Museum, New Jersey.

Upcoming in 2026: a group exhibition at the Newark Museum and an exhibition curated by Camilo Alvarez, opening in March 2026 at the Mattatuck Museum, Waterbury, CT. Her work is currently on view at Fondation Villa Datris, Vaucluse, France. In 2024, Philemona Williamson exhibited in Century: 100 Years of Black Art at the Montclair Art Museum, New Jersey.

Philemona Williamson is the recipient of numerous awards including Anonymous Was A Woman; Joan Mitchell Foundation Award in Painting; Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant; National Endowment for the Arts; and New York Foundation for the Arts. Williamson has taught painting at numerous colleges, including Pratt Institute and Hunter College, New York City, and served on the Advisory Board of the Getty Center for Education in California.

JENKINS JOHNSON GALLERY 
1275 Minnesota Street #200, San Francisco, CA 94107

25/10/25

Domenico Zindato @ Andrew Edlin Gallery, NYC - 'On the Dotted Line' Exhibition + A Book offering the most comprehensive view of his recent work to date

Domenico Zindato: On the Dotted Line
Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York
November 7 – December 20, 2025

Andrew Edlin Gallery present On the Dotted Line, an exhibition of recent paintings by Domenico Zindato—his fifth with the gallery and the first solo presentation in our new space in Tribeca. A hardcover publication dedicated to the artist accompanies the exhibition, offering the most comprehensive view of his recent work to date. A Kabinett presentation of Zindato’s work will be held at Art Basel Miami Beach (December 5–8).

Domenico Zindato Book
Domenico Zindato: On the Dotted Line
Published by Andrew Edlin Gallery, 2025
Book Cover courtesy of Andrew Edlin Gallery
The accompanying monograph provides critical context for the exhibition with an essay by Julián Gómez Sánchez, a conversation between Zindato and Gallery Director Aurélie Bernard Wortsman, more than 30 full-color plates, and archival materials that reveal the artist’s influences and process. As a lasting record of this pivotal moment in his career, the book underscores Zindato’s shift from drawing to painting and places his work within a broader Latin American arthistorical and cultural framework.
Domenico Zindato (b. 1966, Reggio Calabria, Italy) is known for his intricate, trance-like compositions rooted in ritual, intuition, and meditative mark-making. For decades, he concentrated on detailed drawings in ink and pastel on paper, producing labyrinthine works that tread between the ecstatic and the contemplative. In this new body of work, he expands into painting on both canvas and dried leaves. Although he first experimented with canvas in the 1980s, Domenico Zindato did not return to the medium until 2020, this time working with acrylic paints and Flashe—a process he likens to acupuncture: “where the skin is activated by needles—I use my fingers to touch the blank canvas, delineating lines and shapes that I intuitively develop.” This tactile method has been central to his work since the early 1990s, when, while in Paris, he received a box of soft pastels from the legendary Sennelier store. Rubbing pigment directly with his fingers became a formative gesture—bridging body and surface, energy and image.

Based in Mexico since the late 1990s, Domenico Zindato draws deeply from the country’s visual culture: the radiant hues of Oaxacan textiles, the geometric patterns of Zapotec temples, and the visionary palette of Huichol yarn paintings and beadwork. These influences intertwine with his own experiences with peyote and the vivid inner imagery inspired by its use. His small paintings on dried leaves, collected from his surroundings, evince a reverence for nature imbued with fragility and impermanence—these intimate works seem to breathe with life. Across both large canvases and delicate leaves, Zindato’s compositions pulse with organic patterning, recurring symbols, and motifs that stretch beyond the frame, evoking mythological cycles and the interconnectedness of ecosystems.

A highlight of the exhibition, …..each one its special radiance….., is a large-scale painting that incorporates an excerpt from Marcel Proust’s Time Regained. Handwritten in Zindato’s signature cursive script, the words—“Instead of seeing one world only, we see that world multiply itself, and we have many worlds, each one with its special radiance”—undulate across a dense, foliage-like ground. The phrase resonates as both a reflection on perception and a metaphor for Zindato’s art: a vision of worlds multiplying, expanding, and connecting. 

Scholar Julián Gómez Sánchez places his visual language within a broader continuum of Latin American artists engaged with themes of transcendence and interconnectedness, drawing a parallel with Shipibo-Conibo artist Sara Flores, whose kené designs embody flora, fauna, and spiritual realms. Zindato’s work, too, emerges as a meditation on the unseen threads that bind us—to one another, to the natural world, and to the sacred.

Discovered in the 1990s by the maverick art dealer Phyllis Kind (1933-2018), Domenico Zindato has been represented by Andrew Edlin Gallery since 2009. His work has been featured in major exhibitions including As Essential as Dreams: Self-Taught Art from the Collection of Stephanie and John Smither at The Menil Collection (2016) and The Hidden Art: Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Self-Taught Artists from the Audrey B. Heckler Collection, co-published by Rizzoli and the American Folk Art Museum (2017). A previous gallery publication, Domenico Zindato: Recent Drawings (2013), includes an essay by critic Edward M. Gómez. His works are held in the permanent collections of the American Folk Art Museum (New York), The Menil Collection (Houston), the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Milwaukee Art Museum, the North Dakota Museum of Art, and the Whitworth Gallery (Manchester, UK).

ANDREW EDLIN GALLERY 
392 Broadway, New York, NY 10013

Eric Fischl @ Skarstedt Gallery, Paris - 'Couples' Exhibition of Recent Paintings

Eric Fischl: Couples
Skarstedt, Paris
October 20 – December 6, 2025 

Skarstedt presents the exhibition Eric Fischl: Couples, an exhibition devoted to the artist’s recent work, in Paris. Four years after his first exhibition Eric Fischl: My Old Neighborhood, which inaugurated the Paris gallery, ERIC FISCHL returns with a series on the historical theme of couples - whether mythological, literary or cinematic – as well as the feelings that are intrinsically linked to relationships: fidelity, passion, and love, but also breakups, betrayal and solitude.

Renowned for his depiction of the human figure, Eric Fischl’s naturalistic paintings captures moments of everyday life, featuring characters from the American middle class. Having been raised in the suburbs of Long Island, Fischl’s quasi-autobiographical works provide food for thought about American society, where image culture, sexuality and the troubles of couple relations are recurrent themes.

Each painting is imbued with a tragic tranquillity, the characters belonging to a true “casting” of actors that the artist mobilises to tell an intimate story. The direction of his narratives guides the choice of protagonists he employs, taken from his own photographs, working, in a way, as a director. Roadsides, hotel rooms, suburbs, swimming pools: these are all cinematic settings that serve as backdrops for his works, where apparent stillness masks deeper psychological unease.

Fischl’s characters rarely make eye contact—either with the viewer of the others in the composition— but are often driven by a desire to get closer to one another. The viewer becomes a witness to scenes populated by the unspoken, where an imminent incident risks triggering a rift or, alternatively, a healing complicity. The proximity of bodies juxtaposed to their emotional distance and nebulous dynamics are at the heart of Couples. The series presents duos - companions or strangers - suspended in moments of immobility, where narrative certainty is withheld and the viewer is left to navigate the emotional terrain between the figures.

Since the 1980s, the artist has been constructing these pictorial episodes of great intensity from his memories and his own photographic montages. With lucidity, Eric Fischl reveals the other side of the American way of life, exploring the invisible flaws of intimacy, desire and the human condition in a tragicomic tone. In Fischl’s own words, “When something happens beyond what is expected, and whose very nature strips you of your armour, that’s the definition of tragedy. Ambiguity is then the only way to move towards understanding.”

SKARSTED PARIS
2 Avenue Matignon 75008 Paris

Previous Exhibitions at Skarstedt Paris:

Sue WilliamsJune 5 – July 25, 2025

Chantal Joffe: The Dog's BirthdayApril 3 – May 31, 2025

Self-Portraits , February 13 – March 29, 2025

Andy Warhol: Who is Who?, October 14 – December 21, 2024

24/10/25

ringl + pit @ Robert Mann Gallery, NYC - Grete Stern + Ellen Auebach Photography Exhibition

ringl + pit
Robert Mann Gallery, New York
October 23 - December 6, 2025

At the height of the Weimar Republic, an artist duo experimented with gender roles and consumer culture, subverting a commercial world dominated by cheerful faces and brightly illustrated pages. They photographed wigs, mannequins, and merchandise in unorthodox still lives, tapping into Berlin’s vibrant, avant-garde spirit. Their work transcended traditional advertising, highlighting touch, texture, and enigma. Their name: ringl + pit.

Robert Mann Gallery presents ringl + pit, an exhibition featuring rare studio photographs alongside an exceptionally limited-edition portfolio of the duo’s life work—much of which has been rarely exhibited to the public.

ringl + pit were the childhood nicknames of Grete Stern (ringl) and Ellen Auerbach (pit). Both trained under Walter Peterhans, the pioneering photography instructor at the Bauhaus, who emphasized precision, formal clarity, and graphic design. In 1930, Stern and Auerbach founded their Berlin-based studio, ringl + pit, blending avant-garde experimentation with commercial portraiture and advertising. Their work emerged during a period of increasing independence for women in Germany, both socially and artistically.

Their photographs challenged conventional advertising norms through striking, surreal, and meticulously composed images. Working collaboratively, the women alternated roles behind the camera and on set, constantly refining each shot until it felt just right. The studio quickly gained a reputation as one of Germany’s most innovative, producing crisp, compelling images that merged modernist aesthetics with subversive wit. Their work was widely recognized, earning international awards and appearing in influential publications such as Die Gebrauchsgraphik and Cahiers d’Art.

Among their most iconic works is Komol Haircoloring Advertisement, an advertisement for hair dye that disrupts traditional beauty standards with artificial hair, a paper cutout silhouette, and metallic mesh. In the Güldenring Cigarettes Advertisemen, they defy convention by omitting both the pack and the hand, instead focusing on a single cigarette protruding from a cellophane wrapper. Their textile commission for Maratti captures a seam running down a luxurious swath of fabric—eschewing the expected female model and instead emphasizing craftsmanship and tactile detail.

The exhibition also includes two rare self-portraits. In pit with Veil, Ellen Auerbach is shown in a stylized headpiece, her sideways glance withheld from the viewer, hinting at the portrait as a form of disguise. In contrast, Grete Stern appears in a tight close-up, her bespectacled face framed with intense, inward focus. Together, these portraits reveal the duo’s deep artistic dialogue—an exploration of selfhood, queerness, and mutual expression. Their work captures the intellectual and creative energy of Weimar-era Germany, a time of extraordinary cultural ferment that was tragically cut short by the rise of the Nazi regime. As progressive Jewish women, both Grete Stern and Ellen Auerbach were forced to flee the country in the early 1930s.

Ellen Auerbach eventually settled in New York; Grete Stern made her home in Buenos Aires. Though continents apart, the two remained lifelong friends. In 1985, they co-published Fotografie ringl + pit, a carefully designed portfolio that echoed the aesthetic and material choices of their early 1930s studio work.

Taken together, their photographs illuminate how Ellen Auerbach and Grete Stern not only participated in, but helped define the avant-garde spirit of their time. Through humor, experimentation, and a refusal to conform to prescribed gender roles, they carved out a bold new space for visual expression. Their work endures as a testament to photography’s power to question representation, defy convention, and assert identity.

The exhibition ringl + pit is presented in conjunction with Yale University of Art Gallery’s The Shared New Vision of ringl + pit, on view through December 7, 2025. 

ROBERT MANN GALLERY
508 West 26th Street, New York, NY 10001

Richard Misrach @ Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco - 'Rewind' A Retrospective Exhibition

Richard Misrach: Rewind
Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
October 30 – December 20, 2025

Richard Misrach Self-Portrait
RICHARD MISRACH 
Self-Portrait, 1975 
© Richard Misrach, courtesy of Fraenkel Gallery

Richard Misrach Photograph
RICHARD MISRACH 
Cargo Ships (January 8, 2025, 7:13 am), 2025
© Richard Misrach, courtesy of Fraenkel Gallery

With Richard Misrach: Rewind, Fraenkel Gallery presents a retrospective look at the artist’s career, spanning more than five decades. The exhibition is organized in advance of a full-scale survey of Misrach’s work at museums in the U.S. and Europe, planned for 2027 and 2028. Presented in reverse chronological order, the exhibition ranges from Cargo, Misrach’s newest series exploring the impact of global trade, to Telegraph 3 A.M., his earliest project, documenting street culture in Berkeley, California in the early 1970s. Highlighting ideas and themes that have consistently driven his work, the exhibition presents photographs made with an array of materials and techniques. Using everything from 35mm film to large-scale digital prints, the show traces Misrach’s development across the forefront of the medium. Fraenkel Gallery has shown Misrach’s work since 1985; this is seventeenth exhibition with the gallery. 

Whether photographing subjects as disparate as environmental disasters or cloud studies, Misrach has always pursued beauty. “I’ve come to believe that beauty can be a very powerful conveyor of difficult ideas,” says Richard Misrach. “It engages people when they might otherwise look away.” The exhibition begins with a 2025 sunrise view of a freighter ship in the San Francisco Bay, printed at more than 5’ x 6’. Composed in vivid shades of pink, blue, and violet, the image from Cargo addresses the complex economic systems that shape modern life, and their far-reaching consequences. Other seductive but charged images document the U.S.-Mexico border wall, from the series Border Cantos; Louisiana’s highly polluted Cancer Alley, from Petrochemical America; and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, from a series shown here for the first time, 20 years after the storm. Several photographs come from Desert Cantos, Misrach’s long-running series examining humans’ multifaceted relationship with the landscape of the American West.

Since the start of his career, Richard Misrach has moved seamlessly between social concerns and more philosophical, experimental questions. “My work…has been about navigating these two extremes—the political and the aesthetic,” Richard Misrach writes. His first series Telegraph 3 A.M. used a medium format camera on a tripod. Working during the day and at night, Richard Misrach made portraits recording the effects of drugs and poverty in the wake of the Berkeley counterculture movement. In the series that followed, Richard Misrach began photographing in the desert, shooting at night but using a strobe to reveal the otherworldly shapes of cacti and sagebrush. The richly black, split-toned prints he made depict a near-mystical landscape visible only to the camera.

Later series push further into sublime encounters between nature and the camera. Starting in the 1990s, Richard Misrach photographed the Golden Gate Bridge, capturing variations in atmosphere and color that border on abstraction. Working from a single vantage point, Richard Misrach waited for the light and composition to align in front of his camera, an approach he returned to with On the Beach, his study of the ocean’s infinite surface, and most recently with Cargo. Abstraction in nature is also at the center of the series Notations, exploring the surreal hues found in color photographic negatives, digitally rendered. In these images, Richard Misrach inverts the tonalities of clouds or desert scrub brush, creating delicate studies of texture and form.

Richard Misrach (born 1949) has been photographing the American West for more than 50 years. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Art Institute of Chicago; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and Centre Pompidou, Paris, among others. Border Cantos, a collaboration with the composer Guillermo Galindo, opened at the San Jose Museum of Art in California in 2016 and continues to travel throughout the U.S. His work has been featured in more than a dozen books, including Telegraph 3 A.M., Bravo 20: The Bombing of the American West, Crimes and Splendors: The Desert Cantos of Richard Misrach, On the Beach, Destroy This Memory, Petrochemical America, Border Cantos, Blind Spot Folios 001: Nancy Holt & Richard Misrach, On Landscape and Meaning, Notations, and most recently, Cargo. His photographs are held in the collections of major institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others. He is the recipient of numerous awards including four National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships and a Guggenheim Fellowship. 

FRAENKEL GALLERY
49 Geary Street, San Francisco, CA 94108

23/10/25

Antoni Tàpies @ Pace Gallery, NYC - A Survey of Works on Paper

Antoni Tàpies: On paper
Pace Gallery, New York
November 7 - December 20, 2025

Pace presents a survey of works on paper by the Spanish artist Antoni Tàpies at its 540 West 25th Street gallery in New York. Bringing together some 40 artworks created between the 1940s and the 2010s—including never-before-exhibited compositions—this presentation showcases Tàpies’s meditations on the human condition through his works on paper and, more broadly, his indelible impact on the history of art in Europe and across North America and Asia.

Born in Barcelona in 1923, Antoni Tàpies was a self-taught artist who developed a unique visual language centering on exchanges among symbols, gestures, and materials. The artist—who was also a celebrated theorist and philosopher—incorporated signs and symbols from Catalonia and other cultures into his paintings, collages, and sculptures, imbuing his work with historical allusions and odes to phenomena of the natural world. Replete with personal resonances and references to political and social struggles in his native Catalonia and Spain, his art made radical aesthetic propositions during the postwar era.

Over the course of his seven-decade career, Antoni Tàpies investigated abstract and surrealist forms using unconventional, raw materials. His combinations of media as diverse as wood, dirt, spray paint, cardboard, blankets, clothes, carpet, furniture, and marble dust reflect the intensely experimental ethos of his process. Tàpies forged complex layers of materials like these, bringing striking amalgams of color and texture to the fore of his compositions. In this way, enactments of transformation and transfiguration animated the spirit of all his work as an artist.

Pace’s exhibition of Tàpies’s works on paper, the gallery’s twelfth exhibition dedicated to the artist since it began representing him in 1992, sheds new light on the ways that drawing functioned in his practice—as a medium through which he could narrate his own experiences and express the poetic and fragile dimensions of the human condition. Featuring a large selection of works produced between the start of his career in the 1940s and the final years of his life, this presentation will trace the development of his visual lexicon, which reflects his deep interest in signs and symbols from Eastern religions and philosophies, particularly Buddhism. They also speak to the connections between Antoni Tàpies and his American contemporaries at the forefront of Abstract Expressionism—importantly, the artist began showing with Martha Jackson Gallery in New York the year it opened in 1953, during the early years of his career, and he presented solo exhibitions with the storied American gallery until 1978.

Tàpies’s reimagination and redefinition of painting as a highly physical undertaking would inspire future generations of artists. Notably, in 1993—the same year he mounted his first solo show with Pace—he was chosen to represent Spain at the 45th edition of the Venice Biennale, when he won the Golden Lion for his large-scale installation titled Rinzen. In 1984, the artist established the Fundació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona—which opened a museum and library in 1990—to support the exhibition of his work and that of other modern and contemporary artists. Along with the Fundació Joan Miró and Museu Picasso, the Fundació Antoni Tàpies remains a key cultural institution in the fabric of the Spanish city.

Today, his work can be found in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Baltimore Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Museo Tamayo, Mexico City; the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Barcelona; the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; the Museo Guggenheim, Bilbao; Tate, London; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; the Moderna Museet, Stockholm; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Kunstmuseum Basel; the Städel Museum, Frankfurt; the Museum Ludwig, Cologne; the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art; the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; and many other international institutions.

Concurrently with Pace’s exhibition in New York, Antoni Tàpies: The Imagination of the World is on view at the Museu Tàpies in Barcelona through January 25, 2026.

Antoni Tàpies (b, 1923, Barcelona; d. 2012, Barcelona) is recognized as one of the leading artistic voices to emerge from postwar Europe. Working in parallel with global art movements including Abstract Expressionism, Gutai, Art Informel, Tachisme, and Arte Povera, Tàpies believed that his era required a new kind of existential expression. Influenced by Surrealist methods while a member of the avant-garde Dau al Set group in postwar Barcelona, he came to develop a unique form of automatism and to reject representation and the illusionistic picture plane. He incorporated unconventional media such as textiles, straw, detritus, and found objects into his work, accentuating their tactile and material nature. Their earthy, distressed surfaces relate to themes of entropy and decay, challenging the viewer to find beauty in what is typically overlooked. Tàpies’s oeuvre resides between figuration and abstraction, matter and mysticism, as manifested through his painting, sculpture, drawing, collage, and printmaking.

PACE NEW YORK
540 West 25th Street, New York City

Jodi Hauptman: Chief Curator, MoMa, New York - The Robert Lehman Foundation Chief Curator of Drawings and Prints

The Museum of Modern Art appoints Jodi Hauptman as The Robert Lehman Foundation Chief Curator of Drawings and Prints

Jodi Hauptman
JODI HAUPTMAN
© 2021 The Museum of Modern Art, New York 
Photograph by Peter Ross

The Museum of Modern Art announces the appointment of Jodi Hauptman as The Robert Lehman Foundation Chief Curator of Drawings and Prints following a comprehensive search by the Museum in partnership with search firm Russell Reynolds. In this role, Jodi Hauptman will guide all aspects of the department’s wide-ranging program, from exhibitions and publications, to acquisitions and research, to The Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Study Center—a collection of more than 70,000 drawings, prints, illustrated books, multiples, and ephemera that has been central to MoMA since its founding.
“Jodi is a curator of uncommon clarity and imagination,” said Christophe Cherix, The David Rockefeller Director of The Museum of Modern Art. “Her exhibitions and publications have changed how we look at works on paper, and as The Robert Lehman Chief Curator she will deepen the strength of MoMA’s collection while empowering audiences to connect intimately with art and artists, think more broadly, and discover new connections.”
“I am honored to take on this new role at this pivotal moment,” said Jodi Hauptman. “I look forward to sharing the Museum’s unparalleled collection, collaborating with exceptional colleagues, and illuminating modern and contemporary artists’ innovative, radically experimental, and deeply formative practices on paper—encouraging close looking and inspiring wonder in the infinite possibilities of drawings, prints, books, multiples, and much more.”
Jodi Hauptman most recently served as The Richard Roth Senior Curator in MoMA’s Department of Drawings and Prints. Her acclaimed exhibitions—including Cézanne Drawing; Engineer, Agitator, Constructor: The Artist Reinvented; Edgar Degas: A Strange New Beauty; Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs; Georges Seurat: The Drawings; and this year’s Hilma af Klint: What Stands Behind the Flowers—have illuminated the crucial role of works on paper in modern and contemporary art, revealing fascinating new aspects of an artist’s practice and often providing the essential key to understanding their work more broadly.

Jodi Hauptman has authored and co-edited numerous award-winning publications and has partnered with colleagues in MoMA’s David Booth Conservation Department on fieldshaping technical research. She has contributed to acquisition initiatives that have been transformative for the Museum’s collection, including the avant-garde works of the Merrill C. Berman Collection—with numerous artists represented at MoMA for the first time—and, this year, an extraordinary gift of drawings and paintings by Paul Cézanne from the Henry and Rose Pearlman Foundation. Hauptman holds a doctorate in art history from Yale University and earned her A.B. from Princeton University. She was a 2018 Fellow at the Center for Curatorial Leadership.

MoMA - The Museum of Modern Art, New York 

Ding Yi @ Lisson Gallery, London - 'The Road to Heaven' Exhibition

Ding Yi: The Road to Heaven
Lisson Gallery, London
Through 22 November 2025

For his inaugural solo exhibition at Lisson Gallery and his first return to exhibit in London in over five years, renowned Chinese abstractionist Ding Yi presents a new body of work. This latest series is deeply informed by the history and cosmology of the Naxi people of Yunnan in southwestern China, offering a rich cultural and conceptual dimension to his distinctive visual language. In line with his larger corpus, the artist’s latest drawings and paintings employ a systematic iconography in the service of a layered, subjective response – a continuous act of translation rather than a fixed text.   

In 1988, while a student at Shanghai University, Ding Yi adopted the cross, either in the form of a ‘+’ or ‘x’ symbol, as a leitmotif. Initially arranging crosses in strict grids, he later developed complex geometric patterns in fluorescent colours, producing works that mirrored the architectural and economic explosion of Shanghai in the late 1990s and early 2000s.  Since 2011, Ding Yi has shifted toward a broader perspective, exploring themes of the cosmos, nature, and the universe, gradually moving beyond the strict rationality of his earlier work toward a more emotive and intuitive sensibility. Following his 2022 solo exhibition in Tibet, he began to engage more deeply with specific cultural and geographic contexts, with recent works reflecting a turn inward—toward spiritual reflection and contemplative states.

In 2024, following three research visits to Yunnan and in-depth conversations with scholars and Dongba priests, Ding Yi studied and internalised the texts and beliefs of the Dongba religion—an ancient tradition blending animism and Tibetan Buddhism. This belief system is preserved through sacred manuscripts composed in a unique pictographic script – the most significant and visually striking being The Road to Heaven. Used in funerary rituals, the long scroll depicts the soul’s symbolic passage from the earthly realm to the afterlife, and lends its title to this exhibition.

Drawing from the scroll’s visual and spiritual resonance, Ding Yi created a group of works executed on coarse-fibred Dongba paper using acrylic and water-soluble coloured pencil. These compositions reinterpret The Road to Heaven through his signature cross motif. The drawing transposes the Dongba writing system into a sequence of intricate schemes, each composed from a dense array of crosses. In this fusion of Dongba cosmology and his distinctive abstraction, Ding Yi invites viewers to perceive two worlds at once—entwined yet distinct in sensibility. Featured in the exhibition is The Road to Heaven 2024-B17, a four-panel work on Dongba paper. Each panel alludes to the transmigration of the soul through allegorical topographies: Nine Black Mountains, The Underworld, The Natural World, and Heaven.

The exhibition also features a suite of horizontal-format works on Dongba paper, continuing his iconic Appearance of Crosses series. For Ding Yi, works on paper hold a vital place in his practice, serving as both experimentation and refinement. In these, tiny crosses applied in various colours form mosaic-like compositions that oscillate between microcosmic and macrocosmic resonance. Blocks of dense black hatching – inset with constellatory motifs – echo the starry skies that have featured in Ding Yi’s works for two decades. Elsewhere, streaming blue diagonals conjure the two fundamental elements of life,  according to the Naxi – ‘Qi’ (energy) and water, linking to the ‘Twenty-eight mansions’ of Naxi astrology: the nightly resting places of the moon.

A group of larger relief paintings, rendered in chiselled basswood, features tiered zigzags that evoke the sacred Hengduan mountains of Yunnan in the guise of psychedelic abstraction. Coloured diagonals offset the faint underlying grid, while bold geometry, as often in Ding Yi’s art, compresses a sense of the minute, the handmade and the contingent, reflected in the tiny carved compartments that constitute each painting.

Ding Yi defined the first two stages of his career in terms of ‘steadying’ (the cultivation of a formal language) and ‘overlooking’ (the application of that language to the rapidly evolving world around him). The third, ongoing stage is that of ‘looking up’ – of widening his horizons, both spatial and temporal, to the cosmos and its ancient conceptualisations. The mathematical construction of his works belies a deep interest in the idiosyncratic and irrational dimensions of human thought and cultural tradition. The cross itself – at once Modernist and pre-modern, personal and functional – encapsulates the beguiling duality of his art. As curator Cui Cancan has observed, the “Winding Path” of Ding Yi’s practice “has no terminus – it sways fiercely between the poles of locality and globalisation.” The series of work featured in this exhibition is also on view at Ding Yi: The Winding Path at Contemporary Gallery Kunming and Anthropology Museum of Yunnan University, China, until 9 November 2025.

Artist Ding Yi

A leading figure in Chinese contemporary art, Ding Yi works across painting, sculpture, installation, and architecture. Since the late 1980s, his signature motif—the cross “+” and its variant “x”—has served as a symbol of structure, rationality, and a visual language exploring the essence of being. Trained in both art and design, Ding Yi began experimenting with abstraction in 1982. During his student years, he developed a strong conviction about how to paint and what kind of artist he would become. Rejecting the Expressionism and Surrealism then prevalent in China, he chose a rational path “free from ideology.” Profoundly influenced by Western artists such as Piet Mondrian and Frank Stella during the 1985 “New Wave” art movement, Ding Yi launched his iconic Appearance of Crosses series in 1988, aiming to create “an ultimate impression of abstraction”. At the time, he “designed” paintings resembling plans for fabrics or blankets, using rulers and tape to eliminate traces of hand gestures—rigorously precise compositions formed through the
repetition of the cross.

Ding Yi’s methodical structures are animated by vibrant, reflexively chosen colours, introducing an element of chance and tension into the work. Through colour and form, his paintings reflect on China’s rapid industrialisation and urbanisation, with visual motifs echoing QR codes and the sensory intensity of an information-driven society. Since 2010, Ding Yi has adopted a more expansive perspective in his examination of the world, integrating reflections on the broader human condition. His more recent works reveal greater luminosity and intensity, carrying a deeper emotional resonance.

Ding Yi was born in Shanghai in 1962, where he continues to live and work. He studied Design at the Shanghai Art & Design Academy (1980–1983), and later traditional Chinese painting at Shanghai University’s Fine Arts Department (1986–1990). His recent solo exhibitions include those at Contemporary Gallery Kunming and Anthropology Museum of Yunnan University (2025); Mostyn, Llandudno, Wales (2025); Galerie Karsten Greve, Cologne (2024), Paris and St. Moritz (2025); Château La Coste, Provence (2024); Ningbo Museum of Art and Huamao Museum of Art Education (2023); MOCAUP, Shenzhen (2023); Mojie Art Museum, Taiyuan (2023); TAG Art Museum, Qingdao (2022); Jebumgang Art Center, Lhasa (2022); Galería RGR, Mexico City (2022); ShanghART Gallery, Shanghai (2018) and Singapore (2022); Timothy Taylor, New York (2021) and London (2019); Long Museum, Chongqing (2020) and West Bund, Shanghai (2015); Nova Contemporary, Bangkok (2020); Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle, Munich (2019); Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou (2018); Xi’an Art Museum (2017); and Hubei Museum of Art, Wuhan (2016).

Ding Yi has exhibited extensively in major international group exhibitions at institutions such as The British Museum, London; M+ Museum, Hong Kong; Power Station of Art and MOCA Shanghai; SFMOMA; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York and Bilbao; Mercedes-Benz Contemporary, Berlin; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Lehmbruck Museum, Duisburg; MAXXI, Rome; UCCA, Beijing; and touring exhibitions in Bern, Hamburg, and Barcelona. He has also shown in biennales and triennales including the Venice Biennale (1993), Asia-Pacific Triennial (1993), Biennale of Sydney (1998), Yokohama Triennale (2001), Shanghai Biennale (2006), Shenzhen Sculpture Biennale (2012), and Busan Biennale (2016). 

LISSON GALLERY
67 Lisson Street, London

Ding Yi: The Road to Heaven
Lisson Gallery, London, 27 September – 1 November 2025

22/10/25

Anish Kapoor @ Jewish Museum, NYC - 'Early Works' Exhibition

Anish Kapoor: Early Works
Jewish Museum, New York
October 24, 2025 - February 1, 2026

The Jewish Museum presents the first American museum exhibition to focus solely on the formative early work of renowned artist Anish Kapoor. These rarely seen works include Kapoor’s striking pigment sculptures, together with works on paper and sketchbooks. Anish Kapoor: Early Works reveals the experimental proclivities of a trailblazing artist at the beginning of his career. The exhibition opens concurrently with the Jewish Museum’s inauguration of its newly transformed collection galleries and learning center.

Born in Mumbai (1954) and following a time in Israel in the early 1970s, Anish Kapoor moved to England to study art. Since his first solo exhibition in 1980, he has gone on to become one of the most internationally recognizable artists working today. His distinctive sculptural idiom, which first emerges in these early works, brought a radically new voice to British art and then to the international stage. Drawing on an engagement with Conceptual art and Minimalism, his early work was suffused with his unique approach to materiality and presence. Through some 55 works on view, including a selection of recent sculpture, the exhibition foregrounds the artist’s early and ongoing investigations of the boundaries of sculpture, color, and form.
“The Jewish Museum has a long tradition of presenting contemporary art as part of its ongoing commitment to exploring the narrative of shared humanity worldwide, together with the rich diversity of the global Jewish experience,” said James S. Snyder, Helen Goldsmith Menschel Director. “Anish Kapoor: Early Works reinforces this mission by exploring the boundary-pushing practice of one of the most influential artists of our time, while also highlighting themes of ritual, perception, and the power of materiality that resonate across the diversity of world cultures and histories.”
Early Works presents Kapoor’s pigment sculptures in richly hued and evocative groupings that seduce and confound with their uncanny combinations of cleanly articulated forms with delicate and unstable surfaces of loose pigment that migrates across floors and walls. The exhibition also explores how formal vocabularies and perceptual concerns present in Kapoor’s early sculptures connect to his later work. On view are also select examples of Kapoor’s more recent sculptures created with Vantablack, a nanotechnological substance that absorbs nearly all light. Presented together, these sculptures showcase the artist’s masterful play with perception, drawing on the psychic effects of color—and its absence—as well as the allure of objects that appear to defy their own material nature.

Also on view is a selection of Kapoor’s early drawings and gouaches. Intimately scaled, these works depict surreal, gestural, and subtly irregular forms, offering an aesthetic counterbalance to the formally austere sculptures where virtually all traces of the artist’s hand have been erased.
“These extraordinary early works are virtually unknown to American audiences and represent a side of Kapoor that will be revelatory,” said Darsie Alexander, Senior Deputy Director and Susan and Elihu Rose Chief Curator. “Our show offers a rare glimpse into Kapoor’s process of pairing of color and form to explore the spiritual, psychic, and physical possibilities of sculpture.  A keen eye towards the placement of objects transforms how they are perceived by viewers and foretells a future making environmental works on a much larger scale. We are thrilled to be organizing this effort in collaboration with the artist.”
Artist Anish Kapoor

Anish Kapoor is recognized internationally as one of today’s leading contemporary artists, renowned for sculptural works that are adventures in form and in engagement public space.

Kapoor’s work has been exhibited worldwide, with recent solo exhibitions at Cidade Matarazzo, São Paulo, Brazil (2024); Liverpool Cathedral, UK (2024); ARKEN Museum of Contemporary Art, Ishøj, Denmark (2024); and Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, Italy (2023-24), among others. Large scale public projects by Kapoor include Cloud Gate (2004) in Millennium Park, Chicago, USA; Dismemberment Site I (2003–2009), Kaipara Bay, New Zealand; Turning the World Upside Down (2010), The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; and Ark Nova (2013), the world’s first inflatable concert hall in Japan.

Anish Kapoor represented Britain at the 44th Venice Biennale in 1990 with Void Field (1989), for which he was awarded the Premio Duemila for Best Young Artist and won the Turner Prize in 1991. He was awarded a CBE in 2003 and a Knighthood in 2013 for services to visual arts.

Born in Mumbai, India in 1954, Anish Kapoor lives and works in London and Venice, Italy. He studied at Hornsey College of Art, London, followed by postgraduate studies at Chelsea School of Art, London.

This exhibition is organized by the Jewish Museum’s Senior Deputy Director and Susan and Elihu Rose Chief Curator Darsie Alexander and Leon Levy Associate Curator Shira Backer, in close collaboration with the artist and his studio.

JEWISH MUSEUM, NEW YORK
1109 5th Avenue at 92nd Street, New York, NY 10128

Previous Exhibition on Wanafoto:
Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity, May 23 — October 12, 2025