Earthwork Exhibition @ Art Museum at the University of Toronto - Curated by Mikinaak Migwans

Earthwork 

Alex Jacobs-Blum, Art Hunter, BUSH Gallery, Edward Poitras, Faye HeavyShield, Lisa Myers, Michael Belmore, Mike MacDonald, Protect the Tract Collective

Curated by Mikinaak Migwans 

Art Museum at the University of Toronto

September 4 – December 20, 2025

Faye HeavyShield

Clan (performance documentation), 2019 

Courtesy of Blaine Campbell

BUSH gallery 

MOMENTA 2021

Photo by Jean-Michael Seminaro 

The Art Museum at the University of Toronto presents the exhibition Earthwork, which reassesses the art historical framing of the “earthwork” popularized by the land art movement of the 1960s and ’70s, reclaiming it from an Indigenous perspective. It is curated by Mikinaak Migwans, Curator of Indigenous Contemporary Art at the Art Museum and Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History at the University of Toronto.

Works by Alex Jacobs-Blum, Art Hunter, BUSH Gallery, Edward Poitras, Faye HeavyShield, Lisa Myers, Michael Belmore, Mike MacDonald, Protect the Tract Collective

Earthwork redefines a term that until now has referred to a type of artistic practice associated within the larger conceptual framework of land art. In this exhibition, Mikinaak Migwans shifts our understanding of earthwork to refer to a way of working, rather than the making of singular objects — similar to the term “beadwork.” With a Canada-wide scope emphasizing the Great Lakes region, the exhibition takes as its starting point an understanding of ancestral earthworks less as monuments and more as sites of ongoing stewardship and care. It considers multiple layers of engagement with the land, including a history of land defense movements, medicine walks, and ancestral practices of prescribed burns, alongside contemporary artworks as creative acts of relational intervention.

“Redefining earthwork in this way helps us think about land as part of the cycles of life and death, rather than eternal monuments outside of time,” says Mikinaak Migwans. “It also helps us to see the huge labour investment that goes into maintaining relations on the land, getting away from this idea that the natural is something opposite to the human. Indigenous connections to land, especially, have been erased in colonial accounts that talk about a natural environment that is ‘virgin,’ ‘untouched,’ and in this way, unclaimed. But recent scholarship is starting to show that North America’s ecosystems were carefully cultivated and maintained by Indigenous Peoples. They’ve quite literally shaped the landscape through generations.” 

Art Hunter 

Untitled (Controlled burn at Kay-nah-chi-wah-nung mounds), 2023

Digital print

Photo courtesy of the artist

Art Hunter 

Untitled (Controlled burn at Kay-nah-chi-wah-nung mounds), 2023

Digital print

Photo courtesy of the artist

Central to the exhibition is photo and video documentation by Art Hunter of land stewardship practices at the ancestral Kay-Nah-Chi-Wah-Nung Historical Centre, a national historic site and one of the most significant places of early habitation and ceremonial burial in Canada located in northwestern Ontario. Art Hunter’s description of the Anishinaabe community’s controlled burn and other processes to maintain the site’s special ecology served as the inspiration point for Earthwork. 

Michael Belmore

drift, 2025 

Steel, wood, 2.43 m x 9 m x 4.5 m

Photo courtesy of the artist.

Michael Belmore

drift, 2025 

Steel, wood, 2.43 m x 9 m x 4.5 m

Photo courtesy of the artist

Internationally recognized artist Michael Belmore will create a new piece in his snow fence series, which will be on view from November 2025 through March 2026—following the seasonal cycle rather than the exhibition cycle. 

A new audio work by independent curator and artist Lisa Myers helps visitors think about land relations through walking and listening. 

Other featured artists are #BUSH Gallery (Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, Peter Morin, Tania Willard), Alex Jacobs-Blum, Faye HeavyShield, Mike MacDonald, Edward Poitras, and Protect the Tract Collective. 

The exhibition offers visitors a printed Engagement Guide, to better connect with the works on view by sharing specific histories and information in an accessible way.

ART MUSEUM AT THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO

University of Toronto Art Centre

University College, 15 King’s College Circle, Toronto, Ontario M5S 3H7

artmuseum.utoronto.ca

The Bridges of Michael Kenna @ Robert Mann Gallery, New York

The Bridges of Michael Kenna

Robert Mann Gallery, New York

September 4 - October 18, 2025

Bridges span rivers, connect cities, and carry us over what once seemed impassable. Where once there was only a divide — a river too wide, a ravine too deep — now there is a line drawn through space. We drive over bridges, walk across them, sometimes without even thinking. Yet Michael Kenna impressively photographs these bridges stretching across the globe in a unique light of the feat of human construction through time.

Kenna’s first show with Robert Mann Gallery opened in 1997 around the time the movie, The Bridges of Madison County was released; a moving love story about a photographer on an assignment to shoot historic bridges. Michael Kenna shares this fascination in capturing these structures, 

“Bridge structures are usually geometric and stationary with straight lines, verticals, horizontals and other angular constructs. The universe is constantly moving, flowing organic, uncontrollable and unpredictable. The abstract relationship between the two, almost like yin and yang, can be visually stunning and continues to fascinate and attract me.”--Michael Kenna

The bridges in this exhibition cross over bodies of water, from Sydney Harbour Bridge, Study 1, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, to Brooklyn Bridge, Study 1, New York City, USA carrying multiple lanes of traffic, trains, and possibilities. While other small bridges such as Canal Bridge, Banbury, Oxfordshire, England and Ponte dei Sospiri, Venice, Italy stretch a short distance suitable only for individuals to journey across. Each bridge featured in the exhibition has its own historical significance and the possibility of one day being replaced. Michael Kenna beautifully captures the bridge’s story, often at dawn or dusk, along with often solidifying its place in the world. 

What was once the end of the road becomes a place of crossing. What was once isolation becomes relationship. The landscape is no longer defined by separation, but by the possibility of reaching across. In The Bridges of Michael Kenna, the artist’s careful treatment of each composition is apparent from frame to frame, in which every detail is given its due consideration to express this relationship between the bridge and the land. The images in the exhibition represent over 50 years of Kenna’s exploration of this subject matter.

With dozens of monographs and hundreds of solo exhibitions held around the world, Michael Kenna is one of the most widely exhibited and beloved photographers working today. His work has been shown at the Tacoma Art Museum, the Palazzo Magnani Museum in Reggio Emilia, Italy, and Bibliothèque Nationale de France, to name a few. Kenna's photographs are included in many distinguished public collections including the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Museum of Modern Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Shanghai Art Museum; the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography; the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, Korea; the Museum of Decorative Arts, Prague; Museum of Art and Photography, Bangalore, India; and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

The Bridges of Michael Kenna is on view in conjunction with the artist’s exhibition, Japan: A Love Story, at the International Center of Photography through September 28, 2025. 

ROBERT MANN GALLERY 

508 West 26th Street, New York, NY 10001

www.robertmann.com

Jeffrey Gibson @ The Met Facade, NYC - The Genesis Facade Commission: Jeffrey Gibson, The Animal That Therefore I Am

The Genesis Facade Commission: Jeffrey Gibson, The Animal That Therefore I Am

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

September 12, 2025 – June 9, 2026

Portrait of Jeffrey Gibson: Eileen Travell

Jeffrey Gibson (American, born 1972)

Installation view of The Genesis Facade Commission:

Jeffrey Gibson, The Animal Therefore I Am, 2025

Courtesy the artist

Image credit: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 

Photo by Eugenia Burnett Tinsley

The acclaimed interdisciplinary artist JEFFREY GIBSON has transformed the iconic niches of the Museum’s Fifth Avenue facade with a series of four large-scale sculptures that explore the metamorphic relationships between all living beings and the environment. A member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and of Cherokee descent, Jeffrey Gibson draws from his distinctive style fusing worldviews and imagery with abstraction, text, and color to create these new figurative works cast in bronze. On view through June 9, 2026, The Genesis Facade Commission: Jeffrey Gibson, The Animal That Therefore I Am marks Gibson’s first major exploration of this material at a monumental scale.

"Jeffrey Gibson is one of the most remarkable artists of his generation and a pioneering figure within the field of native and Indigenous art," said Max Hollein, The Met’s Marina Kellen French Director and Chief Executive Officer. "These new works are based on his signature use of unconventional materials and reimagined forms, employing them to explore often-overlooked histories and the natural world. We’re thrilled to have his monumental sculptures installed on The Met’s iconic Fifth Avenue facade."

David Breslin, Leonard A. Lauder Curator in Charge, Modern and Contemporary Art, said, "Jeffrey Gibson is an artist brilliantly attuned to the varieties of life that our world holds—the human, the animal, the land itself. His art vibrates and bristles with that life, the histories that never leave us, and the futures that his vision makes possible."

Jeffrey Gibson (American, born 1972)

Installation view of they carry messages between 

light and dark spaces biakak / dawodv / hawk,

for The Genesis Facade Commission: 

Jeffrey Gibson, The Animal Therefore I Am, 2025

Silicon bronze with patina finish

Courtesy the artist

Image credit: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 

Photo by Eugenia Burnett Tinsley

Jeffrey Gibson (American, born 1972)

Installation view of they plan and prepare for 

the future fvni / sa lo li / squirrel,

for The Genesis Facade Commission: 

Jeffrey Gibson, The Animal Therefore I Am, 2025

Silicon bronze with patina finish

Courtesy the artist

Image credit: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 

Photo by Eugenia Burnett Tinsley

Titled The Animal That Therefore I Am, the installation transforms the Museum’s neoclassical facade into a dynamic stage for Gibson’s ambitious vision of figural presence and ecological kinship. Each 10-foot bronze sculpture takes the form of a regional animal: a hawk, a squirrel, a coyote, and a deer. Using cast elements such as wood, beads, and cloth to build texture, Jeffrey Gibson embraces a new process that expands his sculptural vocabulary. From these reproduced wood supports emerge referential animal forms, with each sculpture formally fusing the animate and the inanimate. Intricately bold, patinated abstract patterning evokes beadwork and textiles drawn from a range of Indigenous visual languages—motifs that are seamlessly integrated into the sculptures’ surfaces.

The works are inspired by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida’s book The Animal That Therefore I Am, which examines the violence inherent in the human domination of animals—a theme Gibson connects to broader cycles of conflict. By selecting species native to the New York area, he reflects on how these creatures have been forced to adapt to human environments, inviting us to consider what they endure and what they might teach us. The Animal That Therefore I Am flanks the Museum entrance, the zoomorphic forms remaining in dialogue with the surrounding landscape, from the natural environment of the Hudson River Valley, where Jeffrey Gibson lives and works, to the urban ecology of Central Park encircling The Met.

Jeffrey Gibson (American, born 1972)

Installation view of they are witty and transform themselves 

in order to guide us nashoba holba / wayaha / coyote, 

for The Genesis Facade Commission: 

Jeffrey Gibson, The Animal Therefore I Am, 2025

Silicon bronze with patina finish

Courtesy the artist

Image credit: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 

Photo by Eugenia Burnett Tinsley

Jeffrey Gibson (American, born 1972)

Installation view of they teach us to be sensitive 

and to trust our instincts issi / awi / deer, 

for The Genesis Facade Commission: 

Jeffrey Gibson, The Animal Therefore I Am, 2025

Silicon bronze with patina finish

Courtesy the artist

Image credit: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 

Photo by Eugenia Burnett Tinsley

This project is the latest in The Met’s series of contemporary commissions in which the Museum invites artists to create new works of art, establishing a dialogue between the artist's practice, The Met collection, the physical Museum, and The Met's audiences.

Artist Jeffrey Gibson

Jeffry Gibson is an interdisciplinary artist who grew up in the United States, Germany, and Korea. His expansive body of work ranges from hard-edged abstract paintings to a rich practice of performance and filmmaking to significant work as artist convener and curator. Since the 2000s, Gibson’s work—which often incorporates Indigenous aesthetic and material traditions—has consistently revealed new modalities for abstraction, the use of text, and color, with the artist applying his formal mastery to concepts such as human connection and collective identity. Notably, Gibson’s work has introduced a broad range of recurring sources, material elements, and imagery while offering a critique of the reductive ways in which Indigenous culture has been historically flattened and misappropriated.

Recent solo exhibitions include Jeffrey Gibson: the space in which to place me (The Broad, 2025); Jeffrey Gibson: POWER FULL BECAUSE WE’RE DIFFERENT (MASS MoCA, 2024); This Burning World: Jeffrey Gibson (ICA San Francisco, 2022); Jeffrey Gibson: The Body Electric (SITE Santa Fe, 2022); Jeffrey Gibson: They Come From Fire (Portland Art Museum, 2022); Jeffrey Gibson: INFINITE INDIGENOUS QUEER LOVE (deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, 2022); and Jeffrey Gibson: Like a Hammer (Denver Art Museum, 2018). Jeffrey Gibson was selected to represent the United States at La Biennale di Venezia, the 60th International Art Exhibition, in 2024. Jeffrey Gibson also conceived of and co-edited the landmark volume An Indigenous Present (2023), which showcases diverse approaches to Indigenous concepts, forms, and media. His work is included in the permanent collections of the Denver Art Museum; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Canada; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Portland Art Museum; Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others. Jeffrey Gibson has received many distinguished awards, including the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship Award (2019), and is currently an artist in residence at Bard College, in Annandale, New York. He lives and works in Hudson, New York.

The Genesis Facade Commission: Jeffrey Gibson, The Animal That Therefore I Am is conceived by the artist in consultation with Jane Panetta, the Aaron I. Fleischman Curator in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art at The Met. The exhibition is presented by Genesis.

METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART

The Met Fifth Avenue Facade

www.metmuseum.org

Warhol/Cutrone @ Galerie Gmurzynska, Zurich - Exhibition curated by James Hedges

Warhol/Cutrone

Galerie Gmurzynska, Zurich 

Through September 30, 2025

Warhol/Cutrone, an exhibition at Galerie Gmurzynska in Zurich, curated by James Hedges, juxtaposes Andy Warhol and Ronnie Cutrone, including paintings, drawings, and unique polaroids.

“Ronnie Cutrone was a painter and illustrator known for his Post-Pop imagery featuring cartoon characters like Woody the Woodpecker, Bart Simpson, and Bugs Bunny. Cutrone’s life and career make us remember New York at its creative apex. Reminiscing of another era, Cutrone said, “New York was elegant and sleazy. Now it’s a shopping mall for dot-commers. We need our crime rate back. I want my muggers and hookers back.” - James Hedges 

Andy Warhol and his right-hand man Ronnie Cutrone were the perceived masters of Manhattan in the 1970s and 1980s.

Working in synergistic fashion with Andy Warhol, Ronnie Cutrone helped execute some of the artist’s most iconic silkscreens. The duo’s collaborations countenance: Hand Tinted Flowers (ca. 1972), Invisible Sculpture (1972-83), Drag Queens/Ladies and Gentlemen (1974-75), Oxidation (Piss Paintings) (mid-late 1970s), Sex Parts/Torso (mid-1970s), Hammer & Sickle (1976-1977), Skulls (1976-77), Gems (1978), Shadow Paintings (1979), and Butcher Knives, Guns, Dollar Signs (1982).

With Andy Warhol one special focus of this exhibition is on his unique polaroids. Many of Warhol’s polaroid photographs have never been exhibited before and feature stars such as Grace Jones, Joseph Beuys, Keith Haring, Lou Reed and Candy Darling. Cutrone’s three-dimensional photographs of the Factory, shown publicly as well for the first time ever, give a historic and unprecedented peek into Warhol’s circle.

While with Ronnie Cutrone the focus of this exhibition is on his cartoon-infused painting, sculpture and drawings which shocked the New York scene in the 1980s. These works garnered him major solo shows in the inaugural Post-Pop wave, whilst igniting debates over the sanctity of the American symbols such as the flag and Mickey Mouse. After 1983, when Ronnie Cutrone left Warhol’s Factory, he perused his independent art career which reached great heights, including highly lauded museum exhibitions at the Whitney, the Museum of Modern Art, and the L.A. County Museum of Art, amongst many others.

“One thing I picked up from Andy: say loud and clear because if the WHOLE world gets it, the art world will get it too.” - Ronnie Cutrone 

Artist Ronnie Cutrone

Ronnie Cutrone (10 July, 1948 - 21 July, 2013) worked as Andy Warhol’s preeminent assistant from 1972 to 1982, though his collaborations with Warhol well preceded this. Ronnie Cutrone met Andy Warhol when he was only sixteen years old. Ronnie Cutrone, in 1966, joined the ranks of The Velvet Underground, formed by Lou Reed, John Cale, and Warhol, as a performer/dancer. Three years later, Ronnie Cutrone began writing as a columnist for Warhol’s Interview magazine, lauded for dovetailing reviews on avant-garde art exhibitions and features on celebrities, nightlife fixtures, and even politicians like Nancy Regan.

In 1972, Cutrone’s took up the mantle as Warhol’s apprentice, a post he maintained for the next decade. This was the zenith of Warhol’s international fame, and the Pop Art bastion took Ronnie Cutrone under his wing, entrusting Cutrone to, unlike Warhol’s other assistants, “work on the one thing he cared about the most, which was his art”. Although Ronnie Cutrone was, by this point, already burgeoning as a nascent artist of his own right—having assisted with programming John Giorno’s “Dial-A-Poem” at MoMA in the 1970 “Information” exhibition curated by Kynaston McShine.

Ronnie Cutrone’s responsibilities varied, ranging from conceptualizing Warhol’s subjects, mixing palettes, photographing live models and executing the silkscreen. Indeed, as the two artists ‘artistic relationship matured, the lines of influence became bi-directional. As philosopher, critic, and Warhol expert Arthur Danto observed in his biography, Andy Warhol (2009), “Cutrone played an important role in the later phase of Andy’s artistic career”.

During Cutrone’s time at Warhol’s Factory, he rubbed shoulders with Lou Reed, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Mick Jagger, Grace Jones, Lucio Amelio, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Fred Hughes, VictorHugo, Paul Morrisey, Gerard Malanga, Anjelica Huston, Debbie Harry, Salvador Dali and Alice Cooper, amongst others. After long days and nights of helping Warhol at the Factory, Ronnie Cutrone would frequent artist hubs like Max’s Kansas City, drinking “all night with bob Rauschenberg, Larry Rivers, Malcolm Morlye and Robert Smithson” or unwinding at the Mudd Club.

GALERIE GMURZYNSKA

Paradeplatz 2, Zurich

www.gmurzynska.com

Warhol/Cutrone @ Galerie Gmurzynska, Zurich, June 14 – September 30, 2025

Roger Ballen Exhibition in Austria at Museum Gugging, Maria Gugging - "roger ballen.! drawing meets photography" Exhibition

Roger Ballen.! drawing meets photography

Museum Gugging, Maria Gugging, Austria

September 25, 2025 – February 15, 2026

Roger Ballen

Funeral rites, 2004

© Roger Ballen

Roger Ballen

Untitled, 2020

© Roger Ballen

Roger Ballen

Wall shadows, 2003

© Roger Ballen

The exhibition roger ballen.! drawing meets photography by South African-based photo artist ROGER BALLEN (*1950) transcends the boundaries between photography and other art forms, at museum gugging.

Nina Ansperger and Roger Ballen in museum gugging

© NÖ Museum Betriebs GmbH, Daniel Hinterramskogler

"With Roger Ballen, we are bringing one of the most important and influential photographic artists of the 21st century to museum gugging," explains Nina Ansperger, the exhibition's curator. Over the past decades, his artistic work has evolved from narrative photography to a work increasingly dominated by drawing. Drawing is therefore the focus of this exhibition. "Roger Ballen is closely connected to Jean Dubuffet's idea of ​​Art Brut and defines himself as an 'outsider.' Drawing, as a central element of his photographic art, is simultaneously the most important medium of the art from Gugging. Thus, not only the subject matter but also the location of the exhibition could not be more appropriate," Nina Ansperger asserts. 

Roger Ballen, who refers to himself as an “outsider,” said: “I have brought drawing and photography into painting to produce a mixed medium image. It has been my goal to break down the boundaries between photography and other arts, taking photography out of its self-isolation as a form.” 

Roger Ballen in museum gugging

© NÖ Museum Betriebs GmbH, Daniel Hinterramskogler

New York-born Roger Ballen has lived in South Africa for several decades. His photographic works, created over 40 years, possess incredible narrative power because they oscillate between painting, drawing, installation, and photography. His “Ballenesque” aesthetic is unsettling, vehemently demands self-reflection and leads to a journey into one’s own unconscious.

Curator: Nina Ansperger

MUSEUM GUGGING

Am Campus 2, 3400 Maria Gugging

www.museumgugging.at

Robert Therrien @ The Broad, Los Angeles - "Robert Therrien: This is a Story" - The largest museum exhibition of the artist’s work to date

Robert Therrien: This is a Story

The Broad, Los Angeles

November 22, 2025 – April 5, 2026

Robert Therrien

No title (folding table and chairs, dark brown), 2007

Painted steel and aluminum, fabric, and plastic 

Courtesy of Glenstone Museum 

Photo by Joshua White/JWPictures.com

The Broad presents Robert Therrien: This is a Story, the largest museum exhibition of the late artist’s widely-adored work to date. Therrien’s meditations on scale and material are a deeply influential and well-known approach within the field of contemporary sculpture, significant to The Broad’s own identity as a museum, and long admired by visitors of all ages. The installation will showcase Therrien’s personal vocabulary of images and symbols—from enormous tables, chairs, and dishes, to intimate drawings of snowmen, birds, and chapels—as they become a language of continuous creation and transformation for the artist over time. Featuring more than 120 works spanning five decades, the exhibition offers unprecedented access to the artist’s exploration of scale, memory, and perception, just miles from the downtown Los Angeles home and studio space he operated out of for close to thirty years beginning in 1990. Many of the works on view, including those created just before Robert Therrien’s untimely death in 2019, have never been featured in museum exhibitions and will offer new avenues of understanding his practice.

“Robert Therrien has longstanding ties to The Broad and was one of the very first L.A.-based artists to enter the Broad collection decades ago, in its first, formative years. His massive sculpture Under the Table has captivated visitors to our museum’s galleries since the day The Broad opened in 2015, as a surreally enlarged wooden table offering layers of the artist’s intellectual and art historical inquiry within an aura of domestic familiarity,” said Joanne Heyler, Founding Director and President of The Broad. She added, “For our visitors who know and love Under the Table, this ambitious show will reveal a deeper and wide-lens look into the completely unique world Therrien created–a Los-Angeles-based body of work that reshaped contemporary sculpture.”

Robert Therrien

No title (bent cone relief), 1983 

Lacquer and wax on wood 

Courtesy of The Broad Art Foundation

Photo by Joshua White/JWPictures.com

Robert Therrien

No title (black witch hat), 2018 

Carved Delrin plastic

Courtesy of Robert Therrien Estate.

Photo by Joshua White/JWPictures.com

Robert Therrien (1947–2019) was born in Chicago and relocated to Los Angeles in the 1970s to complete an MFA at the University of Southern California. Despite the prominence of conceptual and minimalist practices at the time, he developed his own adjacent artistic vernacular that saw the infinite potential of ordinary objects across basic forms and their three-dimensional counterparts, varying in size, color, and detail. A single Robert Therrien gesture can expand, contract, change materially, or seamlessly transform into other images entirely. A chapel will become an oil can; the oil can will become a pitcher; the pitcher, a cone, then morphing into a witch hat. At the heart of Therrien’s practice is a sense of artistic animation, by turns fun, playful, and serious.

“Los Angeles has been and remains a historically important place to make sculpture and Robert Therrien is vital to that story” said Ed Schad, Curator and Publications Manager at The Broad. “From his handmade and intimate responses to Minimalism in the 1970s, to his early involvement in what would become a golden age of L.A. fabrication, Therrien made important contributions to many of sculpture’s central conversations for over forty years. However, the most important thing to know about Therrien is that he can evoke a sense of wonder. What starts in Therrien’s personal and closely guarded memories and passions, becomes a mysterious place in which a viewer can think about and dwell in one’s own.”

Visitors will be able to walk under and around large tables and chairs, approach enormous hanging beards, and navigate around large, stacked dishes designed to appear to be in motion and alter one’s sense of balance. In addition, a special collaboration with the artist’s estate will expose visitors to partial reconstructions of Therrien’s studio environment, including his project tables, drawings, and tools, to full-sized rooms full of surprises and encounters that are a hallmark of the artist’s practice. Therrien’s living and working space in Downtown L.A. remains pivotal to his understanding of space and size.

In addition to being the largest solo museum presentation of his work to date, Robert Therrien: This is a Story places his legacy within the broader arc of contemporary sculpture in Los Angeles and beyond. An exhibition catalog published by DelMonico Books will develop these connections further, edited by curator Ed Schad and featuring texts by Kathryn Scanlon, Richard Armstrong, and Darby English, as well as reflections from Vija Celmins, Vicky Arnold, Jacob Samuel, Christina Forrer and more.

THE BROAD

221 S. Grand Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90012

www.thebroad.org

Westwood | Kawakubo @ NGV International, Melbourne - A Major Fashion Design Exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria

Westwood | Kawakubo 

National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne 

7 December, 2025 - 19 April 2026

World's End, London (fashion house)

Vivienne Westwood (designer)

Malcolm McLaren (designer) 

Outfits from the Pirate collection, autumn–winter 1981–82 

Pillar Hall, Olympia, London, 31 March 1981

Photo © Robyn Beeche

Comme des Garçons, Tokyo (fashion house)

Rei Kawakubo (designer) 

Look 5, from the Break Free collection, 

spring–summer 2024. Paris, 30 September 2023 

Image © Comme des Garçons

Model: Hannah Heise

World's End, London (fashion house)

Vivienne Westwood (designer)

Malcolm McLaren (designer) 

Outfit from the Savage collection, spring–summer 1982 

Pillar Hall, Olympia, London, 22 October 1981 

Photo © Robyn Beeche

Comme des Garçons, Tokyo (fashion house)

Rei Kawakubo (designer) 

Look 28, from the 2 Dimensions collection, 

autumn–winter 2012. Paris, 3 March 2012

Image © Comme des Garçons

The NGV’s world-premiere exhibition pairs two global icons – and iconoclasts – of the fashion world for the first time, British designer VIVIENNE WESTWOOD (1941 – 2022) and Japanese designer REI KAWAKUBO (b. 1942) of Comme des Garçons. Born a year apart in different countries and cultural contexts, each brought a rule-breaking radicalism to fashion design that subverted the status quo. Today, their critically acclaimed collections are celebrated globally for questioning conventions of taste, gender and beauty, as well as challenging the very form and function of clothing.

Portrait of Katie Somerville, 

Senior Curator, Fashion and Textiles, NGV 

with VIVIENNE WESTWOOD, London (fashion house)

Vivenne Westwood (designer)

Ensemble, 1987, Harris Tweed collection, autumn-winter, 1987–88

at the announcement of Westwood | Kawakubo on display 

at NGV International 7 December 2025 to 19 April 2026

Photo: Eugene Hyland

Portrait of Danielle Whitfield, 

Curator, Fashion and Textiles, NGV 

with COMME DES GARÇONS, Tokyo (fashion house) 

Rei KAWAKUBO (designer) 

Look 9, 2012, 2 Dimensions collection, 

autumn-winter 2012–13

at the announcement of Westwood | Kawakubo on display 

at NGV International 7 December 2025 to 19 April 2026

Photo: Eugene Hyland

Through a showstopping display of more than 140 innovative and ground-breaking designs, Westwood | Kawakubo explores the convergences and divergences between these two self-taught rebels of the fashion world. The exhibition brings together important loans from international museums and private collections – including New York’s Metropolitan Museum, The Victoria & Albert Museum, Palais Galliera, and the Vivienne Westwood archive – alongside 100+ outstanding works from the NGV Collection. The exhibition features more than 80 works that have recently entered the NGV Collection, including nearly 40 outstanding works recently gifted to the NGV by Comme des Garçons especially for this exhibition. 

Comme des Garçons, Tokyo (fashion house)

Rei Kawakubo (designer) 

Look 28, from the 2 Dimensions collection, 

autumn–winter 2012. Paris, 3 March 2012

Image © Comme des Garçons

Model: Henna Lintukangas

Comme des Garçons, Tokyo (fashion house)

Rei Kawakubo (designer) 

Look 2, from the Smaller is Stronger collection, 

autumn–winter 2025. Paris, 8 March 2025 

Image © Comme des Garçons 

Model: Mirre Sonders

Presented thematically, Westwood | Kawakubo charts the defining collections and concerns of their practices – from the mid-1970s to the present day – inviting audiences to consider the multiple ways that Vivienne Westwood and Rei Kawakubo have each rewritten fashion conventions and codes over the course of their careers. These include: the impact and influence of the punk zeitgeist of the 1970s; the reinterpretation and reinvention of historical fashion references; their experimental design methodologies and the interrogation of gender and the idealised body. Alongside fashion, the exhibition also features archival materials, photography, film and runway footage, offering audiences a deep insight into the minds and creative processes of these two legends of contemporary fashion.

Vivienne Westwood, London (fashion house)

Vivienne Westwood (designer) 

Look 49, from the Anglomania collection, 

autumn–winter 1993–94

Le Cercle Républicain, Paris, March 1993

Photo © firstVIEW 

Model: Kate Moss

Exhibition highlights include Westwood’s iconic punk ensembles from the late 1970s, popularised by London bands such as The Sex Pistols and Siousie Sioux; a romantic MacAndreas tartan gown from Westwood’s Anglomania collection (autumn-winter 1993-94), famously worn by Kate Moss on the runway; and the original version of the corseted Wedding dress first shown in the Wake Up, Cave Girl Autumn-winter 2007-08 collection and later worn by Sarah Jessica Parker in Sex and The City: The Movie.

Comme des Garçons, Tokyo (fashion house) 

Rei Kawakubo (designer) 

Look 4, from the Blood and Roses collection, 

spring–summer 2015. Paris, 27 September 2014 

Image © Comme des Garçons 

Model: Andrea Hrncirova

Comme des Garçons, Tokyo (fashion house) 

Rei Kawakubo (designer)

Look 1, from the Blue Witch collection, 

spring–summer 2016. Paris, 3 October 2015

Image © Comme des Garçons 

Model: Maja Brodin

Comme des Garçons, Tokyo (fashion house) 

Rei Kawakubo (designer)

Look 6, from the Invisible Clothes collection, 

spring–summer 2017. Paris, 9 March 2017 

Image © Comme des Garçons 

Model: Georgia Howorth

In 2017, The Met in New York staged the exhibition, Rei Kawakubo / Comme des Garçons: The Art of the In-Between, which opened with the pop culture phenomenon the Met Gala. The NGV exhibition features a version of the sculptural petal ensemble worn by Rihanna on the red carpet, as well as key designs from collections of those worn by Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, and Tracee Ellis Ross. Also on display are dramatic abstract works spanning the recent decades which challenge the relationship between the body and clothing, including the playful Two Dimensions, spring-summer 2012, and the abstract forms of Invisible Clothes spring-summer 2017. Striking gingham sculptural forms from Body Meets Dress – Dress Meets Body collection (spring-summer 1997) also feature.

Comme des Garçons, Tokyo (fashion house) 

Rei Kawakubo (designer)

Look 6, from the Body Meets Dress–Dress Meets Body collection, 

spring–summer 1997 

Image © Comme des Garçons

Major showstopping moments in the exhibition include a dramatic, spotlit gallery highlighting how both designers have been influenced by fashion history; Westwood’s sweeping silk taffeta ball gowns inspired by 18th century court dress are presented alongside Kawakubo’s punk interpretations in pink vinyl and rich floral jacquard. A further dynamic display juxtaposes the bold, red tartans, English tweeds, grey plaids and navy pinstripes of Kawakubo with Westwood’s iconic tailoring. Sculptural, deconstructed, cinched and exaggerated silhouettes demonstrate their exacting approaches to cutting and textile traditions.

The exhibition design presents the two distinct voices of Vivienne Westwood and Rei Kawakubo as parallel yet fundamentally unique forces in fashion. The design uses symmetry as its cornerstone concept, presenting these designers like left and right hands; symmetrical but not identical.

Comme des Garçons, Tokyo (fashion house)

Rei Kawakubo (designer) 

Look 1, from the 18th Century Punk collection, 

autumn–winter 2016. Paris, 5 March 2016

Image © Comme des Garçons 

Model: Anna Cleveland

The exhibition explores Westwood and Kawakubo’s practices across five themes. Punk and Provocation considers how punk, both aesthetically and conceptually, crystallized in the early collections of each designer and has remained a touchstone, if not a design manifesto, throughout their careers. Highlight Vivienne Westwood works in this section convey some of the key aspects of punk clothing – offensive graphics, bondage trousers, distressed knitwear, tartan, leather, safety pins and chains. In dialogue, four notable works by Rei Kawakubo demonstrate the influence and ethos of punk in her practice.

World's End, London (fashion house)

Vivienne Westwood (designer)

Malcolm McLaren (designer) 

Outfit from the Nostalgia of Mud collection, 

autumn–winter 1982–83. 

Pillar Hall, Olympia, London, 24 March 1982 

Photo © Robyn Beeche

Rupture explores the unique design lexicons of Vivienne Westwood and Rei Kawakubo, revealing how each have been driven by the desire to break free of convention and reinvent the rules of dress. Early highlights here include displays of Westwood’s Pirate (spring-summer 1981) and Nostalgia of Mud (autumn-winter 1983) collections that encapsulated the New Romantic and Buffalo movements of 1980s London, contrasted by recent works from Kawakubo’s Not Making Clothes collection, spring-summer 2014, which saw her negate the boundaries between body and garment.

Vivienne Westwood, London (fashion house)

Vivienne Westwood (designer) 

Fragonard, evening dress, 

from the Cut, Slash & Pull collection, 

spring–summer 1991 

116 Pall Mall, London, October 1990 

Photo © Robyn Beeche 

Model: Sara Stockbridge

Reinvention looks at the way both designers have referenced the past or looked to the future, looking to sources of inspiration that include fashion history, tailoring traditions, decorative arts and textiles. For Vivienne Westwood art history has been a constant influence, most notably in her Portrait collection (autumn-winter 1990), which featured prints of famous eighteenth century paintings by Boucher and Fragonard emblazoned on the corsetry. For Rei Kawakubo, breaking the rules of taste has resulted in collections that bring together clashing pattern, ruffles and frills.

The Body: Freedom and Restraint explores the ways in which both Vivienne Westwood and Rei Kawakubo have consistently challenged existing conventions related to ideal and idealised female bodies and rallied against objectification. Beginning with iconic works from Westwood’s Erotic Zones collection (spring-summer 1995) and Kawakubo’s The Future of Silhouette (autumn-winter 2017-18), this section considers the ways in which both designers have redefined the female body.

Comme des Garçons, Tokyo (fashion house)

Rei Kawakubo (designer) 

Look 13, from the Uncertain Future collection, 

spring–summer 2025. Paris, 28 September 2024 

Image © Comme des Garçons

Model: Astrid Wagemakers

The final section of the exhibition, The Power of Clothes, considers fashion as a tool to convey a message, personal or political, and the powerful individual female voice. It concludes with recent Westwood collections – Propaganda (autumn-winter 2025) and Chaos Point (autumn-winter 2008-09) – that utilise clothing and fabrics as a canvas for messaging about the environment, social inequity of political freedoms in an echo of her early punk days. These are seen in context with the self-reflective power of Kawakubo’s recent collections (Uncertain Future, spring-summer 2025) which express her emotional response to the state of the world.

Portrait of Tony Ellwood AM, Director, NGV 

with VIVIENNE WESTWOOD, London (fashion house)

Vivenne Westwood (designer)

Gown, 1998, Dressed to Scale collection, autumn-winter 1998-99 

at the announcement of Westwood | Kawakubo on display 

at NGV International 7 December 2025 to 19 April 2026

Photo: Eugene Hyland

Tony Ellwood AM, Director, NGV said: ‘This exhibition celebrates two leading female fashion designers from different cultural backgrounds, who both had strong creative spirits and pushed boundaries. Through more than 140 designs from the NGV Collection and key international loans, Westwood | Kawakubo invites audiences to reflect on the enduring legacies of these groundbreaking designers and contemplate the ways in which fashion can be a vehicle for self-expression and freedom."

The exhibition will be accompanied by an ambitious world-first publication, also titled Westwood | Kawakubo, exploring the intersecting histories of Westwood and Kawakubo with new reflections from industry experts including Jane Mulvaugh, Valerie Steele, Stephen Jones, Akiko Fukai and Dame Zandra Rhodes.

FASHION DESIGNER VIVIENNE WESTWOOD

Vivienne Isabel Swire was born in Glossop, Derbyshire on 8 April 1941. In 1961, she married Derek Westwood, later divorcing and partnering with Malcolm McLaren. The couple became creative collaborators and proprietors of a retail outlet at 430 Kings Road Chelsea, going on to have a radical influence on international fashion over the next decade. Westwood and McLaren stocked the store with a combination of their own designs and purchased items, changing the name every few years to reflect the tenor of the clothing. Over subsequent years the store became; Let it Rock (1971), Too Fast To Live, Too Young To Die (1972), Sex (1974), Seditionaries (1977) and World’s End (1980).  

In 1980, Vivienne Westwood and Malcom McLaren’s interests began to diverge and by 1984 Vivienne Westwood was designing independently, moving her business to Italy for production with her new business partner Carlo d’Amario. Over the next two decades, Vivienne Westwood redefined her practice, embracing and reimagining Saville Row tailoring techniques and British textiles. She also began conducting regular archive research of London’s Victoria and Albert Museum and The Wallace Collection. In 1990 she launched her first full menswear collection and structured her business into a variety of labels, including Gold Label and its diffusion line, Red Label. Twice-awarded British Designer of the Year, in 1992 Vivienne Westwood was granted an OBE, and in 2006, a DBE. Vivienne Westwood died in London on 29 December 2022.

FASHION DESIGNER REI KAWAKUBO

Japanese designer Rei Kawakubo was born in Tokyo in 1942 and graduated from Keio University in 1964 with a degree in Literature and Fine Art. After working first as a stylist, she began designing her own clothes and established Comme des Garçons in 1969. The label was incorporated in 1973, coinciding with the presentation of her first major women’s collection. Despite her lack of formal training, Rei Kawakubo courted critical and commercial success. A new Tokyo boutique was launched in 1975, followed by a dedicated menswear line, Homme Comme des Garçons, in 1978. Rei Kawakubo debuted on the Paris runway three years later, in 1981, where she continues to show her two main collections twice-yearly. Her work is known for its conceptual and avant-garde leanings, and for a groundbreaking approach to form and function. Many subsequent projects and ready-to-wear lines have since been introduced and include knitwear, furniture and perfume. 

Rei Kawakubo’s work has been featured by museums in solo and group exhibitions and she has received numerous honours including the Mainichi Fashion Award in 1983 and 1988, Fashion Group Night of the Stars Award in 1986, the French Chevalier de L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1993 and, most recently, the Harvard University Graduate School of Design Excellence in Design Award in 2000. In 2017, her work was the subject of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute exhibition, Rei Kawakubo / Comme des Garçons: The Art of the In-Between.

NATIONAL GALLERY OF VICTORIA

NGV International, 180 St Kilda Road, Melbourne, 3004 VIC

www.ngv.vic.gov.au

Daniel Richter @ Thaddaeus Ropac Salzburg - "Mit elben Birnen" Exhibition

Daniel Richter: Mit elben Birnen

Thaddaeus Ropac Salzburg

Through 27 September 2025

Thaddaeus Ropac Salzburg presents a new series of paintings by German artist DANIEL RICHTER. Created over the past year, these large-scale works navigate a space between figuration and abstraction, characterised by chaotic entanglements of fragmented bodies. Creature-like forms are depicted against jagged fields of colour in bright, contrasting tones, evoking a sense of rebellious energy and electric vibrancy.

Daniel Richter’s painting has been marked by a continual formal transformation since the beginning of his career. While opaque, monochrome areas of colour characterised Richter’s work of the past few years, the backgrounds of these new, intensely colourful compositions appear torn or singed. At times, the candy-coloured shapes that seem to race across the canvas are delineated by black, dense lines; at others, they seem to detach from the background or erupt across the pictorial space.

In some works, the artist leaves behind traces of his physical presence as visible fingermarks on the canvas, intensifying a heightened sense of primordial energy and unresolved conflict. ‘The dynamic in my work is mainly based on pushing and shoving, or on elements that are being confronted by each other – mingling, pushing, pulling,’ Daniel Richter explains.

The temporal and spatial indeterminacy of scenes refuses to resolve into a coherent time, place, or even pictorial space. The works appear to depict surreal landscapes of the mind or imagination rather than representations of any external world. Colours clash or recede with intense emotional charge, the bold contrasts and abstract patterns recalling the formal vocabulary of Clyfford Still. And yet, despite the underlying violence, the works convey a touching sensuality and beauty that counterbalances their restless energy.

The exhibition’s title references the opening line of Friedrich Hölderlin’s poem Half of Life, which Daniel Richter cryptically rephrases. The poem is centred around a stark contrast between idealised beauty and a world marked by emptiness. The lines, which sound almost prophetic in today’s political climate, accompanied Daniel Richter during the creation of this series. Hölderlin’s image of creaking weathervanes can be read as a symbol of the fragile, often fractured order of our time.

Friedrich Hölderlin

‘Half of Life’

With its yellow pears

And wild roses everywhere

The shore hangs into the lake,

O gracious swans,

And drunk with kisses

You dip your heads

In the sobering holy water.

Ah, where will I find

Flowers, come winter,

And where the sunshine

And shade of the earth?

Walls stand cold

And speechless, in the wind

The weathervanes creak.

The anarchic humour of his titles is typical of the artist, whose sensibility for the absurd and the drastic is also closely linked to the Hamburg music scene and punk. The city, where Daniel Richter studied under Werner Büttner from 1992 to 1996, has played a pivotal role in his life and career, serving as both a formative backdrop for his artistic development and a long-standing base from which he emerged as one of Germany’s most influential contemporary painters.

Artist Daniel Richter

Born in Eutin, Germany, Daniel Richter lives and works in Berlin. He studied at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg from 1992–96 under Werner Büttner, and later worked as an assistant to Albert Oehlen. Comprehensive solo exhibitions of Richter’s work have been held at Kunsthalle Tübingen (2023); Space K, Seoul (2022); 21er Haus, Vienna (2017); Camden Arts Centre, London (2017); Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek (2016); TAXISPALAIS Kunsthalle Tirol, Innsbruck (2014); Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt (2014); Kestner Gesellschaft, Hannover (2011); CAC Málaga and Denver Art Museum (both 2008); Hamburger Kunsthalle (2007); National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (2005); and Kunsthalle Kiel; Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf (2001).

Daniel Richter’s works are included in renowned collections worldwide, among them the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Hamburger Kunsthalle; the Nationalgalerie, Berlin; the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart; the Museum of Fine Arts Leipzig; the Kunstmuseum Den Haag; the Contemporary Art Collection of the Federal Republic of Germany; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Denver Art Museum; and the Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain, Strasbourg. In 2023, the Oscar-winning director Pepe Danquart released the documentary Daniel Richter, offering a multifaceted insight into the artist’s life and work.

In December, a major retrospective will open at the Museum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte Schloss Gottorf (until February 2026).

THADDAEUS ROPAC SALZBURG

Salzburg Villa Kast, Mirabellplatz 2, 5020 Salzburg

ropac.net

Related Posts:

In English

Daniel Richter 

Kunsthalle Tübingen (2023)

Daniel Richter: Pink Flag – White Horse 

National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (2005)

En Français

Daniel Richter. Drapeau rose – Cheval blanc

Musée des beaux-arts du Canada, Ottawa (2005)

Daniel Richter: Mit elben Birnen

Thaddaeus Ropac Salzburg, 25 July — 27 September 2025