Portia Zvavahera @ David Zwirner, Los Angeles - 'Zvibereko zvemweya wangu' Exhibition

Portia Zvavahera

Zvibereko zvemweya wangu

David Zwirner, Los Angeles

November 14, 2025 – February 7, 2026

Portia Zvavahera

Takasunungurwa, 2025 

© Portia Zvavahera. Courtesy Stevenson and David Zwirner

David Zwirner presents Zvibereko zvemweya wangu, its third solo exhibition with the Zimbabwean artist Portia Zvavahera. Taking place at the gallery’s 606 N Western Avenue location in Los Angeles, this presentation features a series of new works that continues to develop Zvavahera’s experiments with different painting processes and subject matter by joining her carefully charted dream worlds with her lived experience and daily rituals. Portia Zvavahera expands her practice with familiar motifs and narratives; her works are populated by symbolic creatures that become powerful conduits for the interpretation of spiritual visions and the contemplation of our earthly existence. 

In her paintings, Portia Zvavahera gives form to emotions beyond the domains of everyday life and thought. Her vivid imagery is rooted in the cornerstones of our earthly existence—life and death, pain and pleasure, isolation and connection, and love and loss. These deeply personal visions are realized through layers of vibrant color and ornate, veil-like patterns that the artist builds up into palimpsestic surfaces through a combination of expressive brushwork and elaborate printmaking techniques. Zvavahera’s compositions draw on particular traditions of figuration in past and present Zimbabwe, first expressed in the work of Thomas Mukarobgwa in the 1960s, while also pointing to postwar artistic practices that probe the nature of the human condition.

Zvavahera’s latest exhibition powerfully continues this exploration of the human condition. Themes of love, loss, fear, family, and protection recur throughout this new series of paintings, mirroring her broader practice. The show title Zvibereko zvemweya wangu loosely translates from Shona as the “fruits of my soul,” aptly describing the intense creative output behind these works. These monumental paintings are among her most energetic to date, deeply inspired by her love for family and, particularly, the passing of her late grandmother. Here, Portia Zvavahera resumes her study of dreamscapes, delving into subject matter that women, especially mothers, have experienced across time. She strips away the protective veneer of modern society, exposing core emotions that relate to the profundity of life and death. Incorporating new motifs like vessels, trees, water lilies, and snakes, Zvavahera’s paintings guide viewers on journeys, telling abstracted stories about the strength within the maternal and matriarchal world, where reality and imagination merge.

Shona is the artist’s native language, which she speaks at home; titles in Shona are provided with a translation only when Portia Zvavahera feels that the English words suffice. Experimenting with batik and block printing, oil sticks, and acrylic paints, Zvavahera's canvases are applied with layers, and then, like dreams, unfold into camouflaged compositions rich in symbolism and psychological depth. Within Zvibereko zvemweya wangu, Portia Zvavahera portrays small figures, children unbound by the canvas and surrounded by protecting arms and feathered veils painted with leaves, using a traditional wax-resist batik method, in works such as Kubuditswa muhari (2025). Others like Kubudiswa (redeemed) (2025) show a series of bowing figures—a community seemingly praying as a form of collective strength, demonstrating their power in numbers.

Artist Portia Zvavahera

Portia Zvavahera was born in 1985 in Harare, Zimbabwe, where she currently lives and works. She studied at the BAT Visual Arts Studio, National Gallery of Zimbabwe, from 2003 to 2005. She then received a diploma in fine arts from Harare Polytechnic in 2006.

Portia Ndakaoneswa murima, the artist’s first solo presentation in New York and her second with the gallery, was on view at David Zwirner, New York, in 2021. Zvavahera’s first exhibition with the gallery, Ndakavata pasi ndikamutswa nekuti anonditsigira, was at its London location in 2020.

The artist has presented several solo exhibitions with Stevenson, Cape Town and Johannesburg (2014–2020), and a solo exhibition with Marc Foxx Gallery, Los Angeles (2017). The National Gallery of Zimbabwe, Harare, presented her solo exhibition Under My Skin in 2010, and in 2020, the Institute of Contemporary Art Indian Ocean, Port Louis, Mauritius, held her solo exhibition Walk of Life. She was invited to show her work as part of the Zimbabwean Pavilion exhibition Dudziro: Interrogating the Visions of Religious Beliefs at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013. In 2022, her work was included in the 59th Venice Biennale.

In 2024, Kettle’s Yard, University of Cambridge, England, presented Portia Zvakazarurwa, a solo exhibition of the artist’s work organized in collaboration with Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, where the show traveled in 2025. Curated by Tamar Garb, this exhibition marked Zvavahera’s first solo institutional presentation in the United Kingdom. Also in 2024, the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, presented Imba yerumbidzo (House of praise), as the fifteenth iteration of its Open Space solo exhibition series. The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, opened Hidden Battles / Hondo dzakavanzika, Zvavahera's first institutional solo exhibition in the United States, in August 2025. The artist also opened her first solo institutional exhibition in Germany at Fridericianum, Kassel, on September 27, 2025.

DAVID ZWIRNER LOS ANGELES

616 N Western Avenue, Los Angeles, CA

www.davidzwirner.com

R. Crumb @ David Zwirner, Los Angeles - 'Tales of Paranoia' Exhibition

R. Crumb: Tales of Paranoia

David Zwirner, Los Angeles

October 10, 2025 – January 10, 2026

Panel from R. Crumb, I'm Afraid, 2025

© Robert Crumb, 2025 

Courtesy the artist, Paul Morris, and David Zwirner

David Zwirner presents an exhibition of new drawings and prints by iconic illustrator and cartoonist R. Crumb (b. 1943), on view at the gallery’s 616 N Western Avenue location in Los Angeles. In his works of the last several years Crumb reflects on life in his eighties and his sixty-year career as well as themes of personal and mass paranoia during these times of social and political unrest. Crumb’s most mordant attacks are, as always, reserved for himself and show him contending with his own manic anxieties in a humorous and insightful manner.

The new works in this exhibition represent Crumb’s first extensive solo comic work in over two decades, marking an impressive late-career resurgence. Many of these incisive, introspective, and formally adventurous illustrations were made for the artist’s publication, Tales of Paranoia. This new comic book—Crumb’s first in twenty-three years—was published this month by Fantagraphics. Created in the wake of the 2022 passing of Crumb’s wife and longtime artistic partner, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, these works reveal a mind turning inward without its usual counterpoint—absent her grounding presence, the work veers further into obsessive, unfiltered reflection. As Crumb noted in 2019, “Success and the love of real women helped me a lot. Aline really saved my dismal ass.” [1] Crumb and Kominsky-Crumb had frequently collaborated, particularly in the decade preceding her death, and her absence is felt directly in the content of these recent works.

While Crumb’s early work skewered both mainstream and countercultural figures with a hyper-libidinal, satirical edge, his recent drawings meditate on paranoia, particularly around medicine and disease. These works convey a heightened self-awareness, oscillating between genuine suspicion and conspiracy; they incisively mirror a broader culture of mistrust of authority and the erosion of shared meaning and reliable information in the world today. In A Difficult Conundrum (2025), each panel depicts an increasingly agitated Crumb, his speech bubbles multiplying in a spiraling monologue directed against a pharmaceutical company. Through the familiar conventions of the comic form, Crumb constructs a self-portrait steeped in uncertainty and vulnerability. In other works he revisits his past, exploring difficult and disturbing moments that continue to affect him. As the title suggests, The Very Worst LSD I Ever Had (2025) documents a harrowing acid trip that Crumb experienced in 1966, which led him to seek several sessions of regressive hypnosis.

Also on view is a rare sketchbook from earlier in Crumb’s career, which offers an intimate glimpse into Crumb’s process and preoccupations. Placed in dialogue with the recent drawings, it highlights not only the evolution of the artist’s style and tone but also the enduring idiosyncrasies—formal, psychological, and narrative—that continue to define his work. Numerous recent etchings Crumb produced in collaboration with the renowned print studio Two Palms, New York, are also featured.

Artist R. Crumb

Born in Philadelphia, R. Crumb (b. 1943) moved to the dynamic Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco in 1967, and relocated in 1991 to the south of France, where he currently lives and works. Crumb joined David Zwirner in 2006. This is Crumb’s seventh solo exhibition with the David Zwirner gallery.

Solo exhibitions of Crumb’s work were presented at the Contemporary Art Galleries, University of Connecticut, Mansfield (2020), and at the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara, California (2018). In 2016, the Cartoonmuseum Basel organized Aline Kominsky-Crumb & Robert Crumb: Drawn Together, the first comprehensive museum presentation of the artists’ joint work. A retrospective of Crumb’s work was held in 2012 at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. In 2011, his work was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Museum of American Illustration at the Society of Illustrators, New York. A major solo show devoted to Crumb’s work was organized by the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, in 2007, and traveled from 2008 to 2009 to the Frye Art Museum, Seattle; Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston; and the Grand Central Art Center, Santa Ana, California. Other solo exhibitions of the artist’s work have been organized by the Whitechapel Gallery, London, a show that traveled to the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (both 2005); and Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2004). Terry Zwigoff’s documentary Crumb was named the best film of 1994 by the late critic Gene Siskel and won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival in 1995

Work by the artist is represented in major museum collections worldwide, including the Brooklyn Museum, New York; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, Los Angeles; Musée régional d'art contemporain Occitanie, Sérignan, France; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; and The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

[1] Nadja Sayej, “Robert Crumb: ‘I am no longer a slave to a raging libido’,” The Guardian, March 7, 2019. Accessed online.

DAVID ZWIRNER, LOS ANGELES

616 N Western Avenue, Los Angeles, CA

www.davidzwirner.com

Luc Tuymans: The Fruit Basket @ David Zwirner, NYC + Los Angeles

Luc Tuymans: The Fruit Basket 

David Zwirner, New York 

November 6 – December 19, 2025 

Luc Tuymans

The Family, 2025

© Luc Tuymans. All rights reserved

Courtesy Studio Luc Tuymans, Antwerp, and David Zwirner

David Zwirner presents an exhibition of new paintings by Belgian artist Luc Tuymans on view at the gallery’s newly renovated 533 West 19th Street location. Luc Tuymans has been represented by David Zwirner since 1994; this is the celebrated artist’s eighteenth solo show with the gallery. The Fruit Basket will travel to David Zwirner Los Angeles in February 2026.

One of the most important painters working today, Luc Tuymans pioneered a distinctive style of figurative painting beginning in the 1980s that has been singularly influential to his peers as well as subsequent generations of artists. Featuring subject matter that ranges from the mundane to the profound, the artist’s deeply resonant compositions insist on the power of images to simultaneously reveal and withhold meaning. Over time, Luc Tuymans has adapted both the content and formal construction of his works to engage with contemporary visual culture and the sociopolitical contexts in which they are shown, thereby continually asserting the relevance of painting in a digitally saturated world.

Thematically, The Fruit Basket picks up where Tuymans’s previous exhibition—The Barn, held at David Zwirner New York in 2023—left off, delving further into the deleterious effects of the conflation of image and reality. The exhibition considers the pervasive atmosphere of fracture that is specific to the United States at this moment. Foregrounding the highly mediated state of contemporary experience, Luc Tuymans reinforces a growing sense of dissolution through varied subject matter and formal approaches, which are installed in an unexpected cadence across the show. Throughout, he modulates the tonality of his colors to match the heightened artifi ciality of the imagery he has carefully chosen, creating thought-provoking juxtapositions of scale and technique. 

Measuring sixteen feet tall and more than twenty-three feet wide, The Fruit Basket (2025)—from which the exhibition takes its title—presents a picture that is literally fragmented, composed of nine distinct parts arranged into a grid. Based on an iPhone photo that Luc Tuymans took of an actual basket of fermenting fruit projected onto a blue-cast multipart screen, the eerie tones and diffuse focus of this painting betray the presence of digital light. An object of fascination for the artist, the fruit basket—sometimes seen as a symbol of plenty—and its contents are distorted almost beyond recognition, becoming something else entirely, a kind of memento mori. Due to the sheer size of the composition, the viewer must step back to take in the work in full, only to notice the intrusion of the artist’s fingers at the bottom corner that indexes his engagement with the image on his phone. The strong diagonal that cuts across the picture plane mimics the construction of the similarly scaled epic history painting The Raft of the Medusa (1818–1819) by Théodore Géricault. In likening a fruit basket—an object that is also commonly gifted to the sick—to Géricault’s raft of the dying, adrift from a shipwreck, Luc Tuymans emphasizes decay rather than abundance. 

A related group of four large-scale works, collectively titled Illumination, is installed throughout the show, appearing at first as fields of color that are lit from within in a manner akin to the rectilinear abstractions of Mark Rothko—a prodigious artist whose life ended in tragedy, and an ongoing interest for Tuymans. Tuymans’s paintings harken back to 1950s and 1960s abstract expressionism and color field painting, non-referential styles that had their heyday during a period of intense sociopolitical turmoil in the US and are now the subject of renewed interest. In contrast to the spontaneity of abstract painting, Tuymans’s works are deliberately constructed, based on zoomed-in stills captured on his phone from a documentary about the restoration of fifteenth-century illuminated manuscripts. Luc Tuymans decided to encase these compositions in nearly black hues (though using no actual black pigment), applied by hand in thick bands around their borders. These off-square “frames” occupy almost as large a portion of the canvas as the actual image, further emphasizing the light that these colorful passages seem to emit—in this case reproducing the bright and mottled light that artifi cially results from taking a photo of a screen with a smartphone and drastically enlarging it. The subject of these paintings is amorphous, opening onto multiple readings that signal the instability of memory and the ways in which the past can be reinvented through image. 

Another group of canvases, painted in Tuymans’s distinctive and recognizable style, literalizes a feeling of intrusion at the heart of the exhibition. Hollow (2025) features the empty interior of a prosthetic latex mask, which floats against a dark, monochromatic ground. The inverse of a face, this image foregrounds the question of what is real and what is fake. Meanwhile, the smallest work in the show, The Maggot (2025) presents a close-up of the titular insect, alternately considered a harbinger of decay and rot and a medical cure capable of cleansing an open wound. Migrants (2025) glows urgently with hot reds and oranges and a looser treatment of paint. Rendered in an impressionistic style that is legible only from a distance, the image of dozens of faceless figures cloaked in shadow derives from a news photograph of migrants waiting at a border—the only work in the show to be based on an unmanipulated, “real” image. 

Finally, a group of four canvases based on 3D-printed figurines of actual people feature individuals that in different ways read as quintessentially American. Appearing at once uncannily lifelike and frozen in time, the people are rendered with an increased feeling of dimensionality, hinting at their status as objects. Executed on a more intimate scale that brings the viewer face-to-face with the subjects depicted, these paintings are meant to project optimism. However, Luc Tuymans has bestowed the canvases with an ashen underlayer, coupled with a thin treatment of paint, causing the figures to appear as if they were never alive to begin with. Paintings from this group both open and close the exhibition. In the first gallery, Hall of Fame (2025) features a figure donning the yellow NFL Hall of Fame jacket and holding a football between his hands as he stares vacantly ahead, a champion of the most American of pastimes. Likewise, the last painting in the show, The Family (2025) features a group portrait of three generations clustered together, smiling brightly while receding before our very eyes, underscoring the impossibility of a certain kind of reality.

Artist Luc Tuymans

Born in 1958 in Mortsel, Belgium, Luc Tuymans is one of the most important painters of his generation. His first major museum presentations were held in 1990 at the Provinciaal Museum voor Moderne Kunst, Ostend, Belgium, and the Vereniging voor het Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst, Ghent. In 1992, the artist participated in Documenta IX in Kassel, in addition to having a solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Bern, which helped cement his growing reputation in Europe. In 1994, Luc Tuymans: Superstition debuted at Portikus, Frankfurt, and traveled to David Zwirner, New York; the Art Gallery of York University, Toronto; The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago; the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; and Goldie Paley Gallery, Moore College of Art & Design, Philadelphia, establishing him as a major influential artist abroad. In 2001, the artist represented Belgium at the Venice Biennale to great acclaim. Luc Tuymans lives and works in Antwerp. 

One of the first artists to be represented by David Zwirner, Luc Tuymans has had numerous solo exhibitions at the gallery since joining its roster in 1994. In May 2023, David Zwirner presented The Barn, a solo exhibition of Tuymans’s work, at the gallery’s 537 West 20th Street location in New York. This was the artist’s seventeenth show with the gallery and his first solo presentation in the United States since 2016. Previous shows at David Zwirner include Eternity (2022); Monkey Business (2021); Good Luck (2020); Le Mépris (2016); The Shore (2015); The Summer is Over (2013); Allo! (2012); Corporate (2010); Forever, The Management of Magic (2008); Proper (2005); Fortune (2003); Mwana Kitoko: Beautiful White Man (2000); Security (1998); The Heritage (1996); Francis Picabia and Luc Tuymans: Paintings (1995); and Superstition (1994). 

Luc Tuymans has been featured in numerous solo exhibitions at prestigious institutions worldwide. An in-situ temporary mural by the artist, L’Orphelin, was on view at the Rotunda Valentin de Boulogne in the Musée du Louvre, Paris, in 2024–2025. In 2024, the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, presented The Past, a major exhibition of the artist's work. Other solo presentations include those held at Palazzo Grassi, Venice (2019); De Pont Museum, Tilburg, The Netherlands (2019); Museum aan de Stroom (MAS), Antwerp (2016), which traveled to the National Portrait Gallery, London (2016); Qatar Museums Gallery – Al Riwaq, Doha (2015); Menil Collection, Houston (2013); the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio (2009), which traveled to San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Dallas Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and BOZAR – Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels; and Tate Modern, London (2004), which traveled to K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf.

The artist has received numerous awards and honors, including the Medal of Honor, International Congress of Contemporary Painting (ICOCEP), Porto, Portugal (2019); the Coutts Contemporary Art Foundation Award, Zurich (2000); and the Flemish Culture Award for Visual Arts (1993). His works are featured in museum collections worldwide, including the Art Institute of Chicago; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Fondazione Prada, Milan; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; The National Museum of Art, Osaka; Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; Pinault Collection, Paris; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Tate, United Kingdom. 

Luc Tuymans’s catalogue raisonné of paintings, from 1972 to 2018, is available from David Zwirner Books and Yale University Press. The three volumes feature full-color images and documentation of more than five hundred paintings.

DAVID ZWIRNER

533 West 19th Street, New York, NY 10011

www.davidzwirner.com

Robert Smithson. Casting a Glance: Dancing With Smithson @ Marian Goodman Gallery, Los Angeles - Exhibition Curated by Lisa Le Feuvre

Robert Smithson 

Casting a Glance: Dancing With Smithson

Curated by Lisa Le Feuvre

Marian Goodman Gallery, Los Angeles

8 November 2025 – 24 January 2026

In 1968 Robert Smithson declared: “A great artist can make art by simply casting a glance.” This exhibition takes him at his word. Casting a Glance: Dancing with Smithson invites eighteen artists to join him on the floor as partners who resist, improvise, and extend the rhythm of his thinking.

Robert Smithson with Leonor Antunes, Nairy Baghramian, Daniel Boyd, Tony Cragg, Tacita Dean, Pierre Huyghe, An-My Lê, Steve McQueen, Julie Mehretu, Ana Mendieta, Delcy Morelos, Bruce Nauman, Gabriel Orozco, Giuseppe Penone, Tavares Strachan, Álvaro Urbano, Adrián Villar Rojas, and James Welling.

Casting a Glance tracks Smithson’s trajectory from his early 1960s drawings that confront the crumbling ideals of European Modernism with a queer sensibility to his searing critiques of industrial capitalism and attention to geological timescales, positioning him as both provocateur and visionary. Robert Smithson called for artists to infiltrate corporations, championed the agency of all earth-beings, choosing the exhausted edges of suburbia over charismatic metropolitan centers. His innovative conception of the site/Nonsite dialectic, his redefinition of what sculpture could be, and his conviction that art is a philosophical encounter with the Earth’s surface converge in this vibrant dance among the artists on view.

Rarely seen works by Robert Smithson — chosen in dialogue with the participating artists — capture his restless energy. His drawings of landmark earthworks, pseudo-minimalist sculptures, references to the occult and the erotic, sit alongside renderings of imagined islands and material experiments. Smithson asked urgent questions about place, decay, and the fictions of permanence. Mirror Displacement Indoors (1969), colloquially known as “Dead Tree,” anchors the exhibition. It is comprised of an uprooted tree, with leaves and root ball intact, and double-sided mirrors inserted into the tangle of roots and branches. Over time the tree dries, the leaves fall, the earth falls from the roots, while the fixed structure of the mirrors remain stable. Decay and entropy are key concepts for Smithson, and are threads running through the exhibition.

The eighteen artists gathered here both challenge and align with Smithson’s art and ideas. Tony Cragg’s In No Time (2018) joins works by Leonor Antunes and Álvaro Urbano in a knot of arboreal forms, extending Smithson’s fascination with trees and their mirrored lives. Delcy Morelos’s grounded forms quietly speak to An-My Lê’s charged landscape, which, in turn, suggests a kinship to Smithson’s imagined islands. James Welling’s Barbizon (2025) channels Smithson’s dismissive obsession with constructed landscapes, while Giuseppe Penone’s Geometria nelle mani – ovale (2005) stands in dialogue with Smithson’s reclining, decaying tree. Ana Mendieta’s earthworks resonate with Smithson’s Hypothetical Continents, with both artists employing the photographic image to make their temporal sculptures immutable.

Smithson’s speculative crystal universes are echoed in Pierre Huyghe’s evocation of half-million-year-old selenite, while Tavares Strachan’s redefinition of polar exploration rub against Smithson’s mapping of New Jersey as a different kind of elsewhere. A rarely seen mirror table sculpture from Smithson’s studio supports three hand scaled sculptures by Gabriel Orozco, reflecting the continuity of these mirrored surfaces into the present.

Nairy Baghramian’s Jupon Suspendu (2017) folds her sculptural lexicon into the conversation, gently interrupting Smithson’s hand-built Minimalism. Daniel Boyd’s collages double back on Hercules, pushing against Smithson’s conflation of camp bodies with classical statuary, while two scores by Bruce Nauman ask for a hired dancer to clear a room and telephone the artist. Adrián Villar Rojas’s Return the World X (2012) shares time with Smithson’s Partially Buried Woodshed (1970). Julie Mehretu’s Six Bardos: Luminous Appearance (2018) which meditates on time, memory, and transcendence, is placed in dialogue with the atmospheric veils of color in Smithson’s 1963 painting Tear.

Steve McQueen’s Broken Column (2014) speaks directly to Smithson’s acute attention to materiality and material history, while Tacita Dean’s Salt (A Collection) (2013–14) from the Great Salt Lake slips beside Smithson’s own drawings of Spiral Jetty (1970); both charting the eponymous film. Three moving image works complement the exhibition. East/Coast West Coast, made with Nancy Holt in 1969, is an improvised a dialogue in which Holt and Smithson perform the stereotypical positions of American East Coast and West Coast artists of the late 1960s. Robert Smithson described the thirty-five-minute film Spiral Jetty (1970) as “a set of disconnections, a bramble of stabilized fragments taken from things obscure and fluid, ingredients trapped in a succession of frames, a stream of viscosities both still and moving” – a phrase that reverberates across and through Casting A Glance. Swamp, from 1971, also made with Nancy Holt, is shot in the swamplands of New Jersey, Smithson’s home state, a location he frequently returned to in his work.

Curator Lisa Le Feuvre

Lisa Le Feuvre is a curator, writer, and editor. In 2018 she became inaugural Executive Director of Holt/Smithson Foundation, the artist foundation dedicated to the legacies of artists Nancy Holt (1938-2014) and Robert Smithson (1938-1973).

Lisa Le Feuvre has curated more than seventy-five exhibitions as an institutional and independent curator, edited over thirty books and journals, spoken at 150 museums and universities across the world, and has published more than 125 essays and interviews with artists. Her recent curated exhibitions include For What It’s Worth: Value Systems in Art since 1960 at The Warehouse, Dallas, (2024, curated with Thomas Feulmer); Robert Smithson / Teresita Fernández at SITE SANTA FE, New Mexico (2024, curated with Fernández); at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio Nancy Holt: Power Systems and Maria Hupfield: The Endless Return of Fabulous Panther (Biimskojiwan) (2025); and, on display through next year at the Farnsworth Art Museum, Joan Jonas: An Island Departure (with Jaime DeSimone). Le Feuvre’s recent publications include the introduction to the compendium Great Women Sculptors (Phaidon Press) and texts on the artists Henry Moore, Kapwani Kiwanga, Delcy Morelos, Charlotte Moth, Lucia Pizzani, Robert Rauschenberg and Medardo Rosso.

About Holt/Smithson Foundation

Nancy Holt (1938-2014) and Robert Smithson (1938-1973) transformed the world of art and ideas. Holt/Smithson Foundation develops their distinctive creative legacies and is the hub of all things Holt and Smithson. Holt and Smithson recalibrated the limits of art, changing what art can be and where art can be found. Their art, writings, and ideas built the ground from which contemporary art has grown. Collaborating with artists, writers, thinkers, and institutions the Foundation realizes exhibitions, publishes books, initiates artist commissions, programs educational events, encourage research, and develops collections globally from its headquarters in New Mexico.

MARIAN GOODMAN GALLERY

1120 Seward Street, Los Angeles, California 90038

www.mariangoodman.com

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

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

www.berggruen.com

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

www.berggruen.com

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 

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 

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 

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

www.jenkinsjohnsongallery.com

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, 1975 

© Richard Misrach, courtesy of Fraenkel Gallery

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

fraenkelgallery.com

Maren Hassinger: Living Moving Growing @ BAMPFA - Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive + Catalogue

Maren Hassinger: Living Moving Growing

Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

June 6 - November 29, 2026

Maren Hassinger: Tree Duet I, 

5617 San Vicente Blvd, Los Angeles, c. 1977/2021 

Silver gelatin print, 20 x 30 in 

Photo: Adam Avila

Courtesy of Susan Inglett Gallery, NYC

Maren Hassinger

Love (Pyramid), 2008/2015 

Installation view, The Sondheim Finalists,

Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD. 

Pink plastic bags filled with air, breath, and

love notes, steelhead pushpins, Dimensions variable (unique) 

Courtesy of the Artist and Susan Inglett Gallery, NYC

The most comprehensive retrospective to date of MAREN HASSINGER will be on view at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), featuring half a century of work by one of the most influential living artists in the United States. Maren Hassinger: Living Moving Growing encompasses the full scope of Hassinger’s output across an eclectic range of forms, including large-scale sculpture, site-specific installations, video, and performance. The exhibition displays more than twenty of Hassinger’s most notable works from the 1970s to the present, as well as participatory and performance elements executed in partnership with the artist. Maren Hassinger: Living Moving Growing is accompanied by an extensive exhibition catalogue, featuring new scholarly essays and previously unpublished documentation of Hassinger’s work.

Maren Hassinger began her career in the 1970s and brought new perspectives to contemporary art, positioned in dialogue with a cohort of Black artists, feminist artists, and artists addressing ecological concerns. Known for constantly experimenting with impermanent and industrial materials as well as performance, she has worked at the intersection of dance, sculpture, video, and installation over the past five decades. While her work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions at leading museums across the country, the ephemerality of her practice requires that many of her sculptures and installations be recreated anew for each presentation. Maren Hassinger: Living Moving Growing is the most ambitious retrospective to date of the artist’s body of work, assembling major sculptures alongside temporary installations that will be recreated at BAMPFA. Notable examples include Love (2008), a site-specific sculpture composed of pink plastic bags inflated by human breath and filled with love notes; Beach (1980), a floor installation consisting of sand, plaster, and wooden dowels; and multiple sculptures that incorporate recently harvested tree branches, which BAMPFA will realize in partnership with the University of California Botanical Garden.

Over the course of Maren Hassinger: Living Moving Growing, BAMPFA will host a series of participatory workshops engaging visitors to co-create to a new work that will be incorporated into the retrospective. This has become a major aspect of Hassinger’s practice, extending her work in performance to engage directly with audiences. Hassinger will invite visitors to join her in twisting and knotting newspapers to create a new, large-scale installation. Assembled within the gallery, the installation will continue to grow throughout the run of the exhibition. The exhibition also features archival documentation, including video and photographs of many of Hassinger’s performances and ephemeral public art projects. BAMPFA is also working with Maren Hassinger to restage one of her most iconic performances, Pink Trash (1982) on UC Berkeley’s Crescent Lawn, across the street from the museum. 

Born in Los Angeles in 1947, Maren Hassinger studied dance and sculpture at Bennington College and received an MFA in Fiber Structure from UCLA. In the 1970s, she began collaborating with other artists as part of the collective Studio Z, including Senga Nengudi, Ulysses Jenkins, and David Hammons, among others. In 1980, Hassinger had her first solo exhibition at Just Above Midtown Gallery in New York; the following year, she became the first Black artist to have a solo exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Hassinger relocated to the East Coast in 1984 to participate in the artist-in-residence program at the Studio Museum in Harlem. After several years on Long Island, she moved to Baltimore, where she became Director of the Rinehart School of Sculpture at the Maryland Institute College of Art, a position she held for twenty years. She currently lives and works in Harlem, New York.

Maren Hassinger: Living Moving Growing marks the culmination of a renewed interest in Hassinger’s work in recent years, during which she has been featured in acclaimed group exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, and The Whitney Museum of American Art, among other leading art institutions. Her retrospective at BAMPFA will be co-curated by BAMPFA Chief Curator Margot Norton and Senior Curator Anthony Graham.

In conjunction with the retrospective, BAMPFA is partnering with DelMonico Books / D.A.P. to publish a fully illustrated catalogue on Maren Hassinger, the most extensive scholarly publication on this artist ever assembled. The catalogue will feature an introductory essay by Graham and a roundtable conversation moderated by Norton with Hassinger’s collaborators, including gallery owner, filmmaker, and activist Linda Goode Bryant, and artists Senga Nengudi and Ava Hassinger—Maren’s daughter and an accomplished artist in her own right. In addition, the catalogue will include an original interview with Hassinger conducted by the distinguished art historian Lowery Stokes Sims. Additional essays will be contributed by Robyn Farrell, Senior Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs of The Kitchen; Kristen Juarez, Senior Research Specialist at the Getty Research Institute; and Hilton Als, UC Berkeley professor and longtime critic and essayist at The New Yorker.

“Maren Hassinger’s practice has been of great influence for generations of artists–from her early collaborative performances and experimental installations with Studio Z and JAM to her direct impact over decades as a teacher, and through her monumental sculptural installations in major museum collections across the United States,” said Margot Norton. “We are thrilled to finally bring her artworks and their stories from across her career together through our exhibition, and to showcase Hassinger’s profound contributions to contemporary art.”

“For decades, Maren Hassinger has created sculptures and installations that transcend disciplinary boundaries, transforming industrial and mass-produced materials into evocative abstractions,” said Anthony Graham. “This exhibition showcases how these innovative works have drawn attention to subtle movements and forms of our everyday lives, connecting us to one another and to the world around us.”

“Maren Hassinger’s work invites us to reflect on the beauty and complexity of human connection—through movement, material, and shared experience. Presenting this landmark retrospective at BAMPFA underscores our commitment to amplifying artists whose practices challenge conventions and inspire collective engagement across generations,” said BAMPFA’s Executive Director, Julie Rodrigues Widholm. 

Artist Maren Hassinger

Maren Hassinger (b. 1947) has spent the past five decades building an interdisciplinary practice that articulates the relationship between nature and humanity. Carefully choosing materials for their innate characteristics, Hassinger has explored the subjects of movement, family, love, nature, environment, consumerism, identity, and race. The artist uses her materials to mimic nature, whether bundling them to resemble a monolithic sheaf of wheat or planting them in cement to create an industrial garden. Over the past decade, Hassinger has been commissioned to make work for Sculpture Milwaukee (curated by Ugo Rondinone); The Art Institute of Chicago; Dia Bridgehampton; Socrates Sculpture Park, Queens; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; the Rockefeller Foundation, Tarrytown; and the Aspen Art Museum. Hassinger was recently honored with an exhibition focused on her collaborative performance work with Senga Nengudi at the Cooley Gallery, Reed College, Portland, OR traveling to the Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH (2024), as well as a two-person survey alongside Nengudi at the Institut Valencià d'Art Modern, Valencia (2025). Hassinger is the recipient of the Women’s Caucus for the Arts Lifetime Achievement Award. Her work can be found in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; the Guggenheim Museum; the Hirshhorn Museum; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Art; the Walker Art Center; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others.

Maren Hassinger: Living Moving Growing is curated by Margot Norton, Chief Curator, and Anthony Graham, Senior Curator.

BERKELEY ART MUSEUM AND PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE - BAMPFA

2155 Center Street, Berkeley, CA 94720

bampfa.org

Now Showing: Youssef Nabil's I Saved My Belly Dancer LACMA, Los Angeles - Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Now Showing: Youssef Nabil’s I Saved My Belly Dancer 

LACMA, Los Angeles

Through January 11, 2026

Youssef Nabil

I Saved My Belly Dancer #XXIV, 2015

Courtesy of the artist

© Youssef Nabil

Youssef Nabil

I Saved My Belly Dancer #II, 2015

Courtesy of the artist

© Youssef Nabil

Youssef Nabil

I Saved My Belly Dancer #XXV, 2015

Courtesy of the artist

© Youssef Nabil

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) presents Now Showing: Youssef Nabil’s I Saved My Belly Dancer, the first public presentation of the film since it entered the museum’s collection in 2025. The exhibition is centered around Nabil’s film, I Saved My Belly Dancer (2015), which marks its 10th anniversary this year. Tahar Rahim, who resembles Nabil, embodies the artist’s alter ego, while Salma Hayek stars as the titular belly dancer. For Youssef Nabil, the dancer represents both a remembered and an imagined memory of Cairo. He states, “I wanted to talk about belly dancing as an art form that is probably unique to us [Egypt]. It’s our dance. I’ve always loved it. So, I wanted to talk about saving the idea of belly dancing in my memory, more than anything.” 

The installation of Now Showing intends to evoke the type of mid-20th-century movie theater, including retro seats, contemporaneous with the Egyptian films that inspired the works in the exhibition. The space contains a photographic portrait of the director, hand-colored by Nabil’s mentor, Van Leo, and vintage movie posters. Additionally, the exhibition features photographs, based on the film, created by Nabil’s signature practice of hand-painting on silver gelatin prints rendered dreamlike by the unearthly intensity and tonality of the color palette. This is a revival of a mid-20th century technique associated with such Cairo-based photographers as Van Leo (Levon Alexander Boyadjian (1921–2002)).

This presentation continues LACMA’s history of exploring how film and popular culture interrelate with traditional areas of art from all periods and cultures. Over the past 30 years, the museum has acquired time-based media objects in nearly every curatorial department, including Nam June Paik’s Video Flag Z (1986), Matthew Barney’s REPRESSIA (decline) (1991), Bill Viola’s Slowly Turning Narrative (1992), and Mariko Mori’s Miko no Inori (1996), as well as works by Tacita Dean, Stan Douglas, Pierre Huyghe, Christian Marclay, Steve McQueen, Bruce Nauman, and Diana Thater.

Artist Youssef Nabil

Born in Cairo in 1972, Youssef Nabil began his career as a photographer in 1992, shooting his friends and creating scripts for them to perform, inspired by films from Egypt, Europe, and Hollywood. He developed a distinctive style by hand-painting gelatin silver prints reminiscent of glamorous celebrity portraits from the 1940s and ’50s, a technique he mastered through his friendship with renowned studio photographer Van Leo (Levon Alexander Boyadjian (1921–2002)). In 2003, Youssef Nabil left Cairo for an art residency in Paris, where he began taking self-portraits, addressing more personal issues of identity and displacement. Nabil continued his artistic practice in New York, where he lived from 2006 to 2018. His artistic practice addresses universal themes of absence, nostalgia, and cultural identity, while maintaining strong connections to his Egyptian heritage. Youssef Nabil has continued to draw inspiration from cinema, making portraits of contemporary film stars and artists, such as Catherine Deneuve, Omar Sharif, and Marina Abramovic. He also makes video works, collaborating frequently with actor Tahar Rahim. Currently, he is working on his first feature film, which will be multilingual and partially filmed in Egypt. Today Youssef Nabil resides between Paris and New York.

This exhibition was organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and is curated by Linda Komaroff, Curator and Department Head, Art of the Middle East, LACMA.

LACMA - LOS ANGELES COUNTY MUSEUM OF ART 

5905 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA, 90036 

lacma.org

Now Showing: Youssef Nabil’s I Saved My Belly Dancer 

LACMA - Los Angeles County Museum of Art 

August 24, 2025 – January 11, 2026

Realms of the Dharma: Buddhist Art Across Asia @ LACMA, Los Angeles

Realms of the Dharma: Buddhist Art Across Asia

LACMA, Los Angeles

May 11, 2025 – July 12, 2026 

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) presents Realms of the Dharma: Buddhist Art Across Asia. International in scope, this exhibition examines key concepts of Buddhist thought and practice through sculptures, paintings, textiles, and ritual objects. Incorporating 180 masterpieces of pan-Asian Buddhist art, Realms of the Dharma begins with the religion’s origins in India in the 5th century BCE and follows its spread through Southeast Asia, the Himalayas, and East Asia. Drawn from LACMA’s permanent collection, with several significant loans from private collections, the exhibition explores the life of the Buddha, the role of the bodhisattva or Buddhist savior, Buddhist cosmology, and such key concepts as dharma, karma, nirvana, mantra, mudra, and mandala. The show will focus on art associated with such key phases of Buddhism as Theravada (early monastic Buddhism), Mahayana (the “Great Vehicle”), Vajrayana (the “Diamond Vehicle”—tantric or esoteric Buddhism), and Chan (Zen).

“Realms of the Dharma presents an exciting opportunity for visitors to learn about the Buddhist religion, cosmology, and practice through works of art,” said Stephen Little, Florence & Harry Sloan Curator and Department Head of Chinese & Korean and South & Southeast Asian Art. “The exhibition explores the key concepts underlying this religion’s historical development and the reasons for its widespread popularity across Asia.”

Michael Govan, LACMA CEO and Wallis Annenberg Director said, "Following our recent exhibition Mapping the Infinite, which looked at cosmologies across cultures, Realms of the Dharma continues LACMA's commitment to presenting stories, perspectives, and ancestries that are deeply connected to the people of L.A. County. We've made that a cornerstone of the museum's approach to studying and sharing the collection with our vast public.” 

Realms of the Dharma: Buddhist Art Across Asia is divided into two sections. The first section tells the story of Buddhism’s birth and growth in and around the Indian subcontinent. The second section follows Buddhism as it travels beyond India to Sri Lanka, Myanmar [Burma], Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Indonesia, Kashmir, Nepal, Tibet, China, Korea, and Japan.

Realms of the Dharma: Buddhist Art Across Asia - Highlights

Buddha Shakyamuni 

India Uttar Pradesh, late 6th century 

Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 

gift of the Michael J. Connell Foundation

Photo © Museum Associates/LACMA

From the late 6th century, the north Indian image of the historical Buddha Shakyamuni, with its serene countenance, embodies the style of the late Gupta dynasty (320–600), a balance of elegant form and inner spirituality. Although the Gupta rulers were Hindu, they actively patronized Buddhism. This Buddha embodies two ideals basic to Buddhism, the perfect yogi and the universal ruler. He possesses the yogi's supple body and contemplative gaze, and the ruler's strong shoulders, firm body, and webbed hands and feet. Time-honored traditions of portrayal connect the Buddha's human form with nature; his long eyes are shaped like fish, his curls like snail shells, and the profile of his left shoulder and arm like the trunk of an elephant. Following the invasion of northern India by Islamic rulers from Afghanistan in the 12th century, this sculpture was long preserved in a Tibetan monastery.

The Bodhisattva Maitreya 

India, Bihar, Gaya District, 11th century 

Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 

from the Nasli and Alice Heeramaneck Collection, 

Museum Associates Purchase 

Photo © Museum Associates/LACMA

In Buddhism, Maitreya first appears as a bodhisattva—a fully enlightened being who was prophesied to become the Buddha of the next cosmic eon, or kalpa, after the end of the current universe. Until that time it is thought that Maitreya exists as a bodhisattva, but will eventually descend to earth from the heaven where he currently resides, undergo his final rebirth, and become a Buddha. In the 11th century schist The Bodhisattva Maitreya, the figure can be identified as Maitreya by the presence of a miniature stupa (reliquary) in his headdress. Maitreya's name means “The Benevolent One."

The Cosmic Buddha Vairochana 

China, c. 1600 

Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 

gift of Richard and Ruth Dickes 

Photo © Museum Associates/LACMA

The Cosmic Buddha Vairochana is a rare painting from China of the primordial Buddha Vairochana, a central figure of the Five Cosmic Buddhas of the Mahayana and Vajrayana pantheons. The veneration of Vairochana first flourished in China during the Tang dynasty (618–906), and worship of this Cosmic Buddha soon spread to Korea and Japan. The historical Buddha Shakyamuni was believed to be a manifestation of Vairochana, who exists beyond time and space. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of this work—in addition to its remarkable state of preservation—are the large numbers of smaller Buddhist and Daoist figures, among which are the guardians of the four cardinal directions and Dizang (Kshitigarbha or Earth Matrix), Bodhisattva of the Underworld.

The Buddhist Deities Chakrasamvara and Vajravarahi 

Tibet, c. 15th century 

Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 

from the Nasli and Alice Heeramaneck Collection, 

Museum Associates Purchase

Photo © Museum Associates/LACMA

The vibrant The Buddhist Deities Chakrasamvara and Vajravarahi depicts the embrace of the deities Chakrasamvara and Vajravarahi, symbolizing the two essential elements of Buddhist belief and practice: compassion (male) and wisdom (female). Chakrasamvara is the central deity of the Chakrasamvara Tantra, a text composed in the late 8th or early 9th century in India, the main purpose of which is to provide a path to spiritual awakening and enlightenment through the meditation on the deity Heruka Chakrasamvara in union with Vajravarahi. The tantra outlines rituals, philosophies, and practices designed to cultivate enlightened states of mind by uniting the principles of bliss (right method) and emptiness (wisdom).

As part of the museum’s effort to share its permanent collection with audiences around the globe, a version of this exhibition was on view at the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City, in 2018, Las Huellas de Buda (The Footsteps of the Buddha). 

Realms of the Dharma: Buddhist Art Across Asia was organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

The exhibition is curated by Stephen Little, Florence & Harry Sloan Curator and Department Head of Chinese & Korean and South & Southeast Asian Art, and is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue with essays by Stephen Little and Tushara Bindu Gude, LACMA’s former Associate Curator of South and Southeast Asian Art.

Realms of the Dharma: Buddhist Art Across Asia

Edited with text by Stephen Little, Tushara Bindu Gude 

Foreword by Michael Govan

Published by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art / D.A.P.

Hardcover, 288 pages, 9 x 11 in., 254 color illustrations

ISBN: 9781942884781 -  Published 2025

LACMA - LOS ANGELES COUNTY MUSEUM OF ART 

5905 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA, 90036 

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