Alexandre Diop @ Stephen Friedman Gallery, London - "Run For Your Life !" Exhibition

Alexandre Diop

Run For Your Life !

Stephen Friedman Gallery, London

19 September - 1 November 2025

Alexandre Diop

A Vos marques ! Prêt ! Illegal, 2025

© Alexandre Diop, courtesy Stephen Friedman Gallery

Stephen Friedman Gallery presents Run For Your Life !, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Franco-Senegalese artist ALEXANDRE DIOP. This marks the artist's debut show with the gallery and his first solo exhibition in London.

Alexandre Diop’s powerful mixed-media works explore themes of history, metaphorical archaeology and socio-political change, with this body of work focusing on the relationship between movement and time, represented by dance or migration. The title of the exhibition, Run For Your Life !, is an invitation to stand for change, show tolerance, and be alert to crises around the world. Diop’s practice is interdisciplinary; his experience as a dancer, musician, and visual artist allows him to create artworks that transcend traditional paintings.

Physicality is central to the artist’s process. Diop’s rigorous approach to his work—which he refers to as object-images—combines found and recycled materials such as scrap metal, wood, leather, and textile remnants with classical techniques like oil painting. The materials are sourced from scrapyards, urban streets and derelict buildings, and then transformed through an intensive process of layering, burning, tearing, stapling and collaging onto wood panels. His material language, while firmly rooted in personal and political narratives, also engages with multiple art-historical lineages. His work draws from movements such as Dada, Art Brut, Expressionism and the Viennese Secession, while maintaining a strong dialogue with both West African aesthetic traditions and the visual codes of contemporary urban culture.

Alexandre Diop’s practice is anchored in drawing. He combines calligraphic strokes, symbols, and layered images that are painted, drawn, or sprayed. Figures— both human and animal—emerge from textured surfaces that blur the boundaries of painting, sculpture, and relief. Their stance recalls the awareness of a dancer, attuned to the body’s own rhythms. In this sense, the works look inward: they stage a dialogue between movement and stillness, surface and depth, becoming mirrors through which viewers may glimpse fragments of their own inner reality.

At the same time, Alexandre Diop’s work confronts the world beyond the self. It reflects on how individuals are bound by external forces—systems of illegality, oppression, and exclusion. In A Vos marques ! Prêt ! Illegal, 2025, a central figure cries out yet remains unheard, embodying the suffocation of life within unjust structures. The work echoes the story of Jesse Owens, the African-American runner who won Olympic gold in 1936 under Nazi rule, and becomes a call for freedom, justice, and resilience against overwhelming odds. Alexandre Diop constructs new worlds where historical, political, and social narratives unfold, offering his figures a space to resist, endure, and reimagine history.

Artist Alexandre Diop

Alexandre Diop is a Franco-Senegalese artist whose powerful, mixed-media works interrogate themes of ancestry, beauty, violence and social transformation. Drawing upon his experience as a dancer, musician, and visual artist, Alexandre Diop brings a multidisciplinary lens to his practice, crafting works that are deeply visceral and formally innovative. Alexandre Diop was born in Paris, France in 1995. He lives and works in Vienna, Austria.

Alexandre Diop’s work has been the subject of major solo museum exhibitions. In 2023, his work was presented with 18th century anatomical wax models of bodies and body parts in Anatomie at Josephinum Medical Museum, Vienna, Austria. His residency at the Rubell Museum in Miami culminated in a touring exhibition, Jooba Jubba, l’Art du Défi, the Art of Challenge, shown in Miami (2022) and Washington DC (2023). In 2022, Alexandre Diop exhibited alongside Kehinde Wiley in La Prochaine Fois, Le Feu, presented by Reiffers Art Initiatives in Paris.

Notable group exhibitions include Les Apparitions, Reiffers Art Initiatives, Paris, France (2025); De Sculptura, Albertina Klosterneuburg, Klosterneuburg, Austria (2025); The Beauty of Diversity, Albertina Modern, Vienna, Austria (2024); Being Mortal, Dom Museum, Vienna, Austria (2023); The New African Portraiture, Shariat Collections, Kunsthalle Krems, Krems an der Donau, Austria (2022); and Le Mouton Noir, Gesso Art Space, Vienna, Austria (2021).

Alexandre Diop’s works can be found in the collections of Albertina Museum, Vienna, Austria; AMA Venezia, Venice, Italy; AMOCA, Cardiff, Wales, UK; Espacio Tacuarí, Buenos Aires, Argentina; Josephinum Medical Museum, Vienna, Austria; Kunsthalle Krems, Krems an der Donau, Austria; MB Collection, Germany; National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington DC, USA; Reiffers Art Initiatives, Paris, France; Rubell Museum, Miami, Florida and Washington DC, USA; Ståhl Collection, Norrköping, Sweden; Stora Wäsby Public Collection, Stockholm, Sweden and The Bunker Artspace, West Palm Beach, Florida, USA.

STEPHAN FRIEDMAN GALLERY LONDON

5-6 Cork Street, London W1S 3LQ 

www.stephenfriedman.com

Ana Cláudia Almeida @ Stephen Friedman Gallery, NYC - "Over Again" Exhibition

Ana Cláudia Almeida: Over Again

Stephen Friedman Gallery, New York

5 September - 18 October 2025

Ana Cláudia Almeida

Licking, 2025

© Ana Cláudia Almeida, courtesy Stephen Friedman Gallery

Stephen Friedman Gallery, New York, presents Over Again, an exhibition of new paintings and drawings by Brooklyn-based, Brazilian artist ANA CLAUDIA ALMEIDA. This marks the artist’s first solo exhibition in New York.

Ana Cláudia Almeida is an artist whose work explores materiality through movement and mark-making, incorporating a range of media including paper, plastic, oil pastels, paint, video, and sculpture. Her practice seeks to disrupt the functional role of objects by examining the dynamic tension between interior and exterior, individual and environment. The fluttering nature of her works on fabric, the shifting quality of her sculptures, and the kaleidoscopic fragmentation of her large-scale paintings transform intangible memories into physical form.

In Over Again, drawing, oil painting, sculpture, and plastic collide in what Ana Cláudia Almeida describes as an “ecosystem of pieces,” where each medium leaks into the next—a monotype that wants to be a drawing, a drawing that yearns to be a painting, and plastic remnants that refuse to be cast aside. Processes coexist and collide across surfaces, embodying the changeability that sustains both life and artistic practice. Her work reflects the cyclical nature and plasticity of life, tracing the ways in which every action leaves an imprint that shapes what comes next.

Ana Cláudia Almeida’s new body of work—and the exhibition’s title—draws inspiration from Brazilian musician Tim Maia’s song Over Again, which she embraces as a mantra urging liberation from rigid patterns in mind, body, and daily life. Literature, music like Maia’s, and the people she’s met have opened her to alternative ways of living, offering a vision of a less harsh existence. “Precisely in the moments when everything felt more urgent than fabulation, allowing myself that exercise was one of the greatest experiences of freedom I could have had… and now my new pleasure is to lean into the place that hope occupies in the lives of us, Black people.”

In works like Cascata II (2025), Ana Cláudia Almeida revisits the notion of freedom—inseparable, for her, from hope. The largest work in the exhibition is composed of vividly painted fabric that cascades from the gallery ceiling. Its free-flowing brushstrokes unfurl in winding swaths of color, a stunning display of the artist’s intuitive process. This sense of unrestrained movement extends throughout the exhibition: in Dew (gripe) and Belly full of liquids (both 2025), Almeida uses expanses of white space to frame and amplify her vibrant, expressive line drawings. 

For Over Again, Ana Cláudia Almeida assembles a constellation of works that speak to difference, resilience, and the radical act of imagining otherwise. Together, they form what she calls “an essay for a world of differences and complexities”—a defiant refusal of the “machine of existence-flattening” and an invitation to inhabit a space where freedom and hope are lived, shared possibilities.

Artist Ana Cláudia Almeida

Ana Cláudia Almeida (b. 1993, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; lives in Brooklyn, New York) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans painting, sculpture, and video. Her work has been exhibited widely in Brazil and internationally. Notable presentations include a two-person exhibition with Tadáskía at the Nevada Museum of Art as part of the Joyner/Giuffrida Visiting Artists Programme; Guandu Paraguaçu Piraquara at Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel, Rio de Janeiro; Buracos, Crateras e Abraços at Quadra, Rio de Janeiro; and Wasapindorama at Fundação de Arte de Niterói, Niterói. Group exhibitions include Ensaios sobre a Paisagem at Instituto Inhotim, Brumadinho; Olhe bem as montanhas at Quadra, São Paulo; Essas Pessoas na Sala de Jantar at Casa Museu Eva Klabin, Rio de Janeiro; Crônicas Cariocas at Museu de Arte do Rio; and Casa Carioca at Museu de Arte do Rio.

Ana Cláudia Almeida holds a BFA from Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro and an MFA from the Yale School of Art. 

Her work is held in the public collections of Museu de Arte do Rio, Instituto Inhotim, Sesc Rio de Janeiro, and the Nevada Museum of Art.

STEPHEN FRIEDMAN GALLERY NEW YORK

54 Franklin Street, New York 10013

www.stephenfriedman.com

Jordan Nassar @ James Cohan Gallery, NYC - "REVELATION" Exhibition

Jordan Nassar

REVELATION

James Cohan Gallery, New York

September 5 - October 4, 2025

Jordan Nassar

Photo by Takamasa Ota

James Cohan presents REVELATION, an exhibition of new work by JORDAN NASSAR at the gallery’s 48 Walker Street location. This is Nassar’s fourth solo exhibition with James Cohan. 

In REVELATION, Jordan Nassar reimagines traditional craft techniques across expansive multipanel embroideries and transportative mosaics to explore inherited nostalgia, history, and heritage. His recent embroideries are poignant meditations on color, as well as light and darkness; they reveal and conceal brilliantly-hued landscapes. In the front gallery, mosaics echoing Byzantine ruins wrap around the walls, eliciting the past in a contemporary site.

Jordan Nassar’s intricately hand-stitched works were made with the participation of Palestinian craftswomen living and working in Bethlehem, Ramallah, and Hebron. Notably, the geometric motifs extend across the entire plane of the canvases, creating dense walls of patterning that obscure imagined vistas. The shadowy palette of these works reflects a somber reverence, one that is punctuated by moments of brightness. A valley lit by a glowing crimson sun emerges from shades of gray in the aptly named Between Two Hedges of Silence, 2025. The artwork titles, as well as that of the exhibition, were inspired by Etel Adnan’s epic poem, The Arab Apocalypse. Jordan Nassar draws on the close linguistic connection between the Greek etymology of apocalypse with the act of unveiling [from apokaluptein, ’to uncover, to reveal’]. Viewers are granted a window of what lies beyond from multiple vantage points and perspectives. 

Alongside these embroideries, the artist has reconstructed two archaeological antiquities, employing the ancient method of hand-cutting glass. The originals are displayed in the arrivals corridor at the Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv as a welcome marker. The first is a fragment of a mosaic floor from a 5th-6th century Byzantine structure attributed to BethLehem of the Galilee; in this installation it is intentionally flipped on its side. Jordan Nassar has depicted its flora and fauna, mirroring its design and formal qualities, to vividly bring this ruin to life. He also asserts his own aesthetic choices, filling in eroded areas with exotic animals and curving grape vines that nod to the intricate Shellal mosaic excavated from the Wadi Ghuzze riverbed and now housed in the Australian War Memorial. 

Jordan Nassar describes “the act of remaking them as a tender gesture,” reframing the historical lineage of the craft as he interprets it. Bisan (Blessed shalt thou be when thou comest in, and blessed shalt thou be when thou goest out) (Deuteronomy 28:6), 2025, is the artist’s translation of a square mosaic from the historic city of the same name, decorated heavily with birds with ribbons tied around their napes. Here, Jordan Nassar has unbridled the birds of their ribbons. Ultimately, Jordan Nassar raises questions about the underlying symbolism of ruins, the implicit power that they project and the narratives they can be used to construct and uphold.

Artist Jordan Nassar

Jordan Nassar (b.1985, New York, NY) earned his BA at Middlebury College in 2007. Recent notable solo exhibitions include Jordan Nassar: Fantasy and Truth at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston in 2023 and THERE in 2024-2025, which traveled from NCMA Winston-Salem (formerly SECCA) in North Carolina to the Susquehanna Art Museum in Pennsylvania. His work has been featured in exhibitions globally at institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Asia Society, New York, NY; Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, NJ; Museum of Arts and Design, New York, NY; KMAC Museum, Louisville, KY, among others.

Jordan Nassar is represented in numerous permanent collections including the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York; Des Moines Art Center, Iowa; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Alfond Collection of Contemporary Art, Rollins Museum of Art, Florida; The Institute of Contemporary Art, Florida; Dallas Art Museum, Dallas, TX; The Museum of Contemporary Art, California; and Rhode Island School of Design Museum, in Rhode Island. Nassar is the recipient of several awards including the 2022 Unbound United States Artists Fellowship and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation 2024 Biennial Grant.

JAMES COHAN

48 Walker Street, New York, NY 10013

www.jamescohan.com

Grandma Moses: A Good Day’s Work @ Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington + Other Venues

Grandma Moses: A Good Day’s Work

Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington 

October 24, 2025 - July 12, 2026

Grandma Moses 

We Are Resting, 1951 

Oil on high-density fiberboard 

Smithsonian American Art Museum, 

Gift of the Kallir Family, in Memory of Hildegard Bachert, 2019.55, 

© Grandma Moses Properties Co., NY

"Grandma Moses: A Good Day’s Work" repositions Anna Mary Robertson “Grandma” Moses (1860–1961) as a multidimensional force in American art, whose beloved painted recollections of rural life earned her a distinctive place in the cultural imagination of the postwar era. Drawing its name from Moses’ reflection on her own life as a “good day’s work,” the exhibition reveals how Moses’ art fused creativity, labor and memories from a century-long life. 

“Grandma Moses: A Good Day’s Work” is anchored by artworks from the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s collection, including many of Moses’ most celebrated paintings. The 88 works in the exhibition are drawn from the museum’s holdings and loans from private collections and public museums and institutions. This selection of objects, primarily created between the late 1930s and the artist’s death in 1961, are woven into a narrative that explores lesser-known aspects of Moses’ life, including the years she spent living, working and raising her family in post-Reconstruction Virginia. Later sections of the exhibition probe Moses’ artistic evolution as the labor of artmaking displaced the hours once dedicated to family and farming, and her personal transformation from farmwife to famous artist in Cold War America. Photographs, ephemeral objects and Moses’ own words—drawn largely from her autobiography—illuminate artworks that were deeply connected to the artist’s life.

The exhibition is organized by Leslie Umberger, senior curator of folk and self-taught art, and Randall Griffey, head curator, with support from curatorial assistant Maria R. Eipert. The exhibition will travel following its premiere in Washington, D.C.

“Grandma Moses was instrumental in bringing self-taught art to the forefront of American consciousness,” said Jane Carpenter-Rock, Acting Margaret and Terry Stent Director of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. “As one of the first major museums to champion and collect works in this tradition, our museum is honored to shed new light on Grandma Moses’ practice and engage new generations by becoming a major resource for studying her art and legacy.”

“Moses was many things to many people: she was an ambassador for democratic American values, a folk hero and pop-culture celebrity, a comforting grandmotherly figure representing a bygone age, an inspiring elder reinventing herself in retirement and an untrained artist presenting what was then considered ‘modern primitivism’ as a surprisingly successful alternative to abstract art,” Leslie Umberger said. “‘A Good Day’s Work’ reconciles these disparate truths while centering on Moses’ art and the life that inspired it—one shaped by ingenuity, labor, a doggedly positive outlook and a distilled understanding of a life well lived.” 

In a lifetime that spanned the presidencies of Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy, the artist experienced seismic historical shifts, including the post-Reconstruction and civil rights eras and two world wars. She began painting in earnest in her late 70s and was 80 when gallerist Otto Kallir introduced her to the American public with her first solo exhibition. In her artworks, Moses melded direct observation of nature and life as she saw it, resulting in idiosyncratic, yet engaging, stories of America. “Grandma Moses” as the press would indelibly dub her, quickly became a media sensation, achieving a controversial celebrity status that surpassed the female artists of her day and remains compelling today.

Through a series of gifts and pledges of 15 important paintings from Kallir’s family, along with gifts from several additional donors and select museum purchases, the museum is establishing a destination-collection of 33 works by Moses, balanced across styles, dates, themes and historical moments. A major asset within the museum’s internationally recognized collection of work by folk and self-taught artists, the Moses collection will comprise significant works, from her earliest extant painting, “Untitled (Fireboard)” (1918), to iconic pieces including “Bringing in the Maple Sugar” (1939), “Black Horses” (1942) and “Out for Christmas Trees” (1946), to her last completed painting, “The Rainbow” (1961), all of which are represented in the exhibition. Also on view will be the first painting donated to the museum by the Kallir family in 2016, “Grandma Moses Goes to the Big City” (1946), a rare work in which Moses includes herself in the depicted narrative. The museum will be a premier Moses repository for scholars and the public.

Artist Grandma Moses

Anna Mary Robertson Moses was born in Greenwich, New York, in 1860 and raised on a farm. From early in her life, she worked as a hired girl, helping neighbors and relatives with cleaning, cooking and sewing. As a child, her father had encouraged her to draw on old newsprint, and she used berry and grape juices to color her images.  

Robertson married at 27 and moved, with her new husband, Thomas Salmon Moses, to Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. There, over the course of the next 18 years, the couple raised five children and worked as dairy farmers, shaping a highly successful butter-making business. Moses did not start painting until she was in her late 70s, after her children had moved on and her husband had died, looking for something, as she put it, with which “to keep busy and out of mischief.” She made paintings that merged fact with fiction and personal with national history, drawing on her own memories as well as family and local lore. She began her foray into the limelight by presenting her pictures at country fairs, alongside her prize-winning fruit preserves.  

In 1938, a collector saw her paintings in the window of a local pharmacy and bought them all. Two years later, Kallir—an art dealer and recent immigrant who had fled the Nazi regime in his native Austria—gave Moses her first solo exhibition. In the aftermath of World War II, Moses was seen as a global ambassador for democratic American values, and her unpretentious sensibilities and the scenes of family life and holidays enchanted a populace weary from conflict and rapid change. Following a press event and presentation of her paintings at Gimbels department store, the media dubbed her “Grandma Moses.” Gradually, ‘Grandma Moses’ became a household name. In 1947, Hallmark licensed the rights to reproduce her paintings on greeting cards. Reproductions on drapery fabric, china and other consumer goods followed, along with magazine features, television and radio interviews and an Academy Award-nominated documentary. Moses died at 101 in 1961, after painting more than 1,500 images.  

Publication: A richly illustrated catalog, published in association with Princeton University Press, will accompany the exhibition. It is co-edited by Umberger and Griffey, with a foreword by Carpenter-Rock and contributions by Erika Doss, Eleanor Jones Harvey, Stacy C. Hollander, Jane Kallir and Katherine Jentleson. The book will be available for purchase ($60) in the museum’s store and online.

SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM

8th and G Streets, NW, Washington, DC 20004

americanart.si.edu

David Alekhuogie @ Yancey Richardson Gallery - "highlifetime" Exhibition

David Alekhuogie: highlifetime

Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York

September 2 – October 18, 2025

David Alekhuogie 

Mother Country Masque I, 2024

© David Alekhuogie, courtesy Yancey Richardson Gallery

Yancey Richardson presents highlifetime, an exhibition of new work by David Alekhuogie, the artist’s second exhibition with the gallery. Bringing together work from his series A Reprise—including layered, wall-mounted works that combine photographs, collage and sculpture—David Alekhuogie continues his exploration of how narrative and authorship are embedded in Western presentations of African art while reflecting on how Black aesthetics are circulated, accessed, valued and interpreted today. Coinciding with the exhibition is the release of Alekhuogie’s new monograph titled A Reprise, published by Aperture. 

Reflecting his understanding of the relationship between modernity and colonialism, David Alekhuogie sees photography as a site where complex historical processes unfold and where the consequences of those processes continue to be seen. In his works, he critiques the underlying structures of western appropriation and classification that shape the collective understanding of images, often through his own acts of appropriation whereby source material is rephotographed, reimagined and remade.

Alekhuogie’s series A Reprise is the result of his engagement with the photographs Walker Evans made while on commission from the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1935 of African sculptures included in the exhibition African Negro Art. These photographs were revisited in Perfect Documents: Walker Evans and African Art, 1935, an exhibition organized by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2020, that reexamined the tightly cropped and formally inventive images Evans made.

Alekhuogie’s encounter with this exhibition and the images Evans made sixty-five years prior provided the basis for considering how Black aesthetics and cultural objects have been altered—if not altogether changed—by their exhibition in western institutions and subsequent documentation by photographers such as Evans. In highlifetime, Alekhuogie investigates these images of African sculpture by remixing them into vibrant and multilayered collages which attempt to reanimate historical objects after their original capture.

To make these works, David Alekhuogie transposes facsimiles of masterpieces of African art onto paper structures of his own making, before then rephotographing these image-sculptures, regularly using East and West African textiles as backdrops to create dynamic juxtapositions of space and form. The spatial interpretation of the original sculptures via Evans’ photographs is intensified by Alekhuogie’s layering of two or more framed photographs into new sculptural constructions. Through his own transmutation of these images, David Alekhuogie brings what he calls the “hand-me-down nature of Pan Africanism” to the foreground and questions through whose eyes and whose agency African Americans form their cultural narrative.

Accompanying new works from the A Reprise series are selections from Alekhuogie’s 2017 series Pull_Up, which is on view in the project gallery. Referencing the fashion trope of sagging pants that reveal successive layers of clothing, David Alekhuogie creates flattened and nearly abstract fields of layered color and contrasting textures. With the horizon line of the waist present yet concealed, Alekhuogie reimagines the body as a landscape, one where the coded representations of Black masculinity can be explored.

Through his critical evaluation of Black antiquity and formal interpretation of contemporary representations of Black masculinity, Alekhuogie’s images pose fundamental questions about our relationship to the past and how we continue to remake it in the present.

David Alekhuogie (b. 1986, Los Angeles, CA) is a photographer and artist based in Los Angeles. He received his MFA from Yale University in 2015 and BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2013. His work will be featured in the Hammer Museum’s upcoming Made in LA 2025 biennial. His work was also included in Companion Pieces, the 2020 iteration of the Museum of Modern Art, New York’s biennial New Photography series and was presented in Men of Change: Power. Triumph. Truth (2021) at the California African American Museum in Los Angeles.

From 2024 to 2025, he was a fellow of the Harvard Radcliffe Institute. His work has been exhibited at the Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, OH and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angles, CA.

YANCEY RICHARDSON 

525 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011

yanceyrichardson.com

Sonia Gomes @ Pace Gallery, London - "É preciso não ter medo de criar" Exhibition Curated by Paulo Miyada

Sonia Gomes 

É preciso não ter medo de criar

Pace Gallery, London

October 14 – November 15, 2025

Sonia Gomes 

Raw | Cru, 2025 

© Sonia Gomes, courtesy the artist 

and Mendes Wood DM 

Photo by Ding Musa

Pace presents É preciso não ter medo de criar, the first solo exhibition in the UK by São Paulo-based artist SONIA GOMES, on view at its gallery in London. Curated by Paulo Miyada, the exhibition will feature all-new works, including the artist’s signature pendants and torsions, alongside paintings and new sculptural explorations in bronze. Sonia Gomes will sign copies of her new catalogue, Assombrar o mundo com Beleza (I Haunt the World with Beauty), at the opening reception on Monday, October 13, from 6 to 8 p.m.

One of Brazil’s foremost contemporary artists, Sonia Gomes combines second-hand textiles with everyday materials such as birdcages, driftwood, and wire to create abstract sculptures that reclaim traditions rooted in Afro-diasporic experiences and craft modes of artmaking from the margins of history. In 2015, she was the only Brazilian artist invited by the late curator Okwui Enwezor to the Arsenale exhibition of the 56th Venice Biennale, and in 2018, she became the first living Black woman artist to receive a monographic exhibition at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP). Last year, in 2024, she returned to Venice, showing work as part of the Holy See Pavilion for the 60th Venice Biennale.

Born in 1948 in Caetanópolis, a former textile hub in Minas Gerais, southeastern Brazil, Sonia Gomes has cultivated a singular practice anchored by her deft and meticulous manipulation of varied materials. Across these transformations, her approach remains rooted in gestures of care and reinforcement: sewing, tying, and wrapping.

The exhibition’s title—translated as “one must not be afraid to create”—is drawn from Clarice Lispector’s 1943 novel Near to the Wild Heart and has guided Gomes’s embrace of new materials and techniques for this show. In addition to her ongoing experimentation with found and gifted fabrics, Gomes has created bronze sculptures for the first time. These forms—casts of textile-wrapped tree burls and branches—extend the artist’s visual language, highlighting the tension between vulnerable materials and elevated finishes. This relationship recurs in a new group of wall-mounted works made from reclaimed lumber, transformed by the artist with gold leaf and fragments of a 19th-century liturgical vestment. Rectangular in form, they bring together weathered wood and gilded surface, continuing Gomes’s engagement with contrast and transformation.

A major new work included in the show, titled Tereza (2025), fuses a group of Gomes’s previously unrealized pendant works into one commanding form. Suspended from the ceiling and meandering through the exhibition space, this sculpture holds a vital, organic quality. In Brazilian Portuguese prison slang, tereza refers to the makeshift ropes used in escape attempts that are often fashioned from tied-together bedsheets and other fabrics. Gomes’s hanging works, such as this one, embody the word’s liberatory implications, allowing their textile remnants—carriers of collective and individual memory—to slip free from oblivion.

The artist’s Torção (torsion) sculptures, two of which feature in the exhibition, emerge from a single line. To create these, Gomes engages her whole body in describing the sculpture’s composition with uncoiled construction wire and steel reinforcing bars for the base. Choosing from her extensive trove of fabrics, Gomes forms the sculpture’s body by wrapping, twisting, tying, weaving, and stitching scraps of these materials around and through its skeleton. In her studio, she separates handcrafted textiles—such as laces, embroideries, and knits—from industrially made materials, treating the former as compositional tools and the latter as a color palette. In a new wall-based Torção included in the exhibition, Gomes has explored an unprecedented level of openness in her composition: for the first time leaving one extreme of the spiral-wire structure hanging freely in the air.

Other highlights include two-dimensional artworks from Gomes’s Raio de Sol (Sunbeam) series and new paintings. Throughout these, open and expansive forms layer and coalesce. These gestures, created by Gomes in Posca pen, watercolour, acrylic, thread, beads, and oil, recall the spiral forms that are deeply embedded in cyclical conceptions of time. In one work, Gomes has woven history into the present by embedding within it a 2.3 × 1.5 m length of shibori-dyed, hand-stitched cotton—crafted in two days by Bai artisans on China’s Tibetan border and first encountered by the artist in a London market in 2019—so that the fabric’s contorted surface collapses past and present into a single poetic return.

Since 2018, Sonia Gomes has been modifying six volumes of Enciclopédia de Fantasia (Encyclopaedia of Fantasy), a collection of classic children’s fables gifted to her by a friend. A video work included in the exhibition—the artist’s first foray into the medium—shows a dreamlike version of this process in which Gomes’s interventions and additions fluidly interact with the text and pages.

Concurrent with her exhibition in London, Gomes’s first-ever solo museum show in the United States, Sonia Gomes: Ó Abre Alas! The exhibit at Storm King Art Center is on view through November 10. She is also presenting works in the Glass Pavilion at Louvre-Lens, France, until early next year, and at Instituto Tomie Ohtake in November 2025.

Artist Sonia Gomes

Sonia Gomes (b. 1948, Caetanópolis) combines secondhand textiles with everyday materials, such as furniture, driftwood, and wire, to create abstract sculptures that reclaim Afro-Brazilian traditions and feminized crafts from the margins of history. Juxtaposing tensile and slack forms, Gomes’s contorted sculptures exude a corporeality and dynamism that she attributes to her love of popular Brazilian dances. Sonia Gomes uses found or gifted fabrics, which, according to her, “bring the history of the people that they belonged to.” “I give a new significance to them,” she adds. Her assemblages thus tie Brazil’s historical trajectory to the long-disregarded narratives of women, people of color, and countless anonymous individuals.

Through its recycling of used fabric, Gomes’s work also evinces a principle of thrift that is both a consequence of Brazil’s rapid and uneven industrial development and a dissenting answer to its accompanying culture of wasteful consumption and environmental destruction. As a whole, her art is marked by a decolonizing impulse, providing oblique responses to the social inequities and ecological urgencies of present-day Brazil and, more broadly, a globalized world.

Gomes’s work is represented in numerous collections around the world, including the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; the Pérez Art Museum Miami; the Rubell Museum in Miami; the Minneapolis Institute of Art; the San Antonio Museum of Art in Texas; the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo; the Museu de Arte de São Paulo; the Museu de Arte do Rio, Rio de Janeiro; the Instituto Inhotim in Brumadinho, Minas Gerais, Brazil; both the Guggenheim New York and Abu Dhabi; and Tate in London.

PACE LONDON

5 Hanover Square, London 

www.pacegallery.com

"Surface Streets" Group Exhibition Curated by Russell Ferguson @ Marian Goodman Gallery, Los Angeles

Surface Streets

Curated by Russell Ferguson

Marian Goodman Gallery, Los Angeles

6 September – 18 October 2025

Wilhelm Sasnal 

Berkeley Street, 2024 

Oil on canvas

© Wilhelm Sasnal, courtesy of Marian Goodman Gallery

Marian Goodman Gallery presents Surface Streets, curated by Russell Ferguson, a group exhibition of recent paintings made in Los Angeles. The title of the exhibition, a term that contextually denotes Los Angeles streets (but not freeways), is intended to evoke both the specificity of the local environment and the tactility that is integral to painting. The intergenerational group of artists chosen by Ferguson for this exhibition traces a variety of aesthetics, strategies, and traditions, yet at the same time pays close attention to the physicality of the painted surface which unites them. While many works in Surface Streets depict familiar scenes of everyday urban life, others reach beyond, to a movie set, to an ancient fossil, or even into spaces of fiction and fantasy. 

Surface Streets includes works by Hye-Shin Chun, Kirsten Everberg, Owen Fu, Anna Glantz, Robert Gunderman, James Iveson, Becky Kolsrud, Tidawhitney Lek, Manuel López, Nihura Montiel, Paige Jiyoung Moon, Paul Sietsema, Wilhelm Sasnal, Henry Taylor, and Tristan Unrau.

Hye-Shin Chun (b. 1983, Libreville, Gabon) graduated with a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2015). Her work has been exhibited at numerous group shows, including Elsewhere, Ivory Gate Gallery, Shanghai, China (2025); Now You Don’t, Five Churches, Los Angeles (2025); 12 Hour Day - 12 Hour, Helen J Gallery, Los Angeles (2023); and Smoke The Moon Gallery, Santa Fe, NM (2023, 2024). 

Kirsten Everberg (b. 1965, Los Angeles) received an MFA from UCLA in 2004. That same year, Everberg held her first solo exhibition at 1301PE and was included in Russell Ferguson's group exhibition, The Undiscovered Country at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. She has exhibited widely, including at the Scottsdale Museum of Art (2011); Pomona College Museum of Art, Claremont, CA (2013); and FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, Reims; Le Consortium, Dijon, France (2009); amongst others.

Owen Fu (b. 1988, Guilin, China) received a bachelor’s degrees in philosophy and art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and in 2018, completed his MFA at the ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena. Recent solo exhibitions include Balice Hertling, Paris (2021, 2023); and Mine Project, Hong Kong (2020). His work has also been featured in group exhibitions at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2023); Beijing Biennale, China (2022); Sifang Art Museum, Nanjing, China (2022); and Redling Fine Art, Los Angeles (2021).

Anna Glantz (b. 1989, Concord, MA) has exhibited her work in solo shows internationally. Recent solo exhibitions include Knowing what you know, Chris Sharp Gallery, Los Angeles (2025); Lichens, The Approach, London (2023); Cement Answers, Chris Sharp Gallery, Los Angeles (2022); and Baby Grand, The Approach, London (2020). Group exhibitions include Untitled (for Jenni), Gordon Robichaux, New York, NY (2025); Trespass sweetly urged, Tanya Leighton, Berlin (2024); A Minor Constellation, Chris Sharp Gallery, Los Angeles (2022); Therein / Thereof /Thereto, Standard (OSLO), Oslo, Norway (2021); and A Love Letter to a Nightmare, Petzel Gallery, New York, NY (2020).

Robert Gunderman (b. 1963, Los Angeles) attended the Otis Parsons School of Art Los Angeles (1989). Recent solo exhibitions include Place Like You, Wilding Cran Gallery, Los Angeles (2023); The Quiet Beliefs, Diane Rosenstein Gallery, Los Angeles (2021); and Never Let Us Go, Desert Center, Los Angeles (2019). Group exhibitions include Ripe, Harper’s, Los Angeles (2023); LA ON FIREcurated by Michael Slenske, Wilding Cran Gallery, Los Angeles (2020); and Between Worlds, Edward Cella, Los Angeles (2021).

James Iveson (b. 1983, England) holds an MFA from University of California, Los Angeles (2016) and a BA from Goldsmiths University of London (2006). Selected solo exhibitions have taken place at South Willard, Los Angeles (2022); Norwich Outpost, Norwich, UK (2012); and Dicksmith Gallery, London (2010). Selected group exhibitions include Taking Care, Hannah Hoffman, Los Angeles (2025); 4 X 4, Karma, New York, NY (2024); South Willard, Gordon Robichaux, New York, NY (2023); 356 Mission Road, Los Angeles (2014); The Tetley, Leeds, UK (2014); and Kettles Yard, Cambridge, UK (2013).

Becky Kolsrud (b. 1984, Los Angeles) received an MFA from University of California, Los Angeles (2012) and a BA from New York University (2006). Important solo exhibitions include Elegies, JTT, New York, NY (2021); As Above, So Below, Make Room, Los Angeles (2020); and Yackety Yack Girls, Karma, New York, NY (2011). Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Aïshti Foundation, Beirut, Lebanon (2022); Gavlak Gallery, Los Angeles (2020); Stephen Friedman Gallery, London (2020); Magenta Plains, New York, NY (2018); Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles (2020); and Fredericks & Freiser, New York, NY (2019). Kolsrud’s work is in the permanent collection of the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.

Tidawhitney Lek (b. 1992, Long Beach) completed her BFA at California State University, Long Beach in 2017. Solo exhibitions include Long Beach Museum of Art, Long Beach, CA (2023); Sow & Tailor, Los Angeles (2022); and Taymour Grahne Projects, London (2021). Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, San Diego, CA (2024); Cantor Arts Center Stanford University, Stanford, CA (2024); ICA Miami, Miami, FL (2022); Anat Ebgi, New York, NY (2024); and Ben and Brown Fine Arts, London (2022). Institutional collections include the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; K11 Art Foundation, Hong Kong; and Pérez Art Museum, Miami.

Manuel López (b.1983, East Los Angeles) attended East Los Angeles College and transferred to The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) where he earned his BFA in painting and drawing in 2010. He has exhibited in institutions, galleries, and museums internationally and nationwide including Atkinson Gallery at Santa Barbara City College, Santa Barbara, CA (2022); Baik Gallery, Seoul, South Korea (2023); Vincent Price Art Museum, Monterey Park, CA (2018); Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles (2023, 2022); and Self-Help Graphics, Boyle Heights, CA (2017); among others.

Nihura Montiel (b. 1988, Tijuana, Mexico) received her BFA from Roski School of Fine Arts, University of Southern California in Los Angeles (2023). Selected solo exhibitions include A Dog Named Masterpiece, Sebastian Gladstone Gallery, Los Angeles (2024); and The Object of My Object, In Lieu, Los Angeles (2022). She has exhibited at Mrs. Gallery, Maspeth, NY (2022); Carlye Packer, Los Angeles (2023); Ochi Projects, Dallas, TX (2023); Château du Marais, Le Marais, France (2021); and Amor Services, Los Angeles (2020). 

Paige Jiyoung Moon (b. 1984, Seoul, South Korea) received a BFA from ArtCenter College of Design in 2012 and graduated from the Seoul National University of Technology in 2007. Her work has been exhibited in solo presentations at Steve Turner, Los Angeles (2024, 2020, 2019), and Steven Zevitas Gallery, Boston (2017). Select group exhibitions include Kiaf Seoul, Steve Turner, Los Angeles (2024); Made in L.A. 2023:Acts of Living, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2023); and Ogdoad, La Luz de Jesus Gallery, Los Angeles (2018).

Paul Sietsema (b. 1968, Los Angeles) graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles (1999) and the University of California, Berkeley (1992). Solo exhibitions of his work have been held at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, Denver, CO (2014); the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2013); Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland (2012); the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (2009); the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY (2009); the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA (2009); and the Whitney Museum of American Art (2003). Sietsema’s work has been exhibited extensively in biennials including Carnegie International (2008), Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art, Germany (2008), and Istanbul Biennial, Turkey (2019).

Wilhelm Sasnal (b. 1972, Tarnów, Poland) studied architecture at the Kraków University of Technology (1992–1994) and painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków (1994– 1999). His works have been featured in major exhibitions worldwide, including solo presentations at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the Netherlands (2024); and Longlati Foundation, Shanghai, China (2023). Institutional collections include The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum New York, NY, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, among others.

Henry Taylor (b. 1958, Ventura) graduated with a BFA from the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia (1995). A major survey exhibition dedicated to the artist, Henry Taylor: B Side, his largest to date, was exhibited at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and was then on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY (2024). Other select solo exhibitions include Henry Taylor. no title, Hauser & Wirth, New York, NY (2024); Jill Mulleady & Henry Taylor: You Me, Berlin (2024); and Here and There, Tokyo, Japan (2018). In 2018, Taylor was the recipient of The Robert De Niro, Sr. Prize in 2018 for his outstanding achievements in painting. Taylor’s work was presented at the Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2017 and the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019.

Tristan Unrau (b. 1989, Brampton, Canada) holds an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles and a BFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Sebastian Gladstone, Los Angeles (2023); 56 Henry, New York, NY (2022); Unit 17, Vancouver, Canada (2021, 2018); and Towards, Toronto, Canada (2020), among others. Recent group exhibitions include 50 Paintings, Milwaukee Art Museum, WI (2023); Drawings, Clint Roenisch Gallery, Toronto, Canada (2018); and Cynthia Daignault: There is nothing I could say that I haven’t thought before, FLAG Art Foundation, New York, NY (2017), among others. 

Born in Glasgow, Scotland, Russell Ferguson has lived and worked in Los Angeles for many years. He joined the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles in 1991, and later became the Deputy Director for Exhibitions and Programs, and Chief Curator of the Hammer Museum from 2001-2007. Ferguson also served as a professor of the Department of Art at the University of California Los Angeles from 2007-2013. An established scholar and critic of contemporary art, his numerous writings have been published internationally.

MARIAN GOODMAN GALLERY LOS ANGELES

1120 Seward Street, Los Angeles, CA 90038

www.mariangoodman.com

Eija-Liisa Ahtila @ Marian Goodman Gallery, Paris - "On Breathing" Exhibition

Eija-Liisa Ahtila: On Breathing 

Marian Goodman Gallery, Paris 

September 5 – October 4, 2025 

Voir la version en Français

Eija-Liisa Ahtila

On Breathing, 2024 

Single channel installation. Image 4K UHD 

Audio 2.0. 9 min. 45 sec. en boucle. Crystal Eye 2024 

© Eija-Liisa Ahtila, courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery

Marian Goodman Gallery Paris presents a new exhibition by Eija-Liisa Ahtila, which features the French premiere of two new large-scale video installations, On Breathing and APRIL ≈ 61°01' 24°27', 2024. A master of cinematic installations, Ahtila challenges the idea of moving image perspective and constructs an experience of several co-existing temporalities and spaces for the viewers. A continuation of her research over the last decade, the works in the exhibition each explore in their own way forms of ecological narrative and their modes of presentation. Since abandoning a more anthropocentric viewpoint, Ahtila has been seeking to make visible the non-human world, with a focus on trees in particular. While On Breathing depicts the subtle intertwinement of tree branches with the morning mist, APRIL captures the silent passage of one season to the next through spatial movements among the trees and the attentive observation of a forest ecosystem.

On the ground floor of the gallery, the nine-minute projection On Breathing, 2024,is a visual poem in which the focus is the slow and hypnotic movement of the evaporative mist surrounding an oak tree. This morning phenomenon is typical of autumn and winter conditions when the sea remains warmer than the surrounding air and ground. The displacement of the fog and its sound in the branches poetically suggest a vegetal respiration: "The air around the oak tree seems tangible, and the space inside it becomes actual, as if the breathing of the tree were, for a moment, perceivable."

Eija-Liisa Ahtila, who frequently deploys multi-channels and split-screen installations to simultaneously unfold several aspects of one narrative, superimposes layers of video to conjure different temporalities. The wandering of the fog and its interplay with the leaves, the rhythm and the camera angles, all result in a unique, animated tableau.

Considering her recent works as a continuum, Eija-Liisa Ahtila notes that each creative process naturally leads to the next. Since 2011, she has gradually replaced human protagonists with trees and living organisms, resulting in a series of works that address the ecological narrative within the moving image. This new direction questions the contemporary relationship between nature and humanity, as well as the artificial boundary between us and other living beings. "I have attempted to develop visual approaches and methods of storytelling that might show us a way out of anthropocentrism and enable the presence of nonhuman species in our imaginary."

On the gallery lower level, APRIL ≈ 61°01' 24°27', 2024, first exhibited at the Kröller-Müller Museum in the Netherlands, immerses the visitors in the forest of Aulanko Nature Park, Finland, near Ahtila's hometown. Known as a natural environment unsullied by human activity, the forest was filmed for two consecutive seasons in 2022 and 2023, between the end of March and May. If the title of the work evokes the month associated with the regeneration of nature, the 12-meter-long, 8-channel installation shows the subtle transition from late winter to summer. The suite of eight sequences follows a chronological order, showing the forest from the first moments of snowmelt on the left to the premature arrival of summer on the far right.

The scale and horizontal nature of the installation are reminiscent of her iconic work Horizontal, 2011, which came from her desire to represent a giant spruce tree in its entirety. Eija-Liisa Ahtila not only chose to capture the tree by filming it in several horizontal sections, thus avoiding the distortions inherent in the use of a wide-angle lens, but she also decided to present the tree as an horizontal installation on a series of 6 projection screens.

With APRIL, the forest as an ecosystem - where trees and a multitude of organisms and plants constantly interact with each other -  is, for the first time, the center of the artist's attention. The source of the work stems from life in a forest where each singular being is an integrated element of the whole, and the whole is simulaneously within that singular being. To create a cinematic language suited to her subject that immerses us in the forest, the camera movements in the eight sections are fluid and asynchronous, alternating between slow motion and momentary stops. "The theme of APRIL is the spatiality of being, the constant change and shape-taking of the forest, that is its fundamental quality," says Eija-Liisa Ahtila.

Eija-Liisa Ahtila was born in Hämeenlinna, Finland in 1959. She has been honored with numerous prizes over the past two decades that include, most recently, becoming Commander, First Class, of the Order of the White Rose of Finland (2020). She works and lives in Helsinki.

Eija-Liisa Ahtila's work has been widely exhibited since the early 1990s. Horizontal is prominently featured in The Power of Trees, on view until 14 September 2025 at Shirley Sherwood Gallery of Botanical Art, Kew Gardens, Richmond, near London. Most recently she has had solo exhibitions at Serlachius Manor, Finland (2024); Kröller-Müller Museum (2024), The Netherlands; the Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita, US (2022); the National Gallery of Art, Vilnus, Lithuania (2021); the M Museum, Leuven, Belgium and the Serlachius Museum Gösta, Mänttä, Finland (both 2018). She has also had solo exhibitions at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne, Australia (2017); Guggenheim Bilbao, Spain (2016); Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, New York and Oi Futuro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (both 2015); Kiasma, Helsinki, Finland (2013); Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden (2012); Carré D'Art, Nîmes, France (2012); Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City, Mexico (2012); Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois (2011); Parasol Unit, London, UK (2010); Jeu de Paume, Paris, France (2008), amongst many others. Ahtila was a jury member at the Venice Film Festival in 2011 and the President of the Jury at the FIDMarseille in 2013 (Festival international de cinéma de Marseille).

MARIAN GOODMAN GALLERY

79 rue du Temple, 75003 Paris

www.mariangoodman.com

Witnessing Humanity: The Art of John Wilson @ The Met, NYC - Largest-Ever Exhibition of Works by American Artist John Wilson

Witnessing Humanity 

The Art of John Wilson 

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

September 20, 2025 – February 8, 2026

John Wilson (American, 1922–2015)

My Brother, 1942 

Oil on panel, 12 x 10 5/8 in. (30.48 x 26.9875 cm) 

Smith College Museum of Art, Purchased, (SC 1943.4.1) 

Courtesy of the Estate of John Wilson

The Metropolitan Museum of Art will present Witnessing Humanity: The Art of John Wilson, the largest exhibition of this artist’s work and his first solo museum show in New York. For over six decades, American artist JOHN WILSON (1922–2015) made powerful and poetic works that reflected his life as a Black American artist and his ongoing quest for racial, social, and economic justice. His art responded to the turbulent times in which he lived, with a focus on such subjects as racial violence, labor, the writings of Richard Wright, the Civil Rights Movement, and street scenes, and also captured intimate images of family life, with a particular focus on fatherhood. Drawing from the collections of The Met, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and a dozen other lenders, this exhibition features over 100 artworks made over the course of Wilson’s career, including paintings, prints, drawings, and sculpture, as well as illustrations for children’s books and archival material; many of the works have not been shown before. The exhibition is organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA).

“While the powerful impact of John Wilson’s art and the enduring relevance of the themes he explored are undeniable, he has not yet received the recognition his work so deeply deserves,” said Max Hollein, Marina Kellen French Director and Chief Executive Officer of The Met. “This landmark exhibition honors Wilson’s extraordinary artistic achievements—illuminating the incredible range of work he produced over five decades—and affirms his place in art history as one of the foremost artists devoted to social justice and portraying the experiences of Black Americans.”

Jennifer Farrell, exhibition co-curator and Jordan Schnitzer Curator in the Department of Drawings and Prints at The Met, said, “Wilson’s art is imbued with compassion and empathy while conveying his anger and distress at the wrenching effects of disenfranchisement, racism, and economic inequality. Challenging deep-seated prejudices and omissions within our national history, Wilson centered the experiences of Black Americans to create images that convey strength, resilience, and humanity. Deeply personal yet widely resonant, his work continues to offer a powerful lens through which to consider today’s urgent dialogues about race, equality, and representation.”

Leslie King Hammond, exhibition co-curator and art historian, professor emerita, and founding director of the Center for Race and Culture at Maryland Institute College of Art, said, “John Wilson was an artist of profound resilience and passion for the innate essence of dignity, beauty, and humanity of Black Americans, which he witnessed in families, community, and all humankind. He was intentional and relentless throughout his life to create imagery that demanded respect for the Black body in an America struggling with its contested legacy of slavery.”

Working in a figurative style, John Wilson sought to portray what he called “a universal humanity.” While still a teenager, he was struck by the absence of positive representations of Black Americans and their experiences in both museums and popular culture. To counter such prejudices and omissions, Wilson put the experiences of Black Americans at the center of his work and created images that portrayed dignity and strength.

The exhibition begins with work John Wilson made while in art school in Boston, where his subjects included the horrors of Nazi Germany and American racial violence, as well as portraits of his family and neighborhood. It continues through his time in Paris, Mexico City, and New York, capturing the humanity and scope of Wilson’s art. The exhibition concludes with Wilson’s return to Boston and his focus on portraiture. Included are maquettes and works on paper for two of Wilson’s most celebrated works—his sculpture of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at the United States Capitol and the monumental sculpture Eternal Presence.

Witnessing Humanity: The Art of John Wilson is co-curated by Jennifer Farrell, Jordan Schnitzer Curator, Department of Drawings and Prints at The Met; Leslie King Hammond, art historian, professor emerita, and founding director of the Center for Race and Culture at Maryland Institute College of Art; Patrick Murphy, the MFA’s Lia and William Poorvu Curator of Prints and Drawings; and Edward Saywell, the MFA’s Chair of Prints and Drawings.

The exhibition is accompanied by a richly illustrated catalogue, jointly authored and edited by the MFA and The Met, and produced by MFA Publications. Reproductions of artworks and photographs accompany critical essays and personal reflections, including analyses by art historians, interviews with Wilson’s peers, remembrances from fellow Black creatives, and a full chronology by the late artist’s gallerist.

THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART

The Met Fifth Avenue, Galleries 691–693

1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10028

www.metmuseum.org

Lauren Quin @ Pace Gallery

Pace Gallery represents Lauren Quin

Portrait of Lauren Quin

Photograph by Lee Thompson

Lauren Quin 

Lowing, 2024 

© Lauren Quin, courtesy Pace Gallery

Photo by Marten Elder

Pace announces its representation of the Los Angeles-based artist LAUREN QUIN, who is known for her expansive, vibrant abstractions in which she orchestrates layers of colors, patterns, and symbols to describe, deconstruct, and interrogate the entanglement of real and pictorial space. Quin’s repertoire of dynamic movements and noncompositional forms create pulsating networks of marks and countermarks, which churn and fluctuate between the concrete and the ephemeral. 

Often working at large scale, Lauren Quin constructs her paintings methodically from an arsenal of recurring gestures and techniques. Expressionistic brushstrokes are truncated by channels carved across a painting’s surface, creating sculpted fissures in images that Lauren Quin further disrupts through passages of monoprinted ink, which she weaves between layers of paint. Turbulent and engrossing, her works are as much excavated as they are made. Past and present mingle on the surfaces of her canvases, interrupting and distorting one another.

Drawing is an essential part of Quin’s process. Rather than a compositional map, drawing serves as a compass, a tool for orienteering. In her work, painting is revealed as a wilderness—the act of painting involves the risk of getting lost, of giving up the notion of fixity in space and language. Amidst this painterly derive, Lauren Quin deploys and re-deploys symbols from her ever-expanding archive of drawings, anchoring her process and linking one painting to the next.

The poetic substrate of Quin’s abstraction is temporality. In each work, Lauren Quin interrogates the unfolding of painterly time while also producing an altogether different kind of time. “You can span time inside a painting because when you look at it, you don’t read it left to right; you start to enter, circle, and travel,” Lauren Quin has said. “It takes a long time for a painting to unfold.”

Quin’s representation by Pace follows her New York solo debut in 2024 at 125 Newbury, a project space helmed by Pace Founder and Chairman Arne Glimcher. Entitled Lauren Quin: Logopanic, the exhibition was presented in two parts, bringing together a new body of work. In the 125 Newbury Free Press, Arne Glimcher wrote that Quin’s paintings “knocked me out by their power, intensity, and ravishing beauty … They were overwhelming, like storms harnessed at the moment of exquisite danger.”

Lauren Quin’s first solo exhibition with Pace will open in Los Angeles in February 2026. Her work will be featured prominently in the gallery’s booth at the upcoming edition of Frieze Seoul in September. 

Artist Lauren Quin

 

Born in Los Angeles in 1992, Lauren Quin received her MFA from the Yale School of Art and BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In addition to her 2024 exhibition at 125 Newbury in New York, the artist has presented solo shows at the Pond Society in Shanghai and Blum & Poe in Los Angeles in recent years. In 2023, she mounted her first US museum exhibition, 'My Hellmouth', at the Nerman Museum of Art in Overland Park, Kansas.

Lauren Quin’s paintings are included in major museums collections internationally, including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C.; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; the Pérez Art Museum and Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio; and the Long Museum and Yuz Museum, Shanghai. 

PACE GALLERY

www.pacegallery.com

Josh Smith @ David Zwirner, Los Angeles - "Destiny" Exhibition of new paintings

Josh Smith: Destiny

David Zwirner, Los Angeles

September 13 – November 1, 2025

Josh Smith

Find Me, 2025

© Josh Smith. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner

David Zwirner presents Destiny, an exhibition of new paintings by JOSH SMITH, on view at the gallery’s 606 N Western Avenue location in Los Angeles. This is Josh Smith’s first solo presentation in Los Angeles.

For Destiny, Josh Smith has made a series of paintings that continue his long-running dialogue with the grim reaper, a figure that has appeared in his work for years in countless guises. In these new canvases, the reaper is set loose in New York City, riding a bicycle through familiar streets, cutting past landmarks like the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty. The once faceless symbol of death now has eyes and stares back at you, tangled in the swirl of the city. It is funny, unsettling, and alive.

Smith’s paintings are built out of seemingly contradictory parts: loose but controlled, casual but deliberate, improvised yet tightly bound. He uses the bikes almost like scaffolding. Wheels, frames, and spokes break up the surface and give him an excuse to push color and shape across the support. The reapers wear cloaks made from bold strokes of black, but also from sharp hits of high-tone green, violet, or electric orange. Each canvas is a balancing act where lines threaten to collapse but never do.

There is a real sense of watching a painter solve problems in real time. Josh Smith allows the work to remain in a state of flux. Marks overlap, collide, and seem to rearrange themselves. It is this willingness to keep things open and unsettled that gives the paintings their energy. Even as they embrace a sense of improvisation, the paintings are held together by a deep understanding of how images work and how paint moves.

In these works, the grim reaper is not just a joke or a dark emblem. He becomes a vehicle for Josh Smith to explore the formal and conceptual terrain that drives him as a painter: tension and release, composition and collapse, figure and ground. The humor of portraying death speeding through Manhattan traffic does not diminish the force of the paintings. It sharpens it. The works are graphic and immediate, but also dense, layered, and full of small surprises—lines veer off and double back; colors press against each other in unexpected ways; forms fracture and then reassemble.

Made with this show in mind, the paintings in Destiny are clear about their own pleasures: color, form, and a bit of absurdity, pushed right up to the surface without fear.

The result is a series that feels both pointed and off-the-cuff, tough but playful. These are paintings that believe in themselves even as they undercut their own seriousness. They channel the spirit of the New York School—not as a style but as a way of working that values conviction, quick thinking, and the thrill of watching it all come together on the canvas.

Artist Josh Smith

Josh Smith was born in 1976 in Okinawa, Japan, and grew up primarily in East Tennessee. His work has been presented in numerous solo exhibitions at museums and arts institutions in the United States and abroad. In 2024, a solo presentation of Smith’s work, Life Drawing, was shown at The Drawing Center, New York. Other recent solo shows include those held at the Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn, Germany (2016); Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Roma, Rome (2015); Zabludowicz Collection, London (2013); The Brant Foundation Art Study Center, Greenwich, Connecticut (2011); Centre d'Art Contemporain Genève, Geneva (2009); De Hallen Haarlem, The Netherlands (2009–2010); Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna (2008); and SculptureCenter, New York (2004).

Josh Smith’s work has also been included in important group exhibitions, such as Forever Young – 10 Years Museum Brandhorst, Museum Brandhorst, Munich (2019–2020); Trouble in Paradise: Collection Rattan Chadha, Kunsthal Rotterdam (2019); Publishing as an Artistic Toolbox: 1989–2017, Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2017–2018); Painting 2.0: Expression in the Information Age, Museum Brandhorst, Munich (2015–2016), and Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna (2016); The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World, The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2014–2015); The Painting Factory: Abstraction After Warhol, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2012); ILLUMInations, 54th Venice Biennale (2011); and The Generational: Younger Than Jesus, New Museum, New York (2009).

The artist has been represented by David Zwirner since 2017, and his first exhibition, Emo Jungle, took place at the gallery’s 519, 525, and 533 West 19th Street locations in New York in 2019. David Zwirner Online presented High As Fuck, the artist’s second solo show with David Zwirner in 2020. Also in 2020, a solo exhibition of new paintings was presented concurrently at the gallery’s locations in London and 69th Street in New York. In 2023, a solo presentation of the artist's work was on view at David Zwirner, Paris.

Josh Smith’s work is held in numerous international public collections including The Broad, Los Angeles; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

DAVID ZWIRNER LOS ANGELES

606 N Western Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90004 

www.davidzwirner.com

Charline von Heyl @ The George Economou Collection, Marousi / Athens - "The Giddy Road to Ruin" Exhibition

Charline von Heyl 

The Giddy Road to Ruin

The George Economou Collection, Marousi / Athens

14 June 2025 – March 2026

Charline von Heyl 

The Giddy Road to Ruin, 2015

Acrylic on canvas, 62 x 54 inches (157.5 x 137 cm)

© Charline von Heyl

Courtesy of Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne and Petzel New York

Photo: Butcher Walsh

The George Economou Collection presents The Giddy Road to Ruin, the first survey exhibition by German-American artist CHARLINE VON HEYL (b. 1960) in Greece. 

Across three floors of gallery space, The Giddy Road to Ruin features select works from the last several decades. The earliest is an outstanding painting from the George Economou Collection—an emblematic example of the artist’s practice—Untitled (11/93, I) (1993), while the most recent is her first-ever photographic work, Athens, made in 2024.

The title of the exhibition, The Giddy Road to Ruin, derives from her 2015 painting of the same name and may be interpreted as a reflection of her thinking as well as the nature of painting itself. Displayed at the exhibition’s beginning and considered within the context of Greece’s ancient and modern landscape, the painting takes on greater significance, especially in relation to its presentation alongside the Athens (2024) collages. In these graphic images we experience the echoes and rumblings of both the present and history.

Charline von Heyl is one of the most significant painters of her generation. Educated in Germany in the 1980s and inspired by both senior artists and contemporaries—including Martin Kippenberger, Rosemarie Trockel, and Michael Krebber, as well as Albert Oehlen, Jutta Koether, and Cosima von Bonin—her work began to carve out new territory, particularly after her move to New York in 1996. While her paintings share the rigor and intensity of theirs, Charline von Heyl’s work eschews irony in favor of a more openly amused humor and a certain nimbleness in the synthesis of mind and hand.

Once in the United States, Charline von Heyl developed a novel, constructive, and strategic approach to creating and solving artistic problems that allows each painting to be “a self-generating machine that finds its own soul.” Her work is neither wholly abstract nor representational but simultaneously both. Her art succeeds by embracing visual and conceptual contradictions, keeping viewers intrigued by the seemingly impossible combinations of subjects, compositions, and styles that result in deeply satisfying yet puzzling works. In many of her paintings, forms appear both in stasis and in flux simultaneously, as evident in works such as Demons Dance Alone (2022) or World Rabbit Clock (2022). Shapes seem to be concurrently at the fore and in the background, as seen in her depiction of bowling pins—a recurring image in her vocabulary, particularly well-represented in two paintings from 2015 on mid-twentieth-century barkcloth fabric that are located on the second floor of the exhibition. To the indiscriminate eye, the contradictory styles in von Heyl’s paintings might seem irreconcilable, yet they all coexist within the singularly coherent universe of her art.

While a series of four densely composed paintings on barkcloth are a through line from the first floor, the appearance of two stolid and iconic works on the second floor signal a change of mood in the exhibition. The heraldic devices in Untitled (11/93, I) (1993) carry ominous, even militaristic overtones, in contrast to the insouciant black-and-white cut-out shapes of Time Waiting (2010), which harken back to mid-century travel advertisements’ filtered interpretation of Cubism. These works stand in stark contrast to the owl paintings from 2020–2021, in which the generally solitary birds—symbols of good fortune and wisdom—gather, against type, into a multitude. This capacious theme, with its potential for great and even adorable variation, offered a lighthearted interlude for Charline von Heyl to paint and for the viewer to enjoy encountering the third floor of the exhibition.

Here the opening salvo is a boldly blue bird in the large, rectangular painting Animal Delinquency (2021). Ultramarine fowl are partially obscured by two smudged-out, variegated forms of two other creatures—owls, perhaps? The collapse of subjects and the spaces they inhabit creates an apprehensive experience. The scroll-like structure of Banish Air from Air (2017) also features bird-like forms flying through interlocking patterns of words, lines, and shapes. At its center is a variation of her repeated, defiant yet playful female power figure, also seen in The Giddy Road to Ruin.

The painting Ninfa (2021) continues the subtle theme of feminine power in her work. Pulchritude is rendered as outlandish, with blue lips and a graceful line suggesting a chin overtaken by a coalescence of black and ochre biomorphic forms resembling birds. The head itself transforms into a dense field of patterns, becoming increasingly abstract. The fifteen diverse, rigorous while and whimsical black-and-white drawings that comprise Drawings Group 2 (2006) elaborate on and connect to the inscriptive elements—sometimes appearing as ideograms or Rorschach-like forms— not unlike Banish Air from Air. They also echo the structure and palette of Athens earlier in the exhibition. Each work on view is replete with such recursive connections, dissonances, and discontinuities—eye-opening and mind-boggling revelations await.

Charline von Heyl: The Giddy Road to Ruin is co-curated by Adam D. Weinberg and Skarlet Smatana, the director of The George Economou Collection, in close collaboration with the artist. A publication with essays by Adam D. Weinberg and artist Helen Marten accompanies the exhibition.

THE GEORGE ECONOMOU COLLECTION

80 Kifissias Ave, 15125 Marousi, Athens

www.thegeorgeeconomoucollection.com

James Bidgood: Dreamlands @ CLAMP, New York + 2025 Monograph from Salzgeber + 1971 film "Pink Narcissus"

James Bidgood | Dreamlands 

CLAMP, New York

Through August 29, 2025

James Bidgood

“Richie Backstage, Sleeping Portrait,”

 mid-1960s/printed later

Digital C-print 

© Estate of James Bidgood

Courtesy of CLAMP, New York

James Bidgood, Dreamlands, Salzgeber, 2025

Book Cover Courtesy of Salzgeber

160 p., 24 × 32 cm - English / Deutsch

ISBN 978-3-95985-718-5

CLAMP presents “James Bidgood | Dreamlands,” an exhibition of photographs marking the launch of the monograph of the same title from Salzgeber, in addition to recent screenings of the artist’s cult classic film, “Pink Narcissus,” at theaters across the United States and Europe.

The book combines iconic motifs from the artist’s oeuvre with many previously unpublished images. The exhibition at CLAMP includes twelve of these new photographs selected from the estate archives, along with a large-scale print of “Pan”—the monograph’s cover image.

“Pink Narcissus,” James Bidgood’s film from 1971, described as a “kaleidoscopic fever dream of queer desire,” was recently restored by the UCLA Film & Television Archive, and has been playing at theaters since late 2024, including MoMA (New York), Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), BAM (New York), Metrograph (New York), and other screens in London, Bologna, San Francisco, Seattle, Provincetown, Tucson, St. Louis, etc.

James Bidgood passed away in 2022 at the age of 88. A New Yorker for over 70 years, he was adored and admired by generations of artists and cinephiles alike.

When James Bidgood first came to New York from Wisconsin in the 1950s, he worked as a drag performer and occasional set and costume designer at Club 82 in the East Village. After studying at Parsons School of Design from 1957 to 1960, James Bidgood found jobs as a window dresser and costume designer.

He then went on to work as a photographer for men’s physique publications and began creating his own personal photographs and films that greatly benefited from his talents in theater design and costume construction. It was during this period in the early 1960s that James Bidgood began working on his masterpiece—the 8mm opus “Pink Narcissus.”

In his tiny apartment in Hell’s Kitchen, he handcrafted sets using humble materials to create a theatrical dreamland in which artifice became transcendent. With hand-tailored clothing, saturated lighting, and lots of glitter, James Bidgood built a cosmos of queer belonging, populated with angelic figures of male beauty—including Cupid, Pan, and other mythological gods, along with harlequins, soldiers, firemen, hustlers, drag queens, altar boys, and more.

Bidgood’s confined domestic production speaks to both necessity and liberation—”a queer creative spirit refusing to be constrained by material limitations.” In fact, the artist and his models would eat, sleep, and frolic within the sets until it was time to tear them down and begin building the next scene.

Within this space, and in front of his lens, the homosexuals that were ostracized by larger society could be beautiful, glamorous, complex, silly, or simply themselves.

CLAMP 

247 West 29th Street, New York, NY 10001

clampart.com

James Bidgood | Dreamlands

CLAMP, New York, July 10 – August 29, 2025