Coco Fusco @ El Museo del Barrio, NYC - "Tomorrow, I Will Become an Island" Exhibition

Coco Fusco

Tomorrow, I Will Become an Island

El Museo del Barrio, New York 

September 18, 2025 — January 11, 2026

Coco Fusco

Photo by Aurelio Fusco

Coco Fusco

Your Eyes Will Be an Empty Word (still), 2021

HD Video, 13:30 mins

Courtesy of the artist and Mendes Wood DM

Coco Fusco

A Room of One's Own: Women and Power

in the New America, 2006-2008

Performance documentation

Courtesy the artist and Mendes Wood DM

El Museo del Barrio presents Coco Fusco: Tomorrow, I Will Become an Island, the first U.S. survey of the influential Cuban-American interdisciplinary artist and writer COCO FUSCO (b. 1960, lives in New York). The exhibition is spanning more than three decades of Fusco’s groundbreaking career.

Widely recognized for her incisive explorations of the dynamics of politics and power, Fusco’s interdisciplinary practice spans video, performance, installation, photography, and writing. Tomorrow, I Will Become an Island traces her extensive practice through a selection of more than twenty of her works, created since the 1990s and extending to a new photographic series on view for the first time at El Museo del Barrio.

“Coco Fusco stands among the most provocative voices in contemporary art. Her work challenges conventions, sparks vital conversations, and continues to resonate powerfully at a time of profound social and political reckoning.” —Patrick Charpenel, Executive Director, El Museo del Barrio

Organized thematically, the exhibition explores central concerns that Coco Fusco has addressed across her practice, including immigration, military power and surveillance, post-revolutionary Cuban history, and the lasting legacies of colonialism. The presentation offers an expansive view of her multidisciplinary approach through key bodies of work, including:

• Immigration Narratives: Works addressing the perception of immigrants in the US and Europe, including Everyone Here is a New Yorker (2025), a new photographic suite that extends from Fusco's 2024 public art video animation commission by More Art, Inc.

• Intercultural Misunderstandings: A room dedicated to Fusco’s projects, created in counterpoint to the 500th anniversary of the so-called “discovery” of the Americas, including a reproduction of her iconic Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West (1992/2025), originally performed in collaboration with Guillermo Gómez-Peña.

• Interrogation Tactics: Video, photographs, and performance documentation that consider military tactics, surveillance technologies, and the exploitation of female sexuality in the War on Terror.

• Poetry and Power: A focused selection of video, featuring several works that reflect on the history of artists’ challenges to the Cuban government—a central subject in Fusco’s oeuvre. Together, this selection illuminates the breadth and depth of Fusco’s artistic vision—one that remains acutely relevant in today’s national political and cultural climate.

Coco Fusco 

La noche eterna (The Eternal Night), 2023

HD Video, 1:13:45 mins

Courtesy the artist and Mendes Wood DM

Coco Fusco 

La plaza vacía (The Empty Plaza), 2012

HD Video, 11:53 mins

Collection of El Museo del Barrio, New York 

Acquisition enabled by VEZA New Media Fund 2022 

and headline supporters South SOUTH and Niio 

Coco Fusco and Paula Heredia

The Couple in the Cage: A Guatinaui Odyssey, 2003

Video, 31 mins

Collection of El Museo del Barrio, New York

Acquired through "PROARTISTA: Sustaining the Work 

of Living Contemporary Artists," 

a fund from the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Trust 2008.1

“El Museo del Barrio has been a steadfast supporter of Coco Fusco’s groundbreaking practice from early on, recognizing the power and potency of her work. This includes her participation in the groundbreaking 2008 exhibition Arte No es Vida, as well as her presence in recent collection-based shows such as Culture and the People and Something Beautiful. This survey extends that dialogue, offering audiences a deeper understanding of an artist whose voice remains as vital as ever.” —Susanna V. Temkin, Interim Chief Curator, El Museo del Barrio

Tomorrow, I will Become an Island is organized by El Museo del Barrio in collaboration with MACBA Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona.

Borrowing its title from the artist's recent monograph publication, Tomorrow, I will Become an Island is organized at El Museo del Barrio by Susanna V. Temkin, interim chief curator, and Rodrigo Moura, former chief curator, with support from Lee Sessions and Maria Molano Parrado. Exhibition design by Solomonoff Architecture Studio/SAS and graphic design by estúdio gráfico.

ARTIST COCO FUSCO

Coco Fusco is an interdisciplinary artist and writer based in New York. She is a recipient of a 2023 Free Speech Defender Award from the National Coalition Against Censorship, a 2021 American Academy of Arts and Letters Art Award, a 2021 Latinx Artist Fellowship, a 2021 Anonymous Was a Woman award, a 2018 Rabkin Prize for Art Criticism, a 2016 Greenfield Prize, a 2014 Cintas Fellowship, a 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2013 Absolut Art Writing Award, a 2013 Fulbright Fellowship, a 2012 US Artists Fellowship and a 2003 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts.

Fusco’s performances and videos have been presented at the 56th Venice Biennale, the Sharjah Biennale, Frieze Special Projects, Basel Unlimited, three Whitney Biennials (2022, 2008, and 1993), and several other international exhibitions. Her works are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, The Walker Art Center, The Art Institute of Chicago, The Whitney Museum, the Centre Pompidou, and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona. 

Coco Fusco is the author of numerous books, and she contributes regularly to The New York Review of Books and numerous art publications. Her monograph publication Tomorrow, I will Become an Island was published by Thames & Hudson in 2023.

Coco Fusco received her B.A. in Semiotics from Brown University (1982), her M.A. in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University (1985), and her Ph.D. in Art and Visual Culture from Middlesex University (2007). She is a Professor at the Cooper Union School of Art.

EL MUSEO DEL BARRIO, NEW YORK

1230 5th Avenue at 104th Street, New York, NY 10029

www.elmuseo.org

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

Berend Strik @ Hopstreet Gallery, Brussels - "Threads that Echo" Exhibition - Text by Marja Bloem

Berend Strik 

Threads that Echo

Hopstreet Gallery, Brussels

4 September - 25 October 2025

Berend Strik gave this rather enigmatic title to his first exhibition at the Hopstreet Gallery, but looking at his work, the meaning becomes clear.

Upon entering the first room, visitors are immediately struck by a large, colourful piece. A Pollock? No, a Strik! In this uninvited collaboration with Pollock, Strik explains his relationship with art history, with the ‘great’ masters – his icons.

The work is composed of photographic images that have been enhanced with textile techniques including threads, appliqués and different types of stitches. This fusion of photography and textiles is a rare combination.  For Strik, who also creates drawings, ceramics and theatre, the choice of photography was based on one of its essential characteristics. “A photograph shows an image of something that once existed, but is no longer physically visible. It does not exist, yet it can be seen in a photographic image. Memories, references, descriptions, suggestions and spatial indications are all part of it.” And the textile work opens that space up. The Pollock piece is part of an ongoing project Strik has been working on for several years, entitled Deciphering the Artist’s Mind, in which he seeks to position himself in relation to art history and reflect on his role as an artist within society.

The Dutch artist Karel Appel, also one of Strik’s icons, is also featured in Deciphering the Artist’s Mind. Appel became notorious for saying “I just mess around a bit.” In reality, Strik discovered, Appel allowed the unconscious to surface, but he knew exactly what he was doing. It is precisely this kind of hidden meaning that Strik seeks to uncover or highlight. To that end, he chose to cover certain areas with velvet (what is being concealed?) and to add all manner of stitches, holes, and fabric fragments. He didn’t work on a photograph of a work by Appel but on a photo of a work that no longer exists because Appel himself painted over it. The original work was concealed under layers of paint, but was revealed through infrared light.

Strik deliberately avoids the word embroidery as he feels it steers the viewer’s thoughts in a particular direction, which is precisely what he wishes to prevent. He wants the viewer to bring their own context to the work, and in doing so, reach something more universal. For Strik, the artist’s studio is above all the place of genesis; the place where a work comes into being.

The series about mothers, presented in another room, also relates to the idea of origin. By concealing some elements and accentuating others, these works exude a subtle, intimate atmosphere that is universally recognisable. Strik aims to evoke a sense of shared memories, a feeling like ‘oh yes, my mother…’ and ‘we all have a mother’.

In Strik’s work, we can see very clearly how it was made; unlike, say, a painting where one can only guess at the suggestions. We can literally see the stitches, how a shape has been cut from fabric and sewn on, how the stitching varies from rough to precise. Sewing is an ancient technique; it’s instantly recognisable to the brain. Human brains are equipped with mirror neurons that associate results with movements: splatters with a mess, a cut with a knife. Sewing is one of those gestures, deeply rooted in our cognitive process, going back to the beginnings of humanity and the earliest human societies. The combination of these two elements, photography and sewing, has a unique effect on the brain. On the one hand, there is the photograph, which feels deeply personal precisely because of its universality. The image is then pierced by the familiar gestures of sewing. In our minds, these elements do not naturally belong together. It’s precisely this sense of the unexpected that compels the viewer to keep searching for meaning.  Strik’s art is an active event: a process of manipulation, transformation, and reinterpretation of images and materials. It plays with revelation and concealment, with the human desire to understand, and the necessity of leaving space for the unknown. Altering photographs with a needle and textiles is a form of dissection and reconstruction.

“As a photographer I capture,” Strik explains, “and as an editor of the image, I liberate it. Only then does the photograph gain value as an autonomous entity with presence in the here and now.”

Marja Bloem, Director of the Egress Foundation

Artist Berend Strik

Berend Strik (born 26 April 1960, Nijmegen) is a Dutch visual artist who lives and works in Amsterdam. He studied at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam from 1985 to 1988. Between 1998 and 2000, he participated in the International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP) in New York.

Strik’s work is held in various public collections in The Netherlands, including the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam; Fries Museum, Leeuwarden; Kunstmuseum, The Hague; Museum Het Valkhof, Nijmegen; Rijksmuseum Twenthe, Enschede; Stedelijk Museum Schiedam; Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; Schunck Museum, Heerlen; TextielMuseum, Tilburg; and Museum De Domijnen, Sittard.

His work is also represented in numerous corporate collections, such as Stichting Kunst & Historisch Bezit; ABN AMRO; Achmea Art Collection; AkzoNobel Art Foundation; AMC Art Collection; Bouwfonds Kunstcollectie; Kunstcollectie De Nederlandsche Bank; LUMC Art Collection; Ahold Collection; BPD Art Collection; and the Rabo Art Collection.

His work is currently on display in the group exhibition ‘Things I’ve Never Seen Before’ at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. It is a selection from the donation made by gallery owner and collector Fons Welters, who donated a series of exceptional works to the museum in 2022. The exhibition runs until 19 October 2025.

HOPSTREET GALLERY BRUSSELS

Sint-Jorisstraat 109 rue Saint Georges, 1050 Brussels 

www.hopstreet.be

Reza Aramesh, Nicola Samori, Hugo Wilson @ Nicodim Gallery, New York - "Mondegreens and New Understandings" Exhibition - With Text by Ben Lee Ritchie Handler

Mondegreens and New Understandings

Reza Aramesh, Nicola Samorì, Hugo Wilson

Nicodim Gallery, New York

September 2 – October 4, 2025

In death, in tragedy, in grief, in heartbreak, one’s recollections of the Before Times are often rose-tinted. Hindsight is not always 20-20; the moments before a fall are remembered with a false clarity, a nostalgia for the era prior to the Bad Thing that brought us to our current moment of despair. After the initial shock of the passing of a parent, the planes hitting, the papers being served, memory softens the years before whatever allegorical or literal bomb dropped. We subsequently highlight and reconfigure the way things were into an architecture that befits the narrative we wish to convey, like a eulogy strung together from slightly—sometimes severely—misremembered song lyrics.

Mondegreens and New Understandings is an exhibition of Starbucks lovers wrapped up like a douche while Tony Danza holds us closer in the bond that will bring us together. 

Reza Aramesh, Nicola Samorì, and Hugo Wilson’s respective practices build monuments to the act of tailoring recollections and reminiscences to suit one’s sense of self, in addition to personal and empiric legacies still being written and reconsidered. 

With Bactrian II, Wilson reappropriates a baseline symbol of Britain’s Orientalist duplicity with a rendering of a shaggy camel moulting its wool in a manner that recalls 18th century jewels of the crown like George Stubbs and John Wootten. The Bactrian breed is famously domesticated, but Wilson’s muse is flamboyant, unbridled, and sure-footed as he proudly trots through a greenish negative space that smirks of English school pretense. The camel is isolated, imperfections magnified—no gods, no masters. He’s almost winking at us, asking (and borrowing a mondegreen from Nigel Tufnel), “what’s wrong with being sexy?”

Aramesh’s Action 211, Site of the Fall: Study of the Renaissance Garden, At 12 noon, Monday 15 July 1968 presents a striking male figure carved in marble, either bound and stripped to be tortured, or slowly disrobing in anticipation of carnal fireworks. The work’s title is evasive in its specificity, the artist gives us an event, place, time, and date, inviting the viewer to speculate on the nature of the scene. Is this David in Calvin Klein preparing for la petite mort or the grand one? The artist’s staging of the human body challenges the viewer with questions of vulnerability and agency, but he alone knows the words to his song.

Samorì’s untitled oil-on-wood-with-copper-leaf piece features a man raising his arms above his head and craning his neck toward the heavens. The brushwork, palette, and subject are reminiscent of Caravaggio or Mario Minniti, but the medium itself is poetically deformed by Samorìs hand—he has peeled the figures arms off, exposing reflective copper leaf on its underside, the hanging “flesh” obscuring the subject’s face and torso. His positioning evokes both the ecstasy of a spiritual awakening and the agony of his dismemberment. If the medium is massaged back to wholeness, will the bodies contained within truly be restored?

In dialogue with one another, Aramesh, Samorì, and Wilson forge new pathways in the way we understand and interpret art history inside our present bubble. There are no fixed positions within the wonky salon of Mondegreens and New Understandings, but rather three unique practices which actively engage and manipulate the ever-evolving subjectivity of observing, reinterpreting, and misremembering the world through art and art in the world.

— Ben Lee Ritchie Handler

REZA ARAMESH (b. Iran) lives and works between London and New York. He received an MA in Fine Arts from Goldsmiths University, London, in 1997. Aramesh reimagines scenes of global conflict through sculptural reenactments, stripping them of overt signs of war, violence, and historical context. The resulting works are caught between beauty and brutality, and question the representation of the male body in relation to race, class, and sexuality. Exhibitions include Mondegreens and New Understandings: Reza Aramesh, Nicola Samorì, Hugo Wilson, Nicodim, New York (2025, forthcoming); Fragment of the Self, Night Gallery, Los Angeles (2025, solo); Foreigners Everywhere, 60th Venice Biennale, Venice (2024); Asia Society Triennial: We Do Not Dream Alone, Asia Society Museum, New York (2021); 12 noon, Monday 5 August, Asia Society Museum, New York (2019, solo); Action 180, Leila Heller Gallery, New York (2019, solo); Like Life: Sculpture, Color and the Body (1300–Now), The Met Breuer, New York (2018); Sculpture in the City, London (2021); Frieze Sculpture Park, London (2017); Art Basel Parcours, Basel (2017); At 11:57 am Wednesday 23 October 2013, Ab-Anbar Gallery, Tehran (2016, solo); and The Great Game, 56th Venice Biennale, Iran Pavilion, Venice (2015). His works have been staged in performative contexts at institutions such as the Barbican Centre, Tate Britain, and ICA, London. Aramesh’s practice is held in numerous public and private collections worldwide, including the Tate, UK; MOCAK, Poland; Rodin Museum; Versaille Palace Collection; Hugo Voeten Foundation; and the Zabludowicz Collection.

NICOLA SAMORI (b. 1977, Forlì, Italy) lives and works in Bagnacavallo, Italy. His work was included as a part of the Italian Pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale. Exhibitions include Mondegreens and New Understandings: Reza Aramesh, Nicola Samorì, Hugo Wilson, Nicodim, New York (2025, forthcoming); La bocca di Berlino, Galerie EIGEN+ART, Berlin (2025, solo); The Ballad of the Children of the Czar, Galeria Nicodim, Bucharest (2024); KAFKAesque, DOX Centre for Contemporary Art, Prague (2024); Blend the Blind, Nicodim, New York (2024, solo); DISEMBODIED, Nicodim, Los Angeles (2024); Luce e sangue, Duomo di Napoli, Neapel (2023, solo); Luce e sangue, Chiesa di Santa Lucia alla Badia, Syrakus (2023, solo); Medea, Antico Mercato, Syracuse (2023); Joshua Hagler, Devin B. Johnson, Nicola Samorì, Hugo Wilson, Nicodim, Los Angeles (2023); DISEMBODIED, Nicodim, New York (2023); Le Ossa della Madre, Villa d’Este, Tivoli (2022, solo); On the Wall, Building Gallery, Milan (2022); MONO, Galerie EIGEN+ART, Lipsia (2022, solo); Sfregi, Palazzo Fava, Bologna (2021, solo); ROMA (Manuale della mollezza e la tecnica dell’eclisse), Monitor Gallery, Rome (2021, solo); Danae Revisited, Fondazione Francesco Fabbri, Pieve di Soligo (2021); 141 – Un secolo di disegno in Italia, Fondazione del Monte, Bologna (2021); Black Square, Fondazione Made in Cloister e Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples (2020, solo); In abisso, Galerie EIGEN + ART, Berlin (2020, solo); Lucìe, MART- Museo d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, Rovereto (2020, solo); Stand 1D08, Galerie EIGEN + ART, Berlin (2020); Collective Care: A House with Many Guests, M WOODS, Chaoyang, Beijing (2020); Cannibal Trail, Yu-Hsiu Museum of Art, Caotun (2019, solo); Solstizio d’Inferno, Biblioteca Classense, Ravenna (2019, solo); Metafysica, Haugar Vestfold Kunstmuseum, Tønsberg (2019); Preparing for Darkness – Vol. 3: I’m Not There, Kühlhaus, Berlin (2019); Iscariotes: Matteo Fato/Nicola Samorì, Casa Testori, Milan (2018, solo); Malafonte, Galerie EIGEN + ART, Berlin (2018, solo); BILD MACHT RELIGION: Kunst zwischen Verehrung, Verbot und Vernichtung, Kunstmuseum, Bochum (2018); Begotten, Not Made, Ana Cristea Gallery, New York (2014, solo); The Venerable Abject, Ana Cristea Gallery, New York (2012).

HUGO WILSON (b. 1982, United Kingdom) lives and works in London. His work has been exhibited at the The National Museum, Stockholm, Busan Metropoli­tan Art Museum, the National Por­trait Gallery, and the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. Wilson is collected by the New York Pub­lic Library, the Deutsche Bank Col­lec­tion, the Janet de Bot­ton Col­lec­tion, the United States Library of Congress and many others. Exhibitions include Mondegreens and New Understandings: Reza Aramesh, Nicola Samorì, Hugo Wilson, Nicodim, New York (2025, forthcoming); The Raft, Galerie Judin, Berlin (2024, solo); SIRANI, Galerie Judin, Berlin (2023); Whatever Gets You Thru the Night, Nicodim, New York (2023, solo); Joshua Hagler, Devin B. Johnson, Nicola Samorì, Hugo Wilson, Nicodim, Los Angeles (2023); Carnal Agreement, Nicodim, Los Angeles (2022, solo); Hollow Moon, Nicodim, New York (2021); Hugo Wilson, Parafin, London (2020, solo); Coincidental Truths, Galerie Judin, Berlin (2020, solo); When You Waked Up the Buffalo, Nicodim, Los Angeles (2020); Iconic Works, The National Museum, Stockholm (2020); Ateneum Art Museum, Finnish National Museum, Helsinki (2020); Crucible, Galerie Isa, Mumbai (2019, solo); Skin Stealers, Nicodim, Los Angeles (2019); Hugo Wilson, Nicodim, Los Angeles (2018, solo); Dialogues / New Paintings from London, GASK, Kutná Hora Museum, Czech Republic (2018); Frieze Sculpture Park, Regent’s Park, London (2018).

NICODIM GALLERY 

15 Greene Street, New York, NY 10013

www.nicodimgallery.com

Elmgreen & Dragset @ Pace Gallery, Los Angeles - "The Alice in Wonderland Syndrome" Exhibition

Elmgreen & Dragset

The Alice in Wonderland Syndrome

Pace Gallery, Los Angeles

September 13 – October 25, 2025

Pace presents The Alice in Wonderland Syndrome, Elmgreen & Dragset’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles—and their fourth with the gallery. This immersive two-part presentation will occupy the main exhibition space and the adjacent south gallery, exploring themes of scale, perception, and psychological distortion through enactments of doubling and resizing. The show follows Elmgreen & Dragset’s recent solo presentations at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris and the Amorepacific Museum of Art in Seoul, and it coincides with the artists’ thirtieth anniversary of working as a duo and the twentieth anniversary of their famed "Prada Marfa" installation, which was unveiled in Texas in 2005.

Renowned for their subversive sculptural interventions, Berlin-based artists Elmgreen & Dragset often examine questions of identity and belonging in their collaborative practice, and they are particularly interested in radical recontextualizations of objects and new modes of representation in sculpture and large-scale installation.

In The Alice in Wonderland Syndrome, the artists explore how scale influences our understanding of reality. For this presentation, the duo plays with the physical features of Pace’s Los Angeles gallery, using the architectural division of the gallery as a framework for doubling and resizing. Each artwork is presented in full scale in the main gallery, while exact half-size versions are shown in the adjoining space, which the artists have rescaled into a half-size replica of the main space. This spatial reduplication and resizing is inspired by the neurological condition called Alice in Wonderland Syndrome, or Dysmetropsia, in which shifts in perception, often triggered by fatigue, alter one’s experiences of distance and scale.

The first work that visitors will encounter in the exhibition is a hyper realistic sculpture of a female gallery assistant slumped over the reception desk, seemingly asleep. The surreal presentation that follows in the exhibition spaces, where objects appear out of scale, could be a vision or dream playing out in her mind, in which visitors are the protagonists.

The main gallery space will feature new sculptural works and wall pieces—works from the duo’s Sky Target series—that probe the boundaries of the real and the reflected, the seen and the sensed. In their circular Sky Target paintings, fragments of clouds drifting across blue skies are rendered on mirror polished stainless steel disks. The skies are partially obscured by reflective surfaces, allowing viewers to glimpse themselves within illusory “heavens.” Each Sky Target is named after a specific location that the artists have visited. Two circular wall works, which the artists refer to as “stripe paintings,” will also be on view. In these works, vertical bands revealing airplanes and their contrails in the sky alternate with equally sized bands of mirrored strips, creating a rhythm of image and reflection. The tension between transparency and opacity, and representation and self-awareness, is heightened by the viewer’s shifting position within the space.

Two figurative sculptures carved in marble will be presented on the floor of both the main and adjacent galleries. One of these works depicts two young men, both wearing VR goggles, embracing—physically close but mentally elsewhere. The other shows a young man seated with headphones, absorbed in his own auditory reality. These figures embody the contemporary condition of disconnection, amplified by digital mediation. The immateriality of the digital experiences represented in both works is contrasted with their medium, marble, a historically significant and physically durable material that is deeply rooted in the tradition of sculpture.

The Alice in Wonderland Syndrome invites visitors into a mise en abyme of visual and spatial contradictions. While much of our reality has been compressed into the format of an iPhone screen, Elmgreen & Dragset continue their investigations into how physical environments shape our sense of self and how bodily presence still plays an important role in the way we interact with our surroundings.

ARTIST DUO ELMGREEN & DRAGSET

Elmgreen & Dragset (Michael Elmgreen, b. 1961, Copenhagen, Denmark; Ingar Dragset, b. 1969, Trondheim, Norway) pursue questions of identity and belonging and investigate social, cultural, and political structures in their artistic practice. They are interested in the discourse that can ensue when objects are radically re-contextualized and traditional modes for the representation of art are altered. Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset are based in Berlin and have worked together as an artist duo since 1995. They have presented numerous solo exhibitions at prominent institutions worldwide including Kunsthalle Zürich (2001); Tate Modern, London (2004); Serpentine Gallery, London (2006); Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, Spain (2009); ZKM - Museum of Contemporary Art, Karlsruhe, Germany (2010); Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam (2011); Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2013–14); Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul (2015); UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing (2016); Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel (2016); Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (2018–19); Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, Texas (2019–2020); Fondazione Prada, Milan (2022); and Centre Pompidou-Metz, France (2023–24). In 2009, they represented both the Nordic and the Danish Pavilions at the 53rd Venice Biennale. They are renowned for large-scale public installations including Short Cut (2003), an installation comprising a Fiat Uno and a camper trailer, which appear to emerge from the ground; Prada Marfa (2005), a full-scale replica of a Prada boutique installed along U.S. Route 90 in Valentine, Texas; and Van Gogh’s Ear (2016), a gigantic vertical swimming pool placed in front of Rockefeller Center in New York City.

Their work is held in public collections worldwide, including ARKEN Museum of Contemporary Art, Ishøj, Denmark; Art Production Fund, New York; Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio; Museo Jumex, Mexico City; Hamburger Bahnhof, Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, Berlin; Kistefos Museet, Jevnaker, Norway; Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, among others.

PACE LOS ANGELES

1201 South La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles

www.pacegallery.com

Harri Koskinen @ Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki - "Magnitude" Exhibition

Harri Koskinen: Magnitude

Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki 

August 22 – September 21, 2025

 

Harri Koskinen one of Finland’s most renowned designers, presents a new exhibition shaped by compelling, multi-layered themes that navigate borderlands between the mythical and the contemporary. Elements subtly reminiscent of survival gear suggest preparation for an uncertain future, serving as a quiet reminder of today’s volatile global climate. At the same time, the exhibition drifts into the realm of myth and adventure. Rather than creating ominous imagery, Harri Koskinen explores the delicate tension between the material form and conceptual depth of his work.

The exhibition presents a selection of unique glass sculptures, both free-blown and mold-cast. Glass, with its reactive sensitivity, naturally lends itself to the creation of multi-layered forms. As a material born from the transformation of sand through intense heat, then cooled into solid form, glass inherently embodies shifting states of matter. Koskinen’s minimalist visual vocabulary resonates beautifully with the fragility of his medium. Most of the featured sculptures were handcrafted at the historic glassworks in Iittala and Riihimäki, with select pieces produced in Switzerland. This marks Koskinen’s fifth solo exhibition at Galerie Forsblom.

HARRI KOSKINEN (b. 1970), is a highly versatile designer known for his conceptual approach. His practice spans both serial production and one-offs. Over the course of his distinguished career, he has served as design director at Iittala and collaborated with prestigious international brands including Artek, Genelec, Hermès, Issey Miyake, Muu, and Svenskt Tenn. Among his many accolades are the Torsten and Wanja Söderberg Prize, the Compasso d’Oro Award, and the Pro Finlandia Medal. Harri Koskinen lives and works in Espoo and Helsinki.

GALERIE FORSBLOM

Yrjönkatu 22, 00120 Helsinki

www.galerieforsblom.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

Sliced Tropics & Cosmic Dancers @ Luhring Augustine Gallery, NYC - Lygia Clark, Sarah Crowner, Mark Handforth, Elizabeth Murray, Richard Rezac, Philip Taaffe

Sliced Tropics & Cosmic Dancers

Luhring Augustine Gallery, New York

September 12 – October 25, 2025

Luhring Augustine presents a group exhibition that highlights the work of Lygia Clark, Sarah Crowner, Mark Handforth, Elizabeth Murray, Richard Rezac, and Philip Taaffe. These six artists share a kindred interest in disrupting of familiar forms, employing unique strategies such as manipulations of lines and planes – folding, pinching, slicing, splicing – and radical shifts in scale to reshape and reimagine recognizable and quotidian motifs. 

ARTISTS BIOS

Lygia Clark (b. 1920, Belo Horizonte, Brazil – d.1988, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) is one of the preeminent artists of the twentieth century, whose pioneering body of work reimagined the relationship between audience and the art object. A founding member of the 1950s Brazilian Neoconcretist movement, Clark proposed a radical approach to thinking about painting by treating its pictorial surface as if it were a three-dimensional architectural space. Her iconic Bichos, or sculptures constructed out of hinged metal planes, allowed for the audience to exercise authorship through participation. Clark’s reliance on the viewer to steer her sculptures through many possible configurations not only jeopardized the autonomy of the art object itself, but also reconfigured her art as a performative, time-based event.

Sarah Crowner (b. 1974, Philadelphia, PA) explores the spaces where geometry abuts gesture, materiality merges with composition, and the graphic confronts the handmade. Her sewn canvases initially appear pristine in their composition, however closer inspection reveals the various slippages, imprints, and nuances of hand-painted surfaces constructed from separate yet related elements. Architecture plays a significant role in many of her works; her site-specific wall pieces transform spaces into three-dimensional experiences in which the viewer processes the environment as one autonomous artwork. The patterns in her work, drawn equally from the natural world and historic sources, create an entryway between the art object and the context, enabling the viewer to be enveloped and literally step inside her work.

Mark Handforth’s (b. 1969, Hong Kong) works are interventions in space: offering novel engagements within existing environments and asserting new perspectives on familiar fixtures. His sculptures displace quotidian objects and recontextualize their forms in unexpected articulations. In some of his iconic works, the bodies of stars, streetlamps, and traffic signs whimsically buckle, twist, and droop. The seemingly defunct and defeated contortions in these forms are countered by a gracefulness imparted by Handforth’s meticulous craftmanship; this incongruity imbues the works with a wry humor and an endearing pathos. His works reference a post-punk aesthetic and utilitarian minimalism, while the capricious scale and juxtapositions draw on the legacies of Surrealism and Dadaist absurdism.

Elizabeth Murray (b. 1940, Chicago, IL – d. 2007, Granville, NY) was an artist at the forefront of American painting for five decades and is considered one of the most important postmodern abstract artists of her time. Her drive and determination produced a singularly innovative body of work characterized by a Cubist-informed Minimalism and streetwise Surrealism. Throughout her career, she reveled in the physicality of paint and approached her work through the constructive vocabulary of sculpture, warping, twisting, splintering, and knotting her canvases. In the 1980s Murray introduced three-dimensionality to her canvases, bringing about a complete break from traditional, flat, rectilinear compositions. Muddied, moody, and gestural, these paintings blazed a course of international recognition and notoriety.

Richard Rezac’s (b. 1952, Lincoln, NE) abstract sculptures, rooted in a studious consideration of the history of art, architecture, and design, quietly connote everyday sources, leaving the viewer with a sense of familiarity and closeness. Exceptionally precise in their execution, with each decision carefully considered by the artist, the pieces are made to be looked at and thought of with absorption. Their human scale and careful placement (the height on the wall, the distance they hang from the ceiling, etc.) initiates a dialogue that demands time, the works revealing themselves slowly. This combination of exquisite craft and spatial intentionality imparts a knowing presence to the sculptures, lending an ostensible sense that they are full of concealed information. Taciturn, earnest, and magnetic, they toggle between congruence and dissonance, space and form, lightness and solidity.

Philip Taaffe’s (b. 1955, Elizabeth, NJ) practice is distinguished by its elaborate sampling of techniques and symbols that merge iconography, design, and art historical and cultural motifs to generate something authentically new. Celebrated for his ability to build intricate and contemplative compositions culled from this wide-ranging lexicon of imagery, Taaffe produces transfixing works rife with geometric forms and interwoven complex patterns that call into question traditionally accepted definitions of realism and abstraction. The visual vibrancy and dynamism that underlie his work reveals the convergence of the optical and the conceptual, the decorative and the narrative, the natural and the man-made, as well as the ancient and the modern. 

LUHRING AUGUSTINE CHELSEA

531 West 24th Street, New York, NY 10011

www.luhringaugustine.com

Koak, Ding Shilun, Cece Philips @ Hauser & Wirth London - "Interior Motives" Exhibition

Interior Motives

Koak, Ding Shilun, Cece Philips

Hauser & Wirth London

22 August – 20 September 2025

Enter interior worlds imagined by contemporary painters Koak, Ding Shilun and Cece Philips at Hauser & Wirth London. The exhibition explores how these artists engage with the interior both as a physical space and a psychological construct. Through distinct painterly vocabularies, each artist interrogates the architectural and domestic environments we inhabit, revealing how these frameworks shape our sense of self, memory and belonging. ‘Interior Motives’ is part of an ongoing initiative at Hauser & Wirth that champions emerging and mid-career artists beyond the gallery’s roster. Produced in collaboration with Union Pacific and Bernheim Gallery, this exhibition reflects a shared commitment to a sustainable arts ecosystem.

Depicting figures in dreamlike domestic interiors, Koak’s painting practice questions the societal expectations and roles of women within the home as well as the traditional portrayal of women by male artists. With a graphic aesthetic that borrows from Japanese and European animations, Koak uses familiar iconography of the home—windows, soft furnishings, flowerpots and vases—to build alternate interiors in which her figures are liberated and given agency. Her contemporary take on art historical depictions of domestic scenes is achieved through a vibrant color palette that blurs the distinction between the imagined and real, between inner and outer worlds, her female gaze highlighting both the emotional and physical experience of her figures.

Inhabiting imaginary worlds, the characters in Ding Shilun’s paintings are often an embodiment of the artist himself, the emotions he feels and the thoughts inside his mind. His worldbuilding relies on everyday objects found in domestic spaces to enable viewers to identify with the characters depicted and emotions evoked. With a style inspired by Japanese manga and traditional Chinese painting, the artist’s interiors include fantastical and mythological elements that question viewer’s perception of reality. Influenced by both global historical events, current affairs and his own experiences, Ding Shilun’s manifestation of his interior realm doubles up as a visual representation of the absurdity of daily life.

The architectural tropes characteristic of household settings, from windows and doorways to hallways and walls, act as visual framing devices in Cece Philips’ paintings. Radiant light is a hallmark of her practice, drawing viewers into the work and leading them through the interiors, yet they are never part of the scene, observing like a flaneur. Like paintings of everyday, domestic life from the Dutch Golden Age and by Félix Vallotton, a narrative is implied—one in which Cece Philips leaves the viewer to fill in the details, encouraged by their imagination and own inner worlds. The use of color adds a layer to the narrative by suggesting a psychological reading, reflecting the figures’ mood and internal realities, as well as that of the viewer. This exploration of interiority is at once about the subject and the viewer, observation and introspection.

ARTIST KOAK

Koak

Courtesy the artist and Union Pacific

Koak (b. 1981 in the US) is known for work that portrays the complex duality of identity and human nature through a mastery of the line which extends across drawing, painting and sculpture. Rendered with exquisite technique, her emotionally charged figures and landscapes are imbued with a profound agency and inner life. Her work challenges historical portrayals of femininity, depicting figures that shift between boldness and vulnerability, resisting fixed definition and embracing emotional depth. Regardless of subject, each piece is approached with the intimacy of portraiture, suggesting a metamorphic state—a dream of becoming something beyond the self: a body becoming a lake, a flower or a landscape. In this way, painting becomes an act of defiance—a feminist gesture that resists enclosure, imagining identity as something fluid.

Recent solo exhibitions include: ‘The Window Set,’ Charleston in Lewes, UK (2025); ‘Lake Marghrete,’ Perrotin, Paris, France (2024); ‘Letter to Myself (when the world is on fire),’ Altman Siegel, San Francisco CA (2023); ‘The Driver,’ Perrotin, Hong Kong (2022); ‘Return to Feeling,’ Altman Siegel, San Francisco CA (2020); and ‘Holding Breath,’ Union Pacific, London, UK (2019). Selected group exhibitions include: ‘Infinite Regresse: Mystical Abstraction from the Permanent Collection and Beyond,’ Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City MO (2024); ‘I’ve got a feeling,’ Musées d’Angers, Angers, France (2023); ‘I’m Stepping High, I’m Drifting, and There I Go Leaping,’ XIAO Museum, Rizhao, China (2022); ‘Familiars,’ Et. Al Gallery, San Francisco CA (2022); and ‘New Time: Art and Feminisms in the 21st Century,’ Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley CA (2021), amongst others.

ARTIST DING SHILUN

Ding Shilun

Courtesy the artist and Bernheim Gallery 

Photo: Will Grundy

Ding Shilun (b. 1998 in Guangzhou, China; lives and works between London and Guangzhou) harnesses his heritage, current events and a global history of art to create large and detailed pictorial works depicting the absurdity of daily life. His unique concurrence of the mythological, the historical and the everyday allow the emergence of an imaginary world with a representation of himself within our seemingly homogenous society. Rooted in pictorial references such as Gustav Klimt or Kai Althoff intertwined with interpretations of Chinese literature—namely a collection of Chinese legends, translated as ‘In Search of the Supernatural,’ written between 220 – 589 AD—Shilun’s characters inhabit imaginary worlds that serve as allegories for human experience and emotion. The precision of the details is used to contrast the different textures found in the paintings, sometimes resembling watercolor, as well as playing on a combination of co-existing perspectives, which question the distinction between real and surreal.

His recent solo shows include ‘Janus’ at ICA Miami, Miami FL (2024); ‘Invites: Ding Shilun,’ Zabludowicz Collection, London, UK (2023); ‘Paradiso,’ Bernheim, Zurich, Switzerland (2022); and ‘Mirage,’ Bernheim, London, UK (2024). Shilun’s work is included in the permanent collections of The Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami FL; The Nancy A. Nasher and David J. Haemisegger Collection of Contemporary Art, Dallas TX; High Museum of Art, Atlanta GA; Rose Art Museum, Waltham MA; Guangdong Museum, Guangzhou, China; Albertina Museum, Vienna, Austria; Museu Inima De Paula, Below Horizonte, Brazil; Asymmetry Art Foundation, London, UK; and Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas TX, among others.

ARTIST CECE PHILIPS

Cece Philips

Courtesy the artist

Photo: Rory Langdon-Down

Cece Philips (b. 1996 in London, UK) is a London-based painter whose luminous compositions explore ideas of spectatorship and voyeurism. Embodying the role and spirit of the flaneur, or flâneuse, her works draw on a multitude of sources, from the archive, film stills, found imagery and memory she weaves together historical and contemporary influences to interrogate ideas of interiority, desire and loneliness. Framing is a recurring device in Philips’ paintings, though windows and doorways, barriers and veils are constructed to challenge an easy reading of her female protagonists. Palette, attention to light and space all lend psychological and narrative depth—details that lead us through and beyond the work and activate the viewer’s own imagination.

Cece Philips held her debut solo exhibition ‘I See in Colour’ at HOME in London, UK, in April 2021. Subsequent solo shows include ‘Between the Dog and the Wolf’ at ADA Contemporary, Accra, Ghana (2022); ‘The Night Has a Thousand Eyes,’ Peres Projects, Berlin, Germany (2022); ‘Walking the In-Between,’ Peres Projects, Seoul, South Korea (2023); and ‘Conversations Between Two,’ Peres Projects, Milan, Italy (2024). Recent group exhibitions include ‘The Painted Room,’ curated by Caroline Walker at GRIMM, Amsterdam, The Netherlands (2023); ‘Digestif,’ a two-person show with Hettie Inniss at Palazzo Monti, Brescia, Italy (2024); and ‘The Shed’ at Berntson and Bhattacharjee, London, UK (2025). Her most recent solo presentation, ‘The Wall: Cece Philips,’ was held at Almine Rech, Brussels, Belgium (2025). Cece Philips completed her MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art in 2023 and was awarded the Fribourg Philanthropies Prize the same year.

HAUSER & WIRTH LONDON

23 Savile Row, London W1S 2ET

www.hauserwirth.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

Austin Martin White @ Petzel Gallery, NYC - "Tracing Delusionships" Exhibition

Austin Martin White

Tracing Delusionships

Petzel Gallery, New York

September 4 – October 18, 2025

Petzel presents Tracing Delusionships, an exhibition of new largescale paintings and works on paper by Philadelphia-based artist Austin Martin White. The show marks White’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. This exhibition corresponds with the release of Austin Martin White’s first monograph. 

Austin Martin White draws on various references to excavate the ways in which history can be bent, reassembled, or hallucinated. Among the most ambitious in scale White has completed to date, the artist debuts a new series which interprets etchings by 18th century Italian architect, artist, and archaeologist Giovanni Battista Piranesi, who fused real monuments and fictive views from antiquity. White probes the inspirational potential of a collapsed, classical past, summarized by Piranesi’s concept of “speaking ruins”: a description for architecture that conjures a world beyond its remains.

Interested in how these images traffic through time as empires decline and global powers shift, Austin Martin White warps, stretches, and splices Piranesi’s reproductions, investigating ruins as arbiters of historical memory. Crumbling arches and labyrinthine stairways, once etched in ink, are fractured and extruded by White through his signature process. Drawing from archival sources, he translates imagery into digital drawings, laser-cuts vinyl stencils, and pushes latex paint through mesh screens from behind. He renders his “Ruins” in maze-like, snaking estuaries of paint. Surfaces appear ridged and vascular, as if oozing from a primordial core.

Monumental in scale, these paintings conjure visions of fantastical follies—structures made not for function but for wonder—while also signaling scenes of industrial collapse or cities devastated by war. Saturating the present yet overlapping with centuries past, White’s images of wreckage become sites of projected anguish, longing, delusion, and desire.

Austin Martin White also turns to the legacy of Bob Thompson, an artist who reimagined the formal and conceptual boundaries of classical painting. Through his “After Thompson” works, White references La Mort des Enfants de Bethel (1964/1965), Thompson’s gouache rendering of the biblical Massacre of the Innocents. White distorts Thompson’s composition further, reframing the plight of the innocents in a present tense. Figures appear ghost-like, as if excreted from the surface, and landscapes buzz with volatile, chromatic intensity—an afterlife of an image that resists repose.

Returning to artists like Thompson and Piranesi, Austin Martin White explores how both destabilize their sources—sometimes reverently, sometimes destructively. White embraces the fragment, sitting in the tension between structure and breakdown, past and present, image and aftermath.

Artist Austin Martin White

Austin Martin White (b. 1984, Detroit, Michigan) is an artist living and working in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He holds a BFA from The Cooper Union and earned an MFA from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College.

Working with a variety of mediums including rubber, acrylic, spray-paint, vinyl, 3m reflective fabric and screen mesh mediums, White creates paintings and works on paper that investigate representations of historical memory, drawing on archival research that addresses issues of identity, race and postcolonialism.

White’s work has appeared in numerous publications including Artforum, Texte zur Kunst, Flash Art, 032c and The Observer, among others.

Austin Martin White was included in the group exhibition Overflow, Afterglow: New Work in Chromatic Figuration at the Jewish Museum, New York in 2024, marking his first institutional presentation. Austin Martin White had his first solo exhibition at Petzel’s Upper East Side location.

PETZEL GALLERY

520 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001

www.petzel.com

Eckart Hahn: Silence @ Pablo’s Birthday, New York

Eckart Hahn: Silence 

Pablo’s Birthday, New York

September 5 – October 10, 2025

Pablo’s Birthday presents Silence, an exhibition by German painter ECKART HAHN. After two decades of collaboration, this is the artist’s eighth solo exhibition with the gallery. Hahn’s practice combines elements of narrative and physical tension to explore paradoxical relationships and power dynamics, such as freedom/control, authenticity/artificiality, or isolation/connection. Through the representation of materiality, pressure, gravity, and restriction, he creates a synergy of form and semantics that aid in exploring these binaries. 

“Sight is effortless; sight requires spatial distance; sight can be turned off.”   

– Susan Sontag

Closed eyes link the cast of characters that Eckart Hahn brings to life; apes meditating with apples balanced on their heads and bullets between their toes, while Kermit raises up a skull, and a bird perches on a tower of stacked stones. The profile of a parrot faces us with its eyelids closed. In these contemplative poses, the gesture of looking away evokes both inner stillness and emotional retreat, while the precariousness of balanced objects becomes a metaphor for weight, gravity, strain. In these visual cues, Eckart Hahn uncovers a deeper psychological tension: the burden of moral ambiguity and the delicate negotiation between personal preservation and collective responsibility.

Susan Sontag writes, “In a modern life–a life in which there is a superfluity of things to which we are invited to pay attention–it seems normal to turn away from images that simply make us feel bad.” Susan Sontag emphasizes the human reaction to a constant carousel of thoughts displayed through the everyday, unceasing newsreel. Hahn unveils this tension: When does self-care become neglect? When does self-care shield us not only from harm but from responsibility, connection, and empathy? In reverse, when does a lack of self-care contribute to a deadening of feeling resulting in cynicism or apathy? 

In Hahn’s paintings, we see both a coping mechanism and disengagement, a focus on the self and a shutting out from the world. Hahn raises the question of whether, in shielding ourselves, we risk severing the very qualities that make us human. But Hahn doesn’t offer resolution; rather, he sustains contradiction. He asks us to sit with it, to feel its pull, and its discomfort. 

ECKART HAHN (b. 1971) attended Eberhardt Karl University and the Johannes Gutenberg School in Stuttgart. His works have been represented in solo and group institutional exhibitions and are featured in numerous collections worldwide. Accompanying the publication of his monograph, "Der schwarze Hund trägt bunt" 2018, were three museum exhibitions at Haus am Lützowplatz, Berlin; Neue Galerie Gladbeck, Gladbeck; and Museum Villa Rot, Burgrieden. In summer 2025, Eckart Hahn presents a retrospective of over 50 works at the Museum Villa Zanders, Bergisch Gladbach, Germany. He currently lives and works near Stuttgart, Germany.

PABLO'S BIRTHDAY

105 Hudson Street, # 410, New York, NY 10013

pablosbirthday.com

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