Lee Friedlander: Christmas @ Deborah Bell Photographs, New York - Exhibition + Book published by the Eakins Press Foundation

Lee Friedlander: Christmas

Deborah Bell Photographs, New York

November 6, 2025 - January 10, 2026

Deborah Bell Photographs presents Lee Friedlander: Christmas, an exhibition of photographs by Lee Friedlander dating from 1958 to 2015, in collaboration with Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco and Luhring Augustine, New York. 

This exhibition also celebrates the release of Friedlander's most recent book, LEE FRIEDLANDER: CHRISTMAS, published by the Eakins Press Foundation, New York. Although many of the photographs on view are well known from their inclusion in Friedlander's previous books and numerous exhibition catalogues, and have appeared on the walls of museum and gallery exhibitions internationally, this publication features Friedlander's personal edit of photographs related to the theme of Christmas. As indicated by the Eakins Press Foundation, the book presents 106 beautifully reproduced photographs that span the artist's life, cover most of the United States, and give us a sweeping view of American culture by this renowned photographer of the social landscape. The exhibition features some 30 photographs selected from the book.

Lee Friedlander: Christmas

Afterword by Peter Kayafas

Eakins Press Foundation, 2025

Clth, 11.75 x 12.5 in. / 112 pgs / 106 b&w / 106 tritone

ISBN 9780871301055

Cover Photograph: Lee Friedlander (American, b. 1934)  

San Angelo, Texas, 1997  

Gelatin silver print  sheet 20 x 16'“ (50.8 x 40.6 cm)  

© Lee Friedlander, Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco 

and Luhring Augustine, New York

Peter Kayafas, Director and President of Eakins Press Foundation, writes in the Afterword to the sumptuously illustrated book:

Whether or not you've celebrated Christmas at any point over the past seventy years--roughly the period covered by these photographs--you have no doubt encountered some of the things Friedlander shows us here....Is Christmas in America a religious holiday? A commercial precept? An ironic commentary? A misunderstanding? An indulgent blasphemy? All or none of the above? In these pictures, the only thing certain is that Christmas has provided an opportunity for the people's photographer to hold up a mirror--and make no mistake, it is Friedlander's mirror--to a diverse, flawed, inventive, preoccupied, and spectacular society.

DEBORAH BELL PHOTOGRAPHS

526 West 26th Street, New York, NY 10001

www.deborahbellphotographs.com

Related Post:

Lee Friedlander: MARIA

Deborah Bell Photographs, New York , November 1, 2018 – January 19, 2019 

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

Lucy Williams

Radiant City

Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco

November 6, 2025 – January 8, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lucy Williams – Radiant City

By Lucy Williams

Contributions by Ben Street, Salena Barry, Kathryn Lloyd 

and Charlotte Mullins / Edited by Matt Price / 

Foreword by Joseph Becker

Published by Hurtwood Press Ltd 

Distributed by Simon & Schuster

Book Cover courtesy of  Simon & Schuster

264 pages featuring 160 illustrations (colour and black & white)

Hardback, 290 x 245 mm portrait

Available at Berggruen Gallery or on its Website

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

BERGGRUEN GALLERY

10 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, CA 94105

www.berggruen.com

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

Jane Hammond

Chocolate Cosmos, String of Pearls

Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco

October 23, 2025 – January 8, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*   *   *   *   *

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

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

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

BERGGRUEN GALLERY

10 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, CA 94105

www.berggruen.com

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

Domenico Zindato: On the Dotted Line

Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York

November 7 – December 20, 2025

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

Domenico Zindato: On the Dotted Line

Published by Andrew Edlin Gallery, 2025

Book Cover courtesy of Andrew Edlin Gallery

The accompanying monograph provides critical context for the exhibition with an essay by Julián Gómez Sánchez, a conversation between Zindato and Gallery Director Aurélie Bernard Wortsman, more than 30 full-color plates, and archival materials that reveal the artist’s influences and process. As a lasting record of this pivotal moment in his career, the book underscores Zindato’s shift from drawing to painting and places his work within a broader Latin American arthistorical and cultural framework.

Domenico Zindato (b. 1966, Reggio Calabria, Italy) is known for his intricate, trance-like compositions rooted in ritual, intuition, and meditative mark-making. For decades, he concentrated on detailed drawings in ink and pastel on paper, producing labyrinthine works that tread between the ecstatic and the contemplative. In this new body of work, he expands into painting on both canvas and dried leaves. Although he first experimented with canvas in the 1980s, Domenico Zindato did not return to the medium until 2020, this time working with acrylic paints and Flashe—a process he likens to acupuncture: “where the skin is activated by needles—I use my fingers to touch the blank canvas, delineating lines and shapes that I intuitively develop.” This tactile method has been central to his work since the early 1990s, when, while in Paris, he received a box of soft pastels from the legendary Sennelier store. Rubbing pigment directly with his fingers became a formative gesture—bridging body and surface, energy and image.

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

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

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

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

ANDREW EDLIN GALLERY 

392 Broadway, New York, NY 10013

www.edlingallery.com

Nicole Wittenberg @ Acquavella Galleries, NYC - 'All the Way' Exhibition + Book

Nicole Wittenberg: All the Way

Acquavella Galleries, New York

October 16 - December 5, 2025

“I think good paintings are moving images, because they’re not static. Great paintings move.”

—Nicole Wittenberg

Acquavella Galleries presents All the Way, Nicole Wittenberg’s second solo exhibition with the gallery and her first at Acquavella’s New York location. Wittenberg’s return to Acquavella follows the artist’s three solo museum exhibitions over this summer: Maison La Roche, Fondation Le Corbusier, Paris; the Ogunquit Museum of American Art, Ogunquit, Maine; and the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland, Maine. Several works from Wittenberg’s museum exhibitions in Rockland and Ogunquit  appears in All the Way.

All the Way explores painting’s ability to capture the sensation of a singular moment extended over time. Nicole Wittenberg's painting practice takes scenes, elements, and encounters with the natural world as its subject matter. Her landscapes and twisting florals explore the medium’s ability to capture temporal moments as impressions that retain the energy of the experience.

The paintings in this exhibition give the viewer the somatic sensation of immersion—to be in a world within the painting. In this respect, Nicole Wittenberg draws on the work of Paul Cézanne and the Post-Impressionists, as well as the Fauvist challenge to traditional color. For Wittenberg “white is not as bright as yellow or certain shades of orange or even certain shades of green or pink. They’re brighter than white. I wanted light that was just as intense as daylight to replicate the sensation of actual light and actually being there.”

Wittenberg’s process often begins with pastel drawings, small oil paintings and ink studies, which display an economy of gesture and an expert handling of the relationship between light and color. Both her drawings and her paintings show a resistance to perspective and a tension with figuration.

Art historian Suzanne Hudson connects Wittenberg's approach to the work of Venetian colorists, such as Veronese: “Sometimes the grounds are exposed more fully, and at others, outline other forms in residual slivers of crackling intensity, further elaborating color ranges and relations.”

Artist Nicole Wittenberg (b. 1979)

Nicole Wittenberg is an artist, curator, professor, and writer who was born in San Francisco and is currently based in New York City. She received her BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2003.

In 2012, Wittenberg received the coveted John Koch Award, presented by the American Academy of Arts and Letters to a young artist making figurative work. From 2011 to 2014, she served as a teacher at the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture and the Bruce High Quality Foundation University, and in 2017, she was a professor in the Critical Theory department at the School of Visual Arts.

Wittenberg’s works are included in prominent collections, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Albertina, Vienna; the Portland Museum of Art, Maine; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the Aïshti Foundation, Beirut.

Nicole Wittenberg

Texts by Suzanne Hudson, David Salle, Devon Zimmerman, 

and an interview by Jarrett Earnest

Published by Monacelli, 2025

256 pages, 250 illustrations

Hardback, 29 cm x 25 cm

ISBN: 9781580936811

Photo courtesy of Phaidon

www.phaidon.com

The artist’s first comprehensive monograph was published this summer by Monacelli Press, coinciding with her recent solo exhibitions in Maine and France.

ACQUAVELLA GALLERIES, NEW YORK

18 East 79th Street, New York, NY 10075 

www.acquavellagalleries.com

Adam Pendleton @ Pace Gallery, Berlin - "spray light layer emerge" Exhibition

Adam Pendleton

spray light layer emerge

Pace Gallery, Berlin

September 11 - November 2, 2025

Adam Pendleton

Black Dada (D), 2025

© Adam Pendleton, courtesy of Pace Gallery

Pace presents spray light layer emerge, an intimate selection of paintings and works on paper from Adam Pendleton’s Black Dada and Untitled (Days) bodies of work, presented across both floors of Die Tankstelle, the gallery’s new space in Berlin. The exhibition’s title, spray light layer emerge, reflects the various “acts” played out in the Black Dada paintings: materially, theoretically, poetically, and ultimately, visually.

A central figure in contemporary American painting, Adam Pendleton is known for continuously redefining the medium as it relates to process and abstraction. His paintings begin on paper by exploring the full breadth of mark-making. He layers paint, spray paint, ink, and watercolor, while integrating fragmentary text and geometric forms, often using stenciling techniques. These works on paper are photographed and then combined through a screen-printing process. Blurring distinctions between painting, drawing, and photography, the resulting paintings are tangible manifestations of his belief in painting as a powerful “visual and conceptual force.”

Pendleton’s Black Dada paintings, shown on the first floor, are conceptually rich and subtly expressionistic: thought-acts suspended in mid-flight, the ghost of an urban scrawl, the impression of dispersed and diffused light. Composed as diptychs on black-gessoed grounds, they direct attention to the fundamental attributes of painting—surface, edge, figure, ground—and to the artist’s unique approach to compositional logic and visual thought. Each painting features one or two hard-edged letters from the phrase BLACK DADA, which function as a “figure” within each composition. BLACK DADA refers to Pendleton’s ongoing exploration of conceptions of Blackness and abstraction. These textual characters hang, rest, or hover within the visual field—where drips, sprays, splatters, and other gestures play against an invisible grid set by the symmetry of the diptychs. By foregrounding the modes and methods of composition, Pendleton’s Black Dada works invite viewers to engage with and question the formal, conceptual, and material possibilities of painting itself. 

Adam Pendleton is currently the subject of a major exhibition at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC. Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen—his first solo exhibition in the city—runs from April 4, 2025, through January 3, 2027, and features new and recent paintings alongside a single-channel video. The exhibition highlights Pendleton’s singular contributions to contemporary American painting and engages with both the architecture of the museum and the historical context of the National Mall. In April 2026, Adam Pendleton will also present a solo exhibition at the Langen Foundation in Neuss, Germany. 

This May, the Museum of Modern Art in New York announced its acquisition of all 35 works from Pendleton’s Who Is Queen? exhibition (2021–2022). This landmark acquisition includes paintings and drawings from the Black Dada and WE ARE NOT bodies of work, as well as three video works: Notes on Resurrection City, Notes on the Robert E. Lee Monument, Richmond VA (figure), and So We Moved: A Portrait of Jack Halberstam. 

Adam Pendleton: An Abstraction

Pace Publishing, 2025

Text by Marc Glimcher

Hardcover, 160 pages, 11 ¾ × 9 ½ in.

Image courtesy of Pace

Pace published Adam Pendleton: An Abstraction. Both a document and evolution of Pendleton’s first solo exhibition at Pace New York in a decade, the volume features a new text by Marc Glimcher.

PACE GALLERY BERLIN

Die Tankstelle, Bülowstrasse 18, 10783 Berlin

www.pacegallery.com

Related Posts:

Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC

April 4, 2025 - January 3, 2027

Adam Pendleton: An Abstraction 

Pace Gallery, New York, May 3 – August 16, 2024

David Adjaye / Adam Pendleton

Pace Gallery, Hong Kong, May 18 – Junu 30, 2021

Frank Kunert, Photography & Miniatures: The Best of - About the book The Best of Frank Kunert, Published by Hatje Cantz

The Best of Frank Kunert

Published by Hatje Cantz

June 2025

The Best of Frank Kunert, Hatje Cantz, 2025

Text: Ariadne von Schirach

Image courtesy Hatje Cantz

Frank Kunert 

Souterrain, 2015 

Image courtesy Hatje Cantz

Frank Kunert 

Attic Flat, 2007

Image courtesy Hatje Cantz

Frank Kunert 

Field Office, 2010

Image courtesy Hatje Cantz

As the title suggests, this book presents the best photographs of Frank Kunert. The choice must have been difficult! These photographs are taken from three books previously published by Hatje Cantz. 

The German photographer FRANK KUNERT (b. 1963) has made a name for himself in the contemporary art scene thanks to a universe that is both quirky and meticulously crafted. Far from documentary realism or traditional portraiture, Frank Kunert creates miniature surreal models, which he photographs with painstaking precision. Each image is the result of a long manual process, blending dark humor, irony, and absurd poetry.

Frank Kunert

Event Restaurant, 2005

Image courtesy Hatje Cantz

Frank Kunert

Salvation, 2009

Image courtesy Hatje Cantz

...When a church becomes a parking lot...

Frank Kunert

Drive-In, 2012

Image courtesy Hatje Cantz

Frank Kunert

Golden Goal, 2003

Image courtesy Hatje Cantz

Frank Kunert 

A Place in the Sun, 2014

Image courtesy Hatje Cantz

The scenes he stages are at once familiar and unsettling. A hotel room with a ski slope as an emergency exit, a balcony facing a brick wall, or a dinner table perched high above a living room on stilts—Kunert’s world defies all logic. He cultivates a distinctly German sense of nonsense, where the banality of everyday life collides with architectural absurdities or surreal situations. This offbeat perspective subtly questions social norms, urban anxieties, and the absurdity of certain conventions.

Frank Kunert 

Auf hohem Niveau, 2008

Image courtesy Hatje Cantz

The previous photograph, both restrained in form and disconcerting in content, encapsulates Kunert’s unique aesthetic, composed of visual paradoxes, understated irony, and a subtle poetics of the absurd. By diverting a commonplace architectural element such as a staircase from its intended purpose, he invites reflection on the relationship between cultural institutions and their audiences. The museum—ostensibly a space of openness and cultural exchange—appears here as an inaccessible fortress, deftly alluding to common critiques of the contemporary art world: elitism, insularity, opacity, and a certain detachment from everyday life.

Frank Kunert

Live Broadcast, 2012

Image courtesy Hatje Cantz

In Live Broadcast the television is physically connected to the toilet bowl, as if drawing its content directly from it. True to Kunert’s style, this photograph combines precise craftsmanship with a sharp sense of irony. It playfully critiques the quality—or perhaps the emptiness and vulgarity—of modern media consumption. By creating a literal pipeline between waste and entertainment, Frank Kunert blurs the line between functionality and absurdity, challenging viewers to reflect on the content they absorb daily.

Frank Kunert

Menu à deux, 2009

Image courtesy Hatje Cantz

"In Frank Kunert’s Menu à Deux, meanwhile, the V-shaped dining table and perfectly symmetrical place settings imply a (nonexistent) mirror—or perhaps a difficult relationship." notes Karen Rosenberg in The New York Times (June 16, 2011).

Frank Kunert doesn’t just aim to amuse; he unsettles, inviting us to pause and see the world through a different lens. His photographs, though seemingly lighthearted, often reveal a quiet melancholy, or a veiled critique of modern society.

In short, Frank Kunert is a sculptor of absurdity and a photographer of the impossible, whose images, beneath their wry humor, capture the paradoxes of a very real world.

I recommend this book to you.

HATJE CANTZ

www.hatjecantz.com

Mary Heilmann @ Hauser & Wirth Zurich - Works on Paper

Mary Heilmann. Works on Paper 

Hauser & Wirth Zurich

26 September – 20 December 2025

Mary Heilmann

Tea Garden, 1984

Watercolor on paper, 76.2 x 55.9 cm / 30 x 22 in

Photo: Thomas Müller

© Mary Heilmann

Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth and 303 Gallery, New York

Mary Heilmann

Untitled Watercolor Study, ca. 1986-1988

Watercolor and pencil on paper, 12.7 x 17.5 cm / 5 x 6 7/8 in

Photo: Thomas Müller

© Mary Heilmann

Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth and 303 Gallery, New York

Mary Heilmann returns to Hauser & Wirth’s Zurich gallery on Limmatstrasse with an exhibition of more than 30 drawings made between 1975 and 2005. Expanding on the artist’s exhibition of works on paper, ‘Daydream Nation’, at Hauser & Wirth New York last year, this presentation continues the recent in-depth exploration into Heilmann’s long-standing drawing practice and coincides with the release of a new publication from Hauser & Wirth Publishers, ‘Mary Heilmann. Works on Paper: 1973 – 2019’. 

Raised in San Francisco and Los Angeles, Mary Heilmann (b. 1940) completed a degree in literature, before receiving her M.A. in ceramics and sculpture at the University of California, Berkeley. Only after moving to New York in 1968 did she begin to paint and in the early 1970s establish a drawing practice that continues to this day.  

Ranging from watercolor studies to paintings on paper in their own right, ‘Mary Heilmann. Works on Paper’ brings together a selection of rarely and never-before-seen drawings that fluctuate in scale and materiality. The exhibition is a celebration of Heilmann’s talent for translating complex images and ideas into deceptively simple geometric forms and abstract gestural marks.  

Mary Heilmann

Untitled Watercolor Study, ca. 1983-86

Watercolor and graphite on paper, 17.8 x 12.7 cm / 7 x 5 in

Photo: Genevieve Hanson

© Mary Heilmann

Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth and 303 Gallery, New York

Mary Heilmann

Untitled Watercolor Study, ca. 1987-1989

Watercolor and pencil on paper, 27.9 x 21.6 cm / 11 x 8 1/2 in

Photo: Genevieve Hanson

© Mary Heilmann

Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth and 303 Gallery, New York

Many of Heilmann’s most well-known and admired series – Fans, Chairs, Serapes, Grids – are represented in the installation as are drawings that have related works in important European museum collections. 'Untitled Watercolor Study' (ca. 1983 – 1986) is one of two drawings in the exhibition that are part of a series of works by Heilmann in tribute to the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian that includes ‘M.’ (1985), a painting in the collection of the Museum Kunstpalast. ‘Islands’, (1988), one of the larger watercolors on view, was made after ‘Laurens’ (1986), an oil on canvas in the collection of the De Pont Museum. 

The works on view not only demonstrate Heilmann’s work serially but also her tendency to revisit and reimagine certain arrangements of form and color. Made 15 years apart, ‘Broken Study’ (2005) is a recompilation of an early red, black and white composition, ‘Untitled Watercolor Study’ (ca. 1989) and Heilmann’s web imagery seen in ‘Blue Net’ (1991).  

As an artist known for working across mediums and for installations that playfully combine disparate works, the exhibition also includes a selection of ceramic ‘Spots’ and sculptural chairs.  

Mary Heilmann: Works on Paper, 1973–2019

Text by Alexis Lowry, Jo Applin, Ilana Savdie

Hauser & Wirth Publishers

English Paperback, 26 x 20 cm; 152pp

16 September (UK, ROW & US)

An in-depth study of Mary Heilmann’s mesmerizing works on paper that explores drawing as a form of daydreaming and memory-making for the influential abstract painter. 

Mary Heilmann’s works on paper are suffused with the same sensibility as her influential abstract paintings, a casual playfulness animating a rigorous attention to form and colour, resulting in joyful, evocative geometries. Their suggestive power reflects Heilmann’s process of what she calls ‘daydreaming’: a conjuring of the sights, sounds, and events of past and future travels, the cyclical nature of memory informing her return to various motifs across nearly five decades of work. Edited and with an introduction by curator Alexis Lowry, ‘Mary Heilmann: Works on Paper, 1973 – 2019’ includes an essay by art historian Jo Applin and a personal reflection by painter Ilana Savdie, all together offering a compelling account of this previously underexamined aspect of Heilmann’s practice. 

Artist Mary Heilman

Considered one of the preeminent contemporary Abstract painters, Mary Heilmann is best known for incorporating a fusion of personal and cultural influences and craft traditions into an artistic practice including paintings, ceramics, and furniture. 

Mary Heilmann is the subject of two major institutional exhibitions, ‘Mary Heilmann. Starry Night’ at Dia Beacon in Beacon NY and ‘Mary Heilmann. Water Way’ at Guild Hall in East Hampton, NY both close in October 2025. On view at the Whitney Museum of American Art until January 2026 is ‘Mary Heilmann: Long Line,’ a site-specific installation that celebrates the 10th anniversary of the opening of the Whitney Museum’s downtown building.  

Her work is included in many prominent international collections, such as those of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany.

HAUSER & WIRTH ZURICH

Limmatstrasse 270, 8005 Zürich

www.hauserwirth.com

Tyler Mitchell @ Gagosian, London

Tyler Mitchell

Gagosian, London

September 15 – October 3, 2025

Tyler Mitchell

Harlem Stoop, 2024

Gelatin silver print, in artist's frame

30 x 37 1/2 inches (76.2 x 95.3 cm)

Edition of 3 + 2 AP

© Tyler Mitchell

Courtesy Gagosian

Tyler Mitchell

The Dinner Party, 2024

Gelatin silver print, in artist's frame

30 5/8 x 48 1/2 x 1 1/2 inches (77.6 x 123 x 3.8 cm)

Edition of 3 + 2 AP

© Tyler Mitchell

Courtesy Gagosian

Gagosian presents an exhibition of photographs by Tyler Mitchell at its gallery in London’s historic Burlington Arcade. This marks the first public display of works from “Portrait of the Modern Dandy,” a visual essay developed for the catalogue of Superfine: Tailoring Black Style, the spring 2025 Costume Institute exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The installation at Burlington Arcade coincides with the launch of Mitchell’s first monograph with Aperture, Wish This Was Real, and features a curated selection of publications that inform and expand his practice.

 

Cover of the book Superfine: Tailoring Black Style 

(New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2025)

Artwork © Tyler Mitchell

Courtesy the artist and Gagosian

Cover of the book Tyler Mitchell: Wish This Was Real 

(New York: Aperture, 2025)

Artwork © Tyler Mitchell

Courtesy the artist and Gagosian

Examining the historical and cultural significance of Black style from the eighteenth century through to contemporary expressions, Superfine focuses on the concept of dandyism through the lens of the African diaspora. The exhibited garments and Mitchell’s photographs together articulate how self-fashioning becomes a form of agency, distinction, and resistance.

Introducing this body of work, Tyler Mitchell notes:

In this visual essay, my aim was not only to depict visions of profound camaraderie, beauty, and joy—though that alone would have been a worthy pursuit—but to explore how Black individuals have appropriated and transformed classical European fashion into something uniquely our own. Featuring models in garments from Superfine: Tailoring Black Style alongside fabulously self-styled men in vintage or the wearer’s own attire, this project is a love letter to modern Black dandyism.

Tyler Mitchell

Untitled (Abdou Shirtless), 2024

Gelatin silver print, in artist's frame

20 x 14 5/8 inches (50.8 x 37 cm)

Edition of 3 + 2 AP

© Tyler Mitchell

Courtesy Gagosian

 

Tyler Mitchell

Untitled (Christian in Wales Bonner Cover), 2024

Archival pigment print, in artist's frame

45 x 34 1/2 inches (114.3 x 87.5 cm)

Edition of 3 + 2 AP

© Tyler Mitchell

Courtesy Gagosian

These portraits engage in a dialogue with traditions of historical studio and portrait photography, emphasizing the symbolic power of dress. Mitchell’s images reflect his ongoing interest in constructing scenes of elegance, kinship, and Black visual sovereignty.

On Saturday, September 20, from 3 to 6pm, Gagosian will host a book signing with the artist for both Wish This Was Real and the Superfine catalogue.

GAGOSIAN

28–29 Burlington Arcade, London W1J OQJ

gagosian.com

Vik Muniz on Photography, Mind, and Matter - The Photography Workshop Series - Aperture, 2025 - A Workshop Experience in a Book

Vik Muniz on Photography, Mind, and Matter

The Photography Workshop Series

Aperture, 2025

Vik Muniz on Photography, Mind, and Matter

The Photography Workshop Series

Aperture, 2025

Format: Paperback / softback

Number of pages: 128

Number of images: 99

Publication date: 2025-08-12

Measurements: 7.5 x 10 x 7.5 inches

ISBN: 9781597114455

In Aperture’s newest volume of The Photography Workshop Series, Vik Muniz—known for his playful pictures that complicate what is understood as a photograph, sculpture, or painting—offers his insight into thinking creatively and seeing the familiar in new and surprising ways.

Aperture works with the world’s top photographers to distill their creative approaches, teachings, and insights on photography—offering the workshop experience in a book. The goal is to inspire photographers of all levels who wish to improve their work, as well as readers interested in deepening their understanding of the art of photography.

Through images and words, Vik Muniz—whose signature style appropriates and reinterprets iconic images—shares his creative practice and discusses a wide range of topics, from generating ideas and creating artworks that challenge viewers’ perceptions, to thinking through collaboration, imperfection, and the interplay of subject, scale, and material.

Vik Muniz on Photography, Mind, and Matter is published by Aperture and available at aperture.org/books.

Public programs planned in conjunction with the new publication include a book signing with the artist at Sikkema Malloy Jenkins in New York on September 6 at 1:00 p.m, and an artist talk at the School of Visual Arts, New York, on September 9 at 6:30 p.m. Details are posted at aperture.org/events.

Vik Muniz (born in São Paulo, 1961) is a prolific, internationally recognized artist, whose signature style appropriates and reinterprets iconic images of our time. His work is featured in major collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo; and Victoria and Albert Museum, London. He has published many books, including the Aperture titles Reflex: A Vik Muniz Primer (2005) and Postcards from Nowhere (2020). Waste Land, a documentary about his work in the favelas and landfills around Rio de Janeiro, was nominated for an Academy Award in 2010.

Lucas Blalock is a Brooklyn-based photographer whose work is in the collections of the Dallas Museum of Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts Boston; Portland Museum of Art, Maine; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among many others. His work has been featured in publications including Artforum, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Art in America, The Brooklyn Rail, BOMB Magazine, W Magazine, British Journal of Photography, and Time.

APERTURE

aperture.org

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

Matthew Rolston - Vanitas: The Palermo Portraits @ Fahey / Klein Gallery, Los Angeles + Other Venues in LA + Special limited-edition monograph on Nazraeli Press

Matthew Rolston

Vanitas: The Palermo Portraits

Fahey / Klein Gallery, Los Angeles

September 25 - November 8, 2025

Photographer and artist MATTHEW ROLSTON, in partnership with Fahey/Klein Gallery, Los Angeles, ArtCenter College of Design, Daido Moriyama Museum / Daido Star Space, and Leica Gallery, present a multi-venue Los Angeles exhibition of his latest series Vanitas: The Palermo Portraits, alongside the release of a special limited-edition monograph on Nazraeli Press.

Four individual works will be on view in a solo exhibition at Fahey/Klein Gallery, Los Angeles, which will display the most extensive presentation of the Vanitas series, including the monograph’s cover photograph. 

At ArtCenter College of Design, Rolston will further present a triptych of the Vanitas work as a wall-sized installation at the College’s South Campus, curated by Julie Joyce, Director, ArtCenter Galleries and Vice President, Exhibitions. This presentation will be the only triptych on exhibition; the central panel appears on the clamshell cover of the forthcoming Vanitas monograph, a signature of the series. These three works, hung in ArtCenter’s Mullin Transportation Design Center, comprise two images of mummified children flanking one of an elderly adult, brought together in the style of an altarpiece, where the sacred and mundane, youth and elder age, collide. 

A single work will be shown at a solo exhibition that will open with a book launch and artist signing at Daido Star Space in downtown Los Angeles on September 30, 2025. Organized in collaboration with the Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation in Tokyo, the presentation echoes the institution’s interest in cross-cultural approaches to photography. 

Leica Gallery, Los Angeles, will present another solo exhibition of an additional single work from Vanitas, accompanied by a public artist talk and book signing. At a venue rooted in the technical and material traditions of photography, this presentation will highlight the painterly, craft-driven aspects of Rolston’s Vanitas project. 

Together, these four distinct presentations introduce Vanitas as a ‘mostra diffusa’, an exhibition intentionally distributed among multiple venues. This multi-venue presentation across Los Angeles reflects a conscious departure from the contemporary conventions of exhibition production, recalling art historical traditions in which singular works were presented in isolation. 

All works, regardless of exhibition venue, will be available exclusively through Fahey/Klein Gallery, Los Angeles, which will also offer an artist-signed edition of the exhibition’s accompanying monograph. 

MATTHEW ROLSTON 

Vanitas: The Palermo Portraits

Nazraeli Press, Mid-September 2025

A special edition of 500 copies 

presented in a custom clamshell case

Hardcover: 12.5 x 18 x 1.5 inches, 

118 pages, 50 four-color plates

ISBN: 978-1-59005-588-5 - $225.00

Book Cover Courtesy of Nazraely Press

FAHEY / KLEIN GALLERY

148 North La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90036

www.faheykleingallery.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