WANAFOTO: modern art

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31/10/25

Adolph Gottlieb and Kim Whanki @ Pace Gallery, Seoul - 'The Language of Abstraction, The Universe of Emotion' Exhibition

The Language of Abstraction, The Universe of Emotion

Adolph Gottlieb and Kim Whanki

Pace Gallery, Seoul

October 31, 2025 – January 10, 2026

Kim Whanki

Untitled, 1967

Oil on canvas, 177 x 127 cm

Pace presents The Language of Abstraction, The Universe of Emotion, a pair of exhibitions of works by American Abstract Expressionist Adolph Gottlieb and pioneering Korean painter Kim Whanki, at its Seoul gallery. On view across two floors of the gallery, these dual presentations—organized in collaboration with the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation and the Whanki Foundation—offer viewers an opportunity to witness how two 20th century figures with different cultural and philosophical backgrounds visualized their unique perspectives and forged a universal language through abstraction.

Gottlieb’s paintings fuse intuitive shapes with bold color fields to visualize emotion and the unconscious, while Kim’s canvases employ repeated dots and refined chromatic structures to evoke an Eastern sense of meditation and cosmic order. Deeply moved by his first encounter with Gottlieb’s work in the U.S. Pavilion at the São Paulo Biennale in 1963, Kim Whanki subsequently relocated to New York, where he embarked on one of the most intense periods of his career. Immersed in the city’s dynamic art scene, he gradually eliminated figurative references from his work, refining his language into dots, lines, and planes. His restrained compositions and luminous fields of meticulously placed dots evoke skies, seas, and constellations, transforming time and space into poetic abstractions. His celebrated Dot Paintings series, completed during these years, played a key role in the introduction of Korean Modernism to the global stage. Pace’s exhibition of Kim’s work from the late 1960s to the early 1970s focuses on the development of his Dot Paintings from structural compositions using crosses and quadrants (Sibjagudo).

A central figure of the New York School alongside Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb was at the vanguard of American Abstract Expressionism. His Pictographs of the 1940s used an all-over grid structure and invented symbols to give form to the unconscious, and in the 1950s he developed his signature Burst series: paintings that juxtapose a floating orb with explosive brushwork. These compositions dramatize the tensions between order and chaos, color, and form, inviting universal and intuitive responses rather than prescribing narrative meaning. Pace’s presentation in Seoul includes a selection of works produced by Adolph Gottlieb during the 1960s and 1970s, including the large-scale painting Expanding (1962), along with canvases from his Imaginary Landscapes series, which utilize the form of landscape painting to include unlimited perception.

Though their practices were rooted in distinct cultural contexts, Kim and Gottlieb are connected by a shared pursuit of universality—using color, symbol, and structure to explore humanity, the cosmos, and the realm of emotion. The Language of Abstraction, The Universe of Emotion is conceived as a dialogue, where the visual and emotional resonances between their works illuminate the boundless possibilities of abstraction and its enduring significance in art history.

Adolph Gottlieb (b. 1903, New York; d. 1974, New York) is recognized as a key figure of the New York School. Initially informed by Italian Renaissance painting, Impressionism, and the European avant-garde, Gottlieb became an advocate of abstraction from the 1930s onward, notably organizing the protest of an exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in 1950, for which he and a group of fellow artists became known as the Irascibles. Producing paintings, drawings, prints, sculpture, and tapestries, Adolph Gottlieb developed an aesthetic vocabulary from Jungian theory, underpinned by aspects of automatism, primitivism, and Surrealism. He continued to refine these stylistic means throughout his career, pursuing images that evoke an immediate and visceral impact on the viewer, through his series of Pictographs, Imaginary Landscapes, and Bursts.

Kim Whanki (b. 1913, Jeollanam-do, Korea; d. 1974, New York) is recognized as one of the pioneers of abstract modernism in South Korea during the twentieth century. The artist studied at Nihon University, Tokyo, from 1933 to 1936, a period during which he began exploring abstraction. From 1946 to 1950, he served as a professor in the Department of Western Painting at Seoul National University, and from 1952 to 1955 as professor and dean of the Department of Western Painting at Hongik University, Seoul. He was appointed as President of the Fine Arts Association in 1963.

PACE SEOUL

267 Itaewon-ro, Yongsan-gu, Seoul

www.pacegallery.com

24/10/25

ringl + pit @ Robert Mann Gallery, NYC - Grete Stern + Ellen Auebach Photography Exhibition

ringl + pit

Robert Mann Gallery, New York

October 23 - December 6, 2025

At the height of the Weimar Republic, an artist duo experimented with gender roles and consumer culture, subverting a commercial world dominated by cheerful faces and brightly illustrated pages. They photographed wigs, mannequins, and merchandise in unorthodox still lives, tapping into Berlin’s vibrant, avant-garde spirit. Their work transcended traditional advertising, highlighting touch, texture, and enigma. Their name: ringl + pit.

Robert Mann Gallery presents ringl + pit, an exhibition featuring rare studio photographs alongside an exceptionally limited-edition portfolio of the duo’s life work—much of which has been rarely exhibited to the public.

ringl + pit were the childhood nicknames of Grete Stern (ringl) and Ellen Auerbach (pit). Both trained under Walter Peterhans, the pioneering photography instructor at the Bauhaus, who emphasized precision, formal clarity, and graphic design. In 1930, Stern and Auerbach founded their Berlin-based studio, ringl + pit, blending avant-garde experimentation with commercial portraiture and advertising. Their work emerged during a period of increasing independence for women in Germany, both socially and artistically.

Their photographs challenged conventional advertising norms through striking, surreal, and meticulously composed images. Working collaboratively, the women alternated roles behind the camera and on set, constantly refining each shot until it felt just right. The studio quickly gained a reputation as one of Germany’s most innovative, producing crisp, compelling images that merged modernist aesthetics with subversive wit. Their work was widely recognized, earning international awards and appearing in influential publications such as Die Gebrauchsgraphik and Cahiers d’Art.

Among their most iconic works is Komol Haircoloring Advertisement, an advertisement for hair dye that disrupts traditional beauty standards with artificial hair, a paper cutout silhouette, and metallic mesh. In the Güldenring Cigarettes Advertisemen, they defy convention by omitting both the pack and the hand, instead focusing on a single cigarette protruding from a cellophane wrapper. Their textile commission for Maratti captures a seam running down a luxurious swath of fabric—eschewing the expected female model and instead emphasizing craftsmanship and tactile detail.

The exhibition also includes two rare self-portraits. In pit with Veil, Ellen Auerbach is shown in a stylized headpiece, her sideways glance withheld from the viewer, hinting at the portrait as a form of disguise. In contrast, Grete Stern appears in a tight close-up, her bespectacled face framed with intense, inward focus. Together, these portraits reveal the duo’s deep artistic dialogue—an exploration of selfhood, queerness, and mutual expression. Their work captures the intellectual and creative energy of Weimar-era Germany, a time of extraordinary cultural ferment that was tragically cut short by the rise of the Nazi regime. As progressive Jewish women, both Grete Stern and Ellen Auerbach were forced to flee the country in the early 1930s.

Ellen Auerbach eventually settled in New York; Grete Stern made her home in Buenos Aires. Though continents apart, the two remained lifelong friends. In 1985, they co-published Fotografie ringl + pit, a carefully designed portfolio that echoed the aesthetic and material choices of their early 1930s studio work.

Taken together, their photographs illuminate how Ellen Auerbach and Grete Stern not only participated in, but helped define the avant-garde spirit of their time. Through humor, experimentation, and a refusal to conform to prescribed gender roles, they carved out a bold new space for visual expression. Their work endures as a testament to photography’s power to question representation, defy convention, and assert identity.

The exhibition ringl + pit is presented in conjunction with Yale University of Art Gallery’s The Shared New Vision of ringl + pit, on view through December 7, 2025.

ROBERT MANN GALLERY

508 West 26th Street, New York, NY 10001

robertmann.com

23/10/25

Antoni Tàpies @ Pace Gallery, NYC - A Survey of Works on Paper

Antoni Tàpies: On paper

Pace Gallery, New York

November 7 - December 20, 2025

Pace presents a survey of works on paper by the Spanish artist Antoni Tàpies at its 540 West 25th Street gallery in New York. Bringing together some 40 artworks created between the 1940s and the 2010s—including never-before-exhibited compositions—this presentation showcases Tàpies’s meditations on the human condition through his works on paper and, more broadly, his indelible impact on the history of art in Europe and across North America and Asia.

Born in Barcelona in 1923, Antoni Tàpies was a self-taught artist who developed a unique visual language centering on exchanges among symbols, gestures, and materials. The artist—who was also a celebrated theorist and philosopher—incorporated signs and symbols from Catalonia and other cultures into his paintings, collages, and sculptures, imbuing his work with historical allusions and odes to phenomena of the natural world. Replete with personal resonances and references to political and social struggles in his native Catalonia and Spain, his art made radical aesthetic propositions during the postwar era.

Over the course of his seven-decade career, Antoni Tàpies investigated abstract and surrealist forms using unconventional, raw materials. His combinations of media as diverse as wood, dirt, spray paint, cardboard, blankets, clothes, carpet, furniture, and marble dust reflect the intensely experimental ethos of his process. Tàpies forged complex layers of materials like these, bringing striking amalgams of color and texture to the fore of his compositions. In this way, enactments of transformation and transfiguration animated the spirit of all his work as an artist.

Pace’s exhibition of Tàpies’s works on paper, the gallery’s twelfth exhibition dedicated to the artist since it began representing him in 1992, sheds new light on the ways that drawing functioned in his practice—as a medium through which he could narrate his own experiences and express the poetic and fragile dimensions of the human condition. Featuring a large selection of works produced between the start of his career in the 1940s and the final years of his life, this presentation will trace the development of his visual lexicon, which reflects his deep interest in signs and symbols from Eastern religions and philosophies, particularly Buddhism. They also speak to the connections between Antoni Tàpies and his American contemporaries at the forefront of Abstract Expressionism—importantly, the artist began showing with Martha Jackson Gallery in New York the year it opened in 1953, during the early years of his career, and he presented solo exhibitions with the storied American gallery until 1978.

Tàpies’s reimagination and redefinition of painting as a highly physical undertaking would inspire future generations of artists. Notably, in 1993—the same year he mounted his first solo show with Pace—he was chosen to represent Spain at the 45th edition of the Venice Biennale, when he won the Golden Lion for his large-scale installation titled Rinzen. In 1984, the artist established the Fundació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona—which opened a museum and library in 1990—to support the exhibition of his work and that of other modern and contemporary artists. Along with the Fundació Joan Miró and Museu Picasso, the Fundació Antoni Tàpies remains a key cultural institution in the fabric of the Spanish city.

Today, his work can be found in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Baltimore Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Museo Tamayo, Mexico City; the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Barcelona; the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; the Museo Guggenheim, Bilbao; Tate, London; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; the Moderna Museet, Stockholm; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Kunstmuseum Basel; the Städel Museum, Frankfurt; the Museum Ludwig, Cologne; the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art; the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; and many other international institutions.

Concurrently with Pace’s exhibition in New York, Antoni Tàpies: The Imagination of the World is on view at the Museu Tàpies in Barcelona through January 25, 2026.

Antoni Tàpies (b, 1923, Barcelona; d. 2012, Barcelona) is recognized as one of the leading artistic voices to emerge from postwar Europe. Working in parallel with global art movements including Abstract Expressionism, Gutai, Art Informel, Tachisme, and Arte Povera, Tàpies believed that his era required a new kind of existential expression. Influenced by Surrealist methods while a member of the avant-garde Dau al Set group in postwar Barcelona, he came to develop a unique form of automatism and to reject representation and the illusionistic picture plane. He incorporated unconventional media such as textiles, straw, detritus, and found objects into his work, accentuating their tactile and material nature. Their earthy, distressed surfaces relate to themes of entropy and decay, challenging the viewer to find beauty in what is typically overlooked. Tàpies’s oeuvre resides between figuration and abstraction, matter and mysticism, as manifested through his painting, sculpture, drawing, collage, and printmaking.

PACE NEW YORK

540 West 25th Street, New York City

www.pacegallery.com

18/10/25

Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective @ MoMA - The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective

MoMA, The Museum of Modern Art, New York

October 19, 2025 – February 7, 2026

Installation view of Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective

on view at The Museum of Modern Art

from October 19, 2025, through February 7, 2026

The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Photo by Jonathan Dorado

Installation view of Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective

on view at The Museum of Modern Art

from October 19, 2025, through February 7, 2026

The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Photo by Jonathan Dorado

Installation view of Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective

on view at The Museum of Modern Art

from October 19, 2025, through February 7, 2026

The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Photo by Jonathan Dorado

The Museum of Modern Art presents Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective, the first major museum exhibition to fully consider every aspect of the artist’s expansive, groundbreaking practice, on view in the Steven and Alexandra Cohen Center for Special Exhibitions. Coinciding with the centennial of the artist’s birth, the exhibition includes some 300 objects that highlight the core values of experimentation and interconnectedness pervading all dimensions of Asawa’s practice. The retrospective spans the six decades of Asawa’s ambitious career, presenting a range of her work across mediums, including wire sculptures, bronze casts, paper folds, paintings, and a comprehensive body of works on paper. Artworks are accompanied by a rich array of archival materials—photographs, documents, and ephemera—that illuminate her public commissions, art advocacy, and meaningful, lasting relationships with members of her community. The exhibition follows a loose chronological arc, interwoven with thematic sections elaborating on the artist’s inspirations and methods.

“What’s exceptional about Asawa’s practice is the multiplicity of her artistic pursuits and the marvelous ability to turn the simplest things into subjects of lifelong creative contemplation,” said Cara Manes. “The exhibition aims to offer multiple points of entry into her work, reflecting what Asawa described as the ‘total act’ of artmaking.”

Ruth Asawa at Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective View,

San Francisco Museum of Art, 1973

Photograph by Laurence Cuneo

Ruth Asawa (1926–2013) was born in Norwalk, California, and raised on a farm. In the wake of Executive Order 9066 signed in 1942, the teenage Asawa and her family were unlawfully incarcerated in war relocation camps along with thousands of people of Japanese descent. After the end of World War II, Asawa enrolled in the experimental Black Mountain College near Asheville, North Carolina, where she explored the artistic possibilities of ordinary materials. There, she developed a technique for looping wire informed by Mexican wire basketry, which she had observed firsthand as a student volunteer in Toluca. This invention would lead to her most consequential contribution to abstract sculpture in the 20th century: a radical body of suspended, intricate looped-wire sculptures. The exhibition begins with a selection of works from her time at Black Mountain College, including explorations of materials, color, and shape in drawings, collages, and prints such as Untitled (BMC.145, BMC Laundry Stamp) (c. 1948–49).

Installation view of Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective

on view at The Museum of Modern Art

from October 19, 2025, through February 7, 2026

The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Photo by Jonathan Dorado

Installation view of Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective

on view at The Museum of Modern Art

from October 19, 2025, through February 7, 2026

The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Photo by Jonathan Dorado

Ruth Asawa continued her material experimentation in wire and paper following her 1949 move to San Francisco, the city that would be the center of her artistic activities for the rest of her life, and where she established a tightly knit family and community. Shortly after her arrival there, she articulated the key motifs and shapes in her looped wire forms in works like Untitled (S.535, Hanging Five-Lobed Continuous Form within a Form with Spheres in the First and Fourth Lobes and a Teardrop Form in the Third Lobe) (1951), on view in the exhibition. She also expanded her range of techniques in drawing, printmaking, and paperfolding, while taking on various commercial design commissions and exhibiting regularly at the Peridot Gallery in New York. In the early 1960s, Ruth Asawa discovered a new method of working with wire by tying and splaying it in ways that evoke organic structures, as seen in works like Untitled (S.390, Hanging Tied-Wire, Double-Sided, Center-Tied, Multi-Branched Form with Curly Ends) (1963).

Ruth Asawa

Untitled (S.390 Hanging Tied-Wire, Double-Sided, Center-Tied,

Multi-Branched Form with Curly Ends), 1963

Copper wire. 20 × 20 × 20 in. (50.8 × 50.8 × 50.8 cm)

Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center,

Gift of Rita Newman

Installation view of Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective

on view at The Museum of Modern Art

from October 19, 2025, through February 7, 2026

The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Photo by Jonathan Dorado

Ruth Asawa

Poppy, 1965

Lithograph. 30 1∕16 × 20 9∕16 in. (76.4 × 52.2 cm)

Publisher and printer: Tamarind Lithography Workshop, Los Angeles

Edition: proof outside the edition of 20

The Museum of Modern Art, New York,

Gift of Kleiner, Bell & Co., 1967

Ruth Asawa continued to experiment with natural forms during a residency at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles in 1965, where she produced a portfolio of diverse, formally rigorous and experimental prints. Drawing from MoMA’s collection, a concentration of works from this portfolio are included in the exhibition, many of which are on view for the first time.

Parallel to her artistic experimentation, Ruth Asawa dedicated herself to her lifelong quest to integrate arts education and practice. One of Asawa’s most transformative projects was the Alvarado Arts Workshop, which started as a grassroots initiative and grew to a momentous movement that embedded vital arts-education programming in San Francisco Bay Area public school systems. Galleries in the exhibition feature archival material related to Asawa’s civic engagement, teaching practice and numerous collaborative public art projects, including Japanese American Internment Memorial (1994) commissioned by the city of San José. Focus on Asawa’s visionary pedagogy extends to the exhibition’s public programming.

Ruth Asawa

Untitled (PF.293, Bouquet from Anni Albers), early 1990s

Ink on paper. 40 × 26 in. (101.6 × 66 cm)

Private collection

A final gallery in the exhibition highlights the last decades of Asawa’s life, which were marked by a renewed dedication to a daily drawing practice. Ruth Asawa tenderly documented her surroundings, paying particular attention to the botanical forms around her, as seen in works such as Untitled (PF.293, Bouquet from Anni Albers) (early 1990s).

Ruth Asawa: A Retrospectiveis an exhibition partnership between the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) and The Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA). The exhibition is organized by Cara Manes, Associate Curator, Department of Painting and Sculpture, MoMA and Janet Bishop, Thomas Weisel Family Chief Curator and Curator of Painting and Sculpture, SFMOMA; with Dominika Tylcz, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Painting and Sculpture, MoMA; and Marin Sarvé-Tarr, Assistant Curator, and William Hernández Luege, Curatorial Associate, Painting and Sculpture, SFMOMA.

The exhibition was on view at SFMOMA (April 4 – September 2, 2025). After its presentation at MoMA, it will travel to Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Spain (March 20 – September 13, 2026); and Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Switzerland (October 18, 2026 – January 24, 2027).

MoMA - The Museum of Modern Art, New York

www.moma.org

10/10/25

Esteban Vicente @ Miles McEnery Gallery, NYC - A Survey Exhibition of a member of the first generation of the New York School of Abstract Expressionism

Esteban Vicente

Miles McEnery Gallery, New York

4 September - 25 October 2025

Esteban Vicente

Water Mill, 1963

Oil on linen, 36 x 40 inches

Miles McEnery Gallery presents a focused survey of works by Esteban Vicente. This is the artist’s eighth solo exhibition at the gallery. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated publication featuring an essay by Daniel Haxall, PhD.

The only Spanish-born member of the first generation of the New York School of Abstract Expressionism, Esteban Vicente was a master colorist. While rooted in the energetic mark-making of Abstract Expressionism, Vicente’s canvases resist bombast or overt drama. He was interested in what he described as the “capacity of color to become light,” and intentionally stripped away “fanciful” brushwork as a means of preserving a pure chromatic landscape, one where the artist’s hand receded. The distinct luminosity of Vicente’s canvases is a testament to the success of his pursuit.

The works on view span four decades of Vicente’s career, from 1960 to 2000. This survey includes the traditional medium of oil painting alongside collages and mixed media pieces, which were integral components of his practice. In particular, collage brought a heightened physicality to his artistic investigations, grounding the ephemeral nature of color in a tactile, constructed surface. It also served as a means of resolving the interplay of form and hue.

Deeply influenced by his natural surrounds, Vicente’s compositions pulse with a radiant sensibility that is less about depicting nature than distilling its essence: the furtive bloom of Spring, the fleeting moments of light before the world moves into evening, or the brooding quiet before a storm. In his canvases and collages, color is both subject and atmosphere, which he transforms into an emotive force that effortlessly stirs memory and sensation.

Artist Esteban Vicente

Esteban Vicente was born in Turégano, Spain in 1903. His father served in the Civil Guard, a police force in the Castile region and was an amateur painter who took the young Vicente with him on visits to the Prado Museum. In 1918, Vicente entered military school, but left after three months. At fifteen years old, Vicente began at the School of Fine Arts of the Real Academia de San Fernando in Madrid. As a young man living in Madrid, Barcelona, and Paris, he developed friendships with artists and writers. In 1928, he had his first exhibition with Juan Bonafé at the Ateneo de Madrid.

Esteban Vicente left Europe for New York City in 1936. The United States became the artist’s permanent home. His contemporaries and associates included Willem de Kooning (their 10th Street studios were on a shared floor), Elaine de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Franz Kline, Barnett Newman, and Ad Reinhardt.

Esteban Vicente spent a good portion of his career teaching. He was among the faculty at Black Mountain College, Black Mountain, NC; the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture, New York, NY; and the University of California, Berkeley, CA, among other institutions.

His work may be found in important collections and museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY, among others.

At the end of his life, the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Esteban Vicente, a museum in his honor, was opened in Segovia by the Spanish government. Vicente attended the museum’s opening in 1998.

Esteban Vicente died at the age of 97 in 2001 in Bridgehampton, NY, ten days before his 98th birthday. He had a long and prosperous career, living and working with multiple generations of artists and painting well into his 90s.

Miles McEnery Gallery represents the Esteban Vicente Foundation.

MILES McENERY GALLERY

520 West 21st Street, New York, NY 10011

www.milesmcenery.com

08/10/25

Lala Rukh @ Grey Noise Gallery, Dubai - "The importance of staying quiet" - Lala Rukh I [First Part of the Exhibition]: Photographic archives

Lala Rukh I [First Part of the Exhibition]

The importance of staying quiet

Grey Noise Gallery, Dubai

September 18 – November 5, 2025

In 2014, The importance of staying quiet was exhibited in Hong Kong as an attempt to acknowledge a minimal vocabulary within Pakistani art. Conceived by Saira Ansari and Umer Butt, the presentation brought together works spanning six decades, between the 1950s and 2010s, and included Anwar Jalal Shemza (1928–1985), Zahoor ul Akhlaq (1941–1999), Lala Rukh (1948–2017), Rashid Rana (b. 1968), Hamra Abbas (b. 1976), Sara Salman (b. 1978), Ali Kazim (b. 1979), Ayesha Jatoi (b. 1979), Fahd Burki (b. 1981), and Iqra Tanveer (b. 1983).

Rather than showing signature works often associated with these artists – most of whom are not minimalists – the exhibition highlighted moments where they pared form and image down to their most distilled elements. The proposition was that minimal vocabularies in Pakistan are not anomalies or exceptions, but part of a more layered understanding of artistic abstraction in the region.

A decade later, The importance of staying quiet returns as a year-long dialogic exchange between Butt and Ansari and will include a series of presentations shaped through discursive encounters. This time, the programme will examine the development of practices that have deliberately engaged minimal or abstract strategies. This exercise is not only about tracing a lineage of abstraction, but about sustaining a way of looking that requires deeper reading and slower appreciation.

The first exhibition of The importance of staying quiet opens with Lala Rukh’s photographic archives from her years at the University of Chicago (1974–76).

While pursuing a second master’s degree at nearly thirty, Lala Rukh already had a trained eye, but these images reveal the sharpening of her framing and the intent of her gaze. This exhibition revisits that gaze, bringing together early works that carry a cinematic sense of composition before arriving at her later language of minimal abstraction.

Photography was central to Lala Rukh’s life yet largely unseen by the public until Sagar (2017) offered a first glimpse into how her retinal memory developed. The exhibition included photographic documentation of rivers and seas across India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Burma, shot during her travels between 1992 and 2005. Each composition follows a specific format, where water bodies, the horizon, and the sky feature in varying proportions. The absence of people and objects is consistent. Among the countless images she took, Lala Rukh’s selection for the exhibition revealed solitude and an intimacy with the waterscapes, preserving fleeting moments in time.

The Chicago photographs, however, are different. They are not minimal or abstract. They contain architecture, people, animals, objects, and most importantly, construct narratives. Additionally, the ‘set’ and direction recall filmic technique. Where a person or an animate body is absent, the scene is weighted with arrival or departure. These photos document Lala’s new surroundings and influences. The artist was broadening her perspective, and encountering art, music, and politics that encouraged experimentation. While these elements are present in the photographs, they are not the main subject of this presentation. Instead, the elemental techniques of printing – resized reproductions of film negatives, and pairing frames in diptychs, triptychs, and other polyptych sequences – are centred.

Lala Rukh’s works on photo paper and other forms of mixed media printing are more clearly offshoots of her photography practice. But her characteristic affinity for rigour, design, and precision can also be seen at play here. Together they foreshadow the ways her later works were composed, executed, and presented.

These images mark an artist testing how vision and perception could be distilled into structure, laying the foundations of a radical practice. Nearly half a century later, they allow for a nuanced reading of an artist whose early experiments in framing, sequencing, and looking shaped her language of abstraction. Connections between these photographs and her later works, particularly in their use of colour and compositional discipline, will be explored in Lala Rukh II, the second part of this exhibition.

Although Lala Rukh produced these images with intention – prepared and perhaps shown during her university years – she never formally presented them as artworks. The editors of this presentation therefore frame them carefully as reflective studies within her archive, read in retrospect as a way to trace her process.

Artist Lala Rukh

Lala Rukh (b.1948, Lahore; d. 2017, Lahore / Lived and worked in Lahore, Pakistan) studied art at Punjab University, Lahore, Pakistan (MFA) and University of Chicago, USA (MFA). She taught for 30 years at Punjab University, Department of Fine Art and the National College of Arts where she set up the MA(Hons) Visual Art Program in the year 2000. After retiring from teaching, Lala Rukh devoted her time in her studio in Lahore and to activism. She was amongst the foremost feminist activist artists of South Asia.

A selection of exhibitions includes: Göteborg International Biennial For Contemporary Art, Gothenburg, Sweden / In Our Own Backyard, Asia Art Archive, Hongkong / Lala Rukh: In the Round, Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah, UAE / After Rain, Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia / Notations on Time, Ishara Art Foundation, UAE / Line, beats and shadows, Kiran Nadar Museum Art, India / Luogo e Segni, Punta della Dogana, Italy / Artist’s Rooms: Lala Rukh, Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai, UAE / Peindre La Nuit, Centre Pompidou – Metz, France / Documenta 14, Athens, Greece and Kassel, Germany / For an Image, Faster Than Light – Curated by Bose Krishnamachari, Yinchuan Biennial, Yinchuan, China / The past, the present, the possible – Curated by Eungie Joo, Sharjah Biennial 12, Sharjah, UAE.

GREY NOISE GALLERY

Unit 24, Alserkal Avenue, Street 8, Al Quoz 1, Dubai, UAE

www.greynoise.org

25/09/25

Kirchner. Picasso @ LWL Museum, Münster + Kirchner Museum Davos

Kirchner. Picasso

LWL Museum, Münster

26 September 2025 - 18 January 2026

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

Kaffeetafel (Vs), 1908

Acquired with the support of the

Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen

LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur

Photo: LWL / Sabine Ahlbrand-Dornseif

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

Drei Badende am Meer, 1912-1920

Switzerland, Private Collection

Photo: Sammlung Ulmberg

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

Tänzerin Palucca, 1929

Private Collection

Photo: Georgios Michaloudis, farbanalyse, Köln

The LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur in Münster presents the exhibition ‘Kirchner. Picasso’. It is the first show to explore these two singular artists and their surprising parallels in such depth.

From the vibrant life of the big city to the intimacy of the studio and the stillness of the mountains: At the beginning of the 20th century, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Pablo Picasso bore witness to a new era, with their works speaking of change, crisis and passion. Though they never met in person, their pictorial worlds and styles converged. 100 works from major European museums will highlight the similarities and contrasts between two of the most important modernist artists.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

Sängerin am Piano, 1930/31

Courtesy Galerie Henze & Ketterer, Wichtrach/Bern

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

Blonde Frau in rotem Kleid (Bildnis Frau Hembus), 1932

Private Collection

Photo: Dominique Uldry

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

Junkerboden, 1938

Kirchner Museum Davos,

Permanent loan from the

Rosemarie Ketterer Foundation

Photo: Kirchner Museum Davos

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Pablo Picasso were born just one year apart, in the German Empire and in Spain. Their paths to art differed widely, yet both shared a passion for innovation and continually reinvented their artistic expression. The exhibition opens with the biographies of Kirchner and Picasso, intertwining the lives of the two artists not only with each other, but also with the events of contemporary history. At the same time, Kirchner and Picasso are placed within the wider context of Franco-German artistic exchange.

In their works, both artists depict people in the big city: while dancing, making music, or at variety shows. It is about glamour, speed and ecstasy – but also about the hard life behind the scenes, about loneliness and poverty. The exhibition tells of both – of the fascination of the stage and of what remains hidden from the audience.

Among the most well-known works by both artists are their expressive portraits. The focus is on the likenesses of their respective life partners. These portraits also clearly illustrate the stylistic developments of Kirchner and Picasso. The subject of the bather, a symbol of insouciance and joie de vivre, is also a recurring theme in both artists’ works. Whether in the studio or in nature – the nude is a is a recurring subject in the work of both Kirchner and Picasso. The view of naked female bodies contrasted with partially clothed men raises questions about the relationship between painter and model. The studio itself also plays an important role: it is more than just a workspace – here, famous works were created, here, ideas were toyed with, life was lived, and sometimes convivial time was spent.

Finally, the exhibition sheds light on the self-staging of both artists. Kirchner in particular regularly depicted himself in self-portraits, which offer a glimpse of his personal situation at various points in time. His life as an artist, as well as his struggle with physical and psychological health, are made visible in these works. Picasso, on the other hand, used the mythological figure of the Minotaur for his self-staging and mastered the art of presenting himself through photographic self-portraits.

An exhibition by the LWL Museum für Kunst und Kultur, Münster, and the Kirchner Museum Davos, where it will be on view from 15 February through 3 May, 2026.

LWL-MUSEUM FÜR KUNST UND KULTUR

Westfälisches Landesmuseum

Domplatz 10, 48143 Münster

www.lwl-museum-kunst-kultur.de

05/09/25

Maria Helena Vieira da Silva @ Guggenheim Museum Bilbao - "Anatomy of Space" Exhibition

Maria Helena Vieira da Silva

Anatomy of Space

Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

October 16, 2025 - February 22, 2026

An in-depth survey of the visual language of Portuguese-born French artist Maria Helena Vieira da Silva (1908–1992), this exhibition traces key moments in her career from the 1930s to the late 1980s through eight thematic sections. Particular focus is placed on her exploration of architectural space, where she dissolved the boundaries between real and imaginary urban landscapes, moving beyond formal references to Portuguese visual culture and avant-garde movements such as Cubism and Futurism.

The idea of space is a central theme in Maria Helena Vieira da Silva’s work; her compositions, featuring labyrinthine structures, chromatic rhythms, and fragmented perspectives, capture the essence of a world in perpetual transformation.

Born in Lisbon, Maria Helena Vieira da Silva trained both there and in Paris. Influenced by her studies in sculpture and anatomy, as well as by the great masters of the past—particularly Paul Cézanne—and the avant-garde movements of the twentieth century, she developed a distinctive pictorial idiom in which the physicality of space merges with the dimensions of time and memory.

Curator: Flavia Frigeri

GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM BILBAO | BILBAO, SPAIN

www.guggenheim-bilbao.eus

28/08/25

Lee Seung Jio @ Tina Kim Gallery, NYC - "Nucleus in Resonance" Exhibition of work by a leading figure in postwar Korean geometric abstraction

Lee Seung Jio: Nucleus in Resonance

Tina Kim Gallery, New York

September 18 - November 1, 2025

Tina Kim Gallery presents Lee Seung Jio: Nucleus in Resonance. Marking the gallery’s second solo exhibition of LEE SEUNG JIO (1941–1990), a leading figure in postwar Korean geometric abstraction, this presentation surveys Lee’s defining Nucleus series, which he explored consistently from the late 1960s to his final decade. For Lee, the nucleus was more than a formal motif; it functioned as a central point of perception, where energy, rhythm, and sensory experience came together.

“I began this [painting] after the launch of the Apollo spacecraft opened my eyes to the spatiality of the universe. It feels like the most fitting way to express the era I live in, so I’ve kept working on it ever since.”[1]

During Korea’s rapid industrialization and urban expansion in the 1960s, Lee turned to a single, enduring motif: the cylindrical pipe form. Lee’s pipes are both abstract and figurative, existing as two-dimensional planes and three-dimensional forms. Although often referred to as the “master of pipes,” Lee once noted that he neither sought nor rejected the label. For him, the repeated cylindrical form was never intended to represent any symbolic object; rather, it served to expose the illusions inherent in visual perception and to question the premise of figurative representation. Through this process, Lee aimed to depict a sensuous realm stripped of symbolic meaning—a world of “sheer particles,” as he described it.

As a founding member of the groups ORIGIN (1962–) and AG (Korean Avant-Garde Association, 1969–1975), Lee helped establish the theoretical and methodological foundations of postwar Korean art. Even though his work was often associated with movements such as Mono-ha, Minimalism, and Dansaekhwa at the time, Lee developed a distinct visual language characterized by precision, restraint, and structural clarity. As Joan Kee has observed, Lee’s work reveals how he critically engaged with contemporary abstraction—a mode in which socio-historical conditions are transformed into rigorous compositional structures.[2]

The earliest work in the exhibition, Nucleus 10 (1968), was first shown at the 12th Contemporary Art Exhibit at Gyeongbokgung Palace Museum. The painting marks the beginning of Lee’s signature motif—a tubular form. This vocabulary finds fuller articulation in Nucleus 74-9 (1968–1974), in which the pipe motif becomes the organizing framework of the entire composition. To achieve the illusion of metallic density, Lee applied oil paint with a flat brush loaded with light and dark tones at either end, then meticulously sanded the surface—burnishing the paint to heighten its reflectivity and optical depth. Featured in Only the Young: Experimental Art in Korea, 1960s–1970s—co-organized by the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea and the Guggenheim Museum—the work affirms Lee’s growing significance within Korean modernism.

Lee continued to experiment with iterations of the Nucleus and develop his formal vocabulary throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Nucleus 73-18 (1973) and Nucleus 74-07 (1974) demonstrate his continued inquiry into the nature of perception, while reflecting a more subtle visual language grounded in the distilled and process-driven aesthetics of the time. Works from the 1980s—represented here by Nucleus 88-10 (1988), Nucleus 86-71 (1986), and the monumental Nucleus 87-99 (1987)—demonstrate his sustained pursuit of structural rigor, while simultaneously drawing the viewer into contemplative, illusionistic spaces that transcend the material surface of the canvas.

The exhibition concludes with the first U.S. presentation of Lee’s black paintings, including Nucleus 78-23, 78-24, 78-25 and 78-26 (all 1978). For Lee, black was not merely a color but a fundamental space of silence, stillness, and emptiness—where all elements were reduced to their origin. In Lee’s vocabulary, the nucleus signified not only the structural core of the image but a condensed field of visual and sensory perception. These works represent the culmination of his decades-long exploration of abstraction, characterized by their emphasis on materiality and process. Lee’s black paintings draw the viewer into a contemplative space where being and form quietly converge, embodying his pursuit of abstraction’s essential condition.

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[1] Lee Seung Jio, “Presenting the Nucleus Series with Cold Lines and Blazes of Fire,” interview with Maeil Business Newspaper, October 24, 1984.

[2] Joan Kee, “Force Fields,” in Lee Seung Jio: Advancing Columns (Seoul: National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, 2020), 14-25.

TINA KIM GALLERY

525 West 21st Street, New York, NY 10011

tinakimgallery.com

23/08/25

Warhol, Pollock and other American spaces @ Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid

Warhol, Pollock and other American spaces

Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid

21 October 2025 - 25 January 2026

Robert Rauschenberg

Express, 1963

Oil, silkscreen ink and collage on canvas,

184.2 x 305.2 cm

Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bernemisza

Audrey Flack

Abstract Expressionist Landscape (with Clouds), 1951

Oil on canvas, 74.93 x 101.6 cm

Museo FAMM, Mougins (The Levett Collection)

Photo: Fraser Marr

Cy Twombly

Detail of Pan, Bassano in Teverina, 1980

Color dry-print, 38.1 x 30.5 cm

Collection of Larry Gagosian

Photo: Rob McKeever

Courtesy Gagosian

Andy Warhol's fascination with Jackson Pollock is well known; his obsession with having one of his works in his extensive art collection, as well as the relationship between his famous car crash series and the notorious accident that ended Pollock's life one night in August 1956.

The Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza is organising an exhibition which brings together the work of these two key names of 20th-century art, shown alongside that of other artists who were reconsidering issues relating to the new spatial strategies at this same time. Other artists include, among others, Audrey Flack, Robert Rauschenberg, Marisol Escobar, Cy Twombly...

Andy Warhol and Jackson Pollock are two extraordinarily complex figures, seemingly very different but in fact united, like an entire generation of artists, by their interest in change in the pictorial tradition, spatial issues and a fascination with large formats.

MUSEO NACIONAL THYSSEN-BORNEMISZA

Paseo del Prado, 8. 28014, Madrid

www.museothyssen.org

16/08/25

Wanda Pimentel @ Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel, Rio de Janeiro - Path in black and white / Percurso em preto e branco

Wanda Pimentel

Path in black and white

Percurso em preto e branco

Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel, Rio de Janeiro

August 16 — October 25, 2025

Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel presents Wanda Pimentel – Percurso em preto e branco [Path in black and white], at Carpintaria, Rio de Janeiro, marking the first exhibition of the artist’s work in her native Rio de Janeiro since her passing in 2019. The show brings together the Animais series, a group of early black-and-white drawings for the first time. Created between 1965 and 1967, this body of work offers rare insight into a formative period of experimentation, marking the emergence of Pimentel’s distinct visual language.

Using anxious, vigorous lines and a restricted palette, Wanda Pimentel drew animals, some identifiable, others invented, whose forms pulse, meander, and buzz among graphic tangles of squiggles and markings. Beetles, kangaroos, armadillos, turtles, bats, giraffes, owls, and monkeys appear, rendered in an inquisitive hand, as if the artist were exploring the textures of fur, feathers, scales, and prints, only to distort their shapes and patterns into the hallucinatory environments of her stylized bestiary.

This earlier facet of Pimentel’s oeuvre reveals a more unbound calligraphic approach, in which the surface of the paper is almost entirely occupied, bristling with visual activity, a sharp contrast to her later geometrically oriented output, which relied on a rigorous spatiality defined by empty space in tandem with hard-edged depictions of objects and limbs. As art historian Vera Beatriz Siqueira proposes in her essay for the exhibition, “In Wanda, animals seem to affirm the graphic basis and central position afforded to the line, defining issues in her oeuvre, while simultaneously heralding the thematic and plastic question of “involvement”, relationships between creatures, objects and their environments, central to her work

The artist’s Untitled (from the Envolvimento series) (1969) was recently included in the MoMA’s permanent collection and was featured in the exhibition Vital Signs: Artists and the Body, organized by Lanka Tattersall in 2024 at the same institution. Wanda Pimentel is currently on view in Pop Brasil: Avant-garde and New Figuration, 1960-70, at Pinacoteca in São Paulo, Brazil.

Artist Wanda Pimentel

Wanda Pimentel (1943–2019), born and based in Rio de Janeiro, developed a distinct artistic practice marked by precise geometric forms and smooth, hard-edge surfaces that blur the lines between abstraction and figuration. Her depictions of domestic interiors and everyday objects in the late 1960s and early 1970s emerged in parallel with Brazil’s military dictatorship. Her work responds to this repressive context, subtly critiquing the isolating effects of authoritarian rule, conservative social values, and fractured national identity. This sense of isolation also reflects the gendered constraints of Brazilian society and the country's peripheral role in global art discourse. Though visually resonant with Pop Art, Pimentel’s use of synthetic aesthetics carries a darker, more ambivalent tone, challenging the easy assimilation of industrial imagery typical of the genre’s Northern iterations. Wanda Pimentel has works in important public collections, such as MoMA – The Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA; MAC – Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Niterói, Niterói, Brazil; MALBA – Museu Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Argentina; MASP - Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand, São Paulo, Brazil; MAM – Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

FORTES D'ALOIA & GABRIEL

Carpintaria, Rua Jardim Botânico 971, Rio de Janeiro

fdag.com.br

09/08/25

Kosmos Klee. The Collection @ Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern - Permanent Exhibition with some 80 changing works from the collection

Kosmos Klee. The Collection

Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern

Permanent Exhibition

Paul and Lily Klee with the cat Bimbo,

Kistlerweg 6, Bern, 1935

Photo: Fee Meisel

Paul Klee

Ohne Titel (Villa am Langensee)

[Untitled (Villa at the Langensee)], 1896

Watercolour on paper, 9,9 × 15 cm

Private collection, Switzerland,

deposit at the Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern

Paul Klee

Ohne Titel (Rückenakt) [Nude from Behind], 1902

Pencil on paper on cardboard, 32,5 × 28,5 cm

Private collection, Switzerland,

deposit at the Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern

The dynamic permanent exhibition devoted to Paul Klee invites visitors to immerse themselves in the life and work of this important modern artist. With some 80 changing works from the collection, Kosmos Klee offers a chronological survey of Klee’s artistic career. Biographical and archival material provide an insight into his life and time. In addition, the ‘focus room’ offers a space for smaller exhibitions devoted to individual aspects of Klee’s work, or contributions to the artist’s global reception.

Paul Klee

In den Häusern v. St. Germain

[ In the Houses of St. Germain], 1914, 110

Watercolour on paper on cardboard

15,5 × 15,9/16,3 cm

Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, donation of Livia Klee

Paul Klee

Tunesische Scizze [Tunisian Sketch], 1914, 212

Watercolour and pencil on paper on cardboard

17,9 × 12,2 cm

Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, donation of Livia Klee

Paul Klee

Ohne Titel (Fabrikanlage)

[Untitled (Factory Plant)], 1922

Watercolour and pencil on paper on cardboard

10 × 8,9 cm

Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, donation of Livia Klee

Zentrum Paul Klee: The collection

The Zentrum Paul Klee is the world’s most important centre for research into Paul Klee’s life and work, and has one of the most significant collections of the artist’s drawings, watercolours and paintings. Paul Klee was primarily a draughtsman, which is why 80% of the collection of the Zentrum Paul Klee consists of works on paper, matching the collected works. Because of the fragility of the works as well as the large size and diversity of the collection, only parts of it can be displayed at once. Paul Klee enjoyed experimenting, not only in terms of content and form but also technically, using light-sensitive paints, inks and papers. For that reason the works need periods of rest between periods on display.

Paul Klee

Karneval im Gebirge

[Carnival in the Mountains], 1924, 114

Watercolour on primed paper on cardboard

24 × 31,3 cm

Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern

Paul Klee

Fische im Kreis [Fishes in a Circle], 1926, 140

Oil and tempera on primed muslin on cardboard

42 × 43 cm

Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, donation of Livia Klee

Paul Klee

Nordzimmer [North Room], 1932, 17

Watercolour on paper on cardboard

37 × 55 cm

Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern

Kosmos Klee

With Kosmos Klee. The Collection the Zentrum Paul Klee offers visitors the opportunity to immerse themselves in Paul Klee’s life and work, as well as in the unique collection of the institution. Some 80 rotating and chronologically organised works provide an overview of Klee’s artistic development, from the highly detailed early works via tendencies towards abstraction and the discovery of colour, to the reduced pictorial language of the later work. Each decade of Klee’s artistic career is identified by a colour in the exhibition, allowing visitors to find their way intuitively around the space. Brief introductory texts, biographical photographs and films give deeper insights into the different phases of the work and Paul Klee’s engagement with the people around him.

Paul Klee

Doppel gesicht [Double face], 1933, 383

Coloured pastel and pencil on paper on cardboard

33 × 21 cm

Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, donation of Livia Klee

Paul Klee

Spätes Glühen [Late Glowing], 1934, 29

Pastel on damask on cardboard

26,8 x 32,5/34,3 cm

Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, donation of Livia Klee

Aside from his works, the Zentrum Paul Klee also preserves the artist’s archive. In the dynamic permanent exhibition, different treasures from the archive are presented, revealing the various aspects of Paul Klee’s life. His love of music is reflected in his record collection and the scores that Paul Klee, a gifted violinist, played from. Klee’s favourite music can be heard as part of a podcast in the exhibition. Parts of the artist’s collection of natural materials, including shells, stones and pages from herbariums, display Klee’s close relationship with nature and natural processes. Other objects include his watercolour box, his schoolbooks, scribbled over with drawings, as well as letters.

Curator: Fabienne Eggelhöfer

And Cover Star Klee, Paul Klee Artworks on Book Covers Exhibition, Through September 14, 2025.

ZENTRUM PAUL KLEE

Monument im Fruchtland 3, 3006 Bern

zpk.org