Daniel Richter @ Thaddaeus Ropac Salzburg - "Mit elben Birnen" Exhibition

Daniel Richter: Mit elben Birnen

Thaddaeus Ropac Salzburg

Through 27 September 2025

Thaddaeus Ropac Salzburg presents a new series of paintings by German artist DANIEL RICHTER. Created over the past year, these large-scale works navigate a space between figuration and abstraction, characterised by chaotic entanglements of fragmented bodies. Creature-like forms are depicted against jagged fields of colour in bright, contrasting tones, evoking a sense of rebellious energy and electric vibrancy.

Daniel Richter’s painting has been marked by a continual formal transformation since the beginning of his career. While opaque, monochrome areas of colour characterised Richter’s work of the past few years, the backgrounds of these new, intensely colourful compositions appear torn or singed. At times, the candy-coloured shapes that seem to race across the canvas are delineated by black, dense lines; at others, they seem to detach from the background or erupt across the pictorial space.

In some works, the artist leaves behind traces of his physical presence as visible fingermarks on the canvas, intensifying a heightened sense of primordial energy and unresolved conflict. ‘The dynamic in my work is mainly based on pushing and shoving, or on elements that are being confronted by each other – mingling, pushing, pulling,’ Daniel Richter explains.

The temporal and spatial indeterminacy of scenes refuses to resolve into a coherent time, place, or even pictorial space. The works appear to depict surreal landscapes of the mind or imagination rather than representations of any external world. Colours clash or recede with intense emotional charge, the bold contrasts and abstract patterns recalling the formal vocabulary of Clyfford Still. And yet, despite the underlying violence, the works convey a touching sensuality and beauty that counterbalances their restless energy.

The exhibition’s title references the opening line of Friedrich Hölderlin’s poem Half of Life, which Daniel Richter cryptically rephrases. The poem is centred around a stark contrast between idealised beauty and a world marked by emptiness. The lines, which sound almost prophetic in today’s political climate, accompanied Daniel Richter during the creation of this series. Hölderlin’s image of creaking weathervanes can be read as a symbol of the fragile, often fractured order of our time.

Friedrich Hölderlin

‘Half of Life’

With its yellow pears

And wild roses everywhere

The shore hangs into the lake,

O gracious swans,

And drunk with kisses

You dip your heads

In the sobering holy water.

Ah, where will I find

Flowers, come winter,

And where the sunshine

And shade of the earth?

Walls stand cold

And speechless, in the wind

The weathervanes creak.

The anarchic humour of his titles is typical of the artist, whose sensibility for the absurd and the drastic is also closely linked to the Hamburg music scene and punk. The city, where Daniel Richter studied under Werner Büttner from 1992 to 1996, has played a pivotal role in his life and career, serving as both a formative backdrop for his artistic development and a long-standing base from which he emerged as one of Germany’s most influential contemporary painters.

Artist Daniel Richter

Born in Eutin, Germany, Daniel Richter lives and works in Berlin. He studied at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg from 1992–96 under Werner Büttner, and later worked as an assistant to Albert Oehlen. Comprehensive solo exhibitions of Richter’s work have been held at Kunsthalle Tübingen (2023); Space K, Seoul (2022); 21er Haus, Vienna (2017); Camden Arts Centre, London (2017); Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek (2016); TAXISPALAIS Kunsthalle Tirol, Innsbruck (2014); Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt (2014); Kestner Gesellschaft, Hannover (2011); CAC Málaga and Denver Art Museum (both 2008); Hamburger Kunsthalle (2007); National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (2005); and Kunsthalle Kiel; Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf (2001).

Daniel Richter’s works are included in renowned collections worldwide, among them the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Hamburger Kunsthalle; the Nationalgalerie, Berlin; the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart; the Museum of Fine Arts Leipzig; the Kunstmuseum Den Haag; the Contemporary Art Collection of the Federal Republic of Germany; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Denver Art Museum; and the Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain, Strasbourg. In 2023, the Oscar-winning director Pepe Danquart released the documentary Daniel Richter, offering a multifaceted insight into the artist’s life and work.

In December, a major retrospective will open at the Museum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte Schloss Gottorf (until February 2026).

THADDAEUS ROPAC SALZBURG

Salzburg Villa Kast, Mirabellplatz 2, 5020 Salzburg

ropac.net

Related Posts:

In English

Daniel Richter 

Kunsthalle Tübingen (2023)

Daniel Richter: Pink Flag – White Horse 

National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (2005)

En Français

Daniel Richter. Drapeau rose – Cheval blanc

Musée des beaux-arts du Canada, Ottawa (2005)

Daniel Richter: Mit elben Birnen

Thaddaeus Ropac Salzburg, 25 July — 27 September 2025

Matt Kleberg @ Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco - "Bless Babel" Exhibition

Matt Kleberg: Bless Babel

Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco

August 21 – October 16, 2025

Berggruen Gallery presents Bless Babel, an exhibition of new work by San Antonio-based artist Matt Kleberg. This exhibition will mark the gallery’s second solo exhibition with Matt Kleberg.

In Bless Babel, each painting builds around a singular central niche, suggesting the absence of a subject. Confronted with this vacancy, the viewer finds themselves at the center of Kleberg’s geometric abstractions. Influenced by architectural and ritualistic spaces, the works in Bless Babel investigate the tropes through which conception is framed by institutional or personal belief. Kleberg’s paintings are not interested in objective truth, but rather in how belief transforms our relationship to space and objects. These paintings are not portals, unless you believe they are. They are not windows, unless you believe they are. 

This exhibition derives its title from Donald Barthelme’s 1987 essay Not Knowing, in which the writer and critic considers uncertainty, improvisation, and discovery as fundamental to the creative act. Barthelme speaks of commentary, elaboration, exegesis, and contradiction as necessary modes of engagement between a piece of art and the earlier works of previous makers that inform it. Babel and the scattering of languages offer an example of how different approaches to the same concept are inherent to human expression. Kleberg’s new paintings embrace the constraints of particular shapes borrowed from Tramp Art frames and Italian Renaissance devotional objects, to explore how different resolutions can come out of multiple iterations of the same motifs.

Matt Kleberg’s paintings contradict themselves, oscillating between ecstasy and oblivion, exuberance and tranquility. Hues of pink, terracotta, and bright blue radiate amongst moody browns, maroon, and sap green. Scumbled surfaces complicate illusionistic shadows; interior space collapses into itself as one moves closer. Shimmering like television static or speckled concrete, colors that appear solid break apart upon inspection. Chromatic undertones shift in their nature–perhaps waiting to coalesce. Some paintings tower, their stripes and bands undulating, monumental and inviting, formal yet playful. Indebted as much to American folk art traditions as to Duccio and the Sienese School, Kleberg’s paintings pay homage—yet with their vacancies and their tensions, the drama is of their own conjuring. A frame within a frame within a frame. The pleasure is in the not-knowing. 

MATT KLEBERG was born in 1985 in Kingsville, Texas. He received his BA from the University of Virginia in 2008 and his MFA from the Pratt Institute in 2015. Coverage of his work can be found in various publications, including The New York Times, The Brooklyn Rail, Artsy, Vice, Maake Magazine, ArtDaily, Juxtapoz Magazine, Square Cylinder, and Hyperallergic. His work is featured in multiple private and public collections, including the Williams College Museum of Art, the AD&A Museum of the University of California Santa Barbara, the Old Jail Art Center, the Addison Gallery of American Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and the National Gallery of Art. Matt Kleberg currently lives and works in San Antonio, TX.  

BERGGRUEN GALLERY

10 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, CA 94105

www.berggruen.com

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

Alexandre Diop

Run For Your Life !

Stephen Friedman Gallery, London

19 September - 1 November 2025

Alexandre Diop

A Vos marques ! Prêt ! Illegal, 2025

© Alexandre Diop, courtesy Stephen Friedman Gallery

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

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

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

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

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

Artist Alexandre Diop

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

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

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

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

STEPHAN FRIEDMAN GALLERY LONDON

5-6 Cork Street, London W1S 3LQ 

www.stephenfriedman.com

Emma Luukkala @ HAM Gallery - Helsinki Art Museum - "Night Wash" Exhibition

Emma Luukkala: Night Wash

HAM Gallery, Helsinki 

20 September - 9 November 2025

Emma Luukkala

Night Wash, 2025 (detail)

Photo: Emma Luukkala

In her HAM gallery exhibition, EMMA LUUKKALA ponders the overlap between the sacred and the everyday. Life flows in endless piles of things and to-do lists, with moments of meaning, intense in their brightness, at the heart of the chaos.

Jobs I’ve done today: swept the floors, folded the laundry, and moved things from place to place. From somewhere, I can hear a blackbird singing.

Not even the grandest and most solemn situations are pure and uncontaminated by the outside world – they are always adorned with everyday chores and annoying dirt. Emma Luukkala asks what sacred could mean in a new materialist context, where the world is not divided dualistically into the superior spiritual and the inferior material, but instead consists of a wide range of intertwined players.

EMMA LUUKKALA (b. 1992) is a Helsinki-based artist who uses painting materials in a variety of ways, combining flat blocks of colour with relief details. She graduated with a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degree from Helsinki Academy of Fine Arts in 2020. In recent years, her work has been exhibited at venues including Jyväskylä Art Museum, Kunsthalle Helsinki, tm•gallery and Galerie Anhava.

HAM GALLERY - HELSINKI ART MUSEUM

Eteläinen Rautatiekatu 8, 00100 Helsinki

www.hamhelsinki.fi

Yuan Fang @ Skarstedt Gallery, NYC - "Spaying" Exhibition

Yuan Fang: Spaying

Skarstedt Gallery, New York

September 4 – October 25, 2025

Skarstedt Chelsea presents Spaying, Yuan Fang’s second solo exhibition with the gallery (the previous one was in London). In this deeply personal and formally rigorous body of work, Yuan Fang turns inward, offering a meditation on illness, identity, and the intricate architecture of womanhood. In addition to her large-scale canvases, Yuan Fang debuts a suite of smaller, more intimate paintings—what the artist refers to as “subplots,” fragments of a larger, lived narrative.

The exhibition’s title alludes to the medical and emotional ramifications of Fang’s recent breast cancer diagnosis and subsequent treatments, functioning as a reference not only to the potential biological consequences of her treatment, but also the literal act of cutting—a gesture central to her process. Through cycles of modification, layering, and erasure, Yuan Fang pares down each composition until a dominant “entity” emerges. These central forms, always abstract yet bodily, function as torsos, anchoring each painting with a visceral sense of presence. “I need my paintings to be confrontational,” Yuan Fang notes, and indeed, each image carries that charge, meeting the viewer with both the emotional weight of her experience and a visual strength that builds like a storm on the horizon. 

New to this body of work is Fang’s embrace of negative space. Informed by the tradition of “leaving blank” in Chinese painting, these compositional voids focus the viewer’s attention on what remains. Separately, the rhythm of her studio practice has slowed, inviting longer periods of contemplation and greater attention to detail. The resulting compositions feel more deliberate with each painting charged with quiet intensity.

Autobiographical threads run throughout. Several works incorporate the artist’s own medical imaging subtly embedded in the compositions, such as Accumulating, Breaking Through the Defense Line. Others channel the psychic toll of external expectation and all of the rage, pressure, and fatigue that accompany it. 

Throughout the show, Yuan Fang navigates the porous boundaries between vulnerability and strength, life and death. This emotional duality is echoed in the palette of deep burgundies, forest greens, and indigos, and in the evocative titles of works such as Standing, Injured Horse and Bloody Meteorite Falling from the Sky. In the ease of her oil transitions and the fluidity of her lines, there is a quiet but profound sense of release. The works in Spaying may emerge from pain, but they insist on clarity. Though anchored in personal experience, Spaying broadens Fang’s ongoing investigation into the construction of feminine identity and the quiet rebellions required to reclaim it. Confronting her own mortality has yielded a new lucidity, and with it, a sharpened resolve to live on her own terms.

SKARSTEDT NEW YORK CHELSEA

547 West 25th New York, NY 10001

www.skarstedt.com

Kim Tschang-yeul 김창열 @ MMCA Seoul - National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea - Retrospective Exhibition

Kim Tschang-yeul 김창열

National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, Seoul

22 August – 21 December 2025

Kim Tschang-yeul

Exhibition Poster 

Image provided by MMCA

Kim Tschang-yeul

Waterdrops SH87030, 1987 

Oil paint and newspaper on hemp, collage, 195×300 cm 

MMCA collection

Image provided by MMCA

Kim Tschang-yeul

Installation view at MMCA

Photograph by image Joom, Image provided by MMCA

The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA) presents the first large-scale posthumous retrospective of Kim Tschang-yeul (1929–2021), a seminal figure in Korean contemporary art.

The MMCA has consistently organized exhibitions grounded in research on senior artists and art history to consolidate the foundations of Korean contemporary art and elevate its stature. As part of these efforts, this exhibition provides a comprehensive reappraisal of Kim Tschang-yeul’s oeuvre within the broader contexts of Korea’s modern and contemporary history and art history.

Kim Tschang-yeul was a leading figure of Korea’s art informel movement in the 1950s, pioneering a synthesis of Western contemporary art idiom and Korean sensibilities. Following his time in New York starting in 1965, he settled in Paris in 1969, persistently experimenting to forge an independent artistic language in response to the times. The motif of the water drop, which emerged in the early 1970s and remained central to Kim’s practice for the rest of his life, became a symbol synonymous with the artist himself.

This retrospective closely examines Kim’s artistic journey, with particular focus placed on the fundamental aesthetics embedded in his work and the evolution of his water drop paintings. The exhibition also seeks to deepen the relatively scarce research on the artist, offering an opportunity to reassess the identity and contemporary significance of Korean art.

The exhibition unfolds across Galleries 6 and 7 in four sections: “Scar,” “Phenomenon,” “Waterdrops,” and “Recurrence.” Gallery 8, serving as a type of appendix to the exhibition, presents unpublished archival materials and works that allow visitors to encounter the artist’s life and creative process from multiple perspectives.

Kim Tschang-yeul

Installation view at MMCA

Photograph by image Joom, Image provided by MMCA

Kim Tschang-yeul: Scar

The first section, “Scar,” centers on Kim’s early works and traces the historical circumstances and artistic activities that shaped his practice. Born in Maengsan, Pyeongannam-do, Kim Tschang-yeul relocated south alone at the age of 16, leaving his hometown behind. Having lived through Korean liberation, division, and war, he inevitably internalized the realities of life and death—an experience that became a crucial foundation for his art. Driven by a desire for new forms of art, he co-founded the Hyundae Fine Artists Association in the late 1950s, which became a pivotal starting point for visualizing the wounds of the era and led the informel movement. Kim Tschang-yeul also pioneered the internationalization of Korean contemporary art by participating in global platforms such as the Paris Biennale (1961) and São Paulo Biennial (1965), which marked key turning points in his artistic career. Along with works exhibited at the São Paulo Biennial, this section features Kim’s pre-informel works such as Sunflower (1955)—shown publicly for the first time—and his cover illustrations for the Police Academy’s bimonthly magazine Gyeongchal sinjo from his time as a police officer, providing insight into both the artist’s formative period and the social realities he confronted.

Kim Tschang-yeul

Rite, 1965

Oil paint on canvas, 162×130cm 

MMCA collection

Image provided by MMCA

Kim Tschang-yeul

Rite, 1966 

Oil paint on canvas, 162×137 cm 

MMCA collection

Image provided by MMCA

Kim Tschang-yeul

Installation view at MMCA

Photograph by image Joom, Image provided by MMCA

Kim Tschang-yeul

Untitled, 1969 

Oil paint on canvas, 20.5×20.7 cm 

MMCA collection

Image provided by MMCA 

Kim Tschang-yeul

Composition, 1970

Acrylic paint and cellulose lacquer on canvas, 150×150cm

Private collection

Image provided by MMCA

Kim Tschang-yeul

Procession, 1971 

Acrylic paint and cellulose lacquer on linen, 150×150cm

Private collection

Image provided by MMCA

Kim Tschang-yeul: Phenomenon

The second section, “Phenomenon,” focuses on Kim’s works from the transitional years spent in New York and Paris, surveying the underexamined origins of his abstract paintings and the formal signs that prefigured the water drop motif. Encouraged by artist Kim Whanki (1913–1974), Kim Tschang-yeul moved to New York in 1965 with support from the Rockefeller Foundation. However, his informel paintings failed to garner attention there, and the emotional dissonance he experienced in a capitalist consumer society left him with a profound sense of alienation and doubt. During this period, he sought a departure from the thick impasto of art informel, experimenting with refined surfaces, geometric forms, and illusory spatial effects. After relocating to Paris in 1969, Kim Tschang-yeul produced the Phenomenon series, in which the previously rigid geometric forms seem to dissolve into organic shapes, while condensed masses are rendered with a mucilaginous quality reminiscent of human organs. These experiments serve as an important precursor to the water drop paintings. On view for the first time in Korea are 8 previously unexhibited paintings from Kim’s New York period, and 11 drawing works from that time, and a 2 water drop painting from 1971 that predates Event of Night (1972), long considered his first water drop work.

Kim Tschang-yeul

Waterdrops ABS N°2, 1973

Oil paint on canvas, 195×130 cm 

Wellside Gallery collection

Image provided by MMCA

Kim Tschang-yeul

Waterdrops, 1979

Oil paint on canvas, 80.5×100cm 

Private collection

Image provided by MMCA

Kim Tschang-yeul

Waterdrops, 1986

Acrylic paint and oil paint on canvas, 73×50 cm 

Private collection

Image provided by MMCA

Kim Tschang-yeul

Installation view at MMCA

Photograph by image Joom, Image provided by MMCA

Kim Tschang-yeul: Waterdrops

The third section, “Waterdrops,” illuminates the defining characteristics and development of Kim’s iconic water drop paintings. The mucilaginous, amorphous masses on his canvas finally transform into complete forms—clear water droplets. These droplets aren’t a product of chance but the culmination of sustained formal experimentation and ontological reflection. Even in the austere environment of a converted stable on the outskirts of Paris, Kim remained devoted to his water drop paintings, eventually garnering recognition with his 1973 solo exhibition in Paris. Initially, Kim Tschang-yeul employed an air-spray technique to render hyperrealistic water drops, later expanding the formal possibilities of his work by reconfiguring the physical relationship between paint and canvas, incorporating stains, and adopting collage techniques. More than mere depictions of material form, Kim’s water drops resonate with East Asian philosophical traditions, functioning as vehicles for meditation while simultaneously evoking a surreal sensibility that entrenched the motif as his distinctive artistic language. This section presents key works from the Water Drop series, ranging from early (1973) to late.

Kim Tschang-yeul

Recurrence SNM93001, 1991

Ink and oil paint on hemp, 300×195 (×4) cm

MMCA collection

Image provided by MMCA

Kim Tschang-yeul

Installation view at MMCA

Photograph by image Joom, Image provided by MMCA

Kim Tschang-yeul: Recurrence

The final section, “Recurrence,” probes the source of Kim’s artistic creation and thought through the interplay of language and image in Kim’s Thousand Character Classic paintings. In the mid-1980s, Kim began incorporating text into his compositions, opening a new realm of expression. While painting water drops on newspaper, he became acutely aware of the intimate relationship between text and image, which subsequently led to his Recurrence series using the Thousand Character Classic. For Kim Tschang-yeul, the Thousand Character Classic was not merely a text but a symbolic system through which he grasped the order of nature and the cosmos. The text is also deeply tied to his childhood. Kim Tschang-yeul filled his canvases with the text as if practicing calligraphy on parchment paper, an act that signified both a return to youth and a reaffirmation of East Asian sensibilities, ultimately opening a space for profound philosophical musings. In his later years, the water drop became Kim’s existential companion, bridging life and art, while the Recurrence series evolved into an act of requiem, suturing life’s scars through brushwork. The Recurrence series, in which text and water drops converge, constitutes both a formal achievement reflecting the essence of his art and evidence of his profound reflection on the roots of existence. This gallery features Recurrence SNM93001 (1991), a monumental 7.8-meter-wide painting from the MMCA collection being shown for the first time, along with an abridged version of the film The Man Who Paints Water Drops, in which Kim Tschang-yeul recounts his life and artistic journey.

After leaving the converted stable in the Paris suburb of Palaiseau for an apartment, Kim Tschang-yeul replaced the nameplate on his door with a single water drop. There, he was affectionately known as “Monsieur Gouttes d’eau” (Mr. Water Drop), and his studio became a kind of sarangbang—a convivial space where artists and friends gathered. The archival section prepared in Gallery 8, “Monsieur Gouttes d’eau, Kim Tschang-yeul,” serves as an appendix to the retrospective, revealing alternate facets of Kim’s life and art. Among the works presented is Il pleut (1973), inspired by surrealist poet Guillaume Apollinaire’s calligram of the same title, which long served as a wellspring of inspiration for Kim Tschang-yeul. The work, which translates the structure of the poem into water droplets, holds greater symbolic resonance in that it is exhibited here for the first time in Korea and abroad. Presenting rarely seen works alongside precious archival materials and large-scale photographs of Kim’s studio, this section offers visitors an intimate encounter with the life Kim Tschang-yeul lived in the company of water drops.

The exhibition catalog includes interviews with the artist, academic research on Kim’s New York works that have lacked sufficient study or exhibition, and an essay by his family, offering a thorough overview of his life. The exhibition layout, which reinterprets the oeuvre of this artist whose practice was long based in France from a fresh perspective, was designed in collaboration with Studio Adrien Gardère, known for its work with leading museums including the Louvre-Lens and the Grand Palais in Paris.

Kim Sunghee, director of the MMCA, notes, “This exhibition seeks to supplement the gaps in existing studies on Kim Tschang-yeul and provide a comprehensive view of the artist’s oeuvre, particularly works from underexplored periods. I hope that this retrospective will serve as an opportunity to rediscover and reassess Kim as an artist, while offering a rare occasion to encounter the distinctive aesthetics and sentiments inherent in his life and art.”

MMCA

NATIONAL MUSEUM OF MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY ART, KOREA

30 Samcheong-ro (Sogyeok-dong), Jongno-gu, Seoul 03062

www.mmca.go.kr

Related Posts:

The Making of Modern Korean Art: The Letters of Kim Tschang-Yeul, Kim Whanki, Lee Ufan, and Park Seo-Bo, 1961–1982

Tina Kim Gallery, New York, May 5 - June 21, 2025

Kim Tschang-Yeul: The Stillness of Water 

Tina Kim Gallery, New York, September 9 - October 16, 2021 

John Zurier @ Peter Blum Gallery, NYC - "Pink Dust" Exhibition

John Zurier: Pink Dust

Peter Blum Gallery, New York

September 2 – November 1, 2025

Peter Blum Gallery presents Pink Dust, an exhibition of new works by Berkeley and Reykjavík -based artist, JOHN ZURIER. This marks the artist’s eighth solo exhibition with the gallery.

John Zurier's exhibition Pink Dust features a body of work created over the past two years predominantly in Iceland. This group of smaller paintings and one large painting emerged from his time at a farmhouse at the base of a mountain with views of fields, the sea, and a glacier in the distance, deeply influencing his artistic practice. The works revisit and expand upon the abstract formal language Zurier developed after his initial visit to Iceland in 2002.

The exhibition title and the largest painting’s title, A History of Pink Dust, are taken from Ron Padgett's book of poems entitled, Pink Dust. They symbolize the tangible residue of the creative process—the erasures, revisions, and diligent effort in both poetry and painting. It speaks to accumulation and condensation, highlighting the complexity and time required to achieve simplicity.

Many of these paintings were created at a farm known for its persistent winds. John Zurier embraces this constant presence, viewing it as a pervasive form of breathing that moves through everything. He aims to cultivate stillness within this dynamic environment, striving for what he calls a silent, moving stillness that moves through the paintings themselves. Over the last two years, his focus has been on achieving greater density in the paintings, imbuing the atmosphere with more weight and making the light feel more substantial.

John Zurier's artistic exploration has led him deeper into the monochrome, which he perceives as a realm of infinite possibility. As color narrows—grays that hold traces of blue or green, whites that carry the memory of yellow— every delicate shift is amplified, encouraging a different mode of perception. Working with colors in lower registers and contrasts demands heightened attention. The paintings encourage viewers to slow down and engage with them over time, resisting quick interpretations and asserting their own temporal rhythms.

While some paintings possess the fluid immediacy of open skies, many surfaces are more distressed and worked. John Zurier employs techniques of scraping, wiping, building up, and tearing down, allowing the paint to accumulate the history of these actions. This creates a quality akin to weathering, mirroring how the Icelandic landscape bears the marks of time. Each surface functions as a field that can be simultaneously disrupted and continued, with marks creating their own logic and rhythm—what Zurier likens to the painting's breathing.

What John Zurier seeks is atmosphere as material itself. The unique, quiet diffusion of Iceland's air inspires him to have the paintings contain this quality. The slow light in Iceland fosters patience, building gradually and shifting imperceptibly with sudden shifts. Working in this light, Zurier has learned to trust the process over deliberate decisions, with paintings emerging from gradual layering.

These recent paintings demand more time to complete due to their layered complexity, requiring periods of dormancy between sessions, and thus holding a temporal density that reflects the desired atmospheric density within the work. Much like air holds moisture or light slows through water, these paintings embody a greater accumulation of time.

This working method has transformed Zurier's perception. His eye has adapted to subtlety, discerning micro-variations within apparent sameness. Stillness, for John Zurier, is not the absence of movement, but movement so concentrated it becomes its own form of rest. In these paintings, he strives to make this paradox visible—surfaces that vibrate with accumulated energy, yet offer profound quiet to those who spend time with them.

JOHN ZURIER (b. 1956, Santa Monica, CA) lives and works in Berkeley, CA and Reykjavík, Iceland. He earned an MFA at the University of California, Berkeley (1984). Instititutional exhibitions include Currier Museum, Manchester, NH (forthcoming 2026); Scheider Art Museum, Ashland, OR (forthcoming 2025); High Museum, Atlanta, GA (2025); The National Gallery of Iceland, Reykjavík (2023); Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, CA (2023, 2018, 2014); Stavanger Art Museum, Stavanger, Norway (2023); Moderna Museet Malmö, Sweden (2021); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA (2017); New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe, NM (2016); Colby Museum of Art, Waterville, ME (2015). He has exhibited at the 30th São Paulo Biennial, Brazil (2012); California Biennial, Orange County Museum of Art, CA (2010); 7th Gwangju Biennale, South Korea (2008); Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, England (2003); and the Whitney Biennial, NY (2002). He received a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship (2010).

PETER BLUM GALLERY

176 Grand Street, New York, NY 10013

www.peterblumgallery.com

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

Grandma Moses: A Good Day’s Work

Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington 

October 24, 2025 - July 12, 2026

Grandma Moses 

We Are Resting, 1951 

Oil on high-density fiberboard 

Smithsonian American Art Museum, 

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

© Grandma Moses Properties Co., NY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Artist Grandma Moses

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

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

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

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

SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM

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

americanart.si.edu

Rauha Mäkilä @ Helsinki Contemporary - "Syksy 2025" (Autumn 2025) Exhibition

Rauha Mäkilä 

Syksy 2025 (Autumn 2025)

Helsinki Contemporary

5 - 28 September 2025

Rauha Mäkilä

Photo courtesy of Helsinki Contemporary

Rauha Mäkilä

Tavantakainen, 2025

Oil on canvas, 80,5 cm x 60,5 cm

Photo: Jussi Tiainen

© Rauha Mäkilä, courtesy of Helsinki Contemporary

Rauha Mäkilä

Piilovaihe, 2025

Oil on canvas, 71 cm x 51 cm

Photo: Jussi Tiainen

© Rauha Mäkilä, courtesy of Helsinki Contemporary

Rauha Mäkilä’s solo exhibition Syksy 2025 (Autumn 2025) presents new works united by a common theme: exploring memories through painting.

Rauha Mäkilä draws inspiration from visual notes and photographs, transforming fleeting snapshots of fast-paced moments into painterly form. Unfolding slowly and deliberately, her paintings emphasise process, materiality, colour and composition.

For Rauha Mäkilä, painting is an antidote to the perfection-driven flood of digital images. Like a book, a painting demands time: it can challenge us, and transport us to another place and time.

Rauha Mäkilä

Halloween 2024, 2025

Oil on canvas, 240 cm x 200 cm

Photo: Jussi Tiainen

© Rauha Mäkilä, courtesy of Helsinki Contemporary

Rauha Mäkilä

Chaplin 1982, 2024

Oil on canvas, 230 cm x 200 cm

Photo: Jussi Tiainen

© Rauha Mäkilä, courtesy of Helsinki Contemporary

Colour is often her point of departure. As she paints, Rauha Mäkilä tests how colours interact to generate different moods and spaces. Too much harmony can be dull. Instead, rhythmic shifts, small imperfections, and even deliberately “wrong” colour choices create compositional vitality. Her works are always constructed in the language of painting: in the brushstrokes across the canvas, in the connections between shapes and colours, in the ways diverse elements support one another, and in what they ultimately convey.

Some of Mäkilä’s new works depict sculptures; others are “meta-paintings,” or paintings of paintings. These do not comment on the art world as such, but probe deeper questions of perception: how we see, what we value, and why. In the end, Mäkilä’s practice reminds us that what we encounter is not reality, but a constructed image—above all, a painting.

HELSINKI CONTEMPORARY

Bulevardi 10, 00120 Helsinki

helsinkicontemporary.com

Guimi You @ Lehmann Maupin, NYC - "Breath, Island" Exhibition

Guimi You

Breath, Island

Lehmann Maupin, New York

September 4 – October 18, 2025

Lehmann Maupin presents Breath, Island, a solo exhibition of new paintings by South Korean artist GUIMI YOU. Inspired by her recent solitary two-week journey to Korea’s Jeju Island, the works in this exhibition trace both the contours of the island’s volcanic terrain and the artist’s own inner landscapes. Through delicate, atmospheric brushwork and a sensibility rooted in East Asian painting traditions, Guimi You transforms Jeju’s flower-filled hillsides, lush botanic gardens, and quiet guest houses into intimate spaces of reflection and self-discovery. Breath, Island follows You’s inclusion in a number of recent institutional exhibitions, including those at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, the Columbus Museum of Art in Ohio, and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Miami, Florida.

Jeju Island, often described as Korea’s island of wind, stone, and women, holds a unique place in Korean cultural collective memory as both a natural sanctuary and nostalgic retreat. For Guimi You, its landscapes are both subject and mirror. Wandering its oreum (volcanic hills), resting beside ponds framed by blooming magnolia, or watching waterfalls carve their paths through black basalt, You allowed the rhythms of the island to shape her own: breath following landscape, painting following breath. Over time, her awareness surpassed the environment, reaching into the very experience of being alive.

Originally trained in East Asian painting, You’s understanding of East Asian pictorial traditions—where painting is not an act of depiction, but of evocation—anchors her approach. Her mark-making recalls the layered transparency of ink washes and the restrained harmony of traditional Korean landscapes, reminiscent of works like Jeong Seon’s Inwangjesaekdo, which capture not only form but atmosphere. Brushstrokes hover like mist, yet settle like memory.

At the same time, You’s years spent in the United Kingdom and United States imbued her practice with the materiality of oil painting and the structural dynamics of Western contemporary art. Her works exist between Eastern and Western legacies, and she approaches them through a lens of synthesis rather than negotiation. In her paintings, oil behaves like ink, and forms emerge with the lightness of thought. In balancing these disparate traditions, You’s paintings enter personal terrain—a space where East and West, past and present, landscape and self gently coalesce.

In Breath, Island, the act of painting is both record and refuge. Works such as Noble Silence (2025) depict the interior of the artist’s wooden guest house: a silent space that holds the sacred stillness of artistic solitude. Elsewhere, Rest (2025) captures figures lingering in a garden at the foot of Mt. Halla; here, human presence dissolves into landscape. In Pause (2025), a simple view of bonsai framed by a greenhouse window becomes a meditation on growth and restraint. Across the exhibition, traces of the artist herself—suggested silhouettes, personal objects, a figure mid-sketch—weave quietly throughout the scenes.

Breath, Island is less a chronicle of Jeju than a portrait of a painter in search of equilibrium. For GuimiYou, painting is not a destination, but a passage: a way of translating identity into image and holding two worlds, East and West, within the same frame. In this sense, her paintings function as islands themselves—floating spaces where the memories of one place and the lessons of another can meet, pause, and breathe.

LEHMANN MAUPIN NEW YORK

501 West 24th Street, New York, NY 10011

www.lehmannmaupin.com

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

Austin Martin White

Tracing Delusionships

Petzel Gallery, New York

September 4 – October 18, 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

Artist Austin Martin White

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

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

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

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

PETZEL GALLERY

520 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001

www.petzel.com

Calida Rawles @ Lehmann Maupin, London - "This Time Before Tomorrow"

Calida Rawles

This Time Before Tomorrow

Lehmann Maupin, London

September 11 – 29, 2025

In her first solo exhibition in London, This Time Before Tomorrow, internationally recognized painter CALIDA RAWLES presents a new body of work that explores cycles of time and human experience. In her signature, hyperrealist paintings, serenely-composed figures wade and float in water. The liquid element, for Calida Rawles, is a charged substance that reflects and refracts issues of race, power, and access. Often dressed in solid-colored garments that fold and billow in response to water’s force and movement, her figures flourish in imperceptible moments of submersion and release. Alternately, the face acts as a window into the subject’s soul. In this new suite of six paintings, water is a container for the ebbs and flows that define contemporary global life. The detailed faces typical of Calida Rawles are absent, and the moments of suspension that have become hallmarks of the artist’s work take on deeper meaning. This Time Before Tomorrow comes on the heels of Calida Rawles’ first solo museum exhibition, Cadida Rawles: Away with the Tides, which debuted at the Pérez Art Museum Miami in late 2024 before traveling to the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art in 2025, as well as her inclusion in the 12th Berlin Biennale in 2022.

In This Time Before Tomorrow, there are no identifiable figures and time does not travel in one direction. Broken, disjointed, murky, upside-down bodies represent the feeling of being knocked off one’s axis, and hyperrealist representation dissolves into fabulism. The paintings picture the liquid and solid contours of the “in-between,” muddying the boundaries between the mundane and the extraordinary by enfolding fantastical, supernatural elements into everyday life. Where and how do we locate ourselves and each other in times of unease and upheaval? What are the consequences of totalizing neglect and frenzy? How much is too much? Calida Rawles answers these questions with play and speculation. Her new works dive more deeply into color theory, asserting her expertise as a colorist; her experiments with both color and chiaroscuro define the buoyancy and stagnation that imbibe the bodies that float, sink, and fold into one another. Strong contrasts of dark and light color, largely within a tertiary palette, create atmospheric volume, depth, and drama. Gestural brushstrokes and depictions of movement mirror states of matter as well as liquid and solid states of being. Blurring the line between hyperrealist figuration and surrealist abstraction, the darkness of the palette personifies the weight of the present while the veil of the water becomes a prism and conduit for other worlds and galaxies.

Reference images of fire, lungs, a Bodhi tree, a living snake plant, and other natural elements inform the artist’s conceptual and formal thinking. In All is One, twin subjects turn inward to face each other at the center of the canvas. Rather than a mirror image, the two sides fuse into one another. The artist’s daughter served as the model for the painting, and resemblance—twin subjects, likeness, similitude, generational transfer, and the past facing the present—forms its core. All four elements are present—fire, earth, water, air—gesturing toward balance. And yet, this is not a picture of symmetry. The subject on the right is slightly higher than its twin, while two otherworldly bubbles draw the eye into another space and time punctuated by flames, lung tissue, tree branches, and shadows.

Abstraction and figuration blend and blur, just as the flesh of Calida Rawles’ subjects diffuse into each other and into aquatic expanses of primordial liquid. Aspects from philosophy texts, speculative fiction novels, ancient and indigenous mythologies, and Black feminist poetry collections and memoirs she read while preparing for the show—including the texts The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Survival Is a Promise, The Myth of Sisyphus, and The Alchemist—are also present. What is the artist’s role in moments of crisis? In When Time Carries, the certainty of time, location, and direction dissolve. Clarity and resolution give way to intermission and surrender as her subject appears to submit to water’s ability to hold, carry, and resist. Is the body floating or drowning? Ripples and bubbles obscure the figure’s face, camouflaging and hiding its identity and actions as it interacts with and is changed by its environment.

Bubbles, shadows, and stars recur in This Time Before Tomorrow as symbols of energy’s transformative potential. Both bubbles and stars are composed of gas. The result of nuclear fusion, air bubbles in this new suite of paintings double as stars and planets on the brink of transformation—an alternate state of matter and being. Once fully formed, a star releases excess fuel to create new stars. Here, stored energy and exhaustion become life forces that catalyze new entities constituted by movement, energy renewal, and subject-object relations that meet disequilibrium and disorientation with lightness and effervescence. Asymmetrical bodies of flesh, water, and gas become ciphers for power, weariness, and hope, while natural elements and processes accumulate energy waiting to be released and recycled.

Beyond water’s function as a vital force and historically charged site of memory, Rawles’ choices in color and pose, as well as how she renders space and the environment, are connected to broader questions of race, representation, and ethics within art history and everyday life. Each artwork is based on a photograph or series of photographs that the artist takes herself, and the tertiary colors of her palate signify the liminal space of transformation and existential angst that her figures tread. This alchemical focus on change, disillusionment, and the potential for renewal in This Time Before Tomorrow is a blueprint for the future. Reflection thus emerges not only as a surface element but also as a character in its own right and a method of making. At a time when chaos of all types—political, economic, environmental—proliferates, Calida Rawles’ new paintings prompt viewers to embrace the threshold between past and present as well as the feeling of being in transition. What results is a vibrant wellspring for inner and outer worldmaking.

LEHMANN MAUPIN LONDON

Mayfair, London

www.lehmannmaupin.com

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

Eckart Hahn: Silence 

Pablo’s Birthday, New York

September 5 – October 10, 2025

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

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

– Susan Sontag

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

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

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

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

PABLO'S BIRTHDAY

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

pablosbirthday.com