Friedrich Kunath @ Pace Gallery, NYC - 'Aimless Love' Exhibition

Friedrich Kunath: Aimless Love

Pace Gallery, New York

Through December 20, 2025

Friedrich Kunath 

You Told That Joke Twice, 2024-2025 

© Friedrich Kunath, courtesy Pace Gallery

Photography by Evan Walsh

Pace presents an exhibition of new paintings by Friedrich Kunath at its 510 West 25th Street gallery in New York. This is the artist’s first solo show in the city since 2019 and his debut presentation with the gallery, which began representing him in May 2025. The exhibition coincides with the release of a new monograph from Monacelli tracing Kunath’s work from the last 30 years. This publication features a new essay by Naomi Fry, staff writer at The New Yorker.

Known for his layered, lyrical work across painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, and video, the German-born, Los Angeles-based artist reimagines rich and diverse source material in cathartic images and objects. Many of Kunath’s paintings depict vibrant landscapes of worldly beauty, often incorporating poetic phrases and quotations from music, film, and literature. Drawing inspiration from Romanticism, popular culture, and his own personal history, he imbues his art with a myriad of seemingly disparate references and resonances, navigating the murky spaces between irony and sincerity, tragedy and comedy. Thereby, Kunath sees himself as a composer of ideas and images across mediums, working fragments into artworks that become worlds unto themselves.

His first presentation at Pace in New York, Aimless Love, meditates on coming and going, free from intent, with aimless momentum. The works are inspired by the artist’s memories of listening to music while traveling by train or car as a child, looking out the window and watching the world pass by. With his new paintings, Friedrich Kunath aims to immortalize the sense of total presence in those memories and experiences, while acknowledging the paradox of trying to hold onto an inherently fleeting, ephemeral feeling.

Installed in ascending and descending orientations that evoke an airplane’s trajectories during takeoff and landing, Kunath’s latest paintings lean more heavily into a meditative, contemplative space than his past bodies of work. These filmic, deeply personal compositions depict expansive seas and crashing waves, rugged cliffsides, scenic roads, and sweeping vistas, exploring moments of connection and loneliness, love and longing, absurdity and wonder. Seen through the windshield or mirrors of a car, the outside world takes on new resonances in the new works. In I Hope Future Me Is Happy (2024–25), a car rounds the bend of a mountain highway, about to disappear but still in sight. In another, a plane glides through a golden sky with the setting sun blazing through its windows. With Have Love, Will Travel (2025), Friedrich Kunath situates the viewer on the passenger side of a car, a decision that reflects his view of his artistic role.

Kunath’s process for these paintings brings forth a dialogue between the unconscious and the representational image. At the start, he embeds abstractions and writings into wet impasto on his canvases. These underside paintings are made in isolation of the image that is created on top, but, in the end, there is a miraculous synchronicity between the two layers— his writings in the dried, textural impasto are legible in his finished paintings, bringing new meanings and juxtapositions to his compositions. With this “voice coming from behind the image,” Kunath says, he invites the viewer to make their own readings of the work.

In addition to paintings, Aimless Love includes a new sculpture titled Following the Feeling (2025), comprised of one pair of dress shoes, shoelaces, wire, and nylon string. This work is a more somber, existential take on Kunath’s 2009 installation LA Trainer (Permanent Reminder Of A Temporary Feeling)—a new iteration of an artwork that he produced early in his career.

Beyond his exhibition at Pace in New York, Kunath’s work can be found in the collections of the city’s Museum of Modern Art and the Marieluise Hessel Collection at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson.

Artist Friedrich Kunath

Friedrich Kunath (b. 1974, Chemnitz, Germany) works across painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, and video to create resonant, evocative, and often melancholy compositions. Based in Los Angeles since 2007, Friedrich Kunath creates work grounded in his experiences on the West Coast of the United States and his enduring relationship with Europe. His art combines references to German Romanticism and American popular culture, and it is informed, in part, by his interests in music, tennis, cars, and the practice of collecting. Kunath's paintings depict vibrant landscapes of otherworldly beauty, and he often incorporates poetic phrases and quotations from music or film into his canvases, forging a visual language distinguished by interplays of wit, emotional depth, and cultural memory. The artist graduated from Braunschweig University of Arts, Germany, in 1998.

Recent solo exhibitions of his work include Friedrich Kunath: Coming Home Was as Beautiful as Going Away, KINDLCentre for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2023); Friedrich Kunath: I Remain Exhausted, Tim Van Laere Gallery, Antwerp, Belgium (2024); Friedrich Kunath: I Need Solitude, But I Also Need You, Nassima Landau, Tel Aviv, Israel (2024); Friedrich Kunath: AT THIS POINT IN MY LIFE (I'LL HAVE THE CALAMARI), G2 Kunsthalle, Leipzig, Germany (2024); and Friedrich Kunath: One Day I’ll Follow the Byrds (Tutto Pasta), Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin (2024). 

Friedrich Kunath’s work is held in prominent public collections worldwide, including the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, California; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota, among others. 

PACE GALLERY NEW YORK

510 West 25th Street, New York City

www.pacegallery.com

Friedrich Kunath: Aimless Love

Pace Gallery, New York, November 7 – December 20, 2025

Joan Mitchell @ David Zwirner, NYC - 'To define a feeling: Joan Mitchell, 1960–1965' Exhibition Curated by Sarah Roberts

To define a feeling 

Joan Mitchell, 1960–1965 

Curated by Sarah Roberts 

David Zwirner, New York 

November 6 — December 13, 2025 

Joan Mitchell 

Untitled, c. 1963 

© Estate of Joan Mitchell

I’m trying for something more specific than movies of my everyday life: To define a feeling.

—Joan Mitchell in ARTnews, April 1965

David Zwirner presents an exhibition of paintings and works on paper by Joan Mitchell (1925–1992) that focuses on the years 1960 to 1965, a brief but critical juncture in the artist’s development. Capping off a yearlong celebration of the centennial of the artist’s birth, this presentation is curated by Sarah Roberts, senior director of curatorial affairs at the Joan Mitchell Foundation, and brings together a significant group of works from public and private collections, as well as that of the Joan Mitchell Foundation. 

During these years, Joan Mitchell spent many weeks each summer and fall living on a sailboat and exploring the Mediterranean from a home base along France’s Côte d’Azur with her companion, painter Jean Paul Riopelle, and her works from this period are inflected by these voyages and the sites of the Mediterranean. Back in her Parisian studio, Mitchell drew on the experience of looking out at the water, horizon, and rocky coasts, resulting in paintings that depart radically from those of the preceding years, and are distinct from those that would follow. Characterized by dark, central masses of swirling brushstrokes in deep greens and blues partially obscuring rich tonal colors embedded beneath, these turbulent canvases exchange the grounding armature that had structured much of her previous landscape-inspired work for more experimental compositional strategies. Constituting, as the poet John Ashbery described, “an unhurried meditation on bits of landscape and air,” the profound, dramatic works on view offer insight into Mitchell’s distinctive process in evolving the structural and chromatic composition of her paintings, while dynamically engaging many of the key themes and motifs that extend throughout her oeuvre.

As Sarah Roberts notes of the exhibition:

For Joan Mitchell, abstract painting had a singular capacity to capture and communicate multiple layers of human experience—things seen, touched, felt, and remembered—in a single visual field. From 1960 to 1965, her days and nights included frequent Mediterranean sailing trips to Corsica and Italy with her partner Jean Paul Riopelle, time spent reading and discussing poetry with friends, deep thinking about painting, and keenly felt losses of loved ones, as well the assassination of John F. Kennedy and growing social unrest in both the US and France. Reflecting on this tumultuous period later in life, Mitchell named all these events as impacting the direction of her work. Never seeking to create direct representations of particular moments or to simply channel a single emotion or thought, she sought instead to render in paint something new that articulated the sum of experiences in all their complexity and ambiguity—to define a feeling.

The selection of paintings and drawings gathered here shows Mitchell at work from 1960 to 1965, responding to the sea’s expanse and surrounding landscapes, and generating fresh ideas about painting itself. Central masses of densely applied paint in somber tones began to emerge in her canvases in 1960. By 1962, she had narrowed the range of hues to the darkest greens, browns, and blues, colors so deep that this group of works has frequently been referred to as the “black paintings,” though true black was rarely included. Mitchell concentrated her swirling central masses into floating islands of color within subtly varied, off-white fields. Within just two years, she would shift again, opening the concentrations into constellations of loose, squared forms and tangled brushwork as she continually experimented.

Reflecting on recent work in her 1965 oral history with art historian Dorothy Seckler, Mitchell noted, “Clement Greenberg said there never should be a central image, so I decided to make one.” With this body of work, Mitchell also patently challenged prevailing conventions of balanced composition and harmonious color, choosing an enigmatic palette with flashes of sharp contrast, shifting her “central” forms slightly off axis, and playing with backgrounds and corners. Echoes of Mediterranean light and rocky, shrub-studded coastlines were met with the turbulence and toughness in her painting technique, giving rise to one of Mitchell’s most daring, moody, and probing bodies of work.

Highlights from the exhibition include Mandres, c. 1962 (Private Collection, courtesy of McClain Gallery), an important transitional work that shows Mitchell beginning to experiment with central forms; Untitled, 1963 (The Museum of Modern Art, New York), an expansive triptych characteristic of Mitchell’s growing engagement with multi-panel works during this period; as well as a selection of small-scale paintings that were inspired by stations on the Paris Metro and debuted in her 1965 solo exhibition at Stable Gallery, New York, including one on loan from the Hofstra University Museum of Art. Also on view are several large-scale paintings from the collection of the Joan Mitchell Foundation that span these years, as well as a grouping of rarely seen works on paper made using charcoal and crayon—sometimes in combination with watercolor—that extend Mitchell’s exploration of form and color in a different medium.

The exhibition is supplemented by a selection of primary materials from the archives of the Joan Mitchell Foundation. A fully illustrated catalogue with new scholarship on this period by Sarah Roberts and other authors is forthcoming from David Zwirner Books.

Artist Joan Mitchell

Joan Mitchell (1925–1992) established a singular visual vocabulary over the course of her more than four decade career. While rooted in the conventions of abstraction, Mitchell’s inventive reinterpretation of the traditional figure-ground relationship and synesthetic use of color set her apart from her peers, resulting in intuitively constructed and emotionally charged compositions that alternately conjure individuals, observations, places, and points in time. Her prodigious oeuvre encompasses not only the large-scale abstract canvases for which she is best known, but also smaller paintings, drawings, and prints.

Born in Chicago and educated at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, from which she received a BFA (1947) and an MFA (1950), Joan Mitchell moved to New York in 1949 and was an active participant in the downtown arts scene. She began splitting her time between Paris and New York in 1955, before moving permanently to France in 1959. In 1968, Joan Mitchell settled in Vétheuil, a small village northwest of Paris, while continuing to exhibit her work throughout the United States and Europe. It was in Vétheuil that she began regularly hosting artists at various stages of their careers, providing space and support to help them develop their art. When Mitchell passed away in 1992, her will specified that a portion of her estate should be used to establish a foundation to directly support visual artists.

In 1951, Joan Mitchell became one of the few female members of the exclusive Eighth Street Club, and, that spring, her work was included in The Ninth Street Exhibition, organized by charter members of The Club with the assistance of Leo Castelli, which helped to codify what became known as the New York School of primarily abstract painters. During her lifetime, Mitchell’s work was exhibited in solo presentations at numerous influential galleries in the United States and Europe, including Stable Gallery, New York (1953, 1955, 1957, 1958, 1961, 1965); Dwan Gallery, Los Angeles (1961); Galerie Jean Fournier, Paris (1967, 1969, 1971, 1976, 1978, 1980, 1984, 1987, 1990, 1992); Martha Jackson Gallery, New York (1968, 1972); Xavier Fourcade, Inc., New York (1976, 1977, 1980, 1981, 1983, 1985, 1986); and Robert Miller Gallery, New York (1989, 1991). The Joan Mitchell Foundation was previously represented by Cheim & Read, New York, where the artist’s work was the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, in 1997, 2002, 2005, 2007, 2008, 2011, 2014, 2016, and 2018.

Her first institutional solo exhibition, My Five Years in the Country, was held in 1972 at the Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, New York. Subsequent museum presentations during Mitchell’s lifetime were held at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1974, 1992); Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1982); Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York (traveled to Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; and La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, California; 1988–1989).

In 2002, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, organized a posthumous retrospective of Mitchell’s work, which traveled to Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas; and Des Moines Art Center, Iowa. In 2010, the Joan Mitchell Foundation organized Joan Mitchell in New Orleans, which included a symposium on her life and work, and three concurrent exhibitions held at Tulane University’s Newcomb Art Gallery, New Orleans Museum of Art, and the Contemporary Arts Center of New Orleans. In 2015, Joan Mitchell Retrospective: Her Life and Paintings was presented at Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria, and subsequently traveled to Museum Ludwig, Cologne. Additional recent museum solo presentations include those at Kunsthalle Emden, Germany (2008; traveled to Palazzo Magnani, Reggio Emilia, Italy and Musée des Impressionnismes, Giverny, France, 2009); Inverleith House, Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh (2010); and Musée des Beaux-Arts de Caen, France (2014). In 2017, Mitchell / Riopelle: Nothing in Moderation opened at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec and traveled to the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (2018); and Fonds Hélène et Édouard Leclerc, Landerneau, France (2018–2019).

A comprehensive Joan Mitchell traveling retrospective was co-organized by the Baltimore Museum of Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The retrospective was first on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2021, before traveling to the Baltimore Museum of Art the following year. The exhibition was subsequently presented at Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, through 2023, where the complementary exhibition, Monet – Mitchell, was also on view. The Saint Louis Art Museum presented an adaptation of Monet – Mitchell in 2023, featuring eight works by Mitchell and two by Monet.

Mitchell’s work can be found in prominent institutional collections worldwide, including the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York; Anderson Collection at Stanford University, California; Art Institute of Chicago; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, Paris; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Leeum Museum of Art, Seoul; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Nakanoshima Museum of Modern Art, Osaka, Japan; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC; RISD Museum, Providence, Rhode Island; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Shizuoka Prefectural Museum of Art, Japan; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate, United Kingdom; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

DAVID ZWIRNER

537 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011

www.davidzwirner.com

Joan Semmel @ Jewish Museum, NYC - "Joan Semmel: In the Flesh" Exhibition

Joan Semmel: In the Flesh 

Jewish Museum, New York 

December 12, 2025 — May 31, 2026 

The Jewish Museum in New York presents a major exhibition of boundary-breaking work by Joan Semmel alongside a selection of artist-curated works from the Museum’s collection in Joan Semmel: In the Flesh. For over 50 years, Joan Semmel has upended traditional figuration with her boldly declarative nude painting through gestural and hyperreal representation. In the Flesh juxtaposes 16 paintings by the artist, drawn from several periods across her career, many monumental in scale, with nearly 50 modern and contemporary artworks from the Museum’s expansive holdings. The works from the collection—encompassing painting, sculpture, photography, and works on paper—were selected by the artist for their engagement with themes present in her work, including her exploration of beauty, agency, and self-perception.

The exhibition is organized by Rebecca Shaykin, Barnett & Annalee Newman Curator of Contemporary Art, and Liz Munsell, Curatorial Consultant, in partnership with Joan Semmel.

“As we consider new possibilities for showcasing the Museum’s robust collection, In the Flesh has offered a special opportunity for exploring the range of narratives and stories that radiate from our holdings,” said James S. Snyder, Helen Goldsmith Menschel Director. “Dedicated to and curated in concert with Joan Semmel, In the Flesh highlights the work and insights of an artist who continues to be ahead of her time. The exhibition simultaneously reflects the Museum’s legacy of championing artists who fearlessly share their lived histories and challenge the status quo through their creative practice.”

Born in 1932 into a secular Jewish family in the Bronx, Joan Semmel trained as an Abstract Expressionist in New York before moving to Spain in 1963, where she enjoyed early success on an international stage. Upon her return to New York in 1970 as a newly divorced mother of two, she found community within the burgeoning feminist and anti-censorship movements, alongside her peers, including Judith Bernstein, Louise Bourgeois, Joyce Kozloff, Joan Snyder, Anita Steckel, Hannah Wilke, and other trailblazing women artists. During this period, she also curated two of the earliest exhibitions of contemporary feminist art, giving women artists a public platform denied to them by many mainstream institutions. Over the course of the following decades, Joan Semmel forged a distinct painterly language of nude imagery that was a defiant response to the male gaze and spoke to her own bodily experience as a woman, emphasizing female empowerment and sexual agency. At 93, Semmel remains a master of figuration, continuing to challenge views of female aging and respectability.

In the Flesh foregrounds the artist’s diligent, life-long investigation of embodied female experience. Spanning over 50 years of the artist’s practice, the exhibition offers new points of entry to some of Semmel’s most pivotal series. Works on view include her 1978 painting Sunlight, one of Semmel’s iconic self-images and a defining work of the feminist movement, together with examples from her bold, high-key Erotic Series of the early 1970s, as well as complex multi-figure compositions, including the recent large-scale Skin in the Game (2019).

The kaleidoscopic selection of Semmel’s featured works provides context for artworks from the Museum’s collection by artists including Ida Applebroog, Marc Chagall, Nan Goldin, David Levinthal, Alice Neel, Nancy Spero, Man Ray, Larry Rivers, Laurie Simmons, Joan Snyder, and Hannah Wilke, among others.

“When I arrived at the Jewish Museum 15 years ago, Sunlight immediately emerged as one of my favorite works in the collection. It is thrilling to present this painting within a comprehensive view of the artist’s development as a painter of the female form, and especially of her own body over time, and to be doing so in such close dialogue with the artist herself,” noted Rebecca Shaykin. “Joan Semmel’s paintings challenged the male-dominated art world of the 1970s. Her work has inspired generations of artists and shifted the trajectory of contemporary art history. Her selections from the Museum’s collection demonstrate how influential the feminist movement has been in changing the conversation about whose perspectives we value and why.”

Artist Joan Semmel

Joan Semmel (b.1932) has long centered her practice around representations of the body from the female perspective. Trained as an Abstract Expressionist in the 1950s, Joan Semmel began her painting career in Spain and South America. Returning to New York in the early 1970s, she turned toward figurative painting, constructing compositions in response to concerns around female representation in popular culture and in art. Her practice traces the transformation that women’s sexuality has experienced in the last century and emphasizes the possibility for representing female autonomy through the body.

Semmel’s work was the subject of a career retrospective, Skin in the Game, presented by the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA in 2021, traveling thereafter to the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York in 2022. Her work has been featured in exhibitions at Tate, London (2023); the Brooklyn Museum (2016 and 2023); the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs (2020); Stadtgalerie Saarbrücken, Germany (2018); the Jewish Museum, New York (2010 and 2018); the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2016); the Bronx Museum of the Arts (2013); and the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio (2008), among others. 

The artist’s paintings are in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; the Brooklyn Museum; the Dallas Museum of Art; the Jewish Museum, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate, London; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others. She is Professor Emeritus of Painting at Rutgers University.

Born in the Bronx, New York, and currently based in SoHo, Joan Semmel studied at Cooper Union, Pratt Institute, and the Art Students League of New York.

Anish Kapoor: Early Works is also on view through February 1, 2026 at The Jewish Museum.

JEWISH MUSEUM, NEW YORK

1109 5th Avenue at 92nd Street, New York, NY 10128

thejewishmuseum.org

Uman @ Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield - 'After all the things …' Exhibition

Uman: After all the things …

Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield

October 19, 2025 - May 10, 2026

Uman 

melancholia in a snowy walk, 2025

© Uman

Courtesy of the artist, Nicola Vassell Gallery and Hauser & Wirth 

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum presents Uman’s first institutional solo exhibition, After all the things …, where she debuts a new body of work that includes paintings, works on paper, video, and sculpture, all of which span the entirety of the Museum’s first floor galleries. The exhibition is on view at The Aldrich through May 10, 2026.

Uman’s practice is interdisciplinary and ever-evolving. Comprising painting, drawing, murals, mosaic, sculpture, and glass, her work is rooted in the tangibility of color and the transportive power of images. Shaped by memories, dreams, and the constant flux of life around her, Uman’s visual language is intuitive and multilayered, adaptable and free; it is neither exclusively abstract nor metaphorical—it grows out of what is indeterminate and into the transcendent. Uman’s inspirations range from her childhood in East Africa and diasporic experiences in Europe and the US, to a love for textiles and transcontinental fashion. Her subject matter evokes the flamboyant fabrics worn by women in the Somali bazaars, the slanted flourishes of Arabic calligraphy taught in the madrasas, and the vast countryside of Kenya and Upstate New York.

Created with oil, acrylic, spray paint, oil stick, and even sometimes incorporating elements of collage and sewing as well, Uman’s compositions dance with animated hues and phantasmagoric patterns. She favors solid and bold colors—reds, yellows, greens, and blues—that she uses to create spirals, grids, and pendants, all-seeing eyes, circles and stars, interspersed with whimsical creatures and native botany. Working on many pieces simultaneously, Uman builds her pictorial arrangements—many of which reference nineteenth-century French painting, surrealism, and visionary abstraction alongside the natural world—with energetic mark making methods, using dry brushes and even her fingers and palms, resulting in surface treatments that disrupt the conventional distinction between paintings and drawing. Fusing art history with autobiography and spirituality with reality, Uman’s work pursues the metaphorical through a close attention to, and reverence for, the natural world. 

A publication, co-published by Gregory R. Miller & Co., accompanies the exhibition, featuring an essay by the curator, images of the works on view, and installation images.

Artist Uman

Born in Somalia, Uman was raised in Kenya before migrating to Denmark as a teenager and later to New York in her early adulthood. Reflecting her experiences growing up across continents and cultures, her vibrant visual vocabulary draws upon memories of her East African childhood, rigorous education in traditional Arabic calligraphy, deep engagement with dreams, and fascination with kaleidoscopic color. In 2010, she relocated to Upstate New York, where she currently lives and works.

Uman has had solo exhibitions at Nicola Vassell, New York; Hauser & Wirth, London and Zurich; Eleni Koroneou Gallery, Athens; Fierman, New York; Anne De Villepoix, Paris; and White Columns, New York. She has been featured in group exhibitions at Le Consortium, Dijon, France; Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, CA; the Aga Khan Museum, Toronto, Canada; For-Site Foundation at Fort Mason Chapel, San Francisco; Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; Karma, New York; and Ramiken Crucible, New York. In 2022, she was the recipient of the inaugural grant for The Cube at TRIADIC’s FORMAT Festival in Bentonville, AR. This year, her work is exhibited at the 12th SITE SANTA FE International. 

The exhibition at The Aldrich will be followed by a survey at the Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College. A public program related to both exhibitions will be presented at the Hessel in 2026.

Uman: After all the things … is organized by Amy Smith-Stewart, Diana Bowes Chief Curator.

THE ALDRICH CONTEMPORARY ART MUSEUM

258 Main Street, Ridgefield, CT 06877 

www.thealdrich.org

Isaac Tin Wei Lin @ Fleisher/Ollman, Philadelphia - 'Intertwined Infinities' Exhibition

Isaac Tin Wei Lin 

Intertwined Infinities 

Fleisher/Ollman, Philadelphia 

November 20, 2025 — January 17, 2026 

Isaac Tin Wei Lin 

Intertwined Infinities, 2025 

Flashe and acrylic gouache on linen 

16 ⅛ × 12 ½ in (41 × 31.8 cm), ILI 662

© Isaac Tin Wei Lin, courtesy of Fleisher/Ollman

Fleisher/Ollman presents Intertwined Infinities, a solo exhibition with Isaac Tin Wei Lin featuring paintings on paper, panel, and canvas; and drawings on paper and photographs. Lin continues his ongoing exploration of how calligraphic gestures can be melded with abstract elements like lattices, biomorphs, and op-art shapes. A new theme in his work are images of tentacle and vine forms that appear part animal part plant. Lin’s paintings often reference patterns and structures found in nature bringing to mind single cellular organisms, plants, DNA helices, and clouds. Lin’s abstraction can also transcend the terrestrial and the somatic and move outward into the cosmos where constellations pulsate with colorful vibrancy and alien life forms sprout from strange vases and egg-like sacs. While Lin’s practice is distinctly his own, his work nonetheless resonates with the history of 20th century abstraction by artists such as Joan Miro, Wassily Kandinsky, Arshile Gorky, Adolph Gottlieb, and Bradley Walker Tomlin; and the extreme patterning of contemporary artists like Barry McGee and Andrew Jeffrey Wright.

Lin’s play between the earthly and the cosmic might be the fruit of his 2025 residency at Oreum on the volcanic island of Jeju, South Korea. This unusual setting allowed for a new experience where he engaged with the wonders of a primordial landscape that evoke both the origins of our planet and the universe itself. The drawings on photographs on view in the exhibition depict the otherworldly lava rock formations on Jeju as well as other sites he visited while traveling in Asia. The Oreum residency was a much needed respite from a period in Lin’s life marked by alienation and doubt, where he found time to make paintings that he views as “meditations on absence, temporality, gravity and the fabric of space, emptiness and fullness—how both can seem the same.”

Isaac Tin Wei Lin (b. 1976; lives and works Philadelphia, PA) has had solo exhibitions at Temple Contemporary, the Asian Arts Initiative, the Print Center, Fleisher/Ollman, and Gallery 543 at URBN (all in Philadelphia); Park Life, Queen’s Nails Annex, Woodward Flats, RVCA, and Needles and Pens (all in San Francisco); and Lamp Harajuku, Tokyo. Isaac Tin Wei Lin participated with the DFW collective in Arts Le Havre, 2012 Contemporary Art Biennial, France. He has been featured in group exhibitions at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Institute of Contemporary Art, Fleisher/Ollman, Painted Bride Arts Center, and the Philadelphia Museum of Jewish Art (all in Philadelphia); the Hole, Bravin Lee, and Franklin Parrasch (all in New York); MASS Gallery, Austin; Elizabeth Leach Gallery, Portland, OR; Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; Somerset House, London, UK; and Scooters for Peace, Tokyo, among others. Isaac Tin Wei Lin has been commissioned to paint several large-scale murals, including three through Mural Arts Philadelphia; a multi-story stairway mural for Facebook's headquarters in San Francisco; and a thirteen-story mural in Heerlen, the Netherlands, commissioned by Stichting Street Art Foundation. His work is in the collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Berkeley Art Museum, and the Free Library of Philadelphia. Isaac Tin Wei Lin was a resident at Oreum, Jeju Island, South Korea in 2025.

FLEISHER/OLLMAN

915 Spring Garden Street, Philadelphia PA 19123

www.fleisher-ollmangallery.com

Li Songsong @ Pace Gallery, NYC - 'History Painting' Exhibition

Li Songsong: History Painting

Pace Gallery, New York

November 7 - December 20, 2025

Li Songsong 

Revolution, 2025

© Li Songsong, courtesy Pace Gallery

Pace presents History Painting, an exhibition of new paintings by the Beijing-based artist Li Songsong, at its 540 West 25th Street gallery in New York. Showcasing a selection of paintings created this year, the presentation spotlights Li’s enduring engagement with history as both inspiration and substance for his work. History Painting is accompanied by an exhibition booklet from Pace Publishing featuring an essay by the gallery’s Curatorial Director, Xin Wang.

One of the most celebrated contemporary painters in China, Li Songsong has honed his distinct style—marked by his use of reliefs, bold brushstrokes, and solid color blocks—over the last 20 years as part of his pursuit “to paint something that had a certain distance from reality,” as he once put it. Contending with history, politics, and culture, Li’s art is forged in enactments of accumulation and subtraction, of exposure and obscuration. At once personal, imaginative, and truthful, his deeply expressionistic paintings often depict fragmented, semi-abstract figurations underpinned by narratives that the viewer is invited to decipher and absorb.

Over the last several decades, the artist has deconstructed and reconstructed recognizable images from newspapers, films, historical photographs, and other media, reinterpreting them through the lens of his own experiences and memories while also creating new textural dimensions within his works. In abstracting images from their original contexts, Li Songsong has cultivated a unique visual language that asks viewers to see the world in new terms—from a different aesthetic perspective.

“History has always been a prime substance, if not subject, throughout Li’s practice, and the artist works with it not as evidence, but as symptom and pathos,” Xin Wang writes in her new text for the artist’s  show. “It is not so jarring, then, that in his recent series explicitly titled History and Past, representational content has given way to the visceral and relational.”

In his presentation with Pace in New York, the artist, who has been represented by the gallery since 2009, shows new paintings from his body of work titled History, which he began in 2023. Entirely abstract, these paintings, all of which are square in format, can be understood as portraits of his ever-evolving relationship to the medium.

“This new group of works has lost its reliance on visual sources,” Li Songsong says. “I simply let the language extracted from (painterly) practice become the protagonist and construct a historical metaphor in the form of ‘painting.’”

Building up his compositions in grids as part of his process, Li Songsong uses color to express his state of mind at the moment the paint meets the surface of his canvases. He sees each of his brushstrokes as agentive and idiosyncratic, indelible and eternal even as they are folded ever deeper into the painterly layers and recesses of his works.

Li Songsong’s paintings animate the fragmentary nature of images and memory, paying particular attention to the people, events, and themes of modern and contemporary Chinese history. Li is interested in the way images cultivate histories and provoke memories, even if their relationship or reference to the past is nebulous and indirect. Although his compositions draw on found imagery—with a range of sources including restaurant advertisements, historical photographs, and movie stills, among others—Li freely reinterprets his sources, altering or omitting visual information. The resulting works eschew narratives, presenting pieces and traces of something rather than a totalizing record, creating new ways of looking at existing information.

PACE

540 West 25th Street, New York City

www.pacegallery.com

Portia Zvavahera @ David Zwirner, Los Angeles - 'Zvibereko zvemweya wangu' Exhibition

Portia Zvavahera

Zvibereko zvemweya wangu

David Zwirner, Los Angeles

November 14, 2025 – February 7, 2026

Portia Zvavahera

Takasunungurwa, 2025 

© Portia Zvavahera. Courtesy Stevenson and David Zwirner

David Zwirner presents Zvibereko zvemweya wangu, its third solo exhibition with the Zimbabwean artist Portia Zvavahera. Taking place at the gallery’s 606 N Western Avenue location in Los Angeles, this presentation features a series of new works that continues to develop Zvavahera’s experiments with different painting processes and subject matter by joining her carefully charted dream worlds with her lived experience and daily rituals. Portia Zvavahera expands her practice with familiar motifs and narratives; her works are populated by symbolic creatures that become powerful conduits for the interpretation of spiritual visions and the contemplation of our earthly existence. 

In her paintings, Portia Zvavahera gives form to emotions beyond the domains of everyday life and thought. Her vivid imagery is rooted in the cornerstones of our earthly existence—life and death, pain and pleasure, isolation and connection, and love and loss. These deeply personal visions are realized through layers of vibrant color and ornate, veil-like patterns that the artist builds up into palimpsestic surfaces through a combination of expressive brushwork and elaborate printmaking techniques. Zvavahera’s compositions draw on particular traditions of figuration in past and present Zimbabwe, first expressed in the work of Thomas Mukarobgwa in the 1960s, while also pointing to postwar artistic practices that probe the nature of the human condition.

Zvavahera’s latest exhibition powerfully continues this exploration of the human condition. Themes of love, loss, fear, family, and protection recur throughout this new series of paintings, mirroring her broader practice. The show title Zvibereko zvemweya wangu loosely translates from Shona as the “fruits of my soul,” aptly describing the intense creative output behind these works. These monumental paintings are among her most energetic to date, deeply inspired by her love for family and, particularly, the passing of her late grandmother. Here, Portia Zvavahera resumes her study of dreamscapes, delving into subject matter that women, especially mothers, have experienced across time. She strips away the protective veneer of modern society, exposing core emotions that relate to the profundity of life and death. Incorporating new motifs like vessels, trees, water lilies, and snakes, Zvavahera’s paintings guide viewers on journeys, telling abstracted stories about the strength within the maternal and matriarchal world, where reality and imagination merge.

Shona is the artist’s native language, which she speaks at home; titles in Shona are provided with a translation only when Portia Zvavahera feels that the English words suffice. Experimenting with batik and block printing, oil sticks, and acrylic paints, Zvavahera's canvases are applied with layers, and then, like dreams, unfold into camouflaged compositions rich in symbolism and psychological depth. Within Zvibereko zvemweya wangu, Portia Zvavahera portrays small figures, children unbound by the canvas and surrounded by protecting arms and feathered veils painted with leaves, using a traditional wax-resist batik method, in works such as Kubuditswa muhari (2025). Others like Kubudiswa (redeemed) (2025) show a series of bowing figures—a community seemingly praying as a form of collective strength, demonstrating their power in numbers.

Artist Portia Zvavahera

Portia Zvavahera was born in 1985 in Harare, Zimbabwe, where she currently lives and works. She studied at the BAT Visual Arts Studio, National Gallery of Zimbabwe, from 2003 to 2005. She then received a diploma in fine arts from Harare Polytechnic in 2006.

Portia Ndakaoneswa murima, the artist’s first solo presentation in New York and her second with the gallery, was on view at David Zwirner, New York, in 2021. Zvavahera’s first exhibition with the gallery, Ndakavata pasi ndikamutswa nekuti anonditsigira, was at its London location in 2020.

The artist has presented several solo exhibitions with Stevenson, Cape Town and Johannesburg (2014–2020), and a solo exhibition with Marc Foxx Gallery, Los Angeles (2017). The National Gallery of Zimbabwe, Harare, presented her solo exhibition Under My Skin in 2010, and in 2020, the Institute of Contemporary Art Indian Ocean, Port Louis, Mauritius, held her solo exhibition Walk of Life. She was invited to show her work as part of the Zimbabwean Pavilion exhibition Dudziro: Interrogating the Visions of Religious Beliefs at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013. In 2022, her work was included in the 59th Venice Biennale.

In 2024, Kettle’s Yard, University of Cambridge, England, presented Portia Zvakazarurwa, a solo exhibition of the artist’s work organized in collaboration with Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, where the show traveled in 2025. Curated by Tamar Garb, this exhibition marked Zvavahera’s first solo institutional presentation in the United Kingdom. Also in 2024, the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, presented Imba yerumbidzo (House of praise), as the fifteenth iteration of its Open Space solo exhibition series. The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, opened Hidden Battles / Hondo dzakavanzika, Zvavahera's first institutional solo exhibition in the United States, in August 2025. The artist also opened her first solo institutional exhibition in Germany at Fridericianum, Kassel, on September 27, 2025.

DAVID ZWIRNER LOS ANGELES

616 N Western Avenue, Los Angeles, CA

www.davidzwirner.com

Clare Grill @ Derek Eller Gallery, NYC - 'Parlance' Exhibition - Text by Mark Krotov

Clare Grill: Parlance

Derek Eller Gallery, New York 

October 17 – November 15, 2025

Clare Grill

Flit, 2025 

Oil on linen, 46 x 42 inches

© Clare Grill, courtesy Derek Eller Gallery

Derek Eller Gallery presents a solo exhibition of new paintings by Clare Grill entitled Parlance.

Thick vertical lines hum close to the surface of Flit like folds in a translucent curtain. Toward the top of the painting, a faded orange circle hovers off to the right of a smaller, more emphatic version of the same. A sun and its ghost? A siren and its shadow? Clare Grill’s paintings are, among much else, documents of accretion, profoundly attuned to their own past lives and to the gestures that conveyed the work from there to here. These flickers and remnants of earlier work never disappear into the background—they linger, waiting for Grill to arrange them in pictorial space and activate them in the painting’s hierarchy.

For Grill, the background texture of a painting is as consequential as the marks and shapes that populate the foreground. “I care about the whole thing,” Grill says, down to the edge of the canvas, the corner where its face turns to become its side, which she attends to with her typically unwavering conscientiousness.

As Grill’s paintings evolve over months and sometimes years, she paints Signets, small works on paper that concentrate the most cherished elements of a work just before it’s transformed and repainted. Once Grill embarks on a new painting, she might return to some of these Signets, treating them as clues or leads—“more bits of information to collaborate with,” as she puts it. In this way, Grill’s artistic process itself becomes a key touchstone for her own work alongside other, more interior forms of inspiration.

The beautiful and disarming paintings in Parlance overflow with surprising juxtapositions of color and texture. They encourage infinite chains of association both stubbornly physical (the background of Flit as mesh or gauze, the possibility of a log and a stump in Lop) and mysterious and ethereal (autumn leaves drifting in a puddle, a sudden vision of the sky in Weld that one might confuse for a hole in the canvas). The surprising use of shadow in Flit calls to mind the blocky lettering on a midcentury movie poster, while the diaphanous simultaneity of shape and background in Dune is so enfolding that it can only refer to an emotion or a mood—to something total and all-consuming.

As pleasurable and open as these paintings are, they’re also dense with private references—words, letters, figures that might be words or letters. What registers at first glance as a constellation of stray components quickly coalesces into a parlance at once intimate and detectable to anyone willing to stop and look. Parlance is full of allusions to Grill’s great-grandmother’s shorthand writing, and to her young daughter’s invented “witch language” and her fake cursive, a pattern that possesses the fluid and halting quality of handwriting but isn’t actually writing—not quite. As with the traces of lettering Grill uncovers in antique embroidery samplers, these subterranean forms of writing exude meaning even as they resist definitive interpretation. Much like abstraction itself.

-- Text by Mark Krotov, 2025

Clare Grill (born 1979, lives and works in Queens, NY) received her MFA from the Pratt Institute in 2005 and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2011. Recent solo exhibitions include Cutwork, Galería Marta Cervera, Madrid, Spain; and Wich Language and Oyster, M+B, Los Angeles, CA.. Group exhibitions include Things I Had No Words For at the Center for the Arts, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University; Interisland (New Paintings from New York and Hawai'i), University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa; Of Flesh and Air, Marta Cervera Gallery, Madrid, Spain; The Feminine in Abstract Painting, Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation, New York, NY; Deep! Down! Inside!, Hales Gallery, NY; and New Skin, curated by Jason Stopa, Monica King Gallery, New York, NY. Her work has been reviewed in Artforum, ArtNews, Hyperallergic, the Brooklyn Rail, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and The Boston Globe. This is her third solo show with Derek Eller Gallery. 

Upcoming Exhibitions at Derek Eller Gallery:

Nancy Shaver, Bus Stop, November 21, 2025 - January 10, 2026

In the North Room: Karl Wirsum, Slideshow: Drawings from the Sixties, November 21, 2025 - January 10, 2026

DEREK ELLER GALLERY

38 Walker Street, New York, NY 10013

www.derekeller.com

Gene Hedge @ Lincoln Glenn Gallery, New York - 'Pieces Of The City' Exhibition

Gene Hedge: Pieces Of The City

Lincoln Glenn Gallery, New York

November 13 – December 20, 2025

Lincoln Glenn Gallery presents Gene Hedge: Pieces of The City, a solo exhibition of the artist’s collages, paintings, and constructions from the 1950s through the 1970s. Hedge’s alternative practices reveal a singular way of seeing the world—an approach that infused his work with depth, dimension, and a quiet sense of reverence for form.

This exhibition marks Lincoln Glenn Gallery’s second presentation of Hedge’s work since the artists passing in 2017. Pieces of The City bring to light a remarkable body of paintings and constructions that remained hidden for decades in his SoHo studio—works that encapsulate both the discipline and devotion of an artist who lived entirely for his craft.

Although Gene Hedge initially found success in the vibrant postwar art world, he ultimately turned away from commercial recognition. By the early 1970s, he had withdrawn from the gallery circuit entirely, devoting himself instead to teaching, travel, and the creative achievements of his peers. Living and working in his SoHo loft on Bleecker Street, Gene Hedge chose a life of solitude and pure artistic pursuit. He painted obsessively, not for sale or acclaim, but for the sake of the work itself—an act of quiet defiance in a market-driven era.

Born and raised in Indiana, Gene Hedge served in the military from 1946 to 1947 and used G.I. Bill tuition assistance to study art at Ball State University. Inspired by the writings of László Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946), he moved to Chicago in 1949 to attend the Institute of Design, founded as the New Bauhaus by Moholy-Nagy in 1937. After graduating, Gene Hedge relocated to New York in 1956, where he began working industrial paper used in highway construction—transforming the material into organic abstractions that bridge art, nature, and technology.

In 1965, Gene Hedge radically reimagined his process by experimenting with acrylic paint. He poured pigment directly onto canvas, coaxing it into biomorphic shapes with a squeegee to create rhythmic compositions that balance control and chance. These works, often produced in sets, explore infinite variations of a single visual idea—each canvas an intimate meditation on movement, repetition, and restraint.

Hedge’s works are represented in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and other major institutions.

Gene Hedge: Pieces Of The City is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue featuring an essay by Clanci Jo Conover.

LINCOLN GLENN GALLERY

542 West 24th Street, New York, NY 10011

www.lincolnglenn.com

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 

© Whanki Foundation · Whanki Museum

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

Daniel Arsham @ Perrotin Dubai - 'What Remains' Inaugural Exhibition of the New Gallery

Daniel Arsham

What Remains

Perrotin Dubai

October 30, 2025 – January 10, 2026

Daniel Arsham

Members of the Future, Cenote Exploration, 2024 

Acrylic on canvas panel 

Unframed: 121.9 × 147.3 × 5.7 cm | 48 × 58 × 2.25 in. 

Framed: 110.5 × 134.6 × 5.7 cm | 43 1/2 × 53 1/2 × 2.25 in. 

Photo: Guillaume Ziccarelli 

© Daniel Arsham. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin

Daniel Arsham

Audio Bonsai 003, 2025

Copper wire, wood, speakers

153 × 132.1 × 101.6 cm | 60 1/4 × 52 × 40 in

© Daniel Arsham. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin

Perrotin Dubai presents a debut solo exhibition What Remains by American artist Daniel Arsham. This exhibition marks the first solo show since the opening of the Perrotin Dubai gallery. What Remains features several new series from Arsham's extensive practice, including sculpture, painting and drawing, and a new sound installation, focusing on themes of cultural memory, and the passage of time.

Daniel Arsham transforms the gallery into a sonic installation with his latest sculptural series of copper wrapped bonsai tree sculptures. Doubling as functional stereo speakers, these works will play ambient music throughout the exhibition. This new series pays homage to Japanese Zen Buddhist culture and Arsham’s past presentations of sand zen gardens, which he has exhibited around the world at the Lotte Museum, South Korea and the Musée Guimet, France, among others.

Daniel Arsham

Stairs in the Labyrinth, 2025

Sand. 72 × 44.5 × 45.7 cm | 28 3/8 × 17 1/2 × 18 in.

© Daniel Arsham. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin

Daniel Arsham also unveils a new suite of works relating to his recent Labyrinth series. Composed in cast sand, Arsham’s Stairs in a Labyrinth draws influence from artists like M.C. Escher and Renee Magritte’s maze-like works to create a sculptural double portrait. From head-on the work appears as a portrait bust of a sitter, transforming in the profile view into a maze of architectural levels and stairwells. Alongside the sculpture, Daniel Arsham presents a stilllife painting of another labyrinth bust and a selection of charcoal prepatory drawings. In this series, Daniel Arsham beckons viewers to navigate intricate compositions, suggesting an interplay of layers and pathways reminiscent of archeological sites where the past reveals itself in unexpected ways.

Alongside these new series, Daniel Arsham expands his decades-long project of “Fictional Archaeology,” where the artist examines objects from the twentieth century that are containers for collective cultural memory. Cast in his signature materials of geologic crystals and pigmented hydrostone, patinated bronze, and fiberglass, Daniel Arsham presents objects like a Rolling Stone magazine eroded with pink quartz crystals, a NY Yankees hat that appears to be emerging out of the architecture of the wall, and a bronze scaled replica of a 1985 DMC Delorean car - immortalized in the film Back to the Future.

Daniel Arsham has spent over twenty years cultivating an artistic universe that challenges conventional perceptions of time and reality. His works often evoke a sense of nostalgia and imaginative exploration, encouraging viewers to reflect on our collective history and the artifacts that shape our cultural identity. 

Artist Daniel Arsham Biography

Born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1980, New York based artist Daniel Arsham’s work explores the fields of fine art, architecture, performance, design and film. Raised in Miami, Daniel Arsham attended the Cooper Union in New York City where he received the Gelman Trust Fellowship Award in 2003. Soon thereafter Daniel Arsham toured worldwide with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company as the company’s stage designer. The experience led to an ongoing collaborative practice which continues as Arsham works with world renowned artists, musicians, designers, and brands including Moët & Chandon, Tiffany’s, Porsche and Dior, among others. In 2021 Arsham was appoint ed the role of creative director of the Cleveland Cavaliers, becoming the first ever fine artist to hold a position of this nature.

Arsham’s uchronic aesthetics revolves around his concept of fictional archaeology. Working in a multitude of disciplines he creates and crystallizes ambiguous in-between spaces and situations, and stages what he refers to as future relics of the present. Always iconic, most of the objects that he turns into stone refer to the late 20th century or millennial era, when technological obsolescence unprecedentedly accelerated along with the digital dematerialization of our world. While the present, the future and the past poetically collide in his haunted yet playful visions between romanticism and pop art, Arsham also experiments with the timelessness of certain symbols and gestures across cultures.

Daniel Arsham has presented solo exhibitions at the Lotte Art Museum in Seoul, South Korea; Sculpture Center, Cleveland, Ohio; Orange County Museum of Art, Costa Mesa and the Petersen Automobile Museum, Los Angeles, California; Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Leeds, U.K.; Musée Guimet, Paris and MAMO Cité Radieuse Arts Center, Marseille, France; UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Dune, Beidaihe, and HOW Museum, Shanghai, China; MOCO Museum London and Amsterdam; Contemporary Arts Center Cincinnati, Ohio; and the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia, among others.His work has been presented at MoMA PS1, The New Museum and LongHouse Reserve in New York, Norton Museum in Palm Beach, The Athens Biennale in Athens; Musée Fenaille in Rodez, La Defense in Paris, and Carré d’Art de Nîmes in France, and SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah, Georgia, among others.

Arsham’s works are in the public collections of Blanton Museum of Art, Texas; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Georgia Museum of Art, Athens; ICA Miami, Florida; Musée Guimet, Paris; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia; National Museum of Qatar, Doha; Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), Florida; Rhode Island School of Design (RISD); and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.

PERROTIN DUBAI

DIFC, Gate Village, Building 5, Unit 1, Podium Level, Dubai

www.perrotin.com

Eric Fischl @ Skarstedt Gallery, Paris - 'Couples' Exhibition of Recent Paintings

Eric Fischl: Couples

Skarstedt, Paris

October 20 – December 6, 2025 

Skarstedt presents the exhibition Eric Fischl: Couples, an exhibition devoted to the artist’s recent work, in Paris. Four years after his first exhibition Eric Fischl: My Old Neighborhood, which inaugurated the Paris gallery, ERIC FISCHL returns with a series on the historical theme of couples - whether mythological, literary or cinematic – as well as the feelings that are intrinsically linked to relationships: fidelity, passion, and love, but also breakups, betrayal and solitude.

Renowned for his depiction of the human figure, Eric Fischl’s naturalistic paintings captures moments of everyday life, featuring characters from the American middle class. Having been raised in the suburbs of Long Island, Fischl’s quasi-autobiographical works provide food for thought about American society, where image culture, sexuality and the troubles of couple relations are recurrent themes.

Each painting is imbued with a tragic tranquillity, the characters belonging to a true “casting” of actors that the artist mobilises to tell an intimate story. The direction of his narratives guides the choice of protagonists he employs, taken from his own photographs, working, in a way, as a director. Roadsides, hotel rooms, suburbs, swimming pools: these are all cinematic settings that serve as backdrops for his works, where apparent stillness masks deeper psychological unease.

Fischl’s characters rarely make eye contact—either with the viewer of the others in the composition— but are often driven by a desire to get closer to one another. The viewer becomes a witness to scenes populated by the unspoken, where an imminent incident risks triggering a rift or, alternatively, a healing complicity. The proximity of bodies juxtaposed to their emotional distance and nebulous dynamics are at the heart of Couples. The series presents duos - companions or strangers - suspended in moments of immobility, where narrative certainty is withheld and the viewer is left to navigate the emotional terrain between the figures.

Since the 1980s, the artist has been constructing these pictorial episodes of great intensity from his memories and his own photographic montages. With lucidity, Eric Fischl reveals the other side of the American way of life, exploring the invisible flaws of intimacy, desire and the human condition in a tragicomic tone. In Fischl’s own words, “When something happens beyond what is expected, and whose very nature strips you of your armour, that’s the definition of tragedy. Ambiguity is then the only way to move towards understanding.”

SKARSTED PARIS

2 Avenue Matignon 75008 Paris

www.skarstedt.com

Previous Exhibitions at Skarstedt Paris:

Sue Williams, June 5 – July 25, 2025

Chantal Joffe: The Dog's Birthday, April 3 – May 31, 2025

Self-Portraits , February 13 – March 29, 2025

Andy Warhol: Who is Who?, October 14 – December 21, 2024

Wolf Kahn @ Miles McEnery Gallery, NYC - Exhibition Curated by M. Rachael Arauz

Wolf Kahn

Miles McEnery Gallery, New York

30 October - 20 December 2025 

Wolf Kahn

Uphill Yellow Field, 2008 

Oil on canvas, 52 x 60 inches, 132.1 x 152.4 cm

© Estate of Wolf Kahn, courtesy Miles McEnery Gallery 

Miles McEnery Gallery pesents an exhibition of works by Wolf Kahn, curated by M. Rachael Arauz, Ph.D., on view at 520 West 21st Street. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue featuring an essay by M. Rachael Arauz.

Wolf Kahn painted the world around him with a reverent devotion. To Kahn, even the most familiar landscapes were a wellspring of limitless inspiration. By returning again and again to idyllic vistas, densely packed woods, and humble barns, he mined the same scenes for meaning, each canvas reflecting the subtle shifts of season or time of day while also satisfying his drive for material exploration. As a master colorist, his palette was not limited to the naturalistic or muted tones of traditional landscape painting; with vibrant oranges, pensive lilacs, and acidic greens, Kahn moved beyond mere representation and captured the complex interplays of himself within these changing surroundings.

M. Rachael Arauz, Ph.D., notes that Kahn’s paintings were “about chromatic experiments, the physicality of mark-making, and the fusion of plein air immediacy with sensory memory as he painted the rural landscape in his urban studio. They are also beautiful paintings of landscapes he knew intimately and properties he cared for. They are not coded critiques of environmental decay, nor are they celebrations of a conquering eye. Kahn’s constructions of landscape, however, direct the viewer to pay attention to what we think we see and to look again at the hidden spaces where disparate elements meet.”

Artist Wolf Kahn

Wolf Kahn (b. 1927 in Stuttgart, Germany) immigrated to the United States by way of England in 1940. In 1945, he graduated from the High School of Music & Art in New York, after which he spent time in the Navy. Under the GI Bill, he studied with renowned teacher and Abstract Expressionist painter Hans Hofmann, later becoming Hofmann’s studio assistant. In 1950, he enrolled in the University of Chicago. He graduated in 1951 with a Bachelor of Arts degree.

After completing his degree in only one year, Wolf Kahn decided to return to being a full-time artist. He and other former Hofmann students established the Hansa Gallery, a cooperative gallery where Kahn had his first solo exhibition. In 1956, he joined the Grace Borgenicht Gallery, where he exhibited regularly until 1995. Wolf Kahn received a Fulbright Scholarship, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, an Award in Art from the Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Medal of Arts from the U.S. State Department.

Wolf Kahn married the artist Emily Mason in 1957. Their marriage lasted sixty-two years until Emily’s death in December 2019, just a few months before his passing. The pair lived and worked between New York City and West Brattleboro, Vermont.

Wolf Kahn regularly exhibited at galleries and museums across North America. His work may be found in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; The Hirshhorn Museum and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA.

Wolf Kahn died in 2020 in New York, at the age of 92.

MILES McENERY GALLERY

520 West 21st Street, New York, NY 10011

www.milesmcenery.com

Yuka Kashihara @ Acquavella Galleries, Palm Beach - 'Stardust' Exhibition

Yuka Kashihara: Stardust

Acquavella Galleries, Palm Beach

October 15 - December 8, 2025 

"Everything is connected, and everything is one. Painting, for me, is a way of knowing who I am. Tracing that history back, it became clear to me that I, too, am made of stardust; and that realization felt profoundly natural. The primeval landscapes I have encountered in my life, too, if traced back far enough, were once stardust."

- Yuka Kashihara

Acquavella Galleries presents Stardust, a solo exhibition of fifteen paintings by the Japanese artist Yuka Kashihara in its Palm Beach gallery.

This suite of acrylic and oil paintings on canvas marks a continuation of the artist’s interest in imagining the otherworldly, while looking even farther to the cosmos. Her work is often sparked by instigating moments and views observed while traveling or walking, which she then blends with conjured vistas. In her new paintings, Kashihara explores our connection with the ancient and cosmic, combining the two ideas by exploring the origin of all organic matter, beginning deep in space.

Yuka Kashihara cites Marcus Chown’s book, The Magic Furnace, as an inspiration for her new work. He states: “Every atom in our bodies has an extraordinary history. Our blood, our food, our books, our clothes–everything contains atoms forged in blistering furnaces deep inside stars, which were blown into space by those stars’ cataclysmic explosions and deaths…The birth of every atom was marked by cosmic events on an enormous scale, against a backdrop of unimaginable heat and cold, brightness and darkness, space and time.” The artist’s newest body of work draws on this idea of celestial kinship.

In Universal Stardust (2025) and Universal Stardust - II (2025), the artist layers vivid shades of acrylic and oil that evoke watercolors in their blurred softness. The strokes and colors bleed and interconnect like the atoms that connect all organic matter. Kashihara simultaneously blends human interconnectedness with deep space, where clusters of atoms or constellations intertwine with what could be ancient flora and fauna deep on the ocean floor or from another planet.

Regarding this body of work, Yuka Kashihara also pays homage to her purposeful commitment to painting as exploration from a young age. The artist states: “When I was seventeen and unsure of my future, I made one clear decision: I would devote myself to painting. I pictured that wish sailing to the edge of the galaxy, like a handful of stardust cast into the night.”

Harnessing the boundless raw material of creation, Kashihara’s paintings offer a duality of the origin of life and its comic roots.

Yuka Kashihara: Stardust is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue with an essay by poet, critic, and curator John Yau.

Artist Yuka Kashihara (b. 1980)

Born in Hiroshima Prefecture in Japan, Kashihara received her B.F.A. in Japanese Painting from the Musashino Art University in Tokyo in 2006 before moving to Germany that year. Studying at the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig, Germany, she received her Meisterschüler (Master Graduate) in 2015.

ACQUAVELLA GALLERIES, PALM BEACH

340 Royal Poinciana Way, Palm Beach, FL 33480 

www.acquavellagalleries.com

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

Nicole Wittenberg: All the Way

Acquavella Galleries, New York

October 16 - December 5, 2025

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

—Nicole Wittenberg

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

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

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

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

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

Artist Nicole Wittenberg (b. 1979)

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

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

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

Nicole Wittenberg

Texts by Suzanne Hudson, David Salle, Devon Zimmerman, 

and an interview by Jarrett Earnest

Published by Monacelli, 2025

256 pages, 250 illustrations

Hardback, 29 cm x 25 cm

ISBN: 9781580936811

Photo courtesy of Phaidon

www.phaidon.com

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

ACQUAVELLA GALLERIES, NEW YORK

18 East 79th Street, New York, NY 10075 

www.acquavellagalleries.com