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11/11/25

Stuart Pearson Wright @ Flowers Gallery Hong Kong - 'Roadkill' Exhibition of Paintings

Stuart Pearson Wright: Roadkill

Flowers Gallery Hong Kong

28 November 2025 – 3 January, 2026

Stuart Pearson Wright

Roadkill, 2024

Oil and pigmented gesso on Oak

23 x 14 cm, 9 x 5 1/2 in

Stuart Pearson Wright

Claire / Clive, 2023

Oil and pigmented gesso on Oak

47 x 36 cm, 18 1/2 x 14 1/8 in

Flowers Gallery Hong Kong announces Roadkill, the first solo exhibition in Asia by acclaimed British painter Stuart Pearson Wright. The exhibition presents a new series of portraits created over the last five years, offering a deeply personal and darkly humorous reflection on one of the most challenging chapters in the artist's life.

Best known for his psychologically-charged portraiture, Stuart Pearson Wright uses the language of painting to explore the tension between vulnerability, absurdity, and resilience, featuring the artist's renowned embodiment of rich surfaces and fine detail. In this body of work, anthropomorphism becomes a central device: human figures merge with animal traits, everyday objects, and theatrical exaggerations. These hybrid presences serve as both unsettling and comical stand-ins for the human condition.

Humour functions here not merely as an artistic strategy, but as catharsis—providing an irreverent and playful counterweight to themes of grief, isolation, and fragility, which the artist experienced during recent struggles in his personal life. Through distortion, disguise, and surreal imagery, Stuart Pearson Wright captures the paradoxical ways in which comedy emerges from pain, and how imaginative reinvention can be an act of survival.

“These paintings embrace the ridiculous because sometimes laughter feels like the only way out of despair,” says Stuart Pearson Wright. “By reimagining myself and those around me in animal or hybrid forms, I found a form of honesty that was impossible through realism alone.”

The works continue Wright’s longstanding engagement with the traditions of portraiture, but with an increased sense of theatricality and allegory. Drawing on influences from Renaissance portraiture, British satire, and the absurdism of literature and theatre, the paintings situate themselves in a liminal space between sincerity and parody.

Stuart Pearson Wright (b. 1975, Northampton, UK) is celebrated for his provocative and technically masterful approach to portraiture. A graduate of the Slade School of Fine Art, he has received numerous awards, including the BP Portrait Award in 2001. His works are held in many prestigious collections, including the National Portrait Gallery in London. This exhibition marks his first major presentation in Hong Kong.

FLOWERS GALLERY HONG KONG

49 Tung Street, Sheung Wan, Hong Kong

www.flowersgallery.com

06/11/25

Jane Irish @ Locks Gallery, Philadelphia - 'An Absolute Reciprocity of Adaptation' Exhibition

Jane Irish

An Absolute Reciprocity of Adaptation

Locks Gallery, Philadelphia

October 3 – November 15, 2025

Jane Irish

Archimedean Spiral, 2024

Oil on linen with clear gesso ground, 56 x 50 inches

Locks Gallery presents An Absolute Reciprocity of Adaptation, an exhibition of new and recent paintings by Jane Irish (b. 1955). This marks the artist’s tenth solo exhibition with the gallery.

Excavating traumas of war and colonialism and embedding these histories into elaborate architectural settings, Irish’s disorienting scenes are layered with multiple visual narratives. Of this new body of work, the artist says:

“Painting representationally or figuratively can be an act of imagination, but entails a code of truth, especially of the interior… The depictions of colonialism and the luxury items in French chateaus, which are often my subject matters, have an overt or covert connection to world systems of exploitation, including especially French involvement in Indochina...I try to exploit a certain doubleness: a harsh critique coexisting with the optimism of political prefiguration.”

Foregrounded by prefigurative politics—an activist approach to ideating a future society—her work analyzes the roots of Western painting and exposes its violent remnants. Within the title, “An Absolute Reciprocity of Adaptation”, she reinterprets the concept of symbiosis drawn from Edgar Allan Poe’s epic poem Eureka. Focusing on a reciprocal adaptation of ideas and mediums, Irish understands how these relations produce a “prefiguration of peace.” Her persistent interest in the cultural memory of the American War in Vietnam reappears in these new works, including references to the anti-war group Vietnam Veterans Against The War (VVAW), which the artist has worked with for decades.

Jane Irish

Return, 2025

Oil on linen with clear gesso ground, 55 x 64 inches

In a large painting on bamboo paper titled Our Testimony (2025), she embosses the VVAW preamble from a 1971 U.S. Congressional record atop an ornately decorated living room. In another painting titled Agent Orange (2025), Jane Irish calls to mind the pollutant used in herbicidal warfare programs with a muddy, darkened palette, while mutating, floating apparitions haunt the room and her 2021 painting Phosphorous hangs on the wall. Of the painting, Jane Irish says, “I emphasize the violence in the room’s decor. With a breaking heart I ask, ‘Why wouldn’t we repeat and preserve the abuse and killing since we idolize our lives around these acts?’”

Meta references continue in Return (2025), where she transforms her series of colonial scenes titled Decay Puits Sauvage (2025) into a phantasmic wallpaper. Paintings of the decaying wall are shown alongside the semi-fictionalized setting in Return, signaling a spiral of meaning and “coevolution.” Juxtaposing images of colonial violence with the indigenous Vietnamese cloud flooring, Irish’s room becomes both contemplative and confrontational.

Also on view is a large-scale study for Irish’s Renaissance-style ceiling painting titled Cosmos Beyond Atrocity (2024), which was commissioned for the new building of the Princeton University Art Museum. Mounting the study as a wallpaper and hanging the drawings in front, the installation presents Irish’s adaptive process to illuminate the layered temporalities and spatial collisions.

Artist Jane Irish

Jane Irish (b. 1955) received her MFA in 1980 from Queens College, CUNY. She got her start as an artist in the East Village in the 1980s and moved to Philadelphia in 1982.

She has exhibited at the Philadelphia Museum of Art; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, PA; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; Delaware Center for Contemporary Art, Wilmington, DE; the Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD; Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans, LA; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX.

She is the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Artist Grant (2025), a BAU Institute Arts Residency Award from the Camargo Foundation (2025), a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Grant (2024), a Pew Fellowship in the Arts (2011), a Painters and Sculptors Grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation (2009), a Painting Fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council of the Arts (1984), and a Painting Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts (1982).

Her work is held in public collections including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Princeton University Art Museum, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.

LOCKS GALLERY

600 Washington Square South, Philadelphia, PA 19106

www.locksgallery.com

Pat Steir @ Locks Gallery, Philadelphia - 'Before the Rain' Exhibition

Pat Steir: Before the Rain

Locks Gallery, Philadelphia

October 3 – November 15, 2025

Pat Steir

Winter Daylight, 2021-22

Oil on canvas, 108 x 108 inches

Locks Gallery presents Before the Rain, an exhibition of new and recent paintings by Pat Steir. This marks the artist’s eighth solo show with the Locks Gallery.

A monumental figure in contemporary painting, Pat Steir developed her distinctive style of Waterfall paintings in the 1980s, embedding deep, lyrical meaning in the free expression of paint. Surrendering herself to chance and “non-intention”, Steir’s process of dripping, pouring, and throwing paint marked a defining moment in her exploration of materiality and of the artist’s role in creation, opening a way for her continued mastery of this dance between paint, gravity, gesture and ground.

Steir’s new works find her building upon and refining these guiding variables. Against a darkened ground, as seen in Many Colors II (Blue) (2022) and Winter Daylight (2021-22), dripping multi-colored brushstrokes act as prisms within the encompassing layers of poured paint while precise white lines recall her underlying interest in grids and matrices.

Pat Steir

Monday Circus, 2022-23

Oil on canvas, 108 x 72 inches

In tandem with the darkened palette and hypnotic allure of these paintings, Steir’s nomenclature also entwines itself with a certain poetics, inspiring viewers not just to look but to ruminate. The artist has said, “[T]he poetry of the title is part of the picture for me. It’s absolutely the same thing.” Take Monday Circus (2022-23), where swinging strokes of chartreuse, maroon, and orange conjure a myriad of evocations from playful to melancholic. In her succinct yet nuanced phrases, such as One Green One (2025), Pat Steir incorporates rhythm in the language of her titles that helps instill the image in the “mind’s eye.”

Artist Pat Steir

Pat Steir (b. 1938) was born in Newark, New Jersey and currently lives and works in New York.

Throughout her renowned career, she has been the focus of numerous solo museum exhibitions and site-specific installations.

Pat Steir was the recipient of a Guggenheim Artist’s Fellowship (1981), a National Endowment for the Arts Individual Artist’s Grant (1973), an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Art from Pratt Institute (1991) and a Distinguished Alumni Award from Boston University (2001).

She is a founding board member of Printed Matter, Inc. in New York and the landmark feminist journal, ‘Heresies’.

Her work is represented in major collections, including: the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; The Museum of Modern Art, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY; The Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA; National Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C.; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, NJ; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The San Francisco Museum of Fine Arts, CA; de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; Tate Gallery, London.

LOCKS GALLERY

600 Washington Square South, Philadelphia, PA 19106

www.locksgallery.com

Luc Tuymans: The Fruit Basket @ David Zwirner, NYC + Los Angeles

Luc Tuymans: The Fruit Basket

David Zwirner, New York

November 6 – December 19, 2025

Luc Tuymans

The Family, 2025

Courtesy Studio Luc Tuymans, Antwerp, and David Zwirner

David Zwirner presents an exhibition of new paintings by Belgian artist Luc Tuymans on view at the gallery’s newly renovated 533 West 19th Street location. Luc Tuymans has been represented by David Zwirner since 1994; this is the celebrated artist’s eighteenth solo show with the gallery. The Fruit Basket will travel to David Zwirner Los Angeles in February 2026.

One of the most important painters working today, Luc Tuymans pioneered a distinctive style of figurative painting beginning in the 1980s that has been singularly influential to his peers as well as subsequent generations of artists. Featuring subject matter that ranges from the mundane to the profound, the artist’s deeply resonant compositions insist on the power of images to simultaneously reveal and withhold meaning. Over time, Luc Tuymans has adapted both the content and formal construction of his works to engage with contemporary visual culture and the sociopolitical contexts in which they are shown, thereby continually asserting the relevance of painting in a digitally saturated world.

Thematically, The Fruit Basket picks up where Tuymans’s previous exhibition—The Barn, held at David Zwirner New York in 2023—left off, delving further into the deleterious effects of the conflation of image and reality. The exhibition considers the pervasive atmosphere of fracture that is specific to the United States at this moment. Foregrounding the highly mediated state of contemporary experience, Luc Tuymans reinforces a growing sense of dissolution through varied subject matter and formal approaches, which are installed in an unexpected cadence across the show. Throughout, he modulates the tonality of his colors to match the heightened artifi ciality of the imagery he has carefully chosen, creating thought-provoking juxtapositions of scale and technique.

Measuring sixteen feet tall and more than twenty-three feet wide, The Fruit Basket (2025)—from which the exhibition takes its title—presents a picture that is literally fragmented, composed of nine distinct parts arranged into a grid. Based on an iPhone photo that Luc Tuymans took of an actual basket of fermenting fruit projected onto a blue-cast multipart screen, the eerie tones and diffuse focus of this painting betray the presence of digital light. An object of fascination for the artist, the fruit basket—sometimes seen as a symbol of plenty—and its contents are distorted almost beyond recognition, becoming something else entirely, a kind of memento mori. Due to the sheer size of the composition, the viewer must step back to take in the work in full, only to notice the intrusion of the artist’s fingers at the bottom corner that indexes his engagement with the image on his phone. The strong diagonal that cuts across the picture plane mimics the construction of the similarly scaled epic history painting The Raft of the Medusa (1818–1819) by Théodore Géricault. In likening a fruit basket—an object that is also commonly gifted to the sick—to Géricault’s raft of the dying, adrift from a shipwreck, Luc Tuymans emphasizes decay rather than abundance.

A related group of four large-scale works, collectively titled Illumination, is installed throughout the show, appearing at first as fields of color that are lit from within in a manner akin to the rectilinear abstractions of Mark Rothko—a prodigious artist whose life ended in tragedy, and an ongoing interest for Tuymans. Tuymans’s paintings harken back to 1950s and 1960s abstract expressionism and color field painting, non-referential styles that had their heyday during a period of intense sociopolitical turmoil in the US and are now the subject of renewed interest. In contrast to the spontaneity of abstract painting, Tuymans’s works are deliberately constructed, based on zoomed-in stills captured on his phone from a documentary about the restoration of fifteenth-century illuminated manuscripts. Luc Tuymans decided to encase these compositions in nearly black hues (though using no actual black pigment), applied by hand in thick bands around their borders. These off-square “frames” occupy almost as large a portion of the canvas as the actual image, further emphasizing the light that these colorful passages seem to emit—in this case reproducing the bright and mottled light that artifi cially results from taking a photo of a screen with a smartphone and drastically enlarging it. The subject of these paintings is amorphous, opening onto multiple readings that signal the instability of memory and the ways in which the past can be reinvented through image.

Another group of canvases, painted in Tuymans’s distinctive and recognizable style, literalizes a feeling of intrusion at the heart of the exhibition. Hollow (2025) features the empty interior of a prosthetic latex mask, which floats against a dark, monochromatic ground. The inverse of a face, this image foregrounds the question of what is real and what is fake. Meanwhile, the smallest work in the show, The Maggot (2025) presents a close-up of the titular insect, alternately considered a harbinger of decay and rot and a medical cure capable of cleansing an open wound. Migrants (2025) glows urgently with hot reds and oranges and a looser treatment of paint. Rendered in an impressionistic style that is legible only from a distance, the image of dozens of faceless figures cloaked in shadow derives from a news photograph of migrants waiting at a border—the only work in the show to be based on an unmanipulated, “real” image.

Finally, a group of four canvases based on 3D-printed figurines of actual people feature individuals that in different ways read as quintessentially American. Appearing at once uncannily lifelike and frozen in time, the people are rendered with an increased feeling of dimensionality, hinting at their status as objects. Executed on a more intimate scale that brings the viewer face-to-face with the subjects depicted, these paintings are meant to project optimism. However, Luc Tuymans has bestowed the canvases with an ashen underlayer, coupled with a thin treatment of paint, causing the figures to appear as if they were never alive to begin with. Paintings from this group both open and close the exhibition. In the first gallery, Hall of Fame (2025) features a figure donning the yellow NFL Hall of Fame jacket and holding a football between his hands as he stares vacantly ahead, a champion of the most American of pastimes. Likewise, the last painting in the show, The Family (2025) features a group portrait of three generations clustered together, smiling brightly while receding before our very eyes, underscoring the impossibility of a certain kind of reality.

Artist Luc Tuymans

Born in 1958 in Mortsel, Belgium, Luc Tuymans is one of the most important painters of his generation. His first major museum presentations were held in 1990 at the Provinciaal Museum voor Moderne Kunst, Ostend, Belgium, and the Vereniging voor het Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst, Ghent. In 1992, the artist participated in Documenta IX in Kassel, in addition to having a solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Bern, which helped cement his growing reputation in Europe. In 1994, Luc Tuymans: Superstition debuted at Portikus, Frankfurt, and traveled to David Zwirner, New York; the Art Gallery of York University, Toronto; The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago; the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; and Goldie Paley Gallery, Moore College of Art & Design, Philadelphia, establishing him as a major influential artist abroad. In 2001, the artist represented Belgium at the Venice Biennale to great acclaim. Luc Tuymans lives and works in Antwerp.

One of the first artists to be represented by David Zwirner, Luc Tuymans has had numerous solo exhibitions at the gallery since joining its roster in 1994. In May 2023, David Zwirner presented The Barn, a solo exhibition of Tuymans’s work, at the gallery’s 537 West 20th Street location in New York. This was the artist’s seventeenth show with the gallery and his first solo presentation in the United States since 2016. Previous shows at David Zwirner include Eternity (2022); Monkey Business (2021); Good Luck (2020); Le Mépris (2016); The Shore (2015); The Summer is Over (2013); Allo! (2012); Corporate (2010); Forever, The Management of Magic (2008); Proper (2005); Fortune (2003); Mwana Kitoko: Beautiful White Man (2000); Security (1998); The Heritage (1996); Francis Picabia and Luc Tuymans: Paintings (1995); and Superstition (1994).

Luc Tuymans has been featured in numerous solo exhibitions at prestigious institutions worldwide. An in-situ temporary mural by the artist, L’Orphelin, was on view at the Rotunda Valentin de Boulogne in the Musée du Louvre, Paris, in 2024–2025. In 2024, the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, presented The Past, a major exhibition of the artist's work. Other solo presentations include those held at Palazzo Grassi, Venice (2019); De Pont Museum, Tilburg, The Netherlands (2019); Museum aan de Stroom (MAS), Antwerp (2016), which traveled to the National Portrait Gallery, London (2016); Qatar Museums Gallery – Al Riwaq, Doha (2015); Menil Collection, Houston (2013); the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio (2009), which traveled to San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Dallas Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and BOZAR – Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels; and Tate Modern, London (2004), which traveled to K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf.

The artist has received numerous awards and honors, including the Medal of Honor, International Congress of Contemporary Painting (ICOCEP), Porto, Portugal (2019); the Coutts Contemporary Art Foundation Award, Zurich (2000); and the Flemish Culture Award for Visual Arts (1993). His works are featured in museum collections worldwide, including the Art Institute of Chicago; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Fondazione Prada, Milan; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; The National Museum of Art, Osaka; Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; Pinault Collection, Paris; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Tate, United Kingdom.

Luc Tuymans’s catalogue raisonné of paintings, from 1972 to 2018, is available from David Zwirner Books and Yale University Press. The three volumes feature full-color images and documentation of more than five hundred paintings.

DAVID ZWIRNER

533 West 19th Street, New York, NY 10011

www.davidzwirner.com

01/11/25

Teemu Mäenpää @ Helsinki Contemporary - 'Paradise Lost' Exhibition

Teemu Mäenpää: Paradise Lost

Helsinki Contemporary

31 October - 23 November 2025

Teemu Mäenpää

Kahdet Kasvot / Two Faces, 2025

Acrylic on canvas, 120 cm x 100 cm

Photo: Jussi Tiainen

Teemu Mäenpää

The Apple, Adam, 2025

Acrylic on canvas, 200 cm x 160 cm

Photo: Jussi Tiainen

Teemu Mäenpää

Kulkijan kukkanen, 2025

Acrylic on canvas, 120 cm x 100 cm

Photo: Jussi Tiainen

Teemu Mäenpää’s expressive paintings brim with raw energy, vibrant colour, and playful openness. His art grows from the very gesture of painting itself: fluttering palm fronds and elongated petals emerge from the natural arc of his hand. He combines media intuitively – from oils to spray paints – creating works that pulse with immediacy. Mäenpää’s boldly physical, uninhibited approach to painting is rooted in his background in street art, and his practice embodies an attitude that defies the gravitas of high art.

Paradise Lost unveils Mäenpää’s latest works – paintings that dance between abstraction and representation, alive with a rich vocabulary of metaphorical plants and animals. The exhibition’s title evokes a longing for nature and a yearning for a lost Eden. Yet in Mäenpää’s art, plants primarily serve as mirrors of human nature, metaphors for care, connection, society, life, and growth. Each painting, in its own way, is also a vicarious self-portrait.

For Teemu Mäenpää, painting plants is also a form of escapism. His canvases conjure comic strip–like adventures, exotic landscapes, and mythical visions of paradise. A recurring motif from his earlier work also makes a reappearance: the humble houseplant. Perched on windowsills, these vegetal figures gaze outward, existing under human care and separated by glass from the world beyond. Mäenpää’s paintings seem to ask: on which side of the window is paradise truly found – and on which side does our real nature belong?

Teemu Mäenpää

Gogonuts Tree, 2025

Acrylic on canvas, 200 cm x 160 cm

Photo: Jussi Tiainen

Teemu Mäenpää

Ihastumisen aakkoset / The ABCs of Infatuation, 2025

Acrylic on canvas, 120 cm x 100 cm

Photo: Jussi Tiainen

Teemu Mäenpää (b. 1977) is a Tampere-based artist who graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki in 2008. He has exhibited widely in Finland and abroad, at venues including Galleria Halmetoja, Make Your Mark Gallery, ARTag Gallery, and XXIX Mänttä Art Festival. His works are held in the collections of the Tampere and Turku Art Museums, the Nelimarkka-Foundation, the Saastamoinen Foundation, EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern Art, and the Seppo Fränti Collection deposited at the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma. Mäenpää has also completed several public commissions.

Paradise Lost marks his second solo exhibition at Helsinki Contemporary.

HELSINKI CONTEMPORARY

Bulevardi 10, 00120 Helsinki

helsinkicontemporary.com

Guan Xiao @ Kunsthalle Wien - 'Teenager' Exhibition

Guan Xiao: Teenager

Kunsthalle Wien

8 October 2025 – 11 January 2026

Guan Xiao

Jeanake, 2025

David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles/New York

Guan Xiao

Midhight Pancake, 2025

David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles/New York

Guan Xiao

Cyclemony, 2025

David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles/New York

Installation view Guan Xiao: Teenager,

Glitea, 2025, Kunsthalle Wien 2025

Photo by Markus Wörgötter

Kunsthalle Wien presents the first solo exhibition in Austria by Guan Xiao (b. 1983, Chongqing, China). Comprising an entirely new body of sculpture and painting, it takes what Guan Xiao describes as the ‘ambiguous life stage’ of the teenager as a starting point for works that reflect upon the currents, conflicts and absurdities of a society impacted by the values of capitalism and liberalism:

A teenager is typically thought to be impulsive, led by their intuition and open to possibilities, changes and uncertainty. They can be dramatic, riven with self-doubt. I see them as both challenging and conquering reality and these ideas echo through this body of work which has a lot to do with this conflicted state of change and uncertainty. – Guan Xiao

Installation view Guan Xiao: Teenager, Kunsthalle Wien 2025

David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles/New York

and Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin/Munich

Photo by Markus Wörgötter

Installation view Guan Xiao: Teenager,

Torso, 2025, Kunsthalle Wien 2025

Photo by Markus Wörgötter

Installation view Guan Xiao: Teenager,

Torso, 2025, Kunsthalle Wien 2025

Photo by Markus Wörgötter

A large, furry A-Frame structure bisects the space, creating a tunnel at the centre of the exhibition. Animated by light, it harbours a collection of cast aluminium objects including scaled-up items of cutlery, a moka pot and a series of enlarged eggs. Outside are a series of gnarled tree roots cast in brass, painted and appended with motorcycle parts and cartoon-like clouds of scribble. These anthropomorphic sculptures with mesh plates or antennae-like wands populate the space like a cast of characters. Two modular columns extend respectively pink and blue arms from aluminium, claw-like bases that resemble oversized bunches of bananas. On the walls, a triptych of panels simulates large, palette-shaped windows covered in a thick layer of paint.

Installation view Guan Xiao: Teenager,

The spent siesta, like a sun-dried memory, 2025; Raining, 2025;

Approaching Dust, 2025, Kunsthalle Wien 2025

David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles/New York

Photo by Markus Wörgötter

Guan Xiao

Raining, 2025

David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles/New York

Guan Xiao

Raining (detail), 2025

David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles/New York

Guan Xiao originally trained as a filmmaker before becoming known for creating sculpture that triggers an impulse for us to create our own narratives and tell stories about what we see. Earlier works resembled museological displays or photography studios that appeared to unite an eclectic selection of objects and images in one scheme. More recent sculpture refers to the Chinese custom of displaying polished tree roots in domestic settings. The practice of root carving dates back to the Warring States Period (474–221 BC), preserving the natural, given form of the wood. Its popularity over the centuries made it a symbol of economic wealth, while becoming a worn-out cultural cliché, denoting a lack of sophistication. In Guan Xiao’s work, the tree root becomes the basis of a singular, mythical creature in an ever-growing multitude of animal or human-like figures. Working with an array of elements – some meticulously hand-crafted, others mass produced – she references a broad range of cultural material that is defamiliarized and uncoupled from its associations to create an ambiguous, semi-fictional space and time.

Teenager returns to fundamental subjects such as food, clothing and shelter to address questions of progress and civilisation, tradition and spirituality that are central to the multi-faceted, playful and poetic work of Guan Xiao. The ‘conflicted state’ of the teenager is used as a metaphor for a society that the artist perceives to be suspended between ‘devotion and restraint’, needs and desires and ancient, philosophical, social and ethical values that are ‘in direct opposition’ to the economic system of capitalism:

China’s imperial history and Confucianism praise restraint suppress individuality. Yets imperial history and Confucianism praise restraint suppress individuality. Yets imperial history and Confucianism praise restraint suppress individuality. Yet subculture, independent cultures throughout history emphasise individuality […]. This contradiction is fundamentally between the philosophical systems of Asia and the economic system of capitalism – a conflict between two modes of thought […]. You might say captitalism is about 'construction', while Asian philosophy is about 'destruction.' – Guan Xiao

Guan Xiao

Photo: Mathilde Agius and Art Basel

Artist Guan Xiao Biography

Guan Xiao (b. 1983, Chongqing, China) has held solo exhibitions at Bonner Kunstverein; Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis (both 2019); Kunsthalle Winterthur (2018); Jeu de Paume, Paris (2016); K11 Art Foundation, Shanghai and ICA, London (both 2016). Her work has also been exhibited at Start Museum, Shanghai (2024); Mudam Luxembourg (2023 and 2021); Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2023); Mercedes-Benz Museum, Stuttgart; Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen (both 2022); the 34th Bienial de São Paulo; the 58th Belgrade Biennale (both 2021); X Museum Triennial; Kunstmuseum St. Gallen; Sharjah Art Foundation (all 2020); Triennale Kleinplastik Fellbach; Honolulu Biennial; Migros Museum, Zurich (all 2019); the 57th Venice Biennale; Julia Stoschek Collection, Berlin; M HKA Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp (all 2017); 9th Berlin Biennale; ZKM, Karlsruhe (both 2016) and the 13th Biennale de Lyon (2015). Her public art commissions include works for Skulpturenpark Köln (2020); Anyang Public Art Project (2019) and High Line, New York (2017). Guan Xiao lives and works in Beijing.

Publication: Kunsthalle Wien will publish an exhibition catalogue that will also be the first monograph on Guan Xiao. Published in English and German it includes new essays by Chelsea Qianxi Liu, curator at UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing and Sarah Johanna Theurer, curator at Haus der Kunst, Munich alongside an extensive interview between the artist and Michelle Cotton, Artistic Director Kunsthalle Wien.

KUNSTHALLE WIEN

Museumsquartier, Museumsplatz 1, 1070 Vienna

www.kunsthallewien.at

26/10/25

Philemona Williamson @ Jenkins Johnson Gallery, San Francisco - 'Disproportionate Upheavals' Exhibition of Paintings

Philemona Williamson

Disproportionate Upheavals

Jenkins Johnson Gallery, San Francisco

November 1 - December 20, 2025

Philemona Williamson

Uneven Terrain, 2025

Oil on canvas, 48 x 56 in (121.9 x 142.2 cm)

Jenkins Johnson Gallery, San Francisco, presents Disproportionate Upheavals, the gallery’s second solo exhibition with narrative painter Philemona Williamson. The presentation includes eight paintings created between 2024 and 2025, along with a significant piece from 2016.

Philemona Williamson, based in New Jersey, is known for her figurative paintings. Williamson’s narratives of childhood and adolescence create a space of fable and memory investigating the dissonance, possibility, and liminal state of transition. With a career spanning over forty years, she creates an iconography both personal and universal.

Figures are dynamic, passionate, volatile, familiar, and strange—moving through moments of uncertainty and landscapes beyond control. Toys and objects act as repositories of emotion and memory. Poetic and open-ended, the paintings invite viewers to tap into their own stories of change, chaos, and possibility.

Philemona Williamson

Dwelling in Discord, 2025

Oil on canvas, 36 x 40 in (91.4 x 101.6 cm)

Dwelling in Discord (2025) interweaves two very different places from her childhood: the upscale Upper East Side NYC apartment where her parents worked and lived, and a small room in a Harlem hotel with a communal kitchen. From a young age, she had to navigate these contrasting worlds. Philemona Williamson affirms that the longing for home, safety, and a sense of belonging in the world never diminishes.

The paintings are visually and technically fluid, with brushstrokes moving through saturated fields of color. The underlying hues in each piece emerge strongly through the figures; ambiguous gestures blur the boundaries between figures and their surroundings. Every plant, animal, object, and landscape feels resonant—as if recalling a half-remembered dream or a return to childhood memories.

Philemona Williamson

A Crooked Line, 2016

Oil on canvas, 55 x 80 in (139.7 x 203.2 cm)

A Crooked Line (2016) was inspired by Williamson’s 2015 artist-in-residence experience at the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans. She explains, “I would often witness the Second Line parades held for important occasions, both joyful and somber. Here, I conjured that heightened revelry, both public and private, that seems to burst forth when one is free to be their authentic self.”

Philemona Williamson’s (b.1951, New York, NY) work is in institutional collections including: Baltimore Museum of Art, MD; Montclair Art Museum, NJ; The Kalamazoo Art Institute, MI; the Sheldon Museum of Art, NE; CNAP: The French National Contemporary Art Collection; and Fondation Francès, Clichy, France. Museum exhibitions include the Queens Museum of Art, NY; the Mint Museum, Charlotte, NC; the Bass Museum, Miami, FL; and Contemporary Art, St. Louis, MO. In 2019, a mid-career survey was held at the Montclair Art Museum, New Jersey.

Upcoming in 2026: a group exhibition at the Newark Museum and an exhibition curated by Camilo Alvarez, opening in March 2026 at the Mattatuck Museum, Waterbury, CT. Her work is currently on view at Fondation Villa Datris, Vaucluse, France. In 2024, Philemona Williamson exhibited in Century: 100 Years of Black Art at the Montclair Art Museum, New Jersey.

Philemona Williamson is the recipient of numerous awards including Anonymous Was A Woman; Joan Mitchell Foundation Award in Painting; Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant; National Endowment for the Arts; and New York Foundation for the Arts. Williamson has taught painting at numerous colleges, including Pratt Institute and Hunter College, New York City, and served on the Advisory Board of the Getty Center for Education in California.

JENKINS JOHNSON GALLERY

1275 Minnesota Street #200, San Francisco, CA 94107

www.jenkinsjohnsongallery.com

16/10/25

Kids ! Between Representation and Reality @ Bucerius Kunst Forum, Hamburg

Kids ! Between Representation and Reality

Bucerius Kunst Forum, Hamburg

28 November 2025 - 6 April 2026

Caspar Netscher

A Portrait of Two Boys, ca. 1680 - 1683

Collection Bob Haboldt, Amsterdam

Jens Juel

Countess Eleonora Sophie Bille Brahe, Née Rantzau,

with her Eldest Son Henrik, 1799

Private collection

Friedrich Seidenstücker

In His Father’s Estate, ca. 1950

Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich,

Ann and Jürgen Wilde Foundation

The exhibition Kids! Between Representation and Reality at the Bucerius Kunst Forum is dedicated to the representation of children in art from the 16th to the 21st century. Six chapters approach the subject from different perspectives and show not only paintings but also photographs, works on paper, prints, media art and sculptures.

The exhibition includes works by Tizian, Anthonis van Dyck, Oskar Kokoschka, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Nobuyoshi Araki, Thomas Lawrence, Joshua Reynolds, Rineke Dijkstra, Judith Leyster, Christoph Amberger, Gerhard Richter and many more.

The multifaceted nature of the exhibition illuminates the diverse perspectives and functions of children's pictures over the centuries. Whether as a symbol of power and domination, as an expression of compassion or as snapshots of happy and sad childhoods: The depictions bear witness to the changing understanding of childhood over the centuries and at the same time illustrate the significance phase of life.

Tizian Vecellio

Double Portrait of Guidobaldo II della Rovere,

Duke of Urbino (1514–1574), and His Son,

Francesco Maria II (1549–1631), 1555

Loaned courtesy of The Klesch Collection

Nicolas Maes

Portrait of a Boy as Adonis, ca. 1670

Joshua Reynolds

Master Crewe as Henry VIII, ca. 1775

Tate Gallery, London, Lent from a Private Collection 2009

The topic of images of children reflects the values and norms of a society and their changes in a special way. Images of children can be used to draw conclusions about social structures and power relations. Origin, status, and sometimes gender play an important role here. At the same time, over the centuries, social groups have influenced each other in the staging of their children and adapted their own representations in the process. How children are shown today is therefore linked to the reception of images of children from earlier times.

The exhibition reveals such cross-references and influences from the past to the present day and also identifies recurring patterns. The exhibition thus begins with a presentation of depictions of Madonna, in which the ideas of mother-child relationships and their influence up to the present day become clear. The father, on the other hand, usually fades into the background. Only when it comes to presenting the progenitor of the family do fathers proudly and consciously show themselves at the side of their young offspring. Until modern times, intimate father-child images were a rarity.

Created in aristocratic circles around 1500, the child portrait was intended to underpin the continuity and claim to power. Against this backdrop, portraits were often created showing the successors to the throne in armor as small adults. In this way, they were prepared for the future role of general and ruler. A playful variant is the portrait historié, in which the children were depicted as ancient gods, for example. Daughters were depicted at a very young age for reasons of marriage policy. Through strategic marriage promises and early marriages, it was possible to expand one's own political influence and territorial power. In the course of the 16th century, the upper classes also portrayed their children, albeit less elaborately. In the 17th century, however, the representative and extravagant portrait of a child became increasingly popular in wider society.

Philipp Otto Runge

Portrait of Luise Perthes, 1805

Klassik Stiftung Weimar, Museums

Henri Martin

Young Peasant Girl in the Sunshine, 1890

John Stanton Ward

The Newspaper Boys, ca. 1960

Rineke Dijkstra

Julia, Amsterdam, 7 March 2022, 2022

Mauritshuis, Koninklijk Kabinet van Schilderijen, The Hague

In the 17th century in particular, Dutch and Spanish genre painters took up the motif of poor children, which still lives on today. The artists were not necessarily interested in taking a socially critical stance. It is not uncommon for children in financially disadvantaged, often precarious life situations to have a smile written all over their faces. Child labor was not fundamentally rejected either. It was seen as a positive contribution that children could make to the family income. Photographs illustrate how differently children grow up globally and structurally to this day. For many children, the street and not the nursery is the place where they come together, interact socially and play together. How the depiction of children has changed over the centuries is made particularly clear in the exhibition by the works of deceased adolescents. In the past, portraits of deceased children were the only means of preserving their memory. Today, commemoration takes place in a different way - for example through lifelike photographs that show children in happy life situations.

The most serious change, which testifies to a different conception and definition of childhood, took place at the end of the 17th century and in the 18th century. Children were now allowed their own development - as close to nature as possible and away from the adult world. The children's room also became increasingly important, and toys and special children's literature were regarded as fundamental elements of its furnishings. The theme of “being a child” is still one of the most popular pictorial themes in the visual arts today: Trying things out, pushing oneself to the limits, drawing, playing and togetherness are characteristic of the most important phase of a person's life.

BUCERIUS KUNST FORUM

Alter Wall 12, 20457 Hamburg

www.buceriuskunstforum.de

13/10/25

Stanley Whitney @ Gagosian, Athens - 'Return to the Garden' Exhibition

Stanley Whitney: Return to the Garden

Gagosian, Athens

October 2, 2025 – January 17, 2026

Stanley Whitney

The Courage of the Poet, 2025

Oil on linen

60 x 60 inches (152.4 x 152.4 cm)

Photo: Owen Conway

Courtesy Gagosian

Stanley Whitney: Return to the Garden,

Installation View, 2025

Photo: Stathis Mamalakis

Courtesy Gagosian

Gagosian presents Return to the Garden, an exhibition of new and recent paintings by Stanley Whitney in Athens. This is Whitney’s first exhibition in Greece since his participation in Documenta 14 in 2017.

The exhibition’s title, Return to the Garden, evokes themes of arcadian innocence and harmony with nature. Unencumbered by preconceived subjects or narrative elements, these vibrant abstractions offer viewers the opportunity to engage with a heightened awareness of color and perception.

Stanley Whitney asserts the power of color through loose grids of roughly rectangular shapes, creating compositions of three or four rows separated by horizontal bands that traverse the canvas. Characterized by active brushwork, layered pigment, and jostling borders, each field is defined in relation to its neighbors and to each painting as a whole. In some works, he repeats variations of the same hues either between multiple blocks or extended across their lateral bands, establishing myriad formal connections and contrasts.

Stanley Whitney

On the Street Where You Live, 2024

Oil on linen

60 x 60 inches (152.4 x 152.4 cm)

Photo: Owen Conway

Courtesy Gagosian

Stanley Whitney: Return to the Garden,

Installation View, 2025

Photo: Stathis Mamalakis

Courtesy Gagosian

By sustaining this format, Stanley Whitney has developed a compositional framework from which to produce individual canvases full of unexpected, energetic harmonies between vivid colors and fluid gestures. Influenced by traditions including Abstract Expressionism and quiltmaking, his paintings additionally parallel the polyphonies and syncopation of jazz, forming compelling expressions of creativity and freedom.

Stanley Whitney also admires ancient Greek vase painting, particularly of the preclassical Geometric and Archaic eras (c. 900–500 BCE). Painted by hand and divided into banded registers, the abstract linear patterns of these early vases underly the compositions of later, more figurative styles. In looking to such ancient sources when developing his stacked compositions, Stanley Whitney draws upon an interest in archaic forms that similarly motivated both the Abstract Expressionists and earlier modernists.

Stanley Whitney: Return to the Garden,

Installation View, 2025

Photo: Stathis Mamalakis

Courtesy Gagosian

Stanley Whitney

Roma 55, 2023

Oil on linen

24 x 24 inches (61 x 61 cm)

Photo: Owen Conway

Courtesy Gagosian

In another connection with Mediterranean antiquity, the title of the Roma series (2017–) speaks to the inspiration Stanley Whitney found in Rome, where he lived and worked for five years in the 1990s. It was then that he consolidated the approach to abstraction that he continues to explore, a method sparked in part by the ancient architecture and murals that he encountered there and in Egypt. Unlike the straight lines of modern construction, the weathered, hand-built structures of the ancient world possess irregular contours and surfaces that correspond with the gestural demarcations of Whitney’s paintings.

Other works featured in Return to the Garden include new paintings from the ongoing Stay Song series (2017–), which Stanley Whitney debuted in Athens for Documenta 14, as well as the Monk & Munch paintings (2020–). In these rectangular canvases, he pays homage to jazz pianist and composer Thelonious Monk and expressionist painter Edvard Munch, highlighting essential relationships between art and music.

GAGOSIAN GALLERY

22 Anapiron Polemou Street, Athens 11521

gagosian.com

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Stanley Whitney: Drawings

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