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

Vik Muniz on Photography, Mind, and Matter

The Photography Workshop Series

Aperture, 2025

Vik Muniz on Photography, Mind, and Matter

The Photography Workshop Series

Aperture, 2025

Format: Paperback / softback

Number of pages: 128

Number of images: 99

Publication date: 2025-08-12

Measurements: 7.5 x 10 x 7.5 inches

ISBN: 9781597114455

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

APERTURE

aperture.org

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

Austin Martin White

Tracing Delusionships

Petzel Gallery, New York

September 4 – October 18, 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

Artist Austin Martin White

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

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

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

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

PETZEL GALLERY

520 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001

www.petzel.com

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

Matthew Rolston

Vanitas: The Palermo Portraits

Fahey / Klein Gallery, Los Angeles

September 25 - November 8, 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MATTHEW ROLSTON 

Vanitas: The Palermo Portraits

Nazraeli Press, Mid-September 2025

A special edition of 500 copies 

presented in a custom clamshell case

Hardcover: 12.5 x 18 x 1.5 inches, 

118 pages, 50 four-color plates

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

Book Cover Courtesy of Nazraely Press

FAHEY / KLEIN GALLERY

148 North La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90036

www.faheykleingallery.com

Rétrospective Suzanne Duchamp @ Kunsthaus Zürich

Rétrospective Suzanne Duchamp 

Kunsthaus Zürich

Jusqu'au 7 Septembre 2025

Le Kunsthaus Zürich consacre à SUZANNE DUCHAMP la première rétrospective au monde. Ses compositions minimalistes et pourtant graphiquement marquantes, associées à des titres suggestifs comme «Usine de mes pensées», sont entrées dans l’histoire de l’art et néanmoins source d’inspiration jusqu’à nos jours. Malgré son appartenance à l’une des familles d’artistes les plus célèbres, son oeuvre est restée jusqu’à présent largement inconnue du grand public. Cette exposition, qui réunit des prêts exceptionnels provenant d’institutions publiques et de collections privées renommées, rend à Suzanne Duchamp la place de premier plan qu’elle mérite.

Dadaïste, peintre, SUZANNE DUCHAMP (1889, Blainville-Crevon – 1963, Neuilly-sur-Seine) a laissé à la postérité une oeuvre aux multiples facettes dont certains éléments figurent dans des collections réputées, mais qui pour l’essentiel est surtout appréciée d’un public d’initié(e)s. Duchamp entretenait des liens étroits avec les avant-gardes de son époque et a enrichi l’histoire de l’art d’apports très personnels. Soeur de Marcel Duchamp, de Raymond Duchamp-Villon et de Jacques Villon, elle échangeait beaucoup avec eux. En 1919, elle a épousé l’artiste suisse Jean Crotti, dont le Kunsthaus Zürich possède des oeuvres clés, et avec qui Suzanne Duchamp a occasionnellement coopéré. La dernière exposition d’ampleur consacrée aux deux artistes a eu lieu en 1983 au Centre Pompidou, à Paris, en coopération avec la Kunsthalle Bern. Il est donc grand temps de mettre à l’honneur le travail de Suzanne Duchamp et d’en montrer toute la profondeur. Par son langage visuel subtil, esthétique et plein d’humour, elle incarne une combinaison hors du commun dans le mouvement dadaïste. Quelle ville conviendrait mieux que Zurich, cité natale de Dada, pour enfin donner à cette artiste d’exception toute l’attention qu’elle mérite?

SUZANNE DUCHAMP : À LA FOIS ABSTRAITE ET FIGURATIVE

Dans son art, Suzanne Duchamp a exploré des voies variées. À Paris, dans le sillage du cubisme, elle commence par se pencher sur la fragmentation d’intérieurs intimes et de paysages urbains, avant de se tourner vers le mouvement Dada. Ses oeuvres associent peinture et poésie dans une démarche expérimentale qui joue avec différents supports et matériaux.

Même si sa peinture évolue de plus en plus vers l’abstraction dans les années 1910, Suzanne Duchamp reste toujours fidèle à certains repères visuels, renforcés par des titres énigmatiques. En 1922, pour des raisons diffuses, elle rompt inopinément avec Dada pour se tourner vers une peinture figurative aux accents souvent ironiques et naïfs.

Dans les décennies qui suivent, elle crée des oeuvres contenant un large spectre de motifs, qui se caractérisent par des expérimentations sur les pigments et par l’importance structurante du dessin. En 1949, son influente amie Katherine S. Dreier la qualifie de « peintre semi-abstraite » – ce qui est une formulation pertinente pour une oeuvre échappant à toutes les conventions de l’histoire de l’art.

UNE EXPOSITION INTÉGRANT LES TOUTES DERNIÈRES RECHERCHES

Cette rétrospective réunit les oeuvres dadaïstes de Suzanne Duchamp et des travaux datant de ses phases antérieures et postérieures de création. Talia Kwartler, commissaire invitée, a étudié pendant plusieurs années l’oeuvre de Suzanne Duchamp et soutenu une thèse de doctorat sur cette artiste au University College de Londres. En 2024, elle a été chargée de cours à l’université de Zurich sur le thème des femmes dans le mouvement Dada.

La détermination de Talia Kwartler a permis de transformer la présentation prévue en une vaste rétrospective, la première jamais consacrée à cette artiste, élaborée avec Cathérine Hug, commissaire au Kunsthaus et spécialiste du mouvement Dada. L’exposition s’inscrit ainsi dans la longue tradition des présentations de Dada organisées au Kunsthaus Zürich depuis 1966, et peut être considérée comme un événement majeur dans la recherche en histoire de l’art. Réunissant près de 50 tableaux, 20 travaux sur papier ainsi que des documents d’archives rares et des photographies d’époque, cette rétrospective offre une vue d’ensemble de toute l’oeuvre de Suzanne Duchamp. De nombreux travaux n’ont été redécouverts qu’au terme d’intenses recherches. Parmi les prêteurs figurent des institutions comme le MoMA de New York, le Philadelphia Museum, l’Art Institute de Chicago, le Centre Pompidou de Paris, la Bibliothèque nationale de France et la Bibliothèque littéraire Jacques Doucet à Paris, le Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen, mais aussi d’importantes collections privées comme la Bluff Collection et la collection de Francis M. Naumann et Marie T. Keller. Cette rétrospective a vu le jour en étroite collaboration avec l’Association Duchamp Villon Crotti.

SUZANNE DUCHAMP : PUBLICATION

À l’occasion de l’exposition, la première monographie consacrée à Suzanne Duchamp vient de paraître, avec de nombreuses reproductions. L’ouvrage comporte une biographie détaillée rédigée par Talia Kwartler, ainsi que des articles d’historiennes de l’art comme Carole Boulbès, Cathérine Hug et Effie Rentzou, auxquels s’ajoutent des perspectives artistiques de Jean-Jacques Lebel (interview) et Amy Sillman (images). La postface est signée Anne Berest, autrice de best-sellers. Cet ouvrage de 192 pages est paru aux éditions Hatje Cantz.

Cette rétrospective est une coopération avec la Kunsthalle Schirn de Francfort (10 octobre 2025 - 11 janvier 2026), où le commissariat est assuré par Ingrid Pfeiffer.

KUNSTHAUS ZURICH  

Heimplatz, 8001 Zurich

www.kunsthaus.ch

Retrospective Suzanne Duchamp 

Kunsthaus Zürich, 6 Juin - 7 Septembre 2025

The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish, Edited by Lucia Pietroiusti and Filipa Ramos, Hatje Cantz + Serpentine

The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish

Edited by Lucia Pietroiusti and Filipa Ramos

Hatje Cantz + Serpentine

The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish

Edited by Lucia Pietroiusti and Filipa Ramos

Hatje Cantz + Serpentine

Serpentine announces the launch of The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish, a book edited by Lucia Pietroiusti, Head of Serpentine Ecologies and curator and lecturer at the Academy of Art and Design of Basel Filipa Ramos. The launch event of the publication, which includes 100 contributors across the arts and sciences, will take place in London at the Royal College of Art on 27th October 2025.

 

The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish is a publication that brings together interventions across the arts, the humanities and the sciences to investigate the history and cutting-edge of more-than-human theories, from animal, plant and fungal intelligence, consciousness and affect, machine sentience and interspecies communication. This publication is an important landmark in Serpentine’s long-term research project of the same name, begun in 2018 to inaugurate Serpentine’s General Ecology project.

 

The publication includes original conversations, essays, interviews, meditations, poems and artwork representations by 100 of the most celebrated environmental thinkers and creatives across disciplines – anthropologists, artists, biologists, ecologists, gardeners, musicians, philosophers, theologians and more, including Sophia Al-Maria, Ted Chiang, Emanuele Coccia, Peter Gabriel, Tim Ingold, Elizabeth A. Povinelli and Karrabing Film Collective, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, Himali Singh Soin, Merlin Sheldrake, Superflex, Jenna Sutela, Anna L. Tsing, Chris Watson and many more.

 

The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish is arranged in five chapters. The first, titled Worlds, focuses on principles of symbiosis and coevolution, anthropological approaches to more-than-human beings; and radical reimaginings of the planet. The second, Beings, presents more-than-human beings as collaborators, co-thinkers, and interlocutors – from the sound of a forest stretching and shifting to the swarming messiness of the soil, through to the body language of animals. The third, entitled Grounds, hosts debates concerning more-than-human and planetary life within the social and political entanglements of anthropocentrism, and calls for more-than-human and environmental practices of justice. Odes, the fourth chapter, brings to the fore an understanding of mythology, storytelling, and meaning-making as planetary manifestations, tracing human/more-than-human relations across deep time. In Oracles, the book’s closing chapter, the spiritual realm and advanced technologies (human and non-human) meet at the porous and uncertain edges of planetary computation and complexity.

 

Publication launches are planned internationally throughout 2025, including at IMMA Dublin on 14th September and then a launch at the Royal College of Art, London, on October 27th 2025, which will feature a Serpentine Cinema programme as well as the presentation of Filipa Ramos’ latest monograph, The Artist as Ecologist (London: Lund Humphreys, October 2025), which discusses the ways in which contemporary artists embrace practices of environmentalism. The London event will include a lecture performance by Elizabeth A. Povinelli. The first launch of the publication took place at E-WERK Luckenwalde, Germany as part of the festival’s sixth iteration, subtitled Love and Lament, and presented by Schering Stiftung, Berlin.

 

Art Direction by Giles Round. Contributors: Andrew Adamatzky; Yussef Agbo-Ola/Olaniyi Studio; Sophia Al-Maria; Allora & Calzadilla; Saelia Aparicio; Chloe Aridjis; Heather Barnett; Antoine Bertin; Lynne Boddy; Elizabeth-Jane Burnett; Vivian Caccuri; Mariana Caló & Francisco Queimadela; Federico Campagna; Teresa Castro; Alex Cecchetti; Vint Cerf; Ted Chiang; Sean Cho A.; Nicola Clayton; Emanuele Coccia; Revital Cohen; & Tuur Van Balen; The Coven Intelligence Program; Marisol de la Cadena; Michela de Mattei; Onome Ekeh; Cru Encarnação; James Fairhead; Adham Faramawy; Simone Forti; Claire Filmon; Rosalind Fowler; Peter Gabriel; Elaine Gan; Jay Gao; Sabine Hauert; Daisy Hildyard; Amy Hollywood; Hylozoic/Desires (Himali Singh Soin & David Soin Tappeser); Tim Ingold; Derek Jarman; Alex Jordan; Karrabing Film Collective; Leah Kelly; Asim Khan; Kapwani Kiwanga; Dominique Knowles; Bettina Korek; Simone Kotva; Daisy Lafarge; Hannah Landecker; Yasmeen Lari; Long Litt Woon; Annea Lockwood; Thandi Loewenson; Miranda Lowe; Sophie Lunn-Rockliffe; Marcos Lutyens; Carlos Magdalena; Michael Marder; Alex McBratney; Natasha Myers; Nahum; Rasmus Nielsen/ SUPERFLEX; Hatis Noit; Hans Ulrich Obrist; Angelica Patterson; Lucia Pietroiusti; Elizabeth A. Povinelli; Maria Puig de la Bellacasa; Filipa Ramos; Asad Raza; Diana Reiss; Tabita Rezaire; Ben Rivers; Giles Round; Merlin Sheldrake; Kostas Stasinopoulos; Jenna Sutela; bones tan jones; Phoebe Tickell; Anaïs Tondeur & Germain Meulemans; Laurence Totelin; Anna L. Tsing; Oula A. Valkeapäa & Leena Valkeapäa; Sumayya Vally; Kim Walker; Chris Watson; Elvia Wilk; Rain Wu & Mariana Sanchez Salvador.

 

Published by Hatje Cantz, The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish is distributed worldwide as well as on Serpentine’s website.

The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish 

History of the programme

The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish began as a multi-year symposium, podcast and research project investigating consciousness and intelligence across species and beings and was launched in 2018 at the London Zoo. Since 2018, it has welcomed over 10,000 audience members and viewers and been a pioneer in environmental and ecological convenings.

 

2018 at the London Zoo: PART 1 LANGUAGE: On interspecies communications, with Ted Chiang, Vint Cerf, Peter Gabriel and more.

 

2018 at Ambika P3: we have never been one: On Gaia theory and micro-organisms, with Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Sophia Al-Maria and more.

 

2019 at EartH Hackney: with plants: on plant consciousness, plant intelligence and communication with the vegetal world, with Tabita Rezaire, Chris Watson and more.

2020 online: the understory of the understory: on land, earth, soil, fungi, with Elizabeth A. Povinelli and Merlin Sheldrake and more. This event marked the launch of Sheldrake’s landmark publication, Entangled Life.

 

2022, Galeria da Biodiversidade, Porto, Portugal: The Shape of a Circle in the Dream of a Fish: on dreams in the non-human world, with Alex Jordan, Onome Ekeh, Federico Campagna and more.

2025, E-WERK Luckenwalde/Schering Stiftung: The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish: Love and Lament: on grief and intimacy in a more-than-human world, with Aslak Aamot Helm, Antoine Bertin, Kapwani Kiwanga, Michael Ohl, Alejandra Pombo Su, Elizabeth Povinelli, Claudia Rankine, Asad Raza, Giles Round, Jenna Sutela, Jovana Maksic, Staci Bu Shea and Revital Cohen & Tuur Van Balen.

 

In addition, releases on Serpentine Podcast’s series: “On General Ecology” and collaborations with renowned environmental podcast Future Ecologies brought together some 60,000 listeners to dive deeper into the ideas and experimentations of the series.

About Serpentine Ecologies

Since 2014’s Extinction Marathon with artist Gustav Metzger, Serpentine has been at the forefront of environmental action and thought. Since the establishment of the General Ecology project in 2018,  the Ecologies initiatives nurture Serpentine’s ongoing engagement with ecology, climate breakdown, more-than-human consciousness, environmental justice and complexity in a changing world. Stretching across all of Serpentine’s activities, infrastructures and networks, Serpentine Ecologies takes a speculative and active stance towards embedding alternative narratives and deep ecological principles into the everyday. Ecologies’ initiatives manifested with projects such as Court for Intergenerational Climate Crimes: The British East India Company on Trial in April 2025, Back to Earth, (2020- 2022), Infinite Ecologies Marathon in 2023, and Daisy Ginsberg’s Pollinator Pathmaker in Kensington Gardens among many other projects. As part of Serpentine’s Back to Earth project, Serpentine and Penguin Press published 140 Artists’ Ideas for Planet Earth, a book inviting artists to re-think the climate emergency.

SERPENTINE GALLERIES

www.serpentinegalleries.org

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

The Making of Modern Korean Art 

The Letters of Kim Tschang-Yeul, Kim Whanki, Lee Ufan, and Park Seo-Bo, 1961–1982

Tina Kim Gallery, New York

May 5 - June 21, 2025

Tina Kim Gallery presents The Making of Modern Korean Art: The Letters of Kim Tschang-Yeul, Kim Whanki, Lee Ufan, and Park Seo-Bo, 1961–1982. Organized in conjunction with the launch of a landmark new publication of the same title, the exhibition brings to life the personal and intellectual exchanges between four pioneering artists who shaped the trajectory of modern Korean art during the transformative decades following the Korean War. Through the presentation of significant paintings made by all four artists during this period, as well as archival materials, photography, and ephemera, the exhibition will make manifest the artistic dialogues and debates that guided the global emergence of Korean modern art.

In the aftermath of the Korean War (1950–53), amid political upheaval and limited institutional support, Korean artists faced the urgent challenge of redefining their cultural landscape and articulating their collective trauma and existential dislocation. Many turned to abstraction as a means of forging a distinctly Korean modernity, one that resisted both Western ideologies and inherited aesthetic traditions. Among Korea’s earliest abstractionists, Kim Whanki evolved from semi-abstracted depictions of moon jars and plum blossoms to the sublime all-over dot paintings of his New York period, blending a Korean sensibility with global avant-garde influences. Park Seo-Bo and Kim Tschang-Yeul, deeply influenced by European Informel, produced early works characterized by thick impasto, raw surfaces, and material experimentation. This shared language laid the foundation for their later iconic series: Kim Tschang-Yeul turned to the meditative precision of his Waterdrop series, reflecting Taoist principles of ego dissolution; while Park Seo-Bo developed his Ecriture series, defined by its monochromatic palette and a rigorous focus on repetition, process, and discipline. Lee Ufan, initially a key figure in the Mono-ha movement in Japan, transitioned in the early 1970s to his From Point and From Line series, merging material restraint with philosophical inquiry in simple, deliberate brush strokes that evoke Eastern calligraphy. By the mid-1970s, each artist had developed a singular visual idiom: distinct yet unified by a shared ambition to advance Korean art on the global stage. Key works from these formative series will be featured in the forthcoming exhibition.

Though geographically dispersed, the four artists remained closely connected through a decades-long correspondence. In the absence of a robust cultural infrastructure in Korea, their letters became essential conduits for critical exchange, exhibition planning, and mutual support. Park Seo-Bo and Kim Tschang-Yeul, lifelong friends and collaborators, played a pivotal role in organizing the second Hyundae Fine Art Exhibition in 1957 and corresponded tirelessly to coordinate Korea’s participation in the 1961 Paris Biennale. Lee Ufan and Park Seo-Bo, who began exchanging letters after their joint inclusion in a 1968 group exhibition in Tokyo, became key mediators between the Korean and Japanese art scenes; and Kim Whanki, a generation older, served as a mentor figure, encouraging Kim Tschang-Yeul to apply for Rockefeller Fellowship funding that ultimately brought him to New York in 1965. From Seoul, Tokyo, Paris, and New York, the four artists exchanged ideas, critiques, and reflections on both the practical and philosophical challenges of working from the periphery of the global art world. Their letters not only offer an unprecedented window into their artistic development but also reveal a collective commitment to building a Korean modernism that could engage—on its own terms—with the broader narratives of postwar art.

The Making of Modern Korean Art foregrounds these correspondences—newly translated, previously unpublished, and reproduced at actual size—as critical primary documents in the story of Korean modernism. Published by Gregory R. Miller & Co., the book is co-edited by Yeon Shim Chung, Professor of Art History and Theory at Hongik University, and Doryun Chong, Artistic Director and Chief Curator of M+, Hong Kong, and features a contribution by Kyung An, Curator of Asian Art at The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Beyond the letters, the volume marks a major contribution to the field as a comprehensive English-language survey of Korean abstraction, spanning the period from the birth of Korean Informel to the formation of Dansaekhwa.

TINA KIM GALLERY

525 West 21st Street, New York, NY 10011

tinakimgallery.com

Fêtes et célébrations flamandes - Brueghel, Rubens, Jordaens... @ Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille

Fêtes et célébrations flamandes

Brueghel, Rubens, Jordaens...

Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille

26 avril - 1er septembre 2025

Fêtes et célébrations flamandes

Brueghel, Rubens, Jordaens...

Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille

Affiche de l'exposition

Pieter II Brueghel (ou atelier de)

Kermesse avec théâtre et procession

Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Bruxelles

© Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Bruxelles /

photo : J. Geleyns - Art Photography

Les fêtes répondent à deux impératifs : constituer un moment de sociabilité, visant à créer et à entretenir un sentiment d’appartenance à une communauté, et une manifestation de réjouissances. C’est à travers le prisme du divertissement collectif que cette exposition se propose d’explorer les fêtes flamandes aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles, des bals princiers, cérémonies religieuses et fêtes solennelles et urbaines aux kermesses et fêtes des rois. Dans une société hiérarchisée et corporative, la fête sert à la fois de rituel social et de soupape de décompression. Aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles, les habitants des Pays-Bas sont touchés régulièrement par des épidémies et subissent les outrages de la Guerre de Quatre-Vingts Ans. La fête constitue alors un moment crucial pour relâcher les tensions et renforcer le tissu social. 

Comme le souligne Juliette Singer, Directrice du Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille et du Musée de l'Hospice Comtesse, et commissire générale de l’exposition : "La fête a bien sûr valeur d’exutoire. Mais elle est aussi une réaction vitale ; faire la fête, revient à faire société, réunir ensemble une population qui dans sa mixité, s’unit le temps de la fête : hommes et femmes, enfants, vieillards, mais aussi mendiants et puissants."

Pieter Brueghel I

Les Mendiants, 1568

Paris, musée du Louvre

© GrandPalaisRmn (musée du Louvre) / Tony Querrec

L’exposition explore les sens de l’imagerie festive. Des représentations telles que les kermesses et la Fête des rois constituent des genres picturaux à part entière, appréciés bien au-delà des frontières. Aux Pays-Bas, l’État spectacle puise abondamment dans les coutumes locales, faisant des solennités un moyen de négociation entre les différents niveaux d’autorité. Les multiples représentations de ces célébrations montrent aussi comment l’État et l’Église tentent, à cette époque, de réguler les excès festifs. Malgré cela, l’aspect ludique et divertissant des fêtes perdure.

L’exposition met en lumière les collections du Palais des Beaux-Arts et du musée de l’Hospice Comtesse, enrichies par des prêts prestigieux du Musée du Louvre et des Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique. Elle réunit un corpus de peintures, albums, gravures et dessins du XVIe au XVIIe siècle, ainsi que divers objets (instruments de musique, céramiques...).

Le parcours permet aux visiteurs de plonger dans l’univers des fêtes flamandes, un patrimoine immatériel, toujours riche aujourd’hui, incarnant des valeurs telles que la mixité, le vivre-ensemble et le sens du collectif.  

Fêtes et célébrations flamandes - Un pacours en quatre sections :

I. Introduction : Guerre et fête

Au 16e et 17e siècle, aux Pays-Bas, comme dans le reste de l'Europe, la guerre est une réalité omniprésente. C'est au cours des périodes de paix que les fêtes prennent place. 

II. Fêtes et cérémonies urbaines

Alexander van Bredael

Fête traditionnelle à Anvers avec le géant Druon Antigon

XVII siècle

Lille, musée de l'Hospice Comtesse

© GrandPalaisRmn / Stéphane Maréchalle

Antoon Sallaert (et atelier)

L'infante Isabelle abattant l'oiseau au tir de la corporation

des Arbalétriers de Notre-Dame, le 15 mai 1615 au Sablon à Bruxelles

Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Bruxelles

© Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Bruxelles /

photo : J. Geleyns - Art Photography

Section la plus fournie en oeuvres, elle présente les principaux types de fête dans les villes des Pays-Bas. On y trouve ainsi des oeuves présentant les cérémonies fêtant l'arrivée du prince dans la ville, comme celle du Cardinal Infant Ferdinand en 1635 qui a fait l'objet de plusieurs tableaux de Rubens (deux appartiennent au Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lille). On trouve aussi dans cette section de l'exposition les fêtes religieuses et celles organisées par les corporations "militaires".

III. Kermesses, noces et fêtes villageoises

Gillis van Tilborgh

Fête villageoise

Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Bruxelles

© Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Bruxelles /

photo : J. Geleyns - Art Photography

Thomas van Apshoven

Fête de village avec joueur de cornemuse sur un tonneau

Milieu du XVII siècle

Lille, Palais des Beaux-Arts

© GrandPalaisRmn (PBA, Lille) / Hervé Lewandowski

Tout comme les fêtes des villes, celles des villages ont bien sûr aussi inspirés les artistes de l'époque. Il ne faut pas manquer d'admirer le tableau Les noces paysannes en présence des archiducs Albert et Isabelles, oeuvre de Jan Brueghel l'Ancien, appartenant au musée du Prado à Madrid.

IV. Fêtes de cour, fêtes des rois

Jacques Jordaens

Le roi boit

Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Bruxelles

© Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Bruxelles /

photo : J. Geleyns - Art Photography

Dans cette section les fêtes ne se déroulent plus à l'extérieur mais à l'intérieur avec, en particulier, les banquets de cour. Là aussi, parmi les impressionnantes oeuvres exposées, il ne faut manquer le tableau Le Roi boit de Jacques Jordaens qui est une des peintures les plus connues de l'art flamand du 17e siècle.

Concerts, banquets et rencontres enrichissent la programmation de cet événement, faisant du Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille un lieu incontournable de cette saison lille3000

Commissariat général : Juliette Singer, Directrice du Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille et du Musée de l’Hospice Comtesse

Commissaires scientifiques

Blaise Ducos, Conservateur en chef, responsable des peintures flamandes et hollandaises au Musée du Louvre

Sabine Van Sprang, Conservatrice de la peinture flamande, 1550 - 1650 aux Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique

Un catalogue publié par GrandPalaisRmnEditions accompagne l'exposition. Connaisance des arts publie un hors-série à l'occasion de l'exposition.

Fêtes et Célébrations Flamandes :

Brueghel, Rubens, Jordaens...

GrandPalaisRmnEditions

Catalogue de l'exposition

Direction d’ouvrage :

Juliette Singer, Sabine van Sprang et Blaise Ducos

208 pages - en français - Prix: 39€

Fêtes et Célébrations Flamandes

Connaissance des arts, Hors-série

Exposition coproduite par le GrandPalaisRmn et le Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille, dans le cadre de la saison Fiesta de lille3000. Elle bénéficie d’un partenariat exceptionnel avec les Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, et le musée du Louvre, Paris.

PALAIS DES BEAUX-ARTS DE LILLE

Place de la République, 59000 Lille

pba.lille.fr

Rinko Kawauchi, M/E, Delpire & Co - Livre de Photographies

Rinko Kawauchi

M/E 

Delpire & Co, 2025 

Rinko Kawauchi

M/E

© Edité par Delpire & Co

Relié, toilé avec marquage argent

216 pages, 22 x 28,5 cm

EAN: 979-10-95821-80-9

Ouvrage bilingue français – anglais

En librairie le 27 mars 2025

Rinko Kawauchi

Image issue de M/E (delpire & co, 2025)

Photographie © Rinko Kawauchi

Rinko Kawauchi

Image issue de M/E (delpire & co, 2025)

Photographie © Rinko Kawauchi

Abeille et les dieux

Abeille au cœur des fleurs

Fleurs dans les jardins

Jardins entourés de murs en terre

Murs dans les villages

Villages au cœur du Japon

Japon dans le monde

Monde au sein des dieux

Puis, puis… les dieux

Au cœur des frêles abeilles

Misuzu Kaneko

Ce poème de Misuzu Kaneko, poétesse japonaise du début du XXe  siècle injustement oubliée et redécouverte par le grand public japonais au moment de la catastrophe de Fukushima (ses poèmes étaient lus à la télévision), a inspiré à Rinko Kawauchi ce nouveau livre. Rendant hommage à cette autrice, la photographe explore notre rapport au monde nous incitant à reconsidérer nos liens en tant qu’êtres humains avec la nature.

Rinko Kawauchi a baptisé son livre M/E en référence à Mother/Earth mais n’en a gardé que les initiales (me en anglais) pour souligner le lien qu’elle entretient avec la terre-mère. Elle pose son regard singulier, empreint de douceur, sur le monde vivant pour en capter la beauté fragile : celle d’une goutte de rosée sur une feuille ou le front gigantesque d’un glacier devant lequel lévite le halo blanc d’un nuage de vapeur provoqué par l’effondrement de la glace dans la mer.

La démarche de l’artiste est très intuitive, ses images ne sont pas construites, elles « arrivent ». Le résultat : des images presque méditatives, comme issues d’un rêve. Elles peuvent être poétiques, mystérieuses, voire même bizarres. D’ailleurs elles ne sont pas parfaitement nettes. Rinko Kawauchi cherche l’éphémère, elle capture cet instant fugace qui précède l’accommodation de l’œil.

Rinko Kawauchi

Image issue de M/E (delpire & co, 2025)

Photographie © Rinko Kawauchi

Rinko Kawauchi

Image issue de M/E (delpire & co, 2025)

Photographie © Rinko Kawauchi

L’artiste saisit aussi bien son environnement immédiat et sa famille que des sujets plus spectaculaires. Elle propose dans ce livre un dialogue entre des images d’Islande et du Japon, principalement autour de l’eau : nuages, pluie, arc-en ciel, glace, neige, torrents, brume... L’ouvrage est construit en jouant avec l’idée de transparence qui lui est chère. Les images sont imprimées sur un papier japonais très fin et se dévoilent progressivement. Des pages blanches, comme des silences, ponctuent les séquences. La couverture est, quant à elle, comme éclaboussée d’éclats d’argent qui reflètent la lumière.

Pour citer Teju Cole, l’auteur du texte qui clôt le livre : « les grands livres de photographie sont ceux qui modifient nos perceptions ». Celui-ci en fait assurément partie.

La photographe japonaise Rinko Kawauchi (née en 1972), connue pour ses images aux couleurs douces et lumineuses s’attache à dévoiler le mystère, la fragilité et la force de la vie sous toutes ses formes. Connue en France depuis son exposition à la fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain en 2005, son œuvre fait partie de nombreuses collections publiques et privées à travers le monde. Son travail a été présenté cet été aux Rencontres d’Arles dans le cadre de l’exposition « Femmes photographes japonaise ». Attachant une grande importance au livre, elle a publié une vingtaine d’ouvrages. M/E est le cinquième à paraître en France.

DELPIRE & CO

13, rue de l’Abbaye - Paris

delpireandco.com

Mon petit Chantilly par Marie Sellier - GrandPalaisRmnÉditions - Jeunesse

Mon petit Chantilly par Marie Sellier

GrandPalaisRmnÉditions - Jeunesse

Parution : 29 janvier 2025

Pour les plus jeunes, GrandPalaisRmnÉditions propose une collection qui leur permet une découverte ludique et largement illustrée des grands Musées et lieux du Patrimoine. Marie Sellier est l'autrice des textes et use de son talent pour présenter l'Art et les lieux prestigieux qui les exposent, avec des mots simples, adaptés au public Jeunesse. C'est à Chantilly que nous emmène le dernier livre de cette collection.

Mon petit Chantilly par Marie Sellier

GrandPalaisRmnÉditions 

Relié, 22 x 22 cm - 48 pages - 40 illustrations

Code EAN : 9782711880768 - Prix : 10 €

Mon petit Chantilly par Marie Sellier

GrandPalaisRmnÉditions 

Mon petit Chantilly par Marie Sellier

GrandPalaisRmnÉditions 

Entre le château, le parc et les grandes écuries, impossible de s’ennuyer au domaine de Chantilly ! Il y en a pour tous les goûts : fans d’histoire ou d’art, amoureux de la nature ou encore passionnés de chevaux.

Ancienne forteresse médiévale complétée d’un château partiellement détruit à la Révolution, ce n’est qu’au XIXe siècle qu’est construite la partie la plus moderne du château, dans un style inspiré de la Renaissance qui lui confère une allure digne d’un conte de fées.

Le dernier propriétaire du château au XIXe siècle s’appelle Henri d’Orléans, duc d’Aumale. Il a pour ancêtre le frère de Louis XIV, et a eu une vie particulièrement romanesque ! Il a consacré son immense fortune à réunir une incroyable collection d’art et de livres. Le château, outre une somptueuse bibliothèque, abrite la seconde plus grande collection de peintures anciennes après le Louvre. Dans la galerie de peintures, on peut voir des chefs-d’œuvre signés Raphaël, Clouet, Ingres ou Delacroix, accrochés comme on le faisait au XIXe siècle.

Les Grands Appartements, à travers des lieux emblématiques comme la galerie des Batailles ou la Grande Singerie, permettent de découvrir le faste des grands seigneurs de l’Ancien Régime. Le Parc comprend un jardin anglais romantique, un jardin anglo-chinois avec un hameau ainsi qu’un grand parterre à la française dessiné par le fameux jardinier de Louis XIV, André Le Nôtre. Il abrite également les Grandes Écuries, construites au XVIIIe siècle par le prince de Condé, qui sont encore aujourd’hui l’un des hauts lieux de l’art équestre.

Marie Sellier est l’autrice d’une centaine d’ouvrages jeunesse sur l’art. Romancière et scénariste, elle a consacré livres et scénarios à des artistes majeurs (Camille Claudel et Auguste Rodin, Van Gogh, etc.) et a travaillé avec de nombreuses illustratrices contemporaines. Au GrandPalaisRmn, elle a signé de nombreux succès, parmi lesquels L’Afrique, petit Chaka… (2001, avec Marion Lesage) ou, plus récemment, L’Arbre de Sobo (2018, avec Charlotte Gastaut) et Où vont les lapins la nuit ? (2022, avec Marie Assénat). Officier des Arts et des Lettres (2013) et Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur (2014), elle a également présidé le Conseil permanent des écrivains (2012-2014) et la Société des gens de lettres (2014-2019).

Dans la même collection : 

Mon Petit Orsay, par Marie Sellier

GrandPalaisRmnÉditions

Mon petit Louvre, par Violaine Bouvet-Lanselle et Marie Sellier

GrandPalaisRmnÉditions

Mon petit Picasso, par Marie Sellier

GrandPalaisRmnÉditions

Mon Petit Cluny, par Marie Sellier

GrandPalaisRmnÉditions

Ma petite Orangerie, par Marie Sellier

GrandPalaisRmnÉditions

Mon Luxembourg, par Marie Sellier

GrandPalaisRmnÉditions

Mon petit Guimet, par Marie Sellier

GrandPalaisRmnÉditions

Mon petit Versailles, par Marie Sellier

GrandPalaisRmnÉditions

Mon petit Fontainebleau, par Marie Sellier

GrandPalaisRmnÉditions

Verne Dawson Exhibition @ Karma, NYC - "Crystal Springs" Exhibition + Monograph Publication

Verne Dawson: Crystal Springs

Karma, New York

January 8 – February 28, 2025

Karma presents Crystal Springs, an exhibition of new paintings by VERNE DAWSON on view at 22 East 2nd Street, New York.

Verne Dawson’s recent paintings center around a spring near the artist’s home in the Blue Ridge Mountains in western North Carolina. As depicted by Dawson, whose approach, unmediated by contemporary technology, foregrounds the primacy of subject, artist, and paint, the spring becomes a place outside of time, at once enchanted and very real.

In Karma’s new monograph on Verne Dawson, critic Jennifer Krasinski hones in on the artist’s atemporal ambitions, writing that “he devoted himself to painting because it offers ‘the much-desired possibility to escape time,’ eluding the dupe finitudes (like now and then) and instead calling attention . . . to time’s suppleness.” His monumental canvas Saluda Crystal Springs (2025) invites the viewer to step into the utopic spaces of the spring and painting itself. While the location is specific, the temporality is an open question. Across nearly fourteen feet, swaths of oil swirl and curlicue, together forming a fantastical landscape populated by a number of nude figures in pairs—without clothes to ground us in a particular era, we are further dislocated from time. Vines snake up trees; the waters are vibrantly blue and yellow; the sun bounces off of the top of a distant mountain. As in the monumental landscape paintings from the Song and Yuan dynasties that are among Dawson’s wide-ranging inspirations, the artist hopes to emphasize humans’ diminutive scale in the face of expansive nature. 

The calligraphically forested Pot Shoals (2024) focuses on one couple as they wade through the springs’ clear water, its aquamarine hue mirrored in the sky above. In the dense trees that frame them, Dawson’s use of the complementary colors orange and green creates a firework-like pop of leaves and vines. Through the Forest (2024) represents a procession of figures walking down to the waters in a style that borders on abstraction; clouds and trees billow above and around them in elemental, gestural whorls redolent of Abstract Expressionism. Through his impassioned renderings of the Crystal Springs, Dawson channels a love of nature and a respect for our place in it.

In the rear gallery, the trompe-l’œil Steampunk (2015/2024) bridges Verne Dawson’s enveloping, out-of-time paintings of the springs with a selection of smaller works of urban and technological subjects—21st Street (2015), Friday Night (2024), and Bi-Plane (2013). A painting of a painting of a jet and a biplane flying over a verdant forest encircled by a stream, Steampunk comments at once on the asynchronicity of modern life and the constructed nature of Dawson’s medium. A painted Post-it note inscribed with the work’s title beside the canvas at the center of the composition pulls the viewer out of the fantasy of painting as a portal into another world, returning them to the reality of the present.

Verne Dawson

To hear a story to its end

Texts by by Jennifer Krasinski, 

Deborah Solomon, Verne Dawson

Karma, New York, 2025

384 pages, 10 1⁄4 × 11 in.

KARMA

22 East 2nd Street, New York City

karmakarma.org

Forbidden Territories: 100 Years of Surreal Landscapes @ The Hepworth Wakefield + Book

Forbidden Territories: 

100 Years of Surreal Landscapes

The Hepworth Wakefield

23 November 2024 – 27 April 2025

The Hepworth Wakefield presents Forbidden Territories: 100 Years of Surreal Landscapes. This major exhibition marks 100 years since Surrealism began with the publication of André Breton’s ‘Manifesto of Surrealism’ in 1924. Taking its title from André Breton’s description of the Surrealist project as “the perpetual excursion into the midst of forbidden territories”, thisis the first UK survey to explore the role of  landscape in one of the most influential artistic, intellectual and literary movements of the twentieth century.

The exhibition brings together over 100 surrealist works, featuring a wide array of British and international artists working across mediums, from Breton’s circle in the 1920s, through to Surrealism’s ongoing resonances in contemporary art. Artists on display include Salvador Dalí, Eileen Agar, Lee Miller and Max Ernst, alongside later Surrealists such as Leonora Carrington, Edith Rimmington, Marion Adnams, Conroy Maddox, Desmond Morris, and contemporary artists working within the legacy of Surrealism such as Shuvinai Ashoona, Stefanie Heinze, Helen Marten, Nicolas Party, and Wael Shawky. Presented in transhistorical groupings, Forbidden Territories explores how Surreal ideas can turn landscape into a metaphor for the unconscious, fuse the bodily with the botanical, and provide means to express political anxieties, gender constraints and freedoms.

Central elements of André Breton’s manifesto, including automatism and psychoanalysis of childhood memories, became a route into re-visioning landscape painting for many Surrealists. Well-known paintings by Max Ernst and Yves Tanguy, which draw on the artists’ formative memories of the forests of Bavaria and seashores of Brittany respectively, will be displayed, alongside the first UK site-specific mural by Swiss artist Nicolas Party. Party is known internationally for hismonumental, immersive murals made with soft pastel, a medium  which holds vivid colours to create fantastical environments. Party will select historic Surreal landscapes to install on the mural, offering a contemporary twist on the Surrealist strategy of collage and juxtaposition.

As well as works by central figures from the movement, such as René Magritte and Francis Picabia, Forbidden Territories foregrounds previously neglected artists and narratives. These include the relationship between Surrealism and ecology, drawing prescient connections topresent day environmental concerns. Visual conversations will be drawn between the humananimal-botanical hybrids of Desmond Morris and Leonora Carrington from the 1950s, to those of Shuvinai Ashoona and Stefanie Heinze working today. Forbidden Territories also includes the first presentation of a new gift of Jean Arp’s plaster sculptures, at The Hepworth Wakefield, generously donated to Wakefield’s art collection by the Jean Arp Foundation. The plasters span several decades of the artist’s career and exemplify the surrealist biomorphism at the heart of his practice.

Surrealism responded to times of political upheaval. A series of works, made around the period of WWI, by Salvador Dalí, Gordon Onslow Ford and Mervyn Evans convey political tensions through uncanny landscapes. This section of the exhibition will also feature several sculptures and paintings by Egyptian contemporary artist Wael Shawky. These are presented alongside Lee Miller’s photographs of Egypt taken during WWI, creating a dialogue between these diverse surreal depictions of the landscapes of North Africa with undertones of political and societal tensions.

Forbidden Territories features a solo presentation of works by Mary Wykeham, a now underrecognized Surrealist artist who decided to become a nun in 1950, at the height of her career. The display includes her paintings, drawings, etchings on paper and copper printing plates, and is the largest public showing of Wykeham’s work since her solo show of 1949 at Galerie des Deux Îles, Paris. It marks the donation of a large group of works by Wykeham to The Hepworth Wakefield by her family, a body of work preserved by the convent where she spent her final years.

A final section of the exhibition brings together new work by contemporary artists María Berrío and Ro Robertson alongside Surrealists Ithell Colquhoun, Eileen Agar and Dora Maar, to explore ideas of gender identity and autofiction within bodies of water. 

Eleanor Clayton, Head of Collection and Exhibitions, said: ‘This unique survey will take visitors on a fantastical journey through an array of surrealist landscapes, some well-known and some rarely seen. Bringing exceptional modern art in dialogue with the best of contemporary practice is at the heart of our programme at The Hepworth Wakefield. We are delighted to be showing long-established masterpieces in Wakefield for the first time, alongside newly commissioned artwork, showing that the influence of Surrealism – one of the most dynamic and wide-reaching art movements of the twentieth century – is still alive to this day.’

Forbidden Territories: 

100 Years of Surreal Landscapes

Published by Thames and Hudson

A book of the same title is published by Thames and Hudson and edited by The Hepworth Wakefield’s Head of Collection and Exhibitions, Eleanor Clayton to accompany the exhibition. The book includes essays by Clayton, Patricia Allmer, Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at the University of Edinburgh; Anna Reid, Senior Lecturer History of Art at the University of Leeds; and Tor Scott, Curatorial Assistant, National Galleries of Scotland. It is interspersed with texts by artists including André Breton, María Berrío, Helen Marten, Ro Robertson and Mary Wykeham offering contemporary and historical perspectives on Surrealism.

Forbidden Territories at The Hepworth Wakefield is presenting concurrently with The Traumatic Surreal at Henry Moore Institute in Leeds. The Traumatic Surreal brings together work made after 1960 through to the present day to explore the radical appropriation and development of surrealist sculptural traditions by women artists in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Luxembourg.

THE HEPWORTH WAKEFIELD

Gallery Walk, Wakefield, West Yorkshire WF1 5AW

hepworthwakefield.org

Jean-Michel Basquiat: Engadin Exhibition @ Hauser & Wirth, St. Moritz

Jean-Michel Basquiat: Engadin

Hauser & Wirth, St. Moritz

14 December 2024 - 29 March 2025

Exploring various artistic motifs that combine the natural and cultural landscape of the Engadin with the metropolis of New York, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s first solo exhibition dedicated to the paintings he created in and inspired by his visits to Switzerland opens on 14 December at Hauser & Wirth St. Moritz. ‘Jean-Michel Basquiat. Engadin’ traces the renowned artist’s connections to the country, which began in 1982 with his first show at Galerie Bruno Bischofberger in Zurich, returning over a dozen times to St. Moritz, Zurich, Appenzell and Basel. The Engadin region in particular continued to fascinate Basquiat long after his return to New York, resulting in a body of work that captures his impressions of the Swiss Alpine landscape and culture through the lens of his highly distinctive and personal artistic language.

Jean-Michel Basquiat. Engadin

Hauser & Wirth Publishers

‘Jean-Michel Basquiat. Engadin’ will be accompanied by a catalog from Hauser & Wirth Publishers, featuring a foreword by Bruno Bischofberger and a text by Dr. Dr. Dieter Buchhart to give visitors a unique insight into this specific chapter of one of the most important artists of the 20th Century.

The exhibition is supported by Dr. Dr. Dieter Buchhart and Dr. Anna Karina Hofbauer, internationally renowned curators and Jean-Michel Basquiat experts.

Born in Brooklyn, New York in 1960 and coming of age in the downtown, post-punk artistic scene of the late 1970s and early 1980s, Jean-Michel Basquiat drew on the diversity and intensity of New York City within his multi-disciplinary practice. His expressive paintings combined bold text and imagery from his expansive references across art, film, history and music, as well as his experiences of everyday racism as a young Black man in the US.

After his first exhibition with Galerie Bruno Bischofberger in 1982, the same year el Jean-Michel Basquiat became one of the youngest ever artists to participate at Documenta in Kassel, the influences of the disparate cultural landscapes of New York City and Switzerland began to take shape in his work, incorporating the motifs of ski lifts, fir trees, mountains and German phrases into his expansive visual lexicon. ‘From then on, Jean-Michel Basquiat often visited me in Switzerland, where he particularly liked it. About half a dozen times in Zurich and exactly seven times in St. Moritz, four of them in the summer’, says Bischofberger. Basquiat was captivated by the Engadin’s vast natural landscape, cultural history and the hospitality of the Bischofberger family. Perhaps what drew Basquiat most to this part of Switzerland was, as Dr. Dr. Dieter Buchhart writes, ‘the contrast between the pulsating life, the clubs, the street noise, and the breakneck speed of the metropolis New York and the ‘discovery of slowness’ in the unique, overwhelming landscape of the Engadin.’

One of the earliest works on view in the exhibition is the monumental painting ‘The Dutch Settlers’ from 1982. Composed of nine canvases, the painting is a prime example of Basquiat’s innovative approach of marrying William S. Burroughs’ ‘cut-up’ technique with a method akin to sampling technology used in hip hop. The montage of nine canvas panels enabled Jean-Michel Basquiat to assemble, combine and recombine different image fields – creating a multi-layered work that emanates a visual rhythm described as an ‘Eye Rap’ by art historian Robert Storr. The artist paints powerful motifs which reference the African Diaspora and slavery (evoked through words such NUBIA and TOBACCO) alongside images of the Engadin, depicting fir trees, a mountain road, as well as an ibex, the heraldic animal of the canton of Graubünden and native to the region. This mountain iconography can also be seen in the playful works ‘Skifahrer (Skier)’ and ‘See (Lake)’ on view in the exhibition. The former depicts a comic-like figure on a bright red background and the latter the local landscape at night, both painted in St. Moritz a year later. These works were part of a series by Basquiat that he intended for a hunting lodge, and were subsequently hung in the Bischofberger’s St. Moritz dining room.

In the winter of 1983/1984, during one of Basquiat’s visits to the Engadin, Bischofberger and the artist began discussing the idea for a collaboration between Basquiat, Andy Warhol and Francesco Clemente. The three artists each created four paintings and a drawing, which were subsequently transported between them to complete. ‘In Bianco’ (1983) showcases the clearly distinguishable artistic contributions from all three, demonstrating how each artist reacted respectfully to the parameters of the others. As Buchhart notes, ‘the cornerstone for this important collaboration was laid in St. Moritz’, marking a turning point in Basquiat’s artistic practice and proving Switzerland to be of great historical significance for the artist in more ways than one.

Integrating the immediate world around him with his varied encyclopaedic knowledge, ‘Big Snow’ (1984) sees Jean-Michel Basquiat once again processing his impressions of the Engadin in conjunction with themes relating to race and Black history, combining motifs of the Swiss mountains, snow and skiing with the Berlin Olympic Games of 1936 and Jesse Owens’ win of four gold medals. In 1985, Basquiat would go on to be part of a group show at the Segantini Museum in St. Moritz, showcasing his work ‘See (Lake)’ (1983) in an exhibition titled ‘The Engadine in Painting’. The latest body of work on view includes a group of monochrome paintings titled ‘To Repel Ghosts’ which Basquiat created in 1986 during his time in Zurich and St. Moritz, exploring themes of emptiness as well as spirituality in relation to the African Diaspora. Musing on what kept drawing the artist back to Switzerland, Buchhart writes, ‘For Basquiat, the Engadin meant work, inspiration, friendship, and rest and relaxation, all at the same time.’

HAUSER & WIRTH ST. MORITZ

Via Serlas 22, 7500 St. Moritz

www.hauserwirth.com