In mid-April 2003, I stood in Fifty Acre Wood, five miles west of Bristol, watching Thom Yorke stomp, slowly, repeatedly through the undergrowth. Under the watchful eye of filmmaker Chris Hopewell, he was shooting scenes for the Jan Švankmajer-inspired, stop-motion video for ‘There, There’, the first single from Radiohead’s upcoming sixth album.

Hail to the Thief was the follow-up to the game-changing, sound-shifting, back-to-back Kid A and Amnesiac, the lengthy, intense, making of which had nearly ripped the band apart. The new record, in contrast, had been recorded with energy, directness, speed. So much so that here was the frontman making – of all things – a pop video.

‘I’m trying to persuade the record company to shell out on lots of singles and all that stuff,’ Yorke told me when we talked in Oxford that month. Hail to the Thief, he insisted, ‘is a pop record. It’s really direct. It has this energy to it. I’d love to know that it was on the radio. Just ’cause that’s where my head's at. I don’t want to be on the top shelves at the back. ’Cause I’m into it too much. I like it. It is,’ he repeated, just for clarity, ‘pop music.’

In mid-October 2026, I stood in the rehearsal space of the National Youth Theatre in north London, watching Yorke tell a bunch of musicians – not Radiohead – that he wanted to hear again the bass being played in a new version of Hail to the Thief track ‘Where I End and You Begin’. Around him and the band, who were arranged in and under scaffolding-type boxes, a troupe of actors were working out moves under the watchful eye of choreographer Steven Hoggett and stage director Christine Jones.

This was the end of the third week of off-site rehearsals, one more to go, on Hamlet Hail to the Thief. This kinetic, musical, theatrical marriage – you might say mash-up – of Radiohead’s 2003 album and Shakespeare’s play premiered in 2025, with brief runs in Manchester’s Aviva Studios and at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon. Now, it was preparing to open at the Barbican in London for a three-month run.

I watched the company, led by returning actor Samuel Blenkin (Alien: Earth) as Hamlet, work on scene 12. Titled State of Play, the script notes describe it as a ‘physical sequence replac[ing] dialogue. The actors and the scenes it replaces [include] Hamlet witnessing Gertrude and Claudius sexually entangled, creating an emotional arc going from “the play’s the thing” and “to be or not to be.”’

The scene is scored by Yorke’s reworking of ‘Where I End and You Begin’, the sixth track on Hail to the Thief, with a male and female vocalist in the corner repeating the climactic lyrics: ‘There’ll be no more lies, I will eat you alive…’

Even in rehearsals, cast and crew and band in mufti, the effect is utterly thrilling.

This is one of the 27 scenes that the play has been edited down to for a running time of between 90 and 100 minutes, the action soundtracked by Yorke’s jigsawed versions of the album’s 14 songs. As the musician, ever the iconoclast, describes Hamlet Hail to the Thief: ‘It moves at a fast pace. It's not four hours. It doesn't have long soliloquies where you can go to sleep, wake up again, you’ve still not missed anything...’ He caught himself and smiled. ‘Um...Did I say that?’

He did indeed, and a lot more besides, when, over lunchbreak, I sat down with Yorke, Jones and Hoggett to discuss the third and biggest outing for their innovative show.

Wallpaper*: Thom, how did constructing this show last year, and now again this year, compare to making an album?

Thom Yorke: When you put a record together, you hope that one piece may move one way. But when it moves in another direction for another track, they're complementing each other. So there's an accumulated emotional effect that happens. Which is the bit that, when we set about this, I hadn't thought about.

There are all these people involved, and everything's happening all around the stage. And some nights the first thing that Hamlet does is get a laugh. And you're like: ‘What, already?’ That kind of thing. That affects how you see the music, too.

But there's also a very selfish element to it. The arc of whatever this is has to satisfy something in my musical head, too.

W*: Christine, what are the origins of this idea?

Christine Jones: I saw the Hail to the Thief tour in 2003 at Madison Square Garden. It was the first time I'd seen Radiohead live, and I was blown away. It changed my DNA structure. Not long after, I was working on a production of Hamlet as a designer. I often write the text out, and I listen to music. I was fresh off this concert, so I was listening to the record, and I literally started writing lyrics along with words from the text. That planted a seed.

Over time, that seed kept growing, and I kept thinking about it. And it was a number of years later when I had the opportunity to ask Thom if it was something that he'd consider collaborating on. And that took a bit of time.

TY: You got a predictable answer!

W*: …which, of course, was ‘no’. But you did say yes, Thom…

TY: Eventually, yeah. It took about five years to get over the presumption of putting those two things together. This is not my world. So I didn't realise, as much as anything, that there's no sense of having to pay homage. This version of Hamlet is not a definitive version of Hamlet.

Then the more you read about these things, the more you realise that nothing is a definitive version of anything. There's no definitive version of a Pinter play. So I had to jump over a few humps in my head before eventually we started properly talking about it.

CJ: In this case, the synergy and uncanny resonances between the play and the music are a particularly fertile collision. But it's us all coming together, and bringing the work that Steven and I have done together for years, bringing experiences of being at Radiohead concerts, of being at other concerts, and seeing how everything impacts each other.

Steven Hoggett: There was something about seeing [Yorke and bandmate Jonny Greenwood’s side-project] The Smile the year before last in New York. The gig was really cheeky. And we were talking for a second about [doing this show] in the round [like The Smile shows] after seeing that gig. But it was the tonality of this cheeky band, that was still as complex and as sophisticated, but were taking our ears on a journey.

It was a big shift watching that gig. We've got 27 scenes. So it's like a greatest hits as a feel and a listening event. And I guess it is akin to – sorry to make the analogy like this, Thom – a Radiohead gig to The Smile. Somebody called The Smile the cheeky younger cousin of Radiohead, and this feels like the cheeky younger cousin of the Hamlet play. It's got an errant nature to it, but it's fleet-footed and it keeps turning itself over.

W*: When you were editing the text, Christine, to get to this ‘greatest hits’ idea of Hamlet, were you trying to shape the remaining text to individual songs? Or was it more freeform than that?

CJ: The first thing I did was, I edited the script. I took a pass at what I call creating a spine-line and pulling out all the pieces that felt the most resonant. Then once I had that, as an exercise, I did say: ‘OK, what if I start at the beginning of the album and I go to the end?’

And that first time through, there was a sense of how different characters connected to different songs thematically. The court being established was [album opening track] ‘2 + 2 = 5’. The ghost being established was ‘The Gloaming’. Ophelia being connected to ‘Sail to the Moon’. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were ‘Where I End and You Begin’.

We ended up changing a lot of that… Although, as we realised the other day, we do start at the beginning of the album and end at the end of the album. We've made a lot of adjustments and flipped scenes around, flipped songs around, but there is that container.

W*: How has it been for your dancers, Steven –

SH: Oh, I love that you call them dancers. They will love you for that!

W*: – getting their heads around the tricksy rhythms of these songs?

SH: There was that big question, and I do enjoy when somebody does this – a friend of mine, when we said we were doing this, went: ‘Who needs that? Dancing to Radiohead...?’ I was like: ‘Yeah, I understand that. I don't think I want to see that either.’

W*: So to be clear…

SH: We don't dance to Radiohead. They actually do a courtly restoration piece of choreography at one point. It's mocked, it's heightened. But the rest of it, we make a real distinction in the room, which is why I made the comment about you calling them dancers. Because they don't dance, they move. The minute you say to somebody ‘dance’, people do weird shit. Whereas if they're moving and it's intrinsic and has a qualitative nature [to] what they're thinking or saying, you can make tonnes of material. So the d-word is not one we drop in the room. Because it inhibits.

W*: When we met in 2003, Thom, with the paint still wet on Hail to the Thief, you insisted it was a pop record. Do you stand by that assessment?

TY: [winces and squirms] I don't f*cking know, do I? Clearly, I've been thinking I've been making pop since we started! So I should probably give up. You laugh, but I'm serious.

W*: The other thing you said was that you'd taken ‘a long six months off’. And then someone close to you said: ‘Why don't you just do a record where you let it happen? Just go in and do it, no agenda, nothing.’ And for you, ‘that made things click’. That energy and that drive – are you seeing a parallel energy and drive here?

TY: We were all [in the band] in agreement with that [idea]. Because we'd been through this [experience]. Kid A was a very long, tortuous process. It was really fun, but we did go a bit f*cking mad. I mean, you build your own studio, and you give yourself no deadline at all... And then after about eight or nine months, [producer] Nigel [Godrich] called it and said: ‘We have to stop. We have to finish whatever the f*ck this is.’

So, yeah, [with Hail to the Thief] we were going the other way. And because we were going the other way, there was no time to go over things. Which, as soon as it came out, I was like: ‘Oh, I kind of wish we had...’ But it's one of those weird things, you lurch from one extreme to the other.

W*: But does that directness now help with this production? Because there's a propulsion to this music, these songs.

TY: I mean, yessss... In the sense that: a lot of the songs lend themselves to be reinterpreted quite easily. And put on different instruments, and slowed down, sped up. I was actually really surprised.

My first test of the whole thing was, they did a read through in New York and they sent me it. I tentatively stumbled through it with acoustic guitar or piano or very basic [instrumentation] underneath to try see what it feels like. To have that music under the words. And I realised quickly: oh, OK, there's a lot of licence here. I can take Jonny's riff on ‘2 + 2’, I can turn it into [something] and it can go anywhere it wants. As soon as it's on the synthesiser, it's almost unrecognisable.

W*: Can you tell us, Christine, about the visuals you've designed for this show?

CJ: I worked with Brett Banakis and Sadra Tehrani as part of a collective. When we first started thinking about this, we were thinking about operating theatres. And recording studios and sound stages. I love recording studio porn. I could just look at recording studios all day long.

Even in the beginning, we weren't sure if the band and the actors were in the same space. [But] we wanted them all to feel like they were definitely in the present together, making this happen. Then over time we started looking at isolation chambers, solitary confinement chambers.

Then we found this piece of research from Nasa, on a resonant acoustic chamber. It's this space where they test the effect of sound waves on objects. They'll put a rocket ship in this room and blast it with sound. That felt like the perfect metaphor for what this world does to Hamlet. He's put into this space, and it is a kind of cruel experiment where the play and the music keep betraying him. And disorienting him. And lying to him. This experiment in how much can one soul take before it completely breaks. So the space is informed by sound.

SH: We liked the idea how speakers can sometimes look really scary. They're big, with those cones. Of course they're sexy and they're black and we see them in gigs and we love them. But actually, there’s the propensity of them to become something to weaponise.

W*: What did you learn from Manchester and Stratford in terms of what worked and what didn’t?

CJ: One of the things that was interesting is that in Manchester, it was a warehouse space. The seating was all made out of bleachers, and it felt like a gig.

TY: Metallic bleachers. When people came into the show, they'd have had three pints thinking it was going to be a gig. Then realised it wasn't. Then they ran for the toilet during the soliloquy. [Which meant the seats going] bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang...

CJ: We've been in this balance between it's a gig and it's a play. When we went to the Royal Shakespeare Company, we were in a thrust theatre space. There it felt like a play. Now at the Barbican, we get to land in a sweet spot – the brutalist architecture, the shape of that [room]… We're finding that it can exist in some space in between. Hopefully the Barbican lets us be both a play and a gig instead of one or the other.

TY: It's crazy intimate in there. F*cking bonkers.

W*: Finally, Thom: did your reconstruction or reimagining of these songs inform the performance of any of the Hail to the Thief songs on the Radiohead tour last year?

TY: [splutters] Doing this? Oh, no! What, I come to the Radiohead gig and say, ‘hey, the other band, they kind of nailed this one...’? No, no. That was not happening!

Hamlet Hail to the Thief runs from 31 October 2026 to 23 January 2027 at Barbican Theatre, Silk Street, London, EC27 8DS. Ticket information here

Rough pieces of burlap hang between the Fondation Cartier's 19th-century arches, facing the historic Place du Palais Royal. The humble fabric comes from sacks produced in India or Bangladesh, then used to transport cocoa from Ghana to Europe. In the hands of Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama, these tattered workhorse bags are now works of art, heavy with meaning and memory.

For the second major exhibition in its vast new Jean Nouvel-designed space, the Fondation Cartier chose Mahama and nine associated artists and collectives to inhabit the entire museum with a show called 'The Harvest Season'. Mahama's monumental installations, textiles and collages are a perfect fit for the museum's generous volumes and intersecting perspectives.

Born in 1987 in Tamale, northern Ghana, Mahama studied art close to home, at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST). He burst onto the international scene by draping the Arsenale in burlap sacks at the 2015 Venice Biennale, and he has steadily gained in stature ever since. (We’ve previously explored his works at London’s White Cube and seen him turn the Barbican pink.)

Mahama's art is social and political, interwoven with the history of Ghana, from colonialism to the euphoria of independence and the early promise of democracy that ended suddenly with a coup d'état in 1966. Exhibition curator Aby Gaye-Duparc says, 'One of the questions Ibrahim Mahama's work asks, and that underlies this exhibition, is: what remains of these utopias conceived at the time of African independence, in the late 1950s and early 1960s? What legacies have endured? What failures? And how do we build the future from that utopia?'

The artist has reinvested the significant earnings from sales of his work into community and educational projects in Ghana, building three art centres in Tamale where artists, schoolkids or anyone else is invited to explore, experiment and create. At one of them, Red Clay, the property contains old trains that once operated around the country's manganese and bauxite mines. He acquired them as archives, to be recycled from memory-imbibed industrial objects into works of art. 'I've always believed that when an artist produces an object, the object is not just reliant on the so-called intellectual value of the artist, because there are so many people who touch these objects, who use them.'

At the Fondation Cartier, the show includes Mahama's evocative installation Parliament of Ghosts. A parliamentary chamber of empty chairs, it is a metaphor for the democratic experiment cut short. Each time the artist shows this work, he changes it; here, he has used wooden stools from Ghana's Asante Empire, which was forcibly annexed by the British in 1902.

Things Fall Apart is a brand new installation. While Mahama was preparing for this show, he learned that the Aboso Glass Factory in southern Ghana was about to be scrapped. President Nkrumah had opened the bottle-manufacturing plant in 1966, just weeks before he was deposed. 'I thought, wouldn't it be interesting if we used the capital that was coming from the Fondation Cartier to acquire this factory, and then rebuild a section of it here in Paris, but also rebuild it in the studio in Tamale as a new public space that allows us to be able to reflect on these histories? So we did. That's where the question of the harvest came from. What does it mean to be able to harvest the potentials that were in the past, but somehow stayed there and never travelled to the future?’

The installation is massive, consisting of the factory's original sign and metal structure, surrounded on either side with 1,000 stacked wooden crates and over 25,000 green glass bottles. Mahama admits it was insanely difficult to purchase the factory, dismantle it, then move a chunk of it to France to be rebuilt. 'It took two years to conceive and make the forms possible. But I thought that was the most interesting thing, because it would introduce a new audience to a very different position in terms of what art from the continent has to offer.'

The exhibition reveals the breadth of Mahama's practice. It includes collages where he covered archival factory orders with charcoal drawings of African labourers carrying steel rails to build colonial railroads. Photographs of women's arms tattooed with their names, serving as a means of identification when they travelled. Immense mixed-media textiles.

It was one of Mahama's university professors, Dorothy Akpene Amenuke, who inspired his work with burlap, and he's invited her to exhibit her textile installations here, such as the immersive, velvety red weaving called Gli, which means ‘wall’. 'Ibrahim is exceptional,' she says. 'Wherever he finds himself, whatever brought him there, he always acknowledges that he didn't come this far by himself.'

Passersby looking through the large windows of the Fondation Cartier will see screenprinted textiles by the young German-Ghanaian artist Zohra Opoku, examining her heritage as the daughter of a village chief whom she met for the first time at age 27, shortly before he died.

Another invited artist is 97-year-old James Barnor, who witnessed Ghana's liberation as the country's first photojournalist. Two years ago, Mahama paid tribute to Barnor by reconstructing his 1950s portrait studio in Accra, Ever Young, at Red Clay. He set up a large-format Polaroid 20x24 Instant Land Camera and, together with Barnor, shot portraits of the locals. The delightful results are on show here, along with Barnor's earlier work.

Mahama went to art school with the painter Gideon Appah, who is successful in his own right. The Fondation Cartier made the choice to display some of his colourful figurative paintings alongside loans from the Musée d'Orsay, underlining his art history references. At the same time, Appah works with a local vernacular – Black surfers, Accra's once-beloved Roxy cinema, men in suits having a smoke. 'I made paintings that referenced things that were happening in the 1970s, from old newspapers referencing the coolness, you know, of Ghanaian culture way back then.'

Other exhibitors have come from different backgrounds or countries – Slovenia, Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo – but all share a connection to Mahama. The CATPC, or Congolese Plantation Workers Art League, is a collective of plantation workers/artists using the proceeds from their artworks to buy back land confiscated in 1911 by the brothers who built Unilever and used forced labour to harvest palm oil. One of their sculptures, cast in a highly symbolic mixture of cacao, sugar, salt and palm oil, portrays an art collector riding a bull, meant to represent the Western museums that have pillaged African art. When asked how they feel to be participating in an exhibition in France, Ced'art Tamasala says, 'This is different, because we have chosen to put our works in Western museums that were supported by forced labour. We are coming to take back a bit of the strength, to bring it back to the plantation where everything came from.'

‘The Harvest Season’ opened in Paris in the midst of social upheaval. Was it the perfect timing for Mahama's message of building a better future? 'It's always the time,' he says, 'because the world has been in crisis for far too long, and artists can have a very important role to play. Sometimes, certain artists are able to accumulate certain powers within the art world that allow them to take more responsibility, where ordinarily an artist would not be able. And when that happens, you have to acknowledge it and do it rightfully as it's supposed to be.'

Ibrahim Mahama at Fondation Cartier until 28 February 2027

Forty years ago, when I first walked down Bleecker Street into the East Village, I thought the old shopfront building where sculptor June Leaf and her husband, photographer Robert Frank, lived and worked to be in keeping with everything about being a certain kind of artist in New York in the 1980s. It wasn't a glass-walled palace or a post-pop classical abstraction, but a fragment of the old city, a vestigial note on a block that, yes, you saw in Jim Jarmusch's Stranger Than Paradise, but also that Melville or Poe might have passed, or even Edith Wharton if her horse-drawn carriage driver had gotten lost. After all, the Federal-style house was built in 1817 when Bleecker Street was still mostly field, though the address had developed a questionable reputation as early as the Civil War. By the 1960s, it was deemed a flophouse.

Leaf and Frank first rented a room there (for $48) in the late 1970s, and eventually managed to buy it, initially with the help of a California couple who later pulled out of the deal, the area apparently being too rough. From then on, the old brick building – its moss green-painted shopfront sporting a fire escape and shaded by a lonely locust tree – was a bulwark against all the forces that were against cities and, in a way, against the artists who worked in them. Or so it seemed to me. And when, at some point in the late 1980s, I once saw Frank sitting outside the place, on a folding chair, I felt as if he were not just studying the street but standing guard.

Frank died in 2019, aged 94, and five years later, when I was invited to meet Leaf and see her studio, I was struck by the realisation that, from a chair on the kerb, her husband could see inside to where she was working, and that, if she wanted, she could see him, too. It dawned on me that the building wasn't a fortress at all. It was a machine, or an engine, a site where, for more than half a century, June Leaf worked on dreams.

Born in Chicago in 1929, Leaf briefly studied at the New Bauhaus (now the Institute of Design), founded by László Moholy-Nagy, followed by a stint in Paris on a Fulbright scholarship. In 1960, she moved to New York, where she taught painting at Parsons and began to experiment with pieces that were part painting, part drawing, part 3-D installation, part theatre – large works that early reviewers had trouble describing and that were not much like the work of artist Red Grooms, despite the frequent comparison: they were at once darker and more exuberant, more comfortable with discomfort. ‘She is trying to make myths from the commonplace,' wrote Lucy Lippard in a 1978 article in Art in America.

Walking through the Bleecker Street house when Leaf was still there, I spotted snapshots of her life with Frank – of the two of them holding hands in Cape Breton, for instance, and then of an older Frank, beaming in her studio. They were images of love and partnership. A book-stuffed sitting room was likewise touched with details of a shared life: a refrain from On the Road – ‘Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?' said Kerouac, who wrote the introduction to Frank's photobook The Americans – pinned below a collection of miniature Statues of Liberty. A paper collage noted Frank's birthday (November 9).

But you mostly felt Leaf, who seemed to see the world as a sketch you could redraw or resee; to her eye, every little piece of Bleecker Street was a possibility. ‘Nothing is safe in this house,' she once said. ‘Real beauty is any emphatic thing we do.' Da Vinci's The Last Supper appeared as a sculpture astride the fireplace and as a print elsewhere, and it reminded you of a thing she used to say: ‘There is no artist that is more perfect than da Vinci in terms of drawing and inventiveness.' Which, in turn, reminded you of Leaf 's unrelenting quest for invention.

In 1975, while Frank was briefly teaching filmmaking in California, Leaf took a course in car mechanics, learning welding and metalwork as a way of bringing her characters to life, as little machines. Some were small, some were huge, or at least trying to be. What was meant to be a ten-foot-tall woman will be on show this autumn at the New Museum exhibition ‘The Bowery: Devil's Mile' in New York. Entitled The Head, it began as a gigantic woman, but the factory making it only got the head done, largely, Leaf told a historian, because of her. ‘It was supposed to be a man and a woman walking, but they got so tired of me at the factory because all I wanted to do was incorporate everything around me!' she said.

There was, famously, another house, in Mabou, on Cape Breton Island, where Leaf and Frank had moved in 1969. (That house, along with Leaf 's studio there, is being preserved.) Back then, at the time, Frank was done with New York. Leaf, however, was reluctant to leave, having only known cities. But she came to love Mabou, committed to it, falling in love with her community.

Even in her nineties, Leaf couldn't stay still for long. The studio was where her hands tried to keep up with her mind in forging dreamscapes: strips of tin were fashioned as limbs, and painted figures raced or ran or fell, and felt alive even when at rest. ‘The secret is not drawing but dance,' is written across one of her charcoal works. She drew her moving sculptures, painted her drawings' momentum and, just standing in her studio, you could see her characters moving toward meanings, inhabiting abstract truths. She once told an interviewer, ‘I make them move, breathe, you know, get up, talk back to me.'

When I dropped by, only a few months before cancer would take her away in July 2024, she was still strong and vital at 94, as sharp as a tack. We talked about writers and painters and the dance of the street, and we looked at drawings, as she demonstrated a wise and critical eye. ‘That's a very good drawing,' she said of some sketch, and I could understand the value of her praise. I watched her look long and hard, which was her secret weapon, along with seeing the playfulness in a serious world. The last pieces she worked on were naturally along the lines of what she'd been working on her whole life, and they were exhibited only a week or so before she died. A friend told me that at the very moment when the art handlers came to take these final pieces off to an exhibition, a few blocks away, she was at work in her studio.

Off to be displayed were two sculptures – of a mother and child, of a man with a spear gesturing heavenwards – as well as an older painting of a boat at sea. When I saw the sea painting, I recalled an antique painting of a shipwreck I'd seen in her home – an ocean liner's passengers evacuated in a large lifeboat, in tumultuous darkness. In Leaf 's painting, the boat feels small, the ocean vast. The ocean is not dark but complicated by synapses of bright colours; it is startlingly alive. The boat is a vessel or perhaps an opening. Maybe it is a man on the stern; maybe he is fishing for something, or maybe mourning a disconnection, his body curled in struggle. A woman lays across the bow and somehow takes centre stage, despite being pictured off to the side. She is forming a shape for rest, or for forging a dream.

‘The Bowery: Devil's Mile' will be on show until 31 January 2027 at New Museum, New York; ‘June Leaf: A Survey' will be on show from 6 February-20 March 2027 at Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Beverly Hills; juneleaf.com

A version of this article appears in the November 2026 Art Issue of Wallpaper*, available from 8 October in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

Gathered in the light-filled spaces of the Petit Palais in Paris, blending into the museum’s permanent collection of work, from antiquity to present day, are 18 figures, visionary women cast in plaster. They are a new addition, courtesy of Paris-born artist Prune Nourry, who is looking to redress a balance that currently sees only 4 per cent of the Petit Palais’ collection created by female artists.

Working in plaster was a conscious choice for Nourry, who was invited by the Petit Palais to include her works as part of her ‘Visionaries’ exhibition. Surprisingly, almost 70 per cent of the works in the museum are ‘studio plasters’, works that were never intended to be displayed, but have survived the decades, unlike their bronze counterparts, which were originally destined for posterity.

It is a fitting analogy for the works themselves. Nourry has populated the Petit Palais with the figures of lesser-known female sculptors, a generous addition to the four female sculptors who are already included in the museum’s collections. As a subject, however, women are prolific.

Upon discovering this, Nourry began to work with three art historians, researching female sculptors in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, collecting their writings and portraits in order to gain a sense of who they were. Featured sculptors, including Käthe Kollwitz, Nancy Elizabeth Prophet, Hélène Bertaux, Jane Poupelet, Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry, Selma Hortense Burke, Daria Gamsaragan, and Sarah Bernhardt, share a strong aesthetic identity to which Nourry was drawn.

Nourry enjoyed the process of creating their representation in plaster – but it was stressful, she adds. ‘Very stressful. Obviously it's an interpretation of them and their portraits, because sometimes on the archive images I have of them, you only have the front, or the profile. If you have different images, they don't look like the same woman – they are from different parts of their life. I had to accept that interpretation was a huge part of this, and I hope that they forgive me.’

Sculpture is an instinctive process for Nourry, the sensuality of which she began to appreciate after being diagnosed with cancer in 2016, at the age of 31. ‘Sculpture is where I discovered the connection between my eyes and my hands – when I went through chemo, I lost the touch within my fingers,’ she says. ‘After that, I started a project where I would be blindfolded and sculpted only with my hands to make them work even more. Because I had the fear of losing them, I focused only on them. Sculpting is what moves me.’

The works here are led by the character of the women themselves, or what Nourry learnt about their character through scrupulous research. While they share arresting marble eyes, in line with the Petit Palais’ sculptures, the busts on show play with scale, a thoughtful consideration of the space a woman can require.

‘I could have done very different styles according to each of their work, but I chose not to,’ says Nourry. ‘The portraits I have are from that time in the 19th century, when you went to the photographer who would arrange you in a certain posture. You wouldn't smile, and you would be quite front-on to the camera. That posture is what you feel in the portraits.’

She wanted the busts to go beyond the concept of the body itself, Nourry adds. ‘I wanted it to be about them as human beings. I did very different sizes, also to show that sculpture can be in very different sizes, and it is not a hierarchy here. It was just based on whose pictures I got first, and I would then start to sculpt first – they would be big because, in terms of the process, this is the timing you have to respect.’

Ultimately, it has been a labour of love for Nourry, and an essential expression of her role as an artist. ‘Sculpture is like my spine,’ she says. ‘It's what keeps me straight.’

‘Prune Nourry: Visionaries’, from 20 October 2026 – 24 January 2027 at Petit Palais; prunenourry.com

Lego’s regular forays into the infinite realms of pop culture are becoming more and more involved. Aside from the big-ticket licensing tie-ins – Minecraft, Star Wars, Pokémon, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, etc – there have also been high-profile collaborations with Pharrell Williams, Olivia Rodrigo, as well as various football and F1 stars.

Now the brick builders have reached out and added another creative to their closet. French electro duo Daft Punk are the newest sign-ups to the world of Lego, promising a fresh take on Lego’s blend of ‘music, culture and creative experimentation’.

So what will Daft Punk bring to the party? After all, Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo officially disbanded their act back in 2021, having founded Daft Punk in 1993. The duo enjoyed a career that mixed highly performative anonymity, stunning live and video visuals, not to mention hit after hit after hit.

Few modern artists – let alone those working in the realm of dance music – have shaped, projected and sustained such a well-curated image as Bangalter and de Homem-Christo. It’s therefore unsurprising to find that Daft Punk™ (note the trademark) is very much a going concern, with creative director Cédric Hervet overseeing a host of posthumous projects that includes remixes, reissues, soundtracks, and high-profile partnerships with the likes of Fortnite.

Lego is the latest brand to come knocking. The collaboration was made concrete by a film featuring Daft Punk’s tracks ‘Voyager’ and ‘Human After All’. It’s a pairing that has its origins in a couple of Lego-related events, starting with the duo’s minifig cameo in the Pharrell Williams 2024 brick-built biopic Piece by Piece, followed by an appearance on the Lego Ideas fan creation site, with Daft Punk Concert, a set suggested by super-fan Patrick Harboun and his son.

That representation of the Daft Punk ‘pyramid’ stage set (from the 2007 Alive tour) will go into production next year, the first in what is hoped will be a series of related sets. It's only hinted at in today's launch film, which follows the Daft Punk robotic minifigures along a holographic red brick road through a neon-streaked landscape, leading to a concert venue that builds itself around them.

Wallpaper* spoke with Cédric Hervet about the scope and scale of the collaboration and what it means for the enduring power of the Daft Punk name.

Wallpaper*: What can the Lego Universe do for DP's legacy, given that the group only exists as a cultural force and not an active music duo these days?

Cédric Hervet: To me, Daft Punk never stopped existing. A legacy doesn't end when you stop making new work. Our creative outset with the Lego team has been to look at legacy not as something static, but an invitation to innovate and create. The music, the robots, the pyramid all live on through the fans, who keep making them their own. My role today is to look after that world and open up new territory for it. And that's exactly the spirit of Lego creativity: you build, you take it apart, you build again.

W*: Do you see any parity between the technology of the Lego brand and the way DP presented themselves over their career?

CH: For me, the common ground is imagination. Lego bricks are an extraordinary tool for creativity: you're handed some bricks, and it's up to you to build whatever is possible with them. That's also how Daft Punk started. Thomas and Guy-Man wanted to make electronic music, so they bought a bit of gear, figured it out, and created with what they had.

As a kid, just the Lego packaging or the pages of the holiday catalogues made me feel like I was stepping into another world. You wanted to know what was hiding behind a Lego City building. With Daft Punk, we always played on that: leaving people room for their own imagination, their own interpretation.

W*: What are you most excited about with this collaboration? The sets? The technology? The new audience?

CH: First, something very personal. I've always loved Lego toys, and I dreamed about this collaboration for years. I still have to pinch myself. I played with Lego bricks as a kid, I spent many hours being creative with my children using them and as recently as last winter I was still giving them Lego Advent calendars. They're 20 and 19 now, which tells you it hasn't aged a day.

I also sometimes ask them whether Daft Punk's music sounds dated, because when you're inside it, it's hard to have perspective. Apparently it still feels very current to them. And then there's the pyramid. I was lucky enough to work on the stage design for the Alive 2007 tour.

Every night, I watched the show from the side of the pyramid. I was the audience's audience. Seeing thousands of people dance with smiles on their faces for an hour and a half was the greatest reward. So, seeing that pyramid come back in bricks, imagined by a father and his son during lockdown, is the link between generations I'd been dreaming of.

W*: How did the collaboration come about - who approached who?

CH: To be honest, on our side, we had tried to approach the Lego Group several years ago. To me the connection was obvious, but the timing probably wasn't right yet. What really unlocked it was the fans.

The Lego Ideas Daft Punk Concert project won the Music to Our Ears challenge in 2020, then reached 10,000 supporters. This gave us an opportunity to see how naturally the two worlds fit together: ethically, aesthetically, culturally. The fact that fans made this collaboration possible is wonderful to me. Daft Punk's story is also a story of fans inspired by other artists.

W*: How do you see the partnership with the Lego Group evolving over time?

CH: We're only at the first few bricks. The Lego universe is vast, and just seeing the two little robots, GM08 and TB3, step into it means a lot to me. They'll get to live their own lives there. I really love the Lego tone, especially in its animated content. It's a lot of fun, and it reveals a different, slightly offbeat side of the characters.

You get a first glimpse of that in the AV. The pyramid set is a first step. Beyond that, I can't say more for now, but I can’t wait to see this partnership unfold based on what brought it to life: fans sharing with each other and passing on creative experimentation from one generation to the next.

Lego.com, @Lego, DaftPunk.com, @DaftPunk

Apple Music has enlisted British producer Fred Again.. to help turn sound into something tangible for its new visual identity. Built around the idea of being ‘made by sound’, the redesign takes an experimental approach, using musical frequencies to create rippling, liquid forms. The results were achieved by playing music into a shallow bath of mineral oil and filming the resulting vibrations.

Fred Again.. and his collaborator Nest Acoustics developed a short musical composition that doubles as the brand's new sonic signature. Individual notes were played through a transducer, a device that converts audio signals into physical vibrations, causing the oil to ripple in response. The movements and refractions were captured on camera, providing the raw material for the new design.

The approach draws on Apple's wider design direction, particularly Liquid Glass, the translucent design language introduced across its software in 2025.

The redesign includes Apple Music's typography. A new wordmark pairs the recognisable Apple symbol with a customised version of Apple's own typeface, SF Pro. Bold, lowercase lettering gives the service a youthful energy, while a reworked musical note icon takes its shape from the forms captured during filming.

The project reportedly took months of experimentation with sound, materials and moving image. A companion film, seen above, documents the creative process, following the journey from the original composition through to the finished identity.

Fans got their first glimpse of the new logo last month at the unveiling of Apple Music Hall, the brand's new live music venue in London, but expect to see it roll out across all platforms this week.

A consideration of the rich and multifaceted lives of women has long shaped Miuccia Prada's Miu Miu, a curiosity that takes shape in both fashion and culture. In 2024, this philosophy was cemented when Miu Miu became the official partner of Art Basel Paris' public programme, with the partnership uniting a host of creatives, from artists to performers and musicians. The programme debuted with Tales & Tellers, by artist Goshka Macuga, and was followed in 2025 with 30 Blizzards, by artist Helen Marten.

For the third year of the partnership, at Art Basel Paris 2026, Miuccia Prada invited French filmmaker Alice Diop to take the reins, with the presentation of a major project at the Palais d'Iéna HQ of France's Economic, Social and Environmental Council in Paris – which is also the site of Miu Miu's runway shows. For the occasion, Diop is presenting an exhibition, ‘Geste de Consolation’ (Gesture of Consolation), which builds on themes that Diop introduced in her 2025 film Fragments for Venus for Miu Miu's anthology series Women's Tales.

For Diop, who for the first time takes on the role of artist-curator, it is an opportunity to broaden a practice which, to date, has encompassed directing and screenwriting.

‘When Miuccia Prada came to me and offered me this opportunity to create a video installation, I was both surprised and intimidated by the trust she placed in me, to do something I'd never done before,' says Diop. ‘But I have learned to trust women who trust me.'

The works in the space are a celebration of Black female creativity, highlighting a thread that has run throughout Diop's work. Now, she gathers the female artists whom she admires, across a prism of mediums and practices, taking visitors on a scenographic journey to discover their work across four connecting spaces. ‘I have invited Black women artists who have helped me over the years to create, and helped to heal and repair me, not only as an artist but as a Black woman. They have considered the way that we have been building ourselves as Black women, due to the need of having to dissociate because of the fetishising gaze.'

Those involved include American artist Simone Leigh, who will present the vast bronze, Sentinel (Mami Wata), an elegant female form cradled by a serpent. ‘Her work has inspired me for years now and has really helped me to grow,' says Diop. Also included is photography from South African artist Zanele Muholi and performances from Ivorian choreographer Nadia Beugré's Prophétique, as well as American composer and musician Angel Bat Dawid with her ensemble, Sistazz of the Nitty Gritty. Visitors will also enjoy a generously stocked library filled with the books that have inspired Diop.

‘At the very beginning, perhaps because I was intimidated by what I was being asked to do, I had no plans to make a work myself,' says Diop. ‘I think the first thing I said was that I was willing to think about an installation, but only from a curatorial point of view. But I was so impressed by the speed and the grace with which these women responded to my invitation, that I felt it was impossible for me not to ask questions of my own discipline, which is film.'

The resulting two-screen video installation unites archival footage from the early to mid-20th century, sourced from so-called ‘scientific expeditions' and private archives. Consisting of both violent imagery, and imagery that has consoled Diop, the installation examines how these have shaped her as a filmmaker. ‘The installation is really a genealogy of my own gaze, in which I've gathered all the images that I have constructed in my own way,' says Diop.

She hopes to take visitors on an emotional journey, through the subjectivity of a Black woman in the 20th century. ‘I'd like the viewer to feel connected to this singular way of looking at the world, that has been developed by the violence that Black women have been subjected to. To also consider the strength and resistance that Black women have developed, through what we have had to resist and survive.'

‘Geste de Consolation' is on show from 21-25 October at Palais d'Iéna, Paris, artbasel.com, miumiu.com

A version of this article appears in the November 2026 Art Issue of Wallpaper*, available from 8 October in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

In his 2009 book The Thinking Hand: Existential and Embodied Wisdom in Architecture, Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa considers the disconnect between the mind and body as a result of the prioritising of the virtual and the visual, re-examining, over several chapters, the significance of the information a body inherently knows. This is the cornerstone of the first show to be staged at Thea, a new exhibition space focusing on art and technology from photography platform Noorderlicht in Groningen. Adopting the moniker from Pallasmaa’s text, ‘Thinking Hands’ (until 1 November 2026) brings together 23 photographers and lens-based artists and artist duos, working both with traditional techniques and digital programmes, to further interrogate these ideas.

In the days immediately prior to opening, neighbours were invited in for a preview. One of these early visitors, recalls general and artistic director Roosje Klap, was quick to share their surprise in finding the space not filled solely with photographs of hands. ‘That would be really boring, wouldn’t it?’ asserts Klap. ‘It is funny what people expect.’ There are, however, plenty of hands, fingers and forearms captured in close-up throughout Thea, which occupies some 8,000 sq m of Niemeyer, a former tobacco factory currently in development as a major new culture and tech centre (of which Klap is cultural development lead).

In the 1934 short film, Hands, for example, authored by filmmakers Ralph Steiner and Willard Van Dyke for the Works Progress Administration – part of Roosevelt’s New Deal, it employed millions of jobseekers in public works projects – the camera closely observes as people write cheques, tie bandages and hammer nails, without revealing anyone’s identity. Paul Kooiker’s 2023 music video for ‘Ze is pas net begonnen’, by the Dutch band De Jeugd Van Tegenwoordig, similarly zooms in: in Kooiker’s trademark grey palette, over four minutes and eight seconds, a pottery wheel spins as a series of hands knead, shape, and open the clay, to varying levels of eroticism.

Nearby, under the banner ‘The Unseen Hand’ (the show is divided into five sections, each focused on a way the body shows what it knows), Kiki Mager’s 5000times (2016) recreates footage from a manufacturing facility in Shenzhen, using animation to highlight the invisible labour of a single pair of hands over one day, during the production of smartphones, tablets and laptops. In ‘The Language of Touch’, Koos Breukel’s The Hands of Sally Mann (2008) centres the American photographer’s hands, her nails stained and dirty from darkroom chemicals, in place of a traditional front-facing portrait, while Andi Gáldi Vinkó’s Sorry I Gave Birth I Disappeared But Now I’m Back (2016-2022), featuring a mix of large framed photographs and 6x4-inch pictures attached to the wall with delicate pink tape, examines the early stages of motherhood, highlighting the body’s intrinsic understanding of (and dealing with) care and comfort.

‘Intellectual knowledge always has been better knowledge, right? It's a higher knowledge. But I'm starting to think that maybe bodily knowledge is actually better,’ reflects Klap, who curated the show with Musoke Nalwoga. ‘The cognitive knowledge can be mimicked, but something that we know in our body, to really have that great intuition, it's not really a cognitive thing. Pallasmaa gave examples like how to sit in a chair, how to walk, and I also thought about for instance, ceramics. If you’ve ever done a pottery course, it's really difficult. This thing is rotating, your clay is going everywhere. But all of a sudden, you can do it, your body has learned.

‘The artists,’ she continues, ‘really understand the urgency of what's at stake right now and I feel, as a profession, they see we're losing shit. So the show really resonated.’ With Taking Care (Love Letter to Fellow Art Work) (2019) – a video piece in which the artist emotes with her hands, at one point licking her finger and appearing to wipe the screen, like a parent might do for a child with food on their face – Laure Prouvost contemplates a central sense of loss, questioning what it means for the digital to replace the physical, when care arrives primarily through a screen.

‘We were emailing, and Laure said, "You know this work's not made for humans? It's made to keep another artwork company; you need to park it in front of a work that needs this caressing’’,’ shares Klap. In Groningen, it is set up opposite Mandy Franca’s Faded Connections (2019), part of a wider project about the artist’s father that considers the way memory functions, using a photograph taken on a mobile phone as a starting point.

A considerable showcase in and of itself, ‘Thinking Hands’ was devised largely to be a prelude to 2027’s Noorderlicht Biennale, titled ‘Play’, which will include most of the artists currently present at Thea and spread out across three provinces. That exhibition has been conceived in part in response to last year’s biennale, ‘Machine Entanglements’, which explored how technology is woven into nature, society and imagination: ‘Play’ will seek to provide an answer, or a way forward, to some of the more troubling questions that arose.

‘With play so connected to the body, it's interesting to have a show [like ‘Thinking Hands’] that talks about what's at stake and the knowledge we still have in our bodies, the generational knowledge – the playing hand, the making hand, also the violent hand and the working hands,’ says Klap.

'Thinking Hands' at Thea until 1 November 2026

Since its inauguration in 1988, SIX by Comme des Garçons is an image-led publication that explores architecture, design and film – with very few of its pages featuring clothes from the brand. This year, coinciding with Frieze London 2026, Dover Street Market presents the new issue, with a ground-floor installation and window display, by Comme des Garçons’ founder, Rei Kawakubo.

The new issue is celebrated with a 3D representation of the publication. Dickon Bowden, Global Vice President at Dover Street Market, explains, ‘SIX has always represented something very special within the world of Comme des Garçons. It was never simply a magazine, but an expression of Rei Kawakubo’s extraordinary creative vision, bringing together fashion, photography, art and culture in a way that felt completely free from convention.

Almost forty years later, that spirit feels as relevant as ever. There is something wonderful about revisiting this incredible body of work and introducing it to a new generation, particularly in a physical form that allows people to experience the imagery in an entirely different way.’

SIX refers to the sixth sense. There have been eight issues so far, and it's included work by Robert Frank, André Kertész, Peter Lindbergh, Gilbert & George, Eileen Gray, and Jean Cocteau, to name a few. The new edition brings together elements from past issues, with photography that feels incredibly contemporary.

The timeless imagery was integral to the publication, as Bowden notes, ‘There is a sense of freedom and experimentation that remains incredibly powerful today. Rather than looking at the archive purely through a historical lens, this installation allows the imagery to exist in a new context. The juxtaposition of different images creates unexpected connections and gives them a new energy.’

At Dover Street Market, which was co-founded by Kawakubo in 2004, the new SIX installation challenges viewers to look for elements of the unexpected. Available to view in-store for one month, the installation also features an accompanying collection of 12 T-shirt styles will also be available at Dover Street Market in London, priced at £95.00 each.

Bowden concludes, ‘I hope people feel a sense of discovery and curiosity. The installation transforms something traditionally experienced on the printed page into a three-dimensional environment. There is something very exciting about encountering these extraordinary images at a different scale and in a completely different setting, allowing people to explore and discover unexpected details in their own way.

For me, this captures the spirit of Dover Street Market and our philosophy of “beautiful chaos” – bringing together different creative worlds, encouraging exploration and creating something unexpected. It is about allowing people to discover things for themselves, rather than telling them what to see or think.’

SIX by Comme des Garçons is at Dover Street Market, 18–22 Haymarket, London SW1Y 4DG . Discover the collection of T-shirts here: shop.doverstreetmarket.com

Rare is the retrospective that can be described as both revelatory and snappy, but such is the dynamic range of the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Roy Lichtenstein: Like New. Titled after a 1962 doubletake on canvas, the finely calibrated blockbuster looks with fresh eyes at an artist best known for his role in igniting and defining the Pop Art movement. But wait, as one of the newspaper ads Lichtenstein harvested for source material might promise, there’s more!

Spanning some 130 works and 6 decades, the exhibition unfolds across New York City’s largest openplan museum gallery – a.k.a., the 1700-square-metre fifth floor of the Whitney, Renzo Piano’s urban-industrial jazz suite of a structure. The space is bracketed by the High Line and the Hudson River seen through floor-to-ceiling windows, and curators Meg Onli and Alex Da Corte have seized it for a show not simply of aggregation but of syncopation.

Beyond the gallery walls, a 9-metre-high aluminum brushstroke sculpture communes with skyscrapers, a hot dog billboard looms over street food carts like a religious icon (complete with ketchup stigmata added by Da Corte), and an 18-piece Gap collection includes a fuzzy quarter-zip covered in giant Ben-Day dots.

'The show is full of masterpieces, iconic works, and rigorous scholarship, but it also has a sensibility that brings Lichtenstein’s work into the present,' said Scott Rothkopf, director of the Whitney, at the press preview. 'We knew it was a once-in-a-generation opportunity.'

Since Lichtenstein’s last retrospective in his hometown of Manhattan (at the Guggenheim in 1993, just 4 years before his death at age 73), the Whitney has acquired a trove of 400 Lichtenstein works as well as the artist’s studio and adjacent home on nearby Washington Street. These gifts from the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation were vital in informing the present exhibition’s multifaceted view, which extends to the 365- page thrill ride of a catalogue designed by Irma Boom, a huge Lichtenstein fan.

The curatorial duo of Onli and Da Corte began by confronting the ubiquity of Lichtenstein. 'The work was everywhere, but in my mind, strangely also always on the surface. I wasn’t so sure of his conceptual practice,' said Da Corte, a conceptual artist himself. 'When we began thinking about what the show could be, we went to Roy’s voice and how he spoke about this work in the time that he made it.'

Lichtenstein embedded his work with oppositions that are enduringly compelling to perceive. Yet now more than ever, those tensions hide in plain sight. He achieved the effortless look of mechanical reproduction entirely by hand, taking pains to erase all traces of craft. He delighted in oversimplifying colours and lines (a ploy he described as 'mock insensitivity'), only to expertly manipulate them through size, shape, and juxtaposition. He made the ephemeral – fugitive subjects such as sunsets, brushstrokes, and mirror reflections – concrete, riffing on art history along the way. (The famed Drowning Girl ruminates on “Brad,” but that wave points to Hokusai.)

'I don’t draw a picture in order to reproduce it,' Lichtenstein said in a 1967 interview. 'I do it in order to recompose it.' The show explores how. To do so, it defies chronology to illuminate gesture and process, experimentation and discovery, across thematic groupings that include a painting-for-painting recreation of Lichtenstein’s first solo show at Leo Castelli’s uptown New York gallery in 1962, a satisfying journey through the brushstroke motif (“Pop Abstraction”), and a playful take on the Artist’s Studios scenes of fictional interiors. The sections reference and reinforce one another, so that even a room devoted to seriality operates profoundly in parallel.

The show begins on an architectural scale with the 29-metre-long Greene Street Mural, a visual greatest hits album that plays all the tracks at once. Originally painted in 1983 on the back wall of Castelli’s newly opened SoHo gallery, it’s the largest of the exhibition’s four recreated murals, which were all done by hand. 'It’s a beautiful mural of icons that Roy had used and would use in time,' said Onli. 'We wanted to meet the moment and give people what they think they know about Roy right away – it’s big, it’s bodied, it’s graphic, it’s instant – and then slow it down.' The experience is paced by vitrines nestled within the mural that contain preparatory drawings, maquettes, and Polaroids. Stand back, look closer, repeat.

What snaps the entire show into focus is the Flash Lab, a section exploring Lichtenstein’s formative years at Ohio State University (OSU) studying under Hoyt L. Sherman, a charismatic professor of fine arts who was obsessed with the nature of human perception and how it could be sharpened. Fueled by intuition, wartime grant money, and anecdotal findings from cohorts ranging from art students to American football players and budding dentists, Sherman backed into principles of sensory physiology – how the visual system processes information – but obscured his discoveries with glibly oracular prose that smacks of L. Ron Hubbard.

'I think most people dismissed him as some kind of a nut,' Lichtenstein said of Sherman in a 1963 interview. 'I had the feeling he knew just what he was saying, but you can’t understand him until you’re able to do it and see it.' The doing and seeing took place in the dark of OSU’s Flash Lab, where Sherman directed students to look at a focal point on a screen, then flashed up a slide for a fraction of a second and had students draw what they had seen. With no time to scan the image by moving their eyes, the students would gradually adapt to a “unified” way of seeing, taking in the whole rather than indexing the parts.

'Roy cited Hoyt Sherman as the person that taught him how to see the world,' said Da Corte, who embodies Sherman in a 15-minute video work. 'So much of what the Flash Lab taught was that it’s not about what you see actively but how you remember what you see.' The show’s darkened space becomes a point around which to orient the retrospective, a kind of big bang for an artist whose impact was not merely a flash or a Pop but all-caps wallop: POW! The work radiates from it as in one of Lichtenstein’s explosions: BLAM, WHAM, VAROOM!

Ideas of doubling and repetition billow and ricochet through the exhibition, in which a recreated Super Sunset Billboard (1967) is placed to echo the museum’s western exposure, but it’s the Mirrors (1969–72) that are impossible to look away from. 'We were interested in creating an almost religious experience with these works, of being in a space that was reflective without reflection,' said Onli. A rounded, silverywalled room is ringed with eight of the canvases—the most every assembled for a retrospective. They flicker between objects and portholes, funhouse fodder and phases of the moon. They isolate and simplify, reflecting nothing, or everything all at once. They look like new.

Roy Lichtenstein: Like New is on view at the Whitney Museum of Art, New York, until 10 May 2027

When Wallpaper* witnesses The Hayley Williams Show’s stop at New York City’s Forest Hills Stadium, the texture, lights and silhouettes that bring the performance to life are striking. Williams’ face, music videos of her dancing and simple silhouettes are projected on white drapes. She’s flanked by her band, who are taking up equal visual space. The atmosphere is inviting and nostalgic. It’s all intentional. 'Hayley wanted it to be much more personal than just the regular rock show,' Swedish lighting and conceptual designer Tobias Rylander tells Wallpaper*, describing his work as 'enhancing someone else’s art.'

Tapped to work on the solo tour of Paramore’s Hayley Williams, he and longtime collaborator, lighting designer and director Michael Straun, started by meeting with her and picking her brain. '[The process is] as individual as the artist themselves,' Rylander says.

Williams’ latest album, Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party, offers a candid glimpse of personal and professional anxieties, sung with snark and gospel vibrato as she shifts from synth-pop anthems like 'Parachute' to mournful ballads like 'True Believer.' 'You do have to learn the music, and you do have to care about it,' Rylander says. 'We studied the music, read the lyrics, and talk to the artist about what the song is about to them.' They also made sure their concept reflected where she is in her career right now. 'She’s coming from a band and finding her identity in this new band,' Straun says. 'She wanted it to not all be about her, and to also be about the other performers on the stage.'

They worked together in lockstep, sharing references of architecture, paintings and films they felt captured not only the album but Williams’ entire solo discography. 'I think we were all quite aligned from the start,' Straun recalls. 'When we got into actually drawing, it came naturally and organically.' They also work with the Williams, as they do with all artists, on the show’s overall flow. 'I build a big piece of paper, which I call the show arc, where each song has got a card,' Rylander explains. 'And on that card, we have a little annotation of where the automation is on stage, but also a thumbnail of what the video content might look like and the information of what colour the song should be. We sit around this table and they tend to rip it apart and put it back together, sort of like a puzzle. These pieces often become almost like an art piece at the end because we draw so much on them and they move so many times.'

One of Williams’ main objectives was creating intimacy regardless of the size of each venue. 'Hayley physically wanted to be close to the band,' Straun says. 'We shrunk everything down so they’re effectively on one island, and Tobias had the idea of making the show super low so we could fit it under the ring in the Hollywood Bowl [the show will stop at the legendary venue in October], but we decided to make that our height for the whole tour. We’ve gone low and wide, which has this feeling that you’re in the room with them.' Starting with that venue in mind, they adapted to the other arenas and amphitheatres she’d be stopping at, keeping the integrity of the concept.

'The layering of the fabrics is actually how I started to make sure we could scale it,' Rylander explains. 'They’re overlapping, and the way that all the video is programmed and the lighting is laid out in a way that we can overlap and adjust everything sideways so we can actually fit the whole show into more or less any size of stage that they go into. We’re not dependent on the stage depth because we don’t have a huge upstage video wall. We noticed that works really well in big amphitheatres where you normally don’t see a landscape expression on stage.'

In the end, they landed on a show that’s 'much smaller and more intimate than I first had thought we would,' Rylander says. 'We knew that Hayley really wanted it to feel homey, and it was about her and the band and the songs and the music more than putting on the biggest show we possibly could. It’s still a quite complicated show with the automation of the fabrics, but it’s also quite delicate. I think Hayley set the tone quite early. It felt natural that we were going to frame something beautiful and soft and singular.'

Rylander and Straun first met in 2012 when Tobias was asked to work on The xx’s Coexist tour. 'Michael was already then their longtime lighting designer and lighting director,' Rylander says. 'So together we created, again, with video projection used as lighting. Since then, we have more and more often collaborated on shows from anything from The 1975 to Beyoncé.' He adds that they both appreciate 'the quality of projected light in terms of video projection instead of LED screens.' They’ve continued that thread on the current tour. 'We quite early on had the idea of projecting these different worlds onto a white canvas of a stage, which gave us the possibility to colour the stage in any colour that we wanted and also show textures and paint different scenes on stage, but also show historical photography from Hayley’s campaign and her personal life.'

Their attention to building intimacy between Williams and her fans begins as soon as the lights go down. 'We start the show with hardly any front light, so that gives a sense of mystery and you don’t just get drawn into Hayley, you get drawn into all the band as one,' Straun says. Instead of big front key-light moments, the projection is sometimes her only front light or sidelight. 'We also don’t use the [image magnification] on the curtains for the first part of the show, which means your eye adjusts to looking at the stage,' Straun continues. 'You get drawn in, and then gradually we reveal the cameras.'

To make sure the design comes to life properly on stage, they do a lot of testing in their studio, checking the opacity or transparency of fabrics and how they take projection. 'We do a lot of experimenting with technology,' Straun says. 'In the show, we’re using a lot of new technology and all the lights are LED, the projectors are laser projectors, the cameras are 4K, but it’s done to make it look old or make it look like it fits. We found some new lights, so we got them sent to our offices, and we played with them and sent Hayley videos of shadows on a wall with different lights. [When we] get the material, we look at what the projection looks like on that. We make sure structures for the wind are hidden, so you don’t notice that.'

The result is a show where very little of the intricate behind-the-scenes tech is revealed. 'When you look at the show, you don’t really see many light sources,' Rylander says. 'You see the light, but we don’t have lights on trusses that are facing the audience, and you don’t see the lenses of the little LED diodes. We use lighting as the physical medium that it is. So in that term, that way, it’s very classical.'

The dedication to using high-tech to create analogue simplicity can be seen throughout the set. At one point in the set, Williams covers Nina Simone’s 'Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood,' making playful hand gestures around her head that create a silhouette of devil horns against the draped curtains. 'Shadow play is the oldest trick in the book,' Rylander says. 'But it’s so effective, and everyone can relate to it, and everyone knows how it works. Everyone knows their own shadow. It’s really special, and my favourite part of the show is how we use the shadows.' One of Straun’s favourite lighting moments is during 'True Believer,' which evolved from Williams’ earlier tour this year. 'We followed some of the musical sounds with these single light bulbs, and on this tour, we have some automation that moves, and just seeing that go from this small venue idea to something bigger that still has the intimacy, that’s a special moment for me.'

Rylander and Straun have worked on everything from esports to large-scale arena tours and theatre. And even when they want the experience to feel simple, science still sits at its core. 'Lighting design is physics,' Rylander says. Each design is planned around how long the stage will take to build and how many trucks the show will travel in before the artist even sees a picture. Rylander also says that as a rule, nothing he shows an artist should be the product of AI. 'I have a firm belief that what we do is a craft and a skill and it shouldn’t be taken lightly. The AI won’t sit in the room with Hayley Williams and talk her through 36 songs that need to boil down to 23, or talk about the feelings that we want to communicate. It’s becoming more and more important for the artist and for the audience to be there in the room and seeing the real thing.'

Despite nearly 20 years of experience and working with some of the biggest artists in the world, they still got 'really nervous,' according to Straun, while watching The Hayley Williams Show on its first night. 'Was this too intimate?' Straun remembers wondering. 'Would you see Hayley from the back of the lawn? We both went up and watched the show from the back of the lawn, and everything worked.' Rylander says the payoff comes with the audience’s first roar. 'It’s a lot of work to get to that moment, and then it’s so definite that it just happens in front of you. It’s why I do what I do. It’s the coolest, and that’s the payoff.'

It’s a landmark anniversary for Art Basel Paris. Now in its fifth year, the fair has evolved, growing to fill the refurbished Grand Palais and branching out across the city. What started as a standalone art fair – albeit an extremely high-profile one as part of Art Basel’s industry-leading stable – has now become Paris Art Week, encompassing events, collaborations and public art initiatives throughout 19-25 October 2026.

'Art Basel Paris has evolved into a major fixture on the international art calendar, while becoming increasingly rooted in the cultural fabric of the city,' says director Karim Crippa, who took on the role in November 2025. 'As I take on the directorship, my ambition is to build on this strong foundation while continuing to foster discovery and new perspectives.'

Paris Art Week is known for its high-level fashion-and-art crossover projects. This time, its annual public collaboration with Miu Miu is Geste de Consolation, by artist Alice Diop, with work by Zadie Smith, Zora Neale Hurston, Audre Lorde and Marie Ndiaye. It will be installed at the Palais d’Ièna.

Also part of the public programme, a monumental work by Japanese artist Keita Miyazaki will be installed on Avenue Winston-Churchill alongside work by Carmen Herrera, Manfred Pernice, Niki de Saint Phalle and Yinka Shonibare.

Maison Guerlain is presenting its annual exhibition at its stunning location on the Champs-Élysées. ‘L’Heure des possibles’ will feature artists Christian Boltanski, Ann Veronica Janssens, Laure Prouvost, Xie Lei, Ugo Rondinone and James Turrell.

Artist CB Evans is collaborating with conceptual fragrance brand The Commentary to bring us ‘The Reckoner’ at Dover Street Market Parfums, and Reiffers Initiatives is presenting another year of their now storied collaborative exhibitions between a younger and older artist, this year featuring Thomas Houseago and Théo Mercier.

Multidisciplinary creative, artist and Ryan Murphy muse Jordan Roth is staging an exhibition of performative sculpture and functional design, ‘To Think of the Tranquil Life of Things’, which will no doubt pique curiosity in both Parisians and the international art crowd.

Inside the fair you can expect presentations from galleries hailing from 41 countries, with ‘blue chip’ galleries bringing stars of art history and the present day. Galleries in the Parcours section on the fair’s balcony bring emerging work, balancing out the biggest names with what is to come. The fair’s talk programme will bring together some of the great minds of the art world including Hans Ulrich Obrist and Simon Fattal, Jeffrey Deitch and Pauline Pavec, Alexandre de Betak and Massimiliano Gioni and Ibrahim Mahama and Zanele Muholi. Those attending the fair at the weekend will be treated to an intervention by Emily in Paris star Sylvie Grateau, who will present a directive along which participating galleries will rehang their booths with new artworks.

'What makes it so distinctive is the dialogue between Paris’ extraordinary heritage and its contemporary energy, bringing together art, fashion, and a vibrant, diverse, youthful, experimental, and creative scene,' adds Crippa.

Paris’ institutions always present a plethora of world-class exhibitions. Ghanaian art star Mahama is in town for his much-anticipated survey at Fondation Cartier, which is one of the must-sees of the week along with Kerry James Marshall’s ‘The Histories’ at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris. The trendsetting Lafayette Anticipations has a contemporary focus and is showing exhibitions by Yu Nishimura, Hélène Fauquet and Mungo Thomson. Palais de Tokyo is hosting a group exhibition that includes Valérie John, Ali Cherri, Sonia Gomes and Céleste Richard-Zimmermann. The institution has been on a roll lately so expectations around this show will be high.

Those who love the Impressionists should pop into the Mary Cassatt at the Musée d’Orsay and photography fans should pop into Stan Douglas’ show at the Jeu de Paume, and MEP (Maison Européenne de la Photographie) for ‘Penn & Fashion’, a tribute to legend Irving Penn.

Commercial galleries don’t shut down while the fair is active, putting on shows to complement their offerings at the fair. Heading to your favourite space is highly advised. Hauser & Wirth is presenting a show on the kinetic sculptor Alexander Calder, celebrating his historic return to Paris; Mendes Wood DM Paris is presenting painting and drawing by Afro-Brazilian artist Rosana Paulino; Mariane Ibrahim is showing work by Amoako Boafo and Thaddaeus Ropac is treating us to an exhibition of work by the great painter Jordan Casteel. Gagosian is showing ‘Lee Krasner: Works from the 1960s’, which sounds pretty unmissable – especially in light of the critically acclaimed ‘Krasner and Pollock: Past Continuous’ currently on at New York’s Met Museum.

Around town you can head to fairs Asia Now for work from across the whole of the Asian continent, and Paris International which is building a great reputation for presenting the cutting edge. Also running is the new event Reference Festival, founded by Mumi Haiati and bringing together creatives and artists from all disciplines including musician Eartheater, toast of the Venice Biennale Florentina Holzinger, Klaus Biesenbach and Hans Ulrich Obrist.

Five years in and the balance between London and Paris in the autumn art season is still finding its identity, but this range of stunning shows across the board tells a story of a landmark year for Paris. Time will tell…

Art Basel Paris from 23-25 October 2026

Studio Iron, the concept store and gallery led by Isamaya Ffrench, operates in the spaces where the boundaries between art and design become hazy, curating a programme that puts a focus on objects and materiality at its core.

The Severe Mercy exhibition by British-American artist, photographer and director Robin Hunter-Blake, whose work spans multiple mediums, is a natural choice for Ffrench, who placed the works in a considered context in the space.

‘Robin’s work felt like a really interesting starting point because there’s something very emotional and visceral about it, but also a sensitivity to material, form and the body,’ Ffrench says. ‘I chose pieces from the Studio Iron roster that could respond to that in different ways, whether through material, tension, humour or sensuality. I wanted the whole thing to feel like a world rather than an exhibition of separate disciplines.’

For Hunter-Blake, who unites photography, kinetic installations and screen printing here, the exhibition presented a chance to bring ideas to life he had been mulling over for years. ‘The works explore emotion, time, and their relationship, with the aim of allowing the viewer to experience the work rather than analyse it,’ he says. ‘Their abstract nature and scale are intended to provoke questions, inviting the viewer into a process of interpretation. This is where the emotional, almost Rorschach-like quality of the work comes into effect, allowing each person to bring their own experiences, associations, and feelings to what they see.’

The works play on scale, material and proportion, cutting often ambiguous forms which invite the viewer to craft their own interpretations. ‘People tend to spend time with the aluminium works, studying them and allowing themselves to sit with what they evoke,’ Hunter-Blake adds. ‘I wanted to extend this experience across the exhibition, moving beyond observation into something more immersive. The screen prints explore a sense of emptiness, and the feeling of being hollow while continuing to exist, function, and move forward within the world. The installation aims to trigger feelings of overwhelm, love, tension, and impulsive expression.’

This is exactly the point, says Ffrench. ‘That’s a big part of what I want Studio Iron to explore. I want people to experience these things in a more instinctive way, to sit with them, touch them, live around them and form their own relationships with them. Hopefully you leave “Severe Mercy” thinking less about what category something belongs to and more about how it makes you feel.’

Robin Hunter-Blake: Severe Mercy, presented by Studio Iron at The Painting Rooms, Covent Garden, until 27 October

‘I've always talked about slowness, or slow looking,' says London-born, Manchester-based artist Louise Giovanelli, on the eve of a major new show at London's White Cube gallery. ‘I see more and more of this tendency in painting – to really focus on directing attention into the canvas and not away from it. I'm contemplative. I really try and hold the gaze of the audience.'

It is a considered approach that's reflective of Giovanelli's practice as a whole, in both her subject matter, which captures the heavy slowness of anticipation, and in the oil paintings themselves. In the flesh, the richly worked pigments shine, glint and seduce, rewarding a second, and a third, look.

Louise Giovanelli presents ‘In the Light of False Suns’

Giovanelli, who developed her craft at the Manchester School of Art, graduating in 2015, doesn't make it easy for her viewers. She is fascinated by the spectacle, but resists the easy narratives that her motifs conjure up.

In a series of works focusing on curtains, there is a playfulness in the disparity between the expectation that something is about to be revealed and the access the closed curtains withhold. For Giovanelli, the concept of a curtain as something that shows, but also hides, is a complex one.

‘This idea of action having happened, or about to happen, means the curtains can be very sad things – or honest and happy, or very grand. They can also be very seedy things. They straddle so many different notions of class and geography; nightclubs, working men's clubs, hotels. They denote so many different things. I think that's why the curtains in particular are so frustrating to people, because of this meta narrative that they have,' she says. ‘They are just a painting, and it's super flat. I've realised fairly recently that it's something I do with all my work. Everything I paint is very close up to the surface. It feels very claustrophobic, almost aggressively pushed forward into the realm of the viewer.'

Throughout Giovanelli's work, there is no single-point perspective, but instead a tension between the figurative and the suggestion of abstraction. We are looking at what is real, but that might not be what we think it is.

‘Of course, the image matters, but, for me, it's probably at the bottom of the hierarchy,' Giovanelli says. ‘Or at least it should be when you're learning how to paint. Everything else is much more important.'

She cites Giorgio Morandi's lifetime spent painting clay pots. ‘There's nothing interesting really about a clay pot – but of course there is. There's the idea of light; different configurations, textures, formats, sizes; where the shapes are placed within the canvas, so that your eye doesn't ever fall out of the vista. All those things look nuanced, but they are very powerful.'

It is a universality reflected in Giovanelli's references, which may appear eclectic – there are motifs and techniques from the Renaissance, religious iconography, nods to theatre and pop culture filmography – yet share a focus on the concepts of worship and idolisation.

For the new work she is set to unveil at White Cube (Mason’s Yard, London, 20 November 2026 – 16 January 2027), she draws links between these themes, as well as forming new connections between her existing paintings. ‘For the first time, I've included a face within a curtain image,' she says. ‘That's something I've never done before. It's almost like I create rules for myself, but then I see that almost as a challenge, so I break my own rule.'

Elsewhere, scale is distorted, and Giovanelli breaks another one of her rules by creating a wig painting (a series of her works that compactly frame wigs) that is bigger than a human head. When we speak before the opening, she is working from photographs of hanging carcasses of meat she took during a visit to an abattoir. ‘I know it sounds crazy, but if I can pull it off, it should be very seductive and beautiful. I want it to look like a seascape or landscape, very geological. It's quite a departure.'

Her technique, also, is developing. ‘I've been known to make works that are very thin, with no discernible brushstrokes, whereas this show has much more of them. It feels like I've found a new confidence.'

Ultimately, the power of paint to convey, magnify, and distort meaning continues to captivate Giovanelli. ‘What I'm trying to do is make paintings that initially register as very seductive and are very beautiful to look at – but there has to be an undercover or slightly macabre tone. There's a darkness in my work that takes a minute or so to really understand or appreciate. I'm old-fashioned. I love the idea of beauty. I think it should be beautiful – but beauty with an edge.'

Louise Giovanelli will be on show from 20 November 2026 – 16 January 2027 at White Cube Mason's Yard, London SW1, whitecube.com

A version of this article appears in the November 2026 Art Issue of Wallpaper*, available from 8 October in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

Tiffany & Co's ‘Artist-to-Artist' programme at Frieze London (see more Frieze Week highlights) invites established artists to select up-and-coming creatives to present their work at the fair. This year, Yinka Shonibare has nominated self-taught Cape Town-based artist Unathi Mkonto. Spanning drawing, installation, sculpture and performance, his distinctive practice is driven by a keen interest in the possibilities of architecture, exploring, through sculpture, how to create a better standard of living.

Yinka Shonibare: Unathi Mkonto's work caught my attention because he has such a unique approach to minimalist art. Having lived in Cape Town, he's really interested in what's going on in South Africa. His method of presenting his work reminds me of a lot of minimalist approaches, but the difference is that he does have a subject matter, which is South African, whereas the minimalists were really focusing on the object itself.

Unathi Mkonto: I studied architecture, and that is part of my art now – in a newer way and with my own rules. I've been comfortable being in between the two, and never having to choose a side. In my practice, the work is sometimes theatrical. I'm interested in the environment that architecture gives – what people experience in the space and what is left behind. The voids and the in-between; everything can be habitable within my world in my architecture. A cardboard box can be a building, a drawing can be a building, you can live in anything. I'm exploring those theories and trying to stretch a language of architecture from the continent that is also inspired by nature, water and the land, and so I'm pulling from all those things.

YS: I've been looking at the work from London, thinking it's a unique approach to art-making. Is it architecture? Is it sculpture? I like that about the work. It refers to art-making in the past, but in an African setting. That kind of continuity of history interests me.

UM: I had been thinking about how agriculture could become the future of African architecture, because we draw from the ground and we learn from the soil. We know how it works, and for me, it's an important resource – rather than bricks and glass and things to build, the ground gives us so much. I've been thinking about what architecture could come out of the soil, and I've been thinking about trees. There is also an aquatic feel, with trees that are floating in water at the same time. It's a mix of the elements, a continuation of the sea, and the beach and the towers. What is the ancient knowledge that Africa has about soil? And how can Africans look more into the soil to create a language – because at the end of the day, our languages are going to come from the soil, they're going to come from nature.

YS: When people see this work at Frieze, I think they should be broad-minded and nourished by new ideas.

UM: I'm really looking forward to making a singular statement, and encountering this fast-moving audience. I was thinking about a work that is a singular language that can communicate, and also create a moment to pause. Something you can meditate on, something that's raw and quite honest, and that isn't overly done, but that attracts you for its honesty and its openness.

The Tiffany & Co ‘Artist-to-Artist' programme is on show from 14-18 October at Frieze London, Regent's Park

A version of this article appears in the November 2026 Art Issue of Wallpaper*, available from 8 October in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

As part of its special projects, London’s 2026 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair at Somerset House (15-18 October) will spotlight modernist artists from Africa and the diaspora.

Titled ‘West Wind’, the 1-54 Presents initiative takes its name from the 1966 song of the same title by Miriam Makeba, the legendary South African singer, songwriter and civil rights activist. The project is curated by Johannesburg-born South African-Portuguese art historian and researcher Nancy Dantas. It will celebrate the work of pioneering modern artists like Alexander ‘Skunder’ Boghossian, Bertina Lopes, Gerard Sekoto, Kofi Antubam, Sam Joseph Ntiro, Papa Ibra Tall and Uzo Egonu, presented by Hannah O’Leary Fine Art; Baya and Rafik El Kamel, presented by Selma Feriani Gallery; and Ibrahim El-Salahi, presented by Vigo Gallery.

'As we prepare for our 14th edition, I have been reflecting on how differently we understand artists when we place them within the histories they helped to shape, rather than at their margins,' says Touria El Glaoui, the founding director of 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair, in a statement. '“West Wind” allows us to look back with greater precision and to see the present differently. By bringing these generations into conversation, this edition places African artists where they belong, as authors of modern and contemporary art.'

Speaking of getting history right, writer and curator Folasade Ologundudu will present ‘(Re)Casting the Canon: From Lagos to London’, promoted as supporting the next generation of critical arts and culture writers to bring the hidden histories of African and African diasporan people into cultural discourse. The research-led initiative seeks to explore how contemporary African art history is shaped through collective memory, reflection, and writing via multi-day writing labs and a pop-up exhibition.

Moroccan artist Hassan Hajjaj, known for his colourful portraits and multimedia art that blends Moroccan culture with contemporary pop art and fashion influences, will present ‘My London Rockstars’, featuring a new generation of artists, musicians and designers shaping the city’s contemporary cultural scene, including Jorja Smith, Slawn and Central Cee.

Kianda Contemporary Art Project, a Johannesburg based art centre and curatorial studio will present work from the 1950s generation to the present day by artists based in Angola and in the diaspora, alongside artists from countries whose influence has been significant for the Angolan scene, which is influenced by colonial and post-independence contexts Mario Tendinha, Yola Balanga, Teresa Kutala Firmino, Alice Marcelino, Ia Sueki and Benigno Mangovo, with guest artists Levy Pooe (South Africa), Beré Magalhães (Brazil) and Emmany Koto (DRC). The Marcos Jinguba-curated exhibition is titled ‘Angola, Angolé, Angolema’, taken from a poetry collection by Angolan Arlindo Barbeitos.

A fifth project to look forward to is ‘Commodity/Couture’, a sensory installation that traces Ghanaian cocoa from farm to finished product, and the value that disappears in between, by Midunu Institute, an Accra-based cultural organization, founded by Ghanaian chef, author and artist, Selassie Atadika, and dedicated to Africa’s culinary heritage and food systems through research, cultural practice and craft.

The Talks Programme is a must-attend and will include panels such as an exploration of African Modernism with Nancy Dantas, The Future of African Art Collecting with Strauss & Co, a celebration of Addis Fine Art’s ten-year anniversary, Contemporary African Art After the Spotlight: Visibility, Value and the Institutions Still to Come, the book launch of Ô Cameroon! Modern and Contemporary Art and Artists From 1925 to Now by Ozong Agborsangaya-Fiteu, The New Institutional Moment: African Art After Visibility with Oliver Enwonwu, and Creatives, Collaborators and Catalysts: Contexts and Challenges of Championing Congolese Culture with The Defise Foundation.

As usual, there will be lots of artworks to see by contemporary artists from Africa and its diaspora, presented by 40 galleries including first timers such as 16/16 (Nigeria), 193 (France/ Italy), Addis Fine Fine (Ethiopia), Affinity Gallery (Nigeria), Ellephant (Canada), Errm Art Gallery (Saudi Arabia) Filafriques (Switzerland/ Cote D’Ivoire), First Floor Gallery Harare (Zimbabwe), Gallery Misr (Egypt), LIS10 Gallery (Italy/France/Hong Kong), Maya Art Space (Lebanon) and THK Gallery (South Africa/Germany.)

1-54 London 2026 will be held at Somerset House from 15 to 18 October 2026

Sixty-one artists have created original work inspired by a Paul McCartney lyric in aid of War Child.

For the third edition of Sound & Vision – which began as a similar project, sparked by the David Bowie lyric back in 2024 – artists including Genieve Figgis, Alvaro Barrington, Joshua Donkor and Sanya Kantarovsky have created new work in response to the ‘Band on the Run’ lyric, 'Well the rain exploded with a mighty crash as we fell into the sun'.

The pieces will be auctioned on 27 October 2026 to raise money for children affected by war worldwide.

The evocative lyric was selected by McCartney, who has been a supporter of War Child since he took part in The Help Album alongside Blur, Radiohead and Oasis, back in 1995.

Gemma Peppe, curator of Sound & Vision and founder of AOAP Projects, says: 'The artists from the third edition of Sound & Vision have had a lot of fun with Paul McCartney’s lyric, "Well the rain exploded with a mighty crash...”. Every artist has taken great care to produce a piece worthy of this year’s legendary musical artists, resulting in a body of fabulous artwork that will no doubt raise a lot of money for War Child and the important work they do.'

SOUND & VISION 2026 – FULL ARTIST LIST

Abigail McGinley

Aleah Chapin

Alex Hanna

Alexandra Beteeva

Alice Kettle

Alvaro Barrington

Anaja Hvastija Gaia

Andrew Maughan

Andrew Torr

Anna Pakosz

Anne Rothenstien

Carl Randall

Charlie Billingham

Chloe Barnes

Christina Niederberger

Colin Murphey

David Harrison

David Rhys Jones

David Hamilton

Diana Copperwhite

Elizabeth Dimitroff

Elizabeth Power

Ellie Cotton

Emma Tod

Fletcher Sibthorp

Genieve Figgis

George Underwood

Georgie Huxley

Gill Rocca

Grace Lee

Graham Fink

Heidrun Rathgeb

Helena Minginowicz

Holly Rowett

Jenni Hiltunen

Joseph Black

Joshua Donker

Marcelle Hanselaar

Marcus Cope

Matt Bollinger

Matthew Clifton

Max Renneisen

Megan Rea

Mercedes Lucy

Nana Wolke

Natalie Wadlington

Nick Grindrod

Peter Messer

PJ Houghton

Ralf Kokke

Salvatore Fiorello

Sanya Kantarovski

Sophie Ruigrok

Sunkyung Baek

Tahnee Lonsdale

Victoria Cantons

Xingxin Hu

Xu Yang

Zoe Hawk

The online auction takes place from Tuesday 27 October to Thursday 12 November 2026, closing 3pm BST (10am EST).

The accompanying exhibition is at Iconic Images Gallery, Friday 6 to Sunday 8 November 2026

Cindy Sherman is a master storyteller. During a five-decade career, she has acted as her own model, constructing identities and occupying different personas for arresting, revealing photographs. By drawing on a distinctive blend of prosthetics, digital devices and theatrical tools, Sherman presents recognisable caricatures, tropes familiar to us from the movies, and from life – the society hostess, the unfulfilled housewife - stereotypes she presents, confronts, and dismantles.

Throughout, artifice is key. In Sherman’s photographs, we can often see the working. The wig may be a little askew, there are visible cracks in the foundation on the thickly made-up face. Sometimes, you can spot the safety pin, holding together the front of the dress.

Sherman builds on a lifetime spent constructing the finer details in her new ‘Fabric Matrons’ series, now on show at Hauser & Wirth in London. Here, Sherman’s women drape themselves in thick swathes of material, recline in front of hanging reams of fabric or pose for the camera, dripping in jewels.

The results are a sumptuous mediation on what it means to age; how we embrace it, how we mask it, or how we make the best of it. For her portrayals, Sherman was inspired by the pages of a glossy magazine she came across at a store in the Hamptons, its pages filled with women of her age whose wrinkled faces had been smoothed over. She has recreated these women’s glamour with a tactile reimagining of what it means to present a different face to the world.

The material looks expensive, befitting of who these women have become. Sherman was invited by Chanel to utilise their fabrics and jewellery, which appear in some of the works, building on a relationship begun in 2010-2012 with Sherman’s Ominous Landscapes series, in which her characters wore gowns from Chanel’s archives. The Chanel tweeds here, woven through with glinting gold threads, sequins and slivers of leather, are gloriously rich in their clashes of patterns and textures, creating rich contrasts between the gloriousness of the material and the casual, slapdash way it is styled. Bows are roughly tied and hems are frayed. Tailoring is eschewed for shapeless gowns which wouldn’t look incongruous on a member of the aristocracy - or on a peasant.

It is a juxtaposition that simmers throughout. Some of Sherman’s characters here are almost airbrushed in their youthfully clear complexions; others gaze at the camera, their faces, criss-crossed by lines, emphasised by the close crop of the portrait.

Says Sherman: ‘It’s gone beyond beauty. I think it’s showing these characters’ neuroses – probably my own, and similar to many women my age.’

Cindy Sherman at Hauser & Wirth London from 13 October – 23 December 2026

Frieze Sculpture has returned to Regent’s Park, transforming the London park into an open-air exhibition of contemporary art until 1 November 2026. The free exhibition brings together 11 international artists, with Fatoş Üstek returning as curator for the fourth consecutive year.

Now in its 14th edition, Frieze Sculpture sees Douglas White transform discarded truck tyres into a seven-metre-tall palm tree, while Catriona Robertson conjures giant worm-like creatures emerging from the earth, imagining a future in which organisms have evolved to consume industrial waste. Elsewhere, Angel Otero has embedded a partially open door into the ground, with a staircase descending beneath the park’s surface, while Ivana Bašić reimagines a Yugoslav war memorial as a breathing sculpture.

Set against the landscape of Regent’s Park, the works invite visitors to consider the histories and forces shaping the world around them. Here, we take a closer look at the sculptures on display.

Angel Otero, ‘Dreams and Salt’ (2025–2026) Presented by Hauser & Wirth

A plywood door sits partially buried in the ground, left ajar to reveal a staircase leading beneath the surface. Neither clearly an entrance nor an exit, it invites questions about what lies below, suggesting that the sculpture’s most significant element may be the part we cannot see. Drawing on his experiences of growing up in Puerto Rico, studying in Chicago and now living between Puerto Rico and New York, Otero transforms a familiar household object into a reflection on migration, memory and belonging. The work follows Otero’s first UK exhibition, recently presented at Hauser & Wirth Somerset.

Carolina Aguirre, ‘Held’, 2026. Presented by Ruttkowski;68

A weathered bronze form splits in two to reveal a white quartz stone, held delicately between its halves. Collected from her family home in Uruguay, the quartz carries a personal connection to memory, place and belonging, themes that run through the work of Santiago-born, London-based artist Carolina Aguirre. Inspired by xenoliths – fragments of rock enclosed within another rock – the sculpture contrasts the malleability of bronze with the permanence of stone, exploring the fragile bonds that connect us to one another and to the places we call home.

Catriona Robertson, ‘WYRM’, 2026 Presented by The Muse Gallery

Colossal worm-like forms appear to weave through the earth in London-based artist Catriona Robertson’s WYRM, imagining a future in which organisms have evolved to consume industrial waste. Made using her signature ‘papercrete’ – a mixture of concrete and recycled newspaper pulp – the sculptures resemble strange archaeological discoveries, combining the textures of industrial debris with the appearance of ancient fossils. Drawing on the discarded materials of urban life, Robertson envisions a world in which the waste of today becomes the building blocks of future ecosystems.

Conrad Shawcross, ‘Eye of the Needle (Time Pebble (E30A13))’, 2026 Presented by Victoria Miro

British artist Conrad Shawcross turns the traditional clock into a meditation on cosmic time with Eye of the Needle, an elliptical sculpture whose perforated surface creates shifting patterns of light and shadow. Part of his ‘Time Pebbles’ series, the work draws on a visit to the Holmdel Horn Antenna in New Jersey, the instrument that helped scientists discover cosmic microwave background radiation in 1964. Combining geometry with scientific inquiry, Shawcross explores how we measure time while looking back to the Big Bang and the origins of the universe.

Douglas White, ‘Black Palm’, 2026 Presented by Leila Heller Gallery

Rising over seven metres high, Douglas White’s Black Palm transforms discarded truck tyres and steel into a towering palm tree. The London-based artist collected the burst tyres along highways in Belize during a residency in the rainforest, where the sight of disease-stricken, blackened palms inspired the sculpture. Set against the carefully cultivated landscape of The Regent’s Park, the work draws attention to the labour and global trade that shape such spaces, while reflecting on Europe’s colonial exploitation of tropical environments and the transformation of rubber into a global commodity.

Elena Nemkova, ‘Agony in the Garden’, 2026 Presented by Dom Art Gallery

Two oversized animal paws rise towards one another in a prayer-like gesture, their crossed claws suggesting both vulnerability and defence. Made from forged metal, its scarred, irregular surface and changing patina respond to the light and weather, giving the sculpture a shifting presence within the landscape. Born in Tajikistan and now based in Milan, Elena Nemkova explores the tension between primal instinct and human emotion, transforming a gesture of uncertainty into one of hope and endurance. Situated in the heart of the city, the work also presents The Regent’s Park as a place of refuge and contemplation.

Ivana Bašić, ‘Metanoia’, 2025 Presented by Albion Jeune

A cluster of lotus-like forms made from concrete, glass and copper incorporates glass vessels that inhale and exhale air through a network of race-car exhaust pipes in Ivana Bašić’s Metanoia. Inspired by the futuristic war memorials built across former Yugoslavia, the sculpture reimagines the Flower Monument at Jasenovac as a living, breathing organism. Born in Belgrade and now based in New York, Bašić draws on her childhood experiences during the violent breakup of Yugoslavia to explore themes of loss, fragmentation and the desire for unity. Combining the permanence of a monument with the fragility of glass and breath, the work reflects on the possibility of renewal in the aftermath of conflict.

Matyáš Chochola, ‘METEOR’, ‘BRUTALIST’ and ‘MACE II’, 2024 Presented by The Chemistry Gallery

Prague-based artist Matyáš Chochola brings together Baroque sculpture and futuristic technology in these monumental works, created using experimental 3D concrete printing. Part of a 12-piece series reinterpreting Matthias Bernard Braun’s 18th-century Virtues and Vices, the sculptures combine references to antiquity, cubism and brutalism. METEOR, inspired by a meteorite discovered in Oregon and sacred to the Chinook people, sits atop a fragment of a classical column, while MACE II features angular, ridged forms finished in metallic copper and anthracite.

The most technically complex of the three sculptures, BRUTALIST , pictured, combines the fragmented form of a classical column with the imposing geometry of brutalist architecture and the playful aesthetic of the Memphis Group. Constructed from individually 3D-printed concrete components, each produced at different angles, the work brings together ancient architectural references and postmodern design. For Chochola, these contradictions are central to sculpture’s ability to challenge how we see the past and imagine the future.

Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran, ‘Warrior Figure’, 2026 Presented by Jhaveri Contemporary and Sullivan+Strumpf

Standing two metres tall, Warrior Figure is a double-sided bronze sculpture with two contrasting faces: one painted and textured, the other highly polished and reflective. Hand-built in clay before being cast in bronze using the ancient lost-wax technique, the figure retains the expressive marks of its original construction and stands on a brightly spray-painted steel plinth. Born in Sri Lanka and now based in Sydney, Nithiyendran draws on South Asian sculptural traditions and Hindu, Buddhist and Christian imagery to create a contemporary idol that brings together different cultural histories, religious references and queer aesthetics.

Tarini Sethi, ‘The Sun Bathes Its Friends and Neighbours’, 2026 Presented by Rajiv Menon Contemporary

Composed of four stainless steel panels, The Sun Bathes Its Friends and Neighbours features an intricate arrangement of intertwined, hybrid bodies, combining erotic imagery with distorted and exaggerated human forms. New Delhi-based artist Tarini Sethi draws on Indian miniature painting, folk art and sacred imagery, including multi-limbed deities, to create an Indofuturist vision in which bodies transcend conventional boundaries of identity and biology. Exploring the tensions between pleasure, power, the grotesque and the sacred, the sculpture imagines a world where physical transformation and sexual freedom are limitless.

Özlem Günyol and Mustafa Kunt, ‘Possibilities for a Sculpture’, 2026 Presented by Dirimart

Three concrete slabs lie flush with the ground, taking the place of the plinths of three London monuments, but without the statues that once stood upon them. Instead, each is inscribed with text describing the missing figure’s pose, replacing the traditional monument with a set of written instructions. Frankfurt-based artists Özlem Günyol and Mustafa Kunt, who have collaborated since 2005, use the work to question the authority and permanence of public monuments. By bringing the pedestals down to ground level and removing their figures, the duo challenges conventional ideas of what a monument should represent and how the public engages with it.

Frieze Sculpture in Regent's Park until 1 November

Alex Margo Arden is an artist who enjoys research. Her passion for piecing together a narrative from historical clues bubbles up in everything she does, from last year’s Accounts – an installation of decommissioned male mannequins she retrieved from the National Motor Museum, which won the 2025 Arts Council Collection Frieze Acquisitions prize – to her recreation of artworks damaged by protestors.

Arden doesn’t shy away from a tricky subject. The topics she is drawn to may appear eclectic, but they are united by a shared specificity. Take her new show at London’s Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation, ‘Nothing Personal’, which is inspired by Amy Winehouse – or more specifically, by Winehouse’s belongings.

By shifting the focus to the things that make up a life, rather than the life itself, Arden is asking the more interesting questions. Crucially, there is no imagery of Amy Winehouse here, yet she is alive in her absence. What is the essence of a person, Arden asks us, presenting here Winehouse’s books, make-up, pictures and games. There are things she owned, things she used, things she never knew she had and things she never got to receive, which raises its own batch of questions – what is different about celebrity ownership and how does death change who an item belongs to? Fetishised, glamorised or sold – either way, the waters get muddy.

Why Amy Winehouse, I ask Arden when she shows me around the exhibition before the opening. ‘There is no one else of her generation like Amy Winehouse,’ she says. ‘Her image is akin to Elvis or Marilyn, or Audrey Hepburn – people whose images become heavily emblematic of many things. This is a much more intimate portrait of her, not about her image or her music, but one which goes beyond the surface. I think that's what a lot of my work does. All my research projects are about things that I think are interesting or troubling.’

Arden completed her postgraduate studies in 2025 at Royal Academy Schools, but has long been fascinated by the questions her research projects raise. Her work is a bewitching blend of conceptual art project and methodical archival research, although the meticulous standards she maintains for the latter cannot be emphasised enough.

These skills take shape most impressively in Library (2026), a work made up of more than 400 of books, all titles that were in Winehouse's own collection, each sourced in the exact same edition as Winehouse’s documented copy.

Arden discovered some of the books Winehouse owned through an auction held by the singer’s estate, others through paparazzi photos of her holding books, or occasionally through interviews she did at home, where books were visible in the background. Sometimes Arden could only see a glimpse of the spine, with no text visible, or the image was so heavily pixelated she could barely make it out. Often, the book would no longer be available, or she couldn’t get the exact edition Winehouse had – Arden says she sometimes had to buy 20 copies to get the right one. She has bought books from all over the world – India, the Philippines, Australia, America, Italy, France, Spain, Sweden, Denmark, and on it goes.

‘They're the exact set that Amy had,’ says Arden. ‘They had the same birthing as the copies of Amy's – these weren't owned by her, but collectively the library is her collection of books. It simultaneously becomes hers and everyone else's, which feels even more loaded than the object being about someone having touched it. These have been touched by hundreds of people. They’ve not gone from a factory to a shop to Amy.’

To look at the books here – there’s Delia Smith cookbooks, Catch-22, Candace Bushnell, Chekhov, Weird Websites and How to Pass Your Driving Theory Test (several copies), Beckham biographies, Booker Prize-shortlisted novels – is an emotional experience. Is there anything more exposing than revealing what you actually read? It is a profound interpretation of who Amy Winehouse was, disregarding the fame and the music and the tabloids and the imagery. In her absence, here, there is an intimacy. It is hugely moving.

Elsewhere, Arden has gathered Winehouse’s make-up, again faithfully sourcing the exact pieces she used, navigating discontinued products and issues of rarity. ‘The whole exhibition proposes to show a different angle,’ says Arden. ‘Of course it's a portrait of Amy, but it's also a portrait of the 2000s. It's a portrait of all of the other people whose objects these were. Even a portrait of the idea that these things have been kept. This make-up has been kept unused for 20 years. What does it mean for things to exist? There isn’t a record of historical objects like this – these are not objects that are in museum collections.’

Winehouse’s jigsaw puzzles, too, are poignant, speaking to her search for mindfulness and the recovery programmes she went through. The jigsaws, of The Simpsons, The Beatles, Casablanca, Cadbury chocolates, are a record of both a point in history and a state of mind.

As well as the recreated collections of Winehouse’s belongings, there are also reconstructions of things she never owned. Arden has duplicated a birthday card Winehouse was given by Mark Ronson and Adele, but never received, after she didn’t attend her own birthday party or greet her guests. Arden’s duplicated copy is identical to the original, down to the idiosyncrasies in the handwriting and the image on the front. ‘My whole practice is rehearsing and repetition,’ she says.

All the information Arden has drawn on is public, sourced from paparazzi photos or documentaries or interviews. ‘I'm just the person to have brought all this together, or seen that there is something there,’ she says. ‘It's very different to a lot of archival research, where it is about finding stuff that's really hard to access. This was really easy to access. What was really hard was getting it all together in the room.’

'Nothing Personal' is at the Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation in London until 23 January 2027

A clutch of exhibitions in recent years serves to remind us that the half-decade leading up to the millennium in Japan may have been one of the most artistically liberating and productive of the 20th century. However, among the artists canonised for their articulations of an anarchic, anti-Western, avant-garde, the majority are, unsurprisingly, men.

‘Kaihō: Japanese Women Artists after 1945’, at Mudam Luxembourg until 14 February 2027, is a delight of a counterpoise. Focusing on a period of significant social change, the exhibition, which will later travel to Munich’s Lenbachhaus and Guggenheim Bilbao, explores various radical modes of artistic expression from female artists that emerged both in Japan and its global communities from 1945 to the turn of the century.

The exhibition picks up in the rubble of postwar Japan, where visitors are met with The Hiroshima Panels (1950-1982), a monumental folding polyptych or byōbu of 15 paintings completed by Toshi and Iri Maruki over 32 years. The scale is imposing, impressing on the viewer the magnitude of the Hiroshima tragedy and the grief that hung heavy in the years that followed. 'This work also carries a history of censorship,' curator Florence Ostende tells Wallpaper*. 'The Marukis began painting it while US occupational powers restricted how the atomic bombings could be depicted, which I think is quite extraordinary.'

Kaihō means ‘breaking free’ in Japanese, and for all its dealings with sexuality, body politics and shifting relations to the nation-state, the exhibition embodies this entirely. But still, Ostende resists the urge to treat the end of the Second World War as a total abscission. Within a broader reorientation of post-war memory, artists like Yoshiko Shimada bore the weight of historical responsibility in confronting Japan’s own imperial legacy and the gendered experience of war.

Woman Shooting (1992), an etching from Shimada’s Past Imperfect series, depicts a Japanese woman in occupied Manchuria wearing a white apron – a uniform of both domestic femininity and wartime mobilisation – while undergoing military training with a pistol. Elsewhere, in A House of Comfort (1993), the artist addresses the women from colonised and occupied territories forced into sexual servitude by the Japanese military as so-called ‘comfort women’.

In ‘Kaihō’, visual culture registers rupture and continuity concurrently. ‘The war did not miraculously dismantle patriarchal and imperial legacies,’ says Ostende, ‘but it did foster aspirations for new democratic freedoms, particularly for women, including the right to vote, improved access to art education and the formation of the Women Artists Association in 1947.’

Women were afforded just enough liberty to create incisive and experimental art that, with irony, skewered the country's entrenched value systems, a critique the postwar order subsequently endorsed as proof of its own progress.

In her video and film work, Mako Idemitsu stages the post-war middle-class ideal of domesticated liberation as an interpellative trap, placing a television in the frame as both surveillant and moral enforcer. In Kiyoko's Situation (1989), for example, a painter's attempts to work are interrupted by the voices of her mother and mother-in-law on an in-frame monitor, the pair admonishing her for sacrificing family life for her art.

The exhibition also witnesses a fundamental rethinking of the representation of the body. 'A very important addition to the show confronting questions of intimacy, perversity and censorship is Tāri Itō’s performance piece Self Portrait (1996),' Ostende says. A reaction perhaps, against the highly eroticised staging of kinbaku rope bondage adopted by male artists like Nobuyoshi Araki, whose photographs render the bound woman immobile and, in effect, a sexual object. 'Itō, wearing latex as a second skin, uses air pipes to inflate parts of her body while narrating her own life story; eventually arriving at her lesbian identity.'

The language of abstraction provided ample breathing space for women to negotiate greater visibility within a male-dominated art world and revealed itself to be a mode capable of translating the fervent indeterminacy of industrial expansion that accompanied feminist discourse in Japan.

Alongside the likes of Tsuruko Yamazaki and Atsuko Tanaka, Yuko Nasaka was one of the few female figures associated with Gutai, an artist’s group directed against a perceived static attachment to tradition in Japanese visual culture. Nasaka’s concentric circles in relief were achieved through restrained, repetitive movement on a potter's wheel, the tool's rotation incised into plaster surfaces. The resulting works explore the possibilities of mechanical process but also feel remarkably cosmic, fulfilling the Gutai movement's open-ended engagement with form and matter.

In the latter half of the 20th century, abstraction registered more than rapid industrialisation and consumerist ideologies. Alongside it, Ostende adds, 'ran an expression of mobility and displacement', that fostered a plurilingual language of post-modernism. Despite remaining largely absent from dominant art historical narratives, as ‘Kaihō’ highlights, Japanese women were active participants in a transnational avant-garde, moving between Tokyo, New York, Europe and Brazil.

Fluxus, a particular kind of anti-art, promoting sensate and participatory models of engagement, offers one of the clearest examples. Recognisable proponents include Yoko Ono and, though she never aligned herself directly with the movement, the late Yayoi Kusama. Just as vital, however, were figures such as Mieko Shiomi, with her action poems, or Takako Saito, whose sensory chess games invited players to engage through touch, sound and smell. 'Being attached to transnational art movements allowed Japanese women to travel and circulate amongst different art scenes, which hadn’t really happened before,' says Ostende. 'They were truly part of a wider emancipatory feminist project.'

‘Kaihō: Japanese Women Artists after 1945’ is on view at Mudam, Luxembourg until 14 February 2027

Photographer Juergen Teller and Edward Enninful are kicking off an art-filled month by creating a special cover for the November Art issue of Wallpaper* magazine.

The issue is on sale now, coinciding with the opening of the Tate Britain exhibition ‘The 90s: Art and Fashion’. It was a decade that saw Teller hone his distinctive style, eschewing the polished glamour of the 1980s for a candid, stripped-back realism, epitomised in album covers and portraits of Sinéad O'Connor, Kate Moss and more. In the latter part of the decade, Teller’s Go-Sees photography series, which saw him photograph every aspiring model who knocked on his door from May 1998 to 1999, rejected a traditional studio set-up in favour of a rawness rooted in reality.

‘Whoever that person was, was great,’ Teller recalls – during a conversation with exhibition curator Edward Enninful for Wallpaper* – of each model who approached him. 'It didn’t matter where they came from or what they did, it could have been anyone I found interesting. That was very important to me, and it was also a bit of a critique on the fashion industry of how that whole thing gets handled, and it is tough for the models.’

For the Wallpaper* cover, Teller draws on this spirit with a bespoke composition and curation by Enninful. He has chosen three of his photographs that define the 1990s to him: Pink Kate in a Towel, London, 1998; Kurt Cobain, Berlin, 1991; and Helmut Lang backstage series, Autumn Winter 1996, Paris, No.1, 1996.

‘Kate [Moss] went to a fashion show in Milan for Gianni Versace, and they coloured her hair pink,’ says Teller. ‘She flew back to London the next day and called me up. She said, “I'm going to change my hair colour back to normal, but before that, Juergen, come over to my house and photograph me, because that could be something.” That was it, and we had a nice time. There was no other reason other than we both wanted to do this picture. It wasn't even for a magazine or anything.

‘Nobody wanted money or publicity, we wanted to do it creatively. We wanted to play. What also really works is the photograph of her turning round on the cover of Wallpaper*. It's like turning round into the 90s kind of thing, and it feels so innocent as well. It's this real sense of freedom.’

Adds Enninful: ‘Juergen called to say, I have the incredible cover for Wallpaper*, and that's what I love about Juergen, his focus. Every job is so important to him. When I saw it, I was like, oh my God, this is amazing! He thinks about it all the time. I love this cover so much.’

A version of this article appears in the November 2026 Art Issue of Wallpaper*, available from 8 October in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

'The 90s: Art and Fashion’, curated by Edward Enninful, is on show until 14 February at Tate Britain, London SW1

For Adam Pendleton, abstraction is a medium with no rules. Throughout his career, the artist has resisted being caged in by the term, instead creating his own way of working, which has led to solo exhibitions at institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

Born in Richmond, Virginia, Pendleton began to shape a new way of working in 2008, creating a framework, Black Dada, which sits at the intersection of the avant-garde, abstraction and Blackness. The resulting works are a visually rich juxtaposition of cultures and history, the works themselves a cumulation of layers beginning with mark-making on paper, which is then photographed by Pendleton before being layered onto canvas using screen printing.

‘I became an artist because I have never been particularly interested in rules or norms,' says Pendleton. We are speaking over Zoom on the eve of his major new show at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam – ‘Some Wild Kind of Language’, 10 October 2026 – 17 January 2027 – where he will present 11 paintings and eight large drawings. ‘When I look back, I realise I was always looking for means and mechanisms that could allow me to tap into that which is different or other.'

Pendleton cites reading as a major influence for him growing up, an act that became bigger than simply experiencing the words on the page. ‘To see words, but you don't just see them, you feel them,' he says. ‘Imagine them taking space in the world around you, to the extent that you could almost taste them. Over time, I started to realise that these words were ideas. By organising the words on the page, by giving them form, they began to take up space within the context of the world. I believe what happened is that I realised you can basically imagine or construct an alternative to that which you experience every day – whether it's going to the grocery store or picking up your kids. There's an infinite number of alternatives that can be made real, and for me, that is the job of an artist.'

It's an apt philosophy for an artist who moves so seamlessly between mediums, rejecting a distinction between them in his embrace of painting, photography, film, text and installation. ‘I am a painter, but I am a painter that is preoccupied with how ideas exist in the world,' Pendleton clarifies. For him, the other mediums find their way into his primary work.

Pendleton is adept at finding connections between these ideas – the primary driver behind the Black Dada movement, which takes a closer look at how things are related. ‘Black Dada is very much my way of establishing and breaking the rules, and it's been very interesting from a critical standpoint. We've been talking about Black Dada publicly since about 2008, and this very interesting thing happened where people started saying back to me what Black Dada was. They were trying to take something that was about perpetual discovery, and they were saying what it is – that's the opposite of what it is.'

His works resist easy classification because Black Dada finds meaning in the unfixed; as the rules are not established, there are endless new discoveries available. ‘Someone would say, “Oh, these paintings aren't very Black, or they don't represent Blackness.” And I'd be so perplexed. How can you say that? These things are defined and take shape in real time, and they're also defined and take shape in the relationship with the individual that puts them forward.'

His uniting of seemingly disparate strands is integral to the works themselves. Composed of fragments pulling from language and geometry, they take shape in physical layers of paint, spray paint, ink and watercolour, interspersed with graffiti-like marks, snippets of text and stencilled forms. And when placed in the context of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, a historic 19th-century building, they become imbued with new meanings again.

Fittingly, Pendleton's paintings will be displayed in the museum's IMC Gallery, also known as the Gallery of Honour, which has previously showcased works championing minimalism, conceptual art and abstraction by artists including Barnett Newman, Morris Louis, Robert Ryman and Willem de Kooning, who themselves grappled with their own mastery of the medium. The other key space is the museum's central staircase and walls, famously painted bright white in the mid-20th century by its then director Willem Sandberg, thus establishing one of the earliest ‘white cubes'.

In Pendleton's takeover, the staircase becomes black. ‘I think my desire to break the rules is on full display here,' he says. ‘It's very intentional.' The staircase is an evocative background from which he showcases eight Basis drawings, his largest pieces to date. The works speak to Pendleton's process of revision and repetition, and are led by the endless possibilities of the materials themselves, and the many tools he uses in his works. His process affects his results – for example, ‘with the spray paint, it is very fast and fluid. But then sometimes I'll slow the spray paint down. I use a simple mono printing technique in the studio while I'm working, spraying it firstly on a sheet of paper, instead of it going directly on the paper that, in this case, will become a drawing.

‘Then I'm pressing the paint into the paper. So there's this very physical act of making, and also this very physical and tangible relationship to time,' he says. ‘There's also a kind of athleticism at play. A tennis player uses her instincts to navigate the court and her relationship to her opponent, but her instincts are informed by years of training, and that is the same with painting. While I am working, I am also training. I'm training my body, my eye, and my mind.'

Presenting his works in a space steeped in cultural and architectural history, paradoxically, becomes freeing for Pendleton. The immersion he creates in this context goes far deeper than the feeling of experiencing a single work. ‘As human beings, and in the way culture functions, we often become unproductively tethered to fixed notions of what things are and what they aren't,' he says. ‘I'm an evangelist for a concept like Black Dada as it allows for one to become untethered – or productively unhinged.'

'Adam Pendleton – Some Wild Kind of Language' is on show from 10 October 2026 – 17 January 2027 at Stedelijk

adampendleton.net

A version of this article appears in the November 2026 Art Issue of Wallpaper*, available from 8 October in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

Photographer Spencer Lowell’s new monograph Futures Past brings together a stunning selection of images on the theme of technology. Lowell’s editorial work is not just about chronicling innovations in processes and manufacturing, but also the ways in which humans interact with emerging tech.

The New York-based photographer drew on material from shoots undertaken around the world between 2007 and 2024, mostly focusing on the USA but with forays into territories like Chile, Norway and Japan. The assignments cover the awe-inspiring – the launch of the Curiosity Mars Rover at Cape Canaveral in 2011 and a view of an experimental ‘fire tornado’ in a Montana lab – to the quirky and the dystopian – from a ‘Butt Robot’ testing seating in Batesville, Indiana, to an Automated Cow Milking System in the Netherlands. The book was designed by Luminosity Lab.

The introduction by the writer and climate activist Daniel Sherrell frames the work as a true expression of our current age. ‘There are people in these photos, but rarely are there individuals,’ he writes. ‘The technologies are the real individuals, protagonists of their own cryptic story. The photographs capture them on their own terms, in the worlds that they’ve built – worlds that both serve and exclude us.’

Lowell, born and raised in Los Angeles, has made the increasingly volatile staging ground between the natural and artificial worlds his beat. His photographic studies range from studies of nuclear power stations and data centres, through to unflinching close-ups of ocean microplastic, captive dolphins and decommissioned spacecraft. Whether or not they're physically present in his images, the effects both of and on humans are central to his work.

Futures Past, Spencer Lowell, text by Daniel Sherrell, KGP Monolith, $75, KrisGravesProjects.com, @KGPNYC, SpencerLowell.com, @SpencerLowell_

The Wallpaper* Art Issue is our annual celebration of art at the intersection of fashion, design and architecture. The latest iteration – our November 2026 issue – hits newsstands today, 8 October, during the busiest month in the art calendar, which kicks off this year with Tate Britain’s blockbuster exhibition, ‘The 90s: Art and Fashion’. To mark the occasion, one of its preeminent image-makers, Juergen Teller, created a very special cover for us with the show’s curator, Edward Enninful. They also got together to discuss a decade that Tate Britain director Alex Farquharson described to me in a recent conversation as foundational for art and culture in the UK today, referring to it as ‘a moment in which artists didn’t wait to be invited, converging with fashion designers and musicians to bypass conventional hierarchies between high art and popular culture’.

It’s a legacy picked up in the discussion between Enninful and Teller, both of whom started their careers experiencing first-hand the sort of enveloping freedom that powers creatives to act.

This month’s issue is hopefully suffused with a similar sense of sovereignty, whether it’s Louise Giovanelli’s beautifully rendered paintings of curtains, Adam Pendleton’s radical takeover of Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum, Joana Vasconcelos’ intervention in a BIG-designed Manhattan skyscraper apartment, or Karon Davis’ joyful reimagining of circus performers. We’re also looking forward to Frieze London – in particular, the Artist-to-Artist programme supported by Tiffany & Co, in which Yinka Shonibare invites South African artist Unathi Mkonto to join him in the spotlight – and Art Basel Paris, where Alice Diop takes up her first artist-curator role for a Miu Miu project celebrating Black female creativity. Meanwhile, Shawn Adams drops into Denmark’s Lego HQ to explore its collaboration with graffiti artist Futura.

Elsewhere, we check out the striking new London flagship store of Palace Skateboards; visit the New York home and studio of the late June Leaf, a haven of creativity that she shared with her husband, photographer Robert Frank, until his death in 2019; admire a Shaker-inspired rail hanging system devised by LA design studio Joshi Greene to lighten and brighten their own space; join Jeff Koons as he works with Hublot on a vivid interpretation of his own balloon pieces in watch form; and marvel at the remaining examples of Belgian modernism, where artistry and architecture surprise and entertain in equal measure. We trust this edition achieves the same. Thank you for reading. Enjoy the issue.

Bill Prince
Editor-in-Chief

Wallpaper’s November 2026 Art Issue is available from 8 October, in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

Frieze Week is back in London, and with it comes the annual rush of openings, exhibitions, performances and parties. Across the city, galleries, museums and a few less predictable venues are making the most of the crowds descending for Frieze London and Frieze Masters.

This year, Yuko Mohri has turned the Barbican’s cast-offs into a wonky concert of leaks, clangs and whirring machinery, while Esteban Jefferson is taking on the British Museum from a gallery just around the corner. Rebecca Warren returns with her first London show in 15 years, Issy Wood puts herself in the frame at the National Portrait Gallery, and Georg Baselitz’s battered Heroes get their first dedicated UK exhibition.

At night, things get a little less civilised. Cult queer party Anal House Meltdown takes over Bolding Gallery for one night only, while at London Performance Studios, Sam Cottington’s new play The Front follows two people who discover, somewhat inconveniently, that they can’t die. Here are ten things worth seeing, doing and staying out late for during Frieze Week 2026.

The Front at London Performance Studios

A trip to the theatre might not be the most obvious addition to a Frieze Week itinerary, but The Front makes a convincing case. The new play was written by artist and writer Sam Cottington, who has recently exhibited at Nir Altman in Munich and Ginny on Frederick in London, and produced by London Performance Studios, with multidisciplinary artist Middleton Maddocks as production coordinator.

Showing for two nights only (16 and 17 October) at London Performance Studios in South Bermondsey, The Front follows its protagonists Carol and Stephen, who meet and discover that, for reasons unclear to either of them, they are unable to die. Their lives unfold across more than a century, taking them from Belgium and the Western Front at the close of WWII to an isolated farmhouse in Bavaria as the Second World War escalates, and finally to the outskirts of present-day Berlin. Cottington describes the play as an exploration of how history feels, rather than how it was.

Yuko Mohri at Barbican

Yuko Mohri has spent a fair bit of time rummaging around behind the scenes at the Barbican. During a residency earlier this year, the Japanese artist explored its workshops and back rooms, salvaging old wires, metal scraps and street lamps that once belonged to the building. Now some of that material has found its way back inside for In Concert, her new installation taking over The Curve.

Mohri, who represented Japan at the 2024 Venice Biennale, is known for kinetic sculptures that combine everyday objects with less stable forces such as water, air, gravity and magnetism. Here, cymbals clang according to water pumped through dangling tubes, a triangle held by a spoon occasionally announces itself, and a firehose drip feeds into a lampshade. Elsewhere, water leaks through a stack of bathroom sinks while fans blow against lengths of old wiring. Savage machinery this is not. Mohri is more interested in things leaking, failing, being patched up and starting again, turning the Barbican’s own cast-offs into a wonky concert for a building currently undergoing its own repairs.

Rebecca Warren at Maureen Paley

It’s been 15 years since the British artist Rebecca Warren last had a show in London. Maureen Paley has been there from the beginning, giving Warren an early exhibition in 2000, years before she was nominated for the Turner Prize, elected as a Royal Academician and awarded an OBE for services to art.

Now, 25 years later, Warren is back at the gallery with an entirely new body of work spanning both the gallery’s Bethnal Green spaces. Warren is best known for sculptures in bronze, clay, and steel that play fast and loose with the human figure, shifting between the bodily, erotic, cartoonish and abstract. For this exhibition, she imagined making a retrospective of her own work, but as a ‘slightly different version’ of herself, allowing forms and ideas from earlier periods of her practice to reappear in new works. At its centre is There Will Be Another You (2026), a life-size bronze reclining female figure whose body seems to melt and morph, with exposed sinews and wires, two right arms and no left. Go to East London to see this show. You won’t regret it.

Esterban Jefferson at Herald St

At the Acropolis Museum in Athens, empty spaces have been deliberately left for sculptures currently held in the British Museum. These gaps became the starting point for ‘British Museum’, Esteban Jefferson’s first solo exhibition with Herald St, fittingly staged at the gallery’s Museum Street space, just around the corner from the museum itself.

Jefferson photographed the empty spaces and plaster casts standing in for missing sections of the Parthenon Frieze, before following the objects to London. At the British Museum, he became interested not just in the artefacts but the visual clutter around them: air purifiers, fans, temperature monitors and other machinery used to preserve the collection. These details appear alongside ancient objects in a new series of paintings, drawing attention to the systems through which museums display, preserve and lay claim to their collections.

Frieze Artist-to-Artist: Paul Robas (Alice Amati) nominated by Louise Giovanelli

For her first appearance at Frieze London, Alice Amati presents a solo booth by Vienna-based Romanian painter Paul Robas, invited to take part in the fair’s Artist-to-Artist section. Now in its fourth edition, the initiative invites seven established artists to each nominate a peer they believe deserves wider recognition.

Robas was nominated by British painter Louise Giovanelli (who co-founded Apollo Painting School with Amati). Robas, who studied in Cluj-Napoca before completing his MFA in Vienna, is interested in what happens to an image as it moves between digital and physical forms. Starting with photographs, both found and his own, he edits, collages, and projects them before translating them into paintings.

His technique is particularly cool, working with encaustic, an ancient technique using wax that he encountered through his study of Roman-period Fayum mummy portraits. Combined with oil, ink and acrylic, the wax gives his paintings their ghostly, fading quality. Elsewhere in Artist-to-Artist, look out for South African artist Unathi Mkonto at Goodman Gallery, nominated by Yinka Shonibare, and Eusung Lee at Seoul’s Cylinder, selected by Ayoung Kim.

Anal House Meltdown x Bolding Gallery club night

This is one night and one night only. And judging by how other events in the series went down, it’s worth rearranging whatever you had planned for Friday 16 October. Anal House Meltdown (AHMD) is landing at Bolding Gallery for Frieze Week. The cult queer party was started in 2011 by artists Prem Sahib, Eddie Peake and George Henry Longly, and has since developed a history as itinerant as it is unpredictable.

Previous incarnations have materialised everywhere from Dalston basements to the volcanic island of Stromboli. For Prem Sahib, a British-Indian artist whose work often draws on the architecture and material language of queer spaces, the party began as another form of space-making – one that takes place on the dance floor. This time, Mayfair’s Bolding Gallery provides the setting, with Barkley Bandon, Lali, Eddie Peake and Debonair playing into the night. There’s no guest list, the bar is cheap and doors open at 8pm. Don’t leave it too late.

Daniel Crouch Rare Books at Frieze Masters

The late Andrew Edmunds left his name to one of Soho’s best-loved restaurants, a candlelit institution on Lexington Street. Less well-known, perhaps, was the extraordinary collection he assembled alongside it. Over half a century, Edmunds, who was also an art dealer and collector, amassed more than 10,000 caricatures and satirical prints dating from around 1680 to 1850. At Frieze Masters, Daniel Crouch Rare Books (specialists in antique maps, atlases, plans and sea charts) presents highlights from the collection, including more than 1,200 prints by James Gillray, 300 works by William Hogarth and over 500 by Thomas Rowlandson.

Sex, food, fashion, politics, race, empire and national rivalry all get the treatment, with works ranging from Gillray’s The Plumb-pudding in Danger to the only known copy of a 1779 satire on Mrs Phillips’s sex shop. Savage, gossipy and frequently ridiculous, the prints are ancestors of today’s political cartoons and internet memes.

Es Devlin at Design Museum

Few people have shaped the way we experience live performance quite like Es Devlin. Over three decades, the British artist and designer has worked across theatre, opera, art, fashion and music, creating stages and kinetic sculptures for everyone from Beyonce and Adele to U2, as well as the Olympic Games.

Now the Design Museum is bringing it all together for ‘Es Devlin: Other Worlds’, the first European retrospective of her 30-year practice. It begins with a reconstruction of Devlin’s London studio, complete with books, tools, and maquettes, before opening out onto Come Home Again, her illuminated drawings of 240 species of plants and animals found in London. At its centre is 30-Year-Desk, where 30 revolving projects including her work on The Lehman Trilogy and the 2022 Super Bowl halftime show, before a bright red passage leads to Infinite Library, a kinetic installation of more than 2,000 books. Devlin describes herself as an ‘everythingist’. ‘I feel like, these days, you need somehow to find permission to be an everythingist because it feels like there’s a sort of pressure always to find your thing,’ she says. ‘And actually, maybe the thing is everything.’

Issy Wood at National Portrait Gallery

So the National Portrait Gallery is launching a new programme devoted to contemporary portraiture, and Issy Wood is first up. Born in North Carolina and raised in the UK, Wood paints people, body parts, clothing, animals, and anything else in her studio, working on linen as well as less conventional surfaces including velvet and clothing, often cropping her subjects so tightly that portraiture and still life begin to overlap.

Wood has quickly become one of the most recognisable painters of her generation. She was taken on by London gallery Carlos/Ishikawa before graduating from the Royal Academy Schools in 2018, and has since developed a practice that extends beyond painting into music and writing. For the NPG, the focus turns to Wood herself. Eleven self-portraits made since 2020 are being shown together for the first time, seven of them never previously exhibited in public. She has described the paintings as substitutes for photographs of herself, with the painted image standing in for the real one. Three self-portraits have already entered the NPG’s collection, making it the only UK national institution to hold one.

Georg Baselitz at Thaddaeus Ropac

Georg Baselitz was 27 years old when, over the course of a single year, he made around 60 paintings, 130 drawings and 38 prints. At the centre of this burst of activity were his Heroes series: paintings of monumental, battered figures, barefoot and dressed in rags or torn military uniforms, stranded in ravaged landscapes.

Now, for the first time in the UK, an exhibition devoted exclusively to the series brings together key works from this formative period at Thaddaeus Ropac. Having left East Germany for West Berlin, Baselitz found himself caught between the state-sanctioned realism of the East and a West Germany swept up in the newfound optimism of the so-called German Wonder. It was the summer of 1965 that Baselitz began the Hero paintings, shortly after a residency at Villa Romana in Florence, where he had become fascinated by the distorted, or, as he called it, 'excessive,' figures of 16th-century Mannerists including Pontormo and Parmigianino. Against the backdrop of post-war Germany, his own figures emerged as partisans, rebels, painters, shepherds and poets. 'They’re not heroes swinging their fists,' Baselitz said. 'They look broken, destroyed, ragged, tattered. And that’s how I wanted them.'

Frieze London 2026 runs from 14-18 October, frieze.com

The tenth British Art Show has opened in Coventry (where it's on until 10 January 2027), celebrating what’s exciting about art made by artists born or based in the UK now, with an eye on the future. Curated by writer, curator and Wallpaper* contributing editor Ekow Eshun, the exhibition features 37 artists, showcased in three literature-inspired sections around the city centre.

Titled ‘British Art Show 10: A Chorus of Strangers’, the exhibition ‘asks questions about what happens when we see from several different positions all together, at once', says Eshun at its opening. 'Perhaps what we see and hear is a set of voices in attunement, sometimes even in disagreement, but a chorus nevertheless speaks on several different levels at the same time.'

Devised to be accessible, free of charge and to travel around the country (after its stint in Coventry, it will tour until June 2028), the exhibition is divided into three strands, each inspired by a different figure. 'Moments of Being' is inspired by literary giant Virginia Woolf; 'Ways of Living', by thinker and theorist Stuart Hall; and 'States of', by ecological philosopher Timothy Morton. On show are the works of both emerging artists and contemporary superstars alike.

‘I didn't start with the texts – the process of thinking about a show starts with the artists', says Eshun. 'But there's a research process that is just about assembling ideas, and then that starts to spill out into thinking about who else has been in this vein. I wanted to put the artist in relation to a wider body of thinking which has always been there.’

Walking into the Mead Gallery at Coventry’s Warwick Arts Centre, we enter a section of ‘Moments of Being’ – described as the moments when the cotton wool comes off life – and see a huge work painted on fabric by Emma Talbot with a fabric sculpture of a fantasy equine figure. The frieze-like work contains philosophical or empathetic phrases alongside an episodic series of vignettes.

The rooms in this venue are filled with painting and sculpture by contemporary greats, such as Mohammed Sami, Louise Giovanelli, Kudzanai-Violet Hwami, as well as the less well-known Matthew Krishnau, 2025 Turner Prize-winner Nenea Kalu, and late figurative painter Alastair MacKinven. There’s also a series of paintings on fabric by Nengi Okumu.

There is a sense of comfort and light in these works by a group of artists that is truly diverse, including in what they choose to represent, from the scars of war to gender and family.

Giovanelli’s painting of a sparkling curtain is set alongside her ecstatic Maenad, (2024), named after the cannibalistic ancient female mythical being. Krishnau’s paintings tell a story of friendship through tiny figures in epic landscapes. Ceramics by Shawanda Corbett and Rae-Yen Song represent this popular medium, executed in completely different ways.

‘“A Chorus for Strangers” unites so many works about coming together,' Eshun says. 'For example, Alex Margo Arden's account, Julianknxx’s film, Joy Gerard's paintings of crowds surging. There are so many works that hopefully articulate something on a few different registers at the same time. Those are the works I'm drawn to.’

These works, housed at the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum, represent protest, catharsis and healing and the collapse of industry. Together, Julianknxx’s beautiful film Shifting | Spirit | Time, 2025, a three-channel work of a choral performance of a single word, ‘wai’, Gerrard’s black-and-white paintings of crowds surging in protest around the world, and Arden’s bound workers represent the shifts in industry that Britain still reels from. Hannah Quinlan & Rosie Hastings’ large-scale fresco The Reconstruction, 2026, features a portrait of Quinlan’s grandmother and mother in a reimagined, queered version of a traditional family. Alvaro Barrington’s roller blinds set against a wallpaper of questionable online posts raises questions about expression and representation.

Now is a great time to be working with artists in Britain – so many are based here, making excellent work, with the support networks among them leading to a wonderful scene. Artists such as Lindsey Mendick, Jack O’Brien, Dala Nesser, Precious Okoyomon and Osman Yousefzada, all included in the show, demonstrate this.

‘I'm always trying to think about patterns that start to form and after a while, it doesn't become about an origin point and a line, it becomes a lattice and I have that in my head the whole time. I ended up in places with some artists that I hadn't anticipated before,’ Eshun says of the process of curation.

‘In my most optimistic version of these things, I like to think that an exhibition itself is a small utopia where anything is possible. I wanted to see if we could create a version of that within the walls of these exhibition spaces.’

I ask Eshun about his storied work on identity, in relation to a show about art in Britain at this time. ‘Let's say the show is as much about being as it is about Britain,’ he says.

‘British Art Show 10’ is a Hayward Gallery Touring exhibition, launched in Coventry, where it shows until 10 January 2027, before touring to Swansea, Bristol, Sheffield and Newcastle Gateshead. For all dates, see southbankcentre.co.uk

Juergen Teller: When did we meet, Edward, around 1993, working at i-D? How old were you, 15 or 16?

Edward Enninful: I was 18. I remember you took me to Cornwall.

JT: You were so scared of the countryside! There were sheep!

EE: I was very urban.

JT: It was hilarious. I remember it – there was a hill, and we were lying down on the grass, looking at the sky.

EE: And I'd never been to the countryside before! I remember first meeting you, Juergen. You came to the office, you had your striped pyjamas, and your camera, and the whole office thought, ‘Oh my God, he's so good-looking.’ You’ve always been so talented. It was really an honour to meet you, you were just full of life and energy – the same as now.

JT: We became friends. We were hanging out in London doing things, and then also working together too.

EE: You’re such a good friend, Juergen, so it never feels like work. And no two jobs are ever the same with you. What I love about working with you is you see things that the normal human eye doesn't see. We can both be looking at the same space, and you will see it from an angle that I've never seen before. So that's always really exciting. And if you’re really into an idea, you know in two seconds. But when you say, ‘Let me think about it,’ you're like, ‘Nah, it's not going to happen.’ And now we’re working together again.

JT: I was a bit shocked when I heard about this exhibition. I thought, oh my God, the 1990s, that was just yesterday. It felt so far away, but at the same time not so far at all, somehow. I had to get my head around it because I'm completely in a different headspace now. And I'm not nostalgic at all. I don't think it was such a great time, in a way. In a certain way it was, but it was really tough and really hard.

EE: Very hard.

JT: The establishment – it took ages to knock on doors and for them to open up. The outlet was very little. There were a couple of magazines, hardly anything in the world. And now there are thousands of them, literally, and there were very few art directors and stylists who inspired me, and who I inspired in return. It was a very small circle. And it took six months to think about an idea, and weeks to shoot.

EE: A picture a day sometimes!

JT: For me, the beautiful thing about the 1990s, or the late 80s, was that I felt really proud. When I did have a chance to make some money, it was an honest way to make a living, like when a musician or a band asked me to do their record cover, back when they were proper record sleeves. I grew up with the visual language of how the graphics sit with a photograph, or whether there's a border around it. So my visual language was really from TV and music. Then I photographed Sinead O’Connor and the single, ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’, became number one.

EE: And you know the video is in the exhibition?

JT: Yes! And I photographed Courtney Love and Kurt Cobain. Is this a portrait? Is this a reportage, or is it actually a fashion photograph? Through these portraits of these musicians, from punk to new wave to grunge, to all these different movements - fashion picked up all that stuff later, and they inspired fashion. So I was interested in music and doing portraits of these things and that's how I got to know these zeitgeist magazines, like The Face and i-D magazine, where there's suddenly these fashion pages. I come from the forest, in the countryside. I didn’t have much of an idea of fashion at all, but it felt very natural to me.

EE: We just wanted to create. We were all living in Notting Hill, kind of broke. I was thrown into i-D at such a young age. I had to sink or swim. But it was just fun hanging out, going clubbing. I was always out. You know, go clubbing, go straight to work.

JT: There was a beautiful, honest naivety. It was a really pure time of wanting to explore. A time before phones and the internet. You had to go to a record store. You had to go to see things happen – it was so much more difficult to find something, so it meant more.

EE: I remember spending hours in libraries, doing research, trying to get images from the 1970s. It was like you said, Juergen, the last time before cell phones, before online. So we were able to really experiment, really make mistakes and learn from them. It's rose-coloured now, but it wasn't the easiest of times either. I was probably the only Black person I remember, apart from maybe Pat [McGrath] and Naomi [Campbell]. We had to negotiate and find our way.

JT: And I'm German! Being in that environment in London was very tough for me. But all these ideas from that time are found in Young Pink Kate [the lead image for the exhibition]. She looks so beautiful, and it was a time where we felt really free. There was no you can't do this, or you have to put on an outfit head to toe, and you have to have that handbag in it. With this photograph, it was just Kate. She went to a fashion show in Milan for Gianni Versace, and they coloured her hair pink. She flew back to London the next day and called me up. She said, ‘I'm going to change my hair colour back to normal, but before that, Juergen, come over to my house and photograph me, because that could be something.’ That was it, and we had a nice time. There was no other reason other than we both wanted to do this picture. It wasn't even for a magazine or anything.

Nobody wanted money or publicity, we wanted to do it creatively. We wanted to play. What also really works is the photograph of her turning round on the cover of Wallpaper*. It's like turning round into the 1990s kind of thing, and it feels so innocent as well. It's this real sense of freedom.

EE: I was lucky to be at i-D at the best time. I would be able to style, commission, see the incredible work that came in, the incredible people, and just be right there. That was very, very special.

JT: I remember in i-D and The Face there used to be cigarette advertising.

EE: Yes! We had to go to the clubs to sell the ads to the record company people. You know the little back page ad? Go and sell it! We were young, we had the energy.

JT: And you didn't need much money to survive. Every single penny I earned, I put back in because photography was expensive back in the day. You had to have film, to have it processed, to go to the lab, to have them printed or print them yourself. You had to be very careful of how much you shoot and how much you spend on things like that.

EE: We were all just growing up, and your tastes change, and the times were changing. We saw so many iterations of what the 1990s meant, from pure minimalism, to when Juergen was shooting with flash. The changes during the 90s result from age and experience, don’t you think, Juergen?

JT: Yes, I became successful, and recognised as a fashion photographer, and American Vogue asked me to work for them. Suddenly, you’re on a Concorde flying to New York, and then you’re in front of these supermodels, like Linda Evangelista and Stephanie Seymour. I remember sitting on a park bench, I was so shy I couldn't even say a word to Linda.

EE: And she was so excited to work with you!

JT: And it was really good. But very quickly, I felt frustrated with the commercial constraints of a big, commercial fashion magazine, and I thought, instead of me flying to New York or around the world, I want to be in my studio. And then all these model agencies called me up, and I thought oh, this is actually interesting. It was at a time when we grew up with Kate Moss, and she became so successful – this quirky, small, super energetic and interesting young woman. Everyone was trying to find a new supermodel like Kate, but there isn't any of course, but it opened up the door for so many other things. I thought, instead of me trying to find another so-called new supermodel, I want to photograph all of them, and put it in a book [Go-Sees, 1998-99]. I wanted to be democratic and I wanted to be able to do a good portrait of anyone. I tried my hardest to do the best positive portrait I could of that person. It became very successful and I learned a lot from that. That was an important project for me – to step back from the hyper-commercialised fashion photography to, hang on a minute. In a way, that was my first conceptual artwork.

EE: For the Tate, Go-Sees was a game changer. I remember when I saw it – wow, this is something new.

JT: And I never had any kind of a stereotype. For me, it's like, whoever that person is, is great. It doesn't matter where they come from or what they do, it could be anyone who I find interesting. So that was very important for me, and it was also a bit of a critique on the fashion industry of how that whole thing gets handled, and it is tough for the models.

EE: It was such a work of art. That's why it's got its own world, essentially, in the exhibition. And what was key when thinking about this exhibition is, obviously, it is at the Tate. It's not the V&A or the National Portrait Gallery. Art has to power every room. Art has to be at the centre of it, and that has been really great. Even when it came to selecting the pieces, it was amazing calling the people in the show because it didn't even feel like work. So that was the first thing. And the second part is, this is not a nostalgic, let's look back, it’s recognising the decade established conditions that are still with us.

And the artists are a combination I really like, many who didn't go to the best schools or weren’t in the right gang, but whose work was amazing at the time. It’s not just, here's a YBA show. And then, of course, how do you show fashion in an exhibition with such great artists? So that was another interesting approach, where we thought, let's make each fashion piece almost like an artwork that can stand on its own, and that was the focus. But this is by no means a comprehensive guide to the 1990s. It's just my view of the 90s, with my friends, great artists that I was lucky enough to grow up with and be around, have a couple of drinks with. So it was really a pleasure, working with people who were so great at what they did, and redefined a whole decade – like Juergen.

Wallpaper*: I’m so glad we get to mark it with our incredible cover from Juergen.

EE: Your cover is so amazing! And let me tell you something about Juergen Teller. He calls me, he kept calling me. When Juergen has something on his mind, he will call you nonstop. And he was getting on a plane, on top of everything he has to do that week – you were in New York, you went everywhere that week.

JT: Yes!

EE: He called to say, I have the incredible cover for Wallpaper*, and that's what I love about Juergen, his focus. Every job is so important to him. When I saw it, I was like, oh my God, this is amazing! He thinks about it all the time. I love this cover so much.

JT: Excellent. Me too!

A version of this article appears in the November 2026 Art Issue of Wallpaper*, available from 8 October in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

'The 90s: Art and Fashion’, curated by Edward Enninful, is on show until 14 February 2027 at Tate Britain, London SW1

Sophie Calle is concerned with absence, she says, upon the opening of her new exhibition at Turner Contemporary in Margate.

It is her first UK exhibition in 2009, itself a surprising absence when considering the prolific nature of the French artist’s work. Calle resists easy definition, flitting between photography, video and installation, interested always in an eclectic array of subjects. In conceptual art project The Hotel (1981), Calle’s documenting of the Venice hotel’s inhabitants during her three weeks as a chambermaid was revealing and moving; in The Sleepers (1979), she invited 28 strangers to sleep in her bed, photographing the results. The works may be diverse, but they reveal a preoccupation with the human condition, exposing an undercurrent of vulnerability.

They are themes very much at play in Something Missing, a travelling exhibition formerly at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. Here, absence takes shape in a multitude of forms – in the longing for a partner evident in On the Hunt (2017–2024), a compilation of the qualities most desired in a romantic partner in a series of classifieds, to Catalogue Raisonné of the Unfinished (2023), a gathering of the projects Calle began but never finished.

‘The Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature (Museum of Hunting and Nature) in Paris gave me an idea,’ says Calle. ‘I didn't know about hunting, but I know about hunting for a man. This museum had the oldest newspaper with personal ads, from 1890, so I went through them.’ In On the Hunt, Calle traces the journey from these ads, at a time before the war when a woman was expected to be a virgin, through to today’s desire for convenience and ease, encapsulated in apps such as Tinder.

‘What I like a lot about it is the economy of language,’ Calle says on the ads, which are touching in their directness (would marry intellectually interesting woman, pretty to look at, or 30-year-old seeks young woman, enormous bust only or bright eyes, without any prejudices on age difference, with artistic, somewhat literary tastes, and able to spend winter in town). ‘They’re like little haikus, because you have to pay by the word, so you have to be very precise and short. This is a vocabulary I generally like to use for my own text, as short and dry as possible.’

Elsewhere, it’s the work that’s missing, although the ideas are very much present, gathered and showcased as part of Catalogue Raisonné of the Unfinished, a tribute to all Calle’s projects which never made it to completion. Here, we have scraps of thoughts which never reached fruition and letters to fellow artists on projects which never materialised. ‘It was a way for me to get rid of everything I haven't finished,’ Calle says. ‘To finish it that way, to give it a life and an achievement, freeing me from all those things that have not worked because you have not done it. It was a way to give life to my project, even the ones that did not exist. So that catalogue, now, has been finished.’

As well a skilled archivist, Calle is an investigator and a sociologist. She is as interested in the experience of others as she is in her own, collecting first-person accounts throughout. Both Turners (1988 - 2013) – where she investigates the case of the stolen Turner paintings in 1994 by talking to security guards, curators and others – and Voir la Mer (2011), where she films residents of Istanbul seeing the sea for the first time, build on this desire to really know another.

‘Voir la Mer is totally silent except for the sound of the sea,’ Calle adds. ‘It’s the first time I did not use words because, for the first time, I had the feeling that the image was saying enough and there was no need to add anything, or I will disturb it. That happens to me so rarely.’

'Something Missing?' at Turner Contemporary until 24 January 2027

In 1997, Comme des Garçons released a mind- and body-bending collection. ‘Body Meets Dress, Dress Meets Body’ – affectionately nicknamed ‘Lumps and Bumps’ – radically reimagined the silhouette with the use of unconventional padding and protrusions. In doing so, designer Rei Kawakubo pushed back on deeply set ideals about the human form, rebelling against mainstream notions of femininity and desirability. For east London gallerist Rose Easton, the collection is a defining moment.

'Her clothes make me feel powerful,' Easton said ahead of the opening of her exhibition ‘Lumps and Bumps’ (until 12 December 2026), an homage to the spirit of Kawakubo’s radical designs. 'For want of a better word, a sort of ugliness that a particular flavour of man didn’t get, that perturbed and distanced them. That look has seeped into the contemporary mainstream now, but this was at a time, in 1997, when spray-on denim and Hervé Léger dresses were the thing.'

Easton’s exhibition brings together a selection of contemporary artists to riff on the 1997 collection. In different ways, Dogperson39, Sarah Benslimane, Sylvie Fleury, Charlotte Kingsnorth and Caitlin MacQueen delve into disturbance and protrusion, experimenting with materials that can’t easily be categorised. Fleury’s bodily sculpture seem to be squeezed and inflated, appearing seductive through its blue chrome materiality, but defying traditional anatomy. Kingsnorth’s padded, pale leather bench is fleshy and bulging, disturbing line we might typically draw between the body and the structure that houses it.

At a time of AI and other technology creating veneers and avatars to smooth out our imagined faults, when GLP-1s and body modifications are booming, Easton 'kept thinking about the dissolution of the boundary of the body, between self and other, physical and digital. And I kept returning to this collection and then inevitably, as it happens when you get a worm in the brain, you start seeing it reflected back to you in everything you do.' The collection opens up a broad spectrum of conversations surrounding the politics of the body, from access and inclusion to taste and the designed environment.

Easton has a background in fashion having previously worked with British designer Phoebe English. Dover Street Market, co-founded by Kawakubo, was the first store to buy their debut collection. Easton frequently infuses art exhibitions with fashion in an unpredictable manner. She is intrigued by how clothes, especially from ‘Body Meets Dress, Dress Meets Body’, can 'act as a structured interface between the body and the world. [Clothing] has the power to modify how we feel about ourselves in relation to that world, and how the world perceives us.' Likewise, she notes, 'artworks can act upon us in a similar way, heightening our awareness of our body in relation to another body or form. We understand these encounters through our own felt senses: a sculpture tells us how to move around it; a painting directs our gaze.'

The gallerist’s own bodily experience also feeds into the show. As a new mother, watching her form change and grow in ways that can at times feel alien, she felt a renewed kinship with the 1997 collection. 'You become so overtly “woman” that it’s almost perverse,' she said. 'Western society still hasn’t quite worked out what to do or how to behave around pregnant mothers… I was fascinated by the ways in which men couldn’t look at me, would avert their gaze and were somewhat horrified by this bulge, this protrusion. Although not the driving force, Rei’s collection and subsequent conversations with the artists were a way in which to navigate this experience.'

‘Lumps and Bumps’ at Rose Easton until 12 December 2026

roseeaston.com

In 1831, Louis Daguerre created the first camera, marking the beginning of a new creative era for photographers – albeit mostly male ones.

It is an anomaly that the new book, Women Photographers are Dangerous, aims to rectify, spotlighting over 60 female photographers who have taken physical and creative risks in their work, spanning scenes from war zones to protests, and fields from journalism to science and advertising.

‘We deliberately did not want to tell a supposedly ‘beautiful’ or idealised story of women in photography,’ says co-author and historian Laure Adler. ‘Instead, we wanted to tell a story grounded in historical and artistic research, bringing unknown figures to light while also paying tribute to those who are better known. It is an uneven and turbulent history, much like the history of women themselves.’ Included here are visual activist Zanele Muholi’s striking portraits, Eve Arnold’s photographs of Marilyn Monroe and the work of Anne Atkins, who was widely believed to have created the first photograph.

For Adler, it was key above all when making the selection to acknowledge the major contribution women made to developing photography’s technical process. ‘As the medium became increasingly successful, men gradually took over the field,’ she adds. ‘This did not stop women from continuing to practice photography, but this history of appropriation is important in understanding how little space has been given to women artists in the broader history of art.’

It is a reality which can be unnerving for the status quo, hence the title of the book. ‘These women are dangerous because they inspire hope, confidence, and ambition in other women who may not yet dare to take that step,’ Ader adds. ‘They are also dangerous to their male colleagues because they are just as talented, sometimes even more talented, than their male peers and partners, and often more courageous.’

Women Photographers are Dangerous is published by ACC Art Books

accartbooks.com

At the turn of the century, an ultra-violent Japanese film about a class of students forced to fight to the death launched teenage actor Tatsuya Fujiwara to national stardom. Today, he’s still known to many by his Battle Royale character’s name – Boy #15: Shuya Nanahara – and his face can be found in everything from gangster video games and billboard advertisements to heads of lettuce in Japanese supermarkets.

But his latest venture to London marks a return to dystopian storytelling of a decidedly different nature. On the weekend of 8-11 October 2026, he’ll play the lead in the first-ever stage adaptation of a surreal 1985 ‘cyberpunk’ novel by Norwegian Wood writer Haruki Murakami at the Barbican. End of the World and the Hard-Boiled Wonderland offers a tale of cyborgs, unicorns, and sewer monsters between a Kafkaesque Tokyo underworld and a strange, walled-off town.

And while a Fujiwara-introduced screening of Battle Royale also takes place at the venue the same weekend, the programming marks a nostalgic head-trip in more ways than one: this was the same stage on which the actor made his theatre debut 29 years ago, when he was just 15 years old. 'I’d never been abroad. I knew nothing of the world. I didn’t even have a passport,' he tells Wallpaper*. 'I didn’t really appreciate the scale of it, and how impressive it was to take a title role on stage at the Barbican – but that’s how my theatre life began.'

That 1997 Yukio Ninagawa stage production of Shintokumaru predated even his star turn in Japan’s notorious Y2K Lord of the Flies, but was no less impressive a feat. The revered theatre director, known for work of 'astonishing visual bravura' and for harmonising eastern and western traditions, said The Guardian in 2016, had plucked Fujiwara from auditions of over 5,000 hopeful youngsters to offer him the title role; a casting process that legendary crime film auteur Kinji Fukasaku would echo three years later in Battle Royale.

In Shintokumaru, Fujiwara would play an isolated youth grieving his dead mother while wrestling with a turbulent, confused attraction to his stepmother. For Battle Royale, Fujiwara cohabited with his young co-stars on the remote island where the film’s deadly school games were staged. 'These were two very different worlds,' the actor recalls, 'but the two great maestros [behind them] were similar, in a way. They’d really drive us as actors towards emotional extremes, and push you harder to give something extra. The difference was that one was in front of a camera, and the other was in front of an audience.'

He became a major screen star following Battle Royale’s release. (Manga adaptation Death Note – reimagined as a musical at the Barbican earlier this summer, and returning for another season in 2027 – was another Fujiwara-led screen smash in 2006.) And he would also return several times to the Barbican with Ninagawa in the years that followed – including for a production of Yukio Mishima’s Yorobashi in 2001, and to perform Shakespeare in 2015. The latter was a source of personal anxiety:

'To bring Hamlet from an Asian country to the homeland of Shakespeare was nerve-wracking,' he recalls. 'It’s like a British company creating a kabuki play and then bringing it to Japan.

'We’d heard scary stories about UK audiences ever since we were young,' he continues. 'That if it wasn’t good, people would stand up and leave in the middle of it… The director drove the cast really hard to be able to respond to such critical eyes on that production. We rehearsed and rehearsed to build our confidence.'

In time, the theatre would even reunite Fujiwara with his Battle Royale co-lead, Aki Maeda: she played his disillusioned schoolteacher’s long-suffering wife in a Japanese production of Chekhov’s Platonov in 2019.

With so much experience working with storytelling trailblazers, it might seem inevitable that an opportunity to engage with 'Japan’s greatest living novelist', as Barbican head of Theatre & Dance Toni Racklin puts it, would one day arise. But even so, Murakami’s cryptic 1985 dual-narrative novel seems a challenging choice.

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, as it is titled in Murakami’s original novel, is the story of a human data processor who encrypts information within his own brain, and eventually finds himself at the centre of a mysterious conspiracy. As he tries to make sense of the chaos around him, he also develops a deep connection to an alternate, superficially peaceful world where his memories and individuality are gradually stripped away. Though complex, the 41-year-old text feels keenly relevant today, with themes of data-mining, surveillance, and fast-developing technologies arguably even more potent now than at the dawn of Tokyo’s technology-fuelled bubble-economy years when it was first published. But either way, most would surely agree, beneath Murakami’s intricate narratives are always much deeper and more profound preoccupations at play.

'He’s a wonderful writer and artist,' says Fujiwara. 'I’ve read his works since I was young, and there has always been something very heartwarming about them.' Part of that appeal is Murakami’s unique ability to conjure up liminality, longing, or nostalgia for 'things that were almost lost', he continues. And that effect is seemingly just as potent on the author himself: 'Murakami told me that he wrote Hard-Boiled Wonderland… so many years ago that he had forgotten about it himself,' says Fujiwara. 'And yet he came to visit the rehearsal and the show several times.'

Produced by the same entertainment company behind Fujiwara’s Ninagawa plays – as well as the theatre director’s 2015 production of Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore (which did not involve Fujiwara) – the Horipro stage production End of the World and the Hard-Boiled Wonderland is directed by Philippe Decouflé, a choreographer and mime artist perhaps best known for his music videos for New Order and Fine Young Cannibals. 'To adapt Murakami for the stage must have been a huge pressure for Philippe,' says Fujiwara. 'In fact, whenever Murakami came to the rehearsal, he’d say that “God is descending on us”, and we’d all get very nervous.'

Just as with his collaborations with Ninagawa, this 2026 production has been defined by long rehearsals and hard work – with the reimagining of such a rich and complex world necessitating strict discipline among the dancers and performers, says Fujiwara. But the results have already been rapturously received in Japan and in Singapore: 'Unabashedly graceful beauty… [and] surreal magic infiltrates all parts, and the result – dare this reviewer say – trumps the novel,' said The Straits Times in April. With the story’s distinct worlds depicted in black-and-white and colour, and incorporating dance choreography, shadow work, and even treadmills, the Barbican’s Toni Racklin now hails it as a 'true spectacle' on the eve of its European premiere.

But for Fujiwara, this headline event within the Barbican’s two-month ‘Haruki Murakami season’ – comprising film screenings, jazz music performances, and even an 'in conversation' event with the author himself – also offers pause for reflection. 'The biggest factor in my own growth and development, in terms of the ways I express things as an actor, was the birth of my child ten years ago,' he says. 'And she is now nearing the age that I was when I made my debut here.' It is, perhaps, the latest cyclical motion in a career that seems to derive strength from folding back upon itself, bringing Fujiwara back to the same stages and themes, but never quite as the same actor.

End of the World and Hard-Boiled Wonderland will be performed at the Barbican Theatre from Thursday 8 – Sunday 11 Oct 2026

Chanel is marking its third year as official timekeeping partner of The Chanel J12 Boat Race with a first for the maison – the creation of two new trophies. Chanel is the first title sponsor for the annual race between Oxford and Cambridge on the River Thames, which will mark the centenary of the first Women’s Race in 1927.

For director of the Chanel Watch Creation Studio, Arnaud Chastaingt, these are milestones to be celebrated with a considered approach. To create the sporting trophies, the first time Chanel has ever done so, required a process at the intersection of design, heritage and modernity.

‘Designing the trophy for The Boat Race was a deeply moving creative challenge,’ says Chastaingt. ‘It was not simply about creating an object, but about giving form to the emotion of a victory shared by an entire crew. What resonates most with me about this race is the extraordinary discipline, trust and synchronisation it requires. We wanted the trophy to honour everything that happens before the final moment of triumph: the effort, the commitment and the collective energy that make such an achievement possible.’

The two new trophies, for the men’s and women’s races, translate this energy into a streamlined form, their silver silhouettes a sculpted foil against the angular lines of their frames – polished white with matte black lines for the women’s trophy, and polished black with matte black lines for the men’s, the colours distinctive to Chanel.

‘From the very beginning, I wanted the women’s and men’s trophies to be exactly the same size, as they represent the same achievement, the same intensity, discipline, collective ambition, and moment of victory,’ Chastaingt adds. ‘There was no reason to express any difference in scale, as both crews deserve to be celebrated with the same strength and significance. The two trophies share a common design language, distinguished only by black and white details that make them unique while remaining complementary, an essential harmony within the Chanel vocabulary. This felt particularly important as the women’s race approaches its centenary in 2027, offering an opportunity to celebrate it.’

The trophies, designed to be lifted as well as admired, created new challenges for Chastaingt, who also had to consider how they felt to hold. Ergonomics, weight and structural integrity were as key to consider as aesthetics, and Chanel worked with British designer and maker of trophies Thomas Lyte to overcome challenges. Bringing the trophies to life took two years overall, with the process requiring 320 hours for each trophy.

It is a natural expression of craft for Chanel, and a discreet and meaningful token of the partnership with The Boat Race, a philosophy Chastaingt was keen to reflect in the trophy’s form. ‘The frame was designed almost like a setting, revealing and elevating what truly matters: The Boat Race itself, its history, its athletes and the intensity of victory,’ he says. ‘For me, this is where modernity lies. Not in adding more, but in refining, distilling and creating space for something that already carries such powerful meaning. The J12 naturally became the link between these two worlds. As a symbol of precision and a constant source of inspiration, it embodies values shared by both Chanel and The Boat Race, making this encounter feel both authentic and meaningful.

theboatrace.org

Liberated by the machine or trapped by technology? That’s the dichotomy at the heart of a new show at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, ‘Home of the Future, 1925 - 1985: Designing Domestic Utopias’, a panoply of visions of the future of labour-saving devices and the push-button era that always seemed to be just around the corner.

The exhibition is accompanied by this handsome volume from DelMonico Books, edited by Wendy Kaplan, who heads up the museum’s Decorative Arts and Design department. It’s a fertile subject for research, not just because those promises don’t seem to have gone away, but also because the vividly rendered future visions conjured up during the era in question have gone on to be so influential, even if the technologies they promised never turned out quite right.

Look inside House of the Future

Modern society always seems on the cusp of a domestic tech revolution, and while the consumer family of 1950 would be shocked and awed by the voice-activated home of today, we’re still waiting for our robot butlers, flying cars, and – perhaps most importantly of all – the endless hours of leisure, personal growth and social interaction promised by liberating technology.

The book, also titled Home of the Future 1925 - 1985: Designing Domestic Utopias, brings together the exhibits, imagery and analysis in a tome designed by Lorraine Wild and Xiaoqing Wang of Green Dragon Office. It’s a cornucopia of future-facing innovations and retro-futuristic optimism, some of which has come to pass (the robotic cleaner) and some of which remains mired in the marshes of impracticality (the flying car).

Whether it was high flying fantasies about a new life in space or simply a family house that was a true machine for living in, advertisers, manufacturers, futurists, optimists and even toymakers all got in on the act. The future was coming, and coming fast.

The benefit of hindsight lends an air of tragic kitsch to much of this material, but these were simpler times when technology’s curative potential wasn’t yet diverted or tainted. Loosely covering the six decades between 1925 and 1985, Home of the Future is a fine accompaniment to a show full of treasures, elevated from domestic banality by faith, wonder and optimism.

As the mood turned, first via newly minted criticisms of rampant consumption and then via the nascent ecological movement, the shiny visions of the future were retrofitted to suit a more sustainable, attainable target.

The first three sections of the book look to the sunlit uplands, while the fourth and final part, The Counterculture and the computer, assesses what happened after the clouds rolled in and more conscious and considered ways of living were explored.

The shape of the home and the objects within it generate debates that’ll run for ever. Future generations will no doubt look back at the first quarter of the 21st century and see similar patterns – explosions of hope followed by misdirection, confusion and despair.

Perhaps we’re ripe for a countercultural pushback against the ubiquitous digital ‘domestic utopia’ we’ve all found ourselves inadvertently trapped in; Home of the Future is a good place to start exploring.

The book, Home of the Future 1925-1985: Designing Domestic Utopias, edited by Wendy Kaplan, DelMonico Books, $79.95, DelMonicoBooks.com, artbook.com,

The exhibition runs from 27 September 2026 to 14 March 2027 at LACMA's Resnick Pavilion, LACMA.org

Within ‘Giving Life’, the second show at the new DiB museum of contemporary art in Bangkok, sits a gleeful disruption: a video game. Nawin Nuthong's Project 147, the first Chanel Gateway Commission, sends a small child through a series of animated vignettes in pursuit of a single question: what is history? Tree nymphs from Thai folklore and a trail of nostalgic artefacts serve as clues, and there is no neat conclusion.

'What I love about contemporary art is that it's a space to ask questions and probably answer each one with another five questions!' says Nuthong, who was born in 1993, raised in Bangkok and trained in film. Visitors build their own avatars, which appear on a giant screen that's refreshed each day. 'The visual and narrative style of gaming has become a global language,' says Miwako Tezuka, director of Dib. 'People will connect. People will understand.'

The commission inaugurates the Chanel Culture Fund's partnership with Dib, the fund's first major alliance with a Southeast Asian art institution, and it lands at a tipping point. 'There is this amazing energy of music, of architecture, of design and of experimentation in Thailand,' says Yana Peel, president of arts, culture & heritage at Chanel. 'In this renaissance, it's not a birth but a rebirth, a chance to really flourish in a way that can be a gateway to the region.'

The country, she says, has already given the world Rirkrit Tiravanija, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Gridthiya Gaweewong and, of course, Yantrasast himself. 'With Nuthong, there's the Trojan horse of the video game that's bringing people into the museum and then asking these existential questions like what is the hero's journey? What are the dragons you need to slay? What is the history? What is the future?' says Peel.

For Nuthong, it’s a breakthrough. 'This is the first time that I get close to the public,' says the artist.

'I'm quite fascinated by gaming: the phenomenon, the excitement, the participation, the distraction, the friendships that are made and where technology is going. In [Chanel’s] first Next Prize cohort [in 2024], we had a game designer named Sam Eng in Brooklyn who won that award,' says Peel.

Opened in December 2025 (when we toured its architecture), DiB is a bold, brilliant, privately owned and funded museum, conceived by its founding chairman, Purat ‘Chang’ Osathanugrah. His mission was to open the collection amassed by his father, Petch Osathanugrah, to the public and create a new magnet for national culture. 'The questions I asked myself in founding this museum started with: what do we leave behind when we're not around? What is legacy? And how can I turn my father's dream, a private collection, into what I believe Bangkok deserves as a museum?' says Chang. At 33, he must be one of the youngest museum founders in the world.

The 1,000-strong collection spans the OGs of Thai art, among them Montien Boonma (1953-2000), whose spiritual works fill an entire floor of the just-opened exhibition, ‘Giving Life’, as well as the new guard and international names with strong bonds to Thailand, from Anselm Kiefer to Alexander Calder. 'We serve as a bridge between Thailand and the world, bridging the old Bangkok, the old heritage, with our current cultural identity,' says Chang, who also grew up playing video games. 'It's about rediscovering and reinventing what used to be overlooked in our heritage, the craftsmanship, the music, the clothes, the venues, and owning it.'

That life is palpable. Yantrasast has transformed a disused steel warehouse into a 7,000 sq m museum arranged around a sweeping courtyard, and its crisp geometric lines give the building both the discipline of a gallery and the ease of a civic stage. Cinema, performance and talks are as much at home here as the art on the walls. The industrial bones remain legible, but nothing about the place feels like a shed with pictures in it.

Is it architecture, a sculpture, or a warehouse full of wonderful art? Kulapat Yantrasast asks the question himself. 'Museums exist in many ways, and this is a balance of those,' says the Thai architect, founder of WHY Architecture. 'Of course it's a converted warehouse, but it has its own life, its own spirit.'

Across the sprawling city that renaissance is grassroots and tangible. Bangkok Kunsthalle founded three years ago, Bangkok CityCity Gallery and the Jim Thompson Art Center anchor a wider network of studios drawing new waves of artists, while Thai artists who left are coming home. 'I think within at least the arts field in Thailand, there's not a lot of top-down approach to it. What you see today is really organic in its expression,' says Chang.

For Chanel, which does not build museums of its own, the model is partnership. 'The idea is to identify the best people with the best ideas in the best cities, who are able to partner with us in a way that's very enduring and long-term,' says Peel. The fund's patronage now spans 50 projects in 15 countries, among them a film restoration project at M+ in Hong Kong and a contemporary art library at the Power Station of Art in Shanghai, following a lineage Gabrielle Chanel began in the 1920s as patron to Cocteau, Dalí, Stravinsky and Diaghilev.

To mark the opening of Nawin Nuthong’s Chanel Gateway Commission at DiB Bangkok, luminaries of the region's art world, from Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia and Korea, gathered for dinner in the museum's underground carpark, made over into a banqueting hall. It was a fitting use of Yantrasast's building: a warehouse that keeps finding new lives.

The commission is on show as part of ‘Giving Life’ until 5 May 2027, dibbangkok.org

‘My identity is scattered all over the place,’ says artist Zoya Cherkassky. ‘I was born in Ukraine, grew up in Israel, and lived in Germany for five years.’ A year and a half ago, Cherkassky moved to the United States, and has been attempting to make sense of both her transitory status and the familiar yet unknown American way of life in a new series of paintings and drawings.

‘I also come from a very mixed family,’ Cherkassky adds. ‘My father was Jewish, my mother is half Ukrainian and half Jewish, my husband is Igbo, and my sister was married to an Arab from Jordan, so I have two nieces who were born there. So adding a new American identity was just a drop in the ocean.’

This heritage is a rich jumping-off point in Cherkassky’s exhibition at Fort Gansevoort, New York, American Cooking, which anchors itself in the everyday rituals Cherkassky has noticed around her. Named after a vintage cookbook she found near her Long Island studio, the works in the exhibition translate scenes of ritual – often involving food but also including playgrounds, subways, pavements – into evocative, often playful figurative paintings.

‘I think these moments are what life is really made of, the things that later become our memories,’ Cherkassky says. ‘I’m also, of course, influenced by the realist and humanist tradition in painting. At the art school in Kyiv, every year began with the same assignment: to make a composition on the theme “How I Spent My Summer.” In a way, that’s what I’ve been painting all my life. Small details are very important to me, the things I notice that make these situations recognisable, something that anyone can relate to.’

Throughout her work, themes including Jewish identity, politics and migration are considered through an often humorous lens, lending a poignancy to her scenes which are rooted in reality. Caught going about their day, Cherkassky’s subjects are vulnerable in their honesty. ‘Humour is what has always helped my people survive – we Jews are stereotypically famous for our sense of humor. It’s also, of course, part of my personality, I love to laugh my ass off and I know a lot of jokes,’ Cherkassky says.

‘In recent years, any political subject has become extremely explosive, and art is often confused with activism or propaganda. This frustrates me because I see how afraid people are to express their opinions. I think it really damages the broader discourse. Nevertheless, it’s important for me to address these subjects. I try to do it through humour, and I just hope that the political content in my work isn't manipulated and taken out of context.’

American Cooking until November 7 at Fort Gansevoort, New York

The subject of home is a multifaceted one. A place of refuge and routine, it can also be a place of containment and mundanity – eclectic meanings ripe for exploration by artists through the medium of sculpture.

In ‘There’s No Place Like It,’ curated by designer Henry Holland, members of the Royal Society of Sculptors muse on these meanings in works alternately poignant, humorous or unsettling. ‘I was really looking for pieces that made me feel something,’ says Holland, who was drawn to the theme upon being invited to curate works by Caroline Worthington, director of the Royal Society of Sculptors.

For Holland, home is a feeling, he says, adding he was keen to discover the artists’ often more subversive interpretations. 'I really hope that, like me, people come away from the show questioning their existing thoughts on what home can mean, while also exploring ways that this can be much broader - in essence, through reading and learning about some of the artists and the ways that they have approached the work,' Holland says.

Artists including Nick Hornby, Poojan Gupta, Michael Coombs, Abigail Norris, Dido Crosby and Victoria Ferrand Scott consider home through fragments, from the physical impact we leave on it - the hair in a brush, the shoes by a door, to the mementoes that become imbued with a greater significance.

‘I think the medium of sculpture allows the artist to explore the theme of home in such an evocative way, by subverting and repurposing recognisable motifs,’ adds Holland. ‘It helps to build a narrative that is completely personal and unique to the artist. What I love about the selection of pieces that we have in the exhibition is how varied the interpretations of home have been to each individual artist.’

There’s No Place Like It, The Royal Society of Sculptors Summer exhibition, curated by Henry Holland until 28 November 2026

sculptors.org.uk

'All of my artworks are given female names,' Renée Levi tells me. We are sitting in her Basel studio beside September, a colossal abstract painting in the vivid, often neon palette that has defined her work for decades. Blues, greens, oranges and pinks, thick with pigment, gather in loose squares and looping circles, each swept across a grid-like industrial mesh with a large mop. Around every mass of colour, Levi has built up zig-zags of silver spray paint. Read from left to right, the forms swell in scale. The surface takes on the look of a map or a geological survey, charting a body moving across it.

The choice of female names is an insistent act to ensure that women are no longer written out of art history. This painting also takes its title from the month of its unveiling on the Hayward's façade on London's South Bank, where it is residing from 23 September to 15 November 2026, marking a shift in seasons when the light changes, the weather turns and the city picks up its pace after summer.

Co-commissioned by the Hayward Gallery and Audemars Piguet Contemporary, and Levi's first large-scale commission in the UK. Seen from the Royal Festival Hall, September appears a different work from the one in the studio. By day, the colour sits on the iridescent mesh. As the afternoon fades it begins to loosen, and by dusk it has lifted from the surface entirely, hovering against the concrete as though nothing were holding it there.

To understand why Levi paints the way she does, it is helpful to know that she did not begin her career as a painter. Born in Istanbul in 1960 and raised in Aargau, Switzerland, she trained as an architect and worked with Herzog & de Meuron in Basel before studying art at the Zurich University of the Arts. Though she sees her early career informing her painting practice.

'It is a kind of continuation,' she says. 'For me, architecture isn't really separate from painting. That separation is something the art market imposes, and it's also a product of how we're taught to think in categories.' Levi thinks of her paintings as objects, and of walls and façades as structures that dictate scale, material and gesture. She has made several public interventions since early in her career, including a commission for the pediment of the Federal Palace in Bern, and her practice has been recognised with the Prix Meret Oppenheim and the Prix de la Société des Arts de Genève. The Hayward is the latest commission in a long investigation into what painting can do to a building, and what a building can do to a painting.

The Hayward is a Grade-II listed landmark, all exposed concrete, jutting forms and hard and fast geometry. Levi’s first visit to the South Bank was on a cold, rainy day, and she read the site closely, with its worn cement paving, an outdoor seating area she describes as ‘full of unrealised wishes’, awkward stairs and yellow concrete elements dating from the seventies. What emerged responds directly to the building's own composition. September takes the Hayward's distinctive protruding rectangular window, often called the ‘eye’ of the building, and makes it part of the painting, extending the work above and below it. Rather than laying an image over the façade, Levi has let the architecture set the terms.

Levi's method is, on its surface, disarmingly simple. She paints in a single continuous passage, left to right, like writing, without correction or overpainting. In her own words: 'Drawing is an immediate, bodily act in situ within a site that determines material, scale, and action… Rules arise within the act and exclude correction, overpainting, and composition.' The immediacy, though, rests on long stretches of preparation and patience. 'You have to understand that I take a lot of breaks,' she says. 'Sometimes I'll go three months without painting, and then I decide it's time to work again.'

She arrives at that moment without a picture in mind, but with everything else settled: the brush, the material, the size of the surface, the colours. 'The preparation actually takes much more time than the painting itself, precisely so that I'm not interrupted once I start.' For September, that meant buying several large mop brushes in advance, one for red, one for blue, one for green, so she would never have to stop and switch. She works with an assistant, but needs silence and concentration above all.

Because the act of painting is everything, Levi does not believe in failure in the usual sense. 'There is no “bad”,’ she says, 'because I really believe in the moment of doing.' The scale of each gesture is governed by the reach of her own body. On the Hayward's surface, no mark exceeds what a human arm can make. Up close, a colossal public painting turns out to be a record of one person moving. Painting outdoors on the Thames for two months posed practical questions for the commission too. The answer was an industrial mesh, the kind usually used for large-scale advertising, which lets air pass through the surface and withstands the weather. There is no system to the palette. 'It's mostly about what makes me happy in the moment,' she says.

What makes September unusual, even within Levi's own practice, is where it will be seen. Painting at this scale as urban public art is new territory for her, and the South Bank as a thoroughfare of commuters, tourists, skateboarders, concert-goers heading to the Royal Festival Hall. Most people will not stand before the work so much as move past it. Levi has embraced that. 'The work can never be seen all at once,' she says. 'It is encountered in passing, from different distances and viewpoints, and perhaps something different is noticed each time.' The painting, she suggests, unfolds twice: first in the act of making it, and again in the movement of the people who walk by. Hayward curator Yung Ma sees it as a disruption of the grey façade, a work that turns an ordinary riverside walk into an unexpected meeting with colour.

For eight weeks, it will slip into the routine of the people who pass it every day, glimpsed at an angle from the bridge, the river path or the top deck of a bus. September's sun sits lower than the summer sunlight, and by late afternoon it glows across the South Bank, turning the grey concrete briefly to honey and catching the mesh so the whole surface shimmers. Against that warmth the neons burn hotter, while the silver zig-zags flare and vanish as the angle changes. As the weeks run on towards November, the light will shorten and cool, the shadows of Hayward's own jutting forms will stretch further across the painting, and the colour, deprived of sun, will begin its evening float earlier each day. As the days change, no passers-by will see quite the work in quite the same way. Then it will be gone. Levi, characteristically, is most interested in that moment. ‘For a limited time, September changes the appearance of the Hayward Gallery. And when the work disappears again, those who have passed it before may notice that something is missing.’

Renée Levi's September, co-commissioned by the Hayward Gallery and Audemars Piguet Contemporary, is on view on the façade of the Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre, London, from 23 September to 15 November 2026

southbankcentre.co.uk

It's a funny thing, Peter ‘Hooky’ Hook is telling me down the line from a California hotel room, ‘to still relish something that you did under very difficult circumstances’.

I’m talking to the bass player – once of Joy Division, then of New Order, now of The Light, the band he formed to play both those previous bands’ songs – about Eternal (Live). It’s a lavish new Joy Division boxset comprising 14 CDs, documenting 16 gigs, and two DVDs of filmed performances. The audio, video and accompanying photography and text vividly capture the short, intense onstage existence of the band, their lifespan cut short after the 1980 death by suicide, aged 23, of Ian Curtis, the frontman who struggled with depression, severe epilepsy and the side-effects of his medication.

‘And it’s a wonderful thing,’ Hook continues, able to be beatific about the near five-decades-deep shared creative endeavour even as his infamous rift with his former bandmates remains as entrenched as ever. ‘Because we made Joy Division’s music, particularly Closer,’ he says of 1980’s second album, released two months after Curtis’ death, ‘and did some of the gigs that are featured on this, when Ian was ill. And as someone said to me yesterday: “It must be really weird, playing Joy Division music to 3,000 people in San Francisco.”’

He couldn’t disagree with that. With Joy Division – the name by which he, Curtis, Bernard ‘Barney’ Sumner and Stephen Morris started performing in 1978 – ‘I was professional for six months. If you can call professional being on £13 a week! And when Ian died, we thought everything had died with him. So it’s amazing to be here, 46 years later, watch how popular it is, and see what an investment that time and difficult working procedures were. Because it's still paying off.’

That ongoing investment finds form in the thoughtful, immersive, world-building creation, design and packaging of Eternal (Live). With spruced-up, 2026-level sound mastered at Abbey Road Studios, the grotty, sticky pub and club venues of 1979 and 1980 never felt more present. With artful updates on Joy Division’s visual language, their heritage and iconography has rarely felt more alive than in this weighty packaging, all housed in a 12-inch x 12-inch lift-off-lid box.

The cover image is a 2023 Wolfgang Tillmans photograph, with the explanatory title Sirius through a Defocused Telescope. ‘I see it as a bookend to the cover of [1979 debut album] Unknown Pleasures,’ explains Peter Saville, longstanding creator of Joy Division and New Order artwork. ‘That’s an image from deep space, a data recording from the first discovered pulsar. And here we have the star Sirius. Conceptually, this idea of an astronomical image is a perfect counterpoint to Unknown Pleasures.’

That new image was chosen by Warren Jackson, who works with Sumner as a personal creative/art director. Its usage was secured when Saville approached the German photographer – a visual artist whose work now commands vast sums, but who was happy to do Saville and the band a favour in terms of usage rights and costs.

‘The influence of Joy Division has gone far and wide,’ says Saville, ‘and across all sectors, to filmmakers, photographers, artists, fashion designers. And Wolfgang is a perfect example of an innovative artist who came through photography, into fine art, in this post-Joy Division era, and to a highly regarded, celebrated [level]. So, the idea of being able to propose it to Wolfgang was in itself very pleasing to me. That’s a very satisfying part of the history of the band.’

Alongside a powerfully Proustian essay by Simon Armitage, the Poet Laureate who was a year-zero Joy Division fan, the interior booklet features 16 pages of evocative portraiture and reportage imagery. They’re by the now-celebrated photographers that the band picked to work with them, and who rose with them, including Anton Corbijn, Kevin Cummins and Jill Furmanovsky. As Corbijn – who directed 2007 Curtis biopic Control – puts it to me: 'I always wanted to work with people who are very serious about what they're making. And Joy Division were that.'

Here are time-capsule monochromes of the gigs captured on the live discs. Hook and guitarist Sumner, intent on their instruments, shot by fan Jonathan Crabb at London’s Hope and Anchor pub, 27 December 1978 – the night that, en route home to Manchester, Curtis had his first recognised epileptic seizure. The singer, head thrown back and blurred in Furmanovsky’s image, at London’s YMCA, 2 August 1979. Drummer Morris, sweat-drenched and locked-in, shot by Martin O’Neill, in front of the paisley-esque wallpaper of Bowdon Vale Youth Club, Altrincham on 14 March 1979.

'Oh, God, yeah, I remember that youth club!' says Morris with a laugh. ‘We played it twice. It was good to do things for young people,’ he adds, mentioning two gigs in one day at Liverpool club Eric's, the first a matinee, ‘the idea being that under-18s could see you’. There is, too, video footage from that night in Altrincham in the boxset’s films, shot by Malcolm Whitehead. He was head of Ikon, which was the filmmaking arm of Joy Division’s record label Factory. Not, insists Morris, that the band had one eye on posterity.

‘It was basically just Malcolm saying, “I want to film you”, and us leaving it to him. We weren't going to say: “Please don't do that, because years later we don’t want pictures of us playing in a place with red flock wallpaper popping up on YouTube and destroying our once powerful, dark mystique,”’ the musician says larkily.

Corbijn, though, thinks the musicians ‘must have had some idea’ about the strength of good photography. ‘You had Bowie [around] and you’d like to look as cool as that. So I’m sure there was that kind of desire.’ He mentions his first, much-reproduced shoot with the band, 15 quick minutes in November 1979 on the steps of Lancaster Gate Tube station in west London. ‘When they saw those, they realised there was a strength there. They were the only people who weren’t shooting “art” pictures.’

Morris valorises those images for reasons for that are, not unusually for the cheerfully plain-spoken drummer, more prosaic. ‘Anton said, “Go down these stairs”, took a couple of pictures and said, “Right, that’s it”. That turned out to be a great photograph, obviously, Ian looking backwards and we’re all coming down the stairs. But the fact that it took him less than 15 minutes to take our picture made him an al right guy to us. We thought, “He can do that again!”’

Hook, finding rare common cause with his former bandmate, tells a similar story. ‘I remember a French photographer, very famous in France, who came to do pictures. Barney was in a terrible mood, and he said, “I'll give you five minutes”. The guy started ranting on in French and pidgin English: “You cannot treat me like this! I have come all the way from Paris! I have many, many pictures to my name!” And when he stopped, Barney went: “Four minutes.”’

As for Corbijn’s own memories, of the gigs, in particular, they’re more blurred. He does, though, recall the night of 4 April 1980 at the Rainbow Theatre, shots from which close the booklet in totemic, shivery greyscale: Curtis, gripping his microphone stand as if his life depended on it. As well he should: ‘Ian had a fit onstage that night and they had to carry him off. That was scary to see. I used that in Control.’

Ian Curtis, of course, was a star who burned brightly and intensely for too short a time. I ask Saville if that isn’t too much of an on-the-nose interpretation of the image that adorns Eternal (Live). Especially given how it – as the designer put it – bookends, almost half-a-century on, the image on the cover of Unknown Pleasures.

‘That is one of the interpretations on the pulsar,’ he agrees. ‘Basically a star that is no longer, but the signal and the energy of which continue in infinity. That is a reading of the pulsar from Unknown Pleasures. It's a dead star, the energy of which is with us forever. It's still radiating around the universe. And you can make that same analogy with the star Sirius.”

Like the title said: this is Eternal.

Eternal (Live) is out on 25 September via Warner Music, available at hmv.com

Before marrying a Beatle, becoming a mother of four, a key member of the band Wings, an animal rights activist, and a vegetarian food entrepreneur and cookbook author, Linda McCartney (1941-1998) was a photographer.

On 25 September 2026, Wrensilva Los Angeles – the audio company’s West Hollywood showroom and listening space – will unveil to the public ‘The Art of the Album: The Photography of Linda McCartney’, presented in conjunction with The Linda McCartney Archive LLP, and MPL Communications. This date will also see the US Postal Service honour McCartney’s extraordinary life with a limited-edition stamp series.

Photography connected with all facets of McCartney’s career and life. The images on display at Wrensilva were used on album covers, and while many were the result of official commissions from record labels, some were personal snapshots.

This is the only installation in the US currently devoted solely to McCartney's music photography. Running through February 2027, it pairs her photographs with the vinyl records that immortalised them, alongside a Wrensilva console where you can play music from that era, including The Beatles, The Cimarons, Denny Laine, Paul McCartney, The Pretenders, Professor Longhair, and Neil Young.

This is the fourth installation for Wrensilva Presents: The Art of the Album. Each one pairs a photographer's work with the respective record covers and vinyl. ‘The idea is to bring people into the creative journey that surrounds the music,’ says Greg Perlot, CEO of Wrensilva. ‘Essentially, [it’s] seeing the genesis of an album cover through the photographer’s lens, what they saw, and then what ultimately became the finished album cover we know and love. For this chapter, we wanted a photographer whose work went beyond enhancing a recording. Mrs McCartney’s unique style helped define what an album cover could be. We brought the concept to the MPL Communications team, and they gave us the chance to do it. We hope this offers people a chance to see her photography in person and experience it in a new way by hearing the albums that feature her iconic work.’

As for a few of Perlot’s standouts in the show, ‘The first is the cover of Paul's 1970 solo record, McCartney, shot during a family holiday in Antigua in 1969. It's the hero image of the installation, and we're presenting it three ways: as a framed print, scaled up into wallpaper on one wall, and reproduced as the commemorative poster.

‘The second is Professor Longhair's Live on the Queen Mary. Paul and Linda met him in New Orleans, while Wings were recording Venus and Mars. When the sessions wrapped, they threw a party aboard the RMS Queen Mary in Long Beach and brought him in to play. Nobody released that performance for three years, until Paul put it out in 1978 as its own record, with Linda's photograph of [Professor Longhair] on the cover.’

What it took to document these historical snapshots is the stuff of legendary music lore. According to Perlot, Linda put it best herself: ‘Most people, if I like their music, I can get good pictures.’

‘Most of the people she photographed were already in her circle,’ he says, ‘not assignments she was sent to cover. And sometimes [these] were portraits that hinted at a crack in the mask of rock-star grandeur.

‘Some of these photographs became the cover,’ adds Perlot. ‘Some lived quietly inside the sleeve, found only by the listener who opened it. Some were taken in the middle of the work, before the album had a shape. She photographed people as she found them, not as they performed for the lens.’

Linda McCartney was born Linda Eastman, in Scarsdale, New York in 1941. After attending Sarah Lawrence College, she studied art under Hazel Larsen Archer in Arizona. Using a Leica camera, she landed her first big gig with Town & Country in the mid-1960s, photographing musicians and entertainers, and became a regular at Bill Graham's Fillmore East New York concert venue. Here she shot the most magnetic performers of the day from Aretha Franklin to Bob Dylan, John Lennon, the Who, and the Animals. Over the years, she perfected her craft and shot legends such as Jimmy Hendrix, and The Rolling Stones on a yacht, and finally, she had that fateful backstage pass to shoot The Beatles at Shea Stadium in 1965.

Rather than set up structured photo shoots, McCartney was a fly on the wall and used a more organic approach to capturing her subjects; she said at the time, ‘Suddenly I found that taking pictures was a great way to live and a great way to work.’ Nothing was contrived and McCartney didn’t direct her subjects, but easily captured some of the most famous musicians of her generation in an unguarded fashion when they were on tour, in hotels, or at home, the images sometimes ending up as cover art for albums. In 1967, her photo of Neil Young appeared on the cover of Sugar Mountain – Live at Canterbury House, 1968. Later in her career, she would take the photograph for the cover of Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson’s single The Girl Is Mine (1982).

Her unique style and soaring reputation led her to become the first woman to photograph a Rolling Stone magazine cover, in 1968, featuring Eric Clapton. Later, she appeared on the cover herself, alongside Paul, in a 1974 issue (photographed by Francesco Scavullo).

Among McCartney’s favourite subjects to photograph were her family and animals. Her photographs have been exhibited throughout the United States as well as at the Royal Photographic Society and the Victoria & Albert Museum in the UK. A collection of photographs, Linda McCartney’s Sixties: Portrait of an Era, was published in 1992.

As for her latest posthumous legacy, the limited-edition US stamp collection features a pane of 20 stamps showcasing five different photographs. The selvage features a black-and-white self-portrait of McCartney behind her camera. Derry Noyes, an art director for USPS, designed the stamps and stamp pane. There will be a first-day-of-issue ceremony for stamps featuring her photography at MoMA in New York City on 25 September 2026.

Wrensilva | Los Angeles, 8625 Melrose Avenue, West Hollywood, CA 90069.
On view through February 2027. Gallery hours: Monday – Saturday, 11am-6pm

wrensilva.com

Twenty years ago, Sofia Coppola’s 2006 film Marie Antoinette was released to a mixed reaction. Some applauded its unusual nature, while others dismissed it. Critics booed the film at Cannes, calling it a superficial, pastel-coloured confection. However, with a major new exhibition at the Petit Trianon inside the Palace of Versailles, running from 22 September 2026 until 24 January 2027, the film is now receiving the ultimate institutional validation. Conceived in close collaboration with the filmmaker and curated by Laurent Salomé, director of the National Museum of the Châteaux of Versailles, and Hélène Delalex, the palace’s chief curator of heritage, the show transforms a once-misunderstood project into a celebrated work of art.

As visitors move through the venue, they encounter a dialogue between real history and cinematic illusion, exploring the Trianon estate as the Queen's personal domain, which Louis XVI gifted to her as a private sanctuary away from the rigid etiquette and intrigue of court. It showcases original production artefacts, including Milena Canonero's costumes and accessories, which won an Oscar for Best Costume Design, offering insight into how the film transcends the traditional, restrained boundaries of period dramas. By emphasising the opulence of the French court, the film also reveals the isolation and performative nature of Marie Antoinette’s life, portraying her existence as a continuous public spectacle.

'I was surprised and excited that the curators wanted to do this exhibit,' Coppola tells Wallpaper*. 'It’s a strange, unique feeling to visit elements of the filmmaking in Marie Antoinette’s actual home, to look at our interpretation of her next to her real busts, with the view of her garden, blurring history and recreation in a way I’ve never seen before. I haven’t worked on an exhibit before, and the curators really invited me and let me set it up, which was amazing to do in the place.'

Stepping inside the ground floor of the Petit Trianon, the intimate space evokes a domestic tranquillity. Unlike other French Queens, such as Catherine de Medici, Marie Antoinette’s historical image carries a lightness of spirit, characterised by fashion, courtly entertainments and pastoral escapism, which were criticised during her lifetime. This exhibition highlights this by presenting the space not as a fixed monument but as an active home.

Coppola's bold aesthetic choices, including decadent visuals paired with a 1980s pop soundtrack, create a juxtaposition between consumerism and historical introspection. The film reflects not only Marie Antoinette’s evolution from a confined teenager to an independent mother amid societal upheaval, but also explores themes of isolation. 'I tried to convey the way they lived and Marie Antoinette’s emotional state and bring the audience into their world instead of looking back as a history lesson. To make it feel tangible and immersive, that you’re there with them. I felt that it could be made with the same playfulness as her follies,' Coppola says.

The retrospective, supported by Cartier, marks a moment of reflection for the institution of Versailles. For Salomé, launching this unique film archive at the palace felt timely, connecting the location’s cinematic legacy with an ambitious curatorial approach. 'It's a very unusual exhibition for us because we don't usually have events like this at the Petit Trianon,' he explains. 'This is the first time we have an exhibition on one film and the making of it.'

Choosing the château was an intentional storytelling decision. 'A lot of the scenes actually made in Versailles were shot in the main palace, but Petit Trianon is completely related to Marie Antoinette,' Salomé says, noting that it became her rural refuge from stiff court etiquette. The exhibit pays homage to the artistry of filmmaking.

The space is filled with visual influences and production artefacts, including diamond jewellery, feathers, and make-up sketches, surrounded by mannequin heads styled with powdered white wigs. On the first floor, mannequins, dressed in Canonero’s elaborate gowns, sit on the original furniture. Salome makes an interesting point about the juxtaposition of new and old. 'The challenge of having film costumes, which of course are not historical 18th-century dresses, is how they work in the actual place where Marie Antoinette lived.' Coppola's film is the only production filmed in this remarkably preserved theatre on the Petit Trianon grounds.

Accompanying the exhibition is the book Making Marie Antoinette, published by Mack and compiled by Coppola's collaborator Andrew Durham, which offers personal insight into the film's creative process. It illustrates daily life on set, juxtaposing historical artistry with contemporary realities such as lavish 18th-century-style wigs alongside modern-day flip phones and ornate gowns worn during cast members' cigarette breaks. This depiction subverts the idealised portrayals of the French monarchy and reveals the genuine camaraderie among the cast and crew, adding depth to the spectacle. Traditional criticisms of the film's anachronisms, such as the appearance of Converse trainers, are addressed, presenting a more nuanced understanding of the film's approach to history and creativity.

'I love Andrew’s photos that capture what it was like on set, and hopefully people who like that film might enjoy this view of it,' Coppola says. 'He captures the actors off set and the mix of period and reality on a film set, them in wigs on their phones or at craft service. I never get jaded about movie magic and the fun of a film set where anything becomes possible.'

Also complementing the exhibition's material archive, Making Marie Antoinette (2026) is an almost 90-minute feature-length documentary being released by Mubi (on 6 November), drawing on 80 hours of behind-the-scenes footage filmed by Sofia Coppola's late mother, Eleanor Coppola. This previously unseen material offers an in-depth look at the film's production and an intimate portrait of the Coppola family, told through Oscar nominee Diane Lane's narration of excerpts from Eleanor's diary. 'It’s cringey for me to see myself as a young director, not yet sure about asserting myself, but I hope it shows how artists develop, and it was touching for me to see this through my mom’s eyes,' Coppola reflects. 'It was such a different time when a female point of view was unusual in film and she shows the pushback and what I was trying to do, which reminds me of that time and how different it was.'

The Versailles exhibition illustrates how the emotional and subjective aspects of a woman's life can go beyond political narratives, and how the story continues to evolve in the public consciousness. 'I tried to make Marie Antoinette human instead of a villain. Antonia Fraser’s biography opened up a new view on her,' Coppola says. 'I can see how, even more these days than when I made it, there’s a lot of pressure on looks, perception and commentary on this.'

'Marie Antoinette by Sofia Coppola', supported by Cartier, is at Petit Trianon inside the Palace of Versailles, running from 22 September 2026 until 24 January 2027

chateauversailles.fr

Making Marie Antoinette book (Important Flowers, 2026) by Andrew Durham, published by MACK, is now available to order. The Making Marie Antoinette documentary is in cinemas in the UK and Ireland from 23rd October 2026 and streaming exclusively on MUBI from 6th November 2026.

Deep in the heart of Battersea Power Station in southwest London, corps of hard-hatted, hi-viz’d builders, fitters and craftspeople are putting their shoulders to the wheel for one last push. We’re two weeks out from today’s unveiling (22nd September), and a few weeks from the opening, of a top-secret cultural hub that’s been five years in the making.

This is the closing stages of a multi-million-pound development with the codename Project Apollo. Two decades since the iTunes Festival (later the Apple Music Festival) launched a 10-year run of London concerts, this is, finally, the bricks-and-mortar arrival of Cupertino’s tech/entertainment behemoth in the live music sector. Presenting, in a bespoke space carved from the vast interiors of Battersea's industrial space-turned-commercial and creative quarter, Apple Music Hall.

The 600-capacity venue is purpose-built with fans and artists in mind – even those who can’t be physically present here on the southern bank of the River Thames. For the punter, Apple Music Hall offers a club-size venue that’s both sweatily intimate and state-of-the-art plush, with unimpeded sightlines, Spatial Audio sound quality and architect detailing (brickwork, fluted arches, black iron) reflecting the iconic, Art Deco design of the century-old power station. With a 48-speaker sound system and 16 hardwired cameras, shows can also be captured for top-quality live recording and/or global livestream.

For artists, Apple Music Hall is adaptive to its core. The 38-foot-stage is fully modular, allowing for configuration for ‘traditional front-facing sets’ or in the middle of the floor for in-the-round-shows. Audiences can be all-seated, all-standing, on bleachers and any point in between.

The facilities backstage, of course, are equally A-list, with capacious, luxe-level dressing-rooms for bands and crews offering penthouse apartment-style views over Battersea Power Station’s shopping and dining galleries. And, adding to the 360-degree facilities for artists, is the relocation here from Kings Cross of Apple Music Radio’s London studios.

With the station’s DJs now broadcasting from brand-new Apple Music Studios in Battersea – also home to the offices of Apple’s European HQ – touring talent have a one-stop-shop for radio sessions, concerts, broadcast events, one-off underplay gigs and launch celebrations. It builds on Apple's LA Radio Studio, creating another cultural node for the company.

‘When designing Apple Music Hall, we wanted to take inspiration from Battersea Power Station while ensuring it features all of the design hallmarks that make it a distinctly Apple space,’ says Kristina Raspe, Vice President, Apple Places. ‘Combining the heritage brick with the new fluted arches and bronze balconies pays tribute to both the building’s history and Apple’s design aesthetic, and seamlessly integrating cutting-edge technology is what Apple does best,’ she adds, ‘This combination has created a truly special venue which will connect artists and fans better than ever before.’

To all of which W* can only say: about time too. We’ve been banging on to Oliver Schusser, Apple’s vice president of Apple Music and international content, about the company’s need to get back into live music every time we’ve met him over the last few years. The German exec was certainly the right man for the job – he came up with the idea for the iTunes Festival back when he was based in London. As I suggested to him when we talked in 2024, on the occasion of the launch of Apple’s new-gen Beats Pill speaker, how about similar Beats live activity? For example: Beats by Beats – the Electronic Music Festival. That idea, I generously offered, was his for free.

‘Ha ha, there could [be]!’ Schusser had replied with a laugh. ‘I would never rule anything out… I don't know whether we do our own festival. But we want to be where music and culture is. That's definitely our place.’ Now, at last, here we are, with Apple’s boots firmly on the ground of a (not-yet-sticky) club floor.

‘We've always thought, wouldn't it be great if we had our own venue?’ Schusser admits when we catch up again. As for the ‘why now?’ question, that’s because ‘we have moved Apple's European headquarters into Battersea Power Station. And there was an opportunity inside the power station a couple of years back to do something absolutely incredible – both from a location point-of-view, but more importantly also from a technology point-of-view.’

Toggling out, Schusser points to other factors informing the decision to make London the location of Apple’s first publicly accessible performance venue anywhere in the world. ‘I lived in the UK for 15 years. I always considered London to be the global capital of live music. It's a combination of the diversity of the artists you have, but also the passion of the fans to go to shows, large and small. And I've always loved going to so many venues in London and in the UK.’

The flexible scope of Apple Music Hall, he continues, its ability to zoom in on club-level shows but beam out to global audiences, is fundamental to company’s vision for the venue. ‘It's important for us to help and provide smaller artists with a smaller space, that has state-of-the-art technology and is really plug-and-play. You can come in, do an interview with [Apple Music Radio DJ] Matt Wilkinson, get your photography and social media done, play a show [and] broadcast worldwide, and get a get a high-quality Spatial Audio recording out of it. That’s a phenomenal setup for artists to do great work.’

While one of the world’s biggest corporations obviously has money to spare when it comes to developing a venue, Schusser insists that he’s not ignorant to the challenges facing grassroots UK music venues. ‘As a fan, there are certainly more concerts now than there were 10, 20, 30 years ago. The choices that fans have, whether it's to go to a festival, to a show… to an arena tour, are bigger than ever.’

The arrival of such a well-funded new venue hasn’t escaped the notice of the UK Government either. Lisa Nandy, the Culture Secretary, issued a statement describing Apple Music Hall as a ‘huge vote of confidence in the UK as a global creative powerhouse. When a company of Apple's scale backs British music and talent, it's a signal of just how strong our creative sectors really are. Our industrial strategy is all about making Britain one of the best places in the world to invest, and the creative industries are a key part of that. These sectors are not only a source of immense national pride, but they also deliver real economic value for the country.’

‘As an industry person,’ Schusser continues, ‘I obviously know that this all sounds easier than it is and there's plenty of bands that are struggling because touring has become incredibly expensive, and for a lot of artists is unaffordable. So our goal is to empower artists to make sure they make enough money from what we do, and to let them do what they do best, which is make music and be on the road and connect with fans.’

When we speak, with the paint and cement literally still wet on Apple Music Hall, Schusser is unable to give any detail on ticket pricing, another hot-button topic within the music industry. Nor can he tell me any artists who’ll be performing. ‘Very soon,’ he promises. ‘But you're not going to be disappointed. You’re going to love it.’

I’ll be holding him to that. I’d also love to see Apple and their shiny new venue doing their bit by paying it forward and supporting a wider UK live sector that, certainly at this club level and below, is struggling in the teeth of mounting costs and declining income – even as that audience appetite for live music, as Schusser says, remains as engaged as ever.

In the meantime: in a venue obviously bristling with future-facing tech and spec, can he isolate a personal favourite design element? ‘We’re pushing the envelope on sound quality,’ Schusser replies. ‘We've developed Spatial Audio with Dolby Atmos as a new sound standard that takes us from stereo to a much better experience. This venue is optimised for that. It allows artists not only to record in Spatial Audio but to perform in it, which is really cool and unique.

‘The other thing I love is, you're going to see us shoot a lot of the content with iPhones.’ The benefit of that: ‘Because they're much smaller cameras, you can put them in many more places, and you can use more of them. So we've optimised the space to use technology for the audience to visually experience.’

Those, he says, are two highlights of the imagineering behind Apple Music Hall. ‘But the good thing is, the way the space is set up, you can bring in a stadium show and have a miniature version in front of 600 people. It's really set up in the most flexible way.’

For more information about Apple Music Hall, including how to access tickets for upcoming shows, visit AppleMusicMall.com or follow @applemusichall

A generous bundle of perfectly yellow bananas crowds an intricately crafted crimson basket; an army of mammoth hippos pile on top of each other with dramatic roars. Look more closely and you'll also find, amid Pablo Bronstein’s new drawings in his solo exhibition ‘Clocks’ at Olney Gleason gallery in New York’s Chelsea, narratively deviant mantel clocks brimming with historical allegory and technical elegance. Leaving time-telling purposes behind, the Buenos Aires-born and London-based artist’s clocks in acrylic tease with references to historical grandeur and nationalist dominance; some completely devoid of arms or too miniature to even notice, they claim dramatic footings in each of his detailed compositions.

Infused with historical references that range from colonial greed to land extraction, Bronstein’s decorative illustrations on paper act out history’s bond between power and ornamentation. ‘The clock as an allegory ties with my interest in decorative arts and in talking about history and geography,' Bronstein tells Wallpaper*. He considers clocks as 'objects that speak more than they are supposed to' and finds 'a lot of content about empires' in them.

For the artist who previously exhibited four antique clocks on pedestals in his 2024 show at Palazzo Bentivoglio in Bologna, such timepieces all 'have history crammed into them as allegory'. Bronstein, whose fascination with mantel clocks is also embodied in his personal collection of 19th-century French examples, is drawn to their decorative abundance rather than their ability to track time.

As a former collector of antiques – particularly silver sugar casters, a passion that started with a gift from his Argentine grandmother – he believes clock design has a uniqueness that is lacking in other decorative arts. 'There is a flat symbolic clarification of the moment and then there is the ornate case,' he says and points out the 'jog between the allegorical sophistication and the numbers that go around'.

This waltz between the globally accepted yet abstract flow of time and a desire for beautification echoes in Bronstein’s complex reference system in the show’s eight drawings. Banana Basket, for example, has one larger banana raised from the generous feast basket with its curvy peels revealing the ripe fruit. Amid the dramatically arched peels and the phallic offer, a central clock shows what Bronstein explains as the Boston time. The entire composition is a reference to the operations of the United Fruit Company and the history of the pejorative term ‘banana republic’, used for countries that, ultimately, were exploited by other nations and corporations.

In Classical Triumphant, a grand Greek Revival building spreads across the drawing’s nearly 2m width and sits over a pedestal adorned with intricate patterning and three clocks, of which the middle is left blank. The referenced architectural period speaks to many world leaders’ inclination towards Classicism and attempts to redecorate their residences in glorifying fashion. ‘In the context of culture war,’ the artist says, 'the presence of purity and perfection signifiers is all the more aggressive.'

In other drawings, a clock-biting alligator climbs a building inspired by Lower Manhattan’s windowless AT&T Long Lines building, and a lion-riding angel hauls a cart full of coals, based on a decorative object on the artist’s own fireplace.

Architectural, historical, or diaristic, the show’s visual cues stems from Bronstein’s own wealth of titles in his personal library. He often starts with a pencil outline while surrounded by numerous books with open pages and lets intuition usher him through the process, including adding the shading with ink. The twisted embellishments and blurred hyperboles rub shoulders with Bronstein’s inquiries about queering the power structures of aesthetics. 'Queer culture is good at pulling extremes together, such as making an enormous drama out of nothing and subverting traumatic elements with humour,' Bronstein says, and adds that this duality lets him 'worm my way into two different places at the same time'.

‘Pablo Bronstein: Clocks’ is on view at Olney Gleason in New York through 17 October 2026

olneygleason.com

Somewhere inside every prescribed life, another life keeps accumulating. An interior world thick with what has been lived, withheld, imagined, inherited and invented; a private geography that grows denser under the pressure of being told where a woman may go, what she may know, how she may appear. Femininity has been one of history’s persistent attempts to give that geography a border. Women have spent centuries exceeding it.

‘En Route’, on show at Mumbai’s Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum until 20 October 2026, takes six 19th-century women travellers as its point of departure: Nellie Bly, Annie Londonderry, Gertrude Bell, Elizabeth Bisland, Agnes Smith Lewis and Margaret Dunlop Gibson. Their journeys across continents became records of landscapes, architecture, languages, textiles, manuscripts and everyday life. In 2025, Maria Grazia Chiuri, the Italian fashion designer, and Karishma Swali, founder of the Chanakya School of Craft and its atelier, encountered their writings in the Vatican Apostolic Library while researching a site-specific commission for the Vatican's Jubilee year. The resulting work travelled from the Vatican to Mumbai, where the exhibition has expanded through new works made in response to the city and the museum.

Bly circled the globe in 72 days; Londonderry cycled around the world, at times wearing trousers to negotiate the practical demands of travel; Bell crossed deserts and documented the landscapes, languages and cultures she encountered; Bisland travelled westward in a race against Bly; and Lewis and Gibson journeyed to Mount Sinai, where Agnes recognised an older Syriac Gospel beneath a later manuscript. Their travels were acts of observation, scholarship and self-determination within worlds that prescribed very different limits for women.

The wider Chanakya celebrations activate several sites across Mumbai, marking 40 years of Chanakya and ten years of the School. ‘En Route’ gives the occasion its most expansive geography: a project about travel that has itself travelled, gathering new histories and new makers along the way.

Four enormous textile panels formed the Vatican installation, built from layered linen and hemp and worked through kantha, alongside manuscripts and two handmade globes. Embroidery is often encountered as surface: an image, a pattern, an ornament. Here, stitch sits over stitch; some layers remain visible, others partially disappear, some become completely buried, while all continue to bear structural weight. Embroidery accumulates histories, memory, labour, touch, knowledge and imagination. It makes a world through what the eye can see, what it cannot, and what it must imagine.

This changes the nature of the map. A map has historically been one of the great instruments for dividing and containing territory, making land available to authority through a line. An embroidered map introduces a geography made through touch, repetition and interpretation. Its territory can remain layered, provisional and unfinished.

Across the work, the words ‘Femininity, the trap’, drawn from Simone de Beauvoir, appear in large embroidered text. De Beauvoir’s own journeys offer a philosophical counterpart. Her writing on walking understood freedom through the body’s capacity for movement, exposure and encounter: transcendence describes the capacity to act upon the world and extend oneself into possibility; immanence describes the repetitive enclosure of a life prescribed in advance. The trap has an interior life too. It teaches a woman to mistake the boundaries around her for the boundaries of herself.

The six women at the beginning of ‘En Route’ breached those boundaries through movement; the women of Chanakya extend the question through making and the worlds they construct. This becomes especially vivid in Antrik Vishwa, the ‘inner universe’, where Chanakya women have embroidered their immediate surroundings alongside remembered places, imagined destinations, fictional landscapes and utopias. These worlds may have no corresponding physical territory, yet they exist within the makers and within collective imagination. 'Craft itself is a language,' Swali says. Here, that language gives material form to places that may exist only in memory, fantasy or collective imagination. Craft gives them material presence.

The new works made for Mumbai push this interpretive freedom further. In one student’s ‘map of memories’ recollections may be lived, inherited, borrowed or imagined, allowing another person to follow her geography and begin forming one of their own.

Mumbai provides a particularly charged ground for this. The cartographic works draw on the museum’s collection to trace the city from Ptolemy’s Heptanesia, the seven islands, and the indigenous Koli communities whose land was progressively transformed through reclamation, to its harbour, mills, chawls and art deco seafront. Swali describes Mumbai as a city of ‘possibility’; Chiuri describes its ‘energy’. Together, the words capture a city shaped by movement, absorption and exchange.

At Chanakya, inherited technique becomes a shared vocabulary through which individual voices emerge. This sits against fashion’s mythology of singular genius. Chiuri puts it plainly: 'Nobody is taking anything from you if you work together.' Swali’s formulation is equally precise: 'The collective does not erase the individual.' For Chiuri, creativity is made through exchange and collective intelligence. Swali locates Indian making within qala, a capacious idea encompassing making, doing and being.

Above Lewis and Gibson’s Cambridge home was the inscription ‘Lampada Tradam’: I will pass on the torch. In ‘En Route’, the torch has no single bearer. It passes through archives, cities, techniques, memories, imaginations and collective acts of making. Each woman adds a layer. Some remain visible; others disappear into the structure, continuing to hold it up.

The world exceeds the territories drawn to contain it. So do the inner worlds women make: accumulated, embroidered, imagined, carried forward.

The 'En Route' exhibition is on display at Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum in Mumbai through 20 October 2026

chanakya.school

Chinese multimedia artist Cao Fei is set to have her largest UK exhibition to date at the Hayward Gallery in London. Slated to open in spring 2027, the exhibition will encompass many of Cao’s influential works, including The Birth (2026), Whose Utopia (2006), RMB City (2007–2011) and Asia One (2018).

Guangzhou-born Cao’s immersive works are found at the intersection of the real and the virtual. She is driven by a fascination with a surreal dystopia that takes the form of vast, all-encompassing worlds, from a dizzying expanse of hyperspace (Nova, 2019) to a robot vacuum cleaner, meandering through piles of rubble (Rumba II: Nomad, 2015).

‘At my 2027 Hayward solo exhibition, from the workers dreaming on the world's factory floors, to the avatars drifting through the virtual city, and on to lives today reorganised by algorithms, robotics and logistical infrastructure – I hope that visitors, stepping into the galleries, might think, from the vantage of the past's future or the future's past, about the future we were once promised: what kind of dream was it, after all,’ Cao says.

Cao, who created a limited-edition cover for Wallpaper’s November 2021 issue, will bring this multimedia approach to her exhibition at the Hayward, divided into five parts. Viewers will begin with the first showing in the UK of The Birth (2026), Cao’s video installation that explores the role of drones in farming across China and Southeast Asia. Elsewhere, part of the gallery will become a factory dormitory, in Whose Utopia (2006), while early projects such as RMB City (2007-2011) follow Cao as she builds a virtual town on the Second Life platform.

‘It’s in the Hayward Gallery’s DNA to collaborate and introduce groundbreaking artists to our audiences,’ adds senior curator Yung Ma. ‘What makes it particularly exciting this time is the possibility of tapping into Cao Fei’s world-building ethos, turning her unique vision into a series of interconnected environments in our iconic spaces. This collaboration is also meaningful on a personal level, as a continuation of our friendship and conversation that has lasted for more than a decade.’

southbankcentre.co.uk

‘Rather than trying to avoid situations in which something difficult might happen, I became interested in what happens immediately afterwards: how do I respond to what has already happened?’ asks Korean artist Sujin Lee. ‘That was something I kept thinking about while making these paintings. I haven’t found a solution. For now, I’m simply learning to endure it.’

It is the silence that lingers after an event has passed that forms the cornerstone of Lee’s current exhibition at London’s Saatchi Yates, ‘Where We Once Stood’. In a series of 15 new paintings, Lee considers this quietness, a feeling that takes the shape of a single girl frozen in uncertainty.

‘Whenever I grow and look more closely at myself, my girls seem to grow with me,’ says Lee. ‘They also change as I observe the people around me – what they feel, how they grow, or sometimes how they remain unable to grow. I’m not sure I can really say that they have “grown up”. There is still a great deal of confusion in them. I often think about the girl, or boy, from childhood that exists within all of us, and whether we ever truly let that child go, or whether some part of them always remains.’

For Lee, who was born in Jeju Island, South Korea, and is now based in Seoul, childhood plays a crucial part in shaping identity. ‘I’ve been drawing for as long as I can remember, so there was never really a moment when I thought, “I’m interested in art, so I’m going to start drawing,”’ she says. ‘From a very young age, I think I simply had this vague sense that I would be drawing for the rest of my life.’

The solitary practice of the act lends itself well to Lee’s introspective nature. She has learnt to look into herself for answers, she says, in an attempt not to be led by others. The natural consequences of this grounding, and a reluctance to be affected by others, are that the figures in her paintings are often alone. Caught in nature, in snowstorms or picturesque landscapes, the girls themselves are a still fixed point, their expressions empty, unreadable.

‘I look at the feelings that remain inside me even when I no longer know exactly why they are there. Feelings that have already passed, no matter how intense they once were, have passed. But the things that remain inside me can stay for a very long time,’ she says. ‘I know that if I simply leave them untouched, they can overwhelm me. So I keep painting in order to face them rather than allow that to happen. At first, confronting them was extremely painful. Now, I’m quite a bit better at it. Maybe that means I’ve grown a little.’

Sujin Lee at Saatchi Yates until 12 November 2026

saatchiyates.com

When the photographs in Jesse Glazzard’s first book, The Sound of Dirt and Beauty, came back from retouching, something was wrong: they were too clean.

The British photographer, who presents the project in an exhibition at the ICA from 12 September, is used to leaving traces of the photographic process intact: flecks of dust on a handprint, dirt, imperfect colour, the evidence of a process that has misbehaved. ‘The dirt is important,’ he says. There is little interest in making things pristine here; instead, imperfection is allowed to remain part of the image, something Glazzard traces back to the environment he grew up in and, later, to the circumstances in which he learnt to make photographs.

When Wallpaper’s acting photography editor Cindy Parthonnaud and I spent time with the book ahead of our conversation with Glazzard, we were struck by the overwhelming generosity of the images. The accumulation of lives and moments that refuse to be contained, combined with a resistance to being too neatly defined or categorised feel fundamental to Glazzard’s work.

Spanning a decade, The Sound of Dirt and Beauty moves through the lives of the photographer’s friends, lovers and collaborators, as well as his own, passing between portraits and parties, bodies and bedrooms, people alone and others sitting in each other’s laps. His transition takes place in parallel to the images over the years, but doesn’t become the book’s singular narrative, rather one moving alongside many others.

There is an extraordinary intimacy to the photographs, so much so that looking through them can produce the slightly disorienting feeling of having arrived somewhere you perhaps shouldn’t be. ‘How the hell did the camera get there?’ Cindy asks, and for Glazzard the answer is trust. He points to a photograph made in bed, in which someone reaches towards his belly button; when there is an ‘instinctual’ relationship between himself and the person he is photographing, he explains, the camera stops feeling like an intervention. ‘The trust is there on both sides, the camera is just kind of there as an extension,’ he says, and often he will barely look through it.

That trust continues long after the shutter closes; many photographs didn't make it into the publication to respect the person’s wishes for it to stay private. ‘I have to put my ego to the side, even though the photo is sick,’ he says. There’s a responsibility that comes with bringing a camera into these relationships: the people in Glazzard’s photographs are not simply subjects to be documented, but participants, with a say in how they are seen. Here, intimacy is less an aesthetic choice than an exchange, and the closeness we experience in the photographs is possible because that responsibility extends beyond the image.

To describe the book simply as a portrait of community would be a lethargic reading, and an insufficient one, something Glazzard himself acknowledges when he speaks cautiously about the neatness of the term. There is a tendency, he says, when making work in and around community, for people to ‘put you in this box and that’s all you are’.

We keep returning to a certain toughness in the photographs…grit, even. Glazzard pauses over the word. ‘Probably more like rough,’ he says, ‘Rough and a bit dirty.' It is a distinction that feels important, because the roughness here is not synonymous with hardship, nor is it polished into an easy narrative of resilience; it coexists with silliness, desire, mundanity and tenderness, closer to the mess of making a life with, around and sometimes in spite of other people.

Part of what gets lost in that neat categorisation, for Glazzard, is class. Handwritten lists interrupt the photographs throughout the book, giving fragments of context to otherwise life-dense pages; one gathers things that remind him of home, Kate Bush among them. Their inclusion allows another part of Glazzard’s experience to enter the book, complicating any temptation to read either him or his subjects through a single identity.

Class is also embedded in the material history of the photographs themselves. Some of Glazzard’s early rolls were processed in his bathroom because regularly paying for a lab wasn’t an option, meaning uneven colour, dust and accidents entered the work through circumstance as much as choice. Eventually, these “imperfections” become inseparable from Glazzard’s distinct photographic language, shaped in part by making do with what was available. His longstanding attachment to the zine comes from a similar place: cheap, immediate and possible to make without waiting for funding or permission. ‘It’s just better to make your own shit and just let them find you,’ he says.

Editing ten years of photographs began, sensibly enough, by covering his entire bedroom in them, surrounding him with the edit until there was almost no escaping it. Pictures came down at night whenever something no longer felt right. Once he reached around 300, he took them to his studio at Studio Voltaire, where Bruno Ceschel, founder of SPBH, and graphic designer Brian Paul Lamotte, joined him on the kitchen floor to find connections Glazzard had become too immersed to see clearly himself.

Chronology mattered less than whether the images spoke to one another: a rose might find itself beside a hand, or photographs separated by hearts and years to suddenly share an intimacy. Glazzard describes looking for ‘how close’ an image feels ‘without the camera being involved’, an instinct that seems to run through the book as much as it guided its edit, and when he finally handed the finished project in, he cried for two days.

Eventually, a kiss made the cover.

The Sound of Dirt and Beauty is published on 15 September by SPBH Editions / Mack. Glazzard presents the project at the ICA from 12 September, opening during Glue Book fair with a talk alongside Biogal and Hannah Geddes in the Nash and Brandon Rooms

mackbooks.co.uk

For an artist most associated with her renderings of the natural world – flowers, landscapes and bones – it is perhaps nonintuitive to consider architecture as a constant in Georgia O’Keeffe’s career.

Indeed, ‘Georgia O’Keeffe: Architecture,’ which opens today at the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA) is the first exhibition concerned exclusively with the artist’s relationship to the built environment. As the show ably demonstrates through an assembly of 36 paintings spanning almost 40 years of O’Keeffe’s career, architecture was a fundamental and perennial fascination for this painter-of-flowers.

The show was passionately cultivated by curator Benjamin W. Colman, who developed the concept from the sole O’Keeffe painting in the DIA’s permanent collection: Stables (1932). The work appears in the Barns section of the exhibition, which collects paintings developed mostly in relationship to upstate New York, particularly Lake George, to which O’Keeffe frequently sojourned from the city.

One of the earlier pieces in this section, My Shanty, Lake George (1922), provided an important talking point for O’Keeffe. Her exploration of colour, form and architecture in this painting was, among other things, a response to the sexism and pigeonholing that would attend her long and singular career in an extremely male-dominated profession.

‘I can paint one of those dismal-coloured paintings like the men [e.g. Arthur Dove, John Marin, Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley and Paul Strand],’ O’Keeffe said, in a recollection captured by the Phillips Collection, regarding Shanty. ‘I think just for fun I will try – all low-toned and dreary with the tree beside the door.’