Earlier this year, in a studio in London, creative director Ben McLaughlin found himself in a room full of Ukrainians. There were boxers from a local gym, a grandmother with her family, a Ukrainian make-up artist and a group pulled together from the city's Ukrainian community by casting director Julia Gilmour. Behind them hung enormous prints of landscapes shot 1,500 miles away, along the Dnipro river.

Dnipro Fotostudiia, a 38-page portfolio made over a single weekend, sits at the centre of Dnipro, The Plunging Shore, the first edition of Unofficial, a new publishing series McLaughlin launches this month through Officialzine. Each edition will be made with an artist or image-maker creating work about the place they grew up, with a deliberate focus on places that don't register as cultural centres. 'I find the more unexpected the place, the better,' McLaughlin says.

Up first is Eugenia Skvarska. The Ukrainian stylist and art director grew up in Kyiv, on the banks of the Dnipro, and after Russia destroyed the Kakhovka Dam in 2023, she felt an urgency to document the river. 'It's impossible to separate it from the history of Ukraine,' she says.

She travelled it between the sites of her childhood with photographer Kalpesh Lathigra in a tiny Smart car donated by a concrete company: guiding, driving, translating, telling the stories of the places they passed through.

The landscapes they came back with, shot on large-format film, are full of summer light. 'A lot of work I see from this region can feel a little cold,' McLaughlin says. 'I hope this project turns that perception on its head.'

Skvarska is more direct. 'We knew this project shouldn't be about documenting destruction. Kalpesh has photographed wars before, but this time we wanted to photograph the soul of the country. The war is still present, but only through subtle details: anti-tank hedgehogs, traces of grief, or a quiet sense of uncertainty in the background.'

She describes her boyfriend's mother spending a night in a bomb shelter, then the next afternoon at the river among families and friends. 'People are constantly trying to hold on to moments of normalcy,' she says.

Rather than presenting the road-trip material as straight documentary, McLaughlin printed Lathigra's landscapes as vast studio backdrops and staged the London portrait shoot against them, with Skvarska styling the cast in garments by young Ukrainian designers, alongside vintage clothing sent from Kyiv by her assistant. 'I wasn't interested in creating costumes, or a romantic image of Ukrainian identity,' she says. 'I wanted the styling to feel honest and contemporary, while still carrying traces of memory and home.'

The portraits sit at the heart of the book, bookended by the landscapes and combining the two collaborators' hands into a single visual language.

The format is difficult to place, which is the point. 'It's not a magazine, but it's not an artist book. It sits in this kind of funny space between,' says McLaughlin, who spent his early career making artist books, then commissioning for magazines.

Unofficial is, in part, a response to what he sees as a glut of both: too many photography books, too many image-led independent magazines with no tone of voice. His answer is to extract the single story and give it everything, an edition at a time. Each is printed in a run of 450 by Grafiche Veneziane and the production shifts to fit the project - an insert, a poster, or a piece of tipped-in ephemera. 'It's not neat,' he says, approvingly.

What began as a set of scans took two years to edit, in printed-out sessions with Adam Murray, a curator and course leader of the MA Fashion Image programme at Central Saint Martins (where Skvarska first began the project as his student) and a close collaborator throughout. Across the book, the river resurfaces in unexpected places - in a painting hanging in a photographed interior, in wedding-venue curtains that gather like waves. 'There's a strength in taking a bit of time,' McLaughlin says. 'I don't think the project would have got to this point without it.'

Two editions a year are planned, and the next two are already in motion. Though McLaughlin is keeping them under wraps, he hints that one draws on a small-town photographic archive spanning half a century. Future editions may loosen the format further still: he's interested in hometowns curated by contributors who aren't image-makers at all. The series grew partly out of conversations about authenticity, and about how often the image of a place has been made by people who aren't from it. It’s what he hopes every edition will share: work made from the inside, in places the world rarely looks.

'Unofficial Dnipro: The Plunging Shore' is now available through Officialzine's website.

Tomás Saraceno is preoccupied with the essential in life. For the Argentinian-born artist, elements such as water and salt – and the less welcome dust and spiderwebs – form the basis for epic, community-minded projects at the intersection of art and science.

With past projects, including 2015’s Aerocene Foundation, a movement that saw aerosolar sculptures rise in fossil-fuel-free flight that set 32 world records in the process, Saraceno has prioritised a focus on eco-social justice. He examines all his works in context, weaving links with local communities throughout and welcoming community participation.

Saraceno, who has had solo exhibitions at the Serpentine, Palais de Tokyo and SFMOMA, now unveils a major takeover of Munich’s historic Haus der Kunst museum. 'Ancestral Futures' builds on several facets of Saraceno’s thought, from his work into the behaviour of spiders to an exploration into the possibilities of air.

‘We are looking at pluralistic futures, with an s at the end,’ says Saraceno on the exhibition’s multi-faceted nature. ‘There are many futures - the futures of the spiders, the futures of the community, the futures of other forms of knowing.’

The exhibition’s subject matter may be disparate, but it is united by a sense of connection, epitomised most literally in Algo-r(h)i(y)thms (2019), an installation made up of suspended ropes that vibrate in deep and satisfying tones when pinged or flicked. Truly immersive, it is strictly hands on, and visitors are encouraged to crawl, hop or navigate their way through the sensory maze. It is an accumulation of Saraceno’s research into the habits of spiders, and an immersive and effective tribute to their collective way of existing.

Water, too, is central to Saraceno’s vision here, and the exhibition marks the unveiling of a permanent piece of land art created by Saraceno, working in close collaboration with the Indigenous communities of Red Atacama, Las Salinas Grandes in Northern Argentina, in their fight against the rapid depletion of ground water. Whether gently pooled in immersive other worlds Saraceno creates here, or contained in mountains of salt crystals which crunch underfoot, water is omnipresent.

‘The community have been trying to strongly convey the message, telling me for almost 15 years, all you do for the air is wonderful, but watch the water,' says Saraceno, 'focus on what is really important. Without water, nobody can live. It is fundamental for everybody, and not only for us as humans, but for the whole ecosystem we are part of.’

It was crucial for Saraceno to draw attention to the water crisis in an immersive, almost playful way. In the vast halls of the Haus der Kunst, visitors – adults, children and dogs – are encouraged to touch and to play.

‘When you stop playing, you stop learning and usually we stop playing at a certain age,' the artist says. 'Artists allow us to keep playing for longer. Let's enjoy it. Let's build something with joy and hope, and then hopefully we will learn something.’

'Tomás Saraceno. Ancestral Futures' is on view at the Haus der Kunst until 7 February 2027

I came to scoff and stayed to praise. Dataland, the museum of AI arts in Los Angeles by Refik Anadol and Efsun Erkılıç, is their supernatural fantasy of gorgeous data. Unlikely as it seems, with multi-coloured lights swirling overhead, underfoot and patterning the body, it is all drawn from the natural world.

The Turkish artists, who are married, first conceived of it during the 2019 Covid pandemic when they felt deprived of actual nature due to the parks and trails that were closed. Working indoors, they created their own out-of-doors, an AI realm that evolved as the new Machine Dreams: Rainforest.

Immersive art installations are commonplace now, but Dataland is a world apart, literally.

Eighty-four 4K Epson projectors and 50 billion pixels deliver images from the Amazon selected from the Smithsonian’s Encyclopedia of Life, a digital resource at the National Museum of Natural History. These are not films but the multicoloured, photographic essences of butterflies, orchids, ferns and fauna. It evolved from Anadol’s own choice to take ayahuasca (a psychedelic) with a spiritual leader and discover profound connections to the rainforest. Here, the journey through the galleries concludes with one called the Sanctuary and a sacred healing song of the Yawanawá people.

Is this recreated world a hallucinatory experience? Pretty much, and doubtless many visitors will enhance their 20 or more minutes of wandering or dancing to light and music.

An omni-sensual experience, it was designed by Anadol, Erkılıç and his collaborators to respond to your responses. At the entry to the 25,000 sq ft structure on the lower level of a Frank Gehry-designed high-rise in the downtown arts district, visitors are given wristbands that convey their physiological and emotional responses. A padded collar around the neck wafts a series of individualised odours, a collaboration with L’Oréal. I got sweet moonflower.

Walking through towering rooms radiant with patterns as well as specific images of foliage and fluidity, with birds and lightning bugs flittering about, my own response was astonishment. The music leans towards techno-pop with bird song from the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology. During my visit, a long passage from Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No.3 added to the sense of being in a meadow dappled with sunlight. The romantic theme was suggested by Esa-Pekka Salonen, conductor laureate of the LA Philharmonic at Disney Hall, which stands across the street. This integration of past, present and future may be key to some sense of wellbeing within the unprecedented presentation. Far from jarring, the Infinity Room is an Avatar-like virtual landscape and fable about a glass hummingbird based on Anadol’s own dreams. But the haunting sound of a mating call is that of a now-extinct bird in Hawaii. It is the last known recording of its call.

Anadol is the most advanced and sophisticated of artists using AI. His pulsing flat screens appear to morph from two to three dimensions and have been shown in many galleries and museums. Art critics were unconvinced and made unflattering comparisons to lava lamps. Anadol accelerated into the challenge by using AI to build his Large Nature Model – ‘the world’s first open-source AI model based solely on nature data’, trained on datasets drawn from 'ethical sources'. As he walked among visitors to this creation, he explained, 'Everything here was designed from the beginning. There are no cables. Intentionally, everything is just art and technology. It’s a first, never been done before. This is ten years of practice.'

He points out that for thousands of years, we have looked at art and had feelings. 'Our model is asking, can art feel us back? Our heartbeat, our emotions, our goosebumps? If it feels, what does that mean? We can hear, touch, smell, feel, even taste, so it's truly exploring the five senses.'

On the taste front, various types of chocolate – 'data sculptures' – are given to visitors at the conclusion of their wander through different galleries. The LA chocolaterie Valerie Confections used data from the show to make the sweets, some being fruity, another with an ashy, woodsy flavour.

About that data: Refik Anadol Studio claims it is erased after 30 days. Visitors can choose to keep their data, which can be used to decorate a T-shirt, available in the gift shop, of course. There are Dataland memberships offering priority visits as well as NFT options. At the conclusion of the show, there is an ironic moment. A gallery with an enormous robotic arm can use your data to produce paintings. The kind that hang on your wall as, well, art.

dataland.art

Transport for London has revealed the latest in its ongoing series of Art on the Underground commissions for the cover of the pocket Tube map, courtesy of American artist Ellen Gallagher. Her piece, Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish, 2026, is the 42nd commission in the series and is an exploration of the capital’s long maritime history.

The Art on the Underground programme has been giving collectable visual impetus to the pocket Tube map – the classic ‘journey planner’ – since 2004. The maps themselves date back to pre-Harry Beck days and represent a beautiful chronicle of the evolution of the design presentation and physical reach of the underground network.

Gallagher lives and works between Rotterdam, the Netherlands and New York, building up richly layered multimedia works that draw on the natural world – particularly water – history, and mythology. Even when reduced down to the compact tube map format, Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish reveals the evidence of work and rework across the surface of the image.

The result is an abstraction that teeters on the edge of figuration, and vice versa, a miniature world of interlocking forms. Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish is a reference to Pip, the ill-fated young Black cabin boy in Melville’s Moby Dick, who fell overboard and was then rescued but left traumatised. The piece ‘imagines the underwater world Pip experiences; the skeletal form of a whale lying on the seabed forms the central composition and brings together themes of marine life, transatlantic history and memory’.

London was once the focal point of the country’s role in the whaling trade, with locations like Greenland Dock receiving carcasses to transform into oil, and bones to be turned into corsets. Gallagher’s commission is a mental map of this long-forgotten and bloody trade, with the skeleton shown intertwined with strands of seaweed that evoke the famously abstracted London Tube map itself, created by Harry Beck in the 1930s.

Another layer of meaning comes courtesy of London’s hidden and covered waterways and historic wells, such as Sadler’s Wells and the River Fleet. As we travel under London, all these histories are bound up in the soil that surrounds us.

As well as gracing the cover of the pocket Tube map, Ellen Gallagher’s artwork will also be seen on posters put up around the network, part of an ongoing commissioning project that has placed art in front of billions of tube passengers over the last two decades.

Art.TFL.gov.uk, @ArtontheUnderground

Artist Benjamin Slinger captures millennial nostalgia in a new body of work entitled ‘Empire’. Here, the British visual artist creates a series of wire-frame paper lamps constructed from vintage fast-food paper bags. Launching with a show in London (23-25 July at 96 Robert Street, London NW1 3QP), the series of lamps will be available from the artist's online store.

The McDonald’s and Burger King bags were collected over the past three decades, and the resulting lamps sit somewhere between sculpture, design objects and cultural artefacts.

Discover 'Empire' by Copyright Slinger

For the 'Empire' series, Slinger was inspired by the classic ‘Akari’ paper lanterns designed by Isamu Noguchi and the graphic identities of multinational fast-food corporations.

While the lanterns are functional objects, the artist’s swapping of washi paper for fast-food bags, with their corporate and consumerist graphics, is a critical reflection on brands within contemporary life – bold and demanding attention. Through the evolving bag designs, the series also documents changes in popular culture over time.

Such dives into design and socio-economic history are not unusual in Slinger’s practice, which spans sculpture, painting and writing. However, ‘Empire’ emerged from one question: ‘How can one produce a design or mass-market object as a work of art?’

Slinger has lowered the boundaries between quality design and mass consumption. The viewer is invited to consider how something of value is produced, how certain objects acquire cultural authority, and how consumerist imagery is embedded in daily life.

An initial edition of 50 lamps will be released across three sizes and more than 25 individual designs. Each lamp is stamped, numbered and signed according to its edition.

‘Empire’ is on show from 23–25 July 2026 at 96 Robert Street, London NW1 3QP, slingercopyright.com

For Keith Haring, New York was a blank canvas, becoming a central piece of his artistic identity after he moved to the city in 1978. It shaped an aesthetic located at the intersection of urban art and activism, which Haring cultivated in the 1980s alongside peers Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat. They led a movement that brought art into the public space, in murals or on the subway, a crucial factor for Haring in raising awareness for fraught and urgent topics such as AIDS and education about drugs.

Born in New York, it was an energy that spread around the world, taking shape in an instantly recognisable shared visual language, a fluidity celebrated now with an exhibition, ‘Keith Haring: A World in Motion’, at New York art space 60 White.

‘Haring did not simply travel the world, he entered into dialogue with it,’ says Carlo McCormick, who curated the exhibition in collaboration with Lio Malca. ‘His work pulses with the energy of New York street culture while reflecting the histories, images, and rhythms of the places he encountered. The result is a global conversation, joyful, immediate, and profoundly connected.’

Recreated in 60 White’s multistorey space is San Francisco nightclub DV8, a hedonistic playground of the 1980s-90s that featured murals painted by Haring. This kind of community element is central to Haring’s work, and is also epitomised in his chalk drawings on black paper, which became familiar sights on the New York subway, and the Sister Cities – For Tokyo painting that he created in 1985, marking the friendship between New York and Tokyo, a bold and brilliant tribute to two cities he loved.

Adds Malca: ‘Keith Haring’s work is rooted in New York, but it belongs to the world. This exhibition highlights his ability to connect people through a shared visual language that remains as immediate and powerful today as it was in the 1980s.’

‘Keith Haring: A World in Motion’ is at 60 White, sixtywhite.com

The Modernist Society takes a detour from its usual publishing habits with a new monograph, The Architecture of Connection, featuring the work of painter Jen Orpin. We’re in the realm of unseen and overlooked infrastructure, with Orpin’s eye – and careful framing – capturing over 200 images of the bridges that span Britain’s motorways.

The choice of subject is certainly up the street of The Modernist’s usual patrons, not least because British motorway architecture is a very cohesive collection of post-war, proto-brutal and strictly functional structures. But Orpin has other motivations. Prior to embarking on the series, she had taken regularly journeys to visit her late father.

‘My dad passed away in December 2015 after three months in intensive care,’ she explains. ‘During that time, I travelled weekly between Manchester and Surrey. I became so familiar with each stretch of road and junction; with the bridges I passed under becoming landmarks. The journeys gave me time for reflection and became spaces where memory, grief, and nostalgia intertwined.’

This perspective gives a fresh layer of meaning to these structures; after all, who hasn’t marked a journey or a familiar route with landmarks such as these? These bridges might be seen as an unlikely subject for a landscape painter, but following her loss, the project consumed Orpin’s practice for eight years.

‘I was drawn to these liminal, overlooked places and concrete structures as both physical and symbolic forms: connecting places, people, and moments in time. They have become metaphors for transition, loss, and connection,’ Orpin says.

The Architecture of Connection brings the entire series together in a monograph for the first time, together with some of the artist’s writings about the work. The primary routes she took were the M1 and M6 motorways, along which one will find some of the most distinctive examples of motorway architecture.

The book was designed by the legendary Malcolm Garrett, renowned for his graphic design work across the British music industry. ‘Here was an unashamed celebration of a contemporary architecture often decried or ignored, yet rapidly becoming a timeless representation of the modern age,’ Garrett says. ‘Like Jen, I admired the elegance not hitherto associated with such functional structures. These images, both painterly and photographic, were of transient moments made effortlessly permanent through what they chose to include or exclude.’

Aficionados of motorway infrastructure – and there are plenty out there – will recognise many of these landmarks, including the Pennine Tower above Forton Services in Lancashire, the M6 bridge that (still) bears the logo of 80s band The Pies, or the Chalfont Viaduct, an Edwardian structure above the M25 that’s also a familiar graffiti site.

‘Jen’s paintings have a stillness and precision, echoed in Malcolm's design which gives them exactly the space they deserve,’ says Jack Hale, who co-founded The Modernist Society with Eddy Rhead and Maureen Ward in 2008. ‘it was a genuine pleasure to work with Jen and Malcolm on this book.’

The Architecture of Connection, Jen Orpin, £45. The first 100 orders will also receive a free limited-edition print produced by Klein Editions, The-Modernist.org, @TheModernist, JenOrpinPaintings.com, @JenOrpinPainter

Mini golf, a playful yet serious pursuit, is a lesson in world-building, a challenge which nine artists in London haven’t been able to resist.

In Battersea, Miranda July, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Delaine Le Bas, Kaylene Whiskey, Saeborg, Natasha Tontey, BKTHERULA, Soda Jerk and Pat Brassington have created interactive golf artworks. The immersive works are a reaction to mini golf’s history, after it was created in the nineteenth century by Scottish women who were excluded from ‘real’ golf courses but refused to sit on the sidelines.

This subversive spirit runs throughout, in the holes which incorporate everything from surreal video to fairground games and fortune-telling.

‘I am a big advocate for mediums that invite artists to push beyond the scope of their regular creative practices, and those that ask audiences to engage with artworks differently, and so in general I think that durational or interactive projects are really interesting,’ says curator Grace Herbert.

‘Whilst digging into the history of mini golf, I was thinking about how there are so many things in our contemporary life that we don’t think about the origins of, that we take for granted, or even infantilise a little bit like mini golf, that have these incredibly rich and even rebellious histories. From here, the idea of a mini-golf and art exhibition by women and non-binary artists whose creative practices think about identity, feminism and politics in various ways emerged.’

Herbert was keen to include artists working across mediums and backgrounds in her curation, resulting in a game here interpreted by an eclectic community which includes musicians, filmmakers, performers, sculptors, activists, athletes, and quantum physicists. The results are fully immersive – these are games you want to play.

‘The brief to artists was to come up with a concept that could be integrated with the design and gameplay, rather than say making objects that would be plonked on a course as obstacles,’ Herbert adds.

’And they all really did that. Delaine Le Bas, for example, was talking about her experience as part of the Romani-Sinti community living in the UK and often feeling a square-peg in a round hole – and so we ended up 3D printing square golf balls for her work.’

The Art of Mini Golf, from RISING Melbourne and Battersea Arts Centre (BAC), is on until 26 July 2026 Battersea Arts Centre

Widely acknowledged as the most-respected photography prize out there, the Prix Pictet has focused on photography’s ability to incite conversations around sustainability since its inception in 2008.

Every other year, the prize announces a new theme, revealed at Les Rencontres d'Arles, which engages with these social and environmental considerations, triggering a cycle which ends with the winning work undertaking a global tour. Themes typically centre around one word – previous iterations have included Fire, Storm and Disorder – and now director of the Prix Pictet Michael Benson has revealed that the theme will be Jungle.

‘The world’s jungles are the great green lungs of the planet,’ says Benson. ‘These huge carbon sinks play a crucial role in regulating and helping to stabilise the planet’s climate. Yet across the globe jungles are in crisis, forests are threatened by deforestation, fires, and degradation; surface water has been lost and rivers are increasingly disconnected and polluted. The implications of any loss or degradation of these densely interconnected ecosystems extend well beyond changes in land use.’

The jury – led by chair Dutch-born British businessman Sir Tim Smit – will review portfolios of work from all around the world which respond to the theme, before deciding on a shortlist of twelve photographers, set to be announced next summer. Elsewhere, Prix Pictet will also host an exhibition at Paris Photo, to mark the Pictet Group’s new role as the official partner.

It is a collaborative relationship which speaks to this year’s theme, exploring the links between humanity and society. ‘Nothing in a jungle exists alone,’ Benson adds. ‘They are complex interconnected systems that we only vaguely understand. The jungle is a place of mystery and secrets. It is a place of legendary lost cities and civilisations of economic adventures and many broken dreams. In this way, the jungle mirrors contemporary human environments more than we might expect. Cities, digital networks and social ecosystems have their own undergrowth: layers of complexity that obscure as much as they reveal.’

prix.pictet.com

New York artist Jordan Eagles was biking along the East River three years ago when he noticed a man with a sports jersey that read 'The Mets are in our blood.' A lifelong fan of the legendary baseball team, Eagles was struck by the bodily immediacy of the emblazoned slogan.

Eagles swiftly turned to eBay to track down the shirt. As it happened, the merchandise was handed out to blood donor fans at the team’s stadium, Citi Field. After customising the top into a muscle t-shirt for his gym workouts, however, the artist realised he was deprived from truly owning the jersey for what it promotes. 'I could not earn this shirt although I was captivated by my own love of the Mets,' he tells Wallpaper*.

While the artist has been creating works with real animal blood since the 1990s, Eagles himself cannot be a blood donor, owing to being on PrEP, the medication that drastically reduces the risk of contracting HIV. The irony was not lost on the artist, and is the focus of a powerful ongoing exhibition, 'Bases Loaded', on view at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn.

The show features 13 of the same Mets jerseys with blood of an undetectable HIV-positive man splashed across them. The grouping of orange and grey uniforms echo the total number of defensive and offensive players on the baseball field, yet here, devoid of perspiring bodies, they become drenched in another form of corporeality. The exhibition also features nine mixed media resin sculptures shaped in the form of a home plate – the base players must touch in order to score a run.

Gay men in the US have long faced stigma around blood donation. After decades of a ban on gay and bisexual men’s choice to donate blood, the FDA eased the restriction in 2023 and began imposing questions about sexual history to any potential donor. The questionnaire, as Eagles notes, still has a bias towards anal intercourse and HIV status. PrEP users cannot donate unless they stop taking the pill for three months.

The politics of blood has long concerned Eagles who has utilised real blood of gay men in myriad forms. From soaking vintage Superman cartoons with blood at an exhibition at the Princeton University Art Museum to projecting close-up blood blotches at institutions such as the Getty and High Museum of Art, the artist has made the public intimate with the spine-chilling tactility of the life-giving fluid.

The show at the Brooklyn multimedia art space, however, holds a deeper personal bond for Eagles. Besides Eagles's own blood and that of the anonymous donor, some of the resin sculptures contain the blood of the artist’s father. As the figure who exposed the artist to Mets fandom and a symbol of familial blood lineage, the inclusion embodies the son’s reckoning with his own reality and his innate need to fit in. Inside a series of resin sculptures, meanwhile, the artist has suspended family photos, in which everyone wears Mets T-shirts, in blood. Other works contain needles, face masks or baseball cards blend with the densely red fluid.

'This project invites the public to think about policy but it is also more broadly about identity, belonging and what it means to be be a part of something,' Eagles says.

Besides the immediate tactility of the works on view, the slipperiness of semantics unifies them and the seemingly disparate realms of sports and sexuality. From the show’s suggestive title to baseball sayings such as 'first base,' 'innings' or 'receivers,' the linguistic flirt between the game and gay sex imbues a playfulness to the otherwise heavy subject.

'Blood in language is often used to be divisive as well, but I am also thinking about my own life and ways of belonging to a community and wanting to be a part of a team that ultimately you are not permitted to be a part of,' Eagles says.

'Jordan Eagles: Bases Loaded' is on view at Pioneer Works through 9 August 2026

Lego Art is one of the more ambitious arms of the Danish toymaker’s empire of creativity. Past recreations of classic works range from Leonardo da Vinci to Claude Monet, Keith Haring to Robert Indiana.

The latest artist to get the brick-built treatment is Austrian master Gustav Klimt (1862-1918). In modern times, Klimt is firmly established as one of the big tickets of contemporary art collecting, but back in the day, his richly sensual and seductive artworks found favour in the gilded age of early 20th-century Vienna.

It’s to this epochal period that Lego has turned, recreating one of the artist’s very best-known works, The Kiss, painted between 1907 and 1908. The original, which measures nearly 2m square, hangs in Vienna’s Österreichische Galerie Belvedere, where it is one of the museum’s star attractions.

Although the Lego Kiss can’t match up to Klimt’s expansive scale, there is still a wealth of detail and a veritable bushel-load of bricks that have gone into the set; 4,000 pieces, to be precise. Measuring in at 60cm by 54cm, Lego’s design team, led by master model designer Milan Madge, has used numerous quirky build techniques to replicate the artist's style.

This has involved creating a multi-layered surface, a dense scattering of single and double-stud pieces, along with smooth and textured parts. In addition to a number of specially decorated Lego elements, there are also imaginative reuses, such as the coiled whip used in everything from Lego Botanical bouquets to a number of Indiana Jones sets (naturally).

The entire project was developed in close collaboration with Vienna’s Belvedere Museum, with Stephanie Auer, the museum’s curator of 19th- and 20th-century art, describing the process as a ‘once-in-a-lifetime experience'. 'Together with Milan Madge, we had extensive discussions about Gustav Klimt’s symbolism, ornamentation, and artistic techniques, as well as how these could be represented using Lego bricks,’ she explains.

Madge describes the process as a ‘unique creative challenge.’ ‘By combining golden Lego elements with specially decorated pieces, we were able to recreate the artwork’s distinctive shades and textures in a building experience that celebrates its extraordinary beauty,’ he continues.

The build process provides a vivid insight into the composition and textural make-up of the original painting. And thanks to inbuilt picture fasteners, once completed, Lego’s take on The Kiss is all set for display.

Lego Art Gustav Klimt - The Kiss, set number 31221, £269.99, Lego.com, Belvedere.at

Also read: Lego Architecture reaches its apotheosis in this massive model of the Sagrada Família

Spiked hair, torn fishnets, safety pins pushed through skin and clothing: punk has often announced itself through the body. It is a fitting point of departure for ‘Unruly – The Body in Punk’, now on view at ARoS in Aarhus, which reconsiders the movement not simply as a sound or a style, but as a physical language of protest, in which the body became a charged site of rebellion.

Bringing together more than 130 works – from photography and film to collage, installation and fashion ephemera – many of them shown in Scandinavia for the first time, the exhibition draws on curator Marie Arleth Skov’s three-year postdoctoral research project. Its focus is the emergence and evolution of punk across London, Berlin, Copenhagen and Aarhus in the 1970s and 1980s, tracing how dress, gesture and performance came to function as acts of refusal. ‘It can be difficult from today’s point of view to understand just how provocative, or even threatening, punks were perceived [to be],’ Skov says. ‘The reaction was one of absolute shock. That’s why I called the exhibition “Unruly”; there were many ways the punk revolt was incorporated, but they were all unruly.’

The exhibition opens with a quote from Vivienne Westwood printed on the wall – ‘If you want change, the best thing to do is attack sex’ (1976) – before moving to Sheila Rock’s photograph, Jordan in Doorway of SEX (1977). Jordan, the general manager of Westwood and Malcolm McLaren’s King’s Road boutique at the time, leans against the doorway in a black leotard and sheer tights, her blonde beehive and heavy eyeliner turning her body into a statement in itself. As one of the defining faces of British punk, she sets the tone for a show in which appearance becomes both performance and provocation. ‘Her fierce attitude and the way she dressed say a lot about how punks incorporated revolt,’ Skov notes.

That same spirit shapes the exhibition’s thematic structure. Rather than unfolding as a strict chronology, ‘Unruly’ moves through a series of ideas: the DIY ethos of London punk, where second-hand clothing, homemade fashion and fanzines collapsed the hierarchy between performer and audience; the East German underground, where punk existed under Stasi surveillance and dress, dance and performance became forms of dissent; and the body as a site of gender play, fetish and self-invention. Fishnets, latex, PVC and bondage references recur throughout, as punk style challenged beauty ideals, sexual norms and the commodification of the body.

The curation, in turn, channels that same sensibility. Skov and her team wanted to avoid a ‘clichéd punk aesthetic’ and instead stay true to punk’s ethos through DIY and recycled display elements, reusing rubber curtains and mirrors from earlier exhibitions. Black walls, open metal racks and visible screws lend the show a stripped-back industrialism, sidestepping the polished neutrality that still dominates so much exhibition design.

Among the standout works is Linder’s Limiting Accessories Ltd. (1977), a mock magazine spread in which Buzzcocks frontman Howard Devoto wears a series of lingerie masks designed by the artist, pouting and gasping somewhere between desire and helplessness. The inversion is sharp: where women have so often been cast as the wearers of constraining accessories, Linder redirects that apparatus onto a male body, making masculinity itself appear staged, vulnerable and faintly absurd.

The exhibition concludes with Nina Sten-Knudsen’s film Panic Eye (1979), projected in extreme close-up, the restless eye darting back and forth across the wall. Surreal, fragmented and faintly unnerving, it is an apt final image. For Skov, punk’s relevance lies precisely in that unease. Today, she sees a renewed ‘no future’ mood shaped by climate crisis, economic rupture and war, alongside a return of conservative thinking around gender roles, precisely the kind of order the punk body was built to resist.

‘Unruly – The Body in Punk’ is on view at ARoS in Aarhus, Denmark until 13 December 2026

The first thing you see as you enter Vibeke Tandberg’s new show is her face, twice. A monitor shows Merge (1998), a 16mm film in which the photographer has double-exposed herself onto herself. It’s a simple effect, but this low-res doubling is a synecdoche of Tandberg’s body of work: there is no one single self.

Questions of identity and performativity run throughout ‘They Live’, a new exhibition at Bergen’s Kode in Tandberg’s native Norway. The show tracks Tandberg’s career, from her early photo projects in the 1990s to more recent plaster works and videos shown for the first time. A key figure from the Nordic wave of young artists in the 1990s, Tandberg was an early advocate for digital photography and photo manipulation. For Living Together (1996), Tandberg used then-new photo editing tools to create a photo series in which she appears as her own twin. In Faces (1998), she merged her face with other people’s, creating androgynous, fictional portraits. The results are unsettling, not because they enter uncanny-valley territory, but rather because they seem hyperrealistic. There’s a clear through-line between these 30-year-old works and today’s debate around authenticity and truth in imagery.

Tandberg herself appears many times throughout ‘They Live’, but she insists that these are not self-portraits. 'That’s a loaded term,' she told me. 'It feels like a self-portrait is done because you want to tell people something about your inner self. It's confiding in the viewer something more psychological than I have ever been interested in. For me, it’s always been more conceptual.'

Tandberg, who started life in the theatre before training to be a photographer, has always enjoyed dress-up. She came to national attention with the Bride series (1993), in which she appears as an idealised newlywed alongside 11 different men. The photographs were published as wedding announcements in local newspapers on the same day, 24 July. The project established Tandberg’s main interests: performativity, playfulness, but also a desire to provoke and critique patriarchal norms.

In 2003, Tandberg bought her most important accessory. She purchased a latex mask and the character of ‘old man’ was born. He appears in much of Tandberg’s subsequent work. Old Man Going Up and Down a Staircase (2003) shows Tandberg, pregnant with twins at the time, performing the role of the aged man, heaving himself up and down a flight of stairs. 'It was such a relief to get rid of my own face,' Tandberg says. 'I was grateful to work within a mask, hiding myself.'

Soon, however, she let other people perform the role. 'It could be anyone in that mask,' she says. 'I didn't really need it to be myself anymore.' The mask is worn by the ballet dancer Maria Kochetkova in Old Man Dancing (2021) and by an assistant in Post Americana (2026), a new film for the exhibition where the old man is a dying cowboy.

The most interesting moments of ‘They Live’, however, star Tandberg’s face – and these are not confined to photography. Echo’s Bones (2021), named after a Beckett short story and realised during the Covid pandemic, contains 87 plaster busts of Tandberg: they lie on the floor, distorted and brutalised – like a graveyard of mutilated selves. As with Bride, Echo’s Bones sees Tandberg using herself to play with conceptual, if unsettling, ideas. Echo’s Bones looks like a society that’s died, but it’s also the same death mask over and over.

The accompanying exhibition catalogue contains several essays that situate Tandberg in an intellectual framework; her work is interpreted through Foucault, Butler, and Deleuze, among others. The exhibition itself, however, only has introductory wall text. We are left to interpret the works ourselves – but not before feeling something first. Tandberg’s oeuvre is well suited to theoretical discussion, but audiences shouldn’t let ideas stand in the way of emotional engagement. After all, Tandberg’s entire career, from the camp to the macabre, is rooted in play.

‘They Live’ is at Kode Bergen Art Museum until 12 September 2026

kodebergen.no

You may have heard of Cuban-born American artist Ana Mendieta (1948-1985), but how much do you know about her art? Her multidisciplinary practice encompassed sculpture, film, performance, photography, painting and drawing, but she is best known for her ‘silueta’, or ‘earth-body', works, in which she outlined her body in nature.

More than 120 of Mendieta’s works are now on view in a new retrospective at Tate Modern in London (15 July 2026 – 17 January 2027), including a nude woman’s form in a tomb covered with sprigs of small white flowers, the flaming form of a body on a sandy landscape, and the shape of a body in a shoreline, being slowly eroded by the tide. The exhibition takes us through Mendieta’s practice, from her teenage years up until around 1984, exploring her whole body of work.

'Tate's involvement with Ana Mendieta really started in the 2000s; we acquired works as early as 2009, so this is not really something new for Tate. But in 2020, when I joined [the gallery] to be in charge of moving image, the first acquisition I worked on with my colleague Mike Wellen, who is the co-curator of this show, was an acquisition of six films by Mendieta, so our representation of the artist really grew tremendously from 2020,’ explains the exhibition’s co-curator Valentine Umansky.

Tate has the largest holding of any museum of Mendieta’s films and this is the biggest-ever UK exhibition of the artist’s work. Many of the works on display have never been shown in the country before.

Mendieta was exiled from Cuba, where she had had an affluent childhood (until her father became a political prisoner), to the United States at the age of 12; there, she lived in foster care with her sister. She went on to study art at the University of Iowa, gaining her MA in 1972, and even in the very early stages of her career she experimented and pushed boundaries by working with themes of violence, gender and ecology. In creating and recording ephemeral works, she explored core themes of death, energy, gender, nature, transformation and spirituality, the last through references to the religion Santeria.

In an early work, Moffitt Building Piece, 1973, she staged the aftermath of an accident on a public pavement and recorded the public’s reaction to it in a series of photographs. This is shown in the exhibition alongside a film work that shows the artist painting the words ‘She Got Love’ in red on a white wooden door. Her work, although it sits in the canon of its time, today feels urgent and radical, partly due to Mendieta’s great gift for image-making and the fact that her subject matter resonates in the current moment.

‘One thing that might be most important is that our awareness of ecology has fundamentally shifted [since Mendieta’s time] and so I had a feeling that younger audiences [and others] in the UK would be very sensitive to some of the topics raised in her works that maybe were not read in this way in the 1970s or 1980s – particularly, her desire and drive to blend [with] or dissolve in nature, and also her care for what we would now call a sustainable mindset,’ Umansky explains.

This is echoed in the restaging of a number of ephemeral works by Mendieta, realised for the exhibition in collaboration with her niece and the head of her estate, Raquel Cecilia Mendieta.

Where no instructions were left for realising these works, Raquel collaborated with the curators at Tate to recreate them as closely as possible in a gallery setting, in some cases for the first time since they were conceived.

Yemaya Gifts, 1982, was originally created for Museo Barrio, an important place for Latin American and Caribbean artists; it has been recreated in sand and mushroom corals for the first time for the Tate Modern exhibition.

For a work in the Untitled: Silueta, 1978, series, a part of the Old Westbury forest at New York College has been recreated using found timber and found and foraged soil, moss and stones.

‘We worked very closely with Raquel Cecilia Mendieta,’ Umansky adds. ‘She had done a series of restagings, but this one [from the Untitled: Silueta, 1978, series] was the first [restaging of that particular work], so it's always an experiment.’

These restagings act as an essential bridge between the documentation film and photography and what must have been the very powerful immediacy of Mendieta’s performances. They also speak to the theme of rebirth that recurs throughout her work.

Much of Mendieta’s work was essentially ephemeral, although very well documented. The exhibition includes sections that reference symbolic locations important to the artist’s work, such as The Grove and The River, while a section called The Repertoire looks at repeated patterns, materials and motifs in her work.

Previous discussion of Mendieta has often centred on the circumstances of her death in 1985 (her husband, artist Carl Andre, was charged then acquitted of her murder after she plummeted from his apartment), but here, we get a deep dive into her legacy as an artist and the impact of her work.

Among the films we see in the exhibition is Sweating Blood, 1973, and Blood Feathers, 1974, where Mendieta covered herself with blood and feathers, transforming herself into a kind of bird, and Grass Breathing, 1974, where she created a kind of pulsing grassy site. There is also the series she made with writer and poet Morty Sklar, Untitled (Facial Hair Transplants), 1972, where she took his facial hair to create a beard on herself. Alongside are works that sit gently in nature, to be later washed away, or where the artist blended her body with the landscape. She was experimenting with gender, identity, physical presence, a love of natural spaces and the ambiguities therein.

There are also many drawings and paintings, previously unseen in London, and a work titled Parachute, made with children that Mendieta taught while working as a primary school teacher.

This show goes some way to replacing myth about Mendieta with fact. It also places the artist alongside the likes of Tracey Emin and Frida Kahlo (also the subjects of Tate Modern exhibitions this summer, Emin until 30 August, Kahlo until 3 January 2027), who have similarly been the focus of much mythmaking, and demonstrates that however much we might know about Mendieta’s life, there is more to learn from her art.

Umansky reflects that the show forms ‘part of the work that the artist’s estate has been doing very meticulously over the last ten years to correct some of the factual errors that were written around [her] work. This is a process that allows for better definition of the works so that they're seen as [if] brand new and in the best possible light.’

‘Ana Mendieta’ at Tate Modern, London, 15 July 2026 to 17 January 2027, tate.org.uk

Two tapestries designed by William Kentridge open one of the early galleries at Palazzo Mora, woven by the Johannesburg-based Stephens Tapestry Studio in hand-spun, hand-dyed mohair in centuries old tradition. They form part of the Porter Series of tapestries that Kentridge has made in collaboration with the studio and respond to the theme of migration and ‘portage’ – or to bear one’s cargo between seas and rivers. We see silhouettes and figures heavy with artefacts, crossing continents, as depicted by maps from nineteenth-century atlases. The images are restless, in motion, forever migrating.

They set the tone for the eighth edition of Personal Structures. The exhibition, organised biennially by the European Cultural Centre Italy, which runs alongside but independent of the Venice Biennale, and has taken ‘Confluences’ as its theme.

A few canals from the Arsenale and Giardini, where national pavilions arrive heavy with the politics of the moment, the Marinaressa Gardens, and palazzos Mora and Bembo offer something quieter. Personal Structures has, since its founding in 2002 by the artist René Rietmeyer, sought to be an open platform for established, mid-career and emerging artists, and it allows each curatorial circle to set its own pitch. This year sees more than 150 artists from over 30 countries gathered across the three venues.

‘With Confluences, different languages and perspectives come together, not to become the same, but rather to create something new,’ says Sara Danieli, who heads art at ECC Italy. The metaphor sits well in a city built on water, where for centuries east and west arrived in the same harbour and made something out of the encounter.

And it is this theme of movement and migration, of belonging or indeed not – be it physically or otherwise – that naturally dominates much of the exhibitions here. We see this at the entrance to Palazzo Mora, where the artist J. Oscar Molina’s ‘Cartographies of the Displaced’ lines the courtyard representing the El Salvador pavilion for the first time at the Biennale. Curated by Alejandra Cabezas, the sculptures look up uneasy to the sky and read as a meditation on exile, and the struggle to ever truly belong to a place or a time.

Upstairs Mora gives shelter to the Palestine Museum US, with a moving display of embroidered panels depicting images of the recent war. Organised by the museum director Faisal Saleh and forming part of the larger ‘Palestine History Tapestry’ project, the series sees work by sixty women in refugee camps across Lebanon and the West Bank who were commissioned to translate a series of photographs using the traditional embroidery technique, tatreez. Each piece is eighty centimetres by fifty and contains fifty-five thousand stitches. The panels hover between image and texture, and the labour held in each stitch slows the eye in a way photographs rarely do.

The mood lifts at Palazzo Bembo, where the top floor of this charming and peculiar building, with views over the Rialto Bridge and the Grand Canal, has been taken over by the Japanese curatorial platform B-OWND. ‘Relational Logic – Beyond Dualism, a World Reconnected’ invites the viewer to look at art beyond grids and boundaries, through the Japanese concept of ‘en’, the word for the connections that bind people, places and moments. Behind it sits the Buddhist idea of ‘ku’, or emptiness, which holds that all things are interdependent and arise temporarily through their relationships with others and the environment. There is an animist sensibility threaded through the rooms as well, one that recognises spirit in all things and sees humans and nature as part of a single, inseparable whole.

The exhibition unfolds from space to space, where seven artists work across art, craft and manga, and a separate room is given over to public tea ceremonies and meditation. The tea utensils on view, the flower vases and bowls, are tools for daily use, and have been objects of devotion for Japanese collectors for five or six hundred years. Ken Ishigami, the curator, quotes Sen no Rikyū, the sixteenth-century master regarded as the father of the Japanese tea ceremony: “The most beautiful thing in imperfection is perfection.”

At the centre of one room is ‘The Way of Interbeing’, a delicate, immersive site-specific bamboo installation by Tanabe Chikuunsai IV, the fourth-generation Osaka bamboo artist whose family has practised the craft for more than a century. Some four thousand strands of recycled tiger bamboo are woven together and held in place by tension alone. It reads like a single architectural gesture, past and future and west and east braided into one space. A final room, a collaboration with Shueisha Manga-Art Heritage, brings lithographs and lenticular prints from Hirohiko Araki’s ‘JoJo's Bizarre Adventure’, the fifth part of which is set across Italy and passes through Venice.

João Gilberto’s ‘É Luxo Só’, arranged by Stan Getz, floats through the gallery of the Brazilian photographer Sandra Cattaneo Adorno, a previous ECC Award winner who returns with ‘Fragments of Light’. Thirteen silver-inked monochromes hang against vermillion walls, and a central photomosaic of the Santa Monica pier reassembles itself as we move around it. The works tilt towards the light streaming through the vast palazzo windows, like sunflowers opening to the sun, says the artist.

Elsewhere in Palazzo Bembo, another Special Project, ‘Unison’, brings together work by the Vienna-based artist Rita Sabo. Curated by Dr Tayfun Belgin, the installation weaves fifteen cultures into a single polyphonic field, layered as painting, sculpture, scent and sound, so the visitor moves through the rooms by all the senses at once. Sabo’s abstract forms delve into the subconscious; her practice fuses traditions and religions and symbol-systems, setting up a vibrating field of marks that resists linear timelines, fixed narratives and singular cultural attributions. Her richly textured work pushes past the linear and the obvious, for something altogether more subtle and hidden.

More sits across the three venues than a single visit can hold, and it is tempting, in an exhibition of this scale, to seek a single argument. Personal Structures actively resists the impulse, and that is its strength.

I’m reminded of something William Kentridge said last year at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, when asked whether he had any hope in a world that for many of us feels increasingly dark and difficult to digest. ‘I have both hope and pessimism, both running together. I think to have only one or the other is to blind yourself to part of the world, and say everything can only be a disaster. It blinds you to many things that are happening. And to say everything’s for the best blinds you to disasters that are very, very present.’ It is the holding of both that makes his work resonate so widely, and the same holding makes ‘Confluences’ feel coherent.

‘Personal Structures – Confluences’ is on view at Palazzo Bembo, Palazzo Mora and the Marinaressa Gardens, Venice, until 22 November 2026. Admission is free.

personalstructures.com

Wimbledon is, of course, defined by the tennis – or is it? What fascinated me most was everything that surrounds it. Over generations, the championships have developed a visual language of their own, built through colour, ritual, uniforms, architecture and an extraordinary attention to detail.

Discover the vibrant design codes of Wimbledon

Working almost exclusively with tight frames, I focused on colour, geometry and repetition. This year's brilliant sunshine became an important part of the story, casting hard shadows across the grounds and reducing many scenes to graphic compositions of green, white and purple. The tennis itself often became secondary to the systems that support it.

Every element feels intentional. One particular standout was the London Fire Brigade, who act as stewards and security throughout the fortnight. Professional, impeccably presented and genuinely welcoming, they quietly contribute to the uniquely British character of Wimbledon, where traditions and systems have been refined over generations.

Then there are the strawberries. They are one of those enduring Wimbledon rituals that have become almost mythological, with queues for them sometimes longer than those for the courts themselves. Alongside the uniforms, scoreboards, pristine grass courts, straw hats, Pimm's and the iconic all-white dress code, they form part of a visual language that is unmistakably Wimbledon.

Switzerland’s Fondation Beyeler, in picturesque Riehen on the outskirts of Basel, has proven to have a sharp curatorial eye. Having first opened its doors in 1997, the Renzo Piano-designed modern art museum is a haven in the village, hosting an impressive and frequently changing permanent art collection alongside contemporary retrospectives.

French artist Pierre Huyghe, known for his surreal, dystopian and often creepy works and films, may seem an offbeat choice, but his solo exhibition – his first in a Swiss museum – makes for an immersive takeover of the space.

‘With our permanent exhibition, we often like to react to the contemporary exhibitions currently showing,’ says Fondation Beyeler’s managing director, Ulrike Erbslöh, who works with the institution’s partners, such as Richard Mille, which is supporting this exhibition. ‘There is a kind of reading of the collection, where we see what works and what is relevant for the artist that also challenges visitors, because they come and ask. Since we have a comparatively small collection, we can play around with it.’

This flexibility works well for Huyghe, who resists traditional exhibition formats, focusing instead on creating atmospheric environments through works that take on a life of their own. His site-specific work for Fondation Beyeler creates uncanny worlds that encompass sound and sight.

The effect is subtle. At first glance, what appears to be an empty space is soon revealed to be humming with a dystopian form of life. We glimpse it through the holes in the walls, or feel it in exhaled breaths. A worm, curled up on the floor, slithers from one end of the room to the other, apparently at random. Clear panes of light anchoring the space steadily become misty and opaque. Throughout, Huyghe’s films, including the recent Liminals (2025), show faceless humans navigating unfamiliar realms that sit somewhere between the Earth and space.

It is all brilliantly disorientating, and made all the more so by the masters, including Monet, Picasso and Francis Bacon, who wait to greet you on your exit. ‘We want visitors to be able to just wander around,’ Erbslöh adds. ‘It gives us this possibility to not distinguish too much, but to have people experience the whole idea of our programming – having exhibitions that also refer to our collection, or have some kind of relationship [with it].’

Pierre Huyghe is at the Fondation Beyeler, with support from partner Richard Mille, until 13 September 2026

fondationbeyeler.ch

‘These women I create have a mind of their own,’ says artist and Wallpaper* US400 honoree Danielle Mckinney. ‘They really challenge me. There is an alchemy that has to happen as I paint.’

American painter Mckinney is a chronicler of the human condition, and particularly adept at capturing that very specific sensation of being alone. In her cinematic and atmospheric portraits in oil paint, Mckinney’s solitary women are at home; smoking in the bath, slouching over a cup of tea, curled up on the couch or sprawled in bed. They emerge, tantalisingly, out of the depths of a darkness that doesn’t quite engulf them, drawn in richly observed palettes of colour.

Mckinney was born in Montgomery, Alabama, attending the Atlanta College of Art before studying photography at Parsons School of Design in 2013. Until the pandemic, painting was only a hobby, with her main work photographing social environments. She was drawn to the way people interacted in public spaces in New York, but when Covid hit, the streets cleared and the population donned masks, Mckinney moved inside. She began taking her painting seriously, and sending her work to galleries.

In the sense that her paintings are snapshots of grand and imagined narratives, they are a natural development from photography. ‘I think about the frame when I make the painting,’ Mckinney says. ‘Photography is all about capturing the moment, and I think I'm doing the same thing in the paintings. I'm really intrigued by interior spaces, and I really enjoy collaging those worlds together photographically and creating another moment within the painting. I feel like I never abandoned my craft. It's just that I'm using it in another way to tell the story.’

Running consistently within her stories are musings on the significance of domestic space. Throughout, the home is as consistent a character as the women themselves. Mckinney is happiest at home – ‘space for me is sacred’, she says – and is building on an art history canon by documenting its domestic rituals. She is intent on stripping back the layers of a persona to get to the heart of who a woman is when she gets home at the end of the day, and closes the door.

‘I was intrigued by the interior space and the woman. I started to look, first, for Black figurative painting, and it wasn't anything that I could really find. I went deeper, and that's when I fell in love with Vermeer and Bonnard. You feel the energy of the sitters in the room, you feel them as a watcher. They create a stage for you to enter.’ Their eschewing of hyper-realist scenes, epitomised by the likes of Rembrandt, is something Mckinney embraces in her own work, choosing raw emotion over perfection.

This emotion plays out in her richly drawn interiors. Mckinney’s women are framed by darkness – she begins by painting the canvas black – and then come the hands, the body and the face. ‘That's the signature, because I feel like that is what people are going to look at to define the mood. So I talk to her – come on, come on, don't mess up on me, please come. And she does, but she's sometimes not who I want her to be.’

The interiors follow, rendered in dark green, browns, burnt umber and sienna. ‘I love to adorn her in her space. She represents this intensity; she's by herself and sometimes not smiling, but when you look and you see these fluorescent red fingernails, it brings wittiness to the intensity.’ For the interior detailing, Mckinney pulls from Pinterest, or riffles through vintage magazines from the 1940s, which she finds on eBay. Sometimes, she listens to music, and makes the mood it triggers tangible.

By painting women alone, Mckinney is still reframing, this time rethinking the connotations inherent in the idea of a solitary woman. ‘The idea of interior space to me is extremely important, because it represents rest, it represents shelter and safety. When people enter an interior space, they're moved by it, or alarmed, or they're registering their sense of safety within that. That’s a natural thing in a painting, because people want to enter it.’

Mckinney can’t help but become attached to her women, she says. ‘I love my ladies. When they leave the studio, I’m grieving, but they don't belong to me – and they are definitely not me. I think they represent the collective, and belong to everybody. I really think they're real – in a fictional way, like how my daughter believes that her dolls are real, and she loves them just the same. The women exist in that very special way, and they're really powerful for me, because when I'm in my studio and I'm having a hard time and I have three good paintings on the wall, those ladies will give me the energy to make the rest of the show. They feed off of each other.’

'Danielle Mckinney: Shelter’ is on show until 4 October 2026 at the Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida, norton.org

This article appears in the August 2026, Creative America issue of Wallpaper*, available from 2 July in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

More than three decades separate the debut of Gillian Wearing’s Dancing in Peckham (1994) and the most recent exhibition of the work in the eponymous south-east London neighbourhood, last year. In the 25-minute film, the artist sways, shakes and moves her body in the central corridor of Peckham’s Aylesham Centre, a shopping arcade on Rye Lane more recently at the core of conversations about gentrification in the area. ‘There were a lot of questions around the Aylesham, and one way of participating was to show that piece in its real context,’ explains Hannah Barry, founder, artistic director and chief executive of local non-profit arts organisation Bold Tendencies, which presented the film in 2025. ‘Context of the location, but more importantly, the context of change. I found it very powerful to show it as a way of participating.’

The decision to exhibit Dancing in Peckham speaks to the balance of creativity and civic responsibility that is fundamental to the programming of Bold Tendencies, which celebrates its 20th anniversary in 2026 (coincidentally, the latest proposal for demolishing the Aylesham was thrown out within days of the new Bold season launching).

Over Zoom, Barry appears in front of a scale model of the multistorey car park that has played host to the arts organisation since 2007; among subsequent architectural interventions is a rooftop bar, Frank’s Café, designed by architects Paloma Gormley and Lettice Drake. Occasionally, Barry swivels in her chair, using the model to highlight a particular element of the Bold trajectory, such as switching entrances in 2016, and the subsequent commission of Simon Whybray’s hi boo I love you.

‘That was a visual arts and a permanent commission, and the opening up of a piece of useful infrastructure,’ says Barry, relaying the genesis of the pink stairwell. ‘I wrote to Simon, a silence, then “every existing surface to be painted pink and glazed. That's the work. A ten-storey love letter to my fiancé”. It turned into this sort of moment, but the intention was simple.’

Indeed, quickly becoming a fixture on Instagram, the work continues to enthral new and returning visitors. ‘Commissioning is a big part of where Bold starts,’ continues Barry. ‘I was interested in this idea that you could intellectually, financially and logistically support a new work of art, beginning to end, and show it. In 2009 we had applied the idea to architecture – that's how Frank's came about.’

Barry, who is also the director of Hannah Barry Gallery on Holly Grove, had previously been involved with a group of artists working out of a DIY space on nearby Lyndhurst Way, primarily in an admin capacity. ‘I was excited to be close to artists of my own generation, which I hadn't ever encountered,’ she recalls. The group’s final show, focused on outdoor sculpture, was titled ‘Bold Tendencies’, and effectively shaped the gallerist’s next two decades. Existing projects such as Skulptur Projekte Münster in Germany, New York’s Dia Beacon and The Fourth Plinth in London proved further catalysts for Bold as it appears today, and its five annual commissions, curated under an umbrella theme and presented on the roof.

‘Sculpture comes with its own logistical concerns, and can be so many different things,’ offers Barry, recognising the focus on large structures. ‘I was always excited by it as a form.

‘Bold is about the principle of exercising your right to joy and the experience of feeling welcome,’ she adds. ‘In European cities you have public squares with people doing different things, and I often think about the rooftop [like that]. There is a sense of responsibility too, because of the nature of the space. Your visit needs to be special and spectacular.’

Alongside the new visual artworks Bold’s programming includes music, dance, literature and learning (typically on other floors), while in 2015, permanent works began being introduced in response to the organisation’s then impermanent situation. Richard Wentworth’s Agora was the first, followed by no more quick, quick, slow by Rene Matić in 2020 and Jenny’s Holzer’s Bold Sign in 2023. In 2017 the organisation’s lease was extended, giving Bold another 20 years. ‘Then it was a kind of act of protection and protest, against diminishing truly public space in the city, and an intuitive feeling that certain things could remain as important emblems of a certain moment.'

For 2026, the chosen theme is Euphoria, and the line-up includes new commissions by Andreas Gursky, Louis Morlæ, Athen Kardashian & Nina Mhach Durban, Tarek Lakhrissi, and Emma Hart. ‘It’s been reflected in very extreme, different ways with the five. The immediate interpretation is about highs, but you can only know the high if you know the low,’ observes Barry. ‘It’s a theme of contrasts, like the wider reflections I have about Bold: you can't have success without failure, joy without sadness…’

Further characterising the organisation’s future, she notes that ‘there’s something about improving it and making it better that is very addictive. Twenty years down the line there's still so much to build and improve on, but it still stands for the spirit and guiding principles of making multiple ideas happen.’

Bold Tendencies summer programme is at floors 7-10, Peckham Multi-Storey Car Park until 12 September 2026

boldtendencies.com

Before becoming a master of Pop Art, Andy Warhol was a commercial illustrator, with his drawings appearing in both fashion advertising and in magazines in the 1950s. It marked the start of the artist’s respect for consumer culture, in contrast to others of the era who publicly disdained commercial work. Warhol could see the powerful role logos and packaging held in communicating a message, a realisation in direct opposition with the artistic style popular at the time.

In 1950s America, abstract expressionism reigned, with Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko offering meditative, often energetic musings on a post-war, politically charged society. When Warhol created his soup cans series, between 1961 and 1962, he chose instead to recontextualise and therefore elevate an ordinary object familiar to millions, with his concrete, figurative style standing apart.

The series is composed of 32 works, each with a different flavour of Campbell’s soup, faithfully rendered in the design consumers instantly recognised. By focusing on repetition and standardised design, Warhol eschewed the individual entirely. Created in the late nineteenth century, the Campbell’s soup can was already a design classic, defined by its bold red and white colours, typography and a gold medallion epitomising the trust consumers put in the product. The red attracted attention; the white, a trustworthy assurance of cleanliness. By the 1960s, the design was among the most recognisable pieces of packaging in America, clearly epitomising the influential role graphic design was set to play in a burgeoning consumer society. Warhol was unique in recognising the power packaging had to transcend the mundane, becoming a cultural symbol in its own right. By reproducing it almost exactly, and without comment, Warhol asked viewers to consider why such an everyday item held so much significance - and whether it came from his reproduction, or the effectiveness of the original package design.

The repetition in the series was crucial for Warhol - when the 32 works are displayed together, they appear as if stacked on supermarket shelves. Viewed as a whole, they emphasise the single can’s place in a larger system of production, much like the identity of the end consumer herself. Taken as a series, the familiar reliability of repetition is lent an unsettling edge. By presenting this ambiguity without defining it, Warhol avoids either critique or commendation, leaving us feeling uneasy. Warhol was adept at blurring these boundaries between commercial design and fine art, and by elevating a commercial product to fine art status he foresaw the increasing dominance of brands in society. In his soup cans, Warhol predicts the power of the logo, and the potential of a brand to eclipse more traditional art in influence. Warhol’s work played a part in triggering this change, leading designers increasingly to respect the extent that everyday objects can shape visual experience. His paintings highlighted the artistry embedded within commercial graphics, influencing generations of graphic designers and advertisers.

The work became a defining image of Pop Art, the artistic movement which rethought familiar motifs from popular culture, from advertising to comics and consumer goods. Arguing against the separation of culture into high and low, in Pop Art everyday products were as legitimate a subject for an artwork as religious iconography, portraits or historical scenes had been. It is an idea epitomised most famously in Warhol’s soup cans, which presented an entirely new vision of what contemporary art could be - and are still as accessible and provocative as ever.

This article appears in the August 2026 Issue of Wallpaper*, available from 2 July in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

In our monthly series, we highlight the products, places and experiences we’ve bookmarked – and that you won’t want to miss.

As Europe sizzles in the summer heat, queuing and crowds are best avoided. But that doesn’t mean your cultural calendar needs to cool off. Take your cue from our editors and drift off the beaten path – dodging the hotspots while keeping your diary rich with art, design and discovery.

Discover an Indonesian art collective, slip into a Stoke Newington dining room for Asian-fusion cooking, or immerse yourself in a new programme from cultural platform Forefront. For their summer escapes, our editors decamp to a Munich art museum, trade Mallorca for its quieter cousin Menorca, and lose themselves in the colour and chaos of Cartagena.

Stay cool, but don't stay at home.

The escape: Cartagena, Colombia

Anna Fixsen, US editor

July Fourth may mark America’s birthday (and a big one at that!) but my (British) husband and I typically celebrate by getting out of the country for our wedding anniversary. This time around, we’re making a beeline to Cartagena, Colombia, a city that’s captivated us ever since we first visited four years ago. We’ll be staying in our favourite place, Casa del Arzobispado, a gem of a hotel located in a 17th-century building in Cartagena's historic walled city, a Unesco World Heritage Site. From there, we’ll do what we do best: take in the local culture, marvel at the beauty of the Caribbean and feast on heaps of ceviche. As a lover of winged critters, I am particularly looking forward to a trek to the Aviario Nacional de Colombia, where I can’t wait to spy coastal birds like herons, pelicans and flamingos.

The art museum: Haus der Kunst, Munich

Hannah Silver, art, culture, watches & jewellery editor

I have wanted to visit the incredible Haus der Kunst in Munich for a long time, and the opening of multi-disciplinary artist Tomás Saraceno’s major exhibition later this month is the perfect excuse. Saraceno works at the intersection of art, architecture and science, and will be unveiling a major new co-commission, encompassing a permanent piece of land art, as part of the show.

The Eurotrip: Menorca

Sofia de la Cruz, travel editor

I spent so many childhood summers along the Mediterranean coast, back when I loathed the sticky humidity and the feeling of sand somehow lingering on your skin for days. Now, not so strangely, it is exactly that sensation I find myself craving. I’m looking forward to a few days by Menorca’s pristine waters, before moving on to the thrum of Ibiza’s balmy, buzzy evenings.

The event: Summer Exhibition, Royal Academy

Léa Teuscher, sub-editor

I’m looking forward to introducing my family to a fantastic London tradition: the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition. Held every year since 1769, it is the world’s oldest open submission exhibition – anyone can enter their artwork for a chance to be displayed on the great walls of the academy’s Burlington House on Piccadilly.

This year the Royal Academicians, led by Ryan Gander for this edition, have sifted through thousands of creations and selected over 1,800 artworks. The rooms are packed with every kind of art – from drawing, painting and photography to sculpture, architecture and film – made by either members of the public, emerging artists or household names. Even if you don’t buy anything, it’s great fun to play ‘guess which artwork is by a famous artist’ or count the red dots marking how many editions of the same piece have been sold. Plus, there are late openings on Fridays and Saturdays (with a gin bar and regular DJ sets).

The music: Madonna, Robyn, Wolf Alice and Joan Jett

Charlotte Gunn, director of digital content

July is a live music extravaganza in London, with this week being particularly stacked. I've been fortunate enough to have been invited to Madonna's 'Club Confessions' on Thursday night – the official launch party for her much-anticipated new album, 'Confessions II', out this Friday. I've heard a few advance songs, and guests would be wise to arrive ready to dance.

On Friday night, Robyn continues the party at The O2 for her 'Sexistential' tour – currently in my top five album releases of 2026. And on Sunday, one of Britain's best guitar bands, Wolf Alice, play their largest headline show to date in Finsbury Park along with Lykke Li, The Last Dinner Party and Rachel Chinouriri. For a slice of rock nostalgia, the inimitable Joan Jett comes to new London venue the British Airways Arc next week – her first show in the capital in 16 years.

Get tickets for Joan Jett, Robyn or Wolf Alice.

The exhibition: 'Rakyat Pasti Menang', Taring Padi

Gabriel Annouka, art editor

I’m already circling 8 July for Indonesian art collective Taring Padi’s 'Rakyat Pasti Menang' ('The People United Will Never Be Defeated') at Ibraaz. The exhibition brings together banners, puppets, prints and archives spanning nearly thirty years of collective making, presented in the Majlis at Ibraaz, a space dedicated to meaningful dialogue and exchange.

93 Mortimer Street, London W1W 7SS
Open 8 July-22 November 2026

The restaurant: Cálong

Anna Solomon, digital staff writer

This month, I’ll be stress-testing the credibility of Cálong’s fusion of Korean and European cooking – think kimchi reimagined as French-style fritters, or roast lamb saddle with gochujang. If the buzz is to be believed, chef Joo Young Won makes the collision feel inevitable. A veteran of Michelin-starred Galvin at Windows, he’s traded the West End for a Stoke Newington dining room, bringing fine-dining technique down to earth. I’m hoping for some serious crunch on those fritters – likewise Joo’s legendary fried chicken. The grilled pork jeyuk and pan-fried hake with mushroom and seaweed dashi also sound particularly good.

It’s an intriguing concept that stops just short of fine dining – a more affordable, thoroughly worthy alternative to the tasting-menu circuit.

The platform: Forefront

Ellie Stathaki, architecture & environment director

Part of London cultural platform Forefront's activities, a new series is being launched this summer, and I am very much looking forward to visiting and meeting the initiative's co-founder, Dicle Guntas, managing director of developer HGG, in July. The new family of shows centres on pairings between architects, artists and designers, and it kicks off with newly commissioned work by architects Bureau de Change and textile artist Ptolemy Mann, curated by Venice Biennale British Pavilion curator Maria McLintock. The exhibition is free to visit and is held at 134 Forefront on Old Street. Knowing Bureau de Change co-founders Billy and Katerina's work, and learning more about Ptolemy's approach, guarantees that we are all in for a treat of colour, pattern and inventive material use.

'Intertwined', Bureau de Change x Ptolemy Mann
134 Forefront, 134 Old Street, London EC1
Open now

‘This is a monumental type of exhibition, because it's an intimidating subject matter, and there is the heaviness of the history and the memory – Manchester deserves a show like this,’ says Ai Weiwei, on the opening of ‘Ai Weiwei: Button Up!’ at Manchester’s vast Aviva Studios. Weiwei is presenting his largest site-specific work to date in the hanger-like space – a big space for the big issues addressed, from industrialisation to globalisation and the consequences of British imperialism.

It is a natural move for Beijing-born Ai, who has dedicated his life’s work to human rights and censorship, through large-scale work that encourages a public response. This exhibition unites two new commissions with work shown in the UK for the first time. It is named in reference to Eight – Nation Alliance Flags, a work comprising eight large-scale flags carefully sewn with four million buttons that the artist bought from A Brown & Co Buttons factory in Croydon, when it closed down in 2019. The work is epic in size, and viewers should get close to appreciate the hand-crafted artistry.

Manchester is a natural home for this tribute to craftsmanship on a vast scale. Ai’s delve into historical Chinese and British relations plays out in this northern birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, a springboard for the artist from which to reflect on the consequences of British territorial expansion.

And the results really are big, from the 49m-long inflatable migrant boat, Law of the Journey (2017) to History of Bombs (2019), a 25m-wide installation depicting different varieties of bombs in 3.5 million toy bricks.

It is all set to the sounds of the work Nian Nian, recorded by 300 volunteers. It is the artist's tribute to the 69,000 people who were killed on 12 May 2008, in an earthquake in Sichuan. Parents demanded a full enquiry but were ignored. Meanwhile, local corruption that had led to poor construction was soon exposed. Ai was prevented from testifying in the trial of human rights activist Tan Zuoren, who had exposed the corruption; the artist received a blow that led to him being hospitalised for a brain haemorrhage.

Nian Nian, which names 5,197 schoolchildren who died in the earthquake, runs for 39 full days without stopping. It is one of Ai’s most moving works.

As part of the exhibition, Ai will present a 24-hour performance piece, Sewing a Button, which recreates the 81 days the artist was detained by public security in China in 2011. To mark the 15th anniversary, audiences will watch the artist eat, sleep and be interrogated by actors on screens around Aviva Studios.

Ai Weiwei on ‘Sewing a button’

Wallpaper*: Sewing a Button restages your 2011 detention in real time. What motivated you to embody that experience again physically, and how has your understanding of that period changed over the past 15 years?

Ai Weiwei: Fifteen years is not a short time for a person, yet I think neither my own circumstances nor the changes in the world have improved the reality of that detention. For someone who experienced it, re-enacting that reality carries two layered meanings. One is to help myself rethink what happened at that time. The other is to remind the audience that, through power or even violence, harm can be inflicted on individuals and even entire countries – a phenomenon that can be seen everywhere today. In other words, true power is the kind that is entirely unrestrained, and the truly weak are those whom no one defends or remembers. This is why I believe the re-enactment of this memory is necessary. At the same time, I feel that today’s situation is no better than it was then.

W*: What responsibility do you think the audience carries in witnessing this work?

AW: Everyone should observe what happened, how it happened, and the details of how power was exercised over people with differing opinions and viewpoints. Audiences should consider the effects of these measures and reflect on them, putting themselves in the place of those affected.

W*: In today’s hyper-connected world, how do you see the relationship between surveillance, power, and self-expression evolving?

AW: Today’s internet has already completely transformed previous dynamics. Regardless of the appearance of AI or other forms of surveillance, developments across politics, economics, and even the military have reduced personal privacy and rights. In this context, individual characteristics risk disappearing, while power grows stronger than ever. This is a new challenge: when individuality and personality vanish, what will human society become?

W*: How do you approach connecting these vast historical forces with personal, human experiences, both your own and those represented in your work?

AW: No matter the scale of historical power, it cannot be separated from individual experience. There is no grand historical phenomenon that exists independently of the people living through it. Therefore, grounding art in one’s own experiences is not merely a matter of creative choice – it is a fundamental responsibility as a human being.

‘Ai Weiwei: Button Up!’ from 2 July – 6 September 2026 at Aviva Studios, Water Street, Manchester, M3 4JQ

For over 60 years, Frank Bowling has explored what a line can express. Curated by Claudia Tobin in collaboration with the artist, ‘Driven to Draw’ at The Royal Drawing School in London brings together sketches, collages, works on paper, and paintings from his archive. Drawing has always been a steady part of his work, and even now, in his nineties, Bowling approaches it each day with a mix of chance, discipline, and skill.

In the show, Bowling, best known for his large, colourful paintings, in which paint moves freely and expansively, with colour extending beyond the canvas, lets visitors get closer to the details, line, surface, and paper, showing drawing as an active part of his process. The exhibition spans from his earliest student sketches to recent works that use threads, ribbons of paint, and various tools.

‘I'm not sure the two are separable,’ Bowling says about drawing and painting. ‘I've been saying for years that I'm drawing in my paintings, drawing with the materials themselves.’ For him, tools like the spray gun, palette knife, and even ‘the bucket left in a pool of paint’ are all ways to draw. He often lets paint pour and watches where it travels, allowing the material to find its own path and create lines as it moves.

Paper, by contrast, offers a different kind of agency. ‘Perhaps it's the nakedness of it,’ he says. ‘The paper doesn't wait, and it doesn't forgive.’

Running from 25 June until 22 August 2026, the exhibition unfolds across three sections: early drawings from Bowling’s years as an art student in the 1950s and 1960s; expanded drawings from the mid-1960s onwards; and recent works that continue his search across various mediums of paper, paint and surface.

Born in British Guiana (now Guyana) in 1934, Bowling came to London, completed national service in the RAF, and studied at the Royal College of Art alongside David Hockney. In 1966, he moved to New York, where his work entered into dialogue with abstraction and colour-field painting. His career reflects an art world slow to fully recognise him – he has been knighted, made a Royal Academician, celebrated worldwide, but late. For years, Black artists like Bowling were expected to explain their work before being seen as complex. ‘For years, I resisted talking about my work in those terms because it's so obvious,’ he says of Guyana's influence, ‘and because I was determined not to allow people to put me in some kind of box.’

The early drawings show an artist learning through attention, using houses, building sites, figure drawings, and portraits, many of which were rediscovered from a ‘battered portfolio’ stored under the stairs for years.

After national service, with a lack of resources and no paint left, Bowling wrote poems and visited museums with help from Keith Critchlow and his family, studying Titian, Rembrandt, Goya and Vermeer at the National Gallery and Tate. ‘Before I knew it, I was doing more drawing than writing,’ he says. ‘You can't always explain why the road you take is the one you take.

‘There was a time when drawing was the only thing standing between me and nothing,’ he says. ‘If I have to get out of bed, if I have to be awake, then I'm going to draw.’

One of the most charged recurring forms in Bowling's work is the map, as seen at the Royal Drawing School. As a child in Guyana, he outlined the country freehand at school, again and again, ‘never quite getting it right’, an exercise that left what he calls ‘an agony’. Years later, in the mid-1960s, he was painting a canvas in New York – in such a way that the paint followed the progress of the sun and shadow across the room – and he noticed the outline of South America appear unexpectedly. It would go on to become a familiar motif.

He speaks too of tracing Vermeer postcards, and of tracing as choice: ‘What you define, what you leave out. It's revision. It's argument.’

In the recent works, drawing becomes entwined with thread, cloth and the labour of the hand. Bowling speaks of threads ‘scrunching and spooling’, staples gathering like flotsam, and ribbons of paint moving over paper. These materials return him to his mother, who was a dressmaker and milliner in New Amsterdam, and to the intimate knowledge of making that shaped his earliest understanding of touch, repetition and care. He uses the German word Fingerspitzengefühl, meaning ‘fingertips feeling’, to describe her dexterity with fabric, pinking shears, a needle, and thread. ‘I think of her guiding a line of thread through cloth as she went about her work making a dress or a sari,’ he says.

Seen through his reflections on his mother, the recurring circles that drift across many of Bowling’s paintings begin to feel newly charged with family presence, especially in relation to works such as Tracing of a photograph of Frank Bowling’s mother. They suggest return and continuity, carrying the quiet force of a parent whose gestures remain alive in their offspring’s work. Whether consciously autobiographical or not, they seem to hold traces of the domestic world Bowling recalls so vividly: the fabric, the thread, the careful making, the maternal line passing through paint.

Bowling has a word for what intimacy can reveal: ‘thingness’, the recognition of the quality of a thing in almost anything, leaves, paper that looks like leaves, the sensation of matter holding its own life. ‘A large painting makes a claim,’ he says. ‘A drawing keeps it close.’

The Royal Drawing School has shaped the exhibition as a space for practice as well as viewing, encouraging visitors to participate. In addition to a special publication designed as both a catalogue and a sketchbook, which includes blank pages that invite visitors to draw, the exhibition offers drop-in drawing stations set up in the gallery for visitors to create their own sketches inspired by Bowling’s work. On 1 July 2026, the online talk ‘Drawing Dialogue: Ben Bowling & Claudia Tobin on Frank Bowling’ brings Bowling's son Ben into conversation with the curator.

After moving to New York in 1966, Bowling heard painting being declared dead; he didn't believe it then and doesn't now. ‘What endures is quality,’ he says. ‘That's the only thing.’ That belief underpins the launch of the Frank Bowling Foundation, which became a registered charity on 24 June 2026, timed to coincide with the exhibition and focused on expanding public access to art education. The foundation's mission is to support emerging artists, create opportunities for art education, and foster appreciation for painting and drawing among wider audiences.

Now 92, Bowling speaks with an acute awareness of time. ‘I have to accept that time is no longer something I have a great deal of,’ he says. ‘I find that the less of it there is, the more present it becomes in the work.

‘I'm still going to work in my studio every day because I think something new will emerge from the liquid paint that no one has ever seen before. That's what I'm looking for. That's what I'm after.’

‘Frank Bowling: Driven to Draw’ runs from 25 June to 22 August 2026 at the Royal Drawing School, 19 to 22 Charlotte Road, London EC2A 3SG

‘I was ready to give up painting,’ says British artist Dale Lewis. ‘I wasn't making any money, and I was just spiralling. I thought I had pushed it as far as I could.’ He began studying at horticulture college, but, ‘I didn’t know how much I would miss painting’, he adds.

His fourth exhibition at London gallery Edel Assanti – his first solo show in London in five years – is perhaps his most personal yet. Throughout, Lewis reflects on this crossroads, looking back to his childhood and intertwining these specific memories with considerations on class, mental health, nature and identity.

Lewis, who received his Fine Art BA from London Guildhall in 2002, had established a distinctive style, often dissecting contemporary issues through a black humour lens. Now, though, Lewis is digging deeper, revisiting personally significant works such as his grandfather’s death and a childhood spent in a damp council flat, reworking them into large-scale paintings in acrylic, oil and spray paint.

‘When I started working again, I thought it's got to be really personal,’ Lewis says. ‘It's got to pack a punch. I thought it doesn't matter if anyone comes and sees them; I was making them for myself. In the beginning, there was a lot of raw canvas, a lot of broken energy. I think this has gone right back to the start, but it's also mixed with what we've learned in that period of time. After Covid, everything shifted, including the way the world is. Everyone I speak to feels like that, that feeling of not knowing what you're doing. There is a sense of sadness – maybe it is not just mine.’

The works speak to this. In The Bell, a Christmas tree is garnished with baubles of memories, from the protests over hotels being used to house migrants that Lewis witnessed in his Essex hometown to a surreal tribute to The Only Way is Essex TV star Gemma Collins. In Mould, Lewis is back in his childhood bedroom, flying the Union Jack in a nod to both innocent fantasies and nationalist violence. His horticultural education is apparent throughout, too, particularly in Kiss Goodbye, which reflects on the temporary brilliance of two extinct species of butterflies.

‘It’s been cathartic,’ Lewis adds. ‘You're facing things and presenting them back to yourself, and you can leave them there. Anyone can look at them and make their own story.’

Dale Lewis is at Edel Assanti until 14 August

edelassanti.com

After more than a decade since the initial idea for a James Turrell Skyspace at the Aros museum in Aarhus was hatched, Turrell’s one hundredth Skyspace, As Seen Below—The Dome, is now finally open.

It’s a massive feat of construction, carried out immaculately by Schmidt Hammer Lassen Architects, who also built the Aros museum. Forty metres across and sixteen metres high, The Dome is one of the largest of Turrell’s Skyspaces. Here, as in much of the artist works, the architecture is not simply a placeholder for his art, but an integral part of it.

'The architecture holds the sky close, so you recognize that the act of looking is the work itself. Here, light isn’t description, it’s the substance you stand within,' Turrell explains.

Visitors approach the dome through a one-hundred-metre-long corridor below the museum and emerge into the massive space, resembling something from a science-fiction film set, void of any decoration. There is simply the dome, a gently sloping floor made of concrete tiles with a central circular “eye” made of Norwegian granite directly below the six metre wide aperture in the centre of the dome, and a circular bench around the perimeter set at a slightly smaller diameter than the dome itself.

The interior of the dome itself is constructed of individual petal-shaped fibreglass panels that have been smoothed with putty by one dedicated construction worker called Heinrich. 'He basically did the whole dome himself, as he wasn’t comfortable letting any other people work on this,' says Jette Birkeskov, Partner-in-Charge and Project Director at Schmidt Hammer Lassen, who, together with Morten Schmidt, has played a central role in the collaboration throughout the project’s development.

The dome is finished in three coats of matt white paint and 1,100 LED light sources around the perimeter light up the walls, contrasting with the sky as seen through the aperture. The magic happens when Turrell changes a seemingly grey Danish sky into bright blue, green, pink or purple. Our eyes deceive us, and we adjust the colour of the sky to contrast with the colour of the walls. So what at one moment looks like a bright blue sky (due to a white/yellow contrasting light on the dome’s walls) slowly turns green, then grey and pink as Turrell adjust the colour temperature of the LED light within the dome.

Turrell’s Skyspace requires time to fully appreciate. It is the subtle changes in light, wind, a sudden glimpse of a bird flying above the aperture or someone dropping a phone on the dome floor reverberating throughout the dome, that create a unique experience in time and space. No two visitors will have the exact same experience, and no two visits will feel the same. This is the power of Turrell’s art and it will provide a huge draw for visitors to Aros for decades to come.

aros.dk

In her homeland, a Björk summer is in bloom.

The National Gallery of Iceland is hosting two exhibitions celebrating the multi-faceted craft of the singer, musician, artist, conceptualist and fashion-forward being from another dimension.

‘Metamorphlings’ is a collection of masks created by James Merry, a Björk visual collaborator since 2009, many of them crafted for her tours and other projects. Echolalia presents three large-scale audiovisual installations. Two of those pieces, ‘Ancestress’ (a ‘lamentation… staged as a ritualistic procession of musicians andq dancers’) and nine-part choral work ‘Sorrowful Soil’, are elegies for her late mother, environmental activist Hildur Rúna Hauksdóttir. They were originally conceptualised around Björk’s 2022 album Fossora but are here ‘reimagined on a theatrical scale within a museum context for the first time’. Alongside those is a new piece, ‘Nerve Bloom’, offering a glimpse into the 60-year-old’s upcoming 11th album, her first studio collection since Fossora.

‘Through Björk, we celebrate brave and forward-thinking art that has, over the years, influenced the global cultural scene,’ says Lára Sóley, artistic director & CEO of Reykjavík Arts Festival, with the two exhibitions at the National Gallery ‘fill[ing] the spaces with an integration of music, craft, performance, technology and visual art’.

Describing ‘Nerve Bloom’, Björk says: ‘I don’t think of me as a visual artist. Because my heart is music. Everything I do comes from a sonic point of view. This is something I have called ‘sonic symbolism’, sound made visual, a reverse synaesthesia. When you listen to a song for the first time, it is like swallowing a whale, you need to feel the whole musical sculpture in one go. The structure of a song has always been extremely important to me. What shape it is. This is part of the craft of being a singer-songwriter... We are tune sculptors.’

Then, on 12 August 2026, there’s Echolalia: the rave. Björk hosts and DJs at the one-day event, coinciding with a solar eclipse, at Víðistaðatún in Hafnarfjörður. With the bill also including performances from Arca, Sideproject and Ronja, the rave marks the 40th anniversary of Smekkleysa (Bad Taste), the Icelandic collective and label that helped launch Björk’s omnivorous creativity.

Here, National Gallery of Iceland chief curator Pari Stave and Merry – an Englishman resident full-time in Iceland for 11 years – explain Björk’s big-time artistic sensuality.

Wallpaper*: Góðan daginn, Pari. What does ‘echolalia’ mean?

Pari Stave: The word refers to the repeating of words or phrases. It was a name given as a kind of umbrella title for the many different installations of Björk’s works.

W*: What was the idea behind Echolalia?

PS: Initially, Björk offered to show two video works, ‘Ancestress’ and ‘Sorrowful Soil’, that feature masks made by James. [Then] in time, she wanted to debut a new work, ‘Nerve Bloom’. As plans evolved further, she added videos of her live performances at Harpa from 2022 – collectively called Björk Orkestral – as well as single-channel videos made for certain songs – collectively called Avatars and Animations.

Taken together, the various installations and video works show the range of Björk’s creative collaboration with artists, some of whom she has worked with [during the course of] many years. It is important to note that she considers herself a singer-songwriter, but her reach extends into other media – often within the spirit of exploration and experimentation – by working with other artists.

W*: With ‘Ancestress’ and ‘Sorrowful Soil’, how are they ‘reimagined on a theatrical scale’?

PS: In the museum’s galleries, the scale of the video projections is cinematic, in the case of ‘Ancestress’, and the sound is optimised to the highest listening standards, so that in both installations the viewer has an immersive visual and aural experience of each work.

In ‘Sorrowful Soil’, each voice in a chorus of 30 choir members was individually recorded – in addition to Björk’s voice – and there is a speaker for each recording. So, as the viewers walk through the installation, they can hear each voice through a single, designated speaker, or hear the choir collectively, by standing in the centre of the room.

W*: What can you tell us about the piece based on ‘Nerve Bloom’, a new song from her next album?

PS: It’s an animation that combines analogue – traditional painting techniques – and technology: digital animation. Over a period of about seven months, Björk worked with the painter Natalia Kleszewska and the graphic artist Natalie Liu to create visual concept for the song. Paintings by Nathalia were animated by Natalie, using CGI technology.

The video components in the gallery include a layering of video, [such as] a large LED screen, a large-scale projection, and smaller projections showing details of the video on two-sided LED screens. The viewer is meant to view the installation from various angles but also align themselves with the centre of the video to observe the layering of images as they unfold.

W*:Takk fyrir for talking to me, James. What does your exhibition title ‘Metamorphlings’ signify?

James Merry: It’s combination of metamorphosis and -ling, a suffix often used for small creatures or beings. I've always tended to think of my masks as a family rather than isolated objects, connected through a kind of Linnaean evolutionary logic. Certain forms and motifs evolve from one mask to another, branching and mutating over time. So ‘Metamorphlings’ felt like an appropriate name, implying a small collection of shape-shifting creatures.

W*: You first met Björk in 2009 and began working with her as a research/personal assistant. What were some of your roles then?

JM: She had just finished the Volta tour when we first met and was in the early stages of developing what would later become Biophilia. So my role initially was as a research assistant, helping to gather and organise all the material she was absorbing that would eventually feed into that project.

W*: You started making masks for the Vulnicura tour. What were your brief/concept and materials for those masks?

JM: Björk’s visual direction centred on a sense of emotional emergency and the craft of embroidery as a form of repair, as well as a symbolic colour palette of healing lilac and urgent neon yellow. So I was really tapping into that and trying to create something that could function as a sort of protective veil – but at the same time feel romantic, organic and refined.

Many of those pieces were made while we were on tour. I would turn my hotel room into a studio and frantically try to create something new in the few days between each performance.

Putting together this retrospective made me fall in love with those pieces again. While I was restoring them, I could feel how they were made with such a burst of creative energy, so they got me feeling very nostalgic.

W*: Tell us, please, about the new mask you’ve created for ‘Metamorphlings’.

JM: The retrospective features over 80 of my masks, and I really wanted to include one new piece to debut at the opening. So I made a new work called Atenovx, as part of an ongoing series I am currently working on, inspired by Romano-Celtic archaeology of the later Iron Age. I had always been really fascinated by historical objects where timekeeping is embedded in the design – ways to track the cycles of the sun and the moon hammered into gold, and so on.

So I made this new piece to function both as a mask and as a working solar calendar, translating the cycle of the year onto the human face. Each month is marked with a gemstone, corresponding to the 12 months of our Julian calendar. The spring and autumn equinoxes align at the eyes, the winter solstice lies at the forehead and the summer solstice is represented by a pearl that rests in the mouth. A sequence of drilled holes marks each day of the year, through which a single pearl can be moved clockwise to track the passage of time.

W*: What is the magic of the mask?

JM: The ability to hide and reveal, both at the same time.

The National Gallery of Iceland, Fríkirkjuvegur 7, 101 Reykjavík, Iceland, until 20September. Tickets here. Rave information here

Nora Chipaumire (styled ‘nora chipaumire’) describes gadzi as an ‘organism’, a term she feels suits it better than ‘installation’. Live performance, sculpture, touch, sound, and moving images share one space, brought to life by people moving through it. ‘My organism holds energy,’ she says, explaining that the work is meant to be experienced physically, through the connection between body and space rather than as an object to view.

Presented as Tate Modern's Infinities Commission 2026, curated by Valentine Umansky and Francis Hardy, gadzi takes its name from gadziguru, the oldest and most powerful feminine presence in Shona cosmology, an indigenous African worldview. Drawing on the legends, stones, and soil of Zimbabwe, the work transforms Tate Modern’s Tanks into an immersive environment where visitors move through sculptural forms, sit on speakers embedded within them, and experience sound physically as it travels. Built from wood, wire, and cardboard, the monumental sculptures give new meaning to everyday materials. Over the past decade, Chipaumire's practice has increasingly focused on the stories and cosmologies of the Shona people, drawing on ancestral knowledge and looking beyond the colonial histories that shaped southern Africa.

Chipaumire rarely separates the physical from the philosophical and almost never speaks about the work as a collection of materials or disciplines. Instead, her work explores memory, landscape, and what it means to remain. At its core, gadzi is shaped by an understanding of the feminine rooted in ancestral belief, moving fluidly between installation and performance to give form to a philosophy that has long existed beyond ‘the very dominant Eurocentric ways in which we try to think about ourselves’.

Chipaumire is not interested in presenting the feminine as a metaphor but as a way of understanding the world, grounded in maturity, lived experience, and knowledge passed across generations. Now 61, she believes gadzi could only have come to life at this point in her career. ‘I'm old enough now to be able to tackle perhaps concerns that are outside of time, and also old enough as a woman to understand what is sacred about the feminine.’ She returns to this phrase almost instinctively, linking age not only to experience but to another way of understanding knowledge itself.

The same refusal to separate ideas from lived experience emerges when the conversation turns to sound. Chipaumire begins with the body: ‘Sound is vibration. It's breath. We are in sound as we breathe, as we speak. Every time we make our voice, and we open our throat, we are in sound, so this is a physical experience.’ Within gadzi, that physicality is carried by a monumental dub sound system embedded throughout the installation. Broadcast through ‘mountains of speaking wood’, the sounds of Chimurenga, both a revolutionary movement and Zimbabwe's celebrated musical tradition, meet the deep bass frequencies of dub. The handmade resonators acknowledge the ingenuity of African and African diasporic approaches to sound technology, where vibration is as significant as melody. ‘To me, sound is physical, is visceral, is the body, is inside of the body.’

Movement, for Chipaumire, is inseparable from sound and the act of listening itself; gadzi is experienced through the body before it is understood intellectually, allowing vibration, movement, and landscape to unfold together. Makeshift lights fashioned from repurposed petrol bottles cast a soft glow across the room, while moving images show the artist navigating the balancing rocks with care. ‘You can walk in and allow your heart to lead,’ she says. ‘This too is the highest form of thinking.’

On view until 23 August 2026, gadzi draws on Zimbabwe's balancing rocks to reflect on the longer histories of colonialism and extraction that continue to shape the present, but the commission refuses to be defined by absence or loss, turning its attention instead to what cannot be taken. ‘There are aspects of us that are not harvestable, that are not extractable, and it is this which I bring into this space. The refusal, the obtuseness to say, “And still we stand, proudly, with elegance.” You could not extract this beauty.’

Here, Chimurenga, literally meaning ‘revolution’, sits alongside dub and punk, allowing different histories of resistance to speak to one another through sound. ‘They are all sounds, different registers, different harmonisations of our collective no. Whether the dub coming from the New World, the Chimurenga coming from the old world, the punk coming from the centre of the so-called Commonwealth, they are all sounds, frequencies, volumes that are saying no.’

A series of live activations animate gadzi further with movement and sound. Tate Modern Lates on 26 June sees the commission spill beyond the East Tank with an evening of music, conversation, film, and workshops, followed by performances on 27 and 28 June. A monumental speaker installation, designed with Ari Marcopoulos and Kara Walker, occupies the Turbine Hall, celebrating the enduring legacy of sound systems within the museum.

Questions of identity give way to questions of power, asking not what it means to be African, Black or female, but how those identities came to exist in the first place. ‘These are constructions,’ she says. ‘We were the first resource to be extracted out of Africa. What is power? Is it the strength to extract and sell others, or is it this truth that we remain?’

Chipaumire is less interested in directing how the work should be read than in inviting audiences to move through it on their own terms, entering what she describes as an ‘energy exchange’ where understanding emerges through participation. ‘All the responsibility,’ she says, when asked what role art can play at a moment marked by displacement, extraction and environmental crisis. ‘The artist is the last intellectual, is the last philosopher who can tackle these issues.’

It’s a scorching day at Lacock Abbey, in the village of Lacock in Wiltshire, and, beneath the screeching of low-flying swifts, Martin Parr’s widow is in the National Trust property’s Manger Barn, discussing her husband’s final work. And his legacy.

‘This project, it really did resonate with him,’ Susie Parr says of ‘Lacock’, a series of portraits of English community and tradition, a year in the taking and curating, which the great photographer-documentarian completed shortly before his death at 73 on 6 December 2025. ‘He was also aware that he was not well. He kept saying, “I'm in the departure lounge." And this was a manageable, doable piece of work.

‘Very different from his fashion work,' Susie adds with a smile of these typical Parr portraits – vivid but unadorned – of shopkeepers and schoolchildren and scarecrows; of VE Day 80th anniversary parties and the Garden and Allotment Association Annual Flower Show; of prize-winning potatoes and best-in-class raspberries and a stout vicar bedecked in Union flags. ‘Martin was the most unlikely fashion photographer – he really hated fashion, actually! He really wasn't at all interested! But it did bring in money for the [charitable Martin Parr] Foundation.’

Across 2025, Parr travelled from the couple’s home in nearby Bristol to shoot in and around the abbey and the adjoining picture-perfect village. Susie and Dr Andy Cochrane – curator of ‘Lacock’ and of the abbey’s Fox Talbot Museum that’s hosting the year-long exhibition – think he must have visited around 30 times.

Parr was a photographer with an anthropologist’s eye, and Cochrane says that all his career-long themes ‘permeate through the work at Lacock: material culture; the daily life of people; and the conviviality, how people engage and get on with each other. That's all embedded in this photography.’

In multiple ways, the series is a carefully considered bookend to an extraordinary career. Parr had shot (briefly) in Lacock in 1988. As the one-time residence of scientist and photography pioneer Henry Fox Talbot (1800-77), Lacock Abbey is widely viewed as the home of photography, hence the National Trust’s on-site Fox Talbot Museum. And the new project became a perfect distillation of Parr’s perennial interest in what his wife calls 'the middle ground. He was drawn to the ordinary, day-to-day life of people, rather than the extremes of how people are behaving'.

Susie Parr and Dr Andy Cochrane tell Wallpaper* more.

W*: Susie, that 1988 visit to Lacock – how did that come about?

Susie Parr: We had been living in Wallasey in the early 1980s, and Martin did his [1983-85] work in [Merseyside seaside resort] New Brighton, The Last Resort, which was the work that shot him to fame. But he also got a lot of criticism for being a middle-class photographer photographing working-class communities.

So, he was thinking: ‘I need to photograph my own tribe.’ And we were thinking: ‘Where can we live to enable you to do this?’ I was the breadwinner at the time, and I got a job in Bristol. So we moved down here and he started that work. It was supper parties, cricket matches, private schools. Very different from the New Brighton work.

Visiting Lacock was part of that. He loved a summer fête and he came and photographed plant stalls, things like that, for a [1989, Thatcher-era] project about the middle classes called The Cost of Living. Those photos, some of which are in this exhibition, were for that project.

W*: So it was a kind of visual anthropology.

SP: Absolutely. He wasn't articulate about it. He just thought in images. He wouldn't be able to analyse his work in an intellectual way. He just had an anthropological approach to ordinary life.

Andy Cochrane: In one of the first meetings that we had at the foundation, Martin brought out an anthropological book that was written in the 1940s, with colour-saturated photography by John Hinde. It was about understanding a National Trust village, Luccombe in Somerset, as part of a Mass Observation project.

I think Martin always wanted to go there and photograph it, and then went instead to Chew Stoke [in Somerset for 1992 project A Year in the Life of Chew Stoke Village]. So there had [long been] a sense of trying to document a National Trust village.

W*: Did the villagers require much persuasion to let him into their homes?

AC: At first, a lot of people, if they're not into art or photography, were unaware of who Martin Parr is… But with Simon [Dunn], the vicar, we did a free screening of [2025 biographical documentary] I Am Martin Parr in St Cyriac's church and invited the village.

And, of course, as people were getting themselves photographed, and the foundation was printing them immediately and handing them back out to the village, it created a critical mass [of interest].

He was also keen to engage with community groups, the clubs, the church, the school. So he was going to all these events in the evening. He was in the yoga club and the photography club and the art club. And the pace that he worked was really impressive to see. He was moving at a pace that was a young man's game!

SP: He was so disciplined and hardworking.

W* And, apparently, disarming. As one of his clearly smitten subjects, Azar Watling of local business John Watling Bespoke Jewellery, says in the accompanying video showing in the museum, ‘he was a little bit cheeky’.

SP: His natural communication style was a bit to the point, blunt, no messing about, no small talk. But when he wanted to engage with people, he could be very funny and charming, with a little bit of banter. He could do that, but it wasn't his natural style.

W*: The village’s VE Day 80th anniversary celebrations in May 2025 must have been catnip for Martin, given everything it represents and the associated, flag-waving iconography.

SP: He did like a Union Flag, but he wasn't very happy about the way they'd been used recently, and all the St George's flags everywhere. He was always wary of the Brexit-y, Reform-y-type thing. But he was never politically critical of any group.

But flags were definitely an important iconography for him – there are so many photos of fetes with Union Jacks and bunting and everything like that. At his funeral, we recreated a country fête for the reception. We had lots of the kind of [food] from his photographs: sad cupcakes, rainbow-coloured cakes, lots of sandwiches wrapped in clingfilm.

W*: Did he like a cake to eat as well?

SP: He loved a cake! Favourite cake? Lemon drizzle, I’d say. Mine? I’m not a cake person, but... a nice fruitcake sometimes. He loved his cup of tea and a cake at 3.30pm. And the final picture in the [‘Lacock’ exhibition] book is his cup of tea and his plate with cake crumbs on it. For me, it’s a poignant full stop to the project.

W*: From a Lacock Abbey point of view – being the home of the beginning of photography – showcasing the final major commission from one of our greatest ever documentarians must feel particularly providential for the property and the National Trust.

AC: It's pretty neat and it’s pretty helpful. The [Fox Talbot] museum was set up in 1975. The National Trust didn't have the money for a museum then – doesn't now! – but they were helped by another internationally famous British photographer, Cecil Beaton. So last year was the 50th anniversary, and Martin was here at that time doing this project. And now with Martin, who’s bigger than Cecil, he’s set it up for the next 50 years.

It is so generous, for the village, the National Trust, and it's a gift to everyone to be able to see this work.

W*: How good a summation is this exhibition, in this place, of Martin’s interests, his eye, his instinct, his emotional feelings for Britain and its people?

SP: I was surprised when I saw it. It's actually very kind. And very different from [his other work]. Because he could have come in and done a number on the hordes of tourists who come to the Fox Talbot Museum. But he didn't. It’s a return to the much earlier, more elegiac way of working. More connection, more gentleness. So I think it's the perfect way to end for him.

W*: Do you mind if I ask, Susie, how emotional is it for you seeing this work displayed here? We're not that many months on from your husband's passing.

SP: I must say, I did get a bit choked when I was looking at the images to write my little introduction [in the book]. But I think I'm OK now. I'm sort of used to it.

I'm finding it really interesting to think about it, that he actually went beneath the façade of the model village to look at real people and real communities. So again, it's another thing to be very proud of about Martin, that he finished off in this way… This, for me, is a perfect rounding of the circle.

‘Lacock’ by Martin Parr, 27 June 2026 – 27 June 2027, Fox Talbot Museum, Lacock Abbey, Wiltshire

nationaltrust.org.uk/lacock

It has been 60 years since the work of Welsh-born, America-residing painter Sylvia Sleigh (1916-2010) was exhibited in the UK. Born in 1916 in Llandudno, Sleigh found recognition for her arresting, realist works in her lifetime, yet never achieved the recognition of her peers.

It is an oversight Daniel Malarkey is keen to put right with his solo exhibition of Sleigh’s works, currently on show in Bloomsbury, London. The paintings here span the length of Sleigh’s career, tracing the development of a distinctive style that nodded to classical traditions but was idiosyncratically Sleigh’s own.

Studying at Brighton School of Art in the 1930s, Sleigh noticed the double standards enshrined in the education system early on, particularly in the life-drawing classes, which allowed female, but not male, nudes. She was to internalise these prejudices, reflecting and subverting them throughout her career.

Upon moving to London to study art, Sleigh met her future partner, the critic Lawrence Alloway, and relocated to New York City with him in 1961, where she remained until her death in 2010. There, the couple became part of a vibrant artistic circle, with members including Joan Semmel, Alice Neel, Miriam Schapiro, and Agnes Martin. Sleigh took a wider interest in the feminist artist movement, taking crucial roles in feminist collaboratives and considering a new representation of women.

While she enjoyed painting still lifes and landscapes, Sleigh was primarily a portrait painter, of herself, her partner Alloway, whom she painted more than 50 times, and group portraits of female artists, including Agnes Denes, Nancy Spero, and Howardena Pindell. Her male nude paintings were controversial, yet in their intimacy and great respect for their subject, they were entirely unlike anything else being created at the time. She noted: ‘I am primarily a portrait painter. In the past, portraiture and the nude were usually separate genres, but new expectations have been inspiring to me.’

Alongside a selection of still lifes, landscapes and a self-portrait now on show in London, there is The Bridge, created by Sleigh in 1963. In the flesh, her reclining nude comes brilliantly to life, eschewing idealism and embracing the female form in all its real beauty.

Sylvia Sleigh at Malarkey, 48 Russell Square, London, WC1B 4JP, until 15 July 2026

danielmalarkey.com

A new monograph published today makes the case for Miyako Ishiuchi as one of the most important photographers of the modern era. Ishiuchi Miyako: Traces, edited by Lena Fritsch and Yasufumi Nakamori, spans five decades of the artist’s career while placing unusual emphasis on Ishiuchi’s own voice. Alongside extensive reproductions of her work, the volume includes extracts from her earlier writings, an in-depth interview conducted by Fritsch and a newly commissioned essay by the photographer herself.

Born in 1947 and raised in Yokosuka, a Japanese port city shaped by the presence of an American naval base, Ishiuchi emerged within a photography world that was overwhelmingly male-dominated. She became one of the few women of her generation to achieve international recognition, developing a practice that challenged conventional approaches to documentary photography.

At the heart of Ishiuchi’s work lies the premise that history reveals itself through surfaces. Rather than documenting events, she photographs the traces they leave behind – scars on skin, worn clothing, crumbling apartments, lipstick tubes, dentures. In her images, objects and body parts become repositories of memory, carrying the imprint of lives that might otherwise go unrecorded.

Her breakthrough came with ‘Yokosuka Story’ (1976-77), a series made upon returning to the city of her childhood. Rather than producing a straightforward documentary account, Ishiuchi photographed streets, buildings and neighbourhoods marked by the proximity of the US naval base. She followed it with ‘Apartment’, a study of ageing interiors and decaying architecture that earned her the prestigious Kimura Ihei Award in 1979.

In the 1990s, Ishiuchi turned her attention to women’s bodies, producing close-up photographs of surgical scars and other physical marks – records of experience inscribed on flesh. This was followed by ‘Mother’s’, made after her mother’s death, in which shoes, dresses, cosmetics and dentures become vehicles for exploring grief.

Two later series extended this logic from the personal to the historical. For ‘Hiroshima’, Ishiuchi photographed the clothing and personal belongings of atomic bomb victims. Her focus was not the disaster itself but its intimate residue.

A similar sensitivity informed a project commissioned by the Frida Kahlo Museum in Mexico City. Ishiuchi photographed the Mexican artist’s most personal possessions – the corsets that supported her damaged spine, the dresses that became part of her public image, the medicines that sustained her and the cosmetics used to construct her iconic appearance. Kahlo’s belongings had been sealed away by Diego Rivera following her death in 1954 and remained hidden from public view for half a century; it was fitting that Ishiuchi – an artist preoccupied with what objects carry across time – was the one to photograph them.

Traces is the book that Ishiuchi’s career has always deserved.

In 1951, photographer Bob Mizer published the first issue of his quarterly magazine, Physique Pictorial. Posing as a bodybuilding guide, to comply with the strict obscenity laws of the time, Mizer’s richly illustrated production was one of the first aimed at a gay, male audience.

Inside, photographs of male bodybuilders were presented as artworks, rooted in realism, with each image accompanied by the corresponding model’s real name, age and vital statistics. An eclectic cultural canon launched the careers of artists and celebrities, including Tom of Finland, whose first drawings were published in Physique Pictorial’s pages, and George Quaintance and Dom Orejudos, whose work sat alongside early photographs of model and actor Joe Dallesandro and fitness coach Jack LaLanne.

The magazine, which ran for 39 years, has left a lasting impact, with artists including David Hockney and Robert Mapplethorpe citing it as an inspiration for their own work. In its celebration of the male body from a pop culture niche, it quietly and defiantly normalised a sensual male beauty.

Now, JW Anderson is the latest to pay homage, presenting an exhibition, ‘Spartacus,’ at his Soho, London store. The name is taken from the chosen pseudonym of the magazine’s illustrator, who was required to adopt a false identity – their true identity remains unknown.

JW Anderson has chosen 40 of Spartacus’ works, once privately owned by Mizer, and now able to view throughout the rest of Pride Month, up to 6th July.

JW Anderson presents: ‘Spartacus, Bob Mizer’s Pictorial Physique’ at the Soho, London boutique until 6 July

Frida Kahlo’s reputation precedes her. Even those who aren’t familiar with her work will recognise her ubiquitous portrait, the aura of which has been in danger of eclipsing her work. It is an oversight Tate Modern is keen to rectify with the major new exhibition, ‘Frida: The Making of an Icon’, which pairs Kahlo’s work with that of her contemporaries and later artists, including Kiki Smith, Judy Chicago and Ana Mendieta. The move cements Kahlo’s place in the art canon, and it seems appropriate that an artist so taken over by legend and myth should share exhibition space with those who respect, acknowledge or have been inspired by her.

It is a shame Kahlo’s work has been outshone by her celebrity, as, in its strikingly surreal composition, it is sharply emotive (although Kahlo rejected the surrealist label itself). She created around 150 works in her lifetime, a third of which were self-portraits. More than 30 of these representations are here, tracing the way Kahlo’s self-perception developed, fractured and rebuilt itself throughout her lifetime, running parallel to the health troubles that plagued her.

Born in Mexico City in 1907, Kahlo established an aesthetic entirely her own, after a difficult start that saw her suffer from polio as a child and, later, chronic pain for the remainder of her life following a near-fatal bus crash. It left her fragmented, a sum of her political, physical and spiritual sides that united to create a magnetic private and public persona.

This fluidity takes shape in the portraits in the exhibition, and we vividly see Kahlo secure in her Mexican identity, documenting her experience as a disabled woman, commitment to social activism and influence on LGBTQI+ art.

Despite André Breton’s identification with and deep admiration for the artist – he called her work ‘a ribbon around a bomb’ – Kahlo consistently rejected surrealism, the movement he co-founded, as a definition of her art, arguing her works were rooted in reality, rather than dreams. Still, many works in Tate Modern’s show overlap with the surrealists’ fantastical view of life, intertwining religious motifs and folklore and fraught with natural imagery – from spider monkeys to tangled vines and thorns – symbolising both the endless pain and deep spirituality that accompanied Kahlo throughout her life.

‘Frida: The Making of an Icon’ is at Tate Modern from 25 June 2026 until 3 January 2027, tate.org.uk

Aesop Queer Library returns for its sixth edition. Swapping beauty products for books, the Australian skincare brand transforms its Soho location into a literary hub between the 3-5 July. This year also welcomes a Reading Room, located in Aesop Spitalfields, and at its Brighton outpost. As always the Queer Library pop-up invites visitors to browse an array of titles by LGBTQIA+ authors and allies, no purchase required.

Step inside Aesop's Queer Library

The diverse array of books on offer spotlights authors from around the globe and provides a platform for underrepresented voices. This year, the library focuses on the queer body and how it can challenge assumptions, give greater visibility to stories too often obscured from view, and serve as an act of joyful resistance.

The 2026 edition titled ’Body of Work’, further champions this, and highlights charitable bodies including the national LGBTQIA+ support line, Switchboard. Since its founding in 1974, the volunteer-led helpline has supported 4 million people. Following last year’s feature title Marsha, by activist, artist and writer Tourmaline, this year explores The Log Books, a literary tribute which showcases a variety of the lives Switchboard has impacted.

‘Being included in the Aesop Queer Library for Pride is a real honour,’ says The Log Books authors Tash Walker and Adam Zmith. ‘At the heart of The Log Books is a simple but radical act: listening. We spent years listening to stories that were hidden from us when we were growing up – stories that should have been ours to know. This book is our attempt to build the world we should have grown up in. Knowing that someone can walk into an Aesop store this Pride, pick up a copy for free, and take it home – that access, that visibility – is exactly what queer stories deserve. Not just to be cherished, but to be known.’

Much like the Aesop shops filled with aromas, Walker and Zmith see their book as a ‘rich cacophony of LGBTQ+ life and history in Britain, full of highs and lows, progress and backlash, and the real stories of queer people across the generations’.

The authors continue, ‘The past fifty years or so have seen enormous change for members of the LGBTQ+ community – and our book documents this, through the questions and concerns raised on calls to Switchboard. There's the temptation to think of that as 'history', or something that we've gone through and it's done. But in fact, so many individual queer people today struggle, and trans people especially are being demonised in public life; in many ways, we've turned back the clock. We have the sense that history is repeating, but that's only because we know this history in the first place. So what we want readers to take away from the book is that the LGBTQ+ community is rich, complicated, messy—and our rights are fragile.’

aesop.com

Aesop Queer Library, Soho
Aesop Soho, 41 Lexington Street, London W1F 9AJ Friday 3 July – Sunday 5 July
Friday: 11:00 AM – 7:00 PM, Saturday: 10:00 AM – 7:00 PM, Sunday: 12:00 – 6:00 PM

Aesop Queer Reading Room, Spitalfields
Aesop Spitalfields, 75-77 Brushfield Street, London E1 6AA Friday 3 July – Sunday 5 July Friday: 11:00 AM – 6:00 PM, Saturday: 11:00 AM – 7:00 PM, Sunday: 11:00 AM – 6:00 PM

Aesop Queer Reading Room, Brighton
104-105 Gloucester Road, Brighton and Hove, Brighton BN1 4AP Friday 31 July – Sunday 2 August
Friday: 11:00 AM – 6:00 PM, Saturday: 10:00 AM – 6:00 PM, Sunday: 11:00 AM – 5:00 PM

Making public art is not always a walk in the park. Forty years after Christo and Jeanne-Claude wrapped the Pont-Neuf, the oldest bridge in Paris, the foundation that bears their names asked the French photographer and street artist JR to commemorate the event with a creation of his own.

The result, La Caverne du Pont Neuf, has been a Herculean journey, from conception to funding (no public money was spent) to construction. On 16 June, JR announced its opening to the public – 10 days late – with a sigh of relief. '[Christo and Jeanne-Claude's] project at Pont Neuf, like mine, will have been the most difficult of our respective careers,; he said. For his predecessors, the main obstacle had been gaining the necessary authorisations. For JR, it was the vagaries of Mother Nature, which made the project what he calls a 'climate odyssey.'

Whereas the 1985 intervention emphasised the shape of the bridge, JR says he 'wanted to deform it, by making it almost disappear.' The project, 120 metres long and up to 18 metres tall, looks like a snow-capped mountain dropped into the city centre, with a tunnel-like cave inside. Like many of the city's monuments, the Pont Neuf was built using age-old limestone from quarries around Paris. The Caverne references that history, contrasting brute stone (or its idea) with the elegance of the surrounding architecture. Inside and out, the structure is printed with pixellated black and white photos of rock from the quarries.

The Pont Neuf is a protected monument, so there was no question of disturbing the surface in any way. At first, JR's studio considered using scaffolding to build something in a fairly classic way. This evolved into the idea of an inflatable installation, a concept Christo and Jeanne-Claude also explored. It would be lighter, faster to build, and more sustainable. (The fabric will also be reused or recycled after the project comes down.)

More than 800 people took part in the construction: engineers, sound and light technicians, seamstresses, printers, and more. An artisanal company in Brittany specialising in inflatable textile structures designed the fabric in lightweight PVC, sewing the pieces together in an intricate pattern like a puzzle. The final installation is composed of four layers, held in place and separated by pressurised air. In fact, air is the primary element, nearly 20,000 cubic metres of it.

The studio tested the Caverne's individual modules in a hangar at Orly airport before commencing installation on the bridge on 11 May. Weather conditions were extreme from the get-go, starting with a week of cold temperatures and nonstop rain, followed by an unseasonal heat wave. At around midnight on 20 May, the team held their breath as they inflated the structure along with its trompe-l'oeil cover. The next morning, Parisians woke to find a mountain range where a bridge once stood.

But four days before the cave was to open to the public, nature struck again with a freak hailstorm. A fierce gust of wind, intensified by the river and the mountain wall, ripped the printed envelope on either end so that it fluttered like a flag. Parts of the inflated structure also suffered, though the damage was contained by the separate modules.

Now it would be impossible to meet the 6 June opening date. And the closing, 28 June, was set in stone, since the Caverne had to be taken down in time for the national holiday. For two days, the team held crisis meetings, consulted experts, and studied the various possibilities—from dismantling the structure to leaving the exterior white, an option JR refused. Finally, it was decided that the printed fabric would go back to Brittany to be repaired. Another team would remove the sound and light installations that had been inserted between two fabric layers and build scaffolding inside the structure, so that the envelope could be replaced from above. Over four nights, cordistes repositioned the printed fabric onto the installation like Alpine mountaineers, a risky operation that had been purposely avoided during the original installation.

Camille Pajot, the Caverne's art director, compares the lengthy, ambitious installation to an epic open-air performance. 'It was like three projects in one. Attaching the canvas to the bridge itself wasn't easy, with the boats going by. Inflating the mountain was pharaonic. And finally, installing light and sound in the interior. And since it was outdoors, everyone could witness our successes and failures.' But, he admitted, that was part of the beauty, too.

On 15 June at 6 p.m., La Caverne finally opened to the public, secured by ropes on the outside. JR opted to leave black marks where the repairs took place, as a reminder. Inside, a total experience touches all the senses, as visitors pass from daylight into the darkened passageway, then back out to the light again. Thomas Bangalter, a former member of Daft Punk, composed an electronic soundtrack like the howling of wind in the mountains. Sarah Bouasse created an olfactory experience around geosmin, the compound that gives damp earth its scent. The company Snap, one of the project's main sponsors, provided an augmented reality experience, including virtual bats and a dancer.

Days after the opening, another week-long heat wave hit Paris. It was surprisingly temperate inside the cave, and visitors were in no hurry to leave, marvelling at the rock-like effects, waving their arms around to watch the augmented reality in action. According to JR, the installation only came alive once the public took part. 'In the end, the audience is the work. That is the essence of La Caverne: it must be viewed through the lens of storytelling and adventure, rather than as a monumental sculpture.'

La Caverne du Pont Neuf runs to June 28 and is open 24 hours a day. Perrotin art gallery in Paris exhibits JR's preparatory "sketches" of the Caverne until 25 July.

'Although dancehall and reggaetón are associated with entertainment and nightlife, they carry deep social, political, and spiritual histories,' says Carla Acevedo-Yates about a new exhibition she curated that explores how the music genres have been helpful as a form of resistance.

'They have a profound history in Black Atlantic performance, serving as sites of cultural production and tools for survival and resistance. Joy and pleasure are essential to that story,' states Acevedo-Yates, adding, 'The exhibition tries to hold these tensions, between resistance and celebration, and grief and joy, across different sexual, racial, and class experiences. It’s not about replacing one narrative with the other, but about expanding how we understand these cultural forms.'

The show titled Dancing the Revolution: From Dancehall to Reggaetón at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago features the work of some 40 artists including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Phil Collins, Reggie Burrows Hodges, Edra Soto, Alberta Whittle, Carolina Caycedo, and Lee 'Scratch' Perry spanning painting, sculptures, video, installations, photographs and a special commissioned mixtape project by Juan Rivera on the evolution of the music genres. Central to the selection of artists and artworks for the exhibition were research trips to Panama and Kingston, where Acevedo-Yates met with curators, historians, and artists, and also spoke with pioneering reggae en español artists, including Renato and Nando Boom. The research trips were supported by prior knowledge and by research conducted by her curatorial team.

One of the curator’s highlights in the exhibition is Territories (1984), an early student film by British artist and filmmaker Isaac Julien that examines Black life in Britain, focusing on the Notting Hill Carnival and sound system culture in London during the 1970s and 1980s. The carnival has its origins in Trinidad as a form of resistance to British colonial rule. The film emphasises how the carnival and expressions of black joy in public spaces were subjected to police violence and government surveillance, shares Acevedo-Yates.

The idea for the exhibition kicked off about seven years ago during mass protests in Puerto Rico, which included members of feminist and queer communities dancing to reggaetón on the steps of a colonial cathedral in Old San Juan, near the governor’s mansion. The protests eventually led to the resignation of then-governor Ricardo Roselló.

Work on the exhibition started some four years after the protests. 'While the exhibition initially focused on reggaetón and the summer of 2019 in Puerto Rico, it expanded to include Jamaica and Panama. It felt important to trace reggaetón’s roots in Black Atlantic culture, from Kingston’s sound system traditions to dancehall to reggae en español,' explains Acevedo-Yates. 'Through my research, I understood that dancehall is not just a genre of music, but also a social space, an attitude, an economy, and even a kind of ritual. Across all of this, I found that visual artists have been engaging with these histories for decades.'

Dancing the Revolution: From Dancehall to Reggaetón is on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago through 20 September 2026

Saturday 11^th January 1969. Jimi Hendrix and his two musicians arrive in Hamburg, after back-to-back shows in Gothenburg, Stockholm and Copenhagen, for a gig at the Musikhalle. On the way there’s some band business to attend to. The mother of bassist Noel Redding is ‘upset’ with the accountant, and drummer Mitch Mitchell owes Redding £72.

Then, two shows in the rackety German port city: a 6pm performance, which is ‘so-so’. Then, a 9pm, which is ‘brilliant’. The fee: ‘£1000 + 50%’, minus the 20% cut (‘£200+) of the ‘man[ager]’.

In this period, 18 months before his untimely death at 27, Hendrix needs to be gigging at this pace – the London-based musician has a serious rug habit that’s costing him the equivalent of £39,000 a year. As much is evident in the invoice he recently received from Belgravia Galleries: ‘One superfine silk & wool Persian hunting rug… One fine Kasmir [sic] Bokhara rug… One fine Turkish prayer rug…’

Luckily, Hendrix has someone taking care of business. As a scribbled note on the invoice attests, the rug dealers’ bill has been promptly settled by one Trixie Sullivan. A member of the musician’s management team, she is, effectively, his right-hand woman.

Such is the treasure trove of detail about the legendary musician’s period living in London that’s contained in a cache of paperwork saved by Sullivan. She had scooped them up after bailiffs had raided the offices of Anim Records in the wake of the 1973 death in an air-crash of Hendrix’s co-manager Mike Jeffery. For 50 years the documents, along with her meticulously detailed diaries, lay in boxes under her bed in Majorca.

Now having been discovered and annotated by her grandson Jonathan Garcia Sullivan, a selection is going on display in Handel Hendrix House. Located in the London building – at 23 and 25 Brook Street in Mayfair – that both musicians called home, albeit 200 years apart, the museum in part consists of a careful recreation of the flat that Hendrix and his girlfriend Kathy Etchingham shared there.

‘Jimi loved rugs so much, and bought so many of them, that he and Kathy had a load rolled up by the side of the bed, and they just alternated them on the floor,’ says exhibition curator and Handel Hendrix House deputy director Claire Davies. ‘You can see in various photoshoots done in the flat [at the time], there's always a different combination of rugs down. When you're working in a museum, everything can become quite static. So we now rotate our rugs in the same way.’ And, courtesy of Sullivan’s careful documenting of the musician’s expenses and excesses, now there’s a paper trail to back up that ‘living story in these rugs’.

Then in her mid-twenties, Sullivan was the assistant to Jeffery. In reality, she was in charge of the day-to-day affairs of the incendiary guitarist and frontman, who had relocated to London in 1966, and his band.

‘Probably more than 50% of the letters, the bills, all the legal stuff, are signed by my nan,’ Garcia Sullivan says. ‘She was dealing with it all, back and forth with so many different big businesses, anything really.’ And, as evidenced by Sullivan’s note in her diary about the band’s inter-personal dealings and concerned mums, she was more, too.

‘From what I understand, my nan acted like the bossy older sister-slash babysitter to keep them in check. People as chaotic as that probably needed that type of person kicking around, someone who keeps everything rolling.’

‘Trixie’s fielding all the phone calls,’ says Davies. ‘We have to remember that in the Sixties, even having a phone line is a luxury. So if anyone wanted to contact the band, they needed to get to her first and then she'd have to pass on the message.

‘That’s given us such a great record of so much activity,’ she continues. ‘She’s having to write down the notes from all these calls. When they move into Brook Street, Kathy is even ringing Jimmy to ask his opinion on colours for curtains. And it's the same with the band members’ parents – someone’s upset or needs some money. That's all going through Trixie. And thank goodness, because now we’ve documentation of those interactions.’

It was a loose but busy and intense time for Hendrix, who would die in September 1970 after choking on his own vomit while under the influence of wine and barbiturates. The Seattle-born musician had lived mostly in London since late 1966. Between May 1967 and October he released three albums: Are You Experienced, Axis: Bold as Love and Electric Ladyland, giving the world now-classics such as ‘Foxey Lady’, ‘Purple Haze’, ‘Voodoo Chile’, ‘The Wind Cries Mary’ and his searing cover of Bob Dylan’s ‘All Along the Watch Tower’. There were multiple gigs, heavy use of alcohol and drugs, and many, many nights out. The Trixie trove includes bills for restaurants, like Mr Love, an appropriately groovy eatery, and for clubs, including iconic Swingin’ Sixties spots The Bag o’ Nails and The Speakeasy.

‘There were so many unsettled bills,’ says Davies. ‘And we can now track when and how they were settled. For example, there were phone bills of Jimi’s. We know that Trixie got a taxi to pay some of them directly because we've got cheque stubs and the taxi receipts.

‘And with The Speakeasy and The Bag O’ Nails, they were late payments. We're trying to work out how much that's about lack of cashflow within the business, because Mike Jeffery had a bit of a reputation for not necessarily managing the books particularly well. But also, it's the 1960s and you can't do anything instantly – everything has to be done manually. By default, every bill can be overdue by virtue of it being a manual world.’

For all the revolutions of the time, it's also, still, a conservative world. Going on display at Brook Street is a letter, dictated by Jeffery and typed up by Sullivan, to Frank Mundy, the general manager of the Royal Albert Hall, ‘intended to reassure him that Hendrix won't be inviting nudity in his performances there,’ says Davies. ‘Because there was recently an interview in the Melody Maker in which he was talking about the concept of people taking their clothes off and being at one with music...’ Mundy was ‘really nervous’ that this would lead to mass nudity in the august hall.

‘So Trixie has to reassure him that that's just a completely misquoted and misunderstood quote. But according to her family, she also got up on stage before his performance and told everybody they have to behave themselves and that the audience has to keep their clothes on!’

Sullivan is now 82 and living with late-stage dementia; her family have auctioned off some of her archives, including audio tapes of Hendrix’s music, to help pay for her care. Even in her younger years, though, Garcia Sullivan says that his grandmother never spoke in any detail about her time at the heart of an intense and bohemian music scene. ‘But she was 25, 26 at the time when she was doing all of this. It's crazy. I'm 29 – I couldn't imagine doing all of that at 25 years old.’

How aware is she that this exhibition is happening?

‘We did have a chat with her two months ago about it. But she doesn't know the details. She's a bit too late into dementia to know. But what's interesting with [people with] dementia is that you can still connect with music. My nan won't remember your name. But she’s still singing. And she'll still recognise Jimi Hendrix’s music. It's pretty incredible.’

The Trixie Sullivan Archive goes on display at Handel Hendrix House, 23 Brook Street, London W1K 4HA, from 19^th June

The work of Lutz Bacher isn’t interested in creating clarity. Although the artist’s decades-long practice used found images, and figures in American history who were both iconic and infamous, it seems that she was never interested in making these people – or the spaces in culture and a national psyche that they might occupy – transparent or easy to understand. Bacher herself worked under a pseudonym, and her likeness appears only once in the career-spanning retrospective ‘Burning the Days’ at Wiels in Brussels – in a photo series that seems to wink and satirise the image of the artist in a studio.

'It’s important to state that we didn’t want to solve who Lutz Bacher was,' the curator Helena Kritis reveals, wanting instead to focus on the idea of instability. The identity and role of the artist is inherently unstable in Bacher’s practice; from her relative invisibility across decades of the work, to the way that the idea of a sense of self can become malleable in the face of this art, and its deliberate overabundance of images.

‘Burning the Days’ opens with a piece that thrives in this unstable place. The Lee Harvey Oswald Interview (1976-78) is presented, on the surface, as an interview with the assassin who shot JFK. But in reality, this is a performance; Bacher herself takes on the role of both interviewer and subject, assassin and archivist. Bacher’s art comes to life in these uncertain spaces in between, where a viewer is forced into a double-take looking at the work. In one of the fragments of text that make up the ‘interview’ (collaged on top of images of Oswald himself, manipulated and distorted by the artist), Bacher-as-Oswald says: 'It should be that more pictures should tell you more, but what happens is that they tell you less and less.'

By drawing on the endless stream of images that make up the language of pop culture – Bacher’s work involves everything from Troll dolls and archival images of celebrities, to toy tanks and cardboard cut-outs of Elvis Presley – she is constantly asking about not just the role that these objects play, but how a viewer might interpret them. For Kritis, Bacher’s work 'refused [the] notion of a clean distinction' between critiquing the imagery and institutions of American culture, and being complicit in the way they can be deployed.

As Kritis puts it: 'She allowed the images to be seductive and visible, but then she also distorted them and exposed how they produced desire, paranoia, conspiracy or myth.' Nowhere is this clearer than in the pairing of two pieces of Bacher’s work on the exhibition’s second floor – what Kritis calls ‘constellations’ – one of which is the wire skeleton of a buffalo, synthetic flesh hanging off of it, materiality of its construction exposed.

On the wall next to it is Men at War (1975), a series of images of American soldiers relaxing on a beach. Read from left to right, Bacher’s treatment of the images – zoomed and cropped, creating a very specific, narrow field of vision – moves further out until it reveals a soldier with a swastika tattooed across his chest. These moments of shock and uncertainty, as if one had been jolted out of reverie, occur throughout the exhibition, in ways that ask questions around complicity and the insidious nature of engaging with culture, and the politics surrounding it, too passively.

There are times where this is done for sly, comic effect; a riff on the pin-ups illustrated by Antonio Vargas for Esquire and Playboy, which Bacher presents alongside knowing, political aphorisms and jokes in cursive text; Playboys (Inflation) from 1993 reads 'of course, there are certain kinds of inflation that I don’t mind at all'. Kritis admits that viewing these images might make someone a little 'uncomfortable', now, still stressing the idea that what Bacher did with the series was take 'this intimate image and make it public; [she] showed the blatant sexism, and made us complicit in watching it together'.

While ‘Burning the Days’ isn’t a chronological retrospective of Bacher’s life and work, it does seem to have an arc that ties it all together. Ascending each of the three floors (and roof terrace) at Wiels where the exhibition is on show, a movement away from the embodied and visual world of mass culture turns into something more abstract and spiritual. One of the final works on the exhibition’s second floor is The Road (2007), a series of 13 images that follow the curve of a road, stopping before the corner is turned.

There’s a movement away from the id, the traceable understanding of culture and its imprints (one striking moment, that illustrates how Bacher’s work interacts with the specificity of where it is exhibited is a toy tank on the wall, tread marks behind it, discolouring the white museum surface), and towards unanswerable question of exactly what it is that lies just out of our reach. On the third floor of the space, the installation Black Beauty (2012-13) – a surface of black silica made to approximate the surface of the moon, with footprints traceable through the room – is paired with Blue Moon (1996), a multi-channel video of the moon, solitary in the sky, and the voices of Bacher and her husband, the astrophysicist Donald C Backer, heard slightly muffled, as if coming from another room.

Bacher’s work, no matter what form it takes, is always fascinated by the power in discovered, repurposed, discarded material. And yet, this seems to fall away at the exhibition’s end, leaving behind a married couple, a far-off celestial object, and the ability to trace the footsteps that led us here.

Kritis pushes up against the artistic tradition that Bacher is most often seen as being a part of: the readymade, found objects repurposed for a new context. Chess (2012), features a replication of one of Marcel Duchamp’s most famous readymade images: a tricycle, turned upside down. Bacher places this between giant chess pieces, and a cardboard cutout of Elvis, as a looping, distorted version of one of his songs plays in the background.

Kritis instead argues for Bacher’s practice as one 'attracted to things carrying a past already charged with social and emotional traces'. ‘Burning the Days’ approaches this in a way that seems like a mirror of the artist’s own approach to making work: by eschewing linearity and easy answers, and instead making tense, sometimes unsettling connections that flicker with the possibility of a new world.

‘Burning The Days’, developed in collaboration with Astrup Fearnley Museet, is on until 9 August at wiels.org

‘Traditionally in the art world, we think of scale as a problematic subject,’ says Anish Kapoor, speaking from his London studio as he finalises the works appearing in his major new Hayward Gallery exhibition, opening on 16 June. ‘In the sense that, why is it so big? It is a perfectly legitimate question, it seems to me. Barnett Newman used to say that scale is not a matter of size, it's a matter of meaning.’

For the Mumbai-born, Turner Prize-winning artist, the scale is important for the physical reaction it incites in the viewer, a visceral response brought palpably to life in his landmark exhibition at the Hayward. In his first retrospective in the space for 28 years, new and fundamental works squeeze, drip and disorient in the Hayward’s Brutalist enclaves.

Kapoor’s works ask us to question the reality around us - where are we in the space, and how are we moving through it? How can our perceptions of what is real shift, and why are we so easily prepared to surrender our grip on lucidity when confronted with works which discombobulate us?

Take entering the exhibition, upon which we are immediately confronted with a vast, red, inflated PVC membrane that easily fills the six-metre-high space. Suddenly, we are small, squeezing around the perimeter of the work in a fruitless attempt to see it all. Elsewhere, perception is treated as lightly as proportion, in the epic Mount Moriah at the Gate of the Ghetto (2022) which hangs, impossibly, from the ceiling. In subverting the familiar curve of the mountain, Kapoor emphasises the unnatural nature of the act God asked Abraham to do at the location in the title. Kapoor’s mountain runs red with the blood which would have flowed had Abraham sacrificed his son, Isaac.

This exploration into ritual sacrifice, and the inner workings of the body, defines Kapoor’s practice. Upstairs, there are metal trays which ooze with red painted silicone forms that could be clots of tissue; sinews wind their way around the containers and spouts facilitate the draining of the ‘blood.’ All of life, in all its rawness, is here.

‘Think of Jackson Pollock,’ Kapoor says. ‘He pours this paint all over the ground again and again every day, in a kind of mad frenzy, and then takes this thing and puts it on the wall. When you see a Jackson Pollock, it is cosmic. He turns it from Earth and blood and body into cosmos - that's the fundamental alchemical transformation. That's why he's the great artist of that whole generation.’

Kapoor’s own transformations, from material into life matter, are equally sublime, and fundamental to our human experience. There is a room here dedicated to Kapoor’s famous uncoverings of the void, with sculptures in Vantablack – a substance created with nanotechnologies, which means it absorbs 99% of light – presenting delightful optical illusions. Try as you might, you cannot make out the shape, form or silhouette of these works, so entirely swallowed up are they by the material. It is a magic trick, and one in which we cannot trust our own senses.

‘I believe in putting the viewer in the place where it is all possible,’ Kapoor says. ‘[French poet] Guillaume Apollinaire’s notion was to take the viewers to the edge, and push them over - and that remains fundamental.’

Anish Kapoor at Southbank Centre's Hayward Gallery from 16 June – 18 October 2026

Twelve minutes into Lift, an Irish-Catholic lady makes a startling confession in the elevator of Denning Point tower block. 'You asked me what was on my mind. Then I thought, nobody had asked me that before,' she says, an epiphany unfolding in the confines of a metallic booth, ascending towards the heavens.

It’s one of many sublime moments in the film, directed by Marc Isaacs and premiered in August 2001. Every day for two months, Isaacs squatted in the building’s lift with a handheld camera, inviting residents to share their innermost thoughts. The resulting vignettes were bolted together across 25 otherworldly minutes, revealing the heterogeneity of London’s high-rises. It was nominated for a BAFTA in 2001, screened across the world and became a cult classic on YouTube.

Now, 25 years on, drawing on recent Instagram interest, Isaacs has compiled 82 stills from the project for a limited run of 100 hand-numbered, signed books. The photographs are introduced with a three-column poem, written by Isaacs, that traverses three time periods: a contemporary part, which sees him observing Albanian-heritage immigrants from his local cafe; a middle part reimagining a dialogue from Lift; and a past part, comprising memories of Isaacs as an eleven-year-old working on a market stall outside the tower block, selling tea towels at four for a pound.

Isaacs, speaking over Zoom from his London studio, remembers Lift’s origin story. Back in February 2001, he had been all set to propose a film for Alt TV, a new experimental strand from Channel 4, about a mysterious fight club for London’s city boys. But the channel’s commissioners, at a meeting, revealed they were already working on the exact same idea.

Thinking on his feet, Isaacs remembered taking a tower block lift up and down every day while working as an assistant on Paweł Pawlikowski’s gritty drama Last Resort (2000). So came his literal elevator pitch: 'I said, I haven't really thought about it at all, but I'm quite interested in making a film in an elevator.' Later that night, at an awards party, he bumped into the commissioning editor in the toilets, who said it had got the green light (budgets were more forgiving, back then).

After enlisting researcher Andrew Hinton to knock on every flat and get a quick bio, Isaacs began to realise that the perfect 'microcosm of London' was hidden away in this Tower Hamlets high-rise. Spontaneity, at first, was key. 'The first two weeks were really exciting. It was really novel. The doors would open, somebody would get in, something would happen.' But Isaacs understood he would have to ask questions to get the main characters talking. It leads to enlightening, miniature conversations. When one gruff man, Peter, is asked what the best thing about his childhood was, his eyes twinkle up and he slurs: 'I’ve seen a golden eagle. It was a big, beautiful thing.' Another man reveals that he was sectioned for schizophrenia after his parents died in the space of a year, the highlight of his life winning a recorder competition in school.

Every night, Isaacs would transfer everything to VHS and watch back what he had been shooting. After a while, several key characters emerged, whom he would sometimes invite back into the lift to build a concrete narrative. If Lift has a protagonist, it’s Lily, an elderly Jewish lady who has lived in the block for 26 years. Positioned as the matriarch of the building, she shoos away tenants at will and leads a rising othering of new tenants. 'It was paradise. Now I've got “troubles” upstairs drilling and banging. Bad health to ‘em all,' she says. At one point, another woman shockingly quips: 'I don’t think we’ve got 20 Jewish people anymore. I was counting the white people when I couldn't sleep last night.'

For Isaacs, who is of Jewish heritage, filming Lift revealed a nuanced form of xenophobia. 'The old Jews would have felt like their world is changing because of the Bangladeshis. Then subsequently, the Bangladeshis would reach to migrant workers from Ireland or Eastern Europeans [...] there were layers to people’s prejudices.' On one occasion, Isaacs himself is even seen as an impostor, perversely framed as a voyeuristic claustrophile. 'What motivates you to want to stand in lifts for 10 hours a day. Is it the confined space you like?'

These stark, often self-sabotaging comments reframe the lift as a confessional space. Lifts are everyday contraptions that get you G to 1 and beyond, but they are also a portal to another world, with a strange limbo between. 'You’re in a completely nowhere space. You’re not in the flat or on the street. You’re suspended in time for 20 seconds. It gave the film a rhythm.' At times, the lift’s mechanical entrails are revealed, breaking this effect like an illusionist exposing their magic boxes.

But it’s the people, rather than the space, that make Lift so special. There’s a surreal romance; one South Asian heritage man, speaking in broken English, continually offers Isaacs food, ending with him teaching Isaacs how to chew betel. There’s optimism; one archetypal New Labour bachelor, who has a sauna and jacuzzi in his flat, shares a carefree attitude. 'I quit my job yesterday,' he says, grinning, returning to talk about Brick Lane curries, his aftershave and going on the pull. But there’s also despair; one man, swaying with a can of super strength lager, can’t bear to show his face to the camera.

At one point, a fly is seen creeping across the wall of the lift. One critic thought it was an ingenious piece of commentary on this point-and-shoot, 'fly-on-the-wall' filmmaking. In reality, they were enlisted as B-roll fodder. 'I wasn't even thinking about that [metaphor]. I bought them in a pet shop in Leytonstone for like 50p for two,' he says, laughing.

Ultimately, like the lift as an object, the film captures a fleeting moment in time, caught between two milleniums. It’s epitomised by one interaction between a man, who owns a local independent coffee shop opposite Starbucks, and a female resident, speaking about the new American franchise’s plans to open 200 more branches in the UK. 'Hopefully they're going to close very soon,' he says, satisfied by the £39 net profit he’s made today. 'Starbucks won't be able to manage against Mr. Coffee,' she says, entirely sincerely. The dramatic irony is piercing.

But Lift’s spirit persists via the medium of YouTube. One woman recently wrote to Isaacs after seeing Lift on the video sharing platform; she had remembered him filming her when she was a little girl. Another has kept in contact with Isaacs and ended up playing a bailiff character in one of his later movies. Isaacs’ latest film, Synthetic Sincerity, set to be premiered at Sheffield Doc Fest in June, imagines him making a deal with an AI research project to use his film’s characters as training data: several Lift characters feature.

Most strikingly, Lift feels strangely zeitgeisty due to its off-the-cuff interviews: it predates and, perhaps, predicts the onslaught of lukewarm TikTok takes, violent vox-pops and Ray-Ban Meta secret filming. Lift now would, perhaps, be called Elevator Takes (there is, consequently, a social media DJ series called Elevator Music.) But Isaacs feels it would be impossible to make a 2026 take on Lift that he would be happy with.

The candour that once met the camera has been replaced by a shared manufactured persona, spoken into a tiny mic. 'They all say the same thing. I need to have healthy eating habits or use the right kind of moisturizer or I learnt to be myself. They talk this Instagram language.' In this sense, the realness that grounds the entire premise of Lift has been lost. 'People were much less bothered about what they were doing. Now, everyone is mediating themselves,' Isaacs says. 'And, with what's happened to the image, you don't even need a camera anymore.'

Pre-orders for 'Lift' are open now

In the world of music festivals, two days are most important. One is the day the gates open, and the rabble-rousing begins. The other is the lineup poster drop. That graphic is often the deciding factor in whether attendees buy a ticket.

Well, when III Points, Miami’s alternative music festival, released its full lineup in 2024, fans saw something uncommon on the poster: a circle.

Generally, these rosters are read horizontally like any other piece of text. Some, like Coachella, gradually decrease the font size to indicate artist calibre. Some, like Lost Lands, have a block of big text for the more popular artists and a block of small text for the rising artists. Tomorrowland has a list of over 850 artists, all in the same size font.

III Points reinvented the wheel (pun intended). For the last two years, the centrepiece of the roster has been a circle. Some names are within the circle. Some sit in the ringed frame, curved to fit. Others are outside of it, and the smallest names are listed horizontally below.

'I kinda reinvented what billing means,' says Santi Vidal, Talent Buyer for III Points. He books the artists and designs the poster. The lineup might not seem like a forum for innovation. After all, Vidal explains its purpose rather simply: '[You want] to get eyes on your biggest talent, but also present your talent in a way that is legible, so people could dissect it and not overwhelm.'

Yet numerous other festivals have started using non-traditional designs. In 2024, Tyler The Creator’s weekender Camp Flog Gnaw used a crossword puzzle. Two other major festivals, HARD Summer and Portola, relied on a more graffiti-esque look, rejecting sequential sizing and uniform font. Vidal comments that the latter two are following the trend he started.

'If you look at those lineups, it's the same thing as us,' Vidal says. 'You don't know who's headliner, who's bigger than who. There's no order.'

Vidal tells me the main reason for this ambiguity is to ease the pressure on the negotiations. Unless a lineup poster is like Tomorrowland, fully alphabetical with the same font size, every artist placement is a negotiation with their agent. I’ve personally heard from agents that billing can be the most stressful part of festival bookings.

Every agent wants their artist to be as high and as big as possible, while Vidal and his counterparts need to consider which acts are the biggest draw for ticket sales. The circle disrupted this standard process.

'It makes how agents perceive it ambiguous. There isn’t one headliner. You're either in the circle or [not]. The font sizes are the same. They don't know what's better than what,' Vidal explains. 'These 20 acts in the middle are all headliners. Then the acts surrounding it on the rings are the sub-headliners. You don't know if the person above you or next to you is billed higher. There’s no Coachella tiered hierarchy.'

Coachella’s poster has maintained the same format since 2003, long before it was a massive cultural touchpoint. But back then, the artist's fame level was obvious. Today, with social media and streaming, artists can attract millions of new fans in a matter of hours, and agents are sure to use those kinds of metrics as points in negotiations.

'In the festival landscape, so many artists are blowing up left and right,' Vidal says. 'If you create this format where it's ambiguous, it makes your life easier.'

Some points of the negotiation go beyond anything concrete as well. Vidal has had agents of more alternative artists request not to be placed beside more mainstream acts. Agents are the ones who are approving these artists to perform, which brings in the ticket sales that keep the festival alive.

'I'm also trying to make these agents that we're paying a lot of money to happy with the way that their client is presented,' Vidal says. 'It's a balancing act, and it's very tedious sometimes with the approval process.'

It might sacrifice some legibility, but a unique design is one way Vidal gets creative to keep the agents happy while easing his stress. Not to mention, he’s in a position to curate a lineup that he wants to see. He likes posters that create hierarchy to help discern which acts are more obscure:

'My taste is kind of niche. I find the nuggets at the bottom, and then I'll go to the top,' Vidal explains. After the negotiations are done and the poster is out, he goes the extra mile and creates a second primary lineup graphic: the music map. He takes every booked artist and arranges them in overlapping Venn diagrams by their genres, creating a cheat-sheet for artist discovery.

'I think that's a really cool way to present a lineup,' Vidal says. 'If you like this artist, then the one next to it you would probably also like.'

With this asset, attendees will have a deeper understanding of who they paid good money to see when that next vital day of the festival comes.

When Arne Glimcher first walked into Paul Thek’s studio in 1965, he was taken aback by three meat sculptures on his work table. 'I knew they were wax but I could almost smell the meat,' the Pace Gallery founder tells Wallpaper*. Glimcher’s initial olfactory response to Thek’s category-defying work had eventually led to the artist’s second solo exhibition in his then-burgeoning career. Six decades later, the gallery presents its second solo show dedicated to Thek, who enjoyed one of the most singular artistic journeys of the 20th century.

An immediately beloved painter in New York’s swirling downtown during Warhol’s Factory era, he left it all behind for Italy in the late 1960s, and after a turbulent exhibition history on both sides of the ocean, which included participation in ‘Documenta V’ in 1972, he experienced neglect from the industry back in the US and worked as a bagger at an East Village grocery store before his AIDS-related passing in 1988.

Around 50 artworks in ‘Dream of Vanishing’ date back as far as 1962, with Thek’s lush ink on paper drawings, and crescendo with the ensuing years’ disarming meat sculptures made in wax as well as bodily materials such as human hair. Fleshy and immediate, they coincide with a period when a visit to Sicily’s Capuchin Catacombs with his lover, photographer Peter Hujar, reshuffled the artist’s ideas around life and transcendence.

Paul Thek Foundation director and The Watermill Center curator Noah Khoshbin, who has organised the show with Glimcher and Pace’s chief curator Oliver Shultz, underlines the painterly quality of the artist’s even most lifelike three-dimensional output. 'The decay he captured in meat had a direct connection to the 17th-century Dutch paintings,' he says. This idea of encapsulating momento mori in multidimensionality was an element of Thek’s playful curiosities beyond his work’s seemingly gruesome veneer.’

Khoshbin, who previously organised The Watermill Center’s 2021 Thek exhibition, ‘Interior/Landscape’, out of Robert Wilson’s personal collection, stresses the necessity of pursuing a 'constellation approach' to present a non-linear path. 'To honour the creative richness of an artist who felt he could be victimised by interpretation, we had to avoid a chronological timeline,' he adds.

Enigmatic in their bearings yet expressive through an inquisitive technique, the works, some of which have never been previously exhibited, embody their time’s social tensions, sifted through their makers’ personal turmoils. In contrast to earlier paintings, in earthy hues and spectral finishes, sculptures such as Untitled (Feather Cross) from 1969 cement faith and its evanescence with a clutter of effervescent white feathers dressing a tall steel cross.

Mortality, in fact, anchors Thek’s constant tug of war between an immensely tactile channelling and a fascination for an ethereal punch. As manifested in the show’s title, a knife-edge march between an incredibly present embrace of life and the ever-imminent loss of it all renders the experience utterly carnal.

Installed in intimate vignettes under moody lighting, the show bows for its finale with late-career colour-busting zigzag-y acrylic paintings from the mid-1980s, just prior to Thek’s death at age 54. Casually called 'bad paintings', these small-scale abstractions, which often came with chairs scaled for children to sit in front of them, were reactionary to the industry’s brutal disinterest in his practice, all while his entire community was facing death and stigma due to the AIDS pandemic.

Both Khoshbin and Glimcher agree on the power of a quintet of scrolls, all kept in the late Robert Wilson’s collection and believed to be from 1973. Marked by erratic and subliminal hand gestures, the ink drawings, which stretch as long as 117 inches, meditate on the thought process of a mind that vehemently refused submission to the status quo. 'He made these drawings when all his peers were denying the hand and producing Pop Art,' says Glimcher, who sees the scrolls as 'the Rosetta Stone of his paintings.'

At a time of artificial intervention into all paths of creativity, Thek’s uncompromisingly raw ways of embodying emotionality speak at louder volumes.

‘Paul Thek: Dream of Vanishing’ is on through 14 August 2026

pacegallery.com

The celebrated British artist David Hockney, one of the most important figures in contemporary art in both the 20th and 21st centuries, passed away peacefully at home on 11 June 2026, one month short of his 89th birthday.

Hockney was a painter whose restless intelligence and chromatic brilliance placed him at the centre of British cultural life for more than half a century.

He never much liked being told what to do. When London’s Royal College of Art (RCA) threatened to withhold his degree in 1962 because he refused to sit a written examination – on the grounds that he should be judged solely on his art – the RCA eventually backed down. It was a small incident, but characteristic of the man. Throughout his career, Hockney remained resolutely, cheerfully himself: a northern working-class boy with peroxide hair, thick-rimmed glasses and an absolute conviction that painting mattered, that looking mattered, and that joy was not a lesser artistic emotion than suffering.

He was born in Bradford in July 1937, the fourth of five children, into a working-class household where his father, Kenneth, was an accountant's clerk and his mother, Laura, a devout Methodist. Kenneth had been a conscientious objector during the Second World War – a piece of principled stubbornness that Hockney seemed to have inherited. He studied first at Bradford College of Art and then, from 1959, at the RCA, where he graduated with a Gold Medal in 1962, entering a London art scene already crackling with energy, from Francis Bacon's visceral figuration to the kitchen-sink social realism of the Euston Road painters.

His peers at the RCA included Derek Boshier, Allen Jones, Patrick Caulfield and Peter Phillips, as well as the fashion designers Ossie Clark and Celia Birtwell, and a young Ridley Scott. It was a remarkable cohort, and Hockney stood out even within it – irreverent, prolific and already commercially astute. His first solo show at John Kasmin's Mayfair gallery in 1963 sold out entirely. Soon after, he boarded a plane for California.

Los Angeles was a revelation. The light, the heat, the unabashed hedonism of it, Hockney absorbed all of it into his palette and never quite let go. The swimming pool paintings that followed: A Bigger Splash, Peter Getting Out of Nick's Pool, the whole glittering series – weren't simply celebrations of Californian leisure. They were studies in surface and transparency, in the way light behaves differently through water than through air, painted with an economy of means that disguised their considerable technical sophistication.

California also gave Hockney something harder to articulate: the freedom to live and work openly as a gay man, at a time when that required real courage. His relationships fed directly into the work, nowhere more so than in Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) from 1972, painted in a ferocious 48-hour sprint after Hockney saw a chance photograph and understood immediately what the picture had to be. The figure standing at the water's edge, watching the swimmer below, carries a weight of unspoken feeling that has made the painting one of the most quietly devastating images in postwar art. In 2018, it sold at auction for $90 million, a record for a living artist.

The 1970s brought further brilliance and some turbulence. The end of his relationship with Peter Schlesinger – the young art student who had been his partner, model and muse – hit him hard, and the paintings from that period carry a more pensive quality, an awareness of absence running beneath their polished surfaces. Jack Hazan's 1974 film A Bigger Splash, in which Hockney played himself, documented something of that emotional aftermath, and remains one of the stranger and more compelling portraits of an artist at work.

Through the 1980s, Hockney threw himself into photography with the same intellectual restlessness that characterised everything he touched. His photo-collages, which he called ‘joiners’, assembled dozens of individual prints into composite images that deliberately fractured single-point perspective, drawing on Cubism's logic to produce something entirely his own. He also became a sought-after stage designer, producing celebrated productions for Glyndebourne, the Metropolitan Opera and the Chicago Lyric Opera, work that gave his already vivid colour sense a theatrical scale it relished.

The 2017 retrospective at Tate Britain became the most visited exhibition in the gallery's history, a statistic that said something about both the breadth of Hockney’s audience and the warmth with which British culture had come to regard him. By then, he had long since returned to Yorkshire, to the wide skies and skeletal hedgerows of the East Riding, painting the same lanes and woodlands through every season with an insistence that felt almost devotional.

The enormous canvases of The Arrival of Spring series, acid green and blossom-bright, were not the work of a man winding down. He published a book of interviews during the pandemic entitled Spring Cannot Be Cancelled, a title that captured something essential about his entire outlook: that beauty persists, that the world is worth attending to, that making pictures of it is one of the more dignified things a person can do.

He declined a knighthood. He embraced the iPad with the same enthusiasm he had once brought to the fax machine and the Polaroid. He accepted the Order of Merit in 2012, and was seen to be genuinely pleased by it. He kept painting.

What Hockney leaves behind goes well beyond the canonical images – the pools, the portraits, the Yorkshire lanes – though those alone would have secured his place in art history several times over. He leaves behind a model of what it means to be a working artist: curious, prolific, resistant to fashion, and absolutely certain that the world, looked at with enough attention, never runs out of things to give.

‘In the world of algorithms and AI, taste is all we have,’ says Francesca Beauman, MD at Persephone Books, an independent publisher with a focus on neglected fiction and non-fiction, mostly by women writers from the mid-twentieth century. ‘Taste is our power. Persephone Books will say, this is a good read. These grey covers are a guarantee of a good read. We promise you that.’

You will recognise the distinctive dove-grey cover of a Persephone book, a reassuringly calming sign of quality that stands out in a colourful and crowded marketplace. ‘It was about 1998, and we were in a deli, Dean & DeLuca, in central Manhattan. Their takeaway paper coffee cups are this exact colour of dove grey – we borrowed it from them. It’s the loveliest colour, serious without being sombre, and very chic.’

It was an auspicious beginning for the family business begun in 1999 by Beauman’s mother, Nicola Beauman, from a basement office in Clerkenwell. Naming her venture after Persephone, the mythical Greek goddess linked to female creativity, set the tone for the publishers which revisits out-of-print books written by women in the interwar years, bringing them to life for a new audience. It has been a successful strategy - after three years in Clerkenwell, the business moved to Bloomsbury, before settling three years ago in Bath. They have since published 153 books.

In the early days, Persephone were publishing twelve books a year, a number now reduced to two in a conscious decision to ensure each revisited author is properly celebrated. ‘It felt like we were neglecting all the previous books we had published,’ says Beauman. ‘I said we need to publish fewer books, so that we can really give each one the attention, and - crucially - keep doing so, otherwise we are back where we started, neglecting books and authors that don't deserve it.’

While each book comes clothed in the ubiquitous grey, the endpapers are individual to the author, and are inspired by some element of the story inside. Each endpaper is taken from the same place and date when the author originally published, and is often by a neglected female textile designer. ‘Textile is such a part of our everyday lives, but you don't see it celebrated in many other places,’ says Beauman. ‘I always think that with all the end papers, if they were framed and put up on the wall, they'd be taken as seriously as all this art by men, but because they're on a sofa or a dress, or some curtains, and done by women, they're not.

‘Reproducing these textiles here was a way of both celebrating them, but also bringing the book to life with a very domestic spin. Each end paper - all 154 - has got a story of why thematically they evoke what the book is about. That's a really fun part of what we do.’

The endpapers are sourced everywhere from the V&A archives to vintage dresses they own (The Closed Door and Every Good Deed are both from Beauman’s dresses) and once, from a jacquard scarf brought into the shop by a reader, which was scanned and became the endpaper for To Bed With Grand Music.

‘The endpaper for The Oppermanns by Lion Feuchtwanger is taken from a rug that was at the very bottom of my mum's laundry basket,’ says Beauman. ‘She thinks that when her parents fled Berlin in 1933 they brought it with them, and it had been sitting in the bottom of the laundry basket. The book is about a Jewish family in Berlin in the 1930s, so obviously it was very appropriate. It was scanned straight into the scanner. If you look at it closely, you can clearly see that it is a rug. Sometimes in the end papers you will see a funny, little dark patch that's definitely a stain, on a vintage dress or somewhere.’

Sometimes they look elsewhere for the design – for the upcoming October release, the 1926 American novel Her Son's Wife by Dorothy Canfield Fisher, they have found a dress fabric called Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, designed in America in the 1920s. For the book Sofia Petrovna, the end paper dates from the 1930s Soviet textile age. ‘It is one of my favourite end papers. We were wondering which way it should go in the book. And then eventually I came back from lunch one day and saw it at a different angle, and realised that, clearly, the design is a very abstract view of a factory with smoke coming out the top. Every time I look at that book, I think, oh my goodness, thank God we worked that out.’

The endpapers are a colourful foil for the covers themselves, which resist easy judgement when spotted on the shelf. ‘What I really appreciate about Persephone books is that you can't judge a book by its cover. It's treating the reader with respect. I'm not saying to you, this is a romance, or a thriller, or for men or for women. It confidently says that this is a really good read, whatever that may mean. And then you as the reader get to open the first page and make up your own mind. Treating the reader like a grown up is quite a rare and wonderful thing these days.’

persephonebooks.co.uk

Two young men, lads, possibly teenagers, stand in the Adriatic, stacked one atop the other. The blonder of the pair wears a chain and wraps his legs over the shoulders and around the torso of his companion, who is bare chested with a tan and striped swimming shorts. ‘I asked them to start playing where the water was low, but they decided that one would sit on the other’s shoulders. It was not my idea!’ photographer Walter Pfeiffer shares of the double portrait, shot in Rimini in the 1980s. ‘I love when the people I photograph participate in the process. I like being in good company.’

At Pinacoteca Agnelli in Turin, where a major new retrospective, ‘Walter Pfeiffer. In Good Company’, has just opened, the image is blown up to movie-poster size and framed with a white border. Positioned so it’s the first standalone image visitors see upon entering the show, it makes a bold impression and, moreover, is a fitting introduction to Pfeiffer’s six-decade career (in 1984, it covered the October issue of French publication Gai Pied, once described as ‘the queen of Europe’s gay magazines’). The show’s moniker, similarly, is a strong proxy for Pfeiffer’s character. The Swiss photographer’s reputation as an enthusiastic collaborator becomes tangible at the show’s opening in Italy, where friends and admirers swarm him to say congratulations and wish him a happy birthday (he’s just turned 80).

Before you enter the show proper, a vast wall covered with pages pulled and printed from Pfeiffer’s scrapbooks provides additional context for the work that follows. It’s a practice he established in the 1960s while working at Globus department store in Zurich, where he had been hired as a window decorator following his studies at the city’s School of Arts and Crafts. ‘I was bored and had no ideas, then I started to crop images out of magazines and glue them into these notebooks,’ he recalls. ‘I don't like to look through my work, that's why I love this wall – I forgot everything, so it was again interesting for me. When we printed it as a book [2012’s Scrapbooks 1969-1985], we took only the interesting things, but here there is more to discover.’

Occupying six rooms with more than 100 images from the 1970s through to the 2020s, ‘Walter Pfeiffer. In Good Company’ highlights the broad scope of Pfeiffer’s career. In one of the smaller spaces is the series Das Auge, die Gedanken, unentwegt wandernd from 1986, featuring black and white headshots printed in strict record cover-sized squares, the portraits are situated in pairs, high up towards the ceiling. Elsewhere, colour is largely king, used to underscore the subversive vitality prevalent in the collection of still lifes, fashion images and erotic scenes. ‘Walter's very open about letting other people interpret the work,’ offers Nicola Trezzi, who, with co-curator Simon Castets, was primarily responsible for the show’s rhythm. ‘He has done so many books and exhibitions, he’s always creating a company of people that will inspire him and trigger his curiosity.’

One particular group of photographs stands out for its delicate sensibility: the portraits in Untitled (Carlo Joh), shot over several months in 1973, portray a young trans person reconfiguring their appearance through make-up and drag. Embracing Pfeiffer’s ongoing pursuit of beauty but with a faint ephemeral shadow (the teenager passed away not long after their final session), the close-ups appear visibly different from their neighbours, a condition emphasised by the large moat of white space and silver frames in which they’re presented.

‘It’s the heart of the exhibition,’ the photographer and Trezzi agree. ‘I knew I had to do this show [1974’s “Transformer: Aspects of Travesty” at Kunstmuseum Luzern], and I’d seen him before in the library of the art school,’ shares Pfeiffer of spotting his subject, later relaying the decision to leave Untitled (Carlo Joh) out of the book that accompanies the Turin exhibition: ‘The atmosphere of the series is completely different. It would have suffered if it was inserted in this energetic rollercoaster of images.’

Books – self-published since near the start of his career and, later, released with the Zurich publisher Edition Patrick Frey – have long been a vital component of the photographer’s work, and the new monograph, from Mousse Publishing, is a unique example that places text, including an essay by Trezzi, at its centre. ‘It’s the first book where I didn’t have to do anything. I always think about when I'm not here anymore, and it was like I wasn’t here. That's why I'm glad I'm in a state now, where if the company is really good, I don't have to worry,’ notes Pfeiffer, adding further weight to the show’s collaborative label. ‘In the 1970s, nobody wanted to show my work; people were not ready. That’s probably why it still looks so fresh, even after six decades, but I wanted people to see it!’

‘Walter Pfeiffer. In Good Company’ is at Pinacoteca Agnelli, Turin, until 13 September 2026

pinacoteca-agnelli.it

This summer, museums across Europe have lined up a stellar programme of exhibitions to dive into once the appeal of sun and sea begins to fade. From Amsterdam and Athens, to Basel, Cologne, and Oslo, institutions are presenting shows that unfold across entire buildings, spill into historic sites, and place contemporary works in dialogue with their collections.

A number of these are major travelling exhibitions, stopping in Europe over the summer months, including Cecilia Vicuña at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; Yayoi Kusama at Museum Ludwig, Cologne; and Ruth Asawa at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. Others coincide with key moments in the art calendar: in Venice, Marina Abramović’s exhibition at the Gallerie dell'Accademia opens during the Venice Biennale, while in Basel, presentations by Pierre Huyghe at Fondation Beyeler and Helen Frankenthaler at Kunstmuseum Basel run alongside Art Basel.

Heading to the continent? Here are 18 must-see exhibitions to catch across Europe this summer.

Cecilia Vicuna at Irish Museum of Modern Art (until 5 July 2026)

The first solo exhibition in Ireland by Chilean artist, poet, and activist Cecilia Vicuña – now in her late seventies – brings together decades of work alongside a major new commission.

Reverse Migration, a Poetic Journey centres on Vicuña’s exploration of ancestry, ecology, and interconnectedness, rooted in her 2006 return to Ireland with her partner, the poet James O’Hern. Born in Santiago in 1948 into a family of artists, Vicuña was studying at the Slade School of Fine Art when the 1973 military coup led by Augusto Pinochet forced her into exile. Many of her early works were lost or destroyed during this period. The breadth of work she has produced since reflects the resilience and adaptability of her practice.

At the core of the exhibition is Aran Quipu (2025), a monumental, site-specific installation created with local makers using wool from Irish sheep. Thick, knotted strands hang from the ceiling, drawing on the ancient Andean quipu system while echoing the symbolic patterns of Aran knitwear. The work anchors the exhibition as a meditation on survival, craft, and shared histories. Elsewhere, Vicuña presents a wide range of works, including paintings, poetry, film, and sound.

Following its Dublin presentation, the exhibition will travel to Whitechapel Gallery, where it will be on view from 7 October 2026 to 14 February 2027.

Danh Vo at Stedelijk, Amsterdam (14 February – 2 August)

Yayoi Kusama at Museum Ludwig, Cologne (1 March – 2 August 2026)

To mark its 50th anniversary, Museum Ludwig presents a major survey of Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama.

Spanning more than 300 works, the exhibition traces Kusama’s seven-decade career, from her early childhood drawings made around 1934 to newly commissioned Infinity Mirror Room created for the museum’s largest gallery. While the show follows earlier presentations at the Fondation Beyeler, Basel, and precedes its next stop at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Cologne’s version introduces several new elements and large-scale installations. These include Aggregation: One Thousand Boats Show (1963), Kusama’s first immersive installation, and I’m Here but Nothing (2000–), a domestic interior transformed by fluorescent dots under black light. On the museum’s roof terrace, brightly painted bronze flowers make their exhibition debut.

Across painting, sculpture, installation, and archival material, the show brings together Kusama’s defining motifs – polka dots, pumpkins, and infinity nets – while also revisiting lesser-seen works from the 1950s. The exhibition continues at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam from 11 September 2026 to 17 January 2027.

Rothko in Florence at Palazzo Strozzi, Florence (14 March – 23 August 2026)

A master of American modern art, Mark Rothko is the subject of a major exhibition in Florence, curated by his son Christopher Rothko, and curator Elena Guena.

Bringing together more than 70 works from leading international institutions, including New York’s Museum of Modern Art and Metropolitan Museum of Art, alongside Tate and Centre Pompidou, the exhibition traces Rothko’s career from early figurative paintings to his signature colour-field works. Drawings and studies for major commissions, including the Seagram Murals, are also on view.

At its core is Rothko’s relationship to Florence. He first visited the city in 1950 and was deeply affected by Fra Angelico’s frescoes at San Marco and Michelangelo’s architecture at the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana - -encounters that would shape his later work.

That dialogue is brought into the present through two satellite installations across the city. At San Marco, a small group of paintings is shown in conversation with Angelico’s frescos inside the monks’ cells. At the Laurentian Library, works are installed in Michelangelo’s dramatic vestibule, a space that had a lasting impact on Rothko and informed the emotional intensity he pursued in his own paintings.

The exhibition continues Palazzo Strozzi’s programme under director Arturo Galasino, which has brought major contemporary figures such as Tracey Emin, Anish Kapoor and Olafur Eliasson to Florence.

Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective at Guggenheim, Bilbao (19 March – 13 September 2026)

Artist Ruth Asawa making wire sculptures, California, United States, November 1954; image: Nat Farbman/The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock; artwork: © 2026 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc., courtesy David Zwirner.

A pioneering figure in postwar American art, Ruth Asawa is the subject of a major retrospective at Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, tracing a six-decade …

Bringing together around 300 works, the exhibition spans the full breadth of Asawa’s practice, from her signature suspended looped-wire sculptures to nature-inspired tied-wire pieces, as well as clay and bronze cast sculptures, paper-folded works, and a wide selection of paintings, drawings, sketchbooks, and prints. At the core of the exhibition are the intricate wire forms for which she is best known – delicate, hanging forms made from looped wire, often shaped into bulbous, nested structures that cast shifting shadows across the walls and floor.

Born in California in 1926 to Japanese immigrant parents, Asawa was forcibly incarcerated during the Second World War. She later studied at Black Mountain College, where its experimental ethos shaped her practice. Based in San Francisco from 1949, she became a leading advocate for arts education and public art.

Organised in partnership with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Museum of Modern Art in New York, this is the first major posthumous survey of her work.

Simon Fujiwara at Mudam Luxembourg (20 March – 23 August 2026)

Japanese-British artist Simon Fujiwara presents his largest exhibition to date at Mudam Luxembourg, a mid-career survey spanning nearly two decades of work. Developed over more than two years, the exhibition brings together key projects from across his practice alongside recent works.

A Whole New World transforms the museum into an immersive environment inspired by the scenography of theme parks, reflecting Fujiwara’s interest in spectacle, identity, and contemporary image culture. Working across painting, film, performance, animation, and storytelling, the exhibition offers a broad view of his multifaceted approach.

Highlights include early works that probe the construction of identity, as well as large-scale installations such as Hope House, which explores the legacy of Anne Frank. More recent projects introduce Who the Bær, a cartoon character without a fixed identity, used to examine authorship, branding, and the fluid nature of the self.

A central work in the exhibition is Joanne (2016–21), a video portrait of Fujiwara’s former schoolteacher, who resigned after private images of her were circulated without consent. Revisited years later through a collaborative process, the project uses the language of marketing and media to reframe her story, shifting it from scandal to one of agency and self-representation.

Across the exhibition, Fujiwara draws on the aesthetics of entertainment and advertising to reflect on a fast-moving, image-driven world.

Niki Kanagini at EMΣΤ, Athens (2 April – 8 November 2026)

A key figure in post-war Greek art, Niki Kanagini is the subject of a major retrospective at National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens (EMΣΤ), offering a renewed look at her four-decade career.

Spanning work from the 1970s onwards, the exhibition brings together a wide range of media, from large-scale tapestries – first shown at the Lausanne Biennale in 1971 – to immersive, participatory installations. The Athens show reintroduces the critical dimensions of her practice, including her early engagement with modernism, her interest in the relationship between applied and fine arts, and her use of writing as a visual and structural element.

Born in Alexandroupouli in northern Greece in 1933, Kanagani studied at the École Cantoale de Dessin et d’Art Appliqué in Lausanne and the Athens School of Fine Art before continuing her training at London’s Central School of Arts and Design. Her early work drew on Bauhaus principles and abstraction, before she turned to tapestry-making, which became central to her practice.

Alexander Calder at Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris (15 April – 16 July 2026)

The Fondation Louis Vuitton celebrates the centenary of Alexander Calder’s arrival in France with one of the most comprehensive exhibitions ever dedicated to the American sculptor, known for his hanging mobiles and kinetic works.

Spanning nearly half a century, Rêver en Équilibre traces Calder’s career from the late 1920 – beginning with his Cirque Calder performances – to the monumental works of the 1960s and 1970s that expanded his practice into the public space. Bringing together around 300 works, the exhibition includes his iconic mobiles and stabiles, alongside wire portraits, carved wooden figures, paintings, drawings, and jewellery conceived as small-scale sculptures.

One of the most exceptional works on view is Cirque Calder, returning to Paris for the first time in 15 years thanks to a major loan from the Whitney Museum of Art. Developed after the artist’s arrival in Paris, it comprises more than 100 small figures made from wire, cork, and wood – acrobats, animals, ringmasters – which Calder would perform himself in front of live audiences. Among those lucky enough to have watched this spectacle were leading figures of the avant-garde, including Fernand Léger, Le Corbusier, Jean Arp, Joan Miró, and Piet Mondrian.

Occupying the entire museum – and, for the first time, its surrounding grounds – the exhibition places Calder’s works within the wider avant-garde, his friends Jean Arp, Barbara Hepworth, Paul Klee and Pablo Picasso, while photographs by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Man Ray, and others capture the artist at work and in life.

Helen Frankenthaler at Kunstmuseum Basel (18 April – 23 August 2026)

Helen Frankenthaler, whose innovations reshaped postwar abstract painting, is the subject of a comprehensive survey at Kunstmuseum Basel. Spanning more than six decades of work, the exhibition marks the largest presentation of her work in Europe to date and her first institutional solo show in Switzerland.

Central to the exhibition is her development of the soak-stained technique, in which thinned paint is poured directly onto unprimed canvas, allowing colour to spread and soak into the surface. The approach produced expansive, fluid compositions and played a key role in the emergence of what became known as Color Field painting in the United States.

For the first time, her paintings are hung in direct dialogue with works that shaped her thinking, from the Renaissance through to modernism. As a student at Bennington College, Vermont, Frankenthaler closely studied artists such as Pablo Picasso, Paul Cézanne, Wassily Kandinsky, Joan Miró, and Henri Matisse, later deepening this engagement through travels to Europe, where she encountered painters such as Titian, Peter Paul Rubens, and Claude Monet.

The exhibition runs alongside Art Basel, held in the Swiss city from 18–21 June 2026.

Summer Programme at LUMA Arles, including Verena Paravel, Gerhard Richter, Camille Henrot, among others

Each summer, LUMA Arles – the arts centre founded by Swiss collector Maya Hoffmann – presents a wide-ranging programme of exhibitions across its campus, bringing together contemporary art, film, and architecture. For 2026, a new cycle opens on 1 May, followed by a second sequence on 4 July.

Among the highlights is Delta, a major new film commission by Verena Paravel, developed as part of her ongoing project Cosmofonia. Filmed in the Rhône river delta, the work focuses on the fragile ecosystem of the Camargue, tracing the often unseen lives of the species that inhabit its wetlands.

Also on view is a presentation of Gerhard Richter’s Overpainted Photographs, a key body of work in which the artist applies layers of oil paint directly onto snapshots, disrupting the image and blurring the line between representation and abstraction. Alongside this, LUMA presents the European premiere of In the Veins, a new film by Camille Henrot, exploring the emotional and cultural systems that shape individual experience.

Further exhibitions include the sixth chapter of the Hans Ulrich Obrist Archives, dedicated to Zaha Hadid, bringing together her early paintings and notebooks, as well as a new commission by Julianknxx.

Marina Abramovich at Gallerie dell' Accademia, Venice (6 May – 19 October 2026)

Serbian performance artist Marina Abramović presents a major exhibition at the Gallerie dell’ Accademie, marking her 80th birthday and coinciding with the 61st Venice Biennale.

Transforming Energy is a landmark project, with Abramović becoming the first living woman artist to be honoured with a solo exhibition at the institution. It also marks the first time a contemporary show extends into the museum’s permanent collection, placing her work in dialogue with Venetian Renaissance masterpieces.

The exhibition brings together iconic works from across Abramović’s career, including Rhythm 0 (1974), her six-hour endurance performance, and Balkan Baroque (1997), the work that earned her the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale, in which she spent days scrubbing piles of bloodied animal bones in response to the violence of the Yugoslav wars.

At the centre of the show are Abramović’s ‘Transitory Objects’, sculptural installations made from stone and crystals that invite visitors to sit, lie, or stand, activating what she describes as ‘energy transmission.’ Elsewhere, Pietà (with Ulay) (1983), a photograph of Abramović cradling the body of her former partner Ulay in her lap, in dialogue with Titian’s Pietà (c. 1575–76), marking the 450th anniversary of the Renaissance painting.

Mrinalini Mukherjee at Hepworth Wakefield, Wakefield (23 May – 1 November 2026)

A major retrospective at The Hepworth Wakefield celebrates the work of Indian artist Mrinalini Mukherjee, bringing together sculpture, drawing, and works on paper from across a four-decade career.

The exhibition places Mukherjee’s work alongside that of an early generation of modern Indian and Bangladeshi sculptors, including her mother Leela Mukherjee, Meera Mukherjee, Novera Ahmed, and Pilloo Pochkhanawala, foregrounding a shared history of modernism that has often been overlooked in Western narratives.

At the centre of the exhibition are her monumental fibre sculptures, such as larger-than-life forms made by twisting, knotting, and weaving dyed hemp into dense, bodily structures. Using the traditional technique of macramé, Mukherjee transformed an unconventional material into sculptural works that suggest both plant-like and bodily forms.

The exhibition also includes her later works in ceramic and bronze, alongside drawings, etchings, and watercolours, tracing the evolution of a practice shaped by nature, Indian sculptural traditions, and modernist experimentation.

Pierre Huyghe at Fondation Beyeler, Basel (24 May – 13 September 2026)

The work of French artist Pierre Huyghe demands space and production – conditions well suited to the Fondation Beyeler – widely regarded as one of the leading museums for contemporary art.

Conceived specifically for the museum, the exhibition invites visitors into Huyghe’s shifting and often unpredictable universe, where fiction and reality continuously blur. Working across film, sculpture, and installation, he creates environments that evolve over time, bringing together newly commissioned works alongside key pieces from recent years.

His recent work, including his transformation of Punta della Dogana during the 2024 Venice Biennale, where visitors moved through darkened, labyrinthine spaces where pathways were unclear and moving images appeared unexpectedly, creating a sense of displacement and uncertainty.

One such example is Human Mask (2014), a film set in post-disaster Fukushima, in which a macaque dressed as a young girl moves through an abandoned restaurant. Moving between human and animal behaviour, the figure produces an unsettling effect, echoing Huyghe’s interest in unstable realities and shifting identities.

Coinciding with Art Basel, the exhibition is presented within the Renzo Piano-designed Fondation, home to a world-renowned collection including works by Alberto Giacometti, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Jean-Michel Basquiat.

Ewa Juszkiewicz at Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid (26 May – 6 September 2026)

The Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza presents a solo exhibition of works by Polish painter Ewa Juszkiewicz, organised as part of its programme devoted to the collection of Blanca and Borja Thyssen-Bornemisza.

Bringing together just over 20 paintings – many drawn from recent bodies of work – the exhibition focuses on her reinterpretation of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European portraiture, reframing the visual language of classical painting and its ideals of feminine beauty.

Juszkiewicz, born in 1984 in Gdańsk, works from portraits of female sitters, keeping their compositions intact while removing the face and replacing it with dense arrangements of braided hair, fabric, or organic forms. By altering these images, she reveals how representations of women in European painting have been shaped by ideals of beauty and decorum, recasting them in a contemporary context.

Also on view is a major exhibition of the Sevillian painter and sculptor Carmen Laffón, and following that a presentation of Kenny Scharf, a central figure in the New York art scene of the 1980s.

Nari Ward at DESTE Foundation Project Space, Slaughterhouse, Hydra, Greece (23 June – 31 October 2026)

Each summer, the DESTE Foundation Project Space Slaughterhouse on the Greek island of Hydra invites a single artist to create a site-specific exhibition. For 2026, Jamaican-American artist Nari Ward presents Until That Day.

Known for his large-scale sculptural installations from discarded materials gathered throughout his neighbourhood of Harlem, Ward reworks everyday objects into compositions that address questions of race, consumer culture, and community. For this exhibition, he turns his attention to the African diaspora in Greece, exploring histories of displacement alongside the cultural contributions of Afro-Greek communities.

Developed specifically for the Slaughterhouse, the project includes a new performance featuring musician Aggelos Aggelou and other Afro-Greek artists, responding to Haile Selassie I (Emperor of Ethiopia, 1930–1974) and his 1963 address to the United Nations. The exhibition’s title is drawn from the speech, later echoed in Bob Marley’s song ‘War’ (1976), which reflects its call for solidarity across national and racial boundaries.

Set within the former slaughterhouse overlooking the Aegean Sea, the exhibition continues DESTE Foundation’s long-running summer programme on Hydra, established by the Greek Cypriot industrialist and art collector Dakis Joannou. Since 2009, the Slaughterhouse has hosted a series of site-specific projects by leading contemporary artists, including Andra Ursuţa (2025), George Condo (2024), and Maurizio Cattelan (2010).

Lucian Freud - Drawing into Painting at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (11 June – 27 September 2026)

The Louisiana Museum of Modern Art presents Drawing into Painting, an exhibition of Lucian Freud that explores the relationship between his works on paper and his paintings, organised in collaboration with the National Portrait Gallery.

Spanning from the 1930s onwards, the exhibition opens with a rare group of early material, including childhood drawings, sketchbooks, letters, and unfinished works, many of which are shown publicly for the first time. Early works on paper include Portrait of a Young Man (1944), drawn in black crayon and chalk. In total, the display brings together 48 sketchbooks alongside preparatory studies and more familiar paintings.

The exhibition places particular emphasis on Freud’s practice as a draughtsman. Working in pencil, pen, ink, charcoal, and etching, his drawings return repeatedly to the same faces and bodies, testing and refining his way of seeing.

By showing drawings alongside paintings, the exhibition reveals how Freud returned to drawing as a way of studying and reworking his subjects over time.

Beatriz Gonzalez at Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo (12 June – 11 October 2026)

The Astrup Fearnley Museet presents a major retrospective of Colombian artist Beatriz González (1932–2026), bringing together more than 150 works spanning six decades. The exhibition arrives in Oslo following its presentation at the Barbican Centre.

Drawing on an extensive archive of images – from Old Master reproductions to newspaper photographs of crime, conflict, and political life – González examined how such images shape perceptions of power and violence in Colombia. Moving between art history and mass media, she reworked familiar visual material to reflect how these images are circulated and understood.

Born in Bucaramanga in 1932, González developed her practice in Colombia from the 1960s, working across painting, printmaking, furniture, and installation. Known in Colombia as la maestra for her influence as both an artist and teacher, she died in Bogotá in 2026, shortly before the retrospective opened at the Barbican Centre.

Across the exhibition are works based on Colombian press imagery, including her repeated paintings of the couple who died at the Sisga dam. These are shown alongside prints of violent deaths and painted furniture – beds, tables, and cabinets – featuring religious and political figures. Later works include projects such as Auras Anónimas (2007–09), where repeated silhouettes of figures carrying bodies reflect on the long aftermath of political violence.

Ana Mendieta at Tate Modern, London (15 July 2026 – 17 January 2027)

The Tate Modern presents a major exhibition of Ana Mendieta (1948–1985), bringing together more than 150 works and marking the first large-scale survey of her practice in the UK in over a decade.

Working across sculpture, film, and photography, Mendieta is best known for her ‘earth-body’ works, in which she traced the outline of her own body into the landscape using elemental materials such as earth, fire, water, and vegetation. These interventions explored the relationship between the body and the natural world, as well as ideas of presence, absence, and impermanence.

Born in Havana, Mendieta was sent to the United States at the age of 12 following the Cuban Revolution, an experience of displacement that shaped her work. Throughout her career, she returned to sites across the Americas and Europe, drawing on archaeology, ritual, and pre-Columbian cultures to reconnect with place and origin.

At the centre of the exhibition is the Silueta Series (1973–80), in which Mendieta carved, burned, or assembled her body’s outline into landscapes, documented through photographs and film. These are shown alongside a group of newly remastered films, many presented in the UK for the first time, early performances, and later sculptural works made in Rome, including earth-based floor pieces and her tree-trunk installation La Jungla (Totem Grove) (1985), as well as restaged installations that bring her ephemeral works into the gallery.

Charlize Theron in tears. 'Hollow earther' incels who steal a spaceship. ICE-style stormtroopers rounding up redheads for 'containment' in the desert. Blazer-clad schoolboys, gathered for an end-of-term, end-of-days class photo, thrashing and headbanging to 'a drunk hooligan singing an ABBA song' in a feat of regimented but feral choreo, stoned on melted down 6G, the fastest tech and highest high available here in the near future.

These are what Gener8ion – filmmaker Romain Gavras, musician Surkin – call their Visions of 2034. The French artists’ new exhibition at London’s 180 Studios gathers together films made as commissioned music videos (for MIA’s 2010 track ‘Born Free’, which imagines an anti-ginger junta); as unwitting but uncannily predictive visions of the possibilities of AI (the many emotions of Oscar-winner Theron, played out on giant screens, filmed in 2018 but only revealed now); and as collaborative, album-promoting singles, most notably ‘Storm’. Touted as the lead track from Gener8ion’s debut album Love & Tears, which is released the same day as the exhibition opens, the viral video has had over 14 million views on YouTube alone since its release at the end of April.

Explaining 'the overall project' for the first time since ‘Storm’ exploded across feeds and screens in spring, Gavras says that the unifying idea across Gener8ion’s work emerged when 'we started thinking about what the near future looks like. Not in the AI/robot way, but the transversal, sideways things. What are the kids going to be doing? What drugs are they going to take in 10 years?'

He cites one piece, ‘God Hates Space’, the album-opener that’s also pegged as a single and also has an accompanying film. 'It’s about not flat earthers but hollow earthers, and it's their propaganda video. Our thinking is: what is a stupid idea now, and how dumber is it going to be in 10 years’ time?'

Hence, then, the unhinged, 60-odd schoolboys who appear in ‘Storm’. The seven-minute epic – filmed in Belgium with head-spinning choreography from French-Belgian choreographer Damien Jalet – is the promo for two conjoined electronic tracks on the album, 'Storm I' and 'Storm II'. They feature Swedish rapper Yung Lean as both vocalist and antagonist. In the video, the 29-year-old, born Jonatan Håstad, is the convincingly teenage bully-in-chief in what’s billed as 'Storm Class of 2034', a school set in (vérifier ses notes) Leeds.

Hence, the first question that had to be asked upon meeting the Paris-based Gavras, 44, and Surkin (born Benoît Heitz), 40, in the bowels of 180 The Strand as they put the finishing touches to the installation of their video exhibition.

Wallpaper*: Pourquoi Leeds?

Romain Gavras: We wanted to set 'Storm' in the UK. In the psyche of people, in the common consciousness, the boys' school is British. [Beyond that] it's as dumb as this: as two French people, we wanted a short name! And to make it specific about a city. Not too posh, not too [overly familiar]. But short. So, Leeds. There you go!

W*: How hard was it to line up the choreography, with so many boys, so many moving parts, and with so many elements to the music?

RG: Damien and I worked before, a few months earlier, on an Yves Saint Laurent commercial [for MYSLF Eau De Toilette Intense, starring Austin Butler]… It took us a long time to cast, because I wanted young kids where you don't feel like they're dancers. So that when the choreo arrives, you're surprised.

So Damien did a lot of auditions. Then he built the choreography, first with four of them, then with five, and so on. So it's a mix between extreme preparation, almost military, and then four days shooting total.

W*: In terms of the song and the film, what was the first step?

Surkin: It was a back and forth between music and video from the start. I started a demo of a song that was very anthemic. What could be called almost stadium music. And we thought: who could we invite on this who could interpret it in a way where it’s something different? And we were talking with Yung Lean – Romain has known him for a long time…

W*: He’s also in your next film, Sacrifice, alongside Anya Taylor Joy and Charli xcx, right?

RG: Yeah. We’re gonna release it around September, October. We got along really well. He was the first one that was cast when I was writing Sacrifice. Before Anya, before everyone. And he was great in it – he'd never acted. Then when we were making the song, it made sense for him to be the face on that.

S: We brought him to the studio and said to him what we were thinking: a drunk hooligan singing an ABBA song. He got really into the idea. We had all these references for the video, different ideas going back and forth. Then we recorded the song first in Paris, then in Sweden, and then we finished it on the set of the video in Belgium.

RG: I've been doing [commissioned] music videos since I was 15. I'm 44 now. So I've lived through decades of music videos. And at some point with Ben, I was like: OK, it's way more fun to be in the heart of it. So we're gonna take Jonatan, and he's gonna sing a drunken ABBA song. Same with 070 Shake on [2021 Gener8ion single and film] ‘Neo Surf’: she's gonna sing a surf trap song.

It becomes more interesting and playful. Because a music video is not somewhere where you make money. I whore myself out to do commercials on the side to bring the money back to make a music video. Because there's no viable economy for music videos.

So it's something we're doing to have fun – and to explore ideas and bring in different people that we like. And explore stuff they wouldn't do normally. Yung Lean would not do an ABBA[-like] song normally.

The ‘Neo Surf’ video was billed as the rebirth of Gener8ion after a debut EP released in 2016. You said then it was about 'a disillusioned and damaged world, with puzzling poetry embodied by idle youth and underlying violence'. That was five years ago. How much more damaged and how much more disillusioned are we now?

RG: Ha! This is the interesting thing with some of the videos we've made five years ago – it still resonates now. If we went into robots and AI, stuff that is very zeitgeist-y, time catches up. But when it's ideas and bigger concepts like repression, youth... The varnish changes, but those things stay the same. And they get worse and dumber by the year.

So the delusion is there. We all know we're dancing on the edge of the volcano, and the end of the world is very close. But the thing is: even when it's gonna be the end of the world, kids are gonna be kids doing kids' things. Taking drugs like kids, dancing, doing stupid shit like kids. Some things will stay the same.

W*: And if people think they’ve seen all of ‘Storm’, they haven’t. Because the exhibition also features a different version of the video, right?

RG: Yes. We didn't put that on the internet because we want people to have a novelty when you come and see it. Basically every time we shoot, I shoot a version for internet and with an idea for the physical spaces. So you have those two formats. Not only can you see it big and not on your phone, but you also have a what-the-fuck moment with something you haven't seen.

W*: The Charlize Theron installation – with music by Foals’ Yannis Philippakis, which is the title track of the album – also ticks the what-the-fuck box. What was the origin of that idea?

RG: I shot it a while back. The idea was, it's like an engine to scan Hollywood actors, to recreate their emotion. So it's a demo version of [new tech]. But we shot it before AI, around 2018. It's an interesting dialogue to have actual Charlize Theron. Because now, her going for all those emotions, that can be done with AI. Whereas the conversation with ‘Storm’ was “AI could never do this”. Then we put out something where the question is: is it Charlize Theron? Or is it AI?

S: Just to be clear: it is Charlize Theron.

This idea that Gener8ion lives in 2034: how pessimistic is your outlook? And how optimistic?

S: It's mix of both, basically. For instance, the ‘Neo Surf’ video was about how kids are still kids, [even] in a pre-apocalyptic future.

RG: Even if the world turns to shit, there's still gonna be beauty. There's still gonna be kids doing stupid shit. The thing that is complex is that sometimes there's beauty in violence. Ben and I are both romantic, whether it's in the music or images. And romanticism is not just optimism or pessimism. It's both intertwined. It's the beauty of the world ending.

W*: And that stupid shit is kids forever chasing a new high. Like melting down 6G chips and inhaling them like crack.

S: That’s also poking fun of at the conspiracy theories around 5G, people being like: ‘They're controlling our minds with 5G.’ We like to play with those.

RG: What's interesting is that I showed it to my dad [esteemed Greek-French filmmaker Costa-Gavras], and he was like: ‘Is this what kids do now?’ Maybe it will be!”

GENER8ION: VISIONS OF 2034, 180 Studios, 180 The Strand, London WC2. 12 June–31 July. Opening times: Wednesday–Sunday, 12 noon–7pm. Tickets: £15.00.

'Everything about Diane was creativity personified,' said Francis Ford Coppola, the director of The Godfather trilogy, on hearing news of Diane Keaton’s death in 2025. Keaton had played Kay Adams Corleone in the films, one of several defining roles in a career that spanned more than five decades, across acting, directing, and writing. Her performances in Annie Hall, which earned her an Academy Award, Reds, Father of the Bride, and Something's Gotta Give established her as one of the defining screen presences of American cinema. Off screen, her oversized tailoring, hats, and menswear-inspired silhouettes cemented her status as a style icon, while her New York Times bestselling books California Romantica (2007) and The House that Pinterest Built (2017) extended her influence into architecture, interiors, and design.

This summer, the Diane Keaton Collection, a four-part auction series organised by Bonhams in partnership with The Fine Art Group, unfolds across New York and Los Angeles throughout June. Comprising more than 550 lots, the sales assemble the artefacts of Keaton’s life, from iconic wardrobe pieces and film memorabilia to the books, artworks, and domestic objects that populated her homes. Here, we highlight eight standout lots that offer insight into the people she loved, the films she made, the homes she built, the styles she cultivated, and the objects she chose to live with.

David Wojnarowicz’s Untitled (Buffalos) (1988-89). Estimate: US $25,000-35,000

Diane Keaton’s collection extended beyond fashion and film memorabilia to artworks displayed throughout her home, a 1926 Spanish-style house in Beverly Hills designed by Wallace Neff. A photograph by David Wojnarowicz appeared in the master bedroom alongside Western furniture and graduated Bauer pottery, reflecting the eclectic sensibility that shaped her interiors.

Created between 1988 and 1989, Untitled (Buffalos) followed a visit by Wojnarowicz to the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, where he encountered a diorama depicting Plains bison driven over cliffs. Having recently been diagnosed with AIDS, Wojnarowicz used the scene as an allegory for the government’s response to the epidemic. The falling buffalo became a symbol of abandonment and collective loss, themes that recurred throughout his work as he confronted homophobia, censorship and mortality. A lifelong admirer of California and the American West, Keaton also collected landscapes by Maynard Dixon and Ed Mell. Her photography book collection is also represented in the sale, with first editions by William Eggleston and Annie Leibovitz, among others.

Two framed mixed media collages by Diane Keaton. Estimate: US$1,000-1,500

Keaton’s interest in collage dates back to childhood. In her memoir Then Again, she recalled visiting the 1961 ‘Art of Assemblage’ exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art with her family and becoming captivated by the boxes of Joseph Cornell. ‘As soon as we got home, I decided to collage my entire bedroom wall,’ she wrote. The fascination was encouraged by her mother, Dorothy Hall, who filled 85 journals with scrapbook entries, photographs and collaged pages. Keaton carried the practice into adulthood, spending evenings making collages while trying to establish herself as an actor in New York and appearing in Broadway productions, including Hair. ‘I did a lot of collages. I couldn’t stop myself,’ she said in 2022. ‘I was really playing around with fantasies all the time.’

An original Annie Hall script. Estimate: $2,000-$4,000

An original mimeographed script for Annie Hall appears in the auction, bound in a red cover and inscribed ‘UNTITLED FILM SCRIPT / 4/15/76’, alongside two loose pages marked ‘NEW ENDING’. The 133-page document captures an earlier stage in the development of a film that would become one of the defining works of 1970s American cinema. Released in 1977, Annie Hall was the fourth collaboration between Diane Keaton and Woody Allen, earning four Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay and Best Actress for Keaton.

The film also crystallised an aesthetic she would carry long beyond the screen: ties, oversized tailoring, hats and menswear reworked into something unmistakably her own. Allen developed the character with Keaton specifically in mind, drawing loosely on aspects of her personality and their earlier relationship. Even the title combined her childhood nickname, ‘Annie’, with her surname, Hall. Recalling the experience in her memoir, Then Again, Keaton wrote: ‘Filming Annie Hall was effortless… no one had any serious expectations.’ Allen encouraged her to ‘wear what you want to wear’, helping create a wardrobe that would become one of cinema’s most enduring style references.

A souvenir programme from the original Broadway production of Play It Again, Sam. Estimate: US$200-300

Before Annie Hall and long before her status as a Hollywood fixture, Diane Keaton starred as Linda Christie in the original 1969 Broadway production of Play It Again, Sam. Included in the sale is a souvenir programme from the production, together with a publicity photograph from the 1972 film adaptation, in which Keaton reprised the role opposite Woody Allen and Tony Roberts. The production ran for 453 performances at the Broadhurst Theatre and earned Keaton a Tony Award nomination for Best Featured Actress in a Play. It was during auditions for Play It Again, Sam that Keaton first met Allen, with their professional collaboration quickly developing into a romantic relationship. Play It Again, Sam was the first film Allen made with Keaton. The pair went on to collaborate on eight films between 1971 and 1993, including Annie Hall, Sleeper and Manhattan.

A pair of Louis Vuitton Star Trail ankle boots. Estimate: US $800-$1,200

A pair of black glazed calf leather Star Trail ankle boots by Louis Vuitton, offered in their original box and marked size 41, accompanied Diane Keaton to some of her most high-profile appearances over the past decade. She wore the chunky lace-up boots while accepting the AFI Life Achievement Award in 2017, styling them with a black turtleneck, belted silhouette, textured white jacket and her trademark wide-brimmed hat. Keaton later described the evening to The Hollywood Reporter as ‘the wedding [she] never had and the retirement party [she] never wanted’. During the ceremony, Al Pacino told his longtime collaborator: ‘You’re a great artist. I love you forever.’ The same pair reappeared at the premiere of Poms in Los Angeles in 2019, the Ralph Lauren show during New York Fashion Week in 2023, and numerous other engagements.

A Baron Hollywood’s Hat Maker black felt bowler hat with black ribbon. Estimate US$400-US$600

Few accessories are as closely associated with Diane Keaton as the black bowler hat. This example, by Baron Hats, was worn repeatedly throughout her life and career and belongs to a category of object that has become inseparable from her public image. The connection dates back to Annie Hall, where Keaton’s adoption of menswear-inspired tailoring and bowler hats helped establish one of cinema’s most enduring style signatures. In an interview with Vogue, Keaton said she owns around 40 hats, naming a plain black Baron bowler as her favourite: ‘I’ve had it for so long. It’s good – it’s dependable.’ Elsewhere, she described hats as ‘the final touch to a great outfit’. In her 2014 memoir, Let's Just Say It Wasn't Pretty, she wrote: ‘My hair is my hat. And my hat is my hair.’

A handwritten letter and inscribed sheet music for All I Have to Do Is Dream from Al Pacino. Estimate: US$300-$500

A handwritten note from Al Pacino and sheet music for ‘All I Have to Do Is Dream’, inscribed ‘To Di / Love AL’, sit among Diane Keaton’s personal papers. The accompanying letter reads: ‘Diane. Andy, me and Don went to a restaurant in Mondello. I will call you with the name of the joint. Sit tight. Be right. Don’t fight. Love Al, Your friend.’ Keaton and Pacino met while filming The Godfather and maintained an on-and-off romantic relationship into the 1980s. Keaton later described him as ‘the most entertaining man’ with ‘the most beautiful face’. Writing in Deadline following her death, Pacino said: ‘She lived without limits, and everything she touched carried her unmistakable energy,’ adding that she was ‘unstoppable, resilient, and above all, deeply human.’

Ed Ruscha signed book. Estimate: US$200-$300

Keaton’s sale includes several artist books by Ed Ruscha, among them a signed edition of Twentysix Gasoline Stations, first published in 1963. The publication comprises black-and-white photographs of petrol stations along the route between Los Angeles and Oklahoma City, with captions noting each location. The first stop was Bob’s Service in Los Angeles; the last, a Fina station in Groom, Texas. The lot also includes Nine Swimming Pools and Guacamole Airlines, alongside Sol LeWitt’s Modular Drawings. Keaton and Ruscha were romantically involved for a period, although little was made public about their relationship and both largely kept it out of view, unlike her more widely documented relationships with Al Pacino and Warren Beatty.

bonhams.com

For years, Yinka Ilori has been described as an artist of joy. The phrase follows him almost everywhere. It appears in reviews, interviews and introductions, attached to the vivid colours and communal spirit that have come to define his public commissions and design projects around the world.

Yet standing inside ‘Joy Through Resistance: He Who Laughs Last, Laughs Best’, his first solo gallery exhibition in London, it becomes clear that Ilori is asking a different question altogether. Not what joy looks like but where it comes from.

The answer unfolds through flowers, lace and sound, beginning with stories of migration, faith and family. Above all, it emerges through the exhibition’s title, borrowed from a proverb that carries particular significance within the context of the show. ‘He Who Laughs Last, Laughs Best’ is less a declaration of happiness than a statement of endurance. The final laugh belongs to the person who survives, the person who remains hopeful. And the person who continues to create, celebrate and gather despite adversity.

For Ilori, joy is not escapism; it is a place of pride.

Presented at Cristea Roberts Gallery, the exhibition brings together new and recent works across painting, print and sculpture, with an immersive sound installation. It is also Ilori’s most personal presentation to date, shaped by grief, memory and the cultural codes of the West African diaspora. The artist has described the show as ‘a homecoming’, one that brings together ‘music, faith, my heritage, resistance, joy’ in a gallery setting after years of working across public space and international commissions.

For Ilori, the timing is important. ‘Most of my work over the last ten years has been centred around joy, folklore, affirmation and creating works that celebrate communities within public space,’ he says. Developed during a period of personal reflection shaped by conversations with family, therapy and a deeper engagement with memory, the exhibition examines the emotional and cultural foundations from which joy emerges. Rather than presenting joy as an uncomplicated state of being, Ilori approaches it as something inherited, practised and continually renewed.

Much of that understanding can be traced back to the Nigerian churches of Ilori’s childhood. Growing up in London, he watched his parents navigate the uncertainty many immigrant families face as they build a life in a new country. Yet his takeaway was not anxiety, but what happened afterwards. Every Sunday, the church transformed into something larger than a place of worship; it became a site of release and community.

‘I remember my parents telling me stories about when they were living in London as illegal immigrants,’ he says. ‘They were going to different lawyers to get their indefinite stay, and then going to church every Sunday, praying. I also saw them dancing for an hour at church, shaking off all the anxiety, the confusion, the fear of being deported back to Nigeria.’

For many within the African diaspora, the church operates as far more than a religious institution. It is a place where culture, language, music and memory are carried across generations through prayer, rhythms, and collective participation. For a young Ilori, these gatherings offered an early lesson in the relationship between joy and survival. ‘When I saw them at church on a Sunday, I saw so much joy in them, and nothing mattered to them. That was where I saw first-hand resistance through joy.’

In Ilori’s work, joy is not simply depicted as the absence of difficulty that exists alongside uncertainty. Instead, it illustrates how someone can still shine amid challenges. The exhibition suggests that communities do not arrive at joy because hardship disappears; they arrive there because celebration itself becomes a way of carrying hardship together. Joy manifests through sound, the choice of material and medium, and ritual – a commitment to continue gathering, celebrating, and imagining futures despite uncertainty.

Floral motifs recur throughout the exhibition, particularly the shape of Nigerian yellow trumpet flower and the British daffodil. The two blooms offer a precise metaphor for Ilori’s dual identity, one rooted in Nigeria and one in London. ‘These two flowers are from different parts of the world, they’re the same colour, and for me they mean the same thing,’ Ilori says. ‘Yellow is a symbol of hope, resilience and rebirth.’

Layered behind these flowers are ornamental lace patterns, which become one of the exhibition’s most trusted materials. In West African diasporic traditions, lace is worn in church and ceremonial contexts as a marker of dignity, pride and style. For Ilori, it is also domestic memory; lace filled his childhood home, bought and sold by his mother, appearing across garments, tables, walls and curtains. ‘My mum loved lace, and lace made her feel her happiest,’ he says. ‘Nigerians love to spend money on lace. That was them resisting and showing joy through their hard-earned cash, wearing lace and looking their best.’ As a surface, lace’s delicacy speaks of vulnerability, while its endurance reflects the resilience of communities shaped by displacement and perseverance.

The same ideas flow into the exhibition’s sculptural works. A custom-made shekere decorated with beads, handmade congas and a drum kit wrapped in lace invite visitors into a space that recalls worship and gathering. Through instruments and play, sound functions as a form of cultural memory.

The exhibition’s two sound commissions extend these ideas further. Composer Peter Adjaye’s contribution unfolds through brass and horn arrangements that move between warning and celebration. Composer and producer James William Blades draws on field recordings, Yoruba lullabies, church hymns, and Nigerian horn samples, with songs drifting in and out of focus, tracing fragments of memory overlapping with fragments of history. Sound and compositions transform the gallery into a space of listening as much as looking.

‘With sound you can take people on a journey,’ Ilori says. ‘I could take you to Nigeria, to Ghana, to Morocco, wherever.’ For him, music, faith and creativity are ways of maintaining tenderness, humour and purpose. ‘I think people want more soul out of life. With the pressures of life, war, crime, policing, whatever the problems are, you need something else to give you release, hope and clarity.’

The exhibition also complicates the idea of Ilori as the ‘architect of joy’. Here, joy is neither fleeting nor accidental, but something inherited, sustained and passed between generations. ‘This show is another testament,’ Ilori says. ‘It felt like the right time to show the importance of joy from a different perspective, in different mediums, in a gallery space.’

At Cristea Roberts Gallery, joy is given roots in sound, lace, memory, faith and history. It becomes less a burst of colour with affirmations and more a form of cultural inheritance, one that laughs last because it has learned to endure.

‘Yinka Ilori: Joy Through Resistance, He Who Laughs Last, Laughs Best’ is at Cristea Roberts Gallery, London, from 5 June to 11 July 2026

‘How do you design something that holds the space, as well as allowing for a fluidity and pace of storytelling?’ asks designer Rae Smith, who has considered the question upon the return of War Horse to the National Theatre in London (until 30 July 2026).

Smith, who has overseen the drawings, costume and set design for the play, won the Tony for Best Scenic Design of a Play in 2011 and sees the show’s return to the stage as a chance to rework the finer details. ‘Every couple of years we come back to the show to make it better and better, because we all love it,’ she says.

Michael Morpurgo’s novel, on which the play is based, follows a horse, Joey, who is shipped to France to be part of the cavalry in the First World War. The play originally premiered at the National Theatre in 2007, transferring to the West End in 2009, where it remained until 2016. It has toured globally since, now returning to its first home on the fan-shaped Olivier stage in the brutalist enclave of the National Theatre.

Joey the horse, controlled by three puppeteers from the Handspring Puppet Company, commands the stage, the centre of a design left purposely clean to allow for Joey’s ‘living, breathing’ idiosyncrasies. ‘It's not so much a set, it's more an environment,’ Smith says. ‘It captures all of the players in it, and the context is so fast you don’t need a piece of scenery every 30 seconds. The Olivier is a great space for storytelling, where someone can stand on stage and address a large audience quite intimately, and consequently the audience can see them in detail quite intimately as well.’

Smith uses screens to express the all-encompassing nature of the First World War, with her drawings acting as a scenic backdrop, or a way of enhancing battles on stage. There was always the intention for the screen to be used for shadow puppets, with some of the background stories playing out in shadow. ‘What was important was the idea that we were telling our great-grandfathers’ stories, because it came very much from the heart,’ Smith says. ‘It is like I am a visual diarist all the way through, and consequently my diary style went from quite sedate landscapes, countryside loveliness, to more expressionist and full of charcoal and foreboding as [the characters] hit France.’

As the characters go into battle, the drawings become almost vorticist in style, the landscapes dissolving into abstraction as the social order is obliterated. The sense of terror is shaped by the art and the dual purpose of the screens. ‘When we talked about the initial idea of the screen with animated shadow silhouettes, we discovered that the shadow puppets were so full of adrenaline that they were shaky when projected up to four or five times the size.’ Smith built on this emotion, also creating a tank that was like a shadow puppet.

‘I handed that over so that its movement would be exaggerated by animators, so you could have a tank followed by a whole collective of tanks, coming over the hills towards the horses.’ Through this intertwining of mediums, the battle comes to life. ‘When the tank spins round, we get the shadowing into animations as well, to give the sense of the mortal excitement for the end – the feelings of the battlefield, basically.’

War Horse is at the National Theatre until 30 July 2026, nationaltheatre.org.uk

‘The way I work is by preparing myself to relinquish a lot of control,’ says Anne Imhof. ‘The piece is often a performance, and it is in spaces where the audience can walk freely and leave or stay however they please. In taking their own angle or direction on the scene, they almost make their own edit, so there's a lot of possibilities that I think through before the piece is staged, but it's not necessarily rehearsed. But there is this magical moment in all of our minds, the moment where the audience comes in, and this transfer of energy is really palpable. I like it.’

Imhof, a German visual artist based between New York and Berlin, works across an eclectic prism of mediums, from performance to sculpture, music, painting, choreography and installation. In the ephemeral, she finds freedom. ‘The potential of things that can happen, or will not happen, is very potent.’

It is a maxim that has run throughout Imhof’s multidisciplinary, avant-garde and occasionally controversial career. She studied at Frankfurt’s academy of fine arts, Städelschule – although before this, she ‘pretty much home-schooled, through my twenties. I studied art pretty late. It was a very self-determined way of becoming an artist’, she says – and demonstrated an interest in the relationship between music and movement in her first performance. It took place in a bar in the city’s red light district, and she invited two boxers and a band along, instructing the boxers to fight until the music stopped; the band, to play until the boxers stopped fighting.

‘In the beginning, I was performing in my work as the person doing the music – I was playing the concert, and I was close to the development of the movement as well,’ Imhof says. ‘I was trying out the performance movement and working very closely with friends, and I'm still working with collaborators that I started with in Frankfurt. It’s been a long journey in which the collective played a big role, and my detour with music has allowed me to be inside of it. It established a framework that there was a movement done by a performer in relation to me.’

Imhof’s performances continue to be defined by this spirit of collaboration, from 2017’s Faust at the German pavilion during the Venice Biennale – for which she won the prestigious Golden Lion for Best National Participation, as well as an Absolute Art Award – to the immersive Sex, first performed over five nights at Tate Modern in 2019, and the compelling Natures Mortes where she took over the entire Palais de Tokyo in 2021.

Imhof’s performances can be raw, haunting and vulnerable, intertwining classical and contemporary references to create juxtapositions also evident in her intimate yet alienated environments, which both group figures together and set them alone. Often held in industrial spaces, they see expressionless performers in leisure wear move past cold materials – glass, steel – in an apathetic retelling of our digital age. Framed as paintings, they play out scenes of isolation from the uneasy perspective of a relentless commodity culture.

Imhof can spend years preparing for her pieces (last year’s Doom: House of Hope at New York’s Park Avenue Armory took three years of development), yet, ultimately, instinct drives them. She cites an early experience as key in defining her practice: ‘In the past, I prepared for pieces by trying out a movement in public; there was no rehearsal space, we went outside and tried out scenes. Once, in Paris, we performed a tiger-like roar piece on all fours, crawling through open spaces. I went with somebody who was taking photos, because I wanted to see how it looked. I wanted to become an image. It was like taking your strength back.’

While Imhof’s work has always been multidisciplinary, recently there has been a shift from the ephemeral to the non-ephemeral. Earlier in 2026, at the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art in Portugal, Imhof presented her first outdoor sculpture. Steelbath (2025) a water-less swimming pool in grey steel, is a dark and subterranean void. Inside the museum, hours before the exhibition opened, Imhof applied horizontal scratches to her paintings, creating a newly visible and more abstract layer.

Imhof will build on these themes with her London exhibition, ‘Citizen’, at Sprüth Magers (5 June – 1 August 2026). Here, new figurative oil paintings, with scratches, will join a film, site-specific sculpture with drawings, and bronze reliefs depicting tender scenes between women. ‘The video work derives from the performance piece, Doom. It's very much about movement, and also about me having brought ballet into the work,’ Imhof says. ‘In the paintings, two ways come together, in the more gestural and movement-based painting that I do, and then the figurative painting – they became one on canvas. For me, it was the new thing that happened in Serralves, opening a whole new way of combining the abstract with the figurative.’

It is a natural culmination of her life’s work so far, Imhof reflects. ‘If I'm interested in the discipline that systems have on us and how that manifests in an object, then I always like thinking back to a very early series of self-portraits,’ she says. You can’t really see her face in those black and white photographs, she adds, but you can see the boxing gloves she is wearing. ‘For me, it is the idea that what I present in the end might be the thing that I've dealt with, more than it is my interest in showing it. The thing confronts the person in front of it. The viewer is very important in the storytelling, around my work and around the shows.’

‘Citizen’ by Anne Imhof is on show 5 June – 1 August 2026 at Sprüth Magers London, spruethmagers.com, anneimhof.com

This article appears in the July 2026 Issue of Wallpaper*, available from 4 June in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today