Life carries weight – and as we dive deeper into our phones, endlessly scrolling through the reels of idealised living, it becomes easier to push the heavier, messier parts of existence out of sight.

Against the ever-shifting surface-level pressures of modern life that we’ve all come to know, ‘The Weight of Being’ at Two Temple Place in London takes an ontological peek into what’s largely remained unchanged – a continual attempt to make sense of life's quiet weight – the good, the bad, and all the shades in between.

Set against a grandiose backdrop of Neo-Tudor architecture, the show presents a medley of sculpture, photography, film and painting. Shedding light on vulnerability, the struggles of mental health, and acts of resilience. Open until 19 April 2026, the exhibition brings together 68 artists, spanning from the 20th century to the present day. There are works from acclaimed artists such as Lubaina Himid and Paula Rego, as well as lesser-known talents such as John Wilson McCracken.

Entering the exhibition space, the weight of the everyday is presented in full colour. Johannah Churchhill’s photography reveals the heavy toll of work, with arresting portraits showing the harsh realities of NHS healthcare workers during the Covid-19 pandemic. Meanwhile, questions of class, community and identity present an image of a world in flux as Simon Bartram's painting, Man of the North Sea, conveys a deep soul-searching within masculinity. Depicting, in painstaking detail, the restless notion of male identity in a post-industrial environment. Similarly, Rohan Patel’s series Where are you Really From? contemplates an identity of dual heritage caught between the margins of race and class – projecting his own precarity of belonging onto the landscape through solitary silhouettes.

Despite the heaviness of the subject matter, joy and humour surface throughout. Works such as Muta & Moretta by Rosie Gibbens open the door to the peculiar world of retrofuturist fembots, delivering a witty critique on how women's bodies are reshaped for fantasy and control.

Capturing moments of warmth and levity, John Wilson McCracken's tender painting of his long-term friend and mentor, Lucien Freud, fast asleep on a sofa, quietly dispels the image of the towering figure of the art establishment, replacing it with something softer and more intimate.

In celebration of natural and imagined landscapes, Birdsong by Lumina Hamid sits at the crux of a kinship with nature, reflecting on how the collective solitude imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic drew attention to the simple things, like birdsong – an intimate but shared experience.

While ‘The Weight of Being’ doesn’t promise answers or easy solutions, it instead offers something more nuanced – permission to linger with discomfort and recognise resilience. Marking how art has always been a tool for carving out individual and collective freedoms. As curator Angela Thomas remarks, 'we do not pretend that art can cure, fix, or neatly resolve, but it can invite us to sit with vulnerability and hope, and to see how they coexist'.

'The Weight of Being' at Two Temple Place, London until 19 April 2026, twotempleplace.org

What do women inherit? Alongside the practicalities of inheritance, the sentimental objects and the legacy heirlooms, the weight of inheritance for women can rest heavily. As well as possessions, our families leave us their names, memories and culture, defining what is to come by what came before.

It is a question considered by nine Sarabande artists in the exhibition, ‘All That’s Been Given’, marking Sarabande’s sixth annual exhibition for International Women’s Day (8 March 2026). Curated by artist alumnus Jennifer Jones, the show sees artists Antonia Caicedo, Bisila Noha, Cherry Song, Ella Lynch, Paloma Tendero, Rizza Zahid, Siphiwe-Nokukhanya Mnguni, Sophie-Mei Birkin and Victoria Ruiz present work in an eclectic range of mediums.

In the works on show here, we move beyond the material remains into the tangible, an elusive concept explored in the physicality of dance by Antonia Caicedo, whose emotionally rendered figurative paintings consider the far-reaching impact of dance in the context of inheritance. It is a wisdom echoed by Cherry Song and Rizza Zahid, who intertwine historical cultural considerations through contemporary work, in contrast to the playful, cutting modernity of Ella Lynch’s sharp and sexy sculptures.

For Siphiwe-Nokukhanya Mnguni and Victoria Ruiz, the concept of inheritance is more abstract, and becomes a questioning of where underrepresented bodies can belong. Bisila Noha’s beautiful vessels consider her place in history through the medium of clay, while materials also have an intrinsic connection to the body for Paloma Tendero and Sophie-Mei Birkin.

Sarabande’s sixth annual exhibition for International Women’s Day runs 4-10 March 2026 at 22 Hertford Road, London N1 5SH, sarabandefoundation.org

Umi Ishihara has had a lifelong fascination with nightlife. During the film director’s childhood, her dad was a party promoter in Tokyo. He was also a free rave pioneer in Japan in the 1990s. Her mum worked nights in a gentlemen’s bar. 'When I was a kid, I didn’t know people woke up in the morning as all my family got up really late,' she laughs, when we speak ahead of her solo show ‘Nocturnal Animals’, currently on at Gasworks in London.

'I was really familiar with this lifestyle. I grew up surrounded by drug dealers, dancers and DJs. It strongly affected my being.' In 2024, she graduated from Goldsmiths with an MA in Artist’s Film & Moving Image. In her films and art installations, she rejects a purely euphoric view of nightlife, also capturing its dark side. At the same time, she is interested in offering alternative queer or female perspectives and celebrating the communities that define club culture.

‘Nocturnal Animals’ draws upon Tokyo’s strip club scene. It includes a looped film with documentary and staged elements, as well as an installation. The film follows two Tokyo strippers who at times take on creature-like form, inspired by a recent spate of bears finding their way into Japan’s towns and cities at night. These roaming animals are at risk within an ever-expanding human world, but also a threat to individual lives. 'It’s a massive issue at the moment,' she tells me. 'I wanted to use that as a metaphor. These girls working in the strip club become nocturnal animals running around and eating men on the street.'

She tells me she had 'always wanted to make a film about women working in the night surrounded by alcohol and music' but until recently had not 'found the right girls' to cast. Around the time Gasworks approached her to commission a new work, she met a woman in a Tokyo nightclub who also works as a stripper. 'Her character stuck in my mind,' she tells me. Soon after, she went to visit the strip club, but her contact hadn’t arrived yet. While waiting, a line of dancers stood in front of the artist, and she was invited to choose one.

'From a female perspective, I felt it was rude to pick based on the women’s appearance,' she tells me. 'I asked a staff member ‘Can you introduce the craziest woman in the place?’' She was connected with a dancer who was ultimately cast as the second woman in the film. 'She is super crazy, but she’s also super organised. Both women are very special; they are really independent and very interested in culture.'

Ishihara is drawn to the nuances that run through nightlife, and stripping in particular. The exhibition explores a fine line between vulnerability and pleasure. 'They use their bodies, dance in really high heels, and drink. They are physically strong. During filming I realised it’s less about vulnerability and more about independence. They have both had tough lives but they’re very positive. In Japan they have ‘gyaru’ culture with crazy long eyelashes, sexy clothes, and lots of makeup. This culture is well known for positive identities.'

Alienation is a long-running theme for the artist, whose previous works have tapped into rave culture. She also organises parties in Tokyo and London and founded ‘Flatline City’ in 2022, an art project that brings together rave, education and community. 'Alienation is key for this work,' she says. 'These girls are alienated in a way but it’s also an entire community of women working in strip clubs. I have a similar approach to raving. I’m always interested in communities that are alienated by society.'

Umi Ishihara at Gasworks, London until 22 March

'It goes back to who we are as Black people and our story,' says gallerist Tanya Weddemire about 'Here Now and Then', an upcoming Los Angeles art exhibition on the Black Diaspora’s lived realities, memory and enduring legacy. 'And I think our stories are forever evolving, whether then, whether now and whether here.'

Organised by Weddemire’s eponymous New York-based gallery in partnership with Hamilton-Selway Fine Art in LA, the exhibition features work by the likes of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Gregory Saint Amand, Julie Mehretu, Mickalene Thomas, Kehinde Wiley and Moses Salihou.

Curated by Weddemire and Ron Valdez, director of Hamilton-Selway Fine Art, the show opens during this year’s Black History Month and coincides with Frieze Los Angeles. We caught up with Weddemire to find out more.

Discover 'Here Now and Then' in Los Angeles

Wallpaper*: Tell us about the artists and artworks featured in the exhibition.

Tanya Weddemire: For this exhibition, we thought of bringing together blue-chip artists, emerging and established artists. When you look at the work of Kehinde Wiley, Julie Mehretu, and Jean-Michel Basquiat, you can see that their work to date has also created a pathway for emerging and established artists in the marketplace, including Candice Tavares and O'Neil Scott, Floyd Strickland, and Gregory Saint Amand.

There is significant connectivity in the work. Jean-Michel Basquiat is of Haitian descent. Gregory Saint Amand is also a Haitian artist. And in his work, you will see he talks about 1804 [the year Haiti declared independence from French colonial rule], which is very prevalent; it's always remembering the Haitian revolution [from 1791 to 1804] but also still paying homage to being a child.

But then you also have O'Neil Scott, who paints from a realistic perspective in finding the light within us. [His] man in the astronaut helmet [alludes] to the Tuskegee Airmen [the first African American military aviators in the United States Air Force] and their mission.

And I think when you look at the work of Candice Tavares and Mickalene Thomas, there's that connectivity of wood. Mickalene Thomas uses a range of mixed-media elements in her work. There's paint, there's probably paper, and there's probably fabric as well. And then in Candice Tavares' work, you see a lot of different exotic woods combined with glass.

I think, with Floyd Strickland and Julie Mehretu, it's also about how they incorporate paint from a textual perspective to a realist perspective. And that is what really brought Ron Valdez and me together to collaborate on this beautiful show.

W*: Can you expand on the show's exploration of what it means to exist in the present moment while carrying the histories, migrations, and inherited narratives of the Black diaspora into the future?

TW: Think about migration, for example, how slaves were brought up from Africa to America. We brought our stories with us as well. [But] our stories were still not being told. So I think at this point, you have these amazing artists that are really talking about those issues, whether it's identity or loss of memory, and bringing those things back and really focusing on the current issues at hand.

Look at Floyd Strickland's piece about Cain and Abel. One was the good son and the other was the bad son, but still, they were both humans. He weaves that into a discussion of the gang situation in LA, and I think for us it's about merging stories and making them current so people can better understand how we, as Black people, are living.

W*: What else should we know about the exhibition?

TW: I want to highlight the essence of collaboration. I think collaboration is very necessary, especially in the art market. [With the invitation from Ron Valdez to stage the exhibition at Hamilton-Selway Fine Art], I have an opportunity to showcase the artists that are represented by my [New York] gallery in Los Angeles. Collaborations help us share our story and message through partnerships and across different locations. That's what I'm really excited about for this particular show: highlighting the connectivity among our artists and working within gallery spaces.

In addition, we wanted to select an organisation we can support, as we are working within the Black Art diaspora. We chose American Friends of Jamaica because they are one of the many non-profits working to support the rebuilding of Jamaica following Hurricane Melissa, so this also has a philanthropic component.

'Here Now and Then' is on view at Hamilton-Selway Fine Art, Los Angeles, from 25 February to 15 March 2026, hamiltonselway.com

tanyaweddemiregallery.org

‘At the age of 13 I realised there was a danger in beauty and innocence – I could not have both,’ wrote Tracey Emin (born 1963) in her 1999 short story, Exploration of the Soul. Now these words, framed, hanging in the Tate Modern as part of her largest-ever exhibition, ‘Tracey Emin: A Second Life’, strike a prophetical tone.

Emin’s influence on contemporary art has been such as to redraw the landscape, yet her works challenge this aura that could have been in danger of eclipsing them. Finally, Emin speaks to us directly through 100 works united here, drawn from throughout her 40-year career. The show is epic in scale. Throughout the mix of media – there is painting, textiles, video, sculptures, neon and installation – Emin returns frequently to the incongruency she noted early on between beauty and innocence, with raw subjects translated into childlike symbols, delicate drawings and joyful colours, or scrawls in neon (‘I could have loved my innocence’).

Emin is ferocious in documenting her life, with a rawness and honesty, going back to her first abortion in 1990, an event she later referred to as an ‘emotional suicide’. It made her realise, she says, that her work before then was a ‘big bunch of crap’. She destroyed it all immediately. It is extraordinary to see, then, a recreation of this early work opening the show. Small photographs of her art-school paintings, framed on stitched fabric, offer a rare glimpse into an artist finding her way.

It’s moving and it’s tough to watch Emin processing her abortion. She is making sense of the jumble of conflicting emotions, as well as its everyday reality. In the 1996 film, How it feels, Emin documents how it feels to have an abortion – useful, she says, for women who are having one, then going into work the next morning, before the fact of it catches up with them. In the film, she stands in the street and discusses her own, turbulent experience. There’s the mundane – getting a cab, choosing what to wear – and the harrowing; the sickness and the fact that, horribly, it doesn’t go to plan.

Mediums are eclectic. Emin writes her CV on paper and documents her year on blankets (‘At the age of 13 why the hell should I trust anyone’ she appliqués in 1999). In 1994, she embroiders: ‘There’s a lot of money in chairs’ on the armchair she inherited from her great-grandmother, after her nan made the comment. Her nan meant that people stuffed money down the back of them.

In her blankets and armchairs, Emin questions the artistic integrity of quilt-making, imbuing the medium in her compositions with the gravity of paintings. The layered, textured quilts, with their bright colours and spontaneous thoughts, are the most joyful part of the show. Elsewhere, she looks beyond the expected for her next canvas; famously, it is on a bed where Emin documents her recovery from an alcohol-fuelled breakdown, with the Turner Prize-nominated My Bed, from 1998, closing the chapter of Emin’s ‘first life’.

Emin’s second life begins with her documenting cancer, surgery and disability. Seen for the first time here are new photographs of her stoma, following her major surgery for bladder cancer. Emin’s unflinching photographs of herself after her operation are vital works, an urgent dismissal of the coy and occasionally dangerous secrecy with which the body is handled. It's hard not to look away, but it's important you don't.

To follow these raw photographs with the series of beautiful, spiritual, large-scale paintings Emin created after her operation, as well as the monumental bronze outside, I Followed You Until The End, 2023, serves to anchor the exhibition, and Emin, in the present. Juxtapositions still reign, but in the gritty, bloody reality of living, Emin celebrates the beauty of being alive.

‘Tracey Emin: A Second Life’ at the Tate Modern, in partnership with Gucci, from 26 February – 30 August 2026, tate.org.uk

Who is Rose Wylie? Born in Kent, England, in 1934, the painter underwent a traditional artistic education at Folkestone and Dover School of Art, and at the Royal College of Art in London. But there, the conventional story ends. Drawn to eclectic inspirations and with a bold, raw style, Wylie eschews cultural parameters; her work is a gorgeous mish-mash of the high- and low-brow that finds inspiration everywhere.

It is a diversity that defines her major new retrospective at the Royal Academy of Arts, her largest to date, which unites over 90 paintings and drawings, from her most famous works to the rarely seen.

The exhibition is visually striking, with the sheer scale of Wylie’s works embodying a desire to create immersive other worlds. Paintings are large-scale and impactful, seeking a joyfulness evident from the start.

The works are arranged thematically, and we begin with Wylie’s early memories of living in Kent and London’s Bayswater during the Second World War. Here, she is attempting to make sense of the foreboding doodlebugs, which are ominous black presences hovering over dogs and ducks splashing in puddles in the park.

We cycle through Wylie’s memories alongside her. The artist documents her day pictorially, as a form of diary-keeping, with no distinction made between the mundane and the magical. In her hands, omelettes are things of beauty, yellowly oozing cheese onto finely decorated blue and white plates. Food is a common theme, but everything attracts Wylie’s attention, from hands and birds, to leaves, bees, rats and cats. She draws every day, in sketchbooks or on scraps of paper, capturing things she sees in the garden, or on the news or the internet.

The ubiquity of the objects belies their luscious composition. Thick brushstrokes and glorious bright colours speak to Wylie’s love of the sumptuousness of her chosen medium. She doesn’t like too much ‘pernickety, precious fiddling about’ she has said, and it shows in her raw outlines and tangible representation. In one series of four monochromatic animal paintings, Wylie forgets her paintbrush entirely, smearing and coaxing the paint directly with her hands.

Seeing the 90 works gathered together emphasises Wylie’s embrace of the cultural prism. Pop culture, film references, football, art dinners, newspaper stories, biblical references – all are fodder for her rich imagination and love of life, a mischievous retelling of her traditional art-school background.

Upon entering the show, you receive Rose Wylie’s A-Z, a small catalogue she wrote to accompany the 2025 exhibition ‘Flick and Float’ at the Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern. The texts inside reference what is significant to her, from A for Abstraction to Z for Zeitgeist (‘gloomy’ is her only comment for the latter). Her selection, and her paintings, are defined by a freedom, from hierarchy and expectation. Wylie is an artist confident and joyful in her identity. Under T, she chooses Taboo, adding: ‘Not sure there are any.’

‘Rose Wylie: The Picture Comes First ’at the Royal Academy of Arts from 28 February – 19 April 2026

royalacademy.org.uk

Television in 1970s America was disappointing. After the optimism and excitement of the 1960s, there was an air of disillusionment around a cultural output which seemed to centre around idealised, out-of-touch programming that felt dated. As an antidote, public access channels began to spring up on US Cable TV networks, with the non-commercial and community based system offering a chance to create independent programming.

The greater freedom it offered sparked some brilliant TV. Paper Tiger Television, formed in 1981, was one such collective taking advantage of the new platform, with their eclectic programming offering a radical alternative to mainstream broadcasting. Every Wednesday at 8.30pm, their grassroots system invited a figure - it could be a theorist, an activist, artist or scientist - to conduct a critical reading of a text, which could be a film, a book, newspaper, magazine or TV programme. Over four decades, 200 members created over 300 shows.

Contributors like Noam Chomsky, Herb Schiller, Donna Haraway, Joan Braderman, Martha Rosler, Joel Kovel, Tuli Kupferberg, Amy Goodman, James W. Loewen, Archi Singham and Thulani Davis jumped at the chance. Now, for the first time in the UK, over 40 of these programmes, rarely seen since their original broadcast, have been united in an exhibition at Goldsmiths CCA.

Seen together, they mark a clear departure from the conceptual art of the 1970s, instead ushering in the era of punk. ‘The work of Paper Tiger reflected the skills of people from art school - people who knew how to do more with less,’ the Paper Tiger Television community says. ‘It was the challenge and the creative energy that fuelled the collective’s work. It was hard, in some ways, but our struggles made our work better. There was no money and therefore the homemade look grew out of necessity. We would borrow a backdrop from a theatre group to add interest to the set. We would do the credits on cards because we did not have the video tech. What started as a necessity became our look and our strategy to be different and to represent the very nature of the collective. As an alternative to the style of corporate media, this then became our resistance, our form of standing apart and standing up to the mainstream.’

They point out the public access model, which allowed for programming to be made cheaply, epitomised democracy. This spirit runs throughout the show, beginning with the title, It’s 8:30. Do you know where your brains are? Paper Tiger Television explains: ‘In NYC there was a commercial news program that began their program with “It’s 10pm, Do you know where your children are?” All New Yorkers knew this well. A Tuli Kupferberg cartoon of a guy watching TV changed it to “Do you know where your brains are?”’

Practically too, the phrase was useful, reminding viewers to tune in weekly. ‘On a more philosophical level, we ask viewers to think about what their brain is doing. Is it alert? Is it thinking about what is going on in the world? This show is sometimes funny, seemingly cute, but these are big questions about our society and the way we communicate with each other and frame and discuss the problems and the successes. You're watching TV - you shouldn’t turn off your brain! We also often started with the image of a clock. This became a visual cue to say “TIME” to watch, turn on your brain and be creatively, intellectually and socially engaged.’

Programming was eclectic, featuring everything from Herb Schiller’s critical readings of the New York Times and Renee Tajima’s critique of the representation of Asian women in Hollywood productions to Martha Rosler reading Vogue and Richie Perez watching Fort Apache: The Bronx. ‘You will see makers from various points of cultural and political life, from many different places geographically,’ the collective adds. ‘The topics span a broad scope of life from feminism, queer issues, environmental activism, political struggles from US and abroad, as well as expression from artists, musicians and poets.’

This diverse nature reflects the spectrum of creativity involved across the board. ‘You will see the makers of the programmes while you watch. The camera people can be seen in the shows, we don’t hide the seams. The process is part of the show. A collective member walks on set and hands a script note to the speaker. Collective members are on set, making music and providing visual interest. The shows end with credits listed as this show made by. There is no named producer, editor, or writer; all in the collective get the same credit.’

'It’s 8:30. Do you know where your brains are?' at Goldsmits CCA until 19 April

goldsmithscca.art

'It’s definitely a big deal but not in a loud way,' says Gideon Appah of his debut exhibition with Pace Gallery in New York. The Ghanaian artist joined Pace, one of the world’s most prominent galleries, in 2022, and has had solo exhibitions in London and Seoul. The New York show, he says, 'does feel different', and being his first with the gallery in the city 'naturally carries weight, and I am trying to experience it as a continuation rather than a peak'.

The artist adds, 'Every show is a marker in an ongoing process. This one feels like an important chapter, especially because it allows me to present a body of work that reflects where my thinking is now, rather than revisiting something already resolved.' The exhibition, titled ‘Beneath Night and Day’, features a new body of work that includes paintings from Appah’s Swimmers and Surfers series, inspired by scenes from Busua Beach, west of Accra, where surfers, fishermen, and swimmers come together at the shoreline.

Appah graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting from the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi in 2012 and held his first solo show the following year at the Goethe-Institut in Accra. The artist, based in Accra, draws on Ghanaian popular culture and childhood memories in his paintings. His work is held in public collections, including the Museum of Contemporary Art Al Maaden in Marrakech, Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum, and the Absa Museum in Johannesburg.

We spoke with the artist to find out more.

Gideon Appah at Pace Gallery, New York

Wallpaper*: Tell us about your Swimmers and Surfers series and its new direction?

Gideon Appah: The series began as an exploration of leisure, vulnerability, and freedom, bodies suspended between control and surrender. Over time, it has shifted. The figures remain, but the focus has expanded to atmosphere, memory, and psychological space. In this new direction, the water becomes less of a setting and more of a threshold. There’s a stronger sense of ambiguity between night and day, safety and risk, presence and disappearance. The paintings are quieter, but also more charged.

W*: What inspires you about surfers, fishermen, swimmers, and the seaside architecture at Ghana’s Busua and Kokrobite resorts?

GA: Busua and Kokrobite are places where work, rest, and ritual coexist naturally. Fishermen and surfers share the same waters but relate to them differently, one through survival, the other through play. That tension interests me. The seaside architecture, hotels, fishing shelters, and unfinished buildings feel provisional, almost temporary, like they’re responding to the rhythm of the ocean rather than imposing themselves on it. These environments carry layers of lived experience, aspiration, and memory, and I try to let those layers seep into the work.

W*: What’s the thinking behind including some of your reference materials, such as movie stills, archival local Ghanaian newspaper clippings, and photographs, in the Pace show?

GA: I wanted to make the thinking and ideas behind the works more visible. These materials are part of my internal archive. They shape how I see and how I paint. Including them acknowledges that the work doesn’t emerge in isolation. Cinema, local histories, everyday imagery, and personal photographs inform it. Presenting these references alongside the finished works opens up a more honest conversation about process and influence.

W*: What can you share about your support for the Ghanaian Art Scene?

GA: I am the largest individual donor to a major art foundation in Accra, which I am very proud of. I have been collecting artworks from several artists. So far, I have some major works from young Ghanaian artists and two international artists, which I keep in my studio. I collect a variety of art forms, including sculpture, painting, collage, photography, drawing, and installation. When I see the work, and I like it, I will buy it. From the beginning, I was able to purchase art supplies and paints to create my work and rent a studio, thanks to patrons who supported me and bought my pieces, mostly drawings. So, collecting art is a sure way to give back to the art community. I am also a supporting member of the BlaxTarlines Community, which is a programme committed to nurturing young artists and curators straight out of college, primarily alumni of Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology.

‘Beneath Night and Day’ is on view at Pace Gallery New York until 28 February 2025, pacegallery.com

The arrival of the Frieze Art Fair in Los Angeles in 2019 affirmed what many—particularly Angelenos—had known for a while: the California city had risen to become a major hub for global contemporary art. And just like other Frieze iterations around the world, as well as similar large fairs like Art Basel, the event quickly ballooned into a wider cultural moment that spans a week of programming, exhibition openings and across the sprawling metropolis.

The first edition of Frieze LA was held at the Paramount Pictures Studios in Hollywood, but the annual anchor for LA’s unofficial art week moved to Santa Monica in 2023. This February, the fair returns for its seventh edition and will run from 26 February to 1 March, 2026, with the first two days as VIP previews before opening up to ticketed guests. It will take place alongside several major exhibitions at the city’s top cultural institutions, including the Getty, Hammer Museum, The Broad, and MOCA that visiting art lovers can enjoy while they’re in town. Many LA-based galleries will participate at Frieze, or the concurrent Felix Art Fair, while a handful have planned exhibitions in their own spaces that will open over the same weekend. Here's everything you need to know.

What is Frieze LA?

The renowned contemporary art fair was founded by Amanda Sharp and Matthew Slotover, the creators of Frieze magazine, and held its first edition in October 2003 in Regent's Park, London. The annual show was later joined by Frieze Masters, dedicated to art created before 2000, and expanded to New York in 2012. The LA edition's debut in 2019 was shortly followed by Seoul in 2022, and the following year, Frieze also acquired The Armory Show in New York, and EXPO Chicago—creating a constellation of events that run throughout the year.

This year, Frieze LA will feature 95 galleries from around the world, with well-known names such as Hauser & Wirth, Gagosian, Pace Gallery, White Cube, David Zwirner and many more on the roster. The LA art community will be represented by a large contingent that includes Matthew Brown, Château Shatto, Commonwealth and Council, Anat Ebgi, David Kordansky Gallery, The Pit, Roberts Projects and more. Curator Essence Harden is returning for a third consecutive year to curate the ‘Focus’ section, which includes 15 emerging US-based galleries.

Where is Frieze LA?

For its seventh edition, Frieze LA will take place at the Santa Monica Airport, located two miles inland from the city’s famed beach and pier. A vast temporary tent will be erected in an open-air parking lot to host the gallery booths, and provide a venue for a robust talks program and awards ceremonies. Across the airport campus, a series of site-specific installations and activations will also be free and accessible to the public.

Top things to see during Frieze Los Angeles 2026

Alicja Kwade at 303 Gallery

If there’s one Frieze booth number to bookmark, it’s 303 Gallery’s (B20), where a solo presentation of works by Polish artist Alicja Kwade is bound to be a fair highlight. Kwade’s combinations of richly coloured, almost planetary stone spheres with bronze replicas of everyday objects, like a monobloc plastic chair or a shopping bag. These pieces examine mass consumption and proliferation in today’s society, placing the weight of the world onto its most humble or commonly used items.

Felix Art Fair

Established in 2018 and now in its eighth edition, the Felix Art Fair is taking place 25 February to 1 March at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. The fair is considered a more relaxed alternative to Frieze, and will feature 57 galleries that include 18 with a presence in Los Angeles—Megan Mulrooney, Albertz Benda, and Weinstein Gallery amongst them—and over 20 first-time exhibitors. The 2026 fair will also mark the launch of The Felix Podcast, a new audio project hosted by LA-based collector Dean Valentine—who co-founded the fair Mills and Al Morán—and journalist Janelle Zara.

The Future Perfect’s Goldwyn House

The Future Perfect continues to update and expand its presence at the Goldwyn House, a storied 1916 mansion at the foot of the Hollywood Hills. During Frieze, the collectible design gallery is unveiling never-before-seen spaces within the residence, including its private residential quarters. Now known as the Goldwyn Guest House, this area will feature works by Sarah Solis and Pinch, as well as Bocci lighting that will extend into the landscape. Meanwhile, the newly unveiled kitchen is hosting a group exhibition titled 'Jugs,' comprising 30 artists’ interpretations of the humble water vessel. Other rooms across the expansive building will exhibit Lindsey Adelman’s Illuminated Mobiles II series of ceramic canopies and hand-blown glass orbs inscribed in gold enamel, Collection Particulière’s US debut of new furniture designs, new pieces by Chris Wolston and a bedroom outfitted by Orior.

'Made in L.A. 2025' at Hammer Museum

Frieze weekend will be the last chance to catch the Hammer Museum’s biennial exhibition dedicated to artists practicing across the greater Los Angeles area. This seventh iteration spotlights 28 multigenerational participants who are working in film, painting, theater, choreography, photography, sculpture, sound, and video. All of the artists were chosen for the way in which they represent and engage with the city, particularly in terms of attitude, and together create a patchwork portrait of LA’s cutting-edge art scene. On view through 1 March.

Ingrid Donat at Carpenters Workshop Gallery

Swedish-French artist Ingrid Donat’s first solo showcase in Los Angeles will involve a selection of sculptural furniture pieces imbued with influences spanning Art Nouveau, Art Deco, and a range of global craft traditions. Titled ‘Tatoo,’ the show demonstrates her signature mark-making techniques in materials such as leather, bronze and fabric. As the centrepiece of the exhibition, the rounded Commode Tatoo is covered in square, geometric patterns that resemble reptile skin, while the Banquette aux Caryatides et Scarifications incorporates wax-cast bronze figures into the slender frame of the upholstered bench. The show runs 26 February to 30 May at Carpenters Workshop Gallery on Santa Monica Boulevard.

Back in 2023, Wallpaper* singled out the vibrant, intricately detailed and strikingly unique work of Korean-born, Los Angeles-based artist Ken Gun Min, naming him one to watch. Two years on, that prediction has proved prescient: exhibitions are selling out, major galleries are borrowing works from Nazarian/Curcio – his representing gallery – and Min is launching his third solo presentation there. ‘Strange Days of a Quiet Sun’ opens on 21 February 2026 and runs until 28 March at the LA gallery.

The exhibition introduces a new body of paintings alongside a monumental, double-sided folding screen, extending Min’s distinctive visual language of swirling colour, dense compositions and highly ornamented surfaces. Embroidery, beading and hand-applied materials enrich his canvases. Yet alongside this maximalism, Min sharpens his symbolic focus. Lush botanical settings function as immersive stages in which human figures, animals and emblems converge. Motifs of the sun, the tree, the animal and the body recur, distilling historical, political and emotional tensions.

The exhibition’s title borrows from astronomy, where a ‘quiet sun’ denotes a cyclical period of diminished solar activity. Min reimagines the term as a metaphor for sadness and estrangement. In one painting, a blackened sun – adorned with onyx stones and black lace – hangs within a turbulent, saturated landscape. This oscillation between seduction and threat becomes a defining theme of the exhibition.

It is felt in Min’s folding screen, composed of eight individually hand-painted, embroidered and beaded canvases, drawing on the traditions of Japanese byōbu and Korean byeongpung. One side unfolds into a kaleidoscopic landscape in saturated colour; the reverse offers a subdued, near-monochromatic image of a tree.

Animal imagery plays a pivotal role in Min’s practice, often evoking pursuit, sacrifice, endurance and transformation. Since 2019, he has returned repeatedly to the tiger, invoking the Korean tiger, a potent symbol in folklore and nationalist iconography. In Tiger as Saint Sebastian, the animal’s staging recalls the religious drama of Peter Paul Rubens, inverting and reworking Western art-historical convention. Throughout ‘Strange Days of a Quiet Sun’, Min fuses references from Western and Eastern art histories more broadly, European hunting scenes colliding with East Asian landscape traditions.

Queer narratives are equally central. Min’s treatment of the male nude within dense, overgrown landscapes positions figures as partially concealed, casting the viewer in the role of voyeur. In one painting, a nude figure is violently embraced by a bear, its claws drawn, blood rendered in shimmering red beads. The image hovers between intimacy and brutality, underscoring the precarious entanglement of pleasure and threat.

Political histories surface intermittently yet insistently. Works such as Beyond the Struggle Narrative (Okinawa) reference the enduring presence of US military bases abroad. In Secret Map of Camp Garrison, Yongsan and 7 Flavors of Magic Candy Tree, branches incorporate stitched imagery, beadwork, pigment and hand-drawn maps based on Min’s visits to Camp Garrison in Seoul in 1997, when it housed a major US military base.

Across the exhibition, botanical abundance becomes the connective tissue binding intimacy and aggression, history and fantasy, beauty and violence. Far from idyllic, these lush environments operate as charged terrains for dense symbolism. Through his elaborate visual language, Min carves out a decisive and unmistakable place within the contemporary art landscape.

'Strange Days of a Quiet Sun' , 21 February-28 March at Nazarian/Curcio, 616 N La Brea Ave, Los Angeles

To get a good look at the paintings in Lorena Lohr’s Motel Nudes series, you must lean in closely. They are miniature round works, some as small as six centimetres wide, each an imagined portrait of a woman in a motel room, 'caught mid-action, kind of luxuriating in suspended time' as described by the artist. Lohr dreams up every detail in an instinctive, open way, but draws from her many travels around the American Southwest, giving the paintings a layered, 'palimpsestic quality.' Motel Nudes is an ongoing series, and four recent paintings are newly on show in London at Soho Revue, as part of the group exhibition Behind the Curtains.

Lohr is a self-taught photographer and painter, and her journey from camera to canvas has been a patient one. 'In 2010 I was riding a Greyhound bus in Arizona at sunrise and saw the desert for the first time,' she says. 'Everything changed at that moment and, for some reason, one effect was that I had the idea of making some kind of devotional painting of a nude in that specific pastel-hued desert setting. The problem was I couldn’t actually draw or paint. So I taught myself, working whenever and wherever I could – it took a ridiculous amount of time.' Her first series of paintings was Desert Nudes, executing that vision of a woman posed in the mythical landscape, and in Motel Nudes the works are far smaller and set inside, with glimpses of familiar distant horizons out of windows.

The Motel Nudes paintings recall Victorian love tokens – which for Lohr are 'a great blend of chintzy and erotic' – in their size, as well as tiny details in Medieval and Northern Renaissance paintings, and intricate portraits on tombstones. They are uniquely compelling, evoking the faded glamour and cinematic nostalgia of the American motel setting. Their size and shape mean that looking at them is akin to gazing through a peephole, giving them what Lohr calls 'a charge of desire.'

'I guess the theme of isolation runs through my work,' she says. 'Motels are a living symbol of isolation – and a strange juxtaposition of being places of utility, and symbols of transience, escapism or the promise of a new life. There are endless stories being played out between the walls of their rooms.'

Lohr describes her paintings as 'parallel viewpoint' to her photography, which tends to avoid featuring people, instead capturing 'arrangements they leave behind.' While photography allows her to document her surroundings, 'drawing and painting for me is a way of reaching small fragments of the past and making them into more of a relic', she explains.

Moments in art history have also informed her practice. 'I was obsessed with paintings of the Northern Renaissance, artists like Joachim Patinir where the landscape itself became centre stage. But I saw there weren’t paintings with that sensibility based in the American desert, or an image of a female nude that wasn’t tied to allegorical or religious narratives – more specifically a figure just lying down in a large vista, being at ease with the surroundings.'

In her works, she is able to reimagine and question what that feeling of ease might look like: 'If you are a woman travelling alone you’re looked at with suspicion or confusion, but the Western idea of the male lone traveller is heroic and mythological. In the Southwest of course you have the cowboy or outlaw archetypes – so the girls I paint have ended up playing with tropes of that imagery.' Here we stumble upon calm, confident women at rest, and are left to imagine where they might be headed. 'There is always a window or door out into the landscape – I suppose signifying that they aren’t trapped, and are still part of the natural world.'

'Behind the Curtains' at Soho Revue until 28 February

On the façade of La Galerie 38 in Marrakech, a colourful 6m-high wooden installation, The Portal by Ghizlane Agzenaï, leads visitors into the self-taught Moroccan artist’s solo show, ‘Dimension 2112: The Station’ (until 14 March 2026).

The exhibition opened on 5 February as part of Gallery Night, an exploration of selected galleries and art spaces in Marrakech’s Gueliz neighbourhood, an initiative by the organisers of 1-54 Marrakech 2026. ‘I am really happy that we got to do the opening during 1-54, because for me personally, it’s like an annual rendezvous to meet artists, to meet people from the art world that maybe we can’t meet every day in Morocco,’ Agzenaï told Wallpaper* after a tour of the exhibition. ‘It’s a fair that has really grown over the years in a very, very positive way. We wanted to have as many people as possible to experience ‘“Dimension 2112”, so for me and the gallery, it was the perfect moment to do the opening.’ (‘2112’ is a nod to the artist’s birthday, on 21 December.)

Agzenaï’s show was one of several that opened during 1-54 Marrakech 2026, which ran 5-8 February at La Mamounia hotel and was the seventh local edition of the fair, which spotlights artists and art from Africa and its diaspora.

‘I think it’s nice to see the enthusiasm,’ Touria El Glaoui, founding director of 1-54, which also has editions in London and New York, told Wallpaper*. She notes that the number of Moroccans attending the fair is growing, with some travelling from Casablanca, Tangier, and Rabat, which is ‘wonderful’, she says (for future visits, she also gave us an insider's guide to Marrakech).

This year’s 1-54 Marrakech hosted 22 galleries, mainly from around Africa but also the rest of world. Among them were Gallery 1957 (London and Accra), space Un (Tokyo), Ellephant (Montreal), AA Gallery (Casablanca), L’Atelier 21 (Casablanca), Filafriques (Geneva and Abidjan), LouiSimone Guirandou Gallery (Abidjan), The Art Fair (Luanda), and Nil Gallery (Paris). Together, they showed work by around 70 established and emerging artists, spanning photography, painting, sculpture, ceramics, tapestries and mixed media.

Showing at 1-54 Marrakech is 'really important', said Canelle Hamon-Gillet, director of La Galerie 38 Marrakech. For this edition, the gallery presented an all-female group show of Moroccan artists, titled ‘Think Out of The Blue’, featuring the work of Ines-Noor Chaqroun, Meriam Benkirane, Yacout Hamdouch, and Nissrine Seffar.

‘I do feel this link between 1-54 Marrakech and the city is getting stronger,’ said El Glaoui, acknowledging the fair’s relationship with galleries, museums, residencies, organisations, foundations, hotels, companies and art spaces based in the city. ‘There’s definitely an understanding of what we are doing for the city, what the city is doing for the fair and how we are collaborating on programmes that make the fair very special.’

Cécile Fakhoury, founder of the eponymous gallery, echoed Hamon-Gillet’s sentiments about the fair’s influence saying 'it’s of course important' to be a part of the event, describing it as “building bridges” between galleries, collectors, and countries. The gallery, with locations in Abidjan, Dakar, and Paris, presented work by Rachel Marsil, Roméo Mivekannin, Sadikou Oukepdjo, Ouattara Watts, Carl-Edouard Keïta and Elladj Lincy Deloumeaux.

Four artists to watch from 1-54 Marrakech 2026

Sara Benabdallah at Nil Gallery

Moroccan photographer Sara Benabdallah addresses the tensions between tradition and modernity, the pressures society places on women, and the place of women in contemporary Moroccan society. Drawing on her background as a filmmaker, she stages photographs that depict the effects these expectations have on women.

In Anemochory (2026), from the Dry Land series, a young woman is seen wearing a wedding garment. While it looks beautiful, it also weighs on her, underscoring the themes Benabdallah explores. In addressing them, the artist seeks to encourage women to make their own choices. 'Here we don’t have static women anymore. We don’t have a checklist. We just have women existing and expressing themselves,' said MaLou Ngwe Secke, curator of the booth.

Born in Marrakech, Benabdallah trained in filmmaking at the New York Film Academy in New York and Los Angeles and holds a master’s degree from the Savannah College of Art and Design.

Geoffrey Phiri at Imvelo Art Studios

Lusaka-based multimedia artist Geoffrey Phiri explores social, economic and political issues in his homeland, Zambia, through his work. For 1-54 Marrakech, the gallery presented a solo booth of media works comprising acrylic, charcoal, fabric, and paper on canvas, examining the impact of copper in the Southern African country before and after colonisation. The pieces examine themes such as the economy, labour, and the environment through the eyes of everyday Zambians, explained the booth’s curator, Ng’onga Silupya.

Phiri was born in Livingstone, and has been a practising artist for over three decades. His work has been shown both locally and internationally, and he is credited with playing a leading role in developing the Zambian art scene, having previously served as chairperson of the country’s National Visual Arts Council.

Meriam Benkirane at La Galerie 38

Trained as an interior architect, Meriam Benkirane creates geometric paintings, sculptures and installations using canvas, wood, and metal that explore the link between modernity and humanity. The work of the multidisciplinary Moroccan artist is described as opening spaces for reflection, combining precision with a quiet spiritual presence.

She has had solo exhibitions at La Galerie 38 Casablanca and featured in a group show in Amsterdam, and showed a mural at the Jidar Festival in Rabat in 2023. Her work is among the collections of the Al Maaden Museum of Contemporary African Art in Marrakech and the Mohammed VI Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rabat. Benkirane lives and works in Casablanca, where she was born.

Elladj Lincy Deloumeaux at Cécile Fakhoury gallery

Elladj Lincy Deloumeaux was born in Guadeloupe, moved to mainland France, where he was raised, and now lives between Paris and Abidjan, the capital of Côte d’Ivoire. The experience of displacement, moving between Caribbean, African, and European cultures, has encouraged the artist to ask questions about his heritage and identity, which are reflected in his paintings.

Deloumeaux is a graduate of the École des Beaux-Arts de Paris and the National Supérieur d’Art Plastique. In addition to featuring in solo and group shows in Morocco, his work has been on display around the world, including at Art Basel Miami (2025), Galerie Cécile Fakhoury in Abidjan (2024), Art Basel Paris (2023), and at Galerie Perrotin in Dubai (2023).

1-54.com

There are moments in an artist’s work where repetition becomes revelation. In the exhibition ‘Basquiat - Headstrong’, that moment takes the form of the human head: cartoonish yet anatomical, part skull, part mask, hovering between human and animal. Seen together at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebaek, Denmark, these works on paper do not read as studies or sidelines to Jean-Michel Basquiat’s paintings, but as a sustained and deeply felt inquiry, one that cuts to the core of his practice at the very moment it was coming into being.

The exhibition brings together 50 works, 49 drawings and one painting, made primarily between 1981 and 1983, the years that fundamentally shaped Basquiat as an artist. Crucially, these heads were not shown during his lifetime. Kept back, stored away, they only entered public view in 1990, more than two years after his death. Their delayed emergence lends the exhibition a particular intimacy: these are not works addressed to an audience, but works Basquiat chose to live with.

As Anders Kold, senior curator and head of acquisitions at Louisiana, puts it, these drawings 'were not made for the market. They were all untitled. And yet he kept making them.' That persistence, obsessive in its focus, lies at the heart of this exhibition. While more than a thousand works on paper were found in Basquiat’s estate, this group stands apart for what it withholds. There are no words, no slogans, no symbols. Absent are the historical references, cultural citations and textual fragments that have come to define Basquiat’s visual language. What remains is the head as subject, motif and container.

The effect is striking. Hung together, the heads confront the viewer with an unsettling range of mental states: skulls and masks, cartoon faces and anatomical cross-sections, eyes that bulge or empty out, mouths clenched into grids of teeth. These are not portraits, nor allegories. They are, as Kold suggests, 'mental heads – containers of emotional archival states'. The head becomes a site where interior and exterior collapse into one another, where psychological pressure is given physical form.

That pressure is inseparable from the conditions under which the works were made. Many of the drawings bear the marks of their own production: smudges, fingerprints, even footprints. Basquiat worked on the floor, oilstick pressed hard into paper, moving fast and exerting force. 'You can almost read how they came about,' Kold notes. 'With great speed and physical intensity – and then, suddenly, he would stop. He knew what he was after.'

This physicality resists the long-standing myth of Basquiat as an intuitive or chaotic draughtsman. On the contrary, the drawings reveal a fierce control. The heads are typically centred on the page, the line is confident, economical, assured. For Kold, this is one of the exhibition’s quiet revelations: 'He was completely beyond as a draughtsman. His line is comparable to the greatest mark-makers in history.'

Yet technical mastery is only part of the story. Made at the height of Basquiat’s meteoric rise – when, at just 21 or 22, he had broken through barriers no Black artist of his generation had – these works also register vulnerability. Without overt reference to race, politics or biography, they nonetheless absorb the pressures of visibility, expectation and scrutiny.

'It’s impossible to take his identity as a young Black man out of the equation,' Kold says. 'There’s a sense of asking: how is the world really looking at me?' That question reverberates beyond the drawings themselves. In the exhibition’s final room, a series of filmed conversations brings Basquiat into dialogue with contemporary artists Alvaro Barrington, Arthur Jafa, Julie Mehretu, Dana Schutz and Ouattara Watts. Speaking candidly about their encounters with his work – and, in Watts’ case, with Basquiat himself – they reflect on his continuing relevance, his generosity of influence, and the difficulty of seeing past the mythology that surrounds him.

Their presence grounds ‘Headstrong’ in the present tense in a very specific way. The filmed contributions do not frame Basquiat as a source of influence to be decoded or claimed, but as a figure whose questions remain unresolved. Barrington, Jafa, Mehretu, Schutz and Watts speak less about style than about proximity: about returning to Basquiat as a way of thinking through visibility, abstraction, race and authorship under pressure. By placing these voices in the final room, after the encounter with the drawings, the exhibition resists explanation. Instead, it allows the work to set the terms, and the contemporary responses to register as aftershocks rather than interpretations.

What emerges is a quieter but more durable repositioning of Basquiat. By withholding biography and refusing to monumentalise his celebrity, the exhibition insists on looking at the work as work – made at speed, at scale, and under extraordinary psychological strain. 'Mythology makes him too big,' Kold says. Here, that mythology is neither denied nor indulged; it is simply set aside. What remains is an artist grappling, through the head, with how meaning forms when identity, perception and self-understanding are all unstable. ‘Basquiat – Headstrong’ does not resolve those questions. Instead, it makes clear that they shaped his practice at its point of origin, not as themes he illustrated, but as conditions he worked within, setting the terms through which the rest of his work would unfold.

‘Basquiat – Headstrong’ is at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art until 17 May 2026, louisiana.dk/en

Lauren Drescher was back in the French Pyrenees last summer when she felt a strong longing for the sea, particularly the New Zealand beach where she has been spending her winters for the last few decades. Alone at her high altitude mountain home in the heart of Europe, she found herself daydreaming about her daily swims in the Oceania. The artist’s musings is the subject of her ongoing exhibition, Swimmers, at New York gallery Planthouse.

Washed in an aquatic blue ink, Drescher’s prints of bathers, animals and sea creatures strip the subjects off of a distinction between the real and the invented. Instead, the intimate vignettes rejoice in their rendition of their own particular realm in which beings of all species fall into a rhythm not unlike the water’s own dance. 'The beautiful thing about making pictures is that we don’t have to explain too much,' Drescher tells Wallpaper*.

A keen swimmer, Drescher has a relentless passion for the sea. 'I feel so liberated in the water,' she says. In fact, the artist tries to take a dip every day when she's spending time in New Zealand. 'I break my day according to whenever there is a high tide,' she adds.

This personal ever-transformative relationship with the water, and Mother Nature more broadly, lies in the core of her prints which she creates by needle drawing onto recycled TetraPak cartons. The material, commonly found in commercial milk brands, features a thick cardboard surface and a thin aluminum lining, which allows for gentle gestures on the surface. The inventive dry point etching technique results in ethereal prints on Japanese paper which the artist prefers for its 'handmade process and forgiving nature.' The process accommodates Drescher’s nomadic life between New Zealand, France and occasionally her hometown of New York, thanks to the prints’ minimal weight.

Weightlessness is a unifying attribute of the works on view. Drescher finds parallels between swimming and flying, which lend kinetic juxtapositions in her work, like female figures dancing with sea creatures hovering joyfully beneath puffy clouds.

Faces, both animal and human, have emotional depth ('Animals are extremely sentient creatures,' she says) while figures – be it a stingray or swimmer; cloud or wave – are rendered in a similar scale, similar to traditional Japanese woodblock prints.

Drescher also finds inspiration in a 17th-century French animal encyclopedia. The fact that the majority of animals, such as elephants, crocodiles and tigers, were drawn by someone who had never seen them in-person gives a naive veneer to an otherwise scientifically-purposed resource.

Says Drescher, 'the fact that they were in created in the most fantastical way reminds me of pure imagination,.' She hopes her audience will similarly get lost in the daydream.

Lauren Drescher: Swimmers is on view through 21 February 2026 at Planthouse, 526 W 26th St #416, New York, NY 10001.

Artist Sussy Cazalet has followed an eclectic path. A background studying printed textiles and interior architecture at New York’s Parson School of Design led to a career in theatre design, before Cazalet began to create her own handwoven works.

A love of mid-century modernist design lies at the heart of her artistic practice, with her travels across India, Africa and the Middle East inspiring her textile works. In 2023, Cazelet unveiled nine woven silk-and-wool tapestries at London’s Tristan Hoare Gallery, the culmination of a close, collaborative project with weavers around the world.

Cazalet is building on these foundations with her second show at the gallery, Ascendance, here translating watercolour studies into fourteen handwoven tapestries. The results are bold and contemporary, juxtaposing instinct with studied form to create hypnotic works.

Despite the modern feel, Cazalet draws on traditional methodologies. She begins with watercolour on paper, which become richly layered and tangible tapestries created using flat-loom weaving and organic dyes. By painting in fibre, Cazelet imbues each piece with a raw edge, calling on cyclical symbols, such as the sun and moon, for an abstract and geometric celebration of materials. Works, displayed alongside watercolour studies and vintage furniture chosen by Cazalet, become immersive mediations on form.

Ascendance is at Tristan Hoare Gallery from 6 February - 20 March

Hundreds of shiny, silver balloons are cascading through a vast, empty warehouse space. Blinding white lights flash overhead, a second at a time, with the room otherwise drenched in pitch-black. The balloons, some of which are conjoined in pairs like cartoon dumbbells, are propelled by powerful blasts of air. All the while, David Bowie’s Sound and Vision pulses through speakers at ear-splitting volume: the spectral synth unspooling, the drums pounding, that rubbery bassline churning away.

Welcome to Here East, the sprawling media complex and creative hub that sprouted up in east London’s Olympic Park for the 2012 London Olympics. Just over a decade since Bowie’s death, this one-night-only immersive experience has been spearheaded by Jason Bruges, the acclaimed artist and lighting designer who once filled York Minster with an ethereal light show and in 2024 installed a Tiffany diamond-inspired illumination in the windows of Oxford Street’s Selfridges.

The project was dreamt up by Bruges' production director Richard Broom, a lifelong Bowie fan, after Here East CEO Gavin Poole invited him to pitch an immersive idea for the space. On the evening of Wallpaper*’s private view, the installation will be part of a Bowie-themed dinner for property brokers who may influence their clients to operate out of the hub, which already hosts the likes of video games developer Sports Interactive and dance choreography pioneer Wayne McGregor.

'That track was absolutely meant to be for that space,' Broom explains in an all-white, minimalist boardroom downstairs, where we’re joined by Bruges and Poole. 'Obviously, there’s the title itself, which is synonymous with what we do. And the intro of the song – that really punchy snare drum – drives through the space and the way that the lights respond to the movement of the balloons, as well as the response people get: immediate joy.

'As the strobe’s going through the space and you’re capturing the movement of those balloons – which are kind of giant particles going through as that air’s flowing – it’s capturing moments in time. I think that’s what that track is about. Bowie’s looking back on his time in Berlin – it was inspired there but he mostly recorded it in France. I can see loads of different synergies in it.'

Although the installation summons simple, childlike euphoria, there is a lot going on behind the scenes. The balloons and strobe lights, for example, are manipulated by DMX-controlled fans, which are typically used for large-scale stage shows. 'It’s essentially fluid dynamics,' says Bruges, 'and it’s quite theatrical, being immersed in that. We’re tying all of things together: the physical environment, the digital environment. With all of our artworks, we’re developing digital control. For us, being able to experiment like this is very powerful and really useful because it will flow back into our permanent commissions.'

It’s fitting that this creative experiment has arisen from Here East’s need to advertise its wares. After all, whether he was tapping into the popularity of the ‘70s folk singer-songwriter movement with Hunky Dory or pivoting to ‘80s stadium-filling pop bombast with Let’s Dance, Bowie himself had a keen eye for commerciality. The site has recently become something of a mecca for his fans (hence the theme for the dinner), as its huge V&A Storehouse, in which the public can peruse artefacts not on display at the main museum in Kensington and Chelsea, also contains the must-visit David Bowie Centre.

Here you’ll find historic items from the main man’s own personal archive, including a framed photo of his idol, Little Richard, and stage outfits worn by his beloved bassist, Gail Ann Dorsey. It’s a link-up that crystallises Here East’s vision of inspiration, collaboration and creativity. 'Pretty much every company here stays and grows,' says Gavin Poole, 'We enjoy that, and we see it by doing some really interesting, pioneering stuff. Sometimes it fails, but that’s what happens with experimentation. You don’t always get it right, but you learn.'

This eerily echoes a sentiment that the academic Will Brooker, who immersed himself in Bowie’s life, mimicking his appearance and even adopting his diet, expressed in a BBC article published upon the singer’s death: 'He didn’t stop when the ‘80s caught up with his pick-and-mix style, and made him look like just another stadium sell-out: as he had in the ‘60s, he tried, and failed, and tried again, and kept pushing himself.'

Bruges suggests that the joyful tribute to this restlessness may pop up elsewhere in the future. 'For me,' he says, 'it’s a little bit less about Bowie’s music and more about how he operated: without boundaries. The work talks about that. I’ve always admired groundbreaking creatives from all different angles, whether they’re scientists, engineers, artists, musicians – people that defy being put into silos of genres and really explore. I really hope the installation will make people think: ‘What if I did something slightly outside the norm?'

Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley have been working together since 2008. Through image, film, text and performance they make humorous, sharp satires, with observations predominantly taken from fiction and characters realised in an instantly recognisable way. In their current exhibition at Mayfair’s Pilar Corrias Gallery, however, they are tackling the enduring real-life icon that is Marie Antoinette, and the female members of her court who also died during the French Revolution.

‘Best Femmes Forever’ gives a voice to Marie Antoinette, her best friend the Princesse de Lamballe, and King Louis XV’s mistress – Marie Antoinette’s rival at the court of Versailles – Madame du Barry, all of whom were killed in extremely brutal ways during the revolution.

‘I think Marie Antoinette’s notoriety really killed her,' says Mary. 'She was so popular and beautiful when she was young, and she was so influential with fashion. People were so thrilled whenever they saw her. I think all that came crashing down on her – everyone who formerly loved and knew her was ready to turn on her.'

Mary and Patrick’s work is distinctive. The pair’s monochromatic, graphic style incorporates a cartoonish or burlesque aesthetic that complements the satirical, scripted verse written by Mary, giving a voice to the characters they portray.

Over a four-channel video installation, the women’s points of view are conveyed through the prism of their constrained, short lives. The Palace of Versailles was a gilded cage for the French aristocracy at that time, who were summoned by the court to live communally. They participated at court in an atmosphere of competition, intrigue and claustrophobia, unable to leave.

‘We tried to bring in the profane aspect in [the] obsession with fashion,’ says Mary of the video installation. ‘The opening sequence between Marie Antoinette and du Barry is very sexually bawdy, but a lot of the text is in the form of a prayer. We were trying to bring together the bawdiest and yet the most tragic elements of this [story].’

The exhibition is installed with an altarpiece in mind and the work is ‘emceed’ by Saint Denis, the patron saint of Paris. Carrying his head under one arm is Saint Denis, who was beheaded at Montmartre (martyr hill) and, legend has it, carried his own head to the Parisian district now known as St Denis. The saint represents martyrdom as a tribute to the three women, and this film is sympathetic to them. The artists believe that none of them needed to have died as they did. The work is also a darkly humorous nod to the use of the guillotine.

Satire falls in and out of fashion. Used throughout history, specifically in the period of the French Revolution in the form of pamphlets, it has long been used to hold power to account.

'We've always felt that satire was a way of gaining proximity to a subject, and it is such an old genre,' Mary says. 'It's so foundational to human modes of expression. Often, we're looking at a straight history and then a totally contemporary satirical type of history as well.'

The artists' work gives voices to voiceless people and voiceless things, speaking to women and the role of women in history and in literature. In satirising archetypes, they call attention to how historical ideas have pervaded to the present day.

'I think we made our first piece in 2008 together, and we have really never strayed from the basic dynamic of I write something, and Pat comes in and films it,' Mary says. 'I pick the subjects by gut instinct, and lots of times I am informed by the previous project. In the case of Marie Antoinette, I literally fell down a Wikipedia hole and then I couldn't stop thinking about it. I also have my eternal inspirations, and these are people like [Algernon Charles] Swinburne and [Edgar Allan] Poe, and some of the First World War poets.'

Adds Patrick, 'I think it's important in the early stages for Mary to be in her own world of the writing and not have any kind of concern about it being seen from the outside until she's ready. That's always an exciting moment, because then I'm usually flooded with imagery, reading it and thinking what [the work] could look like.'

There is a vaudevillian note to their work, which is always filmed in the same style, drawing the viewer out of the time of the project and into Mary and Patrick’s world. Best Femmes Forever is one of only two works by the duo that are based on real historical figures, the other being a commission by the National Portrait Gallery of a double video portrait of Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson and the infamous Lady Emma Hamilton. According to the artists, this may or may not be the start of a trend.

'I think there's a lot of different reasons to continue doing historical figures, it's not just about revisiting some heated controversy,' says Patrick.

'It's really a minefield,' adds Mary. 'I would feel very reluctant to pick a subject that's much more recent in time than the 18th century, because it's one thing to tweak portrayals of Nelson or Marie Antoinette, and it's another to go for figures that are much closer [to us] in time. I don't really care about getting the rise out of people in that way.'

‘Best Femmes Forever’ is at Pilar Corrias, London, until 7 March 2026, pilarcorrias.com

We all know that fashion and aesthetics are cyclical, with bygone styles returning again and again. But few of us were prepared for the abrupt resurgence of Y2K – the collective ‘feel old yet?’ moment – that crashed back into view in 2022. Several years on, the noughties revival shows little sign of slowing. Early-2000s aesthetics continue to play a major role in contemporary visual culture, and the trend has now spilled over into the art world proper.

‘Internet Cafe’, a new exhibition exploring 2000s themes, opened in London last week (30 January 2026) and runs until 7 March 2026. Staged at Sir James Stirling’s fittingly postmodern No.1 Poultry, the exhibition brings together works by 17 artists responding to the decade itself, and to our collective longing for it.

Presented by Hypha Studios and curated by Juliet Wilson, Internet Cafe spans painting, drawing, photography, print, sculpture and installation. The exhibition places particular emphasis on the disappearance of social and cultural rituals once tied to handheld technology, recalling the gadgets and gizmos of the millennium to pose probing questions about our digitally-centred present.

Sam Keelan’s First to Go presents a dreamlike photoscape of a courtroom populated by two nude men and a scattering of Beanie Babies. Charlie Chesterman’s Jelly Bean depicts a lava lamp, its kaleidoscopic form obscuring and refracting a face behind the glass. Naomi Boiko-Stapleton captures the era’s iconic fashion codes – from skinny reading glasses to low-slung velour tracksuits – complete with a tiny dog in homage to the likes of Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie.

Elsewhere, a tombstone to an obsolete desktop computer with the Google homepage glowing on its screen; and neon, glittering dolphins and a unicorn surrounded by hearts and butterflies, by Sam King and Honey Baker respectively, recall the original ‘girlhood’ aesthetic. At the exhibition’s core is a display of Top Trumps cards, first-generation iPods, and Motorola flip phones – fertile ground for millennial memory.

Nokias, Yellow Pages, Furbies – ‘Internet Cafe’ bids them all farewell. The exhibition becomes a tender tribute to the novelties that have quietly slipped away: a Tamagotchi’s final meal, a Blockbuster tape returned but never replaced, the last time your landline phone rang.

'Internet Cafe' is exhibiting at Hypha Gallery 1, No. 1 Poultry, London. Open Wednesday-Saturday: 11am-6pm; Sunday: 12-6pm (closed Monday and Tuesday).

As you enter the Halle am Berghain exhibition space in Berlin, Pierre Huyghe’s latest work Liminals, commissioned by the LAS Art Foundation, immediately unsettles expectations. The installation, comprising a large-scale film and immersive sound environment, sets out to use the principles of quantum physics to stage a world where time stretches, form wavers, and meaning resists closure. Collaborating with quantum physicists and philosophers on this latest production, Huyghe attempted to create a space where viewers encounter, in his words, 'states of indeterminacy – of the uncertainty of being, living or existing'. Rather than explaining quantum science, Liminals offers an experiential pause: an invitation to sense what it means to exist at the threshold of the knowable.

Visually, Liminals situates us in an empty rocky landscape that feels neither entirely foreign nor menacing. The terrain resembles coral reefs – small stones encrusted with lichen, suggestive of life – yet we are clearly not underwater. Vapour drifts in the air, implying water, gravity, and atmosphere. This is, in many respects, Earth, or at least a planet governed by the same physical laws. The camera lingers repeatedly on this environment, asking the viewer to sit with its textures and durations.

From this landscape emerges a figure. We first see a hand: greyish, oddly inert, its fingernails rendered with unsettling specificity, though the image blurs as the camera struggles to focus. Gradually, we realise that the hand belongs to a female body that walks, bends, and observes itself – alive and seemingly autonomous, yet profoundly incomplete. Its head is hollow – no face, no brain, no interiority in any conventional sense. Yet despite this absence, the greyish skin bears unmistakable signs of a life lived: blemishes, stretch marks, a Caesarean scar. These marks suggest reproduction, intimacy, history, and the existence, at some point in time, of at least two other now-absent bodies. The figure’s interiority may be speculative, but biography remains inscribed on its shell.

Although quantum theory was formulated over a century ago, only now are quantum computers capable of modelling paradoxes of simultaneity. For decades, art, especially literature, has tried to represent quantum physics as an abstract elsewhere, a realm safely contained within metaphor. Today, however, quantum computers operate according to principles humans cannot meaningfully inhabit. Ambitious though it is, Liminals does not translate theory into imagery; it confronts the limits of human perception as quantum computation surpasses intuition. Concepts such as superposition, oscillation, and probability collapse become less legible representations than meditations on the limits of representation itself.

In one of the film’s most troubling moments, near the end, the figure bends towards a sharp rock and inserts its pointy end into the cavity where the face and brain would be, repeating this gesture several times. The act resists easy metaphor. It can be read as self-activation, self-harm, or an attempt to generate thought through matter rather than mind. It’s a narrative without resolution unfolding in a zone where every moment is a maybe.

Sound and vibration play a crucial role in Liminals, though not always seamlessly. Halle am Berghain’s high-end system produces low frequencies that rattle and reverberate in ways that sometimes feel uncontrolled, revealing friction, or that the system strains under the material it carries.

This sonic density is underpinned by a complex technical process. Huyghe and his team collaborated with quantum physicist Tommaso Calarco and researchers at Forschungszentrum Jülich in Germany to simulate matter’s oscillations depicted in the film on a 100-qubit Pasqal quantum computer. These simulations produced probabilistic behaviours, which were then translated into moments within the sound design. Calarco described the process as 'plucking the computer’s atom array to hear its reverberations.' What sounds complicated and above all, insanely costly, delivers rather underwhelming results, an amalgamated mass of unmoving drone maximalism.

The female figure appears AI-generated, which introduces continuity issues. Breasts subtly shift shape, hands move awkwardly, and renderings sometimes falter. In one scene, the figure studies her own fingers as if encountering embodiment for the first time. The thumb bends unnaturally and even appears comically out of proportion. Whether these glitches are intentional or related to technological limits is unclear.

There are undeniably powerful images: the hollow-faced figure against the landscape, moments that stun in their stillness and emotional charge. Yet as a durational experience, the work risks boredom, even if that boredom may be part of its logic. Liminals operates less as an explanation of quantum reality than as an exposure of the gap between what contemporary machines can already do and what human consciousness can still bear. Human cognition remains linear, narrative-bound, and resistant to true simultaneity. We experience time sequentially, build meaning through causality, and decide through binaries. Even in the 21st century, despite brains extended by algorithms and machines, simultaneity remains something we gesture towards aesthetically but cannot genuinely inhabit cognitively. Liminals just leaves us suspended there.

Liminals is at Halle am Berghain until 8 March 2026, las-art.foundation

In an exhibition schedule defined by star names and career retrospectives, emerging artists can find it hard to get a foothold in the industry.

It is something that art organisation New Contemporaries has tackled since its inception in 1949, with annual exhibitions spotlighting artists either on the cusp of or in their early careers (featured artists in the past include David Hockney, Paula Rego, Chris Ofili, Tacita Dean and Jake Grewal).

‘New Contemporaries has long been a barometer of contemporary artistic practice, and after 75 years, the annual exhibition remains a rare space [in which] to encounter the breadth of work and lived concerns shaping artists across the UK,’ says Kiera Blakey, director of New Contemporaries. ‘The 2026 exhibition feels particularly urgent in the context of growing precarity for early-career artists, not only as a platform for visibility, but as a form of sustained support rooted in time, attention and care, foregrounding practices that are still in motion rather than fixed or resolved.’

An eclectic mix of mediums is equally celebrated, with featured artists working in photography, painting, sculpture, moving image and installation. Crucially, the geographic spread is just as diverse. ‘For the first time, half of the artists are based outside London,’ Blakey adds. ‘This reflects a deliberate shift in how we think about representation and responsibility, recognising that some of the most compelling ideas and practices are emerging across the UK, in many different contexts and ways of working, well beyond the capital.’

The 26 emerging and early-career artists included in the 2026 exhibition are Viviana Almas, Kat Anderson, Hadas Auerbach, Timon Benson, Lakshya Bhargava, William Braithwaite, River Yuhao Cao, Ali Cook, Shaun Doyle, Ally Fallon, Samantha Fellows, Alia Gargum, Oliver Getley, Makiko Harris, Manuel, Alejandro Hernandez Rivera, Deborah Lerner, Gregor Petrikovič , Will Pham, Isobel Shore, Maya Silverberg, Aaron Alexander Smyth, Christopher Steenson, Varvara Uhlik, Eliza Wagener, Benjamin Waters, and Yimin Xiang.

New Contemporaries is at the South London Gallery until 12 April 2026, and MIMA, Middlesbrough from 8 May – 16 August 2026

newcontemporaries.org.uk

Once named Britain’s most popular painter, self-taught British artist Beryl Cook (1926-2008) was an astute documenter of daily life in Britain. Her distinctive, cheerful and colourful style belied a sharp eye – Cook saw past gender, sexuality and class, choosing to celebrate those often excluded from mainstream representation. Often dismissed as superficial, Cook is now being restored to her rightful place in the art history canon with a major retrospective at The Box in Plymouth, her hometown. (The exhibition follows a number in recent years, including a 2024 show at London's Studio Voltaire that teamed her works with those of Tom of Finland.)

Born in Surrey, Cook moved to Plymouth in 1968 and spent the next four decades chronicling its life, through the economic upheaval of the 1970s, across the dawning consumerist conscience of the 1980s and onwards. Her paintings of its bars, bingo halls, streets and pubs are populated with a cast of the marginalised, from the drag queens indulging in LGBTQ+ nightlife to plus-sized working class women, voluptuous and sensual in their clinging, patterned clothes.

‘Beryl Cook wasn't painting caricatures,’ says Terah Walkup, curator at The Box. ‘She was documenting communities and identities that were actively marginalised, and she did it with genuine affection, technical mastery, and unflinching honesty. Her work from the 1970s to 2000s captures working-class joy, body positivity, and queer culture with a sophistication that's only now being fully recognised.’

Alongside these works, her rarer self-portraiture is displayed, depicting a more fantastical side of her character that she shied away from showing during her lifetime. Lesser known, too, are her inspirations, from Stanley Spencer and Edward Burra to Alfred Wallis, which are placed in context alongside Cook’s own work. Cook’s process, explored in the exhibition – she photographed news reels, street scenes, television screens and newspapers and worked across mediums, including in sculpture and textiles – reveals a canny and contemporary artist.

‘A century after she was born, a reappraisal of Beryl Cook's work feels long overdue,’ says Victoria Pomery, CEO of The Box. ‘Although loved by many, she wasn't given enough serious consideration during her lifetime, and we want to change that. This exhibition is a timely opportunity for us to fully explore her impact and highlight how skilled she was at documenting everyday life during a time of immense social change from the 1970s to the 2000s.’

‘Beryl Cook: Pride and Joy’ at The Box until 31 May 2026, theboxplymouth.com

Richard Hawkins operates as a fan, information he offers during a walkthrough of his latest show – ‘Potentialities’ at Kunsthalle Wien in Vienna – providing a window into a practice that has long engaged with the pleasure of looking and the dynamics of desire, often in tandem with pop culture, frequently concentrated on the heartthrob. Preoccupied with Teen Beat magazine in his adolescence, most recently the American artist has found subjects in so-called internet boyfriends: actors Mike Faist and Josh O’Connor appear in his 2025 works All Hands on D*ck and Dandy Floriculturists, respectively, while Adam Driver’s likeness features in Softly yet Weirdly Ways (2020). Justin Bieber, Timothée Chalamet and Jack O’Connell are other recent protagonists, and each is present in some form in Vienna.

‘There’s an impulse that's probably inexplicable at first, this area of fascination, then I start reading everything I can, wondering if those initial impulses are explained,’ says Hawkins, reflecting on the obsessive enquiries that shape his work. ‘Part of it's not knowing – once I’ve realised what the attraction is, if it can be figured out, it becomes less of a mystery. Keeping it open and spectral even, is part of the fun.’

Part of a larger group of works on canvas (‘They've never been all together,’ notes the artist, ‘so that was a kind of dream’), the paintings are brightly coloured, some with lines of poetry woven around the figures (usually depicted only from the shoulders up), many with marks that from afar (or as seen on a screen) read almost as felt tip pen, a playful aesthetic that speaks to the young Hawkins whose curiosity was confined to periodicals. Today, he is invariably online – a proponent of AI, whose research embraces OnlyFans as much as TikTok or YouTube.

Continuing through 6 April 2026, before moving to Hannover’s Kestner Gesellschaft, ‘Potentialities’ is Hawkins’ first institutional show in over a decade (and his most substantial to date), and is comprised of more than 100 pieces made between 2011 and 2025, grouped into nine distinct bodies of work. As well as paintings, several of the artist’s collages, for which he is perhaps best known and which tend to guide his wider engagement with areas of personal interest, also feature, while sculpture and video are represented too; the last bookends the show, with Cheerful and Scary film compilations, made between 2023 and 2025, hosted in rooms at either end of the space.

Stretching his interpretation of and ongoing study into fandom and obsession are three bodies of work, made between 2012 and 2025, that directly reference other creative figures. Physically positioned nearby one another but with visually contrasting attributes, works about the Japanese choreographer Tatsumi Hijikata, the French writer Antonin Artaud, and the American painter Forest Bess showcase this other thread, in which Hawkins reconsiders their narratives. ‘I'm trying to recreate things, or re-manifest the intent of the original,’ he explains, alluding to his reinterpretations, like the Ankoku collages from 2012, which riff on the choreographer’s own scrapbooks (the Bess works, moreover, which saw him cross-reference Bess’ own lexicon of symbols and colour codes with archives of surviving correspondence, are simply titled The Forrest Bess Variations). ‘I always consider these collaborations,’ he continues. ‘Maybe not Artaud, he was a bit more difficult.’

For all the garishness accounted for in the space, there is an overwhelming understanding of the darkness that underpins it (prior to Teen Beat, Hawkins would fill scrapbooks with images of Dracula and Frankenstein from monster magazines, he says, ‘early self-identifications or something, probably cries for help’). One avenue for this here is a series of wallpapers that reference his earlier haunted dollhouse sculpture. ‘Part of the idea of doing those haunted wallpapers was to insist on a dark presence – things can look cheerful on the surface, but I wanted a kind of depth, a darkness,’ he says. ‘I like the fact that fans aren't just fans, that it goes from adoration of the star to, “I need that star to look back at me”. I love the interchange of energies and the forms of relationship that are unbalanced between the two. I’m interested in the friction about interpersonal relationships.’

At an earlier press conference to introduce the show, Hawkins’ initial silence is broken by his asserting a hope that ‘Potentialities’ ‘doesn’t look too much like a group show’. ‘Maybe to the detriment of my career commercially,’ he clarifies to Wallpaper*, ‘I tend to jump off into a different direction with no consideration that it might have nothing to do with the rest of the work. It’s just how my brain works – I like to follow a fascination until it peters out. Doing is a way of thinking for me, and “Potentialities” [as a title] became a way of describing why it does look like a group show: they’re deep dives into different elements that may be reflective of facets of my personality. It’s a fascination, not a destination.’

Richard Hawkins is at Kunsthalle Wien until 6 April 2026, kunsthallewien.at

‘For me, the attraction of horror lies in its power as a controlled confrontation with chaos,’ says artist and curator Jill Mulleady, who has considered the influence of horror cinema for Sprüth Magers Los Angeles. ‘We don't enjoy the terror because we're masochistic; we enjoy it because it’s profoundly cathartic. It functions as a necessary psychological pressure release for the viewer, and, for me as an artist, it’s a strategy to talk about real-life forces that are too hard to digest directly.’

Horror films have long attracted artists, who are drawn to the genre’s cortisol-spiked bold aesthetics, and appreciate its ability to express an omnipresent state of unease. The monster at the door – or inside us – and themes of repression, political instability and horrifying dystopias all have their roots in culture. In ‘Horror’, Mulleady considers cinematic typologies from German expressionism to Cold War tension and Italian Giallo, tracing their translation into contemporary art.

‘Horror is never static: the “monster” changes,’ she adds. ‘Film history gives us clear cultural markers to illustrate this. As societies modernised, the focus shifted to the psychological and the existential, reflecting the anxieties of industrialisation and war. We can see this directly reflected in film history: German expressionism (for example, films such as The Cabinet of Dr Caligari and Nosferatu) used distorted architecture and one predator-type monster to visualise a psychological collapse and the growing sense of societal dread. While the movement preceded the rise of the full authoritarian regime, its aesthetic certainly mirrored the crushing, authoritarian dread of the era.’

In the exhibition of 30 artists and filmmakers, we follow this mood as it morphs into the very real fears around the nuclear age, encompassed in Japanese monster films, and the unease surrounding the Cold War, which underlined American alien invasion films.

‘In Italy, the stylish, psychological terror of Giallo films used murder mysteries to dissect societal corruption and decadence,’ Mulleady adds. ‘Today, the focus is squarely on systemic and institutional breakdown. This is epitomised by filmmakers like Jordan Peele in the US, who use horror to dissect specific issues like racial gaslighting and the horror of assimilation (for example, Get Out), highlighting how alienation is built into the social structure itself.’

For the artists featured in the show, who include Cindy Sherman, Pol Taburet, Kara Walker, Mike Kelley, Arthur Jafa, Mike Kelley, Ottessa Moshfegh and Precious Okoyomon, the medium offered an irresistible entry into worldbuilding, creating societies devoid of rules and normal expectations. ‘The artists use the fantastic, symbolic or the allegorical not to escape the real world, but to give physical form to intangible dread. By displacing the horror onto a parallel reality, they offer viewers a momentary, fictional release from the pressure of the real, only to reveal that the source of the terror was the human condition all along.’

‘Horror’ is at Sprüth Magers Los Angeles until 14 February 2026, spruethmagers.com

Returning for its fifth edition, AlUla Arts Festival (until 14 February 2026) is gaining momentum, steadily cementing its presence on the international art scene. As part of Saudi Arabia’s 2030 vision to reshape its cultural landscape, AlUla takes centre stage as a focal point for art and heritage and there’s no better setting than this ancient desert town, with its towering rock formations that dramatically rise above lush pockets of palm tree oases.

The headline act this year is ‘Arduna’, an exhibition curated by the soon-to-open contemporary art museum, together with Paris’ Centre Pompidou. Its title meaning ‘Our Land’ in Arabic, the exhibition, which runs 1 February – 15 April, explores our relationship with nature and land, and features over 80 works from both institutions, alongside masterpieces from Musée National d’ Art Moderne.

In keeping with its longer-term ambitions, land art is at the centre of the programme, and the festival has kicked off with Desert X AlUla, the international biennial exhibition, which transforms the local valleys and canyons into an open-air museum. Here, large-scale installations, earthworks and sculptures by a roster of 11 Saudi and international artists unfold within the dramatic landscape. Among them are Saudi-Yemeni artist Sara Abdu’s A Kingdom Where No One Dies: Contours of Resonance, which takes the shape of rammed-earth walls, carved to trace the soundwave of a poem.

Elsewhere, Cuban-born, US-based Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons channels the intense hues of AlUla’s sunsets with Imole Red, a larger-than-life garden-like sculpture centred around the native flowering plant, allium. Meanwhile, further away in a peaceful oasis alive with birdsong, Hungarian-American pioneer of ecological land art Agnes Denes reveals her latest iteration of The Living Pyramid, a towering structure planted with local rosemary, verbena and wild grasses, that will explore the cycle of life over the year.

This all comes together as a snapshot of what to expect when Wadi AlFann is unveiled in 2028. Meaning ‘Valley of the Arts’, the ambitious open-air art initiative – set within a spectacular 65 sq km valley – will feature permanent site-specific works by some of the world’s pioneering artists, including Denes, as well as James Turrell, Michael Heizer, Ahmed Mater, and Saudi-born Manal AlDowayan, whose dazzling white labyrinth, inspired by AlUla’s Old Town, will be etched with stories and drawings by the people of modern-day AlUla.

During the opening week, we saw ‘Vertigo’, a spectacular one-off aerial performance exploring gravity, presented by Villa Hegra, a recently opened Saudi-French cultural hub that hosts artist residencies and studios, an exhibition hall, workshop spaces, and AlUla’s first indoor cinema and performing arts studio. Another highlight is AlJadidah Arts District, which is alive with new artworks, alongside workshops, live performances and a curated programme of art-focused documentaries and films.

AlUla Arts Festival 2026 runs until 14 February, experiencealula.com

What place does the female nude have in art history? It is a question being considered by two very different artists at the Palm Springs Art Museum, where Mickalene Thomas and Tom Wesselmann, in dialogue, present their own portrayals of women’s bodies.

Despite stylistic differences - Wesselmann’s bold planes of colour are in direct contrast to Thomas’s layered collages - both artists share a preoccupation with power and agency. In viewing their work together, a wider historical context invites new interpretation. Wesselmann was heavily influenced by the often contradictory cultural politics of the Sixties and Seventies, the time he was working, something Thomas responds to by focusing on the male gaze itself.

'Across my practice, I engage with and shift narratives that appear in parts of Wesselmann’s work, to expose the mechanics of the male gaze and reframe how women and their bodies are seen, experienced, and understood. I hope that through my work women reclaim their power, not only in art but in reality,’ she says. Here, Thomas tells us why a dialogue between the two felt so natural, and the unexpected harmony she discovered in their work.

Mickalene Thomas on the female form in art

Wallpaper*: What drew you to Tom Wesselmann’s work?

Mickalene Thomas: I first encountered Tom Wesselmann’s work as an undergraduate at Pratt Institute, and it immediately resonated with me, especially his Great American Nudes and use of bold, flat color, which aligned with my own ideas and explorations at the time, while working with formal ideas of painting. In responding to Tom Wesselmann, his provocative signifiers - though complex and rooted in the male gaze- created a context that allowed me to explore Black eroticism in ways that extend beyond the male centered desires. Years later, I became deeply inspired by his maquettes and interiors which allowed me to explore that connection, particularly as I began incorporating interiors into my own work.

Despite generational and stylistic differences, the dialogue between our work reflects questions around power, representation, and agency, while opening space to reconsider who gets to shape these narratives.

How did the curatorial process unfold?

The curator - Christine Vendredi, Executive Director of the Palm Springs Art Museum - wanted to bring together different generations and perspectives to reflect on how women’s bodies are represented in culture. To achieve this, we discussed and focused on featuring pieces that crystallized these themes and highlighted how artists from different backgrounds and eras display power and representation. Through the exhibition, viewers have the opportunity to reflect on how perspectives of the female nude continue to evolve, for me since the Black nude is positioned centrally and in close proximity to whiteness, it was important to foreground and examine these relationships.

Your work actively challenges the historical male gaze, while Wesselmann’s work is often cited as emblematic of it. How do you interpret his depictions of women’s bodies within their historical context?

Understanding the historical context of the 1960s and 1970s , the period when Wesselmann was working , is essential. His work captures the contradictions of an era defined by shifting cultural attitudes around gender and sexuality, blending glamour with critique and reflecting complex ideas about beauty, desire, control, and consumerism. By contrast, my work reframes the tradition of the nude by representing women of colour with strength, beauty, and confidence.

Your work often redefines beauty standards by foregrounding Black femininity, queerness, and glamour. How does this exhibition challenge viewers to reconsider what is beautiful, erotic, or empowered?

My gaze, in particular, is that of a Black woman unapologetically loving other Black women. In my work, I challenge traditional representations of these women and celebrate their strength and beauty by drawing from a place of love and joy.

The exhibition invites audiences to see how ideas of beauty and empowerment change when the subject holds the power, rather than being defined by someone else’s gaze.

How did your use of collage, rhinestones, and layered materials function in contrast to Wesselmann’s flat, graphic surfaces?

Our contrasting materialities add a compelling element to the visitor experience. While Wesselmann’s surfaces are sleek and seductive, my canvases are exquisitely layered and juxtaposed with texture, collage, and rhinestones.

My signature technique is complex and multi-dimensional. The use of silkscreen and college allows for disruptive and playful integration of painting and photography. The addition of rhinestones add a sense of pleasure, seduction, and light. The dynamism of my subjects is expressed not only in the final image, but embedded within the very structure of the canvas itself.

Were there any unexpected tensions or harmonies between your works once they were installed together?

A broad legacy of female representation is incredibly prevalent in the show. There were no moments of friction between our works - what is reflected is the linear connection of formal exploration and particularly how our subjects are viewed - the overall experience is charged with a dynamic sense of sensual and empowering prowess..

How do you think conversations about objectification, body politics, and representation have evolved since Wesselmann’s era?

While cultural narratives have evolved since Wesselmann’s era, with increased awareness of the harms of objectification and greater attention to representation and body politics, there is still significant work to be done. Through my work, I try to shift the more traditional narratives that have historically marginalisation specific communities. I want to make Black identity, femininity, and queerness more visible and I believe it’s possible to achieve this through my practice.

'The Female Form: Tom Wesselmann & Mickalene Thomas from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation' is at Palm Springs Art Museum until April 6

Sam Lipp’s paintings are intensely physical. The US artist places the viewer in intimate proximity with the body, through a mix of portraits, cropped torsos and close-up views across bare shoulders. He ruptures his works’ surfaces using destructive methods, encouraging their steel bases to rust, dragging them across concrete pavements with chains, and fixing them to the wall with crude screws. For ‘Base’, his new show at east London’s Soft Opening, Lipp presents a series of works in three main colourways, moving from bloody reds through to grey and hyper-exposed white, playing with old film and digital image aesthetics.

'It’s the first time I’ve been this methodical,' he tells Wallpaper*, speaking ahead of the show opening. This series of work began with two small, exhibited test pieces, ‘Crying in Paris’ and ‘Vagabond’. While carefully thought through, the apparent immediacy and experimental marks of these paintings have fed into larger works in the exhibition. A central piece, ‘Tyrannicides’, shows two faces with open mouths moving together passionately as their shoulders disappear into a mass of scratches and white exposure. The painting is drenched in fiery tones. Its oil elements, which sit over airbrushed spray enamel, were applied in a single day.

Whether showing himself, live models, or figures from found images, Lipp’s paintings all reflect his inner world to some degree. 'When I decided to drag a piece for the first time, it was based on my emotional state,' he tells me. 'I continue to have a desire to destroy what I create, projecting my emotions and personality onto the image. Shame, guilt, joy, passion... The dragging and rusting have a wildness and uncontrollability to them, but I’m learning how to manipulate them.'

When painting other people, Lipp has used everything from found mugshot imagery, to pornography, and encounters with mutual friends. 'There is always a relationship to film and theatre,' he says. 'It’s like working with actors. There are tangible limits and implicit limits and responsibility; when I’m portraying someone else’s face there are so many complexities.'

He looks for some kind of attraction towards the figures he paints from life, focusing on faces that express a subtlety of feeling or individuals who hold a compelling presence. By the time their image reaches its final state, it has often been cropped or slashed to remove some recognisable elements. While his works are rooted within the self-image curation and bodily marketing of our contemporary image world, they reject the clean flatness that often defines it.

'I’ve always hated smooth things,' he tells me. 'The first paintings I made after college were inkjet prints that were painted on top, so they started as a photo. The direction I forged for myself at college was how much aesthetic territory could I explore away from my own hand. I want to explore both the photographic and painterly nature of the image. Where can it break and where can we find ourselves?'

Lipp graduated from Goldsmiths in 2010 and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago the following year. His early work was driven by the digital landscape of its time, drawing upon the user-driven visual material of gay hookup apps and social media. 'It definitely felt more liberatory in 2015 than it does now!' he laughs. 'These technologies have a very direct relationship with our bodies. I’m thinking of this hive mind consciousness that has now evolved into AI.'

His raw paintings penetrate the image, sometimes showing what’s underneath and at other times literally screwing through it. In earlier works, he welded cleats to the back of his steel bases in order to hang them, but this felt as though he was hiding something, so he introduced the visible screws. 'It’s like a natural inherent gesture which feels violent, troubling and intriguing. The screws came from a truly utilitarian honesty about my material constraints.'

Such interventions call to mind violent yet godly imagery that permeates much older visual culture, particularly the gruesome, erotic and cathartic depictions of Jesus’ crucifixion. Lipp tells me he ultimately delves into shame in order to find something honest within it. 'I have always been interested in debasement as purification, as a religious pursuit or saintliness.'

Sam Lipp is at Soft Opening, London, 17 January - 4 March

Artists’ studios tend to be sanctums of creativity, revealing the inner workings of a fruitful and productive mind. Sometimes methodical, often chaotic on the surface, artists surround themselves with both the functional and the inspiring in a bid to switch off and dig in.

It is a subject that has intrigued curators at London’s Incubator gallery, who, for a new exhibition, have shifted their focus from highlighting emerging artists to the creative process itself. The current group show, ‘Notes from the Studio’, unites 45 visual artists, writers, musicians, and fashion designers, asking them each to submit one item currently taped or pinned to the wall of their studio.

Artists, including Tracey Emin, Christina Kimeze, Bella Freud, Michael Stipe, Rebecca Ackroyd, Jake Grewal, Michael Armitage, Harland Miller and Ben Okri responded enthusiastically, with submissions ranging from personal objects to notes, postcards, sketches and reference images. The gallery preserved the tape or tack each item arrived with, installing pieces in drawn charcoal ‘frames’.

From jewellery designer Alexandra Jefford’s sketch to multimedia artist Daria Blum’s drawing complete with pig magnets, Charlie Gosling’s portraits, and filmmaker Sam Taylor-Johnson’s photograph, the contributions speak to the importance of ritual when displayed together. Amassing fragments of works in progress and images that sparked ideas, the exhibition pays homage to the slower, authentic foundations of the creative process.

'Notes from the Studio' is on show until 31 January 2026 at Incubator London, incubatorart.com

I’m really interested in creating my own architecture, rather than working within a historical framework,’ says Czech artist Klára Hosnedlová, ahead of her first exhibition at London’s White Cube (at the Bermondsey gallery, 11 February – 29 March 2026). ‘If you are creating a new world, it’s much more difficult, because everything has to be a completely new visualisation.’

Throughout her career, Hosnedlová has built entirely new landscapes, interweaving architectural elements with expansive embroideries, performances and sculptures, which together form vast installations. In her richly immersive worlds, Hosnedlová is drawn to both natural materials – flax, hemp, sand – as well as colder forms such as glass, For Hosnedlová, it is essential that the environments are welcoming. ‘I don’t come from an artistic family, so it is important for me to create a world that is more familiar. I love to be able to speak to those who have never been in a museum. I’m lucky that I can still speak through quite a realistic language, which is embroidery – you can see what it’s like in your hands. It is not abstract.’

This tangibility was key throughout her epic recent exhibition at Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof, which used raw materials sourced from what is today the Czech Republic, but formerly Bohemia and Moravia. By drawing on these craft traditions, Hosnedlová unites references to both local folklore and, more personally, childhood memories, creating a general world of the imagination. It is a textural, raw and primal landscape that is always changing, fluctuating, living and dying.

The industrial architecture of Hamburger Bahnhof ’s hall was transformed by six vast, handwoven tapestries, made from flax, hemp and plant-based dyes and reminiscent of animal skin. Their sheer scale became a sanctuary, and one in which the visitor was encouraged to enter, walking among them to discover their own private zones. The experience Hosnedlová created was multisensory, set to a backdrop of music by performance artist Billy Bultheel.

Hosnedlová has worked with Bultheel again for the White Cube exhibition, where her utopian landscape is populated with her large-scale tapestries and sculptures. Throughout, 3D-printed concrete columns are adorned with embroideries, while large floor objects are covered in mycelium (reishi mushrooms), her first time working with the fungi. To support the living elements, the atmosphere is moist.

‘It’s very important for me to be focused on the small details,’ says Hosnedlová. ‘But I also thought in a bigger context, about bringing in new worlds. The contrast is important. I spend some days in a little village, and then I’m in Berlin, which is such a huge city. I am always combining different materials, but it depends on the space. At Bahnhof, it was a monumental hall that used to be a train station. It’s very masculine, full of metal, with a big open space where I always felt a little bit lost. That’s why I started to think about some monumental tapestry, something that’s coming more from nature, and where you can be hidden behind. Sometimes I have a problem in museums where I am standing in front of some artworks and everybody can see me from all sides, so in my installations I create places where you can be a bit hidden.’

She has brought this tension between the heavy-duty industrial and the organic to London. ‘When I saw White Cube, I knew I wanted to create some kind of a laboratory, a stage where I could grow new sculptures,’ she adds. ‘The whole of the space here will appear to be underground. There is no natural light, and usually that’s important for my work. But in this case, it is a space to grow something. The sounds, too, appear to come from underground, with every speaker projecting a different sound. It creates one big one full of many messy noises.’

With new materials and a deeper immersion, Hosnedlová is pushing herself further than she has before. ‘If I can, I’ll push myself into something where I don’t feel 100 per cent comfortable. I love that feeling when I don’t know exactly what I’m doing.’

New work by Klára Hosnedlová will be on show from 11 February – 29 March at White Cube Bermondsey, London SE1, whitecube.com

This article appears in the February 2026 Design Awards Issue of Wallpaper* , available in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News + from 6 November. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

Although best known as a filmmaker, David Lynch (1946-2025) considered himself first and foremost a visual artist. In the late 1960s, he studied painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, where he created his first ‘moving painting’, Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times). Merging mediums and materials, it offered an early hint of the experimentation that was to define his career.

Throughout his life, Lynch went on to create sculptures, watercolours, film, photographs and paintings, many of which are to be united in an exhibition at Pace Gallery, Berlin. Opening on 29 January 2026, it is a teaser for a major retrospective set to open at Pace, Los Angeles this autumn. The exhibition follows rare but significant showings of Lynch’s art, including 2007’s ‘The Air Is on Fire’ at Fondation Cartier in Paris and 2018’s ‘Someone Is in My House’ at the Bonnefanten Museum in Maastricht, featuring more than 500 works.

Works here include the ‘factory’ series of photographs that Lynch took at deserted industrial sites in Berlin in 1999, which captured an evocative and empty world of broken windows, chimneys and machinery. Their beauty sits alongside his unsettling paintings, which intertwine surrealist themes with text and open-ended images. His watercolours, in his distinctive muted palette splashed with reds and yellows, are presented in the frames Lynch designed himself.

Elsewhere, upright lamp sculptures built from steel, resin, Plexiglas, plaster, and wood add to the atmosphere of finding beauty in the unexpected, much like Lynch himself.

Pace Gallery in Berlin presents work by David Lynch from 29 January to 22 March 2026, pacegallery.com

Winston Branch received his OBE last year in 2024, marking decades of work in the arts and his contribution to art in the UK. After moving here at the tender age of twelve, Branch began his formal art education at The Slade (where he was taught by artists including Keith Vaughan, Frank Auerbach and Euan Uglow) before embarking on a lifelong career as an artist. His first solo exhibition took place in 1967 at experimental space Arts Lab, which was also host to John Lennon and Yoko Ono and David Bowie.

In person, Branch is dapper and eloquent when we meet to speak after the opening of his new exhibition ‘Out of the Calabash’ at Goodman Gallery, London. In a return to very large-scale work, which he abandoned shortly after leaving The Slade, Branch is showing a series of abstract works that continue to explore his decades-long investigation into light and perspective through colour and surface.

He has lived all over the world, from California to Italy and Germany and says, 'You’ve got to go where the weather suits your clothes. If something isn’t working, you have to pick it up and go somewhere else.' That being said Branch, now 78, is back in London and back on Cork Street.

Although he started his career as a figurative painter, he began to have a dialogue with history painting through colour, which led him to start working with abstraction. In his words, he wanted to abandon narrative, leaving only colour and light to work with. 'I wanted to omit the narrative concept of painting and use the expressionistic element of the luminosity of light,' he says.

The title of the exhibition, a reference to his Caribbean roots, reminds us that although Branch came to London as a child, his roots are in a very different place. 'Colour is light, and light is feeling. If you get out and stand in the street, depending on the light, it will affect your mood.'

In this exhibition Branch wants to envelop the viewer in colour and light, using both the size of the paintings and a technical use of colour that create dimensions in the paintings. The colours he uses, from bright pinks to yellows and golds, to deep blues, tell their own stories.

'I don’t believe in looking back because it clouds the vision, but what I have learned is how to give myself the structure to pursue my vision. I am pursuing the eponymous nature of paint,' Branch explains. 'You look into the painting. You felt that you were embraced by the painting. You were not standing looking at it, you were enveloped in it.'

There is something deeply traditional in this radically academic approach to painting. Looking into the works, you can see a Turner-esque use of yellow and a classical use of perspective. Prior to adopting abstraction in 1982, his work was inspired by iconography, but following this he became interested in the ‘humanity of colour’ stating that ‘light is life’.

Out of the Calabash is on view at Goodman Gallery, London until 14^th January 2026

goodman-gallery.com

In the 1990s, the late Congolese philosopher, academic, and author Valentin-Yves Mudimbe (1941-2025) released The Idea of Africa, which is described as a scholarly exploration of Western perception of the continent and the need for Africans to avoid those frameworks.

Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination, a new exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, draws from that book and explores themes such as Pan-African subjectivity and solidarity through photography. The exhibition is the third show at MoMA from the 2019 gift of modern and contemporary African art from collector Jean Pigozzi, alongside a selection of recent acquisitions and key loans.

Here, we speak to curator Oluremi C. Onabanjo on how the exhibition came to life.

Wallpaper: Can you tell us about the exhibition title?

Oluremi C. Onabanjo: This exhibition is entitled Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination. With this title, I'm referencing ideas as they've been formulated across the African continent and diaspora. I'm taking cues from a fantastic book by the late Valentin-Yves Mudimbe, the Congolese philosopher, called The Idea of Africa published in 1994. Thirty years after that book was published I was assigned this exhibition and I had recently been returning to his work and thinking a lot about its potential.

I was thinking about what it would look like if one brought those ideas to bear on images introduced to New York in the 1990s, within the context of some really excellent African photography survey shows, and also wondering why it's important to continue looking at those images now. Which brings me to portraiture and political imagination, the second part of the title, which is thinking about creativity both in front of and behind the camera. I'm offering viewers an exhibition that offers critical lessons on the history of self-determination, solidarity, and subjectivity on the African continent and in the diaspora in the mid 20th century.

What can you share about the selection of artists and work featured in this exhibition?

What I'm really aiming for is an interpretive view of the history of photography in Africa. This is not an exhibition that aims to give you an exhaustive chronological history nor a geographic cartographic survey of the continent in every single practitioner, though I feel those exhibitions are extremely important. What I'm offering is a way for people to look, think and make connections across images and in so doing, it allows people to trace an intellectual history, a spirit of Pan-African potential across the African continent.

I feel like it's important to think about what the potential of seeing, for example, a suite of fantastic Seydou Keita images made in the 1950s and 60s in Bamako [the capital of Mali] next to an image of Samuel Fosso embodying the great Seydou Keita in his African spirit series. And that image might be next to an image of Samuel Fosso embodying Kwame Nkrumah [pan-Africanist and Ghana’s first President] across from a text that demonstrates Nkrumah's image-like sense of vision for the continent in the 1960s saying “this is no ordinary wind of change, this is the raging hurricane against which the old order cannot stand.”

What are you excited about visitors discovering here?

You might encounter some really fabulous photographic portraits from the studio of the great Sanlé Sory in Bobo Dioulasso in Burkina Faso. Both are really fabulous souvenir portraits, as well as images from his studio.

But you could also find really rigorously composed portraits of the late J.D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere, whose monumental hairstyles project really gives you a history of newly independent Nigeria through the various hairstyles of its fabulous women. But you could also encounter some unexpected choices, which I think are really important, such as Njideka Akunyili-Crosby’s majestic multimedia work, which incorporates acetone transfers, marble dust, and watercolour. So it's photographic in its making, and in the spirit of that allows people to make connections.

And then a recent acquisition into the [MoMA] collection of Silvia Rosi, who's an Italian photographer of Togolese descent, who is as much a student of the history of West African photographic portraiture as I am, but is an incredible conceptual artist who puts herself in front of the camera and makes these really brilliant meditative images that tell us why it's continually important to look at the form and the substance of this history. I'm trying to encourage people to think about the potential of images to tell us histories, positions, gestures and possibilities.

Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination is on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York until 25 July 2026

moma.org

Swerve January's bleaker connotations by indulging in a healthy dose of inspiring culture, and the slower pace at the beginning of the year is the perfect time to catch up on the exhibitions you may have missed in the pre-Christmas rush. From spotlights on emerging and established artists, to work across mediums, there's a flurry of exciting shows to see.

Exhibitions to see in January 2026

Wes Anderson at the Design Museum, London, until 26 July

Margot Tenenbaum’s Fendi mink coat is one of the most instantly recognisable pieces of clothing in contemporary film. Worn by Gwyneth Paltrow in 2001 movie classic The Royal Tenenbaums, the coat now sits in an expansive exploration of US director Wes Anderson at the Design Museum in London. The exhibition also features a set of bespoke Louis Vuitton suitcases, stamped with miniature safari animals and featured in 2007’s The Darjeeling Limited. In another space, an intimately scaled puppet used to bring George Clooney’s titular character to life in the 2009 stop-motion animation Fantastic Mr Fox is on display. The show is an in-depth ode to hands-on filmmaking, and a welcome antidote to our CGI and AI age.

Read more here

Yayoi Kusama at Fondation Beyeler, Switzerland, until 25 January

The Fondation Beyeler show is the first devoted to the artist in Switzerland and the team is expecting over half a million visitors who will marvel at the sheer range of her work, which spans from small delicate watercolours to a fully immersive installation featuring giant inflated black and yellow tentacles, entitled The Hope of the Polka Dots Buried in Infinity Will Eternally Cover the Universe (2019/2024). The dots and mirrors are delightfully discombobulating, like peering into an abyss. That sense of teetering, of reaching into the cosmos, is threaded throughout all Kusama’s unbelievably prolific output.

Read more here

‘La Salle de Gym des Femmes Arab’ at Aga Khan Park, Toronto, until May 31,

At Aga Khan Park, outside Toronto’s Aga Khan Museum, a run of low billboards presents women in boldly coloured tracksuits and floral coats, hijabs tucked beneath boxing gloves as they strike sparring poses. The installation draws from Hassan Hajjaj’s long-running La Salle de Gym des Femmes Arab (The Arab Women’s Gym), shot over roughly a decade and a half. In this series, Hajjaj places women at the centre of the often male-dominated world of sports. Capturing them actively participating in sports like soccer, boxing, and surfing.

Read more here

‘Peter Doig: House of Music’, at Serpentine South, London, until 8 February

Peter Doig is one of the best-known contemporary artists of our times. His paintings may be beloved, fetching stratospheric prices, but Doig has consistently risen above art-world elitism. Now, his ‘House of Music’ exhibition at Serpentine Galleries strikes a blow for cultural democracy by giving the art-loving public a chance to experience his paintings as if they were at home.

The artist has brought a unique and very rare sound system into the gallery, installed acoustic curtains, and set up lounge spaces. People can sit in the space for long periods of time, and enjoy the work with a bespoke soundtrack of 300 vinyl records that are played continuously throughout the day.

Read more here

‘Monument to the Unimportant’ at Pace, London until 14 February

The objects and things that fill our daily lives are often ones we only notice if they stop working, or if they inconvenience us in some way. The cakes that haven’t risen, the cables that don’t connect or the weeds growing through the crack in the path – all will receive our full attention only when they become a nuisance.

But currently at Pace, London, these items and more are celebrated as things of beauty in their own right, with the group exhibition ‘Monument to the Unimportant’ spotlighting the joy in mundanity. Artists including Henni Alftan, Genesis Belanger, Elmgreen & Dragset, Urs Fischer, Sylvie Fleury, David Hockney and Rachel Whiteread recontextualise the quotidian to create something wholly new.

Read more here

VIVONO. Arts and Feelings, HIV-AIDS in Italy, 1982-1996' at Centro per l'Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Prato, until March 1, 2026

In one of the final rooms of ‘Vivono: Art and Feelings, HIV-AIDS in Italy. 1982-1996’, at Centro per l'Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci in Prato (through 10 May 2026), a gentle army of off-white sofas invites visitors to sit and absorb the words of Nino Gennaro, the artist, activist and poet whose writing is projected onto the surrounding walls (old photographs additionally appear on some of the furniture via a slide show). The space is loosely modelled after Gennaro’s own living arrangement, in the home he shared with his chosen family of community-minded artists until his death, from AIDS in 1995, which he described in personal notes from the 1980s as ‘a place to make mistakes but also to get things right, a place to heal but also to get sick…to die but also be reborn, a place where everything is allowed…’

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Zofia Rydet: Sociological Record is at The Photographers’ Gallery London, until 22 February 2026

In 1978, Zofia Rydet embarked on a colossal task: photographing the inside of every household in Poland. The 67 year-old had already produced a major body of work with Little Man – a study on children, published as a book in 1965 – while her series of photomontages, The World of Feeling and Imagination, had been in development since 1975. What became Sociological Record would ultimately take Rydet into the 1990s, culminating in more than 20,000 images, only a fraction of which were ever printed (by the series’ end her efforts were solely focused on making sure there was a record, as opposed to sharing it).

Read more here

Joy Gregory: Catching Flies with Honey is at Whitechapel Gallery until 1st March 2026

It is apt that Joy Gregory’s first major survey show at the Whitechapel Gallery should take its title from a proverb said by her mother. In every room, her words – ‘you catch more flies with honey than vinegar’ – ring true. Here, these honeyed photographs hold a pertinent political message that sticks. Using nineteenth-century photographic processes to explore issues such as race, gender and colonialism, Gregory’s works pack a punch, rendering them all the sweeter for it.

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‘Seydou Keïta: A Tactile Lens’ is at the Brooklyn Museum until 8 March 2026

In April 2024, curator and author Catherine E McKinley travelled to Mali to meet the family of legendary photographer Seydou Keïta, to discuss an upcoming exhibition and to ask for their participation.

Celebrated as one of the most outstanding 20th-century photographers, Keïta ran a photography studio in the Malian capital, Bamako, between the late 1940s and early 1960s, where he shot black and white portraits of fashionably dressed people, with the patterned backdrops that he is perhaps best known for. He also documented the social and political landscape in pre- and post-independence Mali. That work was introduced to the West in the early 1990s, first anonymously in New York and then later identified, in group and solo exhibitions at galleries, museums, and foundations around the world.

Read more here

Yuko Mohri, ‘Entanglements’, at Pirelli HangarBicocca until 11 January 2026

Yuko Mohri’s living, breathing installations are feats of innovation. At the 2024 Venice Biennale, her work Compose at the Japan pavilion featured rotting fruit, kinetic sculpture and a host of vessels connected by thin tubes, filling the space with scent, sound, and light. Her inspiration comes from moments of everyday ingenuity; for example, the resourceful homemade water-catching devices used against leaks throughout Tokyo’s subway system. ‘Entanglements’, her new show at Milan’s Pirelli HangarBicocca, presents seven existing works within the 4,000 sq m space, exploring how seemingly disconnected pieces react to one another within the same environment. This reflects more broadly on the invisible links and interactions between living and inanimate things in the world.

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Chantal Joffe is at Victoria Miro London until 17 January 2026

Chantal Joffe deals in memory. In the thick, tangible brushstrokes of her paintings and in the generous sizes of her canvases, we are invited to discover Joffe’s women - because it is often women she paints, those she admires, or those she is close to.

Joffe has a wholly unique figurative style of painting, eschewing a neat formality for gorgeously expressive brushwork, with the palpability of the paint allowing for a greater freedom in the depictions of the women she is painting. Her complex, multifaceted subjects can only come alive in Joffe’s thickly-drawn sweeps of paint, their nuances and quirks and features recognisably theirs, without being perfectly or realistically rendered.

Read more here

Unveiled Desires: Fetish & The Erotic in Surrealism, 1924–Today’, at Richard Saltoun London, part 2 until 14 February 2026

‘What fascinates me about surrealism in the context of the erotic is how it transforms desire into a language of liberation,’ says Maudji Mendel of RAW (Rediscovering Art by Women) on the eve of her exhibition opening.

It is a topic she has been considering, in the context of overlooked women artists of the 20th century, for the exhibition ‘Unveiled Desires: Fetish & The Erotic in Surrealism, 1924–Today’, opening at Richard Saltoun gallery during London’s Frieze Week. Organised into two parts, the first running until November 2025 and the second until February 2026, it explores desire and fetish as a neglected part of the surrealist movement.

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‘Nigerian Modernism’ is at Tate Modern, London until 10 May 2026

Stepping into Tate Modern, the proposition is immediate: modernism is plural and Nigeria is one of its centres. ‘Nigerian Modernism’ opens as a conversation, not a line. Media and generations collide. Ceramics answer painting. Print meets sculpture. Osei Bonsu and Bilal Akkouche curate with a choreography that mirrors the experimental drive of the work itself. Opening tomorrow, the exhibition brings together more than 250 works by over 50 artists, spanning the 1940s through to the late 20th century. What emerges is not a tidy lineage but a restless dialogue – a testing ground for freedom, imagination, and struggle.

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Lee Miller at Tate Britain until 15 February

Not long before Tate Britain opened photographer Lee Miller’s largest retrospective to date (2 October 2025-15 February 2026), I travelled to her former home, Farleys House, tucked away in the Sussex countryside. Miller and husband Roland Penrose created a surrealist haven upon moving there in 1949, spending the next 35 years filling the home and gardens with contemporary art. Friends and artists Pablo Picasso, Man Ray and Leonora Carrington were frequent visitors, leaving their mark. Picasso daubed a smiley face on the tiles above the Aga, while Joan Miró absent-mindedly twiddled wine-bottle wrapping into a sculpture, which sits in the dining room.

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Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, The Delusion, at Serpentine North until 18 January 2026

Traditionally, art galleries can be solitary experiences, with visitors avoiding eye contact on a stroll around an exhibition. It is a custom Berlin-based British artist and game designer Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley is keen to challenge, with the artist’s immersive new exhibition at The Serpentine encouraging visitors to interact – with each other.

The video game commission, The Delusion, is a multiplayer experience, inviting viewers to virtually enter digital portals. Inside each one there are conversation starters, reflecting on both the digital world and its often vitriolic and dangerous real-life consequences. Players follow prompts, and are encouraged to engage in honest conversations with themselves and each other.

Read more here

'Visualizing the Supernatural' at Kunstmuseum Basel until 8 March 2026

As a culture, we’ve always loved a good ghost. From a white sheet with black holes for eyes that haunts the pages of a children’s story book, to the Romantic and the Gothic, via spirit photography, ouija boards and Patrick Swayze, the attraction is undeniable. And why not? The question of where we go when we die, if anywhere, is knitted into the meaning of what it means to be human.

Read more here

Islamic art can be misunderstood, particularly in the idea that it entirely forbids depictions of living beings. This view, however, ignores the historical complexities involved. In truth, animals and humans have been shown in Muslim culture’s art, particularly in secular and private contexts (though such representations are rare in religious settings).

This complicated legacy, alongside the exploration of Queer identities throughout Islamic art history, has received little attention in mainstream discourse. Recently, museums and galleries have begun highlighting these narratives for the wider public, including, most notably, at The National Museum of Norway with its new exhibition, Deviant Ornaments. Spanning over a thousand years and four continents, the show features more than 40 works by 30 artists and craftspeople, including textiles, wall tiles, decorative plates, illustrations, as well as contemporary paintings, sculptures, and videos, illustrating the intricate and rich history of queer expression in Islamic art.

Curated by Noor Bhangu, a scholar who developed the concept of Deviant Ornaments during her PhD, the exhibition is also influenced by her personal experiences as a racialised South Asian woman living in Norway. The project began with an exploration of queer history alongside Islamic art history, noting that both fields experienced a significant rupture in the 19th century, characterised by a decline in artistic production. ‘People from this region no longer had a script or understanding of sexuality because they were damaged by colonisation. So this rupture was contemporaneous in both disciplines,’ Bhangu explains.

Divided into three themes - Abundance, Ornamentation and History of Sexuality - Deviant Ornaments highlights the erotic turn in the field to challenge rigid ideas of gender, sexuality, and cultural heritage, while also confronting the difficult legacies of Orientalism and colonialism. The exhibition bridges these perceived ruptures by showcasing works by both historical and contemporary artists engaged with ornamental aesthetics from diverse cultural, political, and geographical backgrounds.

Works on show include the 3D-printed work Amorous Couple (2025) by Rah Eleh, commissioned by the National Museum of Oslo. This piece references a 17th-century Mughal miniature housed at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, noted as one of the few visual portrayals of lesbians with dildos in Islamic art history. The work portrays two queer figures. One is identified as the king’s guard holding the dildo, while the other is an aristocrat and one of the king’s wives. In historical texts, such guards are documented to provide pleasure to the wives in secret women’s quarters using objects like a cucumber.

Bhangu worked in close dialogue with Eleh, stating that there is a passage in a manuscript by Venetian diplomat Ottaviano Bon that mentions the banning of cucumbers and carrots. While he doesn’t explicitly name sapphic pleasure, he was clear that such things were outlawed. ‘There's very little reference to female homosexuality and sexuality. We have more representations of men, both visual and textual, but what we have instead in terms of female histories, feminist histories, are references and suggestions. This manuscript is lovely because it also visualises what we're talking about.’

In room two, there is an eye-catching contemporary painting titled Kasbah (2008) by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. The artwork features a Black figure wrapped in a white shroud, gazing directly ahead. Their eyes seem to follow viewers around the room, and the sitter's gender is ambiguous, reflecting a fluid identity. The title Kasbah refers to a citadel or the Arab quarters of a North African city and it references Édouard Manet’s Orientalist painting Olympia (1863), which depicts a white woman attended by her Black maid, highlighting the racist and sexual legacies of Western art. With Yiadom-Boakye’s painting, the figure confidently occupies space.

Elsewhere in the room is a film project, Dance after the Revolution from Tehran to LA and Back (2020) by Iranian artists Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh, and Hesam Rahmanian, presenting archival footage showing the influence of exiled dancer Mohammad Khordadian, who smuggled VHS tapes of aerobic cabaret to preserve Iranian cultural identity through dance after public dancing was banned. The work provides a look at how Islamic nationalism is intertwined with diasporic modes of survival.

Further in, Parisian-born artist Damien Ajavon’s textile sculpture, Chemin vers Oslo (2025), explores the opacity and poetics of textiles, linking them to queer and Afro-diasporic representations. The woven textile is also decorated with the Hand of Fatima and the protective eye amulet to safeguard the labour the show presents, acknowledge its complex histories, and serve as a protective layer for the exhibiting artists, helping them face criticism and challenges from many sides. ‘It's not that we're scared about the Muslim community taking offence, but this exhibition is challenging Islamophobia as well,' says Bhangu.

Palestinian American artist Kiki Salem’s digital print wallpaper for the mediation station installation A Love Letter to Maria, Foziah, and Fatima (2025) is named after her three grandmothers. She was inspired after discovering a selection of their dresses during her summer trip to the West Bank, drawing from the designs of the Tatreez thobes to create patterns for the wallpaper. The work encourages visitors to sit within the arched space, write a love letter on the provided scroll and share a tender moment in the exhibition. 'It was really important to also include Kiki's work as a layer to talk about how ornaments continue to migrate across different spaces and also how contemporary artists can negotiate with their cultural and familial heritage,' Bhangu says. Håkon Lillegraven, the Public Programme and Education Curator at the National Museum, adds that the love letter scroll will be kept in the museum’s archive after Deviant Ornaments ends and will be part of the documentation. 'We specifically say write in the language closest to your heart so that after the show, we'll have this documentation of what languages people write in, who they write to, and what they wrote. We hope that this archive will help us learn more about the exhibition.'

Deviant Ornaments is at the National Museum of Norway until 15 March 2026

nasjonalmuseet.no/en

‘My creative process always entails taking more or less familiar images and rearranging them to create a disruption,’ says Nashville-based artist Shannon Cartier Lucy. ‘I want to bring anxiety to the surface. This can be a threat to our ego and can make us feel vulnerable.’

It is an unsettling emotion brought to the forefront at Lucy’s current exhibition at London’s Soft Opening gallery, which imbues quotidian images of childhood with an electric charge. In Lucy’s paintings, nostalgic symbols - pencils, straws, pasta necklace - are reframed, becoming play things for adults in a stark confrontation of the childhood memories we repress. The results can be discomfiting.

‘Tapping into this irreducible anxiety is a form of un-homing, which is a critical concept that describes the experience of being displaced from our sense of security and “home.”,’ Lucy adds. ‘I am interested in creating a “new home,” so to speak. My ritual in conjuring up these images and uncomfortable feelings to the surface and sharing them with others is a way to perhaps neutralize the anxiety. It’s like a prayer, almost.’

Lucy draws on cinematic framing techniques to up the psychological tension, with her tight crops forcing a close examination of her subject. But despite the clarity an apparently straight representation, Lucy’s storytelling is full of ambiguities

‘We tend to place an omnipotence in understanding things, and making sense of things. We are conditioned to try to stay in control because we assume it will keep us safe. To be able to organize and grasp the world gives us comfort. So facing ambiguity is an inherently traumatic experience. I hope that making these paintings can shift around my own experience with uncertainty and make that relatable and communicable.’

Shannon Cartier Lucy is at Soft Opening until 10 January 2026

softopening.london

'No ideas but in things.'

That line from the early 20th-century poem by William Carlos Williams, so stubbornly American, hovers over the art of Robert Therrien at The Broad, the contemporary art museum in Los Angeles. Milk pitchers, oil cans, dishes, beds, hair bows, plates, mirrors, even coffins; things were the essence of and the inspiration for his art. ‘This is a Story’, as the exhibition is titled, includes 120 sculptures, paintings and works on paper, all variations on his common themes.

These things might be enlarged or reduced from their original size but each was rendered by the artist with particular care for enticing surfaces, whether velvety or shiny, that invite a longing to touch. Though until 2024 the artist was represented by Gagosian galler,y and the subject of many retrospectives, Therrien’s reputation has faded since his death at age 71 in 2019. This show, with works never before seen publicly, should change that.

Therrien developed as an artist in Los Angeles as minimalism was on the wane and sculpture was being reconceptualised. Eli and Edythe Broad collected his work in depth so the show at the museum they founded in 2000 is optimal though many other collectors and museums have lent works.

Among the many works by Warhol, Basquiat and Koons at The Broad, Therrien’s sculpture Under the Table is arguably the most popular. Adults and children alike can be seen smiling at the unexpected experience of walking under the artist’s gargantuan, ten-foot-tall table with four chairs, exaggerated replicas of originals from his studio. They are always on view. A brown metal folding-table version is in the exhibition.

Therrien incorporated the reductive heft of artists from an earlier era, such as Donald Judd or Brice Marden, with the idiosyncrasies of an increasingly open and flexible time in Los Angeles that produced artists also stretching ideas about sculpture, such as Charles Ray, Paul McCarthy and Tim Hawkinson. Therrien, however, had a poetic rather than pop nature, so that his quotidian objects were enhanced in their transformations.

Ed Schad, curator at The Broad, observes, 'From his handmade and intimate responses to minimalism in the 1970s, to his early involvement in what would become a golden age of LA fabrication, Therrien made important contributions to many of sculpture’s central conversations for over 40 years. However, the most important thing to know about Therrien is that he can evoke a sense of wonder. What starts in Therrien’s personal and closely guarded memories and passions becomes a mysterious place in which a viewer can think about […their] own.'

Therrien was born in Chicago in 1947, but his family moved to Palo Alto, California when he was nine, due in part to his serious asthma. The midwestern childhood and the illness can be gleaned in various recurring shapes. A painting of two blue panels, at first glance appearing as geometric abstraction, is a doppleganger for an open Dutch door, a memory from his grandmother’s house, that he makes as a sculpture. Three graduated spheres stacked vertically pivot from an idea of modern sculpture to a child’s snowman. The shape of a bent cone or a witch's hat is also a simple chapel, used 57 times by Therrien. 'Over time, the chapels come to be increasingly human and vulnerable because of how they have been shaped and how they have been touched,' writes Schad.

Therrien, who was over six feet tall, was a raw-boned, taciturn man with a dry sense of humour. He attended what is now the California College of the Arts in Oakland before studying photography at the Brooks Institute and painting at the Santa Barbara Institute. While earning a master of fine arts degree from the University of Southern California in 1974, he lived in a storefront studio on Pico Boulevard in Los Angeles, where he painstakingly honed his earliest works by hand. He began showing with galleries in LA and, by 1985, Leo Castelli in New York.

After building a large studio in downtown LA in 1990, where he lived alone for decades in the former caretaker's quarters, he began working with fabricators. His art lost none of its intimacy for that. The first piece in the show is an eight-foot tower of fat white china plates that appears to teeter, ready to fall. The plates are ordinary, as are all the kitchen apparatus used in his work, drawn from memories of that childhood in Chicago. Similarly, Revereware cooking pots are scaled up and stuffed into a nine-foot-tall cupboard painted red.

Such Alice-in-Wonderland moments are based on cartoons, his earliest influence as a young aspiring artist. 'I have an attraction to the animated aspect of a cartoon, that really factors into the work,' he told me in 2000, when such pieces were shown at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. 'I think cartoons are part of a lot of people’s consciousness. Cartoons have really reductive body parts. They are reduced to the simplest forms. I end up with images like that.'

But those simple forms, recall another influence: Constantin Brâncuși. This drove him to create a number of massive beards in various scales and materials, all hanging on supports by their ear pieces to emphasise that they are for masquerade. They were made between 2007 and 2014, of metal or plastic or human hair, and he agreed that they wound up looking more like a hairpiece for Santa Claus than the Romanian sculptor. 'I wanted to make something figurative that I could approach in different materials,' he says. 'For some reason, I wanted them to be fake beards. The type of beard in a cartoon image. A beard from animation can have a life of its own, can start walking around. I don’t know if it is a search for that, but I end up with images like that.'

Of all the things made by Therrien, the beards are the most comic and perplexing, unless we remember the moustache drawn on a postcard of the Mona Lisa by Marcel Duchamp, who was Brâncuși’s greatest promoter. L.H.O.O.Q, with its multiple references lusty and otherwise, is also a 'ready-made', the 1919 example of a method of art making that changed history. It is a model by which an artist like Therrien could operate, borrowing 'ready-made' inspirations for his eccentrically personal and inescapably appealing art. All based on 'things'.

‘This is a Story’ is at The Broad until April 5, 2026

thebroad.org

In the 1960s, feminist artists were increasingly looking to express what it is to be female, in ways outside of a language dominated by men. For Valie Export in Vienna, and for Ketty La Rocca [1938 - 1976] in Florence, this meant exploring the potential of the body itself. For Export, the naked body became a medium for discovery - in work TouchCinema (1968) she invited viewers to touch her breasts through a box, her body the cinema screen and her audience the participators. For La Rocca, this same philosophy took shape through looking inwards. The X-Ray images of a skull in her Craniologie series (1973) are double-exposed with photographs of her hands, emphasising the need for both the mind and the body.

Although the two never met, their careers ran on parallel paths. Both confronted the patriarchal language in often controversial visual experiments; sometimes through a linguistic play, sometimes semiotic or sexual, but always with a sharp and defiant eye. It is fitting, then, that their works have now been placed in dialogue, with an exhibition at Thaddaeus Ropac Milan drawing works from both their portfolios.

Why now? ‘Nowadays we don't just see the female body, we see the body in all its diversity,’ says Export, who lives and works in Vienna. ‘We are now ready to accept that we also have so-called male attributes in our female bodies. The classification of male and female is no longer accurate. The prevailing politics, the restrictive politics, tells us that we have a female body and a male body, but that is a reduction to black and white and nothing more, because that black and white is easier to control.’

In both her work and La Rocca’s, this unequivocal thinking is teased into new shapes, with the language taking on new purposes and meanings. A shared retrospective has never felt more timely - here, Export tells us how it feels to revisit the work now.

Valie Export on art, power and the body

Wallpaper*: What interested you most about placing your work in dialogue with Ketty La Rocca’s? Where do you see the most powerful intersections or divergences between your artistic languages?

Valie Export: When I got to know Ketty La Rocca’s work better, what struck me most about her was that she works with hands, that she works in particular with hands. I had once written in a text, ‘My hands are my identity.’ And I really felt that way: that my hands are my identity. They show age, they show gestures, they show movement, they show feelings. Hands are very expressive because they are so mobile. You can paint, you can strike. You can be tender, you can work with them. You can do all kinds of work with your hands. That's the most important thing. And that's what struck me most about her, that she also uses this physical medium, this bodily medium, as an organ of perception. That’s what made me want to engage with her more closely.

Both of you used your own bodies as central material. How do you understand the different ways you and La Rocca approached embodiment, gesture, and communication?

For me, my body was the most important medium; my body is also me. My body expresses who I am, expresses my identity, and that's what surprised me so much about Ketty La Rocca, or rather fascinated me, how she also expressed her identity through her body language, through her body – if you take the hand to represent the whole body. That surprised me so much and created such a connection for me. And hands are also a kind of connection. You shake hands; you give your hand away and you give your hand to someone else. Hands also have such a multifaceted meaning, as do gestures and touch. Hands have their own dialogue; they talk to themselves, but they also talk to others by touching them. By reaching out hands towards one another, they are also a form of object communication.

How do you feel the exhibition reframes La Rocca’s legacy in relation to your own, especially within the lineage of feminist and conceptual art?

La Rocca's legacy is an idealistic one. It is not a tangible legacy. She speaks with her hands, but this legacy cannot be grasped with the hands. It is an idea, and it takes you into a realm of its own, where I can also find myself, reflecting like a mirror, certainly with a living mirror screen. Not completely smooth, but lively, as if a mirror were constantly changing. That's how I see it, that's how it comes across to me and how I see it within feminist and conceptual art. Feminist art is conceptual art, that's very clear to me, but conceptual art doesn't have to be feminist, that's also very clear. But La Rocca puts it the way I've tried to, bringing both together, saying that feminism has a concept and it can also be expressed in conceptual art, but that the oeuvre or the main work or the main word is feminism. While I declared myself explicitly as a feminist, Ketty La Rocca didn’t align herself with the feminist groups that were in Italy at the time. But bringing the body into conceptual art as a subjective perspective is a feminist achievement.

What emotions or memories did this exhibition bring back about the urgency and constraints of working as a woman artist in the 1960s and 70s?

It was a long time ago, and of course it stirs up emotions in me now, how hard it was for us, how we had to fight. How we really had to assert ourselves. But my memories are also linked to very positive developments. We found each other, we came together, we coined the slogan, “Women together are strong”. That's a very important slogan, which may have already existed in the 1920s, but then of course disappeared completely due to the wars, where the masculine was naturally the leadership principle. But we realised that there is no such thing as male and female leadership. There is human leadership. And where do we stand as human beings and what do we have as human beings? But our sociality, our place in society, which is of course now associated with various things, brings us society as women, not as females, but as women. And that, of course, has other effects and implications. And we need to be aware of that. We want to be women. We don't want to be just something, we want to be women. And I believe that young women and girls also know that this is what they want. But we don't want to fight, we want to work together towards a positive future for all genders.

How does this collaboration speak to your own ongoing mission of challenging power structures, both within art and society?

I have nothing against power. We need power. If we want to get things done, we need power. The question is, how do we define our power, or how do we find expressions of power that do not oppress others, but rather analyse and open things up? In the 1960s and 1970s, people said that women did not need power. I was always completely against that, because if we don't have power, we can't change anything. But the structures must be adapted to free speech or free thought. With all the information we have, which we receive every day, it's becoming increasingly difficult to express ourselves correctly, because we don't know the future and we can't influence the future through the many power structures we have, even if we have them or if they exist. That means we must, as I always say, be vigilant and analytical.

We opened up and launched this in the 1960s and 1970s. In the post-war period, it was very important to continue what had been happening for centuries before. Women have been doing this for centuries, or even millennia, and have also fought battles. It's nothing new. We just rediscovered it for ourselves, which was the right thing to do. But we have to keep reconquering these power structures. Ketty La Rocca fought for her cause and for herself during her lifetime, and through my work, which we’re now showing here, I want to demonstrate that her struggle will continue, even though she herself can no longer lead it. But we will carry on, and after me, others will continue to fight against these structures of power.

VALIE EXPORT & KETTY LA ROCCA, 'BODY SIGN' from 16 December 2025 to 28 February 2026 at Thaddaeus Ropac Milan. Curated by Andrea Maurer and Alberto Salvadori in collaboration with Studio VALIE EXPORT and the KETTY LA ROCCA Estate

ropac.net

California-based artist Woody Othello was back in Miami a month or so ago in preparation for his first museum exhibition in his hometown, at Perez Art Museum Miami, and he was trying to reflect on ‘how I got from point A to B and to multiple points’, he tells Wallpaper*. He soon referred to his sketchbook, where he had scribbled his thoughts on the colour red’s connotations for renewal, transformation, and rebirth. This was the point when he decided to cover the walls of the exhibition, titled 'coming forth by day’, in a ruby-toned lime wash paint. Another influence was a trip to Senegal two summers ago, which had exposed him to many interiors painted in clay with rich textures. ‘Each day is a mini rebirth over and over again – we don’t realise how much we change in a lifetime,’ adds the artist, whose works span sculpture, ceramics, painting and drawing.

The exhibition delivers a cohesively ritualistic experience enveloped in Othello’s scarlet hue choice on the textured walls, and tapping into multiple senses, with an olfactory component concocted with vetiver, a plant commonly found in Haiti. Nooks, plinths, and a pyramid layer the show with suggestions to look in, up, and around where his sculptures in glazed ceramic and carved wood await like seasoned storytellers. ‘Woody wanted to take the visitors elsewhere, outside his own space of the museum and transform it into a calm, tender place that feels almost like it hugs you,’ says the show’s curator Jennifer Inacio.

A sculpture from 2025, 'one becomes two, and two becomes one,' 2025, shows a couple of huggers with gramophone-like heads. They tightly caress one another while standing on their knees inside two massive hands that cup them with a motherly compassion. The palpability of safety mingles with a mythical echo in the sculpture’s richly glazed surface, which stems from the artist’s multiple firing process in his kiln in search of the desired finish. ‘Don’t always do the work for the result,’ he says about a commitment to the intuitive process that he lets ‘dictate where things go with openness’.

Besides a creative journey often freed from an urge for a destination, a sense of homecoming resonates with Othello’s return to Miami. He takes the moment to contemplate time and heritage as non-linear forces, with references to spiritual figures of Central Africa, his personal interest in metaphysics, Yoruba shines, and everyday objects, which generally appear in his sculptures as larger-than-life totems of memory and use.

A book about Kongo funerary objects, Four Moments of the Sun by Robert Farris and Joseph Cornet, was inspirational in the show’s embodiment of the animate. The sculptor, in fact, strives to grasp a non-hierarchical physicality in both living and mundane objects through his experiments in scale and material. ‘Both the living and everyday objects are animated by the same presence,’ he says. ‘There is the same emanating force that causes humans to exist as well as the inanimate world at the same time.’ Othello sculpts familiar objects such as mirrors and even telephones out of his receptiveness to their fleeting impact. ‘Spirit takes form in all objects,’ according to the artist, who sees an abundance of potential in ‘unpacking what is between being a messenger and the receiver of that message’. The show’s mirror-like glazed ceramic works with wooden frames possess such double-sided souls between being grounded and ethereal.

In the artist’s offering of a journey to each visitor, the way up remains one of his routes. The show’s central wood pyramid structure, which exhibits various small ceramic sculptures, stemmed from the intention to suggest ascension. ‘At first I thought about a staircase,’ explains De Othello. Eugene Fersen’s book Science of Being, where he talks about the four corners of the evolution – life, mind, truth and love – propelled him to settle on the pyramid form. The sculptures inside the pyramid show oozing bodies, mask-like faces, and less recognisable abstracted compositions, entangled with hands. The medley of the spirited body and the insentient summons another form of spirituality. ‘Everything radiates an essence and functionality,’ says Othello, who continues to ask, ‘How do we become more aware of being in a physical body?’

'Woody De Othello: coming forth by ay' is at Perez Art Museum Miami until 28 June 2026

pamm.org

Formerly a tyre factory, Pirelli HangarBicocca’s vast industrial interior might seem an unlikely setting for the intimate, intensely personal, largely photographic work of Nan Goldin. Yet, as you enter, the space’s dimness and scale create a dramatic and carefully curated build-up of intensity, and an almost heightened sense of devotion to the most comprehensive survey of Goldin’s moving-image work ever staged.

At first, the hangar feels almost empty, save for a small, single, suspended control panel with lights and buttons projecting from its surface, hanging under a cone of light. As visitors move through the shadowed expanse, a constellation of small, purpose-built pavilions emerges, each one an autonomous screening room dedicated to one of Goldin’s films. 'I’ve always wanted to be a filmmaker,' she once said, rejecting the notion of her photographs as static. 'My slideshows are films made up of stills.'

The show, ‘This Will Not End Well’ (until 2 February 2026) brings together six major films and several new commissions, and asserts Goldin as one of the most vital artists of our time. Her work bears witness to the Aids crisis in New York, documents political fervour against the Sackler family, demonstrates solidarity with Palestinians under siege, and insists on recognising animals as sentient beings, all marking her as not only a profound artist but a deeply human chronicler of our world.

The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1981-2022) is arguably Goldin’s most defining work, and still lands with intense emotional charge. When Goldin began photographing her friends and lovers in downtown New York in the late 1970s, she was documenting a world that would soon tear through her community of artists, drag performers, and musicians, erasing people faster than film could preserve them. What makes The Ballad so devastating is that it isn’t reportage, and Goldin never pointed her camera lens at hospitals or protests; rather, she documented the private aftermath, and the absent spaces of former lives. Her images became a deeply emotional diary, and a refusal to let her friends vanish into anonymity. In The Other Side (1992-2021), the mood softens to her portraits devoted to drag queens and trans women, whom Goldin recognised as her chosen family. Goldin’s gaze is never voyeuristic, and her camera lens documents in an empathetic way. It is clear that she cares deeply for her subject matter.

The tone darkens again with Memory Lost (2019-2021), a suffocating immersion into the darkness of drug addiction and relapse, which ends with Gabor Maté, a philosopher, psychiatrist, and writer, saying that it’s only human to do drugs: ‘totally sane, totally desirable, totally human’. Watching that film after Sirens (2019-2020) with an accompanying soundtrack by Mica Levi, it channels the ecstatic hallucination of intoxication. Together, they document a time when Goldin spiralled into an opioid addiction following an OxyContin prescription after a wrist injury in 2010. Her recovery brought with it a rage at a system that had commodified pain, and at the Sackler family, whose pharmaceutical empire profited from the crisis that nearly killed her. In response, she founded P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) in 2017, an activist collective of artists, addicts, and museum workers determined to hold the Sacklers accountable.

Their protests and 'die-ins' staged inside The Met, the Guggenheim, the V&A, the Louvre, saw protesters scatter pill bottles into the water, while chanting ‘Sacklers lie, people die.’ The protestors had some of their desires answered, as the Tate, The Met, the Guggenheim, and the Louvre all severed ties with the Sacklers, and in 2019, the Louvre became the first major museum to physically erase the Sackler name from its walls. While the official reason given by the museum was that the legal time period for displaying the name of a donor had elapsed, the move was perceived as a victory that few artists could have imagined. This shows the way Goldin works: her approach is almost poetic, headstrong and so convincing, that to refuse her requests would be questionable. Her activism was excellently documented in Laura Poitras’s All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022), which won the Golden Lion at Venice. The film captures Goldin’s life and way of working, her work spanning the Aids crisis to the opioid epidemic, from personal trauma to public accountability. 'I wanted them to feel my anger,' she says in the film. 'I wanted museums to know whose money they were taking.'

The exhibition’s final rooms mark an evolution in Goldin’s gaze, showcasing two of her more recent works. You Never Did Anything Wrong (2024) and Stendhal Syndrome (2024) expand her empathy beyond the human, as animals from stray dogs to birds and insects are each treated with the same tenderness as her human subjects. In Stendhal Syndrome, mythological bodies from Ovid’s Metamorphoses blend with her portraits and archival images. These new works suggest a kind of non-hierarchical cosmology, one in which all living things are vulnerable and should be treated the same.

At the far end of the hangar, Sisters, Saints, Sibyls (2004-2022) occupies a raised platform, its three screens narrating the suicide of Goldin’s sister Barbara. Below them are two wax figures, one of a young girl lying in a bed, with a bedside lamp and open bedside cabinet, its table topped with scattered pill boxes, and another of a man, standing and overlooking her on a raised platform. It’s one of her most emotionally wrenching works, and a testament to how trauma can generate empathy, and how art can transmute grief into solidarity.

In the main exhibition room, projected onto one of the museum walls, is a new work of recorded social media footage documenting the genocide in Gaza: Israeli bombings of hospitals, schools and homes, the killing of journalists and innocent civilians, most of them children. It's heart-wrenching and harrowing, but it's a documentation of the brutality we’ve been seeing online since 7 October 2023.

There is no narration to her latest work, which she titles Gaza (2025). 'I could talk about elegant things,' she said at the press conference to the opening of the exhibition at Pirelli in October 2025, 'but really, Gaza is where my mind has been for the past two years.' Goldin is always accompanied by a bodyguard, also present at the opening.

'The Western media has been so complicit in their violence and in their distortion of the facts,' she continued, 'and now there is a supposed ceasefire and everyone will report on that so everyone is looking away from Gaza, and meanwhile Palestinians are continuing to be bombed daily. Looking at this fictional peace treaty that does not bode well for the future of the Palestinian people, but bodes well for the future of Donald Trump… I just want to say, don't look away; this should never have happened. The world could see it, but never stopped it. What does that say about humanity going forward?'

Goldin’s refusal to separate her art from her politics recalls an earlier generation of artists for whom art was inseparable from resistance. You might think of David Wojnarowicz, whose work raged against government indifference during the Aids crisis; Hans Haacke, who exposed museum funding from Apartheid-backed corporations; or Martha Rosler, who critiqued war through photo collages. Goldin’s activism stands in that lineage, but she brings something rare to it, and this is her vulnerability. Her politics are not ideological abstractions; they come from her own lived experience of addiction, loss, and survival.

What makes Goldin so extraordinary is that she reminds us of something the contemporary art world has almost forgotten: that the artist’s role is not only to make interesting, engaging and contemplative things, but to make us see. To see pain, power, love, violence, and situate our own place within them. In the last decade, many artists have become increasingly careful about what they say and show, as the global art market has grown into a multi-billion-dollar ecosystem of fairs, collectors, sponsors, and brand partnerships. Museums depend on private funding, and artists rely on institutions to exhibit and sell their work. Against this backdrop, political expression has become risky, especially when it challenges the very patrons who sustain the system. The result is a climate of fear and self-censorship: an art world that prizes radical aesthetics, but avoids radical politics.

Goldin disrupts that silence; she is one of the few living artists whose work is not only political in content but political in consequence. Her founding of P.A.I.N. actively changed policy, forcing museums to confront the origins of their wealth, and in doing so, exposed how cultural institutions often launder corporate or political power through art. Goldin’s artistic power lies in how she connects the personal to the systemic. Her empathy – for the trans community, for queer lovers, for animals, for addicts, for civilians in Gaza – is not merely sentimental; it is political, as she insists on the dignity of every life many governments would prefer to discard. And to insist and see so clearly is one of the most political acts there is.

Nan Goldin 'This Will Not End Well' at Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, until 15 February 2026

pirellihangarbicocca.org

Jon Rafman’s Instagram profile shows an image of the artist at work. Dirt jams the letters of his keyboard while his desk is ridden with the detritus of a chronically online life; half-eaten Doritos packets, rogue DVD cases, empty cans of energy drinks and a litter of cigarette butts. Conversely, the screen in front of him reflects a Kantian scene of sublime, snow-capped peaks. This image is restaged as a video work at the threshold of Rafman’s latest exhibition Report a Concern - the Nine Eyes Archives at Louisiana Museum of Art, Copenhagen, in which a rotating cast of sticky tableaux are foregrounded by Romantic-era paintings. These contradictory vignettes function as a prologue to Rafman’s hyper-accelerated universe, and offer an outline of the tragi-hero at its core; the internet troll locked in a conflict between digital primacy and a decaying physical state.

Curious about the social and existential impact of technology on contemporary life, the Quebecian artist rose to prominence in the late 2000s, coinciding with the launch of Google Street View. This ambitious mapping project blanketed every highway, country road, and suburban street with camera-mounted cars, resulting in an archive that, as of May 2022, had amassed over 220 billion images. In 2008, Rafman began an excavation. Adopting the troll's sense of obsessive escapism he started mining the depths of that massive digital cache for the surreal and unsettling collection of images that form the heart of this show.

Presented together for the first time in a museum exhibition, Rafman’s Street View project, Nine Eyes, reads like a glimpse into the internet’s unconscious – a chaotic place where violence and beauty coexist. The bizarre juxtapositions are the only constant; a man flips off the camera in Scotland while a kneeling woman prays next to a post box in Washington. Some subjects play to its gaze, like the sex worker mooning the camera in Madrid, while others end up in comical situations trying to avoid it, like a man in Romania hiding his head inside a recycling bin. To call these people subjects, however, misses something crucial about the agency of these images, which were not captured by a human but by the indifferent lens of an unmanned camera. It highlights a crucial distinction between the camera and the artist; where one looks, the other sees. Through Rafman’s eyes, these mechanically-captured moments are elevated into scenes of human significance; collective memories in equal parts funny, eerie, poignant, and profane.

Rafman continually examines the condition of memory in the digital age, arguing that technology has fundamentally rewritten our relationship with the past. This obsession is crystallised in his film, You, the World and I (2010), an ironic retelling of the Orpheus myth where the first-person narrator performs a relentless trawl through Google Earth not for Euredyce herself, but for her image, retracing the moment a Google car drove past them on holiday. When the narrator finally locates his lost love, he is confronted with the image’s inadequacy, wistfully proclaiming; 'it seemed to contain our whole relationship. Yet it was so blurry.'

His latest work, shown here for the first time, sees Rafman grapple with the ethical implications of the Nine Eyes project and the moral relationship he has to the people caught in Google Street View’s digital net. Generated by AI, these videos project speculative narratives onto a selection of these random, context-less scenes. This exploration is darkest in the film Report a Concern: 29052 Oak Road Run, Central Shasta, CA, USA (2025), inspired by Antonioni’s Blow-Up, where a person from one of the images seeks revenge on Rafman’s uncanny double, who, having spent years projecting stories onto these frames, can no longer distinguish fact from fiction. It’s a chilling feedback loop we’ve seen reflected in real-world news. Though the internet can still function as a means of escape, these films gesture to its more sinister potential, an abyss of paranoia that reflects your own fears back to you.

Similarly, the exhibition design transforms the space into an abyss of its own, contributing to the troll-like sense of all-consuming immersion. With floors and walls covered in a visual soup of vivid glitch-scapes, visitors are folded into Rafman's digital vortex, a Boschian fever dream where a man plays the trumpet before a car crash, a child rides a bike in a Scream mask and an inmate makes a run for freedom. It’s absurd, and that’s the point. In a time saturated by data but starved of meaning, Report a Concern - the Nine Eyes Archives is an attempt to define a new, technological sublime characterised by the limitless nested realities of digital space. For Rafman, that’s always been less about documenting the internet than it is about finding a way to humanise the very tools that threaten to alienate us.

Jon Rafman's 'Report a Concern - the Nine Eyes Archives' at Louisiana Museum of Art, Copenhagen until 11 January 2026

louisiana.dk

Australian-born Italian artist and trained architect Bianca Censori has entered the art world in controversial style, unveiling the first part of a seven chapter series, set to conclude over the next seven years.

BIO POP, performed in Seoul, South Korea, over two days on December 11th and 12th, considers themes of domesticity, intimacy and identity. Slowly, carefully, and clad in latex, Censori bakes a cake, before serving it to sculpted clones draped over furniture, so tightly contorted as to become the objects themselves. In her pin-point heels and glistening second skin, Censori serves her cake and perches on one. A musing on ritual, a woman's place or the juxtaposition of the intimate and the public?

What does it mean? Censori tells us here.

Bianca Censori on her debut exhibition and performance

Wallpaper*: What does revolution mean to you, in the context of the home?

Bianca Censori: Revolution starts where behaviour is first learned. The home is where power is normalised.

Why did you want to express this through this medium?
Because domestic power operates through objects, rituals, and bodies. This medium makes that visible.

In what ways do you see domestic rituals shaping public identity?
Domestic rituals train the body. Public identity is just that training carried outward.

Why begin BIO POP in the kitchen? What does the act of baking symbolise for you?
The kitchen is where care, labour, and expectation intersect. Baking is repetitive, ritualised work that looks benign but carries structure.

The cake is rich in familial connotations but here it is an offering, not a nourishment. What are you offering, and to whom?
Time. Labor. Compliance. The offering is made to the system that expects it.

The dark haired doubles are physically contorting themselves to fit here. How does this resonate with you? What do they represent for you?
Adaptation. Endurance. The body adjusting itself to structures that weren’t built for it.

What aspects of your own experience, if any, informed the idea of domesticity as architecture of the self?
The work isn’t autobiographical. It’s observational.

This is described as the origin point of a seven-part cycle. What made domesticity the necessary starting place? Can you tell us how it will evolve?
Domesticity is the first system we enter. The cycle moves outward — from home to culture to collective life.

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American artist Wayne Thiebaud (1920-2021) was fascinated by the symbols of everyday life he saw around him. In the windows of bakeries and on street corners, he was drawn to lusciously frosted cakes and glistening hot dogs; the shapes and colours of gumball machines intrigued him, as did the simplicity of a cup of coffee.

In Thiebaud’s hands, these quotidian motifs are gorgeously elevated when translated into the traditional medium of an oil painting. It wasn’t an obvious career path for Thiebaud, who began working as an illustrator, cartoonist and art director in the 1940s and 1950s, before turning to painting. After being inspired by a meeting with Willem de Kooning in 1956, Thiebaud began painting symbols of American life as he saw them, leading to his first exhibition in 1962.

Great success in the United States followed, yet Thiebaud is lesser known in the UK, and the current exhibition at the Courtauld in London marks his first in the country. ‘To mount an exhibition of his work seemed very long overdue here,’ say the Courtauld curators.

Thiebuad was aware his work captured a slice of 1950s and 1960s life that would soon have passed. ‘He was keen to point out that sooner or later that world would be gone, just as surely as the worlds depicted by his artist heroes Cezanne and Manet are now gone. But his hope was that, like their work, his painting would speak powerfully to later generations. In our contemporary world, where we are all bombarded with fleeting images and everything runs at a million miles an hour, Thiebaud's painting encourages us to slow down and look and think deeply about even the most ephemeral things around us, because there is sometimes unexpected beauty and meaning to be found by doing so. Thiebaud found it in a cheap cup of coffee, a slice of pie, and a gumball machine.’

In 1962, Thiebaud was included, alongside Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, in an exhibition devoted to Pop Art, yet to see his work in the thickly rendered, painterly flesh is to understand how far away from his contemporaries he actually sat.

‘His paintings are lush and thick, you almost feel you could eat them like frosting on a cake,’ the curators agree. ‘But at the same time, they are so painterly and in a way unreal, or perhaps hyperreal, so you are pulled back into his world of painting from the imagination and that experience is powerful, sensual and thought-provoking.'

As the paintings convey the deliciousness of the treat, they emphasise its artifice – the cake is ready to eat, but we can't reach it. ‘They can be wistful or nostalgic. Sometimes a painting of an apparently abundant counter of sweets or deli goods also has large empty areas that seem sparse and melancholy. So his paintings are not simple – they take you on a journey and we hope that people will find that enriching and surprising.’

‘Wayne Thiebaud: American Still Life’, until 18 January 2026 at the Courtauld, London, courtauld.ac.uk

‘I read something by the Nobel Prize-winning writer, Herta Müller, where she said humour is the white trampoline in a dark corner – and I really liked that,’ says curator Nana Bahlmann, who has been considering what makes something funny for new exhibition, ‘Seriously’, at London’s Sprüth Magers. ‘Previously, I had been approached by the gallery to do a show on conceptual photography – I thought it would be quite dry, but when I started looking into it, I found that there's so much more humour and wit in the work. The show grew from that.’

Bahlmann criss-crosses mediums in a far-reaching dive into humour, including photography, film, print media and audio, embracing everything from the slapstick to the witty, observant, subversive and naughty.

‘It's not purely conceptual,’ says Bahlmann. ‘There is a lot of work from the late 1960s and early 1970s, up to work from 2025. There is a lot of visual wit throughout, which you can need in order to get a message across. So there's 1970s feminist art, for example, which plays with that, because how else do you get the attention? There's a lot of cross-references between artists in the show as well, which is quite funny.’

Artists citing and parodying each other throughout add a sly edge to the enjoyably vast curation. There are Peter Fischli and David Weiss works rephotographed by Thomas Ruff; Jonathan Monk referencing Louise Lawler and artist duo Bernd and Hilla Becher; while Cindy Sherman, Thomas Demand, and Andreas Gursky all appear with their own work or through the lens of someone else’s.

Wit may be famously subjective, but in such a big collection, it would be hard not to find something to smile about. ‘On one floor there is the role of the artist, and a play on identity role play,’ says Bahlmann. ‘On another, we’re looking at the body and landscape, or the body in relation to objects.’ It leads to a dissection of object humour, and a reframing of the mundane world we know through sharp satire and gentler mimicry. ‘I've made a lot of discoveries of artists I like through working on this exhibition,’ she adds. ‘I’ve had enormous fun.’

'Seriously' at Sprüth Magers, London until 31 January 2026, spruethmagers.com

The objects and things that fill our daily lives are often ones we only notice if they stop working, or if they inconvenience us in some way. The cakes that haven’t risen, the cables that don’t connect or the weeds growing through the crack in the path – all will receive our full attention only when they become a nuisance.

But currently at Pace, London, these items and more are celebrated as things of beauty in their own right, with the group exhibition ‘Monument to the Unimportant’ spotlighting the joy in mundanity. Artists including Henni Alftan, Genesis Belanger, Elmgreen & Dragset, Urs Fischer, Sylvie Fleury, David Hockney and Rachel Whiteread recontextualise the quotidian to create something wholly new.

‘Artists return to everyday objects because they’re universal and endlessly revealing,’ says Karine Haimo, senior vice president at Pace. ‘The things we barely notice, such as food, furniture, domestic tools, quietly shape our lives. When artists alter scale, material, or context, the familiar becomes strange again, and we’re prompted to look with fresh attention. The works in “Monument to the Unimportant” show how powerful that shift can be. A cake, a pretzel, or a hot-water bottle might seem trivial, but in an artist’s hands they become ways to talk about culture, the body, memory, and the rhythms of daily life. The mundane offers a shared language.’

Looking at these items, left without anyone to operate them, bereft and useless, seems faintly ridiculous, ultimately emphasising our own vulnerability. In Genesis Belanger’s sculptures, the human’s presence is implied so deeply we feel like they must have just rushed away, leaving the phone dangling off its hook behind them. ‘Each object has the ability to tell a story about a person, culture and society,’ says Belanger. ‘It’s not so much that the context changes the meaning of an object, as it provides the space for the meaning to be revealed. A hot water bottle in your medicine cabinet may be invisible, but in a gallery it reveals its allegorical potential.’

It is a narrative made even more literal by Elmgreen & Dragset. In Powerless Structures, Calvin Klein underwear and black Levi’s are strewn on the floor, kicked off by their invisible wearer. ‘In our daily lives, we surround ourselves with myriad mundane objects, be they in our homes or within the public sphere, that we tend to overlook or take for granted without any further reflections upon what they actually represent,’ the duo say. ‘In order to break through the conventional readings of such ordinary items, you have to look at them from a new perspective, so that both the desires and the control mechanisms embedded in their designs can be revealed once again.’

Taken as a whole, the exhibition is unsettling, rooted in the uncanny and hard to place. ‘Many pieces seem immediately recognisable, but they reveal something new the longer you look,’ adds Haimo. ‘An ironing board reflected in chrome or a pair of intertwined urinals shifts from literal object to something more open and poetic. I hope people leave the exhibition with a heightened awareness of the things around them. The “unimportant” is never actually unimportant; it’s where our habits, histories, and emotions live. If visitors start noticing the everyday with more curiosity, that’s the real impact of the show.’

‘Monument to the Unimportant’ at Pace, London until 14 February 2026, pacegallery.com

Regarded as one of Africa’s most influential artists and the godfather of the Afrobeat genre, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti was a revolutionary act whose work shaped a generation of people. His music was a tool of resistance against oppression while creating sounds that traveled through time. Keying into the life of rebellion in which he lived, Afrobeat Rebellion is currently showing at the Ecobank PanAfrican Centre in Lagos, providing a compact look into the life he lived, welcoming audiences into an immersive experience, exploring his journey and legacy.

Divided into multiple sections that weave through Fela’s life, the exhibition expands at different points into collections of moments spanning time and place, providing an understanding of the world the artist inhabited and the people he inspired. One of the first things you see at the exhibition’s entrance is a digital illustration by Diana Ejaita titled that reinterprets Fela’s work and showcases his spirit. The illustration features words like 'Africa Must Unite,' and depictions of the artist and his mother, Funmilayo Anikulapo-Kuti, a women’s right activist and political educator.

Infographics are in Nigerian Pidgin as well as English, taking audiences into the language that was integral in Fela’s life and artistry. ‘It’s important for me that we recognise who Fela was, not just as a musician and an icon, but what he was trying to say about who we are as a people and how we need to maybe reorient our perception,’ says Papa Omotayo, creative director and founder of A White Space Creative Arts Foundation, producer of the exhibition.

The exhibition, which runs until December 28, 2025, also features a wall of posters from as far back as 1978, spotlighting the monumental change that has been experienced in Nigeria, and the things that in some way remain the same. There are often conversations about living archives in contemporary art, and the ways we can reinterpret the exhibition as an archive, and Afrobeat Rebellion, treats itself as an archive that reanimates the past of its subject. It creates a participatory, dynamic, and evolving experience that isn’t limited in its use, connecting audiences to the past. Omotayo believes that ‘the best archives are the ones that are living in which people can engage with.’

For Seun Alli, art curator of the exhibition, they had to ensure to capture some of the magic they found in the archives. ‘Looking at archives and how they could help build a strong curatorial cohesive - I don't want to use the word narrative, but just the story of what we're trying to tell was very important,’ Alli shares.

First shown at the Musée de la musique de la Philharmonie de Paris, and now reimagined into a grand scale and ambitious exhibition spanning various mediums, including photography, film, literature, music, and fashion, the exhibition recreates and showcase Fela’s life and the things he loved. There is a sense of identity within them that encapsulates the breadth of the artist. A display of his costumes and underpants are some of those – regarding the latter, Alli thought they may be too intimate to share, but felt she’d be doing the audience a disservice not to. They also speak to how influential his music was, and how he shaped the arts across the African continent and its diaspora, inspiring artists in new ways to represent themselves and speak truth a power.

‘For us putting together this show, we just felt it couldn't be linear, it had to be multidimensional. It had to speak to different senses, so as much as you're seeing something, you're also going to listen to something, you're also going to feel something. Albeit through different mediums: it could be photography, a song an interview,’ adds Alli.

As Nigeria’s art landscape continues to grow, exhibitions that move away from commercial viability become more important due to their accessibility, and how they can be utilised to create a supporting ecosystem for the arts. ‘I think there's been an absence of institutional exhibitions in the landscape. A lot of the exhibitions have been from privately-owned galleries. It's not to say those galleries have not created work opportunities that is retrospective or more institution, but because of the lack of institutions, whether it's the National Museum or other places, there hasn't been an opportunity for this scale of exhibition to sort of take place,’ Omotayo says. ‘But I think now as we're seeing the growth of organisations like MOWAA, Gas Foundation, projects like this feel like the tipping point where people are starting to understand exhibitions more than just an event or a commercial thing but exhibitions that can speak to a wider narrative.’

Afrobeat Rebellion is showing at the Ecobank PanAfrican Centre in Lagos until December 28

With 2025’s Frieze London and Art Basel Paris in the rearview mirror, it’s roll on Art Basel Miami Beach, opening with two VIP preview days from Wednesday 3 December and welcoming the public from Friday 5 December to Sunday. This year’s edition promises to be as eventful as ever, with more than 280 leading international galleries representing 43 countries and territories. The fair will also debut a new digital art platform in partnership with OpenSea, a sign of the momentum that new media has in the broader art world. Embracing the city’s vibrant community ties, Art Basel Miami Beach will see standout presentations of artists exploring Latin America and the Caribbean. As always, the glitzy event rounds out 2025 on a celebratory note as dealers, collectors and everyone in-between flock to Miami for the art, the beaches and, of course, the parties.

From a major display of works by Christo and Jeanne-Claude on view at chic hotel The Betsy to monumental, pink inflatable creatures by Philippe Katerine suspended over Lincoln Road, there’s no shortage of pop-ups around town. This year, the most anticipated special event is from American artist Alex Prager, who will transform a historic Miami Beach movie theatre into an immersive installation exploring the glamour and artifice of the Golden Age of Hollywood. Called the Mirage Factory, the mise-en-scène, complete with an artificial orange grove, is a collaboration between The Cultivist and Capital One that will be activated throughout the week with dinners from renowned chef Dave Beran, as well as special performances and public experiences. Fresh from Prager’s having photographed Billie Eilish for the cover of WSJ. Magazine, the event marks a significant moment in the artist’s illustrious career.

To help you get the most out of Art Basel Miami Beach 2025, here are the must-see booths. (And while you’re in town, check out Design Miami 2025 too.)

Lehmann Maupin

Speaking of Alex Prager, the artist’s work will also grace the halls of the Miami Beach Convention Center, in Lehmann Maupin’s booth. The gallery is showing new photographs that exude glamour and drama as impressive as that of the pop-up installation; among them is Hidden Hills (Echoes) (2025), in which a housekeeper weeps as a buff man in a bathing suit stands outside the window behind her, posing as if in a body-building contest. He, in turn, looks through another window at a woman in a red satin dress sitting in front of a house of cards precariously stacked on a table. Masks hanging along the wall allude to deceit, and an open flip phone sitting on the sill hints at a fraught message, perhaps an image of betrayal on the brink of being revealed.

Jessica Silverman

With Woody De Othello’s impressive solo show of anthropomorphic sculptures and tile wall pieces on view across town at the Pérez Art Museum Miami, it’s particularly apt for Jessica Silverman to bring the Miami-born artist’s work to the fair. Included in the gallery’s presentation is a large-scale patinated bronze sculpture called inner knowing (2025). While little is needed to entice visitors to see Othello’s museum show, the sculpture offers a glimpse of what to expect in his equally contemplative and expressive investigations of the transformative power of spirituality and both ritual and everyday objects. Though he often explores themes of heritage and place, Othello leaves his work open to the viewer’s interpretation, inviting deep personal connections with whatever emotions the audience brings.

Uffner & Liu

With a roster full of women artists, it’s no surprise that Uffner & Liu should impress with an equally female-forward booth. Visitors familiar with the gallery will see recognisable names like Anne Buckwalter, whose Pennsylvania Dutch-inspired domestic scenes are filled with salacious details, like fornicating figures, and Bernadette Despujols, who paints intimate, textured portraits often centred on the body and exploring resilience and the Latin American diaspora.

The gallery will also show recent and historic works by Reginald Madison, a self-taught painter and sculptor who just joined Uffner & Liu’s roster. Now in his mid-eighties, Madison began working at the height of the Black Arts Movement in the 1970s, drawing inspiration from jazz and his fellow artists to explore the Black experience.

Gemini G.E.L.

A titan of the world of printmaking, Los Angeles-based Gemini G.E.L. is returning to the fair with a rich selection of editions that it has made with leading artists over the decades. Included in the booth will be several prints and sculptures by Robert Rauschenberg to coincide with the global commemoration of what would have been the artist’s 100th birthday. Rauschenberg collaborated with Gemini for four decades, pushing the boundaries of printmaking with works like the Hoarfrost series (1974), on view, comprising ethereal textiles with images transferred from newspapers and other media.

Among the newest editions that Gemini is bringing will be a monumental lithograph by Toba Khedoori featuring meticulously rendered, ghostly tree branches. The elegant image spans three sheets of paper, a testament to the skill of the printmakers at Gemini’s studio, which will celebrate its own milestone next year, its 60th anniversary.

Tina Kim Gallery

Always staging elegant presentations is Tina Kim Gallery, which is bringing a selection of artists from its primarily international roster with a keen eye for Asian-American and Asian artists. A highlight of the booth will be an abstract textile piece by 95-year-old Lee ShinJa. Called Hill (1996), the stunning wool and copper piece spans over 7ft in length and features a vibrant, geometric landscape. While she’s been working since the 1950s, Lee has been on a renewed rise in recent years, with a current solo show at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive in California and a glowing profile in The New York Times.

Erin Cluley Gallery

To tease Nic Nicosia’s solo show that opens next year at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, Erin Cluley Gallery is presenting a selection of photographs from the artist’s celebrated Real Pictures series (1987-89) in the fair’s Survey Sector. Dedicated to under-recognised artists of historical importance, the section offers visitors a chance to broaden their art historical lens and see rarely exhibited artworks. Nicosia’s Real Pictures series is exemplary of such work. Inexplicable scenes, such as children setting fire to a tree, and a clown preparing to brawl with a passing driver, fill these quirky and unsettling photographs, showing moments of everyday suburban life in Dallas. While the works are crucial to the history of photography, they haven’t been exhibited together since a 1999 retrospective at the Contemporary Art Museum in Houston.

Voloshyn Gallery

Also exhibiting in the Survey Sector is the Miami and Kyiv-based Voloshyn Gallery, which is bringing a series of paintings and works on paper by Janet Sobel. The self-taught, Ukrainian-American artist, who died in 1968, depicted anxiety-filled images of battlefields, prisons, and refugees, revealing the trauma and tragedies of the Second World War and its aftermath. These scenes combine Sobel’s memories of her life in Ukraine with the complexities of post-war America, where she was living. Often intimate in scale, the artworks on view reveal Sobel grappling with the duality of the immigrant experience and the transformation of the US in the mid-20th century.

Marianne Boesky Gallery

Bringing a selection of strong works from artists on its roster is Marianne Boesky Gallery, a long-time exhibitor of the fair. Included in the gallery’s booth will be a new, expressionistic painting by French artist Dora Jeridi. Titled Imperfect (2025), the work contains a vibrant yellow abstract drape inspired by the runway shows of designer John Galliano. Taken by the textures and theatricality of these events, Jeridi reimagines the dramatic shapes of Galliano’s designs to comment on the luxury of high fashion and aristocracy. She juxtaposes this with mangled feet and hints of a distorted face in charcoal, alluding to something darker beneath the glamorous surface.

Ryan Lee Gallery and Catharine Clark Gallery

In the Meridians Sector, artists can flex their creative muscles with large-scale and immersive artworks that wouldn’t otherwise fit the format of an art fair. Co-presenting in the buzzworthy section are Ryan Lee Gallery and Catharine Clark Gallery, which are showcasing an installation resembling an oversized vanitas by Stephanie Syjuco. Born in Manila, Philippines, Syjuco is known for her research-based practice exploring authenticity as it relates to race, labour, and history.

Her project in the Medians Sector, Neutral Calibration Studies (Ornament + Crime) (2016), features an array of readymade objects alongside digital prints and laser-cut images, blurring the boundaries between what is real and what is artifice. Symbols related to psychoanalysis, the Philippines, and the Black Panthers are among the themes Syjuco introduces in the work. Together, they question the construct of historical narratives, including in relation to American colonisation in the Philippines.

Art Basel Miami takes place December 5 - 7, artbasel.com

Long before she became synonymous with mirrored rooms and spotted pumpkins, Yayoi Kusama was a child in rural Japan, staring at a field of flowers that multiplied until they seemed to swallow her whole. Born in Matsumoto in 1929 to a conservative, landowning family, she reported seeing patterns consume walls, floors, and even her own body. Drawing and painting became a survival mechanism, though her mother often tore up her sketches, dismissing them as shameful.

Rather than fading, these visions sharpened into an obsession with repetition and obliteration. Endlessly dotting, multiplying, or mirroring forms was a way to master what threatened to overwhelm her and dissolve the self into something larger. What began as defence became the engine of her practice: repetition as both compulsion and liberation, obliteration as both erasure of trauma and creation of new worlds. This logic underpins everything from her Infinity Net paintings to the mirrored rooms, where viewers are drawn into the same disorienting cycle – trapped yet liberated, overwhelmed yet absorbed – that Kusama herself endured.

Yayoi Kusama's early career

When she arrived in New York in 1958, Kusama was fleeing Japan’s rigid social conventions and insular art scene. Trained in the highly codified traditional nihonga painting technique, she found the constraints suffocating, particularly as a young woman producing obsessive, unsettling work. Encouraged by correspondence with Georgia O’Keeffe, she sought the city as a laboratory where scale, radicalism, and visibility were possible.

Into a scene split between Abstract Expressionism’s chest-beating machismo and Minimalism’s cool austerity, she brought something entirely her own: hallucinations rendered as dots and nets, obsessive patterns that replaced heroic gesture with relentless repetition. Donald Judd, then a critic, recognised her radical refusal of centre or hierarchy: where Pollock flung paint, Kusama covered canvases to obliterate herself.

Style and influences

Kusama did not confine herself to the studio. During the 1960s, amid Vietnam protests, second-wave feminism, and sexual liberation, she staged “Happenings”: nude performances in public spaces where bodies were painted with polka dots – or, “marks of obliteration.” Participants became living sculptures, dissolving the boundaries between art and life, politics and spectacle. Sex, provocation and protest intertwined, from an orgiastic tableaux lampooning capitalist excess on Wall Street, to the 1969 antiwar event Anatomic Explosion, using body painting to confront war and social norms.

By the early 1970s, exhausted and under-recognised, Kusama returned to Japan. In 1977 she voluntarily admitted herself to a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo, where she continues to live and work. Far from retreat, this became the foundation for her late-career resurgence. From there, she produced paintings, sculptures, and installations at industrial scale, while also writing poetry and novels. The hospital is not an exile but an anchor: where Kusama transforms private compulsion into public monument.

Kusama drew from Japanese nihonga, European surrealists like Joseph Cornell, and American peers including Claes Oldenburg and Andy Warhol (whom she claimed borrowed her ideas). Her legacy is equally vital: Louise Bourgeois, Tracy Emin, Damien Hirst, and Sarah Lucas owe debts to her radical fusion of obsession, sexuality, and repetition. Contemporary immersive installations by Carsten Höller, teamLab, and Random International’s Rain Room bear her unmistakable influence.

Kusama's most notable works

Infinity Nets (1958–)
Kusama’s Infinity Nets marked her arrival in New York. Canvases covered in tiny, looping, brush marks eschewed bold strokes in favour of a kind of cellular lattice that, when repeated obsessively, created an endless net-like surface. Painted obsessively for hours at a stretch, the nets reflect both hallucination and compulsion. Minimalists admired their seriality; Abstract Expressionists bristled at their refusal of bravura. The Nets foreshadowed much of her later work – from mirrored rooms to installations – proving accumulation can be as radical as expression.

Narcissus Garden (1966)
First staged at the Venice Biennale, Narcissus Garden featured 1,500 mirrored spheres scattered on the grass. Kusama, in a gold kimono, sold them to visitors, provoking outrage while critiquing art as commodity. Spectators became performers in their own reflection, implicated in cycles of desire and self-regard. The piece folds seduction and critique into a single gesture, decades before social media would replicate its self-reflective logic.

Infinity Mirror Rooms (1965–present)
The first, Phalli’s Field (1965), filled a mirrored chamber with hundreds of polka-dotted soft sculptures, multiplying into endlessness. Later rooms incorporated LEDs, water, or lanterns, but the conceit remains: immersion where selfhood dissolves into reflection. These works function on multiple registers – psychedelic spectacle, psychological allegory, feminist critique – and established Kusama as an architect of experience decades before “immersive art” became a marketing category. Infinity Mirror Rooms are available to visit at The Broad in Los Angeles and at the Yayoi Kusama museum in Tokyo.

Pumpkin (1990–)
The pumpkin, painted in childhood and later rendered in sculpture, is her most recognisable motif. Monumental or tabletop, yellow-and-black, it is part self-portrait, part talisman. In Japan, pumpkins carry folk associations with nourishment, grounding Kusama’s delirious hallucinations in earthy solidity.

Kusama's legacy

Kusama endures because she refuses to separate the personal from the political. Dots are not decoration but acts of obliteration; mirrors are not spectacle but metaphors for a society in which identities multiply and dissolve. Her practice bridges modernism’s obsession with the infinite and today’s culture of repetition, spectacle, and anxiety.

Now in her nineties, Kusama is celebrated worldwide, her exhibitions drawing record-breaking crowds, and collaborations with fashion and design cementing her patterns as global trademarks. Cynics might read this ubiquity as commodification, but it also affirms her lifelong project of dissolving art into everyday life. If her 1960s Happenings once scandalised institutions, today’s Kusama stands inside them, filling museums with queues that wrap around the block.

At the centre is an artist who has spent seven decades wrestling hallucinations into form, insisting private visions can become collective experience. Kusama’s dots, nets, pumpkins, and mirrors are playful, obsessive, and inexhaustibly strange. In her world, infinity is not an abstraction but a room you can step into – and perhaps never leave.

Margot Tenenbaum’s Fendi mink coat is one of the most instantly recognisable pieces of clothing in contemporary film. Worn by Gwyneth Paltrow in 2001 movie classic The Royal Tenenbaums, the coat now sits in an expansive exploration of US director Wes Anderson at the Design Museum in London. The exhibition also features a set of bespoke Louis Vuitton suitcases, stamped with miniature safari animals and featured in 2007’s The Darjeeling Limited. In another space, an intimately scaled puppet used to bring George Clooney’s titular character to life in the 2009 stop-motion animation Fantastic Mr Fox is on display. The show is an in-depth ode to hands-on filmmaking, and a welcome antidote to our CGI and AI age.

The curatorial team were granted full access to Anderson’s prolific archive, creating vignettes for each film that form a chronological display. ‘There are so many aspects of his work that are connected with design and architecture,’ says Johanna Agerman Ross, who curated the show and catalogue alongside Matthieu Orléan and Lucia Savi in collaboration with La Cinémathèque Française. 'As a design museum, we wanted to make that a prominent part of the exhibition.'

The lived-in tactility of Anderson’s films is evident throughout. Costumes are made from sumptuous furs and bobbly felts, creating authentic textures and personalities for each of his characters. The Scout outfit worn by 12-year-old Sam (Jared Gilman) in Moonrise Kingdom (2012) is casually styled, with rolled-up cuffs and jaunty accessories, as a child – especially one as rebellious as this lead character – may dress themselves. Willem Defoe’s chilling family fixer in The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), meanwhile, is brought to life with sinister intensity by his tailored leather costume and knuckledusters. Mr Fox’s tiny soft corduroy suit was not the simple creation of his puppeteer but designed by Savile Row tailor Scabal.

The props are equally evocative. While many films utilise props for background world-building, Anderson brings an at times obsessive depth to his creations. The young-adult fiction books featured in Moonrise Kingdom were all designed from scratch, with constructed plots, making the eventual titles and covers seem authentic. The show also features a miniature replica of Anderson’s own childhood copy of Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr Fox. This movie and his other famous stop-motion film, Isle of Dogs (2018), are explored in highly technical detail, with skeletal inner workings highlighting the depth to which each character is articulated and considered, their intricate, kinetic facial features and unkempt fur adding a touch of realism and character.

The exhibition, designed by Ab Rogers, paints a view of the director as both compulsively precise and playful, refusing to cut corners when an original form of expression might be possible. 'I think he became keener about commissioning items as he went along,' says Agerman Ross. 'With his first film, Bottle Rocket (1996), he commissioned some things, but it was all returned to the prop house. With Rushmore (1998), he decided to keep everything because he was quite upset to find that when he needed to reshoot, things weren’t there. This became the starting point for the archive, and I think he got a taste for commissioning.'

The show highlights how Anderson’s process has evolved, from his early explorations of playful stop motion in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004) to his recent work on Asteroid City (2023), which richly combines live action and more imaginative use of design. 'It’s a crescendo of all the techniques he has used, from puppets to miniature models and props and original costumes,' says Agerman Ross.

Anderson is now at a point in his career where he is trusted to fulfill his wildest ambitions. Agerman Ross hopes that this exhibition highlights the creative possibility that still exists in the film industry. 'Filmmaking is a deeply collaborative process. The world of design is vast and film is its own universe; we hope to make it intriguing for young people. How do you become a puppet maker or a set designer? When people see it played out through these objects, they can become more informed about these roles.'

‘Wes Anderson: The Archives’ at the Design Museum from 21 November 2025 – 26 July 2026, designmuseum.org

‘Painting is a bit like when you try to capture your dreams,’ says Danish-born, Paris-based artist Eva Helene Pade, whose romantic figurative paintings are currently on show at Thaddaeus Ropac, London. ‘It’s like when you wake up with a very clear image of your dream, and then you realise it's not that easy and actually not that clear. Then you start sketching it and it changes completely, because then you also have the canvas itself, which makes its own dictation. So you have to change it a lot, but it has to be fun.’

Pade established a fluid, dreamy style at her institutional debut at the Arken Museum of Contemporary Art in Denmark earlier in 2025, and is now presenting a new group of paintings for her first solo UK exhibition. In their celebration of the body, the works continue to consider distortion and movement. Bodies in a crowd are caught in a choreographed dance of emotion, each figure displaying their own primal language.

Pade draws on classical references for her figures in a crowd, bringing them to life with violent brushstrokes. ‘I've always been inspired by history, but in different ways,’ she says. ‘I spend a lot of time looking at the German New Objectivity painters [who established a non-sentimental reality]. Not only do they have a very interesting way of depicting the figurative, giving it a sort of ugliness and an uncanniness to them, but they also express time in an interesting way – or not necessarily time, but what is going on between moments, or between wars. It’s waiting for the next thing to happen, and how they capture it.’

It is a pause the artist reflects in her own work, paying as much attention to the spaces between bodies as she does to the bodies themselves. Pade conducts a geometrical play of shapes and overlapping forms to bring the humanity of her subjects to the fore. ‘When I start the painting, I need to capture the movements especially, and that's why, for me, it becomes more about coordinates in the beginning. When I start, it's about finding the dynamic in the painting, in a movement. Because that's in the end result. There needs to be something that's moving in the painting, if that doesn’t sound completely ridiculous, but it needs to have a pulse. I think it’s especially true when you paint figuratively, because otherwise the characters die. They become frozen.’

Eva Helene Pade, 'Søgelys' is at Thaddaeus Ropac London until 20 December 2025

ropac.net

The work of art and photography duo Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin has defined visual culture, pushing boundaries both aesthetically and technically through their work with figures including Björk, Kate Moss, Lady Gaga, Cindy Sherman, Bill Murray and themselves.

The partners in life and art have collaborated with Chanel and Louis Vuitton, and have shot for every top fashion and culture magazine you can think of, including their series on America’s top 50 creatives for Wallpaper* in 2024. Their early adoption of digital manipulation in the Nineties put them at the forefront of portraiture at a time when experimentation with computer technology in image making was in its emergence. The result is a 40-year body of work made with the declared intention of striking a balance between the moment and timelessness and to ‘destabilise the conventional promise of photography as a purveyor of truth.’

In a preview of work in their retrospective at Kunstmuseum Den Haag opening in March 2026, ‘Can Love Be a Photograph’ ,they are showing images from the project ‘Think Love' at India Mahdavi’s Project Room #21, in Paris. This project, which opened to coincide with Paris Photo, showcases Inez & Vinoodh’s series created with the iPhone 17 in Marfa Texas.

‘Think Love’, created as part of the project ‘Joy, in 3 Parts’ is a series of portraits of couple Charles Matadin and Natalie Brumley. Curated by ex-director of photography for The New York Times Magazine Kathy Ryan, the project also featured Mickalene Thomas and Trunk Xu.

The couple were shot simply, outside with a translucent piece of red fabric, in a series that explores both the intimacy and the euphoria of romantic love and desire. The landscape plays a role in some of the images as a stirring backdrop for the young lovers.

The collaboration with iPhone is a natural progression in Inez & Vinoodh’s use of tech throughout their career, who see it as a way of pushing the boundaries of art and portrait making. In the exaggerated elements of a portrait, they create insights into their subjects or their art, extending the influence of the photograph. They were the first to start using computers to alter the human body in ways that are very normal now, and used them to heighten meaning over a mythical human physical perfection.

Having worked together since 1986, they have an intuitive way of making images, with one taking photographs and the other observing. There is no fixed role and most of their shoots take only fifteen minutes, with the duo demonstrating an apt way of gaining the trust of their subjects that means the process is very fluid, they have said.

In trying to liberate photography from the moment, they have created timeless images with both avant garde and classic qualities featuring well-known figures of recent times. In putting together the large-scale show, previewed here in Paris, they have taken chronology out of the equation, taking their work out of the order in which it was made and focusing purely on the images.

Inez and Vinoodh’s legacy as image makers is set, but they are still seeking to explore photography, its limitations and its possibilities. Here we see a taster of what’s to come in March 2026, on view in Paris until 12^th December.

'Think Love’ is on view from 13th November – 12th December 2025, India Mahdavi’s Project Room #21

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In one of the final rooms of ‘Vivono: Art and Feelings, HIV-AIDS in Italy. 1982-1996’, at Centro per l'Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci in Prato (through 10 May 2026), a gentle army of off-white sofas invites visitors to sit and absorb the words of Nino Gennaro, the artist, activist and poet whose writing is projected onto the surrounding walls (old photographs additionally appear on some of the furniture via a slide show). The space is loosely modelled after Gennaro’s own living arrangement, in the home he shared with his chosen family of community-minded artists until his death, from AIDS in 1995, which he described in personal notes from the 1980s as ‘a place to make mistakes but also to get things right, a place to heal but also to get sick…to die but also be reborn, a place where everything is allowed…’

‘You enter the house, and in literally each corner there is a sofa,’ shares curator Michele Bertolino, sampling the upholstery the morning after the show opened to collaborators and contributors, press, family, and friends of the museum. ‘It's incredible because the sofas are always busy; it means being cosy and having the possibility to stay, to speak together.’ Gennaro’s friends still live in the same house in Palermo, where his work, tied to the idea of affection as recognition and care, remains, and which Bertolino visited often during the making of the show; each time, his hosts put him up in the artist’s old bedroom.

Gennaro’s is one of three monographic spaces that underscore the gravity of the wider show, each consciously developed by the curator’s friend, the architect and exhibition designer Giuseppe Ricupero (the other two rooms focus on Patrizia Vicinelli and Francesco Torrini). ‘These artists give a specific hint to the way in which the HIV-AIDS crisis was approached in Italy and I think, as a first show discussing this, sum up the issue,’ says Bertolino. The show’s moniker moreover, is direct in its communication: ‘vivono’ translates to ‘they live’, and the dates relay the earliest recorded case of AIDS in Italy, and the year HAART therapies were introduced, in Vancouver, at the XI International AIDS Conference.

A response to the silence Bertolino identified around HIV-AIDS in Italian culture – particularly amongst those championing foreign art made in a similar context – the show was constructed through discussions together with research the curator had begun for an earlier photobook project. ‘It came out of necessity,’ he explains today. ‘It's a conversation that is going on [globally], and in Italy we are not addressing the issue.’ Thinking communally, Bertolino worked with a committee that included the collective Conigli Bianchi, activists Valeria Calvino and Daniele Calzavara, and Ida Panicelli, the museum’s artistic director between 1993-94. ‘They took my hand and let me in, this guy coming from contemporary art, asking personal things about their life,’ recalls the curator. ‘They really helped me understand and navigate this history, as it’s not a history I lived.’

Consisting of nine rooms in total, the show is orchestrated primarily around Italian artists, while several British and American names also appear (Robert Mapplethorpe’s quietly brooding Coral Sea (1983) is surrounded by ample white space, while Derek Jarman’s Pontormo and Punks at Santacroce, from 1982, plays nearby to The Pope and the Penis, the bold text-based work previously exhibited at the 1990 Venice Biennale by New York collective, Gran Fury). A specially commissioned Roberto Ortu film introduces the show, and a vast collection of painting, illustration, sculpture, video, photography, and poetry follows. Paramount for Bertolino however, are a series of worktables made up of archival materials such as pamphlets, articles, posters, campaigns by Moschino and United Colors of Benetton, and recent works by Milan’s Tomboys Don’t Cry collective.

‘I wanted it to be meaningful and present, so we had conversations about what it means to collect and preserve, how we build a memory when there is no memory,’ says the curator. Formed around themes, as opposed to chronology, labels include stigma, care, time, shit and celebration; ‘shit’ was a suggestion from Calvino notes Bertolino, acknowledging the term’s complexity. In an essay from the show’s accompanying book, Reader, Calvino expands on the word’s significance, alluding to her own experiences and drug use amidst the social and cultural shift that occurred in the country in the late 20^th century, as Italy moved into neoliberalism. ‘The 1980s were shitty years,’ she writes. ‘Shitty in the sense that they digested and discarded everything that the 1970s had been…the years of marches, collectives, self-awareness groups, counterculture...’

Indeed, much of the work presented at Centro Pecci was made against this backdrop, and yet Bertolino and Ricupero were determined to foreground a sense of lightness within the show, honouring the desire to love and embrace joy that existed in tandem with the extreme grief and political landscape of the time. Writing after his own diagnosis in the 1980s, Gennaro once suggested that ‘it is never a personal matter,’ indicating the comfort sustained from the relationship between HIV-AIDS and creating a shared narrative.

The sentiment is partially echoed in the responsibility Bertolino felt while putting ‘Vivono’ together he says. ‘A lot of people trusted me in a very sincere and immediate way. Behind this work there were people, life experiences – for some people, it was years since they had gone back to the works, or talked about their partner or son,’ he shares. ‘The subtitle of the show is “art and feelings”, and I was really not sure about this, but it is a show about feelings – made through feelings, constructed because of love. And I would love it to be the opening up of a conversation that is not present in Italy. Luca Starita [who also contributed an essay to Reader] will publish in February, a book on literature and poetry and HIV-AIDS in Italy, so things are happening. It’s a collective effort.’

'VIVONO. Arts and Feelings, HIV-AIDS in Italy, 1982-1996' at Centro per l'Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Prato, until March 1, 2026

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