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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Thinking Hands' at Thea until 1 November 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Art Basel Paris from 23-25 October 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Louise Giovanelli presents ‘In the Light of False Suns’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

adampendleton.net

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

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

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

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

The Front at London Performance Studios

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

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

Yuko Mohri at Barbican

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

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

Rebecca Warren at Maureen Paley

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

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

Esterban Jefferson at Herald St

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anal House Meltdown x Bolding Gallery club night

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

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

Daniel Crouch Rare Books at Frieze Masters

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

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

Es Devlin at Design Museum

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

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

Issy Wood at National Portrait Gallery

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

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

Georg Baselitz at Thaddaeus Ropac

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

EE: I was very urban.

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

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

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

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

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

EE: Very hard.

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

EE: A picture a day sometimes!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JT: Yes!

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

JT: Excellent. Me too!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

roseeaston.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

American Cooking until November 7 at Fort Gansevoort, New York

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

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

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

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

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

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

sculptors.org.uk

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

chateauversailles.fr

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

olneygleason.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

chanakya.school

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

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

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

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

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

southbankcentre.co.uk

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sujin Lee at Saatchi Yates until 12 November 2026

saatchiyates.com

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

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

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

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

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

‘Dreary’ seems a harsh characterisation for any of the pieces in the show, which continue over two more sections, focused on the architecture of New York and New Mexico, respectively. The works are united in their formality, and perhaps more strictly figurative than some of O’Keeffe’s trademark subjects – as if turning up the volume on the 'objectivity’ aspect of the dialectic she famously outlined between objectivity and abstraction. Nonetheless, even in her imagery of a city undergoing an industrial revolution and hyper-phallic building boom, there is undeniable emotionality and sly yonic detail in paintings like New York Street with Moon (1925) and Abstraction (1926).

The exhibition comes home, appropriately, to the Southwest, where O’Keeffe settled into her New Mexico environs. This includes her Ghost Ranch homestead, whose patio door was a famous point of obsession in her later works. Here, the curators have provided some charming immersive elements, including a 360-degree video panorama of her Ghost Ranch courtyard, and a hands-on drawing area featuring 3D-printed models and midcentury modern furnishings that were hallmarks of O’Keeffe’s eclectic New Mexico living spaces.

This section offers the viewer much opportunity to meditate on O’Keeffe’s sense of place, from The House I Live In (1937), to the tender, bodily details of her various Ranchos Church renderings, to her patio door. ‘That door was what I bought the house for,’ O’Keeffe says in a video at the entrance of the exhibition.

In a final nod to its lingering importance, the exhibition closes out with a black-painted corridor, a gesture to the portal that held such lingering fascination, with a final work Ladder to the Moon (1958) hanging wistfully in the dark, seemingly pointing the way toward the infinite.

‘Georgia O’Keeffe: Architecture’ is on view from 11 September 11, 2026 – 3 January, 2027 at the Detroit Institute of Arts.

‘I'm absolutely mad about rules,’ says artist Amelia Cross, sitting at her studiously arranged desk at Sarabande, the foundation set up by designer Lee Alexander McQueen to support a new generation of creatives. Meticulously realised miniature drawn studies of items of clothing or clothing-related details, such as shirt cuffs, reside alongside a pair of feet shaped canvases encased in white lace socks. Cross has been preparing her first UK solo show ‘Rules of Disappearance’ which opens 10 September 2026 at Angelica Jopling’s Incubator – a gallery championing emerging contemporary art voices – and will showcase a new series of her wonderful ‘sewn paintings’.

Prefect, a new work, is laid neatly on the studio floor. It looks like a school uniform that its wearer has literally just stepped out of. Composed of a perfectly pleated skirt that sits just so, the emerald velvet ribbon trim of its jacket exquisitely stitched, while the matching tonally coloured button is, as you lean in, in fact not a real button at all, but a tiny and perfectly painted rendition of one. As buttons go, it’s beguiling. Prefect is a great introduction to Cross; the prefect badge that sits on the jacket’s lapel is also painted and actually reads ‘perfect’. This kind of knowing use of words and trompe-l’œil effects is central to the way Cross wants to invite the viewer to engage and interact with her painstaking, thoughtful work – most pieces, depending on their size, take around five weeks. ‘I like the idea of the double take or second look,’ she says. ‘My work is quite multiangular too, so you do have to move around them.’

Other pieces in the show include a series of 32 small panels featuring a variety of buttons – 31 of which will be painted and one of which will be real; Cross liked spot-the-difference books as a child. One of the largest works, Marketing Graduate, is a painter’s shirt rendered as a biting dig at the idea of what a young artist might have to endure in the ever-volatile and competitive art market; the interior of the collar reads ‘Tailored for Blue Chips’, while its four front pockets are festooned with the typical artistic tools, from oil sticks to scissors. ‘It’s called the Marketing Graduate because that really is what a lot of emerging artists are,’ says Cross in a refreshingly matter-of-fact way. ‘It’s very anti-art.’

Inspired by McQueen learning the craft of tailoring on Saville Row, Cross initially studied bespoke tailoring at London College of Fashion – her degree show featured four looks that riffed on Lucian Freud paintings – before completing a master’s in painting from the Royal College of Art in 2025.

Her initial experiments in oil revolved around paintings of clothing, but with the figure all but removed, leaving perhaps a singular hand amid two beautifully executed shirts. Cross says her creative breakthrough came with the work Neck (Study) in 2024; having observed her own trench coat draped over a chair, she felt inspired to make its collar, followed by painting its buttons and a subtle shadow that you can barely see in a reproduction photograph.

‘I had to almost reject fashion,’ she says. ‘And then get into painting to return to it. My sewing machine and paints had been next to each other for years, but it had never clicked until the RCA.’

Cross tells a wonderfully rudimentary and DIY story of an early art-fashion cross-over; at around 16, inspired by a Miu Miu collection, she drew cats on a school shirt collar. ‘I would use up all the data on my phone to look at runway shows,’ she laughs. But her interest in clothes began with her mother, who she says has always been very well dressed – ‘She always taught us, if you have a good handbag and a good pair of shoes, you can walk into any room, and you'll be fine’ – while her father’s career as a pilot instigated her lifelong curiosity around uniforms.

Comparisons to Domenico Gnoli are obvious – Cross describes the way he painted the twill diagonal line of a tie with a slight shadow as ‘just delicious’. She notes, too, that conceptual artists such as Yoko Ono, Lawrence Weiner and Marcel Duchamp feel pertinent inspirations. ‘Mary Kelly, I think, is really interesting,’ she says. ‘She did a lot with fashion, in almost using clothing as a documentation of a life, and creating an archive. I think, in a way, maybe that's also what I'm trying to do: create a form of an archive.’ Agnes Martin’s rigour and simplicity similarly chime with Cross’ sensibility. ‘You can see it has taken her years to get that perfect stripe, and I think I'm also chasing that perfect button or stripe.’

Painting mostly from life, Cross’ signature greyish beige Belgian linen offers her a certain restraint – ‘It allows the shadows or the form to do the talking.’ Her process begins with a sketch. She will then pattern-cut as if she is making clothing, deciding crucial measurements before cutting the linen, figuring out dimensions for the stretcher bars and which bits of the linen will need to be primed in order to be painted upon. This is followed by the cutting of each individual piece; she will then begin to paint and sew.

Born in London, Cross grew up in Portugal, returning to the UK to study for her GCSEs. She recognises that the shift in school uniform from a very simple polo shirt to the traditional state-school grey skirt with a blazer and tie cemented her fascination with the language and codes of clothing. ‘You’re judged immediately on how exactly you wear your uniform – there’s such an unspoken language around it,’ she recalls of school-era styling nuances. ‘I do like that tension between the idea that a uniform is a way to equalise but somehow also offers a way in to breaking the rules.’ On a first date, she says her initial question is always ‘What was your school uniform and how did you wear it?’

For a recent show at Nino Mier Gallery in New York, Cross completed extensive archival research into uniforms, specifically school dress codes and workplace attire at both the V&A and the Goldsmith’s Textile Collection. On a board in her studio, there are images of men wearing plus fours from the 1920s, including Cambridge undergraduates. Inspiration is also gathered from real life, specifically on her Northern Line commute. ‘I like to look back, but also look at what people are wearing now because that makes for a new language.’ One of her favourites among this latest work is Sardines, featuring four almost identical navy suit-jacketed arms, which was largely informed by journeying bankers and the varying iterations on a classic navy sartorial uniform.

For those who invest in Cross’ work, they may find a secondary element in addition to the painting itself in the form of some kind of correspondence from the artist. Secret messages, confessional ideas and writings circulate her practice – perhaps another way to keep the audience alert, engaged, looking. For her New York show, Cross made a work called The Price of Privacy, consisting of a small pocket detail and a partly concealed confessional letter detailing the artist’s own sins of the past year. After it sold, she sent the full letter to the buyer – as yet with no response. ‘But that’s part of it,’ she grins. ‘In my mind, I thought they could post it online or maybe just keep it for themselves… I like that these added elements aren’t obvious straight away,’ she says. ‘My work allows me to play, but also to mess with people a little bit.’

Amelia Cross, ‘Rules For Disappearance’, 10 September – 4 October 2026 at Incubator, London, incubatorart.com

When Charles M Schulz first introduced Charlie Brown to the world in October 1950, the beloved cartoon character wore a plain white T-shirt. But Schulz realised Charlie Brown was missing something. ‘He didn’t bounce off the page,’ the American cartoonist later recounted. ‘So I gave him that little jagged stripe, and he’s had it ever since.’

Clothing quickly became visual shorthand for each character in the Peanuts comic-strip universe. Sally wore polka dots; Linus had stripes and his trusty security blanket; Peppermint Patty flaunted flip-flops. Even Snoopy, the beloved beagle, first appeared with a flower tucked into his collar.

‘Snoopy in Style’, a new exhibition opening today (2 September 2026) in New York, tells the story of Peanuts and its creator through fashion. Through archival material, fashion rarities, special commissions and experiential vignettes, the show highlights Peanuts’ enduring influence on fashion and pop culture.

That starts with Schulz himself. The Minnesota-born cartoonist – ‘Sparky’, as he was known to those close to him – was always a snazzy dresser, thanks to his father (a barber) and a proclivity for sweaters, courtesy of a clothing store called the Lions Den, local to Santa Rosa where he later moved. The exhibition features a selection of some of the best, courtesy of The Charles M Schulz Museum and Research Center, including a red-and-black argyle number and a flame-stitch crewneck.

As the popularity of the strip grew, so did Peanuts’ reach. San Francisco businesswoman Connie Boucher saw opportunity in Peanuts-themed merchandise. In partnership with Schulz, Boucher helped the comic strip grow from a fixture in the ‘funnies’ into Peanuts the brand. Peanuts-themed datebooks, plush dolls, clothing and more – a plethora of which is shown in ‘Snoopy in Style’ – flooded the market. Standouts include original 1960s-era wall calendars with psychedelic graphics; a rainbow of character-themed sweatshirts; and a Boy George-lookalike Snoopy.

As the decades rolled on, so too did the Peanuts cast’s style – especially Snoopy. At various points in the strip’s five-decade run, Snoopy flaunted alter-egos and styles that drew from the disco, prepster and grunge eras – a sartorial edge that earned him the moniker ‘Joe Cool’. Snoopy still inspires today. The exhibition’s pièce de résistance is a room full of plush Snoopys and Woodstocks, reimagined by some of America’s most talented fashion designers, from Christopher John Rogers to Bode and Willy Chavarria.

Apart from a wealth of Peanuts storytelling, ‘Snoopy in Style’ features plenty of fodder for the social media set, including Instagram-friendly vignettes, a central café peppered with Peanuts-sillouette chairs, a midcentury-inspired listening room, and even a gift shop curated by Colette founder Sarah Andelman.

But the best bits are ones that surprise, including a section dedicated to Schulz’s friendship with tennis superstar and activist Billie Jean King. Both supported Title IX, a landmark federal civil rights law that prohibited sex-based discrimination in schools, which helped open the door for female athletes everywhere. Two years later, in 1974, King founded the Women’s Sports Foundation and Schulz readily agreed to be a trustee. The Peanuts gang also came along for the ride, from Peppermint Patty criticising inequities in women’s sports, to Lucy quite literally serving as a poster child for King’s foundation. (‘Thank goodness for sports,’ the famously cantankerous cartoon character quipped. ‘If they didn’t exist, I don’t know what I’d do with my tremendous natural ability.’)

Whether you pop by between matches at the US Open or Fashion Week events, ‘Snoopy in Style’ makes one thing clear: you’re a good man, Charlie Brown.

‘Snoopy in Style’ is on view from 2-26 September 2026 at 25 Little West 12th St, New York, NY 10014

The V&A is celebrating the 80th anniversary of Freddie Mercury’s birth with a free exhibition tracing the singer’s style evolution.

Created together with Mary Austin, Mercury’s former fiancée and friend of 20 years, ‘Splendid Things’ unites eight famous looks Mercury wore in music videos and for performances throughout the 1970s and 1980s.

Costumes and accessories include the monochrome outfit Mercury wore on the cover of Queen’s debut album in 1973, the ‘Mercury Wing’ catsuit designed by Wendy de Smet worn in the ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ video and the crown and cloak designed by Diana Moseley, worn for his last stage appearance with Queen at Knebworth, in 1986.

Austin, who has lent seven of the eight looks to the V&A for the exhibition, emphasises the key role clothes held in Mercury’s exploration as an artist. ‘As we celebrate Freddie’s legacy in what would have been his 80th year, the clothes and costumes to be displayed at the V&A tell a hugely important part of his story both on and off the stage,’ she says. ‘Never mere accoutrements, his costumes and clothes were essential to his performances, creative vision, and wider self-expression, carefully designed to create a lasting visual and emotional impact that has reached across the generations and still reverberates today.’

It is an appropriate tribute to Mercury, who delighted in beauty and had a passion for art, design and fashion, remarking in 1978, ‘I like to be surrounded by splendid things. I want to lead a Victorian life surrounded by exquisite clutter.’

'Freddie Mercury | Splendid Things' will be at the V&A in London from 24 October 2026 – 17 January 2027, across the museum’s permanent galleries, and will be free to visit

vam.ac.uk

At the top of a flight of stairs at Alara in Lagos, are carefully arranged photographs lined in white and dark walls. In them, a father holds his son’s arm, as a mother does her young daughter’s. A preacher speaks with his brother. A woman shops in a mall. An Eyo masquerade stands between two women. A group of children plays. The subjects are all dressed in white garments, a visual marker that identifies them as members of different religious communities that emerged from the Aladura movement.

But collectively, they form What Comes to Mind When You See the Garment?, Stephen Tayo’s new exhibition, on show now until September 20th.

Since 2022, the Nigerian photographer has been developing this ongoing documentary project across five cities across Nigeria, Benin Republic and the U.S and adds to the conversation of the migrational story of the Aladara movement– 'a strand of pentecostal Christianity that emerged among the Yoruba communities in the 1910s and 1920s'

Meaning 'people of prayer', Aladura churches are distinguished by fervent prayer, prophecy, healing, fasting and visions, weaving Christian doctrine with Yoruba modes of worship and expression. That synthesis has also made the movement a subject of suspicion and misunderstanding. For decades, Nigerian popular culture, particularly Nollywood, has repeatedly used white-garment churches as visual shorthand for supernatural narratives. The garment has consequently accumulated associations with spiritual danger, possession, dubious prophecy and ritual, even when the people wearing it are simply moving through their ordinary religious lives.

In this exhibition, Tayo combines sound, film, photography while also experimenting on other elements like printing on textiles and metal. Some of the works are presented in light boxes inspired by churches' offering boxes and other design elements found within the church. There are also dreamlike textures that evoke intimacy such as the soft blur of a sister finding solace in another’s arms.

Tayo is not simply capturing his subjects as a photographer. As a philosophy graduate of the University of Lagos, he is also asking viewers to interrogate the ideas the media has weaponised to shape biases around the Aladura movement.

Wallpaper*: How did the idea for this project come to you?

Stephen Tayo: I wanted to use the work to find a balance with things I've always thought about, especially ideas that have stayed with me over the years. A lot of them are conditioned knowledge, or inherited knowledge, from growing up with my mother. Sometimes she would tell me not to do something, but there wouldn't really be an explanation. It was almost an avoidance of the conversation itself.

I've always been very curious and very critical about so many things, and I felt there was an opportunity for me to develop my own perspective, to arrive at my own expression of the world. I wanted to ask myself: what are the things I'm actually thinking about? How do I look at something and make sense of it on my own terms?

When I started thinking about the series, I kept coming back to one question: What comes to mind when you see the garment? At some point I realised that's the title. It came quite naturally. I had been exploring different ideas, but that question stayed with me. I was deeply curious. I also wanted to decongest everything I had heard about the white garment churches, the Aladura movement. I'd absorbed so much information over the years, and I wanted to spend time with it, to develop my own understanding from a visual perspective.

W*: Why did you decide to shoot the project in black and white? Was that a very intentional decision?

ST: It was, but it also happened quite organically. I shoot film as well, and when I began working on the project I was using a 35mm camera. At the time I was living in Olowogbowo on Lagos Island, and I happened to start photographing the series on black-and-white film. When I developed the negatives and saw the images, I thought, “This is really nice.” There was something about them that immediately felt right. Even when I continued the project on my Fujifilm digital camera, I carried that same visual language across. I based the digital setup on the look and feel of those first developed film photographs.

Once I saw those initial tests, it just made sense. It looked right, and it felt like the perfect decision. In the end, shooting the series in black and white became a very effortless choice.

W*: Were you trying to challenge people's assumptions through this exhibition? When we see the white garment, do we immediately think of spirituality, or controversy? Popular culture and film have often portrayed the white garment church through a particular, sometimes even demonic, lens. Were you trying to make people reconsider those associations?

ST: Very much so. My approach was quite epistemological. I wanted us to investigate our own knowledge again, to take a second look at something that we've inherited a particular understanding of. So much of what we know has been transferred to us. I wanted people to pause, to think, and then think again. I wanted the work to create a space where we could question our own beliefs and assumptions.

When you think about religion in Nigeria today, there's also been a shift. Social media has changed how churches present themselves. Years ago, depending on the church you belonged to, appearing on television or online was often frowned upon. Today, many churches actively use social media as a tool for communication and outreach. That shift interested me, but I also wanted to broaden the conversation beyond religion itself. I wanted to think about our belief systems, our thought processes, and what happens when our eyes come into contact with something that is deeply Nigerian. The white garment is one of the strongest visual identifiers of Nigerian Christianity. It's become part of our cultural identity, not just within Nigeria but across the diaspora. You see white garment churches in London, New York, Atlanta and elsewhere. If someone sees a white garment in Peckham, for example, there's an immediate recognition; "That's Nigerian." That cultural association fascinated me, and I wanted the work to explore that.

W*: Many of the photographs don't show people's faces directly. Why so?

ST: There are actually different kinds of images in the series. Some are frontal portraits, some are taken from the side, but the majority are made from an observational perspective. They're not staged. This body of work requires observation. It requires me to spend time looking, watching and responding to moments as they unfold. I wanted viewers to feel that sense of observation, to feel as though they were witnessing something rather than simply looking at a portrait. Some of the photographs were made with people looking directly into the camera, but many of the works selected for this exhibition were intentionally chosen because they maintain that observational point of view.

W*: Why did it take so long to release the project?

ST: It was actually shown at the International Center of Photography in New York in 2024. Personally, I love my process. I like taking my time to develop a body of work because it becomes part of you. You want to make sure you've really thought through every aspect of it, not just making the photographs, but also how the work is produced, how it's exhibited and how it exists in the world. There are different phases to every project. I don't think I consciously decided to delay showing it. I think it was more that the longer I spent with the project, the more I learned from it. When you're working on personal projects, you're also balancing commissioned work, so sometimes you have to pause, take on other assignments, and then come back to it. That's really what was happening.

W*: What was the reaction of the people you photographed?

ST: It was very welcoming. Whenever I visited a church or a community, I introduced myself and explained that I was working on a project. These days, people usually ask to see your portfolio, which often just means your Instagram. They'd look at my work and say, "Oh, nice. Congratulations. Let us know if you need anything." That openness gave me confidence to continue working from my own point of view. Of course, when I'm photographing on the street, I don't necessarily announce myself. But when I enter churches or more intimate spaces, I always introduce myself first. After that, I take a step back because the work depends on observation. I walk around, spend time in the space, and wait until I encounter something that speaks to me.

The process has been incredibly rewarding because I've learned so much, not only about photography but also about myself. I've discovered different ways of using my camera and different ways of producing work. The more you practise, the more you understand how you want to work within different conversations. For me, that's what keeps me in love with photography. I enjoy learning while I'm making the work, and that openness has shaped the way I think.

There are so many layers to working on a long-term project. Sometimes you make a few images and think you'll return the following month, but then you're busy with commercial assignments and you have to wait. That teaches you commitment. It teaches patience. It reminds you that meaningful work takes time. That's why I describe it as an ongoing project. In a year, two years or even five years, it may become something else entirely. Leaving it open allows me to keep discovering new approaches.

W*: Did the project challenge your own assumptions about religion and spirituality in Nigeria?

ST: Absolutely. First of all, I'm a Christian, and like anyone else, I carry my own assumptions. None of us approaches these subjects without preconceived ideas. When I decided to make this project, I deliberately trained myself to be more open. I saw it as a learning process. My interest was primarily in the physicality of the church rather than its spirituality, even though the visual expression inevitably carries spiritual meaning. Once you spend time there, you begin to see other things. You notice a sense of purity, love and community that isn't always obvious from the outside.

Because my focus was on what we can actually see, I had to approach the work as a student. I wanted to learn first and then develop my own understanding of these spaces and the conversations surrounding them.

‘What Comes to Mind When You See the Garment?’ is on view until 20 September 2026, at Alara, Lagos

They have been emitting, as their founding motto has it, 'The stink of excellence in a world gone tits up since 2004.' They are Modern Toss, cartoon chroniclers extraordinaire of the early 21^st century, scabrous and sweary inheritors of the mantles of both Hogarth and Viz. And this month the artist duo of Mick Bunnage and Jon Link are being honoured with an anniversary exhibition.

Running at the Drawing Room in Bermondsey, South London, it’s titled Having an exhibition yeah?, with Modern Toss’s – how shall we put it? – f*ck-you insouciance baked into its very title. Here, looking all fancy and large-format, are scrappy scribbles of argy-bargy office drones ('I can’t come in today so f*ck off'; 'I think I’ll go home, I’m a bit bored'); toxic workplaces (at a clifftop coastguard station, a manager declares: “Come on mate, I’m not paying you to look out the f*cking window”); and comic characters such as Mr Tourettes, Awkward C*nt and Gitanes-smoking, beret-wearing Art Dog. The Beano it ain't.

The contemporary workplace is their playground, as befits a partnership that began when Link, then a graphic designer, and Bunnage, a journalist, met while in an office job. Albeit that office belonged to the year-zero ’90s lads' mag Loaded.

'It was very freeform at Loaded,' says Link with admirable understatement of an undeniably creative office with the energy and boundaries of a piss-up in a zoo. 'You could just suggest things and the art department worked with the journalists in creative and weird ways. And that's how I started working with Mick, through discussing ideas and then turning them into something.'

This was less a culture of punching the clock than punching other things, including, occasionally, each other. Hence their proto-Modern Toss work, a cartoon strip published in the magazine called Office Pest.

'It was about experimental violence in the workplace,' says Link, who does the drawings. 'And we were actually witnessing a lot of that at Loaded. On the face of it, it looked like an actual office. But there were some very odd things going on in there. Office Pest was influenced by that, and was our way of trying to deal with this office we were in.'

Alongside featuring some of their greatest hits, the exhibition includes a 'working prototype' of what these proud ethno-linguists and champions of gutter Anglo-Saxon are calling 'the first ever UK Swear Map, an interactive artwork and growing archive of regional swearing slang', created with actual academics at the University of Sheffield. There is, too, a Photo Booth offering art-goers an instant portrait courtesy of Link’s wonky pen, and a showing for 'a particularly potent section' of the F*ckyeux Tapestry. It’s their crowd-sourced, 103-metre 'cartoon reimagining of the Bayeux Tapestry'. It features, quite possibly, even more phalluses than – in Modern Toss’s uniquely modern worldview – the manky old bit of French cloth that’s about to be unveiled at another art institution across town.

'I'm sure the British Museum are thrilled that we've done a version that audiences can experience for much cheaper than visiting the original,' says Bunnage. 'Which isn't that good! And we've got more jokes in ours.'

And don’t be fooled by the pair’s cartoons’, well, tossed-off aesthetic. 'Writing jokes is really hard sometimes,' sighs Bunnage. 'It looks like it's taken two seconds, which is about how long it takes to read it, but it might have taken us all afternoon. Which is really embarrassing.'

Modern Toss on 21 years of cartoons

Crudités and crudities: isn’t a 21st anniversary exhibition, with a private view and everything, a little “art establishment” and boring for you guys?

Jon Link: Well, it's actually not the 21st anniversary. It’s more like the 22nd or 23rd. So it's quite good already because it's just a lie.

“The stink of excellence in a world gone tits up since 2004.” Would you say that was a good, future-proofed summation – pessimistic but realistic – of the founding Modern Toss ethos?

Mick Bunnage: Yeah. We anticipated when we started that that was going to be the case. So it worked out quite well.

Link: We're playing a long game on that one.

If working at Loaded was your contextual influence, what were you artistic inspirations?

Bunnage: Viz was a big thing. That was a big thing for us and for Loaded. But we wanted to do something totally new: the simplest possible route to getting a laugh. Jon's drawings were so simple. So we just sat in the pub with a bit of paper and a pencil, and did about 10 cartoons straight off. And we were rocking!

Link: One of the things we first started talking about was cartoons, because we were both into them. We shared some old cartoonists that we liked. We both really like Saul Steinberg and James Thurber.

Bunnage: Also Pete[r Cook] and Dud[ley Moore], Jacques Tati films, Mel Calman cartoons, The Ramones, Mike Judge, greetings cards from 1973 and Novelty Rock by Denim.

The rough and ready nature of the drawings, the wonky squiggles of a lot of the characters: is that a fundamental of Modern Toss?

Link: I think it is. A lot of it came from when we were sitting together talking about ideas, and I’d have an A4 sheet of paper, and [the squiggles] would just be written down to remind us of the joke. And that would be it. That would then be scanned. And that would be the finished thing done.

That gives it a real urgency. It feels like it's done at the same time as a joke, which is quite a powerful thing. [Other cartoonists] put a lot of work into drawings. But with jokes, it doesn't necessarily help a lot of the time.

Can you break down, please, the power of the well-deployed swear?

Bunnage: It is tricky because people always think that we're swearing to upset people. And we're not. It's just punctuation, really. You bung it in because it sounds good. But it is dramatic as well. You can elevate the punch of the joke by sticking in some bit of lazy swearing. It's brilliant, works really well. But it is mostly how people that we know talk. And how talk as well.

Link: What we're doing is really stripped-down captions. We do notice it ourselves, if there's too much swearing in. We often do stuff and then go through it, and we call it the “f*ck sensor” – take a few out or move them around a bit. Just to get a balance

The UK Swear Map: what's the importance of getting a proper linguist, the University of Sheffield’s Dr Chris Montgomery, involved with that?

Link: It came out of an earlier exhibition. In Liverpool, it was suggested to us we should do a localised version of the periodic table using Scouse swearwords. So we put this small thing together and people really responded to it.

Then it happened that the next exhibition was in Sheffield, and they have these big university language departments. So we made contact with them and had a chat with Chris. He said it was a really good idea because people think language is becoming the same everywhere. This map proves that it isn't. There are still these pockets of language around the country that people are really proud of.

We just did Portsmouth for the Swear Map. F*cking hell, there's some stuff going on there! It seems like port areas have really strong [language heritage]. The main one there is dinlo: an outsider idiot that's not local to the area. It's not a particularly heavy swearword, but the way they use it improvise it into longer strands of terrible swearwords is just exceptional.

Any other favourite regional swearwords?

Bunnage: Prannet. No one says that anymore. That's just a berk. All that Cockney stuff is sort of gone, innit? People don't use it anymore. But you can actually use any word not as a swearword but as a comedy putdown. Prannet sounds like something technical, doesn't it?

And any personal favourite cartoons from the exhibition?

Bunnage: There’s a bloke staring at the countryside through binoculars. And a fellow says to him: “Birdwatching?” He replies: “No I'm looking for somewhere to dump me fridge.” It looks really good as a massive landscape cartoon. [pause] The reason that we're not stand-up comedians is because we can't tell jokes. So we draw them.

Link: One that sticks in my mind is an early one from about 2004 – a bloke being interviewed in the street by a news person. And they say: “Are you worried about SARS?” And the other bloke just goes: “No I like it. I think it’s good.”

Bunnage: A lot of the early ones were just a bloke selling someone else to fuck off in various permutations.

Link: There’s a mid-period one: a funny-shaped coffin being lowered into another funny-shaped coffin. And the priest is saying: “And so we say our last goodbyes to Dave, buried alongside his wife, who was also a massive Tetris fan.” It's just a nice image. It's quite sophisticated for us.

What is the risk for any punter entering your Photo Booth at the exhibition?

Link: Funny you should say that. I've done a full risk report on it for the gallery. Well, Chat GPT did. There’s really no risk at all. You'll just get a really sh*t drawing at the end. With a stamp on it. Something you can keep forever.

Anger is, as they say, an energy. But when the real world is really very f*cking angry indeed, how do you stay funny?

Bunnage: Essentially, it’s not too hard because we're actually quite calm people. We don't stoke up anger. We just absorb it and stick it back out again. So, the more there is around, the more we neutralise it. We’re like anger blankets.

I'm going to say it's anger asbestos.

Bunnage Yeah, that's good. But that's dangerous, isn't it? You got to get that shipped away by a professional.

How good a living have you made from two decades of been rude, crude and angry?

Bunnage: Terrible! We’d be better of being vets, or doing dentistry.

Link: It's a way of life, really. A slight curse in a way. But what else are you gonna do?

Having an exhibition yeah? — 21 Years of Modern Toss, Drawing Room, Bermondsey, London SE1 5WS, until 6th September 2026. Tickets available at drawingroom.org.uk

Welsh artist Gwen John is experiencing a well-deserved renaissance, one century after her only lifetime exhibition. A painter as sensitive to psychological interiority as she was the technical aspects of her craft, John’s contemplative portraits are currently featured in a touring exhibition moving from Amgueddfa Cymru to the National Galleries of Scotland before it travels to the US. 'She was such a remarkable painter and a remarkable mind,' says Charlotte Topsfield, co-curator of ‘Strange Beauties’. 'She was a thoughtful artist who was very analytical in her working methods. She was constantly reading and thinking about art.'

Born 150 years ago, John was deeply independent, among the first generation of women to receive a formal art education. She moved to Paris to pursue her painting career, where she was inspired by French modernism. The artist also converted to Catholicism in adulthood and regularly painted the parishioners at her Meudon church. 'She could create suspension, tension and intrigue with something very quiet,' says Topsfield.

Alongside small works on paper, watercolours and rare drawings, the exhibition includes a famous painting, ‘A Corner of the Artist’s Room in Paris’, which reveals John’s presence without showing her. The work features a simple table and chair placed by the window, a piece of clothing slumped casually over the arm.

'I love artists who are good at playing with the absent presence, and you feel the artist in the room through her possessions,' says Topsfield. Many of John’s paintings featured female subjects, some repeated in over 60 different works. 'There is so much depth to them and something slightly enigmatic. When you look at her female sitters you have a very strong sense of an interior life. You get a sense of these women as real people.' John also drew the orphaned children at her local church, later painting them in watercolour at her studio. The repeated motif of a black cat runs through her works, sometimes sitting or sleeping on children’s laps.

While her paintings suggest an enduring interest in women’s interior life and the community that surrounded her, Topsfield notes that a tension exists between the meaning we might read into her work now as a contemporary audience and John’s own drive. She was an avid follower of Cezanne, engaging with the Parisian avant-garde artists of the 1930s. John wrote hundreds of letters to Rodin and attended lectures on cubism.

'I think we instinctively want to know who her sitters are and have a strong sense of them, but at the same time, she was more and more influenced by modernist ideas and she was looking at the works as a pictorial challenge,' says Topsfield. The arrangement of forms and space were just as important as the individual within them. John famously wrote, 'a cat or a man is the same thing… it’s just an affair of volumes… the object is of no importance.'

The exhibition plays with ideas of strangeness, an idea that repeatedly came up in John’s notebooks. She described herself as 'God’s little artist, a seer of strange beauties, a teller of harmonies, a diligent worker.' As Topsfield sees it, 'I think she was trying to step back, look afresh and do away with preconceived ideas. She was very rigorous with everything, which can be slightly destructive as she was very intense with her emotions. She felt things very deeply and sometimes reacted to things in what could be seen as a strange way. At the same time, she had immense intellectual clarity.'

Gwen John at the Scottish National Gallery Of Modern Art until 4 January 2027

Gwen John is exhibited as part of Edinburgh Art Festival 2026 edinburghartfestival.com

In an upstairs office of the Warburg Institute, we sit surrounded by books and records, listening to Elisabeth Welch’s version of ‘Stormy Weather,’ from Derek Jarman’s version of The Tempest. 'How did this ever come out?' Elaine Tierney, one half of the artistic DJ duo Time Is Away asks. 'I guess they were just friends with Derek,' her collaborator, Jack Rollo muses.

This conversation is a kind of office hours for the fictional university department that Time Is Away have developed with the Warburg Institute: The Department of Euterpe. An installation and sound piece, it imagines the history and afterlife of a department driven by research and speculation, the space itself somewhere between a listening room, study hall, and mixing lab.

At the core of this is Warburg’s own methodology, the Bilderatlas Mnemosyne: a vast, ever-changing collage of images that aimed to, as Tierney puts it: 'make an art-historical argument without words.' They place emphasis on Warburg’s associative practice, bringing disparate elements together to create something that’s more than the sum of its parts. Euterpe is designed to be an aural version of this methodology; with around half of the sound piece at the installation’s core – which stretches on to around seven hours in duration, which Rollo and Tierney don’t expect anyone to listen to in a single sitting – being 'quotation from various sources we gathered along the way,' stretching from the institutional records and reports of Warburg itself, to novelists like Penelope Fitzgerald and Barbara Pym, whose work is 'heavy with these institutional lives [and] the weirdness of work.'

The associative impulse at the core of the Department of Euterpe stretches beyond just the ways in which Time Is Away have approached the design of the institution itself, which gleefully subverts the ways in which we understand academic institutions like departments and libraries. 'Once you get to the most specific category level, there’s no order,' Rollo tells me. 'So if there are books on the Archangel Gabriel, for example, you just have to look through them. And the idea is you’ll find things you didn’t know you were looking for.'

Euterpe also winks at the limitations of the museum space itself. While some aspects are 'museum-waxed down,' much of what’s on the desks and shelves of the Department itself can be picked up, read, and thumbed through like a physical archive. While exploring the space, I stopped to read a pamphlet on the University of London PhD programme. The Department of Euterpe, then, gestures towards new ways of understanding and relating to academic institutions, as the pair acknowledge 'knowledge institutions are not necessarily comfortable spaces for everyone.'

By taking these objects – pamphlets, old laptops and mobile phones, and paperbacks ranging from Beckett’s Malone Dies to Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love – and placing them in the context of an installation and an academic institution is described to me as being 'a gesture that has quite a lot of power,' as the duo consider the way that 'meaning bleeds between objects.'

It seems impossible to talk about an installation like this without considering the way it intersects with the historical context of the Warburg Institute itself; with the institute exiled during the rise of fascism, it became a part of the University of London in 1944, before the Second World War ended. Now, the emphasis placed on the possibilities of an educational institution still have a sharp political edge, particularly when it comes to an education in the humanities, with Time Is Away stressing the role of empathy in this kind of education, what they call 'stretching beyond the circle of the self.' They look at Warburg as 'old-fashioned in a good way, because people have the time.' Exploring the institution is, fittingly, like listening to a record: it encourages taking the time to revel in what’s on offer, to search for details and surprises, traces of the lives lived and work done inside this fictional institution.

The conception of these characters began with the pair’s record collection, as they asked themselves: 'what would the reason be for these records to be here, if not for us?' It also allowed them to bring their own private collection into the public space of the Warburg/Euterpe, something expanded on by the institutions office hours, where visitors can book time to go into the upstairs office and listen to the record collection, a way past what they call 'the locked door,' as well as, more playfully, the idea that there shouldn’t be 'good toys on the shelf that nobody’s allowed to play with.' Even the constructed figures in the department are given public-facing lives and work; one of the researchers is writing a fictional PhD on the sonic elements of the department and, 'the last [public] radio piece will include some work on how they’ve finished their PhD.'

Time Is Away place an importance on the public-facing aspects of this work – perhaps in the same way that an academic institution prides itself on the research and publications of its real staff. Broadcasting the audio piece in condensed, multi-hour fragments not only allows the story to be told and to remain archived, but also expands the reach of this public knowledge and speculation. As the duo themselves stress: 'not everyone lives in London.'

They also hope to push up against what they describe as an issue in public culture, the sense that 'the listener needs to be handheld through something,' instead aiming to have the show explain itself – beyond the importance of acknowledging the fictional nature of Euterpe – very little and let listeners make sense of it themselves. When describing the installation, Time Is Away make reference to the 'transformative power of knowledge,' something that seems to be given a greater emphasis entirely because of how little is explained to a visitor or listener. Instead, the hope is that, through a context that gives people space and – maybe more importantly – time, they’re able to discover potential meanings and ideas for themselves through the objects in the installation and the recording itself. When describing the sound piece, Time Is Away tell me that 'you have to lean into it,' with this gesture revealing fragments of not just a fictional institution or an expansive record collection, but fragments of ideas and stories that can be held onto.

The Department of Euterpe (1926–2026), Time Is Away, at the Warburg Institute until 2026 until 3 October

'It’s going to be alright, just imagine you’re a country,' said the architect to Baby Grecia. So begins Once upon a time in Grexia, a myth-making catalogue text by Andreas Angelidakis, written to accompany his show, ‘Escape Room’, at the 2026 Venice Biennale. Taking over the Greek Pavilion, architect-turned-artist Angelidakis reimagines the building as a drag queen in the throes of an identity crisis, desperate to shed her role as a national subject. Like drag, Angelidakis suggests, nationality is a performance, and for Giardini’s Baby Grecia, becoming an escape room is one way of slipping out of costume.

Stepping inside the pavilion feels like entering the glitch-ridden vortex of the early internet. Maybe also a kink dungeon. Or a queer goth disco. Or a souvenir shop. For Angelidakis, it’s also a cave, a metaphor for Plato’s famous allegory where all of these typologies collapse into one another like an oven-baked moussaka. There are neon lights, light-up floors, soft chain-wrapped columns hanging from the ceiling and a soundtrack that includes Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s 1980s anthem ‘Relax’, playing over and over in dizzying loops.

It’s fun, light, and even a little camp, but this head-spinning sensory ‘pleasure dome’ is underpinned by a serious critique of nationhood. Using the building’s architecture as a starting point, Angelidakis studied the details of its symmetrical, neo-Byzantine façade, and found within it a snapshot of Greek modernity. Notably, he discovered the building’s exterior columns are simplified replicas of those in Hagia Sophia. 'Byzantium was not a random choice for a Greek pavilion,' Agenlidakis explains. Rather, these architectural flourishes functioned as a state-sponsored act of imperial yearning mirrored by the right-wing sentiment to ‘make Istanbul Constantinople again’.

The parallels between modern-day MAGA are not lost in the show, which features a series of sculptures that approximate the movement’s infamous red caps, each more incoherent than the last as random letters disappear and reappear.

'The event that inspired this [exhibition] is the 6 January storming of the Capitol,' Angelidakis told me, smoking a cigarette on a printed column-turned-beanbag outside the pavilion. 'We saw this internet culture, people who were dreaming of crazy war, spilling out onto the Capitol.' By making physical the hyper-stimulus of our mediated reality — a space where images and events both past and present fracture into replicas, projections and in some cases sheer illusions – ‘Escape Room’ updates Plato’s allegory of the cave for our algorithmic age. While the original story describes a struggle to see past illusions to the truth, ‘Escape Room’ presents a hall of mirrors where history itself is the prisoner. 'Don't believe anything,' Angelidakis warns. 'We live in the fake news mode. That's why in the catalogue it says in Greek; free errors, free mistakes.'

Curated by George Bekirakis, the exhibition itself is split into two parts, each operating as a reality-building mechanism. The first space references the nation and is built like a stage with an LED-flashing dancefloor and a 21m-long screen whose mind-bending video effect is created by surveillance cameras turned in on themselves to create a kind of tautological panopticon – a closed loop, like a bathroom-mirror selfie that goes on forever. Soft sculptures resembling the pavilion’s columns lie slumped across the floor, as if exhausted by the labour of upholding Grecia’s conflicting national narratives. By turning marble into plush, Angelidakis flattens the hierarchies they are built to uphold. By inviting people to sit on them, he domesticates them, too.

The second part of the exhibition resembles a more commercial space, riffing on the typology of the periptero, a Greek street kiosk, which is a direct translation of ‘pavilion’ in modern Greek. Typically found on urban corners selling everything from cigarettes to ice cream, these local hubs are reimagined here as a distribution point for national myths. In this neon-lit market, display cases are filled with distorted plastic trinkets, 3D-printed figurines that resemble classical sculptures chewed up and spit out by a computer. Nearby, giant plush books rest open on fetishistic metal frames, while racks hang heavy with oversized plush T-shirts. Both are printed with ‘clues’ – a collage of newspaper clippings, Wikipedia entries and fragments from Angelidakis’ own archive. 'Modern Greece was literally a souvenir of ancient Greece, arranged to be a country by the British, French and the Russians. We are a bibelot of antiquity, of all those ancient ideas,' Angelidakis contends. 'I'm trying to restate modern Greece in a way that makes sense, not as a fabricated national story.'

Koyo Kouoh, the curator of this edition, who sadly passed away in 2025, chose ‘Minor Keys’ as the Biennale’s theme, a musical modality that casts a shadow across ‘major’ notes. Angelidakis leans into this register by weaving overlooked histories into his disruption of larger national narratives. He foregrounds figures like Zak Kostopoulos, the queer activist and drag artist brutally killed in Athens in 2018, and Andreas Nomikos, the city's legendary ‘feather lady’, a street hawker and formative figure for Angelidakis: 'That was the first time in my life I heard someone outside of me who I understood was gay.' Though this minor attunement manifests most poetically at the entrance, where a heavy black veil hangs in homage to the artist Vaso Katraki, who won an award at the 1966 Venice Biennale before being imprisoned the following year for her political beliefs.

In its heady collision of political history and queer pop culture, ‘Escape Room’ gamifies the idea of the nation, presenting the visitor – or player – with clues that reveal the conditions of its development and the contradictions that exist within it. Only here, the goal isn't to win but to navigate a confusing system that lays bare the architecture of the fictions we inhabit. 'The moment we start asking if an event is real means we have passed believing images and video as evidence. Now, we’re in a time of post-truth.' He shows me a tattoo on his hand: another hand, throwing dice into the air. It is a fitting motif for the exhibition, a delirious meta-environment where ‘truth’ is up for grabs.

The Venice Art Biennale until 22 November 2026, labiennale.org

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

dataland.art

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

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

Discover 'Empire' by Copyright Slinger

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

personalstructures.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

fondationbeyeler.ch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

boldtendencies.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ai Weiwei on ‘Sewing a button’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dale Lewis is at Edel Assanti until 14 August

edelassanti.com

In her homeland, a Björk summer is in bloom.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

W*: What was the idea behind Echolalia?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

W*: What is the magic of the mask?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

danielmalarkey.com

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

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

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

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

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

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