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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How aware is she that this exhibition is happening?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

pacegallery.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wallpaper*: Pourquoi Leeds?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

London Gallery Weekend returns for its sixth edition from 5-7 June, showcasing a diverse range of unique exhibitions from leading galleries. This year, more than 120 galleries are participating, and whether you’re looking to immerse yourself in large-scale projects or want to have a moment of reflection viewing more intimate works, there’s a variety of contemporary art to see, free, across the city over three days, in addition to performances, artists’ talks and evening viewings.

In this complex era, where long-established values and systems are being reimagined, the exhibiting artists are addressing the current state of life. Their work explores themes such as the irony of late-stage capitalism, internet culture, information overload, the way we perceive ourselves and the world, and the importance of joy, intimacy, and connection. They also look into societal representations of masculinity, the power of memory and remembrance, and the evolution of historical legacy and preservation.

Not sure where to begin? Start with these ten shows.

‘Tainted Love’ at Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery until 20 June

You might recognise the title of the show from Soft Cell’s 1980s pop song of the same name, originally sung in 1965 by Gloria Jones, who is considered the ‘Queen of Northern Soul’. Featuring artworks by Roxana Halls, Caroline Wong, Tamsin Morse, Eileen Cooper, Brian Dawn Chalkley, Darcy Whent, Ben Edge, Sally Kindberg and more, the exhibition explores the landscape of intimacy through themes of connection, separation and alienation, interrogating different emotional states like fractured family bonds, romantic heartbreaks, unrequited love and friendship fallout. It also addresses symbolic ruptures that impact personal and societal perceptions, particularly in the context of political turmoil and pandemics. These events require the need to reconstruct meaning through new narratives in order to cope with instability. The works in the show challenge conventional representations of love and desire, while highlighting marginalised identities, reflecting complex dynamics of intimacy, distance, denial and recognition.

kristinhjellegjerde.com

Gray Wielebinski ‘Bring Me Men’ at Nicoletti until 4 July

For his first solo exhibition with Nicoletti, the London-based American artist takes the title from a slogan displayed on a stone rampart at the United States Air Force Academy, where Gray Wielebinski’s father did his military training in the 1970s. Inspired by the 1894 poem, ‘The Coming American’ by Samuel Walter Foss, it was a call for cadets to join the academy and devote their strength and sacrifice to the nation. However, the phrase was dropped in 2003 due to its exclusionary nature against women, and what critics also addressed as promoting toxic hypermasculinity. This subject matter is examined in the show, looking at the cultural norms, paradoxes and systems in which masculinity is performed, produced and challenged. The slogan is used as a framework in posing a series of questions across the exhibition: ‘Who is a man, how to become one, and through which institutional and affective regimes is it sustained?’ On view are sculptural pieces made of shopping bags, leather gloves, boxes and athletic accessories, as well as two-dimensional collages that investigate the romanticised depictions of white American masculinity.

nicoletticontemporary.com

Shaniqwa Jarvis ‘Only Love Will Break Your Heart’ at Public Gallery until 7 June

Showing 15 new artworks, Shaniqwa Jarvis’ first UK solo exhibition is an immersive, multi-layered experience that transforms photography into a tangible, physical object, challenging the traditional flatness of the visual medium. The New York-born, LA-based artist explores themes of grief, loss, remembrance and resilience, prompting viewers to reflect on their role as active or passive consumers of art. Jarvis, who has experienced personal loss following her mother’s passing, presents grief not as a final stop but as a transitional journey towards discovering beauty in the act of remembering love. Through acrylic washes and flower motifs, which symbolise the softness and strength of memory, and translucent materials in silk paintings on moving reflective surfaces, the artist engages with spectatorship theory. The show is designed to be partly disorienting, making us aware of ourselves and prompting self-reflection among the mirrored displays. There’s also an installation recreating her childhood bedroom, with voice recordings and a short film that combines archival and recent footage reflecting on artistic value, labour, health and the pursuit of ‘making it’ in New York, despite the challenges and self-doubt.

public.gallery

Roni Horn ‘Seizure of Hope’ at Hauser & Wirth until 1 August

Returning to London for her first show in the city in a decade, Roni Horn presents a body of work consisting of 76 drawings from her new Seizure of Hope series, which examines text as a concrete medium. The works focus on themes around repetition and the fluidity of meaning. Water also makes a presence in her art as an unadulterated yet contradictory form. It serves as a metaphor for consciousness, time and the unpredictability of the human condition as something that is constantly in flux. The works on display have water-marred text in ink that’s blurred and almost difficult to read, with the phrase ‘I am paralysed with hope’ repeatedly written. It comes from a monologue by the stand-up comedian Maria Bamford, which Horn describes as a ‘poignant connection to our time with regards to politics and the environment’. Accompanying the drawings on paper is a rare, reflective cast-glass sculpture in the shape of a cube, which responds to light and shadows, relying on natural elements such as the weather as a study and experimentation of weight and lightness.

hauserwirth.com

Yinka Ilori ‘Joy Through Resistance: He Who Laughs Last, Laughs Best’ at Cristea Roberts Gallery until 11 July

He who laughs last, laughs best, is from John Heywood's 1546 collection of English proverbs, meaning that true satisfaction comes to those who weather the hardships and setbacks, celebrating in the end. The idea of resilience is central to Yinka Ilori’s first solo gallery exhibition in his home city of London. Featuring 20 new and recent works across sound installation, painting, sculpture and print, it’s the most personal project to date for the multi-disciplinary artist and designer. The show focuses on the resilience of the African diaspora and how adversity can be transformed into strength and an outlet for community joy. Inspired by his British-Nigerian heritage, he incorporates floral motifs of the Nigerian national flower, the yellow trumpet, symbolising the country’s uniqueness and beauty, alongside British daffodils and ornamental lace, often referred to as Swiss lace. Worn in ceremonial and church attire, it has come to represent joy, personal style, identity and pride. By combining these visual references, they present the boldness required to challenge societal barriers and address racial discrimination. Ilori highlights the power of storytelling to bridge differences, advocating for the protection and nurturing of joy so that it can blossom.

cristearoberts.com

Elena Njoabuzia Onwochei-Garcia ‘Grown: The Altering of Innocence and Experience’ at William Hine until 25 July

Glasgow-based Spanish-British artist Elena Njoabuzia Onwochei-Garcia is presenting a solo exhibition which intricately weaves allegorical scenes from literature, myth and folklore into historical narratives that juxtapose memory with falsehoods. Drawing inspiration from William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience, illustrated poems, she also references the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, examining matrilineal relationships through Persephone’s myth of abduction and loss. The exhibition explores themes of wisdom, sacrifice, terror and naivety, highlighted by Onwochei-Garcia’s signature large-scale installations crafted from washi, a traditional Japanese paper. Central to the exhibition is a reflection on the transition from childhood curiosity to adult challenges, influenced by her mestiza heritage, having Spanish, Nigerian and German roots. Visual elements are drawn from Francisco Goya’s Los Caprichos, culminating in dreamlike watercolour and pastel works that merge human and animal figures. They tell a contemporary allegory, offering a unique way for audiences to engage with the artwork and deepen their understanding of identity and intertwined personal histories.

williamhine.com

Oliver Beer ‘The Sky in the Cave’ at Thaddaeus Ropac until 31 July 2026

Known for his large-scale Resonance Paintings, an abstract series of artworks that show sound vibrations on canvas and interpret the acoustic frequencies of various spaces, Oliver Beer’s new exhibit brings together installation, music, film and paintings, changing the gallery into an immersive area. It’s an environment where the relationship between image-making and space goes hand in hand, having spent many hours underground in the prehistoric painted cave of Dordogne recording sound, singing and collaborating with eight performers. The project emphasises how musical harmony fosters connections among people, places and cultures, with paintings serving as reflections of sound's power to evoke emotions linked to memory and physicality. It transcends us from one emotional state to another. This new series of work follows his foundational research of the Dordogne Valley caves and builds on the archaeological theory that Palaeolithic people viewed caves as instruments where sound and vision are interlinked, not only decorating the areas with art, but also reacting to it acoustically. With these findings, Beer brings his work into the present.

ropac.net

Sara Cwynar ‘Baby Blue Benzo’ at The Approach Gallery until 7 June

In 2022, RM Sotheby's auctioned the 1955 Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR for €135 million, making it one of the most expensive cars ever sold. This event serves as a focal point in Sara Cwynar’s latest exhibition with The Approach, where the main space features the wide-screen, panoramic 21-minute video installation Baby Blue Benzo (2024). Shot on digital and 16mm film, it critiques our current late-stage capitalist society, looking at the role of photography as a tool for manufacturing desire and illustrating the hyperinflation of luxury value, alongside internet aesthetics. In a continuous horizontal scrolling motion reminiscent of social media feeds, she features herself, friends, models and cultural figures like Pamela Anderson to analyse celebrity culture and performance. The juxtaposition of the Mercedes-Benz with benzodiazepines, medications typically used for insomnia and anxiety, epitomises the mental strain from the pressures of 21st century life, detailing the constant need to churn out work or be left behind in our consumerist-driven world. Cwynar connects the Fordist assembly line as a representation of productivity demands and modern consumerism. In addition to the film, there’s a collection of photographic works displayed on custom-made wallpaper designed by the artist.

theapproach.co.uk

Daniel Arsham ‘Time Fold’ at Perrotin until 8 August

Drawing on almost twenty years of Daniel Arsham’s artistic practice, new and historical works will be exhibited across painting, works on paper and sculpture. The show brings together a collection of his major projects in dialogue with five drawings on paper from his archives made between 2007 and 2010, presented to audiences for the first time. Central to Arsham's work is the idea of ‘fictional archaeology’, in which he envisions and materialises scenarios that merge elements of 20th-century consumer and popular culture, transformed. It’s an era that saw technological advancements and the rise of digitising physical and analogue assets. His objects bridge that century and the ancient world and can be seen in one of the works on display, Grey Selenite Eroded Space Odyssey Movie Poster, which challenges our perceptions of what is deemed worthy of preservation. The exhibition opens with eroded busts and classical sculptures that combine ancient iconography with natural minerals such as sand and selenite. Appearing as if unearthed after centuries, the artworks encourage a redefined relationship with history, allowing for a coexistence of history, the present, and the future without lamenting over the past.

perrotin.com

‘The desert wind will salt your ruins’ at Krupa Gallery until 11 July

A common kitchen staple, salt has been used for thousands of years and was once a highly prized, scarce and expensive commodity, valued similarly to gold as currency. Historically, before being displayed in supermarket shelves, salt was mined in brutal conditions– the ancient Roman salt mines come to mind as a form of penal labour and used as a substance to be traded, taxed and even fought over, linked to the colonial system of economic extraction. Its dual properties as a preservative and a corrosive in sterilising soil, also used in warfare to render a land infertile, symbolise survival and destruction. Through photography, painting, collage and sculpture, this group show features the works of Mila Rae Sarabhai, Dzina Liaonava and Yijia Wu as they explore salt’s materiality as an analogy for legacy-making in these disorienting times. An era where it seems like we’re living in a postmodern fiction defined by political conflicts, shifting geopolitical realities and ecological decline. These artists examine history and legacy as things that can be changed and fluid, instead of being static.

krupagallery.com

Angel Otero treats paint as material. The Puerto Rican artist, long based in New York and now returned home, pushes the medium to its limit, layering paint then scraping and peeling and re-layering for densely textured surfaces that sit between abstraction and figuration. His is a deeply personal practice that works with memory and place.

‘Agua Salada’ (Salt Water) at Hauser & Wirth Somerset, the artist’s first UK showing, provided the opportunity to explore these concepts further. For six weeks, he was in residence at Durslade Farm, working from a temporary studio there. The result is a moving journey through time, through memories real or imagined, the ocean he was born from and remains attached to, the people who shaped him, and language. What it means to move and dream between Spanish and English.

‘I have come to understand place as a living presence within the work – not merely a backdrop but a condition that shapes perception,’ he explains. ‘Every environment holds a quiet residue of light, architecture, weather and history.’ He says changing his surroundings can stir certain memories, elements which surface through process rather than depiction. ‘The studio becomes porous, and what lies beyond inevitably seeps into the painting.’

‘Agua Salada’ opens across the converted farm galleries, and with an outdoor sculpture set into the inner cloister courtyard. The saltwater of the title carries several meanings: as the ocean, a horizon of origin and return; as chemistry, the slow dissolution of one substance into another; and as affect, sting and salve. Familiar motifs – doors, bedframes, pianos, clocks – recur across his work as portals between memory and now, and stand-ins for the people who once lived alongside them. Collectively, they speak to how place and family leave mineral traces on us, how grievance can crystallise into identity, and how nostalgia can be both comfort and constraint.

Otero was born in Santurce, in San Juan, in 1981 and trained at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is best known for his ongoing Oil Skin series which began in 2010 whereby paint is layered onto glass, left to dry partway, peeled off in a single sheet, and recomposed on canvas as a new image and a new pattern.

Across the galleries at Hauser & Wirth, the work is dreamlike, sometimes haunting, with a sense of magical realism. Family photographs surface throughout, often only just visible, collaged at the edge of recognition. In ‘A Sailor Before the Mirror’ (2026) Otero takes on portraiture, painting himself as a child held by his grandmother, the two figures tenderly merging into a wave. ‘I see the photo as an object itself,’ he says. When most photographs live on phones, the printed photograph becomes a thing held, kept, left behind for someone else to find.

Otero speaks of his visceral connection to the ocean. For the artist, the sea embodies beauty and terror, its unpredictability and vastness reflecting the instability of memory itself. The sea is also where his godmother, whom he was very close to, lives in his memory. She died a few years ago, and Otero had carried a story about her final days in which she had asked her family to take her to the beach, to sit her in front of the ocean. But then recently, when he asked his cousin about this story, she told him his godmother had been too unwell to be moved. Instead, she had spent her last days listening to recordings of the sound of the sea in her bedroom. Otero has chosen to keep both versions, and the ocean in ‘Agua Salada’ carries this double exposure – what happened and we choose to remember.

His father appears too, through the figure of his grandfather and a small population of crabs. In Puerto Rico the land crab is a delicacy. When Otero’s father became ill, he moved in with his grandfather, who kept these crabs on the balcony. The crabs though, losing their bearings, kept finding their way inside the house with the two men spending their evenings shooing them back out. ‘There was a connection,’ Otero smiles, ‘between these two lonely men living together with these crabs – a beautiful metaphor.’

His grandmother lived in the apartment above his mother's house – in Puerto Rico, middle-class families often build a second floor for older generations to keep them close. Since she passed, his mother has kept the gate locked, cleaning the rooms occasionally and pulling the gate closed again. The outdoor sculpture ‘Dreams and Salt’ (2025/2026) holds this idea of partly entered rooms; of places one moves towards without arriving. He says the portal is about self, the need to escape, the wish to return to where one feels one should be.

Otero shot his first film, showing at Hauser & Wirth, mostly inside his grandmother’s house. The narrative is non-linear, the voiceover is his own, in Spanish. ‘There is a tone and a pace to the way I’m saying things in Spanish. When I create in Spanish, the voice changes, and takes on something more romantic,’ Otero explains. He returns, in the end, to water. ‘I speak to myself in the ocean,’ he says. ‘When you put your ears under the water, everything quietens, and you can hum and speak to yourself. I speak in Spanish.’

Angel Otero ‘Agua Salada’ is at Hauser & Wirth Somerset until 18 October 2026

In the run-up to the 2017 Presidential Elections in Kenya, Michael Armitage attended a major rally by the opposition party in the capital, Nairobi, in part to better understand the relationship between political leaders and their citizens.

The intense and unexpected experiences led to about 18 months of election series paintings exploring what he saw. The body of work includes The Promise of Change (2018), which is featured in a major survey of Armitage’s work at the Palazzo Grassi - Pinault Collection in Venice, titled the same.

'I think I was drawn to the title because it’s open ended. And at that time, it kind of felt very apt for particularly with an opposition [party] that it’s the promise of change that you’re getting with them,' the Kenyan-British artist tells Wallpaper*. 'And then obviously that can work both ways that maybe it’s a promise unfulfilled and as well as the potential for things to get better. That ultimately, it’s also an optimistic idea that with change and reflection, things can improve but it is a promise as opposed to a guarantee.'

Curated by Jean-Marie Gallais, a curator at the Pinault Collection, the exhibition features 45 paintings by the artist made over a decade. The work on view explores themes such as socio-political issues, violence, identity, migration, and memory, often focusing on Kenya and, at times, the world.

'The idea was to have the show kind of unfold like a journey in a way. Starting with figures rooted in real-life stories and day-to-day narratives. Either real people or situations that I have seen first-hand like ‘necklacing’ [extrajudicial torture and or murder] to reflections on migration and the migration route through the Mediterranean to exploring ideas of politics. And the idea was to then progress through myths to landscapes and kind of broader reflections on experience, life and ideas around that,' shares Armitage.

In addition to the Palazzo Grassi show, Armitage’s work has been seen around the world, including at the Venice Biennale, Cape Town’s Norval Foundation, South London Gallery, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It is also in collections such as the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, the Kunstmuseum Basel, the National Galleries of Scotland, Pinault Collection in Paris and the Tate in the United Kingdom.

Armitage was born in 1984 in Nairobi to a Kenyan mother and an English father, and was exposed to art from Kenya and East Africa growing up in the city. The artist attended the Slade School of Fine Art and the Royal Academy Schools, and in 2021 was elected a Royal Academician of Painting by the Royal Academy of Art, all in London.

As his election paintings show, the artist draws from a range of sources, including contemporary events and cinema, for his large-scale oil paintings on Lubugo bark cloth, made from tree bark by the Buganda people in Uganda, which he first encountered in a Nairobi tourist market, sold as a souvenir in 2012.

Deciding to create an artwork can sometimes take on a life of its own and/or take a little while, Armitage discloses. For the Kenya election series, he initially wanted to create a single artwork exploring the relationship between politicians and citizens. Thereafter, he decided to experience that relationship firsthand by attending political rallies.

'I saw very different things being on the ground. How I had seen and reflected on it when not part of it changed what I was doing,' reminisces Armitage. Those experiences transformed his initial thinking from just one painting to a body of work.

An idea becoming a painting can even take over a decade. At about 12 years old, the artist saw a man who had been stripped naked and a car tyre hanging around his neck, while trying to escape from a mob who were after him. To a very young Armitage, the scene looked funny because of his understanding at the time. Years later, an older Armitage realised that the mob were trying to hurt or kill the individual who was likely a thief. He explored the issue later in Necklacing (2016).

And, about a decade ago, the artist heard the song ‘Lampedusa’ by artists Toumani and Sidiki Diabate about the 2013 Lampedusa migrant shipwreck in which more than a dozen people lost their lives trying to journey to Europe, inspiring him for the first time to want to paint about the issue, which didn’t turn out so well. Years later, while in the United Kingdom amid the escalation of hateful rhetoric and policies against refugees and migrants, Armitage felt he was ready and decided to explore the issue through his work, including Don’t Worry There Will Be More (2024), which depicts two people carrying a weary-looking individual.

'We carry around these things in our pocket. [We] can open up our phones and see images which is how the paintings were made,' says Armitage. 'These are images and stories that we carry around with us whether or not we know it. And that we choose to or not to look at them is a form of implication. I felt like that was an approach that I could personally take towards this story. Not one of trying to speak for somebody else but try to speak to something.'

The Promise of Change is on view at Palazzo Grassi - Pinault Collection until 10 January 2027

This week, the fascinating post-pop paintings of Andrew Heard will be exhibited in the UK for the first time in over 30 years. In the 1980s and early 1990s the Hertford-born artist was a well-regarded figure whose work sold especially well in continental Europe. He shared a Shoreditch studio with David Robilliard, an equally revered artist and poet who also had an impish iconoclasm, and was often perceived as a protégé of Gilbert & George. 'Andrew and his pictures were very happy and very sad; very nostalgic but also up-to-date; aggressive and gentle; simplistic and complex, lifefull and deathfull [sic],' the duo writes in the new exhibition's catalogue.

Heard's work juxtaposing sly social commentary with retro English imagery – caddish character actor Terry-Thomas, the kitsch Carry On films – has dropped out of the cultural conversation since he died in 1993. But in his lifetime, before he was claimed by AIDS at the tender age of 34, he was a skilled curator of his own image. He said he adopted his provocative skinhead look, complete with a tattoo of the Union Jack and a dragon on his left bicep, because he didn't want to resemble other artists

Art historian Dominic Johnson, who has curated the new exhibition at Amanda Wilkinson Gallery in London, believes Heard's work has been marginalised because he doesn't slot neatly into the Young British Artists (YBA) movement. 'And I think that's partly a result of institutional laziness,' Johnson tells Wallpaper*. 'Andrew's work doesn't appear in any of the national collections in this country, so he doesn't seem to get included in major exhibitions of art from this period, even though he really should be.'

Certainly, Heard's bold, brilliant paintings reveal a lot about the tensions and complexities of life in late 20th-century Britain. Commenting on the upcoming exhibition, Frankie Goes to Hollywood singer Holly Johnson observes that 'Andrew's work was unique and so English when everyone else seemed to be inspired by the great American artists Haring and Basquiat". I Want to Be Good, the 1992 painting that gives the exhibition its title, shows a familiar bastion of traditional suburban values, the married couple from the Oxo TV adverts, preparing a cake topped with a beefcake male pinup. Beneath the main painting is a strip of images in which Spencer Tracy transforms from benevolent Dr Jekyll to maniacal Dr Hyde in a 1941 Hollywood movie.

As Johnson notes in the exhibition's catalogue, this was an in-joke alluding to rumours that Tracy may have been a closeted gay man. 'This was the last painting that Andrew ever made – it was on the easel when he died,' gallery owner Amanda Wilkinson tells Wallpaper*. 'For this reason, it's so interesting to interpret it as his final gesture. He's showing us this totally idealised family looking gleefully or even lovingly at a kind of eruption of homosexuality from the cake.'

Another painting from the exhibition, 1987's You Are Wretched You Are Scum, superimposes two anguished-looking topless men over a busy but impersonal city road. Written in block capitals, Heard's text reads: 'You are wretched. You are scum. Yes I'm talking to myself.' Is this his response to the vilification of queer men during the HIV/AIDS epidemic? Or a broader comment on urban isolation during the 1980s, when Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher famously claimed that 'there is no such thing as society'. Either way, it's a prime example of Heard's powerful late period. 'Andrew and David Robilliard were both diagnosed with HIV in 1987, and Robilliard died within a year of his diagnosis. Andrew's work definitely gets darker and more focused on 'the end coming' after that,' Johnson observes.

Though the whereabouts of some Heard paintings are unknown, many have been preserved by Hall, who still runs his late partner's estate. Johnson and Wilkinson hope that their bespoke showing of six key pieces, plus an accompanying talk at the Tate Modern on 12 June, will lead to a larger exhibition of Heard's work and a reassessment of his legacy. 'What I really want is for people to be shocked that they don't know his work, and to realise that there's a gap in their sense of what British art looked like in the 1980s and 1990s,' Johnson says. 'I really do think people are going to be blown away when they see Andrew's paintings.'

'Andrew Heard: I Want To Be Good' is at Amanda Wilkinson Gallery from 28 May to 8 August. 'Andrew Heard: Painting, Memory, History' takes place at Tate Modern on 12 June

‘People don't know this side of me. I want them to see that this came from a passionate place, in an attempt to try to get somewhere with it,’ says Jack White, walking me round his first London exhibition, These Thoughts May Disappear, the day before it opens at Damien Hirst’s Newport Street Gallery.

Upon first thought, it is perhaps an unexpected move from White, better known as a musician and frontman of bands including The White Stripes and The Raconteurs and founder of Third Man Records. Yet, even a cursory glance into White’s background reveals a creative polymath who has always worked across multiple disciplines, interested in those hazy spaces where music, art and design begin to blur.

Born in Detroit, and now based in Nashville, White discovered the possibilities in an urban landscape early on, taking the raw materials he saw all around him and stripping them down or building them up, painting them or partnering them, driven by a desire to create.

‘If you have a truck and it's big garbage day and you're in Detroit, you start garbage picking. I was taught about the creativity in taking an old piece of furniture that's headed for the dump and rescuing it and bringing it back to life. It was the first thing I was taught to do with my hands. Someone would say, "I’ve got this old chair of my grandfather’s, I don't want to throw it away." So you reglue it, and then you refinish the wood, reupholster it with new fabric and padding, and you bring it back to life.’

It was only a couple of years ago that White realised that he'd been living by this philosophy in every area of his life. Musically, in his revitalisation of blues and folk, and tangibly, in the physical homes of the independent label, Third Man Records, and vinyl record plant, Third Man Pressing, founded in 2001 and located in Detroit’s historical Cass Corridor. ‘It permeates everything,’ he adds.

White’s first job, as an apprentice at 15, was as an upholsterer, which he followed with the opening of his first shop, Third Man Upholstery, at 21. The space doubled as a studio, and everything – from his tools to his business cards – was yellow, white and black, an early recognition of the significance of a design identity, culminating most famously in The White Stripes’ strict red, white and black palette.

Colour is the first thing you notice upon entering These Thoughts May Disappear. Colour, and the sheer amount of works, which amply fill the lower and upper floors of Hirst’s airy and generous space. White estimates there are around 70 pieces, but is corrected – there are over 100. ‘When Damien [Hirst] first mentioned doing a show together, I came and saw this place,’ White says. ‘It’s massive. I thought, well, I'll have enough for the first room. Maybe that's it. Would they be OK if it's just the first room and the rest is empty, and we don't use that part?’

But as the exhibition started to take shape, filling the space was no longer a concern. Hirst and White first met when White was in the city for the opening of the London outpost of Third Man Records, a stone’s throw from Hirst’s studio in Soho. In 2021, White performed an impromptu gig on Hirst’s balcony, after which he showed Hirst pictures of his sculptures on his phone. ‘He said, "Oh, when's your next show?” and I said, "I've never done one.” No one had ever really invited me to or encouraged it, so I've never really sought it out. I just made work in my own time. He said, "Well, why don't you do one at our gallery?”’

Four years in the making, the exhibition unites a vast body of new work created for the show with more historical works, going back to pieces White made as a teenager, with an emphasis on found materials at its heart. He worked with Connor Hirst, Damien’s son, on a curation which encompasses many works never shown publicly before.

Throughout, there is a nod to this early scavenger spirit, the resurrection of dead materials, or discarded objects, rethought entirely or coated generously in a glossy epoxy resin (‘I like making it so you want to eat it, you know – you just want to take a bite out of the box,’ he says). He is drawn to certain motifs which he reworks throughout. Strikingly, when you enter, it is a model he has dubbed Ukulele Joe, a figure he originally found in a junk shop and then reproduced in a rainbow of different iterations crafted from 3D-printed thermoplastic resin, in different colours and sizes.

On our walk-around, he pauses before the life-size version. ‘I just idolise him,’ he says. Why? ‘He's just so suave. He's got everything figured out. He's so secure in his look. His face is so compelling to me. There's a bit of that multiculturalism of America. There's the kitchiness of America, camp ideas of carnival prizes mixed with what people would put in their home as a nice piece of art – but it's really made out of chalk.’

Stretching up to the double-height ceiling in the second room is a remake of the 2015 sculpture The Red Tree, a project which originally saw White paint a dying tree in his garden red. It has been carefully reproduced here. ‘It died, I brought it back to life, and it died again, and now we're bringing it back to life in a fake version of it – a plastic resin version of the tree which is also the height of the room,’ says White. ‘It was very collaborative for me in Nashville, with the team in London and the fabricators in China. To be able to be a director of a concept was really nice.’

Some pieces are slyly playful. White has repurposed a series of oak and pine wood pallets, imagining different, official uses for them. ‘The beginning of this concept was a fake company called the Pallet Cleanse Corporation. I was garbage picking all these pallets, and I was imagining if there was a company that used them for different businesses and different genres and special interests.’ So we have one for ambulances, painted helpfully with red crosses, and one for schools from which chairs are stacked. They hit that teasing spot – satirical, but also possibly quite a good idea.'

Many things aren’t quite what they seem here. While White has created a world outside of music, it lingers. He demonstrates the microphone in the ear of his lifesize Ukulele Joe – sing through it, and your voice will project through his mouth – and feel free to adjust the echo. Beautifully constructed chairs contain hidden amplifiers and speakers. A bag of scented cedar wood is secreted inside one chair. Under another, I glimpse a samurai sword.

The exhibition closes with the work of six artists, from Ai Weiwei to Damien Hirst, who have put their own interpretation on the amplifier White designed for Fender in 2024. ‘There was only one rule: it has to still be able to play,’ White says. ‘I’m just so thrilled they would do this.’

Throughout, White’s joy in a more unconventional standard of beauty is clear. ‘Does this thing still have the potential to be beautiful and come alive again?’ he asks. ‘Can you bring it back to life? These things have spiritual connotations at times. When you look at the concept of any time a human being tries to create, they are in a way, mimicking creation from God. We can't create from nothingness, we have to create from something that already exists, whereas if there is a God, he or she created from nothingness. Can you imagine if you could wave your hand and make a beautiful statue appear? We can only work from the scraps that we were given on this planet. I like that. That's a challenge.’

Why now, I ask. He hadn’t even thought about putting on an exhibition until Hirst asked him, he says. ‘When someone knows you in the mainstream, you go with it, because you've got a window where people are relating to something you're creating. I was in a bunch of other bands when The White Stripes broke, it was – OK, that's what you want me to do. Even in music, I wanted to be a drummer. I didn't want to play guitar, but that's what people wanted me to do. They related to that part of me, so I don't give a shit. I'll do what works with them, I'm going to go up and do a half-hour drum solo. Maybe someone might like it, or I might read my poetry, and maybe a couple of people might like it. But if I put a melody to that poetry, now I have got 100 people in the room wanting to share it. So I'm going to see now, for the first time, how people are going to respond to things that I physically created.’

White approaches his art as he does his music – he doesn’t know what will happen with the found materials he collects, but he steps back and allows them to come to life. ‘You set up a room, and you bring in the materials, and you get out of the way. Get your ego out of the way, get any of your hang-ups out of the way, and let it happen. If you come in like no, no, no, it has to be like this, and be strict about certain things, it might work, but it also might block you from the beautiful things that might happen by accident.’

THESE THOUGHTS MAY DISAPPEAR, from 29 May – 13 September 2026 at Newport Street Gallery, London

At home in Brighton, Stanley Donwood is looking forward to looking forwards.

The artist is still sorting the screeds of archive pieces that have been returned to him after January’s conclusion of ‘This Is What You Get’, Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum’s sprawling, five-month retrospective gathering his and Thom Yorke’s visual work together for Radiohead. ‘My studio is just full of boxes and stuff,' says the puckishly energetic artist, 57, a friend and collaborator of Yorke’s since their late 1980s days together at Exeter University. 'It’s really difficult. You have to move everything to move anything. Phew, I’ll get there in the end.'

There has been, too, the work on ‘Motion Picture House’, a Radiohead installation based partly on the visuals Donwood created for the paired albums, Kid A (2000) and Amnesiac (2001). Having launched at California’s Coachella festival in April, it’s currently showing in Brooklyn.

'I haven’t seen it for real. I only saw sketches, mock-ups, then fancy computer fly-throughs of virtual environments. It’s its own little world,' he explains, born out of 'that digital exhibition-slash-game that’s not a game [we made] with Epic during the whole Coronavirus time. It’s the film of that, in this quite out-there installation with giant stick figures.'

Then there was the merchandise Donwood created for Radiohead’s surprise, don’t-call-it-a-comeback tour in autumn 2025. As it happens, when Donwood’s and Zoom call with me clicks into life, I’m wearing my T-shirt from the first show in Madrid. Awks-not-awks.

'Nice to see one in the wild!' says Donwood, chirpily. And nice to have a bespoke T-shirt specifically from that gig, I say. 'Yes, I do like doing different shirts for different shows. I was going to do that for every show when they did a tour some years ago. Then they expanded the tour. It became a nightmare of endlessly making new T-shirts, with different trees on them.'

Donwood is just back from Venice and the 2026 Biennale, returning the slow way with his partner. 'We got the train to Bologna, then walked to Florence. It was a lovely thing to do, to get all the Venice stuff out of my head.'

All the 'Venice stuff' was, at least in part, the excitement around ‘No Go Elevator (not without no keycard)’, Donwood and Yorke’s first exhibition, staged with Tin Man Art, outside the UK. It’s a collection of 15 pieces, ink on Japanese paper, that combine the pair’s mutually completed drawings and paintings with assemblies of the word scree that Donwood found in Yorke’s notebooks.

To highlight one image shown alongside this story, titled I have read, understood & agree to the terms, the text that appears underneath runs thus:

'Let me refresh your glass! Go ask the unicorns! The mad king… no happy ending… Throwing knives reflect what you have in mind. There’s a tranquilliser dart for you; keep a left turn at the exit. Pounded against unseen rocks without mercy, the wind and the tide, the ghost wide-eyed. (But with today’s new air-conditioning methods and extensive satellite connectivity.)'

And then, underneath that, 'The thisness of thatness.'

Wallpaper*: So, Mr Donwood: what’s the this-and-that that made the Venice Biennale the right place for you and Mr Yorke to ‘tour’ your work for the first time?

Stanley Donwood: Ahhhhhhh…. The right place? I don’t know what the right place would be. But this is a really tiny exhibition in a really small space: three metres high, four metres wide and five metres long. It’s basically a small box. But it’s got a posh door. It must have been once the entrance to quite a big townhouse. But it’s just the lobby, small and plain. And Venice as a place to do a show? Why not? There are loads of people who are into art there. Let’s hit them up.

W*: When we spoke last summer, Thom said you would be getting back into the painting studio in the autumn. Are these the works that resulted?

SD: Yes. We did a load of work in October, then more earlier this year. It was all done over the course of two months in total. It was nice to just paint. I’m a bit fed up with computers. I mean, they’re kind of useful. But I’m very bored with computers and the internet. I was really keen in the 1990s and early 2000s on everything digital. But it's soured a bit for me. The unintended consequences of the internet, really. Who’d have thought it would lead to a massive global rise in Nazis? I didn’t see that coming. I thought it was gonna be great!

W*: These painting studios – where are they?

SD: Some of it was here [in Brighton, UK]. But also, Thom’s got a new studio, in London town. So I’ve been going up to work there. We do a lot of work in the same studio, but also over the phone – taking photos of things and saying [to each other]: ‘What should I do next? I’m stuck.’

W*: With this exhibition, were the materials – ink on Japanese paper – a founding principle of what these pieces would be?

SD: When we were doing the paintings that became the artwork for [Yorke’s side-project] The Smile, back in 2022, we were using tempera paint, which is very beautiful. And at the same time, we got interested in Japanese painting and how that’s done. So we ended up using this ink made from walnuts, and the paper is Japanese, made from another tree, the bark of the mulberry. It has lovely, long fibres for making paper.

W*: The image that’s titled I have read, understood and agree to the terms: I’m describing that as seven blobby people on their knees, with their hands behind their backs, looking like… they’re about to be hanged. What was the inspo?

SD: With swapping the paintings back and forth, we do the drawing in the evening, usually in front of the telly. Draw a bit, pass the drawing over to the other guy, and it goes backwards and forwards like that. So Thom drew the sitting figures. And I drew those things coming out of their heads. They’re not supposed to be [being] hanged. But I guess they do look a bit like that. Depends on what’s in your mind, really. I think they were supposed to be thoughts coming out of their heads. But now you mention it, they do look a bit sinister.

W*: Then we have Numbers That You’ve Never Seen – an open-topped, stepped, Mayan temple, I’m going to suggest.

SD: There are loads of paintings in that style. They’re like ziggurat structures. There are so many little reasons things are like what they are. But I find if I try to explain it, it sounds like a garbled load of nonsense. Because by the time [the work] comes out, it is a bit garbled.

With these drawings, they’re not really… considered. They’re not planned. They don’t have a start point and an endpoint. They’re the result of an evolving and unfinished thought process. They’re partly from half-remembered dreams. Mis-remembered dreams, really.

So the pictures are one thing. Then there are the words which go with them, which I think are half of the work…

W*: Ah yes. How do you come by those?

SD: Those come from going through Thom’s [writings]. When Thom’s working on music, he collects loads of words. He’s like a park worker with a leaf-blower, but he’s just blowing loads of words. He ends up with this massive load of words that he then picks through to find lyrics.

So I got all of the words he had, all these pages of writing – well, words really. You can’t call it writing because it isn’t yet, it’s the raw material. So I went through it, picked out what I liked, reordered it, sent that back to Thom and he reordered it again. And from the reordering of the reordering, we extracted sequences of words that looked like titles of paintings.

W*: Was this alongside doing the paintings?

SD: This happened at a different time to making the drawings and paintings. So you’ve got this picture and you apply words to it. You give it a title, then you put some other words where normally a painting in a museum would have a description underneath of what it is.

So it makes a different thing. We might have been thinking one thing when we’re painting a picture, another thing when we’re putting the words together. But when you look at the picture and read the words at the same time, we’ve made another thing that we didn’t plan.

That’s as close to a… ah… process as I can get. It sounds awful! Maybe it’ll sound better when you write it down.

W*: We’ll let Wallpaper* readers be the judge of that… Anyway, the exhibition title: ‘No Go Elevator (not without no keycard)’. Thom’s said that that’s a reference to a time he was ‘absolutely fucking wasted in some terrible hotel in Miami and the key card wouldn’t let me in’. Any further intel on that?

SD: I don’t know. I wasn’t there at the time when he lost his keycard. He’s probably had quite a lot of keycards in his time. But, yeah, it’s the sort of thing you can lose, I guess. Actually, I was in a hotel in Zurich the other day and you had to use your keycard to get up in the lift. And I did have a keycard and the elevator was going. I felt like a success.

W*: What might that title convey?

SD: Again, I don’t know. We’ve got this bizarre, meaningless title, but it just sounded quite nice. It looked great as a website too. So we’ve got nogoelevator.com. Which for some reason no one had. It’s a brilliant dot.com. And on that, each picture has its words associated with it.

Weirdly, even though the words and the pictures don’t mean anything by themselves, it still took us ages, and a lot of toing and froing, to work out which title goes with each drawing. I don’t know why. But once they were stuck, we thought: ‘Well, of course that picture's called that. What else could it be called?’

I like that sort of thing. The accidental creation of sense from nonsense.

W*: The exhibition runs until early June. Will you then bring it to the UK?

SD: Oooh! I hadn’t thought of that. I… don’t know. I’ll mention it to my agent. But that’s a really good idea. Because we wouldn’t need much space, so the rent would be quite cheap. We could use a Portakabin or shipping container. We don’t even need that. We could do it in a shed to be honest.

W*: Any other new projects with Thom?

SD: We’re going to try to do some more painting soon. But for me and Thom, it’s been a lot of backward looking. There was the 20th anniversary of OK Computer in 2017. Then all this Kid A and Amnesiac stuff. The show at the Ashmolean. It’s like, everything’s back there [cranes head behind him]. You get a crick in your neck after a while. Looking through old things, I don’t think it’s very healthy. So I just want to do new stuff – not on the computer. Computer not OK!

‘No Go Elevator (not without no keycard)’ is at Castello 2432, Fondamenta dei Penini, 30122, Venice until 7 June 2026, veneziatiamo.eu

Sophie Calle is many things: a detective, a voyeur, a philosopher, a director. But most of all, she’s a storyteller (seen, not least, in her portfolio for Wallpaper* in 2020). In her latest exhibition, ‘Something Missing?’ at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Copenhagen, that story is about absence – the things we lose, the things we fail to notice, the things we never had.

‘It’s not only the gaze that interests me,’ Calle states in a video made specifically for the exhibition by the Louisiana Channel, ‘it’s also the disappearance. Things finishing: a man that leaves, a mother that dies, a painting that’s stolen.’ For Calle, absence is generative. It was, in fact, her father’s absence that drove her to art. ‘I always wanted to seduce him... that he would be proud of me,’ she admits. ‘I decided to try to enter his sphere of admiration.’ The results are visible here in works dating from 1979 to 2023, spanning a four-decade-plus career of turning voids into vantage points.

The show opens with Because (2018-2023), a series of framed felt sheets embroidered with text. I survey each one with the distinct feeling that something is indeed missing until a directive scribbled on the wall catches my attention: ‘You can lift up the curtains! S.C.’ The text, I realise, is a qualifier for the photo that’s hidden behind it, a reason for taking it, acting variably as a punch and a punchline (one sad, the next funny, and so on…), though at times they converge: ‘Because revenge is a dish best served cold,’ states one, before a lift of the felt reveals two gravestones; the mother’s monument towering over the father’s in posthumous settling of scores.

Calle’s wit continues in the next room where, in a curatorial bait-and-switch, she has installed a sturdy leather bench – the kind found in the Louvre or the National Gallery – to encourage lingering. Yet, what’s on view is what cannot be seen. Instead, we’re invited to study photos of Picasso works swaddled in protective paper during Covid lockdowns. The series is the result of an invitation from the Musée Picasso to respond to the master’s work, an encounter Calle found too overwhelming to face head-on. In a deeply Freudian gesture (not least because Picasso harbored a lifelong fear of blindness), she symbolically sterilises his work, allowing his mythos to be neutralised while renegotiating the space between image and spectre.

In one of her most poignant series, The Blind (1986), Calle asked people born without sight to describe their image of beauty. The responses read like poetry: ‘The most beautiful thing I ever saw is the sea, the sea going out so far you lose sight of it,’ writes one response, framed alongside a portrait of the subject and a photo of what they described. The images themselves are often mundane – white sheets, a patch of grass, a sheep – but in playing text against image, Calle initiates a wistful dance between subjective and objective worlds.

This tension is the engine of her work; by emphasising the distance between what is said and what is shown, Calle exposes the very architecture of longing, a framework defined by what is missing. In Voir la mer (2011) she tries to bridge this gap, filming people in Istanbul who have lived their lives by the water but have never actually seen the sea. We approach these films through a corridor lined with photographs of statues with closed or weathered eyes, but since a statue cannot see in any case, they act as monuments to a kind of frustrated desire. In the film, we watch from behind as these people encounter the ocean for the first time. When they turn to face the camera, their eyes often wet with tears, we become aware of our own voyeurism, unable to ever look through the eyes of another. Like the statues, we are left staring at the surface of a depth we can witness, but never inhabit.

Catalogue Raisonné of the Unfinished (2023) lifts the mood with its display of abandoned projects. Calle does so with an unflinching unsentimentality – projects stamped with the reason for their failing, which varies from ‘too late’ to ‘loss of interest’ and the more comical ‘infernal’. In their failure, they lay bare the imaginative leap we make when we turn life into art. When a project comes to an end, its components lose their sacred status and are reverted to quotidian matter – receipts, holiday photos, Google searches – and Calle estimates that we might, too. ‘The almost finished is life,’ said Picasso. For Calle, it might also be found in discarded drafts and false starts; in the gap between record and experience that she’s spent a career trying to glimpse.

‘Sophie Calle, Something Missing?’ until 6 September 2026 at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Copenhagen

louisiana.dk/en

‘I've always been influenced by Italy’s ecclesiastical spaces. I'm sure it's in my work already,’ says Barry X Ball upon the opening of ‘The Shape of Time’, in Venice’s church and monastery, The Basilica of San Giorgio Maggiore. ‘People tell me my work here looks site-specific – it all came together.’

Ball’s canonical works do look right at home in the church, located on an island of the same name. It is an appropriate marking of the latest initiative from the non-profit branch of the monastic Benedictine community, who work to strengthen the bonds between church and contemporary art by fostering relationships with artists.

The island, open to all, is a beautiful haven in Venice. It is easy to see why Ball’s work, situated in the basilica’s arresting architectural spaces originally designed by Italian Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio, seems site-specific, with imposing sculptures and works cast in a textural prism of materials referencing a classical tradition.

For New York-based Ball, this recontextualisation is a natural part of a practice that has spanned a mix of mediums and methods, and has seen him juxtapose a classic figurativism with a contemporary methodology, uniting raw material with 3D digital-scanning and printing, computer-controlled milling and hand-carving.

‘This church is an incredible example of balance, symmetry, organised space and beautiful mathematical principles,’ says Ball on why he was drawn to exhibiting in the space. ‘It is a service model for civic architecture in my country – Thomas Jefferson admired Andrea Palladio above all architects, and his principles extended to the civic architecture of Washington, DC, and also, at the same time, to Britain. They were then linked to the founding of the world's first democracy in America. At our highest point, we had high aims. We've fallen far from a lot of things in our country of late, but I feel like it's my job as an American to respect this place as a work of art.’

Ball’s work is in dialogue with this deep historicity. ‘The Shape of Time’ unites 23 sculptures in the space, many of which are being shown for the first time. They include the magnificent Pope Saint John Paul II – 12 years in the making and crafted from solid silver and 18ct gold, it cuts a striking silhouette against the basilica’s wooden stalls. It is a classical foil for other works, such as Mirrored Buddha Herms, which mingle both the ancient and contemporary, the Catholic and the Buddhist in stone Buddhas, poised in elegant golden plinths which almost resemble a lunar landing module. ‘The world divides into those who think it's landing, and those who think it’s taking off,’ says Ball.

Ball is adept at utilising modern technology to bring these histories to life, best epitomised in Pietà, which pays homage to Michelangelo's unfinished Pietà Rondanini sculpture. Ball and his team 3D-scanned the work in 2011, and now it is cast in Iranian onyx, its proportions streamlined into a seamless strobilated form.

'I was raised as a fundamentalist Christian Protestant, but I was really affected by my contact with the Catholic Church through my many years of studying art in Italy,' Ball adds. 'I've been touched by the church's interaction with me, and how warm they've been in inviting me here.'

‘Barry X Ball – The Shape of Time' at Basilica of San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice, until 22 November 2026

abbaziasangiorgio.it

barryxball.com

A series of large, dense, dark paintings confront the viewer as you enter ‘Francis Picabia. Expanding Horizons’ at Hauser & Wirth London. They are from the artist’s postwar years, when he and his wife Olga returned to their Paris studio apartment following two decades on the Côte d’Azur. In declining health and with little money, Picabia continued to paint restlessly in the crammed space, exploring ideas, forms, compositions, expressions, often layering them as well as drawing on literature, and ancient and medieval art.

Renewing his interest in abstract and nonfigurative art, he continued to paint against the grain of his contemporaries, showing no interest whatsoever in the movements of the moment. These are some of his finest works, at once magical and mysterious, or as Sarah Allen, partner and head of research at Hauser & Wirth, describes them, ‘scary and powerful and radical, not dictated by any conventions or pressures from the art world’.

Niagara, Composition abstraite, Trèfle à une feuille, Le viol – painted between 1946 and 1948 – see paint thick and layered and smudged on surfaces. Look closely and on some you can see another artwork hidden behind, the one or two Picabia painted over, with his previous signatures – scribbled on all his artworks, often in red – barely concealed. Times were tough for Picabia, but equally, he had long had a habit of revisiting canvases, often layering old works with new ideas.

Organised in collaboration with the Comité Picabia and spanning five decades of work, ‘Expanding Horizons’ offers a rare glimpse into the career of one of the twentieth century’s most influential and exciting artists. Born François Martinez Picabia in Paris in 1879 to a Cuban-born Spanish father and a French mother, Picabia moved through artistic movements in rapid succession. Displayed at H&W are examples from these periods – from early landscapes to Dada works and Transparencies, nudes and realist works made during the war, and onto his final textural abstract paintings.

‘For all five decades, he was ceaselessly reinventing himself,’ says Allen, who co-organised the show. ‘He was never resting on his laurels. He wasn’t afraid to take risks, to jump off in completely new directions, or simply not to be liked.’

His 1902 impressionist landscape is one of the earliest works on view here, as we begin to see a shift as early as 1908 towards neo-impressionism, then Fauvism and Cubism, as seen in an oil painting from around 1911. The work was believed to be encouraged by Gabrièle Buffet-Picabia, his first wife, an avant-garde musician whose musical thinking had helped shape his move into abstraction. Allen describes her as someone who ‘really wanted him to push the boundaries’ – a person with serious musical training and a deep investment in new forms of expression. You can sense this in Le Zèbre (circa 1909-1933), which sees the neo-impressionist coastal scene superimposed with a loose, playful line drawing of a zebra-like form and what might be a tablescape. The painting is one of many showing how the artist revisited and revised canvases across decades.

In 1915, on his return to New York – he had first travelled there in 1913 for the Armory Show – Picabia began the mechanomorphic work. These are machine-portraits and invented apparatuses, friends and lovers redrawn as spark plugs, cameras, electrical diagrams. It is the vocabulary that would carry him through Dada’s New York, Zurich and Paris years until 1921, when he renounced the movement as no longer new and walked away.

Picabia’s Transparencies series arrived from the late 1920s. Allen points to preparatory works on paper from 1926 and 1927 as evidence of the thinking before the layering began: single, unlayered figures drawn from museum guidebooks and from Catalan church frescoes. Picabia often referred to such publications, had them annotated, thumbed, rearranged. Allen explains, ‘He wasn’t the sort of guy who would be standing in front of a Botticelli drawing from life.’ You can see the method fully realised in Genèses (1930-1931), with a pair of monkeys dissolving into a pair of humans, a white hoop bending off-centre, dice falling, figures from Romanesque fresco sliding beneath figures from Renaissance painting.

From the 1930s to the 1940s, Picabia began working from various magazine sources – Paris Magazine, Paris Sex-Appeal, Mon Paris – painting nudes with the unusual, flattened surfaces of their source photographs. A great example displayed here is Nu de dos devant la mer (1942-1943), with the model, back to the viewer, seated before water. As in the others, the lighting is slightly off, and the background and foreground have been stitched from different sources.

Allen notes that when the source image was placed alongside the painting, a significant addition became visible, ‘There is no black drapery in the source, and there is no black knee. This was something he added,’ for weight, for structure, for reasons that remain his own. These are paintings made by someone who had been thinking about the relationship between found images and painted surfaces since at least 1901, when he first began using Spanish postcards as source material.

We return to Trèfle à une feuille, or one-leaf clover, the show’s gravitational centre. ‘It’s not called a four-leaf clover, because his luck had run out,’ comments Allen. The form is shieldlike, masklike, reading as an African sculptural object or Romanesque abstraction, and comes forward from a field of dark paint with something close to menace. Olga Mohler, who had been with Picabia for more than two decades of his life and who would have to sell works to cover his burial costs in Paris in 1953, kept this particular work for years in her collection.

Meanwhile, Composition abstraite (1947) pulls in another direction entirely – a form that recalls a shell, or an ear, or something not yet named. The stippling builds up in layers that seem, improbably, to be lit from within. Allen believes this period involved a dry brush, and possibly – in some works – pigment blown directly onto the canvas. He was not well, and you sense this in the colour and surface. ‘I get the same sense of desolation, and confusion, and isolation,’ she says, ‘that I get looking at a Giacometti sculpture.'

The exhibition closes with Ilma’s Paris Horizons (signed 11 May 1951), a delicate ink on paper inscribed throughout by Olga, under Picabia’s direction. The text comes from Viola Ilma’s post-war Paris newsletter – the American journalist’s chatty dispatches on the city’s restaurants, boutiques and bars, picked up by Paris-Presse – and the names slip across the page: Hôtel George V, Maxim’s, Balenciaga, Hermès. Text returns as a compositional device, drawing us back to the artist's seminal L'Œil cacodylate (1921) and the Dada spirit that animated his early work. In Dada (1951), he personifies the movement with a knowing irony, a parting note on its death.

‘Expanding Horizons’ captures the artist’s spirit of ceaseless reinvention. For Picabia, there was no hierarchy of source images. A cave painting newly discovered, a postcard, a museum guidebook, a girlie magazine – all were equally available, equally exciting. He had been doing it half a century before appropriation had a name. The layering, the repainting, the multiple signatures accumulating on a single canvas across decades – these were his practice. Few artists have stood at so many of the 20th century’s openings, and fewer still have walked away first.

‘Francis Picabia. Expanding Horizons’ is at Hauser & Wirth, 23 Savile Row, London, from 21 May to 1 August 2026, hauserwirth.com

The 61st edition of the Venice Biennale opened just over a week ago (see our picks for what to see) and has already caused a stir with collectors and critics alike. Amid the distinct complexities of the 2026 edition, it’s also the first time in the institution’s storied history that it has appointed an exclusive partner. Bulgari, the Roman jewellery maison, is no stranger to cultural patronage, having restored ancient monuments such as the Eternal City’s Spanish Steps and partnered with contemporary art institutions like the MAXXI in Rome and New York’s Whitney Museum. Following the launch of the Fondazione Bulgari in 2024, the maison’s latest role as exclusive partner will continue through to 2030, marking a long-term commitment to the city's artistic legacy.

‘The maison did a lot of these activities before the inauguration of the foundation,’ managing director, Matteo Morbidi, told Wallpaper*. ‘It's not something new, it's just been formalised to manage the work we started many years ago.’ Debuting with two exhibition initiatives, the foundation establishes a presence that bridges the Biennale proper and the city’s historic heart of San Marco. Significantly, the foundation has chosen to work with artists who were already linked to the maison through previous residencies and awards. ‘It’s very important that if we begin a collaboration with an artist, that we are able to support them long term,’ Morbidi added.

The first of the foundation’s two exhibitions takes place at the new, purpose-built Bulgari pavilion within the Giardini, where Canadian artist Lotus L. Kang has created a deeply poetic, site-specific installation titled The Face of Desire Is Loss. Working through themes of transition, cycles of generation, exhaustion and repair, the New York-based artist channels her own Korean heritage to expand the specific into something universal. The show's title borrows from a line in Lara Mimosa Montes’s poetry book Thresholes, an exploration of how structural gaps and voids can become generative sites of strength. It’s an idea that physically manifests the moment you approach the pavilion and notice a large, cast bronze lotus root outside. The root's porous architecture – where its voids lend it the structural capacity to bear a thousand times its own weight – echoes through the exhibition's skeleton. Suspended above the show are industrial ‘superjoists’ that match the root's form, functioning as an incredibly light yet strong framework from which Kang hangs large sheets of unfixed photographic film that chemically change their colours over time, continuously absorbing the light and atmosphere around them.

Suspended alongside these films (or what Lang refers to as ‘skins’) are overhead sculptures of cast aluminum tatami mats and fiberglass-and-plaster kelp knots. The mats act as devices that record sedimentary traces of life, like mattresses collecting the invisible history of the bodies that sleep, love, and convalesce upon them. A Super 8 film loop shot in South Korea plays on a wrapped monitor, capturing Korean mudflats where coastal and land ecosystems overlap. Kang operates entirely within these fluid, permeable boundaries: turning living seaweed inert through casting, while making a still photograph reactive and alive. A choreographed lighting score, synchronised to a rhythm inspired by contemporary Korean poet Kim Hyesoon, cycles the pavilion through the distinct light of dawn, noon, and dusk. Nearby, 49 bottles of spirits sit quietly around the space – a poignant nod to the 49 days a soul hovers in a liminal state before reincarnation in Buddhist tradition, anchoring the entire show in cycles of death and rebirth.

A twenty-minute walk from the Giardini, Bulgari stages its official collateral event in the majestic Salone Sansovino of the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana on San Marco Square. ‘We first selected the location, then presented this to the artists and asked if they would like to respond to it,’ explained Morbidi. ‘We never want to impose something on the artists, but instead give them total freedom of creation.’ Here, Monia Ben Hamouda and Lara Favaretto confront concepts of language and knowledge in radically different ways.

In the library’s vestibule, Monia Ben Hamouda – the latest recipient of the MAXXI Bulgari Prize and a former fellow at the American Academy in Rome – presents Fragments of Fire Worship. Her monolithic, neon wall sculptures introduce a searing, restless energy to the historic venue. As the daughter of a calligrapher, Ben Hamouda treats language as a physical gesture, creating an expressive though nonexistent alphabet out of script-like marks. The use of orange neon also subtly references Marciana's multiple close calls with obliterating fires, positioning language as a similarly ambivalent force that both reveals and destroys.

Stepping into the main salon, Lara Favaretto’s Momentary Monument – The Library approaches language as a completed form: the book. Acting as a library within a library, the installation consists of a bespoke shelving unit which stretches the length of the hall and is stacked with donated books. Prior to the exhibition, a custom software randomly paired titles with unique images from Favaretto’s personal archive and printed them inside each tome. By scattering these images randomly inside books that themselves contain marginalia, annotations and other traces of use, Favaretto subverts the idea of permanent preservation, proving that even recorded knowledge is fragile and constantly shifting. This is mirrored formally, where visitors are encouraged to take a book home, transforming the installation over time as shelves gradually empty. ‘It’s really a work about the conservation of memory,’ Morbidi notes of the dialogue between the artists and the setting. ‘That’s something really important for the future generation. It's a reflection on time, on heritage.’

For the foundation, their role as exclusive partner demands a familiar approach of exchange rather than imposition. ‘We had a very delicate approach with Venice. It's a very fragile environment and we wanted to be in conversation with that,’ Morbidi added. By championing creative freedom and honouring the unique fabric of the city, the Maison is establishing a thoughtful new blueprint for luxury patronage – one that acts as a guardian of cultural heritage while nurturing the next generation of contemporary artists.

With the City of Angels as his muse, multimedia artist, filmmaker, designer, and Los Angeles native, Alex Israel is embarking on his first collaboration with Pace Prints – the leading publisher and gallery of original fine art prints, monoprints and multiples since 1968 in Chelsea. Where is My Mind? is borrowed from the song by American alternative rock band The Pixies and reveals a new suite of 10 archival pigment prints that emphasise introspection.

For this new iteration of the artist’s Self Portrait series, Israel's prints are shaped into silhouettes which incorporate representational imagery, framing his day-to-day observations within the outline of his head. This time, the scale is much more intimate. Closer inspection from the viewer reveals momentary fragments of The Hollywood Bowl stage to the sprawling LA metropolis from an aeroplane window, and an image inlayed with another image of the California desert, depicting a camper van, as part of his psyche and an evolving framework for how we construct and circulate identity in our new, networked world.

Each print originated as a photograph, translated into paint by the Scenic Art department at Warner Brothers Studio – where the artist typically works on a backlot. The resulting paintings were scanned, printed, and mounted within a custom-designed frame in the shape of Israel’s signature silhouette.

Ironically, while allowing us to peek inside his mind, Israel is always slightly incognito, wearing a pair of sunglasses, which has become as much his personal trademark as the silhouettes. In 2010, the artist designed a line of sunglasses called Freeway Eyewear, a nod to his beloved LA, that he sold online, at Barneys New York and Gagosian Gallery in New York. Other high-profile brand collaborations over the years have included German luggage maker Rimowa, and Louis Vuitton fragrance bottles.

Along with large scale, colourful airbrushed paintings of Los Angeles scenes and pastel gradients, Israel’s work has become synonymous with Hollywood fantasy meets lived-in reality and self-branding in the age of Instagram.

Israel’s other highly praised past projects have included a web series talk show, As It Lays, titled after Joan Didion’s LA novel Play It as It Lays in which he interviews 66 LA celebrities from Michael Chow to Jamie Lee Curtis, and Marilyn Manson. Other Hollywood-centric endeavours have included art collaborations with Bret Easton Ellis to directing SPF-18 - a feature-length teen surf film released by Netflix with Molly Ringwald, showcasing cameos of Keanu Reeves and Pamela Anderson.

The Self-Portraits were also a reference for Israel’s limited-edition cover for the February 2020 Design Awards issue of Wallpaper* and he was a judge that same year for the Wallpaper* Design Awards. We caught up with Israel right before his debut at Pace Prints, which will be opening a new Los Angeles facility in the Fall of 2026, expanding its creative partnership with the city’s artists.

An interview with Alex Israel

Wallpaper* Tell us about the new collaboration with Pace Prints, and why you wanted to embark on this series with them in New York, and with a more intimate scale this time?

Alex Israel A couple years ago, I was nearing the end of a series of photorealist, scenic-painted Self Portraits. The mould we used to produce the fibreglass panels was essentially worn out – we had maybe two pulls left. At the same time, there were images and ideas I hadn’t been able to realise in that format. Some didn’t fit the scale – too intimate for eight feet, too expansive for the smaller study paintings at 24 inches.

I’d been collecting these ideas, waiting for the right context. Then Pace Prints came along. The collaboration gave me a new format – more intimate, but also more flexible – and a way to finally bring those ideas into the world.

W* What did you want to reveal about your conscious-subconscious in this new show and how did you arrive at the current visual narratives?

AI My creative brain turns on when I’m in motion. For most of my life, that meant driving. Then, during the pandemic, I started taking long walks – two, sometimes three hours long – and something shifted. The same flow of ideas started happening there too.

And this flow became tied to a new way of seeing Los Angeles – on foot, slower, more attentive. Over time, as the images in this series accumulated, it became clear that what I was building was both a landscape of a city I know intimately and a map of my own mind.

W* The Alfred Hitchcock Presents opening sequence silhouettes are the original inspiration for your iconic Self-Portrait series. Was there another person, place, song, or object that also inspired the imagery in these iterations of the series?

AI There are always a lot of inputs. Walt Disney Animation Studios, Georgia O'Keeffe’s skulls, Robert Bechtle, William Eggleston, John James Audubon. The Endless Summer poster by John Van Hamersveld. The architecture of Lloyd Wright.

And then more personal moments – like Diana Ross. The Hollywood Bowl image comes from seeing her perform there, a picture I took at her show one late summer night in 2022.

W* While not technically your studio, you work with the Warner Brothers backlot so much they gave you a parking space. What other spots in the city are favourite neighbourhoods and landmarks for documenting and creating?

AI Erewhon Market has become a real point of discovery for me – almost the way Fred Segal or Barneys used to function. It’s where I go to see how people are presenting themselves – how they’re dressing, how they’re spending, how they’re performing identity in real time.

Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival is another. I go every year. It’s a laboratory for culture. And Disneyland has always been a great teacher.

W* With social media and self-branding informing parts of your work, how do you feel about AI in the future context of the contemporary art world?

AI As artists, our humanity is the currency. As long as AI can’t replace that, it’s just a tool.

W* With Pace Prints expanding to LA this fall, can we expect to see more collaborations?

AI Yes. When the right idea comes.

W* In a pre-pandemic interview with W*, you mentioned trying not to have too many hang-ups or boundaries and just riding the wave. Is this still the foundation of your process?

AI The future arrives like a wave. I’m here to ride it.

The exhibition will be on view until 6 June, 2026, at Pace Prints 536 West 22nd Street, New York, NY

‘The frame actually came first,’ says Poppy Jones, reflecting on the sleek aluminium structures that contain, singly, eggs, flowers, and glasses of water. Since 2020 the artist has been reimagining these quotidian details – and frequently also, the collars, zips and buttons of vintage apparel – on textiles like suede and silk, via a practice that comprises photography, lithography and watercolour. The metal frames, while subtle, feel now somewhat fundamental. ‘There’s this timelessness. It's the same aluminium as a computer,’ offers Jones. ‘I was making needlepoint tapestries and wanted this cold contrast. Then I framed a panel of a suede jacket and had it in my studio for a year – it was important from the beginning to make an object.’

Two years ago, in the spring of 2024, Jones presented ‘Solid Objects’ across Herald St gallery’s two London sites, publishing a (sold-out) self-titled monograph with Zolo Press in 2025. Earlier this year, she attended Bottega Veneta’s A/W 2026 show, having been commissioned by Louise Trotter for two new works (one, a close-up of the house’s Intrecciato shirt, became the show’s invitation). Most recently, Jones has opened her first institutional solo exhibition, titled ‘Frozen Sun’ after Chris Marker’s ‘La Jetée’, at Towner Eastbourne (until 31 May 2026), while she also features in the group show ‘Handpicked: Painting Flowers from 1900 to Today’ at Kettle’s Yard (until 6 September 2026).

Before arriving at the quiet, affecting style for which she has become known and widely celebrated – and prior to the birth of her first child, in 2019, and the lockdowns of 2020, events which greatly informed this ongoing body of work – the Sussex-based artist describes a more diverse practice, mainly tied to paper. ‘I was interested in fashion and cultural archives, the way we record history and art, and how things like eBay could be a record of our culture,’ she shares. ‘I was making zines, photographing flowers, but everything was separate. It wasn't so home based.’

Domestic parameters today occupy a central role in her work, primarily through subject but also size (her works tend to be not much larger than A4). Indeed, it was while living at her parents’ house during Covid that she began to hone in on her surroundings. ‘Suddenly I had less time and resources, so I kind of embraced the limitations and had to figure out how I could use less more directly,’ says Jones. ‘The combination of a small child and the pandemic brought me inside, looking at ways I could look after him and still make work.’

‘I was really inspired by Sonia Delaunay and the quilt she made for her baby,’ she continues. ‘I've always been interested in textiles, making tapestries in parallel to work on paper.’ Reading Sally Mann’s 2015 memoir Hold Still was similarly encouraging she explains, and helped her reconfigure the role of photographs in her practice. ‘I had always used photography, but I hadn't thought of how it could help me in this new way of working. I don't use my child as my subject, but it was inspiring that Mann managed to make incredible work out of a situation which could have been quite difficult.’

Largely monochromatic in terms of palette, Jones’ works often adopt shades that stick with you like deep red, soft gold and faded denim blue. ‘Because I grew up with my dad being a photographer [her father is the former Vanity Fair photographer, Dafydd Jones] I guess I was interested in black and white photography, and the lack of colours. How sometimes less colour can be just as powerful as a lot,’ she notes. The foundational colour of each work is typically determined by the repurposed fabric used in place of a traditional canvas, while fingerprint smudges highlight the texture of the surface.

‘I'm interested in the authenticity of textiles, like a panel of suede that’s got its own history. And I often use a piece of clothing and then destroy it to make it again, which is kind of like magic,’ adds Jones, alluding to the works that depict close up details of tops and jackets, recalling the former shape of the garment. ‘It’s also related to photography, or like digital technology – it’s a duplicate of itself, but it is itself as well. They’re not really photographs though, because the photographic moment is broken so many times.’

At Towner, where Jones is showing a mix of new and older works, an extended, more assorted palette of colours has been introduced, while she is currently, in the background, experimenting with larger pieces and synthetic materials. Her practice though, remains tethered to 2020; despite having now moved out of her parents’ home, Jones keeps a studio in their garden. ‘There's just a particular corner of their kitchen with really incredible light, so that is where I make most of my work,’ she says. ‘I’ve actually been rereading Elizabeth Bowen, thinking about the way she uses descriptions of light and seasons, and the domestic space to express a mood or the feelings of the characters. I think in the work at Towner, there's that similar kind of feeling.’

Poppy Jones at Towner until May 31

townereastbourne.org.uk

Once a year, Kyoto hosts an independent, international photography festival that brings together artists' perspectives from around the world, installing them in a mixture of art spaces and historical private buildings around the city. Working with scenographers and curators, they adapt each space uniquely to showcase the work they are presenting. The festival connects the photography world in Japan, shifting perspectives while pushing sometimes radical themes. They also have a sister music festival, Kyotophonie.

Following their focus on humanity in 2025, the Kyotographie team have chosen 'The Edge' as the theme for their 2026 edition, bringing together a series of exhibitions that explore the fringes, the dark and the extremes of life on this planet.

Photographers on view this year include a posthumous exhibition of work by Fatama Hassona, The Eye of Gaza. They also have a focus on South Africa that brings together exhibitions and music from the country through the work of Lebohang Kganye, Pieter Hugo and a peripatetic library of South African photobooks, A4 Arts Foundation, music from the peerless Msaki and Tubatsi and an address by Dr Siyabulela Mandela.

Ernest Cole: House of Bondage at Kyoto City KYOCERA Museum of Art takes on his seminal book. Upon being published in 1967, during apartheid, Cole was exiled from the country, as the book explores the devastating portrait of life for Black people in South Africa during that time. Curated by Andrea Holzherr of Magnum, which represents the late photographer’s estate, the exhibition shows his work in Japan for the first time, telling the story not only of his work but also of his life. After moving to the United States in exile, Cole worked for a few years before dropping off the map and becoming homeless, dying in the 1990s. Failed by the systems that supported the publishing of his book, he was devastated at the lack of change it brought on and never lived to see Apartheid end, dying months beforehand. Decades later, he is celebrated as one of the greats in his field, and his moving photographs live on as a portrait of oppression.

Also on view is another artist showing work in Japan for the first time, Linder Sterling. 'Linder: Goddess of the Mind at the Museum of Kyoto Annex' is a survey of her 50-year career and the feminist practice that began by creating self-portraits and record covers while still at college (famously the Buzzcocks’ Orgasm Addict) – work that still has a contemporary charge, to this day. Her work with collage and pornography explores tropes of femininity and female and queer sexuality in a manner that feels radical.

'Despite cultural differences and histories, there’s thankfully always a mutually shared curiosity when I exhibit works away from home.' Linder explains. 'Photomontage can create an instant visual Esperanto regardless of where one is in the world. I always tell visitors that there are no right or wrong meanings in my work, what’s most important are the meanings that they themselves generate. This sometimes brings great delight on my part. Recently, sixteen-year-olds saw the women in the 1970s photomontages as cyborgs who were co-opting domestic utensils to enhance their superpowers, rather than being bowed down with domesticity. I was thrilled at such a reading!'

Another exhibition steeped in pop-culture lore is legendary rock photographer, art director and filmmaker Anton Corbijn’s Presence at the Shimadai Gallery. Corbijn worked for music magazines such as NME in their heyday, and the level of creative freedom and ability to connect with his subjects bonded him to many of the artists he shot. He ended up working as an art director for Depeche Mode and U2, before he made the film Control in 2007, which tells the story of his creative collaborators, Joy Division.

'I knew them as part of my history, in a way, but I don't want to become the guy who does these kinds of biopics,' he says. 'I want to develop myself as a movie maker, because I know very little about filmmaking, to be honest. So, it's a learning curve. So that's why, after Control, which is a story I knew a lot about, I choose a different film, The American, which was fictional.'

In the course of his tour of some of the most recognisable portraits – of iconic musicians, from David Bowie in a loincloth to Brian Eno shot from a distance walking in the countryside – he revealed his next film will be about the writer Patricia Highsmith. This set of portraits, instantly recognisable in their black and white graininess, are a passion project, a mixture of assignments and quests to find subjects as elusive as Bob Dylan and William Burroughs.

The darkness that bleeds into his work is not dissimilar to that in the work of photography master Daido Moriyama, in a stunning iteration of his seminal survey by the curator Thyago Nogueira. 'A Retrospective at Kyoto City KYOCERA Museum of Art' dives into his work chronologically, from his Provoke images to the are, bure, boke (grainy, blurry, out-of-focus) motif.

Throughout, the theme of 'The Edge' is also explored through nature, notably in the work of Juliet Agnel and Atsushi Fukushima. Agnel has created portraits of minerals, rocks and plants that bring out their otherworldly qualities, alongside Fukushima’s images of the extreme ups and downs of life as an arable farmer. We rely on photography to show us the edges of life and society that we can’t access ourselves, and in this conservative era, the definition of what is seen as radical exists on shifting sands. Today’s edge can be tomorrow’s mainstream.

Linder had some words of support for today’s radicals and edge-dwellers: 'Tread carefully but determinedly, there are those in the world would silence all forms of protest and dissent. Use humour, have a light touch, but be deadly serious about what you do. Turn up! Experience life without any filters, there’s a visceral beauty in and around you beyond that of the lens on your phone. Rather than checking in with your phone, check out the big wide world and have your say there. Leave a mark, a breadcrumb trail of sorts, so that others can find you in years to come.'

kyotographie.jp

For the first time, the 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair includes a curated section focused on Afro-Brazilian art and artists. Titled, ‘1-54 Presents: Brazil Beyond Brazil’, the presentation debuts at this year’s edition of 1-54 New York (13-17 May 2026).

According to the organisers, the section draws on archival research, reinterprets modernist legacies, and interrogates the construction of national and art historical narratives, pushing back against the often narrow framing of Afro-Brazilian art. The section will feature artworks by Black Brazilian artists such as Ana Claudia Almeida, Rebeca Carapiá, Helô Sanvoy, Jaime Lauriano, Luana Vitra, Diego Mouro, No Martins, Rommulo Vieira Conceição, Mônica Ventura and Lidia Lisbôa, presented by leading Brazilian galleries including Almeida & Dale, Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel, Nara Roesler and Aura.

The work on view showcases the diversity of Afro-Brazilian art and highlights Black Brazilian history and art history, the complexity of Black Brazilian experiences, and the cultural links between Africa and Latin America. A former Portuguese colony, Brazil was a major destination of the transatlantic slave trade. It has the largest population of Black people outside Africa, with more than half of its population identifying as Black or of African heritage.

Brazilian curator, art historian and professor Igor Simões, who organised ‘1-54 Presents: Brazil Beyond Brazil’, tells Wallpaper* the idea came in part from noticing the absence of Black Brazilian artists in African diasporic art history. Another reason, he adds, is the fetishisation, exoticism and expectations of Afro-Brazilian art, especially as viewed through a global lens.

'I think it’s exciting for [Afro-Brazilian artists and art] to be centre stage rather than on the sidelines,' says Touria El Glaoui, the founding director of 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair.

In late 2025, Glaoui, alongside about two dozen people, including ten US-based emerging Black collectors, travelled to São Paulo on a trip organised by 1-54 and ISE-DA (a contemporary art advisory which specializes in art in Africa and its diaspora with a focus on cultivating the next generation of Black collectors, founded by Nigerian art advisor Adefolakunmi Adenugba), in partnership with Latitude, a platform supporting Brazilian galleries abroad and Cutuca Projetos Culturais.

There, the team met with Simões, who helped curate meetings with Black Brazilian artists, art professionals, collectors, and cultural leaders, as well as visits to the studios of artists including Moisés Silva Patrício, galleries, institutions, residencies, collections, and art spaces, all focused on Afro-Brazilian art. There was also a guided tour of the 36th Bienal de São Paulo, curated by the Cameroonian Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, which featured several artists from Africa and its diaspora, as well as some artists now featured in ‘1-54 Presents: Brazil Beyond Brazil’.

The decision to have the section at the 2026 edition of 1-54 New York was inspired by the visit to São Paulo and conversations with curator Simões, says Glaoui, aligning with 1-54 New York’s expanding focus on spotlighting art from the African diaspora, with dedicated Caribbean and African American sections in recent years. Those visits, tours and conversations brought to the fore the incredible and diverse work of Afro-Brazilian artists and the challenges they face, including insufficient visibility and support, compared to their counterparts.

The new section will be helpful in 'shifting the gaze to [Afro-Brazilian] creativity in Brazil that has often been ignored and not given the right visibility', says Glaoui, adding that it will showcase the exuberance of Afro-Brazilian artists and art, and also be useful for people who might not be knowledgeable about Black Brazilian history.

In addition to featuring in the curated Brazil section, São Paulo-based Aura is one of more than 20 galleries showing work at the wider 1-54 New York, which opens on 13 May at the Starrett-Lehigh Building. Aura makes its debut at the fair alongside galleries from Africa, the Caribbean, Europe and the Americas, including Nassau-based The Current: Baha Mar Gallery & Art Center, New York-based Tanya Weddemire Gallery and Lagos-based Adegbola Gallery, which presents ‘To Carry My Cross’, a solo show of new work by London-based, Nigerian artist Aaron Kudi, who makes abstract paintings with acrylic, enamel paint, ink and liquid metal, glazed tarpaulin and cotton duck canvas.

Returning galleries include Geneva and Abidjan-based Filafriques, Paris- and Venice-based 193 Gallery, Johannesburg-based Kumalo Turpin, Lagos-based O'DA Art, Washington DC-based Gallery Article 15, Baltimore-based Galerie Myrtis and New York-based Kates-Ferri Projects, which presents a group show, ‘Mirrored Histories & Woven Futures’, with work by Damien Davis, Samuel Nnorom and Dana Robinson, who is inspired by 1970s Ebony magazines and explores themes including Black female identity through media such as printmaking, painting, collage and textiles.

The special projects for this edition include Black Forest, an installation by artist and assistant director of media arts and sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Ekene Ijeoma. It seeks to address environmental disparities in Black communities through strategies such as tree planting. Black Forest Library features 40 books, 40 plants, 40 seeds and artworks. Black Forest School, billed as a travelling series of programmes and spaces focused on Black and non-white perspectives in nature, debuts at the fair.

Another special project is Entanglements by TM Arthouse, launched by Tout-Monde Art Foundation, which brings together Caribbean and Amazonian artists such as Nyugen Smith, Chantalea Commin, Tania L Balan-Gaubert, Ramses Serrano, Johan Amiemba, and Edouard Duval-Carrié, with works across embroidery, wood, metal, sculpture and photography examining entanglement as a historical and ongoing force shaping the region.

A third special project to look out for is Collective Practices of Refusal across the Black Atlantic, by TZ Production Company and Vilanismo, a collective of Black Brazilian male artists, which addresses the conditions under which Black life is made visible by exploring themes such as autonomy and self-representation.

1-54 New York 2026 runs between 13 and 17 May at the Starrett-Lehigh Building in Chelsea

1-54.com/new-york

'Too many tourists' reads a scrawl of lipstick-red graffiti on the roller shutters of a shop in Venice’s Rialto district. It is a growing sentiment across global travel hotspots, sparking protests and government-enforced restrictions everywhere from Barcelona to Kyoto. For the 61st Venice Biennale, that tension is addressed at Ca’ Pesaro, where Hernan Bas presents The Visitors, one of Wallpaper’s must-see exhibitions during this year’s festival.

Spanning 40 paintings – some of which were created while the artist was in residence in the city – Bas depicts tourists in both real and imagined scenarios as they navigate bucket-list attractions, historic sites, sacred spaces, seedy entertainment venues and sanitised examples of the natural world. 'I’ve been thinking about this series for a while,' Bas noted at the opening of the exhibition. 'But when I found out I was able to work in this city, it was the perfect opportunity. There’s no better example than Venice for overtourism.'

As a native Miamian, Bas is no stranger to the friction tourism can bring into local communities. Though while it is easy to cast the tourist as a villain, his work resists any over-simplified delineation. His characters - notably all white males - are presented along a spectrum: variously sympathetic and naive, but also smug, entitled, and disengaged. 'It's a mix of people behaving badly, but also some of them, I think, are just sweet individuals,' Bas explained. In one a young man fingers the cheeses of a market stall, flagrantly defying the ‘do not touch’ sign; in another, a midday visitor to a strip club is made all the more disturbing by the pair of binoculars hung around his neck. Other characters are shown innocently indulging their niche interests; a timid-looking boy visiting the crab migration on Christmas Island, say, or a sci-fi fan who’s made the pilgrimage to Little A'Le'Inn in Area 51.

Formally, Bas is a master of surface with a gift for rendering the peculiar, plastic shimmer of a cheap souvenir. His use of photographic cropping, highly saturated colours and dense arrangement recalls the sensory overwhelm of an Instagram feed. But here we are offered a glimpse beyond the highlight reel. 'Online, you only see the best examples of people on vacation. You don’t see the photo of a mom yelling at their son, dragging their suitcase through Venice. No one takes a picture of that.'

Still, there is something performative about Bas’ Visitors that reveals how travel has changed our age of technology. In Alone with Lisa (the Louve, Paris), a fresh-faced boy stands in front of the Mona Lisa, his presence eclipsing the much larger masterpiece hanging directly behind it. 'I always loved that at the Louvre, the biggest painting is behind the Mona Lisa and no one ever looks at it, because they're all there to see the Mona Lisa, or to photograph themselves with the Mona Lisa,' Bas continues, 'There's plenty more photos of people with the Mona Lisa than there is of the actual Mona Lisa.'

The Visitors probe what’s behind the impulse to document ourselves next to these significant objects and landmarks, circling the point where searching slips into self absorption. They highlight how the motivation behind our travels has shifted, moving away from a Grand Tour-eque pursuit of knowledge to a pursuit of social capital. Confident in Kyoto is one such example. In it, a smug-faced boy eats sushi with a fork, a practice generally perceived as disrespectful across Asia. Bas deftly weaves an additional layer of irony into the scene by painting him in a The Smiths Meat is Murder t-shirt, exposing his flimsy, performative ethics. Why bother crossing oceans only to ensure your home comforts and customs remain entirely unperturbed by the reality of the destination, it seems to ask. In his Baudrillardian staging, the world becomes a collection of backdrops rather than a place to be inhabited and engaged with.

The exhibition further probes this voyeurism by turning its gaze toward the industrial machinery of the souvenir. Through Bas’s lens, these trinkets raise uncomfortable questions about their hidden costs. Who pays for the mass-produced ‘Hawaiian’ shirt or the captive animal encounter? Is it the local artisan priced out of their district, the worker on a distant production line, or nature itself? The authenticity of these experiences is treated with equal suspicion. In Feasting off Infamy (Vlad Dracul House, Romania), a visitor stands before the supposed birthplace of Vlad the Impaler - now a quintessential tourist trap pedalling cheap capes and mugs. 'You can go and meet Dracula in his room,' Bas noted, 'but you have to pay extra to get a selfie with him.'

The Visitors hold up a mirror to the 21st-century traveller. As Elisabetta Barisoni, director of the Ca’ Pesaro, aptly notes in the exhibition catalogue: 'In these works, which at first glance appear to be souvenir photos or mementos of exotic travels, the fragility of the values of history and memory is revealed, and our sense of reality is shaken.' Stepping back into the labyrinthine streets of Venice, Bas’ satire loses distance. You realise with a prickle of unease that the ‘visitors’ are not just the characters adorning Ca’Pesaro’s walls, but all of us.

Held at Ca’ Pesaro – International Gallery of Modern Art, Venice Dom Pérignon Galleries, from 7 May – 30 August 2026

In Mous Lamrabat’s Moms see everything (2019/2021), the photographer pictures his mother wearing a pair of novelty glasses. The frames, which resemble hands with long slim fingers and bright red nails, cradle her face, underscoring a gaze that is directed gently away from the camera. Physically not much larger than a postcard, the portrait is situated up high on a wall in one FOMU’s four galleries, where new show ‘Families’ is open. Its towering perspective mirrors the work’s moniker: this matriarchal figure, seemingly, is keeping watch. She’s joined, at a slightly lower level, by Esther ‘Etty’ Beaton, photographed in black and white by her son Cecil, nearly 100 years earlier in 1927.

‘There's so much to say about family,’ offers curator Anne Ruygt, reflecting on the genesis of the Antwerp show in the photography museum’s sun-filled café. ‘It’s unavoidable. Always, but especially nowadays when there are so many societal discussions about the theme of family: about motherhood – and allowing for other experiences of motherhood – about abortion and gender equality, but also the nuclear family and its origins as a historical construct, and how people now are looking for other ways to live together.’

‘We wanted to talk about these other forms [of living together],’ she continues, ‘but also question the way we look at each other and how our society is structured, versus how we picture ourselves and our families.’ The show functions then as a kind of visual investigation of the many interpretations of family, examining how photographers, professional and amateur, have negotiated these relationships both in their work and in private albums, employing their viewpoint on what is fundamentally a universal topic. Chiefly, ‘Families’ asks us to consider who we call family and how we record our personal history, oftentimes centring the friends, caregivers and wider community that have reshaped tradition.

With Being There, Omar Victor Diop expands this concept of the familial even further. Working with Lee Shulman of The Anonymous Project, the Senegalese self-portrait artist inserts his image into a series of anonymous slides of white Americans from the 50s and 60s, a device that disrupts the homogeny of the pictures and asks the viewer to question the society that informed them. Mayara Ferrão’s Álbum de desesquecimento meanwhile, which opens the show, similarly explores absences in photography, and also navigates the racial bias of modern tech systems. Using AI, the Brazilian artist imagines intimate moments and tender celebrations amongst queer Black and Indigenous women in the 19^th and 20^th centuries.

Peter Hujar’s Orgasmic Man additionally, maybe anomalously, features, while elsewhere there are copies of Carmen Winant’s My Birth – the artist’s 2018 book depicting the physicality of labour and delivery – lying open in a vitrine, nearby to a series of anonymous baby photos. Early examples of studio photography (they were made in the 19^th and 20^th centuries), in the background of each baby photo is an arm – or sometimes half a body – belonging to a mother holding up an infant who’s not yet able to sit independently. Described by FOMU as ‘hidden mother portraits’, the pictures illustrate invisible labour and inspire subsequent questions about family dynamics. From the same era, post-mortem portraits speak to the way previous generations have commemorated their dead, while two further vitrines are filled with photobooks by Seiichi Furuya, each spread a memorial for the photographer’s late wife.

As Ruygt acknowledges, ‘Families’ is not exhaustive, its scope contained, partially at least, by the show’s design as a vehicle for the FOMU collection. Made up of some four million objects, since 2023 the museum has invited an artist each year to construct their own reimagining of the collection’s contents; for this latest edition, comprised of more than 200 photographs, Ruygt approached the Dutch author Niña Weijers (she previously contributed a foreword for Chantal Akerman’s My Mother Laughs, written while Akerman was caring for her dying mother in 2013). ‘The show really needed writing and a personal tone of voice,’ says the curator. ‘We have so many beautiful, mysterious images, we felt the need to invite someone with the right sensitivity, to really reflect on them.’

Weijers has written about ten works that appear in the show, using the texts to reflect on her parents’ divorce, her son's relationship with her friends’ kids, and her early understanding of her younger brother’s arrival. In relation to Ugo Woatzi’s The Age of Love, a new series about different forms of coexistence, she delves into the limitations of established family structures, and the potential for new forms of togetherness to be moulded by domestic fallouts. ‘The older I get, the more I consider my friends to be my self-chosen family, and an alternative to the nuclear family that I never found appealing,’ she writes. ‘Kinship is so much more than shared blood, and bearing this knowledge feels not just celebratory but revolutionary.’

The Age of Love, which Woatzi produced to be viewed in the museum’s Kaiserpanorama – a large circular wooden cabinet from 1905, designed for 25 people to sit around and view individual pictures – revisits the archetypal family portrait through the lens of chosen family, leaning into the tools of classic portraiture but with a firm root in contemporary aesthetics. A by-product of working with the structure, which wears a green velvet skirt and an impressive sense of magnitude, is the implied invitation to gather and be with other people; a fitting impulse for a group of photographs that leans celebratory, and ultimately riffs on the wider show’s core themes.

‘My goal was to tie in contemporary questions with historical phenomenon,’ notes Ruygt. ‘To bring those two worlds together. And I think Ugo did that beautifully.’

'Families’ at FOMU, Antwerp until 23 May 2027

There has been much anticipation for the 61st Venice Biennale’s main exhibition, curated by Koyo Kouoh, since it was announced in 2024. When Kouoh passed away quite suddenly in 2025, she had selected the title, ‘In Minor Keys’, the artists, the work and the theoretical framework, as well as the architecture of the venue. It was left to a designated team of seven to realise her vision for the biennale.

The resulting exhibition is, perhaps unavoidably, steeped in mourning, but in light of the framework Kuouh laid out, the grief that radiates through many of the artworks is counterbalanced by a gentle meditative thread that runs throughout the show.

‘In Minor Keys’, the 61st Venice Biennale main exhibition

The exhibition features 110 artists, including the high-profile – like the great Wangechi Mutu, based between Nairobi and Brooklyn – and the up-and-coming – such as Ranti Bam, based between London and Lagos – whose sculptures are made by crushing thick clay with her body to mould it.

There is also work from American artist Nick Cave, who uses beauty and dance to question and heal. We see work, too, by Chilean artist Alfredo Jarr, in which he questions our toxic relationship to rare earth minerals. There are many names we know and some we don’t, making this show a pleasant learning experience for artists and practices unfamiliar.

The exhibition is preluded by statement that asks us to take a moment and breathe, and then to contemplate 'the songs of those creating beauty in the face of tragedy' before opening with the poem If I Must Die by the late Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer, which acts as a reference to both the time of war we are living through and the choice to continue the exhibition after Kouoh’s passing. This does not fall lightly, given the fact that the biennale’s jury, which decides the famous Golden Lion and other awards, resigned after legal action was taken by the artist representing Israel in the wake of the jury’s stating that it would not be considering artists representing countries led by people who have been convicted in the International Criminal Court. There are only two pavilions this affects, Russia and Israel, and today (7 May) there have been large protests at both.

‘In Minor Keys’ goes on to open with an installation by Lebanese-Australian artist Khaled Sabsabi, Khalil, meaning ‘friend’ in Arabic. The circular work uses film, scent and sound to explore the Sufi belief about the inner and outer self and the divine. Intended as a meeting point to encourage conversation in a healing space, the undulating forms shift through the abstract and the figurative. It sets a contemplative tone and a slower pace for considering the exhibition. It is followed by a series of films by the South African artist Berni Searle – whose works bookend the exhibition – dealing with grief and mourning.

Smaller countries and minority perspectives are also considered in the exhibition. Art from the Caribbean rarely takes centre stage, but there are many works by artists working in Central and South America and the Caribbean islands. Florence Lazar’s work It’s All Thanks to Bad Weather, 2024, uses film to look at the moment a hurricane unearthed a necropolis of Amerindian and African bodies, highlighting past colonial crimes in the present day. We hear from a man who talks us through these events and gives us his perspective, highlighting another theme of the exhibition – where it confronts us with unwieldy and heavy subjects, it is often through the lens of human experience, be that through film or photography.

The series Observatorio de lagunas (Lacuna Observatory) by Sofía Gallisá Muriente uses film, photography and found footage to fill in missing gaps in Puerto Rican history. She interprets the images she collects in many ways, from blowing up film stills into large-scale images to processing images to create short films and installations.

American photographer Carrie Schneider’s work is also installed in a unique way, with huge rolls of images stacked on top of one another to the ceiling. The images include those she has taken with a room-sized camera she made, alongside vitrines of framed work. She experiments with how to take and display photos rather than being wedded to one single practice.

American artist Cauleen Smith is presenting The Wanda Coleman Songbook, a meditation on Los Angeles that turns observations of everyday life in the city into an immersive video installation, and also showcases books, records and music by the poet.

A beautiful film and installation work by South Korean artist Yo-E Ryou, Breath Orchestra, a two-channel video work made with divers who can descend up to ten metres without oxygen. The score is composed of four specific breaths used to complete the dives and accompanies a film depicting young women on a rough sea.

Nature is addressed in the exhibition, from the depths of the sea and up to space; humans’ connections to the land, and what is happening to that land, recur throughout.

There are many works that look at resistance, through empathy, research and dialogue, through collaboration and collective action and through art – from Avi Mograbi’s dialogue on the history of the Middle East to the collectives changing the art eco-system in Ghana and Nigeria, through Yinka Shonibare’s GAS Foundation and the trailblazing BLAXtarlines.

In response to the premise laid out at the start of the show, the works within it could be seen as a blueprint for coping with the barbarism of the modern day. Poems and writing hang from the ceiling and monumental fabric works and large sculpture and installation break up the gargantuan exhibition space.

Listening as a practice is also explored, through Pauline Oliveros’ Deep Listening and Laurie Anderson’s immersive protest work that looks at counterculture as resistance. Michael Joo’s work also calls us to listen, through suspended fossil-like forms. An extension of the presentation in The Giardini alongside the national pavilions is a bucolic celebration of the garden in its many forms, a joyous end to a thoughtful exhibition.

Kuouo’s posthumous exhibition follows a career in which she brought art from outside the West to the fore through support, exhibitions and in her work at the Cape Town art museum Zeitz MOCAA. Elements of the premise feel unresolved, but perhaps this was inevitable given the circumstances.

This exhibition feels truly international, featuring work from places rarely platformed in Europe. It feels like a call to push forward into a new era and new modes of thinking for whatever the world throws at us next.

labiennale.org

'You are invited to build something, maybe to demolish something. You are invited to build with others. You are invited also not to build and just stay looking at others working,' says Lithuanian artist Lina Lapelyte of her installation of 400,000 wood cubes at Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. The cubes, chunked from trees from her homeland, spread out and pile up in the 2,500 sq m space like a giant construction site awaiting human hands

While architect Friedrich Neuhaus conceived the space as a handsome train station in the mid-19th century, with ease of travel in mind, Lapelyte has transformed what is today a voluminous gallery into a place of interaction and experimentation.

Although the vision might initially suggest ‘kindergarten’, the artist touches on many aspects within her work – community, improvisation and creation among them. The installation is accompanied by live performances featuring locals singing poetic verses that Lapelyte, musically trained, has translated into moving scores. The exhibition’s title, ‘We Make Years Out of Hours’, borrowed from Jürgen Paape, a German electronic music producer and DJ, invites one to slow down and appreciate the impact of rumination and playful action.

'It is perhaps the small things that count – the one tiny cube that measures ten by ten – when we build together, turning a space into a landscape, into an environment, into a building. When we have a voice of one, it's one thing, but when we have a choir, it becomes another thing. For me, this work is very much about believing in small gestures, in small connections, in our relationships as well; in humanity,' says Lapelyte.

She held an open call for performers. 'There is a sailor, there is a theatre producer, there are some dancers, singers, actors, and some who had never performed. Then we all try to find a way to be within the piece and it's beautiful how we open up, accept the other, and that's what the work is about.’

The sculptural/polyphonic installation is the second Chanel Culture Fund commission at the museum, following 2025’s project with artist Klára Hosnedlová. The three-year programme supports female artists with big visions who create at scale.

‘In the industrial age, people would be running around to catch their trains. What we see here is very dedicated and distilled,' says Yana Peel, president of arts, culture & heritage at Chanel. She first came across Lapelyte’s work in 2014, but it was her operatic piece, Sun & Sea (Marina), for the Venice Biennale in 2019 (winning the Golden Lion) that cemented her reputation as a leading voice. For that piece, set on a faux indoor beach, performers in sunhats and swimsuits sang about the impact of climate change. That stealthy subversion of expectations and genres is a Lapelyte hallmark.

'Deep in my heart, I am a musician, but for me, music was never just about performing a score. For me, music is also about listening and how we listen to the world. Music is a metaphor,' she says. ‘We Make Years Out of Hours’ was gestating in her mind when the invitation for the commission arrived, and Hamburger Bahnhof provided the ideal immersive space with the vaults creating superb acoustics. 'The Chanel Culture Fund generously invites an artist to envision an artwork that probably would be hard without that kind of support and openness,' she adds.

As Peel says, it is great to see so many extraordinary female artists taking up significant space right now: Rose Wylie, Tracey Emin, and Klára Hosnedlová among them. 'Lina’s vision is a non-monument in a sense and really brave,' says Peel, who collaborates with Hamburger Bahnhof directors Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath on the commission.

The Chanel Culture Fund does not build museums or permanent collections, explains Peel, but strengthens existing institutions essential to their home cities. It currently has 42 projects across 15 countries. 'We invest not with the next quarter in mind, but the next generation,' she says of the distinct cultural patronage.

In November 2025, Chanel opened the Espace Gabrielle Chanel at Shanghai’s Power Station of Art, designed by Japanese architect Kazunari Sakamoto. It is the first public art library dedicated to contemporary art in Mainland China. Recently, the Fondation Beyeler in Switzerland and the Chanel Culture Fund announced the appointment of a Chanel Botanical Curator, the first of its kind at a major arts institution.

As Lapelyte’s installation in Berlin suggests, big change, both societally and personally, starts brick by brick and in incremental steps – and ideally, with sonic interludes.

‘Lina Lapelyte. We Make Years Out of Hours’, until 10 January 2027, smb.museum

If you need a reminder why you moved to New York, Club Rhubarb promises the affirmation you seek. The nomadic art project from artist-turned-curator Tony Cox echoes the transgressive and make-do attitude of a downtown before soaring rents and invasive chain stores.

After two prior locations – Cox’s own Chinatown walk-up and a Dimes Square townhouse – Club Rhubarb now calls an assuming two-floor house right across from the New Museum home. The blink-and-you-miss it entrance on the edge of Prince Street opens up to a wonderland that is currently inside the gnarly imagination of artist Brock Enright who has been quietly producing genre-pushing and materially driven mixed-media artworks for 30 years. The 50-year-old’s attention-demanding and unapologetically diaristic artworks in the exhibition ‘I am so pretty’ possess memory-laden found objects and punchy short video work – and they do justice to Cox’s experimental vision.

The takeover starts immediately at the house’s mudroom, up a staircase and into the living room, with splashy-coloured paintings built with wood, acrylic and foam as well as an array of found objects, often with hints at an early MTV-era childhood in American suburbs. Bits of toys, Salvation Army pins, Polaroids and hoses punctured with tiny pins contain a neat obsessiveness, with a precision in their abruptness. Recalling German Conceptualist Rosemarie Trockel in their balancing of an internalised geometry and textured abstraction, the paintings expand from the moodily lit staircase into the bright and spacious living room, which overlooks the New Museum’s own soaring staircase.

Cox, who met Enright around three decades ago, equates his friend’s art to weather. He tells Wallpaper* that ‘there have been so many weather conditions and changes that there is enough work to put in different spaces’. And the curator, who started out as a skater in the 1990s before transitioning to an art practice, fills the space to the brim with Enright’s generous output, mainly created between 2009 and the present. Cox even sees a parallel between his own art practice and Enright’s, which perhaps is most evident on the second floor’s showstopper installation of electronic guitars. In the darkened room, meant to evoke the artist’s own basement in his upstate New York home, a red light plays across the silhouettes of guitars and a shrine with a witch’s hat. A booming audio loop of Enright’s own tunes emanates from the guitars that he physically altered to transmit the unexpected sounds.

One of the inviting doors at the ensuing narrow hallway opens up to the show’s most intimate and grotesque offering: a darkened bathroom where visitors, perched on a bench in the shower, can watch videos streaming on a flat screen mounted above the bathtub. Light Drawing You (2014-25) – an intensely scratched mirror painting lit to a dramatic effect with LED lights – stands above the sink where the cabinet for toiletries would otherwise be hung. Cox says it was Enright’s idea to exhibit his short films from the 2000s inside the bathroom, which has led to this capsule installation that the curator has called BBC Brocks Bijou Cinema in an homage to the eponymous now bygone East Village movie theatre and cruising spot.

The darkened bathroom’s midnight soirée aura suits the videos’ gore content, which chronicles Enright’s defunct business of abducting volunteering clients to experience the thrill of being kidnapped. The venture, which had the artist appear in Rolling Stone and TV shows such as The View and Good Morning America, today feels like an odd alchemy of Saw movie franchise and reality shows in which the extreme is tested with monetary gain as well as loss of self-awareness.

The show’s finale brings back the daylight at the top floor’s main room above the hectic foot traffic of the Bowery which saw countless downtown fixtures stomp its sidewalks before the new Millenium brought waves of change. Here, a generous layout of intricately composed sculptures, which Cox overall calls the Wailing Witches Receiver Arena, evokes the feeling of walking into a secret ritual. Mostly suspended from the ceiling, these gentle sculptures beg for close inspection to reveal the obsessive core of Enright’s drive for embodying any feeling, even when this means an awkwardly fleeting sense of nostalgia. Both alien and disarmingly familiar, the compositions of finds – used scrunchies, bottle corks, straws, umbrellas and toys – resemble magic wands and dreamcatchers. They both animate humour and sternness. As witnesses to the artist’s last three decades of practice, they encapsulate a material force to remember, but they also release a generosity to belong to anybody with a suggestion of possibility and refusal of reason.

Expect a true downtown full circle moment when visiting Club Rhubarb, especially after a visit to the New Museum, which started out 50 years ago displaying similarly experimental work. Cox admits the thrill he finds in organising shows in lived spaces, especially with artworks that hold alluring oddities like Enright’s. ‘I spend so much time in these spaces before I install the shows,’ Cox says and adds, ‘It all started with understanding the uniqueness of seeing art with real things around them.’

‘I Am So Pretty’ is available to visit through an online booking.

'I work very intuitively,' says Sanya Kantarovsky on the eve of the opening of his exhibition ‘Basic Failure' at Palazzo Loredan in Venice – one of Wallpaper’s must-sees during the Venice Art Biennale 2026. ‘I rarely start with a preconceived notion or an idea. I have some vague sense of an effect, or even maybe a theme, which is usually a reaction to the circumstances of the exhibition.'

Kantarovsky, who was born in Moscow before emigrating to New York when he was ten, studied painting at the Rhode Island School of Design. His instincts take shape in haunting works – mostly painting, but also drawing, sculpture, printmaking and animation. Drawn to the complexities and contrasts that make up the spectrum of human emotion, the only thing certain in Kantarovsky's eclectic subject matter, which criss-crosses religion, history, philosophy and spirituality, is an appeal to the raw intuitiveness of human nature.

It's natural to want to read into Kantarovsky's richly emotional figures, but he eschews traditional storytelling as we normally understand it. ‘I have a complicated relationship to narrative,' he says. ‘Of course, the paintings are representational, often figurative, and there is an implied narrative. I liken it to when you're walking down the street and you catch someone's eye, and you witness them for a second. You're aware that there was a moment before you witnessed them and a moment after, but you just have this fleeting second to see this fragment of their struggle or their existence.' These glimpses resist a linear narrative (‘For me, it's the way to make an interesting painting,' he adds), but they are sensitive and highly attuned to their surroundings.

The grand Palazzo Loredan is an appropriately atmospheric location for this new exhibition, running concurrently to the Venice Art Biennale, until November 2026. It unites a series of Kantarovsky's paintings, as well as ceramic work and a glass sculpture created in collaboration with a Murano studio.

‘It's an ancient, historical and extravagant space, and it's filled with ancient books. Those things have their own energy. This show questions what that means, and tries to engage in a generative conversation with the space. I try not to get attached to anything within each painting, and then I try not to get attached to any particular painting, and keep the exhibition itself as the priority. Once the paintings start happening, and they all start talking to one another, and I start talking to them, it becomes like you're writing out a kind of poem composed of fragments or stanzas.'

In the works, the figures are caught in heightened states, contorted or cringing, intimately revealing and yet elusive. ‘The narrative and subject matter are very slippery, and so things could be read in a number of different ways. It is very important to keep that dimension of the painting open. There are innocuous and banal ways to interpret something, and then there are very dark ways to interpret something. And sometimes it's even unclear whether a subject is in distress or ecstasy, and what exactly is at stake.'

It is also unclear where or when these very real moments are taking place. The scenes are slippery in both narrative and time – often, scenes could be medieval, mythical or biblical, but modern detailing stops us short. ‘I'm pulling from just existing in the world,' Kantarovsky says. ‘I'm pulling from my lived experience and those of my friends, from art history. Everything's game. Everything is up for grabs. And I think that's a really exciting part of it.'

Featured in the show is a dying centaur, a favourite motif of artists in ancient Greece, but also popular in the 19th century as a symbol of the end of ancient, spiritual regimes. ‘It is also this kind of basic failure – the name of the show – of integration between our animal selves and our socialised selves,' says Kantarovsky. Caught, helpless, we are reduced to the essential. Witnessing this in the works makes them deeply empathetic.

This vulnerability runs throughout in powerful symbols, which are separated from their source of power, whether it is in a dying classical era or in a painting of a submissive without his dominant. ‘You go grandiose into this poetic narrative, and then you fall down into this mundane, indescript bedroom with the overweight older man and his little white dog, and the viewer has to make those shifts. I'm interested in these sorts of juxtapositions. I think with paintings, it's really interesting, because you can shift a viewer from one place to another.'

The works aren't about him, Kantarovsky says. ‘I can't avoid them representing something specific about myself, because they come from my mind. But at the same time, I'm utterly uninterested in my uniqueness or my specificity. What I think is so interesting is when good art can splinter off the subjective and find its way into somebody else's identification. It's part of the reason I'm interested in figurative painting, because there is this empathy or over-identification that it tends to produce in the viewer. You start to feel that certain pictures touch you in a way, and it's extremely powerful, despite seeming somewhat anachronistic.'

‘Basic Failure' runs 6 May – 22 November 2026 at the Istituto Veneto di Scienze Lettere ed Arti, Palazzo Loredan, istitutoveneto.it

This article appears in the June 2026 Issue of Wallpaper*, available from 7 May in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

In London, Barnaby Barford is marking 20 years of collaboration with David Gill gallery. The artist's distinctive, subversive eye and sharp wit is evident in the exhibition ‘We Are Where We Are’, which unites 35 ceramic sculptures and large-scale drawings.

Barford's sculptures using found porcelain figures put an absurdist spin on contemporary dialogue, considering everything from queueing to pharmaceuticals and rampant consumerism. ‘I’m interested in apathy and impotence in the face of chaos,' he says, 'and in the quiet nihilism of just carrying on, being swept along by forces larger than yourself.'

To celebrate Barford’s exhibition, we are revisiting the November 2007 issue of Wallpaper*, when we invited the artist to bring our fashion pages to life in his own inimitable style. Figurines have never been so well dressed. Enjoy!

Barnaby Barford for Wallpaper*

Barnaby Barford is showing new work at David Gill gallery until 30 May 2026, davidgillgallery.com

Since graduating from Camberwell College of Arts in 2023, Charlie Gosling has established a distinctive painterly style. His luscious mark-makings and evocative portraits, triggering comparisons to Auerbach and de Kooning, reference the historical art canon, but Gosling’s intimate and direct works are very much his own.

In his second exhibition at London’s Incubator gallery, Good Luck with Me Here, Gosling considers those closest to him. Like Lucien Freud, his cast of subjects are populated by friends and family. ‘I like painting people I know, it allows you both to see them differently. I often paint people I admire. That’s what I’m after – capturing that admiration,’ says Gosling.

His process digs into this intimacy. In contrast to his earlier works, which saw him layer paint with a tangible thickness, Gosling is here stripping it back, applying and scraping away layers of paint to create living works which are almost abstract in their swirls of colour and style. ‘I don’t see scraping as reduction but adding to the painting,’ he says. ‘It doesn’t affect how I see a sitter, but it does take more time as I often scrape and add the paint several times. It’s nothing more than a technique. Some paintings are more scraped than others for various reasons, and difficulty with the painting itself. It’s not based on the sitter.’

Gosling’s faces confront the viewer. Working from both photographs and life, Gosling is searching for the essence of the person, in a physical process which takes shape on the canvas. ‘I see paintings through paintings. Auerbach and Cezanne were both inspired by Rembrandt. De Kooning was inspired by Soutine. Soutine was inspired by Cezanne. I like what Auerbach said – when a painting leaves the studio it’s "a new species of living thing". I try not to get too influenced by other painters’ work.’

Charlie Gosling at Incubator until 24 May

Berlin has always managed to outlast proclamations of its alleged endings. A city perpetually declared ‘over’ yet stubbornly, if unglamorously, alive. In recent months, however, the obituaries have grown louder and more insistent. The familiar critique – that a scene built on cheap rents and loose structures was never meant to last forever – has begun to feel less like provocation and more like diagnosis. If Berlin’s cultural capital was once buoyed by precarity, that same condition now threatens to calcify into stagnation.

Then came a week in late April 2026 that sharpened the mood into something harder to ignore. Several announcements landed in quick succession, disparate yet entwined in their 'vote of no confidence' in the city: collector Julia Stoschek confirmed the closure of her Berlin space come October; Artnet shut its Berlin office, effective immediately; Ryanair announced its withdrawal from Berlin starting October, cutting the city off from many direct flights; and the resignation of the city’s culture senator sent waves of political tremor through its arts infrastructure.

What’s more, all of this unfolds against a backdrop of prolonged fracture. For more than two years, the city’s art scene has been marked by deep polarisation, its communities strained by political and ideological divisions that have reshaped both discourse and collaboration. And yet, in a rare moment of collective stillness, those same communities recently found themselves united in grief, mourning the untimely loss of two leading artists, Thomas Zipp and Henrike Naumann, whose practices had helped define Berlin’s contemporary voice.

And still, the city’s tried-and-true Gallery Weekend format persists, benefitting this year from an unexpected realignment: now that the professional preview of the Venice Art Biennale moved to early May, Berlin has accidentally become a convenient waypoint, especially for those travelling from Asia. If Gallery Weekend Berlin has always functioned as a barometer – of energy, of relevance, of hype – then this year’s edition unfolds under a particularly charged moment. The question is no longer whether the city is changing, but what kind of city it is becoming, and for whom.

With nearly 60 galleries participating this year and countless other openings at institutions and special locations – for example, a group show curated by artist David Douard at Halle am Berghain – the city’s art landscape is straddling renewal and returns. The unofficial pre-Gallery Weekend highlight came courtesy of Galerie Neu, with new works by painter Sergej Jensen installed in every room of the simple studio apartment for guests of the KW institute. The city’s old guard gathered around Jensen’s new figurative paintings, small canvases featuring characters with clown noses (or dog snouts?). The mood was cheerful and nostalgic, as the promise of early-2000s Berlin flickered across visitors’ ageing faces. (The show is accessible by appointment only through 30 May and is well worth the trouble.)

Joining the official programme in the new section for young galleries called Perspectives, Mountains gallery enjoys well-deserved recognition after last year’s widely discussed presentation of David Medalla’s works. Now, the gallery returns with Korean artist Shinoh Nam. Titled ‘A Guide to the Interior for a House on Ambiguous Grounds’, the exhibition assembles a vocabulary of fractured architectures as a spatial argument. Nam constructs a fragmented ‘house’ stripped to its floor plan – an open, psychological interior. Steel, glass, and industrial foam are rendered both exacting and unstable, staging a tension between construction and collapse. Here, architecture’s promise of progress is recast as sites of contradiction.

A host of galleries offer shows by strong young voices who have captured the market’s attention recently, including Brook Hsu at Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler; Wynnie Mynerva at Sociéte; and Vivian Zhang at Max Hetzler, to name but a few. At Capitain Petzel, Rodney McMillian structures his first solo exhibition with the gallery around his new film, which is anchored in a historic anti-lynching speech by Ida B Wells-Barnett, delivered in 1909 at the inaugural conference of the NAACP. The text is not treated as archival quotation so much as a living address, spoken into the present tense. McMillian’s new works, meanwhile – sculptures and paintings from his Black Paintings series – carry palpable weight. What might read as abstraction insists on its politics, pushing against the idea of pure form and redirecting attention to the underlying structures that shape it.

Across town in Berlin’s old West, Galerie Buchholz delivers another debut – not just for the gallery but for Germany. Japanese artist Yuji Agematsu presents the first of a two-part exhibition with an installation of his delicate Zips – small, contemplative assemblages made from debris collected on daily walks through New York. Each fragment is placed inside the cellophane of a cigarette packet, turning the overlooked residue of a single day into a ritualised record. Installed on custom shelving designed by the artist, the works accumulate into a quiet calendar of movement and attention, shaped by a practice Agematsu has maintained every day since 1996. The second part, opening later in June, shifts the register entirely. It introduces a performance by the artist alongside a newly activated installation of 35mm slides, photographed in Marseille in 1994 and now projected into the present.

Sprüth Magers presents a triple bill: in the main space, Thomas Demand brings a suite of new works that extend his long-standing investigation into constructed images and their quiet authority. Built from paper, cardboard, and meticulous staging, the works reproduce environments that feel at once familiar and estranged. In this new body of work, Demand pushes further into the tension between evidence and illusion. The images reinforce their own sense of absence – no figures, no incident, only the residue of situations reconstructed from memory, media, or political imagery. For instance, one work returns to a widely circulated police photograph from 2024, where San Diego authorities intercepted a large shipment of methamphetamine concealed as watermelons.

While often described informally as ‘papier-mâché’, US Customs and Border Protection clarified that the drugs were actually wrapped in green-painted plastic and paper to simulate the fruit. In Demand’s reconstruction, the absurdity of the scene is stripped of forensic urgency and restaged as carefully. It’s an image of concealment that doubles back on its own methods of fabrication.

Meanwhile, Robert Elfgen fills the upper gallery space with lyrical assemblages, paintings on copper, cements, and wood, and sculptural interventions that build entire environments rather than discrete objects. Images of polluting power plants and industrial residues sit alongside mythic imagery; animals and imagined forms emerge against landscapes that feel at once constructed and remembered.

In the gallery’s lower level, Martine Syms’s contribution takes the form of ‘Dominica Publishing, a temporary boutique’ – a pop-up space that will exist only for the weekend. This attempt at displaying desire also found expression in her 2024 exhibition at Lafayette Anticipations in Paris, a multimedia project that functioned simultaneously as artwork and concept store. Alongside its retail display logic, the Berlin shop includes works such as This Is A Studio / Aunty (35) (2023), which draws on surveillance footage of a late-night police visit outside the artist’s LA studio. Misunderstandings between officer and artist, spoken over the studio’s security system, circle uneasy questions about safety, belonging and power. Not to be missed.

Gallery Weekend Berlin 2026 runs 1 - 3 May

gallery-weekend-berlin.de

What effect has a fractured global economy had on our society? It is a question preoccupying three artists at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), who look beyond the societal collapse that accompanied the 2008 financial crisis in a multi-media exhibition, ‘Genuine Fake Premium Economy’.

For the three featured emerging artists, Jenna Bliss, Buck Ellison and Jasmine Gregory, the issue is a pertinent one. All born in the United States in the mid-1980s, each has experienced the consequences of living and working in a time of financial collapse, translating these experiences into sharply satirical works.

‘My images do not simply reflect society; they actively reinforce a system in which identity is tied to ownership, lineage, and exclusion,’ says Jasmine Gregory, who undercuts a video installation, Deliver Us From Evil, with a Patek Philippe advertisement. ‘By unsettling [the] coherence [of the images], the work resists that model rather than reproducing it, making visible both its limits and the lives that exist beyond its frame.’

In her Investment Pieces series, Gregory repaints Patek Philippe advertisements, which advise owners to ‘look after their watches for the next generation’, in a hazy grey, shifting the focus away from the watches and onto the father and son.

‘The Patek Philippe advertisements function less as aspirational images than as mirrors of the social order that produces them,’ she adds. ‘They condense and aestheticise the core values of capitalism, such as inheritance, continuity, exclusivity, and ownership. into intimate familial scenes. By repeatedly staging the transfer of a watch between father and son, the ads naturalise the idea that value, like wealth, should pass seamlessly along predetermined lines, obscuring the structural inequalities that make such continuity possible in the first place.’

For Jenna Bliss, this inequality takes shape in the art world. In her film, True Entertainment, set within a fictional art fair, an episodic narrative presents snappy soundbites that strip back art world stereotypes, revealing the instability underneath.

‘There wasn’t really an artistic intervention on my part, but rather a borrowing of a mass media form that was already exploring the interplay of fact and fiction,’ Bliss says. ‘It has a sitcom structure and lacks the confessional-type interviews we often see in reality TV, but the non-actors are playing themselves. In the finale of [reality TV series] The Hills, the camera pulls out to reveal a sound stage and the couple that just “broke up” approach one another again and hug, ostensibly answering the question viewers are always asking, with “no, it is not real”. But there is something hyper-real about reality TV.

‘There may be a relationship here to finance, especially with derivatives trading like we saw leading up to the [2008] crash. Derivatives deal in abstractions, but people lost their real homes as a result.’

It is a hyper-reality also considered by Buck Ellison, whose walnut-framed lightboxes advertise a fictional private bank. In his works, corporate speak becomes confused with theoretical philosophies, with [Scottish economist and philosopher] Adam Smith’s teachings manipulated into supporting the growth of personal wealth. ‘My goal with these works was not to copy appearances from a distance, but to adopt a system’s language, aesthetics, and strategies to examine how it operates from within,’ he says.

In creating the distinctive aesthetic, Ellison cites research that shows that banks prefer the colour navy, creating distance over warmth. ‘It is fitting for institutions that manage risk. They pair serif and sans serif typefaces to balance heritage and neutrality. For [imagined private bank] Orlo & Co, I chose Baskerville, widely used around the bank’s fictional incorporation date (1798), to evoke continuity and elegance, and Helvetica, designed in 1957 in Switzerland, to signal neutrality and institutional anonymity. I also crafted taglines that blend and recontextualise adages, and layered them over images of historical paintings – a strategy I observed in private banking materials, where art itself helps manufacture trust and legitimacy.’

'Genuine Fake Premium Economy’ from 1 May – 5 July at ICA London, ica.art