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

The tiny island of Illa del Rei, located in the port of Mahon, Menorca’s capital, has gone through various incarnations across the centuries. It was the landing place of King Alfonso III in 1287 during the reconquest of the Balearic Isles (hence the name, which translates to ‘King’s Island’); the home of a military hospital for troops during the British occupation in the 18th century; and, over a millenia before – as was discovered by chance in 1888 – the site of a 6th-century Palaeo-Christian basilica. The shards of the mosaics found – depicting deer, birds and twisting vines – are now safely ensconced in the Museu de Menorca.

An altogether more contemporary temple to art now stands on the island: an outpost of the Switzerland-founded gallery Hauser & Wirth, occupying the former hospital and surrounded by serene Mediterranean gardens by Dutch landscape designer Piet Oudolf (the entire project, and outdoor sculpture trail, was overseen by Paris-based architecture studio Laplace). It was within this bucolic scene that Illa del Rei entered yet another incarnation this past week: the setting for a fashion show, with the Australia-based label Alémais choosing the island to present its Resort 2027 collection on Wednesday evening.

‘We followed the signs here,’ Lesleigh Jarmanus, who founded the resort-wear brand in 2021, tells Wallpaper*. ‘We started the collection in January with a design trip through Spain – it rained the entire time, with the sun coming out only twice. Once when we first met our artist collaborator Sophie Wahlquist at her Mallorca studio, and again when we found our show location on Menorca’s Illa del Rei.’

The serendipitous sunshine – which reappeared once again on Wednesday evening – led to what Jarmanus, who worked in fashion for 20 years before starting Alémais, calls ‘a process of generous creative connection’. ‘The local community introduced us to friends, friends of friends, family members and business owners who made it possible for a brand from Australia to stage a show on a small island on the other side of the world,’ she says. ‘As a result, the collection is deeply inspired and grounded by a sense of place.’

Indeed, Wahlquist’s work was central to the collection, which saw Jarmanus continue to forge the eclectic, art-inflected summer wardrobe – enlivened by artisanal flourishes – for which the label has become known (the designer was a Fine Arts graduate before transitioning into a career in fashion). In particular, Jarmanus was drawn to the Germany-born, Mallorca-based artist’s colourful ceramics, which were here used to inform the structure of garments: ‘the ceramic medium inspired us to approach fabric in a new way, twisting, folding and manipulating by hand,’ says Jarmanus, who noted that the collection’s ‘curved and exaggerated’ silhouettes were drawn from Wahlquist’s vessels.

Another inspiration was the city of Barcelona and its Catalan architecture, another stop on her original research trip. ‘There is a unique energy in Barcelona,’ she says. ‘It was even more beautiful in the rain, the grey sky illuminated the organic forms and colours of the city. I was inspired by the bravery in unrestrained creativity and devotion to craft, and how expression can be its own form of alchemy.’ The various buildings conceived by Antoni Gaudí, in particular, drew Jarmanus’ eye: ‘Walking into the Sagrada Família was a deeply emotional experience. The scale, the fluidity of the forms, the way light moves through the stained glass, it felt less like architecture and more like a living expression of faith and imagination.’

All this led to a collection which captured the essence of holiday dressing: the impulse towards colour and adornment, something that Jarmanus says draws on the idea of picking up trinkets and keepsakes on your travels. ‘Our design process is always guided by how we want people to feel wearing Alémais and in this collection we wanted to bring forth a sense of discovery,’ she says. ‘Small details captured in the pieces that act as treasures for the collection – colourful stones captured in macrame, artisan-embroidered lures with unique beaded forms and trinkets. There are details you may not notice at first, but they are intended to bring joy.’

alemais.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

There really is no place like home. Hauser & Wirth’s Artfarm – the gallery company’s hospitality arm – may operate on an international stage, but for Swiss co-founders Iwan and Manuela Wirth, its first opening on home soil feels particularly significant. Chesa Marchetta joins the group’s full-blooded portfolio of hotels, restaurants and retail, and is as transportive and singular as one would expect. For the Wirths, each project is an act of place-making: rooted in art, individuality and connection, with no two expressions ever repeating themselves.

Following the opening of The Fife Arms in Braemar in 2019, the group’s second hotel unfolds in the introspective village of Sils Maria in the Engadin Valley – a place that has long resisted the seductions of speed. The location is rich with personal and historical resonance: it’s the village Iwan frequented as a child with his father, a mountain guide and architect, and it lies three hours from Zurich, where the Wirths founded their first gallery in 1992 alongside Manuela’s mother, Ursula.

Chesa Marchetta, Sils Maria

Chesa Marchetta occupies the shell of a former restaurant and pension, owned by the Godly family for two generations since 1947. It also carries the cultural residue of its life as an artistic salon, once frequented by figures such as Gerhard Richter and Jean-Michel Basquiat. The wider Engadin Valley has long exerted a magnetic pull on artists and thinkers too, such as Giacometti, Nietzsche and Segantini, drawn by a clarity that only this landscape can offer.

The renovation of the 16th-century property, which required reconstruction from within, was entrusted to Paris-based architecture firm Laplace, also responsible for Artfarm’s Mount St Restaurant and the adjoining 18th-century listed Audley pub in Mayfair. The project unfolded over four years, guided less by formal briefing than by observation and immersion. ‘With Iwan and Manuela, there was never a brief in the conventional sense. Our work together always begins with walking,’ says Luis Laplace, principal and co-founder of the studio, which he runs with his partner, Christophe Comoy.

Laplace approached the work with a conservation instinct: to save what could be saved, and intervene only where time had left no choice. Outside, the team revived the traditional sgraffito technique, a method of revealing rather than adding, cutting through the surface to uncover the colour beneath. Indoors, historic Engadin wall paintings depicting wildlife were carefully reinstated.

Structurally, the 13-key, sylvan property comprises four interconnected buildings: the main hotel, two adjoining barns housing the food and beverage spaces, and a three-bedroom house. Staying true to the Engadin visual language was essential: an aesthetic shaped by centuries of life in the surrounding valleys. ‘A sleigh from Sils is not the same as one from Bergell. The smallest detail carries a geography,’ points out the Buenos Aires-born architect.

Regional materials – Soglio granite, reclaimed spruce, original Val Fex stone slabs – form the foundation of the project. The aim was integrity, not novelty. Guest rooms avoid pastiche, engaging instead with the subtleties of place, furnished with handpicked local antiques, and window embroideries created in collaboration with the Benedictine nuns of Kloster St Johann in Müstair. As expected, the art collection is exceptional throughout: a mix of works by Old Masters and local artists, alongside murals by Corin Sands.

The 46-cover restaurant, with a separate entrance to the hotel, is open to both guests and non-residents under the guidance of chef Davide Degiovanni. Inspired by the property’s most recent owners – sisters Maria and Christina Godly – and their ascetic, seasonal approach to cooking (they famously served just one dish a day), it celebrates the meeting of Italian and Swiss cultures and stands as the most extroverted space in the house. Degiovanni’s signature here is aromatic gnocchi with brown butter and truffle, based on his nonna’s recipe.

By contrast, the Lounge Bar, set beside reception, is designed for small, spontaneous moments. ‘It’s the place where conversations begin,’ Laplace muses. The menu distils the idea of ‘eating and drinking the mountain’: local cheeses with preserves, honey and nuts, or charcuterie with pickled mushrooms, paired with wines and spirits drawn from the surrounding region. From the cocktail list, don’t miss the Alpine Juniper: mezcal and rounded añejo tequila layered with alpine botanicals.

The ceiling here was restored in local spruce, beam by beam, following its original pattern with forensic precision. Fixtures such as a 1950s Jean Touret suspension and a 2006 chandelier by Jason Rhoades, from the epilogue of his critically acclaimed Pussy Trilogy, establish a dialogue between eras without hierarchy. There are also striking works by Louise Bourgeois, including Spider II (1995) and Janus in a Leather Jacket (1968), alongside Nicolas Party’s vibrant Landscape (2020).

It is here, Laplace admits, that he feels most connected to the project. ‘It’s the soul of the house. The emotion lies in the subtleties: an irregularity in the grain, a beam slightly bowed by time, a shaft of light that falls differently each hour. Many of these details are almost invisible, yet they are the ones that stay with you.’

Chesa Marchetta is located at Via da Marias 88, 7514 Sils im Engadin/Segl, Switzerland

A version of this story appears in the March 2026 Style Issue of Wallpaper*, available in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News + now. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

All change! It could serve as a mantra for the world right now, but, for the March 2026 Style Issue, we use it to describe the season’s unprecedented reordering of fashion’s high command. The S/S 2026 collections saw debuts by no fewer than 15 creative directors, giving our fashion team cause to focus on the idea of the ‘clean slate’. To this end, we profile two designers on their bold new starts: Glenn Martens, who takes over at Maison Margiela, one of fashion’s most influential houses; and Duran Lantink, whose boundary-pushing debut show for Jean Paul Gaultier in Paris had everybody talking.

Fresh chapters abound in other corners. We take a trip to Seoul to check out Wooyoungmi’s monolithic new flagship store as the Korean label enters a new phase; head to the Swiss Alps, where Hauser & Wirth’s hospitality arm Artfarm is breathing new life into a 16th-century guest house; and meet Ilaria Icardi, Prada’s womenswear design director, who recently launched an eponymous jewellery line.

For our regular digest of the season’s trends, The Glossary, we question what, in our current culture of short attention spans, does ‘newness’ look like? And ahead of a new show launching at MoMu Antwerp, we explore the legacy of the Antwerp Six, a group of radical Belgian designers who changed the global fashion landscape in the 1980s and 1990s.

Elsewhere, we explore the ‘unnatural natural’ new face arising from our Botox and filler fatigue, and highlight the fresh slant on men’s tailoring and womenswear that designers have been taking this season.

Finally, our resident design critic Hugo Macdonald administers a timely blast of fresh thinking to the tired old task of spring cleaning: a balm, he suggests, for both body and soul.

Bill Prince
Editor-in-Chief

The March 2026 Style Issue of Wallpaper* is available in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News + from 5 February 2025. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

The domestic interior is a bountiful setting for painters. It can be used to reveal the private lives of its subjects, drawing rich connections with the inner world and the unconscious. ‘Interior Motives’, a new London art exhibition at Hauser & Wirth, brings together three artists – Koak, Ding Shilun and Cece Philips – to reveal dreamlike and unexpected visions of domestic space.

Koak is a US artist whose comic-inspired paintings of languid bodies are drenched in intense hues. Chinese painter Shilun expands upon everyday domestic objects to create fanciful scenes driven by his own emotional landscape. British artist Philips floods her interiors with radiant light, placing the viewer in the position of an observer. The show is part of the gallery’s ongoing programme championing artists who are not on its roster.

‘Domestic interiors are familiar to all, but the works lure you in with a false sense of security as the surreal, dreamlike elements add a sense of unfamiliarity,’ says Isabella Bornholt, the show’s organiser and associate director at the gallery. ‘Koak’s eccentric colour palette, Philips’ eerie environments, and Shilun’s fantastical elements almost suggest alternate realities. At the same time, the artists’ use of such devices highlights the surreal aspects of both daily life and the world we live in.’

Many of the works include human figures, though these too are warped and removed from a clear sense of reality. Koak’s bodies, for example, stretch and bend with a rubbery quality that transcends human physicality. Some of her characters appear transparent and spectral, the walls behind them visible through their torsos. Philips sometimes blends her figures into their surroundings, with clothes matching the palette of the walls, or whole bodies seeming to become one with the light around them. Shilun’s compositions tend to place bodies in intense contact with one another, their poses suggestive of frenzied movement, as they become tangled with the group and surrounding scene.

‘The use of figures is really significant in connecting the physical with the psychological in the exhibition,’ says Bornholt. ‘They can stand in for the artists themselves, the viewer, entire demographics, or humanity at large, each with their own inner world. In this show, the dynamic between the figures and their environments is especially key as we are exploring the idea that the spaces that we inhabit can impact our sense of self, memory and belonging. Outer worlds shape inner worlds.’

The artists are each inspired by a rich array of sources, both historical and contemporary, from Japanese manga to Dutch Golden Age painters. These reference points impact the unusual perspectives and dimensions in the works, while also combining past and present outlooks on the role and qualities of the interior. ‘Interestingly, Koak’s aesthetic shows influences from Japanese animations and Ding Shilun is inspired by manga, but both artists’ approaches feel very personal to them,’ says Bornholt. ‘It’s like the way in which homes can reflect their owners. To me, the exhibition touches on the importance of crafting environments, whether real or fictional, that are safe places to express yourself.’

Over the years, painting has been a particularly effective medium through which to explore the interior, whether artists create realistic depictions or more surreal interpretations which reveal the invisible forces that shape our private spaces. ‘In “Interior Motives”, Koak subverts narratives on women painted by male artists, Cece Philips invites us to fill in the gaps of what goes unsaid, and Ding Shilun draws on pop culture and personal experiences,’ says Bornholt. ‘I think painting is really effective at allowing the artists to world-build and develop narratives within the environments they depict.’

‘Interior Motives’ at Hauser & Wirth London until 20 September 2025, hauserwirth.com

The Women is an acerbic and witty all-female play set among Manhattan’s moneyed elite. Clare Boothe Luce’s ageless comedy, a 1936 Broadway hit, follows a seemingly content socialite whose life turns on its head when she learns of her husband’s affair. Surrounded by an equally image-conscious, socially astute, and gossip-fuelled circle, she navigates betrayal, pride, and quiet reinvention. With a stellar cast led by Norma Shearer and Joan Crawford, the 1939 screen adaptation brilliantly retains the play’s sharp observational tone and wit, as does, to an extent, the 2008 remake.

The Women critiques and celebrates in equal measure – dissecting the performative reality of womanhood. It explores the layered codes, the pressures and the privileges, while acknowledging female solidarity and resilience. In this, it shares common ground with the work of the artist Cindy Sherman, whose new exhibition at Hauser & Wirth Menorca, ‘Cindy Sherman. The Women’, takes its title, literally and playfully.

Sherman’s first solo exhibition in Spain in over two decades, ‘The Women’ brings together key works from the 1970s to the 2010s – shown without a fixed timeline – to reconsider her legacy in light of today’s image economy, where identity is crafted for digital audiences and self-curation goes unquestioned.

In many ways, Sherman feels like the biographer of our world today. From the start of her career, she’s forensically dissected the ways we inhabit images. Her carefully constructed, highly performative, often cinematic works spoke to audiences way before the language of influencers and personal branding became part of the everyday. ‘She was decades ahead of our current moment of social media and the construction of identity for the camera,’ says the exhibition curator Tanya Barson.

Her artwork unpacks the layers of visual identity, examining how it’s constructed, projected and consumed, and the gazes in which women are subjected. Each persona she adopts is both clearly a mask and a mirror, reflecting the roles women are assigned, expected to play, sometimes reclaim. That this process now plays out across millions of screens daily across the globe makes Sherman’s explorations feel uncannily timely.

Hauser & Wirth Menorca, tucked away on the idyllic Illa del Rei just off the coast of Mahón harbour, invites moments of quiet contemplation. The island setting also sets the tone in the opening gallery, which features works from Sherman’s Ominous Landscapes (2010). Here, female figures dressed in haute couture (from original 1920s Coco Chanel pieces to later designs by Karl Lagerfeld) are digitally superimposed onto island scenes, from Capri to Shelter Island. There’s a sense of dislocation to these spectral women – their scale and presence slightly off, mirroring the disconnect between image and environment, and perhaps our current reality.

Themes of status and self-image continue in the Society Portraits (2008) and the 2016 Harper’s Bazaar commission. In both, women pose in lavish clothing and constructed settings, sometimes multiplied via exposure. The image becomes an echo chamber of aspiration, of artifice, of identity under scrutiny.

Perhaps more powerful is the Flappers (2016–2018) series. Sherman’s admiration for these women who challenged social norms and redefined fashion in the 1920s as acts of empowerment, emancipation and radical modernity is evident. The characters are handled with theatrical flair but without cruelty, with subtle nods to the visual language of the artist and photographer Otto Dix and August Sander. ‘There’s humour,’ says Barson, ‘but also a really intense identification,’ adding that one cannot assume a character ‘with this degree of proximity and accuracy without being somewhat sympathetic.’

Included here are Sherman’s seminal Untitled Film Stills (1977–1980) – the black-and-white photographs that propelled her to prominence as part of the Pictures Generation artists who were back then responding to mass media and celebrity. In each, Sherman styles herself and poses as various archetypal female characters (housewife, career girl, lonely city dweller) in the manner of starlets and scenes from mid-20th-century B-movies, film noir, art-house cinema. These are fabricated memories of cinematic tropes, for a sense of déjà vu without ever being recognisable.

‘These are scenes from films we think we’ve seen, but they don’t exist,’ explains Barson. ‘There is a sophistication in the way she presents the figure in a landscape or interior – the way she uses distance, close-up, framing. It’s highly cinematic.’

Also on view in the final galleries, and interesting to observe now as the world transforms by tech, are early works such as Bus Riders and Murder Mystery (1976), which laid the foundations for her interest in character, performance and process. They seem naïve, charming even. As we observe a young girl in oversized jeans slouched on a bus bench Barson remarks, ‘there’s always a sense that we recognise these women, not just from cinema or media, but from real life. We’ve seen them on the bus, in our families, sometimes in ourselves.’

She says Sherman has been visualising much of the theorising we’ve been trying to do. ‘Her work provides the space for theory to operate,’ she notes. Taken together, the works in ‘The Women’ feel eerily contemporary. At a time when we are all, in some sense, performing ourselves for anonymous audiences, not always to great effect, Sherman’s lifelong investigation into the performance of the self could not be timelier.

‘This isn’t a comprehensive retrospective. It’s a reintroduction,’ says Barson. ‘Many of the works haven’t been seen in Spain before. It made sense to follow a non-linear curation, to allow people to meet these images in fresh ways before returning to the more iconic works.’

On this quiet island, surrounded by Piet Oudolf’s wild gardens and the glimmer of the Mediterranean, Sherman’s work takes on a new rhythm. These images – so deliberately staged – feel even more constructed here, set against nature’s ease. They remind us how much identity is curated, not inherited. And just as The Women revealed the roles women are expected to play, Sherman’s characters, too, hold a mirror to the performances of modern life. As Barson notes, Sherman may well find new audiences at Illa del Rei – visitors unfamiliar with her practice, encountering it anew in this unexpected setting.

‘Cindy Sherman. The Women’ is at Hauser & Wirth Menorca until 26 October 2025

‘Recycling is a failed system,’ declares Argentina-born, US-based artist Mika Rottenberg from her studio in upstate New York. ‘Nothing really gets recycled, even in New York City, it's a complete disaster.’ This damning verdict underpins Rottenberg’s new exhibition at Hauser & Wirth Menorca, ‘Vibrant Matter’, a direct response to the broken promises of a future that never arrived.

Across two films, drawings and a new series of sculptures, Rottenberg’s exhibition instead ponders what might have been. With an emphasis on the haptic and fluid, Rottenberg toys with the transformation of matter into other states, a reminder, in other words, of everything recycling promised. Yet for all the exhibition’s critique, Rottenberg is eager to make clear that ‘this is not a solution, this is just, what do you do with so much trash?’ Her response? ‘You can do something pretty with it.’

For her new Lampshares (2025), Rottenberg has created brightly coloured luminescent fungi that erupt from walls, ceilings and plinths, or simply lie on the exhibition floor like gnarled reclining figures. Beyond their Grimm fairytale looks, these sculptures embody her interest in alchemical transformation. Combining bittersweet vines, an invasive species that chokes the forests surrounding Rottenberg’s studio, with waste plastic that is collected from the Bronx and East Harlem before being melted and remoulded, these psychedelic, eerily anthropomorphic lamps turn toxicity into an opportunity for reinvention.

Straddling natural and artificial, functional and decorative, grotesque and beautiful, they represent the healing and redemptive qualities of Rottenberg's studio in preparation for this exhibition, where damage is, quite literally, metabolised into illumination.

Shown alongside her two films, Cosmic Generator (2017-18) and Spaghetti Blockchain (2019), the Lampshares echo the same fundamental concern with material transformation and systems of production and consumption. Speaking on their joint presentation for this exhibition, Rottenberg points out that ‘video is light and plastic is fossil fuel, which is ancient light trapped in oil, but it could not get back to the earth and complete the cycle. So making it into a lamp is a way to metaphorically release the light.’

In Spaghetti Blockchain, a three-channel montage exploring how humans process and interact with matter – from potatoes being harvested to antimatter research at CERN (the European Organisation for Nuclear Research) – Rottenberg frames these disparate acts as part of a surreal production chain. Like the oddly seductive yet grotesque Lampshares, the film's heavy use of ASMR (autonomous sensory meridian response) invites a playful and visceral engagement while carrying the conceptual weight of ecological collapse and overconsumption.

Cosmic Generator similarly eschews clear categories, instead taking viewers on a disorientating and fantastical trip that connects footage from a plastic goods market in Yiwu, China, with the US-Mexico border, in a continuation of the artist's long-running investigation into labour, materiality and global capitalism. By collapsing distinctions between real markets and imagined portals, industrial zones and kaleidoscopic dreamscapes, documentary footage and constructed sets, the film highlights the absurdity of commodity circulation and how capitalist circuits of production and consumption intertwine in invisible and irrational ways.

The destabilising effect of both films is, for Rottenberg, an essential reflection of our times. ‘Our digital existence is very disorientating,’ she says. ‘Diving into social media, you're reading horrible news and you're being pulled into so many different places that are conflicting – so I think it’s a very current feeling.’ In Rottenberg’s art, however, we can find, if not salvation, then a certain respite, an assurance that the chaos surrounding us is part of a timeless circularity. As she says: ‘Transformation is magic, it's like alchemy, and that's what art is about.’

Mika Rottenberg: Vibrant Matter at Hauser & Wirth Menorca until 26 October 2025, hauserwirth.com

Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely were both immensely influential artists in their own right. Saint Phalle’s sprawling sculptural practice saw her build a famous tarot garden in Tuscany, with her work often focusing on robust, divine figures. Tinguely’s kinetic sculptures offered a satirical view on automation and technical production, long before our contemporary fears of social media and iPhone addiction took hold. This month, Hauser & Wirth in Somerset is housing the first UK exhibition to celebrate the magic of their creative and romantic union, featuring collaborative pieces that bring their seemingly disparate practices together. ‘Myths & Machines’ covers three decades of work, including unseen drawings and furniture by Saint Phalle.

‘The show is intimate,’ says Bloum Cardenas, Saint Phalle’s granddaughter and a trustee of The Niki Charitable Art Foundation. ‘There are drawings and letters from Niki to Jean. It shows some parallels between their work that are not expected or often focused on. Their playfulness is there… also, their megalomania!’ She highlights how important it is that this creative union is being explored within Hauser & Wirth’s rural setting in Somerset. The couple met in the 1950s and married in 1971, purchasing a farmhouse that they lived and worked in. ‘They had this relationship to nature and a connection with the land art movement that is not discussed enough as an influence on both of them,’ says Cardenas.

She notes that their differences complemented each other, while they also shared ideas and happily assisted one another when needed. ‘They were totally in opposition, in contrast. I think that’s why they were able to do collaborative works,’ she says. ‘They were all about art. They had an intense form of love to begin with that was very passionate, but they loved each other in a pretty unique way through their lives.’ Across the show, Cardenas says, ‘their humour, love, and competition’ is in evidence.

The exhibition’s title highlights their combination of ancient and futuristic influences, the coming together of ancient myth and innovative machine. Cardenas describes Tinguely’s work as highly political, touching on decolonisation and the power of reusing junk. ‘Rebellion is a form of poetry,’ she says. ‘Difficult times create the potential for radical poetry, and I think his work really does that. It resonates today when we need it. This sense of freedom is so relevant for our relationship now with machines. They’re meant to help our lives but it’s the other way around.’

Saint Phalle’s work is also pertinent, as the art world revisits the power of tarot and the occult. Art was also a way for her to address early trauma. She was pushed into her first marriage at a young age, feeling trapped to fit society’s demands. Cardenas says the artist was made to grow up too soon. ‘Niki was really into fairytales,’ she says. ‘They help understand the world as we move from children into adults.’ After leaving her marriage, Saint Phalle embraced a bohemian lifestyle, with art as her central drive. ‘It gave her total freedom from her family and expectations,’ says Cardenas. ‘Art was her life, it was her god, it’s all she breathed. It was her reason for being.’

She also notes that Saint Phalle’s works are all in their original state. As a rule, they are not regularly restored, and show some signs of cracking. ‘You have a pure, authentic experience. Imperfection is reality, and perfection is death.’ Across the exhibition, both artists and their passionate creative union are shown to be ahead of their time. From female freedom to the growing oppression of machines, Saint Phalle and Tinguely touched on issues that still urgently drive our world in the 21st century. As Cardenas tells me, ‘They really are better understood today by younger generations.’

‘Myths & Machines’ is at Hauser & Wirth Somerset until 1 February 2026

In New York’s SoHo, at the intersection of Prince and Wooster, artist Gordon Matta-Clark’s legendary 1970s restaurant Food allowed the neighbourhood’s artistic community to come together to eat, work and experiment. The co-founders of global gallery Hauser & Wirth, Iwan and Manuela Wirth are now resurrecting this ethos just across the street at the latest restaurant from their hospitality company Artfarm – it’s the second to be called Manuela, following in the footsteps of the first, in LA. ‘While Manuela is quite a different restaurant to Food, we share the same spirit and belief that art and food can act as catalysts to cultivate community and connection,’ says Artfarm’s CEO Bee Emmott.

Inside Manuela’s artful ode to contemporary dining

The New York outpost offers a seasonal American menu, of which half is plant-focused, and all is freshly prepared using the open kitchen’s wood-fired grill or charcoal oven. The space features more than 45 artworks, including seven site-specific ones by Hauser & Wirth artists, each with a connection to New York. ‘Many of these are functional works,’ says Emmott, referring to a bar and chandelier by Mika Rottenberg, and a 7m-long table by Rashid Johnson.

Two spaces were combined to create the restaurant, resulting in a generous footprint. To craft a unique aesthetic that honours the neighbourhood’s history, and ties together the artworks, the Artfarm team looked to British interior designer Russell Sage, who is a long-standing collaborator. ‘My job was to create both a backdrop and a support system for the artists so that there’s a real sense of balance in the space,’ says Sage of his raw, industrial-influenced approach to the restaurant’s interiors.

Sage has a background in fashion and his shows were a regular highlight of London Fashion Week in the early 2000s. His flair for colour, print and dramatic details translates seamlessly into interiors, which have been his primary focus for the past two decades. ‘One of the things I didn’t like about fashion was its disposability and how fast things turn around,’ says Sage, who has applied his knowledge and passion for eco-friendly textiles – from pineapple leather to repurposed off-cuts from the clothing industry – throughout Manuela in the form of curtains, banquette upholstery and more.

Incorporating recycled and sustainable materials was a shared driver both for Sage and the Wirths. To that end, Rottenberg’s sculptural bar is moulded entirely from plastic waste sourced from around New York, coupled with a chandelier woven from the invasive bittersweet vines that grow near her upstate New York studio – these burst through the splodgy-patterned counter, sprouting illuminated mushroom-like orbs, which are also formed from reused plastics. ‘This whimsical and wildly colourful work sets the tone of the space,’ says Emmott.

Another important element of the project was fostering community, both among artists and local initiatives. Early on, the team partnered with Project Eats, an enterprise that transforms vacant urban plots and rooftops into spaces for growing food. This resulted in the installation of an in-house composter in Manuela’s kitchen (the waste from which is used in Project Eats gardens), and there is also an option for diners to add a donation to Project Eats to their bill.

To encourage interaction between guests, Manuela is designed to feel more elevated canteen than high-end restaurant, so there’s no hierarchy or best seats in the house. ‘We want people to ask questions and to chat,’ says Sage. ‘We want to provoke conversation.’

There is a private dining room, but rather than separating it from the ‘energy of the restaurant’, a clashing patchwork curtain was installed to form a fluid boundary between the two. An intentional gap in the fabric panels offers glimpses inside, where Johnson’s magnificent dining table takes pride of place. ‘What I love about Rashid’s table is that it’s pure him,’ says Sage, who had to reinforce the floor to carry its weight, and remove the shopfront to get it inside the building.

The opportunity to dine among these and other works from the Hauser & Wirth collection – by the likes of Louise Bourgeois, Cindy Sherman, George Condo and Jenny Holzer – adds to the draw of a space that champions sustainability, celebrates local artists and cultivates community in the same way that Food did. Sage’s bold interiors and the boundary-pushing contributions of each artist ensure that Manuela is a contemporary manifestation of the idea that art and food can, and should, bring people together.

Manuela is located at 130 Prince St, New York, NY 10012, United States; manuela-nyc.com.

A version of this article appears in the March 2025 issue of Wallpaper*, available in print on international newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today.

It has been a good year for British painter George Rouy, who, in 2024, became one of the youngest artists to join Hauser & Wirth, in a representation announced in collaboration with Hannah Barry Gallery.

Originally from Kent, he won a place in 2012 to study painting at Camberwell College of Arts. ‘When I was at art school, painting wasn’t as popular as it is now, but it’s had a resurgence,’ says Rouy. ‘At the time, it felt like it wasn’t the cool thing to do, but I went through the process over the years, trying to search for what figuration in art meant.’

After graduating in 2015, he was inspired by French, Dutch and medieval paintings in his early figurative works for group shows. A bold, more confrontational portrait style soon gave way to a deeper concentration in how the paint was applied to the canvas, with Rouy’s thick, instinctive brush strokes lending a thoughtful and expressive edge to his process. It led him naturally to the more abstract style we see today, with the figures in his paintings captured in a state of distorted awakening, as if from a fever dream, a style that has invited comparisons with Francis Bacon. No longer portraits, or specific figures, they are now memories of them.

Rouy traces this fascination with the figure back to his 2023 solo exhibition at Hannah Barry Gallery, when he collaborated with choreographer Sharon Eyal on a live event. ‘It was a turning point when I saw Sharon Eyal’s work,’ says Rouy. ‘It was a massive moment for how I changed my perspective on the way I wanted to approach the figure. When you see her work, it’s very intuitive, heavily emotive, but it’s also incredibly minimal and focused on the body and interactions as a mass – on a group of figures but also on them individually. I walked away from that wanting to erase the clutter and sharpen my focus on the body, and on what that means within painting.’

Rouy’s debut show for Hauser & Wirth, ‘The Bleed, Part I’ (currently on in London, with a Part II to follow in LA in February 2025) builds on this exploration of the figurative. Here, the human form is distorted, faceless, often lost in a mass of writhing figures in a contemporary reimagining of 19th-century classical tragedy paintings.

‘There was a clear shift four or five years ago, where I’d always thought about the figure, but then my focus became very much on the body, and the interactions of the mass of figures and multiples,’ says Rouy, who rejects the idea of the body in static isolation, instead depicting it as constantly in flux, in a relationship with both its own limitations and with a mass of other bodies. ‘You then have this anatomy that’s directly transferred into the work through gesture, but also into the representations of figures as well.’

In contrast to many of his contemporaries, Rouy eschews traditional markers of identity to zoom in, instead, on a more universal experience. With no faces or genitals, there is nowhere to anchor the eye; we are therefore invited to gaze, unheeded, across a blurring of movement, colour and texture. ‘I removed the face because it was becoming too much,’ he adds. ‘Without it, you can assess the whole painting without that focus. I wanted to allow the viewer to treat every aspect of the painting with the same value, and I’m very strict on that. Every part has to have purpose, there’s no filler as such. Removing the face allows your eye to look at the bodies, and then the hands and feet become a lot more of a feature and have a lot more of a purpose, and those things get drawn out more than they would when you had the face.’

In the show, we see hints of what’s next for Rouy. Among his bruised palettes of colours, there are, for the first time, some monochrome works, which he refers to as his phantom paintings. ‘I’ve been wanting to do monochrome works for a while, and they haven’t been successful until this recent body of work. I changed my approach, and started to think about illumination and darkness. By using silver-primed canvas or linen, it gives a backlit feel, but I was using charcoal powder, which sucks and diffuses the light. At first I worked with those two components, but as time went on, it became a bit more sophisticated, and it creates a depth when there’s so many layers, which some of the oil paintings don’t have.’

The visceral results become a fluid jumble of life, which appear to drip and bleed their way across the canvas, hence the exhibition’s name. ‘There is this idea of a leakage, or a bleeding out, but also, it is how well our bodies are interacting with the space around us. Within the paintings, there is that dissipation, in the surrounding areas of the bodies and how they blend into each other. It’s important to say that, with the blood, there is the idea of a life force, but these are depictions of mortal humans. They are not anything larger. They are just as fragile and just as flawed as we all are.’

‘George Rouy. The Bleed, Part I’ is on show until 21 December 2024 at Hauser & Wirth London. ‘George Rouy. The Bleed, Part II’ is on show from 19 February-1 June 2025 at Hauser & Wirth Downtown Los Angeles

hauserwirth.com

A version of this article appears in the January 2025 issue of Wallpaper* , available in print on international newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

In the early 1970s, US artist Jack Whitten underwent a dramatic change in his practice. Moving away from the gestural approach of Abstract Expressionism, Whitten instead developed his own highly innovative techniques that partially concealed traces of his hand behind tools and automated processes. Three events are held responsible: a mental ‘restructuring’, somewhere between breakdown and breakthrough following years of overwork, a desire to distance himself from the influence of the New York School and an encounter with jazz royalty, John Coltrane.

Of these, the last provides the most compelling explanation for what followed. Something about the physicality with which Coltrane played, the way he utilised body and breath, but also his ability to create rich texture by stacking or stretching notes, sparked the idea for Whitten of surfaces that were simultaneously flat planes, but, like Coltrane’s sliding notes, contained infinite depth.

Using improvised tools of his own design: combs, saws, rubber squeegees and other modified serrated instruments, Whitten began raking his personal blend of acrylic into parallel grooves that ran across the entire canvas, at times coalescing with the imprinted forms of objects he’d placed beneath. The resulting abstract compositions, whose dense, tactile surfaces result not only from scraping tools but ice picks, polishers, drills and screwdrivers, fused Whitten’s physical dexterity as a skilled craftsman with an obsession to invent and discover, something that would ultimately define the rest of his career.

For the remainder of the 1970s, Whitten relentlessly pushed the limits of his tools and techniques across different mediums, from acrylic paint to paper, printer toner to timber. Several key examples from this innovative decade feature in a new exhibition at Hauser & Wirth, London. Reflecting the haptic, corporeal energy that fuelled Whitten’s approach during this period, ‘Speedchaser’ includes his renowned Greek Alphabet series, deconstructed Xerox scans, and totemic wooden sculptures that he carved on the Greek island of Crete.

Following the opening of ‘Speedchaser’, and with one eye on Whitten’s major retrospective at MoMA next year, we consulted US artist Glenn Ligon and Chisenhale director Zoé Whitley on the artist’s inimitable legacy and unique approach to materiality.

Behind Jack Whitten’s legacy

Wallpaper*: How have Whitten's innovative techniques or exploration of materials influenced your own artistic process, especially in terms of texture and form?

Glenn Ligon: I discovered Whitten’s work late in my career. He was the mentor I could have had if his work had been taught in the art schools I attended in the late 1970s and early 1980s. I had to find him on my own, and when I found his work, it took me a while to figure out that he had something profound to say about abstraction and figuration and the porous line between the two.

W*: Whitten often engaged with the social and political realities of African American life through abstraction. How has his ability to convey complex cultural narratives inspired your approach to incorporating text, history, and identity in your work?

GL: In 1988 Whitten made Black Monolith I, A Tribute To James Baldwin. I saw that painting for the first time in 2017 in a show at Hauser & Wirth, London. The painting is abstract but Whitten is very clear that the essence of James Baldwin – a writer he knew personally and who was a great influence on him – was ‘in the painting’. While I have long included Baldwin’s words in my paintings, Whitten showed me how to engage the writer’s ideas on a more abstract level.

W*: Whitten pushed the boundaries of abstraction, sometimes incorporating figuration or personal symbols into his work. Has his blending of abstraction and representation influenced the way you juxtapose text, language, and imagery in your art?

GL: For me, text paintings I make are figurative paintings and abstract paintings at the same time. The blurring of those categories comes from thinking about Whitten.

W*: Can you tell me about one of your favourite works by Whitten from the 1970s and what it means to you?

GL: There was an amazing show of Whitten’s Greek Alphabet paintings at Dia:Beacon in 2022. Those paintings were, for me, about Whitten setting up procedures and guidelines to make paintings and then disrupting the very rules he had set up for himself. Artists are always trying to balance control and abandon in the studio. Whitten was a master of that.

W*: This exhibition focuses on Whitten's transition from gestural brushstrokes to innovative, automated processes during the 1970s. You've referred to Whitten as 'a voracious thinker and maker'. What about his wide range of interests inspired this technical and conceptual switch in practice?

Zoe Whitley: This is a big question and an important one. For me, Jack Whitten is a quintessential abstractionist. While he was initially influenced by figurative expressionistic gestures made by artists like Arshile Gorky when he first came from Southern University to New York City, he wanted to face the conceptual challenge of moving with, and through, the density of paint head-on. He took the whole of his life – the good, the bad, the joyous and the vulnerable – and distilled it through gesture into wondrous things, sometimes relatively inscrutable, always technically innovative. Jack knew how to transform theory into practice. He asked himself: how might he make a single line into a painting?

He restructured his studio so that the canvas would be on the floor and he built a structure called the ‘Developer’ that allowed him to rake acrylic paint over a huge area in one rapid, smooth movement. That's how works like The Speedchaser were made.

He read a great deal and certain texts he name-checked as having a transformational effect on his practice. The French philosopher Gaston Bachelard wrote the Poetics of Space in 1958. Bachelard was a game-changer because his ideas centred on lived experience in architectural spaces; the conceptual was married to the feeling. That was one turning point. George Kubler’s The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things was published in 1962. Jack noted this was another formative text because it shifted his understanding of time and his relationship to memory, which became more freed from notions of linear time. Series like Pressed Space start to make sense in relation to Jack's bookshelf!

W*: Whitten stretched the materiality of painting in a way few others considered before him, but the ineffable and spiritual were also an important element to his practice. Can you tell me about the importance of the metaphysical in his work?

ZW: Descriptors like ‘transcendent’ we tend to reserve for religious paintings from the Renaissance, but we should be applying them to works like Whitten's too. This is yet another example of how he channelled his beliefs into actions, his faith into practice. He literally fought the good fight against evil as a civil rights freedom fighter. Non-violent action and passive resistance takes guts. Turning the other cheek is one thing to read about in the Bible and another when you are being pushed in the face and doused with human waste. So art for Whitten was in some ways a refuge, not only a private one, but an expansive cosmology that he allowed us all to share in.

W*: How do you see the relationship between Whitten's early exploration of sculpture in Crete during the 1970s and his evolving approach to painting during the same decade?

ZW: With the benefit of hindsight, it seems clear he approached sculpting like a painter and then, in turn, began painting like a sculptor, embracing the new dimensionality on a flat surface. He found ways to adapt the painting palette so that he was using sculptors' tools on canvas. Conversely, his sculptural compositions always factor in a playful interplay of light and density, as if manipulating something more malleable than the solid forms we are actually perceiving.

W*: Can you tell me about your favourite work of Whitten's from the 1970s?

ZW: It's all about first love for me: Asa's Palace. The painting vibrates and swallows you up in pink and purple, then you come up for air in short bursts of yellow-grey-green. It's the painting that helped me understand what Jack meant when he talked about resisting narrative, not ascribing meaning to colours and just letting the truth come through. He really trusted each colour to hold its own.

W*: Next year will see the opening of Whitten's first retrospective at MoMA. How would you describe Whitten's contribution to American contemporary art and successive generations of young Black artists?

ZW: Jack Whitten was generous with his time and his knowledge and skills. He was never boastful but he understood completely his position as both a teacher, imparting wisdom and encouragement to younger artists, and his parallel role as a lifelong student learning from writers, fellow artists and technology. I wouldn't restrict his influence to any one race, generation or group of creative practitioners. He shifted things for all of us: artists, curators, and thinkers alike.

Jack Whitten, 'Speedchaser', is at Hauser & Wirth, London until 14 December 2025

hauserwirth.com

Los Angeles might be most readily associated with Hollywood’s celluloid dreams, but it’s also heaven for art collectors. The city is dotted with a panoply of contemporary galleries, ranging from purpose-built spaces to converted studios and strip-malls. Here you’ll find emerging American artists side-by-side with the best international talent, and museum-quality collections vying for room beside urgent and thought-provoking street art. Los Angeles, famously, is a patchwork of contrasting scenes and neighbourhoods, but one thing that unites them all is that this has always been a place to see and be seen. That’s never been more true than at these trailblazing art galleries.

See what's on this month with our up-to-date guide to Los Angeles exhibitions.

Jeffrey Deitch

Former MOCA Director Jeffrey Deitch returned to Los Angeles with a bang in September 2018, opening his eponymous gallery in Hollywood with an Ai Weiwei solo show. The maverick art dealer tapped star architect Frank Gehry to renovate the 15,000-square-foot space, which was formerly a cinematographic lighting equipment warehouse. Natural light now streams in through UV-filtered skylights, illuminating solo shows by the likes of Judy Chicago, Robert Longo and Rammellzee as well as carefully-curated thematic exhibitions (People, 2018, Punch, 2019, and Shattered Glass, 2021). Deitch is also known for providing free space for LA’s underground artists. A second, smaller nearby space on Santa Monica Boulevard has featured installations from George Clinton and Pussy Riot’s Nadya Tolokonnikova.

The Jeffrey Deitch Gallery is located at 925 N Orange Dr.

deitch.com

Hauser & Wirth

Opened in March 2016, Hauser & Wirth is arguably the most important and influential commercial art gallery in Los Angeles and sits at the heart of the burgeoning downtown Arts District. The former site of the Globe Grain & Milling Company flour mill sprawls over more than 100,000-square-feet and was converted into a buzzy contemporary art centre in a project led by Selldorf Architects. Multiple galleries of varying scale are connected by interstitial corridors, while the central courtyard is regularly used for large-scale installations and social events. As evidence that ‘sustainability’ is more than a buzzword, a chicken coop and vegetable garden are used to support the on-site restaurant, Manuela. In February 2023 Hauser & Wirth opened a second smaller gallery in West Hollywood, located in a 1930s Spanish Colonial Revival building that was formerly a vintage car dealership on Santa Monica Blvd.

Hauser & Wirth Downtown Los Angeles is located at 901-909 East 3rd St.

hauserwirth.com

Blum

It’s well worth making the journey to Culver City to take in the work at this taste-making gallery, which has earned a reputation for bringing the best of international art to Los Angeles. Originally opened as Blum & Poe in Santa Monica in 1994, the gallery made the move to a 5,000-square-foot former industrial warehouse in 2003 and helped spawn an entire art district in the surrounding area. Today, Blum represents over 50 artists working across various different mediums, and has carved out a niche displaying cutting-edge work from artists based in Korea, Brazil and Japan.

Blum is located at 2727 S La Cienega Blvd

blum-gallery.com

Subliminal Projects

He may be best known around the world for creating Barack Obama’s ‘Hope’ campaign poster and the Obey Giant, but in Echo Park street artist Shepard Fairey’s greatest claim to fame is bringing Subliminal Projects into existence. This vibrant gallery regularly plays host to mixed-media shows that champions local artists and displays work influenced by street art and often shot through with a powerful activist or social message.

Subliminal Projects Gallery is located at 1331 Sunset Blvd.

subliminalprojects.com

David Kordansky Gallery

David Kordansky made his name as one of Los Angeles’ leading art dealers in the 2000s, and opened his eponymous gallery in Chinatown in 2003. The 20,000-square-foot space was once a martial arts studio and a car dealership before being converted into one of the city’s most significant gallery spaces. Three exhibition spaces spread across two buildings separated by a landscaped courtyard. Shows are balanced between artists rooted in the local Southern Californian scene and those from further afield.

David Kordansky Gallery is located at 5130 W Edgewood Place.

davidkordanskygallery.com

The Mistake Room

Located in a renovated industrial warehouse on the southern edge of the downtown Arts District, The Mistake Room has been operating since 2014 displaying artists from around the world with a particular focus on the Latin American diaspora. The space takes its name from the idea that mistakes can be generative moments that rupture the status quo and propose new ways of seeing, being and knowing. It’s a fittingly daring title for a gallery that has hosted eclectic group shows and recently provided a home for a first institutional solo show from Guanajuato-born artist Felipe Baeza’s mutilayered explorations of bodies and migration.

The Mistake Room is located at 1811 E 20th St.

tmr.la

Beyond The Streets

The art dealer Roger Gastman curated the Art in the Streets exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in 2011, and the success of that show led to the first Beyond The Streets show in 2018 that was headlined by street artists including Banksy and Lady Pink. Since moving into a permanent space on La Brea in 2022, the gallery showcases work on loan from private collectors and sits alongside Gastman’s Control Gallery, which focuses on artists who haven’t come from a street art background.

Beyond The Streets Gallery is located at 434 N La Brea Ave.

beyondthestreets.com

In the film that accompanies Larry Bell’s new exhibition at Hauser & Wirth Monaco, the 84-year-old artist is seen from behind, peering through a small aperture in the middle of an enormous, bank vault-style circular door. With his brimmed hat and braces, the artist could easily pass for Heisenberg or Oppenheimer observing some atomic experiment, and yet, given Bell’s highly scientific approach, the comparison goes beyond mere appearances.

The door belongs to Bell’s vacuum-coating machine (affectionately known to Bell as ‘The Tank’), a cylinder ten feet long and seven across, specially commissioned in 1969 to facilitate production of his early Standing Walls. These large-scale sheets of glass, seamlessly joined with silicone into corners, squares and zigzags, mark a departure from Bell’s comparably robust, metal-framed glass cubes produced in the 1960s, towards something purer, more ethereal and, in the artist’s words, more ‘improbable’.

‘Larry Bell: Works from the 1970s’ at Hauser & Wirth, Monaco

Within the tank’s airless seal, Bell plays with the molecular structure of his sculpture's surfaces, evaporating metals at high temperatures to maintain their crystalline structure and coat the glass in gossamer films of aluminium or silicon oxide. As Bell simply puts it: ‘There are things that can be done with metals and surfaces inside an environment that contains no air that cannot be done in the presence of air.’ By layering these films and altering the opacity or reflectivity of the glass, Bell’s Standing Walls become places of performance and optical distortion, activated only by the presence of a viewer.

Four of Bell’s largest and most ambitious Standing Walls from the early 1970s are shown in Hauser & Wirth’s cavernous subterranean gallery. Lit by an oculus that floods the space with Riviera sunshine, each sculpture feels charged to its maximum illusory potential, fluidly disappearing and rematerialising, simultaneously an object and its surrounding environment. For all their technical precision, there is no shortage of subtlety or sensuousness. In a city where glass abounds in the austere forms of high-rise hotels and apartment blocks, these works remind us of the material’s ability to alter our sense of space and of ourselves.

Adding to the room’s optical acrobatics is a large wall piece, Moving Ways (1978), one of Bell’s vapour works made using a modified version of the vacuum coating process to apply aluminium to black paper. Seen through, or reflected by, his sculptures, the works envelop one another, pooling their powers of illusion to create fleeting moments of perfect harmony.

Outside, in the Jardins des Boulingrins that lie adjacent to the gallery, a more recent and highly coloured glass work, The Blue Gate (2021), offers a more complex structural counterpoint to the Standing Walls. Installed on a lawn that forbids viewers to walk on it and approach the sculpture, its surfaces are robbed of their full visual potency and it feels oddly dormant. This work, together with the exhibition as a whole, reminds us that while these sculptures may have been created in a vacuum, they are only truly alive in close proximity to people.

‘Larry Bell: Works from the 1970s’ is at Hauser & Wirth, Monaco, until 31 August 2024

hauserwirth.com

For a balmy outdoor art crawl in August and beyond, DTLA ArtNight is back on the first Thursday of the month from 6-10PM for this reoccurring event with over 30 galleries and museums participating. Visit dtlaartnight.com for a virtual map to plan out a route on foot for the evening. Leica Gallery in West Hollywood is celebrating 50 years of photography with 9 emerging talents under 30-years-old, while William Turner Gallery in Santa Monica is highlighting seven decades of works by the late Southern California painter Ed Moses. Groundbreaking architect Paul R. Williams (1894–1980) will be celebrated in coordinating exhibits at three art institutions – Getty, LACMA and USC Fisher Museum of Art, starting this August through the Spring of 2027.

Los Angeles Art Exhibitions: what to see in August 2026

Paul R. Williams: An Architect Considered

USC Fisher Museum of Art from 18 August 2026 until 13 March 2027

Highlighting 35 housing projects from Williams’s 60-year career, the show emphasizes the designer’s sustained commitment to innovative, dignified solutions for collective living during a period of rapid urbanization. Organized jointly by the USC School of Architecture and the USC Fisher Museum of Art, this exhibition examines Williams’s major contributions to modern multifamily housing as the first AIA-certified Black architect west of the Mississippi River. It pairs original archival drawings with newly commissioned works by contemporary artists and architects. This also comes on the heels of a new book, Regarding Paul R. Williams: A Photographer's View of a Trailblazing Architect photographed by Janna Ireland, published by Angel City Press at Los Angeles Public Library.

Leica Emerging

Leica Gallery until 31 August 2026

Celebrating 50 years of Leica Photography, the West Hollywood Gallery is showcasing a new generation of emerging talent – artists under the age of 30 - who are shaping the future of photography from Paris Brosnan to Gulliver Oldman, Miles Bitton, Rossie Matheson and Sara Messinger among others. Expect work that reflects the evolving future of contemporary image-making and photography through documentary, portraiture, fashion, and cinematic storytelling.

Tale of the Gatherer and Pressure Crack Vessels

Marta until 8 August 2026

This is the last chance to see the gallery’s dual exhibition of work by Copenhagen, and Berkeley-based artists Bonnie Hvillum and Rafi Ajl. Co-existing in the gallery’s main exhibition space, these dialoguing bodies of work from both artists extend from mutual practices defined by acts of process, development, and investigation of the layers that extend over one another into a collaboration between artist and material.

Accent Builders

Dominique Porter Gallery until 15 August 2026

For its second exhibition, this new art gallery space in Los Angeles' Atwater Village, will unify works by Will Bruno, Preston Daniels, Greg Eberhardt, Rod Fahmian, Caleb Lyons, Kathryn Scanlan, Jeremy Shockley, and Pat Strand.  This diverse group of artists works engage with the materiality of their mediums, while approaching the act of building as both a literal and metaphorical process, constructing images and objects that layer perception and form.

Ed Moses: Moses @ 100

William Turner Gallery until 5 September 2026

Located inside Bergamot Station in Santa Monica, the William Turner Gallery exhibition of works by Ed Moses marks the centennial of the artist’s birth in Long Beach, CA. The exhibition brings together a focused selection of material that underscore the restless experimentation and continual reinvention that defined Moses’ practice for more than seven decades, mainly from his Venice, CA studio.

DOUGLAS GORDON

Gagosian Beverly Hills until 22 August 2026

As the last cheers of FIFA World Cup fade from our stadiums and screens, Magic is sometimes very close to nothing at all is an exhibition of works by Douglas Gordon (a lifelong football fan) centered on Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait (2006). This double-screen film produced in collaboration with Philippe Parreno follows legendary French footballer Zinédine Zidane over the course of a single match. The exhibit also includes neon and vinyl text works by Gordon, marking twenty-five years since the artist’s 2001 survey at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. 

Eileen Cowin: Between Panic and Paradise

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) from 23 August 2026 to 3 January 2027

This is the Los Angeles–based artist’s first major museum exhibition. Often blurring the distinction between nonfiction and fiction, for more than 50 years, Cowin’s provocative photography and video works have explored romance and confrontation, the personal and the political, and the monotony and mystery of daily life.

Alex Hubbard Abstract or Regular?

Regen Projects until 15 August 2026

This show includes a new painting and video work by Hubbard, including six larger than life animations projected onto wooden constructions cut to the shape of their subjects, ranging from cartoon characters to an electrocuted pickle. Continuing Hubbard’s ongoing investigation into the assumed infrastructures and authorities of presentation and display, the artist works through a conceptual and material engagement with layering, appropriated imagery, an expansive approach to projected video, and the ambiguity between apparent reality and illusionistic pictorial space. 

A Gaze Through Time: Contemporary Reflections on Memory and History

ADVOCARTSY until 26 September 2026
To inaugurate the new gallery space in Downtown Los Angeles, A Gaze Through Time brings together artists whose practices examine the ways in which memory is preserved, transformed, and reimagined across time. Spanning personal recollection, migration, mythology, political critique, and historical representation, the exhibition considers memory not as a fixed archive, but as a dynamic force through which the past continually informs the present.

Gurjeet Singh

Rajiv Menon until 29 August 2026

I Got a Cut in My Flower Valley is Punjab-based artist Gurjeet Singh first solo exhibition outside of India. His twelve soft sculptures involve forms of rupture and repair, and the frictions in between. In these works, the stitch is the critical anchor and is never seamless. Threads are both taut and loose, trails of colorful beads puncture the surface, layers of fabric form a skin that is at once protective and penetrable. To compose his soft sculptures, and floral motifs, Singh has worked with discarded cloth, fragments sent by his family and friends. He learned to stitch by watching his mother and sisters in their home and learned to build sculptural forms by studying the mechanics at his father’s scooter repair workshop.

Marilyn Monroe: Hollywood Icon

Academy Museum until 28 February 2027

To honour 100 years of the on-screen goddess, hundreds of newly unveiled or rarely seen images, posters, letters, artifacts, and memorabilia are on display of the blond bombshell that still haunt and fascinate. This exhibition offers unique insight into her agency in becoming a Hollywood icon including many costumes from her most famous films.

Urs Fischer: YES and LA DUST

Jeffrey Deitch until 8 August 2028

Looking back on the acclaimed Swiss artist’s April 2013 radical show staged at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Fischer arranged for tons of modeling clay to be delivered to the museum, installed a restaurant kitchen and a grand piano, and invited anyone who wanted to participate to sculpt the clay. Over 2,500 people created an array of figures and forms and Fischer selected the most intriguing sculptures to cast in bronze. This was during Deitch’s tenure as MOCA Director. Thirteen years later, twenty-five of these surreal bronze structures will be presented at his N. Orange Drive gallery in Hollywood.

Zhang Enli

Hauser & Wirth West Hollywood until 22 August 2026

Shanghai-based artist Zhang Enli’s first West Coast solo exhibition is bringing together a new series of abstract portraits. While anchored in figuration and paired with descriptive titles, the works on view convey their subjects’ essence via evocation rather than likeness, with Enli’s increasingly loose brushwork proving abstraction’s power to disclose information about the human condition.

The Rooftop Paintings

Parker Gallery until 15 August 2026

The Rooftop Paintings at 255 Bowery, a solo exhibition by Gerald Jackson, is the 90-year-old’s second at the gallery. This exhibition focuses on a singular group of paintings and works on paper produced in the early 1980s, offering a closer look at a pivotal period in his practice. Jackson relocated from his native Chicago to the Lower East Side in the early 1960s, where he quickly became part of the community of Black artists and musicians living there. The Bowery as a site of artistic inspiration and production has been widely examined.

Yuichiro Ukai

Parker Gallery until 15 August 2026

In his first solo exhibition with the gallery, celebrated self-taught Japanese artist Yuichiro Ukai - also part of Atelier Yamanami - shows a selection of new large-scale works on paper from 2021–2025 never before seen in Los Angeles. The densely animated works on paper poster board incorporate figures from contemporary manga and anime, mythic beasts, and historic Japanese epics. Drawn on sequential panels like traditional picture scrolls, Ukai’s works present a cartographic landscape distinctively melding characters from across cultures, time, and space.

Balboa of House and Garden

Lisson until 22 August 2026

Coinciding with the unveiling of Finch’s site-specific commission at the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago this summer, this marks Spencer Finch’s first exhibition in Los Angeles and his inaugural presentation with the gallery in the United States. Expect to see over fifty unique works on paper, a site-specific skylight installation, and a monumental outdoor sculpture, extending Finch’s longstanding exploration of light, perception, memory, and the emotional resonance embedded within ordinary experience.

World Cup Soccer Exhibit

Torrance Historical Society & Museum until 31 August 2026

In celebration of the upcoming FIFA World Cup 26™, and in recognition of Torrance being the birthplace of AYSO Soccer, the Torrance Historical Society invited Miguel Salazar and Julie Randall to share their private soccer collection that showcases items accumulated from 1998 to 2026. This includes memorabilia such as an autographed jersey from legendary Brazilian soccer star Pelé. Other artifacts and keepsakes representing major soccer events highlight the global impact and lasting legacy from organizations such as the FIFA World Cup, the Women’s World Cup, AYSO, LA Galaxy, and Olympic Soccer, are on display.

Let's Get It On: The Wearable Art of Betye Saar

Roberts Projects until 22 August 2026

As part of a series of exhibitions and initiatives celebrating Saar's 100th birthday this summer, this exhibition explores the central role of costume design in Saar's early career and throughout her life as a mother and artist. The archivally-driven show features over 200 objects, including costume designs, photographs, drawings, garments, jewelry, artworks, and historic materials from the 1950s–1970s.

Keith Tyson: The Generative Universe

Hauser & Wirth DTLA Until 16 August 2026

British artist Keith Tyson’s first exhibition in Los Angeles since 2009 brings together paintings, sculptures, drawings, and mixed media works spanning the past three decades, while making a powerful case for the universe as a single generative system: a constantly shifting, causal network in which forms arise, transform, and dissolve. Tyson, who originally trained as an engineer, was an early practitioner of generative art, and this series showcases chemical reactions and fluid dynamics that create their own swirling, unpredictable imagery, and his ongoing Still Life series, where he reimagines the genre through shifting scientific, mathematical, and art historical frameworks.

California Light and Space (The 21st Century Version)

David Zwirner 4 June until 1 August 2026

Organized by Helen Molesworth, this group exhibit features an A-list curation of works by artists who make up the fabric of the city’s vibrant and diverse arts scene while showcasing the West Coast terroir of Los Angeles. Expect a range of mediums that depict the light and space movement from the 1960s and 1970s, in its current modern-day form, from the San Gabriel Mountains to the Pacific Ocean during the ‘magic hour’. The line-up of talent includes Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Sonia Boyajian, Noah Davis, rafa esparza, Jennifer Guidi, Lauren Halsey, EJ Hill, Thomas Houseago, Manuel López, Rodney McMillian, Mr. Wash, Catherine Opie, Hilary Pecis, Lari Pittman, Jason Rhoades, Cauleen Smith, and Lily Stockman

Lauren Halsley’s sculpture garden

South Central LA, permanent

Artist Lauren Halsey’s public sculpture park and garden in South Central LA is now open to the public. Architecture studio Current Interests, led by Mira Henry and Matthew Au, served as the architectural collaborators on the project. Entitled sister dreamer lauren halsey’s architectural ode to tha surge n splurge of south central los angeles, the project will serve as a living shrine and tribute to the neighborhood that Halsey and her family have called home for several generations, with dedicated space for a full slate of programming led by Halsey's Summaeverythang Community Center.

Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind

The Broad from 23 May until 11 October 2026

Yoko Ono, the visionary artist, musician, and activist whose work has shaped contemporary culture for more than seven decades, will be celebrated at her first solo museum exhibition in Southern California. Materials from the artist’s international campaigns for peace and displays of anti-war activism will also be on view, such as Acorn Event (1968) and Bed Peace (1969), projects done in collaboration with her late husband, John Lennon.

Organized in collaboration with Tate Modern, London, visitors will be invited to directly participate in many of Ono’s works that transform simple acts into expressions of peace and connection. The Broad’s olive trees on East West Bank Plaza will become Wish Trees for Los Angeles, a key installation (first realized in 1996 at Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Santa Monica), inviting audiences to tie their own wishes to the tree branches in a living expression of hope in the city.

Outsiders, Outcasts, Rebels + Weirdos: Punk Culture 1976–86 

The Skirball Cultural Center from 20 May until 6 September 2026

2026 marks fifty years since punk burst beyond New York City, a scene with a notable number of musicians of Jewish heritage. This exhibit highlights the stories of Jewish punks and fellow travelers, including Malcolm McLaren, plus members of the Ramones, the Circle Jerks, Bad Religion, Blondie, the Patti Smith Group, and more. By centering these narratives within the broader story of punk, the exhibition underscores how artists from many communities helped shape a movement that continues to challenge norms around identity, power, and belonging. Featuring more than 500 objects and pieces of ephemera, including clothing by fashion designers Vivienne Westwood.

A Queer Arcana: Art, Magic, and Spirit

Palm Springs Art Museum until Oct 2026

Take a drive out to the desert before the soaring summer temperatures kick-in, for a group exhibition bringing together 35 queer artists whose work spans more than 100 years (1909–2026). Collectively, they explore magic, esoteric spirituality, and occult knowledge as tools for survival, resistance, and world-building. Presented as part of the museum's Q+ Art initiative, curated by David Evans Frantz, Curator-at-Large of Q+ Art, this show explores how queer artists throughout time have turned to esoteric systems to cultivate community and imagine new social and spiritual frameworks.

Several Eternities in a Day: Form in the Age of Living Materials

Hammer Museum until 23 August 2026

This groundbreaking exhibition features 22 indigenous and brown artists using organic and living materials from cacao, tree bark, avocado, and lemon to examine and expose the ongoing political discourse.

Characterized by their diversity and internationality (50% of the artists are indigenous, while the other 50% consider themselves part of the brown cultures.) Some of the participating LA-based artists commissioned for their work include Raven Chacon - the first Native American to receive the Pulitzer Prize for music; Carmen Argote, Jackie Amezquita, Edgar Calel, Rose B. Simpson, among others.

Free and Queer: Black Californian Roots of Gay Liberation

California African American Museum, until 28 February 2027

This exhibit centers Los Angeles as a foundational site of Black queer cultural power, shaped through networks of resistance across neighborhoods, institutions, and grassroots communities. Curated by Susan D. Anderson, the exhibition foregrounds the role of Black queer cultural labor, bringing into focus a history that has often been left out of both mainstream LGBTQ+ narratives and dominant accounts of the civil rights movement. At a moment when queer history and representation are under renewed political pressure, the exhibition feels especially timely and urgent.

Destiny Is a Rose: The Eileen Harris Norton Collection

Hauser & Wirth Downtown Los Angeles 16 August 2026

Eileen Harris Norton has built an inspiring art collection and forged a philanthropic legacy by focusing upon the work of women artists, as well as artists of color and of her native California. Marking fifty years since Harris Norton made her first acquisition - a print purchased in 1976 directly from Los Angeles artist and African American arts advocate Ruth Waddy, ‘Destiny Is a Rose’ will present more than 80 works from Harris Norton’s holdings in an exhibition conceived to celebrate the connoisseurship and commitment to social justice.

Taking its title from a 1990 painting by Kerry James Marshall, ‘Destiny Is a Rose’ features paintings, sculptures and works on paper by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Catherine Opie, Yoshitomo Nara, Betye Saar, Lorna Simpson, and many others.

Five Centuries of Works on Paper: The Grunwald Center at 70

Hammer Museum

Part I: until 17 May 2026

Part II: June 7 – October 25, 2026

The Hammer Museum at UCLA is presenting a two-part exhibition celebrating the 70th anniversary of the UCLA Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts. With more than 45,000 prints, drawings, photographs, and artist’s books, the center’s collection of works on paper is among the most significant in the United States. Part One, features nearly 100 works reflecting the breadth of the collection, from the Renaissance to present day, including works by Albrecht Dürer, Rembrandt van Rijn, Vassily Kandinsky, Käthe Kollwitz, Ansel Adams, Elizabeth Catlett, Corita Kent, Bridget Riley, Ed Ruscha, and Vija Celmins.

The Art of the Album – The Photography of Danny Clinch

Wrensilva on Melrose Ave. until Spring 2026

For a completely immersive experience, Wrensilva LA Listening Studio on Melrose has launched a photo and listening installation with more than three decades of music culture and lifestyle photography by Danny Clinch. This installation brings iconic images together with the album covers they helped define, plus the vinyl itself, played on a Wrensilva record console. It’s a rare chance to stand inside the relationship between image, artist, and record. Featured artists include 2Pac, Johnny Cash, Foo Fighters, Patti Smith, Bruce Springsteen, Eddie Vedder, and more, that reveal living documents of artists in their element, images that become inseparable from the songs, the albums, and the eras they helped shape.

The AIDS Monument 

West Hollywood Park, permanent

Jaws: The Exhibition

The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures until 26 July 2026

For a final end-of-the-summer fling, Jaws: The Exhibition - in the Marilyn and Jeffrey Katzenberg Gallery, will be the largest presentation ever mounted for the Oscar® winning Steven Spielberg classic and feature scene breakdowns, interactive experiences, behind-the-scenes stories, and some 200 original objects, many never before put on public display. And, yes, it’s still terrifying 50-years later.

Big Art. Bigger Dreams.

Downtown LA, until 2028

DTLA Alliance, has partnered with Street Art for Mankind (SAM) and the City of Los Angeles to create a public art museum launching in real time starting with three massive murals by acclaimed LA-based artists. With support from the Coca-Cola Company, a total of 12 large-scale works will be created that will reimagine downtown’s skyline and streetscape by 2028 when the city is set to host the Olympic Games.

Each mural celebrates global values of sustainability, education, and women’s empowerment, turning walls into landmarks. David Flores is creating a massive, vibrant mural on the Los Angeles Athletic Club (LAAC) depicting a skateboarding scene, Emily Ding is bringing to life a powerful and elegant mural of two women walking arm-in-arm on the Figueroa Eight while Shamsia Hassani is crafting a poetic triptych on The Bloc.

Intuit Dome

Inglewood, permanent

One of the most exciting art collections to hit Los Angeles can be found at the new home for the LA Clippers in Inglewood. The cutting-edge sports venue recently unveiled the monumental, site-specific, outdoor artworks commissioned for the Intuit Dome which opens to the public this August. The $11 million public art collection features a collection of globally recognised artists, selected by Ruth Berson, former deputy director of curatorial affairs at SFMOMA, who have deep ties to Los Angeles and intertwine their artistic talents with sports.

Glenn Kaino’s massive sculpture Sails, made of painted steel and wood looms in the form of the clipper ships that connected the world via the ocean’s trade routes. In this ship, basketball is the cultural wind that can connect us all.

Michael Massenburg’s mural of printed porcelain enamel on steel panel features figures of basketball, tennis, and soccer players, singers, musicians, and dancers, titled Cultural Playground expresses the artist’s belief that 'the two most profound things that unite people are the arts and sports.'

Jennifer Steinkamp’s digital artwork Swoosh, uses the entire surface of the Intuit Dome, designed by the architectural firm AECOM, with five animations will transform the surface of the dome and light up the sky with geometric panels.

Patrick Martinez’s sculpture Same Boat uses a neon sign to create an image that reproduces a statement by the late Civil Rights leader Whitney M. Young: “We may have all come on different ships but we’re in the same boat now.”

On a wall adjacent to Same Boat, you will find Kyungmi Shin’s stained-glass mosaic with stainless steel tracery, Spring to Life. For this work, Shin drew inspiration from Centinela Springs, the now-vanished water source in South Los Angeles that once supported the Tongva people and the land they cultivated. (If you would like to see more of Shin’s work, the artist has a solo exhibition at Craft Contemporary until 8, September 2024.)

The Dome opening features an exhibition of photographs by Catherine Opie (on loan from MOCA) evoking the experience of community. “We designed Intuit Dome to be a place that brings people together,” said Gillian Zucker, CEO of Halo Sports & Entertainment. “When it came to our public art, we wanted to deliver a collection that is as compelling to people well versed in art as it is to a novice viewer. We are eager to make these unique works, from these amazing artists, available to everyone.”

Mineo Mizuno: Homage to Nature

The Huntington, Pasadena, until 25 May 2029

The Huntington holds a library with British medieval manuscripts, including the 15th-century Ellesmere tome of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales; 16 themed gardens with more than 83,000 living plants; an art museum and more.

In the main garden area on the vast grounds, Mineo Mizuno’s sculpture celebrates the beauty of wood in its natural state and emphasises its potential as a reusable and renewable resource. This site-specific work explores the fragility of the Earth’s ecosystem, as well as the destruction of the forest and its potential for regeneration.

Now open at Hauser & Wirth Paris, artist Nicole Eisenman’s exhibition ‘with, and, of, on Sculpture’ explores the varied ways in which she intertwines painting and sculpture. This is her first retrospective at this location, which showcases works from 2019 through to present, delving into her stand alone technique and foundational inspiration behind certain pieces from politics to ABBA.

Nicole Eisenman presents ‘with, and, of, on Sculpture’

Sitting distinctly between the title of painter and sculptor, Eisenman feels that sculpture can be also two dimensional saying, ‘A line is sculptural, the way it floats in space on a white page. You’re looking at the representation of a dimension and it can be perceived as either two or three dimensional.’

Upon entering the ground floor of the exhibition space, each piece of work foretells the next. Two figures from Eisenman’s sculptural installation titled Procession (2019) take centre stage, while her latest multi-layered painting Archangel (The Visitors) (2024) hangs at the heart of the exhibition. This painting, somewhat comically, depicts an imagined exhibition featuring fictional sculptures.

The Visitors takes reference from John Heartfield and Rudolf Schlichter’s Prussian Archangel (1920), which featured a ‘pig-headed military figure’ which was first exhibited in Berlin in 1920. The work's title The Visitors refers to ABBA's 1981 single with the same name, which is about the persecution of those who challenge politics.

Downstairs features the Perpetual Motion Machine (2019), while G*d-cat in Drawing for Procession (2018) is a stand alone piece on the upper floor. Head with Slaband Foot (2024) incorporates ‘a plaster slab with an intaglio plate’ which blends its two-dimensional image with a three-dimensional structure. Eisenman is not afraid to get visitors to speculate and weave their own narrative through her wide use of mixed-media and historical connotations.

Nicole Eisenman’s exhibition ‘with, and, of, on Sculpture’ is on display at Hauser and Wirth Paris until 21 September 2024 hauserwirth.com

In 1997, the late German-born Swiss artist Dieter Roth installed a bar as part of his first exhibition for the Hauser & Wirth gallery in Zürich, Switzerland. Fully functional, it was also a performative piece in its own right, drawing visitors into the installation by recording and archiving their conversations. Since then, iterations of the original bar have popped up around the world, united by their tendency to weave site-specific materials into their design.

Now, artist Oddur Roth, Dieter’s grandson, is nodding to this history with a newly rethought Roth Bar, now open at Hauser & Wirth Somerset to mark the gallery’s tenth anniversary. Artist-in-residence Roth stays faithful to the original concept by using salvaged objects and materials in the composition. ‘The challenge with this is ensuring you respect the things that are already there,’ says Roth. ‘You don’t want to put in something that hogs all the attention. It has to be natural. The sculpture has to grow spontaneously and organically within the confines of the building it is installed in.’

Roth, who has been living in Somerset since the start of the year, drew on an eclectic array of materials for his design, frequenting local flea markets and reclamation yards. ‘These places are full of things that, at some point, were very valuable to someone, and that’s how they managed to escape being a kind of garbage. You bring these objects together, and use them as a base for painting, and then the object becomes irrelevant. But when you bring in people, they immediately make a connection to some of the objects.’

By imbuing these objects with both an aestheticism and a different functionality, Roth adds an emotionality to an interactive design. Not quite an installation, not quite a social space, yet ultimately, somewhere people will be keen to spend time, Roth hopes. ‘The objects you see are things you might know from childhood or have had in your home. It gives it a comfortable atmosphere, inviting you to stay and lose track of time. And then the boundary between what is and isn’t art becomes unclear. Can I touch this or not? It raises a lot of questions, like what you are and how things around you function; it’s not just a straight line through life.’ 

Roth Bar opened 25 May 2024 at the Threshing Barn at Hauser & Wirth Somerset, UK

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A version of this article appears in the June 2024 Travel Issue of Wallpaper*, available in print, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

‘Present Tense’, the group show currently on at Hauser & Wirth Somerset (until 28 April 2024), is concerned with what’s happening in art right now. Its title tells you as much, as do the artists, whose work engages with the most pressing social issues facing the UK today – from biases around gender, race and sexuality to the corrosive effects of capitalism and technology, and individual loneliness. 

But while the show is focused on the present, it also asks a specific question about the future. Namely, who will be the next big names in British art? 

‘Present Tense’ at Hauser & Wirth Somerset: the UK’s next generation

For ‘Present Tense’, Hauser & Wirth has gone outside its roster to select 23 talents whom it believes to be ‘the next generation of artists living and working in the UK’. Most of these creatives are under 40 and are already considered some of the country’s most exciting emerging talents. Names like Gray Wielebinski, who had a solo show at ICA last year, and Shawanda Corbett, who recently showed at Tate Britain. Or George Rouy with his stop-in-your-tracks paintings of hazy, vibrating figures, and Ania Hobson with her moody and expressive figurative paintings. 

The show is a panoply of artists you have already heard of or, if you haven’t, you will be glad you learned about by the time you left. If the main draw of group shows is to see a diverse range of talent under one roof, then ‘Present Tense’ doesn’t disappoint. As the show’s curator, Isabella Bornholt, writes over email, the aim of the show was to offer a glimpse into what’s happening in UK art now, rather than a comprehensive overview. 

‘The goal was not to find artists that define the next generation of UK art, instead we were hoping to champion and spotlight a range of exciting examples of the next generation of artists working in the UK today. The selection process was collaborative with the wider Hauser & Wirth team and additional gallerists we have partnered with. The exhibition developed into a far more dynamic and stimulating showcase than I could have ever anticipated, largely due to the passion and enthusiasm from all the artists, many of which created entirely new works for the show.’

Of the many notable names there’s Ebun Sodipo, whose silver-backed collages are made for ‘Black-trans people of the future’, and Shaqúelle Whyte, who enlivens everyday scenes with his loosely rendered brushstokes and vibrant colour palette. Emanuel de Carvalho paints cinematic scenes in a steely colour palette. Meanwhile, Lydia Blakeley reinterprets the world she photographs on her phone into beachy-coloured paintings and sculptures that reveal the false promises of commercialism. 

It is interesting to note that almost all of the artists in ‘Present Tense’ are painters or sculptors, with only one video work on display. In the exhibition notes, Hauser & Wirth comments that this prevalence of more traditional art forms reveals an increasing fascination among today’s artists with craft; and it’s not much of a stretch to see how our tech-saturated reality could create a new appreciation for the physicality of painting and sculptures.

If ‘Present Tense’ foreshadows what’s to come in the UK art scene, then we can expect to see more artwork that marries an engagement with conceptual ideas and a demonstration of technical prowess. And if that means more work from the likes of Ella Walker, who uses traditional fresco techniques to create unconventional representations of femininity, or Sang Woo Kim, who creates a ‘visual skin composed of nostalgia and recollections’ in his paintings as a way to understand his experience as a first-generation immigrant, then that’s good news. 

As with all group shows, there is a natural impulse with ‘Present Tense’ to scour the works for some common theme, to create a unified narrative about the concerns and preoccupations of artists working in the nation today. To do so, though, feels like a bit of a disservice, since what make the show exciting is the variety of the works on display and the singular way each artist engages with what is happening in the world around them.

If, however, there’s any common thread between the works on display, it’s that they are all interrogating the messy and often fallacious ways we relate to each other. If the questions ‘how do I understand you?’ and ‘how do you understand me?’ are being asked here, the answer from each of the 23 artists seems to be ‘not very well’. 

But that hardly means the mood of ‘Present Tense’ is bleak; if anything, it’s optimistic. As Bornholt says, ‘the show is definitely hopeful. Things can be pretty bleak at the moment, especially for young people, but art has always had the ability to transcend the everyday and provide glimmers of hope.’ 

The future is hard to predict, but chances are, many of the names here will continue to make an impact on UK art. I ask Bornholt to fast-forward 50 years into the future and imagine what someone flipping through the ‘Present Tense’ catalogue might think. ‘I had a conversation with Clementine Keith-Roach recently about how only in hindsight can you fully comprehend the current “present”,’ she says. ‘I know all the artists in “Present Tense” are very much here to stay and will go on to achieve great things. I hope people look back on this show as an exciting moment, showcasing artists that I am sure will carry different and unexpected contexts in the future.’ 

'Present Tense' is on at Hauser & Wirth Somerset until 28 April 2024

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Cindy Sherman has long been fascinated with the concept of a persona, dismantling archetypes with unflinching portraits. Evocations of familiar faces – Madonna with child, ageing socialites, film stars – become unfamiliar through Sherman’s lens, distorted with props, filters and digital manipulations.

Cindy Sherman at Hauser & Wirth New York

It is this latter method to which Sherman has returned for a new exhibition at Hauser & Wirth New York, with 30 new works playfully reconstructing the parameters of the face. Sherman uses her own features for the puzzle-like works, collaging the elements of her face to create brand-new characters. By inhabiting the role of both subject and artist, Sherman shifts the dynamic away from the traditional relationship with the sitter, sidestepping its discomfiting voyeurism.

In the clean works – Sherman has stripped back all external detailing, letting the heads take centre stage – the fictional subjects adopt the familiar expression of a sitter, their quiet endurance emphasised by the clearly inhuman contours of their faces. Sherman has left in the marks of collage, with the distortions revealing the hand-cutting and colouring of her methods, in a nod to the complicated nature of identity and the disparity between who we are and how we present ourselves. 

Like her use of make-up, prosthetics and wigs, the digital manipulations here create new characters out of familiar forms – in this case her own – to illustrate the layers that go into an identity, the unsettling results of which are explored in these new works. 

‘Cindy Sherman’, at Hauser & Wirth New York, from 18 January – 16 March 2024

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The Laplace story begins in 2004, when the Swiss art collector Ursula Hauser wanted to turn the stables of her Mallorca residence into guesthouses. Her New York architect, Annabelle Selldorf, was overbooked. One of Selldorf’s project managers, Luis Laplace, asked to do it independently, prodded by his life partner, Christophe Comoy. The move was right; the project sparked an enduring relationship with the client and the creation of the Laplace architecture agency, headed by Laplace and Comoy. 

The two met at a Christmas party in Manhattan in 2001. The former was an architect from Argentina, the latter a French lawyer preparing for Columbia Business School. Separately they were talented, but together they were unstoppable. ‘My model was Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé,’ says Comoy.

Laplace: the practice's origins

Since their first projects were in Europe, they left New York in 2004 to establish their agency in Paris. Laplace, who didn’t speak French, recalls: ‘When we arrived, I thought – what a terrible mistake.’ But he absorbed the best of the city and adapted. ‘There’s enormous respect for artisans here. On weekends, I visited antiques dealers and spent hours while they told me stories about their wares.’ 

Laplace has since developed a reputation for masterful renovations of historical buildings. This autumn, the agency unveiled Hauser & Wirth Paris, the latest in a string of locations it has restored for the global art gallery, including the London flagship, an 18th-century farmhouse in Somerset, and an art centre in Menorca. Marc Payot, Hauser & Wirth’s President, says, ‘Luis Laplace is very strong at turning an existing building into a great space for art, but keeping the spirit.’ 

Designing Hauser & Wirth Paris

The Paris gallery, in an 1877 hôtel particulier near the Champs-Elysées, confirms his skill. The four-story property’s neoclassical façade survived the years, but the interior had been chopped up into smaller rooms. Removing a mezzanine, non-supporting walls, and a central staircase, Laplace created a wow-worthy six-metre-high ground-floor exhibition space. He identified with the sculptor Eduardo Chillida (whose museum, in a 16th-century Spanish farmhouse, he renovated in 2019). ‘Chillida worked his ceramics with mass and emptiness – the space that remains. Ours was the same approach. There was a lot of mass.’

For circulation, he annexed a staircase that belonged to a neighbouring building. British artist Martin Creed painted the stairwell in thick parallel stripes, in colours suggested by Laplace to reflect Parisian codes: gold on the ceiling like gilding, black on the walls to echo the wrought iron railing.

The Laplace agency works almost exclusively for clients in the art world, whether sellers, collectors, or artists (such as Cindy Sherman, for whom they renovated a Paris pied-à-terre). A majority of their projects are residential. One of the first things they do is see a client’s art collection, exploring how to integrate it into the final result. In Europe, they regularly come across collectors of museum-quality pieces living in stately homes that have been disfigured over the years. Comoy says: ‘We explain to clients that it’s in their interest, their art de vivre, to think about the project globally: architecture, interior, design, and art.’

Laplace’s style is eclectic and not necessarily recognisable, aside from a complexity of colour combinations and an abundance of objects – a typical project might have 10,000 references. He decorates with a mix of vintage pieces and original furniture of his own design, either one-off pieces or else extremely limited series. At times, the agency collaborates with contemporary artists, such as Rashid Johnson, who created a mosaic floor for the Mount St. Restaurant in London. Laplace loves helping artists adapt their work to the technical constraints of his profession. ‘Architects can be authoritarian, and make artists feel like they’re boxed into a corner,’ he says. ‘I speak their language.’ Comoy concurs: ‘Luis is hypersensitive and so are artists, so they get along well.’

Laplace: current works

Currently, Laplace is designing a residential swimming pool with a painted bottom by artist Mary Heilmann. And though he says he didn’t grow up in an artistic family, his mother’s pool in Buenos Aires had a bottom painted by his grandfather, in a motif he later realised was copied from a Jean Arp painting. (The same grandfather opened one of the city’s first civilian airports, and secretly flew several targets of the military junta to safety.) Laplace’s earliest memory of noticing contemporary art was around age 13, when he used to wait hours for his mother to pick him up after school, and passed the time at a nearby bookstore. One day, he was struck by a photo in a book about Robert Mapplethorpe, of an elderly woman with a phallus under her arm. It was Louise Bourgeois. ‘I thought: she could be my grandmother!’ 

Now his collection of art books undoubtedly surpasses that of his childhood libreria. When they’re not travelling, Laplace and Comoy spend Saturdays in bookstores and Sundays scouring the Saint-Ouen flea market for furniture and objects. For the past 15 years, they have lived and worked on Paris’s elegant Place Saint-Georges, in a 19th-century apartment they rent above the perpetually-expanding offices of their agency. (Their staff numbers around 50 employees.)  

Both their private and professional spaces are overflowing with treasures: a three-legged Jean Touret lamp; a Carlo Scarpa sofa; a Laplace burl wood bar cabinet; artworks by Paul McCarthy, Pipilotti Rist, and Roni Horn; pre-war Lalique vases; a Jacques Adnet vellum lamp that belonged to Andy Warhol; a Rick Owens chair; an antique butcher’s cleaver; several 1960s M. Vuillermoz polyhedron bar cabinets (they buy and restore every one they come across); and much, much more. ‘We’re not minimalists,’ notes Laplace dryly. Many of these pieces will end up in clients’ homes—though the duo would prefer not to part with their incredible selection of ceramics. 

Recently, they rented a space nearby for Laplace to work on his own ceramics. They are also spreading their wings to the Left Bank, with the purchase of L’Hôtel Samuel Bernard, an 18th-century hôtel particulier behind the Maison Deyrolle taxidermy shop. The once-magnificent mansion had been turned into offices, all the decorative elements and noble materials removed. They plan to transform it into a ‘lieu de vie’ for showing art and design, and hosting collaborations and dinners. ‘We will recreate a universe, a contemporary vision of the 18th century,’ says Comoy. It seems the building was just waiting for them to come along. 

luislaplace.com

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A version of this article appears in the February 2024 issue of Wallpaper* – dedicated to the Wallpaper* Design Awards 2024 – available in print, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

Hauser & Wirth opened 15 galleries around the world before finally making its debut in Paris this month, the same weekend that collectors started flooding into town for the second edition of Paris+ par Art Basel.

The gallery took years to open, explains Hauser & Wirth President Marc Payot, because everything had to be just right. “We don’t have satellite galleries. They’re always specific to the actual place. Here it must feel like a French gallery, which is very different from New York or London.”

One major challenge was finding a suitable location, which ended up being a four-storey neoclassical building with arched windows and Corinthian pilasters, steps from the Champs-Elysées. The Paris-based studio Laplace, a frequent collaborator of the gallery, totally reconfigured the interior, which had been divided up as a radio studio. They removed a central staircase, non-structural walls, and a mezzanine, creating six metres of height in the ground-floor gallery.

“We tried to recreate a Parisian space, using Parisian codes,” says Luis Laplace. Rather than concrete, he installed oak flooring in a clean, contemporary version of parquet de Versailles. Simple baseboards and mouldings line the walls and ceilings. In the entrance, the walls are made of local Croix-Huyart limestone.

Laplace also annexed a decrepit spiral stairway that had belonged to the neighbouring building, restoring the wrought iron railing and replacing the old marble steps with wood. British artist Martin Creed painted black parallel stripes on the walls and gold ones on the ceilings, so now the stairwell dazzles.

Two large exhibition rooms are the backdrop for a stunning inaugural show of new works by Los Angeles artist Henry Taylor (who also has a career survey running at the Whitney Museum of American Art). A Southern California native, Taylor received his MFA at the California Institute of the Arts. He opted to create figurative art at a time when it had fallen out of vogue, a choice that held his career back for a long time.

As a young man, Taylor worked for 10 years as a night orderly at a psychiatric hospital, and painted portraits of some of the patients. “These were the most mentally distressed people you can imagine” says New York curator Laura Hoptman, a friend of the artist who had flown to Paris for the Hauser & Wirth opening. She says that Taylor’s deep empathy was undoubtedly shaped by his experience at the hospital.

You can see that humanity in his colourful acrylic paintings, many of the subjects placed eye-to-eye with the viewer. Among them, actor/dancer Ben Vereen sits on a chair at the beach, a stylised Michelle Obama wears black wings, and a nude Josephine Baker kneels in front of the Louvre, the British Museum, and a ship.

A painter of people, Taylor rejects the title of portraitist, and often employs loose, modernist techniques. Hoptman says he has bigger ambitions: to let the viewer know “I’m part of art history…You can be genuine and also be highly, highly, highly cultured.” One work, of four figures reclining on the grass, is a wink to Edouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe. Taylor’s sculptures, assemblages of objects such as bleach bottles and floor mops, also contain artistic allusions. A tall, solitary tree with an afro-like crown has actual hair on top, a nod to the artist David Hammons’ use of hair swept up from the floors of African American barbershops.

This is Taylor’s first show in France, where he is still little-known (despite having some of his portraits embroidered on the clothing at Pharrell Williams’ menswear show for Louis Vuitton last spring). He spent two months in Paris this summer, creating more than half the works on display. A portrait of his three-year old daughter appears in the background of a self-portrait painted on his 65 th birthday. He is seated alone, in front of a cake, obviously missing her.

Preferring to avoid the crowds, Taylor made himself scarce during the show’s opening events. But a keen observer might have spotted him strolling the streets of Paris not far from the new gallery. As Marc Payot says, “The importance of this place—besides the obvious of Paris being Paris—is that artists want to be here. Their excitement to be here, and show in this gallery, is more than in any other space we have.”

‘Henry Taylor. From Sugar to Shit’ is on view through Sunday 7 January 2024

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The image of 9/11 is viscerally stamped into collective memory. Media photographs of planes impacting, buildings collapsing, and bodies falling have been so widely proliferated that those who weren’t in New York may feel as though they saw the attack firsthand. Avery Singer’s ‘Free Fall’ at Hauser & Wirth London, coinciding with Frieze London 2023, offers a new perspective. The installation tangles together the artist’s childhood memories of the Twin Towers, in which her mother worked; her own trauma following the attack; and the survivors made famous through widely distributed press images. 

Both Hauser & Wirth’s Saville Row galleries have been turned, floor to ceiling, into office spaces. One gallery houses a long corridor that winds into the main room; the other, an imposing wall of elevators. The windows are panelled to match those of the towers, with 18in gaps meant to combat vertigo. ‘Corporate aesthetic in the last few decades hasn’t changed that much. It’s all beige, neutral tones,’ says the artist. ‘It’s oppressive and ugly but also calming.’

‘Avery Singer: Free Fall’ at Hauser & Wirth London

This serene space is punctured by moments of horror. The floor of one gallery is covered with shredded paper. A small painting shows a close-up pepper spray can, referencing the artist’s fear of walking through the streets at night. ‘I was seeing people get into fights, beat each other up and chase each other down,’ she says. ‘It was all anyone talked about for weeks. New York felt really injured but also very united.’ 

Another painting depicts a giant disembodied hand, with protruding flesh and bone. ‘My best friend, months later, told me that when she was finally allowed to go home, she went to her room and someone’s hand was on her windowsill,’ she says. ‘She didn’t know what to do, who to tell. We’re so desensitised to hyperreal violence on screen, but when we actually see it, it becomes something else.’ 

The exhibition includes portraits created from gaming avatars, which are digitally altered and applied to canvas using an intricate technique that creates a textureless surface onto which the image is projected. Marcy Borders, the ‘dust lady’ (so called due to the shot of her fleeing the Towers covered in ash and dust), is shown opposite Stan Honda, who photographed her. Singer has also created a portrait of Rachel Uchitel, who was recorded after 9/11 with a flier for her missing fiancé. Both women struggled with addiction in the following years, the former to drugs and alcohol, the latter to love. ‘The two of them had this loss and tragedy,’ says Singer. ‘How do you cope? How do you recover? I felt a kinship. They were women struggling with surviving something and then turning to addiction.’ 

For most people, 9/11 was seen through a distant lens. Singer brings viewers inside the buildings, adding reflections to the eyes of her avatars, who gaze at offices, computers, and cubicles. ‘It’s one of the last traumatic events in the Western world that happened before social media,’ says Singer. ‘Now mass shooters go on Facebook and livestream it.’

The artist lived in the financial district before the attack and has erected a fully functioning gallery bookstore in homage to her loved local shop that was destroyed. ‘It is very emotional for me,’ she considers. ‘For ten years I had panic attacks every time an airplane went overhead because I heard the first one hit the building. As more time has gone by, I can deal with it as subject matter. It’s not looking for closure, it’s just accepting things in life and moving forwards.’

‘Avery Singer: Free Fall’ takes place 10 October – 22 December 2023 at Hauser & Wirth, London

hauserwirth.com

Frieze London 2023 – bigger, better, longer than any Frieze before – sees the world’s cultural magpies descend on the city. As Frieze marks its 20th anniversary, it’s a big moment for the world’s most famous art fair, and one it is celebrating with a packed programme of events, spanning the established – El Anatsui, Frans Hals and Ai Weiwei lead the heavyweights at Frieze Masters – to the eclectic, such as Sprüth Magers’ presentation of a Hyun-Sook Song retrospective and White Cube’s Mona Hatoum exhibition. More than 160 galleries from 46 countries will come together from 11 – 15 October. 

The action extends far beyond the perimeters of the fair’s epicentre in Regent’s Park. Saatchi Yates art cabaret with Will St John at The Box; Berlin-based and Jamaican-born multimedia artist MJ Harper’s one-off performance at London’s Koko; and Avery Singer’s show at Hauser & Wirth coinciding with Frieze’s opening are just some of our Frieze Week highlights.

Frieze London 2023: what to see in the fair

Frieze Masters presents works from the last few centuries in a generous curation. Galleria Continua will focus on the years 1983 to 1999 in a presentation of Ai Weiwei’s works including his famous Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn and June, 1994. El Anatsui, whose 2023 Hyundai commission is concurrently opening at the Tate Turbine Hall, will showcase a 30-year career with a solo booth at Jack Shainman, while D’Lan Contemporary’s showing of Emily Kam Kngwarray’s paintings marks the first appearance of an Australian First Nations artist at Frieze Masters. Also not to be missed is Nigeria’s most important modernist, Ben Enwonwu, at Kó Gallery from Lagos.

Leading galleries are presenting a selection of group, solo and thematic shows. Look out for Sadie Coles HQ, which nods to the fair’s first edition in 2003 with works by artists who took part, including  John Currin and Sarah Lucas. Also feeling nostalgic is Pilar Corrias, whose solo exhibition by Margate-based artist Sophie Von Hellerman is inspired by Margate’s Dreamland. Immersive works, such as Julianknxx’s video presented by Edel Assanti, which coincides with his Barbican Curve commission, join bronze sculptures by Barbara Chase-Riboud at Hauser & Wirth. 

For Lisson Gallery, US-born artist Van Hanos is the focus, with paintings that draw from time spent in Vienna, while Pace Gallery is giving us a taster of 2024, with works by Paulina Olowska, Mao Yan, Yto Barrada, Kiki Kogelnik, and Robert Longo. At Nicola Vassell, a presentation of new paintings by Deborah Anzinger will examine the ways the artist works with ground cookshop charcoal, a fuel indigenous to her native Jamaica. In the Breguet booth, ‘Resisting Time’, curated by independent curator Somi Sim, will look at the concept of time through artists including Hanne Darboven and Julien Coignet. Marianne Boesky Gallery will showcase Danielle Mckinney’s first U.K. solo presentation, shining a light on her paintings of female figures, caught in moments of leisure.

To celebrate Frieze London’s 20 years, eight established artists have been invited to propose a solo exhibition from an emerging artist. For Tracey Emin, Margate-based Vanessa Raw’s paintings are a natural choice; for Olafur Eliasson, it is Fabian Knecht and his installation of pieces of clothing used as camouflage to protect Russian targets in Ukraine. Anthea Hamilton champions Carlos Villa’s 1980s body-print series, Wolfgang Tillmans’ new sculptures and silver gelatin prints by Mark Barker. Meanwhile, the Modern Institute is showcasing the work of artists Rachel Eulena Williams, Jim Lambie and Andrew Sim and more

Elsewhere, talks not to miss include Thomas J Price in conversation with Gus Casely-Hayford (director, V&A East), Arlene Shechet in conversation with Sheena Wagstaff, and Rachel Whiteread with art historian Briony Fer. Towards the end of the week, catch Maggi Hambling, Sarah Lucas and Louisa Buck and Mandy El Sayegh, Flavia Frigeri and Valerie Cassel Olive.

Frieze London 2023: what to see outside the fair

There’s a packed programme of shows, performances and talks taking place around London during Frieze. 

Listen: Art for Thought Coffee Cocktail evening 

Illycaffè’s collaboration with arts club The Cultivist is a fruitful one. A series of evening talks at the Michelin-starred Apricity will see experts lead the way on arts-based topics. Joey Lico, executive director of The Cultivist (and former director at the New York Foundation for the Arts and art advisor to the White House under the Obama administration) will advise ‘How to Build an Art House’ on 9 October, while curator at the Victoria & Albert Museum East, Dr Madeline Haddon, will discuss ‘Art Through the Ages’ on 23 October. Guests can relax, learn and sip on their coffee cocktails. 

Tickets available @ £40 per person from Eventbrite.co.uk

Listen: Ruinart x Talkart podcast at Serpentine Pavilion

Maison Ruinart and Serpentine have teamed up to explore the possibilities in contemporary art. This live TalkArt podcast recording, the first in a series, will see contemporary artist Eva Jospin and Talk Art Podcast hosts Russell Tovey and Robert Diament discuss Jospin’s inspirations behind Ruinart Carte Blanche Commission, Promenade(s).

Tickets available from Eventbrite.co.uk

See: Saatchi Yates

Catch Brooklyn-based artist Will St John chatting to journalist and photographer Marc C O’Flaherty on 9 October. See St John’s work while you are there, on show until 22 October.

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Do: Minor Attractions

Don’t miss this ‘non-fair’ of performance, music and nightlife, held across two weeks at two different London sites. 

minorattractions.com/Minor-Attractions

154 Contemporary African Art Fair

Held for the 11th year at Somerset House, this year’s exhibition will host over 60 international exhibitors, making it the largest show to date. 

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See Saatchi Yates and Will St. John kick off Frieze Week with an exhibition and cabaret

Saatchi Yates is marking the beginning of Frieze London 2023 with a celebration of its three year anniversary. To commemorate the the occasion, the space will host an exhibition with artist Will St. John, who created classically influenced portraits of New York’s drag queens and trans community through painting and sculpture. The gallery will be hosting a talk at 6:30 on Monday 9 th October which is open to the public and his eponymous exhibition itself will be running until 22nd October.

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Don't miss: Nanomuseum, a limited-edition collaboration between French jewelry house Dauphin and Serpentine Galleries, at Dover Street Market

Charlotte Dauphin and Hans Ulrich Obrist have worked together to create a series of pieces inspired by works of art.  

london.doverstreetmarket.com

Visit: Kaws' takeover of London’s Shreeji News

Gabriel Chipperfield, who transformed the newsagent’s in 2020, creating a salon and reading room and space for events and exhibitions, as well as a wide selection of magazines, let Kaws lead the way when it came to his residency

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Visit: Avant Arte at Matches

Avant Arte is taking over Matches townhouse at 5 Carlos Place, London, during Frieze, with the installation on display until 4 November. 

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Fall down the rabbit hole into Charlotte Colbert’s Frieze Week dreamland

‘Dreamland Sirens’, a London exhibition from Charlotte Colbert, is curated by Simon de Pury and LA-based gallery UTA Artist Space

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Don't miss: MJ Harper’s performance piece at London’s Koko 

Artist MJ Harper will premiere ‘Arias for a New World’ at Koko in London this Sunday, 15 October 2023

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See: Bronx-Based Artist Kenny Rivero's UK debut

The artist's first exhibition outside of the US and Mexico unites his paintings and drawings at Charles Moffett, No. 9 Cork Street, from 5 - 21 October.

https://charlesmoffett.com/artists/13-kenny-rivero/

See:  Yinka Ilori's piece created for member's club George for Frieze London

Yinka Ilori draws on his Nigerian heritage for the piece on show at George Club throughout Frieze. 

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Hospital Rooms and Hauser & Wirth have partnered once more for an annual auction to raise money for the arts and mental health charity. An accompanying exhibition, ‘Holding Space’, converts Hauser & Wirth’s London gallery into a fully sensory space encompassing light, sound and movement.  

Each hour, a sound recorded by South West London Recovery College with composer Alex Groves and the National Opera Studio, will ring throughout the space. Demonstrating new harmonic sounds created by a unique combination of humming, droning and vocalising, the performance will provide an emotive aural backdrop to works including Sutapa Biswas’ mural, originally created for Springfield University Hospital with patients in the OCD clinic.

It is a collaborative spirit also celebrated by Abbas Zahedi, whose magnetised sun created with and for patients in forensic services holds a kinetic interactive poetry piece inside, written by those who experienced mental health services. 

A ceiling installation by Richard Wentworth joins works by Rachael Champion and illuminated sculptures by Jonathan Trayte, while artists Alvin Kofi, Victoria Cantons, Valerie Asiimwe Amani, Giles Deacon, Richard Mark Rawlins and Katharine Lazenby have created vast beds and cushions for visitors to recline on.

Artwork by Martin Creed, Chantal Joffe, Allison Katz, Rashid Johnson, Julian Opie, Charles Gaines, Hurvin Anderson, Do Ho Suh and Caroline Walker are set to go under the hammer at September's auction, supported by Bonhams, with proceeds supporting Hospital Rooms’ projects in mental health hospitals, including the Children and Adolescent Service in Sandwell at Black Country Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust. 

The exhibition 'Holding Space' will take place at Hauser & Wirth London on 17 August - 12 September. The accompanying annual Hospital Rooms auction is supported by Bonhams and will take place at Bonhams, 101 New Bond Street on 12 September 2023

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Cindy Sherman is a dab hand at deconstructing herself. For four decades, the artist has moved through many transformations and transfigurations, using her own face and body as a proxy for society’s divided selves. She has mastered this to such a degree that many may not recognise the ‘real’ Cindy Sherman, only her many, captivating guises. 

Now, during Zurich Art Week 2023, she will take on another, harnessing digital tools that have formed a key facet of her practice since 2000. In the new works on view at Hauser & Wirth Zurich, Sherman has collaged parts of her own face through digital manipulation tools to piece together the identities of various characters. In physicality, the portraits are about Sherman, but in reference to society at large, they are about modernity and the many fractured selves that lurk within it. 

In these new works, there are no scenic backdrops, or mise-en-scène, and each uses limited props. A digital collaging technique – using black and white and colour photographs – is merged with other traditional modes of character transformation, such as make-up, wigs and costumes. 

The results are uncanny, amusing and borderline grotesque as Sherman’s sitters (which don’t technically exist) laugh, grimace or snarl in confusion in front of the camera. This act of digital warping, sampling and remodelling is reminiscent of Sherman’s previous work using physical prosthetics, such as History Portraits (1988) or Masks from the 1990s. Then, as now, the prosthetic machinations were left intentionally exposed, destroying any hope of illusion. 

Sherman photographed isolated parts of her body – her eyes, nose, lips, skin, hair, and ears – which are then cut, pasted and superimposed onto a foundational image. Some collaged elements are less obvious than others; the seams jarring with their subtlety. The cut-and-paste remixes in some are tangible, such as Untitled #631 (2010/2023) and Untitled #652 (2023), where Sherman remixes black and white and coloured fragments. 

The Zurich exhibition comes at something of a moment for Sherman, who is currently staging two museum shows: ‘Cindy Sherman – Tapestries’ at ARoS Aarhus Art Museum in Denmark, and ‘Cindy Sherman: Anti-Fashion’ at Staatsgalerie Stuttgart in Germany. 

Cindy Sherman's show will run at Hauser & Wirth Zurich, Limmatstrasse, 9 June – 16 September 2023. hauserwirth.com

Gary Simmons came to success in the recession of the early 1990s in what he thinks of as a window of market correction that left New York’s surviving galleries with empty walls waiting to be filled. This led to a series of commissions and shows including participation in the landmark group show ‘Black Male’, curated by Thelma Golden. In this moment of chance, Simmons and his peers grabbed what could have been a fleeting moment, and shone. 

‘It was a great opportunity and at the same time you also felt that you were unsure when it was going to end; you almost expected it to end, like the party's over,’ Simmons recalls as we sit to talk at Hauser & Wirth, London, where he has just opened a new show, ‘This Must Be the Place’. ‘So, these memorable moments and installations and statements, I think that is the difference between then and now; this was during moments of crisis, the Aids crisis, the financial crash, [and] different race issues going on with not only the politicians but also with police – there was a response from the artists on the walls.’

‘This Must Be the Place’ at Hauser and Wirth’s London comes ahead of Simmons’ first survey ‘Public Enemy’, opening at MCA Chicago in June 2023. The artist is on buoyant form as he looks both back at his career and forward to this career milestone, which will feature iconic works such as The Black Ark and Garden of Hate. 

The London exhibition, which features a series of paintings and his first large sculptural works, contains all the motifs we would expect from Simmons. We see a layered and scraped-back painting featuring a blurred ‘Bosko’, the racist 1930s Looney Tunes character, a sculpture of the famous crows from Dumbo and a series of black and white stars, blurred by hand. This process of erasure evokes lost histories in tandem with the artist’s desire to somehow memorialise the existence of these tropes, and in turn, shed light on the issues of today’s cultural landscape. 

‘I don't want people to not remember or idealise moments. I think that we have a way, whether it's a cartoon or an event, of treating it; if it was good then we sort of even make it bigger than it was, if it was bad, we make it worse than it was. I guess the nature of memory is to abstract it and it never gets fixed… We take a photograph to preserve a moment, but that's a distortion of that moment…Disney and cartoons are like that. I don't want them to be forgotten for their menace. I think it's important to know that those things were once embedded into something that presented itself as one thing, but it has this undertone, this undercurrent.’

Simmons describes these elements of the cultural landscape as ghosts haunting the common consciousness and captures them in canvas form. ‘Some of the backgrounds take such a long time to develop and I never really know truly where they're going,’ Simmons explains. ‘It just keeps going and then the painting just tells me when it's ready for what sits on top of it. It creates this sense of depth. I think that the haunting comes in when those colours flash as those moments pop out.’

Sometimes these flashes are not tropes but stars; be they shooting stars, star showers or a lone black or white star, they sum up the space between the magical and the tragic, flaming out as they cross the sky. Flanked by the birds evoking Jim Crow and Hitchcock’s The Birds, these paintings show an optimistic side to this radical artist even when cohabiting with more sinister elements of history. 

Gary Simmons, ‘This Must Be the Place’, until 29 July 2023, Hauser & Wirth London. hauserwirth.com

Christina Quarles keeps a folder filled with text documents on her computer desktop: titled ‘thots’, it contains musings on her artistic practice and life. Unpolished and not meant for other eyes, the texts aren’t fully formulated artist statements, but neither are they as personal as a diary. ‘I had a professor who talked about how we need to update drafts about our position in the world,’ the Chicago-born, Los Angeles-raised and -based artist explains. ‘It’s not something that you write once and never look at again; it’s an ongoing drafting process because the world around you changes.’ These thots might never be read by anyone else, but they help Quarles make sense of her life and work within the rest of the world, not unlike her process of creating – puns and all.

Working with painting, drawing, and installation, Quarles’ primary subject is the figure. But rather than focusing on the representation of the human body itself, she aims to show what it feels like to exist within a body. Specifically, ‘I use the figure as a way of describing an experience of embodiment,’ she says when we meet in Berlin for the opening of her solo exhibition, 'Collapsed Time' at Hamburger Bahnhof. The results are canvases bursting with what at first appear to be intertwined or outstretched bodies, but upon longer gazes reveal themselves to be fragments and disjointed limbs created with brushstrokes so visceral they feel as if they’re moving. One head might give way to three arms, with a foot or two popping up elsewhere.

Her chosen colour palette is no less unrealistic, with bodies rendered in shade-shifting rainbows of purples, greens, pinks, oranges, and more. Intertwined with her expressive, gestural strokes she creates almost clinically rendered geometric patterns: at an intuitively chosen point when creating a new work, Quarles stops painting, photographs the piece, and then digitally manipulates it to create a pattern. Additionally, some patterns are based on found materials, such as fabrics found in thrift shops or art historical references; in Berlin, she tells me the most recent computerised pattern she’s been developing is based on a photograph of a work by Olafur Eliasson that she saw in a Frieze LA newsletter. From the computer, she prints vinyl stencils, sticks them to the canvas, paints the pattern, and then removes the stencils to reveal the raw canvas and, in turn, the final piece.

This approach to figuration is Quarles’ way of working through what she was unable to find the language for in writing. During her undergraduate degree, she studied philosophy and wrote a critical race theory thesis about a multiracial identity position – a topic she’d been acutely aware of and interested in, albeit without knowing the terminology, since she was a child. Born to a Black father and white mother, Quarles has relatively light and freckled skin. When kids on the playground asked where she was from or about her family (a common question because ‘in Los Angeles, almost everybody is from somewhere else’, she notes), they’d accuse her of lying when she said she was half Black. ‘From an early age, I was like, “There’s something that’s not quite adding up with these identity categories,”’ she remembers. ‘I was very curious about what it means to have that feeling of loneliness and isolation from not sharing the way that I felt with the way that people saw me.’

After working through what she could with written language in college, she knew she was fated to explore such topics of identity through art – the field she also knew she ultimately wanted to work in, as she had developed a serious commitment to drawing and painting throughout her adolescence. 

Quarles attended her first live figure drawing class at the age of 12 (an older cousin once gave her art lessons as a birthday gift), and she attended a special high school for the arts in LA. ‘Because I had gone to an arts high school, I felt like I understood a lot of technique, but I didn’t have any good ideas I wanted to make paintings about,’ she recalls. So, after using ‘language to figure out where I wanted to go’ in undergrad, she attended Yale’s MFA programme ‘to really think about ideas [through art]’. There she began using drawing and painting to explore the ‘idea of being embodied rather than looking at a body’ and ‘to point to multiply situated identities –identities that are lacking legibility due to an excess of identity rather than a lack of it.’ While language had proven to be a ‘very difficult [medium] to explore this idea of simultaneity in an eloquent way’, visually translating these ideas resulted in powerful, visual figurative abstractions. 

At first, Quarles’ paintings incorporated text, but she soon left words behind. ‘I found that there was too much of a temptation for the viewer to latch onto the text as the direct description or solution to the imagery,’ she has previously said. Her drawings, however, still use words: ‘I think that since the drawings are made entirely of lines produced with a pen, the text can be more integrated into the visuals and not necessarily read as descriptive captions.’ 

Yet even without words her paintings still incorporate puns and double entendre; they are just rendered visually instead of textually. In works such as An Absence the Size of Yew (2019) or Vulgar Moon (2016), a floral pattern opens multiple lines of thought. It could represent a sprawling landscape as well as a bedsheet or a tablecloth within a domestic space. In SLICK (2022), a polka-dotted deep-purple plane appears at once like a starry night sky and a club’s darkened disco-ball-illuminated wall. Whether the figures are setting up a picnic blanket or in bed, roaming together beneath the stars or dancing intimately, is purposefully left ambiguous. 

Most recently, Quarles has been experimenting with a new form: painting with acrylics on watercolour paper. The new works, which will make their debut next month in a major solo show at Hauser & Wirth’s Menorca location, tackle similar subject matter but posed a new challenge through their size. The figures within her paintings are made within the reach of her shoulder rotation, and those within her drawings are made according to the movements of her wrist. But these new works are on ‘a scale that doesn’t work well with any part of my body’, she notes with both a laugh and a slight sense of trepidation. At the same time, she acknowledges that there’s no way to move forward without growth and reassessment, be it through experimenting with new forms, redrafting an artist statement, or further learning –an important part of any practice that will also be explored in Menorca through an Education Lab with events and workshops for the local community. As Quarles says, ‘A studio practice is a continuum that’s always being interrupted and those interruptions are important and generative.’

Christina Quarles: 'Collapsed Time', is on view at Hamburger Bahnhof until 17 September 2023. smb.museum

Quarles' exhibition at Hauser & Wirth Menorca runs from 17 June - 29 October 2023. hauserwirth.com

Phyllida Barlow, one of the most extraordinary forces in British sculpture and arts education, has died aged 78. 

During her 60-year career, Barlow reshaped British sculpture as it was known. Monumental yet anti-monumental, her ability to draw directly from her surroundings and transform humble into entirely new environments was unparalleled. 

Barlow was born in Newcastle upon Tyne, England, on 4 April 1944. In the wake of the Second World War, she and her family moved to Richmond, London. There, her childhood was set against a backdrop of a city in flux, as London began to repair extensive bomb damage and rebuild its infrastructure and identity – scenes that would have a lasting impact on her work. 

Barlow began her education at London’s Chelsea College of Art from 1960-63, where she met her husband, the artist and writer Fabian Benedict Peake and studied under Anthony Hatwell and the more progressive sculptor George Fullard. Although her experiences at Chelsea (notably discovering an affinity with clay) sowed the seeds for her career, she found many of the male-dominated teaching methods restrictive. 

After Chelsea, she enrolled at the Slade School of Art, where she first experimented with materials such as plaster, fibreglass and wood. After graduating in 1966, she went on to teach at a variety of notable UK arts institutions (including Bristol School of Art, Chelsea and Brighton) while pursuing her art practice in parallel. From 1988, she returned to the Slade, where she taught for the next 20 years, retiring to the role of emerita professor of fine art in 2009. During her tenure, she had a palpable impact on the then-emerging generation of contemporary sculptors, including Rachel Whiteread and Angela de la Cruz, Monster Chetwynd, Bill Woodrow and Eva Rothschild.

Barlow’s primary point of interest was in the potential in the everyday. She repurposed overlooked, peripheral materials – including cardboard, plywood and cement – to execute high-impact installations that viewers could not only look at but be within. ‘There’s something about walking around sculpture that has the possibility of being reflective, like walking through a landscape,’ Barlow once said. ‘The largeness of sculpture has that infinite possibility to make one engage beyond just the object itself and into other realms of experience.’

Barlow’s first breakout moment arrived in 2004, when she staged ‘Peninsula’ at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art. Another was in 2010, in a solo exhibition at Studio Voltaire, London, a staggering show that prompted curator Hans Ulrich Obrist to invite Barlow to exhibit at the Serpentine Galleries with Nairy Baghramian, which put her work on the international stage. 

The same year, Barlow joined Hauser & Wirth gallery, with whom she went on to stage eight solo exhibitions and published three monographs, including the recent Phyllida Barlow, Collected Lectures, Writings and Interviews. 

Says Iwan Wirth, president of Hauser & Wirth: 'Phyllida Barlow was a cherished friend as well as a visionary artist. Her ideas, knowledge, experience and wry humour were always shared with the most extraordinary warmth. Her generosity of spirit extended through her art, her writings, and her many years of teaching and mentorship. A truly thoughtful and companionable human being, Phyllida was a guiding light and inspiration to so many. Her loss will be felt deeply by all who knew and collaborated with her in the art community and beyond. Our thoughts are with Fabian and the wonderful family they created together.’

Barlow turned the inherent dullness of industrial matter on its head, injecting bold colour onto muted surfaces and breathing life into otherwise lifeless materials. Her mammoth sculptures often deployed crudely painted, childlike colour palettes, and were composed of awkward amalgams that induced awe and unease in equal measure, and defied both gravity and expectation. 

Her installations were confrontational, intriguing, and owned a singular beauty in their ability to rouse thought, prompt the body to move, and urged us to look, and then look again. 

Barlow’s convention-shattering approach also extended to painting (a discipline she was encouraged to pursue by none other than Henry Moore back in her Chelsea College of Art days); she was a prolific painter throughout her career, yet still described her work in this discipline as ‘sculptural drawings’. 

By the age of 65, Barlow was an acclaimed figure in international sculpture. In 2011, she was accepted as a member of the Royal Academy of Arts (where she exhibited cul-de-sac in 2019) and was awarded the Art Prize Aachen in 2012. In 2014, she dominated Tate Britain’s Duveen Galleries with dock, an intrusive, materially frenzied counterpoint to the austere neoclassical architecture. 

Frances Morris, director of Tate Modern commented: ‘Barlow’s practice implicitly acknowledges that in a world saturated with objects, the role of sculpture and the job of the sculptor might be less about making things than generating a particular type of experience of the work, and of the world in which it temporarily resides.’ In 2021, Barlow was awarded a damehood in The Queen's birthday honours list, which recognises outstanding achievements of people across the United Kingdom. 

In 2017, Barlow represented Britain at the Venice Biennale. ‘Folly’ was a staggering and lauded achievement that took up every available inch of the pavilion and even spilled outdoors. The viewer became an explorer, encouraged to decipher the enormity of her sculptural labyrinth of columns and baubles. 

One of her most recent projects saw Barlow crown London’s newly remodelled The Audley pub in a zesty sky of collaged colour. The ceiling installation for Artfarm’s first London destination has since become a defining characteristic of the storied institution. When asked about her approach to the installation, she told me: ‘You've got to be as bold as you want to be and as free as you want to be.’ And it’s that sentiment of bold freedom that was at the essence of Barlow’s vision –  in her work, and in her progressive approach to art education. It led her to become an inimitable force in sculpture, a legacy that will be cemented for generations to come. 

Barlow is survived by her husband artist Fabian Peake, their children Florence, Clover, Tabitha, Eddie and Lewis, grandchildren, and her siblings Camilla Whitworth-Jones and Jeremy Barlow. 

hauserwirth.com

In her show, ‘A simple prophecy’ at Hauser & Wirth Zurich, Limmatstrasse, Berlinde De Bruyckere weaves history, religion and decay into monumental lead and wax sculptures and mixed-media relief works. 

As with many artists when asked about their work, De Bruyckere responds by delving into her longstanding developments, unpacking narratives from myriad experiences, and reflecting on a changing world. ‘In the 30 years since my career started, my perception of the world we live in, of our society, has changed. I think we have failed somehow. So many promises and resolutions were made, so very few of those became a reality.’ In ‘A simple prophecy’, De Bruyckere is seeking to transform the divine into something more human, bridging a gap between the angelic figures in her Arcangelo series and reflecting on beauty and decay in It almost seemed a lily.

In the era of isolation that characterised the Covid-19 pandemic, De Bruyckere meditated on the pain of dying alone that was felt across the globe, and began seeing saviours from that pain in people. ‘The nurses and the soldiers and everybody working in the hospitals, they became for me like angels.’

For the Arcangelo works shown in Zurich, she has created full-scale human forms (De Bruyckere developed a technique for the materials, combining lead and bronze to create works that can stand exposed to the elements without being dramatically altered) and places them high on plinths. ‘The distance we feel when we first encounter these sculptures is really important; they are high up on their pedestals, it’s like they are asking for respect.’ The plinths echo the overwhelming scale of the tomb of Vasco de Gama. De Bruyckere visited the artefact on a trip to Lisbon, and admired how it protected the Portuguese explorer’s small body. 

On their shoulders, the figures hold swathes of wax-cast animal hides that obscure all but their legs, thin and fragile in comparison to the heavy load they carry on their backs. ‘The title “A simple prophecy” embodies the connection between the profane and the divine. In this specific selection of works, there is always a religious starting point, but then they move to a more universal, human level,’ says De Bruyckere. ‘I really want to make [the Arcangelos] more human. I think this aspiration is reflected in the title: a prophecy is never simple, simplicity is the territory of humans. The divine is always more complex and chaotic.’ 

De Bruyckere frames the Arcangelo figures as simultaneously vulnerable and powerful, using height to inform status, and composition to expose us to their humanity. The final figure of the show, Liggende - Arcangelo I, 2022-2023, (2023), lies flat, described by De Bruyckere as an injured bird waiting for help, and further narrows the gap between human and religious figures. 

This notion returns in her florally inspired works, informed by a trip to a nunnery in Mechelen, Belgium. De Bruyckere describes coming across miniature recreations of the Garden of Eden in the nunnery. Small figures were made from parts of dried flowers, wooden twigs and foliage wrapped in silver, fruit pits painted and decorated, and small amulets placed amongst them by the nuns. The boxes were contained by covers, which allowed them to be closed away, a feature used in her It almost seemed a lily series. ‘I photographed hundreds of these tiny flowers; they became very special to me and I really searched for a way to translate this feeling of abundance and secrecy.’

The mixed-media series is inspired by impressions from the undersides of petals and flowers cut open to expose their reproductive systems. They comprise paper petals, hung in reliefs, and include a box filled with organic matter, echoing those seen in Mechelen. De Bruyckere presents these floral depictions ‘not when it is bright and open and wild’, but dried and decaying. Alongside the craft put into the boxes, she offers an honest view of her subject matter. ‘It's showing us we all have to die, that we're getting older and more fragile, and have all this knowledge that we have built up during our lives.’

De Bruyckere’s ‘A simple prophecy’, in symbolism, execution and inspiration, proposes a narrowing of the gap between religious symbols and humanity. 

Berlinde De Bruyckere: ‘A simple prophecy’ is showing at Hauser & Wirth Zurich, Limmatstrasse, from 26 January – 13 May 2023

hauserwirth.com

Boats have been populating Rashid Johnson’s view lately, particularly in the last two years, after the artist started spending more time on the Hamptons side of Long Island. Since then, boats have unearthed connotations beyond vehicles or charming visual accents on the shore. The epiphany coincided with a heightened sense of solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement and with those struggling through the pandemic – unity, agency and co-existence, Johnson noticed, are notions contained both within his professional and personal circles and the likeness and purpose of a boat.

During those long, idyllic days spent looking at the horizon, he heard numerous expressions of togetherness and, all being somewhat true, he also pondered the meaning of being in the same boat. What was the direction? Or who were his fellow travellers? Johnson’s answers – or at least his searches for them – are a series of paintings and sculptures with boat motifs in his new show at Hauser & Wirth’s art centre in Menorca. Proving that motivation works in mysterious ways, the Brooklyn-based artist made the show’s large-scale grid paintings, and four firepit sculptures encrusted with VHS tapes, a CB radio, book and oyster shells, while unaware of their intended venue. ‘When the opportunity to show them surrounded by water arose, it was clear that the works belonged to Menorca,’ he says.

Johnson’s East Williamsburg studio – which could well moonlight as a warehouse or a mini-factory – is occupied by a combination of works-in-progress and those waiting to dry. Standing amid canvases laid atop one another or leaned side by side, Johnson is dressed leisurely, in all black, on a breezy, slow-paced February afternoon, the kind of afternoon that deserves a chunky cookie, which he offers up. 

Partly inherent to his aura, Johnson’s calmness also stems from his having bid farewell to the show’s artworks. They are already on a journey across the Atlantic Ocean, perhaps facing the ebbing sea towards the Strait of Gibraltar, through which they will cut for the tiny Spanish island. One can imagine Johnson’s impressions of boats, either nocturnal-hued repetitions over linen or firm formations in bronze, swaying back and forth against the diligent waves. Movement, however, is not always desirable. The history of the Atlantic is awash with forced migration, and Johnson’s show borrows its title, ‘Sodade’, from another piece of art that perfectly captures this reality. The namesake Cape Verdean song, famously uttered in Cesária Évora’s velvety voice, is an ode to the longing and fear of loss promised by the sea. The heart-aching lyrics pay tribute to Cape Verdeans, past and present, who have left the island in search of other opportunities: ‘Quem mostrava esse caminho longe? Quem mostrava esse caminho longe? Esse caminho pa São Tomé (Who showed you this distant way? Who showed you this distant way? This way to São Tomé)’. Written by Armando Zeferino Soares in the 1950s, these lines, in the Cape Verdean Creole version of Portuguese, express sodade, meaning longing.

Johnson’s encounter with the song is intertwined with a sense of melancholy and longing that has lingered over his last few years. When the artist shared his sentiments with a friend, they told him about a Portuguese word that somewhat sums up his state: saudade. One of those words that capture a very specific feeling that lacks a translation in another language, saudade expresses yearning for something so close yet undeniably distant. Johnson’s research into the expression reminded him of Évora’s song and the Cape Verdean Creole version of the word. ‘The Creole telling is about cultural formation through colonialism, but also how language gets deformed and reshaped in the hands of folks dominated by an outside presence,’ he adds. Johnson intentionally used the Creole spelling in his show’s title, to honour the struggle against oppression and resilience in the face of loss, in particular, loss tied to the sea. 

Over the past two decades, Johnson’s practice, spanning painting, sculpture, installation and film, has explored notions of authorship, potential, empowerment and even entitlement. All correspond to a sense of agency. His paintings – thick, nearly sculptural and blanketed by grids of faces, or dressed in shards of mirror and mosaic – compel us to think, understand and express. Johnson believes that painting has the function of a soapbox or pedestal, a platform for the exchange of ideas. ‘The visual layer is an entry point for them to penetrate into work and be prompted, or even confused, by what’s beyond.’ 

More literally, the show’s boat sculptures are also functioning firepits, an invitation to convene, warm up and converse. ‘The vehicle has been so present in my work – language can be a vehicle for ideas, as can paint, aesthetics or mark-making,’ he says. In that sense, he likens a boat to a stage, the kind he built in Astor Place in downtown Manhattan last June, with non-profit arts organisation Creative Time. For a month, his Red Stage was activated by poets, dancers, musicians, thinkers, and anyone who had anything to say. He calls them pyres. ‘An open stage or a burning boat allows the audience to reflect on the ideas of autonomy and collectivity, especially when we are doing so much coalition-building around Black Lives Matter, the environment, and LGBTQIA movements.’ 

Johnson’s oeuvre, while unifying, does not compromise on subjective and singular experiences. Reflection, both internal and physical, is the key in his mixed-media mosaic and mirror paintings, which have the energy of abstract expressionism and the social heft of murals. Radiant, meticulous and poetic, the coalescence of shards ‘invites the viewers to piece the bits together and build their collective experience’. This subtle invitation to communion is a core element of the Anxious Men and Bruise Paintings series, characterised by determined hand gestures and infinite repetitions. Whether a face or an abstract circle, the army of motifs over linen multiply to hallucinatory masses, challenging the viewer to separate each figure from the next. The effort, however, is futile – better to surrender to Johnson’s orchestration of a painterly cosmos and plunge into the synthesis of brushstrokes in black and blue. 

Johnson’s colour palette stems from a dynamic between his cultural observations and the alchemy of oil paint. Blue is the fruit of his contemplation on the history of blues music, as well as many artists’ periods dedicated to the hue. ‘Oftentimes, I allow the colour to think about itself,’ he adds. Yellow, which he commonly renders in an alarming hue, is tied to his occasional use of shea butter in some of the sculptures. ‘There is a snowflakeness to mark-making because a gesture can never be repeated,’ he says. ‘But there is satisfaction in just trying to repeat yourself as a mantra.’ The democracy Johnson finds in the grid form – whether with faces, boats or circles – allows him to honour each gesture equally, ‘and aspires to give every section the same opportunity for amplification’, not unlike a voice to be heard or an arm raised.

Johnson builds his grids as a meditative act, rather than basing them on any numeric order. The facial impression in the Anxious Men series was initially intended as a self-portrait, but the feedback he received proved that the sentiment spoke to many. ‘That moment was satisfying, to recognise that this was an opportunity to think about the world as opposed to being trapped in my own existential conundrum.’ A mosaic interpretation of the series is now a mural at the Delta terminal at New York’s LaGuardia airport. Connecting with people in places where they don’t necessarily expect to experience art, he believes, is a promising endeavour: ‘You can traffic through it; you can engage or totally ignore, but regardless, art should have agency in these spaces.’

The artist’s admiration for the architectural marvels of his hometown of Chicago, and his frustration with its segregated urbanisation, contribute to his understating of the impact and the role of an object within an environment. His philosophy of occupying a space is twofold: ‘I’ve been quite careful about not perverting the work when it travels, because my voice must travel along with the themes, concepts and ideas.’ Johnson visited Menorca and Barcelona six years ago, and found himself inspired by the mosaics of Gaudí and Miró. ‘That trip encouraged me to experiment with the medium,’ he remembers. While his mosaic paintings are not included in the ‘Sodade’ show, a similar reflection on formation and singularity constitutes the show’s Seascape, Surrender and Bruise Paintings series. The idea of people gathering around his boat sculptures is exciting. ‘So rarely do artworks have jobs,’ Johnson says. ‘But in the case of a firepit, there is the potential of heat, energy, and a place of activation.’

INFORMATION

This article originally appeared in the July 2022 issue of Wallpaper*. Wallpaper* is available in print, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

Rashid Johnson’s show ‘Sodade’ runs until 13 November 2022 at Hauser & Wirth Menorca, hauserwirth.com 

A notion that often goes unchallenged in the liberal media landscape is the idea of representation as a quick fix for all race relations-related plights. While the holding of space by Black figures in historically white arenas is of course a necessary act of transgression, how these figures articulate temporal discourses around the positionality of Blackness and the Black body in the Western canon is of far more importance. 

Occupying the spot where contemporary painting and body politics converge, American portraitist Amy Sherald opens her first European solo show ‘The World We Make’ at Hauser & Wirth London. You have likely encountered her work before. Upon rising from relative obscurity Sherald went on to paint the official portrait of the 44th First Lady of the United States of America Michelle Obama and the Vanity Fair cover image of Breonna Taylor, whose unjust killing by the American police force was one of the catalysts for 2020’s summer of protests. However, in ‘The World We Make’, Sherald returns to her roots. presenting paintings of family, as well as unknown Black people, individuals she encountered on the streets of Baltimore − where she lived for a long while before moving to New York. The show is accompanied by a monograph of the same title which features all the paintings on view at Hauser & Wirth, essays on her work by Kevin Quashie and Jenni Sorkin as well as behind-the-scenes photographs of her process.

Throughout the exhibition, Sherald’s visually stunning works pop in bold primary colours. Within them rests hints at the possibility of a paradigm shift and the tools for the transformation of consciousness. A diptych of two Black men on raised dirt bikes as if reenacting a jousting scene on horseback hangs on a wall. On another, a Black farmer atop a tractor peers at you as though ready to converse, an outward gaze that serves as a recurring motif in the majority of Sherald's works. What intrigues about this particular presentation from the artist is the abundance of depictions of Black manhood, a stark contrast to the representations of womanhood for which Sherald is most famous. Of the ten paintings on display seven depict men, firmly positioning masculinity at the heart of the show.  

On a guided tour of the exhibition, which spans two halls, led by Sherald, we discussed the centrepiece of one showroom, titled For Love and For Country. The piece reimagines the iconic photograph of a man and woman kissing in Times Square on VJ Day. Here she replaces their white bodies with Black ones in her signature grayscale palette which she elucidates in an effort to circumvent hierarchies of personhood associated with caste. Sherald also replaces the woman in the infamous kiss with a man, back bent and languishing in the same position as in the source image, highlighting alternative modalities of Black being.   

The subjects face each other rather than outwardly, a decision made because the piece is ‘about visibility. So I think it worked for the gaze to not be outward’, she explains. ‘There are so many kisses in art history and I have people in my life who I care about that I want to see represented in art history too.’

In the penultimate chapter of Black feminist scholar bell hooks’ book Art On My Mind: Visual Politics, the author calls to attention the integral role feminism and the civil rights movement played in the transformation of public discourse and consciousness around body politics. She shines a light on the ways in which Black men have historically been viewed as ‘more body than mind’ bound up in ‘racist paradigms of subjugated embodiment’. Referencing Kobena Mercer’s essay Fear of a Black Penis, she adds, ‘Any liberatory visual aesthetic of the Black male body must engage a body politic that critically addresses the way in which racist/sexist iconography refigured within the framework of the contemporary fascination with the “other” continues to be the dominant backdrop framing the way images are created and talked about.’

Mercer’s essay was released in 1994, hooks’ book in 1995, yet today some three decades later, our white-supremacist capitalist patriarchal society continues to intertwine notions of Black manhood and sexuality with violence and hypermasculinity, notions which are turned on their heads in For Love and For Country. 

Sherald’s paintings raise important questions about Black personhood and our positionality within art history. However, the questions that arose in my mind as I left the gallery were those surrounding context. In the years following our summer of protests, we’ve seen a huge increase in demand from galleries for figurative paintings of Black life. As these paintings of the Black quotidian hit critical mass and more artists fold to the demands of curators, what does continually platforming these works mean for the future of Black art within the context of the museum? Moreso at a time when rampant capitalism has created conditions in which artists can barely find time to think, breathe and conjure up new aesthetics. Is repeatedly saying Black people exist and deserve to be a part of the Western art canon enough? Is creating spaces for white audiences to have mediated encounters with Black bodies sufficient? Though there remain uncertainties, Sherald’s works push us to initiate such conversations, and also smuggle in critiques of these systems under the guise of placidity.

INFORMATION

‘The World We Make’ is on view at Hauser & Wirth London until 23 December 2022. hauserwirth.com

The Audley, in Anglo Saxon, means ‘the old friend’, an apt name for a pub that has proudly occupied a prime corner plot in the heart of London’s Mayfair since 1888. 

Now, this old friend has been given new life by Artfarm, the hospitality and development company founded in 2014 by gallerists Manuela and Iwan Wirth, and whose rapidly-expanding portfolio now includes The Fife Arms in Braemar, Scotland, the Roth Bar & Grill at Hauser & Wirth’s art centre in Somerset, the Manuela restaurant in Los Angeles, and the upcoming revival of London’s storied Groucho Club. 

Far from a run-of-the-mill facelift, The Audley will offer three distinct, art-led experiences: a street-level public house (now open), the first-floor Mount St Restaurant and four spaces on the upper three floors which will be available for private hire and will open this Autumn. 

For Ewan Venters, CEO of Hauser & Wirth and Artfarm, the listed Victorian building was a natural fit for Artfarm’s first London project. ‘We had wanted a London venue for some time, preferably within walking distance of the gallery in Savile Row, so when The Audley came up, we jumped at it’, he says. ‘We consider the building to be a tremendous piece of architecture with so much character and history attached.’

Food at The Audley will be helmed by Jamie Shears, with the Mount St Restaurant offering a refined classic-contemporary fusion menu drawing inspiration from London's culinary history. Downstairs, the bar will supply a sophisticated twist on pub grub. 

Naturally, art is the backbone of the project, with a revolving showcase of important works throughout, as well as interventions by Hauser & Wirth’s roster of leading international artists. These include Phyllida Barlow’s ceiling installation in the pub, Rashid Johnson’s floor mosaic in the Mount St Restaurant, and Anj Smith’s ceiling fresco which occupies the top-floor turret. ‘It’s a rare thing to be able to commission site-specific art for a project of this scale, one that will help write the next chapter of the building and outlast us all’, says Venters. ‘I believe these works contribute massively to The Audley becoming a glorious and exciting conversation, with an interior that is full of possibilities and inspiration.’

The Audley’s contemporary art pièce de résistance is impossible to miss. British artist Barlow’s abstract ceiling installation crowns the ground-floor pub in a zesty sky of collaged colour, the permanent mosaic of hand-painted paper framed by the pub’s deep mahogany panelling. 

For Barlow, the invitation was a ‘thrilling offer’. ‘I said yes immediately, even though I have never done anything like this before,’ she explained. ‘But [architect Luis Laplace] and I had a very brief conversation where he said, “you've got to be as bold as you want to be and as free as you want to be.”’ Bold and free is an accurate characterisation of Barlow’s installation, which offers an illusion of kinetic three-dimensionality. ‘It's very active in its relationship to the pub environment, but not in a way that somehow spoils it.’ she continues. ‘I love the idea of it impacting the environment, and making people feel that it was almost natural that it was there.’

Like many of Artfarm and Hauser & Wirth’s previous restoration projects – including Hauser & Wirth Menorca and Durslade Farmhouse in Somerset – architectural renovations have been headed up by Paris-based Laplace, who has put his stamp on The Audley’s original design by Thomas Verity, best known for the pavilion exterior at Lord’s Cricket Ground. Laplace deployed his signature sensitive approach within the constraints of the Grade II listed structure, allowing art, and the building’s treasured history, to take centre stage. 

Among these treasures are The Audley’s original ceiling clock keeping time on last orders, and the original wooden fireplace, inscribed with the Latin ‘salve’ (welcome). It’s a fitting greeting for a pub that has community and tradition in its DNA, sentiments Artfarm hopes to fervidly maintain. ‘This area is so rich in culture and history, and where better for those stories to continue than at the local pub?’ says Venters. ‘Everyone is welcome!’

In the larger landscape of art-meets-hospitality enterprises, Artfarm is undoubtedly tapping into something. Its recipe is proving, again and again, that there is an appetite for the intersection of these worlds. ‘Art inspires, excites and intrigues, it sparks conversations’, says Venters. ‘Restaurants, hotels and bars give people a space to have those conversations, away from their day-to-day lives.’

INFORMATION

theaudleypublichouse.com; artfarm.com

At 92, Ida Applebroog is still working away in her New York studio as she has done, on and off, for the last 50 years. But despite the long career and the indie pop star moniker, Applebroog has flown under the art star radar. She could have been a Kusama (with whom she shares a birth year and familiarity with psychiatric care), Kruger or Bourgeois, but something didn’t click or prevailing forces, personal and political, went against her. 

‘Ida Applebroog: Right Up to Now 1969 – 2021’, a new show at Hauser & Wirth Somerset, makes clear that Applebroog, however underappreciated, is a key figure in American feminist art and American art per se. But also that her work, often raw, confessional, often dealing with dysfunctional relationships and male aggression, also has a dark wit, a way with aphorisms and an illustrator’s fine, engaging line. (The show is an edit of a larger survey that ran last year at Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid, the timing more evidence, perhaps, that the fates are determined on maintaining her low profile.)

Applebroog is a name to conjure with and indeed she did magic it up, dropping her married name, Horowitz, and taking part of her maiden name, Applebaum. The renaming marked new momentum in her art career in the mid-1970s but it was not a happy rebirth, coming after a voluntary stretch in the psychiatric wing of San Diego’s Mercy Hospital for the treatment of deep depression. 

Born to a strict orthodox Jewish family in the Bronx in 1929 – she was one of three girls, a series of disappointments to her parents, gender-wise at least. Applebroog studied graphic design and worked in the art department of an advertising agency (suffering Mad Men-style harassment and mauling) before freelancing as an illustrator for children’s books and greeting cards and taking a job in the art department of New York Public Library. (She might have become, had fate twisted in a different direction, the darker kind of New Yorker cartoonist or perhaps a feminist Robert Crumb.)

Instead, the family moved to Chicago in 1956 where Applebroog took art classes at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and then on to San Diego in 1968 where, aged nearly 40 and married with four children, her mental health quickly deteriorated. She was no fan of San Diego.

At Mercy Hospital, she started to draw biomorphic forms, misshapen cells and odd internal organs. Out of hospital and influenced by Claes Oldenburg, she began to create a series of blobby, soft sculptures in muslin, shredded foam and rubberised cheesecloth. These works were never shown – Applebroog decided that they were accidentally too much like the work or Eve Hesse, an artist she was unaware of when she began the pieces – but photographs of them open the Hauser & Wirth show. 

In the mid-1970s, after returning to New York, she started to work on a series of vignettes on Rhoplex, a sickly skin-like stand-in for vellum. They featured characters, often headless and genderless, trapped within theatre curtains and their fragmented thoughts. Later she started to self-publish books she called performances, series of cartoon film-stills, mundane and menacing with deep shadows. Life, argues Applebroog, is a performance. But more Beckett (she is a huge fan) than Broadway.

In the 1980s and 1990s, she made oil paintings on different size canvases, often arranged in groups and shown both hung and as figures in a landscape, which she called Marginalias. They are mostly a dark, muddy blood colour of violence or the threat of violence, with bodies broken and haphazardly mended. Bad medicine is a regular theme in her work. (Queen Elizabeth II, in ‘work clothes’ rather than regal finery, also pops up in a number of Applebroog’s paintings, an unlikely everywoman.)

During and after her stay at Mercy Hospital, Applebroog drew 150 remarkable sketches of her own genitals. Not forensic but assured, sometimes expertly drawn, sometimes almost abstract, they were intended as therapy but she decided to make them public in 2006 as Monalisa, which saw them scanned and printed on skin-like paper and displayed as the cladding of a room-sized wooden box. It’s a portrait both porous and entrapping. In 2012, continuing that personal excavation, she reprinted the journal she had kept in the mid-1970s and turned that too into an installation piece, including posters and tear sheets visitors could take away with them. 

Applebroog’s subjects have mostly been people, figures, often just lines and without a landscape. Her 2016 series Angry Birds of America, then, feels like a radical left-run, darkly vibrant reworkings of John James Audubon’s iconic ornithological illustrations and her sly take on the rise of Trump. The works make clear that Applebroog – an admirer of Josef Albers – is an expert colourist and her newer works, which close the show, reveal more play with colour, abstraction and new technologies. 

Applebroog is a hard artist to pin down – she shifts tone and medium – but then her art is about the act of pinning down. It is an art both deeply personal and deeply political but never posturing. And that background in ‘commercial art’ and the difficult history before becoming ‘Ida Applebroog’ give the work an odd staying power, a psychic timelessness, unfixed in any particular movement or moment or method. Like her name, Applebroog’s work is a unique invention.

INFORMATION

‘Ida Applebroog: Right Up To Now 1969 – 2021’ is at Hauser & Wirth Somerset, until 2 May 2022. hauserwirth.com

Marcel Duchamp means different things to different people. To some, he fathered the readymade, to others, he turned the role of the artist on its head. To Willem de Kooning in 1951, he was a ‘one-man movement’. 

Published in 1959, the book Marcel Duchamp soon became the bible of the artist’s work. It was the result of years of Duchamp’s collaboration with its author, art historian and critic Robert Lebel, and offered a comprehensive and penetrating study of the artist: from his early painting, subsequent farewell to painting, and invention of the readymade to his fixation on the fetish, a subject explored in a show at Thaddaeus Ropac. Witty, sensual, absurd, ‘Please Touch’ (curated by Paul B. Franklin and now on view at the gallery’s Paris Marais space) emphasises how, through Duchamp’s lens, and with the right, or wrong, state of mind, almost any conceivable object could be a fetish. 

Marcel Duchamp went out of print for 60 years, but the Grove Press English edition is now back in circulation with Hauser & Wirth Publishers’ authorised facsimile of Duchamp’s first monograph and catalogue raisonné, brought back to life with Jean-Jacques Lebel (Robert Lebel’s son) and Association Marcel Duchamp. To this day, the book’s texts, which include chapters written by Duchamp, HP Roché, and André Breton, remain uncannily contemporary, as does Duchamp’s own book design. 

Marcel Duchamp in the words of five leading contemporary artists

To mark the occasion, we gathered the thoughts of five contemporary artists who have directly, or indirectly, cited Marcel Duchamp in their work. From an appreciation of the artist’s non-exclusive relationships with media to a first-hand anecdote about the way he held his cigar, this is what they had to say:

Ed Ruscha

‘When Duchamp came along in the early part of the last century, he hit upon things that were profound and sublime. It was as though he had discovered or invented a completely new musical instrument.’

Gillian Wearing 

‘Duchamp made me realise you do not have to be faithful to any one medium, you can embrace them all. More radically, you didn't have to make work with traditional mediums, art could be made from anything or could have been made already (found objects), then recontextualised. More personally, his shapeshifting photographs had an impact on me; one where he appeared as a much older version of himself via a trick of a light bulb, and others where he became his alter ego, Rrose Sélavy. The latter inspired me to become both Duchamp and Duchamp as a woman in my photographic work Me and Madame and Monsieur Duchamp, which added further layers to his disguise.’

Larry Bell 

‘My memories of Duchamp are brief. He came to my studio in 1962 with English artist Richard Hamilton and American surrealist William Copley. They had come to Los Angeles to look at where Marcel was going to have his first retrospective [the Pasadena Museum of Art]. The museum director was Walter Hopps, who was previously my dealer. 

‘These three guys descended on my studio and gently knocked on the door. I wasn’t expecting anyone to come, and none of my friends would ever come to the front door, so these were unknown intruders. I had a little peephole at the front and I saw these guys dressed in neckties and suits. I was positive they were city inspectors. During that time, there was a lot of pressure on people who lived in storefronts; it wasn’t legal. This was my studio, but I lived there also. 

‘They knocked for about 20 minutes. I finally opened the door and before I could say hello, one of the guys said “Walter Hopps sent us”, so I let them in. At that point, I had very bad hearing, and I didn't hear the names, apart from Copley who introduced me to the group. I thought they might be collectors, and showed them around. One of them had an English accent. The older guy didn't say much, but he smoked a cigar. I smoked cigars too, but I’d never seen anyone hold a cigar between his little finger and ring finger before. The English guy was explaining to the older fella what I was doing, and it was not correct, so I tried to correct the older guy’s understanding. Then Copley said something like, “Marcel, didn’t you do something like this a long time ago?” When he said Marcel, I realised who the older guy was, and I fucking freaked. I couldn’t talk anymore. I was totally catatonic and threw myself against the wall. All of a sudden the atmosphere had changed. They thanked me for letting them come, and they left. On your question about influence, I tried to hold the cigar as Duchamp did, but it didn’t work for me.’ 

Monica Bonvicini

‘Duchamp's use of unusual materials, as well as his choice of productions, is such a fetish, expressing a male desire typical for someone coming from his background. His desire to escape classification of any sort made his own art and his own persona ungraspable, turning himself into fetish subjects. I always found his dealing with erotica and sex not only beautiful but funny and irreverent as no male artist of his generation did.’

Mika Rottenberg

‘[Duchamp is] a huge influence [in] his seriously playful approach to art as a game of logic constructs and values. [Also] his titles, and the way he made viewers complete and participate in the work with no pretence.’

INFORMATION

Marcel Duchamp, £100, Hauser & Wirth Publishers. shop.hauserwirth.com

‘Please Touch: Marcel Duchamp and the Fetish', until 29 January 2022, Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris Marais. ropac.net

A couple of years ago British artist Thomas J Price decided to represent himself. From the outside this may have seemed a strange decision; his career was humming along. But certain things felt erroneous to him. Most of his shows and recognition was outside the UK and he wanted to scale up both literally and figuratively.

Price’s work appears figurative but is rooted in conceptualism, manifesting in sculpture, performance and film. Most known for monumental figures created from imagination, they stand lost in thought or looking at their phones. All depict people of colour. 

Given the nature of his practice, Price was invited by The Art Newspaper to comment on the public debate around monuments to problematic historical figures. Suddenly, an art world he had not felt truly a part of was looking to him for answers. This was followed up by the inevitable blowback, but it also won him the Hackney Windrush commission alongside Veronica Ryan, and he had suddenly become much more visible and in demand. 

‘It was quite surreal initially because I think I was so used to the resistance to the works, the complexity of ideas they encapsulate, and so used to dismissal,’ says Price. ‘To suddenly hear people telling me about statues and public monuments and why representation matters was kind of cute, but I make this work because I want people to look up, I want people to engage and to try to understand. So it was a fantastic moment. It was like, right, okay, here we go! People are listening, let’s have this discussion!’

Now represented by art world behemoth Hauser & Wirth, he has his first show with the gallery, ‘Thoughts Unseen’ opening on 1 October in the gallery’s Somerset outpost. Having spent the end of the summer in residency there, he has had a chance to reflect on his practice to date and a whirlwind year.

‘Switching from my very small studio in London to a much larger space in Somerset has allowed me to work simultaneously on different types of work,’ Price explains. ‘To be able to have different types of sculptures out and to have a different space where I can do the digital sculpting component compared to say, the clay sculpting, and to be able to draw, put my drawings up and look at them in order, that's just been absolutely amazing. I guess it’s allowed me to connect the dots.’ 

Connecting the dots is exactly what Price needed to do as he faced the challenging task of looking back over his work to date and putting together ‘Thoughts Unseen’, as well as making the new works for the show.

‘Because I've got a bit of distance of time, perhaps it’s allowed me to get an overview of the beginning journey into the practice; to see how it developed and to place it into the context of the times.’

In his sculptural works, Price’s subjects are characters, built from past ideas, gestures, stances and of those he has made before. He asks himself questions about where the work will stand and who will interact with it. Interaction is at the core of his work.

‘Where do people expect to see someone like this, where am I going, where am I planning to put it up and what are my ambitions for this character? What are my hopes and dreams for this person?’ he asks himself as he creates a human being from scratch.

By positioning these monumental figures of colour in public spaces, Price raises questions through the audience’s reactions to them. What takes place next is an interaction between the viewers and the sculptures which hold their ground, self-contained, thinking.

‘They’re a portrait of the person looking at them because they bring out our understanding. The character has to give just enough to entice the viewer, but not be so overbearing,’ he explains. ‘I don’t want an audience; I want an engaged participant in this nonverbal discussion.’

Alongside figurative works, ‘Thoughts Unseen’ will include double-channel video work From the Ground Up (2016). The exhibition will put into context Price’s oeuvre ahead of a year that will see the realisation not only of the Windrush Commission but also a commission for Marcus Garvey Park in New York for the Studio Museum in Harlem.

As we emerge from the pandemic and the revolution of ideas in 2020, we are all stepping onto different terrain. Price, and his work, are moving into a space of increased visibility and potential.

‘I’ve always wanted these figures to be able to exist anywhere in the world. One of my first pieces placed outside is in Yorkshire Sculpture Park. It’s still there and it still does amazing things in terms of expanding people’s expectations for where they encounter people, and their idea of what a sculpture of a figure can be.'

INFORMATION

Thomas J Price, ’Thoughts Unseen’, until 3 January 2022, Hauser & Wirth Somerset, hauserwirth.com

‘We hope that the intimacy and magic of this place are transported to the people who visit,’ says Iwan Wirth about the latest Hauser & Wirth outpost in Menorca, which officially opened to the public on 19 July 2021. The art centre – comprising gallery, education lab, restaurant, gardens and boutique – is located on Isla del Rey (Island of the Kings), a small island in the Mahón harbour that is the site of a grand but crumbling former naval hospital, built in the 18th century by the English.

The property also includes outlying buildings and the archaeological remains of a 6th-century basilica. Visitors arrive at this unique setting by boat (five euros for a return ticket), and are greeted by a candy-pink oblong Franz West sculpture – a cheeky statement that sets the mood for this exciting new art destination. 

Heritage, preservation and experimentation

For years now, Hauser & Wirth has been dedicated to renovating old architectural gems, beginning with their revitalisation of the Löwenbräu brewery building in Zurich in 1996 and cemented with the Somerset art centre in 2014. But in terms of its location and heritage, the Menorca project takes this passion to the next level. ‘We could not have picked a more complicated place to build an art gallery’, says Wirth. ‘It is highly protected, covered with rocks, there was no electricity, let alone the logistics of being on its own island.’

Menorca and the Isla del Rey are protected UNESCO Biosphere sites, and the naval hospital, which is across the way from the gallery, is currently undergoing its own renovations thanks to a team of volunteers who began their passion project in 2004 to repair parts of the building and record its fascinating history. 

Where local traditions meet global curiosity 

‘We have a curiosity or an appetite for unusual sites. We are constantly searching for places and spaces, but particularly for places which can be inspiring for the artists we work with, because an urban gallery/white cube can be quite limiting. We have to keep it exciting for them and for us.’

For the design, renovation and landscaping, the gallery turned to architect Luis Laplace and landscape designer Piet Oudolf, both of whom worked together on Hauser & Wirth’s Somerset outpost. It is a fruitful collaboration in all senses. Laplace sought to ‘enhance Menorca’ in his designs, to bring the island and its heritage into its own by using as much local, traditional and recycled material along with the island’s strong craft traditions.

Take for example the use of the local mares stone with its soft pinky-beige tones, local and recycled wood, and the handwoven straw lamps that decorate the outdoor space that is both for dining and relaxing. ‘The lamps were actually woven by a teenage boy from the island,’ recounts Laplace, who happened to see one of them in the back of a local shop. ‘When I asked the owner about the lamps, he said it was his son who made them for fun, a tradition taught to him by his uncle, and they were in fact traps to catch lobster and fish,’ he recounts. But Laplace saw their potential and commissioned the boy to make a series of lamps.

Nautical-inspired details such as blue cording wrapped on the gallery doors, red metal exterior lamps, metal hardware and sinks in the bathroom, and sailing flags that decorate the interior of Cantina, the onsite restaurant, remind visitors of the history of the island and the legacy of the naval hospital.

Laplace intuitively designed the gallery spaces so the entrance is slightly down an exterior walkway and through an open patio, rather than at the beginning of the building, allowing visitors to soak in the landscape en route. It is a subtle yet specific reflection of an experience that is about the outdoors as much as about the art. Louise Bourgeois’ Spider (1994) is installed in the corner of the entry patio and is part of a series of outdoor sculptures placed across the property including Joan Miró’s Pere Ubu and sculptures by Eduardo Chillida, whose solo show is currently on view at the gallery’s Somerset location. 

Hauser & Wirth Menorca’s inaugural exhibition explored uncharted territory 

For Hauser & Wirth Menorca’s inaugural exhibition, titled ‘Masses and Movements’, Los Angeles-based artist, Mark Bradford created a poignant body of work that consisted of a suite of richly layered, abstract canvases, globe sculptures and wall pieces (see W*267). Bradford took inspiration from maps and cartography, particularly the Waldseemüller map from 1507, the first known map to include the name America, and a series of installations about migration and movement made on site with a group of young art students from Menorca. 

The artist arrived a month before the scheduled opening in part to launch Hauser & Wirth’s Education Lab, a central part of the new art centre that will serve both as a space for gallery artists to create and collaborate with local artists and schools, but also be available throughout the year for educational workshops and events.

Hauser & Wirth Menorca: a utopian idea made real

As with community engagement, sustainability has become a core mission of Hauser & Wirth, having recently appointed their first sustainably director for the whole business. In Menorca, sustainable initiatives include the collection of rainwater, energy-efficient climate control, the landscaping by Oudolf, who worked with local plant experts to create a native flora garden that will renew and thrive all year long, and an exciting project to bring a small fleet of solar-powered boats to transport visitors – the first of its kind in the Balearics. In addition, Cantina is run by a local restaurant and vineyard, Binifadet and will focus on local and sustainable food that highlights the island’s culinary strengths. 

In many ways, Hauser & Wirth Menorca feels like a utopian idea about how art can be experiential and engaged with its place, the food, nature, community, and Wirth himself has said as much about this project. It is hard not to fall for the magic and be excited by its potential. An exhibition by American artist Rashid Johnson opens this summer – go for the art, stay for the experience.

INFORMATION
hauserwirth.com

ADDRESS

Plaça de la Constitució, 14
07701 Maó, Illes Balears, Spain

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A major new show dedicated to the work of Spanish sculptor Eduardo Chillida is about to be unveiled at Hauser & Wirth’s Somerset outpost, on Durslade Farm in Bruton. The exhibition, which runs until January 2022, contains 43 works, many loaned from the Estate of Eduardo Chillida, and Chillida Leku, the outdoor museum near San Sebastián, Spain, dedicated to the work of the pioneering artist. 

The show spans 51 years and includes 24 small- and large-scale sculptures, alongside works on paper, hung in three of the five original farm buildings and among the landscape. On a 32 sq m concrete platform in the farmyard sits Consejo al Espacio IX (Advice to Space IX), one of the largest sculptures in the show, completed in 2000 and made in Corten steel, it opens up like a hand towards the Durslade Farmhouse.

Enter the Threshing Barn and you will come across two early figurative works from Chillida’s time in Paris, when the artist, inspired by ancient Greek sculptures from his visits to the Louvre, worked in traditional plaster and bronze. These contrast with the works from 1955 in limestone, 1969 in steel and 1984 in chamotte clay, which illustrate the artist’s return to San Sebastián in the north of Spain in 1951, when he started to work with natural and industrial materials local to the Basque country.

In the Workshop Gallery are sculptures from the 1970s, 80s and 90s in chamotte clay and two pieces in iron, including Lotura VIII (Knot VIII) from 1991. These relate to a large-scale outdoor work that stands at Chillida Leku, and are shown here together with ink on paper works, including two figurative Mano (Hand), from 1976 and 1984 as well as collages from the 1980s and more abstract graphic works that the artist became known for.

In the Pigsty, the early 90s sculptures in chamotte clay feature copper oxide, these works are small in scale, but as illustrated with Lurra M-7 (Earth M-7) despite being just 23 x 32 x 27 cm, the gap between the two halves of the piece is still monumental. These are accompanied by the artist’s Gravitacións or gravitations, works made of paper, ink and string. Chillida produced these pieces alone in San Sebastián in the 80s and 90s, often listening to Johann Sebastian Bach’s chamber music, so the first of four movements of the Goldberg Variations – performed by Kimiko Ishizaka – plays in the Threshing Barn. Also hung in the Pigsty is the largest work on paper the artist produced, an etching from 1988 entitled Homenaje a Aimé Maeght (Homage to Aimé Maeght), in remembrance of his gallerist who passed away in 1981.

Following two steel and Corten steel pieces in the cloister courtyard, the show’s striking finale can be found in the Oudolf field, Piet Oudolf’s 1.5-acre meadow. There, you can find Harri VI (Stone VI) 1996 in pink granite and Elogio del Cubo, Homenaje a Juan de Herrera (In Praise of the Cube, Homage to Juan de Herrera) 1990 in Corten steel.

Visitors familiar with Chillida Leku, where around 40 of Chillida’s monumental steel and stone sculptures sit within a 13-hectare park and a traditional 16th-century Basque country caserío farmhouse, renovated by the artist, will see a strong connection with Durslade Farm, a working free-range farm that dates back to 1768. The two settings could not be more similar. Chillida said Leku, which means space in Basque, was a utopia, ‘a place where my sculptures could rest, so that people could walk among them as though in a forest’. 

Chillida bought the Leku site in 1983. After renovating the property and personally installing the works, he opened Chillida Leku to the public in September 2000, just two years before his death. Leku sadly shuttered at the end of 2010. Although officially closed, it was kept in perfect condition, and you could request a private tour for a donation of €230, as I was lucky enough to do in the summer of 2017. Our host was Mikel Chillida, grandson of the artist and one of five people who run the artist’s estate. According to Chillida, over the next nine years they hosted around 5,000 such private tours.

In November 2017 after reaching an agreement with Hauser & Wirth, Chillida Leku reopened in April 2019. Thanks to the gallery’s support, they added the Pilar Belzunce room (named after Chillida’s wife, to recognise her important role in the artist’s career), a restaurant and café, museum-standard lighting and insulation as well as better access for people with reduced mobility.

The agreement should safeguard Chillida’s legacy, drawing on Hauser & Wirth’s experience in artist estate management (they currently represent 36 artist estates). Running an artist’s estate is, according to Mikel Chillida, ‘a very big responsibility on our shoulders;  an honour and a duty. We have so much respect [for Chillida], we have to do it.’ He adds that Hauser & Wirth’s knowledge and ability to listen is a major benefit. 

The Chillida family had spent ten years seeking support from the local Basque government to keep the museum funded and therefore open, but to no avail. Yet after just one year of discussions with Hauser & Wirth, they had an agreement. Says Mikel Chillida: ‘It was the perfect time and the perfect gallery’. §

INFORMATION

Eduardo Chillida, until 3 January 2022, Hauser & Wirth Somerset (booking is essential). hauserwirth.com

ADDRESS

Durslade Farm
Dropping Ln
Bruton BA10 0NL

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Mark Bradford excavates the past through art. And the past has never felt more present than in 2020, during the global pandemic. Substantial and sumptuous, his abstract paintings have received such acclaim that, Bradford, now 59, has grown accustomed to the demands of being an international art star with a roster of museum and gallery shows.

Winner of a 2009 MacArthur ‘genius’ grant and US representative to the 2017 Venice Biennale, he was elected recently to the elite American Academy of Arts and Letters. His retrospective ‘End Papers’ opened last year at Texas’ Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, as the spread of Covid-19 led to one lockdown after another. ‘A year ago,’ he recalls, ‘I was like, well, one thing I know how to do is to show up and go to work. So I’m gonna show up, I’m gonna go to work. I’m gonna work with no assistants, one assistant, a few supplies, a lot of supplies, because that was changing by the week.’

Forced by travel restrictions and common sense to stay home in Los Angeles, he passed time and explored history by looking at the 1507 Waldseemüller map of the world. Visitors to his Los Angeles studio have been scarce and he is eager to talk about it. Dressed in white sweatshirt and trousers, he has the grace of a very tall dancer as he lopes over to give me an air-hug. Bending himself into a folding chair at a card table, Bradford explains his latest inspiration: ‘I’ve always been fascinated by ancient maps. They become maps of the imagination because obviously maps continually change with wars, with land redistributions, with ecology.’

The Waldseemüller map is a saga of its own and it’s easy to see the attraction for an artist. Not only is it the first record of the word ‘America’, recognising the claim by Florentine explorer Amerigo Vespucci to have ‘discovered’ the continent now known as South America, but the map itself is also a work of art. The four-sheet woodblock print, roughly 4ft x 8ft was created in Strasbourg by cartographer Martin Waldseemüller and Matthias Ringmann, a scholar of Ptolemy’s studies of latitude and longitude. The map was the first to show the continent as surrounded by ocean, not as an extension of Asia. It is long and skinny, with a closer resemblance to Argentina, but it established a landmass that extends south of the equator. ‘The way in which we even obtain this idea of America on the map was a leap of faith,’ says Bradford. ‘It was such a chance, a decision made by listening to other cartographers who had been in the region. I thought that was super interesting because it was the artist’s imagination.’ His comment recalls Ralph Ellison’s narrator in The Invisible Man looking at a map and wondering how Columbus could have thought it was India, as he tries to understand his own place in a shifting world. 

Bradford’s paintings, larger than mere wall maps, vibrate with criss-crossed gestures that simulate the energy and urgency of global matters. ‘With everything that I was experiencing and especially with the protests and the much-needed conversations around race in this country, I chose a map that said for the first time, “America”. What does the word America mean for an African American? It is all there,’ Bradford says. The title for his new show: ‘Masses and Movements’. 

It’s hard to conceive of a more fitting location for the debut of these works than Hauser & Wirth’s new outpost on Isla del Rey in the port of Mahón in Menorca, set to open in July 2021. One of the Balearic Islands off the coast of Spain, Menorca’s enviable position and port have attracted Phoenician, Roman, Ottoman, Spanish and British occupations over the centuries, each leaving behind evidence in its wake.

One example is the decommissioned naval hospital built by the British in the 18th century that is being restored by Hauser & Wirth and Argentine architect Luis Laplace, who designed its Somerset arts centre and St Moritz gallery. A series of eight gallery spaces, a shop and a restaurant will nestle in gardens by Piet Oudolf that overlook the sea. 

The gallery’s co-founders Iwan and Manuela Wirth were, says Iwan, ‘utterly captivated by Menorca and specifically Isla del Rey, which is spectacular. Our vision has always been to expand the idea of the gallery experience and we believe that this location is a fitting, natural and exciting extension to our centres in Somerset and LA. Given the setting so steeped in history and Mark Bradford’s interest in the legacy of the past on contemporary society, he was our choice to inaugurate the new location.’

Coincidentally, these latest paintings are an excavation of Bradford’s personal past. They were not made specifically for the site but were influenced by summers spent on the neighbouring island of Mallorca when he was in his twenties. He hadn’t yet found his way to college, and was helping his mother by working in her beauty salon. Two of her clients had bought houses in Mallorca and invited him to visit. When he asked, ‘How am I going to find you in this town?’ They said, ‘Oh, just ask for the Black women.’ 

Using gesso, paint and stone, he helped them renovate the old structures. That process of building – whether making an elaborate hairstyle in his mother’s salon or erecting a wall – became integral to the way Bradford learned to make his work in layers. In this case, the neutral palette reflects the tans and taupes of the island landscape with an occasional flash of blue, green or yellow. 

Superficially expressive and abstract, each work in the new show derives its organising principle from actual maps, with special nautical rope delineating order and structure. Papers and printed matter are glued down only to be sanded or torn off or obscured. Using caulk, Bradford adds the curved latitudinal and longitudinal lines of a globe. Thick textures cover the surfaces but allow glimpses of imagery drawn from the Waldseemüller map, such as the zephyrs that symbolise directions and wind patterns, as well as the occasional word. 

‘I was fascinated by these little wind symbols on the map. For me, it’s almost like they blew my people north, west, south and east,’ says Bradford. ‘We go from Africa, all the way to the Caribbean, all the way east, all the way through Europe, all the way through the Americas. It was forced but many of us got to where we were, outside of our homelands, on the winds in the sails that pushed those boats. I kept looking at those things thinking, “Yeah, they blew us all over the world.”’

The show also includes sculptures of globes in a single line, in progressively smaller circumferences. ‘This idea of the pandemic, it was not equitable. That’s why there are some big Earths and little Earths. It is a global thing we experienced but we are all not experiencing it the same way.’

Bradford regularly borrows from Greek and Roman mythology, as a way of presenting afresh the stories of gods and goddesses, heroes and villains, with all their foibles and powers. His 2019 show at Hauser & Wirth London, was titled ‘Cerberus’ after the three-headed dog preventing the dead from leaving Hades. Sculptures referencing Medusa have explosive serpentine hair, in a nod to the artist’s collection of comic books and their characters, often drawn from mythology. Old comics have also been repurposed as the bases of his latest paintings, offering tantalising fragments of stories never to be finished.

He believes the isolation of the past year contributed to an interior journey in the studio. Working mostly alone, Bradford felt his work changing. Despite the orderly grid that has underpinned his art from the outset, he embraced a more fluid approach. ‘I think this body of work is me allowing the grids, but also allowing the slippage and the spontaneity, and actually, nature,’ he says. ‘Not just demanding that the only thing I know is the urban environment.’ 

With one of his deep self-deprecating laughs, Bradford adds, ‘If you’re going to tell me to close down, I’m probably going to do just the opposite. Open up, which means taking more risk in the work, finding a way to do it.’ 

Bradford has faith in the utility of the workaround, which was essential to his survival as a 6ft 8in tall, gay, Black adolescent in South Central LA. After discovering club life, he started flunking classes in high school. He didn’t attend college until he was in his late twenties, when he won a scholarship to CalArts. He received his Master of Fine Arts in 1997; he was then 36. The curriculum was heavily influenced by conceptual art, which helped Bradford uncover who he did and did not want to be. In 2001, his collages using curling papers from his mother’s beauty salon featured in Thelma Golden’s ground-breaking ‘post-Black’ ‘Freestyle’ exhibition at Harlem’s Studio Museum. In time, he incorporated grids provided by maps of LA, along with posters and advertisements. The grid referred to modernist art and provided order for his jazzy impromptu surfaces. The originality came in his use of collage and décollage. 

Collage is a historically significant aspect of contemporary art in LA, especially among Black artists ranging from Noah Purifoy to Betye Saar. Bradford had grafted two genres, collage and abstract expressionist painting, into a powerful new species. Success came swiftly, with collector Eli Broad buying works from his early gallery shows. (The collector’s namesake museum, The Broad, now has 11.)

Bradford demonstrates allegiance to his origins with his foundation, Art + Practice, located in the historically Black neighbourhood of Leimert Park since 2014. Established with his partner Allan DiCastro and collector Eileen Harris Norton, it hosts exhibitions of contemporary art along with a crucial, innovative programme of support for foster youth. This evolved out of Bradford’s own wayward youth, as someone who almost fell through the cracks in the absence of education and opportunity. Recognising his good fortune, he chooses to pay it forward but rejects the label of ‘activist’. 

‘I’m an artist,’ he insists. ‘I think that the society or the mainstream or whatever you wanna call it, they just have a very limited idea of what an artist is capable of. So you find a way to survive that’s gonna keep you on safe ground,’ he says. ‘Doesn’t mean that you’re not angry sometimes. It doesn’t mean that you don’t feel. But you have to find that space in order to be able to move through the world, to keep moving in spite of. Not just keep moving, keep moving in spite of.’

A version of this article was originally featured in the July 2021 issue of Wallpaper* (W*267), available for free download

INFORMATION

‘Mark Bradford: Masses and Movements’, 19 July – 31 October 2021, Hauser & Wirth Menorca, hauserwirth.com

During the last decade, Frank Bowling has, at long last, enjoyed belated recognition. In the last two years alone, the modern master received his first retrospective at Tate Britain and was Knighted on the Queen's Birthday Honours List. The attention on his work, albeit overdue, is only crescendoing. 

In the latest chapter of Bowling’s six-decade ascension to acclaim is a transatlantic takeover of Hauser & Wirth galleries in New York and London, on show until 30 and 31 July respectively. These mark the artist’s inaugural exhibitions with the gallery since joining its roster in 2020. With works spanning 1967 to the present day, ‘Frank Bowling – London / New York’ captures how one artist’s inventive approach to the physicality of paint pushed abstraction to its limits. 

As their titles suggests, the simultaneous shows follow Bowling’s life and work between the UK and the United States spanning half a century. Born in Guyana (then British Guiana) in 1934, the artist arrived in London in 1953, graduating from the Royal College of Art in 1962. 

He later shuttled between the art scenes in London and New York, maintaining studios in both cities. London is where Bowling trained as a painter. But while his modern contemporaries including David Hockney, Pauline Boty and Patrick Caulfield were parting the art waves in Britain, Bowling – for reasons unclear, but certainly unrelated to the depth of his artistic output – mainstream success didn’t arrive – arguably one of the greatest artistic oversights of the last century. 

The shows span Bowling’s early engagement with expressive figuration and pop art, to his distinctive blend of poetry and abstraction that continues to evolve today. Visible in his work are the legacies of the English landscape painting traditions of Gainsborough, Turner and Constable. But in 1960s New York, Abstract Expressionism was stirring and Bowling was greeted with a new wave of garish colours and gestural improvisation. He was also met with new dilemmas as the Civil Rights Movement intensified in a city where divisions between the art of Black and white artists remained stark. 

Bowling would often begin a painting in one city and finish it in the other, and his work, in turn, became a hybrid fusion of cities, cultures and atmospheres. In his words, ‘I would just roll the lot up and move. And I knew that when I got to the other end, I could roll them out again and continue to work.’ 

His shows at Hauser & Wirth are as much tales of two cities as tales of two rivers. Bowling’s command of light, colour, and geometry was greatly influenced by the two great bodies of water in his life: The Thames in London and the East River in New York, near to which he maintained his studios. 

Within his vast canvases, the water’s swirling reflections feel tangible. Kaleidoscopic acrylic gel is palette-knifed into ripples and bulging protrusions. Through impasto, collage, stitched canvases, found objects and metallic and pearlescent pigments – each vantage point tells a new story. 

Throughout his career, Bowling has had one finger on the pulse of western modernity and another on that of his native Guyana. At 87, he remains a prolific creator, carefully directing the physical construction of his work as assistants pour, drip and splash paint across his vast canvases.

A tireless experimenter, sharp intellectual, and shape-shifting creative, Bowling may have been cast in the moulds of English landscape painting and American Abstract Expressionism, but spend even 30 minutes with his work, and you’ll unearth untold histories and a poetic approach to abstraction that continues to feel mind-blowingly new.

INFORMATION

’Frank Bowling – London / New York’, until 30 July 2021, Hauser & Wirth New York; until 31 July 2021 Hauser & Wirth London. hauserwirth.com

‘It’s pretty much all over the place and I’m all right with that,’ says Henry Taylor of his work in a film about his latest show. ‘It’s like the A side and B side – one side you want to grind to, the other you want to dance to.’ This spring, the Californian artist brings what he calls his hunter gatherer approach to a major exhibition of works at Hauser & Wirth Somerset.

During the winter months, Taylor has been resident at the gallery, setting up in its studio space, The Maltings. Alongside pieces drawn from across the four decades of his career are new works created during his time in self-isolation, which explore ideas around confinement and freedom.

A series of tabletop sculptures made in the rural location over the last six months offer an altered perspective on urban planning and housing projects. Ephemera familiar throughout Taylor’s work, such as painted black milk bottles and horse figurines, sit alongside objects that signify travel and movement – car tyres and tall ships. Hauser & Wirth’s Pigsty gallery houses a series of the artist’s miniature box paintings, including works created while the artist was still a student – domestic scenes painted on the surfaces of cereal boxes and cigarette packets.

Outside, the artist’s first outdoor bronze sculpture is placed in the Oudolf Field. The figure of a human body in motion, its head replaced by antlers, the work relates to a conversation Taylor had with his brother Randy, a founding member of the Ventura County chapter of the Black Panther Party, about a racially offensive bumper sticker he had seen in the 1980s.

Taylor’s own experience of self-isolation in the English countryside during the pandemic is reflected in two new self-portraits. In the first, we see the artist at home in his new rural Somerset environment, flanked by sheep and wearing a pair of striped pyjamas. In the second, Taylor, the youngest of eight children, nods to his childhood nickname, ‘Henry VIII’, with a regally styled portrait of himself as one of the most renowned kings in English history.

Portrait of my cousin GF: Dana Gallegos (2020) is one of several portraits on display embodying Taylor’s empathy and warmth. The artist, formerly a psychiatric technician, is known for portraying ordinary people with the same reverence as he does public and pop cultural figures. 

‘Everything is inside of you, it just comes out. But it’s always going to come, something is always going to permeate,’ he says. ‘I’m a sensitive individual, I respond to things.’

The exhibition is currently available to view online at hauserwirth.com and will re-open to the public on 13 April 2021 in accordance with government guidelines.

INFORMATION

hauserwirth.com

Takesada Matsutani’s globular, blob-like compositions stem from an unlikely source: blood, which he viewed under a microscope in the 1960s with a friend at medical school. The Osaka-born, Paris-based artist sought to recreate what he saw, armed with industrial glue polyvinyl acetate and a heady dose of imagination. 

From the early 1960s until the 1970s Matsutani was a key member of the Gutai Art Association, the first radical, post-war artistic collective in Japan. The group spurned the traditional art approaches of the time in favour of performative immediacy, interactive environments and a new wave of experimental art. As the group’s manifesto stated, ‘Gutai art does not change the material but brings it to life.’

Matsutani went on to develop his own mode of lifelike material by pouring vinyl adhesive glue, inflating it with his own breath and slicing it and watching it cave in on itself as he dried it with a fan. The resulting forms were peculiar, disconcertingly bodily and went on to form the basis of his distinctive visual language.

The artist’s six-decade career is spotlighted in an exhibition at Hauser & Wirth, the artist’s first solo show in Hong Kong. Organised with art dealer Olivier Renaud-Clément, the show spans the breadth of the artist’s practice, from works on paper created during a period of frugality in 1970s Paris to recent paintings conceived during quarantine and a seminal site-specific installation from the artist’s archive.

Some works resemble deflated balloons, such as Puffed up-1 and Puffed up-2 (both 2020); others are reminiscent of ruptured egg yolks, as seen in Circle-Yellow A.M. (2019). 

In recent years, Matsutani’s practice has evolved with more emphasis on the meditative and methodical, though he remains in tune with the values of his past: simplicity, pure gesture and raw material.

The artist manages repulsion, allure and elegance in a single form. In his multifaceted, fluid approach, he seeks to stop time, materialise a suspended moment and harness philosophy’s call for a ‘return to the simplicity of everyday experience’. In Matsutani’s work, mind, body, matter and spirit converge.

INFORMATION

Takesada Matsutani’s solo show at Hauser & Wirth Hong Kong will run until 11 February 2021. hauserwirth.com

ADDRESS

Hauser & Wirth 

16-15/F, 80 Queen's Road Central
Hong Kong

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Mika Rottenberg

b. 1976, Buenos Aires, Argentina

Combining film, architectural installation and sculpture, Rottenberg investigates ideas of labour and the production of value in our hyper-capitalist world, creating unsettling, subversive allegories for contemporary life. Weaving fact and fiction, she has worked in diverse locations, among them a pearl factory in China and a Calexico border town. Following her 2019 exhibition ‘Easypieces’ at New York’s New Museum and MCA Chicago, and a show at Hanover’s Sprengel Museum, Rottenberg is developing upcoming solo presentations for the Tai Kwun Centre for Heritage and Arts in Hong Kong, the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto, and Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal.

Nicole Eisenman

b. 1965, Verdun, France 

Drawing from her personal experience as an artist in New York City, Eisenman explores narratives such as the dangers of technological dependence and the eternal dread of the future. Through expressive paintings, she has spotlighted issues of gender, race, economic imbalance and gun violence. Her monumental outdoor sculptural ensemble, Procession, was a highlight of the Whitney Biennial in 2019. Eisenman is currently working on a number of solo museum shows across the US and Europe, including presentations at Nottingham Contemporary, the University Museum of Contemporary Art (University of Massachusetts Amherst), and Oslo’s Astrup Fearnley Museet. 

George Condo

b. 1957, Concord, New Hampshire, US

Invented characters with bulging eyes, asymmetrical faces with comical expressions, and bizarre bodies populate Condo’s work, which pays tribute to Old Master portraiture while nodding to the ambition and hysteria of contemporary American society. He has collapsed hierarchies between painting and drawing, the beautiful and the grotesque, and the comic and the tragic. His hallmark approach, ‘artificial realism’, involves ‘dismantling one reality and constructing another from the same parts’. He recently unveiled his first major public sculpture at New York’s Lincoln Center Plaza; titled Constellation of Voices, it evokes both a sun god and a lowly street performer, splendour and anxiety wrapped into one.

Matthew Day Jackson

b. 1974, Panorama City, California, US

Jackson’s art grapples with big ideas, such as the evolution of human thought, the fatal attraction of the frontier, and the faith that man places in technological advancement. Working across a variety of media and using an eclectic material palette, he interrogates the dual forces of beauty and desolation, particularly in relation to the myth of the American Dream. He is currently preparing a solo exhibition of new work to debut at Hauser & Wirth Zurich in October. Foraying into design, Jackson is now expanding his ‘Kolho’ furniture line,  first introduced in 2019 and produced by Finnish manufacturer Made by Choice (see W*242), and he is also collaborating with Calico Wallpaper on a special collection.

Glenn Ligon

b. 1960, Bronx, New York, US

Spanning painting, prints, photographs, sculptures and large-scale installations, Ligon’s work engages with text and found imagery to highlight African-American experiences, rendering a portrait of America as a concept, a place and a nation. Preferring to pose questions rather than propose answers, he engages the state of the world and urges us to do the same. The mutability of images, and our perception of them, are recurring themes. Ligon had works on view in the Duro Olowu-curated exhibition ‘Seeing Chicago’ at MCA Chicago. He will also feature in the ‘Prospect.5, New Orleans’ art triennial, in the autumn, and is at work on upcoming solo exhibitions at Hauser & Wirth New York, and Carré d’Art in Nîmes, France.

Nicolas Party

b. 1980, Lausanne, Switzerland

Party’s familiar yet unsettling landscapes, portraits and still-lifes simultaneously celebrate and challenge the conventions of representational painting. Using soft pastels, he has created a universe of fantastical characters and motifs, where perspective is heightened and skewed to uncanny effect. He has also created public murals, sculptures and architectural interventions to construct enveloping experiences for his audience. Party has recently shown at the Flag Art Foundation, New York, and at Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles. He is now at work on a mural commission from RxArt for the Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, and a new exhibition at Museo d’Arte della Svizzera Italiana Lugano, both debuting later in the year.

Avery Singer

b. 1987, New York City, US

Singer’s paintings employ the binary language of computer programmes and industrial materials in order to remove the traces of the artist’s hand, while engaging with past art historical movements. Her themes have included typified art world scenarios, sexuality, and the female figure. Through deploying new technologies and disengaging with romanticised views of image-making, Singer creates her own way of seeing. Her work is part of the forthcoming exhibition, ‘The Paradox of Stillness: Art, Object, and Performance’ at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. She also has projects in the works at Hauser & Wirth New York in 2021, and a solo exhibition in Asia in 2022.

Lorna Simpson

b. 1960, Brooklyn, New York, US

Simpson came to prominence with her pioneering approach to conceptual photography. Her early work, which juxtaposed text and staged images, raised questions about the nature of representation, identity, gender, race and history. She has since embraced  lm, drawing, sculpture and painting (see W*228), offering powerful critiques of institutional racism and sexism, and immersing viewers in the paradoxes of contemporary American life. From her David Adjaye-designed studio in Brooklyn, Simpson is working on a full schedule of major exhibitions, including solo presentations at the Kunstmuseum Thun, Switzerland, and Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles in 2021, and at the Serlachius Museum in Finland in 2022.

Jenny Holzer

b. 1950, Gallipolis, Ohio, US

A conceptual artist, cultural force and erstwhile Wallpaper* guest editor (see W*247), Holzer is known for deploying text in public spaces to illuminate injustice and call for political action. Beyond museums and galleries, her work has also appeared on storefronts, billboards and T-shirts, even projected on landmark buildings at epic scale. Upcoming projects include commissioned works for Castello di Ama, Château La Coste, Fondation Beyeler, and K21. Holzer will be the subject of a major museum show at Seoul Box this November, and will have an installation on view at MASS MoCA until July 2021. She is also curating an exhibition devoted to Louise Bourgeois at the Kunstmuseum Basel in 2022.

Ida Applebroog

b. 1929, Bronx, New York, US

A self-proclaimed ‘generic artist’ and ‘image scavenger’, painter and feminist Applebroog has spent the past half-century conducting a sustained enquiry into human relations. At once beguiling and disturbing, her work explores themes of violence and power, gender politics, and women’s sexuality and domestic space. In an Applebroog exhibition, the visitor becomes an observer and participant in a domestic drama, presented as fragmented narrative scenes. Applebroog was the subject of a solo show at the Kunstmuseum Thun in Switzerland in 2019, and an exhibition of her Mercy Hospital drawings, executed during her stay in a psychiatric clinic from 1969–1970, opened at London’s Freud Museum in February.

Rashid Johnson

b. 1977, Chicago, Illinois, US

Art history, individual and shared cultural identities, personal narratives, literature and philosophy all factor into Johnson’s multidisciplinary output. His work is embedded with everyday materials and objects, such as radios, shea butter, record covers and tropical plants, often associated with his childhood and referencing aspects of African-American identity. He presented a new body of work at Hauser & Wirth New York last autumn with his exhibition ‘The Hikers’, and is currently preparing works to be presented at Hauser & Wirth London and the New Museum, New York, as well as an outdoor sculpture commission at Storm King Art Center in upstate New York.

Mary Heilmann

b. 1940, San Francisco, California, US

Known for her joyful approach to colour and form, Heilmann is among the most influential abstract painters of her generation. She is influenced by 1960s counterculture, the free speech movement and California’s surf ethos, overlaying minimalist geometries with spontaneous gestures. Her work often has a complexity that only gradually reveals itself to the viewer. She is currently working on an exhibition for the Manetti Shrem Museum of Art at UC Davis, which will examine the sculpture and ceramics she made as a graduate student at Berkeley while spending time with the likes of William Wiley and Bruce Nauman, as well as her time as a visiting artist at UC Davis in the 1970s.

Annie Leibovitz

b. 1949, Waterbury, Connecticut, US

A leading portrait photographer and keen documentarian of social landscapes, Leibovitz consistently its style to technique through collaboration with her subjects, photographing them in their homes or locations of personal signi cance. Since her early years as a photojournalist for Rolling Stone magazine, she has captured historical and cultural touchstones throughout the US and abroad. Her career has dovetailed with, and advanced, photography’s evolution as a force for art making. In addition to participating in a major upcoming exhibition, ‘Le Noir et le Blanc dans la Collection Pinault’, in Rennes, France, she is currently working on a solo show at Hauser & Wirth London, and publishing a new book with Phaidon in November.

Rita Ackermann

b. 1968, Budapest, Hungary

Ackermann’s work negotiates the opposing ideas of creation and destruction, and aggression and fragility. While trained in printmaking, she is best known for large-scale paintings that occupy a space between the figurative and abstract. She has also worked in collage, photography, sculpture and performance. Ackermann recently opened a critically acclaimed exhibition, ‘Mama ’19’, at Hauser & Wirth New York, debuting a series of paintings in which figures and motifs rise to the surface of canvases, only to dissolve and reappear elsewhere again. The polymathic artist also collaborated with French fashion house Chloé on its A/W20 catwalk collection.

INFORMATION

hauserwirth.com

Few neighbourhoods in New York have undergone a transformation as striking or significant as Chelsea. Once an industrial district, its gas stations and warehouses gave way to the inevitable tide of gentrification in the 1990s, after decades of neglect. An influx of art dealers decamping from the bubble of SoHo cemented its designation as the city’s artistic epicentre – though traces of its history still reverberate in the column-free spaces and red-brick façades that make up its warren of high-end commercial galleries and luxury residential developments. 

On a grey day during Armory Week, it’s the tony neighbourhood’s newest addition that has us braving New York’s fickle weather. Taking shelter in Hauser & Wirth’s West 22nd Street bookshop from the sputtering drizzle, we don the necessary safety gear before the brisk walk next door. Inside, the air is coloured with dust and the lingering balm of freshly dried paint. Nearly every sight line out of Hauser & Wirth’s still under-construction new home by Selldorf Architects leads to buildings cocooned in scaffold netting. Chelsea seems poised to emerge anew. 

Swiss husband-and-wife team Iwan and Manuela Wirth have maintained a close relationship with Annabelle Selldorf since the gallery’s inception in 1992. Past collaborations with Selldorf ’s firm have seen the creation of galleries in a former brewery complex in Zurich; the Roxy roller rink on West 18th Street and an Upper East Side townhouse in New York City; a listed bank building in London; and an abandoned flour mill in Los Angeles (see W*205). Until now, the Wirths had mostly sought out buildings with rich architectural histories, drawing on their ‘innate character’. But this latest project, notably, is the first purpose-built, ground-up building for Hauser & Wirth. 

The new five-storey building sits next to Hauser & Wirth’s current Chelsea space in the former Dia Center for the Arts, although the two galleries won’t be physically connected. Its ground and first levels feature sliding concertina-style glass doors that completely fold away – a first for Selldorf in any of her projects, she notes – opening the façade up to facilitate the installation of larger artworks, as well as enticing passers-by with the art on view. The building’s masonry façade will stand in stark contrast to the original red-brick buildings that line West 22nd Street. Selldorf has conceived a grey palette comprising sustainably-sourced concrete blocks and zinc panels, punctuated by generous glazed openings. 

A multipurpose bar and event space on the second level will be used for a programme of artist talks and public gatherings. Private offices and viewing rooms (with interiors outfitted by Rafael de Cárdenas to evoke domestic interiors) and more exhibition spaces occupy the upper levels, including a cathedral-like gallery – high-ceilinged with clerestory windows – at the top. Even unfinished, and strewn with construction debris instead of the art that will eventually be shown here, this expansive space speaks of the Wirths’ ambition. 

The new building offers Hauser & Wirth new levels of flexibility. It offers its artists space big and smart enough to match their ambitions, to display large-scale works and larger-scope exhibitions. And offers visitors a museum-quality viewing experience. Selldorf explains: ‘When we work with a gallery or with a museum, we think: “What kind of art are you showing? How do you engage the visitor? What are the requirements to provide the greatest flexibility, but also the greatest balance between spaces?” And thinking about how people circulate in that space, what their perception is, with or without daylight – it’s a process that’s not entirely objective.’ As such, the column-free gallery spaces lend themselves to a wide range of mediums and installation approaches, easily adapted with temporary walls or the sealing of windows to accommodate both smaller showings and blockbuster-size surveys. 

Still, the anticipation lies in the space being activated by visitors. ‘It is the people who bring a space to life,’ Manuela explains. ‘We see this again and again in the communal atmosphere of the gallery spaces we create. It has been a constant motivator since the earliest days of the gallery. The building complements the art, but should never dominate. If anything, we prefer that the building is serene and understated – a place in which our artists and team will feel at home. This is deliberately not about a grand architectural gesture.’ 

As with other Hauser & Wirth locations, art is integral to the fabric of the building. ‘For me, the architectural experience not only supports the art experience, but is part of it,’ Selldorf explains. To that end, artists Martin Creed, Rashid Johnson, Mary Heilmann and Mark Bradford are plotting permanent interventions in the stairways, lifts, and elsewhere, engaging directly with her architecture. ‘Making good art spaces is an iterative process,’ she adds. ‘You start with an idea, then it gets thoroughly discussed, and so many factors play into it that eventually you don’t even see them.’ 

In the interest of public health, the new gallery’s opening has since been pushed back to the autumn, and Hauser & Wirth has shifted its focus to digital initiatives in the meantime.

Hauser & Wirth is not the only gallery upsizing in Chelsea. A combination of soaring rents and rampant construction has sparked an exodus of midsize Chelsea galleries in recent years. In contrast, a handful of blue-chip stalwarts and new-generation power dealers are doubling down with architecturally driven, museum-worthy spaces to attract blockbuster crowds. In 2018, Lehmann Maupin and Kasmin moved into purpose-built galleries by architects Peter Marino and StudioMDA respectively. This past autumn, Pace Gallery opened the doors to its eight-storey, 75,000 sq ft flagship designed by Bonetti/Kozerski Architecture. Meanwhile, Gagosian has expanded its 26,000 sq ft West 24th Street space into an adjacent site (vacated by Mary Boone Gallery and Pace Gallery last year), and David Zwirner is planning a Renzo Piano-designed tower on West 21st Street. But it’s not just size and space that matters, it’s what you do with it. 

Hauser & Wirth has always challenged accepted practices, but it was its reimagining of a farmhouse in the English West Country in 2014 that proved the full stretch of its ambition. The Somerset art centre in Bruton (see W*176) has become a model for its dynamic approach to exhibition-making. ‘Galleries were intimidating spaces when I was starting out,’ Iwan recalls. ‘I strongly believe you can have the highest calibre of exhibitions combined with an informality that feels inclusive. Although our art centres are a different model of commercial gallery, they are not institutions.’ Selldorf, whose own museum projects include the forthcoming Frick Collection expansion in Manhattan, adds, ‘With Hauser & Wirth, there is a kind of confluence because there is a degree of service to people by incorporating hospitality and educational programmes.’ 

Inevitably there is concern that the march of the new model mega-galleries in Chelsea is stifling opportunity for smaller galleries and the emerging artists they represent. Hauser & Wirth partner and president Marc Payot, who has worked with the Wirths for two decades, has been the driving force behind the gallery’s growing US presence since he relocated to New York in 2008. Payot stresses that ‘smaller galleries are essential to artists and to the public, and to the ecosystem of art sites where new ideas and expressions evolve’, citing Hauser & Wirth’s collaborative efforts with its ‘great friends’ Karma in New York, and Foksal Gallery in Warsaw as examples. ‘We all learn from each other.’ 

Hauser & Wirth’s blistering growth notwithstanding – in the last decade alone, it launched spaces in Somerset, Gstaad, Los Angeles, Hong Kong and St Moritz, with Menorca slated for next year – the partners insist the artists remain their priority. ‘The evolution of the gallery has been gradual and based on a combination of instinct and strategic thinking. We have set out to create a diversity of spaces which mirrors the diversity of our artists’ practice,’ says Iwan. ‘We respond to the artists’ needs, rather than our spaces dictating the way they work.’ 

Payot adds, ‘In that sense, this new building is just like all Hauser & Wirth locations: its design and development were informed by an overarching principle of creating community. We have often described Hauser & Wirth’s spaces as “energy centres” where visitors can stay for a while to see exhibitions, explore books, have a coffee, participate in public programmes, and so forth. It’s a way of life for us, for our team, and for our artists. And we, of course, hope it is a way of life for those who visit.’ 

The new gallery will open with ‘The Bride of God’, a group exhibition curated by New York-based writer and curator Philip Larratt-Smith. Taking Daniel Paul Schreber’s 1903 book Memoirs of My Nervous Illness as a point of departure, the ambitious survey spans painting, sculpture, installation, and video art by Hauser & Wirth artists including Isa Genzken, Jenny Holzer, Paul McCarthy, Pipilotti Rist and Lorna Simpson. The roster is complemented by works by artists not in the gallery’s stable, among them Francis Bacon, Agnes Martin and Andy Warhol. Payot expands: ‘This breadth is a manifestation of Hauser & Wirth’s global perspective and of a desire that guides our programme all the time: to connect the dots across an amazingly complex terrain of art history and intellectual history.’ 

One word is used repeatedly by the Wirths and Payot: ‘home’. It’s a thread that runs through their locations worldwide, reflected in gallery additions from the artist-designed Somerset guest house to the Los Angeles restaurant. Iwan, a self-professed bibliophile, has been instrumental in expanding the gallery’s book publishing operations. Come for the art, stay for a drink at Roth Bar, and peruse the high-gloss publications on display. At its core, Hauser & Wirth is a tight-knit family affair. After all, Iwan established the gallery in 1992 with Ursula Hauser – Manuela’s mother. ‘Our gallery’s origin as a family business touches every aspect,’ says Manuela. ‘We acknowledge that, as with family, relationships are very important to all of us. From this stable base, we feel free to innovate.’

A version of this article originally featured in the May 2020 issue of Wallpaper* (W*254) – on newsstands now and available for free download here

INFORMATION

Due to open in autumn 2020, 542 and 548 West 22nd Street, New York. hauserwirth.com 

Since surfacing on the East Village art scene in the early 1980s, George Condo's career has never been short of attention. He worked in Andy Warhol's ‘Factory', designed an album cover for Kanye West and invented his own visual language, ‘Artificial Realism’. He introduced a new mode of figurative painting to the world: bulgy-eyed, contorted-limbed characters that are at once monstrous, poignant and psychologically searing. 

Coinciding with Frieze Week 2021, Condo will open ‘Ideals of the Unfound Truth’ at Hauser & Wirth London. In new paintings and drawings, the artist layers faces on faces, creating weblike portraits in fractured psyches.

Condo simultaneously riffs on art historical motifs and deploys his inventive visual language of impish characters, dislocated teeth, eyes and breasts and vibrant, deconstructed fragments of colour. In Shanghai, the artist is also staging a major 200-work retrospective at the Long Museum, curated by Massimiliano Gioni. 

Here, we revisit an April 2020 interview with the artist covering Basquiat, boxing matches and his ‘Drawings for Distanced Figures', created during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. 

Wallpaper*: Where are you as we speak?

George Condo: I am sitting in the kitchen with my laptop on the counter. I get better service in here. Out my window, there is a magnolia tree about to blossom. It’s a very bright blue day, 10:50 am and I’m out on Long Island. I left New York City about four weeks ago, just to randomly take a break from work, and I’m sorry for what is happening there now but glad not to be in the midst of it.

W*: Looking back, how do you feel your work or approach to art has evolved since the 1980s?

GC: Well, my approach to art began a lot earlier than the 1980s to be honest. I really started when I was a child of about three years old and kept going ever since. In fact, many of the pictures I made in my teens, like in 1975, were shown in the museum exhibition ‘The Way I Think' at the Phillips Collection in Washington DC and The Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark. And the Tate Modern acquired one from 1976. The reason I mention this is because in 1984 I did my first of a series of paintings I called the ‘expanding canvases.' The MoMA has the first one, called Diaries of Milan. It’s an all-over compositional approach similar to Pollock, but instead of gestures there is this microcosmic interconnection of thousands of actual things, like what you think you see when you look at a Pollock or at static on a television screen, but in my case, it’s delineated. A stream of conscious type of painting basically unedited as I go through it. A bit influenced by Kerouac and the way he would just write a manuscript from start to finish.

W*: Which artists have had the biggest impact on you?

GC: I would say Kandinsky, Picasso, Caravaggio and then about a million others. The reason for the first three is that each of them created their own language which was somehow comprised of everything that came before them and took it to a new level. That's my intention as an artist.

W*: Which career moment will you never forget?

GC: When I first met Basquiat, because he was the first guy I met in New York that was an artist and he told me to move there. So I did in 1979, late December after Christmas, and I remember waking up on 1 January, 1980 and saying ‘this is where I live, thank you Jean.'

W*: Can you tell us about how your classical music training might have informed the way you work?

GC: My interests in music ran parallel with painting for a while in my early teens. I started on classical guitar then. It was kind of a revival moment; musicians like Julian Bream were becoming quite popular. I listened to everything from Benjamin Britten’s nocturnes to Luciano Berio’s sequenzas. I found it so interrelated and challenging. There were pieces written for the guitar I liked, but mainly they were for the lute, by Dowland and Bach. I thought about learning the lute. It was very difficult music: Dowland’s Forlorn Hope Fancy is so modern, with a very Anton Webern-like chordal thing at one point. Pedagogically, it was too difficult to play Bach fugues then turn my wrist to hold a pencil and draw. So I started to play the tenor viol, where lines were significantly reduced.

I've been together with violinist Leila Josefowicz for about two years and she only plays 20th century music. Contemporary composers have written masterpieces specifically for her: John Adams, Thomas Adès, Colin Matthews, and others. She would have performed a new piece by Helen Grime with the London Symphony Orchestra but all concerts are cancelled. Orchestral musicians are totally out of work and great pieces being written as we do this interview will have to wait for their premieres. My heart goes out to all of them. They make the world a sonic place.

W*: How are you adapting your way of working to the period of social distancing? 

GC: I’m just doing my thing, getting through this without thinking too much about how horrible it all really is. I miss my friends, my kids, Leila, and regular life and I feel terrible for those who are suffering worldwide with the virus.

W*: Can you talk a little about the portraits for your new online exhibition ‘Drawings For Distanced Figures’ at Hauser & Wirth? 

GC: They were part of my daily routine. To get up, have coffee and just draw. They are works related to a group of large paintings I’m currently working on. They represent the fear and sadness of the distancing we all have to be a part of.

W*: What’s the most interesting thing you’ve read, watched or listened to in the last few weeks?

GC: The Lennox Lewis vs. Mike Tyson boxing match on YouTube, and lots of other boxing matches. The reason is simply visceral and the connection to boxing is because it’s the way I want to paint. I’m also watching animal fights, like lions and hyenas. The faces are extraordinary.

W*: During the isolation period, have you developed any new interests?

GC: Well, I would say no, unfortunately. I’m too busy being a housekeeper. My big challenge is how to fix a broken doorknob.

INFORMATION

George Condo, ‘Ideals of the Unfound Truth’, 13 October - 23 December, Hauser & Wirth London. hauserwirth.com

Swiss artist Not Vital divides his time between Rio de Janeiro, Beijing, and Sent – the mountain village in the Engadin valley where he hails from. Small wonder then, that pigeonholing his work is a near-futile endeavour. The sculptor and painter’s output bears all the hallmarks of Swiss sensibility (a clean, sober aesthetic); the industry of Chinese manufacturing (‘they have a completely different work ethic’, he admires); with the robust creative flavour of South America – and then some.

Perhaps then, the gentle pastoral setting of Hauser & Wirth Somerset is the perfect foil to Vital’s multidisciplinary practice. The exhibition title ‘SCARCH’– a portmanteau of ‘sculpture’ and ‘architecture’ coined by Vital himself in 2009 – reflects his longstanding interest in landscape and human perception. To wit, the Somerset showcase ranges from early rudimental works to portrait sculptures, mixed-media works on paper, and ‘socially-driven’ installations from his international projects.

Curated by Olivier Renaud-Clément and Giorgia von Albertini, the exhibition opens in the Threshing Barn with a model from Vital’s ongoing series House to Watch the Sunset (2005). ‘The model was three times more expensive than the actual house,’ quips the artist of the project, which began in Agadez, Niger, with a structure built from local mud bricks. ‘When it was finished, I realised this building – or whatever it is – is in itself pure, meaning you cannot add or subtract anything.’

So far, Vital has colonised Switzerland with a concrete version of House to Watch the Sunset; the Amazonian jungle near Paraná do Mamori, Brazil, in angelim vermelho, a native tropical hardwood; and outside of Ulaanbaatar, with iron from the Mongolian steppe. A new iteration, made out of aluminium, will debut in the church of San Giorgio Maggiore during the 2020 Venice Architecture Biennale before voyaging to its final destination on the island of Fangasito in Tonga. The perennial nomad is intent on conquering every continent.

In the adjacent Workshop gallery, Vital shifts gears with a sculptural installation comprising ‘numerical portraits’ of architects. The volume and size of each of the 101 black granite structure is determined by the date and year of each architects’ birth, with Peter Zumthor, Norman Foster, Le Corbusier, and Michelangelo among the luminaries represented in the city-like formation. Also excellent are his mixed-media ‘drawings’ made from ephemera collected on his extensive travels; and the new stainless steel and ceramic tower in the front farmyard, Cannot Enter Cannot Exit (2020), that directs our gaze to the Bruton countryside. Dedicated pilgrims, we’ve dutifully pursued Vital to a remote Filipino province to worship at his concrete shrine, and more recently to the Indonesian island of Flores to scale a 13m building overlooking a trio of volcanoes. Even Hauser & Wirth Somerset, though well-connected to the main transport arteries of the UK, still requires a certain amount of forward-planning to visit. His ambitious works of art would almost certainly be viral Instagram sensations – were they not purposely erected in far-flung locations. And therein lies the crux of Vital’s oeuvre: though it may not always be immediately accessible, physically (or even conceptually), the reward ultimately lies in the journey. 

INFORMATION

‘SCARCH’, until 4 May, Hauser & Wirth Somerset. hauserwirth.com

ADDRESS

Hauser & Wirth Somerset
Durslade Farm
Dropping Lane
Bruton
Somerset BA10 0NL

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We’re inside an aeroplane cabin. The seats are upholstered in a dated, listless blue fabric and look like they might smell. Health and safety manuals rear their tattered edges from seat pockets. There are ashtrays in the armrests and signs on the window panels prohibiting smoking on board. But something feels off. There’s too much headroom, the windows look onto blank white walls and we’re standing on a polished concrete floor.

This is one part of German artist Isa Genzken’s latest exhibition, ‘Window’, at Hauser & Wirth, London. These nine seats and 15 window panels, left in desolation, are already greater than the sum of their parts. Here, we’re confronting our perception of air travel: familiarity, anticipation, glossy consumerism, anxiety and now more than ever, a jumbo-sized stain on the climate crisis. Genzken has managed to conjure all of this, and perhaps even a spell of phantom altitude sickness.

Both Isa Genzken and her work are difficult to pin down. She’s reserved, enigmatic and reluctant to give interviews, but according to Hauser & Wirth Partner Florian Berktold, wields an ‘incredible sense of humour.’ 

Berktold first worked with Genzken in 2004 for a show at Hauser & Wirth’s former plot on Piccadilly in an old bank building designed by Edwin Lutyens. ‘We did not know what Isa was conceiving for that exhibition, other than receiving the material for the invitation card,’ he recalls. ‘A few weeks before the show, Isa called to say that she had finished the show, asking for the works to be picked up immediately.’ 

As with the exhibition in 2004, ‘Window’ is staged almost exactly as it was conceived in Genzken’s Berlin studio. ‘It was again a phone call from her to say that the exhibition is done and that it waits to be sent to London,’ says Berktold. 

Where did she salvage the materials for this project? There’s no clear answer, but Berktold has a clue. ‘In the early 1990s, Isa’s mother was very involved in helping source windows for her work. Isa has said that she would call up Lufthansa telling them that her daughter was in need of aeroplane windows – she was very instrumental in procuring these,’ he explains. 

Elsewhere in the exhibition is a hulking chunk of concrete, which looks as if Rachel Whiteread’s House has been shrunk and posed on steel stilts. It’s not a pretty composition, yet Genzken makes it appear tender, fragile and somehow beautiful like we’ve been handed a pair of rose-tinted glasses and worn them until we don't know any different.

Genzken has never had an exclusive relationship with any one medium or motif. Her shapeshifting practice has seen flings with everything from acoustics to plants. She’s been more faithful to some: umbrellas, architecture, concrete and, as we might have already deduced, windows. ‘Windows ask viewers to physically engage with these questions,’ says Berktold. ‘They act as a border between inside and outside, both architecturally and physiologically, whether they open onto a blank wall or remain firmly shut.’ 

Genzken grew up in West Germany, a country then in post-war tatters and Cold War angst. She took up studies at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 1973 and began mingling in the same circles as Lawrence Weiner, Katharina Fritsch and Joseph Beuys. Her work flirted with Minimalism and Constructivism, but soon enough this elegant rigidity took a U-turn with her ‘ruins’: boxy lumps of coarse concrete, which dredged up memories of rubble-strewn German streets. Then things got trashy. Pizza boxes, police tape and other obscure readymade rubbish discovered while trawling the streets of Berlin were assembled to critique consumer culture and mass production. Her work has often embodied social unease and capitalist ideals conveyed through the architectural language of Berlin and her beloved New York. The 2000 series, Fuck the Bauhaus, using garishly tinted architectural assemblages of cardboard, shells and tape feels both optimistic and apocalyptic. 

Architecture plays a big role in this exhibition too. In one corner of the space, five plinths bear eerie, whitewashed architectural models. Removed from context, they look like space-age, Kubrick-esque environments, but are examples of how Genzken has staged windows, with no apparent architectural function, in and around real-life buildings. In Spiegel, the artist places a symbolic ‘mirror’ up to the postmodern Stadthalle Bielefeld, asking it to face its reflection. 

Isa Genzken’s work will always be frustratingly hard to pigeonhole. Her work is radical and conflicting, with a heretical enthusiasm and unyielding ability for constant self-reinvention. She moves too quickly to be lumped into a movement or classification. Once again, this time at Hauser & Wirth, everything you thought you knew about Isa Genzken can go out of the window. 

INFORMATION

’Window’, until 2 May, Hauser & Wirth.
hauserwirth.com

ADDRESS

Hauser & Wirth
London 23 Savile Row
London W1S 2ET

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‘There is no other city like LA, which generates creativity for the entire world in so many modes,’ says Frieze Los Angeles executive director Bettina Korek. The California native may be somewhat biased, but LA has an indisputable pull – boosted by the thrilling new dimension that Frieze brought to the city’s cultural scene when it launched last year. This week, riding high off the spectacle that is the Oscars, the fair’s sophomore effort returns to Paramount Pictures Studios. Fittingly, the inaugural Deutsche Bank Frieze Los Angeles Film Award for emerging LA-based filmmakers is set to be awarded at the fair. Also new in 2020, Focus LA provides a platform for local galleries aged 15 years or younger, with curated artist projects advised by Rita Gonzalez, curator and LACMA department head of contemporary art. But it’s the solo acts that are raising the stakes – here, we make a beeline for the galleries risking it all on one artist.

Avery Singer at Hauser & Wirth

At 32 years old, the Swiss mega-gallery’s youngest signing is almost certainly bound for art superstardom. Lauded for her forward-thinking visual vocabulary, Avery Singer combines digital and manual techniques with gesso paint to create works on canvas that meld abstraction and figuration, historical and contemporary narratives. The artist, who hails from New York, will present four new paintings at Hauser & Wirth’s stand (B14), flexing her affinity for art history and colour theory in works like Jordan (2019, pictured below), which takes 19th-century European painting and the notion of ‘the intoxicated painter’ as starting points.

Idris Khan at Victoria Miro

At Victoria Miro’s booth (B11), British artist Idris Khan is intent on hitting all the high notes at Frieze with a meditative display of new paintings, sculptures and works on paper, largely rendered in intense shades of blue. But it’s his suite of Large Rhythm Paintings, based on sheet music, that has us completely entranced: obscuring areas of musical notation with gestural passages of oil paint, Khan leaves select elements of the original visible. Additional works include the deeply personal my mother, 59 years (2019) – an abstract monument comprising every printed photograph he could find of his late mother – as well a series of White Wall collages, and a jesmonite maquette of his public art installation recently unveiled in London.

Calida Rawles at Various Small Fires

Various Small Fires (VSF) is making its hometown Frieze debut with a showing of American photorealistic painter Calida Rawles in the fair’s new Focus LA section. The artist’s surreal paintings – depicting her subjects floating or submerged in swimming pools – dive into topics such as colourism, intersectionality, and the marginalisation of black women. The fair presentation coincides with Rawles’ first solo exhibition, ‘A Dream for my Lilith’ (12 February – 14 March), at the gallery’s Johnston Marklee-designed space in Hollywood.

Ugo Rondinone at Galerie Eva Presenhuber

‘Like a diarist, I record the living universe – this season, this day, this hour, this wind, this kind of grass… this kind of snow, this sound in the grass, this silence,’ reflected New York-based, Swiss-born artist Ugo Rondinone in a cryptic statement. The enigmatic Rondinone is revealing little else ahead of his solo presentation at Galerie Eva Presenhuber’s booth (A10), other than it comprises ten small-scale mountain sculptures and one sun painting. Watch this space.

James Turrell at Pace Gallery and Kayne Griffin Corcoran

The American artist has the distinct honour of headlining a double bill of his own work across two galleries – Pace Gallery (B16) and Kayne Griffin Corcoran (B18) – including an immersive LED ceiling installation and works from James Turrell’s Glass series. The immersive joint exhibition was conceived to bolster awareness and raise further funds for his magnum opus, Roden Crater – a monumental public arts project that has been 50 years in the making in the Painted Desert region of northern Arizona. Sitting out LA this year? Pace Gallery is hosting a solo exhibition of Turrell at its London outpost (11 February – 27 March); additionally, a survey of his work, ‘Passages of Light’, is currently on view in Mexico until 29 March. 

INFORMATION

Frieze Los Angeles 2020 runs from 14-16 February. frieze.com

ADDRESS

Paramount Pictures Studio
5515 Melrose Avenue
Los Angeles

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‘I feel like [the gallery] only gave me this show because they thought I was about to die,’ quips Sir Don McCullin ahead of the opening of his new exhibition at Hauser & Wirth Somerset. After six decades of covering conflict, the 84-year-old British photographer words still pierce with the same steely earnestness as his images. This deeply personal survey spans his extensive travels across the globe, from painterly compositions of Somerset’s ‘metallic dark skies’ to the fragile Arctic landscape, colossal ruins in North Africa, sacred Indian and Indonesian locations, and meditative still lifes. Here, in his own words, McCullin candidly opens up about his enduring connection to the British countryside, losing control and the great challenge of landscape photography…

Somerset calling

I owe something to Somerset because I came here when I was a child, about 80 years ago, as an evacuee during the [Second World War]. I spent a couple of years in Somerset, then went back to London and then I went somewhere else because my mother wanted to get rid of me. But I never forgot Somerset and about 36 years ago I returned. I had just been fired from The Sunday Times and I was in a very strange place, I was very depressed. I was sacked by a man called Andrew Neil [then-editor of The Sunday Times], who I don’t like, you might say.

Anyway, I found a house down here in Somerset. Because I lived on the hill outside of town, all you could see were the skies, but they were coming from the west where all our weather fronts are from. I [once] saw a collection of paintings by Constable in a private collection in Canada – he did a series of skies on small canvases. So the first thing I do when I wake up in the morning is to look at the sky and think [to myself] if there is a possibility that I can make a landscape picture today. And of course, some days there are, and some days there are not.

A shot in the dark

I don’t work in the summer, I only take pictures in the winter because the sky is much more expressive. I embarked on this landscape career in between doing the other weird things I do in photography. And I do this voluntarily – no one asks me to do it, no one pays me to do it. It’s me that makes myself do it. I started doing landscapes around 1990, and after all these years I’ve managed to put this collection together. I’ve printed every one of these pictures, so there’s a lot of me in these pictures, a lot of my integrity and a lot of my emotional thoughts. It’s a short history of my life for the last 80 years and it has been a great challenge for me.

I’ve got 60,000 negatives, so in the past I’ve always jumped on the ones I thought were the best, and I pushed a whole swathe of them aside. Now I look at them and think that time helps the negative. You can look at a picture that was take in the 1960s and it appears as if it was taken 100 years ago. Time actually enriches these pictures and makes them look very historical.

Sight of the times

I’m just out of control, but it’s not negative out of control, it’s very positive. I have to be very careful I don’t become very offensive about it because people say, ‘What is he trying to do here? Is he trying to frighten us? Is he trying to please us?’ It’s both, really. I used to travel the world working for The Sunday Times, mostly to wars and revolutions. After I came home, I used to abandon my young family – which was very wrong of me – because I wanted to keep going. I was suddenly like a mad dog out of control.

‘The stillness of silence and sometimes my loneliness provoke my imagination, but, like the surrounding land, I am fighting to release the past in me’

I thought I have to do some English landscapes based on [photojournalist] Bill Brandt, a German emigré who came to England in 1933. He was quite wealthy so he would photograph things like maids in posh houses wearing pinnies. But then he would go to the North of England and photograph miners being scrubbed in aluminium bathtubs – I was a fan of his and started following in his footsteps. Thank God I did, because Northern England was a honeypot, it was full of riches. Still, I was indulging myself – in my conscious – on the back of other people’s misfortunes because I was photographing the underprivileged. Mind you, I came from an underprivileged background myself so I thought I knew and understood what I was doing.

The politics of nature

My work is, in a way, environmental, and it’s the same with the landscape [in Somerset]. Our biggest threat around here is that it’s desirable. So-called developers – who aren’t actually developers but are backward-thinking – want to build here and in the end they’ll ruin what we’ve all came to love. But people must have houses. There’s no doubt that my photography has got a political twinge to it, but I’m not clever enough to frame it with voice and mind – I do it better through pictures. But everything we love is under threat, really, the whole planet.

The landscapes are [political] because of the green belt. There are more than 60 million people living in this country now – where can they go? We can’t imprison them all in cities. Eventually we’re going to have to break out and take some of that land. The green belt was meant as a conservation area for our future generations but we are going to have to bite into it. But I’ll be dead by then, so it won’t bother me. Every time I leave London, I keep seeing another deadly threat: they’re called industrial parks, and they’ve got nothing to do with parkland. It’s a poncey name that’s trying to avoid the fact that it’s another blot on the landscape.

INFORMATION

‘Don McCullin. The Stillness of Life’, 24 January – 4 May, Hauser & Wirth Somerset. hauserwirth.com

ADDRESS

Hauser & Wirth Somerset
Durslade Farm
Dropping Lane
Bruton
Somerset BA10 0NL

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There is a row of small models sitting on the smooth, grey terrazzo bench at artist Monika Sosnowska’s new atelier in Warsaw. It’s surprising that her monumental works – vast brutal collages of welded steel and cast concrete contemplating constructivism and modernism – all start as dainty three-dimensional sketches in wire, cardboard and paper.

Minimal and tidy, her voluminous concrete and glass studio lends itself to pure, undistracted experimentation.

When Sosnowska bought the plot of land neighbouring her home and former studio space, she was seeking more room to work on a larger scale, and the continuation of her pleasant commute through the garden to work. Beyond that, what inspired her was what an empty space could bring to her artistic process.

She picked up the phone and called Basel-based architects Karolina Slawecka and Pawel Krzeminski, whom she had met at Art Basel in 2004, where Slawecka had helped bring one of her artworks to life. She caught them at a good time. It had been two weeks since they decided to leave their respective posts, at Herzog & de Meuron and Atelier Peter Zumthor, to co-found their own studio, Architecture Club.

Swiss precision and first-project pressure meant pushing themselves to the limit to reach the ‘best, most radical’ solution for Sosnowska. It required searching, then re-searching, and thinking, then re-thinking, until the solution was at its most functional, and importantly, most extreme: ‘Just two walls and a slab,’ says Krzeminski.

The 5m by 12m concrete frame, with a steel structure and two glazed façades, may look effortless, but it is the result of a two-year process. All the utilities are hidden in that form, including heating, cooling, an alarm system and acoustic panels. The smooth terrazzo bench levels the atelier up to the street. Light glows from behind the steel I-beam frame that will soon be fitted out with an art crane to suspend and lift heavy works, leaving Sosnowska with a void – the ‘best, most radical’ void – of light-drenched space, filled with undefined artistic potential.

It’s also filled with a custom-made service station and parallel table, both in solid oak. The pieces feel architectural; they ‘belong to the space’. The cuboid station unfolds into a kitchen, storage area and a toilet, while the table hosts a series of models featuring red spikes poking out from a mini polystyrene base.

The design – ‘two walls and a slab’ – was at its most functional, and most extreme

Artist and architects found common ground in model-making. ‘We brought suitcases from Basel filled with different models,’ says Slawecka. And when they arrived, the modelling process continued. They mocked up 1:1 sections of the building façade on site – Krzeminski calls it ‘testing by physical reality’ and there’s even a prototype corner of the building buried somewhere under the studio.

‘Karolina made a beautiful model with Monika. They were cutting cardboard and Plexiglas, and quickly gluing it all together,’ he says. By the time they finished, they had reached the final idea for the space. It captured how light would travel through the building, the roughness of the materials and their industrial references.

The concrete formwork of the walls nods to the coarse timber of early shed-like buildings found in the once-rural suburban neighbourhood. The translucent glass of the street-facing façade, reinforced with gridded wire, blurs outside activity and brings privacy, while the regular glazing to the north reveals the tranquil garden scene with clarity.

The façade was welded on site by the same contractor who works on Sosnowska’s sculptures. ‘It was the natural thing to do. She had the know-how and the people,’ says Slawecka.

It was Sosnowska’s open mind that allowed them to reach the ‘best, most radical’ solution: ‘We discussed details with Monika that we wouldn’t usually discuss with a client. She understands proportions in a beautiful way. Whether you’re designing for one person or 1,000, the principles are the same. It’s the intimacy with the client that becomes more specific when designing for one.’

Slawecka and Krzeminski are well-versed in working on art-related buildings: Slawecka led the LACMA project at Atelier Peter Zumthor; and while at Herzog & de Meuron, the pair worked together on the Tate Modern extension – specifically on its staircase, the spinal chord that shifts from animated public space to rudimentary step-way: ‘The team was stuck, and Jacques and Pierre asked us to work on it for a few months for a bit of freshness,’ says Slawecka.

And fresh they still are. They say they are fairly ‘old’ to be starting their own thing. But as they move through the space, playfully finishing off each other’s sentences, recalling laugh-out-loud anecdotes and off-the-record moments, Slawecka and Krzeminski seem anything but old. In architecture years, they are still young, and with this first project completed, it certainly feels like the start of something. §

As originally featured in the November 2019 issue of Wallpaper* (W*248)

INFORMATION
architectureclub.ch

hauserwirth.com

The rolling hills, rural lanes and soothing whiff of manure in Somerset are a far cry from the smoggy haze of New Delhi, the city where London-born Indian artist Bharti Kher has lived and worked since 1993. Kher is now in her second residency at Hauser & Wirth Somerset, which has offered some much-needed solitude. ‘It’s terrifying, but it helps you confront your own fears about your work,’ she says. ‘You have to quiet the chaos. You have to find the rhythm in the pendulum.’

Kher has our attention before we’ve even left the car park. Her outdoor sculpture, The Fallow, does what it says on the tin, in form and metaphor. Its title refers both to its dusty yellow-brown colour and also to the period in the agricultural calendar when land is left to regenerate. ‘It’s when we all leave the earth alone and let her do exactly what she needs to do to heal herself,’ says Kher, admiring her 3.5m bronze Goddess, halved and hollowed with an ornate, semi-circular band emerging from her innards.

In the Threshing Barn, something peculiar is dangling under the rafters. It’s Kher’s first of two ‘balance pieces’ and the exhibition’s namesake, A Wonderful Anarchy. This compilation of motley readymades includes a ladder from the Victoria and Albert Museum, a piece of black lace from Kher’s mother’s sari shop in Streatham suspended in peaceful equilibrium with chains, a severed cast of an arm, a horn, an astrolabe and an architects’ measuring rod, among other detritus. The walls feature a series of abstract, algorithmic drawings on old ledger paper and recurring circular motifs.

‘You have to quiet the chaos. You have to find the rhythm in the pendulum’

Further in, we get acquainted with The Intermediary Family, a series dreamt up during Kher’s first residency in 2017. She gathered a series of Golu dolls (typically displayed in South India during the autumn festive season) from flea markets, then shattered and glued them all back together in obscure assemblages. Glance and you might see genteel, plump-faced porcelain ornaments posed on tubular cement and candy-coloured wax plinths. Look closer and find freaky cut-and-paste figurines like you’ve plunged headfirst into the warped world of Hieronymus Bosch. Fruits are heads, lions have legs and any religious connotations are quickly buried under the chaos of bodies undergoing bizarre and sometimes comedic polymorphs.

Each figurine has a name, offering a few clues to their provenance. Ship of Fools looks like a pantomime being performed on the Raft of Medusa. Artemis, the goddess of fertility, has a collection of severed heads protruding from her midriff, bringing to mind the Artemis Fountain in Tivoli where the sculpture’s grid-like bosom expels water like an overactive udder. ‘These are the avatars of human existence; they are the avatars of the gods and goddesses and the myth-making of what it is to be human,’ says Kher. ‘When I break them down I fashion new life.’

In the Pigsty gallery is another of Kher’s concentric contraptions, Consummate Joy and Sisyphean. A large hoop of wood frames a scene to match the complexity of its title. A reel of copper wire teeters on the edge of a block of anonymous wood. ‘The circle is all over us, it’s in our atoms,’ says Kher. ‘These are objects that have their own central gravity and centre of grace.’ Another plinth holds what looks like a hunk of raw beef but is in fact jasper stone.

Virus X brings the exhibition full circle. This project – which began in 2010, and concludes in 2039 – involves hundreds of bindis applied in a hypnotic swirl directly onto the wall. This particular piece, in varying shades of green, represents the year 2019. The bindi is an enduring and versatile symbol in Kher’s work. It’s the third eye, the seat of wisdom and also an object of cultural misunderstanding, commoditisation and appropriation in popular culture. ‘It’s a vortex. It's a peephole. It’s an entrance. It’s an exit. It’s a womb,’ she says.

Each year, Kher creates another ‘Virus’ accompanied by a passage of text predicting the state of the world mixed with a few personal updates – part ‘dear diary’, part spooky clairvoyant reading. At times, this is a terrifying, dystopian commentary that ranges from plausible to absurd. She forecasts that next year (Virus XI) texting will be made possible through ‘thought power alone’; in 2029 (Virus XX) ‘artificial intelligence in a computer will pass the Turing Test’ and in 2035 (Virus XXVI), ‘holographic recreations of dead people will become a possibility’. Much of this is informed speculation; the only thing Kher knows for certain is that with each Virus, her age will increase by one.

‘A Wonderful Anarchy’ can be mythical, scientific, ritualistic, sacred and secular all at once. Occasionally you find yourself in an anecdote, something deeply personal or on an unconventional passage to India. There’s a wonderful rhythm to these interwoven subplots, but the whole experience feels more cathartic than anarchic.

INFORMATION

‘Bharti Kher. A Wonderful Anarchy’, until 5 January 2020, Hauser & Wirth Somerset. hauserwirth.com

ADDRESS

Hauser & Wirth Somerset
Durslade Farm
Dropping Lane
Bruton BA10 0NL

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