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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dale Lewis is at Edel Assanti until 14 August

edelassanti.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

danielmalarkey.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The query in the title of the sweeping exhibition ‘The Woman Question, 1550-2025’, now showing at Warsaw’s Museum of Modern Art, is a fundamental one. Through this expansive presentation of figurative painting and sculpture by (and of) women, spanning nearly 500 years, we find more questions than answers, as the show opts for a welcome fluidity and incompleteness over any kind of all-encompassing certainty.

The querelle des femmes – a protofeminist slogan of the 1700s – is translated here as ‘the woman question’, but has also historically been understood as the 'dispute' of women, initially indicating a contestation over the nature or even existence of the category 'woman'. The phrase was subsequently taken up in the 19th century to define a struggle for basic rights, with the inquiry becoming one with more revolutionary stakes. But how are we to interpret it today? In the Polish context, as well as in many other democratic countries around the world, hard-earned women’s (as well as LGBTQ+) rights are being rapidly reversed.

The show fittingly opens with 3 Minute Scream, a 1977 video work by Gina Birch, an artist and member of the British punk band The Raincoats. Her low-volume but high-pitched scream reverberates from its perch above the main entrance, forming a furious sonic backdrop that lingers through the show. This initial gesture might be deceiving, though, as what follows feels decidedly more canonical than punk.

In a small side room with a limit of ten visitors at a time, Artemisia Gentileschi’s Susanna and the Elders (1610) is mounted next to Miriam Cahn’s Must Strike Back (2024), temporally uniting a large swath of the exhibition’s historical purview in a direct dialogue across centuries. Gentileschi’s iconic work explores the harassment of a 'virtuous wife' by two older men during her bathtime, while Cahn’s painting more abstractly depicts a femme body in the act of physically fighting a 'spectre of male sexual violence'. The content of this dialogue across time is clear, but the filmed performance Chiara Fumai Reads Valerie Solanas (2013), shown on an old-school television set in the corner of the room, spells out in no uncertain terms the rage expressed in both of the paintings.

The curatorial approach of Alison M Gingeras, despite the impressive transhistorical conversation it enacts and its undeniable aesthetic merits, is a decidedly institutional and scholarly one: the sections of the multi-room exhibition are devised in nine chapters, which sometimes read like teaching units in a Feminist Art History 101 course.

Despite the inclusion of a small portion of contemporary trans and queer positions – like Puppies Puppies’ (aka Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo) 2022 bronze cast statue or Ambera Wellmann’s 2019 painting In Media Res, for example – and relatively few non-white artists, the show largely mirrors a long-held historical take on women’s art, from Linda Nochlin to Griselda Pollock, falling prey to the parameters that necessitate the inclusion of certain kinds of works. As Gingeras concedes in an interview with Frieze: 'There were, of course, limitations due to pragmatic realities… I had to begin with what was historically available and then build the project outward from there.'

Of course, a blockbuster exhibition like this, mounted in one of the country’s biggest art institutions, demands a certain widespread legibility. Towards the end of the show, sections on motherhood and women at war (specifically in Poland and Ukraine, with other current conflicts conspicuously absent) ground us in a lived reality beyond the realm of women’s (self-) portraiture. While the practical parameters that the show’s curator contends with deny it the possibility of being truly groundbreaking, ‘The Woman Question’ provides a vivid cross-section of 500 years of women in art, resisting their erasure by yet another version of the art historical canon.

'The Woman Question, 1550-2025' at Warsaw Museum of Modern Art until 3 May

artmuseum.pl

Joanna van Son’s gloriously rich, textural paintings could date from another era; they would be perfectly at home alongside Caravaggio’s glints of light, or Frans Hals’ sharply observed portraiture. And yet, the Oman-born, London-based artist has created a style that is entirely her own.

A self-taught painter, van Son studied architecture at the Bartlett, London, translating a keen sense of spatial awareness into a sensual perception of the female figure. ‘Architecture prepared me for the immersive by projecting me into it, making me acknowledge the senses and languages I needed to play with to make new realities present,’ says van Son. ‘It fuelled my indecision when I learnt an architectural drawing could show all realities at once, I never wanted to choose just one, and it enabled me to live in this ambiguity. I’m glad I started painting this way; I wasn’t made to feel bad about being lost, I was made to feel like I was on to something.’

For her first show at Saatchi Yates in London, van Son leans into this immersion with a series of works devoted to her partner, Lilah, reimagining her form in multiple dream-like iterations. In her work, thick, tangible layers of paint imbue an intimate relationship with a scrutiny rooted in art history traditions.

‘My work may just point out two all-consuming facts of my life, painting and Lilah,’ van Son says. ‘I speak to them with an attention nothing else gets. We are the only people in the room. Painting becomes my emotional thinking process, I don't need to talk through things to make sense of the world, I just have to paint them; paint how we interact with each other, capture how we feel about each other. I'm not giving people the image of the perfect relationship, I'm giving something dark and turmoiled, at the same time as passionate or peaceful. I like it being both those extremes at once, and depending who's looking at the work, they may take something else from the painting.’

The paintings are actually an amalgamation of mediums, with the marks of drawing and text often visible among the passionate swirls and coils of paint. Adds van Son: ‘I think the drawing is one of the most precious parts of the painting. I want the viewer to know it exists, I think I always have.’

For the artist, it is at one with the multi-layered meanings inherent in her works. ‘The day I started being more vulnerable with my drawing is the day I actually started to put the bodies in spaces, giving them a plane to lie on or mark where the vantage point cuts them off or moves them around. I think exposing it really shows how I am questioning myself as I paint, questioning the subject’s place on the canvas, etc, which I think is vital for how I learn from my paintings and that continues into my next work.’

Joanna van Son is at Saatchi Yates until 16 April

saatchiyates.com

Cecily Brown's exhibition opens with a group of nature walk paintings. As you enter the London gallery from Kensington Gardens, where spring is finally coming into bloom, there is a sense of the exhibition mirroring its environment.

'Hopefully it's uplifting and it's a bit joyous and the setting of the park is phenomenal, and very emotional for me as well,' Brown says to Wallpaper* at the opening of ‘Cecily Brown: Picture Making at The Serpentine South’. 'The park always cheers you up, doesn't it? On a beautiful day, it's hard to be sad when it's this gorgeous. Hopefully the paintings can add another layer to that.'

Surprisingly, 'Picture Making' is the artist’s first substantial institutional show in the UK. Brown is what we once would have called a ‘market darling’ – not only revered by critics, but also highly commercially successful. She moved to New York from London in 1994, as she felt out of place in the London art scene, which was dominated by the Young British Artists (YBAs) at that time, and has not really looked back.

While her life is primarily in the United States and the urban landscape of New York her work features nature almost exclusively meaning that many of her paintings are created from memory, photographs or a combination of both. Her painting is dramatic, sometimes frenetic, gestural and immediate and her references include the history of painting and popular culture from Breughel to Bitter Moon, a poem by Samuel Beckett.

We see these elements mixed effortlessly in these works made between 2001 and 2025. During this time, her work veers between the more abstract and the more figurative and back again. Some works are made quickly, and others, over months. The paintings can appear abstract at first, but as you spend time with them, figures appear and vanish into the brushwork. Some figurative elements jump out, while others are evasive, slipping in and out of view. Nature operates on its own terms, and while these works are beautiful, they are not simply a presentation of the bucolic. Couples passionately embrace, waves churn, limbs fade in and out of the greenery.

'I don't really like the word escape or escapism, but I do love the idea of getting lost in art, whether it's a painting, a film, a book or music,' says Brown. 'I couldn't get through life without any of those things. It's more like it's this parallel world, isn't it?'

There are also many drawings on display here, taking inspiration from children’s illustrations. They are truly delightful, as are the figurative monotypes that pepper the show. Illustrations are a theme that runs through Brown’s work, with certain images recurring in multiple paintings. She copies images to understand them further.

There is always the question, these days, about making art in the face of global strife, and Brown feels that while her work can provide a break, there is also an instability or unknown in her painting that also reflects our times. 'There is uncertainty in my work, and you're never quite sure where you are. There's a psychological unease that I think reflects the outside world,' she says. 'One does feel guilt for just being in the studio. I think Philip Guston had a famous quote – “How can I be sitting here thinking about red, yellow and blue when there's a war on?”’

Meander through the galleries, and Brown's works will open up around you. Beautiful and masterful at first look, they only reveal more over time.

‘Cecily Brown: Picture Making’ runs from 27 March to 6 September 2026 at Serpentine South

serpentinegalleries.org

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

royalacademy.org.uk

Gustav Klimt's Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer has sold for $236.4 million at a Sotheby’s auction in New York, making it the most expensive modern artwork ever sold and the second most expensive artwork overall, surpassed only by Leonardo da Vinci's Salvator Mundi. The sale exceeded pre-auction estimates of $150 million and set a new record for the Austrian artist, eclipsing the $108 million fetched by Lady with a Fan in 2023.

Painted between 1914 and 1916, the full-length portrait depicts Elisabeth Lederer, the daughter of Klimt’s principal patrons, August and Serena Lederer. She is wearing a white imperial Chinese robe and standing before a blue tapestry adorned with East Asian-inspired motifs, lending her an almost mythic presence reminiscent of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. Art historians have noted that Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer exemplifies the transition from Klimt's ‘Golden Period’ to a more psychologically intense, richly coloured style bordering on Expressionism.

The painting’s value stems not only from its artistic brilliance but also from its extraordinary story. The Lederers, one of Vienna’s wealthiest Jewish families, saw their art collection looted by the Nazis following Austria’s annexation in 1938. Remarkably, this painting survived, while many of Klimt’s works were destroyed in a fire set in 1945 by retreating Nazis to prevent them from falling into Allied hands.

But this is only half of the portrait’s story. It also, remarkably, played a role in Elisabeth’s survival: facing the threat of deportation to concentration camps, she fabricated a claim that Klimt, who was not Jewish but was known for his affairs, was her biological father. Her mother supported the claim with a sworn affidavit. A high-ranking Nazi official, who was Elisabeth’s former brother-in-law, aided the ruse, granting her a revised status that allowed her to remain safely in Vienna until her death from illness in 1944.

If you look closely at the portrait, you can see that Klimt has embedded subtle shapes in the robe’s design, echoing the biomorphic forms he learned about in lectures on cell theory and anatomy. Thus, mythological symbols intertwine with notions of lineage and biology, adding profound resonance given that Elisabeth’s bloodline was both the source of her persecution and her salvation. The portrait thus emerges as an emotionally and historically charged visual tapestry.

The painting was returned to Elisabeth’s brother, Erich Lederer, in 1948. In 1985, it entered the private collection of Leonard A Lauder, the Estée Lauder cosmetics heir, who displayed it in his Fifth Avenue home for four decades, until his death in June 2025. The sale of Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer was the centrepiece of the Lauder Collection auction at Sotheby’s new Breuer Building headquarters this week, which brought in a total of $575.5 million.

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

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

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

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

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

ropac.net

‘I do agree with Matisse, who said artists should have their tongues cut out for the amount of rot they talk,’ says Maggi Hambling. Self-effacing, yes, shrewd, sharp and unfailingly honest – but there’s no worry of any rot from the revered, respected, and often feared, Hambling.

When we visit her in October 2025, in the south London home she has lived and worked in for 40 years, the artist is about to turn 80. She will mark this milestone with both a joint exhibition with good friend Sarah Lucas at Sadie Coles HQ and Frankie Rossi Art Projects in London, and the release of an illustrated monograph of works from a five-decade career, from her 1960s studies at the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing to her recent politically and emotionally charged war paintings.

Leafing through the book, one gets a sense of Hambling’s far-reaching practice, with painting and sculptures wrestling with recurring themes, including the power of nature, war, love and death. Throughout, she is drawn to duality, in ghostly and powerful sea paintings, and in brilliantly alive portraits of loved ones after their death.

Hambling’s oil paintings have the quality of transcending time. Her war paintings eschew contemporary references, meaning they are difficult to place. ‘In the right hands, oil paint has this capacity to make it seem that something is being made in front of you,’ says Hambling. ‘Oil paint is very sexy stuff, and you have to make love with it.’

Hambling sees herself as a vessel through which the paint passes. ‘It’s all about the eye, the hand and the heart,’ she says. ‘The heart is the most important thing. The good paintings paint themselves. I don’t feel that I’m any part of them. I only feel responsible for the bad ones, which I get rid of. I can do a good painting in three-quarters of an hour, but I couldn’t do that unless I’ve done all this shit for three years before.’

The book features a collection of Hambling’s portraits of those she painted, from memory, after they died – a body of work that has included her parents, her late partner of 40 years, Tory Lawrence, and her close friend Derek Jarman. In these portraits, Hambling is making sense of the loss. ‘When somebody you love dies, they go on being alive inside of you. I remember I went on painting George [Melly, the jazz musician and close friend who died in 2007] for a couple of years after he died, with as much life as possible. And then the lorry came and collected all the portraits to take them to the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, and the next morning they had all gone. And I said to myself, you have got to face it, George is dead.’

The significance of her friendships is central to Hambling’s oeuvre, making the new show with Lucas a natural next step. The duo have depicted each other in their work before, Hambling in oil, Lucas in the mischievous sculpture Maggi (2012), composed of a coat hanger, light bulbs and toilet bowl. 'Sarah and I met about 20 years ago. I think we were introduced in the Colony [Room Club in Soho] by Sebastian Horsley, on our birthday, which we share. We just fell into each other’s arms and had a big hug. And that was that. I had always liked her the best of the YBA [Young British Artists] because of the guts and humour of her work. She came to live in Suffolk, and that’s where we became great friends.’

This year, on their shared birthday of 23 October, Hambling turned 80. How does she feel about that? ‘I feel about 15,’ she says. It’s not an age she necessarily expected to see, after a near-fatal heart attack in New York in 2022 left her hospitalised for six weeks. ‘I owe my life to New York. If it had happened in Suffolk, I’d still be waiting for the ambulance. I remember waking up when they were pressing their hands on my chest. I thought, either you’re going to live or you’re going to die. And I went back into another world.’

On her return home, Hambling resumed work, reconnecting with her war paintings, on which she started in 1986 after seeing a photograph in The Times of Arab women dressed in burqas, teetering under the weight of rocket launchers. A surreal contrast, it tied into the extremes she is drawn to, and which run throughout her war works, where life and death exist side-by-side with beauty and violence. ‘When I got home from the hospital, I thought I was painting the war in Ukraine, but everybody told me I’d been painting my heart attack. I don’t know. I suppose they’re right. It was absolute hell without any cigarettes.’

Her work subtly shifted after the heart attack. ‘As I get older, I try to say more with less.’ Increasingly on her canvases, there is an expanse of empty space. ‘I always used to leave a little bit of blank canvas, inspired by Samuel Beckett, who I think is the greatest artist of the 20th century. But now there’s much more – it’s that Eastern thinking that you’ve got to be as eloquent with where you don’t put a mark as with where you do.’

Hambling is disciplined with her work, getting up early every morning without fail. In the afternoon, she catches up on TV soap Coronation Street, which she is passionate about (although, ‘two people kiss and every time the other person sees them, it’s so unreal, it’s unbelievable,’ she complains). The first thing she does every day is make a drawing in her sketchbook with her left hand (she is right handed). ‘And I’ve only got three fingers,’ says Hambling, holding up her right hand to show the absence of a little finger. (She fell down the stairs in Suffolk one night while holding a glass of water.) ‘I shake hands with people and they don’t notice. It’s quite disappointing, really.’ She adds it hasn’t really changed anything; she works with both hands.

Hambling may have a reputation for being outspoken, but she doesn’t set out to be controversial, she says. The sculptures (including the Oscar Wilde statue near Trafalgar Square in central London, a scallop sculpture on Aldeburgh beach in Suffolk, and the Mary Wollstonecraft sculpture in Newington Green, London) are naturally more antagonistic than the paintings.

‘They are different because they challenge you in your space,’ explains Hambling. ‘All the feminists were so cross when I was chosen to do Mary Wollstonecraft. I don’t know if feminists don’t have bodies or something. I don’t understand it – she represents the struggles women have always faced, and she’s confronting the world.’ She based the much-debated decision to depict the 18th-century writer and philosopher naked on the fact that clothes would date the figure (‘When it hit the world, my friend rang up and said, you have put the pussy among the pigeons, which was a very good remark I thought,’ she says).

Does criticism bother her? ‘My teacher at art school said criticism has to be water off a duck’s back. You’re your own best critic. Some people think I’m rather scary, but my students know I’m just a jelly baby, really.’

‘Maggi Hambling and Sarah Lucas: OOO LA LA’ is on show from 20 November 2025 – 24 January 2026 at Sadie Coles HQ and Frankie Rossi Art Projects, sadiecoles.com frankierossiart.com

‘Maggi Hambling’ ($75, Rizzoli) is published on 11 November, rizzoliusa.com

This article appears in the December 2025 Entertaining Issue of Wallpaper* , available in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News + from 6 November. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

A dazzling duo

Ellie Stathaki, architecture and environment director

I recently came across jewellery entrepreneur The Diamond Lab, and this week, I had the opportunity to meet its founders, sisters Ruby and Jamie Patel, at their Selfridges pop-up with Maddox Gallery. Beyond their mission to bring ethical, lab-grown diamonds to the forefront of the luxury industry, the pair also plans to establish their own laboratory in Kenya, where the sisters hail from. Working within the country’s Special Economic Zones – which aim to boost local manufacturing and exports and to create jobs – they are hard at work, picking their architect and crafting their business's spatial representation. More to come.

A London institution

Charlotte Gunn, director of digital content

On Monday, it was off to The Connaught to celebrate editor-in-chief Bill Prince's new book about the hotel, with martinis served by the master Agostino Perrone. In attendance: the cute little white pooch from the cover.

A photographic pilgrimage

Hannah Silver, art, culture, watches and jewellery editor

I was lucky enough this week to have a walk around the exquisite new Diane Arbus exhibition at London’s David Zwirner gallery with curator Jeffrey Fraenkel. The intimate exhibition of 45 rare photographs focuses on the works Arbus created in private spaces between 1961 and 1971. Raw, honest, and respectful – they speak to Arbus’ massive talent.

A visual voyage

Jamilah Rose-Roberts, social media editor

I previously went down to Sadie Coles HQ for the opening of Arthur Jafa’s GLAS NEGUS SUPREME. Having missed his presentation in Croydon earlier this year, I was determined not to miss this one. There was an undeniable pull to this exhibition: the scale, the sound, the weight of it all. The highlight of the evening was meeting Jafa himself. Our brief, easy chat left me with a sense of privilege and a deeper connection to his work. His exacting yet generous nature made me want to return – to sit longer with the work, to let the sound and imagery seep deeper.

For his first exhibition at Sadie Coles, Jafa fills the Kingly Street space with a charged edit of new and recent works: two moving-image pieces, several paintings, silkscreens, and cutouts, all orbiting the same gravitational force – the depth and complexity of Black life. His films unfold with a cosmic and intimate allure, a surge of imagery and music that catches you off guard and carries you into a world of profound intrigue and captivation.

There’s a rhythm to Jafa’s world, a ‘Black visual intonation’, as he calls it, that folds sound and image into one another until they feel inseparable. Clips, faces, fragments, and beats move as if guided by pulse rather than sequence; everything vibrates. Musical figures appear as apparitions, passing through history’s veil with ghostly defiance. And yet, even in that spectral space, the work feels vividly alive.

The new paintings and silkscreens extend this dialogue: Kurt Cobain’s body hovers in a void; Foxy Brown glows, commanding her crowd. Fame, pain, transcendence – all held in tension, all rendered through Jafa’s unmistakable visual cadence. To witness his work is to feel language reshaped; it’s to understand how sound, image and memory can coalesce into something beyond narrative: a collective vibration.

GLAS NEGUS SUPREME continues that conversation with force and tenderness, expanding Jafa’s lexicon of Black being and becoming. On view at Sadie Coles HQ until 22 November 2025.

A Middle Eastern medley

Tianna Williams, staff writer

On Wednesday evening, I headed over to Lamb’s Conduit Street to enjoy a Middle Eastern feast at Honey & Co. The evening, which coincided nicely with Bonfire Night, was a display of festive dining that made me consider swapping the Christmas turkey for spiced lamb and stuffing shawarma. Honey & Co founders Sarit Packer and Itamar Srulovich (who also run sister outposts Honey & Smoke and Honey & Co Daily) served a vibrant mezze, complete with dips and salads. Mains followed, ranging from smoked duck with pickled cherries to slow-roasted lamb shoulder with plums and roses. The evening was rounded off with desserts, from feta and honey cheesecake (divine) to spiced apple mince pies, paired perfectly with Persian tea. The great news is that this delectable menu is available throughout the festive period if you fancy a fragrant feast for yourself.

A theatrical tempest

Gabriel Annouka, senior designer

If an apocalypse had a dress code, it would take the form of BULLYACHE: WHO HURT YOU? at Southbank Centre this week. Part of the Kunsty festival, and staged in the ample setting of the Queen Elizabeth Hall, the performance – directed by Bullyache, the artist duo Courtney Deyn and Jacob Samuel – unravelled as a drag requiem: an end-of-days cabaret that played with glitter as much as it did with grief. East London drag star Barbs, sequins blazing, ruled the stage as a diva in disarray, balancing Deyn’s singing and the dancers with a lawless, intoxicating narrative. Music and lights begged for mercy, and surrender never looked so good. I may have cried, probably laughed, and most definitely both. Absolute mayhem, pure perfection.

A scent-sational history

Anna Fixsen, US editor

‘There are three things no respectable woman should do: smoke, dance the tango and wear Shalimar,’ a famed 1920s-era adage went. Unfortunately for those upright citizens, the appeal of Shalimar – a hypnotic amber fragrance dreamed up by French perfumer Jacques Guerlain in 1925 – has remained a favourite of bad girls everywhere (Frida Kahlo, Brigitte Bardot, Rita Hayworth… need we go on?) for exactly a century. To celebrate the milestone, Guerlain has concocted a 21st-century version of the flapper-era fragrance, Shalimar L’Essence, which emphasises the perfume’s mouth-watering, vanilla notes for a scent that’s suited to today’s rebel. I popped by an exhibition at the Waldorf-Astoria (now home to the world’s largest Guerlain spa) to experience both new and old formulations and geek out over the fascinating history of this storied art deco aroma. Time travel hasn’t been invented yet, but Shalimar might be the next-best thing.

Shaqúelle Whyte may be early in his career, but his richly atmospheric paintings have quickly pegged him as a rising star in the art world. Born in Wolverhampton, Whyte graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art in 2022, going on to receive an MA from the Royal College of Art in 2023. Group exhibitions at Hauser & Wirth, Somerset, and Grimm Amsterdam followed, as well as solo exhibitions at Pippy Houldsworth Gallery (his current show ending 8 November 2025).

Whyte is now settled in London, working on figurative paintings in his Dalston studio that are united by a strong storytelling. Each painting, a fluid capturing of a moment in time, is its own fully formed scene. Whyte’s works are ambiguous – he sets the theatrical stage and leaves it for the viewer to decipher.

In his recent exhibition at Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, ‘Winter Remembers April’, Whyte considered themes of time and history, criss-crossing between the past and the present. Naming the show in tribute to Wynton Marsalis’ recording of the jazz standard, ‘I’ll Remember April’, Whyte celebrates both the musicians who are central to him and the physicality of composition itself, focusing on the scale and perspective of the figures as they move through his canvases.

Artistically, music is key for Whyte, becoming a rhythmic counterpart to the fluid and evocative scenes he creates. ‘Music keeps me sane in the studio,’ he says. ‘For me, song titles, certain genres or artists can inspire thoughts, ideas and feelings that just resonate. It helps me paint, especially when I'm tired and frustrated with my work, and everything that surrounds it. And of course, what I listen to finds its way into the painting, whether that's Earl Sweatshirt or Sampha or Boris Gardiner. Music energises me, it calms me.’

The elusive cinematic quality it holds becomes a part of the paintings. Whyte’s canvases place figures in narrative settings we can’t quite grasp – are they running towards or away from something, are they dancing or fighting? His figures are both familiar and unknowable. Drawn in thick brush marks and translated onto richly textured surfaces, the liminal worlds he creates may be hazy, but the memories and emotions are sharp, his interior narratives becoming lush, cinematic compositions that hover on the edge of comprehension. Whyte offers fragments – a hand poised mid-gesture, a gaze half averted – and invites you to do the assembling.

In the flesh, Whyte’s canvases are life-sized, their generous proportions a playful spin on perception. Throughout, the focus is firmly on the Black figure vividly living: reclining, running, dancing. In composition and colour, the works are synonymous with classical artworks, rife with historical references. By reframing the traditional style, Whyte inserts the Black figure into the work. ‘References to Rubens, to George Stubbs, to Tintoretto all appear in these works, and these 'traditional' artists are naturally touchstones for me,’ Whyte adds. ‘This may sound quite simplistic, but because I'm Black, I also wanted to make paintings with people that look like me. Within the canon of painting, there isn't enough work that's just OK with being, as opposed to carrying the weight of history.’

In interrogating the way Black masculinity has been represented in art and culture, Whyte rewrites it entirely, and his celebration of the body is very human. The ambiguity that runs throughout adds to this – often, we are denied seeing the face of his figures, suggesting a rich interiority we can only guess at. ‘My work isn’t ignorant of history, but rather by leaving it open to interpretation, I try not to be prescriptive,’ says Whyte. ‘I try not to apply any single thought or specific feeling to my paintings.’

'Winter Remembers April' is at Pippy Houldsworth until 8 November 2025

houldsworth.co.uk

American interior designer, entrepreneur and author Kelly Wearstler has launched a bold new venture: Side Hustle, a curatorial platform that reimagines the possibilities of creative collaboration. While the term ‘cross-disciplinary’ has become a trope in the design world, Side Hustle takes the concept to a new level – bridging sculpture, painting, craft, jewellery, music, performance, film, video, culinary culture, automotive design, and even sport.

Side Hustle proposes a framework where disciplines collide and evolve, emphasising experimentation and exchange. But what does this actually look like?

The platform will operate in both digital and physical spaces. Online, it will serve as a living archive, chronicling exhibitions, offering behind-the-scenes insight, and delving into conceptual threads. Physically, Side Hustle will debut at Wearstler’s Beverly Hills residence before expanding to other cities and venues worldwide.

‘My studio practice has long integrated work from across such a wide range of creative disciplines, it is this exploration that led to the birth of Side Hustle – a space for ideas to unfold beyond the logic of client or commission,’ says Wearstler, adding that she hopes to ‘contribute to the ongoing evolution of design as a cultural practice’.

The debut exhibition, Again, Differently, opens October 16 2025 in the Pool House at Wearstler’s Beverly Hills home – a space once used by the Broccoli family for private James Bond screenings, now reimagined as a gallery. The show features an international roster of artists, including Dozie Kanu (Portugal), Joana Schneider (Netherlands), Mariko Makino (United States), Nynke Koster (Netherlands), Sam Klemick (United States) and Sonia Gomes (Brazil). Working with salvaged textiles, architectural remnants and laced garments, the artists transform the familiar into sculptural works and performances.

Meanwhile, the digital platform will extend access to global audiences, offering insights into the artists’ processes and other enhancements to Again, Differently. These include an original essay by gallerist and cultural impresario Jeffrey Deitch, and a soundtrack from Grammy-nominated producer and DJ Kenny Beats. Rather than functioning as a secondary experience, the online component is complementary, showcasing how digital tools can deepen engagement with physical design.

Side Hustle defies any fixed aesthetic or agenda. It’s designed as a flexible, evolving platform – an open invitation for artists and designers to share ideas, push limits and blur boundaries. As such, it stands out as one of the more exciting launches on our radar, setting a blueprint for interdisciplinary collaboration and proving that it’s more than the sum of its parts.

‘Again, Differently’ debuts online on October 16 2025, with public viewings by appointment through the site beginning October 17

sidehustlegallery.com

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

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

‘These speakers and the paintings are both in private hands, and we thought that it would be really good for more people to experience them, and to play their music via the systems,’ says Doig. ‘It’s the same ways that the paintings often end up in private hands, and the people who get to see them are very few. So, it's making all aspects public.’

Doig, who was born in Scotland, has lived and worked around the world and was based in Trinidad from 2002-21, before returning to London. At the Serpentine, he presents a combination of works made in Trinidad and elsewhere. The sense of the Caribbean island’s tranquillity is palpable in much of the work, with Doig’s lion motif patrolling many of the larger paintings. A reference to the Rastafarian Lion of Judah, he stands facing us, lounging in the tropical sun or playing in a deserted urban landscape. You can expect the otherworldly in Doig’s work, an elevated, dreamlike interpretation of the everyday.

In the circular central room of Serpentine South, daylight pouring through the glass roof, three such works sit opposite a 1930-40s Western Electric and Bell Labs sound system. The sculptural set-up means that music is played through two beautiful wooden 1950s Klangfilm Euronor speakers in adjacent rooms, one darkened and peppered with easy chairs, the other light and featuring a café-table set.

‘No one has ever seen this space – it would usually have only been the technician,’ said Laurence Passera of DSP London, custodian of the Bell Labs speaker system. ‘I love the fact that it's being celebrated like this.’

Some of the smaller works in the show deeply evoke Caribbean culture. There is Embah in Paris (2017), a portrait of the late poet and artist Emheyo Bahabba, who shared Doig’s studio for 15 years; another portrait, of Winston ‘Shadow’ Bailey, who often features in Doig’s work; and the song ‘Dat Soca Boat’, which inspired the exhibition’s title. Two paintings of sound systems, towering against lush greenery, flank the entrance to the space, with visitors greeted by a huge work of international flags, tapping into a transnational sense of being.

The welcoming ethos of the exhibition, staged in the free-of-charge Serpentine (an aspect dear to artistic director Hans Ulrich Obrist’s heart, as he recently told us), is being extended into ‘Sound Service’, a weekly Sunday and occasional evening listening session where Doig’s friends will present their own record collections and soundscapes for visitors. Taking part will be Linton Kwesi Johnson, Café OTO, Sean O’Hagan, Ed Ruscha, Nihal Al Assar, Radio Alhara and Andrew Cranston with John MacLean (details at the Serpentine website).

‘The idea of having furniture and chairs here is that some people feel like they can linger, they may even want to have a nap,’ Doig adds. ‘We just wanted to make it a warmer environment for all the senses, not just the eyes, but also the ears and the body.'

This exhibition feels like a gift to the city and its visitors. It has it all – fantastic art, beautiful music and a genuine welcome to all.

‘Peter Doig: House of Music’, Serpentine South, 10 October 2025 – 8 February 2026, serpentinegalleries.org

For Polish artist Łukasz Stokłosa, beauty comes laced with a decadent decay. In the richly rendered interiors of his work, markers of obscene wealth – opulent rooms, embroidered dresses, golden carriages – are viewed through a darkened lens.

Stokłosa’s paintings are haunting interpretations of the classical works of old masters. We recognise the symbols of wealth, but in a gothic shifting of perspective, we can’t quite place them.

‘In this work, I’m focusing more on the object itself, on its seductive attractiveness,’ says Stokłosa. ‘But this beauty is somehow diminished, blurred, so that we have to stop, look closely, and make sure of what we are actually seeing. So that we must check what lies beneath the gilding, that perhaps these are not just innocent objects locked away in museum cases, but histories that are often difficult. I have always been interested in ambiguity, in the interpenetration of histories.’

The artist brings an uncanny element to his figurative works. A self-professed interest in mass culture, including movies, television and genres such as film noir, is translated into deliciously ambiguous works crammed with ghostly apparitions and ostentatious privilege. ‘It is important to me that these objects are, in a sense, extracted, that in the painting there is only one subject, one protagonist,’ Stokłosa adds. ‘The small format of the paintings also forces us to approach them closely. This builds an intimate relationship with the work; suddenly, we are left alone with it.’

In the exhibition ‘Once Upon a Time’ at London’s Rose Easton (until 25 October 2025), Stokłosa brings his protagonists’ world to life through both painting and video works. The latter, created from found footage taken from the 1976 Polish film Tredowata (The Leper), considers the devastating consequences of a world defined by a strict hierarchy. In the film, a potential marriage between a governess and an aristocrat becomes painfully undone.

‘The Leper is a kind of phenomenon in Poland,’ says the artist. ‘It’s broadcast on television almost every holiday. Because of that, I think I’ve seen it, in full or in fragments, probably a dozen times already. At some point, I felt it could be a good subject and material for creating video works. What struck me most was that the structure of this story is very close to the structure of a classical fairy tale. A governess falls in love with a prince, and as we know, that cannot end well.’

Stokłosa overlaps images from the film in a three-screen video that rewrites the classic fairy tale and subsequent happy ending. ‘I have surrounded the motif of The Leper with other themes,’ he says. ‘A kind of collection of props started to form, objects that are beautiful, but because of their exclusivity and preciousness, also dangerous.’

‘Once Upon a Time’ is at Rose Easton, London until 25 October 2025, roseeaston.com

‘I like to find the most banal thing to paint,’ says Helsinki-born, Paris-based artist Henni Alftan. ‘I have no personal mythology, and I'm not interested in it. I'm not trying to find out if you see what I see, if we can share an experience. If the paintings are too particular, it becomes too powerful, and personal. It's not accessible enough for me.’

There is something unsettling in the flat planes, bold expanses of colour and unexpected crops that comprise Alftan’s figurative works, with the level of restraint raising more questions than they answer. ‘We've learned to assume that there is something we're not seeing,’ Alftan adds. ‘I realised that the less I did, the more your imagination developed. In my early painting, there were more events and character, and I realised it would be more interesting to go towards something more mysterious, by concentrating on things that you generally don't pay attention to – that itself is mysterious enough.’

Alftan builds on this feeling of making do with what there is in a new exhibition, ‘By the Skin of My Teeth’, at Sprüth Magers in Berlin. The title, referring to the sensation of just scraping by, reflects the mood of the paintings. Closely cropped, they ask us to zoom in on the details, whether it is a watch positioned perfectly in the middle of a sleeve and glove, the corner of an eye hidden behind sunglasses, or a single coil of hair, on the cusp of being snipped.

For the first time, Alftan is also presenting drawings alongside her paintings. Small in scale, the drawings consider a range of domestic items – paper, matches, a comb – framed and presented as historical museum artefacts.

‘In the paintings, the cropping becomes very important, whereas I'd say the drawings are more about object and hierarchy and arrangement, in an archeological way,’ says Alftan. ‘In the drawings, I am trying to do something that I can't do in painting. My paintings are very architectural and that small scale just wasn't right. In the drawings, it is also about the object, but in a different manner. From afar, they look like an archetype, a minimal representation that I also do in my painting.’

By choosing to focus on the intimate and the mundane, Alftan is reframing the everyday itself, imbuing the perhaps unseen or unconsidered with a new significance. The viewer can’t help but imagine the story in the picture – who spilt the wine? What are they thinking, cooking, feeling? – but Alftan isn’t giving anything away. ‘I don't imagine the stories myself,’ she says. ‘There are many levels of interpretation.’

‘Henni Alftan: By the Skin of My Teeth’ is open from 12 September – 25 October 2025 at Sprüth Magers, Berlin, spruethmagers.com

‘There is a quieter tradition going on, different artists deciding there's something really interesting in this room to paint, rather than outside of [it],’ says Scottish painter, Andrew Cranston. ‘Philosophically, you can only be in one place at a time, and we spend a lot of our lives in rooms, or in limited spaces. I think there’s a disease, a paranoia, that you’re missing out on something over the hill, or a party in the next room. It's a simplistic thing but there's some truth in it – it is almost like all the world's problems stem from a person's inability to be happy in their own room.’

It is a tradition Cranston is considering in a new exhibition with Winifred Nicholson at the Holburne, Bath, with 'Dreams of the Everyday' examining the joy in the mundane. Cranston, born in 1969 in Hawick, Scotland, and based in Glasgow, draws on an art education that concluded with postgraduate studies at the Royal College of Art, where he was taught by Peter Doig, among others. He has been preoccupied with the magical ordinariness of interiors throughout his career, capturing everyday details – food strewn on a table, a quiet moment with the paper – in lusciously thick sweeps of oil paint. Cranston’s work, although firmly rooted in the real world, is nonetheless possessed of a dreamy, otherworldly quality that intersperses memories with mundane details.

‘The condition of a dream is something I can really draw into,’ says the artist. ‘It takes you away from a certain kind of logic, and gives you freedom, but I don't see it as surrealist at all. It seems more of a concrete kind of fantasy, in the way in which dreams are a part of our everyday life. I do gravitate towards things that have a slightly other quality, where there's a moment when something's crystallised. It could be a strange light or atmosphere, or something which could only be described as dream-like. I'm not interested in drama. It's that moment where there's a certain feeling of stasis, that feeling that maybe something’s about to happen, or [has] just happened, but it’s not the event itself. If it was a film, you have to have those performances that don't drive the story forward. They are seemingly unimportant, just little deviations from the story.’

By making the deviations from the story the story itself, Cranston is tapping into a long tradition of observing the unremarkable, a movement in art history that can be traced back to the 17th century and what is now termed the Dutch Golden Age. The period saw an extraordinary flourishing across art and science in the Netherlands, a movement that took shape in the work of artists, notably Rembrandt, Johannes Vermeer, and Frans Hals. They began to consider the realism of interiors as worthy subjects to paint alongside the more accepted biblical scenes and portraits. In the work of their contemporary, Judith Leyster – the majority of which was attributed to Hals until relatively recently – the emphasis on light and shadows inspired by Caravaggio lent a drama to domestic scenes.

It was a tradition that grew stronger over the subsequent centuries. Pierre Bonnard’s bold use of colour in his interiors led the drive into modernism, while in the 19th century, Édouard Vuillard challenged the Parisian stereotype of the domestic as a space reserved for the feminine. His claustrophobic, crowded interiors, juxtaposing patterns with flat planes of colour, bring a jarring realism to everyday scenes, surprisingly intimate in their faithful renderings.

These small details and unexpected clashes in form lend a subversive notion to the formerly female world of a family’s interiors. ‘The idea of interiors as a subject to paint probably didn't occur to me until I was a parent myself,’ adds Cranston. ‘In a way, the children force you inside, and it’s more domestic, and then you often start looking around you to see if there's some material there. It was almost art following life, and that interest in in-between and negative, spaces.’

Unseen spaces and unseen work are immortalised in art and elevated into the sacred – a formerly unthinkable move. ‘An observation I have made about art, and with many things, is that the big things, the huge messages of great importance, sometimes didn't really affect me that much. And yet, the so-called small, unimportant things or the domestic, have the biggest emotional and influential effect on me,’ adds Cranston.

Contemporary female artists are also capturing the subtleties in the silent emotionality of the everyday. Alabama-born, New Jersey-based Danielle Mckinney's portraits of solitary women have seen a rapid rise for the artist, who first published them on her social media a little over four years ago. In her seductive interiors, we view her women voyeuristically. At leisure, reclining against patterned wallpaper, or sunk into deep velvet sofas, or napping in crisp white sheets, they are martyr-like against the deep dark background from which they emerge. Red lips and red nails, cigarette often in hand, the glimpse we are awarded into her solitary female figures at rest feels incredibly intimate.

Scottish artist Caroline Walker (whom we recently interviewed about her show at The Hepworth Wakefield, until 27 October 2025) draws on her own photographs as the sources for her paintings, which capture the everyday lives of women, whether at home, in the maternity unit or at places of childcare. Her depictions of home are more crowded, usually jammed with the paraphernalia that comes with babies and young children – breast pumps, sticker books, endless washes hung out to dry – but are just as cinematic in capturing the detail in those endless, fleeting days at home with small children.

A theatrical aspect is also present in the homes depicted by Cece Philips (on show at Hauser & Wirth London until 20 September 2025), which invite a contemplation of the interiority of her figures. Drawn in deep colours and often framed in the architectural angles of windows and doors, they are caught as if on stage. Inspired by what the interiors of Dutch Golden Age paintings revealed about their inhabitants, she looks to Vermeer and to the intermingling of foreground and background in Pieter de Hooch’s work, where a painting becomes synonymous with a set.

‘Situating my figures within the context of interior scenes is a way of exploring identity and emotion, without depicting them totally or explicitly through the figure,’ Philips says. ‘I’m particularly interested in duality and the line between the private and the public self. The domestic spaces I paint act as a backdrop that is active and emotionally charged – they become metaphors for the inner lives of the figures. In certain ways, the spaces we occupy can act as a reflection of that internal world – and I think a lot about atmosphere when I paint, like a kind of pathetic fallacy, the room takes on the mood of the person, or perhaps the other way around. Colour is central to that for me, conveying emotion in the work with the same weight as the body language of a figure can. Through the rooms the characters inhabit, I’d like the viewer to sense something of that inner self, while also keeping parts deliberately out of reach through framing and details, like their eyes, that are harder to read. I want the viewer to feel like they’re looking in, but not entirely welcome. That distance becomes a quiet assertion of privacy and of the intangibility of their interior.’

More avant-garde interpretations see the figures and the home become, unsettlingly, one. In Nina Raber-Urgessa’s work, the female body literally contorts itself to fit into the space available to it. ‘The home and the domestic area is a very important place, and there is the struggle between work, home, society and expectation,’ she says. ‘The changing point for me, as a woman, was becoming a mother, and discovering in the modern world that there are these invisible struggles women are having, day by day. They have to remove their body and twist, and distort, to fit. You make sure you create a safe space for your family, for your children, and also for yourself.’ In her work Terepeza (2022), the woman’s body is not just the safe space but also the shelter and the nourishment, the kitchen table itself from which to eat or huddle underneath.

In Henni Alftan’s work, home life is fragmented, or cropped in such a way as to create tension, her narratives interrupted or left frustratingly ambiguous. In the geometric blocks of her cityscape, flat planes of primary colours distort and create a separation between our reality and our experience of viewing the work.

For Koak (also showing at Hauser & Wirth London this September), the familiar motifs of home – stairs, flowers, chairs – are just as unsettling, imbued with hints of magical realism that make us question the correlation between inner and outer worlds. ‘The idea of home – the image of it – rides that line between being deeply personal and completely universal,’ she says. ‘And that tension has always sat at the centre of my work. Home becomes a metaphor, a way of talking about the body in relation to community. It’s a space where we can navigate how the world gets internalised. To me, home is like an echo of the body in the place where it meets the world. It’s one of the rare metaphors that allows you to speak about the intimate and the political at the same time. I’m not just drawing the walls of a house, I’m drawing boundaries. And the emotion of the figure inside that space determines whether those boundaries feel like safety or intrusion. That’s something we all instinctively understand.

'So I’ll draw a figure in the kitchen and talk about hunger, or desire, or class, or all three at once. Or a bath that speaks to identity, or shame, or becoming. A window might hold longing, or fear. The symbols of home root so deeply into human experience that they become a gateway to what’s essential. They give us a language to talk about what matters most. And when the world is fracturing, when homes no longer feel safe, we have to lean harder into that metaphor. We have to keep speaking about what threatens that safety, and keep imagining new ways to protect each other. The meaning behind home becomes not just a subject, but a form of shared responsibility.’

The meaning and the medium of home continue to grow. Juno Calypso’s photographs take the building blocks of a soft and feminine home – pink, soft furnishings, a pretty dress –and interrupt them with jarring symbols of consumerism or oppressive beauty rituals. For Do Ho Suh (showing at Tate Modern until 19 October 2025), the very fabric of home life becomes reconsidered in his immersive, large-scale installations that are a literal interpretation of our safe spaces. ‘I think in many ways, and for a lot of people who have moved around a lot, home is everywhere and nowhere,’ he says. ‘Increasingly I don’t really think temporally with these questions – so instead of “when” does a place become home, it’s perhaps more “how” or “what” is home? My idea of my Korean “home” only really emerged when I had left the country. Did it even exist before then? I was not aware of it – in emotional and phenomenological terms – when I was still in Korea.’

In the ephemeral forms of his fabric structures, the concept of home is lightweight, yet clearly defined. ‘The fabric has always been a conceptual choice. I started using it because I was exploring different ways of measuring the spaces I found myself within. The key element of the fabric is that it’s transportable – you can pack an entire house into a suitcase and carry it around with you. That’s one of the most important things for me. When I made the first translucent piece, of my childhood home, I travelled with it in my luggage from Seoul to Los Angeles, literally carrying that impression of space with me. I’ve always thought about architecture as clothing, clothing as architecture. Clothing is the smallest, most intimate inhabitable space that we can carry. Architecture is an expansion of that.’

The diaphanous nature of the fabric works on different levels, seen in its installation space. ‘I like that you can see the museum architecture through the walls. But also crucially that you can see the viewer moving through the work. The fabric architecture is activated by the viewer. It’s why it’s essential for me that the floor-based structures can be entered. They’re porous and, I hope, communicate a certain level of flexibility around notions of memory and location, as well as troubling the museum with domestic interlopers.’

Andrew Cranston and Winifred Nicholson's exhibition at the Holburne, Bath, 'Dreams of the Everyday, takes place 3 October 2025 - 11 January 2026

This article appears in the October 2025 Issue of Wallpaper*, available in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

‘If we’re speaking about an artistic life, then I really feel like I cheated death,' says Jonathan Schofield, art-world survivor. After graduating from London’s Royal College of Art (RCA) in the late 1990s under the tutelage of the likes of Peter Doig and Helen Chadwick, the London-based painter found that the type of work he wanted to create was out of step with the trends of the art world.

‘At that time, around the turn of the century, everyone seemed to be talking about everything but painting. I had always loved paint and colour, so I felt like I was really swimming against the tide,’ he confesses. Eventually, it was in the world of his other lifelong obsession, fashion, that an opportunity for a career arose. ‘A friend asked me to be art director on a fashion shoot; I took it not really knowing at all what it would involve. When I realised it was essentially about making images – and being paid for it – I just thought that was amazing.’

Now, Schofield is preparing for a new exhibition, titled ‘The Defiance of Summer’ (30 September – 21 November 2025 at Vivienne Robert Projects), having returned to painting. He picked up his brushes again seriously during Covid, following a career as creative director at Stella McCartney. ‘I wasn’t meant to have a second turn of the wheel, and so I feel very liberated. As a young artist, you’re so hyper-conscious of your place in the world of private views and artistic trends that you can feel trapped. But since I came back to it, I feel liberated just to paint the things I want to paint.’

Of course, Schofield’s art-school education influenced the work he did as a fashion brand’s creative director. Is the inverse also true? ‘In the art world, I think there’s a snobbery about the purity of the profession. Work is considered a dirty word,’ he says. ‘Now that I’ve worked in a commercial environment with deadlines, I appreciate the importance of discipline and consistency. When you dig into the lives of the great artists, Van Gogh or Francis Bacon, they were incredibly disciplined. Of course, painting can be something profound and even mystical, but there’s a certain level of mundanity that you have to put up with to get there.’

If his work in fashion helped develop his work ethic and process, it also clearly informs the subjects of so many of his paintings, which often depict stylish bourgeoisie in various states of leisure. I ask him if, when he started painting these subjects, he was concerned about whether drawing from the modish world of fashion might be perceived as being at odds with the supposedly high ideals of fine art and painting. ‘I think if one thing keeps me up at night it’s that people take my work as just an endorsement of the culture of “lifestyle” that they reference. I paint about illusions, the barrage of images we are so inundated with that tell us where we should be and how we should look. These aspirational images are so tyrannical and are presented to us without any irony or context. So I’m trying to inhabit that world and paint it with a critical or satirical perspective.’

And yet, I suggest, his paintings still hold a strong affinity for the world of fashion. ‘Absolutely. I’m like a thwarted lover, because I love fashion but I have a deep distrust for the illusions that so often it can contribute to. There’s a strong ambivalence and melancholy to the way I paint my subjects.’

That sense of illusion and melancholy permeates the paintings in Schofield’s new exhibition, in particular the show’s titular work. It depicts a young woman proudly occupying the centre of the enormous painting in the midday sun, spraying a hosepipe in front of her swimming pool. Summer, just like in the idealised images Schofield is referencing, is suspended, as if to be never-ending. Schofield paints the subject with as much admiration as he does scepticism for the impossibility of the young woman’s confidence in the glamorous world she occupies and her defiance of anything that might threaten to intrude.

‘The Defiance of Summer’ is at Vivienne Roberts Projects, London, from 30 September to 21 November 2025, viviennerobertsprojects.com

Kunsthalle Schweinfurt in Germany is presenting a new exhibition, ‘Rolf Sachs: Be-rühren’, opening this Saturday, July 18, and running through October 5 2025.

This will be the most comprehensive retrospective to date of the Swiss artist and designer Rolf Sachs. Showcasing over 150 works spanning from the 1990s to the present day, the exhibition encompasses sculpture, photography, painting and design. ‘Be-rühren’ is German for ‘touch’, and evokes both Sachs’ exploration of sensory perception and his interest in the human condition.

‘Rolf Sachs: Be-rühren’: a multidisciplinary survey

‘Rolf Sachs: Be-rühren’ surveys his entire career, organised thematically around bodies of work. These explore the motifs that define the artist’s practice: a poetic sensibility, an empathetic perspective and a playful reimagining of domestic objects. The latter, in particular, is a central theme, as Sachs seeks to transform ordinary materials into works imbued with wit, emotion and tactility, encouraging both sensory and emotional engagement.

Reimagining the everyday

A dedicated gallery is given to Sachs’ reinterpretation of domestic objects, including sculptures – which often draw on the artist’s Swiss Alpine heritage (he was born in Lausanne, but is now based in Rome) – that recontextualise mundane items. This is felt in Heu, Ross, Wolle and Mist, monumental vitrines filled with natural materials such as hay, manure, wool and horsehair, and Bodenständigkeit, a pine branch cast in bronze.

Blurring boundaries through photography

Sachs’ photography also features prominently, where the artist uses long exposures and flash techniques for spectral, abstract results. In Camera in Motion, inspired by the Swiss landscape, Sachs employs experimental photography to depict a journey along the Albula railway line – the images caught between abstraction and reality. Meanwhile, series like Moving Stills and Shadows transform everyday objects such as toilet paper and spaghetti into ambiguous forms.

Modular design, reconfigured

Another highlight is the presentation of Sachs’ modular furniture series ‘p-arts + fun c'tion’, shown for the first time in over 30 years. This collection of chairs, armchairs and desks is constructed without nails or screws, instead relying on gravity and intelligent design. Its modularity allows for limitless reconfigurations. Notable pieces include the Attraction bed, which fuses cold steel with warm wood to symbolise the emotional connection between its inhabitants, and the Horgenglarus chair, which Sachs has been reinterpreting since 1992 in new materials such silicone, slate, wax, felt and resin.

A new chapter

While ‘Rolf Sachs: Be-rühren’ is a retrospective, it also introduces a new chapter in the artist’s career. A grand hall at Kunsthalle Schweinfurt is dedicated to his latest paintings and drawings – a focus since 2020, inspired by his relocation to Rome. Series such as Can Paintings, Défroissage and Touchée blend abstraction and figuration, with the latter created using Sachs’ fingers rather than a brush.

‘Rolf Sachs: Be-rühren’ is an immersion into the artist’s exploration of abstraction and meaning, underscoring not only the breadth of his practice, but its continuing evolution.

To speak with Johnny Rozsa is a bit like hearing a movie script read aloud. Before he became an era-defining fashion photographer in 1980s London, Rozsa studied architecture, had a stint as a go-go dancer, interned at British Vogue, and ran a trailblazing vintage clothing store. It was only when he bought himself a Hasselblad camera in 1976, though, that Rozsa (the ‘zsa’ is pronounced like Zsa Zsa Gabor) discovered his true calling.

‘I just started shooting,’ he says. ‘I wasn't trained as a photographer, but I muddled through, and I made it.’

Rozsa swiftly became one of the most in-demand celebrity photographers of the time, working for magazines like i-D, The Face, and Vogue, and capturing arresting photos of Sade, Leigh Bowery, Boy George, Hugh Grant, Tina Turner (who introduced the photographer to Nichiren Buddhism in 1982) and many, many others.

Now, at 76, Rozsa—who is based in New York City these days—lives a quieter, albeit no less glamourous, life, with his pet dog and a circle of fashionable friends that includes Hamish Bowles and Jasper Conran. So it was a surprise when, after all his success as a photographer, Rozsa discovered a new creative outlet.

A few years ago, Rozsa began taking painting classes at the Art Students League with noted fashion illustrator Charles Nitzberg. Though he had painted as a child growing up in Nairobi, Kenya, (his Jewish parents moved there after narrowly avoiding the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia) Rozsa discovered a newfound kinship with the medium—one with surprising parallels to photography. ‘Fashion illustration is a dead art,’ he says. ‘If you look at Vogue in the ‘20s, ‘30s and ‘40s, it was all illustrated. There were no photos.’

Rozsa’s Instagram page began to fill up with whimsical watercolour paintings— pretty rosy-cheeked ladies with umbrellas; friends and flowers; and even Rozsa himself.

‘When I discovered photography, you just take a picture and you can print it right away. That was my visual release,’ Rozsa explains. With painting, though, he’s rediscovered something deeper—more meditative. ‘I just got into this zone and I want to get into that zone all the time. It's so wonderful.’

Friends, and soon friends of friends, took notice. One evening at a party, Rozsa ran into Aziza Laraki, the founder and director of Gallery Kent in Tangier, Morocco. ‘She said, “Oh, you're the guy that does ladies with umbrellas. I have a gallery I'd love to show some of your work,’” Rozsa remembers. Though he was nervous, Rozsa agreed.

The result is ‘Compass Point,' a group show opening 10 July in Tangier that will feature dozens of Rozsa’s paintings, alongside work by New Zealand artist Sarah Guppy and UK-based artist Stephenie Bergman.

Tangier isn’t an arbitrary location for Rozsa; the photographer first visited Morocco as a student in the 1970s and has been visiting ever since with friends, notably with the English interior designer Veere Grenney. Now, the country has become something of a second home. ‘It’s such an interesting place. We met all these really interesting people with incredible taste,’ says Rozsa, who recalls catching glimpses of Yves Saint Laurent. ‘It’s a country of contrasts.’

But he still didn’t know quite what to paint for his show. For inspiration, he paid a visit to the library of the American Legation Museum in Tangier, where a friend worked. Here, he discovered century-old photographs and illustrations documenting daily life and traditional clothing in Morocco and the surrounding region. Peter Hinwood, an antique dealer who is best known for his role in the 1975 film The Rocky Horror Picture Show, meanwhile shared a trove of early-20th century postcards depicting shepherds, mothers and children, and sex workers.

Rozsa found beauty in these forgotten images. He responded by reinterpreting them with personality, colour and narrative. Garments are awash in vibrant tones and faces, enlivened with Rozsa’s signature rosy cheeks, gaze directly at the viewer. He’s also given each painting a name, transforming them from anonymous subjects lost to history, to people with a story to tell. Rozsa doesn’t view them as documentarian or even fashion illustration—’I view them as art.’ And like Morocco, these whimsical paintings are about contrasts. ‘It's modern, but it's old; it's colorful, but it's black and white,’ he says.

He’ll be exhibiting close to 50 paintings as part of As part of Compass Point, some in custom palm-leaf frames. No surprise, many have sold well in advance of the opening. Also no surprise, Rozsa has already found inspiration for his next watercolour series: birds, which he plans to render in iridescent paint.

‘How lucky am I that someone's giving me an exhibition at this stage of my life?’ he reflects. ‘I just can't think of anything more pleasurable or creative. It's a blessing.’

A flurry of pastel-coloured strokes forms pillowy clouds, while bold blue hues are dragged down the canvas in swirling formations, evoking the rich layers of the ocean. These are among new works by Leila Bartell, whose solo exhibition ‘Memory Fields’ is on at Tristan Hoare Gallery until 25 July 2025.

Leila Bartell presents 'Memory Fields'

For the London-based painter and film director, ‘Memory Fields’ marks a new evolution in her practice. Bartell’s work usually draws upon nature, memory and the human psyche. However, this new painted series is rooted in landscapes viewed through a contemporary lens.

Bartell’s abstraction allows viewers to ponder their own perception of a ‘modern-day’ sky. The soft colours offer a moment of meditation and create a sense of calmness around the gallery, as if the viewer is cushioned in a sea of clouds. The sky is a key theme in the exhibition. Bartell draws upon constantly moving cloudscapes, their unpredictability and transience. The paintings challenge our perception of how nature adapts amid an ever-changing environment.

However, the series is not all cotton candy colours. Bartell’s work is inspired by the notable sky paintings by 18th-century artist John Constable, who captured visions of very sunny English landscapes. Bartell ran with his idealised interpretation and spun it with a contemporary touch.

Her take disrupts Constable’s dreamy romanticism, introducing bold dashes of acidic yellow and synthetic green that add atmospheric distortion. These unexpected colours hint at current concerns for the climate and environment.

Bartell’s work is much more than a Constable-inspired refresh. Her work explores what it means to look at the sky today in an environment rich in digital technology and where human connection to nature is so disjointed.

Leila Bartell's 'Memory Fields' at Tristan Hoare Gallery runs until 25 July 2025, tristanhoaregallery.co.uk

‘Death is an evil. We have the gods' word for it; they too would die if death were a good thing.’ South African artist Marlene Dumas reads this poem attributed to the Ancient Greek poet Sappho, outside her exhibition ‘Cycladic Blues’, taking place across the neoclassical Stathatos Mansion in the Museum of Cycladic Art in Athens. The poem cuts across time, framing death not as a transition to the next cycle of life, but as a failure – an affront even to the divine – and asserting its finality and violence. With this, Dumas sets the tone for ‘Cycladic Blues’, a deeply personal and expansive exhibition that moves through the many cycles that preoccupy her work: sex and desire, love and hate, life and death, guilt and innocence. The show draws connections between Dumas’ paintings, works on paper, and Cycladic and Hellenistic artefacts selected by the artist – some more than 4,000 years old – from the museum's permanent collection.

The majority of the ancient objects placed in dialogue with Dumas’ works – ranging from early pieces made in 1992 to new paintings created specifically for this exhibition – are Cycladic figurines. Carved from marble and originating from the nearby Cycladic islands, the figurines exude an eerie anonymity. Little is known about them with certainty; they were likely placed in graves and it is assumed they played a role in funerary rituals.

Their minimal, stylised forms – with folded arms, curved and smoothed-over features, and precisely incised lines marking sex and limbs – are a delicate abstraction of the human body, one that resonates with Dumas’ visual language. The ancient figures now stand in quiet proximity to her paintings, which chart the body in its most charged, exposed and intimate states. From the strip-club dancers portrayed in her Amsterdam series to martyrs, murderers and tender portraits of her daughter, Helena (1992), Dumas’ figures are consistently performing, ageing, desiring, or dying. The exhibition becomes not only a confrontation with death, but a meditation on how we face death, through the persistence of bodies, the repetition of ideals or gestures, and the act of image-making itself, in a dialogue that cycles across centuries.

The artist's relationship to Greek antiquity is shaped by conflict. Raised in Apartheid-era South Africa, Dumas witnessed how classical ideals were weaponised by fascist and colonial regimes to uphold order and supremacy. In that context, the smooth, idealised body of antiquity became a political tool. It was only later that she recognised the subversive potential buried within those same classical texts. On Robben Island, political prisoners, including Nelson Mandela, staged and acted Greek tragedies, in acts of camaraderie and survival. In Sophocles’ Antigone, for instance, the prisoners saw a story of moral defiance against state violence. Greek antiquity, for Dumas, thus becomes a paradox: one in which traditional beauty is entangled with brutality.

This tension runs throughout her work. Dumas returns obsessively to death, not as a singular event, but as a persistent cycle that binds all things. In 50+ (2010–2018), painted over eight years and after her 50th birthday, the body is depicted as something already fading. Veins pulsate beneath a translucent skin, as a second face hovers like a spirit leaving the body. Dumas’ process is as much about erasure as depiction; in the studio, as she works, she removes more paint from the canvas surface than she builds. In Long Neck (Fragment) (c. 1998), ink pools and bleeds into paper, forming a dissolving, incomplete body. Her starting points are often photographs, many of them marked by violence and post-mortem images, including that of the young Chechen woman from the Moscow theatre crisis in Alfa (2004). A cropped image of a female’s side profile fades to a milky grey haze, her mouth softly ajar, and her eyes closed in what could be sleep, or deathly slumber.

The tension between presence and absence, eroticism and grief, is heightened in Immaculate, a close-up painting of a lower torso and vagina; the skin of the unknown figure is blue beside the lower torso of a Cycladic figurine. The effect is quiet but charged. Dumas’ painting invites the gaze, in an intimate, vulnerable and fleshy way, whilst the marble figurine, detached from its funerary origin, stands cold and symbolic of the transition to the next cycle in life. Their proximity does not resolve into harmony; rather, they orbit each other in a dialogue of opposites. One speaks to desire and immediacy, the other to departure. But in that friction lies the power of ‘Cycladic Blues’: a refusal to idealise the body as fixed to one state. Rather, the body constantly has the capacity to transform and change, to slip between desire and decay, intimacy and distance, past and present.

The conversation between Dumas’ paintings and the Cycladic figurines is neither seamless nor reconciled, and it is in this friction that gives the exhibition its charge. The Cycladic islands, from which the ancient figurines originate, take their name from the Greek word kyklos (meaning ‘circle’), a reference to how the islands encircle the sacred island of Delos, mythic birthplace of Apollo and Artemis. But the term also evokes larger, more existential cycles: birth and death, memory and forgetting, creation and decay; the very cycles that animate Dumas’ work.

The figurines, with their smoothed limbs and closed forms, speak to the cyclical nature of ritual and mourning. And yet, both ancient and contemporary bodies resist realism, preferring distortion and abstraction as ways of reaching what lies beneath the surface. Their connection lies in the rhythm of recurrence in how form returns in different guises, and how death persistently haunts life.

‘Marlene Dumas: Cycladic Blues’ at the Museum of Cycladic Art until 2 November 2025, cycladic.gr/en

The experience of looking at Megan Rooney’s work is full of surprises. Immediately striking is the size – Rooney paints freely in the ‘wingspan’ format, where she paints as far as her arm can reach – and in the glorious gradients of colours. Look closer, and stories begin to reveal themselves in the fluidity of the works, rich in references and physical touchpoints.

Rooney, who refers to each group of work as a ‘family’, has explored the territory between yellow and blue, stepping into the rich prism of green, for her new body of work at Thaddaeus Ropac London. Marking a moment of transition from one season to the next, each painting tells its own story yet is linked to the other works in an embodiment of a clear narrative.

‘Each painting has its own personality, and the lifespan in each painting is really different from its neighbour,’ says Rooney, speaking from her studio in south-west London the week before her exhibition opening. ‘It’s a slow, protracted process over many months, where I go back and forth in and out of the painting while it accumulates information – different tensions, different emotions, different colour responses. It's actually really slow, even though the paintings have a feeling of movement. But that is a bit misleading, because the movement, for me, comes towards the end of the painting’s life.’

Through a process of layering, undoing, scrubbing, sanding, waiting and repainting, Rooney creates a rich relationship with the work that goes deeper than the surface of a first impression. ‘At the beginning, I am stuck with something blank and empty, and I don't know it. So I like to accelerate quickly through the beginning part, because I don't like new friends. It’s a medium that is very elusive: you're dealing with paint, and it has to dry and set, and has its own agenda, and unless you're willing to be very patient with it, you end up just moving things around that haven't really percolated on the surface.

‘I spend an inordinate amount of time getting to know the paintings in order that I might work out what they are. I never think of them as resolutely abstract. But I also don't know what the form is going to be. I don't know what the subject of the painting is. I don't even know where I'm going, so I spend most of my life with the paintings, in the dark, just trying to get one or two steps ahead of them.’

Rooney is led by the possibilities of colour in the paintings, each of which vividly brings its own distinctive landscape to life. In flux, the thickly drawn mark-makings and tumultuous swirls of colour tell an ever-changing story, hinting at occasionally recognisable forms throughout but always ruled by a dreamy, fluctuating mood.

‘I'm really against formulaic painting. You have to want to investigate the surface. My paintings are notoriously difficult to photograph, and they make us work a little bit harder to decode. It is something that I think pulls the viewer in to spend more time with the work, figuring out its logic, which I think is something that's really lacking in a lot of contemporary painting today. There’s a formula where you see one painting, and you can scan around the room and get the whole show, and I want to resist that. Maybe that's where the storytelling aspect comes in, because each painting has so much of its own narrative, you have to decipher that, and it can be disorienting.’

There is an almost hallucinatory effect in the depth of the yellow, blue and green, and the endless plays it offers the eye. ‘I initially started with the idea of exploring the colour relationship between yellow and blue, because sometimes it's nice to give yourself a jumping-off point. Blue is very wet, very cold, rainy, chaotic spring. Yellow is a more meditative, contemplative colour. There was the idea of interacting with those two parameters; to me, they are opposed. Even though they're complementary, they make me do different things.’

Megan Rooney, 'Yellow Yellow Blue' is at Thaddaeus Ropac London until 2 August 2025, ropac.net

Kaari Upson emerged as one of the most unsettling and formally ambitious artists of her generation, crafting a practice that tunnelled into the core of American pathology with relentless psychological acuity. Her visceral, often epic explorations carved a singular path through the psychic underworld of American culture, staging installations that probed the unstable boundaries of identity, memory, and desire. Trained at CalArts, she was part of a generation shaped by the school’s legacy of conceptual rigour and performative experimentation – yet her work remained wholly her own, marked by feverish intimacy and hallucinatory logic.

Upson’s oeuvre is deeply tied to Los Angeles: its excess, detritus, dream logic, and devastating fires. ‘Dollhouse – A Retrospective’, currently on view at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, is the first comprehensive survey since Upson’s untimely death in 2021, of cancer, at age 51. The exhibition, which is set to travel to Kunsthalle Mannheim in Germany and MASI Lugano in Switzerland, traces the evolution of a practice that blurred the lines between fiction, autobiography, and cultural critique. From the psychologically charged multi-part saga Larry Project to her uncanny dollhouse installations – blown-up versions of a dollhouse her mother built for the artist’s daughter – the retrospective encapsulates Upson's ability to blur the boundaries between reality and fiction, constructing uncanny stage sets for the rituals of trauma and repetition. Set against the museum's serene coastal backdrop and elegant architecture, the show stands as a poignant tribute to an artist whose oeuvre is as disquieting as it is seductive.

Several galleries in the show are dedicated to The Larry Project (2005–2014), Upson’s decade-long descent, in different media, into the persona of a man whose personal archive – discovered in an abandoned house in the San Fernando Valley – became the foundation for an expansive, fictionalised mythology. Upson obsessively reworked this material, constructing a surrogate figure that became a proxy for cultural fantasies of masculinity, wealth, and decay.

Her recreations of domestic spaces – including a full-scale replica of Larry’s house in thick, buttery latex in the installation Recollection Hysteria (2012) – positions the project as a dark mirror to LA’s libidinal architecture. The piece The Grotto (2008), for example, is a fibreglass replica of the Playboy Mansion’s infamous cave-like swimming pool, reimagined as a claustrophobic site of psychic excavation. Inside, Upson projected videos of herself inhabiting grotesque female archetypes – donning silicone prosthetics of exaggerated breasts and genitalia – while engaging in phone-sex roleplay and improvised monologues.

‘Her work is outrageously painterly,’ curator Anders Kold tells Wallpaper*, drawing attention to the way Upson mixed pigments into latex and used airbrushing and paint on the soft, pliable surfaces of sculptures resembling deflated furniture. This painterly quality is exemplified in Mother’s Legs (2018–19), a haunting installation of elongated urethane forms suspended like dismembered limbs. Cast from termite-riddled wood from a tree that once stood outside Upson’s childhood home, each form is fused with knee casts –some from Upson herself, others from her mother – creating hybrids of human and arboreal anatomy. Their missing feet and unnatural proportions evoke dislocation and loss, while the palette of fleshy pinks and sickly tones transforms the forest-like arrangement into a dreamlike procession of maternal surrogates, both tender and uncanny.

Upson’s work frequently draws on her mother’s complex personal history – born in the former GDR, she left East Germany and lived in the West before meeting Upson’s father, whom she followed to the United States, seeking the American Dream. This narrative of migration, reinvention, and utter adaptation – not to say self-negation – underpins Upson’s recurring use of her mother’s image and body, exploring themes of femininity and inherited trauma. Upson’s father, on the other hand, is only referenced directly in a single work: Untitled (2020-21) shows a footless, handless figure in blue jeans and a checkered cowboy shirt lying face down, with five ketchup-red bottles wedged into its back, like knives.

Untitled (Foot Face), Upson’s final and unfinished series, comprises 140 ink drawings made as a daily visual diary. Each work repeats the pairing of Upson’s face and her late mother’s foot – symbols of self and origin. Created during a period marked by her mother’s death from cancer and the recurrence of the artist's own illness, the series traces a gradual dissolution. As the drawings progress, the foot vanishes, leaving behind disembodied eyes adrift in dense crosshatching. Shown here for the first time, the series is a lush meditation on grief, and the quiet erosion of identity at life’s end, eerily continuing the posthumous reckoning with a body of work that continues to speak, even in silence.

‘Dollhouse’ is at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art until 26 October, louisiana.dk/en

The sun is beating down outside the window – it’s the kind of heat to bring out shades. It opens out into an overgrown garden where the undergrowth competes for space in hasty brushstrokes of strong emerald and pale purple. Further away from this chaos, the taller trees calmly blend into the white summer sky in blotches of lime green. Beyond waxy meat-filled Brillo boxes, the artist Paul Thek kept returning to looking at the world through windows and illustrate them in quick paintings – this was one he painted the year before he passed away from AIDS. Currently, it hangs in Thomas Dane Gallery in London, as part of an extensive exhibition of his paintings curated by the critic, writer and artist Kenny Schacter with the designer Jonathan Anderson. 'Paul had a little garden on his roof in his cheap East Village apartment,' said Schachter, 'And he drew flowers and buildings from his rooftop in a colour scheme that he himself related to Monet – even though he spelled him as M-o-n-e-y, poking fun at the value of art.'

Thek was bitter about the art world being exclusionary, said Schachter whose relationship with Thek’s work runs long from when he was seeing reproductions of his work until the first retrospective at Witte de With came along in Rotterdam in the mid-90s. In the initial years, Schachter was the only buyer in New York City of his work. 'The only thing worse than behind the times in the art world is to be far ahead,' he retorted, 'He was constantly facing adversity personally and professionally, but it never got in the way of his work – and that to me is one of the benchmarks against which I measure my own life.'

He’d even acquired one of the numerous sketchbooks maintained by Thek, which he finally brought himself to dismantle and exhibit as individual pages at Thomas Dane Gallery. When I caught him a couple of days after the opening, he had taken two sketchbook pages off the gallery walls and was carrying them around Spain. 'It’s very rare that you can not only live with an artwork but screwing your nose up against it on a regular basis for decades,' he said, pausing for a while when I asked him how the way he saw Thek has changed over the years, 'And still feel the same degree of intensity. I’ve been looking at these two sheets of paper, and you can see the pressure by the intensity of some of the lead markings of the pencil.'

Although paintings formed a significant chunk of Thek’s creative outputs, it remained a medium where his interest kept fluctuating in between his sculptural practice and more immersive installations. After returning from Documenta 5 to New York in 1972, he complained to his friend Franz Deckwitz in a letter, 'I am now here trying to do some paintings, some real paintings, oils on canvas, but it is hard so hard to get started again, the hardest thing I've ever done.' A few years later he wrote to him that it’d been months since he stopped painting. 'I have rather lost interest in it,' he wrote, 'And so I have taken a job here in a kind of supermarket.' Painting was also expensive for an artist who wasn’t really selling anything much during his lifetime, but Thek couldn’t care less about materials choosing to paint on newsprint. 'It’s the least regarded material that an artist would ever see fit to work with, so it had a conceptual import for him in terms of hierarchy of value,' noted Schachter.

Perhaps it was because he could be quite self-critical and strived for a severe form of perfectionism in his work. A true-to-nature verisimilitude, noted Schachter – whereas his paintings were sometimes hurried creations. 'At the same time – I only just read that in his writings today – he said that he has to accept that sometimes he works with very little precision or discipline,' he said, 'Sometimes you see him giving himself a little freedom to be more frivolous in his renderings. Those works have a great sincerity and whimsicalness like his self-portrait as a potato – which is a simple line drawing, almost like a cartoon. I’m drawn a lot more to some of these works.'

At the same time, Thek was an incredible draughtsman and for Schacter, one of the very few artists who almost harked back to Renaissance art in his convergence of thinking conceptually paired with his technical ability. 'He was very cognisant of art history – Jasper Johns or the more classical art of Cy Twombly,' explained Schachter, 'He was just restless and curious, always searching – an insatiable sponge absorbing everything good or bad that surrounded him, which became fodder for is works, which are very diaristic.' He painted a hammer and sickle sometimes – although there’s no signs of his views on Marxism so Schachter thinks it’s similar to Warhol’s ‘Mao’ upon Nixon visiting the Chairman. During his time in Europe, Thek was quite taken by Van Gogh – as at the end of the day, Gogh was a damn good painter, said Schachter – and bicycled around Amsterdam with his ears painted red. Gogh had created his own language to interpret the world around him, and Thek was developing his.

While looking around the gallery, it might seem Thek was following an impressionistic style with visible brushstrokes on canvas, where each layer of colour remained separate. Or sometimes deliberately returning to childlike caricature, scribbles of colour and a fascination with words in big fonts like in ‘Untitled (South America)’. “He never really had a style,' said Schachter, 'He flitted back and forth between sculpture to more ephemeral, collaborative work. He was critiquing pop art and minimal art with the juxtaposition between the cold, clinical hard edge of the encasement filled with the exposed, vulnerable piece of flesh.'

Neither did he want to be only associated with his meat works, as the moment he heard himself being referenced to as the ‘meat man’ in art circles, he stopped. 'He’s not making products for a department store,' laughed Schachter, 'He’s making art to appease himself and like-minded people that responded. When he came back to New York and saw the shitty art of neo-expressionism that he didn’t rate very highly, he said, if people want bad art, I’ll give a taste of what they’re coveting – I’ll make a shitty painting.' He infused such works with humour as much as with childlike innocence, like in his self-portrait as a potato. 'He was very interested in a good-natured critique introducing humour as a disarming mechanism for people to relate to his work,' said Schachter.

For instance, Thek would use a plastic labelling machine to glue the titles of his paintings on faux frames, critiquing the formal mannerist 19^th century framing techniques with brass plaques of artwork details – which we are all familiar with. He hated the white light in galleries where people breezed in and out with short attention spans – instead he made a shift towards smaller works and hung them really low to the ground, adding children’s chairs for people to sit close to the paintings, a single light above the frame – still attached to some of the paintings at Thomas Dane Gallery – revealing the work slowly. 'Art is a slow burning process,' said Schachter, 'And he wanted to bring more attention to the act of looking.' The year before he passed, he wrote to Deckwitz about his show of paintings at Mokotoff Gallery where he switched off all the lights, except for the painting wall. 'It felt like water, like being IN a swimming pool!' he gushed. It was indeed very romantic, said Schachter.

It was very theatrical, the way he wanted his works to be seen and perhaps it’s expected from his preoccupation with theatre performing in 12-hour Abramović-like plays or as a member of a rock band in the ‘60s. Installations like what would become ‘A Work in Progress’ were live performative transformations of the museum into an artist’s studio. 'His collaborations were entirely theatrical – very participatory,' said Schachter, 'For him, art is not an isolated act by a lone actor or genius.' Even while he was working with tenets of Catholicism and ritual in his installations, he was going back to how religious rituals are actually interactions amongst groups of people.

Thek was also surrounded by writers like Susan Sontag or Tennessee Williams and writing was a significant part of his artistic practice, in sketchbooks or in paintings. How then, do we see Paul Thek the writer? 'I’m a writer and I make art,' smiled Schachter, 'And most of my visual work originates in my mind’s eye as the juxtaposition between words and images. Penmanship has an aesthetic quality to it, and Paul was very conscious of the illustrative qualities of his writing – sometimes he writes backwards, sometimes he writes in print. Titles of works are extreme and there’s puns almost like Duchamp.' Could he guess why he and Sontag might have fallen out? 'I think creative people are difficult,' said Schachter, 'He was a very famously, strong-willed artist and she was a strong-willed intellectual, so there’s gonna be come rift in the relationship – I doubt it was something was some significant schism. And she was instrumental in getting Robert Wilson to become the executor of his estate on his deathbed – he thought it was good for the market – which it was.'

Thek was critical of art world inequities, but his work was very much a celebration of life and Schachter needed to surround himself with such extraordinary efforts by an unsung artist, when he started collecting Thek. 'I couldn’t care who sung his praises,' he retorted. Anderson too avidly collects Thek – who interestingly, was designing textiles early in his career, whose evidence no longer remains, like some of his original artwork – and they had been speaking regarding the designer’s purchases for his private collection. Jonathan had told Wallpaper that the Paul Thek Whitney retrospective catalogue was on his reading list, along with Burroughs' ‘Queer’ a couple of years ago – both of which he's now worked on in some public project. Schachter likes collaborating with people from 'afar' he laughed. 'Now that the lead dealer who worked with the estate, Ted Bonin, has died, there’s very few people who would be considered specialists in Paul’s work and by default, I’m among them,' said Schachter, 'I chose some of Jonathan’s personal collection and Thomas Dane Gallery owned some works – Jonathan hung the show.'

Schachter isn’t a fashionista, he laughed. 'I wear the same clothes everyday,' he shrugged, 'I just know I was so moved by Thek’s work and I’m still learning about it 30 years later. The art market has grown more in the 25 years than in the previous 250 years, and nothing has changed. And he fought against it – most artist will make some compromise to the market, like Anish Kapoor makes these candy bowls to be able to make these crazy installations and paintings, but Paul Thek never resorted to such a strategy in relationship to his own sustenance and he sacrificed a lot for it. The goal was to live a creative existence as a maker – and he lived this life in a saint-like fashion.'

Paul Thek: Seized by Joy is at Thomas Dane Gallery until 2 August

Creating worlds and telling stories around marginal communities has long been a passion for Lubaina Himid, who intertwines history, narrative and a centralisation of the Black figure throughout her boldly coloured works. A long career has been punctuated with significant milestones, from Himid’s curation of 1985 exhibition ‘The Thin Black Line’ at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts, which shone a spotlight on underrepresented Black and Asian women artists, to the taking home of the Turner Prize in 2017. In 2026, Himid is to represent Great Britain at the 61st Venice Biennale, with a solo exhibition at the British Pavilion.

Now, Himid is debuting new work alongside her partner, artist Magda Stawarska, at Cambridge gallery Kettle’s Yard. Stawarska is absorbed by a mix of mediums in her multidisciplinary practice, from sound and image to more traditional pieces, such as delicately layered silkscreen prints, her works bringing an evocative immersion to Himid’s brightly coloured paintings.

‘I really like working with Magda,’ says Himid, speaking over Zoom as the duo prepare for the exhibition’s opening in July 2025. ‘There’s somebody there being capable and reassuring, and we can have a fabulous, interconnected conversation. Our two practices, seen separately, look incredibly different to me, but lots of the themes are connected. They just come from a completely different direction: politically, geographically and historically. But we are both having conversations around codes and patterns and language evolving, and we’re trying to find a way to be more playful, perhaps, when we’re working together.’

The work on show at Kettle’s Yard draws from this cultural overlapping. Once the home of Tate Gallery curator Jim Ede and his wife Helen, Kettle’s Yard – which opened as a house and gallery in 1970 – provided a fitting backdrop for an artistic takeover that combines sound, paintings, installation and printmaking. ‘We’ve got different ways of working,’ says Stawarska. ‘We can be very supportive of each other – for example, I love asking Lubaina what she thinks, because she works much more freely and spontaneously. She’s not held by process, while my practice requires a different discipline, so I think we’re learning all the time, about making as well as about what we are interested in.’

In varying ways, both artists are fascinated by the often-neglected minutiae of daily life, from Himid’s interest in the motifs and rituals of the contemporary everyday and the significance of domestic space to Stawarska’s exploration into the power of sound and its potential to reveal a personal relationship with place. Showcasing their new works in a house already ripe with an artistic history feels like an entirely natural move.

The exhibition is inspired by the partially surviving correspondence between writer and poet Sophie Brzeska and artist Nina Hamnett. Known more widely for their connection to modernist sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska (Brzeska’s long-term companion, with whom Hamnett is thought to have had an affair), both women are often overlooked for their own work. In Kettle’s Yard, Hamnett’s likeness lives on in Gaudier-Brzeska’s marble Torso (1913) and bronze Dancer (1913), indirectly leading Himid to her subject. ‘I was interested in the house, and in Henri’s sculptures, and I had been interested in Nina Hamnett for a long time, for her crazy Englishness. I remembered that Nina had been very rude about Sophie, and then I discovered these two had written postcards and letters to each other, in English and French. There aren’t many, but they are really quite caring. There is a care there that you don’t see in Hamnett’s book [Laughing Torso], where she is very throwaway and rude.’

The new work, installation Slightly Bitter, delves into a mish-mash of mediums to bring this complicated relationship between the two women to life, combining the sonic with paintings and found objects, alongside postcards from Himid and Stawarska’s own archives, limited by the fact that Brzeska’s letters were the only ones to survive.

The ambiguous nature of Brzeska and Hamnett’s relationship resonates. Stawarska, who shares Poland as a country of birth with Brzeska, says, ‘I’m quite fascinated by what it would be like to be immigrants in early 20th-century Britain. From Brzeska’s text, you feel that she doesn’t have that sense of belonging. She actually didn’t like being in Britain. She would rather have been in Paris.’

‘So many things resonated with both of us,’ says Himid. ‘We used that understanding of the awkwardness of being those women in difficulty to think about our own lives. It was useful in terms of working out why we did and didn’t do things. This installation isn’t a documentary, it’s about conversations, translations and exchange.’ Himid points to the concept of postcards themselves as key. Easily read, their simultaneously private and public status echoes Kettle’s Yard itself, which acts both as a place to display possessions to visitors and as a retreat from the public gaze.

Himid and Stawarska’s work is everywhere in the space, gentle interventions that are hidden in drawers, behind closed doors and glimpsed in the kitchen. These more subtle pieces join works from Himid’s latest series How May I Help You?, which draws on last year’s Street Sellers. In this new series, Himid envisages the tradespeople and vendors that the Edes may have met during their time living in Tangier, from 1936-1952. Often full length, they are drawn in Himid’s distinctive bold palette of hues, theatrically residing over the imagined world.

‘I’m absolutely obsessed with the daily act of buying and selling ordinary things, the relationship that the seller has with both the things they are selling and the people they are selling them to, and how the people that are buying things have a relationship to the things they’re buying, but quite often seem not to have a relationship with the person they’re buying it from,’ says Himid. ‘You buy a bucket, but you have to decide if you’re going to this or that bucket shop, because of who’s selling it to you. Even if that’s not at the front of your brain, it must be a reason why you choose it.’ To go alongside the Street Sellers series, both Himid and Stawarska worked together on signs that reveal what the street seller was both shouting and feeling, bridging a gap between language, cultures and narrative in much the same way that parallels are drawn between their own oeuvres.

‘There’s been a short but intense history of collaborations [with Stawarska],’ says Himid. ‘I’ve always wanted to show at Kettle’s Yard, and now it has become something with its own momentum.’ Adds Stawarska: ‘Lubaina had mentioned Kettle’s Yard many times in conversations, how much she loves it as a house, how it feels as a space, how sometimes she tries to recreate similar moments in her own house. So I felt privileged to be invited to be a part of this exhibition, because I’m involved in something that she has been passionate about for a very long time.’

‘Lubaina Himid with Magda Stawarska: Another Chance Encounter’ will be on show from 12 July-2 November 2025 at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge

www.kettlesyard.cam.ac.uk

This article appears in the July 2025 issue of Wallpaper*, available in print on newsstands from 5 June 2025, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

Cassi Namoda paints figurative works drenched in bold blocks of colour. They pulse with heat, bringing everyday relationships together with fantastical symbolism. Many reflect upon the post-colonial landscape of Mozambique, combining Western mythologies with African indigenous religions. They also nod to pop and literary culture. For her first institutional work in the UK, Namoda has reimagined one of her paintings as a vinyl stained-glass window at Turner Contemporary in Margate, UK. Looking out over the beach, her languid installation fills the striking floor-to-ceiling window in the Turner’s Sunley Gallery.

‘Margate has such a specific quality. It’s like a portal to a dimension that feels very eccentric,’ she tells me, when we speak over Zoom halfway through the work’s installation. ‘Right now, I’m watching two jet skiers go through this cloudy sea. Some people are wearing heavy jackets and others are almost naked. It reminds me of a jazz song. It has this quirky beat quality and feels very existential.’ In planning the work, she has visited the British seaside town during three different seasons. She has also reflected upon Margate’s social divides and wanted to capture some of its contrasts.

Namoda describes the piece and the town like two magnets repelling. The title of the original painting, What Are You Doing by My Sea?, evokes a sense of conflict and ownership. ‘I felt this painting was interesting to implement because it’s not totally joyful,’ she says. ‘The title is like a rhetorical question; I’m thinking about a social and political context as well.’

The window shows an energetic flock of birds swooping through a yellow sky. A female protagonist stands to one side, looking away from the viewer out to sea. At the bottom of the frame, a male face, cut below the eyes by the composition, is suggestive of a severed head.

‘There’s this central disagreement in the work, but at the same time, it’s all coming from the heart,’ she says. ‘It seems the female figure has had some kind of heartbreak.’ While the original painting features a sunset, Namoda has left the sky in her window installation abstract, creating the feeling that the main character is ‘looking out into nothingness’. This also allows for the changing sun and seascape outside to impact the work.

In her research, Namoda has been inspired by other artist-designed stained-glass windows. She describes Henri Matisse’s Chapelle du Rosaire in the south of France as a site of ‘pilgrimage’ and is drawn more broadly to historical devotional paintings in France and Italy, where she is now based. ‘I think I have always made spiritual works with some symbolism that you would see in “religious” paintings,’ she says. ‘My early experience of painting was through the catholic architecture of the church with stories of crucifixion.’ Namoda engages with the darkness woven across religious imagery. She cites Flemish primitive painting and Pieter Bruegel, whose severed heads are reflected in her own sliced-through composition.

Namoda sees Matisse’s chapel as a peaceful place to ‘sit and reflect’, and she provides a similar experience at Turner Contemporary, with locally sourced pews for visitors inside the space. ‘I wanted to create a holy moment,’ she considers. ‘Something one could look at in amazement.’

When the gallery is closed at night, people on the beach can see the window illuminated. ‘I would say the most exciting part is evening viewing when the whole thing is lit up,’ says Namoda. ‘In the daytime, it’s soft and tender, and the sea is interacting through it. At nighttime you’re dealing directly with the image, which is quite powerful.’

Cassi Namoda's window is on view until 21 September 2025 at Turner Contemporary, Margate, turnercontemporary.org

For more than a decade, Congolese artist Zemba Luzamba has been running a political commentary alongside elegant paintings of men and women in colourful suits.

Six men stand in a circle, making a toast. They are dressed in black suits and hats, one hand to their pockets and wearing eye-fitting glasses. in some portraits, they are wearing boldly coloured suits, with a walking stick, or perhaps they are casually sitting and smoking pipes, but they are always elegant. Such are the paintings of Luzamba, whose work is inspired by the creative elegance of the Congo’s ‘sapeurs’.

The sapeurs (from the Société des Ambianceurs et des Personnes Élégantes) are members of a fashion subculture who are driven by quiet rebellion. Luzamba has been capturing their elegance in his work over the past decade, exploring themes of migration, identity and politics in bright paintings that draw on his experience and what he has witnessed.

His current exhibition, ‘Angalia Kwa Karibu (Look Close)’, is open at Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery in London and, once again, is heavy on his practice as a realist who blends aspects of the past into the contemporary, to critique modern political structures that affect the Democratic Republic of Congo and the world beyond.

Zumba Luzamba on his practice and the sapeurs

Wallpaper*: Your work often features sharply dressed men. Why were you inspired by the Sapeurs?

Zemba Luzamba: Being smartly dressed has always been a part of my identity. I was naturally drawn to the sapeurs – their bold colour combinations, confidence, and elegance deeply resonate with me. But beyond the style, there’s a powerful historical and cultural significance. In the 1960s and 70s, during President Mobutu’s regime, Western-style suits were banned in favour of the abacost, a symbol of political allegiance. In response, wearing a suit and tie became an act of subtle resistance – a reclaiming of dignity and freedom. My work draws from that legacy. The figures I paint are fashion icons and they embody pride, resilience, and cultural memory.

W*: Are you a sapeur yourself?

ZL: I think everyone in Congo has a sapeurs touch. It’s something you are born into but decide if it’s a path you want to follow.

W*: The Met Gala 2025 theme honoured black dandyism and the sapeurs as part of those shaping African fashion. What did you think?

ZL: Interestingly, [The Met’s ‘Superfine: Tailoring Black Style’] is coinciding with my own exhibition, which makes it feel very meaningful.

The recognition is very important not just to the Black community and their contribution to global fashion and culture, but also for the sapeurs, who are uplifting their communities through their art. Much of my work has been using their own visual language to talk about social issues, and often, I draw people in with style so that they can sit with deeper themes. That’s exactly what Black dandyism is about. It makes you understand people, not only in their elegance or what they wear, it tells you a much larger story. Having my exhibition at the same time as this global celebration – it's like the world is finally catching up to the message. And I feel incredibly proud to be part of that conversation.

W*: How did your practice as a painter begin?

ZL: My passion for art began back in the early 1980s. I used to be completely obsessed with comic books. I would even draw the characters on the walls of our family home. That early enthusiasm stayed with me, and when I reached secondary school, I decided to pursue it more seriously. I enrolled at Technical Institute of Plastic Art (ITAP), an art school in Lubumbashi, where I began formal training. Growing up in a middle-class family, pursuing a career in art wasn't seen as a respectable path – art was often dismissed as a hobby rather than a serious profession. So, I initially studied literature, but quickly realised it wasn’t where my passion lay. I found myself frequently visiting a local art school, and by grade nine, I made the bold decision to enroll – much to my father’s dissatisfaction. It took time and persistence, but I eventually convinced him to support my choice.

After matriculating, I continued my art studies at a college in Lusaka, Zambia. That journey came with many challenges. We struggled financially, and because I spoke French, there were language barriers, and documentation issues, but I was determined. During this time, I had the privilege of assisting David Chibwe, a respected Zambian artist. Under his mentorship, I learned the foundational skills of painting, starting from preparing canvases to understanding composition and technique. By the late 1990s, job opportunities for creatives were extremely limited. So, in pursuit of broader visibility and prospects, I made the decision to move south and continue building my path as an artist.

W*: How do you balance aesthetic beauty with political commentary in your art?

ZL: I create works that are visually pleasant, with powerful messages of social or political commentary in the composition, to encourage viewers to engage with them. My aim is to draw viewers in and encourage them to think more deeply on what they don’t see. In my work, I intentionally create compositions that are visually harmonious or pleasing, whether through the use of colour or just doing what I do with the sapeurs and their fashion sense. This initial aesthetic appeal draws the viewer in; I want them to linger long enough to begin asking questions about class, power, migration, identity, or post-colonial struggles.

W*: Your work always leads with themes of resistance, self-expression and community, why is that?

ZL: I mean, we already live on a continent where there is so much inequality and even oppression. Injustice is part of our everyday life. It was important to outline these realities in my work, but also using the sapeurs’ story as a form of history to address what is happening now. Self-expression through protest gives room for more hope.

W*: Aside from the sapeurs, who are the artists or thinkers that have most influenced your work?

ZL: I don’t think I can say but I know It depends on the period of time. I am constantly learning and evolving. I prefer not to limit myself to just a few influences – every creative and thinker I encounter, whether master or newer voices, leaves an impact on my work.

W*: What's the story behind your new series of work and the exhibition, ‘Angalia Kwa Karibu (Look Close)’?

ZL: ‘Angalia Kwa Karibu’ is a Swahili phrase meaning ‘pay close attention’. The idea behind it was to expand on politics and community as a whole. I wanted to talk about the financial burden on successful Black individuals who are expected to support family members as a way of paying them back for the care and education they received in childhood. The tax is not a common practice and is seen as a cultural obligation. I also wanted to explore the hope that can be found in everyday new beginnings. In one of the images, you would see an egg, which stands as a traditional symbol of origin and birth, its golden shell suggesting wealth. You will also find a group of men gathering in a circle to drink whisky as a ritual of celebration, and that was my way of celebrating the community. Beauty is always part of life, but the more attentively we look, the more we can discover what is hidden beneath the surface.

‘Angalia Kwa Karibu (Look Close)’ is on view at the Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery London until 31 May 2025, kristinhjellegjerde.com

I visit Michaela Yearwood-Dan in her bright Hackney studio weeks before the opening of her debut exhibition at Hauser & Wirth in London, the first since the gallery announced representation last year, making her one of the youngest artists on its roster. It’s been a rapid rise for the artist, who left her part-time jobs as a nanny and an art teacher in 2018 to give being an artist a serious go. Her first solo exhibition, at Tiwani Contemporary gallery in 2019, followed, before Yearwood-Dan joined Marianne Boesky gallery in 2021 and then Hauser & Wirth in 2024.

It’s an exciting time for the artist, with her clear sense of purpose encapsulated in the exhibition title, ‘No Time for Despair’. It is taken from a 2015 Toni Morrison essay, in which the novelist and editor looks back to a conversation she had with a friend in 2004, the year George W Bush Jr was re-elected into office. In the year of Trump’s re-election and worldwide conflict, it is a prescient nod.

‘There's so much to enjoy about life, but at the same time, to feel despair in this moment would feel very natural and fair,’ Yearwood-Dan says. ‘It is a feeling that resonates when I read Toni Morrison. She is remembering the moment when Bush was sworn in, and trying to offer a sliver of hope to a reader.

‘Now, with Trump again, and with everything happening in Palestine and Israel, with the attack on trans women – the attack on women, full stop – you realise that there is no time to despair, because you have to think about action first, and focus on the positive. Sometimes you have to remind yourself how far we have come, even when it feels like it’s one step forward, two steps back.’

It is a complicated emotional response that comes through in the works themselves. Large-scale and abstract, they are ultimately joyful in their bright colours, swirling patterns and embrace of non-traditional materials, such as glitter, sequins, crystal and gold leaf. Viewed up close, the paintings appear alive and gloriously textural, replete with thickly drawn waves of paint that make bold foils for glistening materials and snippets of song lyrics, poetry or her own writings, which undulate over the works.

Looking at them and taking in their sheer scale is to immerse yourself in her world, noticing new details every time, from song lyrics that have resonated to delicately curving ceramic leaves, or the ghost of patterns that live on under generous swathes of paint.

‘It's playing around with the different facets of myself,’ Yearwood-Dan says, ‘while at the same time also playing with the high- and low-brow, referencing Joni Mitchell and Hilma af Klint and Monet but then also the artists of the millennial experience, like Kelis as well. So it’s very recent, very contemporary.’

It is a juxtaposition that carries through to the work that explores other facets, most notably in femininity. Motifs from nature and symbolic colours hold both personal and political undertones, speaking to Yearwood-Dan’s experience as a queer Black woman. In Fxxk the opinions and all the logistics, the ceramic petals acknowledge the queer associations of pansies and carnations. Elsewhere, warmly hued flesh tones unintentionally echo the colours of the transgender flag.

‘People talk about floral references in my work, but until I introduced the ceramic petals, there were never any actual flowers. It's more the colours and motifs that make people think of flowers.’

In her work, the traditionally feminine has an edge. ‘The feminine is constantly under debate in our current society. For me, it’s the fluidity and assertiveness of it, and the chaos of it. It’s the taking up space or letting something be an extension of oneself. If I consider myself feminine in my ways that are masculine, and in my ways that are feminine, or assertive and soft and strong and all of those things, then, by extension, the work should be that, it is a fair representation of me as an artist.’

Michaela Yearwood-Dan ‘No Time for Despair’ is at Hauser & Wirth London 13 May - 2 August 2025

hauserwirth.com

In a vintage video interview with Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011), the artist says, ‘There are no rules. That is how art is born, how breakthroughs happen. Go against the rules or ignore the rules.’ Curator Douglas Dreishpoon took this as his cue for a new exhibition, ‘Painting Without Rules’ at Guggenheim Bilbao. The show is adapted from the recent installation he composed at Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, and is the first major survey of Frankenthaler’s work to be shown in Europe since her death at the age of 83.

Successful throughout her half-century-long career, with admired solo shows and museum retrospectives on both sides of the Atlantic, Frankenthaler was for a long time the only woman treated with comparable significance to her male peers in art historical scholarship on postwar abstract painting. Dreishpoon is now in the process of assembling the painter’s catalogue raisonée with her foundation, having already co-authored a book on her later works, and his intimacy with her extensive body of work can be felt in both this exhibition and its vibrant catalogue.

The rule-breaking of the title speaks to the midcentury painting revolution to which Frankenthaler contributed, alongside her fellow Abstract Expressionists and Colour Field painters, many of whom were in her closest circle. It especially reflects her individually expansive approach to the trusty canvas (usually on the floor) and on occasion to sculpture too – like the summer she bashed out ten steel pieces in a two-week stretch at her friend Anthony Caro’s London studio, following her 1971 divorce from her first husband, the painter Robert Motherwell.

Some of these sculptures are on view at the Guggenheim Bilbao, alongside those of Caro and her close friend David Smith, who died young and whose work Frankenthaler kept near always. They’re alive and chaotic, they make sense but also don’t, and that’s a valuable insight into Frankenthaler’s paintings, which are geometric but not, organised yet imperfect, clever and wild. They’re influenced by the older, well-known painters from her coterie, including Pollock and Rothko, but they’re also not like these men’s paintings. It’s as if she absorbed elements of their methods and then expanded on them, integrating some of their techniques and evolving them into a body of work that’s transcendentally greater than the sum of its parts.

‘Painting Without Rules’ is a show about relationships, both artistic and personal, in keeping with Dreishpoon’s biographical approach to the study of art and art history. Whether or not it’s right or fair to read the work of a female artist through the lens of her personal life is a question we still need to ask, particularly when male artists are rarely framed through the lens of their relationships with key women in their lives and how those women shaped their work and ideas (unless in the problematic role of muse). Frankenthaler’s prolific career has been celebrated by numerous shows and books, but few have resisted mentioning her male connections.

What did she contribute to her ‘man painter’ friends’ work and to the history of modern art? ‘Others before her may have stained their canvases,’ says Dreishpoon, ‘but Frankenthaler’s fearless use of the soak-stain technique exploded the process of painting.’ She submerged sponges and rollers in thinned-out oil, then acrylic paint, and allowed it to soak into the fabric of monumental unprimed canvases, creating amorphous, organic-looking stains. She made her breakthrough using this method at the age of 23, in 1952, with the renowned Mountains and Sea, a work foundational to Colour Field painting and the starting point for techniques she would later explore over the years (many represented in the exhibition).

The show focuses on Frankenthaler’s relationships to guide its sequencing – not only her romantic relationships, although they are included because she took lovers and husbands from within her professional milieu, but primarily her creative relationships, with the painters, poets, critics and sculptors she lived among. Just inside the entrance we encounter Pollock’s Circumcision from 1946 ,in close proximity to Western Dream from 1957, showing how his treating painting like drawing – spontaneous, freehand, sketchy – influenced her as a young artist.

Frankenthaler said she liked Pollock’s paintings because they gave the impression ‘something had happened’. From 1959, the word ‘happenings’ started being used to describe a less formal style of art-related event that was emerging. It spoke to a dynamic, living art, a scene animated by spontaneity and social connection. Something happened in Frankenthaler’s paintings too – something dramatic and expressive, something somatic, to expand the often-used word ‘gestural’ to include the whole body and being into how she approached action painting.

Dreishpoon brings up the emergence of New York’s postwar downtown vernacular when he points out the artist’s recurrent square motif. ‘Square’ as opposed to ‘hip’. An uptown girl living a downtown bohemian life, Frankenthaler was both. In her work, squares repeatedly intersect with, yet rarely contain, various flowing, entangled forms. The curator reads them as representing the way that certain structures – maybe a marriage or societal expectations – come into play with the freeform chaos of life.

Frankenthaler was born to a ‘good Jewish family’ on the Upper East Side, and was given financial support, education, and confidence. She grew up in a privileged environment but suffered from the loss of her father at the age of 11. She had solo shows at respected galleries and was curated into era-defining group shows. Her first retrospective, at the Jewish Museum in 1960, was curated by the poet Frank O’Hara.

The Upper East Side townhouse she shared with Motherwell hosted numerous parties and was photographed for an article in Vogue. A blow-up featuring a Rothko over the mantlepiece, between a painting by her and another by her husband, compellingly takes up one wall in the exhibition. The art director of American Vogue, Alexander Liberman, was a close friend. A great painter, yes, and simultaneously a socialite. Like everyone who’s ever had a big career, Frankenthaler was unapologetically ambitious.

One of her early boyfriends, Clement Greenberg (twice her age and considered by some to be last century’s most influential art critic) once said, in front of Frankenthaler and another woman painter, Lee Krasner, that there would never be a great woman artist. Not long afterwards, Frankenthaler painted Scene With Nude, controversial in 1950s America, especially for a young woman. It contains what some see as an inference towards ‘splayed thighs’, which her biographer, Mary Gabriel, suggests was a taunt in response to Greenberg’s gender bias.

Fighting her corner in a misogynist climate, the artist was reluctant to be known as a woman painter, and declined invitations from places like then-new and now-cult downtown femme gallery A.I.R. As for any woman of her generation, especially one with a career, assimilating to aspects of machismo was essential for survival.

Frankenthaler’s freedom in painting was correctly interpreted as transgressive, even by some of her peers. She left the camaraderie of her first gallery because some of the feedback was so cutting. Opinions could be similarly hostile at times later on, but by then she’d grown a thicker skin. Her work is often praised for its formal beauty, through criteria initially laid out by Greenberg, in an effort to protect artists from being targeted for their beliefs at a time when, like now, the New York police and CIA were punishing and paranoid. Postwar abstraction was a form of resistance, against legibility (important politically) and cliché (important aesthetically).

Dreishpoon opens the door to interpretive readings of some of the 1970s paintings, which he describes as ‘provocative and enigmatic’: birth canal-like passageways harbouring floating forms suggest the anatomy of a female body that synchronised with feminism’s rise in the US and womens’ rights with Roe v Wade. They also synched with her divorce, the divorces of many friends, and some of their abortions.

In the 1970s section of ‘Painting Without Rules’, we see Frankthaler painting landscape-like forms: bluescapes with blood red and skin tone strikes across them; sandy yellow waves like aerial view coastlines with black lines that could be… Hairs? Cuts? Boundary crossings? There’s a human scale red-stained figure in the water held down by a straight line, with red dots at the mouth and throat. The paintings are huge. Specifics remain out of reach.

Abstraction thrives on ambiguity. Frankenthaler loved that about it. It is also inherently embodied and emotional, despite art criticism’s best efforts to post-rationalise it as an intellectual position. The ways in which the most celebrated abstract paintings were made, including hers, weren’t necessarily abstract acts, intellectually generated. The word ‘abstraction’ implies that an idea comes first, and is then departed from. Frankenthaler didn’t work like that. Creative impulse channelled through her automatically – that’s where her genius comes into play.

Frankenthaler was well-read and a prolific writer. Her seriosity didn’t constrain her, though. So at ease was she in her seriousness, she wasn’t afraid to mix it with emotionality and elementality, or to lighten it with humour. Her work’s expansiveness, its depth of character, reflects this complexity. As Dreishpoon puts it, ‘An artist unconstrained by rules can be whatever she wanted to be at any given moment. Frankenthaler’s notion of beauty, never cosmetic, was as complicated as the human condition.’

'Helen Frankenthaler: Painting Without Rules' is at Guggenheim Bilbao until 28 September 2025

guggenheim-bilbao.eus

Latvia-born, New York-based artist Ella Kruglyanskaya reframes and rethinks the art history canon, intertwining references to techniques and movements throughout a series of new paintings. In the first of a series of three exhibitions, the first currently at London’s Thomas Dane Gallery, followed by Contemporary Fine Arts in Basel and Bortolami Gallery in New York, Kruglyanskaya considers those who have influenced her practice throughout her career.

Often humorous and occasionally tongue-in-cheek, Kruglyanskaya considers social interactions in all their absurdity, layering familiar tropes with a classical comedy. Here, she tells us what role humour has for her, why she enjoys the act of painting and how she wouldn’t describe her references as ‘eclectic’.

Ella Kruglyanskaya on her paintings

Wallpaper*: Your works are a glorious juxtaposition of references, from the classical to the cartoonish. What inspires you to draw on an eclectic assortment?

Ella Kruglyanskaya: I don’t use the word ‘eclectic’ with myself, but I do live in the world, which feels like a cluster fuck, I suppose that’s what you’re referring to. The absolute dissolution of stand-alone forms, the complete atomisation of aesthetic subjectivity. I find myself scavenging through a collapsed hierarchy trying on various bits for size, seeing what fits and both the positive and the negative of this ‘anything goes’ predicament seems to be one and the same, well… anything goes, kind of? There’s a certain freedom in that. Let’s mine that for gold.

W*: Your works can portray the unsettling edge to domestic scenes. What is it about the quotidian – domesticity, food preparation, interiors – which fascinates you?

EK: It’s such a surprising question – I had to ask someone to help me see what paintings you are referring to in the show; we thought perhaps Lemondrama (After Manet) was the culprit? It is a funny one (I hope), depicting a lush still life with lemons and knife (food preparation? Ditto) and a dead matador in the background (portraying an unsettling edge to the whole lemony scene? Maybe?). I am not fascinated by the quotidian per se, but it can be momentarily fascinating how the act of painting a likeness of something can be fully absorbing, a world unto itself. We are far away from the innocence of those historic still lifes and paintings of domestic scenes, paintings that referred to the ‘things’ in themselves (more or less). Nowadays painted things always, by necessity, refer to earlier paintings of those things.

W*: My attitude towards things I paint is more relaxed. I take pleasure in a squinting observation. I don’t study too hard, I let things slip. Everything is a bit in passing. An ongoing approximation. Yet there is a specificity there, some tension is created. I don’t want to be caught ‘working too hard’ as it would seem like I’m proud of my painterly labour, but lately I’ve decided that humility is the way to go, not pride. Also, everyone can paint so well these days, so what’s the point of competing? My only ‘pride’ is how little time I spend looking at content on screens. I am trying to set some invisible record which in itself will be unpublished and unknown only to add to my private pride.

A careful viewer will see the discussions I conduct in paint and brushstroke on what constitutes ‘finished’. I invite everyone to weigh in (sort of, not really, as of course I am the decider, which is where the fun lies), feel free to judge! Or maybe I’m like those YouTube creators who show you how to spend hours on make-up that looks like you have nothing on. That exists, right? What is ‘effortlessness’ but some right balance of effort and mastery, yet none of it should look easy.

W*: What role does humour have in your work?

EK: Explaining the joke would kill it, but I will admit that humour is foundational. To begin with, the activity of painting is highly questionable, taken as a serious pursuit. Already, there’s hilarity to be found there. Here we are, a quarter into the 21st century and the old rules finally really do not apply, after a very long slope of it all going in that direction. So, I guess the only thing to do is to examine what still applies, what drives the creation of these things we make? I work alone in the studio; I must have a conversation with myself, and this conversation has to be somewhat amusing, otherwise what the hell?

W*: Is there anything else you would like to share about the body of work on view at Thomas Dane Gallery, or about your upcoming exhibitions this year in Basel and New York?

EK: I decided to do these three shows in a row (in London, Contemporary Fine Arts in Basel and Bortolami Gallery in New York, all in 2025) as a ‘trilogy’. There is a loose thread going through, that of a movement of contraction, receding, stepping aside. The first part at Thomas Dane Gallery is called ‘Shadows’ and the last will probably be ‘Folds’. The middle part is still a mystery to me, though it will be revealed soon.

Also I have an artist book coming out this spring, with an essay by Alissa Bennett. It’s called Too Much and it chronicles the last four years of work, with fictional letters to the reader and selected writings that were important to me at that time.

'Shadows' is at Thomas Dane Gallery, London until 3 May 2025

thomasdanegallery.com

In the industrial village of Fiorano Modenese, Italy, a new exhibition celebrates the quiet poetry of everyday objects. Conceived by Italian art curator Sarah Cosulich, ‘An Ode to Things’ brings together paintings, sculptures, and design pieces that explore the beauty found in simple forms and domestic stillness.

Drawn from the private collection of Massimo Orsini, founder of ceramics brand Mutina, the exhibition reflects a deep appreciation for the artistry of the inanimate – vases, vessels, furniture, and decor elevated beyond function into something more contemplative. Timed to coincide with nearby Bologna’s ArteFiera art fair, the event also marks an important anniversary for the brand. ‘Mutina is celebrating 20 years, and among the many things we have done, the most important is the relationship we have forged with the artists and designers who have shaped this entire world of creativity,’ Cosulich said at the opening.

Installed in an intimate corner of Mutina’s expansive showroom – part of the Patricia Urquiola-designed Mutina HQ in Fiorano – the exhibition invites viewers to linger, to look closer, and to find meaning in the ordinary. The show takes its name from a poem by Pablo Neruda, the Chilean Nobel laureate, in which he professes his enduring love for objects. He writes: ‘I have a crazy, / crazy love of things. / I like pliers, / and scissors. / I love / cups, / rings, / and bowls – / not to speak, of course, / of hats.’

Much like Neruda’s poem, the works on display similarly dwell on the presence of the inanimate, with each piece underscoring the beauty of the everyday. An ethereal glass vessel by Ingeborg Lundin is set against an oil painting depicting a living room side table, also with a vase, by John Currin; the real and the depicted vessels each hold a delicate floral arrangement

Also present are artworks from Mutina’s previous, curated ‘Mutina for Art’ collections. Two vases by the French brothers Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec – a fluted cylindrical form and a rounded tube with knobbly protrusions – are placed in conversation with a moody still life from the Parisian painter Aimée Moreau and a dreamlike interior imagined by the acclaimed photographer Luigi Ghirri, who hails from nearby Reggio Emilia.

‘It is a project that, for the first time, allows us to combine Massimo’s collection with modern and contemporary design,’ said Cosulich. ‘It’s blurring the boundary between what is art and what is an object.’

‘An Ode to Things’, part of the Mutina for Art programme at Spazio Mutina Fiorano, opened 6 February and runs until 8 August 2025, mutina.it

When she’s in London, the artist Tasneem Sarkez makes a habit of visiting Edgware Road, variously described as ‘Little Cairo’ or ‘Little Beirut’ towards the south, owing to its vast collection of Middle Eastern joints (a product of migration that stretches back to the Ottoman Empire). On a recent trip to the capital, for the opening of her debut solo show at Rose Easton gallery, Sarkez added Knightsbridge to her itinerary on the advice of her gallerist. ‘I’ve always wanted to go to Dubai,’ she offers, adding that she seeks out similar neighourhoods whenever she travels. ‘It’s about finding the different parallels, and the patterns I’m interested in within my work, just looking at the motifs that are present.’

Based in New York, Sarkez was born in 2002 to Libyan parents living in Portland. Her preoccupation with the familiar and the aesthetically curious began young, she reflects, with her magpie-type tendencies meaning she was ‘always looking for things, constantly scanning the room’. On a trip to Libya last year, her first in 12 years, she purchased some henna stencils, solely for the photoshopped image on the packet: her studio is filled with objects acquired for similar attributes. It’s these – as well as images she finds online and photographs she takes on her phone – that form the basis of her all work (she's a bibliophile and Pascal Ménoret’s Joyriding in Riyadh: Oil, Urbanism, and Road Revolt is another big influence).

With White-Knuckle at Rose Easton, Sarkez leans into the ‘Arab kitsch’ aesthetic she has come to inhabit since beginning in the industry. First arriving at the phrase in an article online, she’s since reconciled the problematic potential of the words with the fact that kitsch is universally observed. In The Real Superhero Key, for example, she taps into vivid Americana, while elsewhere G-Class dance with the Shah looks at the military origins of a Mercedes-Benz model, and First Lady is a nod to Muammar Gaddaffi’s female bodyguards, dubbed the ‘amazons’ by Western press. ‘[Sarkez] paints a lurid picture of the central role amusement plays in politics and public discourse,’ notes Ruba Al-Sweel in a text that accompanies the show. ‘She looks at the way absurd scenarios congeal into metanarratives and canonical images that organise society.’

‘I arrived at oil painting with this idea of making what I want to see, because it's not there,’ says the artist, speaking on her affinity for the medium (two sculptures depicting perfume bottles, a reference to Brooklyn’s beauty shops, also feature in the new show). ‘It's adding the images I see to the art historical canon that is painting, through contemporary still lifes.’ Over Zoom, Sarkez uses a key ring analogy to highlight the way the personal meets the political in her work, suggesting that while there’s always a Sarah and Tom in the gift shop, there’s never a Tasneem. ‘Where are these contemporary signifiers, objects or patterns of identity? Ruba calls [my work] “algorithmic still lifes”, and I do think about composing my paintings in a way that’s very calculated with language and composition, and these more formal elements like traditional painting. It's under that pretense that it makes my name expected.’

In Good Evening, which features a white car with shadows and flashes, and the greeting ‘mah-sah al-khair’ written in Arabic over a back wheel, Sarkez examines the role of modern multimedia and how different cultures and generations navigate it. A counterpart to Good Morning, which appeared in an earlier show with Rose Easton (a further piece, Good Night, will follow at her upcoming show with Romance in Pittsburgh in May 2025), the series is based on the sparkly gifs shared by the artist’s mum and other parents from the diaspora or living outside of the US and Europe, habitually used as a vehicle for affection. ‘On WhatsApp and Viber, all these apps of communication across continents, there's this genre of imagery that's just so good. It’s common amongst people of colour, and it’s very camp. I love the simpleness, the sweetness [of the message],’ says Sarkez. ‘And to paint it in Arabic rather than English, is a kind of visual ode to the language. People don't grant Arabic that same visual “safety”, we've villainised the language, so that decision was to kind of say, “it's just saying good morning”.’

Furthermore, apparent across her practice is the way Sarkez employs tensions (perhaps the most telling property of the kitsch she embraces), and with ‘White-Knuckle’ that manifests via combined irony and seriousness, and concurrent feminine and masculine qualities. The show’s moniker, in particular, carries multiple readings. ‘I looked up vocabulary related to the experience of driving, because I wanted to mirror that interest within my work, but more abstract,’ Sarkez shares. ‘That term, white-knuckle, like gripping a steering wheel super tight, comes from a place of excitement but also anxiety, and that tension I thought was perfect for the show. There was also something funny in having the word “white”, at a visual level, occupy a show that doesn't necessarily touch on whiteness. It’s kind of tongue in cheek.’

Tasneem Sarkez's debut solo show, 'White-Knuckle', is at Rose Easton until 1 March 2025

roseeaston.com

Want to see more shows? Check our guide to the best London art exhibitions to see this month

Twentieth-century American painter Alice Neel (1900- 1984) had a sharply uncanny eye for a portrait, her emotive, psychologically astute works an antidote to the abstract aesthetic fashionable throughout her lifetime.

Born in Philadelphia, she shaped a liberal philosophy during her time in Greenwich Village, New York in the 1930s, encompassed in the left-wing subjects that began to populate her work. A later move to Harlem, in a bid to escape the art world’s insular atmosphere, followed by the Upper West Side, saw her move in new circles, which included Andy Warhol, Frank O’Hara and Robert Smithson, all of whom appeared in her portraits.

Throughout her long career, Neel championed those left vulnerable from social discrimination, celebrating freedom and pride in the body in groups including women and the Black and immigrant communities. With her ninth solo exhibition at Victoria Miro, her support of the queer community is put under the lens in an honest and emotional snapshot of broader American society.

Portraits exhibited here – from Allen Ginsberg to Andy Warhol and performance artist Annie Sprinkle – encompass both the accuracy and the uncanny psychological insights Neel brought to her work. In this exhibition, a narrow definition of subject is eschewed for a wider celebration of queer communities, extended to include activists and thinkers and ‘those who would qualify as queer by virtue of their different take in their given field and thus the world’, says curator Hilton Als. ‘So doing, they reflect Alice’s own interest in and commitment to difference.’

Als builds on his extensive experience engaging with Neel’s work, including for the 2017 show, ‘Alice Neel: Uptown’. ‘[There], I noticed a number of themes in her work that hadn’t been mined previously – namely pictures that showed an array of her queer friends. Friends from her life in New York, New Jersey, and elsewhere. A lot of them were artists and a lot of them had working-class roots. I don’t think Alice ever set out to “represent” anything. She painted her myriad, layered worlds. But what I loved – what I saw in the queer pictures – was a kind of family of difference, men and women and others who may have had relatively little understanding in America at that time but complete understanding in Alice’s universe. Ultimately what I loved about these “queer” pictures is what I love throughout her art: empathy devoid of sentimentality. And what’s fluid in these pictures is fluid throughout the work: the exchange between artist and sitter. If sex and gender are part of that, so much the better.’

In gathering these portraits together, Neel’s sensitivity and celebration of nous is emphasised, the community she creates embodying an ultimately optimistic humanism. ‘There is loads and loads of joy here,’ adds Als. ‘Joy about her incredible artistry and her welcome table approach to things: Sit down! Tell me about yourself! Joy over her boundless curiosity. And humour. And it’s my great hope always that she will contribute to the viewer being a more open person, that understanding is possible, no matter what.’

'At Home: Alice Neel in the Queer World', curated by Hilton Als, is at Victoria Miro, London 30 January–8 March 2025

victoria-miro.com

Discover more of the best new London art exhibitions to see this month

‘It’s supposed to be an experience that you leave feeling transformed,’ Daniel Malarkey, the curator of ‘Last Night I Dreamt of Manderley’ at London’s Alison Jacques gallery, tells me. It’s a grand ambition for a commercial group exhibition, and not one to be taken lightly.

Given carte blanche over the gallery’s many-roomed Cork Street space, Malarkey has pulled together work by over 30 artists across generations and geographies. The result is a fairytale exhibition that negotiates a complex set of moods and feelings; it is both irreverent and unsettling, containing moments of joy alongside a looming, inky darkness.

It opens with L' escargot / The snail (1996) by the late French sculptor Nicola L, a large metal spiral punctuated with 23 lit candles, which reads as a statement of intent. Its warm glow contrasts with the white overhead lighting and its hypnotic, symbolic form beckons the viewer towards an esoteric, unknown world.

What follows is an ambiguous narrative split into four sections: The Dream, The Grand Staircase, The Underworld and The Ancient Wood. These chapters broadly reflect the spiritual journey of the protagonist in Daphne du Maurier’s 1938 Gothic novel Rebecca, from which the exhibition’s title is also taken.

The story unfolds by way of contemporary and historical works by artists including Dorothea Tanning, Maeve Gilmore, Maggi Hambling and Leonardo Devito. The Dream section features a procession of images and forms suggestive of a wide-eyed, childlike naivety. In the next room, The Grand Staircase, this innocence gives way to a collection of more nuanced and fragmented works. Here, a sense of foreboding begins to set in.

The final room, in the gallery’s black-painted basement, contains just two works: a collection of wooden urns by Eleanor Lakelin titled Lifetime (2024) and an untitled painting by Aleksandra Waliszewska containing a storm of excruciatingly dark scenes and almost-hidden faces. Here, Malarkey, explains, ‘you literally face death’.

It would be difficult to emerge from The Ancient Wood not feeling spooked, but its horror also serves to reanimate the world outside of it. ‘You have to face death to feel alive. The show’s about the hero’s journey,’ says Malarkey. The exhibition comes good on his transformative promise.

Perhaps more impressively, it allows each artist to contribute to its narrative on their own terms. The lines connecting their work are often elusive and never forced. Malarkey traces a near-invisible thread across hundreds of years, subtly steering it towards du Maurier’s fictional estate. The story is one that emerges through what he describes as ‘unconscious connections between images and artists through history’.

‘Last Night I Dreamt of Manderley’ is at London’s Alison Jacques gallery until 8 March 2025

alisonjacques.com

Discover more London art exhibitions to see this month

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

Anna Calleja fuses the intricacy of devotional paintings with the everyday trappings of contemporary life. In her new show at London’s Sim Smith, the artist presents an autobiographical selection of works in which she and other characters inhabit comfortable domestic settings. These scenes are cut through with moments of loneliness and tension, as figures zone out in front of phone screens and curl up in foetal positions.

‘I like ambiguity, that’s the point of a visual language, that you aren’t constraining it with words,’ says the artist. Two older pieces seem to represent the dual aspects of the work: love and melancholy. The Invisible String depicts the artist’s parents snuggled under a blanket, while A Stranger I Knew So Well presents a gaping hole in the bed where the artist’s ex-partner once lay.

The new paintings follow Calleja’s inclusion in the Malta Biennale early in 2024, for which she researched three generations of Maltese women in her family, exploring how identity is shaped within a post-colonial country. The artist discovered that her grandmother was not allowed to speak Maltese at school, and her mother not able to buy a washing machine by herself once she was married.

The Invisible String was painted before she completed her research, which granted a new understanding of her parent’s marriage, and the example of heteronormative coupling that she grew up with. ‘They have this deep connection, and they were always a really good example of a secure kind of love that is very natural. Then when I did this research, the title of the work took on this whole new meaning, with their marriage de-emancipating my mother. She lost rights when they got married.’

The new paintings are steeped in her family’s history and her own experience of being in relationships as a queer woman. Her work reflects on the role of women specifically within Catholic societies. This comes through in the devotional aspects of the work, suggested by their intense, glossy surfaces, glowing light, and specific hand gestures, which are inspired by allegorical pieces. ‘The Virgin Mary is this impossible form of a woman,’ the artist says. ‘She is a mother stripped of her sexuality, which is completely impossible to achieve. Growing up Catholic, there are all these ideas of how a woman should be.’

There are times at which her characters seem ready to explode. One particularly intense painting shows a female hand clutching a pair of scissors, ready to plunge them into the other palm. ‘That was like a violent palm reading of women’s destiny. Almost like a retake of the annunciation, when Mary gets the news that she is going to be this self-sacrificial thing and she just accepts it. I was thinking of the Moirai in Greek mythology and the scissors cutting the thread of life. But also, palm readings and the witchiness of that.’

Influenced by artists such as Pierre Bonnard and Gwen John, Calleja often includes the family’s ginger cat, curled comfortingly on her figures’ laps or watching the action nearby. ‘There is this unifying, peaceful factor to everyone loving the pet cat or dog,’ she says. ‘He is also constrained in the house. He is a wild animal, but he’s domesticated. There is this subtle melancholia with pets.’

The technology in her paintings can feel like a jarring 21st-century antidote to some of these more timeless ideas. She describes the phone as a ‘third eye’ that reflects both an idealised version of ourselves and a black mirror to our darkest desires. Electrical cables snake around her paintings, suggestive of nourishing umbilical cords or connecting threads with the world outside. Phones serve to sooth and distract her subjects, who sometimes seem lulled into a place far away from one another and the viewer. Like everything in the work, they are both friend and foe, offering the possibility of rich communication or absent avoidance.

Anna Calleja’s exhibition, ‘One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night’, is at Sim Smith in London until 21 December 2024

sim-smith.com

A pair of white stilettos ascend the stairs; a Kaj Franck glass imprisons a lanky spider; water overflows from the tub in a pink-tiled bathroom. Henni Alftan’s paintings inhabit a border between suspense and generosity from where her vignettes of everyday moments lure the viewer. The Paris-based Finnish artist intricately constructs eerily familiar instances with a painterly determination on form and colour – en route to rigorously constructed visions, however, she refuses to sacrifice a seductive ethereality. ‘I am not trying to paint an illusion – I am trying to do something that is recognisable, and as direct and simple as possible,’ she tells Wallpaper*.

Alftan’s paintings are subject to two solo exhibitions on opposite ends of the globe. This week, New York gallery Karma opens ‘Stop Making Sense’, which features 17 new works, some of which are diptychs. Longlati Foundation in Shanghai has recently opened ‘House of Mirrors’, the artist’s largest solo outing in Asia, with the same number of mostly new works in addition to those from two or three years ago.

In Black Umbrella (In-between) (2023) at Karma, the gap between the diptych’s two paintings eliminates the figure’s face, rendering her likeness as a forever mystery. Her large black umbrella and red sweater claim our complete attention. Bath (2024) at Longlati Foundation leaves its bathing protagonist behind a two-toned blue shower curtain, hinting at an inhabitant’s presence with their visible knees plunged into the tub.

Through windows cropped with a surgical precision, Alftan suggests outlooks into the boundless potential of painting, both as a medium and an act of cataloguing the imagination. The 45-year old’s juxtapositions perhaps largely owe their contagious magnetism to the honest illustration of their protagonists, all while their motivations and the surrounding circumstances remain strictly opaque.

The Note (2023) shows a piece of paper, carefully held by a hand, being calmly conquered by fire. The lack of any piece of writing on the sheet runs against the title’s suggestion; however, the harmony between the slow burn and the patience of the hand fuels a plethora of narratives to muse. ‘There is no story, unless you write it, and there is no right or wrong in your imagination,’ the artist adds.

Alftan experiments with geometric abstraction to convey architectural characteristics in vaguely occupied or completely empty interiors. The artist bases her compositions on sketches, to which is takes care to remain loyal in their translations into paintings. TV (2024) shows a brightly lit television screen in a dimly lit room without any broadcasting imagery. The blue couch in the corner is potentially occupied by a sitter, given the device is turned on, but the probability of a dweller is complicated by a completely emptied shelf unit.

Light claims the leading role in a suite of paintings, Arched Window (2023), Electric Light (2024), Red Sky (2024), Stairway III (2024). In them, Alftan configures the illumination’s hospitable yet alarming impact on interiors with dramatic coloration accents. Fluorescent hues of yellow or red vigorously penetrate into rooms or radiate from them.

Both shows crystallise Alftan’s devotion to explore her practice’s mental, physical, and chemical powers to remind the viewer of the reality of looking at a painting. Stripping her figures and places of any subjective signifiers, she monumentalises their archetypal impacts. ‘They are descriptions of what you are seeing, not of what will happen,’ explains Alftan, who always returns to her notebook of ideas for inspiration. The works’ ephemeral nature – despite her fastidious illustration of textures such as fuzzy, soft, or wet – stems from an unfettered relationship with documenting reality. Referring to the bruises on the figure’s knees in Knees (2023), she says, ‘Yes, they look like bruises but they are also simply stains of paint over another layer of paint.’

‘Stop Making Sense’ is open at Karma, New York, until 11 January 2025. ‘House of Mirrors’ is open at Longlati Foundation, Shanghai, until 18 January 2025

longlatifoundation.org, karmakarma.org

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

‘I just started painting and painting and painting and painting,’ says Tracey Emin, who has spent the last few years exploring the medium in a series of works now exhibiting at White Cube Bermondsey in London. ‘I was quite angry about something – very angry, actually. I started writing over the paintings, and I never know what I'm going to write. It's just automatic. The words “I followed you to the end” came out. I was thinking about when you really believe in something or someone, and you will do anything for them, you will follow them to the complete end, and that's what I felt I'd done. And by following something or someone to the end, I realised it was the end, because I knew where the end was.’

The exhibition, taking its title from this moment of explicit awareness, traces Emin’s journey through loss. Teetering on the precipice of life and death, works consider the finality of emotion hand-in-hand with references to her recent personal exposure to the void. After a diagnosis of aggressive bladder cancer in 2020, Emin underwent major surgery that saw the removal of the affected, and surrounding, organs.

It is an ordeal that takes a visceral form in her works. In a video filmed by Emin, available to view in the exhibition, the pulsing red of her stoma becomes gushes of red spilling across her paintings. The body, reclining on the bed or in the bath, fades into the canvas when confronted by the often beautiful and tender pastels, in lavender and pretty pink gradients of blood.

‘When you have a stoma, sometimes it bleeds and sometimes this circle around the edge bleeds,’ says Emin. ‘But it's not a big deal. It's not a bad thing. It's fucking annoying, because it happens almost every day, and it can be a lot of blood, or no blood. This film is of my daily ritual, when I change my bag and see my stoma often bleeding, and it’s a bit like my bedroom [My Bed, 1998], in a way, I thought, oh, I hate this so much, but God no, it's actually quite beautiful. It's just the way you're looking at it, it’s how you perceive it. Because my stoma keeps me alive, this blood that is flowing is my blood, and that should be a positive thing. My blood is flowing. It's pulsing, it's breathing, it's alive.’

The volatile palette and raw dripping of the blood make an agonised foil for the softer tributes to a life, culminating in a tension between life and death. Among the wounds, the bleeding and the confrontations of mortality are autobiographical acknowledgments of support, such as Emin’s much-loved cats who silently keep watch in works big and small, pictured against her richly drawn domestic world. Ultimately, the paintings are love letters to the medium itself.

‘If all my work that I made before, everything – the sewing, the films, the photographs, the performances – if everything were a mountain, and I was climbing up the mountain, up the rock face, and then I get to the peak of the mountain and I get my flagpole and I stick it in, I attach my flag, and hoist my flag up as my flag blows in the wind. That is my painting. That is where my painting is, but it’s taken me all of that time to get up this rock face and all these different things to understand and appreciate that I had to get to the top of my mountain, not other people's mountains, mine, to understand what is really important to me, and it's painting.’

Tracey Emin, ‘I followed you to the end’ at White Cube Bermondsey, London, 19 September – 10 November 2024

whitecube.com

For Harlem-born artist Tschabalala Self's first solo exhibition in Finland – on show at the Espoo Museum of Modern Art (EMMA) until May 2025 – she pays homage to her birthplace, assembling and staging a convocation of its inhabitants at ease with their surroundings. The title of the exhibition, ‘Around the Way’, is a Black-American colloquialism that signifies the distinctive characteristics or charms of one’s neighbourhood, evoking a sense of familiarity and belonging. It is from here that Self departs, abstracting the essence of her community in vibrant multi-dimensional vignettes.

‘Around the Way’ by Tschabalala Self

The exhibition features nearly 20 works, including recent paintings, life-size sculptures, and three newly commissioned pieces that naturally evolve from the expressive, pluralistic practice that Self is recognised for.

Initially a painting student with an interest in printmaking, she uses fabric in a similar way to collagraph plates to build pictorial space through layers of materiality on the canvas. Her vibrant patchwork tableaux honour a lineage of Black American women such as the Gee’s Bend quilt collective, Faith Ringgold and Dindga McCannon, who similarly worked with textiles in this painterly manner. (Self has previously translated motifs from her painting into footwear and clothing with Ugg.)

The shared experiences and encounters of Self’s Harlem take place across three sites within the exhibition. The first, the public sphere, exists as the street view. Here we encounter the large-scale triptych 12pm on 145th Street (2022), which takes its name from an intersection in Harlem and features a shadow-like figure striding across the canvas.

Mounted against a brick-patterned wall, the paintings in this space truly embody the sensation of being enveloped in the bustling cityscape and for Self, recall memories of walking through the neighbourhood with her older sister, stopping to speak to loved ones, friends, neighbours, and strangers.

Entering the second gallery, the zone of interaction shifts to domestic scenes; lovers dance across chequerboard tiles, while an elderly man sits, watchful, with his hands folded in his lap. In Harlem Sphinx (2024), Self depicts a woman reclining in her pattern-clad boudoir, the view through the ornamentally welded bars stunted by brick.

'Harlem Sphinx is an imagining of a woman in a typical Harlem brownstone,' says Self. 'The room is meant to look somewhat bourgeois, which is often the aspirational aesthetic of a brownstone, but directly outside her window is another building, so you know she’s in a densely populated metropolitan space like Harlem.'

The final setting of the exhibition isn’t necessarily a location but rather a state of mind. 'It’s dealing with interiorities; a reflection of the feelings and interpersonal relationships occurring between characters that we’ve previously encountered in the street and the home,' says Self. 'I imagine the show as someone travelling deeper into knowing the community of characters depicted in my works.'

Speaking particularly to those scenes depicted beyond the public eye, such as Dreamers (2021) or Anthurium (2023), Self’s figures seem to possess a desire and authority to claim their space and determine how they are seen and understood.

Two figurative sculptures, titled Negligee 1 and Negligee 2 (2023), have been pulled directly from the artist's 2019 painting Damsel. Their very presence in the three-dimensional space embodies the illusion of having entered a private sphere. 'The sculptures serve to name the gallery space as that of the characters in the artworks,' says Self. 'Often it is felt that the subjects in an artwork are there for the edification of the viewer, but here that power and spatial dynamic has shifted, and the viewer is made to understand that they have the privilege of entering into the space of the subject.'

In ‘Around the Way’, the conflation of interior and exterior gestures towards the polysemy of home as both a physical and psychological locale. Self uses portraiture as a way in which to emphasise the body as a home for one’s consciousness, ambitions and fears.

'I have always thought of home as the origin,' she says. 'A lot of these works are somewhat nostalgic, envisioned as memories of my neighbourhood [while I was] growing up that are perhaps not realistic depictions but more an attempt to capture the feeling of my birthplace.'

Tschabalala Self: Around the Way is presented in collaboration with the Saastamoinen Foundation at EMMA–Espoo Museum of Modern Art until 5 May 2025 as part of the In Collection exhibition series

emmamuseum.fi

Dutch artist Peggy Kuiper’s first solo show at Reflex in Amsterdam, ‘The Conversation That Never Took Place’, is curated across its two galleries, the original art deco space which sits in the shadow of the Rijksmuseum, and the newer, canal-side residence. Walk into the former and you’re immediately confronted with powerful aplomb by The Bathers II, 2023, a work in acrylic and oil stick captured on linen. The four bold figures with their almost identical faces work to pull you towards them, the canvas thrilling with its layers of hot pinks and acid green, slabs of deep red. There are angular limbs and long skinny fingers, and where these figures reside seems entirely abstract.

This particular work is a fine introduction to Kuiper’s signatures: African mask-like faces, exaggerated bodies and sublime colours, all of which result in work that feels steeped in some kind of wonderful mystery.

Peggy Kuiper’s ‘The Conversation That Never Took Place’ at Reflex

There is an immersive relentlessness about Kuiper’s work that is particularly pertinent when you consider them in the show’s accompanying 300-plus-page coffee table book, created in collaboration with her gallerist Alex Daniëls.

Smaller paintings such as Vibrations, 2023, featuring three heads stacked one upon the other, or works featuring only one figure, Blossom, 2024, or simply a tightly cropped head, Wonderer, 2023, all give off a ferocious beauty. Kuiper’s work is intense, intimate and sometimes feels like looking at a Modigliani that has been stripped down to minimalist lines. If these figures were to be costumed, they’d be done by finding a middle ground between Rick Owens and Jil Sander.

‘They are figures I can relate to,’ Kuiper explains of her characters. ‘I prefer the word “figure” because I am not sure they are always human.’ Drawing on memories and diving into her own emotional terrain are key sources for the artist, as are nature and the seasons. ‘In nature, I always come across colour combinations that seem a bit off but somehow work,’ she says. ‘Colour is also very sentimental to me. I visit the same places because daily they are constantly changing.’

Kuiper studied graphic design at St Joost School of Art & Design, graduating in 2010, and went on to work for Anthon Beeke – a Netherlands design icon – before becoming a photographer. She had always drawn as a child – ‘mostly female figures that I could relate to, and interestingly enough the masks were already there’ – though it wasn’t until her thirties that she picked up a paintbrush again. In 2019, she returned to painting full time.

Despite her preference for working alone, Kuiper acknowledges Daniëls' input and influence. ‘If I don’t feel something, I swiftly paint over it, sometimes too swiftly, according to Alex,’ she smiles. ‘Though that’s why my work is often layered; there might be two paintings hidden below the top one. I don’t delete, I just add on, it only enriches the painting for me. I paint in a hurry because I try to grasp on to a moment.’

Daniels also encouraged her explorations of masks, introducing her to face coverings from the Democratic Republic of Congo. ‘They are a great inspiration, especially the wooden Bwami Lukungu masks from the Lega people,’ says Kuiper. ‘Although simple in form, the masks embody complex and multiple meanings which I think are very strong and enrich my imagination.’

The current show features Kuiper’s first work in bronze, Equilibrium, which captures a signature leaning figure. It took her around a year to complete, though has sparked a desire to further explore the medium.

There are also several etchings on display throughout the exhibition. ‘Colour often serves as an emotional language for me in my paintings, but I also wanted to explore what my shapes and therefore expressions would convey in a single colour with an etching,’ says Kuiper. These works showcase the artist's purity of line exquisitely; the 2023 work Mom is a ravishing highlight.

‘I lost my mother when I was young,’ Kuiper reveals to Katya Tylevich in an essay, ‘Ghosts in a hurry’, featured in the show’s book, that explores various topics within the artist's oeuvre, including the Mother figure in religious art. This perhaps goes some way in explaining the show’s ambiguous title – which Kuiper says is connected to a very important memory. The final line in Tylevich’s essay is a quote from Kuiper reflecting on her own figures. It reads: ‘I’ve come to realise they are self-portraits.’

Peggy Kuiper's presents 'The Conversation That Never Took Place' at Reflex Gallery until 13 July 2024, reflexamsterdam.com

As an Iraqi refugee growing up in Sweden, artist Hayv Kahraman absorbed the teachings of 18th-century Swedish biologist Carl Linnaeus. Famed for his habit of transporting plants from around the world into Europe and for his system of reclassifying them with genus and species names, in Latin, he and his colonialist experiments became an inextricable part of Swedish identity for Kahraman, who saw parallels with her struggles to assimilate in a new country. In artworks by Hayv, who is now based in Los Angeles, these botanical references become synonymous with the idea of the Other. The painted forms of figures become dreamlike symbols, juxtaposed against diaphanous, dreamlike clouds of marbling. 

We talked to the artist about the story behind her works.

Hayv Kahraman on reframing the narrative at Pilar Corrias in London

Wallpaper*: By considering the colonial implications in a single piece of work, you embrace a juxtaposition of artistic forms and cultural references. Can you tell us why Linnaeus' work was so clearly meriting attention for you?

Hayv Kahraman: When I started my schooling in Sweden, I was taught that Carl Linnaeus was a genius and a heroic figure. He was on the 100 Krona bill, and I remember visiting his herbarium in Uppsala during a school field trip. Linnaeus was a Swedish botanist who lived in the 18th century. His taxonomic contributions to the natural sciences by means of collecting plants from elsewhere, bringing them back to Europe and renaming them into his latinised binomial nomenclature, contributed to erasing the indigenous histories surrounding that plant. These colonial practices of renaming flowers and plants, a vocabulary that centered the white European heteronormative man (most famously Linnaeus) and propelled nationalistic, eugenic and nativist pulses into botany were crucial in the expansion of empire. 

But what irked me the most as I was researching, was his incessant urge to ‘acclimatize’ certain plants to the Swedish climate, which of course utterly failed. I am here reminded of the potent assimilation process I underwent in Sweden as a newly arrived Iraqi refugee back in the 1990s. How I was taught to think like a ‘Swede’, to act like a ‘Swede’ in order to be worthy of staying in that country. And it is this feeling of indignation that fuelled the work. I needed to unpack his volatile legacy, and then find alternative ways of sensing the world in which hope can be found.  

W*: By taking control of techniques with roots in other societies, such as marbling, how did you celebrate a new perspective, separate from the historical implications?

HK: My interest in marbling started when I went to the Huntington Library in California to actually see/open/touch/feel one of Linnaeus’ books, and as I flipped open the cover I saw a marbled front piece and knew that I needed to look into this art form. Marbling has a long history, starting in Japan, travelling to central and west Asia and then Europe. It was used in the Ottoman region on legal documents to prevent forgery. Historical implications aside, I found it fascinating that an art medium was used to prevent appropriation, that it's a mono print that cannot be duplicated/appropriated/forged because of its incredible unpredictability. 

What turned things for me personally, though, was when I actually started marbling and experimenting in my studio. I found the process incredibly therapeutic.

[Not] being concerned about how things will ‘look’/ how things will be ‘perceived’/how legible/ knowable the work will be – it allows me to not categorise, to not order things, to break away from that kind of thinking that I’ve been plagued by since I became a refugee in Europe. I found that there’s an acceptance that happens in this process. An acceptance of the flow and movement of life somehow. And as a survivor of domestic violence, relinquishing control can be incredibly difficult, but marbling feels freeing. As if paving a way to heal.  

W*: The works themselves marry these techniques with powerful proportions that make strong female figures central. How did your process inform this otherworldly narrative?

HK: The figure, the body, has always been a means for me to negotiate things around me. I studied ballet in Baghdad at a very young age and since then I’ve always composed choreographies of bodies in my mind. I think of the figures as snapshots in my paintings. They are caught in an act of performing something. A doing and an undoing of something. They’ve become my methodology to think through difficult topics, such as colonial botany in this instance.

'She Has No Name' is at Pilar Corrias, London, until 25 May 2024

pilarcorrias.com

For American artist Joan Semmel, the body is a lens through which to dissect the cult of youth. Using her own body as a reference – although these works aren’t self-portraits – Semmel considers the representation of women through an unflinching examination of the natural ageing process. 

Joan Semmel, ‘An Other View’ at Xavier Hufkens

At her first exhibition with Xavier Hufkens in Belgium, Semmel juxtaposes the tracing of this passage of time with an exploration of political feminist issues. In eight oil paintings and two works on paper, created between 1971 and 2018, Semmel questions the accepted nuances of female beauty, beginning with her early works that sought to dismiss sexual repression for women by depicting intimacy from and for a woman’s gaze.

Through a muted colour palette and with a nod to her abstract expressionist roots, Semmel considers the body as she sees it, eschewing the male gaze altogether. In Weathered (2018), which shows the female body from the viewpoint of the female, the eyes on the body are the artist’s alone. 

Elsewhere, it is props that distort the male gaze. In Disappearing (2006), we are already removed from the body, represented only through a photograph, its opaqueness carefully replicated. The mirrors and cameras of Baroque (2002) force the viewer into the frame, questioning their own motives in the reflection. 

‘Reimagining the nude without objectifying the person, using my own body, made it clear that the artist was female and undercut the stereotypes of the male artist and the female muse,’ says Semmel. ‘I wanted to subvert that tradition from within.’

Joan Semmel, ‘An Other View’, is on until 15 June 2024 at Xavier Hufkens, Van Eyck, Brussels, Belgium

xavierhufkens.com

'I approach the canvas as if it were a stage, or a scene,' artist Guglielmo Castelli explains during our Zoom conversation from his studio in Turin. Speaking at the beginning of March 2024, he tells me that he has just finished the paintings for his Venice exhibition ‘Improving Songs for Anxious Children’, curated by Milovan Farronato at the Palazzetto Tito, and opening to coincide with the Venice Biennale 2024. 

Bringing together a series of paintings, maquettes, textiles and knitted sculptures, the show explores childhood as the genesis of discovery – of the body, of relationships, of death and of the dance between success and failure. Inside Castelli’s canvases, figures bend and contort in ways that defy anatomy, and are set against familiar domestic backdrops. The works portray a metaphysical realm, one that explores ideas of fragility and violence, carelessness and attentiveness, and morality and corruption.

Guglielmo Castelli’s 'Improving Songs for Anxious Children'

'The idea of fragility, in terms of the other side of violence, is like a knife that you cut and open within yourself…' Evoking a sense of inner turmoil and fragmentation, Castelli’s works are as much inhabited as they are inhabiting: some works incorporate collaged items of clothing, hinting at a past presence. In Of aggression and possession, a paper cut-out house is collaged to cover the crotch of an empty pair of shorts, with figures climbing inside and up the legs. The clothing, while contingent, evokes a sense of a hollowed corporeality. Marcel Duchamp's term infra-mince (defined as traces of previous existence) is useful here, prompting viewers to contemplate beyond its surface, beyond fragile boundaries.

In the studio, Castell is interested in ‘recalculating the route’ in his artistic process. At the age of 15, he began illustrating children's books and later turned to fashion illustration for Vogue Italia, but he remained consistent in contemplating the ‘relationship between the world that can create the image and the world that can create the imaginary’. The title for the show, Improving Songs for Anxious Children, is as much a cry for help as it is a call for optimism, aiming to counter today's rapid online consumption culture, redirecting attention towards the nurturing and development of the younger generation.

The act of painting itself is almost a performance, whereby Castelli choreographs the scenes inside the framed canvas: ‘Every time I try to paint onto a canvas on the wall, it produces terrible results. I need to have everything fixed inside the frame before I paint…’ The distorted perspectives and warped spatial relationships further contribute to a feeling of dislocation, as if the viewer has entered into a dreamlike realm where logic and reason are suspended. In The minimum labyrinth, a figure with a sharp gaze casts a white frame, of the perspective sort, enshrining the canvas space; within the painting a smaller painting is depicted, of figures laying on the ground. In this realm of suspension, Castelli orchestrates vivid yet minute psychodramas, imbuing his paintings with our unfiltered internal worlds.

Castelli allows the viewer into his intimate scenes, beyond the frayed and indeterminate edges, involving us in the very fabric of his past. The viewer goes beyond a dialogue with the artwork: an introspective dialogue has begun.

Guglielmo Castelli’s ‘Improving Songs for Anxious Children’ is at Palazzetto Tito, Venice, 15 April – 7 Jul 2024, labiennale.org

‘Accordion Fields’ at Lisson Gallery looks at painting linked to London, bringing together artists who trained in the city, live here or are genuine born Londoners. The show seeks to highlight London’s reputation for artistic excellence and inspiration, somewhere people come to discover their potential, then take it elsewhere or stay and add to the fabric of the city. London has many personalities and many parts, a sprawl of little villages containing myriad identities that can offer anonymity or familiarity.

This isn’t a show about surface parallels, but rather about how the soul of a city permeates the work made in it, and how that manifests in paint by artists Varda Caivano, Sarah Cunningham, Dexter Dalwood, Pam Evelyn, Andrew Pierre Hart, Elinor Stanley, Tim Stoner and Joseph Yaeger. 

From the purely instinctive to the highly constructed and planned, from the abstract to the figurative, all these painters have different approaches to painting. The show raises questions rather than offering didactic, quick, clean hot takes on the medium it addresses. You can divide the work into abstract (Cunningham, Evelyn, Stoner, Caivano) and figurative (Stanley, Pierre Hart, Yaeger, Dalwood) but in this context, why lock them down?

Dexter Dalwood, who dubbed himself the grandfather of the exhibition, grew up in Bristol and lived and worked in London before moving to Mexico City. He is showing three works, including one, striking large work inspired by the history of Mexico, which he started in 2018 as part of a show there. 

‘It was my connection with an interest not only in Mexican history, but in Mexican painting,’ Dalwood explained over video chat. ‘I worked on that painting for nearly two years. If you can see the six panels where those marching feet began, everything was like a grid across the whole surface, and things just moved around.’

Instead of six panels, there are now three, of historical uniformed, marching feet influenced by a range of historical paintings including the Edouard Manet painting The Execution of Emperor Maximilian, 1867, which is also constructed of panels on a neutral background.

‘The execution of Maximilian, which again, is a very, very small part of Mexican history, is also an important point. The gunshot which killed him was the end of any attempt to colonise Mexico – after that, there was never another foreign power that tried to enter,’ Dalwood says. ‘It was like this idea of the present and of the past and  the idea of the resistance.’

Dalwood, who has his first solo exhibition with Lisson in September 2024, after joining the gallery in autumn of 2023, praised the mix of artists in the show and the focus on artists making art. ‘I suppose it's very much a physical painting show, artists standing in front of the canvas making the marks and making the work themselves.’

Pam Evelyn, who makes large, gestural, abstract paintings, is a young female painter making waves in this traditionally male-dominated area of painting. Her work is entirely intuitive and is densely layered onto the canvas. Sarah Cunningham, perhaps the youngest artist in the show, also works with abstract gestural painting. Her work is founded in the physical relationship to the painting while she is making it.

Pierre Hart’s deliberately out-of-time imagined compositions are inspired by jazz experimentation and sound, delicately painted; they have a different feel to the gestural work in the show that is founded in the same openness and exploratory thinking. Hart’s work is in conversation with the textures of Varda Caivano’s lightly painted but deep and cleverly constructed paintings.

‘Accordion Fields’ is best seen in person, and experienced, as the paintings take on new meanings and dimensions in real life.

‘Accordion Fields’ is on show at Lisson Gallery, London, until 4 May 2024

lissongallery.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

‘Portraits of Dogs from Gainsborough to Hockney’, a new show at the Wallace Collection, London, explores how canine companions have been depicted from the 17th century until today. From the fetching to the fur-raising, and the downright regal, the show explores how artists over the ages have taken their beloved dogs as muses. Here, dogs steal the limelight, with the exhibition curation prioritising pawtraits without human presence. 

This niche, yet apparently ageless genre, has more history than most, with dogs depicted in some of the earliest cave paintings alongside humans 8,000 years ago. 

The London art exhibition brings 59 works, spanning paintings, sculptures, drawings, and even taxidermy, to the Wallace Collection’s home of Hertford House, demonstrating the full breadth of humanity’s devotion to dogs. 

Historical highlights include Jean-Jacques Bachelier, Dog of the Hanava Breed, 1768, which proves that tying a bow in a dog’s fringe is far from a contemporary trend, and Edwin Landseer, Hector, Nero and Dash with the Parrot Lory, 1838, which captures an intriguing, and surprisingly relaxed interspecies friendship. Other featured artists include Leonardo da Vinci, Rosa Bonheur, and Thomas Gainsborough. 

But the stars of the show are David Hockney’s dachshunds, Stanley and Boodgie, whom the artist adopted in 1987. These affectionately rendered paintings from 1995, in which the dogs sleep and lounge on their cushions, are a sentimental window into the role of dogs in Hockney’s life, rendered in his inimitably vivid style. 

The Wallace Collection’s director, Dr Xavier Bray (the proud owner of two pugs Bluebell and her son, Winston), was offered access to a wide variety of works from the genre. ‘The idea of curating an exhibition of dog portraiture has been in the pipeline for a long time and, fortunately, the Wallace Collection lends itself perfectly to the staging of such an exhibition,’ he says. ‘Two of our most popular paintings are seminal dog portraits, Rosa Bonheur’s Brizo, A Shepherd’s Dog (1864) and Edwin Landseer’s Doubtful Crumbs (1858–9). They represent two very contrasting approaches to the art of dog portraiture. 

‘Bonheur’s portrait is a superbly lifelike and intimate portrayal of her French otterhound, Brizo. By contrast, Landseer is more interested in introducing a biblical parable into his portrayal, exemplifying the 19th-century urge to moralise through dog portraiture. In his work, a small street terrier waits for the “crumbs” from the St Bernard who falls asleep while feasting in his warm kennel – a Victorian moral of the rewards that await in heaven for the meek amongst us.’

‘Portraits of Dogs from Gainsborough to Hockney’ runs until 15 October 2023 at the Wallace Collection, London. wallacecollection.org

Hertford House
Manchester Square
London W1U 3BN