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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

abbaziasangiorgio.it

barryxball.com

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

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

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

Barnaby Barford for Wallpaper*

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

I’ve been staring at Daphne Wright’s sons for around 20 minutes before she walks into Frith Street Gallery. Not her actual sons, obviously: life-sized casts in painted Jesmonite. One lies along a couch in his boxers, his head propped up by cushions, one hand behind his neck, the other on his belly, his feet resting on one arm. The other sits on the floor with his back against the couch, head bent slightly forwards and down. He’s in a T-shirt and shorts. There’s a watch on his wrist and his left hand grips his right forearm. Next to him, on the rug he’s sitting on, is a vase of wilting flowers, frozen in the moments just before the petals drop.

Wright and I sit opposite one another in a room adjacent to the gallery, where Sons and Couch (2025) is partially visible through the glass doors. Occasionally, as she speaks with the soft, lyrical lilt of her home country, her eyes wander to her sculptural sons.

Wright grew up in rural Ireland and though her parents weren’t artists, they were handy. While they were constructing the farm buildings from the ground up, Wright would take the materials left lying around – gravel, sand, bricks – and combine them with found objects – stones, things pinched from the kitchen table – to make her own little constructions. ‘I don’t ever remember not making something,’ she says. But it wasn’t until she was 18, when someone suggested she go to art college and she enrolled at Sligo RTC, that she understood making could also be a career.

Her early influences came from the spaces that surrounded her: the grand buildings that punctuated the Irish countryside, their scale asserting authority, and the crumbling Georgian aesthetic of Dublin, where she continued her education at the National College of Art & Design. Formative works such as Still Life: Greenhouse (1995), a full-sized structure composed of ornate plaster leaves, and Indeed, Indeed (1998), an installation of towering tinfoil rock-like structures, reflect her interests in architecture, as well as in the tension between fragility and strength that continues to underpin her practice.

But for Wright it always comes back to material. ‘Sometimes I’m drawn to a material without knowing why and it takes me around seven years to develop it, to understand it so that I can move on and leave it behind,’ she explains. That understanding is registered by a feeling of completeness or expulsion, of having travelled to the absolute limits of what she’s working with. At this point she will typically create video work, which serves as a ‘notebook’ for that period, but also a ‘premonition’ for what comes next. ‘It’s a very brutal way to make work because each time you’re having to reinvent yourself, but if you’re not doing that, if you’re not inquiring, I don’t see the reason for doing it,’ she says of her process.

For those who have only encountered the quiet stillness of Wright’s sculptures through photographs, ‘brutal’ might seem like an extreme choice of word. But after an hour of talking with her, it’s clear that she’s someone who is as precise and rigorous with her language as she is with her material – every word, like every form she makes, is selected to produce a particular effect or test out an idea. Her sculptures, though static, are almost always fraught with tension.

Take Stallion (2009), a sculpture of an upturned horse, partially flayed and seemingly wrought with pain, cast in marble dust and resin or, a less obvious example: Fridge Still Life (2021), which casts the artist’s small-sized family fridge, including its contents – a modestly sized chicken, two trays, one with a bottle placed inside it and a few stalks of asparagus. On the one hand, it offers a tantalising peek into someone’s personal life, even more intimate, one could argue, than turning out their handbag.

‘If you look into someone's fridge, it tells you everything. It tells you their economic budget. It tells you whether they're looking after themselves, what kind of diet they’re following,’ says Wright. But it is also a staged artwork. The asparagus, like the oversized vase of flowers that sits atop the fridge, is a nod to the Dutch still life tradition rather than a replica of reality. ‘[Asparagus] wouldn’t have been something we ever got around to being able to afford at the time,’ Wright admits. The work was shown for the first time at the Ashmolean in Oxford as part of her exhibition ‘Deep Rooted Things’, which responded to the museum’s historical collections.

Wright’s sensitivity to material reached new heights when she had her first child. ‘I could not work with material. I had such a revolt to it that I would want to vomit,’ she remembers, drawing a link between the demanding physicality of birthing and caring for a newborn. For a while, it led to her collaborating with other people, a move, she says, that ‘really opened up her world’ and to later making smaller-scale work with clay at home, which eventually led to her exhibition ‘A quiet mutiny’, first staged at Crawford Art Gallery in Cork in 2019. The show was titled after what Wright calls the non-verbal ‘sulking’ power of clay – ‘the way it watches and withholds itself’ – but it could also be seen as her own mutiny against perceptions of artist parents at that time. ‘My biggest fear at the time of having children was that you would disappear because you’re not visible, but at the same time, you don’t care, you just make your work. I would make my work no matter what.’

Prior to the exhibition, however, she’d already begun incorporating her sons into her work – in a way, another kind of mutiny against prevailing ideas around what makes serious art. The first cast she made, Sons (2011), two busts of her children, then aged eight and ten, was inspired by her observation of parents’ obsession with getting their babies’ feet cast as keepsakes. This led to the much larger installation work Kitchen Table (2014), in which one of the boys sits cross-legged on the tabletop while the other sits slumped in a chair, his head resting in the palm of his hand. Her intention was to cast them again in their teenage years, though this time she found she had to wait until she had their permission, which involved many conversations around the genealogy of the work as well as the role of the mother and the artist as both creators and carers. Wright recalls the first work, Sons, making some audiences feel uncomfortable, questioning her right to have used them in such a way, not despite her role as their mother but because of it.

When we encounter Sons and Couch, this is the dialogue we are stepping into – but not only this. As the vase of flowers alludes, that moment has already passed; the Jesmonite sons no longer exist. They have already been altered by time and will continue to be altered until Wright captures their forms again. I ask whether she’s ever considered casting herself beside her sons. She answers quickly: ‘No, but I did cast my own mum. I’ve shown it once but I haven’t been able to let it out again.’

Daphne Wright, 'Expectations' until 18 April 2026 at Frith Street Gallery, London

frithstreetgallery.com

In 2024, a trunk was discovered in an outbuilding at the art gallery and house, Kettle’s Yard, in Cambridge. Inside, much to the great surprise of staff, was a collection of personal effects, including letters, photographs, drawings and clothing, belonging to the Japanese artist Kenji Umeda.

Umeda had been a consistent presence at Kettle’s Yard in the 1960s, after moving from Japan to Cambridge and befriending Kettle’s Yard founders Jim and Helen Ede. They invited Umeda to work at the house, in exchange offering support and advice on selling his work.

The discoveries in the suitcase offer new insight into the works, processes and thoughts of Umeda, as well as revealing a deep affinity with Jim Ede, whom Umeda describes as his ‘sensei’, or teacher, in the unearthed letters.

‘There is very little in the way of Umeda’s work openly accessible in the UK,’ says Inga Fraser, senior curator at Kettle’s Yard. ‘The Kettle’s Yard archive contains several photographs of his later works, but the sketches we discovered in the suitcase gave us valuable insight into the early years of his career, when he was developing as an artist. They show how his sense of observation, shape and form were honed in relation to what he was seeing in the Kettle’s Yard house.’

Discovering the suitcase prompted the Kettle’s Yard team to get in touch with Umeda’s family, who donated further gifts and works, creating a more comprehensive archive at the venue.

Among the found items was Umeda’s extensive correspondence with Ede, demonstrating how their long friendship impacted both their lives. It was during his time at Kettle’s Yard that Umeda discovered Henri Gaudier-Brzeska’s sculptural works, later moving to Italy to study sculpture, and then on to America.

It was a relationship that went beyond Ede’s practical support. ‘The house had recently been extended, resulting in a quadrupling of floor space,’ says Fraser. ‘Ede was by this time in his seventies and needed help to clean and maintain the spaces and artworks – despite these being tasks he had always taken particular pleasure and care in performing. Ede’s example of loving attention to the house was clearly an inspiration for Umeda, who used the time [there] to study closely works by other artists.’ It was the Edes’ way of life, though, that had the greatest impact, adds Fraser, pointing out that the pleasure of domestic ritual is something that became essential to the artist in his life and work.

The correspondence is moving in its tracing of Umeda’s development as an artist, something that takes shape in the marble sculpture Spirality, 1977, which resides at Kettle’s Yard. ‘It is telling that he elected to send a work from this time to his “master” Jim Ede, then living in Edinburgh, and it is also telling that Ede felt the sculpture belonged to Kettle’s Yard and placed it there,’ says Fraser. ‘Umeda asked Ede to write a text for his exhibition catalogue, and the two pages of Ede’s notes for the text feature in our display. The correspondence between Umeda and Ede continued for many years, but I think it was most important for the artist during the period in which he was learning to be a sculptor, and Spirality was given in gratitude for Ede’s guidance.’

Before the works are gathered in Kettle’s Yard in April 2026, they are on display at Margaret Howell, in London. ‘When I visited Kettle’s Yard to see the clothes Kenji had left in his trunk, I was struck by their timeless practicality and the quality of their make,’ says Howell. ‘Many pieces could slip easily into a wardrobe today – a simple work jacket, a printed silk scarf, a classic trench coat. His way of dressing felt very familiar to me – we both come from a time when clothing was made to last, and when buying well was an investment rather than a disposable act.’

Howell’s London store is a natural stop for Umeda’s work, which shares the designer’s reflective and sustainable philosophy. Adds Fraser: ‘I suppose discovering such a time capsule of someone’s possessions is inevitably telling of their particular way of life at that moment. The quality, the materials, and the classic shapes of the garments belonging to Umeda were striking, and this was mirrored in the small number of personal effects: a wonderfully carved wooden tobacco pouch with the edges softened with use, a pot for tea, a fan for the heat, his calligraphy materials.

'I loved seeing the books he had chosen to take with him, which were all neatly tied in bundles with string and remain so. One of these will feature in the display. The clothes do not look out of place today; they are styles that have endured, and have clearly been made carefully using materials that age well. I couldn’t help but think of Margaret Howell’s design philosophy when I first saw them.’

‘Kenji Umeda: A Journey’ at Margaret Howell in collaboration with Kettle’s yard until 12 April 2026, then at Kettle's Yard from 25 April – 6 September 2026

Last week, a historic blizzard walloped the East Coast, paralysing communities and smashing snowfall records. Unfortunately, the harsh conditions also smashed an architectural icon: On 25 February, staff at LongHouse Reserve, a sculpture park and cultural campus in East Hampton, New York, discovered that a Fly’s Eye Dome designed by pioneering American architect and theorist Buckminster Fuller, had collapsed.

The beloved Wiffle ball-like sculpture had stood on the site since 1998, serving as a futuristic backdrop for events including concerts, lectures and sound baths. But heavy snowfall — the most in East Hampton since 1963 – and freezing temperatures caused the 33-ft-wide fibreglass structure to cave. It’s just one of five Fly’s Eye Domes in the world, including versions in the Miami Design District and at Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas.

‘We are shocked by the collapse of the Fly's Eye Dome, a monument at LongHouse that epitomises our mission to inspire living with art in all forms,’ said Louis Bradbury, president of LongHouse’s board of trustees, in a statement.

Buckminster Fuller – affectionately known as ‘Bucky’ to those who knew him– is most famous for having evolved the geodesic dome. Fly’s Eye Domes were a continuation of that research and a prototype for lightweight, utopian housing units that had the potential to be stacked in groups of three; the circular openings or ‘eyes’ would function as windows.

Fuller patented the design, which he called an ‘autonomous dwelling machine,’ in 1965. Fuller died in 1983, but a student and protege John Kuhtik later fabricated the design for LongHouse Reserve according to Fuller's specifications.

LongHouse Reserve was founded by textile artist and collector Jack Lenor Larsen, who lived on the 16-acre property until his passing in 2020. More than 60 works by artists like Sol LeWitt, Yoko Ono and Willem de Kooning dot its gardens.

Bradbury, the board of trustees president, noted that the institution is working with its insurance carrier to assess the damage to the campus, and will launch a restoration effort of the Fly’s Eye Dome once weather conditions improve.

‘Clearing and replacing the Fly's Eye Dome will be an enormous undertaking, at significant cost and requiring in-depth research. We thank our community in advance for patience and support,’ he said.

The artist who’s left their hometown and gone elsewhere is a familiar exhibition trope in New York right now. There’s ‘Monet and Venice’, currently on view at the Brooklyn Museum, while the Met recently wrapped up the blockbuster ‘Sargent and Paris’.

It would be easy to do the same with Isamu Noguchi in Paris, Japan, and Arizona, to name a few places where the artist lived and worked. A new show at the Noguchi Museum in Queens explores his relationship with New York, the city he called his hometown for much of six decades.

‘I’m really a New Yorker,’ Noguchi once said, ‘Not Japanese, not a citizen of the world, just a New Yorker who goes wandering around like many New Yorkers.’

The possessive tone of the exhibition title, ‘Noguchi’s New York’ is well-warranted in this fantastic survey, which dedicates a substantial amount of space to the artist’s projects in the city, about 30 in total. Treasures, such as plans, models and photos, are the stuff of dreams and what-ifs. The exhibition also includes delightful tidbits about Noguchi's creative life in the Big Apple, such as the Phaedra stage set for Martha Graham or his friendship with Yoko Ono. It was all in service, as curator Kate Wiener said, of Noguchi’s ‘decades-long effort to try and shape the city into a more beautiful, natural space for connection and reflection’.

A simple timeline can’t quite capture Noguchi’s relationship with New York, given his frequent comings and goings. Noguchi, who was born in 1904, and first arrived in New York as a pre-medical student at Columbia University in 1922, soon turned to art instead. He then kept coming back, between relocations that were glamorous – in Paris, Hollywood, Mexico City, China, Japan and elsewhere – and one that very much was not: the Poston, Arizona Japanese-American internment camp during the Second World War. Some of these experiences are not especially relatable to the average New Yorker, say, studying under Constantin Brâncuși or meeting Buckminster Fuller in Greenwich Village. Others, such as being priced out of Manhattan and moving to Astoria, Queens, very much are.

The exhibit offers a series of snapshots of Noguchi’s many engagements with the city. There is a row of his early busts, a testament, Wiener explained, to the 'extraordinary networks of people that he met while he was in New York'. There’s dancer Michio Ito rendered in a bronze mask; Clare Booth Luce in marble; and a craggy ceramic Gabriel Orozco. Buckminster Fuller’s noggin appears in chrome-plated bronze, a nod, seemingly, to his suggestion that Noguchi paint his studio entirely in silver.

A considerable amount of real estate at the exhibit is occupied by enchanting models and diagrams of not one but multiple playgrounds that Noguchi laboured to build in New York. Play Mountain, for example, was a 1933 proposal for a block-large park featuring slopes, terraces, a pool and a bandshell. The project, however charming, proved Sisyphean for Noguchi, as stodgy officials were roundly appalled. Prime among these antagonists was Robert Moses, who as the exhibit text notes ‘laughed the artist out of his office’.

Noguchi tried again and again, with proposals for brilliant Constructivist-spirited playground equipment, including Contoured Playground, a 1941 design that consisted of injury-proof gentle gradations, and a scheme for a 1952 playground on the United Nations campus (Moses also stymied this project, threatening not to build railings around the playground’s border if built).

The most dazzling of the playground was an early 1960s project for Riverside Park Noguchi laboured on for five years with fellow modernist Louis Kahn. The plaster and plywood models, which reflect successive fruitless modifications, draw upon Japanese Gardens, Native American serpent mounds, Mayan Pyramids, Indian astronomical observatories, Brâncuși’s Table of Silence and more. Bureaucracy once again intervened; the project was cancelled by New York Mayor John Lindsay. Noguchi and Kahn went on to collaborate elsewhere, but New York missed out.

There are tantalising glimpses of other unrealised projects, some newly unearthed, such as talk of Noguchi filling out the early MoMA sculpture garden and building a primate playground at the Bronx Zoo. A letter from the zoo’s president to Noguchi notes of chimpanzees: ‘They are agile and quick and full of mischief. These, too, would also enjoy different floor levels and would probably use a movable swing but not to the same extent that the orangutan would.’ Unfortunately, there’s no evidence of what Noguchi might have come up with for the chimps, but it’s fuel for imagination.

Amid the joyful works are the ghosts of Noguchi projects that succumbed to the wrecking ball. A nightclub in the basement of a former Baptist church. His Time-Life building interior. The 666 5th Avenue waterfall lobby installation (which, fortunately, the museum has in its holdings).

Another destroyed work is the 1975 sculpture Shinto, which was created for the Bank of Tokyo Building. It was dismembered just five years later without a word to the artist. The exhibit features a letter of remarkably poetic resignation from Noguchi: 'The natural mediocrity of the people who worked there must have finally prevailed. We are out on the street where we belong.’

All of these works – whether they still stand today or were lost – are testaments to Noguchi’s ‘restless idealism', Weiner explained. He made far more money from private commissions. Noguchi wrote in A Sculptor’s World, ‘I am grateful for the opportunity to do significant public works, and look upon them as challenges to sculpture rather than as jobs.’

Hitch the subway to Manhattan and you can easily view two. Red Cube is a kinetic jolt of steel and man-made colour on Broadway; Sunken Garden consists of river-hewn stones from Kyoto set atop patterned Japanese-and-Chinese influenced paving. The latter project sounds like the very picture of zen, but Noguchi described it ‘like looking onto a turbulent seascape from which immobile rocks take off for outer space’.

Most fascinating of all just might be surprising biographical snippets of Noguchi’s colourful life. There’s a chess table he designed for a 1944 exhibition among august company, such as Robert Motherwell, Yves Tanguy and Dorothea Tanning. There’s a sobering firearm-like granite piece, Sharpshooter, that he created for a MoMA event benefitting the Southern Christian Leadership Council after Martin Luther King was assassinated. Noguchi was even a character witness at a 1976 immigration hearing for John Lennon.

Noguchi best summed up his approach: ‘My way was not the way of words, but the way of doing things, making something which might sort of approach that which one felt the world could be. Little spots here and there, so that instead of going to the moon, you bring the moon to you.’

‘Noguchi’s New York’ is at the Noguchi Museum until 13 September 2026.

Also read our guide to Isamu Noguchi’s life and work

On the Giza Plateau, three large-scale stone compositions are in dialogue with the desert. The temporary installation, Echoes of the Infinite, is the work of designer and art director Alex Proba and natural stone company SolidNature as part of ‘For Forever is Now 05’ (until 6 December 2025), the fifth annual exhibition of outdoor art beside the Pyramids curated by Art D’Égypte.

‘Forever Is Now 05’: art and the Giza Pyramids

Each formation by Proba curves towards the horizon in a sequence of soft, continuous gestures: a portal, an abstracted Eye of Horus (an ancient Egyptian symbol), a shallow concave plane. Carved from marble, onyx, travertine and quartzite, the sculptures register the day’s movement through shifts of translucency and tone in the heat and light, making the work a collaboration with the Earth itself.

'These stones already hold millions of years of emotion in their veins,' she says. 'My role was not to impose colour but to listen to it, allowing the forms to flow with the rhythm of each stone’s pattern.'

The compositions hint at ancient emblems, yet Proba approaches form through intuition rather than symbol. Circles and continuous curves recur across her practice as shapes that feel inevitable in themselves, free of overt reference, gestures with emotional resonance that remain open to interpretation. 'I’m drawn to forms that feel alive,' she explains. 'The viewer can decide whether they’re stepping through an eye, an orbit, a horizon or a memory. That ambiguity is part of the invitation.'

Working in stone altered the energy of her visual language. What is often playful became slower and more contemplative. 'The softness remained,' she reflects, 'but the weight of time gave it a new gravity.' Standing before the Pyramids also reshaped her approach. 'The Pyramids made me want to whisper rather than be loud,' she notes. Her aim was not to compete with scale, but to place something that felt as though it belonged, as if it had emerged from the desert itself.

To bring these gestures into monumental form, Proba collaborated with Solid Nature, the Amsterdam-based stone specialist known for its experimental work with OMA and Sabine Marcelis.

Under CEO David Mahyari’s direction, the fabrication became an exercise in structural problem-solving. The sculptures appear to hover lightly above the sand, yet the installation weighs around 20 tonnes. Achieving this visual lightness required an internal construction hidden entirely within the stone. 'The challenge was letting the forms seem to float without altering Alex’s design,' Mahyari explains. 'We had to find ways to counter the natural weight of the material, especially in the portal and the lashes of the Eye of Horus.'

Because nothing could be built directly on site, all components were pre-fabricated. Transport limitations meant hollowing parts of the stone from within to reduce weight, producing some sections fully off-site and shaping others for final assembly in the desert. Each sculpture is composed of two major stone parts bonded around a central support structure. The adhesive had to withstand an extreme climate, expanding and contracting with the desert’s dramatic temperature shifts while holding the overall mass securely. Beneath each form lies a custom-engineered steel platform, buried under the sand to distribute weight across the uneven ground. The platforms had to remain visually discreet yet structurally decisive.

Material selection was equally exacting. Blocks were chosen without natural fault lines or cavities, preserving the fluidity of Proba’s forms. Travertine was cut across the grain for strength, resisting the stone’s natural tendency to split along its layers. For the onyx at the centre of the Eye of Horus, Solid Nature selected a cross-cut orientation, revealing a cloudy, organic pattern that echoes Proba’s curves and sits in quiet dialogue with the geometric precision of the Pyramids.

These decisions underscore the project’s conceptual core: a meeting between geological time and contemporary gesture. Proba often describes stone as memory made visible. 'Memory here is very literal,' she says. 'The veining, the fractures, the mineral patterns are traces of millions of years. Carving becomes a continuation rather than a rewrite.'

Working with a material that may outlast countless generations reshaped her sense of design’s lifespan. It also introduced an ecological dimension that felt clarifying. 'Making sculpture from the Earth’s own material changes how you think about impact,' she notes. 'It feels more responsible, more connected.'

As the sun moves, the sculptures act as instruments of measure. The portal frames the pyramids from certain angles; the Eye of Horus abstracts ancient symbolism into a contemporary flow; the concave plane receives the horizon as though holding it in its bowl. Proba describes seeing the sculptures arrive on site as a moment of recognition. 'They looked as though they had grown from the desert sand,' she says. 'As if the site had been waiting for them.'

At Giza, Echoes of the Infinite sits with a calm that belies its complexity. The three sculptures align with the three Pyramids as though the site had anticipated their arrival, yet their presence rests on months of blue-sky engineering: hollowed stone, concealed steel, calibrated joints and surfaces tuned to heat and wind. What emerges is a study in how mineral colour, geological time and contemporary form can meet without strain. The work holds its place airily, as though carved from the desert, its origin reading as geological, its logistics effectively invisible.

‘Forever is Now .05’ is on view until 6 December 2025,
Giza Plateau, Cairo

Design Miami Paris 2025, the fair's third edition, brings the habitual curation of contemporary design, shown within the Hôtel de Maisons (51 Rue de l'Université, 75007 Paris, until 26 October).

The fair as usual does a great job of showcasing some of the best contemporary and modern collectible design from the industry's key players, but it also renews its commitment to a new generation of creatives, with newly launched initiatives such as the Designers of Tomorrow, in collaboration with Apple, and the Perrier-Jouët Design for Nature Award, inviting designers 'to explore the concept of sustainability as a driving force for meaningful cultural and environmental progress'.

2025 is a year of celebrations, with the concurrent centenary of the 1925 art deco exhibition high on exhibitors' agenda, but also of whim, as evinced by the multiple zoomorphic pieces on display across different galleries, a sign of playfulness within the contemporary collectible design conversation.

Here, we share our highlights from Design Miami Paris 2025

Carl Auböck at Patrick Parrish

The work of legendary Viennese designers Carl Auböck ll (1900-1957) and Carl Auböck lll (1924-1993) is presented by Patrick Parrish, who collated 150 pieces, 25 of which are from his personal collection. The display elevates designs that are 'typically considered as everyday small objects: bells, dishes, baskets, and bookends, revealing each piece as a unique and prescient objet d’art'.

The Soul Garden by Sissel Tolaas and Vikram Goyal

At Design Miami Paris, an artful menagerie by Vikram Goyal and Sissel Tolaas tells a story of scent and nature. ‘The Soul Garden’ features India’s ancient Panchatantra animal stories in the form of sculptural embodiments of empathy and coexistence. Crafted in the designer’s signature burnished repoussé brass and copper, each animal contains a hidden compartment depicting a fable hand-carved in miniature relief. Alongside each sculpture, there is seating to encourage visitors to lower themselves to the animals’ level and sit with them, reflecting on the messages in the fables. In doing so, they also get closer to the ground – both the grass and the stools are embedded with nano-scent activators conceived by Tolaas. Read more.

Surface Narratives by Fornasetti

Surfaces become a meeting point of material and vision in this series of works by Piero Fornasetti. For these pieces, the Italian artist employed a trompe l'oeil treatment and his brilliance is best exemplified by the Trumeau Riflesso di Panoplie sideboard: a reinterpretation of a 1950s piece, its surface features a wunderkammer of musical, scientific, architectural, astronomical and naturalist instruments.

La Déclive by Paulin, Paulin, Paulin

A modular seating concept designed by Pierre Paulin in 1966, ‘La Déclive’ 'embodies one of the designer’s most radical approaches: to eliminate traditional furniture in favour of a shifting, inhabitable floor'. The display is a living reflection of Paulin's vision for a design approach that revolutionises domestic arrangements, fusing architecture and furniture into a novel spatial experience.

Resonating Ping Pong Table, Song no. 1 by James de Wulf

James de Wulf's 'Resonating Ping Pong Table, Song no. 1' is a multisensory piece that works sound into a ping-pong table's typically playful function. Set within the Hôtel de Maisons' gardens, it invites visitors to play, and in return it offers an A-minor pentatonic scale as the ball hits its aluminium plates.

Céramiques 1890–1930 by Galerie Maxime Flatry

Ceramic vases by Jean Besnard, Ernest Chaplet and Pierre-Adrien Dalpayrat are shown here with floral arrangements by Thierry Boutemy. The works of the three pioneering names of French Art Nouveau and art deco ceramics 'stand out for the boldness of their forms, colours, and textures: these rare works reflect a moment of exceptional innovation in the decorative arts'.

Also read: the best design exhibitions to see in Paris this week

What do tigers and popcorn have in common? If you don’t already know, read on.

In the elegantly manicured gardens of L’Hôtel de Maisons (once the Parisian home of Karl Lagerfeld) five sculpted animals make up an inviting menagerie. This is ‘The Soul Garden’, a sensory installation by New Delhi-based designer Vikram Goyal, created in collaboration with olfactory artist Sissel Tolaas and presented by The Future Perfect for Design Miami Paris 2025.

Discover ‘The Soul Garden’ by Sissel Tolaas and Vikram Goyal

While Design Miami’s audience of collectors are no strangers to animal-themed art (who doesn’t love Les Lalannes?), Goyal’s creature kingdom is a step beyond. Described by Goyal as 'a new fable for our turbulent times', ‘The Soul Garden’ reimagines India’s ancient Panchatantra animal stories as sculptural embodiments of empathy and coexistence.

In the designer’s signature burnished repoussé brass and copper, there is an elephant and calf (Gaja and Karabha), a tiger (Vyaghra), a tortoise (Kurma), and a crocodile (Nakra). Each animal represents a human virtue – strength, patience, loyalty, wisdom – and each contains a hidden compartment depicting a fable hand-carved in miniature relief.

In India, explains Goyal, animals hold ancient philosophical significance: 'They are sacred, sentient and divine. Many embody essential virtues – strength, wisdom, loyalty, tranquillity. This recognition of their spiritual equivalence has led to their protection and veneration for centuries. Soul Garden is a contemporary fable where the animals take new forms, reimagined for the world we live in today.'

Alongside each sculpture, there is seating to encourage visitors to lower themselves to the animals’ level and sit with them, reflecting on the messages in the fables. In doing so, they also get closer to the ground – both the grass and the stools are embedded with nano-scent activators conceived by Tolaas, whose practice transforms smell into an emotional, conceptual medium.

'For animals, smell is their primary language,' says Goyal. 'It’s how they find food, recognise kin, warn of danger and even express emotion. Scent is a story, and to be true to the intelligence of animals, “The Soul Garden” needed to speak in this invisible but powerful register.'

Both smells and fables bypass logic and go straight to memory, he explains. 'A scent can collapse decades into a single instant.'

Sissel Tolaas’ lifelong research explores smell as 'the alphabet of the air'. For her, the collaboration was an unmissable invitation to translate the unseen intelligence of nature into something tangible.

'Nature is a living matter,' she explains. 'There are microbes, there is soil that send molecules to the animals of various kinds to keep everything alive. The ecosystem of life is driven by chemistry. Where there’s life, there’s a molecule, there’s air.'

Scent meets design

Solaas' process began in Goyal’s New Delhi workshop, capturing molecules released during the making of the sculptures, then extending into the field to record smell molecules from the habitats of elephants, tigers, and tortoises. These were analysed, replicated, and layered with scent molecules from Indian grasses and soil, to create a diffuse olfactory ecosystem that visitors inhale as they wander among the sculptures.

'Some molecules are even there to activate the molecules in nature,' she adds. 'Animals immediately get those messages. But to be able to understand that, you need to scale down to the level of the animals. That’s why I put the stools – so you take your time, sit down, feel the wind, and smell the popcorn smell emitting from the tiger…'

Indeed, that unmistakable toasted note is the scent of a tiger’s urine. It’s not unpleasant when you think popcorn, but when you know how Vyaghra, the tiger, emits that – well, it’s a playful yet precise reminder of the intimacy of olfactory communication. 'It’s like all the prejudices we have and how much information we miss out by being disconnected,' smiles Tolaas.

Across the installation, Tolaas has used scent to map the invisible relationships between soil, animals, and air. 'Everything is chemistry,' she says. 'Animals communicate through smell molecules – ‘help me get away from the tiger’, or ‘help me find the water’. Elephants can detect water from 20km away. I followed elephants in India to that water. The molecule that elephants were able to detect surrounds them, and some humans have that skill too. But to experience it, you have to sit down next to the elephant and wait for the wind to blow.'

This act of stillness is central to the installation. Visitors are invited to slow their senses and rediscover the subtler frequencies of perception – what Tolaas calls 'the chemistry of empathy'. She continues: 'It’s an attempt to scale down. We just look around, we don’t see the picture. But the Indian relationship to animals – the fables, the spiritual and philosophical dimensions – becomes an extended part of the story. We asked ourselves how we could reactivate those stories and the content they’ve carried for generations, and bring them to the next level.'

If Goyal’s sculptures give form to the idea of a living fable, Tolaas’ contribution gives it breath. Her scents are both real and metaphorical, reconstructions of molecules found in tiger musk, elephant skin, wet soil, and moss. One key molecule, geosmin, is the same compound that gives soil its smell after rain.

'That molecule is produced in the soil to attract bacteria as an indicator of fertility,' she says. 'When that smell isn’t there, it means the soil is dead, just dust and sand. So every time you smell it, it means fertility and life. That molecule has been proven to work on happiness in humans. We isolated it, replicated it, and the serotonin levels skyrocketed – it’s mind-blowing.'

At ‘The Soul Garden’, these chemical notes become an ambient choreography of emotion. 'Air is a shared lever,' says Tolaas. 'We all contribute, we all need it. We exhale information, we inhale information, and we belong. This is where it all begins.'

‘The Soul Garden’ is on view as part of Design Miami Paris, until 26 October 2025
L'hôtel de Maisons, 51 Rue de l'Université, 75007 Paris

Read about more of the best design exhibitions to see in Paris this week

Some artists treat fabrication as a means to an end; Job Smeets is not one of them. He likes to get his hands dirty. His work is loaded with conceptual metaphors, but he speaks most passionately about the tactility of majolica, the plasticity of bronze or a wall tapestry’s interlaced warp threads. Since founding Studio Job in 1998, the Belgian-born designer has sculpted and moulded a language of his own that hovers somewhere between ornate sculpture and pop-influenced design, folkloric and kitsch. His work has both fans and critics, but no one has ever questioned his material prowess or the sincerity of his craftsmanship.

We visited Studio Job weeks before the October 2025 soft opening of House of Delft – at 2,000 sq m, the largest commission of Smeets’ career. When completed (before its official inauguration in October 2026), it will also be the largest artwork in the Netherlands, surpassing the 1,680 sq m Panorama of Scheveningen by Hendrik Willem Mesdag in The Hague.

House of Delft encompasses three galleries in a Frits van Dongen-designed building of the same name (where work in progress is viewable from the street and, as of this week, tours can be booked for the first gallery). Like Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelung, it is a Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art) comprising interconnected forms, including 120,000 tin-glazed tiles, a 40m tapestry and a 7m-high stained-glass window.

The work’s technical complexity and fantastical imagery make it feel like a contemporary reboot of Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights. Like Wagner’s operatic cycle and Bosch’s triptych, House of Delft is a grandiose vision that takes multiple viewings to unravel. Fortunately, visitors can decode House of Delft’s dense symbolism 24 hours a day through enormous ground-floor glass panes. The artwork is a gift to the city of Delft by billionaire native son Chris Oomen.

‘It came at a perfect time in my life. Ten years earlier, I could not have done it,’ Smeets says. ‘A project of this size and complexity is beyond the capabilities of a single artist. It would have taken me an entire lifetime.’

Arguably, preparation for House of Delft began in 2019 when, a few years after splitting up with his life and studio partner, Smeets set about transforming his atelier into a sort of renaissance workshop. He sought out the best illustrators, sculptors, casters, weavers, painters and metallurgists, and convinced them to join him. ‘I spent years assembling this incredible pallet of skills and talent, and this was one of the rare opportunities where I could use them all in a single work.’

But unlike practice at the factorylike studios of many contemporary artists, Smeets is still very much involved in the physical execution of his ideas. A prolific illustrator, he begins every work with his pen.

When not fronted by his Mercedes 450 SE, pimped with bronze emblems of his own making, Smeets’ Tilburg atelier is easy to miss amid the drab industrial landscape. Inside, however, it is a bright, bronze-filled space whose order and calm seems to clash with the whimsical ornamentation and erratic structures for which Studio Job is known. Save for the stacked plaster moulds, a giant glitter globe and a controversial artwork featuring two smoking chimneys inspired by Jake and Dinos Chapman’s Hell, everything on display – including a bed of hand-painted waterlilies, an enormous clown’s shoe and a sculpture of a virus – belongs to House of Delft.

For the past five years, around 50 artists, artisans and constructors have contributed significantly to House of Delft, including textile engineers at Tilburg’s Textile Museum and glazing specialists at Royal Tichelaar Makkum, both world-class institutions and long-time Studio Job collaborators. What can be done at the studio is done at the studio.

There is a station for knitting upstairs, large metal and woodworking shops below. Three women balance on scaffolding while sewing three-dimensional aliens and ice cream cones on to an elaborate tapestry. Occasionally, they glance at scale models for guidance.

‘I have always been fascinated by the total designs of cathedrals and castles, with their fully integrated ornamentation and storytelling,’ says Smeets. ‘This is my attempt to do something similar. It literally feels like I have been lying on my back for five years painting the Sistine Chapel. Every millimetre has a story of its own.’

House of Delft is an homage to the rich history of Delft, which, Smeets notes, was the Silicon Valley of its day, a Dutch golden-age hotbed of scientific and artistic innovation that birthed the microscope, Delftware and Vermeer. But House of Delft is also a Studio Job production, with its earnest morphing of fact, fiction and human folly. Future historians will scratch their heads trying to decipher the connection between cherubs and hotdogs, denim-clad nobles and the rear end of a Cadillac Eldorado Biarritz.

In Studio Job’s surreal world of warped time and space, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, Delft’s 17th-century father of microbiology, is on equal footing with Boyan Slat, the city’s 21st-century inventor of a system that removes plastic from the ocean. The only person who understands these relationships is Job himself, and often he doesn’t get them, either.

‘I’ve included sculptures that represent me as an artist, self-portraits. Crazy stuff like a bent gun, a clown shoe, an apple tree. Moments and memories. I think it’s important for an artist to add their own signatures. Or maybe it’s just exhibitionism.’

Delightfully, there are a number of recurring Studio Job themes in House of Delft, such as kooky clockwork, oversized hot lips and a pageant of heavy machinery. True to form, the work is a composition of stark contrasts – medieval and modern, wool and bronze, handmade and 3D-printed, upside-down and right-side-up.

A scene depicting a 1654 convent explosion (the ‘Delft Thunderclap’) is offset by Dutch ships conquering whitecaps at sea. There are references to wealth, but also the slave trade that helped fuel the embarrassment of riches. Johannes Vermeer baroque in one gallery gives way to Jan Schoonhoven minimalism in another. Enigma is often the whole purpose. Why is a giant caterpillar devouring a bridge? Is the stained-glass glow another explosion or a beautiful sunrise? Some will see commentary on today’s climate apocalypse in the many fires and floods, but tumult and chaos have been Studio Job motifs for decades.

‘I feel the world lives in 80-year cycles of destruction and resurrection,’ he says. ‘Horror and gloom, but also discovery and light. This is the history of humanity, and it’s all a little bit gothic. I’ve always found inspiration in that.’

Of the three galleries that make up House of Delft, the auditorium is the artist’s favourite, perhaps because of its challenging acoustic demands. In addition to three-dimensional acoustic tiles lining the walls, Smeets created two ornate tapestries. The ceiling tapestry ripples in cartoonish fashion, ruffled by a Caterpillar bulldozer.

Rather than opening as a completed work, House of Delft remains a work in progress whose installation is in full public view. Smeets actually prefers it that way. ‘You know, they’ve been working on the Sagrada Família for something like seven generations, but now that it’s nearly completed, it’s just not that interesting anymore,’ he says. ‘I like the idea of the public interacting with the studio while we are laying tiles or hanging stained-glass. I think then they’ll see that House of Delft is not one artwork but hundreds of artworks working together. Each has a specific role to play. I’m just the conductor.’

Contact the Delft Tourist Office (within the Huis van Delft building) to tour House of Delft as the three spaces are finished and open ahead of the full launch in October 2026; the first space is now available to view, and work in progress can also be seen from outside.
studio-job.com

When artist Diego Sánchez Barceló and art director Alex Robertson Dunlop launched Seven Studio, they both relocated – Sánchez Barceló from London and Robertson Dunlop from New York – to Mallorca. Not an established creative capital, perhaps, but a place rich in craft history, which informs the studio’s stripped-back, stone-hewn, quintessentially Mediterranean aesthetic, infused with a brutalist edge.

Their atelier is located in the duo's home, and serves as the birthplace of objects that range from sculptures and homeware to collectible stone furniture and large-scale artworks commissioned for public and private spaces. Each piece is hand-carved from locally sourced stone.

Seven Studio’s ‘Brutal’ stool, for example, is formed by chipping away at a solid block of stone, with visible dents and tool marks giving it an almost primal quality. Similarly, the ‘Stone Glass Moment’ glass series is crafted from sea stones and, as such, blends art and functionality. The ‘Lit Stone’, a lighter case, is also made from hand-carved limestone and sandstone.

The studio has been commissioned to create tables hewn from pink Portuguese marble as well as the stone signage for Hotel Corazón in Mallorca (whose terrace restaurant was recently reimagined by Tatjana von Stein) – both designs echoing the rugged contours of the surrounding Tramuntana mountains. Sánchez Barceló and Robertson Dunlop were also enlisted by von Stein’s Club Làlia in Palma, producing the ‘Emotional’ bench, crafted from Felanitx marés, a local Mallorcan sandstone.

The different backgrounds of the founders bring a unique synergy to Seven Studio: Robertson Dunlop, originally from Australia, honed her creative vision in the fashion world, working with US Vogue editor Camilla Nickerson and spending over a decade with Dries Van Noten, where she contributed to more than 40 runway shows. Her passion for print and physical media culminated in a self-published photo book featuring collaborations with artists like Trajal Harrell, an endeavour that ultimately inspired the formation of Seven Studio.

After 15 years’ working in digital visuals, Sánchez Barceló returned to Mallorca to reconnect with his roots and the hand-carving tradition passed down by his father. His ability to integrate precise digital design methods with the raw materiality of hand-carved stone is central to the modern-meets-traditional ethos of Seven Studio.

The tactile works represent a compelling fusion of heritage and contemporary creativity, rooted in Mallorca’s rich traditions and yet boldly pushing artistic boundaries.

This is the latest instalment of The Inside Story, Wallpaper’s series spotlighting intriguing, innovative and industry-leading interior design.

Jobe Burns is not just a designer, he's also a sculptor. In his renovation of a 300-year-old farmhouse in the West Country of England, that dual identity is felt – this is a home with an artist’s touch. The project began with a chance encounter at Burns' first sculpture exhibition, which led to the client commissioning him to design their home.

The building was groaning with heritage – the challenge for Burns was to preserve this essence while modernising it, or, as the designer puts it, ‘grounding something contemporary in a long, quiet history’.

It was never going to be a quick fix. The whole project took four-and-a-half years, during which time, Burns says, the house ‘became a kind of studio for [him] – four years of slow work, listening to the building, understanding its needs’.

The first nine months were dedicated solely to stabilising the aged structure. Centuries of warping and settling had left no wall, floor or ceiling level, necessitating custom everything, from cabinetry and windows to doors and brickwork. The renovation revealed a lot of surprises, including two brick-arched rooms which lay behind a blocked doorway – leading Burns to reframe the project not as a redesign, but as a process of ‘uncovering what was already there’. ‘If we’d knocked it down and rebuilt it, we would’ve saved about two years,’ he says, ‘but where’s the fun in that?’

When it comes to interiors, Burns has maintained a thread of moody, jewel-toned calm while allowing each room its own identity through subtle variations in material and colour. The kitchen and dining areas are light and relaxed, with off-white walls and layered timber. Meanwhile the bathroom – clad in terracotta, brass and marble – and an ‘in-between’ room painted entirely black and containing only a fireplace and a piano, feel more earthy and meditative.

Tactility and materiality are everywhere: soft corners, rounded window reveals, sculpted plaster skirting boards, lime washed walls, aged timber, polished plaster, exposed stone. Though all new, these details evoke the nobbly charm of an English farmhouse.

Original elements have been preserved wherever possible – doors, floors, oak beams – while materials that couldn’t be reused were repurposed. Old roof tiles now form the base of a fireplace, dead trees from the garden have become tables and shelves, and bricks for new extensions were sourced from a demolished farmhouse nearby.

Interestingly, Burns opted out of smart home technology in favour of manual electrics and plumbing – a decision that, the designer says, encourages the ‘tactile ritual’ of daily life and a return to a slower, more deliberate pace.

The result is a kind of architectural Frankenstein – the original home de- and re-constructed to form a time capsule that is, confusingly, modern.

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.

A symbol of a classic American way of life, the barn is rich in associations of self-sufficiency and community spirit. Now, its heavily romanticised form has been given a contemporary rethink in a project headed by Erin Besler. The co-founder of interdisciplinary design studio Besler & Sons, Besler is interested in the intersection of art, design and architecture. They have championed the notion of architecture as collaborative across a host of eclectic projects, redrawing architectural parameters across the fields of software, exhibition design, buildings and objects.

Collaborative community participation and flexible design potential unite in this project at Art Omi’s sculpture and architecture park in Ghent, Columbia County, New York. Working with the art centre, Besler heads a project to create a barn frame, rather than a functional barn, through a collaborative process involving the wider community.

The project draws on the tradition of barn raising, where a community comes together to build a barn in a process of shared labour. Most barns in America don’t require architects for the build, responding directly to the environment and agricultural requirements.

By opening the gates, Besler unites the expert with the amateur, and the individual with the collective. ‘Architecture has spent so long shoring up boundaries around it, deciding who's a professional,’ Besler says. ‘That has a lot to do with liability and risk management, but also it is a guarded field and hard to access, both in terms of becoming an architect and of providing architectural services. A lot of what I do tries to bring people in, either to contribute to the project with participant ideas, or to find conceptual ways to include people who might not think they have anything to offer, or who would traditionally not have access.’

Participants have been invited to join a rich and varied programme of social gatherings and creative workshops, from frame building to learning how to use tools and building frames and structures. The events culminate in the weekend of the barn raising, where the outdoor installation of the barn frame will be completed at the end of July. The structure will remain standing for the next two years.

Architectural considerations underpin functional choices. The structure is crafted from local wood, mostly pine and Douglas fir, which is untreated. ‘So many architectural materials are treated and chemically dependent on horrible things like arsenic that try to keep [them] up forever,’ Besler says. ‘Barns can go up and come down relatively quickly, like they are built as kits, or they can be taken apart and reassembled, or moved to different places. Some of that idea is built into this. It doesn't need to stay up forever, and we’re not negatively contributing to the environment in the meantime. You start to ask – what if we started to think about buildings in the same way? There are a lot of cultures that don't require buildings to stand forever, and there's a circular idea or temporality built into them.’

Politically, culturally and socially, the barn holds a key place in American culture. A symbol of self-sufficient living, its emphasis on traditional gender and societal roles can also present more problematic connotations.

‘It does seem in every photo of a barn-raising, the women are dressed in smocks and are cooking food, and the men are building,’ Besler says. ‘This project tries to address that in the series of events around the raising and leading up to it, by inviting members of the community to contribute. There is an educational aspect, and also, more generally, some form of experiential learning. You’re on the site and doing it, and if you can do it yourself, you can pass it on to the next person, and that runs through this project.’ Everyone – children and adults alike – can take on a number of roles, from manual labour to photography.

Working together with Art Omi, Besler had the freedom to bring to life the project that spans art, architecture and design. ‘The location is quite rare, and there aren’t a lot of rural arts institutions that are willing to take something that's typically situated in really functional conversations, like a barn, and turn it into something that's more like a container for ideas,’ they add.

By eschewing the formality typical of such a project's process, Besler is keen to strip away the mystique that surrounds creating. ‘This is something that people can relate to even if they're not engaging in architectural or art discourse,’ they say. ‘Whether it's through the everyday materials that people can find at their local hardware store, or because of the barn itself, which is so common out here in the rural United States, and is something people have their own associations with. The project is about barns, but the barn is a vehicle to push these ideas through. It’s a collision between art and life.’

Erin Besler’s barn raising at Art Omi takes place 26 July 2025. More info at artomi.org

This article is in the August 2025 US Issue of Wallpaper*, available in print on newsstands from 10 July 2025, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

For Jack Mama and Nina Tolstrup, founders of London-based design studio Studiomama, joy and play are central to their work. ‘As we grow older, that sense of wonder often gets drummed out of us,’ says Mama. ‘Having children reawakened it – and brought back that instinct to make things just for the sake of it. No agenda, just joy. When I show something to Nina and she laughs or smiles, then I know we’ve found something.’

It’s an instinctive, often unconscious approach that has given rise to some of their most endearing projects, including ‘The Offcuts’, ‘Stone Animals’, and ‘Face Castings’ – the last of which began in 2019, when, in pockets of time between other work, Mama began creating a series of drawings – sketches that suggested faces. ‘The eyes were always a fixed distance apart,’ he recalls. ‘Since then, the forms have evolved to become more abstract, and visually informed by the industrial heritage of the foundry we’re working with.

Each piece is cast by hand at James Hoyle & Son, one of London’s last traditional iron foundries. Founded in 1880 and located near Broadway Market in Hackney, the third-generation workshop still uses processes largely unchanged for centuries. ‘You walk through an unassuming doorway and into the heart of the industrial revolution,’ says Mama. ‘It’s like stepping back in time. Our friend and book collaborator, graphic designer Marcia Mihotich, made a beautiful short film about the making of the castings – so you can see for yourself what I’m inadequately trying to describe in words.’

The resulting forms hover somewhere between relic and ready-made. Some viewers have likened them to Anglo-Saxon artefacts; others see them as found objects. That ambiguity is intentional. ‘We suggest what it could be, and the viewer completes the rest. That interaction enriches the narrative and makes each object personal in the eyes of the beholder.’

The ongoing series is also deeply influenced by Italian designer Bruno Munari – specifically his 1970 book Guardiamoci negli occhi (‘Look into My Eyes’), which invited readers to see through the eyes of another using cut-out portraits. ‘Munari’s poetic way of seeing really resonates with us,’ says Mama. ‘He worked freely across disciplines – painting, sculpture, film, children’s books, and industrially produced objects. What I love most is how he did all of this with such aplomb and a playful, inquisitive spirit. In our own practice, there’s a similar curiosity to work across many fields of design – from furniture, products, interiors and graphics to one-off commissions.’

Having already made books about the studio’s ‘Stone Animals’ and ‘Offcuts’ series (£25 each from the studio's online store), Mama and Tolstrup are now planning to publish Face Castings as the third title in that ongoing exploration (three of the sculptures are also available to buy online). In the end, it’s less about what the pieces are, and more about what you see – and what makes you smile.

studiomama.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From 23 June to 25 September 2025, Ralph Pucci International, the New York art and design gallery, will present ‘Pure’, an exhibition at Château La Coste in France. This marks the fourth contemporary design showcase at the destination, which is set within a 600-acre sculpture park nestled among the vineyards of Provence.

Housed in Oscar Niemeyer’s Pavilion – the Brazilian architect’s final project before his death in 2012 – ‘Pure’ marks the 70th anniversary of Ralph Pucci International and 50 years since Ralph Pucci assumed leadership of the gallery.

The exhibition highlights the artistry of workshop processes. Central to the show are sculptural works crafted from Ralph Pucci International’s proprietary Plasterglass material, developed at the brand’s New York studio and factory. This unique medium resembles plaster and retains the artist's original marks.

Featured pieces include tables, lighting and seating by esteemed designers such as Patrick Naggar, Eric Schmitt, John Koga, Paul Mathieu and Elizabeth Garouste. Rendered in pure white, these works emphasise clean lines and varied textures, and eschew any form of ornamentation. Their minimalism draws attention to their materiality, form and scale; this is design in its ‘purest’ expression. All exhibited pieces will be available for purchase.

The inspiration for the exhibition, Pucci explains, emerged from an encounter with Château La Coste’s owner, Paddy McKillen, during a shared taxi ride from the airport. Discovering a mutual appreciation for each other's work, they agreed to collaborate. ‘Château La Coste is internationally renowned as a leading arts destination,’ Pucci notes. ‘It’s thrilling that Paddy has chosen to spotlight us and contemporary design within such an inspiring setting.’

Audiences will also experience live sculpting sessions by Ralph Pucci International’s master sculptor, offering insight into the processes of the New York studio, which has its origins in the mannequin industry and evolved into a luxury furniture producer and collectible design gallery.

All of this will unfold to a soundtrack of 1950s jazz – Miles Davis, Lee Morgan, the Modern Jazz Quartet, Art Blakey, Bill Evans, McCoy Tyner, Chet Baker – transporting visitors back to the era when the brand was founded.

This exhibition is a holistic celebration of Ralph Pucci International’s artistic and design legacy. ‘I have always celebrated art in all its forms – whether music, painting, photography, dance, sculpture, or architecture,’ the founder reflects. ‘This show is an exciting opportunity to bring all those passions together.’

Details of the exhibition can be found at ralphpucci.com

Spanish fashion house Loewe has announced the winner of its 2025 Loewe Foundation Craft Prize – dedicated to celebrating the contemporary evolution of traditional craft practices – as Kunimasa Aoki. The Japanese sculptor was chosen for his terracotta work ‘Realm of Living Things 19’ (2024), in which layers of clay have been stacked and compressed – expressing cracks and distortion from the force – before being smoked and coated with soil and pencil marks. He describes the work as ‘50 per cent tradition and 50 per cent innovation’.

Aoki was selected as the winner by a jury of 12 leading figures from the worlds of design, architecture, journalism, criticism and curating, including designer Patricia Urquiola, ceramicist Magdalene Odundo, and architect Frida Escobedo. The panel praised Aoki’s technical accomplishment, skill, innovation and artistic vision, selecting his work for its use of the ancestral coil process and its intricate surface details. As the prize winner, Aoki receives €50,000.

30 finalists were shortlisted for the prize, displaying a range of international craft skill and creativity. Alongside Aoki as the winner, two other finalists were given special mentions by the jury: Nifemi Marcus-Bello and Studio Sumakshi Singh.

Marcus-Bello, a Lagos-based designer and artist, was celebrated for his work ‘TM Bench with Bowl’ (2023). The sculptural furniture piece of simple geometric forms is created from reclaimed aluminium from the car industry, cast in pieces before being welded together and sanded. The work explores ideas of globalisation, trade and the dynamics of power, becoming a powerful yet practical meditation on consumerism and the life of materials.

In a recent interview with Wallpaper*, Marcus-Bello discussed how the intersection of craft, history and function is central to his approach, which investigates how materials influence and reflect the societies that use them. ‘Objects are more than their function,’ he explained. ‘They carry histories, relationships, and meanings that shape how we interact with them.’

Studio Sumakshi Singh, based in Gurugram, India, comprises artist Sumakshi Singh, alongside Birendranath Sarkar, Samarjeet Samarjeet and Bikas Barman – working across textiles, threadwork, sculpture, painting and installation. For the Craft Prize the studio was highlighted for its work ‘Monument’ (2024), a life-size reimagining of a column from a 12th-century colonnade in Delhi, made using copper zari, a metallic thread. The jury praised the delicate structure of the piece and the way it forms a testament to the resilience of cultural histories in the face of physical degradation over time.

The other finalists for the prize spanned a diversity of mediums and craft practices, including glassware, jewellery design, pottery, woodworking, furniture making, embroidery and silversmithing. All the finalists’ work is on show at Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum in Madrid until 29 June 2025.

The Loewe Foundation Craft Prize is an annual award established in 2016 by the Loewe Foundation, a cultural body that the fashion brand set-up in 1988 to support design, culture and craftsmanship. The prize honours Loewe’s origins, as a craft workshop of leather artisans which began in 1846.

Book tickets for the Loewe Foundation Craft Prize exhibition at Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum in Madrid until 29 June 2025

The Vaillancourt Fountain may be demolished as part of a redevelopment of the Embarcadero Plaza in San Francisco, where it has stood for 54 years. The controversial public artwork, officially named Québec libre! and designed by Canadian artist Armand Vaillancourt, is missing from plans for the new plaza.

City officials maintain that renderings are merely illustrative and no decisions have been made regarding the fate of the fountain. Nonetheless, Vaillancourt, now 95, and his family are applying pressure to local politicians to preserve his work.

The artist has rallied the support of various groups, including modernist architecture preservation group Docomomo; The Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF); and proponents of public art and brutalism, as well as local skateboarders (the site has been a popular skateboarding spot since the 1990s).

Completed in 1971, the Vaillancourt Fountain is a modernist sculpture made of precast concrete tubes; members of the public can interact with the monument via bridges, walkways and stairs. It formed an important part of the Embarcadero Plaza, which was designed by landscape architect Lawrence Halprin, who described the fountain as a ‘modern-day Trevi Fountain’.

The outdoor art installation has, however, been a source of controversy. It is meant to have water flowing, but it was drained in June 2024, leading some to question its purpose.

The significance of the Vaillancourt Fountain also changed when the Embarcadero Freeway was demolished in 1991; the fountain’s concrete tubes were originally meant to obscure and echo the freeway. Additionally, not everyone is a fan of its brutalist architecture aesthetic; architecture critic Allan Temko compared the fountain to ‘something deposited by a concrete dog with square intestines’.

The redevelopment of the Embarcadero Plaza will create a five-acre park that integrates the waterfront with the financial district, and is estimated to cost $30 million. Restoring the fountain would cost an estimated $3 million, according to San Francisco’s Recreation and Park Department.

Is it worth it? The answer will depend on how you see the Vaillancourt Fountain: modernist gem or ailing monument, icon or eyesore.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The new season at LUMA Arles kicked off in May 2025 with three different exhibitions, all bookended by fog and clouds.

Silver Clouds, that is, a work by Andy Warhol that hovers over the heads of visitors to the exhibition ‘Sensing the Future: Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.)’. Warhol made the pillowy metallic objects in the 1960s, after the engineer Billy Klüver showed him a new material called Scotchpak, used by the US Army to keep food rations hot.

‘Sensing the Future: Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.)’

Klüver worked at Bell Telephone Laboratories, commonly known as Bell Labs, an industrial research-and-development company that was as important then as Google is today (Eero Saarinen designed its New Jersey facility, which you might recognise as the ‘Severance building’). In his spare time, Klüver collaborated with artists on multimedia works using new technologies, and also introduced artists to his colleagues.

In October 1966, he and Robert Rauschenberg organised an event called ‘9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering’ at New York’s 69th Regiment Armory. More than 10,000 curious spectators turned out to watch experimental performances by artists such as Lucinda Childs and John Cage, in partnership with Bell Lab engineers.

Soon afterwards, an open call was held for people to participate in this burgeoning movement. ‘They thought a few people would respond,’ says LUMA curator Martin Guinard. ‘But hundreds of artists and engineers proposed projects.’ The E.A.T. movement was officially born, and lasted for about a decade, until it fizzled out – perhaps, says Guinard, because Bell Labs grew tired of the distraction, or maybe because artists no longer wanted to be associated with a company that was increasingly involved with military contracts.

This exhibition was organised with the Getty Research Institute, which owns more than 200 boxes of documents, photographs, films, and objects from E.A.T. Probably the most striking work on display is the 1968 Cone Pyramid (Heart Beats Dust) by Jean Dupuy. When you hold a stethoscope to your chest, a dusting of red pigment in a glass box bounces to the rhythm of your heartbeat. Another intriguing piece is Moon Museum (1969) by sculptor Forrest Myers, who etched drawings (including a tiny penis by Warhol) onto a series of small ceramic wafers, one of which he surreptitiously sent to the Moon on Apollo 12.

One room is dedicated to the 1970 World's Fair in Osaka, Japan, when Pepsi-Cola hired E.A.T. to make its pavilion futuristic and high-tech. The E.A.T. members hated the geodesic dome-like building, and asked Japanese artist Fujiko Nakaya to mask it in a cloud of fog. She called this a ‘negative sculpture’, ever-changing and moulded by the wind.

‘Maria Lassnig: Living with art stops one wilting!’

Whereas E.A.T. was a (largely male-dominated) movement that broke down barriers between art and technology, the Austrian artist Maria Lassnig resisted the barriers of what a woman could do in the art world. She is the subject of LUMA Arles' second exhibition in this series – ‘Maria Lassnig: Living with art stops one wilting!’ – which explores the connection between Lassnig and Swiss curator Hans Ulrich Obrist.

Born in 1919, Lassnig coined a concept, ‘Body Awareness’, painting or drawing what it felt like to be inside her body, no matter how uncomfortable. The result was vividly colourful, highly personal, frequently violent, and often humorous.

Self-Portrait with Saucepan (1995) shows the artist with an overturned kitchen pan on her head, her mouth open like a response to Munch’s scream. In a series of watercolours, Lassnig inserted her own image as the hero of classic Greek mythological tales. For the short animated film The Ballad of Maria Lassnig, made in 1992, she sang her life story, wearing various costumes, against a background of her characters in motion. After decades of working in near-obscurity, Lassnig finally received recognition later in life, receiving the Golden Lion for lifelong achievement at the 2013 Venice Biennale.

‘Dance with Daemons’

The third exhibition, ‘Dance with Daemons’ snakes up and down the walls and through the large main gallery of the Frank Gehry tower and out into the garden, each work leading to the next like a chain reaction. Tino Sehgal, who choreographed a similar show for the Fondation Beyeler last year, chose works from the Maja Hoffmann/LUMA Foundation collection and from the Fondation Beyeler, juxtaposing them in unconventional ways.

For example, Wolfgang Tillmans’ photo of a Buenos Aires storm drain is sandwiched between Naoya Hatakeyama's River Series photos, while the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi's bust of Mademoiselle Pogany II sits face to face with Alberto Giacometti's bronze of Romanian photographer Éli Lotar III. As the show prepared to open, Hoffmann admitted to Seghal that his selection of her works surprised her. ‘You chose the things that are particularly private, and were not collected to be shown,’ she said. ‘This choreography totally changed my view of them.’

‘Dance with Daemons‘ (a name that will change throughout the run) also reveals how technology has become an integral part of contemporary art today. Carsten Höller's round rotating bed invites viewers to take a nap and then record their dreams for analysis by MIT scientists. Pierre Huyghe’s golden masks emit an AI-generated ‘voice’ in real time. Outside on the lawn, Philippe Parreno’s antennae-like Membrane collects invisible environmental data through sensors and translates it into sound.

And incredibly, 55 years after creating her fog sculpture for the Osaka Pepsi Pavilion, Fujiko Nakaya came to Arles this spring, at age 91, to create a temporary fog sculpture for the pond. The mist drifts and floats, at times hiding Gehry’s tower or enveloping bystanders in its damp embrace as frogs croak nearby. A day before the opening, Vassilis Oikonomopoulos, artistic director of LUMA Arles, noted that Nakaya herself is a force of nature. As she told him after her long trip from Japan: ‘I’m tired until I smell the first drop.’

LUMA Arles’ exhibitions have different end dates, with the final exhibition closing on 10 May 2026. Full info at luma.org

How does pressure create beauty? This question lies at the heart of ‘Boom: Art and Design in the 1940s’, a major exhibition of design, painting, fashion and photography at the Philadelphia Museum of Art that celebrates how a spirit of innovation and resourcefulness flourished despite, and sometimes because of, extreme adversity.

Drawn exclusively from the museum’s vast collection, this ambitious and wide-ranging survey demonstrates how the locomotive of war propelled the visual arts, often through technological innovation. Be it the signature curved plywood of Charles and Ray Eames or the groundbreaking polyethylene plastic behind Earl Tupper’s eponymous kitchen staple, both owe their origins to war: the former originally developed for leg splints with US Navy funding, the latter at DuPont for radar use.

Concurrent with material innovations, the exhibition traces a genealogy of key aesthetic languages that were to dominate the century from the 1940s onwards. Early forays into Abstract Expressionism by Jackson Pollock (Male and Female, 1942–43) and Lee Krasner (Composition, 1949), to the nascent modernism of Paul McCobb’s furniture or Christian Dior’s New Look silhouettes, all mark a dynamic oscillation between politics and visual styles.

Examples of this dialogue are everywhere in the exhibition, but few are as striking, or capture the generative potential of hardship as succinctly, as the experience of Japanese American designers George Nakashima and Isamu Noguchi. Following the attack on Pearl Harbour in December 1941, Franklin Roosevelt's Executive Order 9066 saw around 127,000 Japanese Americans, the majority being second-generation Japanese Nisei migrants from the West Coast, removed from their homes and incarcerated in ten concentration camps in the country’s western interior.

Living in New York, Noguchi was initially exempt from relocation but voluntarily admitted himself to Arizona's Poston camp in May 1942. Nakashima, meanwhile, together with his wife and daughter, were among 13,000 detainees at the Minidoka War Relocation Center in Idaho between 1942-3. With a master’s degree in architecture from MIT, Nakashima turned to making furniture in the late 1930s, establishing a workshop in Seattle in 1940.

While interned at Minidoka, a fortuitous encounter with Gentaro Hikogawa, master carpenter and first-generation Issei migrant, was the catalyst for an expansion in Nakashima’s practice. Under Hikogawa’s tutelage, he mastered traditional Japanese carpentry tools and complex joinery techniques, while absorbing his master’s spiritual reverence for trees. Working in secret with whatever materials they could salvage, the pair designed and made furniture to improve spartan living conditions in the camp.

For Elisabeth Agro, curator of American Modern and Contemporary Crafts and Decorative Arts at the museum, this was a crucial act of resilience. ‘Craft is used as a tool or solace to keep you busy – in times of war people take to knitting or needlepoint as comfort,’ she told Wallpaper* at the exhibition’s opening. ‘There were idle moments in these camps and they were ingenious with their materials. Full suites of furniture were made out of vegetable crates, metal scraps were found, or they would dry reeds to weave them.’

This resourcefulness is evident in Nakashima’s ‘Grass Seated Chair’ (1946), a beautifully refined synthesis of East and West: traditional Japanese craft and austere Shaker minimalism that Nakashima honed during internment. With its simple, utilitarian design and hand-spun seagrass seat, the chair is as much a reflection of Hikogawa’s influence on Nakashima as it is of the sparse conditions that created it.

‘There's a real tension between him wanting to bring forward his heritage, what he learned in the camp through [Hikogawa], and yet wanting to be as American as possible,’ says Agro. ‘You can see what he's fighting for: his family, to establish himself and to claim that he is both Japanese and American – and proud of it.’

Though Noguchi’s experience of internment differed significantly to Nakashima’s, having arrived at Poston voluntarily with the ambition of introducing parks and craft programmes, the experience nonetheless left an indelible mark on his practice. Moving towards abstraction and found material, works like Yellow Landscape (1943) and This Tortured Earth (1942-43), both made on his return to New York, reflect the harsh desert setting of the camp and its isolating impact.

In Noguchi’s totemic and surrealist-inspired sculpture Avatar (1948), four interlocking biomorphic elements introduce the idea of modularity in his designs. ‘That comes out of his internment experience,’ says Agro. ‘The idea that he can disassemble it, the idea of displacement and the possibility that he might have to be moving around at any moment.’

In his Table Lamp, an antecedent of his Akari light sculptures designed the same year as Avatar, Noguchi sought to banish the ghosts of his internment. ‘Internment was a very dark place for him,’ explains Agro. ‘He wanted to make sculptures with light sources and so he made this lamp for his sister, which comes from wanting light to lead him out of that darkness.’

For both Noguchi and Nakashima, the experience of internment bore profound implications on their future output, though it was a subject both avoided discussing. Necessity forced innovative solutions, and both men continued utilising found material in their work, with Nakashima in particular embracing imperfection in the timber he used. Perhaps most crucially in the context of this exhibition, internment consolidated a belief in the universal for both Nakashima and Noguchi: that art and design transcended national boundaries and connected disparate human experiences. As Agro points out: ‘I was asked what’s the one material you find often in this show? And I would say it’s hope.’

‘Boom: Art and Design in the 1940s’ is at Philadelphia Museum of Art until 1 September 2025, philamuseum.org

‘Safiotra [Hybridités/Hybridities]’, British-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare’s exhibition at contemporary art foundation Fondation H in Madagascar, brings together 15 years of his work, including stitched works, quilts, and sculptures, ‘so people can have a full understanding of the scope of my career’, he tells Wallpaper*.

The work on view in the exhibition includes Refugee Astronaut X (2024), Alien Woman on Flying Machine (2011), and three Decolonised Structures from ‘Suspended States’, his 2024 solo show at Serpentine in London.

The nucleus of the exhibition is The African Library (2018), part of Fondation H’s permanent collection. The massive installation, featuring 6,000 books wrapped in Shonibare’s signature Dutch wax fabric, spotlights individuals such as Nelson Mandela, Kwame Nkrumah, and Patrice Lumumba, who helped shape post-colonial Africa. The work is complemented by a digital interface providing historical and biographical information about the figures.

‘It’s great to be showing in Madagascar – this is really my first big show in Africa,’ says Shonibare. He adds that he’s ‘quite open’ to showing his work across the continent – following past exhibitions in Europe, Asia, and the United States of America – and has an upcoming solo show at Goodman Gallery’s space in Johannesburg, South Africa in June.

The Madagascar exhibition also features artworks from the Fondation H collection of artists, including Zanele Muholi (South Africa), Ibrahim Mahama (Ghana), Abdoulaye Konate (Mali), Zoarinivo Razakaratrimo (Madagascar), Malika Agueznay (Morocco), Omar Ba (Senegal), Virginia Chihota (Zimbabwe), and El Anatsui (Ghana].

‘It's such a privilege to be exhibiting an artist who's been exhibiting everywhere in the world but not on the continent where he comes from,’ says Margaux Huille, the director of Fondation H. ‘It all started with The African Library, because Fondation H was interested in the acquisition of this piece and by acquiring it, we felt that it was our responsibility, as an art institution in Madagascar, to showcase it in the most beautiful way [here].’

As part of programming for the exhibition, a series of performances and discussions was held at the foundation, featuring Shonibare and, among others, Gus Casely-Hayford, director of V&A East, London; Smooth-Ugochukwu Nzewi, curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tasmin Hong, curator at Serpentine Galleries, London; Dominique Tiana Razafindratsimba, professor at the University of Antananarivo, director of the Centre for Research and Studies on Identity Construction in Antananarivo, Madagascar.

What impact will this exhibition have on Malagasy artists and people who see Shonibare’s work? ‘I think one impact on the artists for sure is that the way Yinka tackles issues will hopefully give them freedom to express what they want to express in a very accessible way. What is fascinating about Yinka's work is the complexity of the topics he discusses, but with such simplicity,’ says Huille. ‘We have so many young people coming to Fondation H and a lot of times people tell me, “It's amazing. You're building the next generation of artists.” But it's not so much about the next generation of artists, I think it's about the next generation of citizens. It isn’t only artists who will benefit from this show. It's for everyone.’

Malagasy artist Joey Aresoa will be in residence in Lagos, Nigeria, later this year as part of a partnership between Shonibare’s Guest Artists Space (G.A.S.) Foundation and Fondation H.

‘Safiotra [Hybridités/Hybridities]’ is on view at Fondation H in Antananarivo, Madagascar until 28 February 2026

fondation-h.com

Today (24 April 2025) marks the opening of the second solo exhibition from French ceramicist Ludmilla Balkis at New York’s Guild Gallery. ‘Grasp The Mountains, Then Let Them Go’ showcases Balkis’ minimalist ceramic sculptures, which take inspiration from the pastoral surroundings of the Basque Country.

Balkis is inspired by the Pyrenean forests that surround her home and studio, and through which she hikes every day. She uses gathered materials: clay from the earth, stones as decoration, and sticks as tools. The ceramics exhibited in ‘Grasp The Mountains, Then Let Them Go’ also incorporate ferns, hay, branches, kaolin and pebbles. These pieces are elemental and earthy: the designer’s ‘tribute to the land’.

‘By paying homage to the place that has welcomed me – its craggy mountains and fertile soil – my work becomes an act of tactile acknowledgement,’ says Balkis. ‘Tethered to the territory where I live, to its topography, my work is a conscious endeavour to find oneness with the land.’

The sculptures are organic in shape, with many taking on Balkis’ signature ‘Hodei’ form, with wide mouths and columnar bases that expand into fluid canopies. The colour palette is bleached and blanched, achieved by drying and reducing materials to create pale layered glazes.

The designer manipulates the clay as much as she can without it collapsing – ‘pushing the limits of clay's potential’, in the words of Guild Gallery founder and curator Robin Standefer (of design firm Roman and Williams) – drying it in phases to prevent structural failure. It's a ‘humbling’ process, the designer says, and one which harks back to an earlier time: ‘The Basque mountains force the observer to return to a lost state of integrity, to act in accordance with the basic order of things.’

‘These infinite whites, these weathered textures, these open moving shapes, are an homage to the land. The soil. The mountains,’ she adds.

Balkis’ ‘back to nature’ approach mirrors the trajectory of her career: the designer initially studied fashion and art history in Paris, later working as a fashion designer at Celine with Phoebe Philo. However, she found herself drawn to a more fundamental sort of making, and began learning ceramics with Freya Bramble Carter in London in 2014. She moved from the big city to the Basque Country, thereafter adopting her minimalist, imperfect style.

In ‘Grasp The Mountains, Then Let Them Go’, the natural and domestic spheres collide. In the sleek surrounds of New York, Balkis’ work ‘[rehabilitates] the matter of the world’.

‘Grasp The Mountains, Then Let Them Go’ will run until 21 June 2025, rwguildgalleryny.com

From intricate bumblebees and flying swallows to fat hens and foraging badgers: these humble animals are an inspiration for Alex Monroe, who is known for his delicate, nature-inspired jewellery. Now, the British jewellery designer opens a new chapter to creatively explore his fascination with UK wildlife through a sculpture exhibition at the Garden Museum in London.

The exhibition, titled ‘Into the Wild’, was created in collaboration with floral artist Hazel Gardiner. Looking at five habitats within the UK as inspiration, the sole purpose of the exhibition is to invite viewers to savour a moment to just pause. It's a space to take time away from the rush of life, and contemplate the series of floral sculptures, hand-thrown ceramics, and sketches – a delicately tactile ecosystem built on craftsmanship.

The five floral sculptures are crafted from silver, with the flower piece featuring an array of rubies. The exhibition dives into the creative process, documenting the trials and errors that Monroe made before realising the finished pieces. The exhibition will also be accompanied by ‘Wild Botany’, a jewellery collection of 20 pieces inspired by the exhibition’s concept.

In a world where climate discussion is all too often pushed to the wayside, Monroe talked with Wallpaper* about why nature should be at the forefront of design, and the joy in taking time to notice our environment's details.

Alex Monroe on his new sculptures, and a very personal passion for nature

Wallpaper*: Congratulations on your debut exhibition! Reconnecting with nature seems to be a topic at the forefront of the design world. What makes your exhibition different to what we have seen from you before?

Alex Monroe: All the work in the exhibition is unmistakably my work, so you’ll recognise it… but the finished pieces aren’t jewellery, I’ve made sculptures. Although there is a collection of jewellery inspired by the work I did on the exhibition, which will be on display in the shop. I couldn’t help myself… once a jeweller, always a jeweller.

I’ve always studied plants and insects through drawing and then I’ve made interpretations of them in silver. My work is quite forensic, meaning I sketch and create as a way of uncovering information. I often dissect things or collect specimens, and I press plants in my sketch books. I suppose artists and scientists are the same; we’re all just trying to understand things, to understand life. I usually translate all my thoughts and drawings into jewellery because I’m a jeweller. I wonder how they could work on the body. Jewellery is such a fascinating discipline, it’s worn on the body and carried with you. It has to work on the human form.

After a lifetime of using jewellery as my medium, I’ve decided to be purely sculptural. I’ve long been fascinated by classic still lifes, particularly Dutch tulip paintings or Spanish still lifes. The human is slightly removed from the work and observes it. It’s been really fun to shift the viewpoint and discover how that changes things.

W*: Why is connecting with nature important to feed into your creativity and what is it about UK wildlife that inspires you?

AM: This isn’t something I have a choice in. My earliest memories are of lying on my tummy looking at ants or trying to draw the birds I’d seen. In many ways my need to be connected to nature grew stronger when I moved to the city all those years ago. I’ve always felt that we have more than enough extraordinary beauty right here where we live to last a lifetime. Sometimes the desire to search for things further afield means you can miss what’s right under your nose. I spent some time in temperate rainforests in Devon and it was just amazing, like something you’d expect to see in a Jurassic Park movie. We have everything right here, and I think sometimes we just don’t take the time to notice it.

What’s lovely is that now I draw with my daughters. We never go anywhere without a sketch book and a pencil.

W*: What inspired you to start throwing clay?

AM: I can remember making clay pots in primary school so this isn’t something new for me. Actually, I’m doing a farming and biodiversity project in Suffolk and when I came across clay on the land I immediately dug some up, formed it into thumb pots, fired and glazed them. This is just part of life for me. I did study ceramics properly when I was on my foundation course, and luckily I hadn’t lost the ability to throw a decent pot. My daughter has a studio in Peckham, so she helped me. I definitely needed help making the glazes and getting the technical things right, such as firing.

I’m a craftsperson and we make things. I feel like these skills have been undervalued. In this exhibition, I hope to share with the viewer the importance of patient observation, and of craftsmanship. I did the drawing. I made the sculptures. I made the plinths. I made the pots. I harvested hay from each location and I burned it into ash and I made the glazes for the pots out of the ash. By taking time and care, I hope to engage with the viewer, not just so they can enjoy the exhibition, but perhaps they can reflect on some of the ideas I’m exploring.

W*: What challenges did staging the exhibition present?

AM: I already have a challenging job designing jewellery and running the business. Also, I’m trying to establish a farm as part of my environmental work. This [exhibition] has been two years of wonderful, but quite challenging work, so I must admit it’s been quite tiring.

I always worry whether I’ve done enough. If people take time to come and see the pieces, I want to make sure I’ve done everything I possibly can to engage with them. I’m aware it will never feel adequate. I could do with an 'off' button!

W*: A lot of your work is inspired by your childhood, having grown up around an abundance of nature. When creating the exhibition, was there any sense of nostalgia for you?

AM: A large part of my work explores nostalgia and I don’t seem to be able to escape it. As the pace of life speeds up exponentially, I find comfort in remembering what is important. The great thing about drawing is that it goes at a pace unchanged forever. The same applies to the making process. Sitting in Martin’s Meadow in Suffolk, drawing cowslip and fritillary, I can’t help feeling the centuries these few pockets of land have gone through and remained unaltered, the natural rhythm of nature unchanged. Down in the damp gullies of a temperate rainforest, you are in an eerily prehistoric environment. There’s no escaping nostalgia in these places.

We have so much today, but there is a peace and tranquillity in losing yourself in an environment where you can focus on just one thing and where nature sets the pace.

Alex Monroe's 'Into the Wild' opens 1 May 2025 at the Garden Museum in London gardenmuseum.org.uk alexmonroe.com

'Children don’t need to be told how to play – an object just has to catch their attention and make them excited to play, without conscious thought,' says Naoto Fukasawa. 'I’m trying to help kids be creative by letting them find their own way to play.'

The legendary Japanese designer is sharing his thoughts on play while seated on a chair perhaps unlike any other he has designed during his decades-long career: it’s tiny in size, tomato red in colour and has smooth, simple curves. Nearby scattered on grass is the bright, clean form of a blue box with circular holes, a sunshine yellow house and an undulating green ring, upon which a toddler is happily clambering.

This is ‘Yuugu’, Fukasawa’s first collection of children’s play sculptures, created for the Japanese company Jakuets, a progressive pioneer in educational play. Colourful, intuitive and playful, the new collection launched with an outdoor installation at Triennale Milano during Milan Design Week.

Since launching in 1916, Fukui-based Jakuets has spent over a century exploring the meaning of play. Today, it works with 40,000 nursery school and daycare centres across Japan, producing playground equipment, nursery installations and educational material.

‘Yuugu’ – Jakuets’ first collection launched overseas – aims to share the borderless language of play through Fukusawa’s creative perspective, balancing so-called 'imagination triggers' with intuitive function and quality design.

'Kids can play in any environment,' Fukasawa tells Wallpaper*, while seated at a small but perfectly formed red ‘Piccola’ table from the new collection. 'An object doesn’t need to be too obvious in telling them how to play. It has to catch their attention – they see it and say wow and are drawn to it.

'They might use a basic function – like a slide – but they quickly create their own way of playing, so objects don’t need to be too expressive. They have to fit into the surrounding environment and appeal to adults as well as children.'

During the conversation, a handful of children spontaneously stop to explore. The new play sculptures scattered on the grass have simple lines and curves in bold shades (red, blue, green, yellow), their shapes made in carbon fibre using a wooden master mould.

'Surfaces are so important,' he says. 'Fingers and hands have to stick to hold their weight. They must be safe and make children excited, without thinking. Yesterday when I arrived, there was a little girl collecting all the chairs and putting them in a pile.'

There is ‘Omochi’, its bright red shape, round and smooth, resembling a Japanese rice sweet; ‘Banri’, a circular green pathway in undulating heights; ‘House’, a yellow wendyhouse shaped structure; ‘Donut’, with rounded red edges; and ‘Cube’, a blue box with circular cut-outs.

'“Cube” was actually from the imagination of Tadao Ando’s building,' says Fukasawa. 'Often, Ando-san’s architecture does not go straight, there are detours, a journey to follow. Adults can enjoy these play objects too. We want to show people how to have a happy quality of life through these objects.'

The collection is underpinned by Jakuets’ elemental idea of embracing play as an interconnected 'microcosm of what an inclusive, holistic society could look like', as Haruko Tokumoto, manager and fourth generation of the family-run company, adds: 'Play is so important for life. It’s about giving children the freedom to choose how they want to play.

'This is the first time we’ve introduced our play equipment outside Japan. But there are no cultural barriers – children everywhere know how to play. It goes beyond language.'

naotofukasawa.com

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

Thanks to the recent revival of Frank Herbert’s Dune novels, following two eponymous blockbuster movies, the desert is (culturally) hot again. The vast expanses of arid wilderness – with seemingly endless skies, highly adapted flora and fauna, an array of colours, and an eerie quiet – have long been an inspiration for American artists, from Maynard Dixon to Georgia O'Keeffe. And for Dallas-born, California-based sculptor Jonathan Cross, all of these attributes make the desert the perfect place to work, despite the searing temperatures.

'I realised that the Southwest is where my heart is,' he tells Wallpaper*. 'It's got a good combination of big blue skies with clouds… mountains, all the rocks and cacti that I love. And as strange as it may sound like, the desert seems like a very clean place to me.'

Discover Jonathan Cross’ exhibition at Elliott Templeton Gallery

Growing up in the 1980s, Cross watched a lot of sci-fi movies that he admits he was probably too young for. Between this early exposure to post-apocalyptic landscapes and alien worlds, plus his grandparents’ National Geographic subscription, a visual language began to develop – one that would eventually manifest through his striking ceramic sculptures and furniture.

'When your dad puts on Star Wars, or even the old Dune movie, and then you're flipping through National Geographic and seeing Cambodian ruins, all of these things develop a language in your brain,' he says.

Cross splits his time between Pasadena, where his family is based, and Twentynine Palms near Joshua Tree, working at his studio set amongst five acres of desert where he’s built several kilns for firing ceramic pieces.

Although this oasis of art is incredibly remote, one of Cross’ neighbours happens to be fellow artist and photographer Jack Pierson. After the two eventually met, Pierson invited Cross to present a series of recent works at his gallery, Elliott Templeton Fine Arts, in New York City’s Chinatown.

The exhibition, titled ‘Sinter’, brings together Cross’ freestanding and wall-mounted ceramic sculptures, as well as a range of vessels, each united by their material and their severe, brutalist geometry. The jagged angles, crumbling edges and scorched surfaces appear as if they’ve survived the end of a world, and could have easily been lifted from an ancient alien civilisation.

Each piece is formed from a solid block of clay, much of which the artist sources from a mountain in Corona, California and packs into a mould before carving away at its shape. ‘Once I have a solid block, I treat the clay like a stone block, and I carve it using different kinds of tools, like wires and machetes and chisels, to carve and hollow out certain parts of the forms,’ Cross explains.

The varied hues and textures across his works are produced by spraying salt water and sand into the kiln during the four-day firing process, or letting the wood ash settle onto the clay as it’s fired.

Different tree species produce different colours, so by blending the clays and the woods in combinations, Cross is able to achieve subtle blends and gradients across the sculptures. Some he polishes post-firing to achieve a completely smooth finish, contrasting with others that are highly textured.

Once his sculptures have cooled, Cross installs and photographs many of them across the desert setting in which they were formed. 'I love the desert light because it's very dramatic, and so you get harsh shadows and that contrast really makes the pieces pop,' Cross says.

‘My main goal is not to capture the colour and the texture of the work, but to capture the form, because the colour changes depending on the time of day, or whether the piece has been rained on recently.'

Since Wallpaper* last interviewed Cross (in 2023), the artist has begun to experiment with new equipment that he uses to recycle and reform those pieces that don’t survive the kiln the first time around. 'One of my new favourite things is when pieces fail in the firing, and I'm not satisfied with them, I have a sand blaster, angle grinders and stone garden tools, and I can go back and rework the surfaces, and then this work can always go back into the kiln for re-firing.'

Since the rock-like ceramic sculptures are so robust, 'they'll be around for 10,000 years', Cross claims. So millennia from now, they may well be unearthed and rediscovered by another civilisation. But for the moment, enjoy them at Elliott Templeton Fine Arts, until 8 December 2024.

jonathancrossstudio.com

Elliott Templeton Fine Arts is at 5 Henry St, New York, NY 10002

From September 18th to October 27th 2024, the artworks of 22 international artists will be displayed across Regent’s Park. The 12th edition of Frieze Sculpture coincides with Frieze London and Frieze Masters, which take place from October 9th to 13th, also within Regent’s Park. Visitors will have free access to the park to explore the collection, selected by curator Fatoş Üstek.

The artworks, varied in style, material, and origin, collectively evoke a dreamlike sense of enchantment, often with playful and ironic undertones.

Mohamed Ahmed Ibrahim’s The Form (2024) combines archetypal shapes and vibrant colours to elicit not only a childlike sense of wonder but also deeper reflections on the psyche and our surroundings.

Frances Goodman’s totemic sculptures Pillar IV and Pillar V (2024), resembling stacks of colourful pills, offer a satirical commentary on the ubiquity of pharmaceutical consumption in contemporary society.

The works at Frieze Sculpture push the boundaries of what sculptural art can be today, moving beyond classical forms into interactive and performative realms.

An inattentive visitor may easily be fooled by Albano Hernández’s illusory piece The Shadow (2024), which uses water-based grass paint to create the image of a tree’s shadow on the ground. This playful yet thought-provoking piece alludes to the ecological challenges we face.

Fani Parali’s otherworldly sculptural, acoustic, and performative work AONYX and DREPAN (2020) reminds us of the vastness of time and our responsibility to the world during our brief stay in it.

Libby Heaney’s sculptural and immersive installation Ent- (non-earthly delights) (2024) delves into the potential risks of integrating quantum technologies into everyday life, while drawing connections to Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights. Through refractive surfaces and QR codes, visitors can catch a glimpse of what the non-binary logic of the quantum world might look like.

Frieze Sculpture takes visitors on a surreal journey through Regent’s Park’s English gardens, reminding us of our inextricable connection to the natural world - just as Nathan Coley’s illuminated sign from 2022 poignantly declares: 'I Don’t Have Another Land'.

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

A visit to Wanås Konst, in the forests of Skåne in southern Sweden, is not something you can rush. The sculpture park, nestled beside a medieval castle and lake, rewards time spent amongst its tree-lined pathways, where visitors can commune with nature and art.

Wanås is the home of the Wachtmeister family, who began to invite artists to create works for the estate in 1987. Over the years, Marika and Charles Wachtmeister enticed an astonishing array of artists to rural Sweden, from Yoko Ono and Jenny Holzer to William Forsythe and Ann Hamilton. Today, there are some 70 site-specific artworks embedded in the landscape.

‘The Ocean in the Forest’ at Wanås Konst

The Wanås Foundation was established in 1995 and led by Marika until 2011, followed by Elisabeth Millqvist and Matthias Givell, before American-Danish curator Milena Høgsberg took over in 2022. 

Høgsberg lives and breathes the energy of Wanås, where artists are encouraged to stay and get to know the place, even living with the curator if the gorgeous hotel on site is fully booked. It’s this slightly unconventional, open-door attitude that defines Wanås.

Høgsberg’s programme takes its lead from the ethos of Wanås and its natural surroundings. As she explains over coffee, ‘a forest is not a set shape. It’s a living organism that was here before we arrived and will be here after we leave’. Høgsberg notes that ‘we have very little contact with ourselves and our bodies, and our connection to nature. I want to offer a more intuitive approach.’

The theme of this year’s two-part exhibition, ‘The Ocean in the Forest’, stems from a dream. It alludes to the apocalyptic flood, which we know took place by the residue of petrified forests and the fossilised sap of extinct trees. ‘We were born from the water and emerged from this primordial soup – we were a drop in the ocean in a sense,’ Høgsberg says. ‘The Ocean in the Forest’ is also a fantastical image, filled with possibility for magical thinking.

Argentine artist Eduardo Navarro had his own dream of swimming so deep into the ocean that he came to the forest before arriving at the ocean again, in a loop that reflects the two habitats’ innate connection. At Wanås, Navarro has enveloped an oak tree with a jellyfish sculpture (I Found a Forest at The Bottom of the Ocean, 2024), adorned with chimes that can be played by visitors or the wind. For Navarro, the jellyfish is an ancient creature with its own language.

Sound also plays a prominent role in Lebanese artist Youmna Chlala’s installation This Feeling, Oceanic (2024). Memories of the Mediterranean Sea and reflections on the power of water are spoken by Chlala, rooted in her experience of life as an immigrant in the United States. The personal, universal and poetic flow into one another as Chlala invites visitors to take a seat on a blue deckchair and listen, staring out to the horizon between treetops and sky.

Elsewhere, Nigerian artist Evan Ifekoya has reimagined a pavilion where the Wachtmeister family once took tea (Apo Ifa for the High Heart and Warrior Spirit, 2024). Ifekoya brings new intention to the space for physical and spiritual transformation, encased by vibrant Plexiglas walls, and whose title refers to the bag of a Yoruba diviner.

Inside one of the barns is the textile The Ark (2019) by Indian artist Lavanya Mani. A cluster of animals complain to a raven about the conduct of man in a playful version of Noah’s Ark and a 17th-century Mughal court painting. The kalamkari technique – which involves soaking cotton in buffalo milk, drying and washing, before applying natural dyes using homemade tools – and the subject of rising seas are drenched in reference to colonialism and the trade of goods across the Indian Ocean.

In contrast to the bustle of modern life, Wanås Konst is something of an antidote. Pilgrims are reminded of their connection to body, ocean and forest. As Høgsberg says, ‘everyone has some sort of relationship with nature’.

wanaskonst.se

‘Live fast, die young’ does tend to create a legend. Italian artist Pino Pascali exhibited for only four years before being killed in a motorbike crash, aged 32, in 1968. Yet today, Fondazione Prada in Milan has dedicated four of its extensive main show spaces to an exhibition honouring his work.

Born in Bari in 1935, Pascali graduated in stage design and sculpture at Rome’s Accademia di Belle Arti in 1959. Miuccia Prada writes in the exhibition catalogue’s introduction of his ‘inexhaustible instinct to rethink’. The Fondazione show’s curator Mark Godfrey, an art historian formerly at Tate, says that Pascali ‘wanted to get away from the idea of a signature style, reinventing his art after each major public outing. He once compared himself to a snake shedding his skin.’ He did have a style though, albeit a serpentine one, which this generous exhibition lets speak for itself. Spread throughout the sensational Rem Koolhaas-designed complex, the first part recreates his solo shows, the second is an examination of his materials, the third a conversational exercise alongside works by his peers, and the fourth a sequence of his most extroverted installations set against XL portraits of the no less performative artist himself posing by each with comedic verve.

Pino Pascali at Fondazione Prada: a pioneer remembered

Walking through Pascali’s recreated solo shows side by side is superb. You encounter his exhibition-as-unified-installation technique that, while commonplace today, was Pascali’s innovation and, says Godfrey, ‘his most original contribution to contemporary art’. His first solo show was at Galleria La Tartaruga, in Rome in 1965: in this version, you meet idolised elements of Italian culture – the colosseum, columns, and the female body (maternalised and eroticised, here pregnant in puritanical white beside hyper-sexualised red lips) – mainly blanched out, wall-mounted scenographic almost-paintings of details from these theatrically focus-pulled icons. Fragments of ancient ruins and isolated female body parts become like logos. A little sad, but also light, thanks to the ironically naïve charm of Pascali’s prop-like renderings.

His second exhibition, at Galleria Gian Enzo Sperone, in Torino in 1966, showed large-scale weapons crowded into a room, as disconcerting at the time of the Vietnam war as the experience of being dwarfed by 3m guns and missiles up close is in today’s bloodthirsty geopolitical context. One visitor at Fondazione Prada whispered to his girlfriend, ‘I don’t want to get too close’, offering a spontaneous authentic commentary that Pascali would no doubt have appreciated. A father, holding the hand of his little girl, walked out of the room the instant he saw its contents.

Back to 1966, when later that same year, at Rome’s Galleria L’Attico, the artist showed something entirely opposite in aesthetic, but united by its use of forms to communicate something about human violence. If the weapons had all the subtlety of heavy metal, this L’Attico show was – and is in its replication – more ‘kid glove, iron fist’. A series of mat-white painted animal parts, some dinosaur-like, their primitivism rendered minimalist by his white-out technique and abstracting dissection, greets you as sugary. It’s so simple and pretty, it prompts delight. The creatures’ simplified representation is part plaster workshop, part nursery book in appearance, and gives these lobotomised beings an adorable and tragic character. Where are their other body parts? Wall-mounted or on plinths, these animal works bring the hunter’s trophy and colonial collector’s cabinet of curiosities to mind.

Pascali’s presentation is full of pathos and narrative while nevertheless being visually very lean to the point of looking chic. The pieces are made by stretching canvas over wood, in a technique cribbed from model airplanes. One he titled La decapitazione della scultura, nodding to his interest in reconfiguring sculpture as a medium. He called these pieces his ‘fake’ or ‘feigned’ sculptures, and they have something more of stage props to them than the lineage and formalism that sculpture historically carried, especially in Italy.

Halfway through the ‘Animali’ exhibition, Pascali tried out a new trick he’d come up with – he de-installed the works and put new pieces in, creating a second half of the same show, amping up the theatricality that his objects already contained. Part two was a sculpture environment called The Sea, plus a giant black and white dolphin, which he later split in two and mounted either side of a wall so its body is disrupted, reinstalled at Fondazione Prada on a pillar. This piece is flamboyantly fun, with its violence intercepted by the visual impression that the creature is swimming through the wall – or is the wall slicing through the animal? It’s perfectly unclear.

From here, you step into a room containing a flat floor sculpture that drops the heart. Four concrete squares of pavement with removable central panels rest on a low plinth. Three of them have their central panels removed to reveal a turquoise puddle, grey gravel, and opaque black. Titled ‘trapdoors’ (botole), they remind you of the theatre of urban space and the environmental entombment that concrete enacts. Next door, Pascali suspended rope-like 3D hangings in wire wool, contrasting concrete’s rigid containment with their worming organic forms shaped into a net, bridge and creepers straight out of jungle movie set.

Upstairs in the materials section we meet oversized mushrooms and geometric shapes clad in more wire wool and retro fake fur in all its funky fabulosity. Giant rainbow caterpillars made of broom heads. Hay-bale geometry and ready-made impersonations of water and soil. It’s man-made meets nature. Industrial meets agricultural. Pre-digitally modern, conceptually tight, it’s Pascali’s own vision yet of its time, in intimate conversation with Arte Povera and Spatialism, as the vast room mixing his works with those of artists he exhibited alongside in group shows makes clear. Here Janis Kounellis’ blowtorch, metal and plexi Margherita di fuori rubs up alongside Alighiero Boetti’s aluminium and river rocks Panettone, set beside some Pascali. There’s also some amusing genius from Michelangelo Pistoletto and Piero Gilardi, and the relationships here enrich and contextualise the singular clarity of Pascali’s recreated solo shows.

One moment of peak 1960s Italianicity is portrayed by a black and white photo of a handsome, stocky, tousled Pascali leaning over a young woman (Michelle Coudray, long-term partner of Jannis Kounellis) wearing a Pucci mini dress as he looks into her eyes. Literally on the back foot, her bobbed-hair grazes the poultry feathers of his wall-mounted work Le penne d’Esopo at Venice Biennale, beside which his hand is resting territorially. He wears hippy leather sandals, a beatnik-y neckerchief, and a mod-ish silver chainmail belt, holding a cigarette that dates him further. Their body language tells you the picture is staged. Pascali, a consummate communicator, approached presenting his work with as much commitment as he did making it. He was clearly brilliant in the studio, but he was also gifted at framing the results in ways that captivated the public through his spirited style.

The Prada exhibition’s final section shows this to great effect as it places some of his strongest sculptures alongside black and white photographs of him posing in and around them, blown up to fill the walls, taken by his collaborators and friends. He did this so magazine editors would promote his shows as it made the images they received of his work stand out.

The most famous was taken by Claudio Abate, who shot Pascali upside down beneath his giant blue fake fur spider named Vedova blu, which he audaciously showed in a group show of mainly paintings. Like everything Pascali did, it was charismatic yet conceptual, ironic but sincere, evocative, accessible, low-tech, and quite brilliant. As Mark Godfrey and the Prada team’s poised and reverent tribute proves, Pascali’s all-in attitude sealed him a punchy place in art history’s memory.

‘Pino Pascali’ at the Fondazione Prada is on show until 23 September 2024

fondazioneprada.org

Lismore Castle Arts stages exhibitions at historic venues in and around the scenic village of Lismore and its eponymous 11th-century castle, in Waterford, Ireland. Currently on show are site-specific installations by Aleana Egan, Carolina Aguirre, and Niamh O’Malley, in addition to an annual group exhibition, ‘Each now, is the time, the space’, featuring artists Veronica Ryan, Leonor Antunes, Rhea Dillon and Alexandre da Cunha.

The latter show is curated by Habda Rashid, senior curator of Modern & Contemporary art at Kettle’s Yard and the Fitzwilliam Museum. She has brought together the four artists, all of whom work with sculpture and found phenomena, with an ethos inspired by the work of legendary experimental musician and artist John Cage, from whom Rashid also took the exhibition’s title.

‘Each now, is the time, the space’ at Lismore Castle Arts

‘Music is very important to me; it’s the first creative art form that I encountered through family members singing Pakistani songs for different occasions. I suppose that was very spontaneous and Pakistani qawwali [sung poetry] always played in the house,’ Rashid explains. ‘I shifted to Western music, like most people growing up in the UK, but my formative years [were influenced by] Pakistani music.’

Cage’s words – ‘Each now, is the time, the space’ – inspire thoughts of immediacy and embracing the current moment; Rashid has sought to bring such intentions to the making and creating of art.

‘When I was thinking about how I wanted to curate the show, I was keen for there to be a moment in the exhibition when the works are brought together to create a connection, one that was spontaneous and perhaps temporary but meaningful,’ she says.

Citing Cage’s partner, dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham, Rashid also wanted to highlight how the works shown, although static, move and change or have the potential of movement in them. Dillon’s moulded plates made from soap warp and dissolve, and Antunes’ draped sculpture, inspired by the work of Ani Albers, could move or be moved.

Antunes works with sculpture and installation using a variety of media; Da Cunha worked with found objects, making sculpture and wall-mounted work; Dillon’s work deals with history and identity through materials; and 2022 Turner Prize-winner Ryan is famed for her ‘poetic’ sculptural works.

‘You see this most keenly with Veronica’s work, which always looks like it’s tottering and about to fall over, and with Leonor’s pieces that have a flow. But you could say that about all the artists, the compositions by Alexandre, and the shifting nature of Rhea’s pieces, because of the material she uses. It’s as if there is a sense of movement and performance embedded in the show.’

All four artists in the show exhibit a mastery in lightness of touch in the complex and layered works they create, either in combining found materials or altering them to bring them into their aesthetic. They also all employ powerful and unique visual languages, none of which is diluted by the context of the exhibition, which gives each work the opportunity to sing.

‘On a more practical level, when you work with four artists as a curator, you don’t want any of them to feel that you are trying to overly theorise or hammer on a label to their work so they can’t breathe. In a sense the artists I chose needed this level of space and freedom around their works,’ says Rashid. ‘I wanted to create a show which points to broadening understanding and reading of art, to create a playfulness and a less structured way of encountering artworks.’

She hopes visitors will respond to the work in the exhibition space, over and above any theme, and she enjoys that immediacy.

‘It's something you can’t plan out too much until you are in the space and with the works, therefore it’s very scary and exciting for a curator; in that moment, it’s a kind of test on whether your ideas on the show can work.’

The context of Lismore Castle, owned by the Duke of Devonshire, is interesting and complex, with the most recent additions to the architecture made in the late 1800s. The castle has long been the centre of the community in Lismore, something that was palpable when attending the show.

‘It’s a castle that was built in 1185 but it is lived in today. It therefore carries this immense time span of objects and material within this singular context. It reminded me of some of the combinations made by the artists: Alexandre’s bottles and concrete; Leonor’s leather woven screen with rope that is a response to a screen made by the seminal Italian architect Carlo Scarpa; and Rhea’s use of mahogany and cut-glass crystal,’ says Rashid.

These layers of history, materials and ideas combine to make a truly rewarding and meditative exhibition, bringing together the artists’ identities and practices into a living idea.

‘Each now, is the time, the space’ is on until 27 October 2024 at Lismore Castle Arts, lismorecastlearts.ie

Painting, photography and digital reproduction unite in Gerhard Richter’s new sculpture on the plinth at Serpentine South. 

The striped Strip-Tower nods to the German artist’s 2010 Strip Paintings, which themselves looked back to Abstract Painting 724-4, a painting created in 1990 that was then photographed. The resulting images were manipulated digitally on a software programme, before being divided into strips, which were stretched and laminated onto aluminium, and covered with Perspex. 

Here, Richter revisits this mixed-media approach, casting striped ceramic tiles on panels in a cross-section that invites visitors inside in a play on patterns, repetition and reflection. The work forms the latest project in the Serpentine’s long-standing partnership with The Royal Parks to install public artworks in the public green havens. 

‘This is a coda to the acclaimed Richter exhibition we hosted here at Serpentine South in 2008, titled “4900 Colours”,’ say Serpentine CEO Bettina Korek and artistic director Hans Ulrich Obrist. ‘Strip-Tower is a three-dimensional manifestation of themes and methods that underpin Richter’s historic practice in painting, repetition, improvisation and chance and we are grateful to the artist, The Royal Parks and all our partners – specifically HENI – for this spectacular opportunity to build new connections between artists and audiences.’

'Strip-Tower' is at Serpentine South from 25 April – 27 October 2024

serpentinegalleries.org

New York is a city of icons. Heck, its logo (I ❤️NY, anyone?) is as synonymous with the city as it is instantly recognizable throughout the world. The Big Apple in recent years has picked up a few other symbolic signifiers along the way that have become just as representative of the city that never sleeps.

So much so, when Ghanaian palanquin artist Paa Joe teamed up with designer gallery Superhouse for ‘Celestial City’, the inaugural show in its new gallery space, what emerged from Paa’s studio could be classified as the new icons of New York (with some familiar favourites thrown in for good measure). There’s the ‘Statue of Liberty’, for one, and the golden NYC ‘Yellow Cab’, which Paa rendered into a 7.5ft-long hand-carved wood coffin, fully lined in green satin and Dutch Wax, replete with little accuracies like the car’s stick shift and windshield wipers (and of course, signage announcing the ‘Paa Joe x Jacob Art Academy’.)  But perhaps it’s the ‘Hermès Birkin Bag’, or the ‘The New York Times’ with Paa’s portrait on it, too, that really hammer home that New York is a city of signs, symbols and metonyms. 

'Celestial City' is a reimagined New York by Paa Joe at Superhouse

'They've got a lot of the great details in here,' says Superhouse founder, Stephen Markos, who built his gallery platform around overlooked historic practitioners and makers who blur the lines between art and function (aka furniture, sculpture and design). 'There’s this quality to the sculpture and the painting that is so playful, and really, really detailed in funny ways,' he explains. 

But the humorous interpretation of New York is only furthered in sculptures like a 3ft-long ‘Rat’, brimming with a grin, avidly friendlier than nearly all sidewalk vermin, or the famous wired ‘Trash Can’, in which sits a thrown-out ‘Paa Joe’ pizza box –though the box itself is a cube. 'Paa’s studio doesn't necessarily engage with the Western world, and so a lot of these objects, they hadn't seen before when they were creating them,' explains Markos. That would explain the ‘Bagel’ sculpture, schmeared with cream cheese, but without its essential bialy (hole) in the middle.  

Interestingly, when Markos introduced the ‘Trash Can’ at NADA NYC 2023, fair-goers thought the work itself was a functional waste bin – not a sculpture nor coffin – and Markos kept having to pull detritus out from the work. 

Paa and his studio, run by his son Jacob Tetteh-Ashong (both of whom, in full disclosure, this author counts as friends, having long written about and collected their works), have been working with Markos for over 18 months in a collaborative manner on this exhibition. Markos floated the idea to Paa and Jacob that a New York-inspired show could be an ideal kick-off to Superhouse’s new 1,500 sq ft home, in part because the gallery’s previous space was 200 sq ft vitrine in the Chinatown Mall, which posed some constraints in showing works of scale. For example, Paa’s 8ft-high ‘Heinz’ ketchup bottle simply wouldn’t have fit. Now, in the new gallery, it anchors the room. 

The new gallery sits comfortably between the ever-expanding Tribeca arts district and 'old' Chinatown, and in fact, in a Walker Street building of its own legacy. The building used to house a very famous illegal poker ring, as well as counterfeit handbag manufacturers, all next door to fashion studios Proenza Schouler, Aesa Jewelry and Sally LaPointe. Now, Superhouse is reanimating its creative roots (along with art gallery, Off-Paradise), in a space that Markos says is, 'a little bit off the beaten path in this cool, tucked away place'. And what’s more New York than stumbling upon a secret find? 

Paa Joe - 'Celestial City' is on view until 26 April 2024

120 Walker Street, 6R
New York, NY 10013

superhouse.us

‘Originally, the instinct was to do this in San Francisco,' says David Alhadeff, founder of The Future Perfect, of the exhibition ‘Inner Space’, on view until 1 May 2024 at Goldwyn House in Beverly Hills. 'It was so obvious,' he reveals. 'The obviousness became the reason not to do it there.'

The ‘obviousness’ stems from the show’s inspiration. In Alhadeff’s words, the show ‘puts JB Blunk at the conceptual centre point of a body of contemporary work that pays homage to Blunk'. The cult-favourite artist lived in Inverness, Marin County, and until recently, was a name mostly collected and exhibited around the Bay Area. 'The San Francisco community is almost too familiar with Blunk,' explains Alhadeff. 'So we wanted to show this in a place that it can be perceived as a bit fresh, without a community's preconceived notions of what Blunk’s work is about.'

The Future Perfect presents 'Inner Space'

While Blunk 'didn't live long enough to be aware of his influence', he is immediately recognisable for his functional sculptures rendered in redwood, a material native to California’s Sierra Nevada range. Yet, his restless practice extends far beyond just wood objects. Blunk worked in stone, paint, jewellery and woven textiles, and left a canon that stands out, in Alhadeff’s eyes, for the 'humble nature with which it was created'. Blunk has 'this incredible legacy that he has left behind, which permeates into the contemporary work that we represent', explains Alhadeff.

And so, 'Inner Space' is a dialogue between Blunk and his mentor, Isamu Noguchi, as well as contemporary practitioners, sculptor Ian Collings, jeweller Alana Burns, and artist Minjae Kim (who was recently featured in the Blunk-estate-curated ‘100 Hooks’ exhibition, as well). 

'The Future Perfect being a contemporary design gallery, working with historical work is something that we do, but we do it very sparingly – with a lot of intention,' says Alhadeff. Therefore, this is 'the first time that a show puts JB as the conceptual centre of a contemporary design show', and it’s an exhibition that makes connections between how these practitioners work, more so than their formal and aesthetic similarities.

The exhibition, which activates the gallery’s historic Los Angeles space, which Alhadeff explains was bought 'to create these types of conversational shows', features an array of works not often known from any of these practitioners. Blunk’s rare wooden thrones are exhibited alongside his relatively unknown stone wall works, and put into dialogue with a steel table and set of chairs from Noguchi (on loan from Converso Gallery). 

Meanwhile, Kim’s quilted fiberglass chandelier and fiberglass and steel sconces (presented in partnership with Marta gallery), Collings’ stone sculptures, and Burns’ sea-sourced and silver objects and jewellery, evoke the craftsmanship found in both Blunk and Noguchi’s works.

'This is not the kind of lineage that has the patriarchy as part of its formula or a direct passing of some sort of sceptre,' says Alhadeff. 'This is the passing of a passion, a thoughtfulness. What we're really underpinning is this way of working.' Or in other words, making space for the subtle and humble. 

'Inner Space' is on view at Goldwyn House until 1 May 2024 

thefutureperfect.com

For the first time in 20 years, Peter Blake has turned his eclectic gaze to sculpture, presenting new work alongside pieces from his six-decade career in a new exhibition at Waddington Custot, ‘Peter Blake: Sculpture and Other Matters.’ 

‘I think it will be interesting to see everything all together over the long span of my career, and see how things juxtapose,’ Blake tells us. ‘It doesn't necessarily go from the beginning to the end and get better, [but it does] change direction, and become something similar, with some kind of development. And what was interesting is that Jacob [Twyford, senior director at Waddington Custot] picked up on the conceptual art elements of it, which I've never really talked about or pointed out.’

Early works, such as Locker (1959), a sculpture of an old RAF locker adorned with pin-up images, join pieces that demonstrate Blake’s early adoption of storybook characters, such as Tarzan Box – ‘Big Iron Bird, She Come’ (c.1965). In the 2012 series Found Sculpture, found objects including pebbles and rocks are imbued with the status of fine art, coming to rest on their oak and marble plinths. 

Throughout it all runs Blake’s distinctive playfulness (also evident in his 2021 artist’s recipe for Wallpaper* – beans on toast) and a clear love of materials, teased into sculptural shapes or celebrated in their raw forms. For Blake, classic motifs and everyday objects are treated with the same respect.  ‘I try and match the found materials up to what the object is,’ he says. ‘So for instance, in the piece called Family, which is quite big – almost life size – the child is made, as I recall, of childlike things. So it's a box of biscuits, and a ball and things like that. In another piece, the man is made from very masculine things, and the mother is made from very feminine things. The child is made from toys. That's how I do it sometimes.’

A spirit of collaboration unites works from the Still Life series, created as an homage to Claude Monet, with Then & Now, For Damien (2003), referencing Damien Hirst, and later tributes to artist and cartoonist Saul Steinberg. 

Ultimately, the retrospective is a celebration of Blake’s juxtaposition of cultural references and materials, for the creation of pieces sparking joy, above all else. ‘They're all pretty much collage sculptures,’ Blake adds. ‘Though I might be able to, I’m not really a sculptor in the sense that I could sit down with a bunch of clay and make a head.’

Peter Blake’s 'Sculpture and Other Matters' is on at Waddington Custot from 20 February – 13 April 2024

waddingtoncustot.com

With its reassuring sounds, smells and textures, stepping into ‘When Forms Come Alive: Sixty Years of Restless Sculpture’ at the Hayward Gallery, London, is almost like slipping back in utero. Sensation is the star here, with an eclectic roster of emerging and established artists experimenting with fertile forms and occasionally viscous, spiky or stretchy material for a deliciously multisensory group show.

‘When Forms Come Alive’ at Hayward Gallery

Twenty-one artists have explored the possibilities of movement – the full roster comprises Lynda Benglis (winner of a 2024 Wallpaper* Design Award for her Loewe jewellery), Drift, Franz West, Eva Fàbregas, Ruth Asawa, Nairy Baghramian, Phyllida Barlow, Michel Blazy, Paloma Bosquê, Olaf Brzeski, Choi Jeonghwa, Tara Donovan, Holly Hendry, EJ Hill, Marguerite Humeau, Jean-Luc Moulène, Senga Nengudi, Ernesto Neto, Martin Puryear, Matthew Ronay and Teresa Solar Abboud. 

Works capture the unthinking instincts of an organism, appearing to undulate, breathe, float, ooze and squidge around the architectural angles of the Hayward. Unlike most exhibitions, visitors can take a free route, rather than following a prescribed one-way system; here, the gallery’s scattered spaces lend themselves to the offbeat works of the individual artists. With the sheer size of some of the pieces, there was a risk of encroachment on another work, a danger efficiently sidestepped in Ralph Rugoff’s curation, aided by assistant curator Katie Guggenheim and curatorial assistant Anusha Mistry. 

Works are otherworldly forms, inhabiting their own dystopian universe. Eva Fàbregas’ tubular pink beings writhe around their own pink-lit room. Tara Donovan’s epic, vast molecular structures could be a joyful pile of glitter balls or marine lifeforms, an eloquent argument for the fluid nature of sculpture.

Elsewhere, Holly Hendry’s pipes are snaking their way out the window, while Lynda Benglis’ viscid forms emphasise materials’ ephemeral nature. Drift’s beautiful kinetic Skylights flutter open, greeting visitors; EJ Hill, too, reflects this motion in a large-scale rollercoaster sculpture, making for a smorgasbord of sensation.

'When Forms Come Alive: Sixty Years of Restless Sculpture', from 7 February – 6 May 2024 at the Hayward Gallery

southbankcentre.co.uk

'I have always had this feeling and need to express [myself] and use my hands,' reflects Adaesi Ukairo, an artist whose sculptural works sit at the nexus of art, craft and design. London-born and now based in Hastings, Ukairo works principally in copper and brass, creating pieces that are an elemental portal to migration, return and cross-cultural norms, and showcase the endless possibilities that metal provides to those who master it.

Adaesi Ukairo’s works in metal

Ukairo is of dual British and Nigerian heritage and her family moved to Mbaise, in rural Nigeria, when she was aged seven. It’s a place that, she notes, 'had a real communal way of living. I made pieces with women, my aunties and friends. We would all sit around making, from palm fronds rope and all sorts of useful stuff. I don’t think that world is there anymore, it’s all concrete houses now. But those creative influences I have held within my body and now express through my work.'

After she studied jewellery, silversmithing and applied arts at London Metropolitan University, Ukairo’s gradual move to creating larger-scale pieces was in many ways a response to wanting to articulate broader themes in her body of work. The names of her four collections not only offer clues to her intent, but also the method of hand-hammering required to achieve different effects and the cultural references that may lie within. 

'They are all different ways of expressing this feeling of movement and of movement within energy,' explains Ukairo. '“Phlat” are plate-like pieces, so the movement within is quite structured, the hammering quite rhythmic and calm. With “Crush”, I wanted to create structures people recognised as bowls and thus used synclastic raising on sheet metal. I hammer quite energetically, so “Crush” expresses something that is more forceful. “Miri” means “water” in Igbo, and references memories of walking with my friends and cousins down to the stream to collect water, and the stories of Mami Wata, the water spirit that traditionally lives in bodies of water. All these things are in my head; and it’s just flowing.'

The pieces created in copper and brass see the materials echoing a bucolic palette of red earth punctuated by vegetation and bright sunlight that leaves a hazy shimmer in its wake. Ukairo’s choice of materials is also a comment on intrinsic value, with the designer challenging what she sees as the potentially limiting primacy of gold and silver. 'Copper is a beautiful material within itself, and I wanted to express that. And I also felt the same way about brass.'

For ‘Undule’, the most recent of her collections and the most celebrated, Ukairo sought a different means of making. Inspired by master metalsmith Heikki Seppä’s seminal work Form Emphasis for Metalsmiths, she explored anticlastic forming, which she took up as a result of creating experimental pieces in clay.

'Metal is amazingly malleable, but coming to clay having worked with metal for so many years, I made these forms that were very undulating, and I wanted to get these shapes in metal. So, I researched and there is a whole world out there. I got these stakes made for me by a blacksmith and that is how I have been making “Undule”.'

Ukairo’s process is intuitive. She likens it to being in a mesmeric state, and one where she allows the metal to be animated by her hammering tools, emotion and mood 'until I am satisfied with the balance of it and what it expresses', she says. She is keen to allow her collectors to interpret the pieces in their own way: 'Once I finish, it is for others to decide what they want to think,' she says with a wry chuckle. 

However, a positive response at recent exhibitions is reflective of a series that acts as a conduit to the metaphysical and where notions of embodied energy segue with the artist’s personal narrative. Defining space, time and moments is what many abstract objects aim to do; in Ukairo’s case, they explore myriad truths and invite us to do the same too.

ukairo.com

Mirage is a new public sculpture by the artist Katie Paterson and the architects Zeller & Moye. Set amidst the landscaping that surrounds Apple Park in Cupertino, it consists of over four hundred glass columns snaking through the olive grove that surrounds the HQ’s visitor centre. 

Christoph Zeller and Ingrid Moye teamed up with the Scottish artist Katie Paterson to create the piece, using cylinders of pure cast glass made from sands ‘collected from deserts across the Earth.’

Depending on the location and consistency of the sand, each desert generated a set of unique colours and textures. Structural engineering is by Eckersley O’Callaghan, a UK-based firm that has a long history of working alongside Apple on its architectural projects.

The result is an installation that crystallises the variety and scope of these habitats into a singular space. As the artist’s notes describe, ‘together the columns combine the world’s deserts transformed into liquid-like material, flowing like a dune shaped by the wind’.

The process of collecting the sand was undertaken in partnership with Unesco, geologists and the regional communities that live in these places, and to walk through it one is moved to think of taking a trip around the world's many desert ecosystems.

Such a vast array of translucent material creates a very dynamic environment, as the light shifts throughout the day and emphasises different parts of the snaking structure. ‘Mirage creates an experience of being enveloped by Earth’s sublime spaces,’ says Paterson. ‘Each piece of glass is a portal to otherworldly landscapes. Our hope is that Mirage creates a sensory experience that will ignite the imagination, connect visitors to the vastness of the Earth, and its precious wilderness.’

Mirage.place

ZellerMoye.com

KatiePaterson.org

Sculptures, or the hypothetical possibility of them, fascinated Man Ray, who littered his letters with references to them, or hinted at their forms in photographs, despite the fact the existence of these original pieces has since been shrouded in doubt. 

Throughout his career, Man Ray built on these omissions, creating alternative versions of these perhaps mythical works that he referred to as ‘replicas’, ‘editions’ or ‘new originals’. Now, the eclectic creation process of these pieces is explored in a New York exhibition, ‘Man Ray: Other Objects’, at Luxembourg + Co, which traces how the objects came into being, surreal motifs subverted in endless reproduction.

‘This part of Man Ray’s oeuvre has seen less exploration and holds within it what we feel was his artistic revolution,’ says Alma Luxembourg, director of Luxembourg + Co. ‘Some of the stories relating to the original objects which have been lost, destroyed, dismantled, etc, are fascinating and surprising. What is also surprising is the creativity with which Man Ray returned to remake them again and again at various times and often with very small but significant differences. There is a lot of depth within his explorations of the same objects.’

The exhibition encompasses five object groups, from a metronome to a flat iron, a mobile made of coat hangers, a female torso in plaster and a group of small sculptures. ‘Tracking the evolution of these five groups of objects is a wonderful way to both explore the life of Man Ray (his romantic life, his travels, his contacts with other artists and dealers) and to look at the way in which he goes against the concept of the original art object to champion the multiple and explore the complex variations that the multiple can afford,’ Luxembourg adds.   

‘Several objects in the show have never been exhibited previously in the US, for example, Vénus, from the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome. On top of that, this will be a rare opportunity for visitors to encounter multiple objects all together on one table. In some cases, there will be over ten variations of the same object! This is unprecedented and I hope it will give an opportunity to see and study Man Ray’s creative and revolutionary approach – in praise of the multiple!’   

‘Man Ray: Other Objects’, 6 September – 2 December 2023, Luxembourg + Co, New York 

luxembourgco.com

The rolling hills of Yorkshire Sculpture Park (YSP) have become a cabinet of pop-coloured curiosities for Erwin Wurm’s first UK museum show. 

The Austrian artist is known for shattering the rules of sculpture. Turning familiar objects on their heads with bizarre interventions (think Fat Cars, wearable(ish) furniture, warped buildings and anthropomorphic hot water bottles) – Wurm mines ideas from all that surrounds us, and bends those truths into full-blown fantasy. Aptly, the exhibition’s title, ‘Trap of the Truth’, refers to the work of 17th-century French philosopher René Descartes, who set out to interrogate the subjectivity of truth. 

‘Sculpture is always about space and scale. Exhibiting my work in the great landscape of Yorkshire Sculpture Park gives my work a very new dimension,’ Wurm explains to Wallpaper*. ‘My work plays with the absurd to raise social and philosophical issues. The way it is perceived always depends on the cultural context. The exhibition at YSP is the largest show I have ever held in the UK, and I am really curious to see how the British public will respond to it.’ 

Laden with humour and with frequent nods to the dominance of commodity culture, as well as his Austria’s cultural identity (mostly food), Wurm’s new Yorkshire Sculpture Park show will feature more than 100 works (several shown for the first time), including 55 sculptures indoors, 19 sculptures in the landscape, paintings, photographs, videos and drawings created over the artist’s 30-year career. Among the works on show will be Wurm’s Bags series, including the 5m-tall, Step (Big) (2021), which takes the form of the Hermès Birkin bag, and Dance (2021) and Trip (2021) – a briefcase and suitcase respectively – fashioned with long, dynamic legs that look like they might stride across the landscape. Elsewhere, an unseen 3.2m-tall bronze work Balzac (2023) references a Rodin sculpture, and Der Gurk (2016) immortalises the most iconic of Austrian foods (also the key ingredient of Wurm’s deep-fried gherkin dish, shared with Wallpaper* for our artist’s recipe series). 

As Clare Lilley, director of Yorkshire Sculpture Park explains, ‘Erwin Wurm’s sculpture will be a riot of expression and colour against the green Yorkshire landscape and in the galleries. His imaginative powers are limitless, and we hope that visitors will be inspired, energised, confounded, and amused by sculptures that portray familiar objects but in a way that is entirely unexpected. Couture handbags grow long legs and arms and have real attitude; a 4m-high hot water bottle becomes a big, warm mother; a real truck bends and climbs a gallery wall; a gigantic gherkin stands proud.

Wurm draws attention to the ways in which humans conform to society’s demands, to the psychological impact of contemporary culture, and to how we use history and tradition to scaffold our lives.’ 

Erwin Wurm: 'Trap of the Truth', 10 June 2023 – 28 April 2024. ysp.org.uk

The word ‘prolific’ is often thrown around, but Arnaldo Pomodoro, who turns 97 this month, could outshine most artists when it comes to the scope and versatility of his creative output. He has exhibited on five continents, masterminded staggering environmental and architectural works, created set and costume designs for a panoply of theatrical works, and currently has more than 230 of his works on view in public collections and spaces around the globe. 

Born in Montefeltro in 1926 and based in Milan since 1954, Pomodoro began his career as a restoration consultant in Pesaro while studying stage design and working
as a jeweller. In the following decades, he proved his creative versatility; as an artist, educator, documenter of global culture, and sculpture pioneer. He executed his first public commission in the early 1960s when he created a relief for the façade of Cologne’s adult education centre on Josef-Haubrich-Hof.

Soon after, he shifted gears to create the sculptures for which he is best known: geometric spheres, discs, pyramids, cones, columns and cubes. Mostly rendered in burnished bronze, these early works are evocative of futuristic cities containing fossil-like bones of ancient civilisations, rupturing with the chaos of history, but perfectly contained. In 1966, he began experimenting with large-scale sculpture, creating Sfera Grande for the Montreal Expo. The piece now sits outside the Palazzo della Farnesina in Rome, the same city where the artist is currently on show at the Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana, the Roman HQ of luxury fashion house Fendi. 

Pomodoro and Fendi first crossed paths in 2013 when the house established its Milan HQ at Via Solari 35, a vast industrial space that served as the Fondazione Arnaldo Pomodoro from 2005-2012. There, Fendi continues to host the immersive Ingresso nel Labirinto, one of Pomodoro’s most significant works, and open to public view.

The decade-long partnership between Pomodoro and Fendi is now being made concrete in the exhibition ‘Il Grande Teatro delle Civiltà’, curated by Lorenzo Respi and Andrea Viliani, in collaboration with the Fondazione Arnaldo Pomodoro. It spans 70 years of the artist’s practice, and illustrates his versatility at the intersection of fine art, performing arts and design. 

‘With Pomodoro, we share a veritable passion for creativity, natural materials,
and artisanal savoir-faire,’ says Fendi CEO Serge Brunschwig. ‘His signature sculptures are a constant reminder of his powerful contribution to the art history of the 20th and 21st century. Through the exhibition, we celebrate Pomodoro’s work as a universal language and constant source of inspiration, thus reinforcing Fendi’s bond with the Italian artistic heritage and cultural patrimony.’ 

But instead of Pomodoro’s greatest hits, notably his hyper-polished bronze spheres erupting with angular shards, the exhibition sheds an alternative light on the artist’s practice and, in turn, gets to its soul. Archaic, modern, or even fantastical, the tangled matrix of codes, signs and ‘writings’ in these sculptures nod to human interference in nature, creating instead something altogether more unworldly. The show emphasises the inner workings of Pomodoro’s universe, which the curators describe as an ‘exhibition within an exhibition’, comprising drawings, photographs and documents, many never seen before. ‘The exhibition is intended to be a great autobiographical theatre – real and of the mind, historical and imaginative at the same time,’ say Respi and Viliani.

The exhibition begins outside, where Pomodoro has placed Forme del Mito (1983) – an ensemble of four sculptures originally created for artist Emilio Isgrò’s theatrical performances inspired by Aeschylus’ Orestes – at the Palazzo della Civiltà’s four corners. The drama continues in the entrance hall with two examples of the artist’s costume designs, made from robust copper-plated fibreglass fused with softer and more ephemeral materials like raffia and fabric: the first was created for Christopher Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage (staged in Gibellina in 1986), the second for Igor Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex (performed in Siena in 1988). Pomodoro brings the legendary tales of Dido and Oedipus to life, drawing on ancient Greek iconography and traditional African and Asian craft techniques, as well as nodding to the building’s current use as the HQ of one of the world’s most prestigious fashion houses.

Further in, visitors find two works staged in counterpoint on the ground floor: Le Battaglie (1995), based on Paolo Uccello’s Renaissance masterpiece, The Battle of San Romano, is a black sculpture embedded with an abstraction of angular forms, including teeth, arrows and spears, while Movimento in Piena Aria e Nel Profondo (1996-1997) is a monumental double-curved white sculpture resembling an otherworldly archaeological dig. Up on the palazzo’s third floor, the cuttlefish shape of Osso di Seppia (2011-2021) nods to Pomodoro’s earliest sculptures,
which would see the artist scratch marks into cuttlebone as casts for jewellery.

As part of the collaboration with Fendi, the house also invited Pomodoro to create
a one-off edition of its Peekaboo bag, which will be on display for the duration of the show. In 2019, to mark its tenth birthday, Fendi began inviting notable figures – among them, Tracey Emin, Zaha Hadid and Sabine Marcelis – to put their stamp on a blank version of the iconic bag. Pomodoro’s take features shimmering bronze-coloured canvas with protruding barbs. ‘I wanted to place the function of use of the bag in discussion and transform it into something mysterious and visionary,’ says Pomodoro. ‘A medieval shield? A mythological animal covered in sharp spines? An exotic flower with long pistils?’ 

Like his take on the Peekaboo, ‘Il Grande Teatro delle Civiltà’ is a testament to a career whose foundations are an unwavering commitment to a distinctive sculptural language. This is Pomodoro’s theatre: excavating, preserving and reinterpreting what has already been or might have been, in an effort to map what might be ahead. 

This article previews a feature in the July 2023 issue of Wallpaper*, on newsstands and available to subscribers from 8 June. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

‘Il Grande Teatro delle Civiltà’ is on show until 1 October at the Palazzo della Civiltà
Italiana, Rome, arnaldopomodoro.it, fondazionearnaldopomodoro.it, fendi.com

‘In many ways, the sea is the global unconscious,’ says Rasmus Nielsen, who founded Danish artist collective Superflex alongside Bjørnstjerne Christiansen and Jakob Fenger. ‘It’s almost like falling asleep, where you break through this surface. There are different rules down there.’ 

Superflex, known for its politically charged projects described as ‘tools for action’, has long been interested in the state of our seas. As Nielsen notes: ‘a healthy ocean is good for all of us’. Through the years, Superflex has experimented with different watery facets – creating a drive-through cinema in the Coachella Valley for Desert X using a coral-like material with projected footage of fish (Dive-In, 2019), a video of a deep-sea organism known as a siphonophore across the façade of the United Nations Headquarters in New York (Vertical Migration, 2021) and even interviews with marine life (What do you dream of?, 2018).

Superflex and the Super Reef

In November 2022, Superflex announced an ambitious project to restore a minimum of 55 square kilometres of stone reef in Danish seas, in partnership with the World Wide Fund for Nature. This is the amount estimated by scientists to have been removed by humans to build their own homes and structures: ‘We took all the stones away where [fish] had their nests and crevices and cities – fish cities so to speak – and turned them into our cities.’ Of course, Superflex won’t restore this vast area known as the Superrev (or Super Reef) singlehandedly. They hope the project will galvanise local communities and organisations: ‘You could think of it as an underwater urbanisation process that could inspire a whole nation.’

Super Reef began in 2018 with a journey across the Pacific. Francesca Thyssen-Bornemisza, whose foundation Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary (TBA21) is devoted to social and environmental advocacy, invited Superflex to lead three expeditions on the Dardanella research vessel. TBA21 imagined Superflex might be joined by other artists, but, Nielsen recalls wryly, the collective asked a crew of scientists along for the ride instead. They were struck by the effects of climate change they encountered, like the communities of Tuvalu and Kiribati that lie just a few metres above sea level, which ‘might be moving away in a generation or so because they can’t live there, it’s going under’.

In many ways, Superflex’s engagement with the ocean echoes our own coming to terms with the climate crisis. Nielsen remembers the attitude in the 1990s that the right technology could solve all Earth’s problems. By the 2000s, there was a more ‘melancholic acknowledgement’ of climate change, as in the film Flooded McDonald’s (2009), where a life-size replica of the fast-food restaurant silently fills with water. Nielsen describes the work as a vision of the end of the world, in a ‘mild Scandinavian way’. More recently, science and art have become more closely entwined. ‘We’re being flooded,’ Nielsen says. ‘But you know, there are ways of mitigating, of working in that conceptual framework.’

‘Imagine a fish Ikea in the water’

Superflex’s research project Deep Sea Minding, which came out of the TBA21 commission, has sparked all manner of experiments with materials, from aluminium foam to ceramic to concrete, that have been dropped into the ocean to see the response of fish. ‘Imagine a fish Ikea in the water,’ Nielsen explains. 

Projects like As Close As We Get (2021) and Pink Elements (2019) also emerged, with their bubble-gum pink colouring and abundant surface area that look like sculptures but will become underwater fish homes when the seas rise and delight coral polyps (‘the architects of the sea’). In March 2023, Superflex and VogelART announced a new series of glazed ceramic building blocks called the Interface Brick, a collectable object that can also be used for underwater construction. 

Superflex’s voyage around the Pacific curiously echoes the journey of another rag-tag group of innovators – the International Congresses for Modern Architecture aboard the Patris II in 1933. Sailing from Marseilles to Athens, modernist architects like Le Corbusier sipped cocktails and devised the Athens Charter that would form the blueprint for modern cities of the future. Superflex has devised its own set of architectural principles in collaboration with WWF, with the future cities of fish, molluscs and algae in mind. ‘We thought we could make a sort of underwater version – the wet version,’ Nielsen says.

Characteristic of their intrinsically collaborative practice, Superflex realised any underwater project would need to involve its inhabitants, ie – the fish. In contrast to the human-centric nature of city planning, marine cities would need to place fish at the heart of any scientific or aesthetic decisions. In the past, Nielsen has even referred to fish as ‘the clients’. 

Nielsen highlights how easy it is to separate ourselves from the fate of the ocean, despite the fact that two-thirds of the human body comprises water. ‘If you cry,’ Nielsen notes, ‘the tears have the same amount of salt as is in the ocean. So, we have oceans within us in a strange way.’ The only reason why we don’t have a stronger reaction, perhaps, to the sight of the catch of the day is because fish can’t scream. But that is what they are really doing.’

With the outbreak of Covid-19, Superflex’s adventures across the Pacific came to an end, but back in Copenhagen, ‘we realised, actually, there is an ocean right out there as well’. Superflex decided to apply the knowledge they had acquired to a local Danish context, where the loss of the stone reef has stripped the local fish community of places to attach, hide, and be idle. The Danish sea has its own history, as Nielsen explains: ‘We are fundamentally a nation of stone fishers and Denmark is sand and mud. It's shaky ground!’ he laughs. ‘The main body of us is a sea – not a very healthy sea, because of what we’ve pulled out of the sea, because of trawling, and so forth.’ 

In 2022, Superflex placed a series of modular structures of fish-friendly bricks in Copenhagen harbour for the project As Close As We Get – part artwork, part scientific experiment, part maritime home; the Crown Prince of Denmark laid the first cornerstone of the Super Reef, which, as the project unfolds, will pave the way for the era of the fish. 

superflex.net

In his sculptural work, artist Raffaele Salvoldi is best known for working in wood. His intricate sculptures rise like architectural monuments and are composed of hundreds of wooden planks from the construction game, Kapla, which are stacked up to resemble elaborate, gravity-defying structures. 

For Milan Design Week 2023, Salvoldi, who is also a photographer and director, has joined forces with leading marble brand Salvatori – which has previously collaborated with the likes of John Pawson, Kengo Kuma, Piero Lissoni, Patricia Urquiola, Michael Anastassiades – to co-create a three-sculpture installation. 

This time, Salvoldi isn’t using Kapla, but natural stone. ‘Wood and stone are two completely different materials. Wood is forgiving enough to offset any technical imprecisions, whereas with stone, you have to be precise down to the last millimetre,’ Salvoldi explains. ‘The meeting with Salvatori came about purely by chance but it was immediately clear that we were on the same wavelength. I’m not only fascinated by natural stone, but I also share Gabriele Salvatori’s passion for seeking beauty in everything and by beauty, I don’t just mean in the aesthetic sense, but as a tool for deciphering our world.’

Displayed both at the brand’s showroom and boutique in Milan, each of the sculptures – titled Bianco Carrara, Grigio Versilia and Pietra d’Avol – is more than three metres high, and composed of rhythmic, spiralling blocks of stone. In keeping with the brand’s sustainability mission, the material used by Salvoldi derives entirely from waste material from the marble production process. 

Two of Raffaele’s artworks will be on display on the ground floor of Salvatori’s showroom at via Solferino 11. The first greets visitors at the entrance, while the second will be in the Room of Mirrors where its multiple reflections will create a dazzling kaleidoscopic effect.

The third piece will be constructed during Design Week at the Salvatori boutique on the corner of via Palermo and Largo Treves, where, as part of a live performance, the artist will build the work in real-time for all to see. 

As CEO Gabriele Salvatori explains, ‘the collaboration with Raffaele is a perfect fit with our philosophy of promoting designers, artists and work that demonstrate how human ingenuity and talent can become tools to raise awareness about safeguarding the planet, the most precious thing we have. Through Raffaele’s works, we want to restore dignity to every single fragment of raw material by taking a parsimonious approach and highlighting the idea that “top-grade” and “second-grade” materials don’t exist. Instead, it’s up to us to be smart and use each element that nature provides in the best way possible.’

Raffaele Salvoldi’s installation with Salvatori will be on view from 18-23 April during Milan Design Week 2023. salvatoriofficial.com

John Pawson might be best known as an architect, whose ultra-minimalist, rigorously direct approach probes the fundamental meaning of inhabitation and how the body relates to space.

Pawson’s new exhibition at The Mass, Tokyo, is something of a homecoming for the architect, who lived in Japan in his mid-twenties; first in Nagoya, and later in Tokyo, where he frequented the studio of architect and designer Shiro Kuramata. These formative experiences in the country would go on to heavily influence the distilled, pared-back approach to architecture and design for which Pawson made his name. 

Lunula: John Pawson's sculptural debut

Pawson’s show at The Mass, his first solo show in Japan, will span three gallery spaces and extend to an outdoor area in StandBy, a nearby installation space where he will debut his first sculpture. Lunula is a charcoal-coloured structure that can be entered and inhabited. Although Pawson has remained consistent in his view that his work is architecture, as opposed to art, his new sculpture probes the intersection of these disciplines and more broadly questions the relevance of such labels. Lunula is positioned as a multi-sensory experience, enveloping the viewer in its crescent shape and offering a place to sit and reflect around a cylindrical chimney and billowing incense. ‘I designed Lunula as a piece of inhabitable sculpture, to be experienced as a seamless sensory totality. I want it to be a place that feels comfortable to be in, where all the qualities of a very particular spatial environment come alive.’

In the galleries, Pawson will show chromatically ordered images from his Spectrum series, and debut a new series, Home, in which the architect turns his lens towards his own domestic spaces. In these images, Pawson transcends the precision and often white minimalism of his architecture and design work, inviting viewers on a journey of colour, texture, atmosphere and their collective ability to rouse emotion. 

Pawson’s ability to command light and space in the photographic sphere has come to the fore in recent years. It began in 2012 with ‘A Visual Inventory’, followed five years later by Spectrum, which began in book form and became a 2018 exhibition at London’s 180 The Strand. ‘A Shade of Pale’, curated by Carrie Scott, enveloped the entire gallery space in 320 photographs, staged as an immersive architectural installation. 

‘In accepting the invitation to exhibit my photographic work at The Mass, I have a sense of completing a circle that began nearly half a century ago, when I was living in Japan’, says Pawson, who explains how he enlists his camera in the same way that others might use a sketchbook. ‘Those years, first in Nagoya and then in Tokyo, clarified so much for me and continue to influence what I see when I look through the lens of a camera.’

John Pawson's exhibition at The Mass, Tokyo, runs from 14 April - 14 May 2023. themass.jp

Bosco Sodi is a busy man. In the last two months, he has opened a new studio and exhibition space in Mexico City (his third worldwide), unveiled his fourth solo show at Galería Hilario Galguera in the Mexican capital, opened other solo exhibitions in Madrid’s Fundación Casa de México en España and the Harvard Art Museums in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and is in the process of building a new studio in Greece and working towards a major show at China's He Art Museum in November 2024. We also recently showcased Casa Primitiva, a new space by architects Hanghar on the wine estate Sodi owns with his brother Claudio, just outside Madrid.

But Sodi, who, when I call him at 8 am, tells me he has already been up for hours in his home in New York, clearly thrives on spinning numerous plates. Even his new studio space in the Atlampa neighbourhood of Mexico City is a feat in multitasking. Sodi wanted to prepare for an eventuality where he might have to move back to Mexico to look after his parents while ensuring he also had somewhere to work. But in typical Sodi style, Studio CMDX rapidly became much more than just a studio. 

With the help of his friend, architect and long-term collaborator Alberto Kalach (a 2022 Wallpaper* Design Awards winner for Hotel Terrestre in Puerto Escondido), the two have created a vast exhibition space housing an art gallery, artist residency, kitchen and terrace as well as Sodi’s personal workspace. The building was originally an old warehouse in the industrial Atlampa colony that was demolished to make two separate structures. As with Sodi’s previous forays into the world of architecture, the resulting space is almost monastic in its simplicity, a love letter to humble materials like red brick, concrete and wood with huge windows that bathe the rooms in warm Mexican light. 

‘We wanted a space where the art wasn’t competing with the architecture,’ Sodi explains, ‘something with simple materials; we love wood, we love plants, we love concrete and bricks.’ The terrace and exhibition space are filled with Sodi’s own work that until recently had been languishing in storage. Newly dusted off, the pieces dotted around the space create a sort of interactive map of Sodi’s CV over the last two decades. His signature paintings made from layering pigment, sawdust, water and glue adorn the walls and more recent golden clay sculptures are scattered around, creating pops of shiny opulence against muted grey breezeblocks.    

Since its opening in early February 2023, more than 2,000 visitors have already visited the Mexico City studio, something that surprises Sodi. ‘We never thought we would have so many visitors. In the first month of February, we opened it every day, but because of the number of people we’ve had to cut it down,’ he marvels. Perhaps it isn’t that surprising but rather the exact manifestation of Sodi’s mantra that art has the power to bring communities together unlike anything else.

For Sodi, who was born in Mexico City in 1970, it was important to create a democratic artistic space and gallery in his hometown, particularly in a less affluent part of the metropolis: ‘I believe in the power of art to change places, it can completely change the tone of a place and inspire people to reconnect with themselves.’ This is something Sodi has witnessed first-hand at Casa Wabi, his first large-scale studio project that he designed with Japanese architect Tadao Ando in 2014 on Oaxaca’s wild Pacific coastline. In the eight years since it opened, Casa Wabi has attracted a thriving community of creatives and fostered a new generation of local youths with access to and an interest in art.  

The healing effect of creativity in childhood is something Sodi understands intimately. As a child, he was diagnosed with ADHD and dyslexia and was encouraged by his mother to try art classes to help calm his mind. This, it turned out, was the medicine he had needed all along. Inspired by art’s healing balm for his own life and perhaps a strong sense of social conscience impressed upon him by his mother, a Marxist philosopher, Sodi has always felt compelled to share his good fortune. ‘I think when you are a successful artist you have the responsibility to give back. I am a very lucky guy; I am able to do what I love the most and it's a necessity for me, it’s like therapy. When I think where to give back I first think about my country and then also my fellow colleagues, the artists of this world.’

Sodi has lived and worked in many different places, from New York to Berlin, Barcelona to Mexico, but no matter where he is in the world two things remain constant in his work: creating and nature. His use of crude natural materials like volcanic ash, resin and clay is more than just an aesthetic penchant, they are a way of communing with and honouring the natural world. 

‘Art and nature help us to better understand the universe’ he says. ‘If you understand the universe you understand yourself and other human beings.’ The new studio in Mexico City allows communities to take a break from the chaos outside and take a moment to observe the beauty of simple natural materials and thereby reconnect with the stillness in ourselves. ‘Right now we are at a crunch point', Sodi warns. ‘If we don’t learn to connect with ourselves and what nature is, it will be a disaster.’

To make an appointment to visit Studio CDMX visit boscosodi.com/studio-cdmx.

‘Bosco Sodi: Origen’, until 9 June 2023, Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts. https://harvardartmuseums.org/exhibitions/6298/bosco-sodi-origen

Alabanzas, until 7 April, Galeria Hilario Galguera, Mexico City https://www.galeriahilariogalguera.com/exhibitions/alabanzas

Deserts are not dead places. Dry and hostile, yes, but teeming with human and non-human lives evolved to not only survive but flourish in such conditions. Deserts are, according to Diana Campbell, co-curator of Desert X 2023, places full of mythologies. 

This year’s Desert X, a biennial spread across California’s Coachella Valley, adds to those mythologies but seeks to do so in a way which doesn’t romanticise or patronise. As fellow co-curator and artistic director Neville Wakefield suggests, ‘there’s a First Nation saying that “place is a story happening many times” and I think Desert X is part of that storytelling.’

It is often the case that stories told through large-scale sculpture within photogenic landscapes can become ultra-Instagrammable one-liners in which form and spectacle trumps nuance or narrative. With towering snow-capped mountains, vast dry flats, and fantastical rock formations juxtaposed against man-made turbines, infrastructure, and architecture, exhibiting in the Coachella Valley is no small feat. As Campbell tells Wallpaper*, it might be ‘a challenge for many artists to deal with the harshness and the elegance’ of the Coachella Valley.

However, Desert X 2023 probes deeper than aesthetics and even histories. Loose curatorial themes exploring water/drought, abundance/scarcity, and globalism/interconnectedness are present throughout, but there is no single imposed curatorial line. The projects balance impact and subtlety, though one is unapologetically massive and playful: designed to be seen from traffic along the nearby Interstate 10, Matt Johnson’s Sleeping Figure appears as a chaotic and unlikely amalgamation of shipping containers starkly pronounced in the flat valley.

Conceived in 2021 as global trade routes closed following the Suez Canal blockage, the sculpture also inadvertently speaks to the recent disastrous Ohio train derailment. Sited in proximity to a railway line with regular container trains passing by, Johnson’s ambitious structure arrests an implied movement of an otherwise relentless supply chain into a static form, as if fixed in freefall.

Mario García Torres’s work Searching for the Sky (While Maintaining Equilibrium) disrupts the natural environment through modernist interruption. Riffing on cowboy culture, the artist has harnessed Mechanical Bulls, the fairground machinery that replicates a rodeo bull, replacing the faux-animal with flat metallic squares which flicker in the sharp Californian sun. The geometric panels continuously dance as the sun passes, an anarchic version of Robert Smithson’s Mirror Displacements playfully conflating local pop and natural culture.

Two further sculptures, by Torkwase Dyson and Rana Begum, use colour and geometry within pieces to be experienced as well as gazed at. Dyson’s Liquid A Place, against hills overlooking the City of Palm Desert, is a matt-black graphic interjection. An arch with a wedge cut through, Dyson considers the work in relation to ‘our bodies as bodies of water – the 99 per cent of our bodies that are of water, born in water, and carry a kind of liquidity around it,’ it is a piece inviting bodily exploration – the wedge cut-out not only offering a changeable landscape frame but a threshold for the visitor to cross, while steps lead up and over the arch. What had appeared as dense black can be seen up close as a texture akin to local adobe earthen architectures, a physicality formed of and mirroring surrounding nature.

Rana Begum’s No. 1225 Chainlink appears as a joyfully bright yellow mirage within a desert expanse, revealing scale and material only after a long walk from the nearest road. It is formed from off-the-shelf chain-link fencing, calling to mind the US-Mexico border and the violence and division inherent through it. It can also be explored: a series of narrow concentric paths between the mesh gradually become less constricting as the visitor weaves towards the centre, the mesh panels lifted to reveal an open heart.

Begum describes her work as ‘having dual experiences – moments where it is intense, vivid, and loud, and then moments where it’s calm and meditative,’ with the layered yellow mesh forming a solidity, while at other angles – and from within looking out – it feels altogether more uplifting, airy, and less oppressive.

Campbell primarily works in Bangladesh for the Samdani Art Foundation and as chief curator of Dhaka Art Summit (DAS). This year’s DAS, held in February – which also included a work by Begum formed of suspended fishing nets – was titled “বন্যা (Bonna), meaning flood, with Campbell hoping to draw a connection between the two locations. ‘The choices made in Bangladesh will impact California, and the choices made in California will impact Bangladesh,’ she explains of two places at extreme ends of a climate-driven water crisis.

Another creative connection is Bangladeshi architect Marina Tabassum, whose Khudi Bari (Bengali for ‘tiny house’) project similarly appears in both DAS and Desert X. Tabassum’s architecture is focused upon community knowledge and construction and Khudi Bari is a simple lightweight triangulated space-frame design for a home which can be relocated when flash floods threaten chars – small islands within the Bengal delta – and the communities who live on them. 'I believe in the power of our human imaginations to seek appropriate solutions. 'In Bangladesh, communities have always been resilient in the face of changing landscapes, it is part of life here. This is also true of communities throughout the world, especially those who accept uncertainty and adapt instead of resisting and insisting on fixed ideas of the built environment,' says Tabassum. 'This is one of the most important roles of artists, architects and designers – to collaborate and assist in devising solutions that are community-based, and empathetic to the environment.'

A film by Tabassum poetically documenting the construction process of a Khudi Bari is viewable on the Desert X website, though the original intent had been to construct one of the homes in California. Campbell explains that regulations and material costs meant that ‘something that is about $500 per house in Bangladesh would cost $50,000 to show in California as an art object.’ She also notes that ‘It didn't really make sense to put that money into illustrating a low-cost design structure, but her thinking is important for audiences in California so we commissioned the film,’ with Tabussum’s artist fee going towards trucks to support the construction of Khudi Bari homes in Bangladesh. 'I would like to think that based on the philosophy of Khudi Bari, an affordable, adaptable way could be designed and built in the Californian context,' explains Tabassum. 'We recognise there are challenges, but I would also like to think these challenges can be overcome. This is what we refer to as using our ‘context-based imaginations’.

In contrast to the scale of Begum, Dyson, and Johnson, environmental artist Lauren Bon’s work The Smallest Sea With the Largest Heart is barely visible. The pool of a semi-derelict property in Palm Springs, the city at the centre of Desert X and the ideal location from which to visit all the installations, has been filled with highly saline water from the Salton Sea – a nearby man-made lake and environmental disaster – into which Bon has lowered a steel structure of a blue-whale heart which will, over the course of Desert X, metabolise into solid sculpture whilst creating energy and releasing clean water back into the atmosphere.

Artist duo Hylozoic/Desires, formed of Indian Himali Singh Soin and German David Soun Tappeser, also use a sprinkle of salt in their work Namak Nazar is a single wooden pole supporting seven trumpet-like amplifiers pointing in all directions. The pole appears to have salt growing up it as if sucked from the soil, with approaching visitors invited to press a red button to start a solar-powered sound work – a kind of call-to-prayer which weaves in mythical, folk, biblical, and political stories of salt in a prose poem connecting stories to the desert, and landscapes beyond.

This speaks to a core ideal of Desert X for Campbell: ‘rather than being defeated by a violent landscape, how do you work with it?’ These works seek to balance extremes and consider how art can shine a light upon place and nature rather than simply sit within it or use it for new narratives.

That said, the desert backdrop is aesthetically sensational, with Desert X being an increasingly important component of Palm Springs’ cultural calendar alongside Modernism Week and Coachella Festival in part because of how it celebrates the valley’s landscapes. In this, its fourth edition, works are spread across a range of sites including the beautiful Sunnylands Center & Gardens, Palm Springs itself as well as other nearby cities. As such, it acts as a creative excuse to explore parts of the valley that otherwise may not be on a visitor’s itinerary. The beauty and curiosity of the environment is only magnified by the works on show, which also provide a lens for Californians to notice and reconsider their landscape – and its history and future – afresh.

Desert X 2023 is on view until May 7 2023. desertx.org; visitgreaterpalmsprings.com

On a wooden gate leading into Buckhorn, the upstate New York property of collectors Sherry and Joel Mallin, a sign cautions trespassers that there is art ahead. Before the Mallins consigned the home and their collection of over a thousand pieces of contemporary art for auction, peppered throughout the 15-acre landscape – anointed Buckhorn Sculpture Park after they began inviting members of the public to tour the grounds – was a series of outdoor works by Louise Bourgeois, Anish Kapoor, Sol Lewitt, among others, amassed over four decades. They were arranged in a scattered fashion so as to encourage a journey of discovery. (Viewers, Sherry recalls, came dressed in sneakers rather than high heels.) 

In one area was a site-specific installation by Richard Serra; elsewhere, a purpose-built art barn completed in 2000 to rival the best contemporary art museums, housing works that could not be displayed on the limited wall space of the main house. At its fullest, the outdoor collection encompassed 70 sculptures, 31 of which will go to auction at Sotheby’s this month, following a landmark sale in London and New York of works by Robert Gober, François-Xavier Lalanne, and Yayoi Kusama.

Francis Outred, an independent art advisor who previously headed up contemporary art at Sotheby’s, first visited Buckhorn in 2007, when the Mallins were selling a Damien Hirst pill cabinet, titled Lullaby Spring. Made of stainless steel with thousands of handmade pills attached to it, the piece sold for the record price of $19.2 million.‘They really looked after everything as if it was their own,’ he recalls.‘They have six children between them, but they also had a huge amount of other babies here.’

The Mallins have known each other since they were 14-year-old students at the Bronx High School of Science, and subsequently became classmates at Cornell University. They rekindled their friendship in the early 1980s, when both were recently separated from their spouses, and eventually married. Joel, a lawyer who at one time represented Lou Reed, was already a prolific collector of surrealist art, accumulating a litany of works that Sherry, an options trader then uninitiated into the world of collecting, found unpleasant at the beginning of their relationship. 

‘The house was filled with surrealist art of the highest order and I thought it was all awful,’ she remembers. ‘It’s terribly grotesque and I hate all of it. And he said, “Well, you’re only saying that because you know nothing about art, but if you hang out with me, you’ll eventually get to understand it and you won’t feel that way.”’ The two joined a contemporary art class at New York University, and spent their first few years together collecting only Picasso prints. Sherry, who had once studied dance with Martha Graham, found herself drawn to a Cy Twombly painting from the Roman Notes series, its brushstrokes bringing to mind pirouetting dancers.

Thus began a passion for work to which the Mallins felt an inexplicable personal connection. They believe their collection is a mirror of who they are as people. They have never relied on the advice of critics or specialists, operating instead on the undefinable feelings that a piece of art evokes. 

The process can seem mysterious to outsiders. Once, during a private showing, a gallerist offered to leave the pair alone so they could discuss the piece. ‘And I said to him, “No, you don’t have to leave us alone to talk about it, we’ve already talked about it,”’ Sherry remembers. Not a single word had been exchanged between the two. 

‘But we came, we looked, we each looked separately, closely, we stepped back, and we looked at each other and we told each other immediately yes. And if you ask me why, I can’t tell you why. I don’t know,’ she says. Outred calls it their gut instinct.

The unspoken alchemy that informs the Mallins’ collecting strategy has nevertheless allowed various threads to organically emerge across the works: memory, the body, life and death, the passage of time. Outred believes the collection is difficult to qualify in terms of universal themes, but that the Mallins have often been attracted to art that you can touch and feel, that engages with the nature of human existence, and what it means to be alive. The outdoor artworks (among them pieces by Berlinde de Bruyckere, Jeppe Hein, and Dan Graham) range from the whimsical and joyous to the morbidly humorous: a neon, Perspex ‘Hell, Yes!’ by Ugo Rondinone; César’s Le Pouce; David Shrigley’s Memorial headstone in granite, inscribed with a list of grocery items: diapers, cheese, Ziploc bags, Nutella, tampons. 

Many of the artists whose works the Mallins collected became personal friends, and what they call their ‘art children’, among them the sculptor Liza Lou, whose Trailer and Closet they donated to the Brooklyn Museum and the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, and Mike and Doug Starn, who recently made portraits of the couple, and often joined holiday dinners at Buckhorn. 

‘There was always room at the table for another person, and we almost always had an extra bed somewhere,’ Sherry recalls. The pair acted as both patrons and parents, collecting works while also forging profound relationships with their creators.

As they part with the collection, there is sadness, and a sense of inevitability. They never believed that they truly owned the works, but were given the privilege of being caretakers for the time they were housed at Buckhorn. 

Lessons can be drawn from the last 40 years. Joel’s advice: ‘You shouldn’t try and make money on the art that you collect. It’s a fool’s errand.’ 

Sherry: ‘We’re not talking about building an art collection for a museum, we’re talking about living with it in your own home, so you better like it.’

Some years ago, after retiring from their positions on various museum boards, the pair continued to be sought out by art friends for their wisdom. ‘We’re not gossipers, if you tell it to us, it stays with us,’ Sherry says. What would later become known among insiders as the infamous ‘Mallin breakfast’ was born, whereby Joel and Sherry would provide counsel to artists, critics, museum directors, and gallerists at their apartment in Manhattan. 

The meetings lasted an hour, from 8.30 to 9.30, during which peace pacts were brokered between various parties, over bagels, cream cheese, smoked salmon, Joel’s scrambled eggs, fresh fruit, and coffee. Often, people came with their personal problems as well as their art problems – questions about raising a family, and what you do when you have a baby. Canvases were pressed up against the windows and covered the view of Central Park, Lou remembers. ‘For them, the scene outside was like a bad landscape painting. They cared about art and they cared about friendship. That’s the Mallins.’

 ‘A Life in Art: Sculpture from The Mallin Collection’ will go on view in Sotheby’s New York galleries from 18-23 February 2023, before all works will be included in a live auction at 10am on 22 February, and online sale which will close for bidding the following day. sothebys.com

Most artists would consider their first museum survey on home turf as an opportunity to celebrate personal successes. But for Theaster Gates, the Chicago-based artist, urbanist, musician and cultural icon it is also a chance to pay homage to the radical thinkers and creative forces who came before.  

Gates’ first American museum exhibition, ‘Theaster Gates: Young Lords and Their Traces’, opens 11 November 2022 at the New Museum in New York. In developing the show, he first drew from his native Chicago. Thinking about the local 1960s political group, Young Lords, and then about his personal cultural deities – such as bell hooks, Okwui Enwezor, Virgil Abloh, Sam Gilliam and Theaster Gates Sr, all of whom have passed – the exhibition is what Gates describes as ‘a personal pantheon’ and ‘a kind of memorial for different individuals who had an impact on my life and culture’.

The full range of Gates’ multidisciplinary practice, which spans pottery, found objects, sculpture, painting, video and performance (and was explored in Wallpaper's 2021 Theaster Gates interview) is showcased in an epic, site-specific installation that spreads over three floors. The museum becomes a communal space for preservation, remembrance and exchange. As one ventures through the show, there is an emotional cadence that prompts contemplation, whether it’s walking into a spacious room dominated by one of Gates’ libraries, in this case, 4,500 volumes belonging to the film and Slavic studies scholar Robert Bird (a friend of Gates, and former colleague at the University of Chicago, who passed away in 2020) presented on cast-iron Carnegie shelving; viewing a sample cross-section of the artist’s extensive collection of objects and ephemera, encased in 100-year old wooden vitrines from the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago; or hearing live music being played on A Heavenly Chord, Gates’ construction of a Hammond B3 organ with seven Leslie speakers suspended overhead. (The piece will be activated on most Saturdays throughout the show’s duration – check the museum's calendar.)

‘Young Lords and Their Traces’ presented me with the artistic time and space to grieve the lives of people who have been important to me. The New Museum is a site of mourning and mischief, an antidote to the darker emotions we experience when we lose someone who made us, whom we love, or who represents the things we believe in,’ Gates says. ‘Through this exhibition, I’m expressing that artists are not exempt from complex human emotions caused by death. The exhibition doesn’t feel like a survey of objects that I’ve made in the past. Instead, it feels much more like a survey of the ways the material world and the ancestral world come together. Art moves us because art functions as a visible mechanism for the display of deep emotion. Mourning and loss were emotions understood before there was art.’ 

He adds, ‘Making, remembrance, and the accumulation of one’s things are cultural tasks that demonstrate that art and loss have always been aligned. I hope those who experience the exhibition will consider the importance the material world plays in honouring those close to their hearts. I hope they are moved to create minor museums or shrines to those who had a profound impact on their lives, elevating the material to a higher plane. I consider creation the antithesis of death, but I am also moved to remain connected to and conversant with the great spirits who have left us. One could say that my being engaged with the elegiac is oblique, but it’s my way of keeping people alive.’ 

Viewing 20 years of work through this lens certainly reiterates Gates’ profound ability to convey meaning and significance through objects. ‘‘Young Lords and Their Traces” demonstrates a deepening of my artistic interests in objecthood,’ continues the artist. ‘In Chicago, the personal objects, the traces and the collections were always informing our work with our building projects. This show allows visitors access to the part of my brain that has always been engaged with the intimacies of other people’s lives and their possessions. 

‘While there isn’t much of a divergence, I do think this exhibition sharpens my commitment to the archive, ceramics, and narratives associated with the histories embedded in materials. This survey feels much more “essential” in its pronouncement of some of my artistic investments. The question of religious social form and how it is embedded within the history of art demonstrates more profoundly that an object, like the cross, can both say so much and hide so much about people’s deepest intentions, dogmas, and alliances. I wanted to demonstrate that my belief in form-making is as deep as my belief in believing.’

The unmissable show is complemented by 'Vestment', an exhibition of new tar paintings by Gates at Gagosian Gallery's uptown space. In this series, the artist explores religious iconography as politically galvanising devices, while exploring spiritual and stylistic hierarchies and the symbolism and universalism of nationhood. Experimental in colour and made using roofing techniques in homage to Gates' father's profession as a roofer, this new body of work looks back as much as it looks forward.

‘Theaster Gates: Young Lords and Their Traces’, until 5 February 2023, New Museum, New York. newmuseum.org, theastergates.com

‘Theaster Gates: Vestment’, 11 November–23 December 2022 Gagosian. 976 Madison Avenue, New York. gagosian.com