Antwerp has been a hub for collectors for centuries—research has shown that as early as the 1500s, 90 percent of homeowners in Antwerp owned at least one portrait or religious painting. Against this backdrop, Art Antwerp, while founded in 2021, has a deep legacy. The fifth edition, which took place from December 12 through 14 with a preview day on December 11, gathered 79 galleries from 11 countries via an invite-only model that didn’t draw boundaries between emerging and established.

Belgian galleries made up 42 percent of the exhibitor roster, with the Netherlands and France being the most represented countries thereafter at 25 percent and 16 percent, respectively. There were 20 new galleries in the mix, including Night Café from the U.K., Alzueta Gallery from Spain and In Situ – fabienne leclerc from France. Of the about 270 artists featured in the fair, 16 percent were under 35.

The fair embraced Antwerp’s art scene, with 18 percent of participating galleries based in the city itself. Sofie Van de Velde participates in Art Brussels but, according to the gallery’s artist liaison Theresia Wastiau, sees Art Antwerp as “more intimate, more spacious.” Wastiau also lauded the “hometown advantage.” Among the many compelling offerings at the booth were a coated glass, acrylic resin and aluminum piece by Filip Vervaet; Klaas Rommelaere’s hand-embroidery on cotton; and an Ives Maes UV print on multiplex with oil paint, graphite and afrormosia wood that sold on the preview day.

Koen Leemans, director at Antwerp-based Keteleer, also spoke of the fair’s local appeal and the strong interest in young and emerging artists, of which they showed several. Keteleer had the second-largest booth and showed new works by 16 artists, spanning inkjet prints on rag paper by Paul Kooiker for €1,600, an acrylic on cotton work by Naofumi Maruyama for €40,000 and a Stephan Balkenhol painted wood sculpture for €64,000.

A third local gallery, Gallery FIFTY ONE, mounted a solo booth—a repeat decision after featuring Bruno V. Roels last year. “It’s quieter than the big fairs like Paris Photo, which is very, very crowded,” gallery assistant director Fanny Snijders told Observer. This year, the gallery showed work by Belgian artist Katrien De Blauwer: self-described as a photographer without a camera, she assembles images from mid-20th-century magazines, her signature being truncated faces and female silhouettes. The series of all new works was made specifically for the fair. Unique images started at €1,200, while the blown-up editions were priced at €3,000. The image that graced the cover of the gallery’s publication Blue Bruises was sold on the preview day.

Exhibitor Lelong & Co. shows at many fairs in major hubs like Paris, Basel and Miami, but gallery director Nathalie Berghege feels that those destinations are not the only ones worth exploring. “It’s nice to have these kinds of fairs compared to big fairs; it’s another opportunity to discover artists under nice conditions,” Berghege told Observer. “Belgian people are very open… so it’s important that we come to them, not only that they come to us.” Moreover, she added, it’s a way “to enable younger artists to be part of younger fairs.” The prices at the booth ranged from accessible works on paper by Pierre Alechinsky (€3,000-€4,000) to a 2024 bronze sculpture by Jaume Plensa (€320,000). Christine Safa, whose work is currently on view at the gallery space in Paris, was represented at the booth by a small painting (€9,000).

Gallery Richard Saltoun keeps a bracing pace with 22 fairs per year—Frieze Masters, TEFAF and Abu Dhabi Art among them—in a rotation that includes less flashy fairs like Art Antwerp. “It’s really interesting to test smaller markets,” said gallery rep Tessa Cranfield, noting that Richard Saltoun also participates in the similarly sized Vienna Contemporary. Their booth focused on artists from or with close ties to Belgium, including a piece by Polish-Romanian André Cadere that had historic significance, being on view outside the Internationaal Cultureel Centrum (ICC) in Antwerp in 1975, listed at €180,000; nearby, Belgian artist Jacqueline Poncelet’s pieces ranged from €8,000 to €20,000. These were mixed in with selected works by Henri Chopin, Fernand Khnopff and Francis Picabia.

Stigter Van Doesburg from Amsterdam showed three female artists (the gallery’s overall roster is two-thirds women). Bobbi Essers and Erika Peucelle, whose oil on canvas works ranged from €4,000 to €12,000, are in their 20s, while mid-career artist  Dina Danish sold a €13,000 hand-sewn embroidery textile on the preview day. Gallerist David Van Doesburg told Observer: “I think in Belgium, it’s [more common] that people in society buy art and collect. In the Netherlands, I think it’s still about class. It’s far more democratic here… culture is a part of everyday life.”

The latest edition of Art Antwerp marked the debut of the Art Antwerp Acquisition Prize, borrowing from a newly minted tradition initiated at Art Brussels. A work of art valued at up to €10,000 was donated to the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp (KMSKA), funded by Delen Private Bank. There were no criteria regarding the artist’s age, gender or nationality. The prize is a win/win/win: it allows an artist to have their work included in an institutional collection, the gallery gets a sale and the museum adds to its holdings. This year’s prize was awarded to French artist Laure Prouvost for her floral trompe l’oeil oil on mirror piece Sweaty Cuddle. Represented by Galerie Nathalie Obadia in Brussels and Paris, Prouvost is already a well-established name, having received the Turner Prize in 2013 and represented France at the Venice Biennale in 2019. Next year, she will have a solo exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris.

Other new features at this year’s edition included a free Art Advisory Desk, which helped the public navigate the fair in a gesture to make collecting less intimidating to those who are curious or keen to find works within a specific price range or aesthetic genre.

The fair was backgrounded by some Belgian art world turmoil. In October, the Flemish government announced plans to dissolve M HKA—Belgium’s oldest contemporary art museum, which opened in 1985—a move that has been met with fierce pushback. Its collection of 8,000 works is supposed to move to the contemporary art museum in Ghent; the merger is due to happen by 2028, in tandem with canceling a multi-million euro project for a new M HKA building that had been in the works for years. “Nobody is happy about it,” Fanny Snijders from Gallery FIFTY ONE told Observer. “I’m not sure what it’s going to give in the long term—how it will change, if it will change.” M HKA senior curator Anne-Claire Schmitz called the move “explosive” and “disturbing,” especially because it reflected “the diminishing power of cultural institutions” more widely.

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• Observer’s December Art Fair Calendar

Distressed clothing once carried a jolt to social norms—even in the everyday moment where your mother asked with horror why you were wearing ripped jeans when you could afford denim from whole cloth. “Dirty Looks: Desire and Decay in Fashion” at the Barbican in London (on view through January 25, 2026) examines the signification of dirty as a shorthand for transgressing polished aesthetics, for dismantling impeccable craftsmanship and for grim global consumption habits by way of 60 designers or design houses.

“Dirty Looks”—a most clever title!—is not the first exhibition at the London venue that has looked at fashion as a form of judgment: “The Vulgar: Fashion Redefined” was exhibited here in 2017 (Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren as well as Jean Paul Gaultier crossover in both shows). What overlap there may be between dirty and vulgar is not examined here, however, though the idea of dirtiness (as, say, sluttiness, for example) continues to be part of the way women are assessed and dismissed.

Dirt is considered with largesse and subdivided thematically, with heritage designers in the upper galleries and emerging designers in the lower galleries. The show opens with a rather on-the-nose display of dirt-flecked Wellingtons belonging to Kate Moss and Queen Elizabeth II, respectively. The mise-en-scène thereafter is unfortunately quite disappointing—on the bottom two levels, pale draped sheets serve as an unremarkable backdrop, a missed opportunity to create a dramatic dirt-as-mess effect.

Although parsed in many ways, dirt is perhaps most eyebrow-raising when made synonymous with bodily fluids (this is deemed “the last taboo in fashion” by the wall text). Di Petsa’s underwear with menstrual blood stains or piss-darkened denim or leaking nipples from the My Body is a Labyrinth S/S 2025 collection would very likely create double takes if worn out and about. The biocouture of Alice Potts takes a more subtle approach to bodily residue: she filters human sweat into a solution that blossoms into crystals. Here, the solution is applied to a vintage discolored Madame Grès dress, which has crusted over with a glimmering mineralogy. Stains as errors of sloppiness, like Margiela’s lipstick print-dotted white menswear button-down or nebulous beige splotch on white skirt—which look like genuine accidents—contrast with the more inauthentic-looking faux grease stain on a Moschino tank top emblazoned with Antica Pizzeria.

Dirt is also interpreted as distressed: take a Junya Watanabe weathered denim patchwork dress (S/S 2019) or a Comme des Garçons look (A/W 1982) in which a black knitwear top with a hole is paired with a perforated skirt. The split between Eastern/Western attitudes is illuminated here, the former embracing wabi-sabi philosophies and a refusal to discard something because it no longer looks flawless. A 1993 Viktor and Rolf silhouette is actually shedding tufts and fraying sequins, almost like a pet, its huge skirt layered with a thin, fragile web coming undone. Dirt is also depicted as char, exemplified by an Issey Miyake 1998 Pleats Please white dress sullied with burn marks, created in collaboration with artist Cai Guo-Qiang, or Robert Wun’s singed 2024 yellow silk haute couture look.

Less aesthetic and more symbolic is dirt as the burden of a wasteful industry, of which fashion is one of the top three polluting offenders worldwide; its excesses quite literally end up in the dirt, in landfill. The show posits that some designers (Buzigahill, Miguel Androver, Marine Serre) are trying to remix discarded clothes in interesting ways, but most offerings look exactly like clothes that no one wanted, reconfigured into questionable hybrids. Similarly, there are examples of designers repurposing and recycling objects into the shape of garments, bringing to mind the ‘unusual materials’ challenge from Project Runway, from reused spoons to flattened bottle caps and plastic bags. This results in dubious wearability. Maison Margiela makes an appearance with a vest of broken porcelain (S/S 1989). (In many ways, the show might be subtitled “Margiela,” since so many of the label’s looks involve intentional stains, explicit dishevelment and peculiar materials.)

Dirt, as explored by Hussein Chalayan, is perhaps the most poetic and innovatively ahead of everyone else. In his graduate collection in 1993, “The Tangent Flows,” he featured garments buried for months in his friend’s London backyard, relegating garments to organic matter. There are four encrusted pieces hung here above a rectangle of soil, harmonizing fabric and earth. Twenty years later, contemporary designers engage with the same themes but less impactfully: Solitude Studios’ After the Orgy (2025) uses clothes and accessories immersed in a bog to highlight the unpredictable nature of the design process when it is mediated by Mother Earth and its microorganisms. These browned, rumpled and oxidized components read more like a school science project than a conceptual fashion exercise—what was pioneering 22 years ago is less so now.

The perfect exit music, post-exhibition? “Dirrty” by Christina Aguilera.

More exhibition reviews

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• At the Getty Research Institute, the Guerrilla Girls Mark 40 Years of Calling Out the Art World

• Musée Marmottan Monet’s “The Empire of Sleep” Considers Slumber as an Artistic Trope

• “Thirst” at The Wellcome Collection Dives Deep into the Politics of Water

• Kader Attia’s Poetics of Repair in “Shattering and Gathering our Traces”

Tate Modern’s “Nigerian Modernism” aims to disrupt the way we think of art history—not only in Africa but globally. Featuring 59 artists working over a period of 50 years, the 300 artworks in the show “open up and complicate what Nigerian identity is,” according to curator Osei Bonsu. He describes the exhibition as “cultural restoration in real time” because Nigerian Modernism was “relegated to a footnote in Modernism.” The show corrects that oversight.

Nigeria was a British colony from 1914 to 1960, and the exhibition extends to either end of that period and into the 1990s. Artists were wrestling with Eurocentric influences throughout, and there’s a kind of wrenching back from Picasso’s appropriation of the African mask as well as a widely reductive view of African art as ethnographic. Ultimately, both Pan-African pride and hyperlocal communities persisted despite colonial rule.

The first room features portraiture, including Aina Onabolu’s depictions of Lagos society figures. His 1955 Portrait of an African Man depicts a Yoruba gentleman in an elegant agbada; across the room, Akinola Lasekan’s 1957 Portrait of Chief J.D. Akeredolu represents the namesake artist wearing the same type of garment. In turn, Akeredolu’s thorn carvings are shown in a vitrine in the center of the room. Fascinating too are the facsimiles reproduced of Akinola Lakesan’s political cartoons, darkly “joking” about regionalism and tribalism. In the next room, Ben Enwonwu’s paintings span dancing girls and solemn men—in a kind of academic realism—which stand in contrast with his seven Igbo-influenced wooden sculptures, bisecting the room.

Nigeria’s newfound independence inspired artistic groups to retool art education with indigenous representation in mind. The Zaria Arts Society, located in the northwest of the country, rebelled against Eurocentric curricula; the journal Black Orpheus was an outgrowth of this thinking, and brightly covered copies are on view, filled with articles and literary criticism reflecting what Bonsu calls “polyphonic networks.” These journals are surrounded by works including: a 1982 screenprint by Emmanuel Okechukwu Odita that translated the drapery of traditional clothing into abstract forms against a deep yellow and green backdrop,  Jimo Akolo’s 1962 Fulani Horsemen featuring three figures astride equine companions in green, pink, red, and blue, and Yusuf Grillo’s moody, ethereal, and magnetic deep indigo oil on board of a female figure. Nearby is Bruce Onobrakpeya’s The Fourteen Stations of The Cross, a linocut triptych from 1969 surrounded by 14 prints depicting Christ from crucifixion to burial within Yoruba architectural motifs. At age 93, Onobrakpeya was in attendance at the press preview and in fine form.

A room dedicated to Eko—the precolonial name of Lagos—showcases a selection of the incredible photographs JD ‘Okhai Ojeikere took in the 1970s: he made about a thousand, all sculptural varieties of women’s hair designs set against a white background. There are also vinyl record sleeves of Nigerian highlife—a musical genre from the 1950s and ‘60s fusing Latin, European and African traditions—mainly featuring the output of Rex Lawson, as well as images of the patterned buildings (Kingsway Stores, offices for a shipping firm) in a tropical modernism style, dreamed up by [non-Nigerian] architects James Cubitt and T.P. Bennett.

In an exploration of the Oshogbo School, Bonsu notes the “marginalization of those without arts education,” which these artists did not have. Viewers are introduced to the colorful embroideries of Nike Davies-Okundaye, Jimoh Buraimoh’s beautiful beadwork pieces alluding to Yoruba ceremonial cloaks and Twins Seven Seven’s intricate ink drawings of fantastical spirits and ghosts drawn from Yoruba mythologies.

The exhibition also focuses on ‘uli,’ a painting tradition from southeastern Nigeria, based on natural forms that have been historically passed down between women during this period. Uche Okeke’s 1961 Ana Mmuo [Land of the Dead] employs vivid colors, including yellow, orange and red, to summon Igbo spirits and is thought to be prescient in relation to the losses from the outbreak of the Nigerian Civil War in 1967, six years in the future. Obiora Udechukwu’s 1970s-era line drawings in ink are minimalist, including one example featuring a woman’s face with pursed lips, a nose ring, and a squinting gaze, but his four-panel work from 1993, Our Journey in ink and acrylic, is much more epic and vibrant, unfurling with a long yellow swirl. This work is placed alongside wooden sculptures decorated with Indigenous graphics by Ghana-born El Anatsui, who taught at the University of Nigeria in Nsukka as of 1975.

The exhibition concludes with a room dedicated exclusively to Uzo Egonu, a boldly graphic painter who lived in Britain from the 1940s until his death. He melded European Modernism with Igbo sculpture in a figurative/abstract hybrid. In addition to calm scenes of a woman reading or two friends in the middle of hair plaiting, Egonu’s “Stateless People” paintings (of a musician, an artist, a writer) have been reunited here for the first time in 40 years.

In the novel Every Day is for the Thief, Nigerian-American author Teju Cole writes about the protagonist’s delight in finding a music and bookshop while visiting Nigeria. As he scans its offerings, he thinks, “And there is really only one word for what I feel about these new contributions to the Lagosian scene: gratitude. They are emerging, these creatives, in spite of everything; and they are essential because they are the signs of hope in a place that, like all other places on the limited earth, needs hope.” The same could be said about this exhibition.

The mythology of sleep has been intrinsic to human narratives as early as biblical times: Adam was asleep during Eve’s creation, Noah was disabled by catatonic drunkenness, Job suffered from insomnia during a crisis of faith, the apostles dozed in the Garden of Olives. These episodes are all referenced in the exhibition “L’Empire du Sommeil” (or “The Empire of Sleep”), on view at Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris through March 1, 2026. The show spotlights sleep as a respite throughout all stages of life, from the oblivion of newborns to the haunting specter of aging and death. Monet painted both ends—his baby son Jean clutching a doll (1868) and his ailing wife Camille enshrined in a white veil (1879) at the height of her bedridden suffering.

The exhibition text reminds viewers that sleep takes up about a third of our lives; given this significant consumption of hours, it deserves to be pondered and studied. (Wrestling with being unaware consumed both Hamlet—“To die, to sleep; To sleep: perchance to dream”—and Ottessa Moshfegh’s nameless narrator in her breakout 2018 novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation.) Laura Bossi, a neurologist and science historian, curated the show alongside the museum’s director of collections, Sylvie Carlier, and curatorial assistant Anne-Sophie Luyton. “The sleeping model is the ideal model,” Bossi remarked, adding that the artist can supply a “very tender look, trying to preserve a living souvenir”—although “there is always a sort of ambiguity” in the ethics of that vulnerability.

In keeping with the focus of the museum’s collections, the exhibition, which comprises 130 works, extends from the Enlightenment to the Great War with a smattering of historical and contemporary works thrown in. One example of the latter is the opening painting hung in the hallway as a prelude to the exhibition: Paula Rego’s illustration for Jean Rhys’ book Wide Sargasso Sea. It was modeled on her own family reposing on a brightly lit veranda in view of cool blue waters in Portugal, preceding the household’s ultimate uprooting to England. Towards the end of the exhibition, Kiki Smith’s 2001 work Sleep Walker, a woman drawn on Nepalese paper, includes a written component at the lower edge: “she thought if she just could keep her mind moving through her stillness she could awaken.”

The exhibition otherwise mostly sticks to works from the 19th Century. Its most serene depictions of sleep include Michael Ancher’s La Sieste, its subject a woman resting alfresco on a bench amidst garden greenery, hung toe-to-toe with Jean-Baptiste Chatigny’s young man in repose at the base of a tree. Perhaps no one is as placid as the two portraits of pets—an etching of a snuggled dog by David Hockney and a pencil drawing of a comatose cat by Gwen John.

Additionally endearing: John Everett Millais’s painting of a little girl who has nodded off in a pew during a sermon, her head tilting above her prim red cape and fur muff. Max Beckmann’s 1918 etching of himself and his friends yawning, their mouths collectively open and hands not quite covering the chasm of their oral cavities, is particularly amusing. Louis-Léopold Boilly’s lithograph Le Songe de Tartini depicts Giuseppe Tartini making a pact with a horned and winged devil—perched on the end of his bed while he’s tucked in, in a white nightgown—to help come up with his best composition (The Devil’s Trill Sonata).

These droll moments, however, are offset by works depicting a kind of feverish limbo. In La Somnambule, an 1865 oil painting by Courbet, a young woman’s direct gaze at the viewer belies her seemingly possessed and altered state. The oil painting Le Noctambule by Edvard Munch is a self-portrait in which the artist’s sunken eyes and concave posture evoke a zombie-like fitfulness, reflective of the artist’s troubles with sleeping and mental health alike. The stuporous women slumped over in a fin-de-siècle opium den in a painting by Gaetano Previati highlight the hazard inherent in escapist intoxicants.

More disturbing are paintings that show sleep as a kind of desperation. Fernand Pelez’s painting features a child selling violets in the street, too physically exhausted to uphold himself in his commerce and slumbering in a doorway: “it’s one of the few paintings in this exhibition that takes into account a social critique,” Bossi stated of this depiction of poverty and oppression. Edouard Vuillard’s La Berceuse, once in Picasso’s collection, is not of a woman cradling her baby, as the title might indicate in its allusion to a lullaby or soothing rocking motion. Rather, it is an older mother consoling her bedridden adult daughter—shown faceless with chagrin—who has lost her child in a miscarriage.

More extreme still are the unsettling depictions of death, framed as “eternal sleep,” be it Nadar’s eerie photograph of the deceased French writer Victor Hugo (eyes closed and white beard and chest bathed in light), Léon Cogniet’s Tête de jeune fille morte (her lips breathlessly, jarringly agog), or Ferdinand Hodler’s model-mistress Valentine Godé-Darel clenched in evident pain from cancer (which the painter chronicled obsessively in a series of 120 paintings).

A less mortal angle mined in the exhibition is the inscrutability of the dream—the sheer enigma of the unconscious. “Dreams are really the fabric—the construction—of our creativity,” Bossi noted. In the 19th Century, the scientific study of dreams debuted with the works of French scholar and physician Alfred Maury (1861) and Marquis d’Hervey de Saint Denys (1867), the latter of whom influenced Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, published in 1899. Also during the 19th Century, the neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot experimented with hypnosis on so-called “hysterics” at the Salpêtrière Hospital. For all of these practitioners, publications of which are shown in the exhibition, dreams were deemed revelatory of the past rather than prophetic of the future: a reflection of inner life buried beneath the surface.

The exhibition suffers most in its Eros section, where the idea of the erotic—including within Greek mythology—avoids critiquing the violence imposed upon women. Some works are hard to parse: Ditlev Blunck’s The Nightmare from 1846 shows a woman in bed, her chest exposed, her expression one of ecstasy, with a rabbit on her torso and the fabric of her canopy bed askew. Is this a sly, amusing way to champion a woman’s pleasure? Or is she creepily being ravaged and primed for a male gaze? Fairy tales like Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella are also referenced but not reframed as outdated for their patriarchal nature.

The final grouping of the show features the bed itself—an all-purpose place of birth, love, illness and death—and a locus of intimacy and surrender. The graphite-and-watercolor work of an unmade bed by Delacroix in 1824 was deployed for the exhibition’s catalogue cover, doubling as an elegant study of drapery but also “evoking something troubling” per Bossi—a restlessness, so to speak. By contrast, Avigdor Arikha’s pastel of an empty bed is evidence “of a successful marriage,” Bossi noted, with two pairs of slippers symbolically aligned at the base. Balthus’s La Phalène, articulated in casein tempera of a naked young woman about to extinguish the flame of an oil lamp by her bedside, is the concluding work in the exhibition, although in fact the first work Bossi requested to loan for the show. It is fitting that the beginning and the end meet, an exhibition cycle and a sleep cycle in unison.

More exhibition reviews

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• Kader Attia’s Poetics of Repair in “Shattering and Gathering our Traces”

• Tracing the Origins of Emma Kohlmann’s Arcane Figures

• ‘Body Vessel Clay’ Offers a Material Portal to the Ancestral Plane

• Chiharu Shiota Weaves Historical Memory, Body and Belonging in “Two Home Countries”

Flattering visions of America are not exactly a dime a dozen these days, but “Wayne Thiebaud. American Still Life” (on view through January 18, 2026) in London at the Courtauld Gallery provides one such respite from the present turmoil. The Californian artist (1920–2021) broke onto the scene in the 1960s with depictions of lavish Boston creme pies and cheerful gumball dispensers, refashioning what was worthy of being commemorated in paint. In fact, Thiebaud saw his work as being in conversation with that classical artistic archetype of the still life as practiced by the likes of Paul Cézanne and Édouard Manet. Thiebaud reframed American consumer culture as its own sacred offering. Crowned “the laureate of lunch counters,” there is a kind of localized earnestness to his work that is deeply touching, one that makes other American cornerstones like social inequality and strident ambition fully recede. Even a loaded symbolic choice like the jackpot machine, painted in 1962, is posited as economic optimism as opposed to delusion or compulsion.

To access the Wayne Thiebaud show on the third floor of the Courtauld, visitors have to pass through rooms of 20th-century art. On the left side of the entryway of the temporary exhibition space is a young woman powdering herself in an 1888 painting by Georges Seurat, a work of pointillism with a soft color palette. Elsewhere in the room are van Gogh’s Peach Trees in Blossom (1889) and Claude Monet’s Shoreline of Antibes (1888). These delicate canvases serve as a fitting prelude to the pastel insouciance of the American painter’s oeuvre. However, within the exhibition itself, Thiebaud’s work is likened to that of Giorgio Morandi, an Italian painter and printmaker known for his still-life paintings in subtle, muted hues, where carafes and vases stand with quiet pride against monochrome backdrops.

The first painting on view in the exhibition shows a blearier, harsher brushstroke and darker palette than one is accustomed to with Thiebaud: his 1956-59 Meat Counter is densely articulated relative to the airy restraint later used for a mug of coffee, a cold breakfast cereal or waiting cones of ice cream. It contrasts sharply with his similarly themed Delicatessen Counter from 1962, with its prim stacks of cheeses and assemblages of sausages. Thiebaud quickly graduates to a luxuriant yet lightweight hand, deemed “buttery brushstrokes conjuring the subject of the creamy cakes themselves.” Although Pop Art was contemporaneous to when he practiced—and similarly examined tokens of Americana—Thiebaud’s work shared none of the polished slickness ascribed to the movement. He does allude to the homogeneity of food production but willfully disrupts it with minute diverging details. That attention to peculiarities separates him from the mechanized themes and approaches alike of other artists.

Thiebaud’s work isn’t just about its inanimate subjects but also about plenty and bounty. The profusion of sweets spurs a rush of Veruca Salt-level greed for sensual pleasure. Even the non-comestibles, like a panorama of yo-yos, seem almost edible with their swirls and stars, as decorous as the neighboring cakes. Through these multiples, his world is rendered colorful and palatable. That feeling of plenty, threaded through with the ordinary appetites, is augmented by the referential formal qualities at play. As the wall text notes of the peppermint counter, “display windows packed with sweets are like abstract paintings in their own right.” In Thiebaud’s Four Pinball Machines, the square backglasses double as winks to Frank Stella and Ellsworth Kelly.

But Thiebaud’s work is also interesting to recast within today’s obsession with food photography. On Instagram, that hashtag alone has 122 million posts. One thinks of Laila Gohar and her stylized food installations or the New York bakery sensation From Lucie with her frosted flowered creations. Aestheticized treats are just as much relished visually—that sensuality is as much a pleasure as actual consumption. Although as someone who himself worked at a restaurant, there is the sense that Thiebaud had an understanding of hospitality as a lens. Becca Schuh wrote in her essay Bad Waitress: “I’ve been privy to countless conversations about how intellectual labor is labor, about how someone needs to do the sitting around and thinking and theorizing, with the thought underlying this being: and it certainly wouldn’t be the people who carry things for a living.” (Perhaps speaking to this tension between physical and intellectual, in the exhibition catalogue texts about Thiebaud’s work, the word “belie”—to fail to give a true impression of something—is recurrent, as if his work has to smuggle in meaning that is otherwise not possible to perceive at the surface level.) Although Thiebaud’s canvases are never peopled, there’s a sense that service has its beauty. Recategorizing the quotidian from unremarkable to resplendent is in function of appreciating a certain kind of routine—overlooked—labor.

In an accompanying annex section on the first floor in the Drawings Gallery is “Wayne Thiebaud. Delights,” focusing on the artist’s 1965 portfolio of 17 prints, which showcase his adeptness as a draughtsman and printmaker. (In the two decades before becoming a painter, Thiebaud worked as an illustrator, cartoonist and art director.) The etchings are absolutely lovely, presenting the cordial signage for ice-cold watermelon, a comforting plate of bacon and eggs and salt-and-pepper dispensers on a diner table. Many etchings were hand-colored in watercolor, pastel and crayon, in a gentle and appealing palette. The prints capture the richness of their subject more concisely than the paintings, and the medium feels like a genuinely fresh approach even to the very same pictorial mise-en-scène. Thiebaud compared the act of drawing—relative to painting—to translating a language: a different cadence and texture, but the same meaning.

More exhibition reviews

• “Thirst” at The Wellcome Collection Dives Deep into the Politics of Water

• Kader Attia’s Poetics of Repair in “Shattering and Gathering our Traces”

• Tracing the Origins of Emma Kohlmann’s Arcane Figures

• ‘Body Vessel Clay’ Offers a Material Portal to the Ancestral Plane

• Chiharu Shiota Weaves Historical Memory, Body and Belonging in “Two Home Countries”

Artissima (Artissima Internazionale d’Arte Contemporanea di Torino for completists) returned last week with a roster of 176 participating galleries to the Oval Lingotto Fiere—originally built for the speed skating competitions of the 2006 Olympic Winter Games—in an industrial district of Turin. It’s a city where contemporary art has long set the pace for cultural innovation across Italy. The first contemporary art museum in Italy, Castello di Rivoli, was established here in 1984, 10 years prior to the launch of Artissima. The Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo opened almost concurrently with the fair’s debut, and the Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea (GAM) was already flourishing. Artissima came about as a market platform, but equally functioned as a complement to these budding institutions.

The fair was directed for the fourth year by Luigi Fassi, who nonetheless introduced himself as “100 percent a curator.” He first began working with Artissima by overseeing the Present Future section. Since about 2007, Artissima has only had curators as its directors—“which is very telling about the DNA, the spirit of the fair. I’m trying to strengthen this curatorial identity,” Fassi told Observer. He pointed out that more than 50 curators contributed to shaping this edition of the fair, working across its various sections and offsite projects.

“Obviously it is 100 percent a market platform. It has to be, it’ll always be. But I think it’s also an interpretation of what the market is about. I think you can be instrumental for the participating galleries by introducing them to curators, to institutions… It’s important to keep mixing these two sides. We have to work as a service platform.” As for those the fair targets, Fassi noted, “We try to be inclusive towards a middle-class kind of collector, the Italian and international bourgeoisie. Collecting culture in Italy has always been a middle-class game. We all grew up in Italy, regardless of our income, in apartments where our grandparents and our parents had paintings hanging on the wall. So it’s really ingrained. It’s not necessarily like this everywhere, not even in Europe. In Italy, it’s our culture.”

Although this distinctly Italian sensibility grounds the fair’s context, Fassi pointed out that the majority of participating galleries were not Italian. “It’s like 60 percent international, 40 percent Italian. There are not that many regional fairs where the local players are a minority.” The fair is publicly owned, though it doesn’t receive any public money; it belongs to Fondazione Torino Musei, alongside major museum institutions. “I don’t have to respond to a CEO asking me to generate more money. This is my plus. I can reinvest whatever I earn into the fair, in favor of the galleries. If you don’t have to generate money for shareholders, then you think differently.”

As a curator, Fassi had high expectations for the booth presentations. “One work less is better than one work more,” he said. There were around 30 monographic booths, which he noted “gives you an idea of the level of trust the galleries have towards artists, because obviously it’s a bit more risky to come and have just one artist, but it’s fantastic for collectors. Collectors do love that, because they can really delve into the practice of the artist.” The fair also featured dialogues, including one from London-based gallery Alice Amati, which brought together Romanian-born, Vienna-based painter Paul Robas—whose works ranged from €3,000-6,000 and sold during the preview day—and Italian sculptor Ilaria Vinci, based in Zurich, whose celestial-inspired birthday cake sculptures ranged from €2,500-€4,000 and drew particular attention. Amati, presenting for the second time at the fair after graduating from the New Entries section, noted, “I’m originally Italian, so it makes sense to connect with the scene here.” She described herself as being in a “testing phase” with fairs and plans to return not only to Artissima but also NADA Miami in December.

Representing the Turin scene was Biasutti & Biasutti, founded in 2000 by Attilio Biasutti with his son Giuseppe and daughter Paola. The gallery presented a project on the Arte Povera movement with four artists engaging with nature: Piero Gilardi (€150,000-450,000), Giovanni Anselmo (€10,000-400,000), Giulio Paolini (€10,000-70,000) and Mario Merz (€40,000-400,000), including his emblematic Fibonacci series. Paolo Biasutti noted that during Turin’s art week there were “good vibrations,” but that “Turin is a city with a magic,” adding that “with all the difficulties of the moment, we have to overcome things, and [the fair] is a way to overcome things.” The gallery also participates in Bologna’s Arte Fiera, although Biasutti admitted it draws a more national crowd.

More international in scope was Thomas Dane Gallery, which also shows annually at Frieze and Art Basel. Senior director Federica Sheehan told Observer that the gallery, which participated in Artissima from 2010 to 2012, returned in 2023 after opening a Naples location in 2018. “We’ve noticed an increase in foreign visitors,” she said of this edition. The nearby Pinacoteca Agnelli presented a work by one of the gallery’s artists, Paul Pfeiffer, who realized a project on the Pista 500 billboard in collaboration with Artissima. Pfeiffer’s work at the booth featured a deconstructed Justin Bieber body, which became “the most photographed work of the booth… maybe of the fair,” Sheehan said, noting its focus on “religion and pop media at the same time.” Still, photographs by Luigi Ghirri (€11,000) sold first and briskly during the preview day.

Among the New Entries section, which featured 12 emerging international galleries with less than five years of activity, was PİLEVNELİ—founded by Murat Pilevneli in 2017 in Istanbul’s Dolapdere district—appearing for the first time with work by Bora Akıncıtürk (€6,000-€10,000). Pilevneli admitted to being new to the Turin scene but observed that “in the end, all fairs are very similar. The only change is some are more local and some are international.” He described Turin as being on the “local” side of the spectrum but was pleased to encounter Turkish collectors. Akıncıtürk, meanwhile, played with the notion of the fair itself, noting that “conceptually, today’s fairs are generally this dystopian ecological hypercapitalist [thing].” His work, drawn from found online images, takes a “Pop Art-y, kinda flashy colorful” approach—depicting, in this instance, a pair of glimmering secondhand Margiela boots from Vinted and a lesbian pornstar-turned-activist. I think [the work] touches on the market because it is especially about late-stage capitalism,” he added, acknowledging the bottom line underpinning even the most high-minded aesthetics in such a context.

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Today, the blue light emitted by smartphones in the dark is, sadly, the closest contemporary equivalent to a candlelit glow. But centuries ago, the hauntingly beautiful paintings of Georges de La Tour evoked an otherworldly luminescence that remains spellbinding to behold today. The Musée Jacquemart-André in Paris is currently exhibiting the spectacular work of the 17th-century French painter often equated with Caravaggio (also exhibited at the museum in 2018), though he is very much his own icon.

“From Shadow to Light,” a not-quite-retrospective, will be the first devoted to the artist in France since an exhibition at the Grand Palais in 1997. Bringing together around thirty paintings and graphic works, the exhibition pulls thematic threads, partly motivated by the fact that scholars contest the chronology of La Tour’s work. The earliest painting today dates from 1645—less than ten years before his death—and his preceding output is only partially known through historical records and inventories.

La Tour (1593-1652) was incredibly successful in his own time, painting for elite patrons and collectors, including the Dukes of Lorraine, Cardinal Richelieu and even King Louis XIII. Despite this flourishing, La Tour fell off the radar after his death in 1652, and it was not until the early 20th Century that art historians rediscovered and championed his work. Gail Feigenbaum, co-curator of “From Shadow to Light” with Pierre Curie, notes there are “decades with no information” about the painter’s work. “The facts with La Tour are really slippery,” she admitted, by virtue of only having access to—at best—a quarter of his extant work.

To fill out the exhibition, comparative works by contemporaries of La Tour, including work he likely saw and might have been influenced by—or sometimes the inverse, the timelines being difficult to retrace—situate the painter in a wider artistic era. While La Tour’s chosen themes were recurrent within this time, his gently somber stylization is uniquely his own. He didn’t invent the concealed candle trope, but his effervescent glow is unparalleled. With him, light is not a vehicle to brighten a scene but “becomes the true subject of the painting,” the wall text notes.

In the first room, L’argent Versé by La Tour evokes a tense scene with six candlelit figures congregating around a table on which coins and a basket of money act as a centripetal force to their antsy gestures and heavy leaning. Juxtaposed across the way is a painting by Jean Le Clerc, whose Concert nocturne features an animated tavern in which musicians and lovers cavort around a candlelit table, each absorbed in their own interactions: amorously or worriedly. The sense of group dynamic in each is rousing and curious.

In the next room, La Tour’s paintings feature subjects who are old, blind or poor, but they are depicted, per the wall text, “without judgement or sentimentality.” Les Mangeurs de Pois is a close-up of two elders eating peas with their hands from bowls: the woman’s mouth hanging agape, the man’s eyes narrowed in hunger. The wall text marvels at the “radical realism” of these subjects, which neither elevates nor denigrates. The painting is hung alongside a duo by Pensionante del Saraceni, Le Reniement de Saint Pierre, in which two figures are visibly arguing, their hands animated and mouths open in apparent protest. The sense of agitation in the latter only highlights the ascetic calm of La Tour’s pair.

In the next room are two paintings of Saint Jérôme Penitent, with evident variations. This multiplicity of a single work reflects the eager demand for La Tour’s output and the painter’s willing compliance to meet the desires of his patrons. In both works, Saint Jérôme clutches a cross, with a bloody scourge and a book at his feet. One painting, however, is adorned with a Cowboy Carter-style scarlet hat (actually intended for Cardinal Richelieu and probably a courtly gift, intended as bait to bankroll future patronage). Feigenbaum pointed out that the second version is “not a rote copy” and that it is startling to see saggy skin, a visible bunion and naturalist detail. It’s an unusual choice, given that “painters idealize bodies much more than this.”

After moving through a room dedicated to apostles—including the only loan from the Louvre of Saint Thomas (the museum has six La Tour paintings, but five are in unstable condition)—the next highlights how “La Tour is really a poet of the candle flame,” per Feigenbaum. The painting Saint Jérôme Lisant, attributed to La Tour’s atelier, depicts an incredibly minute but beautiful detail: a tiny rip in the page the saint is reading allows the candlelight behind it to shine through. (For any skeptics of an “atelier of” painting rather than by the painter himself, Feigenbaum posited that anything done in La Tour’s atelier would have been under his supervision and maybe even involved his own hand. “They would both be expensive and desirable,” she noted of the impeccable quality of artistic labor.) La Tour’s painting of younger Saint Jérôme is likened to that of a much older iteration, also reading by candlelight, by French painter Trophime Bigot. Bigot was one of many artists who studied in Italy and brought a Caravaggio-esque style back to his native country, much like painters from Spain, the Netherlands and elsewhere. Copies of Caravaggio were “what was circulating around Europe,” Feigenbaum stated.

On the way to the two final rooms are beautiful etchings by Jacques Callot, showcasing two “nocturnes” by the printmaker. It is unclear who came first, Callot or La Tour, because the chronology is muddled. These etchings face a gorgeously smoldering scene in La découverte du corps de Saint Alexis, from La Tour’s atelier: one figure in repose, the other delicately examining the silhouette with a firebrand in hand.

The penultimate room compares the “theatricality, sensationalism and operatic swoon” of baroque stylings to La Tour’s “more realistic and domesticated behavior,” Feigenbaum explained. La Tour’s La Madeleine penitent—in which a skull blocks the flame but bathes the figure in contemplative warmth—is worlds away from the neighboring painting La Madeleine en extase by Louis Finson. La Tour’s version is interiorized and restrained relative to the aggressive physicality of Finson’s subject. “He tells a story differently: much more quietly,” Feigenbaum noted of La Tour. “It’s more of a stillness.” Nearby hangs the image selected for the museum catalogue cover, Le Nouveau-né, showing two figures huddling over a baby “glowing like a source of light.” Feigenbaum pointed out that La Tour has imbued the tableau with an “intrinsic holiness” that brings to mind the classic nativity scene—but without any overt signifiers, thus reflecting an ambiguity and, as such, a daring.

The final room includes the gorgeous oil on canvas Le Souffleur à la pipe—one of the few works dated (1646) and signed—with a figure similar to La découverte du corps de Saint Alexis, whose cheeks slightly puff to maintain a radiant firebrand. This boy’s sense of purpose is at the inverse end of the spectrum to the painting across the room, Saint Jean-Baptiste dans le désert. Candle-free, it features a lanky adolescent in an austere setting who, Feigenbaum remarked, “looks like a kid who’s just really, really depressed.” It’s an amusing painting to end on: the figures in paintings from centuries past often seem to inhabit another world altogether, but a surly teen is a relatable trope throughout the ages.

La Tour had many aesthetic signatures: the exquisite optics conjured, the eerie obscurity his figures inhabited, the way he mixed spirituality and realism and the spare settings that placed the viewer’s focus squarely on his figures. Even if these choices were not ones he invented—as this show highlights, there were art colleagues who did similar—Feigenbaum boasts of La Tour: “He outpainted everyone else.”

“From Shadow to Light” is on view at the Musée Jacquemart-André in Paris through January 25, 2026

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Erin M. Riley’s work challenges her psychologically as she plumbs directly from her own past. But her work is also challenging physically. She dyes most of her yarn (sourced from shuttered textile mills), and her long process includes sketching to scale—in tapestry, the drawing is referred to as a cartoon—before placing the sketch beneath the floor loom. Hand-weaving the image to completion takes about a month. Using traditional techniques, Riley works within a methodology practiced for thousands of years. Yet her large-scale tapestries do not resemble anything traditional; she unflinchingly takes on intimate contemporary subject matter. In the past, she has focused on digital culture (website tabs and JPEGs) and her own tattooed body. Lately, her work has reckoned with her childhood and the scribbles and totems she can (or can’t) remember.

For her new show at PPOW gallery in New York, “Life Looks Like a House For a Few Hours,” on view through October 18, she created twelve works, two of which are shaped pieces. Littered with Polaroids, balloons, YouTube screens, faceless silhouettes, party streamers, clippings of ads for SAABs and Hondas, a Cabbage Patch doll, trees, and a mailbox, the weaver/artist deploys visuals the way authors deploy autofiction. She is unafraid to explore discomfort—and in fact welcomes candor about family trauma, sexual violence, self-harm and other things that tug at one’s heart and mind.

Observer spoke with Riley about her changing attitude towards birthdays, deciphering her own coded writings, being mesmerized by other people’s diaries and a pivotal moment from Sex and the City she inserted into her work.

Tell me about your day-to-day.
I’ve had a live/work studio in Brooklyn for the past 12 years. I wake up every day, and I weave until I’m exhausted, then I do it again the next day. I made a really big piece three years ago, and I realized I needed to think about my practice as this sort of athletic thing because weaving is such a physical activity.

Do you always work toward a show?
Not necessarily. I’m always making work, especially if I’m excited or curious about something. But shows give me this opportunity to make bodies of work rather than just pieces, and create this story. They provide an opportunity to make a piece I’ve been waiting to make, but that didn’t really make sense on its own.

Does what you’re showing in New York overlap with what you showed in London earlier this year at Mother’s Tankstation?
In some ways, there’s overlap; it’s always about my life. But in London, the show was sort of tongue-in-cheek, whereas this show is a little bit more serious. There’s a lot of black—it’s just visually dark, and it’s a lot about childhood and landscape. It’s moving away from this selfie sexy space, trying to unravel who I am and what life is.

Was there an inflection point that made you want to express yourself differently relative to the selfie, sexy space?
I have been almost regressing in my late 30s. I’ve been waiting to be a kid my whole life… to, like, be a brat, be irresponsible. I thought that one day my family would be normal and not have any problems, and I could have problems, and I could stop being the one who took on all the burden. But that didn’t happen. I realized that I had to stop waiting. I’m turning 40 this year, in December. I thought, what am I going into my 40th year with? What am I carrying? I did a lot of cutting, like, okay, I have to stop repeating cycles.

Is this the aesthetic manifestation of that change?
Yeah. The show has multiple references to birthdays, and I really hate my birthday. Not aging—I don’t mind aging—but I think there’s this attention thing that was really uncomfortable in my family, because it really felt fake. On my birthday, everyone was kind of cosplaying that they cared. And I knew that the minute it was over, it was over. I don’t like pomp and circumstance, and I don’t like fakeness. In adulthood, I stopped doing birthdays, but this year, I’m like the show is about a birthday. It’s about existing. It’s a lot of me as a kid and the spaces where I grew up. There’s a lot of mysterious stuff, too. There’s a lot of family lore, but I don’t actually have the story. I don’t have pictures of my childhood home, but I have pictures of this random house, and I wove that. There are these weird sorts of avatars of place.

Tell me about the work that gives the show its name. What does it epitomize?
That piece is my sketchbook, a time card and a photo of me at—I think—my fifth birthday. My time card… I have a lot of records, these sorts of ledgers of time. I grew up on the Cape, and every summer I worked 70 or 80 hours a week because I needed money and I needed to escape. I think the time card is very much one of those things where it’s my accomplishment, my persistence and labor. So much of weaving is labor. And there’s this amazing photo of ballerinas that I had in my childhood bedroom, but one of the ballerinas has combat boots on, which is such a punk dream—not having to go to ballet class. Then there’s this line: “life looks like a house for a few hours.” I don’t know where it came from, or if I just wrote it.

Would you say that you’re an archivist of your own life, saving things that you then create as artworks? Do you need that source material to actualize your work?
How I start shows or think through things is: I always go through my photo collections, my boxes of pictures. I always go through my hard drives. I always just look back at stuff. My work has a lot of references recreating photographs, like the phone selfie digital culture. There are a lot of references to film images and date stamps. I think there was something so treasurable about photographs in the past—having an object and not being able to zoom and not being able to find other versions of it. As a kid, I instilled animus in objects: I held them, and they were sort of powerful. Photographs are very similar. So there is an archival aspect. I’ve looked a lot at my body, but looking back at where it came from, or where it’s been, is sort of a newer thing, void of sexuality. What are my origins?

Given that your work is infused with so much personal history, does it feel loaded to have a collector buy your work?
I don’t think so; there is that sort of detachment. I’ve always allowed things to leave that aren’t securely attached. I’m sort of fluid in this way. Things have value, but I’m also used to loss. I think there is constant processing and resetting. Life is continually working on things and continually letting go. I don’t think I’m that precious with my stuff. I’m just using my work as a way to work through things.

Text and words are a recurrent touchstone. In one work—Road Reverberations—the ground is covered in sentences. Is text something you add in after you’ve decided on the visual references? Or is that part of the thinking initially?
Road Reverberations is a piece of my childhood: we lived at the bottom of two hills, and we used to draw on them in chalk. I asked people [on Instagram]: What was the line that stuck with you in your last abusive relationship, or with somebody who was really toxic? Those lines are from people sending me what stuck with them. “I wish things turned out differently” or “I didn’t mean that.” Or “I’m sorry you feel that way.” You know, all those sorts of bullshit things that people say when they’re hurting you. Others are sort of gibberish or poetic.

When I was younger, I kept diaries, but my mother read them, so I started creating codes and nicknames, sort of talking around things. I created this way of speaking that nobody could understand. A lot of my sketchbooks and journals through high school have a lot of this language. People used to take my journals during class and sort of free write with them, so I’d have different people’s thoughts, too. Language has been a really powerful tool, although it’s been obscured. It’s been this relief—release—but there isn’t a lot of meaning. I love to read; there’s this going back and forth between reading and writing. I really love reading diaries—as a kid, The Diary of Anne Frank and Zlata’s Diary, all of these war-torn diaries of being a kid living through horrible experiences. That sort of moved over to Live Journal, where everyone was talking to the internet… where you’re talking to something inanimate, and you’re just getting stuff out, there’s no real conception of audience, or no expectation of audience. I’ve always written and kept notes. I’m perpetually writing my own story, allowing it to be sort of validated through my work.

I’ve been listening to audiobooks lately. In college, I lived with somebody who was really obsessed with fonts, and I thought about letters a lot because of him. Weaving words is really hard, but it’s also very fun.

Would you consider your work confrontational, to some degree?
I would say so. I don’t know how not to be confrontational when there are issues. I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing. I really hate avoiding stuff, I really hate denying. In this show, there’s a piece that’s a scene where Carrie from Sex and the City cheats on Aidan, and there’s this moment—this YouTube screenshot—that says: “You broke my heart” over the affair. It’s so blunt, you know?

I can absolutely hear Aidan’s exact intonation of “you BROKE my HEART!”
I think that moment is just so solid, you know? It’s about all of those twisted ethical boundaries that I don’t think a lot of people like to admit to or talk about, because it’s pretty shitty. A lot of the images of me in the show are from a relationship that was perpetually secret.

You’re using age-old techniques, yet your work is so enmeshed in contemporary life. Is there a historical tapestry or art historical reference that has marked you?
Not really. I didn’t really love art history as a kid—I really didn’t relate to kings and castles. But I love weaving. There’s a lot of really beautiful weaving that I really related to viscerally… like Magdalena Abakanowicz is this amazing weaver, who weaved with found materials. Hannah Ryggen is somebody who’s getting her flowers right now. She’s this weaver born in the 1800s and made these incredible tapestries. She dyed all of her yarn; it’s about herself and the world. When I’m in Paris or London, I look at the old tapestries, and they’re amazing. But I was never drawn to that stuff.

Which artists, in any media, influence you?
People who are diaristic, who use their body. Luchita Hurtado is a huge influence on my work. Louise Bourgeois—pivotal. With Louise, her saying this thing happened with my father, it sort of led me down this path. I think that gave me a lot of permission to work with family stuff and dwell on things. Tracey Emin, doing the quilting stuff, textiles with trauma stuff. There are a lot of different people who used their bodies and used sexuality or self-portraiture in ways that I really connect with.

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There’s no dimming the cachet around Chanel: as recently as December 2024, the brand generated feverishness when Matthieu Blazy was announced as Karl Lagerfeld’s heir. The exhibition “Les Années folles de Coco Chanel” (“Coco Chanel’s Roaring Twenties”) at the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco through October 5 explores the OG designer’s work within the specific context of the Riviera in the 1920s and, in the process, reaffirms that the modern feverishness around her brand has been palpable since its debut.

The villa-turned-museum is perched on a cliffside with views of the sea. Inside, there are thirty Chanel garments and accessories ranging from a white silk taffeta pleated daytime dress to a black wide-brimmed braided Italian straw hat with silk ribbon, all designed by Gabrielle herself. These are paired with works by artists (among them Pablo Picasso and Natalia Gontcharova) as well as photographers (including Man Ray and Madame D’Ora). Painter Kees van Dongen was such a fangirl of the brand’s silhouettes that he allegedly said he was “only able to paint women in Chanel dresses.” His oil on canvas portrait of the designer from 1920 greets viewers at the top of the first stairway: she’s in a figure-hugging sky blue suit and white blouse layered with a chunky beaded necklace. Front-facing and larger-than-life, she has her hands on her hips, her hat’s cocked to the right and she dominates over a background of scampering horses.

Curator Celia Bernasconi’s aim was, as per her essay “Forming a Body,” to recreate “the experimental spirit and transdisciplinary relationships that were the order of the day.” Creative hybridity and a collaborative orbit are more longstanding than we imagine. Case in point: in 1920, after Chanel met impresario Serge Diaghilev, the man behind the Ballets Russes, his influence permeated her designs with a Slavic slant. In 1922, she launched her “Russian collection” with elaborate detailing, including an intricate fur collar-trimmed wool coat turned inside out to showcase the inverse of the Cornely machine embroidery. Beyond high concept aesthetics, Diaghilev applied a boundary-less approach between artistic disciplines. He employed Sonia Delaunay to design the costumes for Cleopatra; she later launched her own fashion house, Casa Sonia, with her signature cheerful graphic “simultaneous fabrics” in collaboration with textile designer Ilia Zdanevich (nicknamed Iliazd)—whom Chanel then hired in 1927. In a similarly transversal scenario, the 1925 season-opening ballet Le Train Bleu—for which Chanel designed the dancers’ striped bathing costumes in wool jersey, knitted wool, crêpe de chine and silk—was inspired by Picasso’s 1918 painting The Bathers, featuring three women languishing on a shoreline backgrounded by dark waters and a lighthouse. The scenario was written by Jean Cocteau and performed by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes dancers.

In addition to such crossovers, another central theme of the exhibition is the invention of a “Riviera style” and how it came to represent a new femininity. Bernasconi wrote she wished to explore “the female body, as it was dreamed, conceived and liberated by Coco Chanel, during a period of significant social change.” That liberation was available to a typology of thin, wealthy bodies, but that is never contextualized. In historian Amy de la Haye’s essay “Impertinent Chic: Chanel’s Resort Style,” she noted: “the 1920s became the decade of youth, health and fitness; the lithe, athletic body, fashion’s new ideal… Chanel, who was lithe and excelled at outdoor sports, was truly in her element.” Indeed, Chanel’s prizing of thinness is based on her own figure and the jaunty leisure pastimes she wrangled it into. Her designs offered women looks conceived for golf, tennis and equestrian sports, but she ultimately created these designs to meet her own needs, allegedly having said: “I invented sportswear for myself, not because other women played sport but because I did.” As Bernasconi remarked: “She was her own best publicity.”

Chanel, born in the Saumur region, came from modest origins that did not offer horse-riding or tennis lessons. She was known to have been a “raconteur” verging on a liar, and burned documents that might prove her narrative to be false. She was “discovered” in a café-concert by an upper-crust wealthy industrialist, Étienne Balzan, near Compiègne, and self-reinvention is key to her lore. Throughout her life, her image was not to be messed with: when she commissioned painter Marie Laurencin to do a portrait of her, she so thoroughly loathed the pixie dream girl version depicted that she refused to pay for the work. (Laurencin kept it and would not paint a different version. The piece, which is in the exhibition, lives at Musée de l’Orangerie.)

It was at age twenty-seven that Chanel began her designer journey as a milliner at 21 rue Cambon (a tony flagship address to this day) in Paris. Actresses wore her hats, and her designs got press attention. Building on this success, she opened her first namesake boutique in Deauville in 1912, presenting women’s sportswear and accessories. Her wealthy boyfriend at the time gave her the money for the endeavor, but she earned it back and was financially independent thereafter.

The standard practice of fashion drawings was one Chanel ignored: she cut fabrics and fitted them directly onto models’ bodies. She gravitated towards jersey, which was considered a “poor” fabric but was supple enough to enable freedom of movement for leisure activities. Building on the path set by Paul Poiret, a more comfortable, even slightly androgynous-leaning style was championed.

Chanel opened another boutique in the Hôtel Hermitage in Monte Carlo in 1914. The Principality of Monaco was (and is) considered an exclusive location; at the time, Monte Carlo’s opera house was one of the most prestigious in Europe. Chanel stayed at luxury hotels in Monaco until 1928, when she commissioned a villa up in the hills above Roquebrune-Cap-Martin. (To date, the three-story, 15,000-square-foot “pink bungalow on a five-acre olive orchard with fields of lavender” has been restored.) In a March 1930 issue of American Vogue, it’s described as “one of the most enchanting villas that ever materialized on the shores of the Mediterranean. This, one knows, is saying a good deal, for there are many properties in the South of France that are world-famous for their beauty.”

In color lithographs, the caricaturist Sem (aka Georges Victor Goursat) rendered a world of haughty women in fur stoles and sculptural hats, while the men who accompanied them had big teeth and receding hairlines belying their puffed-up finery. Jacques Henri Lartigue snapped motorboat races and seaplane flights held there. The first Women’s Olympics were organized in Monaco between 1921 and 1923, captured in fascinating black-and-white images by Jacques Enrietti in which women long jump and pose for team pictures in shorts and berets.

Chanel continually drew attention beyond the realm of fashion. In Deauville, she was sketched by the aforementioned caricaturist Sem. Two searing chromolithographs include a haggard-looking client asking a haggard-looking Gabrielle to select a hat for her, while another depicts the designer being whisked away by a centaur (meant to be her high-society equestrian English boyfriend), a striped hatbox flying behind her. In an article in April 1930, “Chanel par Colette,” the French writer profiled the designer, praising her mastery—yet nonetheless alluding to her “exasperated patience” and “despotic” eyebrows.

The exhibition concludes with Chanel evening gowns made for dancing, such as a lavishly sequined dress sported by Marion Morehouse (paired with a long string of pearls and a low chignon), photographed by Edward Steichen in May 1926. The introduction of Chanel’s perfume No 5 in 1921—followed by additional scents and a complete range of cosmetics—launched a whole lifestyle and legacy that has endured until today.

Threaded throughout are intermittent installations by contemporary French artist Chloé Royer. Twenty works—created between 2023 and 2025, ranging from prototypes extracted from a shoemaker’s workshop to bronze and enamel sculptures—serve as present-day counter-silhouettes. Royer’s works are posited as a complement to the 1920s output, but her work feels completely unnecessary to an exhibition that has a lot to reveal on its own. Still, it is thematically resonant with ideas of dissecting and analyzing the female form through Royer’s sensitive balance between force and fragility.

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In 2013, Marseille was appointed Capitale Européenne de la Culture—a program intended to strengthen European locales through the prism of the arts. Since then, the city has increasingly drawn interest from within (and even without) France. That interest reached an inflection point after COVID, as people in Paris were drawn to the idea of living adjacent to the sea after being agonizingly shut in during lockdown. This southward movement has spurred territorial tensions and accusations of gentrification, with an article this spring in French newspaper Libération fueling the controversy (“Les Parisiens qui débarquent à Marseille prennent leurs clics et une claque”) about whether this mass shift was denaturing the “caractère” of the city.

Whether Marseille is accepting of this draw from other regions or not, the city has been trying to gain a foothold in the arts. Although it is the second-largest city in France, Marseille’s arts scene does not match its scale. Art-o-rama, a contemporary art fair that recently closed its nineteenth edition, is trying to rally participation locally, although only three galleries from Marseille brought work to this edition (just one independently), which featured fourteen countries. The fair is an outgrowth of the loose invitational salon started by local gallerist Roger Pailhas in the 1990s; today, it’s a three-day fair held in late August that partners with regional players, such as Carré d’Art in Nîmes, Villa Carmignac in Porquerolles, Fondation Luma in Arles and Villa Noailles in Hyères. The press notes point out that eight of the nineteen galleries selected for this year’s Art Basel Statements section previously participated in Art-o-rama.

Jérôme Pantalacci, director of Art-o-rama, said the fair’s signature is that the scenography of the stands is left quite open and that a lot of new work is produced specifically for it. As for Marseille as a backdrop, he noted the acceleration of the arts scene within less than a decade. “There’s a form of effervescence,” he told Observer. The city is notoriously less polished than Paris: “Marseille is disorganized—it’s a bit sauvage. It’s something that people used to not like, but now it’s sought-after. There’s a kind of freedom. It’s not neat, so there are, of course, inconveniences in terms of organization; it’s sometimes chaotic. But that’s also its charm.” The makeup of the city is also different, with a huge community from North Africa. Moreover, there are no banlieues: “the quartiers populaires are in the city, not outside of it,” he said of the socio-economic realities. Asked if the city tends to be misperceived, he admitted that “it’s considered a city that has a lot of crime and is dirty. The contemporary art public and collectors will more easily go to Monaco. But the image of Marseille has changed due to the quality of life, with the sun and the sea and being close to Italy.”

Art-o-rama is hosted in La Friche, a sprawling former tobacco factory turned cultural center in the Belle de Mai neighborhood behind the train station. Upon arrival, one encounters a basketball court and a skate park; its vast floors contain artist studios, exhibition spaces and a large rooftop, linked by heavily graffitied stairwells (“no to war,” “lesbians everywhere”).

Giovanni’s Room, a Los Angeles gallery existent for over three years, exhibited this year for the first time. Gallerist Jeremy Maldonado, however, attends fairs as a visitor in New York, London, Paris and Miami “year-round, seasonally, as it’s crucial as an American business.” He was encouraged to join Art-o-rama by his friends at Parisian gallery Sans Titre, which also brought work to the fair. Maldonado was showing Los Angeles-born New York-based artist Jackie Klein (whose work ranged from $1,000-2,500). “It’s a wonderful atmosphere,” Maldonado told Observer. “Being in Europe and having those dialogues with European art patrons, art dealers, artists… Business comes second. And I feel like the business comes from that integrity. I’m not thinking of selling anything; I’m thinking of presenting a really effective body of work, and that alone should be the focus.” He wagered that he would participate again at Art-o-rama next year.

DS Galerie, a Parisian space in the Marais, was participating in its fourth edition. Gallery representative Ulysse Feuvrier said that Marseille is “an ecosystem that’s growing more and more,” yet the size of the fair was manageable. “It doesn’t bring an overdose in its format, which means there’s more time to see everything and to exchange… It’s a different way to start the year than Frieze Seoul.” The first year DS Galerie participated, they showed sculpture duo Xolo Cuintle, which, based on a meeting at the fair, led to their first solo show in France. This year, Antoine Conde’s drawings were the star, culled from a bank of images of erotica, porn and pop culture and priced from €900-1600.

Galeria Sabot is a longstanding participant, capping their sixth edition, partly anchored by the “friendly organization.” The Romanian gallery has previously participated in Liste, Artissima, NADA Miami and Paris Internationale, but during the pandemic began “rethinking the ways we should survive,” founder Daria Dumitrescu told Observer. The gallery was showing three artists: young painter Daniel Moldoveanu, conceptual artist and critical abstractionist Pepo Salazar and drawings by Alexandra Zuckerman inspired by fabrics, with work ranging from €1,300-12,000. Dumitrescu’s experience was that the sales did not come immediately but that the gallery “built a collector base in France.” The gallery, she noted, “works with very young artists and we grow together—it’s more difficult. You have to create the need in the market, then things happen. Some are older now and more well-known, and things are a bit easier.”

Longtermhandstand from Budapest enjoyed its second outing at the fair. Last year, the gallery showed five artists and “got some really nice opportunities for our artists institutionally,” gallery representative Peter Bencze told Observer. “We also made some sales, but Art-o-rama is not Basel or Frieze—if you know this, you can enjoy it very much. We like vibrancy and also the philosophy of the fair. Nowadays, all artwork is really pushed by the market. Of course, you can sell here as well, but the main thing you realize is that it really helps your artists.” This year, the gallery mounted a themed booth inspired by the correspondence between Marcel Duchamp and Constantin Brâncuși, specifically focused on the latter’s U.S. career. The fourteen artists were selected in a curatorial nod to this reference, although the works were not created purposefully with this in mind. Among those shown were Hungarian artist Áron Lőrincz, French artist Julie Béna and Hungarian artist Omara Mara Oláh, whose work was the most expensive on the stand at €20,000.

MICKEY, a Chicago gallery, returned for the second time to Art-o-rama; gallerist Mickey Pomfrey had been advised to participate on the recommendation of fellow American gallery Good Weather (also at the fair). “What we liked about it was the vibe: there’s a lot of license that they give galleries to be able to exhibit in a different way than a lot of other fairs do. The crowd seemed very engaged. And of course, Marseille is just the most lovely place to be at this time of the year,” Pomfrey said. He further remarked, admiringly, that in Marseille, “the post-internet aesthetic never died like it did in America—they didn’t get hit by the same culture shift experience.” Last year, the stand was dedicated to gouache-on-cardboard paintings by Ryan Nault; this year, Michael Madrigali’s works—made from wood, fiberglass, foam, plastic and paint to resemble renderings—were inspired by a trip to a Mexican artifact museum and exhibited akin to a woman’s shoe display. Pieces were priced at €2,000.

Anchoring the local presence, Marseille gallery sissi club was at the art fair for the fourth time; the gallery was founded in 2019, and the founders initially attended Art-o-rama as visitors. “Art-o-rama is very important because an art scene is formed around it, an international one,” said Anne Vimeux, who spearheaded the gallery alongside Elise Poitevin. During their first year, the booth was dedicated to Inès di Folco Jemni, who they brought back for Liste in Basel this spring. This year, they featured two artists at different points in their careers: photos by Marion Ellena (€800-1,500) and a batik by Amalia Laurent, who just finished a year at Villa Medicis (€10,000). “There are few galleries in the Marseille ecosystem, so when we go elsewhere we represent the scene,” Vimeux said of participating internationally at Material in Mexico City, ARCO in Madrid and Paris Internationale. “Choosing a fair is choosing a scene—that’s how we think about it.”

With both founders being from Marseille, they’ve been happy to see the ongoing growth of curatorial projects and ateliers accompanying artist practices. “What we hope for is that the scene will become more structured around institutions. That’s how we’ll be able to anchor it,” Vimeux said. “We’ve experienced the off-peak moments, but a new generation is bringing a new dynamic.”

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The Rencontres de la Photographie in Arles has been an annual magnet during the summer season for professionals and amateurs alike since it began in 1970 in the south of France. The small city—which has become both more international and more gentrified since a towering Frank Gehry-designed arts center opened in 2021—mounts diverse exhibitions in churches, former middle schools, cloisters, museums, a crypt and even a Monoprix (the French equivalent of Target). The 2025 edition, which runs through October 5, is umbrellaed by the theme “Disobedient Images,” a kind of counterpoint to the existing status quo.

In a reframing of national narrative, “On Country: Photography from Australia” is a group show of artists exploring their country’s identity, subtly or explicitly addressing its heritage of colonialism over First Nations people. Per the wall text, “on Country” indicates “more than just being situated somewhere, it is about being shaped by that place, connected to it, and having a responsibility to care for it.” wani toaishara lovingly portrays Black citizens from the African diaspora in Melbourne while Adam Ferguson sensitively showcases varied populations, from coal miners to contract shearers, based on his 150,000 kilometers of travel across the country. The images by Indigenous photographer Michael Cook are jarring and provocative, replicating a single figure in politically symbolic spaces to underline minority discrimination and lack of visibility.

A very different group show, “In Praise Of Anonymous Photography,” is a fascinating repository of vintage vernacular images divorced from their once-owners. They all come from the collection of Marion and Philippe Jacquier, who were gallerists for over twenty years outside of Paris and self-describe as being “in the business of ‘image hunting.’” They specialize in uncovering amateur photography ranging from pinup girls to animal bestiaries and own a compendium of 10,000 silver prints. Here, the selected images and series are especially enigmatic and often eccentric. One woman (“Lucette”) had 850 photos taken of her during her travels—never backgrounded by anything remarkable, often blurry—between 1954 and 1977. Who she is, the purpose of her documentation, and who took the photos is unknown. In another series, a pharmacist circa the 1950s used a spy camera to photograph his day-to-day customers unbeknownst to them, using a trigger system activated behind the cash register. Though the photos are pedestrian and innocent-seeming, the ethics behind this endeavor are suspect. In another series, a 20-year-old man returns to places he spent time in with a lover before she moved to Tahiti, photographing urban geography and chronicling what happened there (crying, kissing, etc.). Is he a sweet romantic or a creepy obsessive?

Also archival but less inscrutable, “The World of Louis Stettner (1922–2016)” presents the photographer as bridging American street photography and French humanist photography. Born in Brooklyn in 1922, Stettner trained at the Photo League, which he described as “the first progressive, left-wing photography organization in the United States.” His 1946 series on the New York subway captured with his Rolleiflex is fascinating, and the MTA sure looked better then: men in hats and women in fur coats sitting primly between Coney Island and Times Square. His series Nancy is a study of an insouciant adolescent living in Greenwich Village, her life characterized by “sleeping late, odd jobs, money scrounging and partying.” She’s photographed playfully upturning a glass in her mouth or lounging in bed with a radio. Stettner also mixed with French photographers (Willy Ronis, Édouard Boubat, Brassaï); he himself settled in Paris in the middle of the 20th Century for several years, and again late in life.

Featuring another man who moved to France, the “Yves Saint Laurent and Photography” show is a splashy one. Saint Laurent himself was almost relentlessly photographed, snapped by Irving Penn, David Bailey, Robert Doisneau and—in a then-scandalous nude portrait from 1971—Jeanloup Sieff, amongst many others. These photographs unquestionably contributed to Yves Saint Laurent’s renown. Some 80 works trace the evolution of Saint Laurent’s creations in the media (like Richard Avedon’s Dovima with Elephants featuring a F/W 1955 Yves Saint Laurent for Christian Dior dress or Jean-Claude Sauer’s images of bright Pop Art cocktail dresses from the haute couture F/W 1966 collection) as well as iconic portraits of the couturier himself (the show opens with a wallpaper reproduction of Helmut Newton black-and-white 1971 contact sheets and ends with a photo from 2000 by Juergen Teller). Nestled within this exhibition is a panorama of 200 archival items from the Musée Yves Saint Laurent Paris, including passports, paper dolls, scrapbooks of fashion shows, advertising for the opening of the ready-to-wear boutique, covers of Paris Match from when YSL stepped down as a designer and a 42-page special from when he died in 2008. The paraphernalia provides a dense and completist look of someone who was fully documenting his life as it unfolded and had a public-facing persona as much as his collections did.

Focusing on a different veteran icon, Nan Goldin presents a contemporary work at Église Saint-Blaise: showings of “Stendhal Syndrome” (2024) loop on the half hour, with limited seating. The Goldin-narrated photo slideshow has a soundtrack composed by Soundwalk Collective, and the film juxtaposes cropped snapshots of classical, renaissance and baroque masterpieces taken within the collections of international museums (the Louvre, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Galleria Borghese, the National Gallery), interspersed with Goldin’s portfolio of intimate portraits. Stendhal syndrome is a kind of aesthetic affliction named after the 19th-century French author who felt weak in the face of overwhelming beauty. Goldin’s “Stendhal Syndrome” creates parallels between centuries-old gestures and contemporary poses, instilling a meaningful sense of both artistic continuity and sensitive humanism.

Nan Goldin was the guest artistic director of the Rencontres in 2009, and at the time introduced an exhibition featuring work by David Armstrong. Fifteen years later, the two are part of the same festival again: David Armstrong’s photos are on view at LUMA Arles, curated by Mathieu Humery (who also curated the Diane Arbus show last year, which is now in New York until August 17). In the 1970s, Armstrong studied photography and eventually became associated with a larger group of avant-garde artists known as the Boston School. An exquisite portraitist, Armstrong (who died in 2014) captured striking moments amongst his coterie of queer misfits—messy hair, direct gazes and fabulous outfits.

For a more contemporary take on queer culture, Lila Neutre’s work is a tribute to LGBTQIA+ nightlife. “Dancing on Ashes (Open Fire)” juxtaposes two series of photographs completed about ten years apart: Twerk Nation and The Rest is Drag, a vision of parties and performance through queer community, including the collective La Famille Maraboutage in Marseille and their quest for inclusivity. These figures affirmingly shrug off social normativity in patent leather red heels, silver lipstick and sparkly accessories, although the disco ball hanging in the exhibition is on the nose.

One approach that consistently did not deliver across three exhibitions was the “reinvention” of archival material through modern interpretations. The archives remain superior. One such example was Agnès Geoffray’s “They Stray, They Persist, They Thunder.” Geoffray’s portraits of young women are based on research pertaining to underage girls in France imprisoned between the end of the 19th Century and the middle of the 20th Century for deviating from gender norms. Geoffray’s work is shown alongside a selection of historical documents—photographs, articles, administrative paperwork—which are layered in an alarm-red coating. The records themselves are fascinating, but the contemporary portraits feel hollow relative to the originals.

Similarly, a contemporary series on U.S. Route 1 by Anna Fox and Karen Knorr reprises a journey undertaken by Berenice Abbott between July and September 1954; Abbott drove and documented her journey back and forth from Fort Kent, Maine, to the Florida Keys. Route 1 offered, according to Abbott, “a realistic picture of a true cross-section of American life.” Her experiences—never published—reflected the increasing standardization of the mid-century American landscape. In turn, Anna Fox and Karen Knorr photographed small towns, motels and diners along the same route, timed to Trump’s first presidential campaign and the country’s fast-rising zeal for conservative politics. Their images portray an America that is vulgar, ramshackle and stagnant. Unlike the images by Abbott, they feel cliché. Lastly, Carmen Winant’s exploration of the lesbian separatist communities of the 1970s connected her with Carol Newhouse, co-founder of WomanShare, a lesbian feminist community on the West Coast. Winant and Newhouse pursued several collaborative projects, including new work on view here: shooting jointly on the same roll of film sent back and forth, doubly exposing and layering images. The result—deemed, in the wall text, a reclamation of feminist photographic strategies—is not nearly as powerful as the black-and-white photos from the 1970s by Newhouse, which reveal a sense of solidarity and camaraderie.

Earlier this month, international art fair circuit newcomer Riga Contemporary opened in a sleekly converted former warehouse in the Latvian capital. The more than forty participating galleries hailed mainly from Nordic and Eastern European countries, but a handful came from as far away as the U.S., Japan, China, South Korea and Indonesia. While Latvia isn’t the first locale to come to mind when most people think of contemporary art, the fair—which was free with prior registration—drew 12,000 visitors.

“For me, it’s completely flabbergasting when people are like, ‘Why Riga?’ Even people based in Riga!” Jeffrey Rosen, co-director of Tokyo-based Misako & Rosen and co-president of the board of the New Art Dealers Alliance, told Observer. (He was wearing a T-shirt that read “99% joke 1% art.”) Rosen not only showed Lawrence Leaman and Nathan Hylden at his booth at Riga Contemporary but was also an instrumental behind-the-scenes player in its launch. The core curatorial direction for the invitation-only fair came from Rosen, and his familiarity with fair models that are less expensive and more casual, like NADA, likely helped Riga Contemporary find its footing.

His initial approach to building out the fair centered on inviting more mainstream commercial galleries with an artist from the Baltics on their roster. “I think if those spaces participated, they actually could do well,” he said. Yet despite early interest, those art actors ultimately didn’t partake. “They don’t necessarily have the time to be adventurous,” but the ones who did show up were “willing to de-prioritize the sales part of this for a moment, with a longer view.”

Notably, Rosen has a personal connection to Latvia. At 17 years old, he dropped out of college and moved to Riga based on the suggestion of a close friend who had gone there as an exchange student in the mid-1990s. “Although my time here was brief, it left a really strong impression,” he reflected. “I’ve always wanted to come back and was really curious about what was happening here in terms of the art world, because that was my world.”

The Baltic region has been rather barren as far as contemporary art goes; Riga itself has no contemporary art museum. The closest neighboring fair, Art Vilnius in Lithuania, “was definitely a point of reference for us, but mostly as an example for perseverance,” Zane Čulkstēna, founder of Riga Contemporary and Kim? Contemporary Art Centre (Riga’s first player with a sustained contemporary art program), told Observer. Čulkstēna participated in Art Vilnius’ first edition 16 years ago: “It felt like nobody came,” she recalled. “Like, nobody. Yet they did not give up. Right now, it has become a very good regional player. Radical changes require radical patience.”

Since 2021, Kim? Contemporary Art Centre has been an active participant in the international art fair circuit, with recent appearances at NADA Miami (2022), Paris Internationale (2023) and Warsaw Gallery Weekend (2024), among others. In 2022, Kim? launched Riga Confidential, a micro fair that brought together nine galleries. The Baltic and Nordic references at Riga Contemporary mostly came from the Kim? team as a way to be “inclusive of the existing scene,” which Čulkstēna refers to as one that “underpromises and overdelivers, in many respects.” The goal of the fair’s debut edition was attracting local attendance. Starting next year, the focus will broaden to include international visitors and collectors.

Čulkstēna completed an arts administration program at Columbia University—mixing accounting, business law, copyright, fundraising strategies, art history, education and philosophy—and brought that knowledge back to her homeland. “In combination with missing infrastructure and an economic situation that could be better,” she said, “the result is that there are very few collectors. The whole concept of actually acquiring art and having art at home or at the office is still not common in Latvia.” Moreover, the “post-Soviet post-traumatic effect is that art and money do not mix. One is pure, and one is dirty.”

Latvian gallery Masksla XO’s booth showed a sculpture installation by Nils Jumitis, and gallery assistant Biruta Auriņa was “surprised in a good way” about the fair’s turnout and “hoped it will be a tradition.” The gallery, which has been open for 25 years, is one of the oldest on the scene and has shown work in the past at POSITIONS in Berlin and viennacontemporary. “We have to cultivate this culture of buying art, of supporting art,” Auriņa said of the lagging Latvian art scene.

Polina Berlin, a young gallery based in New York, showcased works by Casey Bolding. The eponymous founder was born in Riga but grew up in the U.S. and worked at Paula Cooper before opening her own space. “I was astounded by the level of thoughtfulness and innovation,” she said of the fair, where she also showed Amanda Ziemele, who represented Latvia at the last Venice Biennale. “It’s kind of refreshing to be the only New York gallery here—that never happens,” she quipped. “Everyone’s been very welcoming, which is so nice and perhaps unusual in the art world. It’s a very different group of people than you would encounter at other fairs or in other cities.” She appreciated the scale especially. “I’m not trying to offer something for everyone—and neither is this fair. It’s almost like a back-to-basics thing… It loses this special specificity when it gets too big.”

For Rosen, orchestrating that special specificity was the point. Based in the Otsuka neighborhood of his adopted city, the Texas-born dealer felt on the periphery of the commercial art world, “both geographically and in terms of the power structure.” When he opened Misako & Rosen together with his wife, “it became evident pretty quickly that the best way—the only way—we could function is if we had found galleries that are in a similar position as us and work together.” Rosen’s gallery attends NADA in Miami, Art Basel Hong Kong, Frieze Seoul, miart in Milan, Art OnO in Seoul and a lot of smaller fairs in Japan. He and the Kim? team have collaborated before in Japan, as part of Rosen’s Hot Spring Project.

“The fair model is broken,” he continued, in that many are so profit-driven that it isn’t sustainable for anyone beyond a handful of mega-galleries to continually participate. A fair like Riga Contemporary is “subversive” in part because it’s not as expensive to attend as it’s subsidized by Latvia’s Ministry of Culture, minimizing the economic risk and allowing for non-transactional exchanges. “You try to create a situation which is not off-putting, which is not elitist, but at the same time is not, in any way, selling short art, artists and the thought behind the production of art,” said Rosen. “It’s kind of oddly anti-capitalist.”

The fair’s public program of panels addressed topics ranging from new models of patronage to the evolving role of technology in artistic production. In the opener, “The Role of Galleries in the 21st Century,” gallerist Olga Temnikova (half of Temnikova & Kasela Gallery, headquartered in Tallinn) noted: “We don’t host people in the Baltics that much—I mean it’s hard to get people here.” She herself helped spearhead a twenty-five-gallery micro fair, ESTHER, in New York at the Estonia House, an event subsidized by the Estonian government.

“Can this work? I feel like it can,” Rosen mused. “As long as the fair is able to sustain the funding that makes this possible for us to come here without spending an arm and a leg—why not?” He admitted that it requires a degree of commitment and support from participants. “They don’t necessarily have to be the same people coming back. But I think those who stick with it will benefit from sticking with it.”

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The Bronx Documentary Center, a non-profit gallery and educational space, is currently holding its annual Latin American Foto Festival, spotlighting communities in Puerto Rico, Peru, El Salvador, Mexico, Brazil, Venezuela and Colombia for this edition. In the present political context, in which these communities are especially vulnerable to violence, injustice and displacement, the festival feels lucid and meaningful.
Large-scale photographs are on view at the Bronx Documentary Center and around the South Bronx’s Melrose neighborhood through this weekend. From July 24 through August 3, the festival expands across venues in the city’s other boroughs: Loisaida Center in Manhattan’s East Village, Terraza 7 in Elmhurst in Queens and Toñita’s Caribbean Social Club in Williamsburg in Brooklyn.
Instead of doing an open call, the festival team reached out directly to Latin American photographers, photo editors and curators to survey recent projects that affected them. The final selection, made by festival curator Cynthia Rivera and Bronx Documentary Center founder and co-curator Michael Kamber, encompasses about a dozen projects from seven different countries. “We tend to repeat countries, especially Mexico,” Rivera tells Observer, pointing out that the territories represented best reflect the origins of the Bronx Documentary Center’s local population.

The tenor of the festival, now in its eighth year, shifts with the times. “We try our best to always keep a balance in terms of types of stories that range from violent to light-hearted,” Rivera says. “Sometimes it falls to the more intense side because of whatever is currently happening in the world at the time, or it falls more lighthearted because things are actually too intense, like during Covid, and we know people need some sort of break mentally and visually.” Being balanced is hard to strive for but remains an aspiration: “If we go too far one way—say, too hopeful or too violent—then we aren’t necessarily giving a fair overview of what’s happening in Latin America. Falling in the middle at least gives people an even playing field to start from, if this is the first time they are learning anything about social issues and stories from different places in Latin America.”

Those social issues and stories cover a broad range. In the series Movimento Em Construção (Movement under Construction), a self-organized settlement spearheaded by teenagers in Brazil, Coletivo FotoFlores set out to valorize the struggle of their community, offer education and affirm squatting as a legitimate political tool in the fight for housing. A similar spirit infuses the series Aqui Amanece Mas Tarde (Dawn Arrives Later Here), a collaborative project by Sara Escobar and Pablo Ramos, which features the 1970s-era-built housing cooperative Cooperativa Palo Alto in Mexico City that has won out over gentrification. The series spotlights local totems, like altars of the Virgen de Guadalupe and street murals.

Also from Mexico, The Reasons of the Jungle was curated by the Bats’i Lab (Bats’i being the Tzeltal concept of “authentic spirit”), a collective that highlights Mayan-descended communities in Chiapas, and here showcases the work of sixteen photographers. There’s a powerful black-and-white image from 1992 of the toppling of 16th-century conquistador Don Diego de Mazariegos by Antonio Turok, and Isaac Guzmán’s 2019 photograph of a woman carrying a baby with a militantly raised left fist.

A more downtrodden series, Gabriela Oráa’s Abandoned, documents crises in Venezuela. Oráa began independently, covering a wave of protests, and her work has been in international news agencies like Reuters, AFP and Getty Images. By way of one man, Enrique Martínez—seen sunbathing at the entrance of his home or attending a funeral—Oráa reflects the breakdown of essential support systems, which accelerated Martínez’s death by prostate cancer since his diagnosis came too late due to a lack of available medical care.

In a much more microscopic context, Charlie Cordero’s long-term documentary project explores the Afro-Colombian community of Santa Cruz del Islote—“an island the size of two football fields” off the coast of Colombia—as its 700 inhabitants wrestle with scarce resources and rising sea levels. (Grimly, the island may be underwater in a matter of years.) Despite these hardships, his images are striking and colorful, whether depicting a local resident training a rooster for a fight or a girl with bright and beautiful pink braids set against a weathered blue wall.

In a very blurry and contrasty style, Boris Mercado’s black-and-white photographs of the decline of a once-luxurious building in downtown Lima, Santa Elisa, show its present iteration as a crumbling complex housing impoverished denizens residing on mattresses on the floor. In one image, a six-year-old boy points a toy gun at the photographer, devastatingly prescient of the fact that the subject was shot multiple times in a street fight shortly thereafter.

Photojournalist Carlos Barrera’s unambiguously titled Life And Death In A Country Without Constitutional Rights scrutinizes mass citizen incarceration and the suspension of basic civil liberties, ever since El Salvador’s president in 2022 declared a “state of emergency” that repressed freedom of assembly and due process under the law. The series was a World Press Photo Contest winner in 2025, and the jury praised Barrera: “The story resonates beyond its borders, reflecting the global implications of migration politics as many Salvadorians face the prospect of being deported back to the violence they once fled. The photographer’s work, undertaken at enormous personal risk, brings viewers closer to the human cost of authoritarianism.” Also from El Salvador, Jessica Orellana’s project The Silence of Water presents the country’s water crisis through female experiences in a quieter but no more cheerful series wherein women are forced to confront drought and the scarcity of water sources not subjected to toxic contamination by arsenic and boron.

More locally, Carmen Mojica’s photography explores the entanglements between South Bronx and Puerto Rico from the late 20th Century to the present day via the symbolism of flags in urban spaces and communities in the streets, while Mikey Cordero’s Diaspo Rico explores Puerto Rican migration and identity in the question “What is the commonwealth for people with identity in two lands?”
In Self-Deportation, photojournalist Federico Rios documents the growing number of migrants who have been coerced into returning to their homeland, “doing exactly what American officials want them to do,” as journalist Annie Correal recently wrote, undergoing risky journeys through Panama and inverting their original quests north. Rios’ work, published in the New York Times in May, shows a 25-year-old deported from Texas who will forcibly return to Venezuela, as well as passengers on broken-down boats or on the street in tents as they make their way south from Panama. “The busy new boat route toward South America is a sign, according to migrants, officials and rights groups, that the Trump administration’s harsh tactics are having an effect,” Correal states. “Those heading to Venezuela knew their relatives, many going hungry, would have little to offer.”

Beyond Self-Deportation, the ugliness of the American sociopolitical reality looms over the festival. Of the current disheartening atmosphere, Rivera says: “Part of it felt like even more of a reason to celebrate Latin American culture in the face of everything that’s happening with ICE and the border. And part of it felt like a reason to be extra cautious and not attract attention to ourselves, to our neighborhood, to our photographers, many who are under threat in their own countries.” These extremes were difficult to navigate, but ultimately, even with the risk, participants past and present all told Rivera that “this is even more of a reason to push and tell their stories anywhere that they can.”

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• Boston’s Triennial Reimagines Public Art Through the City’s Social, Historical and Ecological Realities

• Away From Basel’s Main Halls, June Art Fair Held Its Own

• The 13th Liverpool Biennial Celebrates a Vibrant World-City

In a recent interview, Cindy Sherman disclosed she was reading the work of Ottessa Moshfegh. In the author’s novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation, one character says: “Soon we’ll be old and ugly. Life is short, you know? Die young and leave a beautiful corpse.” Sherman’s depiction of womanhood, which often veers into the grotesque, contends with this mindset. Her output—produced alone, if aided by prosthetics and digital technologies—has an unsettling bent that increasingly tackles the effect of age on the female body, which even glamorous film stars and well-dressed society women can’t escape. The value of the beautiful corpse versus a life spent ‘old and ugly’ looms over Sherman’s characters, to say nothing of real women in our patriarchal society.

The longstanding fascination around the artist’s exploration of gender performance and socially constructed personae hasn’t waned. Last year alone, Sherman had solo exhibitions in Belgium at FOMU Fotomuseum Antwerp, in Greece at the Museum of Cycladic Art, in Switzerland at Photo Elysée and in Korea at Espace Louis Vuitton Seoul. Her latest, at Hauser & Wirth’s Menorca location, features work spanning the 1970s to 2010s from eight series. The title “Cindy Sherman. The Women” nods to a 1936 play with an all-female cast written by Clare Boothe Luce; it was a major hit on Broadway at the time and twice-over made into a film. Boothe Luce embodied female success as a writer, society hostess and patron of the arts. “She was someone with multiple identities, so very much [akin to] Cindy Sherman and her subject matter,” Tanya Barson, curatorial senior director at Hauser & Wirth and curator of the show, says at the press preview.

Sherman’s riffing on womanhood is shown here in reverse chronology: the show starts with work from the last decade and then goes backward in time to the artist’s earliest images. According to Barson, “it’s not a comprehensive show by any means, but it does encompass her career.”

The opening room features two large-format series, both commissions for print publications. Ominous Landscapes (2010-12) was for the British magazine Pop, for which Sherman delved into the Chanel archive and donned vintage pieces. (Sherman hasn’t actually named any of her work since Untitled Film Stills, 1977-1980; others have described her series by their content, and these unofficial titles tend to stick.) The couture on view—including a cape from 1925 designed by Coco Chanel herself and two white Karl Lagerfeld outfits from 1985 and 2007 placed in the same frame through multiple exposures—are backgrounded by raw landscapes snapped in Iceland, Capri, Stromboli and Shelter Island. Hauser & Wirth’s own island location off Port Mahon, on Illa del Rei, couldn’t be more fitting. The second series in the room showcases two images from a 2016 series made for Harper’s Bazaar—most eye-catching is a figure in an ornate coat and matching bag by Marc Jacobs, holding an early generation iPhone in an incongruous forest setting. Sherman’s commitment to inhabiting different versions of femininity through her postures and gestures, “tells us the story behind these characters,” Barson says. “She’s an incredible actress and storyteller.”

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The second room hosts a series known as The Flappers (2016-2018), inspired by publicity stills from the 1920s and 1930s; it toys with the fresh emancipation of the modern woman, red-lipsticked and smoking. Although nominally placeless, the backgrounds allude to skyscrapers in New York or the cabaret culture of the Neue Sachlichkeit in Berlin. The aging starlets depicted resist acknowledging that they are, in showbiz terms, past their prime. Is Sherman judging these women for contorting themselves to fit a youth-obsessed mold? Barson takes a softer view: “I think you can’t assume a character to this degree of proximity and accuracy without being also sympathetic.” In an Art21 documentary video on view at the end of the exhibition, Sherman denies ever intending to be critical of her subjects, even with unsightly appearances.

Next follows Sherman’s most well-known series, Untitled Film Stills (1977-1980), plucking from the iconic portfolio of seventy black-and-white photos meant to encompass a single actress’s career. Sherman drew from post-war cinema: 1950s Hollywood, French Nouvelle Vague, Italian New Realist cinema. Before the advent of digital technology, Sherman was staging her figures directly within their environment (“it’s akin to filming on location,” says Barson). One wall blows up a film still as wallpaper onto which the photos are hung: “a little bit tautological.”

This late 1970s period was the era of the Pictures Generation, an artistic cohort addressing the trappings of mass media (among them Laurie Simmons, Richard Prince and Barbara Kruger). This was the decade when “the women’s movement claimed the female body as a site for political struggle, mobilizing around abortion rights above all, but with other ancillary issues spiraling out into agitation over medical marginalization and sexuality itself as a source of women’s oppression,” theorist Laura Mulvey wrote in 1991, famously contextualizing Sherman’s work in art theory terms. “A politics of the body led logically to a politics of representation of the body”—ultimately leading to what she deemed “political aesthetics.”

On the subject of political aesthetics, Barson notes John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, published in 1972, scrutinized how men look at women and how women, in turn, grapple with being looked at. This kind of hyperawareness is at the core of Sherman’s self-fashioned work. Barson asserts Sherman was “decades ahead of our current moment of social media and the construction of identity for the camera.”

In the following room are three different series from Sherman’s very early output, produced while she was still a college student. Bus Riders (1976) showcases a credible typology of public transportation characters, gripping school books or clasping a grocery store paper bag, while The Murder Mystery is more explicitly theatrical. Neither series was shown until 2000. The last series in the room, The Lineup (1977), features women in makeup reminiscent of “early Expressionist cinema.” The artifice of image-making isn’t camouflaged: electrical cables are visible in these black-and-white portraits.

The final room hosts a posh aging grande dame in a gold frame—the only non-photographic frame in the show—paired with two additional images from the Flappers series. In this Society Portrait from the 2008 series, made in front of a green screen, the woman’s overzealous application of blush only underscores her overcorrecting for her advanced age.

Throughout the show, Barson celebrates Sherman’s ability to amalgamate collective imagery and channel that into something new, in spite of it feeling pre-existing. Barson puts it thusly: “I think this is her talent: this uncanny knack for synthesizing everything that we’ve seen… and putting it into a single image.”

“Cindy Sherman. The Women” is at Hauser & Wirth in Menorca through October 26, 2025.

More exhibition reviews

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• The Silent Narratives and Revealing Exchanges of “Vermeer’s Love Letters” at the Frick

• One Fine Show: “Ways of Knowing” at the Walker Art Center

• China’s Terracotta Warriors Headline a Rare Archaeological Display at the Bowers Museum

In Paris, most things drifting in the water—say, in the Seine, or the Canal Saint-Martin—are none too poetic. But Céleste Boursier-Mougenot’s calm installation provides an elegant counterpoint: Clinamen v10, on view through September 21, swirls placidly below the resplendent rotunda of the Bourse de Commerce. A shallow basin painted swimming pool-blue, eighteen meters in diameter, is filled with water in which white bowls float, guided by an invisible hydraulic water pump. As the gentle current propels the ceramics along, playfully jostling each other to create a faintly bell-like sound, serenity sets in around the blithe sensorial soundscape. The bowls circulate not in traffic and not as if choreographed—they’re reminiscent, rather, of the kind of languid repose of floating on one’s back. Curator Emma Lavigne, who is also general director of the Pinault Collection, described it as a respite from “the stridency of the contemporary world.”

She further likened the floating bowls to a contemporary version of Claude Monet at Giverny with the proliferation of nymphéas (water lilies) bobbing in the water. Boursier-Mougenot described the bowls as evoking a flock of sheep.

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Clinamen, conceived in 2012, is shown here at its largest iteration to date, at scale with the architecture of this site. The Bourse de Commerce was an 18th-century stock exchange, partly restored and partly redesigned during a major three-year transformation at the hands of Japanese architect Tadao Ando. Its glass-domed rotunda and original wraparound 19th-century mural are the venue’s crown jewels, below which is the core of the redesign, Ando’s vast and versatile 29-meter-wide, nine-meter-tall concrete cylindrical exhibition space. Staircases wrap around it, atop which visitors can circle a ringed walkway to view the space from above.

The word “clinamen” comes from Epicurean physics and, per the wall text, “refers to the random motion of atoms, a concept that resonates with the work’s inevitably changing and unpredictable nature.” (“Boursier-Mougenot has a weakness for overly clever titles,” Artnews once wrote.)

Clinamen has been floating around, so to speak, since 1997 when Boursier-Mougenot played around with filling up inflatable pools. A ten-meter iteration was shown at the Biennale de Lyon in 2017, hosted in a geodetic building masterminded by Richard Buckminster Fuller; before that, it was shown at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne in 2013.

Boursier-Mougenot worked closely with Lavigne ten years ago, when she was a curator at the Centre Pompidou-Metz and he represented France at the 56th Venice Biennale. In the Giardini, the artist used low-voltage electrical currents to power a ‘mobile’ tree inspired by 18th-century parks and Italian Mannerist gardens. The artist had the French pavilion’s glass roof removed to freely allow in the elements. The same year, his exhibition in Paris, “Acquaalta,” was named after the annual flooding that affects the water levels in Venice. His work not only alluded to this phenomenon but also implemented it. When he took over spaces in the Palais de Tokyo, dark eerie waters unfurled across the cavernous rooms, through which visitors navigated in small wooden boats, while images of the public themselves—filmed by cameras in situ—projected back their movements against the walls.

Clinamen is posited as a kind of synesthesia, the phenomenon of when the brain routes sensory information to more than one sense simultaneously, and one can literally see timbres or hear visuals. In addition to his relationship with water—the artist is based in Sète, a Mediterranean-adjacent French port city in the Occitania region—Boursier-Mougenot has a strong relationship with music, having also worked as a composer heavily influenced by John Cage and Brian Eno, and Clinamen is a balm for the ears and eyes alike.

New in fairs, biennials and triennials

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• Away From Basel’s Main Halls, June Art Fair Held Its Own

• The 13th Liverpool Biennial Celebrates a Vibrant World-City

“So long as we exist, we migrate, we move,” Anne Kremers, director of Fenix, tells Observer. The recently inaugurated museum in Rotterdam (itself a city host to 170 nationalities) is focused on migration, though as sociopolitical precarity escalates and prohibitive immigration policies are reactively instated across the globe, the institution will not reflect such changes. “It’s not a political museum in that sense,” Kremers says of reacting to the news cycle. “Migration is really stories about people. It’s not about facts and numbers.”

The city’s port district—Katendrecht—is a fitting place to host a museum dedicated to the movement of people. The restored reinforced-concrete warehouse in which the museum is housed today was once a headquarters for steamshipping between the Netherlands and the Americas. Rotterdam’s harbor served as a nexus for the journeys of millions of emigrants in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. Today, Fenix is a vast and luminous venue, with enormous windows connecting the visitor to the neighborhood, honoring a complex issue in a comfortable context. “The exhibition design is very toned down,” Kremers notes. “We want visitors to see the building and to see the art.”

The space’s centerpiece is “the Tornado,” a double helix rising from the ground floor to the rooftop, ceaseless reflective surfaces creating engrossing mirrored distortions. At its height, it unfurls onto a viewing platform with clear visibility over the city. There are two staircases; along the way, you can change your route. Feeling a little bit adrift in the crossover is, of course, an emblematic rite of passage here.

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Beyond the exhibitions, there is a desire to federate people who have experienced migration or dislocation in the space. Plein, a free public square, hosts events in tandem with various community organizations. (As André Aciman wrote: “the customs you feel most comfortable with are those you never knew were customs until you saw others practice completely different ones.”) There are language exchanges, a big kitchen in which to cook native cuisines and special events during World Refugee Day and Chinese New Year.

However, art is the mainstay. The ground floor contains two temporary exhibitions—a photography show, “The Family of Migrants,” and a gigantic installation, “Suitcase Labyrinth”—while the upstairs galleries show pieces from Fenix’s collection, which has been growing steadily over the past five years. “All Directions” showcases some 150 works drawn from that collection. The mise-en-scène across 6000 square meters will change slightly every few months with new acquisitions. “Migration is a never-ending story, of course,” Kremers says. “There are a lot of things we’re already covering, but there are always stories that we’re not telling. So if we’re acquiring, it should be a good addition to the artists and the artworks that we already have in the collection.”

Fenix commissioned several pieces, including an ensemble of blue-beaded hand sculptures by French artist Beya Gille Gacha—gestures being a means to communicate beyond language—and American artist Hugo McCloud’s migration patterns on canvas made from ironed plastic bags, highlighting a material symbolic of carrying in a desperate rush and disposability.

The museum impressively samples different kinds of stories, different scales of migratory disruption and different regions affected by recent and past turmoil, only occasionally drawing from more facile depictions.

The first object installed was a segment of the Berlin Wall, which stood from 1975 to 1989, splitting communist East Germany from capitalist West Germany. It dialogues with a work by Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota, State of Being (Passport), 2023, in which travel documents of German lovers that she found at a flea market bear the stamps of visiting each other on either side of the wall. Here, the documents are suspended in the artist’s signature dense web of threads in literal and existential paralysis.

Many works have a connection to the Netherlands. Willem de Kooning was a Rotterdam native son; Man in Wainscott, 1969, is here on display. In his 20s, he illegally smuggled himself onboard a U.S.-bound ship from this very port: his propulsive aspiration to become a famous artist came to be, given his reputation as a pillar of Abstract Expressionism.

Another Dutch mainstay, Rineke Dijkstra, is shown here via her longstanding series Almerisa, 1994-present. It began when her namesake subject was six years old; having fled Bosnia, she was living in a refugee asylum in Leiden. At the time, Dijkstra asked various children from the asylum to wear their best clothes so she could photograph them. Almerisa was wearing too-small patent leather shoes and, from her seated perch, was so petite that her feet didn’t yet reach the ground. Dijkstra was particularly touched by her and started photographing her every couple of years. The series has the affecting continuity of watching someone age, change and grow (present in Nicholas Nixon’s The Brown Sisters, if with a more harrowing origin story). A plain background and chair are the only constants in each image. Fenix owns the series and, every few years, acquires a new photo. Almerisa, who still lives in the Netherlands, attended the opening.

In a more hybrid vision of Dutch identity, Tresses, 2017-2020, by Benin-born Meschac Gaba, recreates the silhouettes of iconic buildings in Rotterdam—Centraal Station, Witte Huis—fashioned from the braids used in African hair salons. It’s a bright, ingenious way to couple disparate traditions and places with flair. (“We don’t shy away from the dark sides of migration, but still, there’s a lot of color. I think it invites the visitor to have a close look,” Kremers says.) In a similar spirit of bridging, Swiss-born Netherlands-based photographer Marwan Bassiouni’s New Dutch Views, 2018, encompasses dual horizons: carpeted interiors of mosques juxtaposed with the brick buildings and slanted rooftops visible through open windows, linking within a single frame the realities of Muslim practices against Dutch living.

Various works transform representative burdens of migration into creative potential. Ukrainian artist Maria Kulikovska, who left her homeland when Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, repurposed visa and residence application paperwork (with letterhead from Landes-Kultur GMBH and the British Embassy in Ukraine) into backdrops onto which she drew furious faces and loaded words (“no? fucking immigrant?”). This determination to reinvent is also behind Brazilian artist Alexandre de Cunha’s Kentucky (Napoli), 2020. What from afar looks like a large-scale textile work is, up close, a customized curtain of mop heads, nodding to the thousands of immigrants who take on thankless cleaning jobs to survive.

In a more literal take on migration, Belgian artist Francis Alÿs’s Geographies, 2007-2008, was inspired by military maps. Landmasses stripped of country names are instead labeled with binaries: utopia/dystopia, other/self, object/subject. The renamed maps highlight the arbitrary nature of designating different parts of the world as “other,” of our knee-jerk distrust of wherever we aren’t.

Also critical of such dividing lines is French artist JR’s Giants, Kikito and the Border Patrol, 2017. The photograph depicts a jarring in-situ work in which he blew up a black-and-white image of Kikito, a one-year-old Mexican boy. Kikito’s image looms in monumental proportions over American guards along the border with Mexico. It is a work meant to be seen from the American side of the divide, to haunt the guards. Kikito’s eyes are downcast as if gazing tenderly at the guards, his oversized hands clasping at the top of the border fence as if he will hoist himself over.

One of the most disconcerting works is Indian artist Shilpa Gupta’s Untitled (Gate), 2009. Twice every half hour, a swinging iron gate slams, sounding as loudly as a gunshot, startling the visitor and visibly damaging the wall. It manifests the violence of demarcating, and its erosion of the wall demonstrates that nothing is indestructible.

Interspersed throughout, offsetting the artworks, are dark and astonishing historical artifacts. These include 19th-century ankle shackles used to prevent enslaved Africans from starting uprisings as they crossed the Atlantic, and a bathroom door circa 1940 marked COLORED from the time of American racial segregation. There’s a boat that crossed to Europe from North Africa, donated by the Ufficio Dogane e Monopoli di Porto Empedocle Sezione Operativa Territoriale Lampedusa after being plucked from the ship graveyard. There is a staggeringly racist 19th-century toy pistol atop which are two figures, a white man kicking an Asian man; the pistol’s grip frame reads THE CHINESE MUST GO.

In this way, “All Directions” lives up to its name, presenting the ugly and the possible alike: the burdens of exile, the sacrifices of leaving, the gamble of chance, the sadness of dislocation, the loss in diaspora, the hope that a safer life can be achieved, the bettering or worsening that can happen when you leave. “We want to share all different kinds of stories around the theme of migration,” Kremers says, “but we don’t want to give you the answers.”

Photographer Rahim Fortune has spent a decade chronicling his family and the local lore of the south, yielding a body of work that is devoted, earnest and solemn. “I tend to lean into the intensity,” he once said. Fortune’s monograph, I Can’t Stand to See You Cry, published in 2022, was nominated for the Paris Photo-Aperture Photobook of the Year and won the Rencontres d’Arles Louis Roederer Discovery Award in 2022. This was followed in 2024 by Hardtack, which earned him a nomination for the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize this year, with accompanying work on view at The Photographers’ Gallery in London through June 2025.

His exhibition “Reflections” at Howard Greenberg Gallery, in collaboration with Sasha Wolf Projects, includes thirty photographs and a short film that will be on view in New York for just a few more days. His contemporary photographs resonate with eight archival images by Black photography stalwarts Gordon Parks, James Van Der Zee, Roy DeCarava and P. H. Polk, selected from Greenberg’s archives. This fall, the exhibition will travel to The University of Texas’ Art Galleries at Black Studies, an on-campus space showcasing art of the African diaspora.

We spoke with Fortune about Black photographic lineage, not framing his subjects “virtuously” and the shortcomings of the fashion world.

What should people know about your path to becoming a photographer?

I got into photography as an extension of music and skateboarding—two things that I did for most of my youth, either in front of the camera or behind the camera. I became serious about it when I moved to New York after meeting Eli Reed, the Magnum photographer, who really inspired me and showed me what was possible with the medium. I wasn’t introduced to documentary photography as a serious social tool. I worked at a photo lab in Austin, and he was a professor at The University of Texas. When I was working at the lab, he was printing a portfolio to apply for a grant, so I was seeing this legendary photographer starting a new project. I feel like every time you start a new project, you go back to being a student and trying to figure it out again. Then I traveled to New York, and I was introduced to [photographers] Jim Goldberg and Mike Brodie, and they just completely opened up my mind.

“Reflections” is posited as “documentary photography with personal history”—how do these two genres overlap, for you?

I always go back to: There’s no such thing as documentary photography, only documentary style. People have also coined the term post-documentary. There’s this idea of objectivity and maybe slight editorialization of real life that would be characterized as documentary. It’s posing as the truth. There’s the old saying: “there’s my truth, your truth and the truth.” I like to think that there is a way in which people are learning about history and other sensitive subjects through my photographs—but that’s not the first goal. Personal history is so tied in: half of the show is my first book, I Can’t Stand to See You Cry, which is completely about my family. There’s a photograph of my father during his final years, before he passed away. Hardtack was made out of losing both of my parents, and going out and continuing to look for community and affirmation.

Do you think visuals can have a palliative effect, relative to loss and grief?

Photography plays a lot on memory. You see an image, and your reading of it is based on your own knowledge and assumptions. The very first book that I ever did was a self-published artist book called Oklahoma, about my mother’s family. My mother passed by suicide in 2007, and the Oklahoma suicide rate is double the national average. That’s not not disconnected from the fact of it having so many Native territories [Fortune is from the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma]. How do you grapple with losing a parent to suicide in middle school? I used photography. Photography allowed me to go digging up bones. It took it out of my head. That’s healing, because for a long time, before I made that work, no one in my life knew anything about my time in Oklahoma, not even my father’s family. It was really just this isolated thing that happened to me and my sister.

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The reason I make my work is very selfish, but I also think that there is collective healing in people being able to recognize what you’ve gone through, connected to their own story. My photographs are about Black American life and my own identity and background and grappling with those things, but I hope that there are these universal themes that people can recognize and apply to their own situations. That’s one thing that I also go to other people’s work for.

Your images of the American South are being shown in New York. What do you hope to reflect about the region that maybe a New Yorker wouldn’t grasp from existing myths or misperceptions? 

That’s a thing that I try to avoid. I really don’t try to force the social-political element of the work. That’s for others to interpret. I find that to frame yourself that way is virtuous. To center a prejudice, and then to say you’re going to shift it, you’re then implying that your subjects need you to change their perception of how they’re viewed. There’s a great quote from Walker Evans, he says [loosely]: “that’s the job of propaganda, not art photography, to change people’s minds and sentiments.” I don’t know that I take on that responsibility. Also, there’s already a wealth of photographs that do that. My work is about image-making. How do you use the camera, this tool, to convey something about reality that is so complicated and so full of contradictions? How do you make a photograph that is interesting as a photograph and not just a document of a beautiful person or a person with a great outfit on, and then put them together as a collection?

In terms of lineage, your work is shown with eight archival photographs. Can you talk about selecting those and how that creates a conversation with your own work? 

Howard often shows very prolific posthumous artists, so to do a show with a young artist was a bold move. They wanted to bring in some of their archive as a way of not being completely out of left field. Their existing archive is massive. They own all the greats—you could have had Dorothea Lange’s “Migrant Mother.” Even the DeCarava print that’s in the show is an original from the 50s. It’s like $50,000—it’s a unique object.

I often find that people haphazardly put together work by old photographers and young photographers; I think that can mostly be done poorly. My favorite photographer is Milton Rogovin, and they have a lot of Rogovin’s work, but I felt that that was not really conceptually interesting. I was thinking about Black practitioners in general, and ones who have maybe been passed over for this type of opportunity. I really believe in this idea that we stand on the shoulders of the giants who never got their due, outside of a select few galleries. The gallery showed me all of the work that they had collected from Black photographers, and that was what I had to work with. There were only four artists in the archive, and those are the artists that you see presented in the room.

There are both portraits and landscapes in your work and the archival selection. Do you see those typologies as complementing each other, or do you see landscape as a form of portraiture?

First and foremost, I’m interested in photographs of people, but I think that forgotten architecture is just as important to understanding history. Where do people shop? Where do people pray? Where do people go to school? Those elements are important.

The book, as a form, is what established your series. Showing the edit at Howard Greenberg, how does exhibiting provide a separate viewer experience? 

The edit for Howard Greenberg leans a bit less on the book. I did that layout myself, with the help of my partner, Miranda Barnes, who gave some excellent feedback. Also, this is a gallery show, so there is a commercial ambition, which informed the edit with prints that were popular. But to see the prints in person: they’re painstaking silver gelatin prints, and that’s a different experience from seeing the tritone plates in the book. Sometimes, printed details that weren’t prominent become prominent at that size.

I read in a previous interview that you have a body of work in color in process. Could you talk about that?

Yes, I’m working in color. I’m interested in that mostly out of a need not to repeat myself. It came as a commission through Aperture. They’re working on a book that’s going to engage the Texas African American Pictures Archive. It’s about 10,000 objects dating back to daguerreotypes and tintypes all the way through the 1980s. They’re re-engaging this archive as a book. They asked me to contribute pictures of Texas as the sole modern photographer in this book, which is a great honor. That will hopefully be coming out later in the year. There are about twenty color pictures that I made in Texas, photographing in the same areas where I made Hardtack, but with a smaller camera working in color. It was a great experiment, and I feel like it put me on my way to now.

You recently collaborated with Bottega Veneta—was it challenging or liberating having a commission that’s so outside of the sensitivity that you bring to your other work? 

I’ve been working in the commercial setting since I moved to New York. I was a commercial assistant for people who do beauty ads, so it wasn’t completely out of my wheelhouse. As a commission, it was incredible; I was really happy with that film. That was my first big campaign that I directed. It was also Matt [Blazy, who moved on to Chanel]’s last collection with Bottega, which was special. Hopefully, Chanel calls. I’m not opposed to it, but I think it has to be tasteful.

There are some similarities to my work, as far as the portraiture and the closeness and the detail. But I want to be careful not to be overly editorializing my personal photographs. I feel that sometimes, when documentary photographers start applying their book projects to brands, sometimes you can’t really go back to fine art—like you use all of that interest up in the fashion world. It’s a tricky balance. And the fashion world is peculiar; I’m figuring out where I fit in with it. I mean, I’m signed with one of the best agents in the States, but I seldom work. I think that the fashion world has chosen its people. I’m figuring out if that’s even something that I want to put myself through.

A lot of my work is about trial and error. I found I’ve had some trouble with fashion, because fashion is about getting it perfect every time. In general, where you don’t have a world of producers and casting agents, you are going to constantly come up short. I just went on a trip—I shot twelve rolls of film, and I think I maybe got one picture, and this was about thirty hours of driving. When you do fashion stuff, you’re expected to nail it. I’m still very much interested and will continue to shoot fashion editorials. But I don’t think that, you know, the fashion world is beating down the door.

“There are a lot of important female artists… the only problem is finding information about them,” French curator and art historian Camille Morineau once told the Institut Français. Her fatigue at seeing women artists being overlooked prompted her to create the Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions (AWARE), a nonprofit dedicated to championing female artists through conferences, symposiums and an ever-growing online reference database. She has made a career of bringing women into the conversation within art historical discourses and institutions alike. Per Morineau, the fallacy of women’s absence from art history reflects their lack of visibility on the record, not their actual dearth.

In this spirit, Morineau recently spearheaded the exhibition “Women of the American West: Trailblazers at the Turn of the 20th Century.” On view at the Jackson Hole History Museum through July 12, 2025, it acts as an art historical corrective and introduces the work of five exceptional Midwestern women artist/rancher hybrids at the turn of the 20th Century: two photographers (Evelyn Cameron and Lora Webb Nichols) and three painters (Fra Dana, Josephine Hale, Elizabeth Lochrie). These women disrupt the clichéd American West mythology so tethered to inflated masculinity.

Morineau—who pursued gender studies in the U.S. and loves the novels of Cormac McCarthy—blended her inclusive feminist retelling of art history through a territorially specific lens. She selected the five artists for the quality of their work and their non-average life stories. They all lived in American territories that had granted women the right to vote in 1869, in what would become Wyoming (that is to say, long before the Nineteenth Amendment’s ratification in 1920). Note that it wasn’t a progressive gesture; it was motivated by a racist imperative to spur white procreation, to rival the Native American population.

Observer spoke with Morineau in her Paris office about the necessity of research to expand gendered artistic references, travel as a form of liberation and hardy Midwestern endurance.

Paint me a picture of “Women of the American West.”

The museum itself is rather small, but it’s a gem, really beautiful. It’s right in the center of Jackson Hole, in the midst of amazing scenery. We’ve got the Rockies on two sides. On the first floor, there’s a dense history of Jackson Hole as a community: lots of Native American objects, to pay homage to the first inhabitants of the land, who are still inhabitants of the land.

The second floor has the exhibition room. It’s not very big. In the corridor leading to it, we decided to place the photographers, because we could show smaller formats. In the exhibition space, we have two walls for Fra Dana. Her ranch was at the border of Wyoming and Montana. She had a super interesting life. She got an education, went to Paris, studied with a painter in New York. She has a palette and a brush that are really strong, which evokes a bit of Cézanne. In the background, there is gold—a bit like Klimt used gold to give beautiful light within the painting. She used very strong colors. It’s all within her home, although we know that she was working outside. There are wonderful portraits of people she asked to be models. There’s a farmer with a very white forehead from under his hat, while the rest of his face is completely tan. He is sitting up straight. There’s a boy, smoking—you can feel that he’s put on nice clothes to model. There are also beautiful self-portraits where she’s reading, projecting herself as an intellectual, like Mary Cassatt from that period.

There’s a wall of Elizabeth Lochrie, a painter of Native Americans. She was accepted as a member of the Blackfeet Nation, given a Native American name. Her story, I think, is really unique.

Bringing visibility to communities who are underrepresented seems very contemporary.

Quite a lot of men artists represented Native Americans, but they were commissioned to do so—they were sometimes paid by the railroad companies to document what was going on, and they would represent them with what I call a “political style,” and gave an ideal vision of things. They were certainly not accepted within the communities; they gave an outside vision of the situation. In Lochrie’s case, she was not commissioned by anybody. The fact that she was given an Indian name, I think, is big.

I came across so many interesting artists that I said, “It’s not going to be one show, but two shows, because how can I squeeze them all in a small space?”

The second show will be about Utah in 2026, right?

Exactly—the one now is about Wyoming and Montana, and the second one will be about Utah and Colorado. It’s going to be more about landscape and larger formats. All these women lived in this region, and the majority of them were ranchers. They had amazing lives. They were artists on the side. A few of the photographers ended up making a living with photography—a better living than being ranchers—because the soil isn’t good in that region.

Would photographers have considered themselves artists at that time? Wouldn’t photography have been considered a trade rather than a form of creative expression? 

I would say a bit of both. The late 19th Century was the moment when photography started being seen as an art in elite circles. But “the new woman” in the States was linked to photography in many ways. Women were freer to express themselves within photography, more than in painting or sculpture, because there were no academies, no schools. I was surprised to see so many of them in that region. But if you think about it, you get it. They could travel with it. They could photograph landscape. They could photograph their life. It’s really moving.

Another common point with all these artists: they wrote diaries. Their aspirations and what their dreams were, what they tried to do and achieve, what they couldn’t achieve. Like many artists, they worked without the eye of somebody else on their pieces. They just built a body of work, which I consider professional artist work—training themselves, or with other painters, traveling and getting a real art education. But during any century, you can become an artist without schooling. You just watch the world and learn to use tools or mediums.

Do you think that their work says something about the region today, or is it simply a portal into the past?

I would say it’s more of a portal to the past because, today, Jackson Hole is a ski resort, which I think I couldn’t afford. It’s linked to Yellowstone and the National Park, which didn’t exist at the time, so there was no business around that at all. I don’t think there’s such great adventure in Jackson Hole today, but I don’t want to criticize it—this spirit of the frontier, I find, is still alive. That’s why I love traveling there: there’s enthusiasm that I don’t find elsewhere. It gave me some strength to do what I do. Some people don’t care about it, it’s ‘woke,’ and some are like, “Wow.” These women existed during this horribly violent moment where everybody was killing each other, and women were raped. The people who hoped to make a living being ranchers found out that the land was really difficult. In that region, life was really tough. It’s freezing cold. The fact that they managed to produce work and nobody looked at it at the time…

Since they were ‘inconspicuous,’ what kind of digging did you have to do to find them?

I did a research trip last July. Wyoming was the first territory (it was not even a state) to give women the right to vote. It was in order to start families and populate the land, but it gave them power. There was a council composed of only women; there were women attorneys—a lot of women in power. When I started my research trip, just having a vague idea of doing a show, I was really surprised to find so many interesting late 19th-century/early 20th-century artists in these regions. The pioneer region—like, how can you be an artist? But of course, it’s more complex than that. Maybe there should be a school named after the painters in the Rockies. It’s going to take quite a few years of research to find out and to map.

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I did some research thanks to my team here in Paris, then I made appointments at university museums, city museums and state museums. I met some colleagues, and sometimes they’d say, “Oh, you’re interested in that photographer?” and wanted to give me the name of another one that I hadn’t heard of. Then, like a police investigator, I’d go see the work to see if I found her interesting.

The five artists in the show are the ones you thought were the most aesthetically ambitious? Meaning there were other references, less notable in what they produced? 

Absolutely.

Five already seems like more than one would find a century ago. How many women artists were there, even those who weren’t necessarily very talented? Double the amount? 

I think three or four times the amount.

Oh, wow.

I mean, women aspire to be artists exactly as men do. It was difficult to become an artist, but not impossible, because the territory was well-connected to the rest of the country by train. And if you were a bit educated or a bit ambitious, you could get information either by reading the newspaper or by traveling to a big city. Pennsylvania had fine arts schools, and a few of them were open to women. If you had the means to travel, you would go to Europe, spending a few weeks in Paris. Traveling when you have a ranch means someone has to take care of the cattle, et cetera. But also, traveling was less expensive. People didn’t expect four-star hotels—especially women coming from Wyoming, right? Not everybody had the opportunity to spend two years at the Beaux Arts. So they would just spend a few weeks, look around and visit museums.

In terms of subject, these women represented relatively domestic themes. Was that a socially conditioned thing, or was it just normal to represent the quotidian? 

That’s a difficult question, but I don’t think it was a social rule. In the case of Fra Dana, for example, her husband was completely okay with her traveling. There are a lot of supportive husbands who let them do whatever they wanted to do. And in that region, nobody looked at art anyway. Nobody was looking.

Reading Fra Dana’s diaries, she’s like, “I hate my life, it’s really difficult.” She chooses to represent her domestic life: the light is beautiful, the objects are beautiful. I think she represented what she felt happy with. My favorite portrait of hers is of a young girl seated next to a bird in a cage, which is, for me, so clearly a metaphor.

But I think they were really quite free, especially in that region, more than on the East Coast in big cities, where rules applied to bourgeois society. This is my gut feeling. I mean, they could ride horses… one of them wore pants. Women were empowered—for the wrong reasons, to create a population to rival the Native one—but at the time, they just used it. People who chose to make the trip to go that far west were pretty extraordinary. It takes some kind of vision to believe in that. They were all adventurers.

AWARE’s mission is reframing art history, which is skewed, to be more inclusive in its references. How was this particular sample of women artists of the West reflective of AWARE’s bigger mission?

I have great respect for research, but research has been directed towards male artists, that’s for sure. There is evidence, in every century, of women artists being great and successful, having markets, working for kings and queens, et cetera. But history wipes them out. It’s mainly linked to economies and the way institutions work.

Somehow, in the States, although there’s been intensive research about women artists in general, it’s revolved around big cities, where women got an education: in New York or Pennsylvania, because there were schools. The Rockies were like a black hole—women were sitting in a wagon, right? And trying to survive. Which is the idea I had!

You just need to dig, to do a bit of research and you find them—it’s completely natural. Of course there were women artists. That kind of research, pushing through with extra effort, is what AWARE is about. We have to put a lot more effort into finding women artists and documenting their work and producing information about them. We have to double-check a lot more, because there were no critics and no newspaper articles about their work, so you have to do the archival research and understand the context. It’s not like Picasso and the 500 retrospectives there. You have to do the digging yourself.

AWARE is about stressing that it takes more effort. Women artists are out there, and actually not so difficult to find. But once we find them, then we have to accept the fact that the art historical narrative is going to change completely.

The Wallace Collection in London is brimming with fine and decorative arts: oil paintings from the 14th Century, Limoges enamel, 18th-century chests of drawers veneered with mahogany and Renaissance objects. This solemn reservoir is on view in Hertford House—the distinguished former residence of the collection’s namesake Sir Richard and Lady Wallace—in a lavish manner that reflects the moneyed tastes and lifestyle of its founders.

What could disrupt such a stately array? Well! English artist Grayson Perry (b.1960) remixes the on-site references—grandiose to some, stodgy to others—in “Delusions of Grandeur.” As someone who has, at every step of his career, dismantled the snobbery of the art world and espoused accessibility at the heart of creativity—he wrote Playing to the Gallery: Helping Contemporary Art in Its Struggle to Be Understood a decade ago—this setting seems in contradistinction to his ethos. But the 40 new works here were made to willfully skewer wealth, not champion it.

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Moreover, as someone who has deconstructed and reimagined gender roles in his creations and in his life (he’s long been vocal about being a cross-dresser), he was compelled to explicitly play with the ascribed femininity of 18th-century French Rococo and the ascribed masculinity of the arms and armor (or what the press release dubbed “the gendering of decoration”).

Perry flips assumptions about identity via ceramics, tapestries, furniture. Many are handcrafted, but these join pieces made with A.I.-generated images of Perry as his alternate persona, Shirley Smith: tiara-topped and holding a rifle, sitting casually on a swing with unkempt bleached hair askew. Perry’s custom works, whether classically crafted or digitally enhanced, are displayed alongside a selection of the Wallace Collection’s holdings, which Perry created in direct or indirect response to. Perry writes in one of the wall captions: “I struggled with the opulent aesthetic, which I found cloying at times. Fortunately, I worked out a strategy that helped me find a fresh perspective.” Incidentally, Perry wrote all the exhibition captions and narrates the audioguide.

As part of his reappraisal of the museum’s history: “I wanted to look at the sophistication and refinement of the collection through the eyes of an ‘outsider artist,’ so have made something in the style of a self-taught art sculpture,” he writes alongside Man of Stories, his ceramic/mixed media work spiky with beads and pebbled, embodied by a silhouette in a crinkled blue cape covered with pins (“BREX SHIT,” “Campaign against living miserably,” “Fuck the Tories”).

“Delusions of Grandeur” opens with works by visionary outsider artists Aloïse Corbaz and Madge Gill—Gill exhibited at the Wallace Collection in 1942. The latter’s girlish figures, drawn against graphically intricate, dense backgrounds, are undated, executed in colored ink on paper. These resonate wonderfully with a selection of pen and colored pencil drawings done by Perry’s surrogate, Shirley Smith—a mentally ill woman who believes herself to be the heir to Hertford House and its vast valuables—featuring similarly naive, detailed settings and characters: an adolescent girl clasping a doll in a plush bed as she’s served tea on a tray, or a bow-adorned mother in bishop sleeves reading to her daughter as a servant stands obediently by. Perry’s aesthetic is self-described at one point as “somewhere between upper-middle-class Victorian child and 1970s Laura Ashley garden party.”

His caption for What a Wonderful World, one of his glazed ceramics—upon which posh women in high-collared dresses state in speech bubbles, ‘We deserve everything’—sizzles with scorn. “Whenever I find myself crossing into ‘West London’… I imagine I can smell a great sense of entitlement emanating from the people who live in a cosseted bubble of beige international wealth.” Perry admits his own success has made him more adjacent to this rung of society than his impecunious origins. But his criticism of wealth is underpinned by his self-awareness of his privilege: he side-eyes prosperity at the expense of communal and social values.

In another glazed ceramic effort, two busts—titled Serious People—flank a brightly-colored tapestry fashioned from 1960s/70s fabrics called Fascist Swing, a pastiche of Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s 1768 painting The Swing. Rather than dignified homage, Perry describes the busts as “party balloons about to burst,” and the frothy nature of Fragonard’s original is flipped into a Lisa Frank-hued night terror. Perry points out: “Seriousness is a sought-after commodity in art, but in its attempts to be significant, it can easily shade into earnestness and pomposity.” Even when it falls into pomposity, he is not dismissive and still can connect to the art: he admits to being “drawn to all those swooning women by Greuze, Schopin, and Boilly” because humans always seek to connect—however far-fetched an art narrative might be from one’s own life.

In the final room, wallpapered in a patterned bubblegum pink design Perry collaborated on with Liberty, an altarpiece and six oversized ceramic plates stand on either side of an orange bedframe with an appliquéd bedspread. Along the bottom of the bedspread is a classic delusion of grandeur line: “I know who I am.” Across the room, a beribboned Madame de Pompadour (the 1759 oil painting by François Boucher) smiles placidly from an ornate frame, in contrast to the wool prayer rug on which Shirley Smith is passed out on the floor. It’s a perfect mélange of femininities: poised versus chaotic, superficial versus warped. Undeniably, Perry’s irreverent version of grandeur is much more fun than the real thing.

Grayson Perry’s “Delusions of Grandeur” is at the Wallace Collection through October 26, 2025.

“How does someone born in Poland or East Africa end up in northern England?” wonders artist Lubaina Himid. The straddled feeling of having roots in two places is something she shares with Magda Stawarska, her artistic collaborator in “Nets for Night and Day,” an exhibition at the Mudam in Luxembourg. The Turner Prize-winning Himid (1954, born in Zanzibar) and multidisciplinary Polish artist Stawarska (1976, born in Ruda Śląska) were colleagues-turned-friends while professors at the University of Central Lancashire, where Stawarska still runs the silkscreen/screenprinting workshops, and where Himid taught in the fine arts department up until 2021. For over twenty years, they have been supportive of each other’s work, whether toying with silkscreening or sound pieces.

“Nets for Night and Day” is one of their many entwined projects. Just before Himid won the Turner Prize, Stawarska remixed and recomposed the soundtrack (from 2005) for Naming the Money, Himid’s installation of 100 cutouts. This was the pivot point at which trust was solidified in their art binary. They next collaborated on a work called the Blue Grid Test, made for a group show at WIELS in Brussels in 2020-21; the Blue Grid Test was then included in Himid’s 2021-22 Tate Modern show. The two are currently in the middle of preparing another show for Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge, to debut this summer. Moreover, they often visit each other’s exhibitions, even if they work on them independently.

“Nets for Night and Day” is, as curator Omar Kholeif describes, “a true and genuine convening.” The wall texts are epistolary excerpts between the curator and artists, reflecting warm exchange rather than didacticism. The titular “nets” are symbolic, per Himid, “a voluminous thing, a material thing, but full of gaps and emptiness and nothingness.” The show has over fifty works made between the 1990s and today, all threaded with themes of migration and memory. This exhibition is the second chapter (although re-envisioned) of a version shown in Sharjah in 2023.

Mudam’s West Gallery is overtaken by the installation Zanzibar (1999-2023), a newly conceived presentation of nine diptychs painted by Himid in the 1990s. These were reinvigorated by a new 38-minute multi-channel sound piece composed by Stawarska that includes recordings of trickling rainfall culled from England and Zanzibar, as well as voice-over vocals from BBC Radio 3 programs Himid listened to while painting.

Stawarska’s sonic component changed Himid’s relationship to her existent works and, for her, the paintings are now only to be shown as an installation inextricable from the audio. For Stawarska, the sound is meant to “perambulate”—it is emitted from white speakers that stand sentinel to the paintings, suspended above a dove-gray carpet. For Himid, revisiting past work from her archive is rejuvenated and newly potent through this collaboration.

Mudam’s East Gallery features Himid’s clustered paintings of fanciful ships and architectural boats—big, long or in little studies—which were initially made for her show in 2005 at the Bowes Museum in the north of England in response to its holdings of ceramics and jewelry and carpets collected by the aristocrats who once resided there. The boats suggest human presence, but there is a total absence of people within the works. In this way, the boats also allude to darker histories, namely the British trade of African slaves. To Himid, “the sea is not a site of holiday” but something more treacherous. It can still be poetic, however–Himid cites Toni Morrison: “All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.”

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Stawarska’s “wallpaper” screenprints belie Himid’s works, unrolling horizontally across the gallery like table runners, layering overprinted patterns that, she says, resemble a “computational error.” Stawarska’s mélange of print, paint and collage at once obscures the original patterns and reveals “a new matrix.” Stawarska and Himid first bonded over a shared love of patterns—Himid’s mother was a textile designer. Hanging her paintings atop Stawarska’s screenprints “made me see my own work, which I’ve lived with and know very well… in a quite different way,” Himid says with delight, a refreshed gaze imbued into her own production.

In addition to paintings, Himid displays reinvented everyday objects (as she puts it, “If it stands still, I like to paint it”). Here, there are found doors and drawers; in the past, Himid has gathered a whole dinner service—plates, tureens, jugs—and painted on those. The gesture is about reinvesting an approachable object with new meaning and narrative.

The last display is a smattering of Himid’s Sharjah Carts: vintage farm wagons sourced from Eastern Europe, alluding to potential departure and uprooting and “what you take in a hurry.” Stawarska’s adjacent filmic works—videos shot in Poland, along the Bosphorus and in Vienna of landscapes and graffitied walls and electrical poles unfurling from the windows of moving vehicles—are nestled in the floor vents, facing upwards towards the glass roof.

While Himid and Stawarska interlink often, Himid will be independently representing Great Britain at next year’s Venice Biennale. When queried if she had been marked by past editions of the biennial, she mentioned Fred Wilson at the U.S. pavilion as memorable and, more recently, Wael Shawky, last year’s Egyptian representative. As for a foretaste of her own pavilion’s offering: “There will definitely be paintings…those are really always consistent to what I do.”

“Nets for Night and Day” is at Mudam Luxembourg through August 24, 2025.