5 Artists on Our Radar This September https://ift.tt/7nF30OK

“Artists on Our Radar” is a monthly series focused on five artists who have our attention. Utilizing our art expertise and Artsy data, we’ve determined which artists made an impact this past month through new gallery representation, exhibitions, auctions, art fairs, or fresh works on Artsy.

Alexandre Diop

B. 1995, Senegal. Lives and works in Vienna.

A Vos marques ! Prêt ! Illegal – On Your Marks ! Get Set ! Illegal, 2025
Alexandre Diop
Stephen Friedman Gallery

A sense of constant motion is embedded within Alexandre Diop’s monumental mixed-media works, which are inspired by his background as a dancer and musician. The Vienna-based artist combines fragments from the world around him—discarded bits of metal, food packaging, nails, and door hinges—into what he calls “object-images,” often depicting frenetic, lithe bodies. Diop, who is newly represented by Stephen Friedman Gallery, will open a solo exhibition, “Run For Your Life !,” there on September 19th, marking his debut with the gallery and in London.

One of the works on view, A Vos marques ! Prêt ! Illegal – On Your Marks ! Get Set ! Illegal (2025), captures the exhibition’s sense of urgency. In the experimental portrait, Diop combines painting techniques with various found objects, layering textiles, netting, book covers, and expressive marks to bring his subjects to life. The piece, which mirrors the starting line of a race, draws inspiration from the story of Olympic medalist Jesse Owens, speaking to themes of freedom and resistance.

Qui vivra, Weira, 2024
Alexandre Diop
CFHILL

Valet, 2024
Alexandre Diop
CFHILL

Driver Of Minds, 2025
Alexandre Diop
Stephen Friedman Gallery

Negrita, 2025
Alexandre Diop
Stephen Friedman Gallery

Following his training at the Inter-University Center for Dance Berlin, Diop continued his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. His solo exhibitions include presentations at Spinello Projects, the Rubell Museum in Miami, and the Josephinum in Vienna. His work can be found in a number of notable collections, including the Albertina Museum and the Rubell Museum.

—Adeola Gay, Senior Curatorial Manager

Ahrong Kim

B. 1985, South Korea. Lives and works in New Jersey.

Occupied, 2025
Ahrong Kim
LaiSun Keane

Weightless, 2025
Ahrong Kim
LaiSun Keane

Ahrong Kim’s surreal ceramic sculptures turn the body topsy-turvy. Across her work, feminine figures dressed in cutesy outfits pop out of vividly patterned, brightly colored surfaces and curvy, disembodied legs stick out of unexpected objects. Drawing together Korean and Western cultural references, these mishmashed figures explore transformation through a cheeky and unexpected lens.

Kim’s current solo show, “Last Rehearsal,” at LaiSun Keane in Boston (on view through September 28th), features works dating from 2021 to the present. They embody the transformative experiences of motherhood, striking a playful tone while reflecting on this stage of life. For example, in Occupied (2025), the top half of a woman’s head, forehead crinkled with worry, sits atop a harlequin-patterned stool. The tiny gilded hands stuck to her hairdo point in many different directions, evoking a multitude of conflicting mental demands. Kim’s signature motif, upside-down, disembodied legs, protrudes from the sculpture’s top in a whimsical flourish.

The Spring of Me, 2025
Ahrong Kim
LaiSun Keane

The Garden, 2025
Ahrong Kim
LaiSun Keane

Lovepool (Falling in Love), 2022
Ahrong Kim
LaiSun Keane

The Last Bow, 2025
Ahrong Kim
LaiSun Keane

Kim earned a BFA in ceramics from Konkuk University in Seoul and an MFA in ceramics from the Rhode Island School of Design. She has exhibited at the Hunterdon Art Museum in New Jersey, and her work is in the permanent collections of the RISD Museum, Fuller Craft Museum, and the American Museum of Ceramic Art.

—Josie Thaddeus-Johns, Senior Editor

Marlon Portales

B. 1991, Pinar del Río, Cuba. Lives and works in Miami.

The Last Man, 2024
Marlon Portales
Spinello Projects

The Sacred Tree II, 2025
Marlon Portales
Spinello Projects

Marlon Portales’s enticing paintings are like pages torn from a lost storybook—fantastical, vividly colored, and mysterious. Borrowing a sense of the natural sublime from the Romantic painters of the 19th century, then dialing up the saturation, the Cuban artist paints scenes evocative of myths or fairytales. His solo presentation with Miami’s Spinello Projects at The Armory Show earlier this month featured a cast of tragic-seeming heroes. In The Last Man (2024), a figure in golden, princely attire is pierced by arrows; in The Dance (2025), three men flee from a fearsome, whip-brandishing female centaur. Even when the narrative context is unclear, the paintings are inflected with high drama.

Portales favors swirling, gestural brushstrokes and foregrounds soft details, like dainty hands holding flowers and rippling, shimmery fabrics. His aesthetic is deliberately feminine—signaling a rejection of notions of masculine strength often embedded in heroic tales and of machismo in Cuban society more broadly. “Since leaving Cuba, my universe has expanded and freed itself from many burdens and prejudices,” the artist recently told Portray Magazine.

The Dance, 2025
Marlon Portales
Spinello Projects

The Wedding (Diptych), 2025
Marlon Portales
Spinello Projects

Lovers, 2025
Marlon Portales
Spinello Projects

Hand of the Sacred Deer, 2025
Marlon Portales
Spinello Projects

After studying art at the Academia Profesional de Artes Visuales Tiburcio Lorenzo in his hometown of Pinar del Río, Cuba, Portales earned a BFA in visual arts from the Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana. In 2018, he participated in the prestigious Fountainhead Residency in Miami, and he has subsequently had solo shows at Pan American Art Projects and Spinello Projects.

—Olivia Horn, Managing Editor

Josh Raz

B. 1993, United Kingdom. Lives and works in London.

Deep Ford (Mudlark at Deptford Creek), 2025
Josh Raz
Ronchini Gallery

Thought Formed in the Gaps, 2025
Josh Raz
Ronchini Gallery

Josh Raz’s large-scale paintings look as if they’ve been lifted from the edge of a dream, with pattern-rich surfaces depicting glistening skies and cities in cosmic, gestural swirls. Painted from imagination, these landscapes hover between the fantastical and the familiar. They could be anywhere, leaving room for the viewer’s own associations and memories.

Earlier this month, Raz showed new works in Ronchini Gallery’s presentation at The Armory Show—one of Artsy’s best booths at the fair. One of those paintings, Deep Ford (Mudlark at Deptford Creek)(2025), peers through a dark brick-lined tunnel under a bridge, which opens onto a twinkling cityscape. The scene is tinted the dark blue of dust; lights bounce off the water’s surface like glowing golden beads. Raz’s loose brushstrokes and rendering of shadows in color reference Impressionist forebearers like Claude Monet, giving the painting a timeless appeal.

Breakers, 2025
Josh Raz
Ronchini Gallery

Night, 2025
Josh Raz
Cob

Fates Fed, 2024
Josh Raz
Ronchini Gallery

Gloaming, 2023
Josh Raz
Ronchini Gallery

Raz graduated from Newcastle University with a bachelor’s degree in fine art in 2016, the same year he won the Hix Award for emerging artists in the U.K. In London, he’s had solo shows at Ronchini and Painters Painting Paintings, and, this year alone, has been featured in group shows at Cob in London, HdM Gallery in Beijing, and F2T Gallery in Milan.

—Maxwell Rabb, Staff Writer

Guim Tió Zarraluki

B. 1987, Barcelona. Lives and works in Barcelona.

El cami mes llarg, 2024
Guim Tió Zarraluki
Artside Gallery

In Spanish artist Guim Tió Zarraluki’s recent soft, introspective compositions, faceless or blurred figures find themselves in vast, often serene landscapes. A sense of solitude pervades these fields, deserts, and other expanses, reflecting the artist’s ongoing exploration of the human condition.

Figures are defined here less by their identity than by their affect: Their postures often suggest contemplation or fatigue. In El cami mes llarg (The longest path)(2024), an ambiguous figure has taken a fork in the road, but glances back—perhaps regretfully—at the path he left behind. The simple gesture carries surprising emotional weight. As in many of the artist’s recent works, the painting’s warm tones are gentle and subdued, contributing to an enveloping sense of peace.

El primer cop, 2024
Guim Tió Zarraluki
Artside Gallery

Almar, 2025
Guim Tió Zarraluki
Alzueta Gallery

Narcis, 2024
Guim Tió Zarraluki
Artside Gallery

Butes, 2023
Guim Tió Zarraluki
Ruttkowski;68

Earlier this month, Zarraluki, who boasts a substantial Instagram following and has experienced significant growth in inquiries on Artsy, caused a buzz at The Armory Show. There, his works were featured in the booth of Spanish gallery Alzueta. This presentation was preceded by a solo show in March with Ruttkowski;68 in Paris. Zarraluki, who received his BFA in fine arts at the University of Barcelona in 2010, has also shown with galleries including Madrid’s Coleccion SOLO and Montreal’s Patel Brown.

—Arun Kakar, Senior Art Market Editor

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Artists Jennifer Packer and Marie Watt receive $250,000 Heinz Awards. https://ift.tt/zTLcoW4

Marie Watt and Jennifer Packer are among six recipients of the 30th Heinz Awards, each receiving an unrestricted $250,000 cash prize for their contributions to the arts. The awards, totaling $1.5 million, recognize American individuals whose work addresses systemic change and sustainability. The award ceremony will take place in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in October.

The Heinz Awards were established in 1993 to honor the late U.S. senator John Heinz. Since its founding, the program has awarded 186 individuals, totaling more than $32 million worth of prize money. Each year, the award is granted to six people, two in each of the three categories: art, economy, and environment.

Packer, a New York–based painter, is honored for her figurative work that reimagines contemporary American representation in art. She is known for her intimate portraits rendered in gestural brushstrokes, where sitters—often Black figures based on her friends and family—emerge from and recede into lustrous backgrounds. Packer has presented solo exhibitions at the Serpentine Galleries in London, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

Based in Portland, Oregon, Watt works across textiles, printmaking, and sculpture in works involving text embellishment and collaboration. A member of the Seneca Nation, she incorporates Indigenous feminist teachings and often invites community participation through sewing circles and material contributions. “Working with the community resonates with me as it connects art and life in a tangible way,” Watt said in a press statement. “She is also known for her collaborative monuments, some of which are in major public collections such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Seattle Art Museum.

“This year, we celebrate 30 years of honoring Americans who excel in the qualities that my husband, John Heinz, held in highest regard: intellectual curiosity, an informed optimism, a passion for excellence, and a willingness to take risks,” Teresa Heinz, chairman of the Heinz Family Foundation, said in a statement. “Their work doesn’t just shift systems; it stirs imagination, amplifies truth, and breathes possibility into the future we all deserve. Honoring them and witnessing their impact is a privilege.”

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KAWS joins UNIQLO as its first artist in residence. https://ift.tt/6iVfRHs

KAWS is stepping into a new role with UNIQLO as the fashion brand’s first artist in residence, the latest in its ongoing series of collaborations with artists. The appointment was announced on September 15th, during New York Fashion Week, at the Museum of Modern Art.

KAWS, whose real name is Brian Donnelly, is known for his “Companions”—cartoonish, hollow-eyed figures that blur the line between collectibles and contemporary art. As artist in residence, KAWS will support the UNIQLO’s aim to democratize art and design for a global audience through events staged at stores worldwide and collaborations with museum partners. He will also participate in creating new LifeWear collections, the first of which will be released in the fall/winter 2025 season.

KAWS’s relationship to the global retailer dates back to 2016. Last year, UNIQLO released the KAWS + Warhol UT collection, featuring clothing with artwork by KAWS and Andy Warhol. Previously, they collaborated on collections featuring characters from Sesame Street and Peanuts as well as KAWS’s own “Companions.”

“I appreciate them giving me this opportunity to be more involved in the company,” KAWS said during the announcement event. “One of the best things about working with UNIQLO is the reach.”

According to a press release from UNIQLO, the new position will encompass multiple responsibilities beyond product design. KAWS will be tasked with introducing new collaborators and developing creative concepts for the brand. Additionally, the artist will contribute to future editions of UT Grand Prix—the retailer’s annual t-shirt design competition—and join events alongside brand ambassadors.

“In our ever-evolving world, art is now more important than ever as an expression of our humanity. KAWS has been breaking the traditional boundaries of the art world, just as UNIQLO in its efforts to redefine the apparel industry through LifeWear,” UNIQLO’s president of global creative of fast retailing, John C. Jay, said in a press statement. “As our artist in residence, KAWS will help Uniqlo to expand the global appreciation and participation of art and creativity for all.”

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Three Klimt masterpieces among $400 million Sotheby’s sale from collector Leonard Lauder. https://ift.tt/Sa8q5YE

Sotheby’s will open its global headquarters in New York’s Breuer Building in November with a $400 million auction of works from the Leonard A. Lauder Collection. The 24-lot evening sale will feature three never-before-auctioned Gustav Klimt masterpieces, led by Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer (1914–16), which is estimated in excess of $150 million.

The portrait is one of only two full-length portraits from this period believed to still be in private hands. The painting depicts Elisabeth Lederer, daughter of August and Serena Lederer, Klimt’s greatest patrons. If sold for its estimated price, it will far exceed the artist’s previous auction record set in 2023 for Dame mit Fächer (Lady with a Fan) (1917), which sold at Sotheby’s London for £85.3 million ($106.75 million). It would also mark the first work to sell for more than $100 million at auction since René Magritte’s L’empire des lumières (1954), which sold at Christie’s New York last November for $121.16 million and was the most expensive work sold at auction that year.

The other Klimt works featured in the upcoming Sotheby’s sale are Blumenwiese (1908), a mosaic-like wildflower meadow estimated in excess of $80 million, and Waldhag bei Unterach am Attersee (1916), believed to be Klimt’s final landscape, estimated in excess of $70 million.

“To have not just one but three rare superb museum-quality masterpieces by Klimt, none of which has previously been offered on the open market, coming up for sale together, represents a truly unique moment,” said Helena Newman, chairman of Impressionist & Modern art worldwide at Sotheby’s, in a statement. “The Portrait of Elizabeth Lederer epitomizes the aesthetic of Vienna’s Golden Age in which youth, beauty, color, and ornament are fused into a stunning Modernist portrait, whilst the two exquisite square format landscapes, Blumenwiese (1908) and ‘Waldhag bei Unterach am Attersee (1916) attest to Klimt’s liberation from the traditional conventions of painting.”

Leonard A. Lauder, a businessman known for his time as chairman emeritus of the Estée Lauder Companies, is widely recognized as one of the most influential American art collectors of his generation. He started his collection in 1966 with the purchase of a Kurt Schwitters collage, going on to acquire a leading collection of Cubist artworks, which he later gifted to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He also championed New York institutions, providing the Whitney Museum of American Art with a record $131 million endowment in 2008. Lauder passed away in July at the age of 92.

“A towering figure in the worlds of art, philanthropy and business, Leonard A. Lauder will long be remembered as an extraordinary art patron with a passion for collecting across artistic periods, mediums and genres, and for transforming the Whitney and Metropolitan Museums with his vision and generosity,” said Sotheby’s CEO Charles Stewart. “We are honored to be entrusted with his exceptional collection, which will captivate collectors worldwide.”

The auction will also feature six bronze statues by Henri Matisse, together expected to realize a price “in the region” of $30 million. This includes Figure décorative (1908), a sculpture of a naked woman reclining, inspired by both Islamic art and proto-Renaissance artists. According to Sotheby’s senior specialist Simon Stock, “This is the most important group of Matisse bronzes to come to auction in recent memory.” Other works include La Serpentine (1909), Nu couché I (Aurore) (1907), and the complete series of Henriette busts.

Other highlights include Edvard Munch’s Midsummer Night (ca. 1901–03), which is estimated at $20 million, and Agnes Martin’s The Garden (1964), a rare canvas that has been featured in several significant exhibitions, including Martin’s 1992 retrospective organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art.

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At 98, Beloved Painter Lois Dodd Is Still Gaining Momentum https://ift.tt/Fd9uMS1

For almost eight decades now, Lois Dodd has been following her own path in the art world. Immune to passing trends and the trappings of fame, the artist has been driven only by her desire to observe and reflect the world around her. Although she began painting in the 1940s and was a key figure in New York’s post-war art scene, it wasn’t until 2012 that she (at the age of 85) had her first major solo exhibition at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City. Today, however, her paintings are held in prestigious collections including those of MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian, and they invite fierce competition at auction. When Reflection of the Barn (1971) sold at Christie’s for $378,000 (nearly five times its estimate) in October 2024, it set the third successive record for the artist’s work in the space of a year.

And yet this remarkable painter, now 98 and still working almost every day, remains largely unknown outside the U.S. Hopefully, that will change this autumn, as the Kunstmuseum Den Haag, in The Hague, Netherlands, presents “Lois Dodd: Framing the Ephemeral,” which runs through January 4th. As the first European retrospective of her work, this revelatory survey brings together almost a hundred paintings from the 1950s to the present day. “In some ways, she could be seen as one of the most important artists of our time,” suggested David Breslin, curator of Modern and Contemporary art at The Met, in an illuminating documentary filmed to accompany the exhibition. This long-overdue showcase should help explain why.

Lois Dodd’s subject matter

Dodd has always insisted on the simplicity of her practice, maintaining that she just paints what she sees. And it’s true that her subject matter might seem unremarkable at first glance. Trees, flowers, windows, doorways, and laundry lines are common motifs, mostly drawn from the immediate surroundings of her homes in rural Maine and New Jersey, or her apartment in lower Manhattan. But beneath their quotidian surface, these exquisitely observed works are spatially sophisticated, lyrical, and utterly compelling. Hovering in the space between abstraction and figuration, they are the result of a lifelong dedication to the act of looking.

Whether it’s a shadow on a wall, the reflection in a mirror, rain on a windowpane, or ice melting on a river, her paintings capture brief, unrepeatable moments. Each one is carefully framed and executed with swift, economic brushstrokes and thin layers of paint, generally in a matter of hours. She often returns to the same scenes over the course of many years, at different times of day or season, recording small variations in light and atmosphere. For Dodd, a dedicated plein air painter who never works from photographs or preparatory sketches, the subject is not so much what she is painting, but how it exists in that moment.

The exhibition, which is organized thematically rather than chronologically, traces the various themes that recur throughout her work and is full of such ephemeral moments. In Light Reflected on Brick Wall, December (2014), for example, she captures the shadow cast on her apartment wall by a fleeting instant of winter sunshine. In Snow Patterns (1985), streaks of falling snow are etched across the facade of a gray barn, while in Burning House, Lavender (2007), a controlled blaze organized by the local fire department rages through an abandoned building, flames pouring from the windows while wisps of smoke skitter across the rooftop. Elsewhere, there is an entire room of nocturnes from the 1970s in deep shades of blue, silver, and black. These works capture the play of moonlight and shadow over the landscape, distilling its forms into stark contrasts of darkness and light.

Walking from room to room, encountering the same scenes and motifs again and again, offers a window into Dodd’s world. One cannot help but be impressed by the consistency of her vision over so many decades. As Louise Bjeldbak Henriksen, the show’s curator, explained to Artsy, “She notices what tends to pass most of us by, and by making us privy to her observations, she teaches us a new way of seeing. Her paintings reward us for approaching them with the same attentive looking with which she made them, while their stillness and clarity offer an antidote to the speed and noise of our present moment, making them feel all the more relevant today.”

Dodd’s artistic career

Dodd was born in 1927 in Montclair, New Jersey. The youngest of five daughters, she lost both parents by the age of 17, which perhaps helped foster the fiercely independent spirit that would shape much of her life and career. From 1945–48, she studied textiles at the Cooper Union in New York City, where she met the painters Alex Katz and Jean Cohen, both of whom would become lifelong friends. She also met the sculptor Bill King, to whom she would briefly be married.

In 1952, she made her mark as the only female founding member of the legendary Tanager Gallery, the first of several co-op galleries that sprang up on East 10th Street in lower Manhattan during the ’50s and ’60s. These artist-driven spaces offered an avant-garde alternative to the more conservative venues of Madison Avenue and 57th Street, and they were situated in the heart of the burgeoning post-war art scene, at the nexus of Abstract Expressionism, Pop art, and Minimalism. Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston, and Ludwig Sander were just a few of the gallery’s regular visitors. Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg both exhibited there, while Andy Warhol had his work rejected by the gallery on three separate occasions.

Dodd, however, would set herself apart from these new movements, acknowledging their importance while preferring to follow her own artistic instincts. As she points out in the documentary, “I never got into total abstraction. But I see abstraction, and [it] is very important to me. But I think all painting is abstract, period.” Henriksen expanded on this idea, explaining that “she absorbed the lessons of modernism, but filtered them through an observational lens distinctly her own. Her compositions distill forms to their essentials…She simplifies form, flattens space, and balances shapes, preserving in paint the feeling and atmosphere of her surroundings as much as their visual representation.”

The influence of abstraction

While her work bears comparisons with other American artists such as Edward Hopper, Arthur Dove, and Georgia O’Keeffe, and even European painters like Johannes Vermeer or Vilhelm Hammershøi, the figure she most often cites as an influence is Piet Mondrian. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Kunstmuseum, home to the world’s largest collection of the Dutch master’s work, is taking this unique opportunity to place the two artists in dialogue, displaying a selection of his paintings alongside Dodd’s. However, as Henriksen points out, the two painters have very different approaches. “Where Mondrian sought abstraction through construction, Dodd finds it in the underlying structures of the observed world.”

Thus, her paintings often develop out of abstract elements she finds close at hand. In the show, this is evidenced through Sun in Hallway (1976), where the view through a doorway becomes a series of geometric color bars, or the oval shape of a mirror in Springtime Studio Interior (1972). Even the stark, geometric alignment of walls and shadows outside her apartment window, as seen in View of Cemetery + Men’s Shelter (1967), turned into an inspiration. In her matter-of-fact way, Dodd explained in the documentary that “I just liked the shape of that rectangle out there, so I started painting it over the years…It would change radically according to the season, according to the hour, and so it became a great subject matter for me.”

“I think it’s all about geometry,” she remarked in a recent interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist (reproduced in the exhibition catalogue). “Even the trees outside, inside. Wherever you are, it’s all about geometry.” This is especially true of her window paintings. Since 1968, window frames of every shape and size have been one of her most enduring motifs, often painted to scale and employing skillful trompe l’oeil effects, and there is at least one in every room of the exhibition. These “Mondrian Constructions,” as she has called them, deftly explore the tension between the rigidly structured grid of the windowpanes and the layers of abstraction found within the glass. Works such as View Thru Elliott’s Shack Looking North (1971) invite the audience to decipher the complex interplay of reflections, refractions, shadows, and distortions in order to make sense of what they are seeing.

Overdue recognition

All of this invites an obvious question: Why did it take so long for Dodd to achieve recognition? For Henriksen, one explanation is that her tenacity and refusal to compromise her personal vision have been both a strength and a hindrance. “By eschewing fashionable movements—whether Abstract Expressionism, Pop, or Conceptual art—she positioned herself outside dominant post-war narratives, which partly explains her long underrecognition, especially internationally. In recent years, however, there has been a broader reappraisal of overlooked women artists and those who quietly persisted outside the spotlight. And her work resonates very strongly in this context.”

Even now, approaching her centenary, Dodd retains the independent streak that has marked her career. Immune to any attempts at interpreting or theorizing her work, she is content to have simply done her own thing and has no advice for young painters except that they try and do the same. “I can’t remember anybody giving me advice,” she wryly told Obrist, “and if they did, I wouldn’t have taken it anyway.”

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Jason Wu collaborates with Robert Rauschenberg Foundation for New York Fashion Week 2025. https://ift.tt/zdftpsM

Designer Jason Wu unveiled his spring 2026 collection, “COLLAGE,” on Sunday evening during New York Fashion Week, in collaboration with the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. Both Wu’s designs—directly inspired by Rauschenberg’s art—and the choice to stage the presentation within a rarely seen installation, are part of worldwide celebrations honoring the late American artist’s 100th birthday.

Set in a raw, industrial warehouse at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, the runway wound through A Quake in Paradise (Labyrinth) (1994), Rauschenberg’s maze-like installation composed of 29 silkscreened aluminum and Lexan panels. Models passed between mirrored and translucent surfaces in deconstructed coats and jackets, gowns printed with Rauschenberg’s imagery, and fluid slip dresses that carried the collection’s collage theme. As sunlight filtered through lofty windows, it ricocheted off the panels, turning the space into a glowing, exhibition-like environment.

Each of Wu’s looks nodded to Rauschenberg’s experimental use of material, echoing his groundbreaking three-dimensional “Combines,” which blurred the boundaries between painting and sculpture. Given access to the Foundation’s archives, Wu drew inspiration from two series: “Hoarfrost” (1974–76) and “Airport Suite” (1974), both known for their layered imagery and use of fabric. He reinterpreted elements of 10 specific artworks—a checklist of which was distributed at the show—into garments made from satin, silk twill, and organza. He described these as “living compositions.”

“Within the centennial initiatives, this dialogue between art and fashion affirms that Rauschenberg’s spirit of experimentation and connection remains vital, inspiring new generations to engage with his work in unexpected and resonant ways,” Courtney J. Martin, executive director of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, told Artsy. The Rauschenberg Foundation approached Wu about a collaboration in January 2025, knowing that the designer has named Rauschenberg as an influence.

Rauschenberg created the installation A Quake in Paradise (Labyrinth) at his Captiva Island studio in Florida in 1994. Designed to adapt to its surroundings and to be navigated by viewers, the work offered a creative yet fitting structure for a runway show. The installation was last shown to the public at MASS MoCA in 2018.

Wu has long intertwined his work with art: His spring 2012 collection was a collaboration with KAWS; his spring 2024 ready-to-wear show paid tribute to Isamu Noguchi and was staged in the artist’s Sunken Garden (1961–64) in Lower Manhattan; and during last year’s New York Fashion Week, he partnered with Chinese calligrapher Tong Yang-Tze.

Calling this latest collaboration “a dream come true,” Wu described the collection in a press statement as “my tribute to Mr. Rauschenberg’s work and my personal journey as an immigrant who collects what seem disparate references into my creations.”

“Seeing Jason Wu translate Rauschenberg’s radical fabric works into living, moving garments was both thrilling and a testament to Jason’s ability to channel the artist’s vision through contemporary design,” Martin told Artsy. “The collection doesn’t merely reference Rauschenberg—it carries forward his belief that materials, collaboration, and risk can transform how we see the world.”

Wu’s timely presentation comes just ahead of “Robert Rauschenberg: Fabric Works of the 1970s,” which will open on September 19th at the Menil Collection in Houston. It will be the first major exhibition to focus on the artist’s fabric works.

Also on Sunday, designer Ulla Johnson presented a collection inspired by Helen Frankenthaler—Rauschenberg’s contemporary and a leading figure in 20th-century American painting—at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. The two shows reflect fashion’s ongoing embrace of art in recent years. Other memorable collaborations this year include Dior’s collaboration with Artsy Vanguard alum Rithika Merchant and Rejina Pyo’s Edvard Munch-inspired collection.

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