5 Standout Shows to See at Small Galleries This January https://ift.tt/6CNPFBS

Visitor, 2025
Gwen Evans
Monti8

In this monthly roundup, we spotlight five stellar exhibitions at small and rising galleries.

Justus de Rode

“Views of Nature”

Open Doors Gallery, London

Through Mar. 31st

We left the cave at nightfall, 2025
Justus de Rode
Open Doors Gallery

In the early days of our planet, 2024
Justus de Rode
Open Doors Gallery

Dutch artist Justus de Rode studied the writings of 19th-century naturalist Alexander von Humboldt to create his new cyanotypes. Drawing on Humboldt’s 1808 travelogue Ansichten der Natur, which he translated for the title of the exhibition, de Rode uses von Humboldt’s ideas as starting points for his artworks. Using cyanotype—a process associated with botanical research—he tones the prints with natural tannins. His subjects, ranging from mushrooms to dogs, appear with varying degrees of abstraction. These muted, haunting works comprise “Views of Nature” at Open Doors Gallery.

In the show, the Amsterdam-based artist also presents several cyanotypes in which the setting remains legible, as in We left the cave at nightfall (2025), which depicts a rocky floor receding into a dark, cavernous depth. Elsewhere, de Rode narrows his focus to animals and insects: In the cracked bark of trees (2025) offers an intimate view of an insect, rendered within a mystical, sparkling environment. Other works move in the opposite direction, deliberately obscuring their imagery and giving way to more expressive, tempestuous compositions, such as the storm-like abstraction In the early days of our planet (2024).

De Rode completed his master’s degree in film and photographic studies at Leiden University in 2022. His photography frequently turns to nature and organic forms to evoke emotions.

Gwen Evans

“The Space Between”

Monti8, Rome

Through Jan. 24th

Threshold, 2025
Gwen Evans
Monti8

Impasse, 2025
Gwen Evans
Monti8

Gwen Evans recasts ordinary domestic scenes as subtly destabilized spaces in her dreamy paintings. In a recent interview with artist David Hancock, Evans revealed she wants to “provoke a sense of unease in the viewer,” echoing Sigmund Freud’s description of the uncanny as “a class of frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar.” In “The Space Between” at Monti8, Evans explores this tension by rendering day-to-day activities with surprising distortions or haunting encounters, unsettling the viewer.

In Visitor (2025), an oil painting, a woman holding a basket faces a haunting silhouette partially concealed behind a patterned blanket billowing on a clothesline. The scene creates a horror-movie sense of foreboding, as the obscured figure seems to hide in plain sight. Many of her works focus on domestic frames, whether that’s the opening of a kitchen cabinet in the crayon-on-paper work Impasse (2025) or a stained glass window in Threshold (2025), where a ghostly figure peers through the sunlit aperture. Across these works, Evans captures the fleeting moments where strange, otherworldly elements can enter our personal space.

Based in Manchester, United Kingdom, Evans graduated from the Manchester School of Art in 2019. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at William Hine Gallery in London and HOME in Manchester.

Sera Holland

“Kaleidoscope”

THEFOURTH, Cape Town

Through Feb. 5th

Monochromania VII, 2025
Sera Holland
THEFOURTH

Tapestry VIII, 2025
Sera Holland
THEFOURTH

Working in dense, accumulated layers, South African artist Sera Holland treats paint as a physical material to be built up in three dimensions. After studying graphic design at Stellenbosch University, Holland lived and worked in Dublin before returning to Cape Town, where she ran a textile design business for a decade prior to refocusing on painting. Her background in textile design shapes the four bodies of highly textured, mostly color-soaked impasto paintings on view in her first solo show at Cape Town’s THEFOURTH, “Kaleidoscope.”

Holland’s “Chromatopography” series presents thickly sculpted abstract surfaces with large ridges and folds intended to catch shifting light. Meanwhile, her “Tapestry” works adopt the logic of weaving, building abstract images through smaller, layered, thread-like marks, reminiscent of cloth. “Monochromania” limits her color palette to foreground texture, occasionally using gold leaf to dot the white or black surfaces. Lastly, the “Onomatopoeia” series repurposes leftover studio paint into instinctive, disordered canvases, reminiscent of used palettes.

“Figure in the Field”

Morgan Lehman Gallery, New York

Through Feb. 21st

A Loving Embrace, 2025
Amy MacKay
Morgan Lehman Gallery

Nocturne: What the Bee Has Seen,, 2023
Claire Nicolet
Morgan Lehman Gallery

What happens when the background of an artwork is just as important as the foreground? “Figure in the Field,” curated by Brooklyn painter Jan Dickey at New York’s Morgan Lehman Gallery, brings together nine artists who draw attention to the background as an active part of the image. The exhibition shows how each of the nine painters negotiate the relationship between figure and field differently.

New York–based artist Dan Gausman’s Volaris Vortex (2025) uses professional tennis-court paint on concrete in a work that redraws court lines into spiraling arcs. Here, he turns the playing surface itself, usually seen as a backdrop, into the primary subject. Meanwhile, French painter Claire Nicolet’s Nocturne: What the Bee Has Seen(2023) depicts stylized plants and clouds in layered blues, flattening the landscape almost as if it were a pattern. On the other hand, American artist Amy MacKay lets the background consume her figure. A Loving Embrace(2025) consists of layered pastel oil paint that depicts two translucent figures, which seem to appear gradually within the surrounding color field rather than standing apart from it.

Concetta Modica and Ignazio Mortellaro

“All Fall Down”

Francesco Pantaleone, Palermo, Italy

Through Mar. 14th

nella carne dei giorni, 2016
Ignazio Mortellaro
Francesco Pantaleone

composizione intrepida - fearless compositon, 2025
Concetta Modica
Francesco Pantaleone

Many of the sculptures in Concetta Modica and Ignazio Mortellaro’s two-person exhibition, “All Fall Down,” appear perpetually on the verge of collapse. Works are placed onto the ground, suspended in the air, or leaning precariously on the wall, leaving most of the white walls at Palermo’s Francesco Pantaleone bare. The entire exhibition shows this perilous balance, where metal rods lean and golden sculptures float in the gallery space.

Works such as Mortellaro’s nella carne dei giorni (2016), composed of brass and iron rods, and Modica’s Testimone (2026), a bronze-cast rod suspended between two stone blocks and held by a rope, emphasize fragility through their unstable arrangements and material contrasts. One of the standout works of the exhibition is Modica’s composizione intrepida - fearless composition (2025), a steel structure rising 5-and-a-half feet and fitted with four ceramic elements. Three of these—shaped like a teapot, a lamb, and what resembles a smushed brain—hang at different heights. Here, the exhibition’s title is made literal. For these artists, falling evokes the inevitability of time, with each object caught in action before an inevitable release.

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Creative Capital announces 2026 awardees and new “state of the art” grant. https://ift.tt/RckV2dB

Creative Capital has announced that it will distribute $2.9 million in grants to 109 artists across all 50 states as well as U.S. territories, marking one of the largest funding commitments in the nonprofit’s 25-year history.

The 2026 awards include the long-running Creative Capital Award—supporting 49 new projects across disciplines—and the inaugural “State of the Art Prize,” a new national initiative offering $10,000 unrestricted grants to 53 artists. This prize was awarded to one artist in every state as well as Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico, and Guam. The winners work across visual arts, literature, performing arts, and film.

The Creative Capital Award provides $50,000 in unrestricted project grants to “risk-taking” artists. These artists will receive professional development and mentorship services. This year, the recipients of both prizes were chosen from 4,546 applicants from all 50 states.

“The 2026 Creative Capital Awarded projects boldly push artistic form and ideas forward, from an Arabic-language jazz opera; to a family-owned grocery store transformed into a community space in gentrifying Washington, D.C., to a film meditation on the color blue,” Angela Mattox, director of artist initiatives at Creative Capital, said in a statement.

The nonprofit framed the awards as especially urgent as U.S. cultural policy continues to constrict funding and institutional support for the arts. “In this moment of urgent and widespread need for arts funding, generous supporters have helped Creative Capital expand our open call, national grant program to serve innovative artists in all 50 states,” said Christine Kuan, president and executive director at Creative Capital.

Here are the winners of the 2026 Creative Capital Award in visual arts:

• Sadie Barnette
• Gina Beavers
• Kenturah Davis
• Liss LaFleur
• Pepe Mar
• Masud Olufani
• Jeff Ostergren
• Margaret Pearce
• Ronald Rael
• Cara Romero
• Yoshie Sakai
• Jean Shin
• Catherine Telford Keogh

Here are the recipients of the inaugural State of the Art Prize in visual arts:

• Katie Baldwin Basile
• Karen Brummund
• Danielle Hatch
• brooke smiley
• Yumi Janairo Roth
• B Proud
• Nydia Blas
• Lorenzo Triburgo
• Kate Greene
• Ash Arder
• Rosy Simas
• Coulter Fussell
• Jazsalyn
• Elle Billing
• Hannah Demma
• Aspen Golann
• Dahlia Elsayed
• Brad Rose
• Juniper Harrower
• Ayumi Ishii
• Elisheba Israel Mrozik
• Russel Albert Daniels
• Ali Printz
• Conor Mullen
• Javier Orfon
• Njena Surae Jarvis

To see the complete list of winners, click here.`

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Diriyah Biennale announces artists for 2026 edition. https://ift.tt/pmiUhI4

The third edition of the Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale will feature 67 artists, including Pacita Abad and Etel Adnan. The event will open on January 30th in Diriyah, Saudi Arabia, a historic city 20 minutes from the country’s capital, Riyadh.

Titled “In Interludes and Transitions,” the 2026 edition will focus on themes of movement, migration, and transformation. The Biennale will aim to frame these ideas through the historical and contemporary connections linking the Arab region with broader global contexts. The exhibition is led by artistic directors Nora Razian and Sabih Ahmed, the curator of Art Jameel in Dubai and the former director of Ishara Art Foundation, respectively.

“This edition of the Biennale takes place at a moment when the role of art feels ever more urgent,” Razian and Ahmed said in a joint statement. “Over the last year, participating artists and our curatorial team have immersed themselves in the nuanced histories of the Arab region, the rapid transformations reshaping it, and the wider philosophical questions that echo across different geographies.… We see the Biennale as an invitation to think rhythmically, to approach time as layered, pulsating, and collectively embodied.”

The exhibition will be staged in the JAX District, an arts area located near At-Turaif, a UNESCO World Heritage Site that was the capital city of the First Saudi State. More than 22 new commissions will be presented; however, exact details have yet to be announced. Exhibition design will be developed by the Italian studio Formafantasma, working in close collaboration with the curatorial team. Milan-based architect Sammy Zarka has also been appointed associate architect and exhibition designer.

Here is the complete list of artists:

• Pacita Abad
• Pio Abad
• Rand Abdul Jabbar
• Abdullah Miniawy Trio
• Etel Adnan
• Yussef Agbo-Ola (Olaniyi Studio)
• Leen Ajlan
• Ahaad Alamoudi
• Elyas Alavi
• Afra Al Dhaheri
• Shadia Alem
• Mohammad Al-Ghamdi
• Mohammed Alhamdan (7amdan)
• Nouf Al-Harthi
• Ramy Alqtham
• Abdullah Al Saadi
• Ruba Al-Sweel
• Lulua Alyahya
• Ismaïl Bahri
• Taysir Batniji
• Dineo Seshee Bopape (Raisib)
• Raven Chacon
• Ayman Yousry Daydban
• Nolan Oswald Dennis
• Rohini Devasher
• Merve Ertufan
• Ivana Franke
• Rahima Gambo
• Eric Gyamfi
• Samia Halaby
• Petrit Halila
• Hazem Harb
• Aziz Hazara
• Ho Rui An
• Alana Hunt
• Kamala Ibrahim Ishag
• Amaka Jaji
• Kayfa ta
• Yazan Khalili
• Moshekwa Langa
• Daniel Lind-Ramos
• George Mahashe
• Guadalupe Maravilla
• Yu Ji
• Théo Mercier
• Nour Mobarak
• Mochu
• Nancy Mounir
• Hussein Nassereddine
• Daniel Otero Torres
• Thao Nguyen Phan
• Gala Porras-Kim
• Sarker Protick
• Abdelkarim Qassem
• Raqs Media Collective
• K.P. Reji
• Faisal Samra
• Oscar Santillán
• Amina Saoudi Aït Khay
• Bogosi Sekhukhuni
• Karan Shrestha
• Elias Sime
• Trương Công Tùng
• Rajesh Chaitya Vangad
• Wolff Architects
• Agustina Woodgate
• Müge Yılmaz

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Amy Sillman to be represented by David Zwirner. https://ift.tt/sbO6Cl7

New York–based painter Amy Sillman will be represented by David Zwirner. The gallery announced that Sillman’s first exhibition with the gallery will open in New York in 2027.

Sillman is widely regarded as a leading figure in contemporary painting, with a practice that has evolved steadily since the early 1990s. Her paintings are typically developed through extended processes of layering, erasure, and revision, emphasizing duration and decision-making as integral components of form. Rather than adhering to a single aesthetic, Sillman’s multidisciplinary practice draws from a broad range of historical references, including Abstract Expressionism, hard-edge painting, and minimalism.

“Amy treats painting as a form of thinking itself, where every mark contains both construction and demolition, certainty and doubt,” David Zwirner said in a statement. “She has this remarkable ability to mine the entire history of the medium in the process. Her practice also encompasses much more than painting.”

Born in Detroit in 1955, Sillman studied at Beloit College in New York and the School of Visual Arts, where she graduated with a BFA in 1979. She completed an MFA at Bard College in 1995. Her first institutional show was “Procession,” presented by the ICA Philadelphia in 2004.

Over the last two decades, Sillman has exhibited extensively throughout the United States and Europe. Notable solo exhibitions include a 2008 traveling presentation co-organized by the Smithsonian Institution and a 2013 survey curated by Helen Molesworth, which traveled from the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston to the Aspen Art Museum and the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College.

Sillman’s work is currently held at prestigious collections worldwide, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, among others. Sillman’s most recent show was mounted by Capitain Petzel in Berlin, where she showed “Minute Cinema: 4 videos for 4 seasons,” a collaboration with composer Marina Rosenfeld.

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How This Istanbul Power Couple Built a Stunning Personal Art Haven https://ift.tt/iYUZgnx

For Demet Müftüoğlu Eşeli, collecting art is as much about creating a platform for artistic exchange as it is about populating her living space.

In 2009, Demet and her filmmaker husband Alphan founded the art-and-culture organization ISTANBUL’74 and its annual IST.FESTIVAL, a program of art-minded discussions and presentations. Previous guests have included Jeff Koons, Sheree Hovsepian, Tilda Swinton, and Kirsten Dunst.

From the outset, Müftüoğlu Eşeli and her husband didn’t consider collecting art to be “about accumulation.” Many of the works they own are the result of “connections,” she noted: “I’m drawn to artists whose work carries emotion, narrative, and urgency.”

The couple’s collection features works by international names such as Nicolas Pol, Jonah Freeman & Justin Lowe, Daniel Arsham, Anton Corbijn, and Robert Montgomery, alongside Turkish artists including Ahmet Doğu İpek, Ertuğrul Güngör & Faruk Ertekin, Mehmet Ali Uysal, and Belkıs Balpınar.

The couple resides in a former fisherman’s house in Istanbul’s quaint Kandilli neighborhood, where sounds of seagulls and ferries mingle from the nearby Bosphorus Strait. Designed by local architect Seyhan Özdemir Sarper, the three-story dwelling is an art-filled sanctuary for the globe-trotting duo, where art is hosted with an air of effortless swag.

The sandy-hued tones, which hint at 1970s West Coast interiors, wash the dwelling with amber shades in furniture and carpeting. An Alexander Calder mobile rests on the coffee table, not so far from a ceramic sculpture by their close friend and collaborator José Parlá.

Bodrum, Turkey-based textile artist Belkıs Balpınar’s bow-shaped weaving, Balloon (2014), sits by the spiral staircase; Greek artist Irini Karayannopoulou’s collage painting, Dark Luna (2024), leans against a wall at an intimate corner, following the work’s presentation in the artist’s 2025 solo exhibition, “Luna,” at the swanky Istanbul members club Clubhouse Bebek.

Müftüoğlu Eşeli’s background as a curator and her collecting “have informed each other deeply,” she says. She organized the group exhibition “NEARNESS: A Neighborhood Exhibition” as part of the most recent edition of the IST.FESTIVAL last October with artworks by artists including Stefan Brüggemann and Sheree Hovsepian housed in venues including ISTANBUL’74’s headquarters and within some of the nearby businesses, such as a butchershop and a florist.

“There’s something very personal about bringing an artist’s work into your home, and at the same time, there’s something very generous about sharing that energy with the public,” she said.

“The artists I collect are often those I’ve had the privilege to work with and build relationships with through ISTANBUL’74,” Müftüoğlu Eşeli added. Parlá, for example, has participated in various festival iterations as a speaker as well as a subject of a solo exhibition, titled “ISTHMUS,” which Müftüoğlu Eşeli organized at a storefront in the city’s bustling cobblestoned district, Akaretler, during the 2019 Istanbul Biennial. A few months later, they partnered with the New York–based artist again for a booth at Untitled Art, Miami Beach, where they presented the same series of ceramic vessels, one of which Müftüoğlu Eşeli currently owns.

The cross-pollination between different roles also lifts the curtain to the ways an artwork makes its way into the duo’s private collection. “I mostly acquire works directly from artists—through studio visits, conversations, and relationships with the galleries,” Müftüoğlu Eşeli said.

Her advice to those new to art buying is unsurprising given her personal path: “You need to know the artist in person and understand the depth of their personality, which is what adds so much to their work,” she said.

Still, collecting art is often about accepting that some works get away. Müftüoğlu Eşeli points to the early collage works of Angel Otero, the Puerto Rico– and Brooklyn-based painter of textured, often collaged, abstractions. Müftüoğlu Eşeli partnered with the gallery Lehmann Maupin in 2012 to present the painter’s work at ISTANBUL’74’s gallery space and it sold out before the opening. “His practice has only grown richer and more profound over the years, and it would have been so special to have one more of his early works from that moment in our shared history,” she added.

Müftüoğlu Eşeli is a firm believer in the personal resonance of engaging in art, of being allowed into the world of an artist, and “gaining access to their perspective.” Owning a work of art is, for her, “the end point of that journey—an artifact of that privilege.”

Whether in work, as a collector, or simply as an appreciator, art is the through line that unites the various aspects of Müftüoğlu Eşeli’s life—and owning an artwork still carries a unique thrill. “It’s all part of the same rhythm—living with art, working with art, and allowing it to shape how we see the world,” Müftüoğlu Eşeli said. “Collecting is a way of honoring that exchange.”

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The 7 Most Striking Artworks at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2025–2026 https://ift.tt/EiW6cD7

“I am an artist. I only know how to work in the studio, and this biennale is an extension of that studio,” said Nikhil Chopra at the opening of the 6th Kochi-Muziris Biennale, South Asia’s largest contemporary art exhibition and the first biennial founded in India. An internationally renowned performance artist and founder of HH Art Spaces, Chopra has shaped the curatorial vision of this edition.

Titled “For the Time Being,” the biennale brings together 66 artists from 25 countries across 29 venues in Kochi, India, a historic port city on the country’s southwestern coast. Much like a performance, the program unfolds gradually, running across 110 days. Rather than presenting a fixed exhibition, many venues function as active sites for durational works, shifting installations, and slow processes of gathering and making.

Responding to a world shaped by conflict, rapid technological change, deepening inequality, environmental crisis, and a pervasive sense of hopelessness, Chopra selected artworks that propose presence and friendship as practical responses to the moment. Many of the works invite visitors to slow down and engage with art through the body—by sitting, walking, sleeping, eating, listening, or simply conversing.

Here, we highlight seven powerful works that made an impression.

Panjeri Artists’ Union

Assemblies of Hope Amidst the Death-Worlds, 2025

The first work visitors encounter at the entrance of Aspinwall House, the Biennale’s main venue, is by Panjeri Artists’ Union, a 14-member anti-caste art collective formed in 2021. Based in Uchu Amtala, West Bengal, just a few train stops from the India-Bangladesh border, the group works from a region shaped by the consequences of the 1947 partition.

Their practice responds to border realities—surveillance, restricted movement, violence under security regimes, and disputes over shared rivers such as the Ichamati—conditions that disproportionately affect marginalized communities. At Kochi, this context takes physical form as a dense room full of ephemera. Protest posters and slogans line the walls, including texts by Indian social reformers, Dalit thinkers, and political poets. Charcoal drawings by members of the collective depict hands, faces, and bodies bent under injustice, alongside watercolors of rivers and children’s drawings that imagine quieter, more idyllic worlds.

The installation also includes handwoven textiles made by laborers put out of work by the shift to machine-weaving in the area. These hang opposite elaborate costumes designed to resemble gods, which draw from Bhaona, a centuries-old theater tradition from the neighboring state of Assam that’s rooted in Bhakti philosophy. This theater is historically performed by lower-caste communities, invoking a sharp tension between spiritual equality and lived inequality.

The space is alive with performance as well. One artist draws chalk lines across the floor while another follows, erasing them. As Anupam Roy, a member of the collective, put it: “Other industries have unions. Art should too, so artists can organize themselves politically.”

Ibrahim Mahama

Parliament of Ghosts, 2017–present

Moving deeper into the Biennale, the viewer finds themself inside the Anand Warehouse, a space once used by the Dutch, and later the British, to store goods moving through Kochi’s ports. Here, Ibrahim Mahama has built Parliament of Ghosts (2017–present), an enclosed chamber lined with heavy curtains made from used jute sacks with over a hundred chairs salvaged from furniture shops across Kochi. The sacks, previously used to transport pepper, grain, and timber from the colonies to Europe, still carry the smell of labor and sea, as if histories of extraction and colonial violence have not fully settled.

An evolution of earlier versions presented at the Manchester International Festival in 2019 (and currently on view at project space Ibraaz in London), the work resembles a parliament, a cathedral, and a courtroom—institutions tied to Western power—but also a classroom, held open for gathering. This openness echoes Mahama’s own training; as he recalled in an interview, his art education in Ghana focused on “transforming art from a state of commodity into a gift.”

Recently ranked at the top of ArtReview’s Power 100 list, Mahama, who founded the Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art (SCCA) and Red Clay Studio in Tamale, Ghana, was present throughout the opening week, talking with visitors and hosting public conversations and performances.

Kulpreet Singh

Indelible Black Marks, 2022–present

Right across from Mahama’s installation, visitors enter a darkened room with three haystacks arranged as seating where they can watch an eight-minute film titled Indelible Black Marks (2022–present). The nightmarish work focuses on stubble burning in Patiala, India, the heart of India’s Green Revolution and its rice-growing belt.

The film unfolds in a surreal, cinematic register with a menacing soundtrack: Farmers run through fields overtaken by fire, the air thick with smoke, carrying canvas in an attempt to extinguish the flames, the land visibly suffocating. The burning of leftover rice stalks after harvest, often due to a lack of alternatives, has become widespread, contributing to severe air pollution across northern India, including Delhi.

Artist Kulpreet Singh, who is from a family of farmers, approaches his subject from within. In particular, his work is shaped by the farmers’ protests against market deregulation that were brutally suppressed in the wake of COVID-19 in 2020–21. “This is a systemic problem,” he said, in an interview. Outside the screening space, two blackened canvases rubbed with burnt hay bear the residue of the process seen on screen.

Dima Srouji and Piero Tomassoni

Air of Firozabad/Air of Palestine, 2025

On the first floor of a former rice warehouse, hundreds of delicate glass bubbles hang in a floating cloud, dancing to the shifts in wind and light.

The installation by Dima Srouji and Piero Tomassoni builds on Srouji’s decade-long engagement with glassblowers in Palestine, a craft facing steady decline. This work was realized instead in Firozabad, India, home to one of the world’s oldest glassblowing communities. Of the 451 glass forms on view, 450 were made in India, while one was produced in Palestine, subtly linking the two sites.

“This is a space for exhalation,” the artists explain. Along a narrow corridor, a small library of philosophy books invites visitors to sit and read. Above, the glass forms hover like held breath, quietly drawing attention to the invisible makers behind the objects we encounter, and to their often-unacknowledged presence across the Biennale.

Otobong Nkanga

Soft Offerings to Scorched Lands and the Brokenhearted, 2025

Stepping back outdoors, visitors enter a dilapidated, roofless space threaded with banyan tree roots where Otobong Nkanga is growing a garden. Known for projects that use gardening as a way to heal land damaged by colonial exploitation, Nkanga turns here to a mix of flowering and fruiting plants suited to Kochi’s tropical soil.

Heliconia, clock vines, frangipani, hibiscus, peacock flowers, bamboo, lemongrass, pepper bushes, torch ginger, ixora, orange jasmine, and lily varieties form the beginnings of a living landscape. Nkanga’s artwork will grow over the course of the Biennale under the care of local gardeners.

Titled Soft Offerings to Scorched Lands and the Brokenhearted (2025), the work creates a gentle space of repair. Women’s voices—folk stories, conversations, lullabies—echo through the garden from hidden speakers, while mud seats facing the pond and sea invite visitors to pause, listen, and rest.

Marina Abramović

At the Waterfall, 2003

On a small island a short ferry ride from the main venue, a monumental curved screen fills the space of Wellington Warehouse. It plays recordings of the faces of 120 Tibetan monks and nuns from five Buddhist schools, along with their voices. It’s a work made by Marina Abramović, captured at the Sacred Music Festival in Bangalore, India, in 2000, as these religious devotees recited the Heart Sutra.

Abramović, who has long been drawn to ancient ritual as a way of cultivating presence, recalled a moment of realization she had while editing the footage: “When you hear all the prayers from different monasteries and traditions at the same time, they sound like a huge waterfall.”

Only 12 chairs face the screen. Those who choose to sit become part of the energy field created by the overlapping chants, entering not just the sound, but its physical force.

Bani Abidi and Anupama Kundaroo

Barakah, 2025

Chosen by Nikhil Chopra as one of his favorite works of the Biennale, Barakah (2025) is a community kitchen conceived by artists Bani Abidi and Anupama Kundaroo, from Pakistan and India respectively. Named after the Arabic term for “blessing,” the work is shaped by their shared experience of hosting meals and gatherings in their homes in Berlin, where they both live. The project brings together artists, cooks, and local communities around the simple act of sharing food.

The exhibition note calls these gatherings-cum-artworks “a counterspell to the anxieties of capitalism,” and, in the Indian context, to communal divisions as well. Run by women from Kudumbashree, Kerala, India’s state-supported network of women’s self-help groups, the kitchen is open daily from 12 to 3 p.m., serving freshly cooked South Indian meals made from local produce at affordable prices, regardless of who you are.

The space itself is modest and welcoming: a circular canteen built from local timber, with a thatched roof and rope joinery that echoes vernacular architecture. In the spirit of the Biennale, Barakah becomes a place to eat and be together, if only for the time being.

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Janet Fish, who painted radiant still lifes, dies at 87. https://ift.tt/M2Xlo1s

American artist Janet Fish, known for her luminous realist portraits of everyday objects, died at her home in Wells, Vermont at 87 on December 11th. Her death was announced by DC Moore Gallery, which represents the artist.

Fish’s husband, artist Charles Parness, told the New York Times that the cause was a recurrence of a brain hemorrhage.

Fish painted hyper-luminous still lifes that revel in reflections and saturated color, transforming everyday glassware and fruit into sensuous objects. Her works invite slow looking, using excess and clarity to make perception itself part of the subject.

Born in 1938 in Boston, Fish was raised by art historian Peter Fish and sculptor Forence Whistler Fish. Her grandfather was the American Impressionist painter Clark Greenwood Voorhees. Janet moved to Bermuda with her family at age 10, where she remained until she enrolled at Smith College in Massachusetts in 1956. After receiving her bachelor’s degree, she pursued painting at Yale, earning a master’s degree.

Football, 1986
Janet Fish
DC Moore Gallery

At Yale, she worked alongside notable artists including Nancy Graves, Chuck Close, and Richard Serra, s. During her time in school, Fish admired painters like Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock, but she never resonated as an artist with Abstract Expressionism. Instead, her instructor, Alex Katz, encouraged her to paint a landscape. She did, and continued to paint flowers throughout her career.

Fish arrived in New York City in 1965. In the late 1960s and ’70s, she arranged everyday objects beneath the sunlit window of her sixth-floor SoHo walk-up, using the space itself as both studio and subject.

Fish relocated to Vermont in 1979 and adopted a horizontal format, incorporating people and animals into her paintings for the first time. One painting, Football (1986), features a chaotic lunch spread, a television playing a football game, and a newspaper open to the sports section. Her dog sits underneath this scattered table. She painted until 2009, when she stopped due to her health.

Fish’s work is held in prestigious collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Brooklyn Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

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