Swedish rapper Yung Lean to present first major art exhibition in Stockholm. https://ift.tt/7urPql3

Jonatan Leandoer Håstad, the Stockholm-born musician better known as Yung Lean, will present his first visual art exhibition, “Collected Works 2016–2026,” at Torsgatan 22 in Stockholm from September 25th through October 11th.

The show brings together a decade of paintings, collages, works on paper, sculpture, and dioramas—most never before exhibited—alongside a site-specific installation and a new narrative short film that Håstad executive produced and stars in. Rather than a standard gallery hang, the works are staged in different environments such as a salon, a television room, and a screening room.

Håstad, who is self-taught, organized the exhibition himself rather than working with an outside curator. It follows a recent live painting installation with Adidas Originals during Paris Fashion Week earlier this year, and several Instagram teasers released by the artist.

“Ever since I can remember I dreamed of colors,” he said in a statement. “I’ve made wooden sculptures and drawings and paintings since I was a kid. Just like my songs, the work is made through stream of consciousness. I go where the hand takes me.” Following the Stockholm run, a selection of works, primarily sculptures, will go to an international online auction in partnership with Bukowskis.

The exhibition arrives amid a broader run of musicians and actors staging their own visual art shows. Last summer, Ed Sheeran opened “Cosmic Carpark Paintings” at HENI Gallery in London, a collection of Jackson Pollock-influenced drip works made in a disused carpark and sold alongside prints for £900 ($1,224) each, with half the proceeds going to the Ed Sheeran Foundation. Sheeran was direct about the reference point and about his own standing as an artist: “It’s mostly just splashing colors on canvases, think Jackson Pollock... I am by no means ’an artist,’ but I do love making art.” Academy Award-winning actor Adrien Brody similarly opened “Made in America” at Eden Gallery in New York last year, his first show of new work in nearly a decade. The show featured large-scale mixed-media paintings and a sound installation of his own composition. Its opening also followed a $425,000 sale of a collage by Brody at the amfAR Cannes gala.

In Håstad’s case, his surreal imagery has run alongside his music since he emerged as the face of the Swedish rap collective Sad Boys and the cloud rap movement that rose to popularity in the early 2010s.

“My paintings mean nothing and also everything,” said the rapper of the exhibition “Here they are.”

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Why Women Bodybuilders Are Everywhere in Contemporary Art https://ift.tt/cOIhrmj

In Keerthana Kunnath’s photo series “Not What You Saw,” groups of brawny bodybuilders gaze potently into the lens as they bend and flex their muscles. But these depictions aren’t what you might expect of the physically demanding sport. Soaked in the golden southern Indian sun, wrapped in ornately embellished fabric, glittering jewelry, and flowers, these bodybuilders are powerful young women from Kerala.

Bodybuilding is an art form as well as a sport, celebrating shape and presentation as well as brute strength. These muscular celebrations, in art history, have usually been of men: from Frederic Leighton’s mighty and undeniably phallic 1877 sculpture An Athlete Wrestling with a Python to Michaelangelo’s towering 16th-century marble masterpiece David. Today, the gym bro aesthetic is a key part of the “manosphere,” as it’s often called, with male politicians such as Pete Hegseth showing themselves working out on social media to prove their masculinity.

In this cultural climate, contemporary artists are looking to women bodybuilders to reimagine gender and beauty stereotypes, allowing their mighty female protagonists to be variously brave, monstrous, beautiful, and always in control. Rather than portraying women as meek and mild, these artists capture the glamour and sexuality of their women bodybuilder subjects, as well as their physical potency.

Pin Up from the Magazine Lady Face Man Body, No. 3, 2011
Cassils
Human Rights Campaign Benefit Auction

It’s not the first time that the gender implications of bodybuilding have been the subject of contemporary art. In Cassils’s 2011 project CUTS, the Canadian performance artist used bodybuilding techniques and steroids to put on 23 pounds of muscle in 23 weeks, resulting in a photo series that depicts the transgender artist as a masculine, yet glamorous, figure.

Kunnath likewise decided to focus on bodybuilding to explore the gendered standards of her childhood. She started her career in fashion photography in London. When she began photographing bodybuilders in southern India in 2024, she wanted to do something different: confront traditional expectations of how a woman should look and behave.

“Growing up, there were always so many ideas around what a woman should be and how much space she was allowed to take up,” the photographer told Artsy ahead of her first solo museum exhibition opening at Foam Fotografiemuseum in Amsterdam on September 18th. “I was drawn to the women themselves; their individuality, confidence, and the fact that they had chosen a path so different from what we typically see women pursue from the region.”

Kiss of Fire, 2022
Ana Benaroya
Two Palms

Her subjects are photographed against a southern Indian landscape, dressed in a blend of traditional outfits from the region to create a juxtaposition with their built physiques. The images are also inspired by posters for vintage Malayalam films, where actresses would be shown as coquettish and pliable. “I wanted to borrow some of that visual language but turn it on its head,” she said. “I wanted the women to feel glamorous and powerful, but without taking away from their strength.”

Glamour is also a key part of the 2022 series “Core” by London-based photographer Celia Croft and art director Kate Kidney Bishop. In one image, a muscular woman stretches a pair of diamanté-encrusted bikini bottoms across her firmly toned glutes. Another photo is reminiscent of a devotional painting as it shows a woman gazing up into the light, her eyelids covered in icy blue eyeshadow, as her long acrylic nails stroke her clavicle.

Across the series, these women are physically powerful and enticingly glamorous. “The whole bodybuilding industry is about muscle, strength, power—and these women are redefining femininity and gender and finding a new space within that,” the pair said in an interview.

In this sense, women bodybuilders capture high femme sexuality as well as the physical strength usually associated with men. American painter Ana Benaroya revels in these two distinct aesthetics in her paintings of physically commanding women. Inspired by Michelangelo’s depictions of the body and contemporary photographs of bodybuilders, her female figures are flamboyant and frenzied, depicted in a palette of acid green, bright purple, electric blue, and hot pink. Their undulating muscles are enormous, creating the appearance of brawny goddesses.

They also have flowing hair, enormous breasts, and talon-like nails. In Spirit Colossal (2025), for example, two women are painted in vibrant red and blue, flexing against a natural backdrop of wildflowers and glittering night sky. “I love creating a balance between perceived opposites within my paintings,” the artist told Artsy. “I never want the women in my work to seem like one thing.”

Her works are also inspired by art historical depictions of women, where their sexuality is foremost. “Women’s bodies as objects of desire is something that is almost impossible to escape, but I am interested in harnessing that to my own end,” she said. “Yes, they can be ripped but they can also be voluptuous and do their hair and nails….They are powerful and monstrous, alluring and beautiful.”

Bodybuilder Beauty, 2023
Elsa Rouy
Larsen Warner

Spirit Colossal, 2025
Ana Benaroya
KOSAKU KANECHIKA

That ambiguity is also on view in the work of British artist Elsa Rouy. Her painted bodies merge together, variously muscular, bony, and bendy. In her 2023 painting Bodybuilder Beauty, a bald figure proudly holds their arms above their head. Their biceps ripple, ribcage flares, and breasts are pulled up near their chin.

“There’s an ambiguity and strength with the bodybuilder physique that I found interesting and wanted to explore,” Rouy told Artsy. “There’s a ferocity to it. I’m constantly trying to look into the push and pull of the body at breaking points and moments of intensity.”

For Bodybuilder Beauty, she was also inspired by a drawing by Jusepe de Ribera, who was known for his sinewy subjects. “Translating the contorted male body into one of a bold and confronting ambiguous figure was fun to do and a way of expressing my own ideas about alternate femininity.”

These vibrant depictions of physically extreme women create a new vision for preconceived notions of gendered behavior and appearance. As Kunnath told Artsy about the people in her photographs, “There is something really beautiful about seeing these women inhabit their bodies on their own terms, without trying to make themselves smaller or more conventionally feminine.”

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Why This Nigerian Collector Is Committed to Buying African Artworks that Feel Like Home https://ift.tt/L6EMDTy

For Dr. Myma Belo-Osagie, collecting art began with a simple goal: to fill her bare dorm room in law school. While at Harvard University, the Nigerian lawyer, collector, and arts patron wanted something to make her space feel less anonymous. Then she encountered a print of a portrait of an African man by Peter Paul Rubens.

“Something in his expression stayed with me long after I walked past it,” she recalled. “I think it was the first time an image really spoke to me and how I was feeling at the time and caused me to want to have it with me rather than simply admire it from afar.”

That encounter sparked an impulse to live with art that has remained at the center of Belo-Osagie’s art-buying ethos. Over the years, she has built a collection of more than 400 works spanning painting, ceramics, sculpture, tapestry, and quilts. She places particular emphasis on artists from Nigeria, Ghana, and across the African continent, including Larry Otoo, Ehinomen Okoeki, and Ndidi Dike.

From private pleasure to responsibility

“I have always bought what I like and what I find interesting—not necessarily because a piece is ‘valuable,’ whatever that means,” she told Artsy. In the early years, that meant buying from artists who were young, relatively unknown, and sometimes struggling to make a living.

While that instinct remains, her understanding of what support entails has evolved. A collection of this scale, she has come to recognize, “comes with certain obligations: documentation that fully acknowledges the artists, proper care, and thinking about what happens to the works after me.” Collecting, she said, has evolved “from simply being a private pleasure to becoming something closer to a responsibility to our society.”

That sense of responsibility is particularly pronounced in Belo-Osagie’s approach to African art. “I am drawn to work that captures African life and identity—scenes and items that reference the way we live, the way we see beauty, the things we use on a daily basis, the things that feel like ‘home’ to me,” she explained.

Her interests are also material. A work does not have to be conventionally beautiful or immediately legible to hold her attention. She is intrigued by objects that make her wonder how they were made and why an artist chose a particular material. She points to a sculpture by Nigerian artist Jacob Jari constructed almost entirely from cornstalks, which she acquired because she found it fascinating “that something so ordinary and ‘basic’ could be used to create art.”

Her tastes, meanwhile, remain fluid. “My favorite [artwork] tends to shift depending on the day of the week and my mood,” she said. One work she repeatedly returns to is Moyo Ogundipe’s Three Lagos Socialites (2007), a densely layered painting depicting a familiar social scene in the Nigerian city. Belo-Osagie is captivated by its detail and by the way it takes a subject explored by other artists and renders it with distinctive complexity.

Building support for artists beyond the collection

As her collecting practice has expanded, so has her engagement with philanthropy. For several years, Belo-Osagie was part of an NGO that encouraged Nigerian companies like banks and corporations to buy and display Nigerian art.

In 2025, her four children launched the Myma Art Prize to celebrate her 70th birthday. The prize rewards early- to mid-career artists from Ghana or Nigeria with $5,000, a funded residency, an exhibition, and professional development support—reflecting Belo-Osagie’s belief that financial support alone is not enough to sustain an artist’s career.

“I began my collecting of African art at a time when many talented artists could barely survive on art sales alone,” Belo-Osagie explained. “But money was never really the entire issue.” Early promise can bring attention, she noted, but once the spotlight moves on, artists still need professional support to continue developing their practices.

The experience of the prize’s first winner, Omolola Coker, has affirmed how beneficial the multifaceted approach can be. During Coker’s residency with Nosona in Benin City, Nigeria, she requested to extend her stay. For Belo-Osagie, it suggested that Coker remained open to being “stretched and refined.” During the residency, Coker has expanded beyond her primary practice of painting and experimented with other media, including bronze casting.

Reimagining a history of patronage

The prize’s format reflects a broader conception of patronage rooted in African history. “Historically we have thought of patronage as wealthy families, individuals, or institutions supporting art and artists by commissioning works and funding artists,” Belo-Osagie explained. “In pre-colonial times, the Asantehene [the Asante kingdom in Ghana] and the Oba of Benin [the Benin kingdom in Nigeria] and their respective palaces were largely responsible for supporting the artists and gold and bronze casters.”

Their support led to the creation of the renowned gold weights in the Asante kingdom and the world-famous Benin Bronzes. This form of patronage, Belo-Osagie explained, was significantly reduced during the slave trade and colonization.

With this model in mind, Belo-Osagie views her role as a collector with a keen understanding of the impact her support has on individual artists, as well as on the broader industry.

“Ultimately collectors help to create legacy and stability for the art world,” she said. “Certainly for Africa I feel one of the major responsibilities is to help develop an art ecosystem that works for the way we, as Africans, want to live today and furthermore, one that provides better understanding and context for not just the intrinsic value of works of African art but also for the economic value art brings to the creative economy and the GDP of our countries.”

Collecting as preservation

For Belo-Osagie, supporting artists also holds a deeper mission to remind future generations of what was lost in the arts due to colonialism and the slave trade.

“I see part of this responsibility as further rebuilding and reviving the awareness amongst a younger generation of the incredible talent, skill, and creativity Africa had in the arts, and restoring confidence in our ability to continue to create and innovate in this space,” she said.

Collecting, in this sense, becomes an act not only of preservation, but restoration.

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Major collection of cat-related art and collectibles heads to Bonhams auction this fall. https://ift.tt/150ry2p

This fall, Bonhams will present the Sandy Lerner Cat Collection, a two-part sale of one of the most significant private collections of cat-related decorative arts, books, and collectibles ever assembled. The first part of the auction will be hosted live at Bonhams New York on September 30th. The second runs online September 22nd through October 1st.

The auctions draw from the Ayrshire Farm estate of businesswoman, philanthropist, and feline aficionado Sandy Lerner. Bonhams will also present two additional auctions from Lerner’s estate, including furniture, paintings, and decorative arts from her Georgian Revival Virginia residence, held in Massachusetts, later in the fall.

Lerner, who co-founded tech company Cisco Systems and later founded the cosmetics brand Urban Decay, has spent more than three decades building the cat collection. She chronicled her collecting journey in the 2017 book Caticons: 4,000 Years of Art Imitating Cats. The collecting habit began, by her own account, during a period when she was “forced to be catless” because her then-husband was allergic; she has said her only criteria for acquisitions were “(1) is it a cat, and (2) do I like it?”

“These are objects I have personally chosen,” Lerner said in a statement. “They need to be rehomed, now, to others who will care for, cherish, and respect them as icons of the human achievement and—in the case of the caticons—affection that created them.”

The Sandy Lerner Cat Collection Part I will feature 66 lots spanning centuries and media. Highlights include Léonard Tsuguharu Foujita’s Chat et Chaton (1934) estimated at $30,000–$50,000; Diego Giacometti’s Tête de Chat (circa 1970) estimated at $20,000–$30,000; and Henri Matisse’s Visages et grenades (circa 1952) estimated at $10,000–$15,000.

Other artists represented in the sale include Rembrandt Bugatti, Édouard Manet, Théophile Alexandre Steinlen, Fernando Botero, and Henriëtte Ronner-Knip. The sale also includes feline-inspired jewelry from Tiffany & Co. and Boucheron, along with Asian works of art such as a Qing dynasty jade cat-form snuff bottle estimated at $30,000–$40,000.

Beyond cats, furniture, decorative arts, and paintings from Lerner’s collection will be featured in Ayrshire Farm: The Sandy Lerner Collection Part I, a live auction in Massachusetts on October 28th. Animal-themed works reflecting Lerner’s broader affection for wildlife appear prominently in that sale as well, including Walter Hunt’s Feeding Time, estimated at $25,000–$35,000. An online companion sale runs October 18th through 29th.

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American painter Mary Heilmann dies at 86. https://ift.tt/QMdbE3P

Mary Heilmann, whose insouciant, wobbly-edged abstractions upended the precision of Minimalism and Modernist geometry, died Friday at a hospital in Riverhead, New York. Her studio confirmed the cause was complications from a recent fall.

Born Mary Ann Heilmann in San Francisco on January 3, 1940, she grew up between the city and Los Angeles in an Irish Catholic family. Her father, a civil engineer, died when she was 13; her mother, a nurse, once warned that a life as an artist would mean she’d “starve in a garret.” “In my mind, I thought, ’Yes!’” Heilmann recalled in an interview with Bomb magazine in 1999. “That’s exactly what I wanted.” She studied English literature at UC Santa Barbara, where she met the ceramicist Ron Nagle and took her first pottery classes, later pursuing ceramics and sculpture at San Francisco State University and at Berkeley under Peter Voulkos. After earning her master’s degree, she moved to New York in 1968, falling in with a downtown circle at the renowned Max’s Kansas City nightclub that included Robert Smithson, Carl Andre, Dan Graham, and Richard Serra, a friend from high school.

Heilmann’s sculptural ambitions stalled when she was excluded from the Whitney Museum of American Art’s landmark 1969 show “Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials,” of whose 22 artists only two were women (Dia Art Foundation would showcase Heilmann’s sculptures in the context of better-known male peers with an influential 2017 exhibition). She turned to painting instead, calling it, in her 1999 memoir The All Night Movie, “a rebellious move” into “the much-maligned practice.”

Her early paintings, including Little 9 x 9 (1973), made by wiping away pigment with her fingers, reworked the rectilinear grids of artists like Piet Mondrian and Sol LeWitt with off-kilter lines and dripping, high-key color. In 1978, after the deaths of the art dealer Norman E. Fisher and the artist Gordon Matta-Clark, she painted The End, a yellow rectangle marred by splashes of blood-red, calling it “a requiem” for those she had loved and lost. The following year, she painted Save the Last Dance for Me, an image of shrinking pink rectangles on black, a work she would consider the breakthrough that established her mature style. By the early 1980s, she felt shut out of the downtown scene: “My clothes were out of style. I’d lost my timing.” The spare paintings that followed, including Rosebud (1983) and Sea Wall (1986), are now considered among her finest.

Gallerist Pat Hearn gave Heilmann the first of seven solo shows at her New York gallery beginning in 1986; Swiss powerhouse Hauser & Wirth began representing Heilmann in the late 1990s. Describing her process in 1987, she said, “When I make a painting, I’m like a kid stacking blocks; I push the shapes around in my mind, I count.” She also became known for boxy plywood chairs with webbed polypropylene seats, begun in 2002. Dozens of her chairs were installed on the Whitney Museum of American Art’s outdoor terrace in 2015 to help inaugurate its Meatpacking District building, and reappeared inside a decade later in “Long Line,“ a show named for a 2020 painting enlarged across the gallery’s walls.

Heilmann only received widespread recognition late in her career. Her first American museum retrospective, “Mary Heilmann: To Be Someone,” opened in 2007, when she was 67, at the Orange County Museum of Art in Newport Beach, California. The exhibition then travelled to the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, and New York’s New Museum. Later shows included the San Francisco Art Institute, Kunstmuseum Bonn, and London’s Whitechapel Gallery. “I have always worked from a sort of underdog position and got a lot of energy from that,” she told Whitehot Magazine in 2007. “So being ’top dog,’ now, is a little bit unsettling—I don’t exactly have the moves for that... but I’m gettin’ ’em!”

“The big boys just totally marginalized Mary because she was turning the whole construction of hard-edged geometry inside out,” the artist Marilyn Minter told the New York Times in 2008. Writing in Bomb magazine in 1999, Ross Bleckner said her paintings “contain a joy so contagious one smiles upon seeing them.” Heilmann herself was matter-of-fact about the sentiment running through her work: “I like to get at deep sentiments through sentimentality,” she said.

She never married and had no children; she is survived by two nieces and a nephew. Asked how she developed ideas for her paintings, she offered a characteristically unadorned answer: “I mostly just think. A lot of it is daydreaming. A lot of it is sitting.”

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Why Norway’s “Trillion Dollar Man” Loves Buying Unexpected Art https://ift.tt/GwxNkMi

Even CEOs get summer jobs. Nicolai Tangen, the head of Norway’s sovereign wealth fund—the public fortune created by the country’s vast oil deposits—has been nicknamed Norway’s “Trillion Dollar Man.” Yet this summer he has been a tour guide in his hometown of Kristiansand on Norway’s southern coast.

Tangen has been showing people around Kunstsilo, the £50 million (about $67.8 million) project that turned a monumental Brutalist grain silo on the town’s dock into a showcase for his collection of Nordic modern art. He gifted the whole package to his town in the summer of 2024. Although the part-private, part-public funding model for its running costs was hugely controversial, the institution has become a phenomenon: Time magazine hailed it as one of the “World’s Greatest Places.”

Behind the unlikely summer gig is one of the more consequential collecting projects in recent Nordic art history. Over two decades, Tangen has assembled thousands of works with the explicit aim of challenging established national canons, championing artists who have fallen from fashion, and filling gaps in the historical record. Now, with the collection installed in a major public museum, his private taste has acquired unusual institutional—and market—power.

Tangen’s collection ranges from works by internationally renowned figures from the region, such as the late Danish CoBrA artist Asger Jorn, through to lesser-known characters, including the Swedish figurative painter Ola Billgren, whose works offer a hazy blend of Hitchcock and Hockney. Highlights can be enjoyed in the current exhibition “Pictures from a New World: Stories from the Tangen Collection.”

On his summer break from his state job, Tangen—an improbably energetic 60-year-old—has been guiding public groups through the galleries in a canary-yellow Kunstsilo-branded gilet, a microphone clipped to its lapel. His delivery is folksy and engaging. “You see where you keep people’s attention, when you get it completely silent, and when they want to move on,” he noted, talking to Artsy following one of the tours. He had them laughing, especially when introducing the more outré pictures. Any jokes fall flat? “Sure,” he acknowledged. “I wasn’t very saucy this time.”

The word collector can mean “so many things,” observed Tangen. “I think it starts by defining your area of interest, and what it is that speaks to you as a person. So first you have to define and frame, and then the work starts.” He is not interested in acquiring works by “the flavor of the year…I know exactly who they are, these artists who everyone else is buying. We’re not buying any of it. We’re doing the opposite: we’re buying stuff that is out of favor. And, frankly, we define art history. This is a scholastic collection.”

Tangen’s use of “we” is deliberate. Throughout his collecting adventure, he has worked with specialists in each of the Nordic countries. “I really don’t like ‘I,’” he said. “It would be very dishonest to pretend I’ve done all this by myself. One person cannot build this; it’s too comprehensive,” he explained. “You’d have to fly around like a madman.”

His key advisor has been the art historian Steinar Gjessing, who also helped form the collection of the late Norwegian business tycoon Stein Erik Hagen (from which Tangen has acquired some 400 works). The motivation behind the Tangen Collection has always been “to find gaps in and alternatives to the national canon,” noted Gjessing. “To demonstrate that there are many stories. Many layers. Many voices.”

Tangen grew up in Kristiansand in the 1970s; his early interest in art came from his art historian mother. Later, he built the successful AKO Capital hedge fund in London, before taking the helm at the Norwegian oil fund in 2020. His artistic interests remained throughout: in 2003, he took a two-year sabbatical to study for an MA at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London.

The first artist to catch Tangen’s eye was Johannes Rian, the mid-century Norwegian painter, whose colorful figurative works echoed those of his teacher Axel Revold and, in turn, Revold’s teacher Henri Matisse. And then came the German-born Norwegian artist Rolf Nesch, on whom Tangen wrote his Courtauld thesis. “He came in quite early in my thinking. It’s partly the composition of the work; it’s the colours; it’s the technique. The whole thing that makes it powerful on the wall. I didn’t know about him.”

He began with Norwegian works before panning out to Swedish, Danish, and, finally, Finnish art. There was a financial advantage to his strategy. “When I started, art from the 1950s wasn’t very sought after, so you could just scoop up the most incredible things.” Tangen’s activities have single-handedly driven prices up for the artists featured in the collection. “Now it’s hyper fashionable.”

Tangen’s tastes have changed—finessed—over the years. “In the beginning it was a bit decorative and simple, and then it became complicated pretty quickly. My heart is closest to abstract art. I think abstraction is modernism and the way you disentangle color and form.” His collection is particularly strong in works that fragment landscapes and interiors: Anna-Eva Bergman’s monumental rock forms, Tove Jansson’s café interiors.

Tangen’s other great interest is literature. He recently interviewed Susan Cain, author of Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking, on his In Good Company podcast (a platform for business leaders and contemporary thinkers). Cain told Tangen that his 10-year-old self would reflect his true character. “I think that is so interesting because I was an introvert, just read books all the time. And I think I have gone back to that,” he said.

Next year Kunstsilo and U.K. literature festival Hay will collaborate on a new literature festival in Kristiansand. The event will have an international focus, Tangen noted, adding that contemporary Norwegian fiction has got stuck in a rut of “gloomy nothingness.” Although the Tangen collection is not without its fair share of melancholy pictures. “We have a lot of it,” he said. “That could fill another exhibition. You could call it: ‘Sad as Hell.’”

Collecting has taken him out of boardrooms and—tentatively—into studios. “I’ve never been very close to the artists whose work I collect. I think proximity can easily bias you,” he said. “Business people tend to be more uniform and alike, in my experience. Artists often carry different struggles, and their art becomes a way of expressing and working through them. I enjoy spending time with both business people and artists. I think it lets me use two different sides of myself.”

Today, Tangen only buys works for Kunstsilo. What he hangs at home are the “leftovers” from earlier collecting days. “I haven’t bought anything privately since 2015,” he said. “Happiness is in the mind; happiness is not about a painting or something you have on the wall. I never miss anything. I like change. When we’re done here next week, I’m not going to miss the summer; autumn is coming up.”

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Works by Marina Abramović and Martin Creed featured in Balloon Museum New York’s inaugural show. https://ift.tt/Q3TkB2y

The Balloon Museum opened its first permanent location on August 7th at the Tin Building at South Street Seaport in Lower Manhattan. Known for its inflatable structures and immersive sensory spaces, the Balloon Museum has previously held temporary exhibitions in Paris and London, drawing millions of visitors.

The Balloon Museum inaugurates its New York home with “Daydream—Air Becomes Art,” an exhibition with new work by Marina Abramović alongside pieces by Martin Creed, Karina Smigla-Bobinski, Alex Schweder, Thom Kubli, Boris Acket, Hyperstudio, and Rub Kandy, among others.

Abramović’s Snowy/Windy/Spring on Planet Z marks her first work to use air as a primary medium, following an artistic career built on duration, endurance, and viewer participation. “I’ve never done anything like this in my life. But if you give me an assignment then I’ll try to see what I can do with it,” Abramović said of her commission for the museum, in an interview with the Guardian.

Meanwhile, Creed’s Work No. 3883: Half the air in a given space fills part of a gallery with blue balloons, while Smigla-Bobinski’s ADA consists of a large floating sphere studded with charcoal that visitors push around the room, leaving marks across the walls as it drifts. Outside the museum, Kandy’s oversized, googly-eyed GINJOS have already begun appearing around the Seaport.

“Balloon Museum was founded on the idea that air and inflatables could become a powerful contemporary language,” said Balloon Museum president and Lux Entertainment CEO Roberto Fantauzzi in a statement. “Establishing a permanent home in New York is an extraordinary milestone for our organization and a reflection of how far this vision has grown.”

Tickets for “Daydream” are available at peak and off-peak rates, with child pricing and family bundles offered.

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