$2 million Joan Mitchell painting leads opening sales at The Armory Show 2026. https://ift.tt/NcdYjFa

The Armory Show 2026 opened its VIP preview on Thursday, September 24th, at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in New York. Galleries across the fair’s 242 international exhibitors reported swift sales in the early hours, with momentum building throughout the day. Notable attendees included actors Jodie Foster, Paul Rudd, and Piper Perabo, alongside collectors Beth DeWoody, Pamela Joyner, and Jason and Michelle Rubell.

The headline transaction reported by galleries at the fair came from Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, which sold a painting by Joan Mitchell for over $2 million to a private collection. The gallery also placed a bronze by Richmond Barthé and a collage by Louise Nevelson, each in the range of $100,000–$250,000, and two works by Benny Andrews at $50,000–$100,000 each.

The Armory Show 2026 runs until September 28th and is organized across four sections: Galleries, Focus, Presents, and Platform.

Check back for our full sales report after the fair closes. In the meantime, these are the leading sales reported from opening day of The Armory Show 2026.

Matisse's Window, 2026
Inka Essenhigh
Miles McEnery Gallery

• Galerie Maximillian sold Rashid Johnson’s Untitled (Large Mosaic) (2025) for $175,000 in the first hour of the fair, along with Jonas Wood’s Five Bonsais (2024) for $125,000 and Peter Doig’s Almost Grown (2001) for $45,000.
• Gazelli Art House placed a painting by Lilly Fenichel with a major private European museum for “around” $200,000.
• Miles McEnery Gallery sold Inka Essenhigh’s Matisse’s Window (2026) for $110,000–$120,000, Karin Davie’s Trespasser no. 2 (2025) for $80,000–$90,000, and two works by Jacob Hashimoto in the range of $75,000–$85,000 each.
• Mennour “nearly” sold out its booth, placing seven paintings by Dhewadi Hadjab for $110,000 each.
• Marc Straus reported 10 sales ranging from $8,000 to $250,000, including four chairs by Lucia Hierro at $85,000 each.
• Hollis Taggart sold a work by Stuart Davis for over $100,000.
• Southern Guild sold a work by Roméo Mivekannin for $56,000, a work by Zanele Muholi for $52,000, and works by Amine El Gotaibi and Adebayo Bolaji for $34,000 and $28,000, respectively.
• Nara Roesler sold Marcelo Silveira’s Seeds VII (2025–2026) for $45,000 alongside five works by Jonathas de Andrade, ranging from $12,000 to $22,000.
• Perrotin sold six works by Kathia St. Hilaire, ranging from $5,000 to $45,000.
• Anat Ebgi sold a painting by Marc Dennis for $55,000, a painting by Marisa Adesman for $50,000, and additional works by Tammi Campbell, Erin Wright, and Olive Diamond for undisclosed prices.
• Hannah Traore sold out its entire booth, with works priced from $2,500 to $27,000.
• Vielmetter Los Angeles reported 10 works sold, ranging in price from $2,500 to $48,000.
• Maruani Mercier Gallery sold Von Wolfe’s The Dollhouse and the Dusk (2025) for $80,000–$100,000.
• Everard Read sold Caryn Scrimgeour’s work for $68,000, a work by Gerhard Marx for $30,000, and a sculpture by Mary Sibande for $12,000.
• Harper’s sold a work by Marc Dennis for $75,000.
• Carvalho sold two works by Élise Peroi for $30,000 and $18,000 each, two works by Rachel Mica Weiss for $29,000 and $22,000 each and another for $22,000. It also sold a work by Heath Wae for $14,500.
• Red Arrow Gallery sold three oil paintings by Brianna Bass for $17,000, $16,500, and $1,540.
• Yiwei Gallery sold six works, each in the range of $7,000 to $16,000.
• Pangée sold the “majority” of works in the booth. Prices were in the range of $5,000 to $16,000 apiece.
• Mindy Solomon Gallery sold three works by Yanira Collado, each in the range of $2,000 to $20,000.
• Tanya Weddemire Gallery sold four paintings by Austin Uzor and O’Neil Scott, each in the range of $8,000 to $10,500.
• Spinello Projects sold seven works by Elliot and Erick Jiménez in the range of “under” $10,000 to $20,000 each.
• Alzueta Gallery sold four paintings by Maria Yelletisch for a range of $12,000 to $15,000, a painting by Claudia Valsells in a range of $7,000 to $10,000, a resin work by Jordi Alcaraz in a range of $25,000 to $30,000, and a painting by Guim Tió Zarraluki in a range of $35,000 to $40,000.
• Alisan Fine Arts sold a work by Yang Yong Liang in the range of $25,000 to $30,000, a work by Wesley Tongson in the range of $25,000 to $30,000, and two works by Li Hong Wei in the range of $16,000 to $20,000 each.
• K Contemporary sold a work by Diego Rodriquez-Warner for $18,000.
• Superposition sold Elegance No. 1 (2026) by Zoë Pulley for $14,000 for the Bronx Museum Acquisition Prize,
• Newchild Gallery sold out its booth of works by Andrew Sendor for undisclosed prices.
• Uffner & Liu sold a sculpture by Curtis Talwst Santiago for a price in the range of $14,000 and $20,000.
• EDJI Gallery sold nine paintings as well as 15 drawings by Killion Huang. Prices ranged from $1,200 to $10,000 each.

from Artsy News https://ift.tt/MbhsCx7

French Artist Prune Nourry to Stage Major Exhibition at Paris’s Petit Palais in October. https://ift.tt/r3pOFeg

Paris museum Petit Palais has invited French artist Prune Nourry to take over its galleries for “Visionaries,” an exhibition opening October 20th and running through January 24, 2027. The show will unfold across the Petit Palais’s permanent collection galleries, its outer esplanade, and its gardens, creating a dialogue between Nourry’s new work and the museum’s holdings.

The exhibition grows out of a year-long research project in which three art historians compiled the writings and photographic portraits of 18 women sculptors from the late 19th and early 20th centuries who have been overlooked by official art history. Among them are Käthe Kollwitz, Nancy Elizabeth Prophet, Hélène Bertaux, Jane Poupelet, Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry, Selma Hortense Burke, Daria Gamsaragan, and Sarah Bernhardt.

Inspired by their work and the strength of their commitment, Nourry sculpted a portrait of each—some 18 new busts ranging from around two to 11 feet in height—working primarily in plaster. The material resonates with the Petit Palais collection, in which nearly 70 percent of sculptures are studio plasters: casts that were never intended for museums, yet have outlasted the bronze versions they document.

The show begins on the museum’s forecourt with Mothership, a hybrid figure suspended between a pregnant woman and the rusted hull of a ship. Inside the sculpture gallery of the North Pavilion, the eighteen portraits animate the memory of the sculptors they represent. Presented throughout the display are some twenty earlier works from Nourry’s “Holy Daughters” and “Venus” series, in scales running from around eight inches to 90 feet, alongside a recurring motif: white marble eyes with black pupils embedded in Nourry’s plaster busts and in the pedestals of the museum’s own works alike, prompting a visual comparison across the eras the collection spans.

Mini Atys, 2023
Prune Nourry
Templon

The exhibition addresses a structural gap in the Petit Palais’s own holdings: of all the works in its collection, barely four percent were made by women, and only four female sculptors are represented.

Born in Paris in 1985, Nourry lives and works between Paris and New York. A graduate in wood sculpture from the École Boulle, she works across sculpture, installation, and performance, combining fieldwork with specialists in genetics, sociology, anthropology and archaeology to develop projects that raise ethical questions about the body, demographic imbalance, and the interdependence of living species.

Clay is the core of Nourry’s practice, though she regularly collaborates with craftspeople to explore new materials and techniques. She is perhaps best known for “Terracotta Daughters,” an army of sculpted adolescent girls, directly referencing the buried warriors of Xi’an. The works toured Shanghai, Paris, New York, and Mexico City between 2013 and 2015, before being buried in an undisclosed location in China where they await excavation in 2030.

In 2016, Nourry was diagnosed with breast cancer, an experience that redirected her practice inward; her 2019 documentary Serendipity, executive produced by Angelina Jolie and Darren Aronofsky, premiered at the Berlinale and opened MoMA’s Doc Fortnight festival. She is represented by Galerie Templon.

from Artsy News https://ift.tt/PXvgDSf

Rapper Yung Lean Tells Us About His Major New Art Exhibition https://ift.tt/uZVYEtN

From Barnhusbron in central Stockholm, Jonatan Leandoer Håstad’s name is currently difficult to miss. A building-sized green wrap covers much of the former Stockholm Gasworks at Torsgatan 22, tiled with fragments of his paintings above the words “Collected Works 2016–2026.” The early 20th-century Art Nouveau complex, originally built for the city’s gas and water works, is now the site of the first major exhibition devoted entirely to the visual art of Håstad, better known as the rapper Yung Lean.

Håstad emerged as a teenager in the early 2010s with the Stockholm collective Sad Boys, developing an internet-native strain of rap whose hazy sound and melancholic, hyper-digital imagery would become closely associated with cloud rap and influence a generation of artists who followed. But music was never his only medium. For years, Håstad has painted, drawn, and made objects alongside his recording career, largely outside public view. “Collected Works 2016–2026” brings that parallel practice together on this scale for the first time.

Two days before the official press preview, Artsy was given the building largely to itself for an hour as Håstad’s crew made last-minute preparations. Lean then sat down for a rare interview focused on his visual art. Inside are paintings, drawings, collages, ceramics, dioramas, installations, and the new short film Slåtter (Haymaking), which Håstad executive-produced and stars in. Spread across the building, the works create something closer to a temporary, darkly dreamt habitat than a conventional white-cube exhibition.

Most have never been exhibited. Håstad mounted a small, four-work presentation at Carl Kostyál in Stockholm in 2016, the year that gives this decade-long survey its starting point.

By the time Håstad arrives and we sit down in the backyard, the building is beginning to fill for a friends-and-family evening. His father, the poet and literary critic Kristoffer Leandoer, has just arrived. Håstad knows people are waiting for him, but the conversation is focused. He drinks water from a champagne glass. He has spoken publicly in recent years about sobriety, and there is little sense here of hiding behind the Yung Lean persona. We are speaking primarily to Jonatan, though, as he points out, he does not find the distinction especially useful.

“I’m Jonatan. I created Yung Lean, and I also made all of these artworks,” Håstad told Artsy. “So I think it all belongs together.”

He does, however, see one important difference. His visual work remains less trained and therefore less professionalized. “I like the rawness,” he said. Years of touring taught him exactly where to stand and how a show should sound. “Sometimes you become too pro.”

In fact, the visual side came first. Håstad calls graffiti his “first big love,” an obsession from around the age of 11 or 12. As a child, he would also spend hours drawing and carving small figures from wood. Music never displaced that instinct. Even while producers were still finishing tracks, he recalls, his mind would already be moving toward the music video: the clothes, the lighting, the image around the song.

That visual practice has since expanded into film and acting, including a role in the forthcoming Netflix film Sacrifice, the recent “STORM” video, and a contribution to the soundtrack for the upcoming video game Grand Theft Auto VI.

“The visual side has always been very important to me,” he said. “Visual art came first, and then music came afterward.”

The rawness Håstad describes permeates the exhibition. Figures emerge from blunt fields of color; alien-eyed faces and checkerboards recur from work to work. The large paintings can feel provisional even when densely populated, with passages of drawing, paint, pattern, and empty ground allowed to coexist. A glazed ceramic such as El Jefe (2022) turns the same vocabulary into a lumpy, comic body. In Perfekt Dejt (Perfect Date) (2025), two figures recline amid a dark, highly saturated forest.

That uncanny, slightly unreal atmosphere extends through the building. Music, low light, and daylight slip through half-open windows and move across its exposed industrial walls. A miniature diorama and a separate TV room deepen the sense that Håstad has temporarily occupied the space rather than simply hung work inside it.

Håstad says he became more willing to take risks around 2016, moving among acrylic, oils, oil sticks, ceramics, and video and beginning to work at larger scales. Asked what changed, he is succinct: “I worry less. I care less about what other people think.”

He has never attended art school. His formal training amounts to a two-week clay course at Folkuniversitetet, a Swedish adult-education organization. This is not a deficit he is eager to correct.

“I think there’s something really beautiful about someone who has a job, like, if you’re a plumber, and on the side you make little wooden sculptures,” he said. His music developed through years of practice until it became his profession. “But this isn’t my job, and I want to keep it pure.”

The exhibition nevertheless marks an unmistakable new stage in Håstad’s relationship with the art world. A selection of works, primarily sculptures, will later be sold through the auction house Bukowskis. He sees no contradiction. Håstad has no gallerist and no external curator, and much of the exhibition has been assembled with people he has known since school. His longtime friend Kaj Lindhé Gimdal has helped with both Håstad’s process and the show’s curation; Håstad also shared a painting studio for roughly three years with Benjamin Reichwald, better known as the rapper Bladee.

“If I went to Bukowskis and saw that Robert De Niro had painted a picture, I’d still want to buy it because Robert De Niro painted it,” Håstad said. “In my case it’s always going to be, ‘Yung Lean made this.’ There’s no getting around that. And I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that at all.”

For Håstad, the model echoes the way his music career began.

“I entered the music world without a record label or management,” he said. “We just uploaded things online, and it was a bit of a ‘fuck you’ to the music industry.”

Some 15 years later, he wants to approach art in much the same way: rent the space, finance it himself, build it himself, then work with an established institution such as Bukowskis where it serves a purpose.

That willingness to engage with the art market does not extend to how Håstad wants the exhibition itself to function. Almost none of the works have been shown publicly before, and admission is free.

“One thing I find boring about the art world is that everything is so gatekept,” he said. “It’s only for rich people, or only for people who are already inside the scene.”

His own celebrity, he argues, makes openness more important, not less. “I’m a fucking famous musician. So, of course this should be open to everyone. It should be free to enter and open for a long time.”

Even visitors who cannot afford an artwork should be able to leave with something small, he said, whether a calendar or a key. “Everyone should be able to take something away with them.”

That independence also informs Slåtter. Håstad traces the film to a soldier’s cottage his mother inherited in Småland, and to childhood encounters with the strange, sometimes frightening imaginative world of Swedish nature. He cites the work of illustrators John Bauer and Elsa Beskow, as well as folklore around mythological trolls Näcken and the invisible spirit Vittra.

“That whole Swedish troll forest becomes very real when you’re a child,” he said. “Then you get older, and you understand what reality is. Somewhere in there, I think I just wanted to get that feeling back in a film.”

As Håstad talks about Bauer’s troll forests and Nordic figures, I mention that Slåtter made me think of Ali Abbasi’s Border (2018). It is, unsurprisingly, a film Håstad admires. He praises the way it places the bureaucratic realities of border control and policing alongside something magical.

Stockholm itself becomes another subject of our conversation. Having lived abroad for many years, I tell Håstad that the city can feel strangely inert despite its beauty, unless you have access to the right social or creative contexts. He partly agrees. The team had discussed staging the exhibition in London or Paris before deciding against it.

“But fuck it. I’m from Stockholm,” he said. “Stockholm made me, and Stockholm is where I want to give something like this back.”

If the exhibition encourages younger artists to find a room of their own, put on shows or concerts, and remain “a little naïve” rather than immediately seeking entry into an established market, he said, “that would be fucking amazing.”

It is a fitting ambition for an exhibition that, viewed from Barnhusbron, looks anything but tentative. Håstad may want to preserve the amateur freedom of making art, but after a decade of doing so largely outside public view, he is no longer keeping it hidden.

from Artsy News https://ift.tt/FnMAvxd

How Madonna Became an Art World Icon https://ift.tt/l0FpVP2

Madonna, 1990
Patrick Demarchelier
Staley-Wise Gallery

The legend is a classic one: A 20-year-old Michigan college dropout lands in New York with $35 in her pocket and gets into a taxi for the first time in her life, telling the driver to drop her off at “the center of it all.”

Soon, the ambitious young Midwesterner would dye her hair blond and find herself at the center of the city’s creative scene. She would date Jean-Michel Basquiat, become close friends with Keith Haring, hang out with Larry Gagosian, collect Frida Kahlo works, and pose for Maripol. Somewhere along the way, she would also become the most famous singer in the world, known simply by her first name: Madonna.

On the eve of the 43rd Video Music Awards, where Madonna leads this year’s field with 11 nominations, Artsy looks back at the Queen of Pop’s unusually deep ties to the art world—and the artists, images, and ideas that have shaped her career.

A muse in the downtown scene

Madonna, NYC, 1980, 1980
Mick Rock
Avant Gallery

The center of it all during Madonna’s meteoric rise in the 1980s was her small but tightly knit downtown community. Living in a fifth-floor walk-up in Alphabet City, she quickly absorbed the neighborhood’s feverish creative output and became a fixture at now-legendary venues including Danceteria and the Roxy.

A Panel of Experts, 1982
Jean-Michel Basquiat
Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO)

It was within this milieu that perhaps the most valuable artwork featuring Madonna emerged, painted by her then-boyfriend Jean-Michel Basquiat. A Panel of Experts (1982), a largely black-and-white work in acrylic and oil pastel, bears Madonna’s name in its upper-left corner alongside that of Basquiat’s ex-girlfriend Suzanne Mallouk. At its center, two chunky figures appear to be fighting—an apparent reference to an altercation between the two women over Basquiat.

Now in the permanent collection of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the painting was reunited with its muse decades later when Madonna posed in front of it during its inclusion in the Barbican’s 2017 exhibition “Basquiat: Boom for Real.”

Making the Madonna image

Madonna (True Blue), 1986
Herb Ritts
CAMERA WORK

"Madonna at Window, NYC 1986", 1986
Herb Ritts
Izzy Gallery

If Madonna became one of the defining faces of 1980s pop culture, photographers and stylists helped fix that face in the collective imagination: ripped fishnets, heaps of bracelets, bleached hair, thick eyebrows, and a gaze that could turn provocation into a dare.

Her largely DIY style fascinated photographers including Herb Ritts and Patrick Demarchelier, but some of the era’s most intimate images came through the lens of Maripol, the French-born photographer, stylist, and downtown fixture who also helped construct the bridal-inflected look of Madonna’s Like a Virgin era.

Madonna (First Single), 1983
Maripol
Exploring the Arts Benefit Auction

A 2017 solo exhibition of Maripol’s work at Dundee Contemporary Arts captured Madonna on the brink of global takeover. The disarming Polaroids show an icon before the mythology had fully hardened: Madonna in bed in 1983; Madonna trying on a pink wig backstage in 1984. They are images of a superstar in formation.

The downtown language of street art

Eric Kroll - Madonna at Danceteria, NYC 1983 Memorial for Michael Stewart, 1983
Eric Kroll
Alpha 137 Gallery

Madonna also had unusually early access to graffiti and street art through her relationships with Basquiat and Haring. During the years when Haring was painting murals at era-defining nightclubs such as the Palladium and Danceteria, Madonna was performing at many of the same venues, trying to make early hits such as “Holiday” and “Everybody” heard.

When her first major nationwide concert run, the Virgin Tour, wrapped in 1985, she held its after-party at the Palladium, with her friend’s work looming in the background.

That friendship was inseparable from activism. As HIV/AIDS was met with intense stigma and governmental neglect, Madonna became an outspoken supporter of AIDS research and fundraising. She frequently appeared at benefit events alongside Haring and other members of their downtown circle, including Kenny Scharf.

Madonna, 2009
Mr. Brainwash
Rago/Wright/LAMA/Toomey & Co.

Keith Haring Andy Warhol record cover art (after Keith Haring Andy Warhol Madonna), ca. 1986
Keith Haring, Andy Warhol
Lot 180 Gallery

Decades later, she returned to the visual language of street art for the cover of her 2009 greatest-hits album Celebration, for which Mr. Brainwash transformed her image into a brightly colored, stencil-like portrait. The Pop palette inevitably evokes Andy Warhol, another figure in Madonna’s orbit and a guest at her 1985 wedding to Sean Penn.

Warhol and Haring even collaborated on a wedding gift for the couple: four works that transformed New York Post covers about the publication of Madonna’s nude photographs into playful Pop art artifacts. The tabloid image, already central to Madonna’s career, became an art object.

The collector behind the pop star

Madonna’s relationship with art was not confined to the people around her. Long before she could afford to collect it, she was looking.

As a teenager, she encountered Frida Kahlo through black-and-white photographs at the Detroit Institute of Arts. She later recalled walking past the museum’s Diego Rivera murals to look at images of Kahlo in her studio, captivated by the Mexican artist’s “self-possession and unique beauty.”

During her first month in New York, with money still scarce, Madonna spent part of her budget on a postcard of Kahlo’s Self-Portrait with Monkey (1940), which she came to regard as a kind of “guardian angel.”

Frida Kahlo, 1931
Imogen Cunningham
Atlas Gallery

Picasso, 1932 (printed 1981)
Man Ray
L’SPACE Gallery

Years later, the actual painting became hers. Madonna acquired Self-Portrait with Monkey at auction in the late 1980s and loaned it to Tate Modern for its 2001 Kahlo survey. Around a decade later, she deepened her holdings with another of Kahlo’s most visceral works, My Birth (1932), acquired through a private sale.

It is easy to see what Madonna found in Kahlo: an artist who fashioned autobiography, physicality, sexuality, and pain into an uncompromising public image. Those same forces have run through Madonna’s own career, which has repeatedly tested the standards imposed on women’s bodies and turned sexuality into both spectacle and a means of self-authorship.

Kahlo is far from the only modernist in Madonna’s collection. Works by Pablo Picasso, Fernand Léger, Man Ray, and Tamara de Lempicka have also been reported among her holdings.

From collector to collaborator

Madonna’s engagement with art has never stopped at ownership. Over the decades, she has maintained an unusually active network of friendships, collaborations, and partnerships with living artists.

The forms of that support vary considerably. In 1997, she sponsored MoMA’s exhibition “Cindy Sherman: The Complete Untitled Film Stills.” In 2001, she presented the Turner Prize to Martin Creed during a live broadcast. And in 2017, she joined Brooklyn Museum director Anne Pasternak and artist Marilyn Minter for a public discussion about feminism and art.

Minter is also represented in Madonna’s collection, as is Tracey Emin. Madonna owns Emin’s 2001 mixed-media work It Just Happens, a characteristically unguarded declaration of desire and autonomy, qualities that readily rhyme with Madonna’s own creative persona.

Madonna : Time lapse photograph spiritual value, 1998
David LaChapelle
Eternity Gallery

Her relationships with artists continue to evolve. During a visit last year to Emin’s foundation in Margate, England, Madonna met with young artists in residence—and did not leave empty-handed. Works she encountered there, including sculptures by Brazilian artist Anderson Asteclines and a small painting by Ethiopian artist Kirubel Mandefro, now hang in her London townhouse.

The gesture says something about the kind of collector Madonna has become. Her interest is not restricted to trophies by canonical names. The same curiosity that once drew her toward artists in downtown New York still appears to guide her toward work being made now.

When art becomes material

For another pop star, name-checking an artist in a lyric or borrowing an artwork for a stage set might read as cultural signaling. With Madonna, the relationship is harder to separate from the work itself. She did not observe the downtown culture that produced Basquiat, Haring, Scharf, and Julian Schnabel from a distance. She emerged from inside it.

In that sense, Madonna was not simply a muse to artists. She adopted one of their fundamental strategies: treating the self as material. Her body, clothes, sexuality, religion, celebrity, and public image became things to be constructed, dismantled, quoted, and reconstructed again.

Art history consequently surfaces throughout her career almost as a second visual language. Horst P. Horst’s photographs famously informed the video for “Vogue,” while the imagery surrounding “Open Your Heart” drew heavily on the paintings of de Lempicka. Minter’s Green Pink Caviar (2009) became a video backdrop on Madonna’s Sticky & Sweet Tour, while animated versions of Haring’s radiant figures appeared elsewhere in the show.

Helen Bennett, Cape, 1936
Horst P. Horst
Robert Klein Gallery

Femme a la Mandoline, circa 1933
Tamara de Lempicka
Heritage Auctions

More recently, the references have migrated into the lyrics themselves. On 2012’s “I Fucked Up,” Madonna imagines an unrealized domestic future: “We coulda bought a house with a swimming pool / Filled it up with Warhols, it would be so cool.”

But perhaps no song makes the relationship between Madonna and the art world as explicit as her recent single “Danceteria.” Released this summer, the track looks back at the scene from which she emerged, name-checking Haring, Basquiat, Maripol, Fab Five Freddy, Scharf, and powerful downtown dealer Tony Shafrazi.

It plays almost like an oral history set to a dance beat. More than four decades after Madonna arrived in New York asking to be taken to “the center of it all,” “Danceteria” makes the case that she did not simply find that center. She was part of what made it one.

from Artsy News https://ift.tt/msp2MdT

The Met to stage major Felix Gonzales-Torres exhibition in summer 2027. https://ift.tt/G4RdMpw

The Metropolitan Museum of Art will stage the first major New York survey of Felix Gonzalez-Torres's work since 1995, opening in summer 2027.

“Felix Gonzalez-Torres: The Spaces Between,” on view June 10th through October 18th, 2027, will present more than 40 works by the Cuban-born American visual artist encompassing installation, painting, photography, sculpture, and video, drawn from public and private collections.

Included in the exhibition will be defining works such as, "Untitled" (Go-Go Dancing Platform) (1991) which consists of an empty blue platform ringed with 48 lightbulbs that is briefly activated once per day by a lamé-clad go-go dancer; "Untitled" (Perfect Lovers) (1987–1990), twin battery-powered clocks which are initially set to the same time and slowly desynchronize; and "Untitled" (Revenge) (1991) a continuously replenished pile of blue candies in clear wrappers.

Rather than a conventional monographic show, the exhibition will place works within the Museum’s permanent collection galleries, ranging from Egyptian art and medieval art to historic British interiors.

“Felix Gonzalez-Torres is one of the most important artists of the 20th century. His installations transform ephemeral materials into enduring experiences that grapple with ideas such as time, loss, and love,” said Max Hollein, the Met's director and CEO. “For the first presentation of the artist in New York City in over three decades, the Met will showcase his art throughout the museum, in conversation with 5,000 years of human creativity.”

Untitled, 1994
Felix Gonzalez-Torres
Carolina Nitsch Contemporary Art

The exhibition is organized in collaboration with the Art Institute of Chicago, which will mount a simultaneous, distinct exhibition, “This Work Cannot Be Destroyed.”

David Breslin, curator of modern and contemporary Art, who organized the show with curator Ann Goldstein, described Gonzalez-Torres's work as inseparable from the crisis that shaped it. “The AIDS crisis was the crucible that forged his resolute conceptual clarity, and his brilliance was creating an open-ended body of work where new meanings can be embedded into historical ones,” Breslin said.

Goldstein, who is now interim director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, co-organized the artist's first major survey in 1994. Three decades after his death, she remarked that the work remains “simultaneously deceptively beautiful and rigorously acute, defiantly romantic and precisely analytical—and uncannily present.” The exhibition's title is drawn from a 1994 fax Gonzalez-Torres sent his friend and gallerist Andrea Rosen, quoting the poet Elizabeth Bishop, “I watched closely the spaces between the birds.”

Born in Guáimaro, Cuba, in 1957, Gonzalez-Torres left the country as a child, living briefly in Spain and then Puerto Rico before settling in New York in 1979. He attended the Whitney Independent Study Program and earned his BFA from the Pratt Institute, and from 1987 to 1994 was a member of Group Material, the politically engaged artists' collective co-founded by Doug Ashford, Julie Ault, and Tim Rollins. His best-known works invite viewers to physically deplete them, taking a candy from a seemingly endless pile, or a sheet from a towering stack of paper, turning gallerygoers into collaborators in works about circulation, loss, and the boundary between public and private life. He died of AIDS-related complications in 1996, at 38.

Interest in Gonzalez-Torres’s work has surged this year. A large survey at the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid, “Dulce Venganza” (“Sweet Revenge”), co-curated by Nancy Spector and Alejandro Cesarco, gathers more than 50 works through October 12th and has drawn attention for how directly the artist’s warnings about “encroaching conservative forces in government,” as Spector has put it, resonate today.

In February, the Fundación Fernando Romero staged an exhibition at Mexico City's La Cuadra San Cristóbal, the Luis Barragán–designed house, pairing Gonzalez-Torres’s beaded curtains, mirrors, and light strings with Barragán’s architecture in what curators called “a poetic dialogue” between two artists who never met.

Gonzalez-Torres himself pointed to art's transformative power in his own writing. Describing a visit to see Roni Horn’s Gold Field (1982) with his partner, Ross Laycock, as Laycock was dying of AIDS-related illness, he wrote that the work was “a new landscape, a possible horizon, a place of rest and absolute beauty.”

An accompanying catalogue will include newly commissioned texts by Breslin, Goldstein, Paulina Pobocha of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Samuel Shapiro of the Met.

Gonzalez-Torres described his intentions simply, “Above all else, it is about leaving a mark that I existed: I was here. I was hungry. I was defeated. I was happy. I was sad. I was in love. I was afraid. I was hopeful. I had an idea and I had a good purpose and that's why I made works of art.”

from Artsy News https://ift.tt/MRcd2PX

Painter Emily Mae Smith's Surreal Visions Embrace the Dark Side https://ift.tt/s49lfgy

Painter Emily Mae Smith believes that in dark times, it’s best to embrace the shadows.

Last week, the artist—best known for her surrealistic paintings of anthropomorphized broomsticks—opened “Transit of Venus” at Petzel Gallery. It’s her first solo exhibition in New York in over four years, on view through October 24, 2026.

The anticipated show brings together 15 new oil paintings and two carved benches made from 2023 to 2026. The works range in scale from the handheld to the monumental and embrace a dizzying range of formal strategies. Smith reprises her saucy broomsticks, revels in hyperrealism, and takes inspiration from French agrarian tableaux.

These varied works are united by Smith’s use of deep shadow and how she sees that shadow in relationship to painting. In the canvas Becoming Neolithic (2026), one of the first works Smith conceptualized while building the show, a towering thicket looms over snowy ground. Hands emerge from its stalks with seeking gestures, reaching toward the sky. The scene is backlit by a setting winter sun. In the foreground, a fox treads over the shadowed snow. It’s one of many paintings in the show that positions the viewer in a place of darkness.

Becoming Neolithic, 2026
Emily Mae Smith
Petzel Gallery

Midnight Assembly, 2023-2026
Emily Mae Smith
Petzel Gallery

“Culturally, we’re in the shadow,” Smith said as she walked through the show ahead of its opening last week. “We’re in a Jungian shadow-reveal sort of space as a society,” where “repressed desires become desperate grabs of power.” She feels a sense of obligation to explore this territory. “Whether or not we want to go there, it’s there. We have to explore it,” she said. “Painting the light from behind is a way of saying: I am the dark side of the image—I’m working from the other side.”

In the years since “Heretic Lace,” Smith’s last exhibition with Petzel in 2022, the artist has relocated from New York City to the Hudson Valley. She now works in a studio in Kingston, New York, where she feels more connected than ever to her natural environment. At the same time, she feels throttled by the pitch of U.S. political upheavals and speed of visual consumption through social media.

In another new painting, Only Human (2026), a bunch of grapes appear in translucent, noxious hues of purple, green, blue, and red. Inside each grape is a human eyeball, sloshing in turbulent water. The grape motif (which reappears in Shadow Land Zeuxis, (2026)) references a classical story about the conflation of reality and illusion. Smith’s painting is simultaneously funny and disturbing and visualizes the pressures of the attention economy, resulting in a frantic, superficial, and distracted mode of existence, with eyes unsure where to turn.

In these times, Smith believes painting can, at the very least, offer a sense of orientation. The exhibition title “Transit of Venus” refers to a rare astronomical event in which the planet Venus passes directly between the Sun and Earth. The planet appears as a small dark spot moving across the face of the solar disk. These transits occur in pairs eight years apart, with more than a century separating each pair. Historically, astronomers used the transit of Venus to calculate the distance between Earth and the Sun. These measurements helped establish the scale of the solar system—and, essentially, our understanding of our place in the universe.

Smith’s paintings formally reflect this idea. “Venus moves across in front of the Sun and becomes a little black dot. That effect connects to the use of backlighting in my work and the way we can know ourselves by seeing something moving in front of us,” she explained.

For the artist, it’s essential to imagine ourselves as bodies in motion, to embrace transformation amid rising authoritarianism in the U.S. “Trying to stay unfixed is a purposeful way to resist the painful transformation we’re having in society right now,” she said. “Being unfixed is dangerous, and people want to eliminate it.” For Smith, the “Venus” of the exhibition title refers equally to the Roman goddess, herself an adaptation of Aphrodite, and a historical embodiment of this embrace of ambiguity and multiplicity. “Venus was used by different people, for different reasons, across time and history,” the artist said.

Smith’s anthropomorphized broomsticks have long served as a nod to the historic position of women in the arts, a winking reference to feminine labor and the male gaze. In this exhibition, Smith’s most iconic motif loosens and morphs, at times, into a Venus-like figure. She sees her painting Becoming Neolithic as an adaptation of the broomstick, as well as The Locust II (2026), which reimagines the 1872 painting The Grasshopper (La Cigale) by French painter Jules Joseph Lefebvre. While Lefebvre renders his nubile young woman as helpless, cowering, naked, and alone, Smith gives her a broomstick and a scythe that serve as a protective weapons. In the painting Venus (Inner Vision) (2026) meanwhile, Smith makes the handle of her torso-like broomstick translucent. The figure’s organs—brain, liver, stomach—and circulatory system are visible, like a version of the “anatomical Venuses” created in 18th-century Florence, wax visions of idealized young women used to teach anatomy. “I wanted to take the idea of a Venus and literally give her interiority,” said the artist.

In these paintings, translucency aids in Smith’s attempt to reenchant people with the magic of painting. “I wish people would consider what it takes to make a painting, and how painting can exist in the world in a complex, fabulous, magical way, and not just as trading cards on the internet, or auction-house commodities,” she said. “So there’s this desire to see inside and make that beautiful.”

Understanding the materiality of painting, she thinks, might be one way to do that. In Sacred Conversation (2026), Smith brings together the animals and plants whose materials become the tools of painting—from badger and sable hair used in brushes to walnut oil, flax, cotton, and cuttlefish-derived sepia. The imagined ecosystem of creatures that could never coexist in nature becomes a kind of portrait of painting itself and its entanglement with the natural world. The structure of the painting, meanwhile, riffs on paintings by Giovanni Bellini and the Renaissance tradition of the sacra conversazione, the gathering of saints. It is a moment of bright light among shadows.

Smith believes that we are living through a moment of societal transformation whose repercussions are still coming into view. “In my last show, I was really interested in my place in painting as a person, as a woman painter, in my own time—how do I belong, what are the problems of trying to belong inside this thing,” Smith said. “Now, I’m asking, what is a painting to the world right now, when it all feels like it’s on fire?”

One of the final works completed for the show, The Changeling (2026), depicts a foot held aloft against the dark sky. It transforms from flesh to straw, and a hand reaches toward it with a lit match, like an inverse of Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam (ca. 1512) . Flames are imminent. But they also bring much-needed illumination.

from Artsy News https://ift.tt/mynYAs9

MSCHF transforms two Lexus electrified vehicles into surreal sculptures. https://ift.tt/3GWtski

MSCHF, the Brooklyn-based conceptual art collective represented by Perrotin, will debut a pair of surreal new car sculptures in New York this week as part of a collaboration with Lexus.

The works reconfigure two of the automaker's electrified vehicles for the exhibition “Motomorphosis,” which opens this week at Chelsea Industrial during Armory Week. The show pairs each unaltered vehicle with its distorted double. A Lexus RZ450e appears once as itself and again as Circle Car, looped nose-to-tail into an endless, driving circle, while a Lexus RX450h+ is shown alongside Twisted Car, its body pulled into dramatic longitudinal torsion.

MSCHF describes the works as “Form Cars,’ positioned as an inversion of the automotive industry’s "Concept Car" prototypes. Kevin Wiesner, the collective's chief creative officer and a founding member, told Highsnobiety the project drew on the vocabulary of 3D animation, where forms bend and stretch without being fixed, as well as on a lineage of car-as-medium artworks in the United States, such as Pippa Garner's sculpture and performance Backwards Car (1974). “We had the idea of inverting the Concept Car and taking a purely Formalist approach to the object,” Wiesner said.

Despite their seemingly impossible shapes, the sculptures were built using conventional auto-body techniques—a steel armature built up with thousands of individual pieces, then finished with the paint and Bondo overcoat typical of a body shop. Some components, Wiesner said, are actual Lexus parts, "but they're sculptures, not cars."

Lexus has framed the collaboration around what it calls "Electric Made Art," treating electrification itself as an artistic medium rather than a purely functional one. "Most conversations about electrification focus on how a vehicle is powered. ‘Motomorphosis’ asks a different question: what can electricity power in our imagination?" said Lisa McQueen, Lexus's senior manager of marketing. "Working with MSCHF allowed us to take the automobile beyond its familiar form and explore movement, transformation and possibility in an entirely new way."

“Motomorphosis” will have a public opening the evening of Thursday, September 24th, and will be on view Friday, September 25th, and Saturday, September 26th.

from Artsy News https://ift.tt/57Gclpk