Chloe Wise paints Olivia Rodrigo for a new limited-edition album release. https://ift.tt/J9IHuhj

In a major music-art world crossover, pop star Olivia Rodrigo has enlisted artist Chloe Wise to create the cover art for the singer’s eagerly anticipated forthcoming album, you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love.

The collectible vinyl cover features Wise’s oil painting Carve our names (2026), a portrait of Rodrigo clad in a pink babydoll dress and holding a glinting knife with foreboding intensity. The collectible vinyl is exclusively available through the singer’s website ahead of the album’s June 12 release.

Wise, who first rose to fame in the 2010s with her sculptural “Bread Bags” that winked at consumer culture, has become, in recent years, known for her psychologically charged portraits. Her 2025 New York exhibition “Myth Information” at Almine Rech, her representing gallery, blended influences from film noir to extraterrestrial experience.

Wise, who first rose to fame in the 2010s with her sculptural “Bread Bags” that winked at consumer culture, has become, in recent years, known for her psychologically charged portraits. Her 2025 New York exhibition “Myth Information” at Almine Rech, her representing gallery, blended influences from film noir to extraterrestrial experience.

Carve our names is the only painting Wise has made in the past six months. When Rodrigo approached Wise about the commission, the Canadian artist had taken a hiatus from painting to focus on “Extrasensory,” her forthcoming video- and installation-based exhibition at Kulturstiftung Basel H. Geiger in Switzerland, which opens on June 12th. Still, Wise jumped at the opportunity, seeing affinities between Rodrigo’s creative world and her artistic practice.

Carve our names was inspired, in part, by a recent photograph of Rodrigo by photographer Chad Moore. Wise leans into a cinematic ambiguity in the scene. Is Rodrigo going to carve the name of her beloved into tree bark, a classic adolescent gesture, or is something more sinister afoot?

Rodrigo told Dazed that she’s a longtime admirer of Wise’s work and was “beyond excited” to collaborate. “She blew me away with what she created, and I can’t wait for fans to get this into their hands,” Rodrigo said.

Wise is the most recent in a string of contemporary women artists to be tapped for a pop star portrait. In 2025, Lily Allen commissioned a portrait from rising artist Nieves González for the cover of her album West End Girl. Artist Issy Wood, meanwhile, painted Charli XCX’s portrait for the November 2025 cover of Vanity Fair.

Wise is delighted by the Rodrigo collaboration, but, for now, is focused on installing her Basel show, which mines the intersection of consumerism, religious worship, and the supernatural.“It’s a crazy roller coaster through all of these different realms,” she said. “There are angels and Victoria's Secret angels. Stay tuned.”

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Artist Kara Walker stars in Loewe anniversary campaign. https://ift.tt/NHAmd4Q

Kara Walker, the New York–based artist known for her large-scale explorations of American history and race, has appeared in Loewe’s 180th anniversary campaign, shot by photographer Talia Chetrit.

Walker joins a cast that includes actresses Sissy Spacek, Julia Garner (who is also a global brand ambassador for Loewe), Kara Wai, and Salma Abu Deif, along with K-pop star Giselle from the group aespa. The campaign, which marks the anniversary of the Spanish house’s founding in 1846, features each subject alongside iconic Loewe bags across the decades: the Flamenco clutch (1980s), the Puzzle (2015), and the new Amazona 180.

A capsule collection, which arrived in stores and on Loewe’s website on June 3rd, includes bags, small leather goods, and ready-to-wear clothing featuring lion motifs—a nod to “Loewe,” the German word for lion. An animated film narrated by Antonio Banderas accompanies the campaign, tracing key moments in the house’s history.

Walker rose to prominence in the mid-1990s with her cut-paper silhouettes. Her large-scale works include A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby (2014) at the Domino Sugar Refinery in Brooklyn and Fons Americanus, the 2019 Hyundai Commission at Tate Modern in London. She received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1997 and is represented by Sikkema Malloy Jenkins and Sprüth Magers.

A special publication, 180 Years of Craft, will be released as a supplement to Loewe Magazine Issue 11, available free in Loewe stores and partner bookstores from June 15th.

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$3.7 million Cecily Brown painting to lead upcoming Christie’s London sale. https://ift.tt/kw75eyC

Cecily Brown’s painting The Haunter (2010) will headline Christie's upcoming Post-War to Present sale in London on June 25th, carrying an estimate of £2.2 million–£2.8 million ($2.95 million–$3.76 million).

The Haunter was acquired in 2011 and has since remained in the same private collection. The Christie’s sale coincides with a major exhibition of Brown’s work at London’s Serpentine Galleries. In November 2025, a new record was set for Brown’s work when her painting High Society (1997–98) sold for $9.81 million at Sotheby’s New York, soaring past its estimate of $4-6 million.

Over her three-decade career, Brown has defined a style of painting that moves fluidly between figuration and abstraction, synthesizing references from art history, literature, and memory.

The Haunter evokes what the auction house describes as a convergence of “the human, the natural and the supernatural.” In the work, Brown cites diverse influences from Francis Bacon’s portraits of Vincent van Gogh and Georg Baselitz’s fractured “heroes” to the gothic fiction of American author Shirley Jackson.

Born in London in 1969, Brown studied at the Slade School of Fine Art amid the rise of the Young British Artists in the early 1990s. By 1994, she relocated to New York City, and her major breakout moment came in 1997 with “*Spectacle*” her debut solo exhibition at Deitch Projects. The show was famously purchased, in its entirety, by Charles Saatchi.

Today, Brown is regarded as one of the most influential painters of her generation. Her work is held in major museum collections including the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate, and the Centre Pompidou. In 2023, she was the subject of a major institutional show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Other highlights from the Christie’s sale include Howardena Pindell’s Webb (2023) one of the artist’s celebrated ‘spray dot’ paintings (estimate: £180,000–£250,000 ($241,000–$335,000)); Andy Warhol’s Jackie from 1964 (estimate: £400,000–$600,000 ($537,000–$805,000); and Christo’s collage L’Arc de Triomphe Wrapped (Project for Paris) Place de l’Etoile – Charles de Gaulle (2020) (estimate: £400,000–$600,000 ($537,000–$805,000) one of the final works completed by the artist during his lifetime.

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5 Standout Shows to See at Small Galleries This June https://ift.tt/SuqpREf

Endless, 2023
Max Rohr
Colombo’s gallery

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

Timewaveultra

“HEAVY DEEDS FROM THE BOOK OF SKULLS”

Tracey Morgan Gallery, Asheville, North Carolina

Through June 27

Foxy Woxi, 2025
TIMEWAVEULTRA (Cole Caswell and Bryan Graf)
Tracey Morgan Gallery

Pure Sound Welcome Home, 2025
TIMEWAVEULTRA (Cole Caswell and Bryan Graf)
Tracey Morgan Gallery

In their latest show, Timewaveultra, the artist duo Bryan Graf and Cole Caswell, presents new, unique photography-based work rooted in the American landscape. Graf and Caswell work together in a collaborative, intuitive process, each making interventions into the other’s photographs through layering, improvising, and collaging. Many of the works in the exhibition are multimedia, incorporating aspects of assemblage, sculpture, text, books, posters, and other objects. The imagery, however, remains rooted in forest life, in scenes like Foxy Woxi (2025), a semi-psychedelic photograph of a fox, or Pure Sound Welcome Home (2025), a photograph of towering evergreen trees above a glittering lake, overlaid with prismatic light.

“It’s all about the rhythm, the waves, amplifying other dimensions,” said the artists in a statement, describing the multimedia works as “a run-on sentence that just flows right.”

Atelier Cléophée

“Revealing Light: Pastel Works by Atelier Cléophée”

Galerie Villa Gabrielle, Paris

Through June 30

Filigrane XII, 2026
Atelier Cléophée
Galerie Villa Gabrielle

Filigrane X, 2026
Atelier Cléophée
Galerie Villa Gabrielle

Paris-based artist Atelier Cléophée dedicates her practice to one medium: pastel. Cléophée works specifically in soft pastels—dry, pure pigments with a powdery finish. Her new exhibition, “Revealing Light,” brings together dozens of drawings made over the past three years, ranging in scale from handheld to window-sized.

A student of art history, Cléophée takes inspiration from centuries of decorative arts, from stained glass and mosaics to wallpaper and textile designs, as well as her extensive travels, which have taken her from the Villa Medici in Rome to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Her drawings are characterized by accumulations of repeating marks, which, though abstract, tap into elemental aspects of nature. In the drawing Filigrane X (all works 2026), for instance, long rippling lines of blue and green pastel bring to mind the rippling tides of the ocean seen from above, or, in Filigrane XII, the shadow patterns cast on dunes. This series takes inspiration from the art of filigree, a delicate, ornamental metalwork that dates back millennia and is used to make jewelry and stained glass windows.

D. Jack Solomon

“ALL IN GOOD TIME”

Kathryn Markel Fine Arts, New York

Through June 27

JAYWALKING, 2018
Jack Solomon
Kathryn Markel Fine Arts

REDUX #22, 2024
Jack Solomon
Kathryn Markel Fine Arts

American artist D. Jack Solomon’s paintings are an unlikely but delightful synthesis of whimsy and geometry. In “All in Good Time,” the 92-year-old artist presents energetic paintings that nod to the formalist concerns of the Bauhaus and Kandinsky, playfully juxtaposed with Pop and even comic book motifs. Certain formal strategies unite these compositions, including repeating circular forms, Constructivist-inspired intersecting planes, and bold colors.

The artist, who lives in Hudson, New York, has experimented with contrasting these varied formal languages since the mid-1990s (in the 1960s and ’70s, his works were tightly focused on Minimalist color grids). He likens his compositions to a kind of collage.

“A resulting composite is either a mash-up of cultural symbols or may suggest a stream of consciousness narrative,” said the artist in a statement for the show. “Lately, more geometric or color-based spaces have come to predominate.”

Lucas Marcos Barquilla

“Rack’t carcasses make ill anatomies”

Brispa Gallery, Madrid

Through June 20

Tab. XIII, Myographia Nova, John Browne 1648, 2025
Lucas Marcos Barquilla
Brispa Gallery

Spanish artist Lucas Marcos Barquilla dives deep into the world of historical anatomical imagery in his new Madrid exhibition, debuting ceramic reliefs inspired by the scientific illustrations from the 15th- to 17th-centuries. The exhibition’s title, “Rack’t carcasses make ill anatomies,” references a gruesome line from John Donne’s 17th-century poem “Love’s Exchange” and hints at the corporeal imagery explored in the show.

Barquilla’s high-fired ceramics are flat, with images glazed on their surfaces, and presented here in wooden frames, sometimes in diptych or triptych formats. Classical-looking figures appear with their bodies splayed open: active participants who pull back their flesh. In Tab. XIII, Myographia Nova, John Browne1648 (2025), a figure pulls up the skin on their back daintily as though taking off a shirt. Many of the ceramics have carved out openings, empty spaces where the interior anatomies should be.

The works are at once humorous and unsettling. In this way, Barquilla upsets the original intention of the illustrations he draws from. While anatomical illustrations were used to study, classify, and control biological life, the artist turns this study into something more human and uninhibited.

Max Rohr

“Somewhere/Sometime”

Colombo’s Gallery, Milan

Through July 17

Bring me back home, 2025
Max Rohr
Colombo’s gallery

After stepping away from the art world for a few years, Italian artist Max Rohr makes his return to exhibiting with “Somewhere/Sometime.” The show brings together nearly two dozen works on canvas as well as watercolors on paper made over the past few years. These recent works are paired with a selection of paintings from earlier in Rohr’s career, some of which are being exhibited for the first time.

Born in Bolzano, Italy, Rohr studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and emerged as a painter in the late 1980s. He is known for his dreamlike figurative paintings that probe metaphysical questions. The exhibition title “Somewhere/Sometime” hints at these uncanny themes of deconstruction and memory. In these paintings, limbs multiply, floating freely from bodies, which themselves merge with architectural forms. In Bring me back home (2025), a colossal head of a man flies through a forest, carried by a disembodied pair of hands, towards a shadowy figure on the left-hand side of the canvas, perhaps to be reunited. At the bottom of the painting, painted as though on a small shelf, a set of hands and three pairs of feet appear, compounding the oddness of the scene. Rohr’s influences are varied, but the cool and muted palette that unifies his work draws from Nordic film and literature. In addition to his career as a painter, Rohr is also an established designer of knitwear for men.

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Works by Marina Abramović and Shirin Neshat featured in traveling Monaco superyacht exhibition. https://ift.tt/YtgAxXB

The Floating Art Hotel, a private superyacht described in a release as “the world’s first traveling art hotel,” will make its debut during this year’s Monaco Grand Prix, presenting works by artists including Marina Abramović, Shirin Neshat, and Tomás Saraceno.

The superyacht will be anchored in Monaco Bay from June 4th to June 8th, coinciding with the annual Formula 1 motor racing event. Organizers plan to take the concept to other international destinations, including Miami, Hong Kong, and Abu Dhabi, with the aim of connecting contemporary art with major international events through site-specific exhibitions and cultural programming.

The Floating Art Hotel’s inaugural exhibition “States of Motion” explores movement “not as image but as condition.” Featuring more than 30 artists, the show spans sculpture, installation, photography, digital art, and performance. The yacht’s 350-square-meter sundeck, meanwhile, will be transformed into a sculpture garden featuring works that interact with the environment. Its 14 guest suites will host a mix of collectors, entrepreneurs, and cultural figures.

“I spent years producing campaigns for some of the world’s biggest brands, and I kept thinking: what if we applied this level of craft to something that actually brings people together?” founder Gaelle Jaunay Calendini said in a statement. “Art, sport, the sea—and the right people in the same room. The magic happens from there.”

Beyond art programming, guests of the Floating Art Hotel will be offered a range of Monaco Grand Prix experiences, including entry to a private viewing terrace overlooking the Sainte-Dévote corner of the circuit. Guests of the yacht’s Owner’s Residence will also receive access to the Formula 1 Paddock Club and Pit Lane during race weekend.

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9 Defining Portraits of Marilyn Monroe https://ift.tt/NRAxiSj

Marilyn Monroe was one of the most photographed people of the 20th century and highly skilled at constructing her own image in the public media. While fine artists were also drawn to portraying her during her lifetime, it was her tragically early death that truly turned her into a cultural icon. In celebration of the centennial of her birth, many of the most celebrated portrayals of Monroe are on display in London’s National Portrait Gallery in “Marilyn: A Portrait,” on view through September 6th.

“One of the points I’d like to bring out in the exhibition is that if Marilyn is an agent in the making of photographs…that somehow pervades the paintings,” said the show’s curator Rosie Broadley. Marilyn never sat for a portrait, and none of the artists who painted her during her lifetime met her prior to doing so, meaning that every painting of her that exists is based on a photograph and is therefore “a reflection of her public persona,” she added.

At the same time, Monroe herself wrote in her memoir that “People had a habit of looking at me as if I were some kind of mirror, instead of a person.” “It’s almost like people will see what they want to see with Marilyn and paint what they want to paint,” Broadley said. At the height of her fame and the immediate aftermath of her death, male artists often saw a beautiful, sexually attractive woman or a troubled star. Few female artists chose to portray her at this time, although those that did, notably, Rosalyn Drexler and Pauline Boty, went deeper in their responses. It wasn’t until feminist writer Gloria Steinem edited a copy of Ms. Magazine dedicated to Marilyn 10 years after her death that female artists began to reclaim Marilyn for themselves. “It was almost like that kickstarted this kind of reappraisal of Marilyn,” said Broadley.

Here are some of the most iconic images of Marilyn from contemporary artists.

Willem de Kooning

Marilyn Monroe, 1954

Marilyn Monroe, 1954
Willem de Kooning
American Federation of Arts

According to the exhibition’s catalogue, Willem de Kooning’s striking abstract portrait of Monroe was the first portrait to be made of the star. It’s part of his “Women” series depicting women figures in paintings, yet Monroe is the only subject identified by name. Perhaps, for de Kooning, it’s an indication of her role as the “ultimate woman.” In 1957, the photographer Sam Shaw took Monroe and her then-husband, the playwright Arthur Miller, to see the painting at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. According to Shaw, Miller was outraged at the depiction, but Monroe herself accepted it. “She thought that artists had the right to depict her as they wished,” said Broadley.

Ray Johnson

Hand Marilyn Monroe, 1958

The Pop artist Ray Johnson’s portrait of Monroe, created at the height of her critical and commercial success, can be read as a prescient appreciation of the damaging effects of fame. Johnson juxtaposes an image of Monroe based on a popular pin-up picture by Bruno Bernard, known as Bernard of Hollywood, with an oversized hand that seems destined to stifle or crush her. The harsh pink color and lines that slice into and around her image, partially obliterating it, add to the sense of danger.

Rosalyn Drexler

The Misfits, 1961

The production of The Misfits (1961), Monroe’s final completed film, was notoriously troubled. With her marriage to Arthur Miller (who had written the script) breaking down, Monroe was frequently late on set and drinking excessively after work. Drexler nails the on-set atmosphere in this queasily colored nightmarish painting based on a black-and-white film still of Monroe and her co-star Clark Gable. Drexler “seemed to see the truth in a way that other people didn’t let themselves think about,” said Broadley. “It feels, when you understand what happens later, that she got a sense of Marilyn’s life slightly spiraling.”

Andy Warhol

Green Marilyn Monroe, 1962

Andy Warhol’s silkscreen prints are undoubtedly the most famous portraits of Monroe and played a key role in cementing her iconic status. Looking at them today, we see a glossy celebration of celebrity and sexuality, but Broadley believes the very earliest versions, such as Green Marilyn Monroe (1962), were intended as tributes to the film star. Produced just weeks after her death, Broadley said, “they genuinely came from a place of shock and grief. They’re not just portrayals of her; they’re almost for her.” When they were first exhibited a few months after her death, “people were really moved; they called them heartbreaking.”

James Francis Gill

Marilyn Triptych, 1962

James Francis Gill used two different photographic sources of Monroe as the basis for his viscerally painful comment on the destructive nature of fame: images taken by Allan Grant and published in Life magazine just a day before she died and a cast photo from The Misfits. In the first two panels, Monroe seems to force herself to perform the role of star for the viewer, but by the third she has given up and sits, slumped and naked, her face scowling. Behind her, the facial expressions in a series of black-and-white images evoke the struggles of maintaining her public persona, alternating between happy smiles and frustrated grimaces.

Pauline Boty

The Only Blonde in the World, 1963

As an attractive blonde whose beauty often overshadowed her talent, Pauline Boty identified closely with Monroe. For her Pop art portraits of the star, Boty chose an image from Monroe’s best-loved film, Some Like It Hot (1959), as the basis for The Only Blonde in the World (1963), in which the character, Sugar Kane, is given an ethereal, almost luminous quality as if she’s sashaying into the afterlife. The vibrantly colored panels that appear about to close over her heighten the sense of a talent eclipsed all too soon.

Audrey Flack

Marilyn (Vanitas), 1977

Audrey Flack’s Marilyn (Vanitas) (1977) brings a contemporary, distinctly feminine take on the age-old genre of vanitas paintings. The work features an early, pre-fame image of Monroe along with the traditional timekeeping motifs of candle, egg timer, and watch, as well as a powder compact and lipstick. With its focus on the fleeting nature of time and beauty, it can be read as a poignant commentary on what Norma Jean sacrificed by becoming Marilyn. The inclusion of one of Flack’s family photographs adds a personal touch, connecting it to “her own experience of being a young child growing up in the ’50s or early ’60s and being in the shadow of this idea of Marilyn being the perfect woman,” said Broadley.

Margaret Harrison

Marilyn, 1998

Margaret Harrison first began painting Monroe in the 1970s, seeing her as one of the many women throughout history who had been “crumpled or destroyed by a society at odds with their talent or intentions,” according to the exhibition catalogue. Here, a close-cropped image of Monroe at the height of her fame is reworked in baby-pink watercolor to produce a picture of heartbreaking innocence. Meanwhile, on the other half of the diptych is a version of the leaked autopsy photograph of Monroe, which was widely reproduced in the press at the time. Again, it conveys the sense of tragic loss.

Marlene Dumas

Dead Marilyn, 2008

Based on the same illicit photograph used by Harrison, but reproduced in a sickly palette of blues and greens, Dumas’s painting is without doubt the most challenging representation of Monroe in the National Portrait Gallery exhibition. “Not everyone is going to feel that it’s an image we should look at,” acknowledged Broadley. “In the exhibition, we portray her as having agency in the creation of her images, and in this instance, she absolutely doesn’t.” However, she believes that Dumas, who was grieving her own mother at the time, acknowledges this media betrayal of such a private image being made public in her work. “It’s almost like she was restoring dignity back to the image,” said Broadley.

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The Frick Collection extends free admission program after announcing Louis Vuitton partnership. https://ift.tt/5vOQEsc

The Frick Collection will extend its popular First Fridays initiative through May 2027 as part of a three-year cultural partnership with Louis Vuitton.

Starting this month, the French fashion house will underwrite the monthly series, which extends free admission to visitors over the age of 10 on the first Friday of every month—excluding January and September—from 5:30 p.m. to 9 p.m.

During First Fridays, visitors can explore both the museum’s permanent collection and temporary exhibitions, as well as special programming including talks, music, dance performances, and live figure drawing. The series, which first debuted in October 2016, returned last spring, soon after the museum reopened to the public following a five-year, $330 million renovation and expansion project.

The initiative comes as part of Frick’s broader effort to increase public access to its world-class collection, housed in a historic Fifth Avenue home.

“The success of our recent First Fridays events reflects an ongoing strong public interest in the museum, now a year after our reopening,” said Axel Rüger, the Frick’s Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Director, in a statement. “We have been pleased to once again offer these unique, after-hours experiences in our galleries each month, which expand access to our historic buildings and offer new ways for visitors to explore our collections.”

In recent years, major institutions, including the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, have expanded free-admission programs through major funding commitments designed to expand audiences and reduce barriers to entry.

The Frick Collection’s partnership with Louis Vuitton was announced in May of this year. Soon after, the fashion house unveiled its Cruise 2027 collection in a runway show at the museum. For Louis Vuitton, the collaboration expands the brand’s longstanding involvement in the arts through cultural sponsorships and support for major exhibitions. The three-year partnership will also support future exhibitions at the Frick beyond the First Fridays series.

Art lovers interested in Louis Vuitton First Fridays are encouraged to register in advance, though walk-in visitors will also be admitted as capacity allows. The next event in the series will take place on June 5th.

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