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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9 Artists on the Books They’re Reading This Summer https://ift.tt/cbFYjKI

Summer brings its own rhythm to the art world. Many galleries turn to group exhibitions, international shows draw audiences to scenic seasonal destinations, and the art fair calendar quiets until September. For artists, that change of pace can also create something increasingly rare: sustained time to read for pleasure.

Books, of course, are often inseparable from an artist’s practice. A memoir can offer a new way of thinking about a life; an unexpected case study can open up a line of research; a collection of essays can sharpen, complicate, or unsettle an idea already taking shape in the studio. Reading may be especially pleasurable in summer—on a beach, in a park, during a quiet stretch at home—but it is rarely only a diversion. Books can become sources, provocations, and points of departure, sometimes feeding directly into new bodies of work or exhibitions.

With that in mind, Artsy asked a group of artists with busy months ahead what they are reading this summer. As they prepare for solo and group exhibitions, biennial and fair participations, they share the books currently sitting on their desks, nightstands, and daybeds.

Ali Banisadr

B. Tehran, 1976. Lives and works in New York.

Reading: Frances Yates, The Art of Memory, 1966

“Books often become companions in my studio. This summer, I’ve been returning to Frances Yates’s The Art of Memory.

I’ve long admired Yates’s writing and have read her other books over the years, but this one has taken on a particular resonance while preparing for my upcoming exhibitions, ‘Talisman’ at Thaddaeus Ropac Paris and my exhibition at the Musée Gustave Moreau, also in Paris, opening this September.

“What fascinates me is her idea that memory images become ‘inner talismans’—images that are internalized and continue to shape how we see and understand the world. I’ve realized this is also how I read: I read, reflect, return to passages repeatedly, and then let them rest. During that process, ideas become images, connecting with memory, dreams, music, and lived experience until they eventually reappear in my paintings.

“Perhaps this is why I paint—to better understand the strange life of images, how they are remembered, transformed, and rediscovered across time. I am spending most of my time this summer in the Forest, Hudson Valley, New York.”

Dominic Chambers

B. St. Louis, Missouri, 1993. Lives and works in New Haven, Connecticut

Reading: Anne Truitt, Daybook: The Journal of an Artist, 1982

“I’ve been reading Daybook: The Journal of an Artist, by sculptor Anne Truitt. This book has been more of a thought companion than a source of inspiration that directly influences my work.

“More precisely, this book is about the life of an artist—her meditations on form and color, her doubts and wit, and the pendulum between motherhood and solitude, and so on.

Body Shimmer (Bright Thoughts #1), 2026
Dominic Chambers
Lehmann Maupin

“Reading about the lives of other artists always fills me with courage. It is difficult to make work against the backdrop of our dismal political, social, and economic background. Reading Daybook has given me a reprieve in spiritual conversation and, when played aloud as an audiobook, has been a stimulating voice to produce work with.”

Hew Locke

B. Edinburgh, 1959. Lives and works in London.

Reading: V.S. Naipaul, Miguel Street, 1959

“The book I plan to reread is Miguel Street by V.S. Naipaul. There is a darkness in this book, alleviated by an equally dark humor—my mother read this to my brother and sister and me as a bedtime story, which in retrospect was quite an unusual, almost adult choice of book. I have read it several times but not for a number of years, so I am looking forward to picking it up again.

Kings & Queens 3, 2025
Hew Locke
Cristea Roberts Gallery

“As I get older, I see more and more in the book. It is a pleasurable read and is, in essence, a collection of beautifully written short stories about a boy growing up in Port of Spain in Trinidad during World War II, and in each chapter Naipaul brings to life one of the street's inhabitants in a short story. They are tragic—disturbing often—but also funny, such as Man Man, who lives on the street and declares himself the new Messiah.

“The characters remind me of people I saw around me when I was growing up in Georgetown, neighboring Guyana. And this book has always been at the back of my mind for my whole career, for example in a new series of paintings of Knights Errant that I have been making recently.”

Paula Siebra

B. Fortaleza, Brazil, 1998. Lives and works in Fortaleza.

Reading: Soetsu Yanagi, The Beauty of Everyday Things, 2018

“The Beauty of Everyday Things by Soetsu Yanagi captivates me with the sincerity and delicacy of the author, who is an artist and collector of Japanese folk art.

“The book is a collection of essays in which the author analyzes various types of traditional items, highlighting the sophistication in these everyday objects—bowls, small plates, and fabrics for kimonos made from banana leaves—especially when crafted by ordinary people.

“He lavishes praise on the simplicity of these sturdy objects made to last, with little or no ornamentation, which we sometimes carry with us throughout our entire lives. I found it an essential read for reflecting on how a people’s identity is tied to a few motifs that recur across generations, and how beauty resides in everyday objects. The author writes in a very heartfelt and sincere way, and it’s a charming, light read to take with you on a trip to the beach, or to enjoy under a shady tree.”

Andrew Kuo

B. New York, 1977. Lives and works in New York.

Reading: Han Kang, The White Book, 2016

List (12/13/14), 2014-15
Andrew Kuo
Rago/Wright/LAMA/Toomey & Co.

“Han Kang’s The White Book has been my summer read, in pieces. Her writing fades in and out, like visiting an album or playlist, and her words on death, life, conflict, and peace through the color white feel both heavy and free. Like my favorite artworks, this book is kind of strange and definitively moving, though it has zero jokes, sadly.”

Alia Farid

B. Kuwait, 1985. Lives and works in Kuwait and Puerto Rico.

Reading: Hilda Hilst, With My Dog-Eyes, 1986

“I am reading a couple of books this summer, but the one I will share is With My Dog-Eyes by Hilda Hilst. I don't remember how this book came into my possession or who might have recommended it. But I love the title.

“I’ve had it in my studio for a while now and picked it up this summer in search of something different and short, so that I could momentarily tap out of my work. I find Hilda’s irreverent style refreshing, a reminder that whatever appears most normal is most ideological.”

Curtis Talwst Santiago

B. Edmonton, Canada, 1979. Lives and works in Potsdam, Germany.

Reading: Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower, 1993, and Donella Meadows, Thinking in Systems, 2008

“I’ve been reading Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower alongside Donella Meadows’s Thinking in Systems. Meadows gives language to something I keep circling in the studio—feedback loops, thresholds, what gets amplified versus what quietly disappears—close to what’s happening in ‘worlds, worlds, worlds,’ my upcoming show at Contemporary Calgary, where cardboard packaging becomes structure and horns and channels act as apparatuses of transmission and interruption.

“Butler’s ‘Earthseed’ philosophy—‘God is Change,’ the idea that change is the only constant, something to be shaped rather than feared—feels close to how I think about working with discarded, unstable materials: not resisting flux but building form out of it. Reading them together this summer feels right for where the show is landing.”

Vuslat

B. Istanbul, 1971. Lives and works in Istanbul and Los Angeles.

Reading: Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, 1983

“The last book I’ve been reading—re-reading, really—is Lewis Hyde’s The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, which has stayed with me in an intimate way.

“Hyde reflects on art in relation to giving and receiving, and this resonates with my ongoing exploration of the Turkish concept of emanet, which is entrusted care, responsibility, the invisible threads that connect us.

“The book has given form and language to an intuition I have been working with for years. For Hyde, a gift stays alive only as long as it keeps circulating. That has given me a new perspective on my site-specific installation for the 2026 Biennale of Contemporary Ceramics, currently open in Rhodes, Greece. Titled May We Meet In The Silence Of Our Souls (2026), the work consists of ceramic forms shaped through breath—they are small offerings entering a shared space, where they are received, held, and carried forward by those who encounter them.

“Since we’re on the subject of books, I would be remiss not to say that my monograph of the same title comes out in America next month from the University of Chicago Press. In May We Meet In The Silence Of Our Souls, Hyde and I enter into a dialogue around these ideas, considering how art can hold and transmit what is entrusted to us. I spent my summer at our family house in Bodrum, on the south coast of Turkey, where three generations of our family come together each summer. It is a time to reconnect with family and friends, share time, and simply enjoy togetherness. To Bodrum, I brought my newly converted tiny house, which serves as my mobile studio. I was also able to continue making art while being surrounded by people I love. For me, it was a beautiful balance between family, friendship, and my practice.”

Sarah Blaustein

B. San Francisco, 1982. Lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Reading: Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, 2000

“I’m reading Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft while I make work for an upcoming group presentation at Untitled Houston for early October with Library Street Collective.

“I love the way King describes the process of uncovering one’s story—that’s how I feel I make my own images, by excavating them one studio session at a time. King compares having great, sober sex to the act of writing. He asks why writers can’t stay sane and go completely nuts (creatively) at the same time. That’s how I like to feel in my studio: both ecstatic and entirely clear-sighted.”

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First Fernando Botero show in London for over a decade to open in October 2026. https://ift.tt/reFYVMv

Opera Gallery London will open “Fernando Botero: In Praise of an Amplified World” on October 12th, marking the first solo exhibition of the Colombian artist’s work in London since 2015

Coinciding with the opening of Frieze London, the show continues through November 12th, and brings together paintings, drawings, and sculptures. Works on view will span nearly six decades, from the mid-1960s to the final year of Botero’s life before his passing in 2023.

The exhibition, with scenography by designer Cécile Degos, argues against reading Botero’s signature style as caricature, framing volume instead as the artist’s central subject. Rather than simply enlarging his figures and objects, the gallery says, Botero “amplified” them, using shifts in proportion to intensify their physical presence. That approach traces back to a 1957 realization: while painting a mandolin, Botero found that shrinking its rosette made the instrument’s body appear far larger. He later credited that discovery with unlocking his entire visual language.

The show also underscores Botero’s lifelong engagement with art history. He worked as a copyist at the Museo del Prado in Madrid in his youth, selling copies of paintings by Diego Velázquez and Francisco Goya to support himself, and the exhibition traces a continuing dialogue in his work with those artists as well as Piero della Francesca and Pablo Picasso.

“Fernando Botero created a visual language that is instantly recognisable yet endlessly nuanced,” Opera Gallery founder Gilles Dyan said in a statement. “Bringing together works across more than six decades, this exhibition highlights the remarkable consistency of his artistic vision and the diversity of his achievements.”

Botero has seen his market grow substantially since his death. According to the Artnet Price Database, total auction sales of his work reached an all-time high of $53.8 million in 2024, the same year his auction record was set at Christie’s with the $5.1 million sale of his 1979 painting The Musicians.

The London show will follow “Botero in New York,” an exhibition organized with the Botero family on view at Sotheby’s Breuer building this summer, through September 7th. That show traces how the artist’s years in Greenwich Village in the late 1950s and ’60s helped shape the voluptuous, flattened style that would become known as Boterismo.

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How to Choose Art for Your Home Office https://ift.tt/ML05RHn

Ferris Wheel Through Time and Space, 2023
Jesse Meserve
TAG The Art Gallery

While the days of COVID-19 lockdowns are behind us, remote work has become a fixture of many jobs. As people find themselves working from home, they are paying greater attention to their home offices, brightening and refreshing domestic spots to suit their professional needs and personal taste.

“The demand for artworks for home offices has increased, driven by the need to make offices more soulful or simply more entertaining during video calls,” Jane Corkin, founder of Corkin Gallery, told Artsy. “They are looking for works that empower and invigorate. We are seeing bold choices and deeper works that bring a layer of introspection rather than mere decoration.”

Whether you’re buying art for the first time or expanding your collection, here are tips from leading galleries and designers on purchasing art that fits into your home working setup seamlessly.

Start with the room, not the art

Happy Place #9, 2021
Leslie Kerby
FROSCH&CO

Like any form of purchasing art, deciding what to buy for your workspace requires consideration about where and how you want the art to live.

In addition to being heavily used rooms, home offices have to be practical and fit the needs of your job. It’s important to think first about the room and how you use it, assessing the physical constraints—size, layout of furniture, and things like the dominant light source and its direction. North-facing rooms tend to have cooler and more even light, while south-facing rooms are warm and shift through the day. This can change how an artwork appears and create glare, depending on how you frame it.

“If a home office gets a lot of natural light, works behind glass—such as photography, drawings, or works on paper—can create reflections that become distracting during the workday, even if they’re barely noticeable in the evening,” said Sarah Sargeant, founder and principal at the New York–based firm Cochineal Design. “It’s worth thinking about the room’s lighting conditions before deciding on framing or medium so the artwork can be enjoyed comfortably throughout the day.”

Red Yellow Black White (from Standing People), 2020
Julian Opie
Robin Rile Fine Art

The overall palette and material feel of the room is also important to consider. A dark space with warm surfaces like leather will need different artworks than a minimal setup with white walls. While your workspace may have specific needs, it’s still a part of your home.

“I think an office should feel like a natural extension of the rest of the home, rather than a space with an entirely different look and feel,” Sargeant added. “I always prefer to propose artwork that complements a home's broader collection and design story. That said, every client is different.”

What artworks tend to work for home offices, and why

Still In The Game , 2022
Yoon Hyup
APC Gallery

Yo Ho Ho , 2008
Todd James
aous

Once you’ve understood the requirements of your space, you can start to think about what will work for your home office. For many people, the wall behind a desk is the best place to hang artwork. Some might find it better to have a single piece proportioned to their room and furniture, but what works for one person might not be best for another.

In his own home office, Mohamed Benhadj, director and curator of Al-Tiba9 Gallery, has a variety of pieces, including a sculpture, photograph, and a neon installation. “I enjoy living with different materials and different artistic languages throughout the day,” he said. “The neon wall installation offers me a new atmosphere at night and keeps me inspired. I always encourage collectors to be creative in their choices and not limit themselves to a single artwork or a single medium.”

Indeed, when you spend hours in the same room, it’s important to think about how you’d like to feel in the morning as well as after a long day of work.

You may have to be flexible as you start to live with your artwork. “We’ve worked with collectors who relocate works from living and dining rooms into their home offices because they realize those are the pieces they want to spend the most time with,” said Emily Siekkinen, director of Octavia Art Gallery.

I Love Liberty, 1982
Roy Lichtenstein
Robin Rile Fine Art

In terms of cost, works on paper, prints, and photography can be more accessible and are easier to hang and move around as you decide on an arrangement.

“A home office is a smaller and more intimate space, and prints tend to work beautifully at that scale—they don’t overwhelm the room the way a large unique painting might, and they let you live with a serious artist’s work without needing museum-sized walls,” said Elisabetta Setzu, senior director of print specialist Gemini G.E.L. “There’s also something appropriate about prints for a workspace: They represent the artist’s hand and process in a very direct way.”

“We’re seeing strong interest in artists whose prints reward close, sustained looking,” added Setzu. “Vija Celmins’s drypoints, Richard Tuttle’s hand-drawn works, and Ed Ruscha’s word-based prints all come up often for home offices specifically, since they're contemplative rather than purely decorative.”

Size, placement, and the video call factor

My Desktop 我的書桌, 2018
Guanyu Xu
Galerie du Monde

Ultimately, the artwork you choose needs to suit your profession. If your office blurs the public-private boundary and you have visitors or are often on video calls, you might have to be more deliberate about what you hang on your walls.

“A therapist, for instance, may want to create a space that feels welcoming, calming, and conducive to vulnerability,” Rachel Vincent-Clarke, director of Galerie Robertson Arès, said. “An entrepreneur might choose works that embody the values, creativity, or visual identity of their business.”

Dealers also suggest artwork that rewards slow viewing, given the amount of time you will spend with it. “One of our collectors shared a photograph of a recent acquisition from our gallery, newly installed in her home office: a subtly hued embroidery on raw canvas by Montreal-based textile artist Cyndie Belhumeur,” Vincent-Clarke added. “The work explores our relationship with the digital world, reflecting on the overwhelming flow of information that surrounds us while reminding us of our capacity to pause, step back, and recalibrate. I think that’s a particularly resonant theme for a home office.”

Practically speaking for video callers, your camera position should be considered when judging where to hang something behind you. If a work is too large, it might not translate well through a screen.

Common mistakes

Westie at Work, 2026
Scott Reeder
Saenger Galería

While keeping these more practical tips in mind can help you choose the best artwork for your home office, there are additional caveats. People can spend hours on end in their workspace, so dealers caution against buying something you think will look good, but isn’t what you really want.

“Only purchase artwork that you’ll want to live with, not just look at occasionally,” said Siekkinen. “A home office is one of the few places where you engage with the same artwork every day, so choosing something that will continue to hold your interest is important.”

Still, a piece should be interesting without being diverting. An eye-catching work could be a good conversation starter or could become a distraction. People who give group presentations might find it challenging to keep their audience’s attention.

Moreover, what’s hanging on the walls might become a distraction to you. “An artwork that makes you feel motivated to work is very different from one that constantly makes you dream about going on holiday or taking a day off,” noted Benhadj.

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Black Mid-Century Artist Felrath Hines Is Finally Getting His Due for His Luminous Abstractions https://ift.tt/9fuDnIj

He was a member of the Spiral Group, the pioneering collective of African American artists in the 1960s, and an artistic peer to Romare Bearden and Emma Amos. Georgia O’Keeffe so admired his talents that she hired him as a personal conservator to her paintings.

But, today, artist Felrath Hines, who died in 1993, is largely unknown—even in the art world.

“Hines was strongly devoted to abstraction and pursued it with a very independent and persistent attitude,” said Andrew Schoelkopf, the owner and founder of New York’s Schoelkopf Gallery. Right now, the gallery is presenting an intimate showcase of Hines’s works, on view through August 21st.

The exhibition includes five key paintings by the artist from the 1950s and ’60s, decades when he produced evocative abstractions painted in bold but sensuous brushstrokes. The exhibition is part of the gallery’s ongoing effort to shine new light on Hines’s career, and builds on a 2022 solo presentation of his work at ADAA: The Art Show in New York.

The jewel of this exhibition is The Bush from 1962, a gestural abstraction painted in foggy passages of greens, purples, and grays, like a landscape seen in the distance of a misty shore. The work is emblematic of Hines’s best paintings of the 1960s. “You can see how his brushwork is the work of an adept painter. It’s rich and layered, which creates a certain luminosity in the surface. I also find his sense of color to be tremendously skillful and alluring,” said Schoelkopf.

Bouquet, 1957
Felrath Hines
Schoelkopf Gallery

Landscape, 1953
Felrath Hines
Schoelkopf Gallery

The gallery first became interested in Hines’s works while researching the Spiral Group, a collective of African American artists who explored the role of art in relation to society and the Civil Rights Movement. “As a member of the Spiral Group, he was a prominent figure in the New York City art world and the Black creative scene of the time,” added Schoelkopf. Still, unlike other Black artists of the era, such as Bearden or Jacob Lawrence, Hines’s story has remained largely untold.

Born Samuel Felrath Hines Jr. in Indianapolis in 1913, the artist had his first forays into art as a teenager, after receiving a scholarship for classes at the John Herron School of Art Saturday School. Following high school, he worked as a firefighter, and as a railway waiter, earning money to support classes at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. By 1946, he had moved to New York where he studied with the Russian-born American painter Nahum Tschacbasov, while also taking classes at New York University and Pratt.

By 1951, Hines had started working at a frame shop in the city. His skill as a painter and his knowledge of framing eventually led him into a career as a conservator at New York’s Fine Arts Conservation Laboratories.

His career as a conservator and his practice as an artist were side by side for most of his life. Over the years, he took major positions at the Museum of Modern Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. Early in his conservator career, he helped conserve one of Claude Monet’s “Water Lilies” paintings for MoMA, an experience that informed his own luminous palette and layered approach to abstraction (the influence is evident in a work like The Bush). Later, Georgia O’Keeffe would bring on Hines to lead the conservation of her personal collection, as well as the care of her works in private and museum collections during the 1970s.

Distant View, 1962
Felrath Hines
Schoelkopf Gallery

Sea Shell, 1962
Felrath Hines
Schoelkopf Gallery

Hines’s painting style continued to evolve. His gestural abstractions, now on view at Schoelkopf Gallery, later gave way to geometric abstractions influenced by De Stijl and Piet Mondrian. While Hines was an active participant in the Spiral Group, he always maintained a very individualized artistic vision.

“Despite his predilection for looking at art in exhibits and galleries, he never painted with other artists,” wrote historian Rachel Berenson Perry in her defining monograph of the artist, The Life and Art of Felrath Hines: From Dark to Light.

The artist wasn’t one to seek the limelight, either. “He was a regular social presence in the New York art world, especially in Black creative circles, but he didn’t like to draw attention to himself,” said Schoelkopf.

Throughout his career, Hines also resisted being classified primarily as a Black artist and believed his work, and abstraction, were universal languages in their expression and reach. As such, he turned down invitations to exhibit in shows focused on the work of Black artists alone, including the major exhibition “Contemporary Black Artists in America” at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1971. These decisions may have contributed to his relative obscurity.

His career as a conservator, at times, detracted from his art practice, too. “He was very dedicated to his work, but he went through long periods of time where his ‘day job’ as a conservator prevented him from spending any time working on his personal creative practice,” said Schoelkopf. A 1979 article described Hines as having “two careers: executing his own art and repairing the art of others.”

In 1984, he retired as the chief conservator of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and devoted the last years of his life entirely to painting, creating some of the most significant works of geometric abstraction in his career. He continued to believe in the power of art, despite never reaching widespread fame. In 1983, he said in an interview, “In my view, an artist’s work is to rearrange everyday phenomena so as to enlarge our perception of who we are and what goes on about us.”

Today, Hines’s reputation is steadily growing (Schoelkopf Gallery has placed his works with institutions including the Cincinnati Art Museum). Schoelkopf says that with Hines one can’t help but notice “how razor-thin the margin is between the type of success Georgia O’Keeffe had” and that of “an artist as well educated, well trained, intelligent, and important as Felrath Hines.” The art world, he thinks, may soon be catching up.

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