The 5 Best Booths at miart 2026 https://ift.tt/TU2nqSt

The Venice Biennale might be just around the corner, but for this week at least, Milan’s art scene is commanding the spotlight. Under a balmy Po Valley sun, an extensive continental art crowd convened at the hulking Allianz MiCo convention center for miart 2026, the fair’s 30th edition, which opened its VIP day on April 16th.

Much has been made of Milan’s ascent as an art capital in recent years, fueled by a fresh cohort of international galleries opening in the city and talk of international collectors drawn in by Italy’s newly favorable tax regime. Yet miart is not the country’s only major art fair—Artissima in Turin and Arte Fiera in Bologna remain formidable Northern Italian counterparts—so its strength comes from the city’s pull. Collectors from across Europe, it turns out, hardly need persuading to spend time moving between the city’s world-class museums, foundations, and growing clutch of tastemaking galleries, all of which drew strong crowds during a packed Milan Art Week. Underscoring that promise is the arrival this year of trendy alternative fair Paris Internationale, which will host its first edition outside the French capital in Milan’s Palazzo Galbani over the weekend.

This year, miart hosts 160 galleries, down from 179 last year, spread across three maze-like floors of the convention center. Like last week’s EXPO Chicago, that lower number is not necessarily a bad thing. In the fair’s main Established section, booths are spacious and often cross-generational, spanning 20th-century masters and sharper contemporary presentations. The fair also shows a clear appetite for the new. That is especially evident in the fair’s Emergent section dedicated to young galleries, which has grown to 26 exhibitors from 20 last year.

So yes, there are plenty of works by Lucio Fontana, Giorgio de Chirico, and Giorgio Morandi on view—but also booths that take a more international and contemporary outlook. London’s influence is especially notable this year: Ginny on Frederick and Rose Easton join the main section alongside debutant Soft Opening and returning exhibitor Sadie Coles HQ, while Emergent includes younger galleries such as Des Bains, Ilenia, and South Parade.

By the fair’s opening hours, the VIP crowd seemed relaxed, and several were ready to buy. “I come to miart every year because it’s a great place to discover gems by major Italian artists as well as masterpieces by artists who are little known outside of the Italian context,” said London advisor Daniel Malarkey, who had bought two works within 20 minutes of the fair’s opening. Having arrived from Mona Hatoum and Cao Fei exhibitions at Fondazione Prada, he pointed to the broader pull of the city itself. “It’s definitely an unmissable time to come to Milan,” he said.

Here, we present the five best booths from miart 2026.

Gaa Gallery

Booth F14

With works by Katja Farin

Held On, 2026
Katja Farin
Gaa Gallery

Keep Close, 2026
Katja Farin
Gaa Gallery

Thorns for Flowers #3, 2025
Katja Farin
Gaa Gallery

Prensive, 2025
Katja Farin
Gaa Gallery

Spiraling Out, 2025
Katja Farin
Gaa Gallery

In Katja Farin’s paintings, bodies bend, glow, and distort. In a series of new works presented by New York and Cologne space Gaa Gallery, the American artist turns to the idea of care. These paintings are intended to explore, as the artist told Artsy, “holding patterns, how we hold each other and the expectations that come with either care or needing care.”

The encounters portrayed here feel at once intimate and estranged. In Moment of Touch (2025), an orange figure leans over a pale, loosely articulated body, its elongated arm wrapping around the smaller form in a gesture that reads as protective, controlling, or both. A ghostly grayscale figure hovers behind them, turning a domestic space into an ambiguous drama.

“Either you’re the person being held, or you’re the person holding, and [there’s an] emotional weight that comes with both of those things,” Farin added. A group of ceramics extends that tension into three dimensions: Mottled vessels bristle with spikes and protrusions, as though growing limbs or priming their own defenses. Paintings on the booth range in price from €1,500 ($1,766) to €16,000 ($18,845), with ceramic works priced at “around” €1,000 ($1,177).

Andrea Festa Fine Art

Booth F11

With works by Pedro Liñares and Leo Orta

Estudo para Cambará, 2025
Pedro Liñares
Andrea Festa Fine Art

BAT Sculpt #9, 2026
Leo Orta
Andrea Festa Fine Art

Estudo para Still Frames de um Dia de Trabalho, 2023
Pedro Liñares
Andrea Festa Fine Art

BAT Sculpt #7, 2026
Leo Orta
Andrea Festa Fine Art

Paris, 1830 (Balzac), 2026
Pedro Linares
Andrea Festa Fine Art

Rome gallery Andrea Festa Fine Art’s presentation, “One’s Natural Habitat,” pairs Brazilian artist Pedro Liñares’s hushed, elusive paintings with French artist Leo Orta’s uncanny sculptures in a booth that rewards slow looking. Despite their different media, both artists share an interest in how forms emerge through time and perception.

Liñares’s paintings are created by accumulating and then erasing pigment, drawing on domestic ornament and architectural fragments. In the abstract, minimal work Motivo 1 (2026), for instance, a pale vertical band marked with patterned geometrical motifs hovers against a black, worked surface that seems almost weathered into being.

Orta’s work, by contrast, pushes outward into space. His pint-sized, hybrid “Bat Sculpt” forms, made from salvaged materials including lava stone, appear to sprout from rough, branching clay supports. In BAT Sculpt #8 (2026), a porous black form reads as both bodily and architectural, as though testing how it might inhabit its surroundings.

“They’ve both been interested in this organic world,” said gallery director Victoria Shimano. “They highlight each other—they don’t interrupt each other.” Works on the booth range in price from €1,800 to €5,500 ($2,120 to $6,478).

P420

Booth C02

With works by Helene Appel, Riccardo Baruzzi, Irma Blank, Adelaide Cioni, June Crespo, Victor Fotso Nyie, Paolo Icaro, Merlin James, Khaled Jarada, Xian Kim, Francis Offman, Alessandro Pessoli, Alessandra Spranzi, Monika Stricker, Franco Vaccari, Pieter Vermeersch, and Shafei Xia.

Sink (with dishes), 2026
Helene Appel
P420

Remaining Gesture, 2026
Khaled Jarada
P420

Traction III, 2025
June Crespo
P420

Polar light, 2024
Monika Stricker
P420

Arbusti della valle – Agazzino, 2026
Riccardo Baruzzi
P420

Bright Birds, 2009
Merlin James
P420

Bologna tastemaker P420 brings the full heft of its roster to miart in a smart presentation showcasing different media, scales, and generations.

That breadth is immediately apparent in the pairing of two standout works at the front of the booth: Khaled Jarada’s Remaining Gesture (2026) and June Crespo’s Traction III (2025). Jarada’s dark, expressive charcoal of a man with a slingshot is raw and poignant. Crespo’s low, horizontal sculpture, by contrast, consists of four sawhorses with cement sculptures resting on top, evoking both bones and DIY tools.

Elsewhere, Helene Appel’s acrylic and oil painting Sink (with dishes) (2026) offers a quiet but exacting meditation on the everyday, while Alessandro Pessoli’s Vergine fiorentina (2026), a small acrylic portrait work, evokes religious intensity on the booth’s exterior.

With prices ranging from €8,000 ($9,423) to €45,000 ($53,005), the gallery struck an optimistic tone early in the VIP day. Gallery director Enrico Maria Branca noted the presence of many of their regular collectors as well as “very good international collectors.”

ML Fine Art (Matteo Lampertico)

Booth C02-C04

With works by Arturo Martini, Marino Marini, Lucio Fontana, Ettore Spalletti, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Piero Manzoni, Carla Accardi, Tancredi, Giorgio de Chirico, Jannis Kounellis, and Giorgio Morandi.

Situated on the top floor of the convention center in miart’s Established Anthology section—dedicated to presentations that display the “complexity, trajectories, and transformations of time”—ML Fine Art’s bumper booth does exactly what the section promises. The local stalwart presents a tightly curated survey of 20th-century Italian art, bringing works from its various movements—post-war, conceptual, and Arte Povera—into crisp relation.

The gallery deftly stages a series of smart conversations between works: A restrained Giorgio Morandi landscape hangs near a sparingly depicted Giorgio de Chirico cityscape (both works are priced in the mid six-figures apiece), while Carla Accardi’s rhythmic abstraction plays off Lucio Fontana’s spatial rupture. The result is a presentation that comes across as an active correspondence across movements.

This is a booth built on confidence in the work itself. At a fair increasingly defined by its contemporary edge, the gallery’s top-quality display is a reminder of miart’s enduring strength in historical Italian art—work that, when installed with rigor, can feel as urgent as anything made now.

M77 Gallery

Booth F17

With works by Carla Badiali, Alberto Biasi, Gianni Bertini, Martha Boto, Giosetta Fioroni, Agostino Iacurci, Emilio Isgrò, William Klein, Antonio Marras, Nino Migliori, Maria Lai, Marco Petrus, Ming Smith, Tino Stefanoni, Grazia Varisco, and Nanda Vigo.

David Murray in the Wings, 1978
Ming Smith
M77 Gallery

Hat + 5 roses, Paris, Vogue, 1956
William Klein
M77 Gallery

When the Cactus is in Bloom #10, 2026
Agostino Iacurci
M77 Gallery

When the Cactus is in Bloom, 2026
Agostino Iacurci
M77 Gallery

When the Cactus is in Bloom #11, 2026
Agostino Iacurci
M77 Gallery

M77’s booth is one of the fair’s most cohesive group presentations, using “New Directions”—the fair’s John Coltrane–inspired theme for this edition—as its organizing principle. Moving across generations and media, the booth maintains a sense of rhythm, improvisation, and syncopation.

That musical reference is most explicit in the special focus on Ming Smith. Installed against a dark blue wall under the title “Jazz Requiem,” her photographs translate jazz into visual form. Not just documenting musicians, Smith’s images channel the musical genre through blur, grain, shadow, and atmosphere. Her David Murray (1993–94), a vintage gelatin silver print of the saxophonist mid-performance, renders him as a dark, almost silhouetted presence. The result is less a straightforward portrait than a meditation on presence, performance, and spontaneity. M77 managing director Chiara Principe noted that Smith started photographing in the 1970s and was the first Black woman artist whose work was acquired by MoMA.

Elsewhere, the booth moves through very different registers. William Klein’s monochrome photograph Hat + 5 roses, Paris (1956) captures a woman in a dramatic floral hat smoking directly into the frame, her face partially veiled by drifting smoke; the image has the touching playfulness that made Klein such an influential photographic force. Agostino Iacurci’s painting When the Cactus is in Bloom 11 (2026), by contrast, introduces a brighter, more graphic tempo, with five cactus forms rising in strict vertical sequence against a pink ground. Works at the booth range from €5,000 ($5,889) to €150,000 ($176,686).

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8 Artists to Follow If You Like Marcel Duchamp https://ift.tt/MY9HnPj

L.H.O.O.Q. Mona Lisa, 1919
Marcel Duchamp
Art Resource

Marcel Duchamp, Duchamp Retrospective, Pasadena Art Museum, 1963
Julian Wasser
Robert Berman Gallery

“The word ‘art’ etymologically means to do, not even to make, but to do—and the minute you do something, you are an artist,” Marcel Duchamp said in his first and last TV interview with the BBC in 1968. It was a characteristically sly incitement from an artist who spent six decades dismantling every assumption about what art could be. From placing a urinal on a pedestal and drawing a mustache on a reproduction of the Mona Lisa (1503), to diagramming the mechanics of sexual desire and reproducing his entire oeuvre in miniature, Duchamp proved that an artist could do and be anything.

Though the French American provocateur worked in glass and avant-garde painting, he’s most famous for his readymades: everyday objects elevated to the status of art by the act of presentation. Such work reveled in institutional transgression and playfully overturned artistic and social customs. Some irony, then, underlies museum shows devoted to his legacy. And this summer, MoMA is presenting “Marcel Duchamp,” the first major retrospective of the artist’s work in the United States in more than half a century, on view through August 22nd. Gathering 300 paintings, sketches, readymades, and sculptures across six decades, it offers contemporary audiences a chance to take full measure of an artist whose influence has become so pervasive as to be almost invisible.

Duchamp shifted art from a purely visual experience to a mental one, paving the way for Conceptual, Pop, and digital art. He granted artists permission to continuously reinvent, provoke, and resist resolution outside of established movements and media. Here are eight contemporary artists who, like Duchamp, refuse to let art settle into good taste.

Nina Katchadourian

B. 1968, Stanford, California. Lives and works in New York City and Berlin.

Lavatory Self-Portrait in the Flemish Style #7 ("Seat Assignment" project, 2010 - ongoing), 2011
Nina Katchadourian
Catharine Clark Gallery

Lavatory Self-Portrait in the Flemish Style #13 ("Seat Assignment" project, 2010--ongoing), 2011
Nina Katchadourian
Catharine Clark Gallery

In 1919, marking the 400th anniversary of Leonardo da Vinci’s death, Duchamp drew a mustache and goatee on a postcard reproduction of Mona Lisa and titled it L.H.O.O.Q. Read aloud in French, the letters roughly translate to “she has a hot ass.” The work was both a prank and a Dadaist provocation, mocking conventional notions of gender, the sanctity of art history, and the fetishization of beauty.

Nearly a century later, the American conceptual artist Nina Katchadourian locked herself in an airplane bathroom, fashioned a wimple from a toilet-seat cover and a veil from a hand towel, and photographed herself in the manner of a fifteenth-century Flemish portrait. The unexpectedly convincing images, Lavatory Self-Portraits in the Flemish Style from her series “Seat Assignment” (2010–present), went viral.

"The Great Airport Mystery" from "Family Gathering" ("Sorted Books" project, 1993--ongoing), 2013
Nina Katchadourian
Catharine Clark Gallery

Katchadourian often imposes such absurd constraints to generate formal invention. In“Sorted Books” (1993–present), the American artist’s longest-running project, she arranges library volumes so their spines form punning stories or sayings, engaging the same wordplay that Duchamp embraced.

One such book stack, Primitive Art (2001), reads: “Primitive Art / Just Imagine / Picasso / Raised by Wolves.” Whether it’s a joke, a piece of art criticism, or a poem is up to the viewer.

Jamian Juliano-Villani

B. 1987, Newark, New Jersey. Lives and works in New York City.

The Breakfast From Hell, 2014
Jamian Juliano-Villani
The BlackWood Gallery

Growing up in New Jersey as the daughter of commercial silkscreen printers, Jamian Juliano-Villani spent her childhood folding identical t-shirts emblazoned with familiar images like Pope John Paul II’s face. That early exposure to mass reproduction still animates her painting practice, which culls imagery from memes, film stills, stock photo databases, children’s books, art history, and the continuous scroll of contemporary visual culture, then recombines it in operatically bizarre compositions.

For Juliano-Villani, as for Duchamp, a chosen image is already a transformed one. Her work is deliberately, joyfully irreverent, flattening hierarchies between high and low culture—like pairing Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man (ca. 1492) with a knife-wielding dog or replacing the turkey in a Rockwell-esque dinner scene with a microwave—and media: Juliano-Villani employs oil painting and graffiti-style airbrushing with the same wry confidence Duchamp brought to placing a urinal on a pedestal (Fountain, 1917).

This impertinence extends to authorship itself. Juliano-Villani has solicited prompts from friends and strangers, even asking Nathan Fielder of Nathan for You fame to generate short scenarios for her to visualize.

Likewise, the artist has outsourced her canvases to reproduction painters in China, making works she described as “human AI.” For example, Ashley (2024) features repeated images of Jean-Michel Basquiat kicking a chair.

Mika Rottenberg

B. 1976, Buenos Aires. Lives and works in New York City.

Hair milked for cheese, acrylic fingernails ground into maraschino cherries, sweat triggering the production of a pearl: These are a few of the absurd forms of labor that appear in Mika Rottenberg’s technicolor video installations.

Working across sculpture, film, architecture, and performance, the artist exposes both the invisible systems that structure contemporary life and the often grotesque conditions that sustain them. Born in Buenos Aires and based in New York, Rottenberg frequently traces supply chains that connect distant, seemingly unrelated sites of production. In Cosmic Generator (2017), a surreal single-channel film and installation, viewers follow the exchange of commercial goods through a subterranean tunnel system that links a Chinese restaurant in Mexicali, Mexico, to a massive wholesale market in Yiwu, China.

The surreal, Rube Goldberg–like contraptions that animate Rottenberg’s films move between comedy and critique, recalling Duchamp’s own tongue-in-cheek fascination with arbitrary systems, futility, and mechanized desire. His monumental glass painting, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915–23), for instance, diagrams a frustrated erotic pursuit played out in an abstract mechanical process involving scissors, sieves, and stove pipes.

Rachel Youn

B. 1994, Abington, Pennsylvania. Lives and works in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Sit pretty, 2024
Rachel Youn
Alice Amati

Duchamp had an uncanny talent for making ordinary objects feel erotic, even perverse. Many of his later works explicitly conjured body parts, from Please Touch (1947), with its three-dimensional rubber breast set against black velvet, to Female Fig Leaf (1950), a bronze cast reminiscent of female genitalia held within a leaf. Youn extends that subversive sensibility through kinetic sculptures built from salvaged massagers, fans, motors, exercise bikes, and artificial flowers that twitch, bow, and strain in awkward, repetitive motions. In Tantal (2026), a diminutive neck massager rotates two red orchids bound together by a thin silver chain, while in Sit Pretty (2024), two overburdened orchid plants shake and gyrate atop a vibration platform draped in a lush crimson hanbok chima, or a traditional Korean skirt.

Ellen Harvey

B. 1967, Farnborough, U.K. Lives and works in New York City.

The Disappointed Tourist: Black Wall Street, 2021
Ellen Harvey
Graphicstudio USF

The British conceptual artist Ellen Harvey is drawn to what culture leaves behind. Her ongoing series, The Disappointed Tourist (2019–present), which comprises hundreds of small oil paintings of places that no longer exist, functions as a catalogue of the irretrievable past. The lost sites, erased by war, ecological disaster, gentrification, or the breakneck pace of modernity, range from the Colossus of Rhodes, felled by an earthquake in the 3rd century B.C.E., to Los Angeles’s Tower Records, which shuttered in 2006.

Harvey is not, however, simply an elegist. Her technically exacting practice is shot through with conceptual wit and a deep understanding of the ways art is circulated and encountered. Interested in expanding access to art, she’s undertaken projects such as copying every nude in Miami’s Bass Museum and creating a miniature version of every work in the Whitney Museum catalog. The impulse has a precedent in Duchamp’s Box in a Valise (1935–1966), a portable “retrospective” of miniature replicas of 69 of his best-known works, including paintings like Nude Descending a Staircase (1912) and readymades like Fountain (1917). Like her forebear, Harvey treats her copies not as mere replicas, but as genuine vehicles for unsettling institutional authority.

Ry Rocklen

B. 1978, Los Angeles. Lives and works in Los Angeles.

While the found objects in Duchamp’s readymades often remain unchanged—like a snow shovel suspended from the ceiling in Prelude to a Broken Arm (1915) and the bicycle wheel mounted on a stool in Bicycle Wheel (1913)—American sculptor Ry Rocklen subjects everyday artifacts to thoughtful acts of preservation and transformation. The American artist’s approach is both conceptual and nostalgic, even reverential. Flat tires, shopping carts, paper towels, umbrellas, and tennis shoes appear in his sculptures, which are alternately tiled in mosaic; cast in porcelain; plated in copper, brass, or bronze; or embellished with beads and other ornamental flourishes.

These interventions don’t obscure the original objects so much as reframe them, revealing their latent value and restoring a sense of beauty to the overlooked and cast-off. Absorption Panel (White Bread) (2024), for example, features a patchwork of various paper towel and napkin patterns rendered in white, cream, and ecru ceramic mounted on mortar and enclosed in a metal frame. A Ritz cracker and a slice of white bread lend the deceptively elegant relief a sense of playfulness.

Nikita Gale

B. 1983, Anchorage, Alaska. Lives and works in Los Angeles.

TALENT 15LBS, 2023
Nikita Gale
Petzel Gallery

In Nikita Gale’s installations, the apparatus of live performance is everywhere, but performers are conspicuously absent. Microphone stands appear without microphones. Stage curtains drape scaffolding with no stage to frame. In TEMPO RUBATO (STOLEN TIME) (2023–24), which won the Bucksbaum Award at the 2024 Whitney Biennial, a player piano in a dramatically lit room silently “played” a selection of pop songs. The mute instrument, like much of the American artist’s practice, poses questions about the structures that determine who gets amplified, and who gets silenced or suppressed.

In this sense, Gale emerges as a contemporary heir to Duchamp’s insistence that art engage the gray matter rather than the retina. The conceptual artist’s work refuses to deliver the sensory experience that viewers have come to expect and instead asks them to reconsider their relationship to spectacle and their desire for on-demand entertainment. Gale similarly emphasizes the role of the spectator as an active participant in the work, necessary to its production and eventual completion.

Andrew Ohanesian

B. 1980, Laguna Beach, California. Lives and works in New York City.

Take-A-Number, 2017
Andrew Ohanesian
Pierogi

In 2012, Andrew Ohanesian reconstructed the ground floor of a quintessentially American suburban home inside a cavernous Brooklyn warehouse, complete with functioning kitchen, living room, beige carpeting, and a china-filled armoire. On opening night, Ohanesian hosted a party, inviting audience participation that left the house all but destroyed: mirrors shattered, furniture overturned, surfaces littered with beer bottles, and walls tagged with graffiti. In mimicking life so faithfully, the installation became a kind of uncanny mirror, collapsing the distance between constructed artwork and authentic event.

Introducing mundane objects into fine art contexts is a conceptual move that Ohanesian, like Duchamp, returns to again and again. But where Duchamp eliminated skill almost entirely, Ohanesian reintroduces the artist’s hand as he replicates mass-produced objects. For Take-A-Number (2017), the artist cast the number dispenser so often seen in D.M.V.s in bronze and naval brass. For other pieces, the intervention is more conceptual than aesthetic, such as Urinal (2013), shown at the 2013 Armory Show: The artist outfitted a urinal with a complex re-circulating plumbing system so that it actually flushed despite being hung on a booth wall. “Ideally, indicting both the art fair as a toilet,” the artist told Artsy. “And carrying forward the idea of a future toilet as art fair, tied together with the visceral flush.” A urinal is a urinal is an art fair: no doubt Duchamp would have agreed.

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Claire Danes voices new Georgia O’Keeffe documentary. https://ift.tt/AhUSfZp

A new documentary about the life and work of American artist Georgia O’Keeffe will be released this spring. The actress Claire Danes features as the voice of the painter, who is considered the mother of American Modernism, while Danes’s husband, actor Hugh Dancy, will narrate. The film, entitled Georgia O’Keeffe: The Brightness of Light, will be released digitally on June 1st, with select screenings on May 10th, Mother’s Day.

The documentary is produced and directed by Academy Award and Emmy-Award winning independent filmmakers Paul Wagner and Ellen Casey Wagner. It features interviews with leading O’Keeffe scholars and experts, including Sarah Greenough, senior curator and head of the department of photographs at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.; Cody Hartley, director of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum; and Agapita Judy Lopez, who cared for the artist and worked closely with her in her studio before becoming a projects director for the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum.

O’Keeffe is known for her sensitive, monumental paintings. They capture the natural world as they depict sensual florals, majestic animal skulls, and sweeping landscapes in vibrant, organic tones. O’Keeffe is considered one of the greatest women artists of the 20th century. The film was made across the locations where the artist lived and worked, including O’Keeffe’s Ghost Ranch and her second home in Abiquiu, New Mexico; Lake George in New York; and Palo Duro Canyon in the Texas Panhandle.

“In the last years of Georgia O’Keeffe’s life, curator Sarah Greenough of the National Gallery of Art worked with her on an exhibit and catalogue of O’Keeffe’s art and letters,” said Ellen Casey Wagner in a press statement. “The artist urged Greenough to set two standards for the show, and we have aspired to the same two standards for our film—to make it honest and to make it beautiful.”

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Julie Mehretu Captures Our Contemporary Chaos in Shimmering Abstract Paintings https://ift.tt/ClNa81U

In Julie Mehretu’s restless canvases, history accumulates on the surface. The Ethiopian American artist is known for abstract paintings, drawings, and prints, and she fills her compositions with layers of marks. Each one draws on sources like maps, art history, spirituality, and global events. Gestural yet organized, Mehretu’s work uses abstraction to turn images—especially those circulating through mass media—into something both spectral and urgent.

Born in Addis Ababa in 1970, Mehretu relocated to the United States during the Ethiopian Revolution, a displacement that would later echo through her work. Her early breakthrough came with vast paintings that fused architecture, urban planning, and calligraphic marks into dizzying, multi-perspectival fields. Mehretu’s works quickly attracted institutional attention for the way they recast abstraction in a globalized age. By the mid-2000s, Mehretu had been included in major exhibitions like the Carnegie International, and in 2005 she received the MacArthur fellowship, cementing her status as one of the most significant painters of her generation.

Over time, Mehretu began to draw from additional sources, including news photography and scenes of protest, war, and catastrophe, all of which she obscures by erasing and layering marks on top. As her practice progressed, so too did Mehretu’s career, and her work has since been exhibited widely, including at the 2015 Sharjah Biennial, the 2019 Venice Biennale, and, more recently, her commission for the façade of the Obama Presidential Center.

Inside Totality (what the ground cannot hold), 2025
Julie Mehretu
Marian Goodman Gallery

In her latest solo show at Marian Goodman Gallery, “Our Days, Like a Shadow (a non-abiding hauntology),” on view through June 6th, Mehretu offers a reminder that abstraction is not an escape from the world but an intensification of it. The exhibition title draws from biblical and Buddhist notions of impermanence. It shows the artist grappling with the complexities of global conflict and polarizing politics. “Beginning in 2016 with the election of Donald Trump, there’s been so much to negotiate and a different kind of dynamic to the world,” Mehretu said. “The language that emerged in the political arena was shocking and scary, but it was also haunting. It re-opened histories we’ve been through in this country that are complicated and uncomfortable. I’m not thinking of history as a positive or negative condition. Every day is a transient, fleeting, and precious experience.”

Exploring this human condition, the show features new bodies of work related to recent exhibitions at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice in 2024 and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney in 2024 to ’25. It includes new examples from Mehretu’s “TRANSpaintings/Upright Brackets” (2024–26) series: ink and acrylic paintings on monofilament polyester mesh, a material that allows the artist to build the composition in layers and for light to shine through. Based on abstracted photographs from media coverage of geopolitical events, the colors and marks form ethereal shadows of their source imagery.

Though the images are taken from reality, Mehretu doesn’t need the viewer to identify the subjects. Indeed, ambiguity is an important part of the work. “I might be depicting a photograph of somewhere recently bombed, but we live in a time where that could be a number of places,” the artist said. “It might be Ukraine last month or Gaza two years ago. Each photograph captures a specific moment, but I’m interested in the condition of that moment and the aftermath and what that conjures in the viewer.”

Removed from the wall, the freestanding compositions are set in aluminum scaffolding-like frames by Iranian German artist Nairy Baghramian. “I was trying to figure out a way to display the paintings and saw Nairy’s show at the Nasher [Sculpture Center] and was blown away,” Mehretu said. “She’s a good friend and was open to inventing something with me. She’s constantly supporting and bracing her work, and that’s what these brackets do.” The armature connects to the ceiling via a single extension as if the entire work might spontaneously pivot. “The moment that was added, the work gained agency, like it has legs and arms,” Mehretu said.

As light shines through the composition and the viewer moves around the piece, colors seem to materialize—the fleeting moments Mehretu hopes to convey. “None of the colors and marks are stable because we live in a vertiginous world where we’re catapulted between realities,” Mehretu said. “They change based on the conditions of light, whether someone is standing on the other side, and where you’re standing.”

Joining the “TRANSpaintings” in the show are a new series of “Black Paintings” (2025–26), stunning meditations on the color black. Mehretu had used dark grounds in previous works, but rather than working with black ink, she wanted to explore what would happen if she introduced white and silver. Then, she made a mistake. “I wasn’t wearing my glasses and I thought I was using silver, but it was violet interference ink,” she explained. The pearlescent, vibrant hue added a new dimension to the dark ground. “As I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned to become comfortable with the uncomfortable, be patient, and to trust the process,” she said. “Once I learned about interference colors, I started to explore and I realized something like ultramarine blue over black can create this wild, reflective effect that changes as you move.”

Using these scintillating hues, Mehretu departed from the source material of her “TRANSpaintings” and instead filled the surfaces with intuitive, improvisational marks. Painted on canvas as opposed to the mesh of the “TRANSpainting” surfaces, the “Black Paintings” rely on Mehretu’s keen ability to layer marks and colors.

While fundamentally exploring the color black, the works vary greatly. Some contain countless layers of bold marks while others are pared down. In some pieces, glistening paint shifts from green to violet to silver like the hues of oil pooling on a blacktop. Iridescent blue might shift to silver like wind blowing across the sand. In others, marks jet over the surface of the work like surveillance drones and ethereal white fades into hazy smoke (is it fireworks or bombs?) across a night sky. One mark can change the whole composition, catching the eye or introducing a different visual plane. “It’s a phenomenon of the materials,” Mehretu said. “I might not even notice something until it emerges.”

The way these marks and colors appear and shift, however, can truly only be experienced in person. Therein lies another important factor in Mehretu’s work: the viewers themselves. Thinking of bodies in space, Mehretu invited choreographer John Jasperse to create a series of performances in dialogue with the show. “After my exhibition in London where I showed “TRANSpaintings” for the first time, I thought how beautiful it would be to see performers move around the works,” Mehretu said. With music by composers Hahn Rowe and Will Johnson, a new work Wandering (2026) will see seven dancers respond to shadows, movement, and energy of Mehretu’s work, performing live in the gallery from May 20th to 23rd.

Walking through the gallery with the artist, it’s clear how much the paintings change through movement. Viewing Mehretu’s work in photographs is one thing, but being there in person as the surface transforms is a completely different experience. Colors shift and layers emerge but, just like the fleeting nature of life Mehretu draws inspiration from, they dissolve just as quickly as they materialize.

from Artsy News https://ift.tt/YiNP5j9