The Art of Asking for a Discount on Art, According to Experts https://ift.tt/oZSEceK

For new art buyers, one question can feel especially fraught: Can I ask for a discount?

In most retail settings, the answer is obvious. In galleries, it’s less so. Prices aren’t posted with markdown tags (if they are displayed at all), and purchase conversations unfold in hushed art fair booths or white-walled spaces where etiquette can feel opaque. Yet behind the scenes, price adjustments are a common—if rarely advertised—part of how the art world operates.

That doesn’t mean discounts are automatic, or that asking is risk-free. In a relationship-driven industry where galleries split proceeds with artists and reputations matter, a poorly timed or overly aggressive request can sour a purchase. A thoughtful one, however, may be considered perfectly appropriate.

The key is understanding that a discount in the art world is gestural. And like most gestures, it depends on context, commitment, and trust.

We spoke with insiders, including an art advisor, a gallerist, and a seasoned collector, about how to navigate this delicate but very real part of purchasing art.

Only ask when you’re ready to buy

57th street gallery, New York City, 1963
Elliott Erwitt
Robert Koch Gallery

For Washington, D.C.–based collector Ramez Qamer, the first rule is simple: don’t ask unless you’re prepared to commit.

“I have to be ready to buy before asking for a discount,” he told Artsy.

Qamer, who has built a focused collection of primarily Southeast Asian artists, approaches negotiations with clarity and honesty. If a work stretches his budget, he says so, but only once he knows he truly wants it. “If I really like a work, I let the gallery know that—but I also explain I have a budget to work around,” he said.

Qamer has had instances where his initial pick was outside of his price range but led to alternative solutions: a smaller work by the same artist, a piece not yet on view, or occasionally a modest adjustment in price. Recently, that approach helped him acquire a painting by a sought-after artist.

Be realistic and respectful when asking

[question] [symbol ?], 2024
Mi Young Um
Art Spoon

If you do decide to ask for a discount, the safest approach is to start small.

Across much of the market, 10 percent is considered a standard discount for individual buyers, while institutions may receive closer to 20 percent. But insiders caution against treating those figures as entitlements.

Art advisor Lara A. Björk, founder of Von Rudebeck Art Advisory, says collectors should resist the temptation to negotiate aggressively, especially with smaller galleries or emerging artists.

“It just would be in poor taste,” she said, describing situations when buyers push for aggressive reductions at small galleries or with works by emerging artists.

What may seem like a minor concession to a buyer can meaningfully affect a young artist’s income or a small gallery’s margin. “It might be a tiny difference for the collector,” Björk notes, “but that change in the figure is often consequential for a young artist and small business.”

For Susanne Vielmetter, founder of the influential West Coast gallery Vielmetter Los Angeles, unrealistic requests reveal more than financial ambition.

“This is an opportunity to show the world how you want to be perceived,” she said. Walking into a gallery out of the blue and demanding a substantial discount on a major work can be “extremely insensitive and show they are not actually interested in what the work stands for,” she added.

In other words, treat the ask as part of a relationship, not a transaction.

Read the market before asking

Discounts are never automatic. And in volatile markets, they become even more situational.

Vielmetter says she discusses potential discount ranges with artists ahead of shows. The gallery “revisits” their pricing agreement “depending on how the market shifts,” she noted. If demand is strong and waitlists are long, flexibility shrinks. If the market cools, conversations may shift.

Collectors notice this, too. “I know not to ask for a discount when there are tens of people ahead of me,” said Qamer.

Björk advises collectors to consider the context of the enterprise they are dealing with. “The approach you should take to an unknown Berlin gallery showing a cutting-edge young artist at an art fair should be different than a mega business with multiple locations,” she said.

Understanding where you stand—in the market cycle, on a waitlist, and within a gallery’s ecosystem—is often more important than the percentage itself.

Timing and setting matter

Gallery Panorama 6, 2017
Rose Blake
Rebecca Hossack Art Gallery

Where you ask for a discount can matter as much as how you ask.

At art fairs, for instance, the atmosphere is fast-paced and competitive. According to Qamer, works at these events are often priced at a premium, and if multiple collectors are circling the same piece, leverage can evaporate.

“If there is another collector interested in the work at a booth, you most likely won’t receive the number you are hoping for,” said Vielmetter.

That doesn’t mean fairs are futile—they can be invaluable events to an artist or to cultivate a deeper connection with a dealer. For Qamer, they’ve been essential for building relationships. After following abstract painter Nour Malas through presentations at Frieze London and Art Basel Miami Beach with her Dubai gallery Carbon 12, for instance, he eventually secured a work through what he calls “polite, thoughtful persistence.”

Still, insiders agree that speaking to a gallery outside of these environments can offer a calmer setting for nuanced conversations. If you’re hoping for flexibility, intimacy often works better than urgency.

Build relationships first

Gagosian. Deal, 2016
Egle Karpaviciute
The Rooster Gallery

In an industry built on reputation and trust, credibility carries weight—sometimes eliminating the need to ask for a discount at all.

Qamer makes a point of explaining that he aims to be “a good home and steward for the artist.” These are factors that dealers pay attention to. Vielmetter says she is often willing to accommodate “budding, determined collectors” with long-term potential, occasionally offering discounts or payment plans to help them “get their foot in the door.”

For advisors like Björk, longstanding relationships can lead to unspoken gestures. A client’s recent acquisition of a Sasha Brodsky painting from dealer Margot Samel came with a discretionary discount without requiring negotiation.

“I’ve known Margot for years,” Björk said. “We have a good relationship.”

Indeed, the art of asking for a discount may lie in creating the conditions where buyers can ask for a discount “without banging on a gallery door,” as Björk puts it.

from Artsy News https://ift.tt/a5vk3RD

A major Jean-Michel Basquiat painting is expected to sell for more than $5 million in May. https://ift.tt/rm526JF

A monumental work by American artist Jean-Michel Basquiat with an estimate “in excess” of $45 million will head to auction this spring. The painting, Museum Security (Broadway Meltdown) (1983), will lead Sotheby’s contemporary evening auction in New York in May. Starting today, March 10th, it will be on public view at the auction house’s Breuer Building headquarters until March 15th. It will then travel to Hong Kong, Los Angeles, and London before returning to New York for the May sale.

According to Sotheby’s, the painting is one of the most significant and complex works ever painted by Basquiat. It belongs to a suite of 12 exquisite works he made that year and features his signature visual lexicon of symbols, signs, and text. These motifs, including crowns, skulls, and stars, also appear in related works from the year, such as Hollywood Africans (1983).

Museum Security (Broadway Meltdown) was executed during a period of prolific output that marked his astronomical ascent from downtown street artist to mainstream figurehead. In the work, the artist reflects on his newfound fame as it relates to his identity and colonialism, and the tension between art and commerce. As the title suggests, Basquiat questions who is allowed to enter the art world. Crossed-out text, another signature of his visual language, is embedded in the work, including the phrases “Priceless Art,” “Five Cents,” and “Museum Security.”

Soon after it was made, the work was included in the 1984 Whitney Biennial, as well as the artist’s second solo show with Gagosian, in Los Angeles. Since then, the painting has appeared in almost every major exhibition of the artist’s work, including shows at the Fondation Beyeler, the Fondation Louis Vuitton, and the Brant Foundation. “This work dances between the written and the drawn,” said Lucius Elliott, Sotheby’s head of contemporary art marquee sales in New York, in a press statement. “On a monumental scale, Basquiat unites images, words, and symbols, folding them together so that the words and their meanings begin to blur and shift. There’s an immediacy from his head to his hand to the line.”

This will be the first time in more than a decade that the work appears at auction. It last sold for £9.3 million ($14.6 million) in February 2013 as the top lot of Christie’s post-war and contemporary auction in London.

Works by Basquiat have continued to command high prices whenever they appear at auction. In May of 2017, an untitled work from 1982 of a massive skull became one of the most expensive works of art ever sold at auction—and a new auction record for the artist—when it sold for $110.49 million at Sotheby’s New York.

At last week’s March auctions in London, Sotheby’s sold Thin in the Old (1986) for £4.54 million ($6.06 million).

from Artsy News https://ift.tt/q0eISR7

5 Ways the Art World Can Better Support Women Artists https://ift.tt/h9nLv48

This Women’s History Month, art world leaders are calling for a reckoning. Works by women artists account for just 11% of museum acquisitions since 2008. Museums’ rates of collecting work by women have declined since 2009. And data suggests that women artists won’t reach parity in auction sales until 2053.

These statistics, presented by Charlotte Burns and Julia Halperin in the Burns Halperin Report, set the tone for the inaugural Making Their Mark Forum in Washington, D.C., organized by collector and philanthropist Komal Shah and curator Cecilia Alemani. The convening grew out of Shah’s publication and traveling exhibition, “Making Their Mark: Works from the Shah Garg Collection,” curated by Alemani and drawn from her collection of women artists’ works. The show is now on view at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, where the forum kicked off on March 5.

Over three days, speakers including Ava DuVernay, Chelsea Clinton, and Jodie Foster joined art world leaders for conversations about the industry’s inequities and the structural change needed to address them. The main day of talks, held at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library, brought together artists, curators, collectors, scholars, and museum leaders, primarily women, from across the United States, the U.K., and Europe.

In her opening remarks, Shah framed what was at stake: “Visibility without sustainability is temporary. Sustainability determines who builds legacy. Legacy determines who shapes culture, and culture shapes policy, ambition, and imagination—the very architecture of what a society believes is possible.” That work feels especially urgent now, given what Clinton described as the current political climate’s “volume and velocity of vile.” DuVernay offered a response rooted in self-determination: to effect change, she argued, it is not enough to seek a seat at the table—“Better have your own table. Better have a place to go.”

Below are five takeaways from the Making Their Mark Forum on how the art world can drive structural change.

1. Stop treating “firsts” as progress

Burns opened the forum with a pointed challenge: “How many times have you read headlines announcing the very first solo show by a woman artist at a major museum? What should be a source of shame is often reframed as a story of progress.”

Museums, galleries, auction houses, and publications often frame overdue recognition—long-delayed institutional attention or market success for an older artist—as a breakthrough. Those moments are worth celebrating, but they are not, on their own, evidence of progress.

Joan Semmel, 93, and Samia Halaby, 89, who both presented at the forum, vividly made that point. Shah recalled accompanying Semmel to her retrospective at the Jewish Museum in New York earlier this year, where the artist reflected on the many decades it took to have a museum show in her home city. Semmel described generations of women who “should have been in the mainstream” but were instead left out, “completely isolated in the men’s world as minor artists.”

Halaby, a pioneer of digital art who has been creating kinetic paintings through coding since acquiring an Amiga computer in 1986, has only gained major institutional opportunities in recent years: Her work currently fills the entryway to SFMOMA, and she is the oldest artist in this year’s Whitney Biennial.

The challenge is to treat these long-overdue milestones as prompts: to ask who else has been overlooked, what structures delayed recognition, and how the industry can stop producing “firsts” so late in the first place.

2. Rewrite the rules of “quality”

Economist Renée B. Adams, a professor of finance at Oxford’s Saïd Business School, challenged one of the art world’s most persistent assumptions: that women’s underrepresentation reflects differences in the quality of their work. Her research finds that paintings by women sell at what she describes as a 42% discount in auctions—a gap that cannot be explained by quality differences.

In another study, Adams had gallery-goers rate identical artworks; participants described the works as less compelling when told the artist was a woman. Any argument that women’s work is underrepresented in museum collections because of its lower quality is simply “gatekeeping,” she said.

Cecilia Fajardo-Hill, co-curator of the landmark 2017 exhibition “Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985,” experienced that bias firsthand. When she first proposed the show, one institution’s response was unambiguous: “Absolutely not. We are not going to dedicate energy to only women.” She kept pursuing it at a second institution—and was fired for it, with a director asking why she was chasing “all these unknown women.” The show eventually found a home at the Hammer Museum, where director Ann Philbin agreed to take it on the spot. “Radical Women” went on to travel internationally and reshape conversations about an overlooked art-historical period—a rewrite of “quality” in practice.

Christophe Cherix, director of MoMA, pointed to the museum’s permanent collection galleries as evidence that greater inclusion does not come at the expense of quality. More than 60% of the works now on view on the second floor are by women artists. “If those galleries are so vibrant and engaging,” he said, “it’s because we are more inclusive.”

3. Change the narrative

Professor and historian Sarah Lewis, speaking with Chelsea Clinton, recalled a quote from the late artist Elizabeth Murray: “Cézanne painted apples and tablecloths and clocks. The Cubists painted still lifes. But when I paint the still life, the critique of my work is that I’m making this feminist statement about the home, and that critique is political.”

Again and again, speakers returned to the question of who gets canonized—and how. Curators described some of the past two decades’ most important exhibitions of women’s work as acts of recovery. Connie Butler’s “WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution” (2007) and Katy Siegel’s “High Times, Hard Times: New York Painting 1967–1975” (2006–08) helped write women artists into histories from which they had long been excluded.

Artist LaToya Ruby Frazier has long centered activists and cultural figures in her work. At the forum, she described using a recent honor—her induction into the Daughters of Pennsylvania Society—to spotlight unsung photographer Sandra Gould Ford, who documented the collapse of Pittsburgh’s steel industry and preserved Black workers’ grievance records at personal risk. “It’s not about me,” Frazier said. “It’s about using this platform to direct it back towards a woman like Sandra, who has been overlooked, erased from history.”

The broader point was clear: changing the narrative means changing not only whose work is shown, but whose contributions are circulated, interpreted, and remembered.

4. Collect like museums are watching

Museum leaders drove home how deeply their collections are shaped by their boards and donors. As Kaywin Feldman, director of the National Gallery of Art, put it, “At least 80% of our collections come through gifts, not from purchase,” meaning institutions are heavily dependent on what collectors acquire in the first place.

That also means museums have to educate collectors—especially board members and patrons—to collect in the institution’s long-term interests, not just their own.

In a later conversation about the market, Christie’s CEO Bonnie Brennan expressed optimism about the coming Great Wealth Transfer—the massive intergenerational transfer of baby boomers’ wealth—which is expected to leave women controlling a greater share of that wealth and, in turn, more financial influence. “I think women are also more civic-minded,” Brennan said. “They’re not just putting things on the walls—they’re thinking about the institutions they support, what they want to see in those institutions, and having those conversations with galleries.”

“We’re all looking for that next generation,” said Mary Sabbatino, partner at Galerie Lelong, during the same conversation. “When I talk among colleagues, that’s one of the big topics…How do you bring people up to the level of people who want to make a great collection and contribute civically to the preservation of culture?”

But buying work is only the beginning. It’s then on museums to show that work to the public. As Cherix put it, “What good does it do to acquire works and put them in storage for 20 or 30 years?” Acquisition without exhibition is its own kind of erasure.

5. Measure progress—and keep measuring

Without long-term tracking, it’s too easy for the art world to mistake passing attention for real change. “Progress isn’t linear,” Halperin said. “It comes in waves, and it often reverses.”

Measurement matters to both drive improvement and reveal who is still left out. Museum leader and educator Sandra Jackson-Dumont stressed that even positive-looking numbers can hide deeper inequities: “We can say this is however many percentages of women artists. But if you break that down and say, well, how many of them are Black? How many of them are differently abled?”

Museums similarly need to analyze who they’re hiring. “You can’t manage what you don’t measure,” said Anne Pasternak, director of the Brooklyn Museum, quoting Michael Bloomberg. That means tracking not just the makeup of acquisitions and exhibitions, but also the staff, leadership, and board composition—“it’s about keeping us honest,” she added.

Data alone confirms that art world rhetoric is turning into real change.

from Artsy News https://ift.tt/3T49ZDE

Sculptor Thaddeus Mosley dies at 99. https://ift.tt/bfx8BEa

Thaddeus Mosley, the self-taught artist best known for his monumental sculptures made from reclaimed wood and bronze, died on Friday at his home in Pittsburgh. He was 99. His family announced the news in a statement, which was confirmed by Karma, the gallery that represents him. No cause of death was specified.

Mosley produced artwork over the course of nearly seven decades, but he found international acclaim only within the last 10 years. In 1968, he had his first solo show at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, where he lived and worked. Yet his breakout moment came in 2018, when Mosley was featured in the 57th edition of the Carnegie International, the longest-running survey of international contemporary art in North America. Soon after, he gained representation with Karma and went on to have six solo shows at the gallery’s spaces in Los Angeles and New York. The last of those shows, “Glass,” is currently on view at the gallery in Chelsea through March 28. The exhibition features a selection of small-scale sculptures the artist produced between 2010 and 2013, assembled from fragments of glass he collected decades ago from an abandoned bottle factory.

Mosley was born in New Castle, Pennsylvania, in 1926. In the late 1940s, he served in the U.S. Navy before earning degrees in English and journalism from the University of Pittsburgh. After graduating, he worked as a photographer and a freelance reporter, and in 1952, took a job with the U.S. Postal Service, where he worked until 1992.

He turned to making art in 1950, creating works he called “sculptural improvisations” that were inspired by Constantin Brâncuși, Isamu Noguchi, African sculpture, and jazz. Mosley had come across a group of teak birds in a boutique window and set out to make his own, carving small figures from fallen logs cast off by the city’s parks department. He then widened his practice to incorporate stone, bronze, and glass after studying books on sculpture at the public library, and developed his signature style, which balances sturdiness with precarity.

Circled Planes, 2020
Thaddeus Mosley
Karma

A major institutional survey of Mosley’s work opened at the Baltimore Museum of Art in 2021, following his participation in the Carnegie International. That exhibition, titled “Thaddeus Mosley: Forest,” traveled to Art + Practice in Los Angeles and the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas. And in 2025, Public Art Fund invited the artist to present a selection of bronze sculptures in the park outside City Hall in New York. His work is held in the collections of museums including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Brooklyn Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Guggenheim Museum.

from Artsy News https://ift.tt/n5heTwM

Cosima von Bonin’s sculptures star in Loewe’s fall/winter 2026 runway show. https://ift.tt/6ZN0JDM

German artist Cosima von Bonin’s whimsical fabric sculptures played a starring role in Loewe’s fall/winter 2026 fashion show on March 6, 2026. The show, held at the Château de Vincennes, marked the first Paris presentation by the Spanish fashion house’s new co-creative directors, Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez, founders of Proenza Schouler.

Plush creations in the form of hermit crabs, bulldogs, and killer whales by the Cologne-based artist sat interspersed atop rows of oversized white shoeboxes that served as seats. As models paraded down the lacquered marigold-yellow catwalk, they sported designs that incorporated her floral and gingham motifs, whether in inner linings or hand-painted onto garments. Loewe’s Amazona 180 bag was also rendered in porcelain by the artist. Von Bonin’s sculptural sea creatures and canines were also present in the form of charms, jewels, accessories, and minaudières.

“Humour, levity, and a bright, inclusive spirit—qualities we recognise as intrinsic to LOEWE’s Spanish heritage—led us to the work of Cosima von Bonin, an artist we have long admired and with whom we were fortunate to spend time recently,” said McCollough and Hernandez in the presentation’s show notes. “Her work mirrors many of the ideas we were seeking to articulate and manifest in physical form. Her wry humour cloaks rigorous questioning and critique—a tension between outward levity and a subversive undercurrent. Humour can be revolutionary, at times the most piercing way to deliver a serious message.”

Von Bonin was born in Mombasa, Kenya, in 1962. She works across painting and sculpture, and often incorporates found objects and pop-cultural touchstones into installations that are tinged with dark humor. Her work has been shown at the 59th edition of the Venice Biennale in 2022, the Glasgow International Festival of Contemporary Art in 2016, and Documenta in 1982 and again in 2007. Solo presentations dedicated to the artist have taken place at the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and SculptureCenter in New York. She is represented by Petzel Gallery in New York.

The luxury Spanish brand has a history of celebrating craft and artistry in its fashion shows, particularly under its previous creative director, Jonathan Anderson. Ellsworth Kelly’s Yellow Panel with Red Curve (1989) served as a starting point for Loewe’s spring/summer 2026 collection, while inspirations for past runway shows and collections have included collaborations with American sculptor Lynda Benglis, Italian painter and installation artist Lara Favaretto, and Los Angeles–based painter Richard Hawkins. The Loewe Foundation recently announced its shortlist of finalists for the 2026 Loewe Craft Prize, whose winner will be announced on May 12, 2026.

from Artsy News https://ift.tt/jc4TYFv

5 Standout Shows to See at Small Galleries This March https://ift.tt/t7ilQov

Acausality #13, 2025
Dario Maglionico
Antonio Colombo

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

Zé Tepedino

“Keep This Between Us”

Ysasi Gallery, Los Angeles

Through Apr. 28

Sem título, 2025
Zé Tepedino
Ysasi Gallery

garupa, 2026
Zé Tepedino
Ysasi Gallery

Brazilian artist Zé Tepedino’s upcycled artworks made a splash at last year’s Art Basel Miami Beach. His hotly awaited stateside debut finally opened at Ysasi Gallery during Frieze Los Angeles last month.

Tepedino traveled from Rio de Janeiro to install the show, collaging the inside of the gallery’s windows with pages from old books to create an aura of mystery from the outside and a sense of intimacy within. The artworks on view demonstrate Tepedino’s material range—he’s known for repurposing found rubber, sails, beach bags, and more into wall-hanging relics like Sem título (2025) and garupa (2026). In the process, Tepedino reasserts the poetic, rather than functional, possibilities of everyday objects. Some works were shipped from Tepedino’s studio; others he made on site, placing Rio in conversation with L.A.

The whole show centers on an unedited film Tepedino shot at Brazil’s world-renowned Carnival with a handheld camera, since this year’s edition coincided with his exhibition’s opening. Ysasi Gallery’s portion is one in a two-part presentation with Brazilian design platform ESPASSO, which hosted an artist talk ahead of the opening.

Alejandra España

“TUNNEL AND THE GLIMPSE”

CAM Galería, Mexico City

Through Apr. 10

Mar de sal, 2026
Alejandra España
CAM Galería

La montaña también es universo, 2026
Alejandra España
CAM Galería

Human perception typically emphasizes objects, or positive space, rather than the negative space surrounding them. Mexico City–based artist Alejandra España is inverting this tendency by harnessing the recognizable motif of the tunnel and the light at its end. In her latest wall-hanging collages, these tunnels are dark swaths of cut paper. Their lights are glistening 24-karat gold leaf.

These collages cluster throughout CAM Galería, punctuated by several oil and chalk paintings like Mar de sal (2026), a transcendent natural scene which also evokes an atomic bomb’s mushroom cloud. España’s more figurative scenes offer a kind of visual key to her comparatively opaque collages, which are the most complex additions yet in a body of work she’s pursued for nearly 15 years, inspired by Abstract Expressionist Robert Motherwell. Ceramic vases embossed with birds, moths, and other fauna anchor the lineup of works, with help from a large triptych reprising their critters. “The exhibition proposes an interconnected vision of existence,” CAM Galería stated in a press text. For España, that means positive and negative space—light and dark—are one.

Maria and Natalia Petschatnikov

“A Rough Cut”

BBA Gallery, Berlin

Through April 18, 2026

Sofa, 2024
Maria and Natalia Petschatnikov
BBA Gallery

It’s impossible to experience all of Berlin in a week. Nevertheless, the artist twins Maria and Natalia Petschatnikov have attempted to condense their hometown of 15 years into a single show. BBA Gallery, situated in the duo’s own neighborhood, provides a fitting venue for such a love letter.

The Petschatnikovs’ forthcoming exhibition, named for the first, choppy draft of a film, encompasses several disparate series of their acclaimed hyperrealistic oil paintings. “A Rough Cut” will feature numerous examples from their “Cardboard Furniture” series, crafted “as both still lifes and landscapes,” the twins stated. Massive renditions of discarded seating like Sofa (2024) will accompany these, offering indirect portraits of their former owners. Glistening portrayals of leaves will appear as well, alongside a 2023 series in which the twins painted crumpled calendar pages from 2032, treating the future “as a discarded relic of the past,” per the gallery.

Graffiti, which figures in several pieces, is specific to any given city. Still, the playful simplicity permeating the Petschatnikovs’ paintings proves universal. The artists, who call themselves “anthropologists of the ordinary,” have discovered an infinite store of inspiration on Berlin’s streets.

Emilie Houldsworth

“Chiaroscuro”

PARRI BLANK, Stuttgart, Germany

Through Mar. 13

After Reni, Bologna, 2025
Emilie Houldsworth
PARRI BLANK

Co-op Isle 2, 2025
Emilie Houldsworth
PARRI BLANK

Velvet meets steel in the sumptuous artworks of London-based artist Emilie Houldsworth, who’s closing out her first-ever solo show on mainland Europe. Houldsworth has brought together sculptures and textiles in this manner since earning her MA from the prestigious Royal College of Art in 2023. Her works portray digital imperfections using a labor-intensive process inspired by the underground dance beats that Bristol, England, where she was born, is known for. After screenshotting glitches that she witnessed while scrolling photos on her phone, Houldsworth developed an algorithm “that generates patterns from randomly selected pixels, fragmenting the image into coded structures,” according to the gallery. These patterns plot her abstract topographies of richly-hued velvet.

The works in “Chiaroscuro,” though, wield newfound drama. Houldsworth made most of them while participating in Italy’s esteemed Palazzo Monti residency last year. Both the 13th-century palazzo and the city of Brescia, Italy, beyond bear scores of historic frescoes. Houldsworth has turned their cinematic scenes into sparse segments of color, divided by steel traces. For example, After Reni, Bologna (2025) trades the artist’s more signature jewel tones for the brooding palettes of Italian Baroque legend Guido Reni, melting his moving scene into something minimal and obscure, suited to contemporary culture’s muddled cacophony.

Dario Maglionico

“Dis-sequenze liminali/Liminal de-sequences”

Colombo’s Gallery, Milan

Through April 3

Reificazione #95, 2025
Dario Maglionico
Antonio Colombo

Since 1998, art dealer Antonio Colombo has brought a fresh perspective to Milan’s storied art scene, showing contemporary Italian artists like El Gato Chimney and Zio Ziegler, American stars like Jacob Hashimoto and Barry McGee, and even musical legends like Moby and Daniel Johnston. In 2017, Colombo gave self-taught Neapolitan painter Dario Maglionico his first Milanese solo show. Now, to mark the gallery’s rebrand—featuring a new gallery name, logo, and website—the newly-minted Colombo’s Gallery is presenting Maglionico’s latest body of work in its project room.

This exhibition, curated by critic, journalist, and professor Arianna Baldoni, centers on Reificazione #95 (2025), a large, enigmatic oil painting that depicts a stylish woman alone at a dinner table. Her face remains hidden—she’s peering at the floating stool, caged jellyfish, and clones of her reflection in the warped surface behind it all. Maglionico has honed his surreal style for nearly a decade. Last year, he was shortlisted for the annual Premio Cairo—a leading prize for ascendant Italian artists, which has been previously awarded to talents like Giulia Cenci and Paolo Bini. The resulting series emphasizes Maglionico’s emergent experiments with mirrors. The results are electric, haunting, tantalizing.

from Artsy News https://ift.tt/AP5YLWw

Why Beatriz González’s Haunting Paintings Are More Relevant Than Ever https://ift.tt/nTLfW9Z

In three pivotal early paintings by the Colombian artist Beatriz González, a smartly dressed couple pose side by side, clutching a bouquet. The man wears a fedora, the woman a headscarf. While the warm colors evoke a sense of optimism, the series title, “Los suicidas del Sisga” (1965), and the figures’ solemn expressions hint at an underlying darkness. González based the works on a photograph from a newspaper’s crime section that was widely reproduced across the media: The subjects, gardener Antonio Martínez Bonza and domestic worker Tulia Vargas, his girlfriend, jumped into the Sisga reservoir, north of Bogotá, to take their own lives just days after the photograph was taken. Bonza left behind a note that he wished to preserve Vargas’s purity from a sinful world.

Over six decades, González, who died last month aged 93, transformed such everyday images into bold, unsettling compositions. Around 150 of these works—which made her one of Colombia’s most revered artists—are on display in “Beatriz González,” a touring retrospective of the artist’s career currently on view at the Barbican Centre in London until May. “I’ve known about Beatriz since I was a young girl,” said her gallerist, Catalina Casas, director of Bogotá’s Casas Riegner gallery. She noted that González’s work has a “universal language” and said, “When we speak to any artist of any generation in the Colombian art scene, she is always a reference.”

Beatriz González’s style

Most of González’s work comes from preexisting images, which she collected obsessively throughout her life. Yet what drew the artist to certain pictures is not always immediately obvious. Curator Lotte Johnson points out that it wasn’t the couple’s background that moved González to create “Los suicidas del Sisga,” for example, but the degradation of the image itself over time. “As it was replicated and reprinted, it started deteriorating,” she said, explaining that González was “interested in how fast we forget” images in the media. “We flip past them, and we almost become desensitized to them.” González then transformed such photographs into flat, boldly colored paintings using “technical tones like yellow, red, green, blue, orange—this kind of kaleidoscopic palette,” she added.

Natalia Gutiérrez, curatorial advisor for the Barbican show and González’s former assistant, points out that the artist clipped at least five newspaper articles a day for over 60 years. She stored this vast array of images in folders, which Gutiérrez is now sifting through to produce a comprehensive catalogue for public research. Despite the clarity of González’s style, Gutiérrez sees no clear throughline for González’s subject matter beyond a particular affinity for photojournalism. Instead, her work was “based on the impact of the image,” she said. González “wasn't interested in just recreating a scene from the news, but abstracting elements of those images.”

While González did not transform all these images into paintings, her collection evolved into an artwork itself, amounting to an “extraordinary archive of postcards, newspaper clippings, and reproductions of works,” according to Johnson. And while many of her best-known works depict death and political issues, she also reproduced globally recognizable artworks.

Associations with Pop art

In 1963, González began working on a series of paintings based on Johannes Vermeer’s The Lacemaker (1670–71), eventually exhibited in her first solo exhibition at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Bogotá in 1964. These reinterpretations became a wider trend in her practice. “She’s grappling with these so-called masters from Western art history and really contending with them with great reverence, but also critique,” Johnson said. “She was taking Veláquez, Vermeer, Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael, these artists who are the so-called pantheon of the Western canon, and thinking about what it means when images of these artworks land in Latin America.”

González’s vibrant reinterpretations led the Western art world to regard her as a Pop art icon as her work gained global acclaim. Yet the artist often stressed that she was not positioning herself in dialogue with Andy Warhol or Roy Lichtenstein and was largely unaware of the movement taking place in the U.S. in the ’60s. “She considered herself a provincial artist,” Casas explained. Yet Casas also noted that she never fought too harshly against the position. “When [curator] Jessica Morgan invited her to be a part of “The World Goes Pop” at the Tate Modern, she said, ‘Well, if I have to be Pop, let them say I’m Pop.’”

González’s work took a political turn

Today, the Tate owns at least two González works that use mass-produced furniture as canvas. The artist started exploring this medium around 1970. At that point in her career, she was “moving away from the traditional format of oil on canvas to experiment,” Gutiérrez explained, noting that many of the paintings reflect their supports. The Last Table (1970), for example, is a reinterpretation of Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper (1495–98) on a faux-wood dining table, and Interior Decoration (1981) is a nearly 66-foot-long section of a silkscreened fabric hanging, often described by the institution as González’s first explicitly political work.

Originally a nearly 640-foot-long curtain (sold by the centimeter in a bid to make her work more accessible), Interior Decoration depicts an image of Colombia’s 25th president, Julio César Turbay. In the original newspaper photograph, the president sings folk songs at an event celebrating a military officer whose new law forced the writer Gabriel García Márquez and others into exile. Johnson explained that Turbay “led a particularly brutal regime,” yet hired journalists to document an “exuberant, frivolous lifestyle.” The piece, which purposefully simplified the figures and distorted the colors, serves as a “searing critique of the political regime and its hypocrisy at the time,” she said.

Before her death, González was intimately involved in her retrospective and was particularly excited for it to show in London. Casas remembers visiting the Barbican with her before heading to the Netherlands, where González spoke about how “she wished she could at some point show there.” For González, “it was like a dream come true,” Casas explained. And while González did not live to see the final installation, Johnson reminded us that, as one of the most influential Colombian artists of her time, her name precedes the exhibition. “This is not a rediscovery of an artist,” she said. “This is someone who has been practicing for decades.”

from Artsy News https://ift.tt/UMci6eE