Hirshhorn Sculpture Garden to reopen in October 2026 following Hiroshi Sugimoto redesign. https://ift.tt/y4V0Exa

The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden's Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, will reopen on October 31st following a reimagining of the landscape by Japanese artist and architect Hiroshi Sugimoto. The project marks the most significant rethinking of the garden since American modernist architect Gordon Bunshaft conceived the Hirshhorn's distinctive cylindrical museum and sunken sculpture garden more than half a century ago. The garden first opened to the public in 1974. In 1981, landscape architect Lester Collins added additional lawns, trees, ramps, and shaded outdoor spaces. Sugimoto's intervention preserves the essential character of Bunshaft's modernist campus while creating a more open, varied, and flexible setting for the museum's collection of modern and contemporary sculpture.

Central to the design is a series of monumental, stacked stone walls that divide the landscape into a sequence of distinct but interconnected spaces, including the East and Central Gardens and West Lawn. The stone offers an elemental counterpoint to Bunshaft's concrete architecture and a restrained backdrop for sculpture spanning more than a century.

The redesigned garden will allow the Hirshhorn to display 50 percent more artworks outdoors. Some 24 major sculptures from Joseph H. Hirshhorn's Foundational Gift will return to view, including works by Auguste Rodin, Henri Matisse, Henry Moore, Alberto Giacometti, and Barbara Hepworth, presented in dialogue with living artists and new commissions rather than organized as a chronological survey.

A wider “front door” will create at-grade sightlines into the garden from the National Mall, while five points of entry, new east and west overlooks, twice as many accessible entrances, and expanded shade and seating will make the previously secluded space more porous. An underground passageway will reconnect the garden directly to the museum, establishing a physical route between the indoor galleries, Sugimoto's landscape, and the Mall.

According to the Washington Post, the overhaul also includes a revamped reflecting pool. and A rotating exhibition program will also launch with a spotlight on large aluminum figures by Yoshitomo Nara.

Sugimoto's design extends his longstanding relationship with the Hirshhorn, which was the first museum to present a major retrospective of his work and, in 2018, invited him to reimagine its lobby.

from Artsy News https://ift.tt/zjsy8vZ

Lee Krasner Steps Out From Pollock’s Shadow https://ift.tt/8HJWeVj

In 1957, Lee Krasner moved her painting tools and set up her studio in the barn on the property of her home in Springs, New York, a hamlet in eastern Long Island. The barn—a single-light-filled space measuring roughly 20 by 20 feet—had previously been the studio of her late husband, Jackson Pollock. But from 1957 until Krasner’s death in 1984, the barn was her domain, and there she took full advantage of the space and freedom finally afforded her, producing the most brilliant works of her career.

A dazzling new exhibition, “Krasner and Pollock: Past Continuous” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, brings together the works of husband and wife, tracing the trajectory of their careers. The show begins with Krasner, opening with a series of abstract collage paintings from the mid-1950s made from cut-up fragments of her old canvases and drawings. It concludes with Krasner, too, closing with Past Continuous (1976), a monumental collage Krasner made from her own Cubist-inspired drawings from the 1930s from which the show takes its name. Pollock’s breathtaking drip paintings appear in the middle like a storm, a force of nature that tore through Krasner’s life.

In his lifetime, Pollock had become synonymous with the barn. There, he had flung, dripped, and poured paint onto canvases unrolled across its floors. In 1949, Life magazine immortalized Pollock and his studio with a profile entitled “Is He the Greatest Living Painter in the United States?” The editorial featured photographer Martha Holmes’s now-iconic images of Pollock at work, dripping paint from a brush with a cigarette dangling from his lips.

Pollock and Krasner had moved to Springs from New York City in 1945, using a loan from gallerist and collector Peggy Guggenheim for the down payment on a two-story home. They had come to the bucolic seaside town seeking an escape from the distractions and demands of city life so they could focus on their work. Pollock first worked in an upstairs bedroom and Krasner in the cramped kitchen. Later, Pollock moved his studio into the property’s barn, and Krasner took the upstairs bedroom he had vacated.

In August 1956, Pollock crashed his car on the side of the road after a night of heavy drinking, killing himself and his passenger, Edith Metzger, a friend of his mistress, Ruth Kligman. Kligman, who was also in the car, survived.

Krasner, who had been traveling in Europe at the time of the crash, returned immediately to plan his funeral. Slowly, in the months that followed, she returned to her practice, eventually moving her tools into the barn, close to a year after his death. For many years, the barn had smelled of the kerosene used to heat a stove, but Pollock had winterized it in 1953, insulating the walls and covering the floor with Masonite squares left over from a printing job by his brother, Sanford. When Krasner entered the studio in 1957, she walked on tiles that hid Pollock’s paint splatters covering the wood floor beneath.

Often, stories of Krasner’s life seem to end with Pollock’s death, but in reality, she was just embarking on the most fruitful years of her artistic career.

Krasner, a rising star

She was born Lena Krassner in Brooklyn in 1908, the fourth of six children in a working-class, Orthodox Jewish household where English, Russian, and Yiddish mingled. Krasner rebelled early and leaned into art. She studied at the Woman’s Art School of Cooper Union, the National Academy of Design (which suspended her for entering a basement off-limits to women), and City College, before she enrolled in 1937 at the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts. There, as The Met’s exhibition catalogue notes, she “imbibed the tenets of Cubism and came to revere Henri Matisse.”

In late 1941, the painter John Graham invited her to show in “American and French Paintings” at McMillen Inc. Krasner, who had cultivated friendships with many in the New York art world, knew every name on the list except Pollock’s. She found his address and called on him at his Eighth Street studio. “I was overwhelmed, bowled over, that’s all,” she later said. “I felt as if the floor was sinking when I saw those paintings.” By 1942, they were dating.

“Krasner held the more prominent artistic reputation of the two. She was better educated and more firmly entrenched in the close-knit and pugnacious New York art world,” write curators David Breslin and Brinda Kumar in the introduction to the exhibition catalogue. Her paintings of the period “articulated still-life forms and figures in thick paint, fusing geometric shapes with organic forms in overlapping planes over flat backgrounds of white or gray,” with primary blues, reds, and yellows “knit together by strong black lines.” Mondrian was an influence, and she often recalled with pride that he admired these works.

Krasner moved into Pollock’s East Eighth Street apartment in fall 1942, and they married in October 1945. A month later, with a $2,000 loan from Peggy Guggenheim, the couple bought a farmhouse and five acres in Springs, complete with a barn.

An era of doubt and rebirth

The move came in the middle of what Krasner called her “black-out period,” in which, as the catalogue puts it, she built up paint on her canvases but no image emerged, producing her “gray slabs.”

Pollock, long in the thrall of Picasso, had finally broken with Cubism, but Krasner wasn’t ready. She said this rupture “took me two years to digest. Between 1943 and 1944 I tried to undo my Cubist orientation and produced very little work in a rather anxious situation.”

But her work also took a backseat to Pollock’s career, which she championed using her connections and good graces to earn the truculent Pollock opportunities, introducing him to Robert Motherwell, Roberto Matta, and Surrealist ideas, including automatic drawing.

“At the expense of her own work,” art historian Kirk Varnedoe wrote, “Krasner poured her energy and intelligence into furthering Pollock’s efforts.” Scholar Robert Hobbs reads the gray slabs of this era as Krasner grappling with news of the Holocaust, slowly emerging from Europe.

Eventually, Krasner broke through this era of artistic doubt. Working in the upstairs bedroom Pollock had vacated, she made the “Little Images,” compact, impastoed canvases of “small dabs of paint intentionally placed in even adjacency” that became “a chromatic prism through which Krasner unlocked an endless palette.”

In 1953, following a disappointing solo show in 1951, she began recycling her unsold canvases into large collages. Some of these works include scraps of Pollock’s discarded drawings and canvases, among them Bald Eagle (1955). In the fall of 1955, at the age of 46, Krasner opened a solo exhibition of her collage paintings at dealer Eleanor Ward’s Stable Gallery in New York, marking her second solo show in New York. While dealer Betty Parsons was the show’s only buyer, the exhibition earned strong reviews with Stuart Preston of the New York Times calling her “a good noisy colorist” and Fairfield Porter writing, in ARTnews, that her art “seems to be about nature” and makes viewers “aware of a subtle disorder greater than [they] might otherwise have thought possible.” The show marked a new era of creativity for Krasner. Pollock, in a downward spiral fueled by alcoholism, meanwhile created only one painting that year.

Krasner’s crescendo

After moving into the barn in 1957, Krasner’s scale and her palette changed. In early 1958, she exhibited 17 of her “Earth Green” paintings, large-scale bright abstractions seemingly inspired by nature, at Martha Jackson Gallery. Stuart Preston wrote in a review in the Times that “the sheer energy that Miss Krasner manages to generate on her picture surfaces.”

Her work went well beyond her canvases, however. Krasner worked tirelessly to secure Pollock’s legacy, and became a key source for critics and curators writing about him. She collaborated on the 1958 traveling retrospective of his work and placed his estate with Marlborough Gallery. When Marlborough’s director offered to represent her too, she declined, preferring to be asked on her own terms, not as his executor.

After her mother died in 1959, insomnia drove Krasner to paint at night under artificial light. The result was the “Umber” series, which the critic Cindy Nemser described as “slashing, splintered strokes of raw umber and white.” By the mid-1960s, bright colors had returned in works like Combat (year), which measures more than 5 by 13 feet, in riotous twists and folds of pink and orange color.

In 1965, Krasner took a step out of Pollock’s shadow when she opened “Lee Krasner: Paintings, Drawings, and Collages,” a retrospective of her work at the Whitechapel Gallery, her first solo exhibition outside the U.S. In 1974, the curator Bryan Robertson found a box of her 1930s drawings from Hofmann’s classes. She cut them into strips and shards, and rebuilt them as canvases named for verb tenses. “I am never free of the past,” she said. “I believe in continuity… the past is part of the present which becomes part of the future.”

At the end of her life, Krasner was looking to the future through her own past. The ailing artist donated her assets, made up mainly from her work and Pollock’s, to create a foundation that would support the work of young artists. The Pollock-Krasner Foundation has granted over $90 million to artists since it was established in 1985, and is the first successful foundation established by an artist, for artists.

from Artsy News https://ift.tt/FLo5yIB

Anina Major’s Giant Woven Ceramic Pots Rethink Bahamian Craft Traditions https://ift.tt/fPUCuBg

Water Tower, 2024
Anina Major
TERN Gallery

In Anina Major’s sculpture Water Tower (2024), strips of woven stoneware climb upward into a 45-inch-tall column, its ombré glaze deepening from pale aqua to rich turquoise. Melted sea glass glints across its irregular surface, while sand gathers around its base. The piece exemplifies the artist’s engagement with palm plaiting, a Bahamian weaving tradition that women have passed down for generations, often as a crucial source of their own income. Major expands the woven form, giving a familiar craft language a monumental presence.

In 2024, Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) acquired the sculpture, which will appear in “The Sacred Mangrove,” Major’s first solo presentation at a major international institution. The show, organized by curator Jennifer Inacio, will open at PAMM on October 1st.

At the museum, Major’s towering ceramic forms rise like sentinels throughout the waterfront gallery. Folkloric bottle trees create a protective presence. Shells and reused ceramic shards scatter across the ground, while a soundscape recorded on a Bahamian beach brings the acoustics of the artist’s home country into the installation.

“I was thinking about the similarities between Miami and the Bahamas,” Major told Artsy. “Not just how Miami has functioned within the historical context of Bahamian culture, but this idea of connecting entities, drawing a line between the two.” With her installation, the artist intends to “command more space and prominence,” enhancing the impact she can make as she works at a larger scale.

The PAMM exhibition arrives weeks after the opening of “SOON COME HOME,” Major’s second solo presentation with TERN Gallery in Nassau, the Bahamas, on view through October 26th. The shows honor an artist who’s nearly a decade into her unique, hybrid practice of translating plaiting into ceramics.

Major began experimenting with this process while studying ceramics at the Rhode Island School of Design, where she earned her MFA in 2017. She learned plaiting through her grandmother, Saphora Alvina Timothy Newbold, known as Mar, who passed the tradition on to other women in the Bahamas. Major has since studied how weaving patterns traveled across the islands and changed from place to place, something she describes as “repetition with adaptation.”

Major cuts rolled slabs of clay into thin strips, then weaves them while they are still pliable. In “The Sacred Mangrove,” she primarily uses plain weave (a simple over-under pattern that creates a checkerboard appearance), while sculptures including Rooted Sky (2026) and Forgotten Maiden No. 3 (2025) incorporate twill and reed-based patterns.

Major often works early in the morning, when ideas come faster than she can realize them. She describes her process as responsive: “There’s something about the clay that tells you when it’s ready to be done,” she said.

House in the Sky, 2026
Anina Major
TERN Gallery

Skyscraper, 2026
Anina Major
TERN Gallery

That extends to glazing. She said she favors a “rich, juicy” surface, with built-up layers. The kiln introduces its own variables, warping the clay or shifting a glaze in ways she cannot fully anticipate. The artist builds further richness through firing techniques and materials beyond clay. In House in the Sky (2026), on view in “SOON COME HOME,” sand and flocking meet a glossy glaze that shifts from mossy green to cream. The Kumbla (2026) pairs salt-fired stoneware with sea glass and sand, its deep blue and violet giving way to areas of pale stoneware.

At first, ceramics offered Major a way to preserve the knowledge she had inherited. Her early works drew from woven bags and dolls associated with Bahamian tourism. Major remembers looking at a souvenir small enough to fit in her palm and wondering what would happen if she deconstructed and magnified it. That impulse eventually produced works like Sandcastle (2025), a roughly 1,100-pound stoneware sculpture that grew out of experiments she began during a 2023 residency at the European Ceramic Work Centre.

The Kumbla, 2026
Anina Major
TERN Gallery

In 2025, Major settled in upstate New York, where she began renovating a former service station into a studio with room for her increasingly ambitious work. That year, Sandcastle was named a finalist for the Loewe Foundation Craft Prize. For Major, enlarging these forms is about how the traditions behind them are valued. “I’m not trying to replace souvenirs in the marketplace,” she said. “I’m actually trying to shift perception and value around that work.”

As her sculptures grew, Major also began thinking about how her individual pieces could inhabit space together. Seeing Betye Saar’s show “Serious Moonlight” at ICA Miami in 2021 brought Major to tears. “I felt seen,” she said. “I was moved by how she allows her symbolic vocabulary to expand spatially.”

The exhibition showed her how individual sculptures could become part of an immersive, room-sized installation. Major also looked to Japanese American ceramic artist Toshiko Takaezu, whose Homage to Devastation Forest (1982 – 1987), exhibited in the Noguchi Museum’s 2024 retrospective “Toshiko Takaezu: Worlds Within,” brings ceramic forms together as a sculptural landscape.

In “The Sacred Mangrove,” Major pushes her work in this direction, treating the exhibition space as an environment rather than a backdrop for individual sculptures. The mangrove became her framework, connecting Miami and the Bahamas through an ecosystem native to each place. Major describes it as “connective tissue” between them. PAMM’s glass-walled space overlooking Biscayne Bay further shaped the installation, which remains visible from outside after dark.

In Nassau, Major’s work is expanding through material. “SOON COME HOME” marks the first time her signature ceramic doll series (including Brassy, 2025), inspired by the straw dolls sold in Bahamian tourist markets, appears in glass.

For Major, home remains a source of inspiration and a place to return to as her practice continues to evolve. “There’s this weird thing that feels like this is just the beginning,” she said.

from Artsy News https://ift.tt/QmeS9Gw

Why Mary Cassatt’s “Little Girl in a Blue Armchair” Is So Radical https://ift.tt/OoPEn7d

“I love to paint children,” Mary Cassatt once said. “They are so natural and truthful. They have no arrière-pensée (ulterior motive).” The American-born Impressionist became one of the most influential artists of 19th-century France with her refreshingly tender portraits of mothers and children painted in loose, tactile brushstrokes. Among her most famous paintings is Little Girl in a Blue Armchair (1878), now in the collection of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. The painting shows a young, tired-looking girl slouching in a large floral blue armchair, a small Brussels griffon dog resting in a matching chair nearby. She wears a bored expression, her limbs sprawled over the chair in exhaustion or exasperation. This frank expression captures Cassatt’s modern, secular approach to portraying children.

This year marks the centennial of Cassatt’s death in 1926 at age 82. In response, many museums are honoring her life and work. The Musée d’Orsay is opening “Mary Cassatt: Being Independent” (“Mary Cassatt: L’Indépendante”) on October 6th, an exhibition of nearly 80 paintings, pastels, and prints. The exhibition will travel to Boston in 2027. Meanwhile, the Art Institute of Chicago is currently hosting “Mary Cassatt: After Impressionism,” which looks at her career in the years after the final Impressionist exhibition of 1886.

To mark the centennial of her life, we’ve taken a closer look at Cassatt’s celebrated Little Girl in a Blue Armchair.

Cassatt collaborated with Degas to create this iconic work

La Petite Danseuse de 14 Ans, 1881
Edgar Degas
Théo Landel

Cassatt was born in 1844 in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania, to a wealthy American family. Initially, her parents resisted her ambition to become a professional artist, but by 1860, a teenage Cassatt had enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. She moved to Europe in her twenties, eventually settling in Paris, where she would live for the rest of her life. Cassatt’s early works took inspiration from the Old Masters, whom she studied closely on painting trips through Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands. Over the years, however, her brushwork loosened and her palette brightened, and she began experimenting with the asymmetrical compositions and unconventional croppings influenced by the nascent Impressionist art movement and the dawn of photography.

By 1877, Cassatt’s works had come into open conflict with the French art establishment and the official Salon rejected both of her submissions that year. That rejection spurred Edgar Degas to invite her to exhibit with the Impressionists, an invitation she accepted. Degas’s friendship with Cassatt shaped Little Girl in a Blue Armchair. The girl in the painting was the daughter of friends of Degas’s, but his contribution extended far beyond that.

“It was the portrait of a friend of M. Degas,” Cassatt wrote to the Parisian dealer Ambroise Vollard in 1903. “I had done the child in the armchair and he found it good and advised me on the background and he even worked on it.” Recent cleaning and infrared imaging at the National Gallery of Art have since confirmed his work on the canvas. Scholars believe Degas most likely reworked the oddly shaped patch of floor between the chairs and the play of light through the windows, and his influence has been traced through the painting’s asymmetrical composition, its bold pattern, and its tight, cropped framing—a debt to the Japanese prints he introduced Cassatt to.

The little girl enacts a rebellion against adult society

The psychology of the painting, however, is quintessentially Cassatt’s. The girl becomes an agent of disorder and rebellion in the tidy adult world she inhabits. Her body sprawls diagonally across the blue-and-white floral chair, cutting against the orderly lines of the upholstery. Her expression sits somewhere between boredom and open irritation, her gaze drifting sideways toward the little dog curled up in the matching armchair beside her. Her look might be one of envy. The dog, unlike her, is unencumbered by expectations. The girl is painted, not in a nursery where she might be at ease, but a fashionable drawing room, the domain of adult women. The girl fidgets under the constraints. Feminist writer Germaine Greer called the painting Cassatt’s “first real stunner,” which she saw “as an icon of the awfulness of being at once controlled by adults and ignored by them.” The composition reinforces this sense of claustrophobia, with chairs pressing in from every side. The girl’s averted gaze here becomes an assertion of her own independence—an autonomy Cassatt celebrates.

The painting caused a controversy when it debuted

Afternoon Tea Party, 1991
Mary Cassatt
Canopy Gallery

In the Omnibus, 1991
Mary Cassatt
Canopy Gallery

Cassatt took an interest in the lives of women and children well beyond the canvas. She was a feminist from an early age and spent her career depicting the “New Woman” of the 19th century. These women went out in society, receiving guests, going to the theater, and conquering the modern world on their own terms. Cassatt was one of these women as well. “I am independent!” she once declared. “I can live alone and I love to work.” Cassatt, unlike many of her era, did not reserve that sense of self-possession for adults. Art historian Griselda Pollock has called Little Girl in a Blue Armchair one of the most “radical” images of childhood because of its lack of sentimentality.

But Cassatt’s frank depiction of childhood also put off viewers acclimated to more idealized imagery. She submitted the painting to the American pavilion at the 1878 Paris World’s Fair, and its jury rejected it. The decision infuriated Cassatt, particularly because Degas had worked on it. “I sent it to the American section of the big exposition, they refused it,” she wrote to Vollard. “I was furious, all the more so since he had worked on it. At that time this appeared new and the jury consisted of three people of which one was a pharmacist!”

Cassatt never knew what had turned the jury off of the work, but in the nearly 150 years since its creation, Little Girl in a Blue Armchair has earned a much warmer reception. The painting entered the collection of the National Gallery of Art in 1983, and has remained one of the most popular works at the museum since.

from Artsy News https://ift.tt/013iY4X

KAWS collaborates with Absolut Vodka on limited-edition bottle and painting. https://ift.tt/UROSIk1

KAWS has collaborated with Absolut Vodka on a new Artist Edition bottle. The design is inspired by a painting KAWS created for the project, with Absolut’s apothecary-style bottle featuring his signature “XX” motif and his signature Chum character on the front of the bottle and an image of the original painting on the back. “I am excited to join the lineage of great artists that have worked with Absolut Vodka over the decades,” KAWS said in a statement. “My goal is to allow art to meet people in unexpected places, and I hope my bottles will be enjoyed at gatherings around the world.”

KAWS, whose real name is Brian Donnelly, is known for his cartoon-like figures and artworks that sit at the intersection of street culture, fine art, and commercial goods. His works have been shown at institutions including the Brooklyn Museum, the Serpentine Gallery, and the Albertina Modern in Vienna. The Absolut partnership follows a string of brand collaborations for the artist, including a 2025 appointment as UNIQLO's first artist in residence and, this past June, a redesign of the packaging for Austria's Sacher-Torte to benefit a children’s charity.

The collaboration extends Absolut’s decades-long history of working with artists on its bottle. Andy Warhol painted “Absolut Warhol” in 1985, becoming the brand’s first artist-designed advertisement and prompting Warhol to recommend Keith Haring as a successor collaborator. Since the 1980s, more than 550 artists have contributed over 850 artworks inspired by the bottle, a collection now housed at Stockholm’s Spritmuseum.

“Our collaboration with KAWS reimagines the iconic Absolut bottle as a witty, unexpected work of art that feels at home on a collector’s shelf or at the center of a gathering with friends,” said Caroline Begley, Absolut’s U.S. vice president of marketing, in a statement. “By bringing KAWS’ remarkable vision to one of our most iconic assets, we’re creating a cultural statement piece that celebrates creativity, self-expression and the power of art to connect people.”

The Absolut KAWS Artist Edition bottle is available for pre-order at Absolut.com and will roll out to select U.S. retailers for a limited time while supplies last.

from Artsy News https://ift.tt/e5Df9nR

8 Contemporary Artists Inspired By René Magritte https://ift.tt/04qlk9f

The work of René Magritte needs little introduction. Since his death in 1967, he has become one of the defining painters of the 20th century, his work influencing generations of artists while also permeating the world of popular culture at almost every level. Referenced by everyone from The Beatles to The Simpsons, his visual vocabulary—bowler-hatted men, veiled faces, enormous apples, and levitating rocks—has left a profound mark on the worlds of advertising, graphic design, film, and photography.

No other artist fused the ordinary with the uncanny so seamlessly, or shifted so effortlessly between a sense of ambiguity, dread, and deadpan humor tinged with occasional vulgarity. His enigmatic paintings, such as The Treachery of Images (1929) or The Human Condition (1933), transform everyday objects, places, and figures into surreal, psychologically charged puzzles. Combining an almost hyperrealist style with jarring shifts of scale, trompe l’oeil illusions, and visual fragmentation, his works raise fundamental questions about the boundaries between reality and representation.

Now, a major new exhibition at Gagosian in London seeks to trace his enduring legacy on the art world. “This is Still Not a Pipe: The Afterlife of Magritte” (through December 12) brings together dozens of the artist’s key paintings and works on paper, setting them in dialogue with work by almost 50 contemporary artists.

As Jasper Sharp, the show’s co-curator, explained to Artsy, Magritte’s influence is by no means a recent phenomenon. “You have artists who were already making work in the ’50s thinking about Magritte, so his influence was already taking shape while he was still alive.” But the idea for the current show evolved when it became clear how great a shadow his work still casts in the 21st century. “Over the past few years, I've found myself having so many conversations about Magritte, unprompted by myself, with painters, filmmakers, and photographers.”

For Sharp, the explanation for this is twofold. “I think the reason that his works have such an enduring appeal is that they disclose themselves very quickly. But, like all really interesting art, they also work on a different level. They’re not completely understandable.” At the same time, his work is technically masterful, another source of inspiration for artists. As Sharp pointed ut, “Max Ernst famously described Magritte as a collagist in paint. Which is why he’s been so influential in the graphic design industry, the music industry, and the fashion industry. The way his works are constructed with different surfaces, different depths, gives so much potential to people who want to take his ideas and run with them.”

With this in mind, here are eight contemporary artists who share some affinity with Magritte’s themes and approach. The first four are featured in the Gagosian show, while the others are our own recommendations.

Lenz Geerk

B. 1988, Basel. Lives and works in Düsseldorf.

Tie III, 2024
Lenz Geerk
Roberts Projects

Man holding the night sky, 2024
Lenz Geerk
Roberts Projects

With their muted palettes and enigmatic subject matter, the paintings of Lenz Geerk exude a strong sense of Magrittean disquiet. Like the Belgian master, his work is steeped in art history, and the figures, objects, and places he depicts seem deeply rooted in the world of dreams. In Tie III (2024), a man in a suit stands stiffly against a bare wall, gazing at his tie unfurled on the floor at his feet, while in Man Holding the Night Sky (2024), a figure stands atop a rock, unfurling a black sheet emblazoned with stars. Cryptic and mysterious, Geerk’s work carefully balances what to reveal and what to withhold.

Dominique Fung

B. 1987, Ottawa, Canada. Lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Look Steadily and Intently, 2021
Dominique Fung
Woaw

Born in Canada, but with ancestry in Shanghai and Hong Kong, Dominique Fung’s work is inspired by Asian artefacts encountered in museums during her youth. Reimagined through a contemporary lens, she liberates these objects from their colonial or imperialist histories, imbuing them with a new and complex life of their own.

Blending older traditions of European painting—whether Baroque, Rococo, or Renaissance—with a Surrealist streak recalling Magritte and Dorothea Tanning, works such as Stray Hair (2020) and Look Steadily and Intently (2021) have a dreamlike quality that hints at unsettling narratives just beyond our grasp. And, much like Magritte, her works operate on multiple levels. Combining elements of humor and the uncanny, their sensuous and exquisitely painted surfaces conceal more serious undertones lurking beneath.

Joseph Yaeger

B. 1986, Helena, Montana. Lives and works in London.

Joseph Yaeger’s paintings, like Magritte’s, are full of secrets. Opaque, voyeuristic, and enigmatically titled, they are charged with a noirish atmosphere of mystery and uncertainty, occupying an uneasy space somewhere between dreams and cinema stills (on which many of them are based). The faces of his figures are often veiled or obscured—by smoke, shadows, bandages, or another person’s hand—resisting any straightforward emotional or psychological interpretation. In particular, they recall iconic works by Magritte, such as The Lovers (1928) or The Son of Man (1946).

Working in watercolor on gesso, his works combine technical mastery with subtle hints of decay, their scarred and cracked surfaces dusted with studio debris, evoking a pervasive sense of dread or unease that underpins so many aspects of modern existence. New works by Yaeger will go on view at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo later this fall.

Isabelle Albuquerque

B. 1981, Los Angeles. Lives and works in Los Angeles.

Call Me, 2024
Isabelle Albuquerque
Newchild Gallery

Just as Magritte would sometimes depict the human form in fragmented, transfigured, or impossible states (as in Le Viol (1934/1945), in which a naked female torso merges with a woman’s face), Isabelle Albuquerque deconstructs the physical form to create formally complex sculptures with strong echoes of the surreal. Exploring women’s experience of desire, sexuality, and violence, she combines traditional techniques with contemporary technologies like 3D scans and lifecasts of her own body to create headless, truncated, or otherwise transmuted figures.

Often merging biological forms with manufactured, mundane, or mythological elements, her sculptures serve as prime examples of the ‘surreal object’, inviting any number of readings and interpretations. In the Gagosian show, her work Summertime Sadness (2024), in which a shock of fire-red human hair sprouts from a bronze cast of a dismembered arm, has definite affinities with Magritte. As Sharp pointed out, it was “the first object she suggested when we approached her for the exhibition.”

Kate Meissner

B. 1995, Sacramento. Lives and works in Los Angeles.

Kate Meissner’s highly saturated, theatrically lit oil paintings present a mysterious shadow world in which familiar scenes are made alluringly strange. The female figures she depicts are elusive, possessed of an eerie, plastic quality somewhere between human and mannequin. Their faces are always obscured, their bodies contorted and partially veiled by fabric, and their limbs either prosthetic or missing altogether.

Often framed in tightly enclosed spaces such as doorways, nightclub booths, or peep-show stages, their compressed, claustrophobic settings evoke a palpable sense of unease while also hinting at unconscious or hidden desires. Blending the surrealism of Magritte with the body horror of filmmaker David Cronenberg, Meissner’s work fearlessly explores the complex emotional and psychological consequences for women of being on display, creating a potent cocktail of apprehension, dread, and curiosity.

Natalia Gonzalez Martin

B. 1995, Madrid. Lives and works in London.

Cascara II , 2024
Natalia Gonzalez Martin
Richard Saltoun

Painted on wood panels using egg tempera and rabbit skin glue, the exquisitely detailed paintings of Natalia Gonzalez Martin hark back to medieval icons, Renaissance altarpieces, and illuminated manuscripts. However, the atmosphere she creates within these confined spaces remains compellingly odd, infused with a healthy dose of Magrittean Surrealism, ambiguity, and eroticism.

Filtered through the lens of her Catholic upbringing, Gonzalez Martin renders everyday objects strange, poetic, or mystical. She often isolates body parts or objects, placing them in flat, shadowless voids, disrupting the viewer’s sense of reality. And, while her paintings sometimes hint at religious ritual and symbolism, their meaning is much more opaque, evoking both past and present, divine and secular, suggesting that there are other ways to exist within the world.

Zhou Song

B. 1982, Jiangxi, China. Lives and works in Beijing.

Wisdom Tree I, 2025
Zhou Song
Maddox Gallery

Holy Light, 2024
Zhou Song
Volery Gallery

A mind-bending mixture of hyperrealism and surreal flights of fancy, Zhou Song’s remarkable oil paintings explore both the anxieties and the sense of possibility engendered by an age of constant technological acceleration. In his work, natural and artificial elements are distorted and reconfigured in uncanny new forms as the world we know unravels before our eyes. In Wisdom Tree I (2025), for instance, pencils coil through trees like branches, while in other works, candles twist together like snakes, and a rabbit balances a tower of hats on its back.

His “New Nature” series (2020–26) is like Magritte reimagined for the post-human age, and borrows freely from the Belgian artist’s iconic repertoire of motifs. Men in suits, apples, bowler hats, and blue skies full of clouds all feature prominently. Indeed, Homeland (2020) is a direct homage to Magritte’s famous painting The Great War (1964).

Kristin Sanders

B. 1989, California. Lives and works in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Shell/Tool, 2023
Kristen Sanders
Asya Geisberg Gallery

Hand and Flint, 2023
Kristen Sanders
Moosey

Magritte’s work often explored the gulf between the physical body and the consciousness within it, and the vividly colored paintings of Kristin Sanders operate in a similar psychological space, reframing it for an era in which artificial intelligence is quickly becoming a reality. The world she conjures is one of mystery and uncertainty—a kind of fever dream in which past and future, human and mechanical, have merged, and the viewer is never sure exactly what they are seeing.

A sense of Magrittean surrealism pervades her work. In Stone/Shift (2023), the face of a humanoid robot is obscured by a piece of sheer silk, while in Body Thing (2023) a hand holds a fragment of a human face, its single eye staring helplessly out at the viewer. And A Sense of Reality (2023), in which a piece of flint hovers in mid air against a cloudy sky, makes a direct reference to Magritte’s The Castle of the Pyrenees (1959).

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

Louis Vuitton launches Keith Haring handbag collection. https://ift.tt/QPpj2qN

Louis Vuitton has unveiled the eighth chapter of its Artycapucines collection, dedicating 13 new bag designs to the work of Keith Haring. Developed in collaboration with the Keith Haring Foundation, the collection features the late artist’s vibrant visual language—including his signature “Running Heart,” “Radiant Baby,” dancing figures, and exuberant graphic compositions. These motifs are translated into designs using different craft techniques, from traditional leather marquetry to cutting-edge laser printing.

Haring, who was born in Pennsylvania in 1958 and died in 1990, became one of the defining voices of New York’s downtown art scene in the 1980s, creating graphic works that moved fluidly between street art, gallery walls, and broader culture. His work, characterized by bold outlines, rhythmic figures, and a sense of collective joy, is some of the most recognizable in post-war American art. Beyond the art world, Haring’s imagery has retained a broad cultural presence. His figures have appeared on everything from UNIQLO T-shirts to stadium murals, and his work continues to be cited by a generation of artists, designers, and musicians.

The new designs continue the collaboration between the Keith Haring Foundation and the French fashion house. Earlier this year, Louis Vuitton presented clothing printed with Haring’s designs at its womenswear presentation at New York’s Frick Collection.

Highlights of the new 13-piece collection include the Capucines Nano Running Heart, a minaudière, or vanity case, crafted in silver-tone metal and set with more than 12,000 hand-placed rhinestones; and the Capucines MM Genesis, inspired by a Louis Vuitton suitcase hand-customised by Haring in 1984. The Capucines East-West Mini Maze, is brought to life through intricate bead embroidery, and the Capucines BB Figures feature Haring’s dancing figures on pristine white Taurillon leather, his characteristic black outline integrated into the bag’s architecture.

Louis Vuitton’s Artycapucines Collection, which launched in 2019, now comprises more than 50 designs by artists including Takashi Murakami, Tschabalala Self, Urs Fischer, and Park Seo-Bo. All 13 pieces from the Haring edition will be released as limited editions in Louis Vuitton stores worldwide from January 1, 2027.

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