Massive Buddha sculpture by Tuan Andrew Nguyen opens on New York’s High Line Plinth. https://ift.tt/J2Xf0qF

Manhattan’s High Line has opened its newest commission by Vietnamese sculptor and visual artist Tuan Andrew Nyugen. The work, a 27-foot-tall sandstone Buddha sculpture entitled The Light That Shines Through the Universe (2026), is now on view at the above-ground park’s intersection of 10th Avenue and 30th Street. It will be installed there for the next year and a half.

Nguyen, who was honored with a MacArthur Fellowship in 2025, recently closed a major presentation at the Art Institute of Chicago. The artist’s practice explores lost or forgotten histories and memories that have been erased by global conflict and violence. His sculptures and films draw upon reparation, and give voices to stories of those who have been overlooked. His monumental sculpture at the High Line, The Light That Shines Through the Universe (2026), takes the form of a Bamiyan Buddha replicating two massive statues carved from cliffs in Afghanistan over a millennium ago. Both were destroyed by the Taliban in 2001. Nguyen uses melted-down artillery shells, which he reshaped into the Buddha’s hands, leaving a gap between the sandstone figure and its glowing appendages to signify that hope remains despite some irreparable damage.

“Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s The Light That Shines Through the Universe is a timely monument for our public space,” said Cecilia Alemani, director & chief curator of High Line Art in a press statement. “It stands today as a powerful and poetic counterpoint to extremism and iconoclasm we continue to witness globally. By resurrecting the memory of the lost Bamiyan Buddhas, The Light That Shines Through the Universe reminds us that cultural treasures—and shared history—can transcend physical destruction.”

Previous High Line Plinth commissions include Iván Argote’s monumental pigeon sculpture, Pamela Rosenkranz’s pink-and-red Old Tree, and Sam Durant’s fiberglass drone. Other works currently on view this season include new works by Katherine Bernhardt, Patricia Ayres, and Derek Fordjour.

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Meet the Psychologist Who Reads People Through the Art They Live With https://ift.tt/ZmINhsg

When Dr. Dimitrios Tsivrikos walks into someone’s home for the first time, he looks at the walls.

“You know how people say that when you start dating someone, you go to their home and look at their bookshelf?” he told Artsy. “I do the same with art, and it doesn’t need to be expensive. It could be a poster. What matters is how someone enriches their environment visually and emotionally.”

Art and psychology are part of the same inquiry for Tsivrikos, an academic psychologist at University College London (UCL), founder and director of London-based gallery and advisory The TAGLI, and an avid art collector. Both fields for him ask the same question: what moves us, and why?

“I have always been fascinated by the relationship between the visual and the emotional, and how those experiences triangulate with who we are, how the information around us influences us, and how those stimuli make us feel,” he explained.

Raised in Thessaloniki, Greece, he was drawn early to the visual world and, eventually, to the question of what aesthetic experience does to us. “I was interested in whether those [artistic] interactions are beneficial to us or simply random,” he said. “Whether something is just aesthetically pleasing, or whether it actually offers emotional enrichment.”

For Tsivrikos, art is more than something to admire or acquire; it is a way of understanding identity, emotion, and the environments people build around themselves. Living with art, for him, can deepen self-knowledge, shape feelings, and widen access to culture.

How psychology led Tsivrikos to art collecting and curation

Tsivrikos came to London to study, eventually earning his PhD and building a career at UCL. Many of his friends were at art school, and he spent his spare time in studios, at openings, and in galleries across the city. “I was not talented enough to be part of that ecosystem [as an artist], but I was always around it,” he recalled.

Collecting became his way of staying close to the creativity he admired. Over time, that exposure became expertise, and expertise became a wider mission: to support artists and widen access to art.

In his home, works by artists across generations commingle. Works by Charlotte Colbert, Pablo Picasso, and Ju Young Kim bring together inquiries into the fractured self and the unconscious. This conversation shifts entirely, though, when presented near paintings by Tristan Pigott, David Hockney, and Tai-Shan Schierenberg, who together make the collection’s more figurative works. Works by Holly Hendry introduce a biological undercurrent wherever they are placed, whilst Vietnam-born artist KV Duong’s latex paintings, meanwhile, introduce a very different kind of surface tension through his exploration of queer identity politics.

Tsivrikos regularly rotates the work on view. “Works speak to each other differently depending on what they are paired with, just like we are slightly different people with different groups of friends. The environment shifts the conversation,” he said.

His curatorial sensibility is informed partly by his master’s degree in curation, but also by a psychologist’s understanding of how environment shapes mood, behavior, and identity. In many respects, curation is a form of applied psychology.

Why living with art can change how we feel

That perspective informs how Tsivrikos thinks about art as a way of understanding ourselves and others. His advice for anyone curious about their own relationship with art—or someone else’s—is straightforward. “Go on a date in a museum,” he advised. “Ask each other about artwork. The way someone describes an artwork, the lenses they use, and the emotions they express. It is such a beautiful entry point into who they are, how they perceive the world, what they dream about.”

That perspective comes through most clearly when he speaks about the works he lives with. Asked which piece resonates most, he points to a small painting titled Resurrection by the Scottish artist Ken Currie. Roughly the size of his torso, it shows two blue, disembodied gloves gravitating downwards, entering into the pictorial field. The gloves could belong to a surgeon or a fisherman; he likes the ambiguity. “It is almost like deus ex machina,” he said. “Two arms coming through to save someone.”

He added: “For me, as a psychologist, human relationships often function like that—someone stepping in to help, to resolve a situation.” The work resonates not just visually but psychologically. There is no gender, no face, no context in the Currie painting. “These two hands are agents of action, of change,” he said.

Tsivrikos compares the painting to Lucio Fontana’s notion of tagli—cuts that open new dimensions, often on canvas. His gallery takes its name from that gesture, and is built around a similar idea: that art should cut through, create depth, and shift perspective.

What Tsivrikos looks for as a collector and advisor

Tsivrikos is less interested in the value of art than in the response it elicits. “I’ve always felt that art is an asset,” he said, “but primarily a cultural and emotional asset rather than a financial one.”

That conviction shapes how he collects. First, the work must resonate. He is drawn to materiality and to Arte Povera, for instance, with its integration of raw surfaces and political charge. Second, he wants to know the artist. “I do not believe artists are responsible for defining the narrative of their own work,” he said. “But I enjoy hearing their perspective. They have done the hard job of creating something. The work then lives in the hands of the public, institutions, and collectors. We each bring our own meaning.”

Third, the work must make him feel something. “That feeling does not have to be positive,” he told Artsy. “It can be anger, discomfort, curiosity, joy. I am not looking for a pseudo-euphoria of constant happiness. I am looking for emotional engagement…There needs to be some emotional friction, something that presses a button.”

His recent acquisitions reflect this range of emotional registers, including sculpture by German artist Alexandra Bircken, valued for “the lightness and symbolism in her sculpture,” which sits alongside a vibrantly colored painting by Tommy Harrison from a recent show at GRIMM Gallery. “His work is full of color and vibrancy. The whole show, curatorially, moved me.”

Why Tsivrikos believes art belongs in everyday life

For all his enthusiasm, Tsivrikos is realistic about the barriers to art. “It would be a lie to claim the art world is accessible. It is not, but we’re improving,” he said. “The idea that art should only live in institutions or museums is extremely elitist. Art grows through interactions, conversations, and the everyday presence of people encountering it.”

For Tsivrikos, the choices we make about what surrounds us shape who we become. Art is a form of self-knowledge: “I see collecting art as assembling a kind of puzzle of who we are at particular moments, as reflected by the works we bring into our lives,” he said. “Art helps us live better.”

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Nairy Baghramian and Ibrahim Mahama to create major new commissions for Art Basel 2026. https://ift.tt/D0CtBlm

Art Basel has revealed further details about site specific sculptures by Nairy Baghramian and Ibrahim Mahama that will appear at the flagship fair in Switzerland this June. The artists are part of Art Basel’s inaugural class of Gold Awardees, and Art Basel announced the commissions this past February.

On the Messeplatz, Iranian-born, German sculptor Nairy Baghramian will present Modèle vivant (S’empilant) (2026), an elaborate installation conceived for the square’s fountain. The work is composed of four lavender, large-scale biomorphic forms that perch on geometric steel supports built around the fountain’s waterfalls. A bench-like pedestal to the side is covered in tiles and surrounded by photographic imprints of flies.

Elsewhere on the Münsterplatz, Ghanaian installation artist Ibrahim Mahama will unveil an installation entitled The God of Small Things (2026). The piece is composed of multiple sculptural elements that are suspended to create a large-scale immersive environment. It takes its title from the Arundhati Roy novel of the same name, and uses rubber castoffs from a factory that was established in Ghana following the country’s independence.

The fair also announced details about its various sectors. Unlimited, Art Basel’s platform for large-scale projects, will be curated for the first time by Ruba Katrib, MoMA PS1 chief curator and director of curatorial affairs. It will bring together 59 projects by 66 galleries, showcasing artists whose practices urgently engage with the current political, social, and ecological climate. Highlights include Isa Genzken’s Untitled (2018), presented by Galerie Buchholz, Hauser & Wirth, and David Zwirner; Tracey Emin’s Knowing my Enemy (2002), presented by White Cube; and Oskar Schlemmer’s Homo, Composition in Metal (1930–31), presented by Leandro Navarro and Thaddaeus Ropac.

In Parcours, curated by Stefanie Hessler, 22 projects presented by 31 galleries will take place in public spaces and historic locations around Basel, including outdoor venues, empty apartments, and shops. “Public space—from the commons to architectures of civic life—is central to conversations around how we live together,” said Hessler in a press statement. “This year’s presentation explores the promise and complexity of ‘conviviality’ through artistic interventions that extend into the fabric of the city of Basel. Bringing together a majority of new and recent works with key historic positions, the sector addresses ecology and labor, artistic community and intergenerational transmission, mythologies and systems of valuation underpinning economic and political formations through a multifaceted urban choreography.” Highlights include new posters by Sarah Crowner distributed across the tram and presented by Galerie Max Hetzler and Galerie Nordenhake in collaboration with Luhring Augustine, and Haegue Yang’s installations from her ongoing Intermediates series, which will be draped across the Mittlere Brücke as well as equipment from an artisanal distillery, and presented by Kukje Gallery and neugerriemschnieder.

Meanwhile, new information surrounding the main sector was announced, as was information for Kabinett, Features, Premiere, Statements, and Edition.

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8 Must-See Shows during Gallery Weekend Berlin 2026 https://ift.tt/9k5fx2E

Malte, 2026
Sophie von Hellermann
Wentrup

“Painting is dead, long live painting!” could be the motto of the 2026 Gallery Weekend Berlin. The event was founded in 2005 by a cooperative of local gallerists as an alternative to traditional art fairs that typically favor painting, yet the strong presence of the medium this year confirms its lasting power.

Following on its founders’ original idea to draw collectors to Berlin in a single coordinated art smorgasbord, the weekend kicks off with over 50 galleries spread across the city. In parallel, there are other major draws like the American digital artist Beeple (Mike Winkelman) presenting robotic dogs with human heads (from Andy Warhol to tech tycoon Elon Musk) in “Beeple. Regular Animals,” at Neue Nationalgalerie. Elsewhere, Gropius Bau has a major show by the renowned performance artist Marina Abramović, “Balkan Erotic Epic,” a multiscreen video installation exploring mythic rituals and sexual energies.

Another big moment for Berlin’s art scene is the reopening of the Boros Collection’s vast bunker of contemporary art from the ’90s to the present, starting May 3rd. Plus, the luxury department store KaDeWe dresses its windows with a 24/7 pop-up show of multimedia and kinetic art by eleven artists, including Talking Heads musician and artist David Byrne, conceptual artist Hanne Darboven (1941–2009), and New York–based multimedia and performance artist Kayode Ojo.

Here are 8 of the most anticipated gallery shows during Gallery Weekend Berlin.

Tauba Auerbach

“Easy Assembly”

Esther Schipper

May 1–June 20

American artist Tauba Auerbach, who works in diverse media spanning painting, weaving, and sculpture, investigates sight and the limits of perception in their piercingly bright paintings. For instance, the New York–based artist’s first exhibition at Esther Schipper in 2013, “Tetrachromat,” centered on works inspired by colors outside the standard RGB spectrum. These colors are only seen by people—usually women—possessing four (rather than the normal three) retinal cones: a condition known as tetrachromacy.

Guided by a similar curiosity around the science of perception, Auerbach presents a series of Pointillist acrylic paintings in their second show with the gallery. These depict foam textures and investigate the role that chance plays in how foam particles interact with surfaces as they merge, collide, and break apart.

Vivien Zhang

“Field Conditions”

Galerie Max Hetzler (Goethestr.)

Apr. 30–June 27

Chance also informs the highly textured, rhythmic acrylic-and-oil paintings by rising artist Vivien Zhang, who has her debut solo show at Galerie Max Hetzler. Inspired by diverse biological sources, from flower patterns and nearly extinct plants to butterflies, the London-based artist ties perception to geopolitical considerations.

For instance, the geometric background in the painting slip between (Ithomia) (2026) refers to the 1909 “Butterfly” World Map. This projection was designed to translate the globe into two dimensions in a more proportionate way to viewers, which results in less bias in the size (and significance) of Western nations.

Robert Elfgen

“utopisch”

Sprüth Magers

May 2–Aug. 1

Acclaimed artist Robert Elfgen studied at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in the early 2000s under the renowned conceptual artist Rosemarie Trockel. Since then, he’s become known for his Romantic-inspired paintings which draw from the natural world and have been shown at major galleries such as Marian Boesky and reside in collections like the Rubells’. His presentation at Sprüth Magers consists of sculptural and mixed-media works, including floor pieces and glass panes. His photocollages, sprayed with metallic paint and with added concrete and brass, are partially sanded down, giving them a grainy texture. The industrial landscapes they depict—liminal spaces with barren countryside and chimneys and rigs—feel equally scuffed and “collaged.” Elfgen paints a warm yellow-and-orange haze into these scenes, bathing the manmade deserts in ethereal light, hauntingly still and devoid of activity. Here and there, a lonely dachshund bears shadowy witness to industrial waste.

A utopia of progress? Doubtful: Elfgen’s wistfully post-Romantic vision suggests that the show’s title is rather darkly ironic. Perhaps there’s a hint of latent longing here, as Germany’s bustling towns turn to ghosts following the decline of industry.

Rodney McMillian

“In Other Realms”

Capitain Petzel

Apr. 29–June 13.

Los Angeles–based artist Rodney McMillian is known for incorporating everyday objects, such as blankets, chairs, and architectural debris, into his abstract paintings and sculptures with rugged textures that allude to the bodily experience of racial and social inequality in America.

In his inaugural solo show at Capitain Petzel, Rodney McMillian deploys acrylic paint and mixed media in a Postminimalist fashion to blur the line between abstraction and representation. The show follows his 2024 exhibition, “The Land: Not Without a Politic,” at the Marta Herford Museum in Herford, Germany (which was his first in the country).

Accordingly, the show at Capitain Petzel includes heavily layered acrylic-and-latex paintings from the “Black Painting” series, as well as misshapen sculptures, such as Untitled (Knoll’s Chair) (2023–26), a combined sculpture made of a chair, fabric, wire, and acrylic. Also included is a film work, based on a text by early American civil rights leader Ida B. Wells-Barnett, who fought to end lynchings of Black Americans.

Bernd Koberling

“Rooted in Time, Rooted in the Sky, Paintings 1992-2026”

Buchmann Galerie

May 1–June 20

Duft der Steine, 2019
Bernd Koberling
Buchmann Galerie

Momentane Vision 11, 2025
Bernd Koberling
Buchmann Galerie

At 88, Bernd Koberling is one of the most renowned living post-war German painters. And the works from his mid-to-late career, shown at Buchmann Galerie, evidence his continued reinvention. He was part of the 1980s Cologne-based Neo-Expressionist art movement Junge Wilde, the members of which opposed the cool rationalism of minimalist art with a messier, gestural approach. At Buchmann Galerie, this style is highlighted in paintings like the oil Erdstelle (1992), notable for its darkly brooding palette and agitated strokes.

By contrast, his more recent works presented in the show—for example, the oil-on-wood work Echo (2024), with rhythmic flickers of bright colors (mostly parakeet green)—are much airier. Elsewhere, in the “Aquarelle” series, Momentane Vision (2025) conveys a keen interest in color, inspired by the Arctic region—he’s frequently visited Iceland, Scotland, and Lapland—particularly its rugged landscapes and diaphanous light.

“Hyperacuity”

Bode

Apr. 30–June 21.

From Abundance, He Took Abundance, 2026
Alteronce Gumby
Bode

Sitting on the moving box, 2025
Teresa Murta
Bode

Though diverse in their approaches and supports, the artists in “Hyperacuity,” a group show at Bode Gallery, all experiment with the means of “polluting” painting, expanding its pictorial possibilities.

For instance, the Bronx, New York–based abstract painter Alteronce Gumby—a 2016 graduate of the Yale School of Art—is fascinated equally by chromatic painting and astrophysics. He combines glass, blue quartz, and acrylic in his densely patterned works. Another Yale MFA graduate, Gabriel Mills, who was 2021’s resident artist at MASS MoCA, shows his panels oscillating between heavy impasto and smudgy blurs. Meanwhile the young Portuguese Berlin-based artist Teresa Murta creates paintings with nervously blobby lines that produce a visual confusion.

Together, the show suggests that “hyperacuity” is a kind of oversaturation.

Sophie von Hellerman

“Letters to a young painter”

Wentrup

May 1–June 12

Paula Modersohn Becker malt Rilke in Paris, 2026
Sophie von Hellermann
Wentrup

The German mid-career painter Sophie von Hellermann revives the country’s legacies of Romantic and Expressionist art in her fluid acrylic works. In her works, which are shown by galleries such as Pilar Corrias and Greene Naftali, she often turns to dream and fantasy, with supple and agile lines, pulsing with energy. Recently, she has also portrayed art history, as in her vibrant 2024 mural for the Brücke Museum, Berlin, depicting Jewish art collectors tied to the museum’s history who were persecuted by the Nazis.

Her fourth solo show at Wentrup takes its title from poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s 1929 book, Letters to a Young Poet. Here the England-based artist’s febrile landscapes in pure pigment convey Romanticism’s fascination with nature. Other works, for example, Paula Modersohn Becker paints Rilke in Paris (2026) (referring to the pioneering German Expressionist woman painter and Rilke’s close friend) reimagine scenes from the poet’s life.

James Turrell

“sensing fields”

Max Goelitz

May 1–July 4.

Consumed by the desire to capture light’s full effects on the mind since the 1960s, James Turrell has become famous for large site-specific installations in far-flung locations. For decades, he’s been involved with constructing an enormous sky observatory at the Roden Crater, in the Arizona desert, for example.

As part of his highly anticipated show, “sensing fields,” at Max Goelitz, the American artist brings to Berlin for the first time a work from his acclaimed “Glass” series (2001–present), Small Elliptical Glass First Cause (2024), in which visitors can see a glass plane, embedded in a wall, radiating a purple computer-programmed light.

“My work is not so much about my seeing as about your seeing.... You are looking at you looking,” he once said in an interview. His works, which at Max Goelitz also include aquatint etchings (Turrell thinks of them as afterimages of light’s glow) and a skyscape sculpture, highlight the subjectivity of vision as a space of self-awareness and contemplation, bypassing conscious thought.

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$33.5 million set of mirrors by Claude Lalanne sets a new record for a work of design https://ift.tt/tDpbCOY

A set of bronze mirrors by French sculptor Claude Lalanne sold for $33.5 million with fees at Sotheby’s in New York yesterday, smashing multiple auction records in the process. The sale of Lalanne’s Ensemble of Fifteen Mirrors from 1974 is now the most expensive work by the artist sold at auction, and also marks the highest price ever achieved at auction for a work of design. It sold for more than double its high estimate of $15 million in a 10-minute bidding war between five collectors.

The ensemble of mirrors surpasses the previous record for Les Lalanne, which was set in December 2025 when Hippopotame Bar, pièce unique by Claude’s husband, François-Xavier Lalanne, sold for $31.4 million. While the two artists worked together in their distinct styles and rarely collaborated on a piece, they jointly presented their work under the moniker of Les Lalanne.

The set of leafy mirrors had been commissioned in 1974 by Yves Saint Laurent for his residence in Paris that he shared with his then-partner, the industrialist Pierre Bergé. The mirrors, 15 in total, were made by Lalanne by hand in gilt bronze, galvanized copper, and mirrored glass, with leaves modeled after those found in the artist’s garden. They were the first mirror works Lalanne ever created, which would become a cornerstone of her practice. At Sotheby’s, they were offered from the collection of Jean and Terry de Gunzberg, who had acquired them in 2009 at the legendary three-day sale organized by Bergé at the Grand Palais in Paris of the masterful collection he had amassed with Saint Laurent. The works have been exhibited at the Centre National d’Art Contemporain in 1975, as well as in the 2010 retrospective at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris.

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Tate announces 2026 Turner Prize shortlist. https://ift.tt/9oJ8yuG

Artists Simeon Barclay, Kira Freije, Marguerite Humeau, and Tanoa Sasraku have been shortlisted for the 2026 Turner Prize. Each artist will receive £10,000 ($13,500), and an exhibition of their work will take place at Teesside University’s Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (MIMA) in North England, from September 26 through March 29th, 2027. An awards ceremony on December 10th, also at MIMA, will announce the winner, who will be awarded £25,000 ($33,760).

Presented by Tate Britain, the Turner Prize is the United Kingdom’s most prestigious recognition of contemporary visual art. Named for the painter J.M.W. Turner and established in 1984, the prize is awarded annually to a British artist to honor an exceptional exhibition or presentation of their work. Last year, it was awarded to Nnena Kalu, and previous winners have included Anish Kapoor, Steve McQueen, and Lubaina Himid.

The 2026 Turner Prize nominees

Multidisciplinary artist Simeon Barclay works across performance, installation, video, sound, writing, and sculpture, using a mix of industrial fabrication techniques and found materials and images (he worked in the manufacturing industry before turning to art making). He is nominated for The Ruin, the artist’s first live performance, which took place at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London and The Hepworth Wakefield in 2025.

The work interrogates the layers of identity surrounding class, masculinity, and inheritance that make up the modern British experience. It employs spoken word, early modern music, and manufacturing sounds, with performers in costumes evoking the industrial landscape of Northern England in the 1980s and 1990s.

Sculptor Kira Freije is known for her abstract aluminium corporeal forms that incorporate faces cast of loved ones, fabric, lighting, handblown glass, and found materials. The sculptures, which include casts of Freije’s hands and feet, draw on her experience working with blacksmiths following her graduation from the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at the University of Oxford in 2011.

She is nominated for her exhibition, “Unspeak the Chorus” at the Hepworth Wakefield in West Yorkshire, which is currently on view through May 6th. It marks her first major solo presentation in the U.K.

Installation artist Marguerite Humeau explores worlds, both imagined and research-based, from prehistoric times through to the speculative future. She makes visually rich, intricate installations that fuse poetry, sound, video, and drawing to interrogate the transition between life and death, origin and ending; posing questions about existence along the way.

She is nominated for “Torches,” an exhibition presented at Denmark’s ARKEN Museum of Contemporary Art and Finland’s Helsinki Art Museum in 2025. In the show, a multisensory landscape represents a partly-imagined ecosystem in transition, using a mix of organic and found materials like beeswax, wasp venom, yeast, bronze, and alabaster.

Tanoa Sasraku, whose practice spans drawing, filmmaking, and sculpture, is known for her work that uses printmaking, sewing, and garment construction to consider how power structures and landscapes are shaped over time.

She is nominated for her solo show “Morale Patch,” which opened last year at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London, which comments on the power struggles and conflicts surrounding diminishing natural resources. Crude oil plays a starring role, both as subject and material, alongside found objects tied to the oil industry presented as relics of an empire.

“It is a privilege to announce this outstanding shortlist,” said Alex Farquaharson, director of the Tate Britain and the chair of the prize’s jury, in a press statement. “The Turner Prize continues to offer the public a compelling reflection of the breadth and vitality of contemporary British art. This year’s selection presents a rich and diverse range of work, spanning installation and performance, and with a strong emphasis on sculptural practice. Each artist invites us into carefully constructed scenarios, both real and imagined, that offer distinct perspectives through which to explore the world around us, and to reflect on our place within it.”

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5 Standout Artists at MoMA PS1’s “Greater New York” https://ift.tt/0metzb9

What is the state of New York’s art scene today? It’s a question that has reverberated across the city over the last few weeks, as Josh Kline’s essay “New York Real Estate and the Ruin of American Art” for October has inspired conversations about how hard it is to make ambitious, exciting new work here.

MoMA PS1’s quinquennial “Greater New York” showcases what’s still possible, in spite of various nightmarish economic and political circumstances. The sixth edition of the event, which remains on view through August 17th and celebrates the institution’s 50th anniversary, proposes specific throughlines. “Attuned to New York City as a nexus of flows and exchanges—of goods, labor, and capital—many of the artists trace how these factors converge to shape everyday experiences,” the press materials state. The expansive curatorial team chose to highlight both intimate, tactile works and larger spectacles. A performance program runs concurrently with the show.

Below are five standout artists from the show, whose practices speak to this multiplicity of artmaking in New York today. They use materials both radical and traditional, from teeth and dead coral to paint and mass media images that worm their way into the collective consciousness. For all New York’s pleasures and problems, these artists prove that vital energy still courses through the city, ready to be metabolized out into memorable new work.

Chang Yuchen

B. 1989, Shanxi Province, China.

For seven years, Chang Yuchen has collected coral fragments and transformed their shapes into a vast semiotic system. The resulting project—Coral Dictionary (2019–present)—exemplifies the single-minded obsession that’s typical of her art practice.

Across delicate graphite drawings, charts, and accordion booklets shown both on walls and in vitrines, the artist elaborates on her expansive lexicon and “translates” each form into English, Mandarin, and Malay. The project bridges gaps between languages, between word and image, and between organic forms and the gallery space.

Chang’s work makes use of the Kamus Sari, “a trilingual dictionary whose example sentences still reflect the political dimensions of life in 1970s Malaysia” according to the press materials. She pairs its sentences, such as “That ship disappeared from sight,” “That body isn’t alive,” and “Take good care till total recovery, in order to prevent relapse,” with coral forms that become signs for each individual word and punctuation mark. The dried corals serve as ghosts of marine life past, no longer living, but speaking through the artist.

Alongside her art practice, Chang teaches in the Dance MFA program at Bennington College. During a 2024 artist fellowship with the New York Public Library, she compiled “Body Dictionary,” an experimental curriculum which, according to the library, linked the “somatic and semantic.”

Akira Ikezoe

B. 1979, Kochi, Japan.

Akira Ikezoe’s paintings are impressive catalogues of visual information. Chart of Darkness (2025), for example, has more in common with an Excel spreadsheet than with a gestural abstract work. The painting features a broad table of icons against a bright yellow background. Each row features objects of similar shapes: A row of pairs, for example, presents the twins from The Shining, butterfly wings, ears, and mittens. Each column presents a category, like food: in one you’ll find an ice cream cone, pizza slice, and churro (a pair of plated sushi rolls is at the intersection of both). Warmth and humor infuse the composition, which evokes the aesthetics of emojis.

In a second painting, Frog Stories Around Windmill (2025), Ikezoe diagrams a network of frogs that live and labor across a flat visual field, like a group of Sims across different frames. Ikezoe’s dual contributions to the exhibition suggest a keen interest in digital aesthetics and the power of visual symbology to communicate across language barriers.

Ikezoe’s work is also included in the 2026 Whitney Biennial and was featured in the 2025 Sharjah Biennial.

Nickola Pottinger

B. 1986, Kingston, Jamaica.

Nickola Pottinger creates totems from a blend of family relics—quite literally. She grinds printed matter, including old book reports and shredded documents, with her mother’s handheld cake mixer, then sculpts the pulp into human and animal forms. The artist embeds these figures with pigment, toys, family heirlooms, and bone. She began collecting teeth as a teenager on visits to her mother’s dental lab, and anonymous ivories feature in the artist’s sculpture Genkle Jesus meek and mild II (2026). The work also counts frankincense, mushroom spores, hair, heliconia, and doily cloth among its materials. The pulpy piece stands on two fungus-like feet, with mushroom horns extending from its head and a feathery brown tail extending behind. The creature has a mouth full of real teeth and two large hands, one extended to the viewer. It looks born from a cauldron, an apt metaphor, perhaps, for an artist’s studio.

The catalogue states that Pottinger’s interests include nurturing and devotion, themes that have emerged since she became a mother and began to contend with the recent wreckage of Hurricane Melissa on the coast of Jamaica, her home country. These sculptures of mythic new beings offer hope and tenderness in the face of all we can’t control.

Julia Wachtel

B. 1956, New York, NY

Julia Wachtel presents what’s perhaps the funniest work in “Greater New York”: the five-panel painting McSwift (2024). A photograph of Taylor Swift on her Eras tour appears to stutter across the first two panels. We see the pop star from behind, her shimmering, fringed dress rippling, her booted feet firmly planted, one hand pointing to the sky in a choreographed gesture while the other, ostensibly, holds the mic. The next panel features a waving Ronald McDonald, and the next two return to Swift’s stage, this half with no pop star to animate it. Ronald becomes a commercial break, a literal clown interrupting a mass entertainment. The quiet of the empty stage, and the darkness in front of it, seem like a reprieve, until you remember that there’s a vast audience out there, hungry and worshipful. The work raises some philosophical questions: Is a painting a stage? Is the painter more similar to a clown or a pop star? And is it her job to entertain? Regardless, she does.

Wachtel rose to prominence as a member of the Pictures Generation, a loose consortium of artists whose great subject was the proliferation of images across pop culture and media and advertising in particular. In 2026, when AI can create infinite images and mash-ups via a simple prompt, this work feels as relevant as ever.

Farah Al Qasimi

B. 1991, Abu Dhabi.

Farah Al Qasimi’s photographs span two walls on the second floor of “Greater New York.” One features wallpaper patterned with a photographed red curtain, a theatrical backdrop to the artist’s bright compositions. Another captures a stone countertop with a wooden cutting board, a sliced watermelon on top of it. The fleshy pink face of the halved fruit gapes at the viewer, while a bright yellow jug of corn oil and a pot of flowers hover in the background.

The scene suggests an everyday riff on art historical still lifes, with an oven range off to the side. Al Qasimi’s vibrant palette extends to other works, which feature a parrot perched on an outstretched hand and a girl lying on her bed in jeans and a headscarf, next to her cat. Elsewhere, the artist captures the interiors of cars, replete with Gatorade bottles, a devotional car ornament, or a flower on the dash. All these images, in fact, come from Al Qasimi’s larger project of documenting the Arab community from Dearborn, Michigan (where the population is half Arab), and the United Arab Emirates, where she grew up. Together, they create a sense of exuberant multiplicity. If patterns occasionally clash, the scenes are only richer for it.

from Artsy News https://ift.tt/wD7im0O