A new film by artist Isaac Julien, featuring actors Sheila Atim and Gwendoline Christie as science-fiction deities, is on view at the Cosmic House in London. The 25-minute work, which incorporates themes from Octavia E. Butler's novel *Parable of the Sower*, explores concepts of change, interconnectedness, and fluid identity through a visually rich, postmodern lens.
The Swiss architect Peter Zumthor's new $724 million building for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Lacma), now called the David Geffen Galleries, has opened after nearly two decades of anticipation. The swooping concrete-and-glass structure is praised for its harnessing of natural light and horizontality, creating a stunning showcase for antiquities and inviting the city inside with floor-to-ceiling windows offering views of the La Brea Tar Pits and Wilshire Boulevard. The building performs best with sculpture and decorative objects, with standout works including Liz Glynn's "The Futility of Conquest" (2023) and Manjunath Kamath's "Vikatonarva" (2024).
The Guardian reviews "Handpicked," an exhibition at Kettle's Yard in Cambridge that brings together over 40 artists from the 20th century to the present, all sharing a floral passion. The show features works by Rory McEwen, Vanessa Bell, Cedric Morris, Christopher Wood, Tirzah Garwood, Celia Paul, Gluck, and Caroline Walker, among others, displayed on white and leaf-green walls inspired by the fresh flowers and floral paintings in the neighboring house. The review highlights specific pieces, such as McEwen's exquisite tulip watercolor and Garwood's poignant painting from the last year of her life, noting the technical variety and emotional depth across the exhibition.
The article reviews a salon-style exhibition curated by Matthew Higgs, director of New York's White Columns gallery, at an unnamed gallery space. The show features 43 paintings by a diverse group of artists including Denzil Forrester, Andrew Cranston, Kaye Donachie, Merlin James, Margot Bergman, Gillian Carnegie, Bill Lynch, and Adam Keay, arranged around mismatched chairs facing white windows painted on the walls. The reviewer describes moving through the space, engaging with individual works, and highlights the eclectic, unthemed curation that prioritizes personal taste and conversation over academic or political messaging.
D.B. Dowd's new book "Reading Pictures" offers a sweeping 400-page history of illustration, tracing the genre from the Diamond Sutra frontispiece in Tang China (AD868) to Molly Crabapple's Gaza reports in 2015. The book examines key works such as Jules Chéret's 1891 poster for the Alcazar d'Été Club, Stuart Davis's caustic covers for The Masses, and Duong Ngoc Canh's Vietnamese propaganda poster, arguing that illustrations are meant to be "read" rather than admired like museum paintings.
The article reviews Keith Haring's early work from 1980 to 1983, currently on view at the Brant Foundation in New York. The author reflects on initially dismissing Haring's graffiti-inspired style as trite and playful, but now sees darker, prophetic themes in pieces featuring apocalyptic imagery, UFOs, nuclear power, and mindless obedience to higher powers. The exhibition, curated by Dieter Buchhart and Anna Karina Hofbauer, runs through May 31.
The Guardian reviews a major UK exhibition of land artist Nancy Holt (1938-2014) at Goodwood in West Sussex, the largest show of her work to date. The exhibition features two large outdoor installations—Ventilation System, a metallic tubular structure resembling building lungs, and Hydra’s Head, six concrete pools arranged like the Hydra constellation in a chalk quarry—alongside indoor photographs, diagrams, and light works. The review praises the cosmic scale and bodily connection of the outdoor pieces but finds the indoor works less effective at conveying Holt’s themes of universal vastness and interconnectedness.
Sung Tieu's installations, characterized by austere, bureaucratic surfaces, explore the hidden architectures of power embedded in everyday systems. The article examines her series of works that deconstruct administrative forms used in asylum procedures, reducing them to blank spaces and quantified grids to expose how institutional power operates through seemingly neutral documents. Her exhibition "In Cold Print" at Nottingham Contemporary physically manifests these themes by using steel fences to control viewer movement, drawing direct parallels between minimalist sculpture and the dehumanizing design of border controls.
The article reviews Tracey Emin's exhibition "A Second Life" at Tate Modern, describing the author's initial lack of aesthetic connection to the artworks—finding the paintings derivative and neon signs tacky—but ultimately being moved by the exhibition's emotional force and the artist's refusal to disguise pain, humiliation, and grief. The author notes the crowded galleries, the predominantly female audience responding with visceral emotion, and highlights the film "How It Feels" as the most impactful piece, in which Emin discusses her traumatic abortion and its effect on her self-perception.
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) has opened its new David Geffen Galleries, a radical reinvention of the museum experience. The installation, conceived by director Michael Govan and architect Peter Zumthor, abandons traditional chronological and departmental silos, instead creating a continuous, curving flow of art from across time, place, and medium. Visitors are encouraged to wander and get lost, forging their own connections between works.
Queere Heilige, große Egos
Andrew Durbin's new biography examines the intertwined lives of artists Peter Hujar and Paul Thek, focusing on their art, desire, and self-staging. The review notes that while the book covers their creative circles—including figures like David Wojnarowicz, Divine, John Waters, and Susan Sontag—it loses sight of the urgent political and social context that animated their work, particularly the AIDS crisis and Reagan-era repression.
Deborah Levy’s latest novel, *My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein*, follows a first-person narrator who travels to Paris to research the American writer and collector Gertrude Stein. The narrative slips between the early twentieth century and the autumn of Donald Trump’s 2024 reelection, using stream-of-consciousness prose and liquid metaphors to blur past and present. The narrator’s research into Stein’s role in shaping modernity becomes a vehicle for exploring her own sense of helplessness and lack of agency in a hyperconnected, war-weary present.
The article, a critic's guide review by Andrew Durbin, contrasts the US national pavilion presentation at an unspecified biennial with those of Britain and Germany. The US presentation is described as vacuous and lacking in meaning, while the British and German installations are praised for being incisive and moving. The review critically examines the thematic and conceptual approaches of each national pavilion, highlighting a disparity in artistic depth and engagement.
Andrew Durbin reviews the national pavilions at an unnamed biennial, contrasting a vacuous US presentation with incisive and moving installations from Britain and Germany. The review critiques the lack of meaningful engagement in the US pavilion while praising the depth and emotional resonance of the British and German contributions.
At the 2026 Venice Biennale's Arsenale, critic Andrew Durbin reviews national pavilions, finding the US presentation vacuous and lacking meaning, while praising the British and German pavilions for their incisive and moving installations that resist erasure. The review highlights a stark contrast in curatorial ambition and political engagement among the participating nations.
Andrew Durbin reviews national pavilions at a major biennial, contrasting a vacuous US presentation with incisive and moving installations from Britain and Germany. The review critiques the lack of meaningful content in the US pavilion while praising the depth and emotional resonance of the British and German contributions.
Com’è la mostra internazionale della Biennale di Venezia? Recensione di “In minor keys” di Koyo Kouoh
The 2026 Venice Biennale, titled "In minor keys" and curated by the late Koyo Kouoh, opens to the public on May 9 amid controversies including the absence of the president's name in the colophon at the Arsenale entrance. The exhibition, organized by Kouoh's team (Rory Tsapayi, Siddharta Mitter, Marie Helene Pereira, Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo, and Rasha Salty), unfolds across the Giardini and the Arsenale's Corderie, featuring works that balance strength and beauty with a harmonious mix of voices and themes. The Giardini section is particularly compelling, with a non-linear, polycentric layout that feels like a living organism, while the Arsenale offers further depth.
Jess Self, a Decatur-based sculptor and educator, presents *Celestial Perspectives* at the Marietta Cobb Museum of Art, an immersive textile environment that explores autobiography through figurative form. The exhibition features works in resin, plaster, felted wool, fiber, and rope, including the large-scale installation *The Veil* and the compelling *She Who Ties Magic Knots*, a resin and plaster cast of the artist's pregnant torso. Self's practice draws on Jungian archetypes and spiritual traditions, and the show communicates themes of connectivity, motherhood, bodily experience, and transcendence without relying on wall text.