worst artworks we saw around the world in 2022

Artnet News editors compiled a list of the worst artworks they encountered in 2022, including a chaotic performance by Poncili Creación at NADA Miami, an overproduced Danish Pavilion installation by Uffe Isolotto at the Venice Biennale, and a Paul Cézanne painting at the Barnes Foundation that disappointed a critic. The article offers subjective, critical takes on these works, describing the NADA performance as bizarre and jolting, the Danish pavilion as graphic and lacking a powerful message, and the Cézanne as a disappointment within an otherwise memorable museum visit.

Zarina Brought the World to New York

The article reviews the exhibition "Beyond the Stars" at Luhring Augustine Gallery, showcasing the work of artist Zarina Hashmi (known as Zarina). It highlights her spare, post-minimalist prints and sculptures that explore themes of mapping, home, and migration, rooted in her peripatetic life from pre-Partition India to New York. The show features 32 works that demonstrate her unique visual language, embedded in Urdu, South Asian histories, and mysticisms.

art best and worst art of 2025 list

Cultured's art critic reflects on the best and worst of 2025, highlighting standout moments including Salman Toor's 2007 portrait of Zohran Mamdani (now mayor-elect of New York), the posthumous Jack Whitten survey "The Messenger" at MoMA, and Anne Imhof's epic production "DOOM: House of Hope" at the Park Avenue Armory. The article also notes Mamdani's arts-friendly transition committee and the broader resilience of artists amid political turmoil.

The Big Review: Rothko in Florence ★★★★★

The Palazzo Strozzi in Florence has launched a major exhibition exploring the profound influence of the Italian Renaissance on Mark Rothko. Co-curated by the artist's son, Christopher Rothko, the show spans three historic locations: the Palazzo Strozzi, the Museo di San Marco, and the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana. By placing Rothko’s abstract canvases in direct dialogue with Fra Angelico’s frescoes and Michelangelo’s architecture, the exhibition highlights how the artist’s visits to Italy in the 1950s and 60s shaped his spatial thinking and spiritual intensity.

stan douglas bard museum survey review

Stan Douglas's survey at Bard College's Hessel Museum of Art features a new video installation titled "Birth of a Nation" (2025), which reworks a racist sequence from D.W. Griffith's 1915 film of the same name. The installation presents the original footage alongside four new videos from different character perspectives, shot in black and white without sound, and ends with a blue screen left bare to suggest the mutability of historical images. The survey also includes earlier works like "Hors-Champs" (1992), which critiques televisual representation through a staged free jazz performance.

william holman hunt the awakening of conscience

The article analyzes William Holman Hunt's 1853 painting *The Awakening Conscience*, which depicts a woman in a Victorian parlor rising from the lap of a man, her gaze fixed on a sunlit garden glimpsed in a mirror. Hunt, a member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood alongside John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, filled the work with dense symbolism—such as the woman's ringless left hand, a discarded glove, and sheet music by Edward Lear and Thomas Moore—to reveal that the scene is not a married couple but a mistress and her lover, trapped in a gilded cage.

Fantastic visions and cosmic rhythms: how Whistler is making me see – and hear – differently

The article explores how the James McNeill Whistler exhibition at Tate in London prompts a reconsideration of the relationship between music and visual art. Whistler titled his works using musical terms like "Arrangement," "Symphony," and "Nocturne," arguing that painting should be abstract and independent of narrative, much like instrumental music. The exhibition, reviewed by Jonathan Jones, highlights Whistler's radical art-for-art's-sake philosophy, which influenced composer Claude Debussy, whose orchestral Nocturnes were directly inspired by Whistler's paintings of light and atmosphere.

25th Biennale of Sydney Review: From the Margins

The 25th Biennale of Sydney, titled "Rememory" and curated by Hoor Al Qasimi, features 143 works by 83 artists and collectives from 37 countries across five venues. The exhibition explores marginalized, fragmented, and repressed histories, drawing on Toni Morrison's concept of 'rememory' as a space between remembering and forgetting. Key works include Tuan Andrew Nguyen's film on Vietnam War trauma, Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme's immersive installation on Palestinian displacement, Khalid Albaih's photographs of Sudan, and Massinissa Selmani's drawings on Algerian socialist building projects.

The Making of a Maintenance Artist

A new documentary titled "Maintenance Artist" (2025) traces the decades-long practice of Mierle Laderman Ukeles, a pioneering artist who focused on marginal, unpaid, and feminine labor. The film covers her career from her 1969 "CARE" manifesto, through her role as artist-in-residence at the New York City Department of Sanitation, to her first retrospective at the Queens Museum in 2017. It highlights her critique of art-world gender biases and her efforts to recognize discounted labor in all fields.

Review: “50th Anniversary Exhibition Part I” at Moody Gallery, Houston

Moody Gallery in Houston opened “50th Anniversary Exhibition Part I” on September 13, showcasing 38 artworks by gallery-affiliated artists. The show is deliberately non-chronological and non-comprehensive, featuring works ranging from 2006 to 2025, including pieces by Melissa Miller, William “Bill” Steffy, Michael Kennaugh, Dan Sutherland, Pat Colville, Tracye Wear, Al Souza, and the collaborative MANUAL (Ed Hill & Suzanne Bloom). The exhibition spans three spaces and highlights the gallery’s eclectic, open-minded approach and its commitment to promoting Texas-based artists.

Blank Spaces. Sung Tieu by Sarah Johanna Theurer

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.

7 Shows to See in Milan Right Now

Gallery Applications Open for Frieze Abu Dhabi

Milan's art scene is currently anchored by several high-profile exhibitions coinciding with the Miart fair. Key highlights include Cao Fei’s exploration of global farming and technology at Pirelli HangarBicocca, alongside Anselm Kiefer’s monumental tributes to female alchemists. Other notable shows feature historical and contemporary dialogues, ranging from Italian post-war masters to experimental multimedia installations.

Between Tropes and Treats at NADA New York

The 12th annual New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA) fair opened at the Starrett-Lehigh Building in Manhattan, featuring a wide array of contemporary works. Critic Rhea Nayyar notes that while many booths felt interchangeable due to prevalent trends like zany sculptures, shiny materials, and kitschy vibrancy, several standout pieces offered genuine engagement. Highlights include Elena Roznovan's maternal ephemera embedded in concrete with bondage tape, Kelly Tapia-Chuning's deconstructed serapes addressing colonial violence, and Niniko Morbedadze's folkloric illustrations.

summer group shows julien nguyen kyoko idetsu reviews

The article reviews two summer group shows in New York. At 56 Henry, "Small Format Painting," curated by painter Josh Smith and actor/former gallerist Leo Fitzpatrick, features 34 artists working on identical 10x8 inch canvases, including blue-chip names like Nate Lowman and emerging talents. At Matthew Marks Gallery, Julien Nguyen presents a solo show of compact oil-on-copper paintings, inspired by Rembrandt's techniques and featuring his muse Nikos.

What I learned from Tracey Emin about regeneration

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.

Adrian Ghenie: Roman Campagna | Exhibition review

Adrian Ghenie's exhibition "Roman Campagna" at a Paris gallery presents a series of paintings and charcoal drawings that subvert the romantic cliché of an artist's transformative encounter with Rome. Ghenie populates landscapes inspired by the Appian Way with grotesque, alien-headed figures hunched over smartphones, urinating on monuments, or weeping at sunsets, using brown and grey tones punctuated by bright colors. The works reference Francis Bacon and William S. Burroughs, and include direct allusions to Bacon's reinterpretation of van Gogh's self-portrait, as well as a copy of a Pompeii mosaic. The show also features large charcoal drawings on paper that reveal Ghenie's process of constructing his contemporary, alienated figures.

Holbein biography interrogates the artist's life and work from a different angle

Elizabeth Goldring’s new biography of Hans Holbein the Younger takes a documentary-focused approach, prioritizing archival evidence over visual analysis. The book examines Holbein’s life (1497/8–1543) through chronological chapters, using inventories, correspondence, and other records to correct long-held assumptions and propose new theories about his work. Goldring’s detective work includes identifying the green curtain in Holbein’s portrait of Sir Thomas More as a reference to the sitter’s role as chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, and suggesting that a lost painting of the More family was given to Erasmus as a gift.

Exhibit Review: Revolution! 250 Years of Art and Activism in Boston – Museum Studies Blog at Tufts University

The Boston Public Library in Copley Square has opened "Revolution! 250 Years of Art and Activism in Boston," its first major exhibition in nearly a decade. The show uses a deliberately unfinished design of plywood and scaffolding to symbolize democracy as a work in progress, moving chronologically from the American Revolution through the 21st century. It features engravings by Paul Revere, portraits of George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, works addressing Toussaint L’Ouverture and Haitian revolution, Boston abolitionists, the Civil War, civil rights leaders Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, and contemporary activism including Indigenous, LGBTQ+, climate, and anti-police brutality movements.

A review within a play. Play by Josiane M.H. Pozi and Emily Pozi  by Nasra Abdullahi

Josiane M.H. Pozi's exhibition "PORTRAIT O.A.Y.G." at Carlos/Ishikawa in London is reviewed through an unconventional, fragmented narrative that blends a play script with critical observation. The review describes Pozi's video works, including "Rhythmic Stimming" (2025) and "Restaurants" (2023), which capture mundane domestic scenes and personal artifacts. The text shifts between a first-person account of meeting the artist and a scripted dialogue between characters J and E, reflecting the exhibition's themes of identity, selfhood, and the poetic potential of everyday objects.

Exhibition Review and Studio Visit Feature: Contemporary Color Field Painter Vanessa Johansson

Contemporary painter Vanessa Johansson recently debuted her solo exhibition at the Sky Garden Penthouse in Gramercy Park, New York. Curated by Jenny Mushkin Goldman of Agency Esta, the show featured Johansson’s large-scale acrylic on canvas works, which utilize fluid, transparent layers to evoke the spiritual and visual language of mid-20th-century Color Field abstraction. Pieces such as the triptych 'Windows' and the diptych 'Flow State' demonstrate her intuitive approach to motion, buoyancy, and orbital forms.

Jule Korneffel Captures the Weight of the Pre-Dawn Sky at Spencer Brownstone Gallery, NYC

Jule Korneffel's third solo exhibition at Spencer Brownstone Gallery in New York, titled 'In Search of Lost Light,' presents a series of paintings that capture the quiet, liminal moments just before dawn. Using artist-mixed natural pigments, Korneffel shifts from her previous twilight-focused work to explore the anticipation of daylight, with pieces like the titular painting (2025) standing out for its playful, musical composition. The show also includes a mural in the gallery's back patio that blends colors into a grey neutral tone reminiscent of early-morning skies.

Folkestone Triennial 2025 review: environmental catastrophe—but also hope, joy and a jolly salamander

The Folkestone Triennial 2025, titled "The Lie of the Land," features 18 artists across the seaside town in southeast England. Works include Sara Trillo's chalk cob sculptures inspired by Iron Age urns, Emilija Skarnulyte's film on nuclear decommissioning at Lithuania's Ignalina plant, Katie Paterson's amulet installation made from planetary crisis materials, and Cooking Sections' activist project on UK sewerage pollution. The triennial runs through the ancient port's historic role as a site of arrival and departure.

Spectral Nomenclature. Anastasia Pavlou  by Arnisa Zeqo

Artist Anastasia Pavlou’s practice is explored through her engagement with literature, memory, and the materialization of language. Her large-scale paintings, which draw formal comparisons to Art Informel and Abstract Expressionism, function as conceptual lexicons where titles—often direct citations from writers like Dionne Brand and Virginia Woolf—carry as much weight as the paint itself. Works such as "The Reader Interrogates Narrative, but Poetry Interrogates the Reader" demonstrate her interest in the "spectral" side of nomenclature, where naming serves to summon ghosts of the past while acknowledging the failures of language to capture emotion.

Beyond the body: Jess Self’s emotive power at the Marietta Cobb Museum of Art

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.

Ballast review: emerging artist Isabella Kennedy considers submerged histories

Emerging multidisciplinary artist Isabella Kennedy has unveiled her installation 'Ballast' at Firstdraft in Sydney, a site-specific work that blends paper sculpture, video projection, and sound. The exhibition draws on the unfinished research of her late father, journalist Les Kennedy, regarding the 1941 disappearance of the HMAS Sydney II. Through delicate stitched paper forms and immersive blue light, Kennedy explores themes of familial grief, maritime history, and the meditative acts of remembrance that bridge personal and national narratives.

‘Roaring: Art, Fashion, and the Automobile in France, 1918-1939’ Review: An Exhibition in Forward Motion

The article reviews the exhibition 'Roaring: Art, Fashion, and the Automobile in France, 1918-1939,' which explores the intersection of art, fashion, and automotive design during the interwar period in France. The show features a range of works including paintings, sculptures, fashion designs, and vintage automobiles, highlighting how the automobile became a symbol of modernity, speed, and luxury in French culture between the two world wars.