Marianna Simnett’s Furry Friends

Marianna Simnett’s exhibition at Société, Berlin, features a provocative mix of film, painting, and sculpture that revels in grotesque, erotic, and fantastical transformations. Works like *Hyena and Swan in the Midst of Sexual Congress* (2019) and the films *Leda was a Swan* (2025) and *Blue Moon* (2022) reimagine classical myths and fairy tales through a feminist, body-horror lens, using AI-assisted visuals and stop-motion to explore themes of animality, abjection, and pleasure. The show includes taxidermy-inspired animations, BDSM-inflected live-action shorts, and sculptures that ensnare human figures in animal forms.

Leonora in the Morning Light review – pioneering British artist who fled convention for the surrealists

A new biopic titled *Leonora in the Morning Light* chronicles the life of British surrealist painter Leonora Carrington, who fled her aristocratic upbringing in London to join the surrealist circle in Paris. The film, adapted from Elena Poniatowska's biographical novel, follows Carrington from her affair with the older Max Ernst through her mental health crisis in Spain and eventual settlement in Mexico, where she created art on her own terms. Olivia Vinall portrays Carrington with a fierce, uncompromising spirit, though the film is criticized for uneven storytelling and clunky dialogue.

The In-Between Worlds of Larissa Borteh

Hyperallergic reviews Larissa Borteh's solo exhibition "In the Wind" at Devening Projects in Chicago, featuring a dozen oil paintings that blur the line between still life and ethereal abstraction. The works, including "Glass House" (2025) and "Tending and Receiving" (2026), use thinned, viscous oil paint to create tactile surfaces that evoke plants in decay, ghosts, deities, or dreamlike visions. The review highlights Borteh's distinctive merging of image and elongated mark, reminiscent of fingerpainting, and her exploration of the spectrum between legibility and opacity.

Huet Lost in the Clouds

Huet perdu dans les nuages

The Musée de la vie romantique in Paris has reopened after a major renovation, but its inaugural exhibition, focused on the 19th-century painter Paul Huet (1803-1869), has been met with harsh criticism. The show examines Huet's depictions of skies and compares his work to contemporaries, yet the reviewer finds it neither a proper retrospective nor a coherent thematic exhibition. The cramped galleries, uneven selection of works, cluttered hanging, and garish scenography are all faulted, with many comparative pieces outshining Huet's own paintings.