robert longo pace gallery review

Artist Robert Longo presents a new exhibition at Pace Gallery, featuring his signature large-scale, hyperrealistic drawings that address themes of brutality, conflict, and protest. The show is a revised version of a 2023 exhibition at the Milwaukee Art Museum, with works based on media images of events such as the war in Ukraine, Black Lives Matter protests, and migrant crises. The article critically examines several pieces, including "Untitled (Ferguson Police, August 13, 2014)" and "Untitled (Refugees at Mediterranean Sea, Sub-Saharan Migrants, July 25, 2017)," arguing that Longo's manipulations of source photographs result in melodramatic and dishonest representations.

lorna simpson met museum painting survey review

Lorna Simpson's paintings are the subject of a new survey exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, titled "Source Notes," on view through November 2. The show features over 20 paintings created between 2014 and 2024, marking the first exhibition to survey Simpson's output in this medium. Curated by Lauren Rosati, the exhibition aims to provide an overview of her painterly practice while connecting it to her collage work, with two vitrines displaying her collages to illustrate the fluidity between the two practices. Simpson, best known for her photography from the 1980s, debuted her paintings at the 2015 Venice Biennale organized by the late curator Okwui Enwezor.

michael armitage david zwirner new york gallery review

Michael Armitage's solo exhibition "Crucible" at David Zwirner's new Annabelle Selldorf-designed gallery in New York features paintings centered on migration, including the work *Path* (2024), inspired by a 2015 Vice News story about an Eritrean teenager's harrowing journey to Europe. The show also includes *Raft (ii)* (2024), a blurry homage to Théodore Géricault's *Raft of the Medusa*, and new sculptures that resemble wood carvings. The gallery itself, a single-story 18,000-square-foot space, opened after a larger planned venue fell through due to financial headwinds during Covid.

Notes from New York: The World in a Convex Mirror

The article reviews the sixth edition of MoMA PS1's quinquennial survey 'Greater New York 2026,' which coincides with the institution's 50th anniversary. It highlights works by artists such as Covey Gong, Win McCarthy, Mekko Harjo, and Sophie Friedman-Pappas, noting how the exhibition's themeless structure and use of reflective surfaces create a hall of distorted reflections. The show includes 53 emerging and midcareer artists, mostly millennials, and is accompanied by a block party and gala rather than a dedicated commemorative exhibition like FORTY (2016).

The Big Review | Venice Biennale 2026: In Minor Keys ★★★½

The Venice Biennale 2026, titled "In Minor Keys," was curated posthumously following the death of artistic director Koyo Kouoh in May 2025. A team of five curators and advisors—Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo, Marie Hélène Pereira, Rasha Salti, Siddhartha Mitter, and Rory Tsapayi—executed her vision across the Giardini and Arsenale venues. The exhibition features 110 artists, with a strong emphasis on new commissions, and is structured around themes of procession, resistance, and joy. Key works include Big Chief Demond Melancon's "Amistad Takeover" (2026), Nick Cave's "Amalgam (Origin)" (2025), and Otobong Nkanga's rewilded columns at the Central Pavilion.

kevin mcgarry reviews jason faragos even

Kevin McGarry reviews the debut issue of *Even*, a new print art journal launched by *Guardian* contributor Jason Farago during Frieze New York. Named after a phrase from Marcel Duchamp's *The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even*, the magazine is a small, paperback-sized publication that prioritizes text over images, positioning itself as an antidote to market-driven art discourse. The first issue features a lengthy essay on artist Joan Jonas by Elisabeth Lebovici, timed to Jonas's U.S. pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale, and a piece by Zachary Woolfe on the Björk exhibition at MoMA. McGarry critiques the journal's ambition to revitalize art criticism, noting that while its goals are lofty, the content sometimes falls back on familiar artspeak.

What You Should Definitely Avoid in Venice

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The article humorously critiques the Venice Biennale, highlighting several disappointments. It describes a Japanese pavilion installation by Ei Arakawa-Nash featuring baby dolls for diaper-changing, which a critic dismisses as a male artist over-romanticizing parenthood. Other flops include long queues for the German and Austrian pavilions, underwhelming main exhibition "In Minor Keys," and annoying self-promotional performers outside venues. The piece also laments the presence of loud American collectors and donors who dominate the event.

15th Shanghai Biennale Review: Code Switching

The 15th Shanghai Biennale, titled 'Code Switching,' has opened at the Power Station of Art (PSA). The exhibition, centered on the theme of what hears and what can be heard, features immersive installations like Allora & Calzadilla's floating yellow synthetic flowers in the atrium, which create a striking yet artificial environment that visitors eagerly photograph. The experience is framed by promotional gestures, such as free manuka honey samples, blurring lines between art, commerce, and audience participation.

jeff koons gagosian porcelain series review

Jeff Koons's latest exhibition at Gagosian Gallery in New York features his new series of large-scale porcelain and stainless-steel sculptures, including the centerpiece *Aphrodite* (2016–21), an eight-and-a-half-foot-tall nude. The show marks Koons's first solo presentation in New York in seven years and follows a turbulent period in his career, including record auction sales, a move to Pace Gallery and back to Gagosian, and two lawsuits. Critic Christopher Garcia Valle panned the works as unstimulating and banal, arguing they fail to awe viewers despite their technical ambition and massive scale.

Todd Gray Reframes Black Diasporic History

Todd Gray's exhibition "Portals" at Perrotin in Los Angeles features multi-paneled photo assemblages that juxtapose images of slavery with European art, architecture, and formal gardens, exploring the evolution of Black history and identity. The show coincides with the opening of his commissioned installation "Octavia's Gaze" (2025) at the new David Geffen Galleries of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Gray's works incorporate his own photographs alongside sources like Hubble Space Telescope imagery, creating layered visual puzzles that invite viewers to find connections and ask questions about African diasporic identity.

Dean Sameshima review – did the neighbours really not know? The extreme LA sex clubs hidden in plain sight

A new exhibition at Soft Opening in London presents Dean Sameshima's "Wonderland" series, photographs taken in the mid-1990s that document the exteriors of queer sex clubs and bathhouses in Los Angeles's Silver Lake neighborhood. The images, shot in a stark, formal style during daylight, capture the unremarkable facades of these clandestine spaces, with only descriptive titles hinting at the activities within.

jaqueline humphries aspen museum review

Jacqueline Humphries's survey exhibition at the Aspen Art Museum features her painting installation "TSLA" (2025), a five-panel work hung on bare metal studs that bisects the gallery space. The installation plays with perception through mirrors and anamorphic imagery, including a distorted Tesla logo, and includes a hidden set of red paintings visible only as reflections. The show also presents nine smaller works generated in part by artificial intelligence, housed in a green-walled adjacent room.

art yuji agematsu judd foundation review

The article reviews Yuji Agematsu's exhibition at the Judd Foundation in New York, where 366 of his "zips"—small assemblages of found objects collected during daily walks and arranged in cigarette cellophane sleeves—were displayed on open aluminum shelves in grids representing each day of 2024. The show ran through August 30, 2025, and marked a departure from previous presentations of Agematsu's work, which had been enclosed in acrylic cases; here, the zips were left exposed, with a fan causing plant matter to sway, making the work feel more alive and immediate.

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Zoë Hopkins reviews Torkwase Dyson's Public Art Fund commission 'Akua' at Brooklyn Bridge Park, a sculptural pavilion that immerses visitors in water sounds and voices of Black writers like Christina Sharpe and Dionne Brand. Paige K. Bradley covers the first-ever solo exhibition of late poet N.H. Pritchard at Peter Freeman, Inc., featuring his concrete visual poems from the Black Arts Movement. Johanna Fateman highlights the work of identical twin artists Jane and Louise Wilson.

Nat Faulkner: The Stuff of Photography

Artist Nat Faulkner has opened a new exhibition at Camden Art Centre featuring works that explore the physical and chemical foundations of photography. The show includes large-scale photographic pieces like 'Aqua Fortis' and sculptural works such as 'Aperture (Iodine)', which uses iodine solution in skylight panels to bathe the space in amber light, alongside silver-plated 'Analogue' reliefs created through electroplating.

V&A Rising Voices review – can decades of stunning global art really be squished into three rooms?

The V&A Museum in London has mounted an exhibition titled "Rising Voices" that attempts to summarize three decades of the Asia Pacific Triennial, a vast survey of contemporary art from Asia, Australia, and the Pacific organized by Queensland Art Gallery. The show crams works from multiple continents, island nations, and Indigenous cultures into just three rooms, featuring bark cloth paintings from Papua New Guinea, Indigenous Australian abstracts, shark sculptures from the Torres Strait, and Tahitian textiles. Many works address colonialism, political oppression, and tyranny, with artists like Elisabet Kauage, Pala Pothupitiye, and Svay Ken using art as resistance. The exhibition includes pieces by Maryam Ayeen, Abbas Shahsavar, Lila Warrimou, Pennyrose Sosa, Aline Amaru, Brenda V Fajardo, and Heri Dono.

Zineb Sedira review: A chic ode to revolutionary cinema, brainy boozers – and exceptional berets

Zineb Sedira's exhibition at Tate Britain presents a cinematic and sculptural homage to La Cinémathèque Algérienne, the Algerian film archive founded in 1965 that became a hub for leftist African filmmakers. The show recreates a 1970s Algerian cafe in Paris, complete with a jukebox, books on revolutionary cinema, and a model movie theater screening a documentary about the archive's director, Boudjemaâ Karèche. Sedira, born in Paris to Algerian parents and based in London, weaves personal and political narratives to explore identity, diaspora, and the role of art in social change.

The Artist Whose Shimmering Obelisks Are Cropping Up All Over the World

Artist Gisela Colón is currently the subject of a major retrospective at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico (MAC), showcasing her signature "monoliths" and iridescent obelisks. These monumental sculptures, which have appeared in global locations ranging from the Great Pyramids of Giza to the Saudi Arabian desert, utilize advanced aerospace carbon fiber and site-specific minerals to create shifting, phenomenological experiences. The exhibition tracks her evolution from 1996 to the present, highlighting her unique ability to blend high-tech materials with ancient totemic forms.

critical reduction the 2014 whitney biennial 5409

The 2014 Whitney Biennial has debuted with a controversial three-curator structure, tasking Michelle Grabner, Stuart Comer, and Anthony Elms with organizing separate floors of the museum. This meta-review aggregates the initial critical reception from major publications, noting that the fragmented format has forced critics to evaluate the exhibition as three distinct shows rather than a unified vision.

pierre huyghe las foundation

Pierre Huyghe has unveiled his most ambitious project to date in Berlin, a major exhibition titled 'Liminals' staged at the cavernous Halle am Berghain. Commissioned by the LAS Art Foundation as part of its 'Sensing Quantum' program, the installation features a massive 50-minute film projected in a former electrical station, accompanied by a droning, atmospheric soundscape. The work continues Huyghe’s exploration of AI-driven systems and 'unworlding,' attempting to create a space that transcends human subjectivity through bio-technological environments.

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.

Salon review – like getting to know fascinating guests at a fabulous party

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.

Gardar Eide Einarsson Leaves You in the Dark

Gardar Eide Einarsson’s latest exhibition at Maureen Paley’s East London space presents a haunting exploration of dissociation and coded information. The show features two distinct series: 'Closed Caption,' a collection of monochrome black gouache paintings featuring isolated subtitles from films, and 'Incendiary Test Area,' a set of hyperrealistic woodblock prints created in collaboration with master Shoichi Kitamura. These prints depict the interiors of mock 'Japanese' houses built by the US Army for fire-bombing tests during World War II.

Locating Luigi Ghirri

Fashion photographer Alessio Bolzoni and film director Luca Guadagnino have collaborated on 'Felicità', a new book and exhibition at Thomas Dane Gallery featuring 45 previously unseen color photographs by the late Italian master Luigi Ghirri. The project is divided into two portfolios: the first focuses on intimate, abstract details of found objects and surfaces in Modena, while the second expands into larger vistas and populated spaces across Italy during the 1980s.

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.

The Carnegie International Looks Back at Itself

The 58th Carnegie International at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh looks back at its own 130-year history, featuring a gallery dedicated to past iterations. The exhibition includes Chris Ofili's "The Adoration of Captain Shit and the Legend of the Black Stars" (1998), which was originally shown in the 53rd International in 1999, the same year Ofili's more notorious "The Holy Virgin Mary" sparked controversy at the Brooklyn Museum. The article reviews how the current iteration captures the excitement of earlier exhibitions while providing commentary on authoritarianism and militarism.

p staff david zwirner review

P. Staff's current exhibition at David Zwirner in New York transforms the gallery's Upper East Side townhouse into a haunting, body-centric experience. The show features a new video titled *Penetration* (2025), split across three floors, depicting a person with a laser beamed at their bare stomach, alongside sculptures with wood spikes under latex drapes and ambient sounds of a beating heart. The installation evokes a dread of having a body, with jaundiced yellow window films and disjointed sensory elements creating an uncomfortable, dysphoric atmosphere.

These Ghosts. Clémentine Bruno  by Michela Ceruti

Clémentine Bruno’s artistic practice explores the tension between presence and absence, treating the canvas as a site of temporal layers rather than a flat surface for representation. Her work emphasizes the preparatory stages of painting—the laying of gesso and the construction of supports—allowing images to emerge reluctantly through processes of sanding, veiling, and partial erasure. Recent exhibitions, such as "Educational Complex" at Tonus and "Vision of Fading" at Mendes Wood DM, highlight her interest in how institutional structures and memory maps dictate what is retained and what is forgotten.

Inside LACMA’s Eye-Popping New Home, How Do You Find the Art?

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) has opened its new David Geffen Galleries building, a major architectural project designed to be a glamorous cultural beacon. The building itself is a striking landmark, but the exhibition spaces within present significant challenges for the display of art, creating a complex, maze-like environment for visitors.

blank space book review cultrure over men

W. David Marx's book "Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century" argues that 21st-century culture has stagnated, blaming the Internet and its economies for a lack of innovation. The book cites critics like Jason Farago and Alex Ross who lament the death of monoculture and the failure of the Internet's promised diversity, while Marx himself longs for a past era of linear artistic progress defined by -isms like Realism and Cubism. However, the review criticizes Marx's framework as rooted in a 19th-century positivist fallacy, noting that art history has never been a clean linear progression and that overlooked artists—such as Hilma af Klint and Hector Hyppolite—have always complicated the canon.