Art News. Vasari Codex

rate_review review schedule May 19, 2026 visibility 31 link 14 artists, 1 gallery

What ‘Costume Art’ Gets Wrong About the Body

The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute spring exhibition, featuring nearly 400 objects, pairs garments and ensembles with Western figurative artworks from the museum's permanent collection in dyadic, associative displays. The show eschews traditional art-historical timelines and context in favor of visual and thematic parallels—comparing, for example, Rudi Gernreich's Pubikini with an Egyptian statuette, or Ying Gao's sound-responsive dress with a David Hockney drawing. The exhibition is sponsored by Jeff and Lauren Sánchez Bezos.

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rate_review review schedule May 19, 2026 visibility 5 link 2 artists

Winston Churchill: The Painter review – We will daub them on the beaches

The Guardian reviews "Winston Churchill: The Painter," an exhibition of nearly 60 paintings by the former British prime minister, curated by Xavier Bray and Lucy Davis. The show assembles works from across the UK and private collections, depicting scenes from Churchill's travels, stately homes, and leisure moments, painted as an amateur Sunday painter for stress relief rather than artistic acclaim. The review notes Churchill's use of techniques borrowed from Walter Sickert, including projectors and monochrome underlayers, and describes his style as charmingly amateurish with a vivacity in seascapes but weakness in figures and architectural luminosity.

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rate_review review schedule May 21, 2026 visibility 7 link 6 artists

« Caïn » de Fernand Cormon : aux origines de la conscience humaine ?

Beaux Arts Magazine analyzes Fernand Cormon's monumental 1880 painting "Caïn," currently held at the Musée d'Orsay. The article describes the scene: a prehistoric, weary clan trudges through a desert, led by a haggard patriarch, with a tired mother on a litter and hunters carrying game. Cormon's work is presented as the antithesis of classical triumph, evoking a melancholic, post-traumatic atmosphere. The painting is linked to the biblical story of Cain, who killed his brother Abel and was condemned to exile, and is accompanied by verses from Victor Hugo's poem "Conscience."

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rate_review review schedule May 22, 2026 visibility 6 link 3 artists

Yu Ji’s Democratic Play

Yu Ji's solo exhibition at PPOW, New York, titled "Origin of the Tiger," presents sculptures and collages created after a residency she organized in Phnom Penh that offered art education to children. The show features works like reed mats with snail shells, a Sony Trinitron looping video, collaged drawings incorporating Cambodian children's art, and composite sculptures such as chairs with concrete knee casts and a figure inspired by a misattributed sixth-century Krishna statue. The exhibition draws on a Khmer folktale about transformation and includes audio of children reciting the story, though the children appear more as muses than collaborators.

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rate_review review schedule May 19, 2026 visibility 8 link 10 artists, 1 gallery

The Black American Artists Who Dazzled Post-War Paris

An exhibition titled "Paris in Black: Internationalism and the Black Renaissance" at the DuSable Black History Museum and Education Center in Chicago celebrates the Black American artists, writers, and performers who moved to Paris after World War II to escape American racism. Curated by Danny Dunson, the show features over 100 artworks from the museum's permanent collection, including paintings by Archibald J. Motley Jr., sculptures by Richmond Barthé, Augusta Savage, and William Artis, and ephemera related to Josephine Baker. It traces the global influence of the Harlem Renaissance and the cross-pollination between Paris and U.S. cities like Chicago.

newspaper Hyperallergic open_in_new Read original

rate_review review schedule May 22, 2026 visibility 5 link 2 artists, 1 gallery

Karla Knight’s Cosmic Conspiracies

Karla Knight's exhibition "Orbit" at Andrew Edlin Gallery presents her game-like paintings and tapestries filled with cryptic symbols, cosmic diagrams, and celestial imagery. Works such as "Orbiter 2" (2024–25) and "Feelers" (2025–26) feature irregular black devices, floating spheres, and rows of arcane script, inviting viewers to decode what appear to be blueprints for extraterrestrial systems or maps of hidden dimensions. Knight employs meticulous grids, bold primary colors, and textile techniques to render the paranormal as strangely normal.

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rate_review review schedule May 19, 2026 visibility 9 link 3 artists

CUANDO LOS OBJETOS HABLAN. MUSEO HECHIZO, DE JUAN JOSÉ SANTOS

Juan José Santos's book "Museo hechizo" (Metales Pesados, 2025) challenges the perceived neutrality of the Western museum, presenting it as an institution shaped by colonial logics of classification, extraction, and representation. The essay centers on the concept of "lo hechizo"—understood as both artisanal precariousness and disruptive enchantment—and explores small, community-based Latin American museum experiences that operate from precarity, reciprocity, and care. Santos argues that the museum is a space of conflict where voices, narratives, and ways of constructing history are contested, and he proposes thinking of the museum through its minor, situated, and alternative forms in Latin America.

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rate_review review schedule May 25, 2026 visibility 3 link 5 artists

Split decision: The Art Museum’s missed opportunity with its new ‘Rocky’ exhibition | Opinion

The Philadelphia Museum of Art's new exhibition, "Rising Up: Rocky and the Making of Monuments," celebrates the 50th anniversary of the film *Rocky* and highlights Philadelphia's boxing history, including figures like Joe Frazier and Bernard Hopkins. However, the author, a street reporter who wrote a book about people running the museum steps, argues the exhibit missed a key opportunity by focusing on the Rocky statue and monuments rather than centering on the film's transformative power and the iconic steps-running ritual that has drawn visitors for decades.

newspaper Inquirer.com open_in_new Read original

rate_review review schedule May 25, 2026 visibility 2 link 2 artists

Criminal review – homelessness show delivers a rage-making punch in the gut

The article reviews "Criminal: An Untold Story of Homelessness, Resistance and Survival," an installation at London's Museum of Homelessness. The show features works by Romany Gypsy poet and artist Gemma Lees, including a caravan installation with china decorated with hostile Sun newspaper headlines about Gypsy and Traveller encampments, and festive bunting printed with historical state proscriptions against nomadic communities dating from the Egyptians Act of 1530 to the 2022 Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act. The exhibition, set largely in the garden of the museum's new home at Finsbury Park's Manor House Lodge, explores how homeless people and nomadic communities have been criminalized over 400 years.

newspaper The Guardian open_in_new Read original

rate_review review schedule May 21, 2026 visibility 8 link 2 artists

Joan Semmel Roars at The Jewish Museum

The article reviews Joan Semmel: In the Flesh, a retrospective exhibition at The Jewish Museum in New York (December 2025 – May 2026). The author describes an initial discomfort with Semmel's graphic nude paintings of aging female bodies, but after researching the artist's significance in feminist art, comes to appreciate her unapologetic honesty. The show is arranged chronologically, tracing Semmel's evolution from works like Erotic Yellow (1973) to later paintings that grow in confidence and freedom, all while maintaining a focus on female embodiment and pleasure from a female perspective.

newspaper Fine Art Globe open_in_new Read original

rate_review review schedule May 25, 2026 visibility 2 link 1 artist

For Ceija Stojka, Memory Is Survival

The article reviews the exhibition "Ceija Stojka: Making Visible" at the Drawing Center in New York, showcasing over 50 paintings and drawings by the late Romani-Austrian artist. Stojka, a child survivor of the Holocaust, documented both the atrocities she endured and the tender, everyday beauty of Romani life, using acrylic, sand, and paper to convey memories of her family's traveling wagon and natural landscapes. The show highlights her self-taught practice and outsider perspective, featuring works from the 1990s alongside her memoirs, which were posthumously translated in 2022.

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