Eliana Willis

In 1985, a group of anonymous women artists came together under the moniker the Guerrilla Girls, taking the art world to task for its abominable representation—or rather, the lack thereof—of women artists, Black artists, and other minority groups. Their bold posters laid bare the systemic inequities of the art world with sharp humor, backed up by well-researched statistics. That was 40 years ago.
“It’s really hard to believe. We literally had the idea to put a couple of posters up on the streets of New York, and all hell broke loose,” founding Guerrilla Girl Käthe Kollwitz told me. (The members all go by the names of deceased women artists.)
The collective’s long history of holding the art world accountable and exposing its discrimination in race, gender, and class is being rightly celebrated in this anniversary year. A major New York moment includes not one but two gallery shows, at Hannah Traore Gallery (which closed over the weekend) and Mary Ryan Gallery. And later this month, the National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA) in Washington, D.C., the world’s first museum dedicated exclusively to women artists, is staging a major solo show of its Guerrilla Girl holdings. (There’s also a show right now at the National Gallery in Sofia, Bulgaria.)
“With the fact that it is the Guerrilla Girls’ 40th anniversary, it felt like the right moment to revisit and be re-inspired and reinvigorated by their work,” NMWA associate curator Hannah Shambroom told me. “They lay out these issues that were an undercurrent in the art world. In art history courses, the under representation of women and artists of color is something that’s not present, because their actual presence is missing—but it’s noticeable throughout. The Guerrilla Girls make that absence very obvious.”
The opening reception for “Discrimi-NATION: Guerrilla Girls on Bias, Money, and Art” at Hannah Traore Gallery, New York. Photo by Deonté Lee, courtesy of BFA.
The collective is receiving an award at the institution’s upcoming gala, and has mounted a campaign to encourage museum donors to help NMWA acquire the entirety of the “Portfolio Compleat,” of every work the Guerrilla Girls have ever made. (The current holdings are missing about 75 works from the portfolio, which comprises 134 posters, nine videos, two newsletters, and six books.)
“As the preeminent museum of women artists in the United States, NMWA should have the complete record of the Guerrilla Girls’ work,” Frida Kahlo, another founding member, told me.
Guerrilla Girls, Guerrilla Girls ManifestA: For Art Museums Everywhere (2024). Collection of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Museum, Washington, D.C., purchase: Members’ Acquisition Fund.
The show includes work ranging from 1985 to the present day, ending with the 2024 work Guerrilla Girls ManifestA: For Art Museums Everywhere. That acquisition included the physical poster as well as a high-resolution digital file that institutions are able to reproduce for exhibition purposes. An enlargement on vinyl will be adhered directly to the wall. (That’s the same way the posters were shown at Hannah Traore, where ManifestA was also the centerpiece.)
The work is a list of challenges to museums, such as to “REPATRIATE pillaged, smuggled, and looted artifacts in your collection” and “HONOR your employees, never undermine their efforts to unionize, and pay them a living wage with benefits.”
In the decades since their founding, the collective, its members clad in their signature, identity-obscuring gorilla masks, has become a powerful force for art world activism in the fight for inclusivity, their message resonating with generations of women. More

Amid the rise of the so-called “manosphere” of rampant online misogyny and pressures to perform palatable womanhood to a global audience via social media, is it time for a resurgence of feminist art? Many would surely say yes. The movement first emerged in the 1960s and ’70s, and many cult favorites have been enjoying renewed popularity in recent years, including Linder. The English artist, now aged 70, is the subject of a short retrospective at the Hayward Gallery in London, on view through May 5.
Much writing about Linder has focused on her wry photomontages from the 1970s and ’80s, which cut up and reassembled imagery from men’s and women’s magazines so that pornographic scenes were overlaid with domestic appliances that foreground the real drudgery inherent to many women’s lives. Though these works are rightfully celebrated, “Linder: Danger Came Smiling” proves that the artist’s roving eye never stopped eviscerating society in the intervening decades. In fact, her recent works are among her most exciting.
Linder certainly believes her montages, old and new, “seem more vital than ever,” as she said during a recent interview with the Hayward’s director Ralph Rugoff. “You hear about deepfake A.I. and women’s bodies being grafted,” she explained. “The head of a pretty 18-year-old can be grafted onto a pornographic body and sent out into cyberspace. We have very very little control over our images.”
Linder, Linder, The Most Sacred Monster of Photomontage in Her Time (2025) featuring portrait of Linder by Benoît Hennebert. Image courtesy of dépendance, Brussels.
In an attempt to wrest back some control, Linder decided to deepfake herself “before anyone else got to do it” for her two most recent works in the show, including Linder, The Most Sacred Monster of Photomontage in Her Time from 2025. A black-and-white headshot of a younger, frowning Linder hovers over a fiery red landscape and a woman’s naked torso. Scissors, a shell, a fork, jewelry, and a snake have been collaged together to make a crown-like headpiece.
The title refers to Salvador Dalí’s Shirley Temple: The Youngest, Most Sacred Monster of the Cinema in Her Time (1939), which manipulates the young actress’s image by placing her face onto the body of a sphinx with strangely pert breasts. It has often been read as a commentary on the sexualization of child stars.
Considering the darker possible applications of A.I. to humiliate women is not the only way in which Linder’s work continues to engage with our time. Nearby, Did he prefer her to us? (2023) prominently features a portrait by Hazel Gaskin of the former porn star-turned-media personality Mia Khalifa with a snake woven through her crown. It is a fitting tribute by Linder after so many decades spent studying the silent women who fill men’s magazines.
Linder, Did he prefer her to us? (2023). Photo: Hazel Gaskin, courtesy of Modern Art, London.
These days, Khalifa is a vocal advocate for sex workers’ rights and her portrait was taken just after she had spoken at the Oxford Union about how she learned to protect herself in the adult entertainment industry. In another portrait, I was to you a garment (2023), her strength is apparent as she wears Linder’s old breastplate, which the artist once used for boxing, a practice she adopted for self-defense.
“[Khalifa has] been taken to hell and back again for one film that she participated in during her early twenties, threatened with death, yet still she stands proud and loud,” Linder said for the exhibition’s catalog. “It was extraordinary working with Mia, witnessing her control of her image within the frame of a photograph and her innate understanding of her body in space.”
One constant in Linder’s work has been her use of what she terms the “scalpel” to dissect her source material before physically piecing together a montage. “When you have Photoshop, it’s quite an eccentric act to still print media and to cut it up and to glue it,” she said. “It’s quite a visceral way of working because of the smell of must in a lot of those magazines, or maybe perfume or pipe smoke.”
Installation view of “Linder: Danger Came Smiling” at the Hayward Gallery in London featuring The Pool of Life (2021). Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery.
One of Linder’s largest ever photomontages, The Pool of Life (2021), was recently blown up to become The Bower of Bliss, a billboard in the central shopping district of Liverpool to advertise the city’s biennial that year. It is filled with classic Linder motifs, including flowers out of body parts, butterflies, shells, and disembodied lips and eyes. Its name references psychoanalyst Carl Jung’s famous description of Liverpool, although he only ever saw it in his dreams.
The work was “on the front line of of popular culture in the city where I grew up,” mused Linder in the exhibition catalogue. “That work is my love letter to the women and queer communities of Liverpool.” She added: “Goods moved through the city at a tremendous pace, along with ideas, pop music or pilfered swag from the docks, football stars, fashion. And from Liverpool they went out across the country and often across the globe.”
Renewed interest in Linder’s work is proof that feminist art is only becoming more relevant. “When we look at artists’ careers, it can look like a glorious ascent,” remarked Linder, during the recent talk at the Hayward Gallery. “But we know that for various reasons, artists more often become visible, then invisible, then we become visible again. It often just depends on the culture at large, rather than our practice, which we sustain quite faithfully.”
Arguably, the artist’s ideas have only been sharpened over the decades, culminating in even smarter works. “In recent years we have seen the full force that is Linder explode in her depth of research and her realized ambitions that span photography and photomontage, performance, music, fragrance design, and fashion,” commented Linder’s gallerist Tim Blum. “She continues to mine subject matter and explore form—always experimenting, always illuminating new shadows of the collective unconscious with her radical feminist visual lexicon.”
Linder herself took a moment to reflect on the occasion of her retrospective. “The experience of regarding decades of work is quite sublime,” she said. “So many of my generation did not make it to this point.”
“Linder: Danger Came Smiling” is on view through May 5, 2025 at the Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre, London. More

Black womanhood—its joys, beauty, and power—is taking center stage at a major group show in Paris. Its mastermind? Multi-hyphenate Pharrell Williams, who curated the exhibition with a personal lens.
“Women have been such a force in my life—from my grandmothers to my mother, to my wife, my daughter, my nieces, my cousins, people on my team, and people on our extended bench,” he told Euronews. “Women are an amazing force for good in the world.”
Carrie Mae Weems, Nina (2009–25). Photo: David Regen. © Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York, Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, and Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin.
“FEMMES” at Perrotin Paris brings together nearly 40 artists, most of them women. Collectively, these works demonstrate the sheer breadth of Black creativity, while exploring threads from motherhood to identity.
These artists were picked, Emmanuel Perrotin told Wallpaper, “after several brainstormings and back-and-forths between Pharrell and my team.” And while the organizers could not include all the artists they hoped to, he added, “we have a large group, and a very good group.”
Installation view of “FEMMES,” curated by Pharrell Williams at Perrotin Paris, 2025. Photo: Claire Dorn. Courtesy of all the artists and Perrotin. © ADAGP, Paris, 2025.
The cross-generational show sees Betye Saar’s richly symbolic assemblages rubbing shoulders with Nina Chanel Abney’s bold canvases, with Esther Mahlangu’s abstractions sitting alongside Carrie Mae Weems’s out-of-focus photographic series. As compelling are the themes unearthed: Zanele Muholi and Henry Taylor’s pieces examine ever-evolving Black portraiture, while works by Malala Andrialavidrazana and Jess Atieno engage with collective history and memory.
Betye Saar, Illusion of Freedom (2009). Photo: Paul Salveson. © BetyeSaar. Courtesy of the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles.
Williams’s touch is evident throughout, the gallery pointed out. The visual language of pop culture—in which the singer, songwriter, and producer is firmly entrenched—is echoed in the exhibition. It’s in Tschabalala Self’s vivid screenprints, which complicate cultural representations of the Black body, and in Todd Gray’s photomontages, rich with layers of meaning.
Nina Chanel Abney, Marabou (2024). Courtesy of Nina Chanel Abney and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. © Nina Chanel Abney.
As creative director of Louis Vuitton Men’s, Williams has also overseen a display of textile artworks at the exhibition. Among them are Georgina Maxim, whose works repurpose fabrics to rewrite their histories; Tandiwe Muriu, who draws on the richness of African textiles for her eye-popping photographs; and Katia St. Hilaire, whose tapestries re-center Haitian history.
Kathia St. Hilaire, Mami ta yunai (2023). Photo: Guillaume Ziccarelli. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin.
“He has a very open mind to the art world,” Perrotin said of Williams’s curation. “We organized this show with a lot of freedom. And yes, [Pharrell’s] list surprised me. It [features] a lot of artists I had no idea existed. And that’s why we take curators, to discover things. To open the prism. It’s very interesting.”
Williams and Perrotin go way back. The pair first connected in 2007 at a Miami pool party, bonding over a shared love for Takashi Murakami and the Japanese art scene. Their shared attitudes were immediately evident at the 2014 exhibition “G I R L,” the musician and gallerist’s first collaboration. Named after Williams’s hit album, it was curated by Williams to include a host of heavy hitters such as Tracey Emin, Ryan McGinley, Guerrilla Girls, and Marina Abramović.
Pharrell Williams, Emmanuel Perrotin, Louise Thurin, and the artists: Alex Gardner, Robert Pruitt, Kenturah Davis, Lauren Kelley, Kennedy Yanko, Theresa Chromati, Naomi Lulendo, Georgina Maxim, Thandiwe Muriu, Kenia Almaraz Murillo, Emma Prempeh, Mequitta Ahuja, Kathia St. Hilaire, Zéh Palito, Todd Gray, and Eden Tinto Collins. Photo: Tanguy Beurdeley, courtesy Perrotin
As a follow-up, “FEMMES” hopes to lend greater visibility to the artists on view, while serving as a powerful affirmation of Black womanhood. “I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for a Black woman,” as Williams told Wallpaper.
“When we considered doing the show again, we remembered how much impact it had, and how I was able to leverage my platform. To give volume and visibility to female artists, how powerful it felt,” he added. “And as you consider everything that’s going on right now, how much more impactful it could be if we were to do this one even a little more focused than before. To be an homage to Black women.”
“FEMMES” is on view at Perrotin, 76 rue de Turenne, Paris, France, through April 19. More

For the next two weeks, the Nili Lotan menswear store in Lower Manhattan is getting an arty infusion. On its walls, where photographs once hung, are now displayed paintings and collages by Alison Mosshart, artist and frontwoman of rock duo the Kills. Some are small abstract works and photomontages; others are large text-based canvases. The effect, Lotan told me at the opening of the exhibition, is “just really free and bold.”
But even before Mosshart’s art descended on the store, the space already boasted a rock-and-rolling flair. Amid racks of Lotan’s understated men’s fashions sits a large bookshelf stacked with records and books about music, accompanied by two guitars resting on stands—most from the personal collection of the designer’s husband, musician David Broza. That Lotan would find a kindred spirit in Mosshart is unsurprising.
Installation view of “NO SLOW SONGS” at Nili Lotan. Photo: Sansho Scott / BFA.com.
“It’s not so much about the music, but it’s that free spirit on stage, the fearlessness, and the boldness, that I’m drawn to and inspires me,” Lotan said. “With Alison, it was her fearless self-expression in the world—and that laugh—that connected us to each other.”
This show, titled “NO SLOW SONGS,” marks Mosshart’s first solo exhibition in New York since 2018. But it emerges from her ongoing visual art practice, which has run alongside her music career. The sleeves of the Kills’s albums, for one, are as much a part of her and bandmate Jamie Hince’s creative project as their contents. For this latest outing, though, Mosshart had to work with speed; it was pulled together in about three weeks.
Alison Mosshart, NO SLOW SONGS (2025), on view at “NO SLOW SONGS” at Nili Lotan. Photo: Sansho Scott / BFA.com.
“Nili asked me if I wanted to do a show in the store. I was like, absolutely, any excuse to do any show. It’s so fun,” Mosshart told me at the show’s opening. “Then all of a sudden, it was real, and it happened. I had only a couple weeks at home to do it, but I just had so much fun being in my studio again.”
What dominates the space are her wildly colorful abstractions such as The Whole Animal (2025) and Skuxxx Rizzz (2025), mélanges of paint and photo snippets. Her expressive collages lean toward the surreal: both I Am the Way (2025) and Fast Break (2025) juxtapose snapshots of a drummer girl against images of dolls and stuffed animals. Prices for the works range from $1,900 to $5,500.
Installation view of “NO SLOW SONGS” at Nili Lotan. Photo: Sansho Scott / BFA.com.
There’s a spontaneity to all of it. Her Self-Portrait (2025), she said, started as a painting, before she “just kept adding things to it so you just couldn’t tell it’s me at all.”
Same with some of Mosshart’s earlier works, which she recently unearthed from under her bed in Los Angeles. Lined up on one wall of the store, the series from 2008 is all impressionistic marks created on paper with makeup. There are smudges of foundation, smears of mascara, and flashes of nail polish.
“These are all paintings I made in London and the oldest things I probably still have,” she explained. “I made them all with old, expired makeup I was gonna throw away. But then I was like, oh no, these are, like, the most expensive things in the world. So, there’s nine of them. I just love them so much.”
Installation view of “NO SLOW SONGS” at Nili Lotan. Photo: Sansho Scott / BFA.com.
Also included here are watercolors, vivid paintings on Polaroid photographs, and a large acrylic work that greets visitors at the entrance with the painted phrase “EXCEPT WHEN NO ONE IS AROUND.” The range of mediums is remarkable, with Mosshart seemingly working from instinct as much as play.
“It’s just doing whatever that I thought. I’m gonna do photo stuff. I want to cut things out. I want to glue things down. Now I’m just covered in paint. Now I’m gonna do watercolors,” she said. “There are no rules to this.”
Alison Mosshart, EXCEPT WHEN NO ONE IS AROUND (2025), on view at “NO SLOW SONGS” at Nili Lotan. Photo: Sansho Scott / BFA.com.
But there clearly is a restlessness at the heart of Mosshart’s art practice.
Case in point: her ongoing creative project, CHOP SHOP, now in its eighth year, for which she creates dozens of artworks for sale. Last year saw her produce a multitude of paintings on playing cards (also seen on the cover of the Kills’s double single “LA Hex / New York”); more recently, she offered a host of photo-based works (which is when I nabbed one). With a body of work like the playing cards, she noted, “I can constantly make them.”
Even the life of a touring musician (she’s fresh off the Patti Smith tribute concert at Carnegie Hall) can’t slow her down.
“You’re really, really busy, and then you have this really strange amount of time when you’re trapped with the idea that you can’t leave and you have to wait,” she said of life on the road. “That’s when I make—it makes me not go insane. My hands are never still.”
“NO SLOW SONGS” is on view at Nili Lotan, 183 Duane Street, New York, through April 17. More

The question of why, at the turn of the 20th century, modern art flourished in Europe has long been one of art history’s most intriguing. Was it exposure to non-Western influences? The advent of the camera? Or was a radical break with the past the only way to cope with a rapidly industrializing world? A surprising survey exhibition, “Gothic Modernity,” which debuted last fall at the Ateneum in Helsinki and is now on view at Oslo’s National Museum, posits a different theory.
The show argues that many leading modernists were paradoxically fascinated with the past, in particular the medieval Gothic tradition of northern Europe and Germany. Themes of morbidity, trauma, spirituality, and the uncanny that reappear in Gothic art have proven to have an enduring appeal, not least, it seems, for those faced with the uncertainties inherent to modernity. For many of these artists, Gothic no longer described a style belonging to a specific time or place that might be revived, but a sensibility and a richly generative aesthetic available to all.
Michael Wolgemut, Dance of Death in the «Nuremberg Chronicle, (ca. 1493). Photo: Ernst Bjerke.
As such, a through line of inquiry can be found between the work of artists like Albrecht Dürer, Lucas Cranach the Elder, and Hans Holbein the Younger, and those like Edvard Munch, Käthe Kollwitz, Akseli Gallen-Kallela, and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. In the short-lived arts periodical Pan, founded in Berlin in 1895, work by the medieval greats was printed side by side with illustrations by contemporary Nordic and German-speaking artists.
Many late 19th-century artists and writers are known to have embarked on pilgrimages to places associated with Gothic art, particularly in Germany and Flanders. They were particularly drawn to the art’s emotionally expressive nature as a portal through which to express otherwise elusive realities. This might also pave the way for an exploration of an artist’s own interiority, or offer a more penetrating glimpse at the alienation or crises experienced by others.
Installation view of “Gothic Modern: From Darkness to Light” at Norway’s National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design in Oslo. Photo: Ina Wesenberg.
For particularly heavy subjects, like death and suffering, some artists revived the medieval practice of printmaking, which could be all the more impactful for its direct, monochromatic qualities. Other artists embraced symbolism as a means of imbuing scenes with greater meaning.
At times dismissed as a movement lacking the sophistication of Renaissance innovations that pulled the West out of the Middle Ages and into the early modern era, the Gothic has never lost its beguiling appeal. Here is our pick of five of the best examples of artists who looked to the past in order to imagine a new future.
Edvard Munch
Edvard Munch, Ashes (1895). Photo: The National Museum/ Børre Høstland.
While himself in the throes of an affair, the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch painted Ashes, a vision of despair as two lovers separate after an amorous encounter. Like many of the artist’s male figures, the regretful suitor holds his bowed head in his hands. The woman, meanwhile, looks out at the viewer aghast, her white dress still unbuttoned to reveal a more racy, red undergarment. Gothic art might have inspired modern artists to explore complicated feelings around carnal desire and the perceived relationship between sin and sexuality.
Munch made several sketches of Gothic cathedrals and their rose windows, which allow divine sunlight to flood into an otherwise austere, dark space. The exhibition links his interest in these scenes with his impulse towards expressionist monumentality. Many old Gothic structures had been left to crumble into a state of disrepair but renewed interest in medieval art dovetailed with a spate of restoration efforts across Europe in the 19th century.
Marianne Stokes
Marianne Stokes, Death and the Maiden (1908). Photo: © Grand PalaisRMN (Musée d’Orsay)/ Hervé Lewandowski.
The Austrian-born Marianne Stokes became one of the leading artists of Victorian England, having settled in the U.K. after marrying an English landscape painter. She was greatly inspired by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which had held up medieval culture as possessing a spiritual and aesthetic integrity since the mid-19th century. Many paintings by artists like Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones revived medieval themes and literary subjects with a vivid, archaicizing style and plenty of symbolism.
Stokes’s Death and the Maiden is based on a popular trope in German Renaissance art, in which a young woman is seized by the personification of death, having developed out of the classic medieval allegory of the danse macabre or dance of death. In this dark vision, a visibly terrified maiden finds herself already in Death’s cold embrace. The trope had regained popularity in the Victorian era, with artist Evelyn De Morgan also making her own version The Angel of Death.
Akseli Gallen-Kallela
Akseli Gallen-Kallela, Lemminkäinen’s Mother (1897). Photo: © Finnish National Gallery/Ateneum, Antell Collection. Photo: Finnish National Gallery/Hannu Pakarinen.
Lemminkäinen’s Mother is one of the best-known masterpieces by Finnish artist Akseli Gallen-Kallela, depicting a scene from the Finnish national epic the Kalevala in which the hero Lemminkänen’s body is rescued from a river and reassembled by his mother. As she waits for the god Ukko to help her bring her son back to life, she is shown by Gallen-Kallela in the classic pietà style. Translating to “pity,” this depiction of the Virgin Mary cradling the body of Jesus Christ after his descent from the cross is one of the most frequently depicted subjects in Christian art and has become an archetypal image of maternal sorrow.
As the exhibition points out, familiar Christian iconography was repurposed by many modernist artists, borrowing its expressive poignancy while giving it new relevance. Gallen-Kallela also revived the traditions of medieval woodcut for sires like Flower of Death, Death and the Flower, a memorial to his deceased daughter, finding it to be a potent medium for the expression of inner turmoil.
Theodor Kittelsen
Theodor Kittelsen, She covers the whole country (1904). Photo: Nasjonalmuseet / Ina Wesenberg.
The Norwegian artist Theodor Kittelsen was admired for his illustrations of fairy tales and Nordic legends. He invented various characters, including forest trolls and the so-called monster of the lake, and introduced them to rugged landscapes in works that contain a mix of darkness and humor.
Folktales about the black death, a bubonic plague pandemic that spread through Europe in the 14th century, informed one series of illustrations. In these works, death is personified as the character Pesta, a sinister old woman who roams the world. In one misty scene, she can be seen flying like an owl over fir tops. In another, her head looms into view as she ascends the stairwell of a house, trapping the viewer on the top floor.
Käthe Kollwitz
Käthe Kollwitz, Death and Woman (1910). Photo: National Museum/ Andreas Harvik.
The work of German artist Käthe Kollwitz never shied from morbidity and suffering, even before she used her work as a medium through which to grieve the death of her young son in World War I. After this time, she repeatedly returned to the motif of the pietà, and many of her works honed in on bodily contact, whether tender or oppressive, to explore the intensity of human relationships. As such, Kollwitz also took the danse macabre to its furthest and most powerful conclusion with Death and Woman. The central female figure is trapped and pulled between her capacity to create new life and the inevitable tug of death.
“Gothic Modern: From Darkness to Light” is on view at the National Gallery in Oslo through June 15, 2025.  More

Tracey Emin, the former wild child of the contemporary British art scene, is the focus of a major new show in Italy, the first of its kind in the country.
A prominent member of the YBAs, aka Young British Artists, the renegade group that rose to international prominence in the 1990s, Emin is known for her absolute candor, for a confessional approach to her sexuality, and for conveying her inner emotional stakes. “Sex and Solitude” at the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, Italy, is no exception. Despite the wide 30-year range of works on view, Emin emphasized in a video interview ahead of the show’s opening: “This show is not a survey show. . .I don’t like doing survey shows or retrospectives. I like to be living now.”
Tracey Emin, I do not expect (2002) Sidney, Art Gallery of New South Wales. Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program by Geoff Ainsworth AM 2018 © Tracey Emin. All rights reserved, DACS 2025. Photo © Stephen White. Courtesy White Cube
The exhibition represents a deep dive into her wide-ranging work, including paintings, drawings, film, photography, embroidery, appliqué, sculptures, and neon installations. It’s curated by the director general of the Palazzo, Arturo Galansino, who sought to explore the titular themes through some 60 works on display. In her embroidered quilt I do not expect (2002), she talks about notions of motherhood and dying alone. Paintings convey pain and longing with sayings like “Hurt Heart” and “I waited so long.”
Tracey Emin Those who Suffer LOVE (2009) exhibition copy. Courtesy of the Artist and White Cube © Tracey Emin. All rights reserved, DACS 2025. Photo © Stephen White. Courtesy White Cube
In an interview between Galasino and Emin included in the show catalogue, he noted: “Your work has always been unapologetically open about sexuality, from periods of intense sexual activity to years of celibacy, and the profound impact of sexual trauma. How has your perception of sex evolved over the years, and how does it continue to inform your work?”
Tracey Emin, Hurt Heart (2015) . ACAF Collection by Yashian Schauble, Melbourne © Tracey Emin. All rights reserved, DACS 2025. Photo © White Cube (George Darrell)
In her typical honest manner, Emin replies: “Sex is very complicated for me, and it always has been. When I was younger, around fourteen or fifteen, sex was a vehicle, a way of getting somewhere, a way of moving, a way of exploring, a way of seeing the world through people, and feeling people. Then I realized that I was giving much more than I was receiving, and I wasn’t happy about it. At that time I went through a period of celibacy again. Throughout my life I’ve gone through long periods of celibacy and abstaining. The longest was around ten years. I think I might be going through another period of that now. This time it’s different because of all the surgery that I’ve had. My body is very affected by everything that has happened to it.” In 2020, Emin told Artnet News that she had been struggling with cancer. “I also think our body has memory,” continues Emin in the show text. “My body’s been hurt by love and by sex and by surgery and by rape and by sexually transmitted diseases and by abortions. It’s like that part of my body is quite numb now, because of psychological and physical reasons. Now what’s more important than sex to me is Love, definitely Love, it has to be Love. The chances of having both at the same time are pretty rare, especially for me.”
Tracey Emin, “Sex and Solitude,” Palazzo Strozzi, Firenze, 2025. Photo Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio © Tracey Emin. All rights reserved, DACS 2025.
A number of the works in the exhibition are presented in Italy for the first time, along with new productions, in different media, specifically created for the show. For instance, Emin created the neon work, Sex and Solitude, shown on the facade of Palazzo Strozzi. Artworks being exhibited in Italy for the first time include: I Followed You To The End (2024), a large bronze sculpture shown in the courtyard. Exorcism of the Last Painting I ever made (1996), a melancholic canvas that has the words “Somethings I just can’t live with and somethings I can” scrawled on it, is also on view.
Tracey Emin, “Sex and Solitude,” Palazzo Strozzi, Firenze, 2025. Photo Ela Bialkowska,OKNO Studio © Tracey Emin. All rights reserved, DACS 2025.
Galansino also asked Emin about her relationship to Italy and what it’s like to show at the historic Palazzo for the first time. Emin responded that she has shown her work quite a bit in Italy in the past, via her gallery, Lorcan O’Neill. “But I haven’t actually ever shown in an institutional space in Italy or had a solo show there. And Palazzo Strozzi is extremely beautiful, architecturally, historically, where it’s placed, the shape of the rooms, everything. It really suits me, it’s fantastic. And so, I’m excited about seeing my work in that environment and also excited in showing in an institutional space in Italy. And in Florence! It’s incredible! Steeped in so much art history, so much history. So, I’m also excited to be there. I have this thing, and I’ve had it for a long time: I won’t show in architectural spaces I don’t feel good about. My priority is showing in cities, towns, and countries that I feel good about. So, Palazzo Strozzi has everything for me I’m really excited.”
“Tracey Emin: Sex and Solitude,” continues at Palazzo Strozzi through July 20, 2025. See more below.
Tracey Emin, “Sex and Solitude,” Palazzo Strozzi, Firenze, 2025. Photo Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio © Tracey Emin. All rights reserved, DACS 2025.
Tracey Emin, “Sex and Solitude,” Palazzo Strozzi, Firenze, 2025. Photo Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio © Tracey Emin. All rights reserved, DACS 2025.
Tracey Emin It – didnt stop – I didnt stop (2019) Bruxelles, Xavier Hufkens Gallery © Tracey Emin. All rights reserved, DACS 2025
Tracey Emin I Followed You To The End (2024). Collection Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar, The Netherlands © Tracey Emin. All rights reserved, DACS 2025. Photo © White Cube (Theo Christelis) More

Though not all the art critics were part of the in crowd on this occasion, the buzz around Tate Modern’s spectacular “Leigh Bowery!” exhibition has been undeniable. It is the first major museum show dedicated to the legendary cultural figure—an artist, performer, fashion designer, club promoter, and T.V. personality. In celebrating Bowery in its 25th year, Tate Modern is making a bold programming choice to recognize the considerable influence of underground countercultures on contemporary artists.
Born in Melbourne in 1961, Bowery moved to London in 1980 and fast became a regular fixture of the city’s queer nightlife. He commanded attention for his flamboyantly unconventional dress and soon built up a milieu of admirers for his razor sharp wit. Embodying the outré spirit of free expression encouraged by clubs like Taboo, the Cha Cha, and Fridge, Bowery was drawn to these spaces for their crowds, which included some of his generation’s greatest artistic talents, like Derek Jarman, Isaac Julien, Cerith Wyn Evans, Neneh Cherry, Jean Paul Gaultier, John Galliano, Grayson Perry, and Peter Doig.
Although a museum show celebrating Bowery’s role as an artist and muse during this richly generative era is a breakthrough in terms of representation for long maligned forms of creative expression, the occasion is bittersweet. Bowery reportedly told musician Boy George that he hoped one day to make it into the Tate, but he would not live to see his belated retrospective. He died of AIDS-related complications in 1994.
Installation view of “Leigh Bowery!” at Tate Modern in London. Photo: Larina Annora Fernandes. © Tate Photography.
Among Bowery’s many performances that are spotlighted by Tate Modern, some saw him embraced by pockets of the traditional art world during his lifetime. In 1988, Bowery staged a five-day performance at Anthony d’Offay Gallery, during which he adopted a variety of poses, including draping himself over a chaise longue, before a two-way mirror, so that both he and his audience was watching himself. Each day Bowery wore a different one of his trademark “Looks” and the experience was turned multi-sensory thanks to the introduction of scents and a soundtrack of field recordings of insects mixed by DJ Malcolm Duffy. The presentation was followed up by a feature in choreographer Mark Clark’s piece Hetrospective at the same gallery the following year, as well as a performance with his close friend and later wife Nicola Rainbird at the Serpentine.

“Every day was a performance for Leigh, even if there was only an audience of one,” his close friend, the artist Sue Tilley, recently recalled for the “Leigh Bowery!” exhibition catalogue. “Of course, Leigh’s real stage was nightclubs. He always made a grand entrance, usually debuting a new fantastic outfit he had been making all week. We’d probably go to three or four clubs a week when I first met him–anywhere if we heard that there was something on. We’d walk in, get a drink, wander around to see who we knew, and then dance like maniacs until the lights came on.”

Bowery’s many artistic achievements are finally being institutionally recognized, but he also served as a source of inspiration to friends and collaborators. By many accounts, Bowery’s willingness to break with convention and keep pushing himself into unchartered and often taboo creative territory was a liberating force that influenced the practices of those who surrounded him. Here are five artists for whom Bowery was a cherished muse.

Stephen Willats
Stephen Willats, Are you good enough for the cha cha cha? (1982). Photo: © Stephen Willats, Tate Collection.
The conceptual artist Stephen Willats, whose work is currently also included in Tate Modern’s survey “Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet” (through June 1), met Bowery at the Cha Cha Club, which was tucked at the back of gay nightclub Heaven. It had a notoriously strict door policy, with co-founder Scarlett Cannon asking wannabe entrants “are you good enough for the Cha Cha?”
“At the time, [Bowery] was developing his ‘Futurist’ image and had already begun to evolve his approach as an artist in articulating the language of interpersonal presentation of the self, centering on himself as the artwork,” Willats recalled in the “Leigh Bowery!” catalogue.
Cannon and fellow co-founder Michael Hardy collaborated with Willats on this triptych of panels celebrating the club that featured detritus picked up off the floor at the end of a night and photos of frequent revelers, including Bowery. Amid squashed cigarette packets, beer cans, and a discarded hairbrush are handwritten accounts of nights at the Cha Cha. They underscore the club as a safe haven for those who felt alienated from mainstream society.
“Have become so used to mixing with gay people all the time, or being with people that are completely open-minded,” wrote Hardy. “You forget about all the narrow-minded people that really exist and thats the whole thing that I got into, you just forget about the whole straight world.” The work debuted at Lisson Gallery in 1983.

Rachel Auburn
Rachel Auburn, Leigh (1982). Photo: © Rachel Auburn.
The fashion designer and D.J. Rachel Auburn met Bowery when he visited her stall Vena Cava in Kensington Market, where she sold her own experimental designs and vintage pieces. “I had already clocked Leigh mincing around on Portobello Road because he had the build of an Australian rugby player but was wearing tweed jackets with big shoulder pads and shirts with pointy collars, wide trousers, and clogs,” she recalled for the “Leigh Bowery!” catalogue.
The pair regularly met up at Taboo nightclub and shared ideas about fashion, eventually debuting their own collections side-by-side at the “New London in New York” fashion show in New York in 1983. “When they ended up being sold at Macy’s, it was considered outrageous because people thought they were similar to what bag ladies wore on the street,” said Auburn.
“Leigh and I both loved art, film, literature, and fashion; he was the first person I could talk to about those things,” she added. “Whenever we went abroad, we would spend all our time in museums. Leigh particularly liked the Museum of Decorative Arts in Berlin. Leigh was influenced by the work of Viennese Actionists, which we saw in Amsterdam, and we both loved Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs. Art would stimulate ideas for designs. For instance, Leigh got the idea of the target motif on his early kaftans from Jasper Johns’s ‘Target’ paintings.”

Sue Tilley
Sue Tilley, Untitled (Portrait of Leigh Bowery) (1985-6). Photo: © Sue Tilley.
One of Bowery’s closest friends was the writer, model, and artist Sue Tilley. Her portrait of him was a true collaboration: Bowery added a grid of thread spools over the painting, referencing his habit of hand-sewing elaborate costumes to debut during his next night out. The work captures one of the sitter’s classic “Looks,” a provocative style of dress and body art that Bowery would adopt for a period of time. In this example, spots that had covered his face spread over his clothes and wig, which some read as a reference to the AIDS-related illness Kaposi sarcoma.
“His energy fueled the night as he approached practically everyone there, either to admire their outfit or to make some witty comment about how they should have tried harder,” Tilley fondly recalled in the show’s catalogue. “But whether it was a compliment or a put-down, no one cared. They were just grateful to have been noticed by Leigh.”

Lucian Freud
Lucian Freud, Nude with Leg Up (Leigh Bowery), 1992. Photo: © The Lucian Freud Archive. All RightsReserved 2024.
Bowery’s best known artistic collaboration was a series of portraits by Lucian Freud from the early 1990s. The pair first met at Taboo and then again when the older painter visited Bowery’s 1988 performance before a two-way mirror at Anthony d’Offay gallery. Of all the work to come from Bowery’s expansive creative universe, it is the Freud paintings that received mainstream recognition within the traditional art world. The sitter had known since 1988 that he had HIV, only informing Rainbird and Tilley, and the tender works strip the performer of clothing and body paint to reveal a man in a state of starkly vulnerable repose.
“They got the best out of each other,” Freud’s daughter Bella told The World of Interiors. “They were both ambitious to break boundaries and the [large] scale was something else. Leigh gave Lucian the idea to do that.” She added: “They had such a good time together and my father was very impressed by Leigh’s performances and he liked having someone who was up for trying new things. […] When he died I remember talking to Dad and he was crying on the phone because Leigh was so important to him.”

Charles Atlas
Charles Atlas, Still from Mrs Peanut Visits New York (1999). Photo: © Charles Atlas. Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York.
Bowery collaborated with the American video artist Charles Atlas on multiple projects. One, the film Hail the New Puritan (1986), is a fake documentary about the Scottish choreographer Michael Clark that was set in the east London council flat that Bowery shared with the artist Trojan. Bowery wore a futuristic, Hindu deity-inspired look with a kaftan and a painted blue face. His deconstructed fashion designs were also featured in a dance sequence set to music by The Fall.
In Atlas’s Mrs Peanut Visits New York (1999), Bowery can be seen strutting along the streets of Manhattan’s Meatpacking District in 1992 in a homemade bodysuit interpretation of “Mr. Peanut,” the Planters’ Peanut mascot in a flora dress and a top hat. All the while, the eccentric look draws surprised stares from passersby.
Atlas introduced Bowery to Marina Abramović, and the three collaborated on the performance Delusional, for which she wore a sheer “queen rat costume” made by Bowery and 400 live rats filled the stage. Though she is known for boundary-pushing work produced over many decades, Abramović describes Delusional as “the most insane work I have made to this day.”
“His impact was strong on me immediately,” she recalled. “I learned so much from him about shame, about extremes. He was a true original, unique and fearless.”
“Leigh Bowery!” is on view through August 31 at Tate Modern, Bankside, London. More

A week out from his debut photography exhibition, Yorgos Lanthimos is feeling equal nerves and excitement. The prints have emerged from his darkroom and were framed in Los Angeles, but he’s yet to lay eyes on them, the director told me over a phone call. “I haven’t seen them framed and on the wall,” he said. “I’m looking forward to go and install—something I’ve never done before.”
The show is a first for Lanthimos, but photography itself has long been threaded throughout his filmmaking career, which has produced some of cinema’s most darkly offbeat entries. He has lensed fashion campaigns and magazine editorials, photographed the goings-on on the set of his movies, and released three books of his enigmatic images. Recently, he told me, he’s been taking photos entirely removed from his films—of his travels through his native Greece, for one.
In fact, photography has turned out to be a distinct creative pursuit for him. “I’m creating a body of work that’s unrelated to my films now; it is more conscious at this point,” he said. “I’m focusing on that now. It has become an important thing in my life other than filmmaking.”
Yorgos Lanthimos, 2024. Courtesy Yorgos Lanthimos / Mack.
The L.A. exhibition, “Yorgos Lanthimos: Photographs,” brings together photographs from Lanthimos’s latest books, released in 2024: i shall sing these songs beautifully, which compiles photographs he shot during the making of Kinds of Kindness (2024) and Dear God, the Parthenon is Still Broken, featuring images from the production of his lauded film Poor Things (2023).
These are not your typical behind-the-scenes photographs. On Poor Things, Lanthimos captured the atmosphere of a film set—with its lighting rigs and constructed interiors—with an idiosyncratic eye, when he wasn’t trotting out large- and medium-format cameras to snap intimate portraits of his cast, including Emma Stone and Mark Ruffalo.
“It was a whole process in between setups, which we kind of enjoyed and gave us a little break within the hectic schedule of filming,” he said.
Yorgos Lanthimos, 2024. Courtesy Yorgos Lanthimos / Mack.
His Kinds of Kindness images, meanwhile, evidence a spontaneity. Shot at real-life locations around New Orleans, the production allowed the director to wander beyond the set and photograph uncanny cityscapes. His images of people, this time round, grow even more abstract—limbs appear detached and faces are averted—rendered all more dramatic in black and white.
“It was experimenting with how different it could look to the film,” he explained of the black-and-white compositions.
Yorgos Lanthimos, from i shall sing these songs beautifully (Mack, 2024). Courtesy of the artist and Mack.
These photographs are made even more mysterious when printed in i shall sing, accompanied as they are with poetic (and surprisingly comic) snippets of text that add layers of ambiguity. “he woke up from a wonderful dream. once his eyes were open he realised the opposite of what he dreamt was true. the two dogs were fucking,” goes one of them; “tears and hearts and smells and songs and hands,” reads another. “where are they going?”
The entire effect, I told Lanthimos, was that of an ancient text that defied singular interpretation. “We tried to avoid being too literal,” he said, crediting publisher Michael Mack for his help in sequencing the book. “You can’t know how other people are going to respond or interpret these connections. It was just a game of seeing these images and texts work together, what kind of a pause you left before you said something again with words, having some humor about it. It is very intuitive.”
Yorgos Lanthimos, 2024. Courtesy Yorgos Lanthimos / Mack.
The show arrives amid Lanthimos’s rich, award–winning filmmaking practice, recognized for its creation of dystopic worlds, so much like our own in their mundanity, in which characters grapple with realities equal parts absurd and brutal. Where Dogtooth (2008) and The Lobster (2015) unpack alienation and isolation, The Favourite (2018) and Poor Things explore how power can distort the individual. Throughout is woven his distinct visual language—wide angles, dramatic zooms, symmetry—that offers an unnatural slant on the most everyday of scenes, fueling the psychological discomfort.
While he was initially interested in filmmaking, Lanthimos said, he realized he first had to get to grips with photography as “the whole medium starts with still images.” Over the years, he picked up and grew proficient in the technical aspects of photography; he shot images on his film sets, some for promotional purposes, never believing they would become an “independent thing.” More interesting to him was the making of the image.
“I was just interested in the act of taking the picture—looking at it, the magic afterwards or the disappointment, making mistakes and trying to figure out how you can correct them,” he said.
Yorgos Lanthimos, 2024. Courtesy Yorgos Lanthimos / Mack.
It’s for this reason that Lanthimos has insisted on photographing on film—a process he termed “a joy in its own right” compared to shooting digital, which “doesn’t feel like I’m actually taking a picture.” There’s a gravity to taking an analog image, he added, as well as a depth in the film photograph.
“I have hundreds of film cameras, which has become a bit of a problem,” he said. “I always find an excuse to get another one, like in case one breaks or something.”
Photography has also inched toward the center of Lanthimos’s practice (he’s built his own darkroom next to his editing suite). The medium, he told me, offers him a new freedom in creative expression and experimentation. Where filmmaking involves greater financial investment and human resources—thus making it “more conservative in how the narrative is constructed”—photography invites independence, an openness, he noted.
“I like the fact that you can just take a picture of a tree, go home, process it, print it, and hold it in your hands and look at it the same day. You may either be disappointed or amazed or intrigued by what it is; it could lead you to start doing something that is interesting to you,” he explained. “The directness of that? I love that compared to filmmaking.”
Yorgos Lanthimos, 2024. Courtesy Yorgos Lanthimos / Mack.
Another thing photography presents to the filmmaker? A different way of seeing.
Throughout our conversation, Lanthimos repeatedly invoked “perspective,” whether in reference to his observer’s eye or the way narratives could be spun out of a single photograph. His first images on sets depicted “corners and perspectives of what was happening on set that were not related to the film”; his penchant for photographing his actors from behind emerged from his desire to “shoot things you never see, which is their back or their side, or while they’re doing something else.”
Yorgos Lanthimos, from i shall sing these songs beautifully (Mack, 2024). Courtesy of the artist and Mack.
Lately, Lanthimos, after living for a decade in London, has moved back to Athens, where he is seeing the place from “a very different perspective.” Armed with his camera, he’s been documenting its landscapes as they newly appear to him—a body of work that he is still processing. “I’d like to take some time off filmmaking and focus on that,” he said, describing the time it takes to understand the images he’s created. He’s speaking, as always, of perspective.
“Even if you just take one picture, there’s so much that you can experience again by the person that you are or the mood that you’re in,” he said. “I love that freedom of just showing one image and people can react to it. Even myself, I can see it differently at different times.”
“Yorgos Lanthimos: Photographs” is on view at Webber at 939, 939 S. Santa Fe Avenue, Los Angeles, March 29–May 24. More