Eliana Willis

Mike Nelson, who has exhibited in many top museums and biennials around the world for decades, is known for eye-opening presentations that immerse audiences into his strange visual universe. For “Extinction Beckons” at Hayward Gallery, on view until May 7, the British artist has brought his epically-scaled installations to London, in what has been billed as the artist’s first major survey exhibition.
The landmark show does not disappoint; from a gigantic maze of nearly two dozen interconnected rooms and corridors to a monumental installation made with 40 tonnes of sand, the show’s curatorial team and installation crew have completely reconfigured and transformed the gallery’s exhibition spaces in order to bring the artist’s unique vision to life. It took more than 30 builders and technicians over a month to install the show, which has been described by the museum as one of the most technically demanding exhibitions it has ever staged.
Alongside new commissions are many key works, some on view for the first time since they were originally exhibited. The Deliverance and The Patience (2001), a mesmerizing maze that was originally commissioned for a Venice Biennale 2001 collateral event staged at a former brewery building on Giudecca is on view, as is the enormous installation Triple Bluff Canyon (the woodshed) (2004), which is recreated with sand sourced from a river in Bedfordshire. Next to this surreal sand dune is a secret passage into I, Imposter (the darkroom), a meticulous recreation of the 2011 Venice Biennale installation that was drawn from his earlier installation in Istanbul Biennial 2003; also on view from the 2011 British pavilion is the dark red room of I, Imposter (2011).
There are many cultural and political references to be unpacked at “Extinction Beckons,” which is like a conceptual, time-traveling puzzle. While it may not be the most comforting exhibition on view, it is definitely a highlight in London so far this year.
See exhibition views of “Extinction Beckons” at Hayward Gallery below.
Installation view of Mike Nelson, I, IMPOSTOR, 2011. Various materials. Photo: Matt Greenwood. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery.
Installation view of Mike Nelson, The Deliverance and The Patience, interior, 2001. Various materials. Various materials. Photo: Liam Harrison. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery.
Installation view of Mike Nelson, The Deliverance and The Patience, interior, 2001. Various materials. Various materials. Photo: Liam Harrison. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery.
Installation view of Mike Nelson, The Deliverance and The Patience, interior, 2001. Various materials. Various materials. Photo: Liam Harrison. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery.
Installation view of Mike Nelson, Triple Bluff Canyon (the woodshed), 2004. Various materials. M25, 2023. Found tyres. Photo: Matt Greenwood. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery.
Installation view of Mike Nelson, I, IMPOSTOR (the darkroom), 2011. Various materials. Photo: Matt Greenwood. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery.
Installation view of Mike Nelson, The Asset Strippers (solstice), 2019. Hay rake, steel trestles, steel girders, sheet of steel, cast concrete slabs. Photo: Matt Greenwood. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery.
Installation view of Mike Nelson, Studio Apparatus for Kunsthalle Münster – A Thematic Instalment Observing the Calendrical Celebration of its Inception: Introduction; towards a linear understanding of notoriety, power, and their interconnectedness; futurobjecs (misspelt); mysterious island* *see introduction or Barothic shift, 2014. Various materials. Triple Bluff Canyon (the projection room), 2004. Various materials.Photo: Matt Greenwood. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery.
Installation view of Mike Nelson, Studio Apparatus for Kunsthalle Münster – A Thematic Instalment Observing the Calendrical Celebration of its Inception: Introduction; towards a linear understanding of notoriety, power, and their interconnectedness; futurobjecs (misspelt); mysterious island* *see introduction or Barothic shift, 2014. Various materials. Photo: Matt Greenwood. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery.
Installation view of Mike Nelson, Studio Apparatus for Kunsthalle Münster – A Thematic Instalment Observing the Calendrical Celebration of its Inception: Introduction; towards a linear understanding of notoriety, power, and their interconnectedness; futurobjecs (misspelt); mysterious island* *see introduction or Barothic shift, 2014. Various materials. Photo: Matt Greenwood. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery.
Installation view of Mike Nelson, Studio Apparatus for Kunsthalle Münster – A Thematic Instalment Observing the Calendrical Celebration of its Inception: Introduction; towards a linear understanding of notoriety, power, and their interconnectedness; futurobjecs (misspelt); mysterious island* *see introduction or Barothic shift, 2014. Various materials. Photo: Matt Greenwood. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery.
Installation view of Mike Nelson, Triple Bluff Canyon (the projection room), 2004. Various materials. Photo: Matt Greenwood. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery.
Installation view of Mike Nelson, The Amnesiacs, 1996-ongoing. Various materials. Photo: Matt Greenwood. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery.

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By 1986, Keith Haring was at the peak of his powers. But when tasked with creating an exhibition for Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum, Haring refused to remount old works, or even to lean on the celebrated visual motifs—the barking dogs, the glowing babies—with which his name had become synonymous. The New York artist wanted to create something completely new.
One of the results was Amsterdam Notes, a 125-foot black ink drawing that stands as one of the largest pieces Haring made for a museum. Nearly three decades on, Stedelijk is restaging the giant paperwork in its IMC Gallery, its so-called hall of honor, alongside two other works from the museum’s collection from May 26.
Keith Haring, Amsterdam Notes (1986). Photo: Collection Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.
Keith Haring, Amsterdam Notes (1986). Photo: Collection Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.
Keith Haring, Amsterdam Notes (1986). Photo: Collection Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.
“For art lovers, Amsterdam Notes is a contemporary Bayeux tapestry, and a holy grail for Haring fans. Since works on paper are fragile, they cannot be exhibited for long,” the museum’s director Rein Wolfs said. “Moments such as this are unique, and happen rarely. But, this summer, the door to the Stedelijk’s treasury is ajar.”
Amsterdam Notes captures many of the socio-political themes around which Haring’s art so-often centered. There’s the oppressive power of religion in crucifixes set alight, and sexual liberation in gleefully exposed vulva and a pair of men clutching each other’s phalluses.
But unlike many of Haring’s smaller works, Amsterdam Notes is not easily reduced to simple messages or stories and seems concerned with the act of looking itself, as offered in many-eyed heads, an imploding television, and a ghoulish mirror reflection. It’s a spatial composition, one that is also charmingly bizarre, filled with monsters, walking brains, errant limbs, and a fish, which Stedelijk speculates is a playful nod to Haring’s name, which means herring in Dutch.
Mural (1986) by Keith Haring on the Food Center Amsterdam. Photo: Hanna Hachula, © Keith Haring Foundation.
As part of the 1986 Amsterdam exhibition, Haring also spray painted a 40-by-66-foot velum for the show’s floor as well as a giant sea monster on the museum’s former art storage depot, which is the largest Haring made in Europe. It was revealed and restored in 2018 after being concealed behind aluminum plates for nearly 30 years.
“Amsterdam Notes” is on view at the Stedelijk Museum, Museumplein 10, 1071 DJ Amsterdam, Netherlands, from May 26.
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It must have taken many hands to rush the Bolognese Mannerist artist Lavinia Fontana’s most ambitious extant painting, a nearly 10-foot-long canvas from 1599, out of a burning building during the French Revolution. Smaller artworks would have been easier to salvage from the Palais Royale when revolutionaries torched it during the days of the Paris Commune, but still, someone thought to rescue Fontana’s The Visit of the Queen of Sheba to King Solomon. When it entered the collection of the National Gallery of Ireland the next year it was murky and darkened by smoke. And there it has remained for over 150 years, almost always displayed but never fully restored. Until now.
The National Gallery of Ireland has comprehensively conserved the work over the past few years, generating new insights into the practice and patrons of the painter, who was the rare Renaissance female artist to command prices equal to those of her male peers. At the base of an ornate clock held by one of the queen’s attendants in this Biblical story—which, in true Fontana fashion, is dominated by a female cast of exquisitely dressed characters—an inscription reads 1599 (a date previously unknown). And new theories have surfaced about possible real-life models for Solomon and Sheba, maybe the Duke and Duchess of Ferrara.
These discoveries, and others, have spurred the museum to organize a solo exhibition of more than 60 paintings and drawings, “Lavinia Fontana: Trailblazer, Rule Breaker,” opening May 6. It is the artist’s first major solo presentation in over 20 years.
Lavinia Fontana, The Visit of the Queen of Sheba to King Solomon (1599). Image: National Gallery of Ireland.
Fontana is known mostly for her impressive life story. She was the first professional woman artist in Italy working outside a convent or court system, and fully supported her husband and children with her work (which included commissions from nobility and popes). She was also the first known woman painter to depict female nudes.
Less is known about the technical side of her work.
“We tend to be, as scholars, preoccupied by women’s biographies, which of course are fascinating when we consider the contexts in which they were working in 16th- and 17th-century Italy,” said Aoife Brady, the National Gallery of Ireland’s curator of Italian and Spanish art. “But sometimes that preoccupation comes at the expense of close looking at their artworks and defining exactly what it is that makes a Lavinia Fontana.”
Preparing around half of the artist’s oeuvre to be exhibited in the show has produced new technical data, better equipping scholars to make firm attributions to Fontana.
There isn’t a firm consensus about how many artworks Fontana produced, but around 130 extant paintings are attributable to her. Given the wave of interest in the artist over the past few years, more people are eager to pin paintings to Fontana and her attributions are “a moveable feast at the moment,” according to Brady. “We’re seeing this massive reassessment of her oeuvre.”
Lavinia Fontana, Minerva Dressing (1613). Courtesy of Galleria Borghese. Photo: Mauro Coen.
This comes as Fontana has recently featured in major group exhibitions at the Prado, the Wadsworth Atheneum, Detroit Institute of Arts, and Milan’s Palazzo Reale. Several Fontana works entered museum collections within the past year: The National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. acquired Fontana’s portrait of musician Lucia Bonasoni Garzoni, for example, and the National Gallery of Victoria acquired the Mystic Marriage of St Catherine. The Getty acquired two Fontana works separately—a small painting on copper and the preparatory drawing made for it.
This swell of interest may seem sudden, but according to Babette Bohn, an art history professor at Texas Christian University and author of Women Artists, Their Patrons, and Their Publics in Early Modern Bologna, attention has come and gone for the Bolognese painter. “From my vantage point she’s always been famous,” Bohn said. “She received more biographies by early modern writers in Italy than any other woman artist during the 16th century.”
Thanks to these biographies, we know that she was born to a successful artist, Prospero Fontana, who was prominent in Bolognese society and trained her in his workshop. The future artist was born into the right family, and in the ideal location.
“Bologna as a city was a very special place, and that provided the perfect Petri dish for Fontana and her career,” explained Brady. Home to Europe’s oldest university, during Fontana’s lifetime it was ruled by an archbishop with liberal attitudes about both artists and women.
Lavinia Fontana, The Wedding Feast at Cana (c.1575-80). Courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.
Bologna was one major factor, but Fontana also had a supportive family. This wasn’t a coincidence, since her father proactively found her a spouse who would support her career (and help her negotiate with clients, something decorum prevented 16th-century women from doing). She married Gian Paolo Zappi, a man with good social standing and little earning potential, and their unusual marriage contract (to be exhibited at “Lavinia Fontana: Trailblazer, Rule Breaker”) stipulated that he’d support her in pursuing a professional career.
Before their marriage was cinched, Fontana painted Self Portrait at the Spinet (1577) and sent it to Zappi’s family as a testament of her skill. This visual proof of her breadwinning abilities proved true. One of her 17th-century biographers, Carlo Cesare Malvasia, pointed out that Fontana’s fees were equal to those of Anthony Van Dyck and Justus Sustermans.
What those male contemporaries didn’t have to contend with, though, was the challenge of working while pregnant and postpartum. Fontana gave birth 11 times between 1578 and 1595, meaning she was pregnant or post-childbirth for a major part of her professional life. Most of her work during her childbearing years (and she sometimes had to return to work sooner than was medically recommended, because she was her family’s earner) was of small- or medium-scale work—more suitable for postpartum recovery. On the other hand, some of her largest works date to the late 1590s when she was no longer having children.
The smaller scale works that were Fontana’s bread and butter were her portraits of important Bolognese figures, at first men and then by the 1580s the noblewomen of the city. She painted more portraits of women than either her predecessors or successors, focusing on their strength of character and detailed rendering of their clothing and jewelry, bringing a distinctly female perspective to female subjects.
Lavinia Fontana, Venus and Cupid (1592). © Réunion des Musées Métropolitains Rouen Normandie, Musée des Beaux-Arts.
“All the ladies of the city flocked in want of her,” wrote Malvasia, “considering themselves lucky to see her in the streets, or to have meetings in the company of the virtuous young woman; there was nothing greater that they desired than to be portrayed by her.”
Fontana’s portraits of women highlight one of her most distinctive qualities—her painstakingly accurate depictions of textiles and jewelry. Written contracts survive between Fontana and her clients showing that the artist sometimes borrowed her sitters’ jewelry, to paint it as accurately as possible when sittings were no longer necessary.
This attention to detail extended to garments, too. “She has this great understanding of paint and can use it like a weaver uses thread,” said Brady. “Just by manipulating lead white pigment and using it almost like thread, she applies paint in a way that’s very intuitive and almost craftsman-like.”
In the late 1590s Fontana moved to Rome, where she was a portraitist for Pope Paul V. Also around this time she painted Vision of Saint Hyacinth (1599), the first altarpiece by a woman to be publicly displayed in Rome, and the ambitious Queen of Sheba canvas that was later rescued from a burning Palais Royale.
As scholars and audiences look closer now at Fontana’s life-sized Queen of Sheba, freshly cleaned from the smokey veil that hid the subtleties of her features all these years, a greater understanding of Fontana also comes into focus.
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As collectors and curators ritualistically shuffled around Berlin, donning Moncler jackets during this unseasonably cold week in April, the mood of the annual Gallery Weekend Berlin felt, in any case, bright.
Spring is certainly here, and, in terms of the Berlin art world, it felt in some ways like the first real spring in years: after several seasons of largely locally attended editions due to the pandemic, Gallery Weekend now, is officially back on its feet. As such, many out-of-towners were spotted perusing the city’s 50 participant galleries, including collector Uli Sigg, Folakunle Oshun from the Lagos Biennial, Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea’s Marcella Beccaria, and Hiuwai Chu from MACBA, as well as Cusson Cheng, Para-site Hong Kong.
In the time between normal editions of the art event, Berlin has evolved, too. A new social energy pulses as four of its major institutions welcome new directors. This week, Klaus Biesenbach was touring the preview on April 27, affectionately documenting artists and dealers on his Instagram at various participating galleries. At Gropius Bau, Performance Space’s Jenny Schlenzka will be arriving this summer to take over the reigns from Stephanie Rosenthal; at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung is preparing for his official program unveiling in early June. Tomorrow, April 29, at the Hamburger Bahnhof, new directors Sam Bardaouil und Till Fellrath will host the annual Gallery Weekend dinner, attended by the nearly 50 participating galleries and scores of their invited VIPs.
The apparent influx has radiated back on the galleries, which have been perhaps Berlin’s most consistently strong suit over the years. Artnet News tied together a loose grouping three core themes that are worth exploring at this year’s Gallery Weekend Berlin, which opens today, April 28.

The Post-Internet Art Scene’s Eternal Returns
Timur Si-Qin, Untitled (2023) (sculpture) and Untitled (natural origin, 1) (2023) (wall work). Courtesy the artist and Société, Berlin.
One could argue if it really went anywhere at all, but, at least in Berlin—an incubator of the post-Internet art aesthetic that peaked during the 2016 DIS-curated Berlin Biennale—there was a small but noted hiatus. In due course, many of the artists associated with the scene have had celebratory comebacks; last fall, during the annual Berlin Art Week in September, Jon Rafman opened a pair of major exhibitions at Sprüth Magers and the art institution Schinkel Pavilion; at Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, video artist Ed Atkins returned to town as well. Given the city’s own history with the the aesthetics and discourse, artists working at this cusp of technology find an engaged and well-versed audience. For Berlin Gallery Weekend this year, the welcome home party continues with artists who intersect with that cohort.
At Société, New York-based artist Timur Si-Qin (who presented at the 2016 Berlin Biennale) has transformed the gallery into a darkened and serene semblance of a greenhouse using technologically-embedded nature, culled from memories and field notes of physical locations the artist has visited. He folds these disparate geographic sites together here into one all-encompassing environment for his exhibition “Natural Origin.” At Galerie Neu, through a new array of cozy sculptures, Olso-based Ynge Holen explores the contentious 5G networks which have already deeply infiltrated society and the landscape. Across town at Wentrup, German artist Britta Thie brings together a series of paintings depicting the backdrops behind the camera of the cinema industry, including solemn and sentimental portraits of the mechanical hardware—lighting, cameras, and other gear—that quietly drive, document, and populate film sets. More