Eliana Willis

Tyler Mitchell has unveiled his latest portraits of Black utopia at Gagosian Davies Street, marking his first solo exhibition in the U.K., and setting the stage for a busy season in London ahead for the artist. 
On view through November 12, the photographs in “chrysalis,” propose a counter-narrative for Black folks, which erases historical trauma, capturing youthful Black bodies in an idyll of nature and leisure, playfully surreal and serene.
From the Greek origin khrysallis, the name denotes the stage in a butterfly’s life cycle where, enclosed within a cocoon, a metamorphosis and maturation take place before it emerges in its final form.
It speaks to the essence of Mitchell’s show, which depicts Black men and women at the cusp of adulthood, and also finds a parallel in the artist’s career—Mitchell has rapidly matured since his debut as a commercial photographer in 2018, and is now a respected voice in conceptual photography, whose work will adorn walls at Frieze Masters, Saatchi Gallery and the Victoria and Albert Museum, all before the end of the season. 
Tyler Mitchell, Chrysalis (2022). ©Tyler Mitchell. Image courtesy of the artist, Jack Shainman Gallery, and Gagosian.
The photographs capture protagonists simultaneously poised and relaxed, whether in positions of rest, recline, and suspension, or mid-movement; swimming, splashing, and playing with the natural elements of land, sky and water. “Collectively, these become the figments of an imaginative and psychic state of being, one in which radiance, resistance, restraint, comfort, and full agency exist,” Mitchell said of his work in a press statement.
Part imagination, part reality, Mitchell’s cinematic dreamscapes create a space where Black-skinned bodies are free to exist in a way that they cannot always in contemporary America, positioning themselves joyfully in any scenario they please, unencumbered by social prejudice.
In Cage, a young Black woman lies, debonair, propped up by her elbows on the grass, legs crossed nonchalantly in the air, against a painted backdrop of garden enclosed within a white-picket fence. In A Glint of Possibility, a young male figure suspends from a tire swing, resting in equilibrium as he contemplates his reverberating reflection in the surface of a lake, while Treading shows a boy’s head emerging from the water, flanked by a cluster of balloons.
Tyler Mitchell, A Glint of Possibility (2022). ©Tyler Mitchell. Image courtesy of the artist, Jack Shainman Gallery, and Gagosian.
Though surreal, Mitchell’s illusory world constructs an optimistic vision, of subjects existing freely in the outdoor space, of a carefree and dreaming youth denied many due to historical, economic, and social exclusion. No work exhibits this quite like Mitchell’s Simply Fragile. Depicting a bare-chested young man leaning aback on a patch of grass near bordering water, he fixates a downward gaze, cross-eyed, on a beetle fleetingly settled on the tip of his nose, expressing a moment of harmony.
“Tyler grew up in Atlanta, so he’s thinking about Black relationships to the land, historically and present, and how those relationships are both real and mythic,” gallery director Antwaun Sargent told Artnet News, adding that the artist is thinking about “the duality around Black identity, and how different movements, Black gestures, have been interpreted in very different ways.” 
Tyler Mitchell, Tenderly (2022). ©Tyler Mitchell. Image courtesy of the artist, Jack Shainman Gallery, and Gagosian.
Indeed, juxtaposed with these images of subjects in harmony with nature are smaller ones set in diptych pairings depicting figures wading, swimming, and struggling in muddy waters, emanating a palpable sense of danger, that pervades the experience of green spaces, asserting the need to remain vigilant, and not, for example, tread in someone else’s yard. In the expressionistic The Heart, Mitchell depicts a boy half-submerged under a layer of sediment, lying horizontally with his eyes closed shut. In Rapture, a hand reaches out of rippling muddy water, implying a sense of struggle.
As for the triptych Protect from all Elements, it concurrently calls upon elements of both harmony and struggle, as a figure pulls a painted sky backdrop to shroud a coffin-like structure containing tilled earth.
The exhibition has positioned Mitchell, who has become an established name in the U.S., to break out in London. He will be one of the central artists in Sargent’s exhibition “The New Black Vanguard,” at Saatchi Gallery, and later this week will debut new works in Regent Park as ”the first contemporary artist to be commissioned by Frieze Masters,” according to Sargent. Along with curating a night of art and cinema at the V&A, these elements well set the stage for what Sargent calls the “London takeover of one of the defining photographers of his generation.”
“Tyler Mitchell: Chrysalis” is on view through November 12 at Gagosian Davies Street, London.
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With no shortage of world class museums, London usually boasts a good roster of unmissable exhibitions. For the art crowds that flock to the U.K. for Frieze Week, the city is putting its best foot forward with a bumper offering of Modern and contemporary art exhibitions.
Fairgoers who need a break the frenzied bustle and want to see more of what London has to offer outside of Regent’s Park and pop-up tents will no doubt feel spoilt for choice. Here is a round-up of nine of London’s must-see museum shows this week.

“Carolee Schneemann: Body Politics”Barbican Art Gallery, through January 8
“Carolee Schneemann: Body Politics” installation view at the Barbican Art Gallery, 2022. Photo: Lia Toby/Getty Images.
The first U.K. survey of radical American artist Carolee Schneemann, who died in 2019, introduces a whole new audience to her transgressive feminist practice. The Barbican Art Gallery has ample space to house more than 300 objects, including large-scale installations, that give a comprehensive overview of just how varied Schneemann’s output of films, paintings, assemblages, performances, scrapbooks and costumes was over her 60-year career. As the title promises, visitors will learn how Schneemann’s body was often her most enduring medium in a series of works that still serve today as bold challenges to a male-dominated art world.
“Carolee Schneemann: Body Politics”, Barbican Centre, Silk Street, EC2Y 8DS.

“Hallyu! The Korean Wave”Victoria & Albert Museum, through June 25
Installation image of Hallyu! The Korean Wave at the V&A. Photo: Ⓒ Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
This exploration of South Korea’s vast and multifaceted international cultural influence takes its name from the 1990s phenomenon of “hallyu”, or “Korean wave,” which refers to the global popularity of Korean culture. An overview of the country’s modern history leads us from war through military rule and into an era of rapid industrialization. With objects ranging from a 1980s sculpture by the video art pioneer Nam June Paik right through to many viral sensations from very recent memory, including K-Pop superstars, the hit Netflix drama Squid Game and Bong Joon-Ho’s Oscar-winning film Parasite, the exhibition proves that this mania shows little sign of slowing down.
“Hallyu! The Korean Wave,” Victoria & Albert Museum, Cromwell Road, SW7 2RL.

“Kamala Ibrahim Ishag: States of Oneness”Serpentine South Gallery, through January 29
Installation view of “Kamala Ibrahim Ishag: States of Oneness” at Serpentine South Gallery. Photo: George Darrell, courtesy Serpentine.
For her first solo exhibition in London, the Sudanese artist Kamala Ibrahim Ishag, now in her 80s, returns to a city that has been woven into her practice since the start. The most historic works on show date back to the 1960s, when Ishag was a student at the Royal College of Art, while other objects relate to a period of self-exile in London during the 1990s and 2000s. Sudanese life, history, spiritualism and culture are the primary themes running through her art, specifically as those subjects relate to the experiences of women. Among the newest pieces are two paintings, Bait Al-Mal (2019) and Blues for the Martyrs (2022), which both reflect on the devastating loses of the Khartoum Massacre on June 3, 2019.
“Kamala Ibrahim Ishag: States of Oneness,” Serpentine South Gallery, Kensington Gardens, W2 3XA.

“Hyundai Commission: Cecilia Vicuña”Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, through April 16
Installation view of Hyundai Commission: Cecilia Vicuna at Turbine Hall, Tate Modern. Photo by Matt Greenwood; © Tate.
The latest artist to take on the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, one of London’s hottest annual commissions, is the Chilean artist and poet Cecilia Vicuña. Using the same ancient Andean-influenced methods, her works range in scale from the tiny sculptures that make up the Precarios series to her vast textile installations, including Quipu Womb, an exploration of feminine energies which was recently acquired by the Tate. This latest commission, Brain Forest Quipu, uses found objects like plant fibre, rope, cardboard and wool to reflect on the destruction of the rainforest both as a driver of the climate crisis and as an act of violence against indigenous communities.
“Hyundai Commission: Cecilia Vicuña,” Tate Modern, Bankside, SE1 9TG.

“Maria Bartuszová” Tate Modern, through April 16
Installation view of “Maria Bartuszová” at Tate Modern. Photo: courtesy of Tate Modern.
In another of many firsts for London this week, the Slovakian abstract sculptor Maria Bartuszová receives her first substantial exhibition in the UK, just coinciding with the inclusion of her work in the “Milk of Dreams” curated exhibition at the 59th Venice Biennale. Giving a sense of the breadth of her exploration into sensual, suggestive and organic forms, more than 80 plaster works have been staged beside bronze casts and aluminum reliefs. The show also sheds light on how Bartuszová’s life was affected by totalitarianism and the Cold War, crucial context that highlights the considerable struggles that she overcame to establish herself as a pioneering woman on the international art scene.
“Maria Bartuszová,” Tate Modern, Bankside, SE1 9TG.

“Lucian Freud: New Perspectives”The National Gallery, through January 22
Lucian Freud, Bella and Esther (1988). Photo: © The Lucian Freud Archive. All Rights Reserved 2022/ Bridgeman Images.
In celebration of the centenary of the birth of one of the greatest 20th-century British artists, the National Gallery has brought together more than 65 of his best known works from the 1940s up to the 2000s, including portraits of his children, various lovers, the financier Jacob Rothschild, artist David Hockney, performer Leigh Bowery and Queen Elizabeth II. The location is especially apt because Freud had a special pass to enter the National Gallery during closing hours, sometimes even visiting in the night, and many of his historical influences, including Holbein, Rubens and Velázquez, can be found just a short walk away.
“The Credit Suisse Exhibition—Lucian Freud: New Perspectives,” National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, WC2N 5DN.

“Christopher Kulendran Thomas: Another World”ICA London, through January 22
Still from Christopher Kulendran Thomas’s film The Finesse (2022).
A new film, The Finesse, produced in collaboration with Annika Kuhlmann, is the centerpiece of Christopher Kulendran Thomas’ solo show at the ICA, a variation of which is also running at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin. Existing across multiple screens and a projection, the work takes us back to the early years of the internet, when the Tamil Liberation movement set up an alternative, cooperative global economy during the Sri Lankan Civil War. By combining archival footage with A.I.-generated avatars, the show prompts us to imagine radical alternative uses for technology in the present day.
“Christopher Kulendran Thomas: Another World,” ICA London, The Mall, SW1Y 5AH.

“Zadie Xa: House Gods, Animal Guides and Five Ways 2 Forgiveness”Whitechapel Gallery, through April 30
Installation view of Zadie Xa: House Gods, Animal Guides and Five Ways 2 Forgiveness at Whitechapel Gallery in London. Photo by Andy Keate.
A new immersive installation by Zadie Xa continues the artists long time interest in her country of heritage, Korea. Housed within a traditional “hanok” architectural structure, a range of sculptures, paintings and textiles revive many of the traditional Korean legends, ideologies and Buddhist shamanic practices that were left behind during the country’s rapid industrialization of recent decades. Among the highlights are the “Animal Guide” marionettes, including tigers, foxes and seagulls, who each have their own spiritual and cultural resonances.
“Zadie Xa: House, Gods, Animal Guides and Five Ways 2 Forgiveness,” Whitechapel Gallery, 77-82 Whitechapel High Street, E1 7QX.

“Objects of Desire: Surrealism and Design 1924-Today”Design Museum, through February 19
Salvador Dalí, Lobster Telephone (1938). Photo: courtesy of West Dean College of Arts and Conservation; © Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, DACS 2022.
The huge impact of Surrealism on art is well known, from Dalí’s clocks to Max Ernst’s experiments with frottage, but although the Surrealists were very interested in creating uncanny objects, their influences on design remain an area that has been under-explored. In a major new survey, the Design Museum brings together examples of interiors, fashion, film and photography—including the work of fashion photographer Tim Walker, design Christian Dior and musician Björk—to show how the same preoccupations with dreams, the absurd, subversion, and desire have tantalized and amused creatives throughout generations.
“Objects of Desire: Surrealism and Design 1924–Today,” Design Museum, 224-238 Kensington High Street, W8 6AG.
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Galleries in London are bringing their A-game—and many U.K. debuts for artists—during this year’s Frieze week, which may be the closest return to a sense of pre-pandemic “normalcy” the city has seen yet.
With travel restrictions relaxed in most part of the world, the U.K. capital is expecting an influx of international collectors, curators and artists. Add to that the frisson of competition brought by Paris+, the inaugural edition of the Swiss organizer Art Basel’s new art fair in France, and you have a recipe for some dynamic programming.
Here are the ten shows you should not miss between the art fair-hopping this week, from a tribute to the recently deceased painter Sam Gilliam, to some of the earliest computer-generated art.

“Garret Bradley: Safe”Lisson Gallery, through October 29
Garrett Bradley, Safe (2022), still, single channel video, HD (color, sound), 20 minutes. Photo: © Garrett Bradley. Courtesy Lisson Gallery.
“Safe” isn’t just the title of the American artist and filmmaker Garrett Bradley’s inaugural show with Lisson Gallery this autumn. It is also the title of her second installment in a trilogy of short films that explores the various dimensions of women’s lives. As a follow-up to AKA (2019), the first installment of the trilogy that examines exterior relationships, Safe (2022) takes a look on the inner life. The work is exhibited in the form of a three-channel video installation, and the film’s score fills all three exhibition spaces across the gallery, creating an immersive experience.
67 Lisson Street, London, NW1 5DA
– Vivienne Chow

“Anne Imhof: Avatar II”Sprüth Magers, through December 23
Installation shot of “Anne Imhof: Avatar II” at Sprüth Magers, London, 2022. Photo: Courtesy of the artist and the gallery.
Spanning all four floors of Sprüth Magers London gallery in Mayfair—the first to take up the whole building—this solo show of new works from the famed German artist is one of the must-see gallery shows this season. There are a lot of works on view: oil paintings, large-scale paintings on aluminum panels, drawings, audio-visual works, and conceptual installations. But its is not just about the show’s sheer size and volume. It is the unsettling scenes and narratives carved out by the seemingly oddly placed fitness equipment and gym furniture installed throughout the gallery that make it a unique immersive experience.
7A Grafton Street, London, W1S 4EJ
– Vivienne Chow

“Jean-Marie Appriou”Massimo De Carlo, through November 12
Jean-Marie Appriou, The Horse. Courtesy of the artist and Massimo De Carlo.
The solo show of the French artist Jean-Marie Appriou is the inaugural exhibition of Massimo De Carlo’s new London gallery in Mayfair. The space is located on the first floor of a Grade II–listed building dating back to 1723. Appriou, who lives and works in Paris, is known for his surreal sculptures of horses, which graced the entrance to New York’s Central Park for a year. This show, featuring a new body of work, is also the artist’s first solo show in the U.K.
16 Clifford Street, London, W1S 3RG
– Vivienne Chow

“Sam Gilliam: Late Paintings”Pace Gallery, through November 12
Sam Gilliam, Lilly (2022). Photo: © Sam Gilliam/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Pace brings a selection of art created by Sam Gilliam during the last two years of his life, from a suite of monumental paintings to smaller works on paper. The exhibition, which is Gilliam’s debut in the U.K., was conceived together with the artist before his death this June. The showcase of one of the most celebrated figures in post-war American art takes up the entire space of Pace’s gallery at Hanover Square.
5 Hanover Square, London, W1S 1HQ
– Vivienne Chow 

“Michael Armitage: Amongst the Living, with Seyni Awa Camara”White Cube, Bermondsey, through October 30
Michael Armitage, Mother’s Milk (2022). Photo: Courtesy of the artist and White Cube.
From last summer’s acclaimed show at the Royal Academy in London, to the recent exhibition at the Kunsthalle Basel coinciding with Art Basel, Michael Armitage has certainly had a great deal of exposure over the past 12 months. At White Cube, the famed artist is sharing the stage with Seyni Awa Camara, a Senegalese artist whose work he has admired over the years. While some of the recent paintings on view at the London gallery were previously shown in Basel, the juxtaposition of these works with a group of Camara’s terracotta sculptures in the gallery’s vast Bermondsey has added another layer of reading to Armitage’s storied practice. This is also the first presentation of Camara’s work in the U.K.
144-152 Bermondsey Street, London, SE1 3TQ
– Vivienne Chow

“Harold Cohen: The AARON Retrospective”
Gazelli Art House, through November 19
Harold Cohen, AARON with Decorative Panel (1992). Image courtesy of Gazelli Art House.
With all the excitement in recent months about generative and A.I.-generated art, it will surely be a surprise to many that Gazelli is staging the U.K. first-ever solo show dedicated to AARON, British artist Harold Cohen’s computer program that was producing its own artworks from as early as the 1970s until the artist’s death in 2016. Today, the collection of outputted art provides a fascinating insight into the developments of machine learning over several decades, as this retrospective takes us through Cohen’s creative journey.
39 Dover Street, London, W1S 4NN
– Jo Lawson-Tancred

“Teresita Fernández: Caribbean Cosmos”
Lehmann Maupin, through November 5
Installation view of Teresita Fernández’s solo show “Caribbean Cosmos” at Lehmann Maupin London. Photo: courtesy of Lehmann Maupin.
Teresita Fernández has explored the materiality of the Caribbean’s earthy terrain through a broad range of mixed media, including glazed ceramic, fired clay, copper and a sculpture of solid charcoal. The islands’ breathtaking natural wonders swirl into abstract forms so that even microscopic details can become a magical cosmic expanse. Viewers may be lulled by notions of tropical paradise, but never far away are references to colonial and commercial violence to the land.
1 Cromwell Place, London, SW7 2JE
– Jo Lawson-Tancred

“Tyler Mitchell: Chrysalis”
Gagosian Davies Street, through November 12
Tyler Mitchell, Cage (2022). Photo: courtesy of the artist, Jack Shainman Gallery, and Gagosian.
Aged just 23-years-old, Tyler Mitchell had already shot to fame after photographing Beyoncé on the cover of Vogue’s September issue in 2018. With dreamlike, tranquil beauty, his latest body of work, “Chrysalis,” presents Black subjects in settings that are undefined but idyllic—if artificially so. Tension might be introduced by the tyre on a rope, which suspends a boy just above a lake’s surface. Elsewhere, a tightly cropped picket fence could bring to mind conventional suburban safety… or containment. Large-scale works are interspersed with a series of smaller studies of men wading and struggling through mud.
17-19 Davies Street, London, W1K 3DE
– Jo Lawson-Tancred

“Alice Neel: There’s Still Another I See”
Victoria Miro Gallery II, through November 12
Left: Alice Neel, John with Bowl of Fruit (1949), Right: Alice Neel John (1933). Photo: courtesy the Estate of Alice Neel and Victoria Miro.
Famous for her searching portrayals of friends, families and strangers, Alice Neel never had any trouble capturing her subject. For the first time, however, Victoria Miro is bringing together portraits of the same sitter that were in many cases painted several decades apart. Inevitably, these revealing pairings show us how each person has evolved and changed in the eyes of the artist, as well as bringing to light Neel’s own stylistic development. The show includes studies of the gallerist Ellie Poindexter, Neel’s friend John Rothschild, her elder son Richard and her mother.
16 Wharf Road, London, N1 7RM
– Jo Lawson-Tancred

“Carolee Schneemann: 1955–1959”
Hales Gallery, through October 29
Installation view of “Carolee Schneemann: 1955–1969,” Hales London, 17 September–29 October 2022. Photo: Courtesy of the Estate of Carolee Schneemann, Galerie Lelong & Co., Hales Gallery, and P.P.O.W, New York.
Just a stone’s throw from radical American artist Carolee Schneemann’s first major U.K. museum survey at the Barbican, Hales Gallery takes us back to her roots by focusing on the four-year period between 1955 and 1959, when Schneemann was just a teenager. Among the works on display is a series of studies of a naked couple embracing from 1957, which was painted only shortly after Schneemann had graduated from her BFA at Bard College; the works bring to light how much Schneemann had been influenced by Abstract Expressionism at the time.
Tea Building, 7 Bethnal Green Road, London, E1 6LA
– Jo Lawson-Tancred
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Munich’s annual Various Others—the southern German city’s answer to a gallery weekend—launched its fifth edition last month. In a slightly unusual partnership, this gallery-weekend-meets-art-festival brings together private galleries and public museums for several weeks of openings and exhibitions.
The art event plays to the strengths of the local art scene, which has a robust institutional landscape, which has blossomed even more in recent years, with new directors at two of its main museums, Haus der Kunst and Kunstverein Munich.
Borrowing from the well-loved Condo format that has taken place in London and New York, Various Others features 19 partner galleries from abroad collaborating with their Munich colleagues. Some were given a carte blanche, like at gallery Beacon, where Société presented a solo display of Trisha Baga’s installation There’s No “I” in Trisha (through October 15).
Sperling, one of the event’s founding galleries, hosted Berlin’s KOW with a two-person show by Anna Ehrenstein and Andrew Gilbert (through October 15), an uncanny union of two artists who each explore power structures in very different ways.
And, not unlike Brussels or Vienna, Munich is steeped in collectors—and some of these patrons opened their doors to the public, with Sammlung Goetz and Pain Caspari hosting viewings.
Here are seven shows not to miss in Munich this month.

Pippa Garner at Kunstverein Munich
On view through November 13
Pippa Garner, Un(tit)led (Women Should Be Free) (No Charge). Courtesy of the artist.
California artist Pippa Garner gets her first solo exhibition at an institution in Europe, a survey of an ephemeral output of work that spans five decades at Kunstverein Munich. Her artistic career began during the Vietnam War, when she worked as a combat artist, documenting and interpreting the historic event. (She was known then as Philip Garner.)
The show “Act Like You Know Me” retraces Garner’s artistic production over the years through photographs (many of her sculptures and artworks were lost, given away, or reused for other projects). It is a tribute to Garner’s unique transgressive methodology of questioning American consumerism, the marketing of lifestyle, as well as gender, identity, and body politics.

Hans-Jörg Mayer and Kenneth Anger at Galerie Christine Mayer
On view through October 15
Kenneth Anger, Astarte (Anaïs Nin) (1954–66) Photo: © Kenneth Anger. Courtesy the artist and Sprüth Magers.
Together with Sprüth Magers, the Munich gallery Christine Mayer has brought together a dark and amusing combination of two enfant terribles: the German painter Hans-Jörg Mayer and the experimental filmmaker Kenneth Anger. Anger, a few years Mayer’s senior, had an outsized influence on the German artist’s practice. Though working in different media, Anger and Mayer are both self-declared Luciferians who mine this occult religion for their work, and that fascination pulses across this rather eccentric two-artist show. To accompany Mayer’s large, colorful paintings that seem to depict half-transformed human figures are are a trio of printed film stills from his seminal 1954 work Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, focusing on a freakish masquerade scene.

Imi Knoebel at Sammlung Goetz
On view through April 29, 2023
Imi Knoebel, 16 Farben auf Blanc de titane (1993). Photo: Johannes Haslinger. Courtesy of the the artist / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2022.
In Germany, the Minimalist painter and sculptor Imi Knoebel needs no introduction—yet an extensive exhibition, like the one at Sammlung Goetz, one of Germany’s most respected private collections, offers a refreshing view into the artist’s career, with museum-quality works and historical considerations. The retrospective, which shirks a chronological succession of work, spans five decades. Organized in collaboration with Knoebel and his wife Carmen, the exhibition features his well-known fiberboard paintings and geometric works made with aluminum, as well as rarely exhibited expressive paintings from the 1980s.

Paula Rego at Jahn und Jahn 
On view through October 15
Paula Rego, Untitled 2 (1999). Photo: © Paula Rego, Courtesy the artist and Cristea Roberts.
An exhibition of Rego’s work carries particular weight this year on the heels of her death in June, at age 87. Yet Rego’s paintings and drawings have a strong gravitas in any context. the show “Fragments of a Language of the Body” bowls you over with two floors of works by the Portuguese artist. (Coincidentally, perhaps, Jahn und Jahn announced this month that it will be opening a space in Lisbon, Rego’s hometown.)
The in paintings, sketches, and drawings on view offer unflinching depictions of difficult subjects and female figures undergoing various life milestones and traumas: suffering, pregnancy, ageing, abuse, abortion. Rego’s skill as an artist is representing such a vast breadth of human emotion from total vulnerability and subjugation to empowerment—even if the latter comes in the simple glance of a subject. Concurrently on view in Venice are several large paintings, given prime place in Cecilia Alemani’s Venice Biennale. It is part of overdue appreciation for an artist of titanic importance in the canon of portraiture.
 
Joan Jonas at Haus der Kunst
On view through February 26, 2023
Joan Jonas during a performance. Photo: Moira Ricci. © Joan Jonas / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2022.
The experimental, 94-year-old artist was finally given a long-planned show at the Haus Der Kunst. A major survey of Jonas’s deep and varied artistic practice—which began in the 1960s, when she helped create performance art as we know it today—has a particular poignancy given that it is a postponed project started by the museum’s former director Okwui Enzewor in 2018.
After Enzwor was ousted from the museum, his Jonas show (as well as a show dedicated to Adrian Piper) was called off, citing “cost” concerns. A show of work by Markus Lüpertz, a member of Germany’s near-monarchic male painter cohort, took its place. (Ironically, that show was organized by the curator Walter Smerling, who is known for murky financial dealings with German institutions.)
The Haus Der Kunst’s new artistic director Andrea Lissoni has brilliantly revived this show with his own vision, organizing it into open-ended themes and bodies of work. It is a fascinating way to wander through the work of an absolutely timeless artist.

Gabriel Rico at Max Goelitz
On view through October 15
A detail of Gabriel Rico’s Because Nothing is More Pleasant to the Eye Than Green Grass Kept Finely Short (99 cm) (2022). Photo: Studio Rico, Courtesy of OMR, Mexico City.
One of the newer galleries on the Munich art scene—and, now in Berlin, as well, where the gallery expanded to this month—Max Goelitz hosted a precise exhibition of work by Mexican artist Gabriel Rico, collaborating with one of Mexico City’s more notable galleries, OMR.
Rico, who is also represented by Perrotin, creates entrancing sculptures that are in an almost neurotically created balance, where disparate materials—wood, bones, neon rope, a rusted old horseshoe—are brought into new constellations. Each individual piece of these masterful compositions seem to be caught in a tension between their historical function—a playing card, a piece of a fishing tool—and the connotation derived from being part of a larger work.
To this end, on view at the gallery is a particularly striking piece from 2022—a large-scale, wall-mounted circle made from a ready-made arrangement of 41 different kinds of knives, some new, some old, some antique. The work introduces a tense kind of holy interpretation of society’s most basic tool.

“To Be Seen. Queer Lives 1900–1950” at the NS Documentation Center
On view from October 7 through May 21, 2023
“Transvestites” in front of the entrance to the Institute of Sexology, Berlin 1921. © bpk / Kunstbibliothek, SMB, Photothek Willy Römer
“To Be Seen” opens this week at the Munich Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism—often just called the NSDOKU—an institution that opened in 2015 on the site of former “Brown House,” the Nazi Party’s Munich headquarters. NSDOKU examines the history and impact of the Nazi party from the time of its formation to the present day.
The upcoming show will focus on the stories of Germany’s LGBTQI+ community, who suffered greatly under the Nazi regime. It will also focus on how queer life became more present in public life during the 1920s, at a time when progress was being made in the realm of human rights and social freedoms. This progress, however, was snuffed out as the Nazis came to power. The show presents historical archive material alongside contemporary works by artists including Maximiliane Baumgartner, Nicholas Grafia, Henrik Olesen, and Wolfgang Tillmans.
Find out more about Various Others’s programming on its website.
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In Los Angeles, the gallery calendar this season is packed with a healthy range of excellent work to see, from conceptual to social realist, from textile-based to figurative. There are two very different takes on studio portrait photography, as well as wide-ranging presentations by or devoted to beloved artists who’ve recently passed, plus a spate of galleries who are new in town (Karma, branching out from New York, and more to come). To get you oriented, Artnet News has compiled our top 10 picks below.

Kaari Upson, “never, never ever, never in my life, never in all my born days, never in all my life”
Sprüth Magers, through October 15
Kaari Upson, Portrait (Vain German) (2020–21). © The Art Trust created under Kaari Upson Trust. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer. Courtesy of Sprüth Magers.
Before her untimely death from cancer in 2021, Kaari Upson was a beloved fixture in the art community of Los Angeles and beyond, whose multidisciplinary practice evinced a dark humor and boundless imagination. Sprüth Magers presents her final bodies of work, including Portrait (Vain Germans), ghostly wall-mounted panels of both painting and sculpture that debuted during the most recent Venice Biennale.

Yukie Ishikawa
Blum & Poe, through October 22
Yukie Ishikawa, Impermanence—Domyaku Uruoi Okoru (2022). Photo: Josh Schaedel. Courtesy of Blum & Poe.
Yukie Ishikawa’s distinct style of painting is notable for its pointed deconstruction of Minimalism’s monochromes and tidy, right-angled grids, deploying curved and irregular lines in their place. Blum & Poe presents the latest in the Japanese artist’s “Impermanence” series, an ongoing body painted over previous works, sometimes adding sand to the paint for texture. Based on the ever-changing view outside her Hidaka City studio window, fine-lined grids form the ghostly abstractions of buildings that shape the urban landscape.

Shahryar Nashat, “Happier Than Ever”
David Kordansky Gallery, through October 22, 2022
Shahryar Nashat, Lover_18.JPEG (2022). Photo: Edward Mumford. Courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery.
Nashat makes intriguingly tactile floor- and wall-based sculptures, as well as paintings and video installations. In his second showing with David Kordansky, “Lover.JPEG,” Nashat coolly conveys the at times unsettlingly brutal aspects of love and passion. We see paintings of a cross-section of a chest cavity; skeins of viscous urethane dripping down from the ceiling, as if sweat traveling down a spine; while floor sculptures offer hints of a now-absent bodily form, like the imprint of a paramour’s body in bed.

Paul Mpagi Sepuya, “Daylight Studio/Dark Room Studio”
Vielmetter, through October 22 More