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    Italy’s Newest Site for Contemporary Art Is Not a Swanky Architect-Designed Museum—It’s the Ruins of Pompeii

    On Friday, May 12, curators, art collectors, and politicians gathered at sunset at Pompeii’s Archaeological Park’s small amphitheater, the Piccolo Teatro Odeion, for the premiere of the first work of contemporary art to have been created in situ and presented on location: Wael Shawky’s new film I Am Hymns of the New Temples.
    The event launched the historic site near Naples as a magnificent new spot for contemporary art. The ancient city of Pompeii, buried under volcanic ash in 79 AD in the violent eruption of Mount Vesuvius and rediscovered in 1748, is known as a popular tourist magnet of an archeological site. Now, it’s also the latest addition to Italy’s growing landscape of cultural heritage institutions commissioning and exhibiting contemporary art.
    Launched in late 2020, Pompeii Commitment is a one-of-a-kind program established by the Archaeological Park of Pompeii and the Italian Ministry of Culture that commits, as its name suggests, to presenting new ways of contextualizing the ruins of Pompeii, a UNESCO World Heritage Site with 2.5 million visitors annually. The program acknowledges the site as a rich source of inspiration and material for contemporary artistic endeavors that has remained largely untapped.
    Andrea Viliani, creator and co-curator of “Pompeii Commitment: Archaeological Matters”, at the Archaeological Park of Pompeii. Photographer: Amedeo Benestante. Courtesy Pompeii Commitment
    The initiator and co-curator of Pompeii Commitment is the visionary Andrea Viliani, who is also in charge of steering Rome’s newly reopened Museum of Civilizations away from its problematic colonial legacy and towards a radical and progressive engagement with its collection. Viliani previously headed Naples’ Madre museum, the contemporary art museum of the southern Italian region of Campania, where Pompeii is located, and had already started laying the foundations for the Pompeii initiative during his tenure there.
    Active since its inception in 2020, the contemporary art program Pompeii Commitment has so far introduced several digital contributions by artists including Anri Sala, Alison Katz, Rose Salane, and Miao Ling, with upcoming digital fellowships and productions by Legacy Russell, Formafantasma, and Sissel Tolaas in the pipeline.
    “You’re about to see a masterpiece,” gallerist Lia Rumma told me earlier that afternoon during a small gathering at her art-filled Naples residence with views of the islands of Capri and Ischia. The veteran dealer has been working with the Egyptian artist Wael Shawky since 2018, and supported the production in Pompeii.
    Still of I Am Hymns of the New Temples by Wael Shawky. Photo: Hili Perlson
    Sébastien Delot, the director and curator of the LaM museum in Lille, France, also chimed in to tell me that he wasn’t going to pass on the opportunity to be involved with Shawky’s new production: “As soon as I heard is was happening, I raised additional funds.” The approximately one-hour long film I Am Hymns of the New Temples will be on view at Lille’s contemporary art museum later this year. Carlolyn Christov-Bakargiev, the director of Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea and Fondazione Francesco Federico Cerruti in Turin, arrived at the luncheon with a literal bang, as a gust of wind suddenly rose from the Tyrrhenian Sea and blew the front door shut, shattering its milk glass panels just as she walked in.
    Christov-Bakargiev is largely to be credited as the curator who brought Shawky’s ambitious practice to a wider audience when she included the first of his three-part epic Cabaret Crusades in Documenta 13, which she curated in 2012 in Kassel and Kabul. There, and in the ensuing two chapters, Shawky presented events and traditions connected to Egypt and the Middle East while questioning unresolvable contrasts of narratives—for example, in looking at the Crusades from an Arab historiographic perspective and using marionettes to portray historical characters.
    Still of I Am Hymns of the New Temples by Wael Shawky. Photo: Hili Perlson
    The new work I am Hymns of the New Temples continues his research into Greek and Roman mythology and how it corresponds to and overlaps with ancient Egyptian cults and traditions. After all, not only temples dedicated to Greek and Roman gods were excavated in Pompeii; the Temple of Isis, dedicated to the Egyptian goddess, with all its stuccoes, states, and frescoes, was discovered there in the 17th century.
    As the sun slowly set behind the ruins, and guests including collector Nicoletta Fiorucci, artist Adrian Paci and his wife Melissa, and politicians such as Massimo Osanna, director-general of all public museums run by Italy’s ministry of culture, took their seats in the ancient stone theater, Viliani and Christov-Bakargiev invited Shawky to talk about the film until the night grew dark enough to start the screening.
    “I wanted to take out the acting,” Shawky said when asked about his use of puppets in earlier works and elaborate masks in this new production. Here, Shawky uses real-life actors, but all wear ceramic masks designed by the artist and made by the ceramist Pierre Architta and the workshops at the San Carlo Theatre and the Fine Arts Academy in Naples. To complete the characters’ lavish, fantastical appearance, Shawky thought up costumes made of ancient San Leucio silks and other fabrics made by historical Italian textiles manufacturers.
    Still of I Am Hymns of the New Temples by Wael Shawky. Photo: Hili Perlson
    The film, which turns into a musical at times, is narrated entirely in Arabic, and takes the viewers through an abbreviated whirl-wind fable about gods, titans, giant cyclopes, demigods, and men. The colorful, almost psychedelic scenes filled with magical figures and animals were shot on-site in the small Odeon, the Praedia of Giulia Felice, the House of the Orchard, the Necropolis of Nocera Gate and the Basilica, the Temple of the Genius Augusti, and the Temple of Isis. There’s a hippopotamus and a crocodile as well, in reference to the murals of the Nile found in Pompeii that feature the semiaquatic animals. It’s a creation story that ends, much like the site that inspired it, with a natural catastrophe.
    “I question history, myths, and stories as a human creation,” Shawky told me after the screening. “My films always try to put everything on top of each other and deal with it, not in a cynical way, but in a very serious, precise degree. Not to the effect that you will really believe the stories, but you will believe and question them at the same time.”
    One of the many myths he attempts to unpack with this work is the common understanding of Pompeii in the Arab world as a type of Sodom and Gamora that was destroyed as punishment, and rediscovered as a warning to us all. “For most of the Muslim or the Arab world, they consider Pompeii as the example of the city of sins,” he added. “This is not part of the Islamic mentality, but it’s part of the Quran that there were many other cultures which fell into sin and corruption and were destroyed by God. That’s one of the stories I want to question here.”

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    Why Did Cypresses Transfix Van Gogh? A Show at the Met Museum Explores the Artist’s Many Depictions of the Symbolic Trees

    Vincent van Gogh’s most famous painting, The Starry Night, has made a rare journey outside the hallowed halls of New York’s Museum of Modern Art—but only a mile and a half uptown to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which is staging a groundbreaking exhibition focusing on the artist’s depictions of cypress trees.
    “From this show, you’ll get a sense of the importance of the close, considered study of nature as the backbone to Van Gogh’s art, and of the rich dialectic between observation and reflection that anchored his world,” exhibition curator Susan Alyson Stein told Artnet News.
    The trees, long associated with death and mourning, became a fascination of Van Gogh’s after he moved from Paris to the Arles countryside, in the South of France, in 1888—sparking both an artistic breakthrough and the mental breakdown that cost him his life in 1890, just a few months after his final cypress picture.
    “The cypresses still preoccupy me,” Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo in 1889, from the asylum in Saint-Rémy where he had checked in after cutting off his ear. “I’d like to do something with them like the canvases of the sunflowers because it astonishes me that no one has done them as I see them.”
    Vincent van Gogh, The Starry Night (1889). Photo ©Museum of Modern Art, New York, licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, New York.
    The Starry Night, of course, is most identified with its dramatic skies: Van Gogh’s bold brushstrokes animating the swirling clouds and sparkling stars into a bold vision of the cosmos.
    But dominating the lefthand side of the frame is a towering cypress tree, a signature motif of the artist’s that is the subject of a dedicated show for the first time.
    The Met has reunited Van Gogh’s beloved nocturne—on loan for the first time since 2009, when it went to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam—with its corresponding daytime scenes of A Wheatfield, With Cypresses, which feature equally animated blue-and-white clouds blowing past the windswept grasses and foliage.
    Vincent van Gogh, A Wheatfield, With Cypresses (1889). Photo ©the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
    The two versions of the painting, one from the Met’s collection and the other from the National Gallery in London, are being shown together—and with the Starry Night—for the first time since 1901.
    The final work in the show is another nighttime scene, the artist’s final rendering of a moonlit landscape and cypress beneath the haloed stars of what could be the Milky Way. Titled Country Road in Provence by Night, it is paired with A Walk at Twilight; both are from May 1890 and feature a couple walking through the foreground.
    Some works are quite cypress forward; in others, the trees are background elements, playing second fiddle to flowering peach trees or verdant fields. Throughout, Van Gogh’s confident mark making and bold use of color captivate.
    Vincent van Gogh, Country Road in Provence by Night (1890). Collection of the Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, the Netherlands. Photo by Rik Klein Gotink.
    Featuring 24 paintings, 15 drawings, and four illustrated letters, “Van Gogh’s Cypresses” includes loans from some 30 institutions and private collections.
    “These were all singular works for which their were no substitutes,” Stein said. “So of course, Starry Night was one of the key anchor loans. The National Gallery London’s second version of A Wheatfield, With Cyprusses was another. But the drawings were equally important, because drawings have to rest between venues—they can’t be exposed to light. Those were among the first works that I looked to reserve for the exhibition.”
    Vincent van Gogh, A Wheatfield, With Cypresses (1889). Photo ©the National Gallery, London.
    Those drawings, as well as the letters, also help dispel something of a myth about the artist: that the speed and ease in which he completed his works meant that they were the product of a sudden fit of inspiration, rather than the result of careful consideration and planning.
    “If you read one of Van Gogh’s letters, he’s defending the apparent spontaneity or impetuosity of his works,” Stein said. “He wrote that these pictures may have been painted quickly, but they were calculated long beforehand. And he went on that if people think I paint too quickly, then they’ve looked too quickly.”
    See more photos from the exhibition below.
    Installation of “Van Gogh’s Cypresses” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo by Richard Lee, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
    Installation of “Van Gogh’s Cypresses” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo by Richard Lee, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
    Vincent van Gogh, Landscape with Path and Pollard Willows (1888). Collection of Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation).
    Vincent van Gogh, Window in the Studio (1889). Collection of Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation).
    Vincent van Gogh, Cypresses (Les Cyprès) 1889. Photo courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum, New York.
    Vincent van Gogh, Drawbridge (1888). Collection of the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum & Fondation Corboud, Cologne. Photo by bpk Bildagentur/Wallraf-Richartz-Museum-Fondation Corboud/Rheinisches Bildarchiv Cologne/Art Resource, New York.
    Vincent van Gogh, Illustrated Letter to Theo van Gogh (Cypresses), 1889. Collection of the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation).
    Vincent van Gogh, Trees in the Garden of the Asylum (1889). Private collection.
    Vincent van Gogh, Cypresses (1889). Photo ©the Art Institute of Chicago/Art Resource, New York.
    “Van Gogh’s Cypresses” will be on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York, May 22–August 27, 2023. 
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    Frieze Forecast: Artists Opt to Either Ply Ancient Traditions or Explore the Outer Realms of the Future

    With Frieze week upon us, art amateurs and cognoscenti alike will be looking to see what styles and concepts are emanating from the New York City art scene. Historically, the fairs have been a reliable barometer; this time around, they match what’s on at major Manhattan institutions—and diversity in all senses is the name of the game.
    Four women artists currently have major museum shows—Wangechi Mutu at the New Museum, Sarah Sze at the Guggenheim, Georgia O’Keeffe at MoMa, and Cecily Brown at the Met—a showcase of identity, ideology, and practice that has been historically sidelined in the art world. The gloriously diverse visions of two of the four, Mutu and Sze, set a tone for the city at large, working, as they do, in surrealism, science fiction, futurism, spirituality, ritual, hapticality, and temporality. From this swath of modes, we can tease out a cluster of related themes that is presently bouncing all over the New York scene: celebration of craft and hapticality, spirituality and a return to ritual, and new mythologies and world-building. This overview of gallery shows and fair presentations articulates a picture of the New York City art scene in this moment.
    ektor garcia, crochet copper wire mesh (2021, detail right), which will be on offer at NADA New York. Photo: Robert Divers Herrick, courtesy of the artist and Rebecca Camacho Presents.
    Across the city, craft objects of all kinds—ceramics, textile, sculpture, assemblage—tell stories of touch and tradition, engaging in practices largely sidelined in art history. At NADA New York (May 18–21), Rebecca Camacho Presents will show delicately rendered copper-wire sculptures in the form of butterflies and chains by ektor garcia, and Maria Herwald Hermann’s boldly colored, impeccably hewn ceramic sculptures that reframe our relationship to domestic objects and everyday life. “There is a tactile, mark-of-hand thread that connects all the work,” Camacho says of all six artists in her presentation for NADA.
    Jeremy Frey, Loon (2015), Permanence, (2023), and Aura (2023). Courtesy of the artist and Karma.
    Over at Karma in the East Village, Jeremy Frey’s handwoven baskets (on view in the solo “Out of the Woods” through June 17) also engage an intimate and culturally rich handiwork, drawing on indigenous traditions local to the Wabanaki of the northeastern United States. In its first presentation at Frieze New York, which bows at the Shed May 18–21, is welcoming first-time participants including, Silverlens of New York and Manila, which will showcase work by Carlos Villa (1936––2013), a Filipino-American artist, activist, and beloved professor whose feathered coats and dynamic, swirling drawings draw on a diverse roster of non-Western ethnic traditions references such as Aboriginal feathered sandals and the patterns of Tapa cloth. 
    Carlos Villa, My Roots (1970–71). From the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase with funds from the Neysa McMein Purchase Award 72.21. Courtesy of the Estate of Carlos Villa, the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), and Silverlens (Manila and New York).
    This turn towards craft is akin to another kind of return: to ritual and spiritual modes of problem-solving. “There’s a lot of interest out there in spirituality, the occult, and astronomy—I think because we’ve just run out of solutions for the world ending,” says independent curator Ksenia M. Soboleva. Spiritual investigation and mystical play abound in “Schema: World as Diagram” at Marlborough Gallery, which opened last week in Chelsea and runs through August 15. Organized by Raphael Rubinstein and Heather Bause Rubinstein, this survey explores diagrammatic ways of thinking in visual art. Over 50 artists are sourced from a number of eras, many of whose work feels extraordinarily in line with their peers of today.
    Alan Davie, The Studio No. 37 (1975). © The Estate of Alan Davie, courtesy of Taylor | Graham, New York.
    Alan Davie’s brightly hued The Studio No. 37 from (1975) borrows symbols from a multitude of religions and cultures, such as the mandala and the ankh, to conjure “mysterious and spiritual forces normally beyond our apprehension.” The collective Hilma’s Ghost work to extend Hilma af Klint’s spiritual vision into the 21st century by creating drawings, a Tarot deck, prints, and here, a geometric painting that celebrate the artist through feminist and mystical ritual. Two incredibly detailed Nineties 1990s works by Paul Laffoley mix science, Christian iconography, Buddhist mandalas, and William Blake, all recasting reality through the artist’s visionary lens.
    Paul Laffoley, Geochronmechane: The Time Machine from the Earth (1990). © The Estate of Paul Laffoley, courtesy of Kent Fine Art, featured in “Schema: World as Diagram” at Marlborough New York.
    Further downtown in Tribeca, Bortolami has unveiled a presentation of Joe Ray—one of the few Black practitioners from the Light and Space movement—explores the cosmos in his show “Inside Out” (on view through June 17). His “Nebula” paintings, an ongoing series of intergalactic landscapes that he started in the 1970s, composed of aerosol and resin, suggest a melding of inner and outer space, as well as Afrofuturist possibilities. 
    Joe Ray, Mildred Ann (2023). Photo: ofstudio, © Joe Ray, courtesy of Bortolami.
    Futurism and new worlds and mythologies also seems to be on top of the mind fors of young artists, many of whom are working in an almost narrative mode, creating new mythologies and building new worlds. As part of Frieze New York, David Kordansky will present works relating to Lauren Halsey’s current installation  on the Met Museum’s rooftop, the eastside of south central los angeles hieroglyph prototype architecture (I). The stone face of the monument, which references the museum’s Temple of Dendur and Egyptian wing, is replete with images of the Watts Towers, graffiti, protest slogans, and other signs of Black urban life and Afrofuturism. Halsey opts for a new suite of digital collages and gypsum-based engravings for Frieze. 
    Lauren Halsey, Untitled (2023). Photo: Courtesy of the artist and David Kordansky Gallery.
    As is evident across the city, artists are creating new universes for us to live in, says Lubov gallery owner Francisco Correo Cordeo. “There’s a lot of imagining what the future is going to look like,” he says, “as well as the different versions of the future that can happen depending on what we do right now.” 
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    See Inside Meow Wolf’s Fourth Psychedelic Exhibition, Opening in the Dallas Suburbs This Summer

    Arts and entertainment juggernaut Meow Wolf has announced the name of its eagerly awaited fourth location, opening in the Grapevine Mills mall near Dallas on July 14. Titled the Real Unreal, the 29,000-square-foot, immersive, interactive exhibition will feature more than 70 installations with work by more than 60 artists, all building on the existing Meow Wolf mythology.
    Conceived by Wisconsin sci-fi and fantasy author LaShawn Wanak, the story for the Real Unreal is about a missing boy, a chosen family, and something called the “Hapulusgarrulus Lophoaquaflori.”
    To forge relationships with the local artist community, Meow Wolf hired Dallas muralist Will Heron as the artist liaison for Grapevine. The exhibition features 38 participating Texas artists, including Mariell Guzman, Riley Holloway, and video game designer XaLaVier Nelson Jr. Also included are a few Meow Wolf vets, like Emmanuelle John, Lance McGoldrick, and Nico Salazar (Future Fantasy Delight), who have now created artwork for all four locations.
    One expected highlight is work by Dan Lam, who was born in Manila and grew up in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Her neon dripping tentacles have won her close to a half-million followers on Instagram, and she’s building her largest-ever piece for Meow Wolf, a 16-by-16-foot installation in her signature rainbow hues.
    Meow Wolf collaborative artist Dan Lam in the studio. Photo by Jordan Mathis, courtesy of Meow Wolf.
    All the participants faced the challenge not only of incorporating their own work into Meow Wolf’s maximalist, kaleidoscopic display, but tapping into the narrative for the space.
    “It’s about finding the right artists who want to tell the stories we’re telling. We give the artists the theme, and let them interpret it their own way,” Kati Murphy, the company’s vice president of communications, told Artnet News. “It’s kind of an exquisite corpse. The stories are threaded through the art.”
    Originally founded as an art collective in 2008, Meow Wolf exploded onto the scene with the 2016 opening of the House of Eternal Return in Santa Fe, its first permanent exhibition. Funded in part by Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin, the house wasn’t just a maximalist art environment brimming with Instagram-friendly photo ops—the abandoned family home concealing mysterious portals to other dimensions was the first chapter in a complex sci-fi-infused universe.
    Meow Wolf collaborative artist Ricardo Paniagua in the studio. Photo by Jordan Mathis, courtesy of Meow Wolf.
    Then came the Las Vegas Omega Mart that opened in February 2021, a grocery store fueled by nefarious technology. That fall, the Denver Convergence Station, a gateway to a parallel universe where four dramatically different worlds converge, followed.
    These ambitious expansions were fueled by a massive round of fundraising—$158 million, to be exact—but were not without their growing pains.
    The original Santa Fe location unionized, reaching a contract agreement last spring after filing an unfair labor practice suit with the National Labor Relations Board. (The Denver location hopes it is close to finalizing its union contract, according to Murphy.) Plans for additional locations in Phoenix and Washington, D.C., fell victim to the pandemic, which also sparked a massive round of layoffs.
    There was also personal tragedy, with the death of Meow Wolf cofounder Matt King in 2022. A posthumous solo show of his paintings, “Matt King: Becoming Light” is set to open at Turner Carroll Santa Fe’s Container in September, and King’s legacy still looms large as Meow Wolf prepares to open its first location without him.
    But the company now appears to be on a strong growth trajectory. Ahead of the Grapevine opening, Meow Wolf will break ground on its forthcoming Houston outpost, set to open come 2024 in the Fifth Ward.
    Promotional imagery for Meow Wolf the Real Unreal in Grapevine, Texas. Courtesy of Meow Wolf.
    And, with each new location, the Meow Wolf mythos deepens. There are already little Easter eggs sprinkled throughout the existing locations that hint at ties between the three.
    “That’s something that’s going to continue to build and grow with each exhibition we open, connecting these spaces to each other,” Murphy said.
    Although guests are welcome to enjoy the art on a purely visual level, the mystery of Meow Wolf has been key to its success, inspiring diehard fans to closely examine even the tiniest details for clues.
    “Our Reddit is insane. They’re like investigative reporters who are dedicated to everything that we do, to the point that they look up our trademark and permit applications,” Murphy said. “It’s really wild how dedicated our fan base is, considering that we just have our physical locations without any preexisting properties or storylines.”
    The longterm plan will be to bring the Meow Wolf universe into other mediums that can be experienced without making a pilgrimage to one of the locations. The first step in that journey was announced in March, with the addition of a Meow Wolf-themed golf course in the popular virtual reality game Walkabout Mini Golf.
    Tickets to the Real Unreal are now on sale for $50 for general admission.
    See more photos from the forthcoming exhibition below.
    Detail of Dan Lam’s installation at Meow Wolf the Real Unreal in Grapevine, Texas. Photo by Shayla Blatchford, courtesy of Meow Wolf.
    Detail of Tsz Kam’s installation at Meow Wolf’s the Real Unreal in Grapevine, Texas. Photo by Will Heron, courtesy of Meow Wolf.
    Detail of Morgan Grasham’s installation at Meow Wolf’s the Real Unreal in Grapevine, Texas. Photo by Will Heron, courtesy of Meow Wolf.
    Detail of Meow Wolf’s the Real Unreal in Grapevine, Texas. Photo by Shayla Blatchford, courtesy of Meow Wolf.
    Detail of Meow Wolf’s the Real Unreal in Grapevine, Texas. Photo by Shayla Blatchford, courtesy of Meow Wolf.
    Detail of Meow Wolf’s the Real Unreal in Grapevine, Texas. Photo by Shayla Blatchford, courtesy of Meow Wolf.
    Detail of Meow Wolf’s the Real Unreal in Grapevine, Texas. Photo by Shayla Blatchford, courtesy of Meow Wolf.
    Detail of Meow Wolf’s the Real Unreal in Grapevine, Texas. Photo by Shayla Blatchford, courtesy of Meow Wolf.
    Detail of Meow Wolf’s the Real Unreal in Grapevine, Texas. Photo by Shayla Blatchford, courtesy of Meow Wolf.
    Detail of Meow Wolf’s the Real Unreal in Grapevine, Texas. Photo by Shayla Blatchford, courtesy of Meow Wolf.
    Detail of Meow Wolf’s the Real Unreal in Grapevine, Texas. Photo by Shayla Blatchford, courtesy of Meow Wolf.
    Meow Wolf the Real Unreal will open at 3000 Grapevine Mills Pkwy Suite 253, Grapevine, Texas, July 14, 2023. 
    “Matt King: Becoming Light” will be on view at Turner Carroll Santa Fe’s Container, 1226 Flagman Way, Santa Fe, New Mexico, September 8–November 5, 2023. 
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    Why Robert Pattinson Became the ‘Mascot’ for a Mysterious New Group Show at Chicago’s Renaissance Society

    A true head scratcher of an exhibition has touched down at Chicago’s Renaissance Society. Curated by artist Shahryar Nashat and critic Bruce Hainley, the show has no title and no press release—just a photo of actor Robert Pattinson in sunglasses and a cap, dining at a restaurant, accompanied by a cryptic explanation.
    “We met for lunch to continue our conversation, soon noticing the celebrity, incognito, taking a meeting nearby, and such serendipity prompted a reaction: Use this strange presence as a device to work through the current moment in relation to how bodies, whether living currency or undead, circulate, distort, unalive, and, yet, love,” Hainley wrote on the show’s website.
    That lunch was about a year ago, in a restaurant parking lot in Los Angeles, and Hainley and Nashat had met to discuss the possibility of curating an exhibition to coincide with the latter’s upcoming solo show at the Art Institute of Chicago. It’s become something of a tradition for contemporary artists to have simultaneous outings at both museums, but instead of a second solo show, Nashat was interested in collaborating with Hainley.
    “We started talking about the idea of a muse or a mascot, and we were like, ‘Maybe we should find this entity or person and see how things come together under that.’ By total coincidence, Robert Pattinson was having lunch at the same restaurant,” Nashat told Cultured. “I took a snapshot of him. Bruce and I looked at each other and were like, ‘There you go. He’s here. There has to be a reason.’”

    The British actor, who has been both a matinee idol—attracting legions of fans for his roles in the Twilight and Harry Potter film series—and an indie sensation, seemed to have the right kind of energy to build a show around. “Robert Pattinson is really a star rather than a celebrity,” Hainley said.
    The exhibition features work by contemporary artists Puppies Puppies (Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo), Karen Kilimnik, and Larry Johnson. The curators have also secured a loan from the Art Institute of an oil painting by the French painter Marie Laurencin, who lived from 1883 to 1956. It’s been in the museum’s collection since 1986, but this is the first time it’s ever been displayed.
    Marie Laurencin, Head of a Young Woman (1926). Collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, bequest of Maribel G. Blum.
    None of the artwork features Pattinson—but the Renaissance Society has exclusively promoted the show with photos of the actor (plus one of fans running their hands through the hair of his wax double at a Madame Tussauds).
    That idea of fan consumption of celebrity, even their physical body somehow beyond their control, is something that ties the works in the show together.
    But if you want to understand what’s going on in the exhibition, you had best get yourself to Chicago to see it in person.
    Installation view of the Robert Pattinson-inspired exhibition at the the Renaissance Society, Chicago, curated by Shahryar Nashat and Bruce Hainley. Photo by Robert Chase Heishman, courtesy of Shahryar Nashat, Bruce Hainley, and the Renaissance Society, Chicago.
    “People are so used to getting a show title, a press release, a list of names, or a description that they probably don’t ever read,” Nashat said. “As soon as you don’t conform to the ways information is usually circulated for reasons that just feel natural, you create mystery, but our intention is not to be mysterious. We want to let the things that matter come first—that’s what’s in the show. You have to be in the space, and then the thinking arranges around it.”
    The exhibition is on view at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, 5811 South Ellis Avenue, Cobb Hall, 4th Floor, Chicago, Illinois, May 13–July 2, 2023.
    “Shahryar Nashat: Raw Is the Red” is on view at the Art Institute of Chicago, 159 East Monroe Street, Chicago, Illinois, October 6, 2022–September 11, 2023.
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    in Street Art

    “Fire And Ice” by Pener in Vienna, Austria

    Street artist Pener just finished his latest mural entitled “Fire And Ice”  in Vienna, Austria. Pener has been one of Poland’s talented emerging artists working in abstract and deconstructive style.Great detail and color transitions create a fluid composition with layers and layers of deconstructed form. The linear details are impressive holding together the constant movement and transparent shapes. An impressive mural from Pener.Scroll down and take a look at more photos of “Fire And Ice”. More

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    in Exhibitions

    In Pictures: Josh Kline’s First U.S. Museum Survey Looks to the Future to Frame Present-Day Anxieties 

    “Prescient” is a word often overused in art speak, but when it comes to the work of Josh Kline, the adjective is actually accurate.
    Time and again over the last decade or so, the now 43-year-old artist has portended the ways in which nascent technologies and growing corporations would come to oppress the people whose lives they purported to improve. He’s turned Teletubbies into symbols of state surveillance; wrapped white-collar workers in plastic trash bags; and employed early deepfake techniques to make George W. Bush cop to war crimes, effectively using the former president’s penchant for historical revisionism against him. 
    These pieces and many others make up “Project for a New American Century,” the first U.S. museum survey of Kline’s work, on view now at the Whitney Museum of American Art. It’s a virtuosic presentation from one of the world’s most timely artists—one that captures the anxieties of our current moment even when it looks ahead.  
    Josh Kline, In Stock (Walmart Worker’s Arms) (2018), detail. Courtesy of the Whitney.
    Included, for instance, is Kline’s film Adaptation (2019–22), which envisions, in a not-so-distant future, a group of essential workers commuting to their jobs by boat in a flooded Manhattan. There’s also his 2014 sculptures No Sick Days and Packing for Peanuts, in which 3D-printed limbs scanned from FedEx employees are imprinted with the company’s logo—an almost comical literalization of corporate exploitation.   
    Indeed, subtlety is not a quality for which Kline is known. Viewers won’t walk out of the Whitney show wondering what he “meant.” But this legibility is a feature, not a bug; the urgency of the artist’s themes calls for action, not equivocation. And it’s intentional: “You shouldn’t need four years of study of Lacan and Deleuze and Adorno and whoever to understand art,” Kline told the New York Times earlier this year. “I want to create an art that’s accessible to the FedEx delivery worker or a doctor who doesn’t have that specific education but is interested in the society they live in.” 
    See more images from Kline’s survey below: 
    Still from Josh Kline’s Adaptation (2019–22). Courtesy of the Whitney.
    Josh Kline, Make-Believe (2017).
    Josh Kline, Desperation Dilation (2016). Courtesy of the Whitney
    Installation View of “Josh Kline: Project for a New American Century” at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 2023. Courtesy of the Whitney.
    Josh Kline, Energy Drip (2013). Courtesy of the Whitney.
    Installation View of “Josh Kline: Project for a New American Century” at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 2023. Courtesy of the Whitney.
    Josh Kline, Creative Hands (2011). Courtesy of the Whitney.
    “Josh Kline: Project for a New American Century” is on view now through August 13 at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. 
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    in Exhibitions

    A Dutch Museum Has Organized a Rare Family Reunion for the Brueghel Art Dynasty—And the Female Brueghels Are Invited to the Party

    Connoisseurs have learnt to differentiate “the Elder” Brueghel painters from “the Younger” generation and many have their preferences for the work of family scion Pieter Breugel the Elder. But this fall, art lovers are invited to enjoy all the members of this Old Masters dynasty as they are reunited for a new survey spanning an incredible five generations at the Het Noordbrabants Museum in the Netherlands.
    Roughly spanning the years 1550-1700, some 80 paintings will chart how one family of outsize artistic talent managed to keep innovating throughout the Dutch Golden Age. The exhibition will explore intergenerational familial connections and influences while also elaborating on the wider network of cultural activity, from significant artists like David Teniers the Younger who married into the family to the wider historical context of colonialism and global trade.
    Jan Brueghel the Elder, Vase of Flowers with Jewel, Coins, and Shells (1606). Photo courtesy of Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, Milan.
    Standout masterpieces by Pieter Bruegel the Elder include The Magpie on the Gallows (1568), his The Beggars of the same year which is travelling from the Louvre in Paris and a rare public glimpse of The Drunkard Pushed into the Pigsty (1557) from a private collection in New York.
    In other cases, close study of detailed miniatures on an intimate scale will introduce visitors to the tiny worlds built up by Jan Brueghel the Elder and his grandson Jan van Kessel the Elder, who he greatly inspired.
    Audiences can also expect to be introduced to some less famous names, including women members of the family like the artist Mayken Verhulst. Mother-in-law to Pieter Brueghel the Elder, she played an active role in the education of her grandsons Pieter Brueghel the Younger and Jan Brueghel the Elder.
    Her own practice, too ofter overshadowed by their achievements, included miniature illustrations and watercolours. She was named one of the four most important female artists of the region in Lodovico Guicciardini’s book Description of the Low Countries (1567).
    “Brueghel: The Family Reunion” opens at Het Noordbrabants Museum on September 30 until January 7, 2024.
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