Eliana Willis

Pioneering light and space artist James Turrell counts Kanye West, Drake, and Kendall Jenner as fans. His ever-increasing portfolio of Skyspaces dots the globe. On October 14, though, Gagosian will unveil the largest James Turrell show to hit Europe in 25 years at their sprawling Le Bourget gallery, on the outskirts of Paris. Throughout its eight-month run, “At One” will survey the Quaker art star’s transcendental oeuvre, spanning works new and old from various series and mediums, including a few debuts.
James Turrell, Aten Reign (2016). Woodcut etching. © James Turrell. Photo by Peter Baracchi. Courtesy the artist.
Among all of Gagosian’s 19 spaces throughout America, Europe, and Asia, the mega gallery’s spacious single-story concrete exhibition hall in Le Bourget particularly lends itself to spectacles, from Richard Serra’s enveloping steel curves to Takashi Murakami’s oversized visions. For Turrell, the centerpiece of “At One” will be his never-before-seen Ganzfeld, All Clear (2024)—a rounded, all-white immersive pavilion meant to stimulate the ganzfeld effect. Inside, the lack of sensory cues will collapse time and space for viewers, as if “skiing in whiteout conditions, ascending into enveloping clouds while flying, or diving into the void of the deep ocean,” Gagosian’s release reads.
James Turrell, Dhatu (2010) from the artist’s “Ganzfeld” series. © James Turrell. Photo by Mike Bruce. Courtesy the artist and Gagosian.
“Echoes of such experiences occur when space is dissolved ephemerally in the Ganzfeld piece, All Clear,” the gallery added. “This occurs at timed intervals to prevent the disorientation from becoming overwhelming.”
“At One” will also debut Either Or (2024), a new addition to Turrell’s “Wedgework” series—the apotheosis of his interest in the “thingness” of light (which is, in fact, both a wave, and a particle.) Here, projectors create the illusion of tangible objects like floating cubes and suspended walls. Earlier standouts of this series, such as Shanta, Red (1968)—which Turrell created just two years after deeming light his primary medium—will appear in smaller adjacent galleries.
James Turrell, Rounded Up (2024) from the “Glassworks” series. © James Turrell. Photo by Stathis Mamalakis. Courtesy the artist and Gagosian.
Turrell’s “Glassworks” series of luminous computer-programmed LED panels will line the hallways between all these spaces. (Kendall Jenner has one one such work.) The selection in “At One” will bridge the aughts through today, including six Glassworks made this year that debuted in Turrell’s smaller exhibition with Gagosian Athens in May. This latest body of Glassworks encompasses every shape Turrell has used in the series so far. Aquatints and woodcuts from Turrell’s monumental Aten Reign, which the Guggenheim boldly installed in 2014, will also appear along the exhibition’s inter-gallery passageways.
James Turrell, Lap Desk (1990). © James Turrell. Photo by James Turrell Studio. Courtesy the artist and Gagosian.
And, because “At One” intends to mark Turrell’s first exhaustive—dare we say “museum quality”—exhibition in Europe in nearly three decades, it wouldn’t be complete without archival materials and some reference to perhaps Turrell’s most famous, formative opus: his still-unfinished land artwork Roden Crater (1976–). Even Kanye West has chipped in to help fund Turrell’s ambitious vision for this Arizona volcano, which has cost him at least two marriages since he began. Blueprints, holograms, models, photographs, a three-dimensional photo viewer, and lap desks related to Turrell’s efforts manifesting Roden Crater will punctuate the show’s disparate components.
“At One” is on view at Gagosian Le Bourget, 26 Av. de l’Europe, Le Bourget, France, October 14, 2024–June 2025. More

Wayne Thiebaud, appropriation artist? That’s the thesis of a forthcoming exhibition at the Legion of Honor, part of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.
“It’s hard for me to think of artists who weren’t influential on me because I’m such an obsessive thief,” Thiebaud told the New York Times back in 1996.
The California artist, who died at 101 in 2021, is of course best known for his still life paintings of cakes and other sugary confections. But he was also a dedicated student of art history, infusing his works with references to masterpieces of the past—both subtle and overt.
“He constantly, continually refers to himself as a thief—and yet no one has completely taken him at his word!” curator Timothy Anglin Burgard told me.
In putting together the show, he found dozens of examples of paintings where Thiebaud was riffing on the composition of works from the past.
Wayne Thiebaud, Tapestry Skirt (1976, reworked 1982, 2003). ©Wayne Thiebaud Foundation/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
There’s Tapestry Skirt, a 1976 portrait of a woman seated in profile in a colorful skirt that mirrors James McNeill Whistler’s famous portrait of his mother, Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1 (1871). The splayed out figure in Thiebaud’s Supine Woman (1963) recalls The Dead Toreador (1864–65) by Édouard Manet. And an array of tasty-looking parfaits in 1962’s Confections mimics the jars in a 1941 Giorgio Morandi Still Life.
Thiebaud would also look to abstract canvases, spotlighting a composition’s similarities with figurative objects. After visiting his hero Franz Kline in New York early in his career, for instance, Thiebaud returned to U.C. Davis in California and painted the gestural looking Electric Chair (1957). More

The U.K.’s annual Turner Prize exhibition opens at Tate Britain in London on September 25, presenting all four nominated artists to the public before a winner is announced on December 3. If a thematic thread can be woven through the suite of exhibitions by Pio Abad, Jasleen Kaur, Delaine Le Bas, and Claudette Johnson, it must be how each reflects on the ways in which the histories we inherit continue to inform our lives.
Founded in 1984, the Turner Prize once thrived on controversy, stirring up heated debate about the nature of contemporary art while spotlighting future titans like Anish Kapoor, Antony Gormley, Damien Hirst, and Steven McQueen. Now in its 40th year, the award is a more low-key affair but continues to recognize important achievements by artists either born or working in Britain.
The winner will receive £25,000 ($31,000), with a further £10,000 ($12,500) for each runner-up. Last year the award went to Jesse Darling.
Installation view of Claudette Johnson, Protection (2024) and Friends in Green + Red on Yellow (2023) in “Turner Prize 2024” at Tate Britain from September 25, 2024 – February 16, 2025. Photo: Josh Croll, © Tate Photography.
The standout nominee this year is portrait painter Claudette Johnson, who was selected for two exhibitions from 2023: “Presence” at the Courtauld Gallery in London and “Drawn Out” at Ortuzar Projects in New York. The 64 year old artist emerged as part of the BLK Art Group in Wolverhampton in the 1980s but has only recently gained widespread renown after taking a multi-decade break from her practice.
In Friends in Green + Red on Yellow (2023), Johnson captures a charming sense of quiet camaraderie between her two sons. A new work, Protection (2024), is the latest of a series of self-portraits like Figure with Figurine (2019) that reference Picasso’s Les Demoiselles D’Avignon (1907) in their arrangement and use of space. Rather than othering West African sculptures and masks, however, Johnson explores her own relationship to these objects as a Black British woman.
Installation view of Jasleen Kaur’s presentation in “Turner Prize 2024” at Tate Britain from September 25, 2024 – February 16, 2025. Photo: Josh Croll, © Tate Photography.
Nominated for “Alter Altar” at Tramway in Glasgow, Jasleen Kaur’s show layers found material to create an impressively evocative and fondly humorous record of her experiences growing up in Scotland as the daughter of Indian parents. The most literal example is an untitled series of salvaged family photographs that have been encased in resin stained the lurid orange of Irn Bru, the quintessential Scottish soda, and inlaid with torn scraps of chapati bread.
Which other objects store cultural memory? Among the everyday detritus on view is an open packet of soft mints, turmeric-stained fake nails, balls of hair, and old flyers for the Indian Workers Union. An unexpected poignance is introduced by the central installation of a vintage Red Ford Mk3 Escort Cabriolet XR3i which Kaur said represents her “dad’s first car and his migrant desires.” These elements are all viewed within the context of sound work Yearnings, featuring the artist’s own vocals in the style of the Muslim Rababi tradition, the practice of which she sees as an act of political resistance.
Installation view of Pio Abad’s presentation in “Turner Prize 2024” at Tate Britain from September 25, 2024 – February 16, 2025. Photo: Josh Croll, © Tate Photography.
If the gallery dedicated to Pio Abad has the unmistakeable atmosphere of a museum, that’s intentional. Nominated for “To Those Sitting in Darkness” at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, the Filipino-born artist has delved into the legacy of the many cultural artifacts that have been locked away in the store rooms of Western museums or flagrantly mislabelled for decades.
Abad’s meticulously researched artworks take these “icons of loss, of personal grief, of colonial grief,” out of the darkness and revisit long unexamined histories. In one example, a 1692 etching advertises the chance to view Giolo, a Filipino man who bought as a slave and trafficked to England, where he was put on display as a curiosity before he died of smallpox. It is displayed beside Abad’s Giolo’s Lament (2023), a series of laser engravings on pink marble that in sequence depict the man’s arm reaching out.
“Giolo is at once monument an flesh, etching the forgotten man into permanence but also reminding us of his fragile humanity,” said Abad.
Installation view of Delaine Le Bas’s presentation in “Turner Prize 2024” at Tate Britain from September 25, 2024 – February 16, 2025. Photo: Josh Croll, © Tate Photography.
A clear conceptual underpinning for the immersive installation by Delaine Le Bas is more elusive than it is with the other three artists, though the work apparently delves into the artist’s Roma heritage. She was selected by the judges for the show “Incipit Vita Nova. Here Begins The New Life/ A New Life Is Beginning,” at Secession in Vienna. The constructions of loose fabric decorated with colorful swathes of paint and fantastical figures will certainly be fun for attendees to walk through, but on their way out they are met with an ominous maxim scrawled in blood red: “know thyself.”
“Turner Prize 2024” is on view at Tate Britain through February 16, 2025. More

Next fall, visiting the Design Museum in London will be like stepping aboard The Darjeeling Limited, when the institution hosts Wes Anderson’s first museum showcase.
The 55 year old director, who was born in Texas to an archaeologist and an advertising professional, has already staged several shows celebrating his visionary film career, which began with cult classics like Bottle Rocket (1996) and Rushmore (1998) before producing award-winners like The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) and the animated Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009). Anderson himself, however, just won his first Oscar earlier this year, when his adaption of Roald Dahl’s The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar scored a nod for best live-action short film. Now, it seems, Anderson is ready to crack open his archives.
The taut innocence and angst of Anderson’s summer camp tale Moonrise Kingdom (2012) perhaps best embodies his vibrantly repressed twee aesthetic, which has transcended film to become an outright meme around whimsy. Anderson has woven in and out of fine art while honing that aesthetic. During work on The French Dispatch (2021), even he employed actual painters to produce the art of his imprisoned Benicio del Toro, star of the film’s second vignette.
Interior of the Design Museum © Rob Harris for the Design Museum. Courtesy of the Design Museum.
Anderson already has curatorial experience under his belt, too. In 2018, for instance, he and his wife Juman Malouf took over Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum amidst the institution’s ongoing experiment inviting contemporary creatives like Ed Ruscha to reinterpret their collection. Anderson signed off on a presentation of puppets from The Isle of Dogs (2018) that same year, and authorized a pop up show of the delightfully detailed sets from Asteroid City (2023) after its release. Both spectacles took shape on London’s Strand.
For his comprehensive retrospective, though, the auteur is working with American Empirical Pictures, la Cinémathèque française, and the Design Museum to offer props, costumes, and behind-the-scenes ephemera straight from his personal collection.
“Each Wes Anderson picture plunges the viewer into a world with its own codes, motifs, references, and sumptuous and instantly recognizable sets and costumes,” the press materials read. “Visitors have the opportunity to delve into the art of his complete filmography, examining his inspirations, homages, and the meticulous craftsmanship that define his work.”
In addition to the Anderson show, the museum has also announced a glitzy homage to the iconic London club Blitz, as well as a group show of art, architecture, and technology around the “more than human” movement.
In the meantime, the public is awaiting Anderson’s 12th film, The Phoenician Scheme, which will mark Michael Cera’s first outing with Anderson. Filming has wrapped, and the movie should hit theaters within the next two years—perhaps in time to align with “Wes Anderson” at the Design Museum.
“Wes Anderson: The Exhibition” will be on view at the Design Museum, 224–238 Kensington High St, London, the U.K., November 21, 2025–May 4. 2026. More

Leonard Hilton McGurr was a New York City kid, growing up on West 103rd Street and Broadway, when he first picked up a can of spray paint in the early 1970s. He adopted the moniker Futura 2000, and 50 years later, the graffiti writer-turned fine artist has his first museum show in his home city, courtesy of the Bronx Museum.
“It feels like a return,” Futura told me, reminiscing about his youth painting subway cars in the Bronx.
The subway features heavily in the show, with part of the museum made up with replica MTA signs and ticket booth, as if you were about to board the train. It is harkening back to the early years of the artist’s career, when he would tag cars and then sit on “the bench,” as fellow graffiti artists called it, to watch their handiwork go by on the Bronx’s elevated lines.
“Part of the mystique of graffiti at that time was the citywide exploration and the discovery of all these neighborhoods and areas of the city where the subway lines start and end,” Futura said.
Photo of Futura 2000 and his son (1980s). Photo courtesy of Futura 2000.
The train yards in the Bronx (and other boroughs) became hot spots for graffiti writers like Futura as the burgeoning movement grew from kids armed with just magic markers or a can or two of spray paint to full-fledged artists creating increasingly elaborate designs that would cover the full subway car.
“At 15, I was not considering myself an artist,” Futura admitted. “I was simply making my mark.”
Futura 2000 in Barcelona in 1991. Photo by Janette Beckman, courtesy of Futura 2000.
Developing a real artistic style—one that’s been likened to Wassily Kandinsky, an artist Futura had never head of as a young man—didn’t come until years later.
In 1973, Futura and a friend got caught in a fire in a subway tunnel. The friend was badly injured, and the incident prompted Futura to enlist in the military. But when his service was done in ’78, it wasn’t long before the graffiti world came calling.
“I met up with some of my old graffiti friends, and they were like, ‘you won’t believe what’s going on underground right now,’” Futura recalled.
Futura 2000, Colorforms (1991). Collection of Patrick Lerouge.
He was blown away by the work being done by artists like Phase 2, Dondi, Blade, Zephyr, and Lee Quinones, and was inspired to try his hand at painting an entire subway car himself—”kind of the ultimate prize for us at that time.”
The result was BREAK, which remains one of Futura’s most famous works. Instead of sticking to the standard graffiti lettering highlighting the artist’s name, Futura spent about four hours transforming the train into an abstract canvas, a hazy field of reds, pinks, and orange, with a burst of white in the center.
Martha Cooper, photograph of Futura 2000’s BREAK train (1980). Collection of Futura 2000.
The artistic breakthrough—more impressionistic and more abstract than anything the graffiti world had ever seen, and remarkably beautiful— was immortalized by the famed graffiti photographer Martha Cooper. Her image, shot (naturally) in the Bronx, is one of the exhibition’s highlights.
If the The Break Train and his other early graffiti work had made him a legend, collaborations with brands like Nike, Supreme, and even Louis Vuitton have made Futura a sought after figure in the hypebeast crowd.
Futura 2000, El Diablo, (1985). Collection of KAWS.
So it is fitting that the show has several pairs of coveted Nike sneakers—including a pair made for the 2024 Paris Olympics, for which the artist also designed the official uniforms for the U.S., Japanese, and South Korean breaking teams.
Futura has also created a new site-specific mural at the entrance to the museum galleries, an almost floral looking explosion of reds, blues, blacks, oranges, and pinks that reflects his virtuosity in aerosol paint.
Futura 2000 made a site-specific mural for his show at the Bronx Museum. Photo by Argenis Apolinario.
“The release he gets with these abstractions, plus the precision of his lines—it’s amazing how he transforms the material,” Eileen Jeng Lynch, the Bronx Museum’s director of curatorial programs, told me during a tour of the exhibition. “He was being very experimental and through being innovative and evolving he was able to produce an aesthetic and call it his own. [Futura has] his own unique visual language.”
The show debuted last year at the UB Art Galleries at the University at Buffalo, and was curated by director Robert Scalise with Zack Boehler, the public art project coordinator at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum.
Kenny Scharf, Keith Haring, and Futura 2000 in 1981. Photo by Gregg-Smith.
It tells a fascinating story of unlikely artistic success, as Futura went from early graffiti writing to showing with Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, and Kenny Scharf at Patti Astor’s Fun Gallery, before (temporarily) quitting the game to focus on raising his kids.
For years, Futura made his living as a bike messenger—his license for “Elite Couriers” is on display alongside photos of him at work and a worn messenger bag. But every time Futura stepped away from his art, something seemed to draw him back in.
Futura 2000’s sculpture Pointman (2019) with his paintings Injection (2018) and Fuxing Road (2014) on view at the Bronx Museum. Photo by Argenis Apolinario.
In the early 2000s, Futura credits the rise of street artists such as Banksy and Shepard Fairey with rekindling interest in earlier practitioners of the medium.
Most recently, it was Eric Firestone Gallery that began working with Futura to reintroduce him to the art world proper in 2020. (He is also represented by the creative agency and artist management firm ICNCLST.) What the gallery recognized was that beyond his reputation in the graffiti world, Futura was and is an artist with a decades-long studio practice.
Futura 2000, Garbage Rock (1983). Collection of Patrick Lerouge.
The Bronx Museum has resurfaced some of Futura’s earliest works on canvas, including a painting he made at the studio of hip hop pioneer Fab 5 Freddy.
Other early ephemera include a Futura painting on a refrigerator door and a “black book” of sketches and signatures from other artists who visited his studio back in 1980, each signing each other’s notebooks. Lost for decades, it is on loan to the museum courtesy of collector Beth Rudin DeWoody.
Futura 2000’s long-lost black book from 1980, on loan to the Bronx Museum courtesy of collector Beth Rudin DeWoody. Photo by Argenis Apolinario.
“One day the book just went missing. I was gutted in the moment,” Futura admitted. “I forgot about that book and when it came back to me as a boomerang, I simply couldn’t believe it because I thought it was actually serendipitous.… it’s just wonderful to have that relic…
returned home, in a sense, for this exhibition.”
“Futura 2000: Breaking Out” is on view at the Bronx Museum, 1040 Grand Concourse, Bronx, New York, September 8, 2024–March 30, 2025. More

In retrospect, Nine Inch Nails’s 1994 record The Downward Spiral had elements that all but guaranteed it iconic status, including an intrepid sound that mashed rock and electronic elements together like none before. On its 30th anniversary, the album has received a second wave of critical attention (yes, it holds up), including a review from Reznor himself who dropped a note on Nine Inch Nails’ website reflecting that listening to his 28-year-old self “still excites me and breaks my heart.”
These are feelings likely shared by fans of the concept album. And for those not content to simply listen to posthumous reflections, there’s an exhibition that’s on the road: “Jonathan Rach: Nine Inch Nails, The Downward Spiral,” which has been organized by Behind The Gallery and will take over 2 Hoxton Street in North London next month.
Robin Finck and Trent Reznor onstage. Photo: Photo: courtesy Jonathan Rach.
The global tour that followed the release of The Downward Spiral was photographed by Rach, who captured the band’s raucous live shows as it catapulted industrial into the mainstream. Rach started collaborating with Nine Inch Nails in the early 1990s as a stage designer and wold later direct Closure, a video album that included live recordings and behind-the-scenes footage.
After its first showing in Australia earlier this year, the exhibition brings forward more than 30 previously unseen photographs from the tour. In addition to the release of limited edition prints, Rach will be on hand for an artist talk that looks back on photographing Reznor et al.
Trent Reznor performing in New South Wales, Australia, during the Self Destruct tour. Photo: courtesy Jonathan Rach.
“To be able to show this collection of photography after some 25 years and see how fans connected to them has been such a rewarding and unexpected gift,” Rach said. “I am looking forward some of the new images I’ve recently found and talking about these captured moments in music history as part of the celebration in London.”
While photographs from The Downward Spiral tour are the focus, Rach has also his images from the band’s six-night residency at the Hollywood Palladium in 2018 as well as images from his work with David Bowie and Lou Reed.
“This is an insight into a pivotal moment in the band’s career and Jonathan was there to capture all of it, before the days of social media,” said Stephen Dallimore, the creative director at Behind The Gallery.
“Jonathan Rach: Nine Inch Nails, The Downward Spiral” will be on view at 2 Hoxton Street, London, October 16–20. More