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    20 Years After Michel Majerus’s Tragic Death, the Pioneering Artist’s Laptop Has Been Restored. Surprises Abound

    On November 6, 2002, when a Luxair plane crashed while attempting to land at Luxembourg Airport, 20 passengers were killed. Among them was the Luxembourgish artist Michel Majerus, who at 35 had already won international acclaim for playful and incisive paintings that borrow from advertising, video games, record covers, art history, and a vast array of other sources.
    Since then, Majerus’s reputation has continued to grow, with younger artists like Jamian Juliano-Villani and Egan Frantz citing him as an influence. In 2022, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami hosted a Majerus survey, and five German museums and art spaces staged shows devoted to his work, which ranges from icy text paintings that recall techno CDs to deadpan abstractions to a half-pipe emblazoned with computer graphics. His longtime Berlin gallery, Neugerriemschneider, and the New York-based Matthew Marks, have been guiding his work into key collections.
    Now a sprawling body of material that details how Majerus made his trailblazing art has become available. His laptop was recovered from the plane crash and has been restored as part of a thrillingly multifarious project that involves his estate, the artist Cory Arcangel, a longtime Majerus fan, and the digital-art organization Rhizome. Arcangel has created an ongoing YouTube series titled “Let’s Play Majerus G3,” and is in a joint exhibition with Majerus (of the same name) that is running through the middle of next March at the estate’s Berlin home, the artist’s former studio.
    “It wasn’t even known whether anything would work,” Arcangel said in a video interview from Stavanger, Norway, where he’s based. “We worked on the project for many years, knowing that it could have just been a big dud. The hard drive could have been corrupted beyond bootable form.”
    Cory Arcangel, Let’s Play Majerus G3!, 2024. © Cory Arcangel and Michel Majerus Estate, 2024/Courtesy Cory Arcangel, Michel Majerus Estate and Rhizome
    A Tour Into the Past
    Mercifully, it was not corrupted, and Dragan Espenschied, Rhizome’s preservation director, went about figuring out how to make the laptop run exactly as it did in the past on a contemporary computer, a potentially thorny process known in the tech trade as emulation. “It can work again if the stars align,” Espenschied said, speaking from his home in Stuttgart, Germany.
    The two men have experience with such projects. They emulated a Macintosh computer that Arcangel bought at a Salvation Army store in 2005, finding a homemade game on it called Bomb Iraq. The artist also helped rescue digital Andy Warhol pieces stored on decades-old floppy discs held by the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh.
    However, the contents of Majerus’s laptop are on an entirely different scale. “It’s a true virtual studio—a true studio,” Arcangel said. There are files related to shows he never realized, his final solo exhibition, in 2002, at Petzel gallery in New York, “almost from start to finish,” a bevy of source images he used, “and photographs he’s taken with his Nikon camera, out and about.”
    On YouTube, Arcangel has released the first video walkthrough of the laptop, a Macintosh G3 Wall Street—“the Ferrari of its day,” as he says. Inspired by popular YouTube channels that do song or chess analysis, Arcangel offers lucid commentary as he clicks through folders and discusses Majerus’s practice for a general audience. He also hams it up a bit. “If you’re wondering why this is all taking so long, that’s how life was in the ‘90s,” he says, firing up the emulation and waiting for Mac OS 9 load. “Computers were slow!”
    Installation view of “Let’s Play Majerus G3,” a project by Cory Arcangel at the Michel Majerus Estate in Berlin, April 27, 2024–March 15, 2025. © Michel Majerus Estate, 2024/© Cory Arcangel, 2024/Photo: Jens Ziehe, Berlin.
    Opening Photoshop 6.0 in the emulation, Arcangel reveals, layer by layer, how Majerus built some images, and how he created digital mock-ups for his exhibitions. “You see the full sausage being made, so to speak,” Arcangel told me. Not everything that was on the laptop is accessible, though. Majerus’s family removed items that they deemed too personal. “If you’re looking for some hot gossip, you’re not going to find it here,” Arcangel cautions his viewers.
    A New View on Majerus
    What is clear is that Majerus was something of a computer power user. “You turn it on, and you immediately see [that it] is heavily customized,” Espenschied said. “Everything that could be changed and configured in the system was changed to look different. The system typeface was like a huge, cartoonish-looking, almost handwritten typeface.”
    Even for those knew Majerus, or who have studied his practice closely, there have been discoveries. “We were surprised by how many photographs he took,” said Ruth Kißling, the director of the Michel Majerus Estate, which oversees his archives and runs its exhibition space. “There’s an endless mass of photographs.” One poignant photo, which Arcangel pulls up on screen on YouTube, shows Majerus’s laptop sitting on a hotel bed: a behind-the-scenes glimpse of an artist on the road, perhaps taking a break from work.
    “He had a computer, and he used it, but he never spoke about it,” Tim Neuger, a cofounder of Neugerriemschneider, told me. As Neuger sees it, “it’s a dimension that we’re not really able to grasp yet, the dimension that Cory is laying open.”
    Michel Majerus, Lettin’ off as much as you can, 1997. © Michel Majerus Estate, 2024/Courtesy private collection and neugerriemschneider, Berlin.
    What would Majerus make of all this? “Michel would have been enormously pleased and happy,” Neuger said, “that such a wonderful figure like Cory would do a YouTube tutorial on him, not an art-historical text but a YouTube tutorial, a new thing.”
    Arcangel likened the experience of looking through the laptop to “going to Pollock’s studio. It’s very similar, but it’s just a virtual version.” Once it was operational, he began spending an hour or two every morning on it. “There’s no organization so I could just like systematically understand it,” he said. “I had to learn it like a language. I had to just go in a little bit every day and just immerse myself in it.”
    While Arcangel develops new episodes of the YouTube program, a total of eight works by the two artists are on view in the Berlin exhibition, including one astonishing Majerus piece that unites a small abstract painting, a pair of Fila sneakers, and the hit Prodigy album The Fat of the Land (1997) on CD—an ode to shifting tastes and disposable consumerism.
    “He was really, really at the edge of something that was happening, and not many artists were in the league that he was in,” Arcangel said. Majerus’s laptop, he went on, “could show us what studios are going to look like in the future. This is what art history will be in the future, undeniably.”
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    Kandinsky’s Roving Creative Journey Comes to Life in Amsterdam

    “Form itself, even if completely abstract,” Wassily Kandinsky once said, “has its own inner sound.” By that measure, the new exhibition at the H’ART Museum must be a symphony. At “Kandinsky,” the Amsterdam institution, in partnership with the Centre Pompidou in Paris, has brought together 60 of the painter’s works to trace his creative journey from evocative figuration to thrilling abstraction. 
    Wassily Kandinsky, Mit dem schwarzen Bogen (Avec l’arc noir) (1912). Photo: Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI/Hélène Mauri/Dist. RMN-GP.
    Among the show’s highlights is Mit dem Schwarzen Bogen, the artist’s 1912 composition that epitomizes his reach for autonomous figuration over naturalistic representation. The painting is constructed with thick black lines, conjoined by organic shapes and a dance of colors. Its movement and dissonance were purposeful and inspired by the musical work of Kandinsky’s friend Arnold Schönberg.  
    “‘Today’s’ pictorial and musical dissonance,” he wrote to the composer in 1911, “is nothing more than ‘tomorrow’s’ consonance.” 
    Installation view of “Kandinsky” at H’ART Museum. Photo courtesy of H’ART Museum.
    It was decades before Kandinsky arrived at his pioneering understanding of abstraction. Born in Moscow in 1866, he later landed in Munich, Germany, where, deeply inspired by Monet, he gave up a career in law and economics for art at age 30.  
    Where his early landscapes, including The Blue Rider (1903), presented a post-Impressionist bent, he began embracing an expressive figuration after spending his first summer in Murnau. There, the town’s colors, light, and local folk art also prompted Kandinsky to develop his artistic theories, contained in 1911’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art.  
    Wassily Kandinsky, Improvisation 3 (1909). Photo: Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI/Adam Rzepka/Dist. RMN-GP.
    This turning point for Kandinsky is highlighted in the H’ART Museum exhibition with paintings such as Improvisation 3 (1909) and Impression V (Parc) (1911), that bear out his experiments in hybrid forms. The period culminates with Bild mit rotem Fleck (1914), a striking work in which the painter’s dissonance achieves dynamism.
    Also central to the show is Kandinsky’s association with the Bauhaus from 1922. While teaching at the school in Weimar, he developed his study on points and lines, writing Point and Line to Plane (1926), a book that would come to be highly influential in 20th-century art. It’s during this time that Kandinsky’s art leaned into geometry with a no less cosmic weightlessness, as seen in 1923’s On White II.
    Installation view of “Kandinsky” at H’ART Museum. Photo courtesy of H’ART Museum.
    From this phase, too, “Kandinsky” will also feature the murals that the artist painted with his students for the 1922 Juryfreie Kunstschau (Jury-Free Art Show). While the original panels have been lost, this reconstruction, featuring the same colors, forms, and dimensions, was faithfully made under the guidance of Nina Kandinsky for the opening of the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 1977. 
    Installation view of “Kandinsky” at H’ART Museum. Photo courtesy of H’ART Museum.
    The couple relocated to Paris in Kandinsky’s later years, where he painted such vital works as Entassement réglé (1938) before he died in 1944. Nina would ensure his legacy, gifting a large trove of his artworks and the contents of his studio (including drawings, watercolors, and graphic works) to the Pompidou. In 1979, she established the Kandinsky Society, headquartered at the museum, which oversaw the publication of his catalogue raisonné. The organization folded in 2015. 
    Wassily Kandinsky, Entassement réglé (1938). Photo: Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI/Bertrand Prévost/Dist. RMN-GP.
    “Kandinsky” marks the first exhibition at the H’ART Museum, after it severed ties with its parent institution, the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. The show was first presented at the Centre Pompidou in 2009. 
    “Kandinsky” is on view at the H’ART Museum, Amstel 51, Amsterdam, the Netherlands, through November 10. 
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    Marina Abramović Wants the Glastonbury Festival Crowd to Be Quiet for a Minute

    Artists, musicians, and philosophers have long explored the value of stillness, emptiness, and silence. In his White Paintings (1951), artist Robert Rauschenberg painted monochrome canvases that allowed in life in the form of viewers’ shadows. Composer John Cage famously provoked the music world with his composition 4’33” (1952), in which a pianist sits still at their instrument for the allotted time, so that ambient noise helped define the music itself. Artist Yves Klein notoriously showed an empty white gallery in Paris, calling it simply Le Vide (1958).
    Now, artist Marina Abramović is calling for a spell of silence at an event that is known for the opposite: the Glastonbury Festival, which started out five decades ago as a simple music festival on a farm in England’s Somerset region, and has since grown to mammoth proportions as an event for theater, comedy, dance, and various other art forms. 
    Crowds at the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury Festival, 2024. Photo: Ben Birchall/PA Images via Getty Images.
    At the festival’s iconic main forum, the Pyramid stage, Abramović will call for silence at 5:55 p.m. local time today, as part of a performance titled Seven Minutes of Collective Silence. The silence is in reply to the theme of this year’s iteration of the festival: peace. The performance is curated by Josef O’Connor through Glastonbury’s ongoing collaboration with Circa, a contemporary art platform.
    “Silence is a powerful tool that allows us to connect with ourselves and each other in ways words cannot,” said Abramović. “At a festival like Glastonbury, where sound and energy are in constant flux, these Seven Minutes of Collective Silence offer a unique opportunity for unity and introspection. It’s about being present together, experiencing the power of silence as one.” 
    For the occasion, Abramović will don a dress created by her friend, renowned fashion designer Riccardo Tisci, which, according to press materials, features “a surprise detail” that will come to light during the performance. 
    It’s truly a gigantic stage for the performer, who has long sought to break out from the role of visual artist into something much larger. Glastonbury Festival provides a venue for that on an unprecedented scale: legend has it that, including gatecrashers, a record 300,000 people attended the 1994 festival, which was headlined by the Levellers. 
    “We are honored to have Marina Abramović bring such a meaningful and profound experience to Glastonbury,” said Emily Eavis, the festival’s co-organizer. “Her work has always pushed boundaries and inspired deep reflection, and we believe this moment of collective silence will be a memorable and impactful addition to the festival.” 
    Abramović will be followed by a set by English musician PJ Harvey. 
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    A Major Museum Survey Honors the Four ‘Grandes Dames’ of Impressionism

    The four grandes dames of the French Impressionist movement will be spotlighted in a major survey at the National Gallery of Ireland that opens today. “Women Impressionists” takes place at the 150th anniversary of the first Impressionist exhibition, mounted in Paris in 1874, and focuses on Marie Bracquemond, Mary Cassatt, Eva Gonzalès, and Berthe Morisot. It’s the first show to bring together the four artists under one roof on the Emerald Isle. 
    Organized by the National Gallery in collaboration with Odrupgaard, a museum devoted to French Impressionism and sited in Charlottenlund, Denmark, the show features works from their collections along with examples on loan from private collections in the U.S. and Europe. The show is overseen by National Gallery curator of modern art Janet McLean and the Ordrupgaard’s senior curator Dorthe Vangsgaard Nielsen.
    Eva Gonzalès, Children Playing on Sand Dunes, Grandcamp (1877-1878). Courtesy National Gallery of Ireland.
    Cassatt and Morisot are nearly as well known as their male counterparts in the movement. Cassatt’s work appears in collections such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and the Philadelphia Museum of Art; her Child in a Straw Hat (1886), which appears in the exhibition in Dublin, on loan from the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., is an icon. 
    Mary Cassatt, Child in a Straw Hat (ca.1886). Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington.
    Morisot, for her part, was married to Édouard Manet’s brother Eugène, and participated in many of the major exhibitions staged by the Impressionists. Her works appear in collections such as the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Musée d’Orsay, Paris; and the Cleveland Museum of Art.
    Marie Bracquemond, Afternoon Tea (Le Goûter) (ca.1880). CC0 Paris Musées / Petit Palais, musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris.
    Bracquemond and Gonzalès are not the household names that Cassatt and Morisot have become, but moved in the uppermost circles of the French art scene of their day. 
    Mary Cassatt, Susan Comforting the Baby No.1 (ca. 1881). Courtesy Columbus Museum of Art
    Bracquemond began to show her work at the Paris Salon when she was just an adolescent, and while she didn’t study art formally, she did receive some instruction from Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres, as well as advice from Paul Gauguin. 
    Berthe Morisot, The Artist’s Daughter, Julie, with her Nanny (ca. 1884). Courtesy Minneapolis Institute of Art. Licenced under CC BY 4.0.
    She and her husband, printmaker Félix Bracquemond, produced ceramic art for Haviland & Co, a maker of Limoges porcelain. She participated in three of the major Impressionist exhibitions, in 1879, 1880, and 1889. Much of her work disappeared into private collections, its whereabouts unrecorded.
    Gonzalès was a model and the only formal student to Édouard Manet, who once painted her at her easel in a work now hanging in London’s National Gallery. She also sat for several other Impressionist painters. Her work was well received by critics of the periodic Salon exhibitions, including Émile Zola. She died in childbirth in 1883, at the age of 34. 
    “Women Impressionists” is at the National Gallery of Ireland, Merrion Square West, Dublin 2, Ireland through October 6, 2024.
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    After Languishing in Obscurity, Cubist Maria Blanchard Finally Gets Her Due

    When we think of Cubism, a pivotal moment in the birth of modernism when artists began to deconstruct their pictorial compositions, we immediately think of Picasso and his collaborator Georges Braque. The names of renowned Salon Cubists like Juan Gris, Fernand Léger, and Jean Metzinger may also come to mind. You’d be forgiven for assuming that no woman made a meaningful impact on the movement, since this has long been the dominant art historical narrative.
    Enter Maria Blanchard. Though she was critically acclaimed in her day, the Spanish artist’s reputation fell into obscurity in the decades after her death in 1932. She is now the subject of an expansive retrospective at the Picasso Museum in his birthplace of Màlaga in southern Spain.
    Though Blanchard was born in another Spanish city, Santander, in the same year as Picasso, 1881, rigid gender norms pushed both talented painters down different paths. Yet, against the odds, Blanchard would consistently defy societal expectations.
    Maria Blanchard. Photo: © Henri Martinie/Roger-Viollet.
    The artist was born with several physical disabilities, including kyphoscoliosis, an abnormal curvature of the spine that caused chronic pain, affected her growth and caused her to limp. As a result, Blanchard was badly bullied at school and her parents encouraged her to pursue a burgeoning interest in art.
    By her early twenties, she moved to Madrid to continue her studies at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando. In 1908, the government of Santander gave Blanchard a grant to continue her education after she won third prize at the National Exhibition of Fine Arts. This backing helped her move to Paris the next year to enroll at the Academie Vitti.
    Maria Blanchard, Woman from Brittany (1910). Photo: José A. Gallego Poveda, courtesy of Colección Gobierno de Cantabria.
    In her early works, it is easy to see Blanchard’s talents as a painter in the more traditional style and spot the emergence of some early experimentation. Some works seem to suggest she may have been looking at Munch, for example, while others are heavily stylized, a tactic she would deploy throughout her career.
    Many of the works in the exhibition are sensitive portrayals of humble figures who look particularly pensive or melancholic. We can only guess at the reason that, shortly after moving to Paris, Blanchard painted The Spanish Woman (1910-13), in which a beautiful woman with classically Spanish features appears emotionally devastated. In 1914, the war meant Blanchard returned to Spain for two years before moving back to Paris in 1916.
    Maria Blanchard, Lady with Fan (1913-16). Photo: Belén Pereda.
    At this time, Blanchard immersed herself in the city’s avant-garde artistic milieu and absorbed the latest developments in a highly experimental movement known as Cubism. At one time, she shared a studio with Diego Rivera and she also befriended Juan Gris. Upon joining the Section d’Or group, Blanchard began making colorful, collage-style Cubist works, choosing to depict predominantly female subjects or humble still lifes. A particularly fun example on show is the sensually anthropomorphized Green Still Life with Lamp (ca. 1916–17).
    Blanchard’s ability to produce exploratory works on the same radical terms as her male peers helped earn the respect of a highly patriarchal art world. Just after her death, her friend, the painter and critic André Lhote, recalled how “her unquestionable technical control, allied with her intense humanity, [which] made her work staggering.” Picasso also praised two works Plate of Fruit and Child with Balloon that were acquired by the Musée de Grenoble in 1926.
    Maria Blanchard, Botella y copa de frutas sobre una tabla (c. 1917-18). Courtesy of Colección Zorrilla Lequerica.
    Once she had decided to settle in Paris permanently, the artist changed her name from María Gutiérrez, taking her mother’s french surname Blanchard to make a complete break from her beginnings in comparatively conservative Spain.
    Partly informed by the “return to order” prevalent in the 1920s after the horrors of World War I, Blanchard soon developed the lessons of Cubism in new directions, pursuing her own vision. Unlike many of her male peers, she was neither particularly interested in the dark complexities of modernity or increasingly abstract investigations of form. Rather, Blanchard was interested in capturing typically marginalized experiences, often focusing on subjects who were working-class or people of color.
    Maria Blanchard, The Fortune-Teller (1924-25). Photo: © Studio Monique Bernaz, Geneva.
    She began painting everyday domestic scenes of people—mostly women—cooking, embroidering, doing household chores, getting dressed up, or breastfeeding, usually surrounded by their offspring. Whereas the identities of the women in Picasso’s many wacky portraits are almost irrelevant, a real sense of characters is evident throughout the work of Blanchard.
    “Her Cubist experience likely gave her the momentum needed to continue to develop the germ of the personal project she brought with her upon leaving [Spain],” suggests the Picasso Museum’s artistic director José Lebrero Stals in the show’s catalogue. Unsurprisingly, Blanchard’s chosen themes were often picked apart by critics, who believed them to be unsophisticated and evidence of a Spanish primitivism.
    During the 1920s, Blanchard was an established artist that worked with a group of dealers known as Ceux de Demain, most notably Frank Flausch, who supported her until his death in 1926. After the death of Gris in 1927, Blanchard’s health deteriorated and she died from tuberculosis on April 5, 1932, at the age of just 51.
    Maria Blanchard, Girl at her First Communion (1914). Photo courtesy of Photographic Archives Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía.
    One of Blanchard’s best known works, Girl at her First Communion is an ominous interpretation of a girl’s societally-sanctioned rite of passage into womanhood. It was shown at the Salon des Indépendants in 1920 and now hangs in Spain’s pre-eminent modern art museum, the Reina Sofía in Madrid. That year, Blanchard was also included in “French Avant-Garde Art,” a landmark exhibition in Barcelona that saw her work shown alongside artists like Matisse, Miró, and Picasso.
    For many decades after her death, as the continent of Europe faced the upheaval of war, only a small circle of dedicated collectors kept Blanchard’s memory alive and preserved her work. Reviewing one exhibition of her work at the Galerie Drouant-David in 1942, the critic Maximilien Gauthier described her “as a woman, a failure.” In 1950, another critic G.J. Gros claimed that she “did not sacrifice her art” to her womanhood because “she was crippled and without beauty.”
    It wasn’t until 1982 that Blanchard received proper institutional recognition at the now defunct Museo Español de Arte Contemporáneo in Madrid. Another retrospective followed at the Reina Sofía in 2012, the same year her work was exhibited at Fundación Botín in Santander. So far, however, there have been no major museum show outside of Spain and much work remains to be done to bring international attention to Blanchard’s many achievements.
    “Maria Blanchard: A Painter in Spite of Cubism” is on view the Picasso Museum Màlaga in Spain through September 29, 2024. 
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    Anselm Kiefer’s Layered Canvases Capture the Agony and the Ecstasy

    Right now, a room in a stately Florentine palazzo is filled wall-to-wall with gleaming gold. But this isn’t yet another ornate private chapel patronized by a powerful mercantile family during the early Renaissance. Rather, these paintings, crammed together in a salon-style hang that even covers the ceiling, are part of major exhibition of new and older works by Anselm Kiefer at the Palazzo Strozzi, on view through July 21.
    Nevertheless, these works may well inspire visitors to contemplate a higher, spiritual realm. The German artist is one of the most celebrated of his generation for his ability to take epic themes of history, memory, philosophy, and myth, and not merely depict but actually materialize them on canvas in an act that has been described as alchemy.
    Installation view of “Anselm Kiefer: Fallen Angels.” Photo: Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio Ⓒ Anselm Kiefer.
    The show’s starting point is Engelssturz (Fall of the Angel) (2022-23), which is situated in the palazzo’s central courtyard and depicts a passage from the Book of Revelation in which the archangel Michael, representing Good, battles against rebel angels that represent Evil. This eternal theme, as relevant today as it was in Renaissance society, runs central to the entire exhibition. It invites open-ended reflection about ourselves, humanity at large, our shared past, and the kind of society that we hope to live in.

    “The concepts of the Holy Spirit and the Trinity continue to captivate me,” Kiefer said a recent conversation with Palazzo Strozzi’s director Arturo Galansino. “Theodicy, a part of philosophy that examines the relationship between divine justice and the presence of evil in the world, is particularly intriguing. It asserts that God is inherently good, and yet the world is plagued by evil. Theologians argue that this coexistence is a result of the presence of free will.

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    “When I first visited Florence, approximately at the age of seventeen—I must consult my diary, its writing is a lifelong practice of mine—I recall making notes about Palazzo Strozzi,” Kiefer told Galansino, reflecting on his lifelong relationship to the venue. “The reason remains elusive, but perhaps its ‘minimal’ allure rendered it one of my favorite edifices in the world.”
    Installation view of “Anselm Kiefer: Fallen Angels.” Photo: Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio Ⓒ Anselm Kiefer.
    Perhaps appropriately for works containing such layered references to literature, poetry, philosophy, religious texts, and ancient myths, Kiefer’s paintings are densely stratified, almost morphing into relief sculptures. Raw materials like seeds, sand, ashes, onto great hefts of lead, are used for their evocative rather than descriptive powers. In this way, the pieces take on a monumental presence despite being affixed to a wall.
    “I perceive a painting as an ongoing process rather than a finished product,” Kiefer told Galansino. “I keep paintings for years, occasionally revisiting and reworking pieces dating as far back as 1969.”
    He later added, “for me, painting is not merely about creating an artwork, but rather, it symbolizes my personal struggle.”
    Installation view of “Anselm Kiefer: Fallen Angels.” Photo: Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio Ⓒ Anselm Kiefer.
    Of the inscriptions that sometimes adorn his work, Kiefer said, “I have always had a strong affinity for writing, literature, and poetry. The words I choose to inscribe have, for me, a certain aura about them.”

    “Inscriptions can serve as a form of commentary, sometimes aligned with the painting, and sometimes in contrast to it,” he added.

    Installation view of “Anselm Kiefer: Fallen Angels.” Photo: Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio Ⓒ Anselm Kiefer.
    The exhibition also contains lead-printed versions made in the 2000s of photographs taken in 1969 known as Kiefer’s “Heroic Symbols” series. The artist himself appears in the images performing what he has described as “occupations” in various locations across Europe. In one case, he donned the Nazi-era Wehrmacht officer uniform that once belonged to his father and made a provocative gesture reminiscent of the now taboo Sieg Heil salute. Kiefer has returned again and again to the weight of recent German history in his work.
    Reflecting on contemporary conflicts, Kiefer told Galansino, “men are ill-conceived. Their actions often defy comprehension. They destroy themselves. Wars have persisted throughout history, spanning various regions.”
    Installation view of “Anselm Kiefer: Fallen Angels.” Photo: Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio Ⓒ Anselm Kiefer.
    Born in 1945 in the southern German town of Donaueschingen, Kiefer gained international renown in 1980 when he and George Baselitz represented West Germany at the 39th Venice Biennale. For the past three decades lived and worked in France. His work was recently the subject of Anselm, a 3D documentary by the German filmmaker Wim Wenders.
    “Anselm Kiefer: Fallen Angels” is on view at Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, Italy until July 21, 2024.
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    What Makes Melissa Cody’s Vibrant Art Tapestries So Powerful to Me

    World Traveler (2014) is displayed in an alcove at the heart of Melissa Cody’s assured solo show, “Webbed Skies,” at MoMA PS1 in Queens. The abstract wool wall hanging channel-changes between multiple patterns up and down its length. It plays with symmetry and rhythm—no two sections obey the exact same rules. In places it has an almost Op Art density, sometimes implying depth that draws the eye in, sometimes suggesting a flow that sweeps you left to right or up.
    A looming semicircle checkerboard at its center is a flourish, a statement of individual ambition designed to attract attention (making a curved border work is tricky in gridded fiber, let alone sixteen nested ones!). Check out the related works of Navajo/Diné weaving in the collection of the Stark Museum of Art in Orange, Texas, which owns the piece. There’s nothing else like it.
    World Traveler is beautifully controlled chaos—a delightful, deliberate tour de force.
    Melissa Cody, World Traveler (2014) in “Webbed Skies.” Photo by Ben Davis.
    Cody, who was born in 1981, hails from a remote community in Arizona with the starkly evocative name of No Water Mesa. She comes from a line of weavers, including both her mother and grandmother. Her aunt, Marilou Schultz, was once commissioned to make a tapestry depicting a circuit board for Intel in the ‘90s (it was shown in Documenta 14 back in 2017).
    Visiting “Webbed Skies” I learned some things about traditional Navajo/Diné symbols: the hourglass shape that symbolizes “spider woman,” the goddess associated with weaving; the serrated “eye dazzler” patterns that occur again and again, an adaptation of a traditional Mexican motif; and so on.
    But the exhibition also shows an artist spinning up her own symbolism to capture her own experiences and feeling of the present. “Whereas I learned to weave with a more artistic-minded approach, my mother and other relatives learned by necessity—they had to clothe themselves and put food on the table,” Cody told Elephant earlier this year.
    Melissa Cody, White Out (2012). Photo by Ben Davis.
    A small work, White Out (2012), made during Cody’s formative studies at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, is a kind of mini manifesto in wool. It features a symmetrical, saw-toothed “eye-dazzler” in greens, oranges, and blues, interrupted by two stark cream-colored rectangles at the left. It feels like the impulsive clash of two systems, but of course it’s actually all one carefully executed design. The patches jut in to exactly the center as if to suggest not just disruption of convention, but an artist seeking a balance between disruption and convention.
    “Webbed Skies” is not a large show (it began, incidentally, at the São Paulo Museum of Art as part of Venice Biennale curator Adriano Pedrosa’s year of culture dedicated to Indigenous artists from around the world). It contains just a little over 30 textile works, across three galleries, some of them imposing like World Traveler, some smaller, like White Out. Still, the show captures the sense of what is exciting to me about the current swell of international institutional interest in textile art—which has been so sustained that it can’t be called a trend, though it is not so widespread as to feel secure.
    Installation view of “Melissa Cody: Webbed Skies,” on view at MoMA PS1 from April 4 through September 2, 2024. Photo: Kris Graves.
    Textile art has met the moment for a variety of reasons—some of them contradictory. Textiles can connote connection to tradition and community. Their tactility and embodied relation to making appeals to a wide audience at a moment when creativity seems very dematerialized and disrupted.
    But, as Brian Boucher found in a recent article, textiles can also be sold as the very template of an industrial art, with the punch-card operations of the Jacquard loom contextualized as the first computer. Cody made complex recent works in “Webbed Skies” remotely, sending digital patterns to high-tech looms in Belgium instead of using the traditional upright Navajo hand loom.
    The gridded patterns of weavings can also be thought of as pixel art, avant la lettre—an association Cody embraces. In the audio guide, she talks about how the hints of spacey psychedelia in World Traveler deliberately tease memories of riding the “Rainbow Road” from Nintendo’s Mario Kart.
    Artists can be simultaneously confined and empowered by the imagery of tradition—pressed to ditch it to develop an individual brand, while pressured to adopt it to fit some stereotypical idea of what “Native weaving” might look like. The turbulence from these competing demands probably intensifies as the world accelerates, as people, images, information, and artworks move around more rapidly and collide in new ways (the exuberant and ever-twisting obstacle course of the “Rainbow Road” actually is a nice organic symbol for this condition, now that I think of it).
    Portrait of Melissa Cody. Melissa Cody Working in Her Studio. 2023. Courtesy Graham Nystrom. Photo: Graham Nystrom.
    There’s a lot going on in “Webbed Skies.” Some experiments I like a little less and some a little more. I ended up being most drawn to World Traveler because it captures this core creative drama at the level of pattern.
    The symmetries and repetitions of the traditional Navajo textile motifs contain plenty of room for expression and innovation, of course. But their ordered geometry intuitively conveys a feeling of preserving a worldview and a stable set of relations to a world—to the land, to community, to tradition.
    World Traveler also expresses a mental map of relations in fiber. But it is, as the title suggests, about the sense of moving between different worlds and multiple patterns of life that pull at you. Cody captures the strangeness of this present, and the beauty that can come in navigating that strangeness, and she makes having that particular conversation in this particular medium look so natural.
    “Melissa Cody: Webbed Skies” is on view at MoMA PS1 in Queens, through September 9.
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    Artist Michael Wang’s Atomic Ode to the Earth

    Michael Wang is an elementalist. The multi-disciplinary conceptual artist and architect has spun the ephemeral qualities of air into the tactile, toyed with the transmutational properties of water, and now, with his upcoming exhibition, “Yellow Earth,” he contemplates and displays man’s relationship to uranium, the earth’s natural source of nuclear energy.
    Michael Wang, 35°33’8”N 108°36’30”W (2024). Courtesy of the artist.
    “A lot of my work is related to energy,” Wang said on a video call last week. “This show is the next chapter of looking at the natural origins of modern energy.” Through his practice, Wang examines the natural world, celebrating its beauty while considering humanity’s position within—or without—it. He is drawn to the constructive and destructive capabilities of energy and its iterations. In particular, he seeks to reveal, rather than expose, the hidden truths and cycles that connect everything together. “Yellow Earth” opens Thursday and runs through August 31 at the TriBeCa gallery Bienvenu Steinberg & C. 
    The exhibit’s name is derived from the yellow color of refined uranium ore, the show’s central material. One of the objects on display is Collision Bar, (Three Balls)—a sleek hexagonal aluminum baton with a slit revealing three acid yellow glass marbles socketed within. The marbles’ eerie glow is at once inviting and ominous, a result of the pigmented uranium embedded within the glass. The artifact evokes the steel control rods of a nuclear reactor, a symbol of both power and danger. Other pieces in the exhibit incorporate small nuggets of slightly radioactive uranium ore. The ore samples are invisible, hidden within sculptural “containment structures” that completely block the transmission of radiation.
    Michael Wang, (Left) Trinities (Fuel Cores) (2024). (Right) Yellow Painting (Tailings) (2024). Courtesy of the artist.
    The show is not only a compelling meditation on the element, but also curated dialogue with the work of Walter De Maria (1935-2013), the father of Land Art (in fact, De Maria’s former lower Manhattan studio was located across the street from the gallery). “Walter De Maria was so interested in danger and its aesthetics. With this work, I am trying to activate the emotional power of his work,” Wang explained. “The muteness of De Maria’s works (and of the artist himself) erases some of the connections that I’m trying to make more visible, or more sensible.”Wang observes an “atomic” undertone in De Maria’s oeuvre. De Maria’s formal language and his exploration of invisible energies reflect the Nuclear Age’s influence on his art. In The Vertical Earth Kilometer (1977), the precision of the artist’s interment of kilometer-long bronze rods mirrors the technical process of burying a nuclear cache for underground detonations. His iconic The Lightning Field (1977) is staged atop actual uranium reserves. Uranium mining in New Mexico, the site of the very first atomic testing, peaked the same year The Lightning Field was unveiled to the public. Wang’s work seeks to connect these dots, revealing “hidden chains of relations.” At the crux of the show is a corridor of seemingly innocuous sealed aluminum tubes. Contained within each tube are radioactive soil samples from New Mexico’s uranium mining belt. 
    Michael Wang, Collision Bar (Three Balls) (2024). Courtesy of the artist.
    Some ideas for the show have been germinating since Wang’s youth. His father was a geophysicist. “From a scientific perspective, from a young age I learned the earth itself is a system. That gave me an awareness of some of these processes,” he said. “My own interest in art was sort of looking for these almost new tools. Natural processes to me didn’t just seem like things that could be subject matter for art making, but they were things that I might actively engage with.”
    Installation view of Michael Wang, Extinct in New York (2019). Courtesy of the artist.
    Within Wang’s practice, there is a palpable tension between the sensual aesthetics of the earth and the political exigencies of today’s climate. Uranium’s charged symbolism and practical impact are juxtaposed with its existence as just another earthly mineral with its own intrinsic beauty and inextricable links within the natural order, both visible and invisible. The element is not presented as inherently positive or negative, but rather, Wang lets the material hang in the ambivalence that he himself is most comfortable in. This off-to-the side neutrality, presenting scientific data to an art viewer and letting them shape their own perspective is a through line in Wang’s diverse work.  
    Michael Wang, Wulai azalea (Rhododendon kanehirai Wilson), Feitsui Dam and Reservoir, New Taipei City, Taiwan. Courtesy of the artist.
    First exhibited at the Fondazione Prada in Milan in 2017, Wang’s long-term project Extinct in the Wild equally grapples with the ethics and emotions of ecological complexities. Wang displayed flora and fauna in greenhouse-like structures with life-support systems designed to cater to the fragile organisms’ specific needs. The exhibit’s species are no longer found in nature, due mainly to human causation, yet they continue to survive by human stewardship. Specimens included the axolotl, a salamander that today can only be found in aquariums or kept as pets. The show’s curators were trained and assigned the task of tending to the organisms. Wang reverts curation to its etymological root—cura is care—by tasking curators with caretaking.
    “The ambivalence and double-edgedness of that relationship is really what drew me to the work,” Wang said.
    Installation view of Michael Wang, Taihu (Stones) (2022). Courtesy of the artist.
    Another of Wang’s energy-focused projects was 10000 li, 100 billion kilowatt-hours, shown at the 2021 Shanghai Biennale. He constructed a massive machine that processed water from China’s Yangtze river which runs through the largest dam in the world, the Three Gorges Dam. The machine’s high-powered jets vaporized the water, turning it into snow.
    Michael Wang, 10000 li, 100 billion kilowatt-hours (一万里，一千亿千瓦时) (2021). Courtesy of the artist.
    Though the city of Shanghai is subtropical, the Yangtze’s waters are sourced from a melting mountain glacier in the “third pole”, the largest existing ice reserve outside of the north and south poles. Through Wang’s work, the river’s water returned to its genesis. “Art for me isn’t just about a strictly-defined human sphere,” he said, “but extends to touch all those entities we are inextricably bound up with.”

    “Yellow Earth” will run from June 27th through August 31st, 2024 at Bienvenu Steinberg and C, 35 Walker St, New York, NY 10013. 
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