Eliana Willis

With his creamy brushstrokes and spirited subjects, painter Frans Hals is perhaps the least-well-known of the Dutch Masters, a group that also counts household names Rembrandt and Vermeer. Yet an eponymous new show at the National Gallery in London makes a case to re-examine his oeuvre with fresh eyes, and think about why his work was a favorite of Manet and Van Gogh.
“Hals was one of the most sought-after painters of his generation,” the National Gallery says on the show’s website. “A gifted artist whose deft brushwork was unparalleled, he built his reputation on a new style of portrait — highly unusual in his time — that showed relaxed, lively sitters, often smiling, and even laughing.”
The first major Hals retrospective in some 30 years, bringing together about 50 of his pieces, has been tickling critics, especially thanks to the merry dispositions of many of the sitters — a specialty of the artist’s, and one that distinguishes him from most of his contemporaries, who depicted their sitters in much more serious moods. The Financial Times raved that it’s “superb” and “swaggering,” while the Guardian called it “joyful.” (By contrast, the Observer called it “boring” and “lifeless.”)
Frans Hals, Catharina Hooft and her Nurse (about 1620), © Photo Scala, Florence / bpk, Bildagentur für Kunst, Kultur und Geschichte, Berlin. Photo: Jörg P. Anders.
“Make your way round it – there are some 50 works on display – and once you’ve lifted your jaw from the ground, you will wonder why Hals has for so long played second fiddle (and, sometimes, not even that) to contemporaries such as Rembrandt and Velázquez,” says Rachel Cooke in the Guardian. “It may strike you as the great art mystery of our age.”
“This is our chance to reintroduce him to a larger public,” Bart Cornelis, who collaborated with a colleague from Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum on the show, told the New York Times. “We thought it was high time that the artist gets his proper due. He is on a level as a portrait painter with Rembrandt and with Velazquez, and he has that important a place in the history of Western painting.”
See more paintings from the exhibition below.
Frans Hals is on display at The National Gallery, London, through January 2024.
Frans Hals, The Lute Player (about 1623), © Musée du Louvre, Paris, Department of Paintings.
Frans Hals, The Laughing Cavalier (1624), © Trustees of the Wallace Collection, London.
Frans Hals, The Merry Lute Player (about 1624–8), Guildhall Art Gallery, City of London Corporation. © Harold Samuel Collection, Mansion House, City of London.
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There is nothing better than a crisp autumn day for gallery hopping and, luckily, New York’s gallery shows are changing as fast as the weather. We’ve surveyed the solo show landscape and there’s plenty to peep besides leaves this October.
From a New Zealand-born abstract painter making her debut in the Big Apple to a New York-based textile artist who felts family pictures, these 10 artists are probing personal and collective histories while pushing the boundaries of their medium.
Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, “La Pensée férale“Mendes Wood DM, through October 27
Daniel Steegman Mangrané. Photo: Amilcar Packer. Courtesy of Mendes Wood DM.
Daniel Steegman Mangrané creates conceptual works that explore the organic versus the built environment. These can range from small plants cradled in fragile, handblown vases shaped like branches, to large-scale installations and films. The artist, who works between his native Barcelona and Rio de Janeiro, returns often to Brazil’s Tijuca National Park—an urban jungle preserve on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro—as a recurring source of inspiration. His work La Pensée férale, from which his show at Mendes Wood DM takes its name, is comprised of seven photographs depicting the eye of a dog variously placed within the landscape of the park. The accompanying text, written by his collaborator on the project, Brazilian philosopher Juliana Fausto, describes the reforestation of the land in 1861 through enslaved labor and the current stray dog epidemic that disrupts its ecosystem.
Alongside other signature works from the artist’s oeuvre, such as leaves that have been meticulously etched and “breathing lines,” threads of LED lights hung from floor to ceiling that react to local weather and sounds, the show offers visitors a comprehensive look into Mangrané’s poetic and wide-ranging practice. Currently the subject of a traveling solo museum exhibition, “A Leaf Shapes the Eye,” which will open at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona (MACBA) in November, Mangrané’s show with Mendes Wood DM marks his solo debut in New York City.

Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, Geometric Nature / Biology (2023). Courtesy of the artist and Mendes Wood DM, Såo Paulo, Brussels, New York.
Sydney VernonKapp Kapp, through November 3
Sydney Vernon. Photo: Daniel Diasgranados. Courtesy of the artist and Kapp Kapp.
Synthesizing family photos with elements of folklore and various histories—personal, collective, and imagined—Sydney Vernon creates nuanced interpretations and critiques of Black representation. The Baltimore-based artist graduated with her B.F.A. from the Cooper Union in 2021 and joined the roster of Kapp Kapp earlier this year. This is her inaugural solo exhibition with the gallery, and her second in the city overall.
Marking her first major body of work since 2020, the self-titled presentation features new works on paper completed in colored pencil, pastel, and ink. Featuring composite portraits and vintage photographs of her family that are integrated with her own imagined architectures and backgrounds, as well as elements from film stills or magazine spreads, Vernon’s disjointed visual perspectives and gestural rendering evoke a sense of magical realism. Her use of formats like diptychs, like those commonly used by Lorraine O’Grady, whom Vernon cites as an influence in her work, suggest truth can be both personal and historical.
Sydney Vernon, Chandelier headlights (2023). Courtesy of the artist and Kapp Kapp.
Emma McIntyre, “An echo, a stain”David Zwirner, through October 28
Emma McIntyre. Photo: Brad Torchia. Courtesy of the artist.
New Zealand-born, Los Angeles-based artist Emma McIntyre practice toes the line between spontaneous and strategic in her work, exploring the ever-expanding possibilities of painting. The artist first applies her pigment by pouring it across the support, letting it variously pool and spill across the canvas. Once reoriented, McIntyre uses everything from rags to her own body to modify the work, drawing from art history and a lexicon of compositional tactics therein to variously guide her interventions.
McIntyre has had solo shows in Auckland, New Zealand, Los Angeles and Paris, but her current exhibition at David Zwirner’s East 69th Street location marks her solo debut in New York City. Among the works included are a handful of canvases that feature her use of a new process in which she creates a chemical solution that oxidizes when poured over iron pigment.
Emma McIntyre, Queen of the air (2023). © Emma McIntyre. Courtesy of the artist, Château Shatto, Los Angeles, and David Zwirner, New York.
Dana James, “Pearls and Potions”Hollis Taggart, October 12–November 11
Dana James with her dogs. Photo: James Collins. Courtesy of the artist and Hollis Taggart.
Based in Ridgewood, New York, Dana James believes that materials can “transcend their nature” and their seeming oppositions—such as opaque and sheer, geometric and organic, light and shadow—can create harmony. The subtle radiance of James’s fields of color, executed in a signature palette of tonal and tinted pastels, recall the work of Abstract Expressionists Helen Frankenthaler or Richard Diebenkorn. In conjunction with the use of shaped canvases, and the inclusion of unorthodox materials like flecks of tin foil, each of James’s paintings illustrate the artist’s ongoing exploration of the inherent dualities and contradictions within visual experience.
A graduate of the School of Visual Arts, James was named one of the top artists of the decade by Daily Collector in 2020. James’s forthcoming exhibition with Hollis Taggart is her second with the gallery and will feature recent work that promises to be her most ambitious to date in terms of scale and complexity.
Dana James, The Pearl Notebook (2023). Courtesy of the artist and Hollis Taggart.
Manal Kara, “Sacred Topology“Deli Gallery, October 13–November 11
Manal Kara. Courtesy of the artist and Deli Gallery.
Moroccan-American poet and self-taught artist Manal Kara uses an intriguing array of media in their work. From organic material such as tree bark and bumble bees, to found objects like hand tools, Kara’s work brings to mind Clement Greenberg’s idea of medium specificity. This concept plays an influential role in the themes explored in the artist’s work, which frequently investigates ideas around place and anthropocentrism. Viewer participation is often a crucial part of their works, which alludes to themes of collectivism and humanity’s connection with each other and the world around them.
Kara’s work has been shown widely both nationally and internationally, with recent solo shows at Pangée, Montreal, and Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles. “Sacred Topologies” at Deli Gallery is their first show with the gallery and features the artist’s most recent body of work.

Manal Kara, Physical Symbol System (illuminated manuscript 2) (2023). Courtesy of the artist and Deli Gallery.
Hillary Harkness, “Prisoners from the Front”P.P.O.W, October 13–November 11
Hilary Harkness. Photo: Christ Sanders. Courtesy of the artist and P.P.O.W.
Artist Hilary Harkness is known for her use of Old Master painting techniques combined with decidedly contemporary themes. Her intricate and meticulously rendered paintings explore ideas around gender, race, class, and power dynamics from an intersectional standpoint. The artist was represented by Mary Boone Gallery until 2019, when she joined P.P.O.W. “Prisoners from the Front” is her first solo show with gallery.
For her P.P.O.W. debut, Harkness took Winslow Homer’s 1866 Civil War painting Prisoners from the Front as a starting point for a new group of works titled “The Arabella Freeman Series.” The resulting scenes entangle Civil War history and the ancestral history of her wife Ara’s family as a means of the interrogating omissions in the historical record about queer lives and the lives of free African Americans. This collection of paintings is juxtaposed within the show with a selection of works from the series “At Home, At War: Life with Alice and Gertrude” (2007–2016), highlighting the artist’s dynamic range as she depicts imagined scenes from the life of the historically influential lesbian couple Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein.
Hilary Harkness, Heaven (2020). Courtesy of the artist and P.P.O.W.
Melissa Joseph, “Irish Exit”Margot Samel, October 19–November 22
Melissa Joseph. Photo: Mary Kang. Courtesy of the artist and Margot Samel.
Originally from rural Pennsylvania, New York-based multidisciplinary artist Melissa Joseph initially worked as a textile designer and arts educator for more than a decade before receiving her M.F.A. from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 2018. Drawing on her experience as an Indian American, Joseph’s practice investigates how people who identify as women of color are able to move through the world and occupy space.
Joseph’s practice is situated at the intersection of painting, textiles, and other crafts like ceramics, bringing forth conversations surrounding gender and labor. Frequently employing images from family photos, her work considers diasporic life, belonging, and the malleability of identity from both a deeply personal yet widely relatable perspective. For her show at Margot Samel—her first with the gallery—she translates archival and recent family photos into large felt works, resulting in fuzzy yet recognizable scenes that seem slightly out of focus.
Melissa Joseph, A bow for Angelik (2023). Courtesy of the artist and Margot Samel.
Freya Douglas-Morris, “This star I give to you”Alexander Berggruen, October 18–November 18
Freya Douglas-Morris. Photo: Isabella Sanai. Courtesy of the artist and Alexander Berggruen.
British artist Freya Douglas-Morris crafts vibrant, dreamlike landscapes and spaces drawn from the artist’s memories and imagination. The artist’s figuration recalls the work of Milton Avery, while the organic line and shape of the paintings can be seen as a contemporary adaptation of 19th aesthetics like Art Nouveau or Arts and Crafts. Her bold and decisive color schemes and flowing brushstrokes of each painting lend them a contemplative, meditative air that invite prolonged looking.
Douglas-Morris graduated from Brighton University with her B.F.A. in 2002, and the Royal College of Art, London, in 2013. Though her work has been represented previously in group shows with Alexander Berggruen, this will be Douglas-Morris’s first solo with the gallery, as well as in the U.S. The exhibition will coincide with a publication, produced by Hurtwood Press Limited, London, in association with Alexander Berggruen, as part of the Hurtwood Contemporary Artist Series.
Freya Douglas-Morris, Mother and child beach scene (2023). Photo: Mark Blower. © Freya Douglas-Morris. Courtesy of the artist and Alexander Berggruen.
Rugiyatou Jallow, “And Her Eyes Were Held by the Sun”Albertz Benda, October 19–November 22
Rugiyatou Jallow. Courtesy of the artist and Albertz Benda.
Swedish-born, Los Angeles-based artist Rugiyatou Jallow frequently centers her compositions on a single female figure and subsequently engages with pervasive ideas around the representation of women. The artist hails from a matrilineal line of artists, as Jallow’s mother, originally from Gambia, and grandmother were both painters, and passed the love of the medium on to her. She studied computer animation at Glendale College in Los Angeles and the influence of this background can be seen in her graphic line work and dynamic approach to composition.
Jallow’s solo exhibition with Albertz Benda will showcase new works that continue her investigation into depictions of women like her, who identify with more than one race and have difficulty fitting into either community. The recent works also mark an evolution in the artist’s practice by way of technique. In her earlier work she was preoccupied with focusing on her figure’s hands; here, she draws focus on the figure’s gaze, lending them a sense of autonomy and authority.
Rugiyatou Jallow, Chapter 2 (2023). Photo: Julian Calero. Courtesy of the artist and Carl Kostyal Gallery; Albertz Benda, New York, Los Angeles.
Justine Hill, “Omphalos”Dimin, October 20–November 25
Justine Hill. Courtesy of the artist and Dimin.
In a suite of new works for Dimin, Justine Hill employs her signature, idiosyncratically shaped paintings to further her investigations into human form, scale, and narrative, tapping into themes from mythology, folklore, as well as contemporary literature. The show’s title Omphalos, means “navel of the earth” in Greek mythology and Hill has borrowed science fiction author Ted Chiang’s use of this word for her own work, citing his short story of the same name that asks: which better exhibits proof of a creator, a navel or no navel? Hill has progressively incorporated more appendages and constructed increasingly figurative supports in her sculptural paintings, and her recent body of work is the most humanoid yet.
Based in New York City, Hill recently concluded an Elizabeth Murray Art Residency by Collar Works in upstate New York. Last year, she was the subject of a solo show at Maki Gallery, Tokyo, and completed a large-scale commission for the College of the Holy Cross—Hill’s alma mater, where she received her B.A. in 2008—which was on view through July of this year.
Justine Hill, Bust 3 (Hide) (2023). Courtesy of the artist and Dimin.

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After a month-long delay, an exhibition that provoked controversy in Santiago, Chile, opened at the capital’s Salvador Allende Solidarity Museum (MSSA) on October 8 with considerable alterations.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of Augusto Pinochet’s coup d’état that resulted in the assassination of the country’s then-president Salvador Allende. As part of its programming to commemorate the event, MSSA invited Cuban artist and Harvard lecturer Tania Bruguera to host a solo exhibition.
“Magnitud 11.9” (a reference to Allende’s assassination date) uses research conducted by the artist in Chile over the past year and archival material to explore democracy and its fragility.
The show’s announcement in August, however, prompted an immediate backlash from those on the country’s political left, including members of Allende’s family, who criticized the artist’s stance against Cuba’s communist government. Bruguera has long centered her artistic practice on critiquing the authoritarian policies of the Cuban state. She left Cuba in 2021 to join Harvard’s media and performance department.
The grandson of the former president, Pablo Sepúlveda Allende, wrote to MSSA demanding the exhibition’s cancellation, launched a petition calling for a “repudiation of the Tania Bruguera exhibition,” and a lengthy post on X, formerly Twitter, explaining his position.
“We consider Tania Bruguera’s exhibition a serious affront and lacking in intellectual honesty,” Allende wrote on X.  “The artist seeks to draw a parallel between the Chilean civil-military dictatorship of Pinochet with what she calls “the reality experienced by the people of Cuba”.
Other criticism arrived from a mayor of a Santiago commune, Daniel Jadue, and the political activist Víctor Hugo Robles, who wrote Bruguera was in Chile “promoting her counterrevolutionary work as an activist dressed as an artist paid by USA.”
In response, MSSA delayed the exhibition’s opening by a month, modified one of its key projects, and has now included the public criticism in the show.
MSSA’s director Claudia Zaldivar said that the exhibition had been approved by the museum’s administrators long in advance and told ArtNews that “this attempt at cancelling the show comes from a small group that considers Bruguera a dissident of the current Cuban government, transferring a local Cuban problem to Chile.”
“In this exhibition, we have tried to go beyond historical figures to review the institutional, legal and emotional instruments that can endanger democracy,” Bruguera said in a statement announcing the exhibition. “Memory, participation, injustice, corruption, and impunity are some of the topics discussed in the exhibition.”

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The prize was launched by the Association for the International Diffusion of French Art (ADIAF) in 2000. Since 2016, proposals by the four nominated artists have been exhibited at the Centre Pompidou. While the exhibition was previously held on the museum’s first floor, this year the artists are showcased on the fourth floor next to the permanent collection (until January 12, 2024), in order to give the prize more visibility. Two of the artists, Bak and Selmani, have used the small space in between their respective rooms to present a joint research project about their proposals.

The winner of the 22nd edition of the Marcel Duchamp Prize will be announced on October 16 and will be awarded €35,000. Each of the four artists received €10,000 towards the realization of their presentation.

Bertille Bak, Still Life (2023). Exhibition view: Prix Marcel Duchamp 2023, Centre Pompidou, Paris.Co-production and courtesy: Bertille Bak, Galerie Xippas (Paris, Geneva, Punta del Este) and the Gallery Apart (Rome). © Centre Pompidou, Bertrand Prévost.
Bertille Bak

For the prize, Bertille Bak has made a video installation that satirizes how masses of flowers are exported from the Global South to the North to satisfy voracious consumer demand.

Still Life (part 1: Winter) (2023) opens with the dismantling of a Christmas fairground and residents tossing Christmas trees out of their windows. The scene then switches to Mayan women in Colombia cutting roses in a greenhouse, in preparation for Valentine’s Day. Crates filled with the flowers are transported by cable car across mountains, down rural streets by rickshaw, and whizzed around warehouses. Gorgeous, brightly colored discs of roses, worn on the backs of silleteros women in Medellin, are spun down a cliff face, while airplanes soar through the sky in a heart formation. Towards the end of the piece, elderly French couples dance in an open-air festival, the discs decorating the stage. The video is the first part a quadriptych project.

“I always want to step aside from documentary-style statements and frontal denunciation and make the viewer reflect a posteriori,” Bak told Artnet News. “That’s why I invent a new language that’s perhaps more playful, to allude to a situation.”

Bak traveled to Colombia earlier this year to embark on her project. “Colombia is the second largest exporter of flowers worldwide after Holland,” she noted, “and the discrepancy between the country’s armed conflicts and all these flowers symbolizing fragility, love and romance interested me.”

As the granddaughter of Polish miners in the north of France, Bak focuses on injustices experienced by certain groups of people, sociopolitical and ethnological issues, and the absurdities of today’s world. An earlier film, Mineur Mineur (2022), about child miners in India, Madagascar, Bolivia, Thailand and Indonesia, is an indictment of child labor that references her family background.

Bak’s work has been exhibited at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Turin’s Merz Foundation and the Louvre Lens. She won the Mario Merz Prize in 2019 and will have a solo show at the Jeu de Paume photography centre in Paris next year. Bak is represented by Xippas (Paris, Geneva and Punta del Este, Uruguay) and the Gallery Apart (Rome).

Exhibition view, Prix Marcel Duchamp 2023. Bouchra Khalili, The Constellations (2011).Courtesy of the artist and Mor Charpentier, Adagp, Paris 2023. © Centre Pompidou, Bertrand Prévost.

Bouchra Khalili

A ‘constellation’ of works, the term being a central motif both visually and metaphorically for the artist, greets visitors in Bouchra Khalili’s installation. The Constellations (2011) consists of a large circle that frames a series of blue screenprints, each of which maps different migratory routes in the Middle East, Africa, and Europe. Opposite is a projection of The Tempest Society (2017), an ambitious film produced for Documenta 14 in Athens that is based on the theatrical experiences of the Al Assifa (Arabic for “tempest”) group, which emerged during the 1970s Arab workers’ movement in France. The film’s protagonists reflect on immigration through the historical and poetic link between theatre and the notion of citizenship in Ancient Greece. Two short films complete the ensemble.

“Although all these works belong to different periods, I sought to show the coherence of my practice that is deployed as if it’s one sole work made through multiple articulations,” Khalili said. “If one often finds circles in my exhibitions, it’s because this visual motif recalls a precise type of performance that is the most ancient form of theater in North Africa called ‘Halqa,’ which means both ‘circle’ and ‘assembly.’”

Born in 1975 in Casablanca, Khalili has exhibited widely, including at the Palais de Tokyo and Jeu de Paume in Paris, New York’s MoMA, the MFA Boston, and Barcelona’s MACBA. She participated in the Biennale of Sydney in 2012, the Venice Biennale in 2013, and the Sharjah Biennial in 2011 and 2023. Khalili won this year’s Sharjah Biennial Prize for her mixed-media installation, The Circle. Her exhibition, “The Circle & The Tempest” is currently on view at Luma Arles. Khalili is represented by Mor Charpentier (Paris, Bogota) and by ADN Galeria (Barcelona).

Exhibition view, Prix Marcel Duchamp 2023, Centre Pompidou, Paris. Tarik Kiswanson, The Wait (2023). Courtesy of the artist and Carlier Gebauer, Berlin/Madrid. © Centre Pompidou, Bertrand Prévost.

Tarik Kiswanson

“I’m best known for sculpture, but here I wanted to make a cosmology of pieces in different media to explore all the subjects at the heart of my work—the question of being uprooted, transformation, metamorphosis, and migration,” Tarik Kiswanson said.

The artist’s presentation is metaphorical and abstract whilst intermingling personal and universal stories. Wedged into a passageway next to his room is a white, elongated ovoid sculpture with three boxes positioned vertically onto its side. “I was looking at grains that disperse in the wind and thinking about cocoons and the chrysalis,” said Kiswanson, whose parents immigrated from the Palestinian territories and eventually settled in Sweden in the 1980s. The work alludes to the diaspora and transformation that displaced people undergo.

Inside Kiswanson’s room is a larger cocoon sculpture, Nest (2021). The cocoon reappears in The Relief (R Gabriel, 1945), (2023), balanced precariously under a wardrobe made by French industrial designer René Gabriel for people whose homes had been bombed during World War II. The idea of reconstruction is also encapsulated in a sound piece about his mother’s first day in Sweden. Further works talk about transforming states in other ways. For instance, The Fall (2020) is a looped video showing a boy falling in slow motion off his school chair as if he’s floating.

“Initially, I treated this idea of transformation through the prism of immigration and my family’s history but, with time, I wanted to expand this question in a more universal way,” said Kiswanson, who cites Martinican writer Édouard Glissant among his influences. “Ambiguity is essential in my work; I always try to avoid literal things.”

In the last year, Kiswanson had solo shows at Sweden’s Bonniers Konsthall, Museo Tamayo in Mexico City, and Austria’s Salzburger Kunstverein. He has also exhibited at Carré d’art in Nîmes, Antwerp’s Museum of Contemporary Art, and participated in the 2018 Gwangju Biennale, New York’s Performa 19 and the 2022 Biennale de Lyon. Kiswanson is represented by Carlier Gebauer (Berlin, Madrid) and Sfeir-Semler Gallery (Hamburg, Beirut).

Massinissa Selmani, Topography of latency (2023). Exhibition view, Prix Marcel Duchamp 2023, Centre Pompidou, Paris. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Anne-Sarah Bénichou, Paris; Selma Feriani Gallery, London/Tunis-Adagp, Paris 2023.
Massinissa Selmani

“I’m always looking for the lightest form, and drawing has that quality,” Massinissa Selmani said about the ‘drawn forms’ in his practice, which encompass drawing, animation, sculpture and murals.

This lightness is matched by the enigmatic and elliptical manner with which he deals with migration, borders, and conflict in his new installation for the prize. Titled Une parcelle d’horizon au milieu du jour (A plot on the horizon at midday), it features drawn shapes employed across multiple media. “Rather than talking about immigration in a frontal way with suffering bodies, I prefer to talk about the idea of the horizon in my project,” explained Selmani, whose starting point was Marc Guillaume’s philosophical book Puissance de l’ellipse (2023).

Several elements recur with absurd flourishes. A bird flies into a birdhouse on a security wall and out the other side before entering again, in a repetitive cycle. Clouds, which also escape human border controls, move freely across the sky. In other drawings featuring isolated architectural elements, a young man is searched by a policeman, a sniffer dog inspects a miniature boat, and a figure holds up his hands, as if against a wall.

Born in 1980 in Algiers, Selmani—now based in the French city of Tours—grew up during the Algerian Civil War and initially studied computer science. Fascinated by press photography, he contextualizes and reconstitutes isolated elements. His diverse sources of inspiration range from the Belgian Surrealists to the Algerian poet Jean Sénac.

Selmani received a special mention from the jury at the Venice Biennale in 2015. His work has also been exhibited at the Dakar Biennale in 2014, the Biennale de Lyon in 2015, Sharjah Biennial in 2017 and Kochi-Muziris Biennale in 2022. He has had solo shows at the Palais de Tokyo and the Centre de Création Contemporaine Olivier Debré in Tours, and he won the SAM Art Projects Prize in 2016. He is represented by Galerie Anne-Sarah Bénichou (Paris), Selma Feriani (Tunis, London), and Jane Lombard Gallery (New-York).

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In a clever curatorial twist, there is a knockout show-within-a-show in “Herstory,” the compelling six-decade survey of the feminist icon Judy Chicago which opened at the New Museum in New York today. Amid floors devoted solely to Chicago’s work, one section, entitled “The City of Ladies,” places her works in dialogue with those of other women artists from across the centuries, from Hilma af Klint to Frida Kahlo.
This curatorial vignette is worth the price of admission in and of itself and underscores larger tendencies in the artist’s practice. Chicago’s hard-to-quantify oeuvre is defined by her broad buckshot scope (and laser-sharp aim)—she is the chameleonic embodiment of a group show. Colored smoke, fireworks, airbrushed car hoods, sculpture, needlepoint, performance, photography, ceramics—the list of mediums she’s mastered goes on and on.
“Judy Chicago: Herstory,” 2023. Exhibition view: New Museum, New York. Courtesy New Museum. Photo: Dario Lasagni
All of these facets are on display in the 84-year-old artist’s victory lap of an exhibition. “Herstory” opens today and runs until January 14, 2024. Encompassing four floors, the exhibition is a study of magnitude that veers from serene to devastating. Goddess sculptures and optimistic 1960s candy-colored abstractions segue into brutal meditations on the Holocaust and extinction. Meanwhile, “The City of Ladies” occupies the museum’s fourth floor. Chicago was on hand at Tuesday’s evening preview event and appeared just as enthralled by the works around her as the other attendees.
The artist at the opening dinner for New Museum’s “Judy Chicago: Herstory.” Photo: BFA, courtesy of Dior.
“My work draws on the historical work, the herstory, that has been assembled in ‘The City of Ladies,’” Chicago said, refined in a double-breasted black suit and white turtleneck, her hair a purple and fuchsia mélange. “Five hundred years of women’s cultural production has been assembled. This is the background against which I have worked, and without it, people would not have been able to comprehend my work,” she said. Throughout her career, Chicago has been as much of a proselytizer and teacher as an artist, always at the ready to celebrate the women who inspired her and came before her.
“Judy Chicago: Herstory,” 2023. Exhibition view: New Museum, New York. Courtesy New Museum. Photo: Dario Lasagni
Grabbing my arm, Chicago drew me across the deep magenta floral carpet and through the crowd. “Come here!” she said, motioning to a wall monitor. “Here is a video of the history of goddess imagery,” she explained. “It tells the story of what my goddesses draw on. There’s a room downstairs that has ‘The Birth Project’ in it. Come here.” We walk to another portion of the gallery. “This is a wall about images of motherhood and birth,” Chicago said. “Nobody, even I didn’t know there was a tradition of women making work on these subjects. This spans centuries!”
She pauses and continues, “It is not only women artists who have been erased but subjects that the mainstream art world has not considered important, like birth and motherhood. My work draws on all this work. That’s what’s important about ‘The City of Ladies.’” Among the 90 artists in this section are marquee names like Leonora Carrington, Georgia O’Keeffe, Hilma af Klint, and Frida Kahlo. But there is a wealth of striking art from artists whom we should know, offering an enrapturing syllabus of women who deserve a rightful place in the canon.
“Judy Chicago: Herstory,” 2023. Exhibition view: New Museum, New York. Courtesy New Museum. Photo: Dario Lasagni
One example is an unforgettable gouache of quiet majesty by artist Charlotte Salomon—it’s a self-portrait, painted in 1940 during her exile in France while pregnant at 26 (she would die in 1943 at Auschwitz). “It’s the most powerful thing that!” Chicago said. “There’s so much heartbreaking stuff. It was damaged and The New Museum had to conserve it. That is a very significant metaphor for the degree to which women’s work historically has not been cared for, not been honored, and not been put together so you can see her story.”
Judy Chicago, Evening Fan (1971). Courtesy of the artist. Collection Jay Franke and David Herro, Miami Beach, FL
On the second-floor gallery, I found a particularly resonant series of photographs. In the images, women are shown holding canisters, from which billowing colored smoke pours forth into nature’s expanse. They’re beautiful from a graphic point of view, but Chicago explains the inherent subtextual protest, “You have to realize I did those in the 70s. At that time, the Buddhist monks were burning themselves in protest for the Vietnam War. They reference a terrible custom in India where widows are pushed onto the funeral pyre so the families won’t have to support them because their husbands died. My work grows out of history.”
Judy Chicago, Rainbow Pickett (1965/2021). Courtesy of the artist, Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation.
Wafting above “The City of Ladies” section are enormous brocade-lined tapestries embroidered with cursive queries like “Would God Be Female?” and “What if Women Ruled the World?” Text is a vital part of Chicago’s practice. When asked if she’s just as much of a writer as she is an artist she deflects. “Doesn’t Ed Ruscha have text?” she responded and impatiently dismissed this subject. Chicago originally produced these gilded banners for Dior’s summer 2020 haute couture show (the house’s creative director Maria Grazia Chiuri is also fond of sloganeering and explicit feminist messaging).
“Judy Chicago: Herstory,” 2023. Exhibition view: New Museum, New York. Courtesy New Museum. Photo: Dario Lasagni
The banners have since become an iconic component of Chicago’s body of work. “The project has developed a life of its own,” Chicago said, “It’s reached out across a number of countries with people all over wanting to have a chance to answer the questions that are posed on the banners, which I guess speaks a lot to the longing for change.”
“Judy Chicago: Herstory,” 2023. Exhibition view: New Museum, New York. Courtesy New Museum. Photo: Dario Lasagni
The banners aren’t as well-known as her 1979 benchmark The Dinner Party, which is permanently displayed in its own gallery at the Brooklyn Museum (the New Museum has the drawings and studies for the plates on display, however, and they’re a revelation). Speaking of dinner parties, Dior hosted a post-preview 230-person celebratory meal down the street at the Bowery Hotel’s rooftop restaurant. After the first course, Chicago rose and delivered a moving speech.
Judy Chicago, Rainbow Shabbat (1992). Fabrication by Bob Gomez, glass painting by Dorothy Maddy. Courtesy of  Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation
“When I was a little girl, I was raised by a father at a time when fathers did not really participate in parenting,” she told the rapt audience. “My father taught me that I had an obligation to work for change, towards a better world, and to make a contribution. As anybody who’s followed my career knows, I’ve had a pretty rough struggle…… I put my faith in art history. And, as it turns out, I might have been right. However, there is still a lot to do before there is real institutional change and the paradigm shift we need if we’re going to survive as a human race.”
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The discovery of Emperor Qin Shihuang’s Terracotta Army may rank as China’s grandest archaeological achievement of the 20th century, but the ruins at Sanxingdui stake a claim as its most beguiling.
The bronze statues, jade swords, and elephant tusks unearthed in China’s southwestern province of Sichuan continue to confound archaeologists, so stylistically distinct are they from anything previously encountered.
The nature of the two discoveries and their impact on the historical record are remarkably similar. Both were uncovered by unwitting farmers digging a well. Both provided evidence of cultures that had previously been considered more myth than fact.
Unlike in Xi’an, however, where excavations on Qin’s third century burial mounds remain largely on hold due to preservation concerns, the archaeological work at Sanxingdui has continued at pace and with the generous backing of the Chinese state.
Grand mythical creature, 1300 – 1100 BCE, Bronze. Image: courtesy Sanxingdui Museum.
The fruits of these ongoing excavations form the backbone of “Gazing at Sanxingdui: New Archaeological Discoveries in Sichuan,” a sprawling exhibition newly opened at the Hong Kong Palace Museum (through January 8, 2024). As the show name suggests, around half of the 120 gold, jade, and bronze artifacts have been found in the past three years. Most have never been exhibited outside of Sichuan.
Although the first Sanxingdui discoveries came in the 1920s, it wasn’t until the late ‘80s that major archaeological work began in a series of pits on the outskirts of Chengdu. The artifacts, which date as far back as far as 4,500 years, are aesthetically distinct from contemporary civilizations: bronze masks with broad, bulging eyes, twisting tree-like sculptures with idling birds, and towering statues depicting slender figures with hooked noses.
Many such artifacts are on display in Hong Kong. There are bronze and gold masks carved with sharply defined cheekbones and brows, stands for bronze trees affixed with kneeling figurines, sculptures that seemingly fuse together tiger and dragon figures, and bronze vessels that more closely echo those of the later Shang dynasty.
Exhibition view from Hong Kong Palace Museum. Image: courtesy Hong Kong Palace Museum.
The exhibition in Hong Kong was timed to coincide with China’s National Day on October 1 and, accordingly, arrives with a political bent; as the museum’s director Louis Ng said in a statement, there’s “the aim of the deepening understanding of the formation and development of the 5,000-year Chinese civilization.” Among its revelations is the banishing of the notion of Sichuan as a cultural backwater. Instead, it evidences a thriving and complex civilization that flourished far from the Yellow River valley. Sanxingdui complicates Chinese history—and wonderfully so.
“Gazing at Sanxingdui: New Archaeological Discoveries in Sichuan” is on view through January 8, 2024, at the Hong Kong Palace Museum. See images of the show below.
Human head with gold mask 1300 – 1100 BCE, Bronze. Image: courtesy Sanxingdui Museum.
Mask with protruding pupils, 1300 –1100 BCE, bronze. Image: courtesy Sanxingdui Museum.
Kneeling figure with twisted head, 1300 – 1100 BCE, Bronze. Image: courtesy Sanxingdui Museum.
Zun Vessel, 1300–1100 BCE, Bronze. Image: Image: courtesy Sanxingdui Museum.
Dragon-shaped object, 1300–1100 BCE, Bronze. Image: courtesy Sanxingdui Museum.
Exhibition view from Hong Kong Palace Museum. Image: courtesy Hong Kong Palace Museum.
Exhibition view from Hong Kong Palace Museum. Image: courtesy Hong Kong Palace Museum.
Exhibition view from Hong Kong Palace Museum. Image: courtesy Hong Kong Palace Museum.
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