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    in Exhibitions

    A Delayed and Expanded David Hockney Show Opens at London’s National Portrait Gallery, Harry Styles and All

    A new exhibition of works by David Hockney at the National Portrait Gallery in London has been a long time coming. When it opened in February 2020 to mixed but generally favorable reviews, it was cut short after just 20 days by the pandemic. It never had a chance to reopen before the museum closed for a mammoth $52 million renovation and rehang, which opened in June. Opening November 2 in an expanded version, the show boasts 33 new paintings produced between 2021 and 2022 at Hockney’s studio in Normandy, including one much-hyped portrayal of global superstar Harry Styles.
    For Hockney, now 86, portraits have been a constant. He has returned again and again across the decades to the same subjects: himself and his friends, most notably former lover Gregory Evans; fashion designer and muse Celia Birtwell; and Maurice Payne, a printer with whom Hockney often collaborated. Far from feeling needlessly exhaustive, whole rooms dedicated to each sitter present a masterclass in all the ways that one person’s essence can be captured.
    Take the artist himself. His self-portraits from the 1950s and early 1960s, when he was still at art school, evince early attempts at self-fashioning, with prominent glasses and lightly eccentric formalwear. The look, later completed with a flat cap, would become quintessentially Hockney. His always imaginative flair can be found in etchings like A Rake’s Progress (1961-1963), a humorous retelling of Hogarth’s classic tale of downfall and depravity that was partly inspired by a trip to New York where Hockney eagerly explored the gay nightlife.
    David Hockney, Celia Carennac August 1971. Photo: Richard Schmidt Collection, The David Hockney Foundation, © David Hockney.
    Over time, Hockney found increasingly inventive ways to depict himself, as in the case of the cartoonish Man Looking for his Glasses (1986) or Self-Portrait Using Three Mirrors (2003). Famously, in 2012, Hockney trod where few other artists had dared by making paintings on an iPad. One self-portrait is presented as a recording, revealing the digital brush strokes being made as if in real time, so we can see part of this unusual mark-making process.
    Across all the works, Hockney plays with a mix of historical references. Some expressionistic or deconstructed elements are clearly borrowed from the moderns, of which he most reveres Picasso, but elsewhere a three-quarter profile, stately pose, or Rembrandtesque brown ink reveals Hockney’s admiration for Old Masters.
    David Hockney, Self Portrait 26th Sept. (1983). Photo: © David Hockney.
    Hockney’s interest in different stylistic approaches is clear in the contrast between Gregory Reading. Vestrefjord (2003), a colorful watercolor sketch in which the figure is loosely outlined but more detail is given over to the tablecloth, and a 1977 drawing in which Gregory’s face is almost lifelike but the rest of the image slowly melts away. Either way, we eventually get to know Hockney’s subjects. What emerges in every case is not merely how their faces change with age but how life makes these characters harden or evolve.
    Though the exhibition is supposedly all about drawing, this term appears to be used more in the sense of sketching to capture a moment rather than strictly the act of putting pencil to paper. For this reason, the more recent Normandy paintings are a welcome addition. Fitting all 33 into one room allows the museum to show off its new, more stately galleries.
    David Hockney, JP Gonçalves de Lima, 3rd November (2021). Photo: Jonathan Wilkinson, © David Hockney.
    In these works, the wider cast of characters are, again, mostly friends and acquaintances of the artist, though notable figures (besides the obvious) include music producer Clive Davis, art dealer David Juda, writer and gallerist Jean Frémon, and writer Charlie Scheips, who appears in two portraits. There are also multiple self-portraits and images of Hockney’s partner J.P. Gonçalves de Lima. These paintings are hardly the artist’s best work—the portrait of Harry Styles has been widely acknowledged to be disappointing and most of the sitters are a slightly grotesque shade of pink, with either aggressively furrowed or aggressively shiny foreheads modeled with strips of peeking white ground—but they still never lack Hockney’s reliable character and éclat.
    “David Hockney: Drawing from Life” opens tomorrow and runs through January 21, 2024.
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    in Exhibitions

    An Yvette Mayorga Work Is Unmistakable. A New Survey Explores Her Unique Inspirations, From German Lithographs to ‘Mexican Pink’

    This summer, as Barbie fever took over popular culture, so did the film’s signature brand of pink. Seemingly overnight, the color was everywhere—on runways, red carpets, car insurance commercials, even Burger King buns. The furor ultimately led to a global paint shortage. 
    The Barbie “moment” came up in a recent conversation with Yvette Mayorga, a Mexican-American painter and sculptor whose work is almost always awash in a similar pink hue. This was not the first time she had been asked about it. 
    “I think it’s a good beginner introduction to feminism,” Mayorga said of the film, somewhat equivocally, before clarifying that she was left “wanting more of a complicated narrative.”  
    Installation view of “Yvette Mayorga: Dreaming of You” at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, 2023. Courtesy of the Aldrich.
    The artist, who was speaking on the occasion of her new exhibition “Dreaming of You,” at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut, was smart to hedge. For one, Barbie-mania feels, today, less like a marketing campaign built around a movie and more like a movie built around a marketing campaign. (The film’s $150 million marketing budget was indeed bigger than its $145 million production budget.) Barbie may mock the commoditization of gender, but its corporate overlords have exploited it to pull a similar trick. 
    More importantly, Mayorga’s relationship to pink is a deeply personal one forged well before the film and its attendant consumer craze. The color has been a staple of the artist’s work almost since the beginning of her practice, roughly a dozen years ago. She’s always viewed pink as an “underdog”: oft dismissed for its feminine, kitsch associations, but extra potent for the same reason.  
    In her world, colors can’t be reduced to stereotypes. Nor can people. 
    Installation view of “Yvette Mayorga: Dreaming of You” at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, 2023. Courtesy of the Aldrich.
    “Dreaming of You” is not Mayorga’s first museum show, but it is effectively her first survey, bringing together pieces from the last six years of her career. The exhibition does more than showcase individual objects. It puts on display the evolution of her practice during that time—a period that saw the artist extend her candy-coated vision beyond the canvas to sculpture, video, and installation.
    Naturally, pink is all over the show; most of the museum’s walls have been painted with it. One gallery is entirely cloaked in the color, save for a black-and-white checkerboard floor that feels a little Lewis Carroll, a lot David Lynch.
    For Mayorga, pink is a point of entry, luring viewers with its boldness. It’s also a point of departure, evoking the polish of Pop art and the lavishness of the Rococo, as well as the bubblegum, “girl power” aesthetics of her Y2K youth. Her preferred hue is “Mexican pink,” a color with historic cultural roots that has, in more recent times, also become symbolic of the Latinx experience in a divided America.
    Yvette Mayorga, ICE ICE LADY (2017). Courtesy of the artist.
    Reclaiming the labor of craft, Mayorga often applies her pink acrylic paint with bakery-style piping bags. The strategy is an homage to her mother, who worked as a cake decorator in Chicago’s landmark Marshall Field’s department store upon immigrating to the U.S. in the 1970s. It also lends the artist’s creations the appeal of something frosted and delicious. “When people encounter the work for the first time,” Mayorga explained, “they often say, ‘Wow, I want to eat it’ or ‘I want to touch it,’ ‘I’m craving something sweet.’”  
    And yet, while Mayorga’s pink artworks look like confections, they taste more like medicine. At the core of almost everything she makes is a theme that underlies them all: the fallacy of the American Dream.  
    One 2017 painting on view at the Aldrich, for instance, nods to the lavish epicureanism of a Late Baroque masterpiece, but its title conjures an altogether different scene: I Remember Eating Hot Chips when my Dad got Deported, After J.H. Fragonard, “The Swing.” Another work from the same series, called High Maintenance, plays on the dual meanings of the word “ICE,” depicting a woman swimming in a palace while an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent enters at the edge of the frame. 
    “I want people to feel disappointed, in a way,” she said of her works’ bait-and-switch play. “Because not everything is what we think it is.” 
    Installation view of “Yvette Mayorga: Dreaming of You” at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, 2023. Courtesy of the Aldrich.
    Among the standouts in “Dreaming of You” is a suite of three new life-sized portraits of her siblings. These form an extension of a body of work she introduced this time last year in a solo show at The Momentary, a satellite branch of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas. 
    The paintings were conceived as a reference to German lithographer Martin Engelbrecht (1684-1756) and his series depicting low- and middle-class laborers. Among Engelbrecht’s subjects are bakers and confectioners, but their jobs, Mayorga pointed out, are “not the defining characteristics of the portraits. You see the people first, then you see these very subtle references to labor.”
    Mayorga’s versions are ovular, shaped like mirrors. They have a lot of mirrors embedded in them too: “I thought it was really important for the viewer to be able to see their reflection in the work.” The idea, she continued, is to remind viewers to “[consider] who the person is before tying them to their labor. That’s a really important conversation to have right now, because of the way that Latinx people are perceived. We are not a monolith.” 
    Yvette Mayorga, Scorpion After Ouvrière en Porcelaine (2023). Courtesy of the artist.
    “Yvette Mayorga: Dreaming of You” is on view now through March 17, 2024, at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut. 
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    in Exhibitions

    See Sharon Stone’s New Paintings—Daubed Abstractions That Reflect Her Inner World

    Ever since receiving a paint-by-numbers set during the pandemic, Sharon Stone has been conversing with colors. That, at least, is how the ’90s Hollywood icon describes her all-consuming relationship with painting, one which has seen her spend up to 17 hours a day in a dedicated studio she’s created in her Beverly Hills home.
    Not that wielding a paintbrush is new to Stone. She grew up painting under the tutelage of her aunt and briefly studied art at Edinboro University, Pennsylvania, before dropping out to pursue a career in modeling and acting.
    Four decades on, Stone is seemingly focused on painting full-time. She has built off her Spring show at Los Angeles’ Allouche Gallery with “Welcome to My Garden,” her East Coast debut, now on view at C. Parker Gallery through December 3.
    The show name is taken from one of the 19 paintings on display in Greenwich, Connecticut, and speaks to a collection that teems with trees, flowers, and leaves—albeit ones that are often washed translucent or dashed and sketch-like.
    “This new exhibition offers a never-before-seen panorama into Sharon Stone’s creative prowess,” said gallery director Tiffany Benincasa. “The artist invites viewers on a journey through the vibrant landscapes of her imagination, reflecting her inner world.”
    Sharon Stone, There’s a Breach in the Atmosphere (2023). Photo courtesy of the artist and C. Parker Gallery.
    The title is also something of an invitation into Stone’s world view. It turns out she has quite a lot to say. Jerusalem, an abstract work comprised of loose puddles of sandy yellows and grays, reflects on her visit to the Western Wall and her prayers for peace. A State of Affairs is Stone’s commentary on the patriarchy with swirls of black snakes coiled over clouds of pink and blue. There is a Breach in the Atmosphere is one of several works that confronts humanity’s indifference to earth’s environmental catastrophe. All pressing and current causes to be sure, but the titles have more bite than the works themselves.
    It’s easy to be cynical about actors who take a mid-career detour to explore other artistic pursuits. In Stone’s case, it’s worth putting such skepticism aside. The variety of work in “My Garden” seems to show a young artist working through their practice and many boast depth and a strong balance of color.
    In interview, Stone has listed the likes of Wassily Kandinsky, Joan Miró, and Claude Monet as influences, but sometimes these figures weigh a little too heavily. Amelia has the block and curvature of a Kandinsky abstract and Reflections, perhaps consciously, appears like a Monet close-up.
    This doesn’t detract from “My Garden,” but rather shows the flashes of a painter still finding their palette and range. Just don’t call it a hobby.
    See more images from the show below.
    Sharon Stone, Reflections (2021). Photo courtesy of the artist and C. Parker Gallery.
    Sharon Stone posing alongside her work Bayou (2022). Photo courtesy of C. Parker Gallery.
    Sharon Stone, Amelia (2023). Photo courtesy of the artist and C. Parker Gallery.
    Sharon Stone, Jerusalem (2023). Photo courtesy of the artist and C. Parker Gallery.
    Sharon Stone, City Lights (2021). Photo courtesy of the artist and C. Parker Gallery.
    Sharon Stone alongside her canvas Welcome to My Garden (2023). Photo courtesy of C. Parker Gallery.
    Sharon Stone, Bamboo Forest Fall/Winter. Photo courtesy of the artist and C. Parker Gallery.
    Sharon Stone, Dreamscape 1. Photo courtesy of the artist and C. Parker Gallery.
    Sharon Stone, The Lantern (2022). Photo courtesy of the artist and C. Parker Gallery.
    Sharon Stone, It’s My Garden, Asshole (2022). Photo courtesy of the artist and C. Parker Gallery.
    “Welcome to My Garden” is on view at C. Parker Gallery, 409 Greenwich Ave, Greenwich, Connecticut, through December 3.

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    in Street Art

    New Mural by PichiAvo in Bayonne, France

    In the city of Bayonne, PichiAvo, the renowned Spanish artistic duo, has once again graced the urban landscape with their latest work of art. This captivating mural, presented as part of the Points de Vue Street Art Festival, pays a heartfelt tribute to Glaucus, the Greek sea god. The mural seamlessly intertwines with Bayonne’s profound connection to water, creating a visual spectacle that encapsulates the city’s spirit.Bayonne, strategically positioned at the confluence of the Adour River and the mighty Atlantic Ocean, has a long history intertwined with the elemental force of water. The city’s development and character have been significantly influenced by its relationship with these aquatic surroundings.The mural is unveiled as part of the Points de Vue urban art festival, a cultural celebration born in 2017. This festival is the result of collaborative efforts between the Basque Country Urban Community, the Bayonne town hall, and the KAXU gallery. Points de Vue stands as a testament to Bayonne’scommitment to urban art and culture.This event is not just a festival; it’s an open-air gallery that extends its reach beyond Bayonne, encompassing the entire region. Attendees can explore the city’s streets, gazing upon monumental frescoes that adorn the walls or embark on a treasure hunt for hidden artistic gems, further emphasizingthe synergy between art and the urban environment.PichiAvo’s tribute to Glaucus, the deity of the sea, beautifully exemplifies this artistic fusion, as the mural not only pays homage to Greek mythology but also resonates with the city’s intrinsic connection to water. It’s a vivid testament to the timeless interplay between nature, art, and culture. The Points de Vue Street Art Festival has created a vibrant platform for such expressions, ensuring that Bayonne continues to be a canvas for artistic inspiration and an ode to the ever present element of water that has shaped its unique character. More

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    in Exhibitions

    More Than 300 Photographs From Elton John’s Legendary Art Collection Are Going on View at the V&A Museum

    The story goes that while sitting beside Cindy Sherman at a New York fundraiser, Sir Elton John complained that her work never came up for auction. Sherman promptly sold him six artist prints from her breakthrough series “Untitled Film Stills.” Her motive? She was in need of a new house.
    The anecdote is indicative of how fame, connections, and no little money, has made John a preeminent collector of photography. He lists it as his second passion, after music, and together with his husband David Furnish, the couple has purchased more than 7,000 photographs that present many of the great photographers, events, and celebrities of the 20th century.
    A selection of more than 300 photographs from this sprawling collection is set to be shown at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum from May 18, 2024, to January 5, 2025. It will be the largest photography show the museum has staged to date.
    Malcolm X during his visit to enterprises owned by Black Muslims. Chicago, Illinois, USA, 1962, by Eve Arnold. Photo: courtesy Eve Arnold, Magnum Photos.
    The exhibition, “Fragile Beauty,” spans the 1950s to the present and features the work of 140 photographers spread across eight thematic sections. It explores celebrity in images of Marilyn Monroe and Miles Davis, reportage in stills from the Civil Rights movement, AIDS activism in the 1980s, and the attacks of September 11 (for which John and Furnish hold the world’s largest collection), and the male body through photographs from the likes of Robert Mapplethorpe and Tyler Mitchell.
    “’Fragile Beauty’ will be a truly epic journey across the recent history of photography,” the show’s curator Duncan Forbes said. “Whether through the elegance of fashion photography, the creativity of musicians and performers, the exploration of desire, or the passage of history as captured by photojournalism, photography reveals something important about the world.”
    John has been collecting photography since getting sober in 1991. In effect, “Fragile Beauty” is the second half of a photographic tour that began in 2016 with “The Radical Eye” in which the Tate Modern staged 150 of John’s photographs from 1920 to 1950 including rare work from Man Ray, André Kertész, and Edward Steichen.
    At the V&A, John and Furnish further a relationship that began with a loan of Horst P. Horst photographs in 2014. In 2019, a significant donation from the couple to the museum’s new photography center saw a gallery named in their honor.
    “Working alongside the V&A again has been a truly memorable experience,” the pair said in a statement. “We look forward to sharing this exhibition with the public.”
    Preview more images from the exhibition below.
    Tyler Mitchell, Simply Fragile (2022). Photo: courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.
    Herman Leonard, Chet Baker, New York City, 1956. Photo: Herman Leonard Photography, LLC.
    Ryan McGinley, Dakota Hair (2004). Photo: courtesy Ryan McGinley Studios.
    Herb Ritts, Versace Dress (Back View), El Mirage (1990). Image: Herb Ritts Foundation, Courtesy of Fahey Klein Gallery, Los Angeles.

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    in Exhibitions

    How an Intergenerational Cohort of Artists at an Icelandic Biennial Grappled with Notions of Darkness

    Landing in Iceland in a gale as the winter darkness closes in, one has a primeval sense of being at the mercy of the elements. So, it feels somehow fitting that the curators of the artist-run Icelandic biennial “Sequences” selected the title “Can’t See,” for its 11th edition, which is on view at several locations until November 26. Not seeing, and darkness, have played a fundamental role in shaping Icelandic culture, said Sunna Ástþórsdóttir, director of the Living Art Museum, which is a co-founder institution of the biennial. “We have all these stories about mythological creatures, mysterious events, and hidden people, which is all to do with the brutality of living here,” she noted.
    The curators—Marika Agu, Maria Arusoo, Kaarin Kivirähk, and Sten Ojavee—are part of a collective from the Estonian Centre for Contemporary Art. They have taken darkness as their starting point, both literally and metaphorically, by thinking about the wealth of life forms that humanity can’t perceive and the urgent issues we blindly refuse to recognize.
    “The title applies to today’s world, with the ungraspable climate catastrophe on its way, but also war in Ukraine and pandemics, so darkness just seems very current,” said Kivirähk. “But it can also be read as the possibility that you might be using your imagination if you can’t see, so the theme embraces both doom and celebration.”
    Edith Karlson, Can’t See (2023). Exhibition view from “Art in the Age of the Anthropocene” at Kumu Art Museum, Tallinn. Photo: Joosep Kivimäe
    In pursuit of the imperceptible, the biennial is divided into four chapters: “Subterranean,” “Soil,” “Water,” and “Metaphysical Realm,” with exhibitions dedicated to these themes on show at four Reykjavik institutions, until November 26. The program brings together more than 50 Icelandic and international artists, in a lineup that includes Nigerian-American artists Precious Okoyomon and Dozie Kanu, as well as Edith Karlson, who will represent Estonia at the 2024 Venice Biennale.

    Okoyomon and Kanu have collaborated to create a wind installation in a lighthouse titled Fragmented sky – wind – fly giving presence to wind (2023), while Karlson’s mercreature sculpture, Can’t See (2023) contributed to the biennial’s title. From Iceland there’s a huge diversity of offerings, including Hrund Atladóttir’s Black Whole (2023), a dizzying video and AI portal into nature, and Brák Jónsdóttir’s sculpture of a shiny cyborgian jellyfish, Turritopsis 2.0 (2023), which is inspired by an immortal species and fuses elements of porn and horror.
    What makes “Sequences” distinctive is the bold dialogues set up across generations, between new commissions and works from museum collections. It might seem counterintuitive for a festival looking to push boundaries to incorporate museum loans and deceased or “outsider” artists, but it’s a thrilling aspect of the program and testament to the curators’ thorough research.
    Grotta Lighthouse lit up at night, venue for Precious Okoyomon and Dozie Kanu’s installation, Reykjavik. Courtesy of Sequences XI

    An example is the unlikely pairing of landscape paintings by Iceland’s art grandee Jóhannes Kjarval (1885-1972) with Þorgerður Ólafsdóttir’s multidisciplinary works based around Surtsey, a volcanic island that erupted off Iceland in 1963. These include her cast of what is believed to be the earliest fossilized human footprint on earth.
    “I have loved Kjarval’s paintings since I was a child, but it hadn’t occurred to me that our works would coincide,” said Ólafsdóttir. “I love all the details in his paintings. They somehow resonated with the tiny particles of seaborne waste embedded in the footprint, so it was an unexpected but happy encounter.”

    Installation view of Monika Czyzck’s installation “Can’t See”. Photo by Monika Czyzck

    Perhaps unsurprisingly, many of the artworks in “Sequences” draw inspiration from Iceland’s magical geology and vivid folkloric tradition. In the “Subterranean” section, Finland-based artist Monika Czyżyk covered the windows with symbols and faces relating to creatures she saw in the stones, mountains and rivers, using a variety of earthy clay tones she found in the Icelandic wilderness.
    Czyżyk’s paintings reverberate with Valgerður Briem’s (1914-2002) intricate ink drawings evoking cartographies or perhaps internal bodily landscapes. The common ground, according to Czyżyk, is a vision of the cosmos, earth and its materials as “alive.” The artist explained, “It feels like we are portraying hidden, speculative worlds, inspired by our surroundings, science, ecology and heliobiology.”
    Besides Briem, the curators have given space to several women from the region who were undervalued in their lifetimes. One is Latvian artist Zenta Logina (1908-83), whose astonishingly dynamic depictions of the cosmos are represented in three relief paintings and a tapestry. A particular revelation was Estonian artist Elo-Reet Järv (1939-2018), with her fantastical leather sculptures, Self Portrait as a Dragon and My Insectivorous Totem (both 1995), which appear to engage in a lively conversation with mischievous rock-and-stone creatures by Icelandic artist Gudrun Nielsen (1914-2000).
    Elo-Reet Järv, Self Portrait as a Dragon (1995), installation view at Kling and Bang. Photo Maria Luiga
    “Sequences” offers a rare and welcome glimpse into these regional scenes, which have had relatively little international exposure. “Something the Baltic and Iceland art scenes share is that being on the ‘edge of Europe,’ so far away from the big system of the art world, it feels like they are more self-sufficient,” said curator Maria Arusoo. “We don’t have a strong market, so it doesn’t dictate what’s happening and the artists are quite independent in their ideas.”
    In terms of artists from further afield, the curators paid careful attention to find shared sensibilities with those closer to home.
    In terms of artists from further afield, the curators paid careful attention to find shared sensibilities with those closer to home. These include Hungarian-born American artist Agnes Denes with six prints that challenge scientific notions of the world as fixed and rational; in these she presents the world mapped onto familiar objects like a snail’s shell or a hot dog (from her Isometric Systems in Isotropic Space – Map. Projections series, examples here from 1976-86), alongside her dreamy flying bird-pyramid works from 1994.
    Also on view was Guatemalan artist Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa’s lyrical sound piece Songs of Extinct Birds That Were Previously Unknown to Science But Have Been Rediscovered Through Spiritist Sessions No. 1-3 (2015); and U.S. Fluxus artist and musician Benjamin Patterson’s zanily brilliant, posthumously produced work When Elephants Fight, It Is the Frogs That Suffer (2016–7), which interweaves frog croaks with human frog noises, spoken proverbs and political messages.
    The strong performance program (which culminated on October 22) gives the festival an experimental injection. Among the standouts are Norwegian artist and virtuoso saxophonist Bendik Giske with Icelandic composer Ulfur Hansson, who has created an ethereal sound by activating strings with magnets stretched across a row of desks, effectively turning them into a giant harp.
    Pola Sutryk’s “perpetual soup”, based on medieval recipe. Vikram Pradhan
    Estonian performer and choreographer Johann Rosenberg gave a messy, gruesome Paul McCarthy-esque performance that was supposed to culminate in the release of imported flies, but they didn’t survive the Icelandic cold, to the audience’s relief. Less dramatic, but definitely more nurturing, is Polish chef and artist Pola Sutryk’s contribution of a “perpetual soup” for visitors, which she said was based on a recipe used in medieval inns, where a pot sat on the fire day and night, with new ingredients added. “As the festival progresses and new relationships build up, so the soup’s flavor is also building up,” she said.
    Human connections may have been encouraged among visitors to “Sequences,” but our species is refreshingly absent from most of the artworks. “We tried to limit the human narration and human representation in the exhibition, to allow ourselves to imagine the world around us through the senses of a variety of species,” explained curator Sten Ojavee.
    Stripping humans out of the picture feels natural in Iceland, away from the behemoth galleries and art fair carousel of big art capitals. In this strongly supportive community, the artists seem connected to the landscape in a way most western Europeans might find hard to comprehend. One has the impression of a thriving, self-reliant scene, driven by a sense of playfulness, joy and curiosity, quietly getting on with the business of making art.
    The exhibitions relating to the four chapters of the festival will run until November 26 at the following institutions: Soil at Kling & Bang; Subterranean at The Living Art Museum; Water at The Nordic House; Metaphysical Realm at The National Gallery of Iceland (House of Collections).

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    ‘Scent of Eternity’: The Smell of Egyptian Mummies Is the Focus of a Denmark Museum Exhibition

    A new exhibition at Denmark’s Moesgaard Museum is promising to transport visitors back 3,500 years through the power of smell. “Ancient Egypt–Obsessed with Life” does not feature sculptural works or ancient jewelry, but rather the fragrance of an embalming oil that was used for the mummification of Senetnay, an Egyptian noblewoman who lived around 1,450 B.C.E.
    The exhibition is the public presentation of research conducted by a team of German archaeologists that scraped the inside of two limestone jars used to preserve Senetnay’s organs and then analyzed the residues to identify balm ingredients. To recreate the embalming scent, researchers worked with a French perfumer and a sensory museologist.
    Labelled “the scent of eternity” by Barbara Huber and her team at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology, the ancient aroma blended together beeswax, plant oil, fats, bitumen (a balsamic substance), and various tree resins. The detection of larch tree resin and pistacia tree resin indicates ingredients were sourced from as far away as India and Southeast Asia.
    The researcher behind the recreated fragrance Barbara Huber in the laboratory in Germany. Photo courtesy of Moesgaard Museum.
    “These complex and diverse ingredients, unique to this early time period, offer a novel understanding of the sophisticated mummification practices and Egypt’s far-reaching trade-routes,” said Christian Loeben, an Egyptologist at Hanover’s Museum August Kestner that houses Senetnay’s canopic jars.
    Senetnay’s embalming jars were found in a royal tomb in the Valley of the Kings in 1900 by Howard Carter, the Egyptologist who would later discover Tutankhamun’s tomb. Though little is known about Senetnay, scholars say she was the wet nurse of Pharaoh Amenhotep II and became part of the Pharaoh’s entourage—a status shown by being placed in the Valley of the Kings, a necropolis pharaohs and nobles.
    An installation view at Moesgaard Museum. Image: courtesy of Moesgaard Museum.
    At Moesgaard Museum, Senetnay’s story is used to explain ancient Egyptian ideas of the afterlife and the rituals practiced to reach it. The exhibition presents the sequence of events from death to embalming and mummification, to the mummy entering the tomb and its spirit’s journey to the underworld.
    “We are pleased to be able to present this completely new research, which has only just been published,” said Mads Holst, Director of Moesgaard Museum. “We are looking forward to giving our visitors a sensory experience of the past: the recreated fragrance of an embalming oil used in an Egyptian mummification workshop thousands of years ago.”
    “Ancient Egypt–Obsessed with Life” is on view at the Moesgaard Museum, Moesgård Allé 15, 8270 Højbjerg, Denmark, through August 18, 2024.
    See more images:
    A bottle of the recreated scent test next to pieces of dammar resin. Photo courtesy of the Moesgaard Museum.
    An installation view at Moesgaard Museum. Image: courtesy of Moesgaard Museum.
    An installation view at Moesgaard Museum. Image: courtesy of Moesgaard Museum.
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    Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels Lands in New York to a Soundtrack of Pounding Techno and Minimalist Bliss

    Last week the annual Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels kicked off in New York. It’s only the second year the festival has touched down in the city, but it’s already a vital part of the cultural fabric. Part of its power is the forward-thinking programming, covering the full scope of contemporary dance. This was on display even on the first few days with three choreographic productions that ranged from uplifting and elegiac to challenging, with soundtracks that veered from Phillip Glass bliss to banging techno.
    Dance Reflections runs until December 14 and encompasses 11 staggeringly diverse shows at multiple venues across the city. The festival kicked off with the 1979 tour de force Dance, a collaboration between Lucinda Childs and Glass. Seventeen dancers from the Lyon Opera Ballet translated Childs’s choreography and the minimal composer’s progressively shifting hypnotic score with glissades, sauts, and pirouettes. Sol Lewitt’s accompanying films commissioned for the original benchmark BAM production were projected onstage, layering the original version with today’s. The result was vital and compelling.  
    Dance by Lucinda Childs © Jaime Roque de la Cruz. Courtesy of Van Cleef & Arpels.
    The harmonious placidity of Dance was contrasted with the underground turmoil channeled in Room with a View, a collaboration by buzzy French collective (LA)Horde and the French electronic musician Rone, who is present onstage throughout mixing the entrancing soundtrack live. It’s a cross between a nightlife crawl and a descent into purgatory, set in a quarry that also looks like the Ridgewood, Queens techno club Basement. 20,000 people saw the Marseille production in July, and it has it all: falling rocks, raining fish, and booming beats. Eruptions of violence and sexual vignettes are woven throughout as the world crumbles around the dancers.
    The (LA)Horde trio formed in 2013, originally meeting in the Paris club scene. They collaborated with Madonna on her current tour, have worked with Spike Jonze and Sam Smith, and are the artistic directors of the Ballet de Marseille. Following the October 20th stateside debut of Room with a View, (LA)Horde member Marine Brutti briefly discussed the show’s themes outside of the NYU Skirball Center.
    Room with a View 2022 © Thomas Amouroux. Courtesy of Van Cleef & Arpels.
    “We wanted to talk about the environmental crisis,” she explained. “What is the dynamic of climate change? It’s collapse. But the movement of collapse, is it always bad? Or does it bring something that is more uplifting? There’s also the collapse of stuff we hate like patriarchy, brutality, violence, and inequality.” Brutti sees the show as a throwback to the electronic scene’s roots. “What the core of techno was in the beginning: queer, liberated, anarchist, and outside of traditional zones.”
    Julie Shanahan in L’Etang by Giselle Vienne. © Estelle Hania. Courtesy of Van Cleef & Arpels.
    Last year, Gisèle Vienne drew attention for the pounding techno dark star of Dance Relfections with the stunning Crowd at BAM. This year, the artist and choreographer explored more intimate themes with the eerie and complex performance L’Étang. It’s a dialogue-heavy adaptation of Swiss writer Robert Walser’s tale of a child faking his suicide to awaken the love of his harsh mother. It’s a heady and complex work with two performers portraying multiple roles. In particular, dancer Julie Shanahan is a revelation as the mother. Witheringly cruel and glacially chic, she has a gift for delivering caustic verbal volleys as well as graceful, gestural movement. And Vienne is a true auteur, whether it comes to pitch-perfect costuming and set design or her ability to tap into darkness and unleash the profound.
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