Eliana Willis

Earlier this year, as the Thom Yorke-led trio The Smile was recording its sophomore album, the newly announced Wall of Eyes, a separate, yet related, act of creation was taking place close by.  
In a room at London’s Abbey Road Studios where the band was working on the record, Yorke’s long-time collaborator Stanley Donwood had set up an art studio stocked with easels and canvases. There, over two weeks, the pair would turn out a run of paintings—of fragmented topographies, alien forms—as a live audio feed from the neighboring control room was piped into the space. 
It was a project of “simultaneous composition,” Donwood said over email. “I find it very useful to listen to the music that will be associated with the artwork while the music is being made, while the artwork is being made.” 
“The music and the visual work both matter very much to me,” Yorke added. “One liberates the other a lot of the time.” 
Fittingly, a painting from the session will grace the cover of Wall of Eyes, while all 10 works will form the second part of Yorke and Donwood’s The Crow Flies series, going on view at Tin Man Art gallery from December 6. The new showcase, titled “The Crow Flies: Part Two,” follows the successful debut of the duo’s works at the London gallery in September, which saw Maastricht’s Bonnefanten Museum acquiring one of the abstract landscapes. 
Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood, Aggag (2022). Courtesy of Tin Man Art.
While the works in part one of the series were created in an Oxford studio in the wake of 2020, Donwood said, “things were much freer, in every way, for the second phase.” He admitted to starting the project with a clear mindset, while the Abbey Road building provided inspiration “in a very vague and non-specific way” (that is, “aside from the ghostly Beatles wandering about”), allowing the duo to work intuitively—or at least attempt to. 
“Intuition is hard to quantify and I think when it genuinely happens, that’s very rare. It’s an excellent feeling when something just goes right; but it’s really, really infrequent,” the artist explained.  
Still, looking at these latest paintings, it’s easy to imagine them emerging from a shared subconscious. Some, like The Lakes, Aggag, and Goom, depict eerie vistas with abstract shards juxtaposed against organic contours. Others, such as Frozen Raw and One of Many, bring the viewer up close to otherworldly silhouettes. Might they be snapshots of exterior as much as interior landscapes? 
Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood, Frozen Raw (2022). Courtesy of Tin Man Art.
Kind of, Donwood said. He brought up the pirate maps and topographic charts that inspired the first The Crow Flies paintings, which in turn represented arcane, complex navigational aids. These new works, he said, “are pictures of the places you might see if you follow the maps.” 
The paintings were created with egg tempera, with the layers blended to evoke the weathering of centuries-old art or frescoes. The choice of linen as canvas was intended to recall vellum or parchment. In Donwood’s telling, the idea was to recreate the effect of Medieval murals that had been “repaired by considerably less skilled people” (see: the infamous botched Jesus restoration).
Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood, River Spikes (2023). Courtesy of Tin Man Art.
While the textures of the works in The Crow Flies depart from Yorke and Donwood’s previous outings, the narratives and motifs that fuel them—haunting abstraction, reimagined artifacts, esoteric terrains—are the same that have informed their decades-long partnership.  
Since the early ’90s, Donwood has created the bulk of cover art for Yorke’s musical projects, from Radiohead to Atoms for Peace to his solo work, some of which featured contributions from the singer-songwriter himself. In 2006, the duo’s joint paintings for Radiohead’s 2003 record Hail to the Thief were first exhibited at Iguapop Gallery in Barcelona (with Yorke using the moniker Dr. Tchock). More recently, they curated a showcase of Donwood’s artwork for 2001’s Kid A to accompany a Christie’s auction in 2021.  
In working together, Donwood and Yorke have established a shared visual language, one that is perhaps now tough to tease out from their individual aesthetic. But maybe that’s the point. 
“There isn’t a lot of navigating to be done,” Yorke said about balancing their individual and collaborative creativity. “The effort to understand where someone else is coming from—that’s the point. So then when you look back at what you’ve done, it speaks to you in a way you didn’t expect.” 
Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood, The Lakes (2023). Courtesy of Tin Man Art.
In fact, according to the pair, their collaboration seems to thrive on necessary friction. “Essential interference” is how Donwood characterized it, while Yorke called it “Midi/USB,” referring to the opposite heads of a connecting cable commonly used with musical equipment. 
Yorke’s is an apt analogy. If music is the root and throughline of his and Donwood’s shared visual art practice, it has arguably also served as the glue. 
“It was partly because we both found ourselves making record covers… and then got carried away,” Yorke explained. “And because of what has developed between the two of us. I never expected that to happen honestly.” 
“The Crow Flies: Part Two” is on view at Tin Man Art, 4 Cromwell Place, London, December 6–10. 

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Grammy-winning singer Alicia Keys and her husband Kasseem Dean, the rapper and producer known by his stage name Swizz Beatz, will exhibit their landmark collection of works by Black artists at the Brooklyn Museum. The show, Giants: Art from the Dean Collection of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys, will run from February 10 to July 7, 2024.
“Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys have been among the most vocal advocates for Black creatives to support Black artists through their collecting, advocacy, and partnerships. In the process, they have created one of the most important collections of contemporary art,” museum director Anne Pasternak said.
The exhibition will bring together works by around 40 artists in the couple’s collection. Known as the Dean Collection, the trove boasts artworks by the likes of Arthur Jafa, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Amy Sherald, Lorna Simpson, Kehinde Wiley, and Esther Mahlangu, as well as the largest number of works by Gordon Parks in private hands.
The show will open with an introduction to the creative lives of the Deans, with sections on different aspects of their collection, such as “On the Shoulders of Giants,” highlighting artists who “have left an indelible mark on the world.” Another section, “Giant Conversations,” will explore Black social issues, while “Giant Presence” will show monumental artworks such as Abney’s Catfish (2017).
Kwame Brathwaite, Untitled (Model who embraced natural hairstyles at AJASS photoshoot) (c. 1970, printed 2018). Photo courtesy of the Dean Collection, Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys.
The Fallin’ crooner and her husband, both born and raised in New York, have long been vocal about their support of African American creatives, not least with their art collection.
Speaking to Artnet News in 2019, Dean characterized growing his collection of African American artworks as “building a family I didn’t even have in music, where there’s a little bit of a disconnect sometimes because of competition and wanting to be the best. I felt something different with the artists.”
Dean was on the board of the Brooklyn Museum from at least 2019 until just last month. In an email, the museum confirmed that the couple is “not funding the exhibition,” clarifying that the show is “being produced by the Brooklyn Museum.” The exhibition is organized by the museum’s curator of modern and contemporary art Kimberli Gant and curatorial assistant Indira A. Abiskaroon.
“You have to understand that this is a different game than buying a piece of jewelry or buying a car,” Dean said in 2019 about his collecting strategy. “This is actually adding to the conversation.”
See more works in the exhibition below.
Derrick Adams, Man in Grayscale (Swizz) (2017). Photo courtesy of The Dean Collection, Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys.
Deana Lawson, Soweto Queen (2017). Photo courtesy of the Dean Collection, Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys.
Ebony G. Patterson, . . they were just hanging out . . . you know . . . talking about . . . ( . . . when they grow up . . .) (2016). Photo courtesy of the Dean Collection, Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys.
Tschabalala Self, Father (2019). Photo courtesy of The Dean Collection, Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys.

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2023 has been the year of Mark Rothko. He is currently the subject of a landmark exhibition in Paris, which includes an impressive 115 paintings that redefines the celebrated Abstract Expressionist’s oeuvre. For anyone stateside who is experiencing FOMO, however, the smaller “Mark Rothko: Paintings on Paper” has opened at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. It’s also a revelatory show, albeit less grandiose than the Paris survey.
Though Rothko is most often associated with majestic canvases, these more intimate paintings, which the artist regarded as finished works in their own right rather than preliminary sketches, reveal a new side to his practice. Alongside his archetypal, hazy fields of color from the 1950s and 1960s, visitors can see figurative works from the 1930s and semi-surreal experimental constructions from the 1940s. In some of these early paintings, soft swathes and unfurling pools of watercolor pigment sit flat on the surface of the construction paper, foreshadowing Rothko’s later anti-illusionistic style.
The exhibition runs through March 31, 2024 and will travel to the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design in Norway next year. Adam Greenhalgh, the associate curator at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, spoke with us about six paintings on paper that evince Rothko’s journey towards abstraction, never losing sight of painting’s richly expressive potential.
Untitled (seated woman in striped blouse) (1933–34)
Mark Rothko, Untitled (seated woman in striped blouse) (1933-34). Photo: © 2023 Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko.
Adam Greenhalgh: “To supplement his meager income during the 1930s, Rothko taught children’s art classes at the Center Academy of the Brooklyn Jewish Center. He took the job seriously, encouraging students to prioritize self-expression over technical skill. He also practiced what he preached, painting quickly and intuitively, delighting in the fluidity and translucence of water-based paints. In this portrait, pools of paint are offset by untouched construction paper, a material also used by Rothko’s young students. Watercolor billows in currents around the woman’s head, beneath her chin, and at the base of her neck, conveying a forceful personality.
This work illustrates how Rothko took advantage of the often-unpredictable results produced by such a liquid paint. And demonstrates his admiration for portraiture of the past, which he praised for its ‘eternal interest in the human figure, character, and emotions—in short, in the human drama.’ It also hints at the facile technique and expressive content of his mature works to come.”
Untitled (seated figure in interior) (ca. 1938)
Mark Rothko, Untitled (seated figure in interior) (c. 1938). Photo: © 2023 Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko.
Adam Greenhalgh: “Rothko was always concerned with the relationship between an artwork and its viewer. In this watercolor, a figure sits before an easel painting of a blue-skinned, pink-haired alter ego. The latter beckons invitingly with a curved blue hook of an arm. Bubblegum pink reflects onto the viewer’s face, tinting it. The pair stare at each other intensely, locked in silent communion.
Throughout his entire career, Rothko sought to foster engaging and potentially transformative encounters between viewers and paintings. This watercolor encapsulates the kind of viewing experience Rothko hoped to cultivate with an attentive and committed viewer.”
Omen (1946)
Mark Rothko, Omen (1946). Photo: © 2023 Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko.
Adam Greenhalgh: “In the 1940s, Rothko looked to the past for a symbolic language that could address what he saw as the tragic nature of human experience. He found subjects in mythology, ancient art, archaeology, religion, and natural history, and stylistic inspiration in the work of European surrealists like Joan Miró and Yves Tanguy, who aimed to visualize the unconscious mind. Omen, with its cruciform composition, echoes 17th-century paintings that show Jesus Christ being taken down from the cross after his death. The suggestion of a figure at right, with upstretched arms and dangling legs, evokes a lifeless body.
Rothko felt that tragic biblical subjects of intense communal grief were emotionally relevant to his own time, as the world grappled with the brutality and terror of events like World War II and the Holocaust. Omen, with its pale, near monochrome palette, soft hazy appearance, and emotionally resonant subject, conveys in a powerfully moving manner, what Rothko saw as the essentially tragic nature of human experience.”
Untitled (ca. 1948)
Mark Rothko, Untitled (c. 1948). Photo: © 2023 Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko.
Adam Greenhalgh: “In 1947 Rothko declared that the “familiar identity of things has to be pulverized.” His mid-1940s symbolic motifs and linear compositions dissolved into hazy shapes and swirling backgrounds. This watercolor exemplifies a transitional period where Rothko is on the brink of developing his classic format. Squiggles and glyphs hint at a half-length figure—torso, shoulders, and head—emerging from a colorful soup, like a final echo of earlier figurative work.
Out of quasi-abstractions like this emerged the rectangular blocks and horizontal bands that came to characterize his art from 1949 onward. Rothko adapted the thin washes and dilute glazes of watercolor paintings like this one to the canvases that would dominate his output for the final years of the decade.”
Untitled (1969)
Mark Rothko, Untitled (1969). Photo: © 2023 Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko.
Adam Greenhalgh: “Despite being, by all accounts, unwell and depressed following a near fatal aortic aneurysm in 1968, Rothko, somewhat surprisingly, made hundreds of paintings on paper in the final two years of his life. They vary greatly in composition, palette, and effect, from fiery and explosive to placid and caliginous. Many, like this one, display a startling vigor and vitality, erupting with volcanic energies and compositional tension.
Rothko once said: “You think my paintings are calm, like windows in some cathedral? You should look again. I’m the most violent of all the American painters. Behind those colors there hides the final cataclysm.”
In late paintings on paper, amplification is the name of the game—in scale, in the energy and force of paint handling, and in the immediacy, intensity, and potency of the colors. This large orange and crimson painting is exemplary. He worked energetically with a large brush, streaking and smearing the paint across the paper. His powerful gestures are recorded in the quick-drying acrylic paint. Rothko began this work with a thin base layer of pink ink, which makes the orange background almost blindingly phosphorescent.”
Untitled (1969)
Mark Rothko, Untitled (1969). Photo: © 2023 Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko.
Adam Greenhalgh: “Rothko’s late paintings on canvas trend dark—blacks, purples, maroons. After he died by suicide on February 25, 1970, the dark palette of these works became associated with his death—a link that persisted.
But, in the final months of his life, he produced a lesser-known suite of ethereal paintings on paper with soft, cloudlike edges surrounded by margins of pale paper. These late works, including this radiant pink painting, undermines any simple association between dark palette and mental or physical health. It is intriguing to speculate where Rothko might have taken his work after this startling painting.”
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It’s a question that has eluded art lovers for centuries. Did Leonardo da Vinci paint another, similar, but slightly younger-looking portrait of the Mona Lisa with her famed, captivating smile, a decade before the final version that now hangs in the Louvre?
The Swiss-based Mona Lisa Foundation certainly thinks so. The foundation, which represents the private owners of the painting is exhibiting the work in Turin’s Promotrice delle Belle Arti gallery, in an exhibition titled “The First Mona Lisa,” until May 26, 2024.
“We have proved beyond reasonable doubt that Leonardo painted two Mona Lisas and this is the only candidate to be the second,” said Joël Feldman, general secretary of the Mona Lisa Foundation, speaking to The Times.
The foundation said the painting was likely made around 1505, and depicts a similarly positioned woman, believed to be based on the Florentine noblewoman Lisa Gherardini. A pastoral background can also be seen in this “earlier” work, however, it was left unfinished and the subject is framed by two columns, which do not appear in Leonardo’s most famous painting.
Better known as the “Isleworth Mona Lisa,” the controversial painting’s previous owner, Hugh Blaker acquired it in 1913, believing it to be the work of the Renaissance master, and brought it to his home in West London. In 1936, the American gallery owner and collector Henry Pulitzer acquired it, and long-argued that it was an authentic Leonardo. The portrait was eventually purchased by its current owners, a consortium of investors who have periodically displayed the painting.
The exhibition, which includes multimedia displays cataloging decades of the foundation’s research into the portrait’s origins, along with background about Leonardo’s life and the Italian Renaissance period, is an “opportunity to also present the massive strides that have been made in the past few years to cement the attribution of the work to Leonardo,” Feldman said in a statement.
The foundation has notably worked with scientists, such as John Asmus, at the University of California, San Diego, who conducted tests strongly suggesting the same artists painted the faces of both women.
However, renowned Leonardo expert Martin Kemp, an emeritus professor of art history at the University of Oxford, will have none of it. The foundation is “in a phase of trying to promote [the portrait] again,” a move that Kemp told Artnet News is common for syndicates attempting to increase the value of a work—an idea the foundation has denied in the past.
Kemp insisted there was “no indication” the work is dated prior to the Mona Lisa, which is believed to have been painted between 1503 and 1517, and the fact that the portrait was done on canvas, when Leonardo was known to only paint on wooden surfaces, was a major clue that it is a copy.
Additionally, Kemp’s examination of the “earlier” work led him to the conclusion it was done by looking at a “finished picture, rather than what we know is under the surface.” For instance, Leonardo used layers of binder with small amounts of pigment to slowly build a “very elusive,” soft effect, which is evident in how the master avoided clear, or sharp edges when rendering his subjects.
The Swiss foundation’s “earlier” version, “does a shot at doing this softness… but it doesn’t have this sort of light passing through all these layers of glaze,” Kemp said, adding that Leonardo’s visual technique is notoriously difficult to imitate. Asked if he had any of his own ideas about who could have painted the mysterious, second portrait, he said he had no theories as to its origin, noting that identifying authors of copied artworks was “almost impossible.”

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Every one of Es Devlin’s designs and sculptures, however ambitious and monumental, is built on the most modest of foundations: paper. With it, the British artist sketches and draws, cuts and folds, sculpts and manipulates to give form to her ideas, before they’re constructed in life-sized proportions. It’s the ideal medium, she said: “Paper is so cheap and ephemeral as a core material, which means there’s real freedom within the mark-making.”
Devlin was speaking to me at last week’s preview of “An Atlas of Es Devlin,” her first monographic museum exhibition at the Cooper Hewitt in New York. Dressed in minimalist black-and-white, she was unpacking the centrality of paper in the show, which delves into her three-decade practice by disgorging her vast archive of drawings, cardboard models, illuminated paper cuts, and other ephemera. Put together, they illustrate her creative process right down to the last design note.
For an artist best known for her kinetic sculptures, immersive installations, and massive stage designs for the likes of Beyoncé and Adele, “Atlas” is a surprisingly intimate exhibition. Or as Devlin puts it, the show has allowed her to access “radical vulnerability,” a tip she picked up from art critic Jerry Saltz’s 2020 book, How to Be an Artist. 
Es Devlin in her studio. Photo courtesy of Es Devlin.
“It’s very personal,” she said about the presentation. “This is literally me getting stuff out of the bin bag stuff I made along the way, not least to retrace my own steps and find my own threads, but also hopefully to help people understand that the large-scale works have quite humble roots.” 
Trained in fine art and theater design at London’s Central Saint Martins, Devlin commenced her practice in the mid ’90s creating sets—each more sculpturally daring than the last—for venues such as the Bush Theatre and London Theatre. Her canvas would expand in the coming years as she signed onto projects from opera and ballet productions to fashion activations such as the immersive labyrinth she designed for Chanel. By 2012, she was taking on the closing ceremony for the London Olympics, then in 2022, the NFL Super Bowl halftime show. 
Es Devlin sketches on view at “An Atlas of Es Devlin.” Photo: Elliot Goldstein © Smithsonian Institution.
But some of Devlin’s most high-profile works have been her designs for arena concerts, headlined by names from The Weeknd to Kanye West. She built a cheeky stage for Miley Cyrus’s 2014 tour centered on the pop star’s infamous tongue; she installed massive rotating, illuminated sculptures for Beyoncé’s Formation World Tour. For Adele’s 2016 concerts, Devlin built a huge screen on stage, projected with the songstress’s closed eyes, which opened once she sang the first line of the first song, “Hello.” 
“It starts with the music and lyrics—I take lyrics really seriously,” Devlin explained of her approach to these large stages. “Then it goes into a broader understanding of the context: Why was the piece written? What’s the context of the work? What’s the story behind it? And then beyond that, it’s really also instinctive: what does the space need?” 
Models on view at “An Atlas of Es Devlin.” Photo: Elliot Goldstein © Smithsonian Institution
However big these projects get, though, Devlin has not lost sight of what—and who—she’s building for: “We have a responsibility to the audience, whether it’s in a small play for 75 people or in a stadium for 200,000. If we’re asking them to gather, then we must hold space for them and for the performer who’s offering absolute vulnerability.”
Devlin has likewise centered the experiential in “Atlas.” Before they enter the show, visitors are ushered into a darkened room, decorated to look like a studio space with large books open at the table and sketches tacked to the walls (more paper!). There, projections mapped onto physical objects, accompanied by the artist’s voiceover, relay her creative process in detail. “Every audience,” Devlin narrates at one point, “is a temporary society.” 
Installation photo of “An Atlas of Es Devlin” at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. Photo: Es Devlin Studio, courtesy of Es Devlin.
That principle, tinged with the utopian, has fueled Devlin’s community and participation-centric installations—her immersive mazes and model cities that encourage viewers to better engage with civilizational shifts and structures. 
Memory Palace (2019), a chronological 3D landscape, aimed to chart and provoke evolutions in human thought, just as The Conference of Trees (2021), an indoor installation of 197 trees at COP 26, emphasized the environmental imperative. Her early experiment with A.I., Poem Portraits (2019), which invited users to contribute a word to a collective, algorithmically generated poem, urged humans to consider machine collaboration—on their own terms.  
Memory Palace (2019) by Es Devlin, at the Pitzhanger Manor and Gallery, in Ealing, London. Photo: Dominic Lipinski/PA Images via Getty Images.
A.I. today, she said, “is beginning to be more than human intelligence.” As a “useful” way of approaching the tool, she pointed out that nature and biology, with their microbial and bacterial entities, encompass more than one intelligence. “When I look at a neural network visually and I look at a bifurcating network of rhizomatic systems,” she added, “I see the connection.”
That Devlin’s work spans mediums and achieves scale makes sense for a world-builder whose project has been to interrogate our species’ relationship with everything else in our environment. It’s a profound venture that, in her words, “invites audiences to practice ‘interbeing.’” 
Installation view of “An Atlas of Es Devlin” at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. Photo: Es Devlin Studio, courtesy of Es Devlin.
At “Atlas,” we’re speaking in a gallery lined with her earliest artworks—nude studies etched in notebooks, abstract oil portraits, charcoal sketches—which she likened to “work at school art shows.” Still, for her, they contain seeds for her latter-day practice.  
She pointed to a series of drawings she created of a girl trapped in various boxes, a juxtaposition of an organic form against a geometric one. In another richly painted work is depicted a tuba entwined with leaves and branches, presenting a “common harmony” between nature and manmade instruments.  
“Some of the work that I’m making now is still interested in how choral music and forms of species can be seen to be continued.” she said. “The project of my practice is to explore that continuity between us and more-than-human forms, be that A.I. or every other living thing on the planet. I do think the most useful application of the craft I’ve been handed over 30 years is to explore and express that sense of continuity.” 
“An Atlas of Es Devlin” is on view at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, 2 East 91st Street, New York, through August 11, 2024. 
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From big red rubber boots to a chopped-up Damien Hirst painting to an anime-themed tax filing software—the medium-spanning work of MSCHF doesn’t lend easily to pithy definitions. Rather, the Brooklyn-based art collective’s output has been aimed toward playfully unpacking structures that undergird our social, economic, and cultural realities—the absurdity of virtual aesthetics, say, or corporate greed.  
As the group’s co-founder Kevin Wiesner told me over email: “MSCHF has always very much been defined by how it works, partly because we are aggressively agnostic about the literal physicality of what we make.” 
In other words, some perspective is needed where MSCHF is involved. Happily, the collective’s first institutional retrospective has just opened at Daelim Museum in Seoul. Aptly titled “Nothing Is Sacred,” the showcase brings together about 130 works, including paintings, interactive games, and fashion objects, created by the group since 2016. However disparate, these so-called “drops” have emerged as strands from “a single practice,” said Wiesner. 
“Looking at all of these projects grouped together, it becomes possible to tease out running themes and commonalities, but also to see the common process employed in making all of them in the first place,” he said. 
MSCHF Wholesale (2020) installation at “MSCHF: Nothing Is Sacred” at Daelim Museum. Photo courtesy of Daelim Museum.
At the exhibition, due space is given to MSCHF’s pieces such as its medical bill paintings, microscopic designer handbag, and large canvases of A.I.-generated feet. A sprawling installation is dedicated to MSCHF Wholesale (2020), its merch-making exercise that produced 1,000 pairs of socks and 1,000 hats, only available to buy in bulk, in a satire of drop culture. 
MSCHF’s core principle, Wiesner said, takes off from Athletic Aesthetics. The theory, proposed by writer Brad Troemel in 2013 that artists today are cultural producers elbowing for airtime in an attention economy, has colored the collective’s craft as much as its extreme release schedule (once every two weeks). But another helpful way to view the group’s practice is as performance art, in which the audience serves as active participants. 
“It is the behavior of the project in the world, the way people interact with and talk about the work, that is the totality of the piece,” explained Wiesner. 
And MSCHF’s drops have had their intended effect. Works like Big Red Boot (2023) and ATM Leaderboard (2022) have gained traction across social media just as others have left IRL footprints. Satan Shoes (2021), for which MSCHF sold Nike Air Max 97s embedded with a drop of blood, brought a lawsuit from the shoe company and sparked what Wiesner termed “a miniature Satanic Panic”; while Severed Spots (2020), which retailed individual dots from a Hirst spot painting, bred its own resale ecosystem. 
In this way, Wiesner offered that the retrospective is less art exhibition and more an anthropological showcase, bringing together as it does “artifacts of the performance, entry points into retelling the stories of each work’s existence in culture.” 
MSCHF’s Jesus Shoes (2019) and Satan Shoes (2021) on view at “MSCHF: Nothing Is Sacred” at Daelim Museum. Photo courtesy of Daelim Museum.
It’s a sentiment echoed by Daelim Museum’s curatorial director, Sabina Yeowoon Lee. In an email, she characterized MSCHF’s practice as “dealing with today’s zeitgeist… [with] sophisticated and witty manipulation to engage participants with their work.” 
“MSCHF is defining a new generation of artists,” she added, “armed with… an unwillingness to be defined or categorized, a deliberate choice of controversial subject matters to push the boundaries, uniquely satirical viewpoints, and fast working athleticism.”
The Daelim exhibition follows MSCHF’s 2022 solo show at Perrotin, its first gallery outing, which signaled the art world’s embrace of its conceptual daring and cultural critique. But viewing almost all of the collective’s work under one roof at the retrospective, said Wiesner, offers the clearest picture yet of how its releases have grown in ambition and complexity.
What’s remained consistent though is the group’s abiding irreverence: “The show title ‘Nothing Is Sacred’ has been a MSCHF internal mantra for years,” Wiesner said. 
“We hope that visitors will get a sense of the underlying sensibility and process that runs through the works in the show,” he added. “We also hope that MSCHF can act as a model for a particular type of making that foregrounds how the work lives in culture at large from the very beginning of the creative process.” 
See more images from the show below. 
Installation view of “MSCHF: Nothing Is Sacred” at Daelim Museum. Photo courtesy of Daelim Museum.
Installation view of “MSCHF: Nothing Is Sacred” at Daelim Museum. Photo courtesy of Daelim Museum.
Installation view of “MSCHF: Nothing Is Sacred” at Daelim Museum. Photo courtesy of Daelim Museum.
Installation view of “MSCHF: Nothing Is Sacred” at Daelim Museum. Photo courtesy of Daelim Museum.
Installation view of “MSCHF: Nothing Is Sacred” at Daelim Museum. Photo courtesy of Daelim Museum.
Installation view of “MSCHF: Nothing Is Sacred” at Daelim Museum. Photo courtesy of Daelim Museum.
“MSCHF: Nothing Is Sacred” is on view at Daelim Museum, 21 Jahamun-ro 4-gil, Jongno-gu, Seoul, South Korea, through March 31, 2024. 
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