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    A Fixation With Non-Conforming Bodies Is Pervading Contemporary Art. Here’s How Two Shows in London Capture the Trend

    What does a human body look like, and how is it meant to feel? This question serves as the lynchpin for two exhibitions currently on show in London—”Support Structures” at Gathering (until July 21) and “Unruly Bodies” at Goldsmiths CCA (until September 3)—both of which celebrate contemporary artists that look far beyond conventional understandings of our flesh.
    At Gathering, the show’s title serves as an umbrella for ideas of nurturing and care, as well as the physical sensation of being in our bodies.
    The show opens with a sculpture by Berenice Olmedo, a Mexican artist whose practice is informed by her work at a Mexico City children’s hospital. Isabela (2020) is named after the child who once wore the leg brace that forms the majority of the piece. The medical equipment is suspended as if a pair of human legs occupy it, in a ghostly balance of fragility and utilitarianism. Lilac-colored straps and a polka-dotted pattern soften and gender the object, something that Olmedo compounds by adding a pair of pointe ballet shoes—surely the most unnatural manifestation of beauty.
    Berenice Olmedo, Isabela(2020). Courtesy the artist and Jan Kaps, Cologne Photography Sprengel Museum.
    Physical aids are also prominent in several prints by Louise Bourgeois. A crutch is seen holding up the bent and falling branches of a tree, and again supporting a faceless amputee. These etchings allude not only to memories of her sister’s physical impairments, but the complexities of the artist’s relationship with her family, which caused considerable mental anxiety.
    Alina Szapocznikow also grapples with the existential challenges of sickness in her photographs of the sinewy, elastic remnants of chewed gum. These works were made soon after the artist was diagnosed with breast cancer and convey the inextricable nature of our physical and mental self, something that is often compartmentalized within medical care.
    Redefining what a body actually means naturally leads to the boundless possibilities of science fiction. An early work by Nam June Paik conceives of a “robot brain” formed from an old diary and a rudimentary computer, while an enormous—and rather chilling— sculpture by Ivana Bašic presents a vaguely humanoid figure with a yolk of blown glass for a head. The piece is reminiscent of HR Geiger’s xenomorphs, with a body that is held in a foetal state, as if it could animate at any moment. The title, I will lull and rock my ailing light in my marble arms, is sensual and caring, seemingly at odds with this nightmarish vision. Perhaps this figure isn’t so horrifying after all?
    Installation view, “Support Structures,” Gathering, June 22 – July 22, 2023. Photo © Gathering (Grey Hutton).
    At Goldsmiths CCA, the tenets of sci-fi serve as equally vital source material. The principle of the show explores “monstrous” visions of the body, as symbols of resistance and non-conformity, where our physical selves are not defined by a smooth, conventional exterior.
    An entire room is given over to Giulia Cenci’s eerie sculptural creatures, which exist as featureless heads attached to dead tree roots, old tubes and moulds of human bones. Presented in a blacked-out interior, with each ‘figure’ housed in a cell formed from reclaimed shower cubicles, this is a chilling vision that speaks to the shadows of trauma and the power of our own dark imagination.
    Camille Henrot’s bronze Mon Corps de Femme (2019) is another standout piece. She manipulates a material historically used to render the hard, imposing symbols of masculine dominance, yet here it conveys the fleshy folds of a postpartum body, where recognizable elements of a belly give way to an empty cavity. The entire piece is shot through with an electrical cable, in an allusion to the currents of our nervous system, not to mention the medicalization of birth.
    Installation view, “Unruly Bodies,” Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art (June 30 – September 3, 2023). Courtesy Goldsmiths CCA. Photo by Rob Harris.
    Elsewhere, the idea of ritual performance and literally “embodying” folklore and myth is explored in Anna Perach’s surreal, tufted costumes. These wearable sculptures extend and confuse conventional proportions, blurring the lines between interior and exterior flesh through enormously tactile and joyfully adorned textural surfaces. These pieces are designed to be worn for performances, but they are just as alluring as inanimate objects.
    The notion of clothing the body is also a central concern for Paloma Proudfoot, whose background in pattern-cutting informs her new ceramic commission for this exhibition, The Mannequins Reply (2023). Each piece of this incredible tableau fits together like an articulated doll, complete with golden pins. These figures upend the symbol of the shop dummy, which is defined by unrealistic proportions and a rigid passivity, in favor of a sinister and sensual agency. Both a hairy torso and a flayed, muscular back are rendered gorgeous through glossy glazes, as well as full breasts and a belly that have broken the threads of their body suit.
    The presence of enormous sewing needles, complete with a rope of red thread, might be tinged with violence, but it ultimately alludes to a space of corporeal care, repair and collaboration. In this work, the words of the academic Susan Stryker that inspired this exhibition feel fully realized: “I want to lay claim to the dark power of my monstrous identity without using it as a weapon against others or being wounded by it myself.”
    “Unruly Bodies” is on view at Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art, London, through September 3, 2023.
    “Support Structures” is on view at Gathering, London, through July 22.
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    Doug Aitken’s New Video Work Visits a Middle American Oil Town and Delivers a Searing Comment on Climate Change

    “What should the future look like?” is a central question occupying the minds of scientists, economists, artists, and politicians debating in important forums daily. However, another set of questions loom, which are just as important, and which often determine the first: “Who gets asked?” The other one, which folds into it: “Who gets to decide?”
    Rarely are such questions about the future put to citizens of small rural communities, even though they may be in some cases most affected by climate change and economic and industrial shifts. This seems to be on the mind of the conceptual California-based artist Doug Aitken when he took his camera inland to an unnamed U.S. oil town and started filming his conversations with the locals.
    In their arid dust-bowl of a town, huge pump jacks dot the horizon, pulsing in and out of a bone dry desert landscape to extract oil, which seems to be the main source of income of the town and also its raison d’etre. The new video, called HOWL, premiered in his solo exhibition at Eva Presenhuber, Zurich last month (it is on view through July 22), and it juxtaposes these rhythmic, unforgiving fracking machines against the voices from the people who coexist among them. The short film and adjacent exhibition that shares its title propose an unsettling view of a climate emergency punctuating our present, and offers a strong dose of angst about the future.
    Doug Aitken, HOWL (film still) (2023). © Doug Aitken.
    “We wanted to give a voice to the people that were there and allow their expression to become the narrative of the work,” Aitken told Artnet News. “It wasn’t a piece that I had a plan for. I did not have a script or a thesis. The work made itself over the time.”
    In HOWL, juxtaposition of the two groups of main protagonists, humans on the one hand, and these massive rhythmic machines on the other, has been formed into a 15-minute narrative across three channels in a darkened room in the gallery. The work, though drawn from real footage filmed across a year, is far from a documentary. Instead, the mood is surreal, with fragmentary glimpses into a polyphony of realities and viewpoints that constitute this anonymous place, which Aitken sees as an allegory for many places in the world that are suffering due to post-industrialism and climate change.
    A woman living in her car in a parking lot speaks about utopia and her ideals for the future, for example. In an abuse shelter, another woman speaks in subtle shifts about physical, emotional, and climate abuse. A group of beauty pageant contestants don oil-black costumes, and all of it is intercut with shots of boarded-up strip malls and empty parking lots. There is a moment of a town brass band parade, which seems to reach to the ghost of some former glory such places once had.
    “At first, I was drawn to this hallucinatory landscape of fracking and drilling and crushing and looking at this activity as the arteries and veins of the body, and this activity as the extraction of the blood from landscape,” Aitken said. “As the journey of creating it progressed, it became equal parts that and a conversation with the people inhabiting the space.”
    Elsewhere in the gallery are individual wall sculptures with single words drawn out from the themes of the film: “howl,” “contact,” “drama,” and “unreal.” These pictographic-like pieces, layered on top of wallpapers of landscapes, and mirror works that cut up your reflection as you pass by, create an immersive space that is as uncanny is the film, except one is a constructed reality and one is tragically real.
    See a clip of the film below.

    Doug Aitken, HOWL (2023). Courtesy the artist and Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich / Vienna © Doug Aitken.

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    A New Immersive Experience Celebrating Hip-Hop’s 50th Anniversary Is Headed to New York’s Hall des Lumières

    A new immersive exhibit will take over the 30,000-square-foot Hall des Lumières in New York City to celebrate 50 years of hip-hop culture with never-before-seen and archival footage of the genre’s most prominent figures.
    The exhibit “Hip Hop Til Infinity” was developed to “recontextualize” how people look at culture and music, and to highlight the genre’s development in a nontraditional way, according to Jon Colclough, vice president of creative strategy at Mass Appeal, which is producing the show.
    “We wanted to raise the profile around the culture and to place it in a place like Hall des Lumières showcases how far hip-hop has come in 50 years,” Colclough told Artnet News.
    Colclough described the experience as a “visual mixtape” in tribute to the genre that will be educational for casual followers, but filled with “easter eggs” for die-hard fans. It will include unreleased images shot by photographers like Joe Conzo, once described by The New York Times as “the man who took hip-hop’s baby pictures,” as well as unreleased footage from Sony’s archives.
    “We hope that this appeals to everyone, not just hip-hop purists. But if you’re just a casual fan, you’ll walk away with some educational knowledge,” he said.
    The Hall des Lumieres in New York City. Photo courtesy of Alexander Paterson-Jones for Hall des Lumières.
    Hip-hop developed as a musical genre and culture after a birthday party DJ Kool Herc threw in the Bronx borough of New York City in August 1973. Mass Appeal has spent the past five years developing a platform called Hip Hop 50 to celebrate the genre’s legacy.
    “Hip Hop Til Infinity” is just the first version that Mass Appeal intends to take elsewhere and focuses “more on domestic storytelling around hip-hop in the United States,” said Colclough.
    “You wouldn’t expect to see hip-hop in a place like Hall des Lumieres,” he added. “I don’t think people understand that hip-hop is a global phenomenon and not just music.”
    Colclough said the visuals in the show last about an hour, while noting that 50 years is a lot to cover in that time. The producers of the exhibition worked with DJ Clark K on the musical score, with physical objects set to complement the visual images.
    He added that the benefit of having an immersive exhibit—typically reserved for the likes of Vincent Van Gogh and Gustav Klimt—is the ability to “transform people across time and space.”
    “We can take them to the West Coast. We can show them the 1970s and what was going on at the birth of hip-hop to how people collaborate now to make music,” he said. “It’s an amazing medium. It’s a little bit of a choose-your-own-adventure. This is not meant to be a historical look back.”
    “There is something beautiful and irreplaceable about being able to recreate how a person heard their favorite song for the first time,” said Caitlin Jackson, the marketing director at Hall des Lumières. She added that tickets will be timed every half hour, though guests are welcome to stay as long as they like.
    “We hope people are here at 9 a.m. dancing through the space, taking everything in and moving through it,” she said. “If you linger in one area, you’re going to miss the beautiful content and photography throughout the space.”
    Mass Appeal has also partnered with Sotheby’s to auction a diamond and ruby ring designed by rap legend Tupac Shakur, which is expected to fetch at least $200,000.
    “Hip Hop Til Infinity” is on view at Hall des Lumières, 49 Chambers St, New York, July 26–September 16. Tickets are now on sale.

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    For Her First U.S. Museum Show, Artist Wynnie Mynerva Has Reimagined the Creation Myth as an Act of Rebellion Against the Patriarchy

    There is a patriarchal bent to many creation myths. In Christian teaching, for instance, God made Adam from dust and Eve from Adam’s rib; the woman is both a product of the man and the cause of his downfall—the purveyor of the forbidden fruit. In Judaic and Mesopotamian lore, Adam was created alongside Lilith, but after refusing to submit to sex, she is banished from Eden and damned to life as a demon. 
    On view now at the New Museum is 65-foot-long panoramic painting—the largest ever displayed at the institution—that offers a different account of life’s origins. The Original Riot (2023), made by Peruvian artist Wynnie Mynerva, reimagines the myth as a syncretic story of rebellion wherein Eve and Lilith team up in an alliance against Adam. 
    The canvas’ climactic scene shows Eve giving her lowest rib—commonly called the “Adam’s rib”—to Lilith as a symbol of their pact. The work, Mynerva told Artnet News, proposes a “first necessary rebellion—a riot that challenges the control of bodies by higher powers that are always male.”
    But for the 31-year-old artist, the token exchanged between the women is more than just a metaphor. Mynerva’s own Adam’s rib, recently removed in a surgical procedure, is also on display in the museum. 
    “My body, as a descendant of Eve, breaks the myth and removes Adam’s body from my own body,” they said of the artwork, Remnant of the first cut (2023). 
    An installation view of Wynnie Mynerva’s The Original Riot (2023) at the New Museum in New York. Courtesy of the New Museum. Photo: Dario Lasagni.
    The exhibition, also called “The Original Riot,” is Mynerva’s first solo museum outing in the U.S. It’s a helpful introduction to their practice—a world of gender fluidity and sexual expression, of visceral paintings and radical body modifications. The artist has shown paintings the size and shape of half-pipes, and presented people copulating in latex bags. They once sutured their vagina shut to “open different possibilities of existing.” 
    Often, Mynerva’s work evokes religious themes—a relic of their youth growing up on the outskirts of Lima, where Catholicism is predominant. They have since distanced themselves from religion, but the iconography still looms large. 
    “The first time I prayed I had terrifying nightmares with God,” Mynerva recalled. “Somehow his presence overwhelmed me and made me feel a lot of guilt. Since then, I have always lived with those images. For me, they became fantastic characters: gods, goddesses, anti-heroes.” 
    Their paintings, like The Original Riot, tend to be extraordinarily large. The scale feels like a pointed gesture unto itself—a defiant reclaiming of space. By design, many are simply too big to buy.  
    “My paintings seek a scenic, theatrical, panoramic quality,” they said. “I intend to offer more than just consumer objects. The paintings are an experience for a community and not just for private pleasure. They are not easy to acquire by individuals, but are designed for public exhibition.” 
    “Wynnie Mynerva: The Original Riot” is on view at the New Museum in New York through September 17.
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    It’s a Spike Lee Joint: A Major Show at Brooklyn Museum Will Exhibit the Acclaimed Filmmaker’s Collection of Art and Objects

    Spike Lee’s ties with Brooklyn are storied. The filmmaker grew up in Fort Greene, where he also established his production offices, while his movies have centered neighborhoods from Bed-Stuy to Red Hook, all filmed on location. And there’s his famed 2014 broadside against the scourge of gentrification, which, among other things, revealed his deep love for the borough. “You have to come with respect,” he said. “There’s a code. There’s people.” 
    For all his deep roots in Brooklyn, though, the borough has yet to host a major exhibition on Lee. But that’s about to change when “Spike Lee: Creative Sources” opens at the Brooklyn Museum on October 6 (through February 4, 2024).  
    The show promises an immersive journey through the director’s creative process and sources of inspiration that have kindled his four-decade film career. More than 300 objects will be featured, not limited to paintings, props, musical instruments, photographs, album covers, and movie posters pulled from Lee’s personal collection (which was previously on view at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in 2021).
    The exhibition, said Kimberli Gant, the museum’s Modern and Contemporary art curator who co-organized it, will offer “a fresh perspective on a cultural icon, focusing on the individuals and influences that have shaped Spike Lee’s body of work, which is so well known today.” 
    “Creative Sources” will be divided into seven segments. Lee’s beloved borough aside, it will delve into Black history and culture, sports, music, cinema history, family, and politics—motifs that have fueled his cinematic storytelling across films from Do the Right Thing (1989) to Malcolm X (1992) to BlacKkKlansman (2018). 
    Each section will feature a clip from one of Lee’s films, with the installation drawing out its thematic underpinnings. His 2020 war drama, Da 5 Bloods, for instance, is paired with propaganda posters from World War II and the Vietnam War featuring cruel stereotypes of Black American soldiers. Lee’s 2000 satire, Bamboozled, which caustically critiqued minstrelsy, will also be shown with its original inspiration, Michael Ray Charles’s potent work Forever Free (Bamboozled) (1997). 
    Other objects speak to Lee’s embrace of Black excellence. There’s Prince’s iconic “Love Symbol” guitar, a commissioned painting by Kehinde Wiley centered on Jackie Robinson, and images of Black creatives such as actress Lena Horne and writer James Baldwin whose work encompassed the fight for civil rights.  
    Not least, Brooklyn is represented here as a locale that has shaped Lee and in turn, been shaped by Lee. The exhibition revisits set designs for his Brooklyn-centric films, including Do the Right Thing and She’s Gotta Have It (1986), rounded out with photographs by Tseng Kwong Chi and David Lee, Spike’s younger brother. 
    “By making Lee’s collection accessible to the public,” said Gant, “this showcase celebrates his legacy while honoring his deep connection to Brooklyn, a place that has been an integral part of his storytelling.” 
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    in Street Art

    “The Peace of Urtaca” by David De La Mano in Corsica, France

    Prolific muralist and painter David De La Mano recently finished his latest mural entitled “The Peace of Urtaca” in Corsica, France.“This mural as a sequence speaks, like other of my murals, of the human condition.”This mural is a proposal from the artist’s friend Fabian Flori, director of “popularte_l_arte_fora_di_cita”, and it deals with war and proposes a mutation from weapons to olive trees, and from soldiers to conscious people.David de la Mano is a Spanish contemporary artist best known for his stunning murals often featuring silhouettes, trees and other monochromatic imagery. de la Mano is a versatile artist who excels from drawing to sculpture. The artist experiments with different techniques among which acrylics, watercolours, ink and collage.His art highlights a vision of humanity with a lot of metaphor and poetry. He is often playing with shadows and lights, forms and contrasts to convey his vision of the world to us.Scroll down below for more images of the mural. More

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    A Bay Area Show Is Serving Up Artworks Inspired by Cheetos’s Bestselling Flamin’ Hot Flavor. See the Spicy Takes Here

    A finger-licking exhibition dedicated to Cheetos’s beloved Flamin’ Hot flavor has debuted at Gallery 1202 in the Bay Area, just as a new biopic about the snack’s purported inventor hits streaming platform Hulu.
    Ruben Dario Villa, a 35-year-old former graphic designer for Apple and Google, curated the show, simply titled “Flamin’ Hot,” about a product he said carries such strong sentiments of nostalgia that it brings people together in a time of increased divisiveness in the United States.
    “I think nostalgic connection points are things that we can all have in common,” he told Artnet News.
    Dario Villa said the inspiration for the exhibition loosely came from thinking about the first time he tried Flamin’ Hot Cheetos when he was nine-years-old.
    “My mom was a health and recycling nut before that was a thing and tasked me with bringing some tortillas from the grocery store,” he said. “I thought, ‘ooh, I’m going to be slick, and buy some Flamin’ Hot Cheetos and some tortillas in two separate transactions.’”
    Dario Villa, laughing, added that he forgot to purchase the snacks separately and began eating the Cheetos on the way home from the store. “I thought I could scratch the Hot Cheetos off the receipt with my Cheeto-dusted fingers but my mom, worried I was taking too long to come home, walks towards the supermarket and catches me literally red-handed.”
    Dario Villa said he built the exhibition around that experience, expressing it in what he called a “Chicano-style interpretation of pop culture to tap into that source of malaise we have as a collective.” He had already been working on a piece inspired by his youth and using Flamin’ Hot Cheetos dust when he was invited by the gallery to curate the show, an offer that coincided with the release of the Hulu film, Flamin’ Hot.
    Installation view of “Flamin’ Hot” at Gallery 1202. Photo courtesy of Rubén Dario Villa.
    “I’m first-generation, my parents are immigrants from Mexico, and I kind of sit at the intersection of American culture,” he said. “So, it’s like an insider-outsider perspective that’s very much informed by the historical art context of like Andy Warhol.”
    Dario Villa said he’s inspired by artists that “have a sense of humor” and did an open call for the show on social media because he didn’t want to exhibit artists that are “too established” for his fun-themed show.
    Ultimately, more than 50 artists submitted with around 26 selected for the show with a mixture of mediums—ranging from Lorena Cortez’s sculpture of a Cheetos bag being tantalizingly emptied into a bowl, to Hey Ruca’s painted reimagining of Cheetos’s mascot Chester Cheetah, to Hortencia Martín’s skate deck carrying telltale signs of Cheetos dust,
    “There’s a still life of Hot Cheetos that’s just so beautiful,” Dario Villa said.
    The artist said the show opened with a street fair vibe, not the “traditional charcuterie and wine vibe,” with food trucks and plant vendors. At the end of the day, he hopes that Richard Montañez—the purported creator of the spicy snack—will make it out for the closing of the show on August 12.
    See more images from the show below.
    Princessa Xicana, Hot & Hashi (2023). Photo courtesy of Gallery 1202.
    Berenice Hernandez-Baltazar, hot Cheeto fingers (2023). Photo courtesy of Gallery 1202
    Pete Dimas, Flaming Lips (2023). Photo courtesy of Gallery 1202.
    Installation view of Rubén Dario Villa’s Hot Ass (2023) at “Flamin’ Hot.” Photo courtesy of Rubén Dario Villa.
    “Flamin’ Hot” is on view at Gallery 1202, 7363 Monterey Street, Gilroy, California, through August 12.
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    As Museums Tap Tastemakers to Elevate Their Exhibitions, India Mahdavi’s Design for a New Pierre Bonnard Show Sets the Standard

    Stepping into the National Gallery of Victoria’s “Pierre Bonnard: Designed by India Mahdavi” exhibition feels akin to entering a Post-Impressionist funhouse, quiltlike in its vibrant patchwork of galleries. The buzzed-about exhibition, co-organized with the Musée d’Orsay, showcases a remarkable selection of Pierre Bonnard’s late 19th-century paintings as well as curation of works by his contemporaries—all set within a colorful salon-like scenography designed by Mahdavi.  
    Installation view “Pierre Bonnard: Designed by India Mahdavi” 2023. Courtesy of the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne. Photo by Lillie Thompson.
    Through clever cutouts that echo the favored window motif in the French artist’s paintings of interiors, visitors encounter sprawling pattern-filled vistas, layered to dizzying effect. “The whole show is about being immersive; the Nabi artists wanted you to enter a world where you can be surrounded by art rather than just looking at it,” says the award-winning French architect and designer of Iranian-Egyptian origin. Derived from the Hebrew word navi meaning “prophet,” the Nabis—a late 19th-century artist movement that included Bonnard—ushered in a new era of design-based art, including everything from furniture to commercial illustration. 
    Creating punchy, art-filled environments has become Mahdavi’s calling card. In 2014, she was tapped to design The Gallery at sketch London—arguably, Instagram’s most iconic restaurant—which she made into a plush pink haven to juxtapose British artist David Shrigley’s graphic, yet whimsical works on view. The design was so successful, Mahdavi’s three-year project lasted eight years, and in 2022, she was asked to redesign the space to complement British-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare’s quilts, sculptures, and masks.  
    The Gallery at sketch, London, 2014 Photography © Thomas Humery
    Mahdavi’s Charlotte velvet bubblegum-hued armchairs, as made famous by sketch, are among her furnishings sprinkled throughout the Bonnard exhibition, which opened this June for a four-month run. “Pierre Bonnard” is the latest of NGV’s Melbourne Winter Masterpieces, an exhibition series that aims to draw tourists to Melbourne during the off-season months. It was organized in collaboration with the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, which holds the largest collection of the artist’s work. Sourced from numerous public and private collections, it features more than 100 pieces by the Nabi titan known for his luminous palette, as well as his contemporaries, such as Édouard Vuillard and Félix Vallotton. Organized chronologically, the exhibition charts Bonnard’s shifting subject matter as he moves from urban Paris in the 1890s, encapsulated in street and theatrical scenes, to the South of France, where from the 1920s onwards he focuses on natural landscapes and quiet moments at home.  
    Installation view “Pierre Bonnard: Designed by India Mahdavi” 2023. Courtesy of the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne. Photo by Lillie Thompson.
    To make Bonnard’s work, which spans paintings, photography, and the decorative arts, more accessible to Australian audiences, NGV enlisted Mahdavi to conceive the exhibition’s scenography—and, indeed, the pairing is undeniably a match made in polychromatic heaven. The conversation began five years when NGV leaders visited her Parisian studio. Upon viewing the catalogue for the museum’s groundbreaking 2018–19 exhibition, “Escher x nendo | Between Two Worlds,” in which Japanese design studio nendo responded to Dutch artist M.C. Escher’s work, Mahdavi was instantly inspired. “It was a very unusual and forward-thinking combination,” says Mahdavi, an admirer of both creative forces. “It was a new way of having a conversation between art and design.”  
    Installation view “Pierre Bonnard: Designed by India Mahdavi” 2023. Courtesy of the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne. Photo by Lillie Thompson.
    Also particularly novel to Mahdavi was the blending art and commerce in the museum context—nearly all her furnishings in the exhibition are available for purchase via her showroom. For nearly a decade, auction houses have tapped interior designers to create vignettes (both digitally and in real life) that ground the art and objects they aim to sell. However, for a major museum to give a contemporary designer such a prominent voice (not only within the scenography but even the actual exhibition title) is daring—and possibly the future. 
    Installation view “Pierre Bonnard: Designed by India Mahdavi” 2023. Courtesy of the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne. Photo by Lillie Thompson.
    “In large art museums, especially those with massive 19th-century art collections, I’m sure [the extent to which we incorporated Mahdavi’s vision] would be considered a bit sacrilegious. Many museums worry about an over-presence of someone else in the room beside the artist,” says Miranda Wallace, NGV’s Senior Curator of International Exhibition Projects. Perhaps indicating a changing landscape, this spring the Musée National Picasso-Paris opened a Picasso exhibition with artistic direction by British designer Paul Smith. “The freedom we gave India, and the way she responded to Bonnard through the environment she created, fit the nature of his work so perfectly. It’s not a forced complementarity.”   
    “Like Bonnard, I always work with my own memory of colors,” says Mahdavi, who shares how her nomadic childhood, during which she moved from “Technicolor” America to Germany, “a lost paradise of color where everything was black and white,” was formative on her aesthetic. Because Bonnard only worked from his memory (he’d sketch a scene after the fact and jot down notes recalling the lighting during a specific moment), Mahdavi found inspiration in the artist’s “distortion of reality,” reflected in his peculiar palette, flattened perspectives, and scenes conflating interiors and exteriors from different locations. “The same way that there’s an abstracted value to Bonnard’s paintings, the exhibition is designed like an abstraction of a home,” explains Mahdavi. Incorporating her own furnishings was one tactic to give NGV’s expansive galleries a more domestic scale. “It’s as if Bonnard is inviting guests into his home.” 
    Installation view “Pierre Bonnard: Designed by India Mahdavi” 2023. Courtesy of the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne. Photo by Lillie Thompson.
    Especially from his earlier years, many of Bonnard’s works are small format. “To give him a bigger voice” and demonstrate the distinctive way he produced “vibrations through pattern,” Mahdavi extracted details from wallpapers and fashions in his paintings, computer manipulated them, and blew them up into backdrops for the exhibition. “We wanted people to understand the strength and modern value of his art,” says Mahdavi of the mise en abyme effect. The carpets’ designs, too, stemmed from the painter’s interiors. Mahdavi’s heavy pattern use, complemented by solid walls in splashy colors, also hark back to the typically fully wallpapered homes of Bonnard’s day without feeling old and stuffy.  
    “We know that people love immersive experiences, but how do you make a meaningful connection between the environment and the work?” says Wallace on bringing historical artwork to new audiences. “The ambition is that you transport people on a conceptual and intellectual journey back in time, as well as into an artist’s vision of the world.” Given the endless creative possibilities that Bonnard’s homes afforded his art (his bathroom alone accounts for the setting of dozens of photographs and portraits of his wife, Marthe), the pairing of Bonnard’s œuvre with a contemporary interior designer makes sense; the choice of the bold, yet shrewd Mahdavi is what makes this exhibition evade gimmickry. Intentionally with very few digital components, the show is a reminder that spectacle and immersion can be achieved without flashy tech. In that regard, the NGV’s “Pierre Bonnard” is a much-needed antithesis to the trend of soulless projection-based shows à la Klimt and van Gogh. 
    Installation view “Pierre Bonnard: Designed by India Mahdavi” 2023. Courtesy of the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne. Photo by Lillie Thompson.
    “Bonnard said that ‘museums are filled with homeless works,’” says Wallace. ‘With India’s display, Bonnard’s artworks are rooted in a fertile and appropriate ground because it’s all about that notion of looking and enjoying the surroundings. The pleasure of the painting’s details comes to the fore and makes them feel fresh.” 
    As for the cadence of shows featuring an external collaborator, Wallace believes NGV director Tony Ellwood is “very keen to push the envelope with Melbourne Winter Masterpieces,” and that “we will look for opportunities where there is a subject that allows us to really engage with design because it is such a fundamental part of this institution.” However, “having the right pairing is not necessarily an annual thing.”  
    “As a museum, we are increasingly challenged to diversify what we’re offering,” Wallace continues. “If we are going to do a show about a European man from the 19th or 20th century, the question becomes ‘how can we also then make sure we are presenting something that wouldn’t have been done 30 years ago?’” 
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