Eliana Willis

An annual celebration of the very best in British contemporary art, the Turner Prize 2025 returns this week with an exhibition of all four nominated artists in the northern English city of Bradford, Yorkshire. Though the showcases by Nnena Kalu, Mohammed Sami, Rene Matić, and Zadie Xa are not united by any particular theme, they each pull us into the artist’s own world while providing an environment for expansive, open-ended contemplation.
The four-part show opens at Cartwright Hall Art Gallery on September 27 through February 22, 2026. A new Turner Prize winner will be announced on December 9 during an award ceremony at nearby Bradford Grammar School. First prize is £25,000 ($34,000), with a further £10,000 ($13,500) awarded to each runner-up. Last year, the top honor went to Scottish artist Jasleen Kaur.
Cartwright Hall in Bradford, England during the Turner Prize 2025 exhibition. Photo: Andrew Benge/ Getty Images.
Founded in 1984, the Turner Prize promotes debate about the current state of art in the U.K. and has been no stranger to controversy, particularly in the raucous era of the YBAs, when the award spotlighted hotshots like Damien Hirst, Anish Kapoor, Rachel Whiteread, and Chris Ofili. Decades later, the award continues to recognize important achievements by artists either born or working in Britain. Here are this year’s shortlisted nominees.

Nnena Kalu
Nnela Kalu’s presentation at Turner Prize 2025. Photo: David Levene.
The standout artist this year is the Glasgow-born, London-based artist Nnena Kalu, who invites audiences to walk among her hanging bundles of found material—including tape, VHS tape, rope, paper, and fabric—that have been bound, layered, and knotted into place by a series of rhythmic motions. The pieces Hanging Sculptures 1-10 debuted last year at Manifesta 15 in Barcelona and, here, are exhibited alongside Kalu’s drawings; charged, swirling vortexes, one of which was recently included in the group show “Conversations” at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool. The artist has used many of the same works to create a fresh, site-specific installation for Cartwright Hall.
Kalu, born in 1966, is the first learning-disabled artist to be nominated for the Turner Prize. Since 1999, she has developed her practice out of studios run by the charity ActionSpace, which quickly recognized the scale of her ambition. Kalu has been publicly exhibiting her work since 2016 and her first solo international museum exhibition, “Creations of Care,” closed last month at Kunsthall Stavanger in Norway. In 2024, she received her first commercial gallery show at Arcadia Missa in London.
Mohammed Sami
Mohammed Sami’s presentation at Turner Prize 2025. Bradford. Photo: David Levene.
The somewhat elusive Mohammed Sami has long been admired by those in-the-know for his paintings of landscapes or domestic settings that capture mesmerizing surface effects but are also filled with haunting, oblique references to violence. Most of these compositions refer in some way to the artist’s memories of the Iraq War, as in the case of an abandoned table overlooked by the shadow of a CCTV camera, as well as his eventual immigration to Sweden as a refugee in 2007. This is certainly the case for the pieces on view at Cartwright Hall, which include new works alongside canvases from his nominated solo exhibition, “After the Storm,” at Blenheim Palace.
Born in 1984, Sami’s major solo institutional debut was at Camden Art Centre in London in 2023 and, earlier this year, he was the subject of a show at KM21 in The Hague, the Netherlands. He has appeared in recent group shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Pinault Collection in Paris, and the Whitechapel Gallery in London. Among the critics, Sami is most widely tipped to scoop this year’s Turner Prize.
Rene Matić
Rene Matić’s presentation at Turner Prize 2025. Photo: David Levene.
Rene Matić’s practice tends to center the photograph within a larger multimedia installation that includes sculpture, sound, text, and moving image elements, and their presentation at Cartwright Hall is no different. Based on their nominated show “As Opposed to the Truth,” at the Centre for Contemporary Arts in Berlin, it foregrounds documentation of the artist’s own queer milieu against echoes of wider societal and systemic violence, in particular the rise of the far-right. The result is an uplifting celebration of resilience and defiance.
A centerpiece of the show is Restoration (2022–), a collection of abandoned black dolls, which Matić has rescued from thrift stores and tenderly rehomes and repairs. They connect this act to their father’s experience of neglect growing up as a Black child in the English city of Peterborough. Born in 1997, the artist has shown at several prominent U.K. centers for contemporary art, including Studio Voltaire, South London Gallery, and Bold Tendencies, and has been collected by Tate, Fondation Louis Vuitton, and Martin Parr Foundation.
Zadie Xa
Zadie Xa’s exhibition at the Turner Prize 2025 in Bradford, England. Photo: Andrew Benge/ Getty Images.
Korean-Canadian artist Zadie Xa lives and works in London, and is nominated for her enchanting, immersive exhibition “Moonlit Confessions Across Deep Sea Echoes: Your Ancestors Are Whales, and Earth Remembers Everything” from Sharjah Biennial 16. The immediately spectacular nature of the work, with its kaleidoscopic color scheme and nature-inspired soundscape, pulls the viewer in, introducing them to its more complex, spiritual meanings. Inspired by Korean shamanism, the work refers to various ancient rituals and evokes a folkloric connection to the oceans, most particularly in a dazzling golden arrangement of hanging seashells.
Xa, born in 1983, has had recent solo museum show at Space K Seoul, Whitechapel Gallery in London, and Leeds Art Gallery. She has also been included in recent group exhibitions at the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich and Copenhagen Contemporary.
“A beacon of the most exciting contemporary art being made at this moment, the Turner Prize continues to delight and provoke debate as it enters its fifth decade,” said Alex Farquharson, director of Tate Britain and chair of the Turner Prize 2025 jury.
“Turner Prize 2025” is on view at Cartwright Hall Art Gallery  in Bradford, West Yorkshire from September 27 through February 2022, 2026.  More

There’s a wave of design energy running through New York right now, with galleries putting on some of the most ambitious shows of the season. From a blue-chip artist like Urs Fischer reimagining furniture at Salon 94 to the New York–based Women’s History Museum’s bleak fashion dispatch at Amant in Brooklyn, design is being presented with as much drama and daring as contemporary art.
Eclectic, eccentric, and unapologetically bold, it’s an ideal time to see how New York’s galleries are expanding the definition of design. Here are six shows worth seeing in venues ranging from the palatial Salon 94 in the Upper East Side to intimate upper-level Tribeca spaces.
1. “Urs Fischer: Shucks & Aww” at Salon 94
Urs Fischer, Clay Chair (2025). Courtesy of Salon 94 Design.
“In some way all chairs or furniture are figuration. The figure might be absent, but it obviously has to relate,” said Urs Fischer earlier this month as he was installing “Shucks & Aww.” “The sculptures are about the figure and the body.” Seating, surprisingly, has been at the core of his practice for years. “Of course you all know his sculptural practice,” said Salon 94 founder Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn. “He takes a humble chair, and turns it into art. Now he’s reversed it and taken his art of the chair and turned it back into a functional object. So the first floor is actually a retrospective of his chair as sculpture, and then the second floor is his actual practice as a furniture maker.”  Artworks include a chaise made to look like a mound of clay but actually cast in polyurethane, a full-scale candle of art mogul Peter Brant leaning on a chair, and a toilet brimming with fresh fruit.
Upstairs the functional design pieces are every bit as outlandish, only this time you can sit in them. Among the standouts is Question, which looks like a ruin of an ordinary kitchen chair but is in fact cast in painted bronze, complete with a curling antenna that sprouts from its back. Then there’s Big Dog Chair, a mint-green straight-back perched atop a canary-yellow dog that doubles as its base. It’s all part of a full-blown product line that spans tables, lamps, mirrors, carpets, and seating galore. Scattered among these is the enchanting Elegy, a glittering installation of 700 hand-blown mirrored glass droplets that descend like a surreal storm. All of these are available in limited-edition batches.
Urs Fischer, L-Shaped Lamp (2025) and Sidewalk Mountain Couch (2025). Courtesy of Salon 94 Design.
The show is playfully subversive, and nowhere more so than in Sidewalk Mountain Couch. Inspired by a pile of garbage bags, it inevitably calls to mind the Trash Bag Sofa by Harry Nuriev of Crosby Studios—the stunt couch of Design Miami 2022. But where Nuriev’s version looked like creepy set decor for Saw 3, Fischer’s is pitch-perfect and chic. “You’re supposed to sink into it like a bag of leaves in the fall,” said Greenberg Rohatyn. The couch comes in a range of colors, but the subtly varied browns on view here are especially covetable, altogether it’s both comfy and oddly beautiful.
An installation view of Urs Fischer: “Shucks & Aww” Courtesy of the artist and Salon 94 Design © Urs Fischer Photo: Stefan Altenburger
But for me, it was all about the clever carpet: a floor covering printed to match the paint-splattered, scuffed surface of Fischer’s Los Angeles studio. Each carpet can be customized to fit a buyer’s space. It’s a trompe l’oeil gesture that is not only oddly beautiful but also reassuringly practical—no need to worry about spills here.
“Urs Fischer: Shucks & Aww” is on view at Salon 94, 3 E 89th Street, through November 1
2. “Colin Knight: Hero’s Wreck” at Superhouse
An installation view of “Colin Knight: Hero’s Wreck,” Photo: Matthew Gordon, Courtesy of Superhouse
Richmond, Virginia–based artist and designer Colin Knight channels a Lord of the Flies–like thought experiment: what if design students were left with only the carcass of a downed plane? “He’s obsessed with World War II era everything,” said Superhouse founder Stephen Markos, “mid-20th century design, mid-20th century fine art.” In “Hero’s Wreck” (through October 18), the exhibition includes aviation-inspired fare like an armchair that makes you feel like a gunner peering from the turret of a B-17 and Crash Fragment is a shrapnel-chic hanging light that resembles a salvaged wing component.
Colin Knight, Survival Raft (2025) Photo: Matthew Gordon, Courtesy of Superhouse.
Another standout chair mimics a survival raft packed with Labububu-sized infantry figures in life vests awaiting rescue. But the show’s pièce de résistance, Show Your Wound, is a sofa–snowshoe–sled hybrid, tufted with sheepskin for comfort; its rawhide back, molded from the contours of Knight’s own body, hovers between the suggestion of a body bag and an unexpectedly intimate embrace. Knight’s fixation on war and memory stems in part from his grandmother’s stories of surviving the Blitz, and by invoking Joseph Beuys alongside the wartime ingenuity of the Eameses, he has forged a distinctive visual language—funny and quirky at times, though never campy—that transforms WWII fascination into a meditation on masculinity and survival.
“Collin Knight: Hero’s Wreck” is on view at Superhouse, 120 Walker Street, 6R, through October 18
3. “Carmen D’Apollonio: Salut, Ça va, c’est moi“ at Friedman Benda
An installation view of Carmen D’Apollonio: “Salut, Ça va, c’est moi,” Photography by Izzy Leung, Courtesy of Friedman Benda and Carmen D’Apollonio
For her fourth solo show at Friedman Benda, Swiss-born, Los Angeles–based Carmen D’Apollonio has conjured her most ambitious body of work yet. “Salut, Ça va, c’est moi” runs through October 16 and is comprised of anthropomorphic lamps that feel at once playful and possessed—but by benevolent spirits. “I come from figuration, so I just thought, how can I do it a little different? I just go from one piece to the other. It’s evolution,” she explained. D’Apollonio specializes in lighting that doubles as conversation pieces, blurring the line between sculpture and design.
An installation view of Carmen D’Apollonio: “Salut, Ça va, c’est moi,” Photography by Izzy Leung, Courtesy of Friedman Benda and Carmen D’Apollonio
Some are crouched, some are droopy, some are gloopy, some look like they’re melting off a table. One even takes the form of a cartoonish high heel shoe, its front serving as a platter. “You can put fruit in here, or your keys,” the artist said on opening night. Making Plans for You is a goofily ingenious two-part lamp that seems to grow straight through a wall.
Carmen D’Apollonio. Photography by Schaub Stierli Fotografie. Courtesy of Friedman Benda and Carmen D’Apollonio.
All the Words I Didn’t Say doubles as a soft sculpture—larger-than-life and a little uncanny, it looks like a human figure leaning against a wall with a colossal lampshade for a head. This floor lamp has had it!
“Carmen D’Apollonio: Salut, Ça va, c’est moi”  is on view at Friedman Benda, 515 W 26th Street, through October 16
4. “Rich Aybar: Rubberworks”  at TIWA Gallery
A selection of Rich Aybar’s rubber-and-steel-based lighting, presented with an industrial yet luminous sensibility. Courtesy of Tiwa.
Rich Aybar has quickly carved out a distinct design vocabulary—amber-hued rubber forms that feel both futuristic and primal, they are instantly recognizable. But what sets them apart is their sense of movement. “I really wanted the wiggle to be palpable,” he said. “A lot of people, when they first see the work, they immediately assume that it’s one of the other hard materials.” He added, “My rubber specifically comes from petroleum, so it’s also a necrotic material. I like the connection to ancient life or ancient death in it.”
In “Rubberworks,” Aybar expands his practice. During a residency at New Wave in Palm Beach, he learned to weld and began incorporating steel into his pieces, alongside sheets of natural Amazonian rubber sourced from the vine. At TIWA, these materials come together in lighting, vessels, and decor objects—including egg-like forms—that glow with a mix of industrial toughness and uncanny eroticism.
Rich Aybar at his studio. Courtesy of Tiwa.
The sensuality is undeniable. “It would be disingenuous to deny that there’s a sexual component or a seduction in the work,” Aybar said. “There is the invitation to imagine yourself enveloped in this world—as a hug or as a fuck, or cuddle. All of this is what I hope to impart.” The results are clean and polished, yet carry a twist of the uncanny—“something nice and naughty… finished, but also a little kinky,” as he put it.
“Rich Aybar: Rubberworks” is on view at at TIWA Gallery, 86 Walker Street, through October 8
5. “Chris Wolston: Gilding the Lily” at The Future Perfect
An installation view of Chris Wolston’s “Gilding the Lily.” Photography by Joe Kramm. Courtesy of the artist and Friedman Benda.
In “Gilding the Lily,” the New York- and Medellín-based artist and designer Chris Wolston has assembled a nature-inspired collection with subtle hints of humor and extravagance. “I was partially drawn to Art Nouveau techniques because of its use of natural forms in creating abstraction,” he said.
Chris Wolston with a bronze mirror from “Gilding the Lily.” Photography by Joe Kramm. Courtesy of the artist and Friedman Benda.
A central motif is the Yarumo leaf, which Wolston gathers from his garden in Colombia. Cast directly into bronze and aluminum, it recurs across dining tables, lamps, and chandeliers, giving the collection a through line that anchors its exuberance in something deeply personal. “They’re all cut from my garden. I have a collection of different species, so everything is just really close to home,” he explained.
The centerpiece is a monumental credenza constructed from thousands of welded wax daisy forms using the lost-wax technique. Though delicate in appearance, it is nearly indestructible. “It’s almost a ton of bronze,” Wolston said.
Chris Wolston, tapestry from “Gilding the Lily.” Photography by Joe Kramm. Courtesy of the artist and Friedman Benda.
Wolston also introduces wool wall tapestries woven in Morocco, designed first as watercolor paintings. “They’re sort of like these deconstructed lilies mixed in with traditional Berber motifs. And then there’s this other layer of distortion that happens in the hand of the artisan,” he said.
Another first for Wolston arrives this fall: his debut museum solo show opens in November at Dallas Contemporary.
“Chris Wolston: Gilding the Lily” is on view at The Future Perfect, by appointment, through October 22
6. “Women’s History Museum: Grisette à l’enfer” at Amant
Installation view of “Grisette à l’enfer” at Amant, Brooklyn. Courtesy of New Document and Amant.
What does one wear to the apocalypse? “Grisette à l’enfer” (“Grisette in Hell”), the first institutional exhibition by the New York–based Women’s History Museum—the art project and brand by Mattie Barringer and Amanda McGowan—reimagines the seamstress and shopgirl of 18th-century Paris as a figure wandering through a boutique blasted into the end times. Mannequins are dressed in gowns cobbled together from scavenged materials—porcupine quills, pelts, shattered glass, and casino chips—while an extremely uninviting pelted chair merges animalia with armageddon.
The whole thing has the feel of being homemade, improvised, and defiantly DIY, as if fashion itself had been rebuilt from ruins.
A sculptural chair from “Grisette à l’enfer” at Amant, Brooklyn. Photo: Angela Kelley.
One part of the exhibition looks like a Tenement Museum tableau after the apocalypse. A mannequin in beekeeper-meets-bridesmaid get-up stands amid blown-out holes that reveal crimson skies and towering goth skyscrapers with crosses on their facades. Videos flicker with vintage runway footage, showing just how surprisingly wearable many of these garments are—you can almost picture them on a red carpet, if only someone would take the plunge.
Installation view of “Grisette à l’enfer” at Amant, Brooklyn. Photo: Angela Kelley.
Overhead, an electronic ticker unspools a delirious litany that succinctly sums up the show: “Women’s History Museum the rapture while wearing beautiful blinding gowns made of hilarious materials… lustful fashion shameless poisons anxious luxury nonperishable essence blissful waste melancholic vanity indefinite fantasy… filthy aspirations dreamlike apocalypse loud bones.” See you in fashion hell.
“Women’s History Museum: Grisette à l’enfer” is on view at Amant, 932 Grand St, Brooklyn, NY through February 15, 2026 More

To own a Radiohead record is to inherit a haunting visual world. Here, the art rock of OK Computer (1997) is wed with chalky collages, the downbeat electronica of Kid A (2000) accompanied by jagged alien vistas, and the jazzy abstraction of The King of Limbs (2011) represented by chilling specters. The band’s music doesn’t just ask to be heard; it insists on being seen.
That visual experience at the heart of “This Is What You Get” at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, the U.K., the first institutional exhibition to spotlight the art surrounding Radiohead. More than 180 objects have been gathered here, curator Lena Fritsch told me, to encourage “thinking about the relationship of visual art and music in a wider sense, to look at album covers differently.”
Installation view of “This Is What You Get” at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, the U.K. Photo: Min Chen.
The show is a homecoming of sorts for a band that formed in Abingdon, Oxfordshire, almost four decades ago. From the early ’90s, the five-piece would create music of increasing complexity, the grinding rock of its debut single “Creep” giving way to electronic and symphonic outings from “Idioteque” to “Burn the Witch.” Among the world’s most popular alt-rock bands, Radiohead is today also one of its most enigmatic (the group just announced its first tour in seven years), its strange soundscapes and cryptic lyrics matched by a sparse online presence.
Contributing to the band’s mystique is, of course, its indelible cover art. Since 1995’s The Bends, their album sleeves have been devised by artist Stanley Donwood in close collaboration with Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke. The pair met while studying art at the University of Exeter in the ’80s and have forged a decades-spanning partnership built on art, music, dark humor, and a shared appetite for experimentation. The Ashmolean exhibition, in fact, doubles as a portrait of their joint practice.
Stanley Donwood and Thom Yorke, The Bends album cover (1995). © 1995 XL Recordings Ltd.
“It’s really rare that an artist is involved in the creative process as early as Donwood,” Fritsch said. “His album covers and all the visual work relating to Radiohead are not just illustrations of sounds and texts, but created in tandem with them.”
As seen in the show, Donwood and Yorke’s collaboration has thrived on a kind of restlessness. Fritsch characterized it as “not a development or evolution in a linear sense, but there’s a lot of going back and forth, being fascinated by one artistic medium or style, then getting bored of it before being super inspired by something else again.” Where they threw themselves into computer manipulation for The Bends and OK Computer, for example, Hail to the Thief (2003) and A Moon Shaped Pool (2016) returned them to a painterly approach.
Stanley Donwood and Thom Yorke, Soken Fen (2013). © Stanley Donwood and Thom Yorke.
Often, too, Donwood sets up a workshop close to where Radiohead were recording, allowing Yorke to easily switch between modes and Donwood to shape the cover art to the music. The process is such that, according to Donwood, “I find it hard to look at [the art] without hearing the music. It’s encoded.” This method of working also birthed Donwood and Yorke’s 2023 series of paintings, “The Crow Flies,” which debuted at London’s Tin Man Art and is on view at the Ashmolean.
“The music and the visual work both matter very much to me,” Yorke told me at that time. “One liberates the other a lot of the time.”
Here are five highlights from “This Is What You Get” that reveal just how Donwood and Yorke have married—and liberated—music and image over the years.
The Collages of OK Computer
Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood, Heavy Snowfall on House (1995). © Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood.
One of the defining albums of the 1990s, OK Computer was Radiohead’s atmospheric meditation on existential dread and urban dislocation. And it had sleeve art to match, created by Donwood and Yorke scanning and digitally collaging a trove of found images—”from old textbooks, brittle magazines from junk shops, what-to-do-in-emergency cards taken from aeroplanes, out-of-date manuals, piles of old photographs,” per Donwood.
“They were literally sitting at the computer together. One person would have a go and then the other would have a go, erasing things or changing things,” Fritsch explained of the creative process that would come to define Donwood and Yorke’s practice.
The exhibition includes test prints from the project—jarring combinations edged by bleached streaks. They appear portentous and disjointed, but purposefully so. At that time, the look of the album “stuck out like a sore thumb,” Donwood said. “But then there were loads of things that looked like it afterwards.”
Notebooks and Faxes
Thom Yorke, notebook featuring lyrics for “Karma Police,” 1995. © Thom Yorke.
Turns out, not all is forbidding in Radiohead land. Donwood and Yorke’s collaboration is threaded with a sense of fun, revealed in previously unpublished notes, sketches, and writings they exchanged over the years. That collection of notebooks and correspondence numbered some 140 pieces, Fritsch said, of which a select number are on display. They offer “a feel of their relationship. It’s a very playful relationship, but at the same time it’s quite serious and very fruitful.”
Among them are faxed letters riddled with in-jokes, comic-like drawings, and a diagram of “Yorke’s worries.” Some of these doodles have even made it into Radiohead’s artwork, including the image of the sharp-toothed bear, now a mascot of sorts for the band; the humor has informed the band’s tongue-in-cheek marketing. Radiohead heads will also love the rare glimpse into Yorke’s notebooks, featuring his lyrics for songs including “Karma Police” and “Fitter Happier.”
The Disquieting Worlds of Amnesiac and Hail to the Thief
Stanley Donwood and Thom Yorke, Get Out Before Saturday (2000). © Stanley Donwood and Thom Yorke.
Though often printed in a 12-by-12-inch format, Donwood and Yorke’s original artworks for Radiohead’s album covers were created on larger—and more—canvases. They’re also rich with references to our political and social realities. For Amnesiac (2001), for example, the duo produced a series of monumental, sinister landscapes, shaped by newspaper images from the Yugoslav Wars. Created with brushes, knives, rags, and sticks, the works depict ghostly figures against isolated planes in scenes of barely contained violence.
Stanley Donwood and Thom Yorke, Pacific Coast (2003). © Stanley Donwood and Thom Yorke.
The paintings for Hail to the Thief, on the other hand, take the form of urban maps filled in with neat, colorful typography. Inspired by the blaring billboards of Los Angeles, the works are composed with phrases plucked from the album’s lyrics and whatever happened to be in the air. They form unsettling yet hypnotic readings such as “Stand / Like Flies / Time Is Up / Blind.”
These references in Donwood and Yorke’s art are also a mirror held up to a moment, noted Fritsch, who also pointed out the pair’s early use of the Mac and a page in their notebooks that mentions Dolly, the cloned sheep. “They reflect the zeitgeist of different times,” she said, “of the times that they were made in.”
The Linocut Art of The Eraser
Stanley Donwood, London Views (6 of 14) (2005–6). © Stanley Donwood
Besides Radiohead, the exhibition dedicates space to artworks devised for Yorke’s other musical projects, including Atoms for Peace and the Smile. Unmissable is the linocut Donwood created for the cover of his first solo record, The Eraser (2006). An extensive scene inspired by a 2004 flood in Cornwall, which the artists witnessed, it depicts London engulfed in dramatic waves, the city’s landmarks such as St. Paul’s Cathedral and the “Gherkin” being swept away. A lone figure stands with an arm outstretched, as if to hold back the waters.
Donwood’s original drawing for the cover, created in a style reminiscent of medieval woodcuts, is on view alongside the linoleum block fabricated for the project. The linocut concept was later developed for the cover of Amok, Atoms for Peace’s 2013 album, which captures Los Angeles amid an asteroid storm.
The Membranes Tapestry
Installation view of Membranes (2025) as part of “This Is What You Get” at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, the U.K. Photo: Min Chen.
Another medieval nod? A massive tapestry that reproduces one of Donwood and Yorke’s paintings from “The Crow Flies.” Created during the recording of the Smile’s Wall of Eyes, the suite of paintings was inspired by ancient maps and fittingly contained eerily textured topographies. The duo then experimented with transforming these canvases into textiles with help from Flanders Tapestries in Belgium. One of these, Membranes, now hangs in Ashmolean’s Music and Tapestry Gallery, offering what Fritsch called “a dialogue between the past and the present.”
It’s a striking sight—an arid terrain overwhelmed by an unwieldy blue form that’s filled in with curlicues and other wavy marks. Seen from afar, the work appears as an aerial map for a nonexistent landscape, made even stranger for being installed alongside a 17th-century tapestry depicting a scene from Ovid’s Metamorphoses and historic musical instruments. It makes for a beguiling juxtaposition; chances are, Donwood and Yorke wouldn’t want it any other way.
“This is What You Get: Stanley Donwood | Radiohead | Thom Yorke” is on view at the Ashmolean Museum, Beaumont Street, Oxford, the U.K., through January 11, 2026. More

As the busiest season for art in London heats up, impressive pieces of public art are taking over the city. Last week saw the launch of the annual Frieze Sculpture outdoor exhibition, with artists like Elmgreen & Dragset, Erwin Wurm, and Jaune Quick-to-See Smith filling the rolling green grounds of Regent’s Park’s English Garden. Further east, in Bromley-by-Bow, legendary 90-year-old conceptual artist Rasheed Araeen debuted a new addition to The Line public art trail. His new site-specific installation provides a welcome pop of color to the surrounding industrial cityscape.
The Frieze Sculpture selection of 14 new or recent works for its 13th edition, which runs through November 2, has once again been assembled by star curator Fatoş Üstek. Her chosen theme, “In the Shadows,” plays with sculpture’s literal, multidimensional presence, which casts shadows, as well as the term’s metaphorical possibilities, touching on absence, obfuscation, or our shared ancestry. For each work, guiding audio interpretations are offered via Bloomberg Connects.
Rasheed Araeen, Untitled The Line installed on The Line in East London. Photo: Angus Mill, courtesy of The Line.
“Darkness mostly stands for an anticipation of fear and pain,” said Üstek, but she nonetheless encourages us to step bravely into the shadows. “These shadows are deeply buried in our psyches, in our ways of being, and ways of existence,” she added. “Let’s get together and pull the veil of reality, to look underneath at what is actually happening here and now.”
With this mission in mind, the thought-provoking show never shies from complex political, ecological, and social issues. In this carefully constructed arena for deep contemplation, engaged audiences will find themselves suspended at the threshold between darkness and light.
Erwin Wurm, Ghost (Substitutes) (2022), presented by Thaddaeus Ropac at Frieze Sculpture 2025. Photo: Linda Nylind, courtesy of Frieze.
Austrian artist Erwin Wurm has gained a cult following for his absurdist works, which invite new ways of seeing everyday objects. Ghost (Substitutes) (2022) is a painted, larger-than-life aluminum cast of a blue suit, a portrait of a person by way of their “second skin,” Wurm’s term for our clothing. The sculpture alludes to the presence of a human inhabitant but, ultimately, amplifies their absence with its rumpled, slack form. The sculpture connects this to the illusionistic nature of cast sculpture dating back to antiquity, when majestic subjects like goddesses or warriors were “defined by a very thin layer of metal and were empty inside.”
Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, King of the Mountain (2024–25), presented by Garth Greenan Gallery and Stephen Friedman Gallery at Frieze Sculpture 2025. Photo: Linda Nylind, courtesy of Frieze.
The trailblazing Native American artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith died at the start of the year, so it is fitting to see her representing at this year’s edition of Frieze Sculpture. King of the Mountain (2024–25), from her recent “Trade Canoe” series, belongs to a wide-ranging practice that also included printmaking, drawing, and painting. The bronze statue of a buffalo standing on a boulder in a canoe is a tribute to Big Medicine, a real albino buffalo that was born on the artist’s reservation in Montana in the 1930s and was believed to have healing powers. Suitably, the monument is raised on a plinth.
“In my art and life, I really strive to reverse the adage that what you see is what you get,” said Smith. “If I can be coyote and practice my sneak up, I can engage the viewers from a distance with one image and lure them in for exposure to another layer, which changes the initial view into quite a different reality.”
Abdollah Nafisi, Neighbours (2025), presented by Dastan at Frieze Sculpture 2025. Photo: Linda Nylind, courtesy of Frieze.
Tehran-born, U.K.-based artist Abdollah Nafisi’s strange, painted construction of salvaged steel, Neighbours (2025), finds a harmonious balance among its various colorful elements. The two large horn-like forms use the wind to make sounds, imbuing the intricate structure with a surprising ephemerality.
“Even though the steel feels heavy and grounded, I’ve built the work to feel like it’s holding its breath, like it could shift at any moment,” said Nafisi. “That tension invites something more fragile, like presence or silence or even memory.”
David Altmejd, Nymph 1 Nymph 2 Nymph 3 (2025), presented by White Cube at Frieze Sculpture 2025. Photo: Linda Nylind, courtesy of Frieze.
Three frolicking nymphs by Canadian sculptor David Altmejd are caught in motion, clothes twirling and limbs kicking out in a moment of joyously free expression. The beautiful folkloric spirits known as nymphs have an affinity with nature, and Altmejd captures something of their carefree whimsy. As they slip past our eye, we can only wonder if what we thought we saw was real of imagined.
“At first their grace draws you in, but up close their rough, pitted texture reveals a raw and tactile energy,” said Üstek. “But nymphs are wild, unstable forces caught between creation and disintegration.”
Assemble, Fibredog (2025), presented by Plinth at Frieze Sculpture 2025. Photo: Linda Nylind, courtesy of Frieze.
The biggest and perhaps most memorable work included in this year’s Frieze Sculpture is Fibredog (2025), a playful sculpture of a scruffy dog made by the London-based collective Assemble. With ritual central to their practice, the group gathered spare wood and thatch from Regent’s Park and its surroundings and its charmingly makeshift appeal brings to mind ancient ceremonies and folklore. Now, it stands proudly as a spot that welcomes people to gather.
“Inspired by a dead tree trunk, they have bound together branches of straw, thatch, and timber into a totem-like form or effigy,” said Üstek. “It has the feeling of something mythic, like it has always been there, waiting to be noticed.”
Frieze Sculpture 2025 is on view at the English Garden in Regent’s Park, London until November 2.  More

The complete U.S. Constitution has gone on display for the first time in history.
While the National Archives Museum in Washington D.C. permanently exhibits the four pages of the Constitution together with the Bill of Rights, it is currently showing the rarely displayed fifth page. The display leads off the museum’s celebrations of America’s upcoming 250th anniversary in 2026.
Sometimes known as the Letter of Transmittal, it was essentially a cover letter that outlined the Constitution’s purpose and explained how it was to be ratified and implemented by the states. It was signed by George Washington, then president of the Constitutional Convention, and dated to September 17, 1787.
The U.S. Constitution, page 1. Photo courtesy of the National Archives.
The documents will be shown surrounded by the 17 constitutional amendments inside the Rotunda of the National Archives. The display will run until October 1 with the museum extending operating hours in anticipation of high demand. The fifth page was previously exhibited for the 225th anniversary of the Constitution in 2012.
“As we approach the 250th anniversary of our nation’s founding, the National Archives is playing a major role in the coast-to-coast commemorations by providing the American people access to their history,” Jim Byron, senior adviser to the acting archivist, said in a statement. “This extraordinary installation welcomes all Americans to celebrate the bedrock of our national life: our Constitution.”
The Bill of Rights, 1789. Photo courtesy of the National Archives.
The celebrations don’t stop there for the National Archives Museum. In October this year, it’s concluding a $40 million renovation of the museum, the first in two decades. Included in the project is “The American Story”, a new permanent exhibition space, and a discovery center in which K-12 visitors will learn about American civics.
The redevelopment will include an A.I. element with the museum uploading two million records (from the Archive’s collection of more than 13 billion) to digital kiosks placed throughout the museum. Upon entering, visitors will digitally select topics that are of interest. Then, while exploring the 10,000-square-foot galleries, A.I. will display documents related to those subjects at the kiosks. It’s the first museum on the National Mall to use A.I. in its displays, which Byron has called “technologically innovative and cutting edge.”
The National Archives Building, Washington, D.C. Photo: Robert Alexander / Getty Images.
The museum is also hosting “Opening the Vault”, an exhibition that features a changing display of artifacts connected to the people and moments that shaped America.
Museums across America have grand plans for the country’s 250th anniversary. The New York Historical is pairing historical paintings with the work of contemporary artists such as Lady Pink and Fritz Scholder. The Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts are teaming up to display more than 1,000 works by American artists including Mary Cassatt, Horace Pippin, and Jaune Quick-to-See Smith. The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History is staging “In Pursuit of Life, Liberty and Happiness,” which features 250 objects from American history. More

For 15 years, the art collective 4heads was a mainstay of Governors Island, helping make the former Coast Guard base an unlikely arts destination in New York Harbor. Now, they are bringing their magic to Rockaway, staging a new edition of their group show “Portal,” with 35 artists showing in a repurposed military warehouse at Fort Tilden, a former United States Army installation right on the beach.
“We were really sad that the island did not have us back,” 4heads co-founder Nicole Laemmle told me. “We took a one-year hiatus—a leap year.”
Then she and co-founder Jack Robinson, her husband, started looking for a new place to stage an exhibition. They landed in Rockaway last year thanks to Christopher Saucedo, a past 4heads artist who is a board member of the Rockaway Artists Alliance, which operates the space.
“It’s just like Governors Island. We’re surrounded by water, and it’s a pain in the ass to get to,” Robinson joked.
Caleb Nussear, R~mr #2 (2016) at “Portal: Rockaway.” Photo: courtesy of 4heads.
A Celebration of Art in All Mediums
A tessellated mirrored sculpture by Caleb Nussear is among the works displayed on the lawn in front of the building, greeting visitors who make the worthwhile trek.
Inside, Robinson and Laemmle have put together a compelling mix of painting, sculpture, photography, and video work, selected via an open call.
A few works were familiar to me. Kate Clark‘s unnerving sculptures of human faces, transformed with animal hides and with the bodies of anthropomorphized deer, have been shown widely at museums including the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.
Work by Kate Clark in the foreground, with Bianca Abdi-Boragi in the center and Robert Lach on the back wall at “Portal: Rockaway.” Photo: courtesy of 4heads.
“She’s kind of a big deal—I was surprised she was so psyched to show with us,” Robinson laughed.
And I remembered the life-size, newsprint-covered Coney Island beach goer sculptures by Will Kurtz—a “Portal” veteran I first encountered on Governors Island in 2014—from an excellent booth at the 2024 Spring Break Art Show.
Will Kurtz, Adorra and Just Do It at “Portal: Rockaway.” Photo: courtesy of 4heads.
Also thematically on point was another Spring Break favorite, from 2025, by Bianca Abdi-Boragi, who coated the inside of suitcases with sand she collected in the Bahamas, Martinique, and the Sahara, and used them as shelves to display cast bronze sculptures of fruits turned into telephones. (The artist did the Midnight Moment video for Times Square in August.)
“Portal” exhibitions tend to excel at finding artists working with unconventional materials.
Robert Lach, crutch wheel I (2013) and wrapped l (2015) at “Portal: Rockaway.” Photo: courtesy of 4heads.
A circular, mandala-like work mounted on one wall, on closer inspection, turns out to be made entirely from salvaged crutches that Robert Lach collected off the streets of New Jersey over a period of about three years. Its surprisingly spare beauty is paired with another work by the artist inspired by his former day job as an art handler, made from foam and cardboard tape roll interiors, bound together by packing tape in cell-like accumulations.
And then there’s Cynthia Reynolds, who has two works in the show: a tidy bundle of bubble wrap, displayed in wavy layers in the window to catch the late summer light, and a large trailing sculpture of pink packing peanuts strung together in a surprisingly delicate arrangement.
Cynthia Reynolds, Cope (anti-static): The Rest of Venus (2025). Photo: courtesy of 4heads.
“At our opening, the artist actually wore the artwork. What she eventually wants to do is walk into the ocean with it because the packing peanuts dissolve,” Laemmle said. “It’s really beautiful when she wears it.”
On the other side of the coin are excellent paintings, including a shrine-like display of colorful animal works by Viktoriya Basina.
Work by Viktoriya Basina at “Portal: Rockaway.” Photo: courtesy of 4heads.
More subtle were Jamie Orr’s canvases mixing acrylic with walnut ink, coffee, and saltwater to create gorgeous, swirling abstractions reminiscent of landscapes with a delicate shimmer.
There is even documentary photography, from Stephanie Keith, who has captured harrowing views of ICE agents at work, detaining immigrants and separating families as part of the current crackdown on the undocumented.
Stephanie Keith, ICE Detention at 26 Federal Plaza, NYC (2025). Photo: courtesy of the artist.
A New Era for a Beloved Organization
Robinson and Laemmle miss some things about Governors Island. The exhibition, originally dubbed the Governors Island Art Fair, adapted crumbling officers’ houses into makeshift galleries, displaying art on kitchen counters, spilling out of ovens and dusty cabinets.
That unique vibe was recaptured in John Buron’s Living Room Incursion, a life-size installation of a recliner chair, television (with working screen), living room window, and baseboard radiator all crafted from cardboard, rope, and fabric, painted entirely in white. The objects, mounted on a platform in the corner of the gallery, are shown askew, an ironing board disappearing into the wall as if being suctioned off into some alternate dimension.
John Buron, Living Room Incursion. Photo: courtesy of 4heads.
And the artists have made good use of the space’s soaring ceilings, hanging works from the aesthetically pleasing beams. From across the room, semicircles of orange and yellow macramé by Ellie Murphy face a site-specific Erin Turner sculpture made of countless copies of her own photo on newsprint, woven together over a chickenwire frame into a massive, twisted ring-like form.
It’s the second year in the barn-like gallery for “Portal,” and the plan is to make it an annual event that can grow to partner with other cultural organizations in the area.
Erin Turner, How to fall while floating (2025) at “Portal: Rockaway.” Photo: courtesy of 4heads.
“We’re hoping next year to have a big art month here for August in Rockaway,” Laemmle said.
“We love it here,” Robinson agreed.
“Portal: Rockaway” is on view at the Rockaway Artist Alliance, Studios 6 and 7 Galleries, Fort Tilden, Gateway National Recreation Area, Far Rockaway, New York, August 23–September 21, 2025. The closing reception is September 21, 3 p.m.–5 p.m. More

Earlier this week at Gladstone Gallery in New York, partner Caroline Luce was standing in front of a six-foot-tall painting unmistakably by Keith Haring. A conflagration of bodies in rapture, it could have been a blissful dance floor at Paradise Garage—packed forms, arms outstretched, caught mid-motion. Brash yellow and red shapes vibrate against a pulsing field of electric blue, the surface alive with passionate drips of purple and syncopated rhythm. For all its liveliness, this radiant depiction of community was in fact the last studio painting Haring ever completed. He finished it in November 1989; three months later, in February 1990, he was gone.
Keith Haring, Untitled (1989). Courtesy of the Keith Haring Foundation and Gladstone Gallery.
“Every time I see it, I get chills,” Luce said. “What’s really fascinating is that it hearkens back to so many of Haring’s earlier motifs—bodies in poses of dancing, joy, exaltation—and what you have here is a community of people. As an activist, as an artist, as a friend, as a member of family, the idea of joy at a time when he was so sick and knew that he only had but so long to be in this world—that the last image is one of togetherness, celebration, vitality. Even the palette is sunny and uplifting. In this single work, it shows the balance Haring was able to strike—to hold all the joy and love and beauty at the same time as the pain, suffering, and loss.”
Haring’s paintings take center stage in “Liberating the Soul,” on view through November 1. It is a tight edit of eight works, but they’re monumental in scale, uplifting in spirit, and elegiac in tone. Made between 1984 and 1989, they confront both life and mortality with brash color and unrelenting energy. They are also studies in communication: Haring’s signature line, deceptively simple, conveys complex messages about sexuality, activism, and community with disarming clarity. Many are painted not on canvas but on industrial tarps—vast, unconventional surfaces that amplify their urgency and rawness.
“He started using tarps in 1981 to find a different medium that was outside of a traditional painting practice,” Luce said. “He continued to use tarps throughout his body of work. The grommets, the sheen, the fact that the material maintains its integrity and becomes a part of the work rather than being overpainted is all very much a part of it. The size of these tarps evidence is how compelling he was at scale and how his language was really able to evoke emotions and energies in a very signature, singular way.”
Keith Haring, A Pile of Crowns for Jean-Michel Basquiat (1988). Courtesy of the Keith Haring Foundation and Gladstone Gallery.
Another startling work is A Pile of Crowns for Jean-Michel Basquiat, a triangle-shaped canvas that depicts a disheveled mountain of his fellow artist’s motif. “Haring painted it almost immediately after Basquiat passed away in August of 1988,” Luce said. “It’s on raw canvas, so it feels a little bit different than the other ones. It’s a monument, and the paint has actually seeped into the surface of the material. It’s poetic and quite moving to take in. He was friends with Basquiat throughout the ’80s. They met when Keith was a student at SVA in 1979, so they were in each other’s lives for that entire decade.”
Tree of Life is another elegy for a lost friend. “She was a student at Columbia and it was a tragic car accident. She passed away at 20, so on the back, the signature in it, he says ‘In memory of Maria Dahlin.’ Christian iconography runs through his work, so here the Tree of Life, is certainly a biblical reference that he would’ve been aware of. And as always with Keith, it’s quite open to interpretation.”
Installation view of “Liberating the Soul: Keith Haring’s Paintings.” Courtesy of Gladstone Gallery.
The painting Safe Sex harnesses vibrant color to capture the spirit of the decade and nods to Haring’s AIDS activism. Brazil could be an ecstatic beach scene of overlapping bodies or a cartographical study. A jumble of intricate hieroglyphs crowds an orange mass pressing towards a cerulean expanse in the corner.
“He spent a lot of time in Brazil,” Luce said. “You could kind of imagine it—the coastline of Brazil, the density of the rainforest. Again, very open to interpretation. Formally, this has a really interesting connection to another major work from the end of his practice, which is called Unfinished Painting, which leaves some blank space open and dripping. And that kind of empty space—is it the Atlantic Ocean? Is it something more cerebral? As always with Haring, he doesn’t want to pin you into one reading of it.”
Keith Haring, Untitled (1985). Courtesy of the Keith Haring Foundation and Gladstone Gallery.
A real wild card in the show is an untitled 1985 painting. It’s not shocking that it’s by Haring, but it’s not as immediately recognizable as the rest. At its center coils an abstracted, bound phallus, while his familiar motifs seem absent. Instead, the composition channels the extremes of the decade—the totally 1980s design and color sense of a Memphis-style squiggle and bolt, and beneath it, a grim subtext. The result is mysterious, colorful, and unsettling, a work that shows Haring’s range as well as his edge. A spectral hand surfaces too, grasping and ambiguous — divine, human, or both. Could this be another safe sex screed with a less clear message? Who knows. “It feels universal,” Luce said, “but also very ’80s.” More

Despite the fact that I have seen many, many art shows sanctifying 1920s modernism from seemingly every angle, the “Mouvement Flou” is a new one to me. The term, meaning the “blurry” or “out of focus” movement, is mentioned in “Man Ray: When Objects Dream” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It is credited to the Surrealist poet Louis Aragon, who used it to refer to the bridge moment in the European avant-garde between Dada, with its obsession with chance and irrationality, and Surrealism, with its concern for dreams and desire. In that brief both/and moment, a sense was percolating of new possibilities not completely fixed to any single creed.
Personally, I like the idea of “Movement Flou” for Man Ray‘s (1890–1976) particular style of creativity. Partly because, as a singular star of that era, he consorted with both Dadaists and Surrealists without becoming a true member of either movement. But also because a commitment to in-between-ness powered his practice.
Installation view of Man Ray: When Objects Dream, on view September 14, 2025–February 1, 2026 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo by Anna- Marie Kellen, Courtesy of The Met
“When Objects Dream” is not really a full-dress Man Ray retrospective. Instead, it uses his 1922 portfolio of “Rayographs,” Champs Délicieux (Delicious fields), as a way into talking about the surrounding era of his art. These were experiments in “cameraless” photography that Man Ray made by arranging objects from his studio on photographic paper and then exposing the surface to a flash of light, so that the objects’ shadows left their outlines.
What makes the Rayographs endure as art is the intriguing sense that they exist in-between different ways of seeing. Each image reads as both a Cubist-inspired 2D abstraction and a ghostly photographic document of a specific chance moment. Their composed, hieroglyphic quality, meanwhile, sits in contrast with them as symbols of quicksilver experimentation.
Man Ray, Rayograph (1925). MAH Musée d’art et d’histoire, City of Geneva. Purchase, 1968. Photo © Musée d’art et d’histoire, Ville de Genève, photo by André Longchamp © Man Ray 2015 Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY / ADAGP, Paris 2025
Other members of the pan-European avant-gardes played with the technique independently in the ‘20s—the flou times—most famously the Hungarian star László Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946). The photogram remains a potential even today, although a minor one. For a hot second, though, the technique offered itself as an area to explore that was in between photography and painting, art and technology. May Ray rushed into the space with all his usual intensity and elegance (though he failed at the self-branding exercise of getting people to permanently use the term “Rayograph”; Moholy-Nagy’s “photogram” won out).
He was good at such stiletto-strike innovation. “What seem to be the tricks of today will be the truths of tomorrow,” he would say.
He was born Emmanuel Radnitzkyin to a Russian Jewish family in 1890 in Philadelphia, and raised in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. He precociously eschewed college for the artist’s life, drawn to the exotic European art styles of the period that shocked still-provincial American taste, stripping his name down to the ultra-modern “Man Ray” in the process. In 1910s New York, he made a living in the fast-growing commercial design world as an illustrator. He learned photography out of necessity, on the side, to document his own tries at experimental painting.
Man Ray, Self-Portrait in 31 bis rue Campagne-Première Studio (1925). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Bluff Collection, Promised Gift of John A. Pritzker Photo by Ian Reeves © Man Ray 2015 Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY / ADAGP, Paris 2025
Man Ray did cartoons for the cover of anarchist Emma Goldman’s magazine Mother Earth, moved to New Jersey, married and separated, wrote some personal art manifestoes, and met his lifelong friend, Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968)—all before finally leaving the States in 1921, with the hope that Paris might better appreciate his art. He was in his early thirties. (Charmingly, when he first met Duchamp, Ray didn’t speak French and Duchamp spoke no English; they intuitively understood one another.)
On either side of the Atlantic, Man Ray’s career was marked by restless zigzag experimentation. Correspondingly, “When Objects Dream” goes in a lot of different directions, mixing his stylish greatest hits in experimental photography with his forays into painting, which are less famous—mostly justifiably so, though I don’t hate them.
Man Ray, Paysage suédois (Swedish Landscape) (1926). Photo courtesy of the Mayor Gallery, London, ©Man Ray 2015 Trust/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY/ADAGP, Paris 2025.
In New York, Duchamp had made a stir with Fountain, his signed urinal, in 1917. Aside from Man Ray’s photos, his most celebrated works pick up Duchamp’s idea of the readymade and run with it. These include a sewing machine covered in a cloth and bound so you just see its lumpy outline, which became an icon of Surrealism (The Enigma of Isidore Ducasse, from 1920), a flat iron with a strip of tacks fixed on it to make it a weapon (Gift, 1921), and a metronome with a little cut-out photo of an eye on it (Object to Be Destroyed, 1923).
Man Ray, Cadeau (Gift) (1921/1963). Photo by Ben Davis
“When Objects Dream” makes me see how kinetic Man Ray’s sculptural imagination was, how much of it is about creating an object that moves in your mind. Each of these works is about more than form or symbolism; it appeals to your sense that you could activate its mysteries. You think about unwrapping the sewing machine… or what you would do with the flat iron (or what it would do to you)… or flicking the metronome so that it comes to haunted life…
Man Ray, ANPOR (1919). Collection of Gale and Ira Drukier, ©the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Photo by Bruce Schwarz.
This Met show doesn’t give us Man Ray’s more conventional photo portraits of the Lost Generation characters he met in ’20s Paris (Joyce, Hemingway, Stein, and many others), focusing instead on his experiments with form and process. The other major technique he is associated with is “solarization,” discovered at the end of the 1920s with his creative co-conspirator and lover, the equally extraordinary Lee Miller (1907–1977). She was 17 years his junior and went to Paris specifically to track him down and insist that he take her on as student. By re-exposing film negatives, ordinary studio images were rendered otherworldly, with harsh transitions of light to dark and halo effects that look like the subjects are oozing radiation.
Installation view of “Man Ray: When Objects Dream,” on view September 14, 2025–February 1, 2026 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo by Anna-Marie Kellen, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
The electric look of solarization made it perfect for images incorporated into the portfolio called “Électricité,” which was what you’d now call “sponsored content.” These images, mingling lightbulbs, female nudes, the moon, and appliances, were commissioned for ten thousand francs (today, about $7,400) as part of a 1928 marketing push by a private electric power company to encourage people to use more electricity. As the catalogue explains, the final portfolio of images, published in an edition of 500, was “given away as a promotional gift to the company’s top customers.” Working between the commercial and fine art worlds was another productive in-between space for Man Ray.
Man Ray, Marchesa Luisa Casati (1922). Collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, gift of Carl Van Vechten (1949-86-4). Photo courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, ©Man Ray 2015 Trust/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY/ADAGP, Paris 2025.
During the Depression years of the 1930s—beyond the scope of this show—when Man Ray was broke and reduced to bartering his art to get dental work, he more fully embraced commercial photography for pay. He would lend his name and experimental powers to fashion advertising, with lasting consequences. Richard Avedon credited Man Ray with “breaking the stranglehold of reality on fashion photography,” infusing it with the small-S surrealist energies that linger even today.
Man Ray served as a logical translator of avant-garde energy to a mass public, via images meant to make clothing desirable. The world of artistic experimentation was linked both in fact and in legend with sexual adventurousness, and Man Ray’s relentless formal experiments have a libidinal, even kinky edge. An American in Paris, he took the tormented voluptuary rebellion of the French Surrealists against Catholic conservatism and leavened it with an American frankness steeped in the cheerfully desacrilizing spirit of commercial culture. You see this in his famous Le Violon d’Ingres (1924), an image of his first French girlfriend, the glamorous nightclub personality and artist Kiki de Montparnasse, glimpsed from behind, her body pierced with the F-holes of a violin: a musical instrument waiting to be played.
Man Ray, Le violon d’Ingres (1924). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Bluff Collection, Promised Gift of John A. Pritzker Photo by Ian Reeves ©Man Ray 2015 Trust/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY/ADAGP, Paris 2025
Such erotic energy powered his artistic imagination in subtler ways, down to the idea of flou itself. Stretching and warping the body insinuated the breaking of conventional taboos around it. Even Man Ray’s photogram process, seemingly safely domestic and focused on still life, is a tactile form of photography. It’s about intimacy and secrets and a form of vision that blurs with touch. The art of the blur evokes the sexual blurring together of bodies; the out-of-focus, the woozy state of desire. This becomes explicit in Man Ray’s 1922 photogram showing two faces in profile (his and Montparnasse’s, I believe), lips locked together, outlines of hands stamped on faces—bodies and minds melting together in an ecstatic moment.
Installation view of “Man Ray: When Objects Dream,” on view September 14, 2025–February 1, 2026 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo by Anna- Marie Kellen, courtesy of the Met
Perhaps because we’ve been overexposed to his most famous creations, his various films of the 1920s draw me most in the Met show. The first, the short Retour à la raison (Return to Reason), 1923, was made on a night’s notice when friend Tristan Tzara sprung on him that it would be featured in a Dada showcase. The latest, L’étoile de mer (The Starfish), 1928, is a willfully hazy, slightly camp erotic fairy tale, putting images to a poem by Robert Desnos. The film style feels more congealed into a narrative, albeit a dream-like one.
Fittingly for the theme of this essay, I like best the film in the show that comes in between, preserving the former’s loose feeling but predicting the latter’s ambition: Emak Bakia, from 1926. It was funded by a wealthy patron Arthur Wheeler (despite his early association with Emma Goldman, Man Ray did not resist a role as entertainment for the rich and aristocratic) with large parts filmed at Wheeler’s estate, from which it takes its name, near Biarritz.
It is a film about constant motion, from a time when capturing motion in new ways on film could still be a kind of magic trick. But it is also about the motion of ideas, shape-shifting rhythmically between different devices. Sometimes it will show Ray’s sculptural artworks in his studio as they rotate or come to stop-motion life or split in double exposure. At other moments there are recognizable humans—Rose Wheeler, his patron’s wife, doing the Charleston, or commanding a car—or landscapes seen from experimental angles. Many times, it veers into pure abstraction, including waves of static Man Ray made by throwing salt and pepper on the film, or jumpy geometric outlines of nails and pins that seem to dance in silhouette on the surface—living photograms. It climaxes with the unforgettable image of Kiki de Montparnasse with cartoon eyes painted on her eyelids, blinking up at the camera with slow, deliberate mischief.
Man Ray, Rayograph (1922). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Bluff Collection, Promised Gift of John A. Pritzker Photo by Ben Blackwell © Man Ray 2015 Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY / ADAGP, Paris 2025
It’s a relentless exercise in piling delight on delight, and an anthology of Man Ray’s themes: experiments with the material of film, sly society portraiture, numinous objects, dream worlds… Above all, with its strobing ideas, this odd film gives the sense that invention itself was more important to him than any individual invention. “Make it new” is the famous mantra of modern art. It certainly applies to Man Ray’s way of thinking. But it would be just as good to say, for him, “Make it flou.”
“Man Ray: When Objects Dream” is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York, September 14, 2025–February 1, 2026. More