Eliana Willis

In April 1874, 150 years ago, the Impressionists held their first exhibition together in the studio of Felix Nadar on the Boulevard des Capucines in Paris. It was a less-than-complimentary review by the critic Louis Leroy of this show that would give the burgeoning art group their name: Leroy describing how Monet’s Impression, Sunrise was less finished that “wallpaper in its embryonic state” and “Impressionism” being reclaimed.
Now, Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum is the site of the new exhibition “Vive l’impressionnisme! Masterpieces from Dutch Collections,” marking the revolutionary art movement’s 150th anniversary.
Paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, and decorative plates by major Impressionists are being brought together for the exhibition, including work by Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt, Auguste Rodin, Camille Pissarro, and Pierre-August Renoir. Artworks on display have been loaned from collections across the country, including from some of the Netherland’s most significant arts institutions including the Rijksmuseum, Stedelijk Museum, Kröller-Müller Museum, and the Kunstmuseum the Hague as well as numerous Dutch private collections. 150 Years of Impressionism – The Netherlands Sees the Light, an accompanying publication to the exhibition, includes texts by 13 Impressionist curators and scholars.
Claude Monet, Poppy Field (Champs de coquelicots) (1881) © Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen.
The exhibition homes in on how Impressionism was received in the Netherlands, and looks at the role that key Dutch collectors like Theo van Gogh played in the movement’s spread outside of France. The catalogue accompanying “Vive l’impressionnisme!” explores the questions the exhibition attempts to tackle, including “when did interest in Impressionist art arise in the Netherlands; who exhibited these works; who purchased them for their own collections; and which works were not appreciated or acquired in time?”
The art dealer Theo van Gogh is best-known for financially supporting his brother, Vincent van Gogh, acting as his dealer, financier, and confidant throughout his life. After Vincent’s death in 1890 and Theo’s in 1891, Theo’s widow Johanna van Gogh-Bonger collated and published a collection of some of the hundreds of letters that the brothers had sent back and forth to each other over many years. This published collection helped to cement Vincent’s legacy after being famously under-appreciated during his lifetime.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir, In the Café (Au café) (c. 1877) © Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo.
The Van Gogh Museum opened in Amsterdam’s Museum Square in June 1973, 83 years after the artist’s death, displaying—among other major artworks—previously unsold work by van Gogh. These unsold works had passed from Johanna to her son, also named Vincent, and were subsequently loaned to the Stedelijk Museum for many years before the Dutch government commissioned a permanent museum dedicated to the artist in 1963.
While the Van Gogh brothers did have their own collection which included several Impressionist works, the Van Gogh Museum has been on a mission since the 1990s to expand their collection of Impressionist art. Recently the Museum has been focused on acquiring work by female Impressionists, most recently collecting pieces by Marie Bracquemond, Berthe Morisot, and Mary Cassatt: Impressionism’s “Trois Grandes Dames”. Part of the exhibition, a virtual installation called the Gallery of Lost Opportunities will highlight masterpieces which were once held in Dutch collections but were sold to collections abroad.
Berthe Morisot, Walk in the Woods (Au bois) (1876) © Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.
Other 150th anniversary celebrations have been held around the world, including an auction at Christie’s New York, an exhibition at the Musee d’Orsay, Paris, and a festival in Normandy.
Fleur Roos Rosa de Carvalho, the curator of the show, told Artnet News: “I am thrilled to finally share this exhibition with the world. It presents a broad picture of the Impressionist movement, celebrating artists who refused to stick to a singular medium—they moved fluidly between different art forms, ignoring all of the age-old hierarchies that ranked painting at the top. Here colorful watercolors and pastels are shown with experimental sculptures and prints, which we hope will challenge the prevailing image of the Impressionists as mere painters of light and color.”
Mary Cassatt, Woman Bathing (1890–91) © Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.
“I’m also really honored to bring these Dutch collections together under one roof for the first time. It’s my hope that the show will inspire other museums and private collectors to continue to work together on an ambitious collecting policy for Impressionist art that transcends national boundaries.”
“Vive l’impressionnisme! Masterpieces from Dutch Collections” will be on display at the Van Gogh Museum from October 11 2024 to 26 January 2025. More

“Dalí Alive,” a multimedia exhibition at the Lume at Indianapolis’s Newfields, has redirected attention to a mysterious case of a missing watercolor by the famed Surrealist whose designs the show is devoted to.
The exhibition, spread across 30,000 square feet, sees Salvador Dalí artworks enlarged and projected onto the walls and floors, promising an immersive experience. “Dalí Alive” follows on from the Lume’s first two immersive shows devoted to reliable crowd-pleasers, one each to Impressionism and to Vincent van Gogh.
The display includes four Dalí watercolors (remember that number!) from the collection of the Indianapolis Museum of Art, part of the Newfields complex.
Salvador Dalí, Tragedy and Comedy (1961). © 2023 Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.
The Spaniard created the watercolors as part of his commission to design sets and costumes for the 1961–62 production of Baroque composer Alessandro Scarlatti’s 1714 opera The Spanish Lady and the Roman Cavalier, produced by Lorenzo Alvary. A Hungarian-American operatic bass, Alvary created his own company in order to put on the opera, in which he played the male lead.
Dalí was in some ways a sensible choice: he had already some experience as a designer for theatrical productions, including several ballets throughout the 1940s.
The opera follows a love story between a Roman centurion and a Catalan woman following the fall of the Roman Empire. The production traveled to Venice, Brussels, and Paris, a tour apparently so physically grueling that a principal ballerina (who had been performing without an understudy for seven months) collapsed on stage during a Paris performance.
Salvador Dalí, The Elephants (1961). © 2023 Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.
Decca Records released a 1962 record of the opera that featured an interview with Dalí. The album cover features one of the watercolors, Apotheosis (1961), emblazoned with a large signature; other Dalí works are included on the reverse and inside of the record sleeve, including Tragedy and Comedy.
In addition to Apotheosis, which features Dalí’s trademark melting clocks among other Surrealist details, and Tragedy and Comedy, Lume is also displaying Musicians and The Elephants, which which Dalí created for the opera and which stars long-legged pachyderms that are also seen in Dalí’s 1948 The Elephants.
Dalí had extravagant plans for The Spanish Lady. Actors blew bubbles filled with Guerlain perfume (though they failed to achieve the square bubbles that Dalí wanted). A Time magazine review of the show gives a long list of things that went awry during a performance at Venice’s La Fenice theatre. These oddities included Dalí himself throwing paint onto a canvas (and onto some audience members) while dressed as a Venetian gondolier, and several “visual distractions” like a walking violin, a blind man seated in front of a TV, some uncomfortably erotic dancing, and liquid carbon dioxide “milk” flowing onto the stage from underneath the rafters.
Salvador Dalí, Musicians (1961). © 2023 Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.
The collaboration between artist and producer was not a peaceful one. Dalí took Alvary to court when he claimed that he was not staying true to his creative vision. (The case was dismissed.) Plans to take the show to London and New York were duly scrapped.
“Dalí Alive” is the first time the watercolor set designs from The Spanish Lady have been on public display for over 45 years. Alvary and his wife Hallie, who owned the paintings, donated them to the Indianapolis Museum of Art in 1973; their agreement with Dalí stipulated that they would not be allowed to sell them.
But here’s the mystery: there were five watercolors, not just the four on view in Indianapolis. The location of the final watercolor is unknown, and it was not donated to the IMA.
Also missing are the costume designs. Their whereabouts are entirely unknown.
“Dalí Alive” is on view at the Lume Indianapolis at Newfields, 4000 N Michigan Rd, Indianapolis, through December 29.  More

As Art Basel returns to Paris at the Grand Palais, the city’s vibrant scene of art dealers are presenting new exhibitions timed with the influx of collectors and global attention.
From renowned international contemporary figures like Dana Schutz to art history stalwarts like Sturtevant, here are eight must-see shows.

“Maison Ancart”
Gagosian
October 13—December 20, 2024
Le Grand Parc (2024) © Harold Ancart. Photo: JSP Art Photography. Courtesy the artist and Gagosian
From twinkling nightscapes of groves, to kissing trees with bright red crowns painted like plump lips, New York-based Belgian artist Harold Ancart opens a window into nature with his upcoming solo exhibit “Maison Ancart” at Gagosian. Trees are the central figures of this show’s paintings, which were “conceived in conversation with the spirit of radical freedom,” according to a statement from the gallery. Fields, mountains, and trees are recurring motifs throughout the artist’s body of work. His art has previously been featured at other behemoth galleries like David Zwirner, and on the concrete walls of handball courts in New York City. Ancart’s imagined landscapes, created using oil sticks, are a delight that you won’t want to miss.

Sylvia Snowden
White CubeOctober 15—November 16, 2024
Sylvia Snowden Sandra Billups (1982) © the artist. Photo © White Cube (Frankie Tyska)
France’s first solo exhibition of works by acclaimed American painter Sylvia Snowden (b. 1942) will be presented by White Cube. The show will feature the artist’s powerful “M Street” series. Created between 1978 and 1997, the collection of emotionally charged paintings captures the lives of the residents of M Street in Washington, DC, where Snowden has lived and worked for more than 45 years. Snowden’s practice digs deep into the African American experience, with a palpable intensity on every canvas built through her raw, impasto brushstrokes and kaleidoscopic whorls of limbs. This Paris exhibition coincides with her first European museum show at the Hepworth Wakefield in the UK and marks her full-circle return to the city, where she first studied at the prestigious Académie de la Grande Chaumièr in 1962. The exhibition is part of the gallery’s “Inside the White Cube” series, a curated exhibition series featuring accomplished, non-represented artists from around the world.

Rashid Johnson’s “Anima”
Hauser & Wirth
October 14—December 21, 2024
Rashid Johnson Untitled Standing Soul (2024). Photo: Walla Walla Foundry © Rashid Johnson. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
Animism is the belief that all things, even inanimate objects, have souls. It’s why Marie Kondo suggests you thank your timeworn shoes for your time together before donating them to your local thrift store. American artist Rashid Johnson compels you to contemplate body and soul as he explores animism in his new exhibition “Anima,” opening at Hauser & Wirth Paris this month.
“Interiority has always been essential in my project … There’s a sense of soul searching, a sense of intimacy that is necessary for me to explore,” the artist explained in a statement from the gallery. The exhibition will showcase “Soul Paintings” and “God Paintings,” two series of works Johnson has been developing over the past several years. Several bronze sculptures by the artist will also be on display. Their wispy metal twists to form skeletal masks that could have been summoned into 3D from one of his paintings.
Jean-Marie Appriou’s “Exonaut Horizon”
Perrotin
October 12—November 16, 2024
Jean-Marie Appriou. ©Jean-Marie Appriou / ADAGP Paris, 2024. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin.
French artist Jean-Marie Appriou is an elementalist, wielding marble, glass, bronze, and even lava, to create his mythological sculptures. His work has been displayed across France from the Louvre to the Fondation Louis Vuitton; now, Perrotin gallery promises to transform its space into an immersive stage where visitors can explore the inner workings of Appriou’s cosmic universe.
The show will feature sheer silk robes like kimonos, engraved to depict floating bronze jellyfish or stout little penguins. One of Appriou’s particularly captivating artifacts is a molten glass orb with plaster fractal faces embedded within it, like a comet that has fallen to the earth carrying evidence of humanoid alien life.
Kader Attia’s “Pluvialité”
Mor Charpentier
October 5th – November 16th, 2024
Untitled, Kader Attia, 2024. Photo by Laurent Lecat. Courtesy of Galerie Mor Charpentier
In celebration of the opening of its new Parisian location at 18 rue des Quatre-Fils, Galerie Mor Charpentier has announced “Pluvialité,” an exhibition featuring Algerian-French artist Kader Attia’s work. The gallery is known for its support of artists from the global south whose work tackles socio-political issues. Attia’s practice explores themes of identity, memory, and the concept of repair through different mediums. The exhibition, Attia’s first show in Paris in a decade, will feature works on canvas, repaired objects, and a dynamic installation. The installation is a study of time and nature, comprised of a battery of rain sticks supported by unipods, arranged like wind turbines, spinning at different tempos.
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“Zip Zap!”
Thaddaeus Ropac
October 12—December 21, 2024
A member of Sotheby’s staff poses with artwork entitled ‘Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe’ 1967, by US artist Elaine Sturtevant. Photo by BEN STANSALL / AFP)
Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery is celebrating the 100 -year anniversary of the birth of groundbreaking American conceptual artist Sturtevant, promising a “sexy funky show that goes through time and thought.” Sturtevant is best known for her pioneering work in appropriation art in the 1960s, where she created near-exact replicas of works by other famous artists. She began her practice long before the concept of “appropriation” was widely understood in the art world. Sturtevant most famously replicated Andy Warhol’s silkscreen works, including his famous Flowers series and portraits of Marilyn Monroe. Warhol himself once remarked, “I don’t know why people are so upset. I only do what Sturtevant does.” He was highlighting the blurred lines between original and copy that Sturtevant sought to explore.

Dana Schutz’s “The Sea and All Its Subjects”
David Zwirner
October 14—November 16, 2024
Dana Schutz, Mountain Group, (2018). © Dana Schutz. Photo: Jeff McLane.
Dana Schutz’s surreal paintings are as comical as they are revolting. A number of the paintings in her upcoming show at Zwirner’s Paris location, called “The Sea and All its Subjects,” are of figures trapped in sisyphean tasks. One of the paintings, The Optometrists (2024), depicts an anthropomorphic cyclops in a knitted sweater crawling through a pit of loose eyeballs and other spherical objects, seemingly picking out his favorite. The New York-based artist is known for her visual storytelling, constructing complex narratives of subjects involved in their own realities. “The Sea and All its Subjects” will be Schutz’s second solo show with the gallery, following her major institution presentation “Dana Schutz: Le monde visible” (The Visible World) at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris that ended earlier this year.

Bracha Ettinger’s “Trust After the End of Trust”
High Art Paris
October 14—December 1, 2024
Bracha L. Ettinger Untitled (2013-2023). Courtesy the artist and High Art
For artist, writer, and psychoanalyst Bracha L. Ettinger, painting is a medium for tending to historical wounds with compassion. Her feminist psychoanalytic background might explain the rorschach quality of the inky, spectral figures in her abstract artwork. Her paintings are deeply emotional, sometimes haunted by regret, other times imbued with gentle wonder. A statement from High Art Paris describes her work as “a monumental architecture of female sign language.” For Ettinger, who lives between Tel Aviv and Paris, “Trust after the End of Trust” is an artistic and theoretical concept that extends her broader exploration of trauma and subjectivity.  More

Live horses tethered to the walls of an art gallery; a knitted circle of nylon threads left to disintegrate in ocean waves; a motorcycle with cattle horns for handlebars riding perpendicular to the ground; and a compass embedded in a slab of granite. These are just some of the so-called “poor art” works made by the provocateurs behind Arte Povera.
Even decades after the term was coined and promoted by the late art historian Germano Celant in 1967, uniting a loose gaggle of postwar Italian artists around their use of humble materials (though this was not always true), art world figures still talk about how their lives were forever transformed by the movement’s radical ideals.
The esteemed Italian-American curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev is one such person. She said in an interview that when she worked as a young, independent freelancer, she sat in the kitchens of several Arte Povera artists, sharing meals and chatting. They taught her that nothing was static, that art objects could change in response to their environments, temperatures, or the light. Arte Povera “says the artwork is not in its materiality, but in its constant, vital transformation of energy,” she added. “And that is really important. That marked my life.”
View of the forecourt of the Bourse de Commerce — Pinault Collection, Paris 2024 Giuseppe Penone, Idee di Pietra, 2010 Mario Merz, Fibonacci Sequence, 1984 © Pinault Collection/ ADAGP, Paris, 2024. Photo: Romain Laprade
And though it was always relevant to art history, suddenly, Arte Povera is front and center this fall. Christov-Bakargiev is curating a major Arte Povera exhibition opening this month (through January 20, 2025). All three floors of the Bourse de Commerce, Pinault Collection in Paris are devoted to it, with separate spaces individually focused on thirteen artists, showcasing some of their best and most historically significant works. This is lightly interspersed with later practices influenced or resonating with Arte Povera, as well as the wider context of postwar avant garde movements, including Japan’s Gutaï. At Art Basel Paris, many dealers are presenting works by artists tied to the art movement.
And yet, that very act of presenting, and consequently, collecting Arte Povera, comes with its own challenges. “It’s not easy to show Arte Povera,” said Christov-Bakargiev at a preview of the Bourse de Commerce exhibition. “How do you show fire? Something burning in a museum?” She pointed to Gilberto Zorio’s Arco voltaico [Voltaic Arc] (1968), of an electric current periodically jumping in an arc made by two charged copper rods that nearly touch. “Look, look,” she urged reporters, interrupting herself on another subject. “We have lightning in the Bourse de Commerce!”
Alighiero Boetti, Autoritratto (Self-portrait), 1993-1994, cast bronze, fountain system, and electric heating element, 200 × 88.4 × 49.5 cm. Pinault Collection. © Adagp, Paris, 2024.
Hard to contain, or even define—these inherent contradictions have inadvertently contributed to limiting Arte Povera’s broader reach outside of Italy, but for the very same reason, have made it a source of endless fascination to many artists and a curious public alike. That interest now appears to be swelling, given a boost by the Bourse de Commerce’s rain-making platform, and perhaps also thanks to a latent yearning for alternative breaks from our digitally hypnotized lives. As Christov-Bakargiev has said, Arte Povera plays upon our physically real presence, urging a closer look, and ultimately experience, of the here and now.
The Bourse exhibit offers this on many occasions, though it takes a good amount of time to absorb fully, and an open mind. There are moments, like under the museum’s vast, central dome, when the artworks can feel like banal, scattered objects with little relation to each other. They do better, taking on a life of their own, in the galleries winding through the building, which are dedicated to a single artist’s vision and world.
One example is the must-see, large, downstairs space featuring Zorio’s practice. Behind a glass window, hangs his glowing-red, thin wire line stretched across the rounded, dark auditorium. In the center, small letters spell out the word “confine.” Made of a chrome-nickel wire that is charged with an electrical current, it is a thing of poetry, both delicate and dangerous. It would immediately burn through flesh if touched. Little explanation is needed here.
Marisa Merz, No Title , 1979, wood, copper, 25 × 40 × 30 cm. Collection du Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, (Rivoli-Turin). Photo : Paolo Pellion. © Adagp, Paris, 2024.
A Surge in Interest
While the current Paris show’s blockbuster appeal marks a major step in wider recognition, Celant’s recent passing, as well as that of artist Giovanni Anselmo, are among the factors that have contributed to an uptick in attention on the group.
The list of institutional shows on the subject feels nearly endless. A traveling exhibition about Anselmo is currently on view at MAXXI, Rome, having debuted at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in February. A rare retrospective of works by Pino Pascali recently closed at the Fondazione Prada, Milan curated by Mark Godfrey. The Guggenheim Museum in New York puts Arte Povera works at the center of its show, “By Way of: Material and Motion in the Guggenheim Collection,” on view until January 12, 2025.
Arte Povera artists were responding to postwar Italy, and the ensuing, hyper-rapid rise of industrialization and consumerism that butted against Italy’s still largely rural communities. Its stars, Giovanni Anselmo, Jannis Kounellis, Mario and Marisa Merz, Pino Pascali, Giuseppe Penone, and Michelangelo Pistoletto, to name a few, were too free-spirited to adhere to a formal manifesto, and some scholars refuse to call them a single “movement.” They were interested in juxtaposing ephemeral, natural, and organic materials with industrial and found ones and, later, they were reacting to the dominant Minimalism of the 1970s and ’80s.
Michelangelo Pistoletto, Venere degli stracci, 1967, reproduction de Vénus en ciment recouvert de mica et de chiffons, 150 × 280 × 100 cm (installation). Courtesy du Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea (Rivoli-Turin). Prêt de la Fondazione per l’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea CRT. Photo : Paolo Pellion.
All told, the movement was brief—its heyday, strictly speaking, is considered to have spanned 1967 through 1972. That is one reason there are but a few existing Arte Povera “master works” on the market, or readily available for viewing, explains Mariolina Bassetti, Global Chairman of Post-War and Contemporary Art at Christie’s in an interview. Still, she notes market interest has grown for the category, with a 2001 auction of about 17 Arte Povera lots selling for a total of about $5 million, versus about $32 million total in 2017 for 30 lots.
New Views on the Movement
Now historians are delving further into the role of women in postwar Italian art, both broadly and in direct relation to Arte Povera. To this day, only one woman, the stellar Marisa Merz (1926-2019), is considered a full-fledged Arte Povera artist, according to criteria such as having no fixed frame formally containing the work within its boundaries and working within the concept of an installation. Yet even Merz, in a too familiar trope, was belatedly recognized internationally, thanks to a groundbreaking 2017 retrospective at the Hammer Museum in L.A. and the Met in N.Y.
Teresa Kittler, a lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Art at University of York, and Sharon Hecker, an art historian and curator specializing in modern and contemporary Italian art, co-edited an upcoming anthology on the roles of female partners, critics, assistants, collaborators, and others in Arte Povera circles and beyond, titled “Art and Intimacy in Modern Italy.”
Portrait of Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev. Courtesy of the Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli-Turin. Photo: Sebastiano Pellion.
Hecker explained Celant has been criticized for depicting a reductively unified vision of Arte Povera, which also marginalized its political dimension. He also over-emphasized the use of “poor” materials, she noted, when some artists from the group employed more noble mediums. Luciano Fabro, for one, had an affinity for precious marble and Murano glass.
She said in an interview that Arte Povera’s male-dominant narrative has turned some of her students away from focusing on the movement. But both Kittler and Hecker are optimistic. “A generation of scholars have done a lot to transform the landscape of postwar Italian arts beyond Arte Povera, which affects how Arte Povera is read, because it puts it in dialog with other things that are going on at the same time, and other artists, making it feel richer and more expansive,” Kittler said. This research has also opened a vast, unchartered area of unrecognized women as well as male artists doing work in postwar Italy, who didn’t quite fit the Arte Povera label. “If you start to scratch the surface,” she added, and “even within Arte Povera, there are figures that come out of the shadows.”
Mario Merz, Igloo Objet cache-toi, 1977, aluminum, C-clamp, grillage, glass, neon and transformer, 185 × 365 cm. Pinault Collection. Photo : Christie’s images LTD. © Adagp, Paris, 2024.
Art in Space
Ideas put forward by Arte Povera thinkers may be striking a particularly resonant chord in today’s digitized world. The movement that was always skeptical of over-theorizing, is focused on confronting the viewer directly with forces of nature, and everyday, simple, crafted materials, so that one can grasp, almost without thinking, the thing in front of them for what it is. It “helps you connect to your body in space, and your physical transformations. To become aware that we live, for example, on a globe that spins, and has gravity,” said Christov-Bakargiev. It can connect the dots in an endless processing of what is real, and what it means to experience something—life—in the flesh.
Pier Paolo Calzolari, Il mio letto così come deve essere (My bed as it should be), 1968, copper, brass, foam, banana leaves, bronze letters, 35 × 175 × 150 cm. Collection Fondo Calzolari. Courtesy of White Cube Gallery (London). Photo: Ben Westoby. © Adagp, Paris, 2024.
Arte Povera artists were groundbreaking on many levels, and invented installation art, according to Christov-Bakargiev, who differentiates this from more closed “environments.” “We are now in a world grappling with this question of tactility and experience. There’s a craving for audiences to see something that feels physical, not just a real work of art, but a work of art that engages your body,” wrote Naomi Beckwith in a recent piece on Artnet. Plus, “there is no way now to show some of the amazing innovations of someone like David Hammons or Mark Bradford without going back to the Arte Povera movement,” she added.
They wanted to break the “nature/culture divide,” noted Christov-Bakargiev in the 2017 Marisa Merz exhibit catalog. Sculptures occupied rooms that changed with them, making the entire thing unfinished, open-ended. “Primary energy and lived experience were important to them. Gravity and electricity—as well as memory, affect, and vital impulses—were put on a par. They did not believe in linear art history, but rather in a spiraling, fluid, subjective sense of overlapping time, both ancient and contemporary.”
These are all ideas that audiences, chained to their smart devices, may find particularly heartening now. More

While wheat fields are a common sight in Montana, this past year a new type of wheat field took root in the city of Bozeman, one that was agricultural—and also an artwork. Though not wholly dissimilar from a standard crop, the stretches of Bobcat (a variety of hard red winter wheat) were part of a new work by conceptual artist Agnes Denes, Wheatfield – An Inspiration (2024).
Presented by Tinworks, a new non-profit art space in Bozeman with a mission centered on bridging the gap between the American West and contemporary art, Wheatfield – An Inspiration reimagines Denes’ most well-known work, Wheatfield – A Confrontation (1982), which saw her plant a two-acre wheat field on Manhattan’s southernmost point. Here, positioned on some of the world’s most prime real estate, the work invited reflection on societal systems of value, priorities, and human needs. Just over 40 years later, Denes continues these lines of inquiry.
Agnes Denes, Wheatfield – An Inspiration. The seed is in the ground (2024). Photo: Blair Speed / Speed Creative. Courtesy of Tinworks, Bozeman, Montana.
The iteration at Tinworks follows another recent reprisal of the original 1982 installation, Honouring Wheatfield – A Confrontation (2024), this time staged in Basel, Switzerland, outside of the Art Basel fair in the city’s Messeplatz. Unlike the present and historic versions, however, in Basel the wheat was planted in moveable Euro pallets, an experiment in avant-garde crop growing (or, as Denes thought of it, “vertical fields”) that may become necessary in the future.
Back in Bozeman, the exhibition of Wheatfield – An Inspiration debuted on June 15, 2024, but the project began in October 2023. For those unfamiliar with the propagation of wheat (as was I at the time of this writing), it typically needs a “dormancy period.” In line with the growth cycle of this specific varietal (which  Denes chose for its close association with the region), the wheat was first seeded in the fall of last year, after which it went through winter dormancy before flourishing this spring and summer.
Agnes Denes, Wheatfield – An Inspiration. The seed is in the ground (2024). Photo: Blair Speed / Speed Creative. Courtesy of Tinworks, Bozeman, Montana.
“Spending time in the Wheatfield was unforgettable. Wheat fields are a common sight in Montana, but few people, aside from farmers, get the chance to experience them up close, to actually wander through such a powerful and iconic presence,” said Tinwork’s inaugural director Jenny Moore.
Coinciding with this period of dormancy, Denes released Questionnaire, a series of questions about issues and concerns around the future of humanity, including A.I., and global warming. Denes welcomed anyone to respond. Harkening back to Wheatfield – A Confrontation, the Questionnaire was first deployed in 1982 and featured thematically similar questions, which have since evolved to reflect our present-day anxieties and hopes.
Packets of wheat seeds offered to the community as part of Agnes Denes, Wheatfield – An Inspiration. The seed is in the ground (2024). Photo: Blair Speed / Speed Creative. Courtesy of Tinworks, Bozeman, Montana.
Coinciding with the first planting, as part of the project, the local community was invited to participate and expand the reach of Wheatfield – An Inspiration by planting provided wheat seeds wherever there was fallow land in the city. Wheat has long played a significant role within the economy of Montana, and though pervasive, planting wheat in otherwise unexpected spaces all over Bozeman made this fact manifest while drawing attention to otherwise abstract ideas around ecology, urban development, and landscape ideals.
Locality and community have remained intrinsic elements to the project’s success, from initial planting to reaping to processing to, ultimately, eating.
“For Agnes, community involvement was vital to this new iteration of Wheatfield,” said Moore. “It began with the selection of Bobcat winter wheat, developed by a neighbor of Tinworks who is a wheat breeder and retired research associate at Montana State University. A local first-generation conservation farmer planted the field. The wheat seeds we distributed to the public to plant in solidarity with the project were donated by a local food and farming organization. Numerous volunteers, visitors, students, and neighbors tended, weeded, and harvested the crop.”
Agnes Denes, Wheatfield – An Inspiration. The seed is in the ground (2024). Photo: Blair Speed / Speed Creative. Courtesy of Tinworks, Bozeman, Montana.
The “public harvest celebration” of Wheatfield – An Inspiration occurred on September 8, a day-long event replete with traditional hand-harvesting demonstrations led by Montana State University Plant Sciences Department students, as well as the various steps associated with processing wheat at a small scale. Following harvest, the wheat was milled, and this month local bakery Wild Crumb is tasked with taking the flour and baking it into bread, which will both be sold as well as distributed to the community in partnership with Gallatin Valley Food Bank.
“Tinworks’ Wheatfield has come full circle in the most beautiful way. It is a living artwork, an inspired place, a community space, and now a food source,” said Moore.
Agnes Denes, Wheatfield – An Inspiration. The seed is in the ground (2024). Photo: Blair Speed / Speed Creative. Courtesy of Tinworks, Bozeman, Montana.
Wheat is one of the oldest cultivated crops, with a history stretching roughly 10 millennia and serving humanity as a source of sustenance and a potent symbol of growth, transformation, and prosperity. Its near universal presence across human history is perhaps the key to understanding how Denes’ recurring deployment of planted wheat in her practice continues to hold profound cultural and societal relevance, even more than four decades after Wheatfield – A Confrontation was grown in New York. The newest evolution of Denes crops in Bozeman, Wheatfield – An Inspiration, continues this legacy and emphasizes the project’s adaptability, continuing an inquiry into the core of our humanity, from mere survival to the highest hopes for the future. More

What do a tin of sardines, an overflowing box of black combs, and a pair of McDonald’s-branded jeans and matching baseball cap have in common? They’re all things people have stolen from work that are going on view in “The Show of Stolen Goods,” a pop-up gallery show coming to New York City in a roving U-Haul truck.
It’s the second edition of the tongue-in-cheek exhibition, which performance artist and sculptor Victoria Gill first staged in January at Filet, an experimental art space in London. This time around, she’s teamed up with curator Jack Chase and James Sundquist, the founder and director—and now getaway driver— of Uhaul Gallery, which has staged four other mobile gallery shows across the city since launching in May.
“Stealing feels like something that is really human nature,” Chase told me.
”I think we have an innate compulsion to collect things. And it happens subconsciously.”
And stealing from work might just be the most universal kind of theft. It doesn’t feel as subversive as stealing from a business as another individual. It is often bound up in resentment of one’s employer—if it isn’t out of absolute necessity. If you’re artist struggling to make ends meet by working as a restaurant server, for instance, why wouldn’t you furnish your silverware drawer with utensils from your day job? (There’s a trio of pilfered forks in the show.)
Black Combs, Has Your Employee Been Stealing From Work? (2024). Lifetouch, Philadelphia (2010) Kat Thek. Photo courtesy of Uhaul Gallery.
Presenting the project in a U-Haul truck moonlighting as a gallery appealed in part because of the low price point, with rentals at as low as $19.99 a day, plus mileage. And then there’s that old saying, about stolen goods that “fell off the back of a truck” (or, as Gill put it, a lorry).
Sundquist, who is also an artist, was inspired to start the mobile gallery when he was moving out of an expensive studio space, and was surprised to see how good his paintings looked in the back of the moving truck.
“I was like, ‘Huh, this is like a little gallery space,’” he told me. “And then honestly, I was at an opening in the Henry Pike Street area. I realized the literal square footage of those spaces is not really much bigger than a U-haul.”
The objects in Uhaul Gallery’s “Show of Stolen Goods.” Photo courtesy of Uhaul Gallery.
Uhaul Gallery launched its first show in early May—during Frieze Week, which Sundquist realized only when dealers from the Independent Art Fair suggested he set up shop outside for the rest of the weekend. The most recent show, during the Armory Show, he parked outside the Javits Center. Uhaul Gallery has also posted up in Soho and outside Gagosian in Chelsea.
“It’s taking this really cheap square footage into much more prestigious real estate we could never afford even if we were doing a pop-up,” Sundquist said.
The gallery does have a budget for parking tickets—but so far, it has gotten lucky.
Uhaul Gallery at the Javits Center during the Armory Show. Photo by Norman Godinez.
“I think there’s a U-Haul effect where the traffic cops don’t even see it.
They just think somebody’s moving. They’ll ticket the car in front, behind me, but they’ll just walk right by,” Sundquist said. He said the one time a police officer did stop, he was able to talk himself out of the ticket: “We showed him the show and he was just bamboozled.
He said ‘This is crazy—I’m gonna give you guys a pass.’”
U-Haul hasn’t caught wind of the project yet, but the company did threaten legal action against a Brooklyn gallery of the same name in 2019.
“If and when U-Haul comes after us, it will become part of the story and an opportunity to use our creativity to reinvent ourselves,” Sundquist said. “The whole project is about seeing what we can get away with.”
Jack Chase, James Sundquist, and Victoria Gill at U-Haul of Chelsea. Photo by Trevor Munch.
Outfitting a U-Haul to show art is surprisingly easy. Sundquist installs white gallery walls along the protective wooden railing that lines the truck’s interior, and runs the lights off the power outlet/cigarette lighter in the dash. Atop the truck, he affixes a hand-stenciled plywood sign with the gallery’s U-Haul themed logo that spins on an inverted disco ball motor.
Submissions for the “Stolen Goods” exhibition came via an open call on Instagram, as well as a few repeat objects from the London show. Anyone who contributed was allowed to remain anonymous, provided they give the name of their employer and the year of the theft.
Original Pink Panther Animation Cel, Why Can’t Humans Behave More Like Animals? (2024) Framestore, London U.K. 2018. Anonymous. Photo courtesy of Uhaul Gallery.
None of the stolen objects are for sale, but Chase has published an exhibition catalogue, priced at $28 in a run of 300. There will also be t-shirts available featuring the Uhaul Gallery logo and the phrase “steal from work” on the reverse. (Previous exhibitions have had prices ranging from $5 for zines up to $7,000 for large paintings.)
Each stolen object has a title. Some of the names allude to the circumstances surrounding the theft. The sardine tin, from trendy Dimes Square restaurant Cervo’s, was stolen by a staffer who often took whole roast chickens home after a shift—hence the name Couldn’t Include the Chicken.
Chase’s contribution, the Boards of Canada record Music Has the Right to Children (1998), stolen earlier this year his last day working at Eavesdrop bar in Brooklyn, has been christened I Was The Only One Who Would Play This Record Anyway.
music has the right to children. I Was The Only One Who Would Play This Record Anyway (2024). Eavesdrop, Brooklyn NY. 2024. Jack Chase. Photo courtesy Uhaul Gallery.
“I don’t think there was anything more [to the theft] than the fact that I have a record player at home and I wanted to keep listening to it,” he said.
Some of the loot seems as though they would be fairly valuable, like Dior heels from the designer’s New York store, an original Pink Panther animation cel from Framestore in London, or a deflated silver Andy Warhol balloon from the Pop artist’s 2022 retrospective at the Tate Modern. With others, like the combs, it’s hard to imagine the motivations for the thefts.
“There are daily objects that are useful and that you could slip in your bag easily.
But then also there’s a theme of taking something a little bit scandalous and a little bit silly, almost like as a token,” Gill said. “I don’t know if it’s element of ‘This will be a good talking piece from the dead-end job that I’m doing at the moment.’”
Silver Balloon, Andy’s Balloon (2022), Tate Modern, London. Anonymous. Photo courtesy of Uhaul Gallery.
She got the idea for the project while working at a high-end fashion magazine in London. Gill already felt conspicuously out of place with her northern accent—a distinct class marker in the U.K. Then she unthinkingly grabbed a tube of lotion from the office bathroom to help out a friend she was meeting after work.
“The next time I was in the office, there was a sticker that was put up on the mirror. ‘This is communal.
Please do not take.’ It just it really stuck with me because I was the only new hire, I was northern and already stuck out like a sore thumb,” she recalled. “I took something from the communal basket, and now there was this sticker in the toilets and everyone would know it was me.”
Apples False Fruit (2023) New York Studio School, New York. Anonymous. Photo courtesy of Uhaul Gallery.
It only took a few weeks for her to collect the objects for the first edition of “Stolen Goods.” Though Gill envisioned the project as a conceptual art piece, it blurs the boundaries of a traditional group show, the stolen goods becoming readymade art objects.
“I see the whole piece as a sculptural piece,” Gill said.
Heels J’adore (2024) Dior, New York. Anonymous. Photo courtesy of Uhaul Gallery.
She hopes the project has a bit of moral ambiguity to it, a provocative yet cheeky way to get viewers to think about what they may have stolen from work over the years.
“When I tell people about the show, the reaction I usually get is a story of something they’ve stolen from work,” Gill added.
”And it’s kind of like a joyous, ‘Oh, my God, yes, I stole this.’ It’s almost like feeling seen.”
“The Show of Stolen Goods” will be on view at Uhaul Gallery, a U-Haul truck parked at Hauser & Wirth, 542 West 22nd Street, October 10; on Broadway, somewhere between Walker and Leonard, October 11; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, October 12:, and on Bedford Avenue, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, October 13, 2024. More