Exhibitions

David Hockney. Keith Haring. Larry Rivers. Jennifer Bartlett. These are just a few of the artists who experimented in the 1980s with the Quantel Paintbox, a forerunner to Photoshop.
Decades later, graffiti artist and photographer Adrian Wilson, himself an early Paintbox user, has tracked down the artists’ long-lost pieces made using the obscure computer graphics machine.
Now, Print reports, Wilson is showing a selection of 20 Paintbox artworks to the public for the very first time in “How Quantel’s Paintbox Changed Our World,” an exhibition from the Computer Arts Society at the Phoenix Cinema and Arts Centre, Leicester, U.K.
“At $250,000 to buy, or a minimum of $500 an hour to rent, Paintboxes were the Rolls-Royce of computer graphics, and hard to get access to,” Wilson told Artnet News. But when artists did get their hands on them, the results were extraordinary. “It was this amazing new thing that was revolutionary and exciting, and launched loads of careers, mine included.”
David Hockney, Ceila Birtwell (1984). ©David Hockney. Courtesy of the Adrian Wilson Paintbox Archive.
The Paintbox became a footnote in history after Quantel lost its patent infringement case against Adobe, and Photoshop became the industry standard. Though largely forgotten today, the Paintbox helped pioneer digital art and animation. More than just a computer program, the Paintbox was a standalone machine, with a drawing surface and stylus pen coupled with a user-friendly interface designed to make artists forget they were using a computer to make art.
It was hugely influential in broadcast television. ABC bought nine Paintboxes ahead of the 1984 Summer Olympics. The first adopter was the Weather Channel, which upgraded from physical stickers representing sunshine and storms to weather maps with broadcast quality graphics. Paintbox was also integral to defining MTV’s visual look, and was used for music videos like Boy George’s “You Are My Heroin,” directed by graphic designer Kiki Picasso.

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And then there were the artists, who Quantel wooed from the start.
“They knew that as their end user, artists were crucial to their success,” Wilson said. “Quantel gave away literally millions of dollars worth of these things, because they wanted to encourage artists to use the Paintbox. And one arrived at my art college.”
That was in 1986 at the U.K.’s Blackpool School of Art, and it changed his life. Wilson believes he was the first photographer to digitally manipulate images.
Ian T. Tilton took this photograph of Adrian Wilson with his work on a Quantel Paintbox workstation in 1987. Photo courtesy of the Adrian Wilson Paintbox Archive.
“You didn’t have to go in the dark room and cut out bits of paper or do it manually. You could have an idea and the Paintbox enabled that idea to become a reality,” he said. Though other photography students were deterred by the Paintbox’s low resolution, Wilson saw endless possibilities in the machine—and he wasn’t the only one.
In 1989, eight months before his death, Haring flew to Italy just to use the Paintbox after someone offered him access to the machine for three days.
“This Paintbox I was using in Rome could mix colors just like a palette, as well as pick up colors from the photos and duplicate them. It was just like mixing paint, except no mess. It’s only electrons and light,” Haring wrote in his journal at the time, marveling over how well his personal style adapted to this new medium. “It has totally revolutionized the notion of art and the image—why hasn’t anyone noticed?”
Richard Hamilton, Just What Makes Today’s Home So Different (1992). ©The Estate of Richard Hamilton. Courtesy of the Adrian Wilson Paintbox Archive.
Quantel invited six artists to try out the Paintbox for the BBC2 series Painting With Light in the mid ’80s. Richard Hamilton and Sidney Nolan were so impressed that they went on to buy their own personal Paintboxes.
Hockney spent eight hours working on the Paintbox at the Quantel headquarters with the BBC. He made what he called his “first colored glass drawings,” sparking a decades-long engagement in digital art that continues to this day with his iPad drawings and animated projected art show, on view through June 4 in London.
The new Quantel exhibition includes a Hockney portrait of British textile designer Celia Birtwell, one of the artist’s recurring muses. The image never made it into the BBC broadcast. Wilson got his hands on it when someone came to him with a box of slides and other Quantel ephemera that had been saved from the trash.

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In February, the company that bought the Quantel brand, Black Dragon, shuttered the Newbury factory where the Paintbox was once produced.
“A lot of things were just thrown out,” Wilson said. “But this person kept them for maybe 20 years. They came to me and said, ‘Hey, I’ve got these boxes of slides that say Quantel.’ They didn’t even have a clue what they were.”
Quickly, Wilson realized the slides had been made during the production of Painting With Light using a film recorder, an old graphical output device that could transfer digital images to photographic film. When he went to Hockney and the other artists and their estates, even they didn’t have copies for their own archives.
For decades, even Wilson had forgotten his formative years on the Paintbox. But in 2021, as the world went crazy for NFTs, a friend mentioned that the latest developments in digital art had generated some interest in the origins of the medium. Wilson, who lives in New Jersey, remembered that all his Quantel work was packed away, with boxes of Kodachrome slides and Cibachrome prints stored at his mom’s house in the U.K.
Part of the Quantel Paintbox interface. Screenshot by Adrian Wilson.
Since then, the Paintbox has become a renewed passion for Wilson, who said the current exhibition represents only a fraction of what he’s tracked down, extracting old image floppy discs and rescuing files from obscurity. (Artists not featured in the show who also used the Paintbox include Nam June Paik and Andreas Gursky, who is known to have continued using it until at least 2008.)
“Everyone involved just loved Quantel and the Paintbox, so that’s why they’ve given me so much stuff,” WIlson said. “All those foundations and artists have given their approval.”
Rediscovering the Paintbox has also inspired him to co-produce a documentary film about the pioneering technology that gave birth to digital art. Wilson’s old friend Trudy Bellinger, who commissioned many Paintbox music videos during her time as creative director at EMI Records, is directing.

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The film will offer a history of the rise and fall of the Paintbox, from its quiet dominance on the airwaves to its ultimate defeat at the hands of Adobe. There is historic footage of Queen Elizabeth II watching an artist create her portrait on a Paintbox, and interviews with Quantel developers.
“We’ve got all this footage of artists using it for the first time and being completely bowled over,” Bellinger told Artnet News.
Adrian Wilson’s working Quantel Paintbox at his New Jersey studio. Photo by Adrian Wilson.
Wilson even tracked down a second-generation version of the machine on eBay for $1,500. Wilson enlisted Mark Nias, a vintage computer expert in the U.K., to restore it to working order, so he can use it to create all the graphics for the film.
In the meantime, Wilson has an open invitation to any Paintbox veterans to come try it out—and he’d also love to get a contemporary NFT artist to mint new work made using the more than 40-year-old technology.
“Beeple on this would be so amazing,” he said. “Following in the footsteps of Haring and Hockney’s first digital art!”
“How Quantel’s Paintbox Changed Our World” is on view from the Computer Arts Society at Phoenix Cinema and Arts Centre, 4 Midland Street, Leicester, U.K., May 9–June 30, 2023. It will travel to the British Computer Society Moorgate, 25 Copthall Avenue, London. 
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On Friday, May 12, curators, art collectors, and politicians gathered at sunset at Pompeii’s Archaeological Park’s small amphitheater, the Piccolo Teatro Odeion, for the premiere of the first work of contemporary art to have been created in situ and presented on location: Wael Shawky’s new film I Am Hymns of the New Temples.
The event launched the historic site near Naples as a magnificent new spot for contemporary art. The ancient city of Pompeii, buried under volcanic ash in 79 AD in the violent eruption of Mount Vesuvius and rediscovered in 1748, is known as a popular tourist magnet of an archeological site. Now, it’s also the latest addition to Italy’s growing landscape of cultural heritage institutions commissioning and exhibiting contemporary art.
Launched in late 2020, Pompeii Commitment is a one-of-a-kind program established by the Archaeological Park of Pompeii and the Italian Ministry of Culture that commits, as its name suggests, to presenting new ways of contextualizing the ruins of Pompeii, a UNESCO World Heritage Site with 2.5 million visitors annually. The program acknowledges the site as a rich source of inspiration and material for contemporary artistic endeavors that has remained largely untapped.
Andrea Viliani, creator and co-curator of “Pompeii Commitment: Archaeological Matters”, at the Archaeological Park of Pompeii. Photographer: Amedeo Benestante. Courtesy Pompeii Commitment
The initiator and co-curator of Pompeii Commitment is the visionary Andrea Viliani, who is also in charge of steering Rome’s newly reopened Museum of Civilizations away from its problematic colonial legacy and towards a radical and progressive engagement with its collection. Viliani previously headed Naples’ Madre museum, the contemporary art museum of the southern Italian region of Campania, where Pompeii is located, and had already started laying the foundations for the Pompeii initiative during his tenure there.
Active since its inception in 2020, the contemporary art program Pompeii Commitment has so far introduced several digital contributions by artists including Anri Sala, Alison Katz, Rose Salane, and Miao Ling, with upcoming digital fellowships and productions by Legacy Russell, Formafantasma, and Sissel Tolaas in the pipeline.
“You’re about to see a masterpiece,” gallerist Lia Rumma told me earlier that afternoon during a small gathering at her art-filled Naples residence with views of the islands of Capri and Ischia. The veteran dealer has been working with the Egyptian artist Wael Shawky since 2018, and supported the production in Pompeii.
Still of I Am Hymns of the New Temples by Wael Shawky. Photo: Hili Perlson
Sébastien Delot, the director and curator of the LaM museum in Lille, France, also chimed in to tell me that he wasn’t going to pass on the opportunity to be involved with Shawky’s new production: “As soon as I heard is was happening, I raised additional funds.” The approximately one-hour long film I Am Hymns of the New Temples will be on view at Lille’s contemporary art museum later this year. Carlolyn Christov-Bakargiev, the director of Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea and Fondazione Francesco Federico Cerruti in Turin, arrived at the luncheon with a literal bang, as a gust of wind suddenly rose from the Tyrrhenian Sea and blew the front door shut, shattering its milk glass panels just as she walked in.
Christov-Bakargiev is largely to be credited as the curator who brought Shawky’s ambitious practice to a wider audience when she included the first of his three-part epic Cabaret Crusades in Documenta 13, which she curated in 2012 in Kassel and Kabul. There, and in the ensuing two chapters, Shawky presented events and traditions connected to Egypt and the Middle East while questioning unresolvable contrasts of narratives—for example, in looking at the Crusades from an Arab historiographic perspective and using marionettes to portray historical characters.
Still of I Am Hymns of the New Temples by Wael Shawky. Photo: Hili Perlson
The new work I am Hymns of the New Temples continues his research into Greek and Roman mythology and how it corresponds to and overlaps with ancient Egyptian cults and traditions. After all, not only temples dedicated to Greek and Roman gods were excavated in Pompeii; the Temple of Isis, dedicated to the Egyptian goddess, with all its stuccoes, states, and frescoes, was discovered there in the 17th century.
As the sun slowly set behind the ruins, and guests including collector Nicoletta Fiorucci, artist Adrian Paci and his wife Melissa, and politicians such as Massimo Osanna, director-general of all public museums run by Italy’s ministry of culture, took their seats in the ancient stone theater, Viliani and Christov-Bakargiev invited Shawky to talk about the film until the night grew dark enough to start the screening.
“I wanted to take out the acting,” Shawky said when asked about his use of puppets in earlier works and elaborate masks in this new production. Here, Shawky uses real-life actors, but all wear ceramic masks designed by the artist and made by the ceramist Pierre Architta and the workshops at the San Carlo Theatre and the Fine Arts Academy in Naples. To complete the characters’ lavish, fantastical appearance, Shawky thought up costumes made of ancient San Leucio silks and other fabrics made by historical Italian textiles manufacturers.
Still of I Am Hymns of the New Temples by Wael Shawky. Photo: Hili Perlson
The film, which turns into a musical at times, is narrated entirely in Arabic, and takes the viewers through an abbreviated whirl-wind fable about gods, titans, giant cyclopes, demigods, and men. The colorful, almost psychedelic scenes filled with magical figures and animals were shot on-site in the small Odeon, the Praedia of Giulia Felice, the House of the Orchard, the Necropolis of Nocera Gate and the Basilica, the Temple of the Genius Augusti, and the Temple of Isis. There’s a hippopotamus and a crocodile as well, in reference to the murals of the Nile found in Pompeii that feature the semiaquatic animals. It’s a creation story that ends, much like the site that inspired it, with a natural catastrophe.
“I question history, myths, and stories as a human creation,” Shawky told me after the screening. “My films always try to put everything on top of each other and deal with it, not in a cynical way, but in a very serious, precise degree. Not to the effect that you will really believe the stories, but you will believe and question them at the same time.”
One of the many myths he attempts to unpack with this work is the common understanding of Pompeii in the Arab world as a type of Sodom and Gamora that was destroyed as punishment, and rediscovered as a warning to us all. “For most of the Muslim or the Arab world, they consider Pompeii as the example of the city of sins,” he added. “This is not part of the Islamic mentality, but it’s part of the Quran that there were many other cultures which fell into sin and corruption and were destroyed by God. That’s one of the stories I want to question here.”

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Vincent van Gogh’s most famous painting, The Starry Night, has made a rare journey outside the hallowed halls of New York’s Museum of Modern Art—but only a mile and a half uptown to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which is staging a groundbreaking exhibition focusing on the artist’s depictions of cypress trees.
“From this show, you’ll get a sense of the importance of the close, considered study of nature as the backbone to Van Gogh’s art, and of the rich dialectic between observation and reflection that anchored his world,” exhibition curator Susan Alyson Stein told Artnet News.
The trees, long associated with death and mourning, became a fascination of Van Gogh’s after he moved from Paris to the Arles countryside, in the South of France, in 1888—sparking both an artistic breakthrough and the mental breakdown that cost him his life in 1890, just a few months after his final cypress picture.
“The cypresses still preoccupy me,” Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo in 1889, from the asylum in Saint-Rémy where he had checked in after cutting off his ear. “I’d like to do something with them like the canvases of the sunflowers because it astonishes me that no one has done them as I see them.”
Vincent van Gogh, The Starry Night (1889). Photo ©Museum of Modern Art, New York, licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, New York.
The Starry Night, of course, is most identified with its dramatic skies: Van Gogh’s bold brushstrokes animating the swirling clouds and sparkling stars into a bold vision of the cosmos.
But dominating the lefthand side of the frame is a towering cypress tree, a signature motif of the artist’s that is the subject of a dedicated show for the first time.
The Met has reunited Van Gogh’s beloved nocturne—on loan for the first time since 2009, when it went to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam—with its corresponding daytime scenes of A Wheatfield, With Cypresses, which feature equally animated blue-and-white clouds blowing past the windswept grasses and foliage.
Vincent van Gogh, A Wheatfield, With Cypresses (1889). Photo ©the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
The two versions of the painting, one from the Met’s collection and the other from the National Gallery in London, are being shown together—and with the Starry Night—for the first time since 1901.
The final work in the show is another nighttime scene, the artist’s final rendering of a moonlit landscape and cypress beneath the haloed stars of what could be the Milky Way. Titled Country Road in Provence by Night, it is paired with A Walk at Twilight; both are from May 1890 and feature a couple walking through the foreground.
Some works are quite cypress forward; in others, the trees are background elements, playing second fiddle to flowering peach trees or verdant fields. Throughout, Van Gogh’s confident mark making and bold use of color captivate.
Vincent van Gogh, Country Road in Provence by Night (1890). Collection of the Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, the Netherlands. Photo by Rik Klein Gotink.
Featuring 24 paintings, 15 drawings, and four illustrated letters, “Van Gogh’s Cypresses” includes loans from some 30 institutions and private collections.
“These were all singular works for which their were no substitutes,” Stein said. “So of course, Starry Night was one of the key anchor loans. The National Gallery London’s second version of A Wheatfield, With Cyprusses was another. But the drawings were equally important, because drawings have to rest between venues—they can’t be exposed to light. Those were among the first works that I looked to reserve for the exhibition.”
Vincent van Gogh, A Wheatfield, With Cypresses (1889). Photo ©the National Gallery, London.
Those drawings, as well as the letters, also help dispel something of a myth about the artist: that the speed and ease in which he completed his works meant that they were the product of a sudden fit of inspiration, rather than the result of careful consideration and planning.
“If you read one of Van Gogh’s letters, he’s defending the apparent spontaneity or impetuosity of his works,” Stein said. “He wrote that these pictures may have been painted quickly, but they were calculated long beforehand. And he went on that if people think I paint too quickly, then they’ve looked too quickly.”
See more photos from the exhibition below.
Installation of “Van Gogh’s Cypresses” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo by Richard Lee, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Installation of “Van Gogh’s Cypresses” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo by Richard Lee, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Vincent van Gogh, Landscape with Path and Pollard Willows (1888). Collection of Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation).
Vincent van Gogh, Window in the Studio (1889). Collection of Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation).
Vincent van Gogh, Cypresses (Les Cyprès) 1889. Photo courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum, New York.
Vincent van Gogh, Drawbridge (1888). Collection of the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum & Fondation Corboud, Cologne. Photo by bpk Bildagentur/Wallraf-Richartz-Museum-Fondation Corboud/Rheinisches Bildarchiv Cologne/Art Resource, New York.
Vincent van Gogh, Illustrated Letter to Theo van Gogh (Cypresses), 1889. Collection of the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation).
Vincent van Gogh, Trees in the Garden of the Asylum (1889). Private collection.
Vincent van Gogh, Cypresses (1889). Photo ©the Art Institute of Chicago/Art Resource, New York.
“Van Gogh’s Cypresses” will be on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York, May 22–August 27, 2023. 
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Arts and entertainment juggernaut Meow Wolf has announced the name of its eagerly awaited fourth location, opening in the Grapevine Mills mall near Dallas on July 14. Titled the Real Unreal, the 29,000-square-foot, immersive, interactive exhibition will feature more than 70 installations with work by more than 60 artists, all building on the existing Meow Wolf mythology.
Conceived by Wisconsin sci-fi and fantasy author LaShawn Wanak, the story for the Real Unreal is about a missing boy, a chosen family, and something called the “Hapulusgarrulus Lophoaquaflori.”
To forge relationships with the local artist community, Meow Wolf hired Dallas muralist Will Heron as the artist liaison for Grapevine. The exhibition features 38 participating Texas artists, including Mariell Guzman, Riley Holloway, and video game designer XaLaVier Nelson Jr. Also included are a few Meow Wolf vets, like Emmanuelle John, Lance McGoldrick, and Nico Salazar (Future Fantasy Delight), who have now created artwork for all four locations.
One expected highlight is work by Dan Lam, who was born in Manila and grew up in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Her neon dripping tentacles have won her close to a half-million followers on Instagram, and she’s building her largest-ever piece for Meow Wolf, a 16-by-16-foot installation in her signature rainbow hues.
Meow Wolf collaborative artist Dan Lam in the studio. Photo by Jordan Mathis, courtesy of Meow Wolf.
All the participants faced the challenge not only of incorporating their own work into Meow Wolf’s maximalist, kaleidoscopic display, but tapping into the narrative for the space.
“It’s about finding the right artists who want to tell the stories we’re telling. We give the artists the theme, and let them interpret it their own way,” Kati Murphy, the company’s vice president of communications, told Artnet News. “It’s kind of an exquisite corpse. The stories are threaded through the art.”
Originally founded as an art collective in 2008, Meow Wolf exploded onto the scene with the 2016 opening of the House of Eternal Return in Santa Fe, its first permanent exhibition. Funded in part by Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin, the house wasn’t just a maximalist art environment brimming with Instagram-friendly photo ops—the abandoned family home concealing mysterious portals to other dimensions was the first chapter in a complex sci-fi-infused universe.
Meow Wolf collaborative artist Ricardo Paniagua in the studio. Photo by Jordan Mathis, courtesy of Meow Wolf.
Then came the Las Vegas Omega Mart that opened in February 2021, a grocery store fueled by nefarious technology. That fall, the Denver Convergence Station, a gateway to a parallel universe where four dramatically different worlds converge, followed.
These ambitious expansions were fueled by a massive round of fundraising—$158 million, to be exact—but were not without their growing pains.
The original Santa Fe location unionized, reaching a contract agreement last spring after filing an unfair labor practice suit with the National Labor Relations Board. (The Denver location hopes it is close to finalizing its union contract, according to Murphy.) Plans for additional locations in Phoenix and Washington, D.C., fell victim to the pandemic, which also sparked a massive round of layoffs.
There was also personal tragedy, with the death of Meow Wolf cofounder Matt King in 2022. A posthumous solo show of his paintings, “Matt King: Becoming Light” is set to open at Turner Carroll Santa Fe’s Container in September, and King’s legacy still looms large as Meow Wolf prepares to open its first location without him.
But the company now appears to be on a strong growth trajectory. Ahead of the Grapevine opening, Meow Wolf will break ground on its forthcoming Houston outpost, set to open come 2024 in the Fifth Ward.
Promotional imagery for Meow Wolf the Real Unreal in Grapevine, Texas. Courtesy of Meow Wolf.
And, with each new location, the Meow Wolf mythos deepens. There are already little Easter eggs sprinkled throughout the existing locations that hint at ties between the three.
“That’s something that’s going to continue to build and grow with each exhibition we open, connecting these spaces to each other,” Murphy said.
Although guests are welcome to enjoy the art on a purely visual level, the mystery of Meow Wolf has been key to its success, inspiring diehard fans to closely examine even the tiniest details for clues.
“Our Reddit is insane. They’re like investigative reporters who are dedicated to everything that we do, to the point that they look up our trademark and permit applications,” Murphy said. “It’s really wild how dedicated our fan base is, considering that we just have our physical locations without any preexisting properties or storylines.”
The longterm plan will be to bring the Meow Wolf universe into other mediums that can be experienced without making a pilgrimage to one of the locations. The first step in that journey was announced in March, with the addition of a Meow Wolf-themed golf course in the popular virtual reality game Walkabout Mini Golf.
Tickets to the Real Unreal are now on sale for $50 for general admission.
See more photos from the forthcoming exhibition below.
Detail of Dan Lam’s installation at Meow Wolf the Real Unreal in Grapevine, Texas. Photo by Shayla Blatchford, courtesy of Meow Wolf.
Detail of Tsz Kam’s installation at Meow Wolf’s the Real Unreal in Grapevine, Texas. Photo by Will Heron, courtesy of Meow Wolf.
Detail of Morgan Grasham’s installation at Meow Wolf’s the Real Unreal in Grapevine, Texas. Photo by Will Heron, courtesy of Meow Wolf.
Detail of Meow Wolf’s the Real Unreal in Grapevine, Texas. Photo by Shayla Blatchford, courtesy of Meow Wolf.
Detail of Meow Wolf’s the Real Unreal in Grapevine, Texas. Photo by Shayla Blatchford, courtesy of Meow Wolf.
Detail of Meow Wolf’s the Real Unreal in Grapevine, Texas. Photo by Shayla Blatchford, courtesy of Meow Wolf.
Detail of Meow Wolf’s the Real Unreal in Grapevine, Texas. Photo by Shayla Blatchford, courtesy of Meow Wolf.
Detail of Meow Wolf’s the Real Unreal in Grapevine, Texas. Photo by Shayla Blatchford, courtesy of Meow Wolf.
Detail of Meow Wolf’s the Real Unreal in Grapevine, Texas. Photo by Shayla Blatchford, courtesy of Meow Wolf.
Detail of Meow Wolf’s the Real Unreal in Grapevine, Texas. Photo by Shayla Blatchford, courtesy of Meow Wolf.
Detail of Meow Wolf’s the Real Unreal in Grapevine, Texas. Photo by Shayla Blatchford, courtesy of Meow Wolf.
Meow Wolf the Real Unreal will open at 3000 Grapevine Mills Pkwy Suite 253, Grapevine, Texas, July 14, 2023. 
“Matt King: Becoming Light” will be on view at Turner Carroll Santa Fe’s Container, 1226 Flagman Way, Santa Fe, New Mexico, September 8–November 5, 2023. 
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Connoisseurs have learnt to differentiate “the Elder” Brueghel painters from “the Younger” generation and many have their preferences for the work of family scion Pieter Breugel the Elder. But this fall, art lovers are invited to enjoy all the members of this Old Masters dynasty as they are reunited for a new survey spanning an incredible five generations at the Het Noordbrabants Museum in the Netherlands.
Roughly spanning the years 1550-1700, some 80 paintings will chart how one family of outsize artistic talent managed to keep innovating throughout the Dutch Golden Age. The exhibition will explore intergenerational familial connections and influences while also elaborating on the wider network of cultural activity, from significant artists like David Teniers the Younger who married into the family to the wider historical context of colonialism and global trade.
Jan Brueghel the Elder, Vase of Flowers with Jewel, Coins, and Shells (1606). Photo courtesy of Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, Milan.
Standout masterpieces by Pieter Bruegel the Elder include The Magpie on the Gallows (1568), his The Beggars of the same year which is travelling from the Louvre in Paris and a rare public glimpse of The Drunkard Pushed into the Pigsty (1557) from a private collection in New York.
In other cases, close study of detailed miniatures on an intimate scale will introduce visitors to the tiny worlds built up by Jan Brueghel the Elder and his grandson Jan van Kessel the Elder, who he greatly inspired.
Audiences can also expect to be introduced to some less famous names, including women members of the family like the artist Mayken Verhulst. Mother-in-law to Pieter Brueghel the Elder, she played an active role in the education of her grandsons Pieter Brueghel the Younger and Jan Brueghel the Elder.
Her own practice, too ofter overshadowed by their achievements, included miniature illustrations and watercolours. She was named one of the four most important female artists of the region in Lodovico Guicciardini’s book Description of the Low Countries (1567).
“Brueghel: The Family Reunion” opens at Het Noordbrabants Museum on September 30 until January 7, 2024.
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