Exhibitions

The floors were a little sticky at the Groucho, a private members club in Soho that has attracted a louche cohort of creative and media types since the 1980s, and which has had something of a revival in the art scene since it was acquired last year by the hospitality arm of the Swiss gallerists behind Hauser and Wirth. The launch party for London Gallery Weekend was not quite equivalent to the downtown New York scenes snapped by writer and Warhol collaborator Bob Colacello (on view at Thaddaeus Ropac)—but still, a gaggle of beautiful people enjoyed summer spritzes alongside ascendent painters including Sasha Gordon and Joy Labinjo.
For committed patrons of the arts, London’s nascent gallery weekend poses something of an impossible task. The city’s sprawling geography and the 150-odd participating galleries make it infinitely less manageable than its counterpart in say, Berlin. Between exhibitions, opening parties, and dinners, there is perhaps too much competing for your attention.
Joy Labinjo and Precious Adesina attend the Frieze 91 x London Gallery weekend opening party celebrating London’s Creative Scene at The Groucho Club on June 1, 2023 in London, England. (Photo by Dave Benett/Getty Images for London Gallery Weekend x Frieze)
But London needs this. Galleries here have had a tougher time recovering from the pandemic than in other centers. Those difficulties piled on top of the logistical hurdles and bad vibes accompanying Brexit, and even that was before skyrocketing inflation rates and wider uncertainty began to catch up with the art world. With a market that relies strongly on sales made outside of the country, and competition from Paris stealing a lot of the thunder of late, there is a lot riding on this event. It has to excite buyers at home and from abroad, and to create a mid-year moment in the calendar for the city outside of Frieze Week in October.
So what does London’s art landscape have to offer? Here are some questions that were in the air going into the marathon weekend.
Installation view of “To Bend the Ear of the Outer World: Conversations on contemporary abstract painting” at Gagoian in London, open until August 25, 2023. Photo courtesy of Gagosian.
What even is “contemporary” abstraction?
Ever since the rise of abstract painting in the early 20th century, public attention has at intervals tacked back and forth between a love of abstraction and figuration. As of now, in early-mid-2023, trendy figurative painting is enjoying a healthy moment in the spotlight. Yet a behemoth exhibition of 40 living abstract painters at Gagosian raised the question as to whether we are in the midst of a pendulum swing back in the other direction. “I think both have existed in parallel,” curator Gary Garrels told me at the opening of “To Bend the Ear of the Outer World.”
“There has been a lot of public attention in recent years for figurative work and I’ve felt that there’s just as much good, interesting work being made that’s abstract and so wanted to forefront that,” Garrels added.
The exhibition was stuffed with the stars of contemporary abstraction. Even amid stellar works by Gerhard Richter, Cecily Brown, and Frank Bowling, and fare by younger super-stars including Jadé Fadojutimi, you could discover some standout works by artists who have had less airtime of late. Among these were a canvas by Jacqueline Humphries capturing something of the distracting noise of modern life, and a meditative moment of quiet offered by way of Jennie C. Jones.
Installation view, Jacqueline Humphries at Modern Art. Photo by Michael Brzezinski.
There is certainly an appetite for the materiality of abstract painting as we emerge from the pandemic and start returning to events in person. The medium doesn’t offer up easy narrative threads and so its power demands an IRL viewing to take in the scale, color, texture, surface, and gestures being made. But what are the defining characteristics of abstract painting being made today?
“I think it’s about the strength of individuals, the affirmation of individual identity and imagination,” Garrels said. “There’s no slot, no box that everybody’s trying to fit into. There’s no movement. It’s not Abstract Expressionism, it’s not Pop Art, it’s not Color Field… It’s just about individuals having a strength of their own convictions.”
Jacqueline Humphries is also given solo real estate by Modern Art across both its spaces. Her knowing canvases build on the history of abstract painting and infuse it with digitally native forms and gestures. A series of “pre-vandalized” paintings carry marks that recall Jackson Pollock but also understand the political agency of this kind of mark-making today, specifically invoking actions taken by climate activists desperate to capture media attention by flinging substances at paintings in museums. In the catalogue text for the Gagosian show, Humphries reminds us that abstraction is the notion that “maybe you can augment the ‘real’ effect without the intermediary of represented ‘things.’” Her cogent statements applied onto dizzying, staticky surfaces are still flash-burned to my retinas days later.
Installation view, “Hardcore,” Sadie Coles HQ, London, May 25 2023 – August 5 2023. Credit: © The Artist/s. Courtesy of The Artist/s and Sadie Coles HQ, London. Photo: Katie Morrison / Sadie Coles HQ, London.
Post-Brexit, and post-lockdown, how can we renegotiate our relationships with each other? 
Many of us have continued to feel the knock-on effects of being physically isolated for several years, and events and openings still don’t totally feel “back to normal.” Over the weekend I witnessed many an awkward dance as people tried to read from micro-expressions whether a handshake or—god forbid!—an air kiss were permitted forms of greeting. Add to that the effects of our mass retreat online and the consequent further disintegration of our shared sense of reality, and many people have come out the other side of lockdown having internalized socio-political isolation that began long before the pandemic and have been polarized on either side of the too-woke and anti-woke divide. So I was on the look-out for themes of physical intimacy, conversations about cancel culture, and any desire for nuance.
And boy did I find them at Sadie Coles. A challenging group exhibition titled “Hardcore,” including 18 artists, explored themes of sexuality in and of itself, wholly indifferent to social rules. As Mistress Rebecca, the dominatrix who wrote the curatorial text for the show, put it: “A hardcore rejects niceties because to be hardcore is to never fall into the safe and simple parameters of right or wrong. Today this seems to be an unnecessarily rare, even brave position to take.”  
King Cobra/ Doreen Lynette Garner, In the Feast of the Hogs (2022). ©KING COBRA (documented as Doreen Lynette Garner). Courtesy of The Artist and JTT, New York.Photo: Katie Morrison / Sadie Coles HQ, London.
Different people moving through the show might find their challenging line at different points. For me, Monica Bonvicini’s whip of buckle-down leather belts swinging in gentle circles or Joan Semmel’s 1977 painting For Foot Fetishists felt tame, but things got closer to the bone with Darja Bajagić’s Ex Axes, reclaiming images from “women with weapons” fetish sites, and King Cobra/Doreen Lynette Garner’s butchered carcass complete with a blood-stained blonde weave. Arriving at Miriam Cahn’s 2017 fleischbild/famillienbild (Meat Portrait/ Family Portrait) would elicit a wince from even the most sexually liberated; it depicts a couple having energetic intercourse while a pint-sized, childlike figure in the foreground turns away. Cahn’s work in particular, whose recent exhibition at Palais de Tokyo ignited a firestorm of controversy in France, seems to sit right on a knife’s edge of what can be socially acceptable today.
Miriam Cahn, fleischbild/famillienbild (2017). ©Miriam Cahn. Courtesy of The Artist and Meyer Riegger, Berlin/Karlsruhe.Photo: Katie Morrison / Sadie Coles HQ, London.
More leather is to be found in the Lisa-Marie Harris sculptures and wall-mounted reliefs at Cooke Latham Gallery, which respond to body shaming and sexually objectifying comments the artist has gotten over the years, and comment on the policing and hyper-vigilant monitoring of the female body as a response to sexual violence enacted on women. Elsewhere, at Stephen Friedman, Sasha Gordon’s surreal self-portraits—including images of herself as living topiary and as a cat—explore the alienation of unconventional human bodies and questions of her identity as a queer Asian American woman in a show titled “The Flesh Disappears, But Continues to Ache.”
How are artists responding to the alarming technological disruptions of our age?
The gargantuan leaps forward in the development of A.I. have pushed the tone of the art-tech conversation to a fever pitch; technologists are sounding the alarm about the threat A.I. poses to human existence itself. But even before this recent turn in the discourse, the destabilizing effects of the internet and its flood of information and distracting noise have been giving artists ample material to work with.
At Sadie Coles’s space on Davies Street, Lawrence Lek’s ultra-prescient “Black Cloud Highway 黑云高速公路” unseats the myth of technological progress in an age of artificial intelligence. Lek’s entrancing 11-minute film Black Cloud follows a lone surveillance A.I. in an abandoned city—SimBeijing, a replica of the Chinese capital built by a tech company to road-test self driving cars. It reports accidents until all other A.I.s are banished, leaving it alone in the metropolis. It then engages a self-help therapy program to help it cope. The aura of post-humanity fills the viewer with dread that we are on the precipice of an abyss, a feeling aided by a thumping soundtrack by Lek and Kode9.
Maisie Cousins, Green Head (2023). Photo courtesy of T.J. Boulting.
Continuing on this theme, Maisie Cousins is showing some work made entirely using A.I. at T.J. Boulting as part of the artist’s quest to relive lost childhood memories. Nestled among real family photos are 19 glossy prints of A.I.-generated images based on memories of lost home videos of trips to an amusement park with her late grandfather. These colorful hallucinations recall Martin Parr’s saturated images of British seaside life, if they were on acid.
At Gazelli Art House, Jake Elwes’s exploration of A.I. and machine learning, “Zizi – Queering the Dataset,” disrupts standardized facial recognition technology by feeding it thousands of images of drag performers. And Machine Learning Porn (2016) exposes the warped understanding of human biology by an algorithm trained to remove explicit imagery by tasking it with creating pornographic visuals.
Final thoughts
What these standout shows have in common—the abstract paintings, the intellectual provocations, the tech experimentation—is that they are all grappling with the specific difficulties of contemporary living; the isolating and scary present, the uncertainty about the future, and the inadequacy of the systems, forms, language, rules, and social mores we have available to answer to this existential nausea.
Many of these works have found a way to express this feeling, and also to propose a way through it. They express a desire for nuance, for queering and questioning labels and boxes, and for opening up space for other ways of thinking, being, and seeing that are undefined. Something Garrels said about abstraction at his Gagosian show might be extrapolated to all of these works: “At the end of the day, it’s the individuals there on their own terms, struggling to find meaning and coherence within this vast barrage of information.”
Javier Calleja, Still on Time (2023). Courtesy the artist and Almine Rech.
The hope is that art will return to us some sense of shared understanding about the nature of existence, the perseverance of the human spirit, and how we might sit through this difficult moment in history.
And if it all feels a little overwhelming, London Art Week has you covered too. Those in need of something to take the edge off of all this heady questioning might head over to Almine Rech, where Javier Calleja’s adorable characters offer up something of a palette cleanser.
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Photoville, New York’s annual open-air photography show, returns to the city for its 12th straight edition this weekend. On view through June 18, the free event offers more than 80 exhibitions across all five boroughs. On view will be work from hundreds of photographers—some up-and-comers, others award-winning artists and professionals. 
More than 50 of the exhibitions will take place inside a series of shipping containers—the kind you see stacked like Legos on cargo ships—which will be laid out in Brooklyn Bridge Park for the first time since the 2019 edition of the event. (COVID precautions kept them from being used in the previous three years.) It feels right to have them back; the steel structures have become a symbol of the scrappy event and its aims.  
Which is not to say that they’re perfect. Many are cramped and reverberant; some are dim and dilapidated from years of use. In other words, they look nothing like the sterile white cubes in which we’re used to seeing art photography.    
That’s a good thing. For Photoville’s organizers, accessibility, not institutional polish, has always been the goal. They want to bring as many pictures to the public as possible, and the shipping containers—weather-ready, open 24-7—provide a simple solution.   
“It’s about the stories,” said Laura Roumanos, one of Photoville’s three co-founders, ahead of this year’s event. “We could spend all this money on white walls and beautiful, multimillion-dollar installations or whatever. But that doesn’t matter.” 
“It’s about the photography,” she continued. “It’s about the story. That is what’s important.” 

Roumanos, a veteran event producer, said she had tears in her eyes when the first storage containers were laid back in 2012, for Photoville’s first edition. “It represented so much to us,” she recalled. “We fought so hard to make people realize that it was a really great place to show work.” 
Back then, the show was modest. Roumanos and her fellow founders—Sam Barzilay and Dave Shelley—had, somewhat miraculously, been lent 80,000 square feet in Brooklyn Bridge Park for their nascent event, but the rest required work. So they launched a Kickstarter campaign and secured corporate sponsorships to raise the roughly $250,000 needed to get the festival off the ground. It opened with 20-some shows in a handful of containers.  
But in the 12 years since then, Photoville has consistently grown: more artists, more exhibitions, more containers, more visitors. More boroughs, too: in 2020, the Brooklyn-centric show ballooned to the Bronx, Manhattan, Queens, and Staten Island. (The year before, Photoville’s organizers held an L.A. edition of the event, but the pandemic halted the expansion almost as soon as it started.) 
A shot of the storage containers at Photoville 2018. Photo: Jessica Bal. Courtesy of Photoville.
This month’s show represents just how far Photoville has come. Going on display is a record number of exhibitions featuring the work of a record number of artists. The budget for the event exceeds $500,000, and visitor numbers are expected to top last year’s high mark of 1 million.  
Crucially, the organizers haven’t cut moral corners in the name of growth. Photoville pays its staffers (there are no volunteers) and gives exhibiting artists honorariums. This year, it will finance “65 to 70 percent” of shows, according to Roumanos. The rest will be covered by sponsors—a group that includes the New York Times, the Bronx Documentary Center, and Harlem’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, among many others. 
Stephanie Mei-Ling, Portrait of Ronisha and her sons in embrace,, from her “Overpolicing Parents” series. Courtesy of the artist.
Inclusivity remains a major programming priority, even if the subject matter may alienate some. Many of the projects on view this year tackle big topics: gun control, gender identity, sex work, the environmental crisis.
A series of photographs by artist Stephanie Mei-Ling documents the impact of Child Protective Services investigations on families, while a body of work by Mackenzie Calle explores the historical exclusion of queer astronauts from the American space program. Jen White-Johnson’s “Autistic Joy” aims to give visibility to children of color in neurodiverse communities. “Guns, Love, Children, America” by Mel D. Cole depicts kids at an NRA convention wielding weapons like toys.
“We’re not just showing beautiful sculptures or paintings,” Roumanos said. “These are conversations.”  
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Since the opening of the Rijksmuseum’s Johannes Vermeer exhibition, the Amsterdam museum has been overwhelmed by visitor demand for the once-in-a-lifetime blockbuster. The institution has had to stay open late to accommodate crowds of art lovers from all over the world eager to see 28 masterpieces by the Dutch Golden Age painter—the most ever shown in one place.
While the end result is undoubtedly a success, director Suzanne Raes’s new documentary from Kino Lorber, which premiered at New York’s Quad Cinema ahead of the final days of the exhibition, provides a fascinating behind-the-scenes glimpse of the drama that preceded the show’s historic run.
Close to Vermeer follows Gregor Weber, the Rijksmuseum’s head of fine and decorative arts, as he embarks on his last show before retirement, curating a career-defining exhibition with Pieter Roelofs, the museum’s head of paintings and sculpture.
The filmmakers are there every step of the way, from determining the optimal exhibition crowd control (a semicircular barrier that allows as many as 15 people to stand around each painting at one time), to traveling in person to museums across the U.S. and Europe to court important loans, to making a handful new discoveries about the artist, who remains something of a mystery despite his worldwide fame.
A still from Close to Vermeer. Photo courtesy of Kino Lorber.
Weber’s passion for the show’s subject is immediately apparent, as he recounts seeing his first works by the artist as a schoolboy visiting London. “The moment I saw the Vermeers, I actually fainted,” he said.
That Weber and Roelofs were able to make this exhibition—which sold out in mere days—happen in the first place is nothing short of remarkable. The show was only possible only due to the fact that the Frick Collection in New York, which has three Vermeers, is currently renovating its Fifth Avenue mansion—normally, loans are out of the question.
Reuniting the bulk of the artist’s oeuvre, in his native country was always going to be a moving experience. Vermeer is only known to have made 37 paintings, including The Concert, which has been missing since its 1990 theft from Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.
But the film packs surprising emotional heft when Weber and Roelofs are forced to come to terms with the absence of key works. At various points, the two stand over a desk, arranging and rearranging postcards of all the Vermeer paintings as they might best be displayed in the show.
A still from Close to Vermeer. Photo courtesy of Kino Lorber.
The famed Girl With a Pearl Earring from the Mauritshuis in The Hague, for instance, would look great next to Study of a Young Woman, from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. And sure, Buckingham Palace hasn’t loaned out The Music Lesson in ages, but “this exhibition is so important that I think they’ll miss something if they don’t let their baby travel to the party,” Weber said hopefully.
But Buckingham Palace ultimately decided to stay home. And while the Met was happy to lend a pair of Vermeers, three of the institution’s paintings by the artist were unable to make the trip. Young Woman with a Water Pitcher was deemed too fragile, and the donors of Study of a Young Woman and A Maid Asleep had imposed restrictions on their bequests, prohibiting the works from ever going on loan.
“I feel a kind of sadness,” Roelofs told Met associate curator Adam Eaker during a visit to the museum. “We know that we’ll never be able to bring paintings like this back home.”
Johannes Vermeer, Study of a Young Woman, (ca. 1665–67). Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The film’s villain, however, is undoubtedly Silke Gatenbröcker, the chief curator of paintings at the Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum in Braunschweig, Germany.
After flipping several Vermeer postcards facedown, resigned to the fact they would not be coming to Amsterdam, Weber voices his determination to secure one more loan, of Braunschweig’s The Girl With the Wineglass. Paired with the similar The Wine Glass from the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin, and the Frick’s Girl Interrupted at Her Music, the painting is “pivotal” in showing Vermeer’s artistic development and recurring themes, Weber believes.
“You’re going after this one,” Roelofs said. “Yeah,” Weber replied.
Johannes Vermeer, The Girl With the Wineglass. Collection of the Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum in Braunschweig, Germany
Cut to the empty galleries of the Braunschweig, barely a single visitor in sight.
“A collection like this and there’s no one here,” Weber marveled.
Sadly, that does not mean the German museum will cooperate.
“This coming year we’ve got the theme for the Lower Saxony state finals. All the students sitting their final art exams have to write about this Vermeer,” Gatenbröcker told him.
Weber points out this can’t be more than 500, maybe 1,000 students. Maybe they could all take the bus to Amsterdam to see it there? (The two museums are only a four-and-a-half-hour drive apart.)
Johannes Vermeer, The Glass of Wine (ca. 1659–61). Collection of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin – Gemäldegalerie.
“They will be bussed here,” the curator insisted.
A disappointed Weber accepts that he will have to take a last yearning look at the painting (and possibly jump off the nearest bridge).
The documentary is at its most riveting, however, when it comes to two of the paintings that did actually make the trip to Amsterdam, including Young Woman Seated at a Virginal, from the Leiden Collection.
American billionaire Thomas Kaplan purchased the work, which is the only privately owned Vermeer, from casino owner Steve Wynn with the help of dealer Otto Naumann. (The latter has one the film’s great lines: “Rich people do a great thing. They die.… it’s like a big funnel effect. [Great artworks] all wind up in museums eventually.”)
Johannes Vermeer, Young Woman Seated at a Virginal (ca. 1670–1672). Collection of the Leiden Collection, New York.
“[Steve] said ‘If you want the Rembrandt self portrait, you have to buy the Vermeer at the same time,’” Kaplan, who is known for his Rembrandt holdings, said. “I thought about that. There’s a little expression: ‘You can’t threaten me with a good time.’”
Experts have determined that Kaplan’s painting was cut from same bolt of canvas as Vermeer’s The Lacemaker, which certainly suggests that both are by the artist—although it’s possible that another artist bought the canvas. But Weber is immediately doubtful about Young Woman, especially her yellow shawl.
“I’m not supposed to be saying this, but you get the feeling someone else came in to complete this painting,” he told Jonathan Janson, a painter and an expert on the artist who runs the website Essential Vermeer.
Johannes Vermeer, The Lacemaker (1666–68). Collection of the Musée du Louvre, Paris.
Janson had his own issues with the painting, namely its compositional similarity to the similarly titled Lady Seated at a Virginal, from London’s National Gallery. “Why would Vermeer have done a copy and paste?” he asked. “There’s nothing original. This is very labored. It’s not a good piece of painting.”
Weber seemed to agreed. “Do I have to write attributed to Vermeer or studio of Vermeer?” he added. “This is really a little bit of a problem.”
The very next shot features an ebullient Kaplan, who arrives at the Rijksmuseum conservation lab to see what they’ve found in its analysis of the work. He is delighted to learn that the woman’s shawl was indeed part of the original composition—proof, he feels, that this is really Vermeer.
Johannes Vermeer, A Young Lady Seated at a Virginal, (c.1670). Collection of the National Gallery, London.
Kaplan is talking, but the camera zooms in on Weber standing behind him, lingering on his obvious unease. Weber does not voice his doubts, and an on-screen caption clarifies that “the Rijksmuseum fully accepts Young Woman Seated at a Virginal as an authentic Vermeer.” It’s a very funny moment.
Perhaps equally uncomfortable is the case of Girl With a Flute, from the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. First, there’s the back room negotiations to ensure that the museum is willing to part with its quartet of Vermeer pictures, which Betsy Wieseman, the curator and head of Northern European paintings, calls “pilgrimage paintings” that people specifically visit the museum to see.
“Would there be a possibility of a reciprocal loan of a Vermeer at some point?” she asked. Roelofs quickly agreed that there could be.
Johannes Vermeer, Girl With a Flute (c. 1669/1675). National Gallery of Art, Washington, Widener Collection.
But months later, when the National Gallery team visits the Netherlands, a new wrinkle has arisen. The Americans have examined the painting, and they don’t think it’s a Vermeer at all.
Girl With a Flute features Vermeer’s signature green earth in the flesh tones, but “look how lumpy the paint handling is. Generally, you get a sense of somebody who’s really struggling, who hasn’t quite got command of his materials,” Melanie Gifford, the gallery’s research conservator for painting technology, said. “This artist knew he should be using green earth material, but didn’t quite have the knack.”
(Janson separately points out the neck in The Guitar Player, from the collection of the Kenwood House in London, is so green that “it looks like a lizard—but there’s no doubt that it’s a Vermeer.”)
Johannes Vermeer, The Guitar Player (ca. 1672). Collection of Kenwood House, London.
The tension in the meeting is palpable, the Rijksmuseum team clearly unhappy with what they are hearing.
“We can say that Vermeer was not involved with the creation of Girl With a Flute,” Alexandra Libby, the National Gallery’s associate curator of Northern Baroque paintings, concluded. “What do you think? Do you still want the painting in your show?”
Weber definitely does. And Roelofs causes some additional drama when he goes to the papers, proclaiming that while the National Gallery is not loaning a Vermeer, it will be one by the time it arrives: “The doubts will evaporate during the flight across the ocean.”
The documentary makes several arguments in favor of the painting, noting its close relationship to Vermeer’s Girl With a Red Hat, also from the National Gallery. (That painting’s authorship has also since been questioned, with a new fringe theory that it is the work of his daughter, Maria Vermeer.)
Jonathan Janson painting in a still from Close to Vermeer. Photo courtesy of Kino Lorber.
Perhaps Girl With a Flute was an early experiment by the artist with green earth, or perhaps Vermeer had an assistant who did parts of it, or perhaps it is unfinished. (The National Gallery curators shoot all these ideas down.)
The dueling opinions don’t exactly amount to an international incident, but Rijksmuseum curator Taco Dibbits does express his disappointment that Roelofs didn’t make their position clear to their colleagues at the National Gallery before speaking to press.
It’s the last real drama in the film, which ends with Weber in the fully hung galleries, a voice over the loudspeaker announcing the museum’s opening for the day—and the beginning of the exhibition he’s been so busy planning.
“Vermeer” is on view at the Rijksmuseum, Museumstraat 1, Amsterdam, February 10–June 4, 2023.
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