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      What I’m Looking At: Cavorting Human-Duck Hybrids, a Tribute to a Legendary Alt-Art Magazine, and Other Things at the Edge of Art

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      “What I’m Looking At” is a monthly column where I digest art worth seeing, writings worth consuming, and other tidbits I come across in my quest to absorb the contemporary cultural moment. Below, assorted thoughts from April 2023.

      More Pombo, Please!
      The most unexpected find this month was at Barro NYC, an art gallery from Buenos Aires with a space in the weird faux New England fishing village-themed mall that is the South Street Seaport. The current show, “Artisanal Conceptualism: Starting Point” (through May 21) features a small selection of deliriously interesting works by Argentine artist Marcelo Pombo (b. 1959).
      The centerpiece of the show is the “Dibujos de San Pablo” series he made during a formative trip to Brazil in 1982, a suite of black-and-white drawings featuring duck-billed lovers intertwined and other fantasies of queer beach life strained through a kind of “dirty Disney” look. There’s other good stuff, too, including a trio of delightfully eccentric contemporary abstractions and some dense graphics he made for Sodoma, a magazine put out by an 1980s gay rights collective of which Pombo was a part.
      My only complaint: Not enough Pombo! “Artisanal Conceptualism” is too small to render anything like a complete portrait of this artist—but it is just enough to suggest that I would like a complete portrait of this artist.
      Drawing from Marcelo Pombo’s “Dibujos de San Pablo” (1982). Photo: Ben Davis.
      Marcelo Pombo, Sin título [Untitled] (2023). Photo: Ben Davis.
      Display of graphics and flyers by Marcelo Pombo. Photo: Ben Davis.

      Catch “Lost” If You Can
      I caught Ficre Ghebreyesus’s second show at Galerie Lelong just in time (it’s open through May 6), and am glad I did. The Eritrea-born artist ran a café in New Haven and died in 2012 without having shown a lot of his works. Posthumously, his fame has expanded and he won a plum spot in the Venice Biennale last year. Even when the works might be seen as flirting with folk-art cliches (skeletons, dancers), they have a distinct atmosphere, simultaneously direct and dreamy, sophisticated and rather dashing.
      I Believe We Are Lost (2002) gives the show its name, a large work that looks like a banner of some kind, done on unstretched canvas, featuring an uneasy trio of jagged monsters framed in a sea of deep blue. But I really like the allover scrap-quilt style of something like Five Figures with Horse Head (1999), with the richness of its colors and the specificity of its details.
      Ficre Ghebreyesus, I Believe We Are Lost (2002). Photo: Ben Davis.
      Ficre Ghebreyesus, Five Figures with Horse Head (1999). Photo: Ben Davis.

      Rite-On
      The back of the Printed Matter bookstore in Chelsea is worth visiting right now for the packed vitrines dedicated to “From the Margins: The Making of Art-Rite” (on view through June 21). Founded in in 1973 by the late Edit DeAk (the stuff here comes from her collection), Walter Robinson, and Joshua Cohn, Art-Rite was a free-spirited alternative art publication with a programmatically scrappy style (the title was a play on the budget store Shop-Rite).
      Art-Rite was a vehicle for plenty of intense, inventive thinking about the big issues of its day. Here, though, the behind-the-scenes photos of the editors, shown with their stitched-together print layouts and Art-Rite posters and cover art, really do radiate the excitement of an art mag that was a creative project itself. The show makes you remember that covering the art scene should be fun first and a professional obligation second.
      “From the Margins: The Making of Art-Rite” at Printed Matter. Photo: Ben Davis.
      Display of material relating to Art-Rite. Photo: Ben Davis.
      Layout for an article in Art-Rite. Photo: Ben Davis.
      Clearing Comes Back
      Clearing gallery has left Bushwick and is now a stone’s throw from the New Museum in Manhattan. The new space doesn’t have quite the same yawning industrial charm as the Bushwick one. But “Maiden Voyage,” its opening group show (through May 21), makes a pretty convincing case for the gallery with a selection of artists to be proud of. It’s all killer, no filler, down to some delightful seating-options-as-art.
      Hugh Hayden, Shadow (2023) and Calvin Marcus, Dead Soldier (2018) in “Maiden Voyage” at CLEARING. Photo by Ben Davis.
      Javier Barrios, Contraataque (2022). Photo; Ben Davis.
      Daniel Dewar and Grégory Gicquel, Oak bench with cinnabar moths, opium poppy flowers and snails (2021) at Clearing. Photo: Ben Davis.

      Fun With Dots
      Of things I read this month, the one that stands out in my mind is actually John Elderfield’s two-part opus on the history of dots in Euro-American art in—that’s right—Gagosian magazine. It’s a fun kind of article: an expansive, informed ramble across art history, from how dots were long frowned on in textiles because they reminded people of skin disease to a theorization of the “film mode” versus “surface mode” of dotting.
      Georges-Pierre Seurat, Seascape (Gravelines) (1890). Photo: Heritage Art/Heritage Images via Getty Images.

      Buy It Now!
      There’s a Jenny Holzer–themed condom for sale on Ebay. It’s $119.99. The condition says “Used,” but don’t worry, I think they just mean it has been used as art.
      Screenshot of Jenny Holzer condom, for sale on Ebay.

      A Few Words on NFT.NYC…
      Finally, at the beginning of the month I did go back to NFT.NYC, the big crypto-art/crypto-business/crypto-whatever conference that is now held in the Javits Center.
      The first time I went to NFT.NYC, in the heady days of 2021, it felt as if everyone was high. It was just at the moment when the drugs were hitting hardest and people are screaming at each other, “We should buy a boat together!!!” Now it feels like everyone has come down and people are kind of looking around at each other and saying, “So…are we still serious about that boat?”
      I should say I only went on Friday, the last day of the conference. I can’t speak for the whole thing. Maybe people were tuckered out from the great stuff they saw the previous days. But most of the art talks I went to were attended by the merest smatterings of people.
      Don’t get me wrong: I saw plenty of people still trying to make an earnest go of it. Most memorably, I sat in on curator Stacy Engman’s talk, the actual title of which, as printed in the program, was: “Most Expensive NFT Stacy Engman Art History NFT Project—$450 Million NFT Value Pegged to Fine Art Market.” The tone of the Engman’s presentation was much less haywire than that manic word salad. Still—it was hard to figure out what she was selling, and that’s kinda where things are at as a whole.
      Sign for NFT.NYC 2023 at the Javits Center. Photo: Ben Davis.
      Curator Stacy Engman presents at NFT.NYC. Photo: Ben Davis.
      A panel at NFT.NYC 2023. Photo: Ben Davis.
      A vendor booth at NFT.NYC 2023. Photo: Ben Davis.
      Bored Ape Takes the Stage, Cannot Hold Mic Straight
      Some people will tell you that the parties are where the real action is at NFT.NYC. I will have to take their word for it. The one I was invited to this time around, put on by Nolcha Shows at the new immersive art venue known as the ArtDistrict in Williamsburg, billed as “a state-of-the-art, next-level 360-degree visual experience.” In practice this meant that, as at many parties and concerts, it had big light projections all over the walls, except these were from a coterie of NFT artists.
      The air of rented decadence was set by the presence of a team of go-go dancers in metal bikinis and capes with lights on them. Partygoers stood around talking about liquidity and fractional lending protocols. There were VIP booths composed of what appeared to be park benches. Someone pitched me on an NFT that would allow me access to a whiskey subscription service.
      The big draw here was the debut performance by Shilly, an act from the Bored Ape enthusiast/content creator Shwaz that is built around a Bored Ape avatar. Shilly has so far released two songs, I’m Boring and Elizabeth Holmes, both of which almost rise to level of creative vision and soulful authenticity of Fall Out Boy’s Ghostbusters cover.
      I found the atmosphere at this event draining and I did not have the stamina to stick around to watch Shilly strap on his motion-capture helmet to perform in-character as Bored Ape #6722.
      I’ve seen the tape though, and I have no regrets. It’s linked below.
      A dancer performing. Photo: Ben Davis.
      A glamorous VIP table. Photo: Ben Davis.

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      Mexican Photographer Kati Horna Collaborated With the Biggest Surrealist Stars of Her Day. Why Don’t We Know Her Name?

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      They were known as the “three witches.”  
      In the feverish cultural milieu of 1930s Mexico City, artists Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, and Kati Horna were the closest of friends and frequent artistic collaborators. Each a European expatriate—Carrington from England, Varo from Spain, and Horna from Hungary—these women came to Mexico fleeing war and persecution and found in each other kindred spirits with shared interests in witchcraft, alchemy, and tarot, passions which bled into their uncanny artworks and collaborative visions. 
      Still, history has remembered their legacies unevenly. While in recent years, Carrington and Varo have become familiar names amid reexaminations of women’s role in Surrealism’s development, Horna, however, has remained a surprisingly obscure figure. 
      Kati Horna, Portrait of Leonora Carrington (1960/1987). Courtesy of Ruiz-Healy Art.
      But her strange and beautiful photography may now be drawing new light. New York’s Ruiz-Healy Art is currently presenting “Kati Horna: In Motion”—the first devoted exhibition of Horna’s work in the city. This haunting exhibition brings together photographs made from the 1930s into the 1960s and offers a window into Horna’s internal world—one replete with mysticism and loss shaped by a war-torn life. 
      Horna was born Katalin Deutsch in Budapest in 1919 to an upper-class Jewish family (Horna would marry the artist Jose Horna in Paris in the late 1930s). She lived amid the city’s intelligentsia and was a childhood friend of Robert Capa, studying photography alongside him. As a teenager, she apprenticed herself to the celebrated photographer József Pesci, whose avant-garde imagery bridged advertising and Constructivist aesthetics. 
      By her twenties, Horna had moved to Berlin, befriending Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, and her compatriot László Moholy-Nagy. The turbulence of the era pulled her throughout the continent. In 1933, she went to Paris, enmeshing herself in the Surrealist movement. A leftist driven by her politics and a supporter of the Spanish Republican cause, she soon relocated to Spain, working as a war photographer through the Spanish Civil War, linking for a time with Capa. These photojournalistic images were published widely, particularly in the Illustrated Press (New York’s Americas Society presented a curation of these works in 2016), and while the exhibition at Ruiz-Healy focuses primarily on Horna’s artistic pursuits made in Mexico, dealer Patricia Ruiz-Healy says her photojournalism—and experiences of war—as key to understanding her oeuvre. 
      “Kati’s photojournalism gave her economic independence and the ability to pursue her political beliefs. Her father died when she was 18 or 19 and she invested an inheritance from her father in buying a camera and for photography classes,” said Patricia Ruiz-Healy, in a conversation, “It gave her creative freedom.”
      Kati Horna, Mujer Con Máscara (1961) from the series “Mujer Y Máscara.” Courtesy of Ruiz-Healy Art.
      Returning to Paris in 1938, Horna and her husband would be pushed into flight again the following year as France came under Nazi occupation. This final exodus would bring the artist to Mexico, a country she would grow to love deeply, and which would allow her the refuge for artistic experimentation. “I am allergic to the question of where I am from,” Horna wrote. “I fled Hungary, I fled Berlin, I fled Paris, and I left everything behind in Barcelona…When Barcelona fell, I couldn’t go back for my things, I lost everything again. I got to a fifth country, Mexico, with my Rolleiflex around my neck, and nothing else.”
      In these Mexican-era photographs, one notices certain recurring fascinations: dolls and masks, Surrealist and occult imagery, and the lives of her friends. Again and again, Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo appear captured in time, as do other artists and actors of the time, in imagery both staged and candid. Varo leans against a window sill, smoking a cigarette, in one photograph, captured as though midstream in conversation. In another, Carrington paints at her easel, with relaxed familiarity.
      Kati Horna, Leonora from the series “Oda A La Necrofilia” (Ode To Necrophilia) (1962). Courtesy of Ruiz-Healy Art.
      “Kati captures Carrington and Varo in their more intimate settings. They appear so relaxed—painting, working, socializing. These are often images of good times, fun times, which are all the more striking when we know how much these people had all suffered in their lifetimes,” said Ruiz-Healy. “So much.” Other photographs are materially and technically experimental, and the show includes photomontages and photo-collages. In keeping with Horna’s Surrealist inclinations. In one photograph, actress Beatriz Sheridan presses her face against a mirror, appearing like a beheaded saint or Medusa, proffering, it seems, her peculiar reflection. In another, an unidentified model is photographed through a glass jug, creating a rippling effect on the photograph’s flat surface. Carrington, particularly, appears often as Horna’s model and muse, her face photo-collaged, in one image, into a Di Chirico-esque architectural space. Varo and Carrington also appear obliquely, in masks and other objects made by the artists (in one of Horna’s photographs, Carrington is pictured in a mask made by Varo, encapsulating their artistic trinity). 
      Masks are one of Horna’s most enduring symbols. In a marvelously uncanny series, “Ode to Necrophilia”—which Horna made for the avant-garde magazine S.NOB in 1962—Carrington appears nude, sitting and crouched beside a rumpled bed. In what seems a twilight light, her face turns away from the viewer, on the pillow rests a haunting white mask.
      Kati Horna, Untitled (1933/1960) from the series “Marchés Aux Puces, Paris.” Courtesy of Ruiz-Healy Art.
      “These are death masks” explained Patti Ruiz-Healy, daughter of gallery founder Patricia and director of the New York space. “Often a plaster cast would be made from the face of a loved one when they died.”
      The images are unexpectedly serene. “These photographs were made in the early 1960s, at a time when Kati’s husband Jose was very sick, and soon passed away. Remedios, who was like a sister to her, was also very sick and died in 1963. It was a way for Kati and Leonora to mourn these people in their lives,” said Patricia Ruiz-Healy. The ‘Necrophilia’ of the title here alludes to the physical love, longing, and embodied mourning for loved ones who are dying or who have passed on. 
      Death suffuses all hidden corners of her oeuvre, it seems, and Horna’s perhaps most revealing images are absent of living figures altogether, instead depicting jumbles of broken dolls in stark black-and-white images. The 1962 series “A Night at the Doll Hospital” focuses entirely on such images, and while superficially these images might call to mind the darkly Surrealist photographs of Hans Bellmer, upon closer consideration Horna’s series is a more tender contemplation of innocence and its loss. 
      Kati Horna, Untitled (1962) from the series “Una Noche en el Sanatorio De Muñecas” (A Night at the Doll Hospital). Courtesy of Ruiz-Healy Art.
      “What she saw in Spain stayed with her forever. She would go into towns and see women and children laying dead in the street with baby dolls and discarded toys next to them,” said Patricia Ruiz-Healy, “The dolls are very symbolic for her. In the series ‘The Night at the Doll Hospital’ there is some hope of fixing them.”
      Horna lived in Mexico until her death in 2000, leaving behind and rich and complex legacy. Patricia and Patti Ruiz-Healy believe some of Horna’s obscurity is due to the rarity of her work in the market. The dealers were introduced to Horna’s daughter, Norah (a sidelong tribute to Carrington), who manages her mother’s estate along with her children, but an exhibition took years to mount. “Horna made only a select reprint of her vintage prints in the 1960s, and donated much of her archive to the Spanish government and to a research institute in Mexico City,” said Patti Ruiz-Healy. Nevertheless, her reputation has been growing steadily in institutional circles. Her works were included in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition “Beyond Surrealism” in 2021. When asked what Horna would have thought of the prospect of art fame, the dealers were circumspect, given Horna’s politics. “She considered herself an art worker, not an artist,” noted Patricia Ruiz-Healy.
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      British Painter Frank Bowling’s First Digital Artwork, an Evocative Play on Color, Lights Up London’s Piccadilly Circus

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      The renowned British abstract painter Sir Frank Bowling is unveiling his first-ever digital artwork on May 4 in London’s Piccadilly Circus.
      At 8:23pm BST, his work, titled Arrival, will flash across the city’s iconic Piccadilly Lights, which usually feature advertisements or brand logos. This will happen every evening at the same time until June 30.
      Since 2020, the Cultural Institute of Radical Contemporary Arts (CIRCA) has been using the Piccadilly Lights to broadcast new works of art by celebrated artists so that they can be enjoyed by passersby for free. The organization’s global network of public screens is always growing, and the work will also appear at 8:23pm local time at locations in Berlin, Milan, Seoul, Los Angeles, and Tokyo. A program and map can be found on CIRCA’s website.
      Sir Frank Bowling, 2021. Photo by Sacha Bowling.
      Arrival, is inspired by Bowling’s move from British Guiana (now Guyana) to London in May 1953 when he was just 19. One of his early defining memories is of the citywide celebrations for the late Queen’s coronation on June 2. The exhibition is therefore timed for both the 75th anniversary of Windrush, the boat that carried Caribbean migrants to the U.K. to start a new life, and King Charles III’s coronation on May 6.
      The work’s warmly evocative orange, pink, and red tones are the result of crossfading two of Bowling’s celebrated Map Paintings, Texas Louise (1971) and Australia to Africa (1969–70).
      “I am a painter first and last, but I am always experimenting,” Bowling told Artnet News. “My intention is just to use color and geometry to create something that will hold the viewer’s eye. I am convinced that light comes out of the paint, and that’s what I’m looking for.”
      “Working on Arrival was an opportunity to use color and light in a totally different way and add something new to the world.”
      Bowling had made the original paintings during a stint living in New York, when he became interested in the stenciled map shapes of Guyana, Africa, Asia, and Australia. The shape of these maps became a guiding framework within which to explore color and geometry.
      “Thinking about my life moving from South America to London and then to New York, and then years moving back and forth across the Atlantic, referencing these earlier works seemed like the obvious move,” Bowling said. 
      “I keep hearing that my work feels relevant right now, but I don’t know. It would be interesting to hear what viewers make of it,” he added. “I remember [Nigerian curator] Okwui Enwezor saying that I started my career as an artist in the ’50s in a moment of global transition, where the world had become an unfixed place. I think there’s a feeling that we are at another moment of transition, of flux, of the possibilities for something new. Perhaps that’s why?”
      CIRCA is inviting viewers with a connection to the Windrush Generation to upload photos documenting their own stories onto its website, some of which will be included in a special film screened on the Piccadilly Lights on June 22.
      Artists previously commissioned by CIRCA include Douglas Gordon, Caroline Walker, Anne Imhof, Laure Prouvost, Shirin Neshat, Marina Abramović, Yoko Ono, and Vivienne Westwood.

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      Got Milk? See Inside a New Exhibition That Unpacks the History and Ubiquity of the OG Superfood

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      Forget avocados, chia seeds, and leafy greens—milk is the OG superfood. With the advent of nutrition science in the early 20th century, milk took on a quasi-miraculous status as a source of fat, carbohydrates, protein, and newly discovered vitamins. It duly became a mass-produced staple of Western diets reshaping cultural and physical landscapes in the process.
      This mythic transformation is the subject of “Milk,” a major exhibition at London’s Wellcome Collection that is set to run through September 30.
      Installation view of “Milk” at the Wellcome Collection, 2023. Photo: Steven Pocock.
      The museum was established in 2007 to challenge public perceptions of health by leveraging the disparate powers of science and art and “Milk” fulfills this mission. The exhibition presents more than 100 items including government posters, promotional films from dairy companies, a herd of cow-shaped creamers, and a handful of bold commissions. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it’s the first exhibition to deconstruct the complex history of the dairy product.
      The exhibition also casts an eye on that other milk, the human kind. Early on, visitors encounter Julia Bornefeld’s dangling sculpture that is simultaneously evocative of cow udders and a human breast. In another work, the video piece Let Down Reflex (2023), Ilana Harris-Babou’s explores Black motherhood through familial conversations about nursing.
      If breastfeeding continues to occupy an uncomfortable place in Western society, “Milk” suggests it may be the product of exclusively associating milk with cows for the past century. Though the roots of this consumption run deeper, as the exhibition shows through historical objects dating back thousands of years, they were supercharged by governmental and industrial forces in the 20th century. Dietary guides printed by the British Medical Association and milk formula tins from the likes of Glaxo make this clear.
      Milk: The Backbone of Young Britain poster. Photo: © IWM (Art.IWM PST 4944)
      Milk is also intrinsically tied to whiteness. With its status as an early superfood, milk was deemed an essential product to maintain the strength and wellness of white communities. The exhibition tracks this thinking sometimes implicitly, such as by displaying dairy product marketing campaigns featuring smiling white families, and other times rather more explicitly, as in the case of a butter advert in from 1920 in which the future U.S. President Herbert Hoover declared dairy essential for the survival of the white race.
      At a time of ever-increasing consciousness around the sustainability of staple foods, Wellcome Collection shows that sometimes the social implications are equally problematic.
      See more images of the exhibition below.
      Milk, ©Lucy + Jorge Orta / ADAGP Paris, 2022. Reproduced with permission of Lucy + Jorge Orta
      Ilana Harris-Babou, Let Down Reflex (2023). Photo: Steven Pocock.
      Photo: Norfolk / Ministry of Health. 1937 – 1938. Wellcome Collection, London
      Evelyn Mary Dunbar, Milking Practice with Artificial Udders, (1940). Photo courtesy of Imperial War Museums.
      “Milk” is on view at the Wellcome Collection, 183 Euston Road, London, through September 30.
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      In Pictures: See Inside Mike Nelson’s Eerie and Remarkably Ambitious Takeover of London’s Hayward Gallery

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      Mike Nelson, who has exhibited in many top museums and biennials around the world for decades, is known for eye-opening presentations that immerse audiences into his strange visual universe. For “Extinction Beckons” at Hayward Gallery, on view until May 7, the British artist has brought his epically-scaled installations to London, in what has been billed as the artist’s first major survey exhibition.
      The landmark show does not disappoint; from a gigantic maze of nearly two dozen interconnected rooms and corridors to a monumental installation made with 40 tonnes of sand, the show’s curatorial team and installation crew have completely reconfigured and transformed the gallery’s exhibition spaces in order to bring the artist’s unique vision to life. It took more than 30 builders and technicians over a month to install the show, which has been described by the museum as one of the most technically demanding exhibitions it has ever staged.
      Alongside new commissions are many key works, some on view for the first time since they were originally exhibited. The Deliverance and The Patience (2001), a mesmerizing maze that was originally commissioned for a Venice Biennale 2001 collateral event staged at a former brewery building on Giudecca is on view, as is the enormous installation Triple Bluff Canyon (the woodshed) (2004), which is recreated with sand sourced from a river in Bedfordshire. Next to this surreal sand dune is a secret passage into I, Imposter (the darkroom), a meticulous recreation of the 2011 Venice Biennale installation that was drawn from his earlier installation in Istanbul Biennial 2003; also on view from the 2011 British pavilion is the dark red room of I, Imposter (2011).
      There are many cultural and political references to be unpacked at “Extinction Beckons,” which is like a conceptual, time-traveling puzzle. While it may not be the most comforting exhibition on view, it is definitely a highlight in London so far this year.
      See exhibition views of “Extinction Beckons” at Hayward Gallery below.
      Installation view of Mike Nelson, I, IMPOSTOR, 2011. Various materials. Photo: Matt Greenwood. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery.
      Installation view of Mike Nelson, The Deliverance and The Patience, interior, 2001. Various materials. Various materials. Photo: Liam Harrison. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery.
      Installation view of Mike Nelson, The Deliverance and The Patience, interior, 2001. Various materials. Various materials. Photo: Liam Harrison. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery.
      Installation view of Mike Nelson, The Deliverance and The Patience, interior, 2001. Various materials. Various materials. Photo: Liam Harrison. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery.
      Installation view of Mike Nelson, Triple Bluff Canyon (the woodshed), 2004. Various materials. M25, 2023. Found tyres. Photo: Matt Greenwood. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery.
      Installation view of Mike Nelson, I, IMPOSTOR (the darkroom), 2011. Various materials. Photo: Matt Greenwood. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery.
      Installation view of Mike Nelson, The Asset Strippers (solstice), 2019. Hay rake, steel trestles, steel girders, sheet of steel, cast concrete slabs. Photo: Matt Greenwood. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery.
      Installation view of Mike Nelson, Studio Apparatus for Kunsthalle Münster – A Thematic Instalment Observing the Calendrical Celebration of its Inception: Introduction; towards a linear understanding of notoriety, power, and their interconnectedness; futurobjecs (misspelt); mysterious island* *see introduction or Barothic shift, 2014. Various materials. Triple Bluff Canyon (the projection room), 2004. Various materials.Photo: Matt Greenwood. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery.
      Installation view of Mike Nelson, Studio Apparatus for Kunsthalle Münster – A Thematic Instalment Observing the Calendrical Celebration of its Inception: Introduction; towards a linear understanding of notoriety, power, and their interconnectedness; futurobjecs (misspelt); mysterious island* *see introduction or Barothic shift, 2014. Various materials. Photo: Matt Greenwood. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery.
      Installation view of Mike Nelson, Studio Apparatus for Kunsthalle Münster – A Thematic Instalment Observing the Calendrical Celebration of its Inception: Introduction; towards a linear understanding of notoriety, power, and their interconnectedness; futurobjecs (misspelt); mysterious island* *see introduction or Barothic shift, 2014. Various materials. Photo: Matt Greenwood. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery.
      Installation view of Mike Nelson, Studio Apparatus for Kunsthalle Münster – A Thematic Instalment Observing the Calendrical Celebration of its Inception: Introduction; towards a linear understanding of notoriety, power, and their interconnectedness; futurobjecs (misspelt); mysterious island* *see introduction or Barothic shift, 2014. Various materials. Photo: Matt Greenwood. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery.
      Installation view of Mike Nelson, Triple Bluff Canyon (the projection room), 2004. Various materials. Photo: Matt Greenwood. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery.
      Installation view of Mike Nelson, The Amnesiacs, 1996-ongoing. Various materials. Photo: Matt Greenwood. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery.

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      See the Rare Keith Haring Drawing—Measuring a Massive 125 Feet—That Is Going on View in Amsterdam for the First Time in 30 Years

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      By 1986, Keith Haring was at the peak of his powers. But when tasked with creating an exhibition for Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum, Haring refused to remount old works, or even to lean on the celebrated visual motifs—the barking dogs, the glowing babies—with which his name had become synonymous. The New York artist wanted to create something completely new.
      One of the results was Amsterdam Notes, a 125-foot black ink drawing that stands as one of the largest pieces Haring made for a museum. Nearly three decades on, Stedelijk is restaging the giant paperwork in its IMC Gallery, its so-called hall of honor, alongside two other works from the museum’s collection from May 26.
      Keith Haring, Amsterdam Notes (1986). Photo: Collection Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.
      Keith Haring, Amsterdam Notes (1986). Photo: Collection Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.
      Keith Haring, Amsterdam Notes (1986). Photo: Collection Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.
      “For art lovers, Amsterdam Notes is a contemporary Bayeux tapestry, and a holy grail for Haring fans. Since works on paper are fragile, they cannot be exhibited for long,” the museum’s director Rein Wolfs said. “Moments such as this are unique, and happen rarely. But, this summer, the door to the Stedelijk’s treasury is ajar.”
      Amsterdam Notes captures many of the socio-political themes around which Haring’s art so-often centered. There’s the oppressive power of religion in crucifixes set alight, and sexual liberation in gleefully exposed vulva and a pair of men clutching each other’s phalluses.
      But unlike many of Haring’s smaller works, Amsterdam Notes is not easily reduced to simple messages or stories and seems concerned with the act of looking itself, as offered in many-eyed heads, an imploding television, and a ghoulish mirror reflection. It’s a spatial composition, one that is also charmingly bizarre, filled with monsters, walking brains, errant limbs, and a fish, which Stedelijk speculates is a playful nod to Haring’s name, which means herring in Dutch.
      Mural (1986) by Keith Haring on the Food Center Amsterdam. Photo: Hanna Hachula, © Keith Haring Foundation.
      As part of the 1986 Amsterdam exhibition, Haring also spray painted a 40-by-66-foot velum for the show’s floor as well as a giant sea monster on the museum’s former art storage depot, which is the largest Haring made in Europe. It was revealed and restored in 2018 after being concealed behind aluminum plates for nearly 30 years.
      “Amsterdam Notes” is on view at the Stedelijk Museum, Museumplein 10, 1071 DJ Amsterdam, Netherlands, from May 26.
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      How Lavinia Fontana Broke Renaissance Tradition to Become the First Woman Artist Known to Depict Female Nudes—and Earn Equal Pay as Men

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      It must have taken many hands to rush the Bolognese Mannerist artist Lavinia Fontana’s most ambitious extant painting, a nearly 10-foot-long canvas from 1599, out of a burning building during the French Revolution. Smaller artworks would have been easier to salvage from the Palais Royale when revolutionaries torched it during the days of the Paris Commune, but still, someone thought to rescue Fontana’s The Visit of the Queen of Sheba to King Solomon. When it entered the collection of the National Gallery of Ireland the next year it was murky and darkened by smoke. And there it has remained for over 150 years, almost always displayed but never fully restored. Until now.
      The National Gallery of Ireland has comprehensively conserved the work over the past few years, generating new insights into the practice and patrons of the painter, who was the rare Renaissance female artist to command prices equal to those of her male peers. At the base of an ornate clock held by one of the queen’s attendants in this Biblical story—which, in true Fontana fashion, is dominated by a female cast of exquisitely dressed characters—an inscription reads 1599 (a date previously unknown). And new theories have surfaced about possible real-life models for Solomon and Sheba, maybe the Duke and Duchess of Ferrara.
      These discoveries, and others, have spurred the museum to organize a solo exhibition of more than 60 paintings and drawings, “Lavinia Fontana: Trailblazer, Rule Breaker,” opening May 6. It is the artist’s first major solo presentation in over 20 years.
      Lavinia Fontana, The Visit of the Queen of Sheba to King Solomon (1599). Image: National Gallery of Ireland.
      Fontana is known mostly for her impressive life story. She was the first professional woman artist in Italy working outside a convent or court system, and fully supported her husband and children with her work (which included commissions from nobility and popes). She was also the first known woman painter to depict female nudes.
      Less is known about the technical side of her work.
      “We tend to be, as scholars, preoccupied by women’s biographies, which of course are fascinating when we consider the contexts in which they were working in 16th- and 17th-century Italy,” said Aoife Brady, the National Gallery of Ireland’s curator of Italian and Spanish art. “But sometimes that preoccupation comes at the expense of close looking at their artworks and defining exactly what it is that makes a Lavinia Fontana.”
      Preparing around half of the artist’s oeuvre to be exhibited in the show has produced new technical data, better equipping scholars to make firm attributions to Fontana.
      There isn’t a firm consensus about how many artworks Fontana produced, but around 130 extant paintings are attributable to her. Given the wave of interest in the artist over the past few years, more people are eager to pin paintings to Fontana and her attributions are “a moveable feast at the moment,” according to Brady. “We’re seeing this massive reassessment of her oeuvre.”
      Lavinia Fontana, Minerva Dressing (1613). Courtesy of Galleria Borghese. Photo: Mauro Coen.
      This comes as Fontana has recently featured in major group exhibitions at the Prado, the Wadsworth Atheneum, Detroit Institute of Arts, and Milan’s Palazzo Reale. Several Fontana works entered museum collections within the past year: The National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. acquired Fontana’s portrait of musician Lucia Bonasoni Garzoni, for example, and the National Gallery of Victoria acquired the Mystic Marriage of St Catherine. The Getty acquired two Fontana works separately—a small painting on copper and the preparatory drawing made for it.
      This swell of interest may seem sudden, but according to Babette Bohn, an art history professor at Texas Christian University and author of Women Artists, Their Patrons, and Their Publics in Early Modern Bologna, attention has come and gone for the Bolognese painter. “From my vantage point she’s always been famous,” Bohn said. “She received more biographies by early modern writers in Italy than any other woman artist during the 16th century.”
      Thanks to these biographies, we know that she was born to a successful artist, Prospero Fontana, who was prominent in Bolognese society and trained her in his workshop. The future artist was born into the right family, and in the ideal location.
      “Bologna as a city was a very special place, and that provided the perfect Petri dish for Fontana and her career,” explained Brady. Home to Europe’s oldest university, during Fontana’s lifetime it was ruled by an archbishop with liberal attitudes about both artists and women.
      Lavinia Fontana, The Wedding Feast at Cana (c.1575-80). Courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.
      Bologna was one major factor, but Fontana also had a supportive family. This wasn’t a coincidence, since her father proactively found her a spouse who would support her career (and help her negotiate with clients, something decorum prevented 16th-century women from doing). She married Gian Paolo Zappi, a man with good social standing and little earning potential, and their unusual marriage contract (to be exhibited at “Lavinia Fontana: Trailblazer, Rule Breaker”) stipulated that he’d support her in pursuing a professional career.
      Before their marriage was cinched, Fontana painted Self Portrait at the Spinet (1577) and sent it to Zappi’s family as a testament of her skill. This visual proof of her breadwinning abilities proved true. One of her 17th-century biographers, Carlo Cesare Malvasia, pointed out that Fontana’s fees were equal to those of Anthony Van Dyck and Justus Sustermans.
      What those male contemporaries didn’t have to contend with, though, was the challenge of working while pregnant and postpartum. Fontana gave birth 11 times between 1578 and 1595, meaning she was pregnant or post-childbirth for a major part of her professional life. Most of her work during her childbearing years (and she sometimes had to return to work sooner than was medically recommended, because she was her family’s earner) was of small- or medium-scale work—more suitable for postpartum recovery. On the other hand, some of her largest works date to the late 1590s when she was no longer having children.
      The smaller scale works that were Fontana’s bread and butter were her portraits of important Bolognese figures, at first men and then by the 1580s the noblewomen of the city. She painted more portraits of women than either her predecessors or successors, focusing on their strength of character and detailed rendering of their clothing and jewelry, bringing a distinctly female perspective to female subjects.
      Lavinia Fontana, Venus and Cupid (1592). © Réunion des Musées Métropolitains Rouen Normandie, Musée des Beaux-Arts.
      “All the ladies of the city flocked in want of her,” wrote Malvasia, “considering themselves lucky to see her in the streets, or to have meetings in the company of the virtuous young woman; there was nothing greater that they desired than to be portrayed by her.”
      Fontana’s portraits of women highlight one of her most distinctive qualities—her painstakingly accurate depictions of textiles and jewelry. Written contracts survive between Fontana and her clients showing that the artist sometimes borrowed her sitters’ jewelry, to paint it as accurately as possible when sittings were no longer necessary.
      This attention to detail extended to garments, too. “She has this great understanding of paint and can use it like a weaver uses thread,” said Brady. “Just by manipulating lead white pigment and using it almost like thread, she applies paint in a way that’s very intuitive and almost craftsman-like.”
      In the late 1590s Fontana moved to Rome, where she was a portraitist for Pope Paul V. Also around this time she painted Vision of Saint Hyacinth (1599), the first altarpiece by a woman to be publicly displayed in Rome, and the ambitious Queen of Sheba canvas that was later rescued from a burning Palais Royale.
      As scholars and audiences look closer now at Fontana’s life-sized Queen of Sheba, freshly cleaned from the smokey veil that hid the subtleties of her features all these years, a greater understanding of Fontana also comes into focus.
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      From Rising-Star Painters to the Return of Post-Internet Art—Here’s What’s Stealing the Spotlight at Gallery Weekend Berlin

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      As collectors and curators ritualistically shuffled around Berlin, donning Moncler jackets during this unseasonably cold week in April, the mood of the annual Gallery Weekend Berlin felt, in any case, bright.
      Spring is certainly here, and, in terms of the Berlin art world, it felt in some ways like the first real spring in years: after several seasons of largely locally attended editions due to the pandemic, Gallery Weekend now, is officially back on its feet. As such, many out-of-towners were spotted perusing the city’s 50 participant galleries, including collector Uli Sigg, Folakunle Oshun from the Lagos Biennial, Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea’s Marcella Beccaria, and Hiuwai Chu from MACBA, as well as Cusson Cheng, Para-site Hong Kong.
      In the time between normal editions of the art event, Berlin has evolved, too. A new social energy pulses as four of its major institutions welcome new directors. This week, Klaus Biesenbach was touring the preview on April 27, affectionately documenting artists and dealers on his Instagram at various participating galleries. At Gropius Bau, Performance Space’s Jenny Schlenzka will be arriving this summer to take over the reigns from Stephanie Rosenthal; at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung is preparing for his official program unveiling in early June. Tomorrow, April 29, at the Hamburger Bahnhof, new directors Sam Bardaouil und Till Fellrath will host the annual Gallery Weekend dinner, attended by the nearly 50 participating galleries and scores of their invited VIPs.
      The apparent influx has radiated back on the galleries, which have been perhaps Berlin’s most consistently strong suit over the years. Artnet News tied together a loose grouping three core themes that are worth exploring at this year’s Gallery Weekend Berlin, which opens today, April 28.

      The Post-Internet Art Scene’s Eternal Returns
      Timur Si-Qin, Untitled (2023) (sculpture) and Untitled (natural origin, 1) (2023) (wall work). Courtesy the artist and Société, Berlin.
      One could argue if it really went anywhere at all, but, at least in Berlin—an incubator of the post-Internet art aesthetic that peaked during the 2016 DIS-curated Berlin Biennale—there was a small but noted hiatus. In due course, many of the artists associated with the scene have had celebratory comebacks; last fall, during the annual Berlin Art Week in September, Jon Rafman opened a pair of major exhibitions at Sprüth Magers and the art institution Schinkel Pavilion; at Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, video artist Ed Atkins returned to town as well. Given the city’s own history with the the aesthetics and discourse, artists working at this cusp of technology find an engaged and well-versed audience. For Berlin Gallery Weekend this year, the welcome home party continues with artists who intersect with that cohort.
      At Société, New York-based artist Timur Si-Qin (who presented at the 2016 Berlin Biennale) has transformed the gallery into a darkened and serene semblance of a greenhouse using technologically-embedded nature, culled from memories and field notes of physical locations the artist has visited. He folds these disparate geographic sites together here into one all-encompassing environment for his exhibition “Natural Origin.” At Galerie Neu, through a new array of cozy sculptures, Olso-based Ynge Holen explores the contentious 5G networks which have already deeply infiltrated society and the landscape. Across town at Wentrup, German artist Britta Thie brings together a series of paintings depicting the backdrops behind the camera of the cinema industry, including solemn and sentimental portraits of the mechanical hardware—lighting, cameras, and other gear—that quietly drive, document, and populate film sets. More