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      A New Culture Hub in Mexico City Pairs Sustainable Dining With Art for a Rare Experience in the Chapultepec Forest

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      When the pandemic led to the cancellation or delay of major art events all over the world, the organizers behind the nascent Lago/Algo project in Mexico City took it as a time to consider what exactly to do with their project.
      “From the roots of the change generated by this crisis, the opportunity arose to recover an emblematic building in Mexico City and give it a new purpose, one that includes transforming the private into the public, the exclusive into the inclusive, the social into the cultural,” organizers said in a statement.
      The project, in the heart of the Chapultepec Forest, one of the largest parks in the Western Hemisphere, opened this February as a hybrid art center (known as Algo) and sustainable restaurant (known as Lago) conceived by chef Micaela Miguel.
      The first art show, a collaboration between the Mexico City galleries OMR and José García, is titled “Form Follows Energy.” Since opening week, a representative said Lago/Algo has welcomed more than 45,000 visitors, all free of charge.  (The representative also stressed that, contrary to previous reports, the project does not involve Gabriel Orozco, and is not funded with public money.)
      Installation views “Form Follows Energy,” Lago / Algo, Courtesy of OMR and joségarcía ,mx;Photos by José Ignacio Vargas © 2022.
      The show presents more than 45 pieces, including some monumental works, by 27 artists from both galleries’ programs. Among those included are Atelier Van Lieshout, Pia Camil, Jose Davila, Simon Fujiwara, Christian Jankowski, Alicia Kwade, and James Turrell. It continues through the end of July.
      The project grew out of a chance meeting between OMR owner and director Cristobal Riestra and hospitality group CMR chief executive Joaquín Vargas Mier y Terán during lockdown, when both had relocated with their families to Valle de Bravo, about two hours outside Mexico City.
      Since CMR’s Restaurante El Lago had been hard-hit by lockdown restrictions, Mier y Terán suggested the possibility of hosting a gallery with a pop-up exhibition as a way to make use of space that was sitting empty.
      From their first encounter in December 2020, Mier y Terán and Riestra bounced ideas back and forth and began including their respective teams to participate in “think tank” discussions on how to grow the idea from a pop-up gallery to something more permanent. 
      Installation views “Form Follows Energy,” Lago / Algo, Courtesy of OMR and joségarcía ,mx;Photo by José Ignacio Vargas © 2022.
      The building that Lago/Algo inhabits was constructed in 1964 in the city’s run-up to hosting the 1968 Olympics and was part of an effort to build up the area of the Chapultepec Forest. (That same year, the city saw the opening of the Modern Art Museum, the Anthropology Museum, and Diego Rivera’s Museo Anahuacalli.)
      Earlier this month, Lago/Algo hired veteran curator Jérôme Sans, best known as the co-founder, with Nicolas Bourriaud, of the  Palais de Tokyo in Paris two decades ago, as creative director. Sans’s exhibition, “Shake Your Body,” is scheduled to open in early September and run through the end of 2022.
      “I’m always interested in new cultural adventures,” Sans told Artnet News in a phone interview.
      Sans, who curated international shows such as the Taipei Biennial, the Lyon Biennial, and who served as director of the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA) in Beijing from 2008 to 2012, said he will travel to Mexico City frequently.
      Photo by Alonso Araugo. Image courtesy Lago/Algo, Mexico City.
      “Wherever I have been working in the world, I’ve always been living in between,” he said. “Movement and challenges activate ideas.”
      The building housing Lago/Algo is a Modernist hyperbolic concrete structure designed by then-24-year old architect Alfonso Ramirez Ponce.
      “We brought back to its original state,” Sans said. “A utopian dream of the 1960s became a new reality in 2022, a place where after two years of lockdown, we can be reunited with nature and reconnected to time and art. A place to share, to live, to reinvent our future. “
      Instllalation view of “Form Follows Energy” at Lago/Algo. Photo by Ramiro Chaves. Image courtesy Lago/Algo, Mexico City.
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      Documenta 15’s Focus on Populist Art Opens the Door to Art Worlds You Don’t Otherwise See—and May Not Always Want to

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      Walking around the many spaces of Documenta 15 during its preview, I fell into and out of love with this massive show over and over again. I’m not talking about the major controversy that is currently rocking this always closely watched exhibition, which has shaken many people’s opinions of the whole thing—I’m going to get to that.
      But first I want to talk about what it felt like in its opening days. If the whole thing closes over the current debates over antisemitism, we should at least have an idea of what other kinds of conversations have been cancelled out.
      The exhibition is, first of all, massive—so massive that I definitely can’t say I’ve actually experienced close to all of it. Its curators, the Jakarta-based collective ruangrupa, invited a passel of other collectives, who then invited still more collectives and artists, who in some cases invited still more collectives and more artists. The result is a brain-busting program featuring thousands of names, spread out and packed into venues across the city, all doing different things.
      The title this year is “lumbung,” a name for a collective rice barn, thus making sharing its hallmark theme. For an art viewer passing through, the effect of all this focus on collectives is, paradoxically, to render one’s experience very individual. You are just not going to have a shared experience of Documenta 15, which is too big to experience overall, designed to unfold over time, and different at every point you touch it.
      Skateboarders on Baan Noorg Collaborative Arts and Culture, Churning Milk Mini Ramp (2022) at the Documenta Halle. Photo by Ben Davis.
      The show is by design anti-spectacular and light on big central images. At Documenta Halle, the photographers tend to gravitate towards a fittingly ordinary display of hanging-out: a rotation of live skateboarders who lackadaisically perform on a shallow, graffiti-splattered half-pipe. This is the work of Baan Noorg Collaborative Arts and Culture from Ratchaburi, Thailand (described as a “long term alternative interdisciplinary art and community-as-case study program based on post-studio and participatory practices”), teaming up with the local Mr. Wilson Skatehalle.
      That staging of two cultures coming together around a common pastime mirrors another encounter set up by Baan Noorg as part of Documenta, maybe the real heart of their contribution: a commercial exchange between local dairy producers in Kassel and the town of Nongpho, advertised in a video above the half pipe.
      Installation by Britto Arts Trust at the Documenta Halle. Photo by Ben Davis.
      Nearby, a mural fills the space with images appropriated from Bengali films by Dhaka-based nonprofit the Britto Arts Trust. In addition, group members have created a bazaar-like display, in the form of a series of stalls stocked with ingenious ceramic and crocheted replicas of everyday food items.
      A short walk away at the natural history museum, a show about rural life by a Spanish collective, INLAND, gives way to a grotto full of AI-generated cave art and a characteristically digressive and trippy video by Hito Steyerl that tells the story of a modern-day shepherd who is part of the INLAND collective. (Steyerl and INLAND also collaborate on a crypto-currency parody called “cheesecoin” that proposes creating an “internet of stink.” More importantly, you can also sample INLAND cheese on site.)
      Works by Erick Beltrán at the Museum für Sepulkralkultur. Photo by Ben Davis.
      At the Museum of Sepulchral Culture, Spanish artist Erick Beltrán’s complex, didactic installation Manifold (2022) is drawn from workshops he did with Kassel residents on what “power” might look like. It’s heady—though I admit I find the diagrams and word clouds illustrating the relationship between the positive value of “multiplicity” and the baleful, modern and Western concept of “unity” not really clarifying.
      At the Stadtsmuseum, Sydney-based Safdar Ahmed presents Border Farce (2022). The two-channel video cuts between the testimony of Kazem Kazemi, an Iranian refugee who was detained in scandalous conditions on Australia’s Manus Island, with intense, psychedelic, and cathartic visuals by Hazeen, an “anti-racist Muslim death metal band” the artist formed, which also features Kazemi.
      Cinema Caravan and Takashi Kuribayashi, YATAI TRIP PROJECT – road to documenta (2021-2022) in Karlswiese (Karlsaue). Photo by Ben Davis.
      Out in Karlsaue park, in the large green swath in front of the Orangerie, there’s a tent by Chinese artists Cao Minghao and Chen Jianjun propagandizing the sustainable virtues of yak hair; a large structure, Return to Sender (2022), made of bales of textile waste that tries to confront the German audience with the extent of First World over-consumption by Nest Collective from Nairobi, Kenya; and a functional, make-shift sauna in the form of the Fukushima nuclear reactor brought to you by Japan’s Cinema Caravan, “a group of primates in the Good Vibes Hominidae family.”

      Community Art and Community as Art
      The projects of Documenta 15 often open onto past works of community-building or research, present pedagogical initiatives, or future processes unfolding during the 100 days of the show or beyond. A lot of it felt to me not like an art biennial, but like an art education biennial—with the strengths and weaknesses this implies. (Indeed, one prominent participant is CAMP notes on education, a collective that sprung from Documenta’s education and outreach department.)
      Camp Notes on Education, CAMP Space (2022) at Hafenstraße 76. Photo by Ben Davis.
      Documenta 15 is full of activity tables, banners exhorting self-reflection and inclusivity, designated chill-out zones for the neurodivergent, childcare spaces for parents, community kiosks selling crafts and vinyl records, collaborative printmaking studios, participatory oral history projects, homages to composting and beekeeping (or, more specifically, a daft combination of beekeeping and cryptocurrency mining).
      Objects are generally makeshift, unexalted, approachable. In film, the vibe is educational, with voiceover or talking heads soberly explaining historical events or topical concerns.
      Ruangrupa emerged in the 2000s out of Indonesia’s grassroots, artist-driven, post-dictatorship art scene. Documenta 15’s framework suggests the massive exhibition as an attempt to showcase egalitarian survival strategies and community initiatives from the Global South (only a single group amid the sprawling program, Black Quantum Futurism, hails from the United States). The concept of “lumbung” is offered as a resource to “heal today’s injuries, especially ones rooted in colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchal structures.”
      Community garden by Nhà Sàn Collective at WH22. Photo by Ben Davis.
      And yet… review the types of initiatives most celebrated here: children’s theater, puppets, workshops on tolerance and stereotypes, street festivals, tributes to scrappy local enterprise, and, above all, community gardening and archives preserving various kinds of marginalized or endangered cultures (the last being the two major pillars of Documenta 15’s aesthetic program).
      None of these are particularly beyond the pale for the typical German or U.S. are viewer. They are just more or less the accepted aesthetic preferences of international NGO culture, which values tangible deliverables and loves to produce texts with the word “community” in them. Indeed, almost all these works come with a label that explains what government agency or foundation has helped support them.
      Video display for the Question of Funding laying out a pitch for Dayra.net. Photo by Ben Davis.
      The Palestinian collective the Question of Funding actually has a video and associated brochure that directly critiques the ways that art philanthropy tends to produce cultures of dependency and limit political horizons. Unexpectedly to me, it turned not into a political call to change neocolonial funding structures but a call for Palestinians to use a blockchain-based service, Dayra.net, that allows participants to swap in-kind services. (Between this and Center for Art and Urbanistics’s “Beecoin,” Documenta 15 marks the arrival of blockchain at the highest level of the non-commercial side of the international art world.)
      Much of the justificatory text here about sharing and cooperation as a new model of co-habitation that challenges neoliberalism and colonialism seems to me to mistake effects for causes. Things aren’t unsustainable, either in art or more broadly, because of a bad mindset. If all the artists in Kassel learn to better share the collective pool—and I’m not dismissing this, it’s a good thing—you are still left with the main problem: that a tiny group of the world’s population controls a vast majority of its wealth and resources, and has it in its interests to keep it that way.
      Lumbung Kiosk, a functional community shop, at work in Hübner-areal. Photo by Ben Davis.
      The major problem is not an abstract “Western” habit of thought, like “hierarchy” or “individualism,” which you can fix by turning to collaboration. These are deflections of the kind that the non-profit world inculcates, as Anand Giridharadas argues in Winners Take All, because non-profit culture functions by reframing the “political as personal,” turning systemic problems into things that can be solved via workshops, at the level of interpersonal dynamics or clever bootstrap initiatives.
      As ruangrupa would also admit, I think, the ascription of an inherently collective form of wisdom to the “non-Western” subject has its own history of “othering” undertones, acknowledged fitfully throughout the show. For instance, one of the many banners stating pedagogical principles hung by *foundationClass collective at the Hafenstraße 76 space features an (ironically anonymous) statement demanding an end to “the narrative of every German cultural institutions [sic] that only acknowledge us collectively and never as individuals worthy of self expression.”
      Banner by *foundationClass collective. Photo by Ben Davis.

      Worth Celebrating
      If I found myself enjoying the “lumbung” vibe despite reservations, it’s because, leaving aside the bigger questions about how viable or radical its proposals for new models for art are, ruangrupa’s focus on sociality just made for a show that feels very approachable and alive. And the particular network-of-networks that ruangrupa has pulled in genuinely feels like it knits together artistic scenes that are vital and under-known. They do have the popular touch.
      The cadre of artists associated with Haiti’s Atis Rezistans (Resistance Artists), at the church of St. Kunigundis, beautifully commanded that space (I gather from a Times article that getting them permission to work in Germany required special attention). André Eugène’s elemental and unsettling sculptures incorporating human skulls dotted the floor, Edouard Duval-Carrié’s portraits of historic leaders of Haiti cut from blue mirrors commanded the walls, and Lafleur and Bogaert’s kinetic sculptures felt both like celebrations of everyday creativity and otherworldly.
      Works from Malgorzata Mirga-Tas’s “Out of Egypt” series on view at the Fridericianum. Photo by Ben Davis.
      At the Frederiecanium, inter-leafed throughout the various floors was a display showcasing recent work by artists from Roma backgrounds. It included Birth, a wild, historically important, multi-panel painting of a Roma origin myth by Tamás Péli from 1983; Damian le Bas’s 2013 painting Safe European Home, a map of Europe rendered as a strange, interlocking mosaic of faces; and Malgorzata Mirga-Tas’s recent “Out of Egypt” series (2021) of embroidered panels appropriating cliched images from 17th century etchings depicting the Roma people as lost Egyptian tribes, using textiles upcycled from clothing worn by the artist’s present-day Roma community.
      Also in the Frederiecanium, one screening room focuses on the legacy of Sada, a collective set up in 2011 to support artists and students in post-occupation Iraq, so completely memory-holed in the U.S. after official military withdrawal. The group’s founder Rijin Sahakian has a film essay that lucidly lays out how recent U.S. culture was shaped by the recent geopolitical crime. Her work has a sense for the darkly resonant image that makes the charges stick, but it’s also memorably direct, without poeticizing its subject.
      Visitors watching Wakaliga Uganda’s Football Kommando at the Documenta Halle. Photo by Ben Davis.
      On a totally different wavelength, I liked Football Kommando, from Wakaliga Uganda, a beyond-low-budget studio based outside of Kampala founded by Isaac Godfrey Geoffrey Nabwana, a.k.a. Nabwana IGG. At one end of Documenta Halle, you enter the screening room past walls studded by homemade posters for the studio’s various adventure movies. A spy caper, Football Kommando tells the tale of a German footballer teaming up with an ass-kicking Ugandan mother, bringing his prowess with a soccer ball to a mission to rescue her kidnapped daughter. It’s fun. It’s also unlike anything I have seen at a biennial before.

      The Only Conversation That Matters
      I mention the questions the show raises about its artistic framework as well as the real highlights because I think both deserve space that the current meltdown is destined to make impossible. I said I hadn’t seen the whole show. Clearly, the curators hadn’t either.
      A slow-moving storm of criticism had haunted the show in the weeks leading up to it, touched off by a local blog decrying the “left-identitarian and postmodern art world,” and presenting any criticism of Israel—or public sympathy for Palestinians—as de facto antisemitic. As the charges of antisemitism circulated more generally in the German press, the bulk of the case was that the show featured many Palestinian artists talking about their plights, but no Israeli-Jewish artists; and that some artists in the show had signed various petitions in support of boycotting Israel or against Germany’s 2019 parliamentary motion conflating boycotts of Israel with antisemitism. (In the United States, a measure outlawing boycotts of Israel is probably heading to the Supreme Court.)
      But shortly after the opening of Documenta 15, observers discovered antisemitic caricatures within a large banner shown in the main plaza in front of the main Frederiecanium site by the Indonesian art collective Taring Padi. The 2002 work, People’s Justice, was a four-story-tall, scabrous tableau. It depicts the struggle between the heroic Indonesian people, shown on the right side as a flow of figures surging into battle beneath a banner that says “Resistance Culture Movement,” against the dictatorship of the then-recently deposed Suharto regime and the international forces that had supported it, illustrated on the left.
      People’s Justice by the Indonesian artists group Taring Padi hangs behind cardboard figures at the Documenta 15 on June 18, 2022 in Kassel, Germany. (Photo by Thomas Lohnes/Getty Images)
      Suharto is depicted in a red suit with lizard eyes at the top left, seated on a throne beneath a tower bearing the flags of the United States and Great Britain, with war planes soaring past them into the skies. At bottom left, an immense skull with bloodshot eyes is accompanied by a banner that reads “The Expansion of ‘Multicultural’ State Hegemony.”
      Amid this fetid landscape of evil cartoons, it’s hard to take in every detail. You see a grinning king fornicating with a crying woman who is also a windup doll. You see a grotesque fat figure with a beast’s snout, wearing a songkok, stuffing his face with a giant sandwich, pants busting open. You see a see a garishly made-up beauty queen, nipples projecting through her top, whose sash reads “Plastiks.” You see a drooling man hypnotized by a TV labeled “PROPAGANDA BOX.”
      Near the front, there is a commando with a pig face, sporting a red beret and a U.S. flag patch, masturbating onto a grave covered in skulls with one hand and giving the thumbs up with the other. Running to join him is a line of helmeted, beast-faced storm troopers, led by a duo labeled “007” and “KGB.” About midway back in this line of troopers, just in front of a figure labeled “ASIO” (the Australian intelligence service), is a figure labeled “MOSSAD” and bearing the Star of David, also with a pig face.
      Detail of the mural People’s Justice by the Indonesian artist group Taring Padi. (Photo by Thomas Lohnes/Getty Images)
      Nearby is a an evil wolf with a blood-soaked mouth with a talking balloon saying “Don’t Worry, Be Happy,” a towering devil-clown applauding the storm troopers—and beside these, a tiny image of a cigar-chomping, fanged man with sidelocks, clearly a caricature of an Orthodox Jew, with a Nazi “SS” on his hat.
      Whatever its background in expressing visceral rage at international forces tied to Suharto’s historic crimes—and Israel really did deal weapons to Suharto—People’s Justice clearly evokes antisemitic imagery.
      When the scandal broke, the work was first covered and then taken down; the artists and curators apologized; and matters have escalated from there, with plans for a systematic review of the show for antisemitism and calls for the head of both Documenta and the German culture minister to step down, and for the show to be shuttered altogether.
      Taring Padi is a storied activist collective with undefined membership that is known to “reject the notion of art for art’s sake,” as the Jakarta Post put it, very much in the politicized and grassroots vibe that is closest to ruangrupa’s heart. They are very prominent in Documenta 15—maybe the most prominent presence.
      Cardboards, a work of the Indonesian art collective Taring Padi, at the Friedrichsplatz square in front of the Fridericianum Museum, one of the venues of Documenta 15 in Kassel. Photo: Ina Fassbender/AFP via Getty Images.
      Their cardboard signs featuring cartoons and social justice slogans about various causes, staked into the ground, filled the main site of the show, while an entire venue, Hallenbad Ost, was dedicated to a retrospective of their political graphics and banners.
      That show is called “Flame of Solidarity: First They Came for Them, Then They Came for Us.” That’s a reference to Martin Niemöller’s famous 1946 poem about the rise of Nazism. “Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew…”
      As Jörg Heiser noted at Art Agenda, a critical essay archived on Taring Padi’s own website pointed out that how the satire of their political graphics “tend to reproduce the common, normative, and stereotypical messages” of Indonesian society, in particular when “depicting the physical and stereotypical attributes of religious, racial, and ethnic diversity.” The danger of something dire like this happening is actually the flip side of the curatorial emphasis on demotic, “popular” culture: The more that aperture opens, the more chance you have to reckon with tropes and stereotypes that a more carefully sterilized academic culture brackets out, because “popular consciousness” is not unilaterally righteous or pure.
      I sort of agree, then, with an essay by curator Mohammad Salemy (though not with his title, “Antisemitism Is the Least of Documenta’s Problems”), when he says that in some sense this scandal grows out of the entire delegated curatorial framework of Documenta 15. Assuming for a minute that neither Taring Padi nor ruangrupa were attempting to dog-whistle to neo-Nazis with People’s Justice, the work simply would not have been shown in a more carefully curated show.
      But the work was shown. The fallout will be immense.
      “Documenta 15: Lumbung” is on view in Kassel, Germany, through September 25, 2022.
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      ‘Harmony Is Never Symmetry’: The Curator of Fondation Beyeler’s Deeply Researched Mondrian Show on What Made the Artist Tick

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      Piet Mondrian—the Dutch painter synonymous with rigidly gridded abstractions—never used a ruler, it turns out. 
      That was one of numerous revelations highlighted by conservators at the Fondation Beyeler in Basel, Switzerland, who have concluded a multi-year research project that preceded a retrospective of the famed artist, which is on view now through October. 
      Mondrian “made marks at the edges, then very slowly painted these lines. They look precise but they are based on intuition,” said Ulf Kuster, who organized the exhibition. For the Dutch artist, painting was a “long process of looking, of composing, of erasing,” the curator explained. 
      The Neo-plasticist’s greatest hits abound with myriad right angles and intersecting lines, so it’s hard to believe that he didn’t use an aid. But Mondrian’s hesitance to using a ruler says more about his dogmatic—and often arduous—approach to art, Kuster pointed out. 
      Piet Mondrian, Composition With Yellow and Blue (1932). © Mondrian/Holtzman TrustPhoto: Robert Bayer, Basel.
      “I really learned that [Mondrian] was a painter who was always in control of what he did,” the curator said of his experience working on the show. “I didn’t realize how painstaking this process of painting must’ve been for him and how thoughtful he looked at things and how much he reflected on painting.” 
      “Mondrian Evolution” is the name of Kuster’s exhibition, which marks the 150th anniversary of the artist’s birth. It also doubles as a description of what viewers can expect at the Beyeler: a tip-to-toe survey of Mondrian’s career, beginning with his younger efforts in portraiture and landscape.
      Those early paintings, completed in the Netherlands just before and after the turn of the 19th century, don’t look like the ones for which he would later become known. But it’s also not hard to spot shared strands of DNA. See, for instance, his many studies of whirling windmills and multi-branched trees: it’s clear that, even then, the artist was trying to translate into oil paint the geometry that governs the world around us.
      “He was looking for harmony, but harmony is never symmetry,” Kuster said. “Harmony has to have tension over time.” 
      Piet Mondrian, Mill in Sunlight (1908). © 2022 Mondrian/Holtzman Trust. Photo: Kunstmuseum Den Haag.
      With exposure to painters like Picasso and Braque, and a multi-year stint in Paris, abstraction began to suffuse Mondrian’s canvases around 1911. His once-representational scenes of Dutch waterways dissolved into Cubist abstractions that, while still based in the lived world, prioritized form over content. 
      Within the next decade, he returned to the Netherlands, then went back to Paris. His loosely-painted cubes morphed into hard rectangles; his cool, fauvist-inspired palette was replaced by solid bands of color. The style that would come to be known as “De Stijl” was born.
      From classic figuration to cutting-edge abstraction, the full trajectory of Mondrian’s work on view at the Beyeler mirrors the evolution of modernism itself. However, the Dutch artist also shows us the importance of looking beyond that familiar story, Kuster pointed out. 
      “Mondrian is someone who teaches you a lot about painting,” said the curator, demonstrating his own affection for the artist. “The very art historical—and in many ways helpful—idea that modern art is a development from figuration to abstraction is okay, but it’s not really interesting to artists.”
      “For an artist,” Kuster went on, “It’s not important if it’s representational or non-representational, because it’s always abstract. It’s always abstract, because painting is abstraction.”
      See some of the highlights of “Mondrian Evolution” below:
      Piet Mondrian, No. VI / Composition No.II (1920). © 2021 Mondrian/Holtzman TrustPhoto: Tate.
      Piet Mondrian, The Red Cloud (1907). © 2022 Mondrian/Holtzman Trust. Photo: Kunstmuseum Den Haag.

      Piet Mondrian, Church Tower at Domburg (1911). © 2022 Mondrian/Holtzman TrustPhoto: Kunstmuseum Den Haag.
      Piet Mondrian, Windmill in the Evening (1917). © 2022 Mondrian/Holtzman Trust. Photo: Kunstmuseum Den Haag.
      Piet Mondrian, Woods Near Oele (1908). © 2022 Mondrian/Holtzman Trust. Photo: Kunstmuseum Den Haag.
      Piet Mondrian, Flowering Apple Tree (1912).© 2022 Mondrian/Holtzman TrustPhoto: Kunstmuseum Den Haag.
      Piet Mondrian, Lozenge Composition with Eight Lines and Red/Picture No. III (1938). © Mondrian/Holtzman TrustPhoto: Robert Bayer, Basel.
      “Mondrian Evolution” is on view now through October 9, 2022 at the Fondation Beyeler in Basel, Switzerland.
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      Restorers Uncovered Stunning Renaissance-era Frescoes By Accident During Routine Repairs at the Prince’s Palace of Monaco

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      The Prince’s Palace of Monaco has just reopened to the public after a period of restoration, boasting a newly discovered series of frescoes that had been hidden from sight for centuries. 
      The wall paintings had been left untouched and it is not known why they were originally covered up. They are believed to have been painted by Genoese artists during the 16th century. This is due both to the style of the works as well as the lime-based plaster used, detected during a multispectral analysis. 
      “This discovery places the Grimaldi family and Palace of Monaco within a new art historical context as a Renaissance palace,” Said chief conservator-restorer Julia Greiner to Artnet News. “The discovery has ignited numerous research projects including conservation and sustainability which have been inspired through his sovereign highness, Prince Albert II’s interest and dedication to environmental issues. Furthermore it has brought together a pluridisciplinary team of approximately 40 specialists that have worked on this project for the last 8 years.”
      Hercules’ tenth labour: the Cattle of Geryon in the Galerie d’Hercule. © Photo Maël Voyer Gadin – Palais princier de Monaco.
      Restorers began routine repair work in 2013 but first realized there were new artistic treasures to uncover in 2015 when examining the lunettes and vaulted ceiling of a loggia in the courtyard. It had been repainted in the 19th century but images of Hercules’s twelve labors were found remaining underneath. 
      The cleaning process revealed richly skilled renderings of these scenes, allegorical figures, and decorative elements totalling some 600 meters squared.
      Frescoes have also come to light elsewhere in the palace. In the Chamber of Europe, previously named the Salon Matignon, an electrician accidentally began the process of uncovering a medallion painted on the ceiling that shows the mythological abduction of Europa by Jupiter. 
      Ceiling of the Chambre Louis XIII mid-restoration. © Photo Maël Voyer Gadin – Palais princier de Monaco.
      In 2020, a large scale fresco depicting Ulysses was also found in the Throne Room. 
      The official residence of the Sovereign Prince of Monaco, the palace was built as a fortress in 1191. In the 700 years since 1297, it has been home to the Grimaldi family, currently Prince Albert II. 
      An opening initially planned for April 2020 had to be delayed due to the pandemic. The palace and its trove of newly-discovered frescoes now remains open until October 15.
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      In Pictures: See Works by the Disabled Artists Reviving the Spirit of Dada at Museums Around the U.K. This Weekend

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      This Saturday, 31 artists will disrupt 30 museums across the UK with surreal interventions intended to honour the 102nd anniversary of the First International Dada Exhibition, staged in Berlin in 1920.
      All the artists taking part identify as d/Deaf, disabled or neurodivergent. The event has been organised by DASH, a disabled-led visual arts charity based in London, and funded £125,000 ($152,000) through the Ampersand Foundation Award.
      “We Are Invisible We Are Visible” was first concocted in 2020 as a response to the question of what the Dada movement would have been like if it had emerged during lockdown. Reviving the spirit of Dada aims to challenge assumptions about disabled people and explore ideas around accessibility, communication, and representation.
      The works planned are primarily performances, dance, and nonsensical happenings, and the venues taking part include Tate’s four locations in London, Liverpool, and St Ives, Turner Contemporary in Margate, the Hepworth Wakefield, the Arnolfini in Bristol, the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead, Manchester Art Gallery, Ikon Gallery in Birmingham and Modern Art Oxford. 
      “We Are Invisible We Are Visible” takes place on July 2, 2022. Below, see more preview images of works by the participating artists.
      Tony Heaton, Great Britain From A Wheelchair (1995). Photo: Paul Kenny. Heaton will perform at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead.
      Andrea Mindel, Mea Culpa (2021). Photo: Vic Lentaigne. Mindel will perform at Towner Eastbourne.
      Aaron Williamson, Invisible Man. Photo: courtesy of DASH. Williamson will perform at Ikon Gallery, Birmingham.
      Aaron Williamson, Hiding in 3D. Photo: courtesy of DASH. Williamson will perform at Ikon Gallery, Birmingham.
      Bel Pye, Cocoon. Photo: courtesy of DASH. Pye will perform at the Centre for Contemporary Art Derry~Londonderry.
      Anahita Harding, Are You Comfortable Yet?. Photo: courtesy of DASH. Harding will perform at Tate Modern, London.
      Nicola Woodham, Buffer performance detail at Cafe Oto, London, in 2021. Photo: courtesy of DASH. Woodham will perform at the Harris, Preston.
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      ‘It’s Important to Leave Something for the People of Venice’: Why Artist Bosco Sodi Is Letting Locals Take His Biennale Art Home

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      When the Venice Biennale closes in November, artworks from hundreds of artists will be packed up and shipped back to countries around the world. But a little piece of the contemporary-art circus that brings so many jet-setting art collectors to the Italian city will stay at the lagoon thanks to Bosco Sodi.
      That’s because the artist is giving away one of the artworks in his exhibition “Bosco Sodi: What Goes Around Comes Around.” Venetian residents will be able to take home the small 195 clay spheres that surround a giant one in Noi Siamo Uno, an interactive display on view beneath a Murano glass chandelier at the Palazzo Vendramin Grimani.
      “It’s very gracious, the biennale, in a way. People come, go around, and then boom, everything disappears,” Sodi told Artnet News. “I think it’s important to leave something for the people of Venice.”
      The artist sourced the clay for his sculptures in Oaxaca, just a few miles from Casa Wabi, Sodi’s studio and a nonprofit arts center that hosts an artists’ residency as well as programming for children. (He baked the clay spheres on improvised oven on the beach at the waterfront property.)
      Bosco Sodi, Noi Siamo Uno in “Bosco Sodi: What Goes Around Comes Around” at the Palazzo Vendramin Grimani, Venice. Photo by Laziz Hamani, courtesy of Kasmin, New York; Axel Verwoordt, Antwerp; and König, Berlin.
      During the show’s run, visitors are welcome to take a single sphere and roll it across the floor to create a space that changes slightly with each guest’s arrival. Each orb represents one of the world’s nation states, while the big one symbolizes humanity (the title means “We Are All One” in Italian.) The opportunity to take one home will come on the show’s last day.
      The gesture is in keeping with the exhibition’s themes of global trade, inspired by Venice’s centuries of history as a major sea power.
      The artist created new works for the show using cochineal, a red dye made from insects that he brought to Italy from his native Mexico. Sodi hadn’t done a project with cochineal in several years, and had to track down a new supplier for the pigment, which precolonial Mexicans used to paint Maya stelae and other monuments.
      Installation view of “Bosco Sodi: What Goes Around Comes Around” at the Palazzo Vendramin Grimani, Venice. Photo courtesy of Kasmin, New York; Axel Verwoordt, Antwerp; and König, Berlin.
      “It’s an insect that grows in the nopales cactus, and it’s a parasite,” he said of the bug. “The make a nest and the leaves get covered with white spots. The farmers scrape them off the leaves and put them in the sun to dry.”
      “What’s interesting about it is, depending on the batch, the color can change completely. It depends on the acidity of the insect. When the cochineal arrived here, it was embraced by all the classical painters of Europe. It doesn’t fade. It changed completely the approach to red and to color—and it came back to Mexico and there began to be classical painting in Mexico.”
      Adding another layer to the cultural exchange, Sodi set up a makeshift studio on the first floor of the palazzo in preparation for the show. He combined the red pigment with sawdust, wood, pulp, natural fibers, and glue to make his textured canvases.
      Installation view of “Bosco Sodi: What Goes Around Comes Around” at the Palazzo Vendramin Grimani, Venice. Photo by Laziz Hamani, courtesy of Kasmin, New York; Axel Verwoordt, Antwerp; and König, Berlin.
      At his waterfront studio in Red Hook, Brooklyn, the floor is encrusted with excess material that dripped off the edges of each painting, the colors from different works layered atop one another like some kind of manmade sedimentary rock.
      But in Venice, Sodi found excessive amounts of liquid seeping through the canvas, which was more loosely woven than what he is used to working worth.
      “I was afraid it would stain the marble floor, so I cleaned it up with the rest of the canvas that was left over, and I began to play with it,” Sodi said.
      He formed the canvases, now dyed deep red, into small bundles and left them to dry. The result was a group of simple but beautiful sculptures shaped like roses—a form that, serendipitously, echoed the rows of ornamental rosettes that adorn the ceiling in the room where they are now on display in Venice.
      Installation view of “Bosco Sodi: What Goes Around Comes Around” at the Palazzo Vendramin Grimani, Venice. Photo by Laziz Hamani, courtesy of Kasmin, New York; Axel Verwoordt, Antwerp; and König, Berlin.
      There are also new works made during lockdown at Casi Wabi. During a trip to the local fruit and vegetable market, Sodi became intrigued by the sack cloths used to transport food and began using them as makeshift canvases. He ransacked a storeroom full of materials left behind by former residents, finding tubes of oil paint and using them to mark the sacks with simple red, black, and orange circles.
      Installed in the palazzo courtyard are a set of sculptures made from volcanic rocks, coated in a fiery red glaze that recalls their origins as molten lava. The series grew out of boredom a decade ago, while Sodi was in Guadalajara fabricating an edition of individually crafted ceramic decanters he was making for 1800 Tequila.
      “I had nothing to do while I was waiting for them to dry. I said to the owner of the factory, ‘What happens if we put a rock in the kiln and we glaze it?’” Sodi recalled.
      Installation view of “Bosco Sodi: What Goes Around Comes Around” at the Palazzo Vendramin Grimani, Venice. Photo by Laziz Hamani, courtesy of Kasmin, New York; Axel Verwoordt, Antwerp; and König, Berlin.
      At first, the factory owner was worried the rock might explode. Then, a salesperson stopped by selling molcajetes, a Mexican mortar and pestle traditionally made from volcanic rock. If he used a rock that had already been fire tested, Sodi realized, it was unlikely the kiln would be in any danger.
      Soon, he was leading an expedition to the Ceboruco volcano, about two and a half hours outside the city, in search of raw materials for his experiment.
      “We went the Mexican way, not with a crane—with two donkeys and 10 guys,” Sodi said. “I call it rock hunting. I pick the rocks that I like, I clean them, and I do the glazing. I respect the form of the rock totally.”
      Installation view of “Bosco Sodi: What Goes Around Comes Around” at the Palazzo Vendramin Grimani, Venice. Photo courtesy of Kasmin, New York; Axel Verwoordt, Antwerp; and König, Berlin.
      The result is a fusion of art and geology. Sometimes, the rocks did still shatter in the heat of the kiln, revealing the raw insides—an accident that Sodi embraced.
      Inside the palazzo, works have been installed amid the historic decor. The Grimani family owned the home from 1517 to 1959, and the original interior remains largely intact, with neoclassical frescoes, damask wall coverings, ornate tapestries, and terrazzo floors.
      There’s even a collection of decorative fans, which Sodi has cheekily augmented with contemporary fans bought in Mexico and in Venice that he’s painted to match his other works in the exhibition.
      Installation view of “Bosco Sodi: What Goes Around Comes Around” at the Palazzo Vendramin Grimani, Venice. Photo courtesy of Kasmin, New York; Axel Verwoordt, Antwerp; and König, Berlin.
      Curated by Daniela Ferretti and Dakin Hart, the show is the first contemporary art exhibition at the palazzo, which opened to the public in 2021 and is operated by the Fondazione dell’Albero d’Oro.
      On the ground floor are more clay works: another giant sphere, cracked towers of large cubes, and a neatly stacked pile of bricks. The sculptures sit just beyond the doors that open out onto the Venetian canal, where deliveries would have been historically made to the home and its residents.
      Installation view of “Bosco Sodi: What Goes Around Comes Around” at the Palazzo Vendramin Grimani, Venice. Photo by Laziz Hamani, courtesy of Kasmin, New York; Axel Verwoordt, Antwerp; and König, Berlin.
      “We wanted to present the works as if they were unique goods coming from America—these red paintings that maybe were found in the Amazon, these clay cubes that were part of a pyramid discovery,” Sodi said.
      But he also believes that these works have a universal quality.
      “Clay has been part of the evolution of man. If you go to a museum in Rome or Egypt or Korea of India or Peru, the first figurines are all very similar, because it’s the essence of man,” Sodi said. “Clay is in our DNA.”
      “Bosco Sodi: What Goes Around Comes Around” is on view at the Palazzo Vendramin Grimani, San Polo, 2033, 30125 Venice, April 23–November 27, 2022.
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      In Pictures: See Grayson Perry’s Irreverent Tapestries, Which Tap Into British Class Anxiety, on View in Salisbury Cathedral

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      Six colourful and richly detailed tapestries by British artist Grayson Perry have been installed in the nave of Salisbury Cathedral in the west of England. The group, titled “The Vanity of Small Differences,” has already toured the country, but this is the first time they have been staged in a church setting.
      The works, each measuring four meters by two meters, were inspired by William Hogarth’s narrative painting series, specifically The Rake’s Progress (1734) which follows the rise and fall of the debaucherous Tom Rakewell. The 18th-century artist typically used these paintings to make biting social commentary about pretensions and class.
      Here, Perry’s protagonist Tim Rakewell explores upward mobility in the present day, using a cast of characters based on people the artist encountered while traveling to various regions of the UK for a TV program.
      “Rich in colour and content, it is Perry’s acutely observed attention to detail which draws you in,” said curator Beth Hughes. “I’m sure we all have moments of familiarity as we look through this tableau of English life and see that mug we have at home and ask ourselves, which social class do I belong to?”
      References to classical and religious art can be found in the paintings, including to Giovanni Bellini’s The Agony in the Garden and Andrea Mantegna’s The Adoration of the Cage Fighters.
      “The Vanity of Small Differences” runs until September 25 2022. See images of the installation below. 
      Installation view of Grayson Perry’s tapestry series “The Vanity of Small Differences” in Salisbury Cathedral. Photo: Finnbarr Webster.
      Installation view of Grayson Perry’s tapestry series “The Vanity of Small Differences” in Salisbury Cathedral. Photo: Finnbarr Webster. Courtesy of Salisbury Cathedral.
      Installation view of Grayson Perry’s tapestry series “The Vanity of Small Differences” in Salisbury Cathedral. Photo: Finnbarr Webster.
      Installation view of Grayson Perry’s tapestry series “The Vanity of Small Differences” in Salisbury Cathedral. Photo: Finnbarr Webster. Courtesy of Salisbury Cathedral.
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      In Pictures: A New Show at the Getty Museum Explores How Medieval Art Has Inspired Pop Culture, From Brothers Grimm to Game of Thrones

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      As current circumstances draw comparisons to medieval times, the Getty Museum presents “The Fantasy of the Middle Ages,” an exhibition that pairs illuminated manuscripts dating back to the 1200s with modern relics inspired by the era, from Brothers Grimm to Lord of the Rings. 
      The show presents nine manuscripts alongside objects on loan from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, UCLA, even the Getty’s own staffers (think: Beanie Babies, Dungeons & Dragons). One prayer book circa 1450, for example, is echoed in Eyvind Earle’s concept art for Disney’s Sleeping Beauty (1959).
      The juxtapositions reveal just how much medieval times—and the epic adventures of heroism, romance, and magic we associate with them—have saturated American culture, and the hazy bounds between fact and fantasy that exist in popular (mis)understandings of the Middle Ages.  
      “This exhibition aims to tell a visual story about how these elements appear in medieval examples, and how they have been changed over time and layered with new cultural and social meaning to result in our modern version of what constituted the Middle Ages,” Getty assistant curator Larisa Grollemond told Artnet News.
      Unknown Franco-Flemish, A Dragon (ca. 1270). Courtesy of the Getty Museum.
      The idea for the show began with a 2014 social media initiative titled “Getty of Thrones,” which recapped HBO’s Game of Thrones episodes with imagery from the museum’s singular collection of medieval manuscripts. The Getty first began collecting in the category in 1983 to help bridge the “chronological gap between the antiquities and Renaissance paintings that Getty himself had collected,” according to Grollemond.
      The social media initiative evolved into Instagram videos “addressing audience questions about links between the ‘real’ Middle Ages and the medieval-inspired world presented in the show,” Grollemond said. Obviously, there weren’t really dragons back then, but even the architecture of medieval-inspired media comes from a self-referential culture resembling Orientalism. “The Fantasy of the Middle Ages” exhibits a 1879 photo called “Stairway of Christ Church,” for instance, that bears striking resemblance to the entrance at Hogwarts. “This was probably not something the filmmakers looked directly at,” Grollemond told the L.A. Times.
      “The Fantasy of the Middle Ages” continues that conversation over two galleries and six sections—a story of storytelling, rooted in mesmerizing drawings of painstakingly preserved tempera, ink, and, of course, gold leaf.
      “There’s a very complex interweaving of fantasy and history in these contemporary takes on the Middle Ages,” Grollemond said. “The ‘medieval’ world that fantasy stories present has the power to shape our view of the historical Middle Ages as well, and so continues to be hugely relevant for artists, creators, and audiences today.”

      Below, see more cultural comparisons from “The Fantasy of the Middle Ages,” on view at the Getty Museum through September 11, 2022.
      Julia Margaret Cameron, The Parting of Sir Lancelot and Queen Guinevere (1875). Courtesy of the Getty Museum.
      C. Hertel, Stolzenfels Castle (1878). Courtesy of the Getty Museum.
      Loyset Liédet & Pol Fruit, The Battle Between Arnault de Lorraine and His Wife Lydia (1467-72). Courtesy of the Getty Museum.
      Master of Guillebert de Mets, Saint George and the Dragon, (ca.1450-55). Courtesy of the Getty Museum.
      Unknown Silesian, The Battle of Liegnitz and Scenes from the Life of Saint Hedwig (1353). Courtesy of the Getty Museum.
      Unknown English, Constellation Diagrams (1200s). Courtesy of the Getty Museum.
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