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      In Pictures: See the Visceral Pleasures of ‘Real Corporeal,’ Debuting Arthur Jafa’s Newest Work Alongside Art by the Next Big Things

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      Not every show is worth a special trip. But “Real Corporeal,” an ambitious exhibition organized by Gladstone Gallery in the former home of Gavin Brown’s enterprise in Harlem, justifies a commute. Helmed by London curator Ben Broome, the show brings together works by an intergenerational cast of artists in a variety of media, all concerned with re-asserting the body’s presence in the gallery space.
      As anyone who’s ever had to use the restroom at an art show might know, white cubes are meant mostly for the mind and eyes. But a robust performance program accompanying the show aims to pack bodies into the gallery, where visitors will be surrounded by 30 works from artists with conversant practices.
      “If one is to conceptualize the exhibition as a family gathering, the aunts and uncles are seated interspersed amongst the younger cousins,” the press statement reads. Renowned electronic musician Klein has a work, cheekily titled Life as a Clout Chaser is Hard (2022), alongside a contribution by her mentor, artist Mark Leckey. Sara Sadik’s moving images are kindred with those of Cyprien Gaillard.
      Those who come to see Arthur Jafa’s latest, Dirty Tesla (2021), which riffs off his practice of sequencing found footage, may stay for Tommy Malekoff’s Desire Lines (2019), a 15-minute video of strange spectacle that contrasts car tires with fireworks. Also on view are figurative paintings by sought-after artists Chase Hall, Pol Taburet, Amanda Ba, and George Rouy.
      Broome told Arnet News that the massive Harlem space was a natural fit for “Real Corporeal”: “It’s an incredible gallery for showing art—there’s nothing else like that monastic top floor in New York City.” But the architecture is but one of many entry points.
      Broome maintains there’s no single “best spot” to understand “Real Corporeal” from—except the mind, counterintuitively, “when you’re on the train home thinking anxiously about whether Klein’s work Life as a Clout Chaser is Hard applies to you.”
      Or, better yet, catch a performance. Gladstone recently hosted Chassol on September 24, and Slauson Malone 1 on September 26. Keep your eyes on the gallery’s Instagram for future announcements, including a yet-to-be-revealed performance from Joan Jonas, the eldest artist in the show.
      “Without her,” Broome said, “I wonder how many of these artists would be here.”
      “Real Corporeal” is on view at 439 West 127th Street through October 15, 2022.
      Tommy Malekoff, Desire Lines (2019). Two-channel digital video and sound. Installation view. Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery. Photography by David Regen
      Installation view, “Real Corporeal,” including Arthur Jafa’s Dirty Tesla (2021) at center. Photography by David Regen.
      Christelle Oyiri, The Twilight of The Idols (2022). Printed 4 plexiglass panel installation. Installation view, Photography © Jay Izzard
      Installation view featuring works by George Rouy, Chase Hall, Christelle Oyiri, Walter Pichler, and Klein. Photo by David Regen
      Chase Hall, Up and Downstate Boys (2022). Acrylic and coffee on cotton canvas
      Pol Taburet, Fertilizer / Neg (2022). Installation view, with viewers. Photography © Jay Izzard
      Installation view, featuring works by Pol Taburet and Rhea Dillon. Photo by David Regen
      Amanda Ba, The Plower and the Weaver (2022). Oil on canvas
      Mark Leckey, To the Old World (Thank You for the Use of Your Body) (2021). Two channel 9:16 video installation, aluminum, steel, with 7.1 surround sound. Installation view. Photo by David Regen
      Christelle Oyiri, Family Fresco 2002 (2022). Printed 4 wooden panel installation. Installation view. Photography © Jay Izzard
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      With Sold-Out Gigs in New York, Iconic Indie Band Pavement Will Open a Pop-up Show Celebrating Its 30-Year History

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      Ice, baby, there’s a Pavement exhibition coming to New York. 
      This week, the seminal band announced the arrival of “Pavements 1933-2022: A Pavement Museum,” a four-day-long pop-up that coincides with its slate of sold-out shows at Brooklyn’s Kings Theater later this month. (The “1933” of the show’s title is a reference to the group’s debut EP, “Slay Tracks 1933-1969,” which was actually released in 1989.)
      Billed—in the indie outfit’s signature brand of slacker savant humor—as an “international museum exhibition,” the show will bring together artifacts and archival material spanning Pavement’s 30-plus year history.
      On view will be “previously unseen imagery, artwork and ephemera, commendations and commemorations,” as well as “rumored relics of the band’s real and imagined history,” according to the project’s website. “Exclusive merchandise and classic museum souvenirs” will also be available for purchase.
      Following its run in New York, the Pavement Museum will make stops in London and Toyko before ultimately landing in the band’s hometown of Stockton, California, where it will go on permanent display. 
      The exhibition “completes a circle for one of the most celebrated and deliberated bands in modern music and helps redefine a secret history performed in plain sight,” an announcement reads. 

      On the occasion of its four sold-out concerts at Brooklyn’s Kings Theatre, the rock band Pavement will unveil an international museum exhibition, Pavements 1933-2022: A Pavement Museum pic.twitter.com/YhrBgY1x0i
      — PAVEMENT (@pavement_band) September 26, 2022

      What that “secret history” refers to is unclear. Probably nothing, as the pop-up’s description reads like a sardonic send-up of the sensationalized, “Behind the Music”–style editorialization of similar shows, like the Rolling Stones’ “Exhibitionism,” for instance. Then again, the tension of a band mocking indie fame while reluctantly embracing it has always been at the heart of Pavement’s charm.  
      A representative for the group didn’t immediately respond to Artnet News’s request for more details about what visitors can expect, but Variety reported that the event is, at least, real, and not another ironic joke. 
      Incidentally, another museum plays a foundational role in Pavement’s history: the group’s frontman and drummer, Stephen Malkmus and Steve West, were working as security guards at the Whitney Museum of American Art when they recorded their first album, “Slanted and Enchanted,” in 1991.
      Pavement, which officially disbanded in 2000, is currently out on the road for a long-awaited—and repeatedly-delayed—reunion tour, the group’s first since 2010.
      “Pavements 1933-2022” will be on view September 29–October 2 at 475 Greenwich Street in New York.
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      ‘I Had Never Seen Anything Like It Before’: Steve Martin on the Spark That Led Him to Become One of the Top Collectors of Australian Indigenous Art

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      Steve Martin has been back in the headlines of late, thanks to his leading role in the hit Hulu comedy Only Murders in the Building. But he also has a star turn this fall at the National Arts Club in New York, which is presenting a small but striking exhibition of Indigenous Australian art from the actor’s personal collection.
      Titled “Selections from Australia’s Western Desert: From the Collection of Steve Martin and Anne Stringfield,” the show features six works from among the 50 or so contemporary paintings by Indigenous Australian artists that Martin has purchased with his wife since 2015.
      The couple’s passion for this still rather obscure area of contemporary art got its start at Salon 94 on the Upper East Side, which at the time was presenting the first U.S. solo show for Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri. Martin read about the show in the New York Times, and was immediately intrigued. “I got on my bicycle, and I went down, and I bought one,” he told Artnet News.
      Bill Whiskey Tjapaltjarri, Rockholes and Country Near the Olgas (2008). Collection of Steve Martin and Anne Stringfield.
      Martin, of course, had been collecting for years, starting out with a James Gale Tyler seascape he picked up at an antique store for $500 at age 21 and still owns; today, he estimated, it has dipped in value to $300. (Martin’s next acquisition, a print by Ed Ruscha of the Hollywood sign, has probably fared better over the years.)
      The love affair with Indigenous Australian art, however, was something of a slow burn for Martin and Stringfield.
      “We hung it, we loved it, but we didn’t really think about it for a few years. But there is a whole culture around these paintings, and slowly, through osmosis, I began to learn more and more,” he said. “The history of Indigenous painting only goes back to about 1970—before that it was sand painting, wall painting, carving, and this was the first time these images could be set down in a permanent way.”
      Making lasting, portable works that could be sold was transformative for the Indigenous art community—and brought something brand new to the art world, a movement that became known as Desert Painting.
      “I think it’s such a fascinating story,” Martin said. He also appreciated collecting in an area where there wasn’t a huge amount of established scholarship.
      “It’s fun to have something to study, to try to understand, to apply your critical eye to without any outside pressure,” he added. “There’s not a lot of promotion about [these] artists. You just have to find it out yourself.”
      Slowly but surely, Martin began buying more and more Indigenous art, even traveling with Stringfield to Australia. (Though they didn’t make it to the Outback, they visited a center where working artists create their paintings.)
      Carlene West, Tjitjitji. Collection of Steve Martin and Anne Stringfield.
      They also met Indigenous artist Yukultji Napangati when she visited New York a few years ago and had her over to dinner.
      “She made my daughter a family member, which was quite an honor, and I played the banjo,” Martin said. “Yukultji is quite a historical figure. She was one of the Pintupi Nine, and came in from the Outback when she was 13—had never seen a white man, had never seen a car—and then became a notable painter.”
      As Martin and Stringfield’s holdings in Indigenous art grew, so too did their desire to show them to the world. To start, Martin staged a small show at the Uovo storage facility in Queens for friends and family.
      Word got out. Next came an outing at Gagosian—nothing for sale, of course—that showed in both New York and Los Angeles, and an exhibition at the Australian counsel residence in New York. (That showed paired Martin’s collection with works owned by John Wilkerson, whose collection focuses on smaller, earlier works on board, before Indigenous artists got access to canvases.)
      These days, Martin and Stringfield are winding down their active collecting.
      “Our indigenous art collection is pretty dense—there’s not much left to acquire. Right now, we are just having fun moving works around,” Martin said. “I love to rotate things. Every time you move a picture, it’s like getting a new picture. You see it anew.”
      And of course, he loves seeing his collection on the walls of the National Arts Club, which is currently presenting works by Tjapaltjarri, Bill Whiskey Tjapaltjarri, Timo Hogan, Carlene West, and Doreen Reid Nakamarra.
      “It’s an unpredictable melange of pictures. There’s some later ones—Timo Hogan is very contemporary,” Martin said, adding that “in the Australian Indigenous art world, a 50 year old is considered a young painter.” Hogan is 49.
      “I’d like people to be able to see the National Arts Club show because it’s very, very unusual,” he added. “And I hope they have the same experience I did—I had never seen anything like it before.”
      “Selections From Australia’s Western Desert From the Collection of Steve Martin and Anne Stringfield” is on view at the National Arts Club, 15 Gramercy Park South, New York, New York, September 12–October 27, 2022. 
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      The Met Is Showing Incredible Ceramics by the Often Unnamed Enslaved Potters Who Worked in the American South

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      The Metropolitan Museum of Art has organized an important exhibition centered around 50 ceramic objects made by enslaved African American potters who were active in westernmost South Carolina during the 19th century.
      “In the decades before the Civil War, a successful alkaline-glazed stoneware industry developed in Old Edgefield District, a clay-rich area,” the museum says in a statement. And while common depictions of slavery focus on the backbreaking labor of harvesting cash crops, the exhibition “Hear Me Now,” shows that enslaved people were also highly skilled artisans.
      “When I talk to artists about it, they’re still incredulous about the fact that these jars were made, that they survived the kiln firing,” said co-curator Adrienne Spinozzi, an assistant research curator from the Met’s American Wing, of the unique ceramic housewares, which became a lucrative cottage industry in the plantation economy.
      Face jug, by an unrecorded potter, attributed to Miles Mill Pottery (1867–85), Old Edgefield District, South Carolina, alkaline-glazed stoneware with kaolin glaze. Photo: Hudgins Family Collection, New York.
      Michigan-based historian Jason Young co-curated the exhibition, contributing years of research and writing about the region’s pottery-rich past. Young also curated a show around Theaster Gates’s engagement with this history, called “The Clay Sermon.” Ethan Lasser, from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (where the show travels to next), rounded out the curatorial team.
      Planning for the show started in 2017, when the Met acquired a face jug from an unrecorded Edgefield potter for their permanent collection galleries. Spinozzi saw the object as a route to have conversations about “American history and these really difficult and complex and challenging moments in our country’s past.” She then visited South Carolina to do further research.
      The exhibition opens with 12 massive jars by David Drake—perhaps the best-known potter from Edgefield. Despite social restrictions against educating enslaved communities, Drake learned to read and write, developing exquisite handwriting, and he carved a wide array of simple literature onto his works, as well as signing and dating them. One jar from June 1834 reads “concatenation,” meaning a system of interconnection. Forty of the jars in the exhibition have similar “verses” carved onto them—sometimes poetic or biblical, sometimes informative (“this jar is for pork”) or even declarative,, proclaiming “I made this.”
      Detail of work by Dave, later recorded as David Drake, American, ca. 1801–1870s.
      Nineteen regional “face jugs” follow Drake’s works. These vessels, not commercial objects, were shaped to have visages with expressions in high relief. They appeared around 1858, half a century after the transatlantic slave trade had been outlawed, but the same year a ship arrived with 400 captive Africans—100 of which went to Edgefield’s potteries. Many face jugs are believed to resemble minkisi, ritual objects hailing from West-Central African religious practices.
      “Hear Me Now” bridges that history with the present moment by including contemporary Black artists who resonate with the Edgefield story, including Simone Leigh, Adebunmi Gbadebo, Woody De Othello, Theaster Gates, and Robert Pruitt.
      Theaster Gates, Signature Study (2020). Courtesy of the artist and White Cube, LondonPhoto: © White Cube/Theo Christelis.
      “As curators, we brought a different set of questions to the material,” Lasser told Artnet News. “We were also conveners, drawing on our own networks to engage friends and colleagues in the act of interpretation.”
      Scholarship on enslaved artists from American history has been slim. A team from the Met traveled with a conservator to South Carolina in 2019 to take samples of residue from the vessels’ interiors beyond their prohibitively slender necks. They’re now working with outside experts to learn what these enigmatic face jugs actually held.
      “We’re building this database that includes photographs of the interior,” Lasser added. “We’re looking at these objects, looking at their histories, trying to see if we can trace them back to the African American community.”
      Storage jar (ca. 1845), by an unrecorded potter, Trapp & Chandler Pottery (1843–ca. 1850), Old Edgefield District, South Carolina, alkaline-glazed stoneware with iron slip. Photo: Courtesy of the Collection of C. Philip and Corbett Toussaint.
      “We want viewers to walk away with an appreciation of the full breadth and depth of this fascinating material,” Young added over email. “We want them to connect with the people who created this material, even while living under a harsh regime of American racism and slavery.”
      To further this aim, on December 3, the Met will host a public program titled “Learning from Edgefield,” which will have discussions with historians, artists, and museum leaders on the best practices around working with African American cultural heritage sites like Edgefield, and how museums collect, display, and interpret objects by enslaved makers.
      “I am most looking forward to the conversations the show opens up,” Lasser said, “about Edgefield and ceramics, enslavement and industry—perhaps even about museums and collecting today.”
      “Hear Me Now” is on view through February 5, 2023, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It then travels to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (March 4–July 9, 2023), the University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor (August 26, 2023–January 7, 2024), and the High Museum of Art, Atlanta (February 16–May 12, 2024).
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      In Pictures: See Inside the Albertina’s Legacy-Defining Basquiat Retrospective

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      No artist in the history of New York City quite exemplifies the grit and determination of the 1980s quite like Jean-Michel Basquiat. 
      In a first for Austrian audiences, Basquiat’s legacy is being given a major retrospective at the Albertina Museum in Vienna. The show includes iconic pieces such as La Hara (1981), a skeletal portrait of a police officer that sold at auction for $35 million in 2017,  and Self-Portrait (1983).
      The exhibition is being billed as a legacy-defining one for the artist. More than  50 major works have been lent from public and private collections, including Basquiat’s estate (the artist’s sisters, Lisane Basquiat and Jeanine Heriveaux, even attended the opening), the Nicola Erni Collection, and art dealer Thaddaeus Ropac.
      Born in Brooklyn in 1960, to a Haitian father and Puerto Rican mother, Basquiat started developing his artistic style as a teenager, first conceiving the graffiti moniker SAMO in the 1970s with a high school friend, Al Diaz. 
      Basquiat’s later work, which many critics defined as “neo-expressionism,” was deeply influenced by these early experiences creating street art, and by the rap and punk music scenes he was a part of. In 1979, together with filmmaker Michael Holman, for example, Basquiat formed an experimental band called Gray. 
      The Albertina’s show unpacks the artist’s roots and follows his meteoric rise in the art world, from being the youngest ever participant at Documenta in 1982, to his relationship with other cultural superstars like Madonna and Warhol, through to his untimely death of a drug overdose in 1988, age 27.
      “Basquiat: The Retrospective” is on view through January 8, 2023, at the Albertina in Vienna. See more images from the exhibition here. 
      Visitors attend the “Basquiat: The Retrospective” exhibition preview at Albertina on September 8, 2022 in Vienna. Photo: Heinz-Peter Bader/Getty Images.
      Visitors attend the “Basquiat: The Retrospective” exhibition preview at Albertina on September 8, 2022 in Vienna. Photo: Heinz-Peter Bader/Getty Images.
      Visitors attend the “Basquiat: The Retrospective” exhibition preview at Albertina on September 8, 2022 in Vienna. Photo: Heinz-Peter Bader/Getty Images.
      Visitors attend the “Basquiat: The Retrospective” exhibition preview at Albertina on September 8, 2022 in Vienna. Photo: Heinz-Peter Bader/Getty Images.
      Visitors attend the “Basquiat: The Retrospective” exhibition preview at Albertina on September 8, 2022 in Vienna. Photo: Heinz-Peter Bader/Getty Images.
      Visitors attend the “Basquiat: The Retrospective” exhibition preview at Albertina on September 8, 2022 in Vienna. Photo: Heinz-Peter Bader/Getty Images.
      Visitors attend the “Basquiat: The Retrospective” exhibition preview at Albertina on September 8, 2022 in Vienna. Photo: Heinz-Peter Bader/Getty Images.
      Visitors attend the “Basquiat: The Retrospective” exhibition preview at Albertina on September 8, 2022 in Vienna. Photo: Heinz-Peter Bader/Getty Images.
      Visitors attend the “Basquiat: The Retrospective” exhibition preview at Albertina on September 8, 2022 in Vienna. Photo: Heinz-Peter Bader/Getty Images.
      Untitled (1982) by Jean-Michel Basquiat. Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam. Photo: Studio Tromp; © Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat, licensed by Artesar, New York.
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      Filipino Artist Pio Abad Turns Ferdinand Marcos and Ronald Reagan’s Cozy Correspondence Into Art at the Carnegie International

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      A foreign dictator pleads his case with the U.S. President and fashionable First Lady. Rudy Giuliani weighs in. So does Senator Orrin Hatch. These are not from the top secret documents kept in Mar-a-Lago by former president Donald Trump, but the correspondence of another celebrity-turned-president, Ronald Reagan, drawn from his official archives. And for the Filipino artist Pio Abad, they are a record of how powerful people manipulate public opinion to maintain their status.
      The Reagan letters all involve the late Filipino dictator Ferdinand Marcos and his wife, Imelda, who fled the Philippines in the wake of the People Power Revolution in 1986, and found refuge in Hawaii. The texts have been carved onto a series of Carrara marble tablets by Abad under the title “Thoughtful Gifts,” as part of his contribution to the Carnegie International exhibition in Pittsburgh, opening on Saturday, September 24.
      “You can see that this wasn’t just a professional relationship,” Abad said of the communications between the two political power couples. “It was a personal one. And I think they genuinely liked each other.”
      “Dear Mr. President, I have no other recourse but to write you this letter,” Ferdinand Marcos entreated with Ronald Reagan on October 20, 1988, in a last-ditch effort to avoid racketeering charges brought by Rudy Giuliani, then-U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. The ousted dictator wanted the president to personally intervene in the case and allow the Marcoses to prove that the billions in cash, real estate, art, and gems they amassed during their decades in power—some of which they smuggled with them out of the Philippines—were not acquired using stolen funds.
      “Imelda sends her prayers to you and Nancy,” Marcos ended his missive. “I remain your obedient servant.”
      Pio Abad, Thoughtful Gifts (October 20, 1988) (2020).
      In his reply, penned that same day, Reagan told Marcos that “the facts and circumstances in this case left me no choice except to defer to the Attorney General. I regret very much that this has become necessary but under our system you will have every opportunity to refute these charges.” He ended they note with an assurance that “Nancy joins me in extending to you and Imelda our best wishes.”
      A day later, the Marcoses were indicted on RICO charges in New York, and although Ferdinand died just a few months later, Imelda would stand trial in 1990—and be acquitted.
      In another letter, presented by Abad as a triptych, Giuliani outlined the evidence against the Marcos family in a dispatch to the Attorney General’s office, following a search of their daughter’s home in California. Giuliani wrote that the assets federal agents seized from the property—including more than 100 works of art and antique furniture—provided “further evidence that the Marcoses have continued to commit crimes and to conceal the fruits of their racketeering enterprise since they arrived in the United States.”
      Although Imelda Marcos was acquitted of racketeering, the trove of art that authorities in the U.S. and the Philippines seized was sold at auction in New York in 1991. But hundreds of works acquired by the family using their ill-gotten gains remain unaccounted for, including a Picasso that was spotted on the wall of Imelda’s home during a visit from her son, Ferdinand Jr., after he won the Philippines presidential election earlier this year.
      “These letters become portals to the past,” Abad said of the historical documents. “They are also like a palimpsest of how these characters were viewed then and how they are now.” Ferdinand Jr.’s rise to power, for example, largely came through a whitewashing of his parents’ actions during their reign. “The way that political personalities are recycled and reinterpreted throughout history, and the fact that we’re seeing this happen within a single generation, is frightening,” Abad said.
      In a further twist of fate, the Carnegie exhibition opens almost 50 years to the day that Marcos declared martial law in the Philippines.
      Pio Abad, installation view of Distant Possessions (2022) in the 58th Carnegie International. Photo: Sean Eaton. Courtesy of the artist and Carnegie Museum of Art.
      Abad’s other work in the exhibition draws on the Carnegie Museum of Art’s own history, specifically its founding patron, Andrew Carnegie. In addition to being a philanthropist and art collector, the steel magnate was—first and foremost—an industrialist.
      “Obviously Andrew Carnegie was one of the proponents of public philanthropy instead of paying your taxes,” Abad said. Carnegie was also a vocal opponent to a proposal being floated by the U.S. government at the time to annex the Philippines, even offering to buy its independence for $20 million.
      In an essay published in 1898, Carnegie put forward his arguments for why Filipinos should be left to govern themselves. In a telling passage, Carnegie described the Philippines as a nation of “about seven and a half millions of people, composed of races bitterly hostile to one another, alien races, ignorant of our language and institutions. Americans cannot be grown there.”
      Abad has taken that last sentence and enlarged it into a wall-sized mural, painted to mimic the neoclassical letters carved on the museum’s façade. The piece is meant to show that the ideological structures that underpin these cultural infrastructures “maybe haven’t really changed,” the artist said.
      That does not mean change is impossible, however. “I think we are at a point where a lot of Americans are questioning the myths that they were brought up with,” Abad said. “Beliefs of exceptionalism are being picked apart—rightfully so.”
      What Abad wants visitors to come away with from his project is to see that “as much as it’s a geopolitical study, it’s also an obsession informed by personal history. So it’s also universal.”
      “It’s a transnational tragedy that touches all our lives, which is ultimately tied to capital or greed or impunity, and the need to transform political fact to personal myth,” Abad said. “Regardless of how distorted it becomes.”
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      See the Hypnotic Immersive Experiences Coming to Frameless, the U.K.’s First Permanent Home for Experiential Art

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      The first permanent space dedicated to immersive art experiences is opening in London this October, and it is a whopping 30,000 square feet.
      Frameless, located in Marble Arch, invites audiences to experience interactive presentations of some of the public’s best-loved masterpieces by historical artists like Klimt, Cézanne, Monet, van Gogh, Dalí, and Kandinsky.
      These will be housed across four galleries decked out with state-of-the-art technology. On the opening night, one of these spaces will be filled with 360-degree landscapes, cityscapes, and seascapes by an assortment of artists including Cézanne, Canaletto, Turner, and Casper David Friedrich.
      The other three will be used to bring to life Edvard Munch’s Scream, with music to heighten the emotion tension, Monet’s The Waterlily Pond: Green Harmony, and Kandinsky’s jazz-inspired Yellow, Red, Blue.
      Frameless anticipates becoming one of London’s major cultural landmarks, and if it does so this will reflect the craze for immersive experiences in recent years as they reimagine familiar works of art for new audiences. The exhibitions have typically been temporary, but their popularity has seen the sector receive a huge boost in funding from investors meaning that we may yet see more permanent spaces like this one, which was modeled on Paris’s L’Atelier des Lumières.
      Frameless opens to the public on October 7, 2022. See images of the digital immersive art exhibition space below. 
      Gallery Munch at Frameless UK. Photo: Jordan Curtis Hughes.
      Gallery Monet at Frameless UK. Photo: Jordan Curtis Hughes.
      Gallery Monet at Frameless UK. Photo: Tom Dymond.
      Frameless Digital Immersive Art Experience. Photo: Paul Musso.
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      I’ve Been to a Lot of Gallery Weekends. Vienna’s ‘Curated By’ Festival Was the Most Cohesive and Moving I’ve Ever Seen

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      The resplendent chandeliers of Vienna’s Kursalon concert hall clashed with the lonely figures by Maria Sulymenko on view at the Vienna Contemporary fair. Standing in the booth of Ukraine’s Voloshyn Gallery, assistant Anna Kopylova and I had quick aside about her travels. She had driven for 30 hours from Kyiv, where, at the beginning of the war with Russia, she spent weeks living in the gallery. It is mostly underground, making it an ideal bomb shelter.
      I was haunted by a remark I had made the night before, lightly complaining over dinner about my seven-hour train ride from Berlin to attend of Vienna Contemporary and Curated By, a city-wide art festival that is, to quote one collector, “unique in the world.” It’s true: for 14 editions, this innovative model sees 24 dealers, with €9,000 in city funding, turn over their spaces to external curators who often hail from museums beyond Austria. Each organizes a single show that reflects on one umbrella theme.
      With an eye toward the ongoing war a 30-hour drive away, this year’s concept was kelet, Hungarian for “east.” (In case the psychological rift in Europe is not clear enough, the theme last year was humor.) Participating galleries each absorb the prompt differently, though in the case of kelet, many took it literally, opting to invite curators from longitudes east of Austria.
      Viennacontemporary 2022. 8-11 September, Kursalon Vienna. Photo courtesy of: kunstdokumentation.com
      Even without such a specific ask, Vienna’s art scene has long looked toward that horizon. Vienna Contemporary, held earlier this month, and the newer fair Spark, which takes place in the summer, both feature an array of galleries from central and eastern Europe.
      At Vienna Contemporary, one of the newcomers this year was Bucharest gallery Sandwich, a small artist-run space quite literally sandwiched between two buildings. The Romanian dealer showed small ceramic works based on a combination of folkloric myths and real political events by Ukrainian artist Diana Khalilova. On another floor, Ukrainian galleries Voloshyn and Kyiv’s Naked Room exhibited for free.
      Vienna and its cultural scene are a gateway between these European geographies and identities of east and west, however loaded the terms are. (“Every mention of east and west is accompanied by scare quotes,” noted Chicago-based curator of Curated By, Dieter Roelstraete, in his opening address.) However you want to slice Europe, Vienna is a town that looks like a polished jewel of old empire where you will hear Slavic languages almost as much as German on the streets. People, culture, and ideas flow from Bratislava and Budapest just as much as from western capitals of comparable sizes.
      Still, talk of east and west is a bit of a political game in Vienna, especially since the outbreak of war. Austria is pervaded by a “spooking kind of quiet” when it comes to solidarity with Ukraine, as one dealer put it. (The events were quieter too, with few to no Russian collectors.) In the not-so-distant past, this country was far from immune to Russian influence, money, and energy. And in the present, the nation has remained suspiciously neutral in a war with one aggressor.
      As such, the concept for Curated By, crafted by Dieter Roelstraete back in March (while Europe was still frozen in a collective gasp), carries a particular weight. Lithuanian curator Valentinas Klimasauskas commented that this year’s focus is, in a sense, a “gesture of art historical or curatorial justice.”
      The Prompt. Milda Drazdauskaitė, Elena Narbutaitė, Ola Vasiljeva, curated by Adomas Narkevičius, installation view GIANNI MANHATTAN (2022), courtesy the artists and GIANNI MANHATTAN, photo: kunst-dokumentation.com
      Kelet was, in some cases, gently rebutted by curators who deemed it too simplistic: Adomas Narkevičius, who organized an exhibition of Lithuanian artists at Gianni Manhattan, said he hoped to “react without responding.” His exhibition, with an all-Lithuanian female cast of artists (Milda Drazdauskaitė, Elena Narbutaitė, and Ola Vasiljeva) is cheekily called “The Prompt.” It examines the limits any sense of knowing, with minimal materials role-playing as something else. Supple-looking drapes of hanging paper obfuscate the view, and a laser light creates a pinkish-blue “cut” in the wall.
      Austrians seem to be well aware of the weird place they occupy now. Until recently, cheap Russian gas accounted for 80 percent of its energy. Europeans are panicking about the impending winter, and what it will mean for the economy (and what that, in turn, will mean for empathy for Ukraine). These same fears are deeply felt in the art world, with its big bright rooms that are costly to heat in a business with tight cash flow.
      This anxiety underpinned two exhibitions, including that of Galerie Georg Kargl, curated by Hana Ostan Ožbolt, where the lights were completely off in the gallery. Small sculptures, including meticulously wrought readymades by David Fesl, punctuated an otherwise somber space. At Galerie Crone, the front of the gallery was also darkened in a show curated by Eva Kraus, director of the Bundeskunsthalle Bonn, and Ukrainian artist Volo Bevza. The natural shadows deepened the poignant mood of an exhibition that included young, contemporary Ukrainian artists reflecting on the relationship between virtual and physical realities of war.
      “I Had a Dog and a Cat,” curated by Hana Ostan Ozbolt. Installation view. 2022. Courtesy the artists and Georg Kargl Fine Arts. © Georg Kargl Fine. Photo kunst-dokumentation.com.
      Particularly impactful was a large, standalone sculpture of a broadsheet by Yevgenia Belorusets. Placed in the middle of the room, the sculpture, called Please don’t take my picture! Or they’ll shoot me tomorrow, is printed with stories written by the artist that play with fact and fiction. The blown-up newspaper encompasses the split personality of media coverage around this war. I was struck by its date: 2015, one year after war officially began in Crimea. It was a time when Russian state money still enjoyed prominent status in the art world under the guise of promoting international exchange. Belorusets’s work punctures that myth and offers a very different picture.
      After circulating unknowable amounts of fairs and gallery weekends in recent years, they can begin to feel cacophonous. By contrast, Curated By hangs together in a way that is hybridized, varied, legible, and not pedantic. Although some contributors gently ignored the brief, all participants agreed it was no time for flashy works but instead an opportunity for muted reflection. There was some sense of a collective subconscious: in times of deep trouble, and where words fail us, art fills a void.
      Installation view. “The Neverending Eye,” Croy Nielsen, Vienna, 2022. Courtesy Croy Nielsen, Vienna. Photo: Kunst-dokumentation.com
      The most successful exhibitions opted to gaze beyond the immediate crisis, tracing a thread between the current war and longer plots. It’s essential not to reduce Ukrainian artists to the experience of this war and the refugee crisis, Polish curator from the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Natalia Sielewicz, pointed out as she gave a tour of “The Neverending Eye.”
      The solo exhibition at Croy Nielsen features works saved from Ukraine by the late Fedir Tetyanych. The pioneer of Ukrainian cosmism worked as a state artist for Soviet Ukraine. His works engage in double-speak: they are both historical champions of the Soviet era and also transgressive attempts to imagine worlds and ways beyond it.
      His “biotechnospheres,” futuristic utopian shelters of his own invention, are depicted in watercolors that were nearly lost to history before a dedicated group of “eastern” Europeans saved them during the onset of war. They hang now in Vienna, as dashed dreams from the past. The futuristic machines are set against lush Ukrainian fields that we now see with new eyes—a fertile, fragile ground.
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