Exhibitions

The Liverpool Biennial, which officially opens to the public on March 20, is the first major exhibition to take place in England in 2021.
Initially slated to run last summer, the postponed opening was hampered by ongoing lockdown restrictions. But organizers have decided to push ahead and open an outdoor-only section of the show ahead of anticipated relaxations on restrictions later this season.
More than 50 artists, including Black Obsidian Sound System, Larry Achiampong, and Linder, are taking part in the full exhibition, titled “The Stomach and the Port,” which references Liverpool’s maritime history.
It includes 47 new commissions of sculptures and installations, a selection of which have been peppered across the city’s public spaces. Now on view are new works by Rashid Johnson, Jorgge Menna Barreto, and Teresa Solar.
“The first ‘outside’ chapter presents works that connect bodies and experiences to key places, past and present, speaking of the movement of humans across the sea and proposing new understandings of the relationships between the body and nature,” curator Manuela Moscoso said in a statement.
Rashid Johnson, Stacked Heads (2020). Installation view at Canning Dock Quayside. Photo by Mark McNulty.
Already installed new commissions include Larry Achiampong’s Pan African Flag For the Relic Travellers’ Alliance, which is being flown in 10 locations, and five kayaks sculptured by Teresa Solar in the shape of human bones.
Rashid Johnson has created a large-scale totemic sculpture titled Stacked Heads, which draws on his ongoing “Anxious Men” series. The new work is made of two bronze heads planted with yucca and cacti plants.
Elsewhere, feminist artist Linder has created a street-level billboard commission called Bower of Bliss. The artist’s photomontages, which she will also present at Tate Liverpool for the biennial, juxtapose everyday images of women from fashion magazines with graphic pornographic images and other archival materials.
Moscoso says the show, in sum, is about “change and healing following the universal shifts we have all experienced in this past year.”
The biennial also has an online portal through which you can find information about participating artists, as well as sonic and digital commissions including a series of podcasts by Ines Doujak & John Barker and an artificial intelligence project from art duo Ubermorgen. 
See more of the new commissions below.
Teresa Solar, Osteoclast (I do not know how I came to be on board this ship, this navel of my ark) (2021). Installation view at Exchange Flags. Photo by Mark McNulty.
Larry Achiampong, Pan African Flag for the Relic Travellers’ Alliance (2021). Installation view at Dr Martin Luther King Jr. building. Photo by Mark McNulty.
Linder, Bower of Bliss (2021). Installation view at Liverpool ONE. Photo by Mark McNulty.
Ines Doujak & John Barker, Transmission: A series of five podcasts on Disease and Pandemics in a Distorted World (2021). Podcast artwork. Courtesy the artists.
Larry Achiampong, Pan African Flag for the Relic Travellers’ Alliance (2021). Installation view at St. John’s Gardens. Photo by Mark McNulty.
“Liverpool Biennial: The Stomach and the Port” runs through June 27, 2021.
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Seventeenth-century painter and biographer Arnold Houbraken records that Rembrandt once told a studio visitor to stand back from a canvas and its disagreeable paint fumes. Whether Rembrandt used his warning as a pretext to corral viewers to optimal viewing distances, or believed that paint—often made of noxious elements like lead—posed a risk, is uncertain.
But “Smell the Art: Fleeting Scents in Color,” a new don’t-scratch-but-do-sniff show at the Mauritshuis in The Hague, reverses the Dutch master’s advice.
In preparation for the show, the museum recently shipped kits with scent spritzers capturing two of the exhibition’s eight scents to journalists. It is now working on a larger “fragrance box”—with four of the scents created for the exhibition—to ship to viewers (smellers) worldwide. Each package, with an invitation to a digital tour, runs €25.
“I don’t think that’s been done before—that you can actually smell something at home,” Ariane van Suchtelen, the show’s curator, tells Artnet News. “We have to see how it works. This box is still an experiment.”
Part of the home experience fragrance box accompanying the exhibition “Fleeting – Scents in Colour” at the Mauritshuis Picture Gallery.

The exhibition explores how smell enhances other senses, which is consistent with the research of Dutch national Justus Verhagen, a neuroscience professor at Yale University who says there is truth to the “Proustian phenomenon” that odors elicit nostalgic, autobiographical memories.
“The sense of smell is tightly interwoven with the evolutionarily old limbic system of the brain by having direct access to structures like the amygdala, hippocampal complex, and cortex,” Verhagen says. “These are strongly involved in emotions and memories.” Other senses, like vision, are “much less direct, as they are gated via the thalamus, among other things.”
Those who lose their sense of smell—as many COVID-19 patients do—report that subsequent experiences are bland. “You feel more ‘connected’ to the environment if you simultaneously smell it,” Verhagen said.
And you’ll definitely smell the environment.
International Flavors & Fragrances, which created the scents for the exhibition, created one that approximates the smell of the building’s interior, which John Maurits (the museum’s namesake), decorated with wood he brought from Brazil.
Present-day visitors will experience a lost scent, as an 18th-century fire destroyed the original interior. (The Mauritshuis also worked with the company to create a separate new smell-based tour of the permanent collection, designed particularly for visually impaired visitors.)
“We view and experience everything—not just art—with all of our senses,” van Suchtelen says. “The exhibit is also about exploring how the artists, who were very much aware of this fact, dealt with that in their paintings, and how they suggested and conjured up all sorts of smells.”  
Prior to researching the show, van Suchtelen had often seen Jan van der Heyden’s View of Oudezijds Voorburgwal with the Oude Kerk in Amsterdam (circa 1670) in the Mauritshuis collection without noticing a privy beside the bridge. The outhouse empties into the canal, where a nearby woman washes clothing; presumably the clothes emerge dirtier than before.
Tourists are likely to celebrate Dutch canals, which no longer stink, for their Instagram splashes, which means modern eyes (and noses) need to recalibrate when taking in 350-year-old paintings. 
“We don’t have that ‘smell memory,’” van Suchtelen says.
To fill those lapses, researchers shared historical recipes with perfumers to approximate what, say, the bleaching fields depicted in a Jacob van Ruisdael landscape would smell like, or what chemicals were used to treat linens like the ones in a Pieter de Hooch interior, and how they would smell. (Both works appear in the exhibition.)
Pieter de Hooch, Interior with Women in front of a Linen Cupboard (1663). Courtesy of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

Lizzie Marx, a doctoral candidate at University of Cambridge researching painted smells, provided the recipe that informed one of the scents sent to journalists: a pomander with a winter perfume. Pomanders, from the French for “amber apple,” were fashion receptacles which delivered scents believed at the time to reverse bad smells that bore illness and plague.
(The other scent… er, odor… sent out was one approximating a foul-smelling canal. Indeed, the spritzer left this reporter with the impression of a dirty gym bag full of spoiled fish.)
The exhibition’s exploration of medicinal smell use, like the pomander, is also timely. It’s easy to look down one’s nose at foolish 17th-century belief in illness-bearing smells, but there was little understanding a year ago about how, if at all, COVID-19 spreads through the air and on surfaces. In the 17th century, people thought disease entered the body through porous skin. Unlike today’s deodorants, perfumes were thought to neutralize dangerous smells. 
(As far as how the scents in the show are distributed, sophisticated dispensers—which use a dry method to release scent molecules—work even for masked visitors, and are operated via foot pedals.)
Other sections of the exhibition address religious ideas about smells—mostly centered on clashes between Catholics and the Protestant church in 17th-century Holland—and smells and food (although the Mauritshuis addressed that more in its 2017 exhibition, “Slow Food: Still Lifes of the Golden Age”).
Installation view, “Fleeting Scents in Color” at the Mauritshuis Picture Gallery.

Jacob Toorenvliet’s Young Woman and Fishwife (1675–80, private collection) in the current show portrays the older woman masking the smell of no-longer fresh herring with very-fragrant orange and while lilies. The young woman is twice maltreated, as a man robs her purse from behind in a manner suggesting sexual assault. 
Exhibition catalogue contributions—including several by Lizzie Marx—also chart new research territory. An essay by Jaap Evert Abrahamse, a city historian, addresses smells in Dutch cities. (Urban planners, you will learn, took into account eastern- and western-blowing winds, which could carry stenches in and out of cities.)
But in the end, when it comes to the smell kits, van Suchtelen warns that it is skin off a museum’s nose to create and ship fragrance boxes.
“We will be extremely happy if we break even,” she said of the 1,500 boxes the Mauritshuis commissioned. “If they are popular, we can of course make more. If we sell out, we break even, I think. So if we don’t, we don’t.”
“Smell the Art: Fleeting Scents in Color,” is on view at the Mauritshuis, The Hague, through August 29.
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Visitors to Munich’s contemporary art museum, the Haus der Kunst, will be met with towering sculptures made from cement, cardboard, and textiles flecked with bright pops of color. The works dominate their surroundings, threatening to topple over and sometimes blocking paths.
The sculptures are the creation of British-born artist Phyllida Barlow, who is the subject of a career retrospective at the museum as part of 2021 programming dedicated to contemporary female artists.
Inspired by the urban landscape of London and the functional materials of construction sites and public infrastructure, much of Barlow’s work is entrenched in the terrain of London, from the East End to the shiny new skyscrapers of the 21st century.

Production still from the “London” episode of “Art in the Twenty-First Century,” Season 10. © Art21, Inc. 2020.

In an exclusive interview as part of Art21’s series Art in the Twenty-First Century, Barlow describes the intersection of form and function in her work.
“Sculpture can take on the world we’re living in,” she says, explaining that the bits of color she incorporates into her work are based on “colors of information in the urban environment” used by builders to mark places in need of repair or other attention.
When she was younger, Barlow was introduced to the work of Eva Hesse and recalls being “completely mesmerized” by the artist’s approach to sculpture, in which she used basic materials like string and cloth to “consume space.”
Right now, Barlow is working on large-scale works that interrupt space, hindering movement and demanding attention.
“This is looking at where sculpture ends up,” Barlow tells Art21, “and what happens if it ends up in places where it’s not meant to be. I have sort of always been interested in the object that seems badly behaved.”
Watch the video, which originally appeared as part of Art21’s Art in the Twenty-First Century series, below. The brand new 10th season of the show is available now at Art21.org. “Phyllida Barlow. frontier” is on view at the Haus Der Kunst through July 25, 2021. 
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This is an installment of “Art on Video,” a collaboration between Artnet News and Art21 that brings you clips of newsmaking artists. A new series of the nonprofit Art21’s flagship series Art in the Twenty-First Century is available now on PBS. Catch all episodes of other series like New York Close Up and Extended Play and learn about the organization’s educational programs at Art21.org.
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If you’re hoping to move on quickly from the memory of the deadly January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol building, Nino Mier’s Los Angeles gallery is not the place for you.
If you want to bask in the rightness of your opposition to the right wing, also not so much.
At the gallery, you’ll be confronted with Don’t You See That I Am Burning (2020), a seven-foot-square painting by Celeste Dupuy-Spencer depicting the deadly insurrection, when thousands stormed Washington in an attempt to overturn the election of Joe Biden.
The picture shows right-wing militias and gangs like the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys, adherents to the QAnon conspiracy fantasy, Evangelicals, and everyday Americans streaming toward the white building.
Numerous flags fly over the proceedings, bearing slogans like “Soldiers in God’s Army,” “Jesus is King,” and “Trump’s Law and Order.”
Celeste Dupuy-Spencer, Don’t You See That I Am Burning, 2020. Courtesy of Nino Mier Gallery and the artist.

Dupuy-Spencer is adept at taking on the pressing issues of the day. In 2017, she painted a toppled Confederate monument in Durham, North Carolina; that same year, she depicted a speeding cop car mounted by demonic figures, summoning police violence. (Officers shot and killed nearly 1,000 people that year, according to the Washington Post.)
Descended from one of the founding families of the city of New Orleans, she has been thinking about how to address her own whiteness in a nation founded in white supremacy, and where dismantling systemic racism remains a profound challenge.
Though set up for greatness—she studied at New York’s Bard College with the likes of Amy Sillman and MacArthur “genius” grantee Nicole Eisenman—she nearly left art behind after a bout with heroin addiction. But ever since Mier’s first solo show of her work in 2016 (which sold out) she’s been on a remarkable trajectory.
The next year, she appeared in the Whitney Biennial (the New Yorker called her a “standout”); a solo that year at New York’s Marlborough Contemporary garnered coverage from Forbes to Vice to Art in America. She was included in the Hammer Museum’s “Made in L.A.” show in 2018; the museum’s curator Anne Ellegood told Elle she would become “one of the great painters of her generation.”
The Capitol riot, founded in white grievance and draped in Confederate flags, drew her in immediately. A painting as ambitious as this might normally take a year to complete, but this one was already on view less than eight weeks after the event.
Celeste Dupuy-Spencer, Don’t You See That I Am Burning, 2020, detail. Courtesy of Nino Mier Gallery and the artist.

The artwork’s title refers to a passage in Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams. A young boy has died and is laid out in his bed, surrounded by candles. His father, asleep in the next room, dreams that his son comes to him, saying, “Father, don’t you see I’m burning?” He awakens to find one of the candles has fallen onto his son’s arm.
“I was thinking of the dream as a critique of the American Dream,” Dupuy-Spencer said in a phone interview. In Freud’s dream theory, she said, “disturbances that happen outside the sleeper are incorporated into the dream. In case of emergency, those are pulled in, and the dream wakes the dreamer up. This idea of the American Dream is a hallucination we’re all having together, including, or especially, the Left. The rioters are one of the things that our dreaming psyche adds into the dream to try to wake us up.”
When Trump’s immigration policies shut out migrants and refugees, Leftists readily cited Emma Lazarus’s poem The New Colossus, with its famous line “give me your tired, your poor, / your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”
But “that was propaganda, created at a time when the U.S. was persecuting and deporting record numbers of people from war-torn countries,” says the artist.
Celeste Dupuy-Spencer, Don’t You See That I Am Burning, 2020, detail. Courtesy of Nino Mier Gallery and the artist.

If you fall for the propaganda, she says, you are just likely to believe that “we don’t have to fight for justice if that’s what the country does by itself.”
To stay in the dream, the fantasy, it’s necessary to believe you’re on the side of good against evil, she says, and she’s aware that this painting could easily be seen by progressives as just an indictment of the right. But look closer. The painting also shows bomber jets, referring to Biden’s bombing of facilities in Syria that were supposedly in use by Iran-backed militias.
“I was conscious of the fact that most of the people looking at this painting are going to look at it as the spectacle of the monstrous right wing defacing our god-given Capitol, and this was a direct assault on the impulse to look at it like that,” she said.
Biden’s participation in ongoing war in the Middle East, with inevitable civilian casualties, doesn’t allow us such an easy out.
“There are monsters,” she says, “on all sides.”
“The Dream of the ‘Burning Child‘” is on view at Nino Mier Los Angeles through March 24.
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As soon as Lady Pink can get a vaccine, she’s headed down to Miami. The legendary street artist’s solo show—only her second in the last decade—opened on Friday at Miami’s Museum of Graffiti, but she could only attend virtually.
“I’m scheduled for my vaccination on April 1,” the 57-year-old, born Sandra Fabara, told Artnet News in a joint phone call with the museum’s co-founder, street artist Alan Ket. But for now, she’s back in Gardiner, New York, a rural town west of Poughkeepsie.
“Can you prop me up on a computer?” Lady Pink asked Ket. “I’ll sit here with makeup on and a glass of wine and chit chat with people at the opening.”
One of the biggest names in street art history, Lady Pink began tagging with graffiti artists including Seen TC5 as a high school freshman in 1979, later co-starring in Charlie Ahearn’s hip-hop film Wild Style. Her work quickly crossed over to the gallery world when she was featured in the first major graffiti art show at New York’s Fashion Moda in 1980.
Lady Pink, Graffiti Herstory (2020). Courtesy of the Museum of Graffiti, Miami.

But despite her regular inclusion in blockbuster graffiti group shows such as “Beyond the Streets,” Lady Pink’s only solo museum show to date has been an offsite exhibition, “Respectfully Yours,” at the Queens Museum in 2015.
Enter the Museum of Street Art, which opened in December 2019 to provide a permanent showcase for an often-ephemeral art form.
“As someone who loves this movement and who’s been painting on the streets and our trains for long time, I love that there’s finally a place dedicated to exhibiting graffiti, because there hasn’t been a place quite like this for a very long time, or maybe even ever,” Ket said. “Presenting Lady Pink for us is very important, a very big responsibility, and quite frankly, an honor.”
Lady Pink, TC5 in the Yard (2020). Courtesy of the Museum of Graffiti, Miami.

A hybrid museum-gallery model, the for-profit institution has a permanent exhibition showcasing the evolution of graffiti art over the last 50 years, but also stages temporary shows where the work is for sale as a way of funding the operation.
“Because we use the word graffiti and we’re dealing with an art form that is typically unsanctioned, people are very weird and wary about it, especially on the philanthropy level,” Ket explained. “Quite frankly, there are not enough places on the planet for these artists to present their work and to sell their work.”
Everything is for sale in the show, except for one canvas consigned to Jeffrey Deitch, which will be on sale at next year’s Art Basel Hong Kong, according to Lady Pink. Ket hopes to attract institutional buyers for her two new bodies of work: large-scale paintings with feminist themes, and a deeply personal portrait series dedicated to her friends in the graffiti community, including Dondi White, Crash, Lee Quiñones, Daze, and Caine One.
Lady Pink, The Gentleman (2021). Courtesy of the Museum of Graffiti, Miami.

“These are some of the unsung heroes. You take us back and teach us the history of this art movement—but you’re doing it in such a loving way,” Ket told Lady Pink. “These should go to the PAMM, to the Museum of the City of New York.”
The portraits grew from work Lady Pink did on an app that turned photographs her friends had posted on Instagram into digital artworks.
“I decided, let me just turn them into real paintings,” she said. “I made 14 portraits of people and friends who have had an impact on me, the people behind all this graffiti, to make it a little more personal.”
Lady Pink, Graffiti Herstory (2020). Courtesy of the Museum of Graffiti, Miami.

This past year also saw Lady Pink create three new murals dedicated to the Black Lives Matter movement—a continuation of her decades-long commitment to using art as a tool for activism. One was outside Cryptic Gallery in Poughkeepsie, one was for the Welling Court Mural Project in Queens, and the third was at a New Paltz handball court, created in conjunction with local high school students. The theme, she was proud to note, was at the students’ suggestion.
“Street art is everywhere. It can be done by everyone, for all kinds of causes—for happy events, and for fighting injustices. So it was amazing to see that,” Lady Pink said.
Lady Pink’s Black Lives Matter for the Welling Court Mural Project in Queens. Photo by Martha Cooper.

But even as social justice graffiti has flourished on the boarded up exteriors of New York businesses, there were reminders that such messages aren’t always welcome.
“In Queens, we wanted to write the words ‘Black Lives Matter’ in yellow paint, like they did in the streets,” Lady Pink said. “But the local neighborhood didn’t want that. They didn’t want a political statement or anything heavy.”
Instead, she and her team painted a field of flowers against a black background, with the names of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and many others written in gray paint. “Folks that were watching us kept throwing us more names to include,” she recalled. “The names kept coming and coming.”
Lady Pink, Black Venus (2020). Courtesy of the Museum of Graffiti, Miami.

As is the case with most street art sites, the Welling Court Mural Project gets repainted each year. Nevertheless, Lady Pink has saved examples of her works from over the years, which makes a future retrospective an intriguing possibility.
“It’s about time,” Ket said. He hopes that such large-scale projects will become possible as his museum continues to grow.
Lady Pink is on board—sort of. “If someone offered to do a retrospective, I would. But you know, it’s also difficult to want to pull out work that I did when I was very young,” she admitted. “I paint so much better now!”
In the meantime, the artist is looking forward to life after the vaccine. “Let’s make some plans,” Lady Pink told Ket of her upcoming trip to Miami. “I want to paint some walls and burn something down.”
“Lady Pink: Graffiti Herstory” is on view at the Museum of Graffiti, 299 NW 25th Street, Miami, Florida, March 5–May 20, 2021. 
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