Exhibitions

Live horses tethered to the walls of an art gallery; a knitted circle of nylon threads left to disintegrate in ocean waves; a motorcycle with cattle horns for handlebars riding perpendicular to the ground; and a compass embedded in a slab of granite. These are just some of the so-called “poor art” works made by the provocateurs behind Arte Povera.
Even decades after the term was coined and promoted by the late art historian Germano Celant in 1967, uniting a loose gaggle of postwar Italian artists around their use of humble materials (though this was not always true), art world figures still talk about how their lives were forever transformed by the movement’s radical ideals.
The esteemed Italian-American curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev is one such person. She said in an interview that when she worked as a young, independent freelancer, she sat in the kitchens of several Arte Povera artists, sharing meals and chatting. They taught her that nothing was static, that art objects could change in response to their environments, temperatures, or the light. Arte Povera “says the artwork is not in its materiality, but in its constant, vital transformation of energy,” she added. “And that is really important. That marked my life.”
View of the forecourt of the Bourse de Commerce — Pinault Collection, Paris 2024 Giuseppe Penone, Idee di Pietra, 2010 Mario Merz, Fibonacci Sequence, 1984 © Pinault Collection/ ADAGP, Paris, 2024. Photo: Romain Laprade
And though it was always relevant to art history, suddenly, Arte Povera is front and center this fall. Christov-Bakargiev is curating a major Arte Povera exhibition opening this month (through January 20, 2025). All three floors of the Bourse de Commerce, Pinault Collection in Paris are devoted to it, with separate spaces individually focused on thirteen artists, showcasing some of their best and most historically significant works. This is lightly interspersed with later practices influenced or resonating with Arte Povera, as well as the wider context of postwar avant garde movements, including Japan’s Gutaï. At Art Basel Paris, many dealers are presenting works by artists tied to the art movement.
And yet, that very act of presenting, and consequently, collecting Arte Povera, comes with its own challenges. “It’s not easy to show Arte Povera,” said Christov-Bakargiev at a preview of the Bourse de Commerce exhibition. “How do you show fire? Something burning in a museum?” She pointed to Gilberto Zorio’s Arco voltaico [Voltaic Arc] (1968), of an electric current periodically jumping in an arc made by two charged copper rods that nearly touch. “Look, look,” she urged reporters, interrupting herself on another subject. “We have lightning in the Bourse de Commerce!”
Alighiero Boetti, Autoritratto (Self-portrait), 1993-1994, cast bronze, fountain system, and electric heating element, 200 × 88.4 × 49.5 cm. Pinault Collection. © Adagp, Paris, 2024.
Hard to contain, or even define—these inherent contradictions have inadvertently contributed to limiting Arte Povera’s broader reach outside of Italy, but for the very same reason, have made it a source of endless fascination to many artists and a curious public alike. That interest now appears to be swelling, given a boost by the Bourse de Commerce’s rain-making platform, and perhaps also thanks to a latent yearning for alternative breaks from our digitally hypnotized lives. As Christov-Bakargiev has said, Arte Povera plays upon our physically real presence, urging a closer look, and ultimately experience, of the here and now.
The Bourse exhibit offers this on many occasions, though it takes a good amount of time to absorb fully, and an open mind. There are moments, like under the museum’s vast, central dome, when the artworks can feel like banal, scattered objects with little relation to each other. They do better, taking on a life of their own, in the galleries winding through the building, which are dedicated to a single artist’s vision and world.
One example is the must-see, large, downstairs space featuring Zorio’s practice. Behind a glass window, hangs his glowing-red, thin wire line stretched across the rounded, dark auditorium. In the center, small letters spell out the word “confine.” Made of a chrome-nickel wire that is charged with an electrical current, it is a thing of poetry, both delicate and dangerous. It would immediately burn through flesh if touched. Little explanation is needed here.
Marisa Merz, No Title , 1979, wood, copper, 25 × 40 × 30 cm. Collection du Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, (Rivoli-Turin). Photo : Paolo Pellion. © Adagp, Paris, 2024.
A Surge in Interest
While the current Paris show’s blockbuster appeal marks a major step in wider recognition, Celant’s recent passing, as well as that of artist Giovanni Anselmo, are among the factors that have contributed to an uptick in attention on the group.
The list of institutional shows on the subject feels nearly endless. A traveling exhibition about Anselmo is currently on view at MAXXI, Rome, having debuted at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in February. A rare retrospective of works by Pino Pascali recently closed at the Fondazione Prada, Milan curated by Mark Godfrey. The Guggenheim Museum in New York puts Arte Povera works at the center of its show, “By Way of: Material and Motion in the Guggenheim Collection,” on view until January 12, 2025.
Arte Povera artists were responding to postwar Italy, and the ensuing, hyper-rapid rise of industrialization and consumerism that butted against Italy’s still largely rural communities. Its stars, Giovanni Anselmo, Jannis Kounellis, Mario and Marisa Merz, Pino Pascali, Giuseppe Penone, and Michelangelo Pistoletto, to name a few, were too free-spirited to adhere to a formal manifesto, and some scholars refuse to call them a single “movement.” They were interested in juxtaposing ephemeral, natural, and organic materials with industrial and found ones and, later, they were reacting to the dominant Minimalism of the 1970s and ’80s.
Michelangelo Pistoletto, Venere degli stracci, 1967, reproduction de Vénus en ciment recouvert de mica et de chiffons, 150 × 280 × 100 cm (installation). Courtesy du Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea (Rivoli-Turin). Prêt de la Fondazione per l’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea CRT. Photo : Paolo Pellion.
All told, the movement was brief—its heyday, strictly speaking, is considered to have spanned 1967 through 1972. That is one reason there are but a few existing Arte Povera “master works” on the market, or readily available for viewing, explains Mariolina Bassetti, Global Chairman of Post-War and Contemporary Art at Christie’s in an interview. Still, she notes market interest has grown for the category, with a 2001 auction of about 17 Arte Povera lots selling for a total of about $5 million, versus about $32 million total in 2017 for 30 lots.
New Views on the Movement
Now historians are delving further into the role of women in postwar Italian art, both broadly and in direct relation to Arte Povera. To this day, only one woman, the stellar Marisa Merz (1926-2019), is considered a full-fledged Arte Povera artist, according to criteria such as having no fixed frame formally containing the work within its boundaries and working within the concept of an installation. Yet even Merz, in a too familiar trope, was belatedly recognized internationally, thanks to a groundbreaking 2017 retrospective at the Hammer Museum in L.A. and the Met in N.Y.
Teresa Kittler, a lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Art at University of York, and Sharon Hecker, an art historian and curator specializing in modern and contemporary Italian art, co-edited an upcoming anthology on the roles of female partners, critics, assistants, collaborators, and others in Arte Povera circles and beyond, titled “Art and Intimacy in Modern Italy.”
Portrait of Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev. Courtesy of the Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli-Turin. Photo: Sebastiano Pellion.
Hecker explained Celant has been criticized for depicting a reductively unified vision of Arte Povera, which also marginalized its political dimension. He also over-emphasized the use of “poor” materials, she noted, when some artists from the group employed more noble mediums. Luciano Fabro, for one, had an affinity for precious marble and Murano glass.
She said in an interview that Arte Povera’s male-dominant narrative has turned some of her students away from focusing on the movement. But both Kittler and Hecker are optimistic. “A generation of scholars have done a lot to transform the landscape of postwar Italian arts beyond Arte Povera, which affects how Arte Povera is read, because it puts it in dialog with other things that are going on at the same time, and other artists, making it feel richer and more expansive,” Kittler said. This research has also opened a vast, unchartered area of unrecognized women as well as male artists doing work in postwar Italy, who didn’t quite fit the Arte Povera label. “If you start to scratch the surface,” she added, and “even within Arte Povera, there are figures that come out of the shadows.”
Mario Merz, Igloo Objet cache-toi, 1977, aluminum, C-clamp, grillage, glass, neon and transformer, 185 × 365 cm. Pinault Collection. Photo : Christie’s images LTD. © Adagp, Paris, 2024.
Art in Space
Ideas put forward by Arte Povera thinkers may be striking a particularly resonant chord in today’s digitized world. The movement that was always skeptical of over-theorizing, is focused on confronting the viewer directly with forces of nature, and everyday, simple, crafted materials, so that one can grasp, almost without thinking, the thing in front of them for what it is. It “helps you connect to your body in space, and your physical transformations. To become aware that we live, for example, on a globe that spins, and has gravity,” said Christov-Bakargiev. It can connect the dots in an endless processing of what is real, and what it means to experience something—life—in the flesh.
Pier Paolo Calzolari, Il mio letto così come deve essere (My bed as it should be), 1968, copper, brass, foam, banana leaves, bronze letters, 35 × 175 × 150 cm. Collection Fondo Calzolari. Courtesy of White Cube Gallery (London). Photo: Ben Westoby. © Adagp, Paris, 2024.
Arte Povera artists were groundbreaking on many levels, and invented installation art, according to Christov-Bakargiev, who differentiates this from more closed “environments.” “We are now in a world grappling with this question of tactility and experience. There’s a craving for audiences to see something that feels physical, not just a real work of art, but a work of art that engages your body,” wrote Naomi Beckwith in a recent piece on Artnet. Plus, “there is no way now to show some of the amazing innovations of someone like David Hammons or Mark Bradford without going back to the Arte Povera movement,” she added.
They wanted to break the “nature/culture divide,” noted Christov-Bakargiev in the 2017 Marisa Merz exhibit catalog. Sculptures occupied rooms that changed with them, making the entire thing unfinished, open-ended. “Primary energy and lived experience were important to them. Gravity and electricity—as well as memory, affect, and vital impulses—were put on a par. They did not believe in linear art history, but rather in a spiraling, fluid, subjective sense of overlapping time, both ancient and contemporary.”
These are all ideas that audiences, chained to their smart devices, may find particularly heartening now. More

While wheat fields are a common sight in Montana, this past year a new type of wheat field took root in the city of Bozeman, one that was agricultural—and also an artwork. Though not wholly dissimilar from a standard crop, the stretches of Bobcat (a variety of hard red winter wheat) were part of a new work by conceptual artist Agnes Denes, Wheatfield – An Inspiration (2024).
Presented by Tinworks, a new non-profit art space in Bozeman with a mission centered on bridging the gap between the American West and contemporary art, Wheatfield – An Inspiration reimagines Denes’ most well-known work, Wheatfield – A Confrontation (1982), which saw her plant a two-acre wheat field on Manhattan’s southernmost point. Here, positioned on some of the world’s most prime real estate, the work invited reflection on societal systems of value, priorities, and human needs. Just over 40 years later, Denes continues these lines of inquiry.
Agnes Denes, Wheatfield – An Inspiration. The seed is in the ground (2024). Photo: Blair Speed / Speed Creative. Courtesy of Tinworks, Bozeman, Montana.
The iteration at Tinworks follows another recent reprisal of the original 1982 installation, Honouring Wheatfield – A Confrontation (2024), this time staged in Basel, Switzerland, outside of the Art Basel fair in the city’s Messeplatz. Unlike the present and historic versions, however, in Basel the wheat was planted in moveable Euro pallets, an experiment in avant-garde crop growing (or, as Denes thought of it, “vertical fields”) that may become necessary in the future.
Back in Bozeman, the exhibition of Wheatfield – An Inspiration debuted on June 15, 2024, but the project began in October 2023. For those unfamiliar with the propagation of wheat (as was I at the time of this writing), it typically needs a “dormancy period.” In line with the growth cycle of this specific varietal (which  Denes chose for its close association with the region), the wheat was first seeded in the fall of last year, after which it went through winter dormancy before flourishing this spring and summer.
Agnes Denes, Wheatfield – An Inspiration. The seed is in the ground (2024). Photo: Blair Speed / Speed Creative. Courtesy of Tinworks, Bozeman, Montana.
“Spending time in the Wheatfield was unforgettable. Wheat fields are a common sight in Montana, but few people, aside from farmers, get the chance to experience them up close, to actually wander through such a powerful and iconic presence,” said Tinwork’s inaugural director Jenny Moore.
Coinciding with this period of dormancy, Denes released Questionnaire, a series of questions about issues and concerns around the future of humanity, including A.I., and global warming. Denes welcomed anyone to respond. Harkening back to Wheatfield – A Confrontation, the Questionnaire was first deployed in 1982 and featured thematically similar questions, which have since evolved to reflect our present-day anxieties and hopes.
Packets of wheat seeds offered to the community as part of Agnes Denes, Wheatfield – An Inspiration. The seed is in the ground (2024). Photo: Blair Speed / Speed Creative. Courtesy of Tinworks, Bozeman, Montana.
Coinciding with the first planting, as part of the project, the local community was invited to participate and expand the reach of Wheatfield – An Inspiration by planting provided wheat seeds wherever there was fallow land in the city. Wheat has long played a significant role within the economy of Montana, and though pervasive, planting wheat in otherwise unexpected spaces all over Bozeman made this fact manifest while drawing attention to otherwise abstract ideas around ecology, urban development, and landscape ideals.
Locality and community have remained intrinsic elements to the project’s success, from initial planting to reaping to processing to, ultimately, eating.
“For Agnes, community involvement was vital to this new iteration of Wheatfield,” said Moore. “It began with the selection of Bobcat winter wheat, developed by a neighbor of Tinworks who is a wheat breeder and retired research associate at Montana State University. A local first-generation conservation farmer planted the field. The wheat seeds we distributed to the public to plant in solidarity with the project were donated by a local food and farming organization. Numerous volunteers, visitors, students, and neighbors tended, weeded, and harvested the crop.”
Agnes Denes, Wheatfield – An Inspiration. The seed is in the ground (2024). Photo: Blair Speed / Speed Creative. Courtesy of Tinworks, Bozeman, Montana.
The “public harvest celebration” of Wheatfield – An Inspiration occurred on September 8, a day-long event replete with traditional hand-harvesting demonstrations led by Montana State University Plant Sciences Department students, as well as the various steps associated with processing wheat at a small scale. Following harvest, the wheat was milled, and this month local bakery Wild Crumb is tasked with taking the flour and baking it into bread, which will both be sold as well as distributed to the community in partnership with Gallatin Valley Food Bank.
“Tinworks’ Wheatfield has come full circle in the most beautiful way. It is a living artwork, an inspired place, a community space, and now a food source,” said Moore.
Agnes Denes, Wheatfield – An Inspiration. The seed is in the ground (2024). Photo: Blair Speed / Speed Creative. Courtesy of Tinworks, Bozeman, Montana.
Wheat is one of the oldest cultivated crops, with a history stretching roughly 10 millennia and serving humanity as a source of sustenance and a potent symbol of growth, transformation, and prosperity. Its near universal presence across human history is perhaps the key to understanding how Denes’ recurring deployment of planted wheat in her practice continues to hold profound cultural and societal relevance, even more than four decades after Wheatfield – A Confrontation was grown in New York. The newest evolution of Denes crops in Bozeman, Wheatfield – An Inspiration, continues this legacy and emphasizes the project’s adaptability, continuing an inquiry into the core of our humanity, from mere survival to the highest hopes for the future. More

What do a tin of sardines, an overflowing box of black combs, and a pair of McDonald’s-branded jeans and matching baseball cap have in common? They’re all things people have stolen from work that are going on view in “The Show of Stolen Goods,” a pop-up gallery show coming to New York City in a roving U-Haul truck.
It’s the second edition of the tongue-in-cheek exhibition, which performance artist and sculptor Victoria Gill first staged in January at Filet, an experimental art space in London. This time around, she’s teamed up with curator Jack Chase and James Sundquist, the founder and director—and now getaway driver— of Uhaul Gallery, which has staged four other mobile gallery shows across the city since launching in May.
“Stealing feels like something that is really human nature,” Chase told me.
”I think we have an innate compulsion to collect things. And it happens subconsciously.”
And stealing from work might just be the most universal kind of theft. It doesn’t feel as subversive as stealing from a business as another individual. It is often bound up in resentment of one’s employer—if it isn’t out of absolute necessity. If you’re artist struggling to make ends meet by working as a restaurant server, for instance, why wouldn’t you furnish your silverware drawer with utensils from your day job? (There’s a trio of pilfered forks in the show.)
Black Combs, Has Your Employee Been Stealing From Work? (2024). Lifetouch, Philadelphia (2010) Kat Thek. Photo courtesy of Uhaul Gallery.
Presenting the project in a U-Haul truck moonlighting as a gallery appealed in part because of the low price point, with rentals at as low as $19.99 a day, plus mileage. And then there’s that old saying, about stolen goods that “fell off the back of a truck” (or, as Gill put it, a lorry).
Sundquist, who is also an artist, was inspired to start the mobile gallery when he was moving out of an expensive studio space, and was surprised to see how good his paintings looked in the back of the moving truck.
“I was like, ‘Huh, this is like a little gallery space,’” he told me. “And then honestly, I was at an opening in the Henry Pike Street area. I realized the literal square footage of those spaces is not really much bigger than a U-haul.”
The objects in Uhaul Gallery’s “Show of Stolen Goods.” Photo courtesy of Uhaul Gallery.
Uhaul Gallery launched its first show in early May—during Frieze Week, which Sundquist realized only when dealers from the Independent Art Fair suggested he set up shop outside for the rest of the weekend. The most recent show, during the Armory Show, he parked outside the Javits Center. Uhaul Gallery has also posted up in Soho and outside Gagosian in Chelsea.
“It’s taking this really cheap square footage into much more prestigious real estate we could never afford even if we were doing a pop-up,” Sundquist said.
The gallery does have a budget for parking tickets—but so far, it has gotten lucky.
Uhaul Gallery at the Javits Center during the Armory Show. Photo by Norman Godinez.
“I think there’s a U-Haul effect where the traffic cops don’t even see it.
They just think somebody’s moving. They’ll ticket the car in front, behind me, but they’ll just walk right by,” Sundquist said. He said the one time a police officer did stop, he was able to talk himself out of the ticket: “We showed him the show and he was just bamboozled.
He said ‘This is crazy—I’m gonna give you guys a pass.’”
U-Haul hasn’t caught wind of the project yet, but the company did threaten legal action against a Brooklyn gallery of the same name in 2019.
“If and when U-Haul comes after us, it will become part of the story and an opportunity to use our creativity to reinvent ourselves,” Sundquist said. “The whole project is about seeing what we can get away with.”
Jack Chase, James Sundquist, and Victoria Gill at U-Haul of Chelsea. Photo by Trevor Munch.
Outfitting a U-Haul to show art is surprisingly easy. Sundquist installs white gallery walls along the protective wooden railing that lines the truck’s interior, and runs the lights off the power outlet/cigarette lighter in the dash. Atop the truck, he affixes a hand-stenciled plywood sign with the gallery’s U-Haul themed logo that spins on an inverted disco ball motor.
Submissions for the “Stolen Goods” exhibition came via an open call on Instagram, as well as a few repeat objects from the London show. Anyone who contributed was allowed to remain anonymous, provided they give the name of their employer and the year of the theft.
Original Pink Panther Animation Cel, Why Can’t Humans Behave More Like Animals? (2024) Framestore, London U.K. 2018. Anonymous. Photo courtesy of Uhaul Gallery.
None of the stolen objects are for sale, but Chase has published an exhibition catalogue, priced at $28 in a run of 300. There will also be t-shirts available featuring the Uhaul Gallery logo and the phrase “steal from work” on the reverse. (Previous exhibitions have had prices ranging from $5 for zines up to $7,000 for large paintings.)
Each stolen object has a title. Some of the names allude to the circumstances surrounding the theft. The sardine tin, from trendy Dimes Square restaurant Cervo’s, was stolen by a staffer who often took whole roast chickens home after a shift—hence the name Couldn’t Include the Chicken.
Chase’s contribution, the Boards of Canada record Music Has the Right to Children (1998), stolen earlier this year his last day working at Eavesdrop bar in Brooklyn, has been christened I Was The Only One Who Would Play This Record Anyway.
music has the right to children. I Was The Only One Who Would Play This Record Anyway (2024). Eavesdrop, Brooklyn NY. 2024. Jack Chase. Photo courtesy Uhaul Gallery.
“I don’t think there was anything more [to the theft] than the fact that I have a record player at home and I wanted to keep listening to it,” he said.
Some of the loot seems as though they would be fairly valuable, like Dior heels from the designer’s New York store, an original Pink Panther animation cel from Framestore in London, or a deflated silver Andy Warhol balloon from the Pop artist’s 2022 retrospective at the Tate Modern. With others, like the combs, it’s hard to imagine the motivations for the thefts.
“There are daily objects that are useful and that you could slip in your bag easily.
But then also there’s a theme of taking something a little bit scandalous and a little bit silly, almost like as a token,” Gill said. “I don’t know if it’s element of ‘This will be a good talking piece from the dead-end job that I’m doing at the moment.’”
Silver Balloon, Andy’s Balloon (2022), Tate Modern, London. Anonymous. Photo courtesy of Uhaul Gallery.
She got the idea for the project while working at a high-end fashion magazine in London. Gill already felt conspicuously out of place with her northern accent—a distinct class marker in the U.K. Then she unthinkingly grabbed a tube of lotion from the office bathroom to help out a friend she was meeting after work.
“The next time I was in the office, there was a sticker that was put up on the mirror. ‘This is communal.
Please do not take.’ It just it really stuck with me because I was the only new hire, I was northern and already stuck out like a sore thumb,” she recalled. “I took something from the communal basket, and now there was this sticker in the toilets and everyone would know it was me.”
Apples False Fruit (2023) New York Studio School, New York. Anonymous. Photo courtesy of Uhaul Gallery.
It only took a few weeks for her to collect the objects for the first edition of “Stolen Goods.” Though Gill envisioned the project as a conceptual art piece, it blurs the boundaries of a traditional group show, the stolen goods becoming readymade art objects.
“I see the whole piece as a sculptural piece,” Gill said.
Heels J’adore (2024) Dior, New York. Anonymous. Photo courtesy of Uhaul Gallery.
She hopes the project has a bit of moral ambiguity to it, a provocative yet cheeky way to get viewers to think about what they may have stolen from work over the years.
“When I tell people about the show, the reaction I usually get is a story of something they’ve stolen from work,” Gill added.
”And it’s kind of like a joyous, ‘Oh, my God, yes, I stole this.’ It’s almost like feeling seen.”
“The Show of Stolen Goods” will be on view at Uhaul Gallery, a U-Haul truck parked at Hauser & Wirth, 542 West 22nd Street, October 10; on Broadway, somewhere between Walker and Leonard, October 11; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, October 12:, and on Bedford Avenue, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, October 13, 2024. More

The British Museum’s exhibition “Silk Roads,” studying the famous ancient trade route, has opened to rave reviews from critics, but one art historian is taking issue with the museum’s accounting of the globe-spanning phenomenon, laid out through some 300 objects from various lenders and the institution’s own collection. 
The museum aims to “challenge and expand” traditional understandings of the Silk Road: “Rather than a single trade route, the Silk Roads were made up of overlapping networks linking communities across Asia, Africa and Europe, from Japan to Britain, Scandinavia to Madagascar,” according to press materials.
William Dalrymple, an art historian, critic, curator, and author of the new book The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World, has characterized the exhibition as misleading, saying it doesn’t broaden the concept far enough.
Scottish-born and based in India, Dalrymple has earned some serious bona fides: his new volume is his 12th published since 1989, and he has won or been shortlisted for numerous prizes along the way. In a review of his latest book, a writer for the Guardian called him “a born storyteller” and said that he “deftly” charts the country’s development while laying out how, for more than a millennium, “Indian goods, aesthetics and ideas dominated a vast ‘Indosphere.’” 
Dalrymple takes issue with what he describes as a lack of any real consideration of India in the British Museum’s representation. 
Wall painting from the south wall of the Hall of the Ambassadors (detail). © ACDF of Uzbekistan, Samarkand State Museum Reserve.
Dalrymple argued, in an essay on the British Museum show and another exhibition on the same subject at the British Library, that India is sorely neglected at the British Museum. What’s more, speaking at the the Henley Literary Festival on September 28, just two days after the show’s opening, Dalrymple asserted that the museum was furthering myths about the Silk Road that are rooted in the late 19th century.
As reported by the Times of London, Dalrymple noted that such myths first started to appear in 1877, when German geographer Baron Ferdinand von Richthofen coined the term Seidenstrassen, German for “Silk Roads.” The term would later appear in the title of a 1938 book by Swedish geographer and explorer Sven Hedin, The Silk Road: Ten Thousand Miles Through Central Asia, which maps the author’s 10,000-mile trek through Asia and other parts of the East. 
Tang dynasty Chinese ceramic figure of a camel. © The Trustees of the British Museum.
“I understand if you’re doing an exhibition that you want it to sound sexy, but it’s perverse to the point of peddling an untruth to have an exhibition about east-west connections that omits the principal center of east-west trade, which was India,” Dalrymple said.
Dalrymple noted there was no Silk Road land route until about the 13th century. Trade over land was obstructed, he pointed out, by a contested border with Persia; traders were able to ride much more safely on monsoon winds across the Arabian Sea, he added.
A spokesperson for the museum responded to the Times, indicating that the show accounts for India partly in its exploration of the spread of Buddhism, as well as in maps showing how a 9th-century ship stopped on India’s shores on its final voyage before sinking off the coast of Indonesia. Garnets found at Sutton Hoo, the site that encompasses two 6th- and 7th-century Anglo-Saxon burial grounds, originated from places including India and Sri Lanka, noted the museum, adding that the show also includes an ivory chess set as an example of materials originating from India.
“Silk Roads” is on view at the British Museum, Great Russell St, London, through February 23, 2025. More

“I know what people think about celebrities doing art, and I feel the same way,” said Robbie Williams. “Fuck off, keep it to yourself.” He is in a chalet in Gstaad, where rooms are lined in glowing golden wood and every window looks out to a mountain. “I’m here because I’m drawing and writing and creating,” he said of the location. “I am my own creative hub.”
He’s not the first pop star to hole up in Switzerland, or to ignore his own advice. Last night, Williams launched a new series of ceramics at Mint, a London gallery that specializes in fancy contemporary design. Williams’s offerings are two big, bold Memphis-style busts of the Pope and Jesus, and an enormous ceramic wall work of Jesus with a shimmering baby blue crown of thorns. The men’s bas relief, highly-worked faces are in cobalt and brilliant yellow, salmon, lime and turquoise: an acid trip in a paint store.
Robbie Williams, Jesus and The Pope (2024). Photo courtesy of 1882 Ltd.
Exquisitely made in Williams’s home town of Stoke-on-Trent, by the craftspeople at the pottery 1882 Ltd, they seem to offer a turbulent view of religion: the Pope demonically fierce; Jesus in a state of anxious fear. “I didn’t see that; I’m not picking up pain,” said Williams, lounging on a couch as he peers at me through his computer’s screen.
Brought up Catholic, Williams’s relationship with religion is now on a par with his ones to drugs and alcohol (non-existent), but he’s feeling a need for a god. “I can see myself circling back,” he mused. “The other day I posted on Instagram: where do you go to for religion if you’re not religious?” These images, though, suggest that Williams might not have entirely shrugged off the enforced Catholicism of his early years.
Robbie Williams’s Pope bust. Photo courtesy of 1882 Ltd.
If the busts pay homage to a range of artists including Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Alex Israel, then Williams readily admits his debt to David Shrigley, too. “I only exist as an artist because of David Shrigley and Banksy. And then Keith Haring and Basquiat,” he said. (He bought a bunch of Banksys at the artist’s famous Notting Hill show in 2005, and offloaded a couple in 2022. “I am impulsive,” is his explanation. Together, they made around $9.8 million.) Shrigley, in particular, allowed him to think that being an artist didn’t mean painting like Constable.
He credits Pollock, too. “An entry route for artists that aren’t artists,” he said. “When Ed Sheeran tried his hand at art, it was colorful entry-level Pollock, ‘I can do that’ stuff.’” The pair swapped paintings a while ago. Williams’s was a “psychedelic, drippy paint thing. It said ‘Say Drugs to No.’”
Close-up of one of Robbie William’s ceramic works. Photo courtesy of 1882 Ltd.
Emily Johnson, also a daughter of Stoke but endowed with a brisk boarding school accent, set up 1882 Ltd in 2011, initially subletting 900-square-meters from the famous Wedgwood pottery in nearby Barleston. “We wanted to keep manufacturing in Stoke, and inject wonderful design,” she said. “And we wanted to work with non-ceramists, so they wouldn’t come with pre-conceived ideas and a fixed notion of what the material can and can’t do.” They have included the fashion designer Paul Smith and the set designer Shona Heath.
The Williams connection came through his manager, a charming Irish man called Stephen O’Reilly, though no one seems quite sure how. “Just the Stoke connection, I think,” said Johnson. “Then he left me a voice message. That was in January. After that, he showed me hundreds of drawings. I thought the Pope and Jesus were phenomenal.” The fact that Williams was going for scale—the slab-built busts are 50 centimeters high—caused a long list of issues. Each took three and a half months. One, a Jesus with hair, collapsed in the kiln once it had been completed. The wall work—120 by 150 centimeters—curled and shrank and cracked. But now, with its finish of brilliant colored glaze, it looks vibrant and pristine.
The process of creating Robbie Williams’s Jesus bust. Photo courtesy of 1882 Ltd.
Usually, Williams draws on paper with water-based Posca pens which contain a water-based acrylic paint that creates a solid opaque finish. Otherwise, he works on an iPad, ever since David Hockney taught him how. “We got invited to his house in L.A. and to where he paints, and it was just fucking wonderful,” said Williams. “Like being in the same room as the Beatles while they’re composing a song. Then he drew a chair on his iPad and I thought, ‘there’s no way on earth you could work electronically and it mean something.’ But here’s David Hockney doing it, and if an iPad is good enough for David Hockney…”
The colored drawings are over-written with slogans such as “I was mentally ill before it was cool”; crude black and white ones—the Shrigley homages—are covered in conjoined speech bubbles containing pithy, self-referential wit. Once Williams had generated around 1,200 of them, he started posting on Instagram. Now he can’t stop. “There’s dopamine happening there when you get a good response,” he said.
He has a biopic out at Christmas in which he appears as a digital version of himself; an album next year; plans for a hotel with a 3000-seater auditorium; and an entertainment university where students will learn about mental health and contacts and agenting. “There’s a complicated inner life. If left untended, it roams to places one wouldn’t want to go,” he said. In other words: stay busy.
Robbie Williams’s Jesus bust. Photo courtesy of 1882 Ltd.
Of the reaction to his art works, Williams is more relaxed. “The kids’ education isn’t funded by my art; it’s not part of my vulnerable identity,” he said. His ego is tied to his performing self; art is a mere adventure and he is an autodidact passing through.
But there’s a bravura in the new works. Perhaps they will appeal to those who like the high-octane Robbie, the “Rock DJ” Williams, the restless loudmouth, as well as Keith Haring and Banksy. And as much as he professes to feel “blessed” with the opportunity to get the work made, he admits that he will only really believe in them once someone shells out the £18,000 ($23,000) to acquire one. “I didn’t create capitalism, but if it sells, I’ll think it’s fucking art.”
Meanwhile, the Ed Sheeran is in storage in Switzerland. I wonder where the psychedelic Williams has gone?
Robbie Williams is on view at Mint, 3-5 Duke Street, London W1, through 31 October. More

Among the sculptural menagerie that’s taken over the ground floor of Christie’s Rockefeller Center galleries, the smallest creature merits mentioning. It’s a metallic fly that lingers on an irregularly-shaped white stone that recalls temple columns and summer heat.
François-Xavier Lalanne, the playful French sculptor of animals, certainly created more elaborate versions of the fly—including one of brass, steel, and rosewood that hid a blue porcelain toilet bowl—but La Mémoire des Mouches (2000) displays the quality that would make Lalanne’s name: a generous attention to all of god’s creatures.
Lalanne’s series of flies arrived after the reemergence of his sheep sculptures in the 1990s, marking something of a humble side project after a grand success. Naturally, at the exhibition spotlighting the 70 works that Dorothée Lalanne, the sculptor’s daughter, is putting up for auction at Christie’s on October 10, it’s the sheep we meet first.
Installaton image of the semi-circle of sheep. Photo: courtesy Christie’s.
French fashion designer Simon Porte Jacquemus has been called in to play curator and zookeeper and he begins with a pair of low-lit sheep-only rooms. In one, a solitary ram lingers, its horns forming stark shadows on the floor. In the other, Jacquemus presents a procession of sheep with the youngest member cast forward, as if auditioning for our affections, with a nursery rhyme, one imagines.
Today, Lalanne is celebrated for bringing together the worlds of fine art and high-end design in sculptural works that boast a utilitarian function (albeit for the bourgeoisie). Of the sheep, some of which double as chairs, he once said, “it is, after all, easier to have a sculpture in an apartment than to have a real sheep. And, it’s even better if you can sit on it.” Fair enough.
The menagerie of Lalanne animals in the main gallery at Christie’s. Photo: courtesy Christies.
At Christie’s, Jacquemus offers a fantastical display through which we imagine how Lalanne might have arrived at such hybrid sculptures. A French farm table laden with a protractor stands beside a puddle of frustrated paper balls. On the back wall are a series of A4 sketches that show a table formed of an upside-down bear, fountains topped by birds, a squat hedgehog. All that is missing is the artist himself bent over the table with his sleeves rolled up.
In the neighboring rooms, we encounter the functional sculptures Lalanne did make. There’s the wader bird whose breast comes aglow as a lamp, the grinning fish content to serve as book ends, the tortoise enrosed with red and green cacti, the docile cow that doubles as a mint planter.
Lalanne’s topiary tortoise alongside a miniture goat in the main gallery at Christie’s. Photo: courtesy Christie’s.
But it’s Lalanne’s less utilitarian full-sized game that most draw the eye. Chiefly, Lapin à Vent de Tourtour (2002), a cutesy six-foot bronze beast that brings together elements of a bird, sheep, rabbit (fun fact: its head moves like a weathervane). It’s a beguiling creature to take in, simultaneously whimsical and unsettling, as though a thing conjured haphazardly in a laboratory.
Lapin à Vent de Tourtour stands among Jacquemus’s thigh-high fields of wheat with a donkey to its side, a towering bear looking on, and a deer surveying the gallery floor. The animals hold the same deep brown patina and seem of one scene. It’s strange to think soon they will be scattered far and wide. More

Amy Sherald shot to superstardom when her portrait of former first lady Michelle Obama debuted in 2018, and now the artist will have a homecoming of sorts at a major museum show at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. Opening in September 2025, “Amy Sherald: American Sublime” constitutes the most expansive exhibition of the artist to date. Organized by the San Francisco Museum of Art, the show will debut in California this November before moving to the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and later to the Portrait Gallery. It is sure to be a blockbuster, when the dual portraits of Michelle and Barack Obama were unveiled at the Portrait Gallery in 2018, the showing nearly doubled the museum’s attendance.
Amy Sherald in the studio with For love,andfor country (2022). Photo: Kelvin Bulluck. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth.
The New York-based artist explores the African American experience in the United States through her intimate portraits of Black Americans—primarily women—set against strikingly colorful, minimalist backgrounds. Over the course of her 15-year-long career, Sherald’s paintings have often commemorated the highs and lows of America’s recent history. In addition to the Obama portrait, the exhibition includes her powerful 2020 portrait of Breonna Taylor, created to honor Taylor’s life after she was tragically killed in her Louisville, Kentucky, home. The portrait became a significant symbol in protests across the country and the world, and achieved even greater notice when it was used as the cover for Vanity Fair. Another highlight of the show is the debut of For Love, and for Country (2022), recently acquired for SFMoMA’s permanent collection.
The cover of Vanity Fair‘s September 2020 issue, featuring a portrait of Breonna Taylor by Amy Sherald. Courtesy of Vanity Fair.
Sherald’s work captures Black Americans’ everyday lives, transcending time and place by removing details that could situate her subjects in a specific context. Her process often begins with photographing individuals she meets by chance or in passing, allowing her to transform each subject into a painted canvas that invites viewers to contemplate their complex interiority and stories beyond the visible.
A distinctive aspect of Sherald’s work is her use of a grayscale palette for skin tones, through a process called grisaille—a Renaissance-era technique where paintings are nearly monochromatic. By depicting her subjects in shades of grey, Sherald emphasizes race as a social construct rather than an absolute identity, challenging viewers to engage with the individuals she portrays without assumptions based on skin color. This technique has become a hallmark of her style, positioning her work as an exploration of identity, representation, and selfhood within contemporary America.
Amy Sherald, Welfare Queen (2012). Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth, ©Amy Sherald.
Curated by Rhea L. Combs, director of curatorial affairs at the National Portrait Gallery, American Sublime is a celebration of Sherald’s precise technical skill and her ability to convey emotional depth through her art. “The Portrait Gallery’s presentation of American Sublime celebrates a full circle of sorts,” Combs states, reflecting on Sherald’s journey as the first woman and the first African-American the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition at the museum in 2016 to becoming a globally recognized artist represented by Hauser & Wirth, with her work in public collections from Baltimore Museum of Art, Cleveland Museum of Art, The Columbus Museum, Long Museum, Shanghai and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, amongst many more. Combs emphasizes Sherald’s capability to draw viewers in through both her technical acumen and the empathy that radiates from her portraits, prompting audiences to consider her subjects’ identities and experiences in an entirely new way.
Accompanying the exhibition is a new publication by SFMOMA, in association with Yale University Press, which chronicles Sherald’s career, artistic influences, and significant impact on the contemporary art landscape.
Amy Sherald: American Sublime is a landmark exhibition that represents Sherald’s most ambitious exploration of American identity, history, and portraiture to date. Her work places Black experiences firmly within the canon of American art, challenging conventional portrayals and offering an intimate view of contemporary life. This mid-career survey underscores Sherald’s influence, blending empathy, historical awareness, and a visionary approach to portraiture that continues to captivate audiences.
“Amy Sherald: American Sublime” will be on view at SFMoMA from November 16, 2024 to March 9, 2025; at the Whitney Museum from April 9 to August 3, 2025; and at the Portrait Gallery from September 19, 2025 to February 22, 2026. More

Henri Matisse’s The Swimming Pool (1952) is a skeletal vision of summer. It features only ripples of blue against a tan background, so it’s the viewer who conjures the leaping bodies, the shapes of water, the dance of sunshine.
If future generations are to enjoy this vibrancy, said its steward, New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the work needs to be taken down and kept somewhere dark for a few years. Ever since MoMA’s exhibition that explored Matisse’s cut-outs a decade ago, The Swimming Pool has seemed a permanent fixture at the museum, guaranteed to be on the wall along with masterpieces like Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night (1889) or Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World (1948).
Installation view of Henri Matisse’s “The Swimming Pool” at the Museum of Modern Art. Photo: courtesy MoMA.
The museum, after all, has long kept it on view after leading a five-year conservation of the gouache-on-paper piece that aimed to restore its original colors. It has hung in a room that matches the dimensions of Matisse’s dining room in Nice, for which it was designed. Ahead of the coming deinstallation, MoMA is hosting a mini reprisal of the 2014 exhibition with “Matisse’s Cut-Outs: A Celebration,” which brings together 10 works famously created by cutting painted paper with scissors.
Matisse turned to crafting these works after undergoing surgery in 1941. Painting had become a painful ordeal, and he often worked from bed or in a wheelchair, carefully shaping sheets of paper before having them arranged with the aid of assistants. Matisse may have been old, infirm, and oftentimes irascible, but he found a new mode of expression in his final decade, one of bold color and deceptive simplicity that has only furthered the brilliance of his legacy.
Henri Matisse, Christmas Eve (1952). Photo: MoMA.
He would produce more than 250 paper cut-outs, some, like The Swimming Pool, spanning whole walls, others designed for a single sheet of paper. These experiments began with Jazz (1947), a series of 20 that he created for Verve, a French art magazine. The original title was Circus, and the theme flows through the works in the form of prancing horses and contorted bodies. They were, Matisse said, “lively and violent” images that crystallized “memories of circuses, folktales, and voyages.”
Henri Matisse beside a stained glass at the Chapel of Vence, France, based on a cut-out. Photo: Universal History Archive via Getty Images.
A highlight arrives with Christmas Eve (1952), a seasonal stained-glass window created by French glass master Paul Bony. It’s based on a Matisse cutout (which appears nearby) that was commissioned by Life magazine for its New York headquarters. Scattered with bright, long-limbed stars and blocks of yellow and green, it’s a standard nativity image that gestures towards the increasingly abstract direction Matisse was headed.
“Matisse’s Cut-Outs: A Celebration” runs at the Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, New York, from November 9, 2024–January 20, 2025. More