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      Artist Jennifer Angus Wants You to See the Beauty of Bugs

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      Jennifer Angus uses her bare fingers to delicately remove a pin holding down the thorax of a large, green insect affixed to a foam board she had used to transport its body. She must be careful: the specimen has been used so many times that holes have appeared in its form. After removing the pin, she hammers the body to the gallery wall to begin forming a pattern.
      “It’s about the negative space between the bodies” Angus said as she worked to install her new solo show at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Connecticut. The show, “Jennifer Angus: The Golden Hour,” (on view through September 8, 2024) reuses the bodies of around 5,000 bugs to comment on an impending human-made global catastrophe.
      The show begins with an Alice in Wonderland-esque experience in which Angus plays with scale. She has made small model homes that are elevated on platforms and form a sort of “main street” leading to a small church. The intent is to make the viewers feel insect sized.
      Along the walls are small display boxes, dioramas in which Angus has personified some of her insects. In the same room, she has placed some of her damaged specimens in jelly jars to create a kaleidoscopic stained-glass window. The orange walls and glow of the “stained glass” give the room a feeling of sunset, mirroring the name of the show.
      Jennifer Angus holds an insect specimen that she prepares to nail to a wall at the Bruce Museum in Connecticut as part of an art installation. Photo by Adam Schrader
      The titular “golden hour” references the warm glow of light that illuminates the sky as the last rays of sunlight begin to fade, Angus said in a statement. She proposes that human life is in its golden hour and draws comparisons to the Doomsday Clock, a symbol for the likelihood of a human-made global catastrophe caused by things like nuclear war or climate change.
      “We are in the twilight of the world as we know it,” she said in a statement. “‘The Golden Hour’ is intended to highlight what we stand to lose if action is not taken to prevent climate change, preserve natural habitats, quell the use of insecticides and overall see nature as something to be protected as opposed to a commodity to be used.”
      In the next room is Angus’s cabinet of curiosities, where the artist has removed drawers from an antique to create more dioramas using her bug specimens. In some, she mixed the fallen-off parts of different bug species to create characters like the Cicada Lady, who has a cicada head, a beeswax body, and grasshopper arms.
      A closeup shows the artist Jennifer Angus removing a pin from a bug she transported to be used in an exhibit at the Bruce Museum. Photo by Adam Schrader.
      “She’s sort of a teacher, which I think is a reflection of me,” she said. The artist was inspired to anthropomorphize the bugs because of Beatrix Potter’s The Tale Of Two Bad Mice, in which she made these mice look “cute.”
      During the installation, this room also included what Angus called her “bug hospital”—complete with an emergency room and an outpatient clinic. Specimens that suffered damage during transport or installation are taken there to be glued back together.
      “We’ve trained the registrar here how to fix them. She’s now a certified bug surgeon,” Angus said. “We repair them if we have the pieces and we put the not-so-great specimens high up or low down and keep the best ones at eye level.”
      The show does not contain informational text, Angus said, because she is “not a fan of didactic work.” But she said she hopes the message of her work is clear, or at the very least, that people go to her website and find out more information about the world of bugs.
      Lou Adams, a printmaker and former assistant to the artist Jennifer Adams, helps the latter install her artwork using bugs at the Bruce Museum in Connecticut. Photo by Adam Schrader
      “Really, my hope is that anyone who comes to see the show will think about insects differently and not be so quick, most important of all, to get out that can of Raid,” she said.
      Angus began working with bugs because she teaches textile design at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. About 20 years ago, she was researching textiles in northern Thailand and came upon a garment that was embellished with green metallic beetle wings.
      “It makes total sense because these are mother nature’s sequins. They’re shiny, metallic green,” Angus said. So, she learned more about how bugs had been used by different cultures over time. For example, in the Victorian era, beetle wing embroidery used bug parts for high fashion. And in Southeast Asia, some cultures used them in headdresses.
      Model houses, including one that once housed crickets, is pictured in an installation by the artist Jennifer Angus at the Bruce Museum in Connecticut. Photo by Adam Schrader
      One day, she decided to try her hand at using bugs to make patterns, which she said “felt really reckless” at the time. But the reaction she got from viewers of her first exhibit of such work affirmed her newfound medium.
      “From a distance, the insects are flattened, and it looks like wallpaper and so people would walk up and then I’d literally see them take a step back as they realized what it was,” Angus said. “We see wallpaper as a domestic space. Yet that thing we don’t want inside is insects.”
      Angus was surprised by the affordability of insect specimens. At the time, each bug cost her about 25 cents—even if they were somewhat difficult to purchase from insect specimen dealers used by academic institutions and museums. The most expensive insects in the exhibit are gold beetles from Costa Rica that can cost over $100 a pop.
      “The internet was just starting so you would get a big book with all the species in black and white, no pictures. I had to learn what was right for my type of work,” she said. They have since become more expensive to buy but easier to obtain online.
      Damaged bugs that cannot be repaired or reused in Jennifer Angus’s artworks are preserved in jellies she makes and includes in an installation mimicking stained glass effect. Photo by Adam Schrader
      It was fortuitous Angus chose the first specimen she did, the Eupholus schoenherrii—a type of blue weevil. She selected them for their pattern but realized quickly their bodies could withstand wear-and-tear. Cicadas also do well for her purposes, but butterflies and moths do not, she learned. And she never works with rare or endangered species.
      “People go, ‘how many insects died for this exhibition?’ and I tell them that, first of all, these are reused,” Angus said. “What you’re seeing has gradually accumulated over more than 20 years. And if you’re upset, wonderful. That’s fantastic. Do something. Most of the species I used come from a tropical rainforest. We all know how fast the Amazon is being cut down.”
      Even Angus was a little squeamish when she opened her first shipment of bugs and over the years there have been some species too gross to work with. But now, she admits she can eat dinner beside her bugs while working.
      The artist Jennifer Angus is pictured holding bugs as transported to be used in a show of her work. Angus uses insects to create geometric patterns and other art, Photo by Adam Schrader
      “I frequently say to the people that are upset, ‘These are adult specimens because if they weren’t, they’d be larvae. And it’d be a totally different show,’” she said. “There are going to be people who aren’t going to like this, I remember an e-mail that I got, and the subject line was ‘insecticide.’ I thought, ‘that’s quite clever.’”
      Angus and her critics often end up agreeing that they want to see the insects thrive, even if their means to that end are different. But sometimes she also thinks about insects that conservationists don’t want to flourish, like invasive lanternfly species.
      While Angus has had her fair share of critics, entomologists and the science community have supported her artistic endeavors. She recalled an exhibition at the University of Nebraska where the chair of the entomology department thanked her for making entomologists “look sexy.”
      A valuable beetle known as Chrysina aurigans, native to Costa Rica, is pictured in an artwork by Jennifer Angus at the Bruce Museum in Connecticut. Photo by Adam Schrader
      When asked if she had ever considered using live bugs in her work, Angus revealed that she had once used live crickets. Returning to the houses on “main street,” the artist said the very first one had its windows and doors covered with plastic film to keep live crickets in.
      “I was reading about cricket cages, which are popular in China in summer because they have a beautiful song. In Germany there was a similar tradition, but it was a much more elaborate house. So that’s where I got this idea,” she said. “But what I have found after the first showing is curators really hate having to look after the livestock.”
      Photo by Adam Schrader.
      Angus noted that the number of artists working with insects is relatively small and so they all sort of know each other.
      “Like Catherine Chalmers, she’s the cockroach lady,” Angus said. “Jan Fabre, a Belgian artist, covered the royal palace with beautiful elytra. It’s inspiring, yet it’s horrific.”
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      Have You Seen This Goat? Artist Duke Riley’s Hunt for a Long-Lost Animal Headlines His New Show

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      Duke Riley has long been captivated by the sea. When I reached the Brooklyn-based artist over the phone, he was sailing off Rhode Island on his boat, on which he lives for months out of the year. He attempted to boil his feelings for seafaring and maritime history down into a neat one-liner—and failed. “It’s the kind of thing that I could write a thesis on,” he told me. 
      Not long ago, while reading up on Theodore Roosevelt’s Great White Fleet, a group of 16 battleships the U.S. president sent on a 1907–09 world tour to showcase the nation’s military might, he stumbled on a curious fact. In the early 1900s, the USS Vermont was once home to a goat named Skellig Mór, which lived on the battleship as a sort of mascot. Just as intriguing was the creature’s back story and its fate, now long forgotten.
      The legend of Skellig Mór has since sent Riley on a quest to locate the animal’s remains. Over the past month, he has plastered missing posters on the street, placed an ad in the Boston Globe, and set up a hotline to receive tips about its whereabouts. He told me the search has not yet yielded any good leads, but he’s been in touch with folks from Boston College who are volunteering their help. 
      Duke Riley’s missing poster for Skellig Mór in the Boston Globe. Photo: @dukerileystudio on Instagram.
      And what might Riley want with the remains of Skellig Mór? The point is to return the goat to its home in Ireland, but more deeply, the hunt itself—which headlines his new solo show, “The Repatriation of King Skellig Mór,” at Praise Shadows Art Gallery in Brookline, Massachusetts—enacts a form of remembrance.
      “Just the very fact that this goat had significance in one place and now, nobody even seems to know where it is,” he said, “is a pretty good argument for why certain things should be repatriated.”
      Skellig Mór made its first public appearance at the 1905 Puck Fair, an annual street festival, in Killorglin in County Kerry, where it was exhibited and crowned king. The following year, the Knights of St. Brendan society, deciding Boston should have its own Puck Fair, bought and imported the goat to the U.S. for such a purpose. But an internal fight split the organization, and, in a highly publicized dispute, its various factions spent years quarreling over the rightful ownership of Skellig Mór.
      Ultimately, it took the courts to decide that the goat should be donated to the U.S. Navy. Skellig Mór was brought aboard the Vermont, where it briefly served as a sort of mascot until it died in 1909. Its body was then reportedly stuffed and displayed in the Boston Museum of Natural History, now known as the Museum of Science. The institution, however, no longer holds those remains. 
      Duke Riley, No. 418 of the Poly S. Tyrene Memorial Maritime Museum (2024), on view at Praise Shadows Art Gallery. Photo: Dan Watkins.
      At the heart of Riley’s latest exhibition is a scrimshaw, titled No. 418 of the Poly S. Tyrene Memorial Maritime Museum (2024), commemorating Skellig Mór. But unlike traditional scrimshaw, which sailors etched into bone or ivory, the artist’s work is drawn on a detergent bottle he recovered from the waters of the U.S. eastern seaboard. The container has been treated to mimic the grain of whale bone, while its face depicts a naval officer weeping by the goat’s tombstone. 
      The work is Riley’s way of not just memorializing the goat, but recognizing its service to the U.S. Navy. “It didn’t willingly enlist,” he noted. “But then again, most humans don’t willingly enlist in the military either. So, there’s some questions about how we separate ourselves from the natural world.”
      A group of Duke Riley’s scrimshaw cassettes. Photo: Robert Bredvad.
      For some two decades now, Riley’s practice has sought to unpack how individual and institutional forces have left indelible marks on our natural landscapes and waterfronts. Notably, he’s done so in his celebrated scrimshaw and mosaics crafted out of scavenged materials, recently showcased at his 2022 solo exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum. 
      “These objects were designed to be appealing to us so that we’ll keep buying them,” he explained of his salvaged hoard. “There’s no reason why you can’t make beautiful objects out of something that was already designed to be beautiful.” 
      Duke Riley, Five Boston Battleships and Their Accompanying Mascots (2024) (detail). Photo: Robert Bredvad.
      At Praise Shadows, Riley is also showing a clutch of “ruby glass” bottles, which reimagine the Victorian souvenir in single-use plastic, as well as more scrimshaw, lovingly hand-drawn as befits a tattoo artist, made of canisters and cassette tapes. His brand of humor and mischief is on display, too: on one scrimshaw tape is rendered a bemused-looking fish with the caption “All That You Have Is Your Sole.” 
      The exhibition is dominated by his latest sailor’s valentine (a shellcraft memento sailors used to gift their sweethearts), an eight-by-eight-foot assemblage made of shells and plastic detritus including disposable lighters, tampon applicators, and syringes. Riley is betting it’s the world’s largest sailor’s valentine: “I don’t think anybody is stupid enough to do something that big.” 
      Installation view of “The Repatriation of King Skellig Mór” at Praise Shadows Art Gallery. Photo: Dan Watkins.
      Besides Skellig Mór, another animal is getting its due at Riley’s show. One scrimshaw bottle, No. 424 of the Poly S. Tyrene Memorial Maritime Museum (2024), is dedicated to Hoover, a harbor seal housed at Boston’s New England Aquarium in the 1980s. Hoover was beloved for its apparent ability to mimic human speech—and in a Boston accent, no less. But like Skellig Mór, Hoover’s story has been lost to history, save for Riley’s posthumous tribute. 
      “We have a very short concept of time in our own self-obsessiveness,” he said. “It’s a reflection of our culture that something that was once deemed important has been completely forgotten.” 
      With that, Riley informed me he had urgent boat business to tend to, namely fishing out some shaving equipment he had accidentally dropped down a toilet. “I have some exciting nautical stuff ahead of me,” he joked. I let him return to the sea. 
      “The Repatriation of King Skellig Mór” is on view at Praise Shadows Art Gallery, 313A Harvard Street, Brookline, Massachusetts, through June 30.
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      ‘Relational Aesthetics’ Is Back at the Beyeler, Baby!

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      Basel’s big museums tend to bring their best for Art Basel week, when the global art circus touches down in the placid Swiss berg. So, when the very biggest, the Beyeler Foundation, announced that its 2024 offering would be a group show, observers scratched their heads. Summer group shows are usually low-stakes placeholders. They don’t attract the buzz of a solo show celebrating a big name. To give you an idea of expectations, in 2023 the Beyeler brought out Basquiat; the year before, Mondrian.
      Well, as it turns out, the Beyeler’s summer group show is getting plenty of buzz—enough, in fact, to legitimately be called “the talk of the art world.”
      Observers are still scratching their heads though.
      Because the show’s a weird one. It’s actually hard even to describe what it is. An experimental exhibition meant seemingly to inject novelty into every nook of the Beyeler, it is both over-stuffed with ideas and coyly under-explained—seemingly because the idea is to throw you off balance. Even the frickin’ title changes over time! It was being called “Dance with Daemons” when I was there, but is constantly renamed. A little accompanying booklet I picked up has a list of other titles including “Cloud Chronicles” and “The Richness of Going Slowly.” As I write this, the name online is “Echoes Unbound.”
      The show’s mission is “to stimulate artistic freedom, interdisciplinary exchange, and collective responsibility,” with its conception credited to no less than seven collaborators: Sam Keller, Mouna Mekouar, Isabela Mora, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Precious Okoyomon, Philippe Parreno, and Tino Sehgal. Instead of too many cooks spoiling the broth, it feels as if they have made some weird new flavor of exhibition—though it must also be said that this offbeat museum-as-living-thing brew is also just a throwback to the “relational aesthetics” moment that brought some of the bigger artists here to fame, when quirky science-project art and poetic scrambling of audience expectations were the rage.
      Now that I think of it, if you wanted to state plainly what this show was “about,” it might be relational aesthetics nostalgia—Rirkrit Tiravanija offers the terrace as a space for cookouts, while Carsten Höller is offering a gallery in the museum to book for psychedelic sleepovers (there’s a holographic flying mushroom in the room). Nevertheless, for my money, the loose-limbed 2000s vibe feels suddenly fresh again, at a time when more market-driven art channels (galleries, fairs) aren’t really supporting much experimental work, and the less market-driven ones (museums, biennials) feel forlorn and at sea.
      A detail of Precious Okoyomon’s the sun eats her children (2024). Photo by Ben Davis.
      Almost everything here challenges the audience to try to inhabit the museum in some kind of fresh way, engaging the senses as well as the brain. You’ve got a whole greenhouse-as-installation by Okoyomon, which is enchanting—there are butterflies!—but gets sinister when you realize it is all various poisonous flowers (there’s also an unsettling animatronic bear, like something out of Five Nights at Freddy’s). You’ve got Parreno’s techno-mythological tower, rising like some kind of alien artifact in the lawn, pulsing with movement and lights in an otherworldly way. You’ve got venerable Japanese artist Fujiko Nakaya’s “sculpture” consisting of jets of mist that are periodically unleashed, swamping the landscape around you. And that’s all before you even get inside the actual museum.
      Within the tony galleries of the Beyeler, you discover that this contemporary art show is not, in fact, all about contemporary art. A big portion is devoted to showing off the famously astounding Beyeler permanent collection—but the curation has been helmed by Tino Sehgal, an artist known for staging “constructed situations” using performers in museums (he also has a charming performance work here, This Joy, featuring three dancers in shimmying, improvisatory formations doing semi-musical vocal riffs on Ode to Joy, among other tunes). True to form, Sehgal has turned his art curating into a performance: the installation is being remixed and rehung constantly so that you feel as if you are always in a show that is midway through being installed. You’ll see art handlers moving paintings often.

      An install of artworks in the Beyeler Foundation’s summer show. Photo by Ben Davis.
      When I passed through, Sehgal had placed highlights together in uncomfortably intimate, wonky proximity. An example: the central panel of a Francis Bacon triptych, hung cheek to jowl with a Rudolf Stingel abstraction, with a life-sized Alberto Giacometti figure placed as if it were staring into it. The gesture does make me viscerally feel why you don’t normally display art like this—what you gain in playful connections in the present you lose in focus on artists’ actual visions. But taken as an artistic performance, Sehgal’s curating is a truly memorable flex.
      There are little experimental flourishes everywhere, but the bulk of the contemporary part of the show is a more conventional, one-artist, one-room kind of thing. The chosen works are united by suggesting the possibility of unexpected experience and encounters, from an evolving A.I.-generated video of a turtle by Ian Cheng, to impressively weird sculptures that incorporate a washing machine and refrigerator by Adrián Villar Rojas.
      A sculpture by Adrián Villar Rojas at the Beyeler Foundation. Photo by Ben Davis.
      It is not all jocular riffing. Arthur Jafa’s almost-abstract black-and-white film, LOML (2023), is a tribute to his friend, the late, great music critic Greg Tate, who passed in 2021. It is just fuzzy shapes, like a memory of some kind of powerful force being called upon, wrestling against oblivion. You might also sense here how the show’s larger spirit of playful juxtaposition can be salutary. For a work that could convey utter melancholy, the experimental context draws to the surface how the film’s ghostly, semi-abstract collage soundtrack has a warmth to it—the side of the work that is not just longing for a lost friend, but paying homage to the delight in musical invention that defined Tate’s writing.
      I could name other highlights, but I’ll just end by mentioning the one that made me know I wanted to write about the show: Cyprien Gaillard’s Retinal Rivalry (2024), a half-hour 3-D film.
      The danger of all this experimental interventionism is that it comes off as a gimmick, novelty for novelty’s sake. And 3-D is a perennial film gimmick. But like this show as a whole, Gaillard’s piece transcends that criticism with dispatch. Palpably the product of an artist with access to top-of-the-line tools and explicitly an exploration of their potentials, it is the best artistic use of 3-D I’ve even seen (and, yes, I am including the “space whale revenge” sequence from Avatar 2: The Way of Water).
      A crowd watches Retinal Rivals (2024) by Cyprien Gaillard.
      Almost narrative-less, it takes us drifting across features of the German landscape and its monuments, often dwelling on the slightly cruddy sides of hallowed things: majestic buildings caked with construction scaffolding, dusty and neglected museum interiors, the dramatic views that inspired Caspar David Friedrich turned to tourist attractions. The imagery feels at once quotidian and meticulously composed, filmic paintings that use depth as one of their colors, putting 3-D’s jewel-box effect to work making you see what you are seeing in a new way.
      At moments, the landscapes of Retinal Rivalry inspire a kind of dark awe about the scope of human impact on the world (the opening scene presses you up close to a huge-feeling mass of discarded glass bottles, only to watch them slither away from you as a chute opens, plunging into a dump far below—an extraordinary effect). At others, it made me chuckle (a shot centering on the giant, cartoonish nose of a sculpture, the camera moving in and out so that the schnoz looms at you comically). In still others, it gave an unexpected, visceral rush (the sequence that floats in on an outdoor wall plastered with Immersive Van Gogh posters, then plunges backwards along its length as if going into hyperspace—almost as if Gaillard were saying, “here, Immersive Van Gogh, let me show you how something really cool is done”). Like this entire experimental Beyeler exhibition, it’s a work of fluid connections, technical bravura, and a surprising emotional range.
      The first of the two times I watched through Retinal Rivalry, a fellow viewer, a Swiss woman wearing a “RAISED BY THE STREETS” shirt-dress, was so distressed at how passive the audience was that she was telling everyone, “You’ve got to move around! The effect is better when you move around!” Helpful tip! As she exited, she said to her companion, “It’s really cool—but they haven’t realized it yet.” I feel like she was really getting into the spirit of this show.
      The Fondation Beyeler’s summer show is on view in Basel, Switzerland, through August 11, 2024.
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      Dozens of Precious Artists’ Books Come Together in a Blowout Summer Show

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      Artists’ books offer a solitary, intimate experience of a creator’s work, one that unfolds across the time it takes the reader to turn the pages, and one that typically comes a lot cheaper than works that hang on the wall. So said two longtime New York dealers, John Post Lee of BravinLee Programs and Adam Boxer of Ubu Gallery, in a video chat on Wednesday that also provided a preview of a show of dozens of these precious objects, now on view at BravinLee.
      The books range as far back as 1931, with European practitioners like Hans Bellmer, Unica Zürn, and the duo of Paul Éluard and Man Ray, along with contemporary artists, some who focus on the medium, like New York’s Scott Teplin, and some less known for their engagement with it, like Alexis Rockman (whose first publication, in 1991, was printed by John Post Lee Gallery).
      The name of the show, “Artists’ Book Month II The World is a Scandal,” is based on an oft-quoted line from Bellmer: “If the origin of my work is scandalous, it is because, for me, the world is a scandal.”
      Hans Ballmer, La Poupée (1934). Courtesy Ubu Gallery.
      The German artist contributes two of the highlights of the show. He started forming mannequin parts into unsettling sculptures, which he called “an artificial girl with multiple anatomical possibilities,” in Berlin in 1933. His book The Doll (printed in German as Die Puppe in 1934, and in French as La Poupée in 1936) contains photos of his dolls in various stages of assembly. The show includes a German printing from an extremely small, unknown edition size, priced at $250,000, as well as a French example from an edition of 100 for $100,000.
      It was Bellmer who brought the two dealers together, in fact, when, 15 or so years ago, Lee had a copy of the Bellmer book he was trying to sell, and asked for help from Boxer, who invited him over and generously shared his knowledge of the artist and the book market. The show combines historical material from Ubu, which shows 20th-century avant-garde art with an emphasis on Dada, Surrealism, and Constructivism, with BravinLee’s contemporary program. 
      George Cochrane, Inferno: Geryon Edition (2018–20). Courtesy BravinLee Programs.
      While the historical and aesthetic merits of these works are easy to see, Boxer said, even when museums are eager to add examples to their collections, they run up against a problem. They may not be able to get support to acquire the works because of one simple question: How will we display it? While vitrines can provide a good showcase, they deprive the viewer of the experience of the book as it’s meant to be. 
      The most ambitious project from BravinLee’s side of the aisle is George Cochrane’s lushly hand-colored copy of Dante’s Inferno, published by Thornwillow Press to mark the 700th anniversary of the poet’s death. It’s illuminated using pigments dating from the author’s day and sourced from Italy, and, for the right buyer, could go for $50,000.
      Martin Wilner, Journal of Evidence Weekly Vol. 172 (2016). Courtesy BravinLee Programs.
      Martin Wilner’s Journal of Evidence Weekly Vol. 172 (2016), meantime, is priced at $20,000. The artist, who has been showing since 1997, appears in museum collections from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art.
      But many of the contemporary artists come at much more modest prices, and offer aesthetic delights aplenty. 
      Iranian-American artist Anahita Bagheri contribtues a gorgeous acrylic and crayon on papier-mâché book which also made an appearance in a 2020 video installation, and lists at $2,500.
      Andrea Burgay, Science Fiction Stories (2024). Courtesy BravinLee Programs.
      Andrea Burgay’s altered found books, such as Science Fiction Stories (2024), exploit the graphic covers and the pathos of the objects’ past lives. They are tagged at just $800. 
      For those on an even tighter budget, there’s Cochrane’s graphic novel Long Time Gone: Chapter One, “Bird Gets the Worm,” created with his young daughter Fiamma, that’s just $20. 
      “It’s an honor to be able to show these young artists alongside these masterpieces of the book arts, in a head space that is more rarified,” Lee said.
      Of the partnership between the two gallerists, he added, “Dealers often aren’t given credit for how nicely they can play together.”
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      Four Overlooked Women Abstract Expressionists Are Spotlighted in London

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      When we think of Abstract Expressionism, we think of large, declarative canvases onto which pigment has been flung, dripped, pooled, or applied in broad, bold brushstrokes. Usually by men. “Montage,” a new exhibition at Gazelli Art House in London, puts the spotlight on women Abstract Expressionists, offering a mix of big names like Helen Frankenthaler, Grace Hartigan, and Betty Parsons alongside those whose legacies are still unfairly overlooked, like Perle Fine, Nancy Grossman, and Sonja Sekula.
      “Montage” shows how these artists, best known as painters, also applied the movement’s radical, experimental spirit to smaller-scale collage works. This survey of mixed-media works includes examples made using all manner of found materials like wood, tissue paper, and sand, in many cases embellished with paint, ink, and charcoal. In this way, the works also evince the enduring influence of European Modernism on the midcentury New York art scene.
      Artnet News picked out four artists from the show whose work was critically acclaimed in their lifetimes and are now finally receiving the attention they deserve.
      Perle Fine 
      Perle Fine in her New York studio in c. 1963. Photo: Maurice Berezov, courtesy of Perle Fine Estate and Gazelli Art House, © AE Artworks.
      Born in Boston in 1905 to Russian immigrant parents, Fine showed an early interest in art and moved to New York in her early twenties to pursue an education at the Art Students League. There she opted to study under the renowned German-born artist Hans Hofmann, who was instrumental in developing the formal breakthroughs that defined European movements like Cubism into a more gestural, expressive style. Over time, Fine cultivated a number of high-profile collectors including Museum of Modern Art founding director Alfred Barr, art director and publisher Emily Hall Tremaine, and architect Frank Lloyd Wright, but also supported her practice by working as a gallerist.
      By 1945, Fine had developed an interest in nonrepresentational art and joined the American Abstract Artists group. Five years later, Willem de Kooning nominated her to join “the Club,” a members-only meeting place on 8th Street where a tight-knit community of artists met to socialize, plan, and debate. The group selected her to participate in the historic Ninth Street Show, which featured artists like Philip Guston, Elaine de Kooning, Joan Mitchell, Robert Motherwell, and Barnett Newman; the show established Abstract Expressionism as a major American art movement. Fine exhibited in all six of the subsequent annual invite-only exhibitions until 1957.
      Perle Fine, Supersonic Calm (c. 1966). Courtesy of Gazelli Art House and Berry Campbell, New York. © A.E. Artworks.
      In 1968, Fine noted that collage helped her learn how construct a composition. “When you do something to that white paper, when you put one or two forms on that white paper, that simple sheet of white paper can become one of the most beautiful things in the world if those forms are put in there in such a way as to involve every inch of that from top to bottom and from left to right,” she said. “Which is something I never was as aware of as when I worked this out in collage and later in painting. So that another great truth about art was revealed to me in this way!”
      After many years living with Alzheimer’s, Fine died of pneumonia aged 83 on May 31, 1988.
      Lilly Fenichel
      Lilly Fenichel in her studio. Courtesy of Lilly Fenichel Foundation.
      Fenichel was born in 1927 to a Jewish family in Vienna that fled the Nazis in 1939, eventually settling in Hollywood. After completing her studies at the California School of Fine Arts (later renamed the San Francisco Art Institute) in 1952, Fenichel became a regular on the burgeoning Los Angeles art scene and eventually a key member of the second generation of the Bay Area School of Abstract Expressionism. She supplemented her income by working as an art director and costume director in the film industry.
      From early in her career, Fenichel became known for striking works made using monochromatic or somber palettes. Though she befriended significant artists on the West Coast like Larry Bell and Ed Ruscha, she decided in 1952 to move to New York, where she believed women artists were more respected. There she befriended artists like Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko and began teaching art classes at the Museum of Modern Art.
      Lilly Fenichel, Collage IV (1961). Courtesy of Gazelli Art House and Berry Campbell, New York, © Lilly Fenichel Foundation.
      “I was an Abstract Expressionist, but with a lot of drawing in it,” Fenichel reflected in 2011. “From the early ’60s, I drew a lot. They were kind of surrealist, very personal, demon, abstract drawing and paintings… There was a progression from those into these minimal paintings that were in my first one person show, at the Santa Barbara Museum in the late ’60s.”
      In 1981, Fenichel moved to New Mexico, having fallen in love with the city of Taos some decades previously. She died in Albuquerque in 2016, just short of age 90.
      Sonja Sekula
      Sonja Sekula in her Breton Studio in 1945. Courtesy of Peter Blum Gallery.
      Born in Lucerne, Switzerland in 1918, Sonja Sekula moved around with her family from a young age, settling in New York in 1936. She eventually joined the Art Students League and studied under fellow European-born Modernist artists George Grosz from Germany and Morris Kantor from Russia. She fell in with a crowd of exiled Surrealists like André Breton and began exhibiting through major gallerists like Peggy Guggenheim and Betty Parsons, in one case appearing alongside Pollock and Newman in a 1949 show. At one time, she lived with dancer-choreographer Merce Cunningham and composer John Cage.
      Sekula was known for small, densely intricate, usually very colorful works. Shortly after she joined Betty Parsons, some of the gallery’s biggest stars, like Pollock and Rothko, complained that it had let in too many artists, “many of them amateurs, most of them women,” and left.
      Sonja Sekula, Untitled Collage (1959). Courtesy of Gazelli Art House.
      Those who knew Sekula remarked on her easy, spirited nature. It is also notable that she was very open about her homosexuality. “To feel guilt about having loved a being of your own kind body and soul is hopeless—let us hope there were many pure moments in each of these attractions and loves,” she wrote in her journal.
      It has been recorded that during frequent hospitalizations in psychiatric wards, doctors tried to cure Sekula of her homosexuality. In 1961, she wrote: “Life was an interesting experience. I do not regret it.”
      Sekula returned to Switzerland with her family in the 1950s. She died by suicide in Zürich in 1963 at the age of 45.
      Amaranth Ehrenhalt 
      Amaranth Ehrenhalt shot for Vogue in 1951. Courtesy of Anita Shapolsky Gallery.
      As an extension to the main exhibition, Gazelli is also showing work by artist Amaranth Ehrenhalt, who was born in 1928 and grew up in Philadelphia, earning her BFA at the University of Pennsylvania in 1951. She later moved to New York, where she befriended many artists and began producing work in the Abstract Expressionist style. At one time, she recalled how her desk was a door propped on top of a bathtub in her tiny Greenwich Village walk-up. As well as paintings, Ehrenhalt produced textiles, ceramics, and even a 150-foot mosaic mural in the French town of Banlieue, where she once lived.
      Having long harbored a love of Europe, when Ehrenhalt was invited on a three-week trip to Paris, she ended up living there for four decades, supporting herself as a divorcée with two children through odd jobs. Her reputation inevitably suffered from being so far removed from the center of the art world at that time, but she came to know influential artists like Sonia Delaunay, Alberto Giacometti, Natalia Goncharova, and Yves Klein.
      Amaranth Ehrenhalt, Neilius I (1958). Courtesy of Gazelli Art House.
      In 2018, Ehrenhalt said in an interview with White Hot Magazine: “I am a colorist. I like to think about my work as a symphony on a flat surface. Everyone who has written about me use words like energy and color, ‘joie de vivre.’”
      Ehrenhalt moved back to New York in 2008, where she died at the age of 93 on March 16, 2021 from coronavirus.
      “Montage” is on view at Gazelli Art House in London through July 13, 2024. 
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      The Met Spotlights the Intricate Work of a Celebrated Silversmith

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      The Met is honoring one of the bonafide greats of American decorative arts. A new exhibition is dedicated to Edward C. Moore, the influential collector, celebrated silversmith, and creative leader of Tiffany & Co. in the late 19th century.
      “Collecting Inspiration: Edward C. Moore at Tiffany & Co.” opened on June 9 and features 70 precious silver creations produced during Moore’s tenure as chief designer at Tiffany & Co. These are paired with an impressive 180 items from Moore’s personal collection, which spans ancient Greece to Japan and the Islamic world.
      So, who was this distinguished doyen of silversmithing? Born in New York City in 1827, Moore apprenticed under his father before inheriting the business in 1851. His artistry soon caught the eye of the very best in the business at Tiffany & Co., where he was offered an exclusive contract before being appointed chief silver designer in 1868. Only a year prior, Moore had been awarded the gold medal at the world’s pre-eminent Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1867.
      Installation view of “Collecting Inspiration: Edward C. Moore at Tiffany & Co.” at The Met in New York City, opening June 9, 2024. Photo courtesy of The Met.
      Over the following two decades until his death in 1891, Moore would leave his mark on one of the most iconic American luxury design houses. Highlights from this era on show at the Met include the Bryant Vase of 1876, the first piece of American silver to enter The Met’s collection, and an ornate 1874 pitcher bearing an elephant head.
      Vase, Tiffany & Co. (1878), Private Collection, New York and Vase, Tiffany & Co. (1877), Brooklyn Museum. Courtesy of The Met.
      By pairing these exquisite 19th century archival pieces alongside the trove of historic treasures to which Moore found himself drawn, the exhibition initiates fascinating lines of inquiry into the possible influences at play in his work. Some particularly magnificent pieces from across centuries and continents include a Roman perfume bottle from the 1st century C.E., a 13th-century Syrian enameled glass bowl, an 18th-century Murano glass cup from Venice, and a 19th-century Japanese lacquered box.
      An installation image of an intricate swan. Photo: Eileen Travell, courtesy of The Met.
      Moore’s dedication to learning from the past and natural beneficence is perhaps best exemplified by his decision to found a school for apprentices at Tiffany & Co. and to supply the students with cherished items from his private collection to use as models and stylistic inspiration, according to a 1891 report in The Studio. The paper also noted how Moore had been motivated not by vanity but by a deep appreciation of beauty, or “the definite purpose of supplying standards, as perfect as could be obtained, in the several industrial arts.”
      Moore bequeathed more than 2,000 objects from his expansive holding of glass, ceramics, and metalwork to The Met. These exceptional items formed the basis of the museum’s collection of decorative arts.
      “Collecting Inspiration: Edward C. Moore at Tiffany & Co.” runs at the Met from June 9 through October 20, 2024. It was made possible by Tiffany & Co. 
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      5 Must-See Shows During Art Basel

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      Next week, the art world is poised to descend on the shores of the Rhine River for Art Basel’s flagship fair, which will unfold alongside a slew of satellite events including Liste, Photo Basel, Basel Social Club, Volta, and June Art Fair. Beyond these selling events, however, there is a slew of institutional exhibitions to take in. From Dan Flavin’s “Dedications in Light” to an all-encompassing Summer Show at the Fondation Beyeler, plus artist spotlights on Mika Rottenberg and Toyin Ojih Odutola, Basel is a veritable hotspot for art lovers this season.

      “Mika Rottenberg. Antimatter Factory” at Museum TinguelyThrough November 3, 2024 
      Mika Rottenberg, still from Untitled Ceiling Projection (2018). Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth.
      At the Tinguely Museum, Argentinian artist Mika Rottenberg’s wonderfully chaotic, absurd, and clever video works address ideas of hard and soft power vis-a-vis capitalism, gender dominance, and the natural world. Like Jean Tinguely, Rottenberg satirizes the state of production across a range of materials, in works like Spaghetti Blockchain (2019) and NoNoseKnows (2015), sending up real-life situations like the facilitation of monetary transactions and industrial pearl production in humorous and surreal videos and sculptures.

      “Cloud Chronicles” at Fondation BeyelerThrough August 11, 2024 
      Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, 2024: Philippe Parreno, Membrane (2023). Courtesy of the artist © Philippe Parreno; Fujiko Nakaya, Untitled (2024). Courtesy of the artist, © Fujiko Nakaya. Photo: Mark Niedermann.
      For its summer show, the Fondation Beyeler has for the first time transformed its entire museum and outdoor park into an experimental environment featuring works by leading contemporary artists. Termed a “living organism,” the show features works by artists working at the edge of traditional mediums, including Ian Cheng, Precious Okoyomon, Philippe Parreno, Rachel Rose, Tino Sehgal, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and Adrián Villar Rojas. A highlight is the inclusion of Carsten Höller and Adam Haar’s Dream Hotel Room 1: Dreaming of Flying with Flying Fly Agarics (2024). The animatronic bed moves based on sensors detected by a shifting body on the mattress, with the course of falling asleep and waking corresponding to a blooming mushroom suspended above the sleeper’s pillow. Visitors can book a 60-minute session to sleep in the bed during museum hours.

      “Dan Flavin: Dedications in Lights” at Kunstmuseum BaselThrough August 18, 2024 
      Dan Flavin, untitled (to Barnett Newman) one (1971). Collection Carré d’Art-Musée d’art contemporain de Nîmes © Stephen Flavin / 2024, ProLitteris, Zurich, Courtesy David Zwirner.
      In the early 1960s, Minimalist pioneer Dan Flavin embarked on a series of artworks dedicated to fellow artists, cultural and political events, and other major touchstones of history, both personal and public. Although he decried the “Minimalist” moniker, Flavin undoubtedly adhered to the principles of the movement, employing industrial objects like store-bought fluorescent tube lights to dictate the bounds of his work. His ongoing fascination with light is obvious in the “Dedications,” which features 58 artworks, many making their debut in Switzerland. With nods to Donald Judd, Barnett Newman, and even his beloved golden retriever Airily, Flavin manages to transform commercially available products—constrained by size and color—into deeply personal tributes.

      “Science Fiction Design: From Space Age to Metaverse” at Vitra Design MuseumThrough May 11, 2025 
      Installation view of “Science Fiction Design: From Space Age to Metaverse.” © Vitra Design Museum. Photo by Mark Niedermann.
      The idea of the “future” has long captivated humans, who have channeled that fascination into movies and books within the realm of science fiction. Flying cars, sentient robot overlords, and trips to far-flung planets have all become fodder for the artists and set designers behind the imagined worlds of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1962) and Blade Runner (1982). Just the chairs included in this exhibition range from Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s 19th century Argyle Chair to Joris Laarman’s Aluminum Gradient Chair (2013), the first 3D-printed metal chair, to the more recent Hortensia Chair (2018) designed by Andrés Reisinger and offered both as an NFT and a functional object. “From the Space Age to the Metaverse” provides a historical primer on the history of futuristic design, and offers a glimpse into untold possibilities.

      “Toyin Ojih Odutola: Ilé Oriaku” at Kunsthalle BaselThrough September 1, 2024
      Toyin Ojih Odutola, Don’t Be Afraid; Use What I Gave You (2023). © Toyin Ojih Odutola. Courtesy of the artist, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.
      If you missed Toyin Ojih Odutola’s spare and striking charcoal drawings on view at the Venice Biennale, you have another opportunity at Basel’s premiere institution with the show “Ilé Oriaku,” which translates to “House of Abundance.” In the Nigerian-born artist’s first comprehensive outing in Switzerland, a wealth of new drawings demonstrates the artist’s work to bring fictional familial stories to life in charcoal, pastel, and pencil. “The work is not about a mythology or a presumption about African-ness” the artist said in Paris Review. “The viewer is immersed in the narrative, an alternative reality.”
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      in Exhibitions

      Jennifer Rochlin’s Quirky Vessels Give Form to Fleeting Memories

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      Jennifer Rochlin’s large, hand-formed terracotta vessels seemingly compel viewers to get up close and personal and take a closer look—a phenomenon no more apparent than in her current solo show, “Paintings on Clay,” at Hauser and Wirth in New York, on view through July 14, 2024. Presented across a range of pedestals and plinths, the exhibition invites visitors to move between, circumvent, and even peer inside the various pots, exploring their painted and etched patterns, vignettes, and, most intriguingly, storylines.
      Installation view of “Jennifer Rochlin: Paintings on Clay” (2024). Photo: Sarah Muehlbauer. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser and Wirth.
      While the tradition of ceramics may call to mind visions of highly polished and evenly proportioned pots and containers, Rochlin relishes in the idiosyncrasies of intuitive form and shape as it directly reflects the hand of the artist and provides a unique starting point for her subsequent paintings and drawings.
      “I did once make a very perfect pot” said Rochlin on a video call from her home in Altadena, California. “I just found it boring, I was like, ‘where’s my way in here’? When I was going to paint and draw, it was just so perfect that I wasn’t interested in it. I think the slumps and the lumps and the molding and the disfigurement, that to me is something that I find aesthetically interesting.”
      Installation view of “Jennifer Rochlin: Paintings on Clay” (2024). Photo: Sarah Muehlbauer. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser and Wirth.
      Rochlin came to ceramics nearly two decades ago, and the medium ultimately became the artist’s “canvas” of choice for her paintings. The shape of each vessel is arrived at intuitively, shaping and fashioning the clay in a manner that its structural integrity stays true but doesn’t adhere to a prescribed form. It is only once the pot is finished that Rochhlin considers what will go on it, with the shape typically informing the rest of the design of the piece.
      The images Rochlin chooses to adorn each vessel with are arrived at in a similar manner: intuitively and based on her present thoughts or emotions. Echoing Surrealist automatism, wherein the artist attempts to let the unconscious come to the fore over conscious control, Rochlin’s memories and imaginings can be traced across the surface of each work.
      Jennifer Rochlin, Trans-Siberian Railway (2023). Photo: Keith Lubow. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser and Wirth.
      A highlight of the show, Trans-Siberian Railway (2023), features a spiraling train surrounded by larger-than-life irises, drawn from Rochlin’s memory of travelling along the Trans-Siberian Railroad in Russia, which she captured on Super 8 film, with the composition alluding to the way in which a roll of film unravels. By one illustrated train car, a man has picked some of the irises and offers them to a woman in one of the train’s windows. In reality, it was a scene of two strangers, within Rochlin’s depiction, the woman is a self-portrait of the artist herself.
      “What’s funny is when I was drawing it, it was completely unconscious that [the subject] became me—it wasn’t,” Rochlin described. “I was in my mind drawing the image that I had from the Super 8 film, which I haven’t looked at in I don’t even know how long. It was a memory of that Super 8. I think it was because I was feeling this longing for a romance at the time that I made the work. I wanted to do this quintessential romantic gesture. The idea that the flowers be thrown up, then the train takes off, and they never see each other again.”
      Jennifer Rochlin, Honey Pot (2024). Photo: Keith Lubow. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser and Wirth.
      Another central work in the show highlights Rochlin’s penchant for collaboration and sharing the experience of making her vessels, Honey Pot (2024). Across its surface are drawings of female genitalia by 22 women artists. Some of the drawings were done very spur of the moment, as Rochlin notably loaded the piece in the back of her car, double parked outside of a gallery opening, and invited several artists out to make their contribution. Others made their additions on studio visits or sent digital drawings to be transferred on.
      Rochlin said, “When I started having artists draw on the pots with the collaborative pieces, then I have all these kind of random drawings—how am I unifying them? I like that it’s like a community, and I love how the act of just scratching into the clay is so pleasurable, I want to share that with people.”
      Jennifer Rochlin, Green Tapestry with Poppies and Bites (2024). Photo: Keith Lubow. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser and Wirth.
      Other pieces on view, such as Green Tapestry with Poppies and Bites (2024), shows another hallmark form of Rochlin’s collaboration, as visitors to the studio have been given the opportunity to physically bite into the clay leaving teeth marks as unique as fingerprints. It also further taps into the process of remembering, as the tapestries and poppies, untethered from a narrative or landscape, float across the surface like fragmented memories. Although every work is rooted into Rochlin’s own deeply personal life and history, throughout is an undercurrent of universality and collective experience.
      “I think since my work is unfiltered and honest, and you can feel the emotion through the mark making, I think that people can relate to it and have it brings up memories for them and they can have a shared memory of a lost love, or your children growing up, or in time passing. That’s what I’m hoping that viewers are experiencing and it’s going to connect with them on a deep level of their own.”
      Jennifer Rochlin, Ladies at the Norton Simon Museum (2023). Photo: Keith Lubow. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser and Wirth.
      Beyond the psychological rawness of Rochlin’s work, the rawness of the base material itself too is stark. When looking closely at each vessel, the imperfect edges and unpainted clay peeking out imbues each piece with an air of the ancient, even primordial, a glimpse at what an artifact from today might look like far into the future. Recalling Athenian narrative pottery in the arrangement of scenes and decorative elements, both the collaborative works and pieces completed by Rochlin alone speak to collective experiences as well as the deeply individual and personal.
      “I’m working in a tradition that has such a long lineage of storytelling and I really love getting to be an active participant and continue this tradition. Making and telling a story on a vessel started thousands of years ago, and that’s still relevant in our day and age. With A.I. and Instagram and all the phones and everything, I think the more handmade the better. The more you get to see something that is just made of dirt, water, and fire, it just stands the test of time. And I’m happy that people are interested in that still.”

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