Exhibitions

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

A year into the current Israel-Gaza War, Palestine Museum U.S. in Woodbridge, Connecticut, is staging an exhibition in London featuring work from 25 Palestinian artists, including several currently trapped in Gaza.
“Art of Palestine: From the River to the Sea” is the second exhibition this year that the museum has held at P21 Gallery, which is dedicated to contemporary Arab art and culture. The show underscores how conflict has reshaped Palestinian culture over the course of decades.
For Palestinian artists who have lived in constant fear over the last year while facing continual displacement since Israel began its offensive after Hamas’s attack on October 7, 2023, showing their art “is extremely important,” Faisal Saleh, the museum’s founder and exhibition’s curator, told me. “Psychologically, it’s just evidence that they’re still alive, basically.”
One body of work in the show is titled just that, “I’m Still Alive” by Mohammed Alhaj. His daily sketches, done in ink on paper, are a continuing record of daily life in Gaza during the war.
Mohammed Alhaj, Displacement, Gaza (2024). Courtesy of the Palestine Museum U.S.
The show also features a selection of children’s drawings, but ones that were made in the wake of Operation Cast Lead, a deadly Israeli offensive in 2009. The drawings, made in art therapy class, depict airplanes dropping bombs and other acts of war. They are a reminder of the long-running nature of the war between Israel and Palestine and of the innocent children who are growing up witnessing unspeakable violence, facing death every day.
Because it is currently impossible to transport artwork out of Gaza, all of the pieces in the show from artists who have been unable to evacuate are represented by prints based on digital images, not originals.
Bayan Abu, Nahleh (2014).
From the start of the war, Saleh was originally in touch with eight artists in Gaza, two of whom were able to escape before the closing of the Rafah crossing. Internet outages make communications unreliable, and the quality of calls can vary widely, but Salah tries to stay in regular contact with as many of them as he can.
The situation on the ground is dire, both from a humanitarian perspective, and a cultural one. Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7 killed 1,200 people and saw 240 taken hostage. Since then, Israel’s counter-offensive has killed more than 41,870 people in Gaza, among them 16,765 children, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health, which is run by Hamas.
“Most artists in Gaza lost all their artwork. It got destroyed with the bombings,” Saleh said. “The Palestinian art institutions, a cultural institutions in Gaza, they’re all destroyed. Art museums, libraries, bookstores that sell old books, anything that has to do with culture and art in Gaza, Israel deliberately destroyed.”
Nabil Anani, In Pursuit of Utopia #7 (2020). Photo courtesy Nabil Anani.
Saleh was born in the West Bank in 1951, just a few years after Israeli forces took over his family’s village in 1948, forcing them to leave their home. He founded the museum in 2018 as a way to tell the story of the Palestinian people, retiring from his HR company in 2023 to focus full time on the institution.
He has found it a challenge to get media coverage for the museum’s programming—and its only gotten more difficult over the last year. In 2022, the Venice Biennale selected a show from the Palestine Museum U.S. as one of its official collateral events. This year, its submission did not make the cut. (It still went ahead as planned, and is on view through November 24.)
“There is the physical destruction of artwork and architecture.… The more subtle danger is the attempt by Israel to erase the Palestinian culture. And this eraser is taking place through censorship,” Saleh said, citing the cancellation of a planned exhibition by Palestinian artist Samia Halaby and the decision of the Noguchi Museum in Queens to ban its employees from wearing keffiyehs.
Samia Halaby, Venetian Red (2021). Photo courtesy of Samia Halab.
As we spoke, I was shocked to see that Microsoft Teams, which was live transcribing our phone call, censored the very word “keffiyeh,” as if it were an expletive and not just a traditional Middle Eastern garment.
Halaby, who is perhaps Palestine’s most famous living artist at 87, is one of the artists included in the exhibition, with one of her abstract canvases. But the show also features artists who are much lesser known, and who are addressing the war in Gaza in a much more direct way.
Tala Abu Nuwar, Three Women with Oranges (2024).
Two works are by Khalil Khalidy, a doctor and artist who had the chance to escape Gaza, but chose to remain, treating the sick and wounded.
One looks at first like a delicate Renaissance red chalk drawing of a youthful angel. Khalidy mixed the blood of an anonymous Palestinian boy who died on the hospital floor after a bombing, paying tribute to one of the war’s many unknown victims. The second shows a young girl crying as she eats a popsicle—a reference to the ice cream trucks pressed into service as mobile morgues because of the ever-growing death toll in Gaza.
Both include a QR code that links to the doctor’s Instagram posts in which he explains the dark inspiration for the beautiful paintings.
Khalil Khalidy did this painting of a boy angel of using paint mixed with the blood of a Palestinian boy who died in a bombing. Photo courtesy of the Palestine Museum U.S. Photo courtesy of the Palestine Museum U.S.
“We’re not showing gory things,” Saleh said. “It’s very subtle and the way art is supposed to be. It’s respectful and thought provoking and it’s getting some ideas across about what’s going on here.”
The exhibition is also showcasing nine selections from Palestinian History Tapestry, a project of 100 pieces of embroidery by Palestinian women telling the story of the nation’s cultural history.
“Each one of them is in beautiful colors, reflecting work of hundreds and hundreds of hours that was done by Palestinian women in refugee camps in Lebanon and Jordan, the West Bank,
Gaza, and other places,” Saleh said of the project, which recently joined the museum collection.
Palestine History Tapestry, Henna Party, Embroidery. Photo courtesy of the Palestine Museum U.S.
The exhibition draws its title from the controversial slogan calling for freedom for Palestinians in the geographic area between Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea—historically the state of Palestine, but now all part of Israel. But for Saleh, the title is meant just to be factual.
“There are Palestinians who live from the river to the sea. They live in Haifa, in Jaffa and Anata, and all these places in Israel proper—and some, you know, in the West Bank under occupation,” he said. “We’re showing the art of these people.
And they happen to live from the river to the sea.
We’re not even saying that they should be free.
We’re just saying this is their art.”
“Art of Palestine: From the River to the Sea” is on view at P21 Gallery, 21-27 Chalton Street, Somers Town, London, September 27–December 21, 2024.
“Foreigners in Their Homeland” is on view at Palazzo Mora, Cannaregio, 2978, 30123, Venice on April 20–November 24, 2024. More

Despite the appearance of progress, the art world’s inclination to frame women artists as “rediscovered” falls into a well-worn trope that continues to center masculinist ideals. There’s definitely an increasing appetite for women’s artwork—especially on the secondary market, where the value of work by women is rising considerably faster than that of work by men. However, while the “forgotten” artist narrative seems to signify a victory for women, it doesn’t challenge the structures that marginalized them in the first place. Instead, these artists find themselves shoehorned into exhibitions and retrospectives; in place to preserve the myth of meritocracy.
In 1988, the feminist art collective The Guerrilla Girls created their sardonic list, The Advantages of Being a Woman Artist. Perks included: “Knowing your career might pick up after you’re 80,” and, “being included in revised editions of art history.” This much is true for Monica Sjöö, a pioneering artist whose first-ever retrospective at Stockholm’s Moderna Museet came some 18 years after her death. Also a writer and zealous activist, Sjöö’s exclusion from art institutions was telling of the academy’s male-dominated agenda at the time. There was little space for women artists, let alone women whose paintings of giant, elephantine phalluses and gods giving birth were deemed too blasphemous for public display. Artists like Sjöö—and others like Leonora Carrington and Pauline Boty, also recently “rediscovered”—are still constrained by this narrative, their work seemingly celebrated but largely reduced to their gender.
Installation view, “Lucy Otter, Studio Jumps,” Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, 2024. Courtesy of Gabriel Sierra and Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London. ©Gabriel Sierra 2024. Photo: Mark Blower.
This brings us to Lucy Otter. Pippy Houldsworth is showing a series of paintings by the abstract artist so unknown because she—quite literally—doesn’t exist. A character from the as of yet unpublished novel by Colombian artist Gabriel Sierra, Otter’s biography is  impressive. Alaskan-born but now Cornwall-based, the character is a former landscape gardener and was once a guest professor at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. The paintings on show at Pippy Houldsworth’s “Studio Jumps,” supposedly made between 1978 and 1979, were created for her “childhood friend” Paul Hickey’s band, Duchamp Widows. The band is also a fictional construct, although their EP—and merch—are very much available for purchase at the gallery.
There are a few ways to look at Sierra’s project here. One interpretation might see the ruse as a bit of fun and ingenuity. Sierra, after all, is far from the only artist to use an alter-ego—Marcel Duchamp himself adopted the alias of Rrose Sélavy when toying with femininity in Man Ray’s photographs. Colombian creatives, too, have a long history of playing with identity to challenge social constraints, from the sculptures of Doris Salcedo and performance pieces by María José Arjona to the personas adopted by musicians like J Balvin. Yet the decision to make Otter a woman seems less like a playful experiment with alter ego, and more like a pointed critique of how the art world fixates on identity over substance.
Sierra’s work as a conceptual artist, with its focus on site-specific interventions and institutional critique, is far removed from Otter’s gestural abstraction and material focus. For his piece, Untitled (The Day as a Hole in the Middle of the Night), created for the 2011 Lyon Biennial, he cut out a large section of the gallery’s wooden floor, suspending it from the ceiling to expose the structure beneath and challenge the viewer’s sense of space. By contrast, Otter’s work emphasizes gestural abstraction with heavy impasto, where materiality becomes the primary focus. 
Installation view, “Lucy Otter, Studio Jumps,” Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, 2024. Courtesy of Gabriel Sierra and Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London. ©Gabriel Sierra 2024. Photo: Mark Blower.
This all left me with several questions. Are artist’s biographies really so integral to the way we interpret their work that Sierra felt compelled to create Otter to be able to experiment with a new mode of creation? Or was the artist really moved to create Otter as a comment on the trend of “rediscovering” women artists? The answer might lie in unpacking why Sierra chose to present this work under a female alias, particularly one whose work supposedly dates back to the 1970s. 
On the one hand, Sierra’s project could be read as a commentary on how the art world disproportionately values the identities and credentials of artists, especially women, over the actual content of their work. On the other hand, the presence of merchandise and the promise of a future novel give the project a somewhat gimmicky feel, as if it’s less about critiquing this idea and more about capitalizing on it.
Here, the line between critique and mimicry becomes blurred. Indeed, much of the “rediscovering” of female artists done by writers, galleries, and institutions today seems entirely predicated on gender, overlooking the economic and sociopolitical conditions that shaped their lives and their ability to make art at the time. Similarly, Otter’s career—an entirely fabricated one—is unburdened by the struggles that real women artists of her supposed era faced. Yet it takes a certain kind of privilege to adopt a female persona, complete with scholarly credentials and historical context, and capitalize on it without having to bear any of the weight that comes with that identity. In doing so, Sierra risks not only trivializing the challenges faced by these women but also distracting from the real, deserving artists of that period, whom the zeitgeist is shining a light on—for now. Only time will tell whether Sierra’s project deepens this critique or merely adds to the noise. More

Oded Lifshitz clutches a microphone and addresses a conference opposing Israeli settlement of Gaza, in 1972, in the dining room of Kibbutz Nir Oz. Behind him, a map of Gaza frames his figure. The words Oded delivered that day are gone as is now 85-year-old Oded, who is one of an estimated 101 hostages who still remain in Hamas captivity in Gaza. It is only by chance that the black-and-white photograph documenting this moment, taken by his wife Yocheved, survives.
Both long-time peace activists, the Lifshitzs were taken hostage from their home in Nir Oz by Hamas on October 7, 2023, yet Yocheved has held fast to her principles since her release from captivity last October. “We must reach an agreement that allows both sides to live,” Lifshitz said in a recent interview. When she was freed, she famously shook hands with her captor and said shalom—the Hebrew word for hello, goodbye, and peace. “The period that I was held in captivity only strengthened my belief,” she said.
While Lifshitz’s convictions remain intact, her lifetime photographic archive spanning nearly 70 years was lost when Hamas incinerated her home. Only 14 of her photographs remain because they were kept elsewhere, and these form a recently opened exhibition at Tel Aviv’s Eretz Israel Museum, Surviving Moments, organized in collaboration with the Hostages and Missing Families Forum and dedicated to the memory of the victims of October 7. The exhibition joins several others across Israel marking the first anniversary of the Hamas attack that day.
Oded Lifshitz speaks at the conference against dispossession and settlement in the Gaza Strip, held in the old dining room at Kibbutz Nir Oz, 1972. Photo: Yocheved Lifshitz. Private collection, Lifshitz family.
Surviving Moments opens with images from the 1972 conference opposing Israeli settlement of Gaza and closes with a snapshot of Nir Oz residents protesting in favor of Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon in the 1980s. “I make a very clear political statement here, connected to the situation today. It’s like we’ve gone back to the past,” said Raz Samira, the exhibition’s curator deputy director of the museum. “History shouldn’t repeat itself.”
Across town, a solo exhibition by Umm al-Fahm–based artist Said Abu Shakra also grapples with the regressions and horrors of the past year at the nonprofit Maya Gallery. Exhibiting expressive mixed-media works all created since October 7, Abu Shakra’s drawings show wild animals fighting each other to the death. There are no sides clearly pegged against each other in his world of hyenas, tigers, and bulls—just violence and a will to survive.
“I’m trying to say, this is our life today,” Abu Shakra said, who noted that he suffered a period of creative paralysis after the attack. “Our life today through the existential war of animals.”
Also included in the show is a separate series of drawings of women, including the artist’s mother. Another room in the gallery displays a paper scroll measuring tens of meters that Abu Shakra drew, a little at a time, as a sort of wartime journal. The unfurled segment on view pans from blindfolded captives loaded onto a pickup truck to crowds surrendering as an airstrike attacks overhead, and women mourning dead children.
Said Abu Shakra, Hyenas (2023). Photo: Yigal Pardo
The artist believes that the work he’s created over the past year differs from everything he created before. Before, said the artist, his existential fear wasn’t as acute. Now he focuses even more on the Umm el-Fahem Art Gallery that he founded in 1996—which received official recognition as a museum this July from the Israeli Ministry of Culture—as a meeting place promoting dialogue and mutual respect.
“How can I be a proud Palestinian in the State of Israel, and also the Israeli who feels respect for the fact that he’s both here and there?” Abu Shakra asked himself. “How can I become a cultural bridge?”
Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7 killed 1,200 people and saw 240 taken hostage. Since then, Israel’s counter-offensive has killed more than 41,870 people in Gaza, among them 16,765 children, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health, which is run by Hamas.
Last week, Israel launched a ground operation across its northern border into Lebanon targeting the Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah. Hezbollah first attacked Israel on October 8, 2023, and has said it will not stop striking Israel until a ceasefire in Gaza is reached.
The violence of the region and its imprint on the landscape is at the heart of Israeli photographer Gaston Zvi Ickowicz’s latest body of work. His exhibition, Field, at Jerusalem’s Israel Museum, features images of one of the sites of the October 7 attack: A field that Nova Festival attendees escaped to as they ran from Hamas. Photographed repeatedly by the artist in the year since, the images in are devoid of people but charged with memory.
Gaston Zvi Ickowicz, Re’im Parking Lot (2024). Courtesy of the artist.
Ickowicz has photographed various landscapes in the region since the early 2000s, including Gaza, the West Bank, and towns along the Gaza-Israel border. Never directly showing violent geopolitical tensions, his photographs expose the impact of these struggles on the landscape. In addition to one large field, in this series he photographed ditches and bushes where Nova Festival survivors told him they had hid for hours, as well as unidentifiable objects left at the festival site, later identified as molten car parts by archaeologists and criminal identification researchers working at the site.
Ickowicz also produced a video work, exhibited in a large-scale triptych screen to create immersive experience. It includes footage taken in 2018 by photojournalist Roee Idan, who had collaborated with Ickowicz on a work called Sunset above Gaza. After Idan was murdered at his home in Kfar Aza on October 7, in front of his three-year-old daughter Avigail who was then taken hostage, Ickowicz received permission from Idan’s family to incorporate his raw materials into Field.
The feeling that comes across when watching the video is of “disorientation, an inability to place yourself in relation to the space,” said exhibition curator and the museum’s curator of photography, Gilad Reich. “Like the survivors who ran in the field without knowing which direction they were running in and what awaited them at the other end of the field.”
Elsewhere in the country, exhibitions at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art (which borders what has now become Hostages Square) highlight paintings by Kfar Aza-based Tal Mazliach who survived the attack, and a group exhibition of artworks by Israeli artists created since October 7. A site-specific installation by Arab-Israeli artist Muhammad Abo Salme, Cascade, transforms 500 kilometers of metal dog-tag chains into a weighted and weightless image of mourning.
“Surviving Moments” is on view through December 14 at the Eretz Israel Museum, Tel Aviv, Israel.
“Said Abu Shakra” is on view through October 28 at Maya Gallery, Tel Aviv, Israel.
“Field” in on view through June 14, 2025 at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel.  More