Art & Exhibitions

She was the queen of the 17th-century still life—and her patrons shelled out lavish sums to own her resplendent flowers. Rachel Ruysch, born in the Hague in 1664, rose to fame for her exquisitely detailed still lifes. Hers were gorgeous and unreal bouquets of flowers that could only exist in art; she placed blossoms that bloomed in different seasons, side-by-side, in painted perpetuity. 
The daughter of the famed botanist Frederik Ruysch, Ruysch grew up in a home surrounded by plants and flowers, often painting specimens in her father’s office. As an artist, she combined her passions for art and science to bring her impossible and yet enthralling detailed visions to life.  
A remarkable talent, she was, in the early decades of the 17th century, regarded by many as Holland’s most famous painter. So great was her celebrity that, unlike many women artists of her era, Ruysch was never fully blotted out from the art historical canon, but, instead, erroneously cast as a minor rather than a major art historical figure.  
Rachel Ruysch, Flower Still Life (ca. 1716–20). Collection of the  Toledo Museum of Art.
“She’s an exceptionally talented artist. Her renderings of nature are just absolutely wonderful. It’s a level of detail, precision, and technical mastery that is truly extraordinary,” said curator Robert Schindler, in a recent conversation. “You can situate her in this environment of the late 17th century and early 18th century at the intersection between art, nature, and science.” 
Now, centuries later, Ruysch is finally stepping back into the limelight with “Rachel Ruysch: Nature Into Art” the first monographic exhibition of her work. The exhibition, curated by Schindler, opened at the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio earlier this week. The TMA is a fitting venue for the exhibition as the first North American institution to collect her work back in 1956 (that painting is here reunited with its pendant for the first time since 1848). The traveling exhibition originated at the Alte Pinakothek Munich late last fall and will travel to the Museum of Fine Arts Boston later this year. 
The exhibition brings together dozens of Ruysch’s paintings borrowed from public and private European and American collections, along with her only known extant work on paper, as well as manuscripts, works by several women botanical artists of her era—including her sister—and contemporaneous examples of botanical and insect specimens.  
Rachel Ruysch, Flowers in a Glass Vase (1704). Collection of the Detroit Instituteof Arts.
The exhibition positions Ruysch as an artist who both defied and defined her times, and makes the case that she should be a household name. Painting over six decades, she lived a remarkable life. She was the first woman admitted to the artistic society Confrerie Pictura in The Hague. Later, she was named court painter to Johann Wilhelm II, the Elector Palatine in Düsseldorf, a power figure in the Holy Roman Empire.  She married an artist too, Juriaen Pool, who was of a lesser fame. Add to this the seemingly impossible reality that she was the mother of 11 children, for whom she cared, and the monumentality of Ruysch’s persona begins to come into focus. 
Still, today her works remain absent from many major museum collections, including the Louvre, the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., and many others. “Nature Into Art” seems set on returning Ruysch to an appropriately vaunted stature. 
Still Lifes, Science, and Sex  
Holland, in the 17th century, witnessed a tremendous vogue for collecting and documenting exotic flowers and plants. While the 1630s had seen the rise of tulipmania, a fever for unusual varieties of tulips, at Hortus Botanicus, Amsterdam’s botanical garden, exotic plants had become the fascination, a seemingly innocuous pursuit that implicitly tied to the nation’s colonial exploits and enterprises, as hitherto unknown flora and fauna captured the European imagination.  
Rachel Ruysch’s still lifes were born of this moment and the science and politics that surrounded it; her famed and multifaceted botanist and anatomist father was an innovator in his field.
Rachel Ruysch, Illustration from Observations of a Surinam Toad. London, Royal Society, Inv. CLP/15i/36 ©The Royal Society.
It was her father who recognized her nascent artistic talent, and who apprenticed her to Willem van Aelst, a well-known floral painter in Amsterdam, an unconventional decision for a woman of her times. Most women who were painters were relatives of male artists and apprenticed to them. 
“It’s this perfect moment where you can really connect depictions of nature with the sort of the broader context of inquiries into nature and the Scientific Revolution,” said Schindler.  The exhibition, which includes specimens of bugs and flowers new to Holland at the time, is a cross-disciplinary venture, with curators consulting scientific historians, zoologists, and botanists for the exhibition.  
One of the highlights of the exhibition is Ruysch’s only extant drawing—which isn’t of flowers, but of a Surinamese toad—which Schindler found at the Royal Society of London.  The drawing is a direct and intriguing link between Ruysch’s artwork and the scientific discourse at the time. It speaks to the lingering belief that certain creatures, namely insects and frogs, could reproduce spontaneously from a process known as a generation.  
“The idea was that certain life forms, especially those considered to be lower in the hierarchy, so butterflies, reptiles, amphibians, and all kinds of insects could emerge spontaneously out of a combination of warmth and moisture an inanimate matter, as you might find decomposing in the undergrowth of a forest floor,” explained Schindler, “This [drawing] is the only time that Ruysch doesn’t use plants as her essential motif. Instead, it’s essentially a portrait of a toad, and situates her in the science of the time.”  
While this example stands alone, the artist continued to invigorate what would be otherwise staid bouquets through the unexpected additions of insects and lizards to her arrangements. In some ways, these additions hinted at the vanitas paintings the Dutch were known for, the insects becoming memento mori hinting at decay, death, and brevity of life. At once, her inclusion of these “lower” life forms is evidence of her own innovative approach to the limited subject matter available to women of her generation.   
Anna Ruysch and Other Women Artists  
Interestingly, the genesis of this exhibition started not with Rachel Ruysch but with her sister, Anna. Also trained as a painter, Anna had her own career as a painter of botanical imagery though her works never reached the dexterity or popularity of her sister’s. 
Seven years ago, Schindler, then a curator at the Birmingham Museum of Art in Alabama, came across a work by Anna Ruysch which he ultimately helped the museum acquire. While Schindler was passingly familiar with Rachel’s work, he was wholly unaware of Anna.  
“At first, I wanted to look at the two sisters together. Rachel goes on to have this outstanding career and Anna really doesn’t. How could that be, you know? Two sisters, both talented, two years apart, and learn from the same teacher, grow, up in the same learned environment, and one goes on to have this fabulous career and the other one doesn’t?” he mused.  
Anna Ruysch, A Still Life of Flowers on a Marble Table Ledge (1685). Birmingham, Alabama, PrivateCollection. Photo: Erin Croxton, Birmingham Museum of Art.
But as his research continued, Schindler realized a much larger exhibition of Rachel Ruysch’s work was in order. “Learning that Rachel had never had a monographic show until now, and the last publication about her work dates to 1956 made it apparent that something on a larger scale was really needed,” he added. 
Still, kernels of that original notion remain, with several works by Anna included in the show. The exhibition additionally situates Ruysch in a larger context of women artists of her era, showcasing works by Maria Sibylla Merian, Johanna Helena Herolt, and Alida Withoos, who were important botanical artists of the era.  
“We wanted to at least point to the fact in the context of this otherwise pretty monographic show that women artists played important, wide-spread roles, and Rachel was one of them,” said Schindler.  
In many ways, women’s influential role in botanical and still life painting points to the confines set against them. In the 17th century, a strict hierarchy of genres was observed. “History painting, which includes biblical, historical, and mythological scenes, was at the top.  Then portraiture, and, at the bottom, still life painting,” explained Schindler. Admission to the guild was often dependent upon these hierarchies. To become a history painter, the study of the human figure, ideally the human nude, was necessary—a course of study forbidden to women. 
“Because of the restrictions that were in place, women were already relegated to the lower genres,” said Schindler “Which in part explains, why there were so many women artists who specialized in botanical illustration.” 
A Life of Fame and Fortune
One of the most fascinating paintings in the exhibition is a 1692 portrait of Rachel Ruysch recently acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The portrait, which shows Ruysch at work surrounded by books and flora, is now believed to be a dual-artist work by portrait painter Michiel van Musscher and Ruysch herself. While van Musscher painted Ruysch’s likeness, it is believed Ruysch painted the lavish blossoms that appear set before her.   
Rachel Ruysch and Michiel van Musscher, Rachel Ruysch( 1664–1750). Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The only recently discovered portrait hints at Ruysch’s impressive stature in her late 20s. It was a fame that would continue to grow through the 1700s.  “We know of one Leiden cloth merchant who paid dearly for a pair of paintings. Depending on which source you trust it was either 1,500 or 1,300 guilders for the pair, which was a very, very substantial amount at the time,” said Schindler. Her paintings entered preeminent collections in Germany, England, and Florence, including that of the Medicis. Research into her patrons and market is only in the early stages of scholarly inquiry, but she was without a doubt one of the leading artists of her age. “Hugely successful, Rachel Ruysch’s paintings often sold for more in her lifetime than Rembrandt’s did in his,” the National Gallery of London, notes on their website.  
In 1723, Ruysch, already a financial success, had the unbelievable luck of purchasing a winning lottery ticket.  For a decade that followed, she seems to have stopped painting, by and large. But in the final decade of her life, she returned to her still lifes, though on a smaller scale and a bit more brooding in temperament. She also began adding her age to the painting, as though to announce that she was still present, still painting at the height of her talents. Included in the exhibition is one such work, the 1741 painting Posy of Flowers, with a Beetle, on a Stone Ledge. Her last known work was painted at the age of 83.  
Rachel Ruysch, Posy of Flowers, with a Beetle, on a Stone Ledge (1741). Kunstmuseum Basel.
When Ruysch did pass away at the age of 86 in 1750, her death was met with a remarkable outpouring. She is believed to have painted some 250 works in her lifetime. “The year of her death, possibly still within her lifetime, a collection of poems is published, twelve of which celebrate her in the absolutely highest terms. It’s the most unusual honor for any art artist, in particular, a female artist, and just speaks to the level of esteem she was held in during her lifetime and in the mid-18th century,” said Schindler. 
For Schindler, he hopes that “Nature Into Art” is a mere jumping-off point for larger scholarly investigations of her work and life. “It’s been such a great project to work on I’m hoping we’ve found ways to get that across to visitors and open the door for more scholarship,” he said “There’s so much more to discover.”  More

Jennie C. Jones (b. 1968) is well known for her embrace of music and sound in her practice, which encompasses painting, sculpture, installation, and audio recordings. So naturally, for her rooftop commission at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, she’s actually built her own musical instruments, fabricating three monumental stringed instruments. Tantalizingly, visitors are asked not to touch the Aeolian harp, zither, and one-string, letting them be activated instead by the breeze.
“You have this very precise settings of objects, almost in an orchestra,” Met director Max Hollein told me.
The sculptures are angular, with a deep red powered aluminum coating and concrete panels meant to match the color of the travertine in the Met’s soaring Great Hall. The wind did not oblige during the press preview for the exhibition, leaving their sonic qualities a mystery.
Jones compared the work’s latent musical potential to Walter De Maria’s (1935–2013) New Mexico Land Art masterpiece The Lightning Field in the exhibition catalogue, saying the untouchable instruments “open up a space for anticipation, for failure, for waiting, for impatience.”
Jennie C. Jones, Ensemble (2025), for the Metropolitan Museum of Art Roof Garden Commission. Photo by Hyla Skopitz, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
But she was also responding to the objects in the Met’s musical instrument collection, which features 5,000 examples from six continents and the Pacific islands.
“These works that are behind glass that you can only imagine what they sound like,” Jones told me. “That was an important thing to carry over.”
The project’s scale presented a major challenge for the artist, who previously built a 16-foot-tall powder-coated aluminum and wood harp titled These (Mournful) Shores for the Clark in Williamstown, Mass., in 2020. (The Met project is just Jones’s second outdoor sculpture installation.)
Jennie C. Jones, Ensemble (2025), for the Metropolitan Museum of Art Roof Garden Commission. Photo by Hyla Skopitz, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
“There’s no precedent,” Jones said. “There’s not a lot of ways to know where there is potential for failure.”
The only musical sculpture on a monumental scale that she could find was a storied 27-foot-tall wind harp built by art student Ward McCain in Vermont in 1972. (It was recently reconstructed on a farm in New Hampshire.)
But Jones dove deeper into musical history as she researched the project, drawing not only on the Met’s own collection of musical instruments, but also African American music and instrument making. Jones sees a through line between handcrafted instruments made by Black folk musicians and instrument makers, like the one-stringed diddley bow, and the hallmarks of Minimalism.
Jennie C. Jones, Ensemble (2025), for the Metropolitan Museum of Art Roof Garden Commission. Photo by Hyla Skopitz, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Her rooftop installation features a simplicity of line and form that works within the legacy of abstract sculpture, while being inspired by the musical lineage of people like Moses Williams and Louis Dotson, both Black musicians from Mississippi who made their own one-string instruments.
“She has a deep investment in history,” David Breslin, the Met’s curator of modern and contemporary art, told me. “She wanted to be in the Modern and contemporary galleries, and the musical instrument galleries, and to think with the architecture to come up with something new, but of her own language.”
Jennie C. Jones, Ensemble (2025), for the Metropolitan Museum of Art Roof Garden Commission. Photo by Hyla Skopitz, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
The architecture of the Met is a quiet undertone in the installation, with the fourth sculpture—a long, thin, red triangle along the garden wall—marking the footprint of the museum’s Modern and contemporary wing. Jones’s installation will actually be the last rooftop commission before the wing is torn down and rebuilt, a long-delayed project first announced in 2014. (It is being helmed by Mexican architect Frida Escobedo with a projected 2030 opening date.)
The Met rooftop commission is of course a beloved summer tradition, which transforms the space not only into a breezy outdoor art gallery, but a popular cocktail bar and live music venue that will be sorely missed during construction. (Forget about trying to go on the museum’s self-proclaimed Friday and Saturday “Date Nights,” unless you are game to wait in a long line just to get up there.)
Jennie C. Jones, Ensemble (2025), for the Metropolitan Museum of Art Roof Garden Commission. Photo by Hyla Skopitz, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
The museum doesn’t have any live events with Jones’s instruments planned, but the artist has already enlisted two musicians to try their hand on her sculptural pieces. Ahead of the opening, Jones filmed a performance on the rooftop with bassist Luke Stewart and cellist Tamika Reed.
“They really went for it. They bought bows and mallets,” she said. “They had a really good time!”
“The Roof Garden Commission: Jennie C. Jones, Ensemble” is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York, April 15–October 19, 2025.  More

A show of graffiti art at London’s Piccadilly Circus that included Banksy and other prominent practitioners of the form was shut down on Thursday over—well, kids, it was shut down over graffiti. 
The show, “Long Dark Tunnel,” had been open for three weeks and had welcomed thousands of visitors, according to the organizer, Arts Arkade. Prominent artists like 10Foot, Tox, and Fume were also on the roster. 
The venue for the show, just steps from Piccadilly Circus, is owned by the Crown Estate, which belongs to the monarch and manages a real estate portfolio reportedly worth about $20.4 billion. The show was organized along with the London publication Big Issue, which is part of Big Issue Group, a social enterprise and B corporation founded in 1991 with the goal “to help millions of people in the U.K. affected by poverty to earn, learn and thrive.”
A tag reading “Fuck the King” appeared partway through the show’s run along with other incidents of vandalism, and the Crown Estate, according to the Times of London, pressured Arts Arkade to deal with the damage.
“Following serious incidents of vandalism and criminal damage to Arts Arkade and some of our neighbors’ buildings,” the organization said on Instagram, “we have regretfully taken the decision to close the ‘Long Dark Tunnel’ exhibition earlier than scheduled. The criminal damage we’ve experienced is totally unacceptable and is not a matter we take lightly.”
A stencil and spray paint artwork by Banksy in Camden Town in London, England, 2011. Photo: Jim Dyson/Getty Images.
Banksy and Tox go way back. The anonymous artist actually created a work on the subject of Tox in Camden Town in 2011. It shows a small child with a soap bubble wand, out of which a Tox tag seems to emerge. Tox had recently been sentenced to 27 months for his activities, with the prosecutor criticizing his work by telling the court, “He is no Banksy.”
10Foot was not shy in the wake of the show’s closure, telling the Times: “It’s the same old story: we’re treated as antisocial idiots and they won’t engage in dialogue with us when we do something widely recognized as positive. Getting bullied by the powerful really makes you feel like a fox being chased by the hunt.
“We threw everything at this show with nothing but good, generative intention,” he continued. “People have come from all over the country in their hundreds. We raised hundreds of thousands for homeless people. But when someone’s written ‘f*** the King’ in the middle of the night, we’ve been told we’re a risk and they have pulled the plug. They could clean it off but instead they’d prefer to throw us under the bus.”

During the show’s run, there were also incidents involving promotional posters and some apparent guerrilla postering, according to the Times, which indicated that workers apparently in Crown Estate-issued outfits removed a promotional poster outside the show. “Soon after the large poster was replaced by smaller posters,” wrote the paper, “with the artists’ tags above red Latin script reading graf scriptores decollabuntur—meaning graffiti artists ‘will be decapitated.’” The party responsible for the threatening posters is apparently unknown. 
“We cannot comment on an ongoing police investigation,” said a representative of the Crown Estate in an email, which also named Arts Arkade as the one responsible for shutting the show down. Arts Arkade did not respond to a request for comment.
This wouldn’t be the first time that a graffiti exhibition seemed to inspire unwanted imitators. When Jeffrey Deitch, the art dealer who briefly served as director of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, unveiled his “Art in the Streets” show in 2011, the Los Angeles Times wrote that the police department reported an uptick in graffiti and vandalism in the museum’s Little Tokyo neighborhood. More

It’s surprising that, even though quantum theory is now officially over 100 years old, so few people truly understand it. That’s not a failing of the public—it’s just that quantum mechanics demands a kind of mental flexibility we don’t often use.
To accept that particles can be entangled across vast distances, or that matter can exist in multiple states at once, all that challenges the classical sense of reality that we’ve grown accustomed to: that things are one way, or they’re another. Quantum theory insists: they can be both.
And yet, as the filmmaker Chris Marker once said, “Rarely has reality needed so much to be imagined.” Doesn’t that feel especially true today?
In this, Laure Prouvost has given me some faith. After stepping out from the near-total darkness of her exhibition “We Felt a Star Dying,” commissioned by LAS Art Foundation, shown in the cavernous Kraftwerk Berlin, I felt I had glimpsed something in her oscillating installation: a possibility of a new artistic era, one accelerated and liberated by quantum computing and its theory. While so much of contemporary art has been whittled down into digestible bites—something easily tidied into a press release or sales pitch—here was a work that resisted categorization, one that seemed to bloom in ambiguity.
Laure Prouvost, WE FELT A STAR DYING 2025. Installation view at Kraftwerk Berlin. Commissioned by LAS Art Foundation and co-commissioned by OGR Torino. © 2025 Laure Prouvost. Photo: Andrea Rossetti © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2025
Prouvost is known for sowing a bit of mischief into her projects, which suits the unpredictable nature of quantum technology well. The French conceptual artist, who some have called an artist-cum-trickster, has tried to fold time and space before; she told everyone she was digging a tunnel between the British and French pavilions when she represented France in 2019. Prouvost has played with the notion of new forms of intelligence—several projects incorporate octopuses, works that encompassed her fascination with the creature’s embodied intellect and otherworldliness.
While artificial intelligence is well-known by now as a new material for artists, quantum computing qubits, the fundamental units of a quantum computer, are an exciting and lesser-known tool that can alter and expand work in manifold ways. Quantum computers process information using qubits, units that can exist in a state of both 0 and 1 simultaneously (called superposition), and which can be connected over long distances (entanglement). These are a good match for Prouvost, who uses them as a creative sparring partner.
Before you see her new multipart work, which manifests as an ever-changing iridescent cascading fabric installation, swelling and sinking against the concrete parameters of Kraftwerk, you hear it. It sounds like it is breathing. What was one of the final touches is one of its most crucial in bringing vitality to the installation, which can best be described simultaneously as a machine, an environment, and a creature.
Laure Prouvost, WE FELT A STAR DYING 2025. Installation view at Kraftwerk Berlin. Commissioned by LAS Art Foundation and co-commissioned by OGR Torino. © 2025 Laure Prouvost. Photo: Andrea Rossetti © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2025
At the central “brain” of this installation is a film, which you lie down on a soft pillow-like half womb and gaze up at. Technically speaking, what you see is what Prouvost calls a “Newtonian film” recording that was fed into a quantum computer, which introduced indeterminate variations to the edit and its imagery.
This makes the film less fixed—a quality that feels aligned with the ways good art should behave, at least in my view. We Felt a Star Dying is fluid, shifting, resistant to a singular interpretation, or even viewing. As viewers lie down they watch mitochondria kiss, a cat walks across the camera lens, though another time it is a bird. Worms move about in soil, and limbs of dancers replicate, twist, merge, and tremble as if they were turned into light and shot through a kaleidoscope. I went twice; it was never quite the same. Patterns emerge that appear like thermal maps. The quantum warps are most basically described as visual effects, but the edits and chronology of the film itself are also warped, as is the coordination of the kinetic installation around you. Prouvost’s own voice is what seems most continuous. A delicate and melodic French accent guides us towards the ideas of everything being everything, and everything being quantum.
Laure Prouvost, We Felt a Star Dying, 2025, video still. Commissioned by LAS Art Foundation and co-commissioned by OGR Torino. © 2025 Laure Prouvost. © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2025
But this is a work that does not simply draw from quantum theory or attempt to explain its science—it reawakens artistic questions about perception, instability, and interpretation instead. Prouvost’s installation, developed in collaboration with philosopher Tobias Rees and Hartmut Neven (head of Google’s Quantum A.I. lab), is technically ambitious, but more importantly it is deeply sensorial. It disarms you the right amount so that you can feel the idea, not rationally understand it (though LAS does have an extensive learning center for that). With “We Felt a Star Dying,” it is not about harnessing a quantum computer or knowing how it works and what it can do (though that is also an effect)—it’s about trying to push viewers to feel the boundaries being redrawn.
The musician John Cage, cited by Prouvost’s audio and visual team as an influence, named a process called “chance operations,” a way to feed natural randomness into the artistic process so as to surrender control, to resensitize both the artist and viewer. Quantum mechanics and computing, with its inherent refusal of binaries and a needed embrace of uncertainty and speculation, feels like an echo of that same impulse. It offers a way out of the overly legible, the tidily framed, over-marketed condition much of contemporary art finds itself in.
Laure Prouvost, We Felt a Star Dying, 2025, video still. Commissioned by LAS Art Foundation and co-commissioned by OGR Torino. © 2025 Laure Prouvost. © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2025
The exhibition of Prouvost launches LAS’s Sensing Quatum program, which will include further installations, a symposium, and a sound lab across this year and in 2026. Unlike A.I., which, if it follows the input rules, produces mimetic results, quantum computing systems produce an ambiguous outcome. These curious systems offer a way to reintroduce strangeness, intuition, and uncertainty into artistic processes—qualities long championed by artists. Cage said: “The function of art is to imitate nature in her manner of operation.” In other words, art should reflect the chaos, unpredictability, and multiplicity of the universe itself.
And while access to quantum computing is still limited—there are only about a hundred worldwide, adding to the monumentality of this show—the conceptual shift they represent is here. Even without physical machines, artists are working with the metaphors and symbolisms they offer. What could art look like if it fully embraced that? If we could build as second nature the notion that nothing is ever just one thing; that everything is not an “and/or” dichotomy, but a “both and” widening of a viewpoint. To truly feel that everything is connected. Imagine reality—and society—with this kind of spirit at hand. There is something to be excited about. More

At 87, David Hockney is not merely still working—he’s blazing full steam ahead. The largest exhibition ever dedicated to the beloved British painter has just opened at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, tracing his astonishing 70-year career across more than 400 works. While the retrospective spans Hockney’s evolution from art student in 1955 to global art-world luminary, it’s his recent output—created in the face of illness, isolation, and the introspection of late life—that may catch viewers most off guard.
“Some of my most recent paintings are included, and I do think it is a very enjoyable and visually interesting survey of works,” Hockney said in a statement. “Not many artists have been drawing similar themes and the same people for more than 60 years.”
Artist David Hockney at Louis Vuitton Foundation on April 7, 2025 in Paris, France. Photo by Luc Castel/Getty Images.
Long hailed as one of the greatest—and most expensive—living artists, Hockney continues to defy expectations. Despite a period of fragile health requiring round-the-clock care, he remains doggedly prolific—often working six hours a day. That irrepressible spirit, along with the wit and warmth that have always defined his work, pulses through new pieces like Play Within a Play Within a Play and Me with a Cigarette (2025), a droll and poignant self-portrait showing the artist in his signature yellow glasses, checkered suit, and yes, a cigarette firmly in hand.
Other recent highlights include mischievous reinterpretations of his artistic heroes—William Blake and Edvard Munch among them. In After Blake: Less is Known than People Think (2024), Hockney responds to Blake’s Dante and Virgil Approaching the Angel Who Guards the Entrance of Purgatory with a contemporary twist, part homage and part philosophical riff on art’s mysteries. Elsewhere, the exhibition elucidates Hockney’s dialogue with artists like Fra Angelico, Cezanne, and Van Gogh.
Visitors look at portraits in “Do You Remember They Can’t Cancel The Spring – David Hockney 25” exhibition at Louis Vuitton Foundation on April 8, 2025 in Paris, France. Photo by Luc Castel/Getty Images.
“What I am trying to do is to bring people closer to something,” Hockney reflected. “You wouldn’t be an artist unless you wanted to share an experience, a thought.”
Hockney and his partner Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima have been personally involved in organizing “David Hockney 25,” so named for its focus on the artist’s output during the first half of the 21st century. Under their guidance, the suite of works in each of the foundation’s 11 galleries have been arranged to show to their best advantage works or series of an impressive but often challenging scale.
Here are eight career-spanning works by the artist that showcase his endlessly regenerative, innovative approach to recurrent themes.

An Artist Finds His Muse
David Hockney, Portrait of My Father (1955). Photo: Richard Schmidt, © David Hockney.
Hockney was born in the small city of Bradford, Yorkshire in the north of England in 1937. When he was still in his late teens, he made a tender portrait of his father seated and dressed smartly. In somber tones, Kenneth Hockney, an accounts clerk, appears almost timid, with his hands in his lap and his gaze downcast. The portrait was shown at the Leeds Art Gallery in 1957 and is the earliest work included in this survey. The work betrays an understated simplicity, especially in its palette, that would continue to be a hallmark of much later portraits.
David Hockney, Adhesiveness (1960). Photo: © David Hockney.
Hockney is best known for elegant figurative work, even at a time when the art world showed much greater interest in the revelations of abstraction, but he was certainly open to a wide set of influences. This candid 1960 work appears to show to show the boxy, cartoonish silhouettes of two male figures with phallic protrusions locked in a “69” pose. The number 48 is a code representing Hockney’s initials D.H. and 23.23 represents W.W., presumably a reference to the American poet Walt Whitman, whose homoerotic verse Hockney had been reading.

California Cool
David Hockney, A Bigger Splash (1967). Photo: © David Hockney.
One of Hockney’s most famous motifs is the swimming pool, through which he captures the free-spirited hedonism of Los Angeles, where he moved in 1964. Though the splash of water in front of a diving board is evocative of true-to-life spontaneity, the idea for the iconic A Bigger Splash (1967) actually came from seeing an ad in a magazine. The disruption at the surface of an otherwise perfectly still composition excites the eye and the mystery of the absent figure has generally been read as erotic.
David Hockney, Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy (1970-1971). Photo: Richard Schmidt, © David Hockney.
Among Hockney’s most celebrated works are his double portraits, including this largely imagined scene containing the artist’s friends Celia Birtwell and Ossie Clark. The two fashion designers were married at the time and an ease and affection thrums through a scene that evokes a carefree day in the sun. However, each protagonist is also noticeably self-conscious as they pose on either side of a balcony that draws our eye beyond. It is thought that the painting was intended as a belated wedding present. The marriage ended in 1974.

Lush Landscapes
David Hockney, A Bigger Grand Canyon (1998). Photo: © David Hockney, courtesy National Gallery of Australia.
A far cry from the rugged Yorkshire Dales near where Hockney grew up, the majestic Grand Canyon made a big impression on the artist. To capture a sense of its considerable, even sublime, scale, he painted it over 60 canvases tiled together in a long sweeping vista. Though the size is unconventional, it speaks to Hockney’s desire to capture the scenery not as it is but as it feels to inhabit. As usual, the art does not shy from greatly amplifying naturally occurring color schemes.
David Hockney, A Gap in the Hedgerow from “Midsummer: East Yorkshire” (2004). Photo: Richard Schmidt, © David Hockney.
Hockney moved back to his native Yorkshire in the late 1990s, and embraced the remarkable shift in topography with charming paintings of classically English green rolling fields. One aspect of the countryside he particularly enjoyed that had been absent in California was the changing seasons, which he tackled by painting en plein air with inspiration from landscape painters like John Constable. This scene is one of 36 watercolors from “Midsummer: East Yorkshire,” a series produced with the help of Hockney’s then studio assistant Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima, who is now his partner.

Technicolor and Technology 
David Hockney, Frank Gehry, 24th, 25th February 2016. Photo: Richard Schmidt, © David Hockney.
Over the years Hockney has remained in demand as a painter of notable figures and this portrait of his friend Frank Gehry is a fitting tribute to the architect responsible for the Fondation Louis Vuitton building in Paris. Other subjects on view include the late artist John Baldessari and Harry Styles.
David Hockney, 27th April 2020, No. 1 (2020). Image: © David Hockney.
In the final decades of his life, Hockney has continued to surprise his admirers with his embrace of new technologies, including those everyday items like iPads that few artists would consider fit for making a masterpiece. These digital compositions became a source of solace during the pandemic of 2020, when Hockney was stranded in the Normandy village where he had bought a house. He made 220 views for his “220 for 2020” series, a celebration of spring during a very uncertain time. These were strung together into a continuous 314-feet frieze at the Salts Mill in his native city of Bradford in 2022.
“David Hockney 25” in on view through August 31 at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, 8 Av. du Mahatma Gandhi, Paris.  More

Hermès doesn’t shy away from a maximal production, but for their presentation at Milan Design Week, they went minimal—in a big way. The enormous, historic La Pelota exhibition space was transformed into an austere white void, punctuated by monolithic white shapes that seemingly hovered above the floor emitting warm-hued glows.
Installation view of Hermès’s Milan Design Week 2025 presentation. Photo: Maxime Tétard. Courtesy of Hermès.
The impressive scenography came courtesy of Charlotte Macaux Perelman, the artistic director of Hermès Maison. Guests would round the corner of her serene displays to discover an intimate arrangement of homewares within. The Hermès team packed lightly—but well. There was a lot of Mondrian-style color blocking, and the overall theme seemed to be high design with restraint.
Installation view of Hermès’s Milan Design Week 2025 presentation. Photo: Maxime Tétard. Courtesy of Hermès.
The press materials stated: “Certain objects, furniture, and fabrics come alive with a reassuring vibration, shimmering with a familiar halo. An object can be an emotion.”
That sentiment played out across the collection in subtle but inventive ways. London-based designer Tomás Alonso, known for his precise, material-forward furniture, presented a side table that combines Japanese cedar and colored lacquered glass—an unexpected but welcome pairing. The matte wood offered a soft contrast to the saturated panels of glass, while the rounded wood base played off the more geometric silhouette of the table’s body. As light passed through the colored surfaces, it added yet another dimension—a quiet play of hue and shadow.
A handblown amber glass vase was accentuated by a supple calfskin leather cuff— another surprising yet natural pairing. In fact, all of the glassware was covetable, with just the right amount of color.
Amer Musa, Partition. Creation: Studio Hermès. Photo: Maxime Tétard. Courtesy of Hermès.
The same could be said of the cashmere blankets, a staple of Hermès. Jordanian artist and designer Amer Musa added an auric touch to her geometric cashmere throw: 24-carat gold powder delicately applied to fine, hand-woven cashmere, the pattern meant to evoke musical staves. This is the softer side of minimalism, after all.
Hermès presents its new home collections during Milan Design Week, from Wednesday, April 9 to Sunday, April 13 at La Pelota, via Palermo 10, Milan: Wednesday, April 9, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Thursday, April 10 to Saturday, April 12, from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m.; Sunday, April 13, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. More

Whenever Loewe gets involved with the craft aspect of a subject—whether or not you were familiar with it, or even interested in it to begin with—you come out of it compelled. I’ve learned to let go and trust the way of Loewe. They’re really that good at these sorts of things. “Loewe Teapots” might not sound like the most bombastic of show titles, but they don’t need excess hype when they’ve got the killer ceramics and porcelain to prove it.
Installation view of “Loewe Teapots,” Milan Design Week 2025. Courtesy of Loewe.
The exhibition marks the brand’s ninth showing at Milan Design Week and was unveiled today during a press presentation at the grand and cavernous Palazzo Citterio
Tea, of course, is rich in symbolism. It’s a theme that feels quintessentially Jonathan Anderson, Loewe’s outgoing creative director: rooted in the quiet ritual of British tea drinking, but also in conversation with the brand’s large and devoted Asian audience, where tea holds deep cultural and aesthetic significance.
Minsuk Cho, Boa Teapot (2024). Courtesy of Loewe.
“Loewe Teapots” is more than an exercise in form—it’s a vessel (literally and figuratively) for global craft storytelling. Many participants are affiliated with the Loewe Foundation Craft Prize, Anderson’s gangbusters passion project which the brand will persevere with. “Loewe Teapots” brings together 25 artists, designers, and architects from around the world to rethink the teapot—not just as a functional object, but as a sculptural form steeped in global tradition.
Akio Niisato, Luminous Teapot (2024). Courtesy of Loewe.
Some of the artists wield subtlety. The Japanese artist Akio Niisato’s Luminous Teapot appears deceptively minimal at first glance—pristine, smooth, and spare. But when illuminated, its surface reveals a constellation of tiny, glowing perforations, like a deep-sea creature pulsing in the dark. The Korean architect Minsuk Cho’s Boa Teapot explores the relationship between texture and form, with a rippling, irregular body and a strikingly flat, circular lid—an interplay that gently evokes the tension between the organic and the engineered.
Rosemarie Trockel, Communal Teapot (2024). Courtesy of Loewe.
But of course, things get more interesting when artists chuck out the rulebook. The Spanish designer Patricia Urquiola’s Ardilla is a hand-sculpted, violet-hued piece that tosses function aside in favor of form. Its stacked, geometric curves feel like a mash-up of architectural histories and cultural codes—you wouldn’t fill it with tea, but perhaps with some kind of mysterious elixir. German artist Rosemarie Trockel’s ominous Communal Teapot takes things even further: massive and monolithic, it is large enough to be used to dump Gatorade on a winning team or to be substituted for a cauldron for a chic witches’ brew.
Wang Shu, Huan Cui – Surrounding Green (2024). Courtesy of Loewe.
Then there’s Huan Cui – Surrounding Green by Chinese architect Wang Shu, a gnostic-looking vessel that radiates quiet mysticism. It doesn’t look like it would pour well—and honestly, who cares? It seems content to simply exist, humming with presence.
Tea cozies, hand-knitted and crocheted by Loewe (2024). Courtesy of Loewe.
Alongside the one-of-a-kind teapots, Loewe is offering a limited run of zoomorphic tea cozies for sale—each one hand-knitted or crocheted into the shape of a hedgehog, owl, panda, frog, or wide-eyed pig. They nod to domestic ritual and childhood memory, with just the right dose of eccentricity.
“Loewe Teapots” is on view at Palazzo Citterio, Via Brera 12, Milan, from April 8–13, 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. daily. More

Across nearly 50 portraits in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s sweeping Amy Sherald exhibition, you’ll find a host of ordinary subjects. A cowboy stands in a stars-and-stripes shirt, a girl daintily balances an oversized teacup, and a boy perches high atop a playground slide. But their everydayness reveals something far deeper: the striking individuality and complexity that make up the American identity.
Fittingly, Sherald has titled her first major museum survey “American Sublime,” a nod to poet Elizabeth Alexander as much as the 18th-century aesthetic theory. To encounter the sublime, according to the Romantics, is to be overcome by awe and reverence. Nature can afford such an experience, but so too can art, noted Rujeko Hockley, the museum’s associate curator who organized the show.
Installation view of “Amy Sherald: American Sublime” at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Photo: Tiffany Sage / BFA.com.
“When I think of Amy’s show, her work in general, and what it means here to have an exhibition called ‘American Sublime,’ I think about her relationship to the history of art, painting, and portraiture, and her very intentional elevation of Black Americans,” she told me. “It’s about being overwhelmed in the face of the incredible range, breadth, and diversity of the American people.”
The show arrays Sherald’s portraits from 2007 to present, which advance yet subvert American realist traditions. Many of them share certain hallmarks—her use of grisaille, for one, which renders her subjects’ skin in gray tones to defeat notions of color as race—but are also remarkably distinct. Some sitters are placed amid amorphous backgrounds and others, more recently, within vivid magic-realist scenes; they are distinguished by their dress and stance. All hold the viewer with a self-possessed gaze.
But how their identity is read remains fluid, shifting in interpretation as the work is interacted with, as Sherald intended. “I want my portraits to create a space,” she has said, “where Blackness can breathe.”
Amy Sherald, What’s precious inside of him does not care to be known by the mind in ways that diminish its presence (All American) (2017). Photo courtesy of the Whitney Museum of American Art.
The artist, of course, is best known for her portraits of First Lady Michelle Obama (so popular it doubled the attendance of D.C.’s National Portrait Gallery) and Breonna Taylor, both of which are included here. But in the years before, since, and in between, she has honed and evolved her practice to unpack and center the expanse of Black narratives—all the better to usher them into the canon of American art.
And her sprawling project has had much to mine: “The American people is the most expansive container out there,” Hockley noted.
Proof is in the exhibition, which has traveled to New York from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (it touches down at the National Portrait Gallery in September). For the best way into the show and Sherald’s multilayered oeuvre, we asked Hockley to spotlight six artworks that capture the painter’s vision of the American sublime.

Hangman (2007)
Amy Sherald, Hangman (2007). © Amy Sherald. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Kelvin Bulluck.
The earliest work in the show, Hangman has rarely been seen since it was purchased by a private collector. Its emergence for the Whitney iteration of “American Sublime” offers a peek into how Sherald’s technique has evolved over decades.
The work depicts a Black man in profile, accompanied by three textured bands that hold the faint silhouettes of haunting specters. Its title, said Hockley, “is Amy’s most direct allusion to the history of American racialized violence.” Yet, however heavy its theme, the curator reads a sense of revelatory, almost religious, light in how the subject is pictured levitating alongside three bronze-looking figures (the effect, Hockley said, was created by Sherald reusing and repainting over the canvas).
“You see the primary figure but you also see these Three Graces, almost. It feels like there are these Classical references and aesthetics, even though she’s thinking about the 21st century,” Hockley added. “It feels like a painting that you would see in a Renaissance church, where you get to the end of the nave and you’re overwhelmed by the communion with something larger than yourself.”

Planes, Rockets, and the Spaces In Between (2018)
Amy Sherald, Planes, Rockets, and the Spaces In Between (2018). © Amy Sherald. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photograph by Joseph Hyde.
In a departure from her saturated backgrounds, this 2018 work sees Sherald land her subjects amid a constructed world for the first time. In it, two women stand hand in hand amid a golden field while a rocket takes off in the far distance. One is transfixed on the launch and the other turns to look back toward the viewer. The horizon is hung low; the sky dominates the painting.
The work conveys the marvel at human engineering, of the “expansion of the natural world,” in Hockley’s words. But there’s a sense of looking forward as much as gazing back, as embodied by Sherald’s sitters.
“This painting, for me, really captures the incongruity of how these little earth-bound creatures have created the technology to go to the moon and to physically, literally do it,” she said. “There’s the mystery of this reality, but also the wonder of it.”

As American as Apple Pie (2020)
Amy Sherald, As American as Apple Pie (2020). Courtesy that artist and Hauser and Wirth. © Amy Sherald. Photo: Joseph Hyde.
Related to the title “American Sublime,” said Hockley, is the well-worn idea of the American Dream. And here, Sherald offers us one such aspirational vision.
The couple at the center the work appears with all the trappings of Americana: the car, the white picket fence, the suburban street. He appears natty in denim and Chuck Taylors, and she chicly clad in pink, with a nod to Barbie, that quintessential American product. The painting offers a 21st-century response to American Gothic, Grant Wood’s celebrated 1930 canvas that encapsulated the nation’s rural values—while leaving room for a sense of “rupture,” said Hockley.
“What is the American dream? Is it attainable? Is it the same then as it was now?” she asked. “Who is the American Dream available to? Is this couple living the American Dream? They look like they are, but they don’t look like what we’ve perhaps been told the people who get to live the American Dream look like.”

Freeing Herself Was One Thing, Taking Ownership of that Freed Self Was Another (2019)
Amy Sherald, Freeing Herself Was One Thing, Taking Ownership of that Freed Self Was Another (2019), on the far left, on view at “Amy Sherald: American Sublime” at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Photo: Tiffany Sage / BFA.com.
The exploration of self-expression is a universal phenomenon, Hockley noted, but in this 2019 portrait of a red-headed young woman, the curator reads something distinctly American. Perhaps it’s something in the nation’s sense of itself, she said, where “there has historically been such a focus on youth culture and the ways young people drive culture.”
The youth at the center of this work appears on the cusp of transformation—her striped top and leather jacket painting her as a teenager even as the rag doll she clutches represents a sign of childhood. “There’s an intensity of that moment at that age,” said Hockley of this dichotomy.
Amy Sherald, Miss Everything (Unsuppressed Deliverance) (2014). Photo courtesy of the Whitney Museum of American Art.
In theme, the work echoes that of Sherald’s Miss Everything (Unsuppressed Deliverance)—also in the show and on the cover of the New Yorker‘s March 24 issue—a portrait of a girl in a whimsical polka dot dress handling a large teacup and saucer. She’s playing dress-up, experimenting with fashion as much as her identity.
“It’s this internal diversity, even in one person,” Hockley said of these sitters’ shifting presentations. “We have so many different sides to ourselves. Nothing is fixed.”

If You Surrendered to the Air, You Could Ride It (2019)
Amy Sherald, If You Surrendered to the Air, You Could Ride It (2019). © Amy Sherald. Courtesy of the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Acquired by the Whitney in 2020, this painting heads out on view at the museum for the first time in “American Sublime.” It’s a surreal one: a man, dressed in a white top and striped trousers, sits serenely on a steel beam, one so high up that only sky appears behind him. The piece’s equally poetic title is borrowed from Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon.
An evident inspiration for the work is Charles C. Ebbets’s iconic 1932 photograph of steelworkers having lunch while perched on a steel beam soaring high above New York City. But, as Hockley pointed out, Sherald’s subject is clearly no hard-hatted workman. “He’s so fashionable, he doesn’t look like he’s on break from construction work,” she noted. “There’s an interesting incongruity there.”
And that’s not the painting’s only departure from reality. The man appears, after all, on top of the world—”higher than any skyscraper,” said Hockley—his orange beanie just about touching the clear sky. His ascension is a mystery, but the vibe is euphoric.
“He’s floating alone, above the clouds. That expansive blue sky just feels so uplifting, elevated, kind of celestial,” said Hockley.

Ecclesia (The Meaning of Inheritance and Horizons) (2024)
Amy Sherald, Ecclesia (The Meaning of Inheritance and Horizons) (2024) on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Photo: Sansho Scott / BFA.com
A centerpiece of the exhibition, Ecclesia is Sherald’s newest, most ambitious work—and her most enigmatic. Each panel in the triptych features a similar scene of a person peering out of a small watchtower on stilts, but each figure hangs out differently. Two of them look out at the viewer, one of them shielding her eyes against the sun, while the middle character stares fixedly toward her right, as if toward the horizon.
The work is rich in symbolism. The figures don clothes representing the weather (the sun, clouds, and a rainbow); each tower is topped by a weathervane bearing a carving of a different animal (a turtle, whale, and dolphin); and the wind is blowing in different directions on each canvas. And why are the shadows falling differently across the panels? Why is one of the women holding a handkerchief?
Sherald may have picked up from Wes Anderson, particularly the coastal scenes in Moonrise Kingdom, though Hockley also stressed the painter’s penchant for magic realist art and films, ones “not so rooted in reality.” The triptych, too, bears traditional iconography yet feels contemporary, straddling time as much as space.
And while the title does nod to community (“ecclesia” is Greek for “assembly”), Hockley almost prefers to have the work defy meaning and gravity.
“What makes it feel connected to this idea of the American Sublime is because it’s like the imagination untethered. It can float free of references or a one-to-one meaning,” she said. “It can be about illusions and making connections in this more idiosyncratic, individual, and imaginative way.”
“Amy Sherald: American Sublime” is on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 99 Gansevoort Street, New York, New York, April 9–August 10, 2025. More