Art & Exhibitions

The monumental environmental installations of the late husband-and-wife duo Christo and Jeanne-Claude are having a major moment, timed to the 90th anniversary of their births—both artists’ birthdates are June 13, 2025. This year and into 2026, a flurry of major projects and exhibitions are revisiting or paying tribute to their groundbreaking work that transformed not just landscapes but the very definition of public art.
“Ultimately, all the work of art that Christo and Jeanne-Claude did is about freedom. And Christo’s childhood growing up in a Communist Bulgaria had a lot to do with it,” said Vladimir Yavachev, Christo’s nephew and the longtime director of projects for the duo. He now helps run their foundation.
The artists, Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon (1935–2009) and Christo Vladimirov Javacheff (1935–2020), met in 1958 and began working together almost immediately. In 1961, their very first collaborative piece, Stacked Oil Barrels and Dockside Packages, featured the main elements that would become the hallmarks of their work. It was a temporary outdoor installation on the harbor in Cologne, Germany, with groups of oil barrels covered by tarps secured with ropes.
Christo and Jeanne-Claude would go on to take this vision to seemingly impossible heights, wrapping entire buildings in fabric—most recently with L’Arc de Triomphe, Wrapped in Paris, a piece posthumously realized under Yavachev in 2021. He’s worked on every Christo and Jeanne-Claude project since The Umbrellas, a Transpacific installation staged in Ibaraki, Japan, and Southern California in 1991.
Christo and Jeanne-Claude, L’Arc de Triomphe, Wrapped, Paris, (1961-2021). Photo: Lubri, ©2021 Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation.
“I was underage labor when I started,” Yavachev recalled. He was 17 when he left his native Bulgaria in 1990, and began working with his aunt and uncle.
Now, it is up to him to complete Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s The Mastaba in the Abu Dhabi desert. First conceived in 1977, the piece will be the artists’ only permanent installation and the largest contemporary sculpture in the world—taller than the Great Pyramid of Giza, made from 410,000 multicolored oil barrels.
Marvels of Engineering
But while construction on that long-gestating project has yet to begin, Christo and Jeanne-Claude are perhaps more visible than ever. The artists’ 90th birthday year has proved an apt moment to look back at some of their most famous works, marvels of engineering and visual spectacles that crisscrossed the globe, often taking many years to come to fruition.
Christo and Jeanne-Claude, The Gates, Central Park, New York City (1979–2005). Photo: Wolfgang Volz. Courtesy of the Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation.
Preserving Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s legacy is complicated by the fact that their ambitious projects were designed to be ephemeral. There are early sculptures, drawings, and preparatory works, but the big pieces that made them famous live on only in photographs and memories. They were committed to the works’ temporary nature and transient beauty.
“[Our projects] exist in their time, impossible to repeat,” Christo told Artnet contributor Devorah Lauter just two months before his death. “That is their power, because they cannot be bought, they cannot be possessed… They cannot be seen again.”
The magic of technology is helping change that.
Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Wrapped Reichstag (1971–95), Berlin. Photo: Wolfgang Volz. © Christo and Wolfgang Volz, 1995.
This year also marks the 30th anniversary of the Wrapped Reichstag, the 1995 project in which the artists covered a Neo-Renaissance government building in Berlin with silvery fabric. And it’s the 20th anniversary of The Gates in New York’s Central Park, which saw 7,503 metal frames draped with orange fabric placed along a pathway of 23 miles.
Both have been resurrected, in a high-tech way.
In Central Park, visitors this February and March could experience the display anew via augmented reality, with the artists’ foundation recreating the dramatic addition to the park landscape digitally in the Bloomberg Connects app. (An accompanying exhibition was held at the Shed in Hudson Yards.)
A person taking part in the Augmented Reality experience and art exhibition for the 20th anniversary of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s “The Gates” in Central Park, New York (2025). Photo: Leonardo Munoz/AFP via Getty Images.
“People’s reaction was very similar to The Gates when they actually saw the project in real life.
So that was very, very nice,” Yavachev said.
Currently, in Berlin, the artists’ foundation is using digital projection to rewrap the Reichstag every night until June 20. The project requires some 30 projectors with a collective 1.2 million lumens, and features an animation of the silvery fabric unfurling over the building’s façade, which had to be digitally mapped for the occasion.
“It’s a little challenging because there are a lot of windows,” Yavachev said. The original piece involved fabricating 70 tailor-made fabric panels, installed by a team of 90 trained rock climbers.
A projection of the Wrapped Reichstag by artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude is displayed on the Reichstag building to mark the artwork’s 30th anniversary, at Platz der Republik on June 9, 2025, in Berlin, Germany. Photo: Adam Berry/Getty Images.
“Of course you cannot replace the real feel of the fabric and the wind,” he said. “This is a way to commemorate the project and as well to introduce young people to Christo and Jean’s work.”
Exhibitions Galore
There are also currently a slew of Christo and Jeanne-Claude exhibitions doing just that. That includes a permanent exhibition with documentation from Wrapped Reichstag at Berlin’s Deutscher Bundestag, the home of the German parliament. A preparatory work for Wrapped Reichstag, featuring a collaged photograph and drawing, was acquired by Bulgaria’s National Gallery in February, and will go on view at the museum on June 24.
The Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin is also getting on the celebration for Wrapped Reichstag, having added Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Wrapped 1961 Volkswagen Beetle Saloon to its permanent collection display this week. (The work was also shown in Art Basel’s Unlimited section in 2024.)
Christo, Wrapped 1961 Volkswagen Beetle Saloon (1963/2014). Photo: Wolfgang Volz. © 2014 Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation.
The artists made the original version of the work in 1964, but had to quickly unwrap the vehicle at the request of the car owner who lent it for the exhibition.
“He later said that it was the biggest mistake of his life,” Yavachev said—the young car owner wanted to be able to drive his car, but it would have proved considerably more valuable if it had remained an artwork. But Christo returned to the idea in 2014, buying the same model year car as he had the first time around to recreate the work permanently.
“The fabric is really thick, so it has great folds,” Yavachev added. “It’s a beautiful work. It just looks really, really good. And it’s almost like a shrunken version of one of the larger [wrapped structures].”
Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Surrounded Islands (1983). Photo: Wolfgang Volz. © 2024 Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation, via the Collection NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale.
There are also larger Christo and Jeanne-Claude shows at museums that have received generous gifts from the artists and their foundation connected to their projects. Works connected to Surrounded Islands, Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s 1983 work outlining 11 islands in Biscayne Bay with pink polypropylene fabric, were gifted to the NSU Art Museum, in 2024, and are currently on view in a dedicated exhibition.
And later this month, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Mo., will unveil the foundation’s gift from Wrapped Walk Ways, a 1978 project in a local park creating 2.7 miles of pathways traced in saffron-colored fabric.
Christo, Wrapped Walk Ways (Project for Jacob L. Loose Memorial Park, Kansas City, Missouri), 1978. Collection of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Mo., gift of the Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation, 2024. Photo: Eeva-Inkeri, © The Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation.
The biggest outing is “Christo and Jeanne-Claude: Wrapped. Tied. Stacked. Würth Collection,” a 60-year retrospective featuring over 120 works at the Würth Museum in Künzelsau, Germany. The museum has one of the largest collections of the artists’ work in the world, thanks to founder Reinhold Würth’s close friendship with the couple.
“Christo and Jeanne-Claude undoubtedly shifted the dimension of what had been conceivable as a work of art until then. Their boldness to wrap a building or monument, or surround an entire coast, did not change the world, but how we see it,” museum director C. Sylvia Weber, who co-curated the show, said in a statement, calling their work “a celebration of the moment.”
Artist Tributes
Other artists are also paying tribute to Christo and Jeanne-Claude, and how their wrapped structures created moments of mystery in everyday environments, igniting the imagination.
Ibrahim Mahama’s wrapping of the Kunsthalle Bern (2025). Photo: Cedric Mussano.
In April, Ibrahim Mahama (b. 1987) wrapped the exterior of the Kunsthalle Bern in jute sackcloth ahead of the renovated institution’s reopening this month. The Ghanaian artist has wrapped buildings before, like the Barbican in London in 2024, but this is his most overt homage to Christo and Jeanne-Claude.
The duo had memorably covered the building for their project Wrapped Kunsthalle (1967–68). Mahama’s take on the piece used a material tied to colonial history and the export of African goods, while referring back to the original installation.
“It was actually the first time that Christo and Jean Claude wrapped a public building—that had never happened before,
such a serious intervention,” Yavachev said. “It’s amazing that it paved the way for young artists to do many other things, so it’s great.”
Christo during the installation of Wrapped Kunsthalle iin Bern (1968). Photo:  Carlo Bavagnoli. © 1968 Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation.
The foundation wasn’t involved in Mahama’s project, but welcomes the creation of new work inspired by Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s projects.
“Any artist can do anything they want.
That’s the beauty about art,” Yavachev said.
He actually personally reached out to the French artist JR (b. 1983) to help set in motion another forthcoming Christo and Jeanne-Claude tribute, titled Projet Pont Neuf: “I’ve known him for many years and I know he’s very inspired by Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s work.”
Christo and Jeanne-Claude, The Pont Neuf Wrapped (1975–85), Paris. Photo:  Wolfgang Volz. © 1985 Christo.
The piece pays homage to Pont Neuf Wrapped, a 1985 project in which Christo and Jeanne-Claude wrapped Paris’s oldest bridge in silky, light golden-brown fabric. JR plans to tap into the city’s architectural history by installing a photographic display of the rocky outcroppings formed at the stone quarries that provided the raw materials to build Paris.
He’s re-envisioning Pont Neuf as a grotto, its arches and parapets obscured by the full-scale black and white photos of the large rock formations that celebrate the natural elements that contribute so much to the beauty of the city.
The technical details of the JR project are still under wraps (no pun intended), but when I asked if the photos would be affixed to some kind of armature, Yavachev said that it would be “more like an inflatable technology.”
JR, Projet Pont-Neuf (collage préparatoire) (2024). Courtesy of Atelier JR. © 2024 JR.
In true Christo and Jeanne-Claude fashion, the new installation is actually getting pushed back to 2026. Their works were so logistically complex that it could take decades to finally bring their vision to life. Wrapped Reichstag took 24 years to finish. The Gates took 26. So what’s one more year waiting to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Pont Neuf Wrapped?
In the meantime, the foundation is partnering with Paris City Hall to stage a public art installation on the banks of the River Seine, near Pont Neuf, presenting a brief history of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Paris projects.
“The nice thing about public art is that it confronts people who are usually not interested in art with art,” Yavachev said. “If you go to a gallery or to a museum, you’re already interested to end up there.
But with public art, you can’t miss it. And as Christo used to say, whether they hate it or love it, it’s OK, because at the end of the day, they just talk about art.”
“Kunsthalle Bern Wrapped: Ibrahim Mahama” was on view at the Kunsthalle Bern, Helvetiapl. 1, 3005 Bern, Switzerland, April 30–June 1, 2025.
“Anniversary Illumination of the Reichstag Building: Tribute to Christo and Jeanne-Claude” is on view at the Reichstag, Platz der Republik 1, 11011 Berlin, Germany, June 9–20, 2025, each night from 9:30 p.m. to 1 a.m.
Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s The Wrapped Reichstag (Project for Berlin, 1971–95) will be on view at the National Gallery, Kvadrat 500, 1, 19th February Street, St. Alexander Nevsky Square,1000 Sofia, Bulgaria, starting June 24, 2025.
Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Wrapped Volkswagen Beetle Saloon is on view at the Neue Nationalgalerie, Potsdamer Straße 50, 10785 Berlin, Germany, in the permanent collection exhibition “Extreme Tension. Art between Politics and Society. Collection of the Nationalgalerie 1945–2000″ starting June 11, 2025.
“Christo and Jeanne-Claude: Surrounded Islands Documentation Exhibition” is on view at the NSU Art Museum, 1 East Las Olas Boulevard, Fort Lauderdale, Florida, through February 23, 2026.
“Christo and Jeanne-Claude: Wrapped. Tied. Stacked. Würth Collection” is on view at the Würth Museum, Reinhold-Würth-Straße 15, 74653 Künzelsau, Germany, through anuary 25, 2026.
“Wrapped Walk Ways – A Gift From the Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation” will be on view at the Nelson-Atkins Museum, 4525 Oak Street, Kansas City, Missouri, June 28, 2025–January 18, 2026.
“Christo and Jeanne-Claude: Wrapped Reichstag, Berlin, 1971–95. A Documentation Exhibition” is on view at the Deutscher Bundestag, Platz der Republik 1, Berlin, Germany, through November 25, 2035.
“Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Paris Projects” and will be on view on the banks of the River Seine, near Pont Neuf, Paris, France, September and October 2025.
“JR: Projet Pont Neuf” will be on view at Pont Neuf, Paris, France, fall 2026. More

The circus has come to town, courtesy of Joe Coleman (b. 1955), painter, performer, and collector of the odd, unusual, and grotesque, from mummies to side show ephemera to true crime artifacts.
The artist is currently enjoying two star turns. One is as the subject of How Dark My Love, a nonfiction narrative film directed by Scott Gracheff that premiered this weekend at New York’s Tribeca Film Festival. The other is as curator of “Carnival,” a wild group show at Jeffrey Deitch, also in New York, that seamlessly melds Coleman’s own paintings and offbeat holdings with high-end art by the likes of Derrick Adams, Celeste Dupuy-Spencer, George Condo, and Anne Imhof.
The show also includes Coleman’s magnum opus, a life-size portrait of his wife, Whitney Ward, in his signature hyperrealistic style. Working with jewelers’ glasses and paintbrushes so fine he has been known to use one with just a single hair, Coleman has illustrated Ward’s entire life, filling every square inch of the canvas with different vignettes drawn from her biography. Nearly four years in the making, the painting’s creation became the heart of How Dark My Love, which itself actually began production way back in 2012.
The painting, Doorway to Whitney, is a companion piece to Coleman’s self portrait, Doorway to Joe. Coleman’s approach to portraiture is unique, choosing to incorporate minute details into text-rich paintings that craft a compelling narrative and demand close looking. An art school dropout, he works unconventionally, completing one small section at a time until the blank canvas is entirely filled in, rather than sketching out the entire composition with a preliminary drawing.

[embedded content]

“I don’t know what the whole image is going to become—it grows organically,” Coleman said in the movie.
The film begins with Coleman already about one year into work on the Whitney painting. (“I can’t believe he started with the rack,” Ward tells the cameras, standing next to a canvas that so far depicts only her shoulders, upper arms, and ample cleavage in the central portrait.)
Joe Coleman, Doorway to Whitney (2011–15). Photo: courtesy of Whitney Ward.
Long before the song “Nasty” wondered “Is somebody gonna match my freak?” there were Coleman and Ward. She’s a dominatrix and photographer (and suspects her 1998 profile in the New Yorker helped cost editor-in-chief Tina Brown her job). He’s bitten the heads off live rats and detonated explosives strapped to his chest during his performances. In recounting their love story in the film, Ward spoke fondly of introducing him to her mother’s ashes on an early date, taking the lid off the urn so the two could hold hands through a fistful of human remains.
At their wedding 25 years ago, Coleman arrived at the ceremony at Baltimore’s American Visionary Art Museum via hearse, and was carried up the aisle in a wicker casket. The officiant was “Dutch,” a ventriloquist dummy who invoked the power of Satan before pronouncing them man and wife (and is among the objects on view in “Carnival”).
Installation view of “Carnival” curated by Joe Coleman. The works on view include a waxen effigy of St. Agnes in the foreground, flanked by two fantasy coffins of the artist and his wife, Whitney Ward, in their wedding attire by Ghanaian artist Theophilus Nii Anum Sowah. Photo: courtesy of Jeffrey Deitch, New York.
“Whitney and I are so fortunate that we found each other. And you know, it’s almost like in this lifetime we were searching for each other,” Coleman told me. “Psychics have said that we’ve been together many lives.”
Once introduced in public access TV interview as “a totally bizarre… despicable, vile, horrendous, rodent-like facsimile of a human,” Coleman is open about the dark chapters of his life, recounting his years of heroin addiction. At the depths of his ten-bag-a-day habit, Coleman would drive his taxi cab to an Alphabet City drug den, reach in with his money, get injected through a glory hole, and then pick up passengers.
Joe Coleman, Stigma Stigmata Camille 2000 (2019). Photo: courtesy of Jeffrey Deitch, New York.
But his years as a cabbie also facilitated his entry into the art world. In 1986, he happened to pick up David Owsley, then a curator at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. Before the ride was over, Owsley had agreed to a detour to see Coleman’s first-ever solo show at a gallery called Chronocide. (The owner, who lived upstairs, kindly opened up the show in the middle of the night.)
“David bought two paintings from that show.
Later he showed me where they were hanging in his home, and they were between an actual Brueghel painting and a work by Reverend William Blayney, an Outsider artist,” Coleman said. “He got it started, you know, got the ball rolling.”
The film has a few glimpses of how Coleman has flourished in more conventional settings, such as his 2017 solo show at the Begovich Gallery at California State University, Fullerton. (Even then, the white cube gallery space was painted a deep red.)
Crowds at the opening of “Carnival, Curated by Joe Coleman” at Jeffrey Deitch. Photo: by Christos Katsiaouni, courtesy of Jeffrey Deitch, New York.
But for the most part, the filmmakers stay firmly planted in Coleman and Ward’s world. Their home, now in an old Victorian upstate where they moved in 2020, is a veritable museum that he’s christened the “Odditorium” and hopes to open to private tours. The artist credits a childhood trip to Times Square to see the old Hubert’s Museum—a Coney Island-style attraction where Madame Tussaud’s wax museum now stands—for his fascination with the fun house aesthetic. (The original painting advertising the Hubert’s flea circus, from about 1935, is included in “Carnival.”)
“There was this kind of chamber of horror, with a woman in wax, and this one little door with a tiny window on it.
And you could see this eye staring through this opening. It was frightening, but fascinating,” Coleman said. “I couldn’t get it out of my mind.
I said ‘When I grow up, that’s where I wanna live.
In the place that has the burlesque, the sideshow, the wax museum.’”
Johnny Meah, Boy changing to girl (1989). Photo: courtesy of Jeffrey Deitch, New York.
Darkness clearly fascinates Coleman, who has made paintings about drug use, murderers, and serial killers. (His piece inspired by the so-called Slenderman stabbing even led to a lawsuit with HBO.) But How Dark My Love is at its heart a love story—and Door to Whitney is nothing if not a labor of love.
“It was hard to finish because I didn’t want to stop making it, if that makes any sense,” Coleman admitted. “And Whitney told me that she missed me making her, because that I would constantly be asking her questions.”
The film indulges Coleman and Ward’s quirkiness, but it also acknowledges the realities of what it means to be an artist in New York City. Because he spent so many years singularly devoted to Doorway to Joe and then Doorway to Whitney, Coleman wasn’t making or selling anything else. (Coleman didn’t want to talk prices, but his record at auction, set in 2011 at Christie’s New York, is $98,500, according to the Artnet Price Database.)
Joe Coleman paints with jeweler’s glasses in a still from How Dark My Love (2025). Photo: by Gregg de Domenico.
As the film goes on, the need to sell the painting so they don’t go broke is very real. Doorway to Whitney is unveiled to great fanfare during Art Basel Miami Beach, as part of Deitch’s 2015 “Unrealism” show with dealer Larry Gagosian.
Seeing the work in person today, reunited with Doorway to Joe at Jeffrey Deitch, is not to be missed—although they have plenty of competition amid the eye-catching display, which includes paintings hanging from the ceiling by Johnny Meah, who’s been called “the last carnival sideshow banner painter.”

There is a full-scale, bedazzled carousel by Raúl de Nieves, and an interactive Narcissister sculpture in which you crank a bike pedal to activate a praxinoscope—a kind of spinning flip book that creates animation—cheekily nestled amid the pubic hair of a female circus performer mannequin clad in sequined-trimmed pink spandex.
And then there’s a life-size wax model of Johnny Eck, a sideshow performer born without legs due to a rare congenital disorder affecting the development of the lower spine. Coleman has brought together a collection of archival photographs from Eck’s life and career, as well as puppets that Eck made himself and the working Railmaster train that he used to bring with him to fairs and carnivals across the country for children to ride. (It’s one of only two surviving models, built by Bruce Rowell in the 1940s.)

Another highlight is Dedicated to Coney Island (1984–2002), Tom Duncan’s mechanized miniature of the boardwalk and amusement park at Coney Island, crafted over the course of nearly 20 years from found objects.
You’ll spot life-size funerary sculptures of Coleman and Ward lying in caskets in their wedding garb by Ghanaian artist Theophilus Nii Anum Sowah, who specializes in fantasy coffins.
Also from Coleman’s personal collection is a waxen effigy of the martyred St. Agnes said to contain a piece of her actual bone, displayed next to wax figures of serial killer Richard Ramirez and cult leader Charles Manson by Hollywood practical effects sculptor Henry Alvarez. And there are elaborate nautical-themed costumes that Ward made for the Coney Island Mermaid Parade, where she and Coleman are the reigning king and queen.
Installation view of “Carnival” curated by Joe Coleman. Two paintings by Derrick Adams are displayed next to an Octopus Mermaid Queen costume designed by his wife, Whitney Ward, with Mr. Gorgeous, for the 2024 Coney Island Mermaid Parade. Photo: courtesy of Jeffrey Deitch, New York.
The exhibition grew out of his most recent book, A Doorway to Joe: The Art of Joe Coleman. When it came out last fall, Deitch, who had included the artist in group shows in the past, agreed to interview him at a talk promoting the 450-page tome.
“After, Jeffrey had a big party at his home, and he and I got to talking. He just got it in his head that he wanted me to curate this carnival show,” Coleman said. (Deitch has long had a fondness for Coney Island, curating the “Coney Island Walls” outdoor street art museum from 2015 to 2018.)
Installation view of “Carnival” curated by Joe Coleman, showing a wax figurine of sideshow performer Johnny Eck, and his train. Photo: courtesy of Jeffrey Deitch, New York.
It proved the perfect partnership, with Deitch there to help bring in contemporary artists exploring carnival-related themes to go with the works that Coleman picked out, including by his friends from the burlesque, sideshow, and Mardi Gras communities.
“Those really complement the show in a really great way and go perfectly with the older, you know, crazy stuff,” Coleman said, “I didn’t have access to them, but Jeffrey did.”
KAWS, UNTITLED (BELIEVE IT OR NOT), 1998. Photo: courtesy of Jeffrey Deitch, New York.
That’s not entirely true. The street artist Chris “DAZE” Ellis is a longtime friend due to their shared interest in Coney Island. And there is also a piece by KAWS, who has become well-known as a collector with a penchant for Outsider art, and included Coleman in a show of his holdings at New York’s Drawing Center.
And the film has a few celebrity cameos from fans of Coleman’s work such as singer Iggy Pop and guitarist Dave Navarro. He also has a studio visit with actor and filmmaker Asia Argento, a friend who appears in the Whitney painting and also cast Coleman in her debut film, Scarlet Diva (2000), in a role inspired by her alleged sexual assault at the hands of producer Harvey Weinstein.
Joe Coleman and Whitney Ward at the opening of “Carnival, Curated by Joe Coleman” at Jeffrey Deitch. Photo: by Christos Katsiaouni, courtesy of Jeffrey Deitch, New York.
Less sympathetic is Coleman’s time with a friend and painting subject, Sam “Sammytown” McBride, a punk singer for the band Fang who killed his girlfriend, Dixie Lee Carney. It’s a reminder that many of Coleman’s works depict, if not celebrate, humanity’s darkest impulses, blurring light and shadow.
“It’s a show that you can keep going back to and finding more,” said Coleman.
”And the same is true for my paintings, too.”
“Carnival, Curated by Joe Coleman” is on view at Jeffrey Deitch, 18 Wooster Street, New York, New York, May 3–June 28, 2025.
How Dark My Love is screening at the Tribeca Film Festival, AMC 19th St. East 6, 890 Broadway, New York, New York, June 12, 3 p.m.; June 13, 9:15 p.m.; and June 15, 8:15 p.m. More

Art Basel, the art world’s premiere art fair, is once again upon us, returning to its namesake Swiss city from June 19 to 22, with VIP days on the June 17 and 18. While there’s plenty of art to see at the fair, we recommend getting out of the Messe and into the city for a bit. There, an abundance of top-tier exhibitions await, from a recently rediscovered nightlife scene by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner at the Kunstmuseum Basel to a major survey of Vija Clemins’s work at the Fondation Beyeler.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner at Kunstmuseum Basel
While in Basel, you must make a pilgrimage to see Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s long-lost Tanz im Varieté (1911). This work’s public reappearance after a century in private hands is a genuine art historical event. Acquired at Ketterer Kunst in June 2024 for €6.96 million (approx. $7.5 million) by the Im Obersteg Foundation, the painting was subsequently restored after surviving both wartime concealment and physical damage by occupying soldiers.
Kirchner, captivated by dance and drawn to Black models and performers, made dozens of sketches from nightlife scenes, which he later transformed into iconic works like Tanz im Varieté. A striking tribute to Berlin’s prewar cabaret scene, the work captures a so-called cakewalk performance between a Black male dancer and a white female partner, set against a dreamlike theater backdrop. It reflects Kirchner’s fascination with movement, modernity, and the expressive potential of the human body—particularly outside bourgeois norms.—Kate Brown
Medardo Rosso, “Inventing Modern Sculpture” at Kunstmuseum Basel 
Medardo Rosso, Enfant au soleil (1891–1892) featured in “Inventing Modern Sculpture” at Kunstmuseum Basel. Credit: Museo Medardo Rosso, Barzio. Photo: Max Ehrengruber.
French poet and art critic Guillaume Apollinaire called Medardo Rosso (1858–1928) “the greatest living sculptor” in 1918, yet the Turin-born artist has not received the same recognition as his contemporary Auguste Rodin. The Kunstmuseum Basel aims to change that with its exhibition “Inventing Modern Sculpture,” which features around 50 sculptures and 250 photographs and drawings. This retrospective explores Rosso’s pioneering artistic approach at the turn of the century and highlights his lasting influence on contemporary art by displaying works by over 60 artists alongside his own. This is Switzerland’s first major Rosso exhibition in 20 years, showcasing rarely seen works from outside Italy—a must-see for anyone visiting Basel. The exhibition runs through August 10. —Vivienne Chow
Maison Clearing
The pastoral home of Maison Clearing. Photo courtesy Clearing.
The Clearing gallery has taken part in the last three editions of Art Basel, but this time the New York and Los Angeles outfit has opted instead to set up shop in a capacious-looking house about 10 minutes from the Messeplatz, at Bannwartweg 39. (Mark it on your map now.) Works by more than 40 artists will be on offer in its many rooms—and its gardens, which measures an astonishing 10,000 square feet.
Notable names include Sebastian Black, Violet Dennison, Ryan Foerster, Tobias Kaspar, Zak Kitnick, and Anne Libby. Writer Olamiju Fajemisin, who recently joined the firm as its director of programming, will curate. Maison Clearing, as the project is titled, will include screenings in the residence’s attic and al fresco dining. A nice bonus: While a ticket to Art Basel runs 69 Swiss francs (about $84) this year, admission is free.—Andrew Russeth
Thomas Ott at Cartoonmuseum Basel
Thomas Ott at his solo show “From Scratch” (2025) at Cartoonmuseum Basel. © Cartoonmuseum Basel. Photo: Derek Li Wan Po.
A visit to Cartoonmuseum Basel may not be the first stop for the typical Art Basel crowd, but it’s well worth exploring. Located in Basel’s old town, the museum has been housed in a building renovated by Herzog and de Meuron and is featured in this year’s Art Basel VIP program.
During the fair week, the museum is presenting “From Scratch,” the first museum retrospective of award-winning artist and comic book creator Thomas Ott. Born in Zurich in 1966, Ott is celebrated in the German-speaking comics world, debuting with Tales of Error (1989). Known for his masterful scratchboarding and wordless storytelling, Ott creates dark, haunting worlds. He is also an animated filmmaker. The exhibition runs through June 21, and Ott will host two signing sessions at I Never Read, Art Book Fair Basel from June 18 to 21 at Kaserne Basel. —V.C.
Ser Serpas at Kunsthalle Basel
Ser Serpas in her studio. Courtesy de Pinault Collection. Photo : Florent Michel
In a recent New Yorker profile, Serpas was described as a trash-art assemblagist. Put another way, the Los Angeles native has developed an art practice centered on collecting found objects and reimagining them as readymades so transient they seem as if they could vanish as quickly as they appeared. Her recent show at Bourse de Commerce–Pinault Collection in Paris was haunting with its dreamlike arrangement of sculptures and paintings set in an attic-like space accompanied by an ambient soundtrack.
For her upcoming exhibition at Kunsthalle Basel, “Of My Life,” Serpas will present both paintings and sculptures, along with a performative element developed in collaboration with the Margo Korableva Performance Theater from Tbilisi, where she once lived. The theater will reenact select works from its repertoire, engaging directly with Serpas’s sculptures. This show is likely to have particular depth, given that Kunsthalle Basel director Mohamed Almusibli and Serpas have a collaborative history; they co-founded the project space Cherish in Geneva, Switzerland.—K.B.
Irène Zurkinden at Kulturstiftung Basel H. Geiger
Irène Zurkinden. Courtesy Meredith Rosen and the Estate of Irène Zurkinden
This Swiss painter is finally receiving an overdue homecoming. While long recognized in Swiss art circles, Zurkinden’s work has been under-appreciated internationally, despite her significant contributions to 20th-century European modernism. That’s beginning to change, however. At last year’s At Art Basel, Meredith Rosen showcased five oil paintings and 12 drawings spanning 1930 to 1955. Now, this major institutional exhibition—the first of its kind in nearly 40 years—will offer fresh insights into her practice.
Born and based in Basel, Zurkinden spent formative years in Paris, like her friend Meret Oppenheim, where she absorbed the influences of French modernism and Surrealism. Her work often depicts women in solitary yet empowered positions, or in intimate domestic settings. A member of the Basler Künstlergruppe 33 and a close companion of the surrealist Meret Oppenheim, she painted the celebrated artist’s portrait several times.—K.B.
Vija Celmins at the Fondation Beyeler
Vija Celmins, Lamp #1, 1964. © Vija Celmins, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery Photo: Aaron Wax
Vija Celmins exhibitions are exceedingly rare pleasures. So far this decade, the gimlet-eyed artist has had a grand total of two: one at Matthew Marks Gallery in New York, where she is based, and the other at Glenstone in Potomac, Md. Now the Beyeler will stage a full survey that includes her tender and disarmingly realistic paintings of subjects like waves and star-filled skies, as well as her rare sculptural pairings, which set a found object (a small stone, say) alongside a copy of gobsmacking verisimilitude.
Viewing Celmins’s work can be humbling, as she invites you to look harder and harder, and then to grapple with your limits. (That great line from Sturtevant could have been said by her: “I create vertigo.”) Her 2018 retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, curated by Gary Garrels and Ian Alteveer, remains one of the most satisfying, and beguiling, shows I have ever seen. Who knows when we will get another one?—A.R.
“History of Pharmacy” at the Pharmaziemuseum Basel
A display at the Pharmaziemuseum Basel. Photo courtesy Pharmaziemuseum Basel
Let’s wish a hearty happy birthday to the Pharmaziemuseum Basel, the Pharmacy Museum of the University of Basel, which turns 100 this year! The museum was founded in 1925 by a professor named Josef Anton Häfliger and has collections that may bring to mind the sculptures and installations of Damien Hirst and Mark Dion. Its delights include an alchemist’s workshop, an apothecary’s lab, and three historical pharmacies, one from Innsbruck, Austria, in 1755.
Even the building itself intrigues. Dating to at least the early 14th century, it has served variously as a public bath and the residence of a printer who hosted Erasmus from 1514 to 1516. Did I mention its vast holdings in pharmaceutical ceramics and its store of unusual remedies, like powdered mummies? There is something here to delight everyone. —A.R. More

Dark clouds and drizzle didn’t dampen the energy at this year’s London Gallery Weekend, which drew art enthusiasts into a three-day city-wide celebration from June 6 through 8. Even short a few trendy galleries, the event once again spotlighted the British capital’s expansive art scene, where cutting-edge performances, digital experiments, and bold textile art vied for attention across 126 participating spaces.
Now in its fifth edition, LGW has become a highlight of London’s annual art offerings. The appeal comes from a genuine sense of camaraderie between galleries big and small in what is one of the largest and most competitive art centers in the world. But can everyone expect their moment in the spotlight given the increasingly crowded London arts calendar?
Guests to Kate MacGarry gallery at London Gallery Weekend 2025. Photo: Linda Nylind.
To wit: A modest number of trendy, younger galleries from last year’s program chose not to participate this time around, including Union Pacific, Guts Gallery, The Sunday Painter, and Xxijra Hii. Word on the street is that an ever-busier events calendar, often not shared in advance, has led to scheduling conflicts that typically give priority to high-profile events organized by well-known galleries in more central locations.
Calendar Clash?
Speaking of high-profile events, this year’s gallery weekend overlapped with the debut London edition of South By Southwest (SXSW), the famed tech and arts conference out of Austin, Texas. Backed by Penske Media and the investment firm Panarae, the event marks an ambitious effort to globalize the SXSW brand and bring a new “experience economy” to the U.K. via talks, music, and film across 34 venues in east London. The inaugural edition brought in 20,505 pass-holders from 77 countries and over 50 different industries, among them King Charles III.
King Charles III views the immersive exhibition “Grounding” with artist Damien Roach on day four of SXSW London 2025 at the Truman Brewery on June 05, 2025 in London, England. Photo: Jack Taylor/Getty Images for SXSW London.
Visual art offerings included LDN LAB, a tech-forward show at Protein Studios curated by Alex Poots of New York’s The Shed, which featured works by Andy Warhol and Beeple, as well as an A.I.-generated audio installation from Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst‘s recent Serpentine show, “The Call.” Also included was a new video work, commissioned by Poots, featuring Hans Ulrich Obrist in conversation with Marina Ambramović and the artist’s A.I. alter ego—and by conversation I mean all three entities awkwardly talking over and past each other, but never really to one another.
Meanwhile, 15 minutes away at Christchurch Spitalfields, “Beautiful Collisions”  highlighted artists of the Caribbean diaspora and, unlike LDN LAB, attracted the usual suspects of London’s art world on its opening night. Organized by curator and advisor Beth Greenacre, it featured works by Alberta Whittle, Denzil Forrester, Tavares Strachan, and commissioned stained glass works by Alvaro Barrington, among others.
Still, it seemed like there was little coordination between SXSW organizers and the LGW team despite the opportunity their coincidence presented to highlight London’s massive art scene—although there was talk of a hastily planned SXSW VIP gallery tour on Thursday, before LGW officially kicked off.
Small Galleries Deliver
Some teething issues are likely to continue as LGW strives to strike a balance between its community-minded ethos and an embarrassment of art riches scattered across London’s vast sprawl. The venture is certainly a worthy one as, even in the face of significant stresses post Brexit, the city’s young galleries remain resilient and deserve championing.
“Cell 72: The Cost of Confinement” performance at Harlesden High Street gallery during London Gallery Weekend 2025. Photo: Jo Lawson-Tancred.
The outer reaches of north-west London had no gallery scene to speak of until 2020, when Harlesden High Street set up shop. It remains relatively isolated but is very much preceded by its reputation so I’d long been meaning to visit by the time LGW provided a reason to swing by and catch the much-discussed endurance art performance piece “Cell 72: The Cost of Confinement.” While I peered through the glass storefront into a messy mock prison cell inhabited by Allen-Golder Carpenter, I felt self-conscious of my voyeurism. The artist, who appeared bored and despondent, was coming up to the end of his 72-hour sentence, devised by fellow American artist Emmanuel Massillon to draw attention to the humiliating, psychologically-punishing effects of incarceration. The installation remains on view through July 13.
Soon after a small group of collectors had pulled up in a car, a constantly-evolving cast of curious passersby began stopping outside the gallery to glimpse the artwork and confer about its possible meanings. At one point, ex-convict-turned-motivational speaker Leroy Smith turned up, moved by the show, and began handing out free copies of his memoir to interested onlookers. It was an unusual but convivial gathering unlike any I’ve witnessed on the streets of Mayfair.
Party at the Pavilion
Worry not, there were plenty of the usual faces in the usual places throughout the weekend. A veritable who’s who of the London art world descended on Kensington Gardens to celebrate the launch of LGW at this year’s Serpentine Pavilion commission, an impressive glass-walled, moveable structure by Bangladeshi architect Marina Tabassum. Only Hans Ulrich Obrist‘s voice streaming out from speakers across the lawn could bring a brief pause to champagne-fueled chatter.
London Gallery Weekend 2025 launch party at the Serpentine Pavilion commission by Marina Tabassum. Photo: © Hydar Dewachi / Art Fund 2025.
When guests were ushered out, one group of artists, curators, and writers jumped into a fleet of taxis headed to an afterparty at Palmer Gallery near Edgware Road. There, raucous conversation evaded serious matters but attendees didn’t skip “Handful of Dust,” the impressive group show installed downstairs until June 14.
A.I. on Trend
Galleries are coming up with increasingly inventive ways to lure in visitors, as even the most well-intentioned will likely manage to see only a fraction of what they’d planned. Amid the bustle, themes have emerged. For one thing, technology is proving to be a tantalizing means for well-established artists to keep innovating a decades-old practice. For Thaddaeus Ropac, 72-year-old David Salle continued developing his experiments with A.I. to inform collaged compositions painted on a grand scale. It has, among other things, freed him from the rules of real life to achieve a weightlessness that had long proved elusive.
Installation view of “David Salle: Some Versions of Pastoral” at Thaddaeus Ropac London in April 2025. Photo: Eva Herzog, courtesy Thaddaeus Ropac gallery.
“For decades, I had this idea of bodies in space that were not held to the laws of gravity,” he told me during a recent walkthrough.
Similarly, 84-year-old French conceptualist Bernar Venet is known for monumental steel structures of repeated lines, angles, or arcs created via the chance effects of an intentional, controlled collapse. For his latest series of computer-generated compositions, on view at Waddington Custot until July 19, the artist followed in the footsteps of generative artists like Vera Molnar by using carefully parametered code to invite new forms of randomness into flat, wall-hanging works, again without relying on gravity. Meanwhile, at South Parade, one of a growing cluster of galleries near Farringdon, Judith Dean has pivoted away from sculpture to make paintings that take as their starting point a word or idea used to search, or sift, through the glut of decontextualized imagery that makes up Wikimedia. Its form is echoed in Dean’s patchworking of seemingly unrelated found material into otherwise impossible compositions.
Simon Lehner, Echo Chamber (Iteration III) (2025). Photo: Tom Carter, courtesy Edel Assanti.
Darker ruminations on our digital world come courtesy of artist Simon Lehner at Edel Assanti, until August 22, who pulls viewers into his creepy interpretation of the manosphere. The star of the show is an incel hunched over a peep show as he delights in the bright, blinding attractions of Reddit forums and YouTube rabbit holes. Appearing in your peripheral vision, he has an uncannily human presence, but the rise and fall of his grey silicone chest is achieved by a sleep apnea machine.
The present moment isn’t all that much easier for women, if a sold-out performance by Nora Turato at the Institute of Contemporary Arts is to be believed. In a humorous, half hour monologue, the artist, bare foot in a loose white dress, was fearless in using her body—convulsing, wretching, hyperventilating, or teeth chattering—to communicate her growing existential dread. The frenzy is brought on by all manner of modern day evils, including noise cancelling headphones, meditation apps, smart watches, productivity, cloying therapy speak, and oversized accessories for infantilizing adults.
Nora Turato, pool7 (performance) at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London in June 2025. Photo: Christa Holka, courtesy the artist and ICA.
Textile Takeover
Another theme was an enduring appetite for ambitious textile work. Notable examples include four of Tau Lewis‘s magnificent masks produced from recycled strips of shimmering fabrics, on view at Sadie Coles in Bury Street until July 19. At Richard Saltoun, meanwhile, Anna Perach‘s towering feminized monsters made by the labor-intensive technique of tufting were activated on Friday afternoon by a performance in which they bow and gesture towards each other as though trapped in a bizarre, robotic courting ritual. Videos circulating online showed the artist Cecilia Fiona inhabiting a similarly elaborate, all-body costume to incorporate dance into her presentation of paintings at Niru Ratnam.
Tau Lewis, Angels covering the horizon like a garment (2025). Photo courtesy of Sadie Coles HQ.
The remaining must-see show is Derek Jarman‘s black paintings at Amanda Wilkinson, another Farringdon Gallery, until July 11. The artist is best known for his extensive filmography, culminating in the highly personal Blue (1993) about the latter stages of living with HIV/AIDS. The strange, angry assemblages at Amanda Wilkinson, filled with driftwood, metal trinkets, smashed glass, and crushed cans, are from around the time of his diagnosis, in 1986, but have an enduring immediacy. More

Yesterday was the first scorching day of summer, and Eden Deering, the director of P·P·O·W gallery, was putting the final touches on a new group exhibition inspired by Lana Del Rey. “Every artist in the show is united in their devotion to Lana,” she said. “Everyone is a Lana fan and is inspired in their work.” The show is also about a lot of other things—art and artifice, sincerity and spectacle. “A lot of the work in the show and a lot of the artists deal with things that are fake,” she continued. “But they’re completely genuine about it.”
Installation view of “Hope is a dangerous thing” P·P·O·W, New York, June 6 – July 12, 2025. Photo: JSP Art Photography. Courtesy of P·P·O·W, New York.
“Hope is a Dangerous Thing,” which opens today and runs through July 12, takes its title from the final track on Del Rey’s 2019 album Norman Fucking Rockwell! Del Rey embodies the contradictions at the heart of the exhibition—emotional sincerity wrapped in spectacle, and something seemingly disposable that still somehow sticks with you. Del Rey looms large as both herself and an avatar: an imperfect pop star who is both underground and mainstream, glamorous and girl next door, entirely concocted yet deeply DIY.
“I was fantasizing about my ultimate girl group, like my ultimate artist Spice Girls,” Deering said. “I wanted everyone to feel like they were their own pop personas, but also be able to see this as an ensemble.” She added, “I wanted to keep it to millennials, to kind of deal with millennial nostalgia—anyone who was coming of age in the aesthetics and pop culture of 2000s, in that era of Tony Blair, pop music, and then also into the Obama era—this hope and what we thought about what the millennium would be.” The Del Rey references in the show range from the explicit to the oblique.
Robin F. Williams, Siri Serving (2025). Courtesy of the artist and P·P·O·W.
“Obviously, Robin took it the most literally,” Deering said. While others engaged with pop and persona more abstractly, Robin F. Williams seemed to depict the singer mid-croon during that 2012 Saturday Night Live dud—a performance widely panned at the time and now seen as a turning point. The vivid painting, Siri Serving, also embodies a figureless A.I. voice, and fittingly, glows in the dark.

The British artist Marianna Simnett also wields A.I., using it alongside her full arsenal of folklore, performance, and body horror in her video Leda Was a Swan. She reframes the myth of Leda and Zeus by casting herself as both victim and aggressor through a hand-painted puppet. The five-minute film was shot and then entirely reprocessed using A.I., shifting through what Deering called “different vibe iterations.” As Deering put it, “She’s talking about power and control, but also the power dynamic between A.I. and the artist.”
Marianna Simnett, Leda Was a Swan, 2024. Video Still, Courtesy: Marianna Simnett and Société, Berlin.
The show is rounded out by a diverse range of artists including Kyle Dunn and Kayode Ojo. Ojo’s standout shimmering sculpture—suspended from silver chains—resembles both a glamorous snowflake and a severe, ominous fractal. It is composed from chandeliers bought online. “It’s all stuff you can purchase on Amazon that are supposed to look like luxury,” Deering explained, “but it’s all basically plastic. It’s also about our relationship to fast fashion.”
Raque Ford, who had an installation at the Whitney last year, has three pieces in the show, including a large multi-section acrylic half circle, In the Ocean, In Da Club, and In My Dreams. Words and images have been carved out of the plastic sheets. “She found it all at the dump and then puts this kind of failed try at erotic fan fiction between Rihanna and Beyoncé on it,” Deering said. “The quote, ‘People think I look just like Beyoncé,’ comes from Real Housewives. It’s like clip art.”
Diane Severin Nguyen was across the room in an N95 mask finalizing Thirst for Love, which is a barrier emerging from the ground with a vivid image of what looks like a shattered space egg. Nguyen was spraying some sort of treatment atop it to give it a velvety kind of flocking. “I was trying to make it look a little bit frozen,” she said. “I don’t talk about my work like, ‘oh, it’s this or that.’ It’s just more like looking and maybe registering some familiarity and something non-familiar.”
Diane Severin Nguyen, Thirst for Love (2024). Courtesy of the artist and P·P·O·W.
In November, Nguyen will headline the Performa Biennial (the other two featured artists are Camille Henrot and Aria Dean). “We’re putting a band together and making a meta pop concert,” she said. Nguyen’s Del Rey connection runs deeper than pop. “I’m a Lana fan,” she said. “One of my goals is to be able to be indie and mainstream at the same time. Lana is the only artist, especially as a woman, who can do that.” She then relates this to her practice—some of Nguyen’s striking, otherworldly visuals are depictions of tiny sculptures she makes that could fit into her hand. “There’s something very minor, detailed, macro—you know, the smallest possible unit—and then something that’s much bigger, historical. It’s putting minor things together and wanting them to be understood on this more grandiose level.”
The artist Paul Kopkau was also attracted to Del Rey’s dichotomous role in the pop universe—sure, she’ll get the number one album, but you won’t hear her in every Uber you jump in. “We’re living in a contemporary time where there’s a lot of artifice surrounding us,” he said. “Lana does this kind of thing that a lot of pop stars don’t… There’s a detachment—she knows she’s dealing with this larger pop culture thing, but then is using that as a medium. And that feels very postmodern.” Kopkau wields simplicity with symbolic force, presenting a minimal yellow disk (Artificial Light, 2024) and a fragile shrine to consumer electronics (Media Studies, 2025) made from Aqua-Resin, acrylic, and recycled butcher paper. The former evokes a synthetic sun; the latter, a makeshift media center assembled from the detritus of contemporary life.
Paul Kopkau, Media Studies (2025). Courtesy of the artist and P·P·O·W.
The show can also be read as something of a self-portrait of Deering—but not only because she cast it from her inner circle. Her mother, Wendy Olsoff, is one of the P·P·O·W co-founders, and David Wojnarowicz and Martin Wong were among its stable. That history echoes quietly in the show’s emotional core. “I spent so much of my life growing up in Provincetown with survivors of AIDS,” Deering said. “There’s a camp side and everything’s kind of funny in here—and it is funny—but there’s also the serious side of being at Tea Dance and everyone singing pop music together. That feels powerful. Hope is a dangerous thing, but we’re still doing it. That’s a really amazing thing about the human spirit.” She paused. “So there’s a really funny, campy, subconscious side of the show. And then another completely emotionally genuine belief in pop—and letting that be in a fine art space in a serious way.”
She added, “A perfect pop song like Lana can transform someone’s spirit in an instant. And the dream of art is to live up to that power that a pop song can have. The futility of that is obvious—as a static object—but I like the idea of reaching for it.”
“Hope is a Dangerous Thing” is on view at P·P·O·W Gallery, 392 Broadway, New York, through July 12. More

Visitors to the Venice Biennale probably aren’t thinking about who designed the Giardini’s national pavilions, where countries around the world present their exhibitions each year. But the Swiss pavilion at the 19th architecture biennale is a celebration of the late architect Lisbeth Sachs (1914–2002), who didn’t design her nation’s pavilion—until this year, that is.
In fact, not a single building in the Giardini is credited to a woman architect. (That will soon change with the completion of the new Qatar pavilion, set to be designed by Paris-based architect Lina Ghotmeh.) So the Swiss pavilion has changed that, temporarily, by resurrecting one of Sachs’s designs inside the building designed by her contemporary, Bruno Giacometti (1907–2012).
“The Giardini is a no-woman’s land,” Axelle Stiefel, one of the five-person all-woman curatorial team, told me. An artist, she joined forces with Elena Chiavi, Kathrin Füglister, Amy Perkins, and Myriam Uzor—the four members of architecture group Annexe—in conceiving a pavilion that presents an alternative history where women had contributed more visibly to our built environment.
“If we think of the necessity of inclusivity for a more sustainable future, we have to give more people a say in the construction and the building practice of the future, and have the voices of women being heard and being present physically,” Stiefel said.
Installation view of “Endgültige Form wird von der Architektin am Bau bestimmt,” the Swiss Pavilion at the 2025 Venice Biennale Architettura curated by Elena Chiavi, Kathrin Füglister, Amy Perkins, Axelle Stiefel, and Myriam Uzor, recreating a 1958 building by Lisbeth Sachs. Photo: ©Keystone-SDA/Gaëtan Bally.
Sachs was one of Switzerland’s first licensed women architects, graduating from architecture school in Zürich in 1939, long before Swiss women had the right to vote or open a bank account. (A referendum granted women’s suffrage in 1971; banking for women followed in 1985.) But when Sachs won an architecture competition in 1939, it jump-started her career.
For the Swiss pavilion, commissioned by the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia, the curators have resurrected the kunsthalle that Sachs built for the 1958 Swiss Exhibition for Women’s Work (SAFFA) in Zürich, organized by the Federation of Swiss Women’s Associations. But today there is almost no trace left of the lakeshore village built for the two-month event celebrating women’s work and their invisible labor, women’s creativity and capacity for avant-garde—and calling for equal rights for women.
The Kunsthalle at the the 1958 Swiss Exhibition for Women’s Work (SAFFA) in Zurich, designed by Lisbeth Sachs. Photo: courtesy of gta Archiv/ETH Zurich.
“It was situated in a park in Zürich, and Lisbeth’s idea was to bring the landscape inside the exhibition space,” Stiefel said.
At the biennale, Sachs’s design is now nested inside Giacometti’s building, which was built in 1952, just a few years before SAFFA. There are three open, circular structures that intersect with the exterior of the existing pavilion—but the walls Sachs built weren’t curved. Instead, there are multiple straight walls on which to display artwork, extending out from each circle.
“The word is radiating,” Stiefel said. “The walls are never frontal, so it’s a more dynamic relationship. I don’t see any equivalent building that shows art that is as interesting and innovative and special.”
The Kunsthalle at the the 1958 Swiss Exhibition for Women’s Work (SAFFA) in Zurich, designed by Lisbeth Sachs. Photo: courtesy of gta Archiv/ETH Zurich.
In the Venice recreation, those walls are built with wood, instead of the original concrete. There are fabric curtains, fluttering in the breeze, and a reimagining of Sachs’s translucent membrane roofs.
The curators have also added an audio element, with speakers integrated into Sachs’s design for the lighting, playing sound recorded during the building of the reimagined pavilion. That includes the ambient noises of the pavilion as construction site, but also the conversations of the curatorial team, from small talk to important moments of decision making. The audio component functions as a spatial memory, a record of the act of building a structure that is itself echoing back to a building long lost to the sands of time.
Axelle Stiefel making a field recording for this year’s Swiss pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Photo: courtesy of Pro Helvetia / KEYSTONE / Gaetan Bally.
So while the project is about integrating the forgotten voice of a woman architect into a historic space, it also quite literally incorporates the voices of the contemporary women who brought Sachs’s design back to life. In addition, the audio serves to recreate a missing element of Sachs’s design.
“We have drawings. We have plans, maybe a few writings and photographs. But we don’t have the intangible of the experience of being an architect in the ’50s or about her direct experience on site,” Stiefel said. “The act of reinterpretation would only be half achieved if there was not also the attempt to be in the present and think about our experience and what we leave once we have to dismantle, once again, this kunsthalle.”
Installation view of “Endgültige Form wird von der Architektin am Bau bestimmt,” the Swiss Pavilion at the 2025 Venice Biennale Architettura curated by Elena Chiavi, Kathrin Füglister, Amy Perkins, Axelle Stiefel, and Myriam Uzor, recreating a 1958 building by Lisbeth Sachs. Photo: ©Keystone-SDA / Gaëtan Bally.
Of course, there was no way the curators could build a completely faithful reconstruction of Sachs’s original design. But a handwritten note by the architect on one of her drawings provided reassurance—as well as the exhibition title.
It read, “Endgültige Form wird von der Architektin am Bau bestimmt,” or “Final form will be defined by the architect on site,” a message allowing for the evolution of the design process in response to the conditions of the site.
Installation view of “Endgültige Form wird von der Architektin am Bau bestimmt,” the Swiss Pavilion at the 2025 Venice Biennale Architettura curated by Elena Chiavi, Kathrin Füglister, Amy Perkins, Axelle Stiefel, and Myriam Uzor, recreating a 1958 building by Lisbeth Sachs. Photo: ©Keystone-SDA/Gaëtan Bally.
It’s an ethos that the curators hope will extend to the way that visitors experience the exhibition.
“You need to be led by your own force of curiosity to wander about that space, like a labyrinth, and find out for yourself,” Stiefel said.
“Endgültige Form wird von der Architektin am Bau bestimmt” is on view at the Venice Biennale, Giardini della Biennale, Swiss Pavilion, Calle Giazzo, 30122 Venezia VE, Italy, May 8–November 23, 2025. More

Opening today is the American debut of “Constellation,” the largest exhibition to date of the revolutionary photographer Diane Arbus. This Park Avenue Armory presentation is especially poignant, as Arbus was a New York local and did much of her work here, sourcing her subjects from every stratum of the city’s society—many heretofore ignored by the mainstream. The exhibition offers new perspectives into Arbus’s universe of humanity.
Curated by Matthieu Humery, “Constellation” runs through August 17 and features more than 450 prints—many of which have never been published. The show debuted at France’s LUMA Arles in 2023 and arrives in the U.S. with its original immersive format intact. It’s like wandering a labyrinth filled with uncanny strangers. The other visitors can be seen perusing this spatial grid-like scaffolding, becoming faces in the crowd and part of the show. There is no order, no timeline, no narrative. Does life really have one? Arbus is known for her subject matter: a cosmogony of the unseen.
Diane Arbus: Constellation, 2025, Park Avenue Armory. All artworks © The Estate of Diane Arbus Collection Maja Hoffmann/LUMA Foundation Photo: Nicholas Knight
She specialized in turning her lens on those pushed to the fringes: circus performers, drag queens, nudists, and the institutionalized. But she also photographed celebrities—James Brown, Roy Lichtenstein, Susan Sontag, and Mae West, who appears curled in bed with her pet monkey. There was no separation between the marginalized and the celebrated. Everyone received equal framing and equal empathy.
In the application for her 1966 Guggenheim award, Arbus wrote, “I have learned to get past the door, from the outside to the inside. One milieu leads to another… a certain group of young nihilists, a variety of menages, a retirement town in the Southwest, a new kind of Messiah, a particular Utopian cult who plan to establish themselves on a nearby island, Beauties of different ethnic groups, certain criminal types, a minority elite.”
Diane Arbus, Peace marchers, N.J. 1962. © The Estate of Diane Arbus.
“Sometimes it would be someone that she would see on the street, and she’d just walk up to them and say, ‘I love your hat. May I take your picture?’” said Neil Selkirk, a former student and collaborator, at yesterday’s preview. “She used the camera as what she called a ‘passport.’ You can’t go up to someone and say, ‘Hey, I want to come home with you and see how you live.’ But you could say, ‘I wanna take your picture.’”
He continued, “She was incredibly smart. She was seductive because she was interested in you. I felt it myself as I watched her talking to other people. She wanted to know, and she was really interested. It’s just a huge compliment to have someone like that asking you interesting questions about yourself. They just totally accepted her instantly.”
Selkirk is the only person ever authorized by the Diane Arbus Estate (she died in 1971 by her own hand at age 48) to print from her negatives. In 2011, LUMA Arles founder Maja Hoffmann acquired his complete set of printer’s proofs—which now comprise this sweeping and unconventional retrospective.
Diane Arbus: Constellation, 2025, Park Avenue Armory. All artworks © The Estate of Diane Arbus Collection Maja Hoffmann/LUMA Foundation Photo: Nicholas Knight
At the show, Selkirk paused before A young Brooklyn family going for an outing (1966), in which a mother with Cleopatra eyeliner and a bouffant hairstyle clutches a leopard-print coat and a baby, flanked by her nonplussed husband and a grimacing son crossing his eyes. “She saw her on the subway and loved the fact that she was obviously trying to look like Elizabeth Taylor,” Selkirk said. “She then made the appointment and went to the house and spent time with them.”
Arbus shot two images of Eddie Carmel, a sideshow performer with gigantism known as “The Jewish Giant” and “The World’s Biggest Cowboy,” in his living room with his parents, a decade apart.
She began her career in fashion, as part of a duo with her husband Allan Arbus, styling his shoots for magazines. “I think she found it absolutely unbearable,” Selkirk said. “They just were just artifice. Her whole thing was the opposite of artifice.”
“She was amazingly consistent and non-judgmental in what she was doing,” Selkirk said. “She emerged out of the era of magazine photojournalism, where there was a presumption that if you showed enough awful things, the world would stop being awful. There was a political intention behind the act of photographing. You were showing the world the way it is. And if the world needed to be improved, people would. That was obviously complete nonsense. The point of the 1967 ‘New Documents’ show at the Museum of Modern Art—with Lee Friedlander, Gary Winogrand, and Arbus—was that they were just observing the world. They weren’t judging it. They were amused by it, in different ways.”
The seminal MoMA show was Arbus’s first major institutional exhibition. “She just wanted to know what made humanity tick,” Selkirk said.
Diane Arbus: Constellation, 2025, Park Avenue Armory. All artworks © The Estate of Diane Arbus Collection Maja Hoffmann/LUMA Foundation Photo: Nicholas Knight
Arbus didn’t find it hard to develop subject matter. She kept meticulous notebooks of people she wanted to photograph. “She compiled lists and then started making phone calls,” Selkirk said. “She scrutinized the want ads in the newspapers to look for events where she might go because something interesting might happen.”
During her lifetime, Arbus’s images were shocking. The world still hasn’t fully caught up to her unflinching, empathetic gaze. There is a striking representation of queer people in the images. But Selkirk demurs that this was just a component of her broader vision.
“She was just as interested in people who fenced or people who did ballroom dancing,” he said. “She said, ‘There are these worlds, and the worlds have rules, and they have gatherings, and they do things together.’ It was this fascination with how people choose to hang together. It wasn’t an obsession with gay or trans people. It’s recognition that they all became—whatever it is they are—however they became it, they became it. And that’s who they are. It’s mutual respect across the board, and that’s all that matters.”
Selkirk’s own entry into Arbus’s orbit was circuitous. In 1968, he was working as one of Richard Avedon’s assistants. One day, the assignment took him to the London home of director John Huston to photograph his wife, Anjelica Huston, and her brother.
Diane Arbus: Constellation, 2025, Park Avenue Armory. All artworks © The Estate of Diane Arbus Collection Maja Hoffmann/LUMA Foundation Photo: Nicholas Knight
“We’re setting up in their living room—it was full of stuff he’d collected from all over the world: voodoo dolls, strange things,” Selkirk recalled. There was one framed image: A family one evening in a nudist camp, Pa. (1965), which showed a trio sprawled in a field—part heartland, part wasteland—as a blurry silo loomed in the background. Their inscrutable gazes challenge the viewer.
“I was left alone for a couple of hours in this room with this picture,” Selkirk continued. “It drove me insane. I had no idea who’d taken it. I just wanted to run out screaming. I didn’t know I shared Earth with people  like that. This is what’s so weird about my being involved in it to this day. It’s the only work of art ever that has had that effect on me. I was devastated by what it was telling me or what it was showing me. I just couldn’t comprehend it. My life was different from that moment on.”
Later, he encountered the same image again—this time propped against a wall in the Dakota apartment of the photographer Hiro. “I said, ‘I’ve seen that photograph before.’ And he said, ‘It’s by a woman called Diane Arbus. You’ll probably meet her.’ A few weeks later, she showed up at the studio. I had first been stupefied by this photograph in a way that I’ve never been since. Now I walk past it every evening on my way to bed.”
“Diane Arbus: Constellation” is on view at the Park Avenue Armory, 643 Park Ave, New York, through August 17. More

Fans of the Moomins have reason to rejoice this summer, as the children’s book characters created by Finnish artist Tove Jansson will alight at the Brooklyn Public Library in “Tove Jansson and the Moomins: The Door Is Always Open,” marking the first-ever exhibition dedicated to the artist and the beloved Moomins. Opening June 28, the show—which is free and open to the public—coincides with a milestone year for Moomin, which kicked off with a monumental exhibition at the Helsinki Art Museum and a full series of events staged around Finland.
First official Moomin dolls made by Atelier Fauni (ca. 1950s). © Moomin Characters.
“It’s been a huge pleasure working on this with the Brooklyn Public Library, and it’s been a long time coming,” said Thomas Zambra, head of business development at Moomin Characters Ltd., and part of the third generation of the Jansson family. “We are celebrating the 80th anniversary of Moomin, so it’s a fantastic time to be able to have such an exhibition, and it is really the centerpiece of our celebrations in the United States this year.”
Written and illustrated by Jansson, the first Moomin book, The Moomins and the Great Flood, was published in 1945 and ultimately became the bedrock for an entire creative world. In the story, the earliest cast of characters—Moominpapa, Moominmama, Snif, the Hattifatteners, and more—are first introduced, and it tells the tale of the long and arduous journey they take to find Moominvalley, where they ultimately make their home. Moominvalley and later Moominhouse are the symbolic heart of the subsequent stories, a site of play and adventure as well as life lessons.
First Swedish edition of the first Moomin story, The Moomins and the Great Flood (1945). © Moomin Characters.
While the story takes place in a fantastical, fictional time and place, the themes presented in this first book and throughout subsequent tales are very applicable to the real world, particularly today. Community, migration, empathy, and family (both biological and found) are just some of the premises that are explored throughout the adventures of Moomin and company, and ones that are reflected too in the Brooklyn Public Library’s ethos.
“Moominvalley and the Moominhouse are the central pieces of the Moomin universe, and they are this place of safe haven, a place where people are welcome regardless of who they are and what they look like,” said Zambra. “The library has this same role within the community. It’s a place where all types of people are welcome. It has this role as a safe space for the community, which ties beautifully with the idea of the anniversary year.”
Moominhouse created by created by Tove Jansson, Tuulikki Pietilä and Pentti Eistola. © Linus-Lindholm / Moomin Characters.
Linda E. Johnson, president and CEO of the Brooklyn Public Library, echoed this sentiment in a statement: “Coinciding with summer at the library and Pride month, this imaginative and joyful exhibition invites visitors of all ages to explore the world of Tove Jansson. Jansson’s work aligns closely with our mission to foster understanding, curiosity, and a sense of belonging through storytelling. Rooted in themes of openness, exploration, and inclusion, her work reflects the library’s commitment to providing free and welcoming access to ideas, culture, and community.”
Tove Jansson in her studio. © Eva Konikoff / Tove Jansson Estate.
Zambra also noted that just a couple of decades ago, there was a fissure between considerations of Jansson and the Moomins, and exhibitions or writing would typically home in on one or the other. This separation can, in part, be traced to the artist’s identity as woman artist hailing from a far-flung Nordic country, and one who identified as queer. “The Door Is Always Open” takes a more cohesive, comprehensive approach, wherein the author and illustrator’s life story and perspective are recognized as the informing force behind the Moomin universe.
Swedish edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, illustrated by Tove Jansson (1966). © Tove Jansson Estate.
While the Moomins began as just a few storybooks, today they are part of an entire ecosystem of children’s literature, toys, and films that have experienced a growing following in the decades since the Moomins’ inception. Through immersive installations, archival materials, multilingual editions of the books, and film screenings, the exhibition is a prime opportunity for those new to the work to explore both the world of Moomin as well as Jansson’s other work—such as her illustrations of J.R.R. Tolkein’s The Hobbit and Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland—and for longtime fans a chance to get to know the characters and the creator behind them better.
Zambra concluded, “I hope that there is something enjoyable for people who are completely new to the Moomins and to Tove, that they find something interesting, something beautiful, and that they’re inspired by the way of life of the Moomins and can integrate something of that into their own life.”
“Tove Jansson and the Moomins: The Door Is Always Open” will be on view at the Brooklyn Public Library, Central Library, 10 Grand Army Plaza, Brooklyn, New York, June 28–September 30, 2025. More