Art & Exhibitions

It’s not often that a man known for dwelling in his mother’s basement becomes a revered cultural icon, but Joseph Cornell has long enjoyed cult status among the cognoscenti of the 20th-century art world. Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Yayoi Kusama, and Peggy Guggenheim were among the many artists and collectors who turned up to the New York artist’s family home in the hopes of gaining access to the highly secretive studio where he made his eccentric assemblages. Few made it past the kitchen table.
“He didn’t let many people in, but the people he did were really interesting,” said Jasper Sharp, ex-curator of modern and contemporary art at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. In this way, the humble workshop became something of a microcosm of its era’s most radical ideas, pre-empting pivotal postmodernist movements like Neo-Dada and Pop Art.
Cornell continues to inspire creatives to this day, including the legendary film director Wes Anderson. He has teamed up with Sharp to recreate Cornell’s studio, complete with some of his best-known works, at Gagosian in Paris next month. “We thought, wouldn’t it be fascinating to bring it back to life?” Sharp said.
An Artistic Affinity
Growing up in Houston, Texas, Anderson first encountered Cornell’s work at local museums like the Menil Collection, which owns Palace (1943). Typical of the artist’s “shadow boxes”—glass-fronted boxes containing assemblages of found objects, often with a surreal effect—the work contains a palatial building set before a forest of twigs. Its attractive symmetry echoes that of the Grand Budapest Hotel in Anderson’s 2014 film of the same name.
Sharp has not been the first to note an affinity between the director and Cornell, both of whom are admired for their highly original approach to creating stylized and antiquated, diorama-like worlds. “They both can take quite simple things and have an alchemical effect on them,” he noted.
Joseph Cornell’s studio in the basement of his family home in Queens, New York, 1971. Photo: © Harry Roseman.
Anderson and Sharp, another longtime Cornell head, have based their reconstruction of the artist’s studio on surviving black-and-white photographs. These reveal one wall of shelves stacked with shoeboxes full of found objects. The artist was a regular at flea markets and antique shops, obsessively hoarding a vast array of items from feathers and seashells to discarded toys, marbles, and maps. Other walls of his studio were lined with curiosities, unfinished constructions, or craftsman’s supplies, from glue and tape to saws and drills.
First stop for Sharp and Anderson was the Joseph Cornell Study Center at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, where the contents of Cornell’s studio were preserved some years after his death in 1972. Objects borrowed from the Smithsonian have been bolstered by the collection of a U.S. artist and close confidant of Cornell’s who received many of his books, shoeboxes, and collages by mail. They will be loaning several hundred to the Paris show. Meanwhile, Sharp and Anderson’s team are scouring markets across Paris and New York for thousands more objects to complete the set.
Labor of Love
At the center of the reconstructed studio will be Cornell’s work table, littered with his X-acto knife, gluing paste, and old magazines from which he cut material for his collages. The time capsule will also feature several unfinished shadow boxes from the Smithsonian. “It will be almost as if he’s just gone out to lunch,” said Sharp.
Some details of the reconstruction could only be described as a labor of love. A galvanized metal sink just like Cornell’s will be decorated with the same cleaning detergent he used. Anderson’s set designers are learning the artist’s handwriting so that they can scrawl true-to-life labels over the white-washed shoeboxes that will replace fragile originals. Some objects have been baked in the oven to give them an artificially aged patina, a technique that Cornell also used.
Presented as a storefront tableau to curious passersby, the installation seeks to capture the softly lit atmosphere of a studio where Cornell mainly worked at night. “We’re not attempting to create a facsimile of the studio,” said Sharp. “We’re trying to get as close as we can in spirit.”
Joseph Cornell, Pharmacy (1943). Photo: Dominique Uldry, © 2025 The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, courtesy Gagosian.
Competed works like the antique apothecary Pharmacy (1943) or the art history-laden Untitled (Pinturicchio Boy) (ca. 1950) have been chosen to demonstrate Cornell’s considerable range. “He often gets accused of being whimsical, in a derogatory way,” said Sharp. “People see him as a bit light and poetic, which I’ve always found peculiar because he was so substantive in his thinking, and so influential on so many artists.”
The city of Paris held a special significance for Cornell, who had been promised a post-graduation trip that never materialized after the death of his father. “He traveled there in his head,” said Sharp. The artist, a recluse who rarely left New York, pored over guidebooks and postcards from Paris. One of the first times he met Duchamp, who would become a close friend, Cornell stunned the French artist with his “almost photographic memory of a city he’d never seen.”
This passion brings a certain poignancy to Sharp and Anderson’s mission. “There is something lovely about bringing him here in perhaps the most intimate form,” said Sharp. “Not just bringing his work here, but the place where the work was born.”
“The House on Utopia Parkway: Joseph Cornell’s Studio Reimagined by Wes Anderson” is on view at Gagosian, 9 rue de Castiglione, Paris, December 16, 2025–March 14, 2026. More

One of the most significant private art collections in Germany has gone on public display for the first time in Berlin. The trove of masterpieces includes pieces by Goya and the French Impressionists, as well as leading contemporary names like Katharina Grosse and Daniel Richter. The Scharf Collection has been amassed over four generations of one visionary family.
Visitors to “The Scharf Collection: Goya – Monet – Cézanne – Bonnard – Grosse,” on view at the Alte Nationalgalerie through February 15, 2026, will be treated to a veritable “who’s who” of Western art history. Among more than 150 works, they will discover a story of growing collector ambition across three centuries.
“You dive deep into the historical developments, learn about the different personalities who have been collecting and preserving the collection,” promised Anette Hüsch, director of the Alte Nationalgalerie.
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, The Seated Clown, Miss Cha-U-Kao from the series “Elles.” Photo: Peter Tijhuis, © The Scharf Collection.
The collection has its origins in the passions of Berlin entrepreneur Otto Gerstenberg, who started out buying Renaissance and Baroque-era prints from Germany and the Netherlands. Over time, his interests expanded to include a much wider range of artists, from legendary Spanish painters El Greco and Francisco Goya to major London names like Joshua Reynolds and James McNeill Whistler. But it was French art that really took Gerstenberg’s fancy. He acquired works by Gustave Courbet, Eugène Delacroix, and Honoré Daumier, and become the owner of the world’s largest hoard of work by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.
Among the examples of Gerstenberg’s Toulouse-Lautrec treasures are lithographs from his “Elles” series, all studies of stage and sex workers seeming relaxing in the time between shifts. The artist himself often lived in brothels for weeks at a time, and this is reflected in his broadly empathetic view of their residents. One of his frequent models was the clown Miss Cha-U-Kao, and in one seated depiction she is shown with her legs spread in a provocatively gender-blurring pose.
Edgar Degas, Nude Combing Her Hair (1886–1890). Photo: © The Scharf Collection, Ruland Photodesign.
After Gerstenberg’s death in 1935, his collection of some 2,200 artworks, including 116 paintings and 1,600 prints, was passed down to his daughter Margarethe. She worked with Berlin’s Nationalgalerie to ensure their protection during the air raids of World War II, although some pieces were looted by Russian troops and taken to Saint Petersburg. The artworks, including Edgar Degas’s notable 1875 painting Place de la Concorde, have never been returned.
Degas is best-known for his distinctive, cropped compositions that offer an unusual vantage point onto a myriad scenes of modern Parisian life, as well as figure studies of ballet dances or jockeys on the racecourse. Many of Degas’s women are shown not in the spotlight but backstage, usually in an unposed and private moment observed from afar. In many cases, the focus is on the curves of her bent body as she washed or combs her hair.
Claude Monet, Waterloo Bridge (1903). Photo: © The Scharf Collection, Ruland Photodesign.
In 1961, Margarethe’s estate was split between her two sons Walther and Dieter, who each went on to develop their share in new directions. Dieter would become known for his eye for leading Surrealists, including Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró, and René Magritte. He sold many of Gerstenberg’s works to secure these acquisitions, and many of his best finds are on public display at “Surreal Worlds” at the Scharf-Gerstenberg Collection in Berlin.
Walther, meanwhile, kept a stronger focus on 19th-century French art. Together with his wife Eve, a mechanical engineer and successful businesswoman, he began buying works by Impressionists like Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Degas, as well some Post-Impressionist pieces by Paul Cézanne and Pierre Bonnard.
One classical example is Waterloo Bridge (1903), one of several views that Monet made of London’s Thames. He was particularly drawn to the atmospheric effects produced by a hazy layer of smoke that draped the city, describing these conditions as “so idiosyncratic” in a letter to his wife in 1900. The randomness of the elements meant that every time Monet settled on the riverbanks, he was met with a new impression. Years later, the painter recalled how London’s “fog gives it its magnificent breadth. Its regular and massive blocks become grandiose within that mysterious cloak.”
Paul Cézanne, The Palace of Fontainebleau (1905). Photo: Philipp Hitz, © The Scharf Collection.
A generation after the Impressionists first used quick, visible brushstrokes to capture fleeting moments that felt true to life, the Post-Impressionists advanced their ideas, bridging them with the modernist developments of the 20th century. Perhaps no artist had a bigger influence on the likes of Picasso and Matisse than Cézanne, who revealed the underlying geometric structure of his still-lifes and landscapes by emphasizing the role of line and form in the pictorial plane.
Meanwhilem Cézanne’s contemporary Bonnard, another favourite of the Scharfs, is admired for his expressive use of color in otherwise unremarkable but charming domestic scenes.
Works by Katharina Grosse in the exhibition “The Scharf Collection: Goya – Monet – Cézanne – Bonnard – Grosse.” Photo: David von Becker, © Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Alte Nationalgalerie / VG Bild-Kunst.
Walther and Eve’s drive to accumulate important works was inherited by their son René, who has expanded the collection to include modern and contemporary art. Having worked at Christie’s auction house in London and New York, he founded Scharf Fine Art in New York in 1988. Inevitably, the city brought him closer to the work of great Abstract Expressionist artists, and for a time he began supporting figures like Maurice Estève and Sam Francis.
Since 2001, René has been living in Germany with his second wife, Christiane. The pair specialize in leading Berlin artists like Katharina Grosse, Daniel Richter, and Liverpool-born Tony Cragg. Their works pull into the present the story of rapid and radical change that is told by the Scharf Collection.
“The Scharf Collection: Goya – Monet – Cézanne – Bonnard – Grosse” is on view at the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin through February 15, 2026. An altered version of the exhibition will travel to the Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf from March to August 2026.  More

It’s never easy to choose a dress for your sibling’s wedding. But the stakes are especially high if you happen to be queen: the wedding is televised, and an entire nation (nay, an entire Commonwealth) will take cues from your sartorial decisions. 
Such were the pressures on Queen Elizabeth II in the lead up to the 1960 wedding of her sister, Princess Margaret, to photographer Antony Armstrong-Jones. Elizabeth had been queen for seven years, and the event marked the first royal wedding to be captured on television. She tapped British designer Norman Hartnell, who’d created her own wedding dress, for the task. Hartnell crafted a light blue gown with a crinoline skirt, plus a bolero jacket to go on top. Famed British photographer Cecil Beaton captured the queen in this outfit, adorned with gloves, a fabric rose hat, and pearls. Around 300 million people watched the nuptials. An image of Elizabeth, steady and devoted to her family and to the British people, prevailed. 
Ensemble worn for the wedding of Princess Margaret, Norman Hartnell, 1960. Credit: © Royal Collection Enterprises Limited 2025 | Royal Collection Trust. Photo: Paul Bulley.
The famous outfit will go on view next year at the King’s Gallery in London’s Buckingham Palace, in an exhibition titled “Queen Elizabeth II: Her Life in Style.” The show will be the largest display to date of the former monarch’s clothing, some of them never beore seen. The checklist of nearly 200 pieces features items from all 10 decades of her life alongside outfits by contemporary British designers Erdem Moralioglu, Richard Quinn, and Christopher Kane, who took inspiration from her royal wardrobe. These pieces confirm the queen’s enduring influence on British fashion, even in the wake of her 2022 passing.
Sketches and illustrations offer insight into the extensive craft and process that went into dressing the queen. An official publication will include reflections by Moralioglu, Kane, Quinn, former Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour, and dress historian Amy de la Haye. 
In a statement, Kane highlighted the historical and metaphorical importance of the Queen’s closet. “From the decline of the court dressmaker to the rise of couturiers like Hartnell and Hardy Amies, her garments tell the story of Britain and its changing identity through fashion,” he said. “[The wardrobe] offers a masterclass in silhouette, construction, repetition, symbolism and, perhaps most importantly, restraint.”
Transparent rain coat, Hardy Amies, 1960s. © Royal Collection Enterprises Limited 2025 | Royal Collection Trust. Photo: Jon Stokes.
The exhibition will showcase Elizabeth’s formal attire along with more casual wear. A clear plastic raincoat by Hardy Amies, who’d go on to make costumes for Stanley Kubrick’s futuristic 2001: A Space Odyssey, offers a modern element. It prefigures the queen’s famous color-tipped clear umbrellas, which added brightness to her nation’s famously rainy weather. Amies and the queen worked together for 50 years.
A tweed jacket and Balmoral tartan kilt by Hartnell appears along with his regal off-white designs for both Elizabeth’s own wedding and coronation day. Such pieces lend themselves to exhibition curator Caroline de Guitaut’s thesis that “Queen Elizabeth II’s wardrobe was a masterclass in symbolism, tailoring, and British craftsmanship.”
Princess Elizabeth’s Wedding Dress, Norman Hartnell, 1947. Photo: © Royal Collection Enterprises Limited 2025 | Royal Collection Trust.
The show provides a striking contrast to “Marie Antoinette Style,” now on view at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum through March 2026. Its tag line, “Shaped by the most fashionable queen in history,” seems to throw a challenge to the British royalty’s sartorial prowess. Ornate and decadent, the British are not. But at the end of the day, it’s Elizabeth who ruled for seven decades. And, of course, kept her head.
“Queen Elizabeth II: Her Life in Style” is on view at the King’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, London, April 10–October 18, 2026. More

Cj Hendry has mastered the art of the spectacle, installing adult playgrounds and floral waterfalls around the world. For her next trick, however, Hendry’s going small—and hopping on the bag charm trend—by launching her first collectible toy named juju.
Juju will debut later this month in Hong Kong, where Hendry opened a new studio in June. The floppy-eared little critter looks a bit like Hendry’s take on Sanrio’s Cinamaroll, featuring the recurring flower shape from her pool pop-ups over one eye. Juju even has its own lore. “No one quite knows where juju came from—only that it appeared quietly, padding softly into the world with a single flower draped over one eye, as if seeing everything half in magic, half in memory,” press materials state. “Juju does not demand attention or glitter for the spotlight; instead, it invites curiosity—a quiet presence that draws you in.”
“I’ve always been fascinated by the culture around collectible objects—how something playful and lighthearted can also hold meaning and craftsmanship,” Hendry mused over email regarding her latest move. “After years of working on large-scale installations and hyperreal drawings, this felt like the perfect time to explore something more intimate, tactile, and accessible, without losing that sense of detail and obsession that’s at the heart of everything I make.”
juju bag charms. Courtesy of Cj Hendry.
Of course, juju will star in a few spectacles of its own, too. On November 17, Hendry will unveil a Christmas tree crafted from 200 oversized green plush jujus at Upper House, a five-star hotel in Hong Kong. Each one is available for “adoption,” and all proceeds will benefit Mother’s Choice, a local charity that supports pregnant teens and children without homes. A representative for Hendry said this mission “resonated with her deeply, aligning with her belief that creativity and community can coexist to create meaningful change.” Hendry’s Christmas tree will celebrate the holidays through January 2.
Meanwhile, juju, which will take the form of bag charms and vinyl Edition Sculptures, will enjoy a debut outing at Phillips Hong Kong on November 29. Hendry is transforming the auction house’s flagship into a pink juju supermarket. There, she’ll release eight colors of the Edition Sculpture, each with a run of 100 ($629 apiece), plus blind-boxed bag charms in a separate rainbow of 24 hues of varying rarity ($24 each).
juju bag charm. Courtesy of Cj Hendry.
They’ll all congregate around an eight-foot tall Edition Sculpture, as well as a juju drawing in Hendry’s signature hyperrealistic style (both priced upon request). Original Hendry drawings like these are notoriously expensive—her Pink Dahlia (2020) colored pencil drawing was one of the top over-performers in Phillips’s Modern & Contemporary Art online auction this September, for instance, hammering at $61,920 against an estimate of $5,000 to $7,000. She’s also dropping merchandise like plush ears, umbrellas, and leather flower trays at Phillips.
That Phillips takeover will remain on view through December 2. Luckily, if you can’t make it to Hendry’s new hometown in time, the Edition Sculptures, bag charms, and original colored pencil drawing will all be available on her website just in time for the holidays. More

Museums and galleries throughout Tokyo are gearing up for Art Week Tokyo, November 5–9, a celebration of the local contemporary art scene co-hosted by more than 50 venues. In lieu of a typical art fair, which brings exhibitors together at a central convention center, visitors can hop on free shuttle buses that crisscross the city, taking them from site to site.
Now in its fourth edition, Art Week Tokyo is the brainchild of director Atsuko Ninagawa, owner of Take Ninagawa Gallery, and is organized by Japan Contemporary Art Platform in collaboration with Art Basel, with support from Japan’s Agency for Cultural Affairs.
Among the leading dealers featured are Pace, Perrotin, Kaikai Kiki Gallery, and Tokyo Gallery + BTAP, the nation’s first contemporary art gallery, which is turning 75 this year. Museums and nonprofit spaces such as the Mori Art Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, and Espace Louis Vuitton, are also taking part.
Other highlights include special programming like a guided tour of the city’s micro homes, led by Kazuyo Sejima, and “Rituals, or the Absurd Beauty of Prayers,” a selection of video works by 10 artists curated by Keiko Okamura and screening for free at a special pavilion in the Marunouchi district.
Ichio Matsuzawa, concept image for AWT Bar 2025. Photo: ©ichio matsuzawa office, courtesy of Art Week Tokyo.
And architect Ichio Matsuzawa has designed a unique pop-up space called the AWT Bar, made from acrylic glass warped into strange shapes, where vistors can taste from a menu by chef Shinobu Namae, a recipient of three Michelin stars.
It’s a unique model, melding together the best of art fairs, festivals, and biennials. The event has drawn increasing international crowds since its soft launch during the lockdown in 2021, earning a slot on the global art world calendar. Last year, 80 percent of the event’s VIP guests were visiting from overseas, with overall attendance topping 50,000.
Here are eight must-see shows across the city this year.

“What Is Real?” at the Okura Museum of Art
Saori Akutagawa (Madokoro), From Folk Tales (1955). Photo: courtesy of Kotaro Nukaga.
Curator Adam Szymczyk, the artistic director of documenta 14, has curated this year’s AWT Focus exhibition, where 100 works by 60 international artists represented by the week’s participating galleries are for sale. Housed in the city’s first private art museum, founded in 1917, the show is inspired by the increasingly complex question of how to define the “real” in the digital age. Work by Sachiko Kazama, Gen Otsuka, and Danh Vo, among others is on display.
The Okura Museum of Art is located at 2 Chome-10-3 Toranomon, Minato City, Tokyo 105-0001, Japan.

“Prism of the Real: Making Art in Japan 1989–2010” at the National Art Center
Noboru Tsubaki, Aesthetic Pollution (1990). Taku Saiki, ©Noboru Tsubaki, courtesy of the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, and the National Art Center, Tokyo.
Co-curated with M+ in Hong Kong, this survey exhibition looks at contemporary art made in Japan after the end of the Cold War, as international exchange flourished during the Heisei era. More than 50 artists are featured, including Rirkrit Tiravanija (b. 1961), Matthew Barney (b. 1967), Mariko Mori (b. 1967), and Lee Bul (b. 1964).
The National Art Center, Tokyo, is located at 7 Chome-22-2 Roppongi, Minato City, Tokyo, Japan.

“Aki Sasamoto’s Life Laboratory” at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo
Aki Sasamoto, Point Reflection (2023), video still.  ©Aki Sasamoto, courtesy of Take Ninagawa and the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo.
This marks New York-based Japanese artist Aki Sasamoto (b. 1980) first mid-career retrospective, highlighting the range of her practice, which incorporates installation, video, dance, mathematical theory, and pop psychology. Her elaborate sculptures will be activated by four performances, to be held throughout the show’s run, including Strange Attractors, which debuted at the 2010 Whitney Biennial at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art.
The Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo is located at 4 Chome-1-1 Miyoshi, Koto City, Tokyo, Japan.

“The Architecture of Sou Fujimoto: Primordial Future Forest” at the Mori Art Museum
Sou Fujimoto, House N (2008), (interior). Oita, Japan. Photo: Iwan Baan.
This is the first major museum show for architect Sou Fujimoto (b. 1971), known for projects like  the 2013 Serpentine Pavilion in London, which he constructed from a matrix of thin white steel poles. Aged 41 at the time, he was the youngest architect ever tapped for the annual project. The exhibition features the typical architectural scale models, drawings, and renderings, but also incorporates installations that the visitor can explore to get a true sense of his architectural forms.
The Mori Art Museum is located at 53F, Roppongi Hills Mori Tower, Tokyo, Japan. 

“Andy Warhol: Serial Portraits” at Espace Louis Vuitton
Andy Warhol, Self-Portraits (1977–86). ©The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Licensed by Adagp, Paris 2025, ©Primae/Louis Bourjac.
Highlighting previously unseen Andy Warhol (1928–87) portraits from the Fondation Louis Vuitton collection, this exhibition unites several bodies of work. The simple and elegant line of his “Unidentified Male” series of sketches from the 1950s are joined by the colorful silk-screened canvases of his “Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century” portfolio (1980) and a series of self-portraits shot in a photo booth the year before Warhol’s death, featuring his platinum blonde “fright wig.”
Espace Louis Vuitton is located at 5 Chome, Shibuya, Jingumae,〒150-0001 Tokyo, Japan.

“Eiki Mori: Moonbow Flags” at Ken Nakahashi
Eiki Mori, Untitled from “Moonbow Flags” (2025). Courtesy of Ken Nakahashi.
Using layers of film negatives, Eiki Mori (b. 1976) has made a new series of photogram portraits called “Moonbow Flags,” named after the subtle phenomenom of a rainbow in the moonlight. The work incorporates geometric shapes inspired by flag designs, turning these symbols of authority into personal and playful works.
Ken Nakahashi is located at 3 Chome−1−32, Shinjuku City, Shinjuku, Tokyo, Japan.

“YEYE: Telepathy” at Kaikai Kiki
One of Yeye’s paintings of her late dog Moonge. Courtesy of Kaikai Kiki, Tokyo.
This is the first large-scale solo show from Korean artist YEYE, who channeled her studies in animation and cartooning into a career in manga before transitioning to painting in 2022. Her debut show with Kaikai Kiki is a tribute to her adorable late dog Moonge, who was her dedicated companion for 15 years.
Kaikai Kiki is located at Motoazabu Crest Building B1F, 2 Chome−3−30 ,Motoazabu, Minato City, Tokyo, Japan. 

“Marina Perez Simão” and “Tomie Ohtake” at Pace
Tomie Ohtake, Untitled (1983). © Tomie Ohtake. Courtesy of the artist’s estate and Nara Roesler Gallery.
Pace has staged not one but two solo shows for the occasion, pairing works by the contemporary Brazilian artist Marina Perez Simão (b. 1981) with those of one of her greatest influences, the late Japanese-Brazilian Modernist Tomie Ohtake (1913–2015). Ohtake, who immigrated to Brazil in 1936, incorporated both geometric and organic forms into abstract works that spanned painting, printmaking, and sculpture. Simão, who recently had a solo show at the Instituto Tomie Ohtake in São Paulo, is showing semi-abstract landscape paintings.
Pace is located at Azabudai Hills Garden Plaza-A, 5-8-1 Toranomon, Minato-ku, Tokyo, Japan. More

Boston’s cityscape just welcomed a new sculpture by Gaetano Pesce. The late, great Italian designer’s final public artwork, Double Heart (2024–25), has landed on Lyrik Back Bay, joining the city’s blossoming public art scene.
Double Heart certainly holds its own, towering 30 feet tall and radiating a warm red glow that echoes the highway’s streaming taillights in the evening. This is Pesce’s only permanent outdoor sculpture to grace America—and it just might prove iconic enough to rival Anish Kapoor’s famed Cloudgate (2006) sculpture in Chicago.
Gaetano Pesce, Double Heart (2024-25). Lyrik Back Bay, Samuels and Associates, Boston, Massachusetts. Courtesy of Goodman Taft. Photo: Aram Boghosian (AramPhoto). Courtesy of Gaetano Pesce’s Studio, New York and Champ Lacombe, Biarritz / London.
Pesce famously worked across art, architecture, and design—eschewing creative categories, while prioritizing innovation. As aesthetics have grown more uniform and utilitarian over the past few decades, he embraced playfulness and imperfection, especially favoring unpredictable resin.
Boston-based developer Samuels and Associates commissioned Pesce’s Double Heart for Lyrik Back Bay, which perches atop a CitizenM hotel, a Rivian store, LEGO’s U.S. headquarters, and more above the eight-lane turnpike, right where Boston’s Back Bay neighborhood becomes Fenway. The sculpture is the sole artwork slated to enliven the site’s plaza, flanked by two tall buildings. The developer opted for this double-pronged layout at the request of locals, who wanted to keep the sunset view that the previous barebones bridge in this spot afforded. It recruited Cambridge and New York-based art curatorial and advisory firm Goodman Taft, however, to sniff out the ideal artist to activate this prime alcove.
Goodman Taft co-founder Abigail Ross Goodman intimated over email that when her team got started on the project three years ago, Pesce was on their shortlist. “This very prominent and public site called for a work of art that could match its spirit, its scale, and its nature as the nexus where many neighborhoods connect and converge,” Goodman Taft senior partner Molly Epstein explained. “Gaetano Pesce reminded us that ‘color is energy, it is happiness, a positive sign,’ and in Double Heart—a unique variant of the sculpture conceived and designed at a monumental scale by the artist specifically for the site and executed in his signature resin and bold red hue—he gives Boston a new public icon of love, empathy, creativity and connection.”
Gaetano Pesce, Heart Lamp prototype (2009). Courtesy of Gaetano Pesce’s Studio, New York, and Champ Lacombe, Biarritz/London.
Double Heart actually began in 1979 as an idea for a table lamp featuring a bespoke base that would reflect the favorite city of whichever collector commissioned it. When Pesce sketched its prototype, he was drawing from that ubiquitous Valentine’s Day motif where Cupid’s bow pierces a heart. The addition of a second heart doubles his message of connection.
“If you want to be sincere in what you do, you have to use material of your time, because that is the proof you work in the moment,” Pesce once said. Because it’s so recognizable, viewers driving by Lyrik Back Bay won’t have to waste any time decoding the sculpture’s meaning.
Pesce previously turned the Double Heart lamp into a monument for Paris+ par Art Basel 2022. “This object is significant because it has meaning in a moment when the world is not doing so well,” he told Art Basel at the time. “So many stupid people are in positions of power, and they are doing serious damage. Art and design have a very significant role to play.”
Gaetano Pesce, Double Heart (2024-25). Lyrik Back Bay, Samuels and Associates, Boston, Massachusetts. Courtesy of Goodman Taft. Photo: Aram Boghosian (AramPhoto). Courtesy of Gaetano Pesce’s Studio, New York and Champ Lacombe, Biarritz / London.
To drive his point home, Pesce made this second, permanent iteration of the work two times taller than its Parisian predecessor. Although he died last spring before bringing the piece to fruition, his estate, his longtime studio staff, and gallery Champ Lacombe, all joined forces to oversee its production at the very fabrication shop that Pesce had selected in Viareggio, Italy. In other words, this sculpture was a labor of love, from beginning to end. More

In August, Brian Eno set out hundreds of small wood panels across a series of worktables in his London studio. Over two days, he laid cut-out stencils atop the array, before spray-painting the blocks in blues, pinks, greens, and metallic shades. Pieces were removed when the artist thought them finished; others stayed until he felt they “got somewhere.”
The upshot of Eno’s project, simply titled “Blocks,” is more than 400 birch plywood slabs carrying surprising, one-of-a-kind designs. From November 12, you will be able to snap them up through London’s Paul Stolper Gallery for £500 ($656) each.
Brian Eno in his London studio during his two-day continuous performance for “Blocks.” © Brian Eno. Photo courtesy Paul Stolper Gallery 2025.
And you’ll be spoiled for choice. Measuring about seven-by-five inches, the compositions on offer range from the minimal to the complex, vivid to muted. Block 223, for instance, features various color fields quietly merging into one another, while Block 55 dances with licks of sunset tones. Some pieces, such as Block 1 and Block 288, boast eye-catching interplays between positive and negative spaces—the result of Eno spraying over objects from cut-out shapes to dried pasta.
Brian Eno, Block 223 (2025). © Brian Eno. Photo: Luke Walker, courtesy Paul Stolper Gallery 2025.
The improvisational nature of the series is in line with Eno’s generative ethos, which hinges on randomness and unpredictability. He believes there’s meaning in the method (see: his 1975 “Oblique Strategies” card deck, created with Peter Schmidt, that encourages creatives to view their process from fresh angles).
“Art is something that happens, a process, not a quality, and all sorts of things can make it happen,” he once wrote. “The value of the work lies in the degree to which it can help you have the kind of experience that you call art.”
Brian Eno, Block 55 (2025). © Brian Eno. Photo: Luke Walker, courtesy Paul Stolper Gallery 2025.
In “Blocks,” chance and randomness also turn up in Eno’s grouped panels. These works are composed of four painted panels, fused together such that a square gap remains at the center. The panels were picked by the artist to showcase unexpected juxtapositions of color and compositions. While Block 367 offers a contrast of spray-painted forms, say, Block 378 brings together panels of a similarly shaped and toned motif.
Brian Eno, Block 378 (2025). © Brian Eno. Photo: Luke Walker, courtesy Paul Stolper Gallery 2025.
This latest artistic series follows Eno’s drop of a custom turntable in 2024, also through Paul Stolper. The $25,000 gadget doesn’t just play records, but lights up with what the artist termed “seductive” color transitions. “When it doesn’t have to do anything in particular, like play a record,” he explained, “it’s a sculpture.”
Earlier this year, Eno and Beatie Wolfe released their twin collaborative albums, Lateral and Luminal, in which the Roxy Music founding member and multidisciplinary artist endeavored to put music to feelings. In yet another collaboration, Eno paired up with Dutch artist Bette Adriaanse for the 2024 book What Art Does, which posits a new theory about, well, what art does.
Brian Eno in his London studio during his two-day continuous performance for “Blocks.” © Brian Eno. Photo courtesy Paul Stolper Gallery 2025.
“Blocks” is available for sale from November 12 at 4.00 p.m. GMT / 11 a.m. ET online, in person, or over the phone through Paul Stolper Gallery. The works will be on view at the gallery, November 14, 2025–January 17, 2026. More

Chelsea is rich with blue-chip shows right now, jewel-box wonders fill Upper East Side townhouses, and Downtown Manhattan teems with emergent names. But if you are seeking truly heady and bizarre art experiences in New York at the moment, and if you have limited time, head to Midtown. On a brief stroll, without spending a dime, and without setting foot in a single museum or commercial gallery, you can savor (1) a formidable corporate curatorial effort, (2) a tantalizing marketing spectacular, and (3) a slow-burning delight that is hidden in a luxury emporium and on offer for just a couple weeks. All three of these displays are thrillingly, brutally of the moment. Let’s take a tour.
JPMorgan Chase’s new home at 270 Park, which was designed by Foster + Partners. Courtesy JPMorgan Chase
1. JPMorgan Chase’s Headquarters at 270 Park Avenue
Start on Park Avenue, between East 47th and 48th Streets. Over the past four years, JPMorgan Chase’s beast of a new headquarters has been rising here, a sleek, impressive, and faintly evil addition to the skyline. Last week, the nation’s largest bank officially moved into the tower, which was designed by Foster + Partners. It cost more than $3 billion to make, has 2.5 million square feet across 60 floors, can hold 10,000 employees, and soars a breathtaking 1,388 feet, making it the sixth-tallest building in the city.
But we are here for the art at street level. The biggest-ticket attraction is a pair of absolutely enormous abstractions by the German grandmaster Gerhard Richter, who is 93 and the subject of an expansive retrospective at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris. Titled Color Chase One and Color Chase Two, they are “painted works made with interlocking, hard-angled aluminum shapes,” according to press materials. With their peculiarly angled planes of flat color, these hard-edged pieces could be chopped-and-screwed versions of Richter’s redoubtable, rectilinear “Color Charts.” They’re punchy, pleasantly awkward, and ultimately forgettable: perfect corporate-lobby art. The unfathomable cost of these things is at least part of their pleasure. The bank did not reply to a question about what they paid, but to offer a point of comparison: back in 2007, Goldman Sachs forked over $5 million for a Julie Mehretu mural.
Wind Dance by Norman Foster on the mezzanine of the lobby at 270 Park Avenue. Courtesy JPMorgan Chase
There’s also a charming Maya Lin installation that clads one side of the building’s base with stone and a Leo Villareal light show on the building’s crown at night, but the work that steals the show is by Norman Foster himself. Centrally positioned in the capacious lobby, it’s a 3-D–printed bronze flagpole that shoots air from its top, keeping its flag fluttering. This invention is designed to replicate wind conditions outside (very cool), though it’s apparently also configured to never let the flag go limp. The Stars and Stripes hangs on it now now, waving surreally. (It recalls, for me, Pope.L’s massive indoor American flag).
A flag with an endless supply of artificial wind, forever aloft: The metaphors write themselves. Take it as a symbol of an institution too big too fail, a troubled republic pretending that everything is normal, or a company that is proud to know which way the wind is blowing. Either way, it’s deranged, and I love it.
Is that augmented reality or an A.I. creation? Neither. It’s Louis Vuitton’s flagship store on East 57th Street, which is currently undergoing a major renovation. Photo by Andrew Russeth
2. Louis Vuitton’s Under-Renovation Flagship Store
Ten blocks north and one avenue west, another impressive feat awaits. Louis Vuitton’s flagship store at the corner of East 57th Street and Fifth Avenue is undergoing a multi-year renovation, but you will see few indications of construction, save for scaffolding above the sidewalk. The whole structure has been done up to resemble a stack of gargantuan LV trunks, and the verisimilitude astonishes. Even up close, the exterior suggests monogrammed leather. To amplify the illusion, the company’s in-house design team installed 840 large rivets, as well as gleaming clasps and handles that weigh up to 5,000 pounds. It shimmers in the sun, and glows at night, thanks to lights secreted along various edges of the trunks.
An artist acquaintance compared it, admiringly, to the basket-shaped building that was built in 1997 for the now-defunct basket-making Longaberger Company in Newark, Ohio, by NBBJ and Korda Nemeth Engineering, a classic of postmodern architecture. It also vaguely harkens to Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s projects that involved wrapping architecture, turning them temporarily into artworks and obscuring their decorative elements. LV has instead forged a building that is pure decoration, a canny advertisement that demands to be photographed. It’s easy to imagine super-fans of the brand replicating the display on their own homes. Silent and impassive, it’s an irresistible monument to luxury.
Espace Louis Vuitton’s display of two works by Gustave Caillebotte on the fifth floor of Louis Vuitton’s temporary store on East 57th Street. Courtesy Espace Louis Vuitton
3. Gustave Caillebotte at Espace Louis Vuitton
For now, LV’s main shop is a temporary, but still quite impressive, space across the street, designed by the serial museum architect Shohei Shigematsu of OMA (who, like Foster, has gotten into the sculpture game by stacking Louis Vuitton trunks into zigzagging columns that stand more than 50 feet tall). Up on the fifth floor, the luxury giant is, for the first time in New York, staging an exhibition under its Espace Louis Vuitton platform, which regularly does ambitious shows at dedicated venues in Tokyo, Munich, Venice, Beijing, Seoul, and Osaka. This display consists of just two paintings, but what paintings! They are prime pieces by Gustave Caillebotte (1848–94) that, earlier this month, were hanging in a touring Caillebotte survey at the Art Institute of Chicago. They will be here until November 16, and an appointment is required to visit them.
Gustave Caillebotte, Young Man at His Window (1876) at the Espace Louis Vuitton in New York. Courtesy Louis Vuitton
Both pictures focus on solitary men. The Impressionist was only 27 when he painted the earlier one, Young Man at His Window (1876), which is owned by the Getty, and it shows a besuited figure from behind. It’s the artist’s younger brother, René, who died a year later, only 26. He’s high up in an apartment that belonged to the wealthy family, hands in his pockets, gazing down onto a street in the 8th arrondissement that is cloaked in shadow. Dapper and still, he’s a man in control of his destiny, but there is a hint of melancholy, even discomfort, about him. He’s isolated, perhaps yearning for something. That woman walking below? An escape, via that horse-drawn carriage in the distance? He can’t bring himself to move.
Gustave Caillebotte, Boating Party (1877–78) at the Escape Louis Vuitton in New York. Courtesy Louis Vuitton
In contrast, the man in the second picture, Boating Party (1877–78), is pure action. A black top hat is perched atop his head, and he is rowing a small boat down the Yerres River in northern France, where the Caillebottes had a summer home. He’s taken off his jacket and put it on the seat next to him so that he can really go at it. We are sitting across from him, almost uncomfortably close, and can see a pair of boaters that we are about to pass. Tall trees recede into the background. It looks relaxing out there on the water. Until last year, the work was still owned by Caillebotte’s heirs, but the Musée d’Orsay was able to pry it loose thanks to a donation of about $50.5 million from LVMH, Louis Vuitton’s owner. For the next two weeks, though, it belongs to New York.
Seeking more Midtown art action? Here’s another roundup, from 2019. Most of the entries remain on view. More