Art & Exhibitions

The annual commission for Tate Modern’s capacious Turbine Hall has tended to go to established artists at the height of their careers: Louise Bourgeois for the first edition in 2000, Anish Kapoor in 2002, and Bruce Nauman in 2005. This year, though, Tate said that the closely watched exhibition will be staged by the daring 35-year-old artist Mire Lee, whose disturbing and alluring kinetic sculptures have appeared in major shows around the world over the past few years.
Lee, who works between Seoul and Amsterdam, joins a small group of artists who have been tapped for the London venue in their mid-30s, including Olafur Eliasson (in 2004) and Tino Sehgal (2012).
Details on Lee’s project are sparse, for now, but the dates are set. Her Hyundai Commission, as the series is known, will open on October 8, the week of the Frieze art fair in London, and run through March 16. A triumvirate is curating: Ann Coxon and Alvin Li, curators of international art at Tate Modern, and Bilal Akkouche, an assistant curator there.
The Tate display comes as Lee has been on a tear, contributing thrilling pieces to the 2022 iterations of the Venice Biennale, the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh, and the Busan Biennale in her native South Korea. In Busan, Lee erected scaffolding in a massive abandoned building and mounted on it fabric torn with holes that suggested lesions or burns.
Other recent pieces by Lee—powered by motors, flowing with vile-seeming substances—can bring to mind malfunctioning organs or malformed creatures as they transmit fraught psychological states. They sometimes appear to be breaking down or metamorphosing.
“I always wanted to make wild-looking kind of works, or crude works,” Lee told me in an interview for the New York Times as she prepped a solo outing last year at the New Museum in New York. Using motors and other unusual techniques, she said, “gave me surprising results.”
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Roelant Savery, the industrious Dutch Golden Age artist best known for his painting of the dodo bird, is the subject of a new exhibition at the Mauritshuis museum in the Hague, Netherlands. Titled “Roelant Savery’s Wondrous World,” the show celebrates the painter’s iconic depiction the now-extinct species, but also his work as the first Dutch artist to paint floral still lifes and street scenes.
Savery, who lived from 1578 to 1639, spent the better part of his career as a court painter to the Habsburg emperor Rudolf II in Prague. The emperor’s wealth and connections allowed Savery to explore a variety of subjects and genres. He produced some of the earliest known topographical drawings of the Czech capital, featuring landmarks like the Charles Bridge, Prague Castle, and the Strahov Monastery.
One of these cityscapes includes a small self-portrait, showing Savery, sketchbook in hand, recording his exotic surroundings.
Roelant Savery, View of Prague (1604–08). Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (acquisition F.G. Waller Fund). Photo courtesy of the Mauritshuis.
Like other Dutch artists from the time, Savery enjoyed drawing ordinary people as they went about their day. These sketches range from a young man sleeping in the street, to a beggar wearing tattered clothes, to a group of well-dressed Jewish people on their way to the Neualtschul (“Old New”) synagogue in Prague, the latter of which constitute some of first artistic depictions of Jews in Europe.
Roelant Savery, Sleeping Young Man, Probably Pieter Boddaert (1606–07). P. & N. de Boer Foundation, Amsterdam. Photo courtesy of the Mauritshuis.
Roelant Savery, Vase with Flowers in a Stone Niche (1615). Mauritshuis, (acquired with the support of the VriendenLoterij, the Rembrandt Association, and Mr H.B. van der Ven, 2016). Photo courtesy of the Mauritshuis.
The exhibition also documents Savery’s a passion for flora and fauna. Some of his still lifes feature as many as 64 species of flowers. He frequently visited the imperial menageries, which included a deer park, a pheasant garden, and an area for Rudolf’s collection of lions. The Mauritshuis noted that, while many of these animals could never coexist in the wild, “in Savery’s paintings they peacefully lived side by side,” united by biblical and mythological symbolism.
Roelant Savery, Two Horses and Grooms (1628). City Collection, Abby Kortrijk. Photo courtesy of the Mauritshuis.
Although many of Savery’s paintings are not scientifically accurate, his most famous portrait of the dodo played an important role in the early scientific community. In the 19th century, biologist Richard Owen, the first superintendent of the Natural History Museum in London (which holds the painting), placed it next to an actual dodo skeleton to explain the creature’s confounding anatomy to students. To this day, the notoriety of the dodo and its evolutionary fate is closely linked to the popularity of Savery’s painting.
“Roelant Savery’s Wondrous World” is on view at the Mauritshuis, Plein 29, 2511 CS Den Haag, the Netherlands, through May 20.
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Pace is mounting its first exhibition of work by the late artist Chuck Close, whom the gallery has represented since 1977. The show may answer the question of whether the art market, and the art world in general, will support the work of an artist who was accused of inappropriate behavior by models in one of the most prominent art-world examples of the Me Too movement. 
“Red, Yellow and Blue: The Last Paintings” will feature paintings, photographs, and works on paper, most of them formerly unseen, all employing only the three primary colors. A catalogue will feature a formerly unpublished 2018 conversation between Close and the artist Cindy Sherman (also known for her depictions of faces and her self-portraits), originally commissioned for the Brooklyn Rail. Also featured will be a new essay by critic Carter Ratcliff on the late works and one by Barbara Knappmeyer, associate director and scientific program manager at the New York Academy of Sciences, on Close’s work in the context of facial recognition technology. 
Two former models accused Close of sexually inappropriate behavior in 2017. He apologized for his “dirty mouth.” According to his CV on Pace’s website, after the accusations emerged, he had no solo shows until 2020; he had only three solo presentations in 2020 and 2021, and none since then. Zachary Small, writing for Artnet News in 2021, asked whether his supporters could stage a posthumous comeback. His works have sold at auction for as much as $4.3 million, fetched by a 1971–72 portrait of painter John Roy at Sotheby’s New York in 2005.
Close became known for his large-scale photorealist portraits that departed from the dominant paradigm of Minimalist art in the 1960s and 1970s. He painted self-portraits as well as a who’s who of cultural figures, including Cecily Brown, Alex Katz, Richard Serra, and Cindy Sherman. His focus on faces grew partly out of his having suffered from facial blindness. In 1988, Close suffered a spinal aneurysm that left him paralyzed, and he relied on a wheelchair for the rest of his life. He was able to paint—despite doctors’ predictions—after extensive rehabilitation and through the use of brush-holding devices strapped to his wrist and forearm.
Close’s work resides in public collections internationally, including those of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Tate Gallery in London, and the Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.
“Red, Yellow and Blue: The Last Paintings” is on view at Pace Gallery, 510 West 25th Street, New York, through April 13. 
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A tender image of a young polar bear drifting off to sleep in a bed he carved out of an iceberg has won over the masses. The photograph, titled Ice Bed, won British amateur photographer Nima Sarikhani the People’s Choice Award for the Wildlife Photographer of the Year, a prize organized by London’s Natural History Museum.
To capture the image, Sarikhani spent three days searching for polar bears through a dense fog around Norway’s far-northern Svalbard archipelago. Finally encountering a young male bear just before midnight, he watched as it climbed the small iceberg, clawed away at the sea ice, then curled up into a serene slumber.
In a statement, Douglas Gurr, the museum’s director, described the image as a poignant reflection on habitat loss: “His thought-provoking image is a stark reminder of the integral bond between an animal and its habitat.”
The photograph was selected from a shortlist of 25 images, whittled down from 50,000 submissions. A record 75,000 voters participated in the 59th installment of the competition. The image, along with four other “highly commended” finalists, will be on view at the London museum through June 30.
Audun Rikardsen, Aurora Jellies. Photo: © Audun Rikardsen / Wildlife Photographer of the Year.
The other finalists include Norwegian photographer Audun Rikardsen, who captured Aurora Jellies, an ethereal image of the aurora borealis illuminating the night sky over the waters of a fjord, aglow with the bioluminescence of moon jellyfish.
Kenyan Photographer Mark Boyd captured two lionesses grooming one of their shared cubs together after an unsuccessful hunt. Lionesses raise each other’s cubs as their own. Shared Parenting evokes the bond of sisterhood as well as the universal love of motherhood.
Mark Boyd, Shared Parenting. Photo: © Mark Boyd, Wildlife Photographer of the Year.
Starling Murmuration by German/Romanian photographer Daniel Dencescu was shot in Rome, Italy. He followed the starlings across the city for days as they danced across the sky, creating enchanting organic shapes. In Israeli photographer Tzahi Finkelstein’s The Happy Turtle, a balkan pond turtle smiles as a northern banded groundling dragonfly pays it a visit in the swampy waters of Israel’s Jezreel Valley.
Tzahi Finkelstein, The Happy Turtle. Photo: © Tzahi Finkelstein / Wildlife Photographer of the Year.
Daniel Dencescu, Starling Murmuration. Photo: © Daniel Dencescu / Wildlife Photographer of the Year.
The prestigious Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition celebrates the nature-focused work of amateur or professional photographers. The 60th edition is currently being judged by an international panel, with its winners set to be announced in October 2024.
“Wildlife Photographer of the Year” is on view at the Natural History Museum, Cromwell Road, South Kensington, London, through June 30.
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Adam Himebauch’s ears are burning. With his eyes closed, he sneaks a smile as I question Francesca Pessarelli of Ceysson & Bénétière in New York about his performance. He’s in it, meditating while laying down on a white slab with his head on a small pillow—a position he is expected to maintain for over a month. The piece is about “mortality, entombment, sacrifice”—supposedly.
Except, that would take serious discipline and focus. Which I guess a painter would be required to have. But something still feels off and I can’t shake the feeling. I start to wonder: can’t he just go home at night to sleep in his bed? The gallery does close, after all.
But the performance, part of the show “Never Ever Land,” is being livestreamed throughout the duration on YouTube. People would see him get up and leave. Still, wouldn’t he have to go off-camera to use the restroom? Looking closer, I notice a can of seltzer sitting on the platform with Himebauch, sweat dripping down its side as if he had to rush into position when hearing the gallery door buzz.
“Is he really expected to lie here the whole time?” I asked Pessarelli. She looks a little caught off guard and unsure of how to respond. After a brief glance at Himebauch, who remains in character, she begins to talk. (Spoiler alert: By continuing to read this story, you are ruinning the surprise of Himebauch’s piece.)
Adam Himebauch is pictured “meditating.” Photo by Adam Schrader.
“The way the exhibition was communicated publicly, mainly through Adam’s social media… is that people are expecting a performance to be occurring throughout the duration of the exhibition, which is the truth,” Pessarelli responded slowly. “The more direct expectation that people are coming in with is to publicly see him lying here on the platform throughout the show, 24/7. It’s the moment they come in and their expectations aren’t met when the performance is actually effectively happening.”
It turns out, I had caught Himebauch lying on the slab one of the few times throughout the performance he is actually expected to do so. The rest of the time, he will not be at the gallery, but carrying on with his life elsewhere and popping in every now and then to keep up the illusion. The livestream was pre-recorded a few days before the show opened using various camera angles, and filmed throughout the day to allow for changes in light.
People would come in and interact with him in different ways and Pessarelli would pretend to sleep, among other scripted interactions. It’s a fairly short loop, only a couple of hours long. An eagle-eyed viewer might be able to tell that there’s only one camera in the room of the gallery despite multiple camera angles appearing on the screen.
Francesca Pessarelli is pictured removing a seltzer can placed next to the body of Adam Himebauch. Photo by Adam Schrader.
“It wouldn’t be too difficult to tell that it is a loop. And you can see the windows, so if the weather is not quite the same, you know…,” Pessarelli said. She noted that the gallery and its workers, as well as friends of Himebauch, may inadvertently ruin the surprise by posting photos of him while he’s supposed to be meditating.
Buried in its write-up about the show, the gallery dropped clear clues into what is going on, such as noting that “Does it even matter if Adam is really here?” Pessarelli said all one would have to do is read the exhibition text and they would be 90 percent there already. Plus, the meditation slab has a QR code that when scanned, will reveal a livestream where viewers would see the artist “meditating,” even if he were not in the room, a clear reveal.
“The intention is not to lie to people or maliciously trick them. The intention is to play on the habits we all have,” she said. “The orchestrators are not any better or smarter than the spectators who come in. We consume media in the same way. We’re just puppeteering or leveraging our shared relationship with information and the media.”
Only one camera, apart from two security cameras, can be seen in the room with Adam Himebauch during his performance. Photo by Adam Schrader
Himebauch, born in 1983, first made a splash in the New York art scene in 2011 under the cheeky moniker “Hanksy.” But his most recent success is due to his long-running performance project, Back to the Future, which saw him craft the faux persona of an established artist who had found fame in the 1970s. The extensive project culminated in the 2022 solo exhibition at Trotter & Sholer, titled “Retrospective” and an accompanying Taschen book. “Blurring the lines between fact and fabrication is a very interesting thing as I believe we’re all playing roles whether we know it or not,” he said in an Instagram post announcing the book.
Pessarelli said that Himbauch’s latest performance could trigger some spectators into a “defensive reaction” after feeling tricked, which Himebauch and his team accepts. But there is precedent for such a performance by artists who have come before Himebauch, such as 4’33”, composer John Cage’s suite of silence.
Adam Himebauch is pictured “meditating.” Photo by Adam Schrader.
But one thing that didn’t quite sit with me as I was talking to Pessarelli was the justification of the trickery as playful, while discussing one of the most serious issues facing the news industry—media illiteracy and the false presentation of fact.
“It’s easier to think about serious things when you interject humor into it,” Pessarelli responded on Himebauch’s behalf when pressed. Later, Himebauch said in an emailed statement through Pessarelli that “it’s the jesters and comedians who have historically been able to get away with telling the truth.”
Vita Kari, another performance artist, attended the show with me and said they found it inspirational how Himebauch played with the illusion of reality in his work, particularly the digital integration of the livestream into the performance.
“Obsessed. It was really different than what I thought it was going to be,” they said. “I thought it was going to be like a resilience training piece, but it was more of a ‘what am I really looking at’ piece. And way more playful than I thought.”
“Adam Himebauch: Never Ever Land” is on view at Ceysson & Bénétière, 956 Madison Ave #2F, New York, through March 16.
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The third edition of the biennial Desert X AlUla show is now open in Saudi Arabia. “In the Presence of Absence” draws on what the organizers say are misconceptions of the desert as an empty space where, they say, “there is much more than meets the eye.”
Consisting of 15 newly commissioned pieces, the biennial is led by independent curator Maya El Khalil and Brazilian artist Marcello Dantas, with artistic direction from curator and art advisor Raneem Farsi, and independent curator Neville Wakefield.
Ayman Yossri Daydban, A rock garden in the shape of a full-sized soccer field, Desert X AlUla 2024, photo by Lance Gerber, courtesy of The Royal Commission for AlUla
An open-air exhibition that is free to all, the show takes place in the desert on the Arabian Peninsula. For the first time, this edition will be sited across three locations: in the desert landscape of Wad AlFann; among the black lava stone terrain and striking views of Harrat Uwayrid; and at the AlManshiyah Plaza, which features the carefully preserved AlUla Railway Station.
Site-responsive works by Saudi and international artists appear side by side, including Monira Al Qadiri, Sara Alissa, Ayman Yossri Daydban, Kimsooja, Ibrahim Mahama, Giuseppe Penone, Faisal Samra, and Bosco Sodi, among others. 
Karola Braga, Sfumato, Desert X AlUla 2024. Photo by Lance Gerber, Courtesy of The Royal Commission for AlUla.
In particular, a press release for the show describes a piece by performance artist Tino Sehgal, tucked away like a bonus track on a record. Sehgal’s work, (un titled) [sic], “emphasizes the interaction between the natural elements of the desert and the human intervention through movement and sound,” the release reads, “creating a connection between the visitor, the environment, and the intangible aspects of experience and imagination.”
Artnet News’s Rebecca Anne Proctor called Desert AlUla one of the six must-see art events across the Middle East for 2023. Proctor wrote in 2022: “The seeds are being sowed in AlUla for a future art ecosystem, and the biennial can arguably be viewed as a catalyst.”
“We challenged the artists to adjust their perspective to encounter the unseen aspects of the place with reverence, attuning to the forces, rhythms and processes that shape the landscape in imperceptible ways,” El Khalil said. 
See more images from the show below.
Aseel AlYaqoub, Weird Life_ An ode to desert varnish, Desert X AlUla 2024. Photo by Lance Gerber, Courtesy of The Royal Commission for AlUla.
Ayman Yossri Daydban, A rock garden in the shape of a full-sized soccer field, Desert X AlUla 2024, photo by Lance Gerber, courtesy of The Royal Commission for AlUla.
Kimsooja, To Breathe – AlUla, Desert X AlUla 2024, photo by Lance Gerber, courtesy of The Royal Commission for AlUla.
Ibrahim Mahama, Dung Bara – The Rider Does Not Know the Ground Is Hot, Desert X AlUla 2024, photo by Lance Gerber, courtesy of The Royal Commission for AlUla.
Desert X AlUla is on view in AlUla through March 23.
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Andy Warhol once thought it would be downright glamorous to be reincarnated as “a great big ring on Liz Taylor’s finger.” It’s this fascination with fame and celebrity that drove him to create dozens upon dozens of hagiographic portraits—of musicians, cinematic stars (Taylor included), athletes, political figures—over his career. These works didn’t just take the form of his signature silkscreens, but also as his lesser-seen film portraits, a kinetic format that framed subjects in no less of an exalted light. He called them his Screen Tests.
In time for Frieze Week, Christie’s Los Angeles, in partnership with the Andy Warhol Museum, will showcase a special selection of these Screen Tests. It will be a rare outing for these four-minute moving image works, the preservation and digitization of which remain an ongoing project for the museum and its Film Initiative.
“We’ve preserved about 40 percent of them and that means there are a lot more that haven’t been seen or shared,” Patrick Moore, the museum’s director, told Artnet News over the phone. “That’s what we’re trying to do at Christie’s. We want people to see some of the iconic figures, but also show them a few that they wouldn’t have been before because they’ve just been transferred.”
Andy Warhol, Lou Reed (Coke) [ST269] (1966). © The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved. Film still courtesy of The Andy Warhol Museum.
Between 1964 and 1966, Warhol shot upwards of 400 of these Screen Tests, which depicted people in his circle or whoever else happened into his Factory. There were his superstars like Jane Holzer, Gerard Malanga, and Edie Sedgwick; musicians including Bob Dylan and members of the Velvet Underground; and downtown figures ranging from poet Allen Ginsberg to writer Susan Sontag. Warhol instructed them to sit in front of his 16-millimeter camera, which captured the tiniest facial tic or movement, without sound.
“A proper painter was not supposed to be also a filmmaker in those days,” Moore explained. “The Screen Tests opened up a different kind of portraiture for Warhol. It was the beginning of an idea, which is, ‘I’m not going to be pigeonholed into any artistic medium.’”
In his lifetime, Warhol would deposit the camera originals of his Screen Tests at the Museum of Modern Art, which today works with the Andy Warhol Museum to transfer the films to high-definition digital formats. This work has enabled modern-day showcases of the Screen Tests, such as in a 2009 series of concerts, where the films were accompanied by musicians Dean & Britta’s haunting soundtrack, and in 2015, when they were splashed across Times Square billboards as part of a Midnight Moment.
Andy Warhol, Jane Holzer [ST144] (1964). © The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved. Film still courtesy of The Andy Warhol Museum.
The Christie’s exhibition will present eight of these portraits, including ones of Dennis Hopper, Bob Dylan, Salvador Dalí, Lou Reed, and Niki de Saint Phalle. Two new Screen Tests will go on view for the first time, featuring Holzer and Sedgwick (in color). They will be projected on a loop in Christie’s dedicated gallery space, at 14 feet in height and 16 feet in width, in a screening that the auction house’s deputy chairman, Sonya Roth, described as “immersive.”
“It ends up being this intimate portrait of the person,” she told me. “You’re really forced to look at the detail at that scale. They’ll be really engrossing.”
Both Roth and Moore were quick to highlight the role of collector Maria Bell in pushing through the exhibition. Bell, who is currently producing a documentary on Warhol, was keen to display the Screen Tests, Moore said, to spotlight the Film Initiative and “how much support the films need to be preserved and made accessible.”
Not least, that Warhol’s Screen Tests would go on view in L.A., the heart of America’s moviemaking machine, seems apropos to an artist who always looked to the stars. Moore, in a statement, called it “fitting that his films would now serve to inspire new generations of artists and filmmakers.” Warhol might even deem it glamorous.
“Andy Warhol Screen Tests” are on view at Christie’s Los Angeles, 336 N Camden Drive, Beverly Hills, California, February 27 to March 14. 
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Alreadymade, its title inspired by Duchamp’s concept of the “readymade”—wherein an ordinary object is elevated to the status of a work of art—extends beyond mere attribution, prompting questions that may arise from the very answers she seeks.
History reveals a pattern of reluctance to recognize the intellectual and creative authority of female artists and writers. Figures like Artemisia Gentileschi, Simone de Beauvoir, and Lee Krasner were overshadowed by their male counterparts in their lifetimes. Through Alreadymade, we are reminded of historical injustices, urging us to reassess the narratives we’ve been taught.
See more images from the show below.
Installation view of “Barbara Visser – Alreadymade” at Kunsthaus Zürich. 2024. Photo: © Franca Candrian, Kunsthaus Zürich. © Barbara Visser.
Installation view of “Barbara Visser – Alreadymade” at Kunsthaus Zürich. 2024. Photo: © Franca Candrian, Kunsthaus Zürich. © Barbara Visser.
Installation view of “Barbara Visser – Alreadymade” at Kunsthaus Zürich. 2024. Photo: © Franca Candrian, Kunsthaus Zürich. © Barbara Visser.
Installation view of “Barbara Visser – Alreadymade” at Kunsthaus Zürich. 2024. Photo: © Franca Candrian, Kunsthaus Zürich. © Barbara Visser.
“Barbara Visser – Alreadymade” is on view at Kunsthaus Zürich, Heimplatz, CH–8001 Zurich, February 9 through May 12. More