Art & Exhibitions

Five digital expressions of legendary late Korean abstractionist Kim Whanki’s iconic paintings are casting a glow over the LG OLED Lounge at Frieze New York.
In the spirit of LG’s initiative at the Guggenheim and its involvement in Britain’s Venice Biennale pavilion, LG OLED has invited a group of Korean multimedia artists to reimagine a select few Kim masterpieces on screens, setting new standards for digital art display.
The showcase, titled “We Meet Again In New York,” coincides with “Whanki in New York,” a new show on view through June 13 at the Korean Cultural Center New York (KCCNY), presented in collaboration with Seoul’s Whanki Museum and LG OLED. Together, they mark Kim’s first extensive posthumous exhibitions in the city.
Installation image of Whanki x LG OLED showcase “We Meet Again In New York” at Frieze New York. Courtesy LG OLED and © Whanki Foundation. Whanki Museum
Stunning Displays
The concurrent showcases highlight Kim’s last decade as a working artist, which he spent in New York. Amidst the rising art capital’s thriving abstract expressionist scene, Kim’s practice of painting Korean cultural icons through international new styles developed into his now-legendary “all-over dots” paintings, which have since sold for millions. Each mark is entirely organic, rather than mechanically perfect, encapsulating the artist’s hand while creating a mesmerizing viewing experience, which is only emphasized by their new translation to LG OLED screens at Frieze.
They portray his paintings with startling clarity and even greater color precision than the 50-year-old artworks themselves. Some of the originals have faded and others aren’t suited to public display, due in part to their fragility or ownership by private collectors in Korea.
Kim Whanki, Duet 22-IV-74 #331 (1974). Digital Expression of Whanki’s painting, 2023. © Whanki Foundation.Whanki Museum
The five works across the presentation were translated by Seoul National University professor Je Baak, media art creator group Verseday, Ahn Graphics CEO Mano Ahnand, and BESIGN CEO Jason Kim. Each artist added touches of their own style to compliment the works.
7-VI-69 #65 (1969), animated by Ahn, radiates while layering the composition’s geometric elements piece by piece, to assemble the whole painting. Kim made the lines of 7-VII-74 (1974) dissipate and reemerge amongst the newly swirling and fading textures surrounding them.
The show’s centerpiece beams on a massive LG OLED screen featuring Kim’s scarlet, sun-themed 14-III-72 #223 (1972). At intervals, Verseday has made its sunspots and brushstrokes shimmer, accenting their textures. The animations emphasize Kim’s interest in creating a time-based viewing experience.
Kim Whanki’s masterpieces digitally expressed by LG Signature OLED M. © Whanki Foundation.Whanki Museum
An International Artist Drawn to New York
Though Kim was born in Korea and helped found the country’s pioneering Dansaekhwa movement, he also carried elements of Korean culture as he moved around the globe.
As an art student in Tokyo during the 1930s, Kim was drawn to Matisse and Picasso and started translating Korean motifs through modern styles. He returned to Korea and co-founded the influential New Realism Group. Decades later in the 1950s, Kim moved to Paris to tackle the canon. Despite his association with Korean lyricism and meditative abstraction, he sought a seamless integration of Eastern and Western aesthetics. He then traveled on to New York in 1963, thanks to a grant from the Asia Society.
Kim immediately fell in with the city’s expanding art scene, where he befriended Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman. He also inspired Nam June Paik. “Many people, even his most devoted fans, might not know that Kim Whanki, despite his achievements and comfortable life in Korea, moved to New York at the age of 50, where he passed away,” noted KCCNY curator Hee Sung Cho.
At the same time, he retained traditional imagery like moon jars in his work, balancing his cultural origins with the eye of an international artist. “By becoming a foreigner in a new city, he turned to his inner voice and created his own new world of art,” observed Park Mee-Jung, director of the Whanki Museum.
Installation view of “Whanki in New York” at the Korean Cultural Center New York (KCCNY), presented in collaboration with the Whanki Museum and LG OLED. Courtesy KCCNY and LG OLED.
Celebrating Kim’s Legacy
KCCNY and LG OLED Art shared the vision of reintroducing Kim Whanki to New York audiences through the Frieze display and the Whanki exhibition currently unfolding across KCCNY’s new seven-story home near Koreatown in Manhattan. “This collaboration was envisioned to create a unique showcase that combined cultural depth with cutting-edge technology,” said Hee Sung Cho, who helped make the partnership possible.
The KCCNY exhibition features loans from private collectors, including the famed sculptor John Pai, as well as numerous works provided by The Whanki Museum. Describing Kim’s legacy, the museum’s director, Park Mee-Jung, said: “​​His work, and the inspiring narrative of his life and artistic evolution across Korea, Brazil, Paris, and New York, has led to an ever-increasing global recognition of his art and impact on the history of Korean art.”
Kate Oh, Vice President of the Brand Communication Division at LG, emphasized the importance of the collaboration: “With this incredible presentation of digital expressions of Whanki’s artworks at Frieze New York, and our partner exhibition at the Korean Cultural Center New York, we hope to contribute to Whanki’s lasting legacy in New York City.”
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In time for National Military Appreciation Month in June, EPCOT’s American Adventure Pavilion, at the company’s Walt Disney World Resort in Florida, is mounting an exhibition of former president George W. Bush’s paintings of surviving military veterans. “Portraits of Courage: A Commander in Chief’s Tribute to America’s Warriors” includes more than 60 portraits, each accompanied by “the inspiring story of the veteran depicted” as written by Bush. The exhibition is organized in collaboration with the George W. Bush Institute.
“Celebrating those who give so much to our country has been part of the fabric of The Walt Disney Company throughout our 100-year history,” said Josh D’Amaro, chairman of Disney Experiences. “We’re grateful to the Bush Institute for allowing us to feature this special collection and share it with our guests.”
Bush’s painting hobby first came to light when a Romanian hacker released photos of Dubya’s daubings in February 2013 (later earning a four-year jail sentence for the act). The paintings were also the basis of a 2017 book by the same name, which became a #1 New York Times bestseller. In 2019, he set out to follow up with a book of portraits of immigrants; as Artnet News’s Taylor Dafoe dryly commented when it was published a year later, referring to a notorious press conference at which W. landed on an aircraft carrier and prematurely declared victory in the Iraq War, “Well, mission accomplished.”
George W. Bush, Army Sgt. 1st Class Michael R. Rodriguez. Courtesy of Grant Miller/George W. Bush Presidential Center via Crown Publishing.
The exhibition will stay on view for a year. In addition to displaying the portraits, it will serve as a place for veterans to access information about free, high-quality mental and brain health care via a program called Check-In. Thousands of veterans of the post-9/11 wars are homeless; many suffered traumatic brain injuries as a result of the improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, that were used to attack them as they patrolled Iraqi cities.
Bush’s paintings of veterans were widely derided as hypocritical when they emerged; in the New Yorker, Peter Schjehldahl wrote, “Having obliviously made murderous errors, Bush now obliviously atones for them. What do you do with someone like that?” By the accounts of his painting instructors, Bush takes the activity seriously; he counts Lucian Freud, Wayne Thiebaud, Jamie Wyeth, Ray Turner, Fairfield Porter, and Joaquín Sorolla as influences.
The United States military operation in Iraq began in 2003, in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, an armed conflict that spanned eight years. About 7,000 U.S. service members died in post-9/11 war operations according to the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University, which also notes more than 30,000 suicides among service members and veterans of the post-9/11 wars. While it’s difficult to know exactly how many Iraqis died, the organization Iraq Body Count records some 113,728 civilian deaths. Brown University’s Costs of War Project estimates that the conflict ran up a bill of $6.4 trillion.
“Portraits of Courage” has been touring the U.S. since 2017, opening at the George W. Bush Presidential Center on the SMU campus in Dallas, Texas, before traveling to venues including Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas, and the Museum of the Southwest in Texas. Speaking to CNN at the launch of the exhibition, Bush said of his painting practice: “It keeps me active, so I’m not on the couch chewing potato chips all the time. It’s one of the great learning experiences.”
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There’s a call atop Ralph Steadman’s X account to “Enter the Steadmanverse.” Click the link and you travel to a Discord server comprised of two dozen or so sleepy channels. It’s a holdover of Steadman’s flirtation with NFTs that came at a time when web3 was seemingly imminent and inevitable.
The move spoke of an octogenarian who remains curious, an artist whose instantly recognizable works of spidery lines and grotesque subjects have remained both relevant and in-demand. Case in point, Harley-Davidson and Supreme recently dropped apparel splashed with Steadman ink. But for enduring popularity, look no further than college campuses where Steadman’s status as the irreverent illustrator-in-chief of ‘70s counter-culture has made his work a dorm wall staple.
Fitting then, that U.S. universities are set to play host to a comprehensive retrospective of Steadman’s varied and long-lasting career. Postponed in 2020, “Ralph Steadman: And Another Thing” makes amends with a marathon tour that begins at American University Museum in Washington, D.C. in September, and will run on-and-off through the fall of 2027.
Ralph Steadman, In the Beginning from Animal Farm (1994). Photo: courtesy Ralph Steadman.
As shown by the topical drawings he posts almost daily on social media—recent examples include bat day, scream day, St. George’s Day, world water day—Steadman remains prolific and engaged. The exhibition starts by presenting a young art student with a rather different palate. While studying at London’s East Ham Technical College in the ‘50s, Steadman dabbled with abstraction, creating geometric watercolors that echo the likes of Joan Miró and Wassily Kandinsky. Early sketchbooks and writings tell the tale.
Steadman’s caustic wit and social conscience, however, were not going to be contained by artfully arranged squares and circles. He began as a cartoonist at Kemsley Newspaper and by the early sixties his biting drawings began gracing outsider magazines such as Punch and Private Eye. He critiqued imperialism, class inequity, and political greed. All of British society, in other words.
Ralph Steadman, Fear and Loathing in Elko for Rolling Stone Magazine (1991). Photo courtesy Ralph Steadman.
Still, the going was tough. “I don’t make a lot of money,” he told an interviewer in 1965. This reality, paired with the country’s narrow publishing industry saw Steadman begin traveling back-and-forth to the U.S. in the early ‘70s. There, of course, he was introduced to Hunter S. Thompson and his anarchic vein of reporting, Gonzo journalism.
Naturally, “And Another Thing” traces this most raucous of relationships, one that rumbled on-and-off for 35 years until Thompson’s death in 2005. But it also delivers a fuller picture of Steadman’s prolific output over the past six decades. Yes, there are nearly 150 original works, but personal photographs, notes, and miscellaneous ephemera help out too.
“Steadman’s art challenges us, teaches us, and alters how we see the world,” said Andrea Lee Harris, the exhibition’s co-curator. “He has given us all a great gift and raised the bar for the generations following in his footsteps. The exhibition will delight diehard fans and uninitiated audiences eager to learn more.”
Ralph Steadman, Soldiers in Stripes from Alice Through the Looking Glass (1971). Photo: courtesy Ralph Steadman.
In contrast to the blood and bones drawings for which Steadman is best-known are his charming illustrations for children’s literature. These predate his work with Thompson and bear names such The Big Squirrel and Little Rhinoceros that offer Steadman working at an altogether different temperature.
There’s a cluster of political cartoons—the likes of Bill Clinton, Ronald Regan, and Richard Nixon, all savaged in pen and ink—but a balance between Steadman’s extremes typically comes in his illustrations for literature.
Chief among these is Steadman’s take on Alice in Wonderland in which he lowered characters he had observed around London into Lewis Carroll’s work. White Rabbit is a frazzled commuter, the Cheshire Cat appears looming and leering as though on top of a billboard, the playing cards are burly laborers complete with union numbers. It’s a frazzled world of chaos and corruption. A Steadmanverse, in other words.
“Ralph Steadman: And Another Thing” will be on view at the American University Museum, Katzen Arts Center, 4400 Massachusetts Ave NW, Washington, D.C., September 7–December 8.
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You could say that depicting motherhood has been something of an obsession for Old Masters from medieval times well into the Baroque period—after all, the Virgin and Child must be art history’s most iconic motif, where Mary often appears suitably docile and doting of the miniature adult in her arms. It may be evidence enough that none of these images were actually made by a mother, and it would be centuries before most had the chance to professionally paint, let alone offer a more candid portrayal of motherhood based on real experiences.
The question of how to represent what is, arguably, humanity’s most impressive act of creation, yet one that is consistently maligned, is the subject of “Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood” at the Arnolfini in Bristol. The show, curated by critic Hettie Judah, author of the manifesto “How Not to Exclude Artist Parents,” also delves into the history of artist mothers and their struggle to make their voices heard within a male dominated field.
Installation view of “Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood” at Arnolfini, Bristol. Photo: Lisa Whiting, courtesy of Arnolfini and Hayward Gallery Touring.
As Judah points out, for centuries it was up to male artists to present their most idealized visions of motherhood. “It’s not often that you see art featuring mothers who are bone-tired from night feeds, picking a chaos world of toys off the floor, or negotiating with opinionated toddlers,” she commented. “Our great museums seldom show mothers desperately juggling work and childcare, struggling with postnatal depression, or worrying about their kid getting picked up for a police ‘stop and search’. Real motherhood, in other words, in all of its diversity.”
Tabitha Soren, My Great American Novel (2007) installed at “Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood” at Arnolfini, Bristol. Photo: Lisa Whiting, courtesy of Arnolfini and Hayward Gallery Touring.
“In the 20th century, women were led to believe that they couldn’t be both an artist and a mother—motherhood was seen as a culturally unserious state, evidence that the woman in question was not fully committed to being an artist,” said Judah. “Until very recently, it was common for art students to be told that lived experience of motherhood was not an appropriate subject for art.”
Claudette Johnson, Afterbirth (1990). Photo: © Claudette Johnson.
One of the most fraught topics for expectant mothers living under the rigid strictures of patriarchy is the question of how their body will change after bearing new life. Stretch marks, scars, and folds are worn with pride by artist Claudette Johnson in a startlingly intimate self-portrait from 1990 that shows the artist in a powerful stance that defies stigma.
Caroline Walker, Bottles and Pumps (2022). Photo courtesy the artist.
The practical realities of caring for a baby was the subject of several 2022 paintings by Caroline Walker, who helped her sister-in-law through the first few anxious days after birth. In one work, the cleaning of equipment for bottle feeding becomes a painterly still life. The collection of plastic objects has unexpected beauty, despite their bright artificial tones of purple and yellow.
Billie Zangewa, Temporary Reprieve (2017) installed at “Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood” at Arnolfini, Bristol. Photo: Lisa Whiting, photo courtesy of Arnolfini and Hayward Gallery Touring.
Among the works Judah was particularly excited to include the intimate drawings of labor and delivery by Canadian-born artist Heather Spears, who stayed with a woman for several days to create the series.
“I have never encountered such a powerful account of the process of labor,” said Judah, “the long duration with its peaks and dips of activity, imagery of women getting up and walking around, napping, embracing their partner, having their cervix measured. It is an extraordinary body of work, and one that has not been seen.”
Jessa Fairbrother, Role Play (Woman with Cushion) (2017) installed at “Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood” at Arnolfini, Bristol. Photo: Lisa Whiting, courtesy of Arnolfini and Hayward Gallery Touring.
Judah is also particularly fond of a small 2011 self-portrait by Celia Paul called Frank and Me, in which her son lies on a sofa in the foreground and she can be seen smiling in the mirror behind.
“My sons are in their 20s, and I am so enjoying this new phase of the mother-child relationship now that they are adult men,” the curator said. “This work of Paul’s moves me so much.”
Paula Rego, Untitled 6 (1999). Photo courtesy Cristea Roberts Gallery.
The exhibition also features the work of women who have more complicated relationships to motherhood. One example is Paula Rego’s moving “Abortion” series based on her own experiences in the 1950s. It was made in the late 1990s to protest a referendum in Portugal that failed to legalize the vital medical procedure. (It was later legalized in 2007.) These works ruminate on the physical dangers and psychological toll of women being forced to visit back street clinics in secrecy.
Installation view of “Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood” at Arnolfini, Bristol. Photo: Lisa Whiting, courtesy of Arnolfini and Hayward Gallery Touring.
“Addressing the historic gender gap isn’t just a matter of fitting women into the story of art as it has been told,” said Judah. “It is also crucial that we start asking which stories and which experiences have been excluded, and which lives have been less visible.”
“Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood” is on view at the Arnolfini in Bristol through May 26, 2024. 
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Spring has sprung in New York—and so has the art world’s busy fair season. Whether you’re a local or in town to visit the more than half dozen fairs alighting in the city this May—including Frieze, NADA New York, and TEFAF, as well as newcomer Esther—you’ll also want to make room on your calendar (and take advantage of the spring weather) to also visit some of the gallery shows debuting this month.
From a New York-native artist taking over a gallery space with site-specific installations to a painter bringing the culture of Aboriginal Australia to a wider audience, these five artists starring in solo shows across the city are not to be missed.
1. Daniel Walbidi, “Yurlupirti: Forever Without End (eternal)”D’Lan Contemporary, through May 31
Daniel Walbidi, Winpa (2023). Courtesy of the artist and D’Lan Contemporary.
Hailing from the Northwestern coast of Australia, Daniel Walbidi (b. 1983) is a Mangala/Yulparitja artist whose practice is centered around learning about and expressing both his culture as well as the natural landscape of his community’s ancestral homeland. A rising star within Australian First Nations artists, the exhibition features 10 recent works by Walbidi that are larger in scale than his previous (and sold out) exhibition with D’Lan Contemporary in May 2023. Employing his signature, meticulous brushwork and vivid color palettes, Walbidi’s paintings illustrate his own deep connection with the coastal desert environment and convey it to a broader international audience.

2. Rachel Eulena Williams, “Dream Speak”Canada, through June 1
Rachel Eulena Williams, Soul on Ice (2024). Courtesy of the artist and Canada.
Marking her second solo exhibition with the gallery, “Dream Speak” sees Rachel Eulena Williams (b. 1991) continue her pursuit of “making painting literal.” Breaking down painting to the essentials, Williams reconstructs these elements (like color, light, texture, and perspective) by using diverse—and sometimes surprising—materials. Colorful fabrics, canvas, rope, fiberboard, hooks, and wire all symphonize, and let viewers explore her distinct artistic vernacular; this includes symbols and iconography that tap the pictographic language of the Bono People, Andinkra, recognized for its ability to concisely express concepts and maxims, as well as pagan symbology.

3. Ronny Quevedo, “Composite Portals”Alexander Gray Associates, through June 15
Ronny Quevedo, El valle de la periferia (The Valley of the Periphery) (2023). Courtesy of the artist and Alexander Gray Associates.
Ronny Quevedo (b. 1981) maintains a practice that consistently draws sharp focus on the intersections and dichotomies between personal and collective histories, dominant and marginalized cultures, and how ideas around identity are shaped. In his newest body of work, Quevedo uses Andean textiles as a starting point to examine pre and postcolonial realities, and in his work literally weaves materials such as paper sewing patterns, metallic leaf on muslin, and carbon copy paper into geometric patterns. The result are works that are deceptively straight forward, full of clues and references that promise to reveal their origins with close and careful looking.
4. Sahara Longe, “Sugar”Timothy Taylor, May 2–June 15
Sahara Longe, Good Times / Bad Times (2024). Courtesy of the artist and Timothy Taylor.
In “Sugar,” Sahara Longe (b. 1994) reconsiders art history and its canonic perspectives to generate new compositional and figurative possibilities. Tapping traditional allegorical motifs—such as Adam and Eve or the reclining Venus—Longe creates entirely new visual interpretations and arrangements, resulting in works that are haunting and timeless. Across all 12 works on canvas in the show, Longe’s deft handling of line and color are brought to the fore, and her use of raw pigments and thick-grain linen make these new works appear from a time gone by, recalling historic modes such as Symbolism or the Bauhaus.

5. Hugh Hayden, “Hughmans”Lisson, May 2–August 2
Hugh Hayden, American Gothic (2024). Courtesy of the artist and Lisson Gallery.
For his second solo exhibition with Lisson this year, Hugh Hayden (b. 1983) creates a site-specific installation for the gallery’s New York space. Employing recognizable materials and motifs in his work, Hayden engages with widely relatable personal themes such as intimacy and desire within a physically explorable context. The show is timed with his 10-year survey exhibition at the Laumeier Sculpture Park, Saint Louis, Missouri, and precedes another major solo exhibition opening this fall at the Rose Museum of Art at Brandeis University, together denoting an important moment in the artist’s career.
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The Motor City is the venue for an expansive exhibition of queer artists taking place this summer, timed to Pride Month. “I’ll Be Your Mirror: Reflections of the Contemporary Queer” is curated by Detroit artist and high school art teacher Patrick Burton. Its title echoes that of a classic Velvet Underground song to suggest a relationship between art and the viewer, as well as, Burton said, “the importance of visibility and affirmation.”
“In many respects, we see art as activism, and it’s really important to respond to the many anti-LGBTQ+ bills that are being advanced right now,” said Burton. “When you want to understand a people, you look at its culture. It’s the same for queer people. It’s in June for a reason, to offer an alternative to parties and parades and drag shows, to help viewers to understand who we are.”
John Criscitello, FGGT (2021). Courtesy of the artist.
The sprawling show includes more than 800 works spread across 12 venues by 170 artists, including well-known contemporary figures like Eve Fowler, Hillary Harkness, Lyle Ashton Harris, Clarity Haynes, and Wayne Koestenbaum, as well as some historical practitioners such as Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden and George Platt Lynes.
This is the biennial’s second edition; the first, which was devoted entirely to Detroit artists, was similarly curated by Burton and also took place over the course of Pride Month. This time, the scope is international, with artists from as far as Beijing. The nonprofit organization that’s putting on the show, Mighty Real/Queer Detroit, is made up of just a handful of people, all with day jobs, who are volunteering their time, Burton said.
Unconventionally for biennial exhibitions, the work is openly for sale; all proceeds go to the artists. The organization’s website includes links to every artist’s website. More

Any halfway serious film buff can name an array of films that take place in New York City, from Taxi Driver to Breakfast at Tiffany’s, from Manhattan to Splash, and from West Side Story to Midnight Cowboy. A film series at New York’s Lincoln Center presents an alternative history of Gotham, including selections from the nearly 6,000-strong collection of the city’s Film-Makers’ Cooperative.
“Seeing the City: Avant-Garde Visions of New York” will run at Film at Lincoln Center from May 3–7 and will highlight visions of the city premised on experimentation and subversion, many of them on 16mm film.
Charles Simonds and Rudy Burckhardt, Dwellings (1974). Courtesy of the Film-Makers’ Cooperative.
Organized by Tom Day, executive director of the New American Cinema Group/The Film-Makers’ Cooperative, and Film at Lincoln Center’s Dan Sullivan, the festival will explore themes like mass transit, the built environment, gentrification, “non-human animals,” and specific neighborhoods, from the Lower East Side to the South Bronx and Coney Island. 
Among the filmmakers are some well-known names. Stan Brakhage contributes The Wonder Ring (1955) as part of a program on transit. Rudy Burckhardt’s Eastside Summer (1959), D.A. Pennebaker’s Daybreak Express (1953), and Arthur “Weegee” Fellig’s WeeGee’s New York (1948) are all part of a program on “city symphonies,” a genre that offers a panoramic view of a city’s architecture and people.
Stan VanDerBeek’s Snapshots of the City (1960), meanwhile, is part of a program of films documenting the various art forms manifesting in 1960s New York, including documentation of Pop Art and Happenings pioneer Claes Oldenburg’s storefront and Judson Church performances.
Francis Thompson, N.Y, N.Y. (1957). Courtesy the Film-Makers’ Cooperative.a
Also on tap are a selection of women’s films about gendered space, such as Shirley Clarke’s 1959 film Skyscraper, documenting the building of 666 Fifth Avenue; Holly Fisher’s 1978 From the Ladies, shot in the powder room of what was at the time the city’s only Holiday Inn; and Bette Gordon’s 1987 Greed: Pay to Play, in which, as Gordon wrote, “Three women have a strange claustrophobic encounter in the ladies lounge of a luxurious Manhattan hotel.” A fixture of New York’s artistic sphere appears in sound: Laurie Anderson’s electronic music forms the soundtrack to Rick Liss’s 1983 N.Y.C. (No York City), in the “city symphony” genre.
Rudy Burckhardt, Eastside Summer (1959). Courtesy of Film-Makers’ Cooperative.
Two opposing notes are sounded by a duo of films spotlighting urban renewal, or gentrification, as the opposing parties might label the phenomenon. John Peer Nugent and Gordon Hyatt’s What Is the City but the People? (1969) was a propagandistic documentary produced by the Department of City Planning to promote its projects. The film Break and Enter a.k.a Squatters / Rompiendo Puertas (1971), by a collective called Newsreel, by contrast, spotlights the efforts of Puerto Rican and Dominican families, as well as the activist work of Operation Move-In, to reclaim abandoned homes.
The Film-Makers Coooperative was established in New York in 1961 by a group of filmmakers and artists and holds one of the world’s largest repositories of film and media art.
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On the heels of the opening of the 60th Venice Biennale comes the 20th edition of Gallery Weekend Berlin, a city-wide initiative that includes scores of solo and group exhibitions around the German capital. This year’s edition is helmed by new director Antonia Ruder following longtime head Maike Cruse’s move to Art Basel, where she now leads the marquee Swiss edition of the fair. With some 50 galleries presenting brand-news shows this weekend, there is a lot to see—but amid the swirl, here are five shows you shouldn’t miss.

Clemens von Wedemeyer’s “Social Geometry” at KOW
Installation view of Clemens von Wedemeyer, Social Geometry (2024) at KOW, Berlin. Photo: Ladislav Zajac. Courtesy the artist and KOW, Berlin.
The German filmmaker has a longstanding interest in social groups and the behavior of the masses. Speaking to those macro themes, he’s again made a comment with his new show, though there is no mob or crowd in site as there has been in works of the past.
Calm and mundane scenes taken from around California, from Meta’s manicured HQ to a dusty landscape at Desert X, or the hilly streets of Palo Alto with their sloped driveways and sea views, become unsettling over time in von Wedemeyer’s new video work Surface Composition, one part of his exhibition “Social Geometry.” A camera hovers, neutrally observing the minutiae of a place that has, in many ways, had the greatest impact on our society and psychology in this century. But the work does not explicitly moralize; instead, it simply gazes on at the details of the physical landscape and people and intersections that have in some indirect, intangible way, shaped the virtual world.
The scenes in Surface Composition could be read like a backstage of our society, which is increasingly migrating onto online platforms that are headquartered in California. The front stage, then, is the titular work of the show, a large immersive video installation that beams a series of abstract nodes that twist, expand, and flicker on screen, cascading against you as you walk through the space. A disembodied voice (which just so happens to be that of the inimitable poet Anne Clark) describes a rapidly entangled network of human impulses, of changing habits, of news as gossip, censorship, and total surveillance. Through poetic simplicity, von Wedermeyer captures what is most unnerving about our era: how the profundity of the change we are living through still eludes us.

Rachel Harrison’s “Bird Watching” at Konrad Fischer Galerie
Installation view of Rachel Harrison’s “Bird Watching” on view during Gallery Weekend Berlin. Photo: Roman März. Courtesy the artist and Konrad Fischer Galerie
The sculptor and artist is a star in my books, a conceptual and poetic trickster whose work pries at the strangeness of high and low culture with poignancy and wit. In “Bird Watching,” there are no birds to be watched, but rather it is the curios of human nature and society that is being drawn up in front of us and formed, filtered, and collaged in various ways onto Harrison’s brilliantly executed sculptures, photographs, and a cheeky new video work.
Nothing seems out of bounds when it comes to what is borrowed, yet it is meticulously mixed in and it all blends perfectly: Stanley Quenchers (those titanic mugs that went viral earlier this year) are juxtaposed against remakes of Giacometti sculptures, one of which is wearing glasses on the back of his head in a clever nod to bro culture but also, perhaps, in homage to Isa Genzken. In view from there are large-format photographs that Harrison made by capturing a televised dog show. These ephemeral photo prints almost seem holographic as you walk near them and reveal themselves the longer you look—fingernails scratch the film, a ghostly dog appears in another—as if the images were being burned into the negative in real time.
Content is layered over and over itself through Harrison’s artistic processing and through relations with other elements in the show. Everything is slightly off-kilter. What gets historicized or becomes valuable, and what is ultimately non-precious and detritus, is completely thrown on its head.

Sung Tieu’s “Perfect Standard” at Trautwein Herleth
Installation view of Sung Tieu’s “Perfect Standard” at Trautwein Herleth. Courtesy of Trautwein Herleth.
The devastations wrought by extractive colonialism are vast and wide-ranging, but German-Vietnamese artist Sung Tieu keeps a tight aperture in her new exhibition “Perfect Standard,” taking an empirical approach to express how seemingly mundane administration was used as a tool for domination.
A thin line of measurement sticks bisects the entire gallery at Trautwein Herleth (formerly Barbara Weiss), a brutal incision by Tieu that heightens a lurking notion of violence. Two different wooden rulers stacked on atop the other stand in for how, through the seemingly neutral tools of bureaucracy and administration, one society imposed itself onto another, in particular France’s colonial rule over Indochina (modern day Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia). Currency is smushed into a walkway of rubber—the material was one of the raw materials extracted by the French via most unfair dealings—that runs the inner perimeter of the gallery. It nearly feels like an existential walk on the plank into the past,  leading visitors to a pair of wall works depicting a second-long scene from the late 19th century. A French colonizer is tossing coins at local children, an act that is vile but seems to have occurred under the auspices of benevolence, as implied by the work’s title, The Opposite of Good is Good Intentions.
In the series of ruler works, variously called “The Ruling,” one set of sticks includes the indigenous measurements that were formerly used in the region while the top lines plots out the European metric system. There is a seven-centimeter difference between them. In many business dealings in the colonial regime, the difference was negated, meaning an unaccounted surplus was continually scooped by the French. Out of this replication of this precise difference, a negative space intermittently occurs in her sculpture, a mathematical gap that expresses an unquantifiable amount of injustice. It is a white space that bleeds all out to rest of the walls, spiraling into a formless scream.

“territory” at Sprüth Magers with works by Mire Lee, Liu Yujia, Gala Porras-Kim, Tan Jing, Zhang Ruyi
“territory” Installation view of Mire Lee. Sprüth Magers, Berlin, April 27–June 29, 2024. Photo: Timo Ohler. On view during Gallery Weekend Berlin.
Shi-ne Oh, head of Asia and Senior Director at the gallery, has put together a deftly curated exhibition of museum-quality work contemplating notions of borderlands. As the shadows of conflict continue to spread a dark sense of anxiety globally, “territory” meets the moment, exploring boundaries as shifting psychological sites as well as political, ecological, and even intimate.
Much of the work in this show feels like it is breathing. In some cases this is actually true: Gala Porras-Kim’s spore-laden work includes mold collected from the British Museum. The microbes are thriving well on this work, called Out of an instance of expiration comes a perennial showing (2022/24). On a top level, it jests at the lack of care that’s been made apparent at the British Museum with all its recent scandals sullying its reputation. But the entropy of the work also speaks most poetically to the decay of the colonial legacy and the so-called universal museum.
And I won’t soon forget the noise of Mire Lee’s rehang of 2022 installation Look, I’m a fountain of filth raving mad with love, a sonically invasive space you step into that is very nearly dark, which feels like a forgotten construction site or a buried memory. Concrete mixers come to life intermittently, violently spinning at odd intervals. Lee brings the borderland to its most intimate zones—the artist said the kinetic sculptures stand in for mouth and assholes. In another part of the installation, visitors can pull up fleshy looking curtains to read concealed fragments of poems, part of a work of poems Lee is publishing later this year.
This show is poetic but deeply political. “We are fed with news 24 hours all around the world and we are constantly here but not here,” commented Shi-ne. “[W]hat is a territory, who defines it, do I belong in my own territory? Is there such a thing?… As a Korean native, this is a question that resonates with me deeply.”

Alex Carver’s “Expanded Skin” at Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler
Alex Carver, exhibition view, “Expanded Skin,” Kraupa–Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin, 2024. Courtesy the artist, and Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin. Photo: Marjorie Brunet Plaza.
Suffering is a constant condition that is made explicit in Alex Carver’s paintings. It is unrelenting. His large-scale paintings, which hang on walls or are tautly suspended on wire cables in the middle of the gallery, depict what is simultaneously beautiful and cruel, capturing something precisely horrific in a blend of painterly styles.
Carver reflects and refracts many moments across art history, in particular its more dysmorphic tendencies: one can detect an homage to Lucio Fontana’s slashed paintings. But Carver does something more brutal when he paints these modernist slices across his scenes, never letting us forget how painting is just a picture, that it’s always just surface.
These are works worth seeing in person because they play with flatness in a most curious way. Several works mirror the maximal logic and figures from Hieronymous Bosch and other medieval scenes. In other parts of a painting, one can pick up a call back to the opulent flowing drapes and clothing folds mastered by Titian, which are skillfully copied in here. Speaking of copies, Carver’s meticulously layering tactics include frottage, pulling in whiffs of patterns and imagery using a technique of rubbing a pattern onto a canvas, officially developed by Max Ernst in the early 20th century, but which we all probably did at some point in the autumn with dried leaves as children. This chorus of references could edge on cacaphony, but Carver holds it together. Anyway, we are fluent in this kind of chaotic flush of images now, where we swipe past brutality and then onto beauty in an instance online, managing our emotions through a constant stream of virtual images that are spliced together. Carver, refreshingly, brings us back to an edge.
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