Art & Exhibitions

It’s a beautiful day in Los Angeles when I reach Jónsi over Zoom. Standing on the balcony of his apartment, the musician and artist spins his camera around to show me his view of the city, its perennially deep blue skies foregrounded by palm trees. “It’s nice and sunny,” he informs me, with some understatement. 
The scene is the antithesis to Jónsi’s native Iceland—with its “darkness and depression”—and perhaps a marked contrast to the music and art he’s turned out. As the frontman of art-rock band Sigur Rós, he’s shepherded haunting, almost hermetic, soundscapes, tinged with his otherworldly voice and cello-bowed guitar. And as an artist, he’s crafted environments meant to envelop viewers, transporting them to spheres not always sunlit. 
His move to L.A. about eight years ago, he told me, hasn’t really shifted his perspective or approach to art-making: “When I first came to L.A., I could never understand working in windowless studios that are like black boxes. But now, I understand that you have to isolate yourself from paradise.” 
Jónsi’s new works, now on view at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in L.A., don’t stray far from that black box. Chief among them is Vox (2023), an installation that invites viewers to sit in a darkened room, leavened only by thin LED screens displaying minimalistic visualizations of light frequencies and the sound of Jónsi’s own singing voice. Sort of: the artist’s vocalizations have also been pitched down, reversed, stretched, synthesized, and sampled with help from A.I.—all the better to probe the essence of the human voice. 
Jónsi, Vox (2023). Courtesy the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles.
“The voice is the most primitive and most beautiful instrument there is. That mid-range frequency of, like, 1,000 hertz is the clearest to people. I just wanted to celebrate that,” he explained of the work. “Basically, every sound in the installation is made by the human voice, or it’s only my voice… egomaniac.” (Jónsi, by the way, has a sense of humor.) 
Voice, in fact, serves as a through line for his other pieces—if not the production of sound, then the act of listening. Silent Sigh (2023) is a matrix of 100 speakers that variously vibrate and rebound as direct currents and a subtle drone weave through them. Meanwhile, Var (2023) presents a ceiling-hung blanket threaded with thousands of tiny directional speakers, which emit ASMR-like sounds of dripping, shuffling, and crinkling.
Jónsi, Var (2023). Courtesy the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles.
The latter, Jónsi said, was meant to evoke a “safe place.” Under its canopy, visitors listening to the gentle soundscape can imagine themselves by a crackling fire, maybe, or hearing rain on a roof. “When you put these sounds together, it’s comforting,” he added, “but it’s also kind of creepy.” 
Realizing these pieces was also a technical venture. Jónsi credited creative engineer Damon Dorsey for building the LED screens for Vox and the speaker web for Silent Sigh (Dark); and recalled how he and his boyfriend spent hours upon hours hand-soldering speakers and wires into Var. But perhaps one the most critical aspect of these pieces, while similarly scientific, remains unseen: scent. 
Jónsi, Var (2023) (detail). Courtesy the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles.
For about a decade, Jónsi has involved himself in perfumery, attempting to distill what he called “good breathable perfume,” while creating scents for his artworks. Var, for instance, is accompanied by the warm smell of freshly cut grass and rain, and Vox sports a more earthy fragrance with notes of vetiver grass (his favorite scent) and root-based essential oils.
In his telling, the aromatic arts remain his one relentless pursuit: “I think perfumery is the ultimate, most depressing thing that is out there. It’s a bottomless pit of disappointment. You do hundreds and hundreds of experiments and nothing works. It is extremely hard, probably the hardest thing I’ve done in my life.” 
But for an artist with a broader project of immersion, scent, along with sight and sound, have been indispensable. His 2021 work Hrafntinna (Obsidian), a tribute to Reykajik’s Fagradalsfjall volcano, brought together a wall of 200 speakers, choral arrangements, and the smell of fossilized amber. Earlier this year, FLÓÐ (2023), unveiled at the National Nordic Museum in Seattle, paired field recordings with the scent of seaweed within a foggy environment.
Creating these artworks, said Jónsi, who was admitted into but never attended art school, has been far more challenging than his work in music. There are the endlessly practical elements of art, for one, from how one realizes a piece to the matter of storing or shipping it. For another, the unspoken communication between the members of Sigur Rós, he added, translates differently in his art practice. 
“Coming from a musical background, you let everything just flow through you and then magic happens,” he explained. “But art is the opposite. Everything is really conceptualized and has to have some genius idea behind it. But it’s also made me think a lot about the stuff I’m doing, which is interesting to me.” 
Jónsi, Silent Sigh (Dark) (2023) (detail). Courtesy the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles.
Still, he acknowledged that his roots in music have shaped the direction of his art, fueling his desire to bring the “invisible magic” of a live show, with its sound and light elements, to the gallery. “You want to enhance people’s senses. You want to trigger something and make them feel more,” he said. 
It’s an experience that Jónsi himself is not immune to. 
“With an artwork like Vox, with 52 speakers, it’s like surround sound. This is hard to experience when you play live music,” he said. “So, this gallery thing has really helped me to enjoy that experience of just being immersed in audio and sound. It’s a different output.” 
“Jónsi: Vox” is on view at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, 1010 N Highland Avenue, Los Angeles, California, through February 3, 2024. 

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The temperature has officially dipped to frosty digits, and the streets smell perpetually of pine needles and roasted chestnuts—it is, after all, the most wonderful time of the year. For many people, the weeks leading up to the new year marks an ideal time to take a vacation and reflect on the last 12 months. Jet-setters typically fall into two camps: those who flock to warmer climes, and those who double down on the magic of winter and set off to chase the snow. While many visitors to the mountain towns that serve as arctic playgrounds for winter sports enthusiasts, some prefer to be swathed in warm corduroys than to carve through it on a blue-bird morning.
Luckily, many of the world-renown mountain towns and ski resorts are also home to world-class art museums and galleries, proving that there is something for everyone at these alpine retreats. Below, we’ve rounded up some of the most exciting art exhibitions now on view at these snowy resort destinations.

Aspen, Colorado
“Issy Wood in the Company of Fernando Botero” at the Aspen Art MuseumDecember 14, 2023–February 4, 2024
Issy Wood, Issy Wood, Tasting it all (2023). © Issy Wood 2023, courtesy the artist; Carlos/Ishikawa, London; and Michael Werner Gallery, New York. Photographer: Damian Griffiths.
The Aspen Art Museum is the crown jewel of the mountain town’s art scene, centrally located in the heart of the city—and while it’s best known as the host of the ArtCrush Gala in August, it is a year-round destination for contemporary art exhibitions and events. Designed by Pritzker Prize-winner Shigeru Ban, the distinctive wooden-lattice-wrapped exterior plays into Ban’s description of the institution: “Because the museum doesn’t have collections, there are many different exhibitions—it’s like a basket, you can put anything you like inside.”
This December, a new painting by contemporary star Issy Wood debuts at the museum alongside work by the late Colombian painter Fernando Botero. The juxtaposition, accompanied by a new text by Wood, is the most recent iteration in a series of artist-led presentations titled “Lover’s Discourse” that draws connections between contemporary work and often unexpected companion pieces. Previous iterations featured artists Zeinab Saleh, Chase Hall, Ulala Imai, and Guglielmo Castelli.

David Yarrow at Casterline | Goodman
David Yarrow, J-Bar. Courtesy of the artist and Casterline Goodman Gallery.
Founded in 2011, Casterline | Goodman gallery is a mainstay of both contemporary and Post-War art in the mountain town. With locations in the heart of downtown and at the five-star Little Nell Hotel, the gallery features a rotating cycle of thoughtfully-curated exhibitions and an extensive inventory of artists including Alex Katz, Frank Stella, Tom Wesselmann, and Helen Frankenthaler, and represents artists including Alexander Höller, Seth Fiifi Afful, Tyler Shields, and David Yarrow.
An exhibition of Yarrow’s striking black-and-white photographs is on view now, displaying the artist’s fantastical narrative images. Deftly capturing subjects including both Hollywood actors and celebrities as well as wildlife and landscapes. While seemingly disparate subjects themes, Yarrow’s lens captures the grace and stately bearing that is shared by practiced performers and great wild animals. Highlights include J-Bar, a cinematic image that conjures the spirit of the famed saloon-style bar at the Jerome Hotel and Snow Monster, in which snow-dusted bison confront the viewer with fierce elegance.

Taos, New Mexico
“Harwood 100” at the Harwood Museum of ArtThrough January 28, 2024
Installation view of the Agnes Martin Gallery at the Harwood Museum of Art of the University of New Mexico. © Agnes Martin Foundation, NY / Artist Rights Society (ARS) New York. Courtesy of the Harwood Museum of Art.
The town of Taos, New Mexico is both a historic destination and one brimming with youthful energy. Located in the north-central region of New Mexico in the heart of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, its name, which translates to “(place of) red willows” is shared with the nearby Native American Taos Pueblo, one of the oldest communities within the United States. In 1915, six artists banded together to form the Taos Society of Artists, and the town has remained a cultural hub drawing such luminaries as Ansel Adams, Georgia O’Keeffe, Alfred Stieglitz, Dennis Hopper, Ken Price, and Judy Chicago.
The Harwood Museum of Art at the University of New Mexico is celebrating 100 years since artists and philanthropists Burt and Lucy Harwood established their eponymous foundation, which they envisioned as a “Salon of the Southwest” that could rival the artistic communities in New York and Paris. In addition to the scores of works on loan to honor the centennial, the permanent collection remains a must-see for all visitors. One particular highlight is the Agnes Martin Gallery, featuring seven paintings by the acclaimed abstract artist who lived and worked in Taos until her death in 2004. The bespoke room is more akin to a chapel than a white-cube art gallery, with four Donald Judd-designed benches arranged beneath the museum’s oculus to encourage contemplation and reflection, while basking in the serene beauty of Martin’s masterpieces.

“Lowe Fehn: Waters of Ours” at the ValleyThrough January 6, 2024
Lowe Fehn, Orbiting Breath to Body (2023). Courtesy of the artist and the Valley.
After stints at Kasmin in New York and as a curator and art advisor in Denver, veteran curator Ari Myers moved to Taos and opened the contemporary art space the Valley. In the few years since its debut, it has emerged as a distinctive and leading voice within the artistic community, and recently moved into a new space, a large 100-year-old adobe building. On view now through January 6, 2024 is “Waters of Ours,” an exhibition of new works on paper by Richmond, Virginia-based artist Lowe Fehn. The theme of water runs throughout the works, as both a metaphor and a physical presence that invites both looking deeper and further beyond. The works have a hazy, dreamlike quality, as if depicting a scene conjured from memory, sun-dappled and mid-movement.

Sun Valley, Idaho
“Sightings” at the Sun Valley Museum of ArtThrough January 4, 2024
Esther Pearl Watson, “An Exercise in Unselfish Love”, 2022.
Over the last few years, individuals have been nudged, rather forcefully, to reassess their relationship with the natural world. Worldwide isolation measures prevented extensive travel, and the challenge of remaining in one place became an opportunity to reevaluate our most immediate surroundings. The impetus for “Sightings” arose with the understanding that many artists began to look to the night sky as a source of comfort and inspiration—a beautiful and comforting constant in a time of upheaval.
The Sun Valley Museum of Art is uniquely located at the edge of the iconic Central Idaho Dark Sky Reserve—a 1,415-square-mile area designated by the International Dark Sky Association for its breathtaking open views of the Milky Way in all its glory. Regulations prevent excess light sources from diminishing optimal views of the stars that draw photographers and stargazers from around the world, and musings about the existence of extraterrestrial life forms abound. The artists in “Sightings” each address the night sky individually, as both a source of mystery and logic.

“Deck the Walls” at Gilman ContemporaryThrough January 24, 2024
Ellie Davies, Seascapes Triptych 3: Birch. Courtesy of the artist and Gilman Contemporary.
The fine art gallery located in the resort community of Sun Valley is celebrating the season with its annual group exhibition, fittingly titled “Deck the Walls.” A wide range of works in media including painting, photography, and collage show the breadth of range within the gallery’s dynamic artist roster.
Ellie Davies is a Dorset-based photographer who trains her lens on the majesty of the natural world, particularly the forests in Dorset and Hampshire in southern England. In Seascapes Triptych 3: Birch, the swirls of light surrounding the pine tree native to the U.K. could be read as either stars twinkling in a dark night sky, or the reflection of light on water.

The Engadin Valley and Gstaad, Switzerland
“Gerhard Richter: Engadin” at Nietzsche-Haus, the Segantini Museum, and Hauser & Wirth St. MoritzDecember 16, 2023–April 13, 2024
Gerhard Richter, St. Moritz (1992). © Gerhard Richter 2023.
Nestled deep within the Engadin Valley, the Swiss town of St. Moritz is world renown as a playground for the rich and famous for good reason. Boasting stunning natural beauty in the glaciers and snow-capped mountains that surround it, as well as a wealth of luxury boutiques and world-class hotels, it’s an ideal venue for both serious winter sports enthusiasts and snow bunnies more interested in the après ski scene. Off piste, the city fondly known as the “Top of the World” is home to world-class art galleries, including Vito Schnabel Gallery and Hauser & Wirth; plus a slew of historic and contemporary museums.
The picturesque setting—which has been featured in multiple James Bond films including Goldfinger and The Spy Who Loved Me, and more recently served as the hideaway for Maurizio Gucci in the 2001 film The House of Gucci—is also the inspiration for a suite of works by acclaimed German artist Gerhard Richter, who is being feted with a trio of exhibitions in and around St. Moritz. More than 70 works on loan from museums and private collections have been reunited as a singular body of work made over the course of 30 years, during which time the artist frequently visited the lakes and mountains of the area.

“Abstract Explorations: 100 Years on Paper” at Gagosian in GstaadDecember 20, 2023–January 25, 2024
Wassily Kandinsky, Réciproque (1935). Courtesy of Gagosian Gallery.
Another city known for its upscale offerings is of course, Gstaad, located in the Bernese Oberland region of the Swiss Alps. Dubbed simply “The Place” by Time magazine in the 1960s, Gstaad enjoys a rosy reputation bolstered by regular visitors including Madonna, Valentino, Grace Kelly, and Princess Diana. It is also a destination for eminent art worlders like collector and LUMA Foundation founder Maja Hoffman, art historian Oiver Berggruen, and the late modern artist Balthus.
Naturally, mega-gallery Gagosian has an outpost in the chic Alpine town. A new exhibition opening on December 20 is “Abstract Explorations: 100 Years on Paper,” which tracks the evolution of abstraction over the course of of the early 20th century through today. Work by artists including Wassily Kandinsky, Cy Twombly, Helen Frankenthaler, and Albert Oehlen chart the enduring appeal of abstraction.
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When I first visited Tbilisi, Georgia, in winter 2018, I was taken to meet Lika Kacharava, and in her small apartment we drank local natural wine, ate homemade fare, and viewed many paintings, drawings, and notebooks by her late brother Karlo Kacharava. His art—renderings of brooding people in desolate places, often captioned with aphorisms, poems, and dedications in Georgian and German—hung on nearly every vertical surface, sat stacked up on the floor, or were arranged in bookshelves. His boldly lined and hued work was everywhere, and all of it was powerful. It was astounding.
The apartment remains a time capsule of an incredibly prolific artistic output in a country that, when Kacharava was alive, was asserting its independent identity from the crumbling Soviet Union (the Georgian civil war ran from 1991 to 1993). The artist died of an aneurism at age 30 in 1994, but he’d already feverishly produced thousands of paintings and works on paper.
He was also a cultural critic, poet, editor, educator, and spearhead of two of Georgia’s avant-garde art collectives. The Cold War art-world polymath struck a nerve just as the globe’s tense postwar geopolitical balances were dramatically shifting. Yet, with the exception of a solo gallery show in New York in 1998 and a group exhibition at Metro Pictures in 2017, his work remained largely unknown outside his home country.

A. Döblin (1992). Courtesy of Karlo Kacharava Estate
That is changing. The London-based gallery Modern Art began working with the estate in 2021. This month, the first solo museum exhibition of the artist’s oeuvre outside Georgia opened at S.M.A.K. contemporary art museum in Ghent, Belgium, in part orchestrated by Kacharava’s estate, which is overseen by Lika Kacharava.
The show, titled “Sentimental Traveller,” in a nod to the artist’s desired and actual travels, exhibits 150 of the artist’s works. There are paintings, drawings, sketchbooks, diaries, and ephemera, from photographs and documentary films to album covers and cassettes from the artist’s collection. (I recognized one painting, Mouchette, 1992, from Lika’s wall). The pieces follow the threads of the artist’s production from about 1988 to 1994, in part referring to his sojourns to Spain, Germany, and Russia; most of all, they at last introduce this remarkable body of work to a western European public.
The show opens with a large-scale painting of a bemedaled military general in a yellow uniform—with rough outlines and bold brushstrokes, the figure appears on a blank background as if he’s striding and giving orders. Called General, Für Helena (1988), the piece is dedicated to “Helena” in large letters (Kachavara spent a short time in the Russian military in Siberia; his work was often dedicated to women he knew and loved, but also to inspirational people he didn’t know, like critic Susan Sontag, German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder, or playwright Bertolt Brecht).
Photo by Dirk Pauwels, Courtesy S.M.A.K.
Other works depict universal topics, but also deeply private interactions, that concerned the artist—ideas, books, places, politics, but above all, people—by way of oversize, sharp-featured heads and often distorted bodies painted in blazing colors like cobalt blue, red, and yellow, but at times also in muted grays (that yellow prevails in so many early works, I was told, was because not all pigments were always available in Cold War Georgia). Some works tend toward hyperrealism, while others evoke the stylized figurations of Ernst Ludwig Kirschner, Max Beckmann, or the political critique of George Grosz—German Neo-expressionists who painted street scenes, satirical cartoons, and portraits in the early 20th century.
Cityscapes show structures that resemble Socialist apartment blocks, bleak industrial buildings, like Factory (1988), or a concrete-heavy corner in Milan (Marino Sironi (1992) is a reference to Italian Futurist Mario Sironi). There are portraits of friends, family, lovers. Helena shows up again as a nude, gazing straight back at the viewer; elsewhere, famous figures, like a small-format, solitary portrait of Endy Warhol (1991), exude a certain melancholy.
Anarchist’s Dream (1992). Courtesy the Estate of Karlo Kacharava, Tbilisi, and Modern Art, London
Kachavara often highlighted his era’s power structures: in stark reds and blues, Wir Sind Das Volk (in German, “we are the people,” one of the early slogans of demonstrators against the German Democratic Republic’s government in 1989) shows stern-faced young people seemingly clashing with authorities. And in a series of works on paper labelled “Erased portraits of politicians,” a blacked-out face of Soviet politicians appears on one side of each page, a sketch of a figure or scene on the other. A handful of the artist’s poems appear in Georgian and English on the walls. “This is how Sunday ends in a proletarian ballerina’s sleep” is an especially evocative line, capturing the ennui of late-Soviet-era communism, but also reminding us that the precarity of art and artists transcends time and space.
Kacharava’s works are deeply narrative—some canvasses even function as storyboards, separated into scenes like the grid of cityscapes, abstractions, and portraits in Stars of Cold War (1991). But Kacharava’s narratives are not linear: the sketchbooks and diaries on display seamlessly combine the visual and textual as if he were hyperlinking his thoughts long before digital hyperlinks existed. The show is an excerpt of a vast archive of networked thinking produced in a politically uncertain time, not entirely unlike our current one. After the estate gained notable gallery representation during the pandemic, interest in the work rose further as war broke out in Ukraine: the greater region’s tensions are of course ongoing and Kacharava’s oeuvre is a multilayered glimpse into one part of post-Soviet art history’s earliest chapter.
Irena Popiashvili, a Tbilisi art-world catalyst and the person who’d originally taken me to dine with Lika Kacharava in that jam-packed Tbilisi apartment, told me after the Ghent opening that today’s Georgian art students see Kacharava as an icon, tattooing his words or images on their skin and avidly reading his writings. Older local artists joke that Kacharava is more alive than they are. He was a generation’s bard, guiding Georgian art back to itself, at the same time as forging a way forward for it to enter the outside world. Now, his own work finally has.
Karlo Kacharava “Sentimental Traveller” is on view until April 14, 2024.

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Whether you are just returning to the city from Miami or simply wanting to see what’s on in the city before the holidays, we’ve rounded up 10 solo exhibitions that are not to be missed before the end of the year. And though the weather may have turned cold, the art scene is hot in New York City.
From an artist mining the “cat lady” cliché through ceramics to a fiber artist pushing the boundaries of their medium to a painter imagining a vivid fantasy world populated by fairies, these 10 artists span the dynamic landscape of art-making today.

Dan Lam, “Guttation”Hashimoto Contemporary, December 16–January 6
Dan Lam. Photo: Justin Clemons. Courtesy of Hashimoto Contemporary.
Hashimoto Contemporary will present a whopping 40 new works by Dan Lam in “Guttation” this month, filling the galleries with polychrome sculptures that appear to ooze and drip. Ranging from small- to large-scale, the collection of works illustrates the artist’s ongoing interrogation of shape, texture, and color, with the works recalling the way water is secreted by plants and fungi in nature. Walking the line between alluring and repulsive, and crafted out of materials like foams, resins, and polymers, the experimental and playful sculptures embody a visceral tactility and materiality.
The Texas-based artist has garnered more than half a million followers combined across TikTok and Instagram, as well as a staunch art world and celebrity collectorship—with Miley Cyrus, The Game, and the Tisch family being just a few of the big names to snap up her work.
Dan Lam, Bark (2023). Courtesy of Hashimoto Contemporary.

TM Davy, “Fae”Company, through January 6
TM Davy. Courtesy of Company.
New York-based painter TM Davy, a graduate of and current teacher at the School of Visual Arts, is recognized for his vibrant figurative paintings and pastels that recall the tradition of magical realism. Frequently incorporating breath work, group singing, and meditation into his practice, he is able to “go there” and fully tap into his creative imagination, manifesting fantastical scenes and scenarios into each of his works.
His current solo exhibition at Company gallery, called “Fae,” features a collection of oil paintings (though most are on canvas, one is on a tambourine and another on a drum). These works bring viewers into his own faerie world, a fantasy realm of winged creatures, “tiny monsters,” and surreal, saturated colors. Inspired in part by media he consumed as a child, including the Dark Crystal (1982) and The Gremlins (1984), the narratives and stories that unfold from these images invite joyous reflection.
TM Davy, a sea of relief (2023). Courtesy of Company.

Mondongo, “Welcome”Barro, through January 6
Mondongo artist collective, Juliana Laffitte and Manuel Mendanha. Courtesy of Barro.
Barro New York is showing “Welcome” by Argentine art collective Mondongo, presently made up of artists Juliana Laffitte and Manuel Mendanha. Working together since 1999, their work has been consistently provocative, frequently engaging with themes of power, work, sexuality, and more. Unconventional materials are also a signature, ranging from meat to wax, video to painting.
“Welcome” highlights three key works from 2023: Villa II is a tondo-shaped work in clay, depicting in meticulous detail lesser-known neighborhoods in Buenos Aires, Dharavi, and Rio de Janeiro. An audiovisual work embedded in plasticine bricks, The Wall, made in collaboration with filmmaker Albertina Carri, employs media materials related to the pandemic. Finally, “Cada cual tendrá derecho a su propio rectángulo” (Each will have the right to their own rectangle) is a series of paintings depicting partial visages of people from the artists’ circle, a play on the virtual meeting of people during quarantine.
Together, the exhibition examines the social, cultural, and political experiences of the past years, with an emphasis on the perspective of the Global South—and presents an intriguing look at the continually evolving state of the world today.
Mondongo, Villa II (2023). Courtesy of Barro.

Diamond Stingily, “Sand”Greene Naftali, through Jan 20
Diamond Stingily, Past (2023). Photo: Zeshan Ahmed. Courtesy of Greene Naftali.
In her highly anticipated solo show “Sand” at Greene Naftali, New York-based artist Diamond Stingily takes over the gallery space with a series of predominantly large-scale works that are based on the material of sand. The inclusion of bronze pieces modeled after various body parts, such as hands, arms, feet, knees, fingers, and ears, evokes an archeological dig or discovery. Recognized for her sparse and emotionally resonant work, the present exhibition highlights her ability to tap the visceral qualities of her chosen materials to engage with themes of place, memory, and experience.
A recent addition to the gallery’s roster, Stingily’s work has been acquired by public collections around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Museum Ludwig, Cologne, and Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami.
Diamond Stingily, detail of Sand (2023). Photo: Zeshan Ahmed. Courtesy of Greene Naftali.

Linus Borgo, “Monstrum”Yossi Milo, through January 20
Linus Borgo. Courtesy of Yossi Milo.
For his debut solo exhibition in New York, and first with Yossi Milo, Linus Borgo interrogates “Monstrum,” the title of the show and Latin term for “monster.” In his otherworldly and often unsettling figurative paintings, Borgo explores the boundaries of the human body—how it is depicted and arranged, within the context of both reality and fantasy. Employing rich and lavish color palettes, each painting is a window into another world; whether incorporating urban landscapes, secluded forest glens, or residential bathrooms, Borgo maintains an incredible command of atmosphere.
“Monstrum” also includes the first exhibition of the artist’s sculptures in bronze, which feature the artist himself as imaginary creatures such as an angel or merman—the latter of which is a motif he has continually returned to in his practice. Tapping elements of Surrealism and mythology, as well as pervasive and personal perceptions of the human body, Borgo’s captivating, even sublime vignettes offer new approaches to ideas around bodily aesthetics, transformation, trauma, and transition.
Linus Borgo, Death Is Like Taking Off a Tight Shoe (2023). Courtesy of Yossi Milo.
Ana Elena Garuz, “Fragments of Belief and Disbelief”Proxyco Gallery, through January 20
Ana Elena Garuz. Courtesy of Proxyco Gallery.
Mining a massive personal archive of magazine cutouts, Ana Elena Garuz draws inspiration from the glossy scraps and pages, composing paintings that vacillate between abstraction and hyperrealism. An apparent fold or tear seen along the edge of her fields of color, or swaths of white that could be interpreted as a highlight, Garuz’s work invites prolonged looking, examining the boundary between what the familiar and the foreign.
In her solo show with Proxyco Gallery, “Fragments of Belief and Disbelief,” Garuz’s recent body of work on view brings to mind historical modes of abstraction, yet her unique artistic sensibility and source materials make each painting decidedly contemporary. Together, the artist’s practice can be understood as a poetic and ongoing dialogue with line and color.
Ana Elena Garuz, Untitled (with pink form) (2023). Courtesy of Proxyco Gallery.

Erik Lindman, “Helian”Peter Blum Gallery, through January 20
Erik Lindman. Courtesy of the artist and Peter Blum Gallery.
Marking the first time that the breadth of artist Erik Lindman’s practice will be on view simultaneously, Peter Blum Gallery is staging “Helian,” featuring the artist’s paintings and sculptures, as well as works on paper. A native New Yorker, Lindman’s work relays his fascination with both material and composition across genre.
Informed by found materials such as steel fragments or heavyweight fabric webbing, Lindman constructs his works in such a way that they may be read holistically rather than by their elements or parts. In his paintings, a central form, evoking a bird or a humanoid form, frequently emerges from a monochromatic field. Lindman builds up the area with paint and mixed-in media to give it texture and “topography,” creating a ground that dialogues with the ambiguous figure. Lindman’s sculptures similarly explore material, but with the advantage of having a third dimension, allowing for experiments with perspective. Ultimately, “Helian” offers a new take on abstraction and its possibilities today.
Erik Lindman, Helian I (2023). Courtesy of the artist and Peter Blum Gallery.

Jennifer Ling Datchuk, “Karma is a Cat”Ruiz-Healy Art, through January 26
Jennifer Ling Datchuk. Photo: Scott Ball. Courtesy of Ruis-Healy Art.
The “cat lady” trope has been widely used to dismiss women for decades, but in Jennifer Ling Datchuk’s solo exhibition with Ruiz-Healy Art, “Karma is a Cat,” the artist reexamines and reclaims this label. Self-described as an “overeducated, cat-loving, elder millennial in a committed and loving relationship with a man and a cat” (a response to Congressman Matt Gaetz’s 2022 tweet criticizing women rallying against overturning Roe v. Wade), Datchuk presents a collection of object-based works that reimagine assumptions about the feminine.
Frequently using materials like porcelain and textiles, often associated with “women’s work,” Datchuk’s show is at once playful and deeply complex, delving into social, cultural, and political assumptions on identity, womanhood, and intersectionality.
Jennifer Ling Datchuk, Hear Us Coming (2023). Courtesy of Ruiz-Healy Art.
Brendan Fernandes, “Within Reach”Susan Inglett Gallery, through January 27
Brendan Fernandes. Photo: Michael Salisbury. Courtesy of the artist and Susan Inglett Gallery.
Brendan Fernandes is the subject of his first solo exhibition with Susan Inglett Gallery, “Within Reach,” comprised of a series of sculptures as well as a program of activations performed by contemporary dancers. Fernandes’s sculptures are inspired by West African headrests, functionally made to preserve complex hairstyles while the wearer sleeps, but with deep-rooted cultural and spiritual importance, with the belief that these objects can promote dreams or prevent nightmares.
Meanwhile, the artist’s choreography juxtaposed with the artworks results in a hybrid dialogue between African and Western artistic practices and presents a complex critique of colonialism and insight into the Fernandes’s own personal identity. (The next performance is scheduled for Saturday, January 20, 2024.)
Also on view in the exhibition are works from the “As One” photography project undertaken by Fernandes in 2015. Originally initiated as part of a commission for the Seattle Art Museum, and later expanded upon using the Cravens Collection at the UB Art Galleries, within the context of the performed dances, the work further interrogates the colonial legacies of the West.
Brendan Fernandes, In Being III (2023). Courtesy of the artist and Susan Inglett Gallery.
Sagarika Sundaram, “Source”Palo Gallery, through February 4
Sagarika Sundaram. Photo: Anita Source. Courtesy of the artist and Palo Gallery.
Sagarika Sundaram’s debut New York solo exhibition “Source” at Palo Gallery offers some immense works made of felt. Featuring both wall-mounted and free-standing pieces, the selection of works are a testament to Sundaram’s ongoing exploration of and experimentation with textiles. Using raw fibers and hand-dying techniques, the artist is able to achieve a painterly quality in her compositions as well as to invoke sculptural traditions, since even the wall-mounted works spill into three-dimensional space. With many pieces seemingly defying physics, Sundaram is an artist to watch in her quest to forward the boundaries of textile and fiber art-making.
Coinciding with the exhibition is the production of a fully illustrated catalogue, edited by curator Andrew Gardner and anthropologist and curator Vyjayanthi Rao, featuring essays by each as well as a dialogue between Sundaram and Bahauddin Dagar, an acclaimed Indian classical performer of the rudra veena.
Sagarika Sundaram, Atlas (2023). Photo: Kunning Huang. Courtesy of Palo Gallery.
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The iconic Flemish artist who lived from 1577 to 1640, was commonly thought to have painted inactive, silent female subjects. But an exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery titled, “Rubens & Women” on view until January 28, 2024, presents a more nuanced look at how the artist depicted women and their influence on his creative world.
The show includes a range of over 40 works, such as intimate drawings and dramatic oil paintings, plus archival material from throughout the artist’s career, spotlighting how “women in Rubens’s art were not simply passive objects to be observed, but active agents of their own destiny,” states the exhibition text.
The show, curated by Dr Ben van Benedon and Dr Amy Orrock, includes international masterpieces never shown in the UK before, along with works from the gallery’s collection.
“Prepare to be surprised by the many faces of Rubens’s women,” said Orrock in a statement. “You will meet formidable patrons, nurturing goddesses, and much-loved family members, all depicted with Rubens’s mix of skill, erudition, and humanity.”
A walk through the exhibition begins with a series of portraits, including one of the artist’s most lavish productions: Marchesa Maria Serra Pallavicino or Marchesa Veronica Spinola Doria (1606–7), while other highlights include Young Woman Looking Down (Study for head of St Apollonia) (1628), on loan from the Uffizi Gallery, Florence, for which the artist’s wife and child posed.
A particularly touching portrait of his daughter, not long before she died at age 12, is also on view.
Importantly, Rubens’ approach to the female nude is explored in a series of works illustrating how his process evolved over time, particularly in connection to the artist’s work with sculpture. And lastly, the show concludes with large paintings of heroic, mythological women, such as the unforgettable, The Birth of the Milky Way (1636-38), on loan from the Prado, Madrid.
The Exhibition “will highlight the tenderness and empathy with which Rubens depicted not only his family, but many of his female figures. If Raphael endowed his female figures with grace, and Titian with beauty, Rubens gave them veracity, energy and soul,” said Van Benedon.
Below, get a sense of the show and some of its highlights at the London show.
Peter Paul Rubens, The Birth of the Milky Way (1636–38). © Photographic Archive. Museo Nacional del Prado. Madrid
Peter Paul Rubens and Frans Snyders, Diana Returning from the Hunt, (ca. 1623). Courtesy bpk | Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden | Elke Estel | Hans-Peter Klut.
Peter Paul Rubens, The Virgin in Adoration before the Christ Child, (ca. 1616–19). KBC Bank, Antwerp, Museum Snyders&Rockox House
Peter Paul Rubens, Venus, Mars and Cupid (ca. 1635). Courtesy Dulwich Picture Gallery.
Peter Paul Rubens, Clara Serena Rubens, the Artist’s Daughter, (ca. 1620–3). Private Collection.
Rubens & Women at Dulwich Picture Gallery. Photo by Graham Turner.
Rubens & Women at Dulwich Picture Gallery. Photo by Graham Turner.
Rubens & Women at Dulwich Picture Gallery. Photo by Graham Turner.
“Rubens & Women” is on view at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, through January 2024.

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Director Yorgos Lanthimos’s new film Poor Things tells the fantastical tale of a young woman, played by Emma Stone, who’s brought back to life by Willem Dafoe’s mad scientist. It’s the stuff of gothic horror, woven with the Greek filmmaker’s winking absurdism, as the movie follows our lead Bella Baxter from her rebirth in the 1880s through the 1960s. Key to that storytelling isn’t just Lanthimos’s surreal scene-setting, but the film’s lavishly eccentric costuming, overseen by designer Holly Waddington.
“I was really encouraged by Yorgos to just go big,” the costume designer told the Motion Pictures Association of her work on the film. “What we ended up with had a lot to do with texture—big textures in the clothing, things that felt organic, things that felt inflated.”
Now, Waddington’s costumes have made their way off-screen and into a showcase at the ASU FIDM Museum in Los Angeles. Organized by Searchlight Pictures, “Poor Things Costume Exhibit” arrays 13 costumes from the film, including eight worn by Stone, and others by her co-stars including Dafoe, Mark Ruffalo, and Ramy Youssef. 
Mark Ruffalo in Poor Things (2023). Photo: Yorgos Lanthimos. Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures. © 2023 Searchlight Pictures All Rights Reserved.
To the museum’s curator Kevin Jones, these pieces, while recognizably “historic,” present a blend of styles to create “looks that are not pedantic.” In an email, he brings up “leg-‘o’-mutton sleeves mixed with go-go boots, lobster-tail bustles worn as outerwear, and reconfigurations of Madeleine Vionnet and Charles James eveningwear.” 
This interplay of styles emerged from Lanthimos’s and Waddington’s vast body of references for the film. According to her, they included Victorian designs as much as 1960s nods to the space age. The works of Otto Dix, Egon Schiele, Georgia O’Keeffe, and John Singer Sargent also served as inspirations. Waddington’s use of period-appropriate fabrics were additionally woven with contemporary techniques—an, ahem, Frankenstein-esque mix-and-match that nailed the movie’s otherworldliness. 
Emma Stone in Poor Things (2023). Photo: Yorgos Lanthimos, Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures. © 2023 Searchlight Pictures All Rights Reserved.
Among the pieces in the exhibition are a paper silk ensemble cut into a mermaid silhouette (what Waddington calls a “weird bustle cage“) that nods to Bella’s awakening youth, and an eye-poppingly yellow Victorian evening gown, complete with pointed sleeves, that marks her sexual liberation.  
Jones himself highlights Bella’s first outfit, a lush blue creation, which mirrors the waters out of which she is rescued by Dafoe’s character, as well as a bronze satin day gown that “blends into the wood paneling of her husband’s chateau—sartorially imprisoning her just as he is trying to physically.” 
“Each costume is a character unto itself that reflects the actor’s circumstance, and subtly reveals to movie-goers the hero’s or villain’s course of action,” he said. “How much costume detail is lost on screen, or how the colors or patterns enhance or subdue the believability of the storyline is evident in the exhibition.” 
See more images from the show below. 
Installation view of “Poor Things Costume Exhibit” at ASU FIDM Museum. Photo courtesy of ASU FIDM Museum.
Installation view of “Poor Things Costume Exhibit” at ASU FIDM Museum. Photo courtesy of ASU FIDM Museum.
Installation view of “Poor Things Costume Exhibit” at ASU FIDM Museum. Photo courtesy of ASU FIDM Museum.
Installation view of “Poor Things Costume Exhibit” at ASU FIDM Museum. Photo courtesy of ASU FIDM Museum.
“Poor Things Costume Exhibit” is on view at the ASU FISM Museum, 919 South Grand Avenue, Los Angeles, California, through December 15. 

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Jamian Juliano-Villani, the New York-based painter known for reappropriating images from memes, fashion photography, and art history for her irreverent paintings, will be showing at Gagosian in March 2024.
The solo exhibition, titled “It,” will feature new paintings, anchored by Spaghettios (2023). The large-scale work, about six feet long and seven feet tall, depicts a bowl of Campbell’s torus-shaped pasta in the foreground and a Spaghettios soup can in the background, with her signature hyperrealism.
The show will be accompanied by the first major publication dedicated to her work, encompassing 45 paintings from 2013 to 2023, including a number of works from the March exhibition.
“I am finally making the work I want to make,” Juliano-Villani said in an email. “Freedom of expression is something I do with defiance and it’s worth defending. Larry [Gagosian] understands that. This show is a love letter from one visionary to another.”
Juliano-Villani is currently exhibiting one of her works at the Gagosian booth at Art Basel Miami Beach this week—alongside new art by the likes of Carol Bove and Lauren Halsey—marking the second year of her journey with the gallery.
One of her works had previously been included in “100 Years”—a group exhibition and collaboration between dealers Jeffrey Deitch and Larry Gagosian during Miami Art Week in 2022, which launched her work with the gallery. Gagosian has since showed her work at Art Basel Hong Kong, Art Basel, and Paris+.
Juliano-Villani had been represented by JTT gallery in New York and Massimo De Carlo, who has galleries in Milan and Hong Kong, as well as in London, since at least 2019. (JTT gallery, in a surprise move in August, closed after over a decade in business.)
In 2021, Juliano-Villani opened her own Lower East Side gallery, O’Flaherty’s, with two longtime friends, Billy Grant and Ruby Zarsky. O’Flaherty’s recently moved locations and reopened in March, inaugurated by the Viennese collective Gelatin.
“Jamian has such a unique and creative perspective that crosses generations from Pop Art to TikTok,” Gagosian senior director Kara Vander Weg said in an email. “We’ve been talking for some time and are delighted to host her exhibition next year.”
“It” will be on view at Gagosian New York, 541 West 24th Street, New York, from March 16, 2024.

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Miami Art Week is welcoming all manner of young and emerging artists, but the Standard Spa on the beach will be showcasing a creative entirely unlike all others. 
From December 5–10, the boutique hotel will host a presentation from Australian interior design company Studio Snoop, featuring works by its A.I. powered designer, Tilly Talbot. Titled “House of Tilly,” the show unfolds within a house-like structure, installed with five “future-living” design prototypes that have been crafted in partnership with human artists. Her collaborators include PLP Architects, Vert Design Studio, and Magical Mushroom Company.
As a digital avatar, Tilly will also show up in an interactive experience to share insights into her designs, as well as information about the hotel, effectively serving as its concierge.
Tilly was designed by the studio’s founder Amanda Talbot to respond to emotional intelligence, following her inquiries into how—and why—humans access A.I. “I started to come across this idea of how loneliness can lead people to tap into artificial intelligence,” she told Dezeen, “and how that can actually help people not feel lonely.” 
The model has been programmed to generate “human-centered” and environmentally minded designs. According to Talbot, Tilly will prioritize eco-friendly materials in her designs, gathering data in real-time to inform her “educated decisions.” 
The Tilly A.I.  Design Collection, featuring Polar Bear with Cadrys and Gus with PLP Architects and Magical Mushroom Company. Photo: Peer Lindgreen for Studio Snoop.
Miami marks Tilly’s U.S. debut, following her appearance at Milan Design Week in March, where she presented at Charles Philip gallery. There, her machine-imagined works were arrayed alongside tablets with which visitors could interact with Tilly via chat. 
Tilly is far from the only A.I. presence in the design space, which is increasingly tapping the potential of generative models. Zaha Hadid Architects, for one, has been leaning on machine intelligence in its design of workspaces, just as firms such as Kahler Slater and Coop Himmelb(l)au are tapping A.I. models to complete tasks including rendering and dreaming up innovative forms. 
Talbot, for her part, is quick to emphasize that Tilly is a tool as much as a collaborator. As with most A.I., Tilly comes with built-in, which “you’ve got to get through,” but Talbot professed the model’s involvement in the studio’s processes has “invigorated” its practice. 
“The more knowledge we have,” she said about A.I., “the more we can engage with it and learn about it and be a part of it.” 
See more of Tilly’s designs going on view at Miami Art Week below. 
The Tilly A.I. Design Collection, in partnership with Vert. Photo: Peer Lindgreen for Studio Snoop.
The Tilly A.I. Design Collection, in collaboration with PLP Architects and Magical Mushroom Company. Photo: Peer Lindgreen for Studio Snoop.
The Tilly A.I. Design Collection. Photo: Peer Lindgreen for Studio Snoop.
“House of Tilly” is on view at the Standard Spa, 40 Island Avenue, Miami Beach, Florida, December 5–10. 

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