Art & Exhibitions

Success arrived belatedly for generative art pioneer Vera Molnár: a major retrospective now on view opened a mere two months after her death.
It was Paris’s Centre Pompidou that broke the news on X in December with a message that read, “It is with deep emotion that we learn of the death of Vera Molnár, with whom we had worked passionately for her next major exhibition.”
That show, “Speak to the Eye,” now occupies the fourth floor of the Pompidou and offers a comprehensive look at an artist who seemed forever ahead of the curve.
To gauge Molnár’s art world standing today, look no further than the tributes that followed her passing. Aside from institutions, curators, and critics, prominent digital artists, and NFT platforms chimed in to herald the impact of her algorithmic experiments, or “Machine Imaginaire,” as she called them.
Vera Molnár, Four Randomly Distributed Elements (1959). Photo: Georges Meguerditchian Centre Pompidou.
Born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1924, Molnár studied art history at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts. She would later say that her first impactful encounter with art came through the pastoral paintings of her uncle. This influence is evident in the earliest works presented in “Speak to the Eye,” a collection of drawings from 1946 that present landscapes as geometric abstractions.
A year later, Molnár moved to Paris with her husband and sometime collaborator, the scientist François Molnár. There she fell in with a crowd of abstract artists that included Fernand Léger and Victor Vasarely, who pushed her geometric inclinations further. Works such as Circles and Half Circles (1953) and Four Randomly Distributed Elements (1959) speak to her contributions to the post-war geometric abstraction movement.
But the concept that would come to guide Molnár’s practice and shape her legacy was the “Machine Imaginaire.” Beginning in 1959, she used simple algorithms to inform the placement of lines and shapes. At the time, computers were elephantine, academic, screen-less things, and for nearly a decade she worked on grid paper by hand.
In 1968, Molnár talked her way into gaining access to a computer at the Sorbonne. She duly taught herself early programming languages such as Basic and Fortran and began producing work using punch cards and a plotter printer. This period is captured at the Pompidou in works such as A Stroll Between Order and Chaos (1975) and 160 Squares Pushed to the Limit (1976).
Installation view of “Speak to the Eye” at Centre Pompidou. Photo: Janeth Rodriguez-Garcia/Centre Pompidou.
This may be the breakthrough for which Molnár is best known, but “Speak to the Eye” offers an artist whose oeuvre is broader.
There’s sculpture in the form of Perspective on a Line (2014-2019), a site-specific installation that contorts exhibition walls, and a photographic series of sand and shadows from the 2000s.
Thrown in for good measure are 22 of Molnár’s diaries, filled with jottings and photographs and plans for upcoming works. She once said in interview that her whole life was squares, triangles, and lines. These diaries prove the point.
See images of works in the show below.
Vera Molnár, Icon (1964). Photo: Bertrand Prévost / Centre Pompidou.
Vera Molnár, Same But Different (2010). Photo: Philippe Migeat / Centre Pompidou.
Installation view of “Speak to the Eye” at Centre Pompidou. Photo: Janeth Rodriguez-Garcia/Centre Pompidou.
Vera Molnár, “In Search of Paul Klee”, 1970. Photo: Hervé Beurel.
“Speak to the Eye” is on view at Centre Pompidou, Place Georges-Pompidou, 75004 Paris, France, through August 26.
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“Nightlife,” a new exhibition at New York’s Marlborough gallery, brings together the works of six photographers known for chronicling the nocturnal goings-on of European and American cities in the early 20th century, including Berenice Abbot, Brassaï, Bill Brandt, Weegee, Helmut Newton, and Irving Penn.
Each of these photographers approached their subject from a different angle. In the 1920s, French-Hungarian photographer Brassaï spent his evenings walking past Parisian bars and brothels, armed with his camera and 24 glass plate negatives. His images variously captured the intimacies, excesses, and joys of night-crawlers, and were celebrated upon the release of his 1933 book, Paris de nuit. Henry Miller dubbed him “the eye of Paris.”
Inspired by Brassaï, Brandt did the same for 1930s London, where he documented the nightly festivities of both the upper and lower classes. His own photography book, A Night in London, published in 1938, offered a glimpse into the prewar night life and labors of British folk across social classes.
Bill Brandt, In the Public Bar at Charlie Brown’s, Limehouse (ca. 1942). © Bill Brandt / Bill Brandt Archive. Photo courtesy of Marlborough New York.
Many of the photographs in “Nightlife” were made possible by the invention and commercialization of the flashbulb, which for the first time in history allowed photographers to take pictures in the absence of natural or artificial light. Prior to the flashbulb, visual documentation of nightlife had fallen to draftsmen to record these environments in sketches.
Photographers Penn and Newton, however, worked in far more controlled settings. Both were active in the field of fashion photography and vastly expanded its scope. Penn’s minimalist portraits hinted at nocturnal trends and styles. Meanwhile, German-Australian photographer Newton favored private as opposed to public scenes. His first two photography books, 1976’s White Women and 1978’s Sleepless Nights, are filled with intimate and erotic pictures of fully or partially nude women posing in bedrooms—a reflection of changing gender norms as well as a commentary on the male gaze that turns observers into voyeurs.
Helmut Newton, Security, New York III (1976). © Helmut Newton Foundation. Photo courtesy of Marlborough New York.
Then there’s Abbott and Weegee, two New York-based photographers who used the same documentary style to depict the Big Apple from opposite perspectives. Abbott’s images of 1930s New York see her hovering in the sky, presenting skylines, squares, and neighborhoods as they developed over time. The city is in the making and unless this transition is crystalized now in permanent form, it will be forever lost,” she once said. “The camera alone can catch the swift surfaces of the cities today and speaks a language intelligible to all.”
Conversely, Weegee stayed on the ground, listening in on police radio broadcasts so he could capture inner-city mishaps such as crime scenes and brawls in the moment. “What I did,” he said, “anybody else can do.” Though ostensibly a press photographer, Weegee’s dynamic frames appealed to the fine art world: his work was first exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in 1943, included the show “Action Photography,” and later compiled in his first photography volume, 1945’s Naked City.
See more images from the show below.
Berenice Abbott, New York at Night (1932). © Berenice Abbott/Getty Images. Photo courtesy of Marlborough New York.
Weegee, Lovers at the Palace Theatre (1945). Photo courtesy of Howard Greenberg Gallery © Weegee Archive/International Center of Photography.
Brassaï, Le bal des Quatres Saisons (1932). © ESTATE BRASSAÏ – RMN-Grand Palais. Photo courtesy of Marlborough New York.
Bill Brandt, Hermitage Stairs, Wapping (1930s). © Bill Brandt / Bill Brandt Archive. Photo courtesy of Marlborough New York.
Irving Penn, Girl Behind Bottle (Jean Patchett), New York, 1949 (1978). © Helmut Newton Foundation. Photo courtesy of Marlborough New York.
Weegee, Woman at a bar (1940s). Photo courtesy of Howard Greenberg Gallery © Weegee Archive/International Center of Photography.
“Nightlife” is on view at Marlborough gallery, 545 West 25th Street, New York, March 7 through April 20.
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Another wave of Basquiat-fever is about to crest over the art world this spring, with a soon-to-open blockbuster show at Gagosian Gallery’s Beverly Hills outpost in Los Angeles, along with a major accompanying exhibition catalogue. It’s just one of many Basquiat projects on the horizon for 2024. 
At a time when it seems the world can’t get enough of Basquiat—the two projects promise to further deepen appreciation and understanding of the artist’s brief but fascinating and dynamic life. As most fans know, he skyrocketed to fame in the New York art world in the 1980s and died at the age of just 27, in 1988.
Then, of course, there’s his market. Basquiat’s current auction record (set at Sotheby’s in 2018) clocks in at a cool $110.5 million, with the second highest auction result not far behind at $93 million, paid at Christie’s New York in 2021. To date, five Basquiat works have fetched above $50 million each at auction. Since 2005, searches for Basquiat on Artnet’s Price Database have skyrocketed; just last year, he was the 8th most-searched artist, keeping company with the likes of Pablo Picasso and Andy Warhol. Last year also marked the opening of the stellar show “Basquiat: KIng Pleasure” which debuted in New York at the direction of the Basquiat Estate and later traveled to Los Angeles. If ever there was proof that the artist’s star is burning bright as ever, and reaching a new fan base, it’s the news that Taylor Swift’s beau, pro football player Travis Kelce, is helping to finance a new documentary on the artist.
Basquiat’s Untitled unveiled in Phillips London. Courtesy of Phillips.
Taken together, the forthcoming Gagosian show and its accompanying catalogue will highlight Basquiat’s lesser-known L.A. period. That’s because, although the artist is often closely associated with New York City and Brooklyn, where he came of age in the heyday of street art and hip-hop, the Gagosian show delves into the heady time he spent in California, where, with the direct support and enthusiasm of the dealer himself (he even had the artist live temporarily at his townhouse with then-girlfriend Madonna) and others, the artist flourished and met a host of like-minded creatives and other artists during his time there.
Meanwhile, Rizzoli is set to release a major monograph on the artist this May, titled “Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Iconic Work,” by Dieter Buchhart, the Vienna-based curator and Basquiat expert who has already published numerous books on the artist. The book also serves as the exhibition catalogue to “Jean-Michel Basquiat,” the major exhibition that took place at the Brant Foundation in 2019. That Dieter-curated show delved into the myriad sources of inspiration that influenced Basquiat and his work, ranging from jazz, anatomy, sports figures, comics, classical literature, the African diaspora, and art history. Reflecting on that 2019 show, Brant Foundation founder Peter Brant said, “It was an honor to inaugurate The Brant Foundation’s East Village space by bringing these important works back to the very neighborhood where Basquiat lived and worked, and to share his legacy with the community that was fundamental in shaping it.”
Jean-Michel Basquiat, Hollywood Africans, (1983). © Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Licensed by Artestar, New York. Photo: © Whitney Museum of American Art/Licensed by Scala/Art Resource, NYImage courtesy Gagosian.
Jumping back to the West Coast for a moment, the show, titled “Jean-Michel Basquiat: Made on Market Street” (March 7–June 1),  is curated by Gagosian and Fred Hoffman, owner of New City Editions, a Venice-based prints and multiples publishing company, who worked closely with the artist in the early 1980s to create now iconic editions.
“For an artist who has long been affiliated with New York, Jean-Michel was surprisingly productive during the time he spent in California—he created nearly one hundred works of art in two different studios near the beach on Market Street in Venice over a two-year period, between 1982 and 1984,” Gagosian writes in the introduction to the catalogue. The show will reunite 30 works produced in Venice, including loans from major collections such as the Broad Museum, MoMA, and the Whitney Museum in New York
Gagosian first met the artist in 1981 at dealer Anina Nosei’s Soho space and immediately offered him a show, which took place the following year, at the North Almont space in Los Angeles. Gagosian hosted a second solo LA exhibition at a larger space, in 1983.
It was in 1982 that Hoffman also met Basquiat, and together the next year they produced six editioned prints including Tuxedo and Untitled, large-scale silkscreens on canvas that feature vibrant colors as well as the clusters of allusive phrases that became one of the artist’s signature marks.
The book includes a written transcript of a panel discussion held in LA in August 2023, between Basquiat’s two sisters, Lisane Basquiat and Jeanine Heriveaux, Gagosian, Hoffman, and filmmaker Tamra Davis who spent a good deal of time with the artist while he was in L.A. and in 2010 released the documentary, “Basquiat: The Radiant Child.“
Jean-Michel Basquiat Horn Players, (1983). The Broad Art Foundation. Image courtesy Gagosian Gallery.
Asked about the first time he ever saw Basquiat’s work, Gagosian said: “I saw five or six paintings—and they stopped me cold in my tracks. I mean, my hair stood on end. I was just transfixed by these paintings and how powerful and original they were.”
Noting that it has been more than four decades since he met the artist, Gagosian called it “astonishing” to see the impact that his art and legacy have had across the cultural realm, adding that his influence is present everywhere. On a personal note, he writes, the show “has allowed me to relive the time I shared with Jean-Michel in California and to think back to when we were young and first getting to know each other in the early 1980s. I could see it then. Today his mark is one of the most widely recognized and celebrated in the world.”
Installation view of “Jean-Michel Basquiat: King Pleasure.” Photo by Ivane Katamashvili, courtesy of the Jean-Michel Basquiat Estate.
Following this  West Coast deep dive, Rizzoli’s May release will yield even more insight to the artist’s broader oeuvre once again. According to Buchhart, Basquiat “took the 1980s art world by storm: first New York, then Europe and the entire world.”
The book delves into 100 works and explores both the inspiration and creation process behind them. Buchart describes the artist’s work as “symbolically charged, highly complex, [and] angry.”
“Thirty-five years after Basquiat’s death,” Buchart continues, “his works and their unmistakeable aesthetic attract the highest attention on both the art market—achieving record prices on the secondary market and at auction—and in art historical writing.”
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Opening at Paris’s Louvre Museum on April 24, “Olympism: Modern Invention, Ancient Legacy” celebrates the history of the Olympics and its designs from ancient times to today. The exhibition comes as Paris prepares to host its third Olympic Games, a whole century since it lasted hosted the event in 1924.
The show delves into the history and political context that birthed the first modern Olympic Games in 1896, tracing how its organizers sought to reimagine the gaming tournaments of ancient Greece. Celebrated here are figures, namely Pierre de Courbetin—known as the “Father of the modern Olympic Games“—as well as the event’s first official artist, French-Swiss artist Émile Gilliéron, and the first President of the International Olympic Committee, Dimitrios Vikélas.
Bréal Cup awarded to Spyridon Louis in 1896. © Stavros Niarchos Foundation.
One starring artifact is the very first Olympic Cup. It was awarded to a Greek water carrier called Spyridon Louis, who was the first-ever winner of the marathon race, which had been invented by the French linguist Michel Bréal for the inaugural modern Games in 1896. The ‘Bréal Cup’ has never before been exhibited in Paris.
Luc Olivier Merson, The Marathon Soldier. © Beaux Arts Paris.
Other commemorative objects round out the exhibition, not limited to postage stamps and flyers immortalizing the games. Ancient vessels and sculptures depicting runners, wrestlers, and disc-throwers further illustrate how Olympic sports have captured the creative imagination through the ages.
Plaster Plaque. © French School of Athens.
The exhibition is part of the 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games’ cultural program. Ahead of the competition—the Olympic Games commence July 26 and the Paralympic Games August 28—the city of Paris has unveiled this year’s medals, which were designed by jeweler Chaumet and are embedded with iron bits from the Eiffel Tower. Foreseeing a swell of visitors, museums in Paris, including the Louvre, have also raised admission fees.
Sneak a peek at the objects in the exhibition below.
Red Figure Cup. © RMN Grand Palais Louvre Museum.
Child’s Sarcophagus. © RMN Grand Palais Louvre Museum.
Commemorative Cover for 1896 Athens Olympic Games. © Olympic Museum Collections.
Modern Plaster Medici Wrestlers. © RMN Grand Palais Louvre Museum.
Commemorative Stamp for 1906 Mesolympiad. © Museum of Philately and Posts Athens.
Trophy Designs for 1906 Mesolympiad. © École Française d’Espagne.
Mesolympiad 1906 Marathon and Athletics Trophy. © Thessaloniki Olympic Museum.
Plaster Relief. © French School of Athens.
Runner Statuette. © The Trustees of the British Museum.
Commemorative Stamp for 1906 Mesolympiad. © Museum of Philately and Posts Athens.
Red Figure Cup. © RMN Grand Palais Louvre Museum.
“Olympism: Modern Invention, Ancient Legacy” is on view at the Louvre, Paris, April 24 through September 16.
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Wander the painting galleries of a major museum on either side of the Atlantic and chances are you’ll encounter John Singer Sargent. The reasons are as much geographic as artistic. Born in Europe to American parents, Sargent flitted between London and Boston and by the final decade of the 19th century was the portraitist of choice for New England’s nouveau riche and Britain’s aristocracy.
On his death in 1925, his legacy seemed settled—Rodin, for one, had called him the era’s Van Dyck. But in time Sargent was labelled a pandering society painter, a traditionalist who devoted his talents to depicting the luxurious draperies of the elite.
Over the past decade, however, Sargent has received renewed attention. First came an exhibition at London’s National Portrait Gallery that suggested his paintings offered a prophetic glimpse at the modern world. Now a show fittingly co-organized by MFA Boston and the Tate Britain — organizations that supported Sargent during his lifetime— presents Sargent’s fastidiousness towards dress not as a shallow vanity, but as a powerful tool used to reveal the interiority of his subjects.
“Fashioned by Sargent”, whose three-month stint in Boston last year is followed in London from Feb 22 to July 7, marries 50-something Sargent paintings with period dresses and accessories, including exact items worn by sitters.
“By showing original garments alongside the paintings in which they are depicted, visitors have a unique opportunity to see exactly how Sargent translated clothing into paint,” Tate curator, James Finch said via email. ” His distinction as a portraitist derives from the special sensitivity he brought to the rendering of clothing and fabric.”
Costume worn by Carmen Dauset Moreno (c.1890). Photo: courtesy Houghton Hall.
And, yes, the garb is gorgeous. There’s the costume of Spanish dancer Carmen Dauset Moreno as shown in La Carmencita (1890). It’s a thing of sun-golden satin trimmed with waves and florets of silver that must have dazzled as it twirled. There’s the flowing sylvan “Beetle Wing Dress” worn by Ellen Terry in her 1888 Macbeth production, so-called because it’s affixed with beetle wing cases. On canvas, Terry has the look of an awed zombie, the crown held aloft, her auburn locks tumbling down her sleeves.
These works, along with Vernon Lee (1881), a dashed portrait of the expansive English writer, speak to Sargent’s place amid the frenetic cultural movements of the late 19th century—he also painted the likes of W.B. Yates, Robert Lewis Stevenson, and Edwin Booth. But most interesting are works in which Sargent uses fashion to express the difference and character of his sitters. There’s certainly something to the organizers’ comparison with a fashion shoot director. Here was a painter who would step away from the easel, cross the room to tweak and cajole garments precisely into place.
John Singer Sargent, Madame X (1883). Photo: courtesy TheMetropolitan Museum of Art.
Most notoriously, his submission to the Paris Salon of 1884, Madame X, depicted Mme Gautreau in a black satin evening dress with a jeweled strap loosed off the shoulder. It proved too salacious with Sargent correcting the strap a year later. In “Lady Sassoon” from 1907 he offers sharp intellect shrouded in refinement through flashes of pink that burst from the folds of a black taffeta opera cloak.
And how did the artist himself dress, you ask? With plain simplicity. “Sargent was not an extrovert, and preferred to dress in the dark suits of the bourgeois middle-class,” Finch said, noting that when the poet Wilfrid Scawen Blunt first met Sargent he called the painter a ‘superior mechanic’ on account of his suit and pot hat.
Other times, Sargent reconfigures dress entirely. In W. Graham Robertson (1894), in spite of the summer heat, he insisted that his sitter don a long woollen coat to complete the dandy look. In his wedding portrait for Ena Wertheimer he has her gleefully mocking societal conventions. She wears the garments of the male-only Order of the Garter and waves a broomstick as though a sword. It was broadly criticized when exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1905 as crass and deliberately provocative.
This reception is a reminder to consider art in the context of its time. Sargent regarded himself an outsider and enjoyed painting those he found kinship with. His tweaks and subtle subversions may seem tame by today’s standards, but as “Fashioned by Sargent” insists, we would do well to pay closer attention.
See more images:
John Singer Sargent, Lady Sassoon (1907). Photo: courtesy Houghton Hall
Opera cloak worn by Lady Sassoon, c.1895. Photo: courtesy Houghton Hall.
John Singer Sargent, Portrait of Ena Wertheimer: A Vele Gonfie (1904). Photo: Tate Britain.
John Singer Sargent, Mrs Carl Meyer and her Children, (1896). Photo: courtesy Tate Britain.
John Singer Sargent, Dr Pozzi at Home (1881). Photo: courtesy The Armand Hammer Collection.
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On its 50th anniversary, in 1979, New York’s Museum of Modern Art coined the term “sound art” in the title of an exhibition of three female artists who were, as visionary curator Barbara London put it, trailblazing “the combination of the aural and the visual.” It cemented a focus on sound that had seen MoMA debut the Moog synthesizer in 1969 and platform the likes of Aaron Copland and John Cage.
MoMA is championing sound art again, this time in a bold, interactive, and overwhelmingly online affair. “Sound Machines” presents five artworks that leverage new technologies to create sonic experiences. It arrives courtesy of a collaboration with Feral File, the digital art platform that prides itself on being by and for artists.
Each of the five works is actually a series of 30 that will be minted on Ethereum and up for auction beginning March 14. Artists will receive 60 percent of proceeds, with Feral File and MoMA splitting the remainder.
Immediately arresting is Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley’s Cancel Yourself (2024), an unrelenting choose-your-own-adventure experience that forces the user to announce a moral failing and suffer being “canceled.” Against a setting of furious glitches and gifs reminiscent of ’90s HTML, users pass through the full cycle of publicly outing themselves. The soundtrack shifts subtly with the narrative: there are melancholic horns after the user posts their offense to social media; distorted moans while doom-scrolling through the backlash; and autotuned a capella vocals as the user posts an apology music video—using a ukulele, of course.
Yoko Ono, SOUND PIECE V (1996/2024). Courtesy the artist and Feral File.
Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst revive the imitation games that Carl Orff and Gunild Keetman invented in the 1920s to teach children music in Play from Memory (2024). Just as Orff and Keetman used prompts, games, and symbols, Herndon and Dryhurst have created machine learning models that conjure both a soundscape and an accompanying image. Their cavernous world, conjured in a dark ink wash, teems with prodigious children and their fantastical instruments.
Two works offer different approaches to audience participation. Yoko Ono revives her Sound Piece V (1996) for the digital era. The original poem-cum-prompt reads, “Tape the sounds of friends laughing together,” and participants will now be able to add their recordings to the work, thereby creating “an ever-evolving archive of sound.”
0xDEAFBEEF looks back at the phone card as a precursor to the digitized token, and plans to attach live call-and-response performances to his images of imaginary phone cards.
0xDEAFBEEF, PAYPHONE, 2024. Courtesy the artist and Feral File.
A blue sea void is the backdrop for American Artist and Tommy Martinez’s work, which runs their sound piece Integrity Protocol/Lower Limb Lecture (2023/24) through a generative interface. Users can play mixer by manipulating the delay, pitch, speed, and feedback.
One promise that arrived with the recent explosion of interest in digital art was that the medium could genuinely interact with audiences. Here, MoMA and Feral File put forward five sound machines that speak to that potential.
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It’s Frieze week in Los Angeles, which means along with the tentpole art fair events, there are a slew of gallery shows across the city bursting with artworks to explore. L.A. is a big, sprawling city, so we’ve narrowed down the glut of shows to five standout exhibitions you don’t want to miss.

“Nery Gabriel Lemus: The Poetics of Place” at Charlie James Gallery
Through March 3, 2024
Nery Gabriel Lemus, They Got Pyramids Where I’m From (2024). Courtesy of the artist and Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles. © 2024 Nery Gabriel Lemus; Photo © 2024 Yubo Dong @ofphotostudio.
In extremely detailed watercolors, L.A.-based Nery Gabriel Lemus conjures distinct moments in time, capturing the tilt of a beloved dog’s head, the sheen of a glazed pot holding the spiky leaves of a red-tinged plant. The almost photographic quality of the works, all of which capture scenes or objects of domesticity in specifically Latinx interiors, is juxtaposed with found objects, often tapestries, that are affixed to the panels, creating a trompe l’oeil affect that begs for closer inspection. In works like On a Wing and a Prayer, They Got Pyramids Where I’m From, and A Gracious Welcome, traditional Guatemalan hupil—the colorful top portion of woven dress worn by Indigenous women—is juxtaposed with identifiable markers of Western culture: a pink leather belt, or strips from a hairy welcome mat found at the front stoop of houses all across suburbia. Like the medium of watercolor itself, used by the likes of John  James Audubon to document “exotic” birds and locales, Lemus has reclaimed these objects, and the method of creating them.

“Karyn Lyons: The End of the Night” at Anat Ebgi
Through March 2, 2024
Karen Lyons, The Dominion of Night (2024). Courtesy of the artist and Anat Ebgi.
New York artist Karyn Lyons’ paintings have novelistic, even preppy coming-of-age quality in which adolescent girls exist suspended between solitary moments of pining and impassioned make-out scenes. In this, Lyons’ first solo exhibition with Anat Ebgi, a new series of paintings evokes the ferocity of such teenage emotions, while seemingly bidding them a fond farewell. One painting, The Dominion of Night (2024) is a nod to René Magritte’s The Empire of Light, pictures the exterior of a stately home at night, only the upstairs windows lights on. The curtains are provocatively drawn back. In one sense we can imagine this house as the soon-to-be adult protagonist’s home and her dollhouse at once, a space in which she tries on grown-up vices and pleasures—sneaking a cigarette or shots of Smirnoff while waiting, as though on a long summer day, for real-life to find her.  

“Justin Williams: Synonym” at Robert’s Projects
Through March 9, 2024
Justin Williams, I listened but only to sounds from the old boat, (2024). Courtesy of the artist and Robert’s Projects.
In “Synonym,” the Australian painter Justin Williams presents variated scenes that incite a mixed bag of feelings, namely that of familiarity and strangeness. Based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with suburban Australia as his stomping ground and Egyptian ancestry in the fold, the folkloric motifs that appear in his canvases are notably hard to place. It’s as if you have stepped into a dream or someone’s else’s memory. Across his quotidian setting, a strongly figured cast of characters seem deeply enmeshed in these moments that are like candid scenes from a film where the volume is off. While it may be impossible to know what his characters are thinking as they wait together for a Bialetti to boil, or gather around a hookah by the bed or under skinny trees, there is something electric passing between them.

“Charles Hickey: The Bathers The Brushers” at Albertz Benda
Through April 13, 2024
Charles Hickey, Clock Sail Basket (2023). Courtesy of the artist and Albertz Benda.
In Albertz Benda’s very unique exhibition space fittingly dubbed “The Bathroom,” Los Angeles-based artist Charles Hickey’s sculptures and canvases, depicting various objects that one might find in a real bathroom, but all of the pieces here are made of plastic. Hickey’s medium is essentially a handheld 3D printer in the form of a pen, functioning almost like a piping bag for icing, giving the canvases a textured, three-dimensional look, and replicas of shampoo, hand soap, toothpaste, and more, fully realized sculptures seemingly conjured by the deft flick of the tool. While the objects are clearly related to the show’s title, “The Bathers, The Brushers,” the paintings are more nuanced, referencing art historical gems like Cézanne’s The Bathers, Van Gogh’s Still Life of Oranges and Lemons with Blue Gloves, and Matisse’s Still Life with Blue Tablecloth. Is Hickey referring to hair and toothbrushes, or paint brushes? Perhaps brushes with greatness, as he reinterprets the great masters of still lifes, while he has chosen to use an ultra-contemporary method for his own artistic contributions.

“Ouattara Watts” at Karma
Through March 16, 2024
Ouattara Watts, Evolution 03 (2023). Courtesy of the artist and Karma, Los Angeles.
At Karma’s Los Angeles outpost, an exhibition of new paintings by the Abidjan-born, New York–based artist Ouattara Watts’s dynamic and luminous paintings take center stage. In his first-ever L.A. show, canvases embedded with the artist’s physical and immaterial experiences around the world come to bear in curious, engaging works. A specific and individual visual language including cosmological references, numbers, figures, and symbols, are informed by the artist’s global exposure to such diverse influences as the animist religion of the West African Senufo people, and the modernists he studied while at L’École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. “I think universally…” the artist said, “about the history of the human soul. It’s not a history of clans, ethnic groups, or even artists, it’s what we can call the human condition.” In the vein of artists like Hilma af Klint and Jean-Michel Basquiat, beyond the specific and myriad references Watts is making, viewers can sense they are in the presence of something greater than themselves, even if they don’t know what it is.
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An upcoming exhibition in Venice will be the first major show to explore how artist Willem de Kooning was inspired by his two visits to Italy, in 1959 and 1969. Including some 75 works ranging from the late 1950s to the ‘80s, it’s the largest-ever presentation in Italy of the Dutch-American Abstract Expressionist’s work and, according to the organizers, the only show ever to closely study Italy’s influence on him.
Curated by Gary Garrels, formerly of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and art historian Mario Codognato, “Willem de Kooning and Italy” takes place at the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice and opens April 17, just in time for the pre-opening festivities of the Venice Biennale.
According to Giulio Manieri Elia, the gallery’s director, the last de Kooning show in Italy took place some 18 years ago. Lenders to the show include the Museum of Modern Art, in New York; the Glenstone Museum, in Maryland; the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid; the Centre Pompidou, Paris Musée national d’art moderne; and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao.
Dan Budnik, Willem de Kooning in his East Hampton Studio, New York (1971). © 2024 The Estate of Dan Budnik. All Rights Reserved. Artwork © 2024 The Willem de Kooning Foundation, SIAE
“Willem de Kooning collected from the cacophony of visual excitement, light and movement in daily life to create his own lexicon,” said Garrels and Codognato in a joint statement.
“The impact of any visual encounter could render or generate an idea for moving into a new drawing or painting. Observing how his New York and East Hampton environments worked into his paintings and drawings, the same occurred in Rome—a gestalt of ‘glimpses,’” they added. “During these formative periods of time in Rome, de Kooning synthesised from all around him a new way of looking and activating his medium, experiencing both classical Italian paintings and sculpture as well as the work of his new Italian artist friends.” 
Willem de Kooning, Red Man with Moustache (1971). © 2024 The Willem de Kooning Foundation, SIAE
De Kooning was one of the key members of a group of painters in New York. He worked alongside action painters, Abstract Expressionists, or the New York School, with artists including his wife Elaine de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Clyfford Still.
Some of his best-known works are his stark renditions of women that he began in 1950. He has become a giant in the market for 20th-century art: in 2015, music mogul David Geffen sold de Kooning’s 1955 painting Interchange to hedge-fund billionaire Ken Griffin for about $300 million, which was then the highest price paid for a painting.
Three paintings from 1960—Door to the River, A Tree in Naples, and Villa Borghese—will be on display together for the first time. Painted after his arrival back in New York, all three show the lasting influence of his Italian sojourn, say the curators.
Willem de Kooning, Villa Borghese (1960). © 2023 The Willem de Kooning Foundation/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. © FMGB Guggenheim Bilbao.
Thirteen small bronzes he made in Rome are also included. Resulting from a chance encounter with a sculptor friend, they stem from the artist’s first efforts with clay. He would turn intensively to sculpture back in New York between 1972 and 1974.
The show will also include a large selection of the “Black and White Rome” drawings that the artist made in 1959 on his visit to the Italian capital, and spans to paintings from the 1980s.
Willem de Kooning, Untitled #12 (1969). © 2023 The Willem de Kooning Foundation, SIAE.
Collaborating on the show is the artist’s foundation.
“The Foundation is delighted to be collaborating with the Gallerie dell’Accademia to present this important exhibition, as it allows us to share Willem de Kooning and the curators’ exceptional vision with a wide-ranging, diverse international community,” said Amy Schichtel, executive director of the foundation.
“De Kooning is one of America’s great innovators; we find that his risk-taking story continues to be of vital inspiration to many contemporary artists as well as to students and our young people.” 
Willem de Kooning, Pirate (Untitled II) (1981). © 2024 The Willem de Kooning Foundation, SIAE.
“Willem de Kooning and Italy” will be on view at the Gallerie dell’Accademia, Calle della Carità, Vice, Italy, April 17 through September 15.
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