Art & Exhibitions

There’s a longstanding practice of an era’s great Shakespeare actors to have their portraits documented by their painterly peers. William Hogarth depicted David Garrick as Richard III on the eve of the Battle of Bosworth. Thomas Lawrence captured John Philip Kemble spotlit and wrapped in a toga disguise as Coriolanus. And, perhaps most famously, John Singer Sargent presented a disturbing vision of Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth, her eyes haunted, her flowing dress dappled and glittering.
An exhibition at Red Eight Gallery near the Royal Exchange in the City of London picks up on the tradition, but updates it for our digital age. Here, the stage’s great actors are also its stars of television and film. The result is uncanny, playful, and futuristic.
Actress Juliet Stevenson. Photo: courtesy Stage Block.
“The Shakespeare Portraits (Act I),” which runs through January 10, 2025, features 10 living actors in digital portraits that are anything but static. In a form not dissimilar from Harry Potter’s living portraits, their gazes shift subtly and their expressions slowly morph through a catalog of emotions.
The portraits are the product of Stage Block, a technology studio set on creating a new type of collectable. Just as in the past, the actors arrived at a studio and posed to have their portrait taken (each one took roughly 80 minutes), only they were captured not by brush but by a state-of-the-art camera with most of the work taking place in post-production.
Patrick Stewart, center, alongside Adrian Lester, left, and Derek Jacobi, right. Photo: courtesy Stage Block.
The kicker? At a click of a button, these eerily alive actors pronounce a Shakespearean soliloquy of their choice. Ian McKellen delivers “all the world’s a stage” from As You Like It, Derek Jacobi offers up Hamlet’s “to be or not to be,” Harriet Walter’s turns to Prospero “Ye elves of hills” from The Tempest, David Suchet performs Macbeth’s infamous lines on the futility of life “tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” (a role Suchet has never played).
Installation view of “The Shakespeare Portraits (Act I).” Photo: courtesy of Stage Block.
The 10 portraits are unique, one-off collectables (they are “on-chain” i.e. recorded on the blockchain) that Stage Block hopes will appeal to both individuals and institutions. The London-based company calls the portraits, “a new chapter in the convergence of portraiture and performing arts assembling some of the most revered actors of our time.”
Stage Block collaborated with the Royal Shakespeare Company’s honorary associate director Ron Daniels for the project and as suggested by the show’s title — Act I — Stage Block is planning to create a second round of Shakespeare Portraits in 2025.
The founders Sattari-Hicks and Francesco Pierangeli, whose backgrounds span finance, entertainment academia hope to replicate the template of “The Shakespeare Portraits” to other artistic disciplines. More

Like so many other works of art produced in the twilight years of the Renaissance, Domenikos “El Greco” Theotokopoulos’s painting Pentecost (ca. 1600) is based on a story from the New Testament. Specifically, it depicts the Holy Spirit descending upon Mary and the apostles in the form of a white bird.
Originally made as part of an altarpiece for the Colegio de Dońa María de Aragón seminary in Madrid, Spain, Pentecost is more than a straightforward illustration of religious narrative or dogma. Through his creative choices—for example, replacing the fiery wind described in the text with the aforementioned bird, or using himself as a model for one of the apostles, looking out directly at the viewer—El Greco is not just giving shape and form to the divine, but also exploring his own relationship to that concept.
El Greco (Domenikos Theotokopoulos), Pentecost (c. 1600). Photo: Archive. Museo Nacional del Prado.
Giving shape and form to the divine also happens to be the focus of “Living with the Gods: Art, Beliefs, and Peoples,” an ongoing exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas. Open until January 20, 2025, it explores how artists from different cultures and time periods have represented concepts integral to their belief systems, including life, death, afterlife, pilgrimage, and—as the title suggests—the gods.
“Living with the Gods” is curated by none other than Neil MacGregor, renowned art historian and former director of both the National Gallery and the British Museum. The exhibition’s subject is dear to his heart, having previously hosted a BBC radio show of the same name in 2018, followed by a bestselling book in 2018.
Bedu Mask from Nafana, Kulango, or Degha peoples, Côte d’Ivoire or Ghana (1948–62). Photo: The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston / D. and J. de Menil.
As the Guardian wrote of this book, which covers everything from French secularism to the mythology of the Yup’ik tribe of Alaska, “Living with the Gods is neither a history of religion, nor an argument in favor of faith, nor a defense of any one belief. Rather, it is an attempt to define the nature of belief, the way it influences people and the countries they inhabit, and to show how fundamental it is in explaining who we are and where we came from.”
The Houston exhibition is more expansive still. It brings in art and artifacts from the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid, the royal residence of the Maharaja of Jaipur in India, the National Gallery of Ireland, the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, to name only a few.
Buddha Enthroned, Thailand (Khmer), Angkor period (c.1180–1220). Photo: Kimbell ArtMuseum.
“Living with the Gods” moves far beyond Christian iconography. Aside from El Greco’s Pentecost, visitors can admire a wooden statue from 13th century Japan of Daiitoku Myōō, a Buddhist guardian deity also known as the Wisdom King of Awe-Inspiring Power, with inlaid crystals for eyes. There’s also a red sandstone statue of a standing Buddha, made in India sometime during the late 5th century.
Perhaps the most impressive item from the exhibition is a conch shell with engravings of human skulls from Veracruz in northern Mexico, dated to between 900 and 1521 AD, but probably made before the arrival of Christopher Columbus in 1492.
John Biggers, The Stream Crosses the Path (1961). Photo: Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, gift of Mr. and Mrs. Arthur J. Mandell © 2024 John T. Biggers Estate.
In addition to ancient artefacts, “Living with the Gods” also devotes space to a selection of contemporary paintings with religious undertones, notably The Stream Crosses the Path by John Biggers, an African American muralist whose work, which blends religious symbolisms with critiques of economic, social, and racial injustice across U.S. history, rose to prominence during the Harlem Renaissance.
“This exhibition is about how people everywhere have made beautiful things to negotiate their place in time and in the world,” MacGregor has said, “and how we use works of art to think about how we relate to each other. Putting art into that context allows for a different conversation. In museums, many great objects can lose their original purpose, which was spiritual. An exhibition of this kind can give that purpose back to them, allowing a new and deeper approach to great and familiar works.”  More

Each year, more than 600 artists apply for just a dozen slots at Kohler’s dynamic and wide ranging Arts/Industry residency program. Having been there, it’s not hard to see why.
Headquartered in the middle of Wisconsin and known for its sleek bathroom and kitchen fixtures, the manufacturer might seem like an unlikely source of artistic inspiration. But the Arts/Industry program, which turns 50 this year, has its roots in the passion of two founding family members who saw the chance to create something special.
The results are unexpected and sprawling. They include two major art centers, the John Michael Kohler Arts Center (JMKAC) and the more recently opened Art Preserve, a satellite campus that houses a fascinating collection of more than 25,000 individual artworks created by 30 artists described as “art-environment builders” (audiences will likely classify them as “outsider” or “folk” art.)
Exterior view of the Art Preserve in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. Photo by Rain Embuscado.
It was in 1974 that siblings Ruth DeYoung Kohler II and Herbert V. Kohler, the children of the original founder, Austrian immigrant John Michael Kohler, Jr., first dreamed up the idea to have artists come to the eponymous village and work side by side with Kohler staffers. Those who work with the artists are called “associates” and assist with planning and creation in the factory’s pottery, foundry, enamel, and plating facilities.
“Artistry is essential to our work at Kohler. Without it, Kohler would not be Kohler,” said Laura Kohler, who is Herbert’s daughter and acts as chief sustainability and DEI officer. “I’ve been involved in the Arts/Industry program for over 30 years and have seen first hand how this program brings diversity, inspiration, and new ways of thinking to our manufacturing environments.”
On a recent tour of the foundry, we spotted current artist in residence Lee Running wearing protective gear as she and another worker were removing a bronze sculpture from its sand cast. A few minutes later we were standing in her dedicated work space within the factory as a fork lift driver carefully deposited it there.
Artist Lee Running working on her sculpture at the Kohler Factory in Kohler, Wisconsin.
“The Kohler Foundry has opened my practice to two things difficult to achieve in other environments: working in a repeated form, and working at a large scale,” Running said. “Having endless quantities of sand for molds, and iron for sculptures, is exhilarating—I feel like I can make anything!”
Running said that at Kohler, where she is in residence through mid-December, she’s developing a process that “renders iron very thin, and very fragile looking.”
On the weekend we visited, Kohler was hosting an alumni reunion for the roughly 500 artists from 25 countries who have participated in the Arts/Industry program (some are repeats; Running, for instance, is on her second residency). The list includes figures such as Ann Agee, Willie Cole, Woody De Othello, Michelle Grabner, Edra Soto, and Tomas Vu, among many others. Amy Horst, executive director of the Arts Center and Art Preserve, called the gathering testament to the fact that what Kohler had built was “more than a residency program—it’s a community built on collaboration and shared inspiration.”
Artist David Franklin working on his commissioned installation for The Shedd Aquarium in Chicago.
On hand for the reunion weekend, artist and sculptor David Franklin spoke about the incredible journey his Kohler residency has taken him on. In the early aughts he was working in a forestry job, barely making ends meet. Then he won a coveted position in the Kohler arts residency program.
His skill in carving and sculpting wood—often animal and human shapes—is evident from even a glance at his work. But Franklin said it was Ruth Kohler who helped him focus in on the fish he was creating and to render them in ceramics. When he began creating them in groups that suggest movement, the effect was compelling.
“I think Ruth Kohler must have known a carver could excel in ceramics as it is so easily carved,” Franklin told me. “This was a revelation and helped me make the leap.”
In 2015 Franklin was commissioned to create a major installation for the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago. The next challenge? Finding the location and infrastructure to create the work, imagined as a swirling, ceiling-hung school of fish suspended at different heights.
Detail of a sculpture by David Franklin.
When he re-approached Kohler for help, the answer was a resounding yes. Out of that need, a new program which brings in artists by special invitation, known as “Makerspace,” was born. (Franklin also had a similar major installation at the most recent edition of the Salon del Mobile in Milan, where he was on hand to greet visitors and discuss his work.)
Kohler is often a major exhibitor at the Art Basel Miami Beach-adjacent, Design Miami fair. This year, along with hosting a pop-up show in Miami’s Design District to celebrate the 50th anniversary, Kohler just unveiled the names of the 12 artists chosen for the arts program in 2025: Sula Bermudez-Silverman, Sameer Farooq, Tanda Francis, Jude Griebel, Iris Hu, Margaret Jacobs, Salvador Jimenez-Flores, Sahar Khoury, Marie Lorenz, Matthew McConnell, Natalia Mejia Murillo, and Eun-Ha Paek.
I asked Running what advice she might have for future and aspiring Kohler residents. “This residency is always a challenge,” she answered. “The environment of the factory is its own eco-system, and it doesn’t stop. It never closes. It’s possible to work as hard as you can here, and that’s liberating! It can just be hard to remember physical limitations.” More

“I know I’m not supposed to because it’s problematic, but I really love Gérôme’s work,” a visitor said sheepishly at the entrance of Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha ahead of a guided walkthrough of the museum’s newly opened exhibition “Seeing is Believing: The Art and Influence of Gérôme.”
The confession reflects a common sentiment around Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824–1904), a French painter and sculptor whose name and work have become all but synonymous with Orientalism, a term that has been the subject of controversy and interrogation—particularly over the past half-century, but even before. His most recognizable painting today, the 1872 painting Pollice Verso (Thumbs Down), which was famously a source of inspiration for Ridley Scott’s 2000 film Gladiator, initially sparked debate when it premiered as scholars disputed whether the thumbs down gesture in gladiatorial combat was historically accurate.
The controversial concept of Orientalism, and its impact on history both real and perceived, is also the keystone theme of “Seeing is Believing,” which seeks to expand the framework through which Gérôme and Orientalist art are considered, inclusive (perhaps most importantly) of non-Western perspectives.
The significance of the show is underscored by the fact that 2024 marks the 200th anniversary of Gérôme’s birth, and the Lusail and Mathaf museums are the only Arab institutions showcasing his art for this bicentennial, a testament to the museums’ innovative approach to Orientalism, past and present.
Installation view of “Seeing is Believing: The Art and Influence of Gérôme” (2024). Courtesy of MATHAF: Arab Museum of Modern Art and Lusail Museum, Doha.
The major exhibition was organized by the future Lusail Museum in collaboration with and presented at Mathaf. The Lusail Museum, in the process of being fully realized on the north side of Doha in a monumental, circular building designed by Swiss architectural firm Herzog & de Meuron, already boasts one of the world’s largest collections of Orientalist art. Many of the expansive show’s 400-plus works are drawn from this collection, alongside major international loans from institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Islamic Arts Museum, Malaysia, as well as a range of new, specially commissioned works by contemporary artists.
“Seeing is Believing” is divided into three distinct parts, each separately curated by Lusail Museum guest curator Emily Weeks, Lusail Museum curator of photographs Giles Hudson, and Mathaf guest curator Sara Raza, respectively. The opening section and focus herein, entitled “A Wider Lens, A New Gérôme” offers a sweeping survey of the man himself, his oeuvre, and the well-known problematic aspects—as referenced by the reluctant fan at the opening of the show—of his work and legacy.
The Art Star of Orientalism
Gérôme’s lavish Orientalist paintings became wildly popular, his depictions not only of resplendent courts, harems, and mosques but “snapshot” compositions of everyday interiors and peoples captured the world’s attention, catapulting him to a level of fame at the time that cannot be understated.
“Gérôme was the most influential, marketable, marketed, and successful artist in 19th-century France,” said Weeks in a walkthrough of the exhibition. “His reputation was international, his prestige and his fame also became incredibly great throughout America and Britain, more broadly throughout Europe, even Japan and Russia. He was known worldwide, mostly for his Oriental works. What that means is that his visions, his creations shaped a worldview. It shaped people’s perceptions of the MENASA region—Middle East, North Africa, South Asia.”
Jean-Léon Gérôme, Portrait of a Woman (Aiouch) (ca. 1855–1856. Courtesy of Colnaghi Elliott Master Drawings.
Born in Vesoul, France, Gérôme was trained in the academic tradition under artists such as Paul Delaroche and Charles Gleyre, as well as at the École des Beaux-Arts. Academic art, or academicism, is a style of art that was initially taught and promoted by the formal art academies of Europe (with the École des Beaux-Arts arguably at the forefront), which adhered to classical ideals and techniques; while there are numerous tenets to the style, highly polished brushwork, romanization, and the inclusion of narrative, even theatrical content are some of the elements that stand out in the tradition.
In the mid-to-late 1840s, Gérôme’s career took off, seeing him win third place at the 1847 Paris Salon and shortly thereafter garnering favor from French critic Théophile Gautier. And while he received increased local attention, his foray into Orientalist painting is arguably what landed him in the history books.
Alexandre Gabriel Decamps, The Turkish Patrol (ca. 1855–56). Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Gérôme visited Egypt for the first time in 1856, heralding the beginning of a life marked by extensive travel, returning multiple times to Cairo and the surrounding areas as well as various locales across the region. Photos included within “Seeing is Believing” emphasize his physical presence there, replete with candid images of Gérôme on a donkey, or seated on the desert landscape. He became so invested in the area that at one point, following a visit to the Ottoman Palace, he not only sold his work there but also became the curator and buyer of the collection (a prototype of the contemporary art advisor?).
Coupled with his earlier travels to Italy as part of his artistic training, Gérôme began to craft a vision of the region, one that tapped the idealized realism of academic painting, the monumentality of Roman art and architecture, and reflected his ardor for the environments and cultures he encountered—cherry picking objects, landscapes, garb, and designs from across time and place and mixing them into his own visual creations.
What is important to note, as it is in the exhibition, is that Gérôme’s work and career essentially evolved in step with the then-emergent medium of photography. Using similar framing techniques as well as photorealistic rendering, Gérôme’s paintings visually argued for their own “realness,” but were instead carefully crafted fantasies, where the boundary between reality and fiction was meticulously blurred.
Jean-Léon Gérôme, The Harem in the Kiosk (1870–1875). Courtesy of Lusail Museum, Qatar Museums, Doha.
The Enduring (and Less-Talked-About) Influence of Gérôme
Today, Gérôme’s work is considered the epitome of traditional, a designation that was creeping in even by the turn of the 20th century; in the twilight of his otherwise dazzling career, his work was increasingly thought of as antiquated, exemplary of academic painting, which slowly seeped popularity with the rise of Modernism. Because of this, little critical attention has been paid to the ways in which, at his height, Gérôme was in fact one of the most innovative artists to emerge in his time.
This is perhaps no more apparent than a close analysis of the artist’s application of color, which is highlighted in the show through never-before-done x-rays of his paintings, which a video display showcases. In a depiction of the Sinai Dessert, which at first glance coalesces into the expected beigey browns, one can see on closer inspection a range of pastels, reds and purples, pinks and blues. “The more you look, the more colors you see,” said Weeks. “This is Gérôme’s attempt at representing what the eye sees in direct sunlight—and what is this? This is the curiosity of the Impressionists. It is no accident that Mary Cassatt was a student of his. The Impressionists understood what [he] was doing.”
Jean-Léon Gérôme, Riders Crossing the Desert (1870). Courtesy of the Islamic Arts Museum, Malaysia.
Beyond his pioneering explorations in opticality, a nascent form of symbolism, can be read in his work. Mining color not only for its visual potential, he also began using it for its ability to convey emotion, even drama. The highly saturated hues that are now synonymous with Orientalist painting originated from Gérôme’s experiments, foreshadowing the greater move toward symbolism as a movement. (It is also no surprise then that Symbolist painter Odilon Redon was also one of his students).
“You may think his style is traditional, conservative, maybe even old-fashioned. Why? Because it’s so intensely realistic,” said Weeks. “This is not Modernism; this is not abstraction. My claim is that Gérôme was not an Impressionist. Of course, he’s not a Symbolist. He’s not avant-garde, but within the process of an academic technique, he was pushing every envelope, every boundary, and the mindset behind this is progressive and modern.”
Jean-Léon Gérôme, The Black Bard (1888). Courtesy of Lusail Museum, Qatar Museums, Doha.
The breadth and scope of Gérôme’s reputation and legacy can be attributed in no small part to his prolific teaching, extended far beyond the few most famous students like Cassatt and Redon. In 1864, he was appointed as a professor at the École des Beaux-Arts, and between his first class and his last in 1904, over 2,000 students, including women, received his tutelage.
“I would argue that every Orientalist work that was created after Gérôme bears his handprint,” said Weeks. “He was that important. That influential.”
Orientalism and the Period Eye
While the etymology of the term Orientalism can be traced to Medieval times, its use and meaning in contemporary discourse was popularized by academic and literary critic Edward Said in 1978 with his book Orientalism. Said’s writings expanded and established the term not only as one to broadly describe the study of and attention to “the East” from a Western perspective, but a political concept inextricably entwined with Western imperialism, fetishization, and contemptuous views and attitudes toward the c region. On the cover of Said’s book is none other than a reproduction of one of Gérôme’s paintings, The Snake Charmer (1880).
Said’s writing was ultimately followed a few years later by art historian Linda Nochlin with her 1983 essay The Imaginary Orient, published in Art in America, where she levels the politicization and issues surrounding Orientalism more squarely within an art historical context, arguing that the power structures and dynamics from which a work of art or artist emerges is imperative to critical assessment.
“Seeing is Believing” does not shy away from the politicization the term engenders within contemporary interpretations of Gérôme’s oeuvre, going so far as to feature a copy of Said’s Orientalism as part of the exhibit. Frankly, it perhaps wouldn’t have been possible to sidestep the inclusion as the release of the book launched both Gérôme’s work and the genre of Orientalist art back into the mainstream consciousness of the 20th century, rendering it the subject of fervent and ongoing debate (and, in some cases, embarrassment for those who enjoy his work).
Vitrine containing the anniversary edition of Edward Said, Orientalism (1994) and Linda Nochlin, The Politics of Visions: Essays on Nineteenth-Century Art and Society (1989). Courtesy of MATHAF: Arab Museum of Modern Art and Lusail Museum, Doha.
Though not a specific term proposed within “Seeing is Believing,” the “Period Eye” could be considered an apt description of the show’s strategy. Coined by art historian Michael Baxandall in 1972, it is an approach to art history that refers to the broader cultural and social environment within which an artwork was made and the manner it would have, at the time of creation, been viewed. While contemporary discourse around Gérôme and Orientalism are today largely bound by political interpretation, it wasn’t always so. The exhibition not only contextualizes the time and place these works were made but offers insight into the evolution of their reception. For instance, the term Orientalist was not then new, but it had a starkly shallower definition and connotation to that of today: “In the 19th century, it was simple: Non-indigenous artist representations of the MENASA region. Full stop. Period. That was Orientalism.”
Jean-Léon Gérôme, Veiled Circassian Lady (1876). Courtesy of Lusail Museum, Qatar Museums, Doha.
Herein lies the primary strength of “A Wider Lens, A New Gérôme”: its comprehensiveness without being prescriptive, no doubt speaking to the show’s intended audience, those of the MENASA region. The show makes no attempt to jump into this specific fray—or any one in particular for that matter. Rather, it presents a comprehensive range—from contentious to comparatively mundane—perspectives and histories together in an attempt to craft a more holistic account of the artist and his oeuvre, leaving ultimate judgment up to the viewer, with the only appeal to the viewer being for an openness to holding more than one thing true at once, rather than dismiss reassessments of any kind as pure apologia.
It is interesting to consider how this approach may have differed had this show been staged in a Western museum to a predominantly Western audience, the same audience Gérôme historically geared his work toward. Here, in Doha, with the subject matter being that of the greater regional peoples and culture, the judgment or lack thereof, fittingly leaves room for the lived experience and histories the assumed regional visitors bring to it; a certain degree of explanation or didacticism is rendered redundant.
In an anecdote around one of Gérôme’s paintings of Cairo, Weeks, who lived in the city for 16 years, noted she couldn’t say where the landmarks in the work were because they did not actually exist. Similarly, visitors familiar with his supposed subjects and places would too recognize immediately the discrepancies. Through this lens, the presentation of “Seeing is Believing: The Art and Influence of Gérôme” at Mathaf itself speaks to a form of reclamation, one in which the roiling debate around Orientalism and the artist who championed it firmly placed within the appropriate context, for MENASA audiences rather than about them. More

Madrid’s Museo del Prado is hosting the debut solo show for German painter and photographer Sigmar Polke in the Spanish capital, 14 years after the artist’s death from cancer. “Affinities Revealed” takes as its theme the major inspiration Polke drew from Spanish painter Francisco de Goya, over 1,200 of whose works reside at the museum.
Image of the exhibition galleries “Sigmar Polke. Affinities Revealed. Photo © Museo Nacional del Prado.
The exhibition consists of more than 40 of Polke’s works as well as Goya’s 1810-12 masterpiece Old Women (also known as Time). Old Women is held in the collection of the Palais des Beaux Arts de Lille; it is being exhibited in Spain for the first time. Polke encountered the painting in 1982, and its impact on his practice, which forms the show’s conceptual basis, was profound.
Exhibited next to Old Women is an X-radiograph of the oil painting that illuminates the development of its composition. It was this image which particularly attracted Polke and “encouraged him to experiment with new directions… offer[ing] him a new source of inspiration to delve deeper into his own artistic concerns,” according to press materials.
The X-radiograph also revealed an abandoned Goya composition depicting the resurrection of Christ and featuring clouds and departed souls. This hidden image inspired other works by Polke that appear in the exhibition, neatly encapsulating the artist’s interest in the magical and the paranormal. Even minor details in The Old Women, including the decrepit sitters’ jewelry and wigs, inspired the German artist, who made direct reference to them.
Image of the exhibition galleries “Sigmar Polke. Affinities Revealed.” Photo © Museo Nacional del Prado.
The Old Women was likely part of a series of paintings along with Maja and Celestina on a Balcony (1808–14) and Majas on a Balcony (1808–14), created without commission from a specific patron. In the painting, two women wearing lavish outfits look in a handheld mirror, with a winged figure representing Father Time behind them holding a broom aloft as if to sweep them both away. On the reverse of the mirror appears the text “Que tal?” (“How goes it?”), and one woman wears jewelry similar to the Spanish Queen Maria Luisa, who was famed for her vanity.
Polke photographed various fragments from The Old Women, which he then enlarged and altered with hand-drawn illustration.
Image of the exhibition galleries “SIgmar Polke. Affinities Revealed.” Photo © Museo Nacional del Prado.
The exhibition’s website explains that the show, curated by the Spanish art historian Gloria Moure, aims to establish a dialogue between “Polke’s formal experimentation and the symbolic charge of Goya’s work.” The exhibition’s press materials note that Goya’s impact on Polke was threefold: he was fascinated with the main himself, the iconography of his work, and the specific facture of The Old Women.
Polke has regularly made headlines since his 2010 passing, including when a man paid $90 at a thrift store for a work he believed to be a signature painting; his photographic work’s rare appearance at Paris Photo; and, perhaps most notably, for a court case involving his estate, which was forced to return a painting it claimed to have been stolen.
“Sigmar Polke: Affinities Revealed” is on display at the Museo del Prado, Madrid, until March 16 2025. More

A major retrospective is looking back at the last 30 years of Cecily Brown’s career.
“Themes and Variations,” on view at the Dallas Museum of Art, sees Brown’s artworks—which sit between figuration and abstraction and which draw on and subvert historic scenes—in their full spectrum. Works tease out the historic views of hunts and garden landscapes, or conjure wreckages and interiors. The British painter is known for engaging with art history and subverting tradition to portray empowered female protagonists.
“From her engagement with historical traditions of eroticism and voyeurism from which women have traditionally been subjects and not authors, to her insistence of her own agency through her form and practice, Brown’s work compels us to look closely not only at her layered compositions but also the world around us,“ noted co-curator of the Brown retrospective, Anna Katherine Brodbeck.
Her 2004 Girl on a Swing, for example, is in conversation with Rococo Fête galante masterpieces like Fragonard’s The Swing (1767), and The Splendid Table (2019-2020) is reminiscent of the still life painting that dominated 17th-century Flemish art, with its sense of overspilling bounty on the table; in Brown’s Splendid Table, this notion is transformed via her wild use of color into something more like a sacrificial altar. In several works, the artist draws on the male masters of art history, like Titian, Bosch, Peter Paul Rubens, Goya, and Bruegel, and spins them on their head.
Jan Davidsz de Heem, Still Life with Ham, Lobster and Fruit (ca. 1653). Courtesy of Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen.
The curator added that Brown “continues to challenge artistic conventions and engage audiences with her revisionist approach to the history of art.”
The exhibition includes work from Brown dating back to the mid-1990s. The artist, who graduated from Slade School of Art in 1993, was a contemporary of the YBAs but not officially a part of the group. Over 30 paintings and drawings—with two new works on paper and two large-scale oil monotypes among them receiving their public debut—have been brought together from international private collections and major institutions.
Cecily Brown, The Splendid Table (2019-20). © Cecily Brown, photo Genevieve Hanson.
This mid-career retrospective also comes at an exciting point in Brown’s career, two years after her painting Faeriefeller (2019) hit the headlines amid a scandal around art flipping. In general, market interest in her work has grown hugely since 2007 when her prices hit over $1 million. Her auction record was set in 2018 when the painting SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER (1999) sold at Sotheby’s New York for $6.8 million, well above the high estimate of $2.5 million.
“Although Brown’s work has reached notoriety during her three-decade-long career,” Brodbeck added, “her sensitivity to the social context from which her work emerges has been little explored.”
Cecily Brown: Themes and Variations closes at Dallas Museum of Art on February 9, 2025, and moves on to Pennsylvania’s Barnes Foundation where it will be on display from March 9 through to May 25, 2025. A hardback survey of Brown’s career has been published to accompany the show.
See more images of work in the exhibition below.
Cecily Brown, Untitled (1996). © Cecily Brown, photo Rob McKeever, courtesy Gagosian.
Cecily Brown, Picture This (2020). © Cecily Brown, photo Genevieve Hanson.
Cecily Brown, High Society (1998). © Cecily Brown, photo Rob McKeever, courtesy Gagosian. More

“Everything has been destroyed in Gaza—institutions, galleries, artifacts, historical sites, mosques, and churches,” Andre Ibrahim said in a phone interview with Artnet recently, speaking from the West Bank. “The most powerful response you can have to that is to create again.”
Ibrahim is one of the organizers of the recently announced Gaza Biennale. The initiative looks to bring together a group of artists, some working under fire amid the ongoing war in Gaza and some who have fled, supported by colleagues in the West Bank.
An installation view of work by Aya Juha in her studio in North Gaza. Photo courtesy of the Forbidden Museum
Ibrahim is affiliated with the Al Risan Art Museum, which is helping sponsor the exhibition. He explained that the Gaza Biennale initiative was originally born from conversations with Tasneem Shatat, an artist from Khan Younis in Gaza. Shatat contacted the institution in April 2024 and has since become its first resident artist.
“Tasneem said that there are all these artists in Gaza who are working,” Ibrahim recalled. “So, a network started to develop to connect artists in Gaza, which eventually led to the project. Calling it a ‘biennale’ during the early planning phase was the best way to describe what we were trying to undertake collectively. The term was debated for a bit and it sort of stuck. It has evolved from there into a real biennale with more than 50 artists.”
The organizers do not currently have any institutional partners to show the work inside Gaza. Ibrahim said participating artists are more interested in having their work reach a wider audience in Europe or the United States, and he’s leading the efforts to find the biennale a home, seeking institutional partners both at home and abroad. The initiative is raising $90,000 to fund the artists.
“It is a message to the art world that there are artists working under unbelievable circumstances, facing obstacles and the harshest conditions, and still creating work, talking about art, teaching art, and running workshops with kids,” Ibrahim said.
Aya Juha. Anas (2024). Photo courtesy of Forbidden Museum
The artists in the biennale come from all over Gaza, Ibrahim added, including from the particularly devastated region of North Gaza. “As horrible as everything is all over Gaza, North Gaza is a whole other level. These artists totally blow my mind.”
He expressed particular awe about the work of the artist Aya Juha. “She’s creating unbelievable work that’s about what happened to her and dedicated to her brother, who was martyred,” Ibrahim said. “She’s addressing issues of imprisonment, torture, and the brutality of what’s happening to the people of Gaza by telling the story of her brother through a series of paintings made in her bombed-out studio.” In fact, Juha’s partly destroyed workspace has become a gallery to exhibit her work to the people of North Gaza, Ibrahim explained.
Fatema Abu Owda. For the exhibition “The Red Feet.” (2024). Photo courtesy of the Forbidden Museum
Other participating artists such as Ahmed Muhanna are making work using very limited supplies, adapting out of necessity to the conditions in Gaza. Reached by Artnet through social media, Muhanna said he had been a specialist in art therapy for children before the war while maintaining his own artistic practice in his studio on the side.
“Since the war entered Gaza, everything was turned upside down from the feeling of fear and excessive anxiety,” he said. During the first three months of the conflict, Muhanna explained, he could not hold a pen or brush from the shock, but he has since returned to a studio overlooking the streets of Gaza.
“With the passage of time, at the beginning of 2024, I gathered my strength as if something inside me was telling me, ‘You are strong and you are an artist, you must gather yourself and send a message that you have something in this world,’” he said.
Alaa Al Shawa. From the exhibition “Fading Gestures.” (2024) Photo courtesy of the Forbidden Museum
Muhanna has created a series of works using aid boxes air-dropped or delivered into Gaza. “He started taking the boxes apart and using the pieces to tell the story of life where he is, using the box as part of the artwork,” Ibrahim explained. “He only had a few supplies, so he found charcoal from burnt sticks from a fire. If you look at the images, you think it’s someone in a studio making it, but he’s figuring out things around him to make the work.”
Ghanim Said Al-din, meanwhile, has found a way to make the separation of the Palestinian enclaves of the West Bank and Gaza part of his work. The artist conceptualized his artwork from his tent in Gaza. Notes and instructions for installation are fed to artists in the West Bank who collaborate in its creation by fabricating the work.
“To what extent his notes will be part of the exhibition remains to be seen, but they are quite beautiful images of his desk where he’s working and what he’s constructing,” Ibrahim said. “It’s a very interesting project which is his way of bringing politics into everyday life.”
Meanwhile, Malaka Abu Owda is creating work using a tablet computer in the town of Al-Mawasi in the Rafah region of Gaza. Ibrahim commended her for making digital work in a way that it is still “very textured.” Her mother, Fatema Abu Owda, is also an artist, though one who prefers to work with physical media and even creates her own colors for her vivid artworks.
Yasmeen Al Daya. Embrace (2024). Photo courtesy of the Forbidden Museum
“Fatema is an incredible woman and artist,” Ibrahim said. “She has been doing these beautiful workshops for kids for free. They are displaced in a tent. She also has very limited supplies. So she started making colors for her paintings, red maybe from some spice or something.”
Like Malaka, the artist Osama Naqqa is making black-and-white drawings digitally from his phone in the Khan Younis region of Gaza. “It’s unbelievable, the detail and the power he’s creating on his phone with his finger,” Ibrahim said.
Not all the artists participating in the Gaza Biennale are still in Gaza. Some have been able to leave and are now in Egypt, Europe, or elsewhere. One of these is Hala Eid Al-Naji, a young female artist now in Cairo.
People are seen participating in the interactive exhibit “Nazah’s Lexicon” from Palestinian artist Hala Eid Al-Naji, currently on display in Cairo and part of the planned Gaza Biennale. Photo courtesy of Hala Eid Al-Naji
Al-Naji has created a project called Nazeh’s Lexicon, a single large installation with multiple parts that the artist described to Artnet as an “immersive journey” showing the displacement of Palestinians from their homeland in Gaza. The installation is currently mounted as a solo show at Kodak Courtyard in Cairo. The work is inspired by a character named “Nazeh” created by her colleague Mohammed Alhaj, who is separately a participant in the Gaza Biennale.
“Although it is a solo exhibition, I consider it the culmination of a collective effort,” Al-Naji said. “Launching this work amidst an ongoing genocidal war was no easy task. The idea began as a modest gathering of displaced artists and architects from Gaza who had relocated to Egypt. It started with us recounting the painful narratives of displacement.”
As this group of artists talked, she noticed that the stories were filled with “rich linguistic expressions” that uniquely describe the situation in Gaza and the subsequent experience of exile. The installation “showcases a collection of terms, expressions, and colloquial words that capture the manifestations of daily life during displacement,” she said.
A person is seen viewing an art installation by Palestinian artist Hala Eid Al-Naji, currently on view in Cairo. It is part of the planned Gaza Biennale. Photo courtesy of Hala Eid Al-Naji
At the heart of Nazeh’s Lexicon is an interactive map of the Gaza Strip with stories “etched into its wooden surface.” The oral histories of Palestinians being passed on through storytelling often “feel inadequate.” As a consequence, she said, “a stronger, more respectful medium was needed—one that honors their pain and wounds.”
Displaced Palestinians from Gaza are invited to participate in the interactive installation and trace their own displacement journeys, she said.
“We are doing this to stop the war,” Ibrahim said. “It is in the hands of Western and Arab governments to stop this war, we all know that. Our message to them, to their institutions, is that we are over 50 artists telling the world that Palestine is still alive and Palestinians in Gaza are not victims but our guides to lead us out of this crisis.” More

A beloved piece of Irish history—both beautiful and scandalous—is back in the spotlight in Miami Beach this year, on view in “Harry Clarke and the Geneva Window” at the Wolfsonian FIU.
The work is a luminous stained glass window by Harry Clarke (1891–1931), commissioned by the Irish Free State in 1926 for the International Labor Court at the League of Nations building in Geneva.
The show at the Wolfsonian juxtaposes the jewel-like window with late 19th and early 20th-century Irish decorative artworks. It also delves into the controversy surrounding the piece, as well as Clarke’s life and career, which was tragically cut short by his premature death at the age of just 41.
Battling ill health from tuberculosis and juggling multiple projects, Clarke finally finished the Geneva Window in May 1930. By the following January, he was dead—and so too was the commission.
Harry Clarke, Geneva Window (1926–30). Collection of the Wolfsonian–Florida International University, Miami Beach, Florida, the Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection.
The Geneva Window is one of the artist’s greatest masterpieces, but the Irish government ultimately rejected the window due to its shocking content, including drunkenness, nudity, and—perhaps worst of all—Protestants.
“Ireland was incredibly conservative at this moment in time,” exhibition curator Lea Nickless told me, admitting that Clarke probably should have known that the work would not be well received.
The nation had just won its independence from Great Britain five years prior, in 1921. Clarke, for his part, was greatly influenced by the turbulent moment at which he came of age, characterized by nationalism and the Celtic Revival, which sought to craft a modern Irish identity informed by its ancient history and the Gaelic language.
Harry Clarke, The Demi-Gods by James Stephens and Juno and the Paycock by Sean O’Casey from Harry Clarke Geneva Window (1926–30). Collection of the Wolfsonian–Florida International University, Miami Beach, Florida, the Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection.
The Geneva Window was meant to be a reflection of Irish culture. But in the contract for the commission, the artist remained vague about his vision for the window, saying only that he would highlight the modern Irish writer with “opportunities for phantasy.”
“At that moment in time, Irish literature was really at the apex of Irish cultural output,” Nickless said, noting that the Irish Literary Revival was closely tied to the country’s nationalist movement.
Harry Clarke, The Wayfarer by Patrick (Pádraig) Pearse and The Story Brought by Brigit by Lady Gregory from Harry Clarke Geneva Window (1926–30). Collection of the Wolfsonian–Florida International University, Miami Beach, Florida, the Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection.
One of the Geneva Window panes honors Patrick Pearse, a poet and revolutionary who was one of the leaders of the Easter Rising in 1916. The rebellion failed, and Clarke even lost his illustrations for The Rime of the Ancient Mariner in a fire that broke out during the uprising. He commemorated the conflict in the Geneva Window by including a poem Pearse wrote the night before his execution by the British.
But of the 15 writers Clarke chose to highlight in the commission—George Bernard Shaw, James Stephens, Sean O’Casey, Liam O’Flaherty, George William “Æ” Russell, Seumas O’Kelly, James Joyce, George Fitzmaurice, Padraic Colum, Lennox Robinson, William Butler Yeats, Seamus O’Sullivan, John Millington Synge, Lady Gregory, and Pearse—seven were Protestant. That was a problem, considering the nascent country’s staunch Catholicism.
Harry Clarke, The Playboy of the Western World by John Millington Synge and The Others by Seumas O’Sullivan from Harry Clarke Geneva Window (1926–30). Collection of the Wolfsonian–Florida International University, Miami Beach, Florida, the Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection.
And some of the window panes were considered too provocative, like the depiction of the titular character from Synge’s popular 1907 play Playboy of the Western World, with tight breeches highlighting his manhood in an erotic manner. In the same pane, another male character from a Seumas O’Sullivan poem seems to place a woman’s hand over his crotch. Several of the featured literary scenes prominently included alcohol consumption, which was not the image of Ireland that its leaders wished to present to the world.
And then there was the pane taken from the 1926 novel Mr. Gilhooley, where a woman clad in a gauzy gown revealing her naked bosom dances for a middle-aged man. The author, O’Flaherty, had actually had work banned under Irish law, as had Joyce, for immorality.
Harry Clarke, Mr. Gilhooley by Liam O’Flaherty from Harry Clarke Geneva Window (1926–30). Collection of the Wolfsonian–Florida International University, Miami Beach, Florida, the Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection.
After the window’s completion, a government official warned Clarke that showcasing Protestants as Irish representatives “would give grave offence to many of our people.” The window was “beautiful,” but the other elements of the work deemed problematic “would give rise to misunderstanding and much adverse comment.”
In the end, the risk of public controversy was just too great, and Ireland never gifted the Geneva Window to the League of Nations. Clarke’s widow, the artist Margaret Clarke (1881–1961), bought the painting back from the government in 1932.
Though Clarke may not be a household name in the U.S., he is a key figure in Irish art history.
Harry Clarke, The Weaver’s Grave by Seumas O’Kelly from Harry Clarke Geneva Window (1926–30). Collection of the Wolfsonian–Florida International University, Miami Beach, Florida, the Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection.
“In Ireland, Harry Clarke is considered the greatest artist of the 20th century—and forget stained glass, that’s across the board,” Nickless said. “He is incredibly venerated.”
Born on St. Patrick’s Day, Clarke trained in stained glass from the age of 14, apprenticing at his father’s church decorating firm in Dublin. He actually first achieved renown as an illustrator, creating drawings for widely disseminated works such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust. (One of those drawings, featuring a self portrait of the artist with Mephistopheles, is part of the Wolfsonian show.)
But when Clarke began focusing on glass, he was doing things with the medium that no one else could do, achieving painterly effects with rich color and fine details. He used acid etching on “flashed” glass that is clear on one side and layered on on the other. Clarke would dip the glass in wax, and then scrape parts of the wax away before immersing the glass in hydrofluoric acid, creating subtle gradations in color where the wax had been removed.
Harry Clarke, A Cradle Song by Padraic Colum from Harry Clarke Geneva Window (1926–30). Collection of the Wolfsonian–Florida International University, Miami Beach, Florida, the Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection.
“He was known to go through the process sometimes as many as six times
for each piece,” Nickless said. “Working with this acid bath, he was right on top of these vats of acid, breathing that in for years on end. It definitely contributed to his ill health and to his tuberculosis and his lung problems.” (Clarke checked in to a Swiss sanatorium for treatment in 1929 and again in 1930, dying on his journey home.)
The Geneva Window is something of his magnum opus. The majority of Clarke’s other stained glass works were done for the Catholic church. Though it was ultimately censored, the Geneva Window gave him a unique artistic freedom.
“This was the true Harry Clarke expressing himself,” Nickless said. “And this was an opportunity to create a modern identity for Ireland.
So that’s what he was so excited about.… and just the way he’s done it is not like any other stained glass artist that you see.”
Harry Clarke, The Dreamers by Lennox Robinson and The Countess Cathleen by W.B. Yeats from Harry Clarke Geneva Window (1926–30). Collection of the Wolfsonian–Florida International University, Miami Beach, Florida, the Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection.
Though it might seem strange that one of Ireland’s most important 20th-century treasures landed in Florida, Margaret Clarke was so upset by the government’s censorship of the work that she vowed it would never go to an Irish museum.
When Wolfsonian founder Mitchell “Micky” Wolfson Jr. was amassing his collection, which focuses on the years 1850 to 1950, he worked closely with the Fine Art Society, a gallery in London. The dealer helped arrange a loan of the window for an exhibition Wolfson held in Miami in 1982.
Then, after a 1988 show of the artist’s work at the gallery, Clarke’s sons agreed to sell Wolfson the work. (The price was in excess of £100,000 [$178,000], according to a London Times article at the time.)
For 25 years, the Geneva Window was the star of the show at the Wolfsonian, which opened in 1995. It became part of Florida International University when Wolfson  donated its collection and Miami Beach building to the state of Florida. But when the museum deinstalled its permanent collection galleries for a renovation project in 2020, the window went into storage.
Harry Clarke, St. Joan by George Bernard Shaw from Harry Clarke Geneva Window (1926–30). Collection of the Wolfsonian–Florida International University, Miami Beach, Florida, the Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection.
“We would get the most heartbreaking emails and calls from Irish people who said ‘we travelled all the way to Miami to see the Harry Clarke window, but it had been taken down,’” Nickless said. “We realized we had to put it back up!”
The museum intends to keep the current exhibition on view indefinitely. But when the time comes to rotate the collection’s display, the Geneva Window won’t be going anywhere.
“On the surface, it is a spectacularly luminous, incredible piece just to look at. It’s beautiful,” Nickless said. “But then it has all of these other stories. The literary stories of each of these 15 writers, but also the narrative of Irish resilience and Ireland’s striving to become its own independent nation.
So it’s one of those complicated works to really figure out and understand. That’s what makes it even more fascinating.” More