Art & Exhibitions

Fashion. Textiles. Interior design. Printmaking. Mosaics. Painting. Sonia Delaunay did it all. An artist and entrepreneur born in 1885, she defied the expectations of her era to enjoy forge a successful 70-year career fueled by her bold, colorful abstractions.
“For Sonia, there was no distinction between the fine and the decorative, and I think that opened up huge possibilities for her,” Laura Microulis, the research curator at New York’s Bard Graduate Center, told me. “This almost insatiable quest to create kind of propelled her throughout her whole life.”
Today best known as one half of a duo with her husband, Robert Delaunay, the artist stands firmly on her own in “Sonia Delaunay: Living Art,” her solo show on view through this weekend at Bard’s Upper West Side galleries.
“For me, Sonia’s work represents just kind of pure joy,” Microulis, who co-curated the exhibition with Waleria Dorogova, said.
Sonia Delaunay, Mosaïque horizontale, executed by Maximilien Herzèle (1954), on view with works on paper by the artist in “Sonia Delaunay: Living Art” at the Bard Graduate Center Gallery. Photo by Da Ping Luo.
The Bard museum, with its focus on decorative arts and design, took a different approach to Delaunay’s work than previous exhibitions, focusing less on her virtuosic sense of color and form, and more on the diversity of her practice and breadth of her artistic output.
Born in the Russian empire, in what is present-day Ukraine, Delaunay left home at 18 to study art in Germany, before moving to Paris.
There, in 1907, she exhibited alongside the likes of Georges Braque, André Derain, and Pablo Picasso in her first art show. (She briefly married the dealer, Wilhelm Uhde, in a mutually beneficial arrangement that allowed her to rebuff her family’s desire that she move home to Russia, and helped disguise his homosexuality.)
In 1909, Delaunay met Robert. They were married by November 1910, and had a son, Charles, in January 1911.
Installation view of “Sonia Delaunay: Living Art” on view at the Bard Graduate Center Gallery with Robert Delaunay’s painting Madame Heim (1926–27) and felted wool cloche and matching silk scarf by Sonia Delaunay. Photo ©Bruce M. White.
The birth inspired Delaunay’s first experiments with non-figurative art, when she made Charles a baby blanket with scraps of fabric, in the style of Ukrainian peasants. Struck by the almost Cubist effect of the color composition, she and Robert began experimenting with abstraction.
The blanket isn’t on view, but the show opens with Delaunay’s “Simultaneous dress” or “Robe simultanée,” a patchwork 1913 gown that Microulis described as “the star object of the exhibition,” on view in the U.S. for the first time ever.
“The dress is super special. Sonia made it to promote what she was doing in terms of her painting at the time,” she said. “It’s basically an abstract painting that she wears.”
Sonia Delaunay, Robe simultanée (1913), on view with works on paper by the artist in “Sonia Delaunay: Living Art” at the Bard Graduate Center Gallery. Photo by Da Ping Luo.
The dress was designed to illustrate the couple’s new concept of Simultanism, or Simultané, which is based on the visual relationship colors have to one another viewed side by side. (The couple would trademark the term in 1925.)
“It’s really the idea that colors, when they’re surrounded by other colors, look different,” Microulis said. “Simultaneous contrasts actually produces an optical effect whereby the colors [seem to] vibrate. And there’s a rhythmic sort of dynamism that is produced as your eye goes across the canvas.”
This concept became the guiding force for Delaunay across mediums, applied to furniture, clothing, accessories, and bookmaking, and even to playing cards and automobiles. The Delaunays designed sets and costumes for ballets and she opened her first fashion and interior design business, Casa Sonia, in Madrid in 1918.
Installation view of “Sonia Delaunay: Living Art” on view at the Bard Graduate Center Gallery. Photo ©Bruce M. White.
Putting together the exhibition was something of a challenge. Many key examples of Delaunay’s work were recently on loan for her 2022 show at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art outside Copenhagen, and are too delicate to be displayed regularly.
But that gave Bard the opportunity to delve deeper into her oeuvre, showcasing lesser-known aspects of Delaunay’s career, such as the tapestries she made for the French state in the mid-1970s, just a few years before her death.
The sheer range of projects on view in the exhibition is nothing short of remarkable, painting Delaunay as an ahead-of-her-time multi-hyphenate. (When I told Microulis I thought she would be an influencer if she alive today, she said I wasn’t the first to jump to that conclusion.)
“Sonia had these very elaborate photo shoots with prominent photographers where she would dress in her clothing. All of those images would be sent out to to various press outlets,” Microulis said. “She was like her own press office.”
Sonia Delaunay in her studio at Boulevard Malesherbes (ca. 1925). Photo courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.
Robert died of cancer in 1941 at the age of 56, while Delaunay lived until 1979, age 94. She became the first living woman artist to have a solo show at the Louvre, in 1964, and remained remarkably productive even into her final years.
And Delaunay was mindful of her own legacy, compiling and exhaustive personal archive of letters, journals, and other materials documenting her remarkable life and many artistic accomplishments. A tireless self-promoter, Delaunay arranged to donate a large collection of her fabric samples and color cards—a selection of which are on view at Bard—to the Textile Arts Museum in Lyon, France.
“Sonia very deliberately wanted her textiles to become a part of the history of luxury silk production in Lyon,” Microulis said. “Given the strategic donations she made to French institutions later in her life, I think she knew on some level that her work and the work of her husband were going to be an important part of the history of art.”
“Sonia Delaunay: Living Art” is on view at the Bard Graduate Center Gallery, 18 West 86th Street, New York, New York, February 23–July 7, 2024.
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With sun-dappled landscapes and the azure allure of the Mediterranean, the French Riviera—also known as the Côte d’Azur—has seduced artists from Claude Monet to Pablo Picasso to Marc Chagall.
A new exhibition at Opera Gallery in Monaco celebrates artists’ lasting love affair with the Côte d’Azur. Under the patronage of Monaco’s Prince Albert II, the gallery will present the 35 modern and contemporary masterpieces in the new show “La Côte d’Azur, Terre d’Inspiration.”
Pablo Picasso, Personnage (Homme) (1970). Courtesy of Succession Picasso via Opera Gallery.
Beyond Picasso and Chagall, artists included in the lineup are Calder, Léger, Miró, Karel Appel, Fernando Botero, George Condo, Niki de Saint Phalle, Jean Dubuffet, Hans Hartung, and Jean-Paul Riopelle. The gallery has also included some contemporary artists whose works have been “similarly energized” by the region.
Marc Chagall, Le peintre et sa vision des couples en rouge, bleu et vert (1981). Photo courtesy of Adagp, Paris via Opera Gallery.
The area around the French Riviera was simultaneously home to Chagall, Picasso, and an aging Henri Matisse for a span of a few years beginning around 1948. Even the famed Irish-born British painter Francis Bacon intermittently lived in Monaco, the sovereign city-state in the broader region of the French Riviera. More

When London’s V&A Museum announced in February that it was seeking a Taylor Swift superfan for an advisory role, it may have been burying the lead. 
Opening at the V&A South Kensington later this month will be “Taylor Swift | Songbook Trail,” a show centered on 16 outfits worn by the 14-time Grammy Award–winning musician. 
The show celebrates Swift’s lyrics and music videos in addition to her costumes, delving into the global Swift phenomenon. Also on view: instruments, music awards, storyboards, and previously unseen archival materials pertaining to her childhood and legacy. It stretches from her earliest styles, when she emerged as a country musician in 2007 clad in cowboy boots, to the jet-black ruffled-shoulder dress she sports in the video for the single “Fortnight,” from her latest album, Tortured Poets Department. 
“We are delighted to be able to display a range of iconic looks worn by Taylor Swift at the V&A this summer,” said Kate Bailey, senior curator for theater and performance. “Each [celebrates] a chapter in the artist’s musical journey. Taylor Swift’s songs like objects tell stories, often drawing from art, history, and literature. We hope this theatrical trail across the museum will inspire curious visitors to discover more about the performer, her creativity, and V&A objects.” 
A still from the music video for “Willow” (2020) by Taylor Swift. Photo courtesy TAS Rights Management.
Leading through the museum’s collection galleries, the “trail” will juxtapose Taylor’s looks with spaces and objects from the museum’s holdings. 
Designed by award-winning designer Tom Piper, the show anticipates Swift’s triumphant return to London’s Wembley Stadium for a five-night stand with opening act Paramore on August 15. 
The V&A is only the latest museum to seek to juice attendance with a Swift show. The Stone Harbor Museum in New Jersey has just opened a showcase of Swift memorabilia, including photos of a young Swift and her family vacationing at the bayside borough. Last year, New York’s Museum of Arts and Design devoted an entire floor of its facility to a show devoted to the pop star. 
“Taylor Swift | Songbook Trail” will be on view at the V&A Kensington, Cromwell Rd, London, the U.K., July 27–September 8, 2024.

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On November 6, 2002, when a Luxair plane crashed while attempting to land at Luxembourg Airport, 20 passengers were killed. Among them was the Luxembourgish artist Michel Majerus, who at 35 had already won international acclaim for playful and incisive paintings that borrow from advertising, video games, record covers, art history, and a vast array of other sources.
Since then, Majerus’s reputation has continued to grow, with younger artists like Jamian Juliano-Villani and Egan Frantz citing him as an influence. In 2022, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami hosted a Majerus survey, and five German museums and art spaces staged shows devoted to his work, which ranges from icy text paintings that recall techno CDs to deadpan abstractions to a half-pipe emblazoned with computer graphics. His longtime Berlin gallery, Neugerriemschneider, and the New York-based Matthew Marks, have been guiding his work into key collections.
Now a sprawling body of material that details how Majerus made his trailblazing art has become available. His laptop was recovered from the plane crash and has been restored as part of a thrillingly multifarious project that involves his estate, the artist Cory Arcangel, a longtime Majerus fan, and the digital-art organization Rhizome. Arcangel has created an ongoing YouTube series titled “Let’s Play Majerus G3,” and is in a joint exhibition with Majerus (of the same name) that is running through the middle of next March at the estate’s Berlin home, the artist’s former studio.
“It wasn’t even known whether anything would work,” Arcangel said in a video interview from Stavanger, Norway, where he’s based. “We worked on the project for many years, knowing that it could have just been a big dud. The hard drive could have been corrupted beyond bootable form.”
Cory Arcangel, Let’s Play Majerus G3!, 2024. © Cory Arcangel and Michel Majerus Estate, 2024/Courtesy Cory Arcangel, Michel Majerus Estate and Rhizome
A Tour Into the Past
Mercifully, it was not corrupted, and Dragan Espenschied, Rhizome’s preservation director, went about figuring out how to make the laptop run exactly as it did in the past on a contemporary computer, a potentially thorny process known in the tech trade as emulation. “It can work again if the stars align,” Espenschied said, speaking from his home in Stuttgart, Germany.
The two men have experience with such projects. They emulated a Macintosh computer that Arcangel bought at a Salvation Army store in 2005, finding a homemade game on it called Bomb Iraq. The artist also helped rescue digital Andy Warhol pieces stored on decades-old floppy discs held by the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh.
However, the contents of Majerus’s laptop are on an entirely different scale. “It’s a true virtual studio—a true studio,” Arcangel said. There are files related to shows he never realized, his final solo exhibition, in 2002, at Petzel gallery in New York, “almost from start to finish,” a bevy of source images he used, “and photographs he’s taken with his Nikon camera, out and about.”
On YouTube, Arcangel has released the first video walkthrough of the laptop, a Macintosh G3 Wall Street—“the Ferrari of its day,” as he says. Inspired by popular YouTube channels that do song or chess analysis, Arcangel offers lucid commentary as he clicks through folders and discusses Majerus’s practice for a general audience. He also hams it up a bit. “If you’re wondering why this is all taking so long, that’s how life was in the ‘90s,” he says, firing up the emulation and waiting for Mac OS 9 load. “Computers were slow!”
Installation view of “Let’s Play Majerus G3,” a project by Cory Arcangel at the Michel Majerus Estate in Berlin, April 27, 2024–March 15, 2025. © Michel Majerus Estate, 2024/© Cory Arcangel, 2024/Photo: Jens Ziehe, Berlin.
Opening Photoshop 6.0 in the emulation, Arcangel reveals, layer by layer, how Majerus built some images, and how he created digital mock-ups for his exhibitions. “You see the full sausage being made, so to speak,” Arcangel told me. Not everything that was on the laptop is accessible, though. Majerus’s family removed items that they deemed too personal. “If you’re looking for some hot gossip, you’re not going to find it here,” Arcangel cautions his viewers.
A New View on Majerus
What is clear is that Majerus was something of a computer power user. “You turn it on, and you immediately see [that it] is heavily customized,” Espenschied said. “Everything that could be changed and configured in the system was changed to look different. The system typeface was like a huge, cartoonish-looking, almost handwritten typeface.”
Even for those knew Majerus, or who have studied his practice closely, there have been discoveries. “We were surprised by how many photographs he took,” said Ruth Kißling, the director of the Michel Majerus Estate, which oversees his archives and runs its exhibition space. “There’s an endless mass of photographs.” One poignant photo, which Arcangel pulls up on screen on YouTube, shows Majerus’s laptop sitting on a hotel bed: a behind-the-scenes glimpse of an artist on the road, perhaps taking a break from work.
“He had a computer, and he used it, but he never spoke about it,” Tim Neuger, a cofounder of Neugerriemschneider, told me. As Neuger sees it, “it’s a dimension that we’re not really able to grasp yet, the dimension that Cory is laying open.”
Michel Majerus, Lettin’ off as much as you can, 1997. © Michel Majerus Estate, 2024/Courtesy private collection and neugerriemschneider, Berlin.
What would Majerus make of all this? “Michel would have been enormously pleased and happy,” Neuger said, “that such a wonderful figure like Cory would do a YouTube tutorial on him, not an art-historical text but a YouTube tutorial, a new thing.”
Arcangel likened the experience of looking through the laptop to “going to Pollock’s studio. It’s very similar, but it’s just a virtual version.” Once it was operational, he began spending an hour or two every morning on it. “There’s no organization so I could just like systematically understand it,” he said. “I had to learn it like a language. I had to just go in a little bit every day and just immerse myself in it.”
While Arcangel develops new episodes of the YouTube program, a total of eight works by the two artists are on view in the Berlin exhibition, including one astonishing Majerus piece that unites a small abstract painting, a pair of Fila sneakers, and the hit Prodigy album The Fat of the Land (1997) on CD—an ode to shifting tastes and disposable consumerism.
“He was really, really at the edge of something that was happening, and not many artists were in the league that he was in,” Arcangel said. Majerus’s laptop, he went on, “could show us what studios are going to look like in the future. This is what art history will be in the future, undeniably.”
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“Form itself, even if completely abstract,” Wassily Kandinsky once said, “has its own inner sound.” By that measure, the new exhibition at the H’ART Museum must be a symphony. At “Kandinsky,” the Amsterdam institution, in partnership with the Centre Pompidou in Paris, has brought together 60 of the painter’s works to trace his creative journey from evocative figuration to thrilling abstraction. 
Wassily Kandinsky, Mit dem schwarzen Bogen (Avec l’arc noir) (1912). Photo: Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI/Hélène Mauri/Dist. RMN-GP.
Among the show’s highlights is Mit dem Schwarzen Bogen, the artist’s 1912 composition that epitomizes his reach for autonomous figuration over naturalistic representation. The painting is constructed with thick black lines, conjoined by organic shapes and a dance of colors. Its movement and dissonance were purposeful and inspired by the musical work of Kandinsky’s friend Arnold Schönberg.  
“‘Today’s’ pictorial and musical dissonance,” he wrote to the composer in 1911, “is nothing more than ‘tomorrow’s’ consonance.” 
Installation view of “Kandinsky” at H’ART Museum. Photo courtesy of H’ART Museum.
It was decades before Kandinsky arrived at his pioneering understanding of abstraction. Born in Moscow in 1866, he later landed in Munich, Germany, where, deeply inspired by Monet, he gave up a career in law and economics for art at age 30.  
Where his early landscapes, including The Blue Rider (1903), presented a post-Impressionist bent, he began embracing an expressive figuration after spending his first summer in Murnau. There, the town’s colors, light, and local folk art also prompted Kandinsky to develop his artistic theories, contained in 1911’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art.  
Wassily Kandinsky, Improvisation 3 (1909). Photo: Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI/Adam Rzepka/Dist. RMN-GP.
This turning point for Kandinsky is highlighted in the H’ART Museum exhibition with paintings such as Improvisation 3 (1909) and Impression V (Parc) (1911), that bear out his experiments in hybrid forms. The period culminates with Bild mit rotem Fleck (1914), a striking work in which the painter’s dissonance achieves dynamism.
Also central to the show is Kandinsky’s association with the Bauhaus from 1922. While teaching at the school in Weimar, he developed his study on points and lines, writing Point and Line to Plane (1926), a book that would come to be highly influential in 20th-century art. It’s during this time that Kandinsky’s art leaned into geometry with a no less cosmic weightlessness, as seen in 1923’s On White II.
Installation view of “Kandinsky” at H’ART Museum. Photo courtesy of H’ART Museum.
From this phase, too, “Kandinsky” will also feature the murals that the artist painted with his students for the 1922 Juryfreie Kunstschau (Jury-Free Art Show). While the original panels have been lost, this reconstruction, featuring the same colors, forms, and dimensions, was faithfully made under the guidance of Nina Kandinsky for the opening of the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 1977. 
Installation view of “Kandinsky” at H’ART Museum. Photo courtesy of H’ART Museum.
The couple relocated to Paris in Kandinsky’s later years, where he painted such vital works as Entassement réglé (1938) before he died in 1944. Nina would ensure his legacy, gifting a large trove of his artworks and the contents of his studio (including drawings, watercolors, and graphic works) to the Pompidou. In 1979, she established the Kandinsky Society, headquartered at the museum, which oversaw the publication of his catalogue raisonné. The organization folded in 2015. 
Wassily Kandinsky, Entassement réglé (1938). Photo: Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI/Bertrand Prévost/Dist. RMN-GP.
“Kandinsky” marks the first exhibition at the H’ART Museum, after it severed ties with its parent institution, the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. The show was first presented at the Centre Pompidou in 2009. 
“Kandinsky” is on view at the H’ART Museum, Amstel 51, Amsterdam, the Netherlands, through November 10. 
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Artists, musicians, and philosophers have long explored the value of stillness, emptiness, and silence. In his White Paintings (1951), artist Robert Rauschenberg painted monochrome canvases that allowed in life in the form of viewers’ shadows. Composer John Cage famously provoked the music world with his composition 4’33” (1952), in which a pianist sits still at their instrument for the allotted time, so that ambient noise helped define the music itself. Artist Yves Klein notoriously showed an empty white gallery in Paris, calling it simply Le Vide (1958).
Now, artist Marina Abramović is calling for a spell of silence at an event that is known for the opposite: the Glastonbury Festival, which started out five decades ago as a simple music festival on a farm in England’s Somerset region, and has since grown to mammoth proportions as an event for theater, comedy, dance, and various other art forms. 
Crowds at the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury Festival, 2024. Photo: Ben Birchall/PA Images via Getty Images.
At the festival’s iconic main forum, the Pyramid stage, Abramović will call for silence at 5:55 p.m. local time today, as part of a performance titled Seven Minutes of Collective Silence. The silence is in reply to the theme of this year’s iteration of the festival: peace. The performance is curated by Josef O’Connor through Glastonbury’s ongoing collaboration with Circa, a contemporary art platform.
“Silence is a powerful tool that allows us to connect with ourselves and each other in ways words cannot,” said Abramović. “At a festival like Glastonbury, where sound and energy are in constant flux, these Seven Minutes of Collective Silence offer a unique opportunity for unity and introspection. It’s about being present together, experiencing the power of silence as one.” 
For the occasion, Abramović will don a dress created by her friend, renowned fashion designer Riccardo Tisci, which, according to press materials, features “a surprise detail” that will come to light during the performance. 
It’s truly a gigantic stage for the performer, who has long sought to break out from the role of visual artist into something much larger. Glastonbury Festival provides a venue for that on an unprecedented scale: legend has it that, including gatecrashers, a record 300,000 people attended the 1994 festival, which was headlined by the Levellers. 
“We are honored to have Marina Abramović bring such a meaningful and profound experience to Glastonbury,” said Emily Eavis, the festival’s co-organizer. “Her work has always pushed boundaries and inspired deep reflection, and we believe this moment of collective silence will be a memorable and impactful addition to the festival.” 
Abramović will be followed by a set by English musician PJ Harvey. 
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The four grandes dames of the French Impressionist movement will be spotlighted in a major survey at the National Gallery of Ireland that opens today. “Women Impressionists” takes place at the 150th anniversary of the first Impressionist exhibition, mounted in Paris in 1874, and focuses on Marie Bracquemond, Mary Cassatt, Eva Gonzalès, and Berthe Morisot. It’s the first show to bring together the four artists under one roof on the Emerald Isle. 
Organized by the National Gallery in collaboration with Odrupgaard, a museum devoted to French Impressionism and sited in Charlottenlund, Denmark, the show features works from their collections along with examples on loan from private collections in the U.S. and Europe. The show is overseen by National Gallery curator of modern art Janet McLean and the Ordrupgaard’s senior curator Dorthe Vangsgaard Nielsen.
Eva Gonzalès, Children Playing on Sand Dunes, Grandcamp (1877-1878). Courtesy National Gallery of Ireland.
Cassatt and Morisot are nearly as well known as their male counterparts in the movement. Cassatt’s work appears in collections such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and the Philadelphia Museum of Art; her Child in a Straw Hat (1886), which appears in the exhibition in Dublin, on loan from the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., is an icon. 
Mary Cassatt, Child in a Straw Hat (ca.1886). Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington.
Morisot, for her part, was married to Édouard Manet’s brother Eugène, and participated in many of the major exhibitions staged by the Impressionists. Her works appear in collections such as the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Musée d’Orsay, Paris; and the Cleveland Museum of Art.
Marie Bracquemond, Afternoon Tea (Le Goûter) (ca.1880). CC0 Paris Musées / Petit Palais, musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris.
Bracquemond and Gonzalès are not the household names that Cassatt and Morisot have become, but moved in the uppermost circles of the French art scene of their day. 
Mary Cassatt, Susan Comforting the Baby No.1 (ca. 1881). Courtesy Columbus Museum of Art
Bracquemond began to show her work at the Paris Salon when she was just an adolescent, and while she didn’t study art formally, she did receive some instruction from Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres, as well as advice from Paul Gauguin. 
Berthe Morisot, The Artist’s Daughter, Julie, with her Nanny (ca. 1884). Courtesy Minneapolis Institute of Art. Licenced under CC BY 4.0.
She and her husband, printmaker Félix Bracquemond, produced ceramic art for Haviland & Co, a maker of Limoges porcelain. She participated in three of the major Impressionist exhibitions, in 1879, 1880, and 1889. Much of her work disappeared into private collections, its whereabouts unrecorded.
Gonzalès was a model and the only formal student to Édouard Manet, who once painted her at her easel in a work now hanging in London’s National Gallery. She also sat for several other Impressionist painters. Her work was well received by critics of the periodic Salon exhibitions, including Émile Zola. She died in childbirth in 1883, at the age of 34. 
“Women Impressionists” is at the National Gallery of Ireland, Merrion Square West, Dublin 2, Ireland through October 6, 2024.
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Michael Wang is an elementalist. The multi-disciplinary conceptual artist and architect has spun the ephemeral qualities of air into the tactile, toyed with the transmutational properties of water, and now, with his upcoming exhibition, “Yellow Earth,” he contemplates and displays man’s relationship to uranium, the earth’s natural source of nuclear energy.
Michael Wang, 35°33’8”N 108°36’30”W (2024). Courtesy of the artist.
“A lot of my work is related to energy,” Wang said on a video call last week. “This show is the next chapter of looking at the natural origins of modern energy.” Through his practice, Wang examines the natural world, celebrating its beauty while considering humanity’s position within—or without—it. He is drawn to the constructive and destructive capabilities of energy and its iterations. In particular, he seeks to reveal, rather than expose, the hidden truths and cycles that connect everything together. “Yellow Earth” opens Thursday and runs through August 31 at the TriBeCa gallery Bienvenu Steinberg & C. 
The exhibit’s name is derived from the yellow color of refined uranium ore, the show’s central material. One of the objects on display is Collision Bar, (Three Balls)—a sleek hexagonal aluminum baton with a slit revealing three acid yellow glass marbles socketed within. The marbles’ eerie glow is at once inviting and ominous, a result of the pigmented uranium embedded within the glass. The artifact evokes the steel control rods of a nuclear reactor, a symbol of both power and danger. Other pieces in the exhibit incorporate small nuggets of slightly radioactive uranium ore. The ore samples are invisible, hidden within sculptural “containment structures” that completely block the transmission of radiation.
Michael Wang, (Left) Trinities (Fuel Cores) (2024). (Right) Yellow Painting (Tailings) (2024). Courtesy of the artist.
The show is not only a compelling meditation on the element, but also curated dialogue with the work of Walter De Maria (1935-2013), the father of Land Art (in fact, De Maria’s former lower Manhattan studio was located across the street from the gallery). “Walter De Maria was so interested in danger and its aesthetics. With this work, I am trying to activate the emotional power of his work,” Wang explained. “The muteness of De Maria’s works (and of the artist himself) erases some of the connections that I’m trying to make more visible, or more sensible.”Wang observes an “atomic” undertone in De Maria’s oeuvre. De Maria’s formal language and his exploration of invisible energies reflect the Nuclear Age’s influence on his art. In The Vertical Earth Kilometer (1977), the precision of the artist’s interment of kilometer-long bronze rods mirrors the technical process of burying a nuclear cache for underground detonations. His iconic The Lightning Field (1977) is staged atop actual uranium reserves. Uranium mining in New Mexico, the site of the very first atomic testing, peaked the same year The Lightning Field was unveiled to the public. Wang’s work seeks to connect these dots, revealing “hidden chains of relations.” At the crux of the show is a corridor of seemingly innocuous sealed aluminum tubes. Contained within each tube are radioactive soil samples from New Mexico’s uranium mining belt. 
Michael Wang, Collision Bar (Three Balls) (2024). Courtesy of the artist.
Some ideas for the show have been germinating since Wang’s youth. His father was a geophysicist. “From a scientific perspective, from a young age I learned the earth itself is a system. That gave me an awareness of some of these processes,” he said. “My own interest in art was sort of looking for these almost new tools. Natural processes to me didn’t just seem like things that could be subject matter for art making, but they were things that I might actively engage with.”
Installation view of Michael Wang, Extinct in New York (2019). Courtesy of the artist.
Within Wang’s practice, there is a palpable tension between the sensual aesthetics of the earth and the political exigencies of today’s climate. Uranium’s charged symbolism and practical impact are juxtaposed with its existence as just another earthly mineral with its own intrinsic beauty and inextricable links within the natural order, both visible and invisible. The element is not presented as inherently positive or negative, but rather, Wang lets the material hang in the ambivalence that he himself is most comfortable in. This off-to-the side neutrality, presenting scientific data to an art viewer and letting them shape their own perspective is a through line in Wang’s diverse work.  
Michael Wang, Wulai azalea (Rhododendon kanehirai Wilson), Feitsui Dam and Reservoir, New Taipei City, Taiwan. Courtesy of the artist.
First exhibited at the Fondazione Prada in Milan in 2017, Wang’s long-term project Extinct in the Wild equally grapples with the ethics and emotions of ecological complexities. Wang displayed flora and fauna in greenhouse-like structures with life-support systems designed to cater to the fragile organisms’ specific needs. The exhibit’s species are no longer found in nature, due mainly to human causation, yet they continue to survive by human stewardship. Specimens included the axolotl, a salamander that today can only be found in aquariums or kept as pets. The show’s curators were trained and assigned the task of tending to the organisms. Wang reverts curation to its etymological root—cura is care—by tasking curators with caretaking.
“The ambivalence and double-edgedness of that relationship is really what drew me to the work,” Wang said.
Installation view of Michael Wang, Taihu (Stones) (2022). Courtesy of the artist.
Another of Wang’s energy-focused projects was 10000 li, 100 billion kilowatt-hours, shown at the 2021 Shanghai Biennale. He constructed a massive machine that processed water from China’s Yangtze river which runs through the largest dam in the world, the Three Gorges Dam. The machine’s high-powered jets vaporized the water, turning it into snow.
Michael Wang, 10000 li, 100 billion kilowatt-hours (一万里，一千亿千瓦时) (2021). Courtesy of the artist.
Though the city of Shanghai is subtropical, the Yangtze’s waters are sourced from a melting mountain glacier in the “third pole”, the largest existing ice reserve outside of the north and south poles. Through Wang’s work, the river’s water returned to its genesis. “Art for me isn’t just about a strictly-defined human sphere,” he said, “but extends to touch all those entities we are inextricably bound up with.”

“Yellow Earth” will run from June 27th through August 31st, 2024 at Bienvenu Steinberg and C, 35 Walker St, New York, NY 10013. 
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