On View

The first headlines came way back in 2014. British Indian artist Anish Kapoor was experimenting with Vantablack, a newly invented material said to be the blackest black ever made.
“This material is the blackest material in the universe. Blacker than a black hole. It absorbs 99.8 percent of all light,” Kapoor wrote in an email. (Artist Diemut Strebe actually created a blacker, 99.995 percent absorbent black with MIT scientists in 2019.)
A highly-advanced scientific discovery featuring a super dense field of carbon nano tubes grown in a lab and heated to super-high temperatures in a reactor, Vantablack was invented by the U.K. firm Surrey NanoSystems with military purposes in mind. But Kapoor believed in its artistic potential right from the get-go. So much so, that he signed a contract securing the exclusive rights to the new material’s use in painting and sculpture.
The move was immediately controversial, kicking off an art supply feud with an artist named Stuart Semple who has since dedicated himself to creating the blackest paints he can, as well as “the pinkest pink” and “the glitteriest glitter”, all available for anyone except Kapoor to use.
“Anish Kapoor,” featuring the U.S. debut of the artist’s Vantablack works, installation view at Lisson Gallery, New York. Photo courtesy of Lisson Gallery, New York.
But Kapoor has long maintained that his agreement with Surrey was a necessary step in developing artistic applications for Vantablack. (It is exceedingly delicate and complicated to produce, and could initially only be made in tiny amounts.)
“This material was made for the defense industry, so I had to gently persuade the company to work with me,” Kapoor said. “It has now been over 10 years since we started our project. This material is highly technical in its application—it is not a paint.”
It wasn’t until 2022, during the Venice Biennale, that Kapoor finally unveiled the fruits of his labor, showing his first Vantablack works at a dual-venue show at the Gallerie dell’Accademia di Venezia and Palazzo Manfrin.
“Anish Kapoor,” featuring the U.S. debut of the artist’s Vantablack works, installation view at Lisson Gallery, New York. Photo courtesy of Lisson Gallery, New York.
Now—on the heels of the release of Semple’s Black 4.0 paint, which claims to be just as light-absorbent as Vantablack—these works are making their U.S. debut, in a show at New York’s Lisson Gallery. Kapoor did not answer questions about Semple, or whether he would ever consider allowing other artists to get their hands on Vantablack now that he’s mastered it.
We tried to get Kapoor to share some details about the long period of trial and error that made his Vantablack sculptures possible, but he was frustratingly tightlipped about the process. He ignored our questions about failed experiments with the material, and about whether collectors need to ensure any special conditions to properly care for Vantablack paintings or sculptures—the prices of which have not yet been disclosed.
When asked how he applied Vantablack to his work, and if the process differs from work to work, Kapoor said only that “the reactor used takes the process to very high temperatures so the objects need to be made appropriately.”
“Anish Kapoor,” featuring the U.S. debut of the artist’s Vantablack works, installation view at Lisson Gallery, New York. Photo courtesy of Lisson Gallery, New York.
What attracted the artist to Vantablack was his fascination with the void, and his efforts to create the illusion of bottomless depth.
“In the Renaissance, there were two great discoveries: perspective and the fold. The fold is a representation of being as we know. If I put this material [Vantablack] on a fold, it would not be seen,” he wrote. “The fold becomes invisible—like Malevich, I claim that this takes the object into a four-dimensional space and time, and beyond being.”
Kapoor, of course, is perhaps best known for the beloved Chicago public sculpture Cloud Gate, popularly called “The Bean,” which has a wonderful mirrored surface that creates warped reflections of the viewer and the city, which shift as you walk around it. One could argue that you haven’t really been to a proper art fair unless you have seen one of his mirrored disk sculptures and marveled at the way your reflection flips and reverses as you approach.
“Anish Kapoor,” featuring the U.S. debut of the artist’s Vantablack works, installation view at Lisson Gallery, New York. Photo courtesy of Lisson Gallery, New York.
The artist’s dual interests in reflectivity and light absorbency, and their opposite effects in a work of art, seem to be working in opposition, as well as being two sides of the same coin. (We asked Kapoor if it was one or the other, and he simply responded “yes.”)
“The mirror works are concave and are hollow spaces full of mirror; the black works are filled with darkness,” he said. “They are opposite and equal.”
“Anish Kapoor” is on view at Lisson Gallery, 504 and 508 West 24th Street, New York, New York, November 2–December 16, 2023.
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Strolling through the door of a what appears to be a typical East London apartment, which has been transported onto the grounds of Tate Britain, visitors are met with a familiar domestic scene. A teenage daughter is lying on her bed listening to music, while her brother takes a bath. In the living room, their father is slumped in front of the television next to a baby resting in its cot, while their mother hovers near the kitchen. If anything is amiss, it could only be that the entire family is made out of meringue, cookies, and cake… and visitors are welcome to have a slice.
No, this is not an episode of The Great British Bake Off. It is a recreation of An Edible Family in a Mobile Home, originally done in 1976 by the performance artist Bobby Baker. Like many women artists of her generation, Baker decided to lift the curtain on everyday life within the domestic sphere, but as always through a playful lens.
Documentation of preparation by Bobby Baker of An Edible Family in a Mobile Home (1976). Photo: Andrew Whittuck.
Using her own home in the working-class neighborhood of Stepney, Baker recreated a typical family using fruitcake for the father, coconut cake for the baby, garibaldi biscuits for the son sprawled in a murky bathwater of chocolate cake, and meringues to make the daughter. The mother, meanwhile, was represented by a pink dressmaker’s mannequin with an elegantly feminine silhouette but a teapot in the place of her head. Her abdomen was hollowed out to make compartments containing snacks. Locals were welcomed to come in and eat slices of the cake family while Baker politely served cups of tea.
Son in the bath from Bobby Baker, An Edible Family in a Mobile Home (1976). Photo: Andrew Whittuck.
Aged 25 at the time that she made the original, Baker was inspired by works like The Store (1961), by Claes Oldenburg and his then-wife Patty Mucha. Instead of selling through the gallery system, the couple made a mock storefront offering painted plaster sculptures of pastries and other food items. As for Baker’s use of real cake? Since 1973, she had been hand-piping her Meringue Ladies World Tour, a band of women characters who perform and dance with Baker before meeting an untimely end. “It was my own language,” she recently recalled in an interview with curator Gemma Lloyd. “It was humble, and pathetic, and it got destroyed. It felt subversive and anarchic.”
The exterior of Bobby Baker’s An Edible Family in a Mobile Home (1976). Photo: Andrew Whittuck.
Portrait of Bobby Baker with An Edible Family in a Mobile Home recreated in 2023 at Tate Britain. Photo: Madeleine Buddo, © Tate.
Feeling like an outsider would in some ways be liberating for Baker. “I’d abandoned the traditional art world because I found it elitist, sexist, and had discovered performance art where I was welcomed and free to do what I wanted,” she said. “I’ve always wanted to make work that people see in and around their own environments. I was living in an area surrounded by families and young children that I wanted to acknowledge.”
Inside Bobby Baker, An Edible Family in a Mobile Home recreated in 2023 at Tate Britain. Photo: Madeleine Buddo, © Tate.
Though Baker’s original was made single-handedly over the course of a month, a big team came together to recreate the work for Tate Britain, using cake from the bespoke bakery Lili Vanilli. Just like in the original, the walls are pasted with newspapers, teen magazines, and comic books from the year 1976, and these were covered in line-drawings made with hand-piped icing. Over the course of each of the exhibit’s two runs, this fall and next spring, visitors are invited to eat their way through the cake family, after which the mother will continue to provide pre-packaged snacks.
Baker’s edible family home accompanies Tate Britain’s new exhibition “Women in Revolt! Art and Activism in the U.K. 1970–1990,” which opened November 8 and runs through April 7. A riotous celebration of second-wave feminism as expressed through painting, photography, writing, posters, and film, it also spotlights how many artists made visible the experiences of women of color, queer, and trans women, and campaigned for equal rights.
Inside Bobby Baker, An Edible Family in a Mobile Home recreated in 2023 at Tate Britain. Photo: Madeleine Buddo, © Tate.
Installed on Tate Britain’s South Lawn, Baker’s edible family is free to visit and is open to the public for the first four weeks of the exhibition (through December 3) and again for the final four weeks (March 8–April 7, 2024). After this, the work will be given to Idle Women, an arts, environment, and social justice collaboration based in Lancashire, northern England, which will repurpose the structure. “I didn’t want it to end up in a sculpture park,” Baker explained, “it’s got to be used for women living now.”

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Artist Alexander Reben is getting his first major retrospective at the Crocker Art Museum, on the heels of becoming the first resident artist at OpenAI, the company behind image generator DALL-E and chatbot ChatGPT.
“AI Am I? Artificial Intelligence as Generated by Alexander Reben” at the California museum brings together deeply conceptual works from across Reben’s practice, which, since about 2012, has seen him co-create alongside A.I. More so, the show aims to unpack what it means to collaborate with algorithms, following the artist’s lead in exploring how human-machine symbioses might lead to creative breakthroughs.
“I let the conceptual idea drive the direction of [the work],” Reben said. “Even if new technology comes out, it might not be the best tool for a particular idea. But when I see new things come out, I tend to come up with new ideas as well, so they tend to come in parallel.”
Reben, who has a background in robotics and math, added he can “digest and interface” with the newest technologies at a programming level, something that gives him control over the outcome that other artists without that background might not achieve.
Take for instance, The Sentinel of Memory in the Valley of Vulnerability (2023), a bronze sculpture that’s a centerpiece of the show. Reben created the work by prompting an A.I. model to describe “a sculpture” before feeding the visual description into DALL-E, allowing the image generator to conjure up the work. He then commissioned an anatomy professor to translate that image into a 3D file which he took to a foundry to 3D print. That form was then cast in bronze.
“It looks like a classic male bust but as you circle around the sculpture, you can see the different elements come to life from the A.I. generated image,” said Francesca Wilmott, the museum’s associate curator. “That work encapsulated so many of the ideas in the show, the back and forth with A.I. as well as his interest in the history of technology.”
The museum has acquired the piece, making it the first A.I.-generated work in its collection.
Alexander Reben, The Sentinel of Memory in the Valley of Vulnerability (2023) Crocker Art Museum, Gift of the Artist and OpenAI
For Reben, another highlight of the show is an interactive piece that invites the public to co-create with him and the A.I. The piece, titled Speak Art Into Life, invites visitors to talk into a microphone, which causes an image to be generated from whatever was spoken. The image compounds with what others have generated into what Reben likened to “an A.I. exquisite corpse.” Visitors will further receive a paper receipt with a QR code that allows them to view the generated image from home later.
Speak Art Into Life also happens to utilize every type of A.I. technology offered by OpenAI, where Reben’s residency is likely to last three months. The artist had been using these OpenAI products since they entered beta testing in 2020, according to the company’s Natalie Summers, and has had significant input into the company’s offerings.
Reben hopes he can help steer the residency program in a way he finds “interesting” and beneficial for future artists. Summer, in turn, praised Reben for being able to address concerns surrounding A.I. in an educational way.
“Artists do much more than advocate on behalf of other artists. They really do make sense of the world around you. Artists help stand in for humanity as a whole I think no other real field does,” Summers said.
“With ultra-contemporary art like A.I. and generative art, it changes continuously,” Reben added. “From a cultural standpoint, this art form is starting to become more mature and accepted. In a meta way, that’s what this show is doing.”
And how should visitors approach his works on view?
“The most important thing: come with an open mind,” he said. “The show has more questions than answers, which is good. I think there’s a lot of assumptions made by A.I. and creativity. I think this subverts some of that.”
See more images from the show below.
Alexander Reben, The Mechanical Swarm (2022). Courtesy of the artist.
Alexander Reben, A Short History of Plungers and Other Things That Go Plunge in the Night (2020). Courtesy of the artist
Installation view of “AI Am I? Artificial Intelligence as Generated by Alexander Reben” at the Crocker Art Museum. Photo courtesy of Crocker Art Museum.
“AI Am I? Artificial Intelligence as Generated by Alexander Reben” is on view at the Crocker Art Museum, 216 O Street, Sacramento, California, through April 28, 2024.
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Talk about a week of honors. Legendary songwriter and longtime Elton John writing partner Bernie Taupin is in New York this week for his induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame at Barclays Center, alongside other superstars such as Kate Bush, Sheryl Crow, and Missy Elliot.
However, amid those career-capping festivities, Taupin also found the time to add another accolade to his busy schedule: the opening last night in Soho of his solo art show at Chase Contemporary. The show, titled “Bernie Taupin: Ragged Glory,” features a selection of compositions centering on the American flag, a motif that emerges from his reflections on family history—his father fought in WWII—and patriotism (“you would be hard pressed to find one having a more far-reaching effect on the psyche of the world than our own Stars and Stripes,” he writes in the press release.) 
This is not the first time Taupin has shown such works. Previously, his flag-inspired canvasses were featured in a show called “American Anthem” at the Museum of Biblical Art in Dallas. And, while painting is not what he is best known for, it has been a lifelong passion for Taupin. “My inspiration for the visual arts started at a very young age looking through picture books with my mother of works by J.M.W. Turner—especially the heroic battle scenes—and the works of Van Gogh,” he explained via email.
Installation view of “Bernie Taupin: Ragged Glory” at Chase Contemporary in Soho. Image courtesy the artist and Chase Contemporary.
He first began painting in earnest at his ranch some 20 years ago. While Taupin says that there is not a real relationship between his songwriting and his visual art, they are connected in at least one way: It was the international success he had with Elton John that allowed him to have the exposure to art that inspired him to paint.
“During our travels in the music world, I frequented most of the major museums, refining my eye and my taste,” Taupin said. “On our first trip to America in 1970, I had the opportunity to visit the Museum of Modern Art in New York where I discovered and was amazed by the Abstract Expressionists, particularly De Kooning and Hans Hoffman.”
Other figures that impressed Taupin include Jean-Michel Basquiat, Wassily Kandinsky, Anselm Kiefer, and Robert Rauschenberg. Some of these influences you see in canvasses featuring guitars stuck to the surface, vibrant colors, and scrawled text. He appreciates art, he said, that is “more from the heart and the brain than for the eye.”
Installation view of “Bernie Taupin: Ragged Glory” at Chase Contemporary in Soho. Image courtesy the artist and Chase Contemporary.
Taupin said that he appreciated that the audience would probably come to “Ragged Glory” based on his celebrity—he is literally in the pantheon of Rock and Roll now, after all—but hoped they would find something deeper in the paintings. “I suspect most visitors to the exhibition may arrive with our songs and even with Elton’s melodies playing in their heads,” he wrote. “I hope people will experience another form of expression—a most personal statement from me.”
“Bernie Taupin: Ragged Glory” is on view at Chase Contemporary, 413 West Broadway, New York, through November 19, 2023.
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A new exhibition of works by David Hockney at the National Portrait Gallery in London has been a long time coming. When it opened in February 2020 to mixed but generally favorable reviews, it was cut short after just 20 days by the pandemic. It never had a chance to reopen before the museum closed for a mammoth $52 million renovation and rehang, which opened in June. Opening November 2 in an expanded version, the show boasts 33 new paintings produced between 2021 and 2022 at Hockney’s studio in Normandy, including one much-hyped portrayal of global superstar Harry Styles.
For Hockney, now 86, portraits have been a constant. He has returned again and again across the decades to the same subjects: himself and his friends, most notably former lover Gregory Evans; fashion designer and muse Celia Birtwell; and Maurice Payne, a printer with whom Hockney often collaborated. Far from feeling needlessly exhaustive, whole rooms dedicated to each sitter present a masterclass in all the ways that one person’s essence can be captured.
Take the artist himself. His self-portraits from the 1950s and early 1960s, when he was still at art school, evince early attempts at self-fashioning, with prominent glasses and lightly eccentric formalwear. The look, later completed with a flat cap, would become quintessentially Hockney. His always imaginative flair can be found in etchings like A Rake’s Progress (1961-1963), a humorous retelling of Hogarth’s classic tale of downfall and depravity that was partly inspired by a trip to New York where Hockney eagerly explored the gay nightlife.
David Hockney, Celia Carennac August 1971. Photo: Richard Schmidt Collection, The David Hockney Foundation, © David Hockney.
Over time, Hockney found increasingly inventive ways to depict himself, as in the case of the cartoonish Man Looking for his Glasses (1986) or Self-Portrait Using Three Mirrors (2003). Famously, in 2012, Hockney trod where few other artists had dared by making paintings on an iPad. One self-portrait is presented as a recording, revealing the digital brush strokes being made as if in real time, so we can see part of this unusual mark-making process.
Across all the works, Hockney plays with a mix of historical references. Some expressionistic or deconstructed elements are clearly borrowed from the moderns, of which he most reveres Picasso, but elsewhere a three-quarter profile, stately pose, or Rembrandtesque brown ink reveals Hockney’s admiration for Old Masters.
David Hockney, Self Portrait 26th Sept. (1983). Photo: © David Hockney.
Hockney’s interest in different stylistic approaches is clear in the contrast between Gregory Reading. Vestrefjord (2003), a colorful watercolor sketch in which the figure is loosely outlined but more detail is given over to the tablecloth, and a 1977 drawing in which Gregory’s face is almost lifelike but the rest of the image slowly melts away. Either way, we eventually get to know Hockney’s subjects. What emerges in every case is not merely how their faces change with age but how life makes these characters harden or evolve.
Though the exhibition is supposedly all about drawing, this term appears to be used more in the sense of sketching to capture a moment rather than strictly the act of putting pencil to paper. For this reason, the more recent Normandy paintings are a welcome addition. Fitting all 33 into one room allows the museum to show off its new, more stately galleries.
David Hockney, JP Gonçalves de Lima, 3rd November (2021). Photo: Jonathan Wilkinson, © David Hockney.
In these works, the wider cast of characters are, again, mostly friends and acquaintances of the artist, though notable figures (besides the obvious) include music producer Clive Davis, art dealer David Juda, writer and gallerist Jean Frémon, and writer Charlie Scheips, who appears in two portraits. There are also multiple self-portraits and images of Hockney’s partner J.P. Gonçalves de Lima. These paintings are hardly the artist’s best work—the portrait of Harry Styles has been widely acknowledged to be disappointing and most of the sitters are a slightly grotesque shade of pink, with either aggressively furrowed or aggressively shiny foreheads modeled with strips of peeking white ground—but they still never lack Hockney’s reliable character and éclat.
“David Hockney: Drawing from Life” opens tomorrow and runs through January 21, 2024.
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This summer, as Barbie fever took over popular culture, so did the film’s signature brand of pink. Seemingly overnight, the color was everywhere—on runways, red carpets, car insurance commercials, even Burger King buns. The furor ultimately led to a global paint shortage. 
The Barbie “moment” came up in a recent conversation with Yvette Mayorga, a Mexican-American painter and sculptor whose work is almost always awash in a similar pink hue. This was not the first time she had been asked about it. 
“I think it’s a good beginner introduction to feminism,” Mayorga said of the film, somewhat equivocally, before clarifying that she was left “wanting more of a complicated narrative.”  
Installation view of “Yvette Mayorga: Dreaming of You” at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, 2023. Courtesy of the Aldrich.
The artist, who was speaking on the occasion of her new exhibition “Dreaming of You,” at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut, was smart to hedge. For one, Barbie-mania feels, today, less like a marketing campaign built around a movie and more like a movie built around a marketing campaign. (The film’s $150 million marketing budget was indeed bigger than its $145 million production budget.) Barbie may mock the commoditization of gender, but its corporate overlords have exploited it to pull a similar trick. 
More importantly, Mayorga’s relationship to pink is a deeply personal one forged well before the film and its attendant consumer craze. The color has been a staple of the artist’s work almost since the beginning of her practice, roughly a dozen years ago. She’s always viewed pink as an “underdog”: oft dismissed for its feminine, kitsch associations, but extra potent for the same reason.  
In her world, colors can’t be reduced to stereotypes. Nor can people. 
Installation view of “Yvette Mayorga: Dreaming of You” at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, 2023. Courtesy of the Aldrich.
“Dreaming of You” is not Mayorga’s first museum show, but it is effectively her first survey, bringing together pieces from the last six years of her career. The exhibition does more than showcase individual objects. It puts on display the evolution of her practice during that time—a period that saw the artist extend her candy-coated vision beyond the canvas to sculpture, video, and installation.
Naturally, pink is all over the show; most of the museum’s walls have been painted with it. One gallery is entirely cloaked in the color, save for a black-and-white checkerboard floor that feels a little Lewis Carroll, a lot David Lynch.
For Mayorga, pink is a point of entry, luring viewers with its boldness. It’s also a point of departure, evoking the polish of Pop art and the lavishness of the Rococo, as well as the bubblegum, “girl power” aesthetics of her Y2K youth. Her preferred hue is “Mexican pink,” a color with historic cultural roots that has, in more recent times, also become symbolic of the Latinx experience in a divided America.
Yvette Mayorga, ICE ICE LADY (2017). Courtesy of the artist.
Reclaiming the labor of craft, Mayorga often applies her pink acrylic paint with bakery-style piping bags. The strategy is an homage to her mother, who worked as a cake decorator in Chicago’s landmark Marshall Field’s department store upon immigrating to the U.S. in the 1970s. It also lends the artist’s creations the appeal of something frosted and delicious. “When people encounter the work for the first time,” Mayorga explained, “they often say, ‘Wow, I want to eat it’ or ‘I want to touch it,’ ‘I’m craving something sweet.’”  
And yet, while Mayorga’s pink artworks look like confections, they taste more like medicine. At the core of almost everything she makes is a theme that underlies them all: the fallacy of the American Dream.  
One 2017 painting on view at the Aldrich, for instance, nods to the lavish epicureanism of a Late Baroque masterpiece, but its title conjures an altogether different scene: I Remember Eating Hot Chips when my Dad got Deported, After J.H. Fragonard, “The Swing.” Another work from the same series, called High Maintenance, plays on the dual meanings of the word “ICE,” depicting a woman swimming in a palace while an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent enters at the edge of the frame. 
“I want people to feel disappointed, in a way,” she said of her works’ bait-and-switch play. “Because not everything is what we think it is.” 
Installation view of “Yvette Mayorga: Dreaming of You” at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, 2023. Courtesy of the Aldrich.
Among the standouts in “Dreaming of You” is a suite of three new life-sized portraits of her siblings. These form an extension of a body of work she introduced this time last year in a solo show at The Momentary, a satellite branch of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas. 
The paintings were conceived as a reference to German lithographer Martin Engelbrecht (1684-1756) and his series depicting low- and middle-class laborers. Among Engelbrecht’s subjects are bakers and confectioners, but their jobs, Mayorga pointed out, are “not the defining characteristics of the portraits. You see the people first, then you see these very subtle references to labor.”
Mayorga’s versions are ovular, shaped like mirrors. They have a lot of mirrors embedded in them too: “I thought it was really important for the viewer to be able to see their reflection in the work.” The idea, she continued, is to remind viewers to “[consider] who the person is before tying them to their labor. That’s a really important conversation to have right now, because of the way that Latinx people are perceived. We are not a monolith.” 
Yvette Mayorga, Scorpion After Ouvrière en Porcelaine (2023). Courtesy of the artist.
“Yvette Mayorga: Dreaming of You” is on view now through March 17, 2024, at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut. 
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Ever since receiving a paint-by-numbers set during the pandemic, Sharon Stone has been conversing with colors. That, at least, is how the ’90s Hollywood icon describes her all-consuming relationship with painting, one which has seen her spend up to 17 hours a day in a dedicated studio she’s created in her Beverly Hills home.
Not that wielding a paintbrush is new to Stone. She grew up painting under the tutelage of her aunt and briefly studied art at Edinboro University, Pennsylvania, before dropping out to pursue a career in modeling and acting.
Four decades on, Stone is seemingly focused on painting full-time. She has built off her Spring show at Los Angeles’ Allouche Gallery with “Welcome to My Garden,” her East Coast debut, now on view at C. Parker Gallery through December 3.
The show name is taken from one of the 19 paintings on display in Greenwich, Connecticut, and speaks to a collection that teems with trees, flowers, and leaves—albeit ones that are often washed translucent or dashed and sketch-like.
“This new exhibition offers a never-before-seen panorama into Sharon Stone’s creative prowess,” said gallery director Tiffany Benincasa. “The artist invites viewers on a journey through the vibrant landscapes of her imagination, reflecting her inner world.”
Sharon Stone, There’s a Breach in the Atmosphere (2023). Photo courtesy of the artist and C. Parker Gallery.
The title is also something of an invitation into Stone’s world view. It turns out she has quite a lot to say. Jerusalem, an abstract work comprised of loose puddles of sandy yellows and grays, reflects on her visit to the Western Wall and her prayers for peace. A State of Affairs is Stone’s commentary on the patriarchy with swirls of black snakes coiled over clouds of pink and blue. There is a Breach in the Atmosphere is one of several works that confronts humanity’s indifference to earth’s environmental catastrophe. All pressing and current causes to be sure, but the titles have more bite than the works themselves.
It’s easy to be cynical about actors who take a mid-career detour to explore other artistic pursuits. In Stone’s case, it’s worth putting such skepticism aside. The variety of work in “My Garden” seems to show a young artist working through their practice and many boast depth and a strong balance of color.
In interview, Stone has listed the likes of Wassily Kandinsky, Joan Miró, and Claude Monet as influences, but sometimes these figures weigh a little too heavily. Amelia has the block and curvature of a Kandinsky abstract and Reflections, perhaps consciously, appears like a Monet close-up.
This doesn’t detract from “My Garden,” but rather shows the flashes of a painter still finding their palette and range. Just don’t call it a hobby.
See more images from the show below.
Sharon Stone, Reflections (2021). Photo courtesy of the artist and C. Parker Gallery.
Sharon Stone posing alongside her work Bayou (2022). Photo courtesy of C. Parker Gallery.
Sharon Stone, Amelia (2023). Photo courtesy of the artist and C. Parker Gallery.
Sharon Stone, Jerusalem (2023). Photo courtesy of the artist and C. Parker Gallery.
Sharon Stone, City Lights (2021). Photo courtesy of the artist and C. Parker Gallery.
Sharon Stone alongside her canvas Welcome to My Garden (2023). Photo courtesy of C. Parker Gallery.
Sharon Stone, Bamboo Forest Fall/Winter. Photo courtesy of the artist and C. Parker Gallery.
Sharon Stone, Dreamscape 1. Photo courtesy of the artist and C. Parker Gallery.
Sharon Stone, The Lantern (2022). Photo courtesy of the artist and C. Parker Gallery.
Sharon Stone, It’s My Garden, Asshole (2022). Photo courtesy of the artist and C. Parker Gallery.
“Welcome to My Garden” is on view at C. Parker Gallery, 409 Greenwich Ave, Greenwich, Connecticut, through December 3.

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Some may have questioned whether flowers could still be a relevant motif in contemporary art today after some major floral artworks failed to please certain critics at Frieze London recently. But a certain thoughtfully curated flower-themed art exhibition staged by a historic perfume and beauty brand in Paris may go a certain way toward restoring faith in the colorful blooms as among the most enigmatic and provocative subject for artists from around the world.
Curated by Hervé Mikaeloff, a curator and art consultant based in Paris, the exhibition “Les Fleurs du Mal” (“The Flowers of Evil”), which pays homage to the poetry of Charles Baudelaire, is a delightful surprise. It sheds a new light on the beauty of flowers and floral artworks, and the ways they represent the fragility and sensuality of human nature and emotions.
Opened during the week of Paris+ by Art Basel across three floors of Maison Guerlain, the historic boutique of the eponymous 195-year-old florist, perfume, and skincare house on Avenue des Champs-Elysées, the exhibition features works by 26 international artists. They come in a range of media—from paintings and sculptures to photography and installations—and there’s no lack of compelling, memorable pieces.
Hymne à la Rose (2022), by the Madagascar-born Joël Andrianomearisoa, for example, is a site-specific sound installation featuring 42 metallic sculptural roses in a dark room filled with the vocals of Moroccan singer Hindi Zahra and Guerlain’s fragrance Épices volées.
A pair of rose sculptures by the Tel Aviv–based Roni Landa may look ordinary at first glance, but it gives a jolt when the viewer realizes how erotic it is. There are also highly symbolic photographic works by the famed Japanese artist and photographer Nobuyoshi Araki and Chinese artist Jiang Zhi, and a rare 2012 watercolor by Anselm Kiefer that is vastly different from the heavy, monumental works for which the artist is better known.
The exhibition’s opening also coincided with the launch of the Lee Ufan Arles and Maison Guerlain Art and Environment Prize. A jury presided over by the Korean-born artist handpicked the French artist Djabril Boukhenaïssi as the winner and four other finalists among the 381 applications. Boukhenaïssi will be awarded a six- to eight-week residency opportunity followed by a solo exhibition in the Espace MA of Lee Ufan Arles in summer 2024.
“Les Fleurs du Mal” runs until November 13. Below are some of the highlights from the exhibition.
Jiang Zhi, Love letter no. 25 (2014). Installation view, “Les Fleurs du Mal” at Maison Guerlain. Photo by Tomy Do.
Roni Landa, Rose Labia (2023). Installation view, “Les Fleurs du Mal” at Maison Guerlain. Photo by Tomy Do.
Roni Landa, Flora Erecta (2023). Installation view, “Les Fleurs du Mal” at Maison Guerlain. Photo by Tomy Do.
Nobuyoshi Araki, Sans titre. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Mennour. Installation view, “Les Fleurs du Mal” at Maison Guerlain. Photo by Tomy Do.
Anselm Kiefer, Extases féminines–Margherite Porete (2012). Installation view, “Les Fleurs du Mal” at Maison Guerlain. Photo by Tomy Do.
Pauline d’Andigné, Flowers (2023). Installation view, “Les Fleurs du Mal” at Maison Guerlain. Photo by Tomy Do.
Duy Anh Nhan Duc, Constellation (2019). Installation view, “Les Fleurs du Mal” at Maison Guerlain. Photo by Tomy Do.
Jean-Philippe Delhomme, Roses et Matisse (2023). Installation view, “Les Fleurs du Mal” at Maison Guerlain. Photo by Tomy Do.
Mykola Tolmachev, Dégel (no 1) (2023). Installation view, “Les Fleurs du Mal” at Maison Guerlain. Photo by Tomy Do.

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