On View

Léon Monet was born in 1836, four years before his younger, more famous brother Claude, and he took a very different path in life. After studying to become a chemist, he moved to Rouen where he specialized in the production of synthetic pigments to be used as dyes, eventually becoming a founding member of the Rouen Industrial Society.
Luckily for Claude, this growing industry was well paid and Léon was able to offer his brother some financial support long before he gained widespread recognition, even introducing him to a few of his rich friends. Taking his interest in Claude’s work a step further, Léon began attending exhibitions in Paris and Rouen and collected paintings by other Impressionists including Renoir, Sisley and Pissarro.
Etienne-Carjat & Cie, Portrait of Léon Monet. Photo courtesy of Musée du Luxembourg.
The exhibition, “Léon Monet, artist’s brother and collector”, which runs until July 16 at the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris, sheds new light on Léon’s little known role as a supporter of the Impressionist movement as well as his relationship with his brother, which may have been more creative than most would assume.
“Léon was a chemist of synthetic colors, and these became increasingly common in painting at the end of the 19th century,” the show’s curator Géraldine Lefebvre told Artnet News. “I think he played a key role in this new way of painting and pushed his brother to use new colors.”
Though the pair were close for many decades, they had sadly fell out by the time of Léon’s death in 1917. Check out a tour of some of the artworks and objects that he collected over his lifetime below.
First notebook of drawings by Monet from 1856, acquired by Léon in 1893. Photo: © François Doury.
Never before seen by the public, one of the most exciting works included in the show is one of Claude’s earliest sketch books, which he started in 1856 at the young age of 15. Léon acquired the book at auction many years later in 1893 and one page bears a personal inscription by Claude written in 1895.
Around this time, Claude also produced caricatures to sell for pocket money. One image of a bourgeois figure with an exaggerated moustache and bowtie and fancy striped pants was originally bought by Léon’s close friend Ernest Billecocq.
Claude Monet, Anglais à moustache (c.1857). Photo courtesy of Musée du Luxembourg.
An 1864 view of the seaside in Le Havre, Normandy, where the two brothers grew up, is one of the most important early masterpieces by Claude from Léon’s collection.
Claude Monet, La plage à Sainte Adresse (1864). Photo: © Tochigi Prefectural Museum of Fine Arts.
Léon also bought this sensitive portrayal of Claude’s first wife, Camille Doncieux, in a state of meditative rest. A reference to the considerable influence of Japonisme on the artist’s works can be found in the fan resting on the mantlepiece, showing a floral design that carries on to the other fabrics in the room. “I think Léon was interested in this painting because of that pattern,” speculated Lefebvre.
Léon presented the work at a local exhibition in Rouen in 1872, proudly putting his name in the catalogue to introduce himself as a collector.
Claude Monet, Méditation, Madame Monet au canapé (vers 1871). Photo: © Rmn – Grand Palais / Gérard Blot.
A year later, in 1875, Léon attended an auction of Impressionist works where he bought the first lot, his brother’s painting of the river Seine. He also encountered some of Claude’s peers, including Sisley and Renoir, whose painting of Paris below he also acquired at the sale.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir,Paris, l’Institut au Quai Malaquais (1872). Photo: © Courtesy of the painting’s owner.
Léon also bought a wintry snowscape by Sisley according to old photographs of his collections. Though the specific work is in a private collection, it would have looked similar to the painting below, which is included in the exhibition.
Alfred Sisley, Route de Louveciennes, effet de neige (1874). Photo: © Hasso Plattner Collection.
When Pissarro visited Rouen for the first time in 1883, he stopped by Léon’s house for dinner. The men had been friends since 1872 thank to the connection made by Claude, and Léon became an early collector of Pissarro’s. “It was important for an artist to go to places where they know they can find a collector who will buy their paintings,” explained Lefebvre.
During the visit, Pissarro became inspired by his new surroundings and dashed of the below sketch of the town and its surrounding hills. Léon immediately snapped up both this and another depiction of Rouen the very same day they were painted.
Camille Pissarro, Environs de Rouen (1883). Photo: © Courtesy of Sotheby’s, Inc.
Léon also bought a work of the beach at Les Petits-Dalles in Normany by Claude’s step-daughter Blanche Hoschedé Monet, the daughter of his second wife Alice who followed in his footsteps to become an Impressionist painter.
Blanche Hoschedé Monet, Les Petites-Dalles (1885-1890). Photo courtesy of Musée du Luxembourg.
Finally, Léon was also interested in works by the lesser-known painter Charles Frechon, a native of Rouen who also notably worked as a draughtsman for the dye industry. “To earn a living these artists made patterns for fabric manufacturers,” explained Lefebvre.
The painting below is not the same autumnal sketch that the collector is known to have acquired, but it spotlights the unique style of the artist.
Charles Frechon, Fenaison, Rouen depuis la rive gauche (1891-1895).
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Raffia skirts, rosebud hair knots, abstracted, eyeless faces, and the Black female body are the elemental components of American artist Simone Leigh’s (b. 1967) distinct visual language, a language the artist has crafted to fluency over the past two decades of her career.
Over the years, Leigh’s artworks have earned widespread critical and public acclaim with solo exhibitions at New York’s New Museum of Contemporary Art, the High Line, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, and the Perez Art Museum in Miami. Last summer, in a career-crowning achievement, Leigh represented the United States at the 2022 Venice Biennale. Her presentation, “Sovereignty,” filled the pavilion’s Neoclassical structure with a striking set of new sculptures made of age-old materials of bronze and ceramic, merging architectural structures with the female body, in powerful statements on Black women’s labor, cultural transmission, and hierarchies of power. The stunning presentation won Leigh the Golden Lion, the biennale’s highest honor.
Now, the American public will have the chance to see many of these works in the U.S. for the first time. The ICA Boston recently opened the much-anticipated exhibition “Simone Leigh,” curated by Eva Respini, deputy director of curatorial affairs, and Anni A. Pullagura, curatorial assistant. Here, 10 works from Venice form the nucleus of an expanded survey of 35 works across ceramic, bronze, and video.
“It’s a privilege to be able to go to Venice. A very small number of people can do that and so we felt it was important to bring the works here, to have U.S. audiences be able to enjoy it. And while the show is certainly a celebratory homecoming, we’ve also created a context for those works within a broader context of her career,” said Respini in a conversation. Following ICA Boston, the exhibition will travel to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles for a joint presentation with LACMA and the California African American Museum. 
If you’re new to Simone Leigh’s work or simply curious about the exhibition, we’ve chosen what we consider to be 5 essential artworks in the exhibition, which unlock insights into Leigh’s larger practice. Read below to find out more.
Satellite (2022)
Installation view of Simone Leigh’s Satellite (2022) at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, 2023. Courtesy of the artist and Matthew Marks Gallery. Photo by Timothy Schenck. © Simone Leigh.
Just the Facts: Before visitors even reach the ICA, they are met by the monumental bronze, Satellite, which towers 24 feet tall, installed outside the museum. Satellite is particularly representative of the ways Leigh explores and combines materials and cultural histories; the figure is inspired by a D’mba, a wooden headdress with a female bust belonging to the Baga people of the Guinea Coast. These headdresses were traditionally worn ceremonially as a conduit between the living and the dead. In Leigh’s sculpture, the head is replaced by a large bronze satellite dish. 
Expert Insights: “Simone’s works are always hybrids in many ways of the cultural and material histories of the African diaspora, the African continent, the Caribbean as well the U.S. Here, she has taken this idea of the headdress, and blown it up to a monumental scale, but in place of a head has cast a satellite dish that is 10 feet across, bringing in a very modern and contemporary conduit. Satellite dishes are built for both receiving and broadcasting. And so that satellite dish, in a way becomes a beacon that not only broadcasts outwards but also receives all of those who come to the show,” said curator Eva Respini. 
Bonus Material: In Venice, Satellite stood majestically at the center of the U.S. pavilion’s courtyard. In this installation, the sculpture, marked by its beautiful black patina, is installed along the Boston Harbor and can be seen from several blocks away, welcoming visitors to the museum.

Overburdened with Significance (2011)
Simone Leigh, Overburdened with Significance (2011). Photo by Timothy Schenck. © Simone Leigh.
Just the Facts: Simone Leigh first rose to acclaim for her busts and heads, which reinterpret the classical motif. Overburdened with Significance is among the earliest heads Leigh created, here defined by an elongated hairstyle composed of glazed rosettes in white, gray, and tan. The figure’s abstracted face will be recognizable to those familiar with Leigh’s work–and is eyeless, as is also common to her works. Such depictions have at times been interpreted as a refusal of a gaze or an inward look, but also speak to Leigh’s interest in the abstraction of the body. 
Expert Insights: “The narrative of labor is very prominent throughout Simone’s work, specifically the idea of anonymous and unrecognized labor, specifically the labor of Black women’s intellectual labor, as well as creative or domestic labor. And so, for me, the rosettes of Overburdened with Significance are not only a motif that she has come back to again and again, but I feel like I can see her making them and I look at the work, that they embody the act of making and very tactile and haptic. Of course, people shouldn’t touch! But this work has the kind of texture and tactility that is what makes her work so resonant,” said Respini.
Bonus Material: Leigh handcrafts each and every rosette, rolling clay between her fingers to form each petal. 
Breakdown (2011)
Liz Magic Laser and Simone Leigh, in collaboration with Alicia Hall Moran, Breakdown (2011). Courtesy of the artists and Matthew Marks Gallery.
Just the Facts: Though not as widely familiar as her sculptures, Leigh has frequently collaborated with other artists in creating video works. The ICA exhibition features three of these video works, including Breakdown (2011) made with artist Liz Magic Laser with composer and musical artist Alicia Hall Moran. The 9-minute single-channel color video features Moran, a mezzo-soprano, singing a libretto of a “hysterical” breakdown, the language culled from fictional scenes of women crying in both television shows and movies. The results film is a moving, tragicomic mediation on psychology, race, and gender.
Expert Insights: “We put ‘hysterical’ in quotes here because it’s really about the roles that women are forced to play and the stereotypes that women have been pushed into. Hysteria in this 19th-century sense is perceived as performative and in this work, Alicia does a beautiful performance that’s very expressive and intense. The volume of her voice and the cadence of it really sort of embodies the libretto and reverberates through the rafters of the Harlem church where this was filmed. Breakdown really underscores the many different arenas, Simone is drawing from and her interest in pushing forward the work of other creators,” said Respini. 
Bonus Material: Moran’s character’s breakdown is spurred by a quite mundane inconvenience: she doesn’t want to attend a ballgame. 

Last Garment (2022)
Simone Leigh, Last Garment (2022). Installation view at “Simone Leigh,” the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, 2023. Courtesy of the artist and Matthew Marks Gallery. Photo by Timothy Schenck. © Simone Leigh.
Just the Facts: This bronze sculpture (measuring approximately 4.5 by 5 feet) has a concrete inspiration—a 19th-century souvenir photograph that depicts an anonymous Jamaican laundress, bent washing clothes in a river. Such souvenir photographs were used by tourism bureaus to attract visitors to the British West Indies and in this case Jamaica. Last Garment reflects upon these visual histories of labor, specifically, the anonymous labor of Black women, giving permanence to this figure. 
Expert Insights: “Simone has intervened and rethought the laundress’s anonymity by giving her a grand scale through this larger-than-life representation made in beautiful and durable bronze. What’s most captivating to me is the incredible attention to detail Leigh brings to this sculpture, in particular the figure’s hair, which is made of almost 800 individual rosettes. Even working at this scale, Leigh brings details to the fore, giving the sculpture an incredible impact in person,” said Anni Pullagura.
Bonus Material: The sculpture is meant to be presented with a reflecting pool, as it was in Venice. Here in the ICA installation, a new, larger reflecting pool has been created for Last Garment, one that is situated breathtakingly along the sightline of Boston Harbor outside.
Cupboard IX (2019) 
Simone Leigh, Cupboard IX (2019). Courtesy of the artist. © Simone Leigh.
Just the Facts: In Leigh’s more recent large-scale ceramic sculptures, bodily elements often fuse with familiar household domestic storage objects, in this case, a cupboard. Cupboard IX, a towering sculpture, which measures 6.5 feet tall, presents a faceless head atop a woman’s torso, whose arms are outstretched in a gesture of welcoming. This upper body is ceramic and fired with a luminous green tea glaze. The head is in the shape of a pot—a vessel we might imagine collecting water or as storage for grain. Still yet, one might picture a woman walking with a pot on top of her head. All these allusions lead back to one of Leigh’s more central symbols: woman as nourisher. This upper torso is affixed to a steel armature overlaid with a raffia skirt. Raffia skirts appear in many of Leigh’s works, signaling motherhood and femininity, along with architecture and Sub-Saharan dwellings. In this way, Cupboard IX brings together many of the motifs that reconfigure throughout her oeuvre. Leigh has said that she creates for an audience of Black women and femmes, and through works like Cupboard IX she speaks to their community roles, as providers and protectors. 
Expert Insights: “The dome shape form reads as a skirt, but it also reads as a structure. It could be a reference to Muskoka architecture or Sub-Saharan architecture. You could think of it as a hut, perhaps, but also as a place of refuge. The idea of hiding under your mother’s skirts, comes to mind. The femme body appears here as a place of gathering, a place of safety and welcoming, which is echoed again in the gesture of outstretched arms,” said Respini. 
Bonus Material: Raffia comes from a palm tree native to Madagascar and is used in many contexts within the African continent including housing and basket weaving. It can be found all throughout the Global South, however, in the Caribbean, and in East Asia.
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The very name “artificial intelligence” tends to position these technological developments in opposition to the natural world. Offering a fresh perspective, the French London-based artist Marguerite Humeau has reimagined A.I. as a type of collective intelligence like the one shared by ants, termites, or bees.
Humeau has tested out the idea by collaborating with A.I. to help create the video work Collective Effervescence (2023) and a ceramic mural for “meys,” her solo exhibition at White Cube Bermondsey in south London, which runs until May 14.
The show is inspired by eusocial insects, which manage to pull-off incredible feats of engineering comparative to their size and individual ability thanks to their instinct for cooperation. Each of these strange but sophisticated artworks are, in some way, the result of the “hive mind.” They prompt viewers to consider what we humans might hope to learn from these seemingly insignificant pests.
“There are forms of life that will survive us, how can we take them as our guides or companions to understand how to navigate our own futures?” Humeau has asked.
In the exhibition’s first room, we see Humeau resurrect and build on intelligence from the past, in this case that of the Polish artist Adam Kossowski who made a large mosaic for the Peckham Civic Centre, also in south London, in 1965. His work, The History of the Old Kent Road, is now scheduled for demolition, but Humeau has decided to give it an update with an A.I. twist by enlisting the help of the GPT3 algorithm to create a new, post-apocalyptic vision of the city. This is displayed in a series of hand-sculpted tiles or “fragments.”

Marguerite Humeau, The History of Old Kent Road (Post-Kossowski) Fragments I–V (2023). Photo courtesy of White Cube.
Marguerite Humeau, The History of Old Kent Road (Post-Kossowski) Fragment XI (2023). Photo courtesy of White Cube.
In Kossowski’s original mural, a single Camberwell Beauty butterfly can be spotted by the more attentive viewers. In Humeau’s version, this insect appears in a large swarm, reminding us that the end of the world for humans may offer other populations the opportunity to regenerate.
The film Collective Effervescence is a study of the harmoniously choreographed behavior of termites living within a mound, capturing the excitement of their shared vitality. Just as humans farm, these insects must create and cultivate a fungus garden as a communal source of food. Once again, Humeau has used OpenAI’s popular A.I. text-to-image generator DALL-E to generate images that fantasize about this process as a ritualistic dance.

Marguerite Humeau, Collective Effervescence (2023). The artist generated this image in part with DALL-E, OpenAI’s image-generation model. Photo: © Marguerite Humeau.
Marguerite Humeau, Collective Effervescence (2023). The artist generated this image in part with DALL-E, OpenAI’s image-generation model. Photo: © Marguerite Humeau.
Marguerite Humeau, Collective Effervescence (2023). The artist generated this image in part with DALL-E, OpenAI’s image-generation model. Photo: © Marguerite Humeau.

Elsewhere in the show, Humeau explores more traditional forms of collaboration and interdependence by working with collectives of craftspeople with a complementary variety of skills. Each specializing in a different kind of material—including, glass, terracotta, wax, and wood—they have worked together on a series of highly intricate sculptures with forms that were clearly inspired by the organic world. These fantastical “totems” or “Guardians,” staged within a dimly lit gallery space, bring to mind the layered branches of coral, the repeat grooves of a mushroom or the porous surface of honeycomb.
Check out some of these works below.
Installation view of Marguerite Humeau’s exhibition “meys” at White Cube Bermondsey. Photo: Ollie Hammick, © White Cube.
Installation view of Marguerite Humeau’s exhibition “meys” at White Cube Bermondsey. Photo: Ollie Hammick, © White Cube.
Installation view of Marguerite Humeau’s exhibition “meys” at White Cube Bermondsey. Photo: Ollie Hammick, © White Cube.
Installation view of Marguerite Humeau’s exhibition “meys” at White Cube Bermondsey. Photo: Ollie Hammick, © White Cube.
Installation view of Marguerite Humeau’s exhibition “meys” at White Cube Bermondsey. Photo: Ollie Hammick, © White Cube.
“meys” is on view at White Cube Bermondsey, 144-152 Bermondsey St, London, through May 14.

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In recent weeks, a hot pink beacon has arisen on the High Line at West 30th Street. Standing 25 feet tall atop the High Line Plinth, Old Tree is the work of Swiss artist Pamela Rosenkranz, its 145 branches recalling at once both the limbs of a tree and human blood vessels.
“This piece immediately stood out because of the ambition of scale, and the color is something incredible that brought it to a whole other level,” Cecilia Alemani, the director and chief curator of High Line Art told Artnet News during the installation of the work. “It’s like the central square in a village with a tree and benches around it.”
Fabricated outside San Diego and shipped cross country in two trucks, the work had arrived in pieces, a steel armature covered with spray foam and carefully sculpted into delicate branches sealed with epoxy.
Each of the 16 limbs and six roots were carefully assembled on site, the tree growing bit by bit, almost as if it had been planted there by Rosenkranz. (The artist even covered the plinth with an earthy surface so it resembles soil.)
Pamela Rosenkranz, Old Tree (2023). A High Line Plinth commission. Photo by Timothy Schenck courtesy of the High Line, New York.
“It’s a synthetic artificial tree in the middle of a park,” Alemani said. That contrast between the natural and the manmade—on a park that is itself an abandoned train track once reclaimed by nature—was part of what drew her to the work, which was first proposed in 2020 in response to an open call. It became a finalist for the site that November.
Old Tree is the third commission for the plinth, which launched in 2019 with Brick House by Simone Leigh. (That piece later won a Golden Lion at the 2022 Venice Biennale, curated by Alemani.) It follows Untitled (drone) by Sam Durant.
Pamela Rosenkranz, Old Tree (2023). A High Line Plinth commission. Photo by Timothy Schenck courtesy of the High Line, New York.
The new artwork’s bold color is a dramatic departure from its two predecessors, which were black and white, as well as the Hudson Yards skyscrapers that tower above it.
“This new part of the city is kind of cold, with incredible glass and mirrored surfaces. It’s so corporate and masculine in a way,” Alemani said. “The contrast with the surroundings is really quite stunning.”
Pamela Rosenkranz, Old Tree (2023). A High Line Plinth commission. Photo by Timothy Schenck courtesy of the High Line, New York.
Rosenkranz applied the bright reddish pink paint as she would to one of her canvases, with seven layers topped with with a clear UV coating.
You can see subtle drips and variations in texture of the painted surface, which adds to the fleshy, bodily feel of the work. The trunk could be a torso, muscular and strong, while the roots and branches recall a delicate network of veins and capillaries.
Compared to the initial renderings, Alemani said, “it looks much less of a tree.”
Pamela Rosenkranz, Old Tree (2023). A High Line Plinth commission. Photo by Timothy Schenck courtesy of the High Line, New York.
The works unveiling comes ahead of the opening of a new extension of the High Line Spur, which was once slated for demolition. Just beyond the plinth and nearing completion is the High Line’s new Moynihan Connection, first announced by then-Governor Andrew Cuomo in January 2021.
The Woodland Bridge, extending along 30th Street, was built last year, with 63 trees, 90 shrubs, and over 5,000 grasses and flowers. This weekend, it was connected to to the public plaza in Brookfield Properties’ Manhattan West building on 9th Avenue with the installation of a 300-foot Timber Bridge made from Alaskan yellow cedar. From there, pedestrians will be able to access the Moynihan Train Hall at Penn Station.
The installation of the new Timber Bridge, connecting the High Line Spur’s Woodland Bridge to Manhattan West and Moynihan Station. Photo by Andrew Frasz, courtesy of the High Line, New York.
“You can walk all the way down to the West Village without crossing the street,” Alemani said.
The $50 million project is expected to open to the public this summer.
“Pamela Rosenkranz: Old Tree” is on view at the High Line at the Spur, at West 30th Street and 10th Avenue, New York, May 2023–September 2024.

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From whichever angle you approach Ramses II, the 13th century B.C.E pharaoh earns his epithet: the Great.
His 67-year reign stands as the second longest in Egyptian history. Bold in both war and peace, Ramses expanded Egyptian territory and signed the earliest-known peace treaty with the Hittites in 1271 B.C.E. This consolidation led to an unparalleled building of cities and monuments—often to himself. Ramses’s progeny was also vast, he’s estimated to have fathered more than 100 children.
There may have been 11 other pharaohs named Ramses, but “Ramses and the Gold of the Pharaohs,” a recently opened show in Paris demonstrates the pharaoh who acquired semi-godlike status in his own lifetime needs no identifiers.
The exhibition is on the third leg of a five-year, 10-city global tour with previous stops at Houston Museum of Natural Science and San Francisco’s de Young Museum. It was devised through a collaboration between the Supreme Council of Antiquities of the Arab Republic of Egypt and World Heritage Exhibitions.
Installation view of Sennedjem’s outer coffin, and its lid. Photo: la Grande Halle de la Villette à Paris, © Yvan Lebert.
Across more than 180 objects, many of which have never before left Egypt, the show creates a vivid picture of the country’s ancient Golden Age. Though Ramses’s tomb in the Valley of the Kings was raided and plundered of its gold adornments, the show presents ample treasures directly connected to him including a colossal red granite statue of the pharaoh’s head, one of his many gold rings, and painted reliefs celebrating his military victories.
More broadly, the exhibition presents a view of the world Ramses inhabited, sculpted, and inspired. There is space dedicated to the grave of royal tomb builder Sennedjem, a collection of mummified animals found at the Saqqara necropolis, and treasures discovered in the royal tombs in Dahshur and Tanis.
Installation of the multimedia display of the Battle of Kadesh. Photo: la Grande Halle de la Villette à Paris, © Yvan Lebert.
The exhibition also leans on contemporary technology to bring both artifacts and historical events to life. Drone footage and computer animations have been used to recreate the ancient splendor of Ramses’s memorial temple, photo-murals are projected on walls, and there’s a multimedia recreation of the Battle of Kadesh, a 1274 B.C.E. chariot battle widely considered the pharaoh’s greatest military achievement. There is also a V.R. experience available to visitors.
“Ramses II is considered to be the greatest king ever to rule Egypt,” said Mostafa Waziri, Egypt’s Secretary-General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities in a press statement. “This exhibition will illuminate the pivotal moments that earned the great pharaoh his place in history, while bringing visitors face-to-face with absolutely stunning Egyptian artifacts”
See more images of the exhibition below.
Head of a colossal statue of Ramses II. Photo: Sandro Vannini/Laboratoriorosso World Heritage Exhibitions.
Statue of Ramses kneeling. Photo: Sandro Vannini/Laboratoriorosso World Heritage Exhibitions.
Granite bust of Merenptah. Photo: 2020 World Heritage Exhibitions.
Necklace with falcon heads and counterweights of Princess Neferou-Ptah Photo: Sandro Vannini/Laboratoriorosso World Heritage Exhibitions.
Coffin of Ramses II made in cedar at the end of the 18th dynasty. Photo: Sandro Vannini, Laboratoriorosso/World Heritage Exhibitions.
Bracelet of Chechonq II. Photo: Sandro Vannini/Laboratoriorosso World Heritage Exhibitions.
Installation view of the upper part of an obelisk with the name of Ramses II. Photo: Sandro Vannini/Laboratoriorosso World Heritage Exhibitions.
Mirror of Sithathoriounet. Photo: Sandro Vannini/LaboratoriorossoWorld Heritage Exhibitions.
“Ramses and the Gold of the Pharaohs” is on view at the Grande Halle de la Villette, 211 Av. Jean Jaurès, Paris, France, through September 6.
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They were known as the “three witches.”  
In the feverish cultural milieu of 1930s Mexico City, artists Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, and Kati Horna were the closest of friends and frequent artistic collaborators. Each a European expatriate—Carrington from England, Varo from Spain, and Horna from Hungary—these women came to Mexico fleeing war and persecution and found in each other kindred spirits with shared interests in witchcraft, alchemy, and tarot, passions which bled into their uncanny artworks and collaborative visions. 
Still, history has remembered their legacies unevenly. While in recent years, Carrington and Varo have become familiar names amid reexaminations of women’s role in Surrealism’s development, Horna, however, has remained a surprisingly obscure figure. 
Kati Horna, Portrait of Leonora Carrington (1960/1987). Courtesy of Ruiz-Healy Art.
But her strange and beautiful photography may now be drawing new light. New York’s Ruiz-Healy Art is currently presenting “Kati Horna: In Motion”—the first devoted exhibition of Horna’s work in the city. This haunting exhibition brings together photographs made from the 1930s into the 1960s and offers a window into Horna’s internal world—one replete with mysticism and loss shaped by a war-torn life. 
Horna was born Katalin Deutsch in Budapest in 1919 to an upper-class Jewish family (Horna would marry the artist Jose Horna in Paris in the late 1930s). She lived amid the city’s intelligentsia and was a childhood friend of Robert Capa, studying photography alongside him. As a teenager, she apprenticed herself to the celebrated photographer József Pesci, whose avant-garde imagery bridged advertising and Constructivist aesthetics. 
By her twenties, Horna had moved to Berlin, befriending Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, and her compatriot László Moholy-Nagy. The turbulence of the era pulled her throughout the continent. In 1933, she went to Paris, enmeshing herself in the Surrealist movement. A leftist driven by her politics and a supporter of the Spanish Republican cause, she soon relocated to Spain, working as a war photographer through the Spanish Civil War, linking for a time with Capa. These photojournalistic images were published widely, particularly in the Illustrated Press (New York’s Americas Society presented a curation of these works in 2016), and while the exhibition at Ruiz-Healy focuses primarily on Horna’s artistic pursuits made in Mexico, dealer Patricia Ruiz-Healy says her photojournalism—and experiences of war—as key to understanding her oeuvre. 
“Kati’s photojournalism gave her economic independence and the ability to pursue her political beliefs. Her father died when she was 18 or 19 and she invested an inheritance from her father in buying a camera and for photography classes,” said Patricia Ruiz-Healy, in a conversation, “It gave her creative freedom.”
Kati Horna, Mujer Con Máscara (1961) from the series “Mujer Y Máscara.” Courtesy of Ruiz-Healy Art.
Returning to Paris in 1938, Horna and her husband would be pushed into flight again the following year as France came under Nazi occupation. This final exodus would bring the artist to Mexico, a country she would grow to love deeply, and which would allow her the refuge for artistic experimentation. “I am allergic to the question of where I am from,” Horna wrote. “I fled Hungary, I fled Berlin, I fled Paris, and I left everything behind in Barcelona…When Barcelona fell, I couldn’t go back for my things, I lost everything again. I got to a fifth country, Mexico, with my Rolleiflex around my neck, and nothing else.”
In these Mexican-era photographs, one notices certain recurring fascinations: dolls and masks, Surrealist and occult imagery, and the lives of her friends. Again and again, Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo appear captured in time, as do other artists and actors of the time, in imagery both staged and candid. Varo leans against a window sill, smoking a cigarette, in one photograph, captured as though midstream in conversation. In another, Carrington paints at her easel, with relaxed familiarity.
Kati Horna, Leonora from the series “Oda A La Necrofilia” (Ode To Necrophilia) (1962). Courtesy of Ruiz-Healy Art.
“Kati captures Carrington and Varo in their more intimate settings. They appear so relaxed—painting, working, socializing. These are often images of good times, fun times, which are all the more striking when we know how much these people had all suffered in their lifetimes,” said Ruiz-Healy. “So much.” Other photographs are materially and technically experimental, and the show includes photomontages and photo-collages. In keeping with Horna’s Surrealist inclinations. In one photograph, actress Beatriz Sheridan presses her face against a mirror, appearing like a beheaded saint or Medusa, proffering, it seems, her peculiar reflection. In another, an unidentified model is photographed through a glass jug, creating a rippling effect on the photograph’s flat surface. Carrington, particularly, appears often as Horna’s model and muse, her face photo-collaged, in one image, into a Di Chirico-esque architectural space. Varo and Carrington also appear obliquely, in masks and other objects made by the artists (in one of Horna’s photographs, Carrington is pictured in a mask made by Varo, encapsulating their artistic trinity). 
Masks are one of Horna’s most enduring symbols. In a marvelously uncanny series, “Ode to Necrophilia”—which Horna made for the avant-garde magazine S.NOB in 1962—Carrington appears nude, sitting and crouched beside a rumpled bed. In what seems a twilight light, her face turns away from the viewer, on the pillow rests a haunting white mask.
Kati Horna, Untitled (1933/1960) from the series “Marchés Aux Puces, Paris.” Courtesy of Ruiz-Healy Art.
“These are death masks” explained Patti Ruiz-Healy, daughter of gallery founder Patricia and director of the New York space. “Often a plaster cast would be made from the face of a loved one when they died.”
The images are unexpectedly serene. “These photographs were made in the early 1960s, at a time when Kati’s husband Jose was very sick, and soon passed away. Remedios, who was like a sister to her, was also very sick and died in 1963. It was a way for Kati and Leonora to mourn these people in their lives,” said Patricia Ruiz-Healy. The ‘Necrophilia’ of the title here alludes to the physical love, longing, and embodied mourning for loved ones who are dying or who have passed on. 
Death suffuses all hidden corners of her oeuvre, it seems, and Horna’s perhaps most revealing images are absent of living figures altogether, instead depicting jumbles of broken dolls in stark black-and-white images. The 1962 series “A Night at the Doll Hospital” focuses entirely on such images, and while superficially these images might call to mind the darkly Surrealist photographs of Hans Bellmer, upon closer consideration Horna’s series is a more tender contemplation of innocence and its loss. 
Kati Horna, Untitled (1962) from the series “Una Noche en el Sanatorio De Muñecas” (A Night at the Doll Hospital). Courtesy of Ruiz-Healy Art.
“What she saw in Spain stayed with her forever. She would go into towns and see women and children laying dead in the street with baby dolls and discarded toys next to them,” said Patricia Ruiz-Healy, “The dolls are very symbolic for her. In the series ‘The Night at the Doll Hospital’ there is some hope of fixing them.”
Horna lived in Mexico until her death in 2000, leaving behind and rich and complex legacy. Patricia and Patti Ruiz-Healy believe some of Horna’s obscurity is due to the rarity of her work in the market. The dealers were introduced to Horna’s daughter, Norah (a sidelong tribute to Carrington), who manages her mother’s estate along with her children, but an exhibition took years to mount. “Horna made only a select reprint of her vintage prints in the 1960s, and donated much of her archive to the Spanish government and to a research institute in Mexico City,” said Patti Ruiz-Healy. Nevertheless, her reputation has been growing steadily in institutional circles. Her works were included in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition “Beyond Surrealism” in 2021. When asked what Horna would have thought of the prospect of art fame, the dealers were circumspect, given Horna’s politics. “She considered herself an art worker, not an artist,” noted Patricia Ruiz-Healy.
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The renowned British abstract painter Sir Frank Bowling is unveiling his first-ever digital artwork on May 4 in London’s Piccadilly Circus.
At 8:23pm BST, his work, titled Arrival, will flash across the city’s iconic Piccadilly Lights, which usually feature advertisements or brand logos. This will happen every evening at the same time until June 30.
Since 2020, the Cultural Institute of Radical Contemporary Arts (CIRCA) has been using the Piccadilly Lights to broadcast new works of art by celebrated artists so that they can be enjoyed by passersby for free. The organization’s global network of public screens is always growing, and the work will also appear at 8:23pm local time at locations in Berlin, Milan, Seoul, Los Angeles, and Tokyo. A program and map can be found on CIRCA’s website.
Sir Frank Bowling, 2021. Photo by Sacha Bowling.
Arrival, is inspired by Bowling’s move from British Guiana (now Guyana) to London in May 1953 when he was just 19. One of his early defining memories is of the citywide celebrations for the late Queen’s coronation on June 2. The exhibition is therefore timed for both the 75th anniversary of Windrush, the boat that carried Caribbean migrants to the U.K. to start a new life, and King Charles III’s coronation on May 6.
The work’s warmly evocative orange, pink, and red tones are the result of crossfading two of Bowling’s celebrated Map Paintings, Texas Louise (1971) and Australia to Africa (1969–70).
“I am a painter first and last, but I am always experimenting,” Bowling told Artnet News. “My intention is just to use color and geometry to create something that will hold the viewer’s eye. I am convinced that light comes out of the paint, and that’s what I’m looking for.”
“Working on Arrival was an opportunity to use color and light in a totally different way and add something new to the world.”
Bowling had made the original paintings during a stint living in New York, when he became interested in the stenciled map shapes of Guyana, Africa, Asia, and Australia. The shape of these maps became a guiding framework within which to explore color and geometry.
“Thinking about my life moving from South America to London and then to New York, and then years moving back and forth across the Atlantic, referencing these earlier works seemed like the obvious move,” Bowling said. 
“I keep hearing that my work feels relevant right now, but I don’t know. It would be interesting to hear what viewers make of it,” he added. “I remember [Nigerian curator] Okwui Enwezor saying that I started my career as an artist in the ’50s in a moment of global transition, where the world had become an unfixed place. I think there’s a feeling that we are at another moment of transition, of flux, of the possibilities for something new. Perhaps that’s why?”
CIRCA is inviting viewers with a connection to the Windrush Generation to upload photos documenting their own stories onto its website, some of which will be included in a special film screened on the Piccadilly Lights on June 22.
Artists previously commissioned by CIRCA include Douglas Gordon, Caroline Walker, Anne Imhof, Laure Prouvost, Shirin Neshat, Marina Abramović, Yoko Ono, and Vivienne Westwood.

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Forget avocados, chia seeds, and leafy greens—milk is the OG superfood. With the advent of nutrition science in the early 20th century, milk took on a quasi-miraculous status as a source of fat, carbohydrates, protein, and newly discovered vitamins. It duly became a mass-produced staple of Western diets reshaping cultural and physical landscapes in the process.
This mythic transformation is the subject of “Milk,” a major exhibition at London’s Wellcome Collection that is set to run through September 30.
Installation view of “Milk” at the Wellcome Collection, 2023. Photo: Steven Pocock.
The museum was established in 2007 to challenge public perceptions of health by leveraging the disparate powers of science and art and “Milk” fulfills this mission. The exhibition presents more than 100 items including government posters, promotional films from dairy companies, a herd of cow-shaped creamers, and a handful of bold commissions. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it’s the first exhibition to deconstruct the complex history of the dairy product.
The exhibition also casts an eye on that other milk, the human kind. Early on, visitors encounter Julia Bornefeld’s dangling sculpture that is simultaneously evocative of cow udders and a human breast. In another work, the video piece Let Down Reflex (2023), Ilana Harris-Babou’s explores Black motherhood through familial conversations about nursing.
If breastfeeding continues to occupy an uncomfortable place in Western society, “Milk” suggests it may be the product of exclusively associating milk with cows for the past century. Though the roots of this consumption run deeper, as the exhibition shows through historical objects dating back thousands of years, they were supercharged by governmental and industrial forces in the 20th century. Dietary guides printed by the British Medical Association and milk formula tins from the likes of Glaxo make this clear.
Milk: The Backbone of Young Britain poster. Photo: © IWM (Art.IWM PST 4944)
Milk is also intrinsically tied to whiteness. With its status as an early superfood, milk was deemed an essential product to maintain the strength and wellness of white communities. The exhibition tracks this thinking sometimes implicitly, such as by displaying dairy product marketing campaigns featuring smiling white families, and other times rather more explicitly, as in the case of a butter advert in from 1920 in which the future U.S. President Herbert Hoover declared dairy essential for the survival of the white race.
At a time of ever-increasing consciousness around the sustainability of staple foods, Wellcome Collection shows that sometimes the social implications are equally problematic.
See more images of the exhibition below.
Milk, ©Lucy + Jorge Orta / ADAGP Paris, 2022. Reproduced with permission of Lucy + Jorge Orta
Ilana Harris-Babou, Let Down Reflex (2023). Photo: Steven Pocock.
Photo: Norfolk / Ministry of Health. 1937 – 1938. Wellcome Collection, London
Evelyn Mary Dunbar, Milking Practice with Artificial Udders, (1940). Photo courtesy of Imperial War Museums.
“Milk” is on view at the Wellcome Collection, 183 Euston Road, London, through September 30.
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