On View

After three years, the Venice Biennale has returned to Italy. In what has been described as the art-world Olympics, nations from around the globe organize presentations in a bid to gain international exposure for their artists. (The stakes can be high: The Polish pavilion, for example, receives more visitors during the first week of the Biennale than any of its museums draw all year.)
To help narrow down which pavilions deserve your closest attention, we’ve put together a guide to our nine favorites below.

Italy
Gian Maria Tosatti, “History of the Night and the Fate of Comets” curated by Eugenio Viola
Gian Maria Tosatti’s “History of the Night and the Fate of Comets” curated by Eugenio Viola at the Italian pavilion in the Arsenale. Photo by Sarah Cascone.
The Italian pavilion in the Arsenale has been drawing long lines to see its massive installation, which takes over a 6,500-square-foot space called the Tese delle Vergini.
As the first artist ever to singlehandedly represent the country at the event, Gian Maria Tosatti has created a haunting site-specific installation that draws on Italian history and the decline of industry in the 20th century.
Visitors are asked to line up one at a time to enter the exhibition, which is filled with old machines sourced from defunct factories. You’ll encounter strange control panels, a room full of mysterious ductwork hanging from the ceiling, and a large bank of sewing machines, seemingly ready for workers to return at any moment.
Throughout, you’re asked to maintain silence, which allows the ominous quiet of the space to take full effect—especially when it’s interrupted, as by a thunderous creaking door.
The installation is imbued with a sense of dystopia, culminating with a darkened room where you can step out onto a platform above the water. Contrasting with the emptiness of the rest of the space, there are lights twinkling in the distance, suggesting that someone is out there, beyond this failed experiment.
—Sarah Cascone

Latvia
Skuja Braden, “Selling Water bythe River,” curated by Solvita Krese and Andra Silapētere
Latvian pavilion, Skuja Braden, “Selling Water by the River,” curated by Solvita Krese and Andra Silapētere, installation view at the Arsenale. Photo courtesy of the Latvia Pavilion.
Ceramics are not typically the flashiest of mediums, but artist duo Skuja Braden has created a show-stopping installation at the Latvian pavilion at the Arsenale. The more than 300 porcelain works make up for their modest scale in sheer volume, with a profusion of lovingly painted vessels piled up on tables, hanging from the walls, and even scattered across the floor.
The partners Inguna Skuja and Melissa D. Breiden have been a couple for 22 years, but cannot legally marry in Latvia, where homophobia is widespread. They’ve spoken about facing physical violence, including people throwing bags of excrement at them, making their selection a particularly progressive choice for the nation.
Their advocacy for the LGBTQ community is visible in works with erotic scenes of female lovers and a wall of bottles shaped like large, perky breasts. But there are also skulls, snails, fruits, lily pads, and many other objects represented in works that range from purely decorative to functional plates, adding a welcome element of design to the exhibition.
This is one pavilion that rewards close looking, with a plethora of tiny little details waiting to be discovered.
—Sarah Cascone

Korea
Yunchul Kim, “Gyre,” curated by Jungyeon Park, Kahee Jeong and Catherine (Hyun Seo) Chiang More

It turns out the eruption of Mount Vesuvius was not necessarily the hottest thing to happen in Pompeii.
A new exhibition in Italy brings together the many examples of erotic art that once hung in the razed Roman city. Some 70 objects, including sexy frescos, marble sculptures, and bronze medallions, are on display in the show, which opens today at the Pompeii Archaeological Park. 
Many works have been excavated from the site in recent years, such as a wall painting discovered in 2018 that depicts Priapus, the god of fertility, weighing his penis on a scale. Another, unearthed in 2019, shows the Greek princess Leda being impregnated by a Roman god disguised as a swan.
Greek myths like that of Leda and the swan were commonly depicted in ancient Roman life, as were more quotidian scenes of intercourse, explained Gabriel Zuchtriegel, the director of Pompeii archaeological park, in an interview with the Sunday Times. 
“Eroticism was everywhere,” the director said, “in houses, baths, and public spaces thanks to the influence of the Greeks, whose art heavily featured nudity.”

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With new discoveries like those in the show, experts are reconsidering their assumptions about the significance of erotic imagery to ancient Roman culture. “Scholars have tended to interpret any rooms decorated with these scenes as some kind of brothel,” Zuchtriegel told The Guardian. The images, he went on, were once thought to be like menus of the services offered at the site. 
But applying a modern-day morality to these scenes of the past is not always prudent.
“It looks a bit like this as you have scenes above each single door, but it is always very risky to make this kind of simplification,” Zuchtriegel said. “The ancient daily life was just as complex as our own, and it’s risky to reconstruct what happened in these places just by judging from the images.”

Illustrating the commonality of sexual imagery, curators have recreated Roman homes within the exhibition’s galleries. Visitors, including young ones (children are encouraged to attend), are also invited to explore the show through an interactive app, which helps contextualize the images and the figures that appear in them. 
See more examples of work on view in the exhibition below:
A sculpture representing Priapus, the Greek god of fertility. Photo: Marco Cantile/LightRocket via Getty Images.
An installation view of “Art and Sensuality in the Houses of Pompeii.” Photo: Marco Cantile/LightRocket via Getty Images. More

Delayed for a year because of the pandemic, the Venice Biennale, titled “The Milk of Dreams,” has finally opened to previews this week.
Curator Cecilia Alemani said the process of putting together the massive endeavor in difficult conditions, doing Zoom studio visits and working remotely, made her appreciate the physical and non-technological dimensions of art-viewing even more. And indeed, this is a very physical show, with a focus on embodied knowledge, artworks with physical presence, and personal sensation.
It also has a self-reflective perspective on art history, and one of its most notable curatorial gestures is the presence of a number of capsule shows within the show, each one looking at a theme that serves as an intellectual guide to the other art on view.
In the plunging Arsenale space, there are two such mini-shows. One, with the prolix title “A Leaf a Gourd a Shell a Net a Bat a Sling a Sack a Bottle a Pot a Box a Container,” is a selection of artworks that reflect on the vessel as a metaphor. The other, “The Seduction of the Cyborg,” pays homage to female artists who have, in various way, thought about the body as a reprogrammable machine.
But there is much more to see. Here are some pictures to give you a sense of the Arsenale section of “The Milk of Dreams.”
The entrance to the Arsenale section of “The Milk of Dreams.” Photo by Ben Davis.
Simone Leigh’s Brick House greets visitors in the opening gallery. Photo by Ben Davis.
Works by Belkis Ayón in “The Milk of Dreams.” Photo by Ben Davis.
Works by Gabriel Chaile. Photo by Ben Davis.
Works by Portia Zvavahera. Photo by Ben Davis.
Ficre Ghebreyesys, City With a River Running Through (2011). Photo by Ben Davis.
Works by Rosana Paulino. Photo by Ben Davis.
Thao Nguyen Phan, First Rain, Brise-Soleil (2021–ongoing). Photo by Ben Davis.
Works by Britta Marakatt-Labba. Photo by Ben Davis.
Eglė Budvytytė, Songs from the Compost: mutating bodies, imploding stars (2020). Photo by Ben Davis.
Niki de Saint Phalle, Gwendolyn (1966–1990). Photo by Ben Davis.
Works by Frantz Zéphirin and Célestin Faustin. Photo by Ben Davis.
Works by Myrlande Constant. Photo by Ben Davis.
Works by Violeta Parra. Photo by Ben Davis.
Works by Felipe Baeza. Photo by Ben Davis.
Works by Pinaree Sanpitak. Photo by Ben Davis.
Works by Safia Farhat and Roberto Gil de Montes. Photo by Ben Davis.
A special capsule presentation titled “A Leaf a Gourd a Shell a Net a Bag a Sling a Sack a Bottle a Pot a Box a Container.” Photo by Ben Davis.
One of Aletta Jacobs’s “Womb Models” (1840). Photo by Ben Davis.
Display of works by Ruth Asawa. Photo by Ben Davis.
A display of works by Tecla Tofano. Photo by Ben Davis.
Luiz Roque, Urubu (2020). Photo by Ben Davis.
Delcy Morelos, Earthly Paradis (2022). Photo by Ben Davis.
Works by Jaider Esbell. Photo by Ben Davis.
Works by Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe. Photo by Ben Davis.
Firelei Baez, something ephemeral and beautifully whole, when seen from the edge of one’s vision, too full when taken head on (2022). Photo by Ben Davis.
Emma Talbot, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (2021). Photo by Ben Davis.
Works by Sandra Vásquez de la Horra. Photo by Ben Davis.
Two sculptures by Candice Lin. Photo by Ben Davis.
Noah Davis, Isis (2019). Photo by Ben Davis.
Aage Gaup, Sculpture I & II (1979). Photo by Ben Davis.
Zheng Bo, Le Sacre du printemps (Tandvärkstallen) (2021). Photo by Ben Davis.
Works by Tau Lewis and, in the foreground, Solange Pessoa. Photo by Ben Davis.
Works by Jessie Homer French. Photo by Ben Davis.
Display of Ibrahim El-Salahi’s Behind the Mask (2020–2021). Photo by Ben Davis.
Prabhakar Pachpute, Unfolding of the remains II (2022). Photo by Ben Davis.
Ali Cherry, Titans (2022). Photo by Ben Davis.
Ishaan Adams, Bonteheuwel / Epping (2021). Photo by Ben Davis.
Ali Cherri, Of Men and Gods and Mud (2022). Photo by Ben Davis.
Installation view of the “Seduction of the Cyborg,” a capsule gallery in “The Milk of Dreams.” Photo by Ben Davis.
Installation view of the “Seduction of the Cyborg,” a capsule gallery in “The Milk of Dreams.” Photo by Ben Davis.
Louise Nevelson, Homage to the Universe (1968). Photo by Ben Davis.
Weimar-era costumes by Lavinia Schulz and Walter Holdt. Photo by Ben Davis.
Rebecca Horn, Kiss of the Rhinoceros (1989). Photo by Ben Davis.
Liliane Lijn, Feathered Lady (1979), Heshe (1980), and Gemini (1984). Photo by Ben Davis.
Works by Kiki Kogelnik. Photo by Ben Davis.
Liv Bugge, Play (2019). Photo by Ben Davis.
Noor Abuarafeh, Am I the Ageless Object at the Museum? (2018). Photo by Ben Davis.
Works by Tatsuo Ikeda. Photo by Ben Davis.
Works by Kapwani Kiwanga. Photo by Ben Davis.
Elias Sime, Red Leaves (2021). Photo by Ben Davis.
Dora Budor, Autophones (2022). Photo by Ben Davis.
Teresa Solar, Tunnel Boring Machine (2022). Photo by Ben Davis.
Paintings by Allison Katz. Photo by Ben Davis.
Özlem Altın, Translucent Shield (calling) (2022). Photo by Ben Davis.
Paintings by Jamian Juliano-Villani. Photo by Ben Davis.
Tetsumi Kudo, Flowers (1967–1968). Photo by Ben Davis.
Photos by Joanna Piotrowska. Photo by Ben Davis.
Louise Bonnet, Pisser Triptych (2021–22). Photo by Ben Davis.
Works by Carolyn Lazard. Photo by Ben Davis.
Entrance to Marianna Simnett’s video installation. Photo by Ben Davis.
Mariana Simnett, The Severed Tail (2022). Photo by Ben Davis.
Raphaela Vogel, Ability and Necessity (2022). Photo by Ben Davis.
Works by Jes Fan. Photo by Ben Davis.
Works by Mira Lee. Photo by Ben Davis.
Works by Kerstin Brätsch. Photo by Ben Davis.
Raphaela Vogel, Psychogräfin (2022) and work by Kerstin Brätsch. Photo by Ben Davis.
Works by Sandra Mujinga. Photo by Ben Davis.
Marguerite Humeau, Migrations (2022). Photo by Ben Davis.
Monira al Qadiri, Orbital (2022). Photo by Ben Davis.
Sondra Perry, Lineage for a Phantom Zone (2020-2022). Photo by Ben Davis.
Elisa Giardina Papa, “U Scantu”: A Disorderly Tale (2022). Photo by Ben Davis.
Geumhyung Jeong, Toy Prototype (2021). Photo by Ben Davis.
Works by Tishan Hsu. Photo by Ben Davis.
Lynn Hershman Leeson, Logic Paralyzes the Heart (2021). Photo by Ben Davis.
Zhenya Machneva, A Girl (2022) and Echo (2021). Photo by Ben Davis.
Janis Rafa, Laceration (2020). Photo by Ben Davis.
Barbara Kruger, Untitled (Beginning/Middle/End) (2022). Photo by Ben Davis.
Diego Marcon, The Parents’ Room (2021). Photo by Ben Davis.
Robert Grosvenor, Block of Water (2019). Photo by Ben Davis.
Installation by Precious Okoyomon. Photo by Ben Davis.
Works by Giulia Cenci. Photo by Ben Davis.
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Sometime late in Imogen Cunningham’s life, a younger female photographer asked her, “What do I have to do to become more famous, to have my work appreciated?” 
“You have to live longer,” Cunningham replied. (The artist receiving the advice? Ruth Bernhard.)
A joke, surely, about the art world’s tendency to appreciate the artistic contributions of women only after they’ve entered the last chapter of their lives, the retort nevertheless contained some plain truth for Cunningham. It wasn’t until 1960, when she was in her late 70s, that she experienced the first real financial success of her then decades-long career—one of the most influential in the history of photography.  
To call Cunningham underrated or overlooked might be inaccurate; despite the meager money she made, she’s rightly considered among the 20th-century greats. Still, her name doesn’t ring as familiar as that of, say, Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, or Dorothea Lange. 
Imogen Cunningham, The Unmade Bed (1957). © Imogen Cunningham Trust.
There’s a reason for that, said Paul Martineau, a curator at the J. Paul Getty Museum, who has just organized a major retrospective of Cunningham’s work.
The name of each of those photographers—all friends of Cunningham’s—comes with a specific image. For Adams, it’s the Western mountainscape; for Weston, the fleshly pepper. Cunningham, on the other hand, “didn’t make one type of picture,” said Martineau. It’s the paradox at the heart of her legacy: the quality that separates her art is the reason people underappreciate it.
“You can’t really assign a label to Imogen,” he went on, calling Cunningham a “pioneer in the field for women.” 
“She wasn’t satisfied with anything… She wasn’t rehashing things over and over again like some artists. She was always pushing herself to innovate, to learn more and experiment.”
Imogen Cunningham, Amaryllis (1933). © Imogen Cunningham Trust.
Cunningham’s capacity for reinvention is on full display in the Getty retrospective, which spans six decades and 180-some prints (roughly three dozen of which were made by contemporaries like Judy Dater, Lisette Model, and Alfred Stieglitz). 
Included are her early pictorialist experiments, made in her late 20s and 30s while living in Seattle with then-husband Roi Partridge; her carefully studied botanical photographs she made upon moving to the Bay Area in 1917; the richly detailed pictures she produced while working alongside Sonya Noskowiak, Paul Strand, and the other artists with whom she co-founded Group f/64; and many other bodies of work. 
And yet, if the exhibition instantiates the stylistic range of Cunningham’s pictures, then it also highlights the subtle artistic tendencies that tie the works together. These are most apparent when looking at Cunningham’s work in portraiture, a constant throughout her career. 
Making pictures of her children or editorial portraits of celebrities for Vanity Fair, Cunningham preferred an intimate approach bereft of artificiality. Rarely did she manipulate her images in the darkroom or even let her sitters wear makeup. 
Imogen Cunningham, Stan, San Francisco (1959). © Imogen Cunningham Trust.
“Cunningham didn’t like to indulge people’s vanity,” Martineau explained. “She’s trying to find the real likeness rather than making people beautiful.” 
She also had a special penchant for capturing other creatives on film, such as dancer Martha Graham, painter Frida Kahlo, writer Gertrude Stein, and fellow photographer Minor White. Her pictures of Ruth Asawa, one of her closest friends, are some of the most sensitively realized portraits of an artist you’ll ever see. 
In the early 1930s, she was sent to Hollywood to photograph “ugly men” like Cary Grant, Spencer Tracy, and Wallace Beery. Cunningham recalled the assignment on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson in 1976, the last year of her life. 
“Did you consider [Grant] an ugly man?” Carson asked the aging photographer in the segment. 
“He convinced me that he wasn’t,” she said knowingly. The crowd erupted in laughter. 
Imogen Cunningham, Self-Portrait with Elgin Marbles, London (1909-10). © Imogen Cunningham Trust.
But for Martineau, Cunningham’s signature portrait wasn’t of an artist or actor. It was of herself—and it came just a few years into her career. The self-portrait, made around 1909, shows the young artist before a small plaster cast of the Elgin Marbles, a sketchbook and pencil in hand. 
“She’s basically putting herself in the trajectory of the history of art, reaching back to the ancient Greeks,” the curator said. “It sets the tone for the rest of her career. She considered herself an artist and she wanted to leave something behind for generations to come, something of value.”
Indeed, the world may have needed 50 years to recognize her talent, but Cunningham saw it in herself right away.
“Imogen Cunningham: A Retrospective” is on view now through June 12 at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. 
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American artist Winslow Homer is best known for his dramatic seascape paintings of fisherman and rescuers battling harsh maritime elements. But an expansive new show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art aims to delve far deeper into the artist’s rich and varied life, as well as the lesser-known topics and subjects he explored.
“Winslow Homer: Crosscurrents” aims to reconsider the artist’s work “through the lens of conflict,” according to the museum. It features 88 paintings, including many from the museum’s own collection, along with roughly 65 loans from institutions and private collections.
Viewers may be surprised to learn in this skillfully organized show that the artist painted many images of the Civil War and Reconstruction, including depictions of its impact on the landscape, soldiers, and formerly enslaved people.
Winslow Homer, The Cotton Pickers (1876). © 2021 Museum Associates / LACMA. Licensed by Art Resource, NY
“This is an important show of one of the most important American artists,” Met director Max Hollein said at a press preview last week. “Homer not only addressed complex social and political issues, but his work is  also about universal concerns: the fragility of human life and the dominance of nature.
“By focusing on the theme of conflict in Homer’s art, this exhibition presents a fresh understanding of his deeply thoughtful approach to depicting race, nature, and environment.”
The centerpiece of the show is The Gulf Stream (1899; reworked by 1906), considered one Homer’s most important works, and one of the first to enter the Met’s collection.
The painting depicts a lone Black man in a small boat on a turbulent sea threatened by sharks encircling the mast-less boat.
While some have interpreted it as a rumination on mortality following the death of his father, the painting “also alludes to the legacies of slavery and American imperialism as well as more universal concerns,” according to the museum. 
Sylvia Yount, who co-organized the show with Stephanie Herdrich, said discussions about the show stretch back to the summer of 2020, which was marked by racial justice protests across the U.S. and the world.
Winslow Homer, The Gulf Stream (1899). Photo courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art
The protests “made our specific approach to Homer that much more relevant as we all reckon with our complex histories and their consequential legacies,” Yount said. “Homer’s deeply humanist art has spoken differently to generations and we feel our examination of the darker undercurrents and tension between sentiment and struggle makes the production decidedly resonant for our viewers today.”
Yount and Herdrich put an interesting and timely spin on the show with a coda selection of works by contemporary artists including Elizabeth Columba, Hugh Hayden, Kerry James Marshall, and Kara Walker that respond to The Gulf Stream and other Homer works.
One gallery includes five works on paper from the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis for Gulf Stream (2003), Marshall’s reimagining of Homer’s canvas.
Marshall’s image “transforms Homer’s dramatic composition, with its uncertain outcome, into what has been termed an ‘allegory of liberation,’ rejecting Black trauma for Black joy,” the museum said in a statement.
Kerry James Marshall, Study for Gulf Stream (2003–04). Collection Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Butler Family Fund, 2005. © Kerry James Marshall. Courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York
Brooklyn-based artist Hugh Hayden, whose work Brier Patch was on view earlier this year at Madison Square Park, came to know Homer’s The Gulf Stream though Marshall’s revision.
Having adapted the subject matter through his own vision, the artist’s three-dimensional sailing vessel has 12 ribs and evokes a sea serpent that reflects both danger and salvation.
Hugh Hayden, Gulf Stream (skeleton study) (2019).©Hugh Hayden, Image courtesy Lisson Gallery
Also on view is a major diptych by Walker titled The Crossing (2017), that offers a response to both Homer’s The Gulf Stream and Emmanuel Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware by addressing the realities of a precarious ship of state.
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In art history, some decades are defined by a singlular style. In the ‘50s, it was Abstract Expressionism; the 60s, Minimalism; the 70s, Conceptualism.
Now? 
“When we look back at this period of the 2010s, we’ll see that this was a moment of figuration,” Ruth Erickson, the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) curator behind a new exhibition dedicated to eight of the genre’s brightest young exemplars, painters Aubrey Levinthal, Arcmanoro Niles, and Celeste Rapone among them.
On Erickson’s point, it would be hard to disagree. In recent years, artists have reanimated the form with eyes sensitized to art history’s propensity for omitting marginalized communities and recapitulating a colonial gaze. 
They’ve done so with tremendous success, filling galleries and museums—and auction lots and magazine covers—at dizzying rates. The demand has transformed these artists into merchandisable superstars, and their work into collector-bate—so much so, that discussions about the quality of their output are often discolored with the sickly greenish hue of money.   
Louis Fratino, Sleeping on your roof in August (2020). Courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York. © Louis Fratino.
Erickson had no intention of letting the market enter the chat for her exhibition in Boston, called “A Place for Me: Figurative Painting.” To her, the show’s prompt wasn’t framed around a question of why people are buying this kind of art, but something slightly different: Why is portraiture so prominent right now?
“I think each of these artists has a different way of answering that question,” Erickson said. The show, she said, is “really about resisting that sense of trying to clump them together and instead trying to highlight them as eight individual voices with a shared interest in a type of art.”
(Still, the market created some obstacles: in several instances, pieces the curator had earmarked for the exhibition were snatched up by collectors.)
Erickson organized the show one artist at a time, selecting one based on another, occasionally asking chosen artists who they thought should be included.
From that process emerged a group of relatively young, emerging talents, rather than established stars, their respective approaches to figuration as varied as their backgrounds. 
Gisela McDaniel, Created for Such a Time as This (2020). Courtesy of the artist and Pilar Corrias, London. Photo: Clare Gatto. © Gisela McDaniel.
Only one artist, David Antonio Cruz, was alive before the ‘80s. (He was born in 1974.) Viewers will find in his staged portraits of Black, brown, and queer sitters the show’s most “realistic” approach to figuration, though that’s not to say the artworks don’t leave room for interpretation.
The artist’s two diptychs in the show each feature overlapping imagery and gaps between the canvases—an acknowledgment, Erickson pointed out, of painting’s inability to truly communicate the human experience. 
The exhibition’s youngest artist, Gisela McDaniel (born in 1995), similarly points to what’s beyond her canvases. While painting portraits of women and non-binary people of color who have experienced personal or inherited traumas, the artist invites her sitters to record audio statements about their stories. 
“Many of the people in the paintings have difficult but important stories that other people need to hear. They’ve been erased historically,” McDaniel told Artnet News earlier this year. “With every single person, I ask for permission every step of the way, especially when I’m painting somebody. I can’t expect that back, but I hope when people experience my work, they walk away from it with a kind of awareness to move around people with respect. That’s a big reason I incorporate voice.”
Doron Langberg,Sleeping 1 (2020). Courtesy of Yossi Milo Gallery, New York, and Victoria Miro, London. © Doron Langberg.
Elsewhere in the ICA show are Louis Fratino’s (born in 1993) quotidian still lifes and moments of tender queer love, each enlivened with a kind of Cezannian perspectival play. Another artist, Doron Langberg (born in 1985), is drawn to similar scenes, but he finds sensuality through a softer, more Impressionist approach, with details that come in and out of focus like the first moment you crack open an eye in the morning.
In organizing “A Place for Me,” Erickson asked many of the participating artists why they painted figuratively. “The resounding answer,” she explained, “was because they paint what they love. It was so simple.” 
“I think it comes from this moment of empathy and humanism and softness that we’re at, where the blinders have been pulled back,” Erickson added. “We know that we should be spending time on the stuff that we love the most.” 
“A Place for Me: Figurative Painting” is on view now through September 5, 2022 at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston.   
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The Italian maverick artist Maurizio Cattelan is not afraid of death. In fact, the ultimate ending is the subject of the artist’s two new shows in Milan. Perhaps counterintuitively, Cattelan hopes these projects will shed light on how to live with pain and trauma in times of turmoil.
“These two works might not be explicitly connected with the tragedies of the pandemic nor the war, but how can you abstract them from the time we’re living?” Cattelan told Artnet News. “Art doesn’t exist without the reactions of the audience.”
The two single-work exhibitions—”Lullaby” and “YOU”—are, the artist says, “magnifying lenses for our secreted pains.”
Both shows opened in Milan last week as part of Milano Art Week, which saw an array of institutional and commercial openings as well as the return of Miart. The project comes on the heels of a high-profile exhibition by the artist at UCCA Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, which drew even more visitors than the museum’s blockbuster Warhol show.
Lullaby (1994) by Maurizio Cattelan, reinstalled in Monumental Cemetery. Credits Zeno Zotti, Tempio Crematorio, Cimitero Monumentale, Milano, 2022.
“Lullaby” is a reinstallation of a work of the same name the artist created in 1994 and just donated to the city of Milan, where he currently lives. The installation is made of piles of sacks the artist filled with debris from a 1993 explosion and Mafia terrorist attack at the Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea (PAC), which left five people dead and the entire city reeling.
Rather than show the work in a white cube, Cattelan opted for a much more visceral setting: the cremation room of the city’s Monumental Cemetery. Two piles of rubble sit on rail tracks that typically transport beds carrying bodies to the crematorium. Visitors must take a long and winding path to find the installation, which is on view until November 6, after which it will enter the collection of the Museo del Novecento.
YOU (2022) by Maurizio Cattelan. Credits Roberto Marossi. Courtesy the artist and MASSIMODECARLO.
“Lullaby is a symbol of a collective trauma: the dramatic bombs that have shaken Italy (and beyond) were targeting cultural sites, museums, and institutions and iconically represented an attack to the idea itself of the future,” Cattelan said.
The city reacted quickly to rebuild the damaged sites, trying to bury the wounds and recover from the shock, according to the artist. But the trauma lingers on, and the “debris is what remained as a physical obstacle to its complete removal.” The piles of rubble on the rail tracks, Cattelan concluded, are stories and narratives of mankind on “a linear path through history.”
YOU (2022) by Maurizio Cattelan. Credits Roberto Marossi. Courtesy the artist and MASSIMODECARLO.
YOU, on the other hand, is a new work unveiled at MASSIMODECARLO, which comprises a statue of the artist hanging from a noose in the green marble bathroom designed by Pietro Portaluppi. Dressed in a blue suit, the barefoot figure holds a bouquet of flowers in his right hand.
Cattelan maintains there is more to the work than the immediate shock of seeing it suspended from the ceiling. “Big changes, revolutions, traumas all bring uncertainty along. In fact all time is uncertain,” he said. “Lullaby and YOU are in good company. Looking back at my work, there’s clearly a sense of loss that connects them all.”
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The 80th Whitney Biennial, which opened for previews this week (and officially opens to the public on April 6) is simultaneously a wildly ambitious and a quietly reserved exhibition.
With 63 artists and collectives, the show is an attempt to depict America as it can, may, or should exist in a moment of deep political, environmental, and social uncertainty. Titled “Quiet as It’s Kept,” the biennial is anchored by every flash of hope and dread you can imagine: the pandemic, demands for racial and economic justice, the 2020 election—you fill in the blanks.
Amid all that, the show’s curators, David Breslin and Adrienne Edwards, opted not to make any grand statements, but instead to offer a series of suggestions and hypotheses. Probably that was the right call.
The show, quite simply, bursts with ideas and provocations both gentle and pointed. So to help you take it all in (or to jog your memory), we’ve put together an extensive collection of images from the show.

Exterior
A piece in Rayyane Tabet, 100 Civics Questions (2022). Photo by Ben Davis.
Lobby
Renée Green, Space Poem #7 (Color Without Objects: Intra-Active May Words) (2020). Photo by Ben Davis.
3rd Floor
Installation dedicated to Cassandra Press. Photo by Ben Davis.
Installation dedicated to Cassandra Press. Photo by Ben Davis.
Two of the readers displayed by Cassandra Press. Photo by Ben Davis.
4th Floor
Charles Ray, Burger (2021) and Jeff (2021). Photo by Ben Davis.
A visitor interacts with Alejandro “Luperca” Morales’s  Juárez Archive (2020–ongoing). Photo by Ben Davis.
Lucy Raven, Demolition of a Wall (Album 1) (2022). Photo by Ben Davis.
Guadalupe Rosales, Kennedy Hall (2022) and 6th Street #2 (2022). Photo by Ben Davis.
Danielle Dean, Long Low Line (Fordland) (2019). Photo by Ben Davis.
Buck Ellison, The Only Easy Day Was Yesterday, Steyr-Mannlicher Luxus in .027 Winchester, See Statement 11, New Nanny 2003 (2021). Photo by Ben Davis.
Ralph Lemon, a selection from an as-yet untitled series (2020–22). Photo by Ben Davis.
Eric Wesley, North American Buff Tit (2022). Photo by Ben Davis.
Andrew Roberts, CARGO: A certain doom (2020). Photo by Ben Davis.
Andrew Roberts, La horda (The horde) (2020). Photo by Ben Davis.
Paintings by Jane Dickson. Photo by Ben Davis.
Sable Elyse Smith, LAUGH TRACK, OR WHO’S THAT PEEKING IN MY WINDOW (2021). Photo by Ben Davis.
Adam Gordon, She throws children into the world (2022). Photo by Ben Davis.
Emily Barker, Death by 7,865 Paper Cuts (2019). Photo by Ben Davis.
Harold Ancart, The Guiding Light (2021). Photo by Ben Davis.
Jacky Connolly, Descent Into Hell (2021). Photo by Ben Davis.
Woody de Othello, The will to make things happen (2021). Photo by Ben Davis.
Alex Da Corte, ROY G BIV (2022). Photo by Ben Davis.
Leidy Churchman, Mountains Walking (2022). Photo by Ben Davis.
Works from Lisa Alvarado’s “Vibratory Cartography” series. Photo by Ben Davis.
Works by Rindon Johnson. Photo by Ben Davis.
Matt Connors, One Wants to Insist Very Strongly (2020), Occult Glossary (2022), I / Fell / Off (after M.S.) (2021), First Fixed (2021), and How I Made Certain of My Paintings (2021). Photo by Ben Davis.
Yto Barrada, A Day Is a Day (2022). Photo by Ben Davis.
Works by Duane Linklater. Photo by Ben Davis.
Rock Lowe, Project Row Houses: If Artists Are Creative Why Can’t They Create Solutions? (2021). Photo by Ben Davis.
Pao Houa Her, from the series “After the Fall of Hmong Teb Chaw” (2017). Photo by Ben Davis.
Renée Green, Lesson (1989). Photo by Ben Davis.
James Little, Borrowed Times (2021). Photo by Ben Davis.
Dyani White Hawk, Wopila | Lineage (2021). Photo by Ben Davis.
Mónica Arreola, Untitled, from the series “Valle San Pedro” (2018). Photo by Ben Davis.
Documentation of the creator of Awilda Sterling-Duprey, …blindfolded (2020–ongoing). Photo by Ben Davis.
Awilda Sterling-Duprey, …blindfolded (2020–ongoing). Photo by Ben Davis.
Works by Veronica Ryan. Photo by Ben Davis.
Installation paying tribute to the work of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951–1980).
Work by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha.
Jason Rhoades, Sutter’s Mill (2000) and Aria Dean, Little Island/Gut Punch (2022). Photo by Ben Davis.
Rose Salane, 64,000 Attempts at Circulation (2022). Photo by Ben Davis.
Rayyane Tabet, Learning English (2022). Photo by Ben Davis.
Stairs
One piece in Rayyane Tabet, 100 Civics Questions (2022). Photo by Ben Davis.
5th Floor
Video installation by Tony Cokes. Photo by Ben Davis.
Denyse Thomasos, Displaced Burial/Burial at Gorée (1993). Photo by Ben Davis.
Michael E. Smith, Untitled (2022). Photo by Ben Davis.
Works by Guadelupe Rosales and [foreground] Rebecca Belmore, iskode (fire) (2021). Photo by Ben Davis.
Cy Gavin, Untitled (Snag) (2022). Photo by Ben Davis.
Trinh T. Minh-ha, What About China? (2021). Photo by Ben Davis.
Dave McKenzie, Listed under Accessories (2022). Photo by Ben Davis.
Image from Raven Chacon, Three Songs (2021). Photo by Ben Davis.
Unattributed, Thomas Edison’s Last Breath (1931). Photo by Ben Davis.
James Little, Stars and Stripes (2021), Big Shot (2021), and Exceptional Blacks (2021). Photo by Ben Davis.
Coco Fusco, Your Eyes Will Be an Empty Word (2021). Photo by Ben Davis.
N.H. Pritchard, Pages from Mundus: A Novel (1970). Photo by Ben Davis.
Image from Alfredo Jaar, 06.01.2020 18.39 (2022). Photo by Ben Davis.
Daniel Joseph Martinez, Three Critiques… (n.d.). Photo by Ben Davis.
Kandis Williams, Death of A (2022). Photo by Ben Davis.
WangShui, Titration Print (Isle of Vitr:.ous) (2022) and Hyaline Seed (Isle of Vitr:.ous) (2022), and [on the ceiling] Scr:.pe II (Isle of Vitr:.ous) (2022). Photo by Ben Davis.
Na Mira, Night Vision (red as never been) (2022). Photo by Ben Davis.
Jonathan Berger, An Introduction to Nameless Love (2019). Photo by Ben Davis.

Installation dedicated to A Gathering of the Tribes/Steve Cannon. Photo by Ben Davis.
Ivy Kwan Arce and Julie Tolentino, Echo Position (2022). Photo by Ben Davis.
Alia Farid, Chibayish (2022) installed on the deck at the Whitney Museum. Photo by Ben Davis.
Alia Farid, Palm Orchard (2022). Photo by Ben Davis.
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