On View

Gustav Klimt, a Viennese Symbolist painter and co-founder of the Viennese Secession movement, first came to prominence as a mural painter. Later, he became known for his paintings of women, including those prominent in Viennese society around 1901–09. This period in the artist’s career was dubbed the “Golden Phase,” and was characterized by striking portraits adorned with glistening gold leaf, which have captured the public’s imagination for decades. Now however, the Neue Galerie is focusing on a significant part of Klimt’s oeuvre that has been overshadowed by the artist’s famed late portraits, with the exhibition “Klimt Landscapes.”
Installation view of Klimt Landscapes, on view at Neue Galerie New York. Image courtesy Neue Galerie New York, Photography by Annie Schlechter
Painted predominantly between 1898 and 1918, Klimt’s landscapes were produced for the artist’s own pleasure during summer vacations in the Austrian countryside, and in particular to Lake Attersee in the Salzkammergut region. These works form a substantial proportion of Klimt’s overall oeuvre and were celebrated during his lifetime.
Moriz Nähr, Gustav Klimt in the garden of his studio at Josefstädter Strasse 21, 1911. Courtesy of Neue Galerie, New York
In the winter of 1903, around 20 landscapes featured in the artist’s only substantial one-man show in Vienna before his death. Known for their innovative square format, which betrayed the artist’s interest in photography, and produced en plein-air (outside), an approach also favoured by the Impressionists, these bucolic works were praised by contemporary critics and were highly sought after by collectors.
Gustav Klimt, Printer: K. K. Hof-und Staatsdruckerei Reproduction of Sunflower (1907-08), Collotype with gold intaglio. First Publisher: H. O. Miethke, 1908-14. Reissued: Hugo Heller Kunstverlag, 1918. Courtesy of Neue Galerie, New York
The current exhibition combines highlights from the Neue Galerie’s Klimt collection with important loans from several private and public collections in the United States and Europe. Klimt’s nature scenes are contextualized in the broader trajectory of his artistic career, which developed from an academic painting style towards greater adoption of Symbolist and Art Nouveau tendencies.
Installation view of Klimt Landscapes, on view at Neue Galerie New York. Image courtesy Neue Galerie New York, Photography by Annie Schlechter.
Photography and design objects by artists of the Wiener Werkstätte (Vienna Worskhops) accompany Klimt’s paintings and emphasize the artist’s central position in the vibrant artistic environment of turn-of-the-century Vienna. The exhibition also accentuates Klimt’s important personal relationships, for instance with fashion designer Emilie Flöge, whose family the artist often accompanied on his productive summer vacations.
Heinrich Böhler, Gustav Klimt and Emilie Flöge,Kammerl/Attersee, 1909. Courtesy of Neue Galerie New York
“Klimt Landscapes” is on view at the Neue Galerie in New York through May 6, 2024. See more images from the exhibition below.
Gustav Klimt, Park at Kammer Castle (1909). Courtesy of Neue Galerie New York.
Gustav Klimt, Two Girls with Oleander, (ca. 1890–92). Courtesy of Neue Galerie, New York.
Gustav Klimt, Forester’s House in Weissenbach II (Garden), (1914). Photo: Hulya Kolabas. Courtesy of Neue Galerie New York.
Gustav Klimt, Fable (1883). Design for Allegorien und Embleme, no. 75aWien Museum, Purchase, Verlag Gerlach & Schenk, 1901 Photo: Birgit and Peter Kainz, Wien Museum.
Gustav Klimt, Idyll,1884. Photo: Birgit and Peter Kainz, Wien Museum. Courtesy of Neue Galerie, New York
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An early portrait bust by the avant-garde sculptor Constantin Brancusi that was believed to have been destroyed is now on display at Artmark auction house until February 25.
The Romanian-French sculptor is celebrated for his stylized pieces like Mademoiselle Pogany (1910-11) or abstract works like Bird in Space (1928) or Endless Column (1938). Earlier in his career, however he produced more traditional sculptures. Portrait of Achille Baldé (1905-6) was made when Brancusi was about 30 years old and had only recently arrived in Paris, where he studied at the École des Beaux-Arts.
At this time he was still casting rather than carving his sculptures and was stylistically influenced by Auguste Rodin, but Brancusi was on the precipice of radically rethinking his approach and changing the course of modernist sculpture forever. Some of his very first works that paved the way for his highly original, more simplified style were The Prayer (1907) and The Kiss (1908).
Whereas Rodin is famous for portrayals of influential thinkers like Anna Noaille and Balzac, Brancusi’s subject Baldé was a waiter at Bouillon Chartier, the same restaurant where Brancusi had worked as a dishwasher when he first moved to Paris.
The bust was eventually passed down to Baldé’s descendants, although records on it disappeared and art historians assumed it had been lost. They knew of it only through archival photographs of Brancusi’s Dauphine Square studio where it appears as a plaster model. The rare artwork is signed by the artist.
It was rediscovered when it appeared at the Paris auction house Drouot last year. The rare find was snapped up by a Romanian collector for €377,000 ($406,000).
“This bust was probably left in the family from generation to generation, and they didn’t know the author’s value,” suggested art historian Doina Lemny, who spoke at the statue’s unveiling on February 17. “It was believed that the work had been destroyed by Brancusi.”
She added that there is also another missing bust portrait from the same period of Brancusi himself, which may yet resurface.
“Brâncusi Exclusiv” is at Artmark’s headquarters at Cesianu-Racovita Palace in Bucharest, Romania, until February 25. There is no sale planned for the work at this time.
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We live in a time when, thanks to generative A.I., we can conjure almost any image we want in an instant. To which new worlds will we prompt this magic technology to take us? It seems that, in the face of overwhelming possibilities, there is a sudden craving to return to nature.
This has clearly been the impulse driving the world’s most famous A.I. artist, Refik Anadol. His new show “Echoes of the Earth: Living Archive,” opening February 16 at Serpentine North in London’s Kensington Gardens, presents three of his latest projects made using custom A.I. generators trained on images of coral reefs and the rainforest.
The exhibition has an immediately impressive visual impact of the kind that we can now reliably expect from Anadol. Unsupervised (2022), his splashy commission for New York’s Museum of Modern Art was an easy crowdpleaser that had its run extended until October 2023. Its fluid waves of surging and swirling color may have had a hypnotic effect on audiences, but such eye-catching theatrics could not convince the critics.
Artnet News’s Ben Davis dubbed it “an extremely intelligent lava lamp,” and New York‘s Jerry Saltz dismissed it as “a half-million-dollar screensaver,” eventually getting into an altercation with Anadol on X (Twitter).
Anadol’s growing celebrity paired with the current craze for all things A.I. makes this latest exhibit a total no-brainer for the Serpentine Galleries, but the same critiques stand. Short and sweet, the show invites audiences to wander through in idle wonder but they shouldn’t expect much substance beneath these psychedelic surfaces.
Living Archive: Large Nature Model (2024) is an immersive, field of moving images that wraps around the gallery’s perimeter walls. In a leafy expanse, animals metamorphose into each other. In one instance, a bear flickers and blurs until it mutates into an elephant.
Refik Anadol, Artificial Realities: Coral (2023). Photo courtesy of Refik Anadol Studios.
Apparitions like these are made possible thanks to Anadol’s new open source Large Nature Model trained on freely available data provided by sources like the Smithsonian Institution, National Geographic and London’s Natural History Museum. The A.I. model can clearly reproduce imagery derived from the natural world, but the presentation doesn’t exactly prove that it can do much more than that. The feeling that one may as well be at the National History Museum’s annual Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition, where they could marvel at the real deal, needs to be suppressed.
Aesthetically, the three projects bleed into one another and its not always easy to tell where one starts and another ends. In one gallery lined with screens, a shape-shifting exotic bird is presumably part of Artificial Realities: Rainforest (2024). Nearby, a fuchsia pink coral-like formation surely belongs to Artificial Realities: Coral (2023).
Debuted at last year’s World Economic Forum, this surreal evocation of ocean environments is apparently intended to raise awareness of climate change. It is not clear that such an impact could offset A.I.’s considerable carbon cost.
A second gallery space is dotted with bean bags, inviting viewers to flop down and gaze up at a vast ceiling screen with undulating forms rippling over each other in avalanches of glowing green sand. The crashing sound of waves paired with sounds reminiscent of the “binaural beats” I sometimes play to induce deep concentration have a strongly meditative effect. It would be all too easy to get lulled into a trance and stare at the screen for an hour, an effect that Anadol is skilled in producing.
The potential of A.I. to reimagine organic forms in a way that feels new and exciting may be better evidenced by the work of other artists. Sofia Crespo’s Structures of Being, currently being projected onto Gaudí’s Casa Batlló in Barcelona, has been a huge success, reportedly drawing crowds of nearly 100,000. Also relying on open-source photographs of underwater fauna, it brings to life and builds upon Gaudí’s own inventive use of these biological forms over 100 years ago.
Last year, Crespo collaborated with Anna Ridler on Various and Casual Occursions, a highly experimental and complex work inspired by the techniques of women botanists from the Victorian era.
Compared to these explorations, Anadol’s inventions feel more like a proof of concept than anything we could honestly call conceptual. Right now, it is still exciting just to see what A.I. is capable of. Some day, audiences may hope to see something more intellectually stimulating than merely stupefying.
“Echoes of the Earth: Living Archive” runs at Serpentine North in London from February 16 through April 17, 2024. 
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We are fortunate enough to live in a time when many contemporary artists are reckoning with the past and making heard the once suppressed voices of people of color, women, and members of the LGBT+ community. Often, however, representations of the white- and male-focused histories being redressed are physically absent from exhibitions of such works.
Not so at the Royal Academy’s “Entangled Pasts: Art, Colonialism, and Change” in London. Here, historical documents of empire, systemic exclusion, and outright racism are shown side-by-side with monumental works by some of the U.K.’s leading contemporary artists like  Frank Bowling, Yinka Shonibare, Isaac Julien, Sonia Boyce, and Lubaina Himid. Other major headliners include El Anatsui, Kerry James Marshall, Kara Walker, Betye Saar, and of course, Tavares Strachan’s majestic public sculpture in the museum’s courtyard.
John Singleton Copley, Watson and the Shark (1778). Photo: © 2024 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
The role of art in shaping convenient narratives and promoting those with power is exemplified by many of the historical paintings on show. The American artist John Singleton Copley was an Academician known to have owned enslaved people and among his works in the show is a double portrait of a plantation owner’s daughters Mary and Elizabeth Royall (ca. 1758). His painting Watson and the Shark (1778) thrilled audiences when it was first shown at the RA for its depiction of a shark attack in Havana harbor, imbuing Britain’s activities across the Atlantic with a sense of heroic excitement.
These canvases form the backdrop to the exhibition’s standout work, Hew Locke’s Armada (2017–19), a suspended fleet of ships. These intricately detailed, colorful vessels represent various moments in history, from the Mayflower that brought early colonizers to America in the 1600s to the cruise liner HMT Empire Windrush, which carried Caribbean passengers to a new life in the U.K. in 1948. Local economies are represented by shipping boats while cargo ships are synonymous with modern-day global trade networks.
Kerry James Marshall, Scipio Moorhead, Portrait of Himself, 1776 (2007). Photo: James Prinz Photography, courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery.
Landscapes by the 18th century English painter William Hodges are typical for their era in how they depict places like the Caribbean and India as exotic, untouched idylls that bear no trace of colonial violence. They are placed beside Yinka Shonibare’s Woman Moving Up (2023), which directly quotes the grand staircase at Chatsworth House as a symbol for the generational wealth evident in Britain’s many country houses, much of which was accumulated by investment in colonial ventures abroad. A female figure ascends the staircase, representing for Shonibare the migration of Black Americans away from Southern states during the 20th century.
“While the geographical move for African Americans ended in 1970,” the artist explained in the show’s catalog, “the spiritual, cultural, economic, and social uprising has yet to cease.”
Installation view of the “Entangled Pasts, 1768–now. Art, Colonialism and Change” at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, featuring Yinka Shonibare’s Woman Moving Up (2023), courtesy the artist and James Cohan Gallery, New York. Photo: © Royal Academy of Arts, London / David Parry. © Yinka Shonibare CBE RA.
The RA itself is implicated as a force of oppression and exclusion within the exhibition, which at least attempts to reckon with its own history as a venue for the promotion of Britain’s imperial ideals throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. The considerable crowds that flocked to its salons to witness works like those by Hodges and Copley are evidenced by a cartoon form 1787.
It would be a mistake to think that the promulgation of detrimental colonial values was limited to before the 20th century. Painter Frank Dicksee, who was president of the RA from 1924 to 1928, insisted that “our ideal of beauty must be the white man’s,” a world view clearly at play in his work Startled (1892), in which two pale figures frolic under a purifying golden light. Another damning painting in the exhibition is The Royal Academy Selection and Hanging Committee 1938 (1939) by Frederick William Elwell, which shows a formal dining table around which pompous white men sit and confer.
Installation view of the “Entangled Pasts, 1768–now. Art, Colonialism and Change” at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, featuring El Anatsui’s Akua’s Surviving Children (1996), courtesy of the artist and October Gallery, and Frank Bowling, Middle Passage (1970), © Frank Bowling. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2024. Photo: © Royal Academy of Arts, London / David Parry.
Most staggering of all, however, is the fact that the first Black member to be elected to the Royal Academy was Frank Bowling in 2005.
In this exhibition, his majestic canvas Middle Passage (1970) is an abstracted meditation on the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade. Yellows, oranges, and greens refer to his birthplace of Guyana and we can make out the faint but familiar outlines of Africa and the Americas. It is staged in conversation with El Anatsui’s Akua’s Surviving Children (1996), in which pieces of driftwood are assembled to imply a gathering of figures. The sculpture was made while the artist was in Copenhagen for a conference on the Danish slave trade, during which he discovered pieces of wood washed up on a beach that brought to mind the many people who had been torn from their homeland and enslaved.
“Entangled Pasts: Art, Colonialism and Change” is on view at the Royal Academy in London through April 28, 2024. 
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Maria Lassnig’s figurative paintings, whose jewel-like and pastel hues belie the heavy psychological states of her self-portraits and subject matter, were late to gain the attention they deserved from the art world. But even less attention was given to her experimental film practice, which she nurtured alongside her paintings throughout her career.
These moving image works, as well as a new posthumous biopic, will be the focus of the prestigious Berlinale film festival, which opens its 74th edition in the German capital this month. Anja Salomonowitz’s feature-length biographic film on Lassnig, called Sleeping with a Tiger (2024), will premiere in Berlin on February 17.
Ten of Lassnig’s short films will be shown concurrently as a part of the Berlinale’s Forum Special section; the program will include Lassnig’s earliest animated work, Encounter (1970), a one-minute stop-motion piece based on her drawings. The 1971 Art Education, which runs just under ten minutes, considers women’s woeful place in art history, not as master of artworks but as its subjects and muses. Other films, like Shapes, explore the relationship between the body, sensation, and movement, a key focus of her painting practice as well.
Maria Lassnig, Maxingstrasse studio, Vienna, 1983. Photo: © Kurt Michael Westermann / Maria Lassnig Foundation.
In the tragically comic work The Ballad of Maria Lassnig (1982), the artist emulates with childlike storytelling and poignant wit the story of her entire life. Green-screened into a stop animation of her own drawings, Lassnig sings melodic verses that detail her birth and childhood, right up to discovery of art, continuing towards the end of her life.
“My childhood was a real life drama,” she sings, gesturing her arms ironically with a flat singsong German. “The pots and pans went flying through the air… The poor child suffered from her parent’s war.” The artist died in 2014 at the age of 94.
The Berlinale’s section head, Barbara Wurm, described Lassnig’s film works as “delightful frictions, lively criticism, wonderful ideas, hand-drawn, and self-sung.”
Still from Art Education. © Maria Lassnig Foundation, courtesy sixpackfilm.
Sleeping with a Tiger, the biopic, charts the personal and artistic life of Lassnig (played Birgit Minichmayr), from her roots in rural South Austria to the art world of Vienna and its prestigious art academy. The film follows her rise to success, her relationships, and her navigation of the male-dominated cultural scene. The biopic presumably takes its title from Lassnig’s 1975 self-portrait of the same name, where she depicted herself embraced by the giant animal.
Studio scenes in the biopic also capture her emotionally and physical invested self-portraiture style that incorporated her theory of “body awareness.” Lassnig would tune into her body while painting, only depicting on the canvas what she could feel while she was working. This intense psychological process would sometimes involve lying on the floor across her blank canvas as she made her strokes. Often, her figures would have intense distortions or be missing body parts altogether. The effect is searing and Lassnig’s portraits offer a clear window into an interior world, consciousness, and the artist’s emotional states.
Maria Lassnig, Dame mit Hirn (Women With Brain) (1990) Maria Lassnig Stiftung. Courtesy Stedelijk Museum.
Born in 1919, Lassnig was a key figure in the postwar Vienna art scene. Like many of her male contemporaries, she was influenced by Abstract Expressionism and action painting, but also by Surrealism due to her time in Paris when she brushed shoulders with Paul Celan and Andre Breton.
Since her death, the artist has had major solo surveys at Kunstmuseum Basel (2018) and the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (2019). Her works and films are largely held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Albertina in Vienna. Her biography was published in 2022.
The Berlinale film festival runs from Thursday, February 15, through Sunday, February 25, 2024.
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When the official collateral events for the forthcoming 60th Venice Biennale were announced last fall, the Palestine Museum U.S. learned that its proposal for an exhibition titled “Foreigners in Their Homeland” had not made the cut. The show, which will spotlight contemporary Palestinian art, will now go ahead as an unofficial collateral event at Venice’s Palazzo Mora instead, opening April 20.
Additionally, a previous iteration of the exhibition concept titled “From Palestine with Art,” which was originally presented as an official collateral event at the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022, is currently being restaged at P21 Gallery in London until March 2.
On view in the London exhibition are two embroidered thobes, a traditional form of dress in Palestine, displayed like pieces of tapestry art. An expansive landscape by the painter Nabil Anani who lives in the West Bank depicts Palestine as it would have looked a century ago, filled with luscious rolling green fields lined with olive and cypress trees.
A montage of portraits by the artist Jacqueline Bejani spotlights Palestinian intellectuals, artists, and writers, like Mahmoud Dawish and Susan Abulhawa, as well as lesser-known pioneers and creative figures. The paintings are streaked with shades of black, green, and red.
“I use the colors of the Palestinian flag, because very often we’re not allowed to show those,” said Bejani. “All of them together become the flag. It’s our cultural heritage. It’s our identity.”
Ghassan Abu Laban, Jidar, OOC (2022). Photo courtesy of Palestine Museum U.S.
Other works, like Ghassan Abu Laban’s Jidar, OOC (2022) refer somewhat obliquely to life under occupation. This almost abstract canvas represents the separation barrier in the West Bank, but one in which an imaginary hole has been torn allowing people to peer through.
A 2021 painting on the universal theme of migration by Gazan artist Mohammed Alhaj has become particularly poignant since Alhaj himself recently had to move his family from the north of Gaza in search of safety. They are currently living in a tent near the southern city of Rafah.
The London show also includes a documentary-style film by the Gazan journalist Roshdi Sarraj, who was killed in a targeted airstrike in October. Capturing air strikes and buildings reduced to rubble, this particularly distressing work will not be included in the exhibition planned for Venice.
While the 60th Venice Biennale’s curator Adriano Pedrosa did not select “Foreigners in the Homeland” as an official collateral event at this year’s Venice Biennale, he did choose a project by Artists and Allies of Hebron, an organization founded by Palestinian activist Issa Amro and Berlin-based South African photographer Adam Broomberg. They will present “Anchor in the Landscape,” an exhibition of photographs taken by Broomberg and Rafael Gonzalez of Palestinian olive trees, which have long been threatened by Israeli occupation.
Nabil Anani, In Pursuit of Utopia (2020). Photo courtesy of Nabil Anani.
The Palestine Museum U.S.’s founding director Faisal Saleh questioned why the artists behind the photography series are not of Palestinian origin.
“This is the dilemma that we as Palestinians are facing,” he said. “Western institutions don’t trust us to tell our own story. It’s a horrible feeling that they always have to find someone whose not Palestinian to lead the project. That’s the message.”
“We may not be the best artists in the world, or the best curators,” he added. “But how do you present 56 years of occupation? We have a story to tell and our story is compelling.”
As Pedrosa wrote in his curatorial statement for “Foreigners Everywhere,” the main exhibition at this year’s 60th Venice Biennale, the theme is intended to spotlight Indigenous artists who are “frequently treated as a foreigner in their own land.”
“Our exhibition is 23 Palestinian artists representing their environment and experiences living under occupation,” said Saleh. “What we presented was exactly what Pedrosa said he was looking for.”
The Biennale noted that of the 72 submissions it received for its program of official collateral events, 42 were not selected. According to its official procedure for the selection process, the curator is never asked for the reason behind their choices.
“Of course La Biennale is happy if those projects not selected take place in Venice,” a spokesperson for the Biennale told Artnet News.
Samia Halaby, Venetian Red (2021). Photo courtesy of Samia Halaby.
Another of the paintings on show at P21 is by the well-established Palestinian-American abstract painter and scholar Samia Halaby. She made headlines last fall when Indiana University’s Eskenazi Museum of Art abruptly cancelled her first U.S. retrospective, which had been in the works for three years.
The decision was made by the museum’s director David Brenneman shortly after Indiana representative Jim Banks told the university it could lose federal funding if any antisemitism was allowed on campus. Halaby has, however, been named as one of the artists to be included in Pedrosa’s main exhibition “Foreigners Everywhere.”
The Palestine Museum U.S. opened in Woodbridge, Connecticut in 2018 as the first museum dedicated to Palestinian history and culture in the Americas.
“From Palestine with Art,” runs at P21 in London until March 2. “Foreigners in Their Homeland” opens at Palazzo Mora in Venice on April 20.

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The Royal Academy in London has unveiled a monumental new public sculpture by the Bahamian-born interdisciplinary artist Tavares Strachan. The First Supper (Galaxy Black) (2023) has been installed in the courtyard as part of “Entangled Pasts, 1768-now: Art, Colonialism and Change,” a new exhibition that puts the RA’s historic artworks in conversation with contemporary masterpieces to explore and challenge narratives around empire, race, and colonialism. It opens today and runs through April 28, 2024.
Inspired by one of art history’s best known paintings, Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper (ca. 1495-98), the mammoth bronze sculpture imagines a convivial gathering between notable historical figures from Africa and its Diaspora who, in reality, never met because they were separated by time and place. Among these 12 Black scientists, activists, and artists are the abolitionist Harriet Tubman, the gay rights campaigner Marsha P. Johnson, the U.S.’s first Black congresswoman Shirley Chisholm, the poet Sir Derek Alton, and the gospel singer Sister Rosetta Tharpe.
Less prominent figures that Strachan has chosen to highlight include the Brazilian resistance fighter Zumbi Dos Palmares, the nurse Mary Seacole, the astronaut Robert Henry Lawrence, and the explorer Matthew Henson. The 13th figure is a self-portrait of Strachan himself in the guise of Judas. The central figure who takes the place of Jesus is Emperor Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia, who some Rastafarians consider to be the returned messiah.
Tavares Strachan, The First Supper (Galaxy Black) (2023). Image courtesy of the artist and Perrotin, collection of Glenstone Museum, Potomac, Maryland.
The long table of animated figures faces museum visitors as they turn into the courtyard from Piccadilly, welcoming them in. The group’s various gestures and expressions lend the work a lively theatricality, and it cuts a striking figure against the RA’s aged gray facade thanks to Strachan’s use of black patina and gold leaf.
Another statue of the RA’s founding president, the painter Sir Joshua Reynolds, can be seen standing on its usual perch just behind. Installed in 1931, its presence reminds us that for centuries these kinds of public monuments were erected almost exclusively to commemorate white men.
“I think it’s important for us to have an archive of the stories of our folks; one that doesn’t necessarily centre Europe, modernism or any -ism that is not indicative of us,” Strachan commented for the show’s catalog.
Strachan was born in 1979 in Nassau, Bahamas and is currently based between New York City and Nassau. His conceptual practice has long brought to light marginalized histories, which is the focus of his ongoing project The Encyclopedia of Invisibility. It was born out of Strachan’s research into Matthew Henson, the first person to reach the North Pole in 1909. For over a century, Henson’s achievement went unrecognized and the milestone was mistakenly credited to his fellow explorer Robert Peary instead.
“Entangled Pasts, 1768-now” opens today and runs through April 28, 2024. 

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When a serious museum show dedicated to a crowd-pleasing artist like Yayoi Kusama or Olafur Eliasson is branded “Instagram-friendly,” it is usually meant as a backhanded compliment. Yet “Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You,” a new survey of works by Barbara Kruger at London’s Serpentine South Gallery goes one step further: it is proudly TikTok-friendly.
Since rising to prominence in the 1980s, the legendary American conceptual and collage artist has proven that she’s still well ahead of the curve. Take, for instance, the Serpentine show’s TikTok filter that allows users to make their own versions of one of Kruger’s most iconic artworks, Your Body is a Battleground, with their selfie cameras. This savvy conceit takes an eye-catching graphic that was first mass-reproduced in print in the 1980s and jettisons it across the globe at lightning speed thanks to the power of social media.
Barbara Kruger, Untitled (No Comment) (2020). Photo: The Art Institute of Chicago, courtesy of the artist and Sprüth Magers.
The influence of the internet is present throughout the main show. Unlike the slow-moving, painfully esoteric films that feature frequently in contemporary art museums, Kruger’s newest piece Untitled (No Comment) (2020) is an immersive three-channelled video installation that was born ready to compete in the attention economy. Its unrelenting, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it stream of cats, hair tutorials, flashing slogans, and quotes from thinkers as diverse as Voltaire and Kendrick Lamar manages to simulate the all too familiar feeling of scrolling on our phones “to relax” before bed.
“This digital availability that you have online is just so irresistible and so dominant today,” Kruger said in a recent interview with curator Hans Ulrich Obrist.
Random sounds playing out from speakers in the galleries are intentionally disorienting. “Having rogue audio thread through the exhibition as a sonic intervention was just another way of challenging and adding to receivership,” she added.
Installation view of “Barbara Kruger: Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You.,” on view from February 1 to March 17, 2024 at Serpentine South. Photo courtesy of Serpentine.
Kruger, aged 79, left art school at Syracuse University after just one year and cut her teeth instead working as a graphic designer for magazines in New York during the 1960s. A decade later, she had developed her trademark style of Futura Bold or Helvetic Ultra Condensed font text on black, red, or white banners slapped over black-and-white images. The works had an immediately memorable impact, not unlike that of tabloid headlines. The popular streetwear brand Supreme once admitted in court to being “influenced” by Kruger’s work.
Throughout the London show, one is assaulted with the artist’s directives, flippant propositions, and succinct statements, all of which seem to be a sad reflection on the state of society. Examples like Admit nothing/Blame everyone/Be bitter (1987) are always humorous enough, however, to avoid being too scolding or didactic.
Untitled (Taxis), 2024, outside of Serpentine’s “Barbara Kruger: Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You.” Photo: George Darrell.
A few of the works have been updated for our present moment through the medium of animation. Untitled (I Shop Therefore I Am) (1987/2019), for example, has the words disintegrate on screen before reforming to flash between new variations on Descartes’ infamous philosophical musing like “I shop therefore I hoard,” or “I sext therefore I am.”
Similarly, in Pledge, Will, Vow (1988/2020) Kruger uses a three-channel video stream of classic texts like the U.S. Pledge of Allegiance to highlight the various ways in which a narrative can be constructed. As each word appears on screen, it flickers between several possible alternatives that would imply new meanings ranging from incisive to playfully absurd. “Allegiance,” might therefore become “adoration,” “adherence,” or “anxiety.”
Barbara Kruger, Untitled (Our Leader) (1987/2020). Photo courtesy of the artist and Sprüth Magers.
Kruger’s classic works reinvented for the internet age reveal the technological leaps that have occurred within her lifetime. Yet they also demonstrate that the pace of social change has unfortunately lagged within that same time. For instance, Your Body is a Battleground was originally made for the Women’s March on Washington for reproductive freedom in 1983 but has, if anything, only grown in relevance in recent years.
Similarly, Untitled (Our People are Better Than Your People) (1994) offers a statement of delusional superiority: “Our people are better than your people. More intelligent, more powerful, more beautiful, and cleaner. We are good and you are evil. God is on our side,” and so on. Originally created as sharp satire 30 years ago, today it reads like MAGA-style political talking points nearly verbatim, with very little room for parody.
“It would be great if my work became archaic,” Kruger told Obrist. “But unfortunately, that’s not the case at this point.”
Barbara Kruger’s “Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You” is on view at the Serpentine South Gallery in London’s Kensington Gardens until March 17, 2024. 
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