Shows & Exhibitions

This morning, Tate Britain made its annual announcement of the four artists shortlisted for this year’s Turner Prize: Jesse Darling, Ghislaine Leung, Rory Pilgrim, and Barbara Walker. Their work will be exhibited at Towner Eastbourne museum in East Sussex from September 28 to April 14, 2024, with the winner later crowned at an award ceremony on December 5.
British artist Barbara Walker, 58, reflects on her life and the experiences of those around her on a range of scales, from intimate studies on paper to large murals. She was nominated for her “Burden of Proof,” exhibited at the current Sharjah Biennial (until June 11), a series of sensitive charcoal portrayals of people impacted by the Windrush Scandal, which saw hundreds of Caribbean workers who arrived to the U.K. between 1948 and 1971 wrongly detained or deported. Identity papers documenting the sitters’ right to remain have been layered into some of Walker’s portraits.
Ghislaine Leung, 42, a Swedish artist based in London, was nominated for the show “Fountains” at Simian in Copenhagen earlier this year. Known for her use of a “score,” or a set of instructions, in her artworks, Leung’s direction is always open to interpretation by the specific gallery working in collaboration with her. For example, the score for Fountains (2022) read, “a fountain installed in the exhibition space to cancel sound,” which led Simian to make use of its subterranean location beneath a public fountain to allow water to cascade down into the gallery space.
Installation view of Jesse Darling, “No Medals, No Ribbons” at Modern Art Oxford, 2022. Photo: Ben Westoby, © Modern Art Oxford.
The British-born, Berlin-based artist Jesse Darling, 41, makes installations from a range of materials and was nominated for two solo exhibitions from 2022: “No Medals, No Ribbons” at Modern Art Oxford and “Enclosures” at Camden Art Centre in London. The Oxford show was the largest of his career, and featured precarious sculptures stitched together using everyday items that had been strangely anthropomorphized, as in the case of plastic bags with metal limbs or a roller-coaster track rewrought into a misshapen, skeletal form.
The British artist Rory Pilgrim, 35, who works between the U.K. and The Netherlands, was nominated for RAFTS, a film commissioned last year by the Serpentine in London. Using music and song, he explores the symbol of a raft as a last resort structure during challenging times brought on by the pandemic and the climate crisis. It features perspectives voiced by eight residents of Barking and Dagenham in East London.
Though there is no obvious common thread between the shortlisted artists as was the case last year, when the cohort were all women or non-binary, but Tate Britian’s director Alex Farquharson commented that vulnerability was a shared theme, with each of the artworks speaking to “social themes, social structures, as well as a real sense of tenderness and humanity.”
One of the world’s most important accolades for contemporary art since 1984, the Turner Prize is known for showcasing radical artistic practices that have historically sparked debate. This year’s jury, chaired by Farquharson, comprises Martin Clark, director of Camden Art Centre, Cédric Fauq, chief curator at Capc Musée d’Art Contemporain de Bordeaux, Melanie Keen, director of the Wellcome Collection and Helen Nisbet, artistic director at Art Night.
The award ceremony on December 5 will take place at Eastbourne’s Winter Gardens, with a prize of £25,000 for the winner and £10,000 for each runner-up.
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Occasionally someone is lucky enough to come across forgotten or undervalued treasure in a charity shop, but it’s not often that they accidentally find an artist’s entire oeuvre. This is what happened to British artist Andy Holden, who discovered not only a collection of paintings by artist Hermione Burton, who died in 2007, but also her framed photographs and self-published autobiography while rifling through a shop in his hometown of Bedford a few years ago.
Now, Holden is presenting more than 20 of the artist’s paintings alongside his own interpretative films in the exhibition “Full of Days” at the Gallery of Everything in London.
With her slightly naive style, Burton would be classified as an outsider or self-taught artist today, but Holden was immediately drawn to her works’ fantastical, otherworldly nature. After reading her autobiography, which narrates the events of her life as well as delving into her lifelong struggle with rheumatic heart disease, Holden even tracked down some of her subjects to record their memories of Burton.
A still from Andy Holden, Kingdom of the Sick. Image courtesy of Andy Holden.
In the exhibition’s longest film, Kingdom of the Sick, which runs for 40 minutes, a motion capture animated version of Burton played by musician Sarah Cracknell is brought to life in the artist’s trademark red beret. The documentary/biopic gives audiences an overview of her life before offering Holden’s own interpretation of this found material that seeks to explore the ways in which sickness and grief can affect our experiences of time.
Burton was born in 1926 in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, but later moved with her second husband to live the U.S., where she became the one of the first-ever patients to undergo open-heart surgery. It was during her recovery that she turned to art.
Made homesick one day by hearing Tom Jones’s Green Green Grass of Home on the radio, she returned to England where she met her third husband, Frank Burton. As her health continued to decline and she was forced to undergo more surgery, Burton kept up her artistic practice and slowly started to gain local recognition, even exhibiting at the Gallery in Wellingborough in 1987.
As Burton frequently painted herself and those that were close to her, Holden has read her undated artworks as though they are a diary, but one without a strict linear structure. He has searched for narrative clues elsewhere. For example, perspectival shifts in the composition that might easily be written off as technical ineptitude have instead been read by Holden as being intentional expressions of a change in Burton’s worldview.
Through his own study of Burton’s art, Holden prompts the viewer to consider both the tempting possibilities and the limitations of interpreting the work that any artist leaves behind.
Preview some of Hermione Burton’s paintings below.
Installation view of “Full of Days” exhibition at the Gallery of Everything in London. Photo: Jorge Antony Stride.
Hermione Burton, Did She Fall or Was She Pushed?. Image courtesy of Andy Holden.
Hermione Burton, God Bless You, Vicar. Image courtesy of Andy Holden.
Hermione Burton, Untitled. Image courtesy of Andy Holden.
Hermione Burton, Untitled. Image courtesy of Andy Holden.
Hermione Burton, Jacqui’s Father. Image courtesy of Andy Holden.
Hermione Burton, Pleasant Thoughts, Jacqui on a plinth. Image courtesy of Andy Holden.
Hermione Burton, Still Life. Image courtesy of Andy Holden.
“Full of Days” is on view at the Gallery of Everything, 4 Chiltern St, London, through April 30.
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Iconic outfits worn by Whitney Houston, Tina Turner, and other “divas” will star in a new exhibition at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) this summer.
The show, simply titled “Diva,” celebrates era-defining performers and the various looks they donned in their heydays. Some 250 objects, including dresses, accessories, and photos, will go on display; many have never been shown in public before. 
Billed as the first of its kind, the exhibition is set to go on view June 24 through April of next year.  
“Today the word ‘diva’ holds a myriad of meanings,” said V&A curator Kate Bailey, who organized the show. “At the heart of this exhibition is a story of iconic performers who with creativity, courage, and ambition have challenged the status quo and used their voice and their art to redefine and reclaim the diva.” 
“Diva” will be divided into two “acts.” The first explores the historical context into which the modern concept of the diva was born. Honored here are opera singers like Adelina Patti and Jenny Lind; silent film sirens such as Clara Bow and Mary Pickford; and actors from Hollywood’s Golden Age, including Vivien Leigh and Mae West. Marilyn Monroe, who fits into the latter category, will be represented by the fringed black dress she wore as Sugar “Kane” Kowalczyk in 1959’s Some Like it Hot. 
Photograph of Maria Callas in Verdi’s opera La Traviata at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, 1958. Photo: Houston Rogers. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
The second act looks at how more contemporary stars have reclaimed the title of “diva” in recent years, often in the face of their own male-dominated industries. Jazz greats Billie Holliday and Ella Fitzgerald make appearances, as do politically minded performers like Nina Simone and Aretha Franklin, while Grace Jones, Prince, Bjork, and Rihanna represent the late 20th and early 21st centuries. 
Included in this section is Edith Piaf’s famed “little black dress” of the 1950s; the powdered wig and train worn by Elton John for his 50th birthday; and the “Vulva pants” designed for Janelle Monae’s 2018 Pynk music video. 
“It is wonderful to see the divas celebrated in this exhibition, and to see the V&A reclaiming the title,” said Dame Shirley Bassey, whose Julien MacDonald-designed pink gown that she wore on stage at Glastonbury in 2007 is included in the show.  
“To me,” Bassey went on, “‘diva’ is all about the power of the voice and the ability to entertain, to succeed against odds, to fight, and break through barrier after barrier: to have your voice heard.” 
See more material from “Diva” below. 
Lizzo is seen in midtown New York on September 25, 2021. Photo: Gotham/GC Images.
Costume, designed by Christian Dior, worn by Vivien Leigh as Paola in Jean Giraudoux’s play Duel of Angels, 1958. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
Tina Turner, performing live onstage c.1979. Photo: Gai Terrell/Redferns.
Elton John’s 50th birthday look with wig and boat hat, designed by Sandy Powell, 1997. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
Photograph of Theda Bara as Cleopatra in the 1917 film Cleopatra. Photograph: ScreenProd / Photononstop / Alamy Stock Photo.
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In Georgie Arce, No.2 (1955), a painting by the Pennsylvania-born artist Alice Neel, a young Puerto Rican boy sits on a dining chair wearing a striped shirt and a large medallion. He holds a toy knife and, with furrowed brows, returns the viewer’s gaze. Neel painted and drew her neighbor, Georgie, starting from around ten years old, many times throughout the 1950s, inadvertently documenting his growth from a child to a teenager. Neel and Georgie both lived in Spanish Harlem, a heavily multicultural part of New York, where the artist resided from 1938 to 1962. 
“For me, people come first,” journalist Mike Gold quotes Neel saying in 1950 in The Daily Workers, a newspaper published by the Communist Party USA. After a chance encounter, Georgie and Neel became friends for around three decades until Georgie was imprisoned for a double murder in 1974. “I have tried to assert the dignity and eternal importance of the human being in my portraits,” Neel added. Her painting of Georgie is on view in “Alice Neel: Hot Off the Griddle,” the most extensive U.K. retrospective of Neel’s work to date, at the Barbican Centre in London until May 21.
Neel–who died almost four decades ago at 84 years old—was relatively unknown for most of her life, but the vulnerability of her portrayals has made the artist into a household name across the globe today. There have been multiple major exhibitions on the artist’s work over the last few years, including at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2021 and last year at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Guggenheim in Bilbao and the de Young Museum in San Francisco. She has also inspired many prominent artists alive today, including Amy Sherald, Wangari Mathenge, and Chantal Joffe. “Neel captures the soul of her subjects,” Sherald said. “Her authenticity is an inspiration.” 
Even with Georgie’s determined stare, tight posture, and the way he firmly wields his ‘weapon,’ there is a tenderness to Neel’s portrait. “It feels like we see a boy who’s yearning to be a young man but who still cowers under his own childhood as well,” Eleanor Nairne, curator of the Barbican show, said. “You see that in many of Neel’s adult portraits, too,” Nairne added. “That sense of how we as people are often reaching for something but also intimidated by that thing we are reaching for.”
Alice Neel, Geoffrey Hendricks and Brian (1978). ©The Estate of Alice Neel. Courtesy The Estate of Alice Neel.
According to Emma Baker, head of contemporary evening sales at Sotheby’s, part of what has also enticed contemporary viewers and buyers to Neel’s paintings is the artist’s social consciousness, and how her portraits anticipated many issues that have only in recent years come to the forefront of mainstream conversations. It has been widely reported that Georgie’s incarceration was a result of the chaos, violence and underfunded system he grew up with. “She was very much attuned to what was going on socially and politically and translating that through the subjects that she chose to depict,” Baker said.
For some, Neel’s depictions of the boy can be seen as a sense of foreboding, from the cheerful little character seen standing with his leg pressed up against the chair in a painting from 1953 to the more pensive personality that comes later. But, for others, like the rest of Neel’s oeuvre, each portrait of Georgie shows the multidimensionality of being human—Neel provides an honest illustration of his innocence, hopes, struggles, and joy, all perfectly entwined. “Part of what I find so compelling about looking at her work is how they don’t calcify into a single fixed image of a person,” Nairne said. “They have some sense of multiplicity in them because we are all, as people, multiple.” 
Beyond Georgie, Neel’s extensive oeuvre not only depicts her friends and family but also marginalized people in New York, including nude pregnant women, who often weren’t found in dignified portraits, part of which has made her into a feminist icon today, though she may not have agreed with being pigeonholed as one. “She painted everyone: people of colour, the elderly, the poor, and gay and transgender people, and persevered through a time when figuration was renounced,” artist Amy Sherald said.
Alice Neel, Pregnant Julie and Algis (1967). ©The Estate of Alice Neel . Courtesy The Estate of Alice Neel.
Neel actively went against the grain of her time, which included disregarding Abstract Expressionism during the 1940s and ‘50s, Pop art during the 1960s, and Minimalism. Consequently, she struggled financially. From 1933, she received a small sum to produce pieces as part of the Public Works of Art Project (replaced by the Works Project Administration created by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1934), a program that employed artists to create works for public buildings and parks during the Great Depression. “It wasn’t a very big income, but it gave me enough to live and paint on,” Neel told the American art historian Cindy Nemser for the book Art Talk: conversations with 12 women artists, published in 1975. In 1943 when the payments ended, she immediately went on welfare until the 1950s, bringing up her children on a tight budget. They managed to live a “nice lifestyle” nonetheless, Neel’s son Hartley told a journalist after her death. “The only reason it was sensitive is that something is embarrassing about being on welfare,” he said. “It’s a certain stigma associated to that.” 
Over the last two decades, “we’ve seen a real return to figuration for many artists,” Nairne said. Who has been and is being represented, and how, has also been a topic brought to the fore, especially with movements such as #MeToo and Black Lives Matter. “It’s interesting to look back to who some of those historical figures were during the 20th century who became important role models or influences on those artists.” 
Sticking with these portraits for so long shows that Neel knew that one day society would value these sorts of paintings and understand the power that portraiture holds to spark conversations around social issues. “She’s a testament to the idea of perseverance, Sotheby’s Baker said, “and to having faith and commitment and belief in what you’re doing.” 
“Alice Neel: Hot off the Griddle” is on view through May 21 at Barbican Art Gallery. The accompanying book Alice Neel: Hot Off The Griddle, edited by Eleanor Nairne, with essays by Eleanor Nairne, Hilton Als and poetry by Daisy Lafarge, is published by Prestel, March 2023.
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For a show opening at the Hill Art Foundation in New York on April 21, the artist David Salle has curated a selection of paintings and sculptures by 35 artists. Drawing on history-spanning works by the likes of Peter Paul Rubens, Francis Bacon, Salman Toor, and Cecily Brown, “Beautiful, Vivid, Self-contained” considers the role of juxtaposition in our experience of art. Below, read an excerpt from the essay Salle wrote for the show’s catalogue.

The purpose of this exhibition is to consider the nature of affinity in painting. What perceptions about painting—from the inside out—bind diverse works together?
How can works of art be said to influence one another? How does aesthetic DNA become encoded in a painting; how is it passed on, and in what form?
What constitutes this influence? How to separate fashion, obvious and transitory, from the mysterious seeding of ideas that disperse like a dandelion puff in the wind?
Are there pictorial inventions that jump across historical divides to be reimagined in a wholly different time and place?
Is there such a thing as “aesthetic personality,” and can it be recognized in another context? Can a painting be said to have a nervous system? What is the psychic mapping that undergirds a pictorial attitude?
Perhaps the thorniest question of all: What is the relationship between intention and style, and is it quantifiable? Can artists of different styles—different surface attributes—have a similar relationship to their intention?
David Salle, Pavane (1990). © 2023 David Salle / VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of Skarstedt, New York.
In a lengthy essay published in the New Yorker in 2007, novelist Milan Kundera discusses the nature of accepted context versus actual influence. He surprises us with the claim that he does not wish to be characterized as an Eastern European writer. It may seem counterintuitive in our current identitarian age, but Kundera doesn’t want to be a “Czech writer.” (He even chafes at being compared to Franz Kafka.) For Kundera, the whole notion of national identity as a literary category is wrong.
[I]f we consider the history of the novel, it was to Rabelais that Laurence Sterne was reacting, it was Sterne who set off Diderot, it was from Cervantes that Fielding drew inspiration, it was against Fielding that Stendhal measured himself, it was Flaubert living on in Joyce, it was through Joyce that Herman Broch developed his own poetics of the novel, and it was Kafka who showed García Márquez the possibility to “write another way.”
How does aesthetic transference happen? Let’s pose the question in different terms. Two renowned composers on what they value, or don’t, in the work of earlier artists:
I don’t believe at all in the distinction between tonal and atonal music. I think the way to understand these things is that they are the result of magnetic forces between the notes, which creates a magnetic tension, an attraction or repulsion. —Thomas Adès
It’s not so much how [Beethoven] gets into things that’s interesting, it’s how he gets out of them. — Morton Feldman
There are many different ways to group paintings; the categories most often used don’t have much to do with a work’s “inside energy.” The presumed affiliations that are readily accessed are: generation (the new painters) or geography (new painting in Canada); appearance, or “style”; technology; or demographics, otherwise known as identity. Now, only a fool would say that context doesn’t matter. Of course, the time and place and the circumstances in which something was made matter greatly—they are in a way the markers of what is conceivable. But they fail to give an account of why certain things hold our attention, or why they affect us as they do. A painting is more than the sum of its parts. It is the way in which those parts are put together that moves us, even if we’re not aware of that dimension.
Anthropomorphizing paintings, projecting onto them the behavioral complexities that one might apply to people, may seem a kind of lunacy, but I’m willing to go out on a limb. Pictures are all equally self-evident; nothing is hidden. Whatever happens in a painting takes place, almost by definition, on the surface. How then can we say of a painting that it is obscure or enigmatic? Perhaps it’s a matter of timing. There are objects that by design reveal themselves to us all at once, and there are paintings whose stories unfold gradually, bit by atonal bit.
Cecily Brown, The use of blue in vertigo (2022). © Cecily Brown. Courtesy of Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. Photo: Genevieve Hanson.
Thomas Adès again, on the power of juxtaposition: “A thing becomes possible which makes another thing possible, which wouldn’t have been possible without it.”
The essential thing: Juxtaposition is the art of the possible. Visual art also adheres to Chekhov’s famous dramatic imperative: If there is a gun in the first act it must go off in the last. Certain things in a painting lay out the conditions for other things to occur. A painting can “import” elements from far away, from different aesthetic universes, if the painting itself has established a sufficiently elastic context. That which was previously impossible now begets the possible. The ways in which that is accomplished are myriad and unpredictable. For the time being, stretchy is good. Stretchy is how we live now. What we want is a stretchy Haggadah.
Can the works in this exhibition be said to speak to each other? What is the common language? Even if everything is a cultural construct, how one operates within that construct is the point of distinction.
To take just one example from our show, consider the way Charline von Heyl lays the structural groundwork in her painting for the unexpected; a surprising yet seemingly inevitable conflict between different pictorial conceptions, like the last act of our drama. This thing—this image, this mark, this color or shape, this interval—requires that thing (the fire burns the stick, the water puts out the fire). Creating that sense of inevitability is the art. This is not merely formalism—it’s the poetics of dynamism. Painting events are like notes in a melody, one note following another in specific intervals of both sound and time. An atonal sequence of notes, though unlikely to strike us as melodic, can still have wrong notes. How can you tell? Even an infant can recognize nonsense words when it hears them. A six-week-old baby (if born to English speakers) will recognize that “pilk” is not a word. There is a similar mechanism in painting, with the mind-bending difference that it is the artist herself who must make the grammatical rules, and also demonstrate in the painting how the rules are true. To make things even more complicated, not all “rules” are equally productive, and not all applications of those rules are equally meaningful.
The paintings in this exhibition, together with the sculptures, provide an occasion to consider the nature of aesthetic grammar and syntax, and to note the adherence to similar or overlapping grammatical rules. It’s not just that something looks like something else; it’s a question of how each picture establishes its own notion of the uses of painting grammar. It is in the complex nature of painting: The artist’s relationship to that grammar is the wellspring of their distinction.

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For over a year, Max and Julia Voloshyn’s gallery space in Kyiv became a refuge and bomb shelter for artists and art workers since Russia’s invasion in Ukraine began. Now, the gallery has been restored to its original purpose as an exhibition space, and it aims to bring a sense of normality to the artistic community and the public amid difficult times.
“The decision to reopen our gallery in Kyiv at this time was driven by a strong sense to support the Ukrainian art scene during challenging times,” the Voloshyns told Artnet News via email.
“Now, as the situation has stabilized, we feel it is the right time to reopen,” the two continued. “We are eager to support both the local community and our artists by providing a platform for artistic expression, contributing to the cultural landscape of our country, and fostering a sense of resilience among the community.” The gallery owners will remain based in the U.S. for now, while traveling between art fairs and running the gallery remotely.
Installation view of “Camera Obscura” at Voloshyn Gallery. Courtesy of the gallery. Photo: Taras Fedorenko.
Voloshyn reopened on Friday, April 14, with the group show “Camera Obscura,” featuring works by artists including Krasimira Butseva, based between London and Sofia, Bulgaria; the award-winning Open Group artist collective founded in Lviv in 2012; the Kyiv-born Nikita Kadan and Lesia Khomenko; Brilant Milazimi, who lives and works in Prishtina, Kosovo; the Bosnian-born and Berlin-based Mila Panic; and Vlada Ralko and Yevgen Samborsky, who both are based in Kyiv.
The exhibition, with an obvious context of the war, “is an attempt to show light in the darkness blacking out Ukraine” by presenting artworks that contemplate conflicting emotions and struggles for safety and freedom.
Kadan’s large-scale photographic piece The Pass, created with together with Ukrainian artist Anton Sayenko, depicts a closed underpass of a subway station in Kyiv that became a bomb shelter. Open Group’s multimedia project Backyard ponders the trauma of loosing one’s home due to the war, and it questions the notion of safety and privacy. Samborsky’s painting Never Again… and Again reflects the failed promise of the words “never again” that came at the end of World War II.
Yevgen Samborsky, Never Again… and Again (2022). Courtesy of the artist and Voloshyn Gallery. Photo: Taras Fedorenko.
When the war broke out, the Voloshyns were stranded in the U.S. and uncertain when they would able to return to Ukraine. But the couple has been actively showcasing Ukrainian artists and participating in art fairs around the world, including the recent ARCO Madrid in February and the upcoming Art Brussels this week.
In fact, the reopening plan was already in place in October 2022, but it was shelved when Russia launched an attack on Kyiv. “One of the rockets hit the playground in Shevchenko park, directly in front of the building where our gallery is located,” they said. “This incident caused damages on the city’s infrastructure, we had problems with electricity and internet at our gallery and with the constant shelling throughout the winter, we decided to postpone our reopening plans.”
Despite the adverse circumstances, artists on the ground continue to work. Some of those who fled earlier are also returning home, while others continue to work between Ukraine and elsewhere. Kadan recently returned to Ukraine from Italy, where he participated in the exhibition ‘Artists in a Time of War‘ at the Castello di Rivioli.
The war has transformed the work artists are creating, the Voloshyns observed, as they present “a stronger focus on themes of survival, resistance, and documenting crimes of Russians. These works not only reflect the changing realities but also serve as a testament to the indomitable spirit of the Ukrainian people.”
“Camera Obscura” runs until May 21. See more images from the exhibition below.
Installation view of “Camera Obscura.” Painting on the right: Lesia Khomenko, Mannequins Exiting Storefronts Shattered by Missiles and Going to Kill Russians (2022). Courtesy of the artist and Voloshyn Gallery. Photo: Taras Fedorenko.
Mila Panic, Strawberry Field (2018), on view at Voloshyn Gallery’s exhibition “Camera Obscura”. Courtesy of the artist.
Open Group (Anton Varga, Yuriy Biley, Pavlo Kovach, and Stanislav Turina), Backyard, on view at Voloshyn Gallery’s “Camera Obscura”. Courtesy of the artist.
Vlada Ralko, from the series “Lviv Diary”, on view at “Camera Obscura,” Voloshyn Gallery. Courtesy of the artist and Voloshyn Gallery.
Nikita Kadan, The Pass (2023), with the participation of Anton Sayenko. Courtesy of the artist and Voloshyn Gallery.
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It was a buzzy opening. Duran Duran keyboardist Nick Rhodes was there, along with Interview magazine’s Paige Powell and renowned Swiss dealer Bruno Bischofberger who milled around excitedly beneath an amazing series of blown-up portraits of the show’s stars: Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, whose paradoxical collaborative paintings were the draw of the evening.
These paintings were the subject of another buzzy opening at Tony Shafrazi’s New York gallery in 1985. But the 2023 version, a slick affair sprawling across four floors of the Fondation Louis Vuitton’s Frank Gehry-designed mega-museum was a far cry from Shafrazi’s intentionally dingy Soho gallery. And it was the Parisian art-going public who turned up in droves for the opening of “Basquiat x Warhol: Painting Four Hands” to sip Moët and feast on a sense of proximity to Manhattan’s downtown art scene in the 1980s.
Michael Halsband’s electric black-and-white photographs capture the protagonists of that scene. His poster images of the pair wearing boxing gloves and faux–sparring, taken to promote the original show, are still genius. Warhol’s weedy figure and Basquiat’s soft good looks make them unlikely sparring partners. On the other hand, the exhibition itself—like all shows at the titanic museum associated with LVMH founder Bernard Arnault—was a true exercise in flexing one’s muscles.
Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol, Untitled, 1984. © Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat Licensed by Artestar, New York, © 2023 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Licensed by ADAGP, Paris. Photo: © Clint Jenkins.
Given their stature within 20th-century art history, and their own playful manipulation of their public images, Basquiat and Warhol’s relationship has been fictionalized on multiple occasions. Their collaboration is the subject of a dramatization currently on Broadway, which stages the partnership as a cynical pairing devised by their gallerist as a bid to revive Warhol’s floundering career by hitching him to Basquiat’s rising star; and it frames both parties as reluctant to play ball.
The reality was quite opposite. “Warhol’s reputation was still high at that time, but it had its highs and lows as it always had,” Bischofberger told Artnet News, speaking through an assistant. The dealer encouraged the collaboration in 1982, which originally included the Italian artist Francesco Clemente. “It was based on an interest in art history and deep knowledge of it, pure interest in the artists and their work, and in experiencing what new comes out of a collaboration between three artists of completely different characters, natures, and approaches, living in the same city and society and being friends.”
Jean-Michel Basquiat, Francesco Clemente and Andy Warhol, Handball (1984). © Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat Licensed by Artestar, New York; © Francesco Clemente; © 2023 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Licensed by ADAGP, Paris. © AKG Images.In fact, Basquiat admired Warhol, and had orchestrated several casual encounters in an effort to enter his orbit. He first approached him in 1979 at a restaurant to cold sell him a postcard collage, then later angled for an invite to Warhol’s studio, The Factory. By the time Bischofberger formally introduced them, Basquiat was a star in his own right, dusting everything he touched.
They did make a series of works with Clemente, but it was Warhol and Basquiat who felt a lasting connection. United by trauma—friends dying of AIDS and being beaten to death by police—and their own recent brushes with death—Basquiat had been hit by a car, Warhol had been shot—the artists decided to continue working together in secret at Warhol’s vacant studio building, and only revealed their four-handed work to their dealer a year later.
In all, they worked together on around 160 paintings between 1983 and 1985. Around 70 of these jointly signed canvases are included in the Paris show, which is the largest number ever to be exhibited together. It also features 220 other works and archival documents, by the artists as individuals, and by others in their circle.
A general view of the exhibition during the “Basquiat x Warhol: Painting Four Hands” press opening at Fondation Louis Vuitton on April 4, 2023 in Paris. Photo by Luc Castel/Getty Images
The enormous scale of some of the works—speaking to Warhol’s love of cinema-screen and billboard format and Basquiat’s experience painting on walls—goes some way towards explaining why there has not yet been an exhibition of this size despite their obvious pulling power with museum audiences. “Here, they can breathe, they can explode in their intensity,” said art historian Dieter Buchhart, who co-curated the exhibition with Anna Karina Hofbauer in partnership with the foundation’s in-house curator Olivier Michelon.
The show opens with a group of portraits of the artists. Among them, a Polaroid selfie of the two, and Basquiat’s now-iconic double portrait, Dos Cabezas, which the artist dashed off to paint after one of their first meetings at The Factory.
Some of the earliest collaborative works made with Clemente—looking somewhat like a cacophonous surrealist game of exquisite corpse—are included. But the duo works by Warhol and Basquiat are the substance of the exhibition—and not all are created equal. Some early ones just look like Basquiat had defaced Warhol’s paintings. The best examples are the more cohesive ones in which, as Warhol once said “you can’t tell who did which parts.” In Taxi, 45th/Broadway, Warhol’s banal yellow car bonnet is transformed by Basquiat into social commentary: a taxicab driver curses a Black figure attempting to flag it down. Also interesting are the ones in which you can see a real back-and-forth dialogue developing between the artists. This can be seen in the 33-foot-long African Masks or in the humorous exchanges made in a series of images prominently featuring a dog motif.
Installation view. “Basquiat x Warhol: Painting Four Hands” at Fondation Louis Vuitton. Photo by Naomi Rea.
A few connecting galleries with Street art by the likes of Keith Haring and Fab Five Freddy and other works by artists of the era, such as Jenny Holzer, add context to the collaboration. Photographs by Halsband and Powell provide a role call of the scene. A mind-bending group shot taken at Mr. Chow’s features dozens of now household names, with the likes of Haring, David Hockney, Alex Katz, and John Chamberlain all crammed into one frame. In another, a radiant Mary Boone holds hands with Basquiat. The gallerist, who also represented Basquiat at the time, gets another nod in one of Basquiat’s “punching bags”—an enigmatic piece embellished with her name and one of Basquiat’s trademark crowns. The show’s meaty catalog doesn’t offer any context for the inclusion, but it is interesting to note that Boone herself was never a fan of the joint works.
“I didn’t like the collaborative paintings. I thought it compromised both artists,” Boone told me over the phone. “I think that Bruno did it with the idea of invigorating the artists. I think that he wanted to inspire Andy. There’s a whole history of art dealers giving artists ideas and artists choosing to take them or not. But I just didn’t think the idea of encouraging artists to make paintings together, where they are just morphed into a third entity, was a good one.” Fortunately, for the collaborators, though: “Jean-Michel was a star, so there was no shortage of galleries wanting to show them.”
Regarding the punching bag work, Basquiat was a notorious prankster, and Boone said she took it as a joke.
Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol, Untitled, 1984. © Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat Licensed by Artestar, New York, © 2023 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Licensed by ADAGP, Paris. Photo: © Clint Jenkins.
As it turned out, Boone was far from the only skeptic of the work. In an oft-cited New York Times review, critic Vivian Raynor panned the Shafrazi show, writing: “The collaboration looks like one of Warhol’s manipulations, which increasingly seem based on the Mencken theory about nobody going broke underestimating the public’s intelligence.” Shafrazi only managed to sell three paintings from the show; two of which were returned after the negative reviews.
Curator Bucchart put the lukewarm reception down to the fact that Warhol had fallen out of favor with the press; he’d been accused of lacking in inventiveness after he turned towards celebrity portraits, and some historians suggest he lost his mojo in the decade after he was shot by Valerie Solanas in 1968. “Anything Warhol was doing in the ‘80s was criticized,” Buchhart said. “So it actually wasn’t personal, it was just unlucky that the greatest project in art history would fall under bad critique because of the circumstances.”
Queried on the sheer number of the works included in the exhibition, and whether they could all be such masterpieces, the curator doubled down on his sentiment. “It’s far away from showing everything,” he noted, citing the existence of more than 100 additional works in the world. “It’s far away from showing everything we got,” he added. “Look at the quality of the works. There are none that fail the highest standards of the Fondation Louis Vuitton.”
I’m not sure to what extent I would agree. A more cynical observer might find something to say in the fact that Galerie Bruno Bischofberger is one of the main lenders of the collaborative works, suggesting there is still unmoved inventory in the back room.
Andy Warhol, Portrait of Jean-Michel Basquiat as David (1984). ©2023 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. Licensed by ADAGP, Paris. Courtesy Norman and Irma Braman.
Perhaps the strongest works in the exhibition are those executed by the artists as individuals, albeit inspired by the other. These include the revelatory acrylic and silkscreen ink print collages of six Polaroids of Basquiat in his underwear posing as Michelangelo’s David (loaned by Miami heavyweights Norman and Irma Braman). Equally strong is the somber assemblage by Basquiat, titled Gravestone (1987, also a private collection), which pays homage to Warhol after his death. The work quotes the elder artist’s crosses, and is poetically, hauntingly, inscribed “perishable” as an ode to the ephemeral nature of being. Basquiat himself would die the following year of a heroin overdose, aged 27.
What is most enjoyable about the show is the fascinating historical context of the collaboration. Here we have two titans of art history working together, undeniably a momentous event, which offers clues about the varyingly inscrutable artists, their immediate environs, and their influence on each other. The experiment brought Warhol back to painting again, and their relationship offers insights into the chess game Basquiat was playing with his own brand.
All told, the exhibition may not demonstrate that everything they made together was amazing—but what is truly amazing is that they did it at all.
“Basquiat x Warhol: Painting 4 Hands” is on view through August 28 at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris.
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The opening of the 14th Gwangju Biennale in South Korea on April 6 might have met with a rainstorm and communication breakdown that led to chaotic arrangements, but it was nonetheless a success.
It wasn’t due to the K-pop glamor brought by Super Junior’s Siwon Choi, who was appointed the ambassador of this edition’s biennale onstage; nor did it have much to do with the strong presence of the opposing Democratic Party, including the mayor of Gwangju, Kang Gi-jung. The real star was the stunning main exhibition curated under the theme of “Soft and Weak like Water” by the Tate Modern’s senior curator Sook-Kyung Lee, the first South Korean-born curator to helm the event since 2006.
Spanning five galleries in the Gwangju Biennale Exhibition Hall as well as four other off-site locations, the beautifully installed exhibition proved more than just a show to impress, but a platform for important dialogues that aim to inspire.
Featuring 79 artists from around the world, the show is divided into four main sections: Luminous Halo, Ancestral Voices, Transient Sovereignty, and Planetary Times. The biennale set in the South Korean city known for its struggle for freedom and democracy might not be overtly political at first glance, but there’s no lack of politically charged yet poetic works that question and respond to urgent issues related to resistance, decolonization, and the environment. The art here is like water—its softness and tenderness can be a powerful mediator that penetrates the hard surfaces to bring about transformation.
Ahead of a full review of this expansive biennial event, we highlight five artists featured in the show deserving of global attention.

Oum Jeongsoon
Oum Jeongsoon, Elephant without trunk (2023). Courtesy the artist and Gwangju Biennale Foundation. Photo: glimworkers.
Who: Born in 1961 in Chung-ju, South Korea, Oum graduated from Ewha Woman’s University’s College of Fine Arts in Korea before furthering her studies at Akademie der Bildenden Kunst in Munich, Germany, from which she graduated in 1988. She was previously a fine art professor at KonKuk University in the 1990s and has exhibited in Korea, Japan, and Germany. She is the founder and director of art exhibition and education centre Our Eyes. She is based in Seoul.
Work on show: Installation work Elephant without Trunk (2023), featured in the section Luminous Halo at the Gwangju Biennale Exhibition Hall. The work earned the artist the inaugural Gwangju Biennale Park Seo-Bo Art Prize, with a cash prize of $100,000 sponsored by the famed 91-year-old Korean artist.
Why you should pay attention: In her ongoing project “Another Way of Seeing,” Oum traces the journey of the arrival of the first elephant in Korea from Indonesia 600 years ago. Elephant without Trunk is an extension of this project, in which Oum reinterprets elephants through the experiences of the visually impaired individuals and plays them up in enlarged forms. These obscurely shaped “elephants”—some without trunks, others without a proper body—serve as reminders of how “no one can see properly, no one can see the whole. We can only see part of the world,” noted Frances Morris, director of Tate Modern and one of the five judges of the Park Seo-Bo Art Prize. Morris praised the artist for sending a strong message to the world in the post-pandemic era: “It defines life through strong connections transcending genres, and traditions which have been passed down to this day.”

Emilija Škarnulytė
Emilija Škarnulytė, Æqualia (2023), on view at Gwangju Biennale. Photo: Vivienne Chow.
Who: Born in 1987 in Vilnius, Lithuania, Škarnulytė is an artist and filmmaker working between documentary and the imaginary. The award-winning artist is a graduate of Tromsø Academy of Contemporary Art in Norway and her works have been collected by in institutions the Kadist Foundation and Centre Pompidou. She is a founder and co-director of Polar Film Lab and is a member of artist duo New Mineral Collective. She is based between Vilnius and Oslo.
Work on show: Æqualia (2023), an immersive video installation featured in Planetary Times at the Gwangju Biennale Exhibition Hall.
Why you should pay attention: Škarnulytė made the news by turning down of the GASAG Art Prize last year in protest of Germany’s reliance on Russian energy amid its war with Ukraine. This year at the Gwangju Biennale, the artist might be back in the news for the art she’s made. Æqualia is an enigmatic and mesmerizing work that features a creature that looks like a mermaid navigating different bodies of water. The mythical creature swims across different rivers around the Amazon, and at one point cuts through the convergence point between the blackwater river of Rio Negro and whitewater of Rio Negro. At times, the mermaid is seen playing with the pink river dolphins, who are residents of the region. Echoing the theme of this subsection, the lyrical nine-minute film captures the beauty and mystery of nature. The mermaid’s navigation through different waters also inspires the way we should act around conflicts and unpredictable circumstances.

Yuko Mohri
Yuko Mohri, I/O (2011-23), on view at Gwangju Biennale. Photo: Vivienne Chow.
Who: Born in Kanagawa in 1980, Mohri is a graduate of the Tokyo University of the Arts and has held solo shows around the world. Her residencies with Asian Cultural Council in New York, the Victoria & Albert Museum, and the Camden Arts Centre in London have enlarged her global exposure. Her works are in the collections of Centre Pompidou in Paris, M+ in Hong Kong, and Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo. She is based in Tokyo.
Work on show: Installation work I/O (2011-23), on view at the glass pavilion of Horanggasy Artpolygon, one of the off-site venues.
Why you should pay attention: The installation artist has been a regular at biennales around the world since 2017, according to our survey last year, and it is not hard to understand why after seeing her work at Gwangju. I/O, which features a set of kinetic sculptures, is an ongoing series. But the artist has given it a new spin, adapting the site-specific work to a local context. By collecting the almost invisible dust and debris from the floor, and sampling environmental elements such as air flow and humidity, Mohri’s work transforms these odd components into a “music score” that is uniquely Gwangju. The artist also links the work to Han Kang’s novel The White Book (2016) and the multi-layered history of the city, symbolizing the creation of a “tone of history that was never written.” She’s expecting to show at the upcoming Art Basel in Switzerland with Mother’s Tankstation, with a solo show at gallery’s London space slated to open in September.

Anne Duk Hee Jordan
Anne Duk Hee Jordan, So long, and thank you for all the fish (2023). Courtesy of the artist and Gwangju Biennale.
Who: Jordan was born in Korea in 1978 and grew up in Germany. A free diver since a young age, Jordan’s installation work explores the intertwined relationships between the humans and non-humans, as well as marine life, technology, food, and sexuality. Humor also often has a role to play in the artist’s inspiring and delightful work. Jordan is based in Berlin.
Work on show: So long, and thank you for all the fish (2023), on view at the basement of Horanggasy Artpolygon, one of the off-site venues.
Why you should pay attention: Jordan has created a mysterious yet whimsical world with her elaborate installation spanning three rooms in the basement of this community art center located on Yangmin mountain. The mirrored rooms, doused in black light and fluorescent colors, are filled with obscure objects and creatures that are inhabitants of a unique ecosystem that exists solely in these rooms. There are also robotic, non-human inhabitants that can sense the presence of humans, as they start making joyous moves to greet the visitors. As it turns out, these robotic critters are part of Jordan’s ongoing series “Artificial Stupidity” (2016–), and the work’s title is taken from Novacene, a 2019 book by James Lovelock, the late scientist, environmentalist, and futurist who has long inspired the artist’s contemplation of our futures through an environmental lens.

Oh Suk Kuhn
Oh Suk Kuhn, “Enemy Property” series (behind, on the wall) and “Prosperity” series (front). Photo: Vivienne Chow.
Who: Born in 1979, Incheon in South Korea, Oh studied photography at Nottingham Trent University in the U.K. before embarking on an artist career. He works with photography, a medium he picked to document and investigate the confluence between his personal and collective memories, and the ongoing trauma of the country’s war-torn and colonial history. Oh is based in Incheon.
Work on show: Photography series “Enemy Property” and “Prosperity,” on view at the Gwangju Exhibition Hall.
Why you should pay attention: At first glance, Oh’s subtle photography series may not be the most eye-catching compared to the elaborate installations surrounding his work. But these seemingly uneventful pictures are telling important stories about the history of Korea that has long been forgotten or even unknown to outsiders. The series “Enemy Property” captures the “enemy houses” in Gwangju built by the Japanese during the colonial period that have been transformed over the years from their original state. His images depict enemy houses seen in Incheon and Busan (where the artist created a series and showed at last year’s Busan Biennale). The “Prosperity” series captures longevity symbols found in Korean culture that were in fact created by appropriating patterns and motifs from other cultures, such as Greek, Chinese, Japanese, and even art nouveau. These very still pictures are like time capsules, which Oh has created to process and question the history and narratives that are still affecting Korea today.
The Gwangju Biennale runs until July 9.
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