Shows & Exhibitions

This year’s Gwangju Biennale has yet to open to the public, but its organizers are already set on scaling up the event by doubling its national pavilion section in its next edition, hoping to seal its position as Asia’s answer to the Venice Biennale.
Already this year, nine countries are featured with national pavilions at the South Korean exhibition—these include Ukraine, China, France, Canada, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, and Switzerland.
Speaking at a press conference on Wednesday, April 5, ahead of Friday’s public opening of the 14th edition of Gwangju Biennale, Yang-Woo Park, president of the Gwangju Biennale Foundation, revealed that the show’s organizers are seeking to host 20 national pavilions for its 15th edition, set to take place in September 2024.
The renowned South Korean art show will have the next exhibition coincide with the 30th anniversary of the inception of the biennale, which was launched in 1994.
Charwei Tsai, A Temple, A Shrine, A Mosque, A Church series (2022). Gwangju Biennale 2023. Photo: Vivienne Chow.
Gwangju Biennale introduced the national pavilion section in 2018; back then, it had only three countries participating, and was down to just two in 2021 (the original 2020 edition was postponed a year due to lockdowns). The show opening on Friday sees its biggest national pavilion section yet, but this is, apparently, only the beginning of a new era.
“It will be the biggest next year,” Park said, speaking to international press via an interpreter. The foundation has already begun the primary outreach for the upcoming show, as not every country is familiar with the Gwangju event.
“We will come up with a pool,” added Park. “We will then send requests and try to reach out to embassies and consulates.”
Gwangju Biennale 2023 exhibition hall. Photo: Vivienne Chow.
Gwangju has a ways to go if the aim is to catch up with Venice, which hosted 80 national pavilions last year. The main reason to host more national pavilions in Korea in addition to the main exhibition, Park noted, was to have greater diversity. “We hope to see more artists and their works from different countries represented in their respective pavilions,” he said. “Art lovers visiting the show can appreciate different voices seen through the medium of art, which can be interpreted differently from the main show.”
The 14th edition has been curated by Sook-Kyung Lee, senior curator of international art at London’s Tate Modern, with the theme “soft and weak like water.” The phrase, borrowed from the ancient Chinese text Dao De Jing, dates to around 400 B.C.; the description of the unique qualities of water is a metaphor for the power of softness, which can be even more forceful in face of hard surfaces as it penetrates and seeps through cracks in order to bring about transformation. Resistance, solidarity, coexistence, and care are key words throughout the 79-artist exhibition that spans across five venues. Park noted that the national pavilion exhibitions staged across the city have also responded to the theme.
Sopheap Pich, La Danse (2022), on view at Gwangju Biennale 2023. Photo: Vivienne Chow.
Meanwhile, the Gwangju event will also be handing out the first Park Seo Bo Art Prize this year to an artist participating in the biennale. The 91-year-old Dansaekhwa master who recently revealed that he has been diagnosed with lung cancer, donated $1 million to the biennale. The sum is being divided into 10 awards of $100,000 for the next 10 editions.
The award, which aims to support younger artists, is dubbed the Golden Dove prize as the winner will be presented a golden dove emblem in addition to the cash prize.
When asked if the name of the award was inspired by Venice Biennale’s Golden Lion, Park noted that dove is the bird that symbolizes the city of Gwangju, and that the biennale was created to honor the 1980 Gwangju Uprising, a traumatic yet instrumental historical event that laid the foundation for South Korea’s transformation into a democracy. “Gwangju is a city of human rights, peace, and democracy,” Park said.
The Gwangju Biennale opens on Friday, April 7 and runs until July 9.

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A dog may be a man’s best friend, but the robotic canines set to take up residence at National Gallery of Victoria’s Triennial are potentially an artist’s worst nightmare.
Among the more than 100 artists and designers that will be on display when the third NGV Triennial opens in December is Agnieszka Pilat, a Polish-American technology-centric artist who is training a trio of robotic dogs to paint autonomously for the Australian art event.
Is Pilat worried about machines threatening human creativity? No. She’s a tech optimist, one who finds Bonnie, Archie, and Basia, the dogs’ names, cute.
One of Agnieszka Pilat’s paintings alongside Boston Dynamics’ SPOT robot. Photo courtesy of the artist.
Throughout the four-month show, visitors will be able to watch as artistically finessed versions of the Boston Dynamics robots paint inside a large white cube. The robot dogs will be armed with sticks of oil paint that they will cast onto an acrylic canvas affixed to the wall. Their decision-making will be based on a series of commands programmed by Pilat, such as the movements of their painting arm, the pressure they exert on the canvas, and whether to paint dots or lines.
Early versions of the robo-art appear like a marker-wielding child dashing off something in between an architectural plan and a family tree—fitting, Pilat believes, since the robots are young in human years and blessed with great knowledge but little understanding.
Pilat has been developing this project ever since she was commissioned to paint a portrait of Boston Dynamics’ Spot in 2020. She has since lived with a 60-pound yellow-and-black beast in her New York and San Francisco homes. Together, they have produced a series of brightly colored works, one of which sold for $31,500 at Sotheby’s in 2021.
Pilat’s presence at the NGV Triennial may represent something of an art world breakout for the trained illustrator who moved to San Francisco in 2004. While Pilat has received considerable attention for the novelty and provocation of her robot paintings, patronage has largely stemmed from the minted Silicon Valley set rather than the art world collectors.

The NGV Triennial will feature more than 75 projects, of which 25 are world premieres, under three main themes—magic, matter, and memory—meant to highlight the concerns of artists featured in the exhibition.
Tracey Emin, David Shrigley, Yoko Ono, Tao Hui, and Schiaparelli are among the artists set to present work, alongside 14 Australian artists, and digital practitioners such as Smac McCreanor and SMACK. It opens on December 3, 2023 and runs through April 7, 2024.
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“Hip-hop is a canon. It’s only 50 years old and it belongs in museums,” Asma Naeem, director at the Baltimore Museum of Art told Artnet News. “It doesn’t just belong in temporary exhibitions; it belongs in the permanent collections of museums.”
To coincide with the 50th anniversary of a genre born in the Bronx at a birthday party hosted by DJ Kool Herc, the institution is presenting its first hip-hop-themed exhibition, titled “The Culture: Hip-Hop & Contemporary Art in the 21st Century,” to consider how the form has shaped all manner of cultural production. The show, which opens today, is not alone in commemorating the movement’s 50th year—Fotografiska and the Museum at FIT are also doing so—but it’s one that’s weaving the overarching culture with works of art in a collage of consequential objects and imagery.
Installation view of “The Culture: Hip Hop and Contemporary Art in the 21st Century” at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Photo: Mitro Hood/BMA.
One of the exhibition’s goals, set by Naeem and her team of curators including Gamynne Guillotte, is to dismantle the divide between hip-hop and high art. As Guillotte said in her opening statement before a preview tour of the gallery: “The separation between street and gallery is a fallacy,” with perhaps an unintentional rhyme recalling the wordplay of Biggie Smalls, the rapper who inspired a piece by Mark Bradford draped behind her.
Titled Biggie Biggie Biggie (2002), Bradford’s piece, which is made of gauze “endpapers” used to curl hair, form an abstract rendering of the Brooklyn M.C. in the first section of the exhibition. Within this same room, described by Guillotte as a “tasting menu” of the sections to come, there is also Baltimore transplant Zéh Palito’s hot pink double portrait, It was all a dream (2022), a 1983 Basquiat canvas dedicated to jazz musician Charlie Parker, and a Dapper Dan down jacket from 2018.
Zéh Palito, It was all a dream (2022). Photo courtesy of the artist, Simoes de Assis, and Luce Gallery.
This collage of styles offers a positive response to a text-based work by New York artist Shirt, installed in the following section of the exhibition centered on Language, which reads in bold black letters, “CAN A RAP SONG HAVE THE SIGNIFICANCE OF ART.” It’s a statement, less a question, that bears out the exhibition’s thesis, but also emphasizes the timeless messaging that runs throughout hip-hop.
Across its elements, hip-hop has always been a way for Black artists in particular to express the grind of systemic oppression, with rap and fashion offering aspirational counterpoints to reclaim painful narratives and history. The Adornment section of the exhibition offers such a juxtaposition of trauma and beauty.
Hank Willis Thomas, Black Power (2006). Photo courtesy of Barrett Barrera Projects.
We see Robert Pruitt’s arrangement of gold chains mirroring the passageways of the transatlantic slave trade, Hank Willis Thomas’s Black Power (2006) gold grills, and Deanna Lawson’s portrait of two men with bold African facial jewelry next to a snapshot of George Washington’s rotting dentures. Naeem described such fashions as a “graspable language” to translate hip-hop’s cultural messaging to a far-reaching audience.
Baltimore sculptor Murjoni Merriweather and her hair braid-crafted sculpture Z E L L A (2022) are also included to center a more personal perspective. “The section is a lot about adornment and I feel like it caters to the purposes of my piece, but also to myself, as a person,” the artist explained. “With hair, we use it in a way to adorn ourselves, to make ourselves feel proud.”
Murjoni Merriweather, Z E L L A (2022). Photo courtesy of the artist, © Murjoni Merriweather.
Hip-hop fashion has also had a terrific commercial appeal, as explored in the Brand section of the exhibition. The gallery opens on a graffiti panel, directly contrasting it with an encased Travis Scott Air Jordan 1 and a Cross Colours denim bucket hat—spotlighting how a criminal act of vandalism has, over the decades, helped birth a commodified culture.
There is even a display of Pharrell Williams’s now-legendary Buffalo Hat (debuted at the Grammys in 2014), which was originally designed by Vivienne Westwood and inspired by Malcolm McLaren’s 1983 Duck Rock album. The curators had to borrow the hat from the fast food brand Arby’s, which recently purchased the hat at auction.
Installation view of “The Culture: Hip Hop and Contemporary Art in the 21st Century” at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Photo: Mitro Hood/BMA.
“It’s always been multidisciplinary and it’s always been about the hustle,” said Guillotte about hip-hop. “So it finds a very natural allegiance with the idea of commerce.”
Naeem’s favorite section, Tribute, adds to this conversation between generations with an homage to Tupac Shakur, who elevated gangsta rap into a veritable art form. The most stirring of three pieces dedicated to the late rapper here is Alvaro Barrington’s aluminum and cardboard hessian spelling Shakur’s potent lyric, “They got money for war but can’t feed the poor,” in yarn.
Joyce J. Scott, Hip Hop Saint, Tupac (2014). Photo: © Joyce J. Scott and Goya Contemporary Gallery.
“Hip-hop is about youth. But how that gap between youth and respect for the previous generations constantly jumps and collides all happens in this section,” said Naeem, who added that Tribute remains her favorite gallery of the exhibition. “I just love Tupac.”
“The Culture” wraps with two rooms, themed Ascension and Pose, that each hold pieces exploring hip hop’s complex relationship with grief and the afterlife (the genre, unfortunately, continues to see many early deaths). Here, John Edmonds’s white-on-white silk print and Baltimore’s own Ernest Shaw Jr.’s dazzling portrait, I Had A Dream I Could Buy My Way To Heaven (2022), encapsulate both the gains and the losses across hip-hop culture.
Installation view of “The Culture: Hip Hop and Contemporary Art in the 21st Century” at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Photo: Mitro Hood/BMA.
The exhibit itself extends, intentionally, into the BMA’s contemporary art wing. In the midst of this crossover hangs Devan Shimoyama’s sculpture, made of Timberland boots, rhinestones, silk flowers, epoxy resin, and coated wire. A showstopper. This blend of street accoutrements and gallery-tier fabrics evokes a beauty that encompasses the street. “Hip-hop conveys different kinds of beauty—other forms of beauty that belong side by side with the Western canon,” said Naeem.
“These worlds have always been in dialogue,” Guillotte added about the coexistence of hip-hop, fashion, and art. “That’s enormously important because there’s power in that. It serves somebody to assume that there is this thing that we call ‘the street’ and there is this thing that we call ‘the gallery.’ How scary would it be if there wasn’t?”
“The Culture: Hip Hop and Contemporary Art in the 21st Century” is on view at the Baltimore Museum of Art, 10 Art Museum Drive, Baltimore, through July 16.
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When I visited John Costi near the end of his six-month residency at South London Gallery’s Fire Station, he plugged a pair of Gucci loafers into his computer. 
Both shoes are dipped in thick shiny black paint and wired up with speakers which play sound from the heel. One of them plays a rap that Costi wrote as a teenager, while the other spouts a poem written by the artist as an adult, considering his time spent incarcerated for armed robbery. 
“You have to laugh, don’t you?” he smiled while the shoes played his teenage rap. He refers to Gucci loafers as aspirational for young London gang members.
John Costi, ART CRACK PIPE (2020). Courtesy of the artist. Photo by John Costi.
The work is on view in “Found Football Difficult” (through June 18), the conclusive exhibition of his residency. “There are a lot of personal sound pieces in the show that are quite dark, but still a bit of tongue-in-cheek humor there,” he later told Artnet News.
The multi-disciplinary artist’s distinctive work is formed from deeply personal subject matter, woven through with musings on masculinity, family and the U.K. prison system. The show takes its title from feedback Costi received in a childhood report card: In lieu of football, he had to find other ways of forging his own definition of masculinity.
The aural overload of two shoes delivering different recordings at the same time is characteristic of Costi’s work, which grabs visitors’ attention from all angles. There is a lot going on in the exhibition, which awakens multiple senses through scent, sound, a cacophony of visual stimuli, and the invitation to take part in his installation by dancing or flicking pennies at the wall. “There are gaps that are left for people to figure out things for themselves,” he said. “But if you don’t notice the references then maybe they aren’t for you.”
“John Costi: Found Football Difficult,” South London Gallery, March 2023. Installation View. Photo: Jo Underhill.
The exhibition covers two rooms, representing day and night; rebirth and death. The rebirth room draws on different elements of Costi’s family life. A collaged blue denim wall pays homage to the goddess Aphrodite and the artist’s Cypriot heritage; Versace’s Blue Denim perfume can be smelled; archive family photos of previous generations are enlarged on the walls; a totemic installation in the center of the room represents an IPP prisoner (Imprisonment for Public Protection sentences were imposed from 2005 to 2012 with indeterminate timeframes; nearly 3,000 imprisoned under the controversial sentence are still stuck in the prison system long after its dismantling). Visitors are invited to dance around it, with foot marks laid out on the floor. 
The death room pumps smoke from multiple points in a long gutter along one side wall; a huge photo of his brother as a child wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with Harry Enfield’s famous catchphrase “Loadsamoney” sits on another wall; a diffuser fills the room with the scent of Joop! for Men; along the back wall, a human form made of the Gucci loafers, a sculptural model of a head framed with rough wood and nails and other found objects, is pinned crucifix-like. The figure represents the artist, or at least a past version of himself, who he is trying to outrun. 
“John Costi: Found Football Difficult,” South London Gallery, March 2023. Installation View. Photo: Jo Underhill.
“Suicide is quite a big theme in the second room,” he said. “Dangling loafers is quite a potent image to me. The more that I go into my thirties the more I worry about finding dangling loafers: my uncle killed himself and then two friends have hung themselves. Suicide is the only thing I know that’s killing men. That and excess.”
This autobiographical exhibition draws on Costi’s lived experience; growing up in North London; aspiring to fit an ideal; his time spent in prison for armed robbery; discovering a new side of himself through making art; finding his own version of masculinity. The narrative could be framed as a redemption arc with a happy ending: “reformed convict finds joy through art.” But Costi’s work doesn’t tie everything up neatly: there is warmth and love to be found in references to his past, and a suspicion of the present, particularly the art world and its acceptance of working-class culture only when contained within the neat borders of the art itself. 
“It’s easy to patronize and talk about how charming working-class sensibility is,” he said. “It’s the same as any kind of activism being commodified or hijacked. Pain or joy. Art is not real and this whole thing is luxury. My parents didn’t have time to make art because they were too busy working. It might have taken me going to prison to make art. I think you have to be really careful with any kind of marginalized person. Their stories are always going to be fascinating to people who don’t have to go through shit.”
The idea of what it means to be a man is pervasive in Costi’s work. “I think in my life I have been lucky to have very strong women around,” he said. “Some gender lines have been blurred in terms of what strength and weakness is. Some of the things I associated with masculinity are kind of weak. The only emotion men are allowed to show is anger. Reactionary sort of behaviour. We can see masculinity as something silly and heteronormative like being able to change a tire in a car, or we could allow people to make artwork about their friends killing themselves.”
“John Costi: Found Football Difficult,” South London Gallery, March 2023. Installation View. Photo: Jo Underhill.
While a lot of the work reflects thoughtfully on his time spent in prison, there are irreverent moments too: three large blue metal panels in his studio that bear family photographs are in fact marketing boards from the North London bookie he went to prison for robbing. There are also highly sensitive elements to the show, including recorded readings of letters written by his mum and incarcerated friends at the time of his imprisonment. 
Costi sees his art practice as one of the key things that changed his life. While institutionalized he took part in an art therapy programme as part of the healthcare wing’s refurbishment. Then in the last six months of his sentence he was granted day release to take part in a fine art course at Kensington and Chelsea College. This was followed by training at Central Saint Martins. But the route for those incarcerated to explore their creativity is still hugely limited. He notes that his experience of prison was very much one of punishment rather than attempted rehabilitation. 
“This is something I’m not very hopeful about,” he said. “In prison you don’t really see rehabilitation or any kind of healing. You see segregation and punishment. The things I have seen help people, or at least give people the hope of being able to change, are things like the King’s Fund, or writing a song, or reading a poem. That’s where one can heal, but the system isn’t going to do that for you.”

“John Costi: Found Football Difficult” is on view through June 18 at South London Gallery.
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Édouard Manet (1832–1883) and Edgar Degas (1834–1917) were peers, friends, and rivals.
The two French painters played a crucial role in the new painting that emerged between the 1860s and 1880s in Paris, but each had strikingly different personalities and artistic approaches. A new blockbuster exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay in the French capital (on view through July 23) highlights their overlapping interests and individual techniques through exciting juxtapositions of their masterpieces. The groundbreaking show will later travel to The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Both artists were born into bourgeois backgrounds. But whereas the extroverted Manet was highly driven towards recognition, the more introverted Degas often eschewed official channels of legitimacy. While they shared certain interests—such as depictions of café scenes, prostitution, nudes in bathtubs, and horse racing—they portrayed these genres in contrasting ways. Manet made audacious paintings reinventing realism and Degas focused on developing a slightly more intimate style. Both of them made a significant mark on art history in the lead-up to Impressionism, a movement with which they later became associated. 
Artnet News spoke to Isolde Pludermacher, chief curator of painting at the Musée d’Orsay, about five pairings of paintings in the exhibition that illuminate the relationship between these two master painters.

Degas’s Femme sur une terrasse (1857–58, reworked 1866–68) and Manet’s Jeune dame (1866)
(L) Edouard Manet Jeune dame (1866). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. (R) Edgar Degas Femme sur une terrasse (1857–58). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York © The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Isolde Pludermacher: “Manet made his painting for a salon in reaction to a painting, La Femme au perroquet (1866), by Gustave Courbet whom Manet was more in dialogue with at the time, whereas Degas’ work was made from a study. Manet’s association of a young woman with a pet could recall his painting Olympia (1863), which features a small black dog. In both paintings, it’s the same model, Victorine Meurent, who also posed for Manet’s painting Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863). Manet evokes the young woman’s intimacy as if the parrot could be her confidant; the parrot is gray and all the color is focused on the model’s dress. 
Meanwhile, Degas’s work [also known as Jeune femme et ibis] wasn’t destined to be seen by a lot of people. Initially, it simply depicted a young woman wrapped in a blue cloak standing on a terrace. Around a decade later, he added two flamboyant pink ibis birds, a sunset, and an imaginary town evoking Babylon. The inspiration is very symbolic, close to the Pre-Raphaelites, and might have been inspired by Gustave Moreau who’d suggested to Degas the idea of painting a young Egyptian woman feeding ibis. 
What interests us is that Degas had seen Manet’s painting in the 1868 salon and made a sketch inspired by it. He might have incorporated the ibis into his work afterwards. There’s a mysterious and enigmatic dimension to Degas’ painting where the birds are free, while the parrot in Manet’s painting is domestic and inside a bourgeois interior.”

Degas’s Monsieur et Madame Manet (ca. 1868–69) and Manet’s Madame Manet au piano (1868)
(L) Edgar Degas Monsieur et Madame Manet (1868–69). Kitakyushu, Kitakyushu Municipal Museum of Art, Japan © Kitakyushu Municipal Museum of Art. (R) Edouard Manet Madame Manet au piano (1868). © Musée d’Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Patrice Schmidt.
Isolde Pludermacher: “This pairing is among the most interesting stories to explore the relationship between Manet and Degas. We imagine that Manet made his painting after that of Degas but don’t know for certain. Degas made the portrait of Manet [on the sofa] and his wife playing the piano at their home and offered it to his models. The Manets organized a lot of parties on Thursday evenings to which they invited their artist friends and we can see this sociability through the painting.
One day, Degas went round to Manet’s and saw that his painting had been cut at the level of the wife’s face. [Manet had cut it because he believed his wife had been rendered “excessively ugly”.] Degas angrily took the painting back and returned a still-life that Manet had given him.
Fascinatingly, Degas kept the [Monsieur et Madame Manet] painting all his life. At the end of the exhibition, there’s a large photograph of Degas in his apartment with the painting on his living room wall. Around 15 years after Manet’s death, Degas added a piece of canvas to complete the missing part of Madame Manet and it was found like this in Degas’s studio after his death.” 

Degas’s Portrait de Mlle Fiocre in the Ballet ‘La Source’ (ca. 1867–68) and Manet’s Lola de Valence (1862) 
(L) Edouard Manet Lola de Valence (1862). © Musée d’Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Patrice Schmidt (R) Edgar Degas Portrait of Mlle Fiocre in the Ballet “La Source” (1867–68). Gift of James H. Post, A. Augustus Healy, and John T. Underwood. Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn © Brooklyn Museum.
Isolde Pludermacher: “What we wanted to show through this pairing is that the two artists, with different techniques, propose a comparable mise-en-scène, both depicting celebrity dancers. In Manet’s painting, it’s a Spanish dancer who was part of a Spanish troupe performing in Paris. In Degas’ painting, it’s an opera dancer, Eugénie Fiocre, who was very famous, notably for her beauty. Neither painting shows the dancer on the stage. In Lola de Valence, it’s [backstage] just before she goes on stage.
In the painting of Fiocre, it’s during a rehearsal break—she’s in a moment of reverie, her ballet pumps beside her, and a figure behind her is playing music. So both artists were interested in sideline moments. Degas obviously had a very particular relationship to dance. He captured the repetition of certain bodily gestures and postures in a singular way. By contrast, Manet was more traditional in the way that he asked his different models to pose.” 

Degas’s Scène de Steeple chase (1866, reworked in 1880–1881 and 1897) and Manet’s L’homme mort (1864)
(L) Edgar Degas Scène de Steeple chase (1866). National Gallery of Art, Washington. Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon. Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington. (R) Edouard Manet L’homme mort (1864). National Gallery of Art, Washington. Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Isolde Pludermacher: “Both these paintings are on loan from the National Gallery of Art, Washington, but have never been shown together before. The pairing is a very striking example of the proximity between the two artists.
Manet exhibited a painting [Incident in a Bullfight] in the Paris salon [in 1864] representing a corrida scene with a dead toreador in the foreground and the corrida in the background. Its perspective was harshly criticized and so Manet cut it into two in order to make a stronger, more powerful image of the dead man. The other part of the painting [The Bullfight] is in the Frick Collection, New York.
Degas’s painting, Scène de Steeple chase, is undoubtedly inspired by Manet. It’s a salon painting too. The horse-racing theme is particularly important for the two artists and symbolically interesting. At the end of the 1860s, Manet went to England and wanted Degas to go with him to the horse races and sell [ensuing paintings] on the English market but Degas declined.” 

Degas’s Dans un café (1875–76) and Manet’s La Prune (1877)
(L) Edouard Manet La prune. National Gallery of Art, Washington. Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon. Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington. (R) Edgar Degas Dans un café or L’absinthe (1875-1876). Paris, musée d’Orsay© Musée d’Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Patrice Schmidt.
Isolde Pludermacher: “It’s a really interesting, lovely confrontation because it’s the same model—the actress Ellen André—in the same bar, La Nouvelle Athènes [in Place Pigalle]. It’s where artists and writers hung out, and Manet and Degas went there every day.
Both paintings were made in the 1870s, later than other paintings in the exhibition. Degas made his first, and showed it in an Impressionist exhibition, and perhaps it inspired Manet.
Even though the model is in the center of Degas’s painting [also known as L’Absinthe] she seems to be in the background. He’s depicted her as if she’s under the influence of alcohol, forlorn, and like a prostitute. Degas was interested in an oblique perspective, her feet and a play on mirrors. In Manet’s painting, the same woman is barely recognizable. She’s traditionally in the center of the composition, also in front of an alcoholic drink, but there’s a gracious pose and a beauty of colors that enhance her.”
“Manet/Degas” is on view at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris through July 23, 2023.
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You can construct whole worlds using the building blocks of Lego, but Ai Weiwei has taken things to another level by recreating Monet’s monumental triptych Water Lilies (1914–26). The mammoth undertaking has gone on display at the Design Museum in London ahead of a major new survey opening next month.
One of the French Impressionist’s most famous paintings, which is currently on display at MoMA, the original work depicts the lily ponds at Monet’s beloved gardens in Giverny near Paris, an idyllic scene hazily rendered by his characteristic bold brushstrokes.
In the new medium of Lego, however, it took 650,000 bricks in 22 colors to make, reaching nearly 50 feet in length.
Detail from Ai Weiwei, Water Lilies #1 (2022), made from Lego bricks. Photo: © Ela Bialkowska/OKNO studio; courtesy of the artist and Galleria Continua.
The result is what the museum calls “a depersonalized language of industrial parts and colors,” with the Lego more suggestive of the pixels through which we often engage with art today, whether the work is natively digital or a photograph shared online.
The artist has added his own touch to the centuries-old composition, inserting a “dark portal” to the right-hand side that leads to the underground dugout that Ai shared with his father while their family was exiled to Xinjiang during the 1960s.
“Our world is complex and collapsing towards an unpredictable future. It’s crucial for individuals to find a personalized language to express their experience of these challenging conditions,” said Ai Weiwei in a statement. “Without a personal narrative, artistic narration loses its quality.”
Detail from Ai Weiwei, Water Lilies #1 (2022), made from Lego bricks. Photo: © Ela Bialkowska/OKNO studio; courtesy of the artist and Galleria Continua.
“Toy bricks as the material, with their qualities of solidity and potential for deconstruction, reflect the attributes of language in our rapidly developing era where human consciousness is constantly dividing,” he added.
The show will also include Ai’s Untitled (Lego Incident), another new work taking the form of a “field” on the floor made from Lego bricks given to the artist by fans around the world after he posted on Instagram that Lego had temporarily refused to stop letting him bulk order their products to make political artworks. Ai believed the Danish company was hoping to protect its business interests in China, but his post resulted in an international outcry and the toymaker changed its policy.
“Ai Weiwei: Making Sense” is the first exhibition dedicated to Ai’s focus on design and architecture specifically. It opens at the Design Museum in London on April 7 with some of the artist’s best known works alongside a series of five new “fields” filled with objects that he has made or collected. It runs until July 30.
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A new exhibition at the National Gallery in London is taking another look at Flemish artist Quinten Massys’s mystifying 1513 painting An Old Woman, popularly known as The Ugly Duchess.
According to a statement in the exhibition catalogue, the figure in the 16th century work “challenges every traditional canon of beauty.” It describes “an elderly woman with lively eyes set deep in their sockets, a snub nose, wide nostrils, pimply skin, a hairy mole, bulging forehead, and a prominent square chin.”
But not everyone agrees. In “The Ugly Duchess: Beauty and Satire in the Renaissance” (on view from March 16 through June 11), curator Emma Capron advocates for a different read of the enigmatic work. The leading expert in Renaissance art is making the case that the old woman is not a woman at all.
“She is most likely a he, a cross-dresser as a play on gender,” Capron told The Guardian. “We know that Massys was very interested in carnivals, where men would impersonate women.” Indeed, notes the statement in the catalogue, a festival dance known as the moresca—in which a sought-after young woman would “often be played by a cross-dressed man”—was popular in Northern Europe at the time.
Francesco Melzi, after Leonardo, The Bust of a Grotesque Old Woman (1510-20). The Royal Collection / HM King Charles III Royal Collection Trust / © His Majesty King Charles III 2023. Courtesy of the National Gallery, London.
The work has hung in the National Gallery for more than 80 years, where it is one of the museum’s “best-known faces.” Informally, it is referred to as The Ugly Duchess as it served as the inspiration for Sir John Tenniel’s illustrations of the mercurial duchess in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the 1865 children’s classic.
Over the years, medical experts have contended that the subject suffered from Paget’s disease, in which bones weaken and eventually become disfigured. But Capron takes a different view. “It’s not Paget’s,” she said, “nor any of the other suggestions like dwarfism or elephantiasis.” Rather, “[Massys’s] images, sometimes grotesque, sometimes simply fanciful and satirical, are partly metaphors for the social disorder of the time,” explained Capron. He is also “just having fun.”
Furthermore, the exhibition claims that a drawing attributed to Leonardo da Vinci’s lead assistant Francesco Melzi, called The Bust of a Grotesque Old Woman, was the basis of Massys’s An Old Woman. Melzi’s image, on loan from the Royal Collection, is thought to be a copy of a lost original by Da Vinci’s own hand. Familiar with the exaggerated physiognomic types popularized by Da Vinci, Massys adapted the woman’s visage from one of the Italian master’s own caricatures.
Leonardo da Vinci, A Satire on Aged Lovers (ca. 1490). The Royal Collection / HM King Charles III Royal Collection Trust / © His Majesty King Charles III 2023. Courtesy of the National Gallery, London.
There is another piece to the puzzle. An Old Woman is one of a pair of paintings by Massys; the companion piece is An Old Man. They are reunited in the exhibition. However, the woman is on the left, whereas in most Renaissance paintings their positions would have been reversed. The woman is also holding a rosebud—a flower with sexual connotations—as a token of her love. Here again the roles are reversed. The gesture went unrequited as the man has his hand raised, seemingly rejecting the romance she is offering.
It “may be another clue that An Old Woman is a man in woman’s clothing,” noted Capron.

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At the 2024 edition of the Venice Biennale, the Republic of Benin will present a national pavilion for the very first time.
Azu Nwagbogu, a curator and founder of the Nigeria-based non-profit African Artists’ Foundation (AAF), will organize the country’s inaugural pavilion. He was tapped by a joint selection committee that included Benin’s president Patrice Talon, the nation’s tourism minister Jean Michel Abimbola, and museum administrators from the National Gallery of Benin.
In a statement, Talon said that Nwagbogu’s “unique background, vision, and expertise in the field of art curation makes him the perfect candidate to showcase Bénin’s cultural heritage and contemporary art to the world.”
The West African country’s announcement situated its upcoming turn at Venice within Talon’s broader cultural policy agenda, which centers around efforts to restitute the many relics stolen from Kingdom of Benin by British soldiers in an infamous 1897 raid.
Last year, the president’s office organized “Art of Benin, yesterday and today, from restitution to revelation,” a traveling show that showed of recently-returned historical artifacts with work from contemporary Beninise artists. The exhibition first opened at the presidential palace in Cotonou, and has since moved to the Mohamed VI Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rabat, Morocco, where it will remain on view through May of this year. 
Nwagbogu, too, has been a vocal restitution proponent, speaking about the topic at international panels and forums in recent years. In 2020, he guest-edited an issue of Art Africa that cited AAF’s own efforts to turn “its gaze to the burning political, civic and aesthetic ramifications of restitution,” the Art Newspaper pointed out. 
The curator also helped found the LagosPhoto photography festival in 2010 and served as the interim director and chief curator of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art in South Africa from April 2018 to August 2019.
What Nwagbogu has planned for the Biennale has yet to be announced, but Benin’s news release said his “vision for the project is to contribute to the construction of the intellectual architecture that will allow Benin to sustain and deploy the great artistic potential that springs from its land and has traversed its various diasporas.”
The curator, for his part, said he felt “exceedingly honored” to be the committee’s choice. “I look forward to working on this exciting project,” he added.
With this week’s news, Benin joins the growing list of African countries to participate in the prestigious event. Cameroon and Namibia made their respective debuts at the 59th Venice Biennale last year, while Ghana and Madagascar first participated in 2019.
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