Shows & Exhibitions

Next year on the first Monday of May, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art will celebrate “Sleeping Beauties” at its always anticipated, star-studded Met Gala, a benefit for the Costume Institute.
The theme is tied to the institute’s spring 2024 exhibition, “Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion,” which is not about fairy tales, but about using technology and conservation to revitalize old garments.
Expect high fashion, yes—some 250 of the collection’s garments and accessories, to be precise—but also augmented reality, artificial intelligence, computer-generated imagery, x-rays, video animation, and light projection. There will even be soundscapes, recreating the subtle rustling of fabrics while being worn.
“The Met’s innovative spring 2024 Costume Institute exhibition will push the boundaries of our imagination and invite us to experience the multisensory facets of a garment, many of which get lost when entering a museum collection as an object,” Met director Max Hollein said in a statement. “‘Sleeping Beauties’ will heighten our engagement with these masterpieces of fashion by evoking how they feel, move, sound, smell, and interact when being worn, ultimately offering a deeper appreciation of the integrity, beauty, and artistic brilliance of the works on display.”
Charles James, “Butterfly” ball gown, (ca. 1955). Purchase, Friends of The Costume Institute Gifts, 2013. Photo courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, BFA.com/Hippolyte Petit.
Of course, continuing to use historically significant clothing can be a controversial proposition, as the Met learned all too well when Kim Kardashian arrived at the institution’s 2022 gala clad in the infamous nude gown in which Marilyn Monroe serenaded President John F. Kennedy at Madison Square Garden in 1962.
Kardashian’s red carpet arrival made headlines, but also outraged many in the fashion conservator and curatorial community, even prompting a condemnation from the International Council of Museums, which created a new a new clothing preservation committee in response to the uproar. (The reality star is believed to have damaged the delicate dress, although the Ripley’s Believe It or Not! museum in Orlando, which owns the piece, has denied it.)
The upcoming show, therefore, won’t be about wearing these old looks—indeed some are so fragile they can’t even be placed on a mannequin form. (Those are the titular “Sleeping Beauties,” and will be displayed in glass coffins.)
Loewe, Jonathan Anderson, fall/winter 2023–24 dress. Nina Ricci, Evening ensemble. Jules-François Crahay, dress (ca. 1958), gift of Jacqueline Watkins Slifka. Photo courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, BFA.com/Hippolyte Petit.
“When an item of clothing enters our collection, its status is changed irrevocably. What was once a vital part of a person’s lived experience is now a motionless ‘artwork’ that can no longer be worn or heard, touched, or smelled,” Costume Institute curator Andrew Bolton said. “The exhibition endeavors to reanimate these artworks by re-awakening their sensory capacities through a diverse range of technologies, affording visitors sensorial ‘access’ to rare historical garments and rarefied contemporary fashions.”
The annual fashion exhibition is a reliable blockbuster for the Met—so much so that last month, the museum announced plans to turn its Great Hall gift shop into a new gallery space for the Costume Institute. That $50 million project is slated to be completed in 2026.
The Met has yet to announce the hosts for the exhibition’s accompany ball, but the show is being sponsored by TikTok and luxury fashion house Loewe, which is led by designer Jonathan Anderson.
“Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion” will be on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000, 5th Avenue, New York, New York, May 10–September 2, 2024.

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Though the approach of Daylight Savings might mean dark days, galleries are lighting up New York with a torrent of new shows this month. Parsing through the hundreds of exhibitions that have recently—or are soon to be—opened, we’ve rounded up 10 artists taking the spotlight this month in solo shows across the city.
From an artist who uses their practice as a research vehicle to explore the profound implications of biomedical technology to a painter who uses fabric as their primary material, these 10 artists are expanding what their mediums are capable of and the scope of artistic inquiry.

Kirsten Deirup, “Ex Voto In Silico”Hesse Flatow, through December 2
Kirsten Deirup. Photo: Pietro Gatto. Courtesy of the artist and Hesse Flatow, New York.
For her second solo show with Hesse Flatow, Hudson Valley-based artist Kirsten Deirup presents a series of paintings and works on paper in “Ex Voto In Silico.” The title of the show is a play on Latin, with the term “voto” meaning votive or offering, and the term “in silico” an invented Latin term referring to when an object has been put through a computer program. Echoing 20th-century discussions around the essence of art in the face of mechanical reproduction, Deirup’s work confronts the boundary between creation by human hand and artificial intelligence.
Incongruities abound in each composition; plants blossom into dazzling gems, a tree is hung with tennis balls instead of fruit, and plastic spray bottles, a slice of bread, or a computer keyboard appear in otherwise classical-inspired settings. Backgrounds are obfuscated and pervasive shadows lend the otherwise aesthetically pristine vignettes a deep, unshakable sense of the uncanny. Here, the idea of artificial intelligence as it is understood in the realm of art is turned on its head, and Deirup captures the zeitgeist of today as we face the unknown.
Kirsten Deirup, Ex Voto In Silico (2023). Photo: Jenny Gorman. Courtesy of the artist and Hesse Flatow, New York.

Heather Dewey-Hagborg, “Hybrid: an Interspecies Opera“Fridman Gallery, through December 13
Heather Dewey-Hagborg. Ana Brígida for The New York Times. Courtesy of the artist and Fridman Gallery, New York.
The first genetically engineered pig heart transplant occurred in January of 2022 following decades of research and experimentation. The relationship between pigs and humans, spanning some 10 millennia from their first domestication, lays at the core of artist Dr. Heather Dewey-Hagborg’s newest exhibition, “Hybrid: an Interspecies Opera,” her third solo with Fridman Gallery. Featuring sculptural works, animations, and a film narrated by the artist and set to an original score by composer Bethany Barrett, questions around our very existence—down to our DNA—are explored within the scope of humanity’s long-standing relationship with pigs.
Dr. Heather Dewey-Hagborg received her Ph.D. in electronic arts from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, is an affiliate of Data and Society and a founding board member of the European Research Council-funded project Digital DNA that explores the relationships between new technologies, DNA, and empirical evidence. Combining expertise with creative expression, Dewey-Hagborg offers a cogent look at the wide-ranging implications of interspecies relationships and new technologies.
Heather Dewey-Hagborg, film still from Future Pigs, Plural (2022). Courtesy of the artist and Fridman Gallery, New York.
Shilpa GuptaTanya Bonakdar Gallery, through December 16
Shilpa Gupta. Courtesy of the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles.
For her debut self-titled solo exhibition with Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, Mumbai-based artist Shilpa Gupta continues her interrogations of language, cultural identity, and ideas around otherness and power—and its myriad effects and consequences. Paring down both ideas and means to their most essential, Gupta poetically captures the collective essence of experience, transcending time and place.
A new sound installation, Listening Air (2023), is a central work in the exhibition. Shown in a darkened gallery space, suspended microphones counterbalanced by dimmed light fixtures move through the air. Rather than take sound, however, the microphones have been turned into speakers which emit spoken words. Leveraging the power of language as a form of resilience and resistance, the work is both haunting and beautiful, a testament to the pervasive desire to speak and be heard.
Concurrent to the present exhibition, Gupta is the subject of a solo exhibition curated by Ruth Estévez at the Amant Art Center, Brooklyn, on view through April 28, 2024.
Shilpa Gupta, Listening Air (2022–23). Courtesy of the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles.
Jessie Makinson, “Bad sleeper”Lyles and King, through December 16
Jessie Makinson. Courtesy of Lyles and King, New York.
Marking a decisive moment in and evolution of the artist’s practice, Jessie Makinson created “Bad sleeper” at Lyles and King, an experimental, site-specific exhibition that melds her painting practice with the architecture of the gallery space, bringing it into the third dimension. Mining art history, literature, and cinema, Makinson presents viewers with a window into an otherworldly, fantastical realm filled with visual references and allusions to influential works by the likes of Italian writer Italo Calvino, Georgian filmmaker Sergei Parajanov, and Polish novelist Olga Tokarczuk. Narrative without being didactic, the scenes and vignettes portrayed elude easy reconciliation; almost human figures and alien-like landscapes beg questions but don’t offer easy answers, providing fertile ground for imaginative interpretations and conclusions.
The immersive project is made up of a hand-painted mural, patterned wallpaper, and plush purple carpet—together the antithesis of a sterile white cube—as well as paintings on canvas and a detailed wooden screen. Inverting common notions of how and where painting is displayed, “Bad sleeper” instead “makes a world for the paintings to live in.”
Jessie Makinson, Tiny Pyre (2023). Courtesy of Lyles and King, New York.
Eric N. MackPaula Cooper Gallery, through December 16
Eric N. Mack, 2021. © Eric N. Mack. Photo: Daniel King. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.
Working at the intersection of art, fashion, and architecture, Eric N. Mack creates intricate compositions comprised of fabric and found objects that defy easy categorization. A self-described painter working in the medium of fabric, each assembled work operates as an archive, recording not only the arrangements and juxtapositions of materials chosen by Mack, but the collection of fabrics themselves—whether it be fine silk, deadstock prints, or heavyweight suiting wools. How the materials interact with each other, as well as with the overall composition, and beyond the space the work occupies, invites considerations of the whole as well as the parts simultaneously. A hanging construction is the centerpiece of Mack’s eponymous exhibition, evoking Modern kinetic art and underscoring his ability to dialogue with surrounding architecture through carefully considered assemblages.
“Eric N. Mack” follows the announcement of his representation by Paul Cooper Gallery last year. In recent years, Mack has completed several high-profile residencies, including at the Chinati Foundation, Marfa, and the American Academy in Rome.
Installation view of “Eric N. Mack” (2023). Photo: Steven Probert. © 2023 Eric N. Mack. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.
Andy Dixon, “Joy”The Hole, through December 17
Andy Dixon. Courtesy of the artist and The Hole, New York / Los Angeles.
Artist and musician Andy Dixon started his career in Vancouver’s punk scene before pivoting to visual art, though his past endeavors continue to influence his practice. Using a process of appropriating old masterwork motifs and compositions—which Dixon compares to music sampling—these elements are then given the “Andy Dixon treatment,” transforming them by simplifying the forms and using a vibrant pastel palette that, together, evokes everything from Disney’s Fantasia (1940) to the oeuvre of Jean-Honoré Fragonard.
In his solo “Joy,” playfulness and joie de vivre abound. “The world could use a bit of happiness and celebration right now,” said Dixon. In Yolo 🙂 (2023) multicolor cherubs drawn from different paintings circle each other in the air, and in Yolo 🙁 (2023) a collection of skulls from various memento mori gaze haphazardly against what appears to be a Dutch landscape. Rounding out the exhibition is a collection of the artist’s outrageously oversized shirts, branded Hermes, Moschino, and Versace, offering a witty look into the sometimes dubious sometimes absurd relationship between retail, fine art, and luxury goods.
Andy Dixon, Pressed Pill (2023). Courtesy of the artist and The Hole, New York / Los Angeles.
Asif Mian, “The Village Bites Itself”Management, November 8–December 17
Asif Mian. Photo: William Jess Laird. Courtesy of Management, New York.
The recipient of the 2019–2020 Queens Museum-Jerome Foundation Emerging Artist Award, Asif Mian was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Queens Museum in 2021, which focused on the artist’s multi-part project RAF. Mian’s exhibition with Management, “The Village Bites Itself,” marks his first solo exhibition with a commercial gallery in the city, and sees Mian continue his exploration of how violence and the perception of violence affect both personal and collective memory, psychology, and behavior.
Mian’s multidisciplinary practice blends autobiographical and universal experience with the aim of responding to and reflecting on the theme of violence; deconstructing and reassembling elements of raw or readymade materials, such as aluminum sheeting or Afghan tribal rugs, the breaking down and rearranging of medium evokes a liminal psychological space, one detached from the quotidian where the “ghosts” of violent acts and the mental processing of violence reside.
Asif Mian, The village bites itself, leaving a 6-foot scar from head to toe (2023). Courtesy of Management, New York.
Raqib Shaw, “Space Between Dreams”Pace, November 10–December 22
Raqib Shaw. Courtesy of Raqib Shaw Studio.
In his first presentation with Pace in New York since 2019, Raqib Shaw’s “Space Between Dreams” will see 16 works brought together. Shaw has garnered widespread recognition for his meticulous and intricate compositions that convey a diverse range of influences—from Japanese lacquerware and Persian carpets to early modern painting. Frequently conceived of as a series inspired by literature, art history, and mysticism, the works within the show synthesize real and imagined places and spaces, inspired by Shaw’s memories of Kashmir, where he is originally from, cityscapes and vignettes from his garden in London, where he is currently based, as well as vignettes reminiscent of New York, Paris, and Venice. Uniquely beguiling, each of Shaw’s works invites the mind’s eye to wander and explore.
Simultaneous to his showing with Pace, Shaw’s first traveling museum retrospective is on view at the Frist Art Museum in Nashville, “Ballads of East and West,” through December 21 before traveling to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, in February 2024.
Raqib Shaw, Space Between Dreams – The Mourning Mendicant (2022–23). © Raqib Shaw / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of Pace Gallery.
Arghavan Khosravi, “True to Self”Rachel Uffner, November 11, 2023–January 6, 2024
Arghavan Khosravi. Photo: Hossein Fatemi. Courtesy Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York.
Nine recent wall-mounted and freestanding sculptural paintings are included in Arghavan Khosravi’s second solo exhibition with Rachel Uffner, following on the heels of her solo exhibition at the Rose Art Museum, Waltham. “True to Self” illustrates Khosravi’s ongoing exploration of ideas and histories around identity, agency, and womanhood, and further provides insight into the evolution of her practice in light of Zan, Zendegi, Azadi (Woman, Life, Freedom), a global movement in solidarity with Iranian women and girls who peacefully demonstrate for their fundamental human rights.
Born in Iran in the years following the Islamic Revolution, Khosravi’s work shows the influence of the three decades she lived there, largely living dichotomously: following strict Islamic law in public while fostering freedom of thought and action in private. Themes of resilience, perseverance, and strength in the face of oppression are found throughout Khosravi’s oeuvre, as well as references to traditional architectural forms, Persian miniature paintings, and canonic artworks and stories ranging from tales of the Iranian hero Prince Siyavush to Bernini’s Rape of Proserpina. Commingling elements of sculpture with painting, Khosravi expresses the dynamism and complexity of lived experiences both conceptually and materially.
Arghavan Khosravi, The Battleground (2022). Courtesy of the artist and Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York.
Pipilotti Rist “Prickling Goosebumps & A Humming Horizon”At Hauser and Wirth, November 9, 2023–January 13, 2024At Luhring Augustine, November 18, 2023–February 3, 2024
Pipilotti Rist (2022). Photo: Joël Hunn. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser and Wirth.
Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist is widely recognized for experimental video art and site-specific installations, as well as for maintaining a distinct surrealist bent in her work. This month, Rist is the subject of a major two-part exhibition staged between Hauser and Wirth’s West 22nd Street building and Luhring Augustine on West 24th Street. The complementary shows invite viewers on a multisensory journey through Rist’s imaginative and immersive world that spans both locations’ interior and exterior spaces, beginning with each of the gallery’s greeting visitors with an “artistic gesture” on their facades, Textile Simultaneity at Luhring Augustine and Innocent Collection at Hauser and Wirth.
Employing a wide range of media, including painting, video sculpture, projections, and more, each presentation will include works debuting for the first time, including new iterations of previous work such as occasion-specific videos that will be shown in the windows of Neighbors Without Fences (2020), a full-scale clapboard house facade. Playful and enchanting, across each presentation visitors will be enveloped in Rist’s singular artistic vision.
Pipilotti Rist, twin concept pictures (2023). © Pipilotti Rist. Courtesy of the artist, Hauser and Wirth and Luhring Augustine / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
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Plenty of people can tell you what a Mark Rothko painting looks like. Posters of the Abstract Expressionist’s seductive fields of color are a fixture on dorm room walls. Fewer people can tell you what it feels like to stand in front of a Rothko painting in person. And until now, I’m not sure anyone could tell you what it felt like to be in the presence of 115 Rothkos all at once—but this transcendent experience is open to a whole lot more people after the Fondation Louis Vuitton opened its stunning encyclopedic winter blockbuster in Paris, “Mark Rothko.”
Most museums would dream of staging a show like this. But these days the massive expenses of shipping, insuring, and loan agreements mean it could only be pulled off by a deep-pocketed private institution. Backed by the billionaire art collector and LVMH chairman Bernard Arnault, the exhibition includes major groups of works lent from the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. and the Tate in London, as well as private lenders including the artist’s children Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko, the Taiwanese collector Pierre Chen, U.S. collectors Adriana and Robert Mnuchin, Elie and Sarah Hirschfeld, and the Nahmad family.
It’s a huge moment for Paris, as the foundation’s curator Suzanne Pagé, who has co-organized this exhibition with Rothko’s son Christopher, can attest.
“Nobody in four generations has had the possibility to see Rothko in Paris,” Pagé told me. While there are two Rothkos in the Pompidou’s collection, the last time the artist had a retrospective in France was 1999—a show Pagé herself curated at the the Musée d’Art Moderne. “A lot of young people have posters, but it is a great betrayal to enter into the emotional painting of Rothko that way. What is essential in the painting of Rothko are the vibrations, which are totally reduced in a poster,” Pagé explained. “You have to stop, look, and be captive with your body, with your soul, with everything in you, and you are hypnotized.”
“Mark Rothko” at the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris on October 17, 2023 in Paris, France. (Photo by Luc Castel/GettyImages)
The exhibition offers plenty of discoveries, from Rothko’s early figurative work to a re-evaluation of his later, darker paintings. It does a fair amount of work to undo how the macabre facts of Rothko’s biography—including his death by suicide aged 66—have colored the interpretation of these late works. A popular myth, which the curators deem reductive, has it that Rothko’s late-career turn from his classic, brightly-colored paintings towards a darker palette of rusty reds, purples, and blackish hues reflected his declining mental state.
“A retrospective by definition needs to tell the whole career. And of course it needs to tell the whole life,” Christopher Rothko told me as we stood in front of some of these murky late works. “I think for me the most important thing is for people to experience the career, see the trajectory of the painting, and not start with the idea of suicide and then view the career backwards—because that’s a distortion. Nobody lives their lives backwards.”
The show takes a basically chronological approach, beginning in a dimly lit subterranean gallery with Rothko’s early works. Painted in New York in the 1930s, where Rothko settled as an adult after emigrating to the U.S. from Russia as a child, these lonely and claustrophobic figurative paintings convey the spirit of the Depression era. His muted “subway paintings” concentrate on oppressive architectural features, corridors, staircases, and rails. A pair of unsettling, brassy nudes with faraway eyes might surprise those unfamiliar with this early period, as might the artist’s lone self-portrait, a dense painting from 1936, where Rothko cuts an inscrutable figure, his gaze obscured behind dark glasses.
Left to right : Mark Rothko, Sacrifice of Iphigenia (1942), Tiresias (1944), Slow Swirl at the Edge of the Sea (1944). Installation view, gallery 1, level -1, on view through 2 April 2024 at Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris. ©1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko – Adagp, Paris, 2023.
From the beginning of the 1940s, there’s a marked shift in style as Rothko grapples with expressing the barbarism of World War II through his brush, as well as his own childhood memories of religious persecution as a Russian Jew. A set of aesthetically troubling paintings veer from realism and draw instead on both mythology and Surrealist techniques for accessing the unconscious mind.
This “neo-Surrealist” period where Rothko repeatedly splits, twists, dissects, and reconstructs the human figure comes to a peak in 1946, when we finally get to Rothko’s abstract turn. The next room hits visitors like a blast of wind, intensified by a Mozart opera reverberating through the galleries. In these scrubbed-out, pared-back canvases, we first begin to see the fields of color, amoeba-like, spring forth inside the painter’s mind as he realizes the impossibility of expressing what he sought to through the human figure. These “multi-form” paintings attempt to capture something of inner human realities, grasping into the abyss and tapping into that realm of experience beyond the measurable, the kind of experience that the Romantic poets called “the sublime.”
A quote on the wall situates you with what was going on in Rothko’s mind: “A painting is not a picture of an experience. It is an Experience,” he wrote.
Left to right : Mark Rothko, No. 8 (1949), Untitled (Blue, Yellow, Green on Red) (1954), No. 7 (1951), No. 11 / No. 20 (1949), No. 21 (Untitled) (1949). Installation view, gallery 2, level -1, on view through 2 April 2024 at Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris. ©1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko – Adagp, Paris, 2023.
After that point, the galleries shift gears into the “classic” Rothkos, his best-known rectangular Abstract Expressionist fields of color from the late 1940 and onwards. The largest portion of the exhibition, it includes 70 works, awash with chromatic harmonies of saturated yellows and reds, but also pinks, purples, and blues. Their bright colors have often led observers to misconstrue these ethereal and beautiful works as serene or cheerful. Coming upon them here, having passed through the context of his earlier work, makes palpable how they are just as perforated with existential angst.
Left to right: Mark Rothko, Ochre and Red on Red (1954), Orange and Red on Red (1957) Installation view, Mark Rothko, gallery 7, level 1, the “Rothko Room” from the Phillips Collection, on view through 2 April 2024 at Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris. © 1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko – Adagp, Paris, 2023.

Through that lens, Rothko’s shift toward his darker hued palette from around 1957 does not feel so much like a break as a natural evolution. Among the examples in the exhibition is Tate Modern’s entire Rothko Room—nine deep red paintings donated by the artist in 1959, originally destined for a restaurant at the Seagram building in New York. Working on a public installation prompted Rothko to change his interaction with the viewer. “He’s no longer trying to grab your attention as you walk by in a museum,” Christopher Rothko said. “He knows that you will be with him for an hour or two, or more, so instead of trying to overwhelm you in a moment with color and emotion, he reduces the tone. He reduces the speed of interaction and lets the painting seep into you.”
After the end of the Seagram commission, Rothko retained this strategy, going even darker for the “black form” paintings, a number of which grace the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas. A number of these sonorous works, which at a glance appear monochromatic but hum with just as many colors as the bright paintings, stole the show for me. Rothko was particular about the way he wanted these works to be experienced: not hung like a monument or trophy on the wall, but mounted low, so that you can look at them directly. In the low-lit setting of the gallery, as your eyes adjust to the lighting conditions, the miraculous paintings almost seemed to hover off the walls.
Left to right: Mark Rothko Untitled (1964). No. 8 (1964) Installation view, Mark Rothko, gallery 6, level 1, on view through 2 April 2024 at Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris. © 1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko – Adagp, Paris, 2023.
Pace Gallery founder Arne Glimcher knew Rothko while he was alive—the gallery has represented the estate since 1977—and has always been fond of these later, under-appreciated works, devoting a gallery show to them in 2017.
Speaking over the phone, Glimcher recalled Rothko telling him a story about a “magnificent” dark painting, now in the dealer’s possession. It had been rejected by a collector who had been invited to the studio, but said she would prefer a “happy” painting in the palette for which the painter was most famous. Rothko recounted his reply: “Red, yellow, orange—aren’t those the colors of an inferno?”
Glimcher credited an introduction by Louise Nevelson—who bonded with Rothko, Barnett Newman, and Adolph Gottleib over their shared refugee experience—for entree into a friendship with the notoriously reclusive painter. His 69th Street studio also just happened to be directly across from Glimcher’s apartment.
“Mark let me come to his studio quite often,” Glimcher recalled. “Sometimes, in the winter, it got dark and I’d be coming home from work because I lived across the street, and there would be a light on. I would knock on the door and he would let me come in and sit and talk and show me the paintings that he had been working on.”
Because of those encounters, the dealer has rare insight into the artist’s feelings about some of the later works, including smaller canvasses and works on paper which he made after a heart attack in 1968 meant he needed to work on a less physically strenuous scale. “He liked the feeling of the brush on the paper, how it slid more easily against the paper than against the canvas,” Glimcher said.
Left to right: Mark Rothko, Untitled (1969-1970), Untitled (1969), Untitled (1969), Untitled (1969), Untitled (1969). Sculptures : Alberto Giacometti, L’Homme qui marche I (1960), Grande Femme III (1960). Installation view, Mark Rothko, gallery 10, level 2, on view through 2 April 2024 at Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris. ©1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko – Adagp, Paris, 2023.
As skeptical as I probably should be about a dealer trying to make a market for less in demand works, I am still persuaded by these sepulchral beauties. The exhibition’s final gallery offers up a number of Rothko’s late black and gray paintings alongside sculptures by Giacometti, as Rothko had originally intended for them to be shown in a never realized commission for UNESCO. The curators position these works, so simple but filled with incredibly rich and beautiful brushwork, as a springboard towards Minimalism. You can certainly see how an artist like Brice Marden might have looked at such works and taken inspiration.
Viewed this way, Rothko’s darker works are rightfully seen as a progression: the artist uses reduced means, and a different chromatic scale, but is still after the same fundamental truths as the earlier works. Through this lens, they could be read as allegorical, with their deepening colors representing Rothko ongoing quest to convey pure human emotion, rather than simply expressing his own feelings. Yet lurking behind the great seduction of the colors in the “classic” Rothko paintings is the same drama: That of the human condition.
“Rothko was always interested in Greek tragedy, and he felt that was what he was attaining and searching for in his paintings: The edge of perception, and taking us forward to someplace else,” Glimcher told me.
With everything going on in the world right now, viewers might find catharsis in these paintings. I certainly did.
“Mark Rothko” is on view at Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris through April 2, 2024.
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The story goes that while sitting beside Cindy Sherman at a New York fundraiser, Sir Elton John complained that her work never came up for auction. Sherman promptly sold him six artist prints from her breakthrough series “Untitled Film Stills.” Her motive? She was in need of a new house.
The anecdote is indicative of how fame, connections, and no little money, has made John a preeminent collector of photography. He lists it as his second passion, after music, and together with his husband David Furnish, the couple has purchased more than 7,000 photographs that present many of the great photographers, events, and celebrities of the 20th century.
A selection of more than 300 photographs from this sprawling collection is set to be shown at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum from May 18, 2024, to January 5, 2025. It will be the largest photography show the museum has staged to date.
Malcolm X during his visit to enterprises owned by Black Muslims. Chicago, Illinois, USA, 1962, by Eve Arnold. Photo: courtesy Eve Arnold, Magnum Photos.
The exhibition, “Fragile Beauty,” spans the 1950s to the present and features the work of 140 photographers spread across eight thematic sections. It explores celebrity in images of Marilyn Monroe and Miles Davis, reportage in stills from the Civil Rights movement, AIDS activism in the 1980s, and the attacks of September 11 (for which John and Furnish hold the world’s largest collection), and the male body through photographs from the likes of Robert Mapplethorpe and Tyler Mitchell.
“’Fragile Beauty’ will be a truly epic journey across the recent history of photography,” the show’s curator Duncan Forbes said. “Whether through the elegance of fashion photography, the creativity of musicians and performers, the exploration of desire, or the passage of history as captured by photojournalism, photography reveals something important about the world.”
John has been collecting photography since getting sober in 1991. In effect, “Fragile Beauty” is the second half of a photographic tour that began in 2016 with “The Radical Eye” in which the Tate Modern staged 150 of John’s photographs from 1920 to 1950 including rare work from Man Ray, André Kertész, and Edward Steichen.
At the V&A, John and Furnish further a relationship that began with a loan of Horst P. Horst photographs in 2014. In 2019, a significant donation from the couple to the museum’s new photography center saw a gallery named in their honor.
“Working alongside the V&A again has been a truly memorable experience,” the pair said in a statement. “We look forward to sharing this exhibition with the public.”
Preview more images from the exhibition below.
Tyler Mitchell, Simply Fragile (2022). Photo: courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.
Herman Leonard, Chet Baker, New York City, 1956. Photo: Herman Leonard Photography, LLC.
Ryan McGinley, Dakota Hair (2004). Photo: courtesy Ryan McGinley Studios.
Herb Ritts, Versace Dress (Back View), El Mirage (1990). Image: Herb Ritts Foundation, Courtesy of Fahey Klein Gallery, Los Angeles.

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A new exhibition at Denmark’s Moesgaard Museum is promising to transport visitors back 3,500 years through the power of smell. “Ancient Egypt–Obsessed with Life” does not feature sculptural works or ancient jewelry, but rather the fragrance of an embalming oil that was used for the mummification of Senetnay, an Egyptian noblewoman who lived around 1,450 B.C.E.
The exhibition is the public presentation of research conducted by a team of German archaeologists that scraped the inside of two limestone jars used to preserve Senetnay’s organs and then analyzed the residues to identify balm ingredients. To recreate the embalming scent, researchers worked with a French perfumer and a sensory museologist.
Labelled “the scent of eternity” by Barbara Huber and her team at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology, the ancient aroma blended together beeswax, plant oil, fats, bitumen (a balsamic substance), and various tree resins. The detection of larch tree resin and pistacia tree resin indicates ingredients were sourced from as far away as India and Southeast Asia.
The researcher behind the recreated fragrance Barbara Huber in the laboratory in Germany. Photo courtesy of Moesgaard Museum.
“These complex and diverse ingredients, unique to this early time period, offer a novel understanding of the sophisticated mummification practices and Egypt’s far-reaching trade-routes,” said Christian Loeben, an Egyptologist at Hanover’s Museum August Kestner that houses Senetnay’s canopic jars.
Senetnay’s embalming jars were found in a royal tomb in the Valley of the Kings in 1900 by Howard Carter, the Egyptologist who would later discover Tutankhamun’s tomb. Though little is known about Senetnay, scholars say she was the wet nurse of Pharaoh Amenhotep II and became part of the Pharaoh’s entourage—a status shown by being placed in the Valley of the Kings, a necropolis pharaohs and nobles.
An installation view at Moesgaard Museum. Image: courtesy of Moesgaard Museum.
At Moesgaard Museum, Senetnay’s story is used to explain ancient Egyptian ideas of the afterlife and the rituals practiced to reach it. The exhibition presents the sequence of events from death to embalming and mummification, to the mummy entering the tomb and its spirit’s journey to the underworld.
“We are pleased to be able to present this completely new research, which has only just been published,” said Mads Holst, Director of Moesgaard Museum. “We are looking forward to giving our visitors a sensory experience of the past: the recreated fragrance of an embalming oil used in an Egyptian mummification workshop thousands of years ago.”
“Ancient Egypt–Obsessed with Life” is on view at the Moesgaard Museum, Moesgård Allé 15, 8270 Højbjerg, Denmark, through August 18, 2024.
See more images:
A bottle of the recreated scent test next to pieces of dammar resin. Photo courtesy of the Moesgaard Museum.
An installation view at Moesgaard Museum. Image: courtesy of Moesgaard Museum.
An installation view at Moesgaard Museum. Image: courtesy of Moesgaard Museum.
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Last week the annual Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels kicked off in New York. It’s only the second year the festival has touched down in the city, but it’s already a vital part of the cultural fabric. Part of its power is the forward-thinking programming, covering the full scope of contemporary dance. This was on display even on the first few days with three choreographic productions that ranged from uplifting and elegiac to challenging, with soundtracks that veered from Phillip Glass bliss to banging techno.
Dance Reflections runs until December 14 and encompasses 11 staggeringly diverse shows at multiple venues across the city. The festival kicked off with the 1979 tour de force Dance, a collaboration between Lucinda Childs and Glass. Seventeen dancers from the Lyon Opera Ballet translated Childs’s choreography and the minimal composer’s progressively shifting hypnotic score with glissades, sauts, and pirouettes. Sol Lewitt’s accompanying films commissioned for the original benchmark BAM production were projected onstage, layering the original version with today’s. The result was vital and compelling.  
Dance by Lucinda Childs © Jaime Roque de la Cruz. Courtesy of Van Cleef & Arpels.
The harmonious placidity of Dance was contrasted with the underground turmoil channeled in Room with a View, a collaboration by buzzy French collective (LA)Horde and the French electronic musician Rone, who is present onstage throughout mixing the entrancing soundtrack live. It’s a cross between a nightlife crawl and a descent into purgatory, set in a quarry that also looks like the Ridgewood, Queens techno club Basement. 20,000 people saw the Marseille production in July, and it has it all: falling rocks, raining fish, and booming beats. Eruptions of violence and sexual vignettes are woven throughout as the world crumbles around the dancers.
The (LA)Horde trio formed in 2013, originally meeting in the Paris club scene. They collaborated with Madonna on her current tour, have worked with Spike Jonze and Sam Smith, and are the artistic directors of the Ballet de Marseille. Following the October 20th stateside debut of Room with a View, (LA)Horde member Marine Brutti briefly discussed the show’s themes outside of the NYU Skirball Center.
Room with a View 2022 © Thomas Amouroux. Courtesy of Van Cleef & Arpels.
“We wanted to talk about the environmental crisis,” she explained. “What is the dynamic of climate change? It’s collapse. But the movement of collapse, is it always bad? Or does it bring something that is more uplifting? There’s also the collapse of stuff we hate like patriarchy, brutality, violence, and inequality.” Brutti sees the show as a throwback to the electronic scene’s roots. “What the core of techno was in the beginning: queer, liberated, anarchist, and outside of traditional zones.”
Julie Shanahan in L’Etang by Giselle Vienne. © Estelle Hania. Courtesy of Van Cleef & Arpels.
Last year, Gisèle Vienne drew attention for the pounding techno dark star of Dance Relfections with the stunning Crowd at BAM. This year, the artist and choreographer explored more intimate themes with the eerie and complex performance L’Étang. It’s a dialogue-heavy adaptation of Swiss writer Robert Walser’s tale of a child faking his suicide to awaken the love of his harsh mother. It’s a heady and complex work with two performers portraying multiple roles. In particular, dancer Julie Shanahan is a revelation as the mother. Witheringly cruel and glacially chic, she has a gift for delivering caustic verbal volleys as well as graceful, gestural movement. And Vienne is a true auteur, whether it comes to pitch-perfect costuming and set design or her ability to tap into darkness and unleash the profound.
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As Japan strives to make a comeback on the global art stage, events staged by homegrown art world players have taken a new turn in a bid to draw attention from an international crowd. The next two weeks see the return of Art Week Tokyo and Art Collaboration Kyoto (ACK), two events looking to suit specific local needs rather than simply imposing the traditional western art fair model.
Despite the friendly rivalry between Tokyo and Kyoto, the two events are coordinated in a way that makes it easier for foreign visitors. ACK, which encourages local Japanese galleries to partner with overseas galleries and share booths with them, moved from last year’s mid-November slot to October 27 (VIP preview day) to 30, just ahead of Art Week Tokyo’s VIP events beginning on October 31 (public days run from November 2 to 5). Art Week Tokyo, organized in collaboration with Art Basel, returns with its successful model of shuttling visitors and art buyers to galleries, but on a bigger scale, and the launch of a curated sales platform called AWT Focus.
In addition to the fair programs, the two events also emphasize the importance of concurrent institutional shows. Here are five exhibitions that are not to be missed.
“Yukimasa Ida: Panta Rhei—For as long as the world turns”Kyoto City KYOCERA Museum of Art, through December 23
Yukimasa Ida, Last Supper (2022). Courtesy the artist and Kyoto City KYOCERA Museum of Art.
If discovering new talent is one of your primary goals for traveling to Japan this week, this exhibition should be on your itinerary.
Born in 1990 in Tottori prefecture, Yukimasa Ida was already an award-winning artist and made it to Forbes Japan‘s 2018 “30 Under 30” list before graduating from Tokyo University of the Arts with a master’s degree in oil painting in 2019. He has since been exhibiting internationally, including solo shows with Mariane Ibrahim at the gallery’s Chicago and Paris spaces, as well as a 2022 solo show at Museo Picasso Malaga in Spain.
“Panta Rhei—For as long as the world turns” is Ida’s first museum solo in his native Japan. The exhibition launched this summer at Yonago City Museum of Art in his hometown of Tottori before traveling to Kyoto City at the end of September. Drawing the concept of “Panta Rhei,” or “everything flows,” coined by Greek philosopher Heraclitus, the exhibition is the Tokyo-based artist’s reflection on his career against the backdrop of the ever-changing world, particularly as he experienced it during Covid. Curated by Jérôme Sans, the Kyoto show features more than 350 works, including paintings and sculptures and recent works never before exhibited in Japan.
Kyoto City KYOCERA Museum of Art is at 124 Okazaki Enshoji-cho, Sakyo-ku, Kyoto, 606-8344.
“Hirofumi Isoya: Duration, and Today”Artro, through November 25
Hirofumi Isoya, exhibition view of Prada Mode Tokyo, Tokyo Metropolitan Teien Art Museum, Tokyo, 2023.
In his solo show “Duration, and Today,” the Tokyo-born Hirofumi Isoya takes over the exhibition venue Artro, which was converted from a historic Meiji-era warehouse, and transforms it into an intimate space.
Japan’s Meiji era (1868-1912) marked the beginning of the country’s modernization, during which the country moved its capital from Kyoto to Tokyo while undergoing major social, political, and economic reforms that saw the feudal society transform into an industrialized state and subsequently emerge as a global power. By placing works made of historic materials in connection with photography, Hirofumi (b. 1978) creates an expanded space to contemplate the concept of time.
Artro is at 556 Kaiya-cho, Nakagyo-ku, Kyoto, 604-8126.
“Mao Ishikawa: What Can I Do?”Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, through December 24
Mao Ishikawa, Scroll, 2021. Courtesy Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery.
Born in 1953 in Ogimi Village in Okinawa, Japan’s southernmost prefecture, the award-winning Mao Ishikawa took up photography in the 1970s. She studied under Tomatsu Shomei at the Workshop Photography School in 1974 and has since been creating photography works reflecting the livelihoods of the people of her hometown. While Ishikawa’s work has already entered public collections in Japan and in the U.S., such as that of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, “What Can I Do?” is the artist’s first solo show at a Tokyo art museum, and is staged on the heels of her successful show in her hometown’s Okinawa Prefectural Museum & Art Museum in 2021.
While the show focuses on the artist’s new works from the “Great Ryukyu Photo Scroll” series which the artist began to work on in 2014, the exhibition promises to be a rare opportunity that allows a meticulous examination of Ishikawa’s early works, developed against the backdrop of the complex geopolitical situation in Okinawa.
Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery is at 3-chōme-20-2 Nishishinjuku, Shinjuku City, Tokyo 163-1403.
“Our Ecology: Toward a Planetary Living”Mori Art Museum, through March 31, 2024
Emilija Škarnulytė, Sunken Cities (2021). Video installation.
This ambitious exhibition, featuring a stellar lineup of 34 local, national, and international artists, marks the Tokyo museum’s 20th anniversary. Featuring around 100 historical and newly commissioned works spanning four chapters, the show reflects ecological changes brought about by humankind since the Industrial Revolution. Among the participating artists are the Santiago- and New York-based Cecilia Vicuña, Thai artist Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Berlin-based Monira Al Qadiri, and Martha Atienza, who divides her time between the Netherlands and the Philippines.
By dedicating one chapter to historical works of Japanese artists born in the first half of the 20th century, the exhibition questions the hefty price that Japan paid for rapid economic growth between the 1950s and the 1980s, which saw serious environmental damage brought about by unchecked pollution. The case analysis of these tragedies remains on the website of the country’s Ministry of Environment even today to serve as a reminder of the painful past. Ultimately, Mori Art Museum wants its audience to rethink our environmental problems through this show, which was realized sustainably.
Mori Art Museum is at 53/F, Roppongi Hills Mori Tower, Roppongi, 6 Chome−10−1, 106-6150 Tokyo.
“David Hockney”Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, through November 5
British painter David Hockney poses at the Orangerie museum in Paris in 2021. Photo by Thomas Coex/AFP via Getty Images.
British painter David Hockney, 86, is a household name in the West; the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo has 150 of his works and has an ongoing relationship with the artist, and yet this eponymous exhibition is his first museum show in Japan in 27 years.
The show features more than 120 works, including some of the most iconic ones produced in the U.K. and Los Angeles, as well as large-scale pieces such as a 90-meter-long work the artist created with his iPad during Covid lockdown. It is also the Asian institutional debut of the artist’s 10-meter-wide 2011 oil painting The Arrival of Spring, Woldgate, East Yorkshire in 2011 (twenty eleven), and the show includes one of the artist’s latest self-portraits.
Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo is at 4-1-1 Miyoshi, Koto-ku, Tokyo 135-0022. 

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Since their emergence a decade ago, immersive exhibitions have been pitched as the ideal vehicle to tell humanity’s greatest stories. Visitors have been ushered inside the kaleidoscopic mind of Vincent van Gogh, through the depths of the cosmos with NASA, and back into the world of Egypt’s greatest pharaoh, Ramses II.
The premise, it seems, is that to truly understand the world and its biggest figures, looking isn’t enough—a full sensory experience is required. Well, it doesn’t get much bigger than the life of Jesus and now visitors to a Dallas, Texas, multiplex can travel back 2,000 years and experience the prophet’s life.
“The Nazarene” deploys the full complement of immersive tricks to recreate 19 episodes from the New Testament’s account of the life of Jesus including the nativity, his baptism, and his ultimate ascension into heaven. There are big screens, atmospheric lighting, panoramic sound, and 3D sets with the experience spread across five galleries.
“It’s a pioneering approach to immersive experiences. While the 360-degree projection forms the core, we’ve layered in spatial audio, practical effects, and curated set elements— like adding layers to an onion,” said Executive Producer Robert Bagdassarov. “To our knowledge, there are no other shows of this kind in existence.”
An installation view of “The Nazarene.” Photo: Courtesy of Tellem Grody PR.
As proclaimed on the exhibition’s website: “You will enter the holy lands of Galilee and Israel. Feel the hot air of the Judean desert and the cool breeze of the Jordan River. Witness miracles and betrayals.”
In some ways, the greatest wonder is that it has taken so long for an immersive spectacle of Christianity to appear. The investor and organizer is Alpine Artists, a reclusive company without a functioning website that describes itself as a “trailblazing production house” with a “stellar reputation for delivering not only enjoyable but also profoundly meaningful experiences.” Tickets are $39 per person.
The immersive component of the exhibition only comprises one part of “The Nazarene” experience. For an extra $30, visitors can also take in “Discover Jesus,” a more traditional and tangible survey, showcasing 300 artifacts from the Holy Land.
Most of the artifacts on display are fairly standard archaeological fare, selected for their material details that can help bring to life the world Jesus and his disciples inhabited. There are period pottery works, fishing hooks from the Sea of Galilee, nails “similar to those used in the crucifixion,” and silver coins, the likes of which were handed over in the course of Jesus’s betrayal by Judas.
The James Ossuary. Image: courtesy Oded Golan.
However, the headline artifact, along with its lender Oded Golan, are rather more controversial. It’s called the James Ossuary, a 1st-century limestone box that some have claimed once held the remains of Christ’s brother, James. This attribution stems from the presence of the inscription “James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus” carved in Aramaic. Experts don’t refute the age or function of the ossuary, but rather that its connection to Jesus is a modern alteration.
In the early 2000s, Golan was tried and acquitted of forging artifacts in an Israeli court; the judge refused to rule on the ossuary’s authenticity.
The James Ossuary inscription noting a brother of Jesus. Photo: courtesy Oded Golan.
Naturally, none of this is mentioned in the exhibition’s promotional materials but, with the ossuary making its first appearance in the U.S., it’s a rare opportunity for Americans to decide for themselves. And with Bagdassarov eying future destinations across Latin America, Asia, and Europe the opportunity may fall to many more.
See more images of “The Nazarene.”
An installation view of the exhibition. Photo: Courtesy of Tellem Grody PR.
The Nativity scene at “The Nazarene.” Photo: Courtesy of Tellem Grody PR.
Nails, the likes of which would have been used to crucify Jesus. Photo: Oded Golan.
Fishing hooks from the Sea of Galilee. Photo: Oded Golan.
A period coin, the likes of which would have been handed over in exchange for Jesus. Photo: Oded Golan.
Period earthenware. Photo: Oded Golan.
Period sandals, the likes of which Jesus might have worn. Photo: Oded Golan.

“The Nazarene” is on view at 10110 Technology Blvd. E., Dallas, through January 7, 2024.
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