Shows & Exhibitions

An exhibition showcasing 51 Ukrainian avant-garde artworks that narrowly escaped the recent bombing of Kyiv will go on view next week in Spain. The show will kick off what could be a series of traveling exhibitions to promote and safeguard Ukraine’s cultural heritage amid the ongoing war.
Titled “In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine, 1900–1930s,” the show is branded as the most comprehensive survey of Ukraine’s avant-garde movement. It is organized by Madrid’s Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza and supported by Museums for Ukraine, an initiative formed by art-world players to protect the country’s cultural heritage. It will open on November 29 with a video message from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Featuring works by 26 artists including masters of Ukrainian modernism Oleksandr Bohomazov, Vasyl Yermilov, Viktor Palmov, and Anatol Petrytskyi, the exhibition will present a total of 69 works on loan from the National Art Museum of Ukraine, the Museum of Theater, Music and Cinema of Ukraine, the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, and other private collections. The selected works, some of which have never been seen by the public, chronicle Ukraine’s avant-garde art movement during the first decades of the 20th century as it explored figurative art, futurism, and constructivism.
The show is curated by Konstantin Akinsha, Katia Denysova, and Olena Kashuba-Volvach, with support from the Embassy of Ukraine in Spain and PinchukArtCentre, as well as blessings from the office of the President of Ukraine and the Spanish Ministry of Culture.
The artworks arrived in Madrid’s Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza. Courtesy Museums for Ukraine.
The majority of the works in the show—51 of 69—were transported out of the Ukrainian capital in a secret convoy early on November 15, just hours before more than 100 missiles rained down on Ukrainian cities, including Kyiv, targeting energy facilities. It was one of the worst missile strikes since Russia invaded Ukraine in February, according to Francesca Thyssen-Bornemisza, the art patron behind the rescue mission and the Madrid exhibition, which was planned with record speed.
“The Kunsttrans trucks were packed in secrecy to safeguard the visual reference of the largest and most important export of Ukraine’s cultural heritage to have departed from the country since the beginning of the war,” Thyssen-Bornemisza, founder of Museums for Ukraine and a board member of the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, said in a statement. Thyssen-Bornemisza is also the founder and chair of TBA21 (Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary).
Kunsttrans, the Austrian art logistics and handling firm, was the only company willing to take on the task and remained in close contact with the drivers throughout the risky journey, Thyssen-Bornemisza noted.
Artworks were loading onto Kunsttrans’s truck, which transported the artworks outside of Ukraine just hours before Russia’s missiles strikes rained down on the country on November 15. Courtesy Museums for Ukraine.
“The convoy was 400 kilometers outside of the city when the worst of the bombing took place,” she recounted. “As the convoy approached the border, crossing at Rava-Rus’ka, a stray missile accidentally fell near the Polish village Przewodow, near the border to Ukraine. NATO was on high alert and Poland went into emergency sessions.” At that point, the trucks were 50 kilometers away from where the missile had landed.
The works arrived in Madrid on November 20, thanks in part to a special intervention from Miguel Iceta, the culture minister of Spain. Such an ambitious loan would normally take at least two years to approve and plan; this one was completed in a matter of weeks.
Since the beginning of the war, more than 500 cultural heritage sites, buildings, and institutions have been destroyed, according to the Ukrainian government’s records. There have also been numerous reports of Russia’s looting of cultural artifacts from Ukraine.
“It is becoming clearer day by day that Putin’s war against Ukraine is not only about occupying territory but it is also about controlling the nation’s narrative,” Thyssen-Bornemisza said.
The artworks arrived in Madrid’s Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza. Courtesy Museums for Ukraine.
A symposium bringing together key cultural figures—including Princess Laurentien of the Netherlands, president of the European Cultural Foundation; Olena Kashuba-Volvach, curator of the National Art Museum of Ukraine; Pina Picierno, vice-president of the European Parliament; as well as curators and representatives of the European Commission—will take place on November 28 prior to the opening ceremony. The symposium is open to the public in the form of a webinar via this link.
The exhibition at Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza will run until April 2023, when it will travel to the Museum Ludwig in Cologne.
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Street art will take center stage in the U.K. with the February opening of “Beyond the Streets London”, a major survey at the Saatchi Gallery. The exhibition will explore the impact of over 150 artists and the movements with which they were associated, including Hip-Hop and Punk Rock.
The sprawling show will fill the entirety of the gallery’s 70,000 square-foot space for the first time in eight years, with presentations of original art and site-specific installations alongside new special commissions. Archival documents such as photography, fashion objects, and rare ephemera, will also be shown to explain the history of the works. 
The exhibition’s curator is Roger Gastman, a leading specialist in graffiti who has staged several museum-scale shows across the U.S. in the years since he co-curated the much-acclaimed “Art in the Streets” show at L.A. MoCA in 2011. 
Co-curated with the L.A. museum’s then-director Jeffrey Deitch, the groundbreaking exhibition elevated an art form that had been mostly marginalized by the mainstream art world and examined its complex history. With over 200,000 visitors, it broke the California institution’s attendance records and subsequent blockbusters followed, including one housed in an office building in New York in 2019. 
A permanent dedicated gallery called Beyond the Streets opened in L.A. just this past September. “Our collector base, our audience just kept asking for more,” Gastman told Artnet News at the time. 
Making an effort to honor the present as well as the past, its inaugural show linked the work of established legends like Eric HAZE and Lady Pink with a newer generation of artists such as Othelo Gervacio and POSE. 
“I don’t want to say I’m the grumpy old man who only cares about historical things, but I want to continue to dig up the stories of the culture of graffiti and street art before they disappear,” said Gastman.
“The story of graffiti and street art can’t be told without highlighting the significant role London, and the U.K. in general, played,” Gastman has said about his latest project at the Saatchi Gallery.
The London exhibition will show street art’s far-reaching influence, from underground social movements to many aspects of mainstream contemporary culture, including what we wear and what we listen to.
“Beyond the Streets London” is on view at the Saatchi Gallery, London, February 17–May 9, 2023. Tickets can be purchased in advance here. 
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While the miniature sets and puppetry pieces soon to be unveiled at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) may look like a nod to December’s booming toy sales, they were actually assembled for the New York institution’s latest motion picture-focused exhibition, “Guillermo del Toro: Crafting Pinocchio.” Opening on December 11, the show takes a behind-the-scenes look at “Pinocchio”—the award-winning filmmaker’s new, undeniably dark, stop-motion take on Carlo Collodi’s classic 1883 children’s story. 
Featuring new plot developments courtesy of Del Toro, “Pinocchio” is the Mexican filmmaker’s first stop-motion animation film. He co-directed the film with stop motion animator Mark Gustafson, who is making his feature directorial debut. The film is already in select theaters and will be available on Netflix on December 9. 
Netflix first pitched the show to MoMA last year, while “Pinocchio” was still in production in Portland and Guadalajara, the museum’s film curator, Ron Magliozzi, told Artnet News. He and the exhibition’s co-curator Brittany Shaw traveled to Oregon for their preliminary meeting with Del Toro in October 2021. “Collaborative effort was important,” Magliozzi recalled of their initial conversation. “We went into the first day of visiting the studio with that in mind.”
“Crafting Pinocchio” unfolds across four floors: it begins with several retellings of the story, including a 2002 edition illustrated by Gris Grimly (which inspired Del Toro), to help contextualize Del Toro’s film, before delving into the film’s pre-production and production stages. It culminates with a program of film features, including several screenings of Del Toro’s “Pinocchio”, from December 22 to December 29, as well as a larger retrospective of all 12 of the filmmaker’s feature films, from December 2022 until January 2023.
Magliozzi has curated previous shows at MoMA around Pixar (2005–06) and Tim Burton (2009), but those focused heavily on concept art—a stage in the animation process that is falling away due to digital tools. “Crafting Pinocchio” shows the shift to research-based studies to create scenery and costumes. 
Mackinnon & Saunders. Puppet making at the Shadow Machine workshop. Guillermo del Toro’s “Pinocchio” (2022). Image courtesy Netflix
Del Toro’s version is set in Fascist Italy and his team went to great lengths to accurately depict a typical 1930s Italian town by diligently scouring historical studies and even topographical maps to fine-tune details such as the color of the sky and even the shape of acorns.
They even used vegetables like cauliflower and mushrooms to imagine the textures of fantastical characters. Those concepts grew into maquettes, paper standards, and then full puppets, cast from the very acrylic molds on view in illuminated cases throughout “Crafting Pinocchio.” Interestingly, Del Toro spent his early career in special effects, even making molds himself.
Full-sized puppets were only made for main characters that required close-up shots, like Pinocchio, whereas a background puppet is six inches tall at most, and pretty much flat at just half an inch thick. The life-sized Pinocchio from the film will be on view, but he doesn’t look like the Disney version’s real boy. Del Toro sifted through over 232 Italian adaptations of Pinocchio to understand the character’s nuance and tie it back to his own vision.
This vision is honored in the exhibition with three new video works in a lower gallery that connect themes throughout Del Toro’s film practice.
To give audiences a sense of what production was like, the curators shipped lighting rigs, dragon screens, five working sets, and four large set pieces, including the largest—a church—from Portland. They’re all puppet sized, disassembling easily so puppeteers can bring scenes to life and be captured up close by cameras so everything appears scaled to real life.
Del Toro’s “Pinocchio” joins projects like Henry Selick and Jordan Peele’s Netflix film “Wendell & Wild” in updating stop motion’s clunky Christmas special ubiquity. Puppets are more sophisticated now and so is digital film, which allows for faster shots and quicker review. And while Del Toro’s “Pinocchio” still used CGI during post production, Magliozzi said limitations were imposed to retain the film’s “handcrafted” feeling.
Guillermo del Toro on the set of “Pinocchio” (2022). Image courtesy Jason Schmidt/Netflix
Ephemera such as alternative movie posters and time-lapse videos of the animators in action will also feature at MoMA, alongside an animation schedule board from the Portland studio, complete with pushpins and rubber bands. “They’re like 10 feet tall,” Magliozzi said. “You think that would be done on a computer, but it’s apparently too complicated and easier to deal with this way.”
While the props, puppets, and sets selected by the curators share the film’s story, people power has proved to be the most important element in the film’s creation. The puppets were made both on- and off-site by companies such as the U.K.-based studio, Mackinnon & Saunders, with some craftspeople making them in their apartments during the pandemic. Meanwhile, at the studios, teams of animators would often work on the same scenes at the same time as it can take dozens of animators a full week just to get several minutes of footage.
It is fitting, therefore, that the last thing visitors see before leaving “Crafting Pinocchio” is a wall of Polaroid portraits featuring every craftsperson who worked on Del Toro’s film.
“All the artists working in the studio had to have a Polaroid taken when they started their first day of work,” Magliozzi recalled. Even as people left the crew, their photos remained and new ones were added as people joined the team.
If you pick up an audio guide, you’ll even hear some of the voices behind those faces narrating “Crafting Pinocchio.” 
“Guillermo del Toro: Crafting Pinocchio,” is on view at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, December 11, 2022–April 15, 2023.
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Carpenters Workshop Gallery is opening a high-art skatepark in West Hollywood tonight with “Turning Tricks” (November 17, 2022–January 14, 2023). The group show was organized by Michèle Lamy, the designer and provocateur (and wife of Rick Owns) behind the creative collectives LamyLand and OwensCorp.
Five undisclosed pro skateboarders will be at tonight’s opening event to shred their boards on the show’s twelve skateable sculptures, created by pro skater Danny Minnick (the exhibition’s co-curator) alongside artists and designers Skyler DeYoung, Chris Benfield, and Lamy’s daughter Scarlett Rouge.
Typically, these skaters would charge appearance fees, but they’re friends of Lamy, who maintains a rich cadre of collaborators, and always brings a posse to art openings. Rapper A$AP Rocky credits her with shaping his career.
Lamy and Carpenters Workshop Gallery partner Loïc Le Gaillard are also friends. As the two talked recently, Lamy expressed a desire to push art’s existing limits, transcending mere objects to encapsulate an ephemeral but palpable vibe. Skating, and its community, came to mind.
“I’m fighting for a new way of being,” she said in a statement. “I’m ready to imagine a new world.”
Rouge at work, on site at Carpenters Workshop Gallery. Courtesy of the gallery.
“I have always been about creating spaces for people and inviting artists to create, and this project is an extension of my world,” Lamy continued. “We are all on this ride together.”
Even though skateboarding only gained mainstream appeal in the early 1990s, Los Angeles has been a hub for it since the 1950s. “No sport is more connected to Southern California than skateboarding,” the Los Angeles Times wrote late last year.
L.A. residents emptied their pools during droughts. Some turned them into DIY skateparks. Last summer, the sport made its Olympic debut at the Olympic Games in Tokyo.
Still, lingering associations between skateboarding and pesky kids—or worse, crime—persist.
Between the gallery and artists, everyone hopes that the communal energy of tonight’s “Turning Tricks” opening carries on well throughout the show’s run over the next two months, leaving a social memory as much a design one.
To that end, they’ve filled out the gallery by fabricating full-on ramps, while reimagining trash cans and fire hydrants as objets d’art and replicating L.A.’s most iconic skating sites.
An installation view of Danny Minnick, Skater shredding H-Street Office Ramp (2022). Courtesy of Carpenters Workshop Gallery.
In Sandpit, for instance, Rouge reanimated a legendary skating site off the Venice Beach boardwalk, once “a notorious intersection between graffiti and skating, with worldwide influence,” the work’s description explained. Legends like Henry Sanchez, Guy Mariano, and Eric Koston practiced there, until the city razed the site in 2000.
Atelier OwensCorp built their own iteration of the Lockwood Elementary School, whose concrete playground remain a popular skating spot, using cinder blocks, asphalt, a chain-link fence, paint, and concrete. Minnick, meanwhile, honors skate and apparel company H-Street, founded in 1986 by pro skaters Tony Magnusson and Mike Ternasky, by recreating their notorious in-house quarterpipe from plywood, masonite, and steel.
The artists also all painted, carved, and re-shaped a total of 65 skate decks from maplewood for collectors at the occasion. Every single one comes with its own print of relief oil-based ink on archival Arches cover paper.
“The essence of skateboarding will be seen and heard for the first time through objects as they should be, without being considered a nuisance, an outlaw, or outsider activity,” Minnick mused in the release. “The exhibition brings the artist energy that has been such a big part of my life to a format for all to consider and enjoy.”
“Turning Tricks” is on view at Carpenters Workshop Gallery in Los Angeles through January 14, 2023.
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At the age of 93, Yayoi Kusama is still actively making art. Some of her most recent creations can be found among her iconic oeuvre on show in a blockbuster retrospective in Hong Kong that celebrates both the artist’s seven-decade artistic journey as well as the first anniversary of M+ museum.
The highly anticipated show, titled “Yayoi Kusama: 1945 to Now,” features more than 200 works ranging from paintings, sculptures, installations, moving images, and archival materials. Divided into six themes: Infinity, Accumulation, Radical Connectivity, Biocosmic, Death, and Force of Life, the colorful exhibition chronicles the artist’s trajectory, beginning with her formative years in Japan, through to her breakthrough in the West following her move to the U.S. in 1957, and finally to the decades after her return to her native country in 1973.
Kusama is now a household name in the art world. She has earned the title of the best-selling Japanese artist in the world, according to data from Artnet Price Database, with sales of her works reaching more than $1 billion as of the beginning of this month. Widely regarded as one of the most influential artists from Asia, her work has been exhibited across the globe, including in previous retrospectives such as the 2012 shows at Tate Modern in London and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the 2017 exhibition at National Gallery Singapore, and last year’s presentation at Gropius Bau in Berlin, which closed in May at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.
So why is M+ staging another Kusama retrospective, and how is it different from its predecessors? “Her New York years had been highlighted and focused upon again and again. However, for me, what has been under-examined is [the period] after she returned to Japan,” Doryun Chong, M+’s deputy director and chief curator, told Artnet News. Chong co-curated the Hong Kong retrospective with independent curator Mika Yoshitake.
Kusama went through a personal crisis after returning to her native country in the 1970s. She was an outcast in Japan, noted Chong, and was soon forgotten by the American art world. But she continued to reinvent her practice and slowly clawed her way back in the 1980s and 1990s to become Japan’s representative at the 1993 Venice Biennale.
“It took her 20 years to get there from 1973. This is the part that we put a lot of emphasis on [in the show], giving equal or even more weight to the second half of her career,” Chong said.
The M+ exhibition, which runs until May 14, 2023, is accompanied by a series of public programs as well as a range of exclusive merchandise. The museum has even teamed up with Hong Kong’s Mass Transit Railway (MTR) to create a Kusama-themed MTR train, complete with images of the artist’s famous dotted pumpkins.
Here are some highlights from “Yayoi Kusama: 1945 to Now”.
Installation view of “Yayoi Kusama: 1945 to Now.” Photo: Lok Cheng. Courtesy M+, Hong Kong. © Yayoi Kusama.
Installation view of “Yayoi Kusama: 1945 to Now.” Photo: Lok Cheng. Courtesy M+, Hong Kong. © Yayoi Kusama.
Installation view of “Yayoi Kusama: 1945 to Now.” Photo: Lok Cheng. Courtesy M+, Hong Kong. © Yayoi Kusama.
Installation view of “Yayoi Kusama: 1945 to Now.” Photo: Lok Cheng. Courtesy M+, Hong Kong. © Yayoi Kusama.
Installation view of Death of Nerves (2022) at “Yayoi Kusama: 1945 to Now.” Photo: Lok Cheng. Courtesy M+, Hong Kong. © Yayoi Kusama.
Installation view of Red Flower (1980) and Gentle Are the Stairs to Heaven (1990) in “Yayoi Kusama: 1945 to Now.” Photo: Lok Cheng. Courtesy M+, Hong Kong. © Yayoi Kusama.
Installation view of Self-Obliteration (1966–74) in “Yayoi Kusama: 1945 to Now.” Photo: Lok Cheng. Courtesy M+, Hong Kong. © Yayoi Kusama.
Installation view of Pumpkin (2022) in “Yayoi Kusama: 1945 to Now.” Photo: Lok Cheng. Courtesy M+, Hong Kong. © Yayoi Kusama.
Installation view of Clouds (2019) in “Yayoi Kusama: 1945 to Now.” Photo: Lok Cheng. Courtesy M+, Hong Kong. © Yayoi Kusama.
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“There is a very deep ambivalence in all relationships, but the more intimate and closer the relationship, the more ambivalent it will be,” said the French artist Camille Henrot at the opening of her exhibition, “Mouth to Mouth,” at the Munch museum in Oslo.
Ambivalence might be an overarching theme in the exhibition, taking place on the ninth floor of the waterfront museum that opened last year to house the world’s largest collection of paintings by Edvard Munch, the Norwegian artist best known for The Scream. But it is the psychologically charged aspect of Henrot’s work that draws the closest comparisons to Munch’s. 
The French-born, New York-based artist, who works across video, paintings and sculpture, was the winner of the inaugural Edvard Munch Art Award in 2015. Worth 500,000 Norwegian kroner ($50,000), the prize is given to an international artist no older than 40, and includes an exhibition at the museum. 
Camille Henrot, Big Kiss (2019), watercolor and ink on Japanese paper. © Camille Henrot. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth.
After winning the Munch award, Henrot had to wait seven years to have her solo show in Oslo, as the museum, designed by Spanish architects Estudio Herreros, was being constructed. Her vision for the show changed in the interluding years, during which she had a large-scale exhibition, “Days are Dogs,” at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, in 2017.
“When I received the Munch award, the connection between my work and that of Edvard Munch was not particularly obvious and it doesn’t have to be,” Henrot said. “But somehow, this new body of work around language, primal fear and early development in our life, has much more to do with his work.”
Her unframed watercolor paintings capture the complexity of human relationships, such as those between mother and child, or between lovers. The works “caress” the walls, in the words of exhibition curator Tominga O’Donnell, thanks to a specially designed system of magnets. “Camille is an incredible artist who approaches the exhibition like it’s a total installation,” O’Donnell says.
Installation view of “Camille Henrot: Mouth to Mouth,” at the Munch museum in Oslo. © Camille Henrot. Photo: Munch museum. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth.
The paintings, many of them in red or yellow, with the figures boldly outlined in black, belong to Henrot’s ongoing “Systems of Attachment” series, started in 2018. A whole gamut of emotions is portrayed, from tenderness to anger. One painting depicts a mother and a child kissing; in others, a mother is biting and devouring her child, or a child is holding up its mother’s mouth and biting her nipples. 
As research for this theme, Henrot said she read Austrian-British psychoanalyst Melanie Klein’s writing on her Object Relations Theory about the mother-child relationship. Henrot began the series as a way to explore her feelings about childhood, as well as her experience of becoming a mother. “There were a number of intense physical sensations and even trauma associated with my own childhood that I felt was probably driving my work at that moment,” she said. 
Believing that women artists portraying such subjects are still looked at pejoratively—and noticing a dearth of artworks—Henrot tackles motherhood, and the labor of breastfeeding, from a feminist and political stance. Her exhibitions, “Wet Job” and “Mother Tongue,” held earlier this year at Belgium’s Middelheim Museum and Austria’s Salzburger Kunstverein respectively, both explored the subject. 
Referring to how her oeuvre touches on a difficult subject, Henrot said: “Even women themselves have a disgust of motherhood; we all have a disgust of our own mother, because that’s where we come from. In a patriarchal society, we’ve been taught to disrespect mothers and devalue their work.”
Installation view of “Camille Henrot: Mouth to Mouth,” at the Munch museum in Oslo. © Camille Henrot. Photo: Munch museum. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth.
“I’ve seen no images of [breast pumping] even though it’s a very important primal thing,” Henrot added. “There are images of sex, death, every possible kinky, intense, dirty aspect of being human, but this image is nowhere and I was very intrigued by that.” 
Born in Paris in 1978, Henrot studied at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, the French capital’s decorative arts school, where she specialized in animation. After graduating, she moved to New York and made experimental music videos while working as an assistant for French artist Pierre Huyghe. Some of her videos were noticed by the art world, inspiring Henrot to make longer films. 
Her big break came when curator Massimiliano Gioni presented her compelling video Grosse Fatigue in “The Encyclopedic Palace,” the main exhibition at the Venice Biennale in 2013, where she won the Silver Lion Award for promising young artists. 
Installation view of “Camille Henrot: Mouth to Mouth,” at the Munch museum in Oslo. © Camille Henrot. Photo: Munch museum. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth.
Grosse Fatigue tells the history of the universe through a vast breadth of images colliding across a computer screen while recognizing the inherent failure in the narrative attempt. It was created thanks to a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, which allowed Henrot to film the collections of several American museums.
“I remember telling Massimiliano the different ideas that I had and he interrupted me, saying: ‘No, you just have to do a master work.’ I thought ‘Oh, my God’ and decided to embrace that sense of panic in the film.”
Rather than writing a cohesive narrative, Henrot made a storyboard in order to keep the possibilities open and let the editing be intuitive. The key was in making the images look random and for the structure to be invisible. “What’s interesting about the film’s format is that you can call upon the viewer’s ability, intelligence and memory of association and experiences,” she said. 
Installation view of “Camille Henrot: Mouth to Mouth,” at the Munch museum in Oslo. © Camille Henrot. Photo: Munch museum. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth.
Henrot said that the making of Grosse Fatigue was born out of a problematic situation when she relocated to the US. “I had no studio and the computer was the only tool I had,” she recollects. “I was working in pajamas in my bed. The computer window was my whole world.”
Prior to moving across the Atlantic, Henrot had acquired a mass of objects on eBay—including animal parts and pornography—that were blocked by U.S. customs. This accumulation would form the basis of her installation piece, The Pale Fox (2014), which, she said, “is a bit like a metaphor of the museum, [about someone] who is greedy and wanting to accumulate everything.”
During the Covid-19 pandemic, Henrot once again found herself in a state of disequilibrium. Having lost her New York studio, she moved back to France to stay with her mother not far from Paris. While ordering and decluttering the library, Henrot found her mother’s books on etiquette. The rather antiquated tomes inspired her series “Dos and Dont’s,” on view at the Munch museum. “My mum is a hoarder; I’m a hoarder,” she said, smiling. 
Camille Henrot, Dos and Don’ts – My Bio (2020), digital collage serigraph print with watercolor, ink, acrylic and oil on prepared canvas. © Camille Henrot. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth.
The multimedia pieces combine screenshots, computer-generated images, photographs, paintings, playlists and wordplay. The series – which involves her revisiting the idea of the computer window for the first time since Grosse Fatigue – draws an analogy between etiquette and the process of manipulation, by both digital and traditional means. 
“It’s a back-and-forth where I’m scanning real brushstrokes then manipulating them on Photoshop so they look like digital brushstrokes,” Henrot said. “There are prints of paintings, and paintings imitating the computer window, and cracks. I was working a lot with a graphic palette on Photoshop which is weirdly named ProCreate.” 
Describing how she amasses images and ideas from multiple sources, Henrot said: “Looking at them when I take a step back, I’m asking myself: ‘Why did I collect that image, what’s interesting in it for me?’ Then I print all the images, and organize them in categories or in Dropbox—I change the places a thousand times. It’s almost borderline because I feel as if I’m losing my mind deciding where they’ll go.”
Although the “Dos and Dont’s” series seems witty, there is something slightly sinister underpinning the references to the etiquette books, Henrot said. “It looks like I’m talking about something very inoffensive, obsolete and ridiculous, but it turns out to be a good metaphor for the world of control and surveillance,” she explained. “Like children, we are under parental control. In every rebellion to injustice, we have a sense of powerlessness, an experience that is very strong when we are children. I don’t identify with the mother, I identify with the child in everything I do.”
Installation view of “Camille Henrot: Mouth to Mouth,” at the Munch museum in Oslo. © Camille Henrot. Photo: Munch museum. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth.
Also on view in Oslo are two bronze sculptures: a monumental work of animals reclining on top of each other, inspired by the fairytale “The Bremen Town Musicians,” and Misfits. The latter is a large cube with cut-out triangles, circles and squares; the corresponding shapes are squeezed haphazardly into the wrong slots, or are discarded on the ground. “There is a certain violence in things being unilateral, being able to function only in a certain way,” Henrot said.
Offering insight into her wide-reaching practice and manner of flitting seamlessly between ideas, she mused: “I think I’m someone who strives in multiplicity. In a way, I am drifting a lot. I like to keep things very open.”
“Camille Henrot: Mouth to Mouth” is on view at the Munch museum in Oslo, through 19 February 2023. 

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There’s some wild painting on show in London in Making Modernism. The Royal Academy’s new exhibition of women artists working in Germany in the early 20th century offers a fresh perspective on some of the great Modernist subjects—nightlife, the nude, the self. The work is burningly experimental—I spent ages hovering in close, trying to work out how paint had been applied—and distinctive in viewpoint.
Gabriele Münter portrays small children as complex beings full of thoughts and feelings. One grasps himself anxiously, another cocks her head, full of attitude. Paula Modersohn-Becker’s retort to the supine nudes of art history is to paint herself standing upright, naked but for a straw hat trailing orange ribbons—a color picked up in the fruit she holds, and the assertive triangle of her pubic hair. In Gabriele Werefkin’s The Dancer Alexander Sacharoff (1909), the gender-fluid performer emerges from fields of ascending blue, his skin, pale as a duck egg, illuminated by coral red burning from his eyes, lips and cheeks. Käthe Kollwitz translates studies of her own body writhing in sexual frenzy into a series of etchings showing skeletal death wrestling a grieving mother for the body of her child. 
Paula Modersohn-Becker, Self-portrait as a Standing Nude with Hat (1906). Image courtesy Paula Modersohn-Becker Stiftung, Bremen.
Making Modernism is the work of British curator Dorothy Price, who has researched, written about, and taught German Modernism for, she admits “all of [my] adult life, basically.” Some 30 years ago, during her postgraduate research into the art and images of 1920s Berlin, Price realized that there was “a huge gap between how art history is constructed and taught in UK academia, and the existence of a whole world of women.” Even her own PhD thesis presented “a one-sided view of modernism—it [didn’t] take account of female subjectivity at all.” So she went back and started to explore the lives and art of the women working in Germany at the time. Recently appointed Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art and Visual Culture at London’s Courtauld Institute, Price’s scholarship has introduced British art history students to the work of important women artists, most notably Paula Modersohn-Becker.
With the exception of Käthe Kollwitz, the artists in Making Modernism have been little, if ever, shown in Britain. And as Price admits, the exhibition only “scratches the surface” of the subject. “It would be great if this prompts other institutions in this country to do monographic shows.”
In the opening gallery, Price positions her artists within a dynamic creative milieu, demonstrating how deeply involved they were in conversations around color, spirituality, psychoanalysis, and modern society. In one interior study, Gabriele Münter shows her partner Wassily Kandinsky peeping over the bedcovers in an adjacent room. In another, he is seated at the kitchen table in his slippers, deep in conversation with the artist Erma Bossi. Münter also paints Paul Klee in a deep blue armchair, his head positioned as though an artifact in the collection of Folk Art arranged on a shelf behind him. 
As with the Barbican’s (unfortunately overloaded) 2018 exhibition Modern Couples, Making Modernism not only moves away from the idea of the avant-garde as a boys’ club, it also reminds us that ideas seldom emerge in isolation. Münter and Kandinsky weren’t just sharing a bed: they painted side by side, argued, conversed, and hung out with artist friends.  
How important were these women to developments in the art of this period? “From my perspective—from things I’ve read, and from their own words, none of it could really have happened without the women in the circle,” explains Price. The influence was material, as well as intellectual. “Münter financed Kandinsky, Marianne Werefkin financed [Alexej Von] Jawlensky. So [the avant-garde group] Der Blaue Reiter would not have been the same without Münter and Werefkin at all.” 
Living in twinned apartments with Jawlensky in Munich, Werefkin held artists’ salons where “ideas were discussed and fermented,” says Price. “The idea of the Phalanx and Neue Künstlervereinigung [art groups] and all those avant-garde moments are born in the salon.”
Werefkin, meanwhile, was recording her own ideas about art in an epistolary diary, published after her death in 1938 as Lettres à un Inconnu (Letters to a Stranger). “She talks a lot in terms of the spirituality of color,” notes Price. “This was in the early 1900s, prior to Kandinsky publishing Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1912), where he obviously talks a lot about spirituality and color. The kernel of those ideas are already being written in Werefkin’s diaries. She records having conversations with Kandinsky and him dismissing her ideas a little bit, so there’s interesting gender politics around those diaries as well.”
Marianne Werefkin, Circus – Before the Show (1908/10). Image courtesy of Leopold-Hoesch-Museum, Düren. Photo: © Peter Hinschlaeger
In addressing female subjectivity, Price was keen to include works that suggested female sexual desire “because we don’t often see that in Modernism—we see a lot of male sexual desire.” Pondering the ways in which male desire manifests itself in art of the time, the treatment of girlhood in this exhibition is particularly striking. 
Ottilie Reylaender’s Beta Naked (ca.1900) portrays a chilly-looking 12-year-old dwarfed by the high-backed chair she’s perched on. Tense and a little cross, her pale limbs poke out of the darkness of a wintery interior. As Price points out, Reylaender was a teenager herself at the time—just 17 or 18: “There’s not a massive difference in age, probably five years or so between model and the artist. So there’s a different kind of relationship between artist and model. It’s a girl on the cusp of adulthood—Ottilie—painting a girl on the cusp of pubescence. A really interesting dynamic.”
Throughout the show, girlhood is addressed without sentimentality or prurience. Werefkin’s Portrait of a Girl (1913) is towering—eyes closed, she seems caught in private thought. In Modersohn-Becker’s Seated Nude Girl, Her Legs Pulled Up (ca.1904), the artist paints her stepdaughter Elsbeth looking cold and a little bored. The artist wrote of the awkwardness she felt in paying local children to model for her when living in the artists’ colony in rural Worpswede. “In all representations of the nude there’s a power relationship,” notes Price. “I think what’s interesting about the ones that I’m showing is that it’s not a sexualized power relationship in the same way as, say, Gauguin or Munch. But it is a power relationship nevertheless. And it’s a class one.” 
Käthe Kollwitz, Woman with Dead Child (1903).  © Käthe Kollwitz Museum Köln
No one at this point would argue the importance of shining a light on overlooked women artists. Taking the position of devil’s advocate, I ask Price what these women actually bring to the story of Modernism? She directs my attention to the central room in the show, which explores intimacy. On one side are Kollwitz’s powerfully claustrophobic studies of maternal love and grief, and her own experience of illicit sexual pleasure. On the other, Modersohn-Becker brings the mannered poise of Renaissance saints into her treatment of solid flesh-and-blood women, complete with dirty fingernails and ruddy faces. The nude is re-imagined as a maternal figure.  
“We’re seeing the female perspective on Modernity,” says Price, simply. “I wanted to think about what the themes of modernism are, typically, and how they then are recalibrated if we look at them through the eyes of women artists.”
Making Modernism: Paula Modersohn-Becker, Käthe Kollwitz, Gabriele Münter and Marianne Werefkin, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 12 November 2022–12 February 2023

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When it was announced last week that Mattel was teaming up to launch a limited-edition, collectable line of Barbie dolls with painter Mark Ryden, the so-called “godfather of Pop Surrealism,” the pairing made an unexpected kind of sense.
This Friday, fans get their first chance to get their hands on the special art Barbies at a pop-up in L.A. put on by Kasmin, Ryden’s gallery. The exhibition features a 1994 work, Saint Barbie, which shows a young girl piously praying to a divine Barbie. Today it is one of Ryden’s best known works. For the “Pink Pop” show, the artist is also debuting a new series of paintings, drawings, and sculptures.
“Barbie has made appearances in my art for a long time,” Ryden said in a statement. “It is difficult to define Barbie. She is a cultural phenomenon, an archetypal figure. She is a bona fide celebrity, a subject worthy for Andy Warhol to portray alongside the likes of Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe.”
A centerpiece of the collaboration is “Nature Queen Barbie,” a one-of-a-kind figurine with chartreuse hair and a dress sprouting a bouquet of animal heads, as well as a gold crown.
Nature Queen is the centerpiece of the “Pink Pop” exhibit by Mark Ryden X Barbie. Image courtesy of Mattel Creations.
Nature Queen is the centerpiece of the “Pink Pop” exhibit by Mark Ryden X Barbie. Image courtesy of Mattel Creations.
Nature Queen is the centerpiece of the “Pink Pop” exhibit by Mark Ryden X Barbie. Image courtesy of Mattel Creations.
As for the more collectable Ryden-themed Barbies, notable is “Bee Barbie,” who wears a bee-striped fur dress and hood, and has bee wings and a deathly pale face. “She’s sweeter than nectar and deep like a sting,” the Mattel Creations site enthuses. “Bee Barbie” is $150.
Barbie Bee Doll is part of the limited edition Mark Ryden X Barbie collection. Image courtesy of Mattel Creations.
Barbie Bee Doll is part of the limited edition Mark Ryden X Barbie collection. Image courtesy of Mattel Creations.
Certificate for Barbie Bee Doll. Image courtesy of Mattel Creations.
The signature product of the Mark Ryden x Barbie collab is likely the “Pink Pop Barbie,” awash in Barbie-core synthetic pink. With candy-stripe stockings and a purse in the form of a T-bone steak, the doll is accompanied by a pet yak and a goony, sentient flower pot. It is $350.
Pink Pop Barbie Doll is part of the limited edition Mark Ryden X Barbie collection. Image courtesy of Mattel Creations.
Pink Pop Barbie Doll is part of the limited edition Mark Ryden X Barbie collection. Image courtesy of Mattel Creations.
Detail of Pink Pop Barbie Doll from the Mark Ryden X Barbie collection. Image courtesy of Mattel Creations.
Detail of Pink Pop Barbie Doll from the Mark Ryden X Barbie collection. Image courtesy of Mattel Creations.
Yak from the Mark Ryden X Barbie collection. Image courtesy of Mattel Creations.
Flower pot from the Mark Ryden X Barbie collection. Image courtesy of Mattel Creations.
Higher up the price scale is the “Mark Ryden x Barbie at the Surrealist Ball” set, which goes for $500. It features two dolls, each with cropped bangs and a dress studded with surreal motifs. One has an orb on her head; the other, a star.
The set also comes with an occult-like pedestal with a dodecahedron studded with glazed, starring eyes.
Black and White Surrealist Ball Dolls is part of the limited edition Mark Ryden X Barbie collection. Image courtesy of Mattel Creations.
One of the dolls part of the Black and White Surrealist Ball Doll set from the Mark Ryden X Barbie collection. Image courtesy of Mattel Creations.
One of the dolls part of the Black and White Surrealist Ball Doll set from the Mark Ryden X Barbie collection. Image courtesy of Mattel Creations.
The Surrealist pedestal from the Black and White Surrealist Ball Doll set from the Mark Ryden X Barbie collection. Image courtesy of Mattel Creations.
A variety of merch related to the collection ranges from a $50 Mark Ryden x Barbie “Bee Brooch” and a $60 “Pink Pop Umbrella” up to a $300 Mark Ryden x Barbie “Pink Pop Purse.”
Mark Ryden X Barbie pin. Image courtesy of Mattel Creations.
Selection of pins from the Mark Ryden X Barbie collection. Image courtesy of Mattel Creations.
Mark Ryden X Barbie umbrella. Image courtesy of Mattel Creations.
Mark Ryden X Barbie handbag. Image courtesy of Mattel Creations.
The full capsule and accessories are available to purchase exclusively at Kasmin for one week before they open to the broader Barbie-collecting public from November 18.
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