Shows & Exhibitions

The Modernist Double
You search for the differences, no matter if the pair is identical—and interestingly enough, you find them.
— Roni Horn

Winter 1898–1899. Toulouse, France. Henri Matisse paints a still life, then another of the same motif. The apples and oranges in Nature morte aux oranges (II) (c. 1899), now in the Kemper Museum, are flat discs of pale orange and yellow. A teacup and saucer and the table’s edge are limned in white. Areas of exposed canvas faintly brushed in black on the compote and wall cause the image to flatten and shimmer. The forms in Still Life with Compote, Apples, and Oranges (1899), in the Baltimore Museum of Art, are more defined. Pink highlights and dark shadows lend volume and solidity to the compote and saucer. The fruit are rounded entities contoured in brushstrokes of ochre and dark red. An oblique yellow line accented in muddy purple defines the edge of the tablecloth.
An installation view of “The Double: Identity and Difference in Art Since 1900” at the National Gallery of Art. From left, Henri Matisse’s Nature morte aux oranges (II) (Still Life with Oranges [II]) (c. 1899) and his Still Life with Compote, Apples, and Oranges (1899). Photo: National Gallery of Art/Robert Shelley.The still lifes with compotes—a type of bowl with a stem for serving sweetened or fresh fruit—are among the earliest of Matisse’s doubles. The artist’s many interpreters have analyzed in detail his recourse to doubling and serial depiction: the origins of this technique in the academic sketch (the first work of a Matisse pair is not inferior to the second, nor is the second a slavish copy of the first); the fact that he typically completed the second version shortly after the first; and the intriguing detail that he seldom showed these works together. Matisse made many doubles, yet he didn’t intend them to be experienced as such. 
What is the double for Matisse? “I always use a preliminary canvas the same size for a sketch as for a finished picture,” the painter explained. The sketch completed, he began work on another canvas the same size “to give the same feeling, while carrying it on further.” Feeling is the key word here. Composition is “the art of arranging in a decorative manner the diverse elements at the painter’s command to express his feelings,” the artist remarked. Painting is an emotional response to a situation, sometimes followed by another attempt to capture the feeling. Only by not copying the first version can the painter give form to the emotion again, and more decisively. 
The painter of compotes and oranges is already a “doubler,” but his two-step method is not yet in place. The Kemper Museum canvas anticipates the art of pure color harmony of the artist’s Fauvist works several years in advance; the more conservative Baltimore picture hews closely to such forebears as Paul Cézanne (the still life on a table, the modeling of fruit with repeated brushstrokes) and Pierre Bonnard (the dry brushwork, the pastel accents, the scum bled layers of paint). One cannot say for certain which rendition came first. The two-step process that Matisse describes could only fall into place around 1905 or 1906, after he comes to an understanding of color as a kind of visual substance that exists in quantitative proportion to the area of canvas to be used. 
Unlike Matisse, who turned to doubled formats repeatedly during his career, Arshile Gorky is identified with a particularly famous example: the two versions of The Artist and His Mother in the collections of the Whitney Museum and the National Gallery of Art. 
Arshile Gorky, The Artist and his Mother (c. 1926–36). This work belongs in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art. © 2021 The Arshile Gorky Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, Digital image © Whitney Museum of American Art / Licensed by Scala / Art Resource, NY.
Inspired by a photograph of the ten-year-old Gorky and his mother, Shushan, taken in Van province in eastern Turkey in 1912, the paintings were both begun after the exiled artist discovered the photo in his father’s house sometime after his arrival in the United States in 1920. The year before, Shushan had died in Gorky’s arms, a victim of the Turkish government’s genocidal policies toward its Christian Armenian citizens. The photo depicts the artist and his mother in front of what appears to be a painted backdrop of a faux mantelpiece and window. Gorky wears a coat, trousers, and white shirt, and holds a bouquet. Shushan in pinafore and coat sits beside him, her arm touching his; a scarf covers her head. 
A working drawing on squared paper reveals Gorky’s thinking as he transposed the photographic image to the two canvases, both likely begun in 1926. Unlike the drawing, the paintings position Shushan in front of the “window.” Omitting the lower hem of her dress, they advance her closer to the picture plane, emphasizing her hieratic presence. In both versions, Shushan’s hands are brushed out like mitts. The hard, white plane of her dress dissolves in her spatially ambiguous lap. Dominated by passages of gray, brown, black, tan, and mint green, the Whitney painting is cooler in tonality than the National Gallery canvas, executed in shades of orange, rose, lavender, and tan. In the Whitney picture, the boy’s feet, clad in slippers, are splayed. The arms of mother and son are slightly apart. In the National Gallery work, Gorky’s feet point toward the viewer; his arm touches his mother’s. 
Arshile Gorky, The Artist and His Mother (c. 1926–c. 1942). The one belongs to the National Gallery of Art. © 1997 The Estate of Arshile Gorky / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
We may never know why Gorky painted this extraordinarily affecting image twice, which canvas he began first, or whether the National Gallery portrait is unfinished. We know that the Whitney painting was a talisman for the artist, who displayed the work in his studio and altered the composition many times, and that he was still at work on the National Gallery canvas as late as 1942. A privileging of finish over unfinish, hence the Whitney’s version over the National Gallery’s, in the literature on the artist fails to grapple with the doubled nature of Gorky’s procedure—the fact that he made two portraits of his younger self and his mother, and that these works draw meaning from and in relation to each other. His restless reworking of these canvases implies that, for Gorky, no one representation could give a definitive form to the works’ multilayered temporality: the instant recorded by the Van photographer evocative of a childhood spent under Shushan’s protection (a “before”); the deeply traumatic period that followed, when the artist and his sister experienced homelessness and an unspeakable loss; and an ever-shifting present when he put brush to canvas as he brought both paintings ever closer to a state of completion, a finish line never quite reached. 

The Illusion of Oneness
“The binocular focus of our eyes converges on a single object and gives the illusion of oneness, so that we tend to forget the actual stereoscopic structure of our two eyes or what I want to call enantiomorphic vision, that is seeing double,” the artist Robert Smithson observed (his reference to enantiomorphy, the phenomenon of forms in nature that are symmetrical and reversed, is explored later in this essay). Gazing at Malevich’s matched squares or the same-sized oblongs in Josef Albers’s Familiar Front (1948–52), we become conscious of our binocularity—the fact that our vision combines slightly different points of view into a single impression (Smithson’s “illusion of oneness”). 
Josef Albers, Familiar Front (1948–52). © The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, 2021, Photo: Tim Nighswander/Imaging4Art.
One of a number of works known as Variants or Adobes, Familiar Front draws its distinctive format from the vernacular architecture of Oaxaca, Mexico, familiar to the artist from his and Anni Albers’s many sojourns there. The portals of these structures, framed by brightly colored lintels and jambs, and adobe walls painted in contrasting hues, are abstractly recalled in these compositions. Applying oil paint directly from the tube to the support with a palette knife, Albers worked from preparatory sketches drawn on checkerboard grids of square and oblong units. Always of the same middle intensity and typically applied in equal amounts, the three, four, or five hues of each Variant combine to produce an intense optical reverberation. Albers’s exquisitely calculated color juxtapositions enhance our experience of seeing two identical forms arranged side by side. Inset in two pink rectangles disposed on opposite ends of a rectangular gold field with uneven margins, the burgundy “doors” of Familiar Front invite us to concentrate on both of these focal points—which read almost as eyes staring back at us—simultaneously. 
Marlow Moss also explored the optical effects of doubled forms. Born Marjorie Jewell Moss near London in 1889, the artist broke away from her family and changed her name to the gender-neutral Marlow in 1920 before decamping to Paris in 1927. Entering the circle of Piet Mondrian and other artists with whom she founded the journal Abstraction-Création, Moss adopted the Dutch artist’s Neo-Plastic vocabulary of square and rectangular planes painted in the primary colors, white, and gray, and bounded by black lines; she developed her first double line painting around 1930. 
Marlow Moss, White, Black, Red and Gray (1932). Kunstmuseum Den Haag, The Hague, The Netherlands.
The double line was for Moss a means to work through Neo-Plasticism, a system that Mondrian had already tested repeatedly after he consolidated it in 1921. In Moss’s White, Black, Red and Gray (1932), a vertical black band bisects the composition roughly in two, yet this solid entity is in turn interrupted by thin parallel lines stretching from left to right dividing the upper half of the canvas from the lower. Rejecting Mondrian’s signature formula of single intersecting lines by inserting the double line in the center of her arrangement, Moss traduces the aim of Neo-Plasticism to achieve a representation of harmony in order to give form to the universal— Mondrian’s “dream of a perfectly equilibrated future society.” The double line in Moss’s painting establishes an extreme tension in the very center of the work, dividing top from bottom and disrupting the “repose” and balance characteristic of Mondrian’s classic style. 
Piet Mondrian, Composition (No. 1) Gray-Red (1935). The Art Institute of Chicago.
The invention of the double line has been much contested. Mondrian, for his part, adopted the format in 1932 and titled some of these works “double line” compositions. Overlapping with single lines (unlike the double line of Moss’s White, Black, Red and Gray, which perceptually lies above the vertical black band) and divided by white bands of equal or greater width, Mondrian’s double line introduced a retinal reverberation to the otherwise balanced arrangements. By 1934–1935, the double line was itself doubled. In Composition (No. 1) Gray-Red (1935), two pairs of parallel lines bisect the composition; the optical intensity caused by the pairs of double lines crescendos at the points of their intersection, while the white, gray, and red planes and single lines at the lower right, a zone of Neo-Plastic calm, are shunted to the margins. As line evolved into the dominant element of Mondrian’s art, line itself was quadrupled and multiplied; the double line, embedded in intricate webs of black bands, was no longer legible as a double. It is as if Moss’s discovery, the reward of a rigorous apprenticeship to Mondrian’s art, came along at the very moment the older painter needed it in order to dismantle his system, which having reached an apogee in 1930–1932, was ripe for “sabotage,” as Yve-Alain Bois has argued. The double line afforded Mondrian a powerful tool to topple the edifice of Neo-Plasticism that he had built with such care, until the double line was itself dissolved in a sequence of multiline compositions of extraordinary visual complexity completed in Paris, London, and New York between 1936 and 1944. 

Temporal Doubling
It is often said that Andy Warhol’s serial images evoke cinematic time. The silkscreened photos in Ambulance Disaster mark a “before” and “after”—the moment of impact, when the ill-fated passenger was flung through the backseat window, and the moment the press photographer took the exposure. A number of works here evoke two points in time simultaneously or fragment an instant through doubling. Doubling is “the two-step that banishes the unitary condition of the moment, that creates within the moment an experience of fission,” Rosalind Krauss has written. This is precisely the effect of Wallace Berman’s photomontage of the “double murder” of Lee Harvey Oswald the day after his assassination of President John Kennedy, where the tall detective in the light-colored suit and hat escorting Oswald has been doubled, splitting the instant before Oswald’s killer, Jack Ruby, pulled the trigger; or Barbara Probst’s simultaneous double exposure of a couple shrouded in smoke from slightly different points of view; or Peter Liversidge’s Polaroids of the rippled surface of a swimming pool blurring any perceptible distinction between one instant and another. In Nam Jun Paik’s Nixon (1965–02), a selection of President Richard Nixon’s speeches plays simultaneously on two monitors. Magnetic coils attached to the screens frame Nixon’s head. As the magnetic current is increased, the president’s face contorts; the distortion jumps back and forth between the monitors. These two Nixons—the powerful leader of the free world and a ghostly, diminished presence—change places as we listen to his justifications of the Vietnam War, his remarks about the Watergate scandal, and his resignation speech. Our normative experience of watching broadcast TV, the ultimate “real time” medium, is continuously interrupted. 
Other practices juxtapose historical periods in a simultaneous arrangement. Works of reenactment, such as Gmelin’s video projection Color Test (Red Flag #2) (2002), a remake of a 1968 film of radicalized young people running through the streets of West Berlin carrying a Communist red flag during the height of the Cold War that was restaged in Stockholm after the fall of the Iron Curtain, and Mary Kelly’s WLM Remix, a 2005 restaging of a 1970 women’s liberation march, as noted, inspire a comparison of two eras of Leftist and feminist activity. Forced to “see” two periods simultaneously enables us to think historically—to consider what the red flag meant then and now, or the status of feminism thirty-five years after the original protest.
Felix Gmelin, Color Test (Red Flag #2) (2002). Courtesy of the artist.
Untitled (2016, at the top of this page), a diptych by Zoe Leonard, explores the mnemonic hold of a recent past on those who are compelled to remember it. Two black-and-white prints have been mounted side by side behind glass. The prints appear to be identical photos of another photo. The subject of this snapshot is the artist’s mother; the place, London during the early 1950s, after Leonard’s family, who had endured the horrors of World War II in their native Warsaw, immigrated to the UK before their arrival in the US. A snapshot asks us to remember the person(s) captured in the photo. The pronounced tilt of the print to a viewer’s left reveals that Leonard took the exposures from slightly different angles, and thus at different instants. Untitled straddles two places and historical moments, yet the “present” recorded by Leonard’s camera is fractured. Just as Gorky realized that his memories of childhood, triggered by his discovery of an old photo, could not be adequately conveyed by any one representation—that his great portrait must be doubled, for doubling alone could express this insufficiency—Leonard chose to photograph the snapshot twice. 
Two photos of a photo, Untitled suggests the inaccessibility, the remoteness, of the moment when Leonard’s mother walked along a London sidewalk some 65 years before, the moment that the snapshot causes us to remember. As Gorky’s and Leonard’s works make painfully apparent, even the most precious familial memories are fugitive and unstable. 
From The Double: Identity and Difference in Art since 1900 published by Princeton University Press in association with the National Gallery of Art on occasion of the exhibition presented at the National Gallery through October 31.
James Meyer is the curator of modern art at the National Gallery of Art and curator of “The Double: Identity and Difference in Art since 1900.”
Follow Artnet News on Facebook: Want to stay ahead of the art world? Subscribe to our newsletter to get the breaking news, eye-opening interviews, and incisive critical takes that drive the conversation forward. More

Here’s a treat for people dreaming of summer sojourns abroad: the Hispanic Society’s new exhibition, “American Travelers,” a delightfully breezy suite of watercolor paintings capturing the sights of Spain, Mexico, and Portugal.
Perhaps the most famous artist in the show is U.S. Impressionist Childe Hassam. In fact, the inspiration of the show was the Hispanic Society’s participation in the 2004 Childe Hassam retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which stressed the importance of Spain to the American artist. A work like Hassam’s Puerta del Sol, Toledo captures the woozy romanticism of the view on the Iberian nation from across the Atlantic.
As the catalogue for “American Travelers” explains:
The story of American artists’ engagement with Spain and by extension with Portugal and Latin America is part of a larger history of nineteenth-century fascination on the part of northern Europeans and North Americans with what they perceived, on the one hand, as the exotic otherness of popular Spanish ethnic culture and, on the other, with the notable achievements of old master Spanish painting.
Less famous than Hassam are other watercolorists featured its in the show, though each brings something fresh. Among the highlights are delightful images of the Alhambra by George Wharton Edwards (1859–1950); a colorful port scene from Orville Houghton Peets (1884–1968); and the Edenic garden from Florence Vincent Robinson (1874–1937). To bridge the show into the present, “American Traveler” presents a fresh spin on the tradition by contemporary painter Timothy J. Clark.
Enjoy some views of “American Travelers” below.
“American Travelers: A Watercolor Journey Through Spain, Portugal, and Mexico. Featuring the Contemporary Works of Timothy J. Clark” at the Hispanic Society Museum & Society. Photo courtesy Hispanic Society Museum & Society.
Childe Hassam, Outer Gate (Puerta del Sol), Toledo (1910). Image courtesy Hispanic Society Museum & Library.
Ernest C. Peixotto, Ávila (1915). Image courtesy Hispanic Society Museum & Library.
George Wharton Edwards, Fountain and Patio of the Lions,Alhambra, Granada (ca. 1924). Image courtesy Hispanic Society Museum & Library.
Milan Petrovic, Toledo Cathedral Tower Seenfrom a Cloister (1927). Image courtesy Hispanic Society Museum & Library.
Orville Houghton Peets, Winter Evening, Lisbon (ca. 1918-1921). Image courtesy Hispanic Society Museum & Library.
Orville Houghton Peets, Cargo Sail Boats, Lisbon (ca. 1918–21). Image courtesy Hispanic Society Museum & Library.
Timothy J. Clark, Gryphons, Azores (2005). Image courtesy Hispanic Society Museum & Library.
“American Travelers: A Watercolor Journey Through Spain, Portugal, and Mexico. Featuring the Contemporary Works of Timothy J. Clark” at the Hispanic Society Museum & Society. Photo courtesy Hispanic Society Museum & Society.

Follow Artnet News on Facebook: Want to stay ahead of the art world? Subscribe to our newsletter to get the breaking news, eye-opening interviews, and incisive critical takes that drive the conversation forward. More

Everything that passed in front of the lens of Sibylle Bergemann seems imbued with hints of steely glamor.
The celebrated photographer, who died in 2010, captured the life, parties, fashion, architecture, and youth subcultures of East Berlin at the height of the Cold War. With a sensitive eye and sense of irony not unlike that of contemporary artists such as Nan Goldin or Annie Leibovitz, Bergemann gained acclaim for edgy and triumphant portraits of women, as well as her views of the city where she was born. This makes her perspective especially vital post-reunification, when the memory of East German life was swept away.
Bergemann documented the transformations that took place in and around the city both before and after the collapse of the Berlin wall in 1989, subverting the propagandizing style that was prevalent at the time. For instance, in a series called “The Monument,” Bergemann systematically documented the creation and erection of statues of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels by German Democratic Republic’s Ministry of Culture between 1975 to 1986. From today’s view, it is hard to tell whether these socialist icons are being constructed or dismantled. Instead, Bergemann’s photos seem to speak to the impermanence of political ideas.
Sibylle Bergemann, Das Denkmal, Berlin, Februar 1986 © Estate Sibylle Bergemann/OSTKREUZ. Courtesy Loock Galerie, Berlin
At the Berlinische Galerie, more than 200 works, including 30 images that are being shown for the first time, show not only the raucous parties and people of East Berlin, but also this artist’s travels to New York, Moscow, and Dakar. These latter are particularly meaningful and charged images: It was rare for artists to travel outside of East Germany. “The first time they let me go to Paris, I was 38,” she said in later interviews. “I fought for it for nine months and then I was allowed to go. Without money, of course.”
See some of the artist’s works below.
“Stadt Land Hund” is on view at the Berlinische Galerie in Berlin until October 10.
Sibylle Bergemann, Unter den Linden, Berlin 1968 © Estate Sibylle Bergemann/OSTKREUZ
Sibylle Bergemann, Selbstporträt, Schiffbauerdamm, Berlin 1986 © Estate Sibylle Bergemann/OSTKREUZ. Courtesy Loock Galerie, Berlin
Sibylle Bergemann, P2, 1981 © Estate Sibylle Bergemann/OSTKREUZ
Sibylle Bergemann, Nina und Eva Maria Hagen, Berlin 1976 © Estate Sibylle Bergemann/OSTKREUZ. Courtesy Loock Galerie, Berlin
Sibylle Bergemann, Moskau, 1974 © Estate Sibylle Bergemann/OSTKREUZ
Sibylle Bergemann, Marisa und Liane, Sellin 1981 © Estate Sibylle Bergemann/OSTKREUZ
Sibylle Bergemann, Katharina Thalbach, Berlin 1974 © Estate Sibylle Bergemann/OSTKREUZ. Courtesy Loock Galerie, Berlin
Sibylle Bergemann, Frieda, Berlin 1982 © Estate Sibylle Bergemann/OSTKREUZ
Sibylle Bergemann, Fenster, Berlin, undated © Estate Sibylle Bergemann/OSTKREUZ. Courtesy Loock Galerie, Berlin
Sibylle Bergemann, Das Denkmal, Gummlin, Usedom, Mai 1984 © Estate Sibylle Bergemann/OSTKREUZ. Courtesy Loock Galerie, Berlin
Sibylle Bergemann, Clärchens Ballhaus, Berlin 1976 © Estate Sibylle Bergemann/OSTKREUZ. Courtesy Loock Galerie, Berlin
Sibylle Bergemann, Caravan-Ausstellung, Berlin 1980 © Estate Sibylle Bergemann/OSTKREUZ. Courtesy Loock Galerie, Berlin
Sibylle Bergemann, Bernauer Straße, Berlin 1990. © Estate Sibylle Bergemann/OSTKREUZ. Courtesy Loock Galerie, Berlin
Follow Artnet News on Facebook: Want to stay ahead of the art world? Subscribe to our newsletter to get the breaking news, eye-opening interviews, and incisive critical takes that drive the conversation forward. More

Apollo is the god of the son. He also presides over music, dance, poetry, and all things arty. How perfect, then, that the image of Apollo is the centerpiece of artist Jeff Koons’s multisensory spectacle on the sunny Greek isle of Hydra.
“Jeff Koons: Apollo,” on offer at the mega-collector Dakis Joannou’s Deste Foundation in a former slaughterhouse, is a “metaphysical dialogue between the contemporary and ancient,” according to the show’s organizers.
If you’re not sure what that means, or what it looks like, we’ve put together some images of this summer spectacle. (For a sense of the social scene at the opening, see Janelle Zara’s Wet Paint in the Wild from earlier this summer.)
Jeff Koons, Apollo Windspinner (2020-2022). Installation view of the exhibition “Jeff Koons: Apollo,” DESTE Foundation, Project Space, Slaughterhouse, Hydra (June 21–October 31, 2022) © Jeff Koons, Photo: Eftychia Vlachou
Perhaps the iconic image of the exhibition is Apollo Windspinner (2020–22), a motorized steel and bronze sun whose gleaming face greets visitors coming and going from the slaughterhouse.
The rest of the exhibition is in a space adorned in a style inspired by ancient Roman frescos near Pompeii.
At its heart is an installation titled Apollo Kithara (2019–22) featuring a very different, polychromed Apollo. The god’s snake is animatronic—“so real it scares people,” according to Zara. A soundtrack mashes up classical Greek and contemporary pop references.
Jeff Koons, Apollo Kithara (2019-2022). Installation view of the exhibition “Jeff Koons: Apollo,” DESTE Foundation, Project Space, Slaughterhouse, Hydra (June 21–October 31, 2022) © Jeff Koons,Photo: Eftychia Vlachou.
An even more contemporary offering to the sun god is a pair of polychromed bronze sneakers, titled, bluntly enough, Nike Sneakers (2020–22).
Jeff Koons, Nike Sneakers (2020-2022), installation view of the exhibition “Jeff Koons: Apollo,” DESTE Foundation Project Space, Slaughterhouse, Hydra (June 21–October 31, 2022),© Jeff Koons. Photo: Eftychia Vlachou.
These detailed simulations of contemporary objects are at last supplemented by a display that amounts to something like an altar to a god of contemporary art: Marcel Duchamp.
Installation view of the exhibition “Jeff Koons: Apollo,” DESTE Foundation Project Space, Slaughterhouse, Hydra (June 21–October 31, 2022),© Jeff Koons. Photo: Eftychia Vlachou.
It really is a multi-sensory experience. To get more of the full effect, French journalist Judith Benhamou-Huet’s video from the site is worth a look.

[embedded content]

“Jeff Koons: Apollo” is on view at the DESTE’s Project Space at the old Slaughterhouse, Hydra, Greece, through October 31, 2022.
Follow Artnet News on Facebook: Want to stay ahead of the art world? Subscribe to our newsletter to get the breaking news, eye-opening interviews, and incisive critical takes that drive the conversation forward. More

In 1970, a 25-year-old radical feminist named Shulamith Firestone published an incendiary manifesto called The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. In it, she identified women’s role in childbearing as the primary cause of their ongoing oppression and proclaimed that “pregnancy is barbaric!”
Firestone called for the abolition of pregnancy and outlined a speculative utopian future in which women would be freed from the forced labor of biological reproduction via the development of artificial wombs. The nuclear family, which she viewed as fundamentally patriarchal, would be replaced by “households”: groups of adults who would share in the communal care of children. 
Firestone’s ideas were controversial then and remain so today, not least because she failed to develop an intersectional understanding of women’s struggles; for instance, she neglected to acknowledge the way race and class have determined which women ultimately bear the brunt of reproductive care work. Despite these shortcomings, her work has remained influential with cyberfeminists, queer theorists, and xenofeminists, who have similarly looked to technology as a means of emancipating bodies from the tyranny of nature (as it says in Laboria Cuboniks’s Xenofeminist Manifesto: “if nature is unjust, change nature!”) and advocated for uncoupling kinship and care relations from purely biological definitions.
Ani Liu was reading Firestone while pregnant with her first child in 2019. An artist-researcher who had studied body-machine hybrids, cybernetics, and cyborgs at MIT Media Lab, she was well-versed in the theoretical and political frameworks for considering gender, gender stereotypes, and ways technology could allow individuals to transcend the limitations of biology. Nevertheless, she was unprepared for the radical changes her body underwent during pregnancy. The experience marked the beginning of her personal and artistic interest in exploring the relationship between the body, society, gender, and politics.
Ani Liu’s latest exhibition, “Ecologies of Care,” on view at Cuchifritos Gallery. Image: Brad Farwell.
“At the time, I was reflecting on the fact that I felt like a human incubator and that society has a stake in that,” Liu told Artnet News. She cites declining birth rates in many countries and the promises those nations make to women in order to increase fertility rates, as well as the way they regulate women’s access to contraception and abortion. “I thought, why are we still doing this the old fashioned way?”
Following Firestone’s provocation, Liu began wondering what might happen if humans outsourced baby incubation to techno-scientific processes. She found that while the research is still a ways away from the fully functioning artificial wombs Firestone envisioned, science has made considerable progress. Incubators can now accommodate premature babies born as early as 20 weeks (full term is considered 39 to 42 weeks). As she looked into this research, Liu came across the concept of interspecific pregnancy, an experimental technique wherein one animal species carries the babies of another.
“It kind of blew my mind,” Liu recalled. “On Wikipedia, it said that we did this with cats where we impregnated them with pandas—because pandas are endangered and cute, so we feel like we want to help them. I was really fascinated by this. At the time, and recently, there was a lot of news about genetically engineering pigs for human organ transplants and so I looked immediately at a pig because it seemed like we already had a lot of research there.”
This line of inquiry led to the first work in her current solo show, “Ecologies of Care,” on view at Cuchifritos Gallery and Project Space in New York’s Essex Market (through August 6). The Surrogacy (bodies are not factories), which depicts a pig uterus inseminated with both pig and human fetuses, is the first piece that greets visitors as they walk in. Sat atop an illuminated vitrine, the sculpture glows, coiled into itself, looking slightly alien yet undeniably alluring. The bead-like bulbous forms made out of transparent, 3D-printed resin look like priceless jewels. While there is undoubtedly something anatomical about the form, it is only upon closer inspection that the milky white substance inside becomes recognizable as human and pig fetuses. 
Ani Liu, The Surrogacy (Bodies are Not Factories). Image: Brad Farwell.
For Liu, the work raises questions of ethics in the exploitation of both human and animal surrogates. “In using the pig as a vessel, it felt almost like equating my own body with that of livestock,” she said. “I wanted to show that we don’t actually need artificial wombs, we really need better policies.”
The rest of the works in the show explore the materiality of maternal care work and the relentless demands of the postpartum process. In Untitled (labor of love), Liu presents a data portrait of the first 30 days following her daughter’s birth. The 60-by-24 inch acrylic sculpture is divided into 48 notches from top to bottom, each one representing a 30-minute increment. Some of these are fitted with tiny glass vials filled with breast milk, formula, and diaper fragments, representing each feeding and diaper change that took place. 
Ani Liu, Untitled (Labor of Love). Image: Ani Liu.
The pace is overwhelming and relentless and gives a sense of the round-the-clock labor required to keep a newborn alive. Liu started collecting the data to monitor her daughter’s health using a mobile app, a process that is likely to be familiar to most new parents. She was struck by the visualization of unrecognized labor it provided.
“I remember there were several times when someone was like, ‘Oh, it’s so nice that you get maternity leave. It’s like a vacation!’ and I would pull up the data and be like, ‘Welcome to my vacation!’ So I knew I wanted to fold this data into my art somehow,” Liu said. “I also really wanted to bring the materiality of my life into the gallery because it was what I was experiencing and you never see breast milk and diapers in these spaces.”
And there is plenty of (synthetic) breast milk in this show—about three gallons of it, to be exact. Shortly after giving birth to her second child during the pandemic, Liu had to return to work; she had not worked at her new job long enough to qualify for maternity leave. Since she had to be away from her child, she had to start pumping, and her symbiotic relationship with her breast pump became the inspiration for a pair of sculptures: Untitled (pumping) and Untitled (feeding through space and time). Both are made with food-grade tubing hooked up to a milky white acrylic box containing an air pump, a liquid pump, and a microcontroller. They circulate a milk-like substance Liu had to “sculpt” through months of trial and error to arrive at the right color and consistency. Untitled (pumping) sits perched on a shelf, neatly coiled, resembling a giant donut made of butter, were it not for the persistent sound of pumping and the sight of milk and air bubbles coursing through its tubes. Untitled (feeding through space and time) is arranged as a tangle of tubes on the floor, recalling the messy realities of childcare. Together, they are like the before-and-after images of the “how it started, how it’s going” meme. 
Ani Liu, Untitled (pumping). Image: Brad Farwell.
The rhythms of both sculptures are programmed to correspond to the rhythms of Liu’s breast pump and contain about a week’s worth of milk volume. Because Liu started working so soon after giving birth, and pumping as a result, she wasn’t able to establish a deep breastfeeding connection with her second child. The kind of physiological responses she used to have when feeding her first child (the mere sight of her daughter was enough to cause milk to start letting down) she now began having with her breast pump. 
“All these Donna Haraway vibes came up for me—I am an animal-human-machine complete cybernetic creature,” she recalled. “There are a lot of hormones that go through your body when you lactate and I think mine were starting to become activated by the sound of the breast pump machine. I kept thinking about the relationship between me and the pump but also between the pump and society. On the one hand, the pump liberates the lactating person to be free of their baby’s mouth. It allows them to travel, work, do all kinds of things. But on the other hand, I feel like sometimes society gloms onto certain types of technologies to be like, ‘Oh look, you can pump! So you can return to work now, right?.’ But breastfeeding isn’t necessarily ‘free’ per se, it takes a lot of time and effort.”
During the pandemic there was a brief moment of acknowledgment that “care work is essential work,” but the return to normal has been swift and particularly ruthless, especially in light of the recent repeal of Roe v. Wade and the ongoing attack on women’s reproductive rights. 
“I’ve always been an advocate of choice and abortion rights but I felt even more strongly about it after I became a mother,” Liu said. “I wanted this and it’s still so hard. No one should have to be forced into this.”
Follow Artnet News on Facebook: Want to stay ahead of the art world? Subscribe to our newsletter to get the breaking news, eye-opening interviews, and incisive critical takes that drive the conversation forward. More

Art blooms all summer long across New York City’s East Village—and now in eight of its 42 community gardens.
Anonymous Gallery teamed up with curator Lola Kramer to present “7 Gardens,” a dispersed exhibition of East Village artists on view in community gardens throughout the storied creative neighborhood. The outdoor exhibition opened on July 14 alongside a traditional showcase of all eight artists in the gallery.
Participating artists, all based in New York, include Ivana Bašić, Urs Fischer, Robert Gober, Terence Koh, Bunny Rogers, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Kandis Williams, and Marianne Vitale.
Inspired by New York City’s declining green space and the community garden movement that took shape in the 1970s, Kramer told Artnet News that she “imagined 7 Gardens as a moment for art to exist outside of the formal and conventional structure of the white cube, even working against it by proposing a more flexible, less moribund alternative.”
“These spaces serve as mini oases where the public can venture for a moment of solitude,” she continued. “It’s an opportunity for art to happen within our community.”
Anonymous Gallery founder Joseph Ian Henrikson said he reopened his New York space during “the midst of the pandemic, the arrival of my first child, and the loss of my sister (who adored time in her garden).”
“It all forced me to reconsider public space, the city itself, and the way I intend to participate in the art world,” Henrikson said. He’d quietly nourished the conceptual seed of “7 Gardens” for years, compiling lists of community gardens in small bursts.
Work by American sculptor Robert Gober, on view at Peach Tree Garden.
“Witnessing New York City collectively respond to tragedy inspired my devotion to a project that I can personally dedicate to my sister, but that also honors these phenomenally unique spaces in the city that has been my home for almost half my life—and will be home to my children as they grow,” Henrikson said.
He started making moves this February, asking gallery staff to contact community gardens. As they began getting responses, Henrikson approached Kramer to assemble the show. Together, they managed to secure even more sites than they’d originally intended. The title “7 Gardens” was more like a goal post.
“We like to think of it as part of our path towards tropism and organic growth,” Kramer said.
Henrikson said he felt like the gardens chose them. “Green Oasis, for instance, is one of the only gardens with an active beehive and an underused 10-foot raised platform,” he said. “Terence Koh came to mind immediately as someone who has created structures and shrines dedicated to bees.”
Koh’s ongoing project at Green Oasis will culminate with community contributions and a “stained-glass light sanctuary, friendly to the humans, bees, and butterflies that inhabit the space,” Henrikson son.
Kramer curated artists whose work would particularly resonate with the project’s unorthodox context and respect for neighborhood heritage. Tiravanija, for instance, has kept the same apartment on East 7th Street since 1982, and it appears throughout his work.
“I was familiar with Bob Gober’s history with the neighborhood, his studio on East 10th Street, and exhibitions like the show he did at 303 Gallery in 1998 with Christopher Wool,” Kramer said. “I understood that gardening is an important part of his daily life. I imagined how powerful it would be to experience his work in this context, particularly because of his porous relationship with the world outside the studio and his channeling of this vernacular across mediums.”
Bench by Bunny Rogers at Orchard Alley.
She had the most fun working with Urs Fischer’s studio on his Chalk and Cheese installation. “Neighbors would walk by, do a double take and smile,” Kramer said. That installation got featured on Instagram by What Is New York, which has 1.3 million followers. Henrikson called it “A real ‘we’ve made it’ moment.”
Local activist and Orchard Alley founder Ayo Harrington invited Bunny Rogers to make her flowered version of the Chrystie-Forsyth bench permanent. Rogers will give a poetry reading on July 27 at 7:30 p.m.
There’s still plenty of summertime in store. “7 Gardens” and promises more programming, such as workshops, artist talks, performances, and screenings. Keep your eyes on the exhibition map as it updates, and check out the central show at 136 Baxter Street, which also functions as an information center for your adventures across the East Village.

Participating gardens include Fireman’s Memorial Garden, 6BC Botanical Garden, Peach Tree Garden, La Plaza Cultural Garden, Green Oasis Community Garden, and Kenkeleba House Garden.
Follow Artnet News on Facebook: Want to stay ahead of the art world? Subscribe to our newsletter to get the breaking news, eye-opening interviews, and incisive critical takes that drive the conversation forward. More

Though the latest edition of Manifesta just opened this month, plans are already underway for a forthcoming iteration of the roving European biennial to take place in Ukraine. 
Last week, at a press conference inaugurating Manifesta 14 in Pristina, Kosovo, the 18-year-old event’s founder and director Hedwig Fijen said she is proposing a 2028 iteration of the show in Kyiv. Projects supporting the future biennial may start as early as next year.
The goal, Fijen told Artnet News, is to “help rebuild and re-strengthen the cultural ecosystem and infrastructure of Ukraine in the next six years to come.” 
The proposed exhibition would be a joint initiative between the Manifesta Foundation and the Ukrainian Institute for Culture. Central to the Manifesta founder’s vision is the concept that past and future Manifesta host cities—such as Zürich, Rotterdam, and Palermo—would “adopt” local art and education institutions in Ukraine. 
Fijen explained that she put the idea in motion shortly after the Russian invasion and that it “has been received with great enthusiasm both from Ukrainian and European side.”
Manifesta Founding Director Hedwig Fijen. Courtesy of Manifesta.
Typically, the director is only partly responsible for choosing the biennial’s host cities. Per Manifesta’s established rules, cities and regions must apply to host an edition of the show. Then, Fijen and the foundation’s board select a destination from a shortlist of candidates. 
The Ukrainian Institute has sent a letter of intent to host Manifesta 17 in 2028, Fijen confirmed. 
“We had a meeting in Prishtina with some delegations of former and future host cities,” she added, noting that the mayors of those places plan to write letters committing to participate in the show. 
Kyiv has twice applied to host Manifesta, most recently for the 14th edition on view now. The foundation ultimately decided against the Ukrainian city in 2018 due to the ongoing war in Donbas following Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Now, the groundswell of European support of Ukraine may have turned the tide. 
More information on the 2028 proposal will be made available in the coming months, Fijen said.
Follow Artnet News on Facebook: Want to stay ahead of the art world? Subscribe to our newsletter to get the breaking news, eye-opening interviews, and incisive critical takes that drive the conversation forward. More

The night the newest edition of the FRONT International opened in Cleveland, the show’s curator, Prem Krishnamurthy, could be found at karaoke bar called Tina’s, belting out a beery rendition of Britney Spears’s Toxic. Before him was a rag-tag crowd of local barflies, goth kids, rust-belt cowboys, baseball bros—as well as a cadre of the international art world there for the show. Everyone was singing along.
Tina’s wasn’t one of the official sites of the triennial exhibition (which is funny, because seemingly every other venue in Northeast Ohio is), but Krishnamurthy called the event the “crux of the show.”
“Karaoke,” he said, “can be such a leveling force. There, in that big room, there are all these different people you don’t know, but everybody’s cheering each other on. When somebody sings, everybody else claps for them and everybody else joins in. To me, that is beautiful.” 
Positive are the vibes conjured by Krishnamurthy’s edition of FRONT, the second since the Cleveland-based event was founded in 2018. The show, titled “Oh, God of Dust and Rainbows,” spans dozens of venues across Cleveland, Akron, and Oberlin, and features work by some 75 artists both local and international, alive and dead. All of it coalesces around the curatorial conceit of the show, which is about embracing “art as an agent of transformation, a mode of healing, and a therapeutic process.” 
The title comes from “Two Somewhat Different Epigrams,” a 1957 poem by Langston Hughes, who spent his teen years in Cleveland and whose presence remains strong in the city: 
I
Oh, God of dust and rainbows, help us see
That without dust the rainbow would not be.
II
I look with awe upon the human race
And God, Who sometimes spits right in its face.
Turning to art for regeneration and repair feels on brand for 2022, but Krishnamurthy and his team actually settled on that theme back in 2019. After the show’s busy opening weekend, Krishnamurthy spoke with Artnet News about the evolution of that and the other ideas at the heart of his ambitious triennial.
Jacolby Satterwhite, Dawn (2021). Photo: Cleveland Clinic. Courtesy of the artist and Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York.
Langston Hughes looms large over the exhibition. It’s from him that the show take its name, and there are several exhibitions that feature or otherwise allude to his writing, his voice, his persona. What did you find in Hughes as you were putting the show together?
I think there are multiple things about Langston Hughes that appealed so strongly to us when we were first curating the show in 2019. Of course there’s his Cleveland connection, which is how we came to him initially. During that period, our curatorial assistant Lo Smith researched Hughes and actually presented back to the curatorial team the idea that Langston Hughes was almost a kind of contemporary artist in the way that he worked polymathically between different fields. 
When he was in Cleveland, he had already been writing poetry for a long time. But as a teenager, he taught in the Karamu House art workshop and produced prints and was making visual art. He organized plays and performances and events that we might think of as happenings. That his career was so multivalent and was really fascinating. I think that in Langston’s work, and in his biography, there is a questing that happens from a very early age, but also a lot of trauma and suffering embedded in it. 
We actually chose the title of the show while we were still formulating what it would be about, still figuring out the artists we wanted to include. So it all kind of emerged organically. And somehow then, once we had this title, “Oh, Gods of Dust and Rainbows,” it became a thing that we could really come back to and let resonate in many different ways. 
Moyra Davey, Still from Horse Opera (2019–22). Courtesy of the artist; Greengrassi, London; and Galerie Buchholz, Berlin, Cologne, and New York.
What did that title mean to you then and what’s your relationship to it now?
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve read that poem over the last two and a half years. Every time I did, it had some different resonance for me. When we started, it was very philosophical and was also very imagistic. There was something in the idea of dust and rainbows that immediately set people’s imaginations on fire. 
From the very beginning, we wanted to reproduce the entire poem whenever we referenced it. Because the second part has quite a different tone than the first. This idea that God sometimes spits right in man’s face—there’s something very pointed and very brutal about that which appealed to us. But I have to say that, now, from the position of having worked on this for years, having worked on it through a pandemic, through global calls for social and racial justice, through seeing the environment collapse around us and more—and a lot of personal challenges—the meaning has changed. It has begun to seem to me almost like a Buddhist sentiment, this inseparability of joy and suffering. 
Making this exhibition—there’s been a lot of dust. It’s been really challenging to produce a show under these conditions and in this time, but then the fact that something so beautiful comes out of it on the other end—that’s really remarkable.
Charmaine Spencer, Water (2021), installation view, The Sculpture Center, Cleveland. Courtesy of the artist.
The show posits art as “an agent of transformation, a mode of healing, and a therapeutic process,” which of course feels very apt in 2022. But, as you mentioned, that concept was first settled on back in 2019, prior to the pandemic and other recent upheavals. What were you thinking of back then?
In 2019, when we were intensively researching the show, we were thinking, first of all, about the context of northeast Ohio, thinking about the historical traumas that the region has faced. A hundred years ago, Cleveland was the fifth or sixth largest city in the U.S., I believe. People here often say, back then, there were more millionaires in Cleveland than there were in New York. The city had this incredible prosperity that was generated through things like Standard Oil, which was founded there, and the steel industry. But that same wealth that was produced in the region led to the destruction of the environment. It led to the destruction of people’s lives in terms of exploitation and the conditions of work in that moment. It set the stage for all of these issues that are problems in Cleveland today and have been over the last 50 years. 
But something that Murtaza Vali, who is part of our artistic team, brought to the table was this realization that the industrial labor and industrial wealth had given way to a focus on health services in the region. The Cleveland Clinic is the largest employer in the city. Also Art Therapy Studio, which was one of the earliest independent organizations for art therapy, was founded there. Alcoholics Anonymous was started in Akron and the National Museum of Psychology is there too. So around 2019, we coalesced this idea and then launched the triennial with the title that it has and the focus on art and healing. 
Then, two months later, the world shut down. 
Nicole Eisenman, Drinks at Julius (2012). Courtesy of the artist and Hauser and Wirth.
How did the conversation about the curatorial conceit of the show evolve from that point on?
When we first started talking about healing and therapy in 2019, I think both of us felt a certain reticence about it. It was something that both of us were deeply invested in our own lives and in our work, but I think we were a little embarrassed. We thought in 2019 that it could be seen as too esoteric or too hippie-dippie or somehow not serious enough for the art world. But we went with it. I believe really strongly in vulnerability and I think we went with what was really close to us and we said, ‘This is something we really care about and we’re gonna do it. Hopefully people will go with it.’ 
Then the pandemic hit and we almost got to the other end of the spectrum where there were suddenly so many projects focused on healing. It became clear to me that we had to articulate healing as something more than an abstract concept. How can art making be healing both for the maker and for the receiver? 
I grew up in a first-generation immigrant family where the idea of doing art was absurd. It was seen as frivolous and I always thought of it as being selfish; that if you did art, you were doing this thing that was too much for yourself, that had too much ego in it. For me, it took this moment—the pandemic and the lockdown—to really like dig into this question of how art can heal on an individual level, as a daily practice; and heal on the level of the collective, through sharing joy and through pleasure and music and dance and craft and color; and, at the same time, also create structural change. How can it actually do that in these different ways? And so for me, it’s been about testing out this proposition to see. Can we draft an idea of how art might really work in all of these ways for the individual and for the planet as a whole?
Isabelle Andriessen, Necrotic Core (2021). Photo: Aurélien Mole. Courtesy of the artist.
Across the exhibition are many different, and often personal, responses to those questions you just posed about art’s capacity for healing. Can you walk me through how this theme of healing through art is expressed in some of the projects included in FRONT?
On the scale of the individual and thinking about daily practice, there’s a big spectrum of examples. I’m thinking about somebody like Julie Mehretu and the mindfulness that she brings to making art, how she paints every day. We’ve really tried to emphasize that healing-through-work approach with the show she curated at the Cleveland Museum of Art. It’s something that resonates with Theaster Gates’s film A clay Sermon, which is about his own origins as an artist. Theaster is an artist who works on the structural level, but my hunch is that he couldn’t do that unless he could also find a way to satisfy himself to an individual level. That comes through his work with clay and ceramics. That’s what this film is really about in my mind. 
But it also uses music and joy to bring people together. There’s also Paul O’Keefe, based in Cleveland, who has used the medium of sculpture to deal with an horrific, unthinkable loss—his son’s suicide at 22. He’s using the language of sculpture as a way to process and integrate that. And Dexter Davis, who is responding to a violent trauma—a shooting that he experienced—but doing that through a daily process of collage that allows him to continue. 
Healing is embedded within some of the exhibition relationships as well. For example, at Spaces om Cleveland, we present the work of Isabelle Andriessen with her father Juriaan Andriessen, who died quite tragically when she was young. To put that work together and try to look at what connections might come out can be healing too. 
Those are some examples on the level of the individual, but on the level of the collective or the group, there are so many projects that come to mind. Maybe one of the most obvious is Asad Raza’s project Delegation. Raza brought a group of musicians on a boat from his hometown of Buffalo to Cleveland. They spent three days on the water—an extremely challenging trip—composing a piece. Then they played that piece once in the old stone church. On the level of performance, it broke so many things down and was just about being together. 
Paul O’Keeffe, Screaming Voicelessly to a Distant Silence, installation view, the Sculpture Center, Cleveland, 2017. Photo: Jacob Koestler. Courtesy of the artist.
And then, on the level of the structural and speaking with power, there are examples like Jacolby Satterwhite who has engaged in a long-term collaboration with the Cleveland Clinic, a major organization that has a historically fraught relationship with its black neighbors and community. What emerged out of it is something that’s challenging to everybody involved, but I think it also changed them. 
And then there’s Cooking Sections’s project on lake Erie and their work that will unfold over the next three years with local farmers that is about changing the farming practices in the region to make them regenerative. It’s about using art, which has certain funding structures, has a certain visibility, to be able to incur change
Finally, I wanted to ask you about karaoke, which struck me as a very fitting end to the show’s kick-off, even if it wasn’t officially part of the show. There was a lot of healing happening in that room.
I think of karaoke is probably the best metaphor for all of this. Where is the art in it? The art in it is not only in what you’re seeing, but it’s in what you bring to it, how you sing it, and whether you’re all in or not. 

“Oh, God of Dust and Rainbows” is on view at various venues across northeast Ohio now through October 2, 2022.
Follow Artnet News on Facebook: Want to stay ahead of the art world? Subscribe to our newsletter to get the breaking news, eye-opening interviews, and incisive critical takes that drive the conversation forward. More