Shows & Exhibitions

The first-ever Namibian Pavilion at the upcoming 59th Venice Biennale has been thrown into chaos over allegations that it misrepresents the country’s art scene. The uproar has prompted the pavilion’s art patron, Monica Cembrola, to resign just one week before the opening of the event. Meanwhile, the main sponsor of the show, luxury travel company Abercrombie and Kent, has also yanked its support. 
The sudden upheaval follows a petition published online in early March, signed by 372 individuals from the Namibian art community. It expressed outrage regarding the proposed Venice show, calling it a “poorly conceptualized and inappropriate debut that takes an antiquated and problematic view of Namibia and Namibian art.”
The pavilion, to be staged on the island of Certosa, is titled “The Lone Stone Men of the Desert” and features work by a Namibian artist who prefers to be known by the Banksy-like pseudonym RENN. Organizers have called it a “land art project,” which comprises a series of sculptures made of iron rods and desert stones in the likeness of the human form.
RENN is a 64-year-old white Namibian man born in Johannesburg, South Africa, who is making his artistic debut in Venice. He began his practice in 2013 in the desert of Namibia’s Kunene district.
RENN, Out of the Sand for the Namibian Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale 2022. Photo ©RENN.
The Venice show also marks the first time that its Italian curator, Marco Furio Ferrario, is organizing an art exhibition. He generally refers to himself as a “strategic consultant,” and has worked since 2014 for companies in Namibia, notably on safari lodges.
“I saw RENN’s artworks in the Namibian desert and fell in love with them,” Ferrario told Artnet News by phone on April 12, adding that he had begun to think about how to show them internationally during the pandemic, and knew the biennial would put RENN’s work on the biggest global stage. Ferrario pitched the idea to the Namibian ministry of culture—which in 2014 had rejected a Namibian artist’s bid to mount a pavilion on the grounds that its scene was “not ready”—and the government agreed to lend its support.
Monica Cembrola, who runs a foundation dedicated to art from Africa, and who came on board as a patron of the pavilion in mid-July 2021, negotiated to stage the event on the island of Certosa. “After I came on board, the curator [Ferrario] did not want to share with me the identity of the artist,” she told Artnet News, as she explained her reasons for leaving the project. “I also wasn’t told that he [RENN] wasn’t an artist. The Namibian art scene deserves better. The petition showed me that the artist was not representing Namibia and I want to help emerging artists from Africa. I have decided to pull out for these reasons.”
Cembrola brought Abercrombie and Kent on board as the pavilion’s lead sponsor. In an official letter obtained by Artnet News, dated April 8, Abercrombie and Kent wrote to Ferrario stating it had given €97,600 to fund Namibia’s debut in Venice but due to the petition and Cembrola’s resignation, it was terminating the sponsorship deal as it would cause “harm” to the A&K brand. The company declined to give a comment to Artnet News.
RENN, Solo for the Namibian Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale 2022. Photo ©RENN.
The petition criticizing Ferrario’s initiative alleges that RENN is known publicly as a member of the tourism industry and is “largely disconnected from the contemporary art and cultural scene in Namibia.” It also argues that “The Lone Stone Men of the Desert” project invokes racist and colonialist ideas about Indigenous peoples.
“We feel Namibia is not being represented at the pavilion,” a member of a concerned artist group who signed the petition told Artnet News on condition of anonymity. They added that Ferrario’s team had threatened several people who signed the petition with lawsuits. “The artist is completely unknown to the Namibian art scene and is not representative of Namibia or its artists. No one who organized the pavilion was from Namibia.”
The pavilion has also been criticized privately for selling RENN’s work as part of its “fundraising goals and packages.” Limited-edition prints are being sold for €15,000 ($16,200), and unique sculptures are going for €50,000 ($54,100). 
In a March 11 email exchange obtained by Artnet News, a representative for Namibia’s ministry of culture wrote to the organizers of the Venice Biennale stating that they would pull their support from the pavilion, and asked organizers to officially “remove Namibia” from the exhibition and “allow the originators of the idea to continue with their own exhibition, however not as a Namibian Pavilion.” A few days later, on March 16, according to the same correspondence, the Ministry reversed this decision.
RENN, Far Gone for the Namibian Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale 2022. Photo ©RENN.
After members of the Namibian art community first voiced objections to the pavilion in late January (two months before the public petition), Cembrola reached out to key individuals from the art scene in the capital, Windhoek, to bring on board additional artists for the pavilion, notably “emerging and mid-career Namibian artists,” in an effort to project a more accurate vision of the country’s art scene. However, after additional names were submitted, Ferrario told Cembrola it was too late to add more artists. 
“The point of this exhibition is that art comes before the artist,” Ferrario told Artnet News, defending the decision. “I did not choose an artist; I chose artworks.”
The scandal surrounding the Namibian Pavilion is particularly symbolic as it comes at a time when art from Africa is increasingly the focus of the international art world. However, the opportunities this opens up are also full of pitfalls—particularly given the imbalances in power and resources between those abroad and those rooted in countries such as Namibia. 
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Four artists—including three women and one non-binary artist of diverse age ranges, racial and cultural backgrounds—have been shortlisted for this year’s Turner Prize, Tate announced on Tuesday morning. It is the first time the prestigious British art prize has featured only women and non-binary artists among the nominees, since the first all-female shortlist in 1997.
Heather Phillipson, Ingrid Pollard, Veronica Ryan, and Sin Wai Kin, are the four U.K.-based artists shortlisted for the coveted prize, which will be awarded in December. An exhibition of their work will take place at Tate Liverpool from October 20 this year to March 19, 2023. This is the first time the Turner Prize has been held at Tate Liverpool since 2007. The Turner Prize winner will receive £25,000 ($32,500), with £10,000 ($13,010) going to each of the other shortlisted artists.
Alex Farquharson, director of Tate Britain and co-chair of the Turner Prize jury, described the shortlist as “excitingly rich and varied.” This year’s award marks a key milestone for the British art scene since it began to reopen in May 2021 following a prolonged period of pandemic lockdown.
The upcoming exhibition at Tate Liverpool is expected to be “mesmerizing and dynamic,” Helen Legg, director of Tate Liverpool and co-chair of the Turner Prize jury said. “The result is a diverse group of artists, each with a singular vision, who impressed the judges with the intensity of their presentations, while also dealing with important issues facing our society today,” she said.
THE END by Heather Phillipson on Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth. Credit: David Parry/PA Wire
Born in London in 1978 and raised in Wales, the 43-year-old Phillipson works with a range of media ranging from video, sculpture, installation, music composition, poetry, and digital media. She is nominated for her solo exhibition “RUPTURE NO 1: blowtorching the bitten peach” at Tate Britain, and THE END, her Fourth Plinth commission and the now-iconic piece stationed in London’s Trafalgar Square. The judges said they were impressed by “the audacious and sophisticated way Phillipson splices absurdity, tragedy, and imagination to probe urgent and complex ideas.”
Ingrid Pollard, Self Evident (detail) 1992 © and courtesy of the artist
The 69-year-old, Northumberland-based Pollard is a photographer, media artist and researcher, with a social practice anchored in representation and history, focusing on race, and the concept of the other. She is nominated for her solo show “Carbon Slowly Turning” at MK Gallery, Milton Keynes. The jury praised the artist’s rich body of work for uncovering hidden stories and histories. She was born in Georgetown, Guyana, in 1953.
Veronica Ryan OBE, Custard Apple (Annonaceae), Breadfruit (Moraceae), and Soursop (Annonaceae), 2021. Commissioned by Hackney Council; curated and produced by Create London. Photo: Andy Keate. Courtesy the artist, Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, and Alison Jacques, London.
Veronica Ryan, 66, was nominated for her solo presentation “Along a Spectrum” at Spike Island, Bristol, and her Hackney Windrush Art Commission in London. Born in Plymouth, Montserrat, in 1956, Ryan works with a wide range of materials from bronze to plaster and marble, creating sculptural objects and installations with containers and compartments that deals with issues revolving around history, belonging, and human psychology. Judges described her new body of work created during her residency at Spike Island “highly accomplished” as it explores a diverse range of subjects including the psychological impact of the pandemic. Ryan received an OBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honors List in 2021.
Sin Wai Kin, A Dream of Wholeness in Parts (still) 2021 © the artist. Courtesy the artist, Chi-Wen Gallery, Taipei and Soft Opening, London. Produced by Chi-Wen Productions, Taipei. Supported by Hayward Gallery Touring for British Art Show 9
The 31-year-old Sin is the youngest among the four nominees. Born in Toronto, Canada, in 1991, they were nominated for their appearance in the British Art Show 9 and the solo presentation by Blindspot Gallery at Frieze London. Sin’s work often appears in the form of performance, moving image, writing, and print, through which they examine the themes of desire, identification, and consciousness in fictional narratives and storytelling. Judges were particularly impressed by “the boundary-pushing nature of Sin’s work,” citing their 2021 film Dream of Wholeness in Parts. Inspired by the ancient Taoist philosopher Chuang Tzu’s famous text Dream of the Butterfly, the film explores contemporary drag, music and poetry, while drawing references from Chinese philosophy and the aesthetics of Chinese opera.
The winner will be decided by a jury panel comprised of Irene Aristizábal, Head of Curatorial and Public Practice at BALTIC, Christine Eyene, a research fellow at the School of Arts and Media, UCLan, Robert Leckie, director of Spike Island, and Anthony Spira, director of MK Gallery.
The Turner Prize 2022 is backed by BNP Paribas, with additional support from The John Browne Charitable Trust and The Uggla Family Foundation.
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For the first time in 40 years, Italian Renaissance master Donatello (ca. 1386–1466) has a major solo show—and the curator, Francesco Caglioti, hopes the blockbuster exhibition will help elevate the master sculptor to the level of fame enjoyed by Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, and Michelangelo.
The reason Donatello has been eclipsed in the public eye by his countrymen?
“It’s simply due to the fact that he was a sculptor and not a painter,” Caglioti, a medieval art history professor at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, told Artnet News. “Donatello was a pioneer of perspective, and his work anticipated photography and cinema. He is really very modern. Donatello is the best sculptor, perhaps, who ever existed.”
The exhibition’s two venues, the Bargello National Museum and the Palazzo Strozzi, both in Florence, approached Caglioti about curating the show some years ago, but he’s been researching the artist for around 30 years, and believes Donatello’s contributions to the art-historical canon have been wrongfully overshadowed by achievements in painting.
Donatello, Crucifix 1408). Collection of the Basilica of Santa Croce, Florence, property of the Fondo Edifici di Culto, Ministry of the Interior. Photo by George Tatge.
“The Renaissance was the triumph of sculpture,” Caglioti said. “And Donatello was a father of the Renaissance.”
The artists of the period were inspired largely by marble statues carved by the ancient Greeks and Romans, not paintings, of which few survived.
“We have to change our perspective on art history,” Caglioti said. “The Renaissance is a sculptural period par excellence.”
“Donatello: The Renaissance” on view at the Bargello National Museum in Florence. Photo by Ela Bialkowska/OKNO studio.
By bringing together an unprecedented number of works by the sculptor, “Donatello: The Renaissance” could very well help upset that hierarchy.
The 130 pieces on view in what’s been dubbed a “once-in-a-lifetime” outing pair Donatello’s sculpture with paintings by his contemporaries and artists who came hundreds of years later, illustrating his lasting influence.
Andrea del Castagno, Farinata degli Uberti (ca. 1448–49). Collection of the Gallerie degli Uffizi, Galleria delle Statue e delle Pitture, Florence, courtesy of Ministero della Cultura, Gabinetto Fotografico delle Gallerie degli Uffizi.
The show includes pieces from the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; the Louvre in Paris; the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.; and the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. Caglioti was also able to secure loans of Donatello sculptures that had never before traveled, such as works from the baptistry in Siena and the Basilica of St. Anthony in Padua, and even the bronze sacristy doors from across town at the Basilica of San Lorenzo.
For the show, many of the works have been carefully conserved by the Opificio delle Pietre Dure in Florence, a public institute of the Italian Ministry for Cultural Heritage that specializes in art restoration. The delicate task required soft-bristle brushes and porcupine quills, treating the centuries-old works with steamed demineralised water and other gentle cleansers before applying a protective coat of microcrystalline wax.
Donatello, The Feast of Herod (1423–27), seen before and after restoration. Collection of the Baptistery of San Giovanni, Siena, baptismal font. Photo by Bruno Bruchi, courtesy of the Opera della Metropolitana.
“They cleaned the bronzes, discovering the very gold covering that was completely hidden by centuries and centuries of dirt and filth,” Caglioti said. “They are very brilliant, with a golden surface that nobody had seen for centuries—they looked almost black.”
(The cleaned works will be shown alongside sculptures that have yet to undergo conservation, and will head to the Opificio delle Pietre Dure once the exhibition ends.)
One of the statues from the baptismal font at Siena Cathedral being cleaned with a porcupine quill. Photo courtesy of the Opificio delle Pietre Dure, Florence.
The show also includes the artist’s pioneering marble sculpture St. George (1415–17), made for Florence’s Orsanmichele church and an early example of perspective in Renaissance art, and his bronze David (ca. 1440), believed by some art historians to be Western art’s first free-standing nude male sculpture since ancient times. (Both are from the Bargello.)
Having the show in Florence means visitors can follow with a trip to the city’s Opera del Duomo Museum, home to an impressive collection of Donatello works.
“If you come to Florence,” Caglioti said, “you will have a very very large vision of Donatello’s oeuvre.”
See more works from the show below.
Donatello, David Victorious (1535–40). Collection of the Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence. Photo by Bruno Bruchi, courtesy of the Ministero della Cultura.
Donatello, Virgin and Child (Del Pugliese – Dudley Madonna), ca. 1440. Collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum, London.
Donatello, Virgin and Child (Piot Madonna), ca. 1440. Collection of the Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo by Stéphane Maréchalle, ©2021 RMN-Grand Palais/Dist. Photo SCALA, Firenze.
Donatello, Attis-Amorino (ca. 1435–40). Collection of the Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence. Photo by Bruno Bruchi, courtesy of the Ministero della Cultura.
Masaccio, Saint Paul from the Carmine Polyptych (1426). Collection of the Museo Nazionale di San Matteo, Pisa. Courtesy of Ministero della Cultura, Direzione regionale Musei della Toscana, Florence.
Donatello, Hope (1427–29). Collection of the Baptistery of San Giovanni, Siena, baptismal font. Photo by Bruno Bruchi, courtesy of the Opera della Metropolitana.
Donatello, Leaves of the Door of the Apostles (ca. 1440–42). Collection of the Basilica of San Lorenzo, Old Sacristy, Opera Medicea Laurenziana, Florence. Photo by Bruno Bruchi.
Donatello, Leaves of the Door of the Martyrs (ca. 1440–42). Collection of the Basilica of San Lorenzo, Old Sacristy, Opera Medicea Laurenziana, Florence. Photo by Bruno Bruchi.
Andrea Mantegna, Virgin and Child (ca. 1490–95), Collection of the Museo Poldi Pezzoli, Milan.
Donatello, Saint John the Baptist of Casa Martelli (ca. 1442). Collection of the Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence. Photo by Bruno Bruchi, courtesy of the Ministero della Cultura.
Donatello, Saint George Slaying the Dragon and Freeing the Princess (1415–17). Collection of the Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence. Photo by Bruno Bruchi, courtesy of the Ministero della Cultura.
Michelangelo Buonarroti, Virgin and Child (Madonna of the Stairs), ca. 1490. Collection of the Casa Buonarroti, Florence. Photo by Antonio Quattrone.
Giovanni Bellini, Dead Christ Tended by Angels (Imago Pietatis), ca. 1465. Collection of the Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia, Museo Correr, Venice.
Donatello, Miracle of the Mule (ca. 1446–49). Collection of the Basilica of Sant’Antonio. Archivio Fotografico Messaggero di sant’Antonio, Padua. Photo by Nicola Bianchi.
Desiderio da Settignano, David Victorious (Martelli David) ca. 1462–64. Collection of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Donatello, Virgin and Child (Madonna of the Clouds), ca. 1425-1430. Collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Donatello and Michelozzo, Dance of Spiritelli (1434–38). Collection of the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Prato, Diocese of Prato.
Donatello, Reliquary of Saint Rossore (ca. 1422–25). Collection of the Museo Nazionale di San Matteo, Pisa, courtesy of Ministero della Cultura, Direzione regionale Musei della Toscana, Florence.
Donatello, David Victorious (1408–09). Collection of the Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence. Photo by Bruno Bruchi, courtesy of the Ministero della Cultura.
Donatello, Virgin and Child (ca. 1415). Collection of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Skulpturensammlung und Museum für Byzantinische Kunst. Photo by Antje Voigt.
Donatello, The Virgin and Child (ca. 1425). Collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum, London.
“Donatello: The Renaissance” is on view at the Bargello National Museum, Via del Proconsolo, 4, 50122, Florence, and the Palazzo Strozzi, Piazza degli Strozzi, 50123, Florence, March 19–July 31, 2022. It will travel as “Donatello: Founder of the Renaissance” to the Staatliche Museum Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Stauffenbergstraße 41, 10785 Berlin, Germany, September 2, 2022–January  8, 2023, and the Victoria & Albert Museum, Cromwell Road, London SW7 2RL, United Kingdom, February 11–June 11, 2023.
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Of all the art exhibitions in the world, our beloved surveys of contemporary art—the biennials, triennials, and sometimes even quinquennials—often feel like they’re designed to overwhelm. 
To better understand how to navigate these massive shows, we asked a few curators who’ve organized them to provide tips on how to make sense of the experience.
Let’s start with the practical advice. 
Work by Angelica Mesiti in the Australian pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019. (Photo by Luca Zanon/Awakening/Getty Images)
Treat It Like a Treasure Hunt
Diana Nawi, the co-artistic director with Naima Keith of last year’s Prospect New Orleans, stressed the importance of having “on-the-ground guidance,” particularly in the form of a map. 
“You can almost have a scavenger hunt, and take the map and cross off things venue by venue,” she said.
Keith also encourages viewers to take “a little bit of time, if you have it, to get a slightly better understanding of that local community,” adding that it could go some ways in better understanding “why that work was put up in that area.”
Prem Krishnamurthy, director of the forthcoming Front Triennial in Cleveland, Ohio, uses a similar metaphor.
“Because [Front has] 25 venues across the three cities that you have to drive between, leave yourself time to treat it like a treasure hunt,” he said. “Or treat it like you’re looking for rainbows. You’re out wandering around and if the light is right, you’ll catch something amazing.”
Front has even dedicated part of its website to tools—including a detailed list of events and a map with venues organized by hub location—to help visitors make their plan of attack. 
But at some point, the practical stuff gives way to conversations about what visitors should go into these events expecting. 
Take your time and enjoy one thing at a time. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
Focus on Singular Experiences
People tend to begin with “the impression that there is actually a way to navigate it all,” said Francesco Bonami, who directed the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003 and the 2010 Whitney Biennial. “And I don’t think there is a way to navigate it.”
“By virtue of their structure, [shows like these are] overwhelming,” Nawi said, adding that Prospect is “the kind of exhibition that is much larger than the two days people usually have for it.”
That means you probably won’t get to see everything.
“Every time you go to the Venice Biennale, you will inevitably meet someone who asks you: ‘Have you seen this thing, or seen this piece?’” Bonami said. “And you will have not seen it.”
This is particularly true, he added, for openings, which he describes as “basically a very self-celebratory moment. At the end of the day, you just feel a sense of exclusion, like you missed a work of art, or you missed a party or something.”
“The beauty of art is that you are the one in charge of your own experience,” Bonami added. So another solution is to organize your time around pre-selected highlights.
When Krishnamurthy does the circuit, he typically “hones in on a handful of key things that I want to make sure that I see, and then I really try to see those and spend time with them.”
Nawi said she had a friend who missed most of a biennial because they spent four hours at a single artist’s performance.
“I feel like that was this really beautiful thing, for them to just stay with it,” she said. “They experienced the entirety of the biennial in front of that performance versus having seen every object.”
The British pavilion at the 2017 Venice Biennale. It was madness. (Photo by Awakening/Getty Images)
Embrace the Madness
Not that you’re guaranteed to miss a lot: not all major art  events are spread out over multiple venues.
Since the Whitney Biennial, for example, is housed in one building, “it is more human in scale,” Bonami said. “I think people, maybe, absorb it in a better way than the Venice Biennale.”
Even so, Bonami only expects people to remember a handful of artworks in the end. 
So perhaps the very best thing to do is not to devise strategies, but simply to accept the undertaking for what it is.
“The absurdity of the endeavor is so much part of it,” Massimiliano Gioni, who organized the 2013 Venice Biennale, explained. “The fact that people are still congregating periodically to look at art made in 80-plus countries in the world, there is a kind of madness to it. So, I say, embrace the madness.”
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As the 50th anniversary of Pablo Picasso’s death approaches in 2023, news has poured in about conservation research into three Blue Period works. 
In 2014, researchers announced a “hidden” portrait beneath The Blue Room (1901) and, four years later, revealed a dozen layers beneath The Soup (1903), plus a landscape below Crouching Beggarwoman (1902). 
The fruits of this research are now being shared with the public in “Picasso: Painting the Blue Period” (until June 12), an exhibition at the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC.
Since the 2018 announcement, researchers at the Phillips, which owns The Blue Room, have honed their analysis with the aid of colleagues in other institutions. National Gallery of Art imaging scientist John Delaney, for example, scanned The Blue Room four times (most recently in 2019) with increasingly refined and sensitive instruments, according to Phillips curator Susan Behrends Frank, to peel back the history of the work.
Each scan “brought forward additional information about elemental materials and clarity of detail in the portrait of the man beneath the surface image,” she said.
“We want people to see this well-known artist in a fresh light—to see him at the very beginning of his career internationally,” Behrends Frank added. “We want people to see how rich this very early moment is in his career, and the conservation science in this exhibition gives you another window into thinking about the creative process of an artist that seems to be so well known.”
An infrared reflectance image of The Blue Room showing the portrait of an unknown man. The canvas is rotated 90 degrees clockwise. Image: John Delaney and Kathryn Dooley, National Gallery of Art.
The Blue Room, which is the first of the three major Blue Period canvases that exhibition visitors encounter, was originally titled The Toilette when Duncan Phillips purchased it in 1927 as his first Picasso acquisition.
It was just the third to enter a U.S. museum after the Art Institute of Chicago acquired The Old Guitarist (1903-4) and Albright-Knox Art Gallery acquired La Toilette (1906) the prior year.
For decades, conservators knew something lay hidden beneath, because some brushstrokes went the wrong way, and underlying forms peeked through. The surface depicts a nude woman, head bowed, washing herself over a basin in a room into which light streams from a window on the left. A bureau and chest flank the window, and a colorful rug, table with flowers, and bed round out the interior.
The bather’s pose, which evokes the works of Edgar Degas and Auguste Rodin, plus Picasso’s addition of two pictures into the scene, reveal his broader artistic mission. 
The artist used ultramarine blue, which was costlier than his typical Blue Period Prussian blue paint, to include an image on the bedroom wall of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s poster “May Milton,” as a way of associating himself with one of his idols. Researchers now believe that the underpainting of the man was done in mid-summer 1901, giving the final version of The Blue Room an early- to mid-November 1901 date, rather than the prior scholarly consensus of summer 1901.
This means Picasso painted the final work shortly after he turned 20, which is significant for an artist who told biographer Pierre Daix that his friend Carles Casagemas’s suicide at that age “got me started painting in blue.” (Casagemas worked in the same studio as Picasso and died in a cafe just down the street that February.)
Notedly, the new dating also means that Picasso memorialized Lautrec with The Blue Room, as Lautrec died in September 1901 at age 36. (Prior dating would have meant that Picasso painted the work while Lautrec was still alive.) 
Picasso may have done the underpainting to curry favor with someone, or it may have been an archetype of someone he saw at Montmartre, Behrends Frank said. She added that conservators’ new understanding of how thinly and quickly Picasso painted The Blue Room supports artist Jaume Sabartés’s recollection, in his memoir of 1901, that Picasso worked seemingly with tunnel vision, focusing all his energy on creating. 
“Our painting really confirms that entire manner of his concentration and process,” Behrends Frank said.
Research into two more Blue Period pictures from the Art Gallery of Ontario, Crouching Beggarwoman and The Soup, also chart new understandings of Picasso’s process.
Pablo Picasso, Crouching Beggarwoman (1902). © 2022 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
In the former, Picasso first drew the woman holding bread (or a bowl) in her hand. But he later changed his mind, and enshrouded both hands in the woman’s cloak. 
“By covering that up and enclosing the figure completely, so all we see is her face, it gave her a totally different presentation and meaning,” Behrends Frank said. 
Scans of the work showed a landscape beneath. It is unknown if Picasso painted that work, which was also initially a mystery.
“We thought this was a fantasy [scene] inspired by [painter Pierre] Puvis de Chavannes,” Behrends Frank said.
But when she and her colleagues showed the under-image to Josep Laplana, director of the Museum of Montserrat, he said he knew what it depicted.
“Immediately, he recognized that it’s this private park now owned by the city of Barcelona,” Behrends Frank said. (There is no record of Picasso having visited the park, which would have been closed to the public in the early 20th century.)
Pablo Picasso The Soup (1903). © 2022 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
In The Soup, Picasso had initially considered a male figure giving bread to a boy or a girl, until he changed it to a woman giving soup to a girl. The image was an “obsession” to Picasso, according to Behrends Frank.
“He was completely struggling with this idea of how to convey something about the universal charity that one associates with soup as a form of nourishment,” she said.
“We think of soup kitchens even today. In Picasso’s mind, he was trying to find a way to universalize this and not simply make it a genre picture, but to give it heft.”
Looking ahead, Behrends Frank thinks there is more work to be done, especially on the many Blue Period works that are in Russia, which have been x-rayed but not subjected to deeper kinds of scans. 
“I’m sure those curators and conservators would love to be able to take this next step that is being done in Europe and the U.S.,” she said.
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The Modernist painter Ernst Wilhelm Nay (1902–1968) has long been a staple of German public collections, beloved for his saturated colors and dynamic compositions, which were inflected by Expressionism, Art Informel, and abstraction over the course of his career. Yet even in his home country, there are still dimensions of his work that remain to be discovered, and a retrospective now on view at the Hamburger Kunsthalle—of 120 paintings, watercolors, and drawings, the largest show of his oeuvre in 30 years—seeks to contextualize lesser-known works and introduce Nay’s practice to new audiences.
“The exhibition is the first comprehensive show in decades, and it is addressed to a new generation of viewers and people who might not be so aware” of the artist’s early career, explained Aurel Scheibler, chairman of the board of the Ernst Wilhelm Nay Foundation, which was created in 2005. “It shows a thread that connects all these different periods of his work.” (Scheibler, who is also an art dealer based in Berlin, is the step-grandson of Nay.)
Exhibition view of Ernst Wilhelm Nay’s retrospective at Hamburger Kunsthalle. Courtesy Ernst Wilhelm Nay Stiftung.
Nay, who studied under Karl Hofer at Berlin’s Akademie der Künste, began painting in the late 1910s and was an accomplished artist by the outbreak of World War II. His work was labeled as “degenerate art” and around ten of his works were confiscated from museum collections. The artist himself destroyed one of his own works for fear of reprisal.
In need of money, Nay joined the army in 1939 and was posted to the Eastern front, followed by France. He managed to continue to make art when he was off duty, painting for a time at the studio of an amateur artist he befriended in France. His studio in Berlin was bombed during air raids of the German capital. “He was more free to work [abroad] than in Berlin,” Scheibler said, but “it was hard to get canvases, so he made more so gouaches and works on paper.” Scheibler added that this period of work, as well as that from just before the war, is very rare and of great interest to collectors.
After the war, Nay’s international career took off when he participated in the Venice Biennale in 1948 and the first-ever Documenta in Kassel in 1955 (its curator, Arnold Bode, would also include him in the next two editions). In 1956, Nay represented Germany at the Venice Biennale. He caused a stir at the third Documenta when he presented his now-celebrated “Eye Paintings,” which were hung from the ceiling—a move that divided audiences at the time. He died in his studio in Cologne in 1968.
Ernst Wilhelm Nay, Couple with butterflies (1939). Alexeyev-Brandl Collection. © Ernst Wilhelm Nay Foundation. VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2022. Photo: Trevor Good.
Magdalene Claesges, scientific director and head of the Nay foundation’s archives in Cologne, said that scholarly and market focus has predominantly been on his famous “Disk Paintings,” and the retrospective—which was curated by Karin Schick—seeks to offer a more polyphonic perspective on his career, which went through many other phases.
Works from between 1954 and 1962 known as the “Scheibenbilder” have long been in demand: a painting from the period, titled Scheiben und Halbscheiben (1955),set a record for the artist at Ketterer Kunst in 2017, selling for €2.3 million ($2.6 million), well above its €250,000 ($412,007) estimate, according to the Artnet Price Database.
But other periods, including that of the “Fugale Bilder,” which preceded it from 1949 to 1951, have been overlooked and under-studied, Scheibler noted. “This period of his work marks a transition from the more figurative work he was making in the 1940s to his later works, which are more abstract. It is a period that is more flat and constructed,” he said.
Though interest in the artist in Germany has long been strong, more recently major institutions in Europe have made moves to collect his work. The Centre Pompidou in Paris, which acquired Inferno Hallelujah (1964), a moody canvas with his iconic eyes in deep crimsons and blues, in 2014, while the Musée National d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris acquired Blau—Orange und Gelb (1967) in 2016. Scheibler said, “People are rediscovering him as one of the major postwar painters of Europe.”
Ernst Wilhelm Nay’s retrospective is on view at the Hamburger Kunsthalle in Hamburg, Germany, March 25 through August 7, 2022.
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Elmgreen and Dragset have taken over the Fondazione Prada in Milan for a show titled”Useless Bodies?” that focuses on Big Tech and its impact on our lives.
The works, according to an exhibition statement, explore “present condition of the body in the post-industrial age, in which it seems that our physical presence is losing its centrality.”
The body, indeed, may even now be “completely superfluous.”
“One could claim our physical selves have even become more of an obstacle than an advantage,” the artists said in a statement. “Twenty years into the 21st century, the status of the body is now that of the product—with our data gathered and sold by Big Tech.”
Many of the figures in the works are in precarious positions: climbing walls, perched atop a ladder, stuffed into the backseat of a car, and—in one particularly unsettling case—rolled half inside a morgue’s cooling freezer.
See more works from the show below.
“Elmgreen & Dragset: Useless Bodies?” is on view through August 22, 2022.
Exhibition view “Useless Bodies?” by Elmgreen & Dragset at Fondazione Prada, Milan. Photo: Andrea Rossetti. Courtesy of Fondazione Prada.
Elmgreen & Dragset’s Watching (2021) in the exhibition “Useless Bodies?” by Elmgreen & Dragset at Fondazione Prada, Milan. Photo: Andrea Rossetti. Courtesy of Fondazione Prada.
Exhibition view “Useless Bodies?” by Elmgreen & Dragset at Fondazione Prada, Milan. Photo: Andrea Rossetti. Courtesy of Fondazione Prada.
Exhibition view “Useless Bodies?” by Elmgreen & Dragset at Fondazione Prada, Milan. Photo: Andrea Rossetti. Courtesy of Fondazione Prada.
Exhibition view “Useless Bodies?” by Elmgreen & Dragset at Fondazione Prada, Milan. Photo: Andrea Rossetti. Courtesy of Fondazione Prada.
Exhibition view “Useless Bodies?” by Elmgreen & Dragset at Fondazione Prada, Milan. Photo: Andrea Rossetti. Courtesy of Fondazione Prada.
Elmgreen & Dragset’s Piscina di Largo Iscaro (2021) in the exhibition “Useless Bodies?” by Elmgreen & Dragset at Fondazione Prada, Milan. Photo: Andrea Rossetti. Courtesy of Fondazione Prada.
Elmgreen & Dragset’s What’s Left? (2021) in the exhibition “Useless Bodies?” by Elmgreen & Dragset at Fondazione Prada, Milan. Photo: Andrea Rossetti. Courtesy of Fondazione Prada.
Exhibition view “Useless Bodies?” by Elmgreen & Dragset at Fondazione Prada, Milan. Photo: Andrea Rossetti. Courtesy of Fondazione Prada.
Exhibition view “Useless Bodies?” by Elmgreen & Dragset at Fondazione Prada, Milan. Photo: Andrea Rossetti. Courtesy of Fondazione Prada.
Elmgreen & Dragset, Bogdan (2020). Courtesy: KÖNIG GALERIE, Berlin, London, Seoul Photo by: Roman März.
Elmgreen & Dragset, The Touch (2011). Courtesy of Perrotin. Photo: Anders Sune Berg.
Exhibition view “Useless Bodies?” by Elmgreen & Dragset at Fondazione Prada, Milan. Photo: Andrea Rossetti. Courtesy of Fondazione Prada.
Elmgreen & Dragset, Statue of Liberty, Fig. 2 (2021). Installation view, 14th Robert Jacobsen Prize of the Würth Foundation, Museum Würth 2, Künzelsau, Germany, 2021. Photo: Studio Elmgreen & Dragset.
Exhibition view “Useless Bodies?” by Elmgreen & Dragset at Fondazione Prada, Milan. Photo: Andrea Rossetti. Courtesy of Fondazione Prada.
Elmgreen & Dragset, The Painter, Fig. 2 (2021). Photo: Elmar Vestner. Courtesy, Pace Gallery, New York.
Elmgreen & Dragset, The Outsiders (2020). Installation view, Art Basel. Photo: Sebastiano Pellion di Persano. Courtesy, Pace Gallery, New York.
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Much has transpired since 2019 when Whitney curators David Breslin and Adrienne Edwards were announced as the next organizers of the institution’s flagship biennial: a pandemic, a presidential election, a wave of protests. Even the date of the always-anticipated exhibition changed, moving from 2021 to April of this year. 
Tasked, as all Whitney Biennial curators are, with staging a show that reflects the times into which it’s born, Breslin and Edwards found themselves in a difficult position. They had to track down art that captured the spirit of those world-altering events without trivializing or exploiting them—and do a lot of that work over Zoom.
With that kind of brief, it’s unsurprising that the biennial almost always produces controversy. 
For their turn in the hot seat, Breslin and Edwards took an open-ended approach that may successfully turn down the collective temperature. They opted to ask questions instead of offering declarations, to create a space for contemplation, and to look beyond the borders of America for a portrait of the country.
Ahead of the opening of the exhibition, “Quiet as It’s Kept,” Breslin and Edwards spoke to Artnet News about the curatorial experience and what viewers can expect.
Alfredo Jaar, still from 06.01.2020 18.39 (2022). Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Lelong & Co.
The idea of designing an exhibition to reflect the art of our times is daunting at the best of times, but the last three years have not been the best of times, and much has changed since 2019 when you two were announced as curators of the biennial. Does that distinguish this biennial from others in your mind?
David Breslin: Well one amazingly consistent thing was working together with Adrienne. Because I do think that in the best of times, these are hard shows to do and, as you say, these have not been the best of times. To have someone that you trust, respect, and admire, someone you have absolute faith in, is really important. 
To the other point, I would say that, for every person who does a biennial, whether they’re at the Whitney or elsewhere, the sands are always shifting; the times and the ways in which artists are reacting to them are constantly changing. I think the degree of change in such a brief period of time is something that Adrienne and I had to reckon with in a way that felt really alive to the moment. But we also didn’t want to claim or sensationalize any particular part of it. We were thinking about how the exhibition can reflect the complicated layers of emotion that we’ve all felt.
Adrienne Edwards: One of the things that really rocked me was when we got on the museum floor before artwork started coming in. It was just this clearing; it was completely open and there was nothing there. In some ways it felt deeply metaphorical and emblematic of what we needed and had hoped for. David and I felt it was important to put together this show, wanted to contextualize artists in relationship—all the stuff you can read in the essay and the press release. But what was really moving was realizing what it meant to stand there and see all of these radical juxtapositions, all of these incredible things—and not just side to side, as we’re accustomed to seeing them, but how you could get a sidelong glance that takes you across 15,000 square feet and see a relationality there. That really opened things up in a way that reinforced that we were onto something when we set out to make a show that was about the conditions in which we were living.
Adam Pendleton, still from Ruby Nell Sales (2020–22). Courtesy of the artist.
How has your approach to the show evolved since 2019?
DB: From about November 2019 to mid-March, when we were told that the museum was shutting down for what was then thought to be a brief moment, we were on the road. It was a traveling moment. It was about going into studios, getting on planes, seeing people from afar, roaming around New York, seeing people that were closer by. But even before that, Adrienne and I had a lot of time to just sit together with artists names or images we wanted to share with each other or books or essays or articles that proved to be formative. Then, in mid-March, everything shifted and, like that, we were on Zoom.
Adrienne and I had to develop a different kind of relationship with each other too. When you’re in the same space, you take for granted that you can just meet up and have a chat. It suddenly had to be very deliberate. But I was surprised by how much more intimacy that allowed for. All the texts that we have, the photos that we’ve sent back and forth, even images of pages from books that we were reading—I still remember that as being a really grounding thing when we were pretty much by ourselves or with our families in that moment.
The phrase that forms the name of the show, “Quiet as It’s Kept,” opens Toni Morrison’s novel “The Bluest Eye.” It was also the name of an album by bebop drummer Max Roach and an exhibition curated by David Hammons. What does it mean to you?
AE: It’s a kind of vernacular that I would hear from my grandmother and women of her generation. It’s this very kind of tongue-in-cheek thing like, ‘I’m going to tell you something you already know, but you never talk about.’ [Laughs] It just worked for us. So did the fact that those sources are interdisciplinary references, because that’s such an important part of the show. Trying to speak to identity or a sense of belonging or history or social formation—those are all things that David and I were thinking about very deeply. So it just seemed to be the perfect title.
Coco Fusco, still from Your Eyes Will Be an Empty Word (2021). Courtesy of the artist and Alexander Gray Associates.
You’ve used somewhat soft language to describe the show—language that suggests rather than states. You’ve called the exhibition “speculative” and an “experiment,” described the subthemes as “hunches,” and the group of artists as an “ensemble.” Fair or not, we tend to associate the Whitney Biennial as a kind of declarative, flag-in-the-ground kind of exhibition—and because of that, it almost always proves to be alienating to some people. I wonder, with this new language, are you trying to get away from that understanding and move toward something more nuanced and contemplative?
AE: I would say it’s necessarily contemplative, given the times in which it’s been made. How can you have any sense of certainty about anything really? It would seem absurd.
That clearing on the fifth floor that I mentioned before, it’s really about leveling and holding space, it’s about the importance of everyone being able to ask questions, to show up with our own experiences and have those brought to the fore.
This whole idea that any singular exhibition could be declarative is already deeply problematic and, at the Whitney, there’s a kind of institutional openness and clarity about that impossibility. Because institutions are changing too. These institutions are comprised of people, so every time you have a different cast of characters here, you’re going to get a different kind of show. What the Whitney Biennial was 20 years ago, what it was 30 years ago—it’s really different from what the Whitney Biennial is now. And you know what? That feels really right and honest and generative.
DB: I think we find that there’s real strength in speculation. Instead of leading with our own kind of declarations of what it should be, we wanted to situate the show as an encounter with different ways of imagining a world. Some exhibitions revolve around this question of, “Well what power does art have to change the world?” They have these very grandiose ideas. In no way are we thinking that it can’t, but we believe art has a way of impacting and changing people, how people think and respond. And then people have a way of changing the world or reacting to it. There’s never going to be any singular story that a show like this can narrate. So it became a question of how we might be able to create an ensemble where there are multiple narratives that can bleed in and out of each other. 
N. H. Pritchard, Red Abstract / fragment (1968–69).
Accompanying the exhibition’s wall texts and other materials is a symbol that comes from the avant-garde poet N. H. Pritchard. It’s a set of inverted parentheses: ) (.  What does that motif mean to you? 
AE: Pritchard is an artist that I’ve come to know in my relationship with [Whitney Biennial artist] Adam Pendleton, who also has reprinted some of his work. The symbol seemed so iconic to David and I, the profound openness it suggests. I think about it as an interval, a space between two marks. It’s so emblematic of where we are in this moment, this in-between space, ready to get on with it. Also, the fact that it was done in ’68, another troubling and complicated year, and still resonates across time is incredible.
Prichard as a figure was so interesting. He traversed these really different worlds and always seemed to be a little too eccentric for both of them in some ways. What we were able to see in the estate was his poetry, but with a visual lexicon added to it. There are these really dazzling, colorful drawings overlaying the language itself. Pritchard’s poetry is very compelling, but it’s not closed in terms of its symbolism or signification. It’s actually profoundly open. Those are all things that Dave and I had been saying we wanted to put into this exhibition.
DB: Adrienne, I still remember when you and I met with Ian Russell, Pritchard’s nephew. We were looking at some drawings and poems—I think it was in August of last year. There were so many times we just looked at each other and we didn’t have to say anything, we just kind of knew. It was one of those great moments that come with working with someone for a long time. When we saw that symbol, our eyes met and we thought, ‘All right, we’re going to do something with this one.’ [Laughs] You will see it on the side of the introductory texts. It’s incorporated there as a nod to this other way of looking and seeing.
Your biennial includes artists outside of the U.S.—specifically from Canada and Mexico—which is not new for the Whitney Biennial, but might nevertheless confuse some who are expecting a survey of American art.
DB: It was very important for us to think about “The Whitney Museum of American Art” and the fact that that can mean so much for so many different people. Obviously, people who visit aren’t just from the United States, and the work that people make within the United States has ramifications everywhere in the world. That’s something Adrienne and I took very seriously in putting on this exhibition, that there is a kind of push and pull relationship between the United States and the countries closest to us. The artists who are working on the border of Tijuana aren’t just being shown on their own. They’re incorporated within a flow of other artists and works that touch on similar themes about, say, how pop culture is defined or minimalism is thought about. We wanted to make an exhibition that looks like what America really looks like, which is a country of immigrants, a country of pressure along the border.
Denyse Thomasos, Displaced Burial / Burial at Gorée (1993). Courtesy of the Estate of Denyse Thomasos and Olga Korper Gallery.
There’s a tonal dichotomy between the show’s top floors—one light and open, the other dark and labyrinthine. What is the relationship between these two sections?
AE: The sixth floor is a labyrinth. There is, almost in a Borgesian kind of way, an unfolding of different kinds of spaces and rooms. Unlike the fifth floor, your experience is far more directed. You’re directed through this antechamber and then you can come out of that and you can go left or right, you can go forward. So there are these undulating, changing experiences there. That floor has a lot of moving image work, which is often presented out in the open because we have literally transformed the floor into a black box itself. It really feels like a void; it has a force to it. Then, on either end, there are these works that are deeply about light.
So as intense as I think it’s shaping up to be on the top floor, it’s actually optimistic. It tries to embody the possibility of something else. I think of that floor as characterizing both a sense of history and also this contemporary moment, the last two-plus years of life in the United States. Deeply encapsulated in that space are our issues, our hopes, our disappointments. But there’s a way out if we choose to take it.
“Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as It’s Kept” will be on view April 6 through September 5, 2022 at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
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