Shows & Exhibitions

The interactive exhibition Color Factory, known for its photogenic displays and massive ball pits, is opening its third permanent location, inside Chicago’s Willis Tower.
The 25,000-square-foot space—the Color Factory’s biggest to date—will feature artists from around the world, including Camille Walala, Yuri Suzuki, Tomislav Topic (of the artist duo Quintessenz)  Liz West, Anne Patterson, Christine Wong Yap, Harvey and John, and Michele Bernhardt, as well as four artists with ties to Chicago in Edra Soto, Akilah Townsend, Adrian Kay Wong, and Emilie Baltz.
Longtime Color Factory fans can rest assured that their favorites installations, such as Confetti Accumulation, which constantly rains confetti, will appear in new forms.
“There are certain things that we cannot take off the menu—there would be a revolt if we did not have a ball pit!” CEO Tina Malhotra told Artnet News. “There’s going to be familiar rooms, but with a completely new design and color story, and new concepts with new artists. We like to give our artists the freedom to bring their own perspective and color story.”
Confetti Accumulation at the Color Factory in New York. Photo courtesy of the Color Factory.
Putting together the lineup, Malhotra said she was looking for “artists who are eager to step outside the traditional museum and gallery world,” she said. “When we’re picking artists, we want people who believe in our mission of inspiring joy through the combined power of art and color, and making art accessible.”
For Walala, a French artist who lives in London, the idea of making an interactive installation for the Color Factory was instantly appealing. She’s planning a mirrored maze featuring colorful, geometric patterns, similar to a 2017 installation she did at Now Gallery in London, but inspired by architectural details from important Chicago buildings.
“What I would love to do is bring back your inner child. When you go to the Color Factory, that’s exactly what you get—the excitement of being a child again,” Walala said. “A lot of people are quite intimidated going to art spaces. I want people who come not to feel the pressure of expressing what the art means to them. It’s more about emotion.”
Tomislav Topic, of the artist duo Quintessenz, Central Color Station. Photo courtesy of the Color Factory.
The Color Factory has spent the past two-and-a-half years planning the new space, which will join two other large-scale art installations in Willis Tower. Olafur Eliasson’s mosaic of curved metal tiles, Atmospheric Wave Wall, was unveiled on the building’s facade in January 2021, and Jacob Hashimoto’s In the Heart of this Infinite Particle of Galactic Dust, a hanging sculpture of paper kite discs hanging from the lobby ceiling.
The Color Factory also has spaces in New York, which opened in 2018, and Housto which followed in 2019. The original Color Factory was unveiled as a pop-up space in San Francisco in 2017, when the craze for immersive art experiences—or Big Fun Art—was still in its infancy. It was an instant hit, extending its planned one-month run to eight-and-a-half months.
“It blew up,” Malhotra said. “It broke the Eventbrite site we were using. The tickets were $30, and they were going on Craigslist for $300!”
In the five years since, the appetite for engaging art experiences has only grown.
“We stand out,” she said. “We’re different from conventional museums. Our experiences really engage all the senses. Smell, touch, taste, sight, sound—and it’s all connected to the art.”
See more works from the featured artists below.
Anne Patterson, Pathless Woods. Photo courtesy of the Color Factory.
Tomislav Topic, of the artist duo Quintessenz, Chang(n)ing Colorways. Photo courtesy of the Color Factory.
Liz West, An Additive Mix. Photo by Stephen Iles, courtesy of the Color Factory.
Liz West, Our Colour. Photo courtesy of the Color Factory.
Yuri Suzuki, The Welcome Chorus. Photo by Kate Radiomargate, courtesy of the Color Factory.
The Color Factory will be on view at Catalog at Willis Tower, 233 South Wacker Drive, Chicago, beginning in June 2022. 
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Dorothea Tanning is known as one of the great Surrealists, but a new show at New York’s Kasmin Gallery reveals a very different side of the artist.
In the artist’s biggest U.S. show in decades, the New York gallery has staged a remarkable showcase of Tanning’s work from between 1947 and 1987. Many of the dreamlike canvases, in washes of color and light, blur the boundaries of figuration and abstraction with fragmented imagery.
The show, titled “Dorothea Tanning: Doesn’t the Painting Say It All,” features works dating from 1947 to 1987. O`rganized in conjunction with the Dorothea Tanning Foundation, it brings together 19 loans, including the show-stopping 1962 canvas Aux environs de Paris (Paris and Vicinity), from the Whitney Museum of American Art.
As in many of the works on view, mysterious figures seem to shimmer in and out of focus in the painting. Hazy body parts emerge piecemeal from swaths of vibrant colors.
“Around 1955 my canvases literally splintered,” Tanning wrote in her memoir. “I broke the mirror, you might say.”
Dorothea Tanning, Aux environs de Paris (Paris and Vicinity), 1962. Collection of the Whitney Museum, New York. Photo courtesy of the Dorothea Tanning Foundation, ©2022 the Destina Foundation/Artists Rights Society, New York.
Yet Tanning, who died in 2012 at the age of 101, remains almost exclusively associated with Surrealism, and for works like her haunting Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, an unsettling interior scene of a girl whose hair stands on end, a life-sized doll in a state of undress, and a massive sunflower.
“Dorothea would say, ‘I am a Surrealist, but my art is not necessarily Surrealism,’” Kasmin Gallery director Emma Bowen told Artnet News. “What you think of with Surrealism are these dreamscapes that don’t really make any sense, that are highly figurative and highly rendered.”
But while Tanning’s best-known work tends to be from the 1940s, there’s little knowledge of the very different styles she was working in for most of her life. The show encapsulates her growth over the later years of her career, including after the death of artist Max Ernst, her husband of 30 years, in 1976.
“While she didn’t want to subscribe to specific genres of paintings, she kind of hits them all,” Bowen said. “There’s Expressionism and abstraction and figuration and Mannerism and Impressionism—she’s not doing any of those things specifically, but she’s pulling from them.”
See more works from the show below.
Dorothea Tanning, Pour Gustave l’adoré (1974). Photo by Diego Flores, courtesy of Kasmin Gallery, New York, ©2022 the Destina Foundation/Artists Rights Society, New York.
“Dorothea Tanning: Doesn’t the Painting Say It All” at Kasmin Gallery, New York. Photo by Diego Flores, courtesy of Kasmin Gallery, New York, ©2022 the Destina Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Dorothea Tanning, Far From (1964). Photo by Diego Flores, courtesy of Kasmin Gallery, New York, ©2022 the Destina Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Dorothea Tanning, Philosophie en plein air (1969). Photo by Diego Flores, courtesy of Kasmin Gallery, New York, ©2022 the Destina Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Dorothea Tanning, Portrait de famille (1977). Photo by Diego Flores, courtesy of Kasmin Gallery, New York, ©2022 the Destina Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
“Dorothea Tanning: Doesn’t the Painting Say It All” is on view at Kasmin Gallery, 509 West 27th Street, New York March 3–April 16, 2022.
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The Mauritshuis museum in the Hague is in full bloom. To celebrate the 200th anniversary of its opening to the public in 1822, the museum has been transformed into a living bouquet, inside and out.
A floral installation on the Dutch classical facade will be replenished throughout the exhibition’s run, and inside, an exhibition titled “In Full Bloom” features some of the most famous still-life works of the Dutch Golden Age. (As an added bonus, visitors with flower names—attention Lilys, Roses, and Violets—get free entrance to the exhibition.)
Originally built as a private residence, the two-story building has 16 intimately scaled jewel-box galleries, where the paintings of lush bouquets and plants are on view. The walls where the paintings are hung are also part of the show: they are covered in a sustainable material made from flower waste, imprinted with the flowers.
One of the flowers used is the Rembrandt tulip, bi-color flowers with a base color and accent “flames” of secondary hues. Those pigments give the exhibition walls their deep saturated color. At the end of the exhibition’s run, the wall panels will be turned into pieces of furniture available to purchase.
Ambrosius Bosschaert, Vase of Flowers in a Window (c. 1618). Courtesy of Mauritshuis, The Hague.
The interest in collecting and documenting exotic flowers and plants began around 1600, and the first botanical garden in the Netherlands, Hortus Botanicus, was established in the late 16th century. Many of the first canvases depicted “impossible” bouquets, juxtaposing flora that would not have ever bloomed at the same time, and arranging it in such a way that would surely have toppled the gilded vase holding the sumptuous bouquet as in Amborsius Bosschaert’s Vase of Flowers in a Window.
Throughout the century, artists became almost clinical in their treatment of each individual petal and leaf, though the compositions transitioned from impossibly staged bouquets to more messy and lifelike arrangements. Around 1630, a phenomenon known as tulipmania took hold of the Netherlands, as the price of tulip bulbs skyrocketed, converging with a skyrocketing price for bulbs, leading to mass speculation and, ultimately, a financial crisis.
There are darker themes embedded in the flora and fauna of still lifes. Rachel Ruysch, the daughter of botanist Frederik Ruysch and one of the most successful female artists in 17th-century Dutch circles, cast darker palls over her compositions, often populated by creeping insects. Though tulipmania had come and gone by 1700, Vase with Flowers includes one of the flamed tulips that had sense fallen out of fashion, as well as an iris, both well past their prime. Ruysch also included an empty stem in the center of the grouping, with its blossom severed, a not-so-subtle allusion to the ephemerality of the bouquet, and life. Like the memento mori, vanitas still-life paintings often held grim references to remind viewers of the preciousness, and precariousness, of beauty.
“In Full Bloom” at the Muritshuis is on view through June 6, 2022.
Rachel Ruysch, Vase with Flowers, (1700). Courtesy of the Mauritshuis, The Hague.
Anna Ruysch, Woodland Scene with Flowers, (1685-1687). Courtesy of the Hoogsteder Museum Foundation, The Hague.
Jan Brueghel I, Flower Still Life (c.1605). Courtesy of Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.
Maria Sibylla Merian, Metamorphosis of the Oak Eggar on a Sprig of Gooseberry Blossom. Courtesy of the Mauritschuis, The Hague.
Maria van Oosterwijck, Flowers in an Ivory Cup (c. 1670-1675). Courtesy of the Mauritshuis, The Hague.
Hans Bollongier, Still Life with Flowers (1639). Courtesy of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
Willem van Aelst, Flower Still Life with a Timepiece, (1663). Mauritshuis, The Hague.
Installation view, “In Full Bloom” at the Mauritshuis, The Hague.
Installation view, “In Full Bloom” at the Mauritshuis, The Hague.
Installation view, “In Full Bloom” at the Mauritshuis, The Hague.
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Ulysses Jenkins’s career arc takes one through the annals of Los Angeles art history, and back to the beginnings of video as a communications technology and a tool of artistic expression. 
From his interrogation of the relationship between the oppressive moving image media and Blackness in pieces such as Mass of Images (1978) and Two Zone Transfer (1979), to his nearly daylong happenings (Dream City from 1983), Jenkins gestures to the potential of video to facilitate experimentation and collective self-determination.  
Jenkins was born in 1945 and grew up near Central Avenue, the historic neighborhood in South Central Los Angeles known for hosting Black jazz pioneers at the Dunbar Hotel in the 1930s and 1940s. Later, he moved westward to the area around Culver City, where many movie studios were located.
Before moving into video and performance, Jenkins was a painter and muralist. He worked as part of an intergenerational team with painter and educator Judith F. Baca on the historic Great Wall of Los Angeles. Jenkins studied under painter and printmaker Charles White, assemblage artist Betye Saar, and media theorist Gene Youngblood in the late 1970s. Kerry James Marshall was his classmate and collaborator.
Jenkins contributed to an arts ecosystem based on collectivity by participating in the influential artist group Studio Z with artists David Hammons, Maren Hassinger, Senga Nengudi, John Outterbridge, and filmmaker Barbara McCullough in the 1980s, and founding the artist studio and performance group Othervisions. Jenkins also collaborated with the East L.A.-based Chicanx collective Asco members Harry Gamboa Jr., Juan Garza, Daniel Joseph Martinez, and Patssi Valdez, and with filmmaker and community educator Ben Caldwell as part of Electronic Cafe, a tele-collaborative network connecting informal public multimedia communications venues founded by Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz. 
Jenkins’s burgeoning interest in video began when he co-founded the media collective Video Venice News in 1972 and documented the Watts Summer Festival. 
Jenkins saw this as a way to employ video to counteract the negative images of Watts propagated by the mainstream media. Remnants of the Watts Festival (1972–73) is both a document of a community, and documentation of Black art. The video features on-the-street reporting and conversations with community members, as well as interviews with festival organizers like Claude Booker, curator of the art exhibition section, who gives a walkthrough of the exhibition, detailing works by John T. Riddle Jr., Betye Saar. and Spencer Cheney, the latter of whom was incarcerated at the time of the exhibition. 
Jenkins pushed his relationship to the video form further as a performer and artist with Inconsequential Doggerel (1981), a fever dream that deconstructs a standard narrative structure by doubling down on image and sonic repetition to disrupt linearity and subjectivity.
In a conversation on the occasion of his first major retrospective, “Ulysses Jenkins: Without Your Interpretation,” Jenkins told us about how then-new technology facilitated his shift into video and performance, the influence of films on this work, and his identification as a griot.
Ulysses Jenkins, Two Zone Transfer (1979), video still. Courtesy of the artist and Electronic Arts Intermix.
Can you talk about your move from muralism and painting to performance, video, and an interdisciplinary practice?
The early ‘70s and the late ‘60s were the beginning of the independent film movement. Because of that, I was influenced by two films—Easy Rider and Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song—and the type of social and political activities that were constructed in those films.
When I was painting a mural in Venice, Rat Trap, I got asked by a good friend of mine, Michael Zingale [if I would] be interested in his video workshop on the boardwalk in Venice. At first, I said, Well, what do I need that for? But my curiosity got the best of me, so I went down and started checking out that workshop and got something we figuratively called the “Video Jones”—getting attached to the equipment and technology. This was a brand new technology at that time, Sony’s Portapak. You could go to the workshop and check out the Portapak for a few days, and in those few days, you got really attached to your capability to record, erase, re-record, play back instantaneously. That was a marvel.
The work you did with Video Venice News and Remnants of the Watts Festival had a community-reporting orientation. But eventually, you really identified with, and identified yourself as, a griot character. What empowered you to take on that kind of role?
When I was at Otis [College of Art and Design] and I was in graduate school, the Caucasian grads kept telling me, “You’re not gonna be anything doing that Black shit.” And I said, What? I mean, how could you even say that? In an institution that has Charles White, that has Betye Saar. Myself, Kerry [James] Marshall, Greg Pitts, Ronnie Nichols—these are all the guys who are in Two Zone Transfer—were all studying with Charlie. And I’m seeing these two happened also at the time to be the only two African American art professors in L.A. A lot of people don’t quite understand the importance and the variance they brought, not only to the school, but to the Black community, and especially the Black arts community.
I didn’t realize at the time that I did Mass of Images, which was prior to Remnants of the Watts Festival and Two Zone Transfer, that I was actually already doing the griot. The griot was a storyteller for culture, for family events, religious events. In Africa, it was the person who came to the village and spread the news. So once I understood that, I realized that if I was going to keep doing performance, I needed a character. I needed a character that I could not only be proud of, but [that] could be representative. I think a lot of young artists may not understand that we have to separate ourselves, to an identity that we can feel proud of. That’s what being an actor really is. You’re portraying something that somebody else has written. I started to actually be able to construct a methodology that would work for me as an African American artist that I could claim as my own. I felt that I could “represent” as a griot.
Ulysses Jenkins, Just Another Rendering of the Same Old Problem (1979). Performance at Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Nancy Buchanan.
I want to take it back a bit to your time studying under Charles White and Betye Saar. In your memoir, Doggerel Life, you mention that Saar “took me through the depth of my cultural being.” You went to college as an undergrad in the South and then came back to California, which I imagine left an impression on you. Can you talk more about what you were learning and what you were dealing with internally?
[With Betye], the whole idea was, How do you perceive our culture from [an internal] point of view? Not many, if any, people were teaching that. To that extent, Betye was espousing that kind of expression in her work, and asking if you can identify with your own culture via the rituals that she’s presenting in her work. I think that’s the power you get spending time with her work. 
If you see the Remnants of the Watts Festival video, there’s a piece of Betye’s that’s in the exhibition section. That particular exhibition was at the time one of the few and only places where African American artists in L.A. could show their work to the public. I was fortunate enough to actually exhibit a painting of myself in the nude, standing in the middle of the road, giving the finger. My angry Black man thing. 
Well, we all have it in us.
My mom didn’t want it in her house.
Ulysses Jenkins, Peace and Anwar Sadat performance documentation (1985). Courtesy of the artist. Photo: BASIA
I love that there’s this theme of diasporic traveling in your work and the ways in which you actualize this traveling through space and time through the context of video, whether in performance-oriented works like the 24-hour happening Dream City and the resulting video of the same name, or in the Video Griots Trilogy, connecting the Black diaspora and Indigenous people. You use time and duration and the traversing of space in both literal and symbolic ways.
I appreciate your comment. First and foremost, people tend to think that we as Black people don’t have anything else to say but what’s happening in the hood. I wanted to break away from that particular notion or construct. So I started making those videos here in L.A., such as Self Divination. That theme continues through [the Video Griots Trilogy] with Mutual Native Duplex and The Nomadics.
In each one of those, I am also exploring different technical processes that go along with how I make those videos. Getting back to the griot concept, I’m extending that process in terms of the ways in which I can actually express the message of the griot. When you get to The Nomadics, the narrative is not spoken per se. There are songs, there are melodies, and music from those cultures. When you see The Nomadics, as the soundtrack changes, so do the cultures.
I’m at a point where I have to actually explain what I’m doing. People tend to just look at video like it’s television. How do you get people to try to venture further into what they’re looking at?
Ulysses Jenkins, Without Your Interpretation rehearsal documentation (1984). Courtesy of the artist.
I think it’s very clear that you’re playing with the mediation of images. Not just what they’re communicating, but how they’re communicating, as well as playing with form. But yes, in 2022, to watch this much video work is also an exercise in thinking about how image-making has impacted how we see the world and how that has evolved with the coming of the digital age.
Well, I get all of that from my painting background. I was fortunate enough to meet Nam June Paik. I had been studying his work as well. I always thought that Nam June was painting, but with video. When he started doing a lot of chroma key [green screen], that is what I was also trying to do, especially with Inconsequential Doggerel.
It is similar to the process of printmaking. I knew that if it were to last, the video would have to be copied. And in making a copy, you lose resolution. So I figured every time that video was reproduced, it would be a new video. Colors would change, electronics would also change. In a sense, what you see today is just a new version of that video, based on the utilization of the technology.
“Ulysses Jenkins: Without Your Interpretation“ is on view at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles until May 15, 2022.
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An immersive exhibition dedicated to the work of Taras Shevchenko (1814–1861), the Ukrainian poet and artist who is credited as a founding figure in the country’s cultural history, is coming to six North American cities.
Proceeds from the project, originally organized by Lighthouse Immersive, the company behind Immersive Van Gogh and Immersive Frida Kahlo, will be distributed to the Red Cross and National Bank of Ukraine Fund. Ticket buyers can choose which of the two organizations to direct their money toward.
The experience was first opened to the public in the port city of Odessa last year in a design managed by Lighthouse Immersive producer Valeriy Kostyuk in coordination with a team of Ukraine-based curators and consultants. Kostyuk also secured the cooperation of the National Museum of Taras Shevchenko in Kyiv, which shared images of the artist’s artworks for the exhibition.
“I have been moved and inspired beyond words by the endurance and resilience of the Ukrainian people in this moment and I am deeply thankful to the incredible team in Ukraine who partnered with me on this project, as well as to the producers at Lighthouse Immersive for standing with me in this moment,” Kostyuk said in a statement.
The show, which was visited in Odessa by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, will now be staged in Toronto, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Boston beginning March 15.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky visiting the immersive Taras Shevchenko experience in Odessa. Photo courtesy Carol Fox and Associates Public Relations.
Shevchenko, who was born into serfdom, was released in 1838 while completing his studies at the St. Petersburg Academy of Art, according to Lighthouse Immersive.
As a writer, painter, and spiritual advisor, he celebrated folk art and helped define Ukrainian identity when the nation was still part of the Russian Empire (1721–1917).
Andrii Bukvych, a Ukrainian diplomat stationed in Canada, said the Shevchenko experience was an opportunity to introduce North American audiences to the culture of his homeland.
“It is encouraging to see the art of one of Ukraine’s most prominent cultural icons being appreciated by audiences on the other side of the world,” Bukvych said in a statement. “It is important for the global community to know what is at stake, and what is under attack.”
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Ever wondered what it would be like to live the life of a spider? For eight minutes at a time, visitors to the Shed in Manhattan can climb onto a giant trapeze-like installation that simulates the vibrations of a spider spinning its web underneath you. A soundtrack plays in the background featuring the amplified sounds of spiders communicating with one another and moving in their surroundings.
The experience is the main feature of “Tomás Saraceno: Particular Matter(s),” the artist and activist’s largest U.S.-based exhibition, on view through April 17. The installation, commissioned by the Shed and titled Free the Air: How to hear the universe in a spider/web, extends across the entire 17,000-square-foot McCourt space, with other works by the artist taking over the second- and fourth-level galleries.
“At the heart of Tomás Saraceno’s work is a new way of inhabiting and experiencing the world, one that centers on an ecologically post-fossil fuels future,” Shed curator Emma Enderby said in a statement. “Tomás presents the necessity to reevaluate how we perceive and operate in the world and what to expect from it, which he achieves through interconnected, nonhierarchical collaborations across the human and nonhuman.”
Tomás Saraceno, We Do Not All Breathe the Same Air (detail), (2019–22). Artwork © Studio Tomás Saraceno. Photo: Nicholas Knight. Courtesy the artist; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery and Neugerriemschneider, Berlin. Photo courtesy the Shed.
The artist’s concerns with “activating ideas toward post-fossil fuel life on Earth” have led him to enact many long-term projects that are both a call to action for like-minded activists, and analyses of how different demographics are affected by climate change.
In the work We Do Not All Breathe the Same Air, Saraceno was inspired by medical ethicist Harriet A. Washington to conduct research on the uneven distribution of pollutants based on geopolitical affiliation and race. In the iteration of the work on view at the Shed, the artist collected filter tapes from regulation agencies in the U.S. to find the highest concentration of pollutants by region.
Described as “readymades created by the atmosphere itself,” the paper strips capture particulate matter, otherwise invisible, to help visualize the unseen forces in the atmosphere.
Another highlight is the DIT (Do-It-Together) sculpture Museo Aero Solar, a pulsing accumulation of plastic bags—a patchwork of capitalist consumption reclaimed and transformed into art. The sculpture, made of thousands of bags from more than 30 countries, floats in the air without fossil fuels, modeling a world that Saraceno is hoping to help build.
See more images of the exhibition below.
Tomas Saraceno. Photo: Robert Rieger.
Installing “Free the Air: How to hear the universe in a spider/web,” 2022. © Photography by Studio Tomás Saraceno, 2022.
Tomás Saraceno, A Thermodynamic Imaginary, (2020). Artwork © Studio Tomás Saraceno. Photo: Nicholas Knight. Courtesy the artist; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery and Neugerriemschneider.
Tomás Saraceno, Printed Matter(s), (2018). Artwork © Studio Tomás Saraceno. Photo: Nicholas Knight. Courtesy the artist; Andersen’s, Copenhagen; Ruth Benzacar, Buenos Aires; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York/Los Angeles; Pinksummer Contemporary Art, Genoa; Neugerriemschneider, Berlin. Courtesy the Shed.
: Tomás Saraceno, A Thermodynamic Imaginary, (2020).Artwork © Studio Tomás Saraceno. Photo: Nicholas Knight. Courtesy the artist; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York/Los Angeles; and Neugerriemschneider, Berlin.
Tomás Saraceno, Webs of At-tent(s)-ion (detail), (2020).e. Artwork © Studio Tomás Saraceno. Photo: Nicholas Knight. Courtesy the artist; spider/webs; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York/Los Angeles; and Neugerriemschneider, Berlin. Photo courtesy The Shed.
Tomás Saraceno, How to entangle the universe in a spider/web?, (2020). Artwork © Studio Tomás Saraceno. Photo: Nicholas Knight. Courtesy the artist and Aerocene Foundation; Andersen’s, Copenhagen; Ruth Benzacar, Buenos Aires; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York/Los Angeles; Pinksummer Contemporary Art, Genoa; and Neugerriemschneider, Berlin. Courtesy The Shed.
Tomás Saraceno, Free the Air: How to hear the universe in a spider/web (2022). Artwork © Studio Tomás Saraceno. Commissioned by The Shed. Photo: Nicholas Knight. Courtesy the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York/Los Angeles; Neugerriemschneider, Berlin; Andersen’s, Copenhagen; Ruth Benzacar, Buenos Aires; and Pinksummer Contemporary Art, Genoa. Courtesy The Shed.
Tomás Saraceno and Aerocene, Museo Aero Solar (detail), (2007-). Photo: Nicholas Knight. Courtesy AeroceneFoundation. Photo courtesy The Shed.
Tomás Saraceno, A Thermodynamic Imaginary, (2020).Artwork © Studio Tomás Saraceno. Photo: Nicholas Knight. Courtesy the artist; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York/Los Angeles; and Neugerriemschneider, Berlin.
Tomás Saraceno, Museo Aero Solar (2007-). Photo: Nicholas Knight, Courtesy Aerocene Foundation.
“Tomás Saraceno: Particular Matter(s)” is on view at the Shed, 545 West 30th Street, New York, February 11–April 17, 2022.
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The artists and curator responsible for the Russian pavilion at the Venice Biennale resigned over the weekend as the Russian Federation’s offensive into Ukraine continued for a fourth bloody day. The pavilion in the Giardini will now remain closed for the 2022 edition of the prestigious art world event.
Artists Alexandra Sukhareva and Kirill Savchenkov, and the pavilion’s curator, Raimundas Malašauskas, each announced their immediate resignation from the pavilion on social media on Sunday, February 27. The commissioning body behind the pavilion also acknowledged the move on its Instagram, confirming that the pavilion would remain closed for the 59th Venice Biennale, which opens in mid-April.
“There is nothing left to say, there is no place for art when civilians are dying under the fire of missiles, when citizens of Ukraine are hiding in shelters [and] when Russian protestors are getting silenced,” Savchenkov wrote in an emotional statement posted to Instagram. “As a Russian-born, I won’t be presenting my work at Venice.”
The news of their withdrawal comes just days after the team behind the Ukrainian pavilion also announced that they had to stop all work on their exhibition due to the invasion. “I would do the same in their place,” Pavlo Makov, the artist who was set to represent Ukraine, told Artnet News, in response to the Russians’ announcements.
On February 24, Russia invaded the neighboring European nation of Ukraine with a multidirectional attack across the country. The attack has spurred a refugee crisis, causing more than 500,000 people to flee the country in just four days. Those remaining in the country, and especially the major cities, are under constant threat of air strikes.
“This war is politically and emotionally unbearable,” wrote curator Malašauskas, a Lithuanian who was born in the Soviet Union, in his statement. He added that the “people from Russia should not be bullied or cast-away solely due to their country’s oppressive policies.”
On Monday, the Italian organization acknowledged the decision in a statement to the press: “La Biennale expresses its complete solidarity for this noble act of courage and stands beside the motivations that have led to this decision, which dramatically epitomizes the tragedy that has beset the entire population of Ukraine,” it said.
The biennale statement added a condemnation of “all those who use violence to prevent dialogue and peace.”
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Cash-strapped museums suffering from a drop in visitor numbers and income during the pandemic may have found a lifeline in the form of a new partnership with a tech company and a commercial gallery.
Four major Italian museums, including the Uffizi Galleries in Florence, have signed onto an ambitious project that will see them sell editioned digital replicas of priceless masterpieces from their collections as NFTs.
The project debuted at London’s Unit gallery, in an exhibition titled “Eternalizing Art History,” which displayed digital replicas of six famous Italian masterpieces by the likes of Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci. These authorized digital copies are shown on digital screens set within handmade replicas of the artworks’ original frames. Each of the digital works (dubbed DAWs by the tech company that made them, Cinello) has been certified on the Ethereum blockchain and can be traded as an NFT. They are available in editions of nine—a common edition size for sculptural works—that are priced at between €100,000 and €250,000 ($114,000–$284,000) apiece.
The participating museums—Milan’s Pinacoteca di Brera and Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Florence’s Uffizi Gallery, and the Complesso Monumentale della Pilotta di Parma—have signed off on the reproductions in exchange for 50 percent of the net revenue from the sale of the works, which will fund their art conservation programs. (The remaining 50 percent is split evenly between the gallery and its tech partner).
Leonardo da Vinci, Ritratto di Musico (Portrait of a Musician), conceived in 1490, digitized in 2021 DAW® (Digital Artwork). Image by Eva Herzog.
The move is part of a broader effort to tour works that cannot be moved due to their fragile state of conservation, and to show them to audiences experiencing more limited travel options. But, as professor Guido Guerzoni of Bocconi University said at the unveiling of the exhibition, the commercial endeavor is about more than just reaching new audiences.
“Museums need revolution if they want to survive,” he said. “In one year of the pandemic, European museums lost 70 percent of their visitors, and between 70 and 80 percent of their revenues. These numbers are impressive but the Italian situation was even worse. If we consider only state-owned museums [… ] this was 85 percent of visitors and almost 90 percent of their revenue.”
The professor added that while the pandemic forced museums to reconnect with local audiences, this strategy is not sustainable in the long run for museums like the Uffizi, which rely on revenue from international tourism. In the absence of physical visitors, museums rushed to deploy digital strategies to reach audiences—which themselves require a huge investment—but few of these digital initiatives have actually been successful revenue generators. Initiatives like this, which may have been regarded as “unthinkable” a few short years ago, are now being lauded as entrepreneurial solutions to the real world problems institutions are facing.
Joe Kennedy, director of Unit London, told Artnet News that there has been “overwhelming interest” in the project so far, with five sales confirmed, and a further 12-15 expected to be confirmed by next week.
Raffaello Santi (Raffaello Sanzio), Madonna del Cardellino (Madonna of the Goldfinch). Conceived in 1506, digitized in 2021 DAW® (Digital Artwork). Courtesy of Le Gallerie degli Uffizi (Florence) and Cinello.
Audiences at the opening were divided on a philosophical question: whether experiencing the digital reproductions could ever be considered a like-for-like experience with standing in front of their originals. “The DAWs are not intended to compete with the original paintings. It’s important to recognize that they are reproductions,” Unit’s Joe Kennedy told Artnet News, adding that their mobility allows them to reach new audiences and reveal the fascinating history and context of the original paintings. “They act as a storytelling tool which ensures these iconic works live on through new generations of art enthusiasts and only enhances the magical experience of viewing the original painting in person.”
But in an age where the metaverse and NFTs are in fashion, this view of the sacredness of the original—while perhaps shared by this reporter—might not be the only answer to this question. Panelist Serena Tabacchi, Cinello’s partnership manager, considered the experiences indistinguishable, and artist Misan Harriman postulated that getting up close and personal with the high quality copies could offer an “even better” experience for audiences. 
“I don’t know if the aura of the original is the same thing in our time,” art historian and Unesco Florence director Carlo Francini said, referencing Walter Benjamin’s seminal text The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, which argued that the “aura”—or the unique aesthetic authority of a work of art—is absent from a mechanically produced copy. “Maybe now we are totally evolved digital spirits.” 
Installation view, “Eternalizing Art History,” Unit London, Image by Eva Herzog.
Indeed, if the “Immersive Van Gogh” phenomenon has taught us nothing else it is that people—some of whom may never have an interest in seeing the originals—will flock, and pay well, to experience digital reproductions. To some of these audiences, the copies of masterpieces by Leonardo, Caravaggio, Rafael, Modigliani, and Francesco Hayez could hold just as much sway as their originals. 
While the initiative seems like a no-brainer for museums, which have educational missions, and bank accounts to fill, the idea raises an interesting quandary. Considering the fragile state of conservation of many of these masterpieces—cited as one of the motives for the project—it is very well possible that these digital copies could outlast their original counterparts. Which in turn begs the question of institutional responsibility concerning ownership of these priceless objects, and whether they should be so cavalier about them disappearing into private hands.
“Eternalizing Art History: From Da Vinci to Modigliani” is on view at Unit London through March 19. 
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