Shows & Exhibitions

More than two decades ago, when Tetsuya Ishida was still a young emerging artist in Japan, he was already dreaming big. He had his eyes set on New York, wishing that he would one day have his solo exhibition in the center of the contemporary art world. He was preparing himself, saving money from a part-time job and learning English when he was not painting.
Ishida’s dream, however, did not materialize prior to his untimely death in 2005 at the age of 31 due to a train accident. But that was not the end of his story: This fall, the late Japanese artist’s wish will come true next month when Gagosian opens “Tetsuya Ishida: My Anxious Self” at its 555 West 24th Street space in New York on September 12.
Featuring more than 80 works, the exhibition, curated by Cecilia Alemani, is set to be the artist’s largest show outside of his native Japan. The gallery is also now representing Ishida globally in association with the artist’s estate, Artnet News can exclusively reveal.
Tetsuya Ishida, Exercise Equipment (1997). © Tetsuya Ishida Estate. Photo: Rob McKeever. Courtesy Gagosian.
“In getting to know the family over the past several years, we learned that an exhibition in New York was Tetsuya’s greatest artistic ambition, and we are incredibly honored to present his paintings in New York on the 50th anniversary of his birth,” Nick Simunovic, senior director of Gagosian in Asia, told Artnet News.
Born in Yaizu, Japan, in 1973, Ishida grew up as part of the country’s “lost generation,” a term referring to those who graduated during the 1990s and 2000s in a period of recession. During his short-lived artist career, Ishida created about 200 works. The sentiment of loss and despair experienced among this generation during a decade marred by high unemployment and high suicide rates can be felt in Ishida’s poignant paintings and graphic works.
Often meticulously detailed, Ishida’s paintings depict expressionless or sad faces of young men, their human bodies merged with objects surrounding them, including plastic bags, airplanes, buildings, broken satellites, machine parts, and animals like crabs and seahorses. At times, his human figures appear nearly lifeless in his paintings, lying on a conveyor belt or arriving as packaged goods.
Critics in Japan relate Ishida’s work with the country’s dominating manga and anime culture, but at the same time, this “convergence” with objects can also be understood as a visualization of the psychological survival mechanism needed during a repressive time.
“At first, it was a self-portrait. I tried to make myself—my weak self, my pitiful self, my anxious self—into a joke or something funny that could be laughed at… It was sometimes seen as a parody or satire referring to contemporary people. As I continued to think about this, I expanded it to include consumers, city-dwellers, workers, and the Japanese people,” the artist was quoted in a statement.
Ishida’s works were exhibited and collected in some parts of Asia but they did not get to travel beyond the region until November 2013, when Gagosian held a solo exhibition of the artist at its Hong Kong space, the artist’s first outside of Japan.
Tetsuya Ishida c. 1995 © Tetsuya Ishida Estate. Courtesy the artist and Gagosian
Recalling the organization of the exhibition, Simunovic, who was leading the gallery’s Hong Kong operation at the time, was first introduced to the artist’s enigmatic paintings through a Hong Kong collector more than 12 years ago. “I was immediately taken with the work and showed it to Larry [Gagosian], who was equally captivated,” Simunovic said. “We both agreed that it would be interesting to present an exhibition and, as we didn’t know the family at the time, we began making plans to mount a show of work from the secondary market. We secured great loans from collectors across Asia.”
The 2013 Hong Kong exhibition became a turning point for Ishida’s art. Jessica Morgan, a curator at the Tate at the time, saw the show and subsequently included the artist in the 2014 edition of Gwangju Biennale, when she served as its artistic director. “Okwui Enwezor, who was on the Gwangju jury at the time, was fascinated by Ishida and the power of his work, and, in turn, featured the artist in his exhibition for the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015,” Simunovic noted. And then, Reina Sofia’s curatorial team saw the Venice show and subsequently offered Ishida’s family a solo show at the museum in Madrid in 2019.
In between, the artist’s relatives became aware of the growing reputation of his work and reached out to Simunovic. “We slowly began building a relationship and we were given works for sale, which we placed in esteemed collections around the world,” he said.
Tetsuya Ishida, Refuel Meal (1996) © Tetsuya Ishida Estate. Courtesy the artist, Shizuoka Prefectural Museum of Art, and Gagosian.
The gallery and the artist’s family were initially working on a show in New York, which was stalled due to the Covid-19 lockdowns. “We believe in his work and feel it’s extremely important that it be seen and understood in the West,” Simunovic said. The 80 works to be featured in the New York show represent nearly half of Ishida’s entire body of work. Some of them are on loan from the collection of the Shizuoka Prefectural Museum of Art, which is located in the artist’s home town in Japan, as well as other private collections. Others are from the estate and will be available for sale, but Simunovic declined to reveal exactly how many works and the price range.
Simunovic is confident the show will resonate with an audience in the West. Ishida’s art, which addresses the themes of disconnection, alienation, and despair, are universal and highly relevant to the current times, he added.
“We live in a pluralistic art world where there are countless western collectors who enjoy collecting Asian contemporary art, just as there are countless Asian collectors who are avidly collecting western contemporary art,” he said.

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Whether or not you know the life and work German-Venezuelan artist Gego (1912–1994) may depend on where in the world you call home. The deeply influential artist—best known for her conceptual and elegant wire sculptures—has routinely been hailed as one of the most influential figures of post-war Latin American art. In the United States, particularly, however, her recognition has been slow-coming when compared to the fame of her contemporaries. “Gego: Measuring Infinity” at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the artist’s first major museum retrospective in the United States since 2005, aims to rectify this discrepancy and introduce Gego’s work to a broader American audience. On view through September 10, 2023, the exhibition presents a simultaneously chronological and thematic survey of her work and practice, offering insight into her distinctive approach to abstraction and influential artistic innovation.
Installation view of “Gego: Measuring Infinity” (2023). Photo: David Heald. © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York.

Who was Gego?
Born Gertrude Louise Goldschmidt to a secular Jewish family in Hamburg, Germany, in 1912, Gego (a sobriquet used throughout her career using the first two letters of her first and last name) did not begin her career as an artist. She studied at the University at Stuttgart (formerly the Technische Hochschule Stuttgart) under German architect Paul Bonatz, earning a degree in architecture and engineering in 1938. While at university, she was exposed to a variety of art and design movements and trends including those produced by the Staatliches Bauhaus, the leading school and eponymous architectural style that flourished in the interwar period.
During this time, Gego was witness to the Nazi party’s ascension to power, the dramatic rise of antisemitism, and Adolf Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor of Germany. Increasingly throughout the 1930s, anti-Jewish laws and legislative persecution of Jews made remaining in Germany untenable. Gego’s German citizenship was nullified in 1935, and the same year as she graduated the German Reich Ministry of Interior began formally restricting the freedom of movement of Jewish people. Compelled to leave the country, many of Gego’s family members were able to flee to England, however, she was unable to obtain an English visa. Instead, in 1939, she immigrated to Venezuela, where she established herself in the capital city of Caracas.
Unfamiliar with the country, culture, and language, coupled with the fact that she was a woman and nonnational, Gego’s opportunities were often few and far between. Regardless, she was able to use her educational background to undertake work as a freelance architect and designer for several firms. At one such firm in 1940, she met urban planner Ernst Gunz. The pair were married that same year, and they went on to have two children. For a brief period, they operated a furniture studio and shop for which Gego worked as a designer. In 1948, however, Gego returned to working on architectural projects, and in 1951 the couple separated. The following year, Gego met graphic designer Gerd Leufert, with whom she would spend the rest of her life. Coinciding with this, Gego left her architecture practice behind and devoted herself to making art.
Installation view of “Gego: Measuring Infinity” (2023). Photo: David Heald. © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York.

Line, Form, and Space
Undoubtedly greatly influenced by her professional and educational background in architecture, Gego’s oeuvre is an enduring testament to her exploration and mastery of line, form, and space. Some of the artist’s earliest works, many of which took inspiration from the natural landscape of Venezuela, illustrate her immediate interest in the formal elements of artmaking and familiarity with prevailing artistic trends of the time, including geometric abstraction. Featured on the first ramp of the Guggenheim exhibition, her watercolor, tempera, and gouache paintings feature vibrant, lush vignettes and her first experimentations with variable composition techniques. Also included are early prints and ink drawings, showing a burgeoning fascination with the possibilities of line—predecessors to the three-dimensional works she commenced making in 1956.
Compared to the airy, kinetic sculptures Gego later became recognized for, the early series of sculptures from the 1950s and ’60s on view are visually (and presumably literally) heavy. Largely comprised of painted iron rods and bars, these early sculptures exemplify the artist’s preoccupation with the interaction of line and space, and an ongoing investigation into the possibilities of different geometric forms. Shapes ranging from squares to tetrahedra, comprised of repeating metal lines, overlap, merge, and stagger and space, offering a different visual understanding of composition based on perspective.
Both sculpture and printmaking remained stalwart facets of Gego’s practice, and the evolution of her work can be traced through her use of line. Initially favoring parallel lines in repetition, as she further explored their potential for interacting with space and form, her lines began to intersect and be overlaid in increasingly complex manners—both in her two- and three-dimensional work.
Gego (Gertrud Goldschmidt), Sin título (Tamarind 1848B) (Untitled [Tamarind 1848B]), 1966. Colección Fundación Gego, Caracas. © Fundación Gego. Photo: Carlos Germán Rojas. Courtesy of Archivo Fundación Gego.

Tamarind Studio, “Drawing Without Paper,” and “Reticulárea”
In both 1963 and 1966, Gego was invited to the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles, where she assumed a comprehensive exploration of the print medium, which resulted in some of her most significant print works. Examples of her experiments into various printmaking techniques, including engraving, etching, lithography, and even embossing, highlight her mastery, as well as exhibit her refined and disciplined approach to color and composition. The Tamarind period prints further emphasize her meticulous investigations into line and shape within the confines of the medium.
In 1969, there was a pivotal shift in Gego’s work, when she moved away from parallel lines to what she termed “reticuláreas,” reticular shapes that resembled nets or structures comprised of nets in her two-dimensional work. This shift soon appeared in her sculptural work as well and subsequently led her to use lighter, more easily manipulated materials such as wire (rather than iron or steel rods or bars). The change in approach is made manifest in pieces from her largest sculpture series, produced between 1976 and 1988, “Dibujos sin papel (Drawings Without Paper).” Here, wire took the place of drawn line, and with each handwoven sculpture hung in proximity from a wall, the wire resembles graphite or ink, and further light cast on the works casts shadows that add another dimension to the work. In a piece from 1985 within the Guggenheim exhibition, the addition of a thin line of red along the edge of the wire grid brings to mind standard graph paper, with a warped addition of gridded wire mimicking a volumetric drawing.
Gego (Gertrud Goldschmidt), Dibujo sin papel (Drawing without Paper) (1985). Private collection. Photo: Barbara Brändli. © Fundación Gego.
Foremost in her use of “reticuláreas,” her hanging sculptures made up of interwoven and repeated webs of wire capture her pursuit of line, form, and space most succinctly, and are widely considered Gego’s most famous works. From comparatively simple and petite constructions to large scale, room-spanning installations, these sculptures have a penchant for moving with the ambient air within the spaces they are exhibited. Within Gego’s body of “reticuláreas” sculptures, the artist created various individual series inspired by nature—recalling the influence of nature seen in her earliest paintings—such as Troncos (Trunks) and Bichos (bugs).
Gego (Gertrude Goldschmidt), Tronco n°5 (Trunk No. 5) (1976). Private collection. © Fundación Gego. Photo: Tomas R. DuBrock. Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

Gego’s Enduring Legacy
Considering Gego’s work and practice within the art historical canon, her career and practice can be recognized as an indispensable facet of 20th-century art. Though just over a decade his junior, her work and innovation within the realm of kinetic art are in many ways a formal counterpart to and furtherance of Alexander Calder’s iconic hanging mobiles. Within the context of 20th-century South American art, her experimentations with kinetic sculpture can be seen echoed in work as Brazillian artist Lygia Clark’s reticulated “Bicho (Critter),” or fellow Venezuelan artist Jesús Rafael Soto and Alejandro Otero, emphasizing the importance of the formal aims she pursued in her practice. Though she received widespread acclaim in her lifetime and has maintained name recognition throughout much of the world, her life and oeuvre are primed for renewed recognition in the United States.
“Gego: Measuring Infinity” is on view at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum through September 10, 2023.
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After years of studying public sculptures across the U.S. to better understand how these monuments tell the story of our nation’s history, Monument Lab, a public art nonprofit based in Philadelphia, has just erected six of its own on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.
Titled “Pulling Together,” the temporary exhibition, curated by Monument Lab’s Paul Farber and Rutgers University–Newark professor Salamishah Tillet, features new work by Derrick Adams, Wendy Red Star, Paul Ramírez Jonas, Vanessa German, Tiffany Chung, and Ashon T. Crawley.
It is the first curated outdoor exhibition on the mall—and the first phase of the organization’s new public art initiative “Beyond Granite,” which hopes to bring more inclusive, equitable, and representative commemorative artworks to the heart of the capitol.
“The mall remains a symbol of our Democratic ideals as a nation. ‘Beyond Granite: Pulling Together’ does not shy away from those aspects in our history that can be very hurtful to Americans. We must tell those untold stories fiercely,” Charles Sams, director of National Park Service, said at the exhibition’s unveiling. “We are only stronger by our diversity. Without it, ecosystems collapse.”
Vanessa German, Of Thee We Sing (2023) in the Monument Lab’s exhibition “Beyond Granite: Pulling Together” on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. (detail). Photo by AJ Mitchell, courtesy of Monument Lab.
Founded in 2012 by Farber and Ken Lum, Monuments Lab rose to new prominence in the wake of the George Floyd protests, which saw activists vandalize and forcibly remove Confederate monuments. The question of what to do with public memorials with problematic histories sparked a nationwide debate and numerous court battles—and also prompted a wider reevaluation of who is honored in town squares across the country.
Monument Lab was the inaugural recipient for the Mellon Foundation’s “Monuments Project,” a $250 million campaign to change the face of American monuments.
Paul Ramírez Jonas, Let Freedom Ring (2023) in the Monument Lab’s exhibition “Beyond Granite: Pulling Together” on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. (detail). Photo by AJ Mitchell, courtesy of Monument Lab.
The philanthropic organization’s $4 million research grant allowed Monument Lab to conduct a comprehensive audit of national, state, and local monuments in the U.S. What it found was of the 50 most-memorialized figures, 42 were white men, and 25 owned slaves.
In organizing “Pulling Together,” Farber and Tillet aimed to create monuments that would honor the untold stories that have been left out of America’s public landscapes, showcasing them alongside famed memorials to the Founding Fathers and those who have fought on behalf of America.
The artist selected for the project represent a diverse group—three Black, one Latino, one Asian, one Native American, and half of them women.
Vanessa German, Of Thee We Sing (2023) in the Monument Lab’s exhibition “Beyond Granite: Pulling Together” on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Photo by AJ Mitchell, courtesy of Monument Lab.
At the Lincoln Memorial, German pays homage to the renowned Black singer Marian Anderson, who famously performed in concert at the monument, back in 1939, when the nation’s capitol was still segregated. The sculpture incorporates historical photographs of the event, as well as steel Sandhof lilies, native to Africa, and blue bottles that make up the singer’s skirt, as a reference to their spiritual significance to enslaved Africans who lived on the Gullah in the Lowcountry.
Anderson was also the point of inspiration for Jonas, who has created a carillon sculpture titled Let Freedom Ring with 32 automated bells that play “My Country ‘Tis of Thee”—part of the set list for her performance. The public is invited to ring a 600-pound bell beneath the tower to sound the final note in the song.
Paul Ramírez Jonas, Let Freedom Ring (2023) in the Monument Lab’s exhibition “Beyond Granite: Pulling Together” on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Photo by Paul Ramírez Jonas.
Another interactive project is Adams’s America’s Playground: DC, a functional children’s jungle gym also meant to recall the history of segregation. One half of the piece is brightly colored, the other in shades of gray, bisected by a historical photograph of Black and white children playing together at a D.C. playground just days after the U.S. Supreme Court ruling Bolling v. Sharpe declared it unconstitutional to segregate D.C. schools.
For Adams, installing a playground at the heart of U.S. politics is also symbolic. “It’s a place where you have to learn negotiation,” he told the Washington Post. “It’s a place where you have to learn to take turns. It’s a place where you understand leadership, and take risks.”
Derrick Adams, America’s Playground (2023) in the Monument Lab’s exhibition “Beyond Granite: Pulling Together” on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Photo by Florie Hutchinson.
For the Living, Tiffany Chung’s installation next to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, is a monumental world map dedicated to Southeast Asian immigrants and refugees, tracing their diaspora due to the war.
Red Star’s piece, The Soil You See…, draws a parallel between the Apsáalooke (Crow) Nation chiefs who signed U.S. government treaties and the 56 signatories of the Declaration of Independence, by placing a large sculpture of a thumbprint on which she’s inscribed the names of those Indigenous leaders near the mall’s Declaration of Independence Memorial.
Tiffany Chung, For the Living (2023) in the Monument Lab’s exhibition “Beyond Granite: Pulling Together” on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Photo by AJ Mitchell, courtesy of Monument Lab.
“What I noticed is that there really isn’t any color represented on the Mall,” the artist told the Post. “That was surprising to me. Everything is, like, the color of the natural materials the monuments are made of. So my thumbprint is red.”
Finally, there is Crawley’s HOMEGOING, an audiovisual memorial to the victims of the AIDS crisis located on the site of the first display of the AIDS Memorial Quilt in 1987. A writer and musician, the artist has installed speakers amid a series of small stages that play a three-movement composition that incorporates music from Black churches, as a tribute to Black queer musicians, as well as a reading of the names of some of those who have died from AIDS.
Ashon T. Crawley, Homegoing (2023) during installation for the Monument Lab’s exhibition “Beyond Granite: Pulling Together” on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. (detail). Photo by AJ Mitchell, courtesy of Monument Lab.
The exhibition, which runs for a month, is a collaboration between the National Capital Planning Commission and the Trust for the National Mall.
“Beyond Granite: Pulling Together” is on view at various locations on the National Mall, Washington, D.C., August 18–September 18, 2023. 
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As Beatlemania spread across the globe during the early 1960s, the Beatles found themselves in a whirlwind of flashing cameras and suddenly their faces were everywhere. Until now, however, we have relatively little idea of what the experience was like from their perspective. For the first time, Paul McCartney is showing the public over 250 photographs that he took between November 1963 to February 1964 in a show that has inaugurated the temporary exhibition galleries at the newly renovated National Portrait Gallery.
Most of the photographs are either of McCartney himself or his bandmates John Lennon, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr, and were taken at a time when the Beatles shot to fame in the United States. In one series, they are shown rehearsing for a pivotal TV appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964 that was watched by an audience of 73 million. That same month, frenzied fans are caught on camera chasing the group’s car down West 58th Street in New York and McCartney also recorded a series of personal mementos from a beach holiday in Miami.
“Looking at these photos now, decades after they were taken, I find there’s a sort of innocence about them,” said McCartney in a press statement. “Everything was new to us at this point. But I like to think I wouldn’t take them any differently today. They now bring back so many stories, a flood of special memories, which is one of the many reasons I love them all, and know that they will always fire my imagination.”
Many of the photographs were recently printed for the first time, having been left as negatives in McCartney’s personal archive and only rediscovered by the musician in 2020. Presented alongside McCartney’s own reflections, they offer a fresh behind-the-scenes lens on the famous story of how four young men from Liverpool became global superstars and redefined the meaning of celebrity for the modern era.
“Paul McCartney Photographs 1963-64: Eyes of the Storm” runs through October 1 before traveling across the pond to the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia, where it will run from December 5, 2023, to April 7, 2024. A book of photographs paired with McCartney’s recollections from the period has also been published by Penguin Press in the U.K. and W.W. Norton in the U.S.
Check out images from the exhibition below.
Paul McCartney, George looking young, handsome and relaxed. Living the life. Miami Beach, February 1964 (1964). Photo: © 1964 Paul McCartney.
A visitor looks at photographs taken by Paul McCartney in Miami. Photo: © National Portrait Gallery, London.
Paul McCartney, John and George, Paris. 1964 Photo: © 1964 Paul McCartney.
A visitor looks at photographs taken by Paul McCartney while rehearsing for The Ed Sullivan Show. Photo: © National Portrait Gallery, London.
Paul McCartney, Self-portraits in a mirror, Paris, 1964 (1964). Photo: © 1964 Paul McCartney.
“Paul McCartney Photographs 1963-64: Eyes of the Storm” at the National Portrait Gallery. Photo: © National Portrait Gallery, London.
Paul McCartney, Photographers, Central Park, New York, February 1964 (1964). Photo: © 1964 Paul McCartney.
A visitor to the National Portrait Gallery looks at photographs taken by Paul McCartney in Paris, 1963-64. Photo: © National Portrait Gallery, London.
Paul McCartney, The crowds chasing us in A Hard Day’s Night were based on moments like this. Taken out of the back of our car on West Fifty-Eight, crossing the Avenue of the Americas. New York, February 1964 (1964). Photo: © 1964 Paul McCartney.
“Paul McCartney Photographs 1963-64: Eyes of the Storm” at the National Portrait Gallery. Photo: © National Portrait Gallery, London.
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It’s an unlikely scenario for any aspiring artist: an artist who has never publicly displayed his paintings and who turns down offers to buy his works, has a dealer proactively visit his studio out of curiosity. (I personally don’t know of an art-world journalist or veteran who has not fielded multiple artists’ requests about getting their foot in the door of a New York gallery.)
But such was the case for Abbott Stillman, a successful New York real estate developer who first took up a paintbrush nearly three decades ago, initially creating representational work—much of it still lifes and portraits—before eventually switching to abstract painting.
In a phone interview with Artnet News, Stillman explained the process of channeling his creativity. “I built a career as a real estate developer and one of the things that’s important in that field, is there are times when it makes no sense to develop buildings. I thought, if I don’t find some other way of being creative, I’m going to do something stupid and create a building when the market doesn’t really need it. So I started painting,” he said.
Abbott Stillman. Photo: Steve Benisty.
Though he never took formal art classes, Stillman did attend graduate school at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he took architecture and city planning courses. “I guess that was some type of training,” he noted.
Over the years, he only showed his work to a small handful of family and friends, and, despite enthusiastic responses, declined to share it with a wider audience.
That changed recently when Soho dealer Georges Berges visited Stillman’s studio in Scarsdale, New York. Now, Stillman’s work (roughly half a dozen pieces) is a major component of the gallery’s summer group show, opening August 17, aptly titled “Urban Summer.” Stillman said that in addition to being busy, he just wasn’t all that familiar with the art world but that Berges “struck the right note” when they met.
Stillman has built several monumental buildings in New York City such as the one-million-square-foot Juilliard complex and the landmark Schumacher building on Bleecker Street. He will be rebuilding the Times Square Theater, a project estimated at $100 million.
LowRez HiFi, Full-scale LED matrices in glass vitrines (Lo-Rez) and a grove of touch-sensitive stalks (Hi Fi) Cooper Hewitt (Smithsonian) Museum in collaboration with Höweler + Yoon Architecture. Photo: Alan Karchmer.
Though the Georges Beres group show marks his first foray into the gallery world, his real estate endeavors brought him into the realm of public art when he collaborated on an installation for a building he was developing in 2006.
Low Rez/Hi Fi combined a sound-and-light grove and LED-based building signage. It was selected by the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum as one of the best designs of any kind in the U.S. and displayed at its 2007 Triennial. The work was later displayed at both the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston and the Contemporary Art Museum in Houston.
As for his love of art, Stillman credits his mother with frequent—he calls them “insistent”—visits to the Metropolitan Museum of Art as a child, where she would create games and challenges such as by asking him: “How fast can you find paintings that combine red and blue?”
“Little by little, I learned to see. That was really what got me interested in art,” he said.
Abbott Stillman, Summer Meander (2023). Photo: Steve Benisty
And now that his work is on view at a gallery, there is no more room for excuses when it comes to sales. In fact, several works are already pre-sold with prices ranging from about $100,00 to $200,000, an impressive level for an artist who has never technically engaged with the market before.
“I realize I’m very fortunate,” said Stillman. “For years, friends kept saying, ‘You’ve got to sell me one of your paintings’ and I said, ‘Well, they’re not for sale.’ When they found out I was doing this show, they said, ‘Well, now you can’t say no because you’re a professional artist.’”
Stillman pointed out that what’s important to him and is perhaps most interesting about his artwork: “I’ve worked a little bit against the Zeitgeist because I’m not an angry person. I’m actually quite grateful for my life. I’ve had a wonderful, fortunate life. A lot of what seems to be au courant is confrontational and questioning of the culture. I’ve been around long enough that I think I’ve reached the point where I said to myself: ‘We’re here for a relatively short time between bouts of being stardust eternally and I’m pretty grateful for this life.’ I think most people ought to be grateful for their lives. I really try to create a sense of harmony and a little bit of quietude in my painting.”
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After the U.S. Navy forced Japan to forgo two-and-a-half centuries of relative isolation in 1853, porcelain, lacquerware, and woodblock prints began flooding westward, launching the Japonisme aesthetic movement. In the 20th century, another Japanese export seized the global imagination: Pokémon, a wildly disparate collection of pocket creatures that spawned a multibillion-dollar empire.
An exhibition at Japan House Los Angeles merges these cultural phenomena, colliding traditional and modern, kitsch and refined. “Pokémon X Kogei,” which runs through early 2024, presents interpretations of the fantastical creatures by 20 Japanese artists spanning pottery, metalwork, textiles, and mixed media.
The show, which debuted at Japan’s National Crafts Museum in Ishikawa this spring, offers a poetic rather than a historical explanation for comingling the two worlds. The elements into which the Pokémon are organized, such as fire, water, ground, and electric (there are 18 in total), are reflected in the processes of art making. A vase, for instance, is formed from ground and water, and then fired in an electric kiln. Japan House also likens the endeavor of Pokémon trainers in rearing their digital pets to the process of artisans learning their craft.
Sadamasa Imai, Venusaur (2022). Photo: Taku Saiki
“Pokémon X Kogei” is organized into three sections, each of which represents a different artistic approach to playing with the Pokémon universe.
In Appearance, artists turn the digital physical, recreating the form and personality of Pokémon with attention paid to their skin, fur, and movement. Sadamasa Imai’s cranky-looking Venusaur, for instance, hones in on the rugged texture of its skin and the heaviness of its gait.
With Stories, the artists inhabit the world of the Pokémon, offering a more abstract take on their lives and journeys. One offering comes from textile designer Reiko Sudo, who explores the franchise’s most iconic creature, Pikachu, dangling from an amber forest of lace that plays with traditional paper-cutting.
Taiichiro Yoshida, Jolteon (2022). Photo: Taku Saiki.
The final section, Life, brings Pokémon into the everyday objects—something that may already be a reality for many of the visitors. The works here, admittedly, are rather more elevated than a mug plastered with Squirtle. Keiko Masumoto, for example, used a wood-fired kiln, the likes of which originate from the 12th century, to create a range of fire element Pokémon including Charizard and Vulpix.
“We’re excited to present this unique collaboration between one of the biggest entertainment properties originating in Japan and some of the country’s most talented craft artists,” Japan House Los Angeles’ president Yuko Kaifu said. “It will art enthusiasts and gamers alike.”
For a franchise born in the 1990s and now successfully embraced by a new generation, chances are Kaifu’s right.
“Pokémon X Kogei” is on view at Japan House Los Angeles, 6801 Hollywood Blvd, Los Angeles, from July 25, 2023 to January 7, 2024.

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A portrait of Harry Styles by the artist David Hockney has been unveiled ahead of a major exhibition of new paintings by the British artist opening at the National Portrait Gallery in London this fall.
The pop star is recognizably himself in the work, with his hair swept back, donning a red-and-yellow striped cardigan and a string of pearls around his neck. The portrait was started in May 2022, when Styles visited David Hockney at his studio in Normandy, France.
“David Hockney has been reinventing the way we look at the world for decades,” Styles told Vogue. “It was a complete privilege to be painted by him.”
David Hockney, Harry Styles, May 31st 2022. Photo: Jonathan Wilkinson, © David Hockney.
Styles’s likeness of is one of more than 33 new works that were completed between 2021 and 2022, and will appear in the upcoming Hockney exhibition, which opens on November 2. Titled “David Hockney: Drawing from Life,” the show is an updated version of an earlier presentation of portraits by Hockney that opened at the National Portrait Gallery just weeks before lockdown in 2020. This show included drawings in a range of media, from pencil and ink to watercolor and the iPad, which Hockney famously pioneered as a new tool for making art.
Since then, the National Portrait Gallery has undergone a major refurbishment and rehang, and the moment has finally arrived to give David Hockney his due. Unlike the 20-day run of the ill-fated original show, the restaged, expanded show will remain open until January 21, 2024. Tickets went on sale today.
David Hockney, Self Portrait, 22nd November 2021. Photo: Jonathan Wilkinson, © David Hockney.
With the latest additions from 2021 and 2022, the bumper exhibition now boasts around 160 works, both new and old. Visitors attracted by the star appeal of Styles will also be moved by Hockney’s intimate portrayals of friends, like the textile designer Celia Birtwell, family members, including the artist’s mother and his partner Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima, and a new self-portrait of Hockney himself in a flat cap and tweed suit.
Other highlights include pencil drawings made in Paris in the early 1970s, a selection of self-portraits from the 1980s, and My Parents and Myself, a 1975 group portrait that Hockney abandoned, greatly upsetting his parents. He later produced another version, My Parents (1977), which belongs to the Tate, but the lesser known, rejected work remained in hiding until it was debuted to the public for the first time during the exhibition’s original 2020 run.

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In 2021, as the world slowly emerged from pandemic lockdown, perhaps the biggest cultural phenomena to rise from the ashes of COVID-19 was the craze for digitally animated projected light shows based on masterpieces by art-historical greats such as Frida Kahlo, Gustav Klimt, Claude Monet, and, of course, Vincent van Gogh.
Now, Lighthouse Immersive Inc., the Toronto-based company behind the best-known exhibition in the genre—”Immersive Van Gogh” of Emily in Paris-fame—has filed for Chapter 15 bankruptcy in Delaware, Bloomberg reports. The July 28 filing is a strategy to protect the company’s U.S. assets during insolvency proceedings in Ontario.
“Immersive Van Gogh” touched down in New York in June 2021 after runs in Paris, Chicago, and Toronto. Originally designed by Massimiliano Siccardi with an original score from Italian composer Luca Longobardi, the New York production also brought on Broadway producer David Korins, who staged the original Hamilton, to add some extra sparkle to the Starry Night.
Its impressive production values and successful marketing campaign (including weed nights) saw it sell 250,000 advance tickets as exhibitions proliferated across the U.S. and overseas. A contestant on The Bachelor even called a visit to the Los Angeles location “the most romantic moment of my life.”
“Immersive Van Gogh” in Chicago. Photo courtesy of Lighthouse Immersive.
By May 2022, there were over five million tickets sold—or one for every 90 Americans. Today, there are permanent Lighthouse Art Space venues in Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Columbus, Denver, Detroit, Kansas City, Las Vegas, Minneapolis, Nashville, San Antonio, and Toronto.
The success of “Immersive Van Gogh” spawned many, many imitators eager to stage easily replicable exhibitions with low insurance premiums compared to traditional art shows physically including high-value canvases.
With at least five competing Van Gogh outfits, the New York Better Business Bureau even went so far as to issue a warning to consumers that Fever’s “Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience” was not the “Immersive Van Gogh” light show featured on the popular Netflix series starring Lily Collins.
In a scene from episode five, season one of Emily In Paris, (left to right) Lily Collins as Emily and Lucas Bravo as Gabriel visit “Immersive Van Gogh.” Photo by Stephanie Branch Netflix © 2020
And then there were the knock-offs for other artists—including living master David Hockney, whose immersive animated light show “Bigger and Closer” got mixed reviews when it opened in February. Lighthouse alone has also staged productions of “Immersive Frida Kahlo” (with the artist’s family’s blessing), “Immersive Monet and the Impressionists,” “Immersive Vatican,” and “Immersive Shevchenko,” featuring Ukrainian artist Taras Shevchenko.
Lighthouse’s website boasts sales of over seven million tickets in 21 North American cities. But over the last two years, demand for so-called “immersive” digital projections of beloved artworks seems to have waned, perhaps due to an over-saturation of the market.
“Immersive Van Gogh” is still on view in Vegas (through January 7, 2024), Detroit (through October 1), Toronto (through October 29), and Chicago, where it is part of a two-for-one showing with “Mozart Immersive” (through September 4). There are currently no sold-out dates at any of the venues. The company’s only other current offering is “Immersive Disney Animation,” now on view in 12 cities.
A credit for Lighthouse Immersive, the company behind “Immersive Van Gogh,” within the experience. Photo by Ben Davis.
There also also plenty of tickets available to the immersive Van Gogh show that reopened July 1 at the Indianapolis Museum of Art Galleries at Newfields. In 2020, the institution announced controversial plans to replace its contemporary art floor with a permanent immersive digital art gallery called the Lume. It launched, of course, with the company’s homage to the famous Dutch Postimpressionist, the touring version of which is called “Van Gogh Alive.”
While there aren’t any Van Gogh immersive experiences on view in New York City, “Beyond Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience” opened in Westbury, Long Island, in March, and is on view through September 4. (Once again, there appears to be no shortage of available tickets at the moment.)
Tickets to Lighthouse Immersive exhibitions, reports ARTnews, started at $22 to $37.
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