Art

In Rome, Villa Medici is playing host to a new elemental exploration. The exhibition, titled THE SIREN SONG, examines the ever-shifting essence of water through the lens of around 30 contemporary artists from around the globe. In a storm of seas, clouds, dew and tears, the show embarks on water’s profound beauty and urges reflection on its place in our lives.At the heart of the exhibition is the mythical siren, first appearing in ancient Greek mythology and having since become the focal point of nautical literature and art across cultures. While they bear a haunting beauty, these creatures' deceptive tunes symbolize entrance and temptation, guiding sailors to their demise.Akin to the allure of the siren, water is an omen of humanity’s fascination with the dangerous unknown. Across the exhi...

Fresh off a new print release with The-Art-Form, Japanese artist En Iwamura is showcasing his latest solo exhibition at Almine Rech. Housed at the gallery's Shanghai location, Glances and Echoes presents a series of works that are partly inspired by Iwamura recently becoming a father, imbuing a sense of childlike wonder in each of his ceramic vessels and ink-based drawings. A student of history, Iwamura revisits artistic tropes from years past to create totemic handmade busts that reference ancient Japanese craftsmanship, from the Jomon era (14,000 to 300 BCE) to the terra cotta haniwa figures from the Kofun period (300 to 538 CE). In particular, the Japanese philosophy of Ma, or the space between things, is a central pillar to Iwamura's practice — emphasizing peacefulness and curiosity th...

Skateboarder and contemporary artist Ed Templeton makes his return to Tim Van Laere with The Sprawl, his first solo exhibition at the gallery in over a decade. In a suite of photographs, paintings, drawings and sculptures, Templeton wides an affectionate eye toward everyday beauty.Born in Huntington Beach, California, Templeton takes thematic inspiration from his punk rock-infused upbringing, reflecting the raw, vulnerable moments that have come to define his life. A pioneering figure in the 90s street scene, his artistic practice developed naturally and helped situate skateboarding within a broader creative discourse, building new bridges between sport, art and culture while tackling social ideas that go overlooked within the subculture.Embracing the pretty and the ugly in equal measure, ...

Los Angeles-based artist Matt McCormick will release a new book chronicling his Into the Distance series. Entitled Out Of The Great Wide Open, the publication revisits the myth of the American West through a contemporary lens, exploring themes of freedom, nostalgia and isolation.Created between LA and New York City, McCormick started Into the Distance in 2017, conflating punk rock influences, such as using a faulty printer to transmit grainy landscape textures that he would overlay with cowboy figures, as an embracing of imperfection that is often erased in the picture-perfect capabilities of the social media age today. In the years since, McCormick's scope has expanded to depict his lone subjects drifting in-and-out of the composition like a scene from a movie — mirroring the blurring of ...

Contemporary American artists, Futura and Kenny Scharf have linked up to co-create a limited-edition sculpture set with AllRightsReserved.The two artists go way back. They held their first joint exhibition in New York’s Tony Shafrazi Gallery back in 1984, which served as the starting point for both their artistic careers and journies. With the latest collaboration, Futura and Kenny Scharf perfectly expressed their chemistry and creative visions in a playful, yet dynamic manner.Dubbed “Untitled,” the new set of stainless steel sculptures showcases two pairs of characters, each onboard a distinct UFO. Futura’s emblematic FL-001 “Pointman” takes on a passenger role on the metallic purple spaceship, which appears to be piloted by ESPACIO, Kenny Scharf’s quirky character. The shape of the space...

While ART X Lagos unfolds in Nigeria, London’s Autograph is set to unveil a powerful solo exhibition showcasing the work of Lagos-born photographer Rotimi Fani-Kayode. In a magnetic display of black and white portraits, The Studio – Staging Desire honors the sanctuary of the artist’s Brixton studio, which served as a creative haven for Black queer self-expression.Through a series of archival photographs and never-before-seen works, the exhibition follows Fani-Kayode as he ventured into spiritual worlds of intimacy, pain and fantasy. From 1983 until his death in 1989, the studio became a home for love and freedom amidst the racial and cultural bustle of London. Coded within sharp gestures, poses and a haunting sense of longing, his work captures a language of complex desire and difference.A...

Fredericks & Freiser presents Phosphorescence and Gasoline, a new solo exhibition by Danielle Roberts, now on view through December 7, 2024. Across a suite of acrylic works, Roberts paints the haze of a hyper-digital, post-Pandemic generation, echoing collective struggles in a neo(n) noir sign of the times.At the heart of each uncanny, everyday scene is the hum of artificial light — iridescent halos around car headlights, vibrant disco balls that silently spin and overhead lamps hung above disillusioned, Hopper-like gatherings. Despite roaring radiance, each face is adorned in a set sunken eyes and dull expressions. This dark and resonant irony of each work beckons the viewer and dares to hold them at distance, “like stepping outside a party but still hearing the music inside,” the gal...

At Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Louisa Gagliardi presents her first solo exhibition in Austria, now on view until December 21, 2024. Whereabouts is a digitally-rendered dance of ink, gel medium and nail polish. The show embraces a liminal melodrama, addressing themes of voyeurism and conformity.The exhibition finds home in the in-between, exploring transitional spaces that seem to define our everyday anxieties. Rather than providing concrete answers, the artist questions how identity and collective consciousness come to shape a sense of agency, or lack thereof. These ideas are reinforced by a dialogue of space, where contrasting sensations of claustrophobia and vastness animate the surrounding architecture.Akin to her previous work, Gagliano reflects on contemporary culture with a sense of pla...

In a twist of Stuart Semple’s nearly decade-long feud with Anish Kapoor, the British artist and activist has legally changed his name to, well, “Anish Kapoor.” To celebrate, he’s stamping his new identity on a new limited-edition print, titled “NOT A NICHE MAN.”The name change is Semple’s latest jab at the original Kapoor for acquiring sole rights to Vantablack, an ultra-dark, light-absorbing pigment, as an artistic material. Though it has since lost its title as the “world’s darkest material,” this exclusivity deal remains highly controversial in the art world. Semple’s change, part performance art, part protest, confronts ideas of what he calls “color hoarding” – the commercial monopolization of colors, including Mattel’s Barbie pink, Tiffany blue and Cadbury purple.Semple has fired back...

SCI-Arc Gallery presents Views of Planet City, a group exhibition inspired by artist, architect and curator Liam Young’s ongoing, environmental art project that began in 2021. Planet City proposes a radical rethinking of a sustainable world where humanity agrees to live amongst one another in a single, massive city, surrendering most of the Earth to a grand project of restoration. Alongside Young, Jennifer Chen, John Cooper, Damjan Jovanovic and Angelica Lorenzi construct alternative visions of this shared future. The works are not limited to images and films of the hyperdense megalopolis, displaying artifacts that emerge from it: pixel-perfect satellite images, costumes and masks born out of a fusion of global cultures, ceremonial relics of nature and a video game simulation that probes i...

Best known for her black cut-paper silhouettes, American artist Kara Walker takes a new technological approach in her latest exhibition at SFMOMA. The show, titled Fortune and the Immortality Garden (Machine), continues her explorations of race, power and history, guiding viewers through a surreal landscape of ritual and respite.The exhibition’s eight Black automatons recall medieval symbols of faith and divinity as they rise and fall in shimmering fields of obsidian. Many of Walker’s robotic Gardeners are trapped in eternal cycles of struggle, though the installation’s central figure, Fortuna, acts as an angel of absolution. The seven-foot-tall prophetess commences a choreographed dance as she delivers freshly-printed fortunes from her mouth.The artist draws from antique dolls, Bunraku pu...

LUPO (Lorenzelli Projects) is a new gallery founded by a team of under-30s in Milan, showcasing a range of artists who hail from the 1990s. The burgeoning gallery is currently presenting Giuseppe Mulas’ thought-provoking project “S'areste” (Sardinian for ‘wild, untamed’), which was made in collaboration with psychiatric patients from the Anteo Social Cooperative in Turin. Each gestural artwork appears like abstracted color fields from a distance, revealing fluid shapes and forms, from Martini bottles to animals — paying homage to the 1973 sculpture, Marco Cavallo, which was created by patients and artists — leading to the Italian movement for psychiatric reform.Previously, Mulas' biggest show to date, Sleep Well Childhood, held at Galleria Alberto Peola in Turin, probed into themes of iden...