Arles, in France’s Camargue region, has been swelling in reputation since Maja Hoffmann’s art campus—featuring a jagged Frank Gehry-designed tower clad in shimmering stainless steel panels—rose over the horizon line. The city has a much longer artistic heritage than that, with Arles Amphitheatre (completed in 90 AD) among the UNESCO World Heritage Site-listed attractions. The Rencontres d’Arles photography festival first brought art fervor to the city over 50 years ago, presenting a global array of photographic practices every summer into early fall since its foundation in 1970. This year, through October 4, some 40 exhibitions are on in venues as diverse as 19th-century industrial buildings and the upper floor of Monoprix (loosely the French version of Target). This array takes the temperature of contemporary photography thematically, formally and politically.

Three exhibitions stand out. At Palais de L’archevêché, “Ghana! Dreaming Independence 1957-1976” examines how the country championed optimism after more than a century under British colonial rule. Beyond reframing its infrastructure, it forged a new liberated cultural identity through the visual arts, flourishing from brochures to postcards to stamps to textiles. These helped dismantle colonial-era racist imagery across photography books and print culture, notably in such tomes as Ghana: An African Portrait (1976) by Paul Strand or The Roadmakers (1961) by American photographer Willis E. Bell and Ghanaian playwright Efua Sutherland. The former, taken with a view camera in the 1960s, focuses on traditional signifiers (which were later printed widely on banknotes); the latter’s well-designed layout and photojournalist style, captured with a medium-format camera, ushered in modern representation. Outside of such publications, the featured mid-20th-century portraits by James Barnor are especially beautiful, while Carlos Idun Tawiah’s contemporary scenes in Accra showcase the ongoing legacy and vibrancy of Ghana’s denizens.

At Espace Van Gogh, Martine Barrat’s body of work centers on late 20th-century New York City’s disenfranchised and underserved neighborhoods. French-born Barrat became an integral part of the communities she photographed, uplifting local lives with respect and love. Though a foreigner, Barrat was readily integrated as an insider—for example, she photographed a couple’s wedding after meeting them while stalled in the subway. She moved to New York in 1968 with the intention of kickstarting a career as a dancer, but was deterred by an accident and acquired a camera instead. In the 1970s, her documentary project on South Bronx gangs, You Do the Crime, You Do the Time, screened at the Whitney Museum. To her, the South Bronx was “the anti-West Side Story.” From the 1980s onward, she spotlit friends and residents of Harlem, often those tied to the Rhythm Club on 132nd Street. In Paris, she applied the same warmth to the neighborhood of La Goutte d’Or, which even to this day is sidelined as unsafe and poor. Her photographs of the youth especially reflect a tenderness that transcends socioeconomic circumstances.

At Chapelle Saint-Martin Du Méjan, Harry Gruyaert’s international cityscapes are less about place than about palette. Encapsulating more than 50 years of meandering the globe, the unilateral vibrancy of color crosses over with what curator Géraldine Lay described as “urban geometries.” His compositions—shaped by architecture, typography and human silhouettes—turn the anonymity of the streets and commercial hubs into something magical. He picks up synchronizations of color as though there’s a secret harmony humming below the cosmopolitan chaos: like the unison of a green suede coat and the green stems of a bouquet of flowers (Belgium) or a woman talking on the phone juxtaposed next to a TV on which Jerry Seinfeld is talking into a mic (Spain) or the flashy, shiny red hood of a car matching the awning of a café tabac (France).

Beyond the Rencontres, LUMA Arles is showing an assortment of exhibitions, arguably the most interesting of which features chimeral drawings by Zaha Hadid, showcasing “the sensation of motion and kinetic distortion.” Titled “I Think There Should Be No End to Experimentation” to aptly reflect her radical and compelling ethos of 21st-century urbanism, it is part of the museum’s ongoing Hans Ulrich Obrist Archives series (it runs through March 31, 2027). Later the first woman to win the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2004, in the 1970s as a student she understood “Suprematist painting not as a flat graphic design but as a map for ‘anti-gravitational reorganization,'” which would play out later in her career as a “direct, transhistorical dialogue between the Russian avant-garde and her own contemporary architectural practice.”

Her acrylic on cartridge paper drawing The Peak, Overall Isometric Day View (1982-3) ushered her into prominent view with a fascinating Hong Kong leisure club proposal that intermingled rocky landscape with urban glamor through horizontal skyscrapers (never made, ultimately, for financial reasons). For an exhibition at the Guggenheim a decade later, Hadid was able to “conceptualize weightlessness, fragmentation and fluidity before translating those 2D concepts into the 3D reality.” The fact that this exhibition is hosted in Gehry’s building is all the more touching, since they were friends.

Elsewhere, Lee Ufan Arles showcases a beautifully moody array of work by Korean director Park Chan-wook (on view through October 4). Known for his trilogy Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002), Old Boy (2003) and Sympathy for Lady Vengeance (2005), amongst other cinematic greats, this show debuts Chan-wook’s trove of still images in Europe—and comes off the heels of his presiding over the 2026 Festival de Cannes jury. During the opening, Chan-wook expressed via translator that he enjoyed relinquishing the control he had to impose on a cinema set, instead gravitating towards existing natural light and happenstance over scenography.

He is attracted to people-less landscapes, but not only. There’s a fish market in which the tentacles of octopi in a slimy pile seem as though fighting each other; a tree (the kind found planted in old Buddhist temples) with shredded bark that looks like a sinewy bone from a skeleton, or the light in Busan hitting a draped cactus by a seaside-facing window.

His clever eye hones in on the way shapes stand in for other familiar forms. Most images were photographed in Korea, but exceptions include an uprooted dead tree lakeside in California he spotted while filming his series “The Sympathizer,” a California barbecue placed in a mosaic circle that reminded him of a UFO, and folded parasols that evoke a ghostly ensemble at La Mamounia hotel in Morocco.

The new kid on the block, institutionally speaking, is Fonds Bustamante: the namesake space of French artist Jean-Marc Bustamante, who represented France at the Venice Biennale in 2003 and directed the prestigious École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris (2015-2018). Housed in a desacralized 12th-century church—formerly also a furniture boutique and events space before falling into ruin—the niche with Saint-Jacques-de-Compostelle is still there, a remaining emblem to welcome pilgrims. The building has been renovated and restructured over three floors by architect/designer Charles Zana, applying a minimalist touch. Bustamante himself intervened on the facade (a mix of new and old stones) with yellow tiles made from enameled lava.

The first exhibition, “En Miroirs,” on view through October 31, mixes Bustamante’s own work with work by artists of all ages—including former students from the Beaux-Arts. He thought about how to “bring something new to the pre-existing offer in Arles,” deciding to focus on, as he said, “my career, my affinities with artists with whom I was linked and worked with, who punctuated 40-50 years of my life as an artist.” He describes the exhibition as an “intimate promenade” through works he finds “essential—not just because they’re good, from my point of view, but also because they reflect the global nature of the cultural offer today.” The opening piece is by Reinhard Mucha, a vitrine and stacked chairs that cheekily play with museum accoutrement in wood, steel and glass (OT Oberer Totpunkt, 1982-85), as well as a recent ensemble of neon-hued pigments on canvas by Gerhard Merz (PSSST GOD, 2026), plus an untitled triptych acrylic on canvas from 2010 by Anne-Marie Schneider. Upstairs there are sculptures (and custom-made seating) by Franz West, as well as a watercolor and a ceramic piece by Thomas Schütte, amongst other works.

While Arles tends to be buzziest in July and August, the fall season is a quieter, crowd-free time to explore a town packing great artistic punch.

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“Some artists are extraordinary, not just in their creative wisdom, but in their misdeeds,” writes Daisy Dixon in her book Depraved: The Story of Dangerous Art, which hit shelves last month. The painting featured on the cover of the U.S. edition of her book is The Rape of Europa by Titian, which hangs in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. There’s a lot of overlap with Claire Dederer’s incredible book Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma from 2024, but Dixon looks at art ranging from the “difficult pleasures” of Carolee Schneemann’s provocative performances to Paul Gauguin’s misogyny and othering gaze to Olafur Eliasson’s duplicity regarding a climate crisis statement that itself created ecological compromises.

“If our art constantly represents historically oppressed groups of people as inferior, and in a way that tries to justify and glamorize this power dynamic, then this hierarchy secures a strong foothold,” Dixon points out. However, she immediately counters, “Critically rethinking our cultural landscape is not going to leave us with a barren, art-free world.” Dixon invokes Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis: “The remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence,” refusing social amnesia over what she calls “artistic counterspeech” in the form of “intervention and the platforming of new narratives” to refashion the art world canon.

Observer spoke to the author over Zoom about some key controversial figures and how to deal with woke dismissiveness, her mixed feelings about Damien Hirst’s tiger shark piece The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, and whether artists can effectively skewer the cultural signifiers that they themselves have been defined by.

What was the imperative for you to write this book?

During my postdoc, I’d started thinking about if art can be speech, might it be a kind of oppressive speech? The #MeToo movement had happened, and this idea that not only might art be oppressive, the question of “can we separate the art from the artist” really came up when certain directors and powerful figures in cinema were being scrutinized because of their terrible behavior towards mostly women, and how that affected people’s reception of their films. After that, during the Black Lives Matter protests, [there was pushback] against oppressive monuments and civic spaces. There was something really quite radical about the amount happening all across the globe. It made me realize that the philosophical tools I’ve been developing since my Ph.D. were really well-placed to answer these quite complicated questions about how art can shape the world in a dangerous way, but also finding nuance in those tricky questions of “can you separate the art from the artist,” which were affecting people as consumers of art—affecting their behavior and putting pressure on their moral compasses [regarding] the art they can enjoy.

In the preface, you talk about those who feel “so-called woke culture trying to destroy their beloved art and tarnish their favorite artist.” Wokeness is a dismissive way to situate critical thinking, so how do you make progress with people who aren’t doing that?

I used to be quite naive, thinking, well, if we answer these questions using analytic philosophy, critical thinking, surely they’re going to think this is a very reasonable position. But it’s not had that reception. I have definitely already had pushback about the book, from that woke criticism standpoint. Coming from academia, I’m used to people disagreeing with me; I’m used to people criticizing me. Normally, it’s done in a very robust, careful way, and there is a risk sometimes that you can be in a bit of an echo chamber where you are somewhat preaching to the choir. In this case, this book is dividing people. The “woke” criticism is an objection to rethinking and radically disarming through ethical curation and community-led activism. I’m not even saying we should censor immoral works—but that doesn’t seem to appease people, because they think if you’re making a woke criticism of art, that you’re for censorship. My book is generally quite anti-censorship. There are going to be some cases where censorship may well be called for—I actually say that the ethics of censorship depends on the ethics of the artwork—but I do caution against it. We have to be very, very careful with it as a method to deal with immoral art.

I don’t want to abandon that attempt to try and persuade people who dismiss these criticisms as woke. I still believe we can change some people’s minds and maybe this book, among many, [provides] ways, if these people just engage with what we’re actually saying.

Is the pushback online or at events?

I think the people who are coming to events have been entirely amenable to the idea. They’ve changed their minds about some of the artworks I look at. Some people were like, okay, we do need to perhaps relook at these canonical masterpieces. There was one review by an art critic that was very, very short, and it just accuses the book of being a rehash of the woke position. Otherwise, it’s just lots of people online, negative comments on X and Facebook.

A lot of the artworks I discuss are artworks by pedophiles and erotic literature that romanticizes and eroticizes sexual violence against children. I’d like to think we can agree that these are dangerous artworks and they are objectively immoral. Then I had these accusations of being woke, and I’m like, “Oh, this is kind of frightening. Like, what?” We need to be able to point out true depravity and where our society is going when it romanticizes or glamorizes sexual violence. This particular critic agrees that the Marquis de Sade’s literature is immoral, but there seems to be a resistance when we talk about art that is racist or art that is sexist towards women—that’s more where the woke objection comes in.

Which reveals misogyny and racism are very… commonplace.

Indeed. I naively thought when I was writing the book that we’d all be on the same page. But maybe we’re still not, as a society.

Definitely not. The political climate reflects ideals that are extremely polarized, and that people are not in agreement at all. There’s no unity; there isn’t even a bridge.

Exactly, and I think the political spectrum is always intimately bound up with moral compasses and the moral landscape. And part of the wokeism objection also gets tied up with the moral relativism charge. “Oh, you shouldn’t be judging these past artworks by today’s standards,” as if today’s standards are a different moral toolkit to what they were before. I’m pretty sure women during the Italian Renaissance didn’t think sexual violence was okay. We might not have had the concepts or the words for it, but morality isn’t entirely contained in each society. There are certain moral facts that I think transcend a particular societal place and time.

You cite Simone de Beauvoir not sanctioning the ideas by Marquis de Sade but sanctioning his revolutionary spirit of breaking taboos. Can you talk about that ambivalence: how do push back on ideas, but see them as groundbreaking in a conceptual way?

With Simone de Beauvoir, she disagreed with the cruel ethics of the Marquis de Sade’s writing. In many of his novels, there’s extreme sexual violation, often involving children, often involving women as well. There’s a lot of rape, and these novels are not just depicting these things: they’re expressing immoral perspectives and inviting the reader to derive pleasure from this violation. Simone de Beauvoir’s position is correctly nuanced because, on the one hand, she’s saying this is objectively an immoral work of art, but she—as an existentialist in the 1950s—saw this 18th century work as having historical value, the way it is set within the French Revolution.

A lot of people think that 120 Days of Sodom by Marquis de Sade should be interpreted as a satire or a critique against the church and state, against the elite classes. It was pointing out the hypocrisies of these corrupt higher rungs of society and the destruction and exploitation of the lower classes. But Sade himself was an aristocrat, so he was living and breathing sexual liberty and extreme freedom. So it’s not a straightforward interpretation.

But Simone de Beauvoir, as well as seeing historical value in it, saw philosophical value, because Sade was an atheist and he adopted a nihilistic moral system. He didn’t think there was such a thing as right and wrong. There was just pleasure and pain, and we should be libertines. We should pursue extreme pleasure at the cost of everything, even the destruction of other people. And whilst Simone de Beauvoir might not have thought that we should live as libertines, she was interested in how we make meaning in a godless world, and how we define ourselves, and what freedom even looks like—if and what free will would look like if we don’t have a kind of divine being that’s designed or fixed our path as human beings.

Even in the most sickening art, in these taboos, you can find political and moral value in them. There’s a way of holding that nuance in both hands, which I think is what Beauvoir was trying to do.

You use Damien Hirst’s tiger shark piece, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, as an example of uncomfortable yet effective art—and how watching David Attenborough documentaries doesn’t hit as hard as seeing Hirst’s work. The things that are problematic can also be the ones that are the most effective or penetrative in terms of having us rethink things. Can you expand on that?

This idea that art can be immoral because its very process or production or material is unethical… there are different ways that that can happen. Even artworks that are about the climate crisis have themselves incurred a carbon footprint. There’s awkward irony. With the animal pieces, I wrote about those also from a perspective as a failed vegan; I now eat meat for various reasons. So I’m already a flawed or complicated moral agent who’s interacting with these works that have involved killing these animals purely for the art.

Damien Hirst’s piece from the ’90s involved killing a real shark purely for the artwork. He has his own fisherman, who apparently has a few sharks on ice because various other sculptures of Hirst’s have decayed or not been preserved well enough. The shark piece has been replaced at least once with another tiger shark caught off the coast in Australia. I’m a huge shark fan. They’re my favorite animal, and I was really determined to hate that shark piece. But I had the honor—really, I think it is an honor—to see it in the flesh in New York on an art trip when I was like 20 years old, and it just really took my breath away. I think the emotional impact and power that that work has comes from the fact that it’s a real shark. You’re literally staring death in the face. Hirst himself is a controversial figure when it comes to animal ethics: his whole oeuvre has involved killing like a million animals, or something crazy like that. So in that sense, this artwork is morally flawed.

But in a weird way, that very moral flaw is what explains its huge impact on people. The ready-made wasn’t new, obviously, when Hirst was doing it, but he did transform the history of art with those pieces, whether we like them or not. From my point of view, it was rich with meaning about the sublime: about the ocean, our respect and awe for it, but also the destruction of the ocean, our overfishing. As an artwork, what it’s saying and doing is almost infinite. But it can do that whilst being flawed.

I just wonder whether it would have had that same effect if it hadn’t been a real shark. I don’t think so. And it’s nothing against David Attenborough. I think his documentaries are obviously incredible, and they get that ethical climate crisis message across well. But it’s quite gentle still: it tugs on your heartstrings a little bit. There’s something about seeing the shark that just is horrifying in a way that the documentaries perhaps weren’t doing quite enough.

You write that there’s a different kind of provocation with artists who are skewering an identity that defines them, doing it “from the inside.” You cite Andres Serrano and Chris Ofili as these two Catholic artists who made very controversial works that had Christian iconographies…

Serrano’s infamous Piss Christ, where the plastic crucifix emerged in his urine in a photograph, provoked so much backlash—people just tried to destroy it. He had funding withdrawn. He received death threats. When it transpired, his own intention for the piece was to show Christ in the realism of the crucifixion. He says the piss and the shit would have come out of him: he’s humanizing Jesus as this real man. And whilst people found it incredibly offensive, blasphemous, I do think that was not an extreme intention. I don’t think an artwork can only mean what the artist intended it to mean, but I do think their background is really important to understanding what the artwork might be saying. I think it can—it should—influence our interpretation of the piece.

Chris Ofili as well… this depiction of the Black Madonna using elephant dung and pornographic collage. I do think when we take into account the artist’s background, that should make us pause to rethink what that artwork is about.

You talk about Hitler when exploring the background of an artist, that none of the violence of his ideas is tangible in his work… it’s this weird absence of provocation by an irredeemable monster. Can you elaborate on how knowing the background of someone can be informative?

That’s a really nice link with the Serrano and Ofili pieces, which might have looked really shocking and disgusting, but were actually made with good faith. It’s the same kind of lesson I drew with Hitler, but in the opposite direction: his paintings have for a long time been dismissed as really crap, and irrelevant to Hitler’s personality and his atrocities that he committed. Art is almost a funny side fact: “Oh, maybe if he got into art school, maybe he wouldn’t have become the most barbaric person possibly in history.”

But in the book, I take seriously what art historians say about Hitler’s watercolors and oils. He painted hundreds throughout his entire life. He started very young, but particularly by the First World War, when he was in the trenches, his anti-Semitic beliefs really started to develop. When he couldn’t get into art school, he blamed Jewish people for it because he thought of Jewish people as having control over the art market. But his actual paintings are very peaceful, ranging from traditional architecture in Austrian and German streets, a lot of landscapes, mountains, lakes, forests and bouquets of flowers. There’s nothing explicit there that we can say about his moral character that is seemingly relevant to the paintings.

But in the book, I explore how his style of art making is really relevant because he thought art should be idealistic and depict romantic things. And his actual own taste in art really defined the art of the Third Reich, which by that point was very similar in style: realistic paintings of ideal bodies. This is where the Aryan myth-making was really falling as an aesthetic, and they of course denounced so-called “degenerate arts” made by not just Jewish artists but also art that was non-representational. Hitler’s style of art making was influenced by classicism and neoclassicism and the Italian and German Renaissance, and that aesthetic was, even before the First World War, very much tied up in Aryan myth making. I think Hitler’s paintings are probably one of the most insidious works of art I look at because of his artistic taste and what he thought art should be.

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Art-o-rama, which ran this past weekend in the south of France, encapsulates a spirit of experimentation. Marseille as a city is gritty and chaotic by reputation; it serves as a fitting backdrop for a looser take on solo and duo presentations. Held at the Friche la Belle de Mai, a multipurpose cultural space that flanks the Saint Charles train station, the 20th edition of the fair presented an international selection of 37 galleries from 18 countries. Among the participants were 19 first-time exhibitors; more than half of those had opened within the last five years. There were only three Marseille spaces, reflecting that the local scene is still nascent, plus a sprinkling from Barcelona, Paris and London, as well as more far-flung representation from Lima and Tokyo.

Cable Depot, a gallery based in Sofia, showcased Liz Elton’s work made from biodegradable compost bags, an ephemeral piece that will ultimately disintegrate. Across the fair, Gallery Hayashi + Art Bridge presented an artist duo that extended their project Secure Shell, featuring a massive, unwieldy installation of stacked industrial materials, military green mixed with yellow warning signs.

Not everyone was peddling extremes. Dittrich & Schlechtriem from Berlin generally focuses on the German market, regularly attending Art Düsseldorf and Art Cologne, but their participation in Art-O-rama was uniquely immersive: photographer Lukas Städler’s work was made over the previous month in Marseille itself. Städler “did shoots here, he developed the film here, he did the prints here, we shipped the frames here,” Owen Reynolds Clements, a gallery representative, told Observer. “It’s a nice way of engaging and having a product at the end, instead of just shipping prints from Berlin and then putting it on the wall.” Work was priced from €3,500 to €5,000.

According to Reynolds Clements, Art-o-rama being held in August created circumstances where the artist and members of the gallery could participate in and contribute to the culture of the city: “We’re producing not just artwork, but a moment. The fair lends itself to that because of the timing and location and the vibe.” Regardless of outcomes, “it’s an investment in [Lukas Städler] and in the gallery. Of course we aim to sell the works, but we’ve built something else around it.” It’s the kind of endeavor that could only happen during this summery stretch of the year, he added. “For Basel, we can’t take a month off and live in Switzerland.”

Meanwhile, Clara Darrason, a gallery open by appointment in Paris, offered another angle on the city, with works underpinned by the urgency of “ecological considerations.” The south of France battled with the rampant fires this summer that pulverized local landscapes; driving outside of Marseille, the blackened carcasses of trees lined the roads. Artist Julia Gault made an in situ work in clay evoking parched earth (Vague de Chaleur or Heat Wave), complemented by perforated copper tubes typically used to channel water and a series of copper etchings replicating geological cartography of underground flows. In tandem, Amandine Guruceaga explored pyrophyte plants—which tolerate fire—using recycled PVC, dyed textiles, copper, as well as acrylic and oil paints. The works on the stand ranged from €2,700 to €8,500.

Darrason, who was participating in her very first fair, said she has a very “decentered gaze” relative to France’s Paris-centric sense of the art world, since she grew up in the region. She also previously lived in New York, where she had a Brooklyn DIY space that offered carte blanche to artists.

It was also the first fair for Ukrainian-born gallerist Viktoriia Velychko, whose Velychko Gallery is based in Paphos, Cyprus. Velychko created an artistic residency there in 2022 that “became a real shelter” as the full-scale invasion by Russia accelerated in her native country. Her format has been nomadic but she is settling into a permanent space in October. Since creating the residency, she realized she wants “to deal only with socio-political art. I try to make it sellable, which is a very, very difficult balance.” Focusing on “displacement and the soft power of colonialism,” Velychko noted how Cyprus itself “is still occupied, and was always part of somebody’s empire.”

In the booth, Reassembled Light of Colonialism, a work by Kyiv-based Olga Stein, was made from cumulated antique lamps that represented wealth during the rampant poverty of the Soviet Union era; the piece was priced at €5,000. Stein shared the booth with works by Michalis Papamichael, whose paper-light replicas of domestic interiors—doors of a wardrobe, a piece of floor—were colored using natural pigments native to Cyprus. His pieces were priced between €2,400 and €3,900. (The works did not sell during the fair but received “significant interest.”)

Velychko was drawn to Marseille over Athens—which has more obvious regional proximity to Cyprus—as a Eurocentric point of reference, though her dream is to participate in LISTE. “Many galleries come from Art-o-rama to LISTE,” she remarked.

One of the only American galleries present was Good Weather, which has locations in Chicago, Little Rock and North Little Rock. It presented work by Brooklyn-based Raque Ford, and the artist’s text-driven works sold well, with three smaller pieces ($2,700 each) purchased and a fourth on hold. Ford’s large poem ($12,000), sprawling across the length of the booth, also sold.

Founder and director of Good Weather Haynes Riley has participated in Art-o-rama for several years and was on the selection committee. “My first year, I was able to sell to collectors from Madrid, Bucharest, Brussels and France,” he recalled. “It’s a nexus here. The people might not be into the artists you’re showing that year, but they have met you and follow your program. Then the next year, they find an artist they are interested in. Continuing to return to a place—putting three or four years in—is a smart investment as a gallery.”

He noted that, in a landscape where “art fairs have become badges or signifiers of success for galleries,” small fairs provide a softer start. “Most fairs that can produce these opportunities at low costs for galleries are real opportunities to know if you want to be in this long-term—and not just put you out of business because it costs an arm and a leg to do them.” He first experienced this accessibility at NADA Projects in New York and at Material Art Fair in Mexico, which let galleries be “relational, instead of transactional” because “fairs like this offer opportunities that are lower-risk to go to a new place to meet new people.”

Director of Art-o-rama Jérôme Pantalacci admitted that the Marseille fair could not exist as such without public funding, collectively from the city, region, department and Ministère de la Culture. “In France, existing outside of Paris is complicated,” he said. “Our goal is to provide support for emerging artists—international and local, since the art market is global anyway.”

Art-o-rama, and fairs like it, are essential because it’s “a low entry level to be in a new place, to test something out,” Riley said. His own offerings are starting to supersede the Art-o-rama buyer’s budget, tipping into the $10,000-$20,000 range—as the gallery grows, the artist’s market grows. Scaling their success, Riley noted that Good Weather is “sort of growing out of the fair, which is what you want galleries to do.”

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Photographer Catherine Opie might be known for her portraits of her queer community, her family, public figures, and sportsmanship, but she’s not hemmed in by anything. “Every body of work is connected, even though they might look very different from one another. But it’s all interconnected in this brain of mine,” the photographer said during a Zoom interview from her home base in Los Angeles.

“Mountains Don’t Know Their Names” does indeed look very different from her other work. The exhibition currently on view at PoMo in Norway (through January 3, 2027) was created during a three-week immersion in the Norwegian winter landscape in 2024. Opie aspired to the vernacular rather than the traditions of landscape photography. As an American artist, she delivers an outsider’s gaze on the Norwegian topography while also asserting a universal sense of awe before nature. There are 53 works on view from among thousands of images taken, complemented by 30 ceramic sculptures of Norwegian mountains developed as a visiting artist at Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Colorado in 2024.

The press materials describe this body of photographs as “approaching nature as she would normally approach living subjects,” which Opie affirms: she spent her quiet, cold time bonding with landscape to create meditative moments around light and the allure of the natural world.

The title “Mountains Don’t Know Their Names” is very compelling. As a portrait photographer, can you talk about photographing a subject that is unaware of itself, that doesn’t have language?

I think we’re going through an incredible time as a species. We’re watching our planet burn, literally—we have fires right now in France and Spain, unheard of fires, right at this very moment. Much of my work deals with the specificity of identity. Can a mountain have a specific identity in relationship to ideas around nationalism? In Norway’s case, that is somewhat true. The Blue Mountain, the idea of the blue light, through early paintings, began to epitomize a certain kind of national identity in Norway. “Mountains Don’t Know Their Names” is another way to talk about national identity as well as light, as well as the planet, as well as portraiture. In some ways, I’m using something that is an everyday occurrence where people live in that region: that is their mountain. But what does their mountain mean to them? Is it a landscape, or is it a sentient being, to a certain extent, in terms of how they get their water, their resources, the things that a mountain provides? I know that from living here in California, what the Sierras provide in terms of our water—whether or not we’ll be able to provide 70% of the nation’s produce from the state of California.

There are these really large philosophical quandaries that I’m [addressing] within this body of work, as well as bearing witness. Which is always incredibly important within my work.

Photographing a mountain was posited as equivalent to photographing a person—that both qualified as portraits. How so?

In the idea of a mountain as a portrait versus a mountain as a landscape, I think obviously one would argue—and certainly religious scholars would argue with me—that a mountain is not a sentient being. But at the same time, we’re using these resources for rare earth and minerals.

I have a really amazing artist friend, Liz Larner, and one day, we were talking about the alchemy of materials and whether or not these materials give us energy, and then geeking out that maybe AI is actually going to control us because the rare earth and minerals actually know that they need to make the planet better. I love going in that sci-fi direction of a mountain being a sentient being. I think that that’s a great Kim Stanley Robinson read—it’s like right out of Ursula Le Guin, out of Octavia Butler. What is this that we’re doing all the time, in relation to the valuing of resources?

That a mountain could be a sentient being: why not? It holds an enormous amount of life on it. If we were to track every form in terms of the biology from a mountain, I think we would be shocked at how alive a mountain is. In the same way, we were totally surprised that trees talk to each other. These things are really important for us to remember, and I think that art can frame things in this way.

You did a three-week immersion in the region, directly within the landscape. How did you organize this immersion? And was the act of looking at something that static a different kind of exercise for you?

It wasn’t static. I made it static. You don’t see any of the elements of what I’m dealing with in order to make the photographs: You don’t get that I’m freezing. You don’t understand that the wind is blowing to a point where if I don’t hang on to my tripod, it will skate across the ice. The [mountains] become these silent stand-ins. It is a true representation, because I’m not manipulating it.

How I organized myself was I gave myself a twenty-day road trip. I knew that each location needed to be five days. I thought I was going to be alone, but then I ended up having my friend Kate Kunath come with me, who made a brilliant video piece that’s in the museum, that accompanies the work. What’s really cool about this piece is you see me thinking in real time about how I’m trying to make this body of work. You don’t ever get that from me. You always just have the work.

Five days in each location was important because I didn’t want to be just a road tripper, where you go through a place and you take some pictures of that place and then you move on to the next location. I felt that if the mountains were this community’s friends, so to speak, that they were their resources, that I needed to get to know them on different days and under different lighting and under different moods—maybe there would be a day that I wouldn’t get the blue light. So it’d be important that I stay there, knowing those mountains.

You’re showing 53 images. How big was the body of work that you photographed, and how did you make that edit?

Well, it’s really curious. It ended up being an edit which questioned photography on its own, and that’s part of the title. Here we have Trump wanting to put his face on Mount Rushmore, yet another mountain that was actually very important Indigenous land at one point in America. But I didn’t know that I would be making vernaculars. I didn’t know that I would want to do these sweeps of what it looked like of the snow blowing and the whiteness; I really was just going for the blue mountains. And then 10,000 photographs were made in a twenty-day period.

Between the conversations I had on videotape with Kate about what I was doing, it led to a very different body of work. Before, I just put out a body of work and we might be able to talk about it in terms of both art history and photo history. But this body of work attempted to actually break down these ideas of how we hold landscape photography and the vernacular and the experience of the vernacular. There is no Norwegian word for vernacular, and I find that very interesting. Yet the vernacular and what they present within their landscape is so utterly important to their identity. Every time you go into an old restaurant, there are photographs of Norway’s fishing history—its history is presented on the walls of every place you enter. I think that’s really interesting to think about how a nation becomes its own identity out of wealth, in terms of the kind of separating from Danish rule. What is the specificity of identity of a place is such a big question for me, in the work.

For me, what I want for the audience is to be held by these blue mountains, for them to be swept away, but also placed and displaced: all at the same time. The framing and the scale when you enter those rooms: I feel watching the viewer look at the work does that. I’m happy for that.

If you’re looking at the natural panorama as someone who is not from that place, is your gaze “other” by looking at it? 

Well, the gaze is always othered. I don’t speak the language. If I were to all of a sudden enter Norway and learn the language, speak Norwegian, and I lived there for 10 years, maybe there wouldn’t be the othering. And that is something that we always talk about within documentary photography. That is a very important ethical question, but I think that’s why vernacular is so interesting, because if I can recognize, as outside of the community, what is important within their gestures, within their society, that’s embedded within their landscape, then isn’t that also, in the same way as in a portrait, recognizing a fellow face, a fellow traveler?

There’s not a grocery store that I don’t enter in Norway where there isn’t the sweet little hut with the reindeer sausages hanging in it—and that’s a vernacular. That is something that they recognize of themselves within their community. That’s the same way that Robert Frank came to The Americans under Guggenheim [fellowship], and we got to see America in a very different way at that time period. And we’re in a very interesting time period in Norway. They share a border with Russia. The kind of fights happening around NATO and the ideas of borders are everything that is being talked about globally on the world stage. Using these different moments, and being an outsider, not a Norwegian, still allows you to look very intently at these really big questions that we’re faced with.

How did the ceramic component feel like a good complement to the images?

Just the simplicity of the hands making clay, that earth comes out of earth. The idea that I tried to make something that I hadn’t met yet, before the mountains versus after the mountains. It’s just like sixty-five-year-old poetry at this point, to be honest, it’s just like okay, bring on my Kiki Smith, bring on my elders in me. Like, let’s get down and a little different in a way that we’re talking about materiality and representation.

Also, quite honestly, I’m losing the ability to use my hands: I am having cortisone shots all the time because of the weight of the cameras. I could be doing a Gucci campaign… I’m hand-holding a camera for eight hours a day that’s seven and a half pounds. My body is starting to get worn out from my own medium. So, quite frankly, heading over to work with clay is not only good for me mentally, but it’s also really interesting to see that transformation that photography can’t do, because it is out of an imagination. Photography is never out of an imagination, except for the conceptualization of the work. It’s always of the real.

Would you say that you had certain preconceptions about what it was going to be that you know on site felt different, or did you not necessarily conceive of anything ahead of time?

Well, I preconceived the framing and the light and what I wanted to get, and I didn’t know if it was possible. And then once I got that on the second day, I was like, “Oh my God, I got the light. It happened. It’s really here, like what I imagined.” And then all the rest just is because you’re out and about, and you photograph. I would say that one is always surprised by what happens on a journey.

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Muzeum Susch is situated hours from Zurich in the Engadin Valley of the Swiss Alps: a rural region in a sequestered mountain location. The site re-occupies a 12th-century monastery that later became a brewery, and the discreet white architecture reflects a singular sense of place rooted in local geology. Approximately 10,000 tonnes of rock were excavated from the mountainside behind the buildings. Some interior galleries sit deep inside that excavation with walls of visibly exposed rock, and museumgoers can hear water moving through the mountain. “Visitors descend, climb, pass through narrow corridors and suddenly enter tall, light-filled rooms. The architecture encourages close looking, and that rhythm fundamentally shapes the encounter with the artworks,” collector Grażyna Kulczyk, the museum’s founder, tells Observer.

(In the introduction to a publication about the venue, Muzeum Susch: Alpine Laboratory, art critic and editor Jennifer Higgie wrote: “That Muzeum Susch has gallery spaces hewn from stone is symbolic on many levels: it embodies the idea that art history is no longer fixed but mutable and that women are literally and metaphorically breaking down the walls that, for far too long, have confined them.”)

The Muzeum Susch—”a name like a sigh,” writes Paweł Goźliński—opened in December of 2018, coinciding with the 100th anniversary of Poland gaining independence as a salute to Kulczyk’s place of birth. From the beginning, the museum was conceived not only as a site for exhibitions but also for international collaborations, publishing, residencies and research at the in-house Instituto Susch, which focuses exclusively on women artists in Central and Eastern Europe post-1945.

The venue’s 1,500 square meters are dedicated primarily to temporary exhibitions—currently on is feminist activist/artist Mariuccia Secol’s show “Unraveling”—although select parts of Kulczyk’s collection are also presented in a separate part of the complex. We connected with Kulczyk to discuss the ideal conditions for viewing art, the feminist figures she most appreciates and how artistic importance does not always dovetail with historical visibility.

What are the advantages and disadvantages of being located so remotely?

People often describe Susch as remote, but I experience it differently. It is removed from the constant demands of the art world, and that distance creates the conditions for concentration. Susch is inseparable from its architecture, its landscape and its pace—it could not be transferred anywhere else. Visitors do not arrive by chance. They come because they have made a conscious decision to be here, and that changes the way they experience art. The museum follows its own rhythm, largely independent of the metropolitan exhibition calendar. That allows us to devote time to research, to artists who require sustained attention and to projects that mature slowly.

Of course, there are practical challenges. Every exhibition requires more planning, transport is more complex and assembling international teams takes longer. Those logistical difficulties are a small price to pay for the intellectual freedom the place provides.

Can you tell me about your background as an entrepreneur?

Entrepreneurship was the way to build things that did not yet exist. I started early, in the 1980s, building a family business in Poland at a time when private enterprise operated within very narrow limits. After 1989, when the country opened, the scale changed—everything had to be built from the ground up. I trained as a lawyer in Poznań and went into business in the years when Poland was inventing a private economy from nothing. There was no model to copy. Everything was a first attempt, which suited me.

The project most people know is Stary Browar in Poznań, opened in 2003—a 19th-century brewery that I transformed into a place where commerce and art sustain each other: 50 percent business, 50 percent art. Building businesses taught me to think in decades, to accept responsibility for complex projects and to understand that lasting value comes from sustained work. When I turned to the cultural field, those were exactly the qualities required. Establishing a museum, supporting artists and developing research programs all demand patience and the willingness to invest in ideas whose significance may become visible only years later.

What is your approach to collecting?

I have been collecting art for more than 50 years. I work with galleries, occasionally with auctions, sometimes through private opportunities, but above all through long-term relationships with artists, curators and gallerists. I did not begin with a strategy or the ambition of building a major collection. What interested me first was direct contact with artists and with the intellectual questions their work raised. I have always been drawn to artists who were difficult to place, rather than those who already occupied an established position. [My] collection reflects conversations, encounters and decades of looking—a record of curiosity more than a catalogue of acquisitions.

How regularly do you add works? What is your most recent addition?

I continue to acquire, but far more selectively. One of my most recent acquisitions is an early painting by Marlene Dumas—a work from the late 1980s, from the years when she was still finding the language for which she later became known. That interest in formative moments—before an artist’s language is fully established or widely recognized—runs throughout my collection. Today, I am less interested in expanding the collection than in deepening it. What interests me are works that change the way I understand an artist I have been looking at for years.

Susch is described as presenting a “matrilineage of the sometimes omitted, overlooked or misread”… can you tell me about some experiences you had in the art world that made this state of affairs apparent to you?

When I started collecting, I repeatedly encountered remarkable women artists whose work was absent from the dominant historical narratives. What interested me was not simply that they had been overlooked, but why. Which institutional mechanisms determined visibility? Which works entered museums, publications and teaching, while others disappeared? This gradually became one of the central questions behind Muzeum Susch. What interests me is how art history is constructed, why certain artists disappear from it while others become central, and how we can better understand those mechanisms.

Who are some of the artists you love who fall into this category today?

There are many, and every exhibition changes the answer. Artists such as Anu Põder, Tapta, Běla Kolářová, Mariuccia Secol, Gabriele Stötzer, Edita Schubert, Laura Grisi, Emma Kunz and Evelyne Axell all demonstrate that artistic importance and historical visibility are two different things. What connects them is that their contribution deserves a far more central place within 20th-century art history.

Who are the thinkers, curators or writers doing the most to champion women in the arts?

Many people have contributed enormously to this field, and some of them have worked directly with us. Jennifer Higgie edited our monograph Muzeum Susch: Alpine Laboratory and spent time in Susch as a resident. Alice Rawsthorn, Siri Hustvedt and Chloë Aridjis all wrote for the book, and the title of our inaugural exhibition was inspired by one of Hustvedt’s texts. At Muzeum Susch, Cecilia Alemani curated the Anu Põder retrospective.

More broadly, the work of historians and curators such as Griselda Pollock, Catherine de Zegher, Lynne Cooke and the late Okwui Enwezor has profoundly influenced how museums and researchers approach overlooked artists and the writing of art history.

What matters most is that lasting change happens when research, exhibitions, publications and institutional commitment reinforce one another. Many of our exhibitions start with years of archival work, conversations with estates, scholars and artists and the reconstruction of histories that have never been properly studied. The museum presents the results publicly; the institute develops the knowledge that makes those exhibitions possible. Recognition is never automatic; it is built. Somebody is always writing art history—and it matters who.

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A child of a photo enthusiast, Judy Glickman Lauder—the widow of billionaire art collector Leonard Lauder—has collected photographs since the 1970s. An exhibition of part of her collection is now touring the U.S., featuring some 100 prints by 50 artists, having kicked off this summer at the Southampton Arts Center in New York. Divided into eight thematic sections and curated by Anjuli Lebowitz, the selection includes work by eminent practitioners like Nan Goldin, Graciela Iturbide, Danny Lyon, Susan Meiselas, Gordon Parks and James Van Der Zee. (The national tour of this exhibition is presented by the American Federation of Arts (AFA), which co-organized the exhibition with the Portland Museum of Art, Maine.)

Spanning quotidian moments to historic pinnacles, “Presence: The Photography Collection of Judy Glickman Lauder” examines different facets of human vulnerability. The title of the exhibition is in reference to theorist Roland Barthes’ pronouncement: “Every photograph is a certificate of presence.” The exhibition will migrate to the Sarasota Art Museum in Florida in 2026-2027, the Gibbes Museum of Art in South Carolina in 2027 and the Lowe Art Museum in Florida in 2027-2028.

Down the line, Lauder will donate her entire collection to the Portland Museum of Art in Maine. This includes some of her own work, for which Lauder traveled to Europe to document sites related to the Holocaust as a chilling record of an unthinkable period. We spoke to the collector, photographer and philanthropist about her family legacy—both she and her dad belonged to the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain—plus her penchant for 20th-century images and her work with infrared film.

Tell me about your trajectory within the world of photography. You very much grew up around the medium.

My father was a doctor, but his passion was photography. I was the subject in front of my dad’s big Graflex camera, with the black cloth and the light meters and all that. I was in the dark room as a child, mesmerized by the magic of it, seeing images appear in the developer.

My dad was the president of the Oakland Camera Club, which met in Berkeley; his friends were Ansel Adams and Edward Weston. They knew about images, composition, beautiful darkroom papers. He did a commercial, which is on YouTube; it [won a] Clio in the ’60s. It’s of a child growing up and becoming an adult with a child of her own; it’s called the Kodak Turnaround commercial.

When did your own practice take form?

I became a photographer many years later. I was born in the late ’30s, I didn’t really start learning dark room [technique] until the ’70s. I’m a mom of four: I was busy taking color snapshots of every child, every graduation, every trip, blah blah blah. In the ’70s, I was a docent at UCLA at an art museum on campus; I was doing some postgraduate work. I started going to photography workshops where I learned [to use the] dark room, and it opened up avenues for my own creative expression.

I photographed with Kodak Tri-X, but I also worked a lot with Kodak high-speed infrared film, which is no longer around like it was. I used that especially when I was photographing Holocaust images after the fact in Eastern Europe. I came in the ’80s, but there were still remnants. For three years, I went to camps, railroad tracks, former ghettos, memorials and everything, and infrared gave it a grainy timelessness, but you never know what you’re getting with infrared. I was photographing through two cameras: one with black and white, and one with infrared. The soul of my work is that Holocaust work.

I was asked to go to Denmark in the early ’90s to put together an exhibit dealing with the Danish rescue of the Jews in October ’43. The Danes were hiding Jews secretly in their homes, in their warehouses and getting them on boats in the middle of the night. Nothing was documented. A lot of the rescuers were teenagers at the time, driving their family’s herring boats at great risk. I was able to interview survivors, resistance people, rescuers, and they took me to all these places where it happened.

Do you remember the first photo that anchored your collection?

I had moved from Northern California to Southern California; in Los Angeles, there were two photography galleries, G. Ray Hawkins and Stephen White, and I would see all these images, and many of them were affordable because it hadn’t really caught on as the beautiful art form that photography is. Early images that I purchased were by Jerry Uelsmann: three images of his wife. It’s a positive, a negative and, I think, solarization. Very mystical. Another one was by Barbara Morgan, who [photographed] a lot of Martha Graham, she did a New York winter park scene superimposing another negative of a dancer and a photogram of two white tulips.

I’m drawn to the human presence. I have a beautiful print by Arthur Rothstein. Dorothea Lange. A lot of images are very timeless. Some are decisive-moment images. Many by women photographers: Judy Dater, Cherie Heiser, Margaret Bourke-White. I have a wonderful image of Mick Jagger and Bianca on their wedding day, Patti Smith with Robert Mapplethorpe and just a whole lot of different rock and roll [figures]. I’m very interested in the civil rights period in the United States in the ’50s and ’60s: I have a lot of images from Selma, Birmingham, Montgomery, Atlanta and so on.

I ended up having a collection of 700 images, gradually over 50 years. My husband and I were both on the board of the Portland Museum of Art in Maine, and I gave my collection to them. It was an opportunity to see all these images because I had no room to hang them. It was the first time I was able to really put it all together. Some say it’s sort of a “self-portrait” because it tells you a little something about yourself. When I look at the collection, it tells me a bit about different segments that I’m drawn to. There’s the injustices, of course, the civil rights period. But there’s a lot of labor, like Salgado, the gold mines in Africa. I also have Salgado’s work from Kuwait, the people trying to get rid of the fire of the oil wells. And I have humor: Elliott Erwitt’s humor and Melanie Bennett’s.

I’m still more drawn to the 20th Century, rather than what is going on today.

Why is that?

I’m not able to see the timelessness yet in much of the work that’s being done today. I grew up in a certain era, and I’m still drawn to it. I look at everything, but the images that I purchase seem to be from the ’40s to the ’90s.

You were saying that your collection became too big to display. How did you experience the collection in a day-to-day way beforehand? Were you turning over the images that you would exhibit in your home?

I really didn’t. That takes a lot of energy, a lot of time, and I was very busy with my own photography. Images that I purchased I would keep for a while, but then I would just always give them to the museum. I have a lot of photographs in my house, but not so much changing [up] different ones. As life went on, I knew that these photographs would hold together as a collection, and I wanted a museum to have it.

Do you collect other forms of art, or exclusively photography?

Oh, sure. I do have some sculpture and some paintings. I love old things. I love the treasure hunts and flea markets, thrift shops, antique places. Maine is kind of a mecca for that type of thing.

For the exhibition, it’s 100 photographs by about 50 photographers. Does it feel like more of a spotlight on a particular thread, or does it feel emblematic of the collection at large?

It’s a spotlight: it’s really the human spirit. There’s wonderful humor, there’s photojournalism, there’s portraiture like you wouldn’t believe. Photography is something that people just automatically relate to. Everyone has a cell phone or camera, they know what they’re saying. They don’t have to know 18th-century Japanese woodcuts. They see it and boom: it hits them. These were chosen by Aperture and the Portland Museum of Art curator Angeli Libowitz. At the time, with Chris Boot, who was the director of Aperture, we all met to decide what should be shown. There’s many ways it can be shown. I have four [of my own] Holocaust-related images, and I have one that I took in Istanbul.

Which is the most recent photograph that you’ve purchased?

I was at AIPAD, and I purchased a couple paparazzi photographs of Jackie O. and Robert Redford—just candid, wonderful images. I have fun with celebrity. I recently got a portrait of Edward Hopper, the painter, in Maine. They’re a bit more expensive than they were in the ’70s, but there are still treasures, and people should be out there looking.

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Centro Botín, an arts hub in Cantabria designed by Renzo Piano, with seaside views from the stilted structure’s corridors and platforms, has been spotlighting drawing practices since 2006. The current show, “Marisol: When Things Are Just Beginning” is the first dedicated retrospective of the Venezuelan-American artist’s drawings, featuring some 120 works spanning from 1949 to just before her death in 2016.

According to Bárbara Rodríguez Muñoz, Centro Botín’s director of exhibitions, the Spanish institution privileges “researching, presenting, and cataloguing the drawings of artists for whom drawing is fundamental to the practice—not a sketch, but a superior work—actually part of their positioning and thinking and expressing.” The Marisol show in particular foregrounds drawing as a medium by which the artist expressed both her colorful curiosity and looming anxieties. It is construed as a sampling from within her lifetime’s output; there are sketches for costumes she made for a Martha Graham performance in 1975 and outlines of her hand used to create silhouettes in the ’60s and offhanded doodles on envelopes from the 2000s. In the exhibition catalogue, curator Laura Vallés Vílchez writes of the drawings that “they are neither preparatory nor confessional, nor can they be considered marginal.”

MoMA lent two works on paper, and most of the works come from American collections. The drawing selection is custom-framed for the show and presented alongside a sprinkling of sculptures, which the catalogue qualifies as “carved and assembled wooden figures, often painted, incorporating found objects, plaster casts of [Marisol’s] own face and hands, and direct references to mass culture… hieratic figures that oscillate between caricature and idol.” There are also archival materials and several Warhol short films in which Marisol starred.

In fact, the exhibition opens with a 16mm Warhol-made film of Marisol, Women and Dog (1963-64), part of the Whitney’s collection, in which the artist stands stock-still adjacent to three shoulder-to-shoulder blocky female forms, as though an annex sculpture herself, doing nothing more than blinking for three minutes. Two other Warhol films later in the exhibition show her working in the studio on her sculptures in stop motion and, nearby, gallivanting with John Giorno and Robert Indiana as they scamper in dapper outfits, drinking, in Old Lyme, Connecticut, in 1964. Rodríguez Muñoz speculates that Warhol and Marisol “may have recognized in each other their [need for] privacy, in the fact that they were both shy people.” Marisol by reputation was characterized as being extremely taciturn. (“I feel uncomfortable with the established codes of conduct,” she once stated.)

The exhibition traces the artist’s drawing practice back to her strict Catholic school education. In a never-before-shown sketchbook of untitled drawings from 1958-60, “you can see here some of her aesthetic languages but also thematic preoccupations in terms of the body of the woman, the body of the woman being fragmented, lips and hands and nails, you will see that all across the exhibition,” noted Rodríguez Muñoz. Limbs are often autonomous and piecemeal: perhaps reaching for something or probing. The fixation on hands and fingers in cheery colors feels oddly resonant with the contemporary obsession with nail art. One drawing is scribbled on in green pencil: I don’t understand why she has found nothing. It’s a weirdly prescient statement that would seemingly foreshadow the emptiness Marisol felt about being a participant in the art world.

Marisol, née Escobar—though she excised her last name, explaining the choice thusly in an interview: “I wanted to get completely rid of my background”—grew up in an affluent Venezuelan family, zigzagging between three countries. Born in Paris in 1930, her family returned to Caracas in 1935, settling thereafter in Los Angeles in 1946. In Los Angeles, she began her artistic training, then returned to Paris to study at the École des Beaux-Arts and the Académie Julian before hightailing it to New York in 1950. There, she enrolled in drawing classes at the Art Students League and deployed colored pencils, charcoal and collage. In two separate interviews available within the exhibition, Marisol cited Rembrandt and da Vinci as influences. Prior curators of her work, Marina Pacini and Cathleen Chaffee, felt her pieces reflected an “openly Fauvist palette, evocative of both Picasso’s Guernica and Matisse’s Luxe, Calme et Volupté.”

Recognized for her sculptures more than any other artistic output, Marisol moved in the same circles as Pop Art figures, although she at no point embraced that movement. Rodríguez Muñoz notes of Marisol’s drawings that “they’re not doing what Pop Art did in terms of elevating consumer culture, she’s introducing more intimacy and vulnerability, and irony towards fame.” However apart she felt, she exhibited at Leo Castelli Gallery, an arbiter of taste of the era, renowned for spotting new talent, in 1957 on the Upper East Side, first in a group exhibition in May, then in a solo show in November. In one black-and-white photo, she appears as a demimondaine hanging with Castelli in December 1957, wearing all black and sporting what today might be called a cunty bob. Her work was cited alongside Jackson Pollock and Jean Dubuffet, in an article praising Alfred Barr, former director of the MoMA, as being a “forecaster of trends.”

As she gained art world notoriety and press attention, she retreated from the New York scene and eventually from public view altogether. The Centro Botín show is loosely structured around three “displacements” that truncated her life, increasingly stoking her skepticism of the Western art nexus. One disruption (possibly a mental health outburst) began in 1957, when she left for Europe after her first solo show, when media attention had ramped up. This recurred a second time a decade later, in 1968, when, as militant activist fury rose around the war in Vietnam, Marisol traveled for long stretches to Asia and South America. Thereafter, in the ’70s, the work she produced was “more violent, more explicitly sexual, more angry,” Rodríguez Muñoz notes. The final disruption of her life was not willful; in 2000, she began to struggle with dementia, though she continued drawing for another 15 years.

It was her first retreat that inspired the exhibition title, excerpted from a letter written by gallerist Castelli in the late 1950s. He wonders at her: “How can you leave when things are just beginning?”

Part of the reason was this: her work may have been well-known enough to cover Time magazine in 1970, but she, as an artist, was often reduced to her beauty or othered for her Venezuelan origins. Vallés Vílchez notes she was “repeatedly described in the press as ‘Latin Garbo.'” A short New York Times review of her sculpture work, a clipping here in a vitrine, describes these works as “found in some South American jungle, they would not surprise archeologists.” In July 1958, a magazine article was titled “Latin Beauty’s Host of Stern People, Staring Pets.” The persistent condescension is unsettling. Moreover, the catalogue cites that in 1974, Marisol indignantly rejected a “folk artist” designation assigned to her by a critic, countering that she did not come from some backwater with a hissing vehemence: “You still have delusions of colonialism.” She continued: “I’m sick and tired of your lousy art reviews—fucking asshole […] If you call my work folk art it is only because you are prejudiced about my South American background. Folk you.”

Even beyond reductionist criticism, art historian Cecilia Fajardo-Hill notes Marisol’s multiple identities muddled the context in which her work was featured. In 1966, she was included in one of the first surveys of Latin American art in the United States, “Art of Latin America Since Independence,” at the Yale University Art Gallery. That same year, she was part of “Art of the United States: 1670–1966” at the Whitney. Yet, earlier in the decade, she was excluded from the São Paulo Biennial in 1963 for lacking U.S. citizenship, and in 1968 she represented Venezuela at the Venice Biennale. “This condition of ‘no place/all places’ encapsulates both the constraints imposed on Marisol’s agency and the expansive, transnational scope of her artistic identity,” remarks Fajardo-Hill.

Ultimately, she donated her apartment and estate to the first museum to buy her works and back her economically. Buffalo AKG Art Museum received everything when she died in 2016; she had no heirs. The museum sold her New York apartment to fund managing the estate and digitizing the work.

A catalogue essay notes Marisol’s art world prevalence coincided with a surge in feminist thought: in 1963 Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique, and throughout the decade, the English translation of The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir increasingly circulated. Marisol never explicitly aligned herself with these discourses, but the idea of the female body as, per Vallés Vílchez, “a site of expectations” runs through her work without question, and her aesthetics of fragmented female bodies seem to address the deep malaise of living in a sexist society.

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Artist Julian Schnabel’s five-decade career has pivoted around using repurposed materials, from wax to velvet, as fresh surfaces; his most recent subversion is handling a paintbrush elongated by a stick. His work is currently on view in the south of France at the resplendent Château La Coste, which has 40 al fresco installations and sculptures scattered across the 500-acre site, plus five indoor galleries.

At Galerie des Ancien Chais is a sampling of nine monumental works drawn from across Schnabel’s career. A painting from 1975 is the earliest in the show; the use of a boxing ring floor for The Edge of Victory (1987) reflects how he was constantly flipping what can or should be used as an art surface. His most recent work is a Plate Painting that stars himself from 2023, showcasing a dapper hat, his signature glasses and a striped robe. The edit was chosen with curator Donatien Grau, head of contemporary programs at Musée du Louvre; the two worked together on a Musée d’Orsay show in 2018, “Orsay vu par Julian Schnabel,” in which the artist selected works from the prestigious collection alongside his own productions.

In the neighboring Bastide Gallery, is a cluster of Umbrella Pines, also shown this spring at Pace, that resonate with the French estate’s cypresses, stone pines, olive trees and oaks. His ongoing Plate Paintings series, which he began in the 1970s fashioned from shattered dishware, takes inspiration from Antonio Gaudí’s mosaics throughout Barcelona.

Observer spoke via video with the artist, who was in his Hamptons home in between a surfing session and a massage.

Where am I catching you?

You’re in my kitchen in Montauk. [He moves the screen around.] These drawings were made in 1978. That one says “for Piero Manzoni, for Lou Reed: ‘I’m gonna stop wastin’ my time. Somebody else would have broken both of her arms.'” That’s a Henry Fox Talbot photograph, one of the first photographs ever.

Oh wow!

Jorge Galindo made this. This is an old collage from the ’90s. I’m walking into the living room.

Is every room filled with art?

Yeah, all the rooms. That’s from 1980. And that’s from 1636.

What range!

[He walks outside.] That’s a sculpture of mine called Ahab. There’s another one here called Idiota that I made in Spain in 1988. It’s bronze… I’ll sit here in the garden.

In the press materials, the nine paintings are described as “the most loved.” What determines the hierarchy of “most loved” among your creations?

I think that’s Donatien saying that, and he’s seeing if I’m agreeing with him.

Do you?

I think that each of these paintings is emblematic of a particular moment. They encapsulate something, they represent a group of paintings. For example, Untitled (Los Patos del Buen Retiro III), the one that says “Nip” on it… I made five paintings that were that size; there were four painted on some light-colored tarps that belonged to the Reina Sofía. So that stands as a representative of that. “Los Patos del Buen Retiro” means the ducks in the Buen Retiro, the lake in the middle of the park in Madrid. I fell in that lake, kind of depressed. I went out on a rowboat and fell off the rowboat and watched the lake come between me and my glasses, and then thought, well. When I gave this course to the Círculo de Bellas Artes, I told these kids that, at one time, my only friends were the Patos del Buen Retiro, the ducks in the pond.

The Untitled (Sister of Ozymandias) is painted on a sail, and I made another painting called Ozymandias, and other groups of paintings on sails, like the [abstract] Jane Birkin paintings on felucca sails from Egypt. So that painting represents that body of work, in a way. Then I made Last Big Girl with No Eyes: a painting that I first showed at Larry Gagosian. Robert Rosenblum wrote the catalog text: “Schnabel’s Violent America.” There were four that were that size.

I made a group of pictures that are painted on canvas that have resin on them. I was in Giovanni Volpe’s palace in Venice years ago; he had paintings of procurators that were members of his family from the 18th century, people with these red vests on. I just thought they needed a little white. So I started to make my own antique paintings, and painted the white on top of them.

You have two paintings in that show that have resin on them. One is of José Ramón Antero, where he looks like a priest; there’s a little white right triangle in the corner. José Ramón Antero was called Pi-nueve because he had a long nose, Pinocchio is Pino Ocho, he was Pino Nueve. I did not name him that; the local people did. I did not call him that to his face. You have to go to Spain to find somebody with a nose like that.

For the Christ painting, I tied my friend Victor Hugo Demo to a cross in my studio in San Sebastián and painted him. Then there’s Jack the Bellboy. That’s from 1975. I didn’t want to paint on canvas that you could buy in an art supply store with a stretcher that was predetermined by somebody else. So when I bought that, I modified it, and I covered it with joint compound and Rhoplex, and made these lumps on it, and changed the edges, and cut holes in it, and that was the beginning of me making a receiver for whatever things I believe would end up in a painting, or should be in a painting, or could be in a painting. Jack the Bellboy was sort of a surrogate for me in a way. In a sense, that’s a self-portrait.

And then there’s a self-portrait with the plate painting that’s from 2023. I once said anything could be the subject of a painting: a smudge of dirt, a painting of your own painting. I mean, Van Gogh used to paint paintings of his own paintings.

Then The Edge of Victory is the one with the big white marks on it and the gaffer’s tape, and that was painted on the [floor of the] boxing ring of the Gramercy Gym where Mike Tyson trained; Floyd Patterson also. I once let Jamie Nares use my studio on 23rd Street for free, and I guess to return the gift, he found these tarps that they were going to throw out of the gym on 14th Street, and he brought them to me. So I made three paintings. One was called Muhammad Ali, one was Descent from the Cross, and The Edge of Victory. I glued the gaffer’s tape down, and then painted those white marks on it.

I think I talked about each painting that was in that show just now.

Do you feel like this selection distills your career or your approach?

The point of being able to have the experience there is not about me; it’s about you, and us, communing with these different variables that might open up a path to some place in your consciousness, that becomes a part of your reality that you carry with you when you walk out of there. Maybe Donatien’s role in this is him trying to bring people closer to my sensibility, or to show what my work is about. How do you mediate somebody else’s work and try to make the public see what you’re seeing because you think it’s of value?

That’s a good question. How?

If we dissect each person’s intention here, you’ve got Paddy [McKillen, owner of Château La Coste] that has this property. He wants to show what art is, or what art can be, right? And then Donatien selects this place because of the context of what Paddy’s doing, and then he’s melding that with what you would call my career, or whoever I’m supposed to be as an artist or whatever.

Could you speak more about the exchange between you and Donatien? How does that conversation beget the distillation that we were just talking about?

How did you feel when you walked into the room?

The scale felt striking, it was humbling to be around those paintings because they have such enormous presence.

It’s like being in church.

Yes.

The church of your insides, your own church. [Designer] Azzedine Alaïa years ago said to me, there’s this young guy that loves your work. I want you to meet him and let him into your studio, and that was Donatien. He had already written a book about Proust. And then we became friends. Later he worked at the Musée d’Orsay, and they had never had a show of a living artist there before. I was going to work on my film At Eternity’s Gate, and I was looking around at the paintings in the museum. He asked Laurence des Cars to have an exhibition where we could show some of the paintings that I was looking at, affected by. They started to say, “Oh, you can’t have this one because it has to be in this spot,” or “it’s earmarked for another exhibition.” I said, “You can’t say it’s ‘vu par Julian Schnabel’ if they’re not the paintings that I selected, so I’m not doing it.” Laurence des Cars talked to the different curators, and they let me use the paintings that I selected. Did you see that show?

I did.

I don’t only do one thing. One guy came to my show at Château La Coste and he said, “Which one of these paintings is yours?” I said “they’re all mine.” The breadth or the possibilities of what painting can be… I had no idea what my paintings were going to look like when I was beginning, or what being a painter meant, but I guess as you live your life and you go through these different moments, you say, “Oh, I see a painting there. I see a painting in that. I see a group of paintings in that. I see a plethora of possibilities here.”

Obviously there are bodies of work that are not in that show also. But I think that it’s a pretty concise embodiment of the different possibilities of what one person can do, and my attitude towards image-making or mark-making or making something, even though a lot of things that I made are not in. Donatien was trying to frame it and contextualize it. And I think it was a healthy marriage.

Tell me about the work in the other gallery.

I wanted to show something that was also recent; I made them while I was waiting for the Venice Film Festival to tell me if our film was going to be shown, because it was invited to be in competition the year before, and I turned it down for other reasons, but they let me submit it again. They gave me the “Glory to the Filmmaker Award,” and we showed the film. But I didn’t know that that was going to happen.

While I was waiting, anxious about it, I was painting these umbrella pine trees that surrounded the house in Ansedonia that we rented. They’re also similar to the trees by the Villa Borghese, and I was just looking at the scaffolding of those branches. Those drawings I painted on 18th-century maps of Italy that I had blown up from little maps, because they weren’t that size. I could do that while I was waiting, in terms of the film.

And then when I came back to Montauk, I painted those plate paintings on the floor, which is unusual. I had the brushes taped to sticks, and I was pressing on the paper, and the bristles would look like pine needles. I mix the paint wet on the brush as I’m dipping it into the different pots of paint, so it makes that kind of color where the light of the Naples yellow hits the green or the umber.

That’s a very different thing to be doing than, say, me putting lumps on the canvas, making Jack the Bellboy in 1975. But it’s the same brain or the same impulse to discover ways of applying paint to a material. If you call art a “practice,” you’re practicing, and you’re practicing your stroke, the same way a surfer would perfect their way of riding a wave.

It’s the gesture of it. There’s a palimpsest of things that exist. We didn’t invent anything. There’s no personal language: there’s just a personal selection of language. What is it to make a painting? Why is that a painting? Let’s talk about The Edge of Victory. Somebody else might look at that and say, “Well, that’s not a painting… Where’s all the things that I thought were supposed to be in a painting?” What this is saying is: well, maybe this is what a painting can be.

What was your own process of deconstructing what a painting could be, of realizing that there were more possibilities than just a formatted canvas?

If you put on a sweater and it’s itchy, you take it off. I was looking at the different things that were presented to me as art. I’m thinking about what was being shown at the Whitney Museum when I first came back to New York in the ’70s, and I was thinking about what I was seeing when I was in art school in Houston, or what the teachers were doing. It didn’t really do anything for me. I wanted to make something, but I needed something that was particular to me. And you stumble upon things, and you don’t even know, really, what you’re looking for.

I wanted to be an artist. I didn’t know what that meant. And as I’m older, it’s about the commitment that you have to doing that. You have no idea what it’s going to be or what you’re going to do. I was talking with my friend; I said… What was the quote? “I didn’t know what it was until I did.” And it’s about leaning towards a divine light and maybe it’s going to hit you.

Have you always felt this way?

I made a painting, and there was a nurse’s hat. I used to go to Max’s Kansas City, and after one night of drinking, these two artists who were about 10 years older than me came over to the studio and looked at it, and they said, “I don’t think you’d need the nurse’s hat in that painting.” I listened to them, and I cut the hat out of it, and I ruined the painting… Most older artists are going to try to get you to conform to the standards that you’re out to destroy anyway. Obviously, that was a good lesson because it didn’t stop me from putting broken dishes on my painting. Why did I do that? I did that out of desperation. I was looking for another painting that I had never seen before. I think that’s the goal. How do you make a painting that is particular to you? When you start looking at other people’s work, you see their references, and either they have elevated them or taken them to some other place, or they’re just repeating something that somebody else has already settled for and claimed for themselves because they lived it. No substitute for that.

Speaking of different generations: do you feel intrigued by what newer generations are doing today? Do you follow what’s happening?

No I don’t, and I’m not.

Why not?

I mean, I’d like to be surprised. It’s not just a generational thing. I think it’s just about people, and luckily, because people know who I am, or artists know who I am, they try to connect with me. I can recognize when I think people have something special.

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IDA, a four-year-old Parisian consulting agency specialized in the development of art acquisitions, exhibitions, custom commissions and events, primarily connects corporate enterprises with artists. But founders Florence Marmiesse, a French art consultant who came up through Sotheby’s and Artcurial, and Camilla D’Alfonso, an Italian photographer, also launched a short-term summer residency in Italy as a distinctive way to foster artist projects.

Since founding the agency, they’ve teamed with players in the world of hospitality—hotels, restaurants, real estate—to, as Marmiesse puts it, determine “how art can be injected in different aspects of companies.” It’s imperative, on the one hand, to understand the company’s needs: “we make sure it’s made on budget, it’s made on time, the deadlines are respected,” but also, “we do a lot of pedagogy”—meaning educating organizations about artistic value and pushing their thinking to be more elastic.

(The two are regularly contacted by hotels that say, we have a wall, can you fill it? “We’re like: that’s not really the way it works to create an exhibition,” says Marmiesse. D’Alfonso affirms: “We’re not decorators.”)

On the flip side, Marmiesse adds, the artist’s needs are just as important. “You need to pay the artist; they need to be raised up… we, as the intermediary, are making sure the artists feel well understood and respected, that they have freedom and are able to do their art properly. We make sure the artists are not used as a marketing tool: we want to value their work.”

Throughout the year, they accompany their clients on art buying missions, supporting patronage and commissions. They’ve collaborated with modeling agency Ford Models Paris and Hoxton Hotels. Some of their time is spent scouting for artists at art fairs, attending graduation shows at École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts and other schools of their ilk and doing studio visits.

The agency name references the highest mountain in the most populous island of Greece, Crete, where Marmiesse and D’Alfonso once traveled and where, according to legend, the Greek god Zeus was born. Although based in Paris, both travel frequently: “it’s very important for us to be able to get out of the Parisian microcosm.”

Thinking beyond the Paris microcosm prompted the creation of the artist residency at Ebbio, a restored 13th-century farmhouse in the Tuscan countryside in proximity to Siena and an hour’s drive from Florence (also not far from Castello di Ama, a winery that also hosts artists). Set among an especially fertile landscape beneath which roils a volcanic geology, the program is open to artists worldwide regardless of medium. It is very short, taking place every two years, two weeks apiece for four artists across two summer sessions, but comes with curatorial, administrative and logistical support.

The partnership with Ebbio is incumbent on the property’s availability, since at other times it’s a yoga retreat and operational hotel. The residency is anchored around a perennial theme, “Seeds Grow,” championing experimentation and artistic development. The theme helps refine the selection process, which respectfully aligns with the naturalism of the seven hectares, given its bounty of olive trees, lavender fields, summer garden bursting with herbs and vegetables, and array of chicken and geese. The emphasis on nature is “not a greenwashing, but really because we want to give value to it,” Marmiesse says.

For the residency’s second year, the selection was guided by a jury of art world figures including Sotheby’s auctioneer Phyllis Kao, journalist George Nelson, gallerist Romero Paprocki—whose Parisian space will host the results of the residency in Paris in July 2027—and the two founders of IDA. They seek diversity in terms of medium, nationality and career path, with each juror proposing several candidates in addition to reviewing outside applications, which this year spanned 27 nationalities.

The first cycle of artists culminated in an exhibition in 2024 in Rome at the Institut Français and in a hotel. Beyond that, Louise Vendel did an exhibition in a deconsecrated church, shifting her typical black and blue palette to Tuscan orange and yellow. Jade Tang did a large-scale piece about Tuscan vegetation, shown at the DRAC in France. Yoan Estivenin had a show at Art Paris inspired by animals on the property and objects in the farmhouse. Dancer Sulian Rios worked for two weeks on a choreography that was presented last year in various theaters.

The two artists appointed to this year’s June session were Taiwan-born, New York-based composer Shiuan Chang and Spanish-born, London-based artist Almudena Romero. They were inspired by birds and local plants, respectively.

Nominated by Kao, Chang—who has only recently recovered after a health issue—applied to work on a solo for contrabass flute (an instrument two octaves lower than a “regular” flute) and was adapting his performance art project People Concerto. His residency rhythm was reading in the morning, walking, composing and watching the sunset after dinner. His normal days working in his Queens home are typically 8-11 hours of composing and writing music for commissions. After having rejected academia and the conservatory system in favor of interacting with the general public, he organized concerts at galleries and museums in New York. He recently composed a violin concerto for the Taipei Symphony Orchestra, as well as a composition reproducing sounds of the forest for Cloudgate Dance Theater of Taiwan (soon touring in Berlin, Turin and Singapore), in addition to creating music to accompany patients at a psychiatric hospital in Taiwan throughout their day. During the residency, he was inspired by the high frequencies of two species of owls on the property—”the sound of nature is very rich,” he acknowledges—as well as cicadas and various birdsongs. His signature is implementing a lot of glissando, pitch moving from one point to another point: a kind of migrating sound.

Romero, an expert in 19th-century photography techniques who has taught and worked with museums on cyanotypes and wet collodion, was inspired by English polymath John Herschel’s findings that spearheaded the beginnings of color photography. As an environmentalist, she wanted to produce work without harmful chemicals like silver nitrate, instead creating with organic plant-based pigments and natural dyes, which are more fragile and ephemeral in their results (and less secure archivally) but without the risk of polluting. Sustainability and working with nature is something she’s always been steeped in, coming from multi-generations of organic orange farmers in Valencia. “I do think that my practice aligns very well with the ethos of seeds growing,” she says.

She did two types of research during her residency: extracting pigments from plants in the summer garden, including purple cabbage, onion skin, beetroot, spinach and turmeric—making the hues more alkaline with sodium bicarbonate or more acid with vinegar, to then see how colors vary when placing leaves (also from the garden) on a wooden surface covered with the juices of the pigments and left in the sun to create “fossils of our time.” She’s also looking at the chromatic green tonalities and crop cycle growth of barley, rye and wheat grown in the same patch of soil, functioning as a kind of “farmed photograph,” which she winkingly plants in former darkroom equipment. Her current exhibition in Toulouse, “The Eye,” (part of her Farming Photographs series) is a one-hectare installation of a human eye shaped into a French field using nothing but wheat and winter grasses.

Marmiesse says Ebbio is “our lab. It’s super important for artists to have the safe space to be able to experiment. They are free to create—and also to rest… We really believe artists are the solution to a lot of issues of the world.” If that sounds hyperbolic—and indeed IDA’s mantra is a cheerleader-y one, “art can do it”—she qualifies, “they allow all of us to see either things we don’t want to see or can’t see. Sometimes it’s hard but it [can be] done with sincerity and ingenuity in a world where… money can smash everything. We want to protect that with this residency: making sure these voices are heard.”

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The burgeoning Baltic art fair Riga Contemporary completed its second edition last week, attracting a young stylish crowd on opening night. Prioritizing cultural fervor over commercial single-mindedness, it boasted deliberately affordable participation fees for galleries and free entry for visitors—largely possible because it’s subsidized by the Riga City Council. Bringing together 40 galleries from 15 countries, it adopted a two-pronged curatorial approach: on one hand, guided by regional scouting from the Latvian team behind Kim? Contemporary Art Centre, on the other, American reach by way of Jeffrey Rosen, the Texas-born co-founder of MISAKO & ROSEN gallery in Tokyo and a co-president of NADA, who helped anchor the first edition of the fair in 2025.

“It’s broadening the circle, keeping it international, but it’s also a little bit more realistic in terms of what we’re expecting of people,” Rosen told Observer. “We’re trying to grow a market within a region… rather than trying to start from another part of the world.” This was a pivot from the expansive view of last year, which brought over spaces from Korea and Jakarta. “It seemed irresponsible to try and get galleries from Asia to come unless they themselves had a good plan.” He felt that without striving so hard to be as geographically diverse as possible, the result was more consistent presentations.

Rosen shared a booth with the Milwaukee outfit Green Gallery, jointly showing almost entirely Latvian artists selling in the €3,000-6,000 range, including a painting by Amanda Ziemele (who represented Latvia at the Venice Biennale in 2024), deconstructed mirror pieces by Indriķis Ģelzis and psychedelic drawings by Viktor Timofeev. “We could use our international perspective and presence as a way to boost what’s happening locally,” Rosen reasoned.

“It takes time to let everyone know we are here to stay,” Zane Čulkstēna, founder of Kim? Contemporary Art Centre, added, noting the team’s efforts to become better acquainted with the regional Eastern European and Nordic scenes. “For years, we would rather meet in New York or Venice than in Warsaw or Budapest, or even in Helsinki. We made a conscious effort to go country by country and look into what’s happening there and approach galleries.”

Among the galleries, there was significant American representation: from New York (Jenny’s, Polina Berlin, Margot Samel, The Gallery), Chicago (Good Weather, TALA, Weatherproof, Met Him Pike Hoses) and Los Angeles (Gattopardo, Kristina Kite). The European presence included two galleries from Milan (Castiglioni, eastcontemporary), two from Brussels (Gauli Zitter, Kin) and one from Paris (new garden galerie). There were eight galleries from Riga itself and a sprinkling from Helsinki, Bucharest, Warsaw, Tbilisi, Tallinn and Vilnius.

For a new fair, pre-existing models provide deeply problematic strategies as a result of “corporate greed and the fact that… they’re being made as mass entertainment events for an audience [even though] they’re trade fairs for professionals. Who’s winning in that equation? The person that owns the fair! But not the galleries; not the audience; not the artists,” Rosen said. “Maybe you start from the ground up with the local audience… You’re trying to generate some sense of culture, which can generate commerce.” Maintaining an intimate scale—and refusing to aspire to be a massive event in the long term—draws, perhaps, just a small portion of the population, but an audience large enough to feel like a viable alternative.

This sentiment was echoed in a conversation—part of the public program—around the topic of the art market in 2026. One speaker, Emily Watlington, deputy editor of Art in America/ARTnews, noted that we’re existing in an age without “a set of shared references” and that any “idea of there being an authoritative decider of who is an important artist has kind of fallen apart.” This status quo of disparate hierarchies, she pointed out, is one local communities can adeptly fill in for themselves. The idea was also echoed by an international panel addressing the topic of the role of regional art fairs, where speakers including the artistic director of ArtVilnius, the CEO of CHART Art Fair, the artistic director of Foto Tallinn Art Fair and the artistic director of Art Düsseldorf collectively agreed that it doesn’t make sense to aspire to ruthless global competitiveness over nurturing the local scene with the specificity on offer.

The two Estonian co-founders of London-based Galerina, Niina Ulfsak and Mischa Lustin, started the gallery within their apartment—”it was a bit like ‘if you know you know’ kind of thing… We would only DM [the address] to people because it was in our house”—until going public in January. (Gallerist Olga Temnikova of Temnikova & Kasela, who had a booth at the fair and spearheaded ESTHER in New York at the Estonia House, an event subsidized by the Estonian government, gave them their first internship when they were still teenagers.)

Of his native Baltic region, Lustin says: “It’s in its early embryonic stage—it really would be smart to capture it, because it’s only been 30-odd years of free market economy in this region, and it’s only now that the middle class is beginning to stabilize a little bit and emerge and start to poke the ceiling a little bit.” Given the huge success of companies with founders from this region—Vinted, Bolt, Revolut—”there’s more money in the economy.”

Not that much money, though. One Latvian gallerist somewhat dryly described the scene as “more art lovers than buyers.” Slovakian gallerist Nico Bernath, who launched his new namesake space in April, described European fairs as “sleepy” and that “you have to convince people” relative to the American insouciance about spending on art. Bernath was showing Hungarian artist and healer Réka Lőrincz, who toys with gender stereotypes, and whose embroidered piece Invisible Work, selling at €7,000, was made from actual American dollars set within delicate embroideries—a perfect capitalist emblem. Bernath has participated in fairs with a previous project in Mexico City and in Miami, and is more enthusiastic about showing in North and Central America.

By contrast, Lustin posited that “there are enough cool emerging galleries [at the fair] where if you would like to invest in contemporary art whose value will grow, these would be, logically, the galleries to do it at. Because they’re more affordable—now—but many galleries here have a very tight grip on the institutional support of these artists’ careers, because that’s what provides the longevity of these artists’ market.” Galerina was showing small new works for £600 by a Polish artist and British artist Sarah Staton’s larger pieces on linen, selling from £5,000-6,500. Lustin continued: “When we do the fairs, obviously, the objective is to sell, but another objective is to meet those curators and institutional people and writers who do reviews.”

“Our collector base was the art world itself,” Lustin added. “It wasn’t the people who have, like, 10k to spare on an artwork. These were the people who would have 2k to spare or a thousand pounds to spare—the artists, the gallerists, the curators, the sort of people who are in this community.”

Gallerist Peter Bencze of Budapest-based Longtermhandstand said: “I don’t believe in all of this crisis. If you are showing good art and you are doing the work, at some point it will pay off. There is a person in the world who wants to buy a painting from you—you have to find them! I truly believe these small-format fairs, like Riga Contemporary, are helping a new generation… This is part of the evolution, even if it’s slower than big fairs, but I really like the conversations.” His booth featured a duo show: Hungarian artist Attila Bagi, whose €4,000 paintings referenced a set of posters from the 1982 World Cup, and half-Hungarian half-Syrian ceramicist Róza El-Hassan, showing women’s anti-war activist circles selling for €4,500 each.

Whether the fair is in crisis, the second edition overall seemed successful. Rosen noted this second edition “feels improved… It’s not an unknown quantity.” He described the first year as possessing a “what is going on?” vibe, “whereas I felt like [at the opening] people were like, this is our art fair.”

More in Art Fairs, Biennials and Triennials

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• Zero 10 in Basel Contextualized Digital Art Within a Broader Historical Framework

• Observer’s 2026 July Art Fair Calendar

• In Basel, a Cautious But Committed Market Rediscovers Its Nerve

• At Liste Basel, Market Trends Give Way to Explorations of Contemporary Anxiety

• Global Art Biennials: Renovation, Revelation—or Repetition?

Marina Abramović—unilaterally considered a pioneer of performance art—was still having breakfast in the Austrian Alps when we spoke over Zoom. She was staying there in anticipation of traveling to Venice, where her exhibition “Transforming Energy” (May 6-October 18, 2026) will make her the first living woman to have an exhibition at the Galleria dell’Accademia di Venezia, installed amidst its Renaissance masterpieces. This “first” is no surprise—since the 1970s, Abramović has continually pushed the boundaries between body/mind and artist/audience, including with the groundbreaking show “The Artist Is Present” at MoMA in 2010.

Abramović’s assemblage of short films, “Seven Deaths” (a manifestation of her lifelong fascination with Maria Callas, the iconic opera diva of the 20th Century), is installed through November 30 in Cisternerne in Copenhagen, a former 19th-century underground water reservoir with a sensory-rich subterranean atmosphere. In its humid darkness, under high ceilings that originally held 16 million liters of water, the pronounced acoustic reverberation dramatically impacts how these seven arias are experienced.

Throughout, Abramović serves as the protagonist, dying in diverse ways opposite actor Willem Dafoe, who appeared with her in Robert Wilson’s The Life & Death of Marina Abramović. Jointly, they interpret the dramatic climaxes from Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata, Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca and Georges Bizet’s Carmen. Abramović compresses the psychodrama of the arias, fleshing out the emotional betrayals and agonies in her own theatrical microcosm. Incidentally, Abramović will turn 80 on the final day of the exhibition.

We spoke with the artist about her striking overlaps with Maria Callas, how museums need to better evolve with the needs of the public and her utterly surprising guilty pleasure.

To start with “Seven Deaths,” which came first: the scenography or the music?

First came Callas, her voice. After that, her life. She died from a broken heart. In my own life, I also almost died from a broken heart. I identify so much with her. She’s a Sagittarius. She had a really difficult childhood—like me—and also a big nose. She always was thinking that she’s too fat and tried to lose this weight, to look anorexic. In many ways, I got very angry at her, because she really had this gift—the voice—but she was willing to give up the gift and everything just for love and a normal life with [Aristotle] Onassis, who didn’t deserve any of it. So actually, these two biographies merged together.

My big idea was not to make opera. My idea was to actually make seven movies. I would have liked to have seven different directors to direct me, and I’m dying over and over with the Callas music. I approached these directors: Polanski, I had lunch with; a long conversation with Iñárritu; with Peter Weir, the Australian director—not to mention the other names. All of them had different agendas. It was impossible. It took four years of this negotiation. I had to do this all at once, and all the directors were busy on different projects. So I was losing an enormous amount of time, with no result. And then, out of the blue, completely unexpected, came the director of the Munich Opera at that time, Nikolaus Bachler. He came to Stockholm—I had a show there—just to have a conversation with me, to say opera really needs new blood. We would like to work with artists, and we would like to work with you, if you can stage and direct the Barbe-Bleue opera.” And I say, Oh my God—this is like God sent him to me! I say, You know what? I don’t give a shit about Barbe-Bleue, but I have a project for you. We finished lunch, we shook hands, and we say, okay, we are doing opera. I arrived in Munich exactly four days before the complete lockdown for COVID. To do this piece, I stayed three months, having the entire opera for me, putting this together and having tests every three days.

For the movie, Peter Weir, the Australian director, actually helped me. I was in Australia, and I love his work, and I called him, and we had a meeting in Sydney to talk about this movie. And at that time, he was in the countryside somewhere; he hurt his leg very badly, so he was in a plaster at home. He said, we can’t have the meeting, but we can have a long conversation, because I can’t move. The conversation lasted around three hours. In the end, he said, “Marina, all of us that you ask have their own stories, and this is not our story. This is your story. You have to concentrate and do it yourself.” After Australia, I came back, and I got this invitation for the Munich opera. “Seven Deaths” was born.

I decided, okay, I have to play the spirit of Callas. I can’t sing. But there is one moment [in the first film] when I’m lying in the bed and I’m looking at the photographs of my past, and everybody thinks (because we reconstructed Callas’ room to perfection, including sleeping pills, the telephone, the flowers, the bed sheets, the paintings that she had in the room) that when I opened the drawer that I’m looking at the photographs of her and Onassis. But I was looking at my marriage and my photographs. So this was really that mix of the autobiographical and her story. Now you ask me a question, so I can have another bite of breakfast.

The films throughout are about female pain and rage and heartbreak, but in the final film, there’s a gender inversion where you’re dressed like a man, and Willem Dafoe is dressed like a woman. Did you think about playing with gender in other ways?

It’s really good that you notice this. “Casta Diva” was the first song I ever heard when I was 14 on a small radio in my grandmother’s kitchen. And I just cry and say, Oh my god, I want to know everything about this voice and who is singing. I put “Casta Diva” at the end. She’s a druid queen, she falls in love with an officer; she has two children with this officer. She wanted to escape with him and betray completely her own country. But at the same time, he falls in love with her mate. She’s totally brokenhearted. She now betrayed the country. She lost the honor—there’s nothing for her to do [except] go and die in a fire. And when she’s going on this path, to the fire to burn, he’s standing with everybody else, looking at her. And in that moment, he understood how stupid he is to fall in love with the stupid mate, and how great and unbelievable this woman that he abandoned is, and falls in love with her again. But then he’s a coward. That’s why I changed the clothes. Now, he is this cowardly woman, kind of stumbling. He looks like Bette Davis on drugs, by the way. [Abramović laughs.]

Definitely.

She’s the one in male clothes, the one who actually took the courage to save her honor. The dress was so expensive: all the costumes are by Riccardo Tisci, who was working at Burberry at that time. This work has so many different lives. One is a stage version with the full orchestra: an opera setting. Another version is the installation: just one screen and all the films at the same time. In Cisternerne, the echo is unbelievable: the sound completely gives another dimension to this whole thing.

In an interlude between the films, one voiceover is a string of connected words: “intuition, premonition, feeling, hunch”… I was wondering how you balance, as an artist, intuition with control?

First of all, intuition is everything. Artists have to have intuition, even predict the future of their own work. I think that my childhood living in the Balkans and coming from this background of communism and a very religious grandmother, I actually developed lots of stuff to do with dreams, and meanings of dreams, and intuition, and inspiration. First, you have to feel it, and then you can read what it is about, but if it is not a feeling, I don’t care.

There are so many artists where you have to read lots of text in order to get the key to the work. And I really think that you can first be moved by the guts. You have to have tears in your eyes, and then you think later on about what happened to you. But intuition, inspiration and really prediction are incredibly important. If I get an idea and I like the idea, I’m not interested in doing it at all. I’m always interested when an idea is impossible or is so difficult that I am afraid of it.

If you think about Callas, this was when I was 14. I realized the piece in the 2020s during COVID. I mean, this is an enormous amount of time. Sometimes I need the piece to grow. For my Balkan erotic epic, 2005 is when I first wanted to do it, and I just developed the piece [this year]. I mean, it takes years. Walking the Great Wall in China took us eight years just to get permission. I don’t care about time. I really care that, actually, I am on the right path with my own guts and heart.

You’ve toyed extensively with risk and danger throughout your career. Where are you at today with the idea of risk?

In the beginning, when I was young, I was so interested in risk and danger and pain. But now I understand that actually, physical pain is something that I really can handle—but I can’t handle emotional pain. Emotional pain is so much more difficult, and I still haven’t found a way to do that. I don’t think I’m the only one: I think that the entirety of humanity has a problem with emotional pain. I think you grow and, getting older, you get wisdom. It doesn’t mean that I’m very wise. I’m just getting wise. I never wanted to get into all this suffering; I understand things how they are.

You’ve talked about how performance art is a young person’s game, and that many who did performance art would age out of it. Why have you had the endurance in a way that other people haven’t?

I come from Slavic mountain people. [She laughs.] People already at the end of their 70s give up performance. It was too demanding. First of all, it’s an immaterial form of art—you can’t make a living. All my life, I was teaching in order to pay my rent. The first time I was ever paid for performance was when I was 65 years old, at the MoMA, because I had to sit there for three months, and I could not work, so they had to pay me.

I never was even thinking that I could make a living out of this. And then there was the pressure of the galleries and museums to produce goods: people started making mixed media stuff, video, sculptures, and so on. But I never give up. I think one of the most revolutionary, the most difficult, and the most demanding but incredibly transformative forms of art is performance. I’m very happy that I continue; I work with young people. I teach them. I have my own institute in Greece. I want to tell the young generation of artists that the real performance we are talking about is long durational, hours and hours and months and months; it actually is transformative, not just for the public, but for the person doing it, and creates a completely new kind of dynamic and energy. The public comes because they don’t believe this is happening. They bring their friends, the friends bring their friends, and it becomes this new dynamic, which normally in a museum doesn’t happen. I just think that my entire life, till my last breath, I will dedicate to this form of art.

[She sips from her mug of tea.] I’m always drinking Yorkshire Gold. Did you ever try Yorkshire Gold?

I haven’t!

Yorkshire Gold is good.

You first attended a Venice Biennial when you were 14, and obviously you’ve had a long career there. What is your feeling about showing there today?

Venice is like being at home to me. Since I was 14, I have seen every Biennale. And also in 1995, I got a Golden Lion [ed note: 1997]. So this is like the biggest honor, and I still come because I really love the sadness, the melancholy, the drama of Venice. But right now, I’m also the first woman to show at the Accademia—like at the Royal Academy. In 265 years, I was the first woman. Now I’m here, the first woman. I’m getting this role to be the first woman everywhere, like a truck, making the road for other talented women. [She laughs again.]

This show is very particular. It’s called “Transforming Energy,” and it’s really the public doing the work. I’m giving the public the tools: the objects, the minerals, and very clear instructions, and they have to experience it themselves. There are 65 years to my career. It is not enough that you actually show and perform. The public has to take their own steps and see what they feel.

I also believe that right now, in the 21st Century, museums have to change. It’s not enough for the public just to go and look at things. The public wants to be part of something, and they want their own experiences. This is what I recognize, and I give them this opportunity.

The show was in Shanghai before, and the Chinese public was unbelievable. They did exactly as was instructed. They had headphones to block the sound; they’re in a group, but they’re alone at the same time. How are the Italians going to do all this? I will see what will happen. I don’t think they’re so structural.

You never know with Italians. Crystals and energies have become something lots of people are widely into. Have you noticed that mysticism resonates more with the public? Maybe because people are so desperate to believe in something other than the ugliness of the social-political realities?

We live in a very difficult moment of human history. It’s a mess, really a mess. So people really lost their own center, especially the spiritual center, and then technology took over, and then artificial intelligence. It’s unbelievable. Kids completely lose their own sense of intimacy and sit at the table and text rather than talk. The young generation is afraid to fall in love because they’re afraid of pain. They’re afraid of emotions. I mean, we are damaging ourselves right now because of the way we are living. So people are looking to everything—they look into every form of spirituality they can get.

But what I’m really offering is the pure energy, because the materials we are using are copper, iron, amethyst, quartz and selenite, which really historically have certain energies. I mean that they’re really conserving energy and light and knowledge. The whole motto in this show is: give me the time, and I will give you experience. If you don’t give me the time, no experience.

I remember very well a long time ago at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, I had two objects and asked the public to sit on them. There were two Americans, and one American said to another American—I just overheard the conversation—”Listen, I’m sitting here five minutes. Do you feel anything?” The other says “Nothing. Let’s go for a hamburger.” So the whole thing is, give me your time. I will give experience, but not after just five minutes.

That’s so cliché, but so funny. Let me ask you one last question.

Ask me something private that you want to know.

Do you secretly have bad habits? Like you doomscroll on Instagram? Or a habit that is almost contradictory to the themes of your work?

Oh yes, like everybody else. But I don’t have Instagram. My Institute has Instagram, but I don’t have the passwords, so someone always shows it to me. I am absolutely not on social media myself. But when I’m really overworked and tired, I love to watch Christmas movies. I love them—they’re so stupid. They always start out very complicated and always finish with a happy ending. That’s one. And then I also like series that have a lot of seasons, like 40 seasons. I found one series, but I finished it unfortunately. It’s called “The Heartland.” It’s Canadian, and it’s all about horses in the middle of nowhere. Horses get born. They die. A woman makes pie, washes the dishes. It’s 10 episodes each. So you’re living with some imaginary family with no stress.

But lately, I really recognize my addiction, and now I don’t put the computer I watch on next to my bed. I stopped that about a year ago. Now I read books. I’m reading specific things that really inspire me, so then I fall asleep with the book on my chest.

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“The Woman Question 1550-2025,” closing soon at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, is as impactful as it is informative. Part of the urgency of the show, museum director Joana Mytkowska writes in the accompanying catalogue, is the “disbelief at the rising wave of anti-women rhetoric and legal changes around the world—including Europe and the United States, once considered a bastion of civil equality.” The show further debunks the myth that women have only been artists in the recent past, asserting that women have been a continued presence over centuries, finding ways to fulfill an artistic practice despite the systemic structures that sought to hold them back. Mytkowska notes how important it is to demythologize women as “hidden behind allegory, afraid to express dissent” and to instead see them as “fully independent, self-aware and shameless.” Art is “an emancipatory strategy.”

Several contributors to the catalogue texts repeat how the exclusion of women from art history occurred “late,” or rather “recently”—when art historians compiled and anthologized art and chose to spotlight exclusively works by men—a narrativization instated by the likes of Ernst Gombrich and H.W. Janson. The show is a transhistorical counterpoint that accentuates self-portraiture across 199 potent references that are not “exceptions” but clear “examples.” “The Woman Question’s” curator, Alison Gingeras, aptly cites art historian Mary Garrard in her exhibition text: “feminism existed before we knew what to call it.”

Works by Lubaina Himid (recasting Poseidon’s wife as an African matriarch) and Alina Szapocznikow (a depiction of Polish and Soviet friendship with missing limbs) in the entryway serve as a preamble to the show. Once the entryway is behind the visitor, they hear the first work before anything else. Gina Birch’s “3 Minute Scream,” a 1977 Super 8 film, is a cri de coeur of feminist fury and punk ire, setting forth the tone of resistance to the status quo. Therein are nine chapters that examine Baroque women, motherhood and war.

Within the opening section, “Femmes Fortes,” is a powerful work by Macena Barton, a founding member of Women Artists’ Salon in Chicago. Her oil on canvas interpretation of “Salome” (circa 1929) depicts herself as the titular figure post-decapitation against a bright yellow backdrop, a sensuous body with a pitiless gaze upon the saint’s blueish bearded head at her feet on a bronze platter. The painting was a rebuttal to a misogynistic art critic belittling the ability of female artists as painters of nudes. This abuts a work by Betty Tompkins, often censored throughout her career (by galleries and customs agents alike) for depicting sex and reappropriating pornography. Her Women Words (Artemisia Gentileschi #2), a 2024 acrylic on digital print on canvas made specifically for the show, remixes Jael and Sisera (1620) by Artemisia Gentileschi. Tompkins’ version is partially overwritten—quite literally—with vituperative phrases in pink lettering. Samples include BANSHEE = WOMAN TALKING IN PUBLIC. Another: IS SHE FUCKABLE? But the best is: AS I WAS GETTING INTO MY UBER SOME DUDE YELLED “DO YOU KNOW WHERE YOU ARE GOING, BITCH?” AND I YELLED “ALL THE WAY TO THE TOP, ASSHOLE.”

Fittingly, an original 1610 Artemisia Gentileschi work, Susanna and the Elders (Susanna e i vecchioni), is hung in the room next door to Tompkins’ wink. Gentileschi’s painting, executed when she was merely 16, is seen as eerily prescient of the rape and trial she would bear at the hands of a “family friend.” Her work shares a room with a video of Chiara Fumai reading Valerie Solanas’ “Scum Manifesto,” underscoring how broad yet harmonious the scope of this show is.

Gingeras noted during a tour of the exhibition, “I didn’t want to have just the greatest hits… I wanted to weave artists who are untrained, without a diploma, next to trained artists, without any distinction, because to me, it’s a big feminist gesture of this kind of radical horizontality.” Such references include Polish artists Maria Korsak, Genowefa Magiera and Anna Sacha. Moreover, Gingeras wanted to show the breadth of women’s work across centuries, “to pick things that were not necessarily the most famous examples, because the subtext of the show is really paying homage to all the scholars and all the work that’s been done since Linda Nochlin and Griselda Pollock.” She emphasized that “there is no essential female trait or subject. Like, this is exactly not what the show is about.”

In the section “Education & the Canon,” a work by Marie Bashkirtseff serves as a compelling counter-narrative to the notion that women weren’t artists until recently. Born in Russian-controlled Ukraine, she moved to France and studied at the Académie Julian in Paris. She wrote in feminist papers and protested against art schools that refused to train women. Her oil on canvas from 1881 depicts the women’s atelier, a room teeming with female artists and their easels, clustered around a young boy modeling for them. Simply encountering this image of a room full of women serves as proof of longevity.

But the evidence of women artists goes much further back. In the section “Palettes & Power” is Lavinia Fontana’s oil on canvas Self Portrait at the Spinet (Autoritratto con spinetta), completed in 1577. Elegantly coiffed and ornately dressed, she is likely the first professional woman artist in Western history (as in, a woman who earned income through art). She inherited her father Prospero Fontana’s studio, and for her marriage, she negotiated that she would earn money as a painter instead of bestowing a dowry. Within her painting here, an easel is visible in the back. Although sheet music is offered to her as she sits at her instrument, her obvious confidence renders the playbook superfluous.

In a more contemporary light, Lisa Brice’s 2023 Untitled (after Vallotton), in pigment and oil on canvas, takes the ugliness of the South African artist’s apartheid experience and fully inverts the racial positioning of Vallotton’s La Blanche et La Noire from 1913 (itself a callout to Manet’s infamous Olympia from 1863). Instead of being a passive secondary figure, the Black woman is the painting’s pillar, an artist in a red beret and blue dress, smoking, as the white odalisque is subject to her gaze and depiction, nude and vulnerable.

Mobilizing a different medium, the artist Puppies Puppies’ 2022 bronze cast (with an engraved base spelling WOMAN) brings contemporary gender identity discourse into the exhibition. Categorized within the sector “A Muse of Her Own,” A Sculpture for Trans Women… is a life-sized nude self-portrait rendered from a body scan of the Japanese-Puerto Rican artist. She celebrates the right to self-determination, and Gingeras said during the exhibition tour: “I think it’s important that the coalition around women includes people whose identities fall outside of the biological truth.”

In other so-called transgressive depictions, Finnish artist Ilu Susiraja’s 2025 photograph High Cheek Bones highlights the absurdity of hostility towards non-conforming bodies. Using self-portraiture, the strings of floating red balloons are taped to her cheeks as she, in a floral dress, sits against a patterned backdrop in her wooden kitchen, gaze deadpan. The balloons won’t give her cheekbones any more of a lift than any beauty delusion could. The futility of trying to fit a particular prototype of womanhood is rendered with wit and malaise both, whether the focus is body silhouette or face shape.

The exhibition’s deep-dive into motherhood—”Of Woman Born”—is wonderfully unsparing. A painting from Clarity Haynes’ new series, Crowning, is shown here—a baby’s head emerging from a bloodied vulva, painterly but medically accurate and gushing with life. Haynes is known for her 20-year Breast Portrait Project, in which she painted just the torsos of women and non-binary people, most of them queer or on the spectrum.

Another startling work in this section is by Evelyn Nicodemus, who grew up in Tanzania. She depicts a Black woman in stirrups in the dreaded gynecological chair. Nicodemus herself was among the first generation to experience Western medicine coming into the country. When she was a teenager, she suspected she was pregnant and had to go to the gynecologist; it was such a traumatic experience for her that it was only years later, when she made the painting, that she was able to excise that memory. Gingeras notes that the painting is meant to transcend her personal story: “it also emblematizes this painful history for women of color, knowing that enslaved women were experimented upon.”

A non-fine-art piece acts as a telling totem all the same: namely, Madame du Coudray’s Machine, an 18th-century textile sculpture, or rather a replica by the Muséum national de l’histoire naturel in Paris. The anatomical reproduction was designed by a midwife, Angélique Marguerite Le Boursier du Coudray, alongside an illustrated obstetrical handbook she published. She used these tools while traveling around France, educating women on how to give birth and how to take care of themselves—in defiance of male doctors who didn’t want her to transmit this information. “I think having this historical object obviously gives this different frame for all of these discussions around reproductive justice,” Gingeras explained during the exhibition tour.

The final section, “Wartime Women,” is a harrowing note to end on, but an unfortunately topical one. It’s the most “focused”: dealing with the Second World War and the Shoah through mostly Polish artists on the one hand and contemporary Ukrainian artists on the other. Wrestling with the reality of the full-scale invasion, Vlada Ralko’s sprawling and suitably disturbing work from 2022 is an unraveled scroll made from acrylic paint and oil paint stick on canvas. It commingles letters from the Ukrainian alphabet and lone limbs, as though blown apart from bodies. Gingeras describes it as “this kind of Guernica that she started when the Russian invasion began.”

Nearby are appliquéd textile banners by Zuzanna Hertzberg from her series Jewish Shmates [Rags], representing the repressed histories of anti-fascist Polish Jewish women. Of the four depicted—all anarchists, leftists and communists, who were organizing in the ghetto and challenging fascist repression—three were murdered. One was Eve Adams (née Chawa Złoczower), a queer woman who went to America and founded the first lesbian bar in New York. At the end of the 1930s, she was deported back to Poland and killed in the camps.

As Griselda Pollock wrote in the exhibition catalogue, ultimately: “There is no more a women’s art than there is a men’s art. Yet there are areas of experience that have not been presented by men, or by Western European people, or by heterosexual people or by able-bodied people. Feminist thought is an international project, interrogating itself and its own inevitable blind spots because there is a hierarchy of power.” “The Woman Question” is an exercise in dismantling that hierarchy of power, taking a prismatic and expansive view via its intersection of geographies, identities and timelines. If only such an exercise could ripple beyond museum walls.

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In Milan, miart’s multi-decade existence was joined this year by a new compatriot, Paris Internationale Milano, which brings the French experimental fair into an Italian setting. It marks the first time the fair has staged an event outside of  France. Hosted at Palazzo Galbani, a 1950s modernist building on Via Fabio Filzi that was quite literally under construction (the drilling was not a sound piece), the fair sits just a short walk from Centrale station. 

Strategically timed, it overlaps with Milan Art Week and Milan Design Week, attracting collectors from both spheres. Its VIP opening day was the day after miart’s. Running from April 18 to 21, the fair is free to attend with registration, as has always been the case in France.

Paris Internationale Milano gathers a selection of 34 international galleries and three non-profit spaces, including long-standing participants in the French edition alongside first-time exhibitors. Its inaugural edition preserved not only the spirit of the original but also codified its signature pillars: an unexpected venue, an adaptable mise-en-scène, a brut/déconstruit aesthetic, an assemblage of interesting galleries and a general cool-kid vibe. The spatial design was overseen by the Swiss architecture studio Christ & Gantenbein, which has been working with Paris Internationale since 2022; they collaborated with Milan-based designers NM3. Each gallery had freestanding walls, designed for reuse in future editions, and spread across four floors connected by two, unfortunately unreliable, elevators.

The Milanese fair so convincingly replicated the atmosphere of the French one that: “I’m still a little bit confused if we are in Milan or in Paris,” Michal Lasota from Stereo gallery in Warsaw admitted with a laugh. “I have this analogy with a ship: we are just somewhere else, on the same ship… Most times, editions are in a new place, even in Paris, but somehow it’s always the same. We like it here a lot.”

Lasota continued, “We have a long relationship with Paris Internationale—we took part in the first edition in Paris in 2015. We know they know what they are doing, so we should join the party.” Stereo did a site-specific painting presentation featuring a desk chair, trash bin and power strip: “all the paintings refer to an office because of the character of the building.” The token objects were executed in a simple neutral style but with a “sense of humor.” The works ranged from € 8,000 to €30,000; one painting sold within hours on the preview day for €28,000.

Across town, miart fair director Nicola Ricciardi noted that the team behind Paris Internationale Milano was transparent about their presence and goals. “We were the only city with just one fair—you go to London, there are seven fairs,” Ricciardi reasoned. “We were an anomaly.” He added: “If a fair like Paris Internationale decides to show up here, it means that they noticed there is potential and opportunity—which is good news.”

At miart, galleries had mixed feelings about the new arrival. Ludovica Barbieri, a partner at MASSIMODECARLO, was waiting for both fairs to be over to make up her mind about the incoming event. “I think that two fairs for Milano are too many—but maybe I’m wrong,” she speculated. Others felt that having more events always adds to a city’s appeal. The new fair was proof that “the city is growing up,” said Matteo Graniti, co-founder and director of Milanese galleries IPERCUBO. “It’s not a cannibalization.” 

Some Milanese galleries had booths at both miart and Paris Internationale Milano, including Vistamare, zaza’, Luisa Delle Piane and kaufmann repetto. “I’m telling a lot of people that I do Paris Internationale—they don’t know,” Francesca Kaufmann of kaufmann repetto said, but confidently added: “They will.” 

She recounts how her gallery couldn’t participate in Art Basel in the early 2000s and that having LISTE was a perfect way to be in the mix. Paris Internationale, in both cities, is a comparable initiative. “These dealers are working 24 hours a day—besides their gallery job—to make this fair sustainable without having any income themselves. It’s an incredible project,” Kaufmann praised. kaufmann repetto is spotlighting one piece, by Anthea Hamilton, a sculptural table that sits between art and design. Kaufmann noted that Paris Internationale, “having an overlap of two days with the Salone is really important—it’s a good experiment.”

Francesca Minini gallery from Milan is double-dipping too. “We always do miart,” said gallery representative Francesca Fattori, but countered: “We wanted to be present on this occasion. It’s an international breadth, in terms of approach and location.” The gallery is showcasing a special project by 31-year-old artist Ambra Castagnetti, who created three works exclusively for the fair, plus one pre-existing piece. Fattori noted that she recognized people from miart but also saw faces she didn’t, and was happy to encounter “a new public.” Two sales, one in marble and one in copper cast, were made within the first hours of the preview day, with prices ranging from €12,000 to €23,000.

The co-founders of Paris Internationale include a cohort of gallerist duos, at Galerie Gregor Staiger (in Zurich/Milan), Galerie Ciaccia Levi (in Paris/Milan) and Galerie Crèvecoeur (in Paris), all of whom were part of the selection committee—plus Silvia Ammon, Director of Paris Internationale since its inception in 2015. 

Marie Lusa of Gregor Staiger describes the fair as “quite punk.” Of Milan as a locus, she said: “There are trends, but the result is not there yet,” indicating the scene is on the up but still in its ascendancy. She has full faith in the city’s growth, reminding us that “Paris of ten years ago was not where Paris is today. Paris Internationale really created a new energy—so maybe we will also create this excitement.” She noted there are great private institutions locally, but no government support; engagement has to come from other areas. 

As for her booth, Gregor Staiger is presenting “exhibition copy” Polaroids based on the too-sensitive originals by 80-year-old photographer Walter Pfeiffer. The originals were photographed between 1972 and 2020 (starting at 4,800 Swiss francs). Pfeiffer is scheduled to open a show at Pinacoteca Agnelli on April 30. 

Ciaccia Levi presents a debut solo show of oil on canvas paintings by 23-year-old Japanese artist Ibuki Inoue, influenced by both manga and Japanese engraving. His works on the booth range from €2,200 to €8,000, most of which sold during the preview day. 

Antoine Levi noted the fair is “not about name-dropping; it’s about projects. This philosophy, which has served us for a decade, is now applicable elsewhere.” He described Paris Internationale as a fair created “by gallerists made for gallerists” that is “modular and multifunctional, but also open onto the world.” 

The original fair, he explains, was founded in 2015 “out of necessity, out of complementarity.” Although not a fan of l’enfilade—the rows upon rows that define classical art fairs—Levi readily admitted: “one [fair] without the other wouldn’t function. We are in Milan because of miart—that’s very important. We created Paris Internationale because there was FIAC too [the former Paris fair that is now Art Basel Paris]… There’s no invasion or theft or appropriation of intellectual or structural value. We succeed because there is potential.”

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In the run-up to the chaos that is Salone del Mobile and Milan’s design week—as attested by the many construction sites throughout the city—miart opened with its own offering, vying for a place in the Italian art scene. The fair, which ran from April 17 to 19, inaugurated its 30th edition within a new location in Allianz MiCo conference hall in Milan’s northwestern district. It featured early twentieth-century works—with plenty of Lucio Fontana, Gino Severini and Alighiero Boetti to go around—as well as a wide swathe of contemporary practices. This inclusion of modern art notably distinguishes the fair from Artissima, the Turin-based autumn fair dedicated exclusively to contemporary work.

The peculiar architecture of Allianz MiCo overlooks the impersonal CityLife mall and several skyscrapers; one miart attendee remarked that this backdrop “brings a little Dubai to Milan.” The fair, which had 60 percent Italian representation and 40 percent international representation, was divided into three sections layered across three floors. This was the first time the fair was configured as such, and the change was considered disruptive; galleries were worried their collectors might not find them. However, miart’s fair director Nicola Ricciardi felt the pause between floors would be “refreshing” for the gaze: “It helps the collector pay more attention. They have to readjust.” He added, “We needed to offer people something different. These are not the times for cut and paste, always doing the same thing.” Some felt the top floor (with the most prominent galleries) was neglected due to poor signage, while others found it easier to distinguish between the strata of art offerings because they weren’t all compressed in the same amorphous space. 

One Milanese journalist noted some absences at the fair, including gallerists ArtNoble, UNA galleria and Galleria Raffaella Cortese, a signal, perhaps, that the fair wasn’t a unilaterally appealing event despite its breadth.

Ricciardi noted that “Milan is never going to be Paris… we’re never going to have a Tour Eiffel.” But the contemporary art scene in Milan has “improved dramatically” over the past decade, Ricciardi said. The introduction of a 5 percent VAT tax last year—down from 22 percent, and now on par with France and Germany—has, per Ricciardi, led to a 20 percent increase in sales within the Italian art market.

miart’s Emergent section, encompassing 29 galleries, functioned as the de facto starting point, placing these booths in the path of visitors heading down to the larger Established section below. The first work visible in Emergent was a quilted textile piece at Ferda Art Platform, an Istanbul gallery presenting a monographic display by Güneş Terkol, with all works priced under €10,000. Further in, Milan’s MATTA gallery was showcasing deliberately mismatched Theresa Büchner images that re-appropriated stills from 1980s German films (€1500-€6000). Gaa Gallery, from New York and Cologne, featured bright figurative paintings plus ceramic works by Los Angeles-born, London-based Katja Farin (€1500-€16,000). Four galleries that had shown in Emergent in previous years—Eastcontemporary, Ginny on Frederick, Rose Easton, and zaza’—graduated to the Established section, housing an intense concentration of 111 galleries. 

In the Established section, Francesca Kaufmann of kaufmann repetto spoke with candor about the legacy of the fair. “miart used to be a bad fair,” she remarked, recalling how everyone would instead travel to Turin’s Artissima for a barometer on contemporary art. According to Kaufmann, miart’s turnaround began roughly a decade ago when Emanuela Forlin took on her role as Exhibition Manager. She met with various Milanese galleries—kaufmann repetto included—and helped renegotiate the fair’s standing with its owners, who also oversee bigger commercial events for unrelated sectors like eyewear and bridal. The appointment of Vincenzo de Bellis—now Director of Fairs and Exhibition Platforms at Art Basel—also brought new energy and direction. Today, Kauffman sees miart as: “part of the project of our city.” She was formerly on the fair’s committee and still is a participatory voice. The gallery experienced solid success in terms of sales, with both Italians and foreign clients picking up works by Vivian Suter, Pae White, Bruno Munari, Katherine Bradford and Lily van der Stokker. Works on the stand ranged from €2000 to €80,000.

Ludovica Barbieri, a partner at MASSIMODECARLO, founded in Milan in 1987, described the booth “as a solo presentation with a little extra.” A monographic selection of works by California-born, New York-based Nicole Wittenberg revealed landscapes from pastel studies created en plein air and then developed on canvas, selling for €12,000 apiece; six works sold within hours of the preview day. A separate corner was dedicated to all-female artists, including Andra Ursuta, Paloma Varga Weisz and Giulia Censi; a bronze sculpture by Alicja Kwade and an oil on linen by Austyn Weiner from this section were sold. “We are a big Milanese gallery, so for us it’s supporting the city,” Barbieri said of the gallery’s participation. Beyond the confines of the fair itself, Barbieri expressed enthusiasm about the growing number of  private foundations and institutions taking root in Milan, noting that, in the city, “the vibe is good.”

Soft Opening from London presented six artists, including an amusing set of text paintings by Dean Sameshima (one read “Anonymous Straight Guy”) as well as works by Gina Fischli, Olivia Erlanger and Ebun Sodipo, the latter making her Italian exhibition debut. All the works were priced under €50,000. Gallery director Antonia Marsh had never attended miart before, but had been a guest through Conceptual Fine Arts’ one-month gallery visiting program in the city. She also reasoned that “Italy has a really long history of collecting.”

Tucked into a back corner, Milanese gallery Secci presented a solo, site-specific installation with a mirrored floor and plexiglass domes by Alfredo Pirri. Secci’s Senior Director Sara Cirillo was underwhelmed by the new three-level setup of the fair because “people don’t know the path they’re following.” Pirri’s framed watercolors (€32,000 each) were part of the gallery’s private collection and offered for sale for the first time. However, the plexiglass domes did not have a firm price because Pirri wanted to speak to collectors directly “to understand” their desires. Although there had been interest, most collectors were not keen on negotiating this way. Despite this tricky position of selling work on the booth, Cirillo described the wider Milanese art scene as “propre vero,” or undeniable.

On the upper floor, the Established Anthology section brought together 20 international players, including Ben Brown Fine Arts, GALLERIA CONTINUA, Peter Kilchmann, Galerie Lelong, Galleria Lia Rumma, Richard Saltoun and Tornabuoni Arte. Here, the conference center walls were painted white and the space was much airier. Cardi Gallery Manager Chiara Adducchio felt miart’s upper-floor position made it easier—relative to the setup from previous editions—to talk to collectors. Cardi’s booth drew from the full breadth of its Italian roster, including historic figures like Jannis Kounellis, Enrico Castellani, Agostino Bonalumi, plus living artists at various stages of their careers. The highest-priced work on the booth was €490,000; the most accessible was at €30,000. Gianpietro Carlesso’s sculpture was the sole sale on the preview day. 

Although the fair provided a frenzy of activity on its own merit, between the introduction of Paris Internationale Milan across town and Salone del Mobile on the immediate horizon, Adducchio noted: “everyone was freaking out about FOMO.” It’s not art week without it.

Athens-based artist and architect Andreas Angelidakis will take over the Greek Pavilion at the 61st Venice Biennale, delivering an anti-fascist escape room embellished with intentionally campy flourishes. Half Greek, half Norwegian, Angelidakis studied architecture in Los Angeles and in New York. His artistic practice is deeply interdisciplinary, encompassing architecture, publishing, exhibition design and curation. A self-proclaimed internet obsessive, he remixes online culture with architectural emblems, creating environments that explore how space and infrastructure are inextricable from power.

Using the pavilion’s national and architectural legacy as source material, he scrutinizes the venue’s inaugural year, 1934, through historical research. The year the pavilion debuted, Hitler and Mussolini met for the first time in Venice. The roots of fascism lay latent there, resonating alarmingly with today’s MAGA zeal and even Italy’s own far-right government. The installation—curated by fellow Athenian George Bekirakis—draws from virtual reality, Fire Island gatherings, Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and the legacy of the Greek empire. Visitors are encouraged to engage with the soft sculptures and contemplate the themes of the show, including the way past political turmoil slithers into the present, the marketability of tourism and antiquity-as-spectacle.

We spoke with Angelidakis about his “Byzantium goth disco,” as he dubbed his installation, in addition to his memories of attending the biennial as a young visitor, buying unofficial riot shields online and what he’ll be doing at 4:20 p.m. on the Biennale’s opening day.

Tell me about how you conceptualized the pavilion.

I treat the pavilion as a being with consciousness, and I give her the microphone. The subject is the building itself, which looks like an Orthodox Church. The pavilion was built in 1934—12 years after [the Lausanne convention, which recognized the sovereignty of the new Republic of Turkey]—and it’s literally a souvenir of a MAGA moment for Greece. It’s like a Trump hat left over from that period. On the ministry’s website, they have a great text from a historian about the political maneuvers behind the pavilion being Byzantine. The competition was canceled because they wanted to assign somebody to make it exactly like that. I exhibited at the Greek pavilion four times with the architecture biennial, and I had never checked what the columns are. Digging a bit on Google, I realized [they] are copies of Hagia Sophia’s columns.

The year 1934 is also interesting because it’s the year that the fascist egg hatched, in a way. Mussolini wanted to meet Hitler in person, and so he invited him to the Venice Biennale, where two pavilions were being inaugurated: Austria and Greece. Those were the two countries that were being nominated to join the Axis of the Germans and Italians. Austria, of course, became part of the Axis; Greece did until the war started. We switched back to the Allied forces.

So I was looking at the pavilion in this context, the histories. The year 1934 is also the year of the pink list: Hitler identifying homosexuals in his own ranks and killing them. And the Night of the Long Knives [a purge that took place in Nazi Germany from June 30-July 2, 1934, intended to consolidate Hitler’s power]… political analysts are saying that what’s happening in Washington is from the Nazi playbook.

How do these loaded themes manifest formally and spatially, in terms of what the visitor encounters?

The pavilion has a double persona; it is split in two. The national part is all about the history of the country and statecraft. There was a national schism in 1915: Greece was split in two for two years. There was a government in Athens and a government in Thessaloniki. Greece was a country that colonized itself. There are the Greeks, but there’s also the indigenous population that grew up in an Ottoman context.

The other part is a kiosk or períptero, as a pavilion is called in Greek. The períptero has a digital stage that collects information—basically a surveillance system in a feedback loop. There’s this giant screen, then the other side looks like a mix between a discotheque and a police station. There are neon signs with pink eggs, but behind them are riot shields with handles on the opposite sides. I’m using the riot shield a lot. I buy copies on Temu, flip the handles to the outside, and then they become the basis of a work.

There are souvenirs hanging: the words immigrant and homosexual, T-shirts with historical diagrams, Plato wearing Peggy Guggenheim glasses and military boats from the Border Patrol. Sculptures, 3D printed, are placed in fridges that usually sell drinks on the street. I wanted to be giving out drinks inside the pavilion—or water, because in a biennial, everybody’s looking for water. I was like, what if we could get a water company to make us a bottle of water.

That would have been very in-demand. What is your relationship to previous Venice biennials as a visitor? Does it feel particularly meaningful to partake as an artist?

For me, it’s incredibly meaningful to have that happen this late in my career; I turn 60 in two years. I’ve been going to Venice since 1997. The first time I was with a friend who was just becoming a biennial superstar, Vanessa Beecroft, so I kind of experienced the whole thing. I crashed parties when I was younger, and I didn’t have money to take a taxi or even a vaporetto.

I visited in 2007, which was Nikos Alexiou; he was referencing Byzantium. And there were years that I got bored of it. But I went to Cecilia Alemani’s biennial—she did only women in the central pavilion, you would see Nan Goldin and Leonora Carrington and Marisol. It was amazing. Now I come to Venice as somebody who’s been there a lot.

Although there is serious political discourse here, can you elaborate on the more playful elements that you implement? I mean, even just Plato wearing Peggy Guggenheim glasses.

Peggy is not random—she’s part of the storyline of the pavilion. Cecilia Alemani recently did a show on how the Greek pavilion was rented to Peggy Guggenheim in 1948: that’s where she first showed the Surrealists and the Cubists in Europe. I’m five Peggys away from the original, but she’s still part of the story, because that was the first time the pavilion experienced art that was not politically guided—it had been, until 1948.

The title of the piece is Escape Room, which is a very popular type of entertainment. I mean, it’s global. Venice is full of escape rooms. But the escape room is a format that came from video games. In 2007 in Japan, they made a physical escape room—which is the definition of Plato’s cave. You are placed in a reality that doesn’t make sense, and you have to escape from it.

I’m still working on the trinkets zone. “Pavilion” in Greek is also the yellow kiosks everywhere that sell everything from drinks to tourist souvenirs. Usually, they’re close to archeological sites, full of little Parthenon sculptures. My subject is tourism as well, because Greece really was just a souvenir country for the philosophy of antiquity. I play between souvenir and bibelot—the souvenir is for the traveler, the bibelot is for the collector. I’m treating both in a democratic way. And I mean, Venice is very familiar with merchandising. I guess I’m trying to say that history is a toy, and we can play with it. In Greek, story and history are the same word.

The fun part is that it looks like a nightclub. There’s a huge disco floor playing a song that was very radically gay during the AIDS crisis: “Relax” by Frankie Goes to Hollywood. In 1983, they came on the pop scene wearing leather jockstraps. It’s a song about fisting. The cover of the record was a version of Guernica. Then there’s a Byzantine instrument used in monasteries to call the priest, which is just two pieces of wood hit together, but it’s kind of the same rhythm as “Relax.” And then there are also some street recordings from Athens playing sometimes.

People are allowed to touch everything and can hang out and have a conversation. They can sit on the soft pieces. The soft sculpture is a replica of the two columns of the pavilion in different sizes. They’re sculptural bean bag chairs. They kind of sit on a Guernica aerial yoga sculpture.

I’ve never heard those words together, ha. Do you see yourself as queering the pavilion?

There weren’t many incidents of queer history within the pavilion. I’m queering the idea of a national pavilion, I guess, and, if not, playing with, let’s say, the idea of a monument and souvenir shop. I’m resetting the pavilion in a way, by turning it into an escape room: fun, scary, camp. And the Peggy reference will also be a big sign on the door, which is the Peggy glasses made out of chain that’s soldered, and the lenses are riot shields. But her glasses are the wings of a bat. The fridges are full of humans turning into owls or trying to fly. It’s all male figures, because it’s a male problem, politics and war, as far as I can see.

We’re doing a tribute to a party on Fire Island, which is a Tea Dance. I grew up reading descriptions of how gay men were almost being wheeled in there in the early 1980s, still going to Fire Island and partying even though they were barely alive. So we’re doing the Tea Dance at 4:20 p.m. in the afternoon.

I love that.

I’m doing it with a group called Power Dance Club, a famous gay Greek group on the underground club night scene. The club in Fire Island was called the Pavilion; I’ve been there, and I’ve been to the Tea Dance once. You could sense that these guys who are still there—they were in their 60s—had been through, like, war. You can see it on their bodies.

The Tea Dance will just be for the inauguration?

Yeah, it’s like a big gay party at the Greek pavilion, inside the installation. We’re doing a micro-version. No invitation needed—but, of course, it’s inside the Giardini, which is already an invitational place. Four o’clock is when the officials start to speak, so I give them 20 minutes to say what they have to say, then we start the party inside the installation. We can’t be bothering the other pavilions, but there’s a sound system. People can bring their drinks in and lie on the beanbags.

That sounds fun. I love that you give the officials 20 minutes, and then you’re like, “Here we go!”

I wanted to have 4:20, that code, out in the world. The flyer will have reference to an Andrew Holleran book that talks about New York in the 1980s, and there’s a Fire Island chapter. It’s a beautiful kind of elegy. It’s very layered, but nobody has to look at every layer: it will be spooky, crazy, fun, loud. Everything is allowed.

Right, you can engage with the work on different levels: the political or the spectacle.

If somebody who works as a riot policeman happens to be in the audience, they might like it, because it would be familiar.

I’m not sure how many riot police are going to attend the Venice Biennale.

I don’t know. ICE doesn’t travel? [With an Italian accent] Giacomo Polizia!

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In front of the Grand Palais, two colossal Haribo-like inflatable silhouettes greeted visitors for gimmicky photo ops. The work by French artist Fabrice Hyber (represented by Nathalie Obadia) introduced a bit of frivolity to Art Paris, a relatively low-key French fair that appeals to local collectors. Beneath a beating spring sun through the historic glass nave, the vibe on the preview day was more a soothing burble than a fizzy buzz; nobody was wearing ostentatious attire. The 28th edition of the fair brought 160 galleries from some 20 countries, with 30 percent first-time participants. As usual, Art Paris provides a local spotlight of the Parisian, and more widely French, art scene, with few blue-chip galleries among the booths, barring Galerie Lelong and Almine Rech. Other powerhouses, despite having spaces nearby on Avenue Matignon, did not attend.

Almine Rech has been an Art Paris faithful for years. “It’s very important to show our commitment to local art,” senior director Thibault Geffrin told Observer. “We have a lot of artists based in Paris; we try to always include their works on our booth so they can see and promote their work.” A textile piece by French-Malagasy artist Joël Andrianomearisoa—nominated this year for the Prix Marcel Duchamp—was on the wall facing the entrance to the Grand Palais, while a portrait painting by Inès Longevial faced the passageway. The works in the booth ranged from €20,000-100,000; the €100,000 cap was intentional. “Art Basel Paris is a much more international crowd, and is a much bigger fair, so it’s two different presentations,” Geffrin explained, adding—and echoing many—that the flock here is French or more locally European, and the prices reflect that. On the preview morning, Oliver Beer’s 2026 framed pigment on canvas Résonance Painting (Swim Until You Can’t See Land) sold for £75,000-80,000; not long after, Andrianomearisoa’s 2025 metal and paint sculpture sold for €20,000-30,000.

According to Geffrin, “having two spaces in Paris, we see our collectors all year long, but it’s also part of an event that gathers everyone together”—all the more worthwhile since there is “time to spend with our collectors here that you might not have time to spend at Art Basel.”

“The market in Paris has changed a lot these last years,” reflected Garrett Landolt, director at Esther Schipper, at a booth down the aisle from Almine Rech. “It was, to begin with, quite a local market: Parisians buying in Parisian galleries. It’s become so international these last years with Art Basel coming. What we’ve heard from some is that Art Basel Paris has just become so prestigious that Art Paris suddenly is more accessible and maybe more interesting, because you have different price points. So you get a great diversity of visitors.” He remarked not only on the “quality of advisors and collectors” coming by, but also that visitors were curious about works on the booth and taking time to ask questions, in contrast to buyers rushing to get the works they want as at Art Basel.

The curiosity at the booth mostly centered on the work of French artist Etienne Chambaud (€10,000-€30,000), who explores animals (eagles, lambs) represented in religious icons bought at auction and transformed. Chambaud has a restorer stabilize the works, then covers all non-animal elements in gold leaf—including the saints—so that, as a result, the animals are completely isolated and foregrounded. In a different register nearby, Canadian-born New York-based Sojourner Truth Parsons’ canvases are colorfully layered in phosphorescent paints—her work is now on view at the gallery’s Parisian space, located in an interior courtyard within Place Vendôme. Everything on the booth was below €50,000, with German artist Matti Braun being the most expensive at €48,000. The gallery otherwise participates in all the Art Basel fairs, plus Art Jakarta, West Bund and Frieze Seoul.

Galerie Pol Lemétais was at Art Paris for the first time with a singular monographic exhibition of remixed tapestries by Aurélia Jaubert. Based in Toulouse in southwestern France, the gallery represents art brut artists and participates in Outsider Art Fair in New York and Outsider Art in Paris; Art Paris was a bit of a leap. Jaubert is an artist whose work gallery representative Aurelie Fourrier described as “related to contemporary art, but with a discrepancy,” given her unusual techniques, which remix and collage embroidery and textiles using found materials—vintage tapestries, sewing accessories—sourced from charity shops or garage sales. The six large works on the stand, made between 2020 and 2025, were priced between €13,000-25,000; nothing sold on the preview day, but a sale for €15,000 was made the next. A selection of Jaubert’s pieces are on view in Paris at the Halle Saint Pierre, in the 18th arrondissement, at a dedicated art brut space.

Beirut-based Saleh Barakat Gallery was back at Art Paris, having participated about half a dozen times. “Paris has that halo; it’s important to be present here,” the eponymous gallerist said. But Art Paris in particular is more “franco-français” and closer to the spirit of the gallery—”our artists are very engagé [politically committed]”—rather than “conceptual art, global art.” Barakat added that Art Paris completes the “rendezvous in the fall” with a spring counterpart. (The Lebanese gallery had participated in Art Basel Paris and Doha, Art Dubai and Abu Dhabi Art.) In the booth, there were ceramics by Hala Matta, custom rugs by Sara Badr Schmidt and a gorgeous, vivid canvas by Nabil Nahas. The pieces ranged from €800 for small formats (“We’re not pretentious,” Barakat noted), with everything else marked from €2,000 and capping around €10,000.

One level up, Galerie Prima—which has been open for a year and a half—is displaying work by two painters: Bryce Delplanque (still lifes priced at €6,000-€9,000) and Gaspard Girard d’Albissin (figurative works inspired by online images and fashion editorials priced at €3,500-10,000). They are part of the Promises sector on the upper balcony on the south side of the Grand Palais, dedicated to galleries established less than a decade ago and selected by curator Marc Donnadieu, who is also a member of the Art Paris selection committee. Here, there are spaces more widely international than downstairs, with examples from Australia, Morocco and Singapore.

It’s Prima’s second time at the fair; the gallery sold out Delplanque’s paintings and achieved new visibility for Héloïse Rival’s ceramic murals in 2025. The other fairs they have participated in include the Invited section at Art Brussels and Asia Now in Paris, though they are intrigued by Paris Internationale and Artissima. The founding duo spent over a decade at French gallery Filles du Calvaire, which participated in Art Paris for several editions with successful results (and had a booth again this year), solidifying their next-generation interest. Co-founder Laëtitia Ferrer told Observer that she and her associate have “a taste in particular for figuration, but one that always provokes questions… something a little bizarre, but also semantic.” Two works by d’Albissin were pre-sold before the fair (for €4,500 and €6,000), while Delplanque was showing a new series: an homage to author Joan Didion’s personal belongings sold at auction, including stacks of books written by William F. Buckley Jr. and the Houston Junior League Cookbook.

As with any fair, this one caters to a wide range of tastes. Works by the artists featured in blockbuster exhibitions right next door were glimpsed at here: there are two Nan Goldin Cibachromes from 2000 and 2013 at Yvon Lambert and a 2009 rhinestoned work by Mickalene Thomas (Keri On, 2009) at Opera Gallery. There is also a stunt-y oversized raw iron teapot by Joana Vasconcelos that visitors clamor to sit in at Gowen Contemporary and a bone-chilling oil portrait of Elon Musk at Galerie Idéale by Stéphane Pencréac’h. It takes all kinds.

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Painter Danielle Orchard’s female figures evoke a particular tenderness, despite her protagonists’ aloof demeanors, which she cultivates by implementing a classical remove. Her new works in “Borrowed Chord” at Perrotin in Paris, are—as ever—ruminative in nature and soothing in tone, articulated primarily in oil stick on rough linen. They immerse the viewer in a world of female subjectivity, be it through experiences of early motherhood, the act of disrobing, gazing fixedly at one’s naked body, wrangling with creative choices, enjoying close sorority or embracing occasions of solitude.

“Orchard’s engagement with the figurative tradition treats the language of modernism not as a set of exhausted forms, but as a living system,” writes Max Weintraub in the exhibition text, astutely describing the work as having a “quiet authority.” Her skewed proportions and quixotic silhouettes purposefully eschew realism for something lively, shapely and imaginative.

We spoke to Orchard in Paris about her awe of Greek caryatids, how leaving New York City changed her practice and the celebrity she accidentally but repeatedly conjured.

Let’s start with the exhibition’s title. Where did it come from?

“Borrowed Chord” is this concept my husband—who’s a musician—was explaining to me in relation to a Simon & Garfunkel song that we were listening to. I asked him: how do you make something sound like indescribable yearning? And he was like, there’s actually a term for it. You take a traditional chord, and then you move in parallel to it, and then you return to it. The subtle departure from the familiar has this emotional effect on the listener. I feel like there’s a similar effect in painting with color, where you adjust the temperature slightly. I thought it had this really great color cognate.

I painted a guitar lesson [Borrowed Chord (2026)]. One woman is nude, one woman is clothed, so there’s this strange play with who’s the vulnerable party and who’s the confident one, which changes when you’re in any sort of situation where someone is imparting knowledge.

Did you envision a particular piece that they were playing?

That’s a really good question. I hadn’t thought about that at all. I was thinking of it as very rudimentary. I’m trying to learn a little bit of piano, and that kind of humility, starting at toddler level… It’s foundational, yet there’s that inherent vulnerability in learning anything new.

The nudity in your paintings is often a shared state among multiple figures.

In Frieze I and Frieze II, I was really just thinking about low-relief Greek and Roman friezes, and how they’re these intentionally decorative objects that are so beautifully ornate, but tucked into the highest corner, nearly impossible to view. I went to Greece, to the archeological museums, and spent a lot of time in Athens looking at that stuff. When you bring them down [to eye-level], everything’s kind of squat and strange. It felt like there was an inherent modernist painting idea.

When you’re painting multiple figures, do you know ahead of time how they are going to be in relation to each other? Or is that something that you work out in the moment?

Definitely in the moment. I use a lot of oil stick—it’s compressed oil paint, which is more like a drawing tool—and it’s a little bit unwieldy, because it kind of breaks apart as you’re drawing. It’s intentionally less controlled. As I’m working, I’m thinking about these fairly rigid stone forms, but then using this really loose, playful paint. [In Frieze I and Frieze II], there was this dissonance, but I guess the idea is mostly just to let the form build in a way that isn’t premeditated. I really wanted to let color dictate the form.

Are there other referential moments from your Greek visit?

In Greece, it was the first time I saw caryatids—the women who function as columns—in person. I’ve had this idea that some of the women in my paintings are kind of propping up canvas edges. I loved seeing them in person. This is just an incredible artistic convention that I wish would come back—archaeologically necessary things that are in the form of women. It’s the height of objectification, but it’s also so powerful: you’re literally holding up a temple.

What’s your relationship to sculpture?

I think about sculpture all the time with these paintings. I don’t sculpt at all, but I do think of reductive versus additive. I did some sculpture while studying, using it as a drawing tool. Traditional painting programs use clay to force you to think through the form and its surroundings, the idea being that it helps you visualize things when you’re drawing. You wouldn’t fire the clay; it just goes back into the pile. That visceral idea of carving space is stuck in my memory.

Tell me about your implementation of color. The Goldfish (2025) is especially saturated.

I’ve been trying to use unpleasant ground colors. This one was a milky orange, not a beautiful color. That’s a through line for this idea: start with something a little bit off, and when you add color relationships, you can push the color in different directions. When you use blue on top of orange, you’re going to get some very strange results because they’re complementary; they react very strongly. I’m trying to find these strange neutrals that exist in the skin. I included the goldfish as this Matisse quote, but in this version, in the bag…

…they have a short lifespan.

Exactly. Like short-duration moments in paintings. That’s why I use burning cigarettes because, to me, they denote duration. I recently went to a lecture about a botanist writing a book about Emily Dickinson. The thesis of this book was that there’s a tendency to anthropomorphize plants, but she was botanicalizing humans. She was going the other way in her poetry. That’s something I find very fascinating, when the objects in paintings carry more human presence than the humans do.

Tell me about Metaphysical Muse (2025). It seems like a placeless dreamscape.

The collapsing of space is something that’s very familiar to painters when they’re in the studio. You’re pulling from memory, art history, the stuff that’s directly in front of you… you’re pulling from every flower that’s been painted. When you cast light on a model, you’re creating these artificial environments, and then you try to ignore all the external information around it. I wanted it to still feel like an art studio, like an interior and an exterior in one, in the way that Giorgio de Chirico and some of the other metaphysical painters were interested in symbolic spaces.

Do you use models in real life?

I have… I actually did for a long time. I also was one, too, for art classes. And those dynamics have always been really interesting to me. I did it because I needed money in school, but I was fascinated by that relationship of being drawn and also being someone who draws—kind of thinking through form as it pertains to your own body. That experience did set me on a certain course with my subjects.

When you’re without a model, do you have a cast of characters in your head? Or are your figures totally untethered to a point of reference?

I don’t use anything consistently or with any kind of intention—there’s no reference to real people. I just pull from memory, which I think ends up being a mix of art historical references, but also my body and the people I’m around, like my friends and other painters I know. Sometimes they’ll kind of look like a person, but never intentionally. And sometimes I’ll change it if I think it’s bordering too close. I’m looking for almost a classical remove.

I went to the Louvre right when I landed in Paris for my show. It’s really fascinating to see the transition from Etruscan to Roman bronzes. The Etruscan work is rougher, but they look like a guy you could see on the street. Then there was this movement toward erasing recognizability or definitive identity. I think that is a quandary that artists throughout history have grappled with: stylization versus the reality of what they’re depicting.

In modern painting, faces are kind of like a mask. Sometimes they look like celebrities, and I have to change it. For a good six months, I felt like everything I was painting looked like Jennifer Aniston. I wasn’t actively watching Friends… it’s almost like your brain gets into some loop, and you can’t break it. When that happens, to break that loop, I’ll have my husband come in. I’ll paint him just to sort of force my hand. But I don’t know if anyone else would think that it looked like her.

You mentioned other painters—who do you spend time with?

My closest painter friends are Nikki Maloof, another painter represented by Perrotin who lives near me—we met when we were like, 18, so we’ve been friends a long time—and Louis Fratino. We’re always sending pictures of what we’re working on, trying to get feedback. Just like, does this look like shit? It’s not extremely specific.

Can you be truly candid with each other?

I think so. No feelings are hurt because I think all our tastes are pretty aligned. Artists are the hardest on themselves, and then the people around them are like, I actually think that that’s really beautiful. Or, I do think you could push that.

It sounds like a gentle group.

We also talk about different paints—it’s a lot of material support. There’s a whole New York crew. I don’t live in New York anymore, but I’m a few hours outside, so I’m back and forth all the time. There are a lot of cool painters there. I’m glad that I got to ingratiate myself before I left.

What’s it like to be outside of New York? Was the move related to your practice?

Definitely. I was just so sound-sensitive. I lived in New York for 15 years, or approaching 15, and I moved studios so many times because I was always trying to find something peaceful, and it’s hard to do. It’ll work out for a while, and then you get a new neighbor and hear their podcasts. I don’t like listening with headphones in the studio; I have music on, but I don’t like anything that takes me out of the environment too much. When I moved to my 12th studio or something, I was like, I can’t do this anymore.

We found an old ceramics building that was for sale that we could afford. We could just buy a little building. I can spill paint, not care and not have somebody take it out of my deposit. It’s been really freeing. It finally feels like a space I never have to leave. Everything carries this temporary feeling in New York, like, “I’m not gonna get too used to this, because…”

…disaster could strike!

Like the landlord raises the rent 100 percent, and then you have to move. So this is just really nice. I could leave if I want. Above all, it’s quiet; it’s just birds and the trees. I like being in nature. It makes me feel better about everything, and it just clears my head. I feel like it’s changed some of my color usage, as well.

Your relationship to light must be so different!

Totally. There are a lot of windows in the studio, but you can just go outside and paint. I don’t paint from nature exactly, but I’m out there sometimes working on stuff. It does get boring, though; the winters are kind of rough. Cabin fever.

I love Clasp (2026); it’s such a deeply feminine gesture. Tell me about it.

I’ve used that gesture before in the past, of unhooking or hooking a bra. When I first started painting it, it was just, to me, such a funny incongruity between the sexuality of undoing the bra, but then its reality, which is awkward—you’re just like [here, she arches backwards and contorts herself].

Yes! It’s these crazy acrobatics.

It’s so funny to have it be portrayed as being very sensual, but it has ideas of proprioception built in. It’s a thing you’ve done a thousand times to your own body, but sometimes it can still, you know, throw you—which, to me, has a relationship to painting. You can return to the same thing that you do all the time in the studio, but it can just feel so foreign, depending on the day, or so awkward. As in, I just can’t quite get to that movement that I had yesterday or that rhythm. That’s the root of the gesture. I think that painting the contours of backs is really beautiful.

I’m sort of playing with surface here. I started working on this pretty rough linen that I had never used before, and I loved it so much. It sort of disperses the paint differently, so the brush or palette knife will catch on this texture. It’s not a portrait linen, which is super fine. It was very fun for me to contend with this outside complication—to deal with this weird area of fabric.

The title, Clasp, makes you look at her neck rather than the main gesture; I love that redirection. By contrast, Studio Annunciation (2025) is more overt.

I think that when inspiration strikes, it is kind of an uncanny sensation. Like, the day before, you had no ideas, and then the next day, a thousand ideas. You can’t dictate the cadence: it can be six months of nothing, and then two weeks of rapid creativity. It’d be great if you could schedule it out, but it doesn’t work that way.

I really just wanted to paint an angel. I was looking at that time at so much Fra Angelico, just like the floating figures. It was a familiar motif that gave the artist so much space to experiment. I’m not a religious person, but I do look to these icons from painting history as inspiration for the work that I’m making. She’s a woman sculptor, and then the annunciation’s coming in, helping to actually sculpt. But because the sculpture is pregnant, I was like, Oh, I should have her doing a C-section.

I didn’t get that right away!

It could be red clay or blood.

I love this idea of a “morning practice,” which is the title of the neighboring work. Do you have any rituals?

I was trying to get into meditation. I haven’t had much success with consistency, but I do love it as an idea. That was definitely baked into this idea that discipline results in a freer mind. I have a hard time doing things that aren’t in support of the other stuff that I do. I view it as a distraction, which is not a healthy way to live.

I can relate. If you’re working towards something, all the parts have to fit. Otherwise, you’re just like, ‘What is this outlier?’

Yeah, exactly—even if it makes you feel better.

Escape (2026) is a very New York piece.

This is the first time I’ve been away from my kid and my husband since I had a kid. So it’s been almost two years of constant companionship. I’m alone in my studio all day, but I also love solo travel more than anything. There’s a fire escape… but I was also just thinking about the notion of ‘escape’ from what you’re used to, the things that are idealized about that. It can be kind of melancholy, I think, when you’re traveling alone. It’s fun but, yeah, dinner for one. She’s also smoking indoors, like Parisians do. The curtain is kind of from Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, where it’s almost part of the figure, like she’s emerging or disappearing into it.

Is she the only smoker in the show?

She is. I quit smoking. It’s not trying to be autobiographical, but I think stuff like that happens when it’s just not on my mind anymore. Like wine glasses.

The way space feels in your paintings is often willfully wonky. Can you talk about that?

The objects are there to function spatially, but they’re also working symbolically. In that way, you can manipulate them at your leisure to aid in the general construction of the painting. It’s just making them subject to the demands of the square or the rectangle. I think that was popularized in modernist painting, but if you look at even Neolithic art, you can see that there was always this idea that you can change the shape to make it work for the constraints of the canvas. Sometimes I want it to be a little physically disorienting—an instability—so the figures can be more monumental. Kind of like this caryatid idea. And then the things around them are, like, swimming. It’s almost a cartooning impulse sometimes. My husband is really into graphic novels and comics. Each artist has their own sort of spatial logic, and it’s really on display in comic books. They even exaggerate it. It’s their signature.

I sometimes feel like that can be true of life, as well. There’s that weird drift feeling, like art-making as a living and how unstable that can feel, you know? Not financially, I mean, just like literally going in the studio and trying to make things out of nothing.

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In January, French musician Sébastien Tellier released his seventh album, “Kiss the Beast.” On the cover, in a frontal portrait by Jean-Baptiste Mondino, Tellier is overflowing with guru-like long hair that his white button-down can’t contain. “I’m the ‘Kiss’ and the ‘Beast,’” Tellier explains over Zoom, wearing a rhinestone-studded baseball cap. (He clarifies, for those who are literally-minded: “It’s not a beast in the wood. It’s the beast inside you.”) It’s a call to “accept your savage side.”

Embracing his id is not something he always felt he could do. “I was a sad teenager,” he reflects, as a banlieusard who grew up in Cergy-Pontoise, the homogeneously built northwestern outskirts of Paris (“no charm, not classy at all”). But he’s had quite a run since he began making his own music on a four-track recorder. His first outing as a professional musician was a quarter century ago, when he was the first act signed onto Air’s new label Record Makers, via his 2001 album “L’Incroyable Vérité.” He thereafter followed Air on tour.

His breakout song, the spirited but melancholic and affecting La Ritournelle (which had many lives in soundtracks and advertisements), hinges on piano, bass, drums and strings; he considers it timeless. “It’s not a question of production,” he adds. “The sensation hasn’t become old.” He played it live, singing before a piano and accompanied by a string orchestra, at the Opening Ceremony of Paris’s 2024 Paralympics.

Tellier has released albums every few years: “Politics” (2004), “Sexuality” (2008), “My God Is Blue” (2012), “L’Aventura” (2014) and “Domesticated” (2020). Looking back on his discography, he says, “each album is a representation of how [I’ve grown] up: my new state of mind, my new vision on the world.” In a true charting of adulting, his previous album reflects what it means to become a family man and the banality of cleaning up after chaotic children. “I don’t care that I’m not young anymore. I never bet on my youngness, and so I feel okay to be 50.”

His process begins with composition and lyrics; in the studio, he does all his demos alone. He fiddles until he hears something “that excites my ear,” often simply three or four notes. “It’s a mix between luck and chaos,” he admits. “It’s chord by chord… sometimes I can compose a song in 10 minutes, and sometimes it could be two weeks.”

Once he has his melody, he tries singing in English, French, Spanish and sometimes Italian, looking for the language that will help his melody rise. He finds that energetic songs are better suited for English, whereas French is better suited for intimiste music and romantic feelings. (“I do my sad song in French and my happy song in English.”)

Equal parts pop artist and crooner, Tellier is very prone to nostalgia. “My heart is still stuck in the 80s,” he admits. His very favorite synthesizer, the Prophet-5, dates from 1977. “I want to keep the best side of the past but… I try to discover something new,” he says, and that newness stems from trying “to find something with no name. It’s a feeling; it’s a question of style.”

In his latest work, the level of autotune is high (“I’m not like Christina Aguilera or Beyoncé,” he once said). He wanted Thrill of the Night to be a hit; to get a mainstream guarantee, he wondered “who is the big hit maker now? The guy who worked with The Weeknd is a good one! I said to myself, ‘Okay, I have to call this guy.’” That guy was Oscar Holter, the mind behind The Weeknd’s “Blinding Lights.” Tellier’s breathy, synth-y track features Slayyyter and Nile Rodgers.

He still loves French electronic music (like Daft Punk and Justice), and French hip hop and rap (like PNL and Booba). “But I think in the new world, we don’t really care about where the music comes from,” he says. “Now it’s not a question of country, it’s a question of feelings and sensations. The country doesn’t matter anymore because French can sing in English, a Spanish singer can sing in English… it’s just an international game.” Said by a former participant in Eurovision! (He sang “Divine,” a track from an album co-produced by Daft Punk’s Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, after arriving onstage in a golf cart, sporting a glittering blazer and inhaling from a helium balloon. He placed 19th.)

In conversation, Tellier is refreshingly low-key. He talks about how much he loves flowers—which fill his house—and self-describes as “sensitive.” The gentleness, or douceur, of his approach can be found in his music, but is cloaked in a kind of aestheticized seedy masculinity. In most articles about the French musician, the adjective “louche” is inevitably dropped, as is a reference to musician/infamous dirtbag Serge Gainsbourg, vis-à-vis predecessor vibes. French pop culture magazine Les Inrocks dubbed Tellier “le chanteur à la barbe légendaire.” In a slip of the tongue, Tellier called his own album “Kiss the Bitch.”

Tellier clearly plays with his image. As a fan of Salvador Dalí, he fittingly loves exaggerating his persona—sometimes, in ways that can seem dubious. His 2012 video for “Cochon Ville is filled with naked bodies and violence against women, but is framed as being cult cosplay. The cover for “Sexuality” features a tiny man riding a donkey about to traverse a larger-than-life naked woman’s torso, like something Terry Gilliam might have dreamed up. Pitchfork once described Tellier as emitting “a particularly retro kind of theatrical sleaziness distilled from early-VHS-era pornography.”

Tellier toys with this. In fact, his look was put on display in January in Paris, where he was featured at Perrotin as a muse. (Something is in the air with musicians in galleries. Elsewhere in the Marais, his collaborator on the track “Amnesia,” Kid Cudi, né Scotty Ramon, recently showed paintings at Ruttkowski;68.) The Perrotin show was a kind of flashy marketing extravaganza in the lead-up to “Kiss the Beast,” a mix of oversized guitars and stylized photo shoots, created in collaboration with French artist Xavier Veilhan, Tellier’s longtime friend.

Tellier’s relationship to the art world is very tied to Veilhan, with whom he first collaborated 20 years ago. “I went to his atelier with my keyboard, and I composed the music of the movie in front of him,” he recalls. They worked together on the French Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2017, which was imagined as a recording studio-sculpture; Tellier was one of the performers invited to do a one-off performance for the public. Down the line, Veilhan became the godfather of his son, and Tellier owns several artworks by his friend. Tellier also collects work by Hungarian-French Op artist Victor Vasarely. “I’m a small collector,” he demurs. “I miss [the] big money.”

In today’s world, it seems like embracing one’s savage side, or “kissing the beast,” is an attitude already widely unleashed and often to alarming effect. At least Tellier’s take is a reassuringly entertaining one.

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At 45 years old, ARCOmadrid has been running long enough that generational shifts have taken place in both the galleries that bring work to the fair and the collectors who frequent it.  Director Maribel López, who has been in the position for 15 years, should know. She herself was once a gallerist (“I was not a good gallerist—but I was a passionate gallerist!”), and the experience shaped her devotion and respect “for the gallery as an institution.” When she joined ARCOmadrid in 2011, the fair was weathering rough economic times. “It was difficult to convince galleries to come to Spain,” she told Observer. “That’s changed radically in these years.”

By 2015-16 the economy in Spain was improving and things started to shift. “As a constant, we didn’t change the tone in what is important for us. We never chased blue-chip galleries… Sometimes they want to come, sometimes they don’t. We don’t chase them because, for me, that alters the ecosystem too much. ARCO is a fair where people come to discover new artists, to find interesting pieces but not at the highest of prices.”

At its latest edition, held March 4-8 with 211 galleries from 30 countries, there was no sign of a midlife crisis. The goal, according to López, is “the sustainability of the business more than the profit” because ARCOmadrid nourishes Fundación ARCO, which promotes collecting, contemporary art research and the publication of artistic trends and techniques. Founded in 1987, the foundation’s collection includes pieces by Ryan Gander, Beatriz González, Carlos Motta, Oscar Muñoz, Adam Pendleton, Laure Prouvost and Danh Vo.

ARCOmadrid continues to function as a Latin American focal point in Europe. Participation at this year’s fair was 34 percent Spanish and 66 percent international, with more than 31 percent of the international galleries hailing from 11 Latin American countries with a marked presence from Brazil and Argentina. López noted that Madrid outside of ARCO is “very lively” not only institutionally but also because galleries from Latin America open second spaces locally and collectors from Latin America infuse the scene with fresh energy.

Madrid gallery Memoria made its debut at the fair in this edition. “If you’re not in ARCO, you’re not doing anything,” gallery staffer Maria González declared. She and her colleague Amalia Pascual were both sporting round red stickers reading “Cultural VAT now” in Spanish to show their allegiance to the strike happening during the fair. (The Spanish government introduced the possibility for VAT reform in 2024 but didn’t carry it out. Comparatively, France, Germany and Italy have all made VAT reforms.) Pascual said it has spawned “a sense of community within the galleries; we have a common goal, we’re fighting for a common strategy.” It’s important to democratize art and “it’s awful for the artists and the galleries, so we’re protesting against that,” González added.

The stand featured a six-meter-long canvas by Spanish-born Chilean artist Roser Bru that was brought from Chile and mounted on a wooden structure. “We based the curation around this,” Pascual noted. The work references an elegiac poem by Pablo Neruda (“Spain In Our Hearts”) and also repeatedly reused Robert Capa’s iconic image of a fallen soldier. Memoria’s project space was dedicated to Terry Holiday, a trans woman in her 70s (double the life expectancy of a trans woman in Mexico). The project space is “an homage to her life and the struggles she’s had, but it’s also an ode to the joy that she brings… she’s empowering herself and standing up to all those that can’t and couldn’t, and telling the story of her friends… because she has a voice,” Pascual noted.

Although a young space, Memoria was not part of ARCOmadrid’s new galleries section curated by Rafa Barber and Anissa Touati, which showcased spaces that have been operating for less than eight years. The section included booths from emerging spaces in Athens, Istanbul, Tbilisi, Ljubljana and Cape Town, as well as Exo Exo gallery from Paris, which was showing Ash Love—who has work on view at Casa de Velázquez, a French institution based in Madrid for nearly a century. “In that context, we thought it would be interesting to show their work given this residence,” noted gallerist Elisa Rigoulet. It was the first time the French gallery had participated in ARCOmadrid—though they’d shown Ash Love at Art Basel Paris in October—and it felt like a successful inclusion. “Sometimes fairs can be slow; this is very dynamic,” Rigoulet said.

One Ash Love piece—an acrylic box filled with compressed Mylar balloons and party dust, like if Arman was a raver—sold on the VIP day for €2500, as did an oil on linen painting by Yann Stéphane Bisso for €3000. Another young gallery, New York’s Gratin spearheaded by Madrid-born gallerist Andrea Torriglia, showed work by 28-year-old self-taught German artist Max Jahn, who paints self-portraits on copper in a nod to the Old Masters tradition. Gratin’s booth, with works ranging from $12,000-$22,000, sold out on the VIP day to institutions and European art collections.

Among the most seasoned fair participants was Chantal Crousel from Paris. Niklas Svennung, Crousel’s son and the gallery’s director, affirmed that his mother started coming to ARCOmadrid in 1980. The gallery participates in nine art fairs each year, and Svennung feels that “ARCO has cultivated a big generosity and seems to be a very genuine alternative to other ways to navigate the art fair agenda that we know is very intense. I think ARCO has always managed to be very ambitious, yet very human and friendly at the same time.” He positioned the fair’s philosophy as “people who are also interested in an alternative to the, let’s say, very Anglo-Saxon way of doing art business” and appreciates that “year after year, it seems… very healthy, intellectually speaking.”

The gallery mounted a group show, with Anri Sala’s work being the most accessible at €25,000 and José María Sicilia’s the most expensive at €90,000. Sicilia, with whom the gallery has worked for more than 40 years, has a show of light pieces and embellished mirrored folding screens at Madrid’s Palacio de Liria, a sprawling neoclassical private home and estate. There was also work in the booth by Wolfgang Tillmans, currently visiting professor at Beaux-arts de Paris and pieces made in 2025 by Rirkrit Tiravanija, Abraham Cruzvillegas and Gabriel Orozco.

Madrid- and Seville-based Galería Rafael Ortiz, which has participated in the fair since 1986, brought silver gelatin prints by Graciela Iturbide (which sold on the VIP day), bright gouaches on paper by Equipo 57, geometric and graphic acrylics on canvas by Manuel Barbadillo and mixed media sculptures in wood, metal and lead by Carmen Calvo. The works in the booth ranged from €2000-€95,000. There was also a special project dedicated to Curro González because, said gallerist Rosalía Ortiz, showing just “two [works] by one artist makes it really difficult for visitors to understand a career.” González’s paintings on canvas were dense with lines so fine they appeared to be made with pen, alongside unique polychrome ceramics and ink drawings on paper, functioning as a kind of “small exhibition.”

Nächst St. Stephan from Vienna’s booth leaned “minimal and abstract,” noted gallerist Rosemarie Schwarzwälder, another veteran who has been participating since the 1980s and who also served on ARCOmadrid’s selection committee for seven years. She said that “this art fair is always a platform [through which] people meet each other. Either you meet artists or you meet collectors or you meet friends like this, and get to know another culture.” She was showing Katharina Grosse, with whom she has worked for more than 25 years, with a painting priced at €265,000, as well as a small textile work by Sheila Hicks for €48,000. There were also pieces by Czech-born Luisa Kasalicky—a “great talent with her very specific own language”—and Jongsuk Yoon—“a late bloomer… we met maybe when she was a little bit over 50, but she was very energetic, and she really wanted to enter in this art market.”

Ultimately, the vibe this past weekend in the IFEMA conference center was a good one. As Svennung of Chantal Crousel put it: “it’s a complicated time, but ARCO and an art fair like this is capable of providing a sense of community and of elevated thinking and exchange and tolerance that’s important to have at any price nowadays.”

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The Nederlands Fotomuseum—the country’s national museum of photography—reopens this week in a renovated warehouse in Rotterdam’s harbor, located on the south bank of the River Maas. The repurposed six-story cast-iron column structure was built at the turn of the 20th Century and originally used to store coffee shipped from Brazil but stood empty for many years before being registered as a national monument. The museum, founded in 2003, acquired the building in 2023 through a private donor, though it also received funding from the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science and the Municipality of Rotterdam.

Without minimizing the contemporary reality of photographic dematerialization, the museum’s intention is to show the history of photography in its objecthood. What is a photography museum’s responsibility in the uncertain age of A.I.? Here, it is still deeply tied to an analog history that is worth celebrating: it’s a “heritage that requires care and knowledge,” Martijn van den Broek, head of collections, who has been with the museum for 25 years, told Observer.

The newly rehabilitated structure houses one of the largest museum collections of photography in the world, as well as accoutrements such as vintage cameras, guidebooks, negatives, slides and prints. Across the second and third floors, climate-controlled facilities house the museum’s collection and its digitization and conservation hubs. These spaces are public-facing, with windows that offer visitors a look at the fragile processes happening there. It’s a much more modest mise-en-scène relative to the neighboring Depot of Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, which opened its stored collection to visitors in 2021.

The Nederlands Fotomuseum’s fourth and fifth floors can accommodate two temporary photography exhibitions. The opening show, “Awakening in Blue: An Ode to Cyanotype” (on view through June 7), features work by 15 contemporary artists who have used this lensless historical technique. First up are reproductions from Anna Atkins, a pillar of the cyanotype method in her cataloguing of algae (gelidium corneum, polysiphonia spinulosa…) in the 19th Century. Today, artists like Farah Rahman and Sarojini Lewis use this technique to demystify colonial history. Arash Fakhim’s Sofreh series of cyanotypes on textiles is hemmed to fabrics that reimagine the traditional Iranian ritual cloth, while Marijn Kuijper’s embroidered quotes of Dutch legislation limiting queer families are layered upon cyanotypes of negatives.

The other temporary exhibition, “Rotterdam in Focus: The City in Photographs 1843 – now” (on view through May 24), is unfortunately a dull compilation of people-free topographies of the city, revealing none of its dynamism and reading more like an urban brochure. (And yet, an inkjet print from a photo collage by Paul Citroen—Metropolis, 1923, displayed several floors below—shows how exciting, frenzied and dense the depiction of a city can be.)

The museum’s first-floor permanent exhibition is grandly dubbed “The Gallery of Honour,” and it presents a sampling of photography in the Netherlands spanning from the 19th Century to the present day. The collection compresses Dutch photography into 99 photographs, featuring names who have risen from national to international acclaim, such as Anton Corbijn, Viviane Sassen, Rineke Dijkstra and Erwin Olaf, alongside lesser-known practitioners.

There are portraits of famous pop culture figureheads, like a gelatin silver print of Tupac Shakur looking askance by Dana Lixenberg from 1993, or Cor Jaring’s close-up shot of John Lennon and Yoko in bed, demonstrating for peace at the Hilton Hotel in Amsterdam in 1969. Peter Hunter (né Otto Salomon) snapped John F. Kennedy at his sister’s birthday party in London without flash, the blur of movement reflecting the spontaneity of the photo.

There are various images from World War II, most of them implicit in their charge. Perhaps the most heart-stopping is a compilation of passport photos taken with a Polyfoto camera featuring a sweetly grinning Anne Frank, the document a chilling one because the viewer, of course, knows her fate: she would die five years later in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany. Less overt, unless you scan the QR code, is Henk van der Horst’s Zuiderpark Swimming Pool, shot from a bird’s-eye view in The Hague circa 1938. The cheerful geometry of the New Photography image is belied by the fact that the photographer joined the Dutch resistance and was murdered in a concentration camp. Nearby, Hans Poley’s image only feels bleak when you read the caption: People on the Roof Terrace of Their Hiding Place, Haarlem, 1943. It shows a group of dapper men and women crouched over gravel and peeling potatoes—an innocuous scene that does not foretell that their hiding place was discovered and the Gestapo captured them in 1944. The same year, in Amsterdam, Charles Breijer kept a concealed Rolleiflex in his bicycle bag and provocatively took photos of German authorities despite the high risk of retribution.

The images of women in this selection feel empowered. Early in the timeline is a beautiful nude self-portrait by Katharina Behrend from 1908, orchestrating her own representation as a muse only to herself. Paul Citroen’s 1931 portrait of Estella Reed, a dancer, shows her in a charmingly informal way, tilting her head so her cheek is cradled in her hand and strands of her hair fall loose, neither self-stylized nor self-conscious. Press photographer Jaap J. Herschel’s documentation of a demonstration for birth control and abortion rights in Utrecht in 1970 features a lineup of young women from the Dutch feminist group Dolle Mina, lifting their shirts up to reveal the words BAAS IN EIGEN BUIK (BOSS OF OUR BELLY). In the 21st Century, Meryem Slimani’s Instagram page is digitized, rotating through posts showing her mother stylishly outfitted in a mélange of streetwear and traditional Moroccan clothing. The work got attention when it was included in a Stedelijk Museum Schiedam exhibition in 2019-2020 about modest fashion. “Our story is now part of Dutch cultural history,” Slimani captioned one post.

Although the Gallery of Honour existed in the museum’s previous space across the river, a newly added timeline explaining the history of photography—internationally and in the Netherlands—strengthens viewers’ understanding of its power. Dutch tax authorities recognized “photographer” as a profession in 1857. By 1900, police stations were photographing criminals, whom they catalogued in albums. In 1933, an art school in Amsterdam debuted a photography department, followed by the opening of a dedicated professional photo school in 1940. In 1958, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam started collecting photography, and in 1971, the first photo gallery opened in the same city. In 2000, the verb “to Photoshop” was added to the Dutch dictionary.

This local history is in conversation with sweeping changes to society’s habits of documentation and self-depiction. Who would have guessed that a museum would cite an A.I.-generated image of octogenarian Pope Francis wearing a puffer jacket widely diffused in 2023? The real question is, with such rapid-fire evolutions in synthetic images, what awaits us next?

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