Sunday, September 28, 2025

mumok stages the most comprehensive Tobias Pils exhibition

Exhibition view: Tobias Pils. Shh, 27. September 27, 2025 to April 12, 2026. Photo: Georg Petermichl / mumok.
VIENNA.— Born in 1971 in Linz, Austria, Tobias Pils is among the most exciting painters working today. Employing a heavily reduced color palette, he creates paintings and drawings that weave abstract and representational elements into associative pictorial worlds. What in terms of subject matter can be interpreted as an investigation of both elementary and personal themes like birth and death or becoming and passing, also negotiates central questions in painting at large. For in Pils’ visual cosmos, one painterly mark leads to the next, one image to another, as if painting were constantly staging its own death and rebirth. Pils‘s deliberate use of painterly means creates distance. His preference for grayscale, which has recently been expanded by select colors, as well as for enigmatic constellations of what often remains a hint of architecture, a figure, or an object remove his paintings from reality and render them dreamlike. His pictures invite us to search for clues, to engage with their inherent logic and the grammar of the painterly language. Analogous to the process of painting governed by intentions and chance events, the viewing of the images also proves to be a processual event with an open outcome. Recapitulating the painterly process is not limited to a single work. Pils’s paintings are created in groups that the artist calls “families.” Their coherence presents itself in the way certain compositional elements reappear throughout—comparable to a musical theme whose variation creates different moods. The term “family” implies that the images are close to the artist, yet not limited to the personal. They illustrate universal experiences of intimacy and distance, opposition and fraternization—a cosmology of the creaturely. The exhibition at mumok is the most comprehensive presentation of Pils’s oeuvre to date. Along with an overview of his painterly works of the last decade, it also highlights the artist...
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Radius: Helen Frankenthaler Prints in Context on view at the IU Eskenazi Museum of Art

BLOOMINGTON, IN.— Helen Frankenthaler (1928–2011) was one of the most innovative and influential artists to emerge in the mid-twentieth century. Initially celebrated for her spontaneous and expressive Abstract Expressionist painting, she continuously developed her artistic approach throughout her lengthy career, experimenting with a variety of techniques and media. In 1961, Frankenthaler made her first print and quickly took to the collaborative and technical challenge of printmaking. Over the next fifty years she became one of the most active and creative printmakers of her generation. Frankenthaler’s body of work stands out for the diversity of techniques she used, such as aquatint, lithography, woodcut, and screenprint, as well as the number of studios with which she partnered. "We are delighted to present this celebration of Helen Frankenthaler's work. Her groundbreaking approach to printmaking
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Pace Gallery will present a selection of photographs by Peter Hujar at Frieze Masters

LONDON.— At the 2025 edition of Frieze Masters, Pace Gallery will present a selection of photographs by Peter Hujar, highlighting the artist's backstage portraits of performers in the theatres and nightclubs of 1970s and '80s New York. Featuring a group of 15 works printed by Hujar, Pace’s booth will underscore the celebrated artist’s transformative photographic eye and his extraordinary darkroom technique. In 1974, Hujar was introduced to the Palm Casino Revue, an experimental theatre in the East Village and hub of avant-garde drag. There, and in other venues, he began photographing performers in and out of costume, often in intimate backstage settings where they dressed, rehearsed, rested, and posed for his camera. Both participant and documentarian of a pivotal moment in queer cultural history, Hujar also made his home and studio above the Eden Theater on East 12th Street—a gathering place for artists, performers, and other vital downtown figures. The idea of life as performan
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Urs Fischer exhibits new dust paintings, a sculpture, and a video installation at Gagosian in Rome

ROME.— Gagosian opened After Nature, an exhibition of new paintings, a sculpture, and a video installation by Urs Fischer at the gallery in Rome, opening on September 17, 2025. Marshaling a dizzying variety of materials and methods, Fischer explores themes of perception and representation. He distorts scale and reimagines common objects and images through technological intervention, reworking historical genres and motifs while embracing transformation and decay. In After Nature, Fischer presents a new suite of paintings on aluminum depicting dust salvaged from his studio floor, a large-scale soft sculpture of a reclining female figure, and an interactive video installation. Irresistibly recalling Man Ray’s photograph Dust Breeding (1920), which captures the buildup of grime on the surface of Marcel Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) (1915–23), Fischer’s eight new dust
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Helen Levitt's enigmatic street photography celebrated in landmark exhibition at Fundacion MAPFRE

BARCELONA.— Dedicated full-time to her artistic activities, the photographer Helen Levitt (New York, 1913-2009) did not begin to gain public recognition until relatively late in life. Although her name has always been associated with "street photography," as it was precisely the streets of her native city that provided the context for the production of her images, throughout her career Levitt made forays into film, visited other countries such as Mexico, and also focused on colour photography. Her images, almost invariably ambiguous and mysterious although not necessarily at first glance, are also characterised by their spontaneity, warmth and sensitivity. The movements and gestures of the figures captured by her lens and the communication between them transcend that inclination to "photograph children" which many critics pointed out after her first exhibition at the MoMA in 1943, entitled Helen Levitt: Photographs of Children. Levitt's work as a whole goes far beyond the latter aspect, revealing
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Maria Lassnig's abstract self-portraits illuminate self with dragon in Hong Kong

HONG KONG.— The oeuvre of the seminal painter Maria Lassnig (1919 – 2014) covers more than 70 years of intense work between the end of the Second World War and her death in 2014. At the center of her profound research into painting is a unique interest in the relation between awareness and the human body—particularly the artist’s body—which Lassnig termed ‘body awareness.’ Titled ‘Self with Dragon,’ this is Lassnig’s first solo exhibition in Hong Kong. Presenting a selection of paintings and works on paper from 1987 to 2008, the show provides an insight into Lassnig’s approach, how she questions perception beyond the visual, how our body senses as a whole and the ways in which language becomes part of such perceptions. Lassnig first developed her theory of ‘body awareness’ in the 1940s; in the decades that followed, she rendered her physical and emotional states in arresting visual terms, often
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Museum of Fine Arts, Boston opens the most comprehensive Martin Puryear survey in nearly 20 years

BOSTON, MASS.— For more than half a century, the preeminent sculptor Martin Puryear (born 1941) has captivated the public with works of astonishing beauty and elaborate craftsmanship whose sources of inspiration range from global cultures and social history to the natural world. Co-organized by the Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA) and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA), Martin Puryear: Nexus is the first substantial survey of the artist’s work in nearly two decades. Assembling some 50 works from across Puryear’s career, the exhibition focuses on his use of a rich variety of materials and media—from sculptures in wood, leather, glass, marble, and metal to rarely shown drawings and prints. After debuting at the MFA, where it is on view in the Linde Family Wing for Contemporary Art from September 27, 2025, through February 8, 2026, the exhibition travels to the
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Kunstmuseum St. Gallen opens the first retrospective in Switzerland of the work of Jacqueline de Jong

ST. GALLEN.— The first retrospective in Switzerland of the work of the Dutch artist Jacqueline de Jong (born in Hengelo, the Netherlands, in 1939; died in Amsterdam in 2024) brings together an oeuvre of painting, sculpture, and graphic art produced in dialogue with some of the most important post-war artistic movements in Europe over a period of more than six decades—including CoBrA, Pop Art, New Figuration and Postmodernism. Aged 21, De Jong became involved in the revolutionary, radical avant-garde movement the Situationist International, whose members aimed to break free from the spectacle of capitalism and create adventurous, self-directed encounters with the world. Throughout her career, De Jong stayed true to this spirit. Her shapeshifting and oftentimes politically engaged work was playful, erotic, funny, dark, and—above all—always radically contemporary. Unafraid and open, she sought to uncover what was hidden below the surfaces of the images that came at her in ever-increasin
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Kimsooja opens Sunhyewon Art Project 1.0 with immersive hanok installation

SEOUL.— Located in Samcheong-dong, Seoul, Sunhyewon is a site steeped in the history and tradition of SK Group, recently reopening as the group’s new research institute. To introduce this special place to the public and expand its role as a cultural platform, PODO museum has launched a new cultural program, “Sunhyewon Art Project 1.0.” The inaugural project presents an exhibition by Kimsooja, a world-renowned artist representing Korea. This exhibition marks a special moment where the historical depth of Sunhyewon meets Kimsooja’s artistic universe, offering visitors a contemplative experience that transcends time and space. The central work, To BreatheㅡSunhyewon, 2025, is a site-specific installation that transforms Kyonheunggak, a traditional hanok building that retains the dignity of Korean architecture, into a whole piece of contemporary art. By covering the floor with mirrors, Kimsooja reflects the architecture, light, and viewers, dissolving boundaries between b
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Haegue Yang's three-decade practice explored in Zurich retrospective

ZURICH.— Leap Year is the first survey exhibition by the Berlin and Seoul based artist Haegue Yang (Seoul, 1971) in Switzerland. Spanning over three decades of artistic exploration, Yang‘s work resists categorisation, intensely navigating the art historical boundaries between abstraction and figuration. Through diverse media, such as anthropomorphic sculpture, installation, essayistic video, and experiential text, Yang constructs constellations of works that challenge our understanding of contemporary life through intimacies woven between bodies and objects. In exploring how movement, emotion, and sentiment function within various contexts, Yang’s oeuvre simultaneously reveals the personal and the collective, in other words, a holistic unfolding of memories and socio-cultural associations. Themes of identity, biography, and transnationality are central to her work, which reflect her subjective perceptions of the collective fabric of society. Drawing
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Kunsthal KAdE opens Europe's first retrospective of Jacob Lawrence

AMERSFOORT.— Kunsthal KAdE presents the first-ever retrospective in Europe of the work of the African-American artist Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000). Lawrence gained fame in 1941 with his iconic painting series "The Great Migration," a series of 60 panels, half of which can be seen at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the other half at the Phillips Collection in Washington. In this series, Lawrence tells the story of the mass migration of Black people from the southern United States to the north. Throughout his career, Jacob Lawrence focused on African-American history and daily life in Harlem, New York, the neighborhood where he grew up. Through art workshops in Harlem in the 1930s, Lawrence developed his own autonomous painting style in the wake of the Harlem Renaissance and is considered one of the most important African-American painters of the 20th century. His colorful, narrative version of collage
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Bilbao Fine Arts Museum launches groundbreaking digital knowledge platform

BILBAO.— The Bilbao Fine Arts Museum has unveiled what it calls its “other expansion”—a pioneering digital platform designed to open the doors of its vast collections, archives, and curatorial knowledge to the world. While the museum’s physical expansion, led by Norman Foster and Luis María Uriarte, is transforming its architecture, this parallel digital leap is set to redefine how audiences connect with art, history, and culture. The new platform, hosted at bilbaomuseoa.eus, functions as an ambitious knowledge graph powered by semantic technology. This means that for the first time, thousands of works of art, bibliographic records, historical documents, and archival materials are interlinked in a single digital ecosystem. Visitors can now move seamlessly from a painting to the biography of its artist, from there to a related exhibition, or even to critical essays and multimedia content. “It’s about creating a museum without walls,” says project lead Irune Mar
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Toulouse-Lautrec exhibition opens at the Museo degli Innocenti

FLORENCE.— Today, Florence steps into the intoxicating world of late-19th-century Paris as the Museo degli Innocenti unveils its much-anticipated exhibition “Toulouse-Lautrec: A Journey into the Paris of the Belle Époque.” Running from now through February 22, 2026, the show promises to transport visitors into the heart of Montmartre’s cafes, cabarets, and boulevards, where art, nightlife, and social change collided in dazzling fashion. Walking into the Museo degli Innocenti today, one is struck not by the austere calm of a typical art gallery, but by a lively, theatrical atmosphere. Period furnishings, archival objects, and evocative lighting set the mood: this is Paris, 1880–1900, not Renaissance Florence. The curators have spared no detail in creating a sensory immersion. At the center of the exhibition lie over 100 iconic works by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec — among them Jane Avril (1893), Troupe de Mademoiselle Églantine (1896), and Aristide Bruant in His Cabaret (1893
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The things that I have apparently parodied I actually admire.
Roy Lichtenstein

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Hidden histories revealed: Over 130 works illuminate queer contributions to modernism

With Queer Modernism. 1900 to 1950, the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen presents the first comprehensive exhibition in Europe dedicated to the significant contributions of queer artists to modernism. Featuring more than 130 works by thirty- four international artists—including paintings, drawings, photographs, sculptures, films, publications, and archival materials—the exhibition project focuses on the first half of the twentieth century. It tells an alternative history of modernism, one in which queer artists placed themes such as desire, gender, sexuality, and the politics of self-representation at the center of their work. It also traces stories of queer life in times of war and resistance. Despite their close ties to the avant-garde, queer perspectives have often been marginalized in the art-historical canon. The frequent absence of documentation and accounts of

Jordy Kerwick's striking new solo exhibition One to Give. One to Take Away presented in YSP's The Weston Gallery

Jordy Kerwick’s striking new solo exhibition One to Give. One to Take Awaywill is being presented in Yorkshire Sculpture Park’s The Weston Gallery and outdoors this autumn, marking the first UK museum solo presentation of his work. One to Give. One to Take Away features dynamic sculptures and vibrant large-scale paintings by Jordy Kerwick, most of which were created especially for Yorkshire Sculpture Park (YSP). An Australian artist now based in France, Kerwick places storytelling and material exploration at the heart of his practice. He creates compelling worlds where reality and fiction blur, inhabited by creatures that evoke the magic of myths and fairytales. Known for the distinctive visual language of his paintings,

The medal commemorating the 70th anniversary of the Battle of Britain soars to chf 100,000

This week, Piguet Auction House successfully concluded the sale of the rare medals coming directly from the House of Savoy. These medals came from the prestigious collection of the last two Kings of Italy, Their Majesties King Victor Emmanuel III and King Umberto II, part of which had been carefully preserved until now by the daughter of the latter: H.R.H. Princess Maria Gabriella of Savoy. This unique provenance played a decisive role in the success of the sale, as did the historical significance of the medals selected by Fabrice Van Rutten, Head of the Numismatics Department. All the lots found buyers, and several results stood out for prices far exceeding the initial estimates. “We are very pleased with these results, which demonstrate that even in a niche field such as commemorative medals, an exceptional provenance attracts international buyers and drives

Michael Richards monograph launch at Center for Art, Research and Alliances

The Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA) and the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami (MOCA North Miami) announced the release of Michael Richards: Are You Down?, the first monograph dedicated to artist Michael Richards (1963–2001) and the visionary practice he developed during a prolific decade from 1990 to 2001. Of Jamaican and Costa Rican lineage, Richards was born in Brooklyn, raised in Kingston, Jamaica, and lived and worked between New York City and Miami. An integral member of a generation of Black artists that emerged in the 1990s, Richards produced sculptures, drawings, installations, and video work that gesture toward repression and reprieve and the possibilities of uplift and downfall, often in the context of the historic and ongoing oppression of Black people. “Though the issues which inform the work may be seen

Casco Art Institute launches autumn program With Wapke Feenstra's Rerooting in the Polder

Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons announced its 2025 Autumn artistic program, Rerooting in the Polder, an exhibition by Frisian artist and long-term Casco collaborator Wapke Feenstra. Co-initiator of the artist collective Myvillages (2003) and Rural School of Economics (2019), Feenstra has spent several decades investigating the ecologies of land—its physical, mental, and social dimensions—by tapping into local knowledges and engaging with people and the everyday. Through her work, she gives form to ways of living with the land that have eroded over time, that which persists, and the potential that lies therein. With Rerooting in the Polder, Feenstra’s long-standing engagement turns toward the Dutch landscape, offering particular attention to the distinctive form of the polders: flat, low-lying tracts of land (re)claimed from the sea, lakes, or rivers, made

Tim Van Laere Gallery presents Dennis Tyfus's genre-defying solo show

Tim Van Laere Gallery announces Oi on Canvas, the new solo show of Belgian artist Dennis Tyfus. This is the third solo show of Tyfus since joining Tim Van Laere Gallery in 2021 and his first show in the Roman space. In this exhibition he presents his paintings for the first time to the public. Born in Antwerp in 1979, Dennis Tyfus is a shape-shifter of contemporary art—an artist, musician, publisher, and performer whose work resists categorization. With a practice that flows freely between drawing, sculpture, installation, music, tattooing, video, publishing, and live performance, Tyfus creates an ever-expanding, self-sustaining universe where each medium cross-pollinates the other. At the heart of Tyfus’s work is a spirit of improvisation, irreverence, and play. Rooted in the ethos of DIY and underground culture, he transforms constraints into opportunities and the unexpected

Tate Britain premieres Onyeka Igwe's our generous mother

This autumn Tate Britain premieres a new film installation by Onyeka Igwe, entitled our generous mother. The work continues Igwe’s interest in exploring archives and unravelling histories, in this case focused on the university in Nigeria where the artist’s mother studied in the 1970s. The exhibition is the latest instalment in Art Now, Tate Britian’s long-running programme of free contemporary exhibitions. Celebrating its 30th anniversary this year, Art Now continues to showcase emerging talent and new developments in the British art scene. Igwe’s new work explores the University of Ibadan, the oldest degree-awarding institution in Nigeria. Moving through the university’s tropical modernist architecture, the film traces the building’s personal and political histories, from its colonial roots through national independence, civil war and towards the present day. It presents

Air de Paris opens an exhibition of works by Emma McIntyre

It’s impossible to think about Emma McIntyre’s work without thinking about all of art‘s history, and it’s impossible to think about Emma McIntyre’s work without thinking about Los Angeles. And so, in Syllables in Oleander there it is: art history accumulated, laid bare of historical context, and filtered through the prism of L.A.’s shadowless daylight— revivified and teased out to excite anew. “Theater is the negation of art”1 writes Michael Fried derisively from 1967. So be it, McIntyre and Los Angeles respond in unison from 2025, distilling and amplifying the artifice out of AbEx‘s gospel to resuscitate its corpse into a presence completely of its own time—a history-less, frontier abstraction rising up from a sun-burnt, jacaranda-tinted coastal mirage. The musty old canvas becomes a stage, populated with myriad characters, busy with action. In Los Angeles, says

Michael Rakowitz: Proxies for Poets and Palaces opens at Stavanger Art Museum

Iraqi-American artist Michael Rakowitz draws upon his Arab-Jewish heritage to scrutinize Western interventions in the Middle East. His works foreground the significance of cultural heritage in times of war and probe the ways in which societies negotiate the relative value of human life and cultural monuments. At the centre of this exhibition are eight reliefs conceived specifically for Stavanger Art Museum, presented as a room within a room. These reliefs are reconstructions of sculptures that once adorned the walls of a chamber in the Assyrian Northwest Palace of Kalhu (near present-day Mosul). They form part of Rakowitz’s ongoing series The invisible enemy should not exist, originally initiated as a response to the looting of the Iraq Museum in 2003 following the US-led invasion of Iraq. Rather than replicating the lost objects, the artist “reappears” them

Michael Beutler transforms Z33 into a living studio of paper and imagination

Michael Beutler (°1976, DE) presents his first major solo exhibition in Belgium at Z33. Over the past few weeks, he exchanged his Berlin studio for the art house in Hasselt, where his work came to life. Large quantities of paper, cardboard, and textiles found their way into the building and were transformed using self-made tools into building blocks for expansive installations: from colorful columns and paper waffles to curls, loops, and a flowing weaving studio. Z33 currently feels like one big studio, where the joy of making is palpable throughout. Together with a team of fifty participants – student workers, guides, architecture students (UHasselt), and product design students (LUCA School of Arts, campus C-mine) – Beutler explores the artistic potential of simple materials. He demonstrates greatness through simplicity and collaboration, showing how imagination
Flashback: On a day like today, Italian painter Tintoretto was born
Tintoretto (September 29, 1518 - May 31, 1594), real name Jacopo Comin, was a Venetian painter and a notable exponent of the Renaissance school. For his phenomenal energy in painting he was termed Il Furioso. His work is characterized by its muscular figures, dramatic gestures and bold use of perspective in the Mannerist style, while maintaining color and light typical of the Venetian School. In this image: A man looks at 'The Coronation of the Virgin, The Paradise' a painting by 16th century Venetian artist Tintoretto, on display at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid, Wednesday, June 7, 2006.

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