Emma Webster: That Thought Might Think, Petzel, New York

Fri 7 Mar 2025 to Sat 12 Apr 2025

520 W 25th Street, NY 10001

Tue-Sat 10am-6pm

Petzel presents That Thought Might Think, an exhibition of panoramic paintings by Los Angeles-based artist Emma Webster. The show marks Webster’s solo debut with the gallery. These new works are Webster’s largest to date, and depict expansive, revelatory vistas of genesis and apocalypse. Painted amid the Los Angeles fires, her two paintings offer a front row seat into dramatic, fantastical maquettes of rupturing landscapes. Morphing light, space, and scale, Webster speaks to the precarity of the natural world and the role of artifice.

The artist’s duet of paintings plays with a shifting sense of beginning, end, and causation. The Material World evokes a cool, Proterozoic majesty. Verdant with foliage beneath eclipsed sunlight, the viewer faces a front of cut-out trees, scraggly and bare-boughed. Meanwhile, Era of Eternity is a celestial rapture of a spiraling sunburst, with a flurry of geese cresting the canyon below. Webster casts tense atmospheres, placing her scenes in strange times of day, unclear if they represent daybreak or nightfall. Do these worlds unveil a beginning, a coming dawn, or the serene melancholy of twilight? And with it, an unraveling?

These two paintings are deeply rooted in the context of ecological crisis. Webster says: “It was surreal to make this work while just outside the studio; the orange, smoky sky was raining ash from the fires.” Yet, Webster celebrates the power and resilience of natural systems, both surreal and sophisticated, through her constructed environments. They are virtual plein-air paintings of supernatural landscapes that do not represent real-world places. However, they are places which absorb the viewer, familiar yet not, further illuminating the complex entanglements of the Anthropocene.

To create her paintings, Webster fuses VR technology, penned sketches, and scans of hand-made sculptures. She translates her digital dioramas to the painted plane, integrating inventive means to advance the genre of still life. With both digital and analog tools, Webster expands on the rich history of artists commandeering technologies, such as the Claude glass or camera obscura. By building an entire set in virtual reality, Webster expands the planes of her enveloping paintings. Her landscapes take on an immersive quality, like a proxy for reality, becoming avatars of the natural world. The unsettling panoramas in That Thought Might Think intertwine the material and the virtual, where the bounds of reality become increasingly elusive. In an era where seamless technologies chase the knife’s edge of sentience, Webster highlights the urgency of our relationship to the natural, the simulated, and the real.

About Emma Webster

Emma Webster was born in 1989 in Encinitas, California, and currently lives and works in Los Angeles. She graduated with her BA from Stanford University in 2011 and received her MFA in Painting from Yale University in 2018.

That Thought Might Think is Webster’s first solo exhibition with Petzel, New York. Other recent solo exhibitions include Perrotin, Hong Kong (2025); Perrotin, Paris (2024); Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles (2023); Perrotin, Dosan Park, Seoul (2022); Stems Gallery, Brussels (2021); and Alexander Berggruen, New York (2021). Group exhibitions include Petzel, New York (2023); Max Hetzler, Berlin (2023); Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (2022); Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, San Diego (2022) among others.

Webster’s work is part of various public collections around the world, including the Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Los Angeles, California; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, Florida; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, San Diego, California; Pérez Art Museum Miami, Miami, Florida; Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, Ohio; Xiao Museum, Rizhao, China; Yuz Museum, Shanghai, China; The Warehouse, Dallas, Texas; and the Groeninghe Art Collection, Bruges, Belgium.

In 2021, Webster published Lonescape: Green, Painting, & Mourning Reality, a collection of musings on landscape and image-making in an increasingly digital world. Both this artist book and her eponymous monograph, published by Perrotin in 2024, are available in the Petzel Bookstore.

ELLES, Fleiss-Vallois, New York

Fleiss-Vallois presents Elles. With works spanning from 1934 to 2024, the exhibition brings together 8 radical female artists who have laid the groundwork for future generations of women artists.

Elles (plural of “she”) is a noun. Therefore, on its own, the word Elles implies a following verb. Yet it is left open ended – the exact action to be discovered or decided. Or perhaps it is meant to imply many actions – an unending list of activity and accomplishments. Either way, Elles conveys the artists’ activity rather than passivity. Elles also implies a collective, a group of women connected in their experience, interests, or pursuits. Though spanning a century, several continents, and many art historical movements, there exist countless threads of connection between these artists: they respond to women’s role in society during periods of male dominance, political unrest, social upheaval, or technological advancement; they make images which inherently reflect changing attitudes, circumstances, and hierarchies; they construct new worlds.

The exhibition includes 50 of Leonora Carrington’s early drawings, which will be unveiled for the first time through this exhibition, alongside works by Pilar Albarracín, Niki de Saint Phalle, Eulàlia Grau, Zhenya Machneva, Lucie Picandet, Virginie Yassef, and Julia Wachtel.

Wed 12 Feb 2025 to Sat 26 Apr 2025

1018 Madison Avenue, NY 10075

Tue-Sat 10am-6pm

* Rise and Repaint Member: Exhibition The Guest Book *

The Guest Book is a dynamic, rotating group exhibition that reflects on creative gestures made in the Okanagan-Similkameen. The Guest Book includes 26 alumni of the Similkameen Artist Residency (SAR), featuring artworks made during or in response to their residency at SAR between 2021–23, and three Syilx-Okanagan artists. This exhibition reflects SAR’s gratitude for the artists who have shaped their identity as an organization, and for the communities and territories that surround and inspire us.

Mirroring the variable experience of attending the residency, small groupings of alumni artists’ work are installed for 1–2 weeks each, rotating throughout the exhibition. When developing this schedule, SAR curated groupings that encourage thematic and aesthetic conversations between artworks. These include performative processes in collaboration with nature; abstractions inspired by the landscape; the identities and regionalities of “home”; and processes of place. Instead of rotating like residency alumni works, Host Nation artists’ works stay in place throughout the exhibition, grounding the show and encouraging visitors to reflect on their relationship to the region. This curatorial decision is made out of respect for the Syilx-Okanagan people, who have created art on and tended to these lands since time immemorial.

Embodying SAR's goal of creating cross-regional dialogues, The Guest Book bridges local, national, and international artists. Through the showcased works, visitors will experience the energy of SAR, with each piece reflecting the unique perspectives and experiences of the artists who have contributed to our development. SAR is grateful for the opportunity to showcase these works, as each participating artist has been so generous in sharing their creativity with us.

Learn More Here

* Rise and Repaint Member Exhibition * CONNECT Collective: Alchemy

Teresa Selbee-Baker
Kara Brauen
Amanda MacLeod
Ember Muninn

Artist Talk + Reception: Friday March 21st @ 5pm

The CONNECT Collective comes together as a group of female and other underrepresented gendered artists providing members an opportunity to put into practice our values of community over division and cooperation over competition.

They state: “We share and nurture our unique skills and strengths with each other in order to transform into something greater than we could alone. We are rediscovering community in the modern age and celebrating what it means to be creative in partnership.”

The CONNECT Collective works with three common themes: exploration of the self; a desire to be present; the grounding power of nature. Collaboration in collective community offers an opportunity for members to find kinship in shared experiences while softening the isolation of making in a male-dominated art world.

Many different mediums and techniques are used by members including oil paint, acrylic paint, printmaking, embroidery, and encaustics. By exhibiting as a collective, the group is able to develop a uniquely layered sensory experience for the viewer that is different than when exhibiting solo. Playing with juxtaposition of pieces gives their exhibitions a unique energy and movement, and allows new relationships and narratives to emerge from their collective works.

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Derriann Pharr: I Am a Bloodstone, Luis De Jesus Los Angeles, Los Angeles

Sat 1 Mar 2025 to Sat 5 Apr 2025

1110 Mateo St, CA 90021

Tue-Sat 10am-6pm

Luis De Jesus Los Angeles presents Derriann Pharr: I Am a Bloodstone, the Birmingham-based artist’s Los Angeles debut exhibition.

Derriann Pharr’s mixed media work conjures abstract drawing, painting, and poetic expression in a quest to free the human figure from societal norms and conventional notions of aesthetics and beauty. Drawing from her own experiences as a Black biracial woman grappling with self-esteem while facing societal expectations, Pharr's commitment to liberating her figures stands as a response to her observation of “a lack of intrinsic and physical consideration of marginalized bodies in the American South.”

At the core of Pharr’s artistic practice are themes of transformation, personal growth, and self-acceptance. Each work serves as a deliberate effort to deconstruct and reconstruct deeply rooted beliefs regarding identity, while also incorporating forms that have been historically overlooked in figure drawing, which often idealizes the human body. Rendered with pastel and acrylic on heavyweight black paper, vivid shades of magenta, glowing yellows, dreamy azures and radiant jewel tones infuse her works with an undeniable energy. The figures exist in a state of ambiguity, twisting and turning among lush arrangements of plants, ultimately evolving into spiritual representations of their authentic selves.

Pharr’s figures transcend the constraints of naturalistic representation by shapeshifting in a dynamic interplay of gestural marks, their contours fluid and otherworldly, defying the realities and confines of societal norms and expectations. Pharr’s affinity for vibrant colors evokes the peculiarities of childhood and gendered color preferences, wherein young girls often embrace and express a passion for bright hues before succumbing to insecurities and adopting more subdued palettes.

In I Am a Bloodstone, Pharr envisions landscapes untainted by the injustices of our imperfect humanity. These vibrant scenes emerge as a response to the prevailing sociopolitical environment, serving as a call to embrace personal authenticity as a form of resistance. Distorted depictions of eyes, limbs, genitalia, and therianthropic figures intertwine with vegetation, symbolizing a harmonious relationship between human essence and the natural world. The figures glisten and find solace beneath protective botanical canopies that connect our existence with theirs. The interplay of soft and hard along with the fusion of grittiness and smoothness, reflects the intricate tapestry of emotions and experiences that define the human spirit.

Derriann Pharr (b.1998, Winfield, AL) holds a BFA from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Recent solo exhibitions include Scott Miller Projects, Birmingham, AL (2024), and Bells Gallery, Dothan, AL (2024). Pharr currently lives and works in Birmingham, AL.

Julian Opie, Lisson Gallery, New York

Thu 13 Feb 2025 to Sat 19 Apr 2025

504 West 24th Street, NY 10011

Tue-Sat 10am-6pm

“Each retina reads a flat image, but your body senses space, and that – combined with bifocal vision and movement – means that a picture with a carved depth creates a kind of animation, a sort of magic trick as your brain reads, with image and material competing in the same space.” Julian Opie, 2024

Lisson Gallery presents an exhibition of new and recent works by Julian Opie, united by the theme of the walking figure. Encompassing sculptures, animations and paintings, these extend the artistic vocabulary that he has developed over four decades – “a language of forms, of images, of people.”

Four sculptures, installed at staggered intervals on concrete plinths, derive from Opie’s Busan Walkers series of 2023. Rendered in high-gloss auto paint on aluminum, each depicts a figure in motion – a passerby originally photographed on the Busan seafront and subsequently translated into a drawing, which in turn served as templates for a series of twenty statues. A simplified profile view of a body has been enlarged – given volumetric depth – and yet the image remains studiedly two-dimensional.

Red phone. (2023) and Yellow phone. (2023) portray people walking while holding their mobile devices. At once inhabiting the physical world and the virtual space, the figures express a quality – pervasive in Opie’s art – of demonstrative gesture and self-containment. Sleek externality belies a sense of the sealed interior. The man in Black shorts. (2023) swings his arms as he walks; the young woman of Turquoise hair. (2023) adopts a more extravagant posture, flinging out one arm behind her to merge with her hair.

In this way, Opie invests minor details, a transient stance or a piece of clothing, with emblematic force. In their dual flatness and heft, the Busan Walkers invoke a long history of free-standing and architectural sculpture, for instance classical Greek carvings that were originally designed to be viewed frontally, as adornments on buildings, and later reinterpreted as objects in the round; or the monumental bronze statuary of historical figures familiar in cities around the world, their stone plinths rendered here in the more urban language of cast concrete. Opie restates that tension between image and objecthood, conveying visual information through the barest essentials.

He has eliminated practically all individualizing details from his figures. And yet, contrary to the standardized signage that constituted an early inspiration, a sense of ‘real life’ persists. It is discernible in three new animations on LED screens, also deriving from a larger group, in which he depicts lines of schoolchildren in continuous motion. The imagery shares the declarative linearity and flatness of his work in general – the children’s faces and clothes are neutral, differentiated by basic facts of hairstyle, height, or clothing (the anomaly of a baseball cap, the shape of a dress).

These works mark a new development in that Opie hasn’t previously included children in his images of walking crowds, and while the animations are schematic – types who might almost have sprung from an instruction manual – they are also made individual. No two figures are alike. The cyclical movement, too, varies within each animation. As Opie has noted: “Each child walks at a slightly different speed, so the relationships between them change over time like four independent pendulums.”

In contrast to the monodirectional movement of the LED works, three paintings of children walking, made on gridded resin supports, show backward and forward positions. The image is hand painted and deeply engraved into the material, whose stone-like quality and monumental scale evokes imposing decorative friezes on the walls of ancient temples. The rhythm of the animations devolves into something more syncopated, suggestive of two-way motion. Each painting and animation depicts a particular year group: the artist began by making videos of classes in a school. Seen as a totality, the endlessly strolling children amass into a portrait of growing up.

Lucia Koch: People and Natural Numbers,Nara Roesler New York, New York

Thu 16 Jan 2025 to Sat 8 Mar 2025

511 W 21st Street, NY 10011

Tue-Sat 10am-6pm

One of the highlights of the exhibition is the group of works from the Numbers series, developed by Koch throughout 2024, which takes the Fundos series as its starting point, in which Koch photographs the inside of boxes and packages and, through enlargements and the use of natural lighting, gives these objects an architectural character, as if they were extensions of the very space in which they are located. As with Fundos, the basis for the recent works is cardboard boxes and packaging. In Numbers, however, the artist highlights the cavities and openings present in these objects, referring to architectural elements such as windows, grilles, and other openings, the quantities of which are referenced in the titles of the works.

In People, another recent sculptural series, the artist is inspired by works made by French artist Francis Picabia (1879-1953) during his stay in New York in 1914. Through drawings of incomplete machines, Picabia created mechanomorphic portraits of people in his social circle. People has a similar starting point: using objects, mirrors, light sources, and projections, the artist creates games and interactions between the elements, to evoke presences in space, as if they were people. The same occurs in The Wife, a work in which Koch explores the translation of drawings into objects that would not exist on their own.

According to Mark Lee, “the reciprocal relationship between the work of art and the surrounding space, whether immediate or distant, contingent or projective, has always been persistent in Koch’s work. Long known for her use of architectural elements of windows, curtains, wallpaper, screens, or billboards to alter the surrounding environments, her interventions have always been generous invitations to discovery, participation, and interaction. Alongside building components, color is treated as a space to be inhabited rather than a layer to be applied.

Solo Exhibition: color bloom by bari wieselman schulman

13 January - 31 March 2025

growth and potential energy; two blooms from the same garden, the exhibition comprises two intertwined bodies of work that flow organically around their space, enveloping us in brilliant hues and bold brushstrokes. with bari’s characteristic use of intense saturated color, highly gestural form, and immersive texture and movement, the works vibrate with complex harmonies and distinctive rhythms, playing with scale, layering, contrast.

color bloom cultivates a hidden sanctuary of movement, color, and light rooted in the essential rightness of natural chaos, bursting with energetic potential. invoking the emotional resonance of color, bari creates a space ripe with, and for, transformation.

The Gallery, 202 Wisconsin Ave. Lake Forest IL. 60045

More information & view the exhibition

Juanita Guccione: A Divine Gamble, Lincoln Glenn, New York

Thu 30 Jan 2025 to Sat 15 Mar 2025

542 West 24th Street, NY 10011

Tue-Sat 10am-6pm

Lincoln Glenn Gallery presents Juanita Guccione: A Divine Gamble, an exhibition of 18 paintings largely produced in the 1940s. Guccione’s output defied categorization, spanning Cubism, Surrealism, Social Realism, Abstraction, and the many unnamed styles that form at their intersections. The grouping of paintings that comprise A Divine Gamble are unified by Guccione’s sensitive and singular approach, complicating our understanding of Surrealist iconography and style.

Juanita Guccione (1904–1999) was an artist whose adolescence and young adulthood were filled with an unimaginable amount of change on both global and personal scales. Guccione came of age in the Northeast United States in the shadow of the first World War, later traveling to France, Greece, and Italy during the Interwar period. As a young adult, Guccione joined an artists’ colony in northeastern Algeria, where she later bore a son. Upon returning to the States, Guccione collaborated with European exiles such as Giorgio de Chirico and Arshile Gorky; studied under the tutelage of Hans Hoffman; and created murals through the Works Progress Administration. While the world went to war once again, Guccione mourned the death of her sister Dorothy and married her beloved husband Dominick J. Guccione.

By the 1940s, Guccione had been steeped in both adventure and violence; love and tragedy; scholarship and intuition. Her paintings from this period address uncertainty through Surrealism, allowing the irrational juxtaposition of objects to express a variety of conflicting truths in a single picture. Disembodied limbs and familiar art historical tropes as seen in Lessons from the Rose suggest a dreamlike memory of prewar Europe, a misty forest of cigarettes between painted fingernails and beauty at the edge of decadence. War Gadgets imagines the implements of an unseen violence, understood only through the death-laden news reports of the war overseas.

The artworks presented in A Divine Gamble vary greatly in their compositions; some focus on figures, while others explore architecture or arrangements of objects. Overlaid over each composition, however, are recurring evocations of chance, fate, randomness, and the ways in which they combine. Guccione’s decadeplus deep-dive into Surrealism could be viewed as her way of making sense of the enormous forces that acted upon her but remained so firmly out of her control.

Following the death of Dominick Guccione in 1959, Juanita Guccione never again showed her earlier works, and her output became increasingly abstract. While the majority of her work from 1950 to 1990 was entirely devoid of the human figure, in the final years of her life, Guccione returned to a style resembles her work from the 1940s. Don’t Be So Sure, II, as the singular work from the 1990s amidst this grouping of paintings, illustrates Guccione’s return to the mode through which she was able to process and understand a rapidly changing world that may have felt, at times, like A Divine Gamble.

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Liisa Pesonen: Same But Different, Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki

Fri 21 Feb 2025 to Sun 23 Mar 2025

Yrjönkatu 22, 00120

Tue-Fri 11am-6pm, Sat-Sun 12-4pm

Liisa Pesonen’s new paintings feature recurring motifs vaguely reminiscent of a vase. In terms of content, they can be interpreted as inheriting the legacy of still life painting. Despite their identifiable subject, most of Pesonen’s paintings are centered on structural elements, such as the dynamic relationship between lines, planes, forms and colors. That said, the artist never treats her paintings as pure studies of form, but rather as an inquiry into the meanings that emerge from interactions of compositional elements.

Pesonen’s paintings are variations of an ongoing dialogue played out between the subject and the background. What the artist initially conceives as a vase might be transformed into a rectangle or a linear configuration. Her paintings are characterized by their seemingly endless alternation between representation and abstraction, dialogues between static form and dynamic drawn lines, and interplays of spontaneous expression and meticulous control. At the heart of her practice, she often returns to the same question: Where exactly is the subject located in the painting? Is it the representational form of the vase, or is it hidden in the textures of the drawn lines? Even when the subject is a recognizable object, Pesonen never exclusively depicts the object for its own sake, but rather as an interpretation of something that can only be expressed through the language of painting or drawing. Sometimes her vases are like anthropomorphic figures that briefly leap off the background, only to disappear again the next moment.

Liisa Pesonen (b. 1962) is a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts, and her work is represented in many private and public collections, including those of the City of Helsinki, the State Art Deposit Collection, the City of Jyväskylä, Wihuri Foundation and Pori Art Museum. She has had many solo exhibitions and she has participated in group exhibitions at the Lönnström Art Museum, Pori Art Museum, and the Mänttä Art Festival.

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Lindsay Adams: Keep Your Wonder Moving, Sean Kelly Gallery, Los Angeles

Sat 18 Jan 2025 to Sat 8 Mar 2025

1357 North Highland Avenue, CA 90028

Tue-Fri 11am-6pm, Sat 10am-6pm

Sean Kelly, Los Angeles presents Keep Your Wonder Moving, the West Coast debut of Chicago-based artist Lindsay Adams and her inaugural solo exhibition with the gallery. Titled after a note written by poet Patricia Spears Jones to philosopher Audre Lorde, the exhibition, presented on the third floor, consists of eleven abstract paintings. Keep Your Wonder Moving emphasizes the artist’s longstanding interest in world-building – Adams’ exploration of abstraction as a conduit for expanding the imagination while embedding deeply personal narratives.

Adams’ work interrogates the boundaries of abstraction and representation, seamlessly weaving together the materiality of paint with the intangibility of memory and cultural identity. Her layered approach—where pigments are built up, washed away, or otherwise manipulated—imbues each canvas with a sense of flux, reflecting her assertion that painting is as much alchemical as it is artistic. Her process leaves behind not only a complex surface, but also an ambiguity that invites sustained contemplation.

Keep Your Wonder Moving pivots from her earlier figurative depictions of nature and Black subjects to a complex abstract vernacular. As Adams describes, this transition emerged as “an inevitable shift toward expressing a conceptual story, allowing myself latitude in my storytelling and cultural reflection.” The works on view highlight her interest in constructing imagined ecologies, spaces in which rhythmic gestures and dynamic hues engage in a continuous dialogue. For instance, in Rhythm With Blues, electric yellow and lavender forms bloom against an inky blue background, evoking a field of abstracted flowers that resist traditional representational constraints. Adams challenges the viewer to question the delineations of form to embrace the unknown.

Thematically, Adams situates her practice at the intersection of resilience, freedom, and the quotidian realities of Black womanhood. Her work transforms the canvas into an aspirational site—one that allows for intimate encounters with self-discovery and resistance against societal constraints. This ethos resonates with her political and cultural identity, as her paintings assert their presence within a broader discourse of artistic and social transformation. The exhibition thus positions painting as both a reflective and generative act, with Adams’ compositions acting as sites where meaning is not prescribed but rather discovered.

Lindsay Adams is currently finalizing her MFA in Painting and Drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and received a BA in both International Studies and Spanish from The University of Richmond. She has already garnered critical recognition, including the prestigious Helen Frankenthaler Award in 2024 and the New Artist Society Merit Award in 2023. Her work has been exhibited at the Baltimore Museum of Art, MD and the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library, Washington, D.C., and is included in the collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art and Northwestern Law School.

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Susanne Johansson: The Unanswered Question, Galleri Magnus Karlsson, Stockholm

Sat 1 Feb 2025 to Sat 8 Mar 2025

Fredsgatan 12, 111 52 Stockholm

Tue-Fri 12-5pm, Sat 12-4pm

Susanne Johansson’s relationship to nature is both on a concrete and an idea-based, poetic level in her work. The prosaic motives of an easily recognizable and relatable environment are repeated and deepen in content through time and presence. A meticulously small section is condensed into something grand and fundamental. Often painted with a fluid directness and a sense of air and light, but also with a sooty and subdued harshness that emphasizes a more serious mission. The paintings shift between the familiar and the unfamiliar, between memories, associations and something more abstract. A variety of moments and events that can be difficult to formulate or capture. A hare that quietly listens among the stubble in the field and the solitary bullfinch in the maple tree behind the studio. The neighbour’s green shed as a portal to another reality. The large rock and the uprooted tree with its microcosm.

Susanne Johansson was born outside Kalix in northern Sweden and spend a lot of time in the forests and fields growing up. For much of her life she has lived and worked in the countryside in close proximity to nature. After studies at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm (1992–1997), she gained great recognition for her expressive and suggestive paintings. At the time, the focus was often on the figures, between layers of colours in compositions filled with history, both personal and collective memories. A few years later, landscapes began to emerge into her imagery, and in recent years they have almost completely dominated her paintings. In her most recent exhibition, human figures disappeared completely, replaced in some cases by birds and other animals.

In her works, Johansson returns to fascinations from her childhood, the world that exists in the seemingly insignificant. From these recurrent motifs emerges a low-key narrative that provides no answers. A raven lands very close, the snow and the light carries eons of time beyond comprehension. At the edge of the river, in a chaos of branches and roots, the kingfisher sits and looks down into the water. The tranquil rhythm of time in the movement of the water. Amongst the muted tones, there is something that makes itself known and is familiar. The kingfisher’s blue plumage like an exclamation mark.

In between the trees, the light filters down into the mirror of the wetland. I have been here before and lost track of time. Here I have met myself in different versions. And my friend, the unanswered question.
- Susanne Johansson

Susanne Johansson was born 1969 in Stråkanäs outside of Kalix, Sweden and lives and works in Uppsala, Sweden. Education at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm, Sweden (1992–1997). Selected exhibitions: Tayloe Piggott Gallery, Jackson Hole, US (2022), Turn Gallery, New York, US (2022), Hedvig Eleonora Church, Stockholm, Sweden (2021), Galleri Magnus Karlsson, Stockholm, Sweden (2021, 2015, 2012, 2009, 2007, 2004, 2002 & 1999), Fullersta Gård, Huddinge, Sweden (2019), Uppsala konstmuseum, Sweden (2018), Trafo Kunsthal, Norway (2018), Galleri Ping-Pong, Malmö, Sweden (2018), Galleri Magnus Karlsson, Stockholm, Sweden, w. Johanna Karlsson and Petra Lindholm (2017), Hellvi Kännungs, Gotland, Sweden (2014), Volta NY, New York, US, Fred [London] (2011), Fred [London], UK (2010), Konsthallen/Kulturens Hus, Luleå, Sweden (2007), D’Ombra/The Shadow, Palazzo delle Papesse, Siena and MAN, Nuoro, Italy (2006–2007), Feigen Contemporary New York, US (2006), Galeria Monica De Cardenas, Milan, Italy (2005), Prague Biennale 2, Czech Republic (2005), M’ARS Center for Contemporary Art, Moscow, Russia (2005).

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bari wieselman schulman, Color Bloom, The Gallery,Lake Forest, IL

January 13 - March 31, 2025

202 e wisconsin ave,

lake forest, IL

60045 United States

Growth and potential energy; two blooms from the same garden, the exhibition comprises two intertwined bodies of work that flow organically around their space, enveloping us in brilliant hues and bold brushstrokes. with Bari’s characteristic use of intense saturated color, highly gestural form, and immersive texture and movement, the works vibrate with complex harmonies and distinctive rhythms, playing with scale, layering, contrast. Color bloom cultivates a hidden sanctuary of movement, color, and light rooted in the essential rightness of natural chaos, bursting with energetic potential. Invoking the emotional resonance of color, bari creates a space ripe with, and for, transformation.

speaking in color, bari wieselman schulman is a modern abstract painter and mixed-media artist obsessed with color, language (and color as language), and the ways in which art and art objects invite dialogue and carry meaning in(to) the world. a divergent thinker with an intuitive and experimental process, her work challenges us to see, feel, and think differently, encouraging connection with our neuropsychological sense of self.

chicago-born and rooted in madrid, bari received a phd in psychology from the university of chicago and spent years in the design world working at the intersection of people, brands, and products. her background in language and behavior provides a unique window into the relationships between humans, objects, and spaces, and is a critical frame of reference for her work.

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Citra Sasmita,Into Eternal Land,Barbican Center, London

Thu 30 Jan—Mon 21 Apr 2025

Barbican Centre
Silk Street, London
EC2Y 8DS

The Indonesian artist transforms The Curve in her first solo UK exhibition. Via painting, installation, embroidery and scent, take a sensory journey exploring ancestral memory, ritual and migration. 

Sasmita’s practice often engages with the Indonesian Kamasan painting technique. Dating from the fifteenth century, and traditionally practiced exclusively by men, Kamasan was used to narrate Hindu epics. Reclaiming this masculine practice, Sasmita is interested in dismantling misconceptions of Balinese culture and confronting its violent colonial past. Challenging gender hierarchies and reinventing mythologies, her protagonists are powerful women who populate a post-patriarchal world. 

Citra Sasmita is a self-taught artist; she studied literature and physics, then worked as a short story illustrator for the Bali Post before she began developing her expanded artistic practice.

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Lucia Nogueira: Ends Without End,Luhring Augustine Chelsea, New York

Fri 17 Jan 2025 to Sat 22 Feb 2025

531 West 24th Street, NY 10011

Tue-Sat 10am-6pm

Celebrated for her poetic sculptures, installations, and drawings, Nogueira (1950–1998) was a Brazilian-born artist who spent much of her career in London. The city profoundly shaped her practice, and as Ian Hunt notes, she “[drew from] the strong British precedents in the 80s for sculpture as an experimental and empirical urban art form.”[1] London’s streets were also inspirational, often providing the found materials that became central to many of her works. In pieces such as Ends Without End, Nogueira evokes open-ended narratives with disparate everyday objects—a deconstructed tricycle, a displaced sink, and disjointed handrails—that are seemingly linked by silicone cords that appear and disappear as they pierce the floor and wind through the installation. Another striking work, Needle, incorporates red silicone tubing that cuts through the floor, under a glass sheet, and extends into another room. The sense of playfulness with a disquieting edge that permeates these installations is a current that runs throughout Nogueira’s oeuvre, the mundane often taking on a foreboding tone.

Nogueira’s work was also shaped by language and her experience as a non-native English speaker, her titles frequently infusing modest assemblages with layered narratives. In Full Stop, an iron post and a wooden drum are transformed by an enigmatic title that invites multiple interpretations—a phrase that suggests both an action and a moment of finality—and imbues the simple objects with an evocative tension. In Innocent, a toy creature under a glass box is juxtaposed with a wind-up mouse placed just outside of the container. Enclosed within a wooden frame, this tableau feels both ordinary and mysterious, its components transformed into characters in an unfolding drama. This duality reflects the way in which Nogueira’s work considers the tensions and the connections between her Brazilian roots and her adopted home in the UK.

Born in Brazil, Nogueira studied journalism in Brasília and photography in Washington, D.C. before moving to London in 1975, where she studied painting at Chelsea College of Art and the Central School of Art and Design. Her career was marked by significant recognition, including a Fondation Cartier fellowship in 1993 and a Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award in 1996. Her work has been the subject of major exhibitions, including a retrospective at the Fundação de Serralves: Museu de Arte Contemporânea in Porto, Portugal in 2007, and a presentation at the 33rd Bienal de São Paulo in 2018. Nogueira’s work is held in prominent international collections, including Tate, London, UK; Fundação de Serralves: Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Portugal; Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, Portugal; and Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), Spain, among others.

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Guerrilla Girls, Discrimi-NATION, Hannah Traore Gallery, New York

January 16 - March 29, 2025

Tuesday- Saturday | 11:00am- 6:00pm
150 Orchard Street,

New York, New York, 10002

Hannah Traore Gallery is pleased to present Discrimi-NATION: Guerrilla Girls on Bias, Money, and Art, an exhibition by the Guerrilla Girls. The anonymous collective of feminist-activist artists will present a range of poster works. This marks the first time these works are shown in a commercial gallery setting, and their first show in the Lower East Side in 10 years.

The Guerrilla Girls have persistently approached their mission with a distinct visual flair, combining street art aesthetics, academic research, and a signature irreverence. Founded in 1985, this exhibition traces their decades-long practice of shining light on enduring systemic inequities across race, class, gender, and more, and so inciting meaningful dialogue about cultural value and the urgent need for structural change. Their anonymity, sustained over nearly four decades, underscores their message: the focus is not on the individual artist, but on dismantling the structures that sideline many. In this sweeping and robust selection of works, Discrimi-NATION simultaneously provides historical context and present-day relevance, emphasizing how questions of access, fairness, and representation remain urgent today.

“Discrimi-NATION is, at its core, a show about New York and holding the art industry accountable—an extension of the work we’ve been doing since our earliest posters,” said a member of The Guerrilla Girls. “Hannah Traore Gallery is the first commercial gallery to approach us, and to have the courage to produce this exhibition. It’s a privilege and an honor to show with her on the occasion of our 40th anniversary.”

Having pioneered their street-intervention style of art world critique in New York City in 1985, the Guerrilla Girls now return to the cultural epicenter, revisiting the scene of their earliest battles, reaffirming their legacy, and inspiring a new generation to dismantle the status quo. Shortly after their founding, the Guerrilla Girls began wheat-pasting their works throughout the Lower East Side, covering building facades with provocations regarding the woeful underrepresentation of women and minority groups in the city’s art institutions. Their work, woven into the fabric of everyday public life, would incite longstanding conversations far beyond the sanitized confines of museums. They’d go on to post stickers, hand out flyers, and stage guerrilla-style appearances throughout the 80’s and into the 90’s, the neighborhood a burgeoning landscape of artist collectives and community-driven nonprofits that proved to be fertile territory for their activism.

By pairing data-driven facts with bold graphics and sardonic wit, the Guerrilla Girls reveal how art’s perceived neutrality often masks longstanding biases. Pieces such as Only 4 Commercial Galleries in NY Show Black Women (1986) and Guerrilla Girls’ Code of Ethics for Art Museums (1990, updated 2018) spotlight persistent imbalances that continue to shape the field. Later works like Pop Quiz Update (2016) engage evolving cultural conversations, speaking to the complexity of contemporary political and social landscapes. Together, these works encourage viewers to consider the many factors—wealth, institutional tradition, implicit bias—that influence the stories told and the creatives celebrated in the public forum. Throughout, their trademark combination of statistics, humor, and anonymity levels the playing field, their evidence-laden interventions offering unflinching insights of inconvenient truths.

This exhibition highlights Hannah Traore Gallery’s commitment to expanding the boundaries of what belongs in an exhibition setting, championing artists who were previously underrepresented, who challenge established narratives, and who apply ambitious new frameworks of artmaking. The gallery considers itself among the emergent spaces downtown who are indebted to the Guerrilla Girls’ historic campaigns, further inciting new waves of experimental and inclusive art that address social issues, and bring the collective’s irreverence and boldness into a new age. By spotlighting the Guerrilla Girls’ long-running critique of institutional norms, the gallery invites visitors to reflect on ongoing inequalities, consider possible reforms, and envision a more inclusive cultural future.

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Louise Bonnet: Reversal of Fortune, Galerie Max Hetzler, Potsdamer Straße, Berlin

Fri 15 Nov 2024 to Sat 18 Jan 2025

Potsdamer Straße 77–87, 10785

Tue-Sat 11am-6pm

Internationally renowned for her emotionally charged depictions of the human form in unusual, often exaggerated poses, Bonnet explores difficult feelings such as fragility, melancholy, loneliness and grief in her work.

The title of the exhibition, Reversal of Fortune, insinuates a plot twist or turning point that leads to both tragedy and a moment of catharsis. The works all revolve around the notion of falling. In the paintings we see female figures slipping off beds, divans or couches, plummeting from unseen heights towards the ground, gliding or toppling headfirst, and lying on the floor, after a fall from beyond the picture frame. Exploring the feeling of downward descent as a recurring idea, the works come together to represent all the different strands of meaning that unravel for the artist from out of this theme. Bonnet explains:

‘I thought that falling, which betrays us as absolutely human – our bodies slipping from an ordained position, failing to perform an expected pose or an expected role – could therefore be a form of passive resistance, a way to show complete humanity in the face of what is being expected by the world or ourselves.’ (1)

At moments, the act of falling is dramatic. In Asteria Red, the figure delves headfirst, the impact of the fall painfully visible on her distorted nose and strewn hair. The frailty of our human condition is made obvious in this work, through the danger inherent in daring to dance and the difficulty of maintaining balance.

Old Master painting has a strong influence on Bonnet’s work, in terms of theme and subject, as much as painting technique. Her practice of oil paint on linen creates a translucent layering of light and gentle flesh tones, reminiscent of Dutch 16th century painting. For subject matter, Bonnet is drawn to Pieter Bruegel, in particular his Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, 1560, which depicts a pastoral scene of people and animals going about their business. In the background, Icarus can just be made out by his flailing legs as he falls with a splash into the sea, so that for all our ambitions and search for power, the world moves on, indifferent to human suffering. The compositional elements of this source image appear in Bonnet’s A Splash Quite Unnoticed, where the legs of the protagonist are only just visible behind the still-life in the foreground. The title draws from a line in William Carlos Williams’ poem, When Icarus Fell, which was written about Bruegel’s painting.

Falling simultaneously offers the narrative of an escape, such as in the Greek myth of Asteria, the Titan goddess of oracles, constellations and falling stars. She herself fell to earth to escape Zeus’ advances, and the island of Delos was created where she came to land. In Asteria Pink, the artist seems to evoke the elongated grace of Parmigianino’s Madonna with the Long Neck, 1534–1540, emulating with distorted exaggeration the Madonna's stylised self-possession, her daintily bent hands and feet, and the flowing pink drapery which softly envelops her body. This mannered elegance is reminiscent of the slipping odalisques of 19th century painting, who were presented languidly reclining on their beds. Unconcerned with realistic proportionality, Bonnet's figures are similarly devised to fit the composition into which they are placed. In contrast to their historical counterparts, however, they convey a spectrum of emotion rather than an ‘idealised’ female form.

Bonnet’s love for symbolism is apparent in the inclusion of flowers in a number of the exhibited works. The artist depicts begonia, a symbol of warning or caution, black irises, signifying danger, and dahlias, which represent instability. In Dahlia, the figure falling off a divan gazes up at a bouquet reminiscent of the one in Édouard Manet’s Olympia, 1863. As in Bonnet's earlier work, the figures rarely look outside of the painting. The artist employs cinematographic techniques to let us gaze at her subjects unobserved, not in order to objectify but rather to find in their bodies a language for the emotions we suppress. While they are deeply rooted in art historical references, the works speak a universal language of embodiment, bringing a renewed perspective on the delicate tensions within ourselves. Bonnet’s work continues to resist easy categorisation, instead inhabiting a space of careful consideration and restraint, where narratives are felt rather than told.

Louise Bonnet (b. 1970, Geneva) lives and works in Los Angeles. Bonnet’s work was presented in an institutional duo exhibition with Adam Silverman at Hollyhock House, Los Angeles (2023). Her work has also been exhibited in various group presentations including the 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, Venice; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; Aïshti Foundation, Beirut (all 2022); Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin (2021); and Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich (2019).

The artist’s work is held in various museum collections including the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick; Denver Art Museum; Fondazione Re Rebaudengo, Turin; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; Long Museum, Shanghai; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; MAMCO Genève, Geneva; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Museum Brandhorst, Munich; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Yuz Museum, Shanghai.

Laura Bidwa: Each, Kathryn Markel Fine Arts, New York

Thu 9 Jan 2025 to Sat 15 Feb 2025

179 10th Avenue, NY 10011

Tue-Sat 11am-6pm

Kathryn Markel Fine Arts presents Each, an exhibition of paintings by artist Laura Bidwa. This is her first solo exhibition with the gallery and takes place in the new “Pocket” gallery at the 179 10th Avenue location.

Bidwa’s recent paintings are composed of layers of oil, latex, and spray paints on panels that the artist applies with a confident and exuberant brush. Planes of color are disrupted by bold brushwork, building organic forms carefully laid down, which create distinct, painterly shapes. The simplicity of the background creates the clarity necessary to highlight the eccentric use of color.

The paintings are packed with contradictions, as they are both energetic and quiet, textured and smooth. Surfaces are matte or gloss, thin and thick. In the artist’s own words, “If it works, I can draw a viewer into looking at a painting very carefully, noticing the gesture of a brushstroke or a shape, how the paint’s edges change, how the surface of the oil paint is matte or slightly less matte or shiny, how the colors shift as the paint is thicker or thinner. I hope the viewer is able to be lost in looking, seeing one thing after another even in this simple object.”

Laura Bidwa is based in Columbus, Ohio and received her BFA in Painting in 1990 from Indiana University and her MFA in Painting and Drawing in 1996 from The Ohio State University. She has participated in several national and international residencies including at the Vermont Studio Center and in Dresden, Germany through the Greater Columbus Arts Council. Bidwa has exhibited extensively across the U.S. and Europe in both commercial and nonprofit galleries as well as art fairs in New York, Miami, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Her work is included in over 100 private, public, and corporate art collections.

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Ana González: Bruma, Sean Kelly Gallery, New York

Fri 10 Jan 2025 to Fri 21 Feb 2025

475 Tenth Avenue, NY 10018

Tue-Fri 11am-6pm, Sat 10am-6pm

Sean Kelly, New York presents Bruma, Ana González’s first solo exhibition in New York. The paintings and prints on fabric in Bruma depict the flora and fauna of González’s native Colombia and represent the ecosystems under threat from industries seeking to exploit them for their natural resources. González’s practice opposes the disappearance of these habitats, not only warning us of what will be lost in their destruction but proposing new ways to relate to the natural world. Bruma engages with the vast ecological and human history of these landscapes encouraging the viewer to see our environment in a new way.

The works on view in Bruma were developed in response to González’s travels through the cloud forests of Colombia, an isolated region in the Andes Mountains which is both incredibly biodiverse – only an estimated ten percent of its species have been cataloged – and endangered by deforestation and climate change. In González’s paintings, the wax palms and other plants native to the Andes Mountains emerge from washes of white paint, referencing the mist that gives the forests and the exhibition their name. These landscapes reappear in the artist’s Devastations series, textiles onto which the artist prints photographs of Colombia’s vulnerable ecosystems. The monumental five-part work, QUIMBAYA offers a panoramic view of the cloud forest, capturing in monochromatic green the verdant abundance of the forest at an immersive scale. Here, as in all her Devastations works, González has partially unraveled the tapestry, disrupting the coherence of the image and physically representing the ravaging of these sites.

In her work González reflects upon the writings of 18th century German geographer and naturalist, Alexander von Humboldt, who revolutionized the way we understand nature by presenting it as an interconnected web of life. Humboldt observed, “If one thread is pulled, the whole tapestry may unravel,” a metaphor that resonates powerfully with González’s work. Her unraveled tapestries poignantly embody this concept, suggesting that the destruction of even the smallest part of an ecosystem can threaten the stability of the whole. Devastations presents two possible futures for the ecosystems they depict: preservation and destruction. González asks viewers to see both possibilities at once – that while the abundance of life contained within these images is in immediate danger of being lost, there remains the potential for conservation if humanity reprioritizes its relationship with nature.

As much as González’s practice is concerned with the future, it is equally attentive to history. This is most apparent in González’s decision to title the works in Bruma in the language of the Muisca, the indigenous civilization that inhabited the Colombian Andes from 600–1600 CE. Referencing a pre-colonial past, the titles invoke the spiritual importance that the Muisca placed on the environment, implicitly contrasting them with our contemporary culture of accumulation and consumption. The large-scale tapestry ANGAPACCHA (“Powerful Waterfall,” in the language of the Muisca) spills off the wall and into the gallery space. According to Muisca specialist, anthropologist and ethnobotanist Wade Davis, “Waterfalls were seen as places of origin, liminal places, doorways to the divine.” ANGAPACCHA performs a similar function within the exhibition, inviting viewers to engage with the natural world as a sacred space

González’s works in Bruma are at once a return to the past and a reimagining of the future, reactivating ancient ways of interacting with the environment at a moment when they are urgently needed.

Ana González is a graduate in architecture from Universidad de Los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia. She pursued advanced studies in Art and Gender at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, and completed a Master’s in Arts and Media, focusing on Photography, Printing, and Publishing, at both the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts and the École Supérieure de Commerce de Paris in France. Her work is part of significant private and public collections, including the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection, the Havremagasinet Länskonsthall Museum in Sweden, the National Museum of Colombia, the Bogotá Museum of Modern Art (MAMBO), the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, CA, the JP Morgan Chase Art Collection, NY, and the Museo de la Universidad de Antioquia, Medellín, Colombia. González has engaged extensively with Colombian Indigenous communities, implementing social and humanitarian projects with the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta communities, the Nukak people of Guaviare, and Misak women in Cauca. She is currently collaborating with the Amazon Conservation Team and Cartier to build a traditional healthcare house located in the Colombian Amazon.

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Charlotte Keates: Sound Bridges, Arusha Gallery, London

The paintings in this show are inspired by a constantly growing collection of film and television ‘stills’. They are often the connecting scenes, the ‘mise-en-scène’ that create a setting for the narrative to play out. I began collecting these stills about 5 years ago... something as simple as a colour combination/composition or texture can be all that inspires me to want to use the image. I’m interested in the way that these glimpses of stage sets and scenery flow into the next scene where all of the action might happen. The potential of these spaces and the lingering sense that something bigger is about to happen...

A ‘sound bridge’ within film references the audio that is used in a succeeding scene to flow and overlap into the preceding scene. Often I might jot down words or feelings that I have in the moment when hearing these sounds and these help to inform the next painting. There is a sense of flow, from one film still to the next, yet they are independent separate scenes - often used within a film to ground a story or give it context.
Traces of objects or symbolism are often mimicked and repeated within each scene or space and I like to consider this within the paintings I’m making for the show.

Often split into 3 Acts. Act 1, the set up. Act 2, the confrontation & Act 3, the resolution. I think that for most of the scenes they feel very much like Act 1 and 3, the before and the after...

Although I have been using these film stills quite closely, I have only been using them as the initial inspiration. My work as it develops becomes far more intuitive and instinctual, and by this developing in front of me on the panel as I make the paintings, I notice a lot of personal objects and personal references creep in, and these for me are perhaps the most interesting parts. It often isn’t until they are all together that it all sort of slots into place for me, and I notice how although these paintings are very inspired by external imagery, they have very clear ideas that are formed around me and ongoing in my own life. Examples of this are the fish in ‘through a fish bowl’ - they didn’t feature in the film still shot of an interior, but my daughter had just learnt the word ‘fish’ and it brought so much joy - I guess I don’t need to really overly explain these decisions, but perhaps just acknowledge for myself that there are deeply personal symbols and feelings within the works and I think that’s so important that this is evolving within the paintings more and more.

Sound bridges are like an echo - something repeated and continuing, that reappears and conjures a new feeling and emotion when paired to a different image (or new scene) in the same way that memory can influence a moment, the remembering of a sound but then hearing it in a current moment - becomes something completely different.

Wed 11 Dec 2024 to Sat 21 Dec 2024

6 Percy Street, W1T 1DQ

Mon-Sat 11am-6pm