Jesse Mockrin: Echo, Art Gallery of Ontario

Time varies
Art Gallery of Ontario
317 Dundas Street West
Toronto, Ontario
M5T 1G4

Inspired by Baroque paintings, sculptures, and drawings at the AGO, in her first solo museum exhibition, American artist Jesse Mockrin radically re-envisions familiar historical subjects—Bathsheba, Solomon, and Daphne among them—through her own contemporary, feminist lens. Urgent and subversive, Mockrin’s closely cropped compositions reveal the unsettling and uncanny dramas buried in the art historical canon.  Curated by Adam Harris Levine, the AGO’s Associate Curator of European Art, this exhibition will feature more than 12 new large-scale paintings and works on paper, installed alongside paintings, drawings, and sculptures from the AGO’s European Collection.  

Jesse Mockrin (b. Silver Spring, MD, 1981) received her M.F.A. from the University of California, San Diego in 2011, and her B.A. from Barnard College, New York in 2003. She has had solo exhibitions at James Cohan (New York), Night Gallery (Los Angeles), Nathalie Karg Gallery (New York), Galerie Perrotin (Seoul), and the Centre for International Contemporary Art (Vancouver). Her work is in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art among others. Mockrin's work has been covered extensively, appearing in publications including The New York Times, The Brooklyn Rail, Vogue, Artforum, T Magazine, Art in America, and Modern Painters, among others. 

9 Women, 20th Century, Nagas, New York

Wed 3 Sep 2025 to Sat 25 Oct 2025

47 West 28th Street, NY 10001

Wed-Sat 12-6pm

In 1943, Peggy Guggenheim organized 31 Women, the first exhibition in the United States devoted entirely to women artists. More than eighty years later, 9 Women, 20th Century takes up the spirit of that landmark show and extends it. The exhibition brings together works by nine women who made distinct contributions to the major artistic movements of the past century, many of whom remain overlooked today.

The exhibition opens with a quiet yet radical portrait of the writer Colette by Elisabeth Fuss‑Armoré, a painter active in the intellectual circles of 1920s Paris. Colette, known for her literary explorations of bisexuality and female independence, sets the tone for a show concerned with self-invention, freedom, and the margins of visibility.

From Surrealism to Abstract Expressionism, the works trace diverse paths through modernism. Leonor Fini’s drawing of a witch, the only one included in her autobiographical Le Livre de Leonor Fini, appears alongside Leonora Carrington’s dreamlike horse from her interment in Spain and Grace Pailthorpe’s vibrant watercolor shaped by psychoanalytic theory.

Elsewhere, Californian artist Jennie Lewis depicts San Francisco architecture in modern artworks, while Louise Janin’s experiments in Symbolism, Musicalism, and her swirling cosmogrammes which reflect an abstract spiritualism rooted in Eastern philosophies. The abstract paintings of Mary Abbott and Amaranth Ehrenhalt speak to their deep involvement with the New York and Paris avant-garde. The exhibition closes with a late work by Pacita Abad, whose richly textured trapunto paintings, layered with stitching and sequins, pushed painting toward a tactile and physical experience.

Together, these nine artists expand our understanding of modern art—not as a linear story of male innovators, but as a broader field shaped by women whose lives and work crossed movements, geographies, and mediums.

LAURA FINDLAY | The Darkest Hour, Norberg Hall Gallery/ Calgary

LAURA FINDLAY

The Darkest Hour:

EXHIBITION

Sept 19 – Oct 25, 2025

333b 36 Ave SE, Calgary, AB T2G 1W2

Exhibition text by Nicole Dufoe, Writer

First, I see the photographic negative. I admit this, on my part, to be an error—the colours in these paintings are not reversed but flooded by the flash—yet the ethereal glow of the night garden recalls a darkroom alchemy. Laura Findlay is also a professional photographer who began honing her skills as a teenager with a series of jobs in photo labs; this entrenched sensibility shows up in her play of light and dark as well as in the images themselves, which are scavenged, manipulated, and reborn on the studio floor.

There is also the sculptural negative: the relief, or cast. Many artists build their paintings from the ground up. These works come to be through careful removal, as Findlay wipes away layers of pigment and glaze with brush, cloth, and even finger. The pink bruise of her touch transforms the blank panel beneath with stains of petal and feather.

I see too, in Findlay’s paintings, a tenderness. Fecund but fleeting subjects appear in a palette that hints of a rising sun. The promise of a bursting blossom; a fat worm on cut wet grass; red fruit ravaged by hungry bugs; wing, plume, and incandescent rot. I feel here the ephemerality that both painters and poets have long ached to capture, that other negative—the “negative capability”—which Keats experiences attempting to cage a nightingale with rhyme and metre. The felt truth of his project has outlived its poetic cliché: meaning found only in beauty, and beauty only in transient uncertainty.[i] The life cycle may be long, but oil paintings will also have their day in the mud; perhaps this is itself a wonderful reason, these pieces suggest, for us to continue making them.

Artists may be alchemists, but they are not magicians. After visiting the Chauvet Cave, John Berger interprets the prehistoric markings of animals in motion (some of the oldest yet discovered) as acts of excavation. “The drama of these first painted creatures … is always behind, in the rock. From where they came. As we did, too…”[ii] The flickers of life Findlay’s paintings pursue are similarly unearthed more than they are created.

And the earth continues sprouting. In “Some Thoughts on the Common Toad” (1946) George Orwell describes the inevitable return of a London Spring in the shadow of the second world war.

There is something radical, Orwell suggests, in submitting to the joy of nature, as its stubborn, gorgeous, fertile mess comes “seeping in everywhere” regardless of crumbling concrete or dour, didactic headlines.[iii] A pause for the robin or foxglove is anything but political acquiescence. In Elaine Scarry’s assessment, the beautiful should not distract from the concerns of the world but rather intensify our engagement. Findlay’s thumb presses into the painting, yes, but the aesthetic pleasure she creates pushes back upon us viewers “to repair existing injuries.”[iv] What we do with that pressure, of course, becomes our own responsibility.

Not that the toad or the daffodil needs to be seen to wield power. In this project, Findlay admits traces of the domesticated human: mown lawns, vinyl siding. But an explosion of daisies soon makes a mockery of a chain link fence. The pedigreed roses share real estate with feral weeds. I am reminded again of Orwell’s essay, and the urban bird who does not pay a “halfpenny of rent.” Etymologically, a radical is also a root. The garden grows despite our careful planting, not only because of it.

Findlay’s paintings make room for what emerges each year from the frozen dirt. They offer space for the splendour which, every morning, comes in the wake of the darkest hour.

Coven: Beyond Borders, Brighton at the Regency Town House, October 29 - November 2, 2025

The Regency Town House,
13 Brunswick Square,
Brighton and Hove,
East Sussex BN3 1EH
United Kingdom

We are an international, intersectional womxn’s art collective dedicated to increasing diverse representation in the art world. We believe we can work together to break down the barriers to inclusion and visibility for all non-conforming, out-of-the-box, hard-to-classify artists. The exhibition showcases a diverse, multicultural collection of artists from Argentina, Chile, Italy, Lebanon, Malaysia, the UK, and the USA, including a live contemporary art performance by our Malaysian member, Benazir Ihsan, on Saturday, November 1, at 1:00 PM

Learn More Here

Lin Wang: True Romance, HB381, New York

Fri 5 Sep 2025 to Sat 25 Oct 2025

381 Broadway, NY 10013

Tue-Sat 10am-6pm

HB381 presents True Romance, a solo exhibition by Oslo-based ceramicist Lin Wang (b. 1985, China). Wang is especially known for her production of large-scale still life installations and sculptural assemblages which investigate the corporeality and historic resonance of porcelain. Over centuries, porcelain’s combination of a kaolin-rich white clay body with deep cobalt glazes has registered the ongoing effects of contact and trade, as well as the phantasmic projections of a long-standing dialog between East and West. Working between China and Norway, Wang’s interest in this interchange holds personal significance, tinged by her own wanderlust, homesickness, and experiences of cultural discovery.

Fine china, originally imported along the Silk Road’s overland trade routes and maritime corridors, has been notoriously difficult to reproduce throughout history, a Gordian knot which confounded European chemists who termed the mystifying substance “white gold.” One thread of Wang’s ongoing project on the topic, Exotic Dreams and Poetic Misunderstanding, investigates Europe’s quest for Chinese porcelain, exposing deeply-held forms of looking and longing. At the same time, Wang often amends this perspective on alterity with her personal impressions; recalling the children’s fairy tales she was told as a young girl, she teases out the West’s own romantic mythos.

The hallucinatory scene of Wang’s exhibition is introduced through a pair of two-meter-wide metal screens which take the form of a mountainous coastline. These screens, titled On the Other Side of the World, are inset with thousands of minute porcelain plates pigmented in the evocative blues and whites of Delftware. Produced in Jingdezhen, China, Wang’s hand-painted plates scintillate, reflecting light like the fragmented surface of the ocean. As with her previous work The Silk Roads, presented at Kunsthall Grenland in 2019, the diminutive plates combine en masse to form a rippling abstract field. The enumeration of cobalt-glazed porcelain rounds gestures to the ebb and flow of tides, currents, and waterways; its form might also be seen as coin-like tokens of exchange or the scales of a vast sea creature. Inevitably, the work touches on themes of landscape and national borders, trade routes and continental rifts. The vibrant fields of color draw the eye through nebulous gyres and into uncertain terrain, much like the clouded mountain scenes of traditional Chinese scroll paintings.

Moving further into the gallery, the viewer discovers Porcelain Flesh Table, a rigid steel structure supporting 72 porcelain bricks with imagery of crashing waves. Wang has long been interested in sailors and their experience traveling between countries and cultures; theirs is a lifestyle situated on the periphery of society, yet which allows them to take up the mantle of cultural ambassador and myth maker, returning home not only with fine porcelain wares and spices but extravagant tales as well. Of particular interest to Wang, sailors carried back a visual record of otherness embedded in their skin via the elaborate tattoos they acquired in foreign ports — sometimes bawdy and profane, at others poetic or expressive of religious reverence. Porcelain Flesh Table interweaves the iconography of traditional blue-and-white “export ware” patterning with these images of sailors’ tattoos to startling effect. Other images appear like reflections tossed about by the waves, including mythic Buddhist and Christian deities and the fantastic creatures populating the terra incognita of early maps.

A semi-transparent paneled silk screen further divides up the gallery, concealing a number of porcelain vessels that appear to crack and splinter. As their blue-and-white surface falls away, a wrinkled underlayer resembling skin is revealed. Wang has developed a deft technique for imprinting texture into porcelain which gives it the appearance of actual flesh. Intercut with her sculptures’ sinuous blue-and-white imagery, stretches of skin are revealed as grizzly reminders of the human cost of the globalizing project. Throughout, the delicate materiality and translucence of porcelain — which itself summons comparison with bone and skin — is refigured not only as canvas but as a quasi-corporeal body, marked by the ambitions of commerce and the aftermath of empire.

Both Porcelain Flesh Table and I Never Saw the East Coast until I Moved to the West function as piecemeal ossuaries, still lifes in the rich tradition of the Dutch Golden Age, with porcelain bones, internal organs, and fragments of tatted and crinkled skin. In these scenes, reminiscent of the work of artists Adriana Verajão, Tishan Hsu, and Robert Gober whose critiques of bodily autonomy, subjectivity, and the advance of technology fuse subject with object, Wang proffers the ultimate collision between fantasy and reality. Hers is a gothic display of our entanglement in romantic fictions, a fragmentary sculptural tableau serving as evidence for both humanity’s brutality and its transience.

In True Romance, the intermingling of symbolic forms produces a third space in which the expanses of distance linking Eastern and Western pictorial traditions are collapsed. The resulting works point to the human predilection toward myth-making, invention, and misconception. In her elaborations on desire, Wang engages porcelain’s varied histories and their oceanic echoes, building upon her own experiences as ceramicist and tattoo artist, traveler and immigrant, fantasist and materialist to show us the enduring power of images.

Wang received a bachelor’s degree in sculpture from the China Academy of Art and a master’s degree in fine art from the University of Bergen. Her central research project Exotic Dreams and Poetic Misunderstandings consists of an ongoing series of exhibitions over the past decade. In 2019, as part of the research for this project, she produced two solo exhibitions at the Kunst-hall Grenland and the Vigeland Museum. Wang has completed numerous public commissions, including for the Hammerfest Hospital, Sarpsborg Library, and Tønsberg Courthouse. Her work is included in the collections of the Nordenfjeldske Kunstindustrimuseum, Oslo Kommune, Porsgrunn Kommune, and the National Museum, Oslo, Norway.

* Rise and Repaint Member * Lindsay Keeling, Present Spaces: Solo Exhibition, August 18 - December 12, 2025 at Switzer Gallery, Pensacola, FL

Pensacola State College
Visual Arts Department
Anna Lamar Switzer Center for Visual Arts
1000 College Blvd., Bldg. 15
Pensacola, FL 32504

Present Spaces is a solo exhibition of abstract landscapes that illuminate the intersection of place, emotion, and personal presence. This collection is an invitation to slow down and step into a moment of peace.

Through vibrant yet peaceful paintings, this exhibition explores what it means to be fully here, grounded, and embodied. Each painting becomes a site of reflection, where color, texture, and horizon lines create space for stillness. This connection to the natural world brings a sense of clarity and confidence, allowing vulnerability to become a powerful form of presence.

Reception & Artist Lecture Tuesday, September 23rd 5:00-7:30pm.

Learn More Here

Sophie Calle: Behind the Curtain,Perrotin New York, New York

Thu 4 Sep 2025 to Sat 18 Oct 2025

130 Orchard Street, NY 10002

Tue-Sat 10am-6pm

Perrotin New York presents Behind the Curtain by Sophie Calle, an exhibition that disrupts conventional ideas of perception. In 2023, Calle became the first artist to take over the Picasso Museum galleries in Paris. Behind the Curtain includes two series on Picasso’s most emblematic paintings. Also on view, In Memory of Frank Gehry's Flowers imagines a memorial in honor of the renown architect, and Calle's Parce que series pairs photographs and poems that disrupt traditional processing of information.

Concurrently, Sophie Calle will present an exhibition at Paula Cooper Gallery in New York titled Sophie Calle: On the Hunt, on view September 5 - October 18.

On October 17, Art21 will premiere an episode featuring Sophie Calle as part of their Peabody Award-winning biennial program, Art in the Twenty-First Century on PBS. On September 9th, Sophie Calle will participate in a conversation with Bette Gordon and co-hosted by Art21, including an advanced screening of Calle's segment.

Over the last four decades, Calle has become known for artworks that blur the boundaries between private and public spaces, reality and fiction, art and life. Internationally acclaimed, Sophie Calle represented France at the Venice Biennale in 2007 and has exhibited in major museums across the globe, including Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Art Institute of Chicago; Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Musée d'Orsay, Paris; Tate Modern, London; Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Santiago Museum of Contemporary Art, Chile. Her work is held in the collections of numerous prestigious institutions, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Louisiana Museum, Denmark, among others.

Because, 2018

Each of the artworks composing the series consists of a wooden frame where a photograph is displayed, under a curtain embroidered with a sentence explaining the reasons triggering the photographic act. The curtain thus covers the photograph until lifted by the viewer, unveiling the narrative explaining the picture’s origin. Because thus reverses the traditional relationship between image and text, and disturbs our conventional perception and processing of information.

In Memory of Frank Gehry's Flowers, 2014

Since Sophie Calle met Frank Gehry in Los Angeles in 1984, when he offered to be her impresario, he sent her flowers on the day of all of her exhibition openings. The work In Memory of Frank Gehry's Flowers gathers photographs of these ephemeral gifts. Each of the 25 elements of the series consists in a photograph depicting dried flowers, and in one installation. The latter is composed of 11 photographs of flowers in Plexiglas frames and a vase designed by Frank Gehry displayed on a pink shelf. In Memory of Frank Gehry’s Flowers evokes a memorial, and is part of Sophie Calle’s ongoing sublimation of mourning through art. In Memory of Frank Gehry’s Flowers also presents another recurring approach of the conceptual artist: her propensity to elevate mundane or throwaway objects through a process evoking that of the archive, and conferring to them a new meaning.

"I met Frank Gehry in 1984. I asked him where the angels were in Los Angeles. He answered my question and, out of nowhere, offered to become my impresario. I had found my angel. The next day, the Fred Hoffman Gallery contacted me to propose a meeting. A date for an exhibition was set. Ever since that day, for each of my openings, Frank Gehry sends me flowers that I keep and preserve."

Series Picassos in lockdown, 2022

For the 50th anniversary of Pablo Picasso’s death in 2023, the Musée Picasso in Paris invited me to create a show in dialogue with the artist. I hesitated: I could not face the overwhelming presence of his work. When the museum closed due to the pandemic, the paintings were covered for protection. Wrapped up, hidden, Underneath — a ghost- like, less intimidating presence that I immediately photographed.

Catherine Balet: Albedo, Bigaignon, Paris

Wed 20 Aug 2025 to Sat 4 Oct 2025

18, rue du Bourg-Tibourg, 75004

Tue-Sat 11am-7pm

Bigaignon presents Catherine Balet’s fourth solo exhibition at the gallery. Entitled Albedo, this series explores the intimate and essential relationship between water and light—elements that are both physical and symbolic.

The term albedo refers to the ratio between the light received by a surface and the amount it reflects. This scientific concept becomes, here, a poetic metaphor, expressing the shifting dialogue between matter, energy, and perception.

For this series, Catherine Balet overlays her photographs with textured glass, capturing the distortions produced by the interaction of light and water. The undulating movement of the current draws unpredictable geometric shapes across the surface. Far from being a mere protective layer, the glass acts as a living membrane, enhancing the image through its direct interplay with light.
Each scene—fragmented bodies, moments of bathing—is seen through this changing prism, where reflections become a visual language, an essential component of the work. The glass, inspired by stained-glass techniques, offers a palette of textures and nuances that diffract the light, making it shimmer depending on the angle of view, deconstructing the photographic image to reveal a new visual and sensory dimension in which bodies seem to dissolve and reassemble.

Albedo also evokes the light reflected by submerged bodies, echoing an ancestral, almost sacred, connection between humans and water. When a body enters water, there is a fragile tension between the skin of the water and human skin—a moment of transition, of fusion, of return to the element. These images convey the sensory experience of a floating body, suspended, drifting in contemplative stillness and a form of intimate reverence.

The light dancing across the glass surface recalls the vibrant brushstrokes of the Impressionist painters, who also sought to capture this fleeting interplay between light and water. One thinks of Monet and his Water Lilies, where water becomes mirror, painterly surface, and pure abstraction; of Renoir and his bathers bathed in warm light; of Sisley and his shimmering river reflections; of Pissarro, observing atmospheric variations over canals; or of Berthe Morisot, whose water scenes combine delicate linework with the evanescence of light. In the background also lingers the memory of Seurat’s bathers, that serene humanity suspended in time.

Through this body of work, Catherine Balet extends and reinvents this painterly tradition, transposing it into a photographic medium where light, water, and glass become the agents of a shared visual alchemy.

Weaving Poems, Sotheby’s London, London

Exhibition: Mon 28 Jul 2025 - Fri 22 Aug 2025

34-35 New Bond Street, W1A 2AA

Mon-Fri 9am-4.30pm, Sat-Sun 12-5pm

Weaving Poems is a collection of 24 carpets created by Afghan designer Maryam Omar and the women weavers of Bamiyan in central Afghanistan. The designs are inspired by poems associated with traditional weaving practices, as well as by the natural and cultural landscapes of the Bamiyan Valley.

The exhibition pays tribute to these artisan communities and their heritage. Weaving Poems was first exhibited at Qatar Museums’ inaugural Design Doha in 2024. A sister exhibition will open at the UNESCO Cultural Centre in Bamiyan in September 2025. The Weaving Poems carpets were handwoven using locally sourced spun wool and natural and mineral dyes by Nakbakht, Shahra Bano, Sadiqa, Ruqia, Soqra, Razia, Ozra, Fatema, Zahra, Maryam, Masuma, Sharifa, Zahra, Sakina, Nakbakht, Malalay, Rahima, Noor Begum, Sajeda, Zainab, Aziza, Marziya, Zahra and Razia.

Fourteen of the Weaving Poems carpets will be on display at Sotheby’s New Bond Street from July 28 to August 22 2025. The exhibition is organized by the UK charity Turquoise Mountain Trust in partnership with Sotheby’s and marks the first in a series of events celebrating Turquoise Mountain’s 20th year.

Turquoise Mountain’s work with artisan communities in Afghanistan is generously supported by the Qatar Fund For Development, Alwaleed Philanthropies and partners around the world.

Solo Exhibition - Regina Durante Jestrow: Everything Mixing Always - Baker–Hall, Miami, FL

September 6, 2025 - October 11, 2025
1294 NW 29th St.,
Miami, FL 33142

Baker—Hall presents Everything Mixing Always, Regina Durante Jestrow’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, on view September 6–October 11, 2025. Featuring new textile-based works, the show draws from the spiderweb quilt pattern—layering historical symbolism, personal meaning, and geometric abstraction. Durante Jestrow explores themes of intuition, protection, and labor through movement-driven compositions inspired by music and improvisation. Her materials—hand-dyed and secondhand fabrics, sequins, neoprene—reflect a commitment to sustainability and place. Based in Miami, Durante Jestrow reimagines American quilt traditions through abstraction and experimental processes, blending the spirit of folk art with contemporary concerns around memory, rhythm, and emotional resonance.

Learn More Here

Carol Rhodes: Sites, Alison Jacques, London

Sat 7 Jun 2025 to Sat 9 Aug 2025

22 Cork Street, W1S 3LZ

Tue-Fri 10.30am-6pm, Sat 11am-6pm

Alison Jacques presents Sites, a solo exhibition of work by Scottish artist Carol Rhodes (b.1959; d.2018). Spanning nearly 20 years, many of the exhibited works have never been seen in London. In 1994, Rhodes began a body of highly distinctive paintings, which she proceeded to develop over two decades, until motor neurone disease made it finally impossible for her to paint and draw.

Since her death in 2018, the significance of these works has been increasingly recognised. Drawing on recent research in her archive, this exhibition sets up specific pairings of paintings and drawings dating from 1995 to 2014 to illustrate the richness, specificity and psychological depth of her practice. This exhibition runs parallel to Rhodes participating in A Living Collection, The Hepworth Wakefield and Fake Barn Country, Raven Row, London.

Rhodes’s paintings are aerial views of fictional, post-industrial edge-lands; land interrupted by excavations, depots, industrial units, motorways and business parks, and sometimes bordered by the sea. Rhodes described her subject matter as being ‘in-between places’ and ‘non-places’ – places without history that were normally disregarded or hidden. The aerial viewpoint she employed was not, however, merely a formal device; it had very personal resonances. Being remote was not just to do with distance, it was a state of mind:

The thing about being up high is that you can see a lot. And the higher up you go, the more you can see. The more terrain that is opened up for us to see, the easier it is to understand what happens below and so it gives us a feeling of security and control. But if you go too high, there is a line that, when crossed, changes that into an agoraphobic panic. I would like my pictures to be on that line… the line between security and unease.

Rhodes felt that to look down was to see something that was ‘already over’. It induced what she described as a sort of nostalgia she connected to her peripatetic upbringing. Growing up in India, she moved to England when she was fourteen, and soon afterwards to Scotland, where she lived and worked for the rest of her life. A lasting sense of displacement and estrangement fed into her work in a very deep way. Rhodes’s working practice was detailed and very carefully planned:

I get an idea, a notion or a feeling that on the one hand is extraordinary vague but it has got a very strong core. Then I look through a lot of different photographs in the books I’ve got in the studio and flesh that out, little bits from different images, it can be tiny portions from a huge array of different photographs. Then I pin down the thing that was in my mind and spend a lot of time drawing it out.

The distance from which she depicted her views was, she said, in contrast, or even contradiction, to the specificity with which she painted them. The importance of imposing intention and function onto the substance of paint was crucial for her; was the grass dry, wet, long, short? Was the soil sandy or chalky? She wanted water to be opaque, very much a surface. Such specificity extended to clear references to social geography and the real impact of human intervention on the natural environment. But the land in Rhodes’s paintings can also be read metaphorically, for example, as a wounded body. Organs, muscles, veins, skin and bones are continually suggested. ‘These are portraits of landscapes’, she once wrote.

Rhodes’s use of colour was distinctive and particular. Annotated strips of paper used as bookmarks record the page numbers in books in which a particular colour, or the resonance, or sum, of colours and tones on the printed page, had caught her attention. Also important were the remembered colours of her Indian childhood and those of historical paintings. An especially strong influence was 14th and 15th century Sienese painting and the concurrence of this exhibition with Siena: The Rise of Painting at the National Gallery would have delighted her.

One of the first exhibitions to bring wider attention to Rhodes’s work was titled The Persistence of Painting (CCA, Glasgow, 1995). Painting has always persisted and Rhodes’s sense of that, and her contribution to its continuity, reminds us that the only landscapes we have – the only reality – are that which we ourselves create.

Carol Rhodes was born in Edinburgh in 1959. After graduating from Glasgow School of Art in 1982, she stopped painting for nearly ten years, focusing on social and political activism, including the anti-nuclear and women’s movements. She started painting again in 1992 and her work began to be exhibited regularly from 1994. A mid-career survey of Rhodes’s work was presented at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh in 2007. Recent institutional surveys include MAC Belfast, Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge; Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow; Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht and Haus am Waldsee, Berlin.

Rhodes’ work has been acquired by major museums including Tate, London; National Galleries of Modern Art, Edinburgh; Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht; Yale Center for British Art, Connecticut; and The Hepworth Wakefield.

Luchita Hurtado. Yo Soy, Hauser & Wirth Downtown, Los Angeles

Sun 29 Jun 2025 to Sun 5 Oct 2025

901 East 3rd Street, CA 90013

Tue-Sun 11am-6pm

I did many self-portraits. And then at one point I decided I would use letters, and I did...I started with a portrait that said, ‘I am.’ And I decided that was as much me as my real face and figure.’ - Luchita Hurtado
Over the course of her eight-decade career, Venezuelan-born, Los Angeles-based artist Luchita Hurtado (1920 – 2020) committed to a lifelong journey of personal and artistic evolution defined by ceaseless experimentation. The first exhibition devoted to the artist at Hauser & Wirth in Los Angeles, ‘Yo Soy’ (I Am) brings together paintings and drawings from a pivotal moment in Hurtado’s career: Inspired by the surge of feminist activism in LA, the artist held her first solo exhibition at the Woman’s Building in February 1974, debuting her Linear Language series of expressive, geometric word paintings. A half century on, ‘Yo Soy’ revisits that landmark presentation and includes never-before-seen works from the series it introduced. Through her vibrant, abstract canvases—some cut up and meticulously resewn—visitors will be able to experience the depth of Hurtado’s exploration of pattern, mysticism, the earth and the cosmos.

The 1970s were a period of intense productivity for Hurtado. Living in Santa Monica Canyon with her own studio and her children now grown, she found herself at the heart of a burgeoning women’s movement in Los Angeles, a collective awakening that profoundly shaped her artistic identity. As an original member of the Los Angeles Council of Women Artists, Hurtado later cited a seminal meeting of local women artists in 1971, organized by Joyce Kozloff, as a turning point in both her artistry and activism. There, Hurtado introduced herself to the group using her married name, ‘Mullican.’ Her friend, the printmaker June Wayne, interjected: ‘Luchita what?’ The prompt led the artist to reintroduce herself as ‘Luchita Hurtado.’

This fabled account of self-renaming laid the foundation for Hurtado’s Linear Language series, which began with a self-portrait that featured the abstracted word ‘Yo.’ Hurtado created the subsequent works in this series between 1972 and 1974, in a process that relied upon speed of action in merging language with graphic patterns and textiles. Describing the technical innovations her series inspired, the artist explained:

‘To achieve quickness, the evenness and length of stroke I needed on large canvasses, I rigged up bottles with nozzles that became the brushes I needed. [...] I painted large paintings, all messages, some right side up, some on their side, some cut, set apart, as life does, and sewed together again. Some were in layers, one atop the other.’

Among works on view in the exhibition is ‘Self Portrait’ (1973), in which bold red, yellow, black and silver lines traverse every direction within sewn panels of varying sizes. Beneath the work’s intricate design lies the words—‘I Live I Die I Will Be Reborn’—that four decades later would serve as the inspiration for Hurtado’s 2019 retrospective at the Serpentine Galleries. In another piece on view from the original Woman’s Building exhibition, deep blue and purple patchwork obscures the title ‘Earth & Sky Interjected’ (1973)—a work that likewise provided the title for a later exhibition, Hurtado’s 2024 – 2025 survey at the Harwood Museum of Art in Taos, New Mexico.

‘Yo Soy’ also will present a selection from Luchita Hurtado’s archive, including original exhibition and artwork documentation, along with ephemera from organizations such as the Los Angeles Council of Women Artists, Womanspace and the Woman’s Building.

About the Artist
Born in Maiquetía, Venezuela in 1920, Luchita Hurtado dedicated her practice to the investigation of universality and transcendence. Though personally connected to a vast network of internationally renowned artists and intellectuals—including Mexican muralists, Surrealists, members of the Dynaton movement, feminists and artists in the Chicano/Latino art scene—Hurtado remained an independent and largely private, but highly prolific, creator. Her exhibition at the Woman’s Building in 1974 was the only solo presentation of her work prior to her mid-90s, with her first institutional survey at the age of 98.

Hurtado’s body of work cohered through an examination of self-affirmation, introduced in her early period from the 1940s to 1960s. This output was defined by surrealist figuration, biomorphism and geometric abstraction, executed in brightly hued palettes with striking expressive range. Her work continued to evolve throughout the late 1960s and 1970s, demonstrating a fluid shift towards representative figuration that led to a production of contemplative self-portraits known as her ‘I Am’ paintings. This series was followed by a group of surrealist ‘Body Landscapes’ wherein the human figure assumes the form of mountains and desert sand dunes. At the end of her life, Hurtado continued to explore themes of language and nature with her work, focusing on the planet, natural elements and the environment, in recognition of the urgency of the ecological crisis. These works function as symbolic proxies and intimate meditations on the Earth as mystic progenitor, underscoring the interconnectedness between corporeality and the natural world.

In 2019, Hurtado was listed in TIME 100’s most influential people and received the Americans for the Arts Carolyn Clark Powers Lifetime Achievement Award. Recent solo exhibitions include ‘Luchita Hurtado: Earth & Sky Interjected’ at the Harwood Museum of Art, Taos NM (2024 – 25), ‘I Live I Die I Will Be Reborn’ at the Serpentine Galleries, London, UK (2019) that traveled to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2020), ‘Just Down the Street’ at Hauser & Wirth Zurich (2020) and ‘Dark Years’ at Hauser & Wirth New York (2019). In 2018, her work was included in the Hammer Museum’s biennial exhibition ‘Made in L.A.’ and is featured in public collections worldwide, including The British Museum, London, UK; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles CA; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles CA; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York NY; Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires, Argentina; Museum of Modern Art, New York NY; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston MA; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston TX and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco CA.

PROTO-HEROINE, Sarah Brook Gallery, Los Angeles

3311 E Pico Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90023

June 28 - July 26, 2025

• Jenny Hata Blumenfield

• Cheryl Humphreys

• Lois Lane

• Jane Swavely

• Vanessa Zarate

In Gertrude Stein’s canonical stream-of-conscious poem, Sacred Emily, she wrote, “Rose is a rose is a rose.” In Proto-Heroine at Sarah Brook Gallery, the collection of works seem to be saying, “Woman is a woman is a woman.”

Stein dedicated the poem to her lover, Alice. Sarah is dedicating this show to all women, specifically mothers. Stein’s poem can appear to be disconnected or disjointed, but that general feeling is emblematic of all existence, is it not? This is especially true for women, who tend to have unreasonable expectations placed upon them and often receive a disproportionately disappointing amount of gratitude for the amount that they do simply to keep this world spinning.

The repetition of Stein’s words offer a sense of flexibility and fluidity in context and meaning. The intangible connections made between touch and tone within each of the works included in this exhibition offer a sense of grounded introspection and reverence. In times like these, we must examine ourselves and the world around us with more scrutiny than ever before; that said, we must never let go of love or lose hope. Proto-Heroine is full of love; it is full

of hope.

– Keith J. Varadi, June 2025

A Posthumous Kaari Upson Retrospective

An Exhibition That. Asks You to Confront Your Tenderness and Your Cruelty.

Bodies remember. Objects tell tales. Memories leave traces. In Kaari Upson's distinctive world, beauty meets horror, sensitivity resonates with despair. The first retrospective museum exhibition featuring Upson after her untimely death shows the strength and range of an artist already well on her way to becoming a modern classic.

The exhibition is generously supported by The Obel Family Foundation and is producered by Louisiana in collaboration with Kunsthalle Mannheim and Masi Lugano.

At her untimely death from cancer in 2021, aged 51, Kaari Upson was widely regarded as one of the most significant and versatile American artists of her generation with a practice spanning sculpture, drawing, performance, film and painting. Though her career was cut short, she has left behind a rich, intense and strongly personal body of work that revolves around identity, body, relationships, emotions, illness and loss.

27 May - 26 October 2025

Louisiana Museum Of Art

More Information Here

Sue Williamson Traces South Africa’s History, Sidestepping Memorials and Myths

Sue Williamson’s practice, rooted in South African history and influenced by her journalistic background, spans photography, drawing, and installation to probe themes of memory and remembrance. Throughout her work, injustice (and perhaps even evil) is made vividly evident. Since the early 1970s, she has documented various communities’ pleas for justice, explored the harsh realities of apartheid, and laid bare the lingering effects of colonialism—including migration, dispossession, and dislocation. Her first-ever retrospective, “There’s something I must tell you,” on view at Iziko National Gallery in Cape Town through September 24, reveals these throughlines.

Via Art In America

Iziko South African National Gallery in Cape Town, South Africa

More Information Here

22 February - 24 September 2025

Cindy Sherman - The Women (Solo Show)

Cindy Sherman is globally renowned for her exploration of identity and gender through the performance of meticulously observed personas for the camera. For her first solo exhibition in Spain in over two decades, ‘Cindy Sherman. The Women’ features a selection of the artist’s most iconic bodies of work, dating from the 1970s to 2010s, emphasising how Sherman revolutionized the role of the camera in artistic practice.

The exhibition includes the groundbreaking Untitled Films Stills (1977 – 1980), through which Sherman came to widespread attention as one of the ‘Pictures Generation’ artists who gained prominence in the 1970s and ‘80s responding to the age of mass media and celebrity. This pivotal series will be juxtaposed with Sherman’s large-format portrayals of film stars, starlets, society women and fashionistas from various series made over subsequent decades, addressing the layered presentation and public perception of femininity.

‘Cindy Sherman. The Women’ takes its title from the 1936 all-female hit play by Clare Boothe Luce, a merciless ensemble piece about women’s interactions with women, of their own and different classes, and of different appearances. Twice made into feature films (1939 and 2008), it is exemplary of the genre of classical Hollywood ‘women’s film’ around which feminist film theory was formed. Moreover, not only the characters in her play but Boothe Luce herself is representative of the multifarious kinds of femininities explored by Sherman.

Dates: 23 June – 26 October 2025

Hauser & Wirth, Menorca

More Information Here

Mildred Thompson: Frequencies

Institute of Contemporary Art (Miami, FL)

“Mildred Thompson: Frequencies” is the most comprehensive solo museum exhibition to date for American artist Mildred Thompson. Bringing together approximately fifty works from 1959 to 1999, the exhibition surveys Thompson’s multifaceted practice, featuring paintings, sculptures, etchings, drawings, assemblages, and musical compositions. Throughout her peripatetic career, Thompson worked across media and disciplines, drawing from both scientific research and a poetic pursuit of abstraction to explore the limits of perception. Often featuring radiating swirls of color and gesture, her diverse bodies of work seek to visualize extremes of scale—from the human body and built environments to microscopic particles and the vastness of the cosmos.

More Information Here

Closes: October 12, 2025

The Homeless Wanderer: Solo Show by Aïda Muluneh.

Galleria Giampaolo Abbondio in Milan presents Aida Muluneh, an internationally renowned Ethiopian photographer who has revolutionized the visual narrative of the African continent.

A former photojournalist for The Washington Post, Muluneh has exhibited in the most important international museums, from MoMA to Tate, and is the founder of key festivals and platforms for the promotion of African photography. In her work, the image becomes a political and spiritual act, a sacred space where primary color and geometric composition reflect the dialogue between migration, identity, and belonging.

Through a powerful and unmistakable visual style, Muluneh “redraws” contemporary Africa with images that speak to all of humanity. As critic Jacqueline Ceresoli, whose text introduces the exhibition, states:
“Her photographs are visionary windows that compel us to see another Africa: enigmatic, ritualistic, sublime. A land that migrates and remains at once, inhabited by timeless and placeless goddesses.”

As is customary for the gallery, the exhibition title is inspired by a piece of music: The Homeless Wanderer by Ethiopian pianist and composer Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou. A bittersweet echo accompanies the viewer's gaze, becoming the soundtrack to a silent and powerful diaspora.

Where: Galleria Playlist di Giampaolo Abbondio, Via Archimede 73, 20129, Milano
When: 13 June - 31 July 2025, Mon - Fri 3.00PM - 6.00PM / on appointment
Admission: Free

More Information Here

Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting

National Portrait Gallery London

Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting is the largest major museum exhibition in the UK dedicated to one of the world’s foremost contemporary painters.

Saville rose to prominence in the early 1990s, following her acclaimed degree show at the Glasgow School of Art. Since then, she has played a leading role in the reinvigoration of figurative painting – a genre that she continues to test today. Her unique ability to create visceral portraits from thick layers of paint reveals an artist with a deep passion for the process itself.

From charcoal drawings to large-scale oil paintings of the human form, this chronological display includes works that question the historical notions of female beauty, the monumental nudes that launched Saville to acclaim in 1992, and new works on display for the first time.

Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting brings together 45 works made throughout the artist's career. It traces the development of her practice, spotlighting key artworks, and exploring her connection to art history. The exhibition was created in close collaboration with the artist. It brings together works from public and private collections worldwide.

National Portrait Gallery. St Martin's Place. London, WC2H 0HE. Tel +44(0)20 7306 0055

20 June - 7 September 2025

Marilla Palmer: Ecstatic Earth,Kathryn Markel Fine Arts, New York

Thu 26 Jun 2025 to Fri 1 Aug 2025

179 10th Avenue, NY 10011

Tue-Sat 11am-6pm

Kathryn Markel Fine Arts presents Ecstatic Earth, featuring new paintings by Marilla Palmer. This is her sixth solo exhibition with the gallery.

On this body of work Palmer writes, "Where is Mother Nature? Wondered Goethe. “She is the only artist; arriving, without a trace of effort, at perfection, at the most exact precision, though always veiled under a certain softness.” Working so directly with nature makes it feel like I’m collaborating, but with an unpredictable partner. Who knows what will appear in my studio garden, the forest or in the coral reefs? How will the petals change when pressed or if the wet watercolor, interference paint or sequins will capture the ecstasy of what I see? I find the tiny steps and evanescence of what Goethe called nature’s dance fascinating, even hallucinatory. “We live in her midst and know her not. She is incessantly speaking to us, but betrays not her secret.” wrote Goethe.

Maria Sibylla Merian was determined to uncover nature’s secrets. She believed that insects were having sex and making babies in the ecstatic earth. It seemed like a wild idea at the time, in 1700. She sat in the mud of Surinam and gorgeously documented vibrating life, intimately in minutiae proving her theory. Close observation of what’s growing or flying through my studio garden feels important, urgent, because it’s fleeting. The wind blows in spores and birds drop exotic seeds on the native pollinators. (Who’s native anyway?) Human presence is everywhere on the earth, in the seas and in the sky. So what I do, in my collages, is to create hybrids: nature and artifice. I don’t only document what I see, I respond to the unfathomable beauty of what is with embellishment. Nothing on the earth is pure anymore, our planet is a collage. Technology and travel reveal and make accessible the fabulousness of our planet, but then there’s the famous, Faustian pact.

Purple haze is in my brain, lately things don’t seem the same. Don’t know if it’s day or night. Excuse me while I kiss the sky. A multicolored constantly changing hallucinatory evanescence. Jimi Hendrix ecstatically saw “Butterflies and zebras and moonbeams.” Nature is fluid, euphoric. Hermaphrodite tropical fish flamboyantly change color and shape as they morph from female to male or exist as both, living in the reefs with the hermaphrodite coral and jellyfish bright as miniature neon. But the purple, ochre and black coral is being bleached by pollution. “The tiny island sags downstream, 'Cause the life that lived is dead And the wind screams “Mary””….shred that guitar, Jimi."