The Art Collective Superflex Wants to Change the World and Thinks You Can Too →

Superflex | The New York Times

Superflex’s Superbrick Factory is a work space in which “Superbricks” are produced and used to construct sculptures in the space. Superbricks are pink, curved bricks made from unfired clay that are constructed to avoid the right angles and straight lines of human architecture. Credit": Mathias Lassen/Courtesy of Museum Jorn

by Laura Rysman

If humans have any chance of saving themselves and life as we know it, we need to see the world in a whole new way — from the point of view of other species.

It’s a theory championed by the Copenhagen art collective Superflex, which builds on the philosophy that art and artists can and should play a role in the future of the world. […] That kind of thinking has placed Superflex among the innovative artists addressing the world’s ills today. Key to their philosophy and others like them is the belief that people should consider the impact on other species and work not only with fellow artists, architects and other experts, but also with communities to address those ills.

“We believe that today art is, and should be, at the forefront of making infrastructure at every possible level,” said Bjornstjerne Christiansen, one of the founders of Superflex, speaking on a panel titled “Worlds Imagined: Biodiversity and Tech” at the Art for Tomorrow conference in Milan last week. “It’s in the actual landscape-making where art has a crucial role to play.”

Read more here.

Ann Veronica Janssens in 'Colour: Seeing Beyond Pigment' at Z33, Hassel, Belgium →

Ann Veronica Janssens
May 16 - August 24, 2025 | Z33, Hassel, Belgium

Ann Veronica Janssens, 09.04.23, 2023 & 04.10.23 #2, 2023. Photo © Kobe Vanderzande

Pigments are everywhere. From paints to cosmetics and clothes, from everyday objects to your food and drinks, they literally add colour to life. Unfortunately, the pigment and dye industry is one of the most polluting industries in the world. In the search for natural alternatives, Laboratorium – the biolab for art, design and biotechnology at KASK & Conservatorium in Ghent – went a long way. Here, melanin proved to be a fascinating track. In Z33, researchers, designers and artists present their results for the first time.

In the exhibition, Belgian artist Ann Veronica Janssens contributed Future Forms of Beauty, where she manipulates transparent ribbed glass with a thin layer of synthetic melanin.

Curated by Annelies Thoelen, Colour: Seeing Beyond Pigment is presented in collaboration with: KASK & Conservatory (HOGENT – Howest), VUB (Sustainable Engeneering Materials Research Group) and UGent (Evolution and Optics of Nanostructures).

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Petra Cortright in Electricity for All at Knoxville Museum of Art, Tennessee →

Petra Cortright
May 15 - August 16, 2025 | Knoxville Museum of Art, Tennessee

‘Electricity for All’ at the Knoxville Museum of Art features work by contemporary artists exploring the complex relationships between technology, information, and power. Curated by KMA’s assistant curator, Kelsie Conley, the exhibition showcases work by Petra Cortright alongside pieces by Jim Campbell, Petra Cortright, Daniel Canogar, Nathan Hylden, Beryl Korot, Frederick Hammersley, Matthew Angelo Harrison, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Amor Muñoz, Iván Navarro, Marilène Oliver, Mimi Ọnụọha, Trevor Paglen, Nam June Paik, Elias Sime, Jered Sprecher & Sam van Strien.

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In Dialogue: Angela Bulloch, Richard Deacon, Janice Kerbel, Pae White and Jim Amberson →

Angela Bulloch and Pae White | STPI Creative Workshop & Gallery, Singapore

Artists in the exhibition New Releases Old Friends, Angela Bulloch, Richard Deacon, Janice Kerbel, and Pae White, come together for a panel discussion at STPI Creative Workshop & Gallery moderated by Jim Amberson.

New Releases Old Friends spotlights new facets of their respective practices, with fresh works by Bulloch, Kerbel and Rehberger premiering in Singapore alongside earlier works by Deacon and White – all developed in close collaboration with STPI’s Creative Workshop during their residencies with the esteemed Visting Artists Programme (VAP).

Find more information on the exhibition here.

The Decisive Moment with Jonny Niesche, the Australian contemporary artist behind Gucci's 90x90 project on his career-defining epiphany. →

Jonny Niesche | Assouline Culture Lounge

Photo by Dirk Tacke.

by Sofia Quintero

In the occasion where fine art meets high fashion, few brand collaborations strike the perfect balance between heritage and innovation. But not every brand is Gucci. To celebrate its iconic silk scarves, the Italian heritage brand launched "90x90," a special campaign featuring nine international artists tasked with reimagining five archival themes: flora, fauna, nautical, equestrian, and the GG Monogram.

Among these visionaries is Jonny Niesche, an Australian contemporary artist whose vibrant works have captivated the art world at large with his hypnotic blend of romanticism, abstraction, and minimalism. Known for his explorations of light and space perceptions, Niesche brings a distinct angle to the collaboration. "I have loved Gucci since my teens," Niesche says. "The brand has always had an elegance and classic style that really resonates with me." 90x90 marks Niesche’s first partnership with a fashion label. He deliberately waited for the ideal opportunity, and Gucci was the perfect fit.

Read more here.

Diana Thater and 8 Other Artists Pick Most Influential Environmental Art of the Past Century →

Diana Thater | Cultured Magazine

“This might not be environmental art, but it is an astounding image of the living environment, and it does what 'environmental' art should do and that is to give us an appreciation of the fascinating lives of others. It covers the 'art' part of the equation be being a REALLY GOOD photograph—something, ironically enough, we see very little of these days.

The story is this: A photographer was filming crested black macaques in Indonesia. He left his camera, and a female macaque snapped a series of self-portraits. You can see her thinking about it across the range of images. There are several shots where she tries serious looks—then she finally grins. Presumably, she was looking at her own reflection in the lens as she tried out different attitudes. In some of the photos you can see the camera lens reflected in her eyes. It’s not just a charming image of self-reflection; smiling from ear to ear, this macaque presents herself to the world. My purpose in making art is in representing those who do not represent themselves. But this macaque doesn’t need me. Crested black macaques are critically endangered.”

Read more here.

Review: Jorge Pardo at 1301PE →

Jorge Pardo | ArtForum

by Jan Tumlir

“Art is what it has become,” Theodor Adorno unequivocally declares in Aesthetic Theory (1970). His statement implies that the original meaning of a work can be completely overturned by its contemporary circumstances. A similar point can be made about gallery practice: Operational protocols, once seemingly set in stone, can undergo ground-up rethinking with every slight shift in our systems of informational and economic distribution. Jorge Pardo’s latest outing at 1301PE addressed this process from an ironic distance. But some measure of warmth could also be felt here, directed from the artist to the gallery’s founder, Brian Butler, with whom he has worked closely since the earliest days of his career. 

This show consisted of just one painting, Untitled, 2024, the scale and proportions of which closely matched those of the wall on which it hung, one that faced the entrance to a reconfigured downstairs gallery. Normally, this space opens onto a corridor that connects to the reception desk and office, and, farther on, to a stairway leading up to a second showroom. On this occasion, however, the passage had been sealed. In a period when commercial galleries are increasingly prone to hedging their bets with “mixed nuts,” something-for-everyone assortments of art, this was a rather striking proposition. Even more so was the fact that this work could be read as a kind of tribute to its site. At a distance, the painting appeared resolutely abstract, nonreferential, this impression reinforced by its title (or lack thereof). Observed more closely, it was revealed to be suffused with information. Its surface teems with material gleaned from every poster Butler had produced to accompany the gallery’s exhibitions up to then. Snippets of typography and fragments of imagery are scattered throughout, as if drawn through a shredder and then spread, mulch-like, across the picture plane. As with much of the artist’s work, Pardo layered, condensed, and recomposited the source data with the aid of computer programs run with minimal interference. Nevertheless, the result bore a strikingly organic aspect. From its earthy, autumnal tones to the quasi-gestural application of each daub of color, the painting greeted the eye as a kind of Arcadian landscape akin to those by Édouard Vuillard.

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Uta Barth in Blur / Obscure / Distort: Photography and Perception at the Norton Museum of Art, Palm Beach →

Uta Barth
April 5 - August 24, 2025 | Norton Museum of Art, Palm Beach

Installation view of Blur / Obscure / Distort: Photography and Perception (April 5 – August 24, 2025) at the Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida. Courtesy of the Norton Museum of Art. Photo: Ashley Kerr.

Blur / Obscure / Distort: Photography and Perception brings together photographs that are linked by the common objective of disrupting the viewer’s sense of time, space, place, or scale. Sometimes considered errors, photographic blur, distortion, and obfuscation have also been important creative and aesthetic strategies adopted by artists since the medium’s 19th-century inception. Highlighting photographs from the Norton’s Collection and a selection of special loans, this exhibition points to the constructed nature of perception and, in turn, photography’s vulnerability to manipulation even when it appears to show what is “real.”

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Pae White in Énormément bizarre at Centre Pompidou, Paris →

Pae White
March 26 - June 30, 2025 | Centre Pompidou, Paris

Jean Chatelus, who passed away in 2021 at the age of 82, was a Lyon-born historian and lecturer at the Sorbonne. Throughout his life, he amassed a unique collection, driven more by an impulse to accumulate than by a traditional collector’s approach. Comprising nearly 400 pieces—sculptures, installations, paintings, photographs, drawings, votive and vernacular objects—the collection explores themes of the body, death, and the fleeting nature of life.

Énormément Bizarre: The Jean Chatelus Collection, donated by the Antoine de Galbert Foundation reflects Chatelus’s evolving tastes: from an early fascination with Surrealism and repurposed objects, to a later focus on body art. It also reveals his keen interest in non-Western ethnographic artifacts, folk traditions, and the works of contemporary art’s outsiders and enfant terribles, including Pae White, Cindy Sherman, Mike Kelley, Christian Boltanski, Yayoi Kusama, Michel Journiac, Daniel Spoerri, Robert Filliou, Nam June Paik, Joana Vasconcelos, Andres Serrano, and Wim Delvoye.

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Fiona Banner AKA The Vanity Press →

Fiona Banner AKA The Vanity Press | Burlington Contemporary

Fiona Banner AKA The Vanity Press in 2024. (© Fiona Banner Studio; courtesy the artist and Frith Street Gallery, London; photograph Leroy Boeteng).

interviewed by Millie Walton

Although the links drawn between different types of assault and exploitation – on the body, on the landscape, on language itself – are often unsettling and confronting, there is always a sense of play to what Banner makes, a sending-up or collapsing of ‘grand’ ideas but also of her work. For her Tate commission in 2010, for example, she bought and installed two full-size fighter jets – a Sea Harrier aircraft and a SEPECAT Jaguar aircraft – into the Duveen galleries, creating an environment that was alternately monumental and sad. She later melted the planes down into ingots, which she keeps in her east London studio. Ahead of Banner’s solo exhibition at Frith Street Gallery, London (21st March–3rd May 2025), Millie Walton spoke to the artist about language, time, motherhood and military aircraft.

Read more here.

Artist Rirkrit Tiravanija: "As an artist, I can only make signs."

Rirkrit Tiravanija | Louisiana Channel

“Paying attention now is actually a kind of political act."

Renowned Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija reflects on the role of art in a time of crisis, the importance of questioning authority, and the need for critical engagement with the world around us in repressive times.

For Tiravanija, art serves as a space of doubt and freedom: "Art is always a place where we can have doubt, we're free to think, and we're free to question authority—any kind of authority." He urges viewers to challenge established institutions, including their own assumptions.

“I think now when we're in a place and time where you know there's so much trying to ask for attention, but the attention they're asking for is a kind of is a diversion from reality in a way is a diversion from facts is a diversion from truth,” Tiravanija says.

Tiravanija talks shares his view of the world at the occasion of his most recent work ‘A Million Rabbit Holes (2024), reflecting the events leading up to the US selection in November 2024.

Throughout the discussion, Rirkrit Tiravanija draws on personal observations and global political concerns, highlighting the dangers of uncritical acceptance: "We're coming to a place where the dreams are going to be shattered, there is no more dream."

Tiravanija also reflects on the commodification of art, arguing for a return to its radical roots: "Art has to stop becoming commodified and art has to go out and back into the woods as it was. Or maybe Duchamp, like has said, you know, it's time to go underground."

Despite the challenges ahead, the artist remains hopeful that crisis can be a catalyst for change: "I think we're coming to a big crisis and I I think, and I hope, that crisis is extreme enough to wake people up, to come together, to do things together in opposition to those things that are being set on us."

Inside An Intimate Dinner In Support Of The LA Arts Community Fire Relief Fund →

Jorge Pardo | Elle Decor

Photo by Katie Jones

By Sean Santiago

Last weekend, ELLE Decor hosted an intimate dinner at Ardor at The West Hollywood EDITION in support of the LA Arts Community Fire Relief Fund. The event was supported by Visit West Hollywood and Monacelli, off the back of Primack and Weissenberg’s Love How You Live: Adventures in Interior Design multi-city book tour. Each guest took home a copy of the book along with their own one-of-a-kind plate, hand-painted by artist Jorge Pardo. Sales of the plates, currently available by special order through the AGO Projects site, will raise money for the relief fund.

Read more here.

Philippe Parreno: Between Difficulty and Possibility →

Philippe Parreno | ArtReview

Philippe Parreno, Voices, 2024 (installation view). Photo: Andrea Rossetti.

by Martin Herbert

Philippe Parreno’s exhibitions are often initially experienced as a destabilising encounter with otherness. So, at the risk of blowing that for anyone who hasn’t seen Voices – a version of which, to be fair, was shown earlier in 2024 at the Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul – here’s what a first wander through is like. Haus der Kunst’s huge, darkened, neoclassical main space, flanked by smaller ones on either side and at the back, is dominated by an evolving film on a screen, El Almendral (2024), an updating stream of footage from an almond grove and surrounding landscape in Almería, Spain; almond trees tolerate drought, and this region is steadily undergoing desertification due to climate change. The smaller spaces offer a stop-start scenography of Parreno’s increasingly trademark light- and sound-based sculptures, mostly new, a few dating back years. Among them are a trio of bobbly glass sculptures, shaped like giant peanut shells and containing coloured lights, that slide up and down steel poles and cast rippling, austerely psychedelic patterns on the walls; a 5 × 5 grid of blinking globular heat lamps strung from the ceiling – heat being a leitmotif of the show – and suspended, intermittently rotating speakers that softly emit an aleatory soundscape of droning, muttering and chirring. The latter is part of an overall soundscape divided across the rooms, Voices (2024), which clones and sometimes completely abstracts speech by well-known German TV presenter Susanne Daubner. In each case, here, it feels like something is being transmitted in a language halfway alien, halfway familiar.

Read more here.

Phillipe Perreno in 'Double Vision: The Rachofsky Collection and the Hartland & Mackie / Labora Collection' at The Warehouse, Dallas →

Phillipe Perreno
February 15 - June 28, 2025 | The Warehouse, Dallas

Fraught Times: For Eleven Months of the Year it’s an Artwork and in December it’s Christmas (July), 2017
Cast and painted stainless steel
141 3/4 inches (360 cm); Diameter: 94 1/2 inches (240 cm)
Hartland & Mackie / Labora Collection

The inaugural exhibition of the newly formed Warehouse Dallas Art Foundation offers a glimpse at two collections—The Rachofsky Collection, created over the past 40 years, and the Hartland & Mackie / Labora Collection, developed over the last decade—foregrounding the potent and inventive interplay that will serve as a guiding principle for future programming at The Warehouse. This first look, as it were, is the Foundation’s opening chapter as it explores the art of our times.

Although both collections remain distinct in their points of view, the exhibition illuminates the serendipitous ways they overlap. As the exhibition unfolds, each gallery explores a theme or artist central to both collections, including commitments to several artists collected in-depth, such as Carroll Dunham, Wade Guyton, Marguerite Humeau, Calvin Marcus, and Dana Schutz. The exhibition is punctuated with galleries that offer broad presentations of these artists’ practices. In some instances, works by the same artists from different bodies of work will be placed in conversation, while in others, entirely different practices will be brought into dialogue.

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At Guadalajara Art Weekend, Open Studios Are the Biggest Draw →

Jorge Mendez Blake, Jorge Pardo and Pae White | Observer

Ceramica Suro’s annual Comida celebration during ART WKND GDL. Photo by Tuna Unalan.

By Elisa Carollo

The highlight of the evening at Plataforma was a conversation between Cuban artist Jorge Pardo and American artist Pae White, both of whom have long-standing ties with José Noé Suro. Pardo’s immersive, labyrinthine installation of luminous ceramic walls and colorful lamps seamlessly intertwined with White’s newest series of sculptures, forming an engaging, multisensory environment that explored how visual curiosity and emotional impulses shape perception.

The final stop was the studio of conceptual artist Jorge Méndez Blake, whose multimedia practice explores the intersection of literature, art and architecture—disciplines humans use to define their existential and operational space, imposing structure and direction upon it. Deconstructed pages of famous books transform into constellations of meaning, as Méndez Blake distills single characters, isolating them in a careful, rational order. Across his sprawling studio, various workstations held a series of hyperrealistic paintings, which, through trompe-l’œil techniques, similarly yet more directly challenge the viewer’s perception of reality. These paintings also serve as tools for conceptualizing and developing his other projects, reinforcing the artist’s fascination with language, illusion and the ways in which knowledge is both constructed and dismantled.

Read more here.

Jessica Stockholder: Cardinal Directions at Es Baluard Museu d’Art Contemporani de Palma →

Jessica Stockholder
January 31 - August 24, 2025 | Es Baluard Museu d’Art Contemporani de Palma, Spain

Curated by David Barro and Soad Houman, Cardinal Directions features works loaned from Barrié Foundation’s International Contemporary Painting Collection along with a site-specific work created for Es Baluard Museu. The work of Jessica Stockholder (born in Seattle, United States, 1959 and raised in Vancouver, B.C. Canada) reveals the complex relationship between the illusionistic space of painting and the physical presence of sculpture. Intrigued by the ways things are bounded and how we understand them, she explores this question in relationship to many materials and their intersection with pictorial possibilities. This interstitial state also grounds her work in the overlap between installation and architecture, since it is always linked to the site. Ultimately, her work is about the experience of looking, a kind of abstraction, use of color or artistic experience projected as a way of communicating the world, driven by the artist's conviction that any image of something involves abstraction if we think of it as relating the experience of that thing. 

Her practice is paradigmatic of what is termed expanded painting, a form of painting that can transform context into content by conquering architectural space and prompting a shift from the traditional two dimensions of the canvas to the three dimensions of real space, as well as including the time spectators take to wander through the space without ever finding a definitive viewpoint. This is definitely painting, and in her works we can talk about figure and ground, chiaroscuro, color, composition, space, rhythm . . . Everything hints at aspects or concepts of pictorial tradition, even though the materials might be socks, duct tape, a surfboard, a strip of shower curtain, umbrella fabric, a Ghanaian mask, a typewriter, weights or a carpet she has designed following her own color scheme. It is painting as a reality that can be penetrated, inhabited. Yet it is also painting that lets us continue to talk about painting, even though in many cases the surface to be painted is architectural space. The use of color dematerialises things and gives painting its pictorial quality, as reflected in this selection of works ranging from 2006 to the present. We notice this in her more intimate pieces, assemblages of usually found and reused objects whose material qualities have been erased by the impact of color. Artificial light, as a pictorial strategy, also plays into this intention, into this effect of color. Above and beyond painting, this approach prioritizes the pictorial essence of each object and, by extension, the pictorial potential of architectural space, which supports painting as a wall supports a canvas.

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Philippe Parreno's 'Voices' uses AI to give agency to denuded land →

Philippe Parreno | NewScientist

Philippe Parreno, Voices, Haus Der Kunst, 2024. Photo by Andrea Rossetti.

By David Stock

Phillipe Parreno wants to take visitors to his latest exhibition, Voices at Munich’s Haus Der Kunst, on a journey into the unknown. “There is no dramatic arc produced by Netflix where you just have to sit, shut up and enjoy the show,” the artist explains of the large, multi-room space filled with moving light sculptures, heat lamps, speaker arrays, dancers and film screens. Instead, for Parreno, traversing the rooms is a process of composing your own journey. “You explore time in space with your own curiosity.”

Read more here.

Here are the 10 Must-See Gallery Shows in LA This Month →

Jorge Pardo | Cultured Mag

Jorge Pardo, Untitled, 2024. Image courtesy of the artist and 1301PE.

By Giuliana Brida

Jorge Pardo

Where: 1301PE
When: Through January 11, 2025
Why It’s Worth A Look: Layering 30 years of 1301PE’s exhibition posters into a kaleidoscopic collage of color and form, Jorge Pardo’s monumental canvas blurs the line between a painting and its environment. The result is a dizzying play of abstraction and representation, a work that refuses to be pinned down and demands you step closer to decode its mysteries.
Know Before You Go: Depending on where you stand, colors collide or dissolve, textures sharpen or soften, and the image shifts like a mirage. Pardo wants you lost in the middle of it all—caught between recognition and abstraction, where every angle reveals something new. 

Read more here.

Most influential people in 2024 in the contemporary artworld →

Rirkrit Tiravanija | ArtReview

Photo: Daniel Dorsa. Courtesy Rirkrit Tiravanija and David Zwirner

‘My interest is always to break down the distance between what we think [of] as art or high art and what we do in our daily life,’ Tiravanija once told The Korea Herald. During his close-to-40-year engagement with what has been characterised as relational aesthetics, the Thai artist has become known for his participatory events, from cooking pad thai for gallery goers to providing them with ping-pong tables. You’d think it might be tricky to encapsulate such a career in a retrospective, but his MoMA PS1 survey, which closed in March, before moving to LUMA Arles in June, had a go, as did a second retrospective at Gropius Bau, Berlin, which opened in September, serving curry and Turkish coffees, and providing hangout spaces where the interactions are the work.

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Step Inside a Bewitching Ranch House in Malibu →

Jorge Pardo | Architectural Digest

Photography by Mark Seelen

By Mayer Rus

Despite the eye-rolling hauteur of the word Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art, it is the mot juste to describe what Pardo has wrought: a dizzying, kaleidoscopic fantasy interior in which the floors, walls, ceilings, and furnishings filigree into a single orgasmic organism, brought to life through the artist’s signature experiments with form, pattern, and color. There’s a primary bedroom suite at one end of the structure, two guest rooms at the other, a kitchen/dining zone, and a sunken living room, the latter two mediated by a floor-to-ceiling storage volume clad in quotidian prefab wood shingles that strike a dramatic contrast note amid all the calligraphic finery. “It’s really a simple building, but when you step inside it’s optically extreme,” Pardo says, describing the symphony of engraved, punctured, and otherwise manipulated walls, windows, doors, and furnishings, all fabricated using CNC computer-driven machining processes.

Read more here.