issue 043: enduring & fading

My top 10 art reads from last week: things that aren’t what they seem, and the stamina it takes to keep from disappearing.

Hi artsies,

Another week of hard-to-believe headlines and my stamina getting stress-tested, alternating between shoving my head in the sand and consuming everything in sight.

In the art world, it was a big week for announcements: the 61st Venice Biennale announced its full lineup of 111 artists, collectives, and organizations, the Met Gala announced its 2026 dress code “Fashion is Art,” and NADA New York named 110 galleries for the 2026 Edition. Plus, LA Art Week was in full swing. Lots to look at, and lots to look forward to.

In the rest of this week’s curation, I kept finding echoes of that same feeling: trying to endure, but also sometimes wanting to fade into the background. Enjoy! Or jump to the end for a roundup of Frieze LA and its satellite fairs.

My Top 10 Art Reads: Feb 21 - Feb 27

"The surfaces may appear nearly monochromatic, yet this is a perceptual illusion: dense veils are enveloped in fleeting halos of color, as if former harmonies were faded fields of extinguished light or sepia, entering and exiting the optical field."

"Through experimentation with surface, depth, illusion and imagination, Tuori’s practice explores the manifold ways in which reality is perceived and how, ultimately, that perception defies universal truth and remains profoundly subjective and eerily abstracted."

"To me, it’s so different in the sense that the art piece is like an object and a film is more like watching a dream on a wall or something."

"I had managed to tap into the way I felt about my subjects: that they were beautiful lovers and deserved a loving touch. That was political enough for me."

“I’ve dug into my archive boxes to make a collage, a timeline that’s not a line... Here’s more of my story, including pictures and dangling words to help convey an urgent sense of searching for surprise.”

"Love is an ecstasy that becomes almost religious in many recent works, and it nearly always tips into pain, as love and loss are bound together."

“I was deeply moved by a particular line in the book: ‘Night walk is my own way of enduring my ferocious fate.’ For some reason, I really wanted to believe those words.”

"My work was already dealing with multiplicity and ambiguity—now it's like that is being thrown into a fun-house mirror."

"The figures remain, but the focus has expanded to atmosphere, memory, and psychological space. In this new direction, the water becomes less of a setting and more of a threshold. There’s a stronger sense of ambiguity between night and day, safety and risk, presence and disappearance."

"He understood that a person possesses a 'spiritual eye' that internalizes formative laws so as to discern in a plant what the physical eye cannot. Thus, we recognize plants as readily and completely as we do ourselves."

LA Art Week Roundups

• Artsy’s and ARTnews’ best booth roundups of Frieze LA: the only overlap - Andrew J. Park at Anthony Gallery

• Highly recommend checking out Whitewall’s coverage on ENZO and Felix Art Fair - some really bold and impressive artists to discover

• The Art Newspaper’s coverage of the second year of Post-Fair

• And an art show presented by Barry McGee in an abandoned 99-cent store - creative genius or cheap gimmick?

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‘til next week,

tld-art

P.S. Paying tribute to these art world greats we lost last week: video art trailblazer Ulysses Jenkins, San Francisco art dealer Rena Bransten, Hungarian conceptual artist Dóra Maurer, electronic composer Éliane Radigue, and French graphic designer Jean Widmer.