issue 044: the body as sublime

My top 10 art reads from last week: where bodies become sites of care, conflict, memory, and transformation. Plus, first looks of the Whitney Biennial.

Hi artsies,

The big news last week was the opening of the Whitney Biennial, and by the looks of it, the critics are split. Jump to the end to get my roundup of reviews. In other news…

• Photographer Zanele Muholi won the $216k Hasselblad Award. We’re big fans of hers around here, so that was great to see!

• TEFAF Maastricht ruffled some feathers with a surprisingly contemporary photography display this year.

• ARCOmadrid, Spain’s International Contemporary Art Fair, had a strong showing.

• And I would be remiss if I didn’t include Art Daddy’s Frieze LA field notes. I have mixed feelings about her, but there is some genuine entertainment and insight in there.

The throughline of last week’s art reads was the body’s quiet ability to absorb, endure, and reveal. Enjoy!

Catherine Opie gets her due with a retrospective at the National Portrait Gallery, bringing her "unflinching realism" to a queer community navigating the tension between radical subversion and the quiet safety of domesticity.

Maier’s canvases map the friction between care and cruelty through high-chroma, unstable landscapes, positing that “human ambivalences are our greatest downfall.”

Surgical scars are reframed as “signs of care” in this archive of transmasculine recovery, which invites viewers to “witness without spectacle” from within the privacy of the home.

Israeli artist Doron Langberg confronts their own “complicity in a cycle of violence” through monumental, gashed landscapes that trade his signature queer intimacy for a blunt reckoning with Israel’s actions in Gaza.

This collection reveals an "impossible" drive to "transmit the feeling of a life being lived," stripping away the suburban gloss of the American dream to reach something "closer to the bone."

Three painters navigate the "subliminal landscape" of contemporary abstraction, using layered collage and "programmatic" iconography.

These portraits seek to “unbind the female form,” prioritizing a raw “excitement in the improvised” to ensure the subject is “sexy for herself” rather than a spectator.

Captured by the shores of the Adriatic, these photos quietly observe the "humans’ return to an elemental shape" as tourists and locals both surrender their identities to the sea.

Simpson’s repurposed bedsheets trace the "marks and scars" of the aging female body, reclaiming the nude from the male gaze, building a personal mythology of womanhood.

Sime reclaims the "choke of technology," transforming industrial detritus into almost spiritual braided topographies, offering a tactile "tonic to our artificial embracing times."

Whitney Biennial Review Roundup

I admittedly haven’t read these yet, as I’m planning to check it out myself this weekend, but take a look!

• ARTnews: Our Critics Are Split on the Weirdest Whitney Biennial in Recent Memory

• Artnet: First Looks at the 2026 Whitney Biennial: Politics, Memory, and Unexpected Emotion & The 2026 Whitney Biennial Just Wants You to Feel Something

• Ocula: Break the Internet

• Whitewall: Your First Look at the 2026 Whitney Biennial

• NYT: The Show the Art World Loves to Hate Gets a Soul

• Galerie: Discover the Standout Works at This Year’s Whitney Biennial

• And artist Carmen de Monteflores really got some coverage in NYT and Artnet

That’s all for now!

‘til next week,

tld-art