Last week in the art world. 19 interviews, essays, and editorials that explore artists' meaning, process, and impact behind their work. Plus 3 questions on the future of art.
In between the headlines, these were my favorite interviews, essays, and reviews—each, as always, exploring the meaning, process, and impact behind the art. For this issue, instead of giving you my takes, I’m sharing a short summary for each piece.
Two Chicago shows play with the body: Caland teases surreal shapes into sensual flesh; Lin folds paper into figures that echo intimacy and touch.
Sotheby’s is auctioning Lempicka’s 1927 portrait La Belle Rafaëla—a defiant, female-painted nude once called “the century’s most remarkable”—for an estimated £9m.
Hanh’s new series blur figure and abstraction, confronting the failed promise of representation, shaped by doubt, loss, and eluding ownership.
Anna Maria Maiolino’s retrospective at Musée Picasso crowns six decades of visceral, language-rich art, clay labor, and body as instrument.
At Artlab, Speed’s playful, feminist blueprints unravel how spaces shape and fail our bodies with ceramic fingers, hinged limbs, and living structures.
Creating and Capturing Worlds
These stories explore artists’ relationships with the world—whether capturing it through their own perspective or creating one entirely their own.
Metcalf’s first public solo exhibition transforms the gallery into a surreal ward where her paintings and recordings confront how we treat madness and trauma.
At 72, artist Rosemarie Trockel is still inviting us to question luxury, value, and unexpected pleasures with two new NYC shows.
Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s monumental wrappings revisited worldwide: From the Reichstag to Central Park, new shows, tributes, and digital revivals contribute to their lasting impact.
In his new show, Hawkinson’s small paintings evoke Holbein and hint at mortality, memory, and the sacred in the everyday.
Chinese-Spanish-Filipino-American artist Agosto Machado welcomes us into his altar-filled studio to share stories of queer history, deep friendships, and life as a pre-Stonewall street queen.
Beyond pretty ponds: A philosopher unpacks Monet’s paintings to reveal how the hidden power of atmosphere can transform our perception and our sense of being.
Tracing and Translating Identity
Bodies, worlds—and now, identity. These stories explore how artists capture who we are, across time, as people and as communities.
Merging delicate paper relics with unsettling darkroom alchemy, Harley Weir’s new show asks what it means to become—and unbecome—a woman at every age.
For Sosa Joseph, who grew up on Kerala’s river island of Parumala, painting is pure release—brushstrokes that flow like rain, memory, and instinct combined.
Solange Knowles interviews Matsoukas about her visionary use of photography and film to champion a new standard for Black representation in Hollywood and beyond.
New work by twin sisters Jane & Louise Wilson deepens their decades-long exploration of institutional spaces, tracing how sacred rites echo across time.
Raised in Iowa’s industrial heartland, Levi de Jong reimagines the American flag to test what national ideals still hold weight, in solo London show.
Three South African Art Stories
A trio of pieces that stand out for how they hold the country’s past and present in tension.
A retrospective at Yale spotlights David Goldblatt’s lifetime of photographing how apartheid twisted South Africa’s daily life, finding profound tension in the ‘quiet and commonplace.’
An exhibition of eleven vivid, spiritually charged works reaffirms Samson Mnisi’s legacy as a mythic figure whose abstract, ritual-infused paintings expand the language of African abstraction.
For nearly 50 years, William Kentridge has used drawing, opera, and animation to wrestle with South Africa’s history—holding hope and doubt, the political and the personal, in tension.
Three Parting Questions
My reading isn’t just about the work—sometimes it’s about the larger questions that linger after. Here are three that cropped up last week:
