IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts have launched a virtual museum via Matterport. This VR experience is a replica of their physical museum located in downtown Santa Fe, New Mexico. Visit the virtual museum here.

“For the first exhibition of Marinella Pirelli's work since announcing representation of the estate in 2019, Richard Saltoun gallery has selected three of her most significant films for this online presentation: Narciso, Film Esperienza (Narcissus, Film Experience), 1966-67 (8–15 February), Indumenti (Garments), 1966-67 (15–21 February) and Doppio Autoritratto (Double Self-Portrait), 1973-74 (22–28 February), her final film. One of the most radical filmmakers of post-war Italy, Marinella Pirelli stopped making films after her husband’s death in 1973, marking the end of a 10-year artistic career characterised by innovation in the fields of 16mm film and kinetic sculpture.”

“Pardo joins artist Rafael Domenech to discuss his recent paintings and projects in addition to his proposal for the U.S. Consulate in Merida, Mexico, a project he is designing in partnership with the U.S. Department of State’s Office of Art in Embassies.” Hirshhorn, 3 February 2021.

Hauser & Wirth, New York, 69th Street “Now on view by appointment and through a special online presentation, the artist’s inaugural exhibition presents his prolific and multi-faceted oeuvre from 1953–2013. Organized with Olivier Renaud-Clément, ‘François Morellet. In-Coherent’ underscores the full breadth of Morellet’s artistic explorations through a large array of mediums.”

Read also Studio International's 2016 interview with François Morellet.

White Cube online exhibition “Emma Cousin’s figurative paintings feature dynamic, carnivalesque scenarios that explore the space between realism and fantasy, felt experience and communication. Responding to the limitations of language when used to articulate the complexities of human experience and emotions, Cousin considers how we might interact without it, in pre- or post-linguistic states. Taking this idea of ‘the failure of language to the ultimate point’, she imagines how the gestures of the body would now take over”.

Watch also Studio International's 2015 interview with Emma Cousin.

PUBLIC Gallery, 3D gallery view. “Displayed across three floors of the gallery, each of the artists are exhibited within their own distinct floor, providing viewers a chance to engage with their work on an individual level while a wider dialogue unfolds between them throughout the space as a whole. Through the shapeshifting paintings of Bridget Mullen, hybrid sculptures by Laurence Owen and Vanessa da Silva’s morphing installation, the exhibition reflects on and explores the action of changing state, the notion of ‘becoming other’, a subject that pervades and prevails within each of their practices”.

“Peabody Essex Museum (PEM) explores the universal sanctity of breath through a series of commissioned paintings, accompanied with animation and soundscape, by British artist Zarah Hussain. Moving through inhalations and exhalations, as well as the silent spaces in between, Hussain’s work — produced in London while the artist was under COVID-19 lockdown — utilizes the universal principles of geometry to guide us into moments of deep contemplation and stillness”. Zarah Hussain: Breath is on view at PEM until 20 June 2021.

Watch also Studio International's 2017 interview with Zarah Hussain. “I don’t think something that’s spiritual precludes the use of technology”

“Inspired by the dedication of Liverpool's key workers, Aliza Nisenbaum has created a series of paintings of NHS staff from Merseyside who have worked tirelessly for their community during the pandemic. Follow the story of how Aliza made these works and hear the personal stories of the NHS staff.” Find out more about the Aliza Nisenbaum display on at Tate Liverpool until 27 June 2021.

Read also Studio International's interview with Aliza Nisenbaum. “‘I’ve found Zoom surprisingly intimate. It’s not the same as face-to-face but you can get very close to a person.”

“Ringing in the New Year with a moving tribute to 100 NHS and healthcare workers who died this year from COVID-19, Patti Smith and her Band will mark the beginning of 2021 with a 10-minute performance. A gift to London, the city that Smith loves, the event will be streamed around the world for free, via the CIRCA YouTube channel on Thursday 31st December, 23:45 GMT.”

“In the run-up to midnight, CIRCA will present ‘ONE’ a major new 10-minute commission by the winner of the Venice Art Biennale 2017, Anne Imhof using footage filmed at the Tate Modern during the artist’s large-scale installation and performance in 2019.”

Lévy Gorvy New York. “A major exhibition of works by the renowned Italian artist Michelangelo Pistoletto. The first US presentation in a decade to feature multiple installations by Pistoletto, it will take visitors on a journey through one of the most influential and enduring artistic practices to unfold from the postwar period to the present. Lévy Gorvy’s exhibition will resonate with the themes that have animated Pistoletto’s body of work for over six decades: perception, time, history, tradition, and the relationship between art, artist, and viewer. Designed by the artist specifically for the gallery’s New York space, Michelangelo Pistoletto’s exhibition is organized in collaboration with Galleria Continua.”

Watch also Studio International's interview with Michelangelo Pistoletto at Blenheim Palace, 2016.

Thaddaeus Ropac. View online until 16 January 2021. “For this new series of paintings, Jean-Marc Bustamante has experimented with a new type of support made with gesso, a plaster and sand coating that is usually used to prepare the walls before the making of a fresco. This white material allows for a slightly irregular surface, which catches the light and creates texture, reinforcing the sculptural component of his painting.” More information can be found on the Thaddaeus Ropac gallery website.

Barbican Centre, London. “In this video, Michael Clark and one of his oldest friends Les Child take us on an informal walk around the exhibition. They reminisce on London in the 80s, discuss their working process and look forward to what the future might hold.”

Read also Beth Williamson's review of Cosmic Dancer. “Through film, sculpture, painting, costume and photography, this wild party of an exhibition celebrates 40 years of Clark’s work, extending beyond modern dance to visual art, music, costume and set-design.”

“Ikon announces the world premiere of year zero (2020), a new audiovisual artwork by British artist Haroon Mirza. Taking place on Wednesday 16 December 2020 at 8pm GMT via Ikon Gallery’s YouTube account (and available until 14 February 2021). The work is part of Mirza’s ‘modular opera’ series, composed by him and realised in collaboration with a singer, musician and designer. Produced during the COVID-19 lockdown, it is inspired by the widely circulated smartphone footage of Italians singing from their balconies and windows at the start of the pandemic, their small but rousing balcony performances capturing a collective sense of optimism and unity. Part recital, part voice experiment, year zero is performed by vocalist Sarah-Jane Lewis and accompanied by an electronic score performed by musician Jack Jelfs”.

”Mazzoleni presents its latest Online Viewing Room: Massimo Vitali. New Normal 2020. The presentation retraces a narrative path through the photographer's 25 year long career until his most recent portraits of the Italian beaches post-lockdown. Starting from Massimo Vitali. Human Constellations, the major retrospective at the Ettore Fico Museum in Turin, currently closed to the public due to the pandemic, this OVR introduces Vitali's new photographs from the atypical summer 2020. The artist returned to the Italian shores to uncover how the recent confinements and new social distance measures affected the Italian habits on vacation”. 11 December 2020 - 13 February 2021. To access the Online Viewing Room please click on this LINK.

Luhring Augustine “… presents an online exhibition of nine new works on paper by Salman Toor. Rendered in charcoal, gouache, ink, and ballpoint, these drawings comprise a moving and intimate body of work that explores the anxieties and the comedy of identity. Like Toor’s paintings, these new works on paper oscillate between heartening and harrowing, seductive and poignant, inviting and eerie.” 1 December 2020 – 15 January 2021.

On the occasion of her survey exhibition, Prime Suspect, at the Brandhorst Museum in Munich, McKenzie talks to curator Jacob Proctor about the development of her work, her interests and influences, as well as her artistic methodology over the past two decades.

Read also Joe Lloyd's review of Prime Suspect. “A mid-career survey of the Brussels-based Scottish artist conceals big questions in illusionistic marvels.”

Dynamic Visions at Tornabuoni Art “presents a selection of 38 artworks exploring the major trends in Op Art, Kinetic art and Arte Programmata. In addition to the 20th century masters Josef Albers, Marina Apollonio, Alberto Biasi, Enrico Castellani, Dadamaino, Piero Dorazio, Michelangelo Pistoletto and Victor Vasarely, the exhibition highlights the influence and topicality of their artistic research through a dialogue between the installations PLASTIC PLOT (2017) by contemporary artist Francesca Pasquali and Tu Sei (1973) by kinetic art pioneer Alberto Biasi.” Visit the gallery for further information and a 3D tour.

White Cube Bermondsey, 3 December 2020 – 27 February 2021. “… an exhibition by Al Held (1928−2005), the first solo presentation of his work in London since 2008. Focusing on paintings made in New York during the 1960s, the selection includes key paintings from the ‘Alphabet’ and ‘Black and White’ series – both of which exemplify Held’s unique exploration of hard-edge geometric abstraction.” Click here to preview the exhibition and watch a fascinating video of Held in conversation with Marcia Tucker, Curator of Painting and Sculpture at Witney Museum of American Art, New York, ahead of his 1974 retrospective at the museum.

Modern Art, London and Mendes Wood DM, New York “present two concurrent exhibitions devoted to German-Brazilian painter Eleonor Koch (1926-2018) bringing together a group of works produced from the late 1960s, when the artist established herself in London, to the 1990s, upon her return to São Paulo.” More information about the exhibition can be found here.

In this fascinating video, Kjartansson collaborates with Niels Borch Jensen of BORCH Editions in Copenhagen (who has worked with artists such as Georg Baselitz, Tacita Dean, Damien Hirst and Martin Kippenberger) to create new etchings and woodcuts, which are his first foray into the medium of printmaking. Kjartansson says of the experience: "Every act of artistic creation is a mood. The mood in BORCH’s printmaking studio completely fascinated me. When asked to do a series I visited the premises and fell in love with the staff, the building, the methods, smell, and last but not least, I fell in love with the lunch." The resulting works can be seen at i8 Gallery, Reykjavik.

Kander, who is currently participating in PHOTO IS:RAEL 2020, is an award-winning photographer with an international reputation. He has photographed politicians, film stars, royalty and Olympic athletes, as well as turning his attention to some ambitious landscape projects. Studio International spoke to him in 2014, at the opening of Dust at Flowers Gallery in east London, about his influences and what draws him to photograph the darker side of human experience.

White Cube online exhibition: “An online exhibition inspired by Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 thriller about the seductions and dangers of looking. Featuring paintings and photographs by Ellen Altfest, Jeff Burton, Gillian Carnegie, Julie Curtiss, Judith Eisler, Celia Hempton, Danica Lundy, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Laurie Simmons, Jeff Wall and Carrie Mae Weems.” Rear Window, until 19 January 2021.

Modern Art online exhibition: “Richard Tuttle’s new body of sculptures entitled TheStars were made during the summer of 2019 at his home and studio in Mount Desert, Maine. Made predominantly from plywood, paint, paper and metal wire, each work sits atop its own hand-made shelf, annotated by Tuttle with its particular title, and secured to the wall with a single nail.”

Berenice Carrington presents a short film about extending her diary entries made during the Covid-19 Pandemic into a series of lino prints. Taking the ancient Greek origins of the word ‘pandemic’ as her starting point, Carrington applies the metaphoric language of the classic Greek legends and myths to her observation of the pandemic on Yell, in the Shetland Islands. Her project seeks to record a distinction between self-shielding and social distancing, a phenomenon that she describes as ‘an acute transformation of space’.

Watch also Studio International's interview with Carrington. The artist, who describes her work as ethnographic drawing, explains how her practice began when she worked with Aboriginal people in Australia and draws similarities between that continent and Shetland, where she now lives.

Tanya Bonakdar Gallery – online viewing room New works by Thomas Scheibitz. “Over the past two decades, Scheibitz has developed his own conceptual language that bridges the realms of figuration and abstraction, at times dissolving them entirely. By using language and forms that suggest numerous meanings, Scheibitz challenges the viewer to consider multiple perspectives.”

View IMMA's collection of works online by artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Leonora Carrington, Lucian Freud, Les Levine, Paula Rego, Eva Rothschild, Sean Scully and many more.

Hirshhorn Talking to Our Time online series: Henrot and Orraca-Tetteh come together to discuss the project and more with Hirshhorn associate curator Marina Isgro. Wednesday 28 October 2020. This programme will be recorded and made available following the event on the Hirshhorn YouTube channel.

Barbican, London Video walkthrough of the exhibition Toyin Ojih Odutola: A Countervailing Theory. “Narrated by Toyin Ojih Odutola, the video reveals an epic cycle of new work that unfurls across the 90-metre long Curve gallery, exploring an imagined ancient myth conceived by the artist. An immersive soundscape by renowned conceptual sound artist Peter Adjaye fills the space in response to Ojih Odutola’s drawings.” More information about the exhibition can be found on the Barbican website.

Hauser & Wirth online exhibition: “… comprises of five new small-scale portraits made by Amy Sherald over the course of the pandemic. Taking as its title a widely cited statement by celebrated novelist, poet, and activist Alice Walker, this presentation finds Sherald returning to the medium of gouache for the first time since she was a child, with results that reaffirm the inherent radicality of both her vision and technique.”

Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, 3D tour. A Focus on Painting, curated by Julia Peyton-Jones, features four artists from different generations and at different points in their careers: Alvaro Barrington, Mandy El-Sayegh, Rachel Jones and Dona Nelson. Further information about the exhibition, with videos of each artist, can be found here.

The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden hosted an online presentation of Duets on Ice, an iconic performance work by celebrated American multimedia artist Laurie Anderson. The artist performed the work — streamed live for the first time — from the Hirshhorn’s outdoor plaza, and is available online exclusively through the museum’s website and YouTube channel.

“The forthcoming fall season of Talking to Our Time will stream 11 live talks and one pre-recorded talk that will be presented for the first time. The new schedule continues to feature a diverse group of artists, including Huma Bhabha, Kota Ezawa, Camille Henrot, Zoe Leonard, Shana Moulton, Akwetey Orraca-Tatteh, Deborah Roberts, Sterling Ruby, Haim Steinbach, Kiyan Williams and Krzysztof Wodiczko.

Public Gallery until 7 October, 3D virtual tour: “Curated by Saelia Aparicio and Harminder Judge the show brings together 15 artists – including Tai Shani, Huma Bhabha, Rebecca Ackroyd, Shezad Dawood, Trenton Doyle Hancock and Mandy El-Sayegh – to explore ideas of transformation from the bodily to the spiritual, a subject that pervades and prevails within both their practices.”

bitforms gallery x Small Data Industries presents DIRTSCRAPER by Peter Burr, streaming online, 16–30 September 2020. bitforms.art/stream

“DIRTSCRAPER is a theorized landscape of urban development that Burr has reconfigured within the framework of a website. Originally presented as an immersive interactive installation, the artist refashioned this piece to debut in an online setting as a generative video game where residents of a “smart architecture” act as informal narrators.”

Flowers online exhibition: “Earlier this Spring, Edward Burtynsky found himself in mandated lockdown in Grey County, Ontario due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. The lockdown presented him with an opportunity to get out into the surrounding landscape, new camera in hand, and begin focusing on Nature as his subject matter. The result is a new series titled Natural Order, which recalls Burtynsky's earliest works as a photographer.” Until 11 October 2020.

Hauser & Wirth: “… an online exhibition of new works by Los Angeles-based artist Mark Bradford. Created during the Covid-19 quarantine dictated by LA County’s stay-at-home order, this series finds the artist exploring the nature of art in isolation and what it means to create in a time of intense societal indetermination..”

Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac: “Over fifty of Alex Katz's works, selected by curator Robert Storr, are presented in this online-only exhibition alongside rarely seen archival material, Katz's favourite poems that have informed his art, and a conversation between the longtime friends and collaborators.”

Following the live streaming of the opera on 5 September, the performance will be available as video-on-demand from 7 September to 7 October 2020.

Chisenhale Gallery “… share a newly commissioned three-part audio work by artist and Chisenhale alum, Wojciech Kosma, who is based in rural Poland. Wojciech invited his friend, artist Sung Tieu to listen to and discuss songs from his new EP, released in July 2020 under the alias spalarnia (DYM Recordings). In opposition to the politics of division and anti-minority rhetoric in contemporary Poland, the songs and related informal conversation revolve around deconstructing whiteness, as well as religious and national identities.”

Richard Saltoun, 3 September – 29 October 2020. The gallery opens its first new physical exhibition in six months, featuring the work of the British minimal artist Bob Law (1934-2004). The exhibition has been curated by art historian Anna Lovatt, author of Drawing Degree Zero: The Line from Minimal to Conceptual Art. Experience a 3D version of the show featuring an introduction to individual works and audio descriptions by Anna Lovatt.

Serpentine Sackler Gallery until 20 October and online. The first UK solo exhibition of works by Luchita Hurtado who sadly died 13 August aged 99. “The exhibition traces the trajectory of Hurtado’s expansive, 80-year career and reveals the scale, experimentation and playfulness of her impressive oeuvre … she is now receiving the recognition she has long deserved and was recently featured in Time Magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people of 2019.”

White Cube, online exhibition until 3 September 2020. “The gulf between accurate recollection and false memory is explored in the richly toned and layered paintings of Antonia Showering (b1991). Combining elements of her cultural heritage with personal experience, the paintings’ fluid forms, both figurative and abstract, point to the deeply-subjective nature of representation.”

Hauser & Wirth, Dispatches, Online Exhibition. “Charles Gaines – pivotal figure in the field of conceptual art, esteemed CalArts educator, and influential member of the LA arts community – presents an online exhibition of 10 Plexiglas gridworks conceived and executed in recent months during this time of isolation.”

Watch also Charles Gaines: Evidencing Reality, 2019.

Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC), Mexico City, until 16 August 2020 (online solo screening). “In Walled Unwalled, Abu Hamdan performs a lecture that covers a series of legal and historical cases that revolve around evidence heard through walls, concluding with a diagnostic on the political and social use of the wall. Here he focuses on the multiplication of border walls and the permeability of houses, pyramids, prisons and even the planet’s atmosphere. As governments erect barriers to keep out immigrants, their police and armed forces spy on what happens behind closed doors, violating the privacy of individuals.”

75 years since the dropping of the atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima by allied forces during the second world war, a new digital artwork from contemporary artist Es Devlin, working in collaboration with her long-term studio colleague Machiko Weston, has been specially commissioned by Imperial War Museums (IWM).

“Italian artist and film-maker Rä di Martino, who deals principally with our perceptions of reality and fiction, sets the iconic American cartoon mouse on the stripped-back stage of Lanzarote. She imagines ‘an old and tired version of Jerry... a sort of angel lost in a limbo’ who mopes around and gyrates somewhat arthritically.”

UNSTILLED LIFE: Artist Animations 1980 – 2020. An online exhibition of 13 films, including Poor Poor Jerry, curated by Paul Carey-Kent, Emma Cousin, with Teresa Grimes, co-hosted by Ron Mandos Gallery, Amsterdam, Tintype, London, and Blinkvideo, Hamburg.
Edwina Ashton | Rä Di Martino | George Eksts | Oona Grimes | Andy Holden | Mary Reid Kelley & Patrick Kelley | Erkka Nissinen | Jacco Olivier | Zbigniew Rybczynski | Jennet Thomas with Paul Tarragó | Markus Vater | Run Wrake | Madalina Zaharia.

Richard Saltoun online exhibition. ‘A pioneer of 1970s Feminist Art, Su Richardson played a key role in revalidating craft as a fine art form. Simultaneously celebrating, exploiting and subverting feminine craft skills such as crocheting and embroidery, Richardson’s home-made objects and D.I.Y. aesthetic stir the unconscious of domesticity and femininity and their mutual implications with humour and dexterity.’

Watch also Studio International's interview with Richardson at the opening of Home Strike at L’étrangère, London in 2018. She talks about her crocheted works, made in the 1970s, and also more recently constructed body parts “indicating bitter fantasies”.

Hauser & Wirth online exhibition. ‘There is nothing to do now but paint my life — Dreams, surroundings, predicament — desperation, Musa — love — need — Keep destroying any attempt to paint pictures, or think about art —’ Philip Guston.

In September, Chisenhale Gallery will reopen with Thao Nguyen Phan's new commission, Becoming Alluvium. “Composed of two elements – a single channel film work and a series of lacquer and silk paintings – the works simultaneously explore real and imaginary worlds, weaving narratives concerning food security and ecological sustainability with myth, memory and ritual.” For more information please click here.

In anticipation of the exhibition Chisenhale Gallery are streaming Thao’s 2019 video work Mute Grain until 13 August 2020.

White Cube, online: Babel features works “concerned with language and communication. Some of their messages take on new and unintended meanings as we struggle with silence and strive to keep connected in our current circumstances.” Featured artists: Mel Bochner, Tracey Emin, Cerith Wyn Evans, Theaster Gates, Gilbert & George, Douglas Gordon, Wade Guyton, Al Held, Ibrahim Mahama, Christian Marclay, Harland Miller, Sarah Morris, Damián Ortega, Park Seo-Bo, Eddie Peake, Jessica Rankin, Gary Simmons and Danh Vo.

Anselm Kiefer – “The pictures were painted in Barjac, in the south of France [...] The grass, the entire vegetation was so dried out that the light yellow stalks and the withered thistles made for a whole variety of ochre and yellow shades which delighted me; which, in their beauty on the verge of decay, reminded me of the Grim Reaper, Eros and Thanatos. As I walked through the glowing fields, I kept thinking of Walther von der Vogelweide – his love-songs, his poems, so closely bound up with his life.” See also the 3D tour of the exhibition at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Salzburg.

Watch also a video of the first major retrospective of Kiefer’s work to be held in the UK at the Royal Academy of Arts, 2014.

Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac. “Gilbert & George invited Julia Peyton-Jones to their house in East London where they live and work. The artists conducted a tour of their studio presenting models and catalogues of two of their current exhibitions, describing how they make their pictures in addition to showing their work in progress on their latest series entitled ‘The New Normal’ as well as other projects which are underway.” More online exhibitions can be found on the Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac website

Read also The Lives of the Artists: 50 years of Gilbert & George, Studio International, 2017. To coincide with the 50th anniversary of the artists’ meeting, we published Gilbert & George’s Magazine Sculpture, first displayed in a black-and-white, censored version in Studio International’s May 1970 edition.

Lisson Gallery Screening | ** WARNING: This video contains strobing imagery **. To view, select full-screen with sound on (preferably with headphones and in a room with the ambient lights turned down or off). “This 15-minute sequence of intermittent photic stimulation, entitled Dreamachine 1/0 (2020), has been developed as an online version of an earlier installation, itself made in homage to the original Dreamachine, a stroboscopic device created by Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs with the help of Ian Sommerville.” More information can be found on the Lisson Gallery website.

Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, Los Angeles, 15 July – 19 September 2020. “Sleep Close and Fast presents a new seven channel sound installation featuring recordings of lullabies sung in the artist’s own voice. Culled from a variety of sources including cult horror films, opera and literature, the lullabies chosen all share dark and haunting undertones. Emanating from stainless steel barrels, the sculptural acoustics suggest deep space, distance and memory. The voice recordings are accompanied by a percussion beat set to the rhythm of the artist’s heartbeat, acting as a metronome for the lullaby.” More information about the exhibition can be found on the Tanya Bonakdar Gallery website.

Listen also to the Turner Prize-winning artist introducing her work Timeline at The Edinburgh Festival, 2012.

Hirshhorn Museum presents the US Premiere of The Evidence Room. Take a virtual tour of "an installation that gives visual testament to the atrocities of the Holocaust”. More information about the installation can be found on the Hirshhorn website.

Felipe Pantone: CONTACTLESS will be on view at Albertz Benda from 16 July until 28 August 2020. “Many of the works that Pantone created for CONTACTLESS were intended for the viewer to touch and reshape by hand.” However, due to health guidelines during the Covid-19 pandemic that “preclude physical interaction, Pantone has developed digital copies of the works on a WebGL app. This technology allows users to access accelerated 3D animations directly on standard browsers, without relying on plugins or installations.” Click here to visit the virtual exhibition.

This solo exhibition follows a one-year stay as In House: Artist in Residence 2019 at the Gropius Bau, Berlin. “Addressing global systems of exploitation and extraction, her work turns a poetic and critical eye toward the circulation of people, flora and fauna as well as natural resources, especially minerals.” Gropius Bau, 10 July – 13 December 2020

Watch also Studio International's interview with Nkanga at the opening of Artes Mundi 8 in 2018. The artist talks about her inspirations for the works on show at Artes Mundi 8, and her enduring preoccupations with the reciprocity or interconnectedness of emotion and action around the world.

Hauser & Wirth, online exhibition with a VR walkthrough and videos.

To accompany his contribution to Parasol unit's online exhibition and digital publication O Sole Mio, Nathaniel Rackowe talks about how, during the Covid-19 pandemic, he is “trying to make art that somehow speaks of finding hope in difficult times”. One particular line in the song O Sole Mio, Your window panes shine, got him thinking of a childhood memory of seeing the sunset reflected in the kitchen window. “The idea of light, reflected light, sun, these are all things that are significant in my work … exploring how light describes and transforms structure, environments and the way we understand our surroundings”.

Kitchen Window, 2020 appears in Issue 11 of O Sole Mio

Hannah Barry Gallery until 5 September 2020. “Drawn in colour pencil on tracing and cartridge paper they capture a soft, velvet and vibrant texture – a world of baited and untold pleasures, of salutary vice. A translation of the popular French expression, ‘peur bleue’ – colloquially, ‘violent fear’ – the exhibition displays Jacotey’s emblematic storytelling of love, anxiety and passion here set in the eidetic Provencal landscape.”

Watch also Studio International's interview with Jacotey at the opening of Dolly at Hannah Barry Gallery in 2014.

This major exhibition devoted to Christo and Jeanne Claude retraces the story of wrapping the Pont-Neuf in Paris, from 1975 to 1985, and looks back at their Parisian period, between 1958 and 1964, before the wrapping of the Arc de Triomphe in 2021. Centre Pompidou, 1 July – 19 October 2020. 

Read also Studio International's interview with Christo in 2018. ‘Art is useless’.

Opening 2 July, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac Paris Marais presents There Are More Eyes Than Leaves on the Trees, an exhibition of new paintings by Jules de Balincourt (at the gallery and online). “Created while he was splitting his time between Costa Rica, where he has been living partially for the past 20 years, and Brooklyn, where he has spent the last few months in lockdown, the paintings result from a personal reflection on the possibilities of isolation.”

Read also Studio International's interview with De Balincourt in 2016. ‘I can’t be painting bouquets of flowers and pretend that everything is wonderful. That doesn’t interest me’. The painter’s uncanny worlds reflect the post-9/11 zeitgeist with a beguiling charm. The world is a fragile, unsettling place, he says, and it’s difficult not to respond to that.

Pace Gallery. This online exhibition features a series of 11 new drawings by Loie Hollowell reflecting the artist’s lived physical experiences of sex, pregnancy, and postpartum motherhood. The artist’s most recent drawings were created while in quarantine at the end of her second pregnancy during the Covid-19 pandemic.

MoMA: Artist Project. Watch the online premiere of Tourmaline’s Salacia (2019) with an introduction by the filmmaker. It is the story of Mary Jones, a Black transwoman and sex worker living in Manhattan’s Soho in the 1830s, and Seneca Village, a community of free Black and Irish immigrant landowners located in what is now Central Park. The film will be on view until Monday 6 July.

Jodie Carey discusses her new sculpture series, Sun Discs. These works are currently on view through September at New Art Centre, Roche Court, in the group exhibition Common Thread.

Watch also Studio International's interview with Carey in 2017. She talks about her developing practice, the impact of motherhood, her concerns with mortality and the fragility of human life, and her redefinition of the monumental.

Museum of Fine Art Ghent (MSK) unveils state-of-the-art 360º digital tour of largest ever exhibition of Jan van Eyck. At spectacular 20K resolution, the tour allows visitors to navigate through the museum’s 13 galleries, zoom into more than 120 works of art, accompanied by audio and video commentaries in eight languages, in two versions for adults and children. The tour is free of charge and is available until the end of 2020.

Read also Studio International's review of the exhibition. Celebrating the first stages of restoration of the Ghent Altarpiece, as well as the incredible academic knowledge, innovation and artistic precision of the first learned painter in northern Europe, this once-in-a-lifetime exhibition brings together half of Jan van Eyck’s known works.

Leila Heller Gallery: Artist Spotlight Series

Born in the Republic of Korea in 1960, Ran Hwang currently lives and works in both Seoul and New York City. In this video Hwang talks about how her cultural background, growing up in a Buddhist family, influenced her work and how memories of the 9/11 attacks on New York impacted her art concepts and practices.

Cecilia Brunson Projects (CBP) presents Dyed in the Wool, an exhibition by the Guatemalan artist Sandra Monterroso (b1974). “Born during Guatemala's three-decade civil war, Monterroso has developed a socially and politically motivated practice in which she strives to restore her cultural and ancestral heritage as a Mayan artist.” The exhibition page with images and performance videos can be found here.

Watch also Studio International's interview with Brunson in 2016. The Latin American art dealer explains the ethos of her gallery and the importance of the Brazilian neo-concrete artist, Willys de Castro.

Faith Ringgold talks about her motivation to create the mural-scale painting American People Series #20: Die (1967), which makes reference to Picasso’s Guernica. “I became fascinated with the ability of art to document the time, place, and cultural identity of the artist. How could I, as an African American woman artist, document what was happening around me?”

#DesignDispatches. Tim Marlow, Chief Executive, Design Museum talks to Italian design duo Andrea Trimarchi and Simone Farresin, founders of Studio Formafantasma. Speaking from Tuscany in Italy, they start by discussing the difficulties of working and living in the same space during lockdown.

Read also Studio International's review of Formafantasma: Cambio, Serpentine Sackler Gallery, London. From an ancient forest to an Ikea stool, from musical instruments to makeup brushes, Andrea Trimarchi and Simone Farresin show the effect on trees of our insatiable desire for new designs.

White Cube until 2 August 2020. An online exhibition of new paintings created at her London home during the recent months in lockdown.

Also, you can listen to Tracey Emin talking about the works and about her upcoming move from London to the seaside town of Margate on Front Row, BBC Sounds.

Hirshhorn Artist Diaries. Aliza Nisenbaum talks about the changes she has had to make to her creative process during the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown.

Read also Studio International's interview with Nisenbaum. She talks about her first UK public commission, a mural at Brixton underground station, which offers an intimate portrayal of Transport for London staff as part of the Art on the Underground series.

Rana Begum created this animation for Parasol unit’s O Sole Mio project. “Central to it, as in all her works, is a specific balance between light, rhythm and colour. Begum’s oeuvre conveys the essence of these positive elements and, remarkably, despite the recent months of limitations with which we all live, she has been sufficiently at ease to harness positive energy and complete works that are testimony to a mind deeply at peace.”
– Ziba Ardalan, Curator.

Watch also Studio International's interview with Rana Begum at her north-east London studio in 2016. She talks about her creative process and the works she prepared for her first solo UK exhibition at the Parasol unit.

“I have to paint, there’s not a choice … it is my life, it’s an obsession … it's the thing that lets me cope with the noise of the world”

For an artist whose work is bound up with trauma and who suffered the devastating loss of 12 years’ work in a fire earlier this year, he remains remarkably upbeat. Read David Trigg’s interview with De Freston.

Hauser & Wirth - Dispatches. ‘On the occasion of the UCCA Beijing group exhibition, take a deep dive into the outlandish world of NoNoseKnows, Rottenberg’s video work in which bodies become a means of production, creating what Rottenberg calls “a spiritual kind of Marxism.”’

Kavi Gupta Gallery, Chicago. "It’s okay for artists to reflect. You don’t have to be making all the time. Sometimes you just have to stop in the center of everything and just look around, and absorb, and help, and just be there. And if you make it through, afterwards then you can tell a story. That’s my take." – Mary Sibande.

New York and Bergamo look to the future together, thanks to art and solidarity. The two cities, at the centre of the pandemic, become a symbol of recovery.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has lent Caravaggio’s The Musicians to the Accademia Carrara until the end of the summer, in a gesture of international generosity, giving Bergamo the opportunity to re-open its doors and greet the public with a surprise. Caravaggio’s painting is being shown in an ad hoc installation in the museum’s gallery of 17th-century painting, hanging alongside works of Caravaggisti. The painting was included in the museum’s Simone Peterzano exhibition, open for just 20 days before the Covid-19 pandemic caused the museum to shut its doors to the public. Caravaggio’s work was due to return to New York after the exhibition’s closure on 17 May but thanks to the close relationship between the two institutions, the Metropolitan Museum has allowed the work to remain in Bergamo.

Accademia Carrara reopened on 22 May and has introduced electronic bracelets, Fidelitas Distance, to ensure adequate distance is maintained between museum visitors.

To accompany her contribution to Parasol unit's online exhibition and digital publication O Sole Mio, Koushna Navabi talks about how the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown has affected her work, how it reminds her of life under curfew during the revolution in Iran, and how the idea of putting together the image of a fallen tree with an Iranian poem came about.

Fallen Tree / I Shall Salute the Sun Once More, 2020 can be viewed in Issue 6 of O Sole Mio

Navabi also features in Ordovas Gallery’s The Artist’s Room, which brings together a selection of works by twelve modern and contemporary artists including Paula Rego, Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach.

MoMA’s exhibition Sur moderno: Journeys of Abstraction — The Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Gift was due to close two months ago but due to the Covid-19 crisis it remains in situ while the museum is temporarily shut. It can now be viewed online as part of their Virtual Views series in English and Spanish. Sur moderno “celebrates the radical ways that artists from Brazil, Venezuela, Argentina, and Uruguay used abstraction to reinvent art and, in turn, transformed society and contemporary life. Through this comprehensive collection, the exhibition is a journey through the vibrant history of modern Latin American art and includes works by Lygia Clark, Gego, Hélio Oiticica, Jesús Rafael Soto, and more”.

Watch also curator Inés Katzenstein and Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro, senior advisor to the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, discuss the exhibition in a live Q&A event that was streamed live on 28 May 2020.

ViRal/ViTal ENERGY 2020 is an imagined artistic installation intended to be presented in the urban space of cities around the world. It comprises of a 15-metre high inflatable sculpture created by algorithm (Leonel Moura), a virtual reality work on the theme of micro-organisms projected at night (Miguel Chevalier) and a musical composition based on the breathing of the composer Jacopo Baboni Schilingi. In the current context of the fear linked to the coronavirus, they see their creation as a symbol of breath and respiration, a hymn to life.

Watch also pioneering computer artist Miguel Chevalier talking to Studio International in his Paris studio, 2018, ahead of two simultaneous solo shows in London’s Mayor Gallery and Wilmotte Gallery.

In September this year, the Royal Academy of Arts was due to hold the first major retrospective of Marina Abramović’s work in the UK, bringing together works spanning her 50-year career, along with new works conceived especially for the occasion. Due to the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic, it has now been postponed until autumn 2021.

In the meantime, however, you may like to watch Abramović talking to Studio International at the opening of 512 Hours at London’s Serpentine Gallery in 2014. She explains why, for her, presence is so important, and what she expects from this long-durational performance. “A performance can’t happen without audience … Chemistry between audience and performer is key.”

Hard to imagine in these times of social distancing.

Inspired by the universal warmth and positive message of the song, Parasol unit foundation for contemporary art invited artists to contribute to a virtual exhibition by making or writing a work in response to the concept, meaning and associations connected to the iconic lyrics and melody of O Sole Mio – what it represents to them, the memories it evokes and/or how we might understand it within the context of our time. To accompany his contribution to the online exhibition and digital publication, Richard Wentworth created this video for Studio International. Other artists participating include Ryan Gander, David Claerbout, Christine Rebet, Sonja Braas, Jakub Julian Ziółkowski and Koushna Navabi.

Watch also Studio International's interviews with Ryan Gander (British Art Show 8, 2015) and Christine Rebet (Parasol unit, 2020).

In the latest edition of Home Fires, from his studio in New York, “Pinhassi speaks about his recent work Stalls (2020). As with many of his works, Stalls collapses traditional notions of architecture, nature and the body, invoking both public and private space commonly associated with the social relations of the corporeal”.

Video walkthrough of the exhibition at i8 Gallery, Reykjavik, Iceland. More information about Guðmundsson and the works can be found here

Speaking from his home in Reading, England artist Robert Fitzmaurice describes his creative life under lockdown.

Read also Anna McNay’s interview with Fitzmaurice. The artist talks about the work in his latest show, now postponed, his interests and influences – and how he is coping with lockdown.

Online exhibition of video art marking MOMENTUM’s 10th Anniversary

“Addressing the viral times we live in, COVIDecameron takes its title from Boccaccio’s literary classic, The Decameron. We follow in this author’s fabled footsteps, whose storytellers flee the plague in Florence; escaping the dangers of disease in the city, they retreat to the countryside to regale each other with tales of their times. Escaping from the world at large, they instead bring the outside world to life in seclusion through the artistry of their storytelling.” Artists: Shaarbek Amankul, Stefano Cagol, Nezaket Ekici, Thomas Eller, Theo Eshetu, Doug Fishbone, Mariana Hahn, Gülsün Karamustafa, David Krippendorff, Janet Laurence, Map Office, Kate McMillan, Tracey Moffatt & Gary Hillberg, Anxiong Qiu, Nina E. Schönefeld, Varvara Shavrova, Sumugan Sivanesan, Mariana Vassileva, Shingo Yoshida.

Mazzoleni’s digital project: #MAZZOLENIBRUNCH

Melissa McGill: “As the sails glide through the lagoon in unison, the distinct reds will visually mix, join, and blend, reflecting in its waters. Against the contrasting sky and sea, the reds reference the forces of life and passion, of alarm and urgency, and Venice itself – from its bricks and terra cotta rooftops, to its flag and history of trade in red pigment, to paintings by Titian, Tintoretto, and other Venetian masters.” For more information about this project go to Mazzoleni’s Facebook page.

Lévy Gorvy’s online viewing room

This online exhibition features twelve watercolours painted by Clemente at his New York home during this time of self-isolation.

All at Once, Fridman Gallery’s first online exhibition.

Ana Prvacki’s very apposite video is part of All at Once, curated by Regine Basha, featuring images, sound, video and performance from artists such as Julie Mehretu, McArthur Binion, Milford Graves, Cauleen Smith, Nate Lewis, Aura Satz, Heather Dewey-Hagborg and Public Assembly.

Studio International archive, 2013. At the opening of Kara Walker's first UK exhibition at Camden Arts Centre, Anna McNay spoke to her about her work, which is a dark and, at times, sinister, exploration of race, gender, sexuality and violence in American history and society.

Hirshhorn Artist Diaries. 100 artists have been asked to make a series of short video diaries to become part of the Hirshhorn’s record of the effects of the global pandemic on artists, their art-making practices and their views of the world.

Read also Anna McNay’s interview with Mariko Mori from the Studio International archive, 2016. The artist talks about her mission to place site-specific artworks honouring nature on the six habitable continents, and her involvement with the cultural programme of the Rio 2016 Olympic and Paralympic Games.

Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac Paris Marais. To coincide with the reopening on 12 May of Sylvie Fleury's exhibition She-Devils on Wheels the gallery are sharing the video of her 1998 performance Between My Legs.

Ikon Gallery video walkthrough

If only a magic wand could be waved to solve the world’s ecological problems. John Newling has an abundance of them, bundled up on plinths in his solo exhibition at Birmingham’s Ikon Gallery. Made from sticks collected by the artist on his daily walks near his Nottingham home, the black and white wands are joined by other objects: leaf fossils reminding us of vast geological periods, and feather quills speaking to the comparatively recent emergence of human culture. Read David Trigg’s review of the exhibition:

Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre | 3D Virtual Tour. Yin Cao, curator of Chinese art, Art Gallery of New South Wales: “Art can encourage compassion, fellow feeling and cross-cultural understanding. Such understanding is especially important in the moment of Covid-19, when many Australians of Chinese heritage have experienced unkindness and abuse”. Pulse of the Dragon features ten contemporary Chinese and Chinese-Australian artists, including Guan Wei (also currently on the walls of the closed Art Gallery of NSW in the exhibition In one drop of water), Cang Xin, Jin Sha and Yang Xifa, who responded to five elements of Chinese tradition: religious witchcraft, mythology, folk art, folk culture and the literati spirit.

See also the Together in Art, Art Gallery of New South Wales.

Camden Art Centre. Originally planned as a group exhibition, this new online project has been developed in response to the Covid-19 crisis and the closure of the galleries due to the pandemic. It investigates the importance of the plant kingdom to human culture, science and spirituality and features new digital commissions and online works by Adam Chodzko, Tamara Henderson, Ghislaine Leung, James Richards and Steve Reinke, Joachim Koester, Gemma Anderson and Kerstin Brätsch. Curated by Gina Buenfeld and Martin Clark, film by Antonio Rui Ribero. Read more about this project on the Camden Art Centre website.

Turner-Prize-winning artist Helen Cammock talks about her new film and text work created during her residency at Wysing Arts Centre.

Read also David Trigg’s interview with Cammock. “Creativity requires a space of idleness, of being still”

Albertz Benda, New York, online launch. For the online presentation, Le Brun has made short films about each painting which can be viewed on the show's webpage. Read also, from the Studio International archive, Jill Spalding’s interview with Le Brun in New York, 2014

Lisson Gallery W 24th St, New York. Virtual tour of Richard Long’s first exhibition at Lisson’s New York gallery.

Watch also, from the Studio International archive, Kate Brindley talking to Anna McNay about Long's exhibition Time and Space at Arnolfini, Bristol, during the city’s 2015 European Green Capital celebrations.

Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Sonnet Stanfill, Senior Curator of Fashion and Textiles, takes a closer look at some of Schiaparelli's most iconic garments, including the Shoe hat and Skeleton dress, created in collaboration with Salvador Dali.

Read also a Cindi di Marzo's review of Schiaparelli & Prada: Impossible Conversations, Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute, New York from the Studio International archive, 2012.

Short video interviews with contemporary artists whose works have featured in exhibitions at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. View more on the Guggenheim YouTube channel

Watch also a video tour of Lin Tianmiao’s Beijing studio from the Studio International archive, 2015.

Virtual tour of Cao Fei’s exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery, London

Cao’s first large-scale UK exhibition is a fantastical exploration of utopian and dystopian worlds, a collision of the real and the virtual, and a meditation on technological progress. Read David Trigg’s review.

Recorded April 10, 2020 in Reykjavík

Hirshhorn Artist Diaries. 100 artists have been asked to make a series of short video diaries to become part of the Hirshhorn’s record of the effects of the global pandemic on artists, their art-making practices and their views of the world.

Watch also the video diaries of Theaster Gates, Shirin Neshat and Tony Ousler.

Virtual tour of Léon Spilliaert at the Royal Academy of Arts, London

Read also Joe Lloyd’s review of the exhibition. “Ostend’s master draughtsman oscillates between retreat and escape, nocturnal and diurnal, imbuing the everyday with an eeriness.”

Palazzo Strozzi, Florence
Tomás Saraceno talks about Particular Matter(s). With Saraceno’s solo show Aria temporarily closed at Palazzo Strozzi, he is turning to online platforms to give a greater insight to particular artworks.

And read Veronica Simpson’s review of Tomás Saraceno: Aria. “Saraceno’s utopian visions for a future without fossil fuel or boundaries – and his admiration for spider technology - make for a compelling show.”

Galerie Hubert Winter
Watch one of Hafif’s last interviews at her studio in Laguna Beach, 2017.

And view a virtual tour of the exhibition.

Alice Walton with Anna Lucas
Exhibition online at Tintype, London.

“One of the great joys of walking in a forest, is you give up any attempt to analyse it... you just enjoy the act of looking.”
A virtual tour of Among the Trees at Hayward Gallery with Director Ralph Rugoff.

Curators' Picks – Short Films

Kirsten Lepore, Hi Stranger, 2017. Animation, 2 mins.

Whitechapel Gallery YouTube Channel

Temporarily closed due to the Covid-19 pandemic the gallery are featuring online screenings of film, video and animation as part of their Artists’ Film International series.

Video tour of his exhibition at The Met Breuer

See also the feature-length documentary Gerhard Richter Painting, filmed mostly at his studio in Cologne

Whitney Museum of American Art

The artist talks about the making of her installation Kitchen, a tribute to the unsung labour of women throughout time. Created over the course of five years Kitchen presents a full-scale, exactingly detailed room encrusted with individually applied glass beads.

Video walkthrough of this group exhibition at Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art narrated by curator Natasha Hoare. Transparent Things uses Chapter 1 of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel as a script. In this brief text objects exert uncanny agency, pulling us back anecdotally and materially into their past, and catalysing radical perceptual shifts. This 'script' lends itself to an exploration of contemporary sculpture.

Exhibition Tour | Tate
Tate curators Caroline Corbeau-Parsons and Alice Insley discuss the iconic illustrator's short and scandalous career. Read also Beth Williamson's review of the exibition and A New Illustrator – Aubrey Beardsley, published in the very first issue of The Studio magazine in 1893.

MoMA VIRTUAL VIEWS
Dali made this short 16mm film on the terrace of his villa in Port Lligat, Costa Brava, Spain and is one of nine films from MoMA’s Private Lives Public Spaces exhibition made available online

“What else is there to do but work. I’ve had no problem ever finding things to do, and the thing that motivates me is painting”.

This documentary film follows British artist William Tillyer as he prepares new paintings for a series of major 80th birthday exhibitions held at Bernard Jacobson Gallery in 2018 and works on a number of collaborative projects.
A Film by Mark James.
Exclusive Online Screening (Work in Progress), for a limited period only.

Simon Lee Gallery
Video walkthrough of the exhibition.

Read also Alexander Glover's 2016 interview with Donna Huanca.
“Memory is perhaps the most permanent architecture”. The Chicago-born artist discusses shedding skin, the idea of permanence, and being involved in Manifesta 11.

Curator-led video tour, filmed before Tate Modern closed.

There is a great deal of death in this exhibition but, ultimately, it is an overwhelming lust for life that permeates every room.
Read also Beth Williamson’s review of this exhibition

Portrait artist Patricia Guzmán shares her thoughts and fears concerning the Covid-19 pandemic from her home in Mexico City.

“I never imagined that one of my anxieties would be to feel fear once I stepped out of my door, to go out to the street, and be close to my fellow human beings.”

perpetuum mobile is an immersive three-screen video installation showing Kirwan’s live performances in the ancient cedar forests of Lebanon and on the Ustyurt plateau and Aral Sea regions of Uzbekistan. These were synthesised with her performances under water and other imagery to create an immersive montage of fragmented, interwoven images as a metaphorical meditation on memory and memorial. The soundscape was composed by Tom Lane with whom Kirwan has had a long-standing collaboration.

Brooklyn-based artist Anita Glesta sends a video message from her temporary studio in upstate New York. "I am reading about, and working on, what it means when a foreign substance … enters the body, and the fragility of being human"

View also Glesta’s The WATERSHED Project at the National Theatre, London 2015 and Navigating Memory, the Universe and Nothing, Studio International 2013.

Richard Saltoun Gallery

An online 360 walkthrough of Soltau’s first solo show with the gallery, re-staging works from her early years in post-war Darmstadt, Germany.

Parasol unit foundation for contemporary art

Two group exhibitions of works by contemporary Iranian artists held concurrently at the 58th Venice Biennale and London in 2019.

Perrotin #Unlocked

In this video Daniel Arsham talks about the making of Paris, 3020.

Read also Joe Lloyd’s review of Paris 3020 published before the lockdown.

This exhibition looks back to the art of the distant past and imagines how it might appear in the distant future. It is an extension of Arsham’s recurrent practice of ageing up emblematic objects and technologies of the past half-century into colourless, corroding husks.

BMW Tate Live Exhibition Performance

A one-off performance, My Body, My Archive, filmed in the now empty Tanks at Tate Modern following its closure to the public.

Centre Pompidou, Paris

“…an artist marked by his history and a half-century of questioning on the role and voice of the artist in our societies”. For those of you who didn’t get to see the exhibition, watch this video walkthrough with Bernard Blistène, exhibition curator.

Studio International Archive
Surrounded by her wall-sized canvases and small graphite drawings (stored in paint-splattered plastic leaves), Wylie talked about her drawing, painting and thinking process, and the things that inspire and influence her work.

Hauser & Wirth
At home in Somerset, Don McCullin talks about photographing a landscape he knows in his bones, as depicted in his exhibition The Stillness of Life.