Month: September 2025

Maria Lassnig: Self with Dragon

September 26, 2025

Hauser and Wirth, Hong Kong Sept 26 2025 to Feb 28 2026

Hauser & Wirth’s Hong Kong exhibition of Maria Lassnig last year felt like a clear, unsentimental reminder of how much of contemporary figurative painting still sits in her shadow. The show gathered works from the 1960s through the early 2000s and framed them not as historical artifacts but as still-charged experiments in how a body can be felt, pictured, or even invented. Lassnig called it “body awareness,” which sounds gentle enough until you’re in front of the paintings. They’re anything but soft. They are negotiations between sensation and representation, full of edits, ruptures, and moments where the figure seems to peel itself out of the paint in real time.

The curators made a smart decision to avoid overloading the space. Hong Kong can overwhelm quickly; here, the relative sparseness gave each canvas room to broadcast its pressure. Early works like Self-Portrait with Telephone positioned her as an artist already suspicious of realism’s promises. The body is both there and not there, rendered in zones of color rather than anatomical confidence. You sense she’s painting what she feels rather than what she sees, and sometimes the feeling isn’t particularly coherent. That incoherence is the point. Lassnig trusts it more than a mirror.

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Contemporary Art, Sculpture

Dream Rooms: Environments by Women Artists

September 20, 2025

M+ Museum, Hong Kong, 20 September 2025 to 8 January 2026

From the M+ Museum in West Kowloon, this blockbuster exhibition, Dream Rooms: Environments by Women Artists 1950s–Now, was a massive, shimmering statement that basically told the Hong Kong art scene that women have been building entire worlds for decades. The show takes over several key spaces in the museum, including the West Gallery, Focus Gallery, Atrium, and the Main Hall. Because many of the installations were “environments” (like the Feather Room and Spectral Passage), the show had specific “House Rules” most notably that visitors had to remove their shoes and wear socks to enter the actual artworks.

The Concept: Art You Can Live In

The brilliance of Dream Rooms was perhaps in the scale, but also in the reclaiming of history. For years, “environmental art” (large-scale installations) was seen as a masculine pursuit: heavy materials, industrial grit, “man against nature.” This show proves that women were also the true pioneers of immersive spaces, often using “soft” or ephemeral materials to create even more powerful psychological impact.

The Standouts:

Chiharu Shiota’s Infinite Memory: Walking into the Focus Gallery felt like entering a collective dream. Shiota’s signature red thread webs were so dense they felt like architecture. It was a massive, pulsating nervous system that made you feel slightly trapped.
Aleksandra Kasuba’s Spectral Passage: This was the show-stopper for anyone who loves color theory. A series of interconnected nylon tunnels that felt like walking through a rainbow. Paired with Gustav Holst’s The Planets, it turned the museum into a futuristic transit hub for the soul.

Architecture

Skylight Magic!

September 13, 2025

When the Yale Center for British Art (YCBA) reopened in March 2025 after its two-year closure, the “stealth” nature of the work was its greatest success.

It’s a rare feat in architecture to spend over $16 million and have the most common reaction be, “Wait, what actually changed?” But for a Louis Kahn masterpiece, that is exactly the point.

Before the renovation, the 224 domed skylights (which Kahn called the building’s “fifth elevation”) had yellowed and cracked over nearly 50 years.

Louis Kahn's Yale Center for British Art (YCBA)

The Material Swap: The original acrylic domes were replaced with high-performance polycarbonate. To the naked eye, they look identical to the 1977 originals, but they are significantly more durable and offer much better UV protection.

Just below the domes, the museum installed new “daylight cassettes.” These are the diffusers that catch the sunlight. They were engineered to mimic the original quality of light while better protecting the delicate Turner watercolors and Constable oils from direct sun.

The “Butterfly” Effect: Kahn famously said that on a gray day the building looks like a moth, and on a sunny day like a butterfly. Because the new skylights are so clear, that “breathing” quality of the light, where the galleries brighten and dim as clouds pass, feels more vivid than it has in decades.

Subtle but Significant Upgrades

Beyond the roof, the “barely there” changes were meticulously executed by Knight Architecture:

LED Transition: They swapped out the hot halogen bulbs for custom-tuned LEDs. This reduced energy consumption by nearly 60%, yet they managed to keep the warm, incandescent “glow” that Kahn preferred.

The “Domestic” Feel: The walls were refreshed with new natural Belgian linen, and the worn synthetic carpets were replaced with New Zealand wool. Even the iconic white oak wall panels were refinished by hand rather than replaced, preserving the “patina of use.”

Why it Matters in 2026

Since you’re likely visiting or following the current cycle, the museum is now in its “New Light” era. The reinstallation of the permanent collection is not just a chronological walk.

Note: If you are there this spring, don’t miss the “Going Modern: British Art, 1900–1960” exhibition. Seeing those mid-century works under the newly clarified light of the fourth-floor galleries is a completely different experience than it was five years ago.

It’s a demonstration in how to honor an architect’s ghost while bringing the building’s infrastructure into the 21st century.

Contemporary Art, Sculpture

Richard Serra: Running Arcs (For John Cage)

September 12, 2025

Gagosian, New York, September 12 to December 20 2025.

At Gagosian’s West 21st Street space, Running Arcs (For John Cage) returned to public view after more than three decades, its first presentation in the United States. The three monumental, conical steel plates are arranged in a staggered rhythm that bends the room into corridors of weight. Each plate is roughly 52 feet long, 13 feet high, and 2 inches thick. The title nods to Serra’s friendship with Cage and to the way the piece scores movement, tempo, and chance as you pass along its curve. (Gagosian)

The plates do not tower for effect. They lean in and run, turning peripheral vision into an event and making the floor feel like a material in the piece. It is Serra at his most austere. And most cinematic. (Gagosian)

Richard Serra (1938–2024) reshaped late 20th-century sculpture with site-scaled steel works that use mass, balance, and procession to produce experience. Trained in painting before moving to industrial materials, he developed a vocabulary of rolled or forged steel plates and torqued forms, along with a major body of drawings. His long relationship with Gagosian includes landmark installations across the gallery’s New York spaces. (Gagosian)

Photography

Paolo Roversi Along The Way

September 11, 2025

Pace Gallery, New York, Sept 11 to 25 October, 2025

Paolo Roversi show in Pace’s focused retrospective, titled Along the Way, staged to coincide with New York Fashion Week and running mid-September through late October.

What surprised me, walking into it, was how little the show tried to “convert” the skeptical viewer. A lot of fashion photography in a white-cube gallery arrives with an apologetic posture: please notice the craft, please forget the client, please treat these as pictures not product. Pace mostly sidestepped that anxiety by leaning into Roversi’s real subject, which is not “fashion” so much as the conditions under which someone becomes image. The wall texts and selection emphasized collaborators and long relationships, which is the right frame for him. His best work is basically an extended study in trust, timing, and light.

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