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Drawing, Painting

Casper David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, February 8 to May 11, 2025

The Met billed this as the first comprehensive U.S. exhibition devoted to Caspar David Friedrich, bringing together roughly 75 works across oil paintings, finished drawings, and working sketches, plus selected works by contemporaries to sharpen the context.

The curatorial intelligence (by Alison Hokanson and Joanna Sheers Seidenstein) was to resist the one-image shorthand that tends to follow Friedrich, especially the meme-ified cliche of “Wanderer,” and to build an argument out of motifs. The press material lays those themes out explicitly: spirituality and religion, the infinite and unknowable, time and mortality, solitude and companionship, the familiar versus the unknown, and the perilous beauty of the sublime.

Early Friedrich appears as draftsman and printmaker, someone who draws outside, tests techniques, and only later, steps into oil with public ambition. The Met’s “Inside the Exhibition” material emphasizes that trajectory, and in the galleries you could feel it: the authority of pencil and wash, the way a plant study or a rocky outcrop can serve as a rehearsal for metaphysical drama. Friedrich’s breakthrough ink-wash drawings, made for public exhibitions in Dresden and Weimar, and these don’t “illustrate” Romanticism so much as manufacture a mood.

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Contemporary Art, Drawing, Painting

William Kentridge: A Natural History of the Studio

Hauser and Wirth, New York, 1 May to 1 August, 2025

The show’s organizing idea is disarmingly simple and, for Kentridge, unusually literal: the studio as a thinking machine. Kentridge has described the studio as “an enlarged head,” a place where the world comes in, gets broken into fragments, and returns as drawing, performance, or text. (Hauser & Wirth) That statement can read like artist talk boilerplate until you are in the installation, where the “head” is not metaphorical but procedural. The show was built around his episodic film “Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot,” and then surrounded the viewer with the working material that makes that film possible: drawings, paper fragments, revisions, and sculptural props that feel as if they have wandered out of rehearsal. (IFPDA)

The exhibition is not a greatest-hits survey. Instead of treating film, drawing, and sculpture as parallel lanes, it shows their cross-contamination. The film’s premise, a self-portrait displaced onto a domestic object, lets Kentridge do what he does best: think in public. The coffee pot is comic, but it is also a constraint, a way to keep autobiography from turning sentimental. That emphasis on apparatus is why the show feels closer to a studio visit than to a polished museum narrative. (The World Of Interiors)

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Contemporary Art, Sculpture

Kara Walker: Fortuna and the Immortality Garden (Machine)

SF MoMA, San Francisco, July 1 2024 – June 7 2026

Fortuna and the Immortality Garden (Machine)
A Respite for the Weary Time-Traveler.
Featuring a Rite of Ancient Intelligence Carried out by The Gardeners
Toward the Continued Improvement of the Human Specious
by
Kara E-Walker

Kara Walker’s Fortuna and the Immortality Garden (Machine) is an intricate, imposing sculptural installation that confronts the viewer with the brutal machinery of empire, myth, and memory. In her signature fusion of historical allegory and visual spectacle, Walker constructs a haunting tableau.

The work centers on Fortuna, the Roman goddess of luck and fate, reimagined through the lens of colonial violence. Mechanical elements suggest both the churn of progress and the dehumanizing gears of oppression — evoking the plantation, the empire, the factory, and the museum all at once. Figures emerge in silhouette or sculptural form, echoing Walker’s earlier cut-paper work but rendered here in three-dimensional space. It is monumental and inescapable.

Fortuna and the Immortality Garden is not a place of peace, but of decay masked as beauty. The “garden” is littered with the wreckage of history, and the “machine” is a self-perpetuating myth engine. It grinds trauma into iconography.

As with much of Walker’s work, the piece invites viewers into complicity: to witness, to feel, and to reckon with the myths they’ve inherited.

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