Tag: Contemporary Art

Contemporary Art, Drawing, Sculpture

Tom Sachs at the New School

Lecture notes Feb 11 2026, New School, New York.

1. The Ethos of Making vs. Owning

Sachs argues that ownership is passive, while making is an active spiritual state.

“Drive for making, not for owning”: A critique of consumerism. The value of an object isn’t in its MSRP, but in the labor, repair, and understanding of how it functions.

Tom Sachs speaking at the New School auditorium

Broadway Boogie Woogie: This refers to Piet Mondrian’s 1942-43 painting, which he replicated with gaffer’s tape. Sachs views it as a blueprint for organized chaos. It represents the “grid” of the city—pulsating, rhythmic, and strictly structured yet vibrating with energy. He uses it as a metaphor for his studio’s organization.

2. Bricolage & Gesamtkunstwerk

These are the two bookends of his technical and conceptual approach.

Bricolage (“Everything kind of works”): The art of using whatever is at hand. In a Sachsian world, “perfect” is the enemy of “done.” If a zip-tie and plywood solve the problem, that is the most honest solution. It highlights the “scars” of construction.

Gesamtkunstwerk: A “total work of art.” This is why he doesn’t just make a sculpture; he makes the zine, the film, the uniform, and the ritual ceremony to go with it. Every detail of the environment is considered part of the piece.

3. Layers of Experience & Sympathetic Magic

Space Suit Details: Sachs focuses on things like LCGs (Liquid Cooling Garments). Even if the cooling tubes don’t “work” to NASA standards, the act of sewing them creates a “layer of experience” for the maker and the viewer.

Sympathetic Magic: This is a key Sachs concept. It’s the idea that by building a 1:1 scale model of a Saturn V rocket out of plywood, you are actually “summoning” the power and prestige of the space program. If you build it with enough devotion, it becomes the thing it represents.

The Shoe: His Nike collaborations (like the Mars Yard) are extensions of this. They aren’t “fashion”; they are tools for the “sport” of making.

4. The Studio as a System

“I’m not James Bond, I’m Q”: Bond is the consumer of gadgets; Q is the creator. Sachs identifies with the tinkerer in the basement who enables the mission.

The Sports Team: The studio (131 Varick St) operates under “Ten Bullets” (his code of conduct). Like a team, everyone has a role, a uniform, and a shared goal of excellence through discipline.

5. ISRU & The Daily Ritual

ISRU (In-Situ Resource Utilization): A NASA term for “living off the land” (e.g., making fuel from Martian soil). Sachs applies this to the studio: use what you have, don’t buy new stuff if you can build it.

Output before Input: This is his productivity mantra. Do not check your phone or “consume” (input) in the morning until you have “produced” (output) something—writing, drawing, or building.

Avoid the Phone: The phone is a portal to “other people’s agendas.” Sachs advocates for keeping the morning sacred for your own creative labor.

6. The Archive (Zines and Books)

A Book for Every Project: Documentation is as important as the object. A project isn’t finished until it is “codified” in a zine. This traces back to his high school days—the DIY ethos of punk rock and skate culture where if you didn’t print it, it didn’t happen.

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Contemporary Art, Sculpture

Dan Flavin: Grids

Zwirner, New York, January 15—February 21, 2026

Dan Flavin at David Zwirner is often the rare “big-name light show” that is actually about looking, not just bathing in color for the selfies. This one, titled Dan Flavin: Grids, is a tight, historically specific presentation: it focuses on Flavin’s “grid” constructions, a body of work he began in 1976.  Zwirner frames it as the first focused examination of that format.

The gallery’s stated premise is also unusually specific: several installations are “re-creations” of how Flavin installed the grids in significant lifetime exhibitions, with loans from public collections and the Estate. That matters because Flavin’s work is not just “light in a room.” It is light behaving against a particular corner, a particular wall height, a particular ceiling condition. In other words: architecture, but with fluorescent tubes doing the drawing.

Flavin’s grids are a special subset of his practice because they push past the clean one-liner summary of him as the artist of commercially available fluorescent lamps. In the exhibition text, curator Michael Govan is quoted calling the grids “among the most intense and concentrated” of Flavin’s lights. The reason is structural: the grids pair an equal number of vertical fixtures facing backward with horizontal fixtures facing forward, in varying color combinations. You end up with a work that broadcasts outward to you while also pumping color into the corner itself, so the room becomes a mixing chamber.

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Contemporary Art, Painting

Maria Lassnig: Self with Dragon

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

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.
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Contemporary Art, Sculpture

Richard Serra: Running Arcs (For John Cage)

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)

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Contemporary Art, Drawing, Uncategorized

Lisa Yuskavage: Drawings

The Morgan Library & Museum, New York, New York
June 27, 2025–January 4, 2026

At the Morgan Library & Museum (June 27, 2025–January 4, 2026), Lisa Yuskavage: Drawings presents three decades of the artist’s works on paper—studies, monotypes, and freestanding drawings that function like blueprints for her paintings. You can watch her figures come from graphite sketches into radiating flesh, then dissolve again into stains and distemper; the materials list alone—graphite, Conté, pastel, charcoal, gouache, watercolor, ink, acrylic—maps a vocabulary of touch that’s looser, funnier, and more intimate than the canvas persona most people know. The Morgan’s presentation makes a case that the drawings aren’t side notes, they reveal how sex, comedy, and sentimentality get tuned at the level of the line.

Critics have read the show as a recalibration of her reputation, where early ’90s sheets sit beside recent work to show an artist steadily iterating how bodies occupy desire and space. Whether you find the erotics subversive or skeptical, the draftsmanship is the constant, and the Morgan’s intimate room serves it well.

Artist bio (brief): Born in 1962, Lisa Yuskavage is a New York–based painter represented by David Zwirner, known for saturated, figurative canvases that splice Old Master atmospheres with pop-libidinal charge. The Morgan exhibition marks the first comprehensive museum presentation of her drawings, spanning the early 1990s to today.

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Uncategorized

Anindita Dutta: Performance Piece

Pen and Brush, New York, May 20, 2026

Anindita Dutta is an Indian-born, US-based sculptor, installation artist, and performance artist whose practice is materially anchored in wet clay and, increasingly, in the collision between clay and repurposed everyday matter (textiles, clothing, domestic remnants). Her work treats the body as a site of pressure: memory, mortality, and impermanence made literal through the thick clay that cracks, slumps, dries, and records her imprint.

Her most legible “signature” is the way she uses clay as both medium and metaphor. Clay lets her keep process visible: surfaces read as worked and worried. In performance-related work, the body and clay often blur into one another. Clay carries its own behavior, and Dutta leans into it rather than hiding it.

A mildly skeptical read, and I think it is fair, is that work like this can tip into seduction by material density. When it’s strongest, the material excess is in service of a specific psychic or bodily proposition, not just “look how much the surface can hold.” The better pieces tend to be the ones where she maintains a clear hierarchy: sensation first, symbolism second, then spectacle.

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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, textiles

Ghada Amer: Disobedient Thought

Marianne Boesky, New York, May 1 to June 14, 2025

Ghada Amer’s exhibition Disobedient Thoughts at Marianne Boesky Gallery in Chelsea, presented in spring 2025, offered a lucid and forceful summation of her long-standing project: to unsettle the hierarchies that separate abstraction from figuration, craft from high modernism, and private desire from public form. Installed across the gallery’s West 24th Street space, the show combined large-scale embroidered paintings with a suite of compact sculptures.

The paintings announce Amer’s method through contradiction. From a distance, several canvases read as exercises in modernist discipline, such as grids, nested squares, vertical bands. These recall canonical figures such as Mondrian or Albers. Up close, however, these structures are disrupted by cascades of hand-embroidered thread that slip, knot, and pool across the surface. The thread, often attached with gel medium, refuses the crisp authority of paint. It sags and tangles, asserting gravity and the unmistakable presence of the artist’s hand. Amer’s signature strategy, overlaying abstract order with unruly materiality, here feels less oppositional than accumulative.

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Contemporary Art, Sculpture

Jane Rosen: New Studies

Sears-Peyton Gallery, New York, January 30 to March 8 2025

At Sears-Peyton Gallery (Jan 30–Mar 8, 2025), New Studies distilled Jane Rosen’s lifelong attention to animal presence into spare, lucid objects and drawings. The show paired hand-blown, pigmented-glass “birds” poised on limestone or travertine plinths with sheets of Korean watercolor and gouache. Works that read like field notes pared to essentials. The figures sit in dialogue with their stone bases; on the walls, feathered marks and negative space do the same work at paper scale. The installation made her method plain: subtract until the living line remains.

Born in New York City in 1950, Jane Rosen worked across sculpture and drawing, often marrying blown glass to found or carved stone to consider animal intelligence and our ties to the natural world. After early decades in the New York scene, she relocated to the California coast, teaching widely (including SVA, Stanford, and UC Berkeley) while developing the avian forms that became her signature. Rosen died on April 18, 2025, in Northern California.

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Contemporary Art, Painting

Livien Yin: Thirsty

Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University, Palo Alto, California, August 21, 2024–February 23, 2025

At Stanford’s Cantor Arts Center, Livien Yin’s exhibition “Livien Yin: Thirsty” (on view August 21, 2024–February 23, 2025) is an intimate, single-gallery show in the Ruth Levison Halperin Gallery and marked Yin’s first solo museum exhibition. The exhibition brought together new and recent paintings shaped by a research-driven practice: Yin stages luminous, fictional vignettes—often casting friends as models—to collapse past and present and draw connective threads between contemporary life and historical Asian American figures and environments. A central historical anchor is the story of Chinese “paper sons and daughters” during the Chinese Exclusion Act era; Yin draws from historic photographs while using the absences and gaps in the archival record as a productive space to imagine possible realities

I’m also drawn to her formal style which evokes for me a sort of paint-by-numbers vibe (I mean this in the best, most complementary way), where local color shifts are not smoothed together in their modelling but are stepped like layers.


https://livienyin.com/
https://museum.stanford.edu/exhibitions/livien-yin-thirsty
https://lahstalon.org/at-the-cantor-spirit-house-and-livien-yin-explore-asian-american-identity/

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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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Ceramics, Contemporary Art, Uncategorized

Tammie Rubin: Points of Origin

C24 Gallery, New York, New York, January 11 – 8 March 2024

From C24’s Exhibition Description:

Rubin’s conical sculptures reference hoods, headdresses, and helmets, and manifest power, awe, anonymity, horror, and magical thinking. The sculptures have a wide range of references from Catholic capirote hats, Ku Klux Klan hoods, and West African & Aboriginal headdresses, to dunce caps and medieval helmets. Suspended somewhere between familiarity and uncertainty, these sculptures capture the duality that is at the heart of Black life in the United States.

-C24 Gallery
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Contemporary Art, Painting

Gary Hume

Matthew Marks Gallery, New York, New York November 10 to December 22, 2023

These new works are signature Gary Hume: slick, flat, and glossy. He explores his languid forms with household alkyd paint, leaning, in this case, toward abstraction. The shapes are seemingly unchallenging and easy to digest — is this the visual equivalent of Nickelback? — although the color palette has some interesting dissonance. The motif of swans heads is scattered through the paintings, but they are abstracted and non-specific in their storytelling.


The housepaint used is interesting as some of the early work that established his reputation is starting to effloresce, as house paint alkyd contains different sets of acids than fine arts paints. The substrate is aluminum, which Hume has found balances the need for a visually perfectly flat surface with lightness, strength, and stability.

The questions on this work revolve around the level of seriousness. Is this work glib? Is it overly stylized? Does it have a narrative tension? Not sure that this is much more than law firm conference room art.

Hume (England, 1962) works in both London and the Catskills, New York, although recently put the Catskills studio up on the market.

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