Squall: Sigrid Sandström at Perrotin, London
Swedish painter Sigrid Sandström opens "Squall" at Perrotin London, a show that translates sudden weather shifts into fluid, abstract canvases. She applies diluted acrylics on flat cotton, allowing pigment to bleed, pool and dry slowly, creating misty, double‑sided surfaces. The exhibition’s layout moves against the usual left‑to‑right reading flow, echoing Asian scrolls and historic friezes, while the works reference Swedish landscapes and an urgent ecological narrative. Sandström deliberately omits human figures, positioning each painting as a torch that points outward toward the climate crisis.
Lutz Bacher Never Offered Easy Readings: ‘Burning the Days’ at WIELS
WIELS in Brussels opened “Burning the Days,” the first posthumous survey of Lutz Bacher’s five‑decade practice. Curated by Helena Kritis, the show shuns a strict chronology, letting thematic connections between photography, sculpture, and installations guide the narrative. It highlights Bacher’s...
“Where There Is Colour, There Is Imagination”: Painting the Dream, and the Persistence of Surrealism
Opera Gallery’s "Dreaming in Colour" exhibition opened in London on March 5, 2026, featuring twenty‑five contemporary artists who fuse vivid palettes with surrealist motifs. The show positions colour as a narrative engine, allowing works by Gustavo Nazareno, Xevi Solà, and Oh de Laval to reinterpret...
Art Smith, Modern Cuff, c.1948
Art Smith’s Modern Cuff, featured in Elephant’s March column, showcases cold‑flat brass sheets linked by thin twisted rods, creating a sculptural, wearable piece. Smith, a Black gay artist active in New York’s Greenwich Village from the 1940s‑1970s, helped define the studio...
Inside Yihao Zhang’s Unsettled Machines
Yihao Zhang creates kinetic sculptures that loop endlessly, using salvaged motors and car parts to embody the perpetual adaptation required of queer individuals navigating hostile systems. His installations, exhibited in London and Berlin, translate personal psychological states into mechanical motion...
R. Jamin Declares War on the Big Light
R. Jamin’s newly released *Cool Overhead Manifesto* denounces modern overhead lighting—particularly fluorescent and LED fixtures with ≥3000 K color temperature—as cultural tyranny that erases shadow and disrupts human rhythm. She traces lighting from fire to incandescent bulbs, highlighting how each generation traded...
Earrings for Peggy Guggenheim, C. 1938
Peggy Guggenheim’s 1938 earrings, a gift from Surrealist Yves Tanguy, are miniature paintings rendered in silver, gold, pearls and oil on shell. The pieces embody Tanguy’s dreamlike biomorphic language on a wearable scale. Guggenheim wore one of the earrings alongside...
Napoles Marty in Conversation with Diana Nawi: Mentorship, NXTHVN, and the Frieze Los Angeles Impact Prize
Napoles Marty, the 2026 Frieze Los Angeles Impact Prize winner, credits the NXTHVN residency for sharpening his conceptual focus and confidence. At Frieze he will present a series of charred wooden guardian sculptures alongside two drawing series that record the carving...
Mortality in Color: Anna Tuori’s First Berlin Solo Exhibition
Finnish artist Anna Tuori opens her first Berlin solo exhibition, "Paradise News," at Contemporary Fine Arts, showcasing twelve newly commissioned 2025 paintings. The works employ sand‑laced pigments on unprimed canvas, blending expressionistic still lifes with abstracted figurative scenes in a...