Art

Francis Bacon’s work doesn’t pull punches. His portraits—distorted, raw and brutally emotional -- are on full display at the National Portrait Gallery’s Francis Bacon: Human Presence. The exhibition spans Bacon’s career, from his early 1940s portraits to his self-portraits and deeply personal works in the 1960s. It’s a study of how Bacon tore apart traditional portraiture, using his personal anguish as fuel. The influence of his relationships is glaring -- most notably, his long-term partner Peter Lacy, whose vulnerability is captured amidst chaos. Bacon’s use of the triptych format reveals the collapse of their relationship, faces twisting into something monstrous. And when his lover George Dyer died by suicide just before a major show, Bacon’s grief turned inward. A 1973 self-portrait sh...

Everyday is an adventure in Jonas Wood's vibrant paintings. The American artist is globally recognized for flattening the banality of daily life into wondrous compositions that incorporate his passions across sports, plants and virtually any subject that piques his interest. On view at Gagosian London is a new solo exhibition of paintings that explore how Wood conflates often competing elements. Housed at the gallery's Grosvenor Hill location, the eponymously titled show presents some of Wood's most chaotically patterned works to date. Wood likes to play with perspective, shifting the flattened plane of the canvas through repeating patterns, like the texture of a wall or couch, with competing colors, shapes and decorative elements, such as a distant skyline in Robot and Bear (2024) or a di...

Wahyu Ichwandardi aka Pinot isn’t your typical animator and illustrator. A quick scroll through his Instagram feed and you’ll encounter drawings and animations in his signature, pixelated style. Although the Indonesian artist employs traditional tools such pen and paper to create quirky visuals of cats, dogs and even Steve Jobs, Pinot is acclaimed for using unconventional devices to create a slew of meticulous animations such as crafting a rainy New York City scene using Mario Paint in the Nintendo SNES. He’s able to create on anything that is programmable including Nokia phones, PalmPilots, ZX Spectrum and vintage Apple Mac computers. The artist is prolific with these devices, having created hundreds of these illustrations that depict bustling city life, nostalgic avatars and familiar pop...

Marianne Boesky Gallery presents a new solo exhibition by Jammie Holmes. For his second show with the gallery, the Dallas-born artist summons a new body of large-scale paintings that captures narratives of Black families and Southern tradition, exploring the potency of love and loss in a series of lush floral scenes.Morning Thoughts marks a departure from the artist’s signature style of portraiture; rather, he turns an inquisitive eye towards the symbolic power of flowers. Flecks of his more familiar motifs are peppered throughout the works, though the few human subjects of the exhibition appear as opaque silhouettes or faces engulfed in a massive bloom.The exhibition calls on still life traditions in a bouquet of fiery daylilies and rich, regal morning glories. Holmes was drawn to these f...

"What if we were all actors in a film in perpetual production?" asks American artist Martine Syms. "What if “reality” was written by images?" Total is a new solo show that embarks to answer these existential questions through a series of objects-turned-editions that replicate the artist's Los Angeles-based studio.On view at Paris' Lafayette Anticipations, the show marks Syms' first retrospective exhibition in France, and will present a meditation on consumption as a form of performance and performance as a means of consumption. By transforming her own studio objects as editions available for purchase, Syms probes into the ways in which material objects act as extensions of identity, as well as the mechanisms that drive these desires. The show is mapped out across shopping bags, t-shirts, f...

A new book from Japanese publisher Iwanami Shoten is set to feature the image boards of Studio Ghibli's Hayao Miyazaki.The upcoming title will highlight both publicized and never-before-seen image boards of several Ghibli films, and will include an interview with Ghibli producer Toshio Suzuki. Each volume will focus on a single Studio Ghibli film and will showcase the early pre-production illustrations that serve as the basis of the films' strong visual components. In order to retain the magic of these image boards, the pages will be measured at a whopping 12.8 by 10.1 inches.As per SoraNews24, the volumes will seemingly be published in the order of movies' release dates, kicking off with Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind and Laputa: Castle in the Sky followed by My Neighbor Totoro.The Ha...

The Drawing Center in New York City recently opened a monumental exhibition entitled The Way I See It that features over 350 artworks curated by KAWS. Culled from his immense, personal collection of over 3,000 works on paper, KAWS selected a diverse coterie of pieces by an estimated 500 artists. The presentation continues The Drawing Center’s programming that solely focuses on the exhibition of drawings, both historical and contemporary, while offering viewers a glimpse into the personal tastes of diverse collectors from across the globe.Covering the 20th-21st centuries, The Way I See it encompasses works on paper that touch on distinct genres including comics, commercial illustrations as well as pages torn from graffiti black books. It includes pieces by Abstract Expressionist Willem de K...

Jun Takahashi is set to present his first-ever solo art exhibition, Peaceable Kingdom in Hong Kong this month.Takahishi is a highly acclaimed figure in the fashion sector, whom most know of as the founder of UNDERCOVER. While this is his first solo exhibition in Hong Kong, the designer has been creating paintings outside of his fashion work for decades. In 2023,  Takahashi finally presented his artwork to the public and was even featured on the cover of Hypebeast Magazine last fall.Going deeper into Takahashi’s dark and surreal universe, Peaceable Kingdom will showcase the three canvases that inspired the motifs in the designers’ SS25 Men’s collection. A new body or paintings will also be unveiled at the exhibition, all tied in with a running concept of portraying “the conflict between the...

Buying property in any metropolitan city comes with a steep price tag, but how about one with an original Banksy mural? A Bristol building is about to hit the auction block bearing one of the elusive street artist's early imprints of a bear throwing a molotov cocktail at the police. Entitled Mild Mild West, Banksy was inspired to paint the mural back in 1999, after a warehouse party was raided by the cops. The building was vacant when first bought in 2000 for a modest $71,000 USD. Today, it houses four bedrooms and a barber shop on the ground floor, which is expected to garner roughly a million dollars when it hits the market with the following blurb: “Bristol’s home-grown and anonymous graffiti artist Banksy is known all across the world for his satirical, anti-establishment, and thought-...

In Austria, the Vienna Secession and Seoul’s Art Sonje Center are presenting an interplay of light and darkness. Curated by Sunjung Kim, Forms of the Shadow is a group exhibition that brings forth a constellation of sculptures, paintings, embroideries and performances that explores humanity’s enduring journey through adversity and hope.The show features the work of 17 artists, each inviting viewers to reflect upon interconnectedness amidst turbulent times. Ramiro Wong’s melty suitcases and Jin-me Yoon’s multi-channel video work echo the outsider experience, probing historical tension between the East and West. Elsewhere, Janie Jin Kaison’s lush scenes and Kyungah Ham’s embroidered chandelier disrupt funerary scenes with moments of unexpected beauty. With an air of melancholic hope, the wor...

At the dawn of the 20th century, a new cultural scene emerged in East Sussex. Composed of a circle of writers, artists and philosophers, the Bloomsbury Group marked a new sense of modern thinking in England. While they first came together in the then burgeoning art hub of Bloomsbury, the bunch carved out a home at Charleston, artist Vanessa Bell’s countryside farmhouse.Nearly one century later, Sotheby’s has just announced a new private selling and loan exhibition in collaboration with Charleston, spotlighting the works of the influential intellectual club at the estate-turned-museum. Curated by the ex-Fendi, Dior menswear director Kim Jones, Radical Modernity: From Bloomsbury to Charleston honors the experimental and progressive spirit of the Bloomsbury Group.The exhibition features a stu...