ART NEWS: May 03

 

“Becoming Ocean: a social conversation about the Ocean” is an exhibition that addresses the challenges facing the ocean through the diverse voices of more than 20 international artists, underlining the essential role of collaboration and the conviction that art and culture are drivers of social and environmental change. The exhibition reflects on our understanding and ignorance of the ocean and its future. The exhibition embodies the shared values and methods of the participant institutions, using the limitless forms of artistic expression to foster an open, collective conversation about the challenges facing the ocean—those that affect the entire planet. It invites us to rethink our relationship with the ocean and imagine new ways of acting to ensure its preservation. The massive effects of industrial fishing, the pollution of bodies of water, the rapid expansion of oceanic shipping, and the looming ecological threats posed by the emerging deep-sea mining industry all highlight the destructive nature of our contemporary relationship with the ocean. These human actions are driving the loss of marine biodiversity on an unprecedented scale. Yet, is it possible to imagine a different way of relating to the ocean (or even to regenerate it from the past)? Info: Curators: Hélène Guenin, Chus Martínez, Sébastien Ruiz and Marie-Ann Yemsi, Villa Arson, 20 Avenue Stephen Liégeard, Nice, France, Duration : 8/5-24/8/2025, Days & Hours: Mon & Wed-Sun 14:00-18:00, https://tba21.org/

Simon Lässig and Vera Lutz’s first institutional exhibition, “Romeo’s eyes” brings together newly developed filmic, photographic, and installative works that explore the processes of seeing and showing. This is an exhibition of two artists working alongside, and in response to, one another. In this sense, the duo show also serves as a framework for their ongoing dialogical practice, which began ten years ago in Munich. The artists’ practices are conjoined through an engagement with different modalities of language and space, and through a shared inquiry into the construction of the self. Lutz’s works often take the physical characteristics of the exhibition space as a starting point. They are informed by their surrounding elements, while at the same time mimicking, exaggerating, or altering them in response. In his practice, Lässig, by contrast, negotiates mimetic processes and conditioned forms of seeing, particularly as they emerge in early childhood and are methodologically embedded within the medium of film. Info: Curator: Gloria Hasnay, Assistant Curator: Lucie Pia, Kunstverein München e.V., Galeriestr. 4, Munich, Germany, Duration: 10/5-17/8/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 12:00-18:00, www.kunstverein-muenchen.de/

Two Iranian artists currently in residence at the Pinault Collection Lens presents exhibitions at Galerie Christophe Gaillard. These two exhibitions are the result of their first months of research and creation at the Pinault Collection Lens, and offer an intimate and poignant look at experiences of transformation, isolation and memory. Tirdad Hashemi takes over the gallery’s main space with “Butchered Bodies”, a series of paintings in which trans bodies appear in a state of suspension, between becoming and dissolution. Marked by solitude, desire and resistance, these bodies are neither fixed nor victims, but entities in mutation, claiming their presence through an existence that oscillates between visibility and erasure. Hashemi explores isolation not as absence, but as a site of identity construction, where being is constantly shattered and rebuilt, where flesh expresses itself without permission and demands to exist.  In the front space, Soufia Erfanian presents “Lies That Bled”, a series of canvases which revisit the fragmented memories of a childhood marked by loss and uprooting. Between the sudden disappearance of a father and the forced estrangement of a mother under patriarchal laws, her work focuses on the way the past is reconstructed through memory, oscillating between truth, imagination and oblivion. Rather than freezing an answer, her paintings open up a space where trauma becomes an ever-evolving process, an intimate path towards reconciliation and healing. Info: Galerie Christophe Gaillard, 5 rue Chapon, 75003 Paris, France, Duration: 15/5-21/6/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 10:30-12:30 & 14:00-18:00, Sat 12:00-19:00, https://galeriegaillard.com/

Alan Sonfist, a pioneering artist in the history of Land Art and Earth Art movements, who has centred his work on the relationship between art and ecology, presents “Seeds of Time”.  The exhibition explores the early years of Sonfist’s career, with a focus on the 1960s and 1970s, highlighting the precursor aspects of his ecological thinking through photographs, videos, and archival materials. In his work, Sonfist expands the concept of community to include non-human beings, conceiving his installations as public monuments that no longer solely focus on events from human history but celebrate the entire natural ecosystem, thus revitalising the history of the environment and the various species of a place.  In particular, through his famous “Time Landscape” series, Sonfist studied and recreated the indigenous flora of various locations, in collaboration with scientists, politicians, urban planners, and members of local communities, shedding light on the archaeology of natural systems and the impact of human activities. Info: Curator: Marco Scotini, Parco Arte Vivente (PAV), Via Giordano Bruno 31, Turin, Italy, Duration: 15/5-19/10/2025, Days & Hours: Wed-Fri 16:00-19:00, Sat-Sun 12:00-19:00, https://parcoartevivente.it/

“CHROMA” is a multi-sensory installation exploring the power of color, texture, and interaction through contemporary Swiss design and invites visitors into a vibrant, dreamlike environment where art and design merge seamlessly. Through bold hues, tactile surfaces, and unexpected juxtapositions, the installation encourages a deeper engagement with every detail. At the core of “CHROMA” are dynamic, biomorphic sculptures conceived by Nadja and produced in collaboration with TWOSEVEN, a Brooklyn-based design/build studio led by Swiss-born Franco Goette and Martina Salisbury. These interactive works invite visitors to engage with the installation physically—some can be stepped into, while others prompt playful exploration of texture and form. “CHROMA” is also a celebration of collaboration, uniting leading Swiss ateliers with international design voices. Featured throughout the space are pieces by renowned names such as atelier oï, Röthlisberger, and USM Modular Furniture—each representing the enduring quality and innovation of Swiss design. Jakob Schlaepfer’s luxurious textiles are integrated into both the sculptures and the surrounding curtains, adding depth, tactility, and visual intrigue. Completing the sensory experience, Sula’s soft, plush rugs invite visitors to slow down, linger, and fully immerse themselves in the rich colors and layered textures of the installation. Info: Curator: Nadja Stäubli, WSA 180, 180 Maiden Lane Atrium, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 16-21/5/2025, Days & Hours: 12:00-19:00

Mikołaj Sobczak’s exhibition “Moon, Sun, Mercury” assembles a fractured history of resistance, propaganda, and survival. Across three large-scale paintings and subtle footnotes, Sobczak draws from communist posters, esoteric traditions, queer archives, and contemporary technofeudal critiques to sketch a portrait of power and its breakdown. At the center of the exhibition stands “Sun”, a work that confronts the aesthetic and political dimensions of magical realism. Far from an escapist fantasy, magical realism is presented here as a tool of survival in the face of violence and systemic erasure. Sobczak assembles a vivid ensemble: a revolutionary woman drawn from communist propaganda, standing in a posture echoing the Magus of the Tarot. “Moon” plunges into a field of disorientation. Here, Sobczak stages a collision between capitalist iconography, fascist grotesques, and present-day humanitarian crises. The “Knight of Capitalism,” drawn from Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello’s analysis of capitalism’s evolving legitimations, is transformed into a monstrous amalgam of George Grosz’s fascist caricatures and contemporary technofeudal motifs. “Mercury” shifts the focus to the machinery of thought: the cognitive maps through which power reproduces itself, and the cracks where alternative knowledges persist. The figure of Eve Adams, the Polish-Jewish immigrant whose pioneering lesbian writing led to her deportation from the USA and death in Auschwitz, anchors the work’s exploration of surveillance, morality, and state violence. Info: Curator: Mirela Baciak, Salzburger Kunstverein, Hellbrunner Straße 3, Salzburg, Austria, Duration: 17/5-13/7/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 12:00-19:00, https://salzburger-kunstverein.at/

Paulo Nimer Pjota is an artist whose painting practice channels the spirit of remix. Drawing from archaeology, street culture, mythology, and pop iconography, he builds layered compositions that often unfold across raw canvas and scrap metal. Paulo sees equivalence between his role as an artist and that of a hip-hop producer sampling sounds; he lifts and collages imagery across time periods and contexts—dissolving distinctions between varied forms of visual, popular, and cultural iconography.  With “A Lua e Eu” (The Moon and I), Paulo debuts an entirely new body of work that marks a shift in focus—from urban visual culture to the rural environments of his youth. Drawing on memories of growing up in São José do Rio Preto, this exhibition moves through interior scenes, plant life, and mythological figures to explore more introspective terrain—the compositions are looser, more surreal, and at times nostalgic. Referencing early sketchbook drawings, Paulo’s paintings trace an arc back to his early days of mark-making as a child, when drawing was a way of navigating the world with curiosity and imagination. Info: Curators: Gabi Ngcobo and Rosa de Graaf, Kunstinstituut Melly, Witte de Withstraat 50, Rotterdam, The Netherlands, Duration: 17/5-21/9/2025, Days & Hours: Wed-Sun 11:00-18:00, www.kunstinstituutmelly.nl/

In “Social Insecurity”, Tania Gheerbrant stages a material confrontation with the long history of mental health as a tool of social control. Drawing connections between the witch hunts of early modern Europe, the birth of psychiatric institutions, and the systemic repression of marginalized communities today, her exhibition examines how ideas of “normalcy” have always served political ends — and how they continue to shape the precarious architectures of solidarity. At the core of the exhibition lies a video work that stitches together contemporary interviews with voice-hearers and readings of poetry from mental health activist publications. These voices resist the flattening logic of diagnosis. Instead, they articulate a politics and poetics of experience, suggesting that solidarity is not charity, but the shared construction of new social forms. Upon entering, visitors encounter a mural in low light — silhouettes of familiar figures, half-forgotten by official histories. The flowers made from archival prints, the DIY newspaper aesthetics, the tactile visibility of histories usually hidden or sanitized. By reactivating the discarded and overlooked, Gheerbrant insists on forms of memory that are not merely illustrative, but insurgent. Info: Curator: Mirela Baciak, Salzburger Kunstverein, Hellbrunner Straße 3, Salzburg, Austria, Duration: 17/5-13/7/2025, , Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 12:00-19:00, https://salzburger-kunstverein.at/

Originating in extensive research and culminating in material sculptures or installations, Ximena Garrido-Lecca’s work foregrounds indigenous knowledge systems and artisanal traditions along with modern technological infrastructures. For a new large-scale project “Germinations”, Garrido-Lecca continues her research into plants originally domesticated by Andean and Mesoamerican cultures and their subsequent global dissemination. Taking center stage here is Solanum tuberosum, a tuber known in many places as the potato. Domesticated more than 8,000 years ago in the Altiplano region, the potato has been a pillar in the lives of Andean communities, where it is grown as a source of sustenance and attributed symbolic and spiritual value. Today, more than 4,000 potato varieties have been adapted to different altitudes and climatic conditions around the world. Garrido-Lecca unveils an installation inspired by Andean cosmovision, the planting and harvesting of potatoes as ritual events, and a unit of measurement known as the papacancha, which unites space, time, and climate. Throughout its various elements, Germinations draws on the Andean concept of Pacha, a word with diverse interrelated meanings, which evokes, among other things, a cyclical and simultaneous dimension in which past, present, and future occur. Info: Curator: Karsten Lund, The Renaissance Society at The University of Chicago, Cobb Hall, 4th Floor, 5811 S. Ellis Ave, Chicago, IL, USA, Duration: 17/5-13/7/2025, Days & Hours: Wed-Fri 12:00-18:00, Sat-Sun 10:00-18:00, https://renaissancesociety.org/

Museum Tinguely celebrates Jean Tinguely’s 100th birthday with a grand festival in Solitude Park, where the museum is located. The festivities includes a birthday meal, cake, and various creative interventions. The highlight of the evening is be the official inauguration of the exhibition  “art ghost train, Scream Machines”, in the park in front of the museum. “Scream Machines”, a large-scale installation designed by British artist Rebecca Moss and Swiss artist Augustin Rebetez, take visitors on a short journey through an immersive artistic landscape. The installation payx homage to “Le Crocrodrome de Zig et Puc”e, a work by Jean Tinguely created in 1977 in collaboration with Bernhard Luginbuhl, Daniel Spoerri, and Niki de Saint Phalle for the opening of the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The original installation comprised a huge, walk-in sculpture with a ghost train, wheels, a marble run, illuminated lettering, and a crocodile leg completely covered in chocolate. “The art ghost train” by Rebecca Moss and Augustin Rebetez will be in operation from 22 May (Tinguely’s birthday) to 30 August (Tinguely’s day of death) 2025 in Solitude Park, in front of Museum Tinguely. Info: Museum Tinguely, Paul Sacher-Anlage 1, Basel, Switzerland, Duration: 22/5-30/8/2025, Days & Hours: , Tue-Wed & Fri-Sun 11:00-18:00, Thu 11:00-21:00, www.tinguely.ch/

The exhibition “Come in, Look out”is an overview of Karin Kneffel’s work with 70 paintings, supplemented by a small group of watercolors. Karin Kneffel’s paintings are both seductive and enigmatic. Seductive, because she places objects in the picture that sometimes amaze with their richness of detail and accuracy. Karin Kneffel became known for her paintings in which fruit is greatly enlarged and extremely close to the eye, with intense colours and vivid plasticity. She depicted the grapes, peaches and apples on canvases up to 7 metres high. These paintings from the early 2000s give the impression of an exaggerated reality that barely conjures up the idea of oil painting on canvas. One might rather think of a pane of glass behind which the subject of the picture is located. Karin Kneffel has explored the photographic gaze, her paintings show blurs, unfolding multi-layered spaces, and in recent years she has repeatedly used panes of glass and mirrors as motifs. She has depicted interiors as seen through a window pane fogged up with water or through a pane on which there are many drops of water. More or less transparent substances such as water and glass are essential aids for the enigmatic nature of her pictorial motifs. Info: MKM Museum Küppersmühle for Modern Art, Philosophenweg 55, Duisburg, Germany, Duration: 24/5-1/9/2025, Days & Hours: Wed 14:00-18:00, Thu-Sun 11:00-16:00, https://museum-kueppersmuehle.de/