ART NEWS: Oct.03

An exhibition dedicated to Heinz Mack, an iconic figure of the ZERO movement. In the unique setting of The Fondation Le Corbusier-Maison La Roche, his kinetic art and op art works resonate with the purist architecture. Vibrant reliefs, luminous sculptures, and colorful paintings establish a dialogue in which light becomes movement and color becomes vibration. This confrontation between iconic modernist work and Mack’s experimental research reveals the power of art that questions our perception and transforms space into a sensory experience. The works exhibited are dated between 1995 and 2021, explore the artist’s investigation and redefinition of the relationship between light, color, structure, and space. Mack’s lifelong artistic production has always been investigating the fundamental role that light plays as a constitutive factor of vision, creating an impressive body of work that has radically changed the course of contemporary art. The dialogue between light and colour in relation to structure, vibration, and rhythm represents the central factor of the continuation and metamorphosis of Mack’s work. In these variations in the artist’ oeuvre, light is expressed in its purity as transformation of surfaces and spaces. Info: Maison La Roche, 10 square du Docteur Blanche (Access via 55 rue du Docteur Blanche), Paris, France, Duration: 21/10-20/12/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.fondationlecorbusier.fr/

As the inaugural female artist-in-residence in 2003 at STPI, Pacita Abad created a series of bold, vibrant works in print and paper—her first time working extensively in these mediums. Two decades after her residency, the exhibition “Common Ground” is a rare opportunity to encounter such a significant body of her works, amidst a renewed global recognition of her practice.  When Abad was invited to do a residency with, she was working mostly with abstraction, translating her cross-border experiences into kaleidoscopic compositions that captured the intensity of a life lived across cultures. She made the circle—a shape she described as “direct, simple, modern, universal, intimate, fascinating and playful”—a central motif. Inviting joy and connection, the works produced at STPI’s workshop reflect her belief that art should be accessible and enjoyable for everyone. At a time when Abad’s work has gained global recognition, this exhibition restages a selection of works from her pioneering 2003 STPI exhibition, “Circles in My Mind”, along with two paintings made in the same year, borrowed from the Pacita Abad Art Estate. Presented now, her works continue to speak with renewed urgency, addressing culture, identity and diversity in ways that feel especially needed and resonant today. Info: STPI, 41 Robertson Quay, Singapore, Duration: 23/10-13/12/2025, Days & Hours: Mon-Thu & Sat 10:00-19:00, Sun 10:00-17:00, www.stpi.com.sg/

Two and a half thousand years ago, a man ordered the sea to be flogged”. So opens the tale, told in a woman’s voice, in “Cloud Catchers”. The story unfolds as a tapestry of ancient myths recounting humanity’s precarious relationship with water—from violent floods to enduring droughts, often personified by female figures. Ingrid Hora’s research emerges from an imaginary prompted by fog fences, a soft water-collection technology recently developed and currently tested in various regions of the world—among them Barcelona and the Anti-Atlas Mountains in Morocco. The research materialised in a three-channel video installation, modelled after this technology and augmented with sculptural interventions that expand Hora’s work on the materials, shapes, and imagery of vessels used to condense and contain water. Dragon trees, ocarina instruments, and vases of various forms speak of continuity and communication across bodies. The highly choreographed moving images, filmed by the artist across the Mediterranean Sea, follow the pace dictated by the relentless flow of found footage collected on social media and scientific platforms. Info: Curator: Emanuele Guidi, BAR project / HAUS – Space for Art and Contemporary Practice, Carrer de la Ciutat de Granada 34-36, Barcelona, Spain, Duration: 23/10-28/11/2025, Days & Hours: by appointment only book here, https://barproject.net/

The exhibition “Irradiation” brings together six of Anton Vidokle’s films made over the past decade in dialogue with a special installation of 24 Himalayan landscapes by Nicholas Roerich, created between the early and mid-20th century. Vidokle’s films revisit the suppressed philosophy of Cosmism, which imagined immortality, resurrection, space travel, and cosmic unity as humanity’s common task. Originating with the 19th-century librarian and thinker Nikolai Fedorov, Cosmism profoundly influenced the Soviet avant-garde in the wake of the October Revolution. Filmed across Kazakhstan, Siberia, Japan, Italy, and Mesopotamia, Vidokle’s works weave together documentary, performance, and essay, inviting reflection on death and immortality, ecology and spirituality, and the possibility of art as a vehicle for collective transformation. Presented alongside Roerich’s radiant Himalayan landscapes—long revered for their spiritual and healing qualities—the exhibition proposes an encounter between moving image, sound, historic collection, and the museum itself as a site of memory, preservation, and potential resurrection. Installed as a therapeutic array, Roerich’s paintings are conceived as more than images to be viewed: their vibrational color fields are believed to irradiate the body, fostering psychological and physical healing simply through presence and exposure. The dialogue between Roerich’s luminous visions and Vidokle’s cinematic meditations opens a speculative space where earthly and cosmic time converge. Info: Curators: Martina Yordanova and Vasil Vladimirov, National Gallery / The Palace, 1 Knyaz Alexander I Sqr, Sofia, Bulgaria, Duration: 23/10/2025-25/01/2026, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 10:00-18:00, https://nationalgallery.bg/

The Lebanese artist Huguette Caland consistently defied the social and aesthetic expectations of her time during her almost fifty-year career. Her multifaceted life’s work from three continents is the focus of the exhibition with around 300 works, “A Life In A Few Lines”. It focuses on her resistance to social and sexual norms and her approach to life between different cultures and places. Caland’s artistic life was shaped by her experiences in Beirut, free-spirited Paris and bohemian Venice, California. These places reflected the political, cultural and social currents of her time and had a lasting influence on her work. Her art – often sensual and bold – explores themes of community, urbanity, love, ageing and the search for identity. Her works – colorful paintings, delicate drawings, sculptures and textiles – reflect a rebellious, life-affirming attitude that challenged conventions around beauty, desire and female identity. Caland’s fascinating mixture of abstraction, figurative depictions and explicit erotic motifs was ahead of its time. Today, Caland is considered an icon of female emancipation and an inspiration for female artists worldwide. Info: Deichtorhallen Hamburg, Deichtorstr. 1-2, Hamburg, Germany, Duration: 24/10/2025-26/4/2026, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 11:00-18:00, www.deichtorhallen.de/

Launched in 2010, LagosPhoto is the first international arts festival of photography in Nigeria. The festival includes exhibitions, workshops, artist presentations, discussions, and large-scale outdoor prints displayed throughout Lagos. LagosPhoto Festival, the leading international arts festival of photography in Nigeria, transitions to a biennale format. Following the festival’s successful geographical expansion to Benin Republic in 2023, this change is driven by a commitment to creating a more impactful and inclusive event. The biennale format allow for extended planning, providing artists and creatives more time to prepare their participation.  The theme for LagosPhoto Festival 2025 is ‘Incarceration.’ This edition explores various dimensions of incarceration, from physical imprisonment to intellectual, psychological, and societal confinement. As described by Head Curator Azu Nwagbogu, “Incarceration can take many forms – physical, intellectual, and psychological. It can be imposed by external forces or self-inflicted through our own mental models and societal structures. Through this theme, aims to challenge artists to uncover and liberate narratives that resonate with our times.” Info: LagosPhoto Biennial 2025, Lagos, Nigeria, Duration: 24/10-29/11/2025, www.lagosphotofestival.com/

Rebecca Lindsmyr’s second solo exhibition with the NILS STÆRK Gallery, is titled “Inferior Lips”. Her work revolves around questions of identity, language, and the shifting nature of the self. Through painting, she explores how subjectivity is formed, fractured, and reshaped over time – both personally and culturally. Her practice draws on psychoanalytic and post-structuralist thought but remains grounded in the material and emotional language of the body. Lindsmyr approaches the painterly surface as a site of projection and resistance, where gestures, marks, and erasures reflect inner tensions and social codes. A recurring motif in her recent work is her own handwritten signature, used not only as an autobiographical marker, but as a way to question how identity is reproduced, abstracted, or lost. The signature becomes a stand-in for the self: expressive yet mechanical, intimate yet estranged. Working with techniques such as layering, screen printing, and masking, Lindsmyr creates surfaces that hold contradiction – moments of legibility and confusion, presence and absence, repetition and rupture. Her paintings resist fixed readings, instead opening space for reflection on how we construct meaning, filter emotion, and navigate the complexities of selfhood. Info: NILS STÆRK Gallery, Glentevej 49, Copenhagen, Denmark, Duration: 24/10-13/12/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 11:00-17:00, Sat 11:00-15:00, https://nilsstaerk.dk/

“The Clock Wife” is an exhibition that focuses on artist estate management by presenting four estates through the eyes of the women overseeing them: Marja Bloem presenting her partner Seth Siegelaub; Sue Cramer and Emma Nixon presenting husband and father John Nixon; Johanna Monk presenting her beloved Vanita Monk; and Juf (Bea Ortega Botas and Leto Ybarra) presenting their peer Fran Herndon.  At the core of the exhibition is the conflation of administrative and emotional labour inherent to this line of work. Yet an exhibition built around an acknowledgement of the invisibility of certain forms of labour—and an attempt to centre them in turn—has a paradox at heart: how do you make visible that which is not seen? While still acknowledging the artists around whom each of the estates revolve, “The Clock Wife” spotlights the work of the executors themselves. In order to do so, each executor has been asked to state a current need of the estate, one that, if filled, would better equip her to do the work at hand. In turn, the exhibition budget, as well as aspects of the broader institutional budget that pertain to some of the needs—such as the advertising budget, the public program budget and the ‘office costs’ budget—have been redistributed towards tending to them. Info: A Tale of A Tub, Justus van Effenstraat 44, Rotterdam, The Netherlands, Duration: 25/10/2025-25/1/2026, Days & Hours: Thu-Sun 13:00-18:00, https://www.a-tub.org/

George Rouy’s exhibition “Shadowing” is shown at Pablo Picasso’s sculpture studio at the Château de Boisgeloup. He is recognized as a leading figure in a new generation of international artists. His dynamic and signature use of the human figure, vexed with desire, freedom, alienation and crisis, speaks to the extremities of our time. Bodies – captured alone, gathered in quiet groups, or imprisoned in crowds of amorphous energy – move from absorption and poise to expansive forces of incitement and charge. Together they present rhapsodic explorations of mass, movement and identity in a globalized and technologically driven 21st century, alluding to recurring themes of figure and phantom, landscape and anatomy, faces and masks. This bold and subversive corporeal language captures the grave beauty and perpetual transformation of our contemporary moment. Articulating a vocabulary of painting as distinctive as it is visceral, Rouy’s works are defined by contradictions: stasis and flow, precision and indeterminacy, chaos and harmony. All his work is an ongoing inquiry into the body and the body as a landscape, an ongoing deconstruction of the image towards an expression of the human body in the throes of becoming, reconstruction and reformation. His painterly language embraces at once extreme figuration and pure abstraction to capture the perpetual transformations of the body in our contemporary moment. Info: Château de Boisgeloup, 2 Rue du Chêne d’Huy, Gisors, France, Days: 25-26/10/2025, 1-2, 8-9, 15-16 & 22-23/11/2025, Hours: 10:00-17:00, www.fabarte.org/