ART NEWS: Dec. 01

 

In the exhibition “The Minimal Input”, the “BIBLIOSCULPTURES” series by Ingo Gerken interacts with selected books, catalogues, and magazines from 20th- and 21st-century art history. By adding actual objects and items, opened book pages become conceptually open terrain for subtle shifts in meaning, poetic expansion, and controversial commentary. Gerken’s minimal interventions trigger multilayered interactions with the depicted artworks and their institutional contexts. At a 1:1 scale, everyday things enter the pictorial surfaces of representative art publications as assertive and subversive elements, disrupting the narratives right in the middle of the book. They open up new access to the dimensions and relations of art and, through the interplay of the components, renegotiate the boundaries of image, space, artwork, and value. Info: Kuckei + Kuckei Gallery, Linienstraße 158, Berlin, Germany, Duration: 25/11/2025-31/1/2026, Days & Hours: Wed-Fri 12:00-18:00, Sat 12:00-17:00, www.kuckei-kuckei.de/

By tracing narratives silenced by fragmentation, censorship, and distorted through historical manipulation, Sandra del Pilar investigates how history takes root. In “Gaps and Ghosts”, history resides not only in archives, but also in suppressed collective memory where it has been intentionally obscured or erased. The exhibition constructs a conceptual map that brings together practices of intervention and reimagining in five chapters. In her practice, Sandra del Pilar pursues the fractures and gaps that are left behind the conventional historical narratives. Working from a postcolonial and feminist perspective, she approaches images as sites where the personal and the political intersect. Employing transparent synthetic fibers like gauze and tulle, del Pilar creates layered spatial structures in which image and body intersect, transforming the surface into a spatial and temporal field. These surfaces generate an unstable field of perception between the viewer and the image. As Gaps and Ghosts follows erased narratives and suppressed voices, it blurs the lines and creates new thresholds between past and present. Info: Zilberman Gallery, İstiklal Cad. No.163 Mısır Apartmanı K.3 D.10, Beyoğlu / Istanbul, Turkey, Duration: 11/12/2025-31/1/2026, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.zilbermangallery.com/

In a summery and wintery mix, “Spirit and Shadow”, a solo exhibition featuring the work of Elijah Gowin. The artist’s images illuminate the ephemeral beauty of light emerging from darkness, capturing the quiet mysteries of transformation and transcendence of some of nature’s tiniest wonder’s. Traveling to photograph fireflies in Virginia, Malaysia and Thailand, Gowin photographs the visual beauty of these majestic insects. Juxtaposing these twinkling creatures at nightfall are snow flakes flurrying after the sun has set on the rural land. Their white and bluish tones echo the glow of lightning bugs, creating a visual symphony of movement, rhythm, and reflection. Unpredictable effects in Gowin’s camera techniques resound in surprising explosions of color and tone; at times, the distinctions between the foreground and background seem to dissolve. Streaks of yellow glide across the images as white orbs sparkle like crystals. The outline of a tree branch or the shadow of a river bank hazily glow in the background. Sometimes, the fireflies appear as stars fallen from the ether, floating down the river. Info: Robert Mann Gallery, 508 West 26th Street, Suite 9F, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 11/12/205-31/1/2026, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 10:00-18:00, Sat 11:00-18:00, https://robertmann.com/

Darvis’ solo exhibition “Between States” explores the hypnagogic state between dreams and reality. The works carry a whimsical yet profound sense of a world suspended. Figures, landscapes, and emotions hover in the lightness of their own present being. This reflection is not just an aesthetic choice – it is a philosophical one. It invites viewers to experience a kind of perceptual weightlessness, to hover between understanding and wonder, and to remain fully present. The freedom he seeks to embody in both his painting and performance is driven by transcendence of these respective mediums, a type of liminal levity, where he invites us to float into our own equilibrium by simply being. While still rooted in the Western figurative tradition, his paintings are looser and more expressive, with a physical language. The movement of performance meets brush and canvas. This not only demonstrates commitment and confidence in his decades of artistic mastery, but also embodies the fluid dream states he is occupying which cultivate the fluidity and blurred lines between performance and painting. Info: Leila Heller Gallery, 22 East 80th Street (Ground Level), New York, NY, USA, Duration: 11/12/2025-17/1/2026, Days & Hours: Mon-Sat 0:00-18:00, www.leilahellergallery.com/

“I trust you would” is the title of Gabriella Boyd’s first solo exhibition in Amsterdam. Fragility and vulnerability, in Rose’s hands, are not weaknesses. Rather, they are intrinsic to the act of loving, the inevitable consequences of opening oneself fully to another; they mark the courage it takes to inhabit desire and the attendant risk of loss. The slippage between tenderness and endurance also animates Gabriella Boyd’s new paintings, which explore the fragility and force of connection through dreamlike, corporeal forms. Neither fully figurative nor wholly abstract, her work inhabits a liminal space of intimacy and strength: a porcine ambulance, overlaid with a rib-like structure, speeds through a city at sunset, its interior cradling two small bodies; crystalline shards of light fracture across the canvas, catching and scattering attention; pastel hues streaked with ochre; deconstructed floor plans sprawl across the background, punctuated with stipples and small crosses, a recurring motif in Boyd’s work. Though there is no concrete narrative or autobiographical story to be gleaned from these paintings, Boyd begins with intuitive marks and gestures guided by her own feelings. Working in the vein of psychoanalytic and Surrealist tradition, her forms emerge from the unconscious drift of association: an inward turn toward the body as the site of knowing. Info: Grimm Galley, Keizersgracht 241, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Duration: 12/12/2025-7/2/2026, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-18:00, https://grimmgallery.com/

The group exhibition “REMNANTS” explores how the memories of the past and the traces of nostalgia can evolve into a narrative mythology and a distinctive visual language within an artistic practice—one that relate to the present, engages with contemporary questions and concerns, and reflects the artist’s ongoing search for self- understanding.  The  exhibiting  artists  draw  from  the  world  of  their  childhoods, revisiting personal symbols, characters, and moments that form the foundation of their visual vocabulary and authenticity. At the center of the exhibition is the transformative process through which remembrance, nostalgia, and the search for identity take on a visual  and linguistic  form — offering  new  ways  to  understand  or  reframe  the experiences of the present. In Áron Baráth’s paintings, the gesture takes center stage—the quasi-origin point of an  art  piece,  the  moment  of  creation  itself,  marked  by  an  unrepeatable  and irrevocable movement. Veronika Csonka works with recycled PLA to create her 3D pen–drawn objects, which evoke her immediate surroundings, the wildlife of Lake Balaton, and the flowers and plants of her childhood. Dániel  Fazekas  is  a  pioneering  and  leading  Hungarian  figure  of  the  airbrush technique—an  approach  that  in  recent  years has  played  a  defining  role  in  the international  painting  discourse. In Erik Tollas’s practice, the central focus lies in the dialogue between different materials, forms, and colors. His works incorporate remnants, rejects, and recycled materials—leather, wood, plastic, and textiles—through which he constructs a richly textured new world. Info: Curator: Farkas Tiffany, Ani Molnár Gallery, Bródy Sándor utca 36, Budapest, Hungary, Duration: 12/12/2025-31/1/2026, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 11:00-18:00, https://molnaranigaleria.hu/

“Vacuum”, the 2025 annual exhibition of the Salzburger Kunstverein, is dedicated to the concept of vacuum in both its physical and ideal form. This encompasses a spectrum that – based on scientific principles – also includes cultural transfers and possible aesthetic practices. From the ancient ‘horror vacui’ to the first vacuum experiments in technical physics in the 17th century to today’s quantum physics, our understanding of ‘emptiness’ has changed radically. What was once considered a frightening, absolute void is now understood by quantum mechanics as a space full of particle fluctuations and potentials. From the outset, the vacuum has been both a scientific phenomenon and a theoretical concept. In this tradition, the exhibition invites us to reactivate the vacuum as a conceptual tool for discussing questions of space, presence and absence, participation and social conditions – as an exploration of what is hidden, repressed or not yet realised. Participating Artists: Ani Gurashvili, Ulrike Königshofer, Melanie Moser, Luz Olivarez Capelle, Martin Sommer, Manuel Tozzi, Francisco Valença Vaz, Bartholomaeus Wächter and Kay Walkowiak. Info: Curator: magazin53a, Salzburger Kunstverein, Hellabrunner Straße 3, Salzburg, Austria, Duration: 13/12/2025-1/2/026, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 12:00-19:00, www.salzburger-kunstverein.at

“All About Love” is a monographic exhibition by Mickalene Thomas, recognized worldwide for her bold and multidimensional practice. Through painting, collage, photography, video and installation, Thomas reimagines classical portraiture from a uniquely queer and Black feminist perspective, exploring the visibility and representation of Black women in art, history, and popular culture. At the heart of her work is love, presented as a force of liberation, self-assertion, and joy. Inspired by bell hooks’s seminal book, “All About Love: New Visions” (1999), the exhibition celebrates love’s power to transform both personal and collective life. Featuring works spanning over two decades, the exhibition honors the agency, beauty, and resilience of Black women. Thomas’s subjects – friends, family, lovers, and cultural icons – are depicted with confidence, sensuality, and grace, reclaiming spaces historically denied to them. Her lush, rhinestone-studded compositions invite viewers into worlds where pleasure becomes a political act and representation takes on a radical form. The exhibition invites audiences to enter a universe of love, leisure, and liberation, spaces where beauty, intimacy, and self-possession reshape the art historical gaze. Info: Curators: Rachel Thomas, Lauriane Gricourt and Erin Gilbert, The Grand Palais, 17 Avenue du Général Eisenhower, Paris, France, Duration: 17/12/2025-5/4/202, Days & Hours: Tue-Thu & Sat-Sun 10:00-19:30, Fri 10:00-22:00, www.grandpalais.fr/