ART NEWS: Dec 02

 

“No Limits” marks Ranbir Sidhu’s first museum exhibition. Drawing on his intimate knowledge of metal manufacturing, his sculptures and installations are intricately engineered feats of balance and visual harmony, incorporating materials from around the world, including gold, marble, and mirror-polished steel. The exhibition features a sculpture, a maquette and three large-scale sculptural installations set against black and aubergine walls. The exhibition opens with Mask as Monument (2020), a sculpted life-sized helmet. An object of beauty that simultaneously attracts attention as it shields its subject from view, Sidhu questions, “What remains after technology?” An artwork Sidhu describes as being “both of this world and beyond it” the angular, multifaceted surface of “Asteroid 3033 X1” (2025) draws inspiration from the crystalline geometry of azurite and the Widmanstätten pattern. Stretching more than 7.5 meters wide, weighing more than 5000 lbs and composed of more than 500 metal facets, the work is illuminated from within and reverberates with an original soundscape featuring both electronic sounds and classical Indian music mixed by Sidhu. Its surface is chemically etched with an invented script, visualizing what language may look like in the future. Info: Curator: Julian Cox, Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), 317 Dundas Street West, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, Duration: 11/12/2025-3/1/2026, Days & Hours: Tue & Thu 10:30-17:00, Wed 7 Fri 10:30-21:00, Sat-Sun 10:30-17:30, https://ago.ca/

With new productions and over 100 works from the past 15 years, “MƎTAATEM” provides a broad overview of Kerstin Brätsch’s work. The central starting point is the relationship between painting and the body on a physical, psychological and social level. Like a portal to another world, visitors pass through a kind of labyrinth of color, light and sound or step in front of a suggestive wallpaper with mirrored motifs reminiscent of the inkblot tests of the psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach. Similar to the principle of mimicry in animals, in which they imitate patterns from their environment to protect themselves from threats, the artist takes elements from her own works and makes them appear again and again in new forms and materials. She “petrifies” her own brushstrokes by transforming them into sculptural objects made of cement. At the same time, she regularly collaborates with other artists and craftspeople and incorporates factors such as light and chance as equal elements in the artistic process. In doing so, she poses fundamental questions about the authorship and subjectivity of painting in order to put its effectiveness to the test again and again. Info: Kunstmuseum Bonn, Museumsmeile, Helmut-Kohl-Allee 2, Bonn, Germany, Duration: 11/12/2025-12/4/2026, Days & Hours: Tue & Thu-Sun 11:00-18:00, Wed 11:00-19:00, www.kunstmuseum-bonn.de/

“In the Fles: presents Joan Semmel’s iconic paintings and self-images alongside works from the Jewish Museum’s collection to explore parallel themes of the body, intimacy, and autonomy. The exhibition juxtaposes 16 paintings by the artist, drawn from several periods across her career, many monumental in scale, with nearly 50 modern and contemporary artworks from the Museum’s expansive holdings. The works from the collection—encompassing painting, sculpture, photography, and works on paper—were selected by the artist for their engagement with themes present in her work, including her exploration of beauty, agency, and self-perception. Spanning over 50 years of the artist’s practice, the exhibition offers new points of entry to some of Semmel’s most pivotal series. Works on view include her 1978 painting “Sunlight”, one of Semmel’s iconic self-images and a defining work of the feminist movement, together with examples from her bold, high-key “Erotic Series” of the early 1970s, as well as complex multi-figure compositions, including the recent large-scale “Skin in the Game” (2019). Info: Curators: Rebecca Shaykin and Liz Munsell, The Jewish Museum, 1109 5th Ave at 92nd St., New York, NY, USA, Duration: 12/12/2025-31/5/2026, Days & Hours: Mon & Sat-Sun 12:00-18:00, Thu 11:00-20:00, Fri 11:00-16:00, https://thejewishmuseum.org/

“Infinite Landscapes” presents photographs of the poet of European color photography, Luigi Ghirri. His photographs are widely recognized for their subdued pastel tones, quietly deserted street scenes, and expansive empty spaces surrounding everyday objects—elements that create a distinctive sense of emotion and rhythm through restrained composition. His images reflect a visual experiment aimed at seeing familiar scenes in new ways. Ghirri once remarked that “when you look at a landscape as if for the first and last time, you feel as though you belong to every landscape in the world,” perceiving the scene before him not merely as part of reality, but as an image that reveals how we understand the world. He meticulously captured visual cues found in ordinary elements such as billboards, maps, windows, and objects, revealing the hidden order of images embedded in familiar landscapes. This exhibition encompasses major series including offering a comprehensive view of the new visual sensibility Ghirri forged at the boundary between reality and image. Info: Museum Hanmi Samcheong, 45, Samcheong-ro 9-gil, Jongro-gu, Seoul, Korea, Duration: 12/12/2025-15/3/2026, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 10:00-18:00, https://museumhanmi.or.kr/

Kunstmuseum Den Haag recently acquired more than a hundred preliminary studies by Marlow Moss. In “A Suitcase Full of Sketches” is on presentation a selection of these sketches alongside three paintings by Moss from the museum’s collection that are being reunited after several years of travelling to exhibitions. Like other geometric abstract artists of her generation, Moss sought a perfect harmony of lines and planes, creating a reality removed from the material world. In her own innovative way, she contributed to the development of modern art. Moss made the sketches, which all date from after 1940, as studies for reliefs, sculptures, paintings and drawings. They demonstrate the artist’s versatility, including mathematically calculated compositions, watercolours with organic forms and preliminary studies for pencil drawings.  Moss was at the centre of avant-garde art circles in the 1930s and in close contact with other artists. For this reason, the display includes works by her contemporaries such as her artist friend Jean Gorin, who adopted a similar mathematical approach in his work. Piet Mondrian was also an important contact. Moss and Mondrian admired each other’s work, and Moss has been credited with introducing the double parallel line also adopted by Mondrian. Info: Kunstmuseum Den Haag, Stadhouderslaan 41, Den Haag, The Netherlands, Duration: 13/12/2025-10/5/2026, Days & Hours: Daily 10:00-17:00, www.kunstmuseum.nl/

The group exhibition “Feelings of the Season IV”  takes its cues not from winter itself, but more from how the season behaves. How different works sit in a room when it’s cold outside. Some works feel like they have thickened in the cold. Klodin Erb’s paintings resemble icy icons, hybrids of church and crystal. Each one is named after a real rocket, as if they’re holding their breath before lift-off, lending a muted sense of propulsion to otherwise static images. Erb’s “Nachtisch”, on the other hand, sets a tone of festive excess. Hybrid figures emerge as overripe offerings: part fruit, part flesh, part ornament. Pleasure and decay settle together, like a party table after the guests leave: crumpled napkins, something sweet still in the air. Alice Wang’s works zoom in, they’re microscopic and cosmic at the same time. Her meteorite scans are silvery, splintered, like ice trying not to break. Lêna Bùi’s paintings flicker between botanical and anatomical. They feel steeped in the seasonal pace: slowed, alert, held close. Like winter itself, they ask for proximity and reward attention over time. Miao Miao’s trees are calm and brittle. Behind them, windows and walls, flattened city textures. They rest in a suspended pause, a kind of compression of memory and time. Rebekka Steiger’s painting conjures a nocturnal scene: two spectral riders moving through a thick blue sky. The scene evokes a deep winter night. The palette is glacial, but pulsing: washes of color flicker and layered pigments settle like cloud cover or cosmic dust. Info: Galerie Urs Meile Ardez, Bröl 63, Ardez, Switzerland, Duration: 27/12/2025-1/3/2026, By appointment only, https://www.galerieursmeile.com