Uta Barth in Blur / Obscure / Distort: Photography and Perception at the Norton Museum of Art, Palm Beach

Uta Barth
April 5 - August 24, 2025 | Norton Museum of Art, Palm Beach

Installation view of Blur / Obscure / Distort: Photography and Perception (April 5 – August 24, 2025) at the Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida. Courtesy of the Norton Museum of Art. Photo: Ashley Kerr.

Blur / Obscure / Distort: Photography and Perception brings together photographs that are linked by the common objective of disrupting the viewer’s sense of time, space, place, or scale. Sometimes considered errors, photographic blur, distortion, and obfuscation have also been important creative and aesthetic strategies adopted by artists since the medium’s 19th-century inception. Highlighting photographs from the Norton’s Collection and a selection of special loans, this exhibition points to the constructed nature of perception and, in turn, photography’s vulnerability to manipulation even when it appears to show what is “real.”

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Pae White in Énormément bizarre at Centre Pompidou, Paris

Pae White
March 26 - June 30, 2025 | Centre Pompidou, Paris

Jean Chatelus, who passed away in 2021 at the age of 82, was a Lyon-born historian and lecturer at the Sorbonne. Throughout his life, he amassed a unique collection, driven more by an impulse to accumulate than by a traditional collector’s approach. Comprising nearly 400 pieces—sculptures, installations, paintings, photographs, drawings, votive and vernacular objects—the collection explores themes of the body, death, and the fleeting nature of life.

Énormément Bizarre: The Jean Chatelus Collection, donated by the Antoine de Galbert Foundation reflects Chatelus’s evolving tastes: from an early fascination with Surrealism and repurposed objects, to a later focus on body art. It also reveals his keen interest in non-Western ethnographic artifacts, folk traditions, and the works of contemporary art’s outsiders and enfant terribles, including Pae White, Cindy Sherman, Mike Kelley, Christian Boltanski, Yayoi Kusama, Michel Journiac, Daniel Spoerri, Robert Filliou, Nam June Paik, Joana Vasconcelos, Andres Serrano, and Wim Delvoye.

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Fiona Banner AKA The Vanity Press

Fiona Banner AKA The Vanity Press | Burlington Contemporary

Fiona Banner AKA The Vanity Press in 2024. (© Fiona Banner Studio; courtesy the artist and Frith Street Gallery, London; photograph Leroy Boeteng).

interviewed by Millie Walton

Although the links drawn between different types of assault and exploitation – on the body, on the landscape, on language itself – are often unsettling and confronting, there is always a sense of play to what Banner makes, a sending-up or collapsing of ‘grand’ ideas but also of her work. For her Tate commission in 2010, for example, she bought and installed two full-size fighter jets – a Sea Harrier aircraft and a SEPECAT Jaguar aircraft – into the Duveen galleries, creating an environment that was alternately monumental and sad. She later melted the planes down into ingots, which she keeps in her east London studio. Ahead of Banner’s solo exhibition at Frith Street Gallery, London (21st March–3rd May 2025), Millie Walton spoke to the artist about language, time, motherhood and military aircraft.

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Artist Rirkrit Tiravanija: "As an artist, I can only make signs."

Rirkrit Tiravanija | Louisiana Channel

“Paying attention now is actually a kind of political act."

Renowned Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija reflects on the role of art in a time of crisis, the importance of questioning authority, and the need for critical engagement with the world around us in repressive times.

For Tiravanija, art serves as a space of doubt and freedom: "Art is always a place where we can have doubt, we're free to think, and we're free to question authority—any kind of authority." He urges viewers to challenge established institutions, including their own assumptions.

“I think now when we're in a place and time where you know there's so much trying to ask for attention, but the attention they're asking for is a kind of is a diversion from reality in a way is a diversion from facts is a diversion from truth,” Tiravanija says.

Tiravanija talks shares his view of the world at the occasion of his most recent work ‘A Million Rabbit Holes (2024), reflecting the events leading up to the US selection in November 2024.

Throughout the discussion, Rirkrit Tiravanija draws on personal observations and global political concerns, highlighting the dangers of uncritical acceptance: "We're coming to a place where the dreams are going to be shattered, there is no more dream."

Tiravanija also reflects on the commodification of art, arguing for a return to its radical roots: "Art has to stop becoming commodified and art has to go out and back into the woods as it was. Or maybe Duchamp, like has said, you know, it's time to go underground."

Despite the challenges ahead, the artist remains hopeful that crisis can be a catalyst for change: "I think we're coming to a big crisis and I I think, and I hope, that crisis is extreme enough to wake people up, to come together, to do things together in opposition to those things that are being set on us."

Inside An Intimate Dinner In Support Of The LA Arts Community Fire Relief Fund

Jorge Pardo | Elle Decor

Photo by Katie Jones

By Sean Santiago

Last weekend, ELLE Decor hosted an intimate dinner at Ardor at The West Hollywood EDITION in support of the LA Arts Community Fire Relief Fund. The event was supported by Visit West Hollywood and Monacelli, off the back of Primack and Weissenberg’s Love How You Live: Adventures in Interior Design multi-city book tour. Each guest took home a copy of the book along with their own one-of-a-kind plate, hand-painted by artist Jorge Pardo. Sales of the plates, currently available by special order through the AGO Projects site, will raise money for the relief fund.

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Philippe Parreno: Between Difficulty and Possibility

Philippe Parreno | ArtReview

Philippe Parreno, Voices, 2024 (installation view). Photo: Andrea Rossetti.

by Martin Herbert

Philippe Parreno’s exhibitions are often initially experienced as a destabilising encounter with otherness. So, at the risk of blowing that for anyone who hasn’t seen Voices – a version of which, to be fair, was shown earlier in 2024 at the Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul – here’s what a first wander through is like. Haus der Kunst’s huge, darkened, neoclassical main space, flanked by smaller ones on either side and at the back, is dominated by an evolving film on a screen, El Almendral (2024), an updating stream of footage from an almond grove and surrounding landscape in Almería, Spain; almond trees tolerate drought, and this region is steadily undergoing desertification due to climate change. The smaller spaces offer a stop-start scenography of Parreno’s increasingly trademark light- and sound-based sculptures, mostly new, a few dating back years. Among them are a trio of bobbly glass sculptures, shaped like giant peanut shells and containing coloured lights, that slide up and down steel poles and cast rippling, austerely psychedelic patterns on the walls; a 5 × 5 grid of blinking globular heat lamps strung from the ceiling – heat being a leitmotif of the show – and suspended, intermittently rotating speakers that softly emit an aleatory soundscape of droning, muttering and chirring. The latter is part of an overall soundscape divided across the rooms, Voices (2024), which clones and sometimes completely abstracts speech by well-known German TV presenter Susanne Daubner. In each case, here, it feels like something is being transmitted in a language halfway alien, halfway familiar.

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Phillipe Perreno in 'Double Vision: The Rachofsky Collection and the Hartland & Mackie / Labora Collection' at The Warehouse, Dallas

Phillipe Perreno
February 15 - June 28, 2025 | The Warehouse, Dallas

Fraught Times: For Eleven Months of the Year it’s an Artwork and in December it’s Christmas (July), 2017
Cast and painted stainless steel
141 3/4 inches (360 cm); Diameter: 94 1/2 inches (240 cm)
Hartland & Mackie / Labora Collection

The inaugural exhibition of the newly formed Warehouse Dallas Art Foundation offers a glimpse at two collections—The Rachofsky Collection, created over the past 40 years, and the Hartland & Mackie / Labora Collection, developed over the last decade—foregrounding the potent and inventive interplay that will serve as a guiding principle for future programming at The Warehouse. This first look, as it were, is the Foundation’s opening chapter as it explores the art of our times.

Although both collections remain distinct in their points of view, the exhibition illuminates the serendipitous ways they overlap. As the exhibition unfolds, each gallery explores a theme or artist central to both collections, including commitments to several artists collected in-depth, such as Carroll Dunham, Wade Guyton, Marguerite Humeau, Calvin Marcus, and Dana Schutz. The exhibition is punctuated with galleries that offer broad presentations of these artists’ practices. In some instances, works by the same artists from different bodies of work will be placed in conversation, while in others, entirely different practices will be brought into dialogue.

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At Guadalajara Art Weekend, Open Studios Are the Biggest Draw

Jorge Mendez Blake, Jorge Pardo and Pae White | Observer

Ceramica Suro’s annual Comida celebration during ART WKND GDL. Photo by Tuna Unalan.

By Elisa Carollo

The highlight of the evening at Plataforma was a conversation between Cuban artist Jorge Pardo and American artist Pae White, both of whom have long-standing ties with José Noé Suro. Pardo’s immersive, labyrinthine installation of luminous ceramic walls and colorful lamps seamlessly intertwined with White’s newest series of sculptures, forming an engaging, multisensory environment that explored how visual curiosity and emotional impulses shape perception.

The final stop was the studio of conceptual artist Jorge Méndez Blake, whose multimedia practice explores the intersection of literature, art and architecture—disciplines humans use to define their existential and operational space, imposing structure and direction upon it. Deconstructed pages of famous books transform into constellations of meaning, as Méndez Blake distills single characters, isolating them in a careful, rational order. Across his sprawling studio, various workstations held a series of hyperrealistic paintings, which, through trompe-l’œil techniques, similarly yet more directly challenge the viewer’s perception of reality. These paintings also serve as tools for conceptualizing and developing his other projects, reinforcing the artist’s fascination with language, illusion and the ways in which knowledge is both constructed and dismantled.

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Jessica Stockholder: Cardinal Directions at Es Baluard Museu d’Art Contemporani de Palma

Jessica Stockholder
January 31 - August 24, 2025 | Es Baluard Museu d’Art Contemporani de Palma, Spain

Curated by David Barro and Soad Houman, Cardinal Directions features works loaned from Barrié Foundation’s International Contemporary Painting Collection along with a site-specific work created for Es Baluard Museu. The work of Jessica Stockholder (born in Seattle, United States, 1959 and raised in Vancouver, B.C. Canada) reveals the complex relationship between the illusionistic space of painting and the physical presence of sculpture. Intrigued by the ways things are bounded and how we understand them, she explores this question in relationship to many materials and their intersection with pictorial possibilities. This interstitial state also grounds her work in the overlap between installation and architecture, since it is always linked to the site. Ultimately, her work is about the experience of looking, a kind of abstraction, use of color or artistic experience projected as a way of communicating the world, driven by the artist's conviction that any image of something involves abstraction if we think of it as relating the experience of that thing. 

Her practice is paradigmatic of what is termed expanded painting, a form of painting that can transform context into content by conquering architectural space and prompting a shift from the traditional two dimensions of the canvas to the three dimensions of real space, as well as including the time spectators take to wander through the space without ever finding a definitive viewpoint. This is definitely painting, and in her works we can talk about figure and ground, chiaroscuro, color, composition, space, rhythm . . . Everything hints at aspects or concepts of pictorial tradition, even though the materials might be socks, duct tape, a surfboard, a strip of shower curtain, umbrella fabric, a Ghanaian mask, a typewriter, weights or a carpet she has designed following her own color scheme. It is painting as a reality that can be penetrated, inhabited. Yet it is also painting that lets us continue to talk about painting, even though in many cases the surface to be painted is architectural space. The use of color dematerialises things and gives painting its pictorial quality, as reflected in this selection of works ranging from 2006 to the present. We notice this in her more intimate pieces, assemblages of usually found and reused objects whose material qualities have been erased by the impact of color. Artificial light, as a pictorial strategy, also plays into this intention, into this effect of color. Above and beyond painting, this approach prioritizes the pictorial essence of each object and, by extension, the pictorial potential of architectural space, which supports painting as a wall supports a canvas.

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Philippe Parreno's 'Voices' uses AI to give agency to denuded land

Philippe Parreno | NewScientist

Philippe Parreno, Voices, Haus Der Kunst, 2024. Photo by Andrea Rossetti.

By David Stock

Phillipe Parreno wants to take visitors to his latest exhibition, Voices at Munich’s Haus Der Kunst, on a journey into the unknown. “There is no dramatic arc produced by Netflix where you just have to sit, shut up and enjoy the show,” the artist explains of the large, multi-room space filled with moving light sculptures, heat lamps, speaker arrays, dancers and film screens. Instead, for Parreno, traversing the rooms is a process of composing your own journey. “You explore time in space with your own curiosity.”

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Here are the 10 Must-See Gallery Shows in LA This Month

Jorge Pardo | Cultured Mag

Jorge Pardo, Untitled, 2024. Image courtesy of the artist and 1301PE.

By Giuliana Brida


Jorge Pardo

Where: 1301PE
When: Through January 11, 2025
Why It’s Worth A Look: Layering 30 years of 1301PE’s exhibition posters into a kaleidoscopic collage of color and form, Jorge Pardo’s monumental canvas blurs the line between a painting and its environment. The result is a dizzying play of abstraction and representation, a work that refuses to be pinned down and demands you step closer to decode its mysteries.
Know Before You Go: Depending on where you stand, colors collide or dissolve, textures sharpen or soften, and the image shifts like a mirage. Pardo wants you lost in the middle of it all—caught between recognition and abstraction, where every angle reveals something new. 

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Most influential people in 2024 in the contemporary artworld

Rirkrit Tiravanija | ArtReview

Photo: Daniel Dorsa. Courtesy Rirkrit Tiravanija and David Zwirner

‘My interest is always to break down the distance between what we think [of] as art or high art and what we do in our daily life,’ Tiravanija once told The Korea Herald. During his close-to-40-year engagement with what has been characterised as relational aesthetics, the Thai artist has become known for his participatory events, from cooking pad thai for gallery goers to providing them with ping-pong tables. You’d think it might be tricky to encapsulate such a career in a retrospective, but his MoMA PS1 survey, which closed in March, before moving to LUMA Arles in June, had a go, as did a second retrospective at Gropius Bau, Berlin, which opened in September, serving curry and Turkish coffees, and providing hangout spaces where the interactions are the work.

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Step Inside a Bewitching Ranch House in Malibu

Jorge Pardo | Architectural Digest

Photography by Mark Seelen

By Mayer Rus

Despite the eye-rolling hauteur of the word Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art, it is the mot juste to describe what Pardo has wrought: a dizzying, kaleidoscopic fantasy interior in which the floors, walls, ceilings, and furnishings filigree into a single orgasmic organism, brought to life through the artist’s signature experiments with form, pattern, and color. There’s a primary bedroom suite at one end of the structure, two guest rooms at the other, a kitchen/dining zone, and a sunken living room, the latter two mediated by a floor-to-ceiling storage volume clad in quotidian prefab wood shingles that strike a dramatic contrast note amid all the calligraphic finery. “It’s really a simple building, but when you step inside it’s optically extreme,” Pardo says, describing the symphony of engraved, punctured, and otherwise manipulated walls, windows, doors, and furnishings, all fabricated using CNC computer-driven machining processes.

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Uta Barth at 1301PE

Uta Barth | Artillery Magazine

Uta Barth, Untitled #7, 2024

By Jody Zellen

In these pieces, the emphasis is not on the individual picture, but on the myriad ways it can be transformed and what those transformations imply about the difference between what the eye sees and how the camera records. Barth goes beyond the act of looking by manipulating the visual cues (the passage of the sun and its shadow) by which we map our days: She draws our attention to the subjective nature of our own passage through time and space, contingent on our perception of it.

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In Her Own Space: Petra Cortright on Art, Life, and the American West

Petra Cortright | Verse

Petra Cortright, Bridal Shower, 2013 (video still)

A conversation between artist Petra Cortright and Leyla Fakhr, Artie Handz, Jamie Gourlay and Ivan Zhyzhkevych

“Yeah, I’ve always been super interested in it and growing up on the internet, you learn to speak in a certain way. Even like, you know, something as simple as like you said capitalization, it's more casual to speak in all lowercase, and that's what I prefer. I still write emails to this day in all lowercase. Like I refuse to give in to that level of professionalism, unless it's something to do with my son's school as I don't want to seem like a crazy person. But other than that, if it's just on me, I usually come across as the voice is different. 

All the titles of my paintings, they kind of come from these SEO lists. I don't remember a single title of a painting, not a single one, because they're really crazy. And also growing up on the internet, different websites had different acceptable ways of speaking and early YouTube was really rough. Not as rough as forums, I mean, depending on which forum, but there are levels of banter that I really appreciate and there's this kind of thing to like give someone a hard time, but like everyone knows you’re just having a laugh. So although I've had such a hard time, I think like the last decade with all the wokeness that’s creeped into everything and people getting banned for this or that, I think it's so silly. 

I've just been really interested in the way that people speak online and I've really enjoyed it. But that is what got me in trouble with the keywords that I put on the videos because there's a lot of really, really bad words in there. People accuse me of profiting off of racism and all this, but it's like, you single out and cherry pick certain things from this big list of everything, especially these words that are really supposed to provoke a reaction, but then there's other stuff in there, it’s everything. I don't know, I'm really, very interested in it. Everything in my work always has a lot to do with internet language.” — Petra Cortright

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Rirkrit Tiravanija’s Latest Show in London Tackles Disillusionment and Political Polarization

Rirkrit Tiravanija | Observer Magazine

Courtesy of the artist and Pilar Corrias

By Elisa Carollo

For his latest exhibition, “A MILLION RABBIT HOLES,” on view at Pilar Corrias in London during Frieze Art Week, Tiravanija has created an immersive environment that captures the atmosphere of American politics in the run-up to the presidential election next month while also reflecting on the dangerous polarization spreading across countries facing shared geopolitical uncertainties. Ahead of the opening, Observer connected with the artist to discuss the themes that shaped the show and the evolving meaning of “relational art,” with its inherently political dimension.

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The Art of Film

Diana Thater | Aesthetica Magazine

Diana Thater, Practical Effects, Installation view: LUMA Arles, France, 2024.

By Emma Jacob

Diana Thater (b.1962) has been a pioneering creator of film and art since the early 1990s. She is best known for her site-specific installations, such as Delphine (1999) and knots + surfaces (2001), which explore the relationship between humans and the natural world. Here, she approaches the idea of post-apocalyptic life through a poignant and wistful lens, following a primate-like robot that is the last being left on Earth. It is tasked with the upkeep of a garden filled with intricately sculpted topiary animals. Devoid of interaction, the colourful robot can only find companionship with the figures it cares for. This video is a strange and tragicomic vision of how the organic and inorganic worlds may collide and support one another in unexpected ways as the Earth shifts and changes due to human behaviour. 

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Fondation Beyeler’s 'What Time Is Heaven?' Show Is in Constant Transformation

Philippe Parreno | Hypebeast

Philippe Parreno, Membrane, 2023 and Fujiko Nakaya, Untitled, 2024. Installation view, Fondation Beyeler, 2024. Courtesy: the artists. Photo: Mark Niedermann

By Keith Estiler

Organized in collaboration with the LUMA Foundation and conceived by a team including Sam Keller, Mouna Mekouar, Isabela Mora, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Precious Okoyomon, Philippe Parreno, and Tino Sehgal, ‘What Time is Heaven?’ offers an evolving spectacle rather than a static collection that is now on view through August 11, 2024.

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Rirkrit Tiravanija: ‘Food is an easy door to go through. It’s something we all do'

Rirkrit Tiravanija | Financial Times

Rirkrit Tiravanija opening for A LOT OF PEOPLE at MoMA PS1, 2023. Photo by Marissa Alper.

By Caroline Roux

“Food is an easy door to go through,” says the artist of his preferred medium of engagement. “It’s something we all do.” There will be no cooking here, but the influence of “Pad Thai” is all over the show. It is here in a series of woks that have been fetishised as art objets, while upstairs, in an area cordoned off with stacks of art books and catalogues, a man is making Turkish coffee on two electric rings. “It’s the opposite of an espresso,” says the barista, an Iranian drafted in from Luma’s catering staff. It is delicious, not strong but fruity and scented with just the right amount of rose water.

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Judy Ledgerwood: Sunny Redux at Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago

Judy Ledgerwood | Tussle Magazine

Judy Ledgerwood, Sunny Redux at Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago, IL

By Pia Singh

A little over a year since ‘Sunny’ opened at Denny Gallery, New York, Rhona Hoffman presents an exquisite selection of Judy Ledgerwood’s large-scale paintings in Sunny Redux. It’s hard to write about Ledgerwood’s works in relationship to one another without getting caught up in formalist underpinnings of abstraction, interpretative language, or trying too hard to set out to contextualize the artists’ engrossment with color, form, and pattern. Initially, it was the intensity of play, how Ledgerwood teases both theory and history through the pleasurable (dare we say beautiful) translation of form and color, that felt like one possible route to entering the show. Yet, it felt like a disservice to the demand of the work, specifically at this time. 

 

How does one write about the rebellion of abstraction at a time of war? What bearings does language have on policy, and in turn, how does “art-speak” afford a degree of political impunity, dissuading both reader and writer from identifying the marks of imperial violence on our perception? Between the undeniable espousal of practice (as politic) and theory (of art), and accelerated consumption of images in mediated realities, what is revolutionary about the condition of slow-looking that a Ledgerwood demands? 

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