Artist Jonny Niesche takes us on a tour of his home

Jonny Niesche | Esquire

by Amy Campbell

One of the most exciting names in contemporary Australian art right now, Niesche has exhibited all over the world, from Ibiza to Amsterdam to Germany, where he was the official artist for the 2024 Munich Opera Festival. Just this year, Gucci handpicked him to reimagine its iconic silk scarves and archival motifs as part of the Italian fashion house’s 90 x 90 project. His work is held in the collections of some of Australia’s biggest institutions, the NGV, MCA and MONA among them.

But we’re not here to talk only about the work Niesche makes. In addition to being a successful working artist, he is also an avid collector. The collection he and his wife Amber have built, which brightens the walls, floors and surfaces of their two-story home, contains some of the most significant names in contemporary Antipodean art.

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Abraham Cruzvillegas, Danh Vo, Rirkrit Tiravanija at Galerie Chantal Crousel

Rirkrit Tiravanija
June 13 - July 27, 2025 | Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris

Uta Barth, Field #9, 1995

Around La salle de jeux (1998), a historic and participatory piece by Rirkrit Tiravanija, Galerie Chantal Crousel presents a selection of works by Abraham Cruzvillegas and Danh Vo.

La salle de jeux (1998) by Rirkrit Tiravanija evokes a café or clubhouse—social settings where people meet to drink tea, watch television, play cards or share memories. A selection of games, DVDs and CDs is made available, and visitors are invited to take over the exhibition space as they wish. A corkboard, ready to receive any notes or drawings guests feel like posting, further encourages social exchange.

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Uta Barth in Split Diopter 2, curated by Jan Tumlir and Reza Monahan, at SCI-Arc Gallery, Los Angeles

Uta Barth
June 6 - July 20, 2025 | Southern California Institute of Architecture Gallery, Los Angeles

Uta Barth, Field #9, 1995

Split Diopter 2 explores the relationship between fine art and cinema, as well as the impact of technical optics on creative practice. This exhibition disassembles the cinematic apparatus of the “waking dream” into a collection of parts: still frame, action sequence, mise-en-scene, soundtrack, film reel, promotional poster, etc.—each of which is assigned to an individual work of art. Navigating this array of objects in the space of the gallery, viewers are enjoined to imagine their own filmic narrative, while also reflecting on its material means of construction.

Split Diopter 2 features works by Uta Barth, Matthew Brannon, John Divola, Alex Israel, William E. Jones, and Hedi El Kholti. A soundtrack has been composed for the exhibition by Eyvind Kang. Also included is a dance video shot with a split diopter lens, choreographed by Brian Golden and performed by Jas Lin, Madison Ostrach, and Euseon Song. Finally, Split Diopter 2 presents a documentary in which artists Stan Douglas, Lynne Marsh, Patti Podesta, Jeffrey Stuker, and Liam Young discuss the influence of cinema on their respective practices.

*Split Diopter 2 is based on Split Diopter held at Chapman University’s Guggenheim Gallery and Co-Curated by Guggenheim Gallery Director, Marcus Herse.

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Petra Cortright in Looking at Horizons at Almine Rech, Monaco

Petra Cortright
June 5 — September 19, 2025 | Almine Rech, Monaco

Looking at Horizons at Almine Rech Monaco explores contemporary manifestations of landscape painting, featuring works by Joël Andrianomearisoa, Miquel Barceló, Alejandro Cardenas, Petra Cortright, Johan Creten, Genieve Figgis, Daniel Gibson, Youngju Joung, Scott Kahn, Minjung Kim, John McAllister, Anthony Miler, César Piette, Salvo, Gert & Uwe Tobias, and Jess Valice. Through the diversity of their inspiration and research, they celebrate landscape as a complex pictorial genre that questions the material aspects of a territory as much as the way we look at it. 

At a time of great climatic challenges, these artists invite us to observe living things and spaces with curiosity, delicacy, and care, for landscape painting is both a window on nature, and a mirror reflecting our relationship with it. Investigating landscape today is giving a form to our collective concerns, questioning our perception of nature, and the condition of painting itself. 

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Screening and Talk: Ana Prvački's 'Flowering under stress' at àngels barcelona

Ana Prvački'
June 2 | àngels barcelona, Spain

Ana Prvački’s videos combine humor, poetry, and sharp observation to question everyday rituals, social codes, and our relationship with the environment. Through small performative actions and a carefully crafted visual language, the artist introduces subtle twists that invite us to rethink the familiar from a playful and critical perspective. Her works, positioned between the conceptual and the sensorial, offer unconventional/ offbeat yet incisive reflections on the norms that shape daily life. This screening of Flowering under stress is presented in collaboration with The Voice of the Art as a part of àngels films’s spring screening series.

Find more information on the screening here.

Jorge Méndez Blake in BE-LONGING: An Exhibition of the Mercedes-Benz Art Collection in Mexico City

Jorge Méndez Blake
May 30 – August 31, 2025 | Espacio CDMX, Mexico City

Jorge Méndez Blake, Poema en estructura circular (Stevens), bricks, ink, paper, 2025 and Buhlebezwe Siwani, Mnguni, inkjet print, 2019, Mercedes-Benz Art Collection © Courtesy the artists and for Jorge Méndez Blake: OMR, photo: Ramiro Chaves.

Curated by Polina Stroganova for the Mercedes-Benz Art Collection, BE-LONGING brings together selected works from the Mercedes-Benz Art Collection and contemporary artists living and working in Mexico. The exhibition explores the theme of identity, a subject deeply embedded in contemporary artistic discourse and continuously negotiated within society at large. The works by 32 international artists illustrate not only the relevance and complexity of the chosen topic, but also its potential to promote individual and collective resilience.

The exhibited works deal with identity-forming aspects such as bodies, origins, memories, geographies and vocations. These thematic strands allow for multiple interpretations and perspectives on identity emphasizing the concepts of fluidity, dialogue, and the interplay between different points of view. Visitors are invited to contribute their own experiences and associations to this dialogue, making a space for exchange, reflection and critical engagement with the evolving nature of identity in contemporary society. The exhibition’s scenography is designed by the esteemed Mexico City-based architectural studio C Cúbica, which has developed a modular display tailored to the concept of the exhibition. This design reinforces the exhibition’s emphasis on interconnectedness and multiplicity.

The show marks the launch of a series of dialogue-driven, international exhibitions of the Mercedes-Benz Art Collection designed to engage with local artistic practices. Through a dynamic and modular approach, this initiative aims to reach a broad international audience while fostering collaborations between Mercedes-Benz employees, different communities as well as diverse artistic networks in key international locations—Mexico City being the first.

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Simryn Gill and Tom Melick's Stolon Press in 'Flat earth' at Monash University Museum of Art

Simryn Gill
May 29 – July 12 2025 | Monash University Museum of Art

Stolon Press, Mixed business, 2025. Installation View, Stolon Press: Flat earth, Monash University Museum of Art | MUMA, Naarm/Melbourne, 2025. Photo by Andrew Curtis.

Working with the question of how an exhibition might be a book, Flat earth presents a diagrammatic flat plan of a proposal in space.

Stolon Press is a Sydney-based art and publishing collective whose work sits somewhere between art and book, image and text. Established in 2019 by writer Tom Melick and artist Simryn Gill, Stolon Press has published twenty books to date, regularly involving an extended network of collaborators and friends.

Conceived as a flattened ‘map’, Flat earth creates a shared space where artistic, linguistic and material practices converge. Artworks overlap across the galleries as a material gesture toward cohabitation and neighbourliness. Flat earth brings together work by longtime Stolon Press collaborators, including writer, translator, and anthropologist Elisa Taber, and Lebanese-born, Sydney-based artist Khaled Sabsabi. Considering the postponement by Monash University on March 25, 2025, the artists have chosen to show works from their practices and processes made from residual materials.

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Jessica Stockholder returns to Canada and the landscapes that shaped her work

Jessica Stockholder | The Globe and Mail

Artist Jessica Stockholder poses for a photo in her installation, The Squared Circle: Ringing at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Toronto, on April 17. Courtesy Galit Rodan/The Globe and Mail

by Kate Taylor

Artist Jessica Stockholder has erected a bright yellow wrestling ring on the ground floor of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Toronto. Visitors aren’t permitted to clamber up there themselves, so they will have to make do with the symbolism: It’s a platform.

Like a museum, it’s a performance space for a controlled encounter. Like the world these days, it’s a site for violent display and boastful victory. Yet it is also resolutely cheery, surrounded by walls and floors painted with large geometric shapes in orange, red and green and accompanied by a sculpture made of deconstructed standing lamps and a net of hot-pink cords.

Stockholder, who grew up in Vancouver but made her career in the United States, has taken over the entire lobby space, blurring the lines between her art and the museum’s signage and mechanical elements. Wall texts, featuring witty bits of concrete poetry, insert themselves into awkward corners; a video screen hangs alongside an air vent of a similar size.

“It’s not a white cube space. A lot of people describe it as difficult to work in,” Stockholder said in a recent interview. “There’s a front desk, there’s two entryways. […] I really had a lot of fun. I sort of welcomed everything about the space. If you are not spending your time wishing for a white cube, it’s a lovely space.”

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Ann Veronica Janssens's '50 km of atmosphere to give a deep blue' at Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Les Brigittines

Ann Veronica Janssens
May 25-29, 2025 | Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Les Brigittines, Belgium

"50 km of atmosphere to give a deep blue"courtesy Kunstenfestivaldesarts, © Anna Van Waeg

After exhibiting in the world’s most prestigious museums, Ann Veronica Janssens presents her first performative project for the festival. Set in the awe-inspiring Brigittines Chapel, the atmosphere seems to change in colour, texture, and consistency. Or is it our perception that shifts? As we watch, a person meticulously narrates the installation instructions for some of Janssens’ works, detailing the technical characteristics and possible outcomes. Through these polyphonic descriptions, we might begin reconstructing them in our minds. Manuals of installation turn into manuals of imagination.

Through the immersive, experimental, almost theatrical performance, we enter a sensory installation while her sculptures enter our minds. One of the most anticipated performances of the year, a captivating dialogue between reality and imagination.

From fog sculptures and shifting spectrums of color to the delicate interplay of light on reflective surfaces, Ann Veronica Janssens explores the fluidity of matter and challenges the boundaries of sculpture. Her creations exist equally in their physical form and in the viewer’s perception. Transforming as we move, they invite interaction, sparking a dynamic dialogue with our senses.

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The Art Collective Superflex Wants to Change the World and Thinks You Can Too

Superflex | The New York Times

Superflex’s Superbrick Factory is a work space in which “Superbricks” are produced and used to construct sculptures in the space. Superbricks are pink, curved bricks made from unfired clay that are constructed to avoid the right angles and straight lines of human architecture. Credit": Mathias Lassen/Courtesy of Museum Jorn

by Laura Rysman

If humans have any chance of saving themselves and life as we know it, we need to see the world in a whole new way — from the point of view of other species.

It’s a theory championed by the Copenhagen art collective Superflex, which builds on the philosophy that art and artists can and should play a role in the future of the world. […] That kind of thinking has placed Superflex among the innovative artists addressing the world’s ills today. Key to their philosophy and others like them is the belief that people should consider the impact on other species and work not only with fellow artists, architects and other experts, but also with communities to address those ills.

“We believe that today art is, and should be, at the forefront of making infrastructure at every possible level,” said Bjornstjerne Christiansen, one of the founders of Superflex, speaking on a panel titled “Worlds Imagined: Biodiversity and Tech” at the Art for Tomorrow conference in Milan last week. “It’s in the actual landscape-making where art has a crucial role to play.”

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Ann Veronica Janssens in 'Colour: Seeing Beyond Pigment' at Z33, Hassel, Belgium

Ann Veronica Janssens
May 16 - August 24, 2025 | Z33, Hassel, Belgium

Ann Veronica Janssens, 09.04.23, 2023 & 04.10.23 #2, 2023. Photo © Kobe Vanderzande

Pigments are everywhere. From paints to cosmetics and clothes, from everyday objects to your food and drinks, they literally add colour to life. Unfortunately, the pigment and dye industry is one of the most polluting industries in the world. In the search for natural alternatives, Laboratorium – the biolab for art, design and biotechnology at KASK & Conservatorium in Ghent – went a long way. Here, melanin proved to be a fascinating track. In Z33, researchers, designers and artists present their results for the first time.

In the exhibition, Belgian artist Ann Veronica Janssens contributed Future Forms of Beauty, where she manipulates transparent ribbed glass with a thin layer of synthetic melanin.

Curated by Annelies Thoelen, Colour: Seeing Beyond Pigment is presented in collaboration with: KASK & Conservatory (HOGENT – Howest), VUB (Sustainable Engeneering Materials Research Group) and UGent (Evolution and Optics of Nanostructures).

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Petra Cortright in Electricity for All at Knoxville Museum of Art, Tennessee

Petra Cortright
May 15 - August 16, 2025 | Knoxville Museum of Art, Tennessee

‘Electricity for All’ at the Knoxville Museum of Art features work by contemporary artists exploring the complex relationships between technology, information, and power. Curated by KMA’s assistant curator, Kelsie Conley, the exhibition showcases work by Petra Cortright alongside pieces by Jim Campbell, Petra Cortright, Daniel Canogar, Nathan Hylden, Beryl Korot, Frederick Hammersley, Matthew Angelo Harrison, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Amor Muñoz, Iván Navarro, Marilène Oliver, Mimi Ọnụọha, Trevor Paglen, Nam June Paik, Elias Sime, Jered Sprecher & Sam van Strien.

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In Dialogue: Angela Bulloch, Richard Deacon, Janice Kerbel, Pae White and Jim Amberson

Angela Bulloch and Pae White | STPI Creative Workshop & Gallery, Singapore

Artists in the exhibition New Releases Old Friends, Angela Bulloch, Richard Deacon, Janice Kerbel, and Pae White, come together for a panel discussion at STPI Creative Workshop & Gallery moderated by Jim Amberson.

New Releases Old Friends spotlights new facets of their respective practices, with fresh works by Bulloch, Kerbel and Rehberger premiering in Singapore alongside earlier works by Deacon and White – all developed in close collaboration with STPI’s Creative Workshop during their residencies with the esteemed Visting Artists Programme (VAP).

Find more information on the exhibition here.

Sylvie Fleury & Angela Bulloch: THE ART OF SURVIVAL / BABY DOLL SALOON

Angela Bulloch
May 3 - July 26, 2025 | Mehdi Chouakri, Charlottenburg

At the heart of the intuitive and almost experimental collaboration between Sylvie Fleury and Angela Bulloch—now brought together in the exhibition THE ART OF SURVIVAL / BABY DOLL SALOON in Charlottenburg—are a series of firework performances the artists staged in London (1993), Dijon (1994), and Berlin (1999). Rather than bursting into color across the sky, the fireworks in these works seemed to explode within the space itself. Soot marks left behind on white walls bore witness to the pyrotechnic interventions. These attacks on the interior—long symbolically charged as the realm of the domestic and confined— can be read as a casual yet sharp critique of a visual tradition that, for centuries, has placed women within enclosed, private settings: from Vermeer’s The Lacemaker (c. 1670), to the impressionist paintings of Berthe Morisot, to Edgar Degas’ Woman Ironing (1887). along with focused group presentations of painting, sculpture, photography, and ceramics.

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The Decisive Moment with Jonny Niesche, the Australian contemporary artist behind Gucci's 90x90 project on his career-defining epiphany.

Jonny Niesche | Assouline Culture Lounge

Photo by Dirk Tacke.

by Sofia Quintero

In the occasion where fine art meets high fashion, few brand collaborations strike the perfect balance between heritage and innovation. But not every brand is Gucci. To celebrate its iconic silk scarves, the Italian heritage brand launched "90x90," a special campaign featuring nine international artists tasked with reimagining five archival themes: flora, fauna, nautical, equestrian, and the GG Monogram.

Among these visionaries is Jonny Niesche, an Australian contemporary artist whose vibrant works have captivated the art world at large with his hypnotic blend of romanticism, abstraction, and minimalism. Known for his explorations of light and space perceptions, Niesche brings a distinct angle to the collaboration. "I have loved Gucci since my teens," Niesche says. "The brand has always had an elegance and classic style that really resonates with me." 90x90 marks Niesche’s first partnership with a fashion label. He deliberately waited for the ideal opportunity, and Gucci was the perfect fit.

Read more here.

Diana Thater and 8 Other Artists Pick Most Influential Environmental Art of the Past Century

Diana Thater | Cultured Magazine

“This might not be environmental art, but it is an astounding image of the living environment, and it does what 'environmental' art should do and that is to give us an appreciation of the fascinating lives of others. It covers the 'art' part of the equation be being a REALLY GOOD photograph—something, ironically enough, we see very little of these days.

The story is this: A photographer was filming crested black macaques in Indonesia. He left his camera, and a female macaque snapped a series of self-portraits. You can see her thinking about it across the range of images. There are several shots where she tries serious looks—then she finally grins. Presumably, she was looking at her own reflection in the lens as she tried out different attitudes. In some of the photos you can see the camera lens reflected in her eyes. It’s not just a charming image of self-reflection; smiling from ear to ear, this macaque presents herself to the world. My purpose in making art is in representing those who do not represent themselves. But this macaque doesn’t need me. Crested black macaques are critically endangered.”

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Review: Jorge Pardo at 1301PE

Jorge Pardo | ArtForum

by Jan Tumlir

“Art is what it has become,” Theodor Adorno unequivocally declares in Aesthetic Theory (1970). His statement implies that the original meaning of a work can be completely overturned by its contemporary circumstances. A similar point can be made about gallery practice: Operational protocols, once seemingly set in stone, can undergo ground-up rethinking with every slight shift in our systems of informational and economic distribution. Jorge Pardo’s latest outing at 1301PE addressed this process from an ironic distance. But some measure of warmth could also be felt here, directed from the artist to the gallery’s founder, Brian Butler, with whom he has worked closely since the earliest days of his career. 

This show consisted of just one painting, Untitled, 2024, the scale and proportions of which closely matched those of the wall on which it hung, one that faced the entrance to a reconfigured downstairs gallery. Normally, this space opens onto a corridor that connects to the reception desk and office, and, farther on, to a stairway leading up to a second showroom. On this occasion, however, the passage had been sealed. In a period when commercial galleries are increasingly prone to hedging their bets with “mixed nuts,” something-for-everyone assortments of art, this was a rather striking proposition. Even more so was the fact that this work could be read as a kind of tribute to its site. At a distance, the painting appeared resolutely abstract, nonreferential, this impression reinforced by its title (or lack thereof). Observed more closely, it was revealed to be suffused with information. Its surface teems with material gleaned from every poster Butler had produced to accompany the gallery’s exhibitions up to then. Snippets of typography and fragments of imagery are scattered throughout, as if drawn through a shredder and then spread, mulch-like, across the picture plane. As with much of the artist’s work, Pardo layered, condensed, and recomposited the source data with the aid of computer programs run with minimal interference. Nevertheless, the result bore a strikingly organic aspect. From its earthy, autumnal tones to the quasi-gestural application of each daub of color, the painting greeted the eye as a kind of Arcadian landscape akin to those by Édouard Vuillard.

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Charline von Heyl in Remix: From Gerhard Richter to Katharina Grosse at The Albertina Museum

Charline von Heyl
June 29, 2025 - January 4, 2026 | The Albertina Museum, Vienna

Charline von Heyl, Bait Ball, 2017

The Viehof Collection is one of the most important private collections in Germany, whose focus is undoubtedly on the art of its own country, with a special focus on those artists who shaped the Rhineland and its art centers of Cologne and Düsseldorf as a nucleus of the avant-garde of international importance. 24 artist positions were selected for the major spring exhibition in order to present the development of German painting and sculpture after 1960.

The show presents an overview of the depth of this collection: from Joseph Beuys, Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke, who stand for the “cheeky”, socially critical art of the 1960s, to that of the 1980s, which was shaped by Martin Kippenberger, Albert Oehlen and Katharina Sieverding, to the field of figurative and abstract art of the 21st century, which is represented by works by Neo Rauch, Daniel Richter, Isa Genzken and Katharina Grosse.

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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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Uta Barth in Anonymous Was A Woman: The First 25 Years at the Grey Art Museum

Uta Barth
April 4 - July 19, 2025 | Grey Art Museum, New York University

Installation view of Anonymous Was A Woman: The First 25 Years. Courtesy Grey Art Museum, New York University. Photo: Simon Cherry

This exhibition celebrates Anonymous Was A Woman (AWAW), a grant program for mid-career women artists living and working in the United States. Featuring works by 41 of the 251 artists who received the award in its first quarter century, it provides a timely opportunity to look back at a crucial period of art production by women, and to reflect on the program’s enormous impact.

Since its inception, AWAW has helped reshape the landscape of arts funding, filling a vacuum left after the National Endowment for the Arts terminated its grants to individual artists in 1994. Every year between 1996 and 2020, AWAW awarded unrestricted gifts of $25,000 to ten women artists over the age of 40; in recent years, both the amount of the award and the number of awardees have increased. Initiated and still led by photographer and philanthropist Susan Unterberg, who herself remained anonymous until 2018, the groundbreaking program refers to a phrase in Virginia Woolf’s essay “A Room of One’s Own,” which drew attention to challenges faced by women writers and artists in a patriarchal society. True to its name, AWAW solicits recommendations from over 200 unnamed nominators and selects awardees via anonymous panels. Over the years, the grant, which provides both financial support and professional recognition, has been truly transformational for a number of the recipients.

The artworks on view span an array of media, subject matter, and formal approaches. Equally wide-ranging are the generational, regional, ethnic, and racial backgrounds of the artists represented. Guest curators Nancy Princenthal and Vesela Sretenović sought works created as closely as possible to the year the artists received the award. Rather than choosing a thematic focus, the curators aimed to trace the development of contemporary art practice over the last twenty-five years, addressing issues of identity and community; the position of women artists in society; the shifting value of craft; the expanding possibilities for installation and time-based media; as well as the many uses of anonymity. The opportunities for future interpretations of AWAW’s importance remain, like art itself, infinite.

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