Artist Carlos Agredano grew up on a dead-end street in the shadow of the 105 Freeway in Lynwood, a city that borders South Los Angeles. In the early days of lockdown, he would trace a path that ran parallel to the interstate highway, an 18-mile stretch of the LA basin’s vast infrastructural network, trying to understand the concrete monolith that had cut his neighborhood in half. That spring 2020 semester, he was finishing his undergraduate degree at Harvard University in his childhood bedroom, where each day he would methodically sweep the fine layer of black soot, pollution from car exhaust blown in from an open window, that had gathered on every surface.

The tyranny of the LA freeway system has since become the primary concern of Agredano’s practice. At the Los Angeles Nomadic Art Division (LAND), he recently exhibited FUME (2025), a traveling sculpture in which three different air quality sensors mounted to an aluminum circular platform are hitched to his black 1992 Toyota Pickup. One sensor monitors the output from the truck’s exhaust pipe. Another, monitoring ambient air quality, is enclosed by futuristic arches inspired by the Googie architecture of the LAX’s Theme Building: a vacant monument to Space Age hubris now stranded in the center of the loop of the airport’s eight terminals.  

As an object, both scientific and artistic, FUME collects the evidence of the gradual violence of toxic drift that seemingly takes place invisibly, primarily impacting working-class communities of color. “I want the sculpture to collect data in the way that my body or my family or my neighbors’ bodies collect data by how they are breathing in the debris,” he told ARTnews. “Although we don’t exactly know [the extent] of it or what it’s doing to us, the idea for this sculpture is to at least quantify it.” He joked that his medium is smog, and his artist assistant is the city of Los Angeles itself.

Over 50 years ago, postwar artists like Yves Klein, Otto Piene, or Fujiko Nakaya used air in different ways, though they were often animated by a utopian idea of air as a borderless, metaphysical material of shared experience. Agredano instead reveals how air quality is unevenly distributed via its sociopolitical context. By extensively researching social histories, like Eric Avila’s Folklore of the Freeway: Race and Revolt in the Modernist City (2014), scientific studies from UCLA’s Center for Occupational & Environmental Health, and environmental impact reports by the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans), among other sources, Agredano connects the evidence of pollution to the longer histories of destructive urban planning in Los Angeles (the vanity plate on his truck spells out JSTOR, the digital academic library.)

One example of this ruinous urban planning is, in fact, the 105, an auxiliary interstate freeway constructed in the early ’90s to improve access to LAX. Part of a 1960s masterplan by Caltrans, its construction was halted in 1972 after a community-led federal lawsuit—but only after homes had already been razed. “It’s really important to me to research the development of the freeway system, and know exactly why the freeways were built, which in Los Angeles was the same story of Black and Brown communities being seized through eminent domain and through the historical redlining of those communities,” Agredano said, adding that, under the guise of progress, these projects all follow the same pattern: “eminent domain, destruction of homes, removal of a community, and then the construction of a freeway.”

In an earlier piece, Collector (2019), Agredano placed an unprimed canvas in the backyard of his childhood home. Over the course of a year, it soon became dirtied. To those unfamiliar with the work’s history, at first glance, the canvas’s ashy blots resemble charcoal or smeared graphite. The caption corrects that impression, listing as its materials smog, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, ground-level ozone, particulate matter, soot, dirt, dust, guano, and automobile tire microplastics, among others. Agredano thinks of the work as a self-portrait, one that indexes not only his body and what it experiences but the larger systems of which it is a part. Agredano’s work uses “gestures that are very minimal, but illustrative of these huge outside forces,” said Bryan Barcena, a curator at large at LAND, who organized the presentation of FUME, with Irina Gusin.

In its title, Collector also references the acquisition of art objects and how they circulate within the art world; a museum previously did not allow the work to enter its galleries because of its use of pollutants, according to Agredano. “I like that the work can create that sort of resistance in people,” he said, “because why is it okay for millions of people to live next to this material, but it can’t enter the museum space?”

As a canvas polluted in the predominantly Latino Lynwood, Collector also points out how conceptions of “dirty” and “clean” can be racially coded. Agredano is reminded of the Bracero Program, in which Mexican laborers came to the US during World War II to fill labor shortages. “This idea of the ‘dirty Mexican’ is a historical thing,” Agredano said, “When the braceros came to the US, they were literally sprayed with DDT, and were, in a sense, fumigated.”

As FUME collected air samples, Agredano invited local artists—Hunter Baoengstrum, Daid Roy, Angela Nguyen, Chris Suarez, Vincent E. Hernandez, Felix Quintana, Lizette Hernandez, Eduardo Camacho, Maria Maea, and Cielo Saucedo—to create works on or around the freeways significant to them. Agredano calls the collaborative project a form of “sous-veillance,” or “a view from below,” a form of data collection that captures what was “created against our will and creates a document of it.” Nguyen has created a tufted rug depicting the history of the 91, which runs from Gardena, through Orange County, to Riverside. Roy staged a noise concert in the bed of Agredano’s Pickup, Baoengstrum planted a filing cabinet on the 101, and Quintana installed a temporary tetherball court by the 105.

Against and within the freeways’ crude geometries, strangling the city and sloughing infinite toxic particles, these artists shape LA’s freeways into sites of resistance and invention, reappropriating privatized, policed, or abandoned spaces for the commons. Like generations of LA artists before them, from Studio Z to ASCO, Agredano and his collaborators are creating a new map of the city. 

The photographs of Cara Romero operate on the precipice between the risk of death and possibility of self-dissolution. A woman buried in sand stares resolutely at the viewer, or a figure floats in a body of water below an oil field. Her lens fuses Indigenous ancestral memory with the immediacy of pop culture. Her world-building, indebted to centuries-old oral tradition, doesn’t merely picture survival; it renders it mythic, futuristic, and, crucially, still unfinished.

Defying the erasure of California Indian peoples, Romero, an enrolled citizen of the Chemehuevi Indian Tribe, sees her work as “painting with the light of photography,” as she told ARTnews during a recent interview. “We don’t have a word in our language for photography. The figures [in my work] represent ideas and stories bigger than themselves––and at the heart of my work is shared storytelling, representation, and collaboration with loved ones, friends, and family appearing in a kind of repertory.”

Romero is having the greatest exposure of her career to date, having featured in more than 10 museum group exhibitions since last fall, including “Smoke in Our Hair: Native Memory and Unsettled Time” at the Hudson River Museum (through August 31) and “Second Nature: Photography in the Age of the Anthropocene” at the Cantor Art Center (through August 3).

At Dartmouth’s Hood Museum in New Hampshire, she is the subject of her first institutional solo show, “Panûpünüwügai,” a Chemehuevi word that translates as both “source of light, like sun coming over the mountains” and “animating the inanimate, giving spirit, or living light.”

“The spirit of the light, or living light, references the painting of light with photography, bringing these stories to life and people together,” Romero said of the exhibition’s title. “These gifts photography has brought to my life.”

Romero’s wry, autochthonous lens cuts through the stereotypes of Native people, women in particular, placing them at the center of the American landscape. In TV Indians (2017), for example, a group of Indigenous people wearing historic garb are seen in a desert landscape, a mound of vintage televisions behind them. This pile of TVs refers to the ancestral adobe ruins scattered throughout the Southwest, and imbues them with a moribund quality, not onto the decidedly animate subjects, but instead upon the Hollywood caricatures, which flash on the screens behind them, that they are laying to rest.

In Romero’s images, an Indigenous futurist aesthetic emerges, as in 3 Sisters (2022), in which the titular figures are perched on a cloud against a purple celestial sky. Donning early-aughts rectangular sunglasses and Evoking it-girl goddesses, their bluish skin is tattooed from head to toe, in motifs specific to each sitter’s tribe (Anishanaabe, Pueblo, and Sioux, from left to right). They don early-aughts rectangular sunglasses, and wires carry life-giving energy from their bodies to the rest of the world. Romero’s 3 Sisters recalls depictions of nude women from across art history, while simultaneously upending the male and colonial gaze completely, reclaiming space—both literally and figuratively—for Native womanhood.

These Native women confront a world that seeks to dominate them, not as passive figures but as agents of deliberate refusal, according to curator Rebecca DiDimenico, who included Romero in a recent exhibition at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art in Colorado. She added, “Her work disrupts not only how Native bodies are represented in the art world, but where they are allowed to exist at all––refusing the boundaries that would confine Indigenous subjects to ethnographic display or historical past.”

Moments of levity abound through Romero’s saturated colors and campy pop iconography. Her “Imagining Indigenous Futures” series features subjects adorned in stripes and traditional tattoos, suspended in space with corn, or haloed and enrobed in raven feathers. By contrast, Arla Lucia (2019) layers markers of Indigeneity—dentalia, bead and quillwork earrings, a heraldic necklace—onto a portrait of Wonder Woman, exalting Native feminine power through materials and myth. (The photograph features in both her Hood Museum survey and “Indigenous Identities: Here, Now & Always,” curated by late artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith at Rutgers’s Zimmerli Art Museum.)

Her interest in infusing pop culture into her images, Romero said, had been a motivation since childhood “because of our absence—and complicated presence—in media. We were never in Life Magazine, never in art books, never in the anthropological canon except as objects. But I also admired the photography of dominant American pop culture. Now, I’m creating a narrative by placing us in different decades, responding to that absence with a quirky presence.”

She added, “I blend time to say: we have our own lived experiences woven into the fabric of America. We’re not all historic or bygone. We’re still here, living tremendous lives.”

That insistent refrain of “We are still here” present across Romero’s oeuvre is best exemplified in works like Ha’ina’ia mai (2024), a black-and-white image in which a lei-draped Native Hawaiian woman rests on the seabed beneath the water’s surface, her hands extended in a submerged greeting, a gesture of welcome, survival, and futurity.

But Romero also turns her lens on issues of climate change, specifically from an Indigenous perspective, like in Evolvers (2019) where feather-crowned children sprint across hot sand in a desert sprinkled with wind turbines. In Weshoyot (2021), Weshoyot Alvitre, who is dressed in traditional Tongva garments, floats in a deluge, cleaving nets that try to catch her. Her apocalyptic compositions cut through the distant, desensitized haze of “climate porn” imagery that often accompanies these discussions, according to Eve Schillo, a photography curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. At LACMA’s “Nature on Notice,” Romero’s Water Memory (2015) depicts two traditionally dressed Native figures in free-fall through water. Their descent is neither escape nor surrender, but an act of survivance in which memory of the past lives of the land are carried forth. The dammed rivers that submerged their homelands are remembered within the context of the climate crisis that now threatens all waters.

Entangled with the colonial gaze, Romero’s images don’t just disrupt the medium’s stereotypes but flip the structural frameworks that once sought to catalog, freeze, and erase Indigenous life altogether. In the 19th century, ethnographic photographers like Edward Curtis and Ansel Adams staged Native people in motley clothing borrowed from sundry other tribes, posing them in landscapes conspicuously cleared of settler presence to construct the fiction of a vanished race—all while obfuscating the violence that made such images possible.

“I call it the ‘one story narrative,’” Romero said of that 19th-century imagery. “There are thousands of different stories from our community, all totally valid.” This expansive vision feels particularly charged given Romero’s position as Chemehuevi, among California’s most systematically disappeared peoples and whose continued existence challenges the myth of a bygone people. Her pan-Indigenous casting becomes a kind of visual insurgency: Ohlone and Coast Miwok burial grounds, Native Hawaiian waters, Sioux beadwork traditions. It’s coalition building as aesthetic strategy, each collaboration a small act of resurrection against colonial archives that sought to fix Indigenous peoples in amber, forever in the past tense.

Romero continued, “When you can check internal biases about who Native people are—especially when it comes to photography harnessed by turn-of-the-century ethnographic photography—to be making contemporary work, it does a lot psychologically quite quickly. It says ‘Oh, these people are living,’ and ‘Oh, these people have a sense of humor,’ and ‘Oh, they have a shared sense of humanity that I can identify with.’ All those things are clever.”

Humor is a core strategy Romero employs across various bodies of work. She draws viewers in with jocular visuals and cheeky titles, only to deliver a resonant and psychological gut punch. In Sand and Stone (2020), for example, a woman with long jet-black hair lays buried in the Mojave Desert, illustrating the creation story of the locale’s Southern Paiute people. The Mojave, like many desert landscapes, has become a psychic playground for non-Natives in search of reinvention or forms of transcendence. (Burning Man is held on Northern Paiute land.) Romero’s work doesn’t imagine a new Eden; it recalls the one that’s always been there, one that has repeatedly been buried under sand, stone, and spectacle. In thinking of the migration of recent disaffected settlers seeking spiritual redemption on stolen lands, an understanding of the bond between people and land becomes especially poignant.

“What interests [non-Native] people about our cultures tends to be the culturally private,” Romero said. “Yet we, without a choice, understand Western culture completely.” Even amid the asymmetry, she feels that she must “give generously and willingly,” offering viewers not just critique but communion.

In the middle of a room full of working people, there’s a large bird cage-like structure made of cameras and cables. Someone is inside of it; a flash goes off. Just next to this structure there’s a dummy similar to the kind used in crash tests. On both sides of the room there are four plots marked out with black tape. Inside each plot, couples wear VR goggles. They walk backward and forward with their arms stretched out, and are being directed by assistants in black. 

This is your first introduction to Jordan Wolfson’s new work, Little Room, at the Fondation Beyeler in Basel, Switzerland. This VR work requires two people to have their bodies scanned—though how exactly this scan will be used within virtual space is not made explicit at first. The wall text reveals little, telling viewers that what they will experience will be “morally and emotionally challenging.” With Wolfson, this disclaimer comes as a matter of course.

Wolfson made his name in the 2010s with puppets, violence, and controversy. Female Figure (2014) featured a sexy animatronic witch who danced in front of a mirror, locking eyes with her audience through the glass. Colored Sculpture (2016) was a nasty little boy doll repeatedly hurled at the ground, and Body Sculpture (2023) took the form of a titanium cube with exquisitely articulated arms that appeared to touch itself, even mime, in its own cube-way, cube-suicide. Little Room is an explicit mix of tactics derived from Wolfson’s puppet-centric art and one of his most iconic works, the VR piece Real Violence (2017). 

In that work, the audience member is dropped into an urban setting on a sunny day. The stillness is interrupted by the appearance of two characters, Wolfson and another man, who is kneeling on the ground, holding his hands up in a pose of supplication. Wolfson is holding a bat. He begins to beat this man to death in front of you. Blood splatters. Recalling the controversy that followed this piece at the Whitney Biennial, I approached Little Room with trepidation.

The process of being scanned, while similar in its gestures to going to the doctor or through the security line at an airport, is the first movement into another reality. Like an initiation rite, the piece begins with crossing a number of thresholds. The first threshold is finding a partner. Fortunately, I was quickly paired with another lone viewer, an artist with elfin features. “We’re about to get very intimate,” I told him. I had no idea. 

We were told to get ready to enter a full-body scanner, and that our silhouettes would be very important. Near the queue, there was a simple black vanity with a double-sided mirror, wipes, hair ties, and tape, as well as baskets for personal effects. People wearing long dresses or skirts were encouraged to put on a pair of grey sweatpants. I was instructed that I should tie my hair back by an assistant who was in the middle of taping someone’s flowing culottes tight at the knee. I was then passed off to the next assistant who was in charge of taking the scan. A platform inside the cage calibrated and raised itself slightly, responding to my measurements. Inside the cage, many cameras were pointed at me. I was told to prepare for the flash.

After our respective scans my partner and I sat at a table and made small talk as we watched the room for clues of what we were about to experience. In a square in front of me a man and a woman have begun the experience, their eyes obscured by the heavy VR headset. They had just finished the calibration. The woman suddenly stepped back, startled, and began to laugh, then to cry. An assistant put a pair of headphones over her ears while she wiped a tear with the bottom of her T-shirt. It dawned on me, too late perhaps: she was reacting to herself. Wolfson had made puppets and animators out of each of his audience members by having each couple don each other’s skin.

When Real Violence premiered at the Whitney Biennial, the piece sealed Wolfson’s reputation as an edgelord. Wolfson insisted that this work and others were not political, that his art was just about violence (despite the fact Real Violence did contain one culturally specific element: Hanukkah prayers that figured prominently on its soundtrack). Given the nationwide movements against gender- and race-based violence and a focus on representation and identity politics that defined the 2010s, his refusal to have his work answer to those terms cast him as a provocateur. Yet it was a role Wolfson seemed to play with pleasure. 

Post-pandemic, amid another Trump presidency, it’s difficult to find his edgelord persona quite so sexy or subversive—there’s enough to fear between the rise of the alt-right, ICE, and so much else. The mid-2010s were about debating what violence was—a microaggression, an artwork, a cop wrapping his bicep around a Black man’s throat and choking him to death. By 2020, the terror of fascism and genocide had reached a fever pitch, changing that discourse entirely.

If Wolfson is such an artist of his time, what is he now? I wondered this to myself as a headset was placed on my head. A white void, lined with a grid that seemed to stretch into infinity, began to appear. My partner in this piece was told by an assistant to calibrate the headset by walking and flipping his palms so that my skin can fit itself to his body. There were technical difficulties. The anticipation was difficult to bear. I had always been curious to know what it is to see myself as others do. The opportunity to do so had finally arrived, and I realized I was frightened.

My hands appeared before me with hair on their knuckles. Glancing down at myself, I saw my partner’s clothing: a striped shirt, beige pants, white sneakers. A figure—myself—appeared in my periphery. She was there, her eyes wide fixed in a bloodshot demonic stare, glitching, body folding and unfolding. Without meaning to, I said the word “stop” out loud.

From the hips down I was quite distorted, shorter and wider than I am, with very small feet. I tried to look up my dress, but it didn’t work. I couldn’t take my eyes off her, even as I wanted to flinch. Then a rectangular mirror appeared in the void. I could see myself wearing my partner’s skin. His face and gaze were all wrong, and I couldn’t get his arms to work, sometimes they disappeared completely. I tried dancing, and his body shuddered.

Male and female voices began chanting a poem with flat affect. My mouth was opening and closing to match its words: “God molested you.” The word “transparency” chimed as I looked down at myself in my partner’s body, seeing empty space ringed by the outline of his pants and sneakers. The mirror flipped, passed through us, and we followed it. There was a phantom feeling of touch as I skimmed my hand over the surface of the mirror, like trying to grab a beam of light. The poem continued: “Look at your hands, I love you. Look at your hands, I hate you.” We circled each other in that timeless void. The VR goggles suddenly began streaming reality. It was over.

After removing the VR headset and the headphones, my partner and I sat down and drank a glass of water. “You have spots,” he said, and I rolled up the sleeve of my sweater, which I had taken off when I was scanned. I looked at my own freckles, a bit dazed. I realized my internal monologue had gone completely silent during the duration of the experience, and in the moments afterward had to readjust to hearing my own thoughts again. My partner’s experience wasn’t as absorbing. The audio in his headset was broken—he hadn’t heard anything. 

It turned out that the body-switching experience made for a good bonding moment. My partner-in-art and I spent the next few hours wandering around the Beyeler talking about the work. The intensity of the experience, like a physical glow, eventually sloughed off, along with any frustrations with technical frictions. What remains are strong images of encounter, as when that twitching, uncanny body of mine appeared, followed by the moment I saw his face on mine, stiff, carved, and distorted. I’ve been left with a new memory.

Little Room could easily be read as an overly self-referential work, remixing the most obvious mediums and thematic aspects of his practice. But what makes this piece an elegant continuation of his body of work is that it is a quiet, compelling response to the criticism he received over the years. In Little Room, he tries to solve a problem: can the artist skirt the moralistic demands of representation?

Wolfson has often used white characters—including versions of his own body—to create supposedly apolitical scenarios in which violence isn’t racialized. But by putting the bodies of audience members into the work, something hyper-specific is achieved. 

VR has often been touted as an “empathy machine,” with the potential to create understanding and care across disparate groups, as anthropologist Lisa Messeri noted in her recent book In the Land of the Unreal. It seems too neat to think that Wolfson has used VR in this way. Rather, with Little Room he seems to give imagined critics exactly what they want—not to think of the artist anymore, of what anything represents, but to experience themselves, that entity we are all obsessed with. As for your role puppeting the Other, good luck with that burden, because it’s not on Wolfson anymore. If there is violence in that room, it’s something you brought with you. Can you handle that?

Over the past 40 years, German artist Katharina Grosse (b. 1961) has gained many fans for using an airless spray machine to make eye-catching, color-saturated, and immersive paintings. Many of her works have been shown in museums and galleries—one from 2004 involved spraying paint across the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston’s interiors, along with clothing, papers, eggs, and coins scattered across the floor—but she has also created site-specific installations for less conventional places, including an abandoned military building in New York’s Fort Tilden Park.

This week, Grosse will take on one of the biggest projects of her career: a monumental painting that will fill the Messeplatz in Basel during the Swiss edition of Art Basel. Titled CHOIR and curated by Natalia Graboska, the project will see her spray paint the entirety of this pedestrian precinct in shades of magenta.

ARTnews spoke with Grosse about the evolution of her practice and her plans for this year’s iteration of Art Basel.

ARTnews: You were introduced for the time to a spray gun in Marseille. What was so enticing about it? 

Katharina Grosse: I was in Marseille for half a year in the 1990s. It was a very anarchic place, much more so than it is now. I got to see people work with spray guns and other tools. I only tried out a spray gun a few years later. [The people in Marseille] saw themselves as outsiders. The atmosphere there definitely changed my approach to painting.

Edvard Munch experimented with spraying devices to paint during the 1890s. Was he one of your inspirations? 

I did not have this reference, no. However, I have always been attracted to Munch’s work, especially because he was doing unusual things with his paintings, taking them off stretchers and hanging them off a hook in the snow. His outdoor studio is fascinating to me. His works had no beginning no end, which I can relate to because, to me, a painted image is not limited to a canvas. I traveled to Norway around 1985 to see where Munch lived and the landscapes he drew inspiration from. I am currently preparing a show that will open in 2026 at the Munch museum in Oslo.

How has your technique evolved since you spray painted a corner of one of the Kunsthalle Bern’s galleries in green, then realizing that painting “could pass over architectural structures and borders”?

Untitled [a 1998 work that involved spraying acrylic paint directly onto the corner between two walls and a ceiling at the Kunsthalle Bern] was a key moment in my career. It made me understand the independence of painting, which doesn’t have to comply with spatial rules. It’s almost like an exterior agent that swoops in, flickers up, shows possibilities we hadn’t seen before, makes them more complex and then, all of a sudden, wears off and disappears. Another turning point for me was The Bedroom. In 2004, I painted over my bedroom, including personal objects—books, sheets, works that I had made in the past, pieces of furniture. It did not feel like a loss, but rather like a transformation. It gave me another perspective on my life. Now, when I’m invited to paint in a public space, I draw from that experience. I see it as a crossover. I put a painted image—which is a proposition, part of my imagination—on top of something that everybody knows.

The same kind of crossover will happen on Messeplatz, which Art Basel has commissioned you to paint entirely before the beginning of the fair.

It’s the first time that a painter has been invited to take over the 53,800-square-foot Messeplatz. The challenge with that piece is that I have to be up to that scale. My movement determines how the place is being perceived. The spray gun will help me expand my reach. With this tool, I can paint endlessly. Then, I will go over the whole square—into the water, over the water, over the roofs that are in front of the entrance.

Fair-goers are transient. Once they step into the Messeplatz, they will become part of the work. I really want to create a painting that is almost like a threshold between reality and fiction. It is a membrane: you can walk through it, step out of it at any time, or stay in it as much as you want.

How will you do that?

I want to make a visceral painting that gets into your system so fast that you don’t have to think about it. In that prospect, I’ve worked working with photographs, floor plans, models of various scales, but with a clear vision in mind. [The idea] popped into my head right away—which is not always the case.

The square is being protected by a very thin layer of asphalt that will be peeled off and recycled once the fair is over. I usually don’t paint on black, so we’ll have to create a white structure for me to paint over. I chose two tones of magenta for their high visibility. This is the color that lifeguards now use instead of orange.  

How do you feel about your work being ephemeral?  

I like the idea that my work will disappear after seven days, once Art Basel is over. You can’t buy it, you can’t own it. It defies the reality of the fair, which is mainly about transactions. There is beauty in that transience.

Your exhibition at the Deichtorhallen Hamburg features an installation and a selection of studio paintings, as well as drawings and sketch books. What does working indoors bring you that performing outdoors does not? And vice versa?  

Working outdoors is almost like swimming in the sea; and indoors, like swimming in a pool. There are two different ways to do it, and yet, you’re still in the water. In my studio, I can be working on 20 to 30 works at the same time. My approach to color is then more experimental. Otherwise, I use it to come into an area which escapes labels, definitions, and descriptions, to feel a direct resonance with a space I am connecting with.

You are known for embracing the events and incidents that arise as you work. What kind of incidents could occur during the creative process?

I don’t expect anything, and that’s the point. In my experience, I start with what I have envisioned, to get a sense of the space and atmosphere I am working with, but I am still aware that many things may impact my work—the wind, the weather, my team. After a while, you become part of the painting, which makes it easier to adapt and find solutions. You resonate with everything and everybody you work with, like an organism.

Last week, the VIMA contemporary art fair opened its doors to the public for the first time in Limassol, Cyprus, ushering in waves of eager visitors looking for fresh insights into the island country’s rapidly developing creative ecosystem, and its emerging position within the wider Mediterranean art scene.

Named for the Greek word ‘Vima’, meaning ‘step’ or ‘podium’, the newly launched exhibition— the first of its kind in Cyprus—originated with the desire of co-founders Lara Kotreleva, Edgar Gadzhiev and Nadezhda Zinovskaya to build a meaningful platform for Cypriot art on home soil. At the same time, the fair also aims to bring in creatives, collectors, and aficionados from around the world.

“We are focused on the region around Cyprus and the Mediterranean,” Kotreleva told ARTnews. “We wanted to attract galleries which are vibrant and dynamic, to build connections for Cyprus. In the art ecosystem here, we need initiatives like this to strengthen the market. I believe that VIMA can play this role. These types of projects can bring much needed visibility.”

The venue for VIMA’s three-day inaugural exhibition was a former industrial site that once served as part of the SODAP winery. First built in 1947, this location served as the main production centre for processing grapes grown in both Limassol and Paphos, but it was ultimately abandoned due to age and obsolescence. Today, it provides a perfect blank canvas for this new chapter of Cyprus’s story, linking past and present.

This spirit was perhaps best embodied in VIMA’s first ever Special Project exhibition. Entitled ‘The Posterity of the Sun’, in reference to the 1950s novel La Posterite du Soleil written by poet Rene Char and philosopher Albert Camus, this striking outdoor showcase assembles 17 works by 17 artists from across Cyprus and other Mediterranean countries, placing them in dialogue with each other, the historical architecture, nature, and the passage of time.

“I came to Cyprus for the first time last October,” Ludovic Delalan, who curated the exhibition, told ARTnews. “I knew where it was located on the map, but I didn’t know the place, and I really felt that it was very important to come here before even starting to think about anything. As a curator, I like to play with the historical and social context when I conceive an exhibition, so I really wanted to understand both the history of Cyprus, and the Cyprus of today.”

“When I came here and saw that it’s an open-air exhibition space, exposed to the sky and the sun, I decided to play with that,” he explained. “The sun is something that is always present— something familiar—but, at the same time, the Sun will one day disappear. I really liked the idea of placing this symbol in dialogue with the human condition. I also love to play with the emptiness, so I wanted to use the space as it is. We did not remove any of the vegetation. We did not repaint anything. I really like these marks of the passage of time. It feels like something has happened here, and now we are the day after.”

Notable pieces include works from the legendary Cypriot ceramicist Valentinos Charalambous’s ‘Talisman’ series of wall-mounted relief sculptures. Made from refractory clay, they explore a visual language between abstraction and representation, combining both natural and human forms inspired by his own cultural roots, and the surrounding natural environments of Cyprus. Nearby, a trio of pieces—linen painted with natural pigments, including clay, ash and spices— from Tunisian-Italian artist Monia Ben Hamouda’s ‘Rain’ series hung draped from exposed concrete beams, fluttering in the sea breeze, animating the primal, instinctive gestures used to create these works.

Another noteworthy inclusion is Shroud by Lebanon-based Honduran fabric artist Adrian Pepe. This monumental artwork, created from hand-felted wool, was originally woven in 2024 to envelope the facade of Villa des Palmes, an iconic heritage building damaged in the 2020 Beirut Port explosion. For VIMA, it was hung from the back of one of the venue’s buildings.

“When I was invited by Ludovic to take part in this exhibition, I was very interested in the state of disrepair of the buildings here,” said Pepe. “This textile piece was created to wrap around a broken building in Beirut, so I brought it here to extend that gesture of repair and protection.”

“I think it’s a very well curated event,” he continued. “As I’ve walked around through the different halls, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the consistency and quality of the works and the galleries that are here.”

Spanning two large halls, VIMA’s main exhibition comprised a wide variety of works created by contemporary artists from across the Mediterranean region. Rather than using an open call, the VIMA committee elected to use an invitation-only selection process, emphasising both quality and regional relevance. The inaugural fair hosted nearly 30 galleries, nonprofits, and artist-run spaces, representing approximately 100 artists from some 20 different countries, echoing Cyprus’s historical position and geographical importance as a meeting point between East and West.

Showing with Nicossia-based gallery Art Seen, Greek artist Marina Genadieva’s works are deeply tied to the history and nature of her adoptive home of five years, Cyprus. This is exemplified in her Species of Native Flora – Section of Cyprus Buffer Zone; a hand-drawn map depicting the endemic flower species found within the so-called ‘Green Line’.

“I use my art to try to understand this invisible boundary,” said Genadieva. “During my research, I found out that the state of Cyprus hasn’t documented much about these flowers, because they cannot enter. It’s not fully known what exists there, so I imagined some of them. If you look at the map, it’s difficult to discern which of them are real and which of them are imaginary.”

“It’s so important for all the artists here—and also others that come from other places—to take part in something like this,” she added. “It’s an honour for me to be a part of VIMA, especially as my first art fair.”

Beyond these main events, VIMA was further enhanced by extensive public and parallel programmes, including a robust roster of tours, talks, live music, site-specific performances and off-site exhibitions, held across both Limassol and Nicosia.

Already a massive success with visitors, VIMA has set the stage for what may become an extremely exciting and vibrant part of the Mediterranean art scene. As the fair’s organisers look to what comes next, it can safely be said that this was an exceptional first step for Cyprus’s first art fair.

“Seeing these artworks all in the same venue is so beautiful,” said Kotreleva. “We would love to continue what we have started here. It’s a challenging prospect, to keep this momentum going, but for now we are very happy with what we’ve achieved.”

Since British colonial officers confiscated the Ngadji drum in 1902, the Pokomo people in southeastern Kenya have witnessed a significant percentage of their community convert to Christianity or Islam. They can no longer perform certain traditional ceremonies. Prior to British colonial rule in Kenya, beginning in 1895, Pokomo artists crafted these wooden drum for calls to worship or to celebrate the start of a king’s reign. More than a century later, this group is still fighting to restore their community from this violent past by retrieving their sacred instrument from the British Museum in London.

This story is one of many that Open Restitution Africa, an African-led research organization based on the continent, compiled with scholars to help reframe narratives around the repatriation of important cultural objects from museums and private collections. William Mutta Tsaka, a researcher at the National Museums of Kenya, wrote the Ngadji case study in November 2023 with a $1,650 microgrant from ORA. With a three-year, $600,000 grant from Mellon Foundation, the project has allowed ORA to support scholars for four months and collect data about around 16 individual restitution efforts.

ORA initially planned for the grant program to cover the costs of collating and reporting the research. However, not long into the project, founders Chao Maina and Molemo Moiloa realized the needs were greater than expected, as most repatriation grants resourced provenance research for professionals working with Western museums. But most independent researchers had to rely on community fundraising or personal funders before ORA’s microgrants. ORA’s microgrants are likely the first to fund independent scholars or community activists on the continent.

“We found that people were using this tiny bit of additional resources to get on a bus and go into a village and do additional interviews,” Moiloa told ARTnews. Tsaka’s grant, like many researchers’, covered the equipment, travel, and other fieldwork costs.

The project aims to disrupt the media and scholarship landscape ORA’s founders had identified in a 2022 report, titled Reclaiming Restitution: Centering and Contextualizing the African Narrative. In it, Maina and Moiloa argue that even though discussions about African restitution increased after 2017, African voices and the needs of Africans have been largely absent from these conversations. Among their findings was that Africans authored at most 4 percent of all academic publishing on restitution between 2016 and 2021. When those voices were present, the focus had been on Africans arguing for the right to own their material culture instead of providing an understanding of the impact an object’s loss had on its community. The report also emphasizes that restitution cases extend beyond the Benin Bronzes, which have been given an outsize significance in the media.

Along with case studies, ORA has created an open data platform, unveiled at the end of the year, to contain researchers’ documents, interview transcripts, and other materials with other recorded events. They hope to show that restitution is more than “putting something in a box and sending it on a plane,” Moiloa said. “The really complex work of repair and restoration is actually the work of Africans.”

This community-centered approach to restitution research also highlights the immense challenges faced when tracking, locating, or retrieving seized artifacts. In ORA webinars and conferences, researchers have shared stories about removing arsenic, a preservative that conservationists treated artifacts with until relatively recently; settling customs disputes with different jurisdictions; or determining who has the right to advocate on behalf of a community for an object’s return.

To write his case study, Tsaka traveled to Tana River County, a coastal province in Kenya where the Pokomo people live, and interviewed community members and representatives from Recovery of the Ngadji, a nonprofit initiative, who had sought the object’s return from the British Museum between 2019 and 2023. Through his research, Tsaka learned that Ngadji’s case is likely stalled still because of intracommunity discord. Even though Pokomo elders granted the initiative’s founders, Makorani Mungase and Baiba Mjidho, permission to visit the Ngadji in the British Museum’s archive, these elders argue that the pair started the initiative without community consent. In 2020, Pokomo elders sent a letter to the British Museum asking the museum to pause all negations with the initiative because of this.

“It’s important that negotiations involve the local community,” Tsaka told ARTnews. “It’s not a good idea to form an NGO to negotiate with [Western] institutions; the item belongs to the community.”

The British Museum and the Recovery of the Ngadji initiative did not respond a request for comment from ARTnews about the negotiation process.

The Ngadji case study provides a picture of how ORA’s research and data challenges the methods of contextualizing objects and their respective restitution claims accurately. One important point of distinction in this discussion is between material culture, such as the repatriation of the Benin Bronzes, which have made international headlines, versus requests for human or prehistoric remains, which have been underreported in the media. This is has led to a bias within the international media, according to ORA, with a 2022 report noting that this bias is “understandable,” given that conversations and research about restitution recently became more popular.

But, failing to research a wide variety of cases may also oversimplify restitution discussions and silence narratives that don’t fit a specific mold. That’s what ORA’s model aims to change.

 “Our researchers go into villages and museums to track the stories of cases about human ancestors, prehominid remains such as dinosaurs, [and] through to what is usually expected: material culture like Benin bronzes,” Moiloa said.

Independent curator Phumzile Nombuso Twala, for example, used her microgrant to develop a case study on Sara Baartman as a way to humanize the Black woman who had been dehumanized by the human circuses she was exhibited in. Twala includes details about Baartman’s life before moving to Europe, the conditions she faced while in England and France, and the efforts the Griqua community made to reclaim her remains in the 1990s from France’s Musee de l’Homme. In her report, she emphasizes the roles artists, African media, and national government can play when supporting community-led efforts like these.

Other ORA-funded case studies show how human remains are just another resource extracted from Africa, like in one by independent curator Mwape J. Mumbi, about the first human fossil found in Africa. Even though the Kabwe Man—named for the Zambian town it was unearthed in and also known as the “Broken Hill Skull”—helped paleontologists and archeologists better understand humankind’s evolution, the skull represents Zambia’s colonial, environmental, and cultural history. African laborers uncovered the skull while mining for lead and zinc in a town, more two hours north of the capital city Lusaka, that environmentalists now consider one of the most polluted in the world. (A 2015 scientific study found that children who live in Kabwe have serious health risks from soil contamination.) Mumbi argues that Zambia could have benefited financially if the research funding—and later the tourism-related spending from its display—had stayed in Zambia rather than going to the United Kingdom and the Natural History Museum in London.

A UNESCO court ruled in 2024 that the UK must repatriate Zambia’s skull. But the negotiations for its return have also stalled, with UK researchers making the case to international courts that Zambia didn’t have the infrastructure necessary to preserve the skull for future research. Zambia’s government has provided evidence to the contrary.

In a statement to ARTnews, the United Kingdom Natural History Museum said that it “remains committed to continuing to work constructively with the UK government and the Zambian government on this matter.”

Mumbi said that negotiations might have actually stalled because of fears of what Zambians would do with their item once it was returned, as some Zambian communities believe the artifact doesn’t belong in a museum for display and should instead be reburied in Kabwe. Mumbi believes that these discussions need to be left to Zambians to decide.

Now, nearing the end of its research and discovery period, ORA is ready to share data insights with Africans first and foremost. Collaborating with digital storytellers and AI software developers, they hope their data platform will provide restitution practitioners with the qualitative and quantitative resources needed to move various ongoing cases forward. Maina shared that Africans’ century-long effort to restitute objects has often happened behind closed doors between museum and national leaders. With this data, they can identify patterns that help Africans receive their confiscated objects faster.

“This is the first data set of its kind, so we are looking to translate it into insights and specific tools that people can use within restitution” Maina said. “For example, you’re more likely to succeed in a restitution process with multiple stakeholders as opposed to fewer ones.”

Kiang Malingue, one of Hong Kong’s most prominent galleries, will open a new commercial space in New York’s Chinatown neighborhood this week.

Known for a program that equally nurtures emerging talents and represents some of most acclaimed artists from Asia, Kiang Malingue has established itself in the past 15 years as a gallery to watch. Among the artists on its roster are two artists who have previously done national pavilions at the Venice Biennale, Ellen Pau (Hong Kong in 2001) and Ho Tzu Nyen (Singapore in 2011), as well as US-based artists Homer Shew, Brook Hsu, and Kyung-Me.

Its founders, Edouard Malingue and Lorraine Kiang, said the move to New York is part of a strategy that includes tapping into a growing community of young Asian American collectors and an increasing market interest in Asian and Asian diaspora artists.

“After years of running the gallery in Hong Kong, we wanted to have a foot in the West to continue promoting the program and to create more dialogue between the West and where we are in Hong Kong now,” Malingue told ARTnews.

Added Kiang, “The program was always meant to grow and develop. Opening in New York gives us the opportunity to see how it can evolve elsewhere.”

The gallery, too, has matured alongside growing interest in understanding Asian artists and Asian art. Two decades ago, institutions and scholars only scratched the surface, whereas today, audiences want to go deeper. Kiang Malingue wants to serve as one venue for that to occur as “there aren’t enough galleries that truly spend the time to delve into this subject matter,” Kiang said.

Located at 50 Eldridge Street, the space’s inaugural exhibition will present new work by Japanese artist Hiroka Yamashita, marking her New York solo debut. The show is also a homecoming of sorts as Yamashita received her MFA from Rutgers University in 2019 and hasn’t been back to the city since. “It’s an exciting return to New York for her—she knows the city well,” Kiang said.  

Chinese galleries have been steadily expanding their presence in New York in the past few years, mirroring a broader migration trend as more wealthy Chinese individuals move to the United States. In 2023, Alisan Fine Arts, a long-established Hong Kong gallery known for championing Chinese modern masters and contemporary ink paintings, opened a location on the Upper East Side. Earlier this year, Shanghai-based gallery Bank, which represents some of China’s most buzzed-about ultra-contemporary artists like Sun Yitian and Liang Hao, launched its own outpost in the city.

Recognizing the potential to connect with those high-net-worth individuals as well as members of the Asian diaspora seeking to reconnect with their cultural roots, Kiang said the gallery hopes to foster a sense of community. “It’s just like Asians wanting to have Asian food in New York,” she said, noting that the collectors they’ve already met in the city are eager to learn more when they talk about artists from Hong Kong, Greater China, and the Southeast Asia. “There’s a kind of familiarity—whether it’s in the language or in what the artist is doing.”

Even still, Malingue hopes all will come to the gallery to learn about its program. “I believe a gallery’s role is to bring people together—to create a place where people can meet and discover things they didn’t expect,” he said.

In its first year in New York, Kiang Malingue plans to mount three to four exhibitions, before refining their approach for the following year. While some of the programming in New York will be drawn from Hong Kong, the aim is to also develop exhibitions that connect the two spaces and for the New York outpost to be rooted in its local context.

“It’s really like two trees,” said Kiang. “One that’s deeply rooted in Hong Kong, and a young one we’re planting in New York.”

A Hong Kong gallery opening in the US at this moment, when the global art market is contracting and geopolitical tensions between the US and China are at a historic high, exacerbated by a tariff war, might seem like an odd choice. (The Trump administration’s sweeping 145 percent tariff on imports from China, now also applies to Hong Kong.) When asked about the impact of the tariffs, especially when several Chinese galleries have pulled back even showing at US art fairs, Malingue said his gallery’s operations haven’t yet disrupted, but he acknowledged the challenges ahead.

“It’s super tough, but it’s never been more vital to have a dialogue between New York and Hong Kong,” Malingue said. “When things become tough, that’s when you need to engage with the public, because sales don’t happen with the snap of a finger. We have to explain what the artist is about.”

The gallery has long championed multimedia practices, particularly video, which are less affected by tariffs. In September, it will present a video-based exhibition by Chinese artist Zheng Bo, the first of many such shows in the medium. However, Kiang emphasized that the gallery remains committed to showcasing work across all mediums, ranging from painting to installation, and will not pivot solely to video art because of the ongoing tariff dispute. Another strategy, Malingue noted, could be that the gallery launch a residency program to invite artists to live and create in New York for extended periods if tariffs on Hong Kong artists become prohibitively high.

Despite the current state of US-China relations, Malingue said institutional interest stateside hasn’t waned. “I want to insist on the fact that US institutions are still extremely engaged with what’s happening around the world,” he said. “They remain open, curious, supportive.”

While launching a new space during a market downturn might seem counterintuitive, many art market experts believe it’s actually one of the best times to expand. Kiang shares this optimism, noting that the timing could work in their favor. As speculative buying slows, she said, collectors often turn their attention away from the blue-chip or the market darling toward emerging artists with experimental or conceptual practices, whose works typically fall into lower price brackets.

This trend is backed by the latest UBS Art Basel Market Report, which found that while global art sales declined by 12 percent, the segment for works priced under $50,000 grew in both value and volume in 2024. That describes much of Kiang Malingue’s roster, with prices ranging from $5,000 to $300,000. “You can only be a gallerist if you’re idealistic,” said Malingue. “You have to believe that people will come together—and when you present an artist from the Asian diaspora, you have to believe that it won’t just resonate with the diaspora community. The work can touch the soul and curiosity of a much broader audience.”

Last Thursday, just ahead of this year’s Gallery Weekend Berlin, art-world revelers gathered in a converted 1950s gas station, dubbed Die Tankstelle, in the capital city’s Schöneberg neighborhood. The spot is well-known to locals, less for filling up on gas, than for art. Until recently, it was a museum dedicated to German artist George Grosz. But as of this month it is the new shared space for megadealer Pace Gallery and a hometown shop, Judin Gallery.

Related Articles

Pace Embroiled in $1 M. Lawsuit Over Contested Louise Nevelson Sculpture

Sotheby’s and Pace Gallery In Talks For Significant Partnership: ‘A New Model’

As part of the partnership, Pace rents out half of the Die Tankstelle from Judin founder Juerg Judin, who has owned it since 2005, with the two companies sharing the costs of running the space. (The galleries declined to disclose the specific financials of the arrangement.) For its inauguration, Judin is exhibiting works on paper by Tom of Finland in the downstairs space; upstairs, Pace is showing works on paper by Jean Dubuffet, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Robert Nava. After this debut, the galleries will alternate between shows, with each mounting about three per year.

The collaboration, and the quirky space itself—with its narrow, rectangular forms reminiscent of shipping containers—doesn’t feel like the grand commercial and architectural gestures one might expect from the likes of Pace, which operates in seven international cities. But the project does fit in with Berlin and its changing art landscape.

“In the future, galleries have to collaborate more, not less, to also get through the difficulties that we have now. We have a changing world, a changing market,” Judin told ARTnews during the May 1 opening preview.  “Cost-cutting was not at the core of this project,” to work with Pace, said art historian and co-owner of Judin Gallery, Pay Matthis Karstens. “It’s a journey to see where our joint strengths and paths can lead.”

The main exhibition space of this new Pace-Judin venture measures 3,200 square feet, across two stories, and adjacent to this is a café and bookshop. To distinguish the former gas station from its past life, Judin commissioned architect Guido Hager to landscape the outdoor courtyard into a peaceful garden with a gurgling fountain and pond that was completed by 2008, becoming the dealer’s personal residence for several years. To “survive” downcycles in the market, amplified by Trump tariffs and geopolitical turmoil, “you can either withdraw into your own, little shell, or you can open up,” Judin said. And while most in the art world were fairly “territorial,” he offered that Pace CEO Marc Glimcher and himself were not. Glimcher, who paused to high-five his Berlin-based senior director Laura Attanasio, said he agreed.

Asked about the decision to open in Berlin, Glimcher said it evolved naturally from his long-standing friendship with Judin. “Everybody wants to know what our strategy is—I don’t know! It just happened,” he said, clarifying that the gallery had been actively looking for a suitable office for Attanasio with a viewing room. But since some eight of the gallery’s artists are based in Berlin—including Alicja Kwade, Nina Katchadourian, and painter Adrian Ghenie, who is co-represented by Judin and Pace—it made sense to open a full-fledged exhibition space.

“Berlin is like a transfusion, if you’re in the art world,” Glimcher added.

A Changing City

Berlin itself has been going through a tumultuous period, as costs of living rise and younger, less established artists don’t have the free terrain—and incredibly cheap rent—that has defined the city’s alternative, open-to-all arts scene for the decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Even more grave, government funding for the arts has been slashed by €130 million (about $147 million), leading to the resignation of the city’s senator for culture, Joe Chialo, last week, with more cuts expected in future. Meanwhile, the Israel-Palestine conflict has deeply divided the city’s art scene.

Attanasio said that doesn’t mean “giving up on the city, just because we’re running into some difficult times. Berlin was—and still is—on everyone’s radar.”

Pace chief curator Oliver Shultz added, “Berlin still feels very much defined by its voids and its openness … even as those voids have been filled up over the last 10–15 years, you can still sense this disruptive energy. There’s still space for us.” Antonia Ruder, director of Gallery Weekend Berlin (GWB), held a similar line of defense. Because Berlin lacks a major art fair, she has tried to draw a broader and more international crowd to GWB, the city’s main art-selling event. As part of her strategy, she has introduced new programs including talks in collaboration with Neue Nationalgalerie, a podcast with artists, curated tours, and studio visits. She noted that Berlin is still artist-centered, unlike other, similarly large art hubs. “But in recent years, galleries have become more internationally connected, and there’s a growing effort to strengthen the local market without compromising the city’s spirit,” she told ARTnews in an email.

Much of that spirit was palpable during this past weekend, chock-full of gallery, institutional, and pop-up events around town. Artist Olafur Eliasson tried to manage a long, snaking line of visitors to his show-stopping exhibition, “The lure of looking through a polarized window of opportunities, or seeing a surprise before it’s reduced, split, and then further reduced,” at neugerriemschneider (through August 9). When it started to rain, he pleaded with a gallery worker to hand out umbrellas to everyone waiting to enter.

At the neugerriemschneider’s second space, Thomas Bayrle held court amid his bustling exhibition featuring historic and new work, highlighting his visionary use of technology in art across several decades. “Sometimes I have doubts, but then, I just keep going,” he told ARTnews.

Gallery weekends can tend to be hit or miss, which can be a drag to visitors who have to trek across a given city. But Berlin’s event offers an unusual amount of hits. They range from Sun Yitian’s compelling solo at Esther Schipper, cloaked in dim lighting and entered through a curtain; to a museum-like exhibition of French self-taught painter Camille Bombois (1883–1970) in dialogue with contemporary artists, at Judin’s other Berlin space; to a poignant solo for late artist David Medalla, presented by Mountains gallery, of his iconic “Bubble Machine,” as well as neon sculptures and paintings. (It’s worth noting that Mountains Gallery, like many experimental initiatives around the city, is not part of the official GWB program.)

The city’s institutions also tend to feature their important spring exhibitions during GWB. The theatrically displayed work of maverick artist and opera singer Semiha Berksoy (1910–2004), at the Hamburger Bahnhof National Gallery of Contemporary Art, is a knockout. On view are her raw, expressive portraits with almost mystic symbolism, including characters from her opera performances, which are displayed dramatically as if for the stage.

A new space, at Neue Nationalgalerie, dedicated to Christoph Schlingensief’s Sinking Germany (1999), offers a laugh. The filmed “action” shows Schlingensief, dressed as an Orthodox Jew, dumping an urn full of the “ashes of Germany” and a suitcase of common German objects, into New York’s Hudson River as he plays classical German music on a boombox. It feels just as relevant to watch today.

In the galleries and museums, Berlin’s characteristic irreverence as a leading European art hub can still be felt now, but GWB’s Ruder said there does exist a unique “tension” in the city’s “co-existence of commercial ambition with a strong non-commercial, artist-led foundation.” Nonetheless, she sees “real potential” here, especially given the city’s relatively small but formidable mix of established and emerging collectors.

On that note, Pace’s new gallery, according to senior director Attanasio, is the perfect response to the changing desires of the next generation of collectors. “New buyers want a different surrounding when buying art,” she said. “They don’t want to enter a white cube. They want another experience—a social, communal space that they’re part of.”

The Die Tankstelle “is a location that you probably won’t find anywhere else but Berlin,” local collector Filip Dames, 41, told ARTnews. “It’s a bit of an unorthodox set-up with the shared space.” He noted that the collaboration is also pragmatic as other galleries in recent years have been “spending way too fast, and taking on huge real-estate projects that also probably didn’t really make sense from a financial point of view, and it’s also why, today, a lot of these galleries are struggling.”

The recent government cuts to the arts, Dames said, are “short-sighted” as they underestimate “the one thing that Berlin stands out for: its culture.” He added, “Berlin needs these types of events.”

Nestled between therapist offices and reiki salons on the ninth floor of a 17-story high rise on the westside of New York’s Union Square, Gordon Robichaux is a gallery for those in-the-know. And in its eight years of existence, it has converted a devoted following, a mix of collectors, curators, and critics, to its closely watched program. Each of its exhibitions elaborately delves into a given artist’s story, paying close attention to their innovative use of materials.

Gordon Robichaux’s spring programming pulls back the curtain on the community of artists it has cultivated over the years. At the gallery, it has just opened two exhibitions, both dedicated to late friend, artist and curator Jenni Crain, while simultaneously dedicating its booth at Frieze New York this week to her as well.

Crain contributed to the gallery’s first group show, in 2018, a year after its founding, and had mounted a two-person exhibition there the following year. Besides showing with the gallery, the mixed-media sculptor was a critical support as a friend, curator, and a salesperson during their early years.

Her sudden passing in 2021 at age 30 from Covid-19 was an immense shock to the gallery and its community. In 2022, the gallery mounted two exhibitions for Crain: one featuring two works completed just before her death and one for her final curatorial project, “Synonyms for Sorrow.”

A mix of grief and excitement course through the new shows. “Jenni’s work always grappled with memory, and sensory and bodily experiences in relationship to objects, space, textures, and architecture,” gallery cofounder Jacob Robichaux told ARTnews.

The just-opened exhibitions feature an unrealized floor sculpture by Crain, finished by her eponymous foundation in collaboration with two woodworkers she had previously worked with, at its smaller 907 space, while the larger 925 space will host “Untitled Exhibition (for Jenni),”including the works of artists who influenced her, like photographer Tee Corinne, painter March Avery, and furniture designer Kate Millett, who was the subject of Crain’s thesis at CCS Bard, or whose lives and practices she touched in one way or another, such as Justin Chance, Talia Chetrit, Nick Fusaro and fellow gallery artist Miles Huston, the other half of her two-person show.

Huston, a frequent collaborator of Crain’s, also stepped in to realize the work at 907, consisting of two large pieces lattice-shaped basswood, which Crain had conceived of for the space just before her passing . Each measuring around 7.75 feet in length, the sculpture’s two elements had to be carried nine flights up by four art handlers. “This is the spiritual dimension of art, that it exists beyond people who make it,” Robichaux said. “One of the central tenets of art making, even though it’s not always conscious, is that there is this object that continues to communicate something in time and space beyond our physical presence.”

Artists Sam Gordon and Jacob Robichaux started their eponymous venture in February 2017 at the 925 space; initially, it was available only for six months. The previous year, Gordon had curated a group show, “Persons of Interest,” for arts nonprofit Visual AIDS at the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division in the West Village. The exhibition brought together an intergenerational cohort, all of whom had been HIV/AIDS activists, from deceased artists like Keith Haring, Tseng Kwong Chi, Chloe Dzubilo, Tim Greathouse, Hugh Steers, and Affrekka Jefferson to those who had survived the epidemic like Reverend Joyce McDonald, Luna Luis Ortiz, Raynes Birkbeck, and the late Hunter Reynolds to younger artists carrying on their legacy like Ben Cuevas. That commitment, to shed light onto artists whose livelihood and practices have been overlooked and under-recognized, extends to what unfolds in the gallery’s modest spaces to this day.

As a duo, Gordon and Robichaux organized their first group show together at a law office with artists whom they would soon come to represent, including the iconoclastic East Village painter and performer Tabboo! (born Stephen Tashjian) and the sought-after Brooklyn-based, Ugandan sculptor Leilah Babirye. “We used that first experience as a think tank,” Gordon told ARTnews.

Their inaugural show as the gallery Gordon Robichaux was for mixed-media artist Ken Tisa. Even then, it hinted at the aesthetic and thematic pillars it has become to be known for: sculptural collages assembled from emotionally charged found objects, archival ephemera orchestrated into arresting displays, and paintings with a raw diarist edge. Tisa had been Robichaux’s professor at Parsons School of Design in the late ’90s. When the opportunity to organize an exhibition arose, Robichaux immediately thought of exhibiting a body of work he “only knew through images,” he said, visiting Tisa’s Soho loft with Gordon to see a decades-long collection of ephemera and objects. The last time many of his small-scale paintings about beauty and loss had been exhibited were at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center (now MoMA PS1) in the ’80s.

“This apartment was really a backdrop for many performances and ephemeral events that had happened [there] by Ethel Eichelberger and Peter Hujar,” Robichaux said.

The response to Tisa’s quirky but deliberate art quickly established it as a fresh gallery voice worth watching, with glowing reviews from both the New York Times and Artforum. The critical acclaim for the program has only increased in the eight years since. As a commercial enterprise, they have been successful too, participating in important fairs like Art Basel Miami Beach and Independent in New York. But even more importantly, the duo has been successful in getting many of their 24 artists into the permanent collections of top museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, Vienna’s MUMOK, and the Art Institute of Chicago.

But the founders are humble about their approach as gallerists. “It boils down to the fact that we are both artists, and we know how to treat other artists,” Gordon explained of their knack of raising the profiles of obscure figures.

Tabboo!—a beloved figure since the ’80s known equally for his drag persona and erratic paintings—is just one case study. He’s had a career resurgence since the gallery’s revelatory solo, “World of Tabboo!,” in 2017. The blend of energetic portraits from East Village’s heydays, including one of Haring, and recent cityscapes paid homage to the city’s glorious past and stark present.

A capsule collection featuring his flamboyant paintings from Supreme followed, as did acquisitions from the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (in 2020); the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles (2021); the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami (2022); and the Whitney Museum (2024). Taste-making gallery Karma soon came knocking, sharing representation with the artist since 2021, taking a painting of his to the inaugural edition of Frieze Seoul the following year. Earlier this year, the two galleries mounted a three-venue exhibition for Tabboo!

But the duo said their approach isn’t centered from an academic background but one that puts artists first. “We’re not re-inventing anything but just trying to re-write art history backwards, retroactively with artists who have been kept outside of it,” Gordon said.

Tribeca dealer Ales Ortuzar also took notice of their program. He joined forces with them in late 2020 for an ambitious survey of the mixed-media collagist, poet, and fashion designer Frederick Weston, who had died a few months earlier at 73. By this point, Gordon Robichaux had included his work in their first group show, mounted a solo for him, and helped organize a site-specific installation Weston at the Ace Hotel. The show at Ortuzar’s White Street space featured body maps, prints, drawings, and photo-collages which the artist had created, beginning in 1979 and up until his death.

Partnerships with blue-chip galleries, like Karma and Ortuzar, have been key to how Gordon Robichaux has been able to grow its program not just quickly but successfully. The founders see it as an alternative format at a moment when galleries of their size are struggling during an uncertain market.

“We are growing exponentially, but not in the traditional way,” Gordon said.

Their only physical extension outside of New York has been two quick stints in Los Angeles. In March 2020, they did a gallery swap with LA’s Parker Gallery, and that summer they mounted a group show at Marc Selwyn Fine Art in Beverly Hills. Then, in 2022, gallery artist Eve Fowler handed over her studio during her absence to shoot a film. There, they mounted two solo exhibitions one for Leilah Babirye and then one for experimental photographs of artist and Tribeca dealer Kerry Schuss, both of which led to local institutional acquisitions from the Hammer and the Museum of Contemporary Art, respectively.

In lieu of expanding their physical footprint in New York or elsewhere, the founders instead focus on enhancing their artists’ global visibility. After an artist receives their very first or long-overdue solo at Gordon Robichaux, the critical and commercial buzz in turn lends itself to interest from bigger players, as it has with Tabboo! and Weston. That recipe for success extends across the pond to three London galleries whom they share artist representation: McDonald with Maureen Paley, Siobhan Liddell with Hollybush Gardens, and Sanou Oumar with Herald St. This week, Hollybush Gardens will also open a show for another Gordon Robichaux artist, Rosemary Mayer, featuring the late artist’s mixed-media sculptures and drawings made between 1971 and 1983.

“The art world has flattened,” Gordon said simply.

While Gordon Robichaux may be better known for its focus on artists of an older generation, it has also been helping support the careers of a select few emerging artists, like Babirye, who fled Uganda in 2015 after she was outed. That year, she secured asylum in the US through the Fire Island Artist Residency, where the duo first encountered her work. Her totemic sculptures of a contemporary divinity and womanhood struck them. “As an African lesbian woman, she owns a tradition that Picasso or Braque claimed as theirs,” Gordon said.

But, at that point, Babirye’s future in the US was still in limbo. They provided her with a Brooklyn studio where she carved wooden sculptures out of the debris from nearby bike repair shops that would form the basis of her New York solo debut, in 2018. She arrived to the opening after a delivery shift for Uber Eats. The artist’s second exhibition sold-out early in its month-and-a half-long run. A co-representation deal with London’s Stephen Friedman Gallery followed in 2021. In 2023, she completed a residency at Yorkshire Sculpture Park in Wakefield, England, with a solo show there following the next year, when she participated in the Venice Biennale’s main exhibition, “Foreigners Everywhere.” Her first exhibition with Galerie Max Hetzler opened last week as part of Berlin Gallery weekend. And, the ICA Boston has a show of her sculptures scheduled for 2026.

That they have managed to maintain these artists on their rosters is a testament to the care and artist-forward thinking they have imbued into this project. Their secret for mutual loyalty is listening. They want to be “of service to the artists, especially those who haven’t the luck or the push,” according to Gordon.

White Columns director and chief curator Matthew Higgs, who has collaborated with the gallery several times, called Gordon Robichaux “one of the most important programs in the entire art world,” which he attributed to their “integrity, good grace, and humor.”

Part of their success, Higgs said, is that their location in Union Square, instead of Chelsea or Tribeca, makes their gallery a destination where visitors are meant to spend time. “They invite the visitors on an intimate engagement within a small space which allows them to focus on each artist with full support,” he told ARTnews.

But how did two artists learn to sell art to the largest institutions? Gordon answered simply, “It is just enthusiasm, sincerity, and understanding,” before noting that the duo very much had to learn the business on the job. Thinking through the question more deeply, he continued, “There are so many untold histories and we can find connections between these artists, curators, and writers whose paths at some point crossed.” Among them is Agosto Machado, a fixture of the downtown scene who was close friends with Marsha P. Johnson. He had never had a gallery show until his debut at Gordon Robichaux in 2022, from which MoMA acquired Shrine (White). (The work is currently on view in its second-floor collection galleries.)

A loyal collector base, including ARTnews Top 200 Collector Beth Rudin DeWoody, has also helped them stay afloat. “They were smart to see the histories we were exhibiting and where they actually fit in in the larger history,” Gordon said of the gallery’s client base, though he cautioned that “that amazing obsessive collector profile is slowing down.”

But Gordon sees this as an opportunity to “be a part of an experience” for young collectors just starting out. “Our program is our reputation,” he said. “Many people still haven’t heard of us which is exciting because there is more to share.”