An NSFW picture of Lorde has gone viral, stirring debate on social media about why the singer chose to bare it all for a special-edition release of her new album Virgin.

The photograph, which appears in the vinyl edition of that LP, shows Lorde donning a pair of see-through pants, without any underwear beneath them. Composed so that there is little to see beyond her waist, the picture echoes the album’s cover, an X-ray of the singer’s pelvis by artist Heji Shin.

Artist Talia Chetrit appears to be credited as the photographer of the picture in the liner notes for the vinyl, which were posted to Reddit by fans earlier this week. Chetrit previously photographed Lorde for the cover of one of the album’s singles, “What Was That,” featuring the singer’s face dripping with a translucent substance that may be water, sweat, or something else entirely.

Many of Chetrit’s photographs feature herself and others in various states of undress, often as a comment on how erotic desire and power play a role in how we see. “Power dynamics, agency, sexuality, and the psychology behind imagery have always been an important part of my work,” she told Flash Art in 2018. She has worked on commission for fashion magazines and shown her art in galleries.

Similar pants to the ones worn by Lorde here have also appeared in at least two other pictures by Chetrit, both of them self-portraits. In both, the artist artist poses before a mirror, spreading her legs and holding her camera to her face.

Of Plastic Nude (2016), Amanda Maddox wrote in Aperture last year, “While Chetrit’s see-through garment leaves virtually nothing to the imagination, it’s not exactly titillating by default. Perhaps this image is an evocation of the striptease, which, as Roland Barthes characterized it, ‘is based on a contradiction: Woman is desexualized at the very moment when she is stripped naked.’ Then again, is Chetrit nude? As she leans back against a piano, her plastic-wrapped torso and legs all but open to be viewed, I can’t help but be reminded of the beguiling woman dressed deceptively in a flesh-colored body stocking that E. J. Bellocq photographed a century earlier. In each case, the viewer must look closely to determine if the nudity is an illusion.”

Seen in that light, the new photograph of Lorde speaks to Virgin’s broader concerns with how much one is meant to reveal of their inner self, specifically when it comes to gender. “Some days I’m a woman, some days I’m a man,” Lorde sings on the opening track, “Hammer.” And of the album more broadly, she has said that, during its making, “I was beginning to understand that my gender was more expansive than I had thought.”

Throughout the run-up to the album, Lorde has subverted gender conventions. In the video for “Man of the Year,” she tapes her breasts and writhes around on a pile of soil that references Walter De Maria’s New York Earth Room (1977), an iconic work of the Land art movement. That movement has always been aligned with a certain brand of masculinity, even though women such as Agnes Denes and Nancy Holt are also associated with it.

“Today, land art appears as an almost perfect distillation of the art world’s history of male privilege, with its conviction that man is entitled to space to roam, to make his mark; women, however, never enjoyed that privilege,” wrote Megan O’Grady in 2018. Lorde’s mimicry of the De Maria piece seems to upend that notion, as does the closer of Virgin, a song called “David,” whose name may be an allusion to the Michelangelo sculpture, arguably the most famous male nude in art history.

The Virgin vinyl photograph also points up a contradiction: though Lorde has left little of her torso to the imagination, we still can’t see aspects of her gender identity. That much is also obvious based on the Shin photograph on the album’s cover, one of many X-ray photographs she’s taken. As Shin told ARTnews in 2019, “Even if you can see through me, you can understand even less of what’s going on.”

Most social media users haven’t engaged with the artful ideas broached by Chetrit and Shin’s photography for Lorde. Some have questioned why the vinyl’s picture did not gain the controversy that followed a recent Sabrina Carpenter album cover featuring that pop star kneeling before a man who can be seen grabbing her hair. (Carpenter later released new cover art that she jokingly said had been “approved by God.”)

One X post with 86,000 likes appears to mock the photograph as “groundbreaking” while labeling the Carpenter cover “anti-feminist.” Its poster, whose X page notes that they run a parody account, then wrote in a follow-up tweet, “today when us woman are still fighting for our rights, its bizarre that influential people do weird stuff like this for engagement. both covers are very odd.”

In response to that post, one user, apparently referencing Madonna’s 1992 Sex book, wrote, “No need for all the discourse. 90’s Madonna would kill you all.”

Other users have also poked fun at the Virgin picture. “when you open your Virgin vinyl and see lordussy,” reads one tweet accompanied with an iCarly clip in which the actress Miranda Cosgrove enters a room and is met with a blinding flash of light.

Someday, when art historians survey the art of the Covid-19 pandemic, attempting to chronicle aesthetic trends and salient themes, a section on domestic photography might include Talia Chetrit’s latest images. In her arresting exhibition “DICKERING” at Hannah Hoffman gallery in Los Angeles, Chetrit presents ten new large-format photographs that expand on her semi-autobiographical investigations of gender, sexuality, and representation, now with a stronger emphasis on the dynamics at play in familial relationships.

A few portraits of her boyfriend, their toddler son, and the artist herself—all in varying stages of undress—counter familiar heteronormative images of domestic bliss. In the black-and-white photograph Untitled (Family #1), 2021, the gangly, hairy dad appears in an elegant skirt with BDSM accoutrements—maybe one worn by the photographer to a glamorous opening in pre-pandemic times. Looking with an opaque expression toward the camera, he foppishly reaches down to stuff a bottle into his child’s mouth. Suspended from the wall behind them are four spiky fire pokers—objects consistent with the fetish-inspired outfit. It’s an unconventional and transgressive scene of childcare in which the feminized boyfriend functions as both sex object and domestic worker; quarantine, we are reminded, offered many people a reprieve from certain social and sartorial norms. But the photo also frames gender as a form of amusement, a low-key afternoon activity of dress-up—or, rather, dress-down. One must also remember that, for the boyfriend—a cisgender man in the quiet intimacy of his home—little is at stake in putting on a skirt. The same act in a more public setting has the potential to be not only a visual articulation of gender identity, but also a political act with consequences.

Themes of sexual play and familial triangulation are also central to many of Chetrit’s other photos, including Cat Boot Baby (2021), which captures the diapered toddler entertaining himself with blocks alongside a feline companion in mid-leap. The cat’s tail stretches out of the frame and seems to curve back into the shot in the form of a black leather boot that partly obscures the view of the baby’s head, and possibly even knocks against him, as his body language suggests. The boot—an overdetermined erotic signifier with which Chetrit has long been preoccupied—is more than a sneaky insertion into a mundane scene of early childhood; the photographer effectively uses the object to underscore rather than conceal the presence of sex in the American home. Other images focus on similarly evocative feminine objects, including one high heel standing erect inside another, a dainty pearl crucifix dangling from a tyke’s bike, and a luminous rubber nipple. Taken together, the carefully curated photographs play with and expand on the symbols and norms of white middle-class heterosexual desire and family life, rather than undoing or doing away with them altogether.

Yet even if the world Chetrit inhabits seems thoroughly heterosexual, her work is indebted to, and at times emulates, queer photographers’ practices that remap the intersections of the erotic, the domestic, and the familial. To be sure, the photos of her partner in a dress might produce valuable alternative visions of heterosexual relationships and modes of eroticism, but they can also read as facile appropriations of queer imagery, as uninspired photos purely intended to shock. The show’s emphatic gerund of a title, “DICKERING,” which generally means to haggle over something, calls to mind a negotiation of these competing interpretations of Chetrit’s work. And perhaps this inconclusive back-and-forth exchange is the reason her exhibition is compelling.

MAXXI, Italy’s national museum of contemporary art and architecture, has revealed the finalists for its MAXXI Bulgari Prize, which is given annually to a young artist. The nominated artists are Talia Chetrit, Invernomuto (a duo comprising Simone Bertuzzi and Simone Trabucchi), and Diego Marcon. The museum plans to announce the winner in October 2018.

Formerly known as Premio MAXXI, the prize, which draws support from its eponymous co-sponsor, has recognizes Italians, as well as international artists who have created work in Italy in the past two years. Each finalist will now create a site-specific work to be exhibited at MAXXI in May 2018. A jury will then select the prize’s winner, whose work will be acquired by the museum.

The finalists were selected by a jury featuring Bartolomeo Pietromarchi, the director of MAXXI Arte; curator David Elliott; Yuko Hasegawa, the artistic director at MOT in Tokyo; and Hans Ulrich Obrist, the director of London’s Serpentine Galleries. The jury cited the finalists’ “clear understanding of the historical moment in which we are living and a capacity for expanding the confines of the artistic idiom,” a release noted.

The history of the empty gallery show is by now widely known. The bare rooms and closed spaces of Yves Klein, Robert Barry, Art & Language, Maria Eichhorn, and many other artists are ensconced in art history books and, in recent years, have provided the subject for two separate major museum shows—“Voids: A Retrospective” at the Pompidou in Paris in 2009 and “Invisible Art” at the Hayward Gallery in London in 2012.

However, an equally intriguing phenomenon, the show with just one work, has received comparatively little notice. I am thinking not of shows that fill an entire gallery with one grand, overproduced installation (a bane of so many seasons), but exhibitions that consist of only a single discrete piece—a sculpture, a painting, or a photograph alone in a gallery. They are out in force in New York galleries at the moment.

The one-work show advertises an artist’s unbridled confidence. It can be delivered with a measure of aggression (“This will dominate the room”) or insouciance (“This is all I need to do to get people talking”) or even disdain, real or feigned (“This is all the space deserves”). Often, it embodies a mixture of all those attitudes. Always, it is an act of seduction and a tactic for control. The work takes on the aura of a relic in a church or a depiction of a deity in a temple.

The prime example of the one-work exhibition at the moment is Richard Prince’s “Cowboy” show at Gladstone Gallery’s West 21st Street location, which runs through Halloween. The whole cavernous space houses a single metal sculpture of a young boy dressed as a cowboy. He has blond hair, impressive chaps, and a holster with two guns, and he stands on what looks to be a plywood box, also cast in metal.

“It surprised me at first,” the artist writes in a lengthy booklet accompanying the show, recalling the moment that he saw the mannequin his work is based on. It was a gift from his wife, he says. “Made me physically move when I first walked in on it. Startled.” It may also startle you a bit. The boy stares you down as you enter Gladstone, his left hand hovering above one revolver, ready to draw.

Immaculately trompe-l’œil, the piece radiates a distinct creepiness, tied to the dressing up, posing, and fetishization of young bodies, and calls to mind another one-work show, from 1983, featuring Spiritual America, a photograph of a naked 10-year-old Brooke Shields that Prince appropriated and displayed at a gallery, also called Spiritual America. Prince makes reference to this work in his essay, adding that he made changes to the boy mannequin, altering his pose and dress.

Prince has a long history with cowboys, ranging from the iconic Marlboro ads he photographed in the early 1980s to the undistinguished paintings he made a few years back of cowboys taken from pulp book covers. While most of Prince’s work over the last decade since he made his delightful “Nurse” paintings has felt sadly onanistic—either an indulgent retread or a toss-off joke—Cowboy just manages to escape that fate. It harbors a potent darkness. Prince’s Cowboy, after all, is not a cowboy, but rather a young boy pretending to be one. It is difficult to resist seeing the sculpture as a brazen portrait of the conservative white American male psyche: a child, fantasizing about power, freedom, and violence. Like Prince’s work, that worldview has a certain very sleight, sinister humor to it—at least until, as we have seen, the guns turn out to be real.

On a far more positive note, the artist and dealer Benjamin Morgan Cleveland has staged an uplifting, generous beauty of a one-work show at Eli Ping Frances Perkin on the Lower East Side. The one work is a huge couch with fabric colored bright pink, pale rose, and orange. The piece—which has the same good vibes of the classic Nickelodeon couch, a friend suggested—fills a sizable percentage of the gallery and is so tall that you have to hop up a good yard to relax on its sumptuous cushions. It’s worth the effort. And just when you think it can’t get any better, you may notice that its legs are large, ancient-looking wooden feet—each with four toes, like something out of a Maurice Sendak book. Are monsters hiding inside the furniture? Is the sofa itself some kind of camouflaged beast? All I know is that I wish I had an apartment large enough to provide that sofa a home. The show is on view through November 1.

If Prince and Morgan Cleveland both use the one-work show to engineer a knockout aesthetic punch (and a killer Instagram moment), then Talia Chetrit wields the technique with oblique, secretive intents in her show at Off Vendome in Chelsea, which is titled “Parents” and runs through this Saturday, October 17. She has left the gallery space empty except for a television and two leather chairs by the window. (Coming upon it, I thought about those scenes in movies where the hero bursts through a door expecting to find the kidnapping victim only to receive a videotaped message from the villains.) Chetrit’s TV has a video on loop, about 10 minutes long, which she recorded of her mother and father during a photo shoot, without their knowledge. They are a good-looking couple, and they wait patiently as their daughter works, largely unseen. They chat and goof off, dad especially hamming it up, kissing his wife’s neck or sucking in his belly as Chetrit gets ready to shoot. At a few moments, knowing smiles and maybe even uncomfortable glances seem to pass between the two parents, though it’s hard to say because they come and go in such a flash. Art is brushing up against the limits of what it can represent, what it allows us firmly to know. Alone in that room, the video becomes both a teasing, sneaky behind-the-scenes document of a superb photographer at work, in control, and a modest, affecting portrait of family members aging together.

It should be noted, though, that “Parents” is not, strictly speaking, a one-work show. One floor below, in the gallery’s office, Chetrit has hung five of her characteristically mysterious, alluring photographs, though they are all in different styles, as if we are looking at selections of her work rather than a full-on exhibition. None show her parents, though the artist does appear in one. She is straddling a space heater with her bare legs, her jeans are down at her boots, and she has left her face outside of the frame.

Talia Chetrit, Parents, 2015.

“Art of the City” is a weekly column by ARTnews co-executive editor Andrew Russeth.

The painting Saul and David has been reattributed to Rembrandt. It was thought to be his work until 1969, when it was dismissed as the work of a follower. [The Art Newspaper]

The Chrysler Museum of Art’s chief curator, Jeff Harrison, will be stepping down after 33 years at the museum. [Artforum]

Talia Chetrit’s “I’m Selecting” at Sies + Hoke. [Contemporary Art Daily]

The Amati “King” cello, the oldest surviving cello built in the mid-16th century, will be on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art beginning June 11. [Press Release]

Alexander Melamid has started a new quarterly art magazine, Artenol, intended as an “a purgative for an ailing art world, a palliative for afflicted aesthetes.” [The New York Times]

Artist Nadia Plesner has published a book detailing her three-year battle with Louis Vuitton over her right to use a bag resembling theirs in illustrations she made for charity. She claims an LV lawyer told her, “If you do not stop your campaign immediately, your artistic career will end here. You will never exhibit in a single gallery or museum in your life.” [The Art Newspaper]

A Turner Prize-nominated artist, Roger Hiorns, is planning to bury a Boeing 737 jet under the ground just outside Birmingham as part of a large-scale installation. He’ll need a  £250,000 grant from Arts Council England to proceed. [The Independent]

The High Museum of Art in Atlanta has appointed Charles L. Abney III as chairman of its board of directors. [Artforum]

“Five Out-of-the-Way Art Spots With Out-of-This-World Food.” [Wall Street Journal]

A look at MoMA’s labor dispute. [The Stranger]

Artist Justin Beal has collected 50 years’ worth of “Soft Matter” in a group exhibition at New York’s Wallspace gallery. The term refers to a classification of organic materials, plastics and foams from sustainable design expert Ezio Manzini’s 1989 book The Material of Invention (MIT Press). The show (through Aug. 1) features 20 works by 10 artists: Archizoom Associati, Becky Beasley, Hans Breder, Tom Burr, Talia Chetrit, Gaylen Gerber, Luisa Lambri, Enzo Mari, Carlo Mollino and Michael E. Smith.

Most of the works employ a palette of black and white. There are a number of photographs, from Lambri’s almost all-white images of architecture and Breder’s collagelike images of multi-limbed bodies to Mollino’s lushly colored Polaroids of women in architectural environments. The most colorful works are Enzo Mari’s Bambu and Pago Pago vases (1969), which complement Gerber’s Support (1970), an elongated dome of polyurethane foam coated in white paint. The work alludes to what Beal calls “a restrained or sexualized body.” This allusion is implied by Beal’s examinination of the relationships of furniture, architecture and sculpture to the human form in work from the 1960s to today.

Beal spoke with A.i.A. by e-mail last week about material, color and the artist-curated show.

ELLIOT CAMARRA It is surprising to see work from a wide range of disciplines and motivations looking so formally cohesive. Are there groupings that are especially exciting to you?

JUSTIN BEAL I think the best artist-curated shows begin with the work that you care about and the artists who influence your own practice and the formal cohesion follows from there. The three design objects in this show were included in the “New Domestic Landscape” show at [New York’s] Museum of Modern Art in 1972, so they have a determined place in art history, but each has a unique character as a specific object—the Puffo has been appropriated and resurfaced by Gaylen Gerber, the Bambu vases have the character and discoloration of 45-year-old plastic and the Mies Chair I restored and disassembled myself.

To me the differences in discipline are second to the similarities of materiality and sensibility. It also helps to work with artists with a sophisticated understanding of architecture. Luisa Lambri knows more about architecture than most architects. In terms of groupings, I was particularly excited to see how Talia Chetrit’s photograph of the bicycle seat worked next to the disassembled Archizoom chair—the rubber and leather, the deconstructed object, the absent body. If the show had to be only two pieces, it could be those two.

CAMARRA In your own work you seem to play with the relationship between architectural order and organic materials. Did curating the show help you explore this?

BEAL Absolutely. That relationship is always present in my work, but I tend to approach it from a fairly fixed perspective. I combine organic elements with architectural materials because they have such a clear metonymic relationship to the body. It is a way to address the friction between the corporeal and the architectural. The process of working with other artists who approach the same material or subject mater from a different vantage point reopens that investigation in new ways. Becky Beasley uses cucumbers in her work. I use cucumbers in my work. On one level that is just a dumb coincidence, but it turned me on to her work in general and her excellent exhibition “Spring Rain” in particular [at Spike Island, in Bristol, UK]. In her photograph, Becky employs the cucumber in a totally different way, with a sensitivity to architecture and the body that was very resonant to me, but with an entirely different lexicon and system of associations.

CAMARRA In a primarily monochromatic exhibition, the most notably vibrant pieces are the Carlo Mollino Polaroids and Enzo Mari vases, which share a color scheme and are arranged side by side. Can you talk about your decision to break with the prevailing palette?

BEAL I rarely use color in my own work, and when I do, it generally comes inherent in a material or a found object rather than through an additive process such as painting. A similar logic applies to this show, with the exception of two works by Michael E. Smith and Gaylen Gerber, both of which are actually painted white. I did not actively seek out the orange in either the vase or the Polaroid, but once I saw it, the two pieces needed to be close to each other. The coincident color may just be a product of the fact that both works were made around the same time in the same part of the world, but it also presents an interesting formal connection between Mari and Mollino, who are both enormously influential figures for me and whose bodies of work are opposite in so many ways—one extroverted, the other introverted, one humanist, one elitist. It made sense to me to put them together.