Anne Imhof is recognized internationally for her genre-spanning practice that encompasses performance and choreography, painting and drawing, and installation and sculpture. Even her abstractions are characterized by a keen interest in the body and human presence, and though her work continues to expand into ever more media, Imhof conceives her art making from the vantage point of painting. Her recent cloud paintings exhibit the qualities associated with her work as a whole: seductive, disarming and steeped in artifice. Untitled (1pm) (2024), her newest large-scale canvas, depicts a hyper-realistic sky; the image is generated digitally but rendered in the traditional medium of oil paint, with layer after layer applied meticulously across the canvas. An ominous explosion arises amid this gorgeous expanse of blue and white, familiar from a plane’s-eye view. In the smoke’s fiery expansiveness, dystopian undertones are palpable.

Anne Imhof is celebrated internationally for her enduring performances and spectral paintings, yet her artistic practice originates in her drawings. These works on paper depict wraithlike bodies, often in communion with each other or with animals and their surroundings. Imhof’s line moves between sketched passages and intensely worked fields of graphite and other drawing tools, resulting in compositions that seem to coalesce—and drift away again—before our eyes. The figures in her drawings are youthful and androgynous, much like the performers who she regularly features in her choreographed pieces. In Untitled (Riders series) (2024), a lone figure floats at the center of the drawing flanked by two dolphins. Their name stems from the ancient Greek term “delphinos,” meaning womb, and they are commonly associated with intelligence, communication, empathy and joy. The animals seem to surround the figure, as if guiding them through whatever journey they may be making. Ethereal and mysterious, Imhof’s drawings show the fundamental process of an artist who has been called a pioneer of her generation.

Rosemarie Tockel is one of the most important and influential German conceptual artists, whose feminist practice continues to challenge traditional notions of gendered and artistic production. Since the late 1980s, the stovetop has been one of her signature motifs, an everyday object heavily associated with women and their domestic labor. Trockel’s sculptures and wall-mounted reliefs simplify and abstract the symbol, referencing the patriarchal world of twentieth-century abstraction and Minimalism while offering a female-driven alternative. Agoraphobia (2022) is a light blue ceramic object whose form echoes a corner of a conventional electric stove found in most homes. The work’s title is the scientific term for the fear of crowded spaces, which can be understood as an ironic comment on society’s traditionally restrictive understandings of femininity.

Nancy Holt’s rich and varied body of work consistently investigated the relationship between light, perception and space. As a pioneer of the land art movement, and with a deep interest in the natural world, Holt placed immense importance on engaging with the environment through art. Sun Tunnels: Shifting Shadows (1976) is the documentation of light cycles as seen through Holt’s renowned land art sculpture, Sun Tunnels (1973–76), located in Utah’s Great Basin Desert. The work comprises four concrete structures arranged in a cross formation, positioned to frame the sun as it rises and sets during the solstices; perforations in the tunnels allow light projections to be cast inside and follow the constellations of Draco, Perseus, Columba and Capricorn. Seen here are thirty photographs depicting changes in sunlight and shadow in one of the sculpture’s elements; photographed over the course of one day, the shadows shift from one side of the tunnel to the other, eventually capturing the artist’s own shadow and marking her presence.

John Baldessari is a pioneer of American conceptualism, renowned for questioning art-historical paradigms with visual humor. Baldessari’s sight gags and witty juxtapositions draw his viewers in, as access points to a rigorously theoretical praxis founded in semiotics, dialectical materialism, and Arnheimian understandings of perception. This methodology is exemplified in his Vertical/Horizontal Series (2003), in which he playfully subverts habits of viewing pictures and texts, disallowing side-to-side looking as to challenge normative engagement with the pictorial plane. In Vertical Series: Fun (2003), the word “fun” accompanies a slanted black-and-white photograph of people playing in a pool, narrowly cropped. The literalness of “fun,” color scheme, and awkward angling disrupts the lighthearted connotation of the piece’s subject and title. The diver’s ready position, leaning forward in anticipation, becomes threatening, directionally poised to plunge down the vertical composition until he hits “fun” itself, thus whimsically dramatizing the art historical issue of orientation.

Barbara Kruger’s iconic practice explores the power of image and text, confronting viewers and demanding their meaningful consideration of the dynamics of control, class, corruption and consumerism. Her politically charged approach is exemplified in Pledge, Will, Vow (1988/2020), a five-minute, three-channel video installation, in which Kruger interrogates the language employed in the US Pledge of Allegiance, final wills and marriage vows. On three red screens, words appear in white, one after another. As Kruger animates each quotation, she disrupts familiar phrasing with jarring word adjustments, accompanied by a loud sonic “click” for each proposed edit, before settling on the original clause. This digital interpretation of oft-repeated, static text forces her audience to contemplate the promises of each passage, deconstruct hidden meanings and consider what is being omitted. As Kruger explains in a conversation with curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, Pledge, Will, Vow “was a chance for me to use moving images to edit, and comment on these ‘official’ texts.”

A major exhibition of Kruger’s work, No Comment, recently opened at ARoS, Aarhus, Denmark and is on view through April 21, 2025.

Video: Excerpt from Pledge, Will, Vow (1988/2020)

For over three decades, Arthur Jafa has produced imagery that dissects the realities, constructions, and influence of Blackness in contemporary culture. Through strategies of appropriation, as well as lyrical manipulations of industrial materials, his works reveal poignant gaps and connections between different sources through the power of juxtaposition. Black Différance, Miles and Betty (2024) is one of Jafa’s aluminum “cutout” sculptures, which take their format from the work of Cady Noland (an artistic touchstone for Jafa) and their content from music history. The front panel features Miles Davis, pulled from an Apple advertisement using his image. Three prominent holes in the aluminum give views onto the back panel, depicting Betty Davis—Miles Davis’ second wife, and a performer and songwriter in her own right—on the cover of her album They Say I’m Different. Compared to her album title, Apple’s appeal to “Think Different” rings hollow, laying bare the frequent commercialization of Black culture by capitalist societies that still treat their Black citizens unequally.

Occupying one of the central positions in the landscape of American painting for the past forty years, George Condo creates works that bridge an array of aesthetic gestures, moods and influences from fields such as art history, music, philosophy and popular culture. In his American Icons (2024), Condo paints iconic characters from the Golden Age of American animation, revisiting the themes and motifs in his acclaimed Cartoon Abstractions series (2009–10). Compared to these earlier works, his American Icons are denser in composition, with bolder coloring and greater fidelity to the original cartoon. In American Icon 4: Slick the Wolf (2024), his chosen subject is Slick Wolf, an iconic Tom and Jerry antagonist, overlaid with a storm of pink, teal and silver. The portrait is rendered in Condo’s unique and utterly recognizable pictorial mode, which artfully balances figuration and abstraction with thick and loose brushwork.

An exhibition of new works by Condo will open at Sprüth Magers, New York in early 2025.

Jon Rafman’s interdisciplinary practice explores the impact of technology on contemporary consciousness. He incorporates the vocabulary of online worlds to create poetic narratives that capture the tension between the machine-eye and the human impulse to make meaning. In his recent paintings, he deploys a text-based algorithm to generate an aesthetic experience—specifically, an artificially intelligent clip-guided diffusion algorithm. The algorithm ingests the artist’s text prompts with its mechanic neutrality and attempts to recreate them; the resulting images are reproduced onto canvas, printed atop a painted gesso surface, where the imperfections of the reproduction stir in the viewer new possibilities for aesthetic enjoyment. The beautiful female subject of this canvas, caught between sorrow and apprehension, is reminiscent of the appropriated images of Richard Prince and other artists who have pushed painting to new limits. Rafman attempts to force the images as far as possible from the comfort of their perfect digital origins and into the rough and tactile material world.

Part of the first generation of Americans raised on television, Gretchen Bender was a pioneering multidisciplinary artist whose practice interrogated the accelerated age of mass media. She is best known for her immersive, multichannel “electronic theater” installations produced in New York in the 1980s that subverted the power of corporate imagery on collective consciousness and prefigured the practices of many younger artists in the post-Internet age. Bender’s The Pleasure is Back (1982) is from her earliest series of multipanel works, influenced by her time in Washington DC working at a feminist-Marxist silkscreening collective. The immediacy of the silkscreening process allowed her to juxtapose imagery by contemporary artists with visuals taken from magazine advertisements at a hyper-current pace. This strategy of appropriation aligned her with fellow artists of the Pictures Generation, such as Cindy Sherman, Louise Lawler and Barbara Kruger, yet her push to never be a step behind the culture she was sampling, eventually leading to her use of television as source material, set her apart from her peers.

John Waters is known worldwide for his groundbreaking independent films and riotous books; similarly, his work in the field of visual art regularly skewers film and pop cultural tropes, offering cutting, but loving, critiques of mass media, celebrity and insider art-world knowledge. The world of movie memorabilia provides the backdrop of Waters’ surreal and fantastical sculpture, Fellini’s 8 1/2 (2014). Based on an actual promotional item handed out in Baltimore when Fellini’s classic was released there, Waters’ work enlarges the simple object from 8 1/2 inches to 8 1/2 feet, reflecting the outsized role of the film and its long afterlife in popular culture. Constructed from white pine, wood stain and pressed letters, the sculpture accurately mimics the industrial process that created the original trinket, producing a feeling of trompe l’oeil wonderment that follows in the wide-ranging footsteps of René Magritte, Vija Celmins, Claes Oldenburg and American roadside attractions.

Known for their “sculptural theaters,” which combine movies, animation, sound, performance and sculpture into fully immersive experiences, the artist duo Lizzie Fitch and Ryan Trecartin also have a robust sculptural practice. Like their videos, their sculptures feature idiosyncratic characters that seem to belong to a complex, multilayered narrative. The figure in American Honey (2015) wears a cropped T-shirt with the phrase “Free Spirit” and a skirt with stars similar to those on the American flag; holding a to-go coffee cup, they have a pie-tin head emblazoned with stars and red-and-white-striped petals. Fitch and Trecartin offer an ambiguous message through these symbols of American spirit and Americana. As with all their works, the artists challenge established identity roles such as gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and age, and in doing so, present a vision of the world that is fragmentary and caught in a process of continuous development.

Sylvie Fleury’s multimedia practice explores the intersections between art, fashion, and beauty, interrogating the politics of consumerism and fetishism. In her paintings of makeup compacts, Fleury meticulously applies layers of acrylic paint mixed with metallic specks, giving the works a tactile and sensual quality that closely recalls the sleek beauty products they represent. The rounded canvas of The Luminous Lifting Cushion Foundation (Pink Porcelain) (2019) presents as a beige concealer in a lilac container; yet it likewise invokes the history of Minimalism and shaped canvases, largely by male artists, including Ellsworth Kelly, Kenneth Noland and Frank Stella, whose works Fleury regularly sends up in her own inventive objects. Fleury’s diligent brushwork also mimics the consumer’s application of the factory-produced commodity upon their skin, revealing her interest in the strategies of seduction used in cosmetic branding and gendered patterns of consumption.

Benches and footstools have constituted an essential component of Jenny Holzer’s oeuvre since the mid-1980s, which regularly combines textual elements with everyday forms in the public sphere. Each sculpture features an intriguing phrase written by the artist, which, in the case of Selection from Truisms: Words tend to… (2020), stems from her first major series, Truisms (1977–79), a compilation of aphorisms on power, politics, violence and social structures. The statement inscribed onto the white labradorite footstool, with its strikingly iridescent play of colors, reminds us that “Words tend to be inadequate.” Even so, Holzer’s work in stone harnesses the power of language to create an object of contemplation, inviting the viewer to slow down and consider their own position on the text cut into its surface.

Since the early 2000s, Jenny Holzer has delved into topics of recent American history. Her new body of drawings is based on tracings of documents used in preparation for her Redaction Paintings. The tracings can reproduce pages from reports of military operations, domestic surveillance, tech advancements for warfare, and, as in the two works presented here, investigations of the Trump administration. The source document for FIRED UP (2024) is an excerpt of text messages sent to and from Mark Meadows, the former chief of staff, before and during the insurrection of the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. go to D.C. (2024) reproduces a handwritten note by Rudy Giuliani associate Lev Parnas on Ritz-Carlton stationery, submitted as evidence in Donald Trump’s 2019 impeachment inquiry. Both tracings evidence the hands that made them: hand and fingerprints cover the page of FIRED UP, forming abstract patterns reminiscent of firework explosions or even shrapnel; smudges from Holzer’s application of charcoal likewise appear in go to D.C.. Gestures record a body on redacted pages, countering the sometimes sparse information with an invitation to bear witness.

Since the early 2000s, Jenny Holzer has delved into topics of recent American history. Her new body of drawings is based on tracings of documents used in preparation for her Redaction Paintings. The tracings can reproduce pages from reports of military operations, domestic surveillance, tech advancements for warfare, and, as in the two works presented here, investigations of the Trump administration. The source document for FIRED UP (2024) is an excerpt of text messages sent to and from Mark Meadows, the former chief of staff, before and during the insurrection of the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. go to D.C. (2024) reproduces a handwritten note by Rudy Giuliani associate Lev Parnas on Ritz-Carlton stationery, submitted as evidence in Donald Trump’s 2019 impeachment inquiry. Both tracings evidence the hands that made them: hand and fingerprints cover the page of FIRED UP, forming abstract patterns reminiscent of firework explosions or even shrapnel; smudges from Holzer’s application of charcoal likewise appear in go to D.C.. Gestures record a body on redacted pages, countering the sometimes sparse information with an invitation to bear witness.

Examining the conditions, procedures, presentations and boundaries of art, Louise Lawler’s photographs and interventions analyze the contextual production of meaning and the very infinitude of context. The artist’s recent body of “swiped” images uses long exposures and swift camera movements to create abstract pictures of iconic artworks, which seem to vanish before the viewer’s eyes like a hazy memory—transcendent images that perpetually move and shift. In Three Flags (swiped and moving) (2022), we see a photo of Jasper Johns’ painting Three Flags (1958), taken during the de-installation of the exhibition Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Heavily blurred, its stars and stripes bleed onto the wall on which it hangs. As an analogue method to manipulate the image, this swipe challenges perception and mirrors the fast-paced flood of images that characterizes everyday life in the digital era.

Andreas Gursky is one of the most important photographers alive today, whose large-format, high-definition images portray a vision of humanity dwarfed by industry with extraordinary detail. His works from the early 1990s capture factories, stock exchanges, airports, golf courses, and highways, often from aerial viewpoints that reveal patterns in the crowds and infrastructure. In Steiff, Höchstatt (1991), Gursky constructs a hyperreal contemporary tableau of people manually assembling teddy bears in a factory in Höchstadt, Germany. The composition is overwhelmed by desks, sewing machines, and boxes of fabric, an excess of meticulously observed details that make it impossible for the viewer to take in the entire image at once. Steiff, Höchstatt documents the complex production of bespoke stuffed animals, a commodity whose connotations are gentle and domiciliary, in a mode that is simultaneously industrialized and hand wrought, an ever-decreasing occurrence under global capitalism.

Thomas Demand’s work has long focused on detailed reenactments of specific and familiar places, public and private sites, often loaded with sociopolitical meanings but also sometimes devoid of specific context. The artist constructs scenes from paper and cardboard, which he then carefully lights and photographs to produce his finished artworks. These life-sized models are precise but retain subtle, deliberate flaws and anachronisms that challenge complacent assumptions about photography’s claims to verisimilitude and authenticity. Blossom V (2015) stems from a series of close-up views of cherry blossoms. Meticulously printed as dye transfers, each one is as serene as the next, reflecting the flowers’ associations with impermanence, hope and renewal.

Through collage, drawing, sculpture and film, Kara Walker scrutinizes the cultural and psychological implications of racism. Her signature stylized black cut-out silhouettes, which recall a popular form of artistic expression during the nineteenth century, have appeared in exhibitions worldwide since the 1990s and have cemented her as one of the most complex contemporary American artists of her generation. Walker’s latest body of work on paper embraces color: Selkie with her Skin on (2024) is composed of a jumble of cut-paper limbs and heads defined by strokes of watercolor and sumi-e ink in a range of hues. The outlines of these elements form a white figure in the negative space of the composition’s center, visually evoking harrowing historical contexts of capture, sexualized violence, and drowning. The work’s title refers to a selkie, a mercurial creature that slips between animal and human by wearing and removing her sealskin, which also calls to mind the archetype of the shapeshifter in African American folk mythologies. Epitomizing Walker’s prowess in constructing narratives imbued with layers of references, Selkie with her Skin on questions the stories—both real histories and fabrications—we tell about Black bodies.

The practice of Richard Artschwager, which spans sculpture, painting and drawing, is marked by a spirit of nonconformity. Defying categorization, his works echo elements of Pop art but lean much closer to the slick, pared-back language of Minimalism. Artschwager’s Corner Splat series ironically imitates Formica, a commonplace smooth surface material used to make various laminated plastic products. Referencing the tradition of trompe l’oeil painting, Corner Splat II (2009) plays with material and perspective to confound viewers’ expectations of the objects and spaces surrounding them. The work reflects Artschwager’s fascination with the ordinary and unremarkable, which he used as a vehicle to explore the peculiarities of the everyday and art itself.

Salvo was an Italian Conceptual artist in dialogue with the burgeoning Arte Povera movement before his practice dramatically shifted in 1973 when the artist turned decisively to figurative painting. His oil paintings embrace the aesthetics of traditional art histories, from Giotto and Botticelli to Italian Futurism and Surrealism, employing flat geometric forms and rich colors that reveal the painting’s artifice. Salvo’s landscapes and cityscapes have a characteristic brightness, a result of the artist’s bold palette and his captivating, often surprising, representations of light. This remains true even for paintings of night, such as Notturno (2007), a simple scene of domiciliary buildings and manicured vegetation backlit by an enchanting night sky. The brilliance of the stars and the luminescent horizon illuminate the dreamlike nightscape, exhibiting Salvo’s noted mastery of color and light.

Salvo’s work is the subject of a major retrospective at Pinacoteca Agnelli, Turin open till May 25, 2025. A two-person exhibition with Andreas Schulze, titled About Painting, is also on view at Sprüth Magers, London through December 20, 2024.

One of the most important representatives of figurative painting, sculpture, video and installation in the last four decades, Karen Kilimnik continues to produce wide-ranging, groundbreaking work. The artist brings together historical cultural references – including ballet, the aristocracy and Romanticism – with the spheres of books, music, film and television. The figures and animals in her compositions are recognizable to many from the realms of art and world history, fairy tales, pop charts or the pages of magazines, yet they are rendered surreal through the artist’s manipulations of both content and painterly material. birds of happiness / paradise island (2021) is indicative of Kilimnik’s lush style of painting that achieves a feeling of frothy opulence via bold colors, velvety brushwork and luxurious, curious characters. Tropical birds in pinks and purples perch amid a verdant setting, with a gilded frame painted nebulously around the work’s edges. The work demonstrates Kilimik’s playful approach to style and substance and invites viewers to step into her rich imaginative spaces.

Drawing has been a crucial part of Karen Kilimnik’s practice since the mid-1970s. Her works on paper emerge from her careful contemplation of cultural touchstones, and like her paintings, they dissolve distinctions between “high” and “low” culture. In Christmastime reindeer (1992), a deer prances across the composition, caught in a buoyant leap through a hilly, snow-covered landscape—a backdrop that Kilimnik sets with just a few strokes of black crayon and white acrylic highlights. Though the animal’s expression is cheerful, and its collar covered in bells and holly is festive, the artist’s omission of its right eye troubles the scene, adding a surreal element. At the same time, it gives us a special insight into how Kilimnik layers and builds up her charismatic tableaux. The gold frame—a common feature of Kilimnik’s works—gives the sweet reindeer an extra dash of whimsy and humor.

Mire Lee’s practice is interested in materiality, frequently employing industrial material to create organic forms that elicit emotional responses. Open wound: Surface with many holes #1 (2024) is one of Lee’s new membranous fabric sculptures, which the artist calls “skins.” The work is composed of safety netting typically used in construction and a gelatinous solution—the same pigmented methylcellulose featured in her major installation for Tate’s Turbine Hall. Covered in sludge and varying-sized holes, the mesh’s robust texture turns into gaping wounds and references the fragility and disintegration of bodies. Exploring the toll living in our current turbulent times takes on both body and mind, the sculpture evokes conflicting feelings of disgust and tenderness toward the strange fleshy form.

Mire Lee’s new site-specific work for Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall as the current Hyundai Commission artist is on view through March 16, 2025. It marks the first major presentation of Lee’s work in the UK.

Hyun-Sook Song understands painting to be an act of concentrated meditation that visually records the artist’s state of mind. Song’s decades-long practice has been defined by her distinctive style: simple compositions of deliberate linework that is reminiscent of East Asian calligraphy, rendered in the ancient medium of egg tempera. 9 Brushstrokes I (2023) is emblematic of the artist’s economy of gesture, naming the number of brushstrokes needed to complete the work and prompting the viewer to identify and trace each measured line. The neutral-toned painting reads as an elusive still life with a dark deflated ellipse resting atop a translucent foundation against a gradient backdrop, exploring the tension between abstraction and figuration.

A solo exhibition of Hyun-Sook Song’s works is currently on view at Sprüth Magers in New York, running through December 20, 2024.

Analia Saban’s singular practice brings together opposing concepts: two and three dimensions, painting and sculpture, digital and analog, industrial and handmade. Her series of woven paintings are no exception. To produce them, Saban weaves linen canvas with “threads” of paint, which she creates by drying thickly painted lines of acrylic into long, pliable strands. Using a Jacquard loom—half of which operates by computer, half with physical labor—she interlaces the paint with the linen into compositions that hover between representation and abstraction. Woven Radial Gradient as Weft (Center, Cadmium Yellow Medium) (2024), with its yellow paint and circular composition, recalls a sunburst or an eclipse though remains wholly abstract. Mesmerizing both in their symmetry and for their intricate process, Saban’s woven works are in dialogue with the legacies of minimalist and monochromatic painting (including Agnes Martin, Robert Ryman and South American modernists, such as Hélio Oiticica and Mira Schendel), and at the same time rework painterly conventions, incorporating elements of craft, design, and everyday materials and industries.

Before her death in 2021, Kaari Upson created a groundbreaking body of work that delved into the deep-seeded psychological motivations and urges that comprise the human experience. In obsessively composed drawings, haunting paintings, engaging videos, and sculptures that range from intimate objects to room-sized installations, the artist questioned the nature of our relationships with ourselves and others. Oma Under Table (2019) is a painting unique within her oeuvre and stems from her background as the daughter and granddaughter of German immigrants—“Oma” is the German word for grandmother. The painting’s support is cast from a dollhouse that was a family heirloom—specifically the house’s mantelpiece—which the artist enlarged to human size using various scanning and casting techniques. Atop this panel, a ghostly figure coalesces from networks of parallel lines characteristic of the artist’s paintings. This “Oma” seems to appear from the background as if encased within the work, or emerging from a tomb. Moving nimbly between abstraction and figuration, Upson wrestles between the two in this richly layered and revelatory canvas.

Moving freely between figuration and abstraction, Andro Wekua creates multilayered paintings exploring the gaps and overlaps between memory, fantasy and cultural histories. The Georgian artist’s tenuous relationship to his country manifests itself in his media and methods, creating mysterious and unsettling images in which figures are hidden away, surfaces are scratched or effaced, and colors are opaquely layered. There (2013/2023) hints at a row of blue and pink buildings, with flat areas of red suggesting roofs, hidden beneath a layer of streaky white paint that contains traces of the artist’s hand continuously applying and removing his colors. The work, which recalls Wekua’s seaside hometown of Sukhumi, devastated by civil war, is perhaps the product of a fading memory, that of the city itself or the youth spent there, a meditation on the unbridgeable distance between history, fact and fiction.