For over fifty years, John Baldessari questioned the relationship between word and image, undertaking experiments across different media that explore how meaning is constructed and interpreted. Created using found black-and-white photographs along with hand-colored overlays of black, white, red and green, Elbow, Room: Yes/No; Stop/Go (1986) epitomizes Baldessari’s interplay between formal aesthetics and narrative suggestion. Five images of women’s elbows fill most of the composition, their forearms and hands pointing in different directions, moving the viewer’s eye dynamically across the work. The title’s phrase “Elbow Room” implies the need for freedom and space, which is undercut by the rigid verbal commands of Yes/No, Stop/Go, and by the obscuring action of the artist’s four colored squares. With the resulting visible fragments, Baldessari breaks down conventional storytelling, leaving the viewer to synthesize their own meaning and pay attention to both imagery and concepts they might otherwise have missed.

John Baldessari’s solo exhibition Parables, Fables, and Other Tall Tales is on view at Bozar Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels, through February 1, 2026.

Andreas Schulze is a key figure in German contemporary painting. His colorful pictorial worlds, which move between abstraction and figuration, stem from close observations of daily life and probe our social and cultural norms. Drawing freely from Surrealism, Dadaism, and Abstract Expressionism, the artist’s unique, otherworldly scenes often blur the boundaries between architectural and pictorial space. In Untitled (Wallpaper) (2025), a giant boot-like shape marches across the canvas in front of a wall of vertical green, red and white stripes; a horizontal row of bluish rectangles above, each with a keyhole, have the look of cupboards. The “wallpaper” in the painting cleverly emphasizes the wall on which the painting (and all paintings) hangs, and Schulze’s deliberate shadows create an overt sense of depth and scene-setting, despite the otherwise abstract nature of his colorful array of shapes and planes. The work sets up a compelling dynamic between inside and outside, flatness and depth, that recurs throughout Schulze’s oeuvre.

Special, a major solo exhibition of Schulze’s work, opens at ICA Miami on December 2, 2025.

Keith Haring was an iconic American Pop artist whose life was tragically cut short at age thirty-one due to AIDS-related causes. Haring’s prolific artistic practice is characterized by his distinct, widely recognized visual language, as well as his politically provocative and popular culture-conscious content. Untitled (1989) is a bold, painted collage that appropriates Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa (1503), reproducing it with doubled eyes alongside two loosely inspired impressions, one in red and the other in silver. In the red figure, Haring again duplicates Mona Lisa’s eyes, but here, he depicts them looking in multiple directions, no longer coy and enigmatic but energetic and puzzling. Created during the last years of his life, Untitled suggests a vibrant and meditative exploration of artistic legacy and canon.

George Condo is an icon of contemporary American painting, reimagining the imagery and practices of Western art history, most especially modernism and abstraction, with vitality and dynamism. The Blues Musician (2021) exemplifies Condo’s unique and utterly recognizable pictorial language: thick, bold black and blue lines compose multi-colored fragments that form intertwined faces against a deep turquoise backdrop. In this painting and across his oeuvre, Condo constructs a plurality of simultaneous emotional states, which the artist refers to as “Psychological Cubism.” Through such emotive fragmentation, Condo concurrently questions the logic of our exterior world and portrays the complexity of our interior lives.

A major solo exhibition of Condo’s work is on view at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris and will run through February 8, 2026.

Best-known for his plastic works, with curving surfaces in stunning, vibrant hues, Craig Kauffman was one of the most significant figures to emerge from the fertile art scene in 1950s and 1960s Los Angeles. His painterly and sculptural objects continually experimented with form, color, material and space. No. 1 (1963) stems from a body of work begun in 1961 incorporating sensual and mechanical pendulous forms, inspired, in part, by lingerie catalogues and earlier machine drawings of Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia. Here, Kauffman experimented with acrylic lacquer applied to the back of clear plastic. This technique ensured the front remained sleek and flat—a lustrous surface for his fetishized fragments of the human form. By displaying the large panel in a shadow box frame, ambient light is captured behind the intensely colored translucent plastic, making it seemingly float and cast shadows on the white backing. No. 1 is a key precursor to Kauffman’s celebrated vacuum-formed plastic works and testifies to his deep engagement with both art history and new technology.

Sterling Ruby’s multifaceted practice spans painting, sculpture, textile, ceramics and video, and is defined by its sustained engagement with our chaotic present. For over two decades, his work has explored themes of violence, confinement and societal pressures through a consistent focus on material and artistic process. While Ruby’s previous WIDW canvases were bisected vertically and horizontally—echoing the frame of a window—the TURBINE series, begun in 2021, is characterized by frenetic, whirling lines rendered in thick masses of oil paint; working on the ground, the artist then feathers them outward to generate yet more movement. In TURBINE. Solar Cult. (2025), a base of electric yellow is intersected by bright orange, green, pink and black lines, which arc across the canvas much like the arms of the windmills that give the series its name. As Ruby notes, the TURBINE series, “has a lot of speed, has a lot of violence, has a lot of push and pull.” As in many of his past bodies of work, collage elements—here, painted cardboard—add additional physical and temporal layers to the vigorous, dynamic composition.

Rosemarie Trockel’s work critically explores the conceptual dimensions of craft, challenging entrenched social norms surrounding the notion of the male artistic genius, gender roles and cultural philosophies. Trockel’s diverse oeuvre spans various mediums, with her paintings reflecting this versatility. She first garnered acclaim in the 1980s for her “knitting paintings,” machine-produced wool works that evoke traditional feminine handicrafts. These pieces subverted conventional associations of women’s work by integrating them into the fine art context. Papagallo (2014) is part of this ongoing body of works, updated for a new millennium: instead of using a machine to produce them, Trockel wraps loose strands of yarn around the canvas to form the geometric compositions. The pared-down composition and horizontal stripes directly reference the male-dominated world of twentieth-century abstraction and Minimalism, offering a female-driven alternative aligning with forebears such as Agnes Martin and Bridget Riley. The title references the Italian word for “parrot,” giving the work’s bright colors a real-world corollary despite the otherwise abstract composition.

Jenny Holzer is a conceptual artist whose text-based practice is an ongoing artistic investigation of language and the constructions of political meaning. From the late 1980s onwards, benches and footstools have become a crucial medium for such discourse. As is the case with Truisms: Push yourself to the limit… (2019), a white marble bench with the titular inscription centrally engraved. The inscription and title stem from her first major series, Truisms, a collection of terse one-liners written between 1977 and 1979 that compile aphorisms on power, politics, violence, and social structures. In this work, Holzer’s declarative and confrontational speech is exhibited in a mode that promotes contemplative and reflective terms of engagement, requiring viewers to slow down, sit, and consider their own positions on the statement.

This March, the Glenstone Museum reopened its Pavilions with a new presentation by Holzer.

Louise Lawler is a steadfast investigator of picture-making. Since the late 1970s, her practice has involved photographing the works of other artists, capturing overlooked or tacitly aesthetic forms of art experiences in museums, collections, auction houses and storage depots. In Signed On Back (1994), Lawler photographs Andy Warhol’s silkscreen O.J. Simpson (1978)—part of Warhol’s investigation of celebrity—on auction at Sotheby’s in November 1994. Although Lawler does not intervene directly in the spaces she photographs, her adept selection, cropping, scaling and titling directs her viewers’ attention to the politics of display. Here, the title and composition draws our eye to Sotheby’s label, bent and raised against the wall, noting that the work has been signed by both Warhol and O.J.—whose public identity had just transformed from celebrated athlete to murder suspect. Where “signed on back” typically signals added value, here Simpson’s signature now carries ambiguous worth. Lawler prompts us to consider what we are viewing: a Warhol, a Simpson, an object for sale, or a Lawler documenting art’s circulation. By foregrounding the dual signatures while claiming the work as her own subject, Lawler destabilizes authorship itself, revealing how institutional framing and market forces determine the interpretation of the same gesture as enhancement, encumbrance or lucrative controversy.

Across five decades, Nancy Holt’s varied body of work consistently investigated the relationship between light, perception and space. In her collage Untitled (Photo Panel) (1972), round cutouts reveal different parts of a photograph displaying a brick building on the corner of a street. Viewing the piece occurs incrementally from left to right and from top to bottom, where the photograph is presented in its entirety. Through the cutouts, Holt guides the gaze through this conventional urban scene, alluding to details that might otherwise go unnoticed. The work examines the objectification of the process of looking and calls to mind Holt’s Locators, her breakthrough sculptures. These simple structures made from a horizontal steel pipe to be looked through like a telescope were her first experiments with physically directing, defining and restricting the gaze. The Locators led to related video works and her landmark sculpture Sun Tunnels.

Since the late 1970s and 1980s, works by Barbara Kruger have deployed a distinct visual language that combines black-and-white found imagery with bold, insistent texts, and often bordered with a red artist’s frame. This straightforward aesthetic sets the stage for complex ideas around power, influence and politics to emerge and impact the viewer. In Untitled (Raw material) (1988), a depiction of the brain’s circulatory system is rendered not in black and white, but black and blue, adding to the enigmatic quality of the ghostly source image. Spreading across the composition in two horizontal bands are the words “Raw Material,” rendered in the artist’s signature oblique Futura bold type, bordered in red. On one level, this could refer literally to the brain matter on display, but also metaphorically to the basic building blocks of thought that human brains have the power to generate—and for society to then influence and shape.

The practice of Richard Artschwager spans sculpture, painting and drawing and is marked by a spirit of nonconformity. His works have always defied categorization, echoing elements of Pop Art but leaning much closer to the sleek, pared-back language of Minimalism. Splatter Chair B (2008) refuses neat distinctions—appearing as if thrown or “splattered” into a corner, it spans two adjacent walls and activates both pictorial and sculptural space simultaneously. The work is constructed from wood painted with streaks of black, gray and white, giving it an almost graphic, illustrative quality that plays against its three-dimensional presence. At its center, a section of gray patterned Formica defines the chair’s seat, grounding the piece in recognizable furniture form while contrasting with the painterly surface treatment that surrounds it. This tension between flatness and volume, between painted image and physical object, lies at the heart of the work’s conceptual ambiguity.

Kara Walker’s work is celebrated for its unflinching and unapologetic look at American history as it relates to the Black experience and its roots in enslavement. First known for her use of the cut-paper silhouette, her paintings, sculptures, installations and works on paper offer a constantly transforming reflection of contemporary society. Charcoal Drawing (2001) is an early drawing by the artist whose format recalls political cartoons of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by artists such as William Hogarth and Honoré Daumier. Two men (perhaps a two-headed being) carry a lamp whose bright white flame stands out from the dark, charcoal background. A clamor of women and children, strapped and improbably attached to one another, draw up behind them, one exclaiming “Help!” The text below reads: “(A brief Glimmer) From Yesterdays Darkness Into Tomorrows,” suggesting, the cyclical, futile nature of historical injustices and the hope for progress.

Combining industrial materials and volatile substances, Mire Lee creates beautiful yet often grotesque forms that evoke bodies, tension and psychological trauma. Though resolutely abstract, her sculptures and wall-based works include appendages, membranes and structures that cannot help but feel embodied and lifelike. Lee’s Heads (2025) continue this exploration through the classical motif of the bust. Skull-like in shape, with molded concrete surfaces reminiscent of bone, these forms twist improbably around components such as rotational bearings and computer wires.

Mire Lee’s recent Faces (2025), premiered at Sprüth Magers, Los Angeles this fall, are paintings created by manipulating pigmented methylcellulose. A thickening agent, the methylcellulose contracts as it dries, gripping and pulling into configurations that suggest torn skin and a range of chance compositions and surface qualities. Each of the Faces has its own aura; together they suggest a nameless crowd—victims, perhaps, of violence and terror. Suffering is implied through the dark red-brown tinting and lacerated membranes, but also beauty, transformation and redemption.

Pamela Rosenkranz’s artistic practice explores the profound scientific and sociocultural systems that affect humanity. Her interdisciplinary approach incorporates elements from neurology, art history, biorobotics, and literature, often blurring the distinctions between nature and culture. In Rosenkranz’s recent body of works on paper, Healer Scrolls, she continues her inquiry into the archaic image of the serpent, drawing on ancient kirigami cuts and folds to evoke a pattern that resembles the scales of a snake. Healer Scrolls (Monet Ideas) (2025) continues the artist’s negotiation with this squamate form, shimmering in emerald mother-of-pearl hues. The title of this series references both the historic rolls of paper used to store information and the continuous unrolling movement of scrolling through the internet’s vast wealth of knowledge.

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. Pink Cloud (2025), 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 cloud, tinted in shades of reddish-pink and gray, stretches across the expanse of a diffuse sky. Born from an explosion, its uncanny vastness embodies the palpable dystopian undertones that pervade the entire series.

Anne Imhof’s solo exhibition of new work opens at Serralves Museum, Porto, in mid-December 2025.

Over a prolific two decades, the late Kaari Upson created a groundbreaking body of work that delved into the deep-seeded motivations and urges that characterize the human experience. In works that range from intimate objects to room-sized installations, the artist explored the nature of our relationships with ourselves and others as well as with the domestic spaces we inhabit. 98 (2013) is a stunning work from her celebrated series of domestic sculptures, which she began to produce in 2012 using mattresses, sofas and other objects found discarded near her studio in Los Angeles. Upson cast these forms in silicone and urethane, fascinated with the possibility of lifting and replicating not only their physical surfaces, but also the emotional and psychological impressions of those who had used them. This sculpture, with its gestural sprays of color, perfectly illustrates Upson’s painterly style and her vivid exploration of both the beauty and grotesqueness, the fragility and excesses, of capitalist Western society.

Martine Syms’ work is distinguished by its boundlessness: her subjects flow across media—publishing, moving image, photography, installation, performance and software programming—dissolving the lines between them. Combining her distinct sense of humor with sharp-witted observations and social commentary, the Los Angeles-based artist moves seamlessly between constructing elaborate fictions and a research-based practice. Her video The Fool (2021) plays on a screen housed in a custom cardboard television box covered in artist-designed stickers that reproduce ephemera from her life and travels. In the video, a narrator describes a brief encounter with a former love interest, while varied footage fills the screen: a performance of a gymnastics routine merges with iconic Baroque paintings; club scenes mix with a day at the beach. Taking the viewer on a hazy journey, the images at times seem to illustrate the story being recounted, but elsewhere they fail the narrator entirely, hinting at the gulf between memory, dreams and reality.

David Salle came to prominence in the 1980s as a leading figure of the Pictures Generation. His distinctive paintings are created by combining disparate visual fragments drawn from cartoon imagery, advertisement, graffiti and art history into layered compositions that speak to our image-saturated contemporary moment. Orange Jumper (2025) stems from a new series where Salle employs artificial intelligence to generate reinterpretations of his earlier work. The AI processes the artist’s Pastorals (1999–2001)—paintings originally based on a nineteenth-century opera backdrop depicting a romantic couple in an alpine setting—generating warped, illogical variations of these compositions. The original Pastorals drew from scenes that encompassed traditional pastoral drama elements: dual narratives, courtship themes, and the juxtaposition of natural and supernatural realms. Salle uses the AI-distorted imagery as the foundation for new painted works, creating a dialogue between his artistic past and present, all mediated through technology.

One of the most internationally celebrated figures in American contemporary art, Ed Ruscha has been casting his eye across the land and culture of America for over sixty years, creating iconic images of vernacular architecture, language and symbols. Drawing has remained a crucial part of his practice since his early years of study in art and graphic design, as has his deadpan use of words and phrases, which are often central visual elements in his paintings and graphic works. Riot Box (2020) comes from a group of works pairing two words. Atop lush washes of color, in this case a soft orange reminiscent of dusk, the letter-forms are slightly blurred as if they are motion across the page. As is common with Ruscha’s wordplay, the words are incongruous and require the viewer to imagine what they might mean together; or simply, like the artist, to enjoy the clashes and connections that their pairing creates.

Thea Djordjaze’s distinctive paintings exemplify an embodied practice that investigates the poetics and particularities of space, alongside the inherent characteristics of her chosen materials. Her ongoing series of plaster-filled wooden frames with pigment both embedded within and layered upon their porous surfaces occupies a hybrid territory between painting and relief, fusing painterly gestures with sculptural presence. In Untitled (2025), a rich orange field meets broad areas of blush pink and pale blue, punctuated by a vermilion oval. Hints of green emerge through the creamy plaster ground, which is extensively marked with grooves, punctured holes and pronounced scratches—asserting the work’s identity as what Djordjadze terms a “relief painting” rather than a flat surface. These textured layers, along with paint splashes and drips, invest the work with a tangible sense of immediacy and gestural energy, revealing painting as a site of physical negotiation between artist, medium and space.

Lucy Dodd’s newest paintings mobilize material, color and shape to explore both personal as well as universal roots, reflecting the artist’s recent move from upstate New York to the Scottish countryside. Working outdoors, Dodd produced a group of cathartic works that are a true display of place, time and setting. Using mostly unconventional pigments derived from nature and her immediate surroundings, the artist traces the passage of time and vibrant energetic shifts that are echoed in frenetic landscapes composed of colorful spills, drops and stains. The monumental canvas Becoming Butterfly (2025) features a recurring motif in Dodd’s oeuvre and a universal symbol of transformation, as well as a near symmetrical composition mirrored left to right across a central fold. Visible are the remnants of the artist’s dynamic, gestural movements along with chance drips and other effects, including rings left by paint pots left to dry atop the canvas as she worked on it on the ground. Celebratory and effervescent, Becoming Butterfly reflects the feeling of freedom and self-realization that characterizes Dodd’s recent body of work.

Sylvie Fleury’s 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 canvas The Essential Face Palette (Medium 2) (2019) presents a multihued collection of neutrals and pink tones—everything one might need to add depth and highlights to one’s beauty routine. 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. The painting’s diligent fabrication also mimics the precise manufacture of the factory-produced commodity, revealing Fleury’s interest in the strategies of seduction used in cosmetic branding and gendered patterns of consumption.

Sylvie Fleury’s solo exhibition She-Devils on Wheels is on view at Sprüth Magers, New York through December 20, 2025.

Through a physical and conceptual reimagining of elements from everyday experience, the work of Robert Therrien creates new modes of understanding familiar objects and spaces, crafting scenarios that oscillate between the surreal and the commonplace. Stacked plates are an important, recurring motif in Therrien’s practice, particularly in his monumental sculptural installations in the collections of Tate, The Broad, Glenstone and other major institutions; the shape, in his words, “belongs to everybody. Everyone can use and recognize it.” In No title (stacked plates, blue) (2018), the artist inks a simple blue composition of a precariously stacked tower of plates. In this work and throughout his practice, Therrien wittily dramatizes the banality of domestic life.

Robert Therrien: This is a Story, the largest museum exhibition of the artist’s work to date, is on view at The Broad, Los Angeles, through April 5, 2026.

Gala Porras-Kim’s research-driven practice examines how our understanding of cultural artifacts is shaped by the museological and modern epistemological conventions that dictate their collection, taxonomy, preservation and display. San Vitale, Ravenna, marble floor reconstruction (2025) is the latest in her series of intricately detailed color pencil drawings depicting marble tiles in Ravenna, Italy—in this case, the church of San Vitale’s reconstructed floor mosaic. During the sixteenth century, the basilica’s floor was renovated not only for aesthetic reasons but also to elevate it significantly, protecting it from recurrent flooding. Performing a close reading of uncatalogued histories, Porras-Kim reveals the signs of care and neglect, conservation and flawed restoration efforts embedded within the surface. Using a medium that is itself inherently subjective and resistant to mechanical reproduction, this work challenges the notion of historical accuracy. By recording the visible layers of time, the drawing emphasizes how histories are shaped by intervention, subject to inevitable decay, and perpetually open to reinterpretation.

Analia Saban’s singular practice brings together opposing concepts: two and three dimensions, painting and sculpture, digital and analog, industrial and handmade. Her paintings, sculptures and works on paper are deeply engaged with the basic tools of art making: while she uses traditional materials such as paint, linen, wood, ink and paper, she turns onto its head our concept of what a painting, sculpture or drawing entails. Studio Notes (Lace Doily) #1 (2025) begins with a piece of gridded notebook paper, inked with black printers ink, and passed through a laser cutter, which meticulously burns away parts of the paper to reveal the finished design. Part of a new series, the Studio Notes drawings depict many of the materials, objects and symbols that Saban has drawn from over the years, forming a kind of visual lexicon of her practice.

To produce her series of woven paintings, Analia 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. Tapestry (Flowchart, Landscape), Paint on Linen (2025) stems from the artist’s recent interest in computational flowcharts, which reflect our era infused by algorithms and AI. She abstracts these technological diagrams, imagining new means of connecting and automating thought; hints of actual landscape elements—a sunburst in the upper left, tree limbs in the lower right—make their way through the networks of lines. Though influenced by recent technologies, Saban’s woven works are also in dialogue with the legacies of minimalist and monochromatic painting. At the same time, she reworks painterly conventions, incorporating elements of craft, design, and everyday materials and industries.

Hyun-Sook Song understands painting to be an act of concentrated meditation that visually records the artist’s state of mind. Her decades-long practice has been defined by a distinctive style: simple compositions of deliberate linework that is reminiscent of East Asian calligraphy, rendered in egg tempera. In Brushstrokes-Diagram (2025), a translucent white fabric, hanging gracefully on the right side of the painting, partially obscures a horizontal post and another enigmatic form, atop a dark backdrop. In this work and throughout her oeuvre, Song explores the tensions between abstraction and figuration, revealing profound theoretical investments in the visualization of concealment and economy of gesture.