The work of John Baldessari, a key founder of conceptual art, continuously broke traditional artistic boundaries and expanded our understanding of what art can be. Always working between mediums, in the 1990s Baldessari began to create photo-painting hybrids that used deliberately cropped found imagery, often film stills, as a ground onto which he added touches of acrylic and vinyl paint. Two Cars (One Red) in Different Environments (1990) is a prime example of these compositions, whose multiple panels are connected by intersecting themes and forms. At the top, cars are caught in a dramatic nighttime chase—a classic Hollywood trope—with two small figures silhouetted against the blazing headlights. In the bottom panel, a candy-red car is parked on a well-manicured street while two people converse behind it; here, the artist has blacked them out with paint, turning them into anonymous silhouettes. Through this gesture of removal, Baldessari redirects viewers’ attention from the main subject of the images to what surrounds them, motivating alternate readings of the work.

Rosemarie Trockel’s machine-knit wool works exemplify her revolutionary artistic practice, deliberately employing a medium traditionally linked to femininity and domestic craft. The historic Untitled (1985) epitomizes this approach: the striking black-and-white checkered work from her Strickbilder series, or “knitting paintings,” challenges preconceptions about supposedly inferior textile techniques. The serial checkerboard motif is exemplary of Trockel’s early wool works, in which the artist borrows imagery from fashion magazines and pattern books to create her woven canvases. Untitled, a tactile re-exploration of the Minimalist grid, is both visually elegant and conceptually rigorous—serving as a testament to Trockel’s enduring legacy, which remains as relevant today as it was four decades ago.

Through her multifaceted practice, Rosemarie Trockel interrogates questions arising from artistic processes and societal issues, particularly by reinterpreting traditionally “feminine” techniques and crafts such as ceramics. Trockel frequently employs architectural elements—doors, windows, stairs—as recurring motifs in her work, drawing on their rich art historical associations and engaging Duchamp’s ironic subversion of Alberti’s definition of painting as an open window onto the world. In Time She Stopped (2024), this dialogue becomes tangible: the pictorial square—a ceramic slab punctured by a small hole on the left—sits within a pistachio green wooden frame that explicitly evokes the window form, yet the slab blocks rather than enables vision. This deliberate obstruction simultaneously references art historical predecessors and explores the gendered constructs they embody, while also addressing the inherent limitations of representation.

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 Fool (2025) exemplifies Condo’s unique and utterly recognizable pictorial language: thick, bold lines compose multi-colored fragments that form intertwined faces. In this drawing and across his œuvre, Condo constructs a plurality of simultaneous emotional states, which the artist refers to as “Psychological Cubism.” Through such emotive fragmentation, Condo is able to concurrently question the logic of our exterior world and portray the complexity of our interior lives.

A major solo exhibition of Condo’s work opens at Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris on October 10, 2025, and will run through February 8, 2026.

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. Top Ten Grossing Films of 1988: Die Hard (1989) is part of a series of ten sculptures made of black crumpled heat-set vinyl, backlit by neon, that illuminate the titles of 1988’s highest-grossing films, compiled by Bender during her constant scrutinizing of Hollywood production dailies and magazines. Driven by her desire to stay ahead of the popular culture her art was critiquing, Bender began researching industry production notes in Variety about upcoming films before they were completed, or often before they even went into production. She discovered that what was portrayed as an “entertainment” industry was quickly revealed to be an industry of corporate and financial politics. Over thirty-five years since its inception, the series continues to resonate as programming and personalities are currently being cut due to political influence over corporate interests.

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. White 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, composed of shades of gray and white, stretches across the expanse of a diffuse sky, familiar from a plane’s-eye view. This work is distinguished by its cool, restrained color palette, in contrast to the bold colors that characterized earlier images. Nevertheless, its uncanny vastness continues to convey the palpable dystopian undertones present throughout the entire series.

Kara Walker’s œuvre scrutinizes themes of race, gender, sexuality and violence, showcasing a profound exploration of societal complexities and positioning her as a preeminent figure among contemporary American artists. The Duchess of Hispaniola (2025) is part of a suite of new cutout collages in vibrant ink and watercolor, presented on a grand scale akin to history paintings. These works build upon Walker’s iconic monochromatic silhouettes by harnessing the power of formal composition, texture and color. Drawing loosely from Thomas Lawrence’s portrait of Elizabeth Farren, later Countess of Derby (1790)—with its figure in a fur-trimmed cloak—as well as recent images depicting refugees in transit, the artist transforms these diverse references into her own visual vocabulary. Through this deliberate collision of historical and contemporary imagery and her appropriation of the traditions of Western art history, Walker creates incisive commentary on power, displacement and cultural hierarchy, ultimately challenging who gets to be portrayed with dignity and authority.

Cyprien Gaillard’s multifaceted practice examines the cyclical interactions between nature, human industry, conservation and decay, made visible and palpable through materials gleaned from meaningful sites across the globe. Gaillard’s newest wall sculpture, Penombra (Prelievo C) (2024), explores the patterns by which forms, spaces and histories interweave across time. The title itself—“Penombra” meaning partial shade in Italian, paired with “Prelievo” (withdrawal)—signals the interplay between concealment and extraction that underpins the piece. Derived from the adjustable visors that shade the screens of Italian cash machines, the work evokes elements reminiscent of medieval armor, while embodying the reliance on cash payments in a country struggling to break away from its shadow economy.

As part of his solo exhibition at Haus der Kunst in Munich, Gaillard’s new film, Retinal Rivalry, will be on view from October 17, 2025, through March 22, 2026.

Entropy in both the manmade and natural world is central to Cyprien Gaillard’s œuvre. Everything but Spirits (2020), the artist’s series of double-exposed Polaroid works, features tropical plants as agents of nature that visually overgrow images of alcoholic beverages—a symbol of decay of the modern world. As the two photographic images merge, Gaillard offers a kaleidoscopic view onto the perils of human hubris that disrupt natural ecosystems but also generate surreal vistas charged with possibility. Gaillard’s use of the fleeting Polaroid photograph is by no means incidental, and not only because the obsolete analogue technology is a kind of relic in its own right. The medium’s environmental wastefulness amounts to a kind of “entropy accelerator,” and its poor light stability causes the photo to fade over time, mirroring the decay these images explore.

As part of his solo exhibition at Haus der Kunst in Munich, Gaillard’s new film, Retinal Rivalry, will be on view from October 17, 2025, through March 22, 2026.

Observing complex cultural codes and touching on social conditions, Barbara Kruger produces images rife with doubt that trouble the viewer’s preconceived notions. The reconfigurations of her iconic vinyl works from the 1980s transform previously static images into dynamic videos, each amplified by distinct sound effects. In the LED panel Untitled (Remember me) (1988/2020), a swarm of pixels arranges to command the viewer to “Remember me / Dismember me / Delete me.” The captions sit underneath a closely cropped, bloodshot eye and change to the sound of an industrial machine to “Embrace us / Replace us / Release us.” In her juxtapositions of text and image, Kruger delivers bold social commentary on power, capitalism, identity and gender that continues to animate viewers to question their own positions, motivations and beliefs.

From the 1960s onwards, German artists Bernd and Hilla Becher began systematically capturing industrial architecture across Europe and North America, challenging the perceived gap between documentary and f ine art photography. Winding Tower, Zeche Friedrich der Große, Herne, D (1978) is characteristic of the Bechers’ formal arrangements: a black-and-white view of a winding tower, which is an above-ground mine shaft, in Recklinghausen, Germany, from a three-quarters perspective. The structure is utilitarian; yet, by photographing this construction as if it were a sculpture, the Bechers challenge viewers to understand the medium beyond its function of cataloging the visual world and revel in the unintended and overlooked beauty in the forms of modern life.

A major solo show is currently on view at Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur, Cologne, until February 1, 2026.

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. Locus Solus (2007/2009) was shot in a private home, with modernist furniture, sculpture and painting—icons of twentieth-century design and art history—absorbed into the everyday life of a collector. The diptych’s mirrored images destabilize our spatial understanding, creating a disorienting symmetry that challenges the photograph’s relationship to truth and representation. This doubling transforms what could be mere documentation into an interrogation of how we see and construct meaning, prompting us to consider our own position as viewers peering into this private collection, now rendered strange and uncanny through Lawler’s lens.

For over four decades, Senga Nengudi has been pushing the boundaries of sculpture, photography and performance. A member of the African American avant-garde in Los Angeles and New York in the 1970s and 80s, Nengudi began her career with innovative sculptures and performances, staged within art spaces and beyond gallery walls, that expanded the definition of sculpture, engaged with performance art’s ephemeral nature, and questioned women’s delimited roles in contemporary culture. R.S.V.P. Reverie – Stale Mate (2014) is a prime example of the artist’s celebrated R.S.V.P. works, a series of nylon-based sculptures which she first developed in the mid-1970s. The sculptures, inspired by the ways bodies—in particular female ones—must change and adapt over time, carry an invitation to RSVP, or “please respond.” This request was in part literal: during improvisational performances, dancers interacted with the sculptures’ fibrous stockings, their movements reshaping both the nylons and their own bodies. The work’s title, however, invokes the idea of the opposite of responsiveness: a “stale mate” might refer to a partner or relationship that has become static or unfulfilling.

Thea Djordjaze’s distinctive paintings exemplify the artist’s 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 her latest large-scale work, Untitled (2025), light washes of purple, green and orange—along with a faint yellow star at the composition’s center—emerge through the creamy plaster ground marked by significant scratching, gouging and layering that invest the work with tangible immediacy. These interventions reveal painting as a site of physical negotiation between artist, medium and space.

Using industrial materials such as plexiglass, aluminum, tinted metal, wood and plaster, Thea Djordjadze’s hybrid compositions and installations shift the spaces they inhabit. Though always abstract, her structures create tangible connections between the physical properties of her materials, the site in which they are installed, and the time and experience of viewing them. space frontier (2025) is a prime example of Djordjadze’s interest in how architectural elements such as walls, partitions and passages—things that define space—can assimilate and assume other roles. The large-scale aluminum installation, which draws on the forms and materials of Minimalism, plays with the expectations of conventional functionality. Implying a specific use and simultaneously undermining the impression of purpose, space frontier presents a piece of idiosyncratic poetry—an allusive arrangement with no literal, definitive meaning, that points toward something beyond itself.

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. Green Blouse (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.

Sylvie Fleury’s multimedia practice explores the interplay between fashion and art, interrogating the politics of consumerism and fetishism. This interrogation is as provocative—radically questioning the paradigms of desire and art history—as it is playful. This duality is embodied in her series of mannequin sculptures, where fiberglass model body parts are coated in sleek car paint and equipped with an item of clothing. In Mercury Retrograde (2025), a synthetic, turquoise-lacquered arm extends from the wall, holding a silver jacket. The sculpture’s disembodied nature is disquieting, evoking the uncanny in ways similar to contemporaries such as Robert Gober and Charles Ray, yet its iridescent colors and surfaces are unquestionably alluring.

Celebrated for his multifaceted œuvre that deftly balances aesthetic play with meticulous craftsmanship, Richard Artschwager created objects incorporating elements of Pop Art, Minimalism, and Conceptualism, all unified by a distinctive sense of humor and whimsy. Untitled (Study for a Postmodern Idyll) (1992) embodies the artist’s commitment to blurring the boundaries between furniture, painting and sculpture through his use of unconventional materials and innovative pictorial strategies. Employing his signature materials—including Formica and Celotex, surfaces closely associated with domestic interiors and industrial furniture—Artschwager’s Study for a Postmodern Idyll demonstrates his characteristic embrace of ambiguity, simultaneously invoking and critiquing the nostalgic image of the perfect home.

David Lamelas is a key figure in the history of conceptual art. His nomadic practice comprising film and video, performance, photography, sculpture, installation and drawing is as pioneering as it is complex, eluding tidy categorization. Central to Lamelas’ œuvre is the notion of time and what people make of it, as well as the sites and locations we inhabit day to day. Signalling of Three Objects (1968) captures three views of the artist’s performative installation in London’s Hyde Park in 1968 (a recreation of a previous installation he had orchestrated two years before in his native Buenos Aires), in which he arranged rectangular painted metal plaques around three objects: a tree, a lamppost, and a folding chair. By demarcating these quotidian forms from the urban landscape, “drawing” around them in space and time, he calls attention to people’s relationships to public sites as well as to the notion that even a simple act can constitute an artistic gesture worth recording. This unique sequence of images from the 1968 intervention includes a view of the artist walking in the distance between the lamppost and the folding chair; and another where he sits in the chair, a bemused expression on his face, emphasizing the passage of time.

Gala Porras-Kim’s research-driven practice examines how museological choices and conventions surrounding collecting, taxonomy, preservation and display shape our understanding of cultural artifacts. Central to her practice is drawing, with intricately detailed images allowing her to examine and reconsider historical objects and their contexts. Her most recent works focus on the collection of Oxford University’s Pitt Rivers Museum, which categorizes materials based on perceived formal or functional similarities, rather than by geographical or cultural provenance. The colored pencil drawing 1 case C.33.A with 78 votive offerings at Pitt Rivers Museum (2025) critically interrogates the institution’s display practices by depicting a showcase containing objects offered either as requests for healing or expressions of thanks for recovery. Visually striking and thought-provoking, the work illuminates the tension between the artifacts’ original ritualistic purpose and their current placement within the vitrine’s composition.

Drawing fluidly from fiction and reality, mythology and life, and the tangible and the subconscious, Oliver Bak constructs enigmatic narratives, where age-old beliefs take form as haunting pictorial encounters. Bak’s painted worlds are propelled by constant synthesis and anchored in a deep understanding of the medium’s history. His latest work, Greyhound, ghost dog II (2025), depicts a spectral figure holding the leash of an equally ghostly greyhound against a richly textured, mottled background. The greyhound—a recurring motif in the artist’s works—carries symbolic weight: since ancient Rome, this breed has been regarded as an omen of supernatural apparitions. Here, Bak skillfully merges the spectral and corporeal, using fleshy undertones within the phantom forms to create a deliberate tension between presence and absence.

A solo exhibition of Bak’s work opens at Indipendenza in Rome on October 18, 2025.

Henni Alftan’s painterly practice imagines scenes of modern life that, at first, appear intimately familiar yet become increasingly elusive upon extended engagement, a result of the artist’s careful cropping and economy of means. Ace (2025) is perfectly emblematic of such familiarity and mystery: an extreme close-up of three playing cards pinched between perfectly manicured red fingernails, set against an olive-green backdrop. The most prominent of which is the ace of diamonds, flanked by another diamond and a third, partially obscured card. Yet, it remains unclear if the titular “ace,” refers to the central object or the quality of the hand. The nature of the game played is also opaque, as is the identity of the player, beyond their choice of painted nails. In Ace, Alftan thwarts the natural urge to narrativize the composition, including and omitting just enough information to encourage perpetual speculation without resolution.

Alftan’s current solo show at Sprüth Magers, Berlin, runs through October 25, 2025.

Thomas Demand (*1964, Munich) lives in Berlin. Demand is the subject of a major touring retrospective, The Stutter of History, which has been exhibited at Taipei Fine Arts Museum (2025), Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2024), Israel Museum, Jerusalem (2023–24), Jeu de Paume, Paris (2023), and UCCA Edge, Shanghai (2022). Other selected solo exhibitions include Museum of Contemporary Art, Toronto (2022), Centro Botín, Santander (2021), Fondazione Prada, Venice (2017, 2007), Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (2016), Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2015), Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (2012), Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (2009), Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg (2008), Serpentine Gallery, London (2006), Museum of Modern Art, New York (2005), Kunsthaus Bregenz (2004), Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk (2003) and Castello di Rivoli, Turin (2002).

As a pioneer of the Land Art movement, Nancy Holt developed a rich and varied artistic practice that explores the interplay between light, perception and space. In the early 1970s, she began creating sculptural viewing instruments composed of two perpendicular pieces of welded steel pipe, which she termed Locators. For Holt, these devices served as powerful tools for making viewers acutely aware of the act of perception itself. This is particularly evident in Locator with Mirror (1972), in which the bowl of the pipe is aimed at a circular mirror. Through this work, viewers observe themselves in the act of observing, creating a visual doubling that evokes profound questions about artistic engagement and self-awareness.

For over three decades, Arthur Jafa has produced works that dissect the realities, constructions and influence of Blackness in contemporary culture. Through strategies of appropriation, his works reveal poignant gaps and connections through the power of juxtaposition. Between 1990 and 2007, Jafa gathered hundreds of images in binders that he collected from magazines, books, his own photographs and other printed ephemera. This personal atlas has fed his practice ever since, including in his videos, paintings, and this untitled photographic arrangement from 2023, which explodes his image bank into numerous clusters across ten frames. One grid of images, for example, includes photographs of Malcolm X and Angela Davis alongside an African sculpture and Robert Mapplethorpe’s sexually charged photographs of Black male bodies. In bringing these and other more anonymous portraits together, Jafa points to narratives about Black life and history that continue to influence culture today.

Jon Rafman’s interdisciplinary practice 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. For nearly two decades, Rafman has “traveled” digitally across the globe collecting images gleaned from Google Street View maps. All captured anonymously by the spider-eyed ball atop a Google van, the images range from haunting to shocking to lyrical. Despite the specifics of time and location noted in the titles, each picture also resonates more universally and with symbolic force. 4224 Jefferson Ave, Woodside, California, USA (2018) depicts an arrest underway within a suburban northern California neighborhood. Though a police officer and a man look at the camera, seemingly unfazed, a middle-aged woman lies with her back against the police vehicle, suspended mid-action.

Jon Rafman’s solo exhibition 9 Eyes is on view at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humblebæk, Denmark, through January 11, 2026.

The late Kaari Upson worked in a wide array of media, including sculpture, video, drawing and painting, until her death in 2021. In the last two years of her life, the pandemic underway and her studio empty of assistants, Upson returned to painting, a medium important at the outset of her career and which she could produce alone. In this untitled painting from 2020, a female figure with blonde tresses—a recurring image in Upson’s work, often a kind of self-portrait—intermingles with the checkered grid of a picnic blanket and green bottles, seemingly upside-down. To the left, an appendage reaches upward from the woman’s side, whether her own or belonging to a second being. In these paintings, the artist prided herself on applying paint without the use of a paintbrush; therefore, pours, sprays, and pressings of paint create an array of visual effects and a frenetic, exciting energy. Moving nimbly between abstraction and figuration, Upson wrestles between the two in this richly layered canvas.

Kaari Upson’s solo exhibition House to Body Shift is on view at the London gallery through November 1, 2025.

Andreas Schulze is a key figure in German contemporary painting. His colorful pictorial worlds, oscillating 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 creates unique, otherworldly scenes, as in Rock Vista (Taormina 5) (2014). The painting comes from a body of work with references to Italy, a place of great importance for Schulze personally as well as for art history. The composition displays an array of earth-toned bands of color, reminiscent of a wall or fence, that are pierced by a rounded central zone whose horizontal azure bands suggest a seaside landscape. Are we peering through a fence gap at the sea? Or is this zone floating surreally across our field of vision? The work sets up a compelling dynamic between inside and outside that recurs throughout Schulze’s œuvre: he paints an attractive scene that beckons the viewers, only to keep it closed off through compositional and painterly tactics, thereby leaving us wanting to see and know more.

Salvo was an Italian Conceptualist 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 draw attention to the painting’s artifice. Primavera (2007) is a simple composition; surreally colored trees and bushes cut vertically through horizontal bands of cadmium green, seafoam and lemon yellow. The painting’s sublime brightness is characteristic of Salvo’s renowned sumptuous light effects, which generate serene, dreamlike scenes.

Pamela Rosenkranz’s practice explores the scientific and sociocultural systems that profoundly affect humans and the environment. Her interdisciplinary approach incorporates elements from neurology, art history, biorobotics, and literature, often blurring the distinctions between nature and culture. In her recent body of works on paper, Healer Scrolls, Rosenkranz 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 (Pink Fishes) (2025) continue with this squamate form, shimmering in a bright pink mother-of-pearl hue. 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.