Thomas Demand is best known for constructing intricate paper models of images he culls from newspapers, magazines, and similar sources, and photographing them to produce large-scale, sharp prints. The resulting work is convincingly real and, yet, eerily artificial, deftly balancing the space between sculpture and photography, illusion and image, and reality and interpretation. Eis (2025) navigates these dichotomies especially well. The photograph depicts the terrain of a tabular iceberg with intensely patterned crevasses, such that it immediately evokes climate change and glacial ablation. The topological nature of this image recalls some of Demand’s most acclaimed works, such as Grotto (2006) and Pond (2020).

Sprüth Magers is proud to include Eis (2025) in the Gallery Climate Coalition Initiative. Part of the proceeds from the sale of works included in this initiative directly support climate action in the visual arts.

Sterling Ruby’s wide-ranging, multidisciplinary work spans urethane and bronze sculptures, large-scale textile collages, handmade ceramics, and hallucinatory color-field canvases, reckoning with the conflict between individual desires and social structures. Ruby’s bronze cast FP (Flower Power) sculptures take their title from a news photograph of 1960s anti-war protests in the US: amid heightened tension, a lone protester is shown placing wilting carnation flowers into the barrels of rifles on the steps of the Pentagon building. These somber, elongated sculptures are made in a process of sand-casting aluminum; the flowers and wood structures are pressed and buried into the ground in order to create the forms. The ghostly patina of the artwork is achieved through layering white over black pigment, resulting in an ashen, volcanic appearance. FP (8643) stands like a totemic or memorial object, the flower placed reverently as an offering.

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. Smiling and Laughing (2021) exemplifies Condo’s unique and utterly recognizable pictorial language: thick, bold lines fragment yellow and red intertwined faces. In this drawing 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 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 will open at Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris in October 2025, his most significant exhibition to date.

A prime example of John Baldessari’s framed compositions with multiple elements from the 1980s, The Fallen Easel (1988) comprises images from the artist’s vast archive of film stills and found photographs. His use of these excerpts positions the work within the history of appropriation art, effectively examining the social and cultural influence of mass media. Many of Baldessari’s works from this time were irregularly shaped, often using repetition, inversions and mirroring. The Fallen Easel’s unorthodox arrangement gives the work a sense of physical instability; the title alludes to the eponymous easel in the tilted frame to the left, but also to the “fall” of traditional easel painting from the apex of fine art. The gaps between the frames, and within the images themselves—for example, the colored dots obscuring three figures’ faces on the right, a pictorial gesture for which Baldessari was well known—serve to underscore gaps in meaning, undermining expectations of how images function.

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.

Since 1967, when they met at Saint Martin’s School of Art in London, Gilbert & George have created art together as one visionary entity, producing bold, self-referential work. Their 2019 series THE PARADISICAL PICTURES is a set of thirty-five large-scale panels that represent themselves amongst psychedelically-colored, organic motifs. In CURL (2019), Gilbert & George’s eyes stare out at the viewer against a backdrop of vibrantly hued vegetation. Despite CURL’s vibrancy and the heavenly connotation of the series’ title, the stark gaze of the artists’ disembodied eyes in conjunction with the artificiality of the coloring, especially acid green, draws out a darker, anthropocentric subtext. CURL, alongside the rest of THE PARADISICAL PICTURES, was exhibited at the opening of The Gilbert & George Centre in Spitalfields, East London in 2023.

Gilbert & George’s upcoming solo exhibition 21ST CENTURY PICTURES opens at the Hayward Gallery, London, on October 7, 2025.

Gary Hume rose to prominence as one of the most important and independent voices among the Young British Artists, an ambitious generation of artists graduating from London’s Goldsmiths College in the late 1980s. He is best known for his figurative and abstract paintings on aluminum panels, made with high-gloss household enamel paint, often featuring natural motifs. Hume’s The Window and The Fire (both 2025) are elegant compositions that suggest vibrant, tumbling lemons and a Chrysanthemum-like flower, straddling the boundary of figuration and abstraction. The organic forms and coloring of the paintings stand in stark contrast with their shiny artificiality and sparseness, a tension that testifies to Hume’s painterly acuity and self-restraint.

Gary Hume rose to prominence as one of the most important and independent voices among the Young British Artists, an ambitious generation of artists graduating from London’s Goldsmiths College in the late 1980s. He is best known for his figurative and abstract paintings on aluminum panels, made with high-gloss household enamel paint, often featuring natural motifs. Hume’s The Window and The Fire (both 2025) are elegant compositions that suggest vibrant, tumbling lemons and a Chrysanthemum-like flower, straddling the boundary of figuration and abstraction. The organic forms and coloring of the paintings stand in stark contrast with their shiny artificiality and sparseness, a tension that testifies to Hume’s painterly acuity and self-restraint.

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. Originally exhibited at the 12th Liverpool Biennial, the colored pencil drawing Future spaces replicate earlier spaces (shell instruments) (2023) centers on ancient shell instruments. Porras-Kim focuses not on their outward appearance but on their interior spaces—the hollow chambers that once carried sound across ceremonial or communicative contexts now lost to us. The shells embody a paradox of continuity and rupture: while their physical forms have remained unchanged over centuries, still capable of producing the same sounds, the cultural framework that once gave those sounds purpose has changed. The work explores this temporal gap between function and significance, suggesting that when we encounter such objects today, we participate in an act of archaeological ventriloquism—making them speak with historical authority while projecting our contemporary interpretations of their meaning.

Henni Alftan’s artistic practice is grounded in a profound exploration of the medium of painting, examining its methods and histories. Her intimate yet enigmatic portrayals of everyday life arise from a process of observation and deduction, resulting in precise and carefully cropped figurative works that embody a studied economy of means. BIC (2024) exemplifies Alftan’s distinctive approach: Using a tightly cropped composition that draws intense focus to the motif while subtly hinting at the space beyond the canvas, her works evoke cinematic techniques that generate curiosity and suspense. In this piece, a hand firmly grips a pen mid-motion, writing the word “No”—a gesture that is both mundane and charged with potential meaning. The depicted hand becomes a surrogate for Alftan’s own holding the brush, transforming the act of painting into a commentary on itself. By rendering the specific quality of ballpoint ink on paper through an entirely different medium, Alftan demonstrates painting’s ability to incorporate and reinterpret other forms of mark-making while asserting its own material specificity.

Alftan’s work is currently featured in a solo show at Sprüth Magers, Berlin, running through October 25, 2025.

Anne Imhof is recognized internationally for her genre-spanning practice that encompasses performance, choreography, painting, drawing, installation and sculpture. Though her work is multifaceted and continues to expand into ever more media, Imhof conceives her art-making from the vantage point of drawing, with even her abstractions characterized by a keen interest in the human body. Imhof’s latest work, Untitled (2025), showcases her signature scratch-making technique. Working on an aluminum canvas coated in smooth black acrylic paint, the artist inscribes undulating gestures across the surface. These scratches become the true subject, acting as traces of action, much like scars that record distinct physical movements. They suggest something being worn away or carved into, while also evoking the fluid, organic gesture of a wave against hard industrial materials.

Rosemarie Trockel is widely regarded as one of the most important and influential conceptual artists working today. Her sculptures, collages, ceramics, knitted works, drawings and photographs are noted for their subtle social critique and range of subversive, aesthetic strategies. Emphasizing the serial approach of her practice, A Ship So Big, a Bridge Cringes (2012/21) presents two photographs encased in acrylic: one depicting a burner from one of the artist’s well-known hotplate series, this one originally made in ceramic; the other showing an aging ship, the Royal Iris, moored and abandoned along the Thames River. The images share brown metallic tones and represent symbols of domestic and industrial manufacturing; they are also reminiscent of artistic traditions from painterly seascapes to minimalist sculpture. The use of past works demonstrates how integral variations are within Trockel’s oeuvre, which is fueled both materially and conceptually by a constant process of collecting, overwriting, and re-ordering.

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 paintings, he deploys a text-based algorithm— specifically, an artificially intelligent clip-guided diffusion algorithm—to generate an aesthetic experience, in a diffuse painterly style that is already “outdated” in today’s fast-paced AI development. The resulting images are reproduced onto canvas and printed atop a painted gesso surface where the imperfections of the reproduction add additional layers of information and meaning—Rafman attempts to force his images as far as possible from the comfort of their perfect digital origins and into the rough and tactile material world. The teenage boys in 𐤀𐤇𐤉𐤌 (Brothers) (2022) are who we often think about as internet denizens. Because of the quirks of earlier AI algorithms, their limbs and clothing interlace, merging their bodies and identities.

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

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 (Deep Ponds) (2025) continues with this squamate form, shimmering in mother-of-pearl hues. The title of this series references both the historic rolls of paper used to store information and the movement required to navigate the internet’s vast wealth of knowledge, that which unfolds and unwinds in a serpentine fashion.

Thea Djordjadze’s sculptures draw on the language of architecture, allude to modernist design and echo the culture of her native Georgia. She combines a variety of artistic, industrial and unconventional materials to produce idiosyncratic works full of contrasts. Gestenfehler (2020) is a prime example of Djordjadze’s interest in how architectural elements such as walls, partitions and shelves—things that define space—can assimilate and assume other roles. The work resembles a vitrine, a common institutional tool to designate objects as meaningful and off-limits. Here, however, it lies on the floor, containing nothing, but augmented with brushy swaths of light blue and purple. The work’s title is an invented term that translates to “gesture-error.” Djordjadze plays with the expectations of conventional functionality but ultimately presents a piece of idiosyncratic poetry with no definitive interpretation; instead, the work is given the autonomy to develop its own history and meaning.

Mire Lee’s practice is deeply rooted in materiality, frequently employing industrial materials to create organic forms that elicit emotional responses. Open wound: Surface with many holes #7 (2025) is one of Lee’s new membranous fabric works, which the artist refers to as “skins.” It is composed of safety netting typically used in construction, dipped in a gelatinous solution of pigmented methylcellulose, similar to that in her major installation at Tate’s Turbine Hall in 2024. Its many holes mark the delicate boundary separating the inside from the outside, referencing the fragility and disintegration of bodies. Exploring the toll living in our current turbulent times takes on both body and mind, these “open wounds,” ever-present representations of hurt, evoke conflicting feelings of disgust and tenderness.

Lee’s first solo show with the gallery is currently on view in Los Angeles and will run through October 25, 2025.

Andreas Gursky ranks among the most important photographers of his generation. His monumentally scaled works have redefined the medium in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, distilling the circumstances of modern-day life into powerful visual statements. Interested in the workings of globalization, consumerism and social phenomena as they relate to contemporary society, Gursky investigates the conditions of our changing planet. In Dolomiten, Seilbahn II (Dolomites, cable car II) (1987), a solitary red cable car appears suspended in the dense mists of the Italian Dolomites, rendered seemingly weightless against the dramatic backdrop. The photograph’s composition emphasizes the sublime vastness of the natural environment while drawing attention to the fragile presence of man-made infrastructure within it. This early work reveals the foundational elements that would come to define Gursky’s practice: an entirely unique approach to seeing reality that merges documentary precision with painterly sensibility, establishing a visual framework that examines the relationship between human technology and the natural world.

Over a prolific two decades, the late Kaari Upson created groundbreaking works that delved into the motivations and urges that characterize the human experience. Her drawings formed a fundamental part of her practice. These two works stem from her Grotto Drawings (2008–10), pastel and charcoal works on paper that begin with porn imagery—some appropriated, others featuring Upson herself wearing prosthetic breasts and vulvas. The grotto, a recurring feature in her work, refers to the notorious structure at Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion. First, Upson printed out the original image onto paper and applied water and baby oil (a nod to the well-lubricated, shiny bodies of porn stars) to distend and diffuse the images. Their colors bleed across the page, nearly subsuming them into abstraction, and the results, such as the untitled drawing from 2008, are artworks unto themselves. She then scanned and enlarged them, printing them as large-format inkjet prints and re-drawing them with layers of rich color pastels. Their lush surfaces echo the softcore nature of the imagery, and Upson’s charcoal dustings add a dark edge to each intriguing scene.

Kaari Upson’s solo exhibition House to Body Shift is on view at the London gallery through November 1, 2025, and her first major posthumous exhibition, Dollhouse – A Retrospective, closes on October 26, 2025, at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark.

Over a prolific two decades, the late Kaari Upson created groundbreaking works that delved into the motivations and urges that characterize the human experience. Her drawings formed a fundamental part of her practice. These two works stem from her Grotto Drawings (2008–10), pastel and charcoal works on paper that begin with porn imagery—some appropriated, others featuring Upson herself wearing prosthetic breasts and vulvas. The grotto, a recurring feature in her work, refers to the notorious structure at Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion. First, Upson printed out the original image onto paper and applied water and baby oil (a nod to the well-lubricated, shiny bodies of porn stars) to distend and diffuse the images. Their colors bleed across the page, nearly subsuming them into abstraction, and the results, such as the untitled drawing from 2008, are artworks unto themselves. She then scanned and enlarged them, printing them as large-format inkjet prints and re-drawing them with layers of rich color pastels. Their lush surfaces echo the softcore nature of the imagery, and Upson’s charcoal dustings add a dark edge to each intriguing scene.

Kaari Upson’s solo exhibition House to Body Shift is on view at the London gallery through November 1, 2025, and her first major posthumous exhibition, Dollhouse – A Retrospective, closes on October 26, 2025, at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark.

The mystical scenes of painter Oliver Bak unite the spirits of the past and present. Drawing fluidly from fiction and reality, mythology and life, and the tangible and the subconscious, he constructs enigmatic narratives by conflating different fragments of human experience. Bak’s pictorial worlds are propelled by constant synthesis and anchored in a deep understanding of the medium’s history. The subjects in his drawings—a vital cornerstone of his practice—echo his works in paint, similarly incorporating natural imagery that navigates flourish and decay while exploring inner existential conflict. This thematic consistency finds new technical expression in his pencil-on-paper work Group of dancers (2025). Here, four dancing figures are depicted mid-gesture, their dynamic energy conveyed both through line and the application of beeswax. The wax infuses the work with an atmospheric effect and signals a notable evolution in the artist’s technical approach. It creates subtle tonal variations and textural richness beyond what traditional graphite can offer, suggesting both the ephemeral nature of dance and the artist’s commitment to expanding his formal vocabulary.

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

Louise Lawler ranks among the pioneering female artists associated with the Pictures Generation of the 1970s and 80s. Her conceptual photography captures art objects in situ at museums, auction houses and private homes, examining how context transforms meaning. She Wasn’t Always a Statue (A) (1996/1997) exemplifies this approach through a densely composed black-and-white photograph taken in a plaster cast museum in Munich. The image shows copies of classical sculptures: two crouching Aphrodites in the foreground, Nike of Samothrace in the center, and Venus De Milo visible in the background on the left. Lawler’s tight framing amplifies the sense of fragmentation present in these sculptures, already marred by the loss of heads and limbs. The work’s title alludes to the transformation these figures have undergone—from divine mythology to marble artwork to plaster reproduction to photographic subject. Nike becomes a fitting emblem of this transition, her body dismembered first by history, then by the camera. Through this characteristic visual wit, Lawler demonstrates that every act of looking is also an act of editing—whether by time, institution or lens.

Marcel van Eeden is a renowned draughtsman who sources the images of his work from media that precede his date of birth. Working primarily in monochrome on paper, van Eeden commits himself to the endless and absurd task of attempting to draw everything prior to his existence, in part, out of a fascination with the philosophy of absence, or “nonbeing” as espoused by Schopenhauer. Untitled (2023) is a prime example of van Eeden’s approach, a charcoal drawing of an astir street that is both stylistically cinematic and somber, reminiscent of film noir. It is part of a series of drawings that illustrate German painter Hans Thoma’s journey through the Netherlands in 1898, and the cultural events from that time and place. Notably, van Eeden was awarded the Hans Thoma Prize in 2023.

Keith Arnatt occupies a key position in the history of twentieth-century British conceptual art. Emerging amid the tumult of London’s art scene in the 1960s and 70s, Arnatt’s work explores the meaning and function of art, as well as how the perception of an artwork, and the artist, operates in relation to the act of creating a work. In his series Notes from Jo (1991–95, printed 2013), Arnatt collected and photographed handwritten notes and domestic reminders that his late wife, Jo, had left him around the house. Ranging from the mundane to the angry, the instructions reveal the intimacy and humor of domestic life. Arnatt’s preservation of these notes through photographic documentation, enlarged to a point that becomes surreal, underlines the artist’s distinctive skill of being able to discern the visual and conceptual possibilities of objects and remnants from daily life.

Windows and doors have played a crucial role in Andreas Schulze’s work as recurring motifs, displaying the artist’s attention to domestic objects and architecture, as well as his artistic approach to thinking through painterly spaces. Through their forms and serial execution, these passageways manifest how abstract variations have shaped Schulze’s oeuvre, possibly serving as a commentary on Minimalism in the manner of Donald Judd. In Untitled (Door in the forest) (2024), an emerald-colored door frame, complete with handle and keyhole, gives the illusion of looking outward (or inward) onto a nebulous view. Schulze achieves this effect through his distinctive technique of blending colors with gradual transitions to lighter and darker tones. Installed on the wall, where a doorway might naturally appear, Schulze’s painting prompts an architectural moment that blurs the lines between the interior and the exterior, evoking an expansive atmosphere that is familiar yet mystical.