Robert Morris was a pivotal figure in postwar American art, playing a central role in various avant-garde movements during the 1960s and 1970s, including Minimalism, Performance Art, Land Art, and Process Art. His interdisciplinary work encompasses objects, sculptures, drawing, film, performance art and writing. Untitled (1967/95) is a wall-mounted sculpture made from heavy industrial felt—a material Morris began working with in the late 1960s. In this notable work, he cut long horizontal slashes into a large rectangular sheet of the thick textile, employing it as sculptural material. Suspended by grommets attached to the top corners of the piece, the heavy felt responds to gravity, arranging itself in a way that calls to mind skin, in a configuration that Morris referred to as “anti form.” Morris’ innovative engagement with felt and other unconventional materials greatly impacted subsequent generations of artists who explored similar themes of materiality and process.

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. Thinking and Smiling (2025) exemplifies Condo’s unique and utterly recognizable pictorial language: thick, bold lines fragment the blue and grey face of a subject whose wide, asymmetrical eyes stare eagerly back at the viewer. 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 is able to concurrently question the logic of our exterior world and portray the complexity of our interior lives.

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. The Space Between, his final body of work, comprises inkjet prints of vernacular imagery reproduced from the artist’s vast archive of film stills, advertisements, and other media, juxtaposed with texts below them that call out particular elements seen in the imagery above. Throughout the series, Baldessari investigates zones of physical and conceptual distance between figures and objects in a range of banal, surprising and funny compositions. In The Space Between Head and Hand. (2019) a central figure, dressed in a curious costume fit for a film or television set, is excised from its original scene. Lacking all context, the character’s aura is at once heightened and rendered mysterious. Together with the caption, which points us toward a shape wedged between the character’s theatrical headpiece and his gloved hand, Baldessari makes us attend to relationships, everyday details, and “spaces between” that we might otherwise overlook.

In her multifaceted practice, Rosemarie Trockel explores questions arising from artistic processes as well as societal concerns. A poignant illustration of her approach is evident in her reimagining of techniques and craft traditionally deemed “feminine,” such as ceramics. Trockel’s ceramic works demonstrate a remarkable spectrum, ranging from amorphous to definite objects. In the case of Untitled (2019), the viewer is presented with an abstract form that emphasizes its handmade nature. The highly textured surface is coated in a milky white glaze, with red and blue areas emerging from it. This wall-mounted sculpture, both glossy and irregular, alludes to a mirror—an object frequently evoked by Trockel. However, rather than reflecting its surroundings, the untitled piece draws attention to its own extraordinary texture, color and distinctive shape.

Thea Djordjadze’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 Untitled (2025), lush oranges, greens, and browns emerge through the creamy plaster ground marked by scratching, gouging and layering—processes that invest the work with a tangible sense of immediacy. These interventions reveal painting as a site of physical negotiation between artist, medium and space.

Anne Imhof is known primarily for her enduring performances and spectral paintings, yet her artistic practice originates in her drawings which are frequently characterized by a keen interest in the human body. Imhof’s most recent works transform this ongoing drawing practice into sculptural, patinated bronze reliefs, a new medium for the artist. Untitled (Goatling) (2024) is an embodied and eternalized drawing with a seductively smooth and dark surface. Its tightly cropped view of androgynous figures with intertwining limbs suggests an embrace, affectionate and violent at the same time— especially evident in the lifeless figure of a goat kid held close to the chest of a faceless character. Expanding on themes of melancholy and allegory that are present in many of Imhof’s works, the work is an exploration of personal history and imagined narratives.

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. 7 Brushstrokes over 1 Brushstroke II (2024) 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. In this work, a translucent white fabric, hanging gracefully, is interrupted by a horizontal post, revealing a dark elegant backdrop on the left side of the composition. The fabric, in turn, partially obscures the post’s umber form. In this painting and throughout her oeuvre, Song explores the tensions between abstraction and figuration, revealing profound theoretical investments in the visualization of concealment.

Jenny Holzer’s text-based practice is an ongoing artistic investigation of language and the construction of political meaning. Since the late 1970s, her texts have appeared on posters, LED signs, benches, paintings and plaques, where they have the power to affect viewers in everyday situations. It’s completely different to consider… (1981), part of an early series of hand-painted enamel signs, draws from Holzer’s Living (1980–82), in which she presents quiet observations, directions and warnings. Written in a matter-of-fact style suitable to describing everyday life, these commentaries touch on how individuals negotiate landscapes, expectations, desires, fears, other bodies and themselves. Here, the artist addresses the notion of “taste,” perhaps making a connection between the concept of artistic connoisseurship and the literal taste that we feel, sometimes viscerally, with our senses.

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

Working across media for nearly two decades, Kaari Upson examined the lines between the self and the other, as well as our intimate psychological connections to the spaces we inhabit. Her compendium of sculptural forms, cast directly from domestic objects, included mattresses, couches, cushions, doors, and rugs, some of which were family heirlooms and others that she found by the side of the road around her Los Angeles studio. She began by creating a latex mold of the object, into which she would pour and spray pigments, and then fill with silicone or resins that absorbed these colors—all visible in the lush hues of the finished work. In Hallway KU (2014), the pile of the original rug is clearly visible, creating a highly tactile surface that is heightened by the work’s bright blue and white hues, as well as the artist’s initials scrawled in black, “KU.” Placed on the wall, the sculpture upends our sense of space, creating a feeling of unease despite the object’s bold textures and tones. This dynamic of uncanny beauty carries through Upson’s entire oeuvre, making Hallway KU a key example of the artist’s wide-ranging practice.

Kaari Upson was a prolific experimenter across media. For one of the artist’s final series, Cuppies, she delved into the field of ceramics. Each example from the series was cast from a ball of her studio cat’s fur, generating an oblong clay cup that bows to one side as if beginning to fold in on itself. The Cuppies were conceived as vessels to serve food to art viewers, giving the overall project an element of both carefree absurdity and shared community. Upson inscribed and painted unique phrases and imagery onto the Cuppies’ highly textured surfaces, which burst with energy, color and often a dark sense of humor. Together they create a textual and visual lexicon that charts many of the concepts that fed into Upson’s work over decades: “I Am the Mirror,” “Girls Next Door,” and “Vain German” among them. At the same time, the Cuppies also document the artist’s moods and experiences in the final year of her life. Faces stare out at us, meeting our gaze, asking to be seen, touched, consumed and remembered.

For over four decades, Barbara Kruger has combined piercing texts with images in works that interrogate the mechanisms of power and cultural systems of representation that affect our daily lives and relationships. She is renowned for her large-scale public installations, which have been showcased on the exteriors of buses and trains, as subway posters and in display windows. In the spring of 1989, the present work, Untitled (We need healthcare and housing) (1989), was prominently displayed on a billboard at a junction in New York’s Lower East Side, directly addressing the area’s pressing homelessness issue. The screenprint, contained in Kruger’s signature lacquered red frame, features the words “We need health care and housing” superimposed on a poignant black-and-blue image of a man holding his head tightly between his hands—a gesture conveying desperation. As with many of Kruger’s works, the piece retains its potency, highlighting the systemic inequities that remain unresolved even thirty-six years after its inception.

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 fine art photography. Winding Tower, Reed & Herb Coal Co., Joliett, Schuylkill County, USA (1975) is characteristic of the Bechers’ formal arrangements. It comprises a set of four black-and-white typological views of a winding tower, also known as a minehead, in Northeastern Pennsylvania from frontal and three-quarters perspectives. The structure is utilitarian; yet, by photographing this construction as if it is 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.

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. Her new triptych, 1 Case C.61.A with 162 Sympathetic Magic objects at Pitt Rivers Museum (2025), critically interrogates the institution’s forms of display. It depicts three showcase drawers containing items whose appearance resembles the cures or protections they are believed to offer. This work exemplifies Porras-Kim’s visually striking and thought-provoking drawings, illuminating the friction between the objects’ ritualistic function and their current placements within the composition of the vitrine.

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 #3 (2024) 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 Modern’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 will present her latest work in a solo show at Sprüth Magers, Los Angeles, opening on September 9, 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. Red Wine II (2025) is perfectly emblematic of such familiarity and mystery; a crimson splatter drips down the chest of a faceless person in a white button-down, several small drops forming a bloody halo. Besides a bare neck that partially peeks over their shirt’s collar, the subject is absent from the scene. It is unclear who they are and how this ensanguine spill came to be, although the painting’s title offers a hint. In Red Wine II, Alftan thwarts the natural urge to narrativize the composition, including and omitting just enough information as to encourage perpetual speculation, without revelation.

Alftan’s upcoming solo show at Sprüth Magers, Berlin, opens September 12, 2025.

Andreas Schulze is one of the great individualists of German contemporary painting. His unique, vividly visual worlds, which include sculptures, drawings and expansive installations, are born from careful observation of everyday life. His canvas Untitled (Colorful Wesseling 15) (2022) exemplifies this approach, belonging to a series of vibrant paintings whose exaggerated forms and bold palette hint at industrial and urban structures alongside landscape fragments. In this particular work, steam plumes—one purple, the other gray—escape from a Y-shaped pipe against a background featuring a honeycomb pattern and areas resembling vegetation and corrugated iron. By invoking Wesseling—the industrial city near Cologne associated with the chemical and petroleum industries—Schulze satirizes, abstracts and colorizes the everyday reality of German urban life, imbuing it with both adversity and peculiar optimism.

Parallel to Frieze Seoul, Andreas Schulze’s work will be on view in the group exhibition About Painting alongside works by Salvo and Henni Alftan at the Shinsegae Gallery, Seoul, September 3–October 25, 2025.

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. In Una gita in montagna (2007), which translates from Italian to “a trip to the mountains,” Salvo paints a lush green and yellow landscape in which the peaks of blonde buildings mirror the golden mountain apexes in the distance, framed by verdant vegetation. Through coloring and form, Salvo represents these man-made constructions in harmony with the natural world, the tension of the work lying instead between soft, curvy lines and sharp, harsh ones. Una gita in montagna and its sublime brightness are characteristic of Salvo’s renowned sumptuous light effects, which generate serene, dreamlike scenes.

Parallel to Frieze Seoul, Salvo’s work will be on view in the group exhibition About Painting alongside works by Andreas Schulze and Henni Alftan at the Shinsegae Gallery, Seoul, September 3–October 25, 2025.

Known for his minimalist abstract paintings, David Ostrowski continuously pursues the idea of total reduction in painting in a conscious rejection of painterly codes and traditions. At first, emptiness seems to define his works, but upon closer inspection, the various layers within the painting reveal a wealth of complexity; indeed, Ostrowski often layers his paints over areas of paper and canvas remnants from his studio, generating underlying emotional affects and energies. In F (Leichtathletik) (2021), a blue spray-painted line moves across, down and around the bottom half of the monochrome canvas, tracing what approaches a number or letterform, but never quite arrives at one. The German word “Leichtathletik” translates to the athletics of track and field, and the line’s gentle arc could reflect a body’s trajectory through space. Still, like all Ostrowski’s works, F (Leichtathletik) challenges any simple interpretations and exemplifies how the artist achieves the greatest effects using the most minimal means.

Often employing unconventional pigments derived from nature and her immediate surroundings, Lucy Dodd’s paintings mobilize materials, colors, and shapes to explore personal and global narratives. After spending much of her life in upstate New York, Dodd recently moved back to the United Kingdom, specifically the Scottish coast on the North Sea, where she has created a new body of work that responds to her changed surroundings. Hope (2024) is a product of such migration, a frenetic composition of spills, drops, stains, and surprising chemical reactions from the dandelion, forget-me-nots, and other biota she manipulates. This painting was constructed over many weeks, using a vocabulary of chance operations and deliberate, controlled movements across its surface, enacting a prolonged, intimate exchange between the artist and her new environment.

Robert Elfgen’s works thrive on a specific kind of narrative and symbolic density, on biography, everyday observations, and an acute sensibility for the subliminal poetry of myths and rituals. In Ellen (2023), Elfgen transforms the industrial crudeness of concrete into a serene landscape depicted across five panels. His pigments seep into the porous surface of the concrete, creating an interplay between the material’s inherent roughness and the gentle gradation of color that suggests the tranquility of a lake at sunset, reminiscent of nineteenth-century romantic landscape painting. The texture of the concrete itself contributes to the imagery, with its grain and irregularities shaping the motif. The five-panel format creates a panoramic vista that draws viewers into a contemplative space where industrial materials transcend their origins to evoke a peaceful image of nature.