Through January 11, 2026, the Contemporary Austin hosts the first solo museum exhibition in Texas of sculptor Raul De Lara, an artist known for his highly technical approach to woodworking. De Lara transforms everyday tools, plants, and furniture into anthropomorphic and surreal forms. These works act as vessels of memory, resilience, and humor, but also as pointed reflections on the immigrant experience, queer identity, and the liminal space of DACA status, the temporary US policy that offers young undocumented immigrants protection from deportation and the ability to work legally, though without a path to permanent residency or citizenship.

De Lara’s background roots him in both Mexican and American traditions of making. Trained in Austin and later at Virginia Commonwealth University, he honors traditional woodworking while experimenting with scale, humor, and magical realism. His sculptures range from saints conjured out of branches to furniture reimagined with uncanny detail. ‘Growing up, I would see craftsmen carve these saints out of branches,’ he recalls. ‘I always wonder, like, at what point does the branch become a saint?’ he wonders. That threshold between the ordinary and the sacred, the native and the foreign, and the tool and the symbol is where his work finds its resonance.

Cavale II, 2023 | all images courtesy of Raul De Lara, unless stated otherwise

seven new works on view at the Contemporary Austin exhibition

For the show in Austin, his hometown after immigrating to the US at age twelve, De Lara completes seven new sculptures shaped from mesquite, walnut, cedar, and oak. The pieces reference wildflowers native to both Texas and northern Mexico, such as Damianita, Indian Blanket, and Sleepy Daisy. Their dual botanical origins parallel the artist’s own exploration of cultural hybridity and contested belonging. ‘Why can plants be native to two places, but never people?’ he asks. By embedding this question into wood and form, the New York-based artist turns sculpture into a stage for negotiating identity and precarity.

the sculpture was made for Hermés new Aspen Boutique’s window display

When Woodworking Meets Belonging and Legal Uncertainty

Raul De Lara insists that the act of sharing is central to his practice. ‘Some of the best works are the ones that, when you share yourself, you really get beyond just the object,’ he says. ‘When you can connect with people in that way—thinking that our work can make people feel a sense of care, or want to care—that’s enough.’ In Austin, the newly commissioned sculptures invite audiences to engage with beauty while confronting difficult questions of who gets to belong, how stories are carved into materials, and why plants are allowed a dual nativity denied to people.

The artist himself describes the project as the most complex of his career. ‘Honestly, this show… they’re the most layered, and they have the capacity to fail. Pulling one off is a miracle, and I have, like, six miracles to do,’ he shares. This balance of rigor and risk reflects the precariousness of his legal and social position under DACA. ‘My legal standing here—if the law changed tomorrow, that would be a different exhibition. It’s a reality… I could not even make my own show.’ In these remarks, the material and the political fuse, as woodworking becomes both a technical dance with fire and a metaphor for living in limbo.

these works act as vessels of memory, resilience, and humor

Tornado, 2020

Installation view, HOST: Raul De Lara, The Contemporary Austin – Jones Center on Congress Avenue, Austin, Texas, 2025. Artwork © Raul De Lara | image by Alex Boeschenstein, courtesy of The Contemporary Austin

For Being Left-Handed, 2020

Como Las De Mi Tierra / Like The One’s Back Home, 2024

Hermés Window Installation in Aspen, Colorado, 2023

Soft Chair (M1), 2023

The Wait (Again), 2022

Pending Flowers, 2024

La Monstera, 2023

installation view, HOST: Raul De Lara, The Contemporary Austin – Jones Center on Congress Avenue, Austin, Texas, 2025. Artwork © Raul De Lara | image by Alex Boeschenstein, courtesy of The Contemporary Austin

installation view, HOST: Raul De Lara, The Contemporary Austin – Jones Center on Congress Avenue, Austin, Texas, 2025. Artwork © Raul De Lara | image by Alex Boeschenstein, courtesy of The Contemporary Austin

project info:

artist: Raul De Lara | @rauldelaraa

exhibition: HOST: Raul De Lara

location: The Contemporary Austin | @contemporaryatx – Jones Center, HOST gallery, 700 Congress Avenue, Austin, Texas 

dates: September 12th, 2025 – January 11th, 2026

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Ai Weiwei reveals his recent installation, Three Perfectly Proportioned Spheres and Camouflage Uniforms Painted White, for the Pavilion 13 in Kyiv, Ukraine. Commissioned by RIBBON International, the major and large-scale artwork remains on-site between September 14th and November 30th, 2025. The building, renovated in 2025 by ФОРМА and RIBBON International and home to the Pavilion of Culture, becomes the temporary platform for the artist’s response to the ongoing war in Ukraine. It consists of three mathematically precise spheres wrapped in camouflage uniforms, which he handpainted in white with his team.

The artwork is both a sculpture and a political statement, constructed within Kyiv’s Pavilion 13 during the active conflict period. Ai Weiwei’s installation in Ukraine references Leonardo da Vinci’s De Divina Proportione. The mathematical precision of the spheres represents rational order and Renaissance humanism, while the camouflage clothing interprets the ongoing conflict outside of the pavilion. The artist suggests cognitive dissonance: while the spheres stand for harmony, precision, and logical systems of humans, the painted uniforms bring forth the symbols of war and actual conflict taking place in the country.

all images courtesy of RIBBON International | photo by Dmytro Prutkin

Evolution from the artist’s work, Five Raincoats Holding a Star

Ai Weiwei took research trips throughout Ukraine for his installation inside Pavilion 13 with the organization RIBBON International. The process allowed him to gather firsthand accounts and experiences from frontline soldiers, civilians, and even medical professionals on-site that ultimately shaped his textile-based, large-scale artwork. In his sculptural work, the artist grounds the work within Western art historical traditions all the while commenting on their relevance to contemporary crises. The decision to exhibit in Kyiv during active conflict is an undertaking that shows logistical and security challenges that the artist has overcome to make powerful statements about art’s role during wartime. The installation in Ukraine named Three Perfectly Proportioned Spheres and Camouflage Uniforms Painted White is Ai Weiwei’s evolution from his earlier work Five Raincoats Holding a Star. 

It reaffirms his sustained engagement with themes of protection, visibility, and political symbolism. In the earlier work, the raincoat acted as protection from natural elements, while the current camouflage fabric addresses human-created dangers. The showcasing fits inside Pavilion 13 where the building’s glass walls – originally constructed in 1967 to showcase Soviet Ukrainian industrial achievements – now frame the sculpture’s responses to current conflict, and passersby immediately see it from the outside, claiming a visible reminder of the country’s present situation. Ai Weiwei’s installation Three Perfectly Proportioned Spheres and Camouflage Uniforms Painted White is on view in Kyiv, Ukraine, between September 14th and November 30th, 2025.

Ai Weiwei reveals installation, Three Perfectly Proportioned Spheres and Camouflage Uniforms Painted White

the artwork in on view at Pavilion 13 in Kyiv, Ukraine, commissioned by RIBBON International

the artwork is both a sculpture and a political statement

Ai Weiwei’s installation in Ukraine references Leonardo da Vinci’s De Divina Proportione

the mathematical precision of the spheres represents rational order and Renaissance humanism

detailed view of the installation

the camouflage clothing interprets the ongoing conflict outside of the pavilion

the spheres stand for harmony, precision, and logical systems of humans

the major artwork remains on-site between September 14th and November 30th, 2025

project info:

name: Three Perfectly Proportioned Spheres and Camouflage Uniforms Painted White

artist: Ai Weiwei | @aiww

commission: RIBBON International | @ribbon.international

firm: FORMA Architects | @forma_ua

space: Pavilion 13 by Pavilion of Culture | @pavilionofculture

location: Akademika Glushkova Ave., 1, Pavilion 13, VDNG, Kyiv, Ukraine

dates: September 14th to November 30th, 2025

photography by: Dmytro Prutkin | @poplava_ua

The post ai weiwei’s installation in ukraine unveils proportioned spheres & dyed camouflage uniforms appeared first on designboom | architecture & design magazine.

Artist Cj Hendry is back with a second edition of her plush Flower Market, the interactive installation which has just transformed New York City‘s Rockefeller Center into a landscape of hand-crafted flowers. New Yorkers and visitors are welcome to explore the space and curate their own bouquet for just one weekend from Friday, September 19th until Sunday, September 21st, 2025 from 10am-7pm.

This year’s opening comes one year after the Flower Market’s viral debut. That first iteration occupied the minimalist Louis Kahn-designed park at the southern tip of Roosevelt Island before it expanded to Brooklyn’s Industry City to accommodate swelling crowds. Those previous sites were certainly less central than this year’s prime spot in Midtown Manhattan — the elongated greenhouse sits beneath the plaza’s row of world flags and overlooks the sunken courtyard which, during the winter months, hosts the city’s most iconic ice rink.

Twenty-seven new plush flower designs are introduced this year, each produced with the same attention to quality and detail that defines Cj Hendry’s varied practice. Visitors are invited to select a flower to take home, with all additional flowers available for just $5 USD. This way, the installation extends beyond its setting and out into the rest of the city. ‘It was so lovely to see every other person below 14th street carrying a bouquet of flowers,’ writes a commenter on social media.

Cj Hendry’s Flower Market 2.0 arrives in Rockefeller Center | image © Cj Hendry Studio

Cj hendry is ‘dialing it up to 100’

With its new location in Rockefeller Center, Cj Hendry’s Flower Market is still an immersive, greenhouse-like environment. Inside, a series of original artworks by the artist’s studio, editioned floral wall sculptures, and a line of limited-edition merchandise — including totes, t-shirts, and caps — extend the project into multiple formats.

A satellite Flower Cart at Top of the Rock, open daily from early morning until midnight, even brings the work into dialogue with one of the most well-known observation decks in New York. Moreover, a limited 28th plush flower design is being offered exclusively at Top of the Rock as an add-on to ticketed entry.

Hendry describes last year’s Flower Market as ‘chaotic and beautiful,’ a spontaneous exchange between her artworks and the city, so that interaction and collection become part of the art. This Flower Market 2.0 version channels that same energy into a context which is even more chaotic. ‘We’re dialing everything up to one hundred,’ she says.

the installation is open from September 19th — 21st, 2025 | image © Cj Hendry Studio

visitors are invited to select a flower to take home, with more available for purchase | image © Cj Hendry Studio

this new edition introduces twenty-seven new plush flower designs | image © designboom

a limited 28th flower design will be available exclusively at Top of the Rock | image © designboom

the Flower Market is an immersive, greenhouse-like environment | image © designboom

original artworks and editioned floral wall sculptures will be on view | image © designboom

a Flower Cart satellite location will be open from morning to midnight | image © designboom

project info:

name: Flower Market

artist: Cj Hendry | @cj_hendry

location: Rockefeller Center, NYC

dates: September 19th — 21st, 2025 (10am-7pm)

photography: © Cj Hendry Studio, © designboom

The post Cj hendry’s flower market returns to NYC, this time at rockefeller center appeared first on designboom | architecture & design magazine.

Inside Milan’s Fondazione Prada, Alex Da Corte pays homage to Claes Oldenburg’s Mouse Museum (1965-1977) through a multitude of pop culture and art objects encased in a singular, panoramic glass pane. On view from September 18th, 2025, the exhibition and installation sit on the eighth floor of the Torre building within Fondazione Prada’s lot as part of Atlas, the foundation’s exhibition project presenting solo or comparative works by artists across the eight floors of the building. For the first time, visitors experience these two installations at once in the same space because the two mini museums – one by Claes Oldenburg and the other by Alex Da Corte – stand next to each other. When viewed from above, the structure housing the Swedish-born American sculptor’s collection is shaped like a cartoon mouse head and an early movie camera, drawn from his drawing named Geometric House.

In Alex Da Corte’s case, there’s a macabre twist: his structure looks like a cut-off left ear of the mouse, a reference to the episode of Vincent van Gogh’s life. Inside both of the mini museums, a collection of objects appeals to the visitors, reflecting on mass production and consumer culture as well as the ever-changing trends in pop culture. In an interview with designboom during the preview of Mouse Museum (Van Gogh Ear) (2022) inside Milan’s Fondazione Prada, Alex Da Corte tells us that he arranged the collection as a sort of self-portrait. When asked if they reflect his life, a peek into his daily practice, he shares with us: ‘I’m not interested in revealing a specific event or part of myself. I think viewers see what they see and find their own lives in the objects, whether or not they know the work’s source. We project meaning onto objects because they ground us and make a safe space.’

all images courtesy of Fondazione Prada | exhibition photos by Delfino Sisto Legnani – DSL Studio

Personal objects in varying color intensity for the exhibition

Alex Da Corte’s Mouse Museum (Van Gogh Ear) (2022) inside Milan’s Fondazione Prada mirrors the curation and artistic practice of Claes Oldenburg’s Mouse Museum (1965-1977). The similarities occur in amassing and presenting mass-produced and pop-culture objects, but the saturation and shade of the objects seem shifted. It may be due to the aging of the objects, but in Claes Oldenburg’s space, the repertoire is hushed, earthy, wooden, domestic. In Alex Da Corte’s room, the colors are louder, the objects are familiar and recent, and the arrangement has a comic tinge. In terms of color, the Venezuelan-American artist explains to designboom that it is important in his practice.

‘Color for me is essential. Color relates to a psychological state. Colors chosen for products are meant to attract or repel. Depending on taste, you might dislike something just because of its color,’ he says. ‘When arranging things here, it’s often about color; painting in space with objects. Claes also had a perfect sense for color. His objects are rich, maybe a different tonality, but similarly colorful.’ Away from the shade, the technique in presenting the Mouse Museum collection inside Fondazione Prada links the artistic practice between the two artists. The order is not alphabetical, by material, or based on production year, yet in both museums, the items relate through a loosely associative sequence, relying mostly on visual similarities and suggestive connections.

exhibition view of Mouse Museum (Van Gogh Ear) (2022) by Alex Da Corte

Alex Da Corte mirrors Claes Oldenburg’s collecting practice

Playful personal objects show up in Alex Da Corte’s Mouse Museum (Van Gogh Ear) inside Milan’s Fondazione Prada. Among them is a Harry Potter magic wand, a Bart Simpson thermos, kitchen utensils, a plastic beer pong cup, and a foam cast of Marcel Duchamp’s face. There’s also the ceramic-glazed Garfield statue, a yellow rooster with a tail made of quill feathers, wearable feet gloves that resemble real skin, beer bottles, brooms, a miniature disco ball, a blasted pumpkin, and perhaps the showstopper, a zombie-looking head atop a lamp base. These peculiar objects mirror the ones inside Claes Oldenburg’s Mouse Museum: a rotting slice of pie, a balloon shaped like a human leg, an enlarged cluster of bananas, a giant ceramic ear, and even a miniaturized ladder.

‘Looking at Claes’s works today, I don’t know the objects, but I’m amused or reminded of something. I imagine where they came from and their function,’ Alex Da Corte shares with designboom. ‘My interest comes from thrift stores, where you find a fragment of an object and wonder about its function. Without its original purpose, it can have a new life. Seeing a second or third life for objects is exciting.’ For the artist, it feels like a dream come true seeing the objects collected by Claes Oldenburg for his Mouse Museum for the first time in Fondazione Prada. ‘I only knew them through photographs in the book, and those were in black and white. To experience the colors and textures and to see so many similarities is exciting. My interest is in hands, food, plastic, and even clay. There’s humor in the work, and I see a parallel there,’ he adds.

the exhibition and installation sit on the eighth floor of the Torre building within Fondazione Prada’s lot

The first time Alex Da Corte came across Claes Oldenburg’s works was around 25 years ago. ‘It was in my undergraduate library. I stumbled upon the book he made with his partner to mark the presentation of the Mouse Museum. I knew Claes’s work and his relationships to soft things, sculpture, and performance, but I didn’t know much about contemporary art. When I saw the Mouse Museum, I was taken by all it afforded an audience and how generous it was. Only today am I seeing the real one. For 25 years, I’ve been wondering about this work,’ he says.The artist created his Mouse Museum (Van Gogh Ear) in 2022 for his survey exhibition ‘Mr. Remember,’ which is on view at the Louisiana Museum in Humlebæk, Denmark. 

He recalls that when he was thinking about what a retrospective or a survey of his own work would look like and what it means to remember himself and the objects he had gathered over his life. ‘The person who did that so correctly was Claes. I thought, I can’t remake the whole museum; it’s too sacred. So I thought, I’ll cut off an ear: a little piece of me, a little piece of him,’ he shares. Mouse Museum (Van Gogh Ear) (2022) is inside the Torre within the lot of Milan’s Fondazione Prada, on the eighth floor. The public viewing begins from September 18th, 2025, where viewers can also visit Sueño Perro: Instalación Celuloide by De Alejandro G. Iñárritu, a cinematic and photographic exhibition that unveils and showcases previously hidden film materials and imagery by the Mexican filmmaker, which were preserved for 25 years in the film archives of the National Autonomous University of Mexico. 

among the objects are a Harry Potter magic wand and a foam cast of Marcel Duchamp’s face

the technique in presenting the Mouse Museum collection links the artistic practice between the two artists

everyday objects are also on view in the installation

exhibition view of Mouse Museum (Van Gogh Ear) (2022) by Alex Da Corte

exhibition view of Mouse Museum (1965-1977) by Claes Oldenburg

a collection of objects appeals to the visitors, reflecting on mass production and consumer culture

the similarities between the two installations occur in amassing and presenting mass-produced and pop-culture objects

view of the cardboard-made toothpaste

the collection is on view through a singular glass pane

view of the structures on the eighth floor of the Torre building

left: Claes Oldeburg’s Mouse Museum (1965-1977) | right: Alex Da Corte’s Mouse Museum (Van Gogh Ear) (2022)

the installations are on view from September 18th, 2025

project info:

name: Mouse Museum (1965-1977); Mouse Museum (Van Gogh Ear) (2022)

artists: Claes Oldenburg, Alex Da Corte 

museum: Fondazione Prada (Milan) | @fondazioneprada

location: Largo Isarco, 2, 20139 Milan, Italy

opening date: September 18th, 2025ù

photography: Delfino Sisto Legnani – DSL Studio | @dsl__studio

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Birdhouses designed by Norman Foster, Sou Fujimoto, Lina Ghotmeh, Frida Escobedo, and more are shown in the exhibition Architects for the Birds during London Frieze Week. Taking place at Christie’s London 20/21 Marquee Week between October 13th and 17th and during the Frieze Week between October 8th and 14th, 2025, the project led by Norman Foster brings together ten renowned architects to design homes for the birds for an exhibition and a charity auction supporting brain cancer research.  

Norman Foster initiated the collaboration with the Tessa Jowell Foundation, inviting nine other architects to interpret themes of sanctuary, care, and hope through miniature architectural birdhouses. The participating architects include Norman Foster, Renzo Piano, David Chipperfield, Grafton Architects, Sou Fujimoto, Lina Ghotmeh, Jacques Herzog, Frida Escobedo, Farshid Moussavi, and Kazuyo Sejima/SANAA.

all images courtesy of Christie’s Images Ltd. 2025 | photo by Michael Bodiam

Exhibition at Christie’s King Street during London’s Frieze Week

Each architect, including Norman Foster, who conceived the project, received an open brief allowing interpretation of the sanctuary theme, and the resulting birdhouses are set to be exhibited publicly at Christie’s King Street during London’s Frieze Week in October 2025, then sold at a private dinner auction. While specific construction details aren’t provided, each architect, including Norman Foster himself, likely approaches the birdhouses using materials and techniques consistent with their established design philosophies and architectural styles.

The scale shift from large buildings to small birdhouses poses technical challenges, as details that work at building scale may not function at miniature scale, requiring the contributing architects to rethink proportions and their joinery methods. The theme of sanctuary, care, and hope offers them a conceptual framework while allowing individual interpretation. Some architects focus on the protective aspects of shelter, such as Norman Foster’s tiered, lamp-like birdhouse, while others zero in on the nurturing qualities of home, including Frida Escobedo’s ladderized wooden open birdhouse and Grafton Architects’ playful resting rods. 

Norman Foster, Birdfeeder, 2025. Prototype | photo by Michael Bodiam

‘Architects for the Birds’ to support research on brain cancer

Named Architects for the Birds, the exhibition coinciding with London Frieze Week and the auction by Christie’s represents a rare and collectible design challenge through birdhouses by the most revered architects of the present time. Each birdhouse is slated to be auctioned at a private dinner at Christie’s to support the work of the Tessa Jowell Foundation to improve treatment and care for people with brain cancer across the NHS in the UK.

The Tessa Jowell Foundation focuses on brain cancer treatment improvement, specifically addressing what they identify as the leading cancer killer of children and adults under 40. The foundation was established following Tessa Jowell’s death from brain cancer. She served as the UK’s longest-serving Secretary of State for Culture, which explains the cultural connections that enabled this architectural collaboration.

Norman Foster, Birdfeeder, 2025. Prototype | photo by Michael Bodiam

Frida Escobedo, Bird Station – 01, 2025

Grafton Architects, A drawing of Éanlann for Architects for the Birds, 2025

Grafton Architects, Éanlann, 2025

Grafton Architects, A drawing of Éanlann for Architects for the Birds, 2025

Jacques Herzog, Utensils, 2025

Jacques Herzog, Utensils, 2025

Kazuyo Sajima, Tori no le, 2025

project info:

name: Architects for the Birds

architects: Norman Foster, Renzo Piano, David Chipperfield, Grafton Architects, Sou Fujimoto, Lina Ghotmeh, Jacques Herzog, Frida Escobedo, Farshid Moussavi, Kazuyo Sejima | @officialnormanfoster, @rpbw_architects, @david.chipperfield, @graftonarchitects, @sou_fujimoto, @linaghotmeh, @herzogdemeuron, @fridaescobedo, @farshidmoussavi, @sanaa_jimusho

foundation: Tessa Jowell Foundation | @tessajowellfoundation

auction: Christie’s | @christiesinc

event: London 20/21 Marquee Week, London Frieze Week | @friezeofficial

dates: October 13th to 17th, 2025

photography: Michael Bodiam | @michaelbodiam

The post norman foster, sou fujimoto, lina ghotmeh and more design birdhouses at christie’s in london appeared first on designboom | architecture & design magazine.

Marianne Boesky Gallery in Chelsea presents Esto es América, o qual é o limite?, the debut New York solo exhibition by Argentinian artist Gabriel Chaile. Currently on view through October 18th, 2025, the show brings together adobe sculptures, drawings, and photographs that combine ancestral forms with contemporary political imagery.

The five sculptural works at the center of the exhibition extend Chaile’s long-standing interest in the genealogy of form — his term for the ways shapes and motifs recur across cultures and time. The clay structures resemble bread ovens and animal figures, their surfaces marked with dense black line drawings. ‘Each sculpture is covered in black line drawings,’ the artist explains. ‘Within those lines, other hidden drawings emerge — like walking through a jungle, where you’re present, yet not always visible.’

Esto es América, o qual é o limite? (install view), Marianne Boesky Gallery, photo © Jason Wyche

gabriel chaile’s procession of anthropomorphic ovens

Artist Gabriel Chaile arranges the works in motion, as though marching across the gallery floor in procession. The largest piece suggests the body of a lizard or bird, captured mid-transformation. Surrounding it, four oven-like volumes evoke both domestic use and anthropomorphic presence. Together they form what the artist describes as ‘a walk, a march, or a protest.’

Along the walls, large photographic prints document a protest Chaile witnessed in Montana during a residency in the United States. Elderly people, children, and young adults gathered quietly with ambiguous signs. ‘What struck me was the manner of protest: people standing quietly on sidewalks,’ he recalls. ‘Watching from the car, I felt a kind of alignment — not necessarily with the political opposition, but with the deeper message: a call for a more inclusive coexistence.’

Esto es América, o qual é o limite? (install view), Marianne Boesky Gallery, photo © Jason Wyche

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Earlier sculptures by Gabriel Chaile were often upright and hieratic, monumental in their stillness. The new works, by contrast, embody motion. ‘My previous sculptures were more static,’ he continues. ‘In contrast, this new group feels animated — as though they’re walking, moving. There’s an intentional sense that these once-static forms are now coming alive.’

The intricate tattoo-like drawings across their surfaces amplify this quality, making the sculptures appear restless and layered with meaning. Chaile describes these as the ‘rebellious siblings’ of his earlier work, which continue the same lineage yet shift its tone.

Esto es América, o qual é o limite? (install view), Marianne Boesky Gallery, photo © Jason Wyche

The exhibition’s title spans Spanish and Portuguese: Esto es América states, ‘This is America,’ while o qual é o limite? asks, ‘What is the limit?’ 

For Chaile, this dual language mirrors the histories of colonization that reshaped Indigenous languages across the continent. It also raises the contemporary question of what boundaries allow coexistence rather than division. He concludes: ‘This exhibition, for me, raises the question of what kind of limits allow us to live together — what boundaries support coexistence, rather than division.’

Esto es América, o qual é o limite? (install view), Marianne Boesky Gallery, photo © Jason Wyche

Esto es América, o qual é o limite? (install view), Marianne Boesky Gallery, photo © Jason Wyche

Esto es América, o qual é o limite? (install view), Marianne Boesky Gallery, photo © Jason Wyche

Esto es América, o qual é o limite? (install view), Marianne Boesky Gallery, photo © Jason Wyche

Esto es América, o qual é o limite? (install view), Marianne Boesky Gallery, photo © Jason Wyche

project info:

exhibition title: Esto es América, o qual é o limite?

artist: Gabriel Chaile | @soychaile

gallery: Marianne Boesky Gallery | @marianneboeskygallery

location: 507 West 24th Street, New York, NY

dates: September 4th — October 18th, 2025

photography: © Jason Wyche, Marianne Boesky Gallery

The post massive adobe ovens by artist gabriel chaile march across marianne boesky’s NYC gallery appeared first on designboom | architecture & design magazine.

For Paris Design Week 2025 (find designboom’s ultimate guide here), Design Disco Club, a week-long exhibition running until September 12th, 2025, organized by publishing house Pli office, takes over the Rem Koolhaas-renovated Lafayette Anticipations, reframing contemporary design through the energy of disco. Conceived by curator and founder of Pli office Christopher Dessus, with scenography by his design and interior architecture studio Paf atelier, the project gathers more than forty emerging designers, architects, and fashion houses to examine how creation today is driven by shifting industrial, human, and emotional rhythms.

The exhibition positions the disco theme as a structural metaphor. The reference point is the 1976 track Disco Inferno, where repetition, acceleration, and collective euphoria translate into design terms. Disco, in this reading, is a prism that reveals how labor bends under the weight of time, how repetition gives rise to both weariness and wonder, and how collective rhythms can reorder the values of creation.

image © Paf atelier

Paf atelier’s scenography as temporal experiment

Scenography by the Paris-based team at Paf atelier translates these ideas into a spatial and perceptual experiment. Visitors step into a deep-blue floor punctuated by harsh light bursts, reflective surfaces, and theatrical shadows. Objects appear isolated or clustered, illuminated like performers in a nocturnal score. The composition draws on Baudelaire’s poem The Clock, where time fractures, suspends, and multiplies, destabilizing linear perception. Here, design is not displayed as a static form but as a constellation of pulses, interruptions, and rhythms—an environment closer to a dancefloor than a gallery.

Design Disco Club brings together design studios such as Uchronia, Soft Baroque, and Odd Matter, and figures like François Azambourg, Samy Rio, and Fabien Cappello. Textile works and objects by Petite Friture and Lambert & Fils appear alongside emblematic fashion pieces from Marine Serre, Dior (Galliano), Jean Paul Gaultier, Marie-Ève Lecavalier, and Thierry Mugler, forming a cross-disciplinary assembly.

Design Disco Club functions as both an exhibition and a forum. Alongside the displays, talks organized with Isabelle Moisy-Cobti and the Fonds de Dotation Quartus open space for reflection on architecture, design, and fashion. The event also coincides with the release of JTM – Disco Inferno, the second issue of Pli office’s magazine.

Pli office takes over Lafayette Anticipations with Design Disco Club | installation images © Florent Michel

the exhibition reframes contemporary design through the energy of disco

the project gathers more than forty emerging designers, architects, and fashion houses

examining how creation today is driven by shifting industrial, human, and emotional rhythms

the reference point is the 1976 track Disco Inferno

conceived by curator Christopher Dessus with scenography by Paf atelier,

Adrianus Kundert, Fontaine

Frédéric Pellenq, Old Oak, New Flame Sculpture

Maria Jeglinska Adamczewska, Visage vase

Julien Carretero, Ateliers Delacroix. Balises

GROOVIDO, Medium Board

Gaspard Fleury-Dugy, Disco Totem

Studio Sho Ota, Surfaced Stool

Uchronia, Flower Coachella

project info:

name: Design Disco Club

designers exhibited: Adrianus Kundert, Alain Gilles – Glass Variations, Bureau, Daniel Zamarbide, Camille Viallet & Théo Leclercq, Dirk van der Kooij, Döppel Studio, Exercice – Glass Variations, Fabien Cappello, François Azambourg, Frédéric Pellenq, Garnier Pingree Design – Petite Friture, Gaspard Fleury-Dugy, Gobezzia, Grégory Lacoua, Groovido, Haus Otto, Julien Carretero & Ateliers Delacroix, Kwangho Lee – Lambert et fils, Laurids Galée, Maria Jeglinska-Adamczewska, Odd Matter, Only Only Studio, Marie et Alexandre – Petite Friture, Pierre Charrié, Quentin Vuong, Samy Rio, Sashaxsasha, Soft Baroque, Stéven Coëffic, Studio Douze Degrés, Studio Élémentaire, Studio GGSV, Studio poirier bailay, Studio Sho Ota, Uchronia, Xavier Brisoux – Glass Variations

fashion garments: Marie-Éve Lecavalier, Jean Paul Gaultier, Marine Serre, Dior par Galliano, Thierry Mugler

location: Lafayette Anticipations | @lafayetteanticipations, Paris, France

curator: Christopher Dessus | @christopher_dessus

assistant curators: Fannie Tomas (design), Jeanne-Léopoldine Claustre (fashion)

scenography + production: Paf atelier | @paf_atelier

organization: Pli office | @pli_office

musical piece: Bureau Bruit

sound installation: Bientôt Minuit

lighting design: iiode

lighting installation: Only Light

set construction: Eotna

graphic design: Créations du Val d’Oise (CVO)

dates: September 6th – 12th, 2025

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The Language of the Enemy marks Adrián Villar Rojas’s first solo exhibition in Korea and the first time in the institution’s history that a single project overtakes all four floors of Seoul’s Art Sonje Center, including corridors, stairwells, restrooms, and peripheral spaces. 

To achieve this transformation, Villar Rojas dismantles the building’s internal systems. Temporary partitions are removed, surfaces stripped back to their structural core, and even the climate controls are abandoned to expose the architecture to external forces of heat, humidity, and air. Soil and vegetation breach the interior, fire is introduced as both material and process, and exit signs glow as ambient lighting. Visitors enter through a mound of earth, stepping into a space where the categories of inside and outside, ecological and institutional, begin to collapse.

At the heart of the exhibition that runs until February 1st, 2026, lies the ongoing series The End of Imagination (2022–ongoing), whose chimerical sculptures appear like artifacts excavated from a future that has already forgotten us. The works are generated through Villar Rojas’s bespoke Time Engine, a digital simulation that merges video game technologies, artificial intelligence, and speculative world-building. From this tool, evolving synthetic ecologies emerge, populated by shifting life forms, architectures, and sociopolitical landscapes. Between 2021 and 2024, the artist and his longtime team began ‘downloading’ these digital beings and painstakingly reconstituting them as physical sculptures.

all images by Seowon Nam

sculptures at the Threshold of Human and Machine

Fabricated in a temporary workshop in Rosario, Argentina, the works are layered composites of organic and inorganic matter made of concrete, salt, resin, glass, soil, auto parts, tree bark, and industrial debris. Each surface retains traces of its digital origin and the collective human and machinic labor that shaped it. Argentine-Peruvian artist Villar Rojas describes this reversal of authorship. ‘I model worlds, and the worlds model ”sculptures” for me,’ he explains. 

The exhibition title points to deeper evolutionary entanglements. Reflecting on The Language of the Enemy, Villar Rojas situates symbolic thought not as an exclusively human invention but as a shared inheritance forged in encounters with other hominin species, Neanderthals, and Denisovans, at once hostile and intimate. Today, he suggests, we face a similar threshold with synthetic intelligences whose ‘languages we barely comprehend.’ The project stages this encounter within Seoul’s Art Sonje Center itself, recasting the institution as a laboratory and ruin.

The ambitious transformation of the venue was realized on-site over six weeks by a group of eleven collaborators, many of whom have worked with Villar Rojas since 2009. Operating like a hive mind or terraforming crew, they constructed the exhibition as a handmade ecosystem. The project also resonates historically, commemorating the inaugural exhibition held three decades ago in the same building that marked Art Sonje Center’s establishment as a key space for contemporary art in Seoul.

The Language of the Enemy marks Adrián Villar Rojas’s first solo exhibition in Korea

the project overtakes all four floors of Seoul’s Art Sonje Center

Villar Rojas dismantles the building’s internal systems

the climate controls are abandoned to expose the architecture to external forces of heat, humidity, and air

at the heart of the exhibition lies the ongoing series The End of Imagination

soil and vegetation breach the interior

visitors enter through a mound of earth

chimerical sculptures appear like artifacts excavated from a future that has already forgotten us

the works are generated through Villar Rojas’s bespoke Time Engine

the works are layered composites of organic and inorganic matter

each surface retains traces of its digital origin and the collective labor

evolving synthetic ecologies emerge

project info:

name: The Language of the Enemy

artist: Adrián Villar Rojas

location: Art Sonje Center | @artsonje_cente, Seoul, Korea

dates: September 3rd, 2025 – February 1st, 2026

curators: Sunjung Kim (Artistic Director, Art Sonje Center), Heehyun Cho (Head of Exhibitions, Art Sonje Center)

coordinator: Seowon Nam (Curatorial Assistant, Art Sonje Center)

organized by: Art Sonje Center

supported by: Arts Council Korea

sponsored by: Marian Goodman Gallery, Kurimanzutto

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Until September 7th, 2025, Venice’s St. Mark’s Square becomes the stage for Dreams in Transit, a large-scale installation dedicated to the stories and aspirations of migrants. Curated by the Art for Action Foundation and inspired by JR’s Inside Out Project, the work transforms the facade of the historic Procuratie with 100 oversized black-and-white portraits. Installed on one of the city’s most recognizable landmarks, the project brings the subject of migration into the symbolic center of Venice, confronting passersby with both absence and belonging.

The portraits stem from an eight-month journey across Europe by filmmaker and artist Sarah Makharine, who met with 100 recently arrived migrants, listening to their stories and collecting their dreams. Unlike conventional portraiture, each subject is photographed from behind, gazing outward. This unusual perspective shifts attention away from facial identity toward collective experience, evoking both departure and the horizon of possibility. 

The intervention forms part of After Migration, a wider program launched during the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale, which examines the long-term social, cultural, and political dimensions of migration. It also resonates with the work of The Human Safety Net’s For Refugees initiative, which since 2017 has supported over 13,000 refugees across six countries through entrepreneurship and training.

all images by Maco Film – Leonardo Mizar, unless stated otherwise

Migration Narratives at The Human Safety Net home in venice

Beyond the public square, the exhibition extends into The Home of The Human Safety Net, where Dreams in Transit, curated by the Art for Action Foundation, continues until March 15th, 2026. Inside, artists and filmmakers expand on the themes of displacement and identity. Sarah Makharine presents the video Echoes of Dreams, while works by Ange Leccia, Lorraine de Sagazan, Anouk Maugein, and the late Leila Alaoui offer contrasting lenses on migration’s personal and collective narratives. The installations trace how stories of movement and loss intersect with resilience and creativity.

A conference, organized with the International Panel on Social Progress, is also part of the program. Associations, researchers, and experts convene at The Home of The Human Safety Net to explore the enduring consequences of migration. During the Venice Film Festival, the short film Sweet Refuge, directed by Maryam Mir and already the recipient of nine international awards, will be screened, followed by a discussion with producer and curator Anadil Hossain. 

By occupying Venice’s central square and one of its historic facades, Dreams in Transit insists that migration is a subject that shapes the shared public sphere. 

Venice’s St. Mark’s Square becomes the stage for Dreams in Transit

a large-scale installation dedicated to the stories and aspirations of migrants | image by LungoLinea Studio

inspired by JR’s Inside Out Project

the work transforms the facade of the historic Procuratie

100 oversized black-and-white portraits compose the project | image by LungoLinea Studio

installed on one of the city’s most recognizable landmarks

Dreams in Transit brings the subject of migration into the symbolic center of Venice | image by LungoLinea Studio

the portraits stem from an eight-month journey across Europe by Sarah Makharine | image by LungoLinea Studio

each subject is photographed from behind | image by LungoLinea Studio

this perspective shifts attention away from facial identity | image by LungoLinea Studio

migration is a subject that shapes the shared public sphere | image by LungoLinea Studio

project info:

name: Dreams in Transit

curation: Art for Action Foundation | @artforaction_foundation

location: Procuratie, St. Mark’s Square, Venice

dates: installation, September 3rd–7th, 2025 | exhibition until March 15th, 2026

artists: Sarah Makharine | @sarah.makharine, Ange Leccia | @ange_leccia, Lorraine de Sagazan, Anouk Maugein | @anoukmaugein, Leila Alaoui | @leilaalaoui

The post 100 large-scale migrant portraits transform venice’s iconic procuratie facade appeared first on designboom | architecture & design magazine.

September brings a wide range of major exhibitions across art, design, and architecture, with museums and galleries unveiling new collections across the world. designboom radar highlights this month include the 40-year celebration of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Wrapped Pont-Neuf in Paris, a survey of wedge-era automotive design at the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles, the long-anticipated U.S. debut of Richard Serra’s Running Arcs (For John Cage) at Gagosian in New York, and Ai Weiwei’s first commission in Ukraine. Explore our picks of what shows to see around the globe below, and check out our dedicated event guide for more listings.

beach ruins

Beach Ruins, a site-specific installation by Greek artist and architect Andreas Angelidakis, is currently on view at the Galeria Municipal do Porto. Drawing on ideas of the ruin, Angelidakis stages a set of fragmented columns that appear to have traveled across Europe, coming to rest in Porto. The installation references the ‘Grand Tour’ tradition of the 17th to 19th centuries, when European elites sought out ancient sites, but here the ruins themselves become the travelers, embodying a playful inversion of history and cultural expectation.

By pairing stone-like columns with parasols, Angelidakis transforms markers of heritage into interactive urban furniture. The pieces function as oversized poufs that invite rest and social gathering. As the inaugural edition of the gallery’s new outdoor commission, the installation sets a precedent for works that activate Porto’s public realm through seasonal, experimental interventions.

name: Beach Ruins
artist: Andreas Angelidakis
gallery: Galeria Municipal do Porto
location: Porto, Portugal
dates: May 10th — October 12th, 2025

Andreas Angelidakis, Beach Ruins, Porto, 2025, image courtesy Galeria Municipal do Porto

Jean Jullien: JUJU’s Castle

The Nanzuka Art Institute in Shanghai presents JUJU’s Castle, the first solo exhibition in China by French artist Jean Jullien. Spread across multiple gallery spaces, the show comprises painting, sculpture, and installation into a spatial experience that unfolds like an imagined fortress. The presentation includes over eighty new paintings created during Jullien’s time in Tokyo, joined by three-dimensional works and a large-scale installation that turns the institute into a multi-room narrative environment.

Each room is conceived as a ‘dungeon’ within the castle, referencing the level-based structure of role-playing games. Visitors are positioned as protagonists — warrior, elf, mage, or hero — encountering fantastical creatures and settings. This transformation of the gallery into an architectural sequence gives the exhibition the pacing of an exploratory journey, moving from one immersive space to another.

name: JUJU’s Castle

artist: Jean Jullien

gallery: Nanzuka Art Institute

location: Shanghai, China

dates: July 12th — October 26th, 2025

image © Nanzuka Art Institute

Andy Goldsworthy: Fifty Years

Edinburgh’s Royal Scottish Academy (RSA) becomes a vast landscape for Andy Goldsworthy: Fifty Years, the artist’s largest indoor exhibition to date. Organized by the National Galleries of Scotland, the show spans five decades and over two hundred photographic works, transforming the historic galleries into an environment of cracked clay walls, windfallen oak branches, suspended reeds, and stones from over one hundred graveyards in Dumfriesshire.

The exhibition is designed as one continuous, site-specific work that responds directly to the RSA’s architecture, using its spaces, light, and materials as active elements. In doing so, it extends Goldsworthy’s long-term investigation into how people, buildings, and the land are bound together and where they are held apart.

name: Andy Goldsworthy: Fifty Years

artist: Andy Goldsworthy 

gallery: Royal Scottish Academy (RSA), National Galleries of Scotland

location: Edinburgh, Scotland

dates: July 26th — November 2nd, 2025

Andy Goldsworthy, Edges made by finding leaves the same size. Tearing one in two. Spitting underneath and pressing flat on to another. Brough, Cumbria. Cherry patch. 4 November 1984, 1984 Cibachrome photograph | all images courtesy the artist, unless stated otherwise

The Wedge Revolution: Cars on the Cutting Edge

Petersen Automotive Museum shows some of the iconic wedge cars from the 60s and 70s in an exhibition, from the 1970 Lancia Stratos HF Zero to the 1974 Lamborghini Countach LP400 Periscopio. Titled The Wedge Revolution: Cars on the Cutting Edge, the show spotlights wedge-shaped automotive design that features angular silhouettes, faceted planes, and even bold geometric forms. These are some of the car concepts and designs that defined the era from the mid-1960s through the early 1980s, with their forward-looking, and quite literally, styles.

Some of the vehicles include models from Aston Martin, Chevrolet, Lamborghini, and Lancia. The exhibition takes the chance to showcase the wedge‑car design movement that emerged as a stray from the curvaceous, chrome-laden styling of earlier eras, visibly favoring a futuristic aesthetic instead of the typical aerodynamic-focused production. Designers such as Marcello Gandini, Giorgetto Giugiaro, Sergio Coggiola, William Towns, and Jerry Palmer played a central role in this visual revolution, and their names appear in the exhibition, a rightful recognition for their progressive wedge-car works.

name: The Wedge Revolution: Cars on the Cutting Edge

museum: Petersen Automotive Museum 

location: Los Angeles, CA

dates: August 2nd, 2025 — September 2026

side profile of the 1970 Lancia Stratos HF Zero | image courtesy of Petersen Automotive Museum

Ernesto Neto: Ba Ka Ba, a Dance of the Eternal Polarities

The Seoul Museum of Art presents ‘Ernesto Neto: Ba Ka Ba, a Dance of the Eternal Polarities,’ a new site-specific installation by the Brazilian artist that transforms the Korean museum’s Seosomun Main Branch lobby into a sensory environment. Commissioned as part of the 2025 SeMA Public Space Project, the woven artwork expands Ernesto Neto‘s longstanding interest in the relationships between body, space, and collective experience.

The installation is composed of expansive crochet structures woven from industrial cotton fabrics in shades of brown and pink. These colors, chosen to evoke tree trunks and night alongside flowers and day, establish a dialogue between natural rhythms and architectural structure. Suspended and filled with dried guava leaves and locally sourced tea leaves, the artist‘s forms invite a multi-sensory encounter that engages smell both texture together.

name: Ba Ka Ba, a Dance of the Eternal Polarities (Ba Ka Ba, uma dança das eternas polaridades)

artist: Ernesto Neto

museum: Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA)

location: Seoul, Korea

dates: August 13th, 2025 — December 31st, 2026

image courtesy SeMA, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery

falling from the sky

Unit, the contemporary art gallery in London, welcomes artist Sho Shibuya with the exhibition Falling from the Sky. Since 2020, the artist has greeted each morning with a painting, translating the day’s sky onto the front page of a newspaper. While his series of daily rituals primarily captures the sunrise, Falling from the Sky turns to the quieter subject of rain. Rendered from photographs of water streaking across glass, the works reflect on ephemerality and the meditative patterns formed by droplets in motion.

For Shibuya, rain carries both intimacy and tension. It recalls both personal memories and stark contrasts in how skies are experienced across the world. Where he finds comfort in gray clouds, others may see smoke or destruction. This duality infuses the series with a sense of fragility, transforming depictions of rain into reminders of peace’s vulnerability. Falling from the Sky asks viewers to linger with these moments, considering what endures after the storm has passed.

name: Falling from the Sky
artist: Sho Shibuya
gallery: Unit
location: London, UK
dates: August 20th — September 17th, 2025

Sho Shibuya, Falling from the Sky, Unit, London | image courtesy Unit

Rocking to Infinity

Kukje Gallery hosts Louise Bourgeois: Rocking to Infinity, focusing on the final two decades of the artist’s career. The exhibition gathers sculptures, drawings, and fabric suites that meditate on intimacy, memory, and time. The title, drawn from Bourgeois’s own writing, evokes the image of a mother rocking a child to sleep. This gesture of security and tenderness resonates throughout the works on view.

Immersive wall installations pair gouaches and watercolors that revisit themes of the self, the couple, family, and the spiral. The gallery’s center hosts major sculptures which explore emotional bonds and the passage of time. The Hanok space introduces a rarer body of drawings on coffee filters, made in 1994, where circular compositions bridge domestic material with reflections on cycles, abstraction, and organic form. All together, the works reveal Bourgeois’s late practice as both intimate and monumental.

name: Rocking to Infinity
artist: Louise Bourgeois
gallery: Kukje Gallery
location: Seoul, South Korea
dates: September 2nd — October 26th, 2025

installation view, Louise Bourgeois: Rocking to Infinity, image courtesy Kukje Gallery

GABRIEL CHAILE: ESTO ES AMÉRICA, O QUAL É O LIMITE?

Gabriel Chaile’s debut New York solo exhibition, Esto es América, o qual é o limite?, presents new adobe sculptures created on site at Marianne Boesky Gallery, alongside drawings and photographs. Drawing from the artist’s ongoing exploration of what he calls the ‘genealogy of form,’ the works draw from the material and formal traditions of Indigenous communities in northeast Argentina while linking them to broader histories across the Americas. The sculptures are at once monumental and anthropomorphic. Their surfaces are covered with dense networks of line drawings, resist straightforward interpretation while holding onto layers of cultural memory.

The exhibition incorporates influences from Chaile’s time in Montana, where he observed a No Kings Day protest that shaped the atmosphere of the new works. Charcoal drawings on canvas echo the markings on the sculptures, while photographs from the protest offer a documentary counterpart. The title itself, half in Spanish and half in Portuguese, reflects Chaile’s negotiation between statement and question, declaration and doubt: ‘This is America’ followed by ‘What is the limit?’

name: Esto es América, o qual é o limite?

artist: Gabriel Chaile

gallery: Marianne Boesky Gallery

location: New York, NY

dates: September 4th — October 18th, 2025

image © Macy Rajacich, courtesy Marianne Boesky Gallery

lee bul: from 1998 to now

The Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art presents Lee Bul: After 1998, a large-scale survey tracing nearly three decades of work by one of Korea’s most influential contemporary artists. Bringing together around 150 pieces, the exhibition spans performance, sculpture, installation, and drawing, examining Lee Bul’s sustained inquiry into the body’s entanglement with society, technology, and systems of power. Together, a range of works illuminate her engagement with utopian modernity’s ideals and contradictions, and the recurring human pursuit of perfection.

Organized in collaboration with M+ Hong Kong, the exhibition unfolds as a landscape where individual memory and historical fragments intersect with broader sociopolitical references. The show charts the evolution of Lee Bul’s practice, and highlights her role in expanding conversations around humanity’s past and imagined futures.

name: Lee Bul: From 1998 to Now

artist: Lee Bul

museum: Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art

location: Seoul, South Korea

dates: September 4th, 2025 — January 4th, 2026

installation views, ‘Lee Bul: From 1998 to Now’, Leeum Museum of Art, Seoul, 2025. courtesy of the artist and BB&M © Lee Bul, photo by Jeon Byung-cheol

Design Disco Club

During Paris Design Week 2025, Pli Office presents DESIGN DISCO CLUB, an exhibition dedicated to a new generation of designers and architects reshaping contemporary practice. Drawing on the collective energy of disco, the project frames design as a space of freedom, emotion, and shared experience, while questioning the balance between industrial and human rhythms. With scenography by Paf atelier, the exhibition stages a diverse spectrum of works that reflect the shifting temporalities of production and the commitments that define today’s creative landscape.

The show features contributions from around 40 emerging creators alongside legendary fashion houses like Dior, Jean Paul Gaultier, Marine Serre, Marie-Ève Lecavalier, and Mugler. A range of objects are each presented as an example from a multifaceted moment in design. With a series of talks, DESIGN DISCO CLUB adopts the spirit of a club to become a gathering space for imagining the cultural forms of tomorrow.

name: DESIGN DISCO CLUB

gallery: Pli Office

location: Lafayette Anticipations, Paris, France

dates: September 6th — 12th, 2025

image courtesy Pli Office

CHRISTO AND JEANNE-CLAUDE: PARIS PROJECTS

This fall, Paris marks the 40th anniversary of The Pont Neuf Wrapped with a citywide tribute to Christo and Jeanne-Claude. The Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation, supported by the City of Paris, stages a free outdoor exhibition along the Seine. Titled Christo and Jeanne-Claude: Paris Projects, the installation highlights the couple’s close relationship with the French capital, where they lived, worked, and realized a series of landmark projects over several decades. The program also includes the naming of a public square in their honor, underscoring the city’s recognition of their enduring cultural impact.

Paris served as both the starting point and central site for Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s artistic collaborations. Their interventions included Wall of Oil Barrels — The Iron Curtain (1961–62), Wrapped Statue, Trocadero (1964), The Pont Neuf Wrapped (1975–85), and L’Arc de Triomphe, Wrapped (conceived in 1961, realized posthumously in 2021). Artist JR will revisit the Pont Neuf with a new project that will transform the iconic bridge into a stone-like cave in the summer of 2026.

name: Christo and Jeanne-Claude: Paris Projects

artist: Christo and Jeanne-Claude

location: Paris, France

dates: September 6th — October 30th, 2025

Christo and Jeanne-Claude, The Pont Neuf Wrapped, Paris, 1975-85 — image by Wolfgang Volz © 1985 Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation

Sweets and Paradise

Bernhard Knaus Fine Art presents Sweets and Paradise, a new exhibition of photographic works by Ralf Peters. Recognized as a leading figure in conceptual photography in Germany, Peters uses digital manipulation to reframe everyday objects, landscapes, and environments, unsettling the line between reality and construction. His practice asks viewers to reflect critically on how images shape perception.

The exhibition brings together two recent series. In SWEETS, natural forms such as branches and leaves are digitally enhanced against vivid backgrounds, transforming them into visual compositions that waver between authenticity and invention. PARADISE introduces AI-generated gardens and architectural visions that draw from cultural and religious ideals, evoking both the desire for harmony and the unease of a digitally engineered utopia. Shown together, the works highlight the tension between nature’s fragility and technology’s promise of perfection, positioning photography as a space where beauty, illusion, and critique converge.

name: Sweets and Paradise

artist: Ralf Peters

gallery: Bernhard Knaus Fine Art Gallery

location: Frankfurt, Germany

dates: September 6th — November 22nd, 2025

Ralf Peters, Poppi Paradise, 2025, image courtesy Bernhard Knaus Fine Art Gallery

Lygia Pape. Tisser l’espace

The Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection unveils the first solo exhibition in France dedicated to Lygia Pape (1927–2004), a central figure of the Brazilian avant-garde. Serving as a prelude to the upcoming exhibition Minimal, Lygia Pape: Weaving Space is built around a major work from the collection, Ttéia 1, C (2003/2025). Formed from copper threads stretched across space, the installation immerses visitors in an environment where light and movement activate the work. This embodies Pape’s idea of ‘weaving space’ and redefines the viewer’s role in the artistic encounter.

The exhibition brings together key pieces from across Pape’s career, from her early abstract engravings to her monumental Livro Noite e Dia III (Book of Night and Day III, 1963–1976), as well as a selection of experimental films. Deeply informed by Brazil’s sociopolitical context, her work reflects a commitment to social transformation, dissolving the boundaries between art and life. The show highlights Pape’s place alongside Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica as one of the defining voices of Brazil’s postwar avant-garde.

name: Lygia Pape. Tisser l’espace

artist: Lygia Pape

gallery: Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection

location: Paris, France

dates: September 10th, 2025 — January 26th, 2026

LLygia Pape, Ttéia 1, C (2003/2025), image courtesy Pinault Collection

Max Lamb: Crockery

Gallery FUMI opens Crockery, a new exhibition by Max Lamb in collaboration with ceramics manufacturer 1882 Ltd., on September 11, 2025. The series features slip-cast earthenware pieces produced from plaster models hand-carved by Lamb, extending his ongoing investigation into material possibilities. Made in Stoke-on-Trent, the works embody the technical rigor of 1882 Ltd. and the designer’s experimental approach, rethinking the role of ceramics in contemporary design.

With Crockery, Lamb turns to a medium traditionally associated with fragility and transforms it into functional forms that challenge assumptions about strength and durability. His interest lies in pushing ceramic beyond its conventional uses, exploring its viability as both a sculptural surface and as a material capable of bearing weight and shaping furniture. In doing so, the project reframes ceramic as both resilient and versatile, opening new ground for its role in design.

name: Crockery

artist: Max Lamb with 1882 Ltd.

gallery: Gallery FUMI

location: London, UK

dates: September 11th — 30th, 2025

image courtesy Penguins Egg Studio (Tom Wright) for Gallery FUMI

Carmen d’Apollonio: Salut, ça va, c’est moi

Friedman Benda New York hosts Salut, Ça va, c’est moi, the fourth solo exhibition by Carmen D’Apollonio, on September 11th. Known for her playful and idiosyncratic approach, the Swiss-born, Los Angeles–based artist expands her practice here with new materials and sculpted glass lampshades, pushing her work toward greater dimensionality and narrative depth.

The exhibition unfolds like a theatrical set, populated by personified lamps that perform across the gallery space — leaning, dripping, suspending, and wandering. D’Apollonio’s new glass elements amplify the dialogue between form, light, and shadow, revealing more of what was once hidden behind linen shades. Titles such as Why fall in love when you can’t fall asleep and If you ever have forever highlight her use of language as a candid, humorous, and empathetic extension of her practice, drawing viewers into a direct conversation that is both intimate and universal.

name: Salut, Ça va, c’est moi

artist: Carmen D’Apollonio

gallery: Friedman Benda

location: 515 W 26th St 1st Floor, New York, NY

dates: September 11th — October 16th, 2025

image © Friedman Benda

Richard Serra: Running Arcs (For John Cage)

Gagosian marks the U.S. debut of Richard Serra’s Running Arcs (For John Cage) (1992), opening September 12th, 2025, at the gallery’s West 21st Street space in New York. First shown more than three decades ago at Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf, the large-scale steel work returns on the exact anniversary of its original unveiling and will remain on view through December 20th.

The sculpture consists of three massive conical steel segments, each inverted in relation to the others and set in a staggered arrangement. Measuring 52 feet in length and 13 feet in height, the monumental forms embody Serra’s enduring investigation into weight, balance, and spatial perception, while also honoring his longtime connection to composer John Cage.

name: Richard Serra: Running Arcs (For John Cage)

artist: Richard Serra

gallery: Gagosian

location: West 21st Street, New York, NY

dates: September 12th — December 20th, 2025

Richard Serra during the installation of Promenade (2008), artwork © Estate of Richard Serra / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. image by Raphael Gaillard/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images

ELMGREEN & DRAGSET: THE ALICE IN WONDERLAND SYNDROME

Pace Gallery presents The Alice in Wonderland Syndrome, the first solo exhibition in Los Angeles by Elmgreen & Dragset, on view from September 13th through October 25th. Spanning the gallery’s main space and adjoining south gallery, the show explores shifts in perception through acts of doubling, resizing, and spatial reduplication.

The Berlin-based duo, known for sculptural interventions that probe identity and belonging, uses the gallery’s architecture as both stage and subject. Each artwork appears at full scale in the main hall, while exact half-size versions are replicated in a carefully constructed miniature of that same space.

name: The Alice in Wonderland Syndrome

artist: Elmgreen & Dragset

gallery: Pace Gallery

location: 1201 South La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles, California

dates: September 13th — October 25th, 2025

Elmgreen & Dragset, installation view, 2025 © Elmgreen & Dragset / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

ai weiwei’s installation in ukraine

RIBBON International presents Ai Weiwei’s Three Perfectly Proportioned Spheres and Camouflage Uniforms Painted White at Pavilion 13, marking the artist’s first commission in Ukraine. Conceived as a site-specific installation, the work continues Ai’s investigation into the material and symbolic traces of conflict, transforming ideologically charged objects into reflections on contemporary struggles and shared human experience.

Referencing Leonardo da Vinci’s Divina Proportione, the piece engages with Enlightenment ideals of harmony and rational order while questioning their appropriation in contexts of war and concealment. By juxtaposing mathematical precision with objects tied to militarized histories, Ai underscores the fragile line between ideals of progress and the realities of violence, positioning the installation within his broader humanist and pacifist practice.

Ai WeiWei says: ‘That is the challenge, to build new works relating to what I feel, to me in the past and to the current situation. Art is more metaphysical. You cannot really give every description, but you can always suggest a gesture or attitude or some kind of symbolic meaning, more like a poetic gesture.’

name: Three Perfectly Proportioned Spheres and Camouflage Uniforms Painted White

artist: Ai WeiWei

location: Pavilion 13, Kyiv, Ukraine

commissioner: RIBBON International, FORMA Architects, Pavilion of Culture

dates: September 14th — November 30th 2025

image courtesy RIBBON International

Sueño Perro: Instalación Celuloide de Alejandro G. Iñárritu

Alejandro G. Iñárritu presents Sueño Perro at Fondazione Prada in Milan, an exhibition marking the 25th anniversary of his debut feature Amores Perros (2000). The installation resurrects previously unseen footage — abandoned during the film’s editing and preserved for decades in the archives of the National Autonomous University of Mexico — revealing fragments that speak to enduring themes of love, betrayal, and violence against the backdrop of Mexico City’s complex social realities. At its core, the work emphasizes the tactile presence of 35mm film, using its grain and flicker to evoke memory and immediacy.

name: Sueño Perro: Instalación Celuloide de Alejandro G. Iñárritu

artist: Alejandro G. Iñárritu

gallery: Fondazione Prada

location: Largo Isarco 2, Milan, Italy

dates: September 18th, 2025 — February 26th, 2026

Stills from Amores Perros (2000) by Alejandro G. Iñárritu, courtesy Rodrigo Prieto © Alta Vista Films

calder gardens

Calder Gardens, the new cultural destination designed by Herzog and de Meuron and Dutch landscape designer Piet Oudolf, has announced its opening date for September 21st, 2025. Located on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in downtown  Philadelphia, the gallery space is set to showcase the art and ideas of Alexander Calder, one of the 20th century’s most influential artists and a Philadelphia native.

The institute has also appointed Juana Berrío as the Marsha Perelman Senior Director of Programs. A seasoned curator, educator, and arts programmer, Berrío will lead public programming that connects audiences to Calder’s work through performances, events, and wellness activities, fostering engagement and community in this innovative blend of art, nature, and architecture.

name: Calder Gardens

architect: Herzog & de Meuron

landscape designer: Piet Oudolf 

location: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
opening: September 21st, 2025

image courtesy Calder Gardens

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