The 26-acre grounds include a sprawling building that recalls the European palaces that once hosted kings and queens. When construction was completed in 1905, the building symbolized colonial power and exclusion under the German empire. Today, however, the building is open to the public.

 “Transforming this narrative into something else and opening a new chapter was very important and symbolic for us,” Lawson told ARTnews. “People are proud to have such a place that is now ours.”

Its presentations would have been unthinkable to the Germans, the British, and the French who colonized Togo before it gained independence in 1960.

Right now, on the ground floor of the Palais de Lomé is a solo show for Kossi Aguessy, a designer born in Lomé, Togo, who was of Togolese, Beninese, and Brazilian descent. His works are found in the collections of museums across the globe, from the Museum of Modern Art to the Centre Pompidou, but not typically in the galleries of Togolese art spaces. Aguessy had expressed interest in showing his work in Africa before his death at 40 in 2017, and the show functions as a posthumous tribute. The response to the show has been positive.

Four other shows devoted to Togo’s history and Pan-Africanism went on view in 2019, when the Palais de Lomé opened, and have gained the general public’s attention.

For Lawson, the Palais de Lomé is more than an art center. She thought hard about how the palace, once a private residence for German, English, and French governors, could be embraced by Togo. In thinking about this, she ensured that Togolese firms were involved in its renovation as a “means to reclaim our inheritance, so to say this place is now ours.”

The mansion has gone through many transformations. Once Togo gained independence, it was the seat of the presidency of the Togolese Republic until 1970, then was later used as a residence by the country’s Prime Minister, Joseph Kokou Koffigoh. But amid a period of social and political unrest, including attacks by the country’s military and citizens in the early 1990s, the building fell into disrepair. It was uninhabited for about 20 years until the president of the Republic of Togo intervened in the early 2010s.

In 2014, President Faure Gnassingbe’s government appointed Lawson to restore the space, which is now home to exhibition spaces, a library, a bookstore, an auditorium, a botanical garden, and restaurants hosting workshops, talks, cultural and live events.

In addition, the center also commissions creatives on projects like “Togo Yeye” (“A New Togo”), a collective cofounded by Togolese photographer Delali Ayivi and artist and curator Malaika Nabillah that highlights Togolese creatives.

Even though the space has become a hotbed for events and tourism, the Palais de Lomé’s newest transformation was initially met with skepticism, Lawson said—but added that it is a “very satisfying moment to see that they were wrong in their projection.”

As well as partnering with external organizations on shows, the Palais de Lomé prioritizes working with Togolese ironworkers, potters, weavers, and carpenters who are brought on board to assist with events held in the space. The aim is to highlight their importance in a society where they are not always respected and to build on that sense of community.

One of the shows currently on view at the Palais de Lomé is the second edition of the traveling exhibition “Dig Where You Stand,” titled ‘From Coast to Coast: Seke.” Organized by the African Artists Foundation (AAF), it officially opened on September 15 and is on view until March 2024. The first edition was held at Ibrahim Mahama’s Savannah Centre for Contemporary Arts (SCCA) in Tamale in the Northern Region of Ghana. The current show is curated by Rosemary Esinam Damalie, with curatorial advice from Azu Nwagbogu, the founder and director of AAF, who also curated the previous edition.

The exhibition connects Togo to other Ewe-speaking countries, building on the call for African solidarity espoused by Ghana’s first president and Prime Minister, Kwame Nkrumah.

“One of the reasons communities in Africa were deeply colonized was because of the language barrier between colonialists and the indigenous people,” Damalie told ARTnews.

“I thought that it was very interesting that one of the ways we could mediate issues of colonialism and the effects it has had in our communities would be that we communicate with one another through local languages.” (Ghana is an English-speaking nation bordered by Togo and Benin, two countries that both use French as their national language. All three countries are united by their Ewe-speaking communities.)

On display are over 160 works spanning mediums including painting, photography, video, sculptures, and installation from the likes of Zanele Muholi, Victor Ehikhamenor, Sika Akpalo, Joana Choumali, Dodju Efoui, Kongo Astronauts, Tessi Kodjovi, Kwami DaCosta, and Renzo Martens and the Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise (CATPC).

The works on view focus on the effects of colonialism on the African continent and explore issues including decolonization, migration, repatriation, restitution, and the power of the arts to positively impact communities on the continent and its diaspora.

While the Palais de Lomé is the main exhibition space, the organizers have also brought the offerings beyond its walls, hosting mobile photo exhibitions, film screenings, and workshops in local communities. The captions and wall texts are in French, English, and Ewe, a local language widely spoken in Togo.

Including the local language makes “people feel at home when they are in the space. It’s kind of restoration within the arts community where all you see is that people are speaking English or just French,” explained Damalie.  

Moreover, the “Dig Where You Stand” concept works for the continent instead of adopting the Western model of exhibitions.

“In the long term, it’d become something like an African community project [that is intentional about] using indigenous materials and including communities in the process while it is moving around the continent,” said Damalie of the show.  

Like Palais de Lomé, the LagosPhoto festival tells Africa’s story on its terms.

For the first time, the festival, also organized by the AAF and now in its 14th edition, is taking place not just in the Nigerian city but also in Cotonou, Ouidah, and Porto-Novo in Benin. Co-curated by Nwagbogu and Peggy Sue Amison, the theme of the event is “Ground State – Fellowship Within The Uncanny.” It explores issues including restitution and restoration.

Nwagbogu shared that, as part of his research as a curator for Benin’s inaugural participation in the Venice Biennale in 2024, he traveled around the country, inspiring the idea of having Benin host the festival.

“What we had done in Lagos,” he said in a recent interview with ARTnews, referring to creating a platform that nurtures and provides career opportunities, including with international publications for local photographers. “We want to do in Benin, so it’s not a gimmick. It’s not a one-off.”

The line-up for the festival, which opened in October and runs through December 31, includes exhibitions, workshops, screenings, and large-scale outdoor installations. It features works by photographers from Africa and the rest of the world, such as Zanele Muholi, Laeila Adjovi, Louis Oke-Agbo, and Carlon Idun.

Nwagbogu added that photography is “the definite medium of our time” for enabling the visibility of contemporary art and artists in Africa and its diaspora to participate actively in global conversations.

Sixteen years after the founding of the African Artists Foundation, he is confident that he and his team “want to do more,” expanding on the significant role the organization has played in building and supporting art communities in Nigeria, Africa, and globally through various initiatives like Dig Where You Stand exhibition and LagosPhoto Festival.

The ARTnews holiday art gift guide has arrived, with art-inspired products for every enthusiast on your list! Whether you’re shopping for an artist, a writer, a hobbyist, or an aesthete, our list of art gifts has you covered, with suggestions for everything from art supplies to art-themed apparel and accessories to artists’ limited-edition home goods. 

The 17th century palace, first occupied by a Jewish family of butchers, is named after arts patron Hortensia Herrero. The wife of supermarket tycoon Juan Roig, Herrero has helped conserve and restore the city’s Iglesia de San Nicolás de Valencia and the Colegio del Arte Mayor de la Seda, among other sites in the city. The Palacio Valeriola, once the headquarters of the national newspaper Las Provincias and a nightclub guarded by two caged living lions, is now home to Herrero’s private collection.

Originally focused on artists local to Valencia, Herrero began to expand her collecting practice after a visit in 2013 to the the opening of the “Sorolla and America” exhibition, at the Meadows Museum in Dallas. There, she met Valencian curator Javier Molins, who advised her to open up her collection to international artists, unaware that he would soon after be asked to help scout them.

“We started visiting art fairs, biennials, exhibitions, studios together. Fortunately, Hortensia and I have similar tastes,” he told ARTnews. The first work the pair agreed on is Anselm Kiefer’s Böse Blumen (2012-2016), which they spotted at the Royal Academy in London. A pictorial tribute to Charles Baudelaire’s cycle of poems Les Fleurs du Mal, the work shows flowers timidly sprouting from the cracks of a thick and dry surface. At close to 20 feet wide and nearly 10 feet tall, Böse Blumen is so monumental that the question of its presentation arose soon after.

Herrero had long been toying with opening a brick-and-mortar space to steward her treasures, so when the Palacio Valeriola became available for purchase in 2016, she jumped at the opportunity, also buying the stationary shop across the street that now serves as the center’s shop and ticket office. She entrusted the rehabilitation project to ERRE studio, led by her daughter Amparo Roig and José Martí. Both architects have done a marvelous job revamping the Gothic palace to its initial state, recycling some of its materials into the underside of a new set of stairs, and connecting it to a building on San Cristobal street that had to be almost entirely reconstructed.

The rehabilitation process has dictacted how one explores the 27,600 square-foot display of 100 works. A typical visit starts on the first floor of the palace. Though the center’s first gallery is framed as an ode to international living artists, there are works by 20th century masters like Joan Miró, Alexander Calder, Jean Dubuffet, and Roy Lichtenstein. Elsewhere, the public is invited to step through Cristina Iglesia’s cave-like installation Tránsito mineral (2023) into the second wing of the center and, from there, to work their way back down, from the David Hockney galleries—devoted to the English artist’s Four Seasons and Autour de la maison series—to the lower level, where contemporary photographs by Thomas Ruff, Idris Khan, and Antonio Girbés, hang in dialogue with pedagogical materials on the history of Valencia and of the center.

Meanwhile, a patio door on the left side of the entrance overlooks a display of 18th-century ceramic azulejos found on site. The floral species identified on those ceramic pieces have been planted underneath each corresponding tile. Until 1389, this outdoor space was known as Calle Cristòfol Soler, the northern border of Valencia’s Jewish quarter.

Other archaeological discoveries have been made during the excavation process. There are more ruins of the juderia, or Jewish district, such as an eight-pointed-star-shaped fountain which stood outside the Islamic house of emir Haçach Habinbadel, as well as ancient graffiti preserved and presented on the top floor, a medieval oven filled with remains of animal bones and kitchen earthenware, and a crystal vase next to the skeleton of a young girl.

There is even a horse skull, which was an inspiration for Mat Collishaw’s Left in Dust, a chandelier-like screen on the museum’s patio showing horses galloping first freely, then before an overexcited crowd. The physical loop in the work references the shape of Valencia’s long-lost Roman circus, while the video loop conveys the despair of having to repeat the same action over and over again.

“I wanted to contrast the freedom and the captivity of the animal doing the same movements in two different environments,” the London-based artist told ARTnews, adding that it was important that the work resonated with its host city. “I was thinking of things within the city that I could incorporate. My work often references primal impulses, certain behaviors or traditions that are prehistoric. Fire, for instance, does not have the same urgency or profundity that it did when we were trying to control it.”

His second installation for the center, Sordid Earth (2022), projects images on either wall of a corridor space of the Fallas, a Spanish festival where effigies are created only to be burnt down amid a fireworks display in March. The longer you stand between the screens, the more heat you start to feel. Is it the energy released by super-efficient LED, or is your mind playing tricks on you?

Five other artists have been commissioned to make works especially for CAHH. For the 52-foot high entrance hall, Tomás Saraceno, also known as “the Art World’s Amazing Spider-Man”, has imagined six tetrahedrons and dodecahedrons covered with iridescent acrylic glass. Some may identify those geometrical shapes, hanging at various heights from the ceiling, as rainbow-tinted clouds; others as disco balls, especially at nightfall, as their colors reflect off the stone walls and stairs of the bulding. The artist himself describes those floating elements as soap bubbles, filled with “cosmic spider webs” (you will see them, if you look carefully).

The most impressive site-specific installation. However, may be the Sean Scully Chapel, which includes stained-glass windows by the Irish artist, as well as a large canvas from his Landline series with horizontal stripes, and drips of red at the bottom, evoking the blood of the Christ. Above the installation reside four ceiling allegories of Painting, Writing, Commerce and the Stationery Trade, painted in 1881 by Valencian master Joaquín Sorolla, and his students José Nicolau Huguet, Vicente Nicolau Cotanda, and Juan Peiró. Herrero purchased the works 20 years ago and decided with Molins, the curator, to have them moved into the palace’s chapel during the restoration. Restorers have recovered representations of the Gospel in each pendentive of the dome that had to be rebuilt entirely. This confrontation of past and present is evocative of Herrero’s vision, where heritage, classical, and contemporary art all meet with grace.

This is the Barbican Conservatory, where Indian sculptor Ranjani Shettar is having her first major institutional show in Europe. It’s also the Barbican Conservatory’s first site-specific work, commissioned specially to work with the intriguing possibilities offered by the 23,000-square-foot space.

The exhibition is titled “Cloud Songs on the Horizon,” but in an interview, Shettar declined to explain the name, saying that she “prefers visitors to arrive at their own interpretations.” There are five groups of suspended sculptures, each molded out of stainless steel and covered with fine, translucent muslin. Some of the sculptures are accented with lacquer. Others are dyed with madder root and pomegranate dye.

The mirrored surfaces of these steel forms create the sense that there are fantastical leaves, vines, curlicues, daisies, flowers, and clouds held within the conservatory. One zany group of sculptures, appropriately called “Moon Dancers,” gyrates like exotic birds over a pond filled with plump koi fish. The contrast between Shettar’s soft shapes and the Barbican’s strong concrete works, somehow.

The sculptures seem to have sprung out of the ground, but that effect was incredibly challenging to achieve for Shettar, because the site kept shifting. So far, she has only exhibited against the plain white, static walls of galleries.

“I came to the Barbican in December to look at the site, then went back to work in my studio in India,” she said. “But the light kept changing with the weather, the plants kept growing, the surroundings kept moving. I had to design for an everchanging venue.” Despite the difficulty of the site, Shettar was given just six months to produce her sculptures.

Shettar is from the southern Indian city of Bangalore, now Bengaluru, known for its tech industry. Growing up in the 1990s during the city’s tech boom, she was surrounded by engineers. Indeed, as is the case with many Bangaloreans, her entire family includes many engineers. The slightly built, bespectacled Shettar says she is often mistaken for one herself when going through immigration at Heathrow Airport. When she was a kid, middle-class Indians did not become artists, but her dad was encouraging. “He lit my path for me; he knew I would be happier as an artist.”

She studied art at the Bengaluru-based university Chitrakala Parishath, where, she said, she began giving herself permission to “not follow the rules.” At the time, the Indian painter M.F Hussain, with his paintings of horses, elephants and goddesses, had great influence.

“What was expected of me was figurative,” Shettar said, “something on a pedestal. But I was always going off track, doing things not expected of me.” She continued to defy convention when on graduating, instead of moving to New Delhi or even staying in Bengaluru, she and her sculptor husband moved to a small town in the southern Indian state of Karnataka, surrounded by the Sahyadri mountain range. As Bengaluru grew stratospherically, the couple retreated to a house they built on their own, with a zero-waste studio for Shettar. “I needed space,” she said. “And not everyone should be moving to big cities. There has to be some reverse migration.” It rains so much in her town that industry has luckily been deterred from entering. “I am surrounded by small farmers and greenery,” she said. The town is also known for sandalwood carvers and traditional crafts.

Shettar’s rural location has influenced her work, which remains organic, with a deep connection to nature. Her sprawling sculptures use traditional Indian crafts and materials, like tamarind and indigo dyes, lacquer, beeswax, and reclaimed teak wood. These materials are then mixed with industrial ones like steel wire and washers, to evoke trees, cobwebs, beehives, stars, ponds and other natural themes.

“Cloud Songs on the Horizon,” the Barbican show, is more joyful than any of her past work.  Her previous installations, designed to be shown in galleries, were often severe and minimalist. These sculptures, intended for a softer space, are playful. Asked about this, she responded, “Times are hard, and we need something hopeful.” The Barbican’s newly appointed head of visual arts, Shanay Jhaveri, said he chose her because of her “deep embodiment of an ecological consciousness, all emanating from a local context.”

The Barbican work comes as recognition for Shettar continues to grow. Her work now sells for over $100,000, but when she began, there was no money in sculpture, except for the chosen few. “When my husband and I started out, we decided that we would do anything to make sculpture,” she explained. Now, her work appears internationally, in venues ranging from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art to the Sharjah Biennial. “If someone had asked me to dream, I don’t think I could have dreamt this.”

Despite getting busier, she does not employ a team to help her. “Process is sacred, and integral to me. If I don’t do it on my own, then what am I doing? That’s the fun of it.” Indeed, as she walked around, she pointed out the tiny grooves on the underside of her sculpture, and delightedly took a video of how the light played on them.

In a recent interview with the Financial Times, Shettar called herself apolitical “in a sense.” But a time may come when Indian artists may not have that luxury. Shettar’s work at the Barbican is supported by the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNA), India’s top private museum, which was recently roiled by controversy. A researcher there was fired for criticizing the institution’s namesake collector for mounting what he called a “self-aggrandizing exercise” by the BJP government, which has been criticized for putting forward a Hindu nationalist agenda, and many looked on as an institution that had rarely staged activist programming was suddenly politicized.

Shettar said she didn’t feel compelled to move her art in a more political direction. Asked if artists should today be more like activists, Shettar said, “I do not think it should be a compulsion. I have chosen to keep my art apart from my activism. I engage with society in my own way, and the two do not have to come in the way of each other.”

“I don’t want my art to be preachy,” she continued. “It needs to be aesthetic above everything else. I am not trying to use my art to inform or educate. I work to please myself first.”

Along the way, Chile also lost the space from its past editions, a structure near the water in the Arsenale, and was forced to relocate elsewhere.

A public call for proposals for the Chilean Pavilion launched on June 5, but its deadline was delayed to July 28 when its organizers found out the space they had long rented for €150,000 was no longer available. On October 5, the pavilion’s organizers announced that they were selected seven projects for an exhibition that was described as being located on “the first floor of the assigned space,” implying that the show would contain more than one floor.

That same day, the commissioner of the Chilean Pavilion, Florencia Loewenthal, issued a second communiqué stating that the show would still take place in the Arsenale and would have two floors, one of which would be dedicated to an exhibition commemorating the 50th anniversary of the 1973 Chilean coup d’état.

In that missive, Loewenthal said that the Venice Biennale had announced a restoration of areas of the Arsenale in June, forcing Chile to seek a new location. The Biennale di Venezia Press Office disputed this, telling ARTnews that the Chilean Pavilion’s organizers first inquired about the Arsenale space in May, even though plans for the restoration had been known since 2022, and that they had not sent an official request to participate until July.

Given the delays and the change of location, curator Gabriela Rangel and artist Patrick Hamilton, who had been in charge of one of the preselected projects for the pavilion, contacted the organizing committee to find out how to access the new location. Loewenthal told them that the new space was not managed by the Biennale, but by the Italian Navy, and that they were “negotiating the possibility of crossing from the Italian pavilion by boat with the Navy [so that the pavilion would] have two entrances and a greater flow of public.”

Hamilton and Rangel then issued an open letter in which they wrote of “organizational problems, unforeseen changes and a lack of transparency in the selection process of the Chilean Pavilion.” The artists León & Cociña, who were behind another considered project, also pulled out of the pavilion.

Once both resignations became publicly known, Alessandra Burotto, executive secretary of Visual Arts, the entity in charge of organizing the pavilion, issued a letter that sought to clarify matters. The new pavilion, she wrote, was located “in front of the Italian Pavilion,” when in reality it is almost more than a mile away from it, across a canal. She said it was the same space where Lithuania’s pavilion was held in 2019, the year it “had won the Golden Globe [sic].”

But, with controversy mounting in the Chilean art scene, Burotto resigned a week later.

In an interview with ARTnews, Hamilton said that Burotto’s statement was an attempt to “cover up problems with zero self-criticism, a demonstration of a complete lack of professionalism, and absolutely childish.” For Hamilton, the loss of Chile’s space “leaves the country’s visual arts without its single publicly funded international showcase.”

After Burotto’s resignation, Carolina Arredondo, the Chilean culture minister, held a meeting with the artists and curators of the five remaining projects. According to El Mostrador, the people behind four of the five projects requested that the show commemorating the 1973 coup d’état be eliminated, given that they were unaware of it when they applied. Nicolás Grum, another preselected artist, told ARTnews that his project would be “certainly unpresentable” alongside the coup d’état presentation, since he had no knowledge of it.

ARTnews has learned that the coup d’état presentation was ultimately scrapped. But even without it, the pavilion continued to face turbulence. Iván Flores, a jury member, was dismissed without justification. (He declined to comment for this article.) Flores filed a complaint, and an open internal disciplinary investigation is ongoing.

The selection of Valeria Montti’s project, curated by Andrea Pacheco and produced by Carola Chacón, has raised not a few eyebrows in the Chilean art scene, since she only had two solo shows on her career. Also, as certain Chilean publications have pointed out, Montti was born in Stockholm to exiled Chilean parents and is based in the Swedish capital. That means she is the first Chilean artist not born in the country to represent it at the Biennale.

Some have accused her project of conflicts of interest. Chacón works at the Chilean Museum of Contemporary Art, whose director, Daniel Cruz, is part of the Chilean Pavilion jury. Pacheco runs a Madrid residency program where another juror, Amanda de la Garza, was previously a guest curator. Some also noted that Montti was a resident at a space managed by Juan Castillo, another jury member.

The Secretariat of Visual Arts told ARTnews that both Castillo and Cruz disqualified themselves from voting. But de la Garza appears to have continued to remained in the decision-making process. Pacheco said de la Garza’s connection to Montti dates back to 2017 and that “it is quite possible that you will find coincidences, not professional ties, between juries and participants.”

Artists behind projects that were ultimately not chosen for the pavilion expressed dismay over the situation. “It does not seem to me that Chile’s official participation in an event like this should be done quickly,” said artist Nicolás Grum. “I believe that the competition process for the next biennial should be opened and awarded in 2024, so that the winning project has at least 15 months to develop.”

Founded in 2003 by Kling & Bang, the Icelandic Art Centre, and the Living Art Museum, Sequences has gained popularity and grown in ambition, and was helmed by Marika Agu, Maria Arusoo, Kaarin Kivirähk, and Sten Ojavee, who run the Estonian Centre for Contemporary Art in Tallinn. It may seem strange to bring in four Estonians to curate an Icelandic art festival, but part of Sequence’s point is to highlight connections between Baltic nations and Iceland. This festival does so convincingly.

Their exhibition, titled “Can’t see,” explores the ever-growing threat of ecological destruction. Divided into four chapters—”Soil,” “Subterrain,” “Water,” and “Metaphysical Realm”—their show was spread across the Nordic House, the Living Art Museum, the National Gallery, and Kling & Bang.

For the show, site­-specific installations are placed in dialogue with preexisting works and institutional loans, including a painting by Jóhannes Sveinsson Kjarval (1885–1972), Iceland’s national hero. “It was important that we allow ourselves to travel back in time,” Arusoo said. “We wanted to look into the local history, to avoid pinning artists, whose works may echo through time, to a specific period.”

Below are five must-see artworks at Sequences, which runs through November 26.

Guest curator Sebastian Cichocki has themed his program, “The Gleaners Society,” around the notion of citizenship. It focuses on the practice of gleaning, a term that traditionally refers to the act of collecting surplus crops following a harvest and redistributing them to people in need. Gleaning was declared illegal by the British courts in 1788, and yet, as Cichocki writes in an accompanying text, it remained a strategy of survival and resourcefulness essential to those marginalized by the emerging forces of capitalism.

Cichocki did not train as a traditional curator, although he now serves as chief curator of Museum of Modern Art Warsaw. Instead, his background is in sociology and it is this experience that has clearly informed his EVA program, which looks at art’s relationship to society, bringing ideas about farming, feeding, and nurturing to the fore. The shows suggests that art can aid in supporting political opposition and can also expand ideas of alternate methods of queer survival, specifically by holding up rural ways of living as a form of protesting societal oppression. Below, a look at a few of the best works on view at this edition of the EVA International.

The effect has been making itself clear in the culture, from the sports comedy 80 for Brady to 81-year-old Martha Stewart’s Sports Illustrated cover to the new reality TV show Golden Bachelor.

The portrait being painted here isn’t such a happy one. Politically, it’s a bit nightmarish, as Senator Dianne Feinstein died at her post in September after observers repeatedly sounded the alarm that she was no longer fit to serve in office. Culturally, it’s not great either. For all the insistence that these cultural artifacts demonstrate the possibility of a rich and sensual life for women aged 50 and older, it’s contingent on embodying the particular glamor of youth, whether eliminating wrinkles with plastic surgery or running after a man in stilettos in some echoing mansion in Los Angeles. 

Can we imagine an alternative where aging is celebrated without being tied to narrow definitions of power and sex appeal? This is the question a group show at New York’s Ryan Lee Gallery implicitly asks. Titled “Can You See Me Now?” the show brings together paintings that represent the aging cisgender female body with a caring gaze that is seen all too rarely in art spaces. The 11 artists included, among them Joan Semmel, Hung Liu, and Samantha Nye, focus on both themselves and their beloved friends, and find much to celebrate.

The show, cocurated by Ryan Lee cofounder Jeffrey Lee and artist Clarity Haynes, was catalyzed by Lee, who has been stewarding the late May Stevens’s estate since her death in 2019. It struck Lee that over the course of Stevens’s career, all her major bodies of work have been lauded, collected, and placed in cultural institutions—except those that depict her aged mother, Alice Stevens. The works were powerful, so why had they never found a response? Lee guessed it might be because the subject was an old woman.

“What’s kind of shocking is that very few artists have grappled with the subject matter in a meaningful way,” Lee said, contextualizing his comment in the long history of nudes depicting women in the Western canon of painting. “We’re so ingrained with this notion of the male gaze that even a lot of women are super critical of aging.”

Haynes paints the nude torsos of women and genderqueer people, many of whom are on the older side. He asked her to help curate a show about aging that would include her own work, and she was only too happy to oblige. 

“When he told me he was doing this, I was like, ‘Are you serious?’” Haynes said in an interview with ARTnews. “Do you know how rare it is that anyone is interested in this, especially in this art market, which is completely obsessed with youth and beauty and this whole ‘ultra-contemporary’ phenomenon?”

One doesn’t realize how little is seen of the aging body until confronted in this way. That surprise quickly melts into a sense of relief and curiosity. 

Stevens’s painting of her mother, A Life (1984), has a cinematic quality. It features a series of images: one shows Stevens’s mother asleep in a chair, followed by another in which she is pictured grimacing and awake. In that last frame, she is lucid, gazing at something outside the confines of the canvas. As she wakes, Stevens’s mother goes from sad old object to fully embodied subject, keen and self-possessed. 

Meanwhile, selections from Samantha Nye’s series “Entertainment for Men” (2006–12) takes a more seductive tack. In these works, Nye fits her aged subjects—her grandmother’s friends in an elderly Jewish enclave in Florida—in poses and outfits from ’80s-era Playboy magazines. They meet their viewers’ eyes. Some are meek; others, bold. All are in various states of undress and marked all over with liver spots. Glamorous, yes. Artificial? Never. We are far from the reaches of The Golden Bachelor.

Haynes partly credits this more expansive view of aging womanhood to the queer, feminist perspective she and other lesbian painters, among them Nye, Angela Dufresne, and Mala Iqbal, brought to the show. For her part, Haynes started her series of torso portraits after immersing herself in the queer and feminist communities of the ’90s. The liberated atmosphere pushed Haynes to view bared breasts and flabby flesh as a form of freedom.

As for painting older subjects, Haynes said she delights in the extra “data” that aging skin has to offer. In her painting Brenda (2020), which is on view in the show, a pair of breasts land at the midpoint of a belly that is creased with stretch marks. The visible blue and purple veins in this stomach might turn off some viewers, but Haynes said they are what makes a work like this one engaging for her.

“The lesbian community has a real acceptance for different body types and a real love for aspects of the body that I think that the cis-male dominated art world doesn’t often have access to,” she said. But because many collectors, curators, and dealers have historically been men, a limited acceptance has shaped careers and canons. Haynes thinks that because her work doesn’t cater to that male audience, it isn’t as successful as it could be. She’s not alone in feeling that way.

Nye told ARTnews that she’s consistently gotten the advice to feature more youthful bodies in her paintings, which are typically populated with older women making love or self-pleasuring in utopian landscapes. The unfortunate truth embedded in this advice reared its ugly head when Nye was showing her paintings in a solo booth presentation during the Armory Show. 

“There was this woman who was really interested in my paintings but her husband essentially put his foot down. She said something like, ‘Oh, I love this work but my husband just can’t look at old bodies like that,’” Nye recounted over the phone. “It was actually quite devastating to hear that. It just reverberates loudly on so many levels.”

It’s for this reason that Haynes and Lee hope to expand this show in the future. 

“I’m really eager to see how the show can be expanded and rejiggered in the future,” Haynes said. She would like to see a version that goes beyond representational paintings and is more inclusive of non-cisgender bodies. “There are so many interesting histories that go into how people represent themselves and how they represent age. I’d like to see it all.”

Correction, 10/17/23, 2:55 p.m.: A previous version misstated Mala Iqbal’s first name. It is Mala, not Molly.

Van Gogh moved to Auvers-sur-Oise, a pastoral commune about 20 miles northwest of Paris, to be closer to his brother and art dealer Theo and his infant nephew, Vincent Willem, as well as to receive treatment from Dr. Paul Gachet.

The first gallery in the Orsay exhibition focuses on Gachet, who made a career out of treating melancholy, the focus of his thesis, and counted artists like Paul Cezanne, Armand Guillaumin, and Camille Pissarro as his patients. Gachet considered van Gogh both a patient and a friend, inviting the artist over for lunch on Sundays. Among the works on view are van Gogh’s portraits of Gachet, including the famed 1890 painting donated to the Musée d’Orsay in 1949, as well as the only etching that van Gogh ever made; Gachet had provided the artist with the materials to create it.

Divided into six thematic sections, like “‘Auvers is seriously beautiful…’” and “The modern portraiture,” the exhibition includes village scenes, still lifes of flowers, experimental portraits with weave patterns, tone-on-tone paintings, a series of fascinating double-sided sketches, letters from Van Gogh including one that he never sent, and 11 of the 12 double square landscapes (1 meter by 50 centimeters, around 3 feet 3 inches by 1 foot 8 inches) that were among van Gogh’s final obsessions before his death.

It is an exceptional display. “This room is an unicum,” said Emmanuel Coquery, the director of the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the exhibition’s co-curator. “The public won’t see anything like it, before a very long time.” (Coquery said he did not request the 12th double-square landscapes, titled Daubigny’s Garden from the Hiroshima Museum of Art in Japan “for logical and ecological reasons”; its twin, however, is on loan from the Kunstmuseum Basel in Switzerland.)  

Among the most famous works on view is Wheatfield with crows (1890), which has not left Amsterdam in nearly a century. The dynamic composition, with confident, visible brushstrokes, features ominous crows fluttering around a stormy sky, often interpreted as the artist’s awareness that his end was near.The painting has long been seen as Van Gogh’s ultimate work, but I much preferred Tree Roots (1890), which is believed to have been completed a few hours before the Dutch master shot himself in the chest. The seemingly abstract painting, with a hurried, almost unfinished appearance, shows a colorful entanglement of roots and tree trunks—the vision of all-mighty nature.

Van Gogh’s death, which has been subject to much speculation, is not extensively addressed in the exhibition, only in the catalogue. “We thought about it, but had no intention of adding fuel to controversies,” Coquery said. “We opted for the road of silence.” In an essay titled “A Short Biography of Unbearable Suffering: Van Gogh’s Self-Chosen End,” Louis van Tilborgh rejects the recent theory that van Gogh did not die by suicide but was murdered, writing, “A greater understanding of what motivated his tragic act can only be achieved when the process leading up to it is mapped out. … Without such analysis, interpreting Van Gogh’s work and life in his months remains somewhat arbitrary, and would amount to nothing less than a biographical misstep.”

Coquery added, “When a person feels compelled to end their own life, the least they deserve is to be heard with empathy.”

Van Gogh’s relationship with Gachet is further drawn out in the exhibition via the inclusion of the palette, now owned by the Orsay, that Gachet lent van Gogh (on June 27), so that he could finish the portrait of his daughter Marguerite playing the piano in a white dress against a red-spotted green background. As part of its efforts to include digitally focused programming for its exhibitions, the d’Orsay has also commissioned a 10-minute VR experience by Agnès Molia et Gordon that allows visitors to explore the contours and hues of this history-infused object.

“We did not want to alter Van Gogh’s works, whose proportions have been respected in the program, and we chose to work on his palette instead,” Agnès Abastado, head of the digital department at the Musée d’Orsay, said of the decision to not create an immersive experience of van Gogh’s paintings like those that have been popular over the past few years. Upon entering a re-creation of Gachet’s interior, Marguerite’s voice lulls you into having a look around, until a color-heavy piece of wood starts levitating toward you. “The perspective then changes,” said Coquery. “The palette becomes a landscape and the user a Lilliputian confronted to hill-sized impastos.”

Like the paint-covered palette, van Gogh’s final paintings are filled with brilliant colors. In Jardin à Auvers-sur-Oise (1890), showing a green-dominated view of Charles-François Daubigny’s garden, van Gogh combines various techniques—flurries of dots, loose or tightly packed strokes, aligned or swirling, neater contours—in such a way that the painting still thrums with life. Coquery said, “Van Gogh is always associated with color. We wanted to highlight the materiality, the thickness of his works.”

Below is a list of 10 best offerings, from exciting up-and-coming artists to established ones, at Frieze London, which runs until October 15.