Fiona Banner AKA The Vanity Press →

Fiona Banner AKA The Vanity Press | Burlington Contemporary

Fiona Banner AKA The Vanity Press in 2024. (© Fiona Banner Studio; courtesy the artist and Frith Street Gallery, London; photograph Leroy Boeteng).

interviewed by Millie Walton

Although the links drawn between different types of assault and exploitation – on the body, on the landscape, on language itself – are often unsettling and confronting, there is always a sense of play to what Banner makes, a sending-up or collapsing of ‘grand’ ideas but also of her work. For her Tate commission in 2010, for example, she bought and installed two full-size fighter jets – a Sea Harrier aircraft and a SEPECAT Jaguar aircraft – into the Duveen galleries, creating an environment that was alternately monumental and sad. She later melted the planes down into ingots, which she keeps in her east London studio. Ahead of Banner’s solo exhibition at Frith Street Gallery, London (21st March–3rd May 2025), Millie Walton spoke to the artist about language, time, motherhood and military aircraft.

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Artist Rirkrit Tiravanija: "As an artist, I can only make signs."

Rirkrit Tiravanija | Louisiana Channel

“Paying attention now is actually a kind of political act."

Renowned Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija reflects on the role of art in a time of crisis, the importance of questioning authority, and the need for critical engagement with the world around us in repressive times.

For Tiravanija, art serves as a space of doubt and freedom: "Art is always a place where we can have doubt, we're free to think, and we're free to question authority—any kind of authority." He urges viewers to challenge established institutions, including their own assumptions.

“I think now when we're in a place and time where you know there's so much trying to ask for attention, but the attention they're asking for is a kind of is a diversion from reality in a way is a diversion from facts is a diversion from truth,” Tiravanija says.

Tiravanija talks shares his view of the world at the occasion of his most recent work ‘A Million Rabbit Holes (2024), reflecting the events leading up to the US selection in November 2024.

Throughout the discussion, Rirkrit Tiravanija draws on personal observations and global political concerns, highlighting the dangers of uncritical acceptance: "We're coming to a place where the dreams are going to be shattered, there is no more dream."

Tiravanija also reflects on the commodification of art, arguing for a return to its radical roots: "Art has to stop becoming commodified and art has to go out and back into the woods as it was. Or maybe Duchamp, like has said, you know, it's time to go underground."

Despite the challenges ahead, the artist remains hopeful that crisis can be a catalyst for change: "I think we're coming to a big crisis and I I think, and I hope, that crisis is extreme enough to wake people up, to come together, to do things together in opposition to those things that are being set on us."

Inside An Intimate Dinner In Support Of The LA Arts Community Fire Relief Fund →

Jorge Pardo | Elle Decor

Photo by Katie Jones

By Sean Santiago

Last weekend, ELLE Decor hosted an intimate dinner at Ardor at The West Hollywood EDITION in support of the LA Arts Community Fire Relief Fund. The event was supported by Visit West Hollywood and Monacelli, off the back of Primack and Weissenberg’s Love How You Live: Adventures in Interior Design multi-city book tour. Each guest took home a copy of the book along with their own one-of-a-kind plate, hand-painted by artist Jorge Pardo. Sales of the plates, currently available by special order through the AGO Projects site, will raise money for the relief fund.

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At Guadalajara Art Weekend, Open Studios Are the Biggest Draw →

Jorge Mendez Blake, Jorge Pardo and Pae White | Observer

Ceramica Suro’s annual Comida celebration during ART WKND GDL. Photo by Tuna Unalan.

By Elisa Carollo

The highlight of the evening at Plataforma was a conversation between Cuban artist Jorge Pardo and American artist Pae White, both of whom have long-standing ties with José Noé Suro. Pardo’s immersive, labyrinthine installation of luminous ceramic walls and colorful lamps seamlessly intertwined with White’s newest series of sculptures, forming an engaging, multisensory environment that explored how visual curiosity and emotional impulses shape perception.

The final stop was the studio of conceptual artist Jorge Méndez Blake, whose multimedia practice explores the intersection of literature, art and architecture—disciplines humans use to define their existential and operational space, imposing structure and direction upon it. Deconstructed pages of famous books transform into constellations of meaning, as Méndez Blake distills single characters, isolating them in a careful, rational order. Across his sprawling studio, various workstations held a series of hyperrealistic paintings, which, through trompe-l’œil techniques, similarly yet more directly challenge the viewer’s perception of reality. These paintings also serve as tools for conceptualizing and developing his other projects, reinforcing the artist’s fascination with language, illusion and the ways in which knowledge is both constructed and dismantled.

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Philippe Parreno's 'Voices' uses AI to give agency to denuded land →

Philippe Parreno | NewScientist

Philippe Parreno, Voices, Haus Der Kunst, 2024. Photo by Andrea Rossetti.

By David Stock

Phillipe Parreno wants to take visitors to his latest exhibition, Voices at Munich’s Haus Der Kunst, on a journey into the unknown. “There is no dramatic arc produced by Netflix where you just have to sit, shut up and enjoy the show,” the artist explains of the large, multi-room space filled with moving light sculptures, heat lamps, speaker arrays, dancers and film screens. Instead, for Parreno, traversing the rooms is a process of composing your own journey. “You explore time in space with your own curiosity.”

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Here are the 10 Must-See Gallery Shows in LA This Month →

Jorge Pardo | Cultured Mag

Jorge Pardo, Untitled, 2024. Image courtesy of the artist and 1301PE.

By Giuliana Brida

Jorge Pardo

Where: 1301PE
When: Through January 11, 2025
Why It’s Worth A Look: Layering 30 years of 1301PE’s exhibition posters into a kaleidoscopic collage of color and form, Jorge Pardo’s monumental canvas blurs the line between a painting and its environment. The result is a dizzying play of abstraction and representation, a work that refuses to be pinned down and demands you step closer to decode its mysteries.
Know Before You Go: Depending on where you stand, colors collide or dissolve, textures sharpen or soften, and the image shifts like a mirage. Pardo wants you lost in the middle of it all—caught between recognition and abstraction, where every angle reveals something new. 

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Most influential people in 2024 in the contemporary artworld →

Rirkrit Tiravanija | ArtReview

Photo: Daniel Dorsa. Courtesy Rirkrit Tiravanija and David Zwirner

‘My interest is always to break down the distance between what we think [of] as art or high art and what we do in our daily life,’ Tiravanija once told The Korea Herald. During his close-to-40-year engagement with what has been characterised as relational aesthetics, the Thai artist has become known for his participatory events, from cooking pad thai for gallery goers to providing them with ping-pong tables. You’d think it might be tricky to encapsulate such a career in a retrospective, but his MoMA PS1 survey, which closed in March, before moving to LUMA Arles in June, had a go, as did a second retrospective at Gropius Bau, Berlin, which opened in September, serving curry and Turkish coffees, and providing hangout spaces where the interactions are the work.

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Step Inside a Bewitching Ranch House in Malibu →

Jorge Pardo | Architectural Digest

Photography by Mark Seelen

By Mayer Rus

Despite the eye-rolling hauteur of the word Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art, it is the mot juste to describe what Pardo has wrought: a dizzying, kaleidoscopic fantasy interior in which the floors, walls, ceilings, and furnishings filigree into a single orgasmic organism, brought to life through the artist’s signature experiments with form, pattern, and color. There’s a primary bedroom suite at one end of the structure, two guest rooms at the other, a kitchen/dining zone, and a sunken living room, the latter two mediated by a floor-to-ceiling storage volume clad in quotidian prefab wood shingles that strike a dramatic contrast note amid all the calligraphic finery. “It’s really a simple building, but when you step inside it’s optically extreme,” Pardo says, describing the symphony of engraved, punctured, and otherwise manipulated walls, windows, doors, and furnishings, all fabricated using CNC computer-driven machining processes.

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Uta Barth at 1301PE →

Uta Barth | Artillery Magazine

Uta Barth, Untitled #7, 2024

By Jody Zellen

In these pieces, the emphasis is not on the individual picture, but on the myriad ways it can be transformed and what those transformations imply about the difference between what the eye sees and how the camera records. Barth goes beyond the act of looking by manipulating the visual cues (the passage of the sun and its shadow) by which we map our days: She draws our attention to the subjective nature of our own passage through time and space, contingent on our perception of it.

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Rirkrit Tiravanija’s Latest Show in London Tackles Disillusionment and Political Polarization →

Rirkrit Tiravanija | Observer Magazine

Courtesy of the artist and Pilar Corrias

By Elisa Carollo

For his latest exhibition, “A MILLION RABBIT HOLES,” on view at Pilar Corrias in London during Frieze Art Week, Tiravanija has created an immersive environment that captures the atmosphere of American politics in the run-up to the presidential election next month while also reflecting on the dangerous polarization spreading across countries facing shared geopolitical uncertainties. Ahead of the opening, Observer connected with the artist to discuss the themes that shaped the show and the evolving meaning of “relational art,” with its inherently political dimension.

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The Art of Film →

Diana Thater | Aesthetica Magazine

Diana Thater, Practical Effects, Installation view: LUMA Arles, France, 2024.

By Emma Jacob

Diana Thater (b.1962) has been a pioneering creator of film and art since the early 1990s. She is best known for her site-specific installations, such as Delphine (1999) and knots + surfaces (2001), which explore the relationship between humans and the natural world. Here, she approaches the idea of post-apocalyptic life through a poignant and wistful lens, following a primate-like robot that is the last being left on Earth. It is tasked with the upkeep of a garden filled with intricately sculpted topiary animals. Devoid of interaction, the colourful robot can only find companionship with the figures it cares for. This video is a strange and tragicomic vision of how the organic and inorganic worlds may collide and support one another in unexpected ways as the Earth shifts and changes due to human behaviour. 

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Fondation Beyeler’s 'What Time Is Heaven?' Show Is in Constant Transformation →

Philippe Parreno | Hypebeast

Philippe Parreno, Membrane, 2023 and Fujiko Nakaya, Untitled, 2024. Installation view, Fondation Beyeler, 2024. Courtesy: the artists. Photo: Mark Niedermann

By Keith Estiler

Organized in collaboration with the LUMA Foundation and conceived by a team including Sam Keller, Mouna Mekouar, Isabela Mora, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Precious Okoyomon, Philippe Parreno, and Tino Sehgal, ‘What Time is Heaven?’ offers an evolving spectacle rather than a static collection that is now on view through August 11, 2024.

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Rirkrit Tiravanija: ‘Food is an easy door to go through. It’s something we all do' →

Rirkrit Tiravanija | Financial Times

Rirkrit Tiravanija opening for A LOT OF PEOPLE at MoMA PS1, 2023. Photo by Marissa Alper.

By Caroline Roux

“Food is an easy door to go through,” says the artist of his preferred medium of engagement. “It’s something we all do.” There will be no cooking here, but the influence of “Pad Thai” is all over the show. It is here in a series of woks that have been fetishised as art objets, while upstairs, in an area cordoned off with stacks of art books and catalogues, a man is making Turkish coffee on two electric rings. “It’s the opposite of an espresso,” says the barista, an Iranian drafted in from Luma’s catering staff. It is delicious, not strong but fruity and scented with just the right amount of rose water.

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Judy Ledgerwood: Sunny Redux at Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago →

Judy Ledgerwood | Tussle Magazine

Judy Ledgerwood, Sunny Redux at Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago, IL

By Pia Singh

A little over a year since ‘Sunny’ opened at Denny Gallery, New York, Rhona Hoffman presents an exquisite selection of Judy Ledgerwood’s large-scale paintings in Sunny Redux. It’s hard to write about Ledgerwood’s works in relationship to one another without getting caught up in formalist underpinnings of abstraction, interpretative language, or trying too hard to set out to contextualize the artists’ engrossment with color, form, and pattern. Initially, it was the intensity of play, how Ledgerwood teases both theory and history through the pleasurable (dare we say beautiful) translation of form and color, that felt like one possible route to entering the show. Yet, it felt like a disservice to the demand of the work, specifically at this time. 

How does one write about the rebellion of abstraction at a time of war? What bearings does language have on policy, and in turn, how does “art-speak” afford a degree of political impunity, dissuading both reader and writer from identifying the marks of imperial violence on our perception? Between the undeniable espousal of practice (as politic) and theory (of art), and accelerated consumption of images in mediated realities, what is revolutionary about the condition of slow-looking that a Ledgerwood demands? 

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Philippe Parreno to transform the entire Haus Der Kunst with fully driven AI exhibition. →

Philippe Parreno | FAD News

Philippe Parreno, My Room Is Another Fish Bowl, 2018, Helium–filled Mylar balloons, adhesive foil , air columns, Variable dimensions . Exhibition view : Philippe Parreno, Gropius Bau,Berlin (2018). Courtesy the artist; Pilar Corrias, London; Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels; Esther Schipper, Berlin/Paris/Seoul. Photo © Andrea Rossetti

By Mark Westall

As part of a groundbreaking new collaboration with Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul, Haus der Kunst, Munich’s global centre for contemporary art, will present a major exhibition by the internationally acclaimed French artist, Philippe Parreno, a multi-media, multi-sensory installation on a giant scale that will take over the entire gallery spaces from the end of November 2024.

Philippe Parreno has revolutionised the experience of museums. The exhibition will encompass Parreno’s key works and early works from the 1990s in multiple media ranging from video and sound to sculpture and drawing, created in collaboration with graphic designers, photographers, musicians, linguists, sound specialists, and actors, among others.

Throughout the exhibition, voices will play a fundamental role in bringing the building of Haus der Kunst to life. The Mittelhalle and Ostgalerie will become a resonating organism of light and sounds, featuring installations, films, new works and collaborations with peer artists.

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'Made by Hand/Born Digital' exhibition explores art that confounds an analog v. digital divide →

Pae White | ArtDaily

Pae White, Phosphenes 1, 2011, ink and clay on wood, 17.75 x 17.75 inches, 45.1 x 45.1 cm.

By ArtDaily

The Santa Barbara Museum of Art’s (SBMA) exhibition Made by Hand/Born Digital features 12 artworks and 9 artists who use brushes, AI, paint, 3D printers, scissors, magazines printed on paper, digital looms, potter’s wheels, Photoshop, and Apple Photo. By continuing to craft ceramics, paintings, and textiles by hand and also using the latest digital tools, many of the artists in the exhibition blur a distinction between the handmade and digital. Collectively, these artists remind us that computers are tools—exquisitely complicated but still tools—made by and for humans.

They allow artists to work faster, experiment before committing precious time and materials, toss the dice of chance to see what AI might conjure, or easily produce minutely wrought labor-intensive details. Their art demonstrates that silicon-based intelligence and our carbon-based mammalian brains can and do work together as well as suggesting an alternative to inevitable digitization of everything. With a mixture of recent museum acquisitions and loans of artworks by Alex Heilbron, Taha Heydari, Yassi Mazandi, Justin Mortimer, Analia Saban, Ena Swansea, Sarah Rosalena, Joey Watson, and Pae White, this exhibition shows that the traditional mediums—painting, ceramics, and weaving—can incorporate the methods offered by digital technologies to erode a clean distinction between the digital and handmade. Perhaps, the biggest lesson is to ignore hype about the latest transformational gadget or app and, instead, pay attention to what artists are really doing with technology and see how they channel cutting edge tools to deal with the age-old struggle of giving concrete visual form to ideas and pictures inside their minds.

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A Thailand Unified at Its Third National Biennial →

Rirkrit Tiravanija | FRIEZE Magazine

Portrait of Rirkrit Tiravanija. Courtesy of Rirkrit Tiravanija.

By Vipash Purichanont

Assembled by an all-Thai curatorial team, the third Thailand Biennale brilliantly exhibits the rich cultural milieu of the country’s Golden Triangle, near Laos and Myanmar

Titled ‘The Open World’, the third edition of the Thailand Biennale is held in the northern province of Chiang Rai. Assembled by an all-Thai curatorial team, the government-supported biennial is led by artistic directors Rirkrit Tiravanija and Gridthiya Gaweewong in tandem with co-curators Angkrit Ajchariyasophon and Manuporn Luengaram.

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Ann Veronica Janssens - L'Aire d'un Souffle →

Ann Veronica Janssens | The Artist’s Parliament

Ann Veronica Janssens and Michel François, L'Aire d'un Souffle, argex concrete and aluminum, approximate dimensions 2030 x 640 x 430 cm. Photo credit: Isabelle Arthuis.

The sculpture L’Aire d’un Souffle (‘The space of a breath’) is the work of two artists. This piece of art takes the form of a completely openwork visual barrier, meaning that we are able to see through and beyond its porous boundary. This grid, through which we can observe the surrounding urban landscape, forms a kind of insurmountable obstacle, a border that can be interpreted in different ways. We can only cross it with our eyes, which are symbolically confronted with the sight of a blast, the origin of which is also open to interpretation.

This grid is perched on a territory of its own; a raised platform separate from the ground of the Esplanade, which invites the public to step up onto it and thus alter their perspective. Our attention is also drawn to this floor that supports and prolongs the grid, as its horizontal grid-like pattern is suddenly interrupted by a long narrow gap. This defined area becomes a space in itself, a field of action in which the public can move around, experiment and interact.

The Office of the Commissioner for Europe and International Organizations and the European Parliament have launched an exhibition project showcasing contemporary artists of the countries holding the rotating presidency of the Council of the European Union.

This project will start during the Belgian presidency in January 2024 and continue in July 2024 with the Hungarian presidency.

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50 Paintings →

Judy Ledgerwood | The Brooklyn Rail

Installation view: 50 Paintings, Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, WI, 2023-24. Courtesy of the Milwaukee Art Museum.

By Saul Ostrow

Given my interest in painting, I found myself going to Milwaukee to see an exhibition that promised to be taking the pulse of contemporary American painting—all the works in it had been made in the last five years. A show of fifty paintings by fifty different painters who the curators claimed were defining the field of contemporary painting seemed a bold move, amidst the general confusion that has been generated by AI, market manipulation, auction house publicity, critical pronouncements, and a general cultural malaise that has lingered since the 1990s. How could any critic resist such a challenge; what could an exhibition indexed to the simple subject of “Painting,” offer? Whatever the curators’ intentions, 50 Paintings seemed to be a brave attempt to bring some discernment to a confused situation.

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Notes on the Gallery as Military Hangar →

Fiona Banner | ArtReview

Fiona Banner, Harrier and Jaguar, 2010, installation view for Tate Britain Duveens Commission. Photo: Sam Drake, Tate Photography. Courtesy the artist, Galerie Barbara Thumm, Frith Street Gallery, London and 1301PE, Los Angeles

By Nathalie Olah

A reencounter with the work of Fiona Banner prompts a reassessment of art institutions as political fields of hegemonic control

A few months ago, I was stood in the main hall of the Tate Britain in London talking to the artist Fiona Banner. It felt significant. My favourite use of that space had been an installation created by Banner over a decade earlier, in which she had hung a Sea Harrier from the ceiling and parked a Sepecat Jaguar on the gallery floor – two RAF planes that had been recently decommissioned. The installation was titled Harrier and Jaguar (2010) and at the time I remember reading that Banner, who is best known for her vast wordscapes comprising hand-typed or written sentiments, believed the objects represented the ‘opposite of language’.

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