David Bellion spent over a decade in top-flight football, playing for clubs like Manchester United and Sunderland, before becoming Red Star FC's creative director, focusing on brand development and cultural connections.
Lachlan Turczan's practice sits in the space between physics, optics, and environmental art, as he works with lasers, water, mist, and custom-built lenses to produce sculptures made entirely from light.
Upon entry, Kent's "IF" (1965) lures the eye upward. The serigraph-a silkscreen print in fine art parlance-hangs high on the wall with a subtle vulnerability. Two orange letters hover toward the composition's top edge, as if pushing to transcend the picture plane. A feeling of possibility emerges through the conjunction and its visual form.
Her practice uses clay to bring people together with the "therapeutic aspects of tactile making". She first came to ceramics during university, where access to the department allowed her to fall in love with the practice. And so, Ciara is deeply cognisant of the importance of supporting those who struggle to access a ceramics studio due to various social factors.
People all saw that there is something new is being attempted here that you've just got to see. I think that is its own reward. In an era where New York's storied Met Opera has faced layoffs, pay cuts, postponed productions, and a controversial financial agreement with Saudi Arabia, forward-thinking artistic direction becomes essential for survival.
Kamrooz Aram is everywhere this year, from Mumbai Art Week to the Whitney Biennial, and critic Aruna D'Souza is grateful. She pens a beautiful meditation on his work, reading his abstract paintings as not simply a denunciation of Western modernism nor a reassertion of Islamic visual motifs, but something else entirely - something gestural, exuberant, riotous, and incomparably his own.
"These works are an exploration of the human body's elasticity and capacity to metamorphose. Informed by my own experience of pregnancy and the birth of my first child last year, these paintings are a meditation on physiological transformation and the body's underlying animalistic and mammalian nature."
"These paintings merge the landscape and the intimacy of windows through the framing of the car, bridging the two realms I've typically explored separately. The car becomes a meditation on transition, on existing simultaneously here and elsewhere."
The RA is led by leading artists and architects, with the UK's oldest-and, crucially, free-art school at its heart. The opportunity to shape the RA's artistic programme and respond to its extraordinary gallery spaces, as well as launching the expanded Collection Gallery, is tremendously exciting.
Ong's work contains a deep reverence for the otherworldly, combining the remnants of ancestral knowledge with speculative visions to form a kind of personal myth-making. The title of their latest series, "Always Were", is intentionally fragmentary suggesting a temporal and grammatical ambiguity that points to the liminal nature of Ong's figures and the time and place they inhabit.
On Franklin Street in Brooklyn's Greenpoint neighborhood, one non-commercial gallery fosters 'a small, stubbornly human space for friction.' Friction—the ubiquitous buzzword that captures the simultaneous delight and discomfort of doing things the slow way—is at the heart of artists Pap Souleye Fall and Char Jeré's current show at Subtitled NYC. It also reflects the overall spirit of this little exhibition space and of a burgeoning movement to reject our culture of optimization in favor of a bumpier, more intimate, less alienating experience.
What began as a passion for collecting became a responsibility. She not only believes in the artistic genius of women, but she wants society in general to hold men and women artists in equal esteem-and to place the same monetary value on their work.
With most of us, 90 minutes of reminiscing wouldn't make for scintillating theater. Gert Boyle, as played by Wendy Westerwelle, is the exception to that rule. The late Gert came to fame when she took the reins of Columbia Sportswear after her husband's death in 1970 and also became the "One Tough Mother," with gray hair and glasses, of its comedic '80s and '90s ad campaigns. In one, she put her son, Tim, through a carwash to test the durability of a coat.