"We're constantly striving to strike a balance between work that respects academic rules of composition, established visual codes and good readability, with something more spontaneous, adventurous, playful, even naive."
Athens is a place you feel, not see. The beauty and soul of the city is laced into the way of life - the small moments and exchanges that happen daily - rather than in immaculately preserved monuments, museums and high streets like those of other European capitals.
Pornceptual challenges mainstream perceptions of pornography, reframing it as inclusive, artistic, intimate, and respectful rather than exploitative or taboo. Its events, from Berlin to international stages, bring a sex-positive, body-inclusive ethos to nightlife. Strict consent practices, no-photo policies, and spaces designed for authentic self-expression create a rare kind of freedom - one that allows visitors to explore identity, desire, and intimacy without judgment.
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 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."
Hong Kong's particular and seductive Metabolist city planning is an ode to consumption as a great totalizer of culture, and to contemporary art as merely a niche commodity form among many others.
"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."
Alexander Basil has created a cosmos. His instantly recognizable style and established color palette implicate the subject matter in a process of calm and sure scrutiny. Central to this cage is the familiar figure that reappears, on a quest through daily life. The protagonist is both the subject and object of reflection that morphs in and with his surroundings, travelling worlds beyond the room he finds himself in.
From February 17 to March 10, 2026, the vibrant intersection of fashion and art will come alive at Platte Berlin with SPOTLIGHT ON BLACK CREATIVITY. This unmissable pop-up exhibition showcases the brilliance of Black designers and visual artists, setting the stage for an extraordinary celebration of heritage and contemporary expression. Dive into a world where creativity knows no bounds, featuring groundbreaking brands such as adesa, Amaluma Studio, Gelisa George, Dinga, Azea Zalea, and GEMZ.
Myriam Jacob-Allard appears through a heavy door and greets us with an easy warmth, scooping us up and welcoming us into her world. We are immediately absorbed by an unexpected color-drenched stairwell. Every surface is saturated in a dense, glowing yellow that reads unmistakably as egg yolk, insulating us from the outside in as we make our ascent. We turn into a long hallway whose fragrant freshly waxed floor catches the light, reflecting it back upward so that the corridor seems to glow beneath our feet.
The evening, spearheaded by directors Sam Bardouil and Till Fellrath alongside patrons Monique Burger and Christine Würfel-Strauss, arrived at a fraught moment for Berlin, whose cultural scene faces funding cuts of roughly €130 million.
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.
Monia Ben Hamouda's work weaves calligraphy, material transformation and ancestral memory into sculptures and installations that oscillate between language and form. In conversation, we traced the conceptual and sensory threads of her practice, unfolding through key works that reflect on heritage, embodiment and translation. Using materials such as iron, stone and pigment, her installations become sites where history is not only referenced but physically felt.
In ChertLüdde, evocations abound: the show is a transcription of California (I've never been, but I imagine it to be sun drenched and a bit dehydrated), which is transposed onto the grid of the gallery in Schöneberg. Shells, dried stalks, bits of pottery, sea urchins, art left behind by visitors, are arranged on a stage (a duplication of the one found in Horvitz's garden in Los Angeles),
