Author: Daphne Whitaker

The landscape genre has long been a site where private perception meets collective meaning. In the work of Lisa Tahar (b. Leipzig, 1963), this encounter is conducted with notable economy. Working in oil on canvas, Tahar began painting in 2018 following retirement from a series of earlier professions, and she has since developed a body of river landscapes that combine meditative calm with an occasional, pointed civic subtext. Biography and Formation Tahar has lived in Leipzig throughout her life, and her four children are now adults. Her artistic practice is self-directed and began late. Rather than the academic training that…

Born in 1949 in Aalst, the Netherlands, Wim de Groot discovered his calling as an artist at an early age. At just fifteen, he expressed his ambition with a declaration that would shape his future: “I want to become a painter!” This early determination marked the beginning of a lifelong engagement with artistic expression, observation, and the exploration of human experience. De Groot’s artistic journey developed through years of study, experimentation, and professional involvement with art. In 1977, he presented his work publicly for the first time in Lochem, where it attracted attention from the regional press. One review described…

Bianca Biji remembers no time before drawing. By the age of three, she was already making marks and applying paint, and the habit never left her. Born in 1970 in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, she grew into an artist who treats a blank surface as an open question rather than a problem to be solved in advance. Where It Began From about twelve until nineteen, she studied at an art school with a focus on graphics. Those years gave her a grounding in drawing and the discipline of the printed line. Then, at twenty, she left Romania for Brussels, Belgium, and stayed.…

There is an old argument, quiet and unresolved, running beneath every painting Lib Mason makes: that beauty and discomfort are not opposites, but companions, and that one can be made to carry the other for as long as a viewer is willing to keep looking. An Inheritance, Repurposed Mason’s technical vocabulary comes from elsewhere, from Flemish panels and Renaissance workshops, from a tradition built on grisaille and glaze, where a painting begins in monochrome and only slowly, through repeated transparent layers, arrives at color and light. She did not inherit this method by accident. It was chosen, deliberately, roughly eight…

Before he was an artist known for canvases that speak in server codes, Yi Zhu spent years watching people compete for attention inside boardrooms, retail shelves, and advertising pitches. He ran a design company. He knew what it felt like to chase a client’s approval, to lose a pitch, to win an award and feel nothing shift underneath it. Long before “429 Too Many Requests” became the title of a painting, he had lived something close to its meaning, professionally, for years. That history matters, because it explains why 201 → 429 → 503, the series that has become central…

St. Gallen – The Kunstmuseum St. Gallen presents the first institutional solo exhibition in Switzerland by the internationally renowned artist Sheila Hicks from February 4 to May 14. Sheila Hicks’ imagination is limitless. The artist, who has been based in Paris since 1964, works with natural materials in vibrant hues. She is constantly knotting, weaving, and spinning new forms out of wool, linen, and silk. On the one hand, the artist was influenced by modernism, having studied painting at Yale University under Bauhaus master Josef Albers. She is, on the other hand, influenced by traditional crafts from several continents, which…

Linz , The Lentos Kunstmuseum presents Unforeseeable Occurrences by Anita Witek from January 27 to April 16. Anita Witek’s artistic output is centered on our visual habits and the reality of images and texts emerging in the mass media, which she investigates through the medium of photography. The artist is fascinated by the specific information that images record in addition to their principal subjects, which she uses as material for her collages. Her works reveal the originals’ latent aesthetic and ideological contents and transform them into the topic of independent associative stories expressed through images. The Lentos is exhibiting Anita…

Aarhus, Cindy Sherman: Tapestries will be on display at the ARoS Aarhus Art Museum  Cindy Sherman is well known for her long-running picture series in which she turns herself into characters. A new internet series debuted in 2017. Sherman began posting “selfies.” These stunning images, which comment on the phenomena of face altering apps or applications, have been given new grandeur and permanent significance through the use of the fine and recognized technique of tapestry. Sherman combines 21st century “face” technology with the traditional skill of tapestry production in Tapestries to produce new images that are rich in texture and…

Chicago, MCA Chicago presents Duane Linklater: mymothersside from March 11 to September 3, 2023. The Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) has announced the opening of a new exhibition, Duane Linklater: mymothersside, on March 11. The exhibit features the work of Duane Linklater, an artist who explores the exclusion of Indigenous content from museums and the contradictions of contemporary Indigenous life within settler systems of knowledge, representation, and value. The exhibition includes sculptures, video works, and digital prints on linen spanning the past decade of the artist’s practice, as well as a newly commissioned work for the MCA’s atrium. Linklater’s work…

Berlin, The Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in Berlin will reopen on June 2-4, 2023, with a sequence of blessings, concerts, lectures, offerings, performances, processions, readings, and rituals. The opening weekend Acts of Opening Again: A Choreography of Conviviality is a chance to welcome the public to the new HKW. All visitors are invited to participate in a performative installation by contributing gestures in the form of poems, songs, gifts, or other symbolic offerings as part of Bernardo Oyarzún’s work El Medán. NOT waiting…, a newly-commissioned performance by nora chipaumire & Germaine Acogny and concerts by Oumou Sangaré, Estrellas del Caribe, and Awilo…