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Superstudio designed 12 impossible ways of living
 
In 1971, Superstudio imagined twelve cities designed to solve the problems of human existence and came up with solutions so complete that there was barely any life left to live. A person wakes up in a five-cubit cell. The temperature is permanently set at 25°C. The humidity never changes. Food and every other necessity arrive automatically. There is no work to do, no reason to leave, and no one else to meet.
 
The room knows what its inhabitant wants before they have to ask. It also knows when they are unhappy. This is the 2,000-Ton City, one of twelve imaginary settlements described by Gian Piero Frassinelli and Superstudio in Twelve Cautionary Tales for...

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Raw Metal and Pale Blue Accents Give Mellow Cafe Its Identity
 
Mellow Cafe is an unbuilt interior concept for a compact takeaway coffee shop in Mulhouse, France. Developed by Wrong Door Studio, the project explores how a small commercial footprint can become a distinctive hospitality experience through a clear spatial strategy, expressive materials, and carefully integrated functional elements. The concept is built around efficiency and intuitive customer flow. Rather than filling the limited space with decorative elements, the design uses the architecture itself to organize the experience, from ordering and preparation to pick-up and product display. Functional zones are visually integrated into the...

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September 7, noon: It’s Labor Day but some labor has to be done. I see a young man at a cafe wearing a hat embroidered with the words “Contemporary Art Market.” If only he knew, I mutter, and bury my head back into my laptop. September 8, morning: I meet Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar in Chelsea. We talk about the rise of authoritarianism, the decline of democracy, and other depressing things. In the evening, this gloominess turns cathartic as he delivers a moving lecture at the CUNY Graduate Center in Manhattan. They serve a buffet but I don’t touch any of it. On my way out, I stop in front of an exhibit in the hallway to educate myself about the Battle of New York in 1776. Outside, the Empire State...

when the house disappears into the ground
 
Across China’s Loess Plateau, an entire house can disappear beneath a field. The dikengyuan begins with a courtyard excavated several meters into the earth, then expands sideways as vaulted rooms are carved from its walls. Seen from above, the agricultural landscape continues nearly uninterrupted. Only the rectangular opening gives the house away, a patch of sky surrounded by ground where we expect to find a roof.
 
Living here reverses some of the most familiar cues of domestic space. The earth moves from beneath your feet to around your body. Entering means descending, and exterior walls become geological mass.
 
Even though humans have lived this way for...

Modular Grid Holds Forest Prunings in a Ziggurat-Like Shelter
 
HUT-SPOT by m²ft architects stands on the edge of the woodland where the vegetation of the Romagna hills in Italy is slowly reclaiming an asphalted clearing, a former tennis court abandoned for decades. A threshold between two worlds with different logics, situated precisely on the boundary between them. It is here, at this point of transition between the man-made and nature reclaiming its space, that the pavilion finds its purpose, gathering prunings and dry branches from the woodland into a modular structure that arranges them to form a ziggurat within the parallelepiped framework, a layering of residues that is both primitive and...

By August, the Tribeca nightclub Vinyl had gone into a Peter Gatien-era meltdown. Time magazine ran a dramatic cover story the year prior (“What Ecstasy Does to Your Brain”) and the dancefloor had posters warning about plainclothes sting ops. There was still talcum powder on the floor for dancing, but euphoric substances had vanished. In all my Sundays of dancing at Vinyl, I had never thought of how close it was to the Twin Towers — until that Tuesday in September when, by nightfall, the pavement outside was stacked with plastic bags of socks, t-shirts, and sweatpants we had collected for tower survivors who were expected to be pulled out “any moment now.” We waited until midnight, and by then it was...

Five teams of designers, featuring architects and landscape designers, will compete for the project, expected to be completed by 2030

MAST Studio Balances Open Halls with Enclosed Exhibition Spaces
 
At Gary Tatintsian Gallery in Dubai Design District, MAST Studio brings two distinct settings for viewing art into one space: open white exhibition halls and an intimate museum room. Designed by Vladislav Gaiduk, founder of the multidisciplinary architecture studio, the 338-sqm interior responds to a brief for a flexible gallery that meets international curatorial standards and accommodates work ranging from paintings to installations. The layout began with an L-shaped unit. MAST reorganized it around a clear rectangular volume, placing an office area at the center and an exhibition hall on either side. A separate portion contains the museum...

Materials for the linocut kit in the Brooklyn Public Library's new craft supply catalog (photo courtesy Brooklyn Public Library) The Brooklyn Public Library (BPL) officially launched its first-ever lending program for craft supplies on Wednesday, September 9. Crochet hooks, thermal laminators, and button makers are among the 31 items now available to rent from the BPL Craft Supply Library. The library consists of craft kits, such as linecut sets and woodworking apparatuses, which can be borrowed for three weeks, and craft tools, which can be borrowed for one week. Patrons with an adult library card can take up to three craft kits and two craft tools home at a time, at no charge, proving a welcome...

The Greek entrepreneur Dimitris Daskalopoulos has donated fifty-one artworks—mostly by Greek artists—from his personal collection to four museums in Greece and Scotland as part of an ongoing philanthropic campaign to make contemporary art accessible to wider audiences. “This initiative seeks to ensure the long-term preservation of the works while sustaining an ongoing dialogue with the art […]

The 61st Venice Biennale is on view through late November, but fall is a time of beginnings, so it is only fitting that many other biennials and triennials opening across the world this season offer their own fresh starts. In a new triennial at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, design is wrested from its typical associations with materialism. A new biennial in Mérida in Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula features 75 artists who work with the word and idiom in pursuit of new fabulations. The days may get shorter in autumn, but as evidenced at this year's photography edition of the Museum of the City of New York Triennial, the night shift proffers its own forms of vitality. Inspired by sci-fi author...

A Connecticut auction house identified the stolen works in a private estate collection and helped return them

The School of Visual Arts (SVA) will be ending its graduate Photography, Video, and Related Media program in light of the institution's mounting deficit. SVA Provost and Vice President of Academic Affairs Jason Koth disclosed the program's termination in an email announcement shared with Hyperallergic.In the announcement, Koth said the MFA Photo candidates will be able to complete their degree without interruption, and that the program would close out in its 40th year with the Class of 2028's graduation. The provost wrote that the “painful decision” to shutter the program was a direct result of “SVA's ongoing economic challenges, the nationwide decline in enrollment in graduate-level...

Through brilliant oranges and moody shades of blue, Los Angeles-based artist Roberta Gentry renders vivid, balanced compositions that, as she says, take the senses seriously. Gentry has long been interested in the relationship between the constructed and the natural, cultivating abstract, biomorphic forms scaffolded by tall columns. Gravitating toward symmetry and restricted palettes, Gentry paints rhythmic pieces that adhere to an underlying grid. Every painting is the result of multiple layers of thinned acrylic, which build into subtle gradients that dissipate across the canvas. “The Rose Lattice” (2026), acrylic on canvas, 36 x 48 inches The paintings shown here are part of that artist’s upcoming...

A figure appears to have been subsumed by a bookcase, and another is swathed in a green sleeping bag beneath a makeshift tent. Whether navigating a bathtub fitted with oars or sleeping in a bed while stacked like pancakes, the figures in Sara Anstis’ atmospheric drawings are immersed in curious activities. Hints of mysterious narratives, nursery rhymes, art historical iconography, and ancient symbolism make their way into enchanting and peculiar tableaux. Anstis conjures a timeless air in the small-scale works of her solo show Pastels at Olney Gleason. Over the past couple of years, her palette has shifted to more muted, autumnal tones in contrast to her earlier works that featured vibrant, saturated hues...

The famed French artist Claude Lévêque, who represented the nation at the 2009 Venice Biennale, has been ordered to stand trial in a French criminal court for rape and sexual assault of three minors, Libération has revealed. His lawyers have filed an appeal, which is expected to further delay a trial in the northern Paris department of Seine-Saint-Denis; it has already taken years for the proceedings to reach this stage. According to court documents leaked to Libération, Lévêque is accused of using “his position and his aura as a renowned contemporary artist to create a context conducive to committing the sexual acts against the minors concerned and to establish, on a moral level, his influence over...

London’s Fourth Plinth on Trafalgar Square has a new art star, and it’s New York–based artist Tschabalala Self, whose sculpture Lady in Blue is the 16th artwork to feature there since 1998. The bronze sculpture shows a Black woman walking. Donning a baby blue dress with a slit and matching heels, she is “not a remote historic figurehead—but a tribute to everyday women. Monumental in scale—but at the same time relatable. London has already fallen in love with her,” said Justine Simons, London’s deputy mayor for culture and the creative industries, in an Instagram post. Among the artworks to have previously appeared on the Fourth Plinth are Ecce Homo by Mark Wallinger in 1999, Alison Lapper...

Shouting and a shoving match erupted as Italian-American artist Sergio Furnari unveiled his unpermitted life-size bronze memorial to slain right-wing activist Charlie Kirk in Times Square on Thursday, according to video footage posted by Al Jazeera and other media reports. The sculpture was uncovered at 2:23 p.m., the same moment the Turning Point USA founder was assassinated one year ago at a speaking event at Utah Valley University in front of some 3,000 people. According to Getty, the sculpture was displayed on the back of a pickup truck that departed immediately after the unveiling. The artist self-funded the sculpture, to the tune of $100,000, he said, telling the Guardian that he aimed to raise millions...

An ancient mausoleum complex was found under a ruined citadel and uncovered by archaeologists in Peru’s northern coast, officials in the nation announced this week. This is the first time experts have found an untouched tomb in the city. The Chan Chan site, once the capital of the Chimu kingdom, which ruled over much of Peru’s coast prior to the Inca, has been undergoing excavations for decades, with much of the area plundered due to centuries of conquest by the Inca, Spanish colonizers, and looters. Near present-day Trujillo, Chan Chan was the biggest city of the Americas in its prime, complete with gardens, plazas, pyramids, and mausoleums spread across nine square miles. “It was a feeling of anxiety...

The Kanal-Centre Pompidou, acollaboration between the Centre Pompidou and the Brussels-based institution Kanal, will finally open on November 28 after a decade of planning, renovations, and delays. Designed around an Art Deco building that formerly housed a Citroën garage, the new 430,000-square-foot complex at Place de l’Yser on the banks of the Charleroi-Brussels Canal is Brussels’ only major […]

A installation developed by the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and a microbes museum in the city’s zoo will depict microbes found in the Old Master painting

To mark the 25th anniversary of 9/11, former US President George W. Bush has officially revealed a new series of paintings about that fateful day and the fallout from it. Titled “Remembering 9/11,” the series is making its debut at the George W. Bush Presidential Center in Dallas, Texas. The paintings feature subjects such as American flags, grieving people, and images of Bush himself, addressing a reeling nation in 2001. The works “reflect on the courage, sacrifice, and resilience that emerged from one of the most defining moments in American history,” per a description on the website for the center, where the works will remain on view through September 30. (They do not address the criticism the Bush...

An installation from Marina Abramović floats "Manhattan's next gimmick"

The $30,000 unrestricted cash prize will be awarded at a ceremony with the Queen of Bhutan in attendance

There are few controls over how mayors spend the Overnight Visitor Levy income, according to plans announced earlier this week

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Raphaël Gaultier on Instagram

Have you ever imagined a pear or an apple with a personality? If the fruit suddenly had two eyes and a stem-like nose, it might look a little like PÉPET, the palm-size “paper friend” produced by TAKEO Co., Ltd. Originally designed by Masae Nagao, the colorful characters come with names like “Dandel,” “Fuji,” and “Sky.” They’re each composed of more than 400 of layers of colorful paper, and they adorably wobble and ruffle when handled. Inspired by the saturated red and green of apples and their leaves, TAKEO will release a new edition named “Pomme” on October 14. Follow updates on the company’s Instagram. Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and...

I’m overdue for some bel canto and WCO has historically done it well.

The Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation on September 10 named the eight recipients of its 2026 Rabkin Prize for arts journalists. Each will receive an unrestricted grant of $50,000. Established in 2017, the honor recognizes the contributions of journalists writing about the visual arts for a general audience and has distributed $4.1 million since its inception. Writers are nominated […]

Qatar Museums has announced that Doha will welcome a permanent pavilion devoted to Gerhard Richter this autumn. The building will occupy the city’s MIA Park, outside the Museum of Islamic Art. It is being designed by Richter himself, in collaboration with Selldorf Architects, the firm behind the recent renovations of New York’s Frick Collection and London’s National […]

In Mesoamerican folklore, the jaguar is a prominent nagual, a being with the power to morph into an animal. Moving from one realm into another allows this hybrid creature to act as a spiritual guide through unknown territories. For Anna Ortiz, the jaguar is also a fitting metaphor for entering into a mythic borderland. Drawing on her Mexican-American heritage, the artist renders remote landscapes through limited, yet vibrant palettes. Ortiz favors subtle shifts in tone and saturation, painting jungle terrain in shades of blues, greens, and pinks. The focused palette emphasizes the fantastic world we’ve entered into, one that appears variable and as a manifestation of myth. “Inundada” In her new body of...

By Jody Zellen Eileen Cowin's thoughtful, intimate, and arresting retrospective Between Panic and Paradise prompted me to take Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida off the shelf. His complex reflections on the essence of photography resonate with Cowin's exhibition. Cowin stages intimate private moments and frames them with precision and exactitude. Blending reality and fiction, she seeks to document the emotional connection that forms with her subjects — be it her family, herself and her twin...

A decade ago or so, parents were finding loom bands in the couch cushions and underfoot during a craze for the analog toys. Kids made bracelets and other items, and in the vein of LEGO and other build-your-own entertainment, YouTube creators provided tutorials for elaborate projects. The toy fad may have waned, but for artist Hannah Buechler, the small, colorful rubber bands proved an accessible material for an inventive application. At a glance, Buechler’s works appear like expressionist paintings, with gestural brushstrokes and carefully chosen colors. But our senses are piqued by the unusual texture, and upon closer inspection, we observe thousands of loom bands in vibrant relief. Loom band detail...

In Lise Davidsen's new album Lise Davidsen: Verdi, which drops tomorrow, the singing is thrilling but the interpretations are limp.

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kokooma’s Website
kokooma on Instagram

Parterre Box offers an (almost) comprehensive introduction to the sopranos headlining Mozart productions in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco this fall.

This season marks the third annual visit of The English Concert to American shores, this time with a production of Handel’s Alessandro.

In eclectic productions of Carmen, Ariadne auf Naxos, and Così fan tutte in Salzburg, A.J. Goldmann finds vindication for Markus Hinterhaüser at the end of the intendant's final Festival.

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Shawne Brown’s Website
Shawne Brown on Instagram

For three decades, Harriet Mena Hill has been a resident of South East London. This area is known in the art world for its schools, such as the esteemed Camberwell College of Arts. But Hill and others who lived there for some time remember it as a historically working-class and, at times, impoverished area of […]
The post Harriet Mena Hill Brings Crumbling Concrete Back To Life first appeared on Hi-Fructose Magazine.

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Chiemeka Offor’s Website
Chiemeka Offor on Instagram

By Barbara Patterson Trans femme artist Pau Pescador's latest exhibition, Amor Prohibido, at Tyler Park Presents explores the volatility of becoming visible in a public space that criminalizes the existence of queer people. As anti-transgender legislation increases and security technologies evolve, the visibility of gender-nonconforming individuals becomes more precarious. A 2015 report by the National Institute of Standards and Technology describes how "intruders" in gender-segregated areas...

Maude Corriveau  
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
 
Maude Corriveau’s Website
Maude Corriveau on Instagram

Marigold Santos’s spectral forms are as layered with detail as they are with metaphor. Swirling amid marbled backgrounds in a feverish dance, they serve as critical examinations of cultural injustice. Their textures materialize their celestial properties as they become fierce teachers of colonial violence, problematic histories, and forgotten ancestry. Covertly, her haunting figural silhouettes aim […]
The post Celestial Stance: The Art of Marigold Santos first appeared on Hi-Fructose Magazine.

By Betty Ann Brown "What is Art, monsieur, but Nature concentrated?"—Honoré de Balzac "Art distills sensation and embodies it with enhanced meaning."—Miguel de Unamuno Hiroko Yoshimoto's paintings concentrate nature into radiant and dynamic beauty, distilling visual sensation into poetic and environmental significance. Throughout the 2020s, Yoshimoto has worked on two series of paintings about nature: Biodiversity and Of Infinite Variety. Both series are based on observation of the natural...

By Julie Faith There is something strange about returning to a place you once knew well after being away for a long time. You recognize the architecture before you recognize what the years have done to you. As I passed through the gate at Corey Helford Gallery, crossed the lot, and headed up the stairs, I felt ridiculously, wonderfully giddy. Kid-in-a-candy-store giddy. I have been away from the gallery and much of the Los Angeles art world, but somewhere between the gate and the stairs, I...

By Victoria Thomas Altadena-based artist James Griffith greets me at his studio, located in a refurbished 1920s firehouse diagonally across the street from the gleaming silver lagomorph of the restored Bunny Museum, by saying "Hi, I just started putting a galaxy in the armpit of a penguin." Great cities announce their identities through their monuments. New York City has the Statue of Liberty, St. Louis the Gateway Arch, Chicago the Cloud Gate, Philadelphia the original LOVE sculpture. And...

Skeletons, tombstones, and serpents. These are just a few of the iconic images pre-v ailing throughout the works of Morgan Sorensen—all relating to the themes of struggle, sadness, pain, and death. While anyone might agree that these graphic designs would all make for killer band T’s, there’s quite a bit of depth surrounding the artist’s […]
The post Future Relics: The Art of Morgan Sorensen first appeared on Hi-Fructose Magazine.

The body is an obsession for Monica Piloni. Whether it’s a hollowed face in the Samieses series or the eerie dolls depicted in “Ilegais”, a majority of Monica Piloni’s sculptures confront the human form. And while consistently returning to the body may seem confining to some, it’s a pursuit marked by liberation for the Brazilian […]
The post The Disconcertingly Honest Self-Portrait Sculptures of Monica Piloni first appeared on Hi-Fructose Magazine.

This article originally appeared in Hi-Fructose issue 42, which is sold out. See Matthew Grabelsky’s new solo show at Thinkspace gallery here.  Matthew Grabelsky had studied tradition in Florence, lived in the cultural nuclei of Europe, but hadn’t yet found the idea that would set him apart as an artist living in the twenty-first century. […]
The post Human/Nature: Animals Go Underground In the Paintings of Matthew Grabelsky first appeared on Hi-Fructose Magazine.

The week of Art Basel is for me the most compelling moment in the city, and this year it reaffirmed its position as the most closely watched annual event in the international art calendar.

For an artist to return to painting after life‑altering injury is to witness the human spirit at its most unguarded. In such a moment, understanding the forces that carry you back to the page becomes all‑important, and in Joel Bradish Nichols’ case, the answers lie in the people and pursuits he had cherished. In a coma for months after a near‑fatal accident, his re‑emergence into artistic practice becomes inseparable from a narrative of devotion and determination — a surrounding spiritedness...

By Tabea Martin ‘Me Myself’ brings together four artists — Anna‑Lena Ruff, Debora Schultheiss, Tabea Martin, and Eva Schick — whose works move across differing styles and energies yet find in this art space an unforced coherence. I sense a shared thread of observation and inner dialogue, and a contemplation of natural female presence. The exhibition is currently showing at the Anja Edith Brinckmann Galerie, Basel. From here, the individual narratives invite a closer reading. By Anna-Lena...

Limited Edition print by Gerhard Wichler It’s been a distinctly textured start to the year at THE GAZE, where invigorating artistic narratives emerge across forms and disciplines, threading their way through an unsettled climate. I’m delighted to share the completion and publication of a candid, close‑range interview with abstract artist Gerhard Wichler—an exchange that brought a refreshing clarity amid the mayhem of today’s world. You can read our fascinating interview here. We also mark an...