Ugo Rondinone

by Renata Mosci Sanfourche

*this interview was originally published in the SS2026 issue of ICON.

It is both difficult to imagine and impossible to ignore that Ugo Rondinone’s Harlem home was once a working church. Today, the space stands as a living expression of his practice—a harmonious interior born out of the contrasts of the world outside. Yet it is precisely within this threshold, between the profane and the sacred, the dark and the light, the inner and the outer, that his home comes to life. “The space becomes a place where these opposites are allowed to coexist, reflecting the complexity of being alive,” he said. Throughout the 20,000-square-foot building, Rondinone juxtaposes an immaculate collection of artworks. Pieces by Sarah Lucas, Valentin Carron, Hans Schärer, Alan Shields, Latifa Echakhch, Peter Halley, Urs Fischer and Cady Noland, among others, form a meditative symphony on the human condition, a score that resounds throughout Rondinone’s practice.

You’re driving through Harlem when you spot a Romanesque church with a for-sale sign. What goes through your head? What seduces you?

It was a rainy Sunday in April 2011. My lat e husband, John Giorno, and I were driving from upstate New York into the city. We had made this drive nearly every weekend for years, but that day we took an unusual route—through Harlem instead of the FDR—to reach downtown. That’s when we saw the sign. We stopped and took a photo of the contact number. The next day, I called the agent and requested a site visit. The church was in poor condition—abandoned for five years and recently foreclosed. A week later, I returned with an architect to assess what it would take to bring the building back to life. The numbers made sense, as did the price. I sold my downtown loft and used the proceeds to purchase the church. We renovated for two years, and I moved in March 2013.

In 2012, you built a live-and-work house in a forest clearing near Zurich, Switzerland. You referred to it as a gesamtkunstwerk, meaning a total work of art. At what point does a house also become an artwork?

A house becomes an artwork at the moment it stops being only a container for life and starts actively shaping that life. For me, it happens when architecture, light, time, objects, rituals, and the surrounding landscape are composed with the same intentionality as a sculpture or an installation. It is a gesamtkunstwerk because nothing in it is neutral: the proportions, the materials, the silence, the forest outside, the rhythm of days and seasons. Living there is not separate from making art; it is part of the work. The house holds memory, labor, solitude, repetition, and care. It asks you to slow down, to be present, to listen. At that point, the house is no longer just functional—it becomes a lived sculpture, activated by time and by the body moving through it.

When you decided to invest in this church—renovate and curate its spaces—did you view it as a challenge, or is inhabiting and transforming places a natural process?

Building and renovating have always felt natural to me, almost instinctive. My father was a stonemason, and as a young teenager I spent Saturdays helping him hand-shape stones for river-stone dry walls. Each stone had to be lifted, examined, and gently altered with a few deliberate hammer strikes until it found its place within the larger structure. That early experience taught me that transforming a space is not about force or domination, but about listening, understanding what already exists and guiding it toward balance and cohesion.

How does your approach change between architecture projects and art installations for museums and institutional spaces?

I do not experience a clear separation between architecture and art installations. For me, both are practices of holding space. They are ways of framing emptiness, light, and time so something can unfold within them. Whether a space is inhabited daily or encountered briefly, my concern is the same: how it receives the body, how it shapes attention, how it allows silence, vulnerability, and reflection to exist. Architecture extends the encounter over a lifetime; an installation condenses it into a moment. But both are ultimately about creating conditions for presence. On your website, we can filter your work between ‘day’ and ‘night’. These contrasts are important in your world where we’re often juggling the perception of the inner versus the outer, the natural versus the man-made, the sacred and the profane, and so on.

Was it important for you to create this type of contrast in the Harlem space?

That contrast continues naturally in the way I organize artworks by other artists within the living space. I am drawn to polarity as a way of creating awareness to overcome the common value system of good and bad. In the Harlem house, one wall holds darker, more sinister works, while the opposite wall gathers pieces that are luminous, open, and bright. The two are not in conflict; they exist in dialogue. Living between these poles heightens perception, it mirrors the oscillation between inner and outer states, between vulnerability and affirmation. The space becomes a place where these opposites are allowed to coexist, reflecting the complexity of being alive.

What do windows represent in your work? Is there any relationship between them and the stained-glass windows we see on the church’s facade, or the Urs Fischer glass in the bathroom? Was your recent exhibition “The Rainbow Body” at Sadie Coles HQ in any way inspired by this Harlem property?

The window has always functioned as a metaphor for both revealing and obscuring. This idea goes back to my very first exhibition, where I presented four large ink landscapes while the gallery windows were boarded up. Visitors were deliberately cut off from outside reality so they could fully enter the artificial, constructed world of the exhibition.

Like in Romanticism, my window sculptures operate as vehicles of longing and desire, thresholds through which emotions, memories, and projections are cast into an unknown future. They frame absence as much as presence. In that sense, the stained-glass windows on the church facade and the Urs Fischer glass in the bathroom are not decorative elements, but extensions of this ongoing inquiry into light, distance, and interiority.

“The Rainbow Body” continues this investigation, not as a literal response to the Harlem property, but as part of the same sensibility: a sustained reflection on perception, transformation, and the fragile boundary between inner experience and the world beyond.

You’re one of the first to collect Franz West’s furniture and they’re prominent pieces in the church. What caught your attention in them and how do they make you feel?

My relationship with Franz West began in the late 1980s, when I was studying in Vienna. What started as an artistic connection slowly grew into a friendship rooted in shared conversations about art, life, and vulnerability. In the 1990s, we began exchanging works, which felt less like collecting and more like an ongoing dialogue between our practices.

His furniture always resonated with me because it refuses hierarchy. It is neither purely sculpture nor purely functional object, but something in between—awkward, intimate, human. Living with these pieces, they activate the space in a very physical and emotional way. They invite the body to participate, to rest, to linger, while also carrying the presence of Franz himself. They make me feel accompanied, grounded, and gently unsettled, reminding me that art can be humorous, fragile, and deeply alive all at once.

How did this Harlem home evolve with you over the years?

A room, an apartment, a house grows alongside you, almost imperceptibly. It begins to carry your breath, your routines, your solitude. The Harlem home has changed as I have changed—it has held moments of joy and grief, periods of intense work and quiet withdrawal. Over time, it became less a place I shaped and more a place that shaped me in return. It stands as a private testimony to a life lived from within, marked not by events, but by presence.

Many years ago one could say it’s unexpected to find a Swiss-born living in Harlem. It may still be something unexpected. What do you like about Harlem and how do you interact with the neighborhood?

Harlem has always been a place of transformation. Since its founding, it has continually reinvented itself—shaped by successive waves of inhabitants and cultures. Once a predominantly white Protestant neighborhood, it later was home to large Italian and Jewish communities before emerging as a center of black cultural life during the Harlem Renaissance, and continuing to evolve into the diverse, multiethnic neighborhood it is today, with Hispanic, Black, and white residents living side by side.

This constant change is not an exception, but part of Manhattan’s deeper character. Its neighborhoods are never static; they shift, adapt, and renew themselves. I find that vitality deeply compelling. Living in Harlem means inhabiting a place where history is layered rather than erased, where cultural memory coexists with everyday life. My relationship to the neighborhood is grounded in that awareness—being present, attentive, and respectful of the rhythms and histories that continue to shape it.

Luc Tuymans

by Renata Mosci Sanfourche

Something about Luc Tuymans’ upcoming show ‘The Fruit Basket’ reads different from his previous exhibitions. The paintings are larger, more complex, and brighter than the works we’re used to seeing him present. Last week, when we sat down to speak about his practice, and the rigor that makes Tuymans the most important painter of our times—he’s credited with reviving painting in the 1980s and influencing a generation of artists—I left with an urgent reminder: it’s impossible, and irrelevant, to try and escape today’s reality.

In just a few days, at David Zwirner’s Los Angeles gallery, visitors will discover a series of new paintings by the Belgian artist Luc Tuymans.

They will encounter The Fruit Basket, the largest painting on view that lends its name to the exhibition. No matter where one stands, it will be impossible to avoid the five-by-sixteen-meter blue image fragmented into a nine-canvas grid and hanging as one piece. As one makes their way closer to the painting, they’ll notice it was once an iPhone picture of a fruit basket—we can see the artist’s thumbs on the bottom edges of the work. When one is but steps away from the painting, their proximity will start to impair their perception and the fruit basket will disintegrate into purposeful brush strokes.

Just like fruits rot, the painting also dissolves, reminding spectators in the United States of their proximity to the degeneration of America. Distance is integral to all of Tuymans’ work, as are the complex moral questions he observes. Over the years, it’s the scale of his paintings that have changed. Today, what reads different in this series is his achievement with light, with color and contrast, and Tuymans explains why: this is the first time he’s been able to paint digital light.

What follows below is a conversation that attempts to trace the evolution of his work. The more you understand about Tuymans’ capacity to capture reality—not romance—and his responsibility and self-awareness with his medium, the more you can appreciate the distance he sets between his work and his spectators, and thus the disintegration of his images, the fogginess in his paintings as the reality of the human condition. These are forces he casts to help us rethink our conception of the past, of humanity and their moral concerns, and the value of painting within this landscape.

Your work can be extremely difficult to process at different levels. For one it’s quite violent, sometimes even painful to sit with, and these qualities present themselves as early as when you started. Where does this feeling come from?

I don’t know, maybe it has to do with the trajectory of life itself and my vision of the world which is not really that optimistic, it’s more of a pessimistic feel for the world because you have to be prepared for things that can happen.

I’m also convinced that in a way things that are making people happy will last 30 seconds. The consequences of violence in any which way or form are gigantic. This also goes to the visual level in the sense that it creates a different form of visuals. That fascinated me and it’s why I also never wanted to make art from art or for art’s sake, but mostly art based upon either an experience or the real so to speak. That’s why I sort of tended towards that notion of a reality.

Were you exposed to violence during your upbringing?

Up until I was 15 I was probably to a certain extent autistic, I was very quiet and all that, and I was bullied at school during that period until I eventually grew and it all turned around. So that probably also enhanced this notion of the idea of cruelty and especially kids, how cruelty has an element of ignorance that plays out, being uninformed, not knowing, not taking the time to know things, and then actually this blunt element of violence which is something that probably enhanced that situation.

I said this many times already—the marriage of my parents was not really happy. There was also the situation that they both were in different camps during the same world war. There was always this situation while we were eating where this came up, there was this tension that was constantly there on different levels.

There’s also my assessment of course that after the second world war, Europe as an empire was dissolved, the colonies were dissolved, and this is sort of a building block for where we are now. Look where we are now. If you do this whole trajectory it explains a lot, and at the same time it doesn’t. That is the conundrum we find ourselves in, and I find this conundrum quite interesting.

In your catalogue raisonné, your paintings are documented starting in 1978 when you were 20 years old. What questions were you asking yourself then?

I was very young. First, painting was quite a problem during that time because it was seen as an antique. I had to revalidate it in a way that would make sense and that’s why I came up with the idea of the authentic falsification.

At first it was quite regressive and I wanted to make work that looked older than it actually was. I wanted to continue painting, because painting is all about the touch, and it’s a medium that grew on me and was appropriate. In the beginning it was very juvenile, it was very existential and tormented which I started to hate and that’s why I stopped painting from 1980 to 1985 when I started working with film, and then I came back to painting informed by film.

Can you talk a little bit about this torment?

The typical sort of romantic idea of the artist who is not doomed but in a sense feels this sort of weight with the world. It’s a selfish proposition and it’s a kind of stupid and naïve one, it doesn’t have enough distance actually. In order to create visuals you need distance.

Through the lens of the camera I achieved that distance and then I could go back. Because I evolved from Super 8 to Super 16 to 35mm, it became expensive, that was one thing. The other thing was that I didn’t have the right script. Then I started to paint again and I found out that this was really an evaluation I’d been making over the last five years. It enabled me to actually paint things that I didn’t have the distance to paint what I wanted to paint then.

There was also the connection between film and painting. I would be a very bad photographer because I would never be in the moment. With film and painting you can approach the image because it’s a different assessment. I mean you can overpaint a painting. You can actually edit in the lens while you’re filming, you can approach the image, so that was quite interesting as a perspective.

Distance with the spectator is also important to you.

Every great artwork is about positioning, and positioning on different levels, and what you mean about how the work is relevant, but also positioning towards the spectator. Even old masters have a real sense about how that will work.

For example, Velázquez used to work with an elongated pencil on a stick in order to see what the distance measurement would be for him, but also the spectator. The distance you measure between the image and the spectator is actually part of the work, and that’s why when you see an image of mine at a distance it will sort of make sense. It’s also important for me to work from a distance. That’s also why I work with a hand mirror that puts the image upside down, to see how it really works. Once you get closer to the image it will sort of disintegrate.

Can you explain this distance and the detachment this creates in your work perhaps through the 1992 series Der Diagnostische Blick?

I was always interested in medicine to a certain extent. I had my opening at the Kunsthalle and at that point I hadn’t painted a lot of portraits. The ones I painted were portraits that I dreamt up and that were halfway self-portraits. Those were the ones from the ‘70s, most of them I destroyed and overpainted, some of them still survive but not many.

So I wanted to paint figures again but not in terms of a psychological perspective. At the opening, I found a psychoanalyst and I asked if they still had these books students use from photographed subjects, with people they would use to make a diagnosis. He said he’d send me these books and out of that I culminated a whole series which is called A Diagnostic View.

It’s interesting because it’s the most naturalistic in a sense, but at the same time this was also the first time I started to apply paint in a horizontal way so that it flattens the surface of the painting and makes it into a barrier where you cannot enter. The paintings turns into a symptom and although it’s very naturalistic it’s missing the real completely. That was the angle.

You’ve said before that Our New Quarters (1986) isn’t your most famous painting but the most important one. Why?

It’s important because it’s about a taboo and because I never lived through the second world war, so there was a moral problem of could you touch up to this specific content. This particular painting came about because I found a book by Alfred Kantor in a bookshop in Antwerp from 1979. Alfred Kantor had survived three concentration camps—Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, and Schwarzheide.

A couple of works were culminated out of that, this one and Schwarzheide (1986). The first one was based on this postcard. What was interesting was that he didn’t write a diary, he made a whole book with drawings. In the beginning of the book he glued these postcards which were handed out in the very beginning when he was in Theresienstadt—a sort of mass model camp they used in propaganda. They gave the inmates these postcards to send to their relatives. Of course he had written in Czech, because he was a Czech Jew, in Czech this is our new quarters. In New York—because he died in ‘79, he lived in New York—he glued them in the book and underneath he wrote Our New Quarters, which is as if nothing had changed in between which I found interesting.

I used the backdrop of a military green color which gets darker on the edges, and then very fast made the contour of the Kasematte, which was an existing building in which they were all gathered. The interesting point is when he was freed he was repatriated to the same spot where he departed from after surviving the whole thing by the Russians, they were repatriated after this Kasematte in Theresienstadt, and he stole a box with these postcards.

By using a sort of white so slightly mixed with yellow undertone, it sort of lights up and gives the idea of a subtitle nearly, so it becomes like a documentary nearly. In that sense it’s an autonomous painting as is the Gas Chamber that came later and so on.

You understand yourself as a Flemish painter and you’re attentive to the lineage you’re carrying forward in that role. You love Jan Van Eyck, you trust in the work of your Flemish predecessors, and you demonstrate an enormous sense of responsibility. Why is this important to you?

When I was nine years old, I was in front of a Van Eyck painting and I saw this and I thought I can’t forget it, this is it. It was an extreme form of perfection. It was important for the entire Renaissance because it was the first time there was enough distance to open the window to the world.

The brothers Van Eyck did not completely invent oil painting but they perfected it. It was then imported into Italy and enabled Leonardo da Vinci to make his first masterpiece. He also had a very interesting motto, if I can, which means I’m big on humility but behind that I have gigantic ambitions.

What’s more important to understand is that the entirety of Belgium, which is a dreamt up country—and a young one, it’s younger than the United States—was given back to the Dutch after the Napoleonic Wars and nobody knew what to do with it, the Rothschilds bought it, it was a tax paradise and they put a king on it.

Flanders was also a region, never a country, it was always under foreign rule, but it was important because of that. There was no time to be romantic or rational like the French, or romantic like the Germans, there was this opportunism within the idea of survival. So the element of the real is really important.

To give an example, people talk about [James] Ensor and say he’s grotesque. He’s not grotesque, he’s a real precursor of expressionism as a soul within that framework. Then you have Magritte whose most famous painting, La Trahison des Images, where you see a pipe and under which he writes, this is not a pipe, of course not because it’s the image of the pipe.

So it’s much more about the real in this part of the world than something else, and that’s what connects it back to Van Eyck, who by heightening the real was able to contract itself from the mnemonic imagery of Christianity, opening it to the world. That is an important statement.

How do you overcome the influence of Van Eyck?

I’m not influenced by Van Eyck because I could never do that, so I’m not even going to try doing that. You have to accept you’re a dilettante in this iteration, accept your position, and work from there. I don’t also see any purpose in trying to mimic it, because that would be impossible and not really interesting. It’s just that you have to validate it for what it is.

In this process, where do you find your freedom?

When I’m working. Although I prepare everything extremely well—I make a lot of drawings—it takes a lot of time before I start the painting process. When I actually start painting it goes pretty fast. At that point, I don’t want to think anymore on the canvas. Some painters do, but I don’t. There are exceptions, there are painters who have changed, but very few. In that sense I know very well what I’m doing, but nevertheless you don’t know everything; there’s always something that sort of escapes you. By concentrating and letting the intelligence flow into the hands instead of the brain, you get an element which is extremely intentional, which is extremely nervous, which is extremely poignant. The first three hours of painting are hell, but when it starts to fall together that’s when the picture starts and you can do things that with the naked eye you know nobody would see but that are fundamental to the image in itself. That’s specific pleasure, and it’s also the pleasure of painting. If I wouldn’t have this tension and this pleasure of doing it I would just discard the work and then I would not do it anymore.

What happens to you at this precise moment when everything that’s inside your head becomes physical?

I don’t think about it. I’m activated. I’m doing it. It takes so much concentration I don’t want to think, I just want to do what I’m doing. As I said the intelligence goes from the head to the hands which is a different intelligence. And I think that’s very important. It’s not that I set out to make a painting in one day, because in the early days I painted for much longer, but at a certain point it grew organically to set myself this sort of situation to go through.

It also changed when I started no longer living in the studio, when I destroyed a lot of things because I worked a lot on it. During the relationship with my first girlfriend, when I was able to move to her place and use my apartment as a studio, I could make this distance, then disturb it and start to work to make a painting in a day, or paint to a point where I would say okay, maybe little changes the day after, but to come back the next day and look at it, if it worked or not. If not, I would destroy and overpaint it. Now I can afford to throw it away and start again in a new canvas.

Do you ever work from your own memory? Could you paint something that’s not visible?

I did work from my memory. There are some works solely made on memory. In the beginning it was a bit more. There were memories from drawings I made and reconstructed into paintings. It still happens, it all depends, it’s a cluster of different things.

Postmemory is a concept Marianne Hirsch developed at Columbia University. She defines it as: “the relationship the generation after bears to the personal, collective, and cultural trauma of those who came before-to the experiences they remember only by means of stories, images, and behaviors among which they grew up.”

One of my first works about memory was the painting I made about the brother of my mother who died during the war. The house was burned down so no photographs were left, only an oil painting in three-quarters which I turned frontal. At that point I was also really impressed by the frontal imagery of Sandar, which is completely dishonest in a sense because it’s a posed image, so it’s a presumption or an assumption of somebody. There, I understood that every form of memory is completely inadequate, and its inadequacy is actually the sort of ambiguity that makes the visual into something interesting, because it actually works on different levels; it works on presumptions, it works on assumptions, and it also has an element of premonition within it. Those are all the uncertainties that pile up within the imaginative proposition of making an imagery, which is always layered—it’s not one layer, it’s several layers. That’s what makes it important, because it will make you doubt the imagery, and doubting an image is important because it works on your brain and it works on your memory.

There was a museum director from Honolulu who hated my work, and when he saw my show at the Tate Modern in 2004 he hated it even more, until he started to dream about it. Then he became a fan. Painting works through time, over time, with time. It’s a very specific slow medium in that sense.

In past interviews, you’ve talked about tonality and a sensibility to light that’s particular to the region of artists you come from. Can you develop on this?

As we look out of the window right now it’s mostly gray here, but the gray has a certain luminosity. I don’t live in California, if I lived in California or Spain the shadows would be different. So in that sense the luminosity is something that eventually always ends up in the tonality. Tonality is an uncertainty within how you perceive culture. Tonality, unlike pure color, creates depth, real depth in a painting, not just a perspective, but real depth in how you assess it, and that is probably to a certain extent linked to the region.

The Fruit Basket is your most recent work on view. Looking at the past 50 years, how has your work changed? Has your process evolved?

The process has changed continuously because we live in a different world. Already the light of the digital is interesting, you can’t get away with it.

When I was given the Max Beckmann prize at the Städelschule, I had to work with the collection, I had to talk to the students, give lectures, and make a big exhibition. I made an exhibition choice about the whole collection, which I showed, but I was also asked to put one of my works in the museum at a specific space. So I shared a space with Max Beckmann and Fernand Khnopff, The Game Warden (1883), because it’s a painting I remembered, and it was actually an image I thought would fit in well. But it didn’t because it was digital light. In a sense you cannot get away from the contemporary, you will evolve if you like or dislike it, it’s going to have an impact. I came to the conclusion that you cannot fight new media, that’s stupid because that’s a fight you can’t win, so it’s better to incorporate it into the toolbox, and in that sense of course things will change.

Now, with The Fruit Basket this is quite imminent, and also with the Illuminations in the show. We show very enlarged images with a sort of dark border that I painted around them, and the fact that they become parallelograms, they’re not really straight. You can see there that the light is enhanced. For the first time I was able to paint digital light. The same is actually happening with the 9-piece sort of The Fruit Basket that you see, so of course it changes continuously.

It took me a long time to assess the idea of quantas. I was always afraid of going over my contrast, so a lot of the imagery looked over-developed on the vanishing point, which is interesting. Now three years I enabled myself to use more color and also to go deeper into the contrast, but a long sort of trajectory to actually come to that.

What does this deeper contrast do to the work for a spectator?

It will make the work and its experience different.

It’s also interesting in museum shows to see—especially the big show I did in Beijing, The Past—how the size grew, how the touch, I mean the way how paint was applied became loose or different than the concise things in the beginning. Also the early works are now 40 years old and already retrieved themselves in a very different way. That’s an interesting juxtaposition, it’s something that’s not completely controllable but on the other hand it grows in a very organic way and has a logic of its own.

In addition to painting, you also have a curatorial practice.

I thought the curatorial practice was an interesting experience, to have to work with another artist’s work. I worked on a big show for China which was art from the 15th century in the lowlands in combination with old Chinese masters from the same time period until the 20th century, which was shown in the Palais des Beaux Art and in the Forbidden City. The second venue was together with Ai Weiwei, where we did contemporary Belgian and Chinese art.

The interesting part is that you can open up the situation to include young artists, which I find really interesting. In the other way, with the old masters, you can make a different point, you can make a different assessment, different worldview which you oppose. So it broadens the scope where you get the idea you’re not just only part of a market that’s a system which has become corporate. So it’s kind of a good antidote against that.

In your lecture, Curating the Library, you evoke three literary works: Spinoza’s Ethics, Life on Earth by Jan Jacob Slauerhoff and Ästhetik des Vorscheins by Ernest Bloch. What is the connection between these works and your thinking?

Spinoza was the last philosopher with a sort of closed system, which was then destroyed by Immanuel Kant. Nevertheless it’s a mathematical proposition of the world and the idea of the principal of God. I found, and still find, it to be not only beautiful but very valid in the sense of the rationale, of how you can look at the world.

Ernest Bloch was the philosopher of the possibilities. He was a philosopher in East Germany and this one book, Ästhetik des Vorscheins, on the aesthetics of appearances was interesting in terms of culture. He also has this one saying that between there’s nothing and nothingness is the process where something actually starts to exist, which I found a very interesting statement.

And Jan Jacob Slauerhoff, specifically that one book I read in an afternoon is very famous, he’s a cult figure in Holland. He was a writer, a poet, but also a writer of novels. He was also a ship doctor and wrote most of his books in different places like in Mexico, China, he also learned Chinese, and he was one of the inventors of the Nouveau Roman before it actually happened. He died in 1934 and made a very interesting statement where he said the world has become smaller in distance but very large in terms of psychology, and I think that was an interesting statement right before the second world war.

The Fruit Basket will be on view at David Zwirner in Los Angeles from February 24 through April 4.

I also asked two Parisians, Lauren Collins and Constance Dovergne, for their recommendations. Here they are, in their own words.

Photographs and a Restaurant

Two Recommendations

Lauren Collins, staff writer at the New Yorker who also runs Lettre Recommandée

I’m keen to see Jeu de Paume’s exhibition of the photographs of Madeleine de Sinéty—daughter of impoverished aristocrats, chronicler of daily life in the Bréton village of Poilley, late-in-life immigrant to Maine, where she shot “elemental occupations” such as woodcutting with horse teams. Her work—the little I know of it—is flat-out beautiful: rubber booted children grabble in ball pit of apples; a mother pickets for daycare funding, a sliver of pink sweater peeking out of her coat, perfectly matched to the flyers strewn on the ground. But I’m just as interested in the way in which de Sinéty made it: over time, as a part of a community, with attention to the possibilities and vulnerabilities of society in the round.

from June 12 to September 27 at the Jeu de Paume

Constance Dovergne, lifestyle chief at Elle France who also runs Carte Blanche

Lately I’ve become less interested in being among the first to try the latest fashionable opening and more interested in enjoying what won’t last. In Paris, as anywhere else, nothing does! (terrace heaters! €1.90 metro tickets! riding scooters without helmets!) And I’ve just heard that Le Repaire de Cartouche, an 11th-arrondissement institution praised by in-the-know chefs, is for sale. So these days might be our last chance to enjoy this place that is everything American foodies fantasize about in Parisian restaurants without the superficial, folkloric and overpriced gloss you’ll get at, let’s say, L’Ami Louis. The decor is old school (insane seventies tiles in the restrooms), the terrines are legendary and the historic staff reminds me of the pot-au-feu restaurants where my grandmother took me when I was growing up in Béarn. The 30€ bistrot menu is everything you need to survive the last days of winter (bouillon de poule vermicelles, lieu noir et orzo au safran, poulet braisé aux morilles). And if you do survive, prepare to be rewarded with the most anticipated food event of spring: the reopening of Le Chateaubriand by beloved chef (and friend!) Robert Mendoza (who previously made a splash at Le Saint-Sébastien, Vivant 2 and numerous pop-ups), under the blessing of legendary chef Iñaki Aizpitarte.

Le Repaire de Cartouche, 8 Bd des Filles du Calvaire, 75011 Paris

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Art

Museums and Galleries

Josef Albers: Duets
Organized in collaboration with the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, this exhibition features important paintings and works on paper from the 1930s through the 1970s. (David Zwirner, January 15-March 21)

Tomorrow: Yes by Erwin Wurm
The exhibition unfolds around two monumental sculptures: a compressed schoolhouse and a six-meter sailboat. (Thaddaeus Ropac, January 17-April 11)

Global Warming by Martin Parr
Drawing from a body of 180 works that began with black-and-white photographs, Global Warming examines recurring patterns in human behavior. (Jeu de Paume, January 30-May 24)

Huma Bhabha / Alberto Giacometti
Responding to Giacometti’s work, artist Huma Bhabha presents a series of sculptures now on view at the Giacometti Institute: “Both artists draw from the art of all epochs and all civilizations—from the art of Ancient Greece to the Renaissance, as well as African arts and cinema—to create new forms and original modes of perception, other visions of humanity.” (l’Institut Giacometti, February 2 -May 24)

All is Portraiture by Barkley L. Hendricks
This is the artist’s first solo show in Europe. All Is Portraiture highlights the central role portraiture occupies in his practice and offers a comprehensive overview of his multifaceted approach. (Marian Goodman, February 6-April 4)

American Images by Dana Lixenberg
In Dana Lixenberg’s first retrospective, the MEP will display more than 30 years of her work, including iconic photographs like her 1993 portrait of Tupac Shakur. (MEP, February 11-May 24)

Photographe de Guerre by Robert Capa
With more than 60 works on display, this exhibition offers a historical look at a reality that is still new: the risks of covering war. (Musée de la Libération de Paris, February 18-December 19)

Clair-Obscur
20 contemporary artists from the Pinault Collection are placed side-by-side to explore pictorial representations of chiaroscuro in contemporary art. (Bourse de Commerce, opening March 4)

Renoir and Love
For the first time since 1985, Renoir’s masterpieces are shown together in France. (Musée d’Orsay, March 17-July 19)

This Will Not End Well by Nan Goldin
This is Nan Goldin’s first retrospective in France featuring her videos, which she calls “films made up of stills”. It includes six main titles spanning 50 years of work. (Grand Palais, March 18-June 21)

Matisse
More than 230 paintings, drawings, books, textiles, objects and watercolors by Matisse between 1941 and 1954 will be on view at the Grand Palais, an exhibition in partnership with the Centre Pompidou. (Grand Palais, March 24-July 26)

The Ambition of Painting by Henri Rousseau
The Musée de l’Orangerie is the first to welcome loans from the Barnes Foundation collection, bringing together for the first time a significant body of work by Henri Rousseau. (Musée de l’Orangerie, March 25-July 20)

Henry Taylor
Henry Taylor is one of the greatest figures in American contemporary painting. In this dedicated exhibition, the Picasso Museum presents nearly 100 works in 13 different rooms. (Musée de Picasso, April 8-September 6)

Lee Miller
The Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris prepares to receive a retrospective on the works of American photographer Lee Miller. Curated by the Tate Modern, the exhibition features 250 prints, many on display for the first time. (Musée d’Art Moderne, April 10-August 2)

Living Bodies by Michelangelo and Rodin
This Spring at the Louvre, the sculptures of Michelangelo and August Rodin will be exhibited together to highlight their mythical and transformative qualities. (Louvre, April 15-July 20)

Calder. Rêver en Équilibre by Alexander Calder
A retrospective to celebrate the works of Alexander Calder on the anniversary of his arrival in France 100 years ago. (Louis Vuitton Foundation, April 15-August 16)

Alechinsky, Balzac, Picasso, Rodin... les voies ardentes de la création
This exhibition shows the connection between labor and creation by looking at artists who, like Balzac, worked hard to create their oeuvres. (Maison de Balzac, through March 15)

exhibitions ending soon

Philip Guston and Raymond Pettibon (Musée Picasso, through March 1)

Gerhard Richter (Fondation Louis Vuitton, through March 2)

100 Years of Art Deco (Musée des Arts Décoratifs, through April 26)

General Exhibition (Fondation Cartier Palais Royale, through August 31)

Events

Events Across Disciplines

February 2 | The French-Mauritian writer Nathacha Appanah discusses her most recent work, which addresses the issue of femicide. (Bourse de Commerce)

February 10 | Arundhati Roy talks about her new novel Mother Mary Comes to Me with the French writer Frédérique Leichter-Flack. The conversation will be in English. She will be signing copies of her novel at Shakespeare and Co. the next day. (Amphithéâtre Émile Boutmy)

February 11 - 13 | The Memorial for Those Who Did Not Fall in War organized by Columbia University’s Global Center in Paris, is a symposium that will gather collaborators from across the globe to discuss what living in war and peace means to society today. (Reid Hall at Columbia Global Center)

March 13 | A Beowulf reading will take place at the Sorbonne with Professor Wilfrid Rotgé. The text will be read in English. (Amphithéâtre Guizot - Sorbonne)

March 26 | Daniel Mendelsohn on his new translation of The Odyssey and the impact reading the classics can have on one’s life. (Shakespeare and Co.)

April 9 | Ben Lerner on his new novel Transcription I. (Shakespeare and Co.)

April 17 - 19 | Festival du Livre de Paris, a three-day book festival in Paris will gather several international artists and publishers. (Grand Palais)

Music and Theatre

Concerts and Performances

January 21 -
March 14 | Hamlet by Ivo Van Hove
Odeon Theatre de l’Europe

January 29 -
March 8 | Contre a play based on John Cassavetes & Gena Rowlands
Petit Saint-Martin

February 4 -
February 5 | Opera To Be Sung by Pascal Dusapin, with Pharrell Williams
Fondation Louis Vuitton

February 10 | Meredith Monk with Katie Geissinger and Allison Sniffen
Bourse de Commerce

February 13 -
February 15 | Présences Électronique an electronic music festival
Maison de la Radio et de la Musique

February 17 | Alvin Lucier performed by Charles Curtis, Oren Ambarchi and Stephen O’Malley
Église du Saint-Esprit

March 10 | Sylvia Plath’s Lady Lazarus in Concert, with Álfheiður Guðmundsdóttir
Cité de la Musique

March 18 -
March 19 | An Evening with David Byrne
La Seine Musicale

March 20 -
April 16 | Bovary Madame by Christophe Honoré
Theatre de la Ville de Paris

April 2 -
May 12 | Romeo and Juliet by Rudolf Noureev
Opéra Bastille

April 10 -
April 13 | Caterine Barbieri
Cité de la Musique

May 13 -
June 28 | Lumières, Lumières, Lumières, a play based on Virginia Woolf’s novel To The Lighthouse by Florent Siaud
Comédie-Française Studio

May 29 | Aya Nakamura
Stade de France

July 9 -
July 12 | Nelken (Carnations) by Pina Bausch
Châteauvallon-Liberté, Amphithéâtre, Châteauvallon, France

Film

What to Watch and Where

January 28 -
February 15 | Márta Mészáros retrospective, first woman awarded at Cannes
Cinémathèque Française

February 11 -
March 1 | Essential Asian Thrillers
Cinémathèque Française

February 14 | Night is Short, Walk on Girl by Masaaki Yuasa (2017)
Musée Guimet

February 18 | Women Are Born Twice by Yûzô Kawashima (1961)
MCJP

February 25 | Look Back by Kiyotaka Oshiyama (2024)
Musée Guimet

March 7 | Two Golden Lions by Lu Yi (2022)
Musée Cernuschi

March 11 | Early Summer by Yasujirô Ozu (1956)
MCJP

March 28 | Teddy Gray’s Sweet Factory (2011) & Think of England (1999) by Martin Parr
Jeu de Paume

Family

Kids Too

February 1 -
June 27 | Petit Sculpteur à Quatre Mains, after listening to a story about one of the museum’s sculptures, families create their own with clay. (4 years and older at Musée Bourdelle *the museum also offers activities using clay for younger and older children)

February 4 -
February 18 | Tapisser la Terre, children explore the universe of the artist Otobong Nkanga while manipulating new materials. (4 to 6 years old at Musée d’art Moderne *the museum also offers activities around this exhibition for younger and older children)

February 7 | Lunettes à Vision Wow, children make their own philosopher glasses to equip themselves with a new outlook. (6 to 12 years old at Palais de Tokyo)

February 7 -
July 18 | La Fabrique des Nymphéas, families design their own interpretation of a water garden using floating inks in a Japanese technique called suminagashi. (Musée de l’Orangerie)

February 14 | “Démouler le vrai du faux”, create real and fake museum pieces by using molds. (6 to 12 years old, Palais de Tokyo)

February 15 | Family Cinema: Beurk, a moment dedicated to independent cinema for children, with a 20–30 minute workshop offered before or after the screening. (6 years and older, Jeu de Paume)

February 23 -
February 25 | Paravents de Corée, children create their own Korean screen or their own Carpes Koï. (7 to 12 years old, Musée Guimet)

March 9 -
July 1 | C’est le Bouquet ! children discover the flower compositions in Louvre’s collection and compose their own arrangements. (6 years and older, Louvre)

March 15 | Atelier l’Empreinte de Ma Gravure, the Institut Feibai offers children and their parents an opportunity to create their own, personalized carved seal. (4 years and older, Musée Cernuschi)

March 15 -
May 10 | Atelier Cyanotype, after looking at Martin Parr’s exhibition with artist Gwenael Porte, children imagine a dream destination and make a postcard using the cyanotype. (7 to 11 years old, Jeu de Paume)

March 28 -
June 27 | Une Licorne Peut en Cacher une Autre, after looking at the unicorn exhibition, children use arts and crafts to transform a unicorn into a fantastical animal. (Musée de Cluny)

March 29 | Family Cinema: Le Carnaval de la Petite Taupe, a moment dedicated to independent cinema for children, with a 20–30 minute workshop offered before or after the screening. (2 years and older, Jeu de Paume)

May 24 | Family Cinema: Nina et le Secret du Hérisson, a moment dedicated to independent cinema for children, with a 20–30 minute workshop offered before or after the screening. (6 years and older, Jeu de Paume)

ongoing exhibitions

My Petite Cinémathèque (Cinémathèque Française, through March 8)

Transparency (2 to 10 years old, Grand Palais, through August 2017)

Nicolas Trembley

Interview with Nicolas Trembley by Renata Mosci Sanfourche

Nicolas Trembley’s allure lies in his commitment to questioning certainty. The exhibitions he curates invite viewers to abandon inherited cultural hierarchies, reconsider how value is assigned in the arts, and open spaces for richer, more complex exchanges in culture.

For over a decade craft has been central to Trembley’s practice. His meticulous consideration for their display, installation, and presentation are in itself worthy of close study. Through his exhibitions Mingei: Are You Here? at Pace Gallery and Craft at Galerie Francesca Pia, he interrogates art history’s Eurocentric vision, framing non-Western vernacular traditions not as relics of the world’s past, but as renewed practices in contemporary art.

Through his research and numerous exhibitions, Trembley challenges boundaries to make room for new typologies in the arts, proposing time and again a critical rereading of the canon. His most recent book, Craft, published Tuesday in Paris by After 8 Books, offers insight into his working process and philosophy through a dialogue with fellow curator Véronique Bacchetta.

You are concerned with breaking hierarchies in the art world. Where do you see yourself as a curator within the institution? Do you consider yourself an outsider or an insider, and what responsibilities accompany this position?

I see myself somewhere in between. I’ve worked inside institutions and with galleries, but always with a desire to question their frameworks and hierarchies. I don’t believe in the simple insider/outsider dichotomy. I’m close enough to understand how the system works, and distant enough to challenge it. This position comes with a responsibility to create spaces where marginalized forms such as craft, vernacular practices, or utilitarian objects can be seen and understood differently.

How does Ursula Le Guin’s 1986 essay The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction align with your beliefs?

What I find compelling in Le Guin’s essay is that she proposes a completely different kind of narrative, one we could easily apply to art history. She challenges the traditional point of view, which has historically focused on heroic, often male-oriented stories: wars, conquests, geniuses, masterpieces. Instead of this linear, monumental structure, she suggests using the metaphor of a carrier bag as a container in which we collect many different kinds of stories.

This carrier bag allows us to hold together narratives that are usually overlooked, the minor, everyday, practical gestures that enable a community to live; gathering, making tools and cooking vessels, repairing things. These stories are generally treated as secondary, yet Le Guin shows they are just as foundational as the grand mythologies of heroes and battles.

This idea of a narrative made from a collection of diverse, modest elements, resonates strongly with my curatorial practice and with the title of the exhibition. It expands our understanding of what is worthy of attention. Rethinking narrative through this lens allows us to challenge the dominant conventions that elevate certain forms and marginalize others, in art as much as in literature or society.

In a 1985 interview for Artforum, Anni Albers said about weaving “I find that, when the work is made with threads, it’s considered a craft; when it’s on paper, it’s considered art.” It’s a very interesting observation on the hierarchies in art.

What makes something a craft and what makes something art? What role, beyond the work itself, does a craft artist need to play to challenge these institutional frames?

Anni Albers’s remark reveals how constructed and arbitrary artistic hierarchies are. Craft is often what comes from domestic life, utility, or illegitimate traditions, while art is what institutions decide to elevate. For craft artists, challenging these frames sometimes requires adopting institutional codes; writing, theorizing, and performing a public identity. Part of my work is precisely to dismantle these barriers and invite other forms of legitimacy.

But it is also, for many makers, a matter of choice. The choice of whether or not to position oneself as an artist. Some people are interested primarily in technique, in perfecting a gesture or mastering a tool. Artists, generally, worry less about technique for its own sake, they use it as a means of expression rather than an end. And yet, reading Anni Albers’s numerous writings on weaving, tools, looms, and techniques, it becomes clear these reflections are an essential contribution to 20th-century (abstract) art. Her work demonstrates technical inquiry and artistic thought are not opposed but can mutually reinforce one another.

Your work is also concerned with transcending time, style, and form. How important is the role of the curator in defending a work when the artist is no longer alive?

When an artist is no longer alive the curator becomes an essential mediator. We must avoid two traps: over-interpretation and fossilization. My role is to place works into new conversations, connecting them with other objects or practices so they remain alive and relevant in the present.

I find it particularly interesting to confront objects or artworks from the past with contemporary art, because it breaks the linear narrative we were taught. Display can disrupt chronology and create new ways of reading history. I often think of the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, which I visited to inspire some of my own projects. When Pitt Rivers donated his collection to the University in 1884, he stipulated that the objects should be preserved and displayed in a specific way; grouped by use or function rather than by geography or culture.

This typological approach—placing weapons from different societies together or domestic tools side-by-side regardless of origin or date—creates a fascinating system. Chronology disappears, and what emerges instead are shared gestures, forms, and needs across cultures. This method offers a powerful model for thinking about juxtapositions today, it shows how objects from different times can resonate with one another, it allows the past to speak with the present in unexpected ways.

When you talk about “Mingei Are You Here?” the exhibition you curated at Pace Gallery, the principle seems to take precedence over the object itself. You even say other series of objects could have replaced Mingei and the exhibition would’ve been the same. What do you mean by this?

It’s not entirely accurate to say the principle is more important than the objects. I have a deep fascination for Japan, for its aesthetics and cultural objects. Mingei is a very particular movement because it forces us to look at things that were never meant to be looked at, objects considered minor or insignificant. I often think of something as simple as a wooden spoon carved by a farmer. Mingei invites us to recognise beauty and meaning where the canon historically saw none.

This philosophy, which radically overturns the aesthetic hierarchies we were taught, was already close to what I wanted to do when I showed so-called kitsch German Fat Lava vases. All it takes is to look at them differently and change their context—for example, removing them from the doily on top of the television set (before flat screens) and placing them in the white cube of a gallery—for the object to become visible in a new way.

So yes, the underlying approach is important, but not more important than the objects themselves. When I say that other objects could have replaced Mingei, it’s true, I recently tested this idea with vernacular Provençal furniture in the French Mingei exhibition in Kobe, and the method worked. What I meant is that there are many possibilities, many other fields still to explore. Mingei is one example of how we can challenge established hierarchies, but it’s far from the only one.

In your interview with Véronique Bacchetta for your new book Crafts you say, “art, architecture, and design develop cyclically, influenced by trends, tastes, as well as the ethical and economic values corresponding to every era.” What are these values today?

Things are changing, and when we see large international exhibitions presenting works by artists we did not previously know—often from communities or minorities that were long unfamiliar to the Western canon—it means the shift has already begun, and this is undeniably a positive development.

For decades, the financial art market was almost entirely dominated by works made by white, Western male artists. To some extent, this is still the case, but the margins have moved. We now see ceramics by Magdalene Odundo or textiles by the Gee’s Bend quilt-makers reaching prices completely comparable to those of painting. This evolution shows the values of our era are expanding: the center is no longer fixed, and forms once considered peripheral are finally receiving the attention and legitimacy they deserve.

The first definition of the readymade came in 1917 by Marcel Duchamp. He said “whether Mr Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article of life, and placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view – created a new thought for that object.”

Before Duchamp, Henry Moore was collecting bones and flints and showing them as found objects. Your work develops from a found object but is transformed in its collection and display. How do you relate to these ideas?

I feel very close to these ideas; it is always stimulating—and often amusing—to question the dogmas that structure the art world. I would like to cite a reference that was crucial for my own research on objects: the exhibition Raid the Icebox that Andy Warhol created in 1969 with the permanent collection of the RISD Museum. I still consider it one of the most subversive proposals ever made on display and on the notion of artistic value.

Raid the Icebox was initiated in 1968 by Jean and Dominique de Ménil. During a visit to the museum’s storage with Daniel Robbins, the director at the time, they agreed to invite an artist to propose a new vision of the permanent collection. Warhol responded in a radically provocative way: he moved entire sections of storage directly into the galleries, disregarding the objects’ condition, value, or even their authenticity or canonical status. Everything was exhibited, rococo paintings, sculptures, hat boxes, umbrellas, furniture.

The show, nearly sixty years old now, raised sharp, complex questions that remain absolutely contemporary: how and why do cultural institutions construct hierarchies, whether historical or aesthetic?

My relationship to the readymade emerges in this context. I am interested in found objects, but not simply in choosing them, rather, in how they can be reorganized, recontextualized, and displayed to produce meaning. It is in this shift from the isolated object to the system of presentation that I locate my own position in relation to the ideas of Duchamp and Moore.

How does a collection of objects transform the perception of an isolated object? How do the values of seriality and repetition we saw in the minimalist movement play a role?

I began collecting objects at the same time I started building a contemporary art collection for the Syz family. It allowed me to test possibilities and explore how meaning shifts when objects are grouped rather than seen individually. The question of the series was essential. It’s a bit like the game of Seven Families: some series share the same shape, but vary in size and color. If you manage to gather the whole set, the collection feels complete. But if you’re missing even one element, you can spend your entire life searching for it… and that search easily becomes an obsession.

A single object can be anecdotal, many objects become a narrative. Seriality reveals variations, forms, and gaps that only appear through repetition. This is something I have always appreciated in minimalism: its ability to make visible what would otherwise remain unnoticed.

I also try to avoid what I would call the atomization of a collection, having “a bit of this and a bit of that.” When a collection is coherent, when its internal logic is visible, it becomes much stronger. The relationships between the objects intensify and their meaning expands.

I am very drawn to systems of classification, to serial logics, to the mechanical rhythm of repetition, but also to the differences contained within similarities — the kind you find in natural history museum vitrines filled with beetles, or in the aisles of screws at the BHV department store. I am a fan of industrial design that advocates quality for the masses, and I have always been fascinated by atlases and their encyclopaedic ambitions.

Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas has been a major source of inspiration. In 2020, the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin reconstructed the 63 historical black-velvet panels of the Atlas, with hundreds of his thumbtacked images. Warburg juxtaposed Renaissance frescoes with Etruscan symbols, newspaper clippings, postcards, maps, sports photography, or Hopi ritual documentation. The panels suggest connections and leap across time and space, functioning almost like a contemporary mood board where periods, styles, and forms intermingle freely.

Such arrangements create new links and interpretive possibilities that disrupt canonical systems of knowledge, making them richer and more complex. This philosophy deeply interests me, informs my projects, and is something I continually strive to apply in my exhibitions.

How do you build an environment for the display of crafts in the context of your philosophy? Is it important for you to show in galleries over museums?

I would actually love to show more in museums, but the temporality is very different. Galleries are more reactive, and of course the objects are often for sale, which creates another kind of flexibility. But my background is in museums. I studied anthropology and sociology, not art history, and this has shaped my entire approach to exhibitions. Over time, I became more interested in texts dealing with the ethnography of the cultural field and with the museum as one of its central tools of transmission.

I studied with the ethnographer Georges Balandier, and we reflected on Jacques Maquet’s The Anthropologist and Aesthetics, Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy, and George Kubler’s The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things. In sociology, I had Edgar Morin as a professor. With him, we looked at cars, film, fashion, exhibitions, all through a transdisciplinary lens, exploring how different forms of knowledge intersect. We also read Stuart Hall on the deconstruction of the popular, and of course Pierre Bourdieu on the correlations between aesthetic taste and social structures.

You talk about applying the principles of ethnography to museology. Can you elaborate on this concept?

All my studies have profoundly influenced the way I think about display. In the earliest experiments in museology, exhibitions often contained objects rather than what we now call artworks. Curators at the time had to invent strategies to elevate these objects, to make them as desirable or as significant as the fine arts. This led to display methods that were far more inventive and exciting than those of traditional museums.

For me, this is where the principles of ethnography meet museology. Early ethnographic museums understood that context, juxtaposition, and narrative could transform the status of an object. They created environments that gave ordinary things a new visibility and a new dignity. This approach continues to inspire me.

Designing an exhibition is thrilling — it is like creating a stage for objects, a mise-en-scène that allows them to speak, reveals their relationships, and gives them a new presence. Whether in a museum or a gallery, the challenge is the same: to imagine a display that elevates and recontextualizes objects so they can be seen in ways they never were before.

In my first interview in this series I spoke with Desiree Heiss and Ines Kaag. I noticed you curated the exhibition for BLESS No 65 Not That I Can’t Wait For it. How does your world collide with theirs?

I admired the way they disrupt the canons of fashion—the runway, production systems, even the idea of the brand—and how fluidly they move between design, art, and other fields. Their work occupies a space in-between, which is exactly the territory that interests me.

When we organized the exhibition in a gallery in Paris, the vitrine was arranged like an apartment, a domestic environment rather than a conventional display. The subtitle of the show, Constantly Challenging the Norm to Encourage New Perspectives, felt absolutely right for them. They were initially reluctant to do an exhibition, because they tend to question every context in which they are invited to participate. I remember that they even intervened in the exterior of the gallery, extending the project beyond the expected boundaries.

Their approach consistently pushes against established formats, and that is precisely where our worlds meet.

What’s your perspective on Ruth Asawa, her work, and the late interest the art market had for her?

I am very happy that Ruth Asawa’s work is finally receiving the recognition it deserves on the market. It is, of course, sad that she is no longer here to benefit from it. I remember when we showed her work for the first time in Mingei Are You Here? at Pace Gallery, it was one of the pieces with the highest insurance value, around one million dollars if I recall correctly. Everyone thought it was absurd at the time. And today, Zwirner sells her works for twelve million…

The problem in the art world is that context often shapes perception far more than quality. Some collectors assume if a work is expensive it must be important, which is absolutely not true. Many expensive works will never change anything in art history. That is not the case with Ruth Asawa. She is a locomotive, and she will pull behind her many other works and practices of a similar nature.

This is wonderful, because it will give far greater visibility to forms — especially craft-based, non-Western, or historically marginalized ones — that much of the art world has ignored until very recently.

BLESS, The Woman Without Anxiety to Conform

Interview with Desiree Heiss and Ines Kaag by Renata Mosci Sanfourche

BLESS is a woman without any anxiety to conform. Created in ‘95 by the German duo Desiree Heiss and Ines Kaag, she’s off-the-grid, mother of her own discipline, her own profession, her own process, her own language. What BLESS has birthed into our growing material world is a constant desire to confront our patterns of behavior and respond to industry. If you were a fan in 2018, you may remember their collaboration where the writer appears in a series of videos inside the neighborhood BLESS had moved into. “One Saturday,” July writes in an Instagram post, “I slipped in when they weren’t home and wore their clothes and practiced some loose thinking—which is super easy to do in their world.” Yes, BLESS makes clothes, accessories, and objects, she writes, but most important, she creates concepts, because she’s above all a dynamic environment and independent practice that Heiss and Kaag have chosen to live with.

In BLESS N°42 Plädoyer der Jetztzeit (pleading for the present moment), you’ve chosen to use the German term Jetztzeit. This is a unique word established by Walter Benjamin in his last major essay, to convey the idea of “time filled by the presence of the now”. What does using this term mean to BLESS, and to this body of work?

First, we should explain our passion in ‘title designing’ as it is a discipline we developed from the very beginning and established as a structuring element, together with the system of numbering our collections (a BLESS collection comprises a variety of products that came to life in a certain time frame). In general, the titles refer to a specific aspect, act as headlines for some elements, or are messages and statements related to the time being—a comment on a political occasion or simply facts we want to draw attention to. Later, the titles help us remember the moment we found them, as if they were headlines in a bless diary.

In the case of Jetztzeit, we wanted to emphasize our wish of acting in the moment more than developing products for a specific time, or lifespan. Jetztzeit as “time filled by the presence of the now,” feels like a good wish and promise for long lasting companionship. We’re both native German speakers who like to play with the typical German language possibility to construct new words by attaching nouns, this often triggers new creations that we regard as important for a product. Sometimes this could even kickoff an idea we would include in the collection.

What’s your definition of a home or an interior, and what kind of qualities do you try to bring to spaces when you design and conceive objects?

It’s interesting that, while reading your question, we realize it’s the kind of question we never ask ourselves, we never try to find definitions for things. Maybe because we like for them to stay in constant motion. Do we need to verbally define a home or an interior when what we love are the multitude of aspects, definitions, and promises the word home can hold? When it comes to our vision of interior, there is strangely also the urge to open it up, to let the outside in, to bring both together. Interior itself is boring and only one side of the game. Only when experienced, thought, and brought together with the outside it becomes somehow complete, like the yin and yang principle.

In the description of BLESS N°07 Tablecare from Livingroom, it says “the charm of old furniture as experienced companions reacts with environmental accessories on the way to a personal living concept.” What kind of possibilities does the relationship this interaction creates open for its user?

BLESS N°07 Livingroom Conquerors came to life in 1999 during a time when people had discovered the concept store formula, such as Colette. Inside these shops, you could blindly trust and buy anything from their curated selection, you knew it was somehow hype or at the edge of the moment. The only thing these shops couldn’t provide were products with traces of lived moments, so people who thought they could consume and relate to taste blindly, were outed by the relatively antiseptic newness of their surroundings.

In the midst of this contemporary setup, we pledged to think of new furniture less as purchasing entirely new pieces to substitute one’s old furniture, but as dressing the items one’s lived with for quite a while in new gowns that would provide fresh shapes, and give them new aesthetic and functional options.

BLESS rarely designs entirely new things, we often use familiar items as a base to build on and/or evolve into something else. In this way, the new never comes from a cold and harsh approach, it brings trust to build on one’s own life experiences, to welcome the new while embracing the familiar.

What is your approach to antiques?

Like anybody and anything that experienced a certain lifespan, antiques are charged with depth, traces of usage and touch that new products can’t provide. A bit like old wine that becomes more complex with time. This can be a plus, can be quite emotionally charged. At the same time, it can also be a burden and a weight that doesn’t allow one to simply let go to freely and lightheartedly construct from scratch. As with anything else, using antiques requires responsibility and a great sense of balance of how much old and new you need to feel your life all right.

I find BLESS to be extremely playful. Last year, I watched a video at your Paris store from when BLESS N°50 Todaying invited people to an apartment full of sheep. Is play an intentional element in your work, and is there any conscious correlation to play and psychological development?

We guess the example you give here illustrates quite well how much we act unplanned and ‘drive-by-sight’, allowing things to happen and to surprise us. In this particular case, we met a wholesale client and friend, by chance, in a café, two days before our small presentation in an apartment, it was to be quite ordinary, with no special features. Of course she asked us what the new collection was about, and we told her about our boredom, that it’s always the same, and that the only characteristic of this collection was that it used lots of wool. Her nonchalant reply was that we should get sheep.

We went back to the office and asked our collaborator to organize sheep, and she managed. We told our model friends there would be surprise guests. Everyone thought that eventually someone well known would show up. It was also the first presentation where we regretted not collecting the mobile phones prior to the arrival of the sheep, we barely found pictures of this presentation without our models having phones in their hands to take pictures of themselves in this situation.

The wallscapes we see in BLESS N°29 have potential to really transform a space. What is the intention behind making a space appear to be what it’s not? What emerges from this?

The BLESS N°29 Wallscapes were originally developed for our retrospective show at the Boijmans Van Beunigen Museum in Rotterdam in 2006. It was to be a quick fix for the eternal and imminent BLESS question of how to expose products that were made to be applied to daily life, not for exhibition purposes. The wallscapes offered a 2D solution by transporting real-life interiors, where BLESS items could potentially live, into the museum. By mixing them in the museum’s architecture, with pieces from their permanent collection, they formed an equally harmonious and exciting environment that offered visitors new perspectives of the museum and its contents, and new insight of the BLESS world.

To attach a life-size motive to a space means to direct the attention of the viewer. The space naturally opens to another dimension: the products you see in the picture seem to make sense as their appearance and application is proved by the picture. Products that you place in front of the motive, or attach directly to the wallscapes, profit from that aura as well. We like to interfere in spaces and bring not only a specific product, but its whole entourage into a situation.

This is a way to emphasize that an idea, or a design, is not only a disconnected object, but wants to be seen in connection and correlation with its environment. The question of where the physical object starts and ends is an interesting one.

BLESS N°41 Retrospective Home and N°56 Worker’s Delight, really play with the idea that we don’t interact with the world in the same ways we used to, and that at times this can be harmful for our well-being. Why was broaching this topic important for BLESS?

Although BLESS was never a fashion label in a classic sense, we still started from a rather garment and object point of view after both of us had studied fashion. It was only in recent years though that we understood the main quality of our work experience, and achievement with and through BLESS, is that we managed to form our own personal, made-to-measure profession, that offered us the ultimate luxury to work on whatever we would love to work on, disrespecting completely categorization of any kind. We’re aware that we created en passant a very precious path of working through living, and the other way around, which is today what we are the proudest of and take pleasure in.

What kind of relationships have you established with your own homes in terms of your personal lives and everyday needs? How has your interaction with space changed since you created BLESS?

Funny enough not a lot of BLESS products live in our homes. Most likely because we always needed the bigger pieces to generate our income through their sales. However, many products were triggered through personal needs even if we end up living with first-prototype versions of them.

What is the architumiture we see in BLESS N°60 Lobby Conquerors?

BLESS N°60 was a dream collaboration, where our friends Mark Lee and Sharon Johnston from Johnston Marklee architects, curators of that architecture biennial, brought us together with Artek. Again, it was very clear to us that we had nothing to exhibit, but would love to create a nice resting situation in the venue’s generous lounge area. The fur stools resembled home pets more than furniture pieces, while the other chairs contained pieces of architecture. The client who purchased the Corner chair baptized it the ‘anti-social chair’, because of its quality to hide you away and provide privacy. We’re happy this project evolved over the years into BLESS N°63 Architecture Reminiscences and BLESS N°66 Architecture Souvenir Baggages, where we rebuilt cut-out pieces of environments that hosted some of our projects. The pieces are somehow ‘takeaway’ architecture pieces that serve as luggage, and provide you with the possibility to take bits and pieces of these locations to another as mobile souvenirs. There will certainly be more in the future. They’re in a way a 3D complement to the wallscapes, coming simply from a different approach, but providing again an interior piece from somewhere else.

Can you explain the philosophy behind BLESS N° 67 Situation Designer, and how the term situation design came to exist and define BLESS’s professional field?

The term situation design is a temporary one, we won’t exclude that we’ll find still another title for our profession as BLESS evolves. For the moment, we simply feel comfortable to shift away from bringing materialized work into this overcrowded world. It’s more interesting for us to move with all our senses into a situation, to create a memorable moment collectively.

The BLESS N°77 BOOKBAG

All the images featured in this interview are extracts from the book Celebrating 25 Years of Always Stress with BLESS N°42-N°74, which was also produced as a limited edition series of tote bags featuring its contents (see below). One bag corresponds to one page (front and back), and there is one bag available for each of the book’s 200 double-spreads.

I also asked three Parisians: Stéphanie D’heygere, Maud Charmoy, and Christine Doublet for their recommendations. They each responded with a restaurant.

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Art

Museums and Galleries

Gerhard Richter (Fondation Louis Vuitton)
The Fondation will dedicate all of its galleries to Gerhard Richter, featuring 275 works by the artist stretching from 1962 to 2024. (Through March 2)

Gerhard Richter (David Zwirner)
This is the artist’s third show with David Zwirner since the announcement of his representation in 2023. On view will be new works on paper, as well as multiple important and distinct bodies of painted work by Richter from the 1990s to the 2010s, including photo paintings, Abstrakte Bilder, and reflective glass installations. (October 20 through December 20)

Polaraki by Araki Nobuyoshi (Musée Guimet)
Over the last 25 years, the collector Stéphane André amassed more than 1,000 polaroids taken by Araki Nobuyoshi. Earlier this year he donated the collection to Musée Guimet. This is the first time these works are shown. (Through January 12)

Childhood Illuminated by Jean-Baptiste Greuze (Petit Palais)
This 18th century French painter is fairly unknown today, but at the time he was an established artist in prestigious art collections. (Through January 25)

George Condo (Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris)
The most significant exhibition to date of George Condo’s work, it features 80 paintings and 110 drawings grouped together in a space devoted to graphic arts and some twenty sculptures. (Through February 8)

Minimal (Bourse de Commerce)
Includes works by Walter de Maria, Sol LeWitt, On Kawara, Dan Flavin, Agnes Martin, Richard Serra, Eva Hesse, Robert Irwin, Donald Judd, and many more. (Through January 9)

Jacques-Louis David (Louvre)
Considered the father of the French School, revered for breathing new life into painting, he produced imagery that still inhabits the collective imagination. (Through January 26)

Le Bruit du Monde by Luc Delahaye (Jeu de Paume)
Presenting the French photographer’s work between 2001 and 2025. (Through January 4)

Weaving Space by Lygia Pape (Bourse de Commerce)
Pape’s first solo exhibition in France brings together works fundamental to her practice, from her first abstract engravings to her majestic Livro Noite e Dia III alongside with a selection of her experimental films. (Through January 26)

Couples by Eric Fischl (Skarstedt Gallery)
Eric Fischl returns with a series on the historical theme of couples, as well as the feelings linked to relationships: fidelity, passion, and love, but also breakups, betrayal and solitude. (October 20 through December 6)

Jacques-Émile Ruhlmann (Galerie Guelfucci)
After spending years in Berlin, this 20th century design gallery opens in Paris with an exhibition dedicated to the Art Deco designer Jacques-Émile Ruhlmann. (Through November 25)

Design Miami Paris (Galerie Éric Philippe)
At the Hotel de Maisons (October 21 through October 26).

Kai Althoff (Tramps)
Gallerist Parinaz Mogadassi opens her new space in Paris with an exhibition dedicated to Kai Althoff. (Through December 7)

Paul Sietsema (Marian Goodman)
This exhibition brings together new works and older works, including two 16mm films. (Through December 20)

Mickalene Thomas (Galerie Nathalie Obadia)
This new exhibition unveils 11 previously unseen works drawn from series inspired by JET and Nus Exotiques-publications known for their portrayals of nudes. (October 19 through January 3)

Exposition Générale (Fondation Cartier Palais Royale)
600 works by more than 100 artists that have marked the Cartier Foundation’s programming from 1984 to today. All displayed in their new headquarters near Palais Royale. (October 25 through August 2026)

Philip Guston and Raymond Pettibon (Musée Picasso)
The two master draftsmen are brought together at the Picasso Museum in two parallel shows. (Through March 1)

Gluts by Robert Rauschenberg (Thaddaeus Ropac)
First exhibition in 15 years dedicated to Robert Rauschenberg’s sculptural Gluts series. (October 20 through November 22)

Ladies & Gentlemen by Daragh Soden (Centre Culturel Irlandais)
Winner of the Grand Prix du Jury Photo at the Hyères Festival in 2017, Daragh Soden came to international recognition with his series Young Dubliners. (November 14 to December 21)

Photographs from The Olbricht Collection (Sotheby’s)
Wolfgang Tillmans, William Eggleston, Cindy Sherman, to name a few. (November 12 through November 19)

100 Years of Art Deco (Musée des Arts Décoratifs)
The Musée des Arts Décoratifs celebrates the centenary of Art Deco with an exhibition of contemporary scenography. (October 22 through April 26)

Art Basel (Grand Palais)
Galleries specializing in modern and contemporary art. (October 24 through October 26)

Paris Photo (Grand Palais)
Leading galleries in the photography market. (November 13 through November 16)

Edward Weston and Tyler Mitchell (MEP Paris)
(Through January 1)

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Restaurants

Three Recommendations

Stéphanie D’heygere, Designer and Founder of Dheygere

My boyfriend chef Mathieu Canet is doing a pop-up at Cravan in Saint-Germain-des-Prés on the 23rd of November. The place is very cosy with good cocktails and the food will be delicious.

Maud Charmoy, Founder of Amuse Bouche

So, I’m very excited about the opening (on the 20th of October) of the restaurant La Table by Christophe Vasseur, the owner of the cherished bakery in the 10th Du Pain et des Idées. It will be open all day from morning to evening, serving coffee and pastries for breakfast, pizzas at lunch, and oven-baked dishes for dinner. He’s serious in terms of quality and good taste so...

Christine Doublet, CEO at Le Fooding who also runs Skip the line

My current dining recommendation in Paris is À La Renaissance on rue de la Roquette. A well-known old neighborhood café, it was recently renovated and reopened by Carina Soto-Velasquez and Joshua Fontaine (the team behind other Parisian favorites like Candelaria and Le Mary Celeste). It was important to them to stay true to the cafe’s roots, with long opening hours open (every day of the week from 8 to midnight), a reasonable price point, a daily set lunch menu and traditional yet updated decor. They brought their personal touch though with excellent classic cocktails, a sharp wine list and perfectly executed bistrot food. They’ve managed to hit the sweet spot of being a spot that has maintained its local clientele while also attracting a hip new one and it’s lovely to see this mix-and-match crowd come together. A must visit! (Of note: they take reservations for meals, but there are always seats available at the bar or outside for a drink and a nibble!)

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Events

Events Across Disciplines

October 21 | Sylvain Maestraggi talks about his new photography book Notes sur Les Rivières d’Athènes
Jeu de Paume

October 21 -
October 27 | Miu Miu presents a film and performance composition for 30 Blizzards by Helen Marten, developed in collaboration with musician Beatrice Dillon and director Fabio Cherstich.
Palais d’Iéna

October 24 | Conversation about the 90s with Sonia Boyce and Edward Enninful.
Petit Palais

October 28 | A conversation with Teri Wehn Damisch to coincide with the launch of the book Passages Transatlantiques Entre les Arts.
Jeu de Paume

October 28 | R.O. Kwon in conversation with Chloé Quenum about questions of ownership and origin in art.
The American Library in Paris

November 4 | John Singer Sargent and Henry James: Painting and Prose in a Gilded Age with Jean Strouse and Madeleine Schwartz.
The American Library in Paris

November 5 | An evening with Fitzcarraldo Editions and Ed Atkins.
Lafayette Antecipations

November 6 | A conversation with Ta-Nehisi Coates.
MK2 Bibliothéque

November 8 | Dialogue with Annie Ernaux on Laurent Cantet’s film Ressources Humaines.
La Cinémathèque

November 13 | Conversation and book signing with photographer Bharat Sikka.
Fondation Henri-Cartier Bresson

November 20 | Jonathan Coe on The Proof of My Innocence.
Shakespeare & Co.

November 27 | Ian Leslie discusses the biography John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs
Shakespeare & Co.

November 29 | Michaël Lucken talks about Araki’s flowers.
Musée Guimet

December 2 | Meeting between the philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman and historian Enzo Traverso about the image of politics and the politics of images.
Jeu de Paume

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Music and Theatre

Concerts and Performances

September 11 -
January 15 | Les Fourberies de Scapin by Molière, Denis Podalydès.
Comédie Française Richelieu

September 24 -
November 4 | Aida by Giuseppe Verdi
Opéra Bastille

October 24 | Edging with Crystal Mess and Hey Bony
La Station - Gare des Mines

October 24 -
October 25 | Thomas Bangalter performs at the Centre Pompidou.
Centre Pompidou

October 26 | Ellen Arkbro: Nightsongs, Daysongs, after inviting Ellen Fullman, the Bourse de Commerce invites Swedish organ experimentalist Ellen Arkbro.
Bourse de Commerce

October 29 | Erykah Badu
Zenith

November 11 -
November 30 | La Walkyrie by Richard Wagner
Opéra Bastille

November 14 +
November 15 | Sleep by Max Richter, a night at the foundation (8-hour concert).
Fondation Louis Vuitton

November 26 -
December 06 | Mémoire de Fille a play based on Annie Ernaux’s novels.
Les Abbesses, Theatre de la Ville de Paris

December 12 +
December 13 | Creation by Bryce Dessner with Isabelle Huppert and Alice Sara Ott, based on excerpts from the anthology of letters between John Cage and Merce Cunningham entitled Love, Icebox.
Fondation Louis Vuitton

December 21 -
January 4 | Swan Lake by Tchaikovsky, ballet Preljocaj.
Théâtre des Champs-Élysées

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Film

What to Watch and Where

October 17 -
October 26 | Louvre Film Festival, from David to Kubrick, the French empire and revolution in film at the auditorium du Louvre Michel Laclotte

October 8 -
November 29 | Orson Welles retrospective at the Cinémathèque Française.

October 9 -
November 30 | Harutyun Khachatryan Retrospective in collaboration with the Centre Pompidou at MK2 Bibliothéque.

October 20 -
November 2 | Hafsia Herzi cinematographer and actress at the Cinémathèque Française (I couldn’t recommend more going to see La Graine et le Mulet).

November 5 -
November 16 | Laurent Cantet retrospective at the Cinémathèque Française.

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Family

Kids Too

Ongoing -
August 2027 | Transparency, an immersive experience for children that includes an ice palace, a mysterious forest, a cave of mineral treasures, a sunny sky or a sparkling ocean. (2 to 10 years old)
Grand Palais

Ongoing -
January 4 | 1,2,3 Couleurs experiment with colors and emotions, every Wednesday, Saturday, and Sunday at 14h30. (3 to 5 years old)
Louvre

October 4 -
March 7 | Dancing Visit discover the works of Claude Monet with a choreographer every Saturday at 9h00. (3 to 5 years old, parents must be present)
Musée de L’Orangerie

October 5 -
February 1 | Au pays d’Orsay “when a museum is born in a train station, its works never stop traveling” a tour and workshop every Sunday at 10h00. (3 to 5 years old, parents must be present)
Musée de d’Orsay

October 18 -
March 3 | Storytelling Tour: In The Clouds, Betty the dreamer wakes up one day with her head in the clouds and her memories all mixed up! Accompanied by a Cultural Guide, set out on a captivating quest to help her regain her memory. The painting by her father, Gerhard Richter, shows the way! Every Saturday and Sunday, and daily during Holidays at 11:00. (2.5 to 5 years old)
Fondation Louis Vuitton

October 18 -
October 26 | Young Audience Film Festival around the Amazon theme: short and feature films by Miyazaki and beyond. (All ages)
Musée du Quai Branly

October 22 -
October 28 | My First Festival (all ages) a film festival for all ages.
Cinémathèque Française

October 25 | Trick-or-Treating (all ages) and Halloween Hop (ticketed event)
The American Library

November 8, 22 +
December 6 | Atelier de Création with the artist Camila Salame based on the works of Martin Parr. (3 to 6 years old, without parents)
Jeu de Paume

November 9 +
November 16 | Atelier Family Cinema on the footsteps of Mary Anning, a moment around independent French cinema for children with a 20 to 30-minute ateliers proposed before or after the film.
Jeu de Paume

November 22 +
November 23 | Family Weekend with several activities including dance, family yoga, meditation, creation, and a guided story visit around the museum. (All ages)
Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris

November 22 +
November 23 | Super Kids Party the annual party this time with Join Cheb Runner, composer of the symphony performed by Meriem Bennani’s flip-flop orchestra.
Lafayette Antecipations

December 22 -
December 24 | Drawing and Painting with Cécile Colom from 10:00 to 12:30, there are many other ateliers in several dates, I’m simply listing the one that falls in my daughter’s age bracket. (4 to 6 year olds)
Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris

• I’ve included only special events, some institutions propose year-round activities for children: Musee Rodin, Palais de Tokyo, American Library in Paris, Cite de l’architecture, Jardin des Plantes.

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In 2018 Walker wanted to start writing for a new world. He set out to make what he called ‘a game of the (needed) future’. The intention was such: inside this video game, the player’s input would matter significantly to the story, and the NPCs (non-player characters) weren’t programmed, but alive. He wanted to create something that spoke to the magical roots many of us have lost connection to, a story built on the universal laws that still hum beneath everything in our world. The reading list that would help him achieve this was long, but he collected all the books and soon started writing. The writing stopped before he finished the books. He had fully lost his mind.

We present you with this week’s list: Psychosis for Dummies.

by Michael Walker

Psychosis for Dummies: R&D for game that accidentally unveiled the game

1. The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson (1995)

2. Nonviolent Communication by Marshall B. Rosenberg (1999)

3. Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence by Max Tegmark (2017)

4. Stalking the Wild Pendulum: Mechanics of Consciousness by Itzhak Bentov (1977)

5. A Brief Tour of Higher Consciousness by Itzhak Bentov (1988)

6. What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly (2010)

7. The Inevitable by Kevin Kelly (2016)

8. The Molecule of More: How a Single Chemical in your Brain Drives Love, Sex, and Creativity by Daniel Z. Lieberman and Michael E. Long (2018)

9. The Burnout Society by Byung-Chul Han (2010)

10. Why Greatness Cannot be Planned: The Myth of the Objective by Kenneth O. Stanley and Joel Lehman (2015)

11. The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick by Philip K. Dick (written 1974 – 1982 and published 2011)

12. The Ringmakers of Saturn by Norman Bergrun (1986)

Extra: How to Make a Sigil

Play Azyros World: real-life NPCs, storyline updates based on player involvement.

Play Your World of Text: one scene using a platform where the audience can create stories directly on the website — a kind of group drawer/whiteboard system.

She also made you a playlist.

by Victoria Castelli

1. ‘Opening Night’ directed by John Cassavetes (1977)

Watching “Opening Night” really shook me, it made me see acting not just as a performance, but as this fragile dance between who you are and who you’re trying to become on stage. John Cassavetes doesn’t try to clean it up; he leans into the mess. And Gena Rowlands… she’s just electric. You feel every crack, every doubt, every raw nerve. It’s a film that made me realize that the best performances don’t hide its cracks, they expose them.

2. ‘Elle’ directed by Paul Verhoeven (2016)

“Elle” isn’t just about violence, it’s about what a woman does with that violence after it happens. It’s sexy and deeply unsettling. Isabelle Huppert’s character doesn’t play victim, she takes control in a way that’s as disturbing as it is powerful. There’s something haunting about how she turns the trauma on its head, manipulates the very thing that tried to break her. In this twisted power dynamic she finds something akin to pleasure, not because it’s right, but because it’s hers. It’s a film that doesn’t offer comfort but leaves you wide open.

3. ‘Morvern Callar’ directed by Lynne Ramsay (2002)

“Morvern Callar” reframes death not as tragedy, but as a quiet rupture; an opening into isolation, reinvention, and moral ambiguity. Lynne Ramsay’s minimalism, paired with Samantha Morton’s hauntingly internal performance, captures a profound loneliness that resists catharsis. The soundtrack is a psychological map that charts the main character’s emotional dislocation. It’s a film where grief gives way not to healing, but to a strange kind of autonomy.

4. ‘Shadows’ directed by John Cassavetes (1959)

In “Shadows,” John Cassavetes uses loose, intimate camera movements to mirror the instability of racial identity and emotional connection. The improvisational style gives the film a crude realism where love feels both urgent and fragile. Racial tensions aren’t dramatized, they linger in glances, silences, and missed connections. It’s a film about people trying to reach each other, and the invisible barriers that shape even the most personal moments.

5. ‘Body Double’ directed by Brian De Palma (1984)

“Body Double” is Brian De Palma at his most provocative; sexy, fearless, and unapologetically stylized. It’s a thriller that blurs the lines between obsession and performance, desire and danger. His signature blend of eroticism and suspense is on full display, turning voyeurism into both a narrative engine and a cinematic spectacle. The result is a film that seduces as much as it disorients.

6. ‘Opera’ directed by Dario Argento (1987)

I first watched Dario Argento’s films in college, and “Opera” completely rewired how I saw horror with its violent, operatic, and meticulously crafted spectacle. Every frame felt like a painting that is stylized but never hollow. The way he turns brutality into beauty was unlike anything I’d seen before. And the soundtrack—so pulsing, so alive—drives the tension straight into your bones. It’s a film that elevates horror without losing any of its edge.

7. ‘Titane’ directed by Julia Ducournau (2021)

“Titane” is a fearless, genre-defying work of feminist cinema. Julia Ducournau creates a world that’s as brutal as it is tender, crafting characters who are messy and deeply human. Agathe Rousselle delivers a staggering performance that is both vulnerable and feral, while Vincent Lindon one that is heartbreaking in its quiet desperation. From its hypnotic soundtrack to its wildly original storyline, the film pulses with an energy that defies expectations. It’s a visceral experience: bold, unsettling, and new.

8. ‘Happening’ directed by Audrey Diwan (2021)

“Happening” is a haunting adaptation of Annie Ernaux’s eponymous memoir, which Audrey Diwan brings to life with striking intimacy and restraint. It’s a film that carries the weight of its subject—illegal abortion in 1960s France—with quiet urgency and devastating clarity. The direction is precise yet poetic, never sensationalizing, only illuminating. Anamaria Vartolomei’s performance is breathtaking, internal, brave. Diwan transforms Ernaux’s deeply personal story into something universal, tender, and shattering.

by Alex Tudela

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I’m currently helping to shape the launch of a new American men’s lifestyle magazine—one that’s asking real questions about identity, legacy, and what it means to live with intention. As we build something that pushes against narrow definitions of masculinity, I’ve found myself reflecting more broadly on American identity itself.

I studied American culture at Brown University, and lately, those themes—belonging, inheritance, reinvention, resistance—have started resurfacing in urgent new ways. Especially now, as certain cultural forces try to dictate who gets to claim “Americanness,” I find myself drawn to stories that complicate the narrative.

When my friend Renata asked me to put together a reading list, I realized many of the books that have stayed with me—some from my education, others more recent—do just that. They offer alternate maps of America: urban, queer, immigrant, intergenerational, intellectual, joyful, disillusioned, resistant.

This is not a list about masculinity per se. Nor does it attempt to define what it means to be American. It’s about perspective. And these books, together, have shaped mine. I hope they offer a messier, fuller, more human vision of American life.

1. The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs

Jacobs taught me to look closely—at sidewalks, at neighbors, at the forces shaping our communities. I encountered this book in college, but its lessons feel even more urgent now. Her defense of organic urban life feels like a quiet rebellion against the top-down fantasies still gripping American politics and planning. mcnallyjackson.com

2. Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin

When I first read Maupin’s serialized stories, they felt like dispatches from a freer, queerer America. These tales offer a glimpse of chosen family, sexual awakening, and tenderness amid upheaval. What’s remarkable is how contemporary they still read, even though they began in the 1970s. That enduring relevance says something about how long we’ve been fighting for visibility—and joy. strandbooks.com

3. Drown by Junot Díaz

I remember reading these stories in college and feeling both exposed and seen. Díaz’s voice—raw, bilingual, intimate—spoke to the fault lines of masculinity and migration. These aren’t tales of easy assimilation, but of complicated inheritance. It taught me that American identity is often born in tension. mcnallyjackson.com

4. Rabbit, Run (and the Rabbit series) by John Updike

For whatever reason, I have first editions of the series sitting on my shelf. Updike writes masculinity in a way that’s both damning and seductive. Rabbit is infuriating, but he’s real– and his restlessness speaks to the hollowness of white, suburban, mid-century identity. The series is a kind of autopsy of the American Dream, one man’s dissatisfaction stretched across decades. strandbooks.com

5. The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides

Set at Brown, where I studied, this novel complicates the intellectual ambitions of youth with the emotional weight of depression, class, and love. It made me confront the limitations of education itself—and what we hope books, relationships, or even belief systems can fix. mcnallyjackson.com

6. Fun Home by Alison Bechdel

Bechdel’s memoir is a revelation—both in its formal invention and its emotional clarity. Queer identity, intellectual inheritance, and familial distance are all woven into a story that’s precise and aching. It reminded me how graphic novels can be as serious as any essay, and how coming out is never one moment—it’s a lifelong process. strandbooks.com

7. The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros

Told in a series of vignettes, Cisneros’s book captures the texture of a childhood shaped by gender, race, and class. It’s a novel about noticing—how a girl sees her neighborhood, her body, her voice beginning to take shape. The simplicity of the language holds immense power. This is a foundational text for anyone trying to understand how identity begins. mcnallyjackson.com

8. Mr. Sammler’s Planet by Saul Bellow

A book I wrestled with more than loved. And yet, Sammler’s ambivalence—his discomfort with modern life, his skepticism of progress—stuck with me. It’s a novel about aging, about memory, about bearing witness to the 20th century as it slips away. And in that way, it’s also about America. mcnallyjackson.com

9. Better Living Through Birding by Christian Cooper

This book has helped me stop, look up, and listen. Cooper’s reflections on race, queerness, and nature come through with such warmth and humility. His joy is quietly radical. In a time of constant noise, he reminds me that attention itself can be a form of resistance—and that wonder still has a place in American life. strandbooks.com

10. Red at the Bone by Jacqueline Woodson

Woodson’s novel is deeply layered but effortlessly readable. It traces the aftermath of a teenage pregnancy across generations of a Black Brooklyn family. What moves me most is the tenderness—how history lingers not just in trauma, but in gesture, in silence, in longing. It’s a novel about inheritance, and the lives shaped around what could have been. mcnallyjackson.com

by Pedro Lourenço

1. The Roots of Brazil

Although I grew up in Brazil I never really realized how deeply conditioned we are to see the world through an eurocentric lens. It took leaving the country to value my roots and recognize how much of our identity is shaped by colonial narratives.

That’s why the book “Descolonizando Afetos” by Geni Núñez resonated with me so much. It’s not just a book about love, it’s a book about unlearning. Núñez, who was born and raised Guarani, explores how colonialism affects the way we relate to others, the way we love, and the way we understand ourselves. She invites us to rethink who we are through a perspective grounded in indigenous knowledge and the people’s connection to the land.

What I find particularly powerful about her work is the way she frames indigenous cosmology. She perceives it not just as culture, but as a worldview where nature isn’t something separate from us. She challenges our behaviors of possession and control, be it over people or the environment, and shifts our perspective into a more humane one. I believe this shift is something we really need right now.

Núñez made me realize that decolonizing how we live and love is a slow process, but also a deeply freeing one. It’s not about rejecting everything: it’s about reconnecting with what was always here and was just silenced.

2. The State of Bahia

Salvador

Bahia was my point of departure. My mom’s family is from Bahia and for as long as I can remember we were visiting Salvador. The Mercado Modelo is a market facing the Bay of All Saints, historically it was used as a commercial warehouse. Today, it’s a symbol of the afro-brazilian cultural resistance and showcases the local identity. As a meeting point for the Pai and Mãe de Santo (Mother and Father of Saint) of the Candomblé spiritual practice, you can find religious products like guides, herbs, and clothing, as well as crafts, ceramics, and local foods. It was an important part of my upbringing.

Candomblé

Since I was little I was in contact with Candomblé, which originated in Salvador with the arrival of West and Central Africans. In recent years, I’ve been deepening my spirituality in this practice. The language of the Orixás, the deities and spirits, are very powerful to me. I love how the French photographer Pierre Verger portrayed brazilian Candomblé in these images, he was one of the best to represent the striking beauty created in these rituals.

In Candomblé, each devout is appointed an Orixá, and mine is Logun Edé, who carries both the masculine and the feminine, the yin and the yang of existence. He lived six months with his mother, Oxum, in the fresh water learning the art of beauty, diplomacy, seduction, and sensibility. The other six months he lived with his father, Oxóssi, in the woods learning to hunt, defend, be agile, and strong. This book, also by Pierre Verger, has been formative.

One ritual in Candomblé that’s very important to me is the plant bath with rosemary, snake plant, and dragon tree. It keeps away negative energy, helps harmonize energy fields, and revitalizes and elevates spiritual vibrations. I boil a handful of each plant, infuse it for 10 minutes, filter out the mixture, and pour the preparation on my clean body, I then let myself dry in fresh air.

Villa Naia

Corumbau is difficult to access, but because it hasn’t been widely explored it’s home to beautiful deserted beaches. Bahia’s beaches have a unique relaxing energy and power. Villa Naia is the hotel of a family friend, Renata Melão, who has extremely good taste and really understands the elegant simplicity of Brazil.

3. Antonio Tarsis

Antonio Tarsis is from Bahia and lives in London. He’s a friend and in my opinion he’s one of the most relevant young Brazilian artists of our times. He made “Mining V” for me using repurposed fabrics from my brand Zilver. To make his assemblages, Tarsis reprocesses everyday objects, and in doing so, speaks to the invisible parts of globalization and the global economy, primarily labor. His work not only reflects on the lives and invisible labor of the marginalized, but seeks to unearth forgotten and suppressed stories often excluded from global narratives. By transforming what’s considered trash into something valuable, Tarsis brings center stage the socio-economic model of inequality in Brazil.

4. The Brazilian Body

Alair Gomes

What interests me in Alair Gomes, the late Brazilian photographer, is his focus on desire and the experience of the transcendence of sex. His work represents a certain tension of heat and sexual energy that I don’t find outside the beaches of Rio. The anonymity of his subject makes us see the human body as a sculpture. It’s this idea of desire and voyeurism that’s so magnetic in his work.

Ney Matogrosso, Caetano Veloso, Maria Bethânia, Fernando Gabeira

The musicians Ney Matogrosso, Caetano Veloso, and Maria Bethânia, as well as the philosopher Fernando Gabeira, mark an important period in Brazilian history. It was the ‘60s and ‘70s, and Brazil was living its largest creative wave, a very original one, that had a serious national and international impact. They are among the most genuine expressions of Brazilian identity and resistance to political oppression, they are examples of people who didn’t fall into any type of conditioning and really created their own expression. Their work resonates in this current political climate; it’s a great reminder that creative expression is a strong resistance to oppression.

5. Ernesto Neto

Ernesto Neto’s work is deeply rooted in the sensorial, an important element in his artistic language. He creates immersive environments that invite the viewer to touch, smell, walk through, lie down, and feel, making the body an active participant in the experience of art. He sees the body not just as a spectator but as a vessel for emotion, memory, and connection. The senses are of great importance to Brazilian life.

6. Heitor Villa-Lobos: Alma Brasileira, 1938

When the Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos wrote “Alma Brasileira” the world was living through uncertain times. Political tensions between countries were high as we were about to enter the second world war. This song evokes a deep, poetic, and spiritual Brazil and speaks to the Brazilian soul. It was an expression of warmth in a difficult moment and testifies to the optimism, love, and comfort Brazil offers the world. I hear it as a remedy that resonates with me today as we undergo a period of such uncertainty. Villa-Lobos was as inspired by Bach as he was by Brazilian folk music. In this version, “Alma Brasileira” is performed by the cellist Yo-Yo Ma.

7. Lygia Pape

Lygia Pape revisited “Ttéia 1, C” throughout her career in 1976 and 2002. Both the work and the name, which means web in Portuguese, remind me of the wisdom of nature. We, nature, need years to develop, adapt, and integrate into an ecosystem. When spiders are building webs, they use their legs to feel the environment’s frequency and assess if it has the necessary conditions for that web. If they feel the wrong conditions, they will eat the web and move onto a new place. I think this is a beautiful metaphor for how we interact with life and make decisions.

8. The Modernists: Oscar Niemeyer and Paulo Mendes da Rocha

The pure modernist form expressed by Oscar Niemeyer and Paulo Mendes da Rocha, have influenced and continue to influence my work today. Take for example Niemeyer’s gold wall at the Alvorada Palace. There’s a magnitude of gold but in equal value a simplicity that removes it from a position of power and wealth, he displaces gold from an ostensible place. I find this brilliant. I’m also fascinated by science fiction and UFOs, and a lot of Niemeyer’s works, and this specific one by Rocha, make me think of spaceships.

9. Lygia Clark

I am attracted to Lygia Clark’s “Biological Architecture” because it’s an experiment where the public interacts with malleable and organic forms. I like the idea that the construction of a space, and the inhabitation of this space, requires the body. It resonates in my own work when I’m making clothes, it’s so sensorial. The body wakens the matter; the work is alive because of the interaction between it and the body.

10. My Mother, Gloria Coelho

My mother Gloria Coelho, who is also a fashion designer, formed me in my passion for futurism and modernism, she was obsessed with science-fiction. I admire the radical way in which she explores an idea in a collection, she looks at sensuality with great intelligence.

This campaign was made using a digitally created sci-fi background. It was done in collaboration with her friend and Dutch photographer Martin Dijkstra, and was based on the film “The Matrix”.

My favorite Gloria Coelho collections from the early 2000s

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by Sam Walker

1. Celine by Phoebe Philo Leopard Coat

The one that got away… now it’s back (on Vestiaire Collective but with tags, and if you’re an XS)! Animal print coats can be so chic and timeless, I’ve been searching for one but struggling to find the right style that doesn’t feel too trendy or cheap. This Celine by Phoebe Philo version in wool feels sleek and put-together — a ‘one and done’ if you will — perfect for the evening or with jeans and trainers during the day. As I get older, I’m gravitating toward eccentric pieces that I can mix in with my normal minimalist style, pieces that are a bit more fun and not trying too hard. This coat checks all the boxes. Available at vestiairecollective.com.

2. Ilaria Icardi Jewelry

I’m not usually a jewelry person; my jewelry collection comprises about four pieces, two of which include my wedding rings. Yet, Ilaria Icardi seems to draw me out of my practicality and make me suddenly yearn for more: a diamond tuxedo ring or a very clever gold whistle - perhaps for the morning dog run? Surely that can be a good purchase rationale… Available at ilariaicardi.com.

3. Saman Amel City Mocs

With the trendy shoe fever going wild, I’ve found the antidote: an incredibly quiet ‘City Moc’ from the impeccably chic Swedish menswear brand, Saman Amel. If you aren’t familiar with them yet, they specialize in bespoke modern tailoring and do classic in a very cool way. At their Stockholm atelier, and their new London outpost, their heady mix of culture and art references feels unpretentious and modern. Available at samanamel.com.

4. New Home Obsessions

For the last couple of years we’ve been renting out our London house while we live abroad. I am longing to finally decorate my home when we move back this summer. I recently visited Venice with my parents and I fell in love with the Italian islands off the Venetian coast — Murano and Burano — and found some Murano glasses to bring home as a keepsake. These Alex Eagle versions are perfect if you can’t make the boat trip. S.R for Louise Roe ceramic dinner plates and Troy Town ceramic vessels from London are also on my wishlist. Alex Eagle glasses available at alexeagle.com, Sophia Roe plates available at louise-roe.com, and Troy Town ceramics available at troy-town-shop.com.

5. Celine 2018 Printed Skirt

Another iconic treasure from the old Celine days. This factory print skirt from the S/S 2018 runway collection is available on ReSee in perfect condition. Act fast! Available at resee.com.

6. Dries Van Noten Fragrances + Trainers

I’m a Dries devout and love what they’ve done with their beauty and fragrance range. In a world where everything feels disposable they truly feel like little collectibles – the fragrances can be refilled when you run out. These trainers seem to be popping up on everyone now, but I think there’s a reason why. The silver and green are standouts if you can find them in your size. Available at driesvannoten.com.

7. Prada Belted Bucket Bag

This is the only new bag on my wishlist. All three colors are divine: black, camel, and this cool white. The distressed belt comes off and can be used as a classic belt which helps justify the high price point (kind of). Available at prada.com.

8. Flore Flore Basics

We launched Flore Flore a few years ago while I was working at Matchesfashion and I haven’t shopped for basics from any other brand since. They make the perfect cuts of every staple, from the Max long-sleeve to the Esme tank they come in classic colors as well as some surprising pops for layering. Available at flore-flore.com.

9. Sophie Buhai Hand Mirror and Lighter

Sophie Buhai is challenging the banal everyday with an exceptional and useful range of new objects. They are exquisite and feel nostalgic. Available at sophiebuhai.com.

10. Prada F/W 2017 Corduroy Suit

If you know me, you know that archive Prada is my constant obsession. I already own quite a few pieces from the F/W 2017 runway collection, including some of the corduroy, but I love the idea of this full suit paired neatly with a knit vest or styled separately for a subtle ‘70s nod. Available at resee.com.

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Miles Davis - Dark Magus: Live At Carnegie Hall 1974
Miles Davis’s infamous 1974 Carnegie Hall concert at the peak of his electric phase. Edited by Mobile Fidelity, this pressing gives the recording the depth and detail it requires. Release Date: March 4, 2025 (back in stock soon).

François J. Bonnet / Sarah Davachi - Banshee / Basse Brevis
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Beatrice Dillon / Hideki Umezawa - Basho Still Forms
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Julius Eastman - Femenine
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Lab Rat XL (The Other People Place) - Mice or Cyborg
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Charles Webster - Born On The 24th Of July Transparent Orange Vinyl Edition
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Takuya Matsumoto - Taking Back EP
Six eclectic feel-good soulful house tracks.

Carrier - Neither Curve Nor Edge / In Spectra
Carrier’s double 12” of sharp, stripped down, advanced dance music on his own label.

Ghost Dubs - Extended Damaged Versions
Reworks from Fiedler’s last year’s praised album on Kevin Martin/The Bug’s Pressure label.

The Bug - Machine
The Bug/Kevin Martin’s compilation of EPs initially issued on his own label Pressure between 2023 and 2024.