In addition to his numerous street art pieces, Alexandre Farto, aka Vhils, has shown his unique creations in various galleries around the world. The works above are from his 2018 exhibition Annihilation at Over the Influence gallery’s temporary location in Los Angeles.
From the gallery about the show-
Presenting a reflection on the current model of globalized development and the forces shaping and affecting local identities around the world today, Annihilation emphasizes the global impact of Los Angeles culture and the subsequent breakdown of unique global identities across continents. For his first solo exhibition in the United States since 2011, Vhils has taken the opportunity to set up a dialogue between the United States, Europe, and China to address the growing struggle for hegemonic supremacy between global powers and the ensuing social and economic impact on the world at large. Annihilation shares the stories of the citizens who breathe vitality into densely populated urban epicenters. Based on a variety of source material, from advertisements collected in cities worldwide to salvaged wooden doors, the new patchwork-like series intentionally dilutes the readability of each individual portrayed, a reflection on how identity is both formed and affected by the city’s visual discourse. This intentional juxtaposition of contrasts mirrors the interplay between elements from various cultures which we observe at work today in large urban contexts.
Vhils-Strata, which presents a selection of his work from the past twenty years, is currently on view at the Museum of Urban and Contemporary Art (MUCA) in Munich, Germany until 3/1/26.
He also recently created the site-specific installation, Doors of Cairo, located near the Pyramids in Giza in Egypt. It is part of Forever is Now 05and is on view until 12/7/25.
“Drexler Pigeon (Columba blued)”, 2022, Oil on wood panel
Clive Smith‘s incredibly detailed trompe-l’œil paintings of birds were part of the 2024 exhibition From Cellar to Garret at Marc Straus gallery in NYC.
The first image is of the painting Drexler Pigeon (Columba blued) which uses elements from fellow artist Lynne Drexler’s 1961 painting Blued.
Kashink was one of the many artists who created murals for Jeffrey Deitch’s Coney Art Walls in Coney Island, Brooklyn. You can find their most recent work on Instagram.
Below is Jeffrey Deitch‘s statement about the project from his website-
“Coney Art Walls was an outdoor museum of street art in the center of the Coney Island amusement park. Sixty-eight murals by leading and emerging artists from around the world were presented during the three year curatorial project from 2015 – 2017. Coney Art Walls was possibly the most visited contemporary art installation in the world during its run, experienced by many of the five million people who visit Coney Island each summer. Since the 1970s, when I would visit Coney Island with my punk rocker friends, I had a dream of creating a populist art installation there. Reading about a large vacant lot in the center of the amusement park, I approached the owner, Thor Equities, with my proposal for an outdoor museum of street art. They were enthusiastic about the concept and funded a remarkable three-year project. The mural project was enhanced by a Brooklyn food court with outdoor seating and a music program. It was thrilling to see hundreds of young people dancing in front of the murals on summer nights.”
Today’s flashback is to a few of the intricate works from Sofia Love‘s 2023 exhibition Vaquera at Shelter in NYC.
From the gallery about the exhibition-
Vaquera – not determined by an article, the word becomes both a noun and an adjective, an iconic figure and a way of being in the world. For Brooklyn-based painter Sofia Love’s debut solo exhibition in New York, vaquera is both a manifesto of queer self-fashioning and a patron saint.
Born and raised in Boston, but with deep family ties to the Mexican community of Laredo, TX, Love’s acrylic paintings serve as a negotiation between ancestral memory and contemporary identity. The titular cowgirl recurs throughout the exhibition – gun-slinging, brown, and frequently nude – framed by expanses of desert. She’s a real, historical cowgirl. She’s the artist traversing her own imagination. She’s a badass dyke. For Love, vaquera is an object of desire and an extension of herself.
While there are traditional canvases, the majority of works on view take the form of nichos, intimate yet elaborately decorated altars that can be found in homes across Mexico. Dedicated to deceased ancestors or particular saints, nichos blend folk spirituality with Catholicism, smuggling pre-Colombian vernacular traditions into contemporary, Westernized culture. Love’s nichos draw on this history to produce art objects that exist at the border of painting and sculpture, with frames that extend the content and imagery of the paintings they enshrine.
The resulting works each have interiors and exteriors, the painting and the frame, in which ambivalent scenes are surrounded by totems and animals that seem to hint at the psychological subtext of the central image. Figures reappear across the framed nichos like characters in a narrative, each with its own personal connotation for the artist. Skulls, moths, storks tell stories that are only partially legible from an external perspective. Like the vaquera herself, Love’s layered compositions refuse any easy interpretation.
Threshold, 2020, a painting by Orlando-based artist Ericka Sobrack, was on view in 2021 as part of Morean Arts Center‘s Fresh Squeezed 5. The annual Fresh Squeezed exhibitions focus on a selection of emerging artists currently living in Florida.
Her solo exhibition, Witching Hour, is currently on view at Cat Eye Creative in Decatur, Georgia, until 11/2/25.
From the artist about her work-
“My paintings are disorientations of everyday spaces, offering the viewer access into a realm of the unknown, ripe with psychological strangeness. Suburban environments are often subverted into a hyper-reality, revealing juxtapositions between the mundane and the eerie to create conflict and tension. I’m interested in how form, light and color within unassuming settings can be manipulated and orchestrated into uncomfortable, almost uncanny depictions of the banal. By deconstructing the mundane and colliding it with the abnormal, these familiar suburban settings transform into strange, otherworldly scenes that amplify human drama, usually suggesting an implied event, a vague story, or fragmentations of memory. Behind these charged scenes often lie personal yet common experiences that linger in a heightened state of uncertainty.
I often explore the idea of safety and threat within domestic spaces, where the viewer becomes a witness, an observer, or a participant of the narratives that unfold before them. These intimate scenes are an embodiment of the emotional discord many of us share, where vulnerability materializes, and we are forced to confront the uncomfortable truths of both physical and psychological isolation.”
Today’s flashback is to Huma Bhabha‘s spooky figures for Before The End, which was on view until March of this year at Brooklyn Bridge Park. It is just one of the many projects organized by Public Art Fund.
From Public Art Fund about the work-
With the ominous title Before the End, Huma Bhabha (b. 1962, Karachi, Pakistan) sets the stage to evoke mythologies as old as humankind. Conceived for Brooklyn Bridge Park, Bhabha’s four monumental painted and patinated bronzes were cast from carved cork and skull fragments. The mysterious figures recall ancient effigies cut into tombstones, their surfaces evoking centuries of eroded sediment and stone. Yet, unlike a tomb, these four-sided vertical forms stand elevated above the earth, their bones open to the sky.
“Before the End” is a title borrowed from the writings of Vincent of Beauvais (ca. 1184–1264), whose medieval imagination sparked with supernatural and apocalyptic visions. Today, the related popular genres of horror and science fiction continue to inspire Bhabha, as does art history from antiquity to the present day. Her rough-hewn figures are ambiguous—are they emerging or trapped within, rising from the depths of the earth or returning to the underworld? Set amidst an expansive landscape where the natural and man-made converge, Bhabha’s sculptures captivate through contradiction, seemingly forged in geological time yet animated with a visceral sense of immediacy.
Wax Monument IV (Free Wax) by Sandy Williams IV was on view at Socrates Sculpture Park in 2020 for Call and Response, Part II of the MONUMENTS NOW exhibition. The outdoor exhibition included ten monuments projects realized by the Park’s 2020 Artist Fellows.
From Socrates Sculpture Park about the work-
A monument to living history, this wax flag can be set alight from multiple-wicks and rests perpendicularly upon a black mulch base shaped like the borough of Queens. Rendered in black and white, the wax flag is reminiscent of – but not equivalent to – the U.S.’s own flag and emblem of patriotism. By enlarging the candle- a commemorative form often spontaneously employed in immediate reaction to events, Williams celebrates this popular, accessible form of expression. Alive with transformative potential, the work invites participation, mark-making, melting, and molding of a malleable symbol.
Born today, 9/12, artist Robert Irwin used light and space in his work as a way to create an experience for the observer. He started out as a painter but later became well known for his site-specific installations and architectural and outdoor projects- including the central garden at the Getty Center in Los Angeles (pictured below) and his work for the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas.
The works above are from his 2020 exhibition, Unlights, at Pace Gallery in New York.
About that show from Pace-
Irwin’s new works are composed from unlit six-foot fluorescent lights mounted to fixtures and installed in vertical rows directly on the wall. The glass tubes are covered in layers of opulently colored translucent gels and thin strips of electrical tape, allowing the reflective surfaces of unlit glass and anodized aluminum to interact with ambient illumination in the surrounding space and produce shifting patterns of shadow and chromatic tonality. Reflecting his recent turn toward the perceptual possibilities of unlit bulbs, Irwin’s new body of work expands the range of possibilities for how we experience sensations of rhythm, pulsation, expansion and intensity, while continuing the artist’s long-standing interest in registering the immediacy of our own presence in space.
Expanding from his breakthrough disc paintings of the late 1960s, Irwin’s new works effectively dissolve the perceived border between object and environment, focusing the viewer’s consciousness on the act of perception. Each light fixture in Irwin’s sculptures contains one or two unlit bulbs—or no bulb at all—while alternating gaps of “empty” wall are painted in subtle shades of gray, producing a sense of uncertainty about what is tactile and what is merely optical. As the shadowed, painted and reflected intervals of space reverberate in the viewer’s visual field, the wall itself enters the composition, destabilizing any sense of figure and ground. To encounter Irwin’s sculptures is thus to allow oneself to be caught in a ceaseless oscillation between flatness and volume, transparency and opacity, solidity and atmosphere.
In Irwin’s art, the object functions as a kind of score for orchestrating “the continual development and extension of humans’ potential to perceive the world.” Although unlit, the bulbs in these new sculptures are therefore never “off.” Their optically rich surfaces serve as energetic loci for heightening the sensory possibilities of the human body. In their chromatic complexity, the works convey an almost painterly quality, recalling Irwin’s origins as a second-generation Abstract Expressionist painter in the 1950s. Suggesting a rhythmic, minimal composition of repeated linear elements, the works also evoke his innovative line paintings of the early 1960s, which involve us physically and perceptually in an open-ended, immersive and transitory experience of seeing.
Widely recognized as a pivotal figure in contemporary art, Irwin is closely associated with the Light and Space movement that emerged in Los Angeles in the 1960s, and he has continued to live and work in Southern California for his entire career. He first used fluorescent lights as substrates for producing what he has called a “conditional art” in the 1970s, often in combination with architectural scrims and other spatial interventions. In the 1990s he introduced colored gels to the fluorescent tubes to alter the chromaticism of the light, and, over the past decade, began isolating the bulbs and fixtures as sculptural objects in their own right. In returning to the use of solely ambient light, Irwin’s new sculptures embody the culmination of seven decades of rigorous experimentation.
“Everything in the world is ultimately conditional,” Irwin has observed. “There is nothing that’s transcended or infinite or whatever you want to call it. Everything acts within a set of conditions.” Like all of Irwin’s works, his new sculptures respond differently to the conditions of each specific environment in which they are installed, attuning our senses to a given context and making possible an intuitive and incidental experience of seeing that resists rational or conceptual explanation. “It’s not about answers,” the artist once remarked, but rather about the act of questioning: “It’s the constant pursuit of the possibilities of what art is.”
Getty Center, Los Angeles
Below is one of his earlier paintings Untitled, 1964-6, which was on view at Palm Springs Art Museum for the 2024 exhibition Particles and Waves: Southern California Abstraction and Science, 1945-1990.
From the museum about the work-
Although this work appears to have a monochromatic white surface from afar, a matrix of thousands of painted dots becomes visible from a closer vantage point. Irwin aimed to highlight the visual effects of color interaction by juxtaposing light green and lavender, complementary colors across from each other on a color wheel. The canvas’s outwardly bowed supports and the increasing density of dots towards the painting’s center further heighten the viewer’s perceptual experience of the work.
The documentary Robert Irwin: A Desert of Pure Feeling, does an excellent job detailing his life, art, and the philosophy behind his work. It is well worth a watch and inspiring to watch him still at work in Marfa at 87. He passed away in 2023 at the age of 95.
From the museum about the artist and the painting-
Mavis Pusey was born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1928. She is known for her abstract paintings of bold shapes and hard edged lines found in architectural spaces. Pusey was a prolific artist who found inspiration in the geometric forms found both in fashion patternmaking and in the printmaking process. During sessions at the Robert Blackburn workshop, Pusey began to develop a body of work revealing the process of urban transformation happening in New York City. She was captivated by the shifts in the urban environment that kept the city suspended in a cycle of destruction and reconstruction.
Throughout her career, Pusey taught at institutions for higher education in New York, Pennsylvania, and was a high school teacher in Virginia. In 2019 at the age of ninety, Pusey passed away after years of declining health. Her legacy lives on through the collections of major cultural institutions across the U.S.
Inspired by the ever-evolving changes in the urban landscape, Pusey presents a familiar scene of demolition and construction in the painting Within Manhattan. Geometric forms resemble architectural building blocks in the process of being assembled or possibly deconstructed. The configuration of shapes in the work allows us to imagine the motion present at the site with scaffolding giving way to discarded boards, positioning us as spectators to change.
The first major museum survey of her work, titled Mobile Images, is currently at ICA Philadelphia until 12/5/25.
