ART IS ALIVE
type: channel
description: Since 2007
date: 2026-06-14T11:08:01Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
generator agent: wordpress.com
items: Francis Picabia at Hauser & Wirth
items: Leon Morrocco’s Mediterranean light
items: R.I.P David Hockney
items: Giorgio Griffa at The Clark Art Institute
items: Henry Moore: Monumental Nature, Kew Gardens
items: Madonna releases Confessions II, the Film
items: LANZA atelier’s crinkle-crankle wall for the Serpentine Pavilion
items: Tête-à-Tête: Joan Miró & Pablo Picasso at Nahmad Projects, London
items: Christopher Barraja at Saint Laurent Babylone
items: Anne Imhof’s live poetry at Sprüth Magers

Francis Picabia at Hauser & Wirth
type: item
creator: nicolassmirnoff
date: 2026-06-14T11:08:01Z
subject: HOME
subject: Dada
subject: Francis Picabia
subject: Hauser & Wirth
subject: Marcel Duchamp
description: Francis Picabia: Expanding Horizons presented at Hauser & Wirth until 1 August 2026, offers a substantial overview of […]
encoded: Francis Picabia: Expanding Horizons presented at Hauser & Wirth until 1 August 2026, offers a substantial overview of the artist’s long and deliberately non-linear career, foregrounding the extent to which Picabia resisted stylistic consistency in favour of continual reinvention. It’s one of the strongest private gallery show, this season. Rather than presenting his practice as a progression through modernist movements, the exhibition is structured around discontinuity. Picabia’s work moves between Impressionism, Cubism, Dada, figuration and abstraction without settling into any single position. The early works, drawn from the 1900s and 1910s, show an artist initially working within Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist conventions and inspired by Spanish folklore. Even here, however, there is a marked tendency towards rupture, with increasingly open handling of form and colour that begins to push beyond the boundaries of naturalistic description. The Dada period marks a decisive break. Working across Paris, Zurich and New York, Picabia produced machine-based compositions that reject traditional painterly values in favour of impersonal imagery. Freedom! These works align him with broader anti-art strategies associated with Dada, particularly the work of figures such as Marcel Duchamp, although Picabia’s approach is notably less systematic and more deliberately inconsistent. A key focus of the exhibition is the “Transparencies” of the 1920s and 1930s. These layered compositions combine multiple iconographic registers, classical references, figures, fragments of earlier works, within densely overlaid structures. Rather than resolving into unified compositions, they operate through accumulation and interference. The works resist hierarchy between images, producing ambiguous spatial and temporal relationships. The exhibition also gives significant attention to Picabia’s wartime and immediate post-war production, particularly his return to figuration in the 1940s. Works fr…

Leon Morrocco’s Mediterranean light
type: item
creator: nicolassmirnoff
date: 2026-06-14T10:53:31Z
subject: HOME
subject: John Martin
subject: Leon Morroco
description: On view at John Martin Gallery in London from 11 June to 4 July 2026, A Studio on […]
encoded: On view at John Martin Gallery in London from 11 June to 4 July 2026, A Studio on the Côte d’Azur presents a group of recent paintings by the Scottish artist Leon Morrocco inspired by the landscapes, villages and distinctive light of southern France. Focusing on the area around Nice, Gourdon and Roquefort-les-Pins, the exhibition reflects the artist’s longstanding engagement with places shaped by colour, atmosphere and architecture. Born in Edinburgh in 1942, Morrocco belongs to a generation of Scottish artists whose careers were defined by travel. After studying at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, the Slade School and Edinburgh College of Art, scholarships took him to Italy, where an encounter with Mediterranean light and European painting would have a lasting impact on his practice. Travel has remained central to Morrocco’s work. Drawing directly from observation, he has spent decades filling sketchbooks across Europe, North Africa, India and the Caribbean before developing paintings in the studio. The works occupy a space between documentation and memory. That approach is evident throughout A Studio on the Côte d’Azur. Depictions of hillside villages, olive groves and sunlit façades are rendered through vibrant colour and fluid drawing. While rooted in specific locations, the paintings are less concerned with topographical accuracy than with conveying the experience of place. The Côte d’Azur has long occupied a prominent place in the history of modern art, attracting figures from Renoir and Bonnard to Matisse and Chagall. Morrocco’s paintings do not directly revisit that legacy, but they participate in a tradition in which landscape serves as a catalyst for painterly experimentation. Rich blues, ochres and greens reflect both the chromatic intensity of the region and the artist’s enduring interest in colour as a structural element. Now in his eighties, Morrocco continues to paint with remarkable energy and curiosity. The works in this exhibition demonstrate …

R.I.P David Hockney
type: item
creator: nicolassmirnoff
date: 2026-06-13T11:03:16Z
subject: HOME
subject: David Hockney
subject: R.I.P
subject: Serpentine
description: Image: David Hockney, London, 2023 © David Hockney Photo Credit: Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima
encoded: Image: David Hockney, London, 2023 © David Hockney Photo Credit: Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima

Giorgio Griffa at The Clark Art Institute
type: item
creator: nicolassmirnoff
date: 2026-06-10T19:12:05Z
subject: HOME
subject: Giorgio Griffa
subject: The Clark Institute
description: The Clark Art Institute will present Giorgio Griffa: Paths in the Forest from 13 June to 12 October, […]
encoded: The Clark Art Institute will present Giorgio Griffa: Paths in the Forest from 13 June to 12 October, 2026, marking the artist’s first solo museum exhibition in the United States. The exhibition offers a focused look at nearly six decades of practice by Giorgio Griffa, whose distinctive approach to painting has quietly redefined the boundaries between abstraction, process, and material presence. Griffa, born in Turin in 1936, he works with diluted acrylic paint on unstretched, unprimed canvas. He allows his surfaces to remain deliberately provisional. The canvases are often pinned directly to the wall and later folded for storage, leaving behind visible creases that become part of their history. For Griffa, these traces are not incidental but integral, evidence of a work that continues to live beyond any single installation. The resulting works are beautiful. At the core of his practice is what he describes as “the intelligence of materials.” Rather than treating painting as either representation or pure abstraction, Griffa considers his works as material facts, structures that register time, gesture, and interruption. His marks, often repeating sequences of lines, numbers, or rhythmic patterns, evoke systems of writing or counting while resisting fixed meaning. He describes them as “impersonal marks that belong to any hand, with thousands of years of memory,” suggesting a language that precedes and exceeds the individual artist. A defining aspect of Griffa’s method is his decision to stop before completion. He often “interrupts” a painting mid-flow, guided by the belief that continuation would impose closure on something inherently open. As he has noted, “in the meantime, life has moved on,” a reflection influenced by Zen thought and its acceptance of impermanence. In this way, each work remains suspended in a state of becoming, refusing the finality implied by a finished image. Over the course of his career, Griffa has developed thirteen loosely connected cycles of…

Henry Moore: Monumental Nature, Kew Gardens
type: item
creator: nicolassmirnoff
date: 2026-06-10T19:04:32Z
subject: HOME
subject: Henry Moore
subject: Kew Gardens
subject: Marc Quinn
description: Kew Gardens has unveiled what is being billed as the largest-ever outdoor presentation of works by Henry Moore, […]
encoded: Kew Gardens has unveiled what is being billed as the largest-ever outdoor presentation of works by Henry Moore, and the most comprehensive staging of the British sculptor’s practice in a generation. Across the 320-acre UNESCO World Heritage Site, 30 monumental bronzes have been installed in dialogue with the landscape, while a parallel display in the Shirley Sherwood Gallery of Botanical Art brings together more than 90 works, including bronzes, drawings, prints, wood carvings and rarely seen studies. This is the show of the season and it’s running until 31st January 2027. Kew has described the project as part of its wider ambition to integrate major contemporary art commissions within its living collections, following previous collaborations with artists including Marc Quinn, Dale Chihuly and Rebecca Louise Law. Presented in partnership with the Henry Moore Foundation, Monumental Nature extends across the entirety of the gardens rather than being concentrated in selected zones, as in Kew’s earlier 2007 presentation. The exhibition also includes works installed inside the Temperate House, the world’s largest surviving Victorian glasshouse. The environment for the works is spectacular! Moore’s tatement on outdoor sculpture anchors the curatorial approach in this fantastic ground: “Sculpture is an art of the open air. Daylight, sunlight is necessary to it, and for me its best setting and complement is nature. I would rather have a piece of my sculpture put in a landscape, almost any landscape, than in, or on, the most beautiful building I know.” Kew describes the project as a “once-in-a-generation presentation” and the most extensive survey of Moore’s work to date in any single outdoor setting. The curatorial premise rests on Moore’s long-held belief in the primacy of landscape as a setting for sculpture. As the exhibition notes: “Henry Moore liked to work outside at his home in Perry Green. Although he also undertook many urban public commissions, he felt that his sc…

Madonna releases Confessions II, the Film
type: item
creator: nicolassmirnoff
date: 2026-06-08T20:06:30Z
subject: HOME
subject: Benedict Cumberbatch
subject: Charlie XCX
subject: Honey Dijon
subject: Kate Moss
subject: Madonna
subject: Torso

LANZA atelier’s crinkle-crankle wall for the Serpentine Pavilion
type: item
creator: nicolassmirnoff
date: 2026-06-08T20:01:51Z
subject: HOME
subject: Interviews
subject: Hans Ulrich Obrist
subject: LANZA atelier
subject: Serpentine
description: For the 25th Serpentine Pavilion, Mexico City–based LANZA atelier has transformed one of architecture’s oldest elements, the brick […]
encoded: For the 25th Serpentine Pavilion, Mexico City–based LANZA atelier has transformed one of architecture’s oldest elements, the brick wall, into a contemporary framework for gatherine. Titled a serpentine, the project reinterprets the historic crinkle-crankle wall, a centuries-old masonry typology found in Suffolk gardens, as a porous and dynamic social space. Rather than treating the wall as a boundary, architects Isabel Abascal and Alessandro Arienzo deploy it as a tool that shapes movement, and encourages interaction. An elegant gently curving brick structure, paired with a translucent canopy and rhythmic colonnades, creates an environment where light, air and people flow freely between cocooning and landscape. Opening at the Serpentine last week, the Pavilion reflects LANZA atelier’s longstanding interest in vernacular forms, craft traditions and collective experience. Founded in 2015, the Mexico City practice has built a reputation for projects that explore the relationship between material culture, climate and social life, often revisiting historical typologies through a contemporary lens. And promoting beauty! At a moment when architecture is frequently defined by spectacle, a serpentine offers a quieter proposition. Drawing inspiration from England’s winding fruit walls, structures designed to create shelter, regulate climate and support growth, the Pavilion foregrounds the environmental and social intelligence embedded within traditional construction methods. More than a temporary structure, a serpentine proposes architecture as a relational condition rather than a static object. In an age marked by social fragmentation and environmental uncertainty, LANZA atelier suggests that architecture’s most radical gesture may not be spectacle, but openness: a wall that connects rather than divides, and a space that invites people to come together. A gesture. What was your reaction when you were first asked to design the Serpentine Pavilion? We were deeply honoured for …

Tête-à-Tête: Joan Miró & Pablo Picasso at Nahmad Projects, London
type: item
creator: nicolassmirnoff
date: 2026-06-07T19:16:16Z
subject: HOME
subject: Joan Miró
subject: London Gallery Weekend
subject: Nahmad Projects
subject: Pablo Picasso
description: At Nahmad Projects, a new exhibition brings together two of modernism’s most defining figures in a focused dialogue: […]
encoded: At Nahmad Projects, a new exhibition brings together two of modernism’s most defining figures in a focused dialogue: Joan Miró and Pablo Picasso. Titled Tête-à-tête, the show runs to 17 July 2026 in Mayfair. Perfectly timed for the London Gallery Weekend. The exhibition revisits one of the most enduring artistic relationships of the 20th century, rooted in shared Catalan origins, mutual admiration, and a lifelong exchange of ideas. Picasso and Miró, though radically different in temperament and style, sustained a creative dialogue that shaped both of their practices across decades. Picasso’s restless reinvention of form and perspective finds a counterpoint in Miró’s dreamlike visual language, where symbols, constellations, and biomorphic shapes drift across the canvas like private mythologies. Together, their work frames a broader story of modern art’s break from tradition, one driven as much by friendship and influence as by formal experimentation. Rather than staging direct comparison, Tête-à-tête emphasises proximity. Works are placed in conversation to highlight contrasts in approach: Picasso’s fractured, analytical Cubism against Miró’s poetic abstraction, grounded in intuition and subconscious rhythm. The result is less a confrontation than a sustained echo between two artistic worlds that continuously overlapped. The exhibition also revisits the idea of painting as dialogue rather than statement, an evolving exchange between two artists who repeatedly challenged and inspired each other. What emerges is a portrait not only of two figures, but of modernism itself as a space of connection, tension, and transformation. The exhibition is on view in the stunning space of Nahmad Projects, 2 Cork Street, London.

Christopher Barraja at Saint Laurent Babylone
type: item
creator: nicolassmirnoff
date: 2026-06-07T19:03:13Z
subject: Non classé
subject: Anthony Vaccarello
subject: Saint Laurent
subject: Yves Saint Laurent
description: At Saint Laurent Babylone in Paris, Daydreaming of Him presents a new photographic series by French-Australian artist Christopher […]
encoded: At Saint Laurent Babylone in Paris, Daydreaming of Him presents a new photographic series by French-Australian artist Christopher Barraja, curated by Anthony Vaccarello. On view to 13 September 2026, the exhibition extends the house’s ongoing interest in contemporary image-making and sensual modernity. Saint Laurent are now also sponsoring film-making. Born in 1996 and working between Paris and Nice, Barraja builds a visual language rooted in Mediterranean light, queer contemporary culture, and the emotional instability of memory. For him, Nice becomes less a place than a state of escape—soft, fragmented, and charged with nostalgia. A graduate of the École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs de Paris, Barraja first gained attention with De Chlore et de Rosé, published by Fisheye Éditions in 2023, which earned the Picto Prize and led to his selection as a Hyères Festival finalist in 2022. In Daydreaming of Him, images unfold through suggestion rather than clarity. Figures appear partial, gestures unresolved, and scenes suspended in a humid, almost cinematic haze. Desire is never explicit but implied, diffused across light, skin, and landscape. The environments are subtle, and express ideas of desire and carelessness. The result is a body of work that hovers between intimacy and distance, where memory feels unstable and meaning remains deliberately open. Across the exhibition, looking becomes projection, and photography a space for meditation. All works are available for sale, alongside a limited edition of one hundred signed fanzines, extending Barraja’s atmospheric world into a collectible form. – <img loading="lazy" width="683" height="1024" data-attachment-id="36517" data-permalink="https://artisalive.co.uk/2026/06/07/christopher-barraja-at-saint-laurent-babylone/slrd_christopher-barraja_exhibition_02/" data-orig-file="https://artisalive.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/slrd_christopher-barraja_exhibition_02.jpg" data-orig-size="2400,3600" data-comments-opene…

Anne Imhof’s live poetry at Sprüth Magers
type: item
creator: nicolassmirnoff
date: 2026-06-07T18:50:00Z
subject: HOME
subject: Anne Imhof
subject: Joseph Beuys
subject: London Gallery Weekend
subject: Sprüth Magers
description: There is a persistent tension running through Anne Imhof’s practice between movement and physicality. Across performance, painting, sculpture […]
encoded: There is a persistent tension running through Anne Imhof’s practice between movement and physicality. Across performance, painting, sculpture and film, the body remains her primary subject, not simply as a physical presence, but as a site of projection, surveillance, vulnerability and resistance. These questions underpin Citizen, Anne Imhof’s new solo exhibition at Sprüth Magers London, presented during London Gallery Weekend and running until 1st August. Bringing together a new body of paintings, sculptures, drawings and film, the exhibition extends concerns explored in her recent projects DOOM: House of Hope and Fun ist ein Stahlbad, both realised in 2025. If those works examined collective experience through choreographed encounters and charged environments, Citizen distills many of the same themes into objects that continue to pulse with latent movement. The exhibition is anchored by a series of large-scale Wave paintings, works that appear suspended between emergence and dissolution. Built through layers of accumulated marks, they resist fixed interpretation, their surfaces oscillating between abstraction and image. Like much of Imhof’s work, they seem to register a state of becoming rather than arrival, holding viewers in a moment of unresolved tension. Elsewhere, site-specific sculptures made from crowd-control barriers introduce the language of public space and social organisation. Familiar as instruments of direction and restriction, these structures carry the memory of gatherings, demonstrations, concerts and queues. Removed from their functional context, they become charged symbols of access and exclusion, subtly shaping the movement of bodies through the gallery itself. A new four-channel film expands these concerns, returning to Imhof’s long-standing interest in choreography, spectatorship and collective behaviour. The moving image has always occupied a complex position within her practice, acting not as documentation but as another arena in which bodie…