HIROKI TSUKUDA – LIMINAL SPACE

Posted on 2025-08-11

In Liminal Space, Tsukuda explores the elusive space between reality and fiction. His works emerge from states of transition – between places, times, and modes of perception. The motifs appear both familiar and detached, like memories of experiences that were never actually lived. Inspired by the aesthetics of so-called “liminal spaces” – deserted corridors, stripped shopping malls, surreal threshold zones – Tsukuda creates imagery that defies clear localization. They hover between presence and absence, memory and imagination. This perspective is shaped by his childhood in rural Japan, where the urban landscape was characterised by architectural remnants such as stairs leading nowhere or doors opening into emptiness, known as Hyperart Thomassons.

Opposite – Jet and star, 2025

Exhibition runs through to August 27th, 2025

Galerie Gisela Capitain
St. Apern Straße 26
50667 Cologne
Germany

www.galeriecapitain.de

  

SARA FLORES – BAKISH MAI

Posted on 2025-08-11

‘Bakish Mai’ presents the recent work of Peruvian artist and activist Sara Flores: a new film and a series of patterned, abstract paintings. Through these works, Flores offers conceptual representations of Shipibo-Konibo ancestral knowledge – mappings of the Amazonian cosmos and histories made visible on the painted surface.

The exhibition’s title, which is also the name of the school co-founded by Flores in the Peruvian Amazon, translates loosely to ‘Land of Yesterday and Tomorrow’. The phrase speaks to a circular idea of time in which ancestral pasts shape the future, as well as the continued resonance of Indigenous epistemologies within a politics of land, life and futurity.’

Opposite – Untitled (Ani Maya Shao Punté Kené, 2024), 2024

Exhibition runs through to September 7th, 2025

White Cube
144-152 Bermondsey Street
SE1 3TQ
London

www.whitecube.com

  

NICOLAS DESHAYES – THE NATURAL WORLD

Posted on 2025-08-04

Since 2017, Deshayes has been making ceramics in the Italian province of Vicenza, an area historically known for manufacturing hand-decorated majolica plates and glazed fruit. Over time, the local workshops have expanded to produce sanitary ware, crockery, funerary urns and ornaments. Deshayes is best known for exploring the material of the human body via amorphous sculpture. Here, he pivots to a more notably figurative language. Each work is modelled, cast, sponged, baked, honed and polychromed, and the exhibition encompasses many cultural registers, from classic historical motifs to contemporary cultural objects. For Deshayes, this multiplicity allows him to question our preconceived notion of taste.

Opposite – Nude, 2025

Exhibition runs through to September 6th, 2025

Modern Art
7 Bury Street
SW1Y 6AL
London

www.modernart.net

  

ÁLVARO URBANO – PRELUDE

Posted on 2025-08-04

Working in the intersection of theater, architecture and film, Álvaro Urbano transforms spaces into immersive environments emulating an oneiric dimension. Through atmospheric installations Urbano researches the ruin as a space where reality and fiction commingle. Staged gestures and reconstituted narratives are used to conjure these lost and heterotopic spaces; disrupting archetypes and objects from their original function render them open to interpretation. For Prelude, Urbano revisits The Ramble, a woodland area of Central Park and a known space of transit whose public distinction borrows from a legacy of 19th-century landscape design – celebrated in the parlance of its time for “obscurity, not absolutely impenetrable, but sufficient to affect imagination with a sense of mystery.”

Opposite – Prelude (Dogwood), 2025

Exhibition runs through to August 22nd, 2025

Marian Goodman Gallery
385 Broadway
10013 New York

www.mariangoodman.com

  

FRANZ STEIN – SUNLIT LOVE

Posted on 2025-08-04

A carpet, the work of a painter?! In recent years, Franz Stein’s canvases have become light, airy—even playful: There are no preliminary sketches or templates. On a layered white base, beneath which thinned layers of acrylic paint shimmer through, the artist swiftly applies color in lines or areas—gestures of powerful energy and intense dynamics. Thus, what initially appears flat becomes, upon longer viewing, a spatial image with foreground, middle, and background. These are worlds cast onto canvas—of thoughts, dreams, and desires: images of spaces and realities, painted utopias! Pure joy in painting, in the act of painting. The indulgent handling of the canvas is inherent in every one of Franz Stein’s works. And now this: the leap from the wall to the floor, from the two-dimensionality of the surface to the three-dimensionality of space, from the formal to the fluffy! Franz Stein designed the 55-square-meter carpet at a 1:20 scale as a draft sketch composed of 21 individual parts. These carpet segments are arranged in such a way that each can function autonomously as a portrait-format rug, yet together they form a landscape-format overall image.

Opposite – Installation view

Exhibition runs through to August 31st, 2025

KÖNIG GALERIE
Monbijoustrasse 11
10117 Berlin
Germany

www.koeniggalerie.com

  

EMILIO GOLA – DEAR FRIEND, WHAT’S THE TIME?

Posted on 2025-07-28

Emilio Gola’s works – be it drawings or paintings – do not have a strictly narrative intent, nor an illustrative purpose. His practice renders reality, yet filtered through an emotional distance, observed with restraint. The subjects that inhabit his works – young friends, siblings, studio mates, fellow artists – seem to enter the image not merely to be represented, but rather to be welcomed. The bodies offer themselves to a gaze that accompanies them: they are figures captured in a state of surrender, oscillating between intimacy and exposure, as if they had just dozed off in a space that allows them to be themselves, without having to prove anything.

Opposite – Viola, 2025

Exhibition runs through to August 30th, 2025

Monica De Cardenas
Chesa Albertini
Stradun 111
CH-7524 Zuoz
Switzerland

monicadecardenas.com