JOHN CURRIN – OPENING CREDITS

Posted on 2026-08-03

John Currin’s show at the Savile Row gallery focuses on a new series of paintings that set pairs or triplets of women with exaggerated physiques in ornamental, Arcadian landscapes. In the sequence of twelve mid-size paintings, performative models, reinterpreted from the pages of 1970s clothing catalogues, are poised in a confident display that provides Currin with the means to explore classical painting. In his rendering of the tension of fabric stretched tight across breasts, the light on feathered leaves and gnarled trunks, the radiant softness of flesh and hair, and the self-conscious assembly of limbs, these tableaus allow Currin to make masterful paintings that replace a disappointing contemporary world, with a ‘lost golden world’ that holds his nostalgia for the past. A group of five new drawings in ink on washed paper interpret the paintings in a new medium and sketches from his process are shown alongside the finished works.

Opposite – Eclipse, 2026

Exhibition runs through to August 22nd, 2026

Sadie Coles HQ
17 Savile Row
W1S 3PN
London

www.sadiecoles.com

  

JÖRG SASSE – RED DOORS

Posted on 2026-08-03

Many of Jörg Sasse’s subjects seem clearly identifiable at first glance and look as if they come from a mundane pictorial world. This apparent reliability is closely connected with the medium of photography: Photographic pictures suggest a faithful representation of reality to this day, as if they were able to create an objective relationship to the world. It is this expectation that is subtly undermined in Sasse’s works. The seemingly photographic images question what can actually be seen as well as what wants to be seen. They refer to our habits of seeing, culturally acquired pictorial patterns, and the assumption that images must have a clear reference to reality.

Opposite – Installation view

Exhibition runs through to August 29th, 2026

Galerie nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder
Domgasse 6
1010 Vienna
Austria

www.schwarzwaelder.at

  

PETER ACHESON

Posted on 2026-08-03

The exhibition brings together small works on canvas, panel, bark, brick, and wood, made by Peter Acheson over several decades. Acheson’s paintings range from textured abstractions to tempered gestures containing references to other artists and periods, among them 19th century French painters, Blinky Palermo, Raoul De Keyser, Bill Jensen, and Forrest Bess, alongside more direct observations from the landscape around his studio in
Columbia County, New York.
Acheson’s concern is less with resolving these references than it is to allow them to coexist, permitting his paintings to act as habitats where various traditions and approaches can meet without hierarchy. This carries through to Acheson’s playful way of treating his compositions, leaving them caught between styles, simultaneously structured and chaotic, with direct references and happenstance similarity.

Opposite – Four Levels, 1983 – 1984

Exhibition runs through to August 14th, 2026

Anton Kern Gallery
16 East 55th Street
10022
New York

www.antonkerngallery.com

  

FRANK BOWLING – LIKE WATER

Posted on 2026-07-27

‘Frank Bowling. Like Water,’ the artist’s first solo exhibition in East Asia, brings together a selection of works from the 1960s to 2020, showcasing his mastery of surface texture. Sir Frank Bowling OBE RA is regarded as one of Britain’s most significant living artists. For over six decades, Bowling has rigorously pursued a practice which boldly expands the possibilities and properties of paint. At the age of 92, Bowling continues to paint every day in his South London studio.

Opposite – Shrill, 2002

Exhibition runs through to August 29th, 2026

Hauser & Wirth
15-16/F, 80 Queen’s Road Central
999077 Hong Kong
China

www.hauserwirth.com

  

UGO RONDINONE – MORE LIGHT

Posted on 2026-07-20

MORE LIGHT is part of a three-part constellation unfolding across London in collaboration with the Royal Academy of Arts and its annual Summer Exhibition. What binds all three parts together is light. Not only as a visual phenomenon, but as a shared human experience. Light becomes both the material and the subject of the works: something that moves through the body and the city.

The first part, THE SONG IS YOU is a new rainbow poem installed in the courtyard of the Royal Academy. Suspended three meters above the ground, the rainbow creates an arc beneath which visitors must pass in order to enter the Summer Exhibition. The rainbow transforms the threshold of the museum into a moment of passage, guiding visitors from the street into the space of the institution.
The second part, LIGHT, consists of fifty-four flags installed on Bond Street, Mayfair. Each flag presents a different sunrise or sunset derived from my ongoing sunrise/sunset paintings, a body of work I began in the summer of2016. As people move through the city, the flags unfold like a sequence of changing skies, carrying viewers through the rhythm of a day.
The third part, MORE LIGHT, brings six sunrise and sunset images into the intimate space of the gallery. The paintings are made with watercolor on unprimed cotton using the most reduced means possible: a horizon line and a circle or halfcircle lightly drawn in pencil, followed by loose washes of color whose edges remain open. The simplicity of the works with its loose watercolor washes allows the image to exist in a state between appearance and fading away.

Opposite – achtzehntermaizweitausendundsechsundzwanzig, 2026

Exhibition runs through to August 22nd, 2026

Sadie Coles HQ
8 Bury Street
SW1Y 6AB
London

www.sadiecoles.com

  

YMANE CHABI-GARA – EVEN E.T. SCARED ME

Posted on 2026-07-13

The highest level of anxiety sums up the feelings Ymane ChabiGara expresses in her paintings. Obsessively she represents enduring modes of confinement, whether voluntary or not. For her first paintings, she immersed herself in the world of hikikomori, those young Japanese people who live in their rooms, completely withdrawn from society. Their daily life is beset by various forms of social anxiety, filled with digital hyper-connection and haunted by fear of failure. Some time after, her practice opened to lighter images of landscapes prompting her pictorial technique to evolve.
In a new way in her practice, she began working in wash drawing in extremely structured compositions involving the use of Sellotape. Later on, the darkness of the contemporary world and of the human spirit resurfaced in her painting. In this exhibition, she confronts herself with another confinement, that of the family circle.

Opposite – One day painting 50, 2025

Exhibition runs through to July 25th, 2026

Mennour
5, rue du Pont de Lodi
75006 Paris
France

mennour.com