The curatorial team were granted full access to Anderson’s prolific archive, creating vignettes for each film that form a chronological display. ‘There are so many aspects of his work that are connected with design and architecture,’ says Johanna Agerman Ross, who curated the show and catalogue alongside Matthieu Orléan and Lucia Savi in collaboration with La Cinémathèque Française. 'As a design museum, we wanted to make that a prominent part of the exhibition.'

The lived-in tactility of Anderson’s films is evident throughout. Costumes are made from sumptuous furs and bobbly felts, creating authentic textures and personalities for each of his characters. The Scout outfit worn by 12-year-old Sam (Jared Gilman) in Moonrise Kingdom (2012) is casually styled, with rolled-up cuffs and jaunty accessories, as a child – especially one as rebellious as this lead character – may dress themselves. Willem Defoe’s chilling family fixer in The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), meanwhile, is brought to life with sinister intensity by his tailored leather costume and knuckledusters. Mr Fox’s tiny soft corduroy suit was not the simple creation of his puppeteer but designed by Savile Row tailor Scabal.

The props are equally evocative. While many films utilise props for background world-building, Anderson brings an at times obsessive depth to his creations. The young-adult fiction books featured in Moonrise Kingdom were all designed from scratch, with constructed plots, making the eventual titles and covers seem authentic. The show also features a miniature replica of Anderson’s own childhood copy of Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr Fox. This movie and his other famous stop-motion film, Isle of Dogs (2018), are explored in highly technical detail, with skeletal inner workings highlighting the depth to which each character is articulated and considered, their intricate, kinetic facial features and unkempt fur adding a touch of realism and character.

The exhibition paints a view of the director as both compulsively precise and playful, refusing to cut corners when an original form of expression might be possible. 'I think he became keener about commissioning items as he went along,' says Agerman Ross. 'With his first film, Bottle Rocket (1996), he commissioned some things, but it was all returned to the prop house. With Rushmore (1998), he decided to keep everything because he was quite upset to find that when he needed to reshoot, things weren’t there. This became the starting point for the archive, and I think he got a taste for commissioning.'

The show highlights how Anderson’s process has evolved, from his early explorations of playful stop motion in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004) to his recent work on Asteroid City (2023), which richly combines live action and more imaginative use of design. 'It’s a crescendo of all the techniques he has used, from puppets to miniature models and props and original costumes,' says Agerman Ross.

Anderson is now at a point in his career where he is trusted to fulfill his wildest ambitions. Agerman Ross hopes that this exhibition highlights the creative possibility that still exists in the film industry. 'Filmmaking is a deeply collaborative process. The world of design is vast and film is its own universe; we hope to make it intriguing for young people. How do you become a puppet maker or a set designer? When people see it played out through these objects, they can become more informed about these roles.'

‘Wes Anderson: The Archives’ at the Design Museum from 21 November 2025 – 26 July 2026, designmuseum.org

Pade established a fluid, dreamy style at her institutional debut at the Arken Museum of Contemporary Art in Denmark earlier in 2025, and is now presenting a new group of paintings for her first solo UK exhibition. In their celebration of the body, the works continue to consider distortion and movement. Bodies in a crowd are caught in a choreographed dance of emotion, each figure displaying their own primal language.

Pade draws on classical references for her figures in a crowd, bringing them to life with violent brushstrokes. ‘I've always been inspired by history, but in different ways,’ she says. ‘I spend a lot of time looking at the German New Objectivity painters [who established a non-sentimental reality]. Not only do they have a very interesting way of depicting the figurative, giving it a sort of ugliness and an uncanniness to them, but they also express time in an interesting way – or not necessarily time, but what is going on between moments, or between wars. It’s waiting for the next thing to happen, and how they capture it.’

It is a pause the artist reflects in her own work, paying as much attention to the spaces between bodies as she does to the bodies themselves. Pade conducts a geometrical play of shapes and overlapping forms to bring the humanity of her subjects to the fore. ‘When I start the painting, I need to capture the movements especially, and that's why, for me, it becomes more about coordinates in the beginning. When I start, it's about finding the dynamic in the painting, in a movement. Because that's in the end result. There needs to be something that's moving in the painting, if that doesn’t sound completely ridiculous, but it needs to have a pulse. I think it’s especially true when you paint figuratively, because otherwise the characters die. They become frozen.’

Eva Helene Pade, 'Søgelys' is at Thaddaeus Ropac London until 20 December 2025

ropac.net

Wallpaper*: What were the main considerations in bringing this world to life?

Nathan Crowley: I think the main consideration was being respectful of the stage show, Wicked, and of the great history of the film. I spent every Christmas watching it with my parents, who have nostalgia about it, as do my grandparents, but my kids also all have nostalgia for Wicked. So you are trying to find a look for Oz that tells the story of this epic journey. The considerations are treading lightly and finding a way through it all and re-designing it for us, because this is the first time that Wicked has been told cinematically, so that's a long journey and we have to really start to understand what Oz is, what our theories of Oz are and what best represents it.

W*: What were the challenges in creating worlds of good and evil in a non-literal way?

NC: We have to redefine the yellow brick road as a form of oppression. How do we visually tell you that story? This is one of the many things that Wicked brings – it says the yellow brick road isn't what you think it is. We tell that story by showing you how it's made. They have to enslave the animals to make it. The munchkins have to get all the yellow tulips we grew and turn them into a yellow dye and make bricks with them, rather than making all the colours of the rainbow for their clothes, it’s now enforced colour to make the bricks, and all their colour is taken away. Munchkin Land becomes monotone yellow. So even when the house lands and Dorothy goes on her journey, she's really becoming an agent of the wizard. She's now working for the wizard. So it's just a very different point of view. And I think that's where you start. What are the visual signatures of showing you that oppression?

W*: What references inspired you?

NC: For Emerald City, it was the Chicago World Fair in 1893, where the great modernists built the White City, that's now long gone. But they built a dream. Edison and his electricity lit it. You look at Sullivan and especially Burnham, who built the White City and is the father of American modernism. The underlying thing that I took to Emerald City was a dream and the White City was a dream. And because we're an American fairy tale, I needed something like the Chicago World Fair to give me that dream.

With Sullivan and Burnham, their architecture was so detailed, but yet because it was en masse, it became simplistic and modern. So that's what I had to do for the Emerald City. I've got to build my green city. But I took inspiration from America, and then I had to add the whimsicalness, taking architecture that feels like it's verticality [using height in architecture] and then twisting them together. I had to form a new type of architecture, which was very exciting actually.

W*: How closely did you work with the director and members of the production team in the design? How flexible were you required to be as the story took shape?

NC: We had many months of prep before we even started building anything. So we worked in this visual room, all together, with Jon [M. Chu, Wicked director] and the producers. You look at it as a whole. I do everything practically and I start building with my giant construction group: it's like a piece of sculpture and it develops, like the dancers. Then the choreographer Chris [Scott, Wicked choreographer] comes in and says; 'Well I've got this idea for this dance, but I need a bridge.' Things change halfway through filming. We always develop it. And Jon would come and say, 'Oh, for this scene I need a giant fountain that rotates.' And yes, I've got a great special effects team. I can build your rotating fountain – but maybe it could open, and flowers and a balloon could come out!

On our crew, we have all the people who can do that stuff. We have engineers and sculptors and artists and prop makers who get excited because it's a challenge. So I don't do it alone. I have this army of people. At one point, we were running a thousand people in my department. And it's the most wonderful thing when everyone is moving. It's so fluid.

Wicked: For Good is released on November 21

The partners in life and art have collaborated with Chanel and Louis Vuitton, and have shot for every top fashion and culture magazine you can think of, including their series on America’s top 50 creatives for Wallpaper* in 2024. Their early adoption of digital manipulation in the Nineties put them at the forefront of portraiture at a time when experimentation with computer technology in image making was in its emergence. The result is a 40-year body of work made with the declared intention of striking a balance between the moment and timelessness and to ‘destabilise the conventional promise of photography as a purveyor of truth.’

In a preview of work in their retrospective at Kunstmuseum Den Haag opening in March 2026, ‘Can Love Be a Photograph’ ,they are showing images from the project ‘Think Love' at India Mahdavi’s Project Room #21, in Paris. This project, which opened to coincide with Paris Photo, showcases Inez & Vinoodh’s series created with the iPhone 17 in Marfa Texas.

‘Think Love’, created as part of the project ‘Joy, in 3 Parts’ is a series of portraits of couple Charles Matadin and Natalie Brumley. Curated by ex-director of photography for The New York Times Magazine Kathy Ryan, the project also featured Mickalene Thomas and Trunk Xu.

The couple were shot simply, outside with a translucent piece of red fabric, in a series that explores both the intimacy and the euphoria of romantic love and desire. The landscape plays a role in some of the images as a stirring backdrop for the young lovers.

The collaboration with iPhone is a natural progression in Inez & Vinoodh’s use of tech throughout their career, who see it as a way of pushing the boundaries of art and portrait making. In the exaggerated elements of a portrait, they create insights into their subjects or their art, extending the influence of the photograph. They were the first to start using computers to alter the human body in ways that are very normal now, and used them to heighten meaning over a mythical human physical perfection.

Having worked together since 1986, they have an intuitive way of making images, with one taking photographs and the other observing. There is no fixed role and most of their shoots take only fifteen minutes, with the duo demonstrating an apt way of gaining the trust of their subjects that means the process is very fluid, they have said.

In trying to liberate photography from the moment, they have created timeless images with both avant garde and classic qualities featuring well-known figures of recent times. In putting together the large-scale show, previewed here in Paris, they have taken chronology out of the equation, taking their work out of the order in which it was made and focusing purely on the images.

Inez and Vinoodh’s legacy as image makers is set, but they are still seeking to explore photography, its limitations and its possibilities. Here we see a taster of what’s to come in March 2026, on view in Paris until 12^th December.

'Think Love’ is on view from 13th November – 12th December 2025, India Mahdavi’s Project Room #21

theravestijngallery.com

3000 copies of the vinyl will be available worldwide. In addition, Rough Trade stores will hold 500 coloured vinyl records and 500 limited-edition CDs featuring a live performance at Brixton Electric.

'What drew us to work with David is the dark sense of humour in his pieces,' the band tell Wallpaper* 'And that he’s sick as fuck!'

Lambrini Girls have had a momentous year, receiving nods from punk elders Iggy Pop, Kathleen Hannah and Carrie Brownstein and critical acclaim from publications such as The Guardian, Rolling Stone and NME – the latter calling their ferocious debut album 'loud, raw, and impossible to ignore'.

Phoebe Lunny and Macieira-Boşgelmez of the band gained a following with their outspoken politics, both in interviews and their music. Their debut record takes on the far-right, gentrification, toxic masculinity and trans rights.

The new vinyl, titled Slutcore Version For Kids Who Can't Read Good captures their humour and DIY ethos – a perfect pairing between two of Brighton's subversive creative forces.

‘You enter the house, and in literally each corner there is a sofa,’ shares curator Michele Bertolino, sampling the upholstery the morning after the show opened to collaborators and contributors, press, family, and friends of the museum. ‘It's incredible because the sofas are always busy; it means being cosy and having the possibility to stay, to speak together.’ Gennaro’s friends still live in the same house in Palermo, where his work, tied to the idea of affection as recognition and care, remains, and which Bertolino visited often during the making of the show; each time, his hosts put him up in the artist’s old bedroom.

Gennaro’s is one of three monographic spaces that underscore the gravity of the wider show, each consciously developed by the curator’s friend, the architect and exhibition designer Giuseppe Ricupero (the other two rooms focus on Patrizia Vicinelli and Francesco Torrini). ‘These artists give a specific hint to the way in which the HIV-AIDS crisis was approached in Italy and I think, as a first show discussing this, sum up the issue,’ says Bertolino. The show’s moniker moreover, is direct in its communication: ‘vivono’ translates to ‘they live’, and the dates relay the earliest recorded case of AIDS in Italy, and the year HAART therapies were introduced, in Vancouver, at the XI International AIDS Conference.

A response to the silence Bertolino identified around HIV-AIDS in Italian culture – particularly amongst those championing foreign art made in a similar context – the show was constructed through discussions together with research the curator had begun for an earlier photobook project. ‘It came out of necessity,’ he explains today. ‘It's a conversation that is going on [globally], and in Italy we are not addressing the issue.’ Thinking communally, Bertolino worked with a committee that included the collective Conigli Bianchi, activists Valeria Calvino and Daniele Calzavara, and Ida Panicelli, the museum’s artistic director between 1993-94. ‘They took my hand and let me in, this guy coming from contemporary art, asking personal things about their life,’ recalls the curator. ‘They really helped me understand and navigate this history, as it’s not a history I lived.’

Consisting of nine rooms in total, the show is orchestrated primarily around Italian artists, while several British and American names also appear (Robert Mapplethorpe’s quietly brooding Coral Sea (1983) is surrounded by ample white space, while Derek Jarman’s Pontormo and Punks at Santacroce, from 1982, plays nearby to The Pope and the Penis, the bold text-based work previously exhibited at the 1990 Venice Biennale by New York collective, Gran Fury). A specially commissioned Roberto Ortu film introduces the show, and a vast collection of painting, illustration, sculpture, video, photography, and poetry follows. Paramount for Bertolino however, are a series of worktables made up of archival materials such as pamphlets, articles, posters, campaigns by Moschino and United Colors of Benetton, and recent works by Milan’s Tomboys Don’t Cry collective.

‘I wanted it to be meaningful and present, so we had conversations about what it means to collect and preserve, how we build a memory when there is no memory,’ says the curator. Formed around themes, as opposed to chronology, labels include stigma, care, time, shit and celebration; ‘shit’ was a suggestion from Calvino notes Bertolino, acknowledging the term’s complexity. In an essay from the show’s accompanying book, Reader, Calvino expands on the word’s significance, alluding to her own experiences and drug use amidst the social and cultural shift that occurred in the country in the late 20^th century, as Italy moved into neoliberalism. ‘The 1980s were shitty years,’ she writes. ‘Shitty in the sense that they digested and discarded everything that the 1970s had been…the years of marches, collectives, self-awareness groups, counterculture...’

Indeed, much of the work presented at Centro Pecci was made against this backdrop, and yet Bertolino and Ricupero were determined to foreground a sense of lightness within the show, honouring the desire to love and embrace joy that existed in tandem with the extreme grief and political landscape of the time. Writing after his own diagnosis in the 1980s, Gennaro once suggested that ‘it is never a personal matter,’ indicating the comfort sustained from the relationship between HIV-AIDS and creating a shared narrative.

The sentiment is partially echoed in the responsibility Bertolino felt while putting ‘Vivono’ together he says. ‘A lot of people trusted me in a very sincere and immediate way. Behind this work there were people, life experiences – for some people, it was years since they had gone back to the works, or talked about their partner or son,’ he shares. ‘The subtitle of the show is “art and feelings”, and I was really not sure about this, but it is a show about feelings – made through feelings, constructed because of love. And I would love it to be the opening up of a conversation that is not present in Italy. Luca Starita [who also contributed an essay to Reader] will publish in February, a book on literature and poetry and HIV-AIDS in Italy, so things are happening. It’s a collective effort.’

'VIVONO. Arts and Feelings, HIV-AIDS in Italy, 1982-1996' at Centro per l'Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Prato, until March 1, 2026

felixgonzalez-torresfoundation.org

‘Exhibition of Old Rope’ consists of ten tonnes of discarded rope – roughly 20 miles in length – intensively cleaned and piled high in the Mayfair gallery. Shrigley spent eight months collecting it from seaports, climbing schools, tree surgeons, offshore wind farms, scaffolders and shorelines around the country.

To be fair to Shrigley, he’s not seriously suggesting that the rope is worth £1 million. The price tag is deliberately provocative, literally embodying the idiom ‘money for old rope’. The Turner Prize-nominated artist is known for his deadpan, self-deprecating work, and the exhibition is intended as a commentary on the contemporary art market and the nature of artistic value.

That said, there may be some genuine artistic value to be found here. Much of the rope is made from synthetic polyester and nylon, materials notoriously difficult to recycle. In this respect, the exhibition addresses a pressing environmental concern – an estimated 640,000 tonnes of discarded fishing gear and marine rope enter the oceans each year – and explores the transformative potential of giving discarded materials a second life through art.

Shrigley’s work has long explored absurdity and humour, slyly questioning the arbitrariness of artistic value. In 2016, he created Really Good, a massive, brightly coloured sculpture spelling out these words. EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE OK (2003-2004) displayed this slightly unsettling reassurance on a billboard, while Brain Activity (2007) featured crude, childlike sketches depicting bizarre or frustrating human scenarios – people trying to squeeze toothpaste back into a tube, awkward social interactions and nonsensical mechanical inventions.

Piles of discarded materials have become something of a trope in conceptual art, and Shrigley’s work takes an established idea to its literal, ridiculous extreme.

Bill Prince, editor-in-chief

On Thursday evening I presented the award for Best Men’s Watch (which went to Urban Jürgensen) at the 25th edition of the Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Genève, otherwise known as the ‘Oscars of the watch industry’, held annually in the Swiss city. The event celebrates watchmaking excellence, whatever and wherever its source, and thus attracts a huge number of entries from across the globe. These are whittled down by the GPHG Academy and then adjudicated by a jury made up of industry insiders, collectors and journalists, of which I was one, and whose final decisions are recorded by secret ballot and revealed on the night. Among the evening’s big winners: Breguet, which picked up the ‘Aiguille d’Or’ (Grand Prize) for its Classique Souscription 2025 timepiece, recreated in celebration of the 250th anniversary of the company’s founding by the 'father of modern watchmaking’, Abraham-Louis Breguet, and Zenith, whose legendary Calibre 135 won the Chronometry prize for supreme accuracy in timekeeping.

A colourful collaboration

Anna Solomon, digital staff writer

Last week, I popped into Rixo’s sumptuously vintage-inspired Chelsea flagship to celebrate the brand’s new collaboration with Ruggable – makers of the machine-washable rugs I’m a little bit obsessed with (I have one in my living room, and honestly, I don’t think I could ever go back to stain remover and scrubbing). The collection, which has now launched and is available to shop, fuses Rixo’s playful, hand-painted prints with Ruggable’s life-proof tech. The result is a whimsical mash-up of vibrant florals, intricate geometrics and painterly motifs. These personality-packed pieces are every maximalist's dream, served with a side of nostalgia but sleek enough for the modern interior.

A riveting read

Ailis Bickford, digital project manager

This week, I welcomed the cold weather and the barrage of Christmas reminders by locking myself in my flat like Ebenezer Scrooge and finishing my book, Flesh by David Szalay – the winner of the Booker Prize for 2025. The story follows a man throughout his life – from growing up in Hungary and joining the army to marrying a wealthy older woman in London. At each stage of the narrative, he is desired for his body. As the story unfolds, the disconnect between his body and mind becomes increasingly, heart-wrenchingly apparent. A short but emotional read, this is definitely one to pick up this winter.

A drizzly drive

Jonathan Bell, transport and technology editor

A swift trip to the drizzly Midlands to visit RBW EV, a company that builds all-new bespoke electric sports cars infused with the spirit of the classic MGB. It wasn't quite top down weather but the driving experience managed to rekindle an authentic connection to the road, thanks to RBW's proprietary engineering know-how. These delightful machines are wrapped up in a finely crafted package and shipped around the world to enthusiasts who want a bit more emotional engagement from their EVs.

Relics in Rome

Hannah Silver, art, culture, watches & jewellery editor

I visited Rome this week to celebrate the opening of Cartier & Myths at the beautiful Capitoline Museums, which places Cartier showstoppers in context with ancient sculptures and artefacts, a celebration of how classical codes have always been an inspiration. A stop to see the exquisite new high jewellery collection at Palazzo Talia’s and a fun dinner at Pierluigi Restaurant made for a whirlwind 24 hours.

Innovation at an institution

Ellie Stathaki, architecture & environment director

A visit to the new Backstage at The Old Vic this week reminded me to book some nights out at the theatre. Beyond creating functional and joyful – much-needed – spaces for the South London organisation's own operations (from a marvellous green room to dressing rooms and a Writer's Room I’d love to book for myself one day), the building also has a new bar and café, open to all – conveniently just around the corner from the main stage. Warm crimson, terracotta, yellow and orange hues (I have always been partial to that colour palette) bring the interiors alive, beautifully complemented by a sturdy, exposed timber frame. An unexpected highlight is the façade’s sunshading screen, which is, in fact, ingeniously made of refurbished and painted old barn doors. You will find me at the bar, having a pre- or post-performance drink soon.

A Scotch sojourn

Anne Soward, production editor

I had a Brigadoon moment this week, lost in the magical mist and fog of the Scottish island of Islay with two Americans (designer Ini Archibong and his manager brother Archie). Known as the whisky island, the tiny Hebridean enclave (home to 3,000 people and a lot of sheep) hosts ten distilleries, but I was here to visit Port Ellen as it prepares to launch a new artwork by Archibong to welcome visitors (more on this to come in a few weeks). Founded in 1825 but closed for more than four decades, this ‘ghost’ distillery recently reopened after the discovery that some of its single-malt casks, left quietly maturing during the closure, had turned into some seriously palate-blowing Scotch. As a cult following clamoured for the liquid gold, the decision was made to rebuild the distillery in contemporary form, adhering to a Scandinavian aesthetic that both suits its setting and presents a fittingly cosy environment for savouring the whisky’s intense flavours. I’ve never been much of a whisky drinker but I was spirited away by the passions of the Port Ellen hosts, who attuned my palate to the amber nectar’s peaty smokiness, heavily imbued with notes of fruit and spices, conjuring up visions of autumn walks, crackling campfires, and Christmas.

A roll call of celebrities from across art, music, fashion and culture were regulars – including Helmut Newton, Grace Coddington, Allen Ginsberg, Yves Saint Laurent, Francis Ford Coppola, Iggy Pop, Rei Kawakubo, Lou Reed, Yoko Ono, Madonna, Alexander McQueen and Kate Moss. They ignored the ‘Complet’ (full) sign that hung on the door to party in absolute privacy.

There every night was owner Tai ‘Davé’ Cheung, who captured it all with his Polaroid camera. How did his guests feel when he pulled it out? ‘They were delighted. With the Polaroid, they saw the result immediately – no surprises. You can’t take a bad picture of someone without them knowing,’ he says now.

Word of mouth drew in his guests, he says. ‘I liked the creatives, the designers, artists, musicians and writers, especially because they taught me things: they shared. The first ones through the door – Brion Gysin, Jean-Marie Rouart, Eduardo Arroyo, Francis Ford Coppola, Aurore Clément, Suzi Wis, Anne-Marie Deschodt, Helmut and June Newton – especially.’

Now – launching during Paris Photo 2025 – Davé’s Polaroids are the subject of a new book , A Night at Davé, conceived by Charles Morin and Boris Bergmann with Davé, which reveals what happened behind its doors. Sofia Coppola, who was a regular in the 1980s with her parents and their friends, was such a fan, she has written the book’s introduction. ‘Davé was the place to be,’ she says.

‘It wasn’t a bourgeois place,’ reflects Davé. ‘It was a place where people could be who they wanted to be.’

The world's most important international photography fair, Paris Photo brings together big-name galleries and smaller ones, iconic photographers and emerging artists. If you're looking for gems by Walker Evans, Berenice Abbott, Lee Friedlander, Irving Penn, Seydou Keïta, William Klein, Weegee, Sally Mann, Sebastião Salgado or Hiroshi Sugimoto, you've come to the right place.

But you'll also find lesser-known surprises, such as Marine Lanier, one of the artists in the ‘Emergence’ sector of the fair and winner of the Prix Maison Ruinart for an enchanting series called Alchimia, shot in the fields and skies of the Champagne region.

In addition to art for sale, the fair offers conversations, performances and book signings from the likes of Todd Hido and Wolfgang Tillmans. And ‘The Last Photo’ is an exhibition of works from the collection of Estrellita B Brodsky, one of the most important private collections of Latin American photography.

All of this edition's curators are women, though Planas says this was not intentional. What was deliberate is an ongoing increase in the number of female artists on display, from 20 per cent in 2018 to nearly double that percentage this year.

Upon entering, visitors come face to face with the Poggi gallery's powerful installation by Sophie Ristelhueber, the French photographer who won the prestigious Hasselblad Award in 2025. A wall nearly 40m long displays works from throughout her career, revealing the scars that war and other disasters have left on landscapes, cities and human bodies.

Steps away, at Klemm's Berlin, Truth Table, by Adrian Sauer, is a project about digital manipulation, consisting of different images (a smiley face, a palm tree, an Eiffel Tower) made up of millions of coloured pixels in various combinations.

Thierry Bigaignon has an actual darkroom on his stand, complete with a photographer: Renato D'Agostin. When a collector acquires one of his silver gelatin prints, they can meet D'Agostin, who will reprint it on the spot, to show how the development process works. Setting up his chemicals before the fair opened, the Italian photographer laughed, ‘It's going to be strange, I feel like an animal in a cage.’

Vermelho from São Paulo presents Brazil's Claudia Andujar, who has reworked her 1975 archives, attaching a yellow acrylic panel to a photo of the Volkswagen that she drove to the Venezuelan border for her work covering the Yanomami people. Rosegallery, from Santa Monica, has come back to Paris Photo after an absence of a few years with a solo show by Mexican artist Tania Franco Klein (who is also currently part of MoMA's New Photography exhibition).

Magnum Gallery is featuring vintage prints by several of its stars, including Philippe Halsman's 1948 portrait of a floating Salvador Dalí and three cats. Galerie Nathalie has Un feu by Luc Delahaye (formerly of Magnum), a photo of migrants standing around a fire, also part of Delahaye's solo show now running at the Jeu de Paume museum. Fraenkel presents a new work by artist/sound composer Christian Marclay, a grid of vinyl record sleeves and covers. Martin Parr's French-fry-eating seagull from 1996 graces the stand of Clémentine de la Feronnière. And at Galerie Suzanne Tarasieve's stand, Juergen Teller is drinking a beer while standing naked on his father's grave.

But not everything is profane. Galerie Binome is presenting dark, ghostly images from Laurence Aëgerter's series on French cathedrals and churches. Aëgerter screen-printed them with thermo-chronic ink, which undergoes a chemical reaction when sunlight hits it, revealing the image underneath. Gallery director Valérie Cazin says, ‘When this happens, the revelation is so magnificent and surprising that the spectator can only observe. It's the same magic as when an image is revealed in a darkroom. In a society where we are all hyperactive, it provokes a moment of meditation.’

The ‘Voices’ sector of the fair features two guest curators. One, Devika Singh, says she approached the theme of landscapes in different ways, ‘from documentary perspectives to more speculative and personal takes’. Works include French painter/photographer Bernard Guillot's atmospheric photos of Cairo's City of the Dead, as well as Indian photographer Gauri Gill's The Village on the Highway, a quietly political statement set against a backdrop of plastic tarpaulins.

This is the third year that the fair has a dedicated ‘Digital’ sector, curated by Nina Roehrs. It includes an installation by conceptual artist Cole Sternberg for Giga – a partnership between Unicef and the International Telecommunication Union to address digital inequalities among the world's children. Called A Garden, the project is a large cube upon which a million images of generative artwork are projected, representing a network of interconnected schools.

In a rather different vein, the digital platform TAEX is showing the Irish artist Kevin Abosch, who trains AI systems with his own images, then ‘sculpts’ them into a kind of synthetic photography. The results can be creepy, such as a white cockatoo emerging from a high-tech apparatus. Two centuries after the French inventor Nicéphore Niépce turned a camera image into the first permanent photograph, Paris Photo is still exploring what defines the art form.

Paris Photo 2025 runs 13-16 November

The partnership is an interesting one, with the gloriously bold colours of Armstrong’s figurative style proving a vibrant foil for Axel Arigato’s clean minimalism. In Armstrong’s work, texture and colour are key in imbuing his subjects with a fluidity and power. When taken off the canvas and translated to a limited-edition capsule collection of sneakers, accessories and ready-to-wear, the work itself becomes a living entity.

For Armstrong, it marks the first time he has undertaken a collaboration of this kind, presenting a new host of challenges he was keen to embrace. ‘I wanted to explore how my creative process in the studio could translate to apparel, and I approached each piece with the same kind of examination and iteration process that I use to figure out a painting’s composition,’ he says. ‘How do I want things to feel, and what material helps me achieve that? What colours make sense for each garment, and how do the tones of each piece fit back into the capsule's overall colour story? Which shapes and lengths make sense to me, and how do things feel when draped on the body? I wanted the pieces to be a bit unexpected, for each piece in the capsule to complement one another, and I feel like we achieved that.’

Armstrong took the fiery colour of his 2023 painting, The Listening Skies, as a starting-off point, interweaving its distinct colour palette throughout the collection as a way of creating a uniform identity for the series. ‘My childhood memories that inspired the painting also played a role,’ Armstrong adds. ‘My dad’s side of the family is from Crenshaw, L.A., and was part of the Black gospel church—sharp in faith and fashion, always dressed to the nines in bold colour. I wanted the capsule to reflect that energy while exploring texture, shape, and how the pieces drape on the body.’

As well as ready-to-wear, the partnership also ushers in the new Squish sneaker, encompassing the sculptural lines and deep curves which run throughout Armstrong’s work. ‘I’ve always been interested in making work beyond the canvas, and I love fashion,’ he says. ‘Creating a capsule collection like this makes my work more accessible to folks who might not be able to afford a painting. It’s especially incredible to see The Listening Skies brought to life in this way - through the campaign and in this collection. Giving my ideas and creativity a platform to play, expand, and learn in new ways has been an experience I’ve deeply enjoyed. I’m grateful to Jens and Axel Arigato for the opportunity and for trusting me at every stage.’

The Axel Arigato x Alvin Armstrong collection launches globally on November 13, 2025. Available at axelarigato.com and select flagship stores

axelarigato.com

Why chocolate? ‘We think the best kind of art is one that raises questions and opens a dialogue,’ says Marc Covitz of the family-run, Beverly Hills-based chocolatier. ‘This particular work always resonated and was an invitation to explore what Made in California means to us. We grew up seeing Ruscha's work and were re-inspired by his recent retrospectives at MoMA and LACMA. We approached the studio and were so pleased with their willingness to collaborate. After many iterations, the project fell into place quite easily.’

The result is made of three ingredients: blood orange olive oil from Petaluma, Sonoma County; sea salt from Tomales Bay; and 73 per cent Peruvian dark chocolate roasted by Chef Thomas Keller in Napa Valley. It is cast in a handcrafted mould of a section of California's Central Valley, stretching from the Pacific Ocean down to the Santa Lucia Mountains. ‘Chef Sandy Tran dreamed up this visual expression, of a region known for agriculture,’ Covitz adds. ‘From her experience of being the executive pastry chef of The French Laundry in Napa. Chef Sandy was familiar with many Californian organic farms. She and our culinary team take an ingredient-first approach and hand-select each vendor. It is also meaningful to our family business to identify and support other independent businesses.’

The chocolate comes in a cloth-wrapped box printed with a reproduction of Ruscha’s lithograph, Made in California (1971), courtesy of the artist and Gagosian. Says Covitz, ‘[He’s] one of the great artists of our time, [and] we could not resist the opportunity to craft a playful response to the work.’

Made in California is $295, in an edition of 300, and available from early December 2025 for pick-up in Beverly Hills or USA and Canada shipping, and-sons.com; sign up on the website to get notified

and-sons.com/california

Welsh’s previous work has considered the role that ideological systems and political structures play in shaping us, in poignant images which emphasise the innocence and isolation of the individual. When he came across Villa Karma, its dual role as sanctuary and site of trauma felt like a natural jumping-off point from which to explore themes of perception, surveillance and identity.

‘I was drawn to Villa Karma for its secrecy,’ Welsh says. ‘The building is like a fortress, with rooms nested within rooms, doorways and vantage points built for observation. It feels ceremonial in its order and deeply oppressive, yet somehow oneiric. The history of the place also drew me in. It was shaped by illness, first a leprosarium and later the residence of a troubled neurologist.’

In Welsh’s photographs, Villa Karma becomes a living thing, its structure not only sheltering its inhabitants but also shaping them. ‘I was drawn to the passageways, whose lines of sight were designed for surveillance,’ he adds. ‘In the end, the camera assumes that role, replacing the architecture as the ultimate instrument of control.’

It is unclear, in the works, if the villa is healing or harming its inhabitants; to find out would be beside the point. ‘Safety and trauma often exist within the same space. What protects can also wound. Architecture absorbs contradiction, shaping anxiety and fear into form. I wanted that ambiguity to surface, where control and vulnerability coexist in the same frame.’

Jaime Welsh 'Convalescent' is at Ginny on Frederick, London, from 8 Nov – 17 Dec 2025

When we visit her in October 2025, in the south London home she has lived and worked in for 40 years, the artist is about to turn 80. She will mark this milestone with both a joint exhibition with good friend Sarah Lucas at Sadie Coles HQ and Frankie Rossi Art Projects in London, and the release of an illustrated monograph of works from a five-decade career, from her 1960s studies at the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing to her recent politically and emotionally charged war paintings.

Leafing through the book, one gets a sense of Hambling’s far-reaching practice, with painting and sculptures wrestling with recurring themes, including the power of nature, war, love and death. Throughout, she is drawn to duality, in ghostly and powerful sea paintings, and in brilliantly alive portraits of loved ones after their death.

Hambling’s oil paintings have the quality of transcending time. Her war paintings eschew contemporary references, meaning they are difficult to place. ‘In the right hands, oil paint has this capacity to make it seem that something is being made in front of you,’ says Hambling. ‘Oil paint is very sexy stuff, and you have to make love with it.’

Hambling sees herself as a vessel through which the paint passes. ‘It’s all about the eye, the hand and the heart,’ she says. ‘The heart is the most important thing. The good paintings paint themselves. I don’t feel that I’m any part of them. I only feel responsible for the bad ones, which I get rid of. I can do a good painting in three-quarters of an hour, but I couldn’t do that unless I’ve done all this shit for three years before.’

The book features a collection of Hambling’s portraits of those she painted, from memory, after they died – a body of work that has included her parents, her late partner of 40 years, Tory Lawrence, and her close friend Derek Jarman. In these portraits, Hambling is making sense of the loss. ‘When somebody you love dies, they go on being alive inside of you. I remember I went on painting George [Melly, the jazz musician and close friend who died in 2007] for a couple of years after he died, with as much life as possible. And then the lorry came and collected all the portraits to take them to the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, and the next morning they had all gone. And I said to myself, you have got to face it, George is dead.’

The significance of her friendships is central to Hambling’s oeuvre, making the new show with Lucas a natural next step. The duo have depicted each other in their work before, Hambling in oil, Lucas in the mischievous sculpture Maggi (2012), composed of a coat hanger, light bulbs and toilet bowl. 'Sarah and I met about 20 years ago. I think we were introduced in the Colony [Room Club in Soho] by Sebastian Horsley, on our birthday, which we share. We just fell into each other’s arms and had a big hug. And that was that. I had always liked her the best of the YBA [Young British Artists] because of the guts and humour of her work. She came to live in Suffolk, and that’s where we became great friends.’

This year, on their shared birthday of 23 October, Hambling turned 80. How does she feel about that? ‘I feel about 15,’ she says. It’s not an age she necessarily expected to see, after a near-fatal heart attack in New York in 2022 left her hospitalised for six weeks. ‘I owe my life to New York. If it had happened in Suffolk, I’d still be waiting for the ambulance. I remember waking up when they were pressing their hands on my chest. I thought, either you’re going to live or you’re going to die. And I went back into another world.’

On her return home, Hambling resumed work, reconnecting with her war paintings, on which she started in 1986 after seeing a photograph in The Times of Arab women dressed in burqas, teetering under the weight of rocket launchers. A surreal contrast, it tied into the extremes she is drawn to, and which run throughout her war works, where life and death exist side-by-side with beauty and violence. ‘When I got home from the hospital, I thought I was painting the war in Ukraine, but everybody told me I’d been painting my heart attack. I don’t know. I suppose they’re right. It was absolute hell without any cigarettes.’

Her work subtly shifted after the heart attack. ‘As I get older, I try to say more with less.’ Increasingly on her canvases, there is an expanse of empty space. ‘I always used to leave a little bit of blank canvas, inspired by Samuel Beckett, who I think is the greatest artist of the 20th century. But now there’s much more – it’s that Eastern thinking that you’ve got to be as eloquent with where you don’t put a mark as with where you do.’

Hambling is disciplined with her work, getting up early every morning without fail. In the afternoon, she catches up on TV soap Coronation Street, which she is passionate about (although, ‘two people kiss and every time the other person sees them, it’s so unreal, it’s unbelievable,’ she complains). The first thing she does every day is make a drawing in her sketchbook with her left hand (she is right handed). ‘And I’ve only got three fingers,’ says Hambling, holding up her right hand to show the absence of a little finger. (She fell down the stairs in Suffolk one night while holding a glass of water.) ‘I shake hands with people and they don’t notice. It’s quite disappointing, really.’ She adds it hasn’t really changed anything; she works with both hands.

Hambling may have a reputation for being outspoken, but she doesn’t set out to be controversial, she says. The sculptures (including the Oscar Wilde statue near Trafalgar Square in central London, a scallop sculpture on Aldeburgh beach in Suffolk, and the Mary Wollstonecraft sculpture in Newington Green, London) are naturally more antagonistic than the paintings.

‘They are different because they challenge you in your space,’ explains Hambling. ‘All the feminists were so cross when I was chosen to do Mary Wollstonecraft. I don’t know if feminists don’t have bodies or something. I don’t understand it – she represents the struggles women have always faced, and she’s confronting the world.’ She based the much-debated decision to depict the 18th-century writer and philosopher naked on the fact that clothes would date the figure (‘When it hit the world, my friend rang up and said, you have put the pussy among the pigeons, which was a very good remark I thought,’ she says).

Does criticism bother her? ‘My teacher at art school said criticism has to be water off a duck’s back. You’re your own best critic. Some people think I’m rather scary, but my students know I’m just a jelly baby, really.’

‘Maggi Hambling and Sarah Lucas: OOO LA LA’ is on show from 20 November 2025 – 24 January 2026 at Sadie Coles HQ and Frankie Rossi Art Projects, sadiecoles.com frankierossiart.com

‘Maggi Hambling’ ($75, Rizzoli) is published on 11 November, rizzoliusa.com

This article appears in the December 2025 Entertaining Issue of Wallpaper* , available in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News + from 6 November. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

So says Angela James, master bookbinder. She is the woman tasked with finding six fellows from the Designer Bookbinder society to each individually produce a single, one-of-a-kind, edition of the works on the 2025 Booker Prize shortlist, as she has done for the past 14 years. As one of this year’s binders herself, she took me through the intense process of producing these individual books in time for the announcement and dinner on November 10th.

‘At the beginning, I have to read closely and take notes, making sketches and little trial pieces. It’s that first stage – reading and designing – that really takes a disproportionate amount of time.’ ‘Time’ is one of the key words in our conversation, given the short window each binder has to complete the entire project. Works are allotted to different designers immediately after the shortlist is announced and from there they have little over a month before the final product will be presented to their respective authors.

Given the pressure of the project, each year only 9 or 10 bookbinders put their names forward as candidates. ‘The people who don’t apply can’t deal with the pressure,’ says James. ‘For those that go through with it, it’s completely absorbing. As soon as your book arrives, you’re focussed. I’m often working late into the night and will wake up the next morning thinking about what I need to do next.’

Bookbinding at this level is a highly technical labour of love. Another key consideration is what kind of materials you might want to use. James tells me that sourcing many things is fairly straightforward, although some particular kinds of suppliers are dying out now. ‘I don’t know if there are many places you can get your hands on pigskin anymore, and I’m not sure there’s a goldbeater left in this country,’ she explains. ‘But I can get goldleaf and goatskin or calfskin without trouble, so once you’ve made your decisions its fairly straightforward.’

Once the sheets are printed, they’re folded into sections, trimmed, and sewn together on tapes that connect the text block to the boards. The binder then rounds and backs the spine to create a smooth shoulder for the boards to sit against, before attaching the covers and adding hand-sewn headbands and leatherwork.

And yet time is only one of the pressures the designers contend with. ‘Usually the authors are delighted with the results, but not always. It’s often the case that what they expected is different to what has been presented to them. These novels have not been in the world long, so they really can feel like the writers’ babies. And sometimes you worry that you’re dressing their babies in clothes they wouldn’t be seen dead choosing.’

But this kind of bookbinding is rarely about just presenting the work nicely. It is also concerned with how the binder understands and reacts to the work. ‘What ‘I’m trying to do is distil the essence of the book, ‘ says James. ‘By the time we get to the ceremony and the dinner, you know that most people there will have read each work on the shortlist, and what I hope is that they look at my version and think “that absolutely sums up the story.” And that’s why it’s so much harder to bind a book when it’s one that doesn’t speak to you. In that situation you just have to find individual quotes or episodes in the story and try to draw an interpretation out of that.’

James’ career has spanned 40 years and her binding of the The Land in Winter will mark her 13^th contribution to the Booker Prize bindings. Does she think the craft is undergoing a quiet resurgence? ‘It absolutely is. I was the last student to study bookbinding at Glasgow school of Art before the course closed down. And there’s only one full time course left in the country. But the enthusiasm for classes is enormous and people are realising just how addictive it is once you start. In fact, the idea of binding the shortlist came after the wife of the former chair of the Booker did a bookbinding class with someone in our Society.’

Having worked in a bookshop recently, it struck me that the interest in bookbinding might reflect a broader trend in contemporary publishing. Walk into any Waterstones now and you’ll find a section devoted to clothbound classics. ‘Yes, I think publishers are alive to it too,’ says James. ‘They’ve suddenly started putting a lot more effort into making their books look physically attractive.’

However, it’s not just about the artifact. ‘Books do suffer from the fact that you can’t hang them on a wall to impress your friends,’ says James, but that’s not a hindrance: ‘As with all applied art, the pleasure it gives isn’t one of just aesthetics. You’re enjoying the fact that it has been made by someone else.’

And for this bookbinder now is the time to pick up a beautiful book. ‘With books in particular, people are realising that reading on a screen is sterile. Interacting with a physical book changes the way you read. The feel of the object in your hands, the smell of the pages – that’s something quite special.’

Ellie Stathaki, architecture and environment director

I recently came across jewellery entrepreneur The Diamond Lab, and this week, I had the opportunity to meet its founders, sisters Ruby and Jamie Patel, at their Selfridges pop-up with Maddox Gallery. Beyond their mission to bring ethical, lab-grown diamonds to the forefront of the luxury industry, the pair also plans to establish their own laboratory in Kenya, where the sisters hail from. Working within the country’s Special Economic Zones – which aim to boost local manufacturing and exports and to create jobs – they are hard at work, picking their architect and crafting their business's spatial representation. More to come.

A London institution

Charlotte Gunn, director of digital content

On Monday, it was off to The Connaught to celebrate editor-in-chief Bill Prince's new book about the hotel, with martinis served by the master Agostino Perrone. In attendance: the cute little white pooch from the cover.

A photographic pilgrimage

Hannah Silver, art, culture, watches and jewellery editor

I was lucky enough this week to have a walk around the exquisite new Diane Arbus exhibition at London’s David Zwirner gallery with curator Jeffrey Fraenkel. The intimate exhibition of 45 rare photographs focuses on the works Arbus created in private spaces between 1961 and 1971. Raw, honest, and respectful – they speak to Arbus’ massive talent.

A visual voyage

Jamilah Rose-Roberts, social media editor

I previously went down to Sadie Coles HQ for the opening of Arthur Jafa’s GLAS NEGUS SUPREME. Having missed his presentation in Croydon earlier this year, I was determined not to miss this one. There was an undeniable pull to this exhibition: the scale, the sound, the weight of it all. The highlight of the evening was meeting Jafa himself. Our brief, easy chat left me with a sense of privilege and a deeper connection to his work. His exacting yet generous nature made me want to return – to sit longer with the work, to let the sound and imagery seep deeper.

For his first exhibition at Sadie Coles, Jafa fills the Kingly Street space with a charged edit of new and recent works: two moving-image pieces, several paintings, silkscreens, and cutouts, all orbiting the same gravitational force – the depth and complexity of Black life. His films unfold with a cosmic and intimate allure, a surge of imagery and music that catches you off guard and carries you into a world of profound intrigue and captivation.

There’s a rhythm to Jafa’s world, a ‘Black visual intonation’, as he calls it, that folds sound and image into one another until they feel inseparable. Clips, faces, fragments, and beats move as if guided by pulse rather than sequence; everything vibrates. Musical figures appear as apparitions, passing through history’s veil with ghostly defiance. And yet, even in that spectral space, the work feels vividly alive.

The new paintings and silkscreens extend this dialogue: Kurt Cobain’s body hovers in a void; Foxy Brown glows, commanding her crowd. Fame, pain, transcendence – all held in tension, all rendered through Jafa’s unmistakable visual cadence. To witness his work is to feel language reshaped; it’s to understand how sound, image and memory can coalesce into something beyond narrative: a collective vibration.

GLAS NEGUS SUPREME continues that conversation with force and tenderness, expanding Jafa’s lexicon of Black being and becoming. On view at Sadie Coles HQ until 22 November 2025.

A Middle Eastern medley

Tianna Williams, staff writer

On Wednesday evening, I headed over to Lamb’s Conduit Street to enjoy a Middle Eastern feast at Honey & Co. The evening, which coincided nicely with Bonfire Night, was a display of festive dining that made me consider swapping the Christmas turkey for spiced lamb and stuffing shawarma. Honey & Co founders Sarit Packer and Itamar Srulovich (who also run sister outposts Honey & Smoke and Honey & Co Daily) served a vibrant mezze, complete with dips and salads. Mains followed, ranging from smoked duck with pickled cherries to slow-roasted lamb shoulder with plums and roses. The evening was rounded off with desserts, from feta and honey cheesecake (divine) to spiced apple mince pies, paired perfectly with Persian tea. The great news is that this delectable menu is available throughout the festive period if you fancy a fragrant feast for yourself.

A theatrical tempest

Gabriel Annouka, senior designer

If an apocalypse had a dress code, it would take the form of BULLYACHE: WHO HURT YOU? at Southbank Centre this week. Part of the Kunsty festival, and staged in the ample setting of the Queen Elizabeth Hall, the performance – directed by Bullyache, the artist duo Courtney Deyn and Jacob Samuel – unravelled as a drag requiem: an end-of-days cabaret that played with glitter as much as it did with grief. East London drag star Barbs, sequins blazing, ruled the stage as a diva in disarray, balancing Deyn’s singing and the dancers with a lawless, intoxicating narrative. Music and lights begged for mercy, and surrender never looked so good. I may have cried, probably laughed, and most definitely both. Absolute mayhem, pure perfection.

A scent-sational history

Anna Fixsen, US editor

‘There are three things no respectable woman should do: smoke, dance the tango and wear Shalimar,’ a famed 1920s-era adage went. Unfortunately for those upright citizens, the appeal of Shalimar – a hypnotic amber fragrance dreamed up by French perfumer Jacques Guerlain in 1925 – has remained a favourite of bad girls everywhere (Frida Kahlo, Brigitte Bardot, Rita Hayworth… need we go on?) for exactly a century. To celebrate the milestone, Guerlain has concocted a 21st-century version of the flapper-era fragrance, Shalimar L’Essence, which emphasises the perfume’s mouth-watering, vanilla notes for a scent that’s suited to today’s rebel. I popped by an exhibition at the Waldorf-Astoria (now home to the world’s largest Guerlain spa) to experience both new and old formulations and geek out over the fascinating history of this storied art deco aroma. Time travel hasn’t been invented yet, but Shalimar might be the next-best thing.

'In the first film,' he has said, 'I saw Boris Karloff cross a threshold as a living cadaver, and saw the glazed, undead eyes glitter and gaze at me.' The director went on to describe this as a Damascene moment, as the image struck him much more sharply than the bloody images of Jesus on the cross that were inherent to his Catholic upbringing: 'I felt the jolt of recognition in that seminal moment. Gothic horror became my church, and that figure, right there, became my shepherd.'

In the latest version of the much-filmed tale, the (strangely beautiful) titular creature is played by Jacob Elordi, while his single-minded, egotistical creator Victor Frankenstein is portrayed by Oscar Isaac. Mia Goth is Elizabeth, Victor’s soon-to-be sister-in-law, his unrequited feelings for whom influence his mania for creating new life from assorted cadavers. He’s helped in this unholy mission by wealthy benefactor Henrich (Christoph Waltz), who has reasons of his own for playing God.

It’s not a totally faithful adaptation – Del Toro, who wrote the script and has longed to make the movie for decades, invented Waltz’s character in one of many narrative tweaks – but visually it summons all the gothic flamboyance of Shelley’s book. In the text, when Victor first looks upon his creation, he describes his horror in grand, gothic terms: 'His yellow skin scarcely covered the works of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun-white sockets in which they were set, his shrivel-led complexion and straight black lips.'

Del Toro maintains the astonishingly vivid tone of the 18-year-old Shelley’s prose by drenching his film in hyper-real colours (including his signature blood-red), extravagant costumes and an almost steampunk aesthetic. Christopher Young, head of archives and design at Tiffany & Co., worked with Del Toro and his costume designer Kate Hawley to provide jewellery such as Elizabeth’s darkly beautiful scarab beetle necklace, which dates back to around 1905 and is rarely shown. 'The scarab beetle necklace, Hawley says, 'is Guillermo’s language.'

When the auteur watched the Universal adaptation of Frankenstein as a child, he was marvelling at James Whale’s cartoonish iconography: Karloff’s slab-like forehead and the bolts through his neck, Victor’s art deco-style lab. This remains the definitive interpretation, but Del Toro has done just as much to visually reimagine the novel. Although Shelley never describes the tools that Victor uses in his ghastly endeavour, the director and production designer Tamara Deverell filled the scientist’s laboratory (which features a circular window, another Del Toro motif) with equipment that’s all the more menacing for its realism.

A key moment in this telling of the 207-year-old tale occurs when Victor’s angelic brother (Felix Kammerer) asks if he ever stopped to consider whether his creature possesses a spiritual essence. For its grandiosity, Guillermo Del Toro’s Frankenstein is never a case of style over substance. In summoning all the flamboyance and wonder of Shelley’s novel, he’s imbued his extraordinary film with lashings of soul.

Frankenstein is on Netflix 7 November

A corresponding exhibition, 'Frankenstein: Crafting A Tale Eternal,' is at The Old Selfridges Hotel in London until 9 November

Whyte is now settled in London, working on figurative paintings in his Dalston studio that are united by a strong storytelling. Each painting, a fluid capturing of a moment in time, is its own fully formed scene. Whyte’s works are ambiguous – he sets the theatrical stage and leaves it for the viewer to decipher.

In his recent exhibition at Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, ‘Winter Remembers April’, Whyte considered themes of time and history, criss-crossing between the past and the present. Naming the show in tribute to Wynton Marsalis’ recording of the jazz standard, ‘I’ll Remember April’, Whyte celebrates both the musicians who are central to him and the physicality of composition itself, focusing on the scale and perspective of the figures as they move through his canvases.

Artistically, music is key for Whyte, becoming a rhythmic counterpart to the fluid and evocative scenes he creates. ‘Music keeps me sane in the studio,’ he says. ‘For me, song titles, certain genres or artists can inspire thoughts, ideas and feelings that just resonate. It helps me paint, especially when I'm tired and frustrated with my work, and everything that surrounds it. And of course, what I listen to finds its way into the painting, whether that's Earl Sweatshirt or Sampha or Boris Gardiner. Music energises me, it calms me.’

The elusive cinematic quality it holds becomes a part of the paintings. Whyte’s canvases place figures in narrative settings we can’t quite grasp – are they running towards or away from something, are they dancing or fighting? His figures are both familiar and unknowable. Drawn in thick brush marks and translated onto richly textured surfaces, the liminal worlds he creates may be hazy, but the memories and emotions are sharp, his interior narratives becoming lush, cinematic compositions that hover on the edge of comprehension. Whyte offers fragments – a hand poised mid-gesture, a gaze half averted – and invites you to do the assembling.

In the flesh, Whyte’s canvases are life-sized, their generous proportions a playful spin on perception. Throughout, the focus is firmly on the Black figure vividly living: reclining, running, dancing. In composition and colour, the works are synonymous with classical artworks, rife with historical references. By reframing the traditional style, Whyte inserts the Black figure into the work. ‘References to Rubens, to George Stubbs, to Tintoretto all appear in these works, and these 'traditional' artists are naturally touchstones for me,’ Whyte adds. ‘This may sound quite simplistic, but because I'm Black, I also wanted to make paintings with people that look like me. Within the canon of painting, there isn't enough work that's just OK with being, as opposed to carrying the weight of history.’

In interrogating the way Black masculinity has been represented in art and culture, Whyte rewrites it entirely, and his celebration of the body is very human. The ambiguity that runs throughout adds to this – often, we are denied seeing the face of his figures, suggesting a rich interiority we can only guess at. ‘My work isn’t ignorant of history, but rather by leaving it open to interpretation, I try not to be prescriptive,’ says Whyte. ‘I try not to apply any single thought or specific feeling to my paintings.’

'Winter Remembers April' is at Pippy Houldsworth until 8 November 2025

houldsworth.co.uk

A comprehensive exhibition earlier this year of over 400 works, at New York’s Park Avenue Armory, has returned Arbus firmly back into the public consciousness. Now, in London, the emphasis shifts to intimacy over scale, with the opening of 'Diane Arbus: Sanctum Sanctorum,' an exhibition of 45 photographs made in private places between 1961 and 1971. The exhibition will go on to travel to Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco in spring 2026.

Before the opening, I walk round the gallery with Jeffrey Fraenkel, who has worked closely with the Estate of Diane Arbus over the years. ‘I first saw Arbus’s work in a magazine, and there was just electricity in the image,’ he says. ‘I had never seen anything like it. It assured me there was a much bigger world out there than the world that I was growing up in. And that was reassuring.’

Over the years, Fraenkel noticed how many of Arbus’ works were taken in the intimate spaces of her subjects – most notably, their bedrooms. These works speak to the level of trust Arbus inspired, as a photographer; a rare move, when considering photography was still disdained as an art form. In some images here, the subject confronts the photographer. In others, caught naked, mid-embrace, they act like she - and by extension, us - is not there at all. What was Arbus, the third person in the room, doing there? ‘There’s more than just respect there, there is trust,’ adds Fraenkel.

Arbus’ work is unique for being free from judgement. She avoided cropping images, displaying the full negative – complete with uneven black borders – as a way of taking the attention away from the photograph, and onto the human being it contained. Here, with the focus on the home, it is a method laced with a particular poignancy. ‘You think you're seeing it all, and then there's more. You look and realise – that's the refrigerator. Those are all the dishes in the sink. It means it’s their entire home. We're seeing everything in one room.’

While we are invited into these intimate spaces, to offer up our own interpretation, Arbus reminds us, again and again, we are looking at a photograph. ‘Her use of flash is really genius,’ Fraenkel says. ‘It pulls all these details out.’ In the pupils of her subjects, there is a reflected pinprick of light, a gentle admonishment that we are looking at a representation of the person only, rather than at the person themselves. Arbus wants us to be aware we don’t know as much as we think we do.

The photographs here are united in their honesty. There is a vulnerability in little-seen works, such as Interior decorator at the nudist camp in his trailer, Mexican dwarf in his hotel room and A naked man being a woman. Elsewhere – in A blind couple in their bedroom, Husband and wife with shoes on in their cabin at a nudist camp and Two friends at home – there is a testament to love, and to the desire to be seen, and known.

Be true to yourself, Arbus is saying, and that will be its own reward. ‘You can understand why these pictures made, and continue to make, so many people uncomfortable,’ says Fraenkel. ‘They don't have easy answers. There are people who would look and say that person is sick, and that would be their initial response. But Arbus had this angle in the world no one else did. I think she is in awe – of their courage, and their self-belief.’

Diane Arbus 'Sanctum Sanctorum' at David Zwirner London from 6 November–20 December, 2025. The exhibition will travel to Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco in spring 2026

'We had the idea of a kind of “matchmaking” service for visual artists and musical artists from our network and beyond, for a conversation that would then inspire a new artwork,' explains the project’s senior producer, Rozenn Logan. Last year, Music Shaped’s inaugural outing featured creatives including legendary musician and In Place of War fellow Brian Eno with Icelandic artist Ragnar Jonasson, and Mercury-nominated singer Self Esteem (aka Rebecca Lucy Taylor) with Sheffield photographer Karina Lax. Raising money via an auction of the final works, the project raised £32,000, with Taylor’s photo currently displayed in the National Portrait Gallery in London.

In 2025, Music Shaped has upped the ante, with 24 creatives across genres and mediums pairing off to inspire a new collection as vibrant and varied as the subject itself. 'The conversations go off in different directions and tangents, but they’re always within the realms of music, art, creative process, and all the things connected to that,' Logan continues. 'Sometimes this spans politics or philosophy, comedy, identity, religion – or just simply how much the colour pink means to someone.'

Among those taking part are Idles vocalist Joe Talbot and Bristol artist Penfold, Radiohead’s Philip Selway and graffiti artist Remi Rough, and Norwegian singer Aurora, who returns for a second year alongside Italian photographic artist Petite Doll. Louis Theroux – who released a song sampling a previous interview clip in 2022 – is paired with Turner Prize-winning Jeremy Deller, while actor Maxine Peake, who has featured on tracks with electronic duo The Eccentronic Research Council, has worked with graphic designer Peter Saville.

Comedian and podcast host Adam Buxton teamed up with fellow comedian and visual artist Joe Lycett for their piece: a painting in Lycett’s bright, purposefully naive style of a Casio VL-Tone keyboard, adorned with the phrase ‘Fucking Amateurs’. 'I think we both feel like amateurs in some way, and for me [finding the Casio VL-Tone] was a really important moment of appreciating that you could make worthwhile music with very little actual musical skill,' says Buxton, who released his debut album Buckle Up earlier this year. 'I always loved that synthesisers and cheap keyboards opened the door to the world of music to someone like me. But I was also aware that a lot of people really hated those sounds for that reason, and thought it wasn’t proper music. So I guess the painting is giving a voice to those who really hate people like me,' he laughs, 'and the kind of music that I love and make.'

Another pairing across the project features Steve Ignorant – frontman of 1980s anarcho-punk band Crass – and visual artist Maisie Cousins. Cousins frequently uses collage in her work and wanted to highlight their shared DIY sensibilities and love of imperfections in her own piece. 'I feel like the visual language world is so polished, but we connected over looking at the human error in things,' she explains. 'I thought it would be more interesting to be paired with someone who was different than me – who wasn’t also a 30-year-old woman. But then we realised we're probably not that dissimilar.'

'We just hit it off,' Ignorant shrugs. 'I think it's because we're not snobs.'

There’s a camaraderie to the project – which will culminate in an auction of the artworks at Bonhams, online and in person between 25 November and 3 December 2025 – that showcases the power of music and art in sparking ideas and bringing people together; the exact reasoning behind In Place of War’s powerful investment in creativity as an act of resistance.

'We’ve seen how art and music can transcend other forms of communication and bypass systems designed to silence people, so it’s incredibly important to our work,' Logan says. 'From female musicians in politically oppressed contexts in Zimbabwe and Brazil, to the concept of “Beautiful Resistance” in Palestine, and how hip hop saves lives in Colombia, these radical, subversive people are using art as a creative response to multiple crises, and transforming their communities and the world around them.

'Art is the first thing that suffers when cuts are made by governments and it’s the last thing that’s considered in any way essential – especially in an emergency situation or where people are living under all kinds of extreme conditions. The last thing you think about is, “Where are we going to put the art!”' says Buxton. 'But actually, it’s a really essential part of making life worth living, and it’s what gives meaning and form to a lot of what we do, and it’s the fun part of what we do. Without it, things get a bit bleak, and for people whose lives are already extremely bleak, it’s even more important.'

Ignorant, who spent his career creating protest music with Crass, puts it simply: 'It's very easy to look out your window and put yourself into a little dark corner and think the world is always going to be shit and it always has been. I've done that before, and it's a very dangerous place to be. So if you can find something to look at that moves you, or someone comes up with an image that can take you out of the misery that we're in, that makes you smile or feel good for five minutes, then that's worthwhile.'

The pieces created for Music Shaped 2025 will form part of the Sound and Cinema Auction presented by Bonhams online from 24 November – 3 December 2025. Proceeds from the artworks will support In Place of War’s #HackMusic Programme, which provides critical catalyst funding to support the development of essential life-changing music projects with indigenous communities; LGBTQI+ artists; artists in conflict zones; and artists responding to the climate crisis.

inplaceofwar.net

On the show's preview day in October, co-hosted by one of the fondation’s key partners, Swiss watchmaker Richard Mille, light is bouncing around Kusama’s mirrored cube Infinity Mirrored Room – Illusion Inside the Heart, a 2025 installation positioned in the garden, while autumn leaves are reflected in the silver balls of Narcissus Garden that float around the lake at the Renzo Piano-designed gallery.

'It really is meditative watching the balls move across the pond,' says Keller of the work that was first shown guerrilla-style at the Venice Biennale in 1966. Back then, Kusama was a plucky underground star working in her adopted home of New York. It was not until 1993 that she represented Japan officially at the biennale: a milestone moment in a career and life that has made her one of the most recognised and oldest living artists in the world.

The Fondation Beyeler show is the first devoted to the artist in Switzerland and the team is expecting over half a million visitors who will marvel at the sheer range of her work, which spans from small delicate watercolours to a fully immersive installation featuring giant inflated black and yellow tentacles, entitled The Hope of the Polka Dots Buried in Infinity Will Eternally Cover the Universe (2019/2024). The dots and mirrors are delightfully discombobulating, like peering into an abyss. That sense of teetering, of reaching into the cosmos, is threaded throughout all Kusama’s unbelievably prolific output.

'I think people sense that there's a lot of integrity, authenticity in her quest. Life and art are not separate. It’s not an artist’s career, it's her life,' says Keller.

What gives this exhibition great energy is the inclusion of 130 previously unseen works in the 300-strong display. Curator Mouna Mekouar worked with the Kusama Foundation to find previously undervalued works such as etchings and a series of small luminescent watercolours featuring landscapes and flowers in bloom.

'When Kusama moved back to Japan in the early 1970s, she didn't have a lot of money and could not afford to buy good paper, so she would work with shikishi, a low-cost calligraphy paper. She did thousands of [such works], and we think it's really striking,' says Mekouar of the curation, which includes a pastel and ballpoint pen Self Portrait 1972 featuring butterflies and botanical motifs collaged into an inky black scape.

Elsewhere, you can track other recurring Kusama motifs, like the Infinity Net abstract works, which she began in New York and has continued throughout her life. Videos of her performance pieces in New York featuring her nude friends painting each other with dots are also on show alongside her fashion creations, such as a 1964 shift dress decorated with macaroni and sprayed gold. This is an artist who does not respect categories but who continually experiments in new mediums, including poetry, sculpture and fashion. Her ambition to cover the world in dots was taken to a new level with her Dots Infinity collaboration with Louis Vuitton in 2012 and 2023. (Kusama also covered Wallpaper* in dots, as a guest editor in October 2023.)

On meeting Kusama at her studio in Tokyo in 2012, at the time of her retrospective at Tate Modern, it was clear this artist is obsessed with creating, and takes to her canvases every day. As Mekouar points out, she does not work from sketches or models; her way of creating is intuitive. 'Painting was a fever born of desperation, the only way for me to go on living in this world,' Kusama once said. Viewing this show, one appreciates her vast vision and her lifelong quest to capture the exhilarated act of creation.

Yayoi Kusama at Fondation Beyeler until 25 January 2026, fondationbeyeler.ch

New books for music lovers and music makers

Portables: A Visual & Historical Exploration of 222 Vintage Portable Turntables

Move quickly to secure your copy of Portables, specialist Brooklyn-based publisher Dust & Grooves’ exploration of the design and variety of the portable turntable, along with the collector culture that has sprung up to cater for these colourful pieces of tech. Featuring no fewer than 222 examples of the genre, this 470-page hardback features photography from Dust & Grooves’ founder Eilon Paz and a historical overview from the music historian Dan Epstein.

The battery-powered turntable is a true pop cultural artefact, frequently branded with toy and comic tie-ins. At the very least, they were brightly coloured, oddly shaped and favoured by design aficionados (the cult Sound Burger from Audio-Technica is still going strong). Portables delves into the key players, both literally and in the collecting scene, with page upon page of luscious imagery.

Portables: A Visual & Historical Exploration of 222 Vintage Portable Turntables, $89, DustandGrooves.com, @DustandGrooves

NME: The Cover 2024 – 2025

NME has come a long way from its origins as an inky weekly exploration of the popular music charts. Now a strictly online portal ‘music and pop culture brand’, the publication is veering back into print with this prestigiously packaged monograph, The Cover 2024–2025.

A celebration of the NME’s undeniable combination of grass roots access to new acts and excellent photography, The Cover includes portraits and images of 50 artists that have captured the industry’s fickle attention over the past 12 months

NME: The Cover 2024–2025, £160, NME.com

No New York: A Memoir of No Wave and the Women Who Shaped the Scene

Coming in early 2026, No New York is author Adele Bertei’s personal memories of No Wave-era New York, a creative cauldron of the avant-garde that sprang from the mid-70s punk and went on to define a generation of the city’s art and music.

Bertei, who played in the Contortions and worked for Brian Eno, is a first-person chronicler of this very female-focused scene. From photographer Nan Goldin, artists and filmmakers like Kathryn Bigelow, Barbara Kruger and Lizzie Borden, through to avant-garde provocateurs like Lydia Lunch and Kathy Acker, Bertei brings the era to life.

No New York: A Memoir of No Wave and the Women Who Shaped the Scene, Adele Bertei, $28.95, PenguinRandomHouse.com, AdeleBertei.com

This Ain’t Rock ’n’ Roll: Pop Music, the Swastika and the Third Reich

One of punk’s less savoury shock tactics was the repurposing of Nazi imagery. It was far from the only genre or performer to flirt with fascism, as Daniel Rachel chronicles in his new book, This Ain’t Rock ‘n’ Roll. Rachel is not looking to cancel or absolve but instead explore the musical obsession with atrocity and how it relates to rock history in general. A sadly rather timely book.

This Ain't Rock 'n' Roll: Pop Music, the Swastika and the Third Reich, Daniel Rachel, White Rabbit Books, £25, WhiteRabbitBooks.co.uk, @WhiteRabbitBks, @DanielRachelAuthor

Suddenly Something Clicked: The Languages of Film Editing and Sound Design

Walter Murch was one of the earliest employees at American Zoetrope, the San Francisco film studio set up in 1969 by Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas. The Oscar-winning sound designer and film editor worked on Coppola’s The Rain People, The Godfather parts I, II and III and The Conversation, along with George Lucas's THX 1138 and American Graffiti and many others, making him well placed to tell the story of modern cinema sound and editing. Replete with anecdotes about some of the most celebrated films in history, Suddenly Something Clicked is a gifted insider’s insight into the craft.

Suddenly Something Clicked: The Languages of Film Editing and Sound Design, Walter Murch, £23.15, Faber.co.uk, Amazon.co.uk

Making It: An Intimate Documentary of the Seattle Indie, Rock & Punk Scene, 1992 – 2008

The story of Seattle’s shift from hard rock satellite to ground zero of grunge and beyond, Making It is a photographic portrait of a city’s music scene in full swing. Featuring a foreword from Megan Jasper, CEO of Seattle’s legendary Sub Pop Records, Holler’s pictures capture a live music scene that was briefly the subject of a global fixation.

Energetic and nostalgic, it’s a chronicle of a scene in the pre-streaming age as well as Holler’s own journey through the era. The photographer is also offering a number of different special editions through her own website.

Making It: An Intimate Documentary of the Seattle Indie, Rock & Punk Scene, 1992–2008, Bootsy Holler, $60, ArtBook.com, BootsyHoller.com, @BootsyHoller

Turn My Head Into Sound: A history of Kevin Shields and My Bloody Valentine

My Bloody Valentine remain niche but highly notable, a band that’s managed to transcend genres and remain innovative, abstract and influential for decades, despite a relatively scant recorded output. Turn My Head Into Sound is the story of the band and its founder and driving creative force, Irish musician and producer Kevin Shields.

Despite the 21-year gap between their second and third albums (1991’s Loveless and 2013’s m b v), Shields and his band – Deb Googe, Colm Ó Cíosóig and Bilinda Butcher – have stayed relevant, with Shields finding a side hustle as a member of Primal Scream and as a producer in his own right. Perer’s book traces the history of the band from the very beginnings.

Turn My Head Into Sound: A history of Kevin Shields and My Bloody Valentine, Andrew Perer, £16.95, Jawbone Press, JawbonePress.com, Amazon.co.uk

Freedom, Rhythm & Sound: Chapter Two

Stuart Baker and Gilles Peterson’s second volume of jazz cover art dives deep into the genre’s frequently avant-garde and innovative album cover artwork. Short of spending many weekends sifting through record bins, this chronology of covers from the world of radical jazz is the only way you’ll ever clap eyes on these obscure and illuminating pieces.

Freedom, Rhythm & Sound: Chapter Two, Revolutionary Jazz Original Cover Art 1965 – 83, edited by Stuart Baker and Gilles Peterson, $49.95, Soul Jazz Records, ArtBook.com, Amazon.co.uk

Buzz Me In: Inside the Record Plant studios

Vintage diversions courtesy of a new history of Record Plant, the legendary studio that had outposts in both New York and California. Founded in 1968 by Gary Kellgren and Chris Stone, Record Plant helped shape the sound of the 1970s. It was here that Stevie Wonder shaped Songs In The Key Of Life, The Eagles checked into Hotel California and Fleetwood Mac got it together to create Rumours. Buzz Me In is an illustrated oral history of this legendary creative space.

Buzz Me In: Inside the Record Plant studios, Martin Porter and David Goggin, £30, ThamesandHudson.com, Amazon.co.uk

How Does It Sound Now? Legendary Engineers and Vintage Gear

The second edition of this insightful tome will be of especial interest to music professionals. Delving into the work patterns, gear preferences and technological evolutions of 32 key engineers and producers, including Bob Clearmountain and Alan Parsons, Gary Gottlieb has produced a book that's also pitched at audiophiles and vinyl obsessives.

How Does It Sound Now? Legendary Engineers and Vintage Gear, Gary Gottlieb, £46.99, Focal Press, Routledge.com

A Brief History of Sound Recording

The eclectic UK-based Museum of Portable Sound has produced its own ‘Fully Incomplete and Highly Biased’ history of sound recording, written by chief curator Dr John Kannenberg and designed to accompany an online and physical exhibit of objects, ephemera and the sounds themselves.

In addition to over 350 illustrations, the book contains a timeline of sound recording history and marks ten years of the museum. From the invention of stereo to the Dictaphone, black box recorder, compact cassette, mp3 and many more formats both weird and wonderful, the book is a true labour of love and well worth your time.

A Brief History of Sound Recording: Fully Incomplete & Highly Biased, Dr John Kannenberg, Available from MuseumofPortableSound.com, @MuseumofPortableSound

Everything We Do Is Music

Writer and broadcaster Elizabeth Alker’s new book traces the often unexpected parallels and cross-pollinations between 20th-century Classical music and the emerging world of pop.

From Steve Reich to Sonic Youth, The Blessed Madonna to La Monte Young, via Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood and Jean-Michel Jarre, Everything We Do Is Music is a fascinating journey that’ll have you reaching for the playlists.

Everything We Do Is Music: How 20th-Century Classical Music Shaped Pop, Elizabeth Alker, £20, Faber & Faber, Faber.co.uk, Amazon.co.uk

The Minimoog Book: The Synthesizer that changed music forever

The newest publication from music specialist Bjooks is this extensive history of the Minimoog synthesiser. Still finding favour amongst contemporary artists (with the Minimoog Model D now back in production), The Minimoog Book is both the history of a technology and the artists that used it to shape their sound and rewrite pop.

The Minimoog Book, £65, Bjooks.com

One Hundred Sheets of Guitars

In the past five years industrial designer Robin Stummvoll has modestly reinvented the art and aesthetic of the electric guitar via his company Verso Instruments. Both the Cosmo and Sine models depart far from conventional norms, yet have proved to be high quality instruments favoured by performers in a variety of genres.

One Hundred Sheets of Guitars is Stummvoll’s celebration of his first century (and more) of custom builds, chronicling each and every guitar along with many of the happy owners. Every instrument is a bespoke build, and the book showcases Verso’s blend of innovative form and beautiful craft.

One Hundred Sheets of Guitars, Robin Stummvoll; contact details at VersoInstruments.com, @VersoInstruments

‘Not everyone could have had access to these people,’ says Clare Grafik, Head of Exhibitions at The Photographers’ Gallery in London, where a substantial new exhibition of the work has just opened (through 22 February 2026). ‘They were often in rural areas with a very local life. For her to gain their trust and access their inner most domestic environments, is a real testament to her personality.’ Rydet travelled by bus or relied on friends for lifts, turning up and knocking on doors unannounced. ‘The actual photographing was quite quick,’ Grafik adds on a video call, ‘it was the conversations she would subsequently have with the homeowners, that profoundly affected the way she thought about life and work.’

A month earlier I had been invited to the Zofia Rydet Foundation, inside the home of its founders, Zofia AugustyNska-Martyniak and her mother Maria Sokol-AugustyNska (Rydet was AugustyNska-Martyniak’s great grandfather’s sister, though she usually refers to the photographer as her great grandmother). Sat in the family’s living room with Grafik and her co-curator, lecturer and cultural manager Karol Hordziej, the visit mirrored some version of Rydet’s own circumstances, with talk filling much of our allotted time. At one point AugustyNska-Martyniak recalls casually how, when Rydet died, in Gliwice in 1997, most of the family were interested in inheriting her cameras; she and her mother instead became custodians of the archive, and it moved with them from a residence in Rabka, to the Kraków house where we’re introduced. The Foundation was established in 2011.

Hordziej , a school friend of AugustyNska-Martyniak’s (he remembers, unconscious of their gravity at the time, first seeing Rydet’s pictures on the walls of her home), has been working with the Foundation for a number of years, originally helping to digitalise the archive as a way to preserve, celebrate and extend its function. In London however, the focus is on around 100 physical prints Rydet made in her home darkroom, as well as books and personal letters. A documentary, ‘Endlessly Distant Roads’ is also on show; made by the Polish filmmaker Andrzej Różycki in 1989, in it, a young AugustyNska-Martyniak can be seen walking beside Rydet, carrying the photographer’s camera bag.

‘The Photographers’ Gallery is interested in what happens to archives, how you deal with archives online, and how they then get translated into physical exhibitions,’ continues Grafik. ‘This project became quite important in terms of thinking about that, because obviously the digitalisation of much of the Sociological Record was the way that that work suddenly became disseminated beyond the boundaries of this sort of niche field, but we’re looking at just a tiny part of it. Ultimately the prints tell you something different about what her intention was for the work, versus scans from negatives.’

‘The project was such an ambitious undertaking, particularly for a photographer in the autumn of her career, to suddenly decide that's what she wanted to do,’ she notes. ‘It brings up all sorts of interesting issues to do with photography, archives, identity; there's many layers to it.’ Rydet predominantly worked in black and white, shooting with a wide angle lens and flash, and the exhibition is largely comprised of the busy domestic spaces of the project’s ‘People in Interiors’ sub-series; lace curtains, religious ephemera, floral tablecloths and posters of pop stars all feature. Elsewhere are works from ‘Women on Doorsteps’, ‘Windows’ and ‘Presence’, the latter highlighting the many images of Pope John Paul II Rydet observed on her travels, (notably elected the same year the Sociological Record commenced, the former Archbishop of Kraków had been the first non-Italian pope in over 400 years).

‘She was very free,’ offers Hordziej, who has worked on previous Zofia Rydet exhibitions across Poland and also in Paris. ‘She never married, never had her own family. Maria from the Foundation told me that her male colleagues [as well as joining photo clubs, she became a member of the Union of Polish Art Photographers in 1965] joked that they were kind of jealous, that she could save all her money for traveling and focus on photography. But she also wanted to talk with her photographs, to ordinary people. She really focused on the message – it’s not how it's done but what is it about.’ Attuned to the project’s future significance, during her lifetime Rydet made a point of entering competitions and gifting her work, oftentimes sending it out internationally; some of these respective labels and similar ephemera still exist in a folder at the Foundation.

Five decades on, against a backdrop of camera phones and social media, reality TV and a contemporary interest in what other people’s homes look like (those before us and currently around us), the exhibition brings Rydet’s work into a new context that speaks to her own curiosity, and her desire to share widely what she saw. ‘She was really photographing people – who wouldn't have been photographed much in their lives, maybe never inside their houses – in their kind of essence, in these interiors that had been put together very organically and often practically,’ shares Grafik. ‘Versus today, where things are photographed all the time. They are so rich as images, each one is a little universe.’

Zofia Rydet: Sociological Record is part of the UK/Poland Season 2025, produced with The Photographers’ Gallery in partnership with the Adam Mickiewicz Institute and the Zofia Rydet Foundation. It is on view at The Photographers’ Gallery until 22 February 2026

The subversive power of beauty is evident from the onset of the exhibition and her early series, Autoportrait (1989-90). In a succession of tightly cropped, close-up, silver gelatin prints, a glamorous young Gregory poses and pouts like a cover girl. Captured with Voguish verve and monochromatic chicness, these shots juxtapose the compositional, pictorial and material details of photography with a sharp point about western beauty ideals.

If we are charmed by the reflective gleam of the artist’s metallic drop earrings against the starched fabric of her little black dress, then we are equally disarmed by the unzipped back of said robe, the vulnerable gaze of her kohl-lined eyes or the moment her face is hidden behind her hands. Excluded from many fashion magazines at the time, Black women, Gregory implies, should be seen as the beautiful individuals they are by being placed front and centre(fold). Yet in a world where Black models grace the covers of fashion journals less than their white counterparts, the unease and vulnerability visible in these images still resonate today.

Interrogating unrealistic beauty standards through beautiful photography also comes to the fore in two renowned series, Objects of Beauty (1992-94) and Girl Thing (2002-4). If, in the former, the construction of femininity is deconstructed through kallitype prints of hairclips, combs and false eyelashes magnified to monstrous proportions, then the latter’s photograms approach the same issue but with a lighter touch. The hard material objects of Girl Thing go soft, dissolving into ghostly forms against a cyan background. Though no less beautiful and evocative, the trappings of femininity are here stripped down to their poetic essence. Luminous in a sea of deep blue, these ordinary objects become an extraordinary sight to behold.

Beautiful accessories again hide ugly realities in Gregory’s haunting series, The Handbag Project (1998-97). Made during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission following the end of Apartheid in South Africa, The Handbag Project illuminates the dark truth of how wealthy white women exploited Black female domestic labour. Her pictograms of collected luxury bags once belonging to said affluent white women are a sweet riposte to this oppressive era. Appearing a mere shell of its once coveted form, the handbag – or rather, the white female privilege it epitomised – is reduced to a remnant.

Impressive in its scope, skill and sensual sensibility, Catching Flies with Honey demonstrates that beauty can be a weapon and a joy, a trap and a method, but one thing is certain: we’ll be thinking about Gregory’s beautiful works of art, as well as their profound meanings, for many years to come.

Joy Gregory: Catching Flies with Honey is showing at Whitechapel Gallery until 1^st March 2026

whitechapelgallery.org

Ünsal built a career in music programming in her native Turkey before heading to London in 2016. Prior to moving to the ICA, she was the head of contemporary music at Southbank Centre, where she was already championing a multidisciplinary approach to the cultural sphere. In her ICA role, she oversees a programme that encompasses cinema, visual arts, talks and events, but which steps away from the traditional format. Supporting creatives is key, with recent initiatives including an investment in a custom-designed D&B Soundscape system, which this month will see artists use the space for live performances in a series of ‘In the Round’ gigs.

‘I went for this job in the first place because I observed that artists, especially younger and emerging ones, didn’t want to define themselves with art forms anymore,’ says Ünsal. ‘The system is changing, and the way that artists are presenting themselves is changing, too. It’s made people more comfortable with sharing their interdisciplinary forms. We do have defined areas here, but I also like them to merge and become really multi-arts.’ It’s an agenda that is reflected in the space’s ambitious programming, with an eclectic curation for autumn that encompassed a retrospective on German filmmaker Angela Schanelec and a new phase of the organisation’s young artists programme, ICA Creatives x Diasporas Now. In the lower gallery, a new commission by British artist Tanoa Sasraku considers the far-reaching implications of the oil industry in her new institutional exhibition, on until 11 January.

‘The ICA is very much the risk taker, and there are not many platforms at the moment that are willing to do that,’ says Ünsal. ‘We like to do the first UK shows of people coming up, and that’s important to us. Tanoa is asking questions and that is something we value and want to support, creating a safe space for voices to be heard.’

This article appears in the November 2025 Art Issue of Wallpaper*, available in print on newsstands from, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News + from 9 October. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

Anna Solomon, digital staff writer

There’s a certain aesthetic – dubbed ‘modern luxury’ on TikTok – that, in my opinion, is the scourge of contemporary design. It’s a deliberate blend of minimalism, high-end materials and technological polish, and I see it so often in new hotels and developments that all those LED-lit, quartz-clad interiors start to blur into one.

So when I visited the showroom of The Capston, which marks the final phase of Embassy Gardens in Nine Elms, I sat up. This isn’t your standard, ‘safe’ London development. The Capston trusts that the right people will fall in love with its bold design, and they probably will.

The Capston’s interiors (developer Ballymore has created likenesses of some of the soon-to-be-built spaces in the showroom) are eclectic, sometimes eccentric, with more than a hint of art deco. There's a ceramic fireplace by Fabienne L'Hostis, stained glass from Stuart Suckling, a mural by Sam Wood, and enviable furniture from Bryan O'Sullivan Studio. The aesthetic will carry across 247 residences – studios to three-bedroom penthouses – in two buildings linked by a ground-floor pavilion and Japanese-inspired gardens.

What summed it up for me was the lift, which features a small niche housing a Vincenzo Muratore sculpture. Now that’s attention to detail.

A traveller's toast

Tianna Williams, staff writer

On the cusp of my friend spontaneously purchasing flights to Mexico, we celebrated with and evening of 'Vinyls by V87' at Viajante87. The Latin American listening bar is a hidden spot, a stone’s throw from Notting Hill Gate. ‘Viajante’ translates to ‘traveller’ in Spanish, reflecting the bar’s inspiration, which spans from Mexico down to Argentina, from Peru to Brazil. We were welcomed by Beatriz, who looked after us for the evening and explained the cocktail menu, divided into three sections: Be Courageous, Be Confident, and Be Curious. Naturally curious, I chose the latter – where you simply tell the bartender what you like, and they create a concoction bespoke to you. With drinks in hand, we enjoyed vinyls of Latin, Afro-international, instrumental jazz, funk, and soul while tucking into fresh guacamole and chips.

A Shoreditch surprise

Jamilah Rose-Roberts, social media editor

After a long stretch of deadlines, I finally took an evening to exhale and catch up with a friend over herbal tea. We met at what I thought was Nobu Hotel Shoreditch, only to find it had been reimagined as Aethos London Shoreditch, newly opened this October.

What was meant to be a quick tea turned into a slow, unhurried evening. The space feels beautifully composed – terracotta tones, brushed metal, and layered wood textures create a warmth that settles around you. The staff were warm and attentive, striking that rare balance between charm and calm precision – the kind of hospitality that makes you want to stay longer than planned.

Aethos draws on Shoreditch’s creative character, but with refinement; it feels more lived-in than staged, more conversational than performative. A new Japanese dining concept and members’ club will open soon, promising to deepen that rhythm.

Having stayed at Nobu before, I’ll be returning once the restaurant and additional spaces are fully curated. Something tells me it’s a place that will keep unfolding, one evening at a time.

An enlivening evening

Gabriel Annouka, senior designer

Thursday evenings are meant for domestic rituals and for pretending that early winter is restorative. Instead, I headed south for a night of performance. At Chemist Gallery, Fiontan Moran restaged Press Release, Hera Santos turned the bathroom into a site of soft resistance, and Anahita Harding held the room – and the staircase – in slow, devotional tension.

Later, at Ormside Projects, Coalesce combined narration, sound, and light. Helin Karabil, with Engin Eskici (aka DJ Baklava), delivered a visual and sonic architecture that transcended the ordinary, demanding full attention and immersion.

A runners reception

Anna Fixsen, US editor

The New York fashion world may lay claim to the first Monday in May, but the Big Apple’s running community owns the first Sunday in November – the day of the TCS New York City Marathon. While you won’t find me shivering on Staten Island at the start line this weekend, I joined Grammy Award-winning actor and singer Anthony Ramos (you’ll know him from a little production called Hamilton) Thursday evening to celebrate his first-ever run through the five boroughs. The event, hosted by Brooks, took place at Ramos’s own watering hole, Milly’s Neighborhood Bar, just blocks away from the marathon course in Brooklyn. He was joined by his coach, the one and only Des Linden, to discuss his training, his charitable efforts for Scholarship Plus, and – one of the biggest parts of conquering a marathon – his ‘why’: ‘I am doing it for my family, I am doing it for myself, I am doing it for the voices in my head that told me I couldn’t,’ the actor said. One of the themed cocktails of the evening summed up the audience’s sentiments best: ¡Vamos, Ramos!

A meeting of minds

Rosa Bertoli, global design director

This week, I was in Almería to take part in Cosentino’s C-Next event, a gathering of designers and other design professionals from 30 countries to discuss trends and the state of the industry from a variety of perspectives. Among the highlights was a welcome dinner inside a local greenhouse (pictured), and I had the opportunity to moderate a panel with designers Peter Ippolito, Chris Thornley of Conran and Partners, Rania Hamed, Amine Khouni, and Sam Boujada of Nexgen Construction. It was fascinating to hear such diverse perspectives on the industry and to discover how leading interior designers craft spaces that are both considerate and experiential.

Style

Basquiat redefined who and what counted as 'serious' painting, insisting that Black subjects and histories occupy spaces long denied them. He layered bebop, boxing, colonial history, and medical textbooks onto doors, panels, and canvases, producing works that felt improvisational but were quietly exacting – a controlled chaos only he could summon. The drips, cross-outs, and abrupt juxtapositions were not accidents but a refusal to smooth the dissonance of his sources, reflecting the fractured politics of the Reagan era: rising policing, rolled-back social programmes, and culture wars that made the downtown art scene both exhilarating and precarious. In a decade dominated by glossy neo-expressionism and Wall Street swagger, Basquiat’s paintings held onto the raw textures of life outside collectors’ lofts.

More than thirty years on, Basquiat’s paintings remain electric, not as 80s relics but because the injustices and contradictions they expose – racism, inequality, commodification – are still with us. Yet the paintings are more than political statements. They are hybrid objects: Haitian and Puerto Rican folklore sits alongside Leonardo da Vinci sketches; graffiti syntax collides with the scale and structure of Renaissance altarpieces. They display the restless intelligence of someone sampling and remixing long before those ideas became art-world buzzwords, conscious of being read, misread, and commodified even while creating.

Early life

Encouraged to draw from an early age, Basquiat spent part of his childhood in hospital after a car accident, poring over Gray’s Anatomy. As a teenager he drifted in and out of school, sold painted postcards, and with fellow New York-born artist Al Diaz, scrawled cryptic SAMO© slogans across downtown walls. By 1981 he appeared in PS1’s New York/New Wave exhibition; a year later he had his first solo show. Collaborations with Andy Warhol brought both visibility and suspicion – their joint canvases pitched Pop’s logos against Basquiat’s furious mark-making – while magazine covers further enhanced his burgeoning celebrity status. Behind the acclaim lay the strain of being a young Black painter in a predominantly white system. In August 1988 he died of a heroin overdose, aged 27, leaving hundreds of paintings and thousands of drawings.

Themes

Recurring themes unify his work. Anatomy was a means of probing what lies beneath the surface. He honoured Black heroes – Charlie Parker, Joe Louis – by placing them at the centre of high art, a corrective to decades of erasure. He explored anatomy and mortality not as gothic flourish but as a way of looking under the skin, of seeing structures of power as well as of flesh. His canvases teem with language: names of commodities, of saints, of the enslaved; words struck through or overwritten as if to stage the violence of erasure itself. And he turned his own predicament – outsider and insider, celebrated and caricatured – into subject matter, producing works that are at once self-portrait and cultural diagnosis.

Works

Untitled (1981 Skull), one of his first big statements on identity, fills the canvas with a head that is mask, portrait and anatomical diagram at once. Painted in searing reds and blues, its split face – half flesh, half bone –reflects both his fascination with what lies beneath appearances and the exposure of being a young Black artist under scrutiny.

Boy and Dog in a Johnnypump (1982) anchors street memories in high-art scale. The “Johnnypump” is New York slang for a fire hydrant opened in summer, a tiny, almost affectionate detail in a painting otherwise full of sharp teeth and wiry limbs. The boy and dog, cartoonish yet threatening, evoke both the joy and menace of the city; the blazing palette nods to Matisse even as the line stays spiky and uncontainable.

Irony of Negro Policeman (1981) distils a complex critique of institutional power. A boxed-in, helmeted officer appears as diagram rather than person, the angular helmet evoking both riot gear and medieval armour. The title’s bluntness forces the viewer to confront a stereotype and its contradictions, turning a commonplace image into a lesson in complicity.

Defacement (The Death of Michael Stewart) (1983), painted after the killing of a young graffiti artist in police custody, compresses rage and grief into a small, intense composition. Cartoonish figures with clubs, hastily scrawled names and a bright, almost sickly palette make it feel like a visual shout rather than a gallery piece – a furious elegy cut from the wall of Keith Haring’s studio.

What unites these works is not style alone but a way of thinking on the surface: painting as a site where cultural memory, personal experience and political crisis converge. At a time when much of the art world smoothed itself into a marketable product, Basquiat left contradictions visible. Far from the myth of a street kid turned star, he was a historically literate painter who bent the languages of Western art to tell a different story, leaving an unflinching record of a city – and a country – in transformation.

Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run is here to change that, providing a rich and in-depth look at McCartney’s second decade in the spotlight through more than 150 photographs (many previously unseen) and first hand testimonies from the band, the wider McCartney family, his fellow Beatles and other prominent figures of the time. Curated by editor Ted Widmer from 42 hours of all-new interviews plus archival conversations, and overseen by McCartney and his team, the book is the definitive tome on the group, told via the words and images of the people who were there.

'The story of Wings is a few different things all at the same time,' explains Widmer. 'It's a story about a family as well as one about a very famous musician, and I think the story of the family is just as compelling. It’s also the story of a decade, but primarily it’s a story about rebuilding. Paul at one point says the breakup of The Beatles was like an atom bomb going off. So there is this problem [pertaining to] a man, and he’s a famous man, but it's something I think we all can relate to. When something ends in your life and you have to rebuild from scratch, it's hard. But we've all had setbacks and we've all had to do it.'

Published ahead of a forthcoming documentary, Man On The Run, which premiered in August at the Colorado Film Festival and will be released widely next February via Amazon Prime, the book picks a different path through this new pool of material. 'There was a very high premium on creativity when making this book, which I really respect coming from Paul,' Widmer explains. 'He didn't want me to see the documentary, and so instead I did my own thing. So you have two products that are related to each other but quite different.'

The book moves chronologically through the decade, from McCartney’s first pre-Wings solo album, through the band’s seven studio albums including seminal 1973 LP ‘Band On The Run’, and to their eventual break up in 1981. There are incredible first-person stories throughout, from Paul and Linda moving to rural Scotland and learning to craft tables and shear sheep – a hands-on, physical act of building their new life – to wilder, more dizzying tales as the band picked up steam and became a global phenomenon in their own right. 'There was an album of Wings' Greatest Hits where the cover photo features a statue of a goddess that Paul and Linda had bought, sitting on a little bit of a snowy mountain,' Widmer recalls. 'They literally flew helicopters with this statue into the Swiss Alps, and it was very dangerous, and cold – plus it's hard to land a helicopter on a pointy mountain top! They finally snapped this picture, and when they got back after nearly killing themselves for the shot, Paul said, "Well, why didn’t we just use some fake snow in a studio here in London?"'

The creation of that particular photograph may have been extravagant, but many of the images featured throughout The Story of a Band on the Run are distinctly more intimate. Linda, as well as being heavily involved in the creative direction of the band and its music, also documented a lot of their behind-the-scenes process. A pair of exclusive photographs seen below, showing Paul during home recording sessions for 1970’s ‘McCartney’ LP and in 1979, recording ‘McCartney II’, were both taken by her; unguarded snapshots into records that would go on to sell millions.

Similarly, the first-person nature of the text – all told through quotes – gives an easy, conversational feel to it all. For his part, Widmer wanted to ask McCartney equally close questions. 'I wondered if birds were important to him when he was a boy, which is perhaps a naive question, but you have to be unafraid to ask something that might be a stupid,' he says. 'And he told me a wonderful story about how he was an avid birder, and how he would ride on a bicycle into Lancashire to look at birds and that he had a bird study book. It was such a good answer.'

Wings, then, might have become multi-platinum, stadium-selling stars in their tenure, but Widmer tells the human side of their story: of a couple very much in love ('Paul didn't want to go on the road without Linda, so he built a band around the idea of being together'), and of art and music healing the fractures left following the break-up of history’s most famous quartet.

'I think it humanises a very famous musician, and I also think it gives an incentive to people who want to be creative that might not know how,' he says. 'The message of the book is: just do it. Grab a sheep and shear it. If you don't know how to make a table, give it a go. And I found that message really uplifting. Even if you don't know much about Paul, or The Beatles, or Wings, everybody needs to get through the challenges of life. And I found the story of this book very exciting that way.'

The aim of the exhibit is to introduce the country’s next generation of photographers on the international stage and, in the process, it presents a portrait of a country at war as seen by youth. The result is a diverse collection of work that spans documentary and art photography, still life, landscape, and collage, some of which were taken before the war began in 2022, and others after. No matter the context in which they were taken, the present circumstances give every image greater resonance. Gathered together on four of the gallery’s white walls, the pictures compel viewers to see how the questions that preoccupy all people, especially young people – what matters to me now? What might come in the future? – become even more significant when they are put at risk.

For many of the young photographers in the show, the opportunity to display their work forced them to confront these questions anew. ‘In the first months of the invasion, I felt a very strong apathy: creating art was no longer needed when it came to survival,’ says Vic Bakin.

‘I asked myself the same question again and again: what’s it for? Why create? And I couldn’t find any answer. I am talking about art, of course. I am not talking about photojournalism, reportage, and documentary photography, which became extremely important in the first months and continue to be important. We should not underestimate the work of Ukrainian (and foreign) photojournalists, who first showed the world Bucha and Mariupol and continue to show the world what happens here. Ukraine, like any other country at war, relies on this powerful medium.’

‘One could say [artistic photography] is not immediate and it’s not crucial enough,’ Bakin continues. ‘And I would agree; it’s a different kind of approach. But still, if you can touch the heart of the audience, it is a legitimate way to do your work. For me, it works: you talk about the same thing, but with different words or in a different language. But still, you tell the story. No matter what, the function is still the same.’

Photographer Mykola Maychyk echoes a similar sentiment, noting that the war has changed the personal and public significance of his work.

‘Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began, my vision and approach to creativity have been turned upside down,’ Maychyk says. ‘My photography has gained a new sense of sensitivity and compassion. It has become a powerful tool for sharing Ukrainian culture (in my case) and for informing the world about the war in Ukraine – a role also seen in the work of Ukrainian military photographers and documentarians.’

Indeed, FUTURESPECTIVE demonstrates just how powerful a tool photography can be, offering viewers intimate insight into a country at war, and the toll such an experience takes on the ones who are forced to go through it. For artists like Maychyk, that is what makes this exhibition so important.

‘Sadly, it took such turbulent times for many of us to realise how vital it is to present Ukrainian art to the world,’ he says. ‘This act serves two inseparable purposes – to inform the world about the war, and to highlight Ukrainian artists whose work is nationally and internationally competitive.’

‘I hope visitors leave with sincere, positive and at times, compassionate feelings. The variety of styles and approaches is truly remarkable, and these works are the kind you want to look at closely, to really feel. I believe that’s exactly what will happen.’

‘FUTURESPECTIVE, at Saatchi Gallery until 16 November 2025, https://www.saatchigallery.com/

As early as 1923, plans for separate urban residential areas for Africans had been developed. Local legislation was already propagating segregated living, but once the Nationalist Party came to power with veiled intentions of white supremacy and instilled the Group Areas Act of 1950, racially segregated town planning became compulsory for South Africa. It forced many like the Docrats to move out of their homes to places 'set aside for them'.

It's an intimate portrait of people that David presents, highlighting a personal relationship with many of them. A group, possibly a family, stands in front of a house which they were about to abandon – some of the elders smile but the younger children’s faces are etched with distress. An empty breakfast table in Tahera Karbelkar’s house speak to her fear in the final days in which she stayed in her home, not answering the doorbell of the Group Area inspectors when David visited her. Her house was demolished and never rebuilt, the dream of redevelopment having never been achieved by the Mandela government.

A blackboard outside a shop reads, ‘We have been trading here for the last 40 years, where must we move?’ In a photograph taken in Ossie’s shop in 1976, his daughter smiled as her father looked on. A year later, her sister Asiya Docrat was lugging items helping Ossie Docrat to close shop. 'I had blackboards outside and I used to put the [match] score up there,' Ossie had said. Before closing shutters, the blackboard read: Fietas died today.

Fragments of Fietas, MACK, £35

mackbooks.co.uk

Nieves González, the Spanish artist known for classical oil portraits that blend Baroque chiaroscuro with modern sensibility, was invited to shape the album’s visual identity. Her figures emerge from Baroque pictorial language yet remain firmly of the present. This sense of suspended modernity forms a signature of her practice – a gaze that feels ancient and immediate at once.

González describes the origin of the collaboration with quiet clarity. 'The project's creative director Leith Clark reached out to me because she felt my work aligned perfectly with her vision for the album's image. I have always dreamed of creating the visual identity for a musical project as music is one of my greatest sources of inspiration. And collaborating with an artist I deeply admire has been truly a privilege.'

Lily Allen has long shaped her artistic life around the act of speaking plainly with perception sharpened by lived experience. Her work moves through private and public memory without seeking to neaten feelings. González approaches image-making in similar ways.

The album artwork depicts Lily in a quilted jacket, seated calmly against a dark background. Her posture is unforced; the light is soft yet unyielding. González says: ‘I wanted to evoke everything that defines a West End Girl and that I also see reflected in Lily – strength, power and wisdom. The intimacy comes from the direct gaze and from the relaxed, almost domestic posture.’

The notion of the 'West End Girl' becomes an emotional anchor – a woman who has lived, learned, and speaks for herself. In this portrait, Allen doesn’t explain, she simply resides.

González's engagement with Spanish Baroque is deliberate. The dramatic play of shadow and illumination does not serve grandeur alone; it forms a site where reality and imagination meet. Layers build upon layers; the surface becomes memory. Beneath one gesture lies another. Each mark responds. Each layer questions and transforms. Meaning emerges from accumulation and time.

This depth is where her collaboration with Lily achieves its potency. The portrait is not an image of a singer, but an image of a person who has stepped into ownership of her narrative. It acknowledges the act of being seen and responds with its own terms.

Music and painting hold memory differently – one moves, the other stays still – yet both reveal an interior life. González listens to music constantly while painting: ‘Every sound around me leaves its mark. Music becomes an essential thread through my work.’

When asked how she balanced Lily's narrative with her own visual language, González responded. 'The balance came from recognising that we are working with similar tensions, in different mediums. My work balances between tradition and innovation, between the recognisable and the unsettling. We were telling the same story; the complexity of being a woman in the present navigating inherited codes while building your own.'

The statement is lived not theoretical. It resonates throughout the portrait. Lily sits in a pose echoing centuries of portraiture. Yet the energy now belongs to a woman defined by voice presence and the articulation of experience.

The album's tone has been described as unguarded and visceral. Yet the portrait remains steady.

'I knew the album's name from the beginning and its influence shaped my approach. I portrayed Lily as a powerful modern woman. I did not try to directly illustrate the music; the album's concept informed the energy; a balance between the immediate and the composed between confession and structure.'

The quilted jacket has become one of Nieves González's recurring motifs, appearing in many of her portraits. Soft fabric rendered with exquisite detail – a garment linked to warmth and protection. On Lily, it becomes a statement of presence: a chosen shelter and a form of steadiness.

While the album is visceral and candid, the portrait remains composed – steady, grounded, unshowy. It doesn’t perform pain; it sits with experience.

Oil painting is an act of duration. Layer upon layer. González speaks of tactility as truth. In an era defined by instant digital image creation, the decision to foreground the hand holds weight. The painting reminds the viewer that life is lived in time and that experience shapes the surface.

González has spoken of 'wanting the viewer to experience both familiarity and strangeness.' A recognition of humanity – alongside its well-known subject.

González’s painting, like Allen’s music, holds time, texture, and self-possession. It’s not a depiction of a celebrity but a portrait of a woman who defines herself.

It sets the emotional horizon. It teaches the eye how to listen.

Every element of Mitski’s performance is meticulously composed, yet charged with emotion, and light becomes the invisible hand guiding the audience through it. Behind this visual language is lighting and stage designer Andi Watson, whose considered use of shadow and illumination shapes the show’s quiet intensity. A longtime collaborator of Radiohead, Watson brings a sculptural sensibility to live music – one that treats light not as decoration, but as a character and a storytelling tool. Here, he reflects on the making of Mitski: The Land, and the disciplined beauty of restraint, contrast and control.

An interview with Andi Watson

Wallpaper*: What were those early conversations with Mitski like? Did she already have a strong idea of how she wanted the show to look and feel?

Andi Watson: To a degree. Mitski and choreographer Monica Mirabile work very closely together, so they already had the choreography developing while I was designing the production. We met in Chicago, in the middle of a snowstorm, at the warehouse where we were building the set. That was a great moment because Mitski could get a sense of performing on the 14-foot circular platform that she's on for about 90% of the show. It also gave us a chance to adapt ideas and experiment together early on.

When you’re working with an artist for the first time, it’s about finding out what they want and how they want to be presented on stage – what the feel of it is, what their on-stage character might be.

With Mitski, there’s definitely a character to her performance. Unlike a lot of bands who just go out as themselves – although that’s never strictly true – Mitski’s very deliberate in how she performs. So it’s about understanding how she wants the audience to see her, and then moving on to the physicality of the stage: what’s on it, how we light it, and how we make sure the choreography reads clearly from every seat.

As far as I’m concerned, there’s no such thing as cheap seats – everyone should have an amazing experience. Mitski is very receptive to that. So we focused on creating good sightlines and enough light to see what’s happening, while still using it sculpturally, as part of the performance.

More than other shows, the lighting here feels like an interactive and expressive tool, for Mitski to use. I imagine that's quite different from working with a band like Radiohead?

Andi Watson: What I consider my job to be is creating environments for songs to exist within when they’re being performed live. That's always the case no matter who the artist is. It’s about creating a world on stage that has an overarching meaning, and then giving each individual song its own world within that.

In Mitski’s case, Monica and I worked closely on how the light would interact with the choreography, and how the choreography would interact with the light. Mitski is such an incredible performer – she’s receptive, curious, and really wants to explore ideas. We wanted the lighting to become part of the choreography.

There are beautiful moments where that works perfectly – where Mitski dances with a beam of light, approaches a cage of lighting beams, or follows little breadcrumbs of light around the stage. She interacts with it. She feels the light. Watching her move, touch and play with those beams is incredible. From my side as a designer, that’s heaven – to have an artist that enthusiastic and engaged with ideas.

Were there added considerations when translating this from live performance to film?

Andi Watson: From the start, it was important that we were capturing the performance, not changing it. We didn’t want to add loads of light or make it something else. I wanted the film to show the actual show, because not everyone gets to see a tour in person. Some people can’t make it to a show, or a country, or see it twice.

So the idea was to preserve the experience. Grant James, who directed the film, had originally been brought in to handle live video when we started moving into larger venues. We’d already been working together, talking about how to make a proper capture of the show rather than a reimagining of it. Mitski, Grant, management and I were all on the same page about that.

The Fox Theatre in Atlanta, where the film was shot, has a very distinctive atmosphere. Did that present challenges?

Andi Watson: Every venue is different. It’s easier when you’re doing arenas or stadiums, because they’re similar every night. With theatres, it changes daily – the sightlines, the rake of the seats, even the size of the stage.

The Fox Theatre is pretty wild. It has that big faux-sky ceiling, a strange, almost surreal atmosphere. That’s very different from somewhere like Hammersmith Apollo. The challenge is to create something that works everywhere – something that feels the same emotionally, even if the physical spaces vary.

The lighting in the show feels minimalist but incredibly effective. Were there points when you decided to pare it back?

Andi Watson: It was always going to be quite minimal. There aren’t that many lights in the show. When we first designed it, before My Love Mine All Mine took off on TikTok, the budget and scale were modest. But honestly, it never needed more.

The focus is Mitski – her choreography, her voice, her performance. There’s no need to add things that would distract from that. Of course, there are moments like the mobile – the big sculpture of copper discs that comes down from above – where we shift the space, but it’s all about giving her something to interact with, to transform the stage for a moment and then return to stillness.

What stands out to you most when you watch the film back?

Andi Watson: There are lots of moments I love. There’s one where Mitski is behind a wall of light and a narrow slice opens up as her character changes. It’s so simple, but beautiful.

Another favourite is when she walks across the stage, following these tiny lights that appear one by one, each disappearing as she touches it. Eventually, she finds the one that doesn’t vanish – her light. It’s very delicate, and when I explained it to her, she just said, “That’s beautiful.”

Then there’s the mobile coming down – that’s a real “wow” moment. The whole audience gasps, and you see hundreds of phones rise into the air. You can feel their energy.

What did you take away from working on this project?

Andi Watson: It was a lovely tour to work on. Everyone – Mitski, Monica, her management, the crew – was working for each other, which isn’t always the case. It was a genuinely collaborative and creative environment.

It’s always rewarding when you make something that’s both beautiful and emotionally powerful. That’s not every tour. But this one was special — it all came together.

Do you still have goals, or artists you’d love to work with?

Andi Watson: When I started, I had a few goals that I thought were unattainable, and I’ve been lucky enough to achieve them. I’ve worked with amazing artists and collaborators, done shows that broke new ground.

At this point, it’s not about ticking off names. What excites me is when people have faith in you – when they give you the freedom to do something that might seem risky or untested. That’s when creativity really happens.

And finally, what’s your favourite thing about doing this work?

Andi Watson: When an artist like Mitski truly interacts with the light, treats it as something alive – that’s what it’s all about. Those moments where you see the audience respond to it, where light becomes emotion… that’s why I do it.

Mitski: The Land, is out exclusively in cinemas worldwide 22^nd October for a limited time.

But before construction began, the now-empty museum proved too tempting a stage for Because Music – the French record label marking its 20th anniversary this year. Long-time collaborators with the Pompidou (legend has it, Daft Punk were inspired to pursue electronic music after a rooftop rave here), the label saw it as the perfect setting for a weekend devoted to art, sound, and creative exchange. And working in close collaboration with the venue, Because Beaubourg came to life.

More than just a party, the two-day takeover drew on the label’s most illustrious names – Thomas Bangalter, Shygirl, Justice – alongside a new wave of diverse talent, breathing creative energy back into the dormant museum.

By day, the public were invited to explore a programme of installations and talks spanning fashion, art, music and gaming. American artist Mickalene Thomas led a masterclass; Michel Gaubert, Jeanne Friot, Jean-Charles de Castelbajac and Surkin examined the relationship between fashion and sound; and Sébastien Tellier joined mix engineer Tom Elmhirst for a deep dive into the art of music production.

Elsewhere, immersive experiences were created by select Because labelmates. Justice's mirrored light installation, Iris Augmented, invited visitors to step inside the world of a Justice music video. Shygirl presented Alias, a sensorial exploration of identity and the inner self. And Thomas Bangalter created a dual video exhibition of never-before-seen works, shot 19 years apart.

The Pompidou’s sixth floor – with its panoramic views over Paris – was reimagined as a roller disco, while by night the museum’s ground floor became the dancefloor, soundtracked by a rotation of DJ royalty including Soulwax, Thomas Bangalter and Erol Alkan, with surprise appearances from Fred Again.. and live performances by Christine and the Queens, Shygirl and Alewya.

'We have done a lot of things together over the last twenty years,' says Emmanuel de Buretel, Because Music founder and label boss, of the collaboration with Centre Pomidou. 'So this concludes a long friendship and a long respect for this beautiful museum which is very pure in the art it presents.'

As send-offs go, it was one worthy of the Pompidou’s legacy – a fusion of art, architecture and sound that captured the spirit of experimentation at the heart of both the museum and the label. As the building enters its next chapter, Because Beaubourg stands as a fitting reminder of what happens when creative worlds collide.

Celebrated as one of the most outstanding 20th-century photographers, Keïta ran a photography studio in the Malian capital, Bamako, between the late 1940s and early 1960s, where he shot black and white portraits of fashionably dressed people, with the patterned backdrops that he is perhaps best known for. He also documented the social and political landscape in pre- and post-independence Mali. That work was introduced to the West in the early 1990s, first anonymously in New York and then later identified, in group and solo exhibitions at galleries, museums, and foundations around the world.

During the Mali trip, McKinley had extensive conversations with members of the artist’s extended family, who showed her his archive, which in turn became their contribution of previously unseen material, photos, and other items in their possession.

‘Seydou Keïta: A Tactile Lens’, billed as the most extensive North American presentation of the artist, is now open at the Brooklyn Museum, and includes almost 275 works, including portraits, rare images, and never-before-seen negatives, textiles, jewellery, dresses, and the artist’s personal items. Keïta‘s family also put McKinley in touch with a surviving sitter of the artist, whose interview will be on view in the Brooklyn Museum exhibition.

'It’s a real range in terms of size, format, and exposure,' says McKinley, who organised the exhibition with Imani Williford, curatorial assistant of Photography, Fashion, and Material Culture at the Brooklyn Museum. 'I think what strikes me the most is that we’ve kind of really just begun to look at Keïta in particular, but also at the broader field of African photography in relation to world photography. So it’s very exciting for me. I think that it’s a new moment in terms of scholarship, and for viewers.'

The journey to the West African country was formative in many ways. 'I learned a lot about Keïta,' McKinley tells Wallpaper*. 'I would say [his family] disrupted a lot of my ideas about who he was and what the studio life was like. And I didn’t realise how involved the family was in the photographic process and how much they were a part of the studio life.'

The knowledge gained from the visit and conversations, McKinley adds, 'shaped everything. It changed the DNA of the exhibition, and even how I look at a lot of the works, because even many of the photos that are well known end up having family members as subjects.' McKinley cites an example of a sitter whom she initially thought was a famous singer, but who turned out to be a completely different person. 'It altered how I think about a lot of the work,' says the curator.

Stories about Keïta’s studio portraits often state that the sitters were middle-class Malians, but that wasn’t necessarily the case, as the list included migrant workers, civil servants, visitors from across West Africa, and some people who saved up for the occasion, 'because of the importance of having a photographic record or memento for the family', as McKinley puts it. 'I think it’s a really exciting moment to re-approach Keïta.'

‘Seydou Keïta: A Tactile Lens’ is at the Brooklyn Museum until 8 March 2026

brooklynmuseum.org

‘There was a time when I often found myself thinking about cables,’ the Japanese artist says, discussing the exhibition’s concept and title. ‘You know how USB cables, power cords, and extension leads at home always seem to get tangled up in drawers or boxes? At one point, I started making drawings based on that tangled state, wanting to think about it positively rather than seeing it as a nuisance. Later, I learned that the word “entanglement” is also used in quantum mechanics, and I was astonished by how mysterious the world really is.’

While Mohri’s creative eye expands far beyond the limits of art, her practice is also rooted in the groundbreaking work of those who have come before her. She cites the French Dadaist Marcel Duchamp as an inspiration. ‘When I saw The Large Glass in Philadelphia, I was surprised by how handmade it felt – far more than I’d expected – and I felt a sudden sense of connection with it.’ The South Korean artist Nam June Paik, who is recognised as foreseeing the big questions of the digital age, has also had an impact, as has the experimental Fluxus movement, whose performances were rooted in process over final, polished result. ‘What resonates with me is not the pursuit of perfection through flawless technique, but rather the rough assembly of something previously unseen using simple, familiar materials,’ she says.

Much of Mohri’s process is intuitive, responding to the particular environment and architecture of her exhibiting space, and often sourcing items locally – the fruit for Compose, for example, was selected from Venice markets. Many of her pieces ebb and flow throughout their showing, parts decomposing or building up. Unexpected changes in the work allow for it to come alive in ways that expand her own perspective. ‘I always wish I could plan more carefully,’ she says. ‘But in my experience, even when I’ve planned everything out in detail, I inevitably discover new aspects of the exhibition space during the installation – and things stop going according to plan. When that happens, I don’t see it as a failure. Often, those moments allow the work to evolve in meaningful ways.’

Her works encourage a bodily response in their viewers. For last year’s show at Artizon Museum in Tokyo, she decided to leave out long explanatory texts, instead allowing visitors to ‘open their senses and simply pay attention to what they could see, hear, and feel in the space’. Mohri hopes this may provoke a sense of familiarity as people recognise the sights and smells of her everyday items. ‘Children and pets brought along by adults seem to enjoy the work without needing any additional information,’ she laughs.

This experience will be encouraged at Pirelli HangarBicocca, in which viewers will encounter a cacophony of works, sounds, smells and sights. ‘Although the space may seem chaotic at first, I believe that viewers – as observers in a physical sense – might witness a moment of chemistry; a sense of order, a hidden law, or even a kind of tear in the world might emerge,’ she says. ‘If viewers come away with a sense that the sensations they’re feeling are connected to the complexities of language, matter, and life – and if they begin to imagine that there are many other ways of seeing the world beyond what they already know – then I couldn’t be happier.’

Yuko Mohri, ‘Entanglements’, at Pirelli HangarBicocca until 11 January 2026, pirellihangarbicocca.org

Gabriel Annouka, senior designer

Certain books are so captivating that you can’t stop reading or thinking about them. In contemporary design, we obsess over the usual suspects: Swiss grids, sans-serifs, and radically clean layouts (yes, I’m complicit). But last weekend at Frieze Masters, I fell for something wonderfully un-minimal: the medieval books of hours.

Gold and silver leaf halos, hand-painted saints, margins blossoming with vines and mythical beasts – these were the Middle Ages’ daily devotionals, meant more for admiring than for reading: spirituality meets genuine art direction. Each one was a distinct, portable cathedral of pigment and vellum – delicate, sacred, and decadent.

They were said to be accessible at the time (that is, intended for laypeople), though mostly owned by privileged men of the medieval elite (Catherine of Aragon also had one). I must admit I wish I could own one myself – perhaps one day. It’s fascinating how these illuminated pages make our branding palettes appear a little anaemic. I left Frieze (mostly Masters) fully enchanted, already planning how to incorporate a little medieval embellishment into my next work – because even dedication, it turns out, looks better gilded.

A Singaporean spread

Sofia de la Cruz, travel editor

The best way to enliven an office routine? A glamorous new restaurant opening just next door. That’s been the case for us with the arrival of Cé La Vi, the acclaimed Singaporean import with outposts in Dubai, Taipei and Tokyo.

Perched atop the newly unveiled Renzo Piano Building Workshop glass cube, the restaurant crowns the 17th and 18th floors with sweeping vistas of the capital. A dedicated lift from the new public square whisks guests skyward, each floor revealing an ever-widening panorama before opening into Cé La Vi’s signature scarlet-hued world. Inside, a slick bar, dining space and terrace set the tone for what’s to come, with the top level soon to open as a lounge and private dining suite.

The menu comprises a confident medley of East Asian flavours and textures rooted in the brand’s Singaporean DNA. Dishes arrive with visual flourish and satisfying substance: highlights include delicately seared tuna tataki with pink peppercorn dressing, ideally followed by a bowl of Maldon-salted fries and a well-timed glass of champagne.

A sumo spectacle

Melina Keays, entertaining director

I’ve been to the Royal Albert Hall and witnessed sumo wrestling’s return to the UK for the first time in 34 years. It was a magnificent occasion, and, for the record, only the second time in history that an official sumo tournament (known as a bansho) has taken place outside Japan. Sipping delicious Hibiki whisky, seated in velvet splendour, I reflected that the Albert Hall seems almost to have been built to host such an event – its grandeur and rotund solidity reflect the features of sumo wrestling, and the great building perfectly encircles the round clay wrestling ring (dohyo) where the action takes place.

The tournament was a mesmerising and very beautiful combination of ceremony, balletic agility, skill, and brute strength – not to mention the thrill of the competition. I will be rattling the doors of the Albert Hall to get a seat next time elite sumo comes to town – hopefully soon.

A magical collab

Anna Fixsen, US editor

Love design history? I certainly do, and one of my enduring fascinations is the life and work of Mariano Fortuny, a Spanish-born, Venice-based design polymath who worked across textiles, lighting, production design and fashion during the early 20th century. Fortuny was so renowned that he was known as the ‘magician of Venice’. Though his design company has been operating for more than a century, it found a kindred spirit in a much younger one: L’Objet, the luxury home and lifestyle brand founded by Elad Yifrach in 2005. The two brands toasted to their latest collab at the Manhattan studio of Athena Calderone this week. The collection, which comprises jewel-toned glassware, Midas-touched plates, games and more, provided an opulent backdrop for the evening. A table, heaped high with glistening fruits and nibbles courtesy of chef Andy Baraghani, looked straight out of a Venetian School still life. Magician, indeed!

An upending exhibition

Anna Solomon, digital staff writer

For something unabashedly and authentically different, head to the Royal Academy for ‘The Histories’, a major retrospective of American artist Kerry James Marshall. His work feels so fresh, so defiantly his own, that I had to keep reminding myself I was in the RA – that bastion of British tradition.

Yet there’s no question that Marshall belongs there, among the greats who came before. His paintings are vast, unruly and crammed with references that ricochet from art history to civil rights, comics to science fiction. He moves effortlessly between portraits, still lives, near-monochromes, and electrifying twists on abstract expressionism and Afrofuturism.

Everything about them is bold – the scale, the colour, and, most of all, the presence. Marshall’s Black figures command every canvas, unapologetically occupying the space from which they’ve long been excluded. By remixing the tropes of Western art history, he rewrites it, inserting new heroes into its frames.

Upstairs, a room rich in regal crimsons and deep purples makes a sumptuous background for a series of opulent paintings, while downstairs, visitors are invited to view work through a peep hole. An animated installation, set to music by Maxwell Sterling, draws from Marcel Duchamp’s surreal universe in its depiction of an unknowable landscape. Throughout, the viewer is cast in the role of voyeur, caught between the tension of the pomp and the stripped-back.

‘Tai Shani: Cardinal’, in on until 8 November 2025 at Gathering, London, UK

This article appears in the November 2025 Art Issue of Wallpaper*, available in print on newsstands from, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News + from 9 October. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

Sam Falls on working in the vineyards for Ruinart

Wallpaper*: Can you tell us why working with Ruinart was a natural move for you?

Sam Falls: I was drawn to the reverence Ruinart has for nature. They had already chosen the title, Conversations with Nature, so it was an obvious fit, but we had to have a dialogue about working with nature through art and creating a collectible object. I have to be sensitive not to objectify nature – instead, I want popularise it in the context of an aesthetic experience.

W*: What did you enjoy about visiting the vineyards?

SF: The vineyards were amazing. It is a unique place where there are centuries of agriculture, and so it is this different type of old-growth landscape that is more human-made, but it's very significant to the place, which I really appreciate. It's iconic to be able to use leaves from the vineyard in the work.

W*: How would you describe your work?

SF: It's not painting, because I'm not using a brush, or paint even, and it's not photography. It's more something that's grown out of my interest in both, merging them to find a way to represent a place. The works are life-sized; they feel very connected to the place where they were made.

W*: How did you begin working on this project?

SF: I was sent images before I got there, so I had an idea of what was possible. The unique thing about Ruinart is that they have begun this biodiversity project, because over time, the vineyards – like any farm – start to deplete and take over all the other native species, and so [Ruinart has] little areas of forest around the vineyards that they've maintained. They have also started replanting within the vineyards themselves, to create wind barriers, but also to return to the natural biodiversity. So it was a perfect place to have access to native plants, as well as the vineyard. And I knew going into it that I could use these. And so I showed up in October, and made it work.

W*: What was it like to be working in that environment?

SF: You really start to be one with a place and connect with the movements of the wildlife. And it all becomes its own unique experience. It was very peaceful. It was just me there. There were these giant flocks of migrating birds every evening; that was just amazing. And then sometimes at night, they would all take flight right next to me, and it would be spooky.

W*: What is your favourite thing about the process?

SF: In these works, rain and humidity are important – they are done as soon as they dry. If it rains for three days, it's three days until they are dry. But some dry overnight, or in two nights. And then I do multiple layers. So I'll [take] off the plants when they die, and then [add] another one that gets saturated, again [creating] a different image. Sometimes the works take a few months, and sometimes a couple of days.

It is such a collaboration with nature that [the result can be unknown], like in photography, where you might have a light leak, and you don't know what the image is until you develop it in the darkroom. That element of chance is what makes it interesting to me.

ruinart.com

Frieze London 2025 highlights

Michelle Uckotter at Kings Leap

At Frieze London 2025, Michelle Uckotter’s ‘Sins of the City’ presentation at King’s Leap was a quiet knockout. Working in oil pastel across conjoined canvases, Uckotter conjures scenes of urban desolation and psychic disarray with a hand both tender and ruthless. Her collapsing Midwestern streetscapes, drawn from the geography of her own Ohio upbringing, possess the melancholy of midcentury photography and the fractured lyricism of TS Eliot’s The Waste Land.

Flanking them on both sides are two women, one jester-like with a violin, the other the blonde Duchess (Nova Sinclair) holding a guitar. Around the corner from the paintings, a camera peephole was installed in the wall, recalling Duchamp’s Étant donnés, which opens onto a flickering bedroom with two dolls lounging on the bed, reading and passing time: an eerie convergence of voyeurism and confession. Through these formal and conceptual apertures, Uckotter collapses time, fusing the allegorical with the documentary. What makes Uckotter singular is not just her radical formalism, but her conviction: her paintings insist that the medium still matters within the debris of the modern world.

Alex Margo Arden at Ginny on Frederick

Alex Margo Arden’s presentation, ‘By All Accounts’, gathered a crowd of decommissioned male mannequins, all salvaged from the National Motor Museum before being sent to landfill, and bound together in a looping tug-of-war rope. 'I was interested in the museum’s decision to remove and dispose of the mannequins,' Arden tells me. 'These figures were the conduits through which the museum’s version of the past was transmitted and in that sense, they’ve become historical objects in their own right. By recontextualising them, I wanted to hold the institution to account for its methods of storytelling – to expose how certain narratives are constructed, and to consider how these discarded bodies might still hold value.'

The installation, Accounts (2025), reconfigures how we think about history and display. Once used to animate scenes of industrial progress, the mannequins now huddle in uneasy congregation, their former authority collapsing into vulnerability. The rope encircling them reads as both connective and threatening. 'The tug of war is a collective contest of strength which can carry a latent violence’, says the artist; she questions 'what it means to pull together, what it means to be pulled apart, and how the residue of effort is marked on the body itself'.

Nearby, Daily Departmental Accident Record hangs on the wall, a reconstructed Hollywood accident-report board that turns bureaucratic order into a memorial. Talking about London, Arden explains that ‘there’s a sense of constant restaging in London… It’s a city where layers of history are always on display. That sense of how histories are performed and maintained feels central to my work.’ Caught between play and danger, Arden’s mannequins become a choreography of bodies tugging against the narratives they were built to uphold. The presentation was the recipient of two awards, granted by the Arts Council Collection and the Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation.

Christelle Oyiri at Gathering

You couldn’t miss Christelle Oyiri’s ‘Venom Voyage’ at Frieze London – a grotesque, luminous-green eruption amid the fair’s otherwise polite minimalism. The artist, producer, and DJ (aka CyrstallMess) transformed Gathering’s debut stand into a delirious anti–travel agency: two office chairs stationed at its centre beneath a bright red double-V logo, flanked by a water cooler and filing cabinet.

Drawing on Frantz Fanon and HE Sawyer’s I Am the Dark Tourist, Oyiri skewered the colonial imagination embedded in leisure culture, where paradise and exploitation intertwine. Glossy souvenirs, militant slogans, with one defiantly reading ‘Jetlag is for amateurs’, and acid-toned walls conjured a space pitched somewhere between seduction and sickness: a Brechtian funhouse that exposed tourism as theatre. ‘Venom Voyage’ left visitors complicit, queasy, and exhilarated; a rare moment at the fair where aesthetics, politics, and pop collided in perfect, poisonous harmony.

Lucia di Luciano at Herald St

Born in 1933 in Syracuse, Lucia Di Luciano has spent six decades making abstract paintings, and her latest works, shown with Herald St at Frieze London, feel almost punk in their chequered rhythms and one-toned palettes: grids that glitch, lines that pulse, colours that refuse to blend. She uses neon pinks in one chequered canvas, and neon yellow in another, where the grid has fractured and dissolved slightly. There’s something startlingly youthful about them, though they emerge from a lifetime of formal artistic rigour.

Di Luciano was part of Italy’s postwar vanguard, aligned with Arte Programmata, the movement that sought to merge logic, mathematics, and art. Alongside her husband and collaborator Giovanni Pizzo, she spent years exploring the algorithmic potential of painting, long before the idea of the digital as a metaphor. Her early black-and-white compositions on Masonite were precise, their mathematically sequenced forms creating optical vibrations that felt both mechanical and ecstatic. Now, in her Minimal and Senza Titolo series, the grid remains, but loosens and her brush marks streak and flicker across the surface, the colour raw and unblended. Her paintings seem to belong to every generation at once: rooted in the cool rationalism of the 1960s, yet with the immediacy of now.

Claudia Alarcón & Silät at Cecilia Brunson Projects

One of the quieter yet most resonant booths at Frieze London came from Claudia Alarcón & Silät, the Indigenous Wichí collective presented by Cecilia Brunson Projects, notably marking the first Latin American representation in the fair’s main section since 2013. Along the booth’s walls, their loosely woven chaguar textiles, framed in warm wood, radiated the rhythmic intricacy of their making. Spun from the hand-twisted fibres of the chaguar plant, these abstractions emerged through the repetition of gesture, poised between the geometric and the spiritual, and carrying stories passed down through generations of Wichí women.

The collective’s latest works, including a revival of an ancestral stitch once thought lost, deepen ideas of preservation and renewal and transform ancient technique into a living, contemporary body of work. Alarcón & Silät’s textiles stood apart for their material humility and conceptual resonance: quiet, deliberate, and profoundly political. They reminded viewers that modern abstraction was never exclusively Western, and that a woven thread can carry cosmology, resistance, and continuity all at once. It was, in every sense, a milestone: for the artists, for Latin American representation, and for Frieze itself.

Bogdan Ablozhnyy at a.SQUIRE

The Bloomsbury gallery, known for its minimalist and conceptually exacting programme, presented six works by Bogdan Ablozhnyy in a meticulously staged installation that earned this year’s Camden Art Centre Prize. A central pole swathed in animal print and imprinted leather was ringed by photographic apparatuses of flashes, shutters and lenses, all orbiting a psychological drama. The scene restaged a case study from Freud’s 1915 essay A Case of Paranoia Running Counter to the Psycho-Analytical Theory of the Disease, in which a woman becomes convinced her lover has photographed their intimacy in secret. Freud interpreted her fear as paranoia, and, by a predictably patriarchal leap, as a symptom of homosexuality.

Ablozhnyy revisits this text not to illustrate it, but to unpack its rhetorics of image, desire, and control. His booth becomes a diagram of projection, where each camera part, musical fragment, blue topazes, and leatherette surface hover between fetish and function, staging the psychic theatre where looking, wanting, and knowing blur. Desire here is not absent but present within its architecture. Ablozhnyy’s work rewards close looking, and what made this booth so exciting was its precision: minimal, disciplined, and charged in a total environment that dramatised theory into an atmosphere.

Alina Rentsch at Petrine

In a fair defined by spectacle and commerce, Alina Rentsch’s Booth (2025) turned its own architecture inside out. The Berlin-based artist transformed the booth into a spatial illusion: a printed carpet stretched to the booth’s exact dimensions, warping the floor into an imagined sub-level visible only from one precise vantage point. Above, a single lamp recited an excerpt from her fair proposal, bringing language back into the infrastructure of display.

Rentsch’s installation functioned as both artwork and a meditation on how the art fair itself produces images, value, and desire. Playing with 17th-century perspective boxes and contemporary economies of attention, she recast the booth as a stage for distortion, translation, and use. Her reference to the kitchen offered a metaphor for how material, language, and labour are processed into consumable form, whether domestic or economic. Subtle yet conceptually exacting, Booth provoked an unexpected reaction from visitors, many of whom hesitated to step onto the carpeted floor, unsure whether they were meant to enter at all. In a landscape of objects for sale, Rentsch’s work stood out precisely because it refused to perform as one.

Daiga Grantina at Emalin

This year’s Fluxus–CPGA Prize at Frieze London went to Daiga Grantina. The Latvian-born sculptor distilled her practice into a single, delicate wall work with Untitled (August #15) (2025) at Emalin. Composed of plywood, ink, fabric, wax, and staples, the piece felt almost weightless, in a subtle compression of form and feeling. The Fluxus–CPGA Prize, awarded jointly by the Fluxus Art Projects and the Comité Professionnel des Galeries d’Art, supports artists expanding cross-European dialogue and experimentation.

Grantina’s sculptures investigate what happens when materials meet, and when tension, pressure, and fragility become their own kind of syntax. Her forms seem to oscillate between the microscopic and the monumental, between organism and architecture, reconfiguring hierarchies of perception. Grantina is currently showing her first UK institutional exhibition at the Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation, until January 2026. Her work reveals abstraction as an ecosystem, and at Frieze, her sculpture felt like a quiet, tensile moment between louder works throughout the fair.

Lauren Halsey at Gagosian

Lauren Halsey’s installation at Gagosian centred on a 6ft plaza sign stacked with blazing slogans, including: ‘Bling Tax & Things’, ‘Grace & Truth’, and ‘2-Getha’, crowned with ‘Affordable Black Art’ and edged with ‘Highly Favored’. The luminous vertical assemblage, titled LODA PLAZA (2025), channelled the consumerist exuberance of South Central Los Angeles’ hand-painted vernacular signage. Surrounding the sign, engraved panels of polymer-modified gypsum on wood mapped fragments of Black history and everyday myth.

Halsey’s installation sits at the intersection of language and architecture, extending her ongoing attempt to reconstitute the visual lexicon of South Central within the economies of the global art world. Her engraved surfaces operate as both document and translation, melding the syntax of urban life, including rendering of graffiti, commercial typography and people into sculpture. The work’s brilliance lies in its refusal to flatten or sentimentalise: Halsey doesn’t turn community signage into decoration, but instead turns it into a form of monumental inscription. Within the fair setting, LODA PLAZA engaged the market’s rhythms while redirecting them toward a politics of visibility, and what emerged was a form of world-building: a plaza within the white cube, showing that language itself can shape space and notions of belonging.

Growing up in Bogotá, she spent much of her time on a family farm, triggering the love of nature and storytelling she was to build on later. Beginning first by drawing large-scale works in charcoal – ‘it was a way of connecting me to the world,’ she says – Berrío became fascinated with Japanese paper, using it to create collages. In the physical and symbolic act of layering, collage makes a natural medium from which to explore the intersection of past and present.

‘I grew up with legends and myths in Colombia, and this fascination with the magical realism of my culture started in childhood,’ says the artist. ‘This fantastical way of seeing the world is always with me.’

At 18, Berrío moved to New York to study at Parsons School of Design, where she discovered a more contemporary mythical heritage in the famous monuments of the city. The aura of New York’s landmarks loom larger than their reality, a magical symbolism that Berrío draws on in her modern retellings.

Speaking to Berrío during her recent debut solo exhibition at Hauser & Wirth (which ran until 19 October 2025), in New York, we glimpse details of these in an eclectic jumble of references from worlds we’ve heard about or seen.

Works are vast and lifesized in scale. They are created from handmade paper, which is torn, cut into fragments and layered, with the resulting mixture of painting and collage reflecting the disparate nature of oral storytelling itself. A rich narrative runs throughout. Among the works on view at the show, entitled ‘Soliloquy of the Wounded Earth’, is a series of three full-length vertical portraits, in which Berrío reinterprets the myth of the Moirai (or Greek Fates), who here become Colombian dancers swirling a vibrant blue ribbon, synonymous with the fragile thread of life. In planning the paintings, Berrío worked with a dancer, creating an image that sparked the idea for a parallel world, where the artist imagines that the threads of the three fates were stolen by humanity.

In other works on show, the humans have ceded control of the Moirai’s threads, and disaster reigns. The threads are no longer recognisable, now woven into everyday motifs, such as colourful banners and flags, and used as symbols of war, as sacred as gods to the crowds in the pictures. Berrío encourages us to wonder whether they are all that will be left when people have burned earth to the ground?

‘What would happen if humanity could control its own destiny?’ she asks. ‘When you walk into the show, you see the myth that is part of the show, and then the parallel world that has been created. Humans have made their own gods, which you can see flying above the crowds. In the struggle to create their own destiny, it ends up being chaos and warfare. Throughout, there is a mix of contemporary life with fantasy and storytelling.’

The world-building continues in other works where we follow individuals – dancers, adolescents, horseriders – as they make their way through colourful worlds that are both fantastical and surprisingly familiar. ‘All these threads of life are connected, so it’s very powerful, but also quite dark at the same time,’ says Berrío. ‘In my work, there is always this sense of mystery, of beauty, but also of darkness.’

Berrío has previously focused on the end of rituals. ‘Now I am going back and seeing how these myths were created, and how these ideas could help or inspire people.’ She acknowledges that the internet and social media have created a different approach to telling stories. ‘We have lost a little bit of those oral traditions now that there are new ways of thinking and reading. But I feel it’s important to keep our stories, stories from our ancestors and the ways in which they developed. That’s what I’d like to bring back.’

This article appears in the November 2025 Art Issue of Wallpaper*, available in print on newsstands from, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News + from 9 October. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

Elsewhere, Greek artist Marietta Mavrokordatou reimagines a harp shop as a melancholic study of urban solitude, while at the Lycée Turgot, Eugene Kangawa and A-POC Able Issey Miyake explore the poetic intersections of light, fabric, and technology through guided tours and workshops. There are also radical publishing and book launches, with Pina magazine celebrating its second issue – featuring an exhibition by Forensic Architecture – at an event hosted by After 8 Books at Paris Internationale.

At night, don't miss the Berlin-based curatorial platform Trauma, throwing an evening of music, art and performance on 23 October at U122AE, the subterranean club located at 13 Rue de Belhomme. And beyond the main fair, make sure to visit Place des Vosges, 7 Rue Froissart, and Paris Internationale – art fairs that bring together some of the most exciting artistic voices in contemporary art working worldwide today.

Ten things to see at Art Basel Paris 2025

Tramps: Kai Althoff

Inaugurating the Tramps gallery space, Kai Althoff returns to Paris with a compelling new presentation following his recent exhibitions in the city at Galerie Hussenot and Modern Art. The second chapter of an exhibition first presented at Studio Casoli in Filicudi, the exhibition brings together paintings, drawings, textiles, sculptural objects, and carefully arranged photographic excerpts on partition walls, which present the artist’s working process and magnify the delicate, thorny beauty embedded in the paintings themselves.

Althoff is one of the most revered painters of his generation and has long explored the intertwined realms of persona, memory, and materiality. His dense, elliptical compositions hover between devotion and delirium: expect interiors filled with fragile figures, faded fabrics, and cryptic symbols, each fragment hinting at a whole that may never be fully seen, a central provocation to Althoff’s practice. This iteration of the exhibition reflects the urban nature of Paris, contrasting with the airy openness of its summer counterpart in Italy.

Passage du Caire, 33 Rue d’Alexandrie, 2e arrondissement. Open until 7 December, Tuesday–Saturday, 11:00–19:00

Dash Snow: ‘Carrion’ at Morán Morán, curated by Jeppe Ugelvig

Morán Morán inaugurates its new Paris project space with ‘Carrion’, a survey exhibition of American artist Dash Snow’s (1981–2009) Polaroid photography, curated by Jeppe Ugelvig. A chronicle of early-2000s New York, post 9/11, and pre-social media, ‘Carrion’ captures a world of skaters, party-goers, squatters, and hipsters navigating sky-rocketing consumerism, jingoism, and celebrity mania.

Born into the prominent de Menil family, Snow moved between subculture and art-world royalty, and tragically died of a drug overdose in 2009 at the age of 27. Drawing connections between Snow and Baudelaire’s fascination with beauty in decomposition, in ‘Carrion’, Ugelvig positions the artist as both a prophet and a romantic whose work translates the finality of the analogue era. Far from mere downtown legend, Snow’s photographs document the fragile poetics of modernism and their grainy analogue quality captures a world on the brink of digital domination.

5 Rue Saint-Gilles, 75003 Paris, from 21 October – 29 November 2025

Eugene Kangawa x A-POC Able Issey Miyake

The collaboration between Japanese artist Eugene Kangawa and A-POC Able Issey Miyake represents a dialogue between visual art and design-led textile research. Emerging from a three-year exchange between Kangawa and A-POC Able’s creative director Yoshiyuki Miyamae, the project originates in Kangawa’s ongoing painting series Light and shadow inside me (2021-), first seen at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo.

Presented in a scenography conceived by Paris-based architect Tsuyoshi Tane, the installation foregrounds a newly developed ‘bit-level fabric’ that shifts from black to white through woven density, rather than with dye. Displaying test pieces, prototypes, and working tools alongside Kangawa’s related works, the exhibition also includes guided tours by Kangawa and Miyamae, along with an on-site workshop. The exhibition is an evolving archive of artistic and technological collaboration that will continue in Tokyo and Osaka later this year. Admission is free, although booking is required.

Lycée Turgot, 40 Rue Volta, 75003 Paris. From 24–25 October (11:00–19:00); 26 October (11:00–18:00)

Cheruby x Viscose Journal: ‘Fashion Sensorium’

This week, Paris is focused on visual art, but Viscose Journal turns up the volume on something rarely given space at an art fair: sound. The independent journal for fashion criticism launched between Copenhagen and New York in 2021, and has built a cult following for its rigorously edited, concept-driven topics that critically dissect fashion and the fashion industry.

Now, for its Paris launch of Issue 08: Sound (alongside a reprint of Issue 07: Scent), Viscose and the Shanghai-based collective Cheruby transform the Paris Internationale fair into a live experiment in sensory thinking. On 24 October, they will feature Thai sound artist Tanat Teeradakorn, who presents newly commissioned works exploring how style might be heard rather than seen, translating texture and rhythm into acoustic form. Alongside Teeradakorn, Swedish scent collective Store Skuggan presents Monkeyflower, a perfume inspired by a once-fragrant flower that mysteriously lost its scent, a poetic meditation on loss, mutation, and extinction.

Paris Internationale on 24 October

Helen Marten: ‘30 Blizzards.’, presented by Miu Miu

For its second year as Public Program Partner of Art Basel Paris, Miu Miu presents 30 Blizzards., a new commission by Turner Prize-winning artist Helen Marten. The installation-performance hybrid unfolds across five sculptural platforms and corresponding video works, tracing a loose meteorology of human experience through childhood, community, sexuality, interiority, and loss.

Marten is known for her linguistically charged assemblages and use of symbols, and at Palais d’Iéna extends her exploration of how language inhabits material form, constructing what she calls a ‘map of emotion’ in 30 Blizzards. Developed with theatre director Fabio Cherstich, whose practice spans experimental opera and scenography, and sound artist Beatrice Dillon, the performance introduces 30 characters conceived less as actors than as semiotic systems, gestures or weather fronts in human guise.

Palais d’Iéna, Paris, 22–26 October (Preview: 21 October)

Airbnb x Art Basel Paris: ‘A Curated Experience with Loïc Prigent’

Following their 2024 collaboration, Airbnb and Art Basel continue their partnership with a new series of immersive cultural experiences across the fair’s global editions. In Paris, the initiative takes shape as an intimate, guided encounter led by Loïc Prigent, known for his sharp-eyed documentaries (Signé Chanel, The Day Before); a journalist and satirist, he has become famed in the fashion world as one of the most witty commentators.

As part of Art Basel Paris’ ‘Oh La La!’ programme, curated by Prigent, a selection of galleries will rehang their booths midweek, reframing their displays in response to the fair’s evolving energy over the week. Prigent’s tour offers rare insight into this process, combining his humour and cultural fluency with behind-the-scenes conversations with artists and gallerists, and access to the fair’s Collectors Lounge.

The collaboration underscores how Airbnb and Art Basel are reimagining hospitality as a form of cultural mediation and where access, curiosity, and conversation replace exclusivity. With limited spots still available for Friday’s session, this experience promises a uniquely Parisian blend of insight and wit: an art-world tour guided by one of its sharpest chroniclers. Book your place on the tour here.

Massimodecarlo Pièce Unique: Elmgreen & Dragset

Visible through the street-facing vitrine day and night, a new installation work depicts a gallery assistant slumped at her desk behind an open laptop. She’s exhausted. Part performative mise-en-abîme, part allegorical mirror, Berlin-based duo Elmgreen & Dragset’s installation confronts passersby with the ambiguities of labour, visibility, and institutional ritual. Is she asleep, disengaged, or quietly protesting? The absurdity is both humorous and unnerving, a hallmark of Elmgreen & Dragset’s practice, and echoes Prada Marfa (2005) and their 2024 Musée d’Orsay exhibition ‘L’Addition’, where inverted male figures disrupted traditional hierarchies.

October 2025 compresses these concerns into a single human proxy, a microcosm of gallery life that collapses critique and fiction, and asks what remains unseen in the everyday theatre of display. The gallery’s Instagram captures passerby reactions that are as telling as the work itself.

57 Rue de Turenne, 75003 Paris in October 2025

Marietta Mavrokordatou: ‘Downtown Blues’

Situated in the Viaduc des Arts, a repurposed railway viaduct in the 12th arrondissement, an area known for its artisanal ateliers, Greek artist Marietta Mavrokordatou presents ‘Downtown Blues’ in The Harp Store, in which she constructs a spectral interior where painting, video, and sculptural debris converge to evoke Paris as both subject and symptom: a city perpetually haunted by its own image. Mavrokordatou is known for her innovative approach to photography, often employing macro lenses and experimental optical techniques to reflect her own visual impairment into her work. The resulting soft-focus, near-abstract images resemble eyes, landscapes, or interior spaces, collapsing the distinction between self-portraiture and perception itself. These works operate as acts of translation, turning the instability of sight into a metaphor for the instability of memory, identity, and collective vision.

In ‘Downtown Blues’, she extends this inquiry to the architecture and aura of Paris, creating an installation that feels both cinematic and introspective. Having previously exhibited with Brunette Coleman in London and elsewhere internationally, Mavrokordatou continues her rigorous investigation into how the spaces we inhabit shape and mirror our inner lives.

The Harp Store, 107 Avenue Daumesnil, 75012 Paris. Opens on 22 October

Barbara Kruger x Performa x Item Idem: ‘The Drop’ (2025)

Few artists have defined the visual politics of our time like Barbara Kruger, whose bold typographic works, red, white, black, and defiantly feminist, have shaped how we see power and persuasion in art. To mark Performa’s 20th anniversary, Kruger’s Untitled (The Drop) returns with Item Idem as a limited series of multilingual apparel featuring her signature slogans, now translated into French and Arabic.

Originally conceived for Performa 17, the project moves from billboard to body, transforming critique into circulation. Oversized jumpers and tees emblazoned with statements like ‘Your gaze hits the shirt’ turn the act of wearing into a form of dissent. Founded by RoseLee Goldberg, Performa has long expanded performance into the social sphere – and here, art becomes commerce’s mirror: proof that a T-shirt can still be a political gesture.

Opening on 20 October, 12pm (online and in-store at Item Idem, Paris)

No Tax: Reba Maybury & Lucy McKenzie: ‘Pervert or Detective?’

Curated by Fredi Fischli and Niels Olsen, this incisive exhibition brings together Reba Maybury and Lucy McKenzie in a provocative exploration of power, authorship, and erotic labour. Within No Tax’s arcade-like vitrines, murals, drawings, and collaborative works stage acts of control and complicity: Maybury, whose practice merges political domination with visual art, directs her submissives to create under her command, probing masculinity, labour, and authority. And McKenzie, known for her intricately detailed trompe-l’œil paintings and architectural interventions, investigates authenticity, illusion, and institutional power.

At the exhibition, buy a copy of Pervert or Detective?, a publication by Reba Maybury and Lucy McKenzie, which presents an extended conversation between the artists, moderated by Marie Canet, and published by No Place Press (MIT Press). With essays and an afterword by Susan Finlay, the book extends the exhibition’s themes. Together, the show and publication reveal the intertwined dynamics of eroticism, labour, and artistic creation, making this a must-see exhibition for those interested in power, performance, and authorship.

More info here.

38 Rue St Sabin, 75011 Paris. 21 October – 9 November. Opening and Book Launch: 21 October, 5–9 pm

He returns to the sentiment of excitement multiple times within our allotted minutes: currently of paramount excitement is his series Symposium of Love, which is making its debut in Greece. Comprised of more than 100 images, uniformly sized just north of the standard 4x6-inch holiday snap, displayed here in a single-file configuration, the series was made in Lithuania – where Teller’s wife and creative partner, Dovile Drizyte, is from – and features the couple as one, limbs sprouting, against a sand dune. ‘It feels often like we’re becoming one, and I thought, how do I do this in my work?’ offers Teller. ‘I’ve never done that before, double exposure or superimposing things. The dunes were great; I photographed her rolling down, she photographed me. It’s like a metaphor for how you stumble through life, there’s something boring, something tragic, something beautiful…’

Woven into the rhythm of the nudes are landscapes and portraits of stuffed animals from a taxidermy museum they visited with their young daughter, Iggy. ‘Iggy really enjoyed it, but I super enjoyed it,’ shares the photographer. ‘Then in the studio it became clear that this work is about life on the planet, and love and nature.’ The series' title, a reference to Aristophanes’ speech from Plato’s Symposium, characterising love and the feeling of becoming whole, followed later. ‘Josselin [Merazguia], my exhibition manager, read me this text and I thought fuck me, this is exactly fucking brilliant for this show in Greece, it’s just perfect.’

Love, family, relationships and religion are frequent threads throughout the wider show. Elsewhere on the ground floor are further photographs of Drizyte, as well as Iggy (not to be confused with Iggy Pop, although features in the show too), the Pope, Teller’s parents, friends, collaborators and self-portraits, while downstairs in the basement is a more conceptual interpretation: a small video room showcases fashion films made between 1998 and today, while The Path of Hope occupies the main hall. Initially conceived for Harper’s Bazaar Italia, photographs of models in variously decorated Italian churches are blown up to mammoth size. Towards the back of the hall, a sleek grey pavilion screens Men, the photographer’s love letter to male relationships inspired by his father-in-law (nearly seven minutes long, the film sees Swedish actor Alexander Skarsgård cutting Teller’s frozen faeces away with a stick).

‘The whole thing could have been square, really boring,’ suggests Teller of the exhibition’s design. Instead, he worked with Tom Emerson of 6a architects, with whom he collaborated on the 2023 show ‘i need to live’ at the Grand Palais in Paris, and who also designed his RIBA award-winning studio in London. ‘Tom’s extremely sensitive [to the work] and brings ideas which help me to be excited; he’s an important part of the show. There are many architects who are like dictators, doing it without really thinking about the work, but with Tom, we have fun.’

Of the curatorial intention, Teller adds, ‘I wanted to have it specific to the space, the place, the people, and to what I feel right now in that moment.’ His fascination with football is well documented – during an earlier preview he notes that his beloved Bayern Munich are playing against Dortmund at the same time as the exhibition’s opening party (they’ll win, 2-1) – and when we speak, he uses this to underscore his precision in choosing which works to show, pointing out an image of a bare-looking goal, shot in Sifnos earlier this year, before swivelling in his chair to highlight the training ground of local team Olympiacos, on the other side of the building.

Immediately to our right are vitrines filled with images from The Myth, shot with Drizyte at the Grand Hotel Villa Serbelloni in Bellagio in 2022, examining the old wives’ tale of raising your legs in the air to get pregnant. It’s the concrete nucleus of the show, and feels emotionally so too. ‘It’s the heartbeat in a way, the centre of the whole thing,’ agrees Teller. ‘I find it very beautiful and romantic, but it can be easily dismissed. It’s what surrounds me, what my head and body are occupied with. It’s an abstract fairytale of a family, it’s not a reportage – even with the coffee series [Guten Morgen Sonnenschein], you have no idea what my kitchen looks like. It’s the same with my self-portraits, I’m not any better or worse than Isabelle Huppert, but I’m always around.’

In a vitrine on the outside perimeter is a close-up of a can of Gaza Cola, the nails of the hand clutching it, belonging to the designer Katharine Hamnett, decorated with the Palestinian flag. It’s part of a wider series about Brexit that the photographer made with Hamnett, with whom he first worked in the 1990s, and reads as an anomaly against his otherwise largely apolitical showcase. ‘You react to the environment of what is now, culturally what you do is a mirror of things,’ says Teller. ‘That’s why I put the table opposite Why Trump [an image made in 2017 of the David King book, Why Trump Deserves Trust, Respect & Admiration, poking out from a jacket pocket]. It’s important what she’s doing and what she stands for, similar to what Vivienne Westwood was doing. I’m very proud of that work, and I put it in because it’s an important statement.’

Juergen Teller, 'you are invited', until 30 December 2025 at Onassis Ready, Athens, onassis.org

'We were mounting an exhibition on games, so it felt like the perfect time to bring in Hassan’s Arab women gym series,' says Marianne Fenton, special projects curator at Aga Khan Museum. 'It’s a different form of play and athleticism. It feels especially critical now to showcase work like his that bridges cultures, brings things together, and reminds us we live in a globalised world with global influences.'

For more than three decades, Hassan Hajjaj has been making works that reinvent the realities he grew up to. Hassan moved to London in the 1970s, shortly after turning 13. With no Moroccan peers at school or in his neighbourhood, he gravitated toward African and Caribbean communities. The Seventies and Eighties DIY spirit shaped him: while friends cooked, photographed, made films, and pursued fashion, he launched his streetwear venture R.A.P. In early-to-mid-80s London, a growing melting pot, he and his circle built their own clubs, hangouts, and looks because the city didn’t offer them; they designed what they wanted to wear and did it themselves.

This soon spiralled into a love of portrait-making. Through collaborations and friends who believed in his vision, he built a practice that is intriguingly important in the art world. Aesthetically, Hajjaj’s images are visually striking, sometimes playful in mood and often subversive in context. He is keen on showcasing Moroccan and diasporic identities on their own terms, centring women and everyday tastemakers while adding elements of music, fashion, street culture and other things that shaped his youth.

In Conversation With Hassan Hajjaj

Wallpaper*: What led to your journey as a visual artist?

Hassan Hajjaj: I’m not a trained artist. I basically started in London. I used to throw a lot of underground parties. I had a streetwear brand and a shop back in 1984. I kept a space where friends would hang out, so I was working with DJs, musicians, photographers, artists. Alongside the brand and shop I was selling pieces from New York, London, and elsewhere. The label was called R.A.P (Real Artistic People)

During that time, I fell in love with photography. I’d borrow cameras, Polaroids, whatever I could get and shoot for myself without thinking much of it, especially because I had professional photographer friends around me. In 1989 I bought a camera from a photographer friend, Zak. About a year and a half later, for my birthday, he brought me a wide-angle lens for £125 back then, which was a lot. My friend believed in what I was doing, so I started putting more into it. I also did assistant styling for Andy Blake on catwalk shows and magazines. That was my learning ground working with people, creating spaces, collaborating as part of a team. That was really my university.

By the mid-90s, I don’t know what happened. I started taking a lot of pictures over the years. Around 1994–95, I went to see Rose Issa (the major Arab curator in the UK). I asked if she would look at my work. I took my negs and contact sheets; she looked and said, “Wow, Hassan, you have a body of work here. If you want, I can help you do shows. You don’t even have to shoot for the next five years.” Having her believe in me and introduce me to the art world was huge. I left her place thinking, I’m going to keep shooting like mad and create twenty years’ worth of shows. And I did. I started showing; she placed a couple of prints with clients and even got one into Christie’s that sold for about £25,000. It was incredible. She introduced me to the art world and taught me how to navigate it, because I came from outside that system.

W*: Your work blends pop aesthetics, music, and culture. Do these influences all stem from Morocco, or were you aiming at a broader aesthetic the West could engage with?

HH: I grew up around big brands, Gucci, Prada. They weren’t designing for our world, but we wanted to be part of that world, because wearing those logos meant you’d “made it.” That’s where counterfeit culture came in. I was one of the people making printed T-shirts riffing on labels Chanel No. 5, Gucci like Dapper Dan was doing in the U.S. I come from that era, and it shows in my work. When I made shoes and outfits in Morocco, I fused those influences. I’m born and raised in Morocco, so tradition is in me, but London opened my eyes to the world, friends from Nigeria, Brazil, the Caribbean, India, China, everywhere. I just mixed it all without overthinking, because that was the world I lived in and felt comfortable with. The shoots aren’t strictly Moroccan or English, they’re a mix of what I grew up around. That all shows up in the pictures.

W*: La Salle de Gym des Femmes Arab is such an interesting body of work, what inspired it?

HH: The body of work is a mix of pictures taken over 10–15 years. There are many gyms now, but in the 90s there weren’t in Marrakech, just old-school spaces. Sometimes the gyms were segregated by time: hours for women, hours for men. This show is dedicated to the women’s side: my playful, stylized take on a female Moroccan gym, almost pointillist in spirit, but in my own world. Because I design elements for shoots, it took maybe up to 15 years to complete that body of work.

W*: With almost 40 years in, what are you most grateful for?

HH: That the process keeps me excited. I can design artwork that prints on fabric, take it to my local tailor, make a piece, get inspired by someone I want to photograph, build a backdrop, shoot, then bring in the cans from London or Morocco and build the frames. The whole journey keeps me busy day to day. It’s not one thing, it’s the mix that keeps me going.

W*: What other projects should we expect from you in the coming months?

HH: I have a space in Marrakech called Jajjah; gallery, restaurant, boutique. This year I decided to invite a Nigerian photographer friend, Andrew Dosunmu, to show from December through March. About twenty years ago he traveled the continent and, in collaboration with PUMA, made a book on African football supporters. We’re showing part of that body of work as a solo show.

Within that, I’m also doing an installation with Art Comes First, Sam Lambert and the collective called Black Supermarket, in collaboration with Andrew. We may also have Daily Paper (the Dutch brand with North African/African founders) join to do a presentation during AFCON. Beyond that, I’m working on a couple of solo shows for next year, including one in the U.S. in February. And I’ll be opening Andrew and Sam’s show on June 15 with them.

‘La Salle de Gym des Femmes Arab’ is at Aga Khan Park, Toronto, until May 31, 2026

Co-founded and programmed by Vanessa Lobon-Garcia and Colm Forde, what began as a low-key attempt to help screen a handful of subcultural films outside the capital has turned into a year-round project, with premieres up and down the country alongside screenings around the globe, from New York to Dubai. At the centre of it still, however, is Doc’n Roll Festival: a programme of 20-plus films, including world and UK premieres, which will show at cinemas in London, Brighton and Dublin from 23 October to 9 November.

Though the project has scaled up, the idea at the heart of it remains the same. ‘We're looking for things that aren’t the classic, cookie-cutter stuff that would go straight to Sky Arts, that’ve been made by the labels to help sell records,’ explains Forde. ‘It’s about showing people that wouldn’t normally get a look in, like the Big Mama Thornton film this year. I'm really happy to bring that to the Barbican because I know there's an audience there for it, but that kind of thing really flies under the radar of other film programmers. They look at these films and think they’re too much work to market. But that's where we really found our niche: giving a break to subjects and filmmakers that really deserve it.’

Doc’n Roll aren’t trying to compete with the current London Film Festival, or any of the circuit’s major players; instead, they’ve carved out a space of their own based on intense fandom – the kind that’s willing to travel. Last year, they had people fly over from Ireland to the capital just to watch a 23-minute short about punk band Fat White Family; he’s already been messaged by one fan this year who is planning on driving 238 miles to get to a screening of Felix, Dare To Dream – a doc about tattooist Felix Leu. There are bigger names amongst the 2025 programme – the UK premieres of Glenn Matlock’s Sex Pistols documentary, and another about Boy George and Culture Club – but it’s in the embrace of the true underground that Doc’n Roll stands apart.

They operate independently, without corporate sponsors – Forde would be open to working with the right people but has also readily turned down the wrong ones, who’ve tried to put restrictions on their decidedly leftfield programming. ‘If you look at the medium to large festivals across the world, they're all sponsored by banks who are art-washing all of them,’ he says. ‘I would love to be working with a brand that I really believe in, that isn't a bank or an insurance company. But the silver lining of not currently having a sponsor is that we don't have to bend the rules to accommodate any bullshit.’

Instead, Doc’n Roll’s ethos remains impressively pure: to create, as Forde describes, ‘a bit of a vibe for people to meet like-minded people who are into weirdo stuff’. In a saturated market of big-budget Hollywood biopics, Doc’n Roll is the antithesis – a decidedly DIY-minded festival creating a space for the misfits. ‘Those biopics are so drained of the real spirit of it all,’ Forde says. ‘Whereas we just wanted to put our love of leftfield alternative music and independent documentary film together in this crazy thing.’

Colm Forde’s picks of Doc’n Roll Festival 2025

Big Mama Thornton: I Can’t Be Anyone But Me

'Big Mama Thornton influenced people like Elvis, but she would play what they called the Chitlin’ Circuit back in the day, when Black artists couldn’t stay in the same accommodations as the white artists they were touring with. She’s doing what she loves, but as a queer, butch, Black woman, even within her own community, that would have been pretty daunting. It’s a real story of resilience and survival, and then unfortunately, the classic story of white artists coming in and making money from her art and her brilliant songs.'

A Way To Die: The Short Films of Coil

'It’s a collection of seven short films that were all shot in Hackney in the late ’70s/early ’80s, showing the deindustrialisation of the area but through quite a heavy, queer, sadomasochistic point of view. It was shot in Super 8 and 16 by the band – Peter Christopherson and John Balance – back when they were art school kids and just starting out, filming the antics of what they were getting up to behind the scenes of their gigs. There’s a hilarious short film in it that shows the industrial extraction of semen to be sold on; it’s some mad, weirdo shit but it’s hilarious if you’re into dark humour.'

Move Ya Body: The Birth of House

'It’s coming from the political aspect of the birth of house, and the gerrymandering within the southern Chicago ghettos where the music came from, which is still a deeply deprived area. The film isn’t just an A–Z of how house music then spread into London and Manchester and Ibiza; it’s told from a very political angle, in terms of the Black voter and the lack of access to real democracy that the Black voter still has.'

Rockers Don’t Stop: The Revival of Rockers Revenge

'The film is a production by record producer Arthur Baker, who was their key patron back in the mid-to-late ’80s when he found the band working in a record store. The band influenced a lot of early house music; they had a great break in the UK on Top of the Pops but couldn’t afford to fly to London for four nights, so they passed on it and petered out. It’s an interesting story about second chances, and about working-class voices.'

Butthole Surfers: The Hole Truth and Nothing Butt

'The documentary sets the scene for the legendary Texan punk band and through the perspectives of other musicians, comedians and people that got swept up in the whole buzz of their live shows. As well as the music, there’s the context of them going against the grain of Reagan and Reaganomics, which paralleled what was going on at the time in the UK with Thatcherism.'

A week at Frieze

Hannah Silver, Arts, Watches & Jewellery Editor

For gallerists, collectors and art editors, it’s been one of the busiest weeks of the year in London, as Frieze hit the capital (read more in our live blog). From the fair’s vantage point in Regent's Park, art trends are set, art deals are made, and artists unite for a few days of art-world gossip and big business. It has been a good vibe this year: hectic, but thrilling, with the emphasis firmly on both the established and the emerging.

Most exciting are the exhibitions and events that spring up around the capital during the fair. In one day alone this week, I whizzed from Joy Gregory at the Whitechapel Gallery to Marina Abramović at Saatchi Yates, Nicolas Party at Hauser & Wirth, Lee Miller at Tate Britain and on to Wayne Thiebaud’s gorgeously painted American pies at The Courtauld. And still, the list of things to see is reassuringly long – showing London’s art scene is still very much thriving.

An exploration of urban forests

Ellie Stathaki, Architecture and Environment Director

'My chat with Lebanese architect Adib Dada of TheOtherDada over a morning coffee at The Standard this week reignited my interest in urban forests. Dada is not only an architect but also a reforestation and rewilding expert and has been working on sites across Beirut for some years now. It's an approach he takes with private projects across the Middle East too, such as his eco home design Landform, which not only ticked the boxes that allowed it to become BREEAM Certified, but is also an interesting and important experiment in learning how to build sustainably in contemporary desert environments. We had covered his Dubai Art Jameel pavilion before but I am watching keenly what he will be up to in the future.'

A theatrical must-see

Gabriel Annouka, Senior Designer

This week I had the pleasure of attending Oscar Wilde’s classic The Importance of Being Earnest at the Noël Coward Theatre, courtesy of a birthday present from a dear friend. Scene stealers were the fabulous Kitty Hawthorne and Jessica Whitehurst, playing the sharp-witted Gwendolen Fairfax and the vivacious Cecily Cardew. The performance overflowed with physical comedy as well as wit. Stephen Fry’s portrayal of Lady Bracknell, iconic and grand. What a fabulous cast and run! The whole show was ridiculous and joyously so; even the final moment, when the cast takes their bows, became another burst of euphoria: the actors transformed into a cascade of gorgeous flowers, stepping forward one by one, smiling, skipping and soaking up the applause from a brilliantly colourful stage. A must-see before the season ends on January 10, 2026.

A long-overdue meeting

Anna Fixsen, US editor

In a globalised world, remote work is pretty much de rigueur. But nothing beats working face-to-face – especially when you work for a team like Wallpaper*’s bright crew of writers and editors. These last 10 days, I have been in London, first on a wonderful visit with my mum, during which we saw all of the city’s sights (Tower of London, Westminster Abbey, Kensington Palace and The V&A to see Marie Antoinette Style…do I need to go on?). The latter half of my trip, though, I got the opportunity to work remotely from Wallpaper*’s HQ, based in a Grade II Listed 1840s terrace in Paddington. It was the first time meeting many of my UK colleagues IRL. In between meetings, there were coffee breaks, treks to the Salad Project and, of course, sessions at local watering holes. Teamwork makes the dream work, as they say – and what a dream team we have.

A clever cocktail

Bridget Downing, Executive Editor

New to negronis, I tried a delicious and pretty orange blossom one – Beefeater Gin, orange blossom, dry vermouth, and Campari – at the Golden Square outpost of London Italian restaurant chain Bancone this week. I’m definitely a convert. They also have a classic and a white variation on the menu, but meanwhile, I looked up Wallpaper* entertaining director Melina Keays’ own classic negroni recipe to try at home. Cheers, Melina.

An electric performance

Sofia de la Cruz, Travel Editor

London’s own Little Simz returned to the stage with a performance that was equal parts rage and grace. Framed as a homecoming, her set at The O2 unfurled with the confidence of an artist entirely in command of her craft: fierce, fluid, and unapologetic. At one point, the arena turned into a club when Simz swapped the mic for a DJ deck. From the endearing childhood video of the rapper opening the show to an unexpected appearance by Emma Corrin and a closing piano sonata by Sampha, the night exceeded all expectations. For the next few days, I’ll be recovering from post-concert-of-a-lifetime depression.

Joffe has a wholly unique figurative style of painting, eschewing a neat formality for gorgeously expressive brushwork, with the palpability of the paint allowing for a greater freedom in the depictions of the women she is painting. Her complex, multifaceted subjects can only come alive in Joffe’s thickly-drawn sweeps of paint, their nuances and quirks and features recognisably theirs, without being perfectly or realistically rendered.

Throughout her career, Joffe has puzzled away at the cyclical nature of family, considering her role as a mother, a daughter and a sister in a series of emotionally-charged paintings which unpick occasionally frazzled, poignant or sensitive dynamics. In Joffe’s paintings, moments in time are captured, frozen and combed over for clues. Work is autobiography – through it, we have watched her daughter, Esme, grow from child to adult, and followed Joffe through sickness and health in a series of unflinching self-portraits.

In 2021’s exhibition, Story, at Victoria Miro, Joffe considered her mother as she aged, from a young mother of three daughters and a son through to an older woman, bandage on eye, recovering from a cataract operation. The details are plentiful – the lace of a nightgown, the stripe of a sofa, the bunny ears of a Halloween costume – and so specific as to, conversely, conjure up a universal experience. Joffe shares the particulars of what has stuck in her memory, generously sharing snapshots so we, the viewers, get to know her mother, our minds then turning to our own.

In a new body of work exhibiting at Victoria Miro in November, Joffe revisits her mother again, now after her death. ‘It has been both difficult and also very moving to me to revisit memory and family in this way,’ says Joffe, who works from photographs, spending time preparing for this exhibition by sorting through a jumble of them in a big box. Mostly, the events were significant enough to capture, yet the meaning of them is lost.

‘Memory is hard to define,’ Joffe adds. She brings structure to its fluid nature, filling in the gaps between events half remembered. In her new work, she criss-crosses narrative and perception, eschewing a chronological retelling of her mother’s life for works which celebrate the everyday fragments. The unexpected moments are highlighted and emphasised, much in the same way memory itself works. The moments Joffe chooses to paint are quiet, the antithesis of the big birthday party or wedding. Joffe’s everyday is filled with cups of tea, walks, books, taking a pause on the sofa or at the kitchen table. ‘Life happens in the everyday,’ she says, simply.

Returning to her mother, now, has been a sharply emotional experience for Joffe. Daryll Joffe has long been a constant in Joffe’s story, a courageous woman who travelled around the globe with her young children, before settling in London and living opposite two of her daughters. ‘My feelings for my mother have been complicated,’ says Joffe on the fluctuating nature of their relationship. ‘But it all changes again after their death.’

Portraying those closest to her comes, of course, with a tangle of issues, springing from memory’s subjective nature. ‘My sisters will get upset about things I can’t predict,’ says Joffe, ‘like how their knees might look’; insecurities stemming from throwaway comments our parents make, which trigger a lifetime of sensitivity, creating a raw awareness of how we are perceived, which we always carry with us. Relationships between siblings, especially, can be particularly close, thorny, sincere and forthright, psychological complexities which always underpin Joffe’s portraits. Viewers recognise the elemental truth of the family dynamics in her works: the power of a parent in youth, to the acknowledgement of their vulnerability as they age, creating a complex, and often not easy, melting pot of emotion.

In Joffe’s work, memory and time cease to exist in the sense we have traditionally understood them, with the past and the future becoming an irrelevance, and leaving us with the memory of human connection as the only certainty. It is an abstract notion Joffe makes tangible in her visceral and very real works. ‘I like very much the Carlo Rovelli understanding of time as being nonlinear,’ Joffe adds. ‘When I’m painting, I have the sense that it’s all a kind of present tense, as if our ghosts are all still here, everywhere all at once.’

Chantal Joffe is at Victoria Miro London from 14 November 2025 to 17 January 2026

This article appears in the November 2025 Art Issue of Wallpaper*, available in print on newsstands from, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News + from 9 October. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

The efforts are for Sound & Vision, a fundraising initiative, exhibition and auction pairing music and art to raise funds to support children and their families worldwide. The particular lyric inspiring the art – ‘If I only could, I’d make a deal with God’ – was chosen by Bush herself.

War Child presents Sound & Vision

‘All wars leave horrific scars:ruined lives, families ripped apart, life-changing injuries, trauma, and loss on a massive scale – but it’s the children who suffer the most in so many ways,’ says Bush. ‘Their past, present and future melt away into fear and uncertainty. It is more important than ever that we support War Child and their invaluable work providing immediate aid to children caught in conflict all over the world, including in Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan, and Syria. Projects like Sound & Vision harness the power of art and music to make a real difference to children living through war.’

Artists taking part include Maggi Hambling CBE, known for her works in the National Portrait Gallery, Tate, and National Gallery; painter Peter Doig (currently showing at Serpentine Galleries), Charlie Calder-Potts, Britain’s youngest female war artist; Unskilled Worker aka Helen Dowdie; Corbin Shaw; Susie Hamilton; and Ayobola Kekere-Ekun.

The online auction runs from Tuesday 28 October to Thursday 13 November 2025 (closing 3pm BST, 10am EST), while the works from ‘Sound & Vision: Running Up that Hill’ will be exhibited at Iconic Images Gallery from 4 to 8 November. Bidding starts at £100 for the original artworks.

Frieze London marks one of the most exciting dates in the art calendar. From its vantage point in Regent's Park, art trends are set, art deals are made, and artists unite for a few days of art world gossip and big business. Over 130 galleries gather at Frieze London, with the focus very much on contemporary art and living artists. It's hectic, but thrilling; the ultimate fashion runway where you can spot everything from your next favourite artist to celebs gathering at the champagne tent. Over at Frieze Masters, the vibe is more grown-up - in the elegant tent, grab the chance to see special works which aren't usually exposed to the light of day.

Frieze is an event which very much ignores the parameters of the park, stretching around the city with a packed programme of exhibitions, talks, pop-ups and endless drinks. Expect a special Frieze nod from hotels, galleries, restaurants and shops who host discussion panels, special breakfasts or simply showcase some art. We're looking forward to seeing which artists the galleries around town will be choosing to spotlight, in the week when all eyes are on London. We are on the ground all week, sharing our look at what's on and spotlighting our favourite things to see in the tent - stay tuned.

Carolyn Quartermaine's photographs at Connolly are gorgeously dreamy

Clothing brand Connolly sets a great example as to how to offer a special experience away from the fair. Upstairs in the store and on show from 15th October until 5th January 2026, there is an exhibition of artist Carolyn Quartermaine's otherworldly works. In the 35 works on paper in the ‘Arcadia’ exhibition, the film has been repeatedly exposed, offering a surreal distortion of the English landscape. Mysterious and sublime, they are a much-needed pause from the chaos.

Drop by Frieze Sculpture

This year’s edition of Frieze Sculpture in Regent's Park, London, brings together works by 14 artists from around the globe. Curated by Fatos Üstek, it’s the first time the exhibition has followed a theme, and the result is a stronger sense of cohesion, where works seem to speak not only to their surroundings but to each other. Check out our favourites here

Millie Walton

Delve into the uncanny at The Shop at Sadie Coles

During Frieze in London, Irish-Australian artist Costelloe is bringing the kitchen, the essence of the home, to life in an exhibition at The Shop at Sadie Coles. With sculptural and photographic work, and in a collaboration with perfumer Fahad Mayet, Costelloe creates an immersive, uncanny environment.

Drop by Mount Street Neighbourhood Arts Festival

Taking place in the heart of Mayfair and coinciding with Frieze Art Fair and PAD London, the festival kicked off on Sunday and runs until 18 October 2025. The festival celebrates the area’s prestigious addresses with an array of fashion, food and art. This season, the theme is centred around art and books, which will be explored throughout the week - check what is going on here.

Tianna Williams

Where to eat around London during Frieze

With so much to see, finding time to pick a delicious restaurant en route, or post fair, can often make or break a day. To take away the stress of choosing, we have put together a guide of the best places to grab a bite after a day at the fair, and help get your fill on art and food. Looking for art-filled restaurants? We have those too.

Tianna Williams

Design has a moment during Frieze

Anchored by collectible design fair PAD, the design world is also putting on a spectacle, with exhibitions and pop-ups taking over galleries, shops and disused spaces across the city. Here, we round up the best design exhibitions to see in London during Frieze Week.

Rosa Bertoli

Discover erotic surrealism at Richard Saltoun

Surrealism in the context of the erotic transforms desire into a language of liberation, says Maudji Mendel of RAW (Rediscovering Art by Women), who has been considering the subject in the context of overlooked women artists of the 20th century, for the exhibition ‘Unveiled Desires: Fetish & The Erotic in Surrealism, 1924–Today’, opening at Richard Saltoun gallery during London’s Frieze Week. Organised into two parts, the first running until November 2025 and the second until February 2026, it explores desire and fetish as a neglected part of the surrealist movement. See more here

Head to Artist-to-Artist in the tent to see emerging or overlooked talent

Discovering new artists to love is easily the best part of Frieze, something that can occasionally get lost in the chaos. For the last couple of years, Frieze has underscored its importance with the brilliant Artist-to-Artist initiative, which sees established artists highlight their emerging or overlooked peers at their own solo exhibitions at the fair.

Now in its third year, the section has for the first time announced a partnership, with Tiffany & Co working alongside the art fair to provide Artist-to-Artist with support and funding which will see the six participating galleries receive direct financial assistance. This year’s solo presentations - Ilana Harris-Babou (Dreamsong), selected by Camille Henrot; Katherine Hubbard (Company Gallery), selected by Nicole Eisenman; Ana Segovia (Kurimanzutto), selected by Abraham Cruzvillegas; Neal Tait (Lungley Gallery), selected by Chris Ofili; René Treviño (Erin Cluley Gallery), selected by Amy Sherald; and T. Venkanna (Gallery Maskara), selected by Bharti Kher - will benefit from the initiative’s new direction.

Don't miss 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair at Somerset House

The 13th consecutive edition of 1-54 London will be held at Somerset House, featuring about 100 established, rising and emerging artists, including Hassan Hajjaj, Seydou Keita, Arthur Timothy, Amina Agueznay, Roisin Jones, Vanessa Endeley, Ugonna Hosten, Ibrahim El-Salahi, Joël Bigaignon and Malick Sidibe. Established over a decade ago, the fair has grown to become the premier platform for showcasing work by artists from Africa and its diaspora, with iterations in New York and Marrakech each year, as well as pop-up exhibitions in cities such as Paris and Hong Kong. See more here

Gameli Hamelo

Stop by Sessions Art Club’s Frieze London 2025 pop-up

For 2025, Sessions Art Club (SAC) returns to Frieze London with a new mise-en-scène: a dining space that sits somewhere between confessional and stage set. Potter, McConkey and Gent reunite to create an environment shaped by cinematic light and tactile form inspired by the primal surfaces of France’s Lascaux caves (the site of prehistoric paintings), and the stylised tension of Paul Verhoeven’s 1992 movie Basic Instinct. The film’s singular blue-lit interrogation scene becomes a visual leitmotif, refracted through shifting shadows and glowing table surfaces that pulse between natural and artificial illumination. Read more here

Sofia de la Cruz

Alex Margo Arden at Ginny on Frederick Frieze

I love the powerful Accounts by Alex Margo Arden, a re-collection of male mannequin figures originally removed from the National Motor Museum. Crowded together, they become one bustling form, synonymous with the figures which once populated dioramas.

George Rouy at Hauser & Wirth Frieze

Hauser & Wirth’s booth is always the best place for both people watching and great art. This year, George Rouy’s work is amongst the highlights – his gorgeously painted, fluid figures need to be seen in real life.

Read our interview with George Rouy from earlier this year.

Christelle Oyiri at Gathering Frieze

After the pulsing, hypnotic world Oyiri created in a Brutalist Berlin shopping centre, we knew she was adept at creating totally immersive scenes. At the Gathering booth, step into a bygone travel agents, complete with sticky spilled drinks and a water cooler, a consideration of the commodified Otherness of travel.

Fashion + art = match made in heaven

While a number of the fashion and art pop-ups might seem opportunist grabs for the art world’s cultural heft, an equal number show the potential spoils of the partnership – whether Stone Island’s sponsorship of Frieze Focus (the scheme supports emerging galleries), Dunhill’s always-illuminating Frieze Masters talks, or the arrival of Prada Mode in London, the Italian fashion house’s roving programme of cultural events. For this edition, the house hands the reins to Berlin-based duo Elmgreen & Dragset, who have created a surreal cinema that will host a curated programme of talks, lectures and screenings over the coming days.
Here, Wallpaper* selects the best fashion happenings to add to your Frieze London 2025 schedule.

Jack Moss

Penny Goring at Arcadia Missa Frieze

Penny Goring's distinctive mix of humour, anger and shame, presented on large-scale Microsoft Paint collages, is completely irresistible to me. Goring has said in the past using MS Paint forces her to be creative when it comes to its limitations, something in no short supply here.

Kaari Upson at Spruth Magers Grafton Street

In the early 2000s, growing up, Kaari Upson was fascinated with her parents’ neighbour, an older man she never spoke to. Over at Sprüth Magers on Grafton Street, her early works from the resulting ‘The Larry Project’ are on show with works which rethink objects from his  home in California. The results are seductive and creepy - in this work, items from her neighbour’s house are reimagined in skin like latex.

F.N. Souza at DAG Frieze Masters

F. N. Souza defined his distinctive style through the Bombay Progressive Artists’ Group. It’s a treat to see his work at Frieze Masters.

Step outside for Sloane Street's art trail

Need a breather from the tent? Artists including Marc Quinn, Maya Rose Edwards, William Farr, James Jessiman and Ro Robertson have created outdoor works which are dotted along Sloane Street, for an art trail curated by Frieze Studios. 'Modern Nature' sees works from oversized flowers, to magpies and casts of coastal erosion, sinking mischievously into the environment. On until 19th Ocrober.

Alex da Corte at Sadie Coles Frieze

Alex da Corte nails the cultural climate with works which consider our contemporary landscape by drawing on varied sources. Is there anything more nostalgic and evocative than a TV guide (here in plexiglass)?

Walther Koenig Books at Frieze Masters

I'm drawn like a magnet to bookshops, and Walther Koenig's curation at their booth in Frieze Masters is especially appealing. Stop by for an eclectic selection of art books spanning mediums and genres - finally something in the Masters tent I can buy.

Step into surreal cinema with Elmgreen & Dragset at Prada Mode

Opening to coincide with Frieze Week, the immersive installation by the Scandinavian duo in London’s Town Hall, a recently inaugurated cultural space close to King’s Cross in the former Camden Council Town Hall, sees the Town Hall’s vast main room transformed into a 104-seat cinema, occupied by a series of hyper-realistic human figures posed in ‘various states of attention’ – from an embracing couple to a woman consuming popcorn on the front row (another potent visual trick, it takes a moment for your eyes to adjust and work out which of the seated figures are real). Their glassy eyes, all rendered from silicone, are fixed on the cinema screen: on it, a distorted film plays on loop, as if watching a scene from a movie through a perpetually blurry lens. It forms the centrepiece of Prada Mode, the house’s roving private members’ club. Read more here

Jack Moss

Tai Shani at Gathering

It has been a big year for Turner Prize winning artist Tai Shani, who caps off a year which has seen installations on New York’s High Line and at London’s Somerset House with a solo exhibition across town at Gathering, London. Shani, who works across mediums in film, performance, photography and installation, draws on historical and mythical references in work which considers the role of desire in society today. They are themes very much prescient in the exhibition, Cardinal, where Shani presents paintings and installations across the two gallery floors. Upstairs, a room rich in regal crimsons and deep purples makes a sumptuous background for a series of opulent paintings, while downstairs, visitors are invited to peer through a peep hole to discover work, Encounters. An animated landscape installation, set to music by Maxwell Sterling, draws from Marcel Duchamp’s surreal universe in its depiction of an unknowable landscape. Throughout, the viewer is cast in the role of voyeur, caught between the tension of the pomp and stripped-back.

Look up

Take a moment to look around you. For the architecture enthusiast, the Frieze entrance pavilions are just as interesting to admire as the exhibits that lie within the popular global fair.

This year, design practice A Studio Between and Norwegian aluminium manufacturer Hydro are behind Frieze's elegant architectural spaces. Set against the green backdrop of Regent's Park, the event's architecture shows off a modular new system that promotes reuse and environmental responsibility. The structure is built from 75 per cent recycled aluminium, not only bringing sustainable architecture practice to the fore, but also opening up discussions around circularity and eco-sensitivity in the realm of temporary exhibition design. Read more here

Ellie Stathaki

Celia Paul at Victoria Miro Frieze

Celia Paul's ghostly portraits are hard to look away from. In this self-portrait, she becomes the subject - translucent yet intense, it's hard to decipher her scrutinising gaze.

LS Lowry at Richard Green Frieze Masters

Lowry was drawn to the solitary and the eccentric, and had a keen eye for the Other. His seated woman, in full Victorian skirt, cuts a theatrical and arresting figure.

During Frieze in London, Irish-Australian artist Costelloe is bringing the kitchen, the essence of the home, to life in an exhibition at an exhibition presented by London-based gallery NEVEN at The Shop at Sadie Coles. With sculptural and photographic work, alongside an artist's book and editioned perfume, Costelloe creates an immersive, uncanny environment.

‘It is a meditation on the cyclical nature of that space, and of homelife and homemaking in general,’ he adds. ‘I liked the idea of focusing on the kinds of rhythms of the home that orchestrate everyday life, and recognising the home as a place of self-actualisation. The kitchen, with all its cultural pretence, felt like the best place to start. It encapsulates the tension between the burden and the beauty of caring for others and oneself in the most basic, daily, repetitive way, so that’s why it became my starting point for this show.’

In Costelloe’s kitchen, we recognise familiar items, but look again, and something is a little – off. There is a fork, but it is woven with human hair, a jug coated in fur, a pair of diamond-studded scissors. Homemaking here is overrun with fantasy, and it’s very impractical.

It also smells good. Costelloe worked with Mayet to create a perfume vessel sculpture, containing the scent of a lived-in kitchen, which is also available to buy. Scents of hot stove, compact powder, a polyester blouse – the kitchen may be empty of its inhabitants, but their presence is still palpable.

‘It’s my most autobiographical body of work to date, and the first time I’ve worked in the realm of scent,’ says Costelloe. ‘When I first started developing the show, I felt nervous about how different everything felt compared to my previous work. Everything is very confusing and can feel alien until you see it together, or at least that’s how it feels to me. But seeing it all installed was emotional. I recognised myself in it, and that means it’s all the same. I’m looking forward to the work hopefully staying with people. I think there’s a type of nostalgia or ghostliness to this show that might stick with you. Perhaps I’m most looking forward to everyone discovering they’re haunted too.’

Leo Costelloe: Kitchen until 1 November 2025 presented by NEVEN at The Shop at Sadie Coles HQ, London. The perfume will be available in a custom boxed edition of 20, produced in collaboration with Dean’s Bottom and Book Works, accompanied by a new publication featuring Costelloe’s writing and photography

nevengallery.com

It is a topic she has been considering, in the context of overlooked women artists of the 20th century, for the exhibition ‘Unveiled Desires: Fetish & The Erotic in Surrealism, 1924–Today’, opening at Richard Saltoun gallery during London’s Frieze Week. Organised into two parts, the first running until November 2025 and the second until February 2026, it explores desire and fetish as a neglected part of the surrealist movement.

A celebration of the power of the unconscious, surrealism has always had its roots in the instinctive. ‘Yet for much of its early history, the female body existed as fetish or fantasy, as a vessel for male projection rather than self-definition,’ Mendel argues. ‘I’m drawn to how female and queer artists have since turned that gaze back on itself, reclaiming the erotic as a site of agency and defiance. In ‘Unveiled Desires’, the erotic is no longer submissive or ornamental; it’s transgressive. Desire becomes a tool of disruption – an act of rebellion against moral and aesthetic control, and a way of reimagining the body as something both intimate and political.’

Artists gathered here, from Helen Chadwick to Jesse Darling, Sin Wai Kin and Meret Oppenheim, explore the freedom of the body through mixed mediums, from sculpture to painting and photography. Here, desire is disturbing, humorous, seductive or repellent, and consistently honest.

‘There is immense power in reclaiming the erotic as something self-authored,’ Mendel adds. ‘The artists in “Unveiled Desires” reveal how the body can exist as both a site of trauma and transcendence; how desire can expose social taboos while simultaneously generating new languages of selfhood.’ In shifting the gaze from passive to active, we can reclaim freedom over the body. ‘In dialogue with one another, the artists expose the erotic as a living tension between vulnerability and power – a space where to be seen is to resist.’

‘Unveiled Desires: Fetish & The Erotic in Surrealism, 1924–Today’. Part 1: until 29 November 2025. Part 2: 9 December 2025 – 14 February 2026

richardsaltoun.com