A Photographer’s Raw Portrait of Her Relationship

Welcome to The Curator, a newsletter companion to The Grand Tourist with Dan Rubinstein podcast. Sign up to get added to the list. Have news to share? Reach us at hello@thegrandtourist.net.

Chicago, “Pixy Liao: Relationship Material” (Until Dec. 8)
A year after Pixy Liao met Takahiro Morooka in college, the young couple began taking staged self-portraits together in their shared apartment. That was in 2007. Over the last 18 years, the series, called Experimental Relationship, has become an honest, sometimes semi-naked, portrait of the changing dynamics and vulnerabilities of love and domesticity. So long as the creative couple are together, the series will continue. A selection of 45 of Liao’s photographs from across the series are on view here. artic.edu

Beijing, “Pipilotti Rist: Your Palm is My Universe” (Until Oct. 10)
With video taking over media these days, the surreal work of Swiss video artist Pipilotti Rist feels more relevant than ever. Rist has long challenged the conventions of video, insisting that it be felt rather than merely watched. Rist’s video projections, often of technicolored bodies or pulsating nature imagery, aim to swallow you up into them. Her latest commission, Your Palm is My Universe, fills the museum’s 107,000-square-foot Great Hall with video and sound. ucca.org.cn

Bern, “Rose Wylie: Flick and Float” (Until Oct. 5)
Only in the last decade has 90 year-old British painter Rose Wylie begun to garner serious international attention, with her paintings shown at the Tate and elsewhere. Though Wylie started painting early on, she’d paused her career while raising her three children. In the late ’90s she picked her brushes back up, working from memory to produce large, uncontrived canvases populated with cartoonish figures. This major retrospective of over fifty paintings aims to secure Wylie’s place as a late-blooming but ever-devoted contemporary artist. zpk.org

New York, “House’s Barbershop” (Until Sept. 20)
When he was just 14, Jeffrey Henson Scales was photographing The Black Panther Party for the party’s newspaper. The Berkeley-raised artist, now a photo editor for The New York Times, has spent decades documenting Black life in America, much of it through street photography. But the series shown here captures a more intimate side of life—the daily happenings inside House’s Barber Shop, a beloved, now-shuttered Harlem institution of over five decades. The series, which spanned five years, captures a changing Harlem. claireoliver.com

Vienna, “Brigitte Kowanz: Light Is What We See” (Until Nov. 9)
As the new digital era dawned, Austrian artist Brigitte Kowanz approached its promises and anxieties from a unique angle. Inspired by conceptual art, her sculptures used neon tubing and LEDs to examine how light can be a medium and metaphor for digital communication. She was particularly interested in Morse code as an early binary language and “the speed of light” it allowed information to travel at. This retrospective—the first since her death at 64 in 2022—includes everything from early objects created with Franz Graf to the light sculptures she began making in the ’80s. albertina.at