Milan’s Fashion Mecca Turns its Gaze on the Everyday
Plus, the unrelenting practice of Frank Auerbach, a Scottish artist who brings words to life, wild sculptures conquer Chicago, and more global openings.
May 7, 2025By
VASILISA IOUKHNOVETS
“Elsewhere” at 10 Corso Como in Milan. Photo: Jacopo Menzani
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Milan, “Da un’altra parte” (Until July 27) “All photographs are monuments. If you photograph this cup on the table, for example, it gives it importance. And over time, photographs become more and more like monuments,” explained Guido Guidi in a 2018 interview. Since the ’60s, the Italian photographer has been leveling his lens on the quotidian, transforming the often overlooked corners of everyday life into remarkable images. The photos here, taken between the 1970s and 2023, focus on the fleeting shadows he’s managed to capture, freezing them in time. 10corsocomo.com
Berlin, “Frank Auerbach” (Until June 28) The German-born British painter Frank Auerbach was known for his tireless, almost obsessive painting habits that saw him in his London studio 365 days a year. For over six decades, he painted the same handful of subjects and landscapes in thickly layered strokes, only to scrape it off and start over 50, sometimes 100, times. “My only ambition is to make one memorable image,” the reclusive painter once said. Curated by Catherine Lampert, whom Auerbach painted for over forty years, this is his first posthumous exhibition, covering drawings and paintings from the entirety of his unwavering career, up to the self-portraits he began to paint in his late 80s, still in the studio. michaelwerner.com
London, “Ian Hamilton Finlay: Fragments” (Until May 24) Scottish artist and poet Ian Hamilton Finlay’s greatest work of art is a seven-acre garden, named Little Sparta, in the hills outside Edinburgh. In his art, Finlay reinvigorated the written word, often by carving it into stone. As one critic wrote, he “understood as few other artists the emotional power of letters cutting into form, shape, and color.” In the garden, over 270 of these sculptures are nestled in the wild landscape. This show is one of eight international exhibitions to mark the centenary of Finlay’s birth, showing his extensive oeuvre of stone and wood sculptures, paintings, tapestry, and print from the 1990s. victoria-miro.com
London, “Richard Hunt: Metamorphosis – A Retrospective” (Until June 29) Across America, over 160 of Richard Hunt’s striking sculptures transform museums, parks, airports, and public spaces. Born in Chicago’s south side in 1935, Hunt earned early acclaim at the Art Institute of Chicago for the evocative sculptures he welded and soldered out of found scrap metal and parts. “It is my intention to develop the kind of forms Nature might create if only heat and steel were available to her,” he said in 1966. His first major European exhibition, and the first after his death in 2023, celebrates his influential career with over 30 major works reaching back to 1955. whitecube.com
New York, “Francis Picabia: Eternal Beginning” (Until Aug 1) Though he’s best known as a Dadaist, Francis Picabia notoriously never stuck to just one style and incorporated everything from impressionism to elements of fauvism and cubism into his canvases. “If you want to have clean ideas, change them like shirts,” he wrote in 1922. But, in 1946, the French artist, returning to Paris from the South of France, announced that he was searching for a “third path” between surrealism and abstraction, the dominant styles of the time. This exhibition is the first to zero in on these last few years of the French artist’s artistic exploration, bringing together 20 paintings from 1945 to 1952. hauserwirth.com
New York, “Teruko Yokoi: Noh Theater” (Until June 14) Teruko Yokoi’s practice was shaped by all the places she lived throughout a career that would take her across the globe. Born in Japan in 1924, the promising artist was trained in traditional painting and calligraphy. In 1954, at 30, she attended the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco for a year before moving to New York City and studying under Hans Hoffman. With friends like Mark Rothko, Joan Mitchell, and Kenzo Okada, her style grew increasingly abstract. She relocated again in 1962, this time to Switzerland, where she lived until she died in 2020. In 20 artworks, this exhibition follows the evolution of Yokoi’s career from the late 50s, when she was living and painting in Hotel Chelsea, through the early 2000s to Bern. hollistaggart.com