14 A Creative Pendular
Nick Alm’s portfolio includes oil paintings and watercolor paintings—both equally impressive. Check out his work and learn how he finds inspiration.
24 The Forgiving Elements of Painting
Early on, Alta Koer realized her love for painting as it came with flexibility and forgiveness, vibrant colors, and the interpretation of reality.
34 A Sacred and Meditative Space
With works that include illustrations, watercolors and hints of architecture, Dariush Vaziri approaches his art with reverence and skill.
The last day of summer has just passed. Where did the summer go?! When we were putting this issue together, we realized this time of year matched so perfectly with our theme: Oils and Watercolors.
The fluid and transparent nature of watercolors reminds me of summer and the richness and depth of oil painting brings the feeling of fall.
In this issue, we celebrate both mediums by featuring the work of Nick Alm, Alta Koer and Dariush
Vaziri. Read on to learn about their start in art, their preferences in medium, and ongoing projects. I’m wishing you a seamless transition into the next season and its endless possibilities!
Devika Strother, Editor in Chief devika@artdictionmagazinecom
Whitney Biennial’s $100,000 Bucksbaum Award Goes to Nikita Gale, Whose Installation Meshed Sound and Mechanics
Nikita Gale has been named the winner of the Whitney Museum’s Bucksbaum Award, which goes to a participant in the Whitney Biennial and comes with $100,000. Gale, a Los Angeles–based artist, is best known for installations that mesh unexpected elements, pairing video and sound equipment with industrial materials like concrete and metal barricades.
For the 2018 edition of the Hammer Museum’s Made in L.A. biennial, the artist presented a sculptural and sound installation titled PROPOSAL: SOFT SURROUND SYSTEM (2018), dissecting the roles music and physical barriers play in galvanizing protest and mass detainments. In 2022, when Gale’s work was shown at 52 Walker Street, the New York Times argued the artist has become part of a distinct group of women artists of color applying new rules to minimalism that were set in place by an older generation of male predecessors.
For the 2024 Biennial, titled “Even Better Than the Real Thing,” Gale presented a player piano for the installation TEMPO RUBATO (STOLEN TIME). But instead of playing its set tune, Gale has made it so the piano emits no sound, other than the clanking of the keys as they are activated. Additionally, the installation, presented in a black box, is dramatically lit, with the lights oscillating up and down as if on a dimmer.
“Works like TEMPO RUBATO decline to perform to the viewer’s liking,” ARTnews senior editor Alex Greenberger wrote in his review of the exhibition. “In doing so, they refuse their viewers’ gaze,
Nikita Gale, TEMPO RUBATO (STOLEN TIME), 2023–24, installation view, in “Whitney Biennial 2024: Even Better Than the Real Thing.”Photo Ryan Lowry
mirroring an unwillingness by many artists here to participate in structures that seek to oppress them.” Gale’s work, relating the body to technology, was selected as the winner by a six-person jury, that included the Biennials cocurators, Chrissie Iles and Meg Onli, as well as Whitney Museum director Scott Rothkopf, Hammer Museum curator Erin Christovale, University of Virginia art history professor David Getsy, and Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art chief curator Stamatina Gregory.
In a statement, Rothkopf said the judging panel believes Gale, who is the prize’s 12th recipient, fits the mold of artists who have been influential to American art, describing their work as taking different forms all at once. “Nikita Gale has an incredible knack for making work that is both conceptually rigorous and full of emotion, somehow disciplined and mysterious at the same time,” he said.
For the 2024 Biennial, titled “Even Better Than the Real Thing,” Gale presented a player piano for the installation TEMPO RUBATO (STOLEN TIME). But instead of playing its set tune, Gale has made it so the piano emits no sound, other than the clanking of the keys as they are activated. Additionally, the installation, presented in a black box, is dramatically lit, with the lights oscillating up and down as if on a dimmer.
In a statement, Rothkopf said the judging panel believes Gale, who is the prize’s 12th recipient, fits the mold of artists who have been influential to American art, describing their work as taking different forms all at once. “Nikita Gale has an incredible knack for making work that is both conceptually rigorous and full of emotion, somehow disciplined and mysterious at the same time,” he said.
Paulina Pobocha Joins AIC as Chair and Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art
The Art Institute of Chicago has named Paulina Pobocha as Chair and Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, just a year after Pobocha took up a curator position at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. In the new role at AIC, she’ll oversee the department’s acquisitions and exhibitions.
For the last year while at the Hammer, Pobocha served as the Robert Soros senior curator, a position she took up in September 2023, coming in very new to the Los Angeles art scene. During her time on the West Coast, she organized the Hammer’s forthcoming edition of the “Made in L.A.” biennial alongside curator Essence Harden. That show is scheduled to open in 2025.
Prior to moving to Los Angeles, Pobocha spent 15 years as a modern and contemporary art curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. A survey of German artist Thomas Schütte’s work that she organized is opening later this month. Before that, she helped mount other major solo shows for artists Guadalupe Maravilla, Rachel Harrison, Robert Gober, Claes Oldenburg at MoMA.
Pobocha will report to James Rondeau, president and Eloise W. Martin director at the Art Institute. In a statement, Rondeau lauded her experience in the field from Los Angeles to New York. He said he expects her vision will now benefit audiences in Chicago and “build on the momentum our curatorial leaders have already set in place.” The museum brought on Ann Goldstein to serve as deputy director and chair and curator of modern and contemporary art, a newly created role, in 2016.
Pobocha’s appointment comes on the heels of a major capital injection for the museum, which announced last week that trustee emeritus Aaron I. Fleischman gave a record gift of $75 million to the institution to establish a new wing around late 19th-century, modern, and contemporary art. The funds will go to further revamping AIC’s exhibition space, an effort that Rondeau initiated in 2019.
Hauser & Wirth Names Gallery Veteran Mirella Roma as CEO
Hauser & Wirth has appointed gallery veteran Mirella Roma as its new chief executive officer, the gallery announced in a press release Thursday.
Roma has been with Hauser & Wirth for 27 years. In the late ’90s and early aughts, she worked as an executive assistant to current co-president Marc Payot. She became an executive director in 2013 and a partner in 2020. According to the gallery. she will work alongside leadership across Hauser’s many global locations.
“As Hauser & Wirth’s new dedicated CEO, [Roma] brings an invaluable depth of knowledge both of our history and our current business combined with an exceptional understanding of our artists, our team and the wider landscape of the art world,” Iwan Wirth said in a statement. “Mirella’s leadership skills will be invaluable as we continue to evolve and create new avenues for our vision of what a gallery can do and be in the future.”
“I’m deeply honoured to begin this new chapter in what has already been such a wonderful journey with my colleagues at Hauser & Wirth,” Roma told ARTnews in a statement. “I’m excited to collaborate even more closely with our international team, whom I hold in the highest regard, as we continue to shape
and define what a gallery can do and be in the months and years ahead. Together, we’ll create new opportunities to inspire, connect, and spark important conversations through art.”
Roma succeeds Ewan Venters who joined the gallery as CEO in 2021. Venters will remain chief executive of Artfarm, the independent hospitality group launched by gallery cofounders Iwan and Manuela Wirth in 2014, until January 2025 or a successor is named.
Venters joined Hauser after nearly a decade as the head of the UK department store brand Fortnum & Mason. He was the first person to hold the title of global chief executive officer at the gallery. At the time, gallery co-president Iwan Wirth said that, while the gallery’s first priority is always its artists and clients, “our business and the art world itself have grown dramatically in scale and velocity, and now that we are a global concern, it is essential to have a strong Chief Executive to lead our team and ensure that we can continue to focus on our first priority—and to do so with even more passion.”
Report Finds Art Sales Stagnate, Even as the Luxury Sector Continues to Grow
A recent study analyzing global luxury spending found that while art sales only grew between 1 percent and 3 percent last year, the overall luxury sector grew between 8 percent and 10 percent. The total revenue figures, according to the study published in June by consulting firm Bain & Company and Italian luxury association Altagamma, estimated the global luxury market at approximately $1.66 trillion; fine art accounted for a mere $45 billion of that.
In surveying people in the trade and analyzing public sales data, Bain found that auctions experienced an estimated 20 percent drop in spending. (This tracks with information recently released by the major auction houses: Christie’s reported in July that auction sales were down 22 percent in the first half of 2024, compared to the second half of 2023, while Sotheby’s saw auction sales drop 25 percent over the same period.) Private dealers, on the other hand, saw modest growth, thanks, according to the report, to collectors seeking more in-person interactions postCovid-19. The report attributed the lower auction figures to more cautious spending amid a slowly recovering US market, ongoing geopolitical conflicts, and “inconsistent performance” in Asia.
“The fine art market hasn’t been growing very dynamically in 2023 and, in the first quarter of 2024 … the auction market continued slowing down,” Joëlle de Montgolfier, coauthor of the report, said in an interview.
Executive vice-president for Bain’s Global Retail, Luxury and Consumer Products Practice, Montgolfier added that, among the
trade’s participants “there’s a perception of shrinkage.”
Art also underperformed relative to other small luxury categories that continue to grow, like jewelry and collectibles.
A 2024 report published by UBS jointly with Art Basel estimates the $65 billion art market grew by only 1 percent since before the pandemic. That survey relies on self-reported revenue figures and does not publish metrics related to profit margins.
The macro uncertainties aren’t expected to materially affect the ultra-wealthy, at least according to a Deloitte report published in May surveying more than 300 family offices each overseeing an average of $2 billion in intergenerational assets. Some 70 percent of those surveyed said they expect to see that value grow this year.
The Bain study also touches on
According to Degen, the fraught political environment is discouraging aspirational spending, a big factor behind stalling revenues.
Mirella Roma. Photo: Katharina Lütscher. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth
the Fife Arms, an ornate hotel in the Scottish Highlands, as well as restaurants in St. Moritz, London, New York, and Los Angeles. Earlier this month, Sotheby’s announced a deal with Marriott’s Luxury Group, a subsidiary of the hotel chain, which will supply venues in different countries for the house to show its products.
broader trends in luxury spending. While traditional luxury products like fine art experienced limited growth, experiential luxury, such as high-end travel, saw substantial gains. Consumers increasingly prefer experiences over physical objects, according to Montgolfier, with heritage brands shifting attention to an experiential sector that functions more like hospitality. The art industry responded to this trend. Hauser & Wirth founders Manuela and Iwan Wirth opened
George Hammer, global head of luxury marketing at Marriott International, reported that they’re trying to unlock a new tier of exclusivity. “We’re seeing a significant shift away from traditional, transactional luxury—people want more than surface-level beauty,” he said.
Major luxury brands like LVMH, Loewe, and Lanvin, meanwhile, have expanded into the art world, funding sculpture commissions and major art prizes and sponsoring exhibitions. (In 2014, LVMH opened a marquee art space, Fondation Louis Vuitton, and it also owns and operates several hotel brands, with a Louis Vuitton hotel set to open in Paris in 2026.)
Natasha Degen, a professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, sees the increase in the fashion labels moving between commercial and institutional spaces—ranging from hotels to museums to private foundations— as a way to hold their clientele’s attention for extended periods. “It’s a strategy to keep visitors in the space longer, a 360-lifestyle brand deepening a consumer’s relationship with it,” she stated in an interview.
Auction houses, meanwhile, are increasingly relying on luxury categories besides art to drive revenue. Last year, jewelry, watches, memorabilia, and other luxury products generated almost a third of Sotheby’s $7.9 billion total revenue. At Christie’s, that figure was $2.1 billion. Josh Pullan, head of the global luxury division at Sotheby’s, told the New York Times in May that such auctions were “an unbelievable entry point for new clients,” with half the buyers and bidders being new to the house.
Adding to the slowdown overall is the difficulty luxury groups still face in appealing to high-end buyers when art acquisitions fall to the lowest rung of their fiscal priorities, Montgolfier said. According to Degen, the fraught political environment is discouraging aspirational spending, a big factor behind stalling revenues. “In a time of conflict, it’s seen as inappropriate or excessive,” she said.
LACMA Ends South Los Angeles Project to ‘De-center’ the Museum Over High Costs
LACMA has officially ended plans to establish a satellite campus at the South Los Angeles Wetlands Park in what was one part of a 2017 plan to “de-center” the museum and expand reach to different parts of the city. The project suffered
higher costs than it had initially anticipated.
In a statement to ARTnews, a LACMA representative said the museum is still pursuing a satellite project in Los Angeles for a museum facility in the neighborhood of Willowbrook. LACMA first notified the city it would not move forward with the Wetlands Park project in 2019.
According to a staff memo published this week by the Los Angeles Board of Recreation and Parks Commissioners, who oversee the city’s public building projects, LACMA submitted a termination agreement on the Wetlands Park project to their office in July. The agreement took effect on September 12.
The proposed site, termed under the agreement as Building 71, spans 84,000-square-feet and was previously operated
as a public transit facility. The Board of Recreation and Park Commissioners report stated that engineering studies conducted as part of the plan “have shown that the cost to repair and retrofit Building 71 will far exceed what LACMA had initially estimated.” In 2017, Michael Govan’s president estimated the project to cost $25 million.
LACMA had planned for the satellite campus to serve as an additional storage and exhibition space for its 150,000-item collection pieces. Meanwhile, a partnership approved by Govan to lend portions of the museum’s collection and installations to the forthcoming Las Vegas Museum of Art are moving forward. Architects for the Nevada project were announced this month and the $150 million museum complex is expected to open in 2028.
California Art Club’s 113th Annual Gold Medal Exhibition
August 20–October 26, 2024
Hilbert Museum of California Art
One of the oldest, largest, and most active professional arts organizations in the world, the California Art Club is dedicated to the advancement and appreciation of artwork created using timehonored techniques in the fields of painting, drawing and sculpture.
Founded in 1909 in the studio of Franz A. Bischoff (1864–1929) along the banks of the Arroyo Seco in Pasadena, Club’s illustrious founding members also included Carl Oscar Borg (1879–1947), Hanson Puthuff (1875–1972), Jack Wilkinson Smith (1873–1949), and William Wendt (1865–1946), whose wife, Julia Bracken Wendt (1871–1941), was a celebrated sculptor.
The Annual Gold Medal Exhibition pays tribute to its pioneering artists who inspired California Impressionism – the first artistic movement defined as purely Californian. The highly-anticipated display has gained the reputation as the most vital platform for demonstrating the best of the realist genre – from pristine landscapes and grittier urban scenes to novel still lifes and evocative figurative paintings and sculptures – all being exhibited for the first time.
The exhibition has a long history having no theme to encourage artists to take artistic risks and create what they consider to be their most important works. As a result, Gold Medal artists use classical methods to express vital modern messages, ranging from environmental preservation to social issues and attitudes.
With the 113th installment of this storied exhibition on view at the Hilbert, visitors are offered a rare
opportunity to view the most exceptional representational works being created today by current Club artists, as well as significant artwork of historic CAC artists in the museum’s permanent collection. This year’s show features nearly 180 works by 163 artists.
Ulla von Brandenburg: In Dialogue
September 4, 2024–July 6, 2025
The Bass Museum of Art
Ulla von Brandenburg, the German-born artist based in Paris, engages with idiosyncratic moments and overlooked figures from the histories of art and culture. Her exhibitions and projects draw a wide range of subjects, including occultism, psychoanalysis, modernist architecture and Hollywood cinema, into contemporary contexts.
Ulla von Brandenburg: In Dialogue is a presentation of von Brandenburg’s work paired with The Bass’s recently acquired ceramic mural by the
Lebanese-American artist Etel Adnan (1925–2021). A leading figure in contemporary Arab American visual art and literature, Adnan created rich, geometric fields of color in her paintings and drawings, some translated into large-scale murals and tapestries that reflect the artist’s enduring interest in architecture and the built environment. Comparatively, von Brandenburg’s multifaceted
practice combines film, textiles, drawings, watercolors and sound into immersive exhibition scenarios where the different art forms harmonize into a cohesive whole (or Gesamtkunstwerk).
Ulla von Brandenburg: In Dialogue explores this cross-generational engagement with geometric abstraction—its interplay of circles, squares and triangles— evident in both Adnan’s mural and von Brandenburg’s practice, and staged alongside the rich history of the Russian-French artist Sonia Delaunay. Here, Adnan’s lyrical abstract mural (Untitled, 2023), at 14 × 21 feet, serves as both a protagonist and theatrical backdrop in von Brandenburg’s exhibition scenography. The works interweave through the language of abstraction and the artists’ shared interests in the social and spatial environment.
The Living End: Painting and November 9–March 23, 2025 Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago
The claim that painting is dead has been a common refrain among critics for decades. Nevertheless, artists have continuously pushed the medium forward. The Living End: Painting and Other Technologies, 1970–2020 surveys the arc of painting over the last 50 years, highlighting it as a mode of artistic expression in a constant state of renewal and rebirth.
This international and intergenerational group exhibition presents the work of more than 40 artists who have redefined painting using emerging technologies, imaging techniques, and their own bodies. Examining the impact that computers, cameras, and television, as well as social media and automation, have had on the medium, The Living End positions painting itself as a manual “technology” that has shifted further away from the immediacy of the artist’s hand over the past 50 years.
The subsequent conceptual shift has led artists to challenge what constitutes a painting, how they are produced, and who (or what) can be considered a painter.
Employing a range of mediums beyond painting, such as video, sculpture, installation, and performance, the featured artists subvert longstanding traditions and mythologies of painting— and the notion of the painter as singular genius—to offer a vital portrait of a medium that is still being reinvented.
This international and intergenerational group exhibition presents the work of more than 40 artists who have redefined painting using emerging technologies, imaging techniques, and their own bodies.
The Living End is curated by Jamillah James, Manilow Senior Curator, with Jack Schneider, Assistant Curator.
Sylvia Snowden: Painting Humanity
March 16–November 3, 2024 The Hepworth Wakefield
Sylvia Snowden: Painting Humanity is the first public gallery exhibition in Europe of African-American painter Sylvia Snowden’s work. Presenting a selection of work from a career that spans six decades, this exhibition includes large early paintings through to more recent works.
Snowden works with oil paint and pastels as well as acrylic and collage to create her expressionist, distorted, monumental figures, capturing the psychological essence of her subjects – their triumphs, torments, joys and pains – in thick impasto, the technique where paint is laid on an area of the surface thickly.
Snowden was born in 1942 in North Carolina and raised in Louisiana and Washington DC, before taking undergraduate and postgraduate studies in Fine Art at Howard University between 1960 and 1965. Snowden’s artistic training took place during a pivotal moment in Black American political history and the civil rights struggle, and she became deeply invested in these issues. Snowden describes her powerful figurative paintings as ‘portraits of humanity’.
Coming of age during the civil rights movement during the 1960s in Washington D.C., Snowden relied on guidance from her Howard University teachers, who were distinguished African American artists and art historians, such as, James Porter, Lois Maillou Jones, James Well and David C. Driskell. Although, her primary inspiration and support came in the form of her academic parents who enabled her to work as an artist as a young single mother.
The 1970s gave way to Snowden’s more abstract compositions in colorful acrylic impasto—now considered her signature style. The four residents of M Street, on view at the Hepworth Wakefield, are all from this period. Contorted figures with large, lumpy limbs push up against the edges of the composition, rendered in oil pastel and thick daubs of acrylic that in some areas glisten with bright color; in others, rich, darker tones contrast against flat white backgrounds. “They look just the way human beings look to me. I’m trying to get into the whole guts of a person; I paint the person without the packaging.”
Tuan Andrew Nguyen: The Island August 16, 2024–May 4, 2025
Smithsonian American Art Museum Artist Tuan Andrew Nguyen creates
multimedia installations that blend fact, memory, myth, and mysticism and use lush imagery to draw out these entanglements. By digging deep into archives and collaborating with communities, his projects weave together many voices to reveal other truths about—and strategies of repair from—colonial violence. In this Washington, D.C. debut, his video work The Island (2017) is shown for the first time with Bidong Spirit I , a sculpted headdress Nguyen created for the film. The titles of both artworks refer to the tiny Malaysian island of Pulau Bidong, a primary destination for Vietnamese escaping by boat after the collapse of South Vietnam in 1975.
While this history is ever present in Nguyen’s video, he sets his story in an imagined future. The main character has lived his entire life on the island. From the late 1970s through the early 1990s, Pulau Bidong was the largest, longest running refugee camp and, at peak population,
the densest place on earth. Born to parents who hid when the camp was cleared in 1991, he has been entirely alone for many decades, tending to the spirits that remain. One day, a United Nations scientist washes ashore. She informs him that they are the only survivors of nuclear conflicts that made “refugees out of the entire world.” As they explore the island, they debate their responsibility to learn from the island’s past, and whether its teachings can save the future. As viewers, we too are invited to ponder these questions. Press characterizations of refugees, found in the archival news reports and first-person testimonies woven throughout, suggest striking parallels to the forced global migrations happening today.
This focused exhibition features the video recently added to SAAM’s collection as part of a longstanding time-based media art initiative. It is presented in a dedicated gallery for immer-
sive media art installations that opened in 2023. This forty-two minute film runs continuously and can be entered at any time. The presentation is organized by Saisha Grayson, curator of timebased media at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Fragile Beauty: art of the Ocean June 8, 2024–January 5, 20 Hillwood Estate, Museum and Garden
The oceans are essential to life. Covering over 70% of Earth, they have remained an object of fascination, both treasured and feared, throughout history. Humanity has benefited from the rich and diverse fauna, flora, and resources the oceans provide, continually taking from these bodies of water for our gain. Fragile Beauty will explore the art of the ocean throughout Hillwood’s collection, from representations of the ocean to pieces created with its precious materials, while contrasting such works with contemporary art. This special exhibition will demonstrate the beauty of and admiration for these magnificent waters while raising the question of how to balance its preservation for future generations.
Oceanic Art at Hillwood
Fragile Beauty will be a celebration of the ocean, showcasing Hillwood’s wide variety of marine-related art for the first time. The exhibition was inspired originally by a rediscovered artwork titled Treasures of the Sea, a 1900 copy after the renowned 1870 masterpiece by Austrian painter Hans Makart (1840-1884), one of the largest paintings at Hillwood and once owned by Marjorie Post’s father, C.W. Post. The piece depicts several allegorical figures among the rich background of the sea. Alongside this painting and additional sea-
scapes will be objects made of rare and precious materials, including coral, pearl, tortoiseshell, and ivory, highlighting the beauty of these resources, many of which have been overexploited by humans. Lastly, Fragile Beauty will survey the use of sea-inspired creatures, shapes, and forms, such as mermaids and seashells, both in usable objects and in art.
Contemporary Displays
A selection of contemporary pieces, by artists including Morel Doucet, Courtney Mattison and Theo Mercier, and designer Christian Louboutin, will be interspersed with Hillwood’s historic pieces, demonstrating how the sea continues to serve as a source of inspiration and the dire need for sustainability for its survival. Mattison, an artist and ocean advocate, creates sculptural works that “visualize climate change through the fragile beauty of marine life.” Similarly, this exhibition will present the splendor of the sea at a time when the ocean is in danger, highlighting how sustainability is more important than ever.
Philadelphia Revealed: Unpacking the Attic
July 18–December 1, 2024
Atwater Kent Collection at Drexel University
Philadelphia Revealed: Unpacking the Attic is a large, interactive display of over 600 authentic objects, telling the story of Philadelphia’s city history collection. Inspiring pride in our great city, this major exhibition reflects 350 years of Philly history.
The exhibition highlights the strengths of the Atwater Kent Collection (former Philadelphia History Museum), including material representing the Atwater Kent Museum’s earliest acquisitions, eclectic collections it absorbed, national celebrations, development
of the city and civic history, Philly sports, salvaged material and relics, manufacturing and retail, and art and music.
The Collection grew over 80 years to encompass an array of Philadelphia stories: objects reflect the city’s diverse residents and their contributions over three centuries. Along with 600+ artifacts, the exhibition includes hundreds more historical images as well as multimedia and hands-on elements.
Related Programming
Philadelphia Revealed is an exhibition, a podcast, and a platform for anyone to add their story to Philadelphia history. Through an interactive game, facilitated by First Person Arts, visitors can find and add their own stories to the archives. They can hear other Philadelphians’ stories through
The Philadelphia Revealed Podcast, produced by WHYY. Hosted by Jamie J. Brunson of First Person Arts, each episode features a new storyteller highlighting an object from the exhibition and sharing their own story inspired by it. Public programs will enable further interaction. Philadelphia history is still being told; Philadelphia Revealed aims to find out what these objects mean to all of us.
