Gleanings

The Scottish-born artist, writer and editor Perri MacKenzie has refined a particular brand of stylised, borderline manneristic figuration, with bold outlines and vibrant hatching that betray the hand of a trained illustrator. Hands, expressive and active, are a recurring motif in her paintings; attached to figures or autopoietically self-rendering, like in M. C. Escher’s iconic lithograph Drawing Hands (1948), they grasp various drawing utensils, most often a paintbrush (see the memorably raucous painting Ghost Painting from 2020, depicting an orange-gloved pair of hands holding back a witch from casting a spell in paint while holding a flanking ghost at gunpoint). Perri is self-conscious about painting, but in an enticingly playful and not self-serious way. She is also print- and medium-curious, painting on walls and unconventionally shaped canvasses and immersing herself in publishing and printing techniques through residencies (many of the printed works in the exhibition were produced at Masereel, formerly known as the Frans Masereel Centrum) and ongoing collaborations.

Her new show in Komplot, the art space and curatorial collective based in Anderlecht, titled ‘What does an oracle look like?’, features paintings, drawings, screenprints and books, including a new installation of large-scale collage paintings on paper depicting the animal fountains of Sainte-Catherine, Brussels (sculpted by Georges Houstont and Godefroid Devreese circa 1895). It’s the first time that the interwoven strands of MacKenzie’s practice have been so conveniently represented in one place, and they establish her as consummate graphic artist, in the sense of the term that also extends to writing. For MacKenzie, voice, text, line and picture seem to exist on a continuum that is grounded in the physicality of the human body.

The show also serves as a platform for the launch of a book of the same name. What does an oracle look like? gathers essays and drawings made between 2020 and 2024, themed loosely around pottery painting and vocal expression. It is designed by Ilke Geers, printed by robstolk Amsterdam and published by Leaky Press. (Ezra Babski)

Given the Musée de l’Orangerie’s focus on impressionism and post-impressionism, it might seem surprising that David Claerbout (1969, Kortrijk) is exhibiting there. His exhibition ‘spring, slowly’, curated by Sophie Eloy, mixes sound, video and photography as part of their contemporary art series ‘Contrepoint’. Since painting underscores Claerbout’s technical savvy, his oeuvre proves a perfect counterpoint to impressionist painters who applied their knowledge of the latest vision science and colour theory, found both time and duration relevant, and aimed for a level of accuracy in depiction that some mistook as more fictional than real. For example, Claude Monet famously created scores of haystack paintings, each indicative of a particular moment of the day and a particular time of the year, in order to accurately capture the effects of sunlight and shadows befalling the landscape.

Claerbout also emphasises each scene’s changing light. For example, video stills from Backwards Growing Tree, a video made over five years, capture distinct moments: Backwards Growing Tree (Red Evening Light), Backwards Growing Tree (Italian Winter), Backwards Growing Tree (Colour Sheet for Summer Days) and Backwards Growing Tree (Colour Sheet for Autumn Days) (all 2023).

Moreover, two specially-designed galleries at the Orangerie host numerous Monet Nymphéas (Water Lilies), several of which Monet gifted the nation the day after the armistice in 1918. Just as Monet’s intensely detailed water lily paintings convey duration and take time to fully experience, Claerbout’s videos position the spectator amidst a cinematic experience for which each viewer, not the artist, authors their own experience. Unlike cinematography, which directs each viewer’s gaze, Claerbout opts for an open system that invites viewers to roam across the screen image in time, in order to ‘spring, slowly’ in space. (Sue Spaid)

Sheep have long occupied a quiet yet profound role in human civilisation. As providers of wool, milk and meat, they are not just agricultural resources but also symbols of pastoral life, ecological adaptation and cultural heritage. Their gentle presence in landscapes, their seasonal migrations and the tactile familiarity of their fleece shape human economies and traditions in ways both visible and unseen. Beyond their economic utility, sheep also embody deeper philosophical questions about domestication, interspecies relationships and the ways in which humans manipulate nature to serve their needs.

The Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam is currently presenting ‘Oltre Terra’, an exhibition by Italian design studio Formafantasma (it was on view at the Nasjonalmuseet in Oslo in 2023). Using a transdisciplinary lens, the project investigates the history, ecology and material culture of wool, tracing its entanglement with human economies, landscapes and the biological evolution of sheep. The title oltre terra references the Latin roots of ‘transhumance’ (trans, meaning across, and humus, meaning ground), evoking the seasonal movement of livestock. This nomadic rhythm underpins the exhibition, which unites insights from designers, anthropologists, biologists, legal scholars and farmers. Through research, material experiments and artistic interventions, Formafantasma repositions wool as more than a textile – highlighting its deep cultural and ecological significance. Central to the exhibition is a reimagined natural history diorama. Rather than a static display, ‘Oltre Terra’ features evolving, life-size reproductions of seven sheep breeds, including the Dutch Drents Heideschaap. Archival materials, films and wool by-products further illustrate how human intervention has shaped sheep’s biological and aesthetic traits, influencing their role in agriculture and industry.

A particularly compelling element of the exhibition is the video work Tactile Afferents, co-produced with Polish artist Joanna Piotrowska (1985). Piotrowska is best known for her psychologically intense photography and film work that explores themes of control, intimacy, domesticity and power dynamics. Her black-and-white photographs often depict people in tense, ambiguous poses that resemble self-defence stances or awkward familial interactions. For ‘Oltre Terra’, Piotrowska contributes an intimate exploration of human-animal relationships through the language of touch. Tactile Afferents examines co-domestication as an embodied experience, portraying gestures of care, control and mutual dependence. By focusing on haptic interactions, the film underscores the tension between affection and dominance in the ways humans handle, shear and rear sheep. Piotrowska’s distinctive visual approach, marked by slow, deliberate movements and a heightened sense of physicality, invites viewers to reconsider their sensory engagement with non-human life. The exhibition further includes a woollen carpet by cc-tapis (a rug company based in Milan) woven from coarse fibres typically deemed unfit for luxury textiles, as well as recycled wool bales from the Italian textile company Manteco, reinforcing the exhibition’s engagement with sustainability and resourcefulness. By bringing together art, research and material innovation, Formafantasma offer a poignant reflection on the ethics and economies of wool, prompting visitors to rethink their entanglement with the material world. (Els Roelandt)

Nothingness has occupied mystics, cosmologists, magicians and painters for eons. Thierry De Cordier’s site-relational solo exhibition at the Fondazione Prada in Milan is situated in three vertical, sun-lit galleries that formerly housed vats of whiskey and gin. Here, ten black paintings of varying scales, realised between 1999 and 2024, simultaneously present and represent nothingness. Much like visitors to Houston’s Rothko Chapel, visitors to ‘NADA’ are invited to sit on a bench and contemplate nothingness, that is, wonder whether it exists and where it begins and ends. Unlike Rothko’s ‘black’ paintings, De Cordier’s paintings are strictly monochromatic, though hardly as hard-edged as Ad Reinhardt’s ‘black’ paintings.

De Cordier’s first ‘NADA’ painting dates from 1999, but it (fittingly) no longer exists. While Reinhardt believed his ‘meaningless’ paintings conveyed ‘nothing’ in particular, that De Cordier (1954) first arrived at this format by erasing a crucifix suggests that his do say something. In fact, De Cordier recalls wanting to ‘symbolically annihilate a deeply-rooted Christian image.’ At some point, he came across the following passage, attributed to the Spanish mystic St. John of the Cross: ‘No emphasis, but absolute rigor. The search for the NADA (Nothing) of the Cross; the concern for the only thing necessary…’. For St. John of the Cross, ‘nada’ evoked the incomprehensibility of God’s form, such that the intellect, memory and will undergo an emptying or darkening.

To prevent people from interpreting these vast spaces as either grey skies or dark seas, imagery associated with his oeuvre, De Cordier has rendered ‘NADA’ on the spot where ‘INRI’ appears in devotional images, a gesture that is simultaneously literal and lyrical. Given that De Cordier once led a nomadic life and later sought refuge in his garden, this exhibition evokes a desolate wilderness, where silence abounds and the sun delimits time. (Sue Spaid)

Taking as its starting point the feature film Fresh Kill (1994), the three-decade survey ‘KI$$ KI$$’, curated by Sarah Johanna Theurer with Lailu Wu, features video, installation art and digital art by Paris-based Taiwanese artist Shu Lea Cheang (1954). A pioneer in digital art, Cheang was one of the first artists to create internet-based artworks. Here, she works with robots, livestreaming and dispensary machines.

‘KI$$ KI$$’ is comprised of five landscape formations, Home Delivery, Portal Porting, Spoken Words, Kiss Kiss Kill Kill and Escape Artist (all 2025). The first three occupy different galleries, while the last two occupy the stairwell. Comprised of Drive By Dining (2002) and Radiotopia (since 2022), the dystopic futuristic foodscape Home Delivery assembles piles of paper food containers, autonomous robots emitting food smells, a livestreamed radio transmission and a video featuring eight Mongolians eating a sheep’s head together. The sci-fi trashscape Spoken Words features abandoned keyboards, cables and screens scattered about a community where people (us) are bred and programmed to ‘retrieve memory and emotional deposits from the net,’ so they can scrape third-party data. Meanwhile, Uttering offers a video portrait of the artist’s changing self, as a nearby machine dispenses obsolete computer keyboard keycaps.

For the digital landfill Portal Porting, Cheang reimagines the internet as a political community. A burnt-out car wreck, surrounded by tree trunks and branches sprouting shitake mushrooms, occupies the centre of this gallery. This mycelial network connects natural communication to the internet. Kiss Kiss Kill Kill is the neon sign from the local bar in her 1994 film, whereas Escape Artist juxtaposes a projected image of a red blood cell with Brandon (1998–1999), her iconic web-based project that explores a murder case via hyperlinked, interrelated narratives. Her sci-fi narratives are not only inspired by the latest technology, but they also deploy it. (Sue Spaid)

Here is another exhibition that is deeply influenced by the writings and research of Anna Tsing. In her seminal work, The Mushroom at the End of the World, Tsing explores the matsutake, a mushroom that thrives in disrupted landscapes, regenerating ecosystems and forging unexpected connections. She refers to this mushroom as the first living creature to grow in the landscape decimated by the 1945 atomic explosion in Hiroshima. The matsutake later developed elsewhere, for example in an industrially ravaged forest, reactivating new forms of plant and human organisation. CRAC Alsace can be seen as functioning like mycelium. It is a living organism shaped by artists, visitors and its own architectural history. The current group exhibition, ‘A meal without mushrooms is like a day without rain’, borrows its title from a line in the diary of John Cage, published in his recent book, A Mycological Foray: Variations on Mushrooms (2020). The show brings together work by artists Alexandre Caretti, Zoë June Grant, Lou Masduraud, Rayane Mcirdi, José Miguel del Pozo and Chloé Vanderstraeten and is curated by Sandrine Desmoulin, Maria Claudia Gamboa, Sarah Menu and Richard Neyroud. Like spores lodged in the architecture of the CRAC, the artworks at this exhibition seem to grow like excrescences. Zoë June Grant builds domestic furniture that she installs near the ceilings, as if in a house turned upside down. Lou Masduraud makes spyholes in doors through which you can discover hidden places while feeling observed. Chloé Vanderstraeten installs sculpted paper organs. Seeking to integrate into a country that is not his own, José Miguel del Pozo translates this disorientation into a feeling of uncanniness, evoking the attitude of a body trying to adapt in an inhospitable world. (Els Roelandt)

Camera Austria’s exhibition space, located in the historic Eisernes Haus (Iron House) — a cast-iron structure built in 1848 — sets the stage for Hey Monte Schlacko, dear Slagorg, the latest project by German artist and Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design professor Susanne Kriemann. Kriemann views the world as an ‘analogue recording system’ that captures human-driven changes over time. Her work focuses on the extraction of raw materials, the handling of landscapes left behind, and what author Rob Nixon calls ‘slow violence’ — a gradual, often invisible destruction spread across time and space. In Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing examines how we can use modern tools to resist the harms of progress and reveal the worlds it has overlooked. Careful observation is crucial here, an idea that is also central to Kriemann’s research. Kriemann studies post-mining landscapes where contaminated and depleted soils begin to regenerate, with mosses, lichens and other plants gradually reclaiming the terrain. Her work explores the afterlives of uranium mining and how vegetation metabolises toxic landscapes. She extracts pigments from these plants to color silk panels, captures their presence in heliogravures and visualises radioactive pitchblende through autoradiographs and photograms. In more recent work, X-ray images reveal the skeletal structures of plants like lupine, fern and gorse bush. Alongside these visual studies, Kriemann’s Library for Radioactive Afterlife (2015–ongoing) collects books that explore the history and narratives of the Atomic Age, reinforcing her deep engagement with bookmaking as a form of artistic inquiry. (Els  Roelandt)

Can there ever be too many exhibitions of work by Surrealist women painters? Recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in their contributions, with major exhibitions offering fresh insights into their pivotal roles within the movement. ‘Surrealism and Magic: Enchanted Modernity’ (2022, Peggy Guggenheim Collection) focused on the mystical dimensions of Surrealism, highlighting works by Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo and Dorothea Tanning. Around the same time, ‘Surrealism Beyond Borders’ (2022, Tate Modern and the Metropolitan Museum of Art) broadened the narrative, emphasising the global and cross-cultural nature of the movement. And last year, Centre Pompidou’s ‘Surréalisme’ show further explored the evolution and lasting influence of Surrealism and included works by lesser-known figures such as Ithell Colquhoun and Suzanne Van Damme, reaffirming the significance of female Surrealists within the canon. Now, Tate St Ives (and in the summer Tate Britain) is hosting the first major retrospective of Ithell Colquhoun (1906–1988), one of the most radical artists of her generation. An integral figure in British Surrealism during the 1930s and 1940s, Colquhoun was not only a painter but also an innovative writer and practicing occultist. Her work investigated surrealist methods of unconscious picture-making while embracing myth and magic, positioning the divine feminine as a source of personal and societal transformation. She was also a fantastic colourist. The exhibition features over 200 artworks and archival materials, tracing Colquhoun’s creative evolution — from her early engagement with Surrealism to her explorations of sexual identity, ecology and the occult. Colquhoun’s commitment to esoteric knowledge extended beyond her art — she was a prolific writer who used her novels to advocate for a specifically female spirituality, reclaiming the lost connections between women and the powers of nature that she believed once existed but had been lost during struggles with patriarchal religions. Her personal library, now housed in the Tate archive, includes over 300 books, periodicals and occult ephemera. A selection of these materials is on view, revealing the network of bookshops, publishers and journals through which she engaged with new ideas and disseminated her work. (Els Roelandt)