Contemporary artist Ahn Kyuchul’s solo exhibition Ahn Kyuchul: Questions — Landscape without Horizon is currently on view at Space ISU in Seoul. The exhibition presents a diverse group of works in various media, including installation, sculpture, painting, and text, that explores fixed ideas and conventions that have persisted in our society today. For the past four decades, the artist has been raising questions about life and the world that surrounds us, taking his detailed observations of everyday life and objects as a point of departure. The exhibition introduces eight new works that reflect these questions he has been pursuing concerning visual art.

The exhibition invites viewers to step into a “landscape without horizon,” encouraging them to consider their own answers to the questions that the artist poses. New works featured in the show include Spiral Wall, which draws viewers in like a black hole, yet its endless rotation prevents them from reaching its center; Dot Practices, which showcases the artist’s intense effort to emulate a minimalist masterpiece with a single dot; Line Practices, that captures the artist’s experimentations to find various ways to draw lines without a ruler; On the Way to Art, that serves as a signpost for seekers of true art; Tilted Seascapes, which suggests a way to adjust three tilted sea painting, and Seven Boxes, in which each box holds the key to another box that doesn't fit, and the whole cannot be understood without opening them all. These works reconstruct the landscape of our time in which the “horizon” has been lost. The exhibition is on view until January 3, 2025.

Michael Joo is participating in the group exhibition Breath(e): Toward Climate and Social Justice currently on view at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, USA. The exhibition features over 100 artworks by 25 international artists, exploring the climate crisis and other human-caused disasters that humanity faces all together.

For the exhibition, Michael Joo collaborated with digital artists Danil Krivoruchko and Snark.art to create a collection of NFTs modelled after the crystalline structure of coral reefs. The algorithms and 3D printing technology utilized for the works have since been put to practical use by researchers at the University of Hawai’i for the research on the development of fish species that inhabit the coral reef. This process illustrates how art and science can be interwoven together in order to address and solve the current environmental issues.

The exhibition spotlights transdisciplinary practices that encompass diverse media, including painting, photography, multimedia, augmented reality (AR), and even living organisms to address the climate crisis, challenge anthropocentric thinking, and present a worldview that moves beyond hierarchical structures to envision all elements of nature as a whole rather than as materials for use and exploitation by humankind. The exhibition continues through January 5, 2025.

Alexander Calder’s solo exhibition Calder. Sculpting Time is currently on view at the Museo d'arte della Svizzera italiana (MASI Lugano) in Switzerland. Featuring more than thirty of Calder's iconic works created between 1931 and 1960, the exhibition marks the artist's first major solo show in a Swiss public institution in nearly fifty years.

The exhibition highlights the sculptural language that the artist developed with unprecedented innovation in the 1930s and 40s. From the early abstract sculptures to mobiles, stabiles, and standing mobiles of various sizes, the exhibition presents a wide range of works that highlight key developments. The installed works are made from a variety of materials, including wood and wire. An early abstract works Croisière (1931) consists of a thin wire and two small spheres that carve out a sense of form through movement alone without any mass. In addition, Eucalyptus (1940), which has been a constant feature of the artist's major exhibitions, is shown interacting with its environment. The exhibition also features a diverse group of works that invite viewers to experience vibrations in unexpected moments, such as Arc of Petals (1941) and Red Lily Pads (1956), which respond to subtle changes in air and light.

The exhibition offers a glimpse of how Calder expanded sculpture beyond its visual and temporal dimensions by adding movement to the once static medium. The exhibition runs through October 6.

The exhibition Spaces by the Berlin-based Nordic artist duo Elmgreen & Dragset is currently on view at the Amorepacific Museum of Art. Commemorating the 30th anniversary of their collaboration, the exhibition is their most extensive presentation in Asia to date.

Elmgreen & Dragset transform five exhibition spaces of the museum into realistic representations of everyday environments, including a Nordic-style house, a large swimming pool devoid of water, a fine dining restaurant titled The Cloud, a kitchen where molecular gastronomy research and culinary practices converge, and a space resembling an atelier. Scattered throughout these installations are fragments of daily life and human figures that blur the boundaries between reality and the virtual. Notable elements, such as the message “See you never!” written on the entrance mirror at the house, children playing alone by the pool immersed in themselves, a figure slumped over on the couch at the restaurant entrance while drinking a glass of whiskey, and a diner engaged in a Facetime call with a recently broken-up friend, embody discontinuous narratives that encourage active participation from the viewers.

By dismantling the concept of the white cube and incorporating architectural elements, the artist duo traverses between public and private spaces, wittily yet grotesquely illustrating the boundaries between reality and fiction, presence and absence, and the subjectivity and otherness of the act of seeing. Furthermore, through reflections in mirrors and the portrayal of individuals absorbed in their own worlds, the exhibition invites viewers to confront and contemplate the complexities of contemporary existence. The exhibition continues through February 23, 2025.

Anish Kapoor, an internationally acclaimed British sculptor, has been awarded the prestigious 2025 Wilhelm Lehmbruck Prize by the Lehmbruck Museum in Duisburg, Germany.

The Wilhelm Lehmbruck Prize was established in 1966 to commemorate the 85th anniversary of the birth of Wilhelm Lehmbruck (1881–1919), the first German sculptor who significantly influenced modernism in the twentieth century. Lehmbruck gradually broke away from neoclassicism, fusing elements of the Romantic and Gothic styles to develop his unique sculptural language. As a seminal figure in the development of modernism, he was a successor to the prominent French sculptors Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) and Aristide Maillol (1861–1944), and he profoundly impacted later generations of sculptors, including Joseph Beuys.

The Wilhelm Lehmbruck Prize is a distinguished award granted specifically to sculptors who have made significant contributions to the development of the genre. An international jury, composed of directors from leading European institutions and members of the board of trustees of the Lehmbruck Museum and the Wilhelm Lehmbruck Museum Foundation, selects the recipient every five years through a rigorous process. Previous winners include Nam June Paik (2001), Richard Serra (1991), and Joseph Beuys (1986).

The jury described Anish Kapoor as “one of the most important and innovative artists of his generation,” highlighting that his works “open up new dimensions of human perception.” The jury praised Kapoor's practice in using a wide range of materials—including pigments, wax, PVC, silicone, stone, and steel—to create works that unite opposing elements: “hard and soft, factual and illusionistic, simple and complex.” The jury expressed its anticipation that Kapoor’s work, which “expands the concept of possibility and challenges our senses,” will “transcends the limits of what is supposedly feasible, [establishing] correspondences with the architecture of the Lehmbruck Museum.”

In response to receiving this esteemed award, Anish Kapoor stated, “I am honored to receive the prestigious Wilhelm Lehmbruck Prize,” and he plans to hold an exhibition at the museum along with a publication commemorating the award.

Jean-Michel Othoniel’s solo exhibition Under an Endless Light is currently on view at the Sara Hildén Art Museum in Tampere, Finland. Marking the first major solo exhibition in Scandinavia, the exhibition covers a wide range of works from the early 2000s to the present, highlighting Othoniel’s practice centered around the theme of nature’s marvels.

This exhibition presents approximately sixty works, many of which reflect Othoniel’s fascination for botany and colors reminiscent of the emergence of spring blooms. Visitors are first greeted by Wonder Blocks (2022), specially created for the exhibition, followed by Fontaine (2015), echoing the Finnish landscapes. Passiflora (2023) and Gold Lotus (2015) contrast with the rugged concrete walls of the museum’s brutalist architecture, presenting a unique experience for the audience. The exhibition extends to the sculpture park, showcasing Othoniel's large kinetic sculpture, Gold Lotus (2015), alongside the massive necklace Collier Or (2017) hanging from a tree.

Capturing the splendor of nature and illuminating its mysterious essence, Othoniel's grand creations engage in a dialogue that encompasses both history and innovation, embodied in his unique language using glass bricks and beads with his own palette of colors. Under an Endless Light continues through September 15. 
 

A solo exhibition of Louise Bourgeois titled Louise Bourgeois in Florence is currently on view under the auspices of the Museo Novecento in Florence. Marking her first major solo exhibition in this Tuscan capital, the exhibition presents a variety of works simultaneously at two major institutions, the Museo Novecento and the Museo degli Innocenti, each under a different title.
The exhibition in the Novecento exhibits approximately 100 works showcasing a variety of media, ranging through fabric, bronze, and marble. The title, Do Not Abandon Me, is associated with Bourgeois’s narrative experience of abandonment, with a particular focus on the mother-child dyad which is fundamental to the formation of one’s relationships.
Notable among the works is a series of red gouache paintings, THE FEEDING (2007), THE BIRTH (2008), and MAMAN (2009), featuring the motif of the mother-child relationship. Created during the artist’s final five years, these paintings explore the cycle of life through iconography of sexuality, childbirth, motherhood, breastfeeding, and dependency. The vivid red, a color most favored by the artist, evokes associations with bodily fluids such as blood and amniotic fluid. 
The center of this exhibition is Spider Couple (2003), one of the most famous and emblematic creations of the artist. From the outset of her career, Bourgeois has immersed herself in the exploration of the mother-child motif, materializing it into the symbolic imagery of spiders from the 1990s. In her practice, spiders are represented as intelligent, protective entities that are conversely aggressive and threatening at times. 
On the other hand, this special occasion revives the collaboration with the Instituto degli Innocenti, founded in 1419 as a hospital with the specific purpose of welcoming children deprived of family care. In the complex designed by Filippo Brunelleschi, the museum provides a space for Cell XVIII (Portrait), a piece that reinterprets the iconography of the Virgin of Mercy, which recurs in some of the most emblematic works in the collection and strongly represents the Institution’s vocation of hospitality. In celebrating the role fulfilled by the Institution over the centuries, this image calls to mind the large female community composed of both the girls received and raised here, and the figures who have contributed to ensuring the promotion of the condition of women and of mothers. The exhibition continues through October 20.