The November issue of ArtReview breaks the rules.
The painter Manuela Solano, who features on this month’s cover, shows a secular devotion to popular culture, from tender portraits of popstars to glammed-up dinosaurs and aliens. These paintings are extraordinary for their skill and subject matter, and also because Solano is blind. ‘In her canvases,’ writes Gaby Cepeda, ‘she grabs these [pop] talismans from our collective memories, holds them to the light and turns them as if they were diamonds, picking out the specific effects that consecrated them in her own memory, and then pours the distilled essence into her work.’ “It reflects me,” says Solano, “but in its being about mass culture, it also reflects everybody else.”
Sarah Jilani speaks to Saidiya Hartman about Minor Music at the End of the World, a collaborative performance inspired by a sci-fi story from W.E.B. Dubois, and what it means to imagine the end of authoritarianism, capitalism and white nationalism. “Critical frameworks devoted to examining power, structures of inequality and the forms of social difference are being prohibited,” Hartman tells ArtReview. “The goal of this fascist authoritarianism is to resurrect an order of values that provided the foundation of slave society.”
Senga Nengudi and Maren Hassinger have maintained a decades-long friendship and artistic partnership that has included sticking hand-in-hand through life’s trials but also ensuring that they both continue with their individual practices. Their methodologies, writes Jessica Lanay, ‘are marked by what many Black women in the arts between the 1970s and today are endeavouring to do through institution building, protest and communal connections: to make more space and invite in more people in an effort to be included in, and eventually transform, exhibition practices, art historical categorisations and the art market’. Yet the artists are also lucid about their exclusion from traditional art institutions. A 2022 report found that Black American women artists represented only half a percent of acquisitions in 31 of the most visited US museums. Hassinger and Nengudi’s communal work, currently on view in a retrospective at the Columbus Museum of Art at The Pizzuti, shows that partnerships and collective intent are transformative, but still need expansion.
In a series of paintings that mix the old and the new, the profound and the mundane, Duan Jianyu navigates the changing faces of everyday life in China. The artist pays attention ‘to everyday life in both its banal and fantastical realities via paintings that often capture wacky, surreal scenes reflecting disjunctive states of urban or rural life as a consequence of rapid change’, writes Yuwen Jiang. ‘Stylistically they flirt with the ugly and vulgar, infused with a deadpan and, at times, brutish humour.’ The composite scenes they depict become spaces in which to engage with contemporary conditions of disengagement and to discuss human agency or the lack of it.
Meanwhile, Zenas Ubere takes a close look at Mobolaji Ogunrosoye’s portrait Zara, One Within the Other (2025). The face, cut and repasted into layered fragments, allows for what most portraits do not: absence. In its elusiveness, ‘Ogunrosoye’s approach disturbs the carefree assumptions we make when we look at a person.’ And in the image-saturated world, the refusal of legibility is also a form of resistance: to simplification, to reductive stereotyping and to facial-recognition technology.
Speaking of which, artists Holly Herndon, Mat Dryhurst, Avery Singer, Jon Rafman and Simon Denny got together to discuss where art might be post-AI. ‘The challenge with AI, says Dryhurst, is that it’s an even slipperier concept than the internet – what exactly is post-AI?’ With the speed at which it evolves, ‘working with AI means living with constant change,’ claims Rafman. Even a label like post-AI will likely soon be outdated. But the artists agree that even if reductive, labels create a context that sustains a practice. And where do we stand in relationship to AI? According to a large language model fed from texts and references assembled by the artists following their conversation, ‘you are the orange at LAYER 0’. Food for thought.
Also in this issue, Elias Tamer observes that in Beirut’s struggle with truth, heritage and preservation are unwanted eyewitnesses; Joanna Walsh asks who can afford to work at scale; and Mark Rappolt annotates English naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace’s nineteenth-century text The Malay Archipelago.
Plus reviews of exhibitions across the globe, including Mark Leckey in Berlin, Tesfaye Urgessa in Norwich, the 13th Mediacity Biennale in Seoul and Coco Fusco in New York; and reviews of books by Olivia Laing, Cory Doctorow, Olga Ravn and more.
