They were friends, lovers, rivals, and each other’s sources of inspiration. Together they would write a significant chapter of postwar art history: John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Cy Twombly. Now, finally, with the Museum Brandhorst in Munich and the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, two German institutions have joined forces and their important collections to come up with an effort that was years in the making and certainly constitutes an exhibition highlight of 2025.

Ten years ago, Benjamin Buchloh and Isabelle Graw claimed that Andreas Gursky’s pictures naively celebrate the “regime of the spectacle” (Buchloh) and “present a world without critique” (Graw). Whatever it is exactly that the two scholars intended with their verdict, it certainly does not apply to Gursky’s current exhibition at Sprüth Magers. 

In 1968, the Italian artist Maria Lai visited the United States, which Magazzino Italian Art is referencing in the title of what is effectively her first retrospective in this country. But much more than that trip, it was the local traditions of Sardinia, where Lai was born in 1919, that had an impact on her artistic production.

The neo-Expressionist painters making such a splash in the 1980s in West Berlin were called Junge Wilde because they were young and wild—they were also generally male. One of the few female exceptions was Galli, who was unearthed by the Berlin Biennale in 2020 and is now being honored in a small but important exhibition at Berlin’s PalaisPopulaire.