The current Cao Fei exhibition in Berlin serves as a small survey for the artist and as an astute window into our contemporary moment.

The first major show for Thornton Dial in Los Angeles, Handwriting on the Wall, represents an ongoing curatorial choice by Blum & Poe to address what might have once been called “outsider” art of the deep South. The show is joined by another, curated by friend of Dial and fellow Southerner, Lonnie Holley—who had a solo show at the gallery in 2022—running simultaneously at the space.

Standing next to any two or three panels, it can be difficult to detect the subtle shifts in shade that the viewer knows are happening along 106 panels between black and white. Yet when we glance down a row of panels, the gradient appears seamless, as the work becomes a perspectival vector through the space. The experience is enveloping, meditative, curious—evoking a slow awareness rarely encountered in the twenty-first century.