The Brooklyn Rail

When a photograph features a painting, one pictorial medium depicts another. How is this situation to be perceived? How does it differ from a painting depicting a painting, or a photograph incorporating a photograph? 

There are photographs of the painter Celia Paul standing in her paint-coated London studio, in a paint-encrusted long dress, standing in front of a mirror. She has painted her reflection in that mirror, and written, "The glass of the mirror, in my painting and in reality, is like a doorway in which I’m standing, my head turned away towards a mysterious interior.” Our recent conversation took place on Zoom.

Who is in control of the image? This question is at home in the work of Thomas Demand (1964). The German artist spends meticulous attention to the execution of his sculptural and photographic work. But also as a viewer, while looking at the public images in news- and other feeds, he is interested in the decisions that have been made before we get to see a photo. The two worlds are not unrelated.

Sky Hopinka is from the Ho-Chunk Nation and Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians. His video, photo, and text work centers around personal positions of Indigenous homeland and landscape designs of language as containers of culture expressed through personal and non-fictional forms of media. On the occasion of Hopinka’s commission for the Barnes Foundation’s Annenberg Court, Red Metal Dust, the artist joined Chenoa Baker on the New Social Environment (Episode #1334).

While many artists borrow from the past, very few collapse historical timelines with the raw, unsettling energy of Sedrick Chisom. He merges the iconography of the American Civil War, medieval mythology, and speculative sci-fi into a single, distorted world-building project. His canvases function as an ongoing catastrophe where history returns like a persistent ghost, blending a deep, daunting seriousness with a neurotic, unhinged humor.

On the occasion of his new exhibition at Matthew Brown, Chisom spoke with curator and writer Ginevra de Blasio. They delve into a practice that treats the canvas as a physical skin, exploring how the “Russian doll” layering of the past simultaneously produces and constrains our present agency. The dialogue touches upon his latest body of work, exploring how a recent shift to London and the spatial constraints of the theater have informed his newly staged, apocalyptic compositions.

William Kent has been on my mind for the better part of fifteen years. I have lived with many of his artworks and tried in various ways to draw attention to his art. But the occasion for me writing about him now is the marvelous show of his work that was mounted at the Ricco/Maresca gallery earlier this spring—the first gallery show Kent has had in New York since the 1960s.

Padmanabh Singh and Noelle Kadar are at the forefront of an effort to invigorate public interest in contemporary art in Jaipur, India. Recently, they joined Guggenheim President Emerita Jennifer Stockman and Rail Consulting Editor Joachim Pissarro to discuss The Jaipur Centre for Art, the unique history of arts patronage in Jaipur, the importance of color to the city and its culture, and their exhibition now on view, Annotations of Colour. 

Dike Blair’s art is thoroughly cosmopolitan—deeply informed, intensely considered, and visually impeccable. Working at small scale, Blair attends closely to relations among his paintings, sequencing them in what he sees as snippets of conversation rather than extended narratives. We met on a cold January day in a backroom at Karma’s new Chelsea gallery, where the paintings for his current exhibition were temporarily hung, aptly enough, on sliding screens.

In Listening All Night To The Rain, Sir John Akomfrah presents the US premiere of the critically acclaimed eight-canto work first unveiled at the British Pavilion during the sixtieth Venice Biennale. For its New York presentation, Akomfrah introduces a focused iteration of the project, debuting the central multi-channel film, Canto VI (2024), and reshaping the work’s structural inheritance into a cinematic experience tailored to this context. Here, the canto becomes an audiovisual vessel organizing colonial archives, diasporic memory, Black Atlantic and climate histories. 

This winter, curator Amira Gad commissioned Mandy El-Sayegh to make her first solo exhibition in the Netherlands, a site-specific survey at Rotterdam’s The Depot titled Figure, Field, Grid that layers years of the artist’s projects across the institution’s third-floor gallery. El-Sayegh’s exhibition feels like entering the wound of our violent present. Images of atrocity, war, mass death, and torture are layered with headlines of political upheaval and paintings and drawings from the museum’s collection.

I first met the painter Paul Pagk in the fall of 1990, and soon was introduced to his work the following year at Thread Waxing Space. Ever since then, I’ve followed his work as frequently as I could in different contexts—from seeing Paul’s paintings in various one-person or group exhibitions, to making occasional studio visits and even once having a conversation before a live audience at the site of his last exhibit at Miguel Abreu in 2023—I’d never had a lengthy conversation in the studio with Paul until recently, just the day before this new body of work were brought to the gallery to be installed for Paul’s current exhibit Inscriptions in a Shade of Color (January 16–February 28, 2026), dedicated to the memory of Franz Dahlen (1938–2025). 

Rob Pruitt began making work as a rebellious art student in the mid-eighties, beginning a professionally successful, albeit brief, collaboration with his then-partner Jack Early. Together the two made sculptures and paintings that in turn interrogated and showcased the masculinity which had policed and persecuted them each throughout young adulthood. After a controversial exhibition and a subsequent hiatus from the art world, Pruitt returned solo in 1998 with Cocaine Buffet—a 16-foot-long mirror laid flat on the floor of the exhibition space with a coordinating 16-foot-long line of cocaine down the middle. Since then, his career has run the gamut from daily portraits of Obama to his trademark panda paintings. The artist spoke with Rail Editor-at-Large Andrew Woolbright to discuss his latest exhibition at 303 Gallery—a series of spectral watercolor gradients that deal in time past and passing, constantly in flux.