"I love the paintings of Enrico Donati as I love a night in May." This sentiment from André Breton reflects the deep admiration he had for Donati's work, emphasizing the emotional connection to the art.
When I'm painting, I try not to look at too many things so I don't become overly influenced. But we can't really escape ourselves. There are imaginations from other people that I love. Diogo's work is a colourful combo of Alejandro Jodorowsky's strange filmic palettes, Japanese sci-fi and vintage posters.
As the trophy takes the form of an elusive UFO, Corey Fah an outsider unfamiliar with the baffling inner workings of the system is unable to collect or even confirm the award. Waidner has said that the novel was partly inspired by the experience of winning the Goldsmiths prize for their previous work Sterling Karat Gold, and by the ephemeral nature of success, with its unfamiliar contexts of social power and opportunity.
An exhibition of Wifredo Lam is about as safe a bet as the Museum of Modern Art can place and still plausibly say that it's a bet on expanding the canon. The Cuban artist is one of the most famous painters of the 20th century, featured in almost every single key show about Surrealism. MoMA acquired his famous painting The Jungle in 1946, a few years after he made it.
Szilveszter Makó 's enigmatic photographs carry layers of mystery and introspection. Standing inside curious block-like backdrops and lain against two-dimensional fields of color and texture, his subjects seamlessly meld into stories in which every detail carries intention. Taking inspiration from art history, the Milan-based artist references Surrealism and grotesque art through his use of chiaroscuro effects via light exploration and contrasting earth tones.
To pass the time, the pair play a game they've shared since Daughter's childhood, triumphantly rattling off palindromes - words that read the same backwards and forwards, such as "m-o-m," "d-a-d," "s-i-s" and "r-a-c-e-c-a-r." As the game gets increasingly complex ("name now one man"), it becomes clear that Dana's play is a dark palindrome itself, where circling dialog and damaging relationship dramas repeat themselves.
After quite impulsively tackling a frame-by-frame sequence of an animated figure merging into a mountainscape using paint on paper a few years ago, the artist started her journey into analogue animation and it's "a rabbit hole I never want to leave", she says. "This sense of continuous, boundaryless flow underpins both my life and my work. In animation, I have found the most compelling way to interpret the world being in constant motion."
The artist is known for his absurdist paintings of animals with overly long legs, contorted bodies, or myriad mutant-like heads or limbs. They're often set amid woodlands or meadows evocative of 18th- and 19th-century academic landscape paintings or depictions of formal hunts. Instead, both domesticated and wild animals graze as normally as they would without dozens of heads or udders attached in unnatural places around their bodies.
London-based, multidisciplinary artist Jana Frost is making "inspiration for fever dreams". Merging fashion photography with collage-art sensibilities, Jana employs cut-out animations, large-scale installations and a directorial style that prioritises several elements coming together to build physical, dreamlike environments. In a nutshell, Jana takes the aesthetic of pop-up books and makes them life-sized, turning dream imagery into physical reality. Sourcing public domain images from libraries and archives, Jana reworks materials then unifies them - and in the process, creates photographic works that play with time.
Karina Lumiere paints like someone who trusts color more than language. Her work does not whisper its intentions. It glows, pulses, seduces. This is abstraction born not from theory, but from devotiondevotion to intuition, to sensation, to the unapologetic power of hue as an emotional instrument. Her path to abstract expressionism was never academic. It unfolded in solitude, shaped by meditation and spiritual practice, where listening became more important than learning and presence eclipsed instruction.
Jodorowsky's most recent project is Alejandro Jodorowsky. Art Sin Fin (Taschen), two volumes in which he reviews his career, almost as boundless as it is surreal. Curated by editor and academic Donatien Grau, director of contemporary programs at the Louvre, this monograph is a work of art in itself and a manifesto that captures Jodorowsky's kaleidoscopic, mysterious, and dreamlike creative spirit across all his universes, from film and theater to poetry and comics, by way of philosophy and tarot.
