{"id":355517,"date":"2025-12-18T06:22:15","date_gmt":"2025-12-18T06:22:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/355517\/"},"modified":"2025-12-18T06:22:15","modified_gmt":"2025-12-18T06:22:15","slug":"critic-johanna-fateman-on-the-hits-and-misses-of-art-in-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/355517\/","title":{"rendered":"Critic Johanna Fateman on the Hits (And Misses) of Art in 2025"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"SalmanSalman Toor\u2019s 2007 portrait of Zohran Mamdani. Image courtesy of the artist, Luhring Augustine, and Thomas Dane Gallery.<\/p>\n

It seems wrong to sugarcoat the year and unnecessary to belabor the bad news, from the tectonic upheavals and wanton destruction to the chef\u2019s kiss insults from on high (i.e. Truth Social posts). But looking back through my photos and notes, I see that\u2014for art\u20142025 was not bad at all. Stunned, 2016-style topical responses are long gone for the most part; the most meaningful work is characterized instead by a steely, head-down focus on being one\u2019s self and doing one\u2019s thing, undeterred. The (art) world may fall apart, but artists seem a psychic bulwark still. And while there were some let-downs, more memorable were the big moves and great shows. There was even some good news.<\/p>\n

Zohran Mamdani<\/a><\/p>\n

Maybe you\u2019ve seen the Time cover collectively naming \u201cThe Architects of A.I.\u201d as the person of the year, with the tech-billionaire usual suspects shown together, perched on a steel beam\u2014House Harkonnen restaging Lunch atop a Skyscraper. But here in New York the person of the year is\u2014hands down\u2014our mayor-elect. When a 2007 portrait of Zohran (then 14 years old), by none other than one of this year\u2019s most celebrated painters Salman Toor<\/a> (then a Pratt MFA student), surfaced on social media last summer, it clinched the sense of destiny surrounding the young politician\u2019s meteoric rise and underdog victory. It did for me, at least, as a fan of both artist and subject. (See below for more on Toor\u2019s bravura two-gallery presentation, which opened in May.)<\/p>\n

With a transition committee that includes Legacy Russell of the Kitchen and MoMA PS1\u2019s Ruba Katrib among its esteemed members, and\u2014over the weekend\u2014such pre-inaugural stunts as a durational listening session at the Museum of the Moving Image in the spirit of Marina Abramovi\u0107\u2019s 2009 MoMA smash, a Mamdani administration seems promising for the arts, though perhaps that\u2019s overthinking things. What\u2019s good for the cost of living, for immigrants, for childcare, healthcare, housing, etc., is good for artists, art workers, and an art world that\u2019s more than a pleasure garden for the ultra-rich. And can\u2019t you just see Toor\u2019s glowy headshot-composition of Zohran framed by the Time\u2019s signature red border?<\/p>\n

\"PortraitPortrait of Jack Whitten with Pink Psyche Queen, 1973, ca. 1975. Image courtesy of the Jack Whitten Estate and Hauser & Wirth.<\/p>\n

\u201cJack Whitten: The Messenger\u201d<\/a> (at the Museum of Modern Art; organized by Michelle Kuo with Helena Klevorn, Dana Liljegren, and David Sledge)<\/p>\n

We all seemed to agree, with fervor and conviction, that Jack Whitten\u2019s survey was perfect\u2014except for its timing, of course (some seven years after his death). A procession of superlative, tough paintings that cite jazz as a formal model for material experimentation, and Black history as a muse, showed his visionary scope and tenacity; archival materials, including his tools (such as the enormous rake-like \u201cDeveloper\u201d that he dragged across canvases) and his studio journals granted insight into his process and his restless self-reflection as he push himself into new artistic terrain. As a long-ago painting student of Whitten\u2019s, I found the show to be both very beautiful and pretty shattering. Only a small portion of this tremendous\u2014and, until recently, under-sung and under-shown\u2014body of work was visible to me when I knew him in the late \u201990s.<\/p>\n

\"ProductionProduction still from the Art21 Extended Play film, Anne Imhof: DOOM. \u00a9 Art21, Inc. 2025. Image courtesy of Imhof and Art21.<\/p>\n

Anne Imhof, DOOM: House of Hope<\/a> (Park Avenue Armory)<\/p>\n

In part, it was the lack of consensus here that made Imhof\u2019s epic production so compelling, its afterimage prolonged for me by a series of chaotic, vacillating text-thread analyses and opinions exchanged with fellow attendees afterward. Unfolding over three hours in the Park Avenue Armory\u2019s drill hall amid Jumbotrons and a sinister fleet of Escalades, with a cast of 60 or so (ballerinas, skaters, models, actors, and more) and an intricately collaged reverse-Romeo and Juliet story arc, it was a commitment\u2014an investment of time that seemed to breed grievance if you weren\u2019t hit with that final-act euphoria many of us felt. Some were fatigued by the rough-around-the-edges spectacle, and then by the parade of takes. Not me, I loved talking about it<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"InstallationInstallation view of \u201cLaura Owens\u201d at Matthew Marks Gallery, 2025. Photography by Annik Wetter. Image courtesy of the artist and Matthew Marks Gallery.<\/p>\n

Laura Owens<\/a>\u00a0(Matthew Marks)<\/p>\n

The Los Angeles-based artist\u2019s return to New York was another notable big swing, much discussed (though not nearly as debated as Imhof\u2019s) in my circle. In room-blanketing installations across the gallery\u2019s two 22nd Street spaces, Owens<\/a> layered 19th and early-20th-century-inspired wallpaper prints, accompanying them with tall, neo-Orphist canvases in Laura Ashley hues and an arsenal of trompe l\u2019oeil techniques. The 360-degree designs were studious and painstaking, but also, in flashes (or cartoony splashes), they recalled\u2014strangely\u2014Katharina Grosse\u2019s forceful, environmentally scaled gestures and improvisations. Arriving as Owens\u2019s show did toward the beginning of the year, in February, I thought it might be a harbinger of things to come for abstract painting. Not so much. More notably, a few established figurative painters upped their game<\/p>\n

\"SalmanSalman Toor, Skinny Boy, 2025. Photography by Farzad Owrang. Image courtesy of the artist, Luhring Augustine, and Thomas Dane Gallery.<\/p>\n

Salman Toor, \u201cWish Maker\u201d<\/a> (Luhring Augustine)<\/p>\n

The Pakistani-American painter\u2019s new work has progressed from tighter, more narrative work that casts queer immigrant characters, like himself, in contemporary scenes\u2014in apartments and bars or on the street, bathed in absinthe light, in a style equal parts Rococo and Van Gogh\u2014to something still recognizably his, but with a murkier beauty and depth. My favorites: Skinny Boy, 2025, whose slightly goofy and apparitional subject holds a phone up, FaceTiming maybe, or taking a selfie, his image reflected in a bathroom mirror; the hazy, lemon-sepia picture Mommy\u2019s Room, 2024, which shows an interior from a curious, astral-projection perspective, similar to the vantage in the also figureless, vertical image of an Islamic cemetery\u2014a place for the dead recalled through a child\u2019s eye maybe, quietly gutting in another year of genocide.<\/p>\n

\"JenniferJennifer Packer, Warp, Weft, 2025. Image courtesy of the artist and Sikkema Malloy Jenkins.<\/p>\n

Jennifer Packer, \u201cDead Letter\u201d <\/a>\u00a0(Sikkema Malloy Jenkins)<\/p>\n

Mourning and memory lend Packer\u2019s breathtaking show its slowed, otherworldly temporality. (\u201cDead Letter\u201d is still on view for another moment, until Dec. 20.) The painter grapples with the loss of her partner, the poet April Freely, in a suite of variously legible, sometimes devastatingly effaced, figurative scenes, punctuated by small still lifes\u2014bouquets alternately fading or bursting with fresh-cut vivacity. In the high-key red-and-blue Warp, Weft, 2025, with its veils of paint thinned with turpentine, the drip seems a metaphor for something (or everything) slipping from our grasp.<\/p>\n

\"VaginalVaginal Davis.\u00a0The Wicked Pavilion: Tween Bedroom. 2021. Courtesy of MoMA PS1. Photography by Steven Paneccasio.<\/p>\n

Vaginal Davis, \u201cMagnificent Product\u201d<\/a> (MoMA PS1; organized by Jody Graf and Sheldon Gooch)<\/p>\n

You have a few months left to see the living legend\u2019s triumphant retrospective\u2014make every effort to get there! \u201cMagnificent Product\u201d tracks Vaginal Davis<\/a>\u2019s production from early performance work and zines to her makeup paintings, bread sculptures, and installations, showcasing her ever-expanding, louche and frilly, queer-Black cosmology of pop-cultural detritus and fantastic invention. At the opening with a group of buoyant friends, who\u2019ve likewise watched Davis\u2019s progression from punk royalty to queer-theory darling to whatever formidable and f\u00eated force she is now, one whispered to me, looking around, \u201cThis is almost\u2026 too good.\u201d And perhaps that sums up 2025: When good things happen, we hold our breath, waiting for the other shoe to drop.<\/p>\n

\"\"Installation view of Beeple\u2019s Regular Animals at Art Basel Miami Beach, 2025. Photography by Sam Falb.<\/p>\n

And now for the disappointments. Well, there was that Taylor Swift album; I realized I\u2019m just not into Caspar David Friedrich; and, in truth, Time is not wrong\u2014the so-called architects of A.I. did define the year in many ways. If there\u2019s an artifact of visual culture that says it all\u2014emblematizing the state of national discourse, the unmasked gutter-racist flipside to MAGA neoclassical aesthetics, and Silicon Valley\u2019s fascist turn\u2014it would have to be that deepfake the president posted. You know, the one where he wore a Burger King crown to dump shit on protestors from a fighter jet. The medium is the message indeed.<\/p>\n

While artists employed the technology inventively and critically (I don\u2019t mean Beeple\u2019s red chip spectacle of billionaire-faced dogbots at Art Basel Miami Beach<\/a>, but rather, work like Tishan Hsu<\/a>\u2019s hyperreal post-corporeal show at Lisson, or Sarah Friend<\/a>\u2019s performance-based investigation of consent in the era of the prompt, both covered by the Critics\u2019 Table), others didn\u2019t engage with the paradigm shifts\u2014sometimes at their peril.<\/p>\n

\"\"Luc Tuymans, The Maggot, 2025. Image courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner.<\/p>\n

Flora Yukhnovich<\/a>\u2019s site-specific, wraparound mural at the reopened Frick, reinterpreting Fran\u00e7ois Boucher\u2019s Four Seasons, fell flat because it looked like A.I., an immersive, decorative \u201criff\u201d on something, which is one of the technology\u2019s familiar fortes. Luc Tuymans\u2019s work, which once felt so eerily trenchant in its observation of our mediated reality\u2014with its faded, unstable, straining renditions of photos\u2014hits differently now. In the painter\u2019s most recent show<\/a> at David Zwirner, his approach to the image seemed outpaced by new modes of filtering and recombination, and a post-truth perceptual baseline\u2014though I loved the fresh, allegorical character of his maggot. So, maybe I take my thumbs-down back. The flaccid phallic parasite with its cloudy Harkonnen vibes is an apt mascot\/memento mori for a mostly revolting trip around the sun. Scroll back to the top of my list for a better image to get behind as we start the new one.<\/p>\n

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