2025-12-20 02:29:40
When considering Miguel Arzabe’s bold, woven works, it’s unsurprising that he begins by painting two abstract pieces. Vibrant fields of acrylic spread across his canvases before they’re sliced into long strips and reconfigured. Resulting are dynamic compositions that meld art historical traditions with Arzabe’s Bolivian heritage, drawing on longstanding Andean imagery and weaving practices.
Next month at Johansson Projects, the Oakland-based artist presents a collection of new wall works and suspended sculptures in Sin Contar Cincuenta. Arzabe refers to his practice as offering a “productive confrontation” of distinct cultures, approaches, and periods, and these new compositions continue his explorations into imagining spaces where differences exist in harmony.
The artist often roots his work in place and connections to a particular environment, and several pieces evoke vast landscapes and weather. “La Bahía de Niebla,” for example, echoes the dense opacity of Bay Area fog, while the elongated form reminiscent of an atoll sprawls across “Isla del Lago.”
Sin Contar Cincuenta is on view from January 17 to March 21 in Oakland. Find more from the artist on Instagram.
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2025-12-19 23:19:04
Lincolnshire-based artist Anthony Theakston continues his explorations of common birds like barn owls and herons, sculpting their likeness in sleek bronze and ceramic. Smooth wings and bodies contrast the fluffy feathers typical of fowl, as they hunch over or curl up as if taking a nap. Elegant and seemingly primed for flight, the avians perch between abstract and realistic representations.
Theakston has several exhibitions and fairs planned for 2026, including Naarden Art Fair and Brussels Affordable Art Fair with DeKunst Salon and the Washington Winter Show and Art Palm Beach with Gladwell and Patterson. He’s also represented by Gallery Bartoux, and you can find more of his work on Instagram.
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2025-12-19 00:19:40
At the start of a new short film, a young boy is gifted a present of a stuffed wolf at a family dinner—an animal he’s afraid of. We’re soon transported to a forest, where we witness a wily tale of compassion and friendship. The film has gone viral since it was released in early December, but this animated gem wasn’t created by Disney or Pixar—it’s a grocery store ad. And it’s shed some unexpectedly bright light on both the joys of the holiday season and the inimitable warmth of human-made film.
French supermarket chain Intermarché launched its advertisement titled “Le mal aimé,” or “Unloved,” during a season in which Coca-Cola’s annual ad was made with generative AI and news of Disney’s licensing agreement with OpenAI means that more than 200 of the media conglomerate’s characters can be used in the generative AI app Sora.
“Unloved,” which is set to a 1970s French hit song by Claude François titled “Le mal aimé,” quickly went viral online with hundreds of millions of views outside of France. The project was produced by an advertising agency called Romance, and the two-and-a-half-minute project took a team of 80 people about a year to create.
The commercial’s painterly scenes and expressive characters meet an emphasis on creativity, humor, generosity, and glee. Indeed, the protagonist—a lone wolf—learns that through making something with his own hands, requiring lots of practice, he can cook the magic ingredient to help him connect with others.
For more handmade cinematic advertising, you might also enjoy Apple’s refreshingly analog holiday ad this year.
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2025-12-18 23:38:00
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2025-12-18 19:00:00
A little more than ten years ago, a particularly—shall we say—interesting painting restoration went viral, spawning memes and earning the piece the cringeworthy nickname “Monkey Christ.” The work, known as “Ecce Homo,” is a century-old portrayal of Jesus in a church in Borja, Spain, that a local octogenarian attempted to restore.
The attention “Ecco Homo” brought, which could be viewed as positive or not depending on your perspective, actually bolstered the town’s struggling economy and raised tens of thousands of euros for charity as people pilgrimaged to see the infamously bungled attempt. But it’s far from the only aging artwork to meet disastrous results when someone tried their hand at an update.
For Julian Baumgartner, a second-generation art restorer and owner of Baumgartner Fine Art Restoration, there’s little he hasn’t seen. Crackling varnish? Check. Deteriorating stretcher bars? Check. Stapled edges? Say no more.
When an oval-shaped portrait fell into his hands, with its structural framework crumbling and its canvas stained, that wasn’t even the worst of it. This particular painting had also been unskillfully painted over to freshen it up, despite—as Baumgartner discovers—the fact that the “fix” actually completely changed the entire feel of the work. As he works, he illuminates how the amateur attempt to restore the work actually eliminated the subtle nuances of the artist’s original intention, and by extension, the sitter’s personality.
Baumgartner is based in Chicago and runs what is now the oldest restoration studio in the city. Using archival and reversible materials, he conserves and restores artworks by removing discoloration, camouflaging cracks, repairing holes, and much more.
Via his popular YouTube channel, Baumgartner chronicles the satisfyingly meticulous, step-by-step process he employs to breathe new life into paintings, whether made by anonymous artists or titans of art history. See more updates on Instagram.
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2025-12-18 03:49:38
In “Rio Tigre,” thick globs of fire consume a shoreline forest, while smoke clouds the skies and melts the landscape from top to bottom. Despite this catastrophic setting, there’s also a tiny man standing in a canoe, seemingly unaware or unable to grasp the destruction.
The unsettling scene is part of Alexis Rockman’s Conflagration series, which translates a distinctly contemporary sense of climate anxiety into eerie paintings. Made from oil paint and cold wax on wood, these pieces are chunky and gestural, placing human touch and material excess in direct proximity.
For nearly five decades, Rockman has rooted his practice in environmental concerns. Today, his body of work is a sort of archive of a changing climate, one in which dire warnings about a warming planet have not inspired robust action but rather entrenched us further in a cycle of denial and fatalism.
Feedback Loop, then, is an apt title for the artist’s upcoming debut at Jack Shainman Gallery. Featuring many forest fire paintings, the exhibition will span watercolors and cinematic panoramas Rockman has made throughout his career, along with works containing soil and organic matter gathered near the Great Lakes. This presents a visual timeline of the artist’s thinking on the changing climate, and of course, the newer works feel more urgent. As the years pass, the scale of devastation grows, and the diminutive animals and figures are no match for raging fires that threaten everything in their paths.
In biology, feedback loops are often categorized as either positive or negative, and Rockman suggests that we’ve entrenched ourselves in an inescapable downward spiral. Given the tiny, lone figures that occupy just a few paintings—others simply feature empty boats—he presents a world in which immense damage is done and the chance of rescue is near impossible.
But where Rockman taps into a universal imbalance through recurring motifs of fire and smoke, he’s also interested in the particular. His works are often based on specific locations like South America’s Rio Pastaza or Lake Athabasca, which borders Saskatchewan and Alberta. In this way, he homes in on the hyperlocal, drawing our attention to real places and urgently addressing what we’re already witnessing.
Feedback Loop runs from January 15 to February 28 in New York. Explore more of the artist’s work on his website.
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