Lewis Baltz
Tract Houses (1971)
Zander Galerie

In the 1960s, suburban expansion was in full force in Newport Beach, California, paving the way for swathes of new, bland buildings. Between 1969 and 1971, Lewis Baltz photographed the area’s newly built and unfinished tract houses in unembellished black and white, drawing attention to their uniformity as a comment on the American Dream’s banal underbelly. The series caught the attention of gallerist Leo Castelli, who gave Baltz – then only 26 – his first solo show. In 1975, Baltz was among the artists in ‘New Topographics’, an influential exhibition at George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, that turned landscape photography toward the built environment.

Beauford Delaney
Untitled (Greene Street) (1950)
Michael Rosenfeld Gallery

In 1936, Beauford Delaney moved to a studio on Greene Street in New York’s Greenwich Village, where he became one of the few Black artists among its bohemian circles. It was there that a teenage James Baldwin first came to visit, finding in Delaney what he called ‘the first walking, living proof … that a Black man could be an artist.’ Inside his studio, Delaney painted portraits, still lifes, and interiors. Outside, Greene Street became a recurring subject too, rendered in thick impasto and Fauve-ish colors. Made 3 years before he moved to Paris at Baldwin’s suggestion, this canvas pushes his street scenes toward abstraction.

Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie
Bedroom, End of May – Beginning of June (2003) (edition of three)
Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi

In 2003, future Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux was living through two life-altering experiences: She was undergoing treatment for breast cancer, and she was madly in love. Ernaux met journalist Marc Marie that year, and they began a passionate affair almost immediately. In the mornings Ernaux found herself transfixed by their clothes strewn across the floor. The couple began photographing postcoital still lifes, which became material for the book The Use of Photography (2005), where they are paired with Ernaux and Marie’s writings on intimacy, memory, illness, and mortality. An English translation was released in 2024.

Nancy Graves
Jabiluka (1985)
Galerie Ceysson & Bénétière

Interested in both art and the natural sciences, Nancy Graves worked with so many mediums throughout her life that her sprawling practice is hard to categorize. In 1969, at age 29, she was invited to show life-size camel sculptures at the Whitney. Fast-forward a decade, and Graves was attaching sculptural elements to canvases, pushing her densely layered paintings into three dimensions. In Jabiluka, named after a uranium deposit in Australia’s Northern Territory, a mosaic face is juxtaposed with intricate line work and a twisting helix, while a painted aluminum form projects from the canvas.

Jenny Holzer
Providing (2024)
Hauser & Wirth

Jenny Holzer has used language as her primary medium since the 1970s, exploring its complicated relationship to power. In 2004, she began working with US government documents declassified under the Freedom of Information Act, many with most of their contents blacked out. Holzer transfers the pages to linen by hand, then covers the censored passages, drawing attention to the gap between what the public is told and what stays hidden. Early works drew on records from the War on Terror, while more recent ones take in the Mueller Report, FBI Patriot Act records, and the January 6 committee findings. Here, blacked-out passages are covered in gold and gold leaf, transforming the withheld text to a luxurious surface.

Wassily Kandinsky
Untitled (1922)
Galerie Le Minotaure

As World War I ravaged Western Europe, Wassily Kandinsky fled Germany for Russia, where he immersed himself in the local avant-garde. In late 1921, he returned to Germany, and by the next year had accepted Walter Gropius’s invitation to join the faculty of the Bauhaus in Weimar. This watercolor was made soon after, at a time when Kandinsky’s work was moving away from the loose forms of his earlier abstraction toward a more geometric vocabulary informed by Russian Constructivism. Both registers are visible here – long diagonal bars of red and green cut across the surface, while dotted fields and soft biomorphic shapes drift around them.

Jean Metzinger
Woman with a Fan (1913)
Luxembourg + Co

This Cubist painting’s storied provenance has made recent headlines. In 1928, the work was bought by Emanuel Lewenstein, a Dutch-Jewish businessman. After Lewenstein’s death, his widow is thought to have deposited the painting, along with other pieces from the family collection, for safekeeping at Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum. But in 1940, the painting mysteriously appeared for sale at an Amsterdam auction, just months into the Nazi occupation. The Art Institute of Chicago acquired the painting in 1959. This year, after extensive sleuthing, the Institute concluded the 1940 auction was a forced sale and restituted the work to Lewenstein’s heirs. The painting now returns to Paris, the city of its making, for the first time.

Takashi Murakami
Schoolgirl Ko² (2023-26)
Perrotin

Much of Takashi Murakami’s practice is inspired by otaku, a Japanese subculture revolving around anime, manga, video games, and cosplay. He traces the subculture back to Japan’s defeat in World War II, which he argues left the country in a state of arrested development. In the 1990s, Murakami began remaking otaku figurines at life size, starting with the 1.8-meter-tall Miss Ko² (1997), which he has been iterating on since. The series’ name comes from ko, Japanese for child or woman, while the sculptures’ voluptuous silhouettes are derived from bishōjo, the idealized ‘beautiful girl’ of otaku culture.

Christina Quarles
And Yer Gunna Find out Hell is Cold (2026)
Pilar Corrias

Christina Quarles has described her paintings as ‘portraits of living within your own body.’ The Los Angeles-based artist draws on her experience as a Queer, multiracial woman, resisting fixed notions of subjectivity in her work. She paints her fluid and contorted figures freely before introducing patterns and planes, sometimes with digitally generated stencils. Recent paintings see an expansion of Quarles’s already wild and vibrant palette: While she previously used sections of raw canvas to indicate light, she has lately been turning to bright, saturated color instead.

Tschabalala Self
Conjure Woman (2025)
Galerie Eva Presenhuber

Tschabalala Self’s monumental portraits of Black women are often made from both painted canvas and sewn fabric. Her stitching echoes the handiwork of the women in her family, who sewed curtains and remade old cloth into clothing. In these large-scale, expressive patchwork paintings, Self imagines a space where these figures can simply be, existing for their own pleasure rather than for onlookers. At three meters tall, Conjure Woman layers oil and acrylic paint, colored pencil and thread over dyed canvas, with rows of eyes surrounding a figure caught mid-stride.