Long before luxury fashion houses were commissioning artists to redesign bottles and packaging, René Magritte was quietly turning an ordinary wine bottle into a work of Surrealist sculpture.
Created in 1955, Femme Bouteille (Woman Bottle) transforms the curved form of a glass bottle into the elongated figure of a nude woman. Rather than simply painting an image onto the surface, Magritte cleverly incorporated the shape of the bottle itself into the composition, allowing the object to become the body. The result is elegant, slightly strange, and unmistakably Magritte. Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: Rene Magritte, Femme Bouteille→
Isamu Noguchi on top of Slide Mantra at Isamu Noguchi: What is Sculpture?, Venice Biennale, June 29–September 28, 1986 (Photo: Shigeo Anzai)
Founded by celebrated sculptor Isamu Noguchi, the Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum is revisiting one of the artist’s most daring and debated exhibitions with Light and Stone: Revisiting Noguchi’s 1986 Venice Biennale, on view now through September 13, 2026. The archival exhibition commemorates the fortieth anniversary of Noguchi’s groundbreaking presentation at the 1986 Venice Biennale, where he became the first solo artist to represent the United States in the U.S. Pavilion. Continue reading Light and Stone: Revisiting Isamu Noguchi’s Radical Vision of Sculpture→
Painted in Sedona, Arizona in 1947, Witnesses originates in a pivotal moment of Dorothy Tanning’s career, when she turned inward, translating the psychological imperatives of Surrealism into interior worlds shaped by ambiguity and concealment. The painting presents a crowded, deliberately compressed interior populated by uncanny, quasi-human figures whose anatomy resist stable definition.
To counter the dehumanizing isolation of incarceration, artist Jesse Krimes (b, 1982) works collaboratively with incarcerated individuals to create artworks from old clothing and textiles that evoke memories of home. Krimes developed his own practice while serving a six-year sentence. In Blackwater(2021), Krimes regards the tentacled animal as “a panoptic state of surveillance” and alludes to the eugenic and white supremacist ideas in America zoology. The title, Blackwater, refers to a prison in Florida.
There’s something quietly hilarious — and a little haunting — about Waiting Pink Small (2024) by Erwin Wurm, At first glance, it’s just a soft, bubblegum-pink suit, neatly assembled and politely standing at attention. But look again: there’s no body inside. No face, no hands—just posture doing all the talking.
