Stav Theodor‑Kimhi

There are exhibitions you leave with a list of works you loved.

And there are exhibitions you leave with a new way of looking.

This is one of those.

About two weeks ago, the Metropolitan opened, for the first time in its history, an exhibition devoted entirely to the idea of Orientalism: the way European artists of the 19th century imagined, described, and painted "the East" (the Middle East, North Africa, and parts of Asia). People of culture and scholarship were fascinated by the Orient, but they also created an image of an East that was exotic, mysterious, sensual, and at times wild. Often, that image said no less about Europe than about the East itself, since it reflected the curiosity, the fantasies, and the power relations of the era, and also the way Europe chose to see the "other". Because in the end, every gaze tells a story not only about what is seen, but also about who is looking.

While I wandered among the works, my mind actually drifted home. To the Mahane Yehuda market and the Old City of Jerusalem, the city of my childhood, to the colorful tiles of Jaffa and the Negev, and to the blazing, blinding sunlight of Israel. Everything on the walls no longer felt like an image of a faraway place. It felt familiar. Not because it was my reality, but because some of the works reflected fragments of landscapes I grew up beside, and they still live in my memory.

That led me to reflect on the exhibition's title: Between Fact and Fantasy. Suddenly it felt like far more than a title.

The exhibition does not try to decide whether Orientalism was truth or fantasy, appreciation or condescension. It shows that all of these existed together. It examines the complex relationship between Europe and the East in a period when colonialism, trade, travel, technological developments, and the exchange of ideas ran in parallel and shaped one another.

One of the moments I loved most was the encounter with the works of Osman Hamdi Bey (above), an Ottoman artist who studied painting in Paris in his youth, but returned to Istanbul and painted most of his works there. Unlike European artists who painted the East from the outside, sometimes without ever having visited it, he used the very European artistic language he absorbed in Paris to paint his own world.

At that moment you can no longer speak only about the question of who was looking at whom. The boundaries begin to blur.

Suddenly it is no longer only the West gazing at the East.

The East begins to gaze back.

In the end, I understood that this is not an exhibition about the East.

It is an exhibition about gazes.

🖼️ Orientalism: Between Fact and Fantasy
📅📍 The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Through February 28, 2027

One of the artists most identified with Orientalism is the French painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Although he never visited the Middle East, he built his image of the "Orient" out of imagination, literature, and objects he knew in Paris.

In his painting La Grande Odalisque (1814) he presents a nude woman reclining in an imaginary harem, surrounded by luxurious fabrics, a pipe, and a fan. It is not an attempt to document reality, but a European fantasy of the East.

By contrast, the women of Osman Hamdi Bey are not painted as objects of the male gaze. They read, study, pray, and go about everyday life. They are the central figures of their own story.

The same artistic language. The same period. But the question "who is painting?" changes everything

Exactly 60 years ago, the Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti passed away. His sculptures, which became one of the most recognizable symbols of modern sculpture, reshaped the way we think about the human figure.

Giacometti was already a successful artist in his lifetime, but over the past decade and a half the value of his works has soared, and some of his sculptures have sold for more than $100 million. His human figures, thin, elongated, and fragile, became his signature, but for him they were never just a style. They were his way of exploring one of the questions that occupied him throughout his life: what is human representation? And yet his figures were given no identifying features. They belong to no age, social class, or ethnicity. They are universal, timeless, and manage to represent the human being as such.

About two weeks ago, one of the most intriguing exhibitions of the summer opened at the Metropolitan Museum in New York: 17 Giacometti sculptures installed inside and around the Temple of Dendur, one of the museum's most impressive spaces.

The choice is not accidental.

Giacometti's sculptural language was born, to a large extent, out of a deep familiarity with ancient Egyptian art. When he arrived in Paris in the 1920s, he spent long hours in the Egyptian galleries of the Louvre. His drawings and studies from that period show an ongoing engagement with the way the Egyptians depicted the human body: monumental, symbolic figures that are at the same time full of human presence.

Now, inside an Egyptian temple from the first century BCE, stand 17 of Giacometti's works, among them Woman Walking (1932) and sculptures from the Women of Venice series (1956). His elongated figures face the figures carved into the temple's stone, and a fascinating dialogue emerges between two artistic worlds thousands of years apart, both engaged with the same basic question: how do we represent the human being.

As the curator of the Giacometti Foundation in Paris put it:
"Egyptian art resonated with Giacometti's constant search for monumentality and humanity at once."

This is not just an exhibition of sculptures. It is an experience of space, light, and scale, in which every movement of the visitor changes the relationship between the works and the temple.

Even if you have visited the Met before, this is a rare opportunity to see one of its most iconic spaces from a new angle.

📍 The Met Fifth Avenue, New York
📅 Through September 8, 2026

Hi everyone,

Today's post is dedicated to the members of our community who are in Israel 🇮🇱

Fresh Paint opens today, one of the art events I love most and look forward to every year. This year the fair marks its 14th edition, and it continues to be one of the most intriguing and influential events in the Israeli art and design field.

As someone who has been following the art world for years, one of the things I love most about Fresh Paint is the chance to discover Israeli artists who are not yet on every radar. More than once I have met artists there at the very start of their careers, and then, a few years later, seen them showing in leading galleries, museums, and private collections. For me, that is one of the reasons this fair remains so relevant and exciting after so many years.

Beyond the works themselves, Fresh Paint is a place where you can feel the pulse of the local scene, see what is occupying artists today, which materials and ideas are taking hold, and how art responds to the reality around it. Alongside contemporary art you will also find design, special projects, social initiatives, and collaborations that expand the conversation beyond the gallery walls.

If you are in Israel in the coming days, love art, are interested in collecting, or simply enjoy discovering new artists, I warmly recommend a visit.

And if you go, tell me which works or artists caught your eye 🎨✨
The fair runs through June 29.
freshpaint.co.il

Today I want to recommend three especially worthwhile exhibitions in New York, each of which uses a different historical artistic tradition to engage with contemporary questions. Despite the differences between them (enormous ones, it must be said), all three show how visual languages from the past can remain relevant, alive, and thought provoking today.

🌺 Fred Tomaselli | Blooms Disrupted

📍 James Cohan Gallery
🗓️ Through June 27, 2026

In his new exhibition, Blooms Disrupted, Fred Tomaselli takes the idea of the garden and breaks it apart into an almost psychedelic visual world. The works were inspired by the garden Robert Irwin designed at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. Irwin saw the garden as a living work of art and not merely landscape design, and that idea of constant change and shifting visual perception echoes through Tomaselli's works as well.

The paintings explode with color, repeating patterns, and geometric forms, moving ceaselessly between order and chaos. The result is kaleidoscopic compositions that weave motifs from nature together with abstract structures, creating an almost hypnotic sense of motion.

Alongside the paintings are collages built from pages of the New York Times. The joining of the everyday news world with an imagined, botanical landscape raises questions about the relationship between nature, information, and media noise in the current era.

🌄 Whitney Bedford

📍 Miles McEnery Gallery
🗓️ Through June 20, 2026

Whitney Bedford, an American artist living in Los Angeles, is an excellent example of contemporary Romanticism (influenced by the Romantic movement of the 19th century). Bedford combines the classical landscape painting tradition with a painterly language marked by flattened space and reduced perspectival depth. She draws inspiration from Renaissance paintings and idyllic landscapes of the past, but unmistakable signs of the present soon break into them: neon sunsets, roads, geometric shapes, contemporary architecture, and the palm trees of Southern California.

The result is a landscape that moves between beauty and a persistent hint of instability. Alongside the romance of nature there is a sense of environmental crisis, shaped in part by the great fires that struck Los Angeles in January 2025. Bedford uses landscape not only as a painterly subject but as a tool for thinking about how climate change is reshaping our relationship with the natural environment.

🪞 Arghavan Khosravi | What Remains

📍 Uffner & Liu Gallery
🗓️ Through July 2, 2026

Last but not least, and to my mind the most interesting, is What Remains by the Iranian artist Arghavan Khosravi. Khosravi builds a world that looks like a many layered dream; she combines the Persian miniature tradition with structures associated with medieval European altarpieces, creating rich compositions in which revealing and concealing happen at the same time. Doors, curtains, and ropes appear again and again in her works, hiding parts of the image and exposing others. Many female figures are only partly visible, as if caught between presence and absence.

Khosravi, who now lives and works in Connecticut, uses this visual language to explore the experience of women living under restrictive political, cultural, and religious systems, and the constant tension between visibility, control, and freedom.

Three exhibitions, three visual languages from the past, and three different ways of looking through them at the present. Which one intrigues you most? 🤍

Yesterday we lost one of the most iconic and influential artists of our time, the British artist David Hockney.
Hockney created for more than six decades and kept working almost until his very last day.

Throughout his career he never stopped reinventing himself, exploring, and pushing the boundaries of the medium; from painting and drawing, through photography and printmaking, to digital work on the iPad.

He became famous for his singular visual language: intense color, dazzling California light, bold compositions, and above all his iconic series of pool paintings, which became an inseparable part of the canon of modern art.

But beyond the aesthetic identified with him, Hockney was an artist of observation. An artist who worked in situ and knew how to take everyday moments, a landscape, light, or human intimacy, and turn them into a deep and unforgettable visual experience.

His legacy is a reminder that great art does not merely document the world, it changes the way we see it.

New York's art world has a little secret: some of the most intriguing contemporary art in the city is not shown in museums or galleries at all, but hides in the luxury jewelry houses of Fifth Avenue ✨

The first institution is Tiffany. From its earliest days, Tiffany has taken an active part in the art world. Its founder, Charles Tiffany, was a patron of the Metropolitan Museum and a founding member of New York's fine arts society. His son, Louis Tiffany, was one of the central artists of American Art Nouveau. Know the Tiffany lamps? 🙂

In Tiffany's Fifth Avenue flagship you will find an especially impressive art collection, including the famous Basquiat painting from the Beyonce and Jay-Z campaign. Alongside it are works by leading American artists such as James Turrell (who truly deserves a post of his own), Rashid Johnson, and more.

The interplay between art and fine jewelry does not stop at Tiffany. The Italian house Bulgari also boasts a close bond with the art world. As of this year the company has become an official partner of the Venice Biennale, it supports young artists, and it contributes substantially to the preservation of antiquities in Rome.

But the most intriguing connection is to the Pop artist Andy Warhol. Bulgari's jewelry of the 70s and 80s was directly influenced by Pop Art, and Warhol himself was obsessed with the brand and an avid collector of jewelry. He once said: “When I'm in Rome, I always visit Bulgari. It is the most important museum of contemporary art.” It is an interesting statement, because it unsettles the separation we usually make between art, design, fashion, and objects of desire. For Warhol, those boundaries were blurred anyway.

Another connection to art lives at Chanel. Coco Chanel was an obsessive collector of art and antiques. Her legendary Paris apartment was filled with art and cultural objects she collected. In that era, collecting art and objects from the East was considered the height of cultural sophistication and was a significant part of the influences on Western modernism, a phenomenon that began in the 19th century and continued deep into the 20th. That eclectic taste is present in Chanel's jewelry space today: part of the collection is displayed in the public space open to visitors, and part is reserved for private clients in the intimate rooms on the upper floor.

It may sound surprising, but perhaps it only proves that art, design, and luxury have always been interwoven.

Were you surprised by the connection between the two worlds? 💎🖼️

A short anecdote: Warhol once offered Nicola Bulgari, grandson of the house's founder, several of his paintings in exchange for Bulgari jewelry. Bulgari refused, and years later admitted it was the worst deal of his life 😅 Which is why, when the store reopened in 2017, three Warhol prints were hung in the VIP area.

🎶 Clinamen | Celeste Boursier-Mougenot at Park Avenue Armory 🎶

Tomorrow, one of the most hypnotic and talked about works of recent years opens in New York: Clinamen by the French artist, musician, and composer Céleste Boursier-Mougenot.

At the center of the installation stand enormous basins filled with water, on whose surface float hundreds of white ceramic bowls. A gentle current moves them slowly, and when they meet one another they produce delicate, unexpected sounds. These acoustic chimes, without any performer's intervention, are the very heart of the work; a true symphony of the moment, unfolding with the flow of invisible waves.

In this work, sound becomes living material and the visitor is invited to take an active part in the experience. The work's title, Clinamen, is taken from Epicurean physics and describes the random swerve of atoms, an idea that mirrors the ever changing nature of the installation. Every movement of the water creates a new encounter between the bowls, and every encounter gives birth to a different sound. In this way a living symphony is built, one that never repeats itself.

The work continues Boursier-Mougenot's long engagement with the border between art, music, and sensory experience. Everyday objects take on a new role here, and sound becomes genuinely sculptural material. Visitors are invited to wander through the space, slow down, and give themselves over to a moment in which time feels almost suspended.

In the new version presented at Park Avenue Armory, the installation fills the enormous Drill Hall and turns it into an acoustic, meditative landscape in which water, ceramics, architecture, and human presence meet in a delicate, ongoing dialogue.

📍 Park Avenue Armory, New York
📅 June 10 through August 26, 2026

This is one of those works that is hard to explain in words! You simply have to be there, listen, and drift. ✨

A recommended experience for kids too! 😊

This time I am taking us a little closer to home, to the town of Montclair, half an hour from us.

At the Montclair Art Museum, more than one hundred works from the private collection of Ann and Mel Shaffer are on view these days, a couple who collected contemporary art for more than four decades. But what makes this exhibition special is not only which artists are on the walls, but the way the art is displayed.

Serious art collectors usually own far more works than can be displayed at home, and rotate them from time to time. With the Shaffers the story is different. Over the years they acquired works that intrigued them, challenged them, or moved them, and not necessarily ones that matched market trends. Above all, they always lived with their art. They did not keep it in storage or hide it behind glass, they wove it into everyday life.

That is also why the exhibition does not feel like a typical museum show. The curatorial choice is clear from the very first moment: there are almost no labels or texts on the walls. Deliberately. That is what the Shaffers' home looks like too. The works are arranged according to how they were placed in the rooms of the house, and chairs are scattered through the gallery spaces, inviting visitors to stop, sit, and look. At moments you feel less like a museum visitor and more like a guest in a home full of art.

What stayed with me from the visit is the idea that art is not something you save for a special day. It is part of life itself. And although it is hard to ignore the monetary value of some of the works in the exhibition, collecting art is not reserved for the wealthy. It can begin with a photograph by a local artist you love, a small print you bought on a trip, or even a find in a neighborhood antique shop. The point is not prestige, but surrounding yourself with things that awaken emotion, thought, and curiosity in you. ✨

What not to miss in the exhibition?

🖼️ Untitled #408 by Cindy Sherman (2002), a work from a pivotal period in the career of one of the most influential artists of her generation.

🖼️ A 2018 work by Nick Cave, in which a bronze head is joined to a pile of United States flag shirts. One of the strongest presences in the exhibition.

🖼️ Jimmy Paulette and Misty in a Taxi, NYC by Nan Goldin (1991), a photograph that stays with you long after you leave the room.

If you are making the trip, it is worth combining it with a stroll through Montclair itself. ☕️ It is one of the most charming towns in New Jersey, with small galleries, cafes and restaurants, and a creative atmosphere you can feel on almost every corner.

A small tip: 📚 public library cardholders in our area can enjoy free museum admission for 2 adults, with children free.

📅 The exhibition is open through June 28, 2026

Continuing the critical conversation around the question "What is art?", it is hard to ignore the exhibition of one of the artists who, it can fairly be said, influenced the art world more than any other artist of the 20th century: the French American artist Marcel Duchamp. With thinking that was groundbreaking and radical for its time, Duchamp paved the way to a new era of creative freedom whose echoes are felt to this day. Through a wide ranging retrospective of some 300 works spanning six decades of creation, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) traces the path of an exceptional artist who chose not to belong to the artistic movements active around him, but to shape for himself a unique and independent artistic language.

Duchamp is identified above all with his readymades, everyday objects taken out of their original context and presented as art. The most famous of them is Fountain from 1917, a urinal submitted to an exhibition under a pseudonym, which changed the philosophical discourse around art from its foundations. The work raised deep questions about the boundaries of the medium, the role of the artist, the concept of originality, and the way we define a work of art.

Although the exhibition sets out to examine the scope of Duchamp's work in an almost research-like manner, a kind of vast laboratory, at times it feels as if its curators seek to re-present the figure of the artist more than to offer a new interpretation or a significant discovery about him. I especially liked the decision to include his early paintings, among them Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2) from 1912, since many people are unaware that Duchamp began his path as a painter. That said, I felt the absence of his kinetic and motion based works, which stood on the seam between object, movement, and perception, and expressed one of the central ideas of his art: art as experience, not only as object.

And still, the chance to see together such a broad body of work by one of the most influential and enigmatic artists of the 20th century makes this exhibition well worth your time.
On view through August 22, 2026.

If May marks the opening shot of New York's art season, June is the crown jewel for art lovers everywhere. The city's iconic museums and innovative galleries open their most intriguing and ambitious exhibitions, and the whole city floods with visual culture at its best ✨

One museum that deserves a post of its own is the Guggenheim, where the exhibition Pop: From the 1960s to Today opens on June 5. As its name suggests, the exhibition examines the ongoing dialogue between iconic Pop works of the 1960s and contemporary pieces acquired over the years, which continue to expand, unsettle, and update the Pop language.

The museum dives into its rich archive and presents works by the giants of the field, among them Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Claes Oldenburg (a Swedish American sculptor known mainly for his environmental sculptures, giant versions of everyday objects. Another central motif in his work is soft versions of rigid objects), alongside groundbreaking contemporary artists like Maurizio Cattelan, to whom I will dedicate a separate post. Through its engagement with media, consumption, advertising, and mass culture, the exhibition revisits fundamental questions: What is art? Where does the line run between high art and popular culture? And what is the museum's role in defining what deserves to be called a work of art?

And as if that were not enough, the exhibition also includes one of Yayoi Kusama's iconic mirror rooms 🪩 an especially immersive, experiential addition that brings an almost infinite dimension of reflection, color, and image into the conversation on visual culture and consumption.

I have no doubt this is going to be a bold, colorful, smart, and experiential exhibition 🎨 and probably the one I am personally most looking forward to seeing in summer 2026.

Last week was one of the historic weeks in the world of the art market. But the sale is not the big story here.

🔨 Number 7A by Jackson Pollock sold at the auction house Christie's for $181.2 million!!! A new record, after Pollock's previous record stood at $61.2 million in 2021. But the story is not the painting. The story is what the sale reveals about the way a great collection is built.

Pollock is the American painter who invented drip painting: painting through movement, pouring paint directly onto the canvas laid on the floor. He shifted the art world's center of gravity from Paris to New York. This painting, from 1948, is one of the peaks of his career.

But the real story is who sold it. Sy Newhouse ran Conde Nast for 40 years and built his art collection on one simple principle: do not buy a lot, buy the best version of every artist he chose, and then do not be afraid to sell it when a better version turns up. He worked closely with the dealer Tobias Meyer for years on end to shape and edit the collection, and together with his wife Victoria invested over $700 million. Since his death, Meyer has been bringing the collection to sale in calculated waves, carefully, so the market is not flooded with iconic works all at once. After this sale, 47 works from the Newhouse collection have brought in over a billion dollars. For comparison: the Paul Allen collection, the largest ever sold, crossed the 1.6 billion mark in 2021. From 155 works. Newhouse: a third of the works, two thirds of the price. That is the result of high quality curatorial work.

christies.com: Jackson Pollock, Number 7A

From a post by ARTernative

When art, big money, and popular culture meet, you get the distilled drama that only the global art market knows how to deliver. This week we received a masterclass in how to turn a modernist sculpture more than a century old into a viral hit, and how a brilliant marketing campaign translates into millions of dollars.

It began with a short promo video produced by the auction house Christie's. On screen: Nicole Kidman, in Louboutin stilettos, striding confidently through the corridors of the company's headquarters, entering a private elevator, and revealing behind white curtains "Danaid" (named for the Danaides of Greek mythology), an iconic 1913 bronze head by Constantin Brancusi. The official goal was to build buzz ahead of the sale of the masterpiece, which came from the private collection of the late media mogul Samuel Irving Newhouse (who acquired it in 2002 for what was then considered a record sum: $18.2 million).

The result? On the evening of the New York auction, the hammer came down at an unfathomable $93 million. With fees and taxes, the final total reached $107.6 million, officially breaking the sculptor's auction record.

This story is a reminder that great art never operates in a vacuum; it lives, responds, and holds a dialogue with contemporary culture. It is a precise marketing move that brings us back, once again, to the conversation about the connections (fascinating, but not only that) taking place at the meeting point of history, art, contemporary culture, and big money.

Want to watch the video? Here is the link: youtu.be/nMDlal5tQP8

May is the biggest month for art in New York. New York's big art fair week closed last week, with fairs like Frieze Art, home to the city's biggest and most powerful galleries, intriguing fairs like NADA (New Art Dealers Alliance), a fair dedicated to young galleries, new voices, and experimental contemporary art, and the Independent Art Fair, a more intimate fair focused on curated presentations and quality solo shows. But the city is still full of exhibitions very much worth seeing.

The Frick Collection · Gainsborough

🎨 For lovers of classical art, The Frick Collection presents Gainsborough: The Fashion of Portraiture, which explores the connection between Thomas Gainsborough's portraits and fashion, status, and visual culture in 18th century England. A beautiful exhibition of stunning portraits, on view through May 25. In general, this is one of my favorite museums in the city, and it holds several masterpieces of art history. An impressive achievement for a relatively small museum.

The Metropolitan Museum · Costume Art

👗 And speaking of fashion, at The Metropolitan Museum of Art the spring exhibition has opened in the new Conde Nast galleries. Costume Art, from the museum's fashion department, sets out to examine the relationship between fashion and art through "the dressed body," presenting historical and contemporary garments alongside paintings, sculptures, and objects from the museum's collections. It is an especially impressive exhibition even for those who would not call themselves "fashion people," because it deals not only with clothes but with identity, body, representation, and visual culture. On view through January 10, 2027.

🖼️ The selection in the galleries right now is so good that narrowing it down was a very hard task, but here are the exhibitions I believe you must see!

Gagosian · Helen Frankenthaler

Gagosian presents one of the leading artists of 20th century American abstraction, Helen Frankenthaler, with 20 of her largest and boldest paintings. On view through July 2.

Hauser & Wirth · Firelei Báez

At Hauser & Wirth, among my favorite galleries in the city, are works by the Dominican artist Firelei Báez, known for layering fantastical figures over colonial maps and historical documents, and for the first time she will also show bronze sculptures. Through July 31.

David Zwirner · Gerhard Richter

At David Zwirner you will want to see the Gerhard Richter exhibition, one of the most expensive living artists in the world, with his blurred photorealist paintings alongside his abstract works. Today, Christie's holds an auction of the collection of the gallerist Marian Goodman, who passed away this past January at 97 and left behind an especially impressive art collection. Seven Richter paintings will be offered, and we may see a new record for the world's most expensive living artist.

Nino Mier Gallery · Jess Allen

Nino Mier Gallery presents Suspending Time by Jess Allen. Allen creates quiet, intimate figurative paintings, with figures, shadows, and psychologically charged spaces that feel almost cinematic. The feeling is of a moment between memory, introspection, and a sense of suspended time. On view through June 13.

Hello to everyone joining 👋

For those who don't know me, I am Stav Theodor-Kimhi, an art curator and advisor. I moved to Tenafly a year and a half ago with my husband and our two boys (5 and 7), and since then I keep discovering, again and again, how rich, intriguing, and endless the art scene in our area is.

I opened this group to bring some order and share the things that are truly worth knowing, without feeling you have to follow a million places or drown in information.

Every week I will share recommendations here for exhibitions, gallery openings, public installations, art fairs, museum events (for kids too), and anything that looks interesting and worth going out for. Sometimes it will be a long list, sometimes one precise recommendation, and we will see together where it goes 🙂

In the summer I will also share art recommendations in Israel, for anyone hopping over on a home visit 🇮🇱

Happy you are here, and the first post is on its way soon 🚀