RODEO GALLERY

The eighty-second edition of the Whitney Biennial—the longest-running survey of contemporary art in the United States—features work of 56 artists, duos, and collectives that reflects the current moment and examines various forms of relationality, including interspecies kinships, familial relations, geopolitical entanglements, technological affinities, shared mythologies, and infrastructural supports. Whitney Biennial 2026 offers a vivid atmospheric survey of contemporary American art shaped by a moment of profound transition. Rather than offering a definitive answer to life today, this Whitney Biennial foregrounds mood and texture, inviting visitors into environments that evoke tension, tenderness, humor, and unease. Together, the works capture the complexity of the present and propose imaginative, unruly, and unexpected forms of coexistence.

Raw Is the Red by Shahryar Nashat transforms the roof terrace of Aspen Art Museum into a sculptural confrontation framed by the commanding presence of Aspen Mountain. At its center stands a vitrine encasing a ‘meat object,’ an image of raw flesh on powder-coated steel, covered in a translucent layer of acrylic gel. Behind it rises a pink marble obelisk whose scale is that of the artist’s own height. Together, they evoke the body as both physical presence and mental projection, as a carrier of both empathy and distance. This is the second presentation of Raw Is the Red, which was first shown on the Bluhm Family Terrace at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2022. In Chicago, the work appeared against a skyline of glass and steel; in Aspen, it meets snowy inclines and winter skies. This contrast between urban architecture and mountain landscape turns the sculptures into stand-ins for human bodies poised against powerful natural forces. Tones of reds and pinks punctuate the muted winter palette, while mirrored panels fold the environment back into the installation. Raw Is the Red becomes both display and dissection—an image of vulnerability and endurance rendered in sculptural form.

Work tends to emerge in cycles. Fevers, shown here in complete form for the first time at Sylvia’s gallery, marks an endpoint to the last few years’ activity. It is just over 30 minutes long and consists of three distinct chapters. Much of the work happened in the context of different exhibitions and events between 2022 and 2026, working with collaborators and friends: Billy Bultheel, Max Bloching, Steve Reinke and Lucy Beech. Sometimes these took the form of curated evenings bringing together artists and performers; other times, they appeared as looped materials shown within larger installations. I’ve sifted through a number of recent experiments, reworking them into this longer-form piece, setting the parts within a larger structure so that an overall dramaturgy takes shape. It’s a pleasure to retrospectively carve a sense of inevitability into otherwise scattered forms, allowing the recurring preoccupations to chime. The last few years have been brutal: consuming streamed images of war and genocide, making art and teaching amidst the German state’s bludgeoning doublethink. Arts funding across Europe cut to siphon more into defence. Wondering what it means to live from project to project, weaving poetic abstractions while absolute events are piped into our pockets in real time. Spending time with the materials here, I sense this manifesting as pressure, and at other times as a vacuum-flask brittleness. In convening Fevers, I found a rhythm emerged through this alternating. Throughout the work, I kept going back to this sense of physically emphasised looking. The first part of the video brings together two classic art-house references, both rooted in the primal urge to inscribe presence through absence: a 4K animated remake of The Flicker (1966) by Tony Conrad and my own rough English translation of Les Mains Négatives ( Negative Hands, 1978) by Marguerite Duras. Originally made on 16mm film, Conrad’s work is based on three rudimentary elements—a title frame, a black frame, and a white frame—reducing cinema to its most elementary principle: alternating fields of light and darkness. The text speaks of the caves of the Magdalenian period, more than 15,000 years ago, where humans placed their open hands against granite walls and blew pigments around them to leave behind outlines. These stencilled silhouettes are more voids than representations—negative impressions where the body briefly pressed itself into the world before disappearing. The pigment records not the hand, but its removal. Overlaid with the subtitles, the harsh pulse of the flicker pushes the eye away, while the overlaid text pleads for an absolute intimacy. In another passage, the camera glides slowly over a vast surface—a landscape of stone, a massive rock formation, a cave wall, its scale impossible to grasp. Like seeing human likenesses in the clouds or moon, at various points the cracks and potholes form faces, sometimes clear, sometimes obscured. It is inspired by the photographer Brassaï’s 1950s photographs of graffiti-covered walls in Paris: anonymous incisions etched into urban surfaces that, for him, had come to replace nature in the modern city. The orphaned marks map out an urban unconscious. After the austerity of these formal passages, the second half of the video becomes richer and thicker. It’s made with a “back to basics” found-footage approach that I like to turn to when working on more logistics-heavy projects. Craving a kind of sketchbook-like impunity, I sit at my desk, gathering found scraps of sound and image, and rework them—teasing out surprises and collisions, improvising reams of material that are then channeled and edited much later. I’ve wanted this piece to feel like a fever dream. Unfolding restlessly: surfaces fracture and accumulate, distortions multiply, each image, already marked by prior manipulations, folds into the next. Throughout the work, gestures recur and unravel—a choreography that persists through its own disintegration. The feverish figure resides not in resolution, but in the constant negotiation of visibility, where coherence slips away even as it briefly assembles. And in the end, a procession of flickering eyes remains: aperture, wound, passage. An unresolved flurry where the body yields to vision, vision opens onto disappearance, and the image is swallowed.

Kunsthalle Wien presents the first exhibition in Austria by Guglielmo Castelli (b. 1987, Turin). The exhibition at Karlsplatz comprises an entirely new body of work including painting, sculpture and a site-specific mural. Trained in theatrical scenography, Castelli has developed a distinctive iconography that draws upon the history of painting, architecture and literature. His compositions are characterised by an earthy, nocturnal palette and a fluid, dreamlike quality that is often difficult to locate in space and time. Sweet Baby Motel presents seven paintings on canvas, each centred on a single figure who often appears weightless or enigmatically suspended in space. Limbs bisect compositions, imitating or morphing into scissors, both a recurrent motif and artistic tool within Castelli’s practice. Spotlit and costumed with harlequin prints, tights, puffed sleeves, gloves and ruffs, his subjects resemble the characters of a theatrical production, caught in a moment of reverie or quiet contemplation. Glimpses of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Hunters in the Snow (1565) or a patchwork of façades that recall the architecture of Friedensreich Hundertwasser add a Viennese accent to these compositions which are installed upon a 22-metre-long painted mural especially conceived for this exhibition. Inspired by the German fairytale Hansel and Gretel, it unfolds in the style of a story book, while remaining conscious of the movement and gaze and the different perspectives available within the space. At the centre of the mural, where the feet of the two protagonists meet, Castelli depicts an upturned gingerbread house, questioning preconceived narratives around hierarchy and control. The exhibition is accompanied by a new publication featuring texts by Sarah Crowe and Lillian Davies, as well as an interview with the artist by Francesco Manacorda. Published by Lenz, Castello di Rivoli and Kunsthalle Wien, the publication will be available from the end of March. The exhibition is organised in collaboration with Castello di Rivoli Museo d‘Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli-Turin.

For Condo London 2026, Sylvia Kouvali is delighted to host MATTA, presenting work by the artistic duo the back studio, alongside Lilith: Portrait of the Artist on Fire (2001), a sculptural work by pioneer artist Liliane Lijn. Based between Turin, Italy, and Mumbai, India, the back studio consists of artists Eugenio Rossi and Yaazd Contractor. The duo is known for a multifaceted and deliberately difficult-to-categorise practice that operates in a conceptual borderland, resisting fixed definitions and embracing ambiguity. Their work is immediately legible yet ultimately elusive, revealing itself through material tension and formal contradiction. the back studio’s production combines elements of industrial construction with hand-blown glass, resulting in seamless assemblages that blur distinctions between sculpture and functionality. Drawing inspiration from figures such as Franz West, Donald Judd, Bruno Munari, and Dan Flavin, the duo adopts an eclectic visual language shaped by West’s experimental ethos, Judd’s essentialism, Munari’s playfulness, and Flavin’s engagement with light. The result is a unique visual language that positions itself in a grey area between sculpture, conceptual art, and design. Central to the back studio’s unique practice is a sustained attention to overlooked details and the re-evaluation of common objects. By reconfiguring form and function, their works generate unexpected relationships between utility and aesthetics. This conceptual openness extends to the viewer’s experience: many of the duo’s installations invite physical interaction, positioning the audience as an active participant and integral component of the work, encouraging reflection, interpretation, and critical engagement. Presented alongside the back studio is Lilith : Portrait of the Artist on Fire (2001) by London-based, New York born Liliane Lijn. The work is a deeply personal and mythologically charged sculptural work that draws upon the ancient figure of Lilith to explore themes of autonomy, rebellion and transformation.

The exhibition presents works that go against data and take the form of ghosts and clouds. Reality is being hijacked and messed by unknown sources and attitudes of the machine that challenge notions of truth and (historical) accuracy. Digitisation has become a process of dematerialisation and disembodiment that has left us with hollow shells and emptiness of things.

The animal wrests the whip from its master and whips itself in order to become master. Franz Kafka The works in this exhibition go against data and take the form of ghosts and clouds. Reality is being hijacked and messed by unknown sources and attitudes of the machine that challenge notions of truth and (historical) accuracy. Digitisation has become a process of dematerialisation and disembodiment that has left us with hollow shells and emptiness of things. Information has been sucking us constantly and this exhibition presents phantom like objects and paintings or traces that look like paintings, that tell stories, represent human life and even though full of texts they are not permeated by information. No matter how information wants to believe it is in itself knowledge, the truth is that information devours knowledge, because it is consuming the possibility of mechanisms that create and allow space for memory and the most important of them all, physical experience amongst other perceptive practises of the brain. The works selected here are seeming surfaces within which other stories lie within and what is seen and narratives are hidden in the form of image, sculpture or sound.