March 10 – April 23, 2023

How two men are rescuing its great antiquities from around the world

The inadvertent downside of novels and films about global warming

March 19 – April 30, 2023

February 26 – May 6, 2023

February 18 – April 16, 2023

March 24 – April 29, 2023

Why the 50-year-old vampire film Ganja & Hess is only now getting its due

The "unusual and stylish" Drops of God is based on a Japanese Manga series

March 4 – April 22, 2023

March 16 – April 22, 2023

From an era-spanning epic to a tale of the super-rich, here are our 2023 picks

Joaquin Phoenix stars in Ari Aster's three-hour sprawl of angst and despair

March 24 – April 29, 2023

March 18 – April 29, 2023

How a violent practice rooted in colonialism is being subverted

Bringing together more than 170 galleries from 36 countries, Expo Chicago hosted its VIP preview on Thursday morning. The fair’s aisles were moderately filled during the first few hours, with a mass of people filling up the Navy Pier during the evening vernissage hours.

Now celebrating its tenth anniversary this year, Expo Chicago made apparent this edition that it is still intent on bringing world-class art and leading curators to the Windy City for a fair experience unlike any other. The fair made good on its promise.

Below, a look at the best on offer during the 2023 edition of Expo Chicago, which runs until Sunday, April 16.

Usually, green screens are temporary placeholders. On set, they stand in for backgrounds or elements that will eventually get replaced with CGI or other footage. But in Will Rawls’s latest project, [siccer], 2023, chroma green predominates.

The project has two parts—a video installation, currently on view at both the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and the Momentary in Arkansas, plus a live performance, premiering at the latter venue on April 21. The green screen’s presence in the performance is especially unusual, as no after-effects can be added live. In the hour-long video, performers move behind green scrims or are cast in green light. It’s easy to imagine them disappearing, but they remain decidedly present.

Below, Rawls talks about the green screen’s meaning. —Emily Watlington

With [siccer], I wanted to make a stop motion film of a dance, which is almost never done! It highlights impossibility of truly capturing a dance. The technique allows you to pause and restart, to tailor what exactly gets captured. It also means the camera operator is kind of dancing with the performer.

Stop motion draws attention to what is missing from an image, and what happens between the frames. The project is very much a product of the pandemic, of continually asking, how do you keep something alive?

A Miriam Cahn painting at Paris’s Palais de Tokyo that incited outrage in France after many claimed it represented pedophilia can stay on view, France’s Council of State said on Friday.

The council’s ruling affirmed a prior decision that a lower court had made in March. The legal matter continued, however, after several children’s rights groups appealed it, forcing a higher court to look once more at the case.

Cahn’s painting, titled fuck abstraction !, appears in her current survey at the Palais de Tokyo, one of the largest solo presentations of her work to date. Her paintings are widely known in the European art scene, with her work memorably appearing in last year’s Venice Biennale.

In the painting, a small figure whose hands are bound is shown kneeling and fellating a larger, more muscular person. Cahn stated that she painted the work in response to atrocities being committed in Ukraine. Specifically, she was reacting to news reports on mass graves in Bucha, as well as the rapes of women and children by Russian soldiers.

“The repetition of violence during wars is not intended to shock but to denounce,” Cahn said.

In February, after a decade-long legal dispute, a French court ordered the Musée d’Orsay in Paris to return a group of Impressionist paintings that were determined to have been illegally sold in Germany during WWII following the death of their original owner, the French art dealer Ambroise Vollard.

The four works returned to Vollard’s relatives as part of the suit are now slated to be sold at auction in France next month—a common outcome for restitution settlements, where the funds raised from public sales of artworks are split among legal heirs, who share ownership.

Two pieces by Pierre-Auguste Renoir—Marine Guernesey (1883) and Judgement of Paris (1908)—Paul Cézanne’s Undergrowth (1890-1892) and Paul Gauguin’s Still life with mandolin (1885) will be offered during a Sotheby’s sale that will take place in New York on May 16.

The Gaugin, which carries the highest estimate of the grouping, is expected to sell for a price between $10 million and $15 million. The remaining three works are valued are prices between $250,000 and $1.5 million.

After his abrupt death in 1939 at the age of 73, Vollard’s estate became embroiled in controversy after evidence came to light that some works in his 6,000-item collection had been improperly distributed by his relatives. (Exact records for the sale history of the four works is unclear.)