Category: Art
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Sophia Luna Portra
Encounters · No. 8 Snake Skin, Warm Blanket Sophia Luna Portra makes sculptures from muslin and coffee, sings gothic folk songs about transformation, and thinks about clothes the way a philosopher thinks about the self. She is at the beginning of something. By Bergotte A note on this essay: the preceding pieces in this series…
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Asger Jorn
Encounters · No. 7 The Vandal with a Vision Asger Jorn bought other people’s paintings at flea markets and painted over them. He helped invent two of the twentieth century’s most radical movements and then walked away from both. He believed that art was not a product but a way of being alive. He was…
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Mick Rooney, 1944–2026: The Painter of the Human Theatre
The British painter and Royal Academician, whose mysterious, richly coloured pictures transformed ordinary human life into scenes of dream, myth and private theatre, has died. Mick Rooney, the British painter whose strange, densely imagined figurative pictures occupied a distinctive place in British art for more than half a century, has died. Born in 1944, Rooney…
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Peter Max, 1937–2026: The Artist Who Coloured the Counterculture
The German-born American artist, whose ecstatic suns, rainbows, cosmic figures and Day-Glo colours became part of the visual language of the 1960s, has died aged 88. Peter Max, the artist whose brilliant colours, cosmic landscapes and buoyant psychedelic imagery became almost inseparable from the visual culture of the American 1960s, died on 14 September 2026…
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Nan Goldin
Encounters · No. 5 The Ballad Nan Goldin spent decades photographing the people she loved — in bed, in bars, in hospital, in death. Then she turned the same unflinching attention on the family that had helped kill them. By Bergotte There is a photograph taken in 1984 that Nan Goldin has described as the…
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Art in the Wake of September 11
Twenty-five years after September 11, 2001, the attacks remain curiously difficult to assimilate into the history of art. This is not because they lacked images. Quite the opposite. Few historical events have been so comprehensively photographed, televised, replayed and digitally circulated. The second aircraft entering the South Tower, the towers burning against an unnaturally blue…
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Harumi Klossowska de Rola at Villa Kérylos
Culture · Art The Animal Remembers Harumi Klossowska de Rola at Villa Kérylos In a house built from a modern dream of ancient Greece, the Swiss artist’s bronze creatures ask what happens when humanity returns the animal world to the realm of the sacred. By Bergotte Harumi Klossowska de Rola, Chinook (Salmon), 2024, bronze, 28…
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Balthus
Encounters · No. 4 The Count of Nowhere Balthus was one of the greatest painters of the twentieth century and the author of images that remain genuinely, irreducibly disturbing. Both of these things are true. The difficulty is that they cannot be separated. By Bergotte Toward the end of his life, Balthus lived in a…
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See Something – Irving Penn 2026
The Passenger is a weekly dispatch on travel — places, hotels, restaurants, the strange logistics of being elsewhere. See Something Irving Penn is everywhere in 2026. Three cities, three exhibitions, and the case for making a trip specifically to see him Irving Penn directed his models with two words. Not an expression — he was…
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Paris in September: Vincent Beaurin at Galerie Poggi
Vincent Beaurin trained as a silversmith, worked as a designer, blew paint at canvases, and eventually found his way to the disc — the simplest form available, saturated with the colour of the last light before the sun disappears. A retrospective profile ahead of his show at Galerie Poggi.
