B-SIDE-ART

The wall looks empty at first — a smear of red ochre, a shadow of plaster gone soft with age. Then the enhanced image sharpens on the screen, and the shadow resolves into numbers. Dots. Bars. A sequence repeating, deliberate, laid down by a hand that knew exactly what it was doing. Somewhere in a Guatemalan jungle, inside a room the Maya themselves buried under mud and rubble twelve centuries ago, a name is about to surface for the first time. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Public Domain — Maya cylindrical vessel, 7th–8th century CE, with painted hieroglyphic text band (Accession 1983.543.3). Thematic illustration only — not from the Xultun site itself. The name reads Sak Tahn Waax — White-chested Fox. It sits beside a formula unlike anything else recovered from the Maya world, one weaving the 260-day ritual count and the 365-day solar year together with the long, wandering cycles of Venus and Mars. Scholars have found Maya artists who signed their work before. They had never found t...

  On a January afternoon in a Chicago gallery, a stainless steel colander tips off a kitchen counter and seems to keep falling past the edge of the canvas. The painting is by Ellen Lanyon, and nothing about it explains itself. A saucepan glints with unease. A vine curls too deliberately near a window. Visitors slow down without quite knowing why. This is representational painting behaving like a held breath, ordinary objects rendered patient and watchful, as if the room itself were about to change its mind. Lanyon painted this vigilance out of the everyday for five decades, until her death in 2013. Lanyon is one of five artists working across the American Midwest whose careers resist a single label or lineage. What links them is not a shared style, a shared decade, or even a shared temperament — it is geography, and not much else. As the Artnet Gallery Network piece profiling them puts it, "There is no through line of what it means to be a Midwestern artist" beyond the fact o...

  Before the dead could pass into the underworld, they needed to speak. That is the belief encoded in one of the more striking finds to emerge from a newly announced excavation at Marina el-Alamein, on Egypt's Mediterranean coast: 24 small gold amulets, each cut into the shape of a tongue and placed in the mouths of the deceased. The idea, practiced widely across Hellenistic and Roman-era Egypt, was practical in its own way — the dead needed a voice to answer the gods of the underworld and, above all, to address Osiris himself, lord of the afterlife and judge of souls. A sheet of gold, tucked between the lips, was thought to grant that voice. Egypt's Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities announced the discovery this week, crediting mission chief Eman Abdel-Khaliq and unveiled by Minister Sherif Fathy. The excavation uncovered 18 tombs at Marina el-Alamein, roughly 100 kilometers west of Alexandria — a site built on the ruins of the ancient city of Leukaspis. Eleven of the tombs a...

  Before the public was let in, a curator walked the empty galleries one more time, checking the sightlines between paintings worth, by one dealer's rough guess, somewhere under ten billion dollars combined. Getting them all into one room had taken Carmen Bambach seven years and a wish list sixty-eight pages long, single-spaced. "Raphael: Sublime Poetry," which just closed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art after a three-month run, was the first exhibition of its kind ever mounted in the United States: more than two hundred works by the Renaissance master, on loan from seventeen Italian institutions and museums across Europe, assembled for a single engagement that will not travel anywhere else afterward. Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain — Raphael, Self-Portrait (ca. 1504–06), Uffizi Gallery, Florence. Raphael himself would have found the scale of the operation almost as strange as the show's opening wall text, which introduces him, in its first line, as "one of th...

  He worked on one corner of the painting for months at a time, building up dots of paint so thin and so many that the surface started to rise off the canvas like relief. It took him nine years. He never finished it. He wasn't allowed to leave the room where he was painting it, and neither was the man he'd already killed with a knife. Richard Dadd began The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke in 1855, inside the criminal lunatic wing of Bethlem Royal Hospital — Bedlam. This July, London's Royal Academy of Arts opens the first major UK survey of his work in over a decade, bringing together more than one hundred pieces under a title that names the place plainly: Beyond Bedlam. Dadd was not, whatever his later reputation suggested, an outsider to the art world. He was a prodigy who entered the Royal Academy Schools at twenty, won medals for draftsmanship, and ran with the same rising painters who would go on to define Victorian art. In 1842 a wealthy patron invited him on a Grand...

Walk into the ground-floor gallery at White Cube's Mason's Yard and you cannot find one place to stand and see everything. The central assemblage — the artists call it a "harmonic percolator" — keeps changing meaning as you move around it. There is no correct angle. That refusal to hold still is not a formal trick. It is close to autobiography. TARWUK is the shared name of Bruno Pogačnik Tremow and Ivana Vukšić, born the same year, 1981, in two different Croatian cities — Zagreb and Dubrovnik — into a country that would not exist by the time they finished growing up. Both came of age during the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s. Since 2014 they have worked as a single artistic entity under one name. They call it, simply, a "condition." The new large-scale canvas anchoring this show — titled, in TARWUK's signature mirrored lettering, MRTISKLAAH_ećšiloduČ (2026) — makes that instability visible on the surface itself. Figures dissolve into one another mid-gesture...