‘Fiza Khatri⁠: The Beauty You Beheld⁠’
Semiose Project Room, Paris
Until March 15, 2025

Some people (this author included) consider lounging a productive activity. The young Pakistan-born, US-based painter Fiza Khatri may well be among them, based on their soothing paintings currently exhibited at Semiose’s Project Room. Three canvases show figures in different states of physical rest, set among lush plants and flanked by a feline companion. But in Khatri’s scenes, stillness is not equated with idleness: The vegetation’s luxuriance and the cat’s vigilance can be read like allegories of rich inner lives, which require repose to be contemplated, explored, and enjoyed to their fullest extent. For those who may not be interested in such iconological musings, this young artist’s impressive command of color, light, and composition suffices to justify a visit to the gallery. K.C.

‘Chiharu Shiota: The Soul Trembles’
Grand Palais, Paris
Until March 19, 2025

Following its grand reopening, the Grand Palais presents a landmark exhibition of Chiharu Shiota, the Berlin-based Japanese artist who transforms spaces into ethereal landscapes of thread. Known for her immersive installations where wool yarn is used to create intricate narratives around everyday objects, Shiota’s work blurs the boundaries between art and architecture, metaphysics and materiality. Spanning 1,200 m² and created in partnership with Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum, whose director Mami Kataoka curated the project, the show invites visitors to journey through seven monumental installations, alongside intimate drawings and archival pieces that chronicle the artist’s two-decade exploration of dreams, time, and interconnection. P.S.

‘Otto Piene’
Sprüth Magers, Berlin
February 12 to April 5, 2025

Otto Piene’s later works, featured in this exhibition, harness the elemental force of fire to conjure something at once ephemeral and eternal. As a cofounder of the ZERO group in 1957, Piene sought to move beyond the material world, using light, movement, and combustion as tools of transformation. The ‘Fire Paintings’ seen here turn flame into a medium, burning through pigment to create luminous, heat-sculpted forms. Also on view are his ceramic ‘Raster’ wall works, where metallic glazes are pressed through perforated screens onto clay before firing. Like the ‘Fire Paintings’, these ceramics bear the imprint of fire, their surfaces marked by the unpredictability of heat and chemical reaction. Together, the pieces on view suggest a universe in flux, where light and material are transformed into something beyond the visible. A.R.

‘Linder: Danger Came Smiling’
Hayward Gallery, London
Until May 5, 2025

Like all true icons, Linder goes by a single name. The British artist emerged from Manchester’s punk scene in the late 1970s. She quickly made her mark with razor-sharp collages dissecting the economies of capitalist desire – and outré performances as the lead singer of the band Ludus. Almost 50 years on, it is clear that Linder has succeeded where many have failed, harnessing the raw energy of her early work to fuel a decades-spanning career across montage, photography, choreography, film, sculpture, and pretty much everything in between. This major solo show at the Hayward Gallery – astonishingly, her first London retrospective – will prove that Linder’s fierce feminist critique has lost none of its bite. Indeed, as alarming new forms of toxic masculinity continue to surge, her work cuts deeper than ever. C.M.

‘Sam Youkilis: Under the Sun’
C/O Berlin, Berlin
Until May 7, 2025

Widely followed on Instagram, New York-based photographer Sam Youkilis appears in his first institutional show: His now-famous iPhone ‘postcards’ of travels to invariably sunny locations are blown up to fit 2-meter-tall vertical lightboxes that are suspended from the ceiling or mounted on walls in a series of immersive spaces. Youkilis’s short films and images seduce viewers with glowing scenes of sunsets on water, of eccentric locals preparing and drinking cappuccino in Italy, of lovers kissing in a window in Istanbul, and more. The last room may be the most hypnotic: On three adjacent screens, swarms of swallows flutter in the sky above Roman streetscapes. The artist has been hailed as an indexer of the quotidian: one can only dream that everyone’s everyday life was as alluring as Sam Youkilis’s snapshots. K.B.

‘Dennis Morris: Music + Life’
Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris
Until May 18, 2025

Dennis Morris is one of those geniuses who work behind the scenes in the making of legends. Icons of the London music scene passed before his lens: Bob Marley, the Sex Pistols, Marianne Faithfull, and more. The Jamaican-born British photographer found his calling early on and began by documenting the lives of Sikh and Black communities in London. He befriended Bob Marley through a moment of boldness and began to associate with other rising talents of the time. Appointed art director at the Jamaican British label Island Records, he advised artists and helped them create unforgettable images, be it on their album covers or in their intimate moments. In this retrospective, Morris’s first, the Maison Européenne de la Photographie retraces the career of this complete artist who helped write a major chapter in music history thanks to his humility and vision. J.A.

Sylvia Sleigh
‘Every leaf is precious’
Ortuzar, New York
February 12 to April 5, 2025

Does beauty only lie in the eye of the beholder, or could it also be found at the tip of a paintbrush? Sylvia Sleigh’s portraits and allegories from the 1960s and 1970s, on view at Ortuzar in New York City, can certainly make you consider the latter hypothesis. The late Welsh-American artist is primarily known for her reinterpretation of historic nudes, in which male models pose in ways that recall Ingres’s La Grande Odalisque (1814) or Manet’s Olympia (1863). But Sleigh did not limit herself to this motif: she also painted more chaste portraits of friends, her husband, and fellow women from the 1970s New York art world. What underpins Sleigh’s vast yet concise body of work, and the paintings exhibited at Ortuzar, is her ability to make bold formal choices – but never to the detriment of her subjects. As a result, beauty hazily beams off her radiant paintings, like heat from a sofa a lover might have just left after a nap. K.C.