JUNE PLAYLIST
SP LIST: ART EXHIBITIONS & BOOKS
Petra Collins, Star, published by Rizzoli
The Canadian-Hungarian artist and director is renowned for shaping the pastel, dreamy, and raw visual language of 2010s girlhood, pivoting to narrative fiction in this latest project to explore the darker, more unsettling undercurrents of modern celebrity culture, obsessive fandom, voyeurism, and the "violence of being seen".
The book features fictional popstars and their fans in tales of love and dangerous obsession – a cinematic journey of the performers as seen through the eyes of their fans and stalkers, images of performances, rescues, and confrontations, interspersed with letters, conversations, and diary entries.
All pictures by Petra Collins, from the book Star
All pictures by Petra Collins, from the book Star
Paul P, The Fugitive Marvels of Sunset, at Maureen Paley, London
from May 29 to July 25, 2026
For over 25 years, Paul P. has created head-and-shoulders portraits of anonymous young men, appropriating imagery from gay erotic magazines published between the late 1960s and early 1980s — around significant historical moments such as the birth of gay rights and the onset of the AIDS crisis.
Taking the late 19th and early 20th-century "defiant dandies" as his muses, he filters his images onto moody backdrops, twilight scenes and fading light, inspired by the coded visual languages or inflections of James McNeill Whistler, John Singer Sargent, Robert de Montesquiou, and Marcel Proust.
This exhibition bridges historical queer subcultures with 19th-century aesthetics, exploring themes of transience, beauty, and memory through a series of melancholy, delicate paintings and drawing studies. The landscapes and portraits in the show also feature recurring motifs including bats emerging from thick clouds and waves lapping onto darkly lit shores.
Left Untitled, 2025, oil on linen, © Paul P., courtesy Maureen Paley, London
Right Untitled, 2025, oil on linen, © Paul P., courtesy Maureen Paley, London
Left Untitled, 2025, oil on linen, © Paul P., courtesy Maureen Paley, London
Right Untitled, 2025, oil on linen, © Paul P., courtesy Maureen Paley, London
Marie Tomanova, Three Empty Weeks in July, at Harkawik, New York
from Jun 12 to July 11, 2026
This is the Czech-born, New York-based photographer’s first solo show with Harkawik, exploring her work which heavily features themes of identity, youth culture, displacement, and community. Showcasing a discipline of daily self-portraiture, the show features 344 instant photographs made throughout 2022, one each day, with the exception of three weeks in July. Those gaps are not incidental. Rather than marking a failure of the project, the missing images become its most charged element: absences that stand in for what the camera cannot capture, the life that persists beyond the frame, the depth of self that resists inscription.
All pictures by Marie Tomanova, 2022, Unique Fujifilm Instax Square print
All pictures by Marie Tomanova, 2022, Unique Fujifilm Instax Square print
Serena Carone at Perrotin, Marais, Paris
from June 5 to 18, 2026
Step into Carone’s world of eclectic and wonderfully unusual objects, as the contemporary French visual artist showcases her latest experimental approach to sculpture, ceramic installations, and mixed media, in this solo exhibition.
Through enamelled faience sculptures featuring striking trompe-l’œil effects, the artist blurs the boundaries between reality and illusion, transforming everyday objects into visual experiences that are as poetic as they are unsettling.
Left Crash alimentaire 1, 2026, Enamelled faience, Photo by Tanguy Beurdeley, ©Serena Carone/ADAGP, Paris, 2026, Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin
Right Merci pour le chapeau , 2024, Enamelled faience and paint, Photo by Tanguy Beurdeley, ©Serena Carone/ADAGP, Paris, 2026, Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin
Left What I see, green eyes, Resin, plaster, oil, Photo by Tanguy Beurdeley, ©Serena Carone/ADAGP, Paris, 2026, Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin
Right Pieuvre 1 , 2026, Enamelled faience, Photo by Tanguy Beurdeley, ©Serena Carone/ADAGP, Paris, 2026, Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin
Christopher Anderson, Index, published by Stanley Barker
This is a visual tome for the eyes and senses, featuring a wide-ranging body of work spanning nearly three decades, including hard-hitting war zone images, street photography from China, a fascination with cars, tender moments on family holidays, Donald Trump and a recent portfolio of the president’s inner circle.
From Anderson’s early images in Afghanistan, where he was already working as a journalist on 9/11 to the second Gulf War and Haiti, where he boarded a wooden boat with hopeful migrants bound for America until it began to sink, a story that earned him the Robert Capa Gold Medal. Designed as 11 volumes housed in a slipcase by the acclaimed artist Brian Roettinger, it’s a visual experience which defines events and fleeting intimacies that shaped the first decades of the millennium.
All pictures by Christopher Anderson, from the book Index
All pictures by Christopher Anderson, from the book Index
Steven Shearer, My Moody Muse, at David Zwirner, London
from 5 June to 31 July, 2026
This highly anticipated show marks the artist's first solo exhibition in London since 2007. Coinciding with London Gallery Weekend, the exhibition features a major debut of new figurative oil paintings, a selection of drawings, and significant loans.
Shearer’s creative practice is celebrated for seamlessly wedding canonical art history with contemporary subcultures and digital imagery.
Centred around an exploration of portraiture, Shearer's visual language synthesises historical art movements like Symbolism, Romanticism, and the Renaissance with contemporary imagery drawn from his vast personal archive of over 36,000 downloaded graphics. His subjects often recall 1970s youth icons, metalheads, and existential, brooding characters reminiscent of Edvard Munch's compositions. The show will also include brand-new, intricately detailed figurative oil paintings shown alongside a carefully chosen grouping of drawings.
Steven Shearer's studio, taken by the artist. Vancouver, Canada, 2026, © Steven Shearer, Courtesy the artist, Galerie Eva Presenhuber, and David Zwirner
Lillian Bassman and Sheila Metzner, C’est Chic, at La Galerie Rouge
from May 29 to September 19, 2026
Bringing together the works of Lillian Bassman and Sheila Metzner, two of the most influential female figures in 20th-century fashion photography, this exhibition highlights their painterly vision and highly experimental photographic art.
Discovered at Harper’s Bazaar, Bassman imposed a signature aesthetic beginning in the 1940s characterised by soft focus, high-contrast silhouettes, and elongated, fluid forms. In the 1990s, she famously resurrected her career by reinterpreting her old negatives in the darkroom, using bleaching, tissue diffusion, and dynamic exposure techniques to alter the original images.
Metzner is known for her elegant, statuesque, and deeply painterly compositions with a timeless aesthetic, achieved using the rare and intricate Fresson printing process—a carbon-based photographic printing method with a distinct matte, charcoal-like, and impressionistic texture.
Together they embody an artistic freedom liberated from the commercial objectives of fashion, distinguished by a sensitive and pictorial approach to printing.
Left Sheila Metzner, Rosemary. Bracelets, 1985
Right Sheila Metzner, White Tulip, From life, 1998
Left Sheila Metzner_Fashion, From Life, 1988 © Sheila Metzner _ Courtesy La Galerie Rouge, Paris
Right Top Sheila Metzner_Odalisque, 1986 © Sheila Metzner _ Courtesy La Galerie Rouge, Paris
Right Bottom Sheila Metzner_Joko Passion, From Life, 1985 © Sheila Metzner _ Courtesy La Galerie Rouge, Paris
Text by Kate Lawson