MARCH PLAYLIST
SP LIST: ART EXHIBITIONS & BOOKS
Helmut Lang: Séance de Travail 1986–2005 at the MAK, Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna, Austria
from 10 December, 2025 to 3 May, 2026
This is the first comprehensive exhibition of Helmut Lang’s oeuvre, offering a renewed understanding of his contribution to culture. Based on the largest and only official public archive dedicated to his legacy—which has been part of the MAK Collection since 2011—the exhibition provides profound and unprecedented insight into Helmut Lang’s mindset and creative process.
Conceived as a mixed media presentation featuring large-scale, site-specific installations, the exhibition transcends the conventions of a classical fashion and traces how his radical vision in the years 1986–2005 transformed the perception of fashion, identity, and visual communication at a global scale.
With his intermedia approach, Lang challenged both established industry norms and societal conventions, fusing them with a deeply human understanding, and a quietly radical stance grounded in loyalty to character and the courage to experiment. Anticipating ideas long before they entered the zeitgeist, he translated them onto a global stage while maintaining a critical distance from trend cycles, resulting in a body of work that remains conceptually and aesthetically relevant to this day.
Left Helmut Lang, test print of an advertisement featuring “elastic holster tank and cotton knit cut-out glove,” Helmut Lang Collection Hommes Femmes Séance de Travail Défilé # Été 04, backstage photograph by Juergen Teller, MAK Helmut Lang Archive, LNI 1778-4-54. Courtesy of hl-art
Right Backstage Photograph by Juergen Teller, Helmut Lang Collection Hommes Femmes Séance De Travail Défilé # Été 94, Paris, 1993, Depicted person: Thomas Braun, Courtesy of hl-art
Left Backstage Photograph by Juergen Teller, Helmut Lang Collection Hommes Femmes Seance De Travail Defile # Hiver 97/98, Paris
Right Proof for an advertisement, photograph by Juergen Teller, Helmut Lang Collection Hommes Femmes Séance De Travail Défilé # Hiver 94/95, Paris, 1994, MAK Helmut Lang Archive, LNI 566-11-21-2. Courtesy of hl-art.
Rose Wylie, The pictures come first, at Royal Academy, London
from 28 February to 29 April, 2026
Known for her bold, uniquely recognisable compositions, which reveal witty observations and subtly sophisticated meditations on the nature of visual representation itself – Wylie draws inspiration from a vast range of sources.
From ancient cultures and art history, to cinema, literature, celebrity media, and her personal everyday surroundings, this exhibition traces Wylie’s evolution as an artist through thematic rooms that reveal her distinctive visual language and practice bringing together more than 90 works that span several decades. Key works sit alongside new and rarely seen paintings and drawings, offering a view of an artist who consistently favours instinct, scale and visual memory in her raw, humorous, and deeply personal works, and profoundly aware of the world around her.
Snowwhite (3) with Duster, 2018, Oil on canvas, 183.5 × 320 cm, Private collection, © Rose Wylie. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner. Photo: Jo Moon Price
HAND, Drawing as Central, 2022, Oil on canvas, 184 × 402 cm, Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent, © Rose Wylie. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner. Photo: Eva Herzog
Dean Majd, Hard Feelings, at Baxter St at the Camera Club of New York
from 4 February to 2 April, 2026
In the photographer’s own words, “Hard Feelings is a decade long odyssey of the trials of being a young man from New York, centering on my friends from Queens. A decade of chasing ghosts, nocturnal quests for ego death, and masculine rites of passage. A decade of love and loss, glory and gore, feeling everything and nothing, and losing myself just to find myself again. Hard Feelings is a reckoning of the past - it’s time to face my shadow, and I invite you to do the same.”
Left Torn, 2018
Right Bohemian Rhapsody, 2017
Left CJ sleeping (woodstock), 2017
Right Ivan crying in my bedroom, 2021
Dana Lixenberg, American Images, at La MEP, Paris
from 11 February to 24 May, 2026
Through her striking portraits, photographer Dana Lixenberg challenges the myth of the American Dream. This latest show brings together several of her projects and series, including Imperial Courts, an ongoing, evolving body of work. Lixenberg has also lensed celebrities including Tupac Shakur, Ivana Trump, Toni Morrison, Biggie Smalls, and Prince, with her striking photographs seen across publications like Rolling Stone and The New Yorker.
Left Tupac Shakur, 1993, © Dana Lixenberg, Courtesy de l'artiste et de Grimm Amsterdam | London | New York
Right Tish's Baby Shower, 2008, © Dana Lixenberg, Courtesy de l'artiste et de Grimm Amsterdam | London | New York
Left Patricia Miller, 1998, © Dana Lixenberg, Courtesy de l'artiste et de Grimm Amsterdam | London | New York
Right Tanya K and her daughter Kayrah, 2021, © Dana Lixenberg, Courtesy de l'artiste et de Grimm Amsterdam | London | New York
Leonard Baby, Resting Babyface at Villa Carlotta, Los Angeles
from 26 February to 11 March, 2026
This evocative solo exhibition at the famed Villa Carlotta in Los Angeles, invites viewers into an intimate space that blends the familiar terrains of the bedroom and the therapist's office, exploring themes of aftermath and introspection. Each painting is a journey through Baby’s emotional landscape, juxtaposing tenderness and mess, control and collapse, humour and embarrassment. It showcases new paintings by the American artist, created during a period of profound melancholy, encapsulating the essence of vulnerability and the complexities of personal experience.
Known for his unique ability to blend humor and sincerity within his work. Baby draws from his own experiences and emotions, inviting the viewer to explore inwards, and trace their own personal narratives of struggle and introspection. Through painting, Baby transforms personal trauma into a testament to resilience and self-acceptance.
Villa Carlotta itself is a building renowned for its short stays and long feelings, embracing the exhibition in resisting the urge to provide conclusions, but instead linger in the discomfort and ambiguity of lived experiences. This show is a poignant reminder of the beauty found in vulnerability and the human condition. Five paintings, one artist, no resolution.
Looking
Left The Shadow Puppet
Right What a Familiar Feeling, 2025, courtesy of the artist
Robby Müller’s L.A. Polaroids, published by Stanley Barker
The Dutch cinematographer shot this personal collection on an SX-70 camera during his extended stays in Los Angeles in the 1980s, while working on films with Wim Wenders and Alex Cox. Without narrative and characters, the shots focus on the "spaces in between"— motel rooms, beachfronts, and street lights, where natural light and colour emphasise the fragments and vibrations of a city as it once was. This is a visually mesmerising and transportive archive that traces Müller’s thoughts and gaze, while also posing questions about light and stillness.
All pictures by Robby Müller from LA Polaroïds book
All pictures by Robby Müller from LA Polaroïds book
Roe Ethridge’s Rude in the Good Way, published by Loose Joints
This is a study of the ‘impolite in photography’, where the politics of desire and its relationship with the image meet in a bold, seductive sequence, oscillating between commercial glamour, private sexuality, studio play, errant snapshots and Ethridge’s characteristically off-hand, converging style.
Left Myla with Striped Shirt, 2008
Right Lulu with Pink Bow Panties, 2025
Left Self Portrait for Fantastic Man, 2024
Right Dripping Ice Cream on a Parsel Bag, 2025
Barkley L. Hendricks, All is Portraiture, at Marian Goodman, Paris
from 6 February to 4 April, 2026
Throughout his 50-year career, the US artist (1944-2017) drew inspiration from his immediate surroundings to create interdisciplinary works. Even with his talents in portraiture, Hendricks refused to limit himself to a single genre and chose to explore other pictorial avenues, also leaving behind a large body of photographic work. During a formative trip to Europe, photography allowed him to capture and craft his approach to what he observed on a daily basis. This exhibition marks his first show in Europe, weaving together paintings, works on paper and photographs including his pioneering portraits of African American subjects and self-portraits influenced by the great classical painters, all of which shine a light on an artist who never stopped experimenting and never followed trends, whose attentive gaze on the world fed his entire body of work.
Left Untitled (Southfield, Jamaica), c. 2000, Archival inkjet print
Right Untitled (Self-Portrait, Philadelphia, PA), 1968, Archival inkjet print
Left Untitled (New London, CT), 1979, Archival inkjet print
Right Untitled (Southfield, Jamaica), c. 1990, Archival inkjet print
Catherine Opie, To Be Seen, at National Portrait Gallery
from 5 March to 31 May, 2026
This marks the first exhibition in the UK to date of iconic photographer Catherine Opie’s work. Curated in collaboration with the Ohio-born artist, the exhibition will span her three-decade career, exploring representations of home, family, identity, politics and power structures through Opie’s vivid and colourful portrait photographs. Works featured from her groundbreaking career span her first major work, Being and Having (1991), her portraits of LGBTQ+ friends inspired by court painter Hans Holbein, to her Baroque-like portraits of artists.
Left Judie Bamber, 1993 © Catherine Opie, courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles; Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, London, and Seoul; Thomas Dane Gallery
Right AB101 Demonstration, 1991 © Catherine Opie, courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles; Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, London, and Seoul; Thomas Dane Gallery
Flipper, Tanya, Chloe & Harriet, San Francisco, California, 1995 ©Catherine Opie, courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles; Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, London, and Seoul; Thomas Dane Gallery
Texts by Kate Lawson