Drawing from his experience of living within two disparate cultures, Kader Attia has developed a complex, multi-media practice that examines the intricacies of social, historical, and cultural differences across the globe, demonstrating how individual and cultural identity is constructed within the context of political domination and conflict. Often using artifacts, discarded quotidian objects, and wartime ephemera to create poetic installations, Attia transforms the space of a gallery into one of introspection, allowing the viewer to become aware of the complicated and often inaccurate depiction of our multiple histories. 

Nicholas Hlobo is known for his mixed-media canvases, sculpture, performance, and installation works that explore complex identities. He uses metaphorically charged materials such as ribbon, leather, wood, and rubber detritus, which he melds and weaves together to create hybrid objects that are intricate and seductively tactile. Each material holds a particular association with cultural, gendered, sexual, or ethnic identities, forming visual narratives that reflect the various dichotomies present within the artist’s home country of South Africa and around the world.

Tammy Nguyen’s multidisciplinary practice explores the intersections between geopolitics, ecology, and foundational texts across the Western canon, using her unique visual language to intertwine disparate subjects and explore the moral gray areas that permeate global history. Across Nguyen’s work, the tension between her elegant forms and harmonious aesthetics often belies the nature of her non-linear storytelling. The confusion this dissonance creates becomes generative, opening space for reevaluation, radical thinking, and the dislodging of complacency.

Billie Zangewa creates intricate collages composed of hand-stitched fragments of raw silk. These figurative compositions explore contemporary intersectional identity in an attempt to challenge the historical stereotype, objectification, and exploitation of the Black female form. Depicting “daily feminism" is central to her practice, which Zangewa defines as the often-overlooked labor traditionally undertaken by women under the patriarchy. 

Based in Sweden and representing the Nordic countries, Klara Kristalova creates figurative ceramic sculptures that take on hybrid forms. Many of her works incorporate both aspects of the human body and elements of nature, such as animals, insects, flowers, and trees. Infused with uncanny details and observations from her daily life and surroundings, Kristalova’s figures constitute a juxtaposition of scale where minute details reflect the monumental impact of constant change.

Hernan Bas: The Visitors
Ca' Pesaro – International Gallery of Modern Art
May 7–August 30, 2026

Hernan Bas will debut a body of over 30 new paintings in The Visitors. Drawing inspiration from Venice, a city uniquely attuned to tourism and continually shaped by its consequences—and also the site of a recent residency undertaken by the artist—Bas has created a new body of work featuring tourists in scenarios both imagined and real. As these protagonists inhabit a shifting terrain of bucket-list attractions, historic sites, sacred spaces, and more, Bas explores the fundamental disconnection between these ‘visitors’ and the worlds they traverse, exposing the absurdity of iconic clichés of tourism.

David Salle: Painting in the Present Tense
Palazzo Cini - The Gallery
May 6–September 27, 2026

For his exhibition at the Palazzo Cini Gallery, David Salle refocuses a custom-designed AI model on an earlier part of his oeuvre, the Tapestry Paintings (1990–91). In doing so, he highlights painting’s ability to collapse multiple temporal realities onto a single plane; “Everything in painting exists in the present tense,” as he says. The original Tapestry Paintings were based on 18th-century Russian tapestries, which were themselves modelled after 16th- and 17th-century Italian paintings. This layering of art history now comes into contact with Salle’s proprietary AI model.

Erwin Wurm
Museo Fortuny
May 6–November 22, 2026

Museo Fortuny will open Austrian artist Erwin Wurm’s first institutional solo exhibition in Italy with a major monographic show. Best known for his anthropomorphic and uncanny sculptures, Wurm has examined the fundamental tenets of the medium for over 25 years, questioning notions of time, mass and surface, abstraction, and representation. For many decades, Wurm has been using clothes to deal with sculptural issues. On this journey, he has frequently crossed paths with Mariano and Henriette Fortuny.