On June 3, Leticia Sánchez Toledo opens Docile Metals and Memory at The Annex Gallery, a series that delves into the material and affective memory of objects. The pieces were conceived from metal trays unearthed on Facebook Marketplace, at Sunday flea markets, and in secondhand venues. They are objects few still wish to keep in their original state — easy to come by, hard to maintain, awkward to place...

A few months ago I wondered in these pages what Macron was getting out of lending the Bayeux Tapestry to the English. Forty thousand French citizens signed a petition to block it, citing textile fragility and, I suspect, a touch of cross-Channel rancour as well. The other question remained: what would the British Museum get out of it.

Now and again, chance weaves a concurrence of circumstances that places us before a window opening onto the past. The opportunity to converse, undistracted, with the Austrian artist Stylianos Schicho was a privilege, since what most interests me in art are the sinews that bind it to whoever produces it.

As a worthy walk-on, more than once I have stood inside a still life: the living scene of a dead nature staged with everyday objects. Between Morandi and Chirico — take your pick of Giorgios — lit by the fierce Miami sun or beneath the drizzle of a summer afternoon, I have slipped into the heart of the anomaly, into the "temple of otherness."

A month ago, during Arte Desobediente Exhibition, I encountered for the first time an artwork by Kerstin Imhoff that has remained with me ever since. It was a visceral piece from her ongoing Bloodline series: a hyperrealistic red vulva rendered in wax-like texture through 3D printing, encircled by a Catholic rosary terminating in a bronze cross. The work was at once devotional and confrontational; an image suspended between martyrdom, sexuality, political violence, and feminine embodiment...

We accept this kind of photograph before we understand it. That is why we are here. They are striking, drawing on the same formal vocabulary inherited from Irving Penn and Richard Avedon, the great schools of studio portraiture on a flat ground. Ever since, we have surrendered to the magic of high contrast, to the shameful retreat of the second plane, of the surroundings, of the context. As though none of that added anything to the emotion or to a denser reading.

The solo exhibition Amazonia, opening on May 22, brings together a body of work produced by Julia out of her sustained engagement with the Shipibo Indigenous community of the Peruvian Amazon. The show is structured around four groups of pieces and combines watercolor and ink on paper, embroidered textile work, installation, and cyanotype...

Influencers and aspiring ones live attentive to whatever happens, eager to reheat it and serve it back to the feeds as if they had just discovered the principle of buoyancy. But few like the man from Syracuse, and very little capable of provoking a genuine eureka.

I suppose that waking up to find the night has birthed a new Banksy is, by now, almost routine. This time, however, something is different. He has literally moved up a step. He has planted a life-size sculpture in one of the most heavily guarded spaces in London. No witnesses.
The piece appeared in the early hours of Wednesday at Waterloo Place, an avenue in central London halfway between Trafalgar Square and Buckingham Palace.