Katie White

1 week ago | news.artnet.com | Katie White

The artist Lucia Wilcox lived a life with the trappings of great cinema, but hardly anyone has ever heard of her. She was born in 1899 and raised in Beirut, and at the age of 22 she moved to Paris, where she partied with Surrealists. In 1938, with the winds of war in the air, she fled to the U.S, arriving in New York. She bought a house in the Hamptons, where she situated herself, becoming a doyenne among a generation of expatriate Surrealist artists fleeing Europe. She married three times.

1 week ago | news.artnet.com | Katie White

A pregnant woman stands, naked, wearing only a red kerchief tied over her head, her long blonde hair visible beneath it. Her blue eyes look out from the canvas with alert intensity. In her hand, low near her round belly, is a paintbrush poised between her fingers—she is an artist paused in the act of painting. The image, a self-portrait by Swiss artist Irène Zurdinken (1909–1987), is startling in its frankness. That it was painted in 1937 only adds to its radicality.

2 weeks ago | news.artnet.com | Katie White

In Alexandra Metcalf’s artistic imagination, the Victorian and the psychedelic collide with dark histories of women’s psychiatric facilities“I’m obsessed with madness,” said Metcalf on a call from her studio in Berlin. “I was reading so much about Bedlam and the history of the asylums. I wanted to make something reminiscent of that, especially given London’s rich history.”Metcalf, who was born in the U.K. and raised between London and Florida, is a rising artist on everyone’s lips lately.

2 weeks ago | news.artnet.com | Katie White

Marley Freeman was sitting in the back room of Karma’s Chelsea gallery, ready to talk. Her newest paintings, fresh and energetic abstractions ranging in scale from the hand-held to the totally epic, leaned on the pristine white walls of the gallery, about to be installed for “no when,” her anticipated new show with the gallery (now on view through July 18, 2025). We weren’t there to talk about her paintings, though—at least not yet. Instead, Freeman began pulling antique textiles from a bag.

3 weeks ago | news.artnet.com | Katie White

If Swiss-born textile artist Silvia Heyden had had her way, she would have been a violin maker. Born in Basel in 1927, she was an avid violinist even as a child. While still a girl, she decided she wanted to learn to make the object that brought such beauty into her life, but she was born too soon for that life course. “Her dad took her around to a few violin makers. They said, ‘Oh, this is nothing for a girl or a woman.