Vandalized Modernism, Creatures With a Warning

Welcome to The Daily Art Download—your daily update on all of the art world news you need to know… I'm your host Percival Doodlethorp.
It is Sunday, July fifth, two thousand twenty-six. Let’s dive in.

Today’s first stop is a modernist scandal with a long shadow. A new story follows Canadian sculptor and photographer Lorna Bauer as she revisits the legacy of E-1027, the modernist villa Irish designer Eileen Gray built on the French Riviera with dashes of input from her lover, Romanian architect and critic Jean Badovici. Bauer’s exhibition “Maison en Bord de Mer,” at New York’s Trotter&Sholer, draws on her 2017 visit, when she photographed the house and noticed a prominent “Le Corbusier” sign that made her ask who was getting credit. The article recounts how Le Corbusier painted murals inside a decade after it was built—murals Gray called vandalism in 1952—and how Bauer’s glass and photo works play with memory, reflection, and the shifting viewpoint of the viewer.

Staying with urgent contemporary feeling, Hyperallergic spotlights Akira Ikezoe, whose cartoonish frogs, bears, raccoons, and monkeys carry heavy ideas about energy systems, resource extraction, and environmental catastrophe. The piece follows a studio visit in New York, where Ikezoe recalls meeting the writer at the 2023 Rehearsal Art Book Fair and discusses his Baby Recipes series (2022), comic-style guides inspired by “frustrations around raising my three-year-old son.” Ikezoe describes how his meticulously detailed oil paintings draw from flowcharts and blueprints, including works that paired nuclear-plant diagrams from sites of serious accidents with animals native to those ecosystems. He links his thinking to the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, which happened months after he moved to New York in late 2010, and to the unresolved dilemma of toxic waste.

Across the same publication, another Hyperallergic piece looks back to a painter who made the microscopic feel monumental. Charles Seliger got his first solo show at age 19, at Peggy Guggenheim’s The Art of This Century in 1945, making him one of the youngest artists associated with the emergence of Abstract Expressionism. But the article stresses how far Seliger stood from the movement’s usual image: he didn’t work on a large scale, and he wasn’t a gestural or geometric painter. Guided by devotion to nature and Surrealist automatism, he pursued what the story calls an independent, maverick path—one reason he’s often left out of Abstract Expressionism surveys that focus on stylistic similarity. A new centennial show, Charles Seliger: The Structure of Matter, at Hollis Taggart, brings overdue attention to his vision of nature’s invisible structures.

Now to an institution that built a platform when few others would. Hyperallergic revisits the history of Aljira, the Newark nonprofit exhibition space founded in 1983 by Guyanese artists Victor Davson and Carl E. Hazlewood. The article places its origins in the aftermath of the Newark Rebellion of 1967 and notes it was founded just over a decade after Newark’s first Black-owned gallery, Aard Studio Gallery, opened in 1972. Named for an Australian Aboriginal word for “dreamtime,” Aljira championed socially engaged artists critiquing gentrification in Newark, American imperialism, and racial capitalism. Eight years after it abruptly closed due to financial difficulties in 2018, the Newark Museum of Art will mount Dreamtime in Newark: Aljira and the Making of Global Contemporary Art, opening October 15 and running through June 30, 2027, featuring 66 artworks by 43 artists.

From institutional history to studio life, Hyperallergic’s “A View From the Easel” checks in with Arghavan Khosravi in Stamford, Connecticut, where she’s worked in a small loft studio above her townhouse for almost five years. She describes a routine that begins with an espresso shot and a news podcast—often from the New York Times or the Washington Post—followed by reviewing sketches and plans. Depending on the day, she’s either finalizing shaped wood panels in the woodshop or moving into underpainting on primed panels, sometimes switching later to music or a dialogue-heavy show for repetitive labor, and choosing silence for brainstorming. Khosravi says the live/work setup gives her flexible hours and more studio time by eliminating commuting, while a nearby woodshop has made her work more sculptural and experimental. Her favorite local museum is the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum.

Finally, Hyperallergic’s weekly editor’s letter, “Art and Resistance on the Nation’s 250th,” gathers a mix of reflection and headlines under a charged holiday backdrop. Senior editor Valentina Di Liscia writes about mixed feelings around the nation’s 250th birthday “today,” alongside “rays of hope” such as the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold birthright citizenship “this week.” The letter points to John Yau’s review of little-known works by Phillip Guston, noting the influence of Guston’s wife, the artist and poet Musa McKim, and their poetry community. It also highlights Aruna D’Souza’s feature on artists who have upended the meaning of Lady Liberty, including Abigail DeVille’s 2020 work “Light of Freedom,” which reimagines the torch as an outsized symbol of protest.

That’s it for today’s Daily Art Download—links to every story are waiting for you in the show notes. Come back tomorrow for another dose of art-world signals and surprises.