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Ina van Zyl paints the human body, plants, flowers and everyday objects in muted tones. Those subdued colours give her canvases a remarkable density and power. She also writes graphic novels, and her work reflects the paradoxes of South Africa, her native country. She was born in 1971 in Ceres and trained at the fine arts school of the University of Stellenbosch. Her first comic strips appeared in Bitterkomix, a South African comic launched in 1992. That underground background shows in her mix of drawing, painting and storytelling. In 1995 she left for the Netherlands on the Thami Mnyele grant,...

Ink and Experiment: The New Graphic Art of Groningen In the early 1900s, Groningen was not the first city that came to mind when people talked about modern art. Amsterdam and Paris got the headlines. But in this northern city, a quiet revolution was happening on the printing press. The best-known figure is Hendrik Nicolaas Werkman (1882-1945). He ran a commercial print shop and made his living with ordinary jobs like letterheads, brochures and invitations. Yet he treated type, ink and paper as materials to play with, not just tools. In the 1920s he began making what he called druksels:...

Groep Scorpio. Every art scene has its gatekeepers. In the early 1960s, a group of Amsterdam-based artists decided they’d had enough of them. Groep Scorpio was a Dutch group of artists who, in the early sixties, rebelled against how artists were given the chance to exhibit in the Netherlands, particularly in Amsterdam’s art centre. The group was active from 1962 to 1966 and put forward “revolutionary” ideas about art politics. So this was about more than a shared style. It was about who gets seen, and on whose terms. Scorpio started in Amsterdam in 1962 with nine Amsterdammers and one...

Throughout her brief career, Francesca Woodman’s artistic output functioned as an inward-facing investigation, transforming her own persona into the central, spectral figure of her work. Photography served as an instrument for psychological excavation; she occupied the dual roles of subject and lens, haunting the private spaces she inhabited. With a maturity that transcended her years, she navigated complex inquiries into bodily existence, gender identity, and human finitude, driven by a profound, almost moth-like compulsion toward her own vulnerability. Her images operate through a striking dualism. Frequently depicted as a fading apparition amidst crumbling interior spaces, Woodman might be found wedged...

A tightly conceived group show built around a deceptively simple premise: black, or the idea of darkness, as a starting point for radically different art-making practices. Its title nodded to the astronomical term for the invisible matter between points of visibility, and, as the poet E.E. Cummings put it, "the wonder that's keeping the stars apart." The roster was formidable — Art & Language, Katharina Fritsch, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Mark Grotjahn, Damien Hirst, Gary Hume, Ellsworth Kelly, Damián Ortega, Ad Reinhardt, Richard Serra, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Gavin Turk, Andy Warhol and Cerith Wyn Evans — spanning generations and continents but united by...