Rene Matić in conversation with Bianca Stoppani; Josiane M.H. & Emily Pozi; Olivia Kan-Sperling in conversation with Jamieson Webster; Olivia van Kuiken by P. Eldridge; Tasneem Sarkez by Leo Cocar; focus on Mexico City: El Desagüe by Luis Ortega Govela; alfatih in conversation with Jazmina Figueroa; Ruoru Mou in conversation with Olivia Aherne; Adam Patrick Grant by Michela Ceruti; Siyi Li by Margaret Kross; Ruofan Chen by Matthew Lawson Garrett; Megan Mi-Ai Lee in conversation with Marie Catalano; Tommy Xie in conversation with Moa Jegnell; davi de jesus do nascimento by Mateus Nunes; a visual essay by Zora Sicher (words by Rose Higham-Stainton); reviews: "to ignite our skin" SculptureCenter, New York by Qingyuan Deng; Basel Abbas and Rouanne Abou-Rahme "Prisoners of Love: Until the Sun of Freedom" Nottingham Contemporary by Amy Jones;
Gerhard Richter Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris by Siobhan O'Leary; Eleanor Antin "A Retrospective" Mudam, Luxembourg by Andreas Schlaegel;
Cyprien Gaillard "Wassermusik" Haus der Kunst, Munich by Philipp Hindahl; Tobias Pils "Shh" mumok, Vienna by Frank Wasser;
Lutz Bacher "Burning the Days" Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo by Sonja Teszler...
We seem to pass through eras faster than we can name them, moving from one aesthetic threshold to the next long before we've had time to understand the last. In this continual churn, labels dissolve almost as soon as they appear, leaving us suspended in a state of cultural overexposure, where every "new wave" is both urgent and already outdated. "The z issue" emerges from this condition of perpetual motion: a moment to consider how art is shaped when time feels accelerated, identities feel fluid, and generational markers blur at the edges. Rather than searching for a definitive term to encapsulate the present, we turned to the artists who are living it most intensely—those under the age of thirty whose practices reveal an era not defined by a singular style but by a restless negotiation between authenticity and sacrifice, solitude and collaboration, the physical and the digital. Their work does not describe the times; it metabolizes them.
The winter issue gathers five cover stories that chart the shifting textures of a generation in motion. Rene Matić—photographed by Benedict Brink in their studio at Studio Voltaire in London, dressed in Kiko Kostadinov—joins Bianca Stoppani in a conversation in which love, memory, and disruption thread through reflections on belonging and faith. From the ferocity of This Is England to tender "beyond repair" Black dolls and self-portraits, they discuss how Matić turns political fracture into a search for the closest thing to freedom. Josiane M. H. Pozi, who created a new artwork titled in my home, in my studio, for flash art! (2025) for the occasion, moves between Nasra Abdullahi's lucid review of her show at Carlos/Ishikawa, London, and the bedroom play-script she performs with her sister Emily, until their voices merge into a single consciousness—a choreography of getting ready, in which clutter becomes ritual and attention becomes devotion. In New York, Olivia van Kuiken—photographed by Ian Kenneth Bird and wearing New Balance—anchors her cover story within P. Eldridge's exploration of how bodies, seams, and multiplied limbs smuggle duration into stillness. Through refusal, mess, and provisional meaning, Eldridge traces an ethics of looking where delay becomes the real timekeeper. Olivia Kan-Sperling, captured by Diane Severin Nguyen in New York wearing Commission, meets psychoanalyst Jamieson Webster on the shared terrain of modernism and psychoanalysis: dissolving narratives, unstable identities, and the hysteric's slippery relation to language. Calling her writing practice "hysteric literature," Kan-Sperling turns bad English, Orientalist kitsch, and fanfic desire into tools of self-sabotage and revelation, exposing the traps of authorship and representation. The final cover features Tasneem Sarkez—photographed by David Brandon Geeting in her New York studio, wearing Kuboraum eyewear and Stone Island—whom Leo Cocar frames as an artist who treats images like linguistic seeds: compressed objects and portraits behaving as morphemes of cultural meaning. Working in the gaps of translation shaped by her Libyan heritage and the Arab diaspora, Sarkez lets drabness flicker between specify and universality, withholding and revealing in equal measure.
This issue comes with different covers, randomly distributed.
Flash Art is a contemporary art and culture magazine founded in 1967. Within a decade, it became an indispensable point of reference for artists, critics, collectors, galleries, and institutions. In 2020, Flash Art became a quarterly publication, at the same time increasing its trim size and updating its graphic identity. The magazine offers a fresh perspective on the visual arts, covering a range of transdisciplinary approaches and fostering in-depth analyses of artist practices and new cultural directions. Today, Flash Art remains required reading for all who navigate the international art scene.
Flash Art is known for it covers featuring artists who subsequently become leading figures in the art world. The magazine includes photoshoots, productions, critical essays, monographic profiles, conversations with emerging and established artists, and a range of ongoing and thematic columns that change every few years. The long history of the magazine is also highlighted by pivotal texts from the archive that are included in the publication time to time. Finally, every issue offers a highly curated selection of the best institutional exhibitions on the global scene.
