Flash Art #355 – Summer 2026 – The Unsolved

Flash Art's summer issue takes on "the Unsolved." Many readers are just beginning to recover from the chaos and rumble that was the opening of the 61st Venice Biennale, "In Minor Keys." In the weeks that have followed, publications have been awash with think pieces on what to do in the face of the event's highs and lows. Ultimately, we've seen a melancholic heaviness seep into the corners and hues of the art being made in this time of conflict, economic recession, and unrest. In this summer edition, the artists and writers don't attempt to provide a solution. Rather, their work is a kind of exploratory lens on the world, one that looks at the ways we've unraveled without attempting to put it back together.
On the cover, Lotus L. Kang—who presents The Face of Desire is Loss in the Bvlgari Pavilion in the Giardini—appears in her studio, photographed by Jeff Enrikson. In a profile on the artist, writer Amy Jones reflects on the birds that populate her work, connecting them to an expansive use of analog film and light-sensitive material. In Ghent, painter Michaël Borremans, photographed by Osma Harvilahti for this issue's second cover, stands among the vast, near life-size canvases that dominate his work space. In conversation with Louisa Elderton, he talks about his process and his sudden desire to paint an apple. His show "French Painting" at David Zwirner, Paris, runs through July 22.
This issue's features begin with Jenna Sutela, who populated this year's Finnish Pavilion with fat, gray puffs of fur styled with big and small horns aplenty. Sarah Johanna Theurer goes through the artist's body of work, tracing her relationship to scientific research and speculative thinking. Making a splash with her viral human bell, Florentina Holzinger's practice, reflected upon by Jeanette Bisschops, has been defined by a transgressive relationship to performance that doesn't fit easily on stage or in the gallery. Rose Salane speaks to Chiara Siravo about her film Mercurial New York (2026) and the careful attention it required to capture the buzz of the city.
Raoul Klooker and Ivan Cheng talk about Cheng's performances, which, nevertheless, the artist insists are in fact "novels." Navigating stray shoes and clipped newspapers, Sonja Teszler tackles Ian Waelder's leveraging of archives in a way that reflects his own personal history as the grandson of a man who had to flee Germany during World War II. Luzie Meyer, profiled by Tabea Marschall, is seen as an artist who works in bits, fragments, and sound bites, which inform her heavily research-based practice.
The columns similarly explore places and people that exist in the gray area of the not-yet-known. Focus On reflects on the complicated histories of Berlin, with written narration by Philipp Hindahl and visual narration by Hyesoo Chung's double-exposure photography of the city as it exists in 2026. Unpack / Reveal / Unleash by Flash Art's managing editor Michela Ceruti hits replay on Sarah Brahim's video and performance work, likening it to her hunt for "a physical copy of Emily Dickinson's Envelope Poems." Studio Scene opens the door to Henri McMaster's studio, which Eilidh Duffy demystifies in all its scraps of fur and jotted-down notes. The Archive features two reprints of Hans Haacke profiles written twenty-four years apart, one from issue #126 in 1986 and the other from issue #270 in 2010.
A Visual Essay by Bella Newman includes images from highly saturated walks through "a place she once felt imprisoned by." Diamond Stingily unpacks these clowns, cars, and underwear/gun holsters through the lens of girlhood.
The issue also finds reviews on "In Minor Keys" at the 61st Venice Biennale by Anya Harrison; the Whitney Biennial 2026 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, by Nina Chkareuli; "Body Fragment" at The Power Station, Dallas, by Lucia Arbery Simek; Tracey Emin, "A Second Life" at the Tate Modern, London, by P. Eldridge; Brook Hsu, "The Barcelona Pavilion" at Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin, by Alessio Avventuroso; and Sanya Kantarovsky, "Basic Failure" at Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, Palazzo Loredan, Venice, by Annalise June Kamegawa.