Innehållsförteckning för November 2025 från Wallpaper

At Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, amid the impending doom rendered on album sleeves, the swashing dollops of paint liberally applied to Covid-era canvases, the black-spider scribbles in notebooks belonging to one of our greatest and most confounding lyricists, there’s a wonderfully deadpan piece of writing. It’s part of an extended text under one of the giant images that characterise ‘This Is What You Get’, an exhibition of the work of Radiohead’s Thom Yorke and his visual artist collaborator Stanley Donwood. ‘Donwood’s initial idea for the cover,’ runs the caption for the pair’s sleeve artwork for the band’s sixth studio album Hail to the Thief (2003), ‘was to create enormous topiary phalluses, and digitally introduce them into the gardens owned by the National Trust, but Yorke wasn’t convinced.’ Yorke bursts into laughter…

Traditionally, art galleries can be solitary experiences, with visitors avoiding eye contact on a stroll around an exhibition. It’s a custom that Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley is keen to challenge, with the Berlin-based British artist and game designer’s new show at London’s Serpentine Gallery encouraging visitors to interact – with each other. The video game commission, The Delusion, is a multiplayer immersive experience that invites viewers to virtually enter digital portals. Inside each there are conversation starters, reflecting on both the digital world and its often vitriolic and dangerous real-life consequences. Players follow prompts, and are then encouraged to engage in honest conversations with both themselves and each other. For Brathwaite-Shirley, the game is a place for players to consider emotions that may spring from virtual interactions, shifting the focus from the…

In the work of New York-based Colombian artist María Berrío, nothing is quite as it seems. Otherworldly tales are part myth, part memory, delicately rendered in watercolour on Japanese paper. Her paintings are unexpectedly rife with familiar and contemporary detailing, in a meeting of worlds real and imagined. It is a style that is reflective of Berrío herself. Growing up in Bogotá, she spent much of her time on a family farm, triggering the love of nature and storytelling she was to build on later. Beginning first by drawing large-scale works in charcoal – ‘it was a way of connecting me to the world,’ she says – Berrío became fascinated with Japanese paper, using it to create collages. In the physical and symbolic act of layering, collage makes a natural…

Chantal Joffe deals in memory. In the thick, tangible brushstrokes of her paintings and in the generous sizes of her canvases, we are invited to discover her women – because it is often women that she paints, those she admires, or those she is close to. Joffe has a unique figurative style, eschewing a neat formality for gorgeously expressive brushwork, with the palpability of the paint allowing for a greater freedom in the depictions of the women that she is painting. Her complex, multifaceted subjects can only come alive in her thickly-drawn sweeps of paint, their nuances, quirks and features recognisably theirs, without being perfectly or realistically rendered. Throughout her career, Joffe has puzzled away at the cyclical nature of family, considering her role as a mother, daughter and sister…

Madrid has always thrived on artistic tension: between heritage and rebellion, classicism and avant-garde. The Prado, Reina Sofía and Thyssen-Bornemisza museums still anchor the city’s ‘golden triangle of art’, yet past these marble halls filled with European treasures lies another Madrid, one shaped by the insurgent galleries and collectors that are placing the Spanish capital on the global contemporary stage. The 2025 edition of ARCO Madrid gathered 214 galleries from 36 countries, turning the city into the art world’s spring focal point. But beyond the contemporary art fair’s temporary pulse, a constellation of cultural projects is now repositioning Madrid more permanently. The capital has become a hotbed of artistic proposals, with an increasing number of international collectors choosing to settle here. At the centre of this momentum is arts project…

What would it be like to experience things from the perspective of a visionary creative? To be able to instantly slip into their world with just the simplest of gestures? The latest perfume from luxury Italian fashion house Zegna is an attempt to do just that. According to the brand, Il Conte is ‘an inheritance of vision’, a fragrance that recreates the moment that company founder Ermenegildo Zegna would step across the threshold of his office to begin work on the menswear house we know today – a house of timeless luxury, shaping enduring style through vision, innovation and exceptional materials. A blend of leather accord, vanilla infusion and benzoin resinoid, Il Conte is the creation of master perfumer Fabrice Pellegrin, who drew inspiration from various elements of Ermenegildo Zegna’s…

For stockists, see page 185 Model: Jolinus Pap Fashion assistant: Alvaro Merino…

Shape shifters Issey Miyake’s twisted collection ponders the ambiguity of clothing ‘Can anything be considered a garment, as long as it’s on the body?’ asked Satoshi Kondo when he presented his A/W25 collection for Issey Miyake at Paris’ Le Carrousel du Louvre earlier this year. Backdropped by a series of performers enacting artist Erwin Wurm’s One Minute Sculptures, the energetic show saw garments twisted in silhouette or context, from trompe l’oeil prints of knitwear that ran across plissé gowns to heat-pressed fabrics used to create structural silhouettes evocative of paper dolls. Elsewhere, quotidien objects were transformed: a ‘paper bag’, printed with an imaginary exhibition titled ‘Abstract, Concrete, and In-Between’, became a top. ‘[It’s about] the freedom of wearing [clothing] in one’s own way, and the exciting possibilities that are yet…

Some artists treat fabrication as a means to an end; Job Smeets is not one of them. He likes to get his hands dirty. His work is loaded with conceptual metaphors, but he speaks most passionately about the tactility of majolica, the plasticity of bronze or a wall tapestry’s interlaced warp threads. Since founding Studio Job in 1998, the Belgian-born designer has sculpted and moulded a language of his own that hovers somewhere between ornate sculpture and pop-influenced design, folkloric and kitsch. His work has both fans and critics, but no one has ever questioned his material prowess or the sincerity of his craftsmanship. We visited Studio Job weeks before the opening of House of Delft – at 2,000 sq m, the largest commission of Smeets’ career. When completed, it…

For stockists, see page 185…

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