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The Art Bystander
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The Art Bystander
The Art Bystander
Substack
Instagram
Podcast
by Appointment
Intelligence
About
Contact
Substack
Instagram
Podcast
by Appointment
Intelligence
About
Contact
Bram Van Meervelde’s Antwerp apartment offers a glimpse into a collector’s lifelong appetite for discovery. 

The artist and dealer, known here as @ouaizda, began collecting shark teeth as a child. 

Today, his searches take him through t
Sir Paul Smith @paulsmith and Pauline Denyer’s west London home has grown around a shared love of British art. Works by David Hockney, Patrick Procktor, Peter Blake and Derek Boshier fill a house whose interiors have evolved gradually, through
When I described Maitha Abdalla’s @maithaabdalla new landscapes as uninhabited, her first answer was “No.”

We were in Paris recording The Art Bystander Podcast. The Emirati artist agreed that the figures had gone from view. I had t
Last night, November 4, at 19 East 64th Street, two masters of postwar art met in New York City, curatorially speaking, for the first time. Their first meeting in the city is actually commemorated by an incredible photograph taken in 1975, on the occ
Rashid Johnson shares a birthday with his son. ‘Birthday Boys’, now on view at Hauser & Wirth’s Wooster Street gallery in New York, takes that connection into the complicated territory of parenthood: learning to recognise the pe
“It’s a kind of a love letter to my wife.”
Every morning, Juergen Teller @juergentellerstudio makes coffee for himself and Dovile Drizyte @doviledrizyte 

One day, he began photographing it alongside the objects nearby. Over three m
At Nelson Rockefeller’s apartment at 810 Fifth Avenue, a Matisse and a Léger faced one another across the living room, each painted to surround a fireplace.

The interiors, developed in the late 1930s by architect Wallace K. Harrison and
Art gives Barack and Michelle Obama’s private offices at the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago much of their character.

Designed by Michael S. Smith @michaelsmithinc, the rooms continue a conversation about art and domestic life that began
Moodboard
2026.11.02

Living with sculptures.
More people should do it.

#theartbystander #sculptures #moodboard
It was the blue ceiling that convinced Lina Attar Ajami to buy the house.

Built around 1860 in Damascus’s Kanawat district, Beit Al Ajami was badly neglected when the Syrian art collector and her husband, Amer, found it. Working with architect
“We carry the shadows of the past in us today.” In Isabelle Zetterström’s @isabellezetterstrom paintings, a spine can also be an egg. Forms suggest anatomy, then become something growing in a landscape. Recognition keeps shifti
At Barnaba Fornasetti’s home in Milan, you enter the music room through an antique wardrobe. Its back has been cut away to create a passage: a small architectural joke that sets the tone for the entire house.

In Città Studi, Casa Fornas
As a Swiss living in Stockholm, I’m especially proud to be part of Basel by Hand. Basel is a city I love, and helping to bring something of it here feels very personal.

What I love about Basel is how naturally culture belongs to everyday life.
Andy Warhol gave Dracula the celebrity treatment.

In Myths (1981), the vampire and the Wicked Witch appear alongside Mickey Mouse, Superman and Santa Claus. The characters that reassure us and those that frighten us belong to the same popular imagin
Jenny Palén @jenny___palen sometimes understands a work years after making it. An image arrives first. Its meaning becomes clear later, with an obviousness that can surprise her.

I visited her studio outside Stockholm, ahead of Shapeshifting,
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