Stéphane Aboudaram. Château La Coste – Provence, France
Provence has long been a place where art, architecture and landscape sit comfortably alongside one another, and Château La Coste has spent over a decade building a reputation as one of the region’s most distinctive cultural destinations, with major works by the likes of Frank Gehry, Louise Bourgeois and Tracey Emin scattered across its 500 acres. From 5 July 2026, the estate turns its attention to something a little more personal than any single artist’s practice, presenting a trio of interconnected exhibitions built around the relationship between Rashid Johnson, Sheree Hovsepian and the wider community of artists who surround them.
Johnson takes over the Oscar Niemeyer Auditorium with a show spanning painting, sculpture and film, arriving shortly after the conclusion of his major retrospective at the Guggenheim in New York, which now travels on to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. His practice has notably drawn on personal and cultural history to examine how people find one another and hold on, and here that thread continues in direct conversation with Niemeyer’s fluid modernist architecture and the Provençal landscape surrounding it.
right. Sarah Aibel, Better Together, 2026
left. Henry Taylor Dakar, Senegal #7, 2019
The exhibition brings together a selection of Johnson’s ‘God Paintings’ alongside new sculptural work, including bronzes made specifically for the site. Also on view is ‘Sanguine,’ his 2024 film exploring attention and care across three generations of his own family – his father, himself and his son. It’s a work that extends his long-standing interest in time and collective experience into something more intimate, using his own bloodline as the framework for a broader meditation on inheritance and care. His presentation runs through 31 January 2027.
Across the estate in the Renzo Piano Pavilion, Hovsepian presents new work running from 5 July to 6 September 2026, including three large-scale sculptures that mark the most ambitious undertaking of her career so far, alongside a series of two-dimensional pieces. Hovsepian’s practice moves across photography, painting, drawing, assemblage and sculpture, and has long centred on the instability of identity and perception, often working through fragmentation and absence to reconfigure the female form.
right. Jeffrey Sonhouse, Brethren, 2026
left. Mindy Shapero, Black Dot Portal (Just a Laugh to Block the Light), 2025
Her mixed media assemblages – mostly set within deep walnut frames she makes herself – combine silver gelatin photographs, ceramic pieces and string into compositions that hold texture, surface and line in constant conversation with one another. Cut-out shapes and silhouettes create space between the female body and what surrounds it, opening onto more personal themes of memory and loss.
The three new bronze sculptures conceived for Piano’s subterranean pavilion push those same photographic ideas of trace and presence into three dimensions. Standing three metres tall, their hand-moulded surfaces carry impressions that register the body’s movement over time, giving the works a totemic presence that feels almost spiritual in the hush of Piano’s light-filled space.
The third part of the programme unfolds in the cantilevered Richard Rogers Gallery, where Johnson and Hovsepian have co-curated a group exhibition titled ‘Rashid, Sheree and Friends…’, which also runs until 6 September 2026. Featuring work by over sixteen artists – including George Condo, Idris Khan, Tyler Mitchell, Lorna Simpson, Sarah Sze, Henry Taylor and Hank Willis Thomas – the exhibition gathers their close collaborators and long-standing creative peers.
right. (painting) Sanford Biggers Landscape Beneath Atlantis 2025, (sculpture) Annie Morris Stack 3, Cobalt Turquoise, 2026
left. Nicolas Party, Still Life (Copper Version), 2025
“This exhibition is rooted in the idea that an artistic practice doesn’t exist in isolation, it’s shaped by friendship, dialogue and proximity,” Hovsepian says. “At Château La Coste, Rashid and I are bringing together not just our own work, but the work of artists who have formed the fabric of our lives. It felt important to us to gather these artists here, in a place so deeply committed to art, so that we could experience it together. It’s a portrait of connection as much as it is a presentation of artwork.”
Johnson shares the same sentiment. “I’m excited by the chance to bring new work into a setting like Château La Coste, and even more so to do it alongside friends and peers,” he explains. “It’s a place that invites reflection and connection, and that sense of gathering, of being together in a beautiful environment, feels central to what this exhibition is about.”
left. Sheree Hovsepian S e u i l , 2026
right. Stephanie Powell, mitosis, 2021
This idea of togetherness as the actual subject of the programme makes up for the perfect change to the exhibition. Johnson and Hovsepian have been partners in life as well as in their respective careers and they’ve built an entire season around it, using Château La Coste’s architecture and landscape as the backdrop for something closer to a portrait of a shared life.
For visitors moving between the Niemeyer auditorium, the Piano pavilion and the Rogers gallery, the effect is cumulative. Each space holds its own distinct body of work, yet together they build towards something more personal, a picture of how art gets made through the people who surround and sustain the artists making it.
Rashid Johnson at Château La Coste. Rashid Johnson, ADAGP Paris, 2026. Photography of Stéphane Aboudaram WEARECONTENT(s)
Discover more here.
photography. courtesy of Stéphane Aboudaram and credited artists
words. Gennaro Costanzo
