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Browsing by tag: conceptual art

Both soothing and disconcerting

Posted by Robin on 6 September 2026 Leave a Comment

Standing in the room is somehow both soothing and disconcerting. If you don’t read the informational display or listen to the audio tour, you might feel like you’re just standing under a particularly fancy disco ball, listening to a higher-pitched edit of dry wind across an empty plain. But it was the scent of the room that struck me: a blend of thyme, black juniper, moss, and gunpowder, inching the red cave toward the realm of the uncanny with the combination of color, sound, and scent, making it easy to envision yourself in the isolation of space or a very high-concept haunted house where that staticky pulsing wind might start saying your name.

— Rena Behar on the El Sol exhibition at Kristallwelten in Innsbruck, Austria. Read more in Art Can Be What You Smell at Defector.

Partly practical

Posted by Robin on 13 August 2026 Leave a Comment

For Oswaldo Maciá, a pioneer in the field of olfactory art, the appeal of using scent is partly practical. “I don’t know how many biennales I have done, but you will have hundreds of people passing in front of your work. They won’t watch a half-hour video or listen to a three-minute piece. Smell is the only language that can instantly hit the brain.”  

— Read more in Follow Your Nose: From provocative perfumes to show‑specific scents, olfactory art is moving into the mainstream at Ocula.

The scent of a damp forest floor

Posted by Robin on 10 June 2026 3 Comments

A thunderous soundtrack swelled from ambient minimalism to cinematic triumph, peppered with bird chirps and the howls of monkeys. The scent of a damp forest floor wafted through the air, dispersed by a device I wore around my neck. The walls seemed to shift around me, and my heart began racing. It was exhilarating. It was mesmerizing. I felt like I was going to be sick.

This was my initial experience of Dataland, billed as “the world’s first museum of AI Arts,” co-founded by media artist Refik Anadol and Efsun Erkılıç and opening to the public on June 20.

— Read more in My Queasy, Forest-Scented Stroll Through LA’s New AI Art Museum at HyperAllergic.

A.I., with human intervention, is used to generate Dataland’s scents, created in partnership with L’Oréal’s Luxe division, and its tastes — chocolates created with a local partner, Valerie Confections. “We can look at a Rothko and feel incredible emotions,” Anadol said, “but that artwork will never feel us back.” Unlike the artworks in Dataland.

— Read more in At the Ambitious New A.I Museum, You Feel the Art, and It Feels You Right Back at The New York Times.

L’Oréal Luxe’s Fragrance Métier team developed 12 bespoke rainforest-inspired scents using a proprietary fragrance model and data from Refik Anadol Studio’s Large Nature Model. The fragrances include concepts such as Scent of Data, designed to evoke the rhythm of algorithms, and Scent of Rain, which recreates the smell of rain-soaked earth through advanced scent-capture technologies.

— Read more in L’Oréal Luxe partners with DATALAND to create AI-powered immersive fragrance art experience at Global Cosmetic News.

Lily of the valley, frankincense, apricot, and banana

Posted by Robin on 14 February 2026 Leave a Comment

The scent [Marissa] Zappas created for the show is a blend of lily of the valley, frankincense, apricot, and banana. Viewers first encounter it on the second floor of the gallery, and by the time viewers reach the third floor, where the portraits of Dorothy Stratten hang, it fully saturates the space. The idea, according to [artist Cristine] Brache, was to create ‘a sensory arc that mirrors the conceptual one,’ as one moves through space and witnesses how Dorothy Stratten’s likeness has been circulated and consumed over time.

— Read more in Perfumer Marissa Zappas and artist Cristine Brache create a scented exhibition inspired by a Hollywood tragedy at Wallpaper. You can read more about the  Centerfolds exhibition at Bernheim in London here.

Sniffing their way

Posted by Robin on 29 October 2025 2 Comments

Ever wondered what war smells like? Or ponder the odor of love, or the stench of medieval Paris, or the sacred fragrance of religion?

A new exhibition in Germany allows visitors to discover unknown worlds of smells by sniffing their way through 81 different fragrances across 37 different galleries.

The show “The Secret Power of Scents,” which opens to the public on Wednesday at the Kunstpalast museum, in the western city of Düsseldorf, combines fragrances with art, taking visitors on a journey of more than 1,000 years of cultural history.

— Read more in German scents exhibition combines 1,000 years of fragrances with art and history at The Seattle Times, or see The secret power of scents: What does the art palace smell like, Mr. Müller-Grünow? at Kulturkenner.

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