Inspiration

When the Belarus Free Theatre opened “Official. Unofficial. Belarus.” at La Chiesa di San Giovanni Evangelista di Venezia earlier this month, it marked the first time Belarus had a presence at the Venice Biennale in six years—and the first time it appeared there not as a state, but, as curator Daniella Kaliada put it, as “a self-governing, self-authored cultural body.” In Venice, the Theatre translates its approach to visual art, stepping away from the plays and theater productions that have become its calling card, to stage an exhibition featuring Belarusian artists working across painting, installations, and large-scale sculptures. The aim is to make the experience of living under authoritarianism viscerally legible—not just visible. “We didn’t want visitors simply to learn about a situation,” cofounder Natalia Kaliada told ARTnews in April. “We wanted them to pass through it: the architecture, feeling, sound, scent, sculpture, obstruction, surveillance, ritual, and bodily experience.” The works on view draw on Belarus’s decades-long experience of repression as both a specific history and a wider warning. As Kaliada said, what once read as a story from the periphery “can now be u

While we wait for the buyer of S. I. Newhouse’s $181.2 million Jackson Pollock painting to reveal him- or herself, at least one buyer at the May marquee evening sales has stepped forward: Jay Chou. The Taiwanese pop star posted on Instagram last week that he was winning bidder for the 1924 Henri Matisse painting, La Séance du Matin, offered at Sotheby’s modern art evening sale last Tuesday. The Matisse sold for exactly $20 million before fees, ultimately reaching $21.2 million with fees. It carried a $20 million to $30 million estimate. Chou often writes about art, or posts photos of art, on his Instagram. In the post last week, he wrote, “Back when I was in Nice, I used to spend a lot of time standing downstairs outside Henri Matisse’s home, looking up at the balcony by the window. I’d imagine him standing there too someday, staring out at the sunlight over Nice, lost in thought, before walking back into his studio to continue creating. I also used to dream about one day being able to collect one of his works from that period in Nice.Never thought that today, the dream would actually come true.” The text was accompanied [...]

Spectacle in all its many forms is the big theme of the summer season, when big, glitzy projects will take over museums across the globe. Laure Prouvost has been given a wide playing field for a show about quantum physics at Paris’s Grand Palais, while Carsten Höller is planning a vast exhibition for Beijing’s UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, the details of which he has largely kept secret. Meanwhile, Tomás Saraceno will bring his monumental sculptures to Munich’s Haus der Kunst; a permanent land artwork by him is also going on view in his native Argentina. He is hardly the only artist considering the land and all the histories embedded within it. Carolina Caycedo is having a show at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo, while the National Gallery of Canada is surveying contemporary Indigenous artists from Inuit Nunaat, Sápmi, and Denendeh. This is not exactly a new theme, of course, and Ana Mendieta was considering it before many others. Tate Modern is giving her a proper retrospective, in one of the season’s most anticipated art events. This period of relative quiet will also leave collectors, curators, critics, and artists with plenty of time to travel—perhaps to the Venice [...]

KYIV CULTURE ATTACKED. Early Sunday morning, Russia struck Kyiv and nearby towns with its largest attack on the Ukrainian capital city since 2024; a rare Oreshnik ballistic missile and drones killed four, injured about 100, and hit cultural institutions, according to reports. Among the approximately 40 damaged sites are the National Chernobyl museum and the National Art Museum of Ukraine (NAMU), per the Kyiv Post. An estimated 40 percent of the Chernobyl museum was reportedly destroyed, while the NAMU’s landmark building was damaged by a blast wave. No artworks were harmed in the NAMU, which was recently restored and reopened in the summer of 2023. On May 21, it debuted a “performance-exhibition” by Holyi/Kostiantyn Mishukov and Oleh Tistol, about art as a form of therapy during war. “We saw how deeply art is capable of supporting people in times like these,” curator and artist Hanka Tretiak told the Kyiv Post. Following the strike, the exhibition had to be dismantled. “Russians are destroying cultural heritage that belongs not only to Ukraine, but to all of Europe and the world,” said Tretiak.  Related ArticlesArchaeologist Who May Have Found D'Artagnan's Skeleton Was Arrested, Co

Controversy has once again reached the Venice Biennale, this time at the Kazakhstan pavilion, where artist Äsel Kadyrhanova’s presentation was reportedly dismantled prior to the exhibition’s opening. The fallout has left fractures within the Kazakhstani art community and among the pavilion’s organizers in Venice, with conflicting accounts emerging over who ordered the work’s removal and why. The news emerged in a May 21 open letter signed by prominent members of the Kazakhstani art community and published on e-flux. The letter alleges that Äsel Kadyrhanova’s multimedia installation Machine (2013)—a meditation on Stalin-era repression in Kazakhstan—was dismantled on May 5 on the orders of the nation’s Ministry of Culture, or by individuals acting on behalf of the pavilion’s organizers, after negotiations between Kadyrhanova and the pavilion’s curator, Syrlybek Bekbota, failed. In a May 11 article published by the Kazakh media outlet Vlast, titled “Kazakhstan’s Ministry Removes Kadyrkhanova’s Work from the Venice Biennale,” representatives of the Museo Storico Navale di Venezia, the Italian Navy–affiliated museum hosting the exhibition, denied any role in the work’s removal. D’Uva, t

At the core of this vision is ensuring that artists are at the center of everything the museum does. “Artists will always exist; institutions maybe won’t always exist,” said Jova Lynne, MOCAD’s artistic director who serves as co-director with Marie Madison-Patton, the chief operating officer. “Putting artists at the forefront and acknowledging the multiplicitous lives that are lived is a cornerstone to what we are doing for this 20th year at MOCAD.” Lynne and Madison-Patton have given MOCAD’s new chapter a title: “A Practice of Multiplicity.” Lynne described this approach as focused on “uplifting the wholeness of the artist and what they bring to the institution and their communities. We accept artists as they are, not just how the art world allows them to exist.” For them, that means being realistic that artists can also have full-time jobs, are raising children, and are caring for their family or other members of their community. “That all goes into the work,” Lynne added. Community is also key to the just-completed renovation, which focused primarily on much-needed infrastructural updates, including adding an HVAC system, to make its home, a former auto dealership, more hospitab

Spanish police have recovered two 17th-century paintings by the Sevillian artist Lucas Valdés that disappeared nearly a century ago after the 1929 Ibero-American Exposition in Seville, according to authorities. The works surfaced earlier this year when they were consigned for auction, prompting an investigation by Spain’s National Police and the country’s culture ministry.  The two oval-shaped oil paintings on pine panel once belonged to the Hospital of the Venerable Priests in Seville, where they formed part of the decoration for the church’s main altarpiece. The paintings were loaned out for the 1929 exposition and never returned. Their whereabouts remained unknown for decades.  According to El País, the investigation began in September 2025 after Spain’s Culture Ministry, alerted by the Archdiocese of Seville, notified police that two works scheduled to go up for auction appeared to match the long-missing Valdés paintings. Authorities intervened before the sale could proceed, effectively freezing the transaction while investigators confirmed the works’ identities.  Police ultimately contacted the paintings’ owners to explain the works’ legal and patrimonial status. Following neg

According to a report from Reform.news, “The blast wave damaged the museum’s historic façade: windows were blown out, window frames damaged, and plaster partially collapsed from walls and inside several halls. In addition, the glass covering of the skylight roof, which provides natural overhead lighting for the exhibition halls on the second floor, was damaged.” The halls of the museum were empty during the attack, after valuable holdings were moved to secure storage during the first days of the Russian invasion. Tatsiana Berezhna, Ukraine’s Deputy Prime Minister for Humanitarian Policy and Minister of Culture, said in a statement, “The National Art Museum of Ukraine is a place where the history of Ukrainian art is preserved. Russia is systematically attacking civilian infrastructure and cultural institutions. Every such strike is an attempt to intimidate and destroy our identity. We are documenting all damage and continue working on restoring our damaged cultural heritage.” The Ministry of Culture is currently preparing an appeal to UNESCO, the UN agency whose duties include the protection of cultural and natural heritage. As noted by Reform.news, “Since deliberate or collateral s

Tess Jaray, a British painter whose understated abstractions explored patterns that recur throughout the world, died on Sunday, according to an obituary posted to the artist’s official Instagram account. She was 88. Jaray specialized in paintings of grids, cubes, and undulating zigzags, all of them set atop palely colored backgrounds. She began making them during the 1960s, at a time when Minimalism reigned supreme across the pond, in the US. But her works exerted a quieter presence, without much of the drama that accompanied that movement. She described a desire to reach something embedded deep within the human condition using these abstractions. In 2019, she told Studio International that she wanted “to make sense of the obsessive searching for patterns and repetition in nature and in art that have been so important … They may be seen as a meeting point, a coming together of the head and the heart and the external and the internal.” While Jaray may lack the name recognition had by some of the most famous artists of her era, she was influential, with her work looked at by artists of many generations—some of whom studied with her at London’s Slade School of Fine Art, where [...]

Demonstrations have been organized at each edition of the fair since 2023. Protestor Cristina Rivera, an artist and technologist, told ARTnews in 2024 that organizers were using Art Basel, a major tourist attraction, as a platform to amplify concerns about Israel’s war in Gaza. The organizers oppose Miami Beach’s investment in Israel Bonds, which the city had doubled to $20 million the previous year. In 2023, the protesters also gathered outside the fair, calling for a ceasefire in Israel’s war in Gaza.

Doyle’s installation Mirror, Mirror sits at the center of his new exhibition, “Collective Hallucinations,” which closes on May 30. From the outside, the structure, which sits in the middle of the third floor gallery, resembles the kind of psychic storefront you might pass in a fading California strip mall. A sign advertises “Psychic Readings $10 Special.” Inside is Ava: an AI avatar with the cadence of a slightly chaotic influencer, equal parts life coach, reality-TV confessional, and amateur therapist. It’s an important detail. Ava sounds eerily close to the flattened influencer cadence that now dominates huge parts of online culture, from TikTok therapists and startup founders to art-world personalities trying desperately to turn themselves into social media brands. Every sentence arrives polished into bite-size emotional shorthand—ridiculous, slightly glib, but not entirely wrong. For Doyle, who grew up in Southern California, the project came from reading about the history of the American West, from Manifest Destiny and railroad expansion to the Dust Bowl and Silicon Valley. The exhibition’s denim collages — cacti, mountains, fences, car keys — frame AI as the latest version of

Kiko Martínez, que fue productor de Álex de la Iglesia y Eduardo Casanova, llevará a la gran pantalla la muerte del concejal de Ermua en manos de ETA | «Es una historia que marcó a toda una generación. Que no caiga en el olvido», afirma La artista ha visitado 'El Hormiguero' para hablar sobre sus nuevos proyectos musicales La piezas del Museo de Bellas Artes forman parte de la exposición 'A la manera de Italia' La pintora, que denunció a un acosador en 2019, pone en manos de la Policía el robo de una pieza y la rotura del cristal de la puerta del local de Barcelona