Inspiración

London-based gallery White Cube will now represent artist Katharina Grosse. Her first exhibition with the gallery will be in April 2026 at its Bermondsey space in London; the gallery will also exhibit a new painting by the artist in its booth at Art Basel Miami Beach next month. Grosse’s relationship with the gallery dates back to 2002 when founder Jay Jopling mounted an exhibition for the artist at the gallery’s former location in Hoxton Square. “I’ve closely followed her trajectory ever since and feel privileged to be collaborating with an artist whose curiosity remains boundless and whose work continues to redefine the language of painting,” Jopling told ARTnews in an email. Grosse is best known for her vibrantly hued abstractions, which are created using acrylic paint and an industrial spray gun. Working primarily on canvas, her practice has also extended to making several site-responsive installations. The first of these occurred in 1998 when she sprayed her paint directly onto the architecture of the Kunsthalle Bern in Switzerland. In 2016, she memorably transformed a derelict structure in New York’s Rockaway Beach that was damaged by Hurricane Sandy in 2012 for Rockaway. Mor

The Indian art market has been reinvigorated in the past few years buoyed by the country’s strong, post-pandemic economic growth, and Mumbai, as its leading hub of business activity, has led the charge. While modern art still accounts for the lion’s share of the market with Mumbai-based auction houses like SaffronArt, Astaguru and Pundoles setting all-time-records, contemporary art has become more mainstream in recent years. While emerging artists and a younger, new generation of collectors have received a lot of attention as part of this surge, younger gallerists have relatively been flying under the radar. These galleries have been set up by millennials, often with business degrees and non-arts backgrounds, and do not shy away from using their spaces as platforms for socio-political critique. Many of them have set up shop in Mumbai’s established art district, located in the three neighborhoods—Colaba, Fort, and Kala Ghoda—in the southern part of the city, while others have opted to open farther afield. In Mumbai, opening a gallery in the western suburbs would have seemed counterintuitive to many, but has worked to Parikh’s advantage. “I was aiming to draw in a new generation of c

Editor’s Note: This story originally appeared in On Balance, the ARTnews newsletter about the art market and beyond. Sign up here to receive it every Wednesday. Happy Thursday! Here’s a round-up of who’s moving and shaking in the art trade this week. Onassis ONX Expands with New Tribeca Space: The Onassis Foundation’s art-and-tech hub is doubling in size with a new location set to open in January 2026. The Tribeca venue will debut with the multimedia exhibition “TECHNE: Homecoming.” Withers Expands US Art and Advisory Team with Frank Lord: The veteran lawyer and art historian joins as senior counsel in New York. Spector Craft Prize Launches with Crystal Bridges Partnership: Crystal Bridges will sponsor the inaugural edition of the prize, whose host institution will change annually. That institution will also acquire a piece by the awardee. A concurrent emerging artist award will give $10,000 grants to five artists. Jessica Silverman Now Represents Lava Thomas: Known for monumental graphite portraits, Thomas explores history and cultural memory through large-scale commemorative portraits.  Kendall Koppe Now Represents Michael Bühler-Rose: The artist, based between New York and Mysor

The statue made its premiere on the National Mall in September as Democrats demanded the release of more files related to Epstein. The artists said at the time that the sculpture was meant to “celebrate” Trump’s ties to Epstein. Now, the sculpture can be seen outside the 2021 14th Street NW location of Busboys and Poets Art Cafe, which describes itself as “a community where racial and cultural connections are consciously uplifted.” This time, the artists said they renamed the work Best Friends Forever.

On Tuesday, international media reported that six Roman-era statues and several gold ingots had been stolen from the museum’s classical department, citing anonymous sources. Later that same day, the Directorate General of Antiquities and Museums (DGAM) and Syria’s Ministry of Culture, which administers it, confirmed that items had been stolen from the museum and that an investigation had been launched, but declined to provide further details.  Around 8:30 p.m. Damascus time on Wednesday, the news outlet Syria Now published images on Facebook of six statues it claimed were the stolen artifacts. This claim appeared to be corroborated half an hour later, when the culture ministry posted a notice featuring the same nude marble statutes of the goddess Venus, along with their dimensions and catalogue numbers, appealing to the public for information. Within hours, however, the post was taken down. Established in 1919, the museum houses thousands of antiquities spanning from prehistory through the Roman and Byzantine eras. Security at the museum was reinforced at the onset of Syria’s 14-year civil war and the later collapse of the 54-year Assad regime last December. The building closed for

Desert X, the recurring exhibition that helped redefine land art for the 21st century, will mark its 10th edition in 2027 with a longer season, new curatorial leadership, and plans for international growth. The expansion signals Desert X’s evolution from a biennial experiment into a fixture of the global art calendar. “Over the past decade, Desert X has evolved from an idea into a movement,” Susan Davis, who launched the project in 2017 to bring large-scale site-specific art to the Coachella Valley, said in a press release. The 2027 exhibition will again be led by artistic director Neville Wakefield, joined by Kaitlin Garcia-Maestas, who now becomes the organization’s first permanent curator. Garcia-Maestas co-curated the 2025 edition and previously ran the exhibition program at Socrates Sculpture Park in New York. The two curators’ collaboration will deepen Desert X’s focus on the desert as both subject and medium, with works conceived to change alongside the landscape. Space Without Measure, the fourth chapter of its partnership with Arts AlUla, will run from January 16 through February 28 of 2026.  The show will present 10 new site-specific works inspired by the poetry of Kahlil

Melvin Donald “Mel” Leipzig, a painter who guided generations of artists from his adopted home of Trenton, New Jersey, died on November 1 at the age 90. According to his daughter, Francesca Leipzig, he died exactly 18 years after the passing of his wife, the artist Mary Jo Michelessi. Across more than half a century, the Brooklyn-born artist portrayed the people and places he encountered—no matter how mundane—with radiant selfhood. He never painted from photographs, preferring to practice what he described in past interviews as “designing with reality.” The setting that defined Leipzig may have been the classroom. Born in Brooklyn in 1935, he showed an early interest in art education, studying at Cooper Union with modern landscape painter Neil Welliver and later earned his BFA at Yale University under Bauhaus legend Josef Albers. He went on to receive his master’s degree from Pratt Institute and was awarded a Fulbright Grant to study in Paris, where he hitchhiked across Europe to paint—an experience that left an indelible mark on his practice.  From 1968 until his retirement in 2013, he was a professor of fine art and art history at Mercer County Community College, where he was a b

Jeffrey Epstein discussed quite a few things in the newly released tranche of emails put out by House Republicans this week: current events, the New York Times’s reporting, legal action against him, and a whole lot more. Yet, based on these documents, he also appears to have some interest in art. In one email sent on May 30, 2019, Epstein wrote to Michael Wolff, a reporter who has written on Donald Trump and his election as President, about a very expensive painting that has commonly been attributed to Leonardo da Vinci. Though Epstein did not refer to the painting by its name, he was talking about Salvator Mundi, the most expensive artwork ever sold publicly at auction. In 2017, the painting sold for $450.3 million at a Christie’s auction. Its attribution, however, has come into doubt since then. The painting’s buyer was reportedly Bader bin Abdullah bin Mohammed bin Farhan al-Saud, a Saudi prince who was little known at the time. He is largely thought to have purchased the work for Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, known as MBS for short. Salvator Mundi has disappeared from public view in the years since. Investigations into its whereabouts have ensnared Dmitry Rybolovlev, [...]

More than 150 unionized workers at Britain’s Tate museums will go on strike in protest over what the union calls “inadequate” pay raises. The Public and Commercial Services Union has announced that the staff will go on strike from November 26 to December 2. The strike comes as Tate Britain is gearing up for the major exhibition “Turner & Constable: Rivals & Originals,” of British masters John Constable and JMW Turner, set to open on November 27, to commemorate the 250-year anniversary of both painters’ births. “Tate has made careful savings this year in order to invest in staff pay and still achieve a balanced budget,” a museum spokesperson told the Guardian. “This includes a 3% salary increase for most roles—including all employees on the lowest three pay bands—while directors are taking a 0% increase to help balance the overall costs. It is only by creating and maintaining a sustainable financial model that we can continue to invest in our staff in the long term.” The museum is also working on new ways to raise funds. Chair Roland Rudd has mooted the notion of selling naming rights to Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall for a minimum of £50 million ($66 million) [...]

On Tuesday, the first three (of 30 total) original canvases by America television icon Bob Ross hit the auction block at Bonhams. The paintings sold for a total of $600,000. The proceeds from this and future sales of Ross’s “happy little paintings” will benefit American Public Television, a nonprofit syndicator that has been impacted by President Trump’s budget cuts. The three Ross landscape paintings—Cliffside, 1990; and Home in the Valley and Winter’s Peace, both 1993—were some of the top lots in a larger sale of California and Western art. Home in the Valley and Winter’s Peace were both painted on camera as part of Ross’s long-running television show, “The Joy of Painting,” a Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) program that ran for 11 years, starting in 1983. (Ross died from lymphoma in 1995.) Cliffside was painted for the 20th volume of Ross’s series of instructional painting manuals, also called The Joy of Painting. The book includes step-by-step directions and photos on how to paint 13 scenes, one of which was Cliffside. The remaining 27 paintings will be sold by Bonhams in 2026 at sales in New York, Boston, and Los Angeles. As reported in The New York Times when the sale [...]

A massive 40-year-old art sculpture is being demolished in Battery Park City to make way for the controversial North/West Battery Park City Resiliency (NWBPCR) project. The sculpture, titled Upper Room, by artist Ned Smyth, is a 20-column court featuring an elongated table with inlaid chessboards. The colonnade recalls ancient architecture and offered a public reprieve for New Yorkers. Commissioned in 1986, it was Battery Park City’s first public art piece. Just last year the Battery Park City Authority (BPCA) released a video contextualizing the artist and sculpture within the New York landscape. On Wednesday, crews began tearing down the sculpture as part of a larger resiliency plan to integrate a coastal flood barrier management system to better protect against natural disasters like Hurricane Sandy, which caused $310 million in damage in Battery Park City. It will run along the Hudson River waterfront from First Place to Chambers Street. Smyth, whose sculpture was previously appraised by the BPCA at $1.5 million, along with nearby residents, also expressed dissatisfaction with the outcome. “I’ve lived in Battery Park City for 31 years, and in those 31 years, not one drop of wat

Lowry stepped down as director of MoMA in September, bringing to a close a 30-year tenure that made him the longest-serving leader in the institution’s history. Lowry shepherded MoMA through several major evolutions, including two renovations and one expansion. The 2019 expansion, which increased MoMA’s area to 708,000 square feet, was accompanied by an influential rehang of the collection that broke barriers between art, architecture, dance, film, and other historically siloed disciplines. His accomplishments also include the merging of PS1, a contemporary art space in a former Long Island City school, with MoMA. He serves on the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation’s board of directors, and sits on the advisory boards of the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, the Mori Art Museum, and the Istanbul Museum of Modern Art. A specialist in 18th-century French art, he has loaned works from his collection to exhibitions at Domaine de Chantilly. He was made an Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters and a Knight of the Order of Merit in recognition of his patronage.  As of 2023, the J. Paul Getty Trust has an endowment of $8.59 billion, making it the wealthiest art trust in the world. It supports the

Bidding starts at $10 million for a painting of Conan the Barbarian that Metallica guitarist Kirk Hammett bought from artist Frank Frazetta for $1 million in 2009. The work, titled Conan the Berserker (1967), served as cover art for a paperback edition of Robert E. Howard’s novel Conan the Conqueror, and is being offered up in Heritage Auctions’ “Hollywood/Entertainment Signature Auction” December 9–10. Conan looks more than a little triumphant in the painting, with his rippling arms stretched wide as he stares down at some heated battle action against a fiery sky. A skeleton with an ax reaches up toward him, and his horse is earning its hay by seeming to fly above the scrum. All of that is suitable subject matter for Hammett, who joined Metallica as lead guitarist in 1983, two years after the heavy-metal band’s founding, and has shredded intensely ever since. He has also collected memorabilia and art—enough so that a book, Too Much Horror Business: The Kirk Hammett Collection, was published in 2012. Conan the Berserker featured in the book as well as in “It’s Alive! Classic Horror and Sci-Fi Art from the Kirk Hammett Collection,” an exhibition at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem,

 Museo Picasso Málaga14 November 2025 – 12 April 2026The Museo Picasso Málaga is presenting the exhibition Picasso Memory and Desire. Centering on the oil painting Studio with Plaster Head executed by the artist in and his contemporaries.The exhibition brings together more than one hundred works by key figures of 20th-century art, such as Giorgio de Lorca.Curated by Eugenio Carmona, professor of art history at the University of Malaga, and sponsored by Fundación Unicaja, the exhibition presents a revealing dialogue between memory and desire, historical time and modernity, and the way in which subjectivity complex painting Studio with Plaster Head (1925), a work that greatly impressed Dalí and Lorca and one considered to