Inspiración

When it’s business as usual in the United Nations General Assembly, debates over international laws and their global impact are coolly waged, their real-time minutes of interest largely to diplomats and reporters. But lately, these summits have gained an unexpected follower in Coumba Samba, an artist who is fascinated by the possibility of so many representatives of different nations gathered in one room. A livestream of these summits in 2024 even constituted a piece unto itself in Samba’s show at Empire, a tiny gallery in an office building located a 20-minute walk from the UN’s New York headquarters. Samba has exhibited canvases as well as found objects— wooden pallets, discarded radiators—painted in hues that pay homage to highly specific yet sometimes elusive sources. Stripe Blinds (2023), for example, is a broken set of Venetian blinds whose slats were painted lime green, mustard yellow, and gray, the colors of an ensemble Samba’s sister wore during her modeling days. But without these sentimental details, the work can feel cold and impersonal. In converting these stories into the ostensibly universal language of abstraction, all the intimacy is lost. A 2024 solo show at Londo

Diego Velázquez’s 1656 portrayal of a Spanish princess and her entourage is one of the most important paintings in Western art history, if not the most conceptually complex by an old master. A deconstruction of the relationship between viewer and viewed, depiction and depicted, Las Meninas comprises a nesting doll of paradoxes that play with pictorial space to ask, Just what is it you think you’re looking at? Las Meninas (The Maids of Honor), was part of a broader backlash against the perfectionism of Renaissance art, which began with the revival of the classical aesthetics a millennium after the fall of Rome. Renaissance painters exalted truth to nature, even in religious art, using perspective, both in its geometric and atmospheric variants, as well as the modeling of form through gradations of light, to create the illusion of three-dimensionality on a two-dimensional surface. They also adopted the use of oil paint, which, along with glazes and varnishes, allowed light to penetrate layers of color, while keeping the evidence of brushwork to a minimum. Together, these tropes heightened the semblance of verisimilitude, opening a metaphorical window that was taken for reality, albei

Editor’s Note: This story is part of Newsmakers, a new ARTnews series where we interview the movers and shakers who are making change in the art world. More than a decade after Pussy Riot cofounder Nadya Tolokonnikova was imprisoned in Russia for two years after performing a “punk prayer” inside of Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior, the artist is putting herself back into a prison of her own making.  For her installation Police State (2025) at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (LA MOCA), Tolonkonnikova has recreated a Russian jail cell. This time, however, she reimagines the cell as a space for art. The work is a form of reclamation not only for Tolonkonnikova but also for all the Russian, Belarusian, and American prisoners whose work is also included in the installation. The effort to include them is part of a larger ongoing project between Tolokonnikova’s organization Art Action Foundation and the Artistic Freedom Initiative, which work together to archive and exhibit prisoners’ art. Within the piece, visitors are thrust into an eerie authoritarian state. Inside a prison cell, one can observe Tolokonnikova making music or art, or even resting throughout the day,

Two weeks after the New Yorker revealed that a “dissident-right art hos” US Pavilion was being floated for the 2026 Venice Biennale, Vanity Fair has now reported further details of the proposal, which hinges on the loan of a Titian painting from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. The proposal is the brainchild of Curtis Yarvin, a computer engineer-turned-thinker beloved among the political far right who has called for an American monarchy. Per Vanity Fair, Yarvin is teaming up with Tarik Sadouma, a Dutch Egyptian artist, to conceive the pavilion. Typically, the pavilion goes to an artist who is already a known quantity in the US: Jeffrey Gibson did last year’s pavilion, and Simone Leigh did the one in 2022, the same year that she took the Golden Lion’s Venice Biennale for her participation in the main exhibition. But Yarvin told Vanity Fair that he wanted to do something different. Of the people charged with selecting the winning proposal for the pavilion, he said, “They could do the normal thing, or they could do a retarded thing, and basically take a fine art thing and put it in the hands of the American middle brow. We’re hoping to pull [...]

On Thursday, a Picasso painting on display at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts was splashed with bright pink paint by an environmental activist, in the latest of such attempts to draw attention to the accelerating climate crisis.  Footage posted on social media by the climate activist group Last Generation Canada shows the moment the protesters hurled the paint at the portrait, a 1901 work by Pablo Picasso titled L’hetaire. The protester is then seen being escorted out of the gallery by a member of museum security. The Instagram post includes a statement from the protestor, identified by the group as a 21-year-old named Marcel. “Today, I am not attacking art, nor am I destroying it. I am protecting it. Art, at its core, is depictions of life. It is by the living, for the living. There is no art on a dead planet,” the statement reads. “[W]ere I in Winnipeg right now, would I still be able to make art,” the Last Generation statement added. “Would I have the time, the energy, the resources? Or would I be too caught up in a fight for my survival and well-being, because my government refuses to protect its own people.” Over [...]

While some critics argued that last year’s presentations were too safe, the 2025 edition leaned into the unusual and jarring—with far-out sound installations and conceptual works that reinforce why Liste remains the art world’s go-to platform for the vanguard. At Beijing’s Vanguard Gallery is a site-specific project by Shenzhen-based painter Jin Haofan titled Islands. Comprising three sets of painting installations—two of which consist of 100 small canvases—the works are pieced together like puzzles, creating the illusion of chromatic and translucent atmospheres reminiscent of dusk and dawn. The effect is that of “Turneresque seascapes after a storm,” according to Vanguard director Sherry Zhang. The bright pink walls lining the booth at Berlin’s Max Goelitz gallery are immediately eye-catching, but the accompanying awkward steel-and-aluminum sculpture that emits whispers leaves visitors slightly unnerved. The sound creeps in—I initially thought my phone speaker was broken—from old Tannoy speakers once used to broadcast disaster warnings. Recorded by Nigerian American poet Precious Okoyomon, the audio was inspired by The Night of the Hunter, Charles Laughton’s 1955 cinematic fever d

While most art collectors focused on Art Basel this week, the Digital Art Mile—Basel’s first-ever digital art fair—opened its second edition on Monday. Launched last year by digital art adviser Georg Bak and ArtMeta founder Roger Haas, the fair is being held at Basel’s underground Kult Kino Camera cinema through Sunday. The event features a series of panels and conferences on the health and future of the digital art market, alongside the headline exhibition “Paintboxed,” which explores the history of one of the earliest digital painting devices: the Quantel Paintbox. Compared to the usual buying frenzy at Art Basel, the atmosphere at the Digital Art Mile was calmer, more measured, and decidedly academic. Digital collectors and curators were eager to discuss their favorite works and expound on the decades-long history of the medium. “A lot of people think it has only been around for a few years, but digital art history is long and storied,” one NFT expert told me. “This is one reason the Digital Art Mile is so important—it educates the public about the canon of digital art.” With that in mind, ARTnews asked 10 prominent digital art figures to select their favorite artwork from the f

The decision stated that the sculptures were removed sometime in the mid-20th century under Franco’s administration and acquired by the city in 1948. Sometime in the early 1950s, city officials arranged for the statues to be relocated to Meirás Palace, the politician’s summer residence, at the request of Franco’s wife.

The artist’s first solo exhibition at an Italian institution. Curated by Stefano Collicelli Cagol, director of Centro Pecci, the exhibition features sculptures created by the artist between 2019 and 2025, all inspired by the theme of light, some of which were produced specifically for

The exhibition, a site-specific display by Reba Maybury and Lucy McKenzie, reimagines the architecture of Ca’Buccari, a new exhibition venue in

“Is that a real Monet?” asks a visitor to Takashi Murakami’s new exhibition at Gagosian New York, “JAPONISME → Cognitive Revolution: Learning from Hiroshige,” on view through July 11. The Japanese artist has subjected the French Impressionist to his characteristic screen-printing technique in Claude Monet’s “Water Lily Pond” And Me, Submerged in the Pond Like Gollum (2025), a slick copy that from a squinting distance might fool you. Conveniently, squinting distance is a popular suggestion for the best way to view Impressionism. Murakami knows his audience; he knows they are always looking at and through screens, and that the lure of the apparently famous now pulls harder than the onetime aura of originality. The same fate has befallen Murakami himself, known more as a celebrity figure than a serious artist. But both his skill and his knowledge of art history, which includes a PhD in traditional Japanese painting, are evident in this exhibition. Despite appearances (and the inclusion of several examples of his Louis Vuitton monogram canvases, allusions to the artist’s collaboration with luxury brands), this show seems less about outward attraction and more about inward exploration.

It’s a well-worn truth by now—or maybe a tired cliché —to say that Art Basel is as much about what happens outside the Messe Basel as within it. Beyond the VIP days, the real action can be found at night over cocktails and private dinners, where collectors, dealers, artists, and advisors close deals, swap gossip, and forge relationships that ripple across the art world for months—sometimes years—to come. After catching the train into town, I arrived in Basel six and a half hours late and walked directly to a dinner hosted by Austrian art dealer Thaddaeus Ropac at the elegantly rustic Safran Zunft. Think Game of Thrones-esque medieval church meets fine dining: 50-foot ceilings, stained glass, Toyota-sized chandeliers, with a side of white asparagus and silky béarnaise. Dubai- and London-based collector Selim Bouafsoun was in attendance, as were Sotheby’s senior vice president Bame Fierro March, Hamburger Bahnhof directors Sam Bardaouil and Tim Fellrath, and Laura Colnaghi. DC: While some of the dealers I spoke to said the pace was slower this year than at previous Basels, the halls of the Messeplatz were still thrumming with collectors and curators swarming like spawning salmon. At