Why Contemporary Artists Are Raiding the Renaissance Toolkit

Three contemporary artists—Alison Elizabeth Taylor, Michael Bühler-Rose, and Nick Doyle—are reviving the Renaissance woodworking techniques of intarsia and marquetry in their current exhibitions. Taylor is showing marquetry hybrid paintings at Jessica Silverman Gallery in San Francisco, Bühler-Rose is presenting a solo booth with Stems Gallery at Independent, and Doyle is also participating in the trend. Their work draws inspiration from the Gubbio Studiolo at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a 15th-century trompe-l'œil room that exemplifies the decorative inlay tradition.

'I’m interested in breaking binaries, barriers and boundaries': Sarah Rosalena on her new LACMA commission

Artist Sarah Rosalena has completed a monumental 27-foot tapestry titled "Threading the Boundless: Omnidirectional Terrain" (2025), commissioned for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s (LACMA) new David Geffen Galleries. The work utilizes an industrial-scale jacquard-rapier loom to weave complex patterns that distort NASA satellite imagery of Earth and Mars. By blending her Wixárika maternal weaving traditions with computational craft, Rosalena transforms scientific data into a tactile, atmospheric landscape that challenges traditional methods of planetary mapping.

'Claude Viallat' at Templon, Brussels, Belgium on 22 Apr–6 Jun 2026

Galerie Templon in Brussels is presenting a solo exhibition of Claude Viallat, celebrating the 60th anniversary of his signature bone-shaped motif. The show features around thirty recent experimental canvases and objects from 2024 to 2026, exploring his practice of repetition and variation on diverse fabrics and found materials.

Stasis field

Dublin’s Kerlin Gallery is hosting "Stasis field," a solo exhibition by Kathy Prendergast featuring sculpture, works on paper, and installations. The show highlights Prendergast’s long-standing fascination with cartography, where she subverts traditional maps using materials like textile, chalk, stone, and hand-applied pigments. Key works include hand-painted volcanic maps and a three-meter-high painted branch, all created through the artist's signature methodical and repetitive hand-crafting processes.

American Rousseaus Return to Paris

Les Rousseau américains de retour à Paris

The Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris is hosting a landmark exhibition titled "Henri Rousseau, l’ambition de la peinture," featuring 50 works by the self-taught master. The show is distinguished by a historic loan from the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, which has sent nine paintings to France for the first time since they were acquired a century ago by Albert Barnes. A highlight of the exhibition is the rare gathering of three "manifesto paintings"—The Sleeping Gypsy, Unpleasant Surprise, and The Snake Charmer—displayed together in a dedicated gallery.

Sue Webster: Fandoms and Icons

Sue Webster's solo exhibition 'Birth of an Icon' at Firstsite in Colchester traces her lifelong obsession with pop culture, from teenage fandom of Siouxsie Sioux to her evolution as an artist. The show features a sprawling installation 'The Crime Scene' (2017–) that maps her personal history through albums, newspaper clippings, and objects, alongside painted jackets and self-portraits. It marks a departure from her earlier work as half of the duo Tim Noble and Sue Webster, embracing a more personal, amateurish style that reflects her journey through adolescence, marriage dissolution, and motherhood.

Hilary Pecis Paints Saturated Snapshots of West Coast Life

Hilary Pecis presents a new series of acrylic paintings in her solo exhibition "Love Letters" at David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles, running from May 16 to June 20. The works capture everyday scenes—a backyard pool, a studio corner, a picnic with strawberry cake—using her signature saturated palette and meticulous attention to texture and pattern, working from photographs onto linen.

‘We refuse_d’: rehearsing refusal as method, memory, and possibility.

Marking the fifteenth anniversary of Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, the traveling exhibition ‘we refuse_d’ has opened at M HKA in Antwerp. Curated by Nadia Radwan and Vasif Kortun, the project draws on the intellectual lineage of Hannah Arendt’s reflections on displacement and the historical precedent of the Salon des Refusés. The exhibition features a constellation of works by artists including Khalil Rabah, Barış Doğrusöz, and Nour Shantout, exploring refusal not as a simple negation, but as a complex strategy for survival, dignity, and the preservation of memory.

From intimate still lives to shadowed saints: the many sides of Spanish painter Francisco de Zurbarán go on show at London’s National Gallery

The National Gallery in London is opening a major survey exhibition of Spanish painter Francisco de Zurbarán (1598-1664), the first on this scale since 1987. The show expands beyond his famous austere saints to include intimate still-lifes, late private devotional works, and large-scale altarpiece reconstructions. Curator Daniel Sobrino Ralston highlights two newly discovered paintings, including *Alcarraza on a Plate*, and a rare reconstruction of the second tier of the Charterhouse of Jerez de la Frontera altarpiece, reuniting works from museums in Grenoble and Poznań.

Jean Shin’s Living Memorial to the Trees of Green-Wood Cemetery

Artist Jean Shin unveiled a new site-specific earthwork titled "Offering" (2026) at Brooklyn's Green-Wood Cemetery on April 18. The installation, situated in a meadow facing the cemetery's gates, consists of a long, oval-shaped mound of soil covering two felled oak trees. The work was inspired by traditional Korean tumulus burial mounds and involved a community ritual led by a Korean shaman, with volunteers planting wildflowers and shrubs on the mound.

The forgotten Chinese conceptualists: Melbourne show brings together works by New Measurement Group

An exhibition at Buxton Contemporary in Melbourne, titled "Poetry Goes No Further Than Language: a Historical Moment of Art Becoming Art Again," brings together the complete artistic output of the New Measurement Group, a pioneering Chinese conceptual art collective from Beijing, alongside four conceptual experiments by Shanghai-based artist Qian Weikang. Curated by Carol Yinghua Lu and artist Liu Ding, the show aims to reassess early Chinese conceptual art, featuring works by the New Measurement Group (Chen Shaoping, Gu Dexin, Wang Luyan), pieces from the New Wave art movement, and new commissions by Melbourne artist Darcey Bella Arnold. The curators faced challenges locating the group's five publications, including one purchased on eBay from Europe, and used re-enactment and re-fabrication to recreate lost works like Qian's "Ladder Poem" (1990).

Nick Goss: Interview of the Month, March 2026 – Paul Carey-Kent

Anglo-Dutch painter Nick Goss has opened a new exhibition at Josh Lilley Gallery, featuring eleven paintings inspired by Eel Pie Island, a private marshy area on the Thames in Twickenham with a bohemian past—including 1960s rock concerts by The Rolling Stones, The Who, and Pink Floyd, a hippie commune, and a 1972 fire. In an interview with Paul Carey-Kent, Goss discusses how he blends fact and fiction, combining sources from hotel corridors, Pompeii, and the Sergeant Pepper album cover to create ambiguous, layered works that evoke half-remembered histories.

Merlin Carpenter “Warning Signs” at Karma International, Zurich

Merlin Carpenter presents "Warning Signs" at Karma International in Zurich, featuring his latest paintings that evolve from his earlier "anti-painting" style. The artist reflects on how his early 2000s work, characterized by a semi-finished, indifferent aesthetic, had become decorative by the time of his 2013 POLICE show, prompting him to update his approach.

Cambodian Artist Sopheap Pich Shares in an Exhibition how He Conceives Sculptures

Cambodian artist Sopheap Pich is presenting an exhibition at Meta House in Phnom Penh that reveals his creative process, showing how he conceives sculptures from initial drawings and woodblock prints to works in bamboo and metal. Born in Battambang, Pich survived the Khmer Rouge regime as a child and later immigrated to the U.S., earning an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago before returning to Cambodia in 2002. The exhibition includes early rattan pieces and recent metal sculptures, reflecting his intuitive, memory-infused approach to making art with a team of ten assistants in his Phnom Penh studio.

Valerie Mercer and the Long Work of Putting African American Art Where It Belongs

Valerie Mercer, the lead curator of African American art at the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA), has spent over two decades building a collection that now includes more than 700 works. Last fall, the museum unveiled a major reinstallation titled "Reimagine African American Art," moving African American art from scattered locations to the heart of the institution, near Diego Rivera's Detroit Industry Murals. The rehang traces a lineage from 19th-century painters like Robert S. Duncanson to modern innovators like Sam Gilliam, covering key cultural movements such as the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement.

Protest Art Exhibitions

The CART Department has organized an exhibition titled 'Ai Weiwei LEGO Story' at Free Parking in New York, running from April 24 to May 3, 2026. The show presents a focused selection of the artist's brick-based works, including pieces from his Zodiac and After series and his BMW art car, highlighting accumulation and repetition as core methods.

Exhibition | Shota Nakamura, 'Apple' at Karma, Los Angeles

Shota Nakamura's exhibition 'Apple' at Karma in Los Angeles presents a series of new paintings that explore familiar subjects—fruit, shells, sailboats, landscapes—through a dreamlike, tonally nuanced lens. The Berlin-based Japanese artist focuses on the tonality of light, using closely-valued hues to investigate relationships between color, luminosity, and illusion. Works such as 'Landscape with Apples' (2026), 'A Black Dog', and 'Violin Player' demonstrate his method of combining personal photographs, memory, and art historical references into compositions that balance representation with formal abstraction, often referencing modern Japanese painters like Zenzaburo Kojima and Morikazu Kumagai as well as Mark Rothko.

Beatriz González at the Barbican: Images Against Oblivion

BEATRIZ GONZÁLEZ EN EL BARBICAN: IMÁGENES CONTRA EL OLVIDO

The Barbican Centre in London is hosting a major retrospective of the late Colombian artist Beatriz González, marking her first solo exhibition in the United Kingdom and her most extensive show in Europe to date. Featuring over 150 works, the exhibition traces her six-decade career, from her early experiments with pop-inflected figuration to her iconic use of domestic furniture as canvases. Central to the show is her 1965 masterpiece 'Los suicidas del Sisga,' which exemplifies her method of translating degraded press photographs into vibrant, critical paintings that challenge historical erasure.

Daniel Blumberg at Galerie Balice Hertling

Galerie Balice Hertling in Paris is presenting an exhibition of silverpoint drawings by artist Daniel Blumberg, running from March 26 to May 16, 2026. The show features 57 images documented by photographer Aurélien Mole, with no accompanying videos or text descriptions in the visual record.

Raphael: Sublime Poetry

This article announces the first comprehensive U.S. exhibition on Raphael, titled "Raphael: Sublime Poetry," which offers an immersive look at the artist's meteoric career through drawings, paintings, prints, and tapestries. It traces Raphael's journey from his birth in Urbino in 1483, through his training under his poet-painter father Giovanni Santi and later Pietro Perugino, to his rise as a peer to Leonardo and Michelangelo in Florence and his final decade as the favorite artist of the popes in Rome, where he was celebrated as the "prince of painters."

Missoula Art Museum opens new exhibit with acclaimed artist

The Missoula Art Museum has opened a new exhibition featuring acclaimed artist Sara Siestreem. Her latest body of work includes large, multi-panel paintings, basket weaving, ceramics, and sculpture, all unified by geometric designs inspired by traditional weaving patterns. A reception was held on opening night, with a second artist talk scheduled for Saturday morning.

National Museum of Asian Art Presents Paintings From India’s Himalayan Kingdoms in New Exhibition

The Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art in Washington, DC, has announced a new exhibition titled “Of the Hills: Pahari Paintings from India’s Himalayan Kingdoms,” running from April 18 to July 26, 2026. The show features 48 paintings and colored drawings, including canonical masterpieces and never-before-seen works, drawn largely from the museum’s 2017–2018 acquisitions of the Ralph Benkaim and Catherine Glynn Benkaim collection. The exhibition explores three key periods from 1620 to 1830, highlighting the collaborative creativity of artists in the small Hindu kingdoms of the Himalayan region.

“Drifting Until Caught” at Brooklyn Navy Yard: Three Artists and the Objectivity of Method

Three artists—Veronika Georgieva, Stephen j Shanabrook, and Shura Skaya—have transformed an industrial venue at the Brooklyn Navy Yard into a pop-up exhibition titled “Drifting Until Caught.” The show, accessible only by appointment, features works that range from pressed plastic sculptures and chocolate casts to wax crayon drawings and acrylic paintings, all exploring the boundary between figuration and abstraction. Each artist employs mechanical or chance-based methods, such as Shanabrook’s hydraulic press or Georgieva’s video projections, to create images that embrace distortion and materiality.

Star of the Wilderness Exhibition celebrating the Publication of "Paint of This Planet” Volume III

ShugoArts in Tokyo presents 'Star of the Wilderness,' an exhibition by Japanese artist Masato Kobayashi celebrating the publication of the final volume of his autobiographical novel trilogy *Paint of this Planet*. The show features new works, including two large-scale paintings—'Artist and the Model' (over 2.6 meters) and 'Star of the Wilderness'—that exemplify Kobayashi's distinctive method of stretching canvas onto its frame while painting directly with his hands. The exhibition traces his journey from Kunitachi, Tokyo, to Ghent, Belgium, where he was discovered by curator Jan Hoet, and later to Tomonoura, Hiroshima, highlighting how his paintings emerge from specific places and moments.

A Roma una mostra celebra il leggendario scenografo e costumista Dante Ferretti

A new exhibition titled "Dante Ferretti. Con i miei occhi" has opened at the Musei di San Salvatore in Lauro in Rome, celebrating the legendary Italian set designer and costume designer Dante Ferretti. Curated by Raffaele Curi, the show runs until July 19, 2026, and features a collection of Ferretti's sketches, charcoal drawings, and collages that served as the foundational visual ideas for films by directors including Pier Paolo Pasolini, Martin Scorsese, Federico Fellini, and Tim Burton. The exhibition presents these preparatory works not merely as production tools but as autonomous works of art, tracing Ferretti's visual genealogy from Renaissance painters like Piero della Francesca and Caravaggio to contemporary cinema.

In Milan, the Italian Renaissance Meets Artificial Intelligence: An Interview with Refik Anadol

A Milano il Rinascimento italiano incontra l’intelligenza artificiale: intervista a Refik Anadol

Refik Anadol's immersive AI artwork, 'Renaissance Dreams,' is on extended daily view at Milan's MEET Digital Culture Center during Design Week. The piece uses artificial intelligence to process a dataset of Italian Renaissance visual and written works from 1300-1600, generating ever-changing audiovisual environments for visitors.

Matisse Mesnil “Sutura” at Romero Paprocki, Milan

Artist Matisse Mesnil has opened a solo exhibition titled "Sutura" at the Romero Paprocki gallery in Milan. The show marks a new phase in his practice, characterized by technical and methodological experimentation focused on metal as his primary material.

Who Are the Custom Mannequins in “Costume Art” Based On? We’re So Glad You Asked

The Metropolitan Museum of Art's 2025 Costume Institute exhibition, "Costume Art," features 25 mannequins modeled after nine real people with diverse body types and mobilities. Curator Andrew Bolton collaborated with artist Samar Hejazi, who created mirrored faceless heads for the mannequins, and artist Tanda Francis, who modeled features after historical figures like André Grenard Matswa. The mannequins are distributed across two thematic sections: "Disabled Body," featuring individuals such as writer Sinéad Burke, athlete Aimee Mullins, and models Aariana Rose Philip, Antwan Tolliver, and Sonia Vera, along with imagery of the late drag performer Goddess Bunny; and "Corpulent Body," featuring models Jade O'Belle, Charlie Reynolds, artist Michaela Stark, and singer Yseult. The living subjects underwent 3D photogrammetry scanning to recreate their likenesses.

Architecture Art Exhibitions

An exhibition titled 'The Eames Houses' opened at Triennale Milano during Milan Design Week 2026. It offers a comprehensive look at the residential architecture of Charles and Ray Eames, featuring scale models of eight house projects, archival materials, and two full-scale pavilion structures built using a modular system developed with Kettal. The show runs from April 20 to May 10 and is accompanied by a newly published volume on the Eames' residential work.

Grapeshot. Nancy Lupo by Maya Tounta

Artist Nancy Lupo is preparing a new exhibition titled "Meow Meow Real Estate" at the Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation in London. The show shares its name with a novel she is writing, both projects emerging from a period of personal displacement and a fixation on finding a home. The exhibition continues a trajectory of shows that serve as interconnected, physical manifestations of her literary and emotional exploration of place.