Final Weeks to Experience Kent Monkman: History is Painted by the Victors

The Denver Art Museum is hosting 'Kent Monkman: History is Painted by the Victors,' a major exhibition of the Cree artist's provocative, large-scale paintings that challenge Western art history through an Indigenous lens. The show, co-organized with the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, runs until August 17 before traveling to Montreal in September. It has drawn widespread critical acclaim and emotional visitor responses, with reviewers praising its blend of humor, beauty, and political urgency.

Roaring: Art, Fashion, and the Automobile in France, 1918–1939

The Saint Louis Art Museum is presenting "Roaring: Art, Fashion, and the Automobile in France, 1918–1939," a major exhibition on view from April 12 to July 27, 2025. Curated by Genevieve Cortinovis, the show brings together automobiles, haute couture, painting, sculpture, photography, film, and decorative arts to explore the intertwined evolution of fashion and car design in early 20th-century France. Highlights include a 1917 painting by Henri Matisse depicting the view from his Renault, juxtapositions of Alfa Romeo and Citroën logos with works by Piet Mondrian and Charles Loupot, and a c. 1927 dress by Suzanne Talbot inspired by Tutankhamun's funerary mask. The exhibition draws heavily from local and midwestern collections, including the Missouri Historical Society.

Farhad Moshiri In the Raha Gallery Collection

Iranian artist Farhad Moshiri passed away on July 17, 2024, at age 61. A pioneering figure in Middle Eastern contemporary art, Moshiri made history as the first artist from the region to sell a work at auction for over one million USD, achieving this milestone twice—first with "Love" at Bonhams Dubai in 2008 and later with "Secret Garden" at Christie's Dubai in 2013. The article highlights his work "Toothpicker" (2008), now part of the Raha Gallery Collection, which was exhibited at the Saatchi Gallery in London in 2010 and sold at Christie's Middle East in 2014. Moshiri's practice combined pop art, kitsch, and precious materials like crystals and glitter, earning him a solo exhibition at the Andy Warhol Museum in 2017.

Christie’s celebrates the late Syrian artist Marwan with non-selling London show

Christie’s is presenting a non-selling exhibition titled "Marwan: A Soul in Exile" at its London headquarters this summer, featuring over 150 works by the late Syrian artist Marwan (1934-2016). The show draws from major private and institutional collections including the Barjeel Art Foundation, the Ramzi and Saeda Dalloul Art Foundation, the Pinault Collection, and the Berlinische Galerie. This marks Christie’s third such non-selling exhibition of Arab art in London over the past three summers, following shows focused on Arab artists from the Barjeel collection and Saudi artist Ahmed Mater. The exhibition coincides with Christie’s 25th anniversary in the UAE and a broader surge in the Middle Eastern art market, including a recent white-glove sale for its online Modern and contemporary Middle Eastern art auction in Dubai.

The flesh artist: Jenny Saville returns to the spotlight with a US$2.7m drawing and major London retrospective

British figurative painter Jenny Saville has returned to the spotlight with a new auction record and a major retrospective. Her charcoal drawing *Mirror* (2011-12) sold for £2.11 million (US$2.7 million) at Sotheby’s London, setting a record for a work on paper by the artist. The sale coincides with *Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting*, a retrospective at London’s National Portrait Gallery running through 7 September, which features 45 works tracing her evolution from early oil paintings to recent charcoals.

Weekly News Roundup: July 7, 2025

The Sharjah Architecture Triennial announced its third edition theme, "Architecture Otherwise: Building Civic Infrastructure for Collective Futures," opening in November 2026, curated by Vyjayanthi Rao and Tau Tavengwa. The Noguchi Museum appointed Hitomi Iwasaki as head curator, while London nonprofit YDP announced an inaugural Duan Jianyu exhibition and permanent commissions by Christine Sun Kim and Danh Võ. Australia's Mordant family gifted major artworks to the Newcastle Art Gallery.

The UAE’s art market is on the up

The UAE's art market is experiencing a resurgence nearly two decades after the 2008 financial crash, driven by a booming economy and strategic investments. Key developments include an Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund, ADQ, acquiring a $1 billion stake in Sotheby's, and Art Basel announcing a new fair in Doha, Qatar, set to launch in February 2026. Meanwhile, Christie's is expanding its Dubai office, and Saudi Arabia hosted its inaugural Art Week Riyadh in April, featuring 32 commercial galleries. Despite these regional moves, Dubai remains the Gulf's commercial art hub, with Sotheby's chairman Edward Gibbs noting a 70% increase in regional bidders over five years and Christie's president Anthea Peers reporting that sales of modern Middle Eastern art trebled between 2020 and 2024.

From Origin to Future. Opening Exhibition for the Naoshima New Museum of Art by Tadao Ando

Architect Tadao Ando has designed the Naoshima New Museum of Art, the latest addition to the Benesse Art Site Naoshima project in Kagawa Prefecture, Japan. This marks Ando's tenth contribution to the site and the first museum to bear the island's name. The museum will open on May 31, 2025, with an inaugural exhibition featuring works by twelve artists and groups, including both longtime collaborators and newer voices. The building, which includes one above-ground floor and two basement levels, features a large roof integrated with the hills and a cafe overlooking the Seto Sea.

How to see every painting by Leonardo da Vinci

This article guides readers on a global tour to see every surviving painting by Leonardo da Vinci, numbering around 16 works predominantly by the master himself, plus a few with his intervention. It traces his career through Florence, Milan, Rome, and France, highlighting key locations such as the Louvre, the National Gallery in London, the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh, and museums in Washington, D.C., and Krakow. The piece also notes the disputed attribution and unknown whereabouts of the $450m Salvator Mundi.

Behind the scenes of the Met’s revamped Rockefeller Wing with its acclaimed architect

Kulapat Yantrasast, the Bangkok-born architect behind Why Architecture, has completed a $70 million overhaul of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Michael C. Rockefeller Wing, which houses the arts of Africa, Oceania, and the ancient Americas. Working with executive architect Beyer Blinder Belle, Yantrasast redesigned the 40,000-square-foot exhibition hall to address longstanding conservation issues caused by a 200-foot glass wall on Central Park that exposed fragile objects to heat and light. The wing reopens to the public on May 31 after four years of construction.

Moffat Takadiwa’s Scrounged Sculptures Confront Africa’s ‘Colonial Hangover’

Zimbabwean artist Moffat Takadiwa transforms discarded consumer waste—including computer keys, toothbrush heads, and plastic combs—into intricate, tapestry-like sculptures. His latest solo exhibition, "The Crown!" at Semiose in Paris, features large-scale works foraged from landfills in Harare’s Mbare neighborhood. These meticulously sorted and woven objects create organic patterns that mask their industrial origins, forcing a confrontation with the physical reality of global overconsumption.

The Sprawling New David Geffen Galleries At LACMA Open To The Public On Sunday, May 3

The David Geffen Galleries at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) will open to the public on Sunday, May 3, after 20 years of development. Designed by architect Peter Zumthor, the 900-foot-long horizontal glass and concrete structure overlooks the La Brea Tar Pits and stretches over Wilshire Boulevard. The main floor, elevated 30 feet above street level, offers 110,000 square feet of gallery space for LACMA’s permanent collection. The inaugural exhibition is inspired by four major bodies of water—the Pacific, Indian, and Atlantic oceans, and the Mediterranean Sea—and features works by artists including Todd Gray, Do Ho Suh, Lauren Halsey, Tavares Strachan, Jeff Koons, and Diego Rivera. The building also includes open plazas, an outdoor public space, and an Erewhon Cafe, with a larger restaurant and wine bar planned for fall 2026.

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Artist Sun Yitian, known for photorealistic paintings of mass-produced consumer objects that sell for up to six figures, is opening her largest solo exhibition to date at Esther Schipper in Berlin as part of Gallery Weekend Berlin on May 2. The exhibition, titled "Romantic Room," features 14 new paintings that incorporate Christian religious symbols alongside references to China's copy culture (shanzhai) and the proliferation of fakes in the 1990s. Works like "Image of Jesus" (2024) depict a Christ with facial fillers, inspired by posters in her hometown Wenzhou, while "Jingpin" (2024) playfully addresses Wenzhou's history of fabricating high-quality shoe copies. The show also includes her ongoing "Shelter" series, featuring inflatable bouncy castles from her childhood.

Primitivism to Reinvent Art

Le primitivisme pour réinventer l’art

Philippe Dagen has published the third and final volume of his series on primitivism, covering the period from World War II to the late 1970s. The book traces how Western artists, from Barnett Newman and Jackson Pollock to members of the CoBrA movement and figures like Jean Dubuffet, Lucio Fontana, and Yayoi Kusama, engaged with so-called "primitive" art from Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, often as a means of rejecting or redefining modern civilization. Dagen also examines the intellectual debates surrounding primitivism, including the critiques of colonized peoples who refused the label "primitive," and the shifting attitudes of thinkers like Claude Lévi-Strauss, Michel Leiris, and Aimé Césaire.

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Norwegian artist Martine Poppe has opened a new solo exhibition titled "East of the Sun West of the Moon" at Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery in London. The show draws on a classic Nordic fairytale as a conceptual starting point, blending memory, nature, and landscape painting. Poppe uses photographs taken over the past decade as source material, transforming them into atmospheric compositions that blur the line between reality and fiction. The exhibition explores themes of freedom, distance, and the mystical wildness of the natural world, inspired by both her childhood experiences and influences from Japanese woodblock prints and 19th- and 20th-century Western artists.

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Korean artist Kim Yun Shin, who turns 90 in 2025, is currently the subject of a two-part solo exhibition spanning Lehmann Maupin's London and New York galleries. Titled after her series "Add Two Add One, Divide Two Divide One," which began in 1975, the shows opened in February 2025 at the gallery's temporary Cork Street space in London and continue at its New York location through May 31, 2025. The exhibitions draw on Eastern philosophy of Yin and Yang, exploring themes of union and division. This follows her debut at the 2024 Venice Biennale, where curator Adriano Pedrosa selected eight of her sculptures for the Central Pavilion under the theme "Foreigners Everywhere." In an interview, Kim discusses her nomadic life—from North Korea to South Korea, Paris, Argentina, and back—and how her experiences as a foreigner shaped her artistic perspective.

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The article excerpts a book about Indian artist Lalitha Lajmi, exploring her creative struggles, loneliness, and distinctive use of blue and red in watercolors. It draws from her dream journals and interviews, describing how she often painted herself in red against blue landscapes, symbolizing desire and isolation, and how her works resemble raw underpaintings that reveal subconscious imagery.

Art Dubai announces details for revised 2026 edition

Art Dubai has unveiled the details for its 2026 "special edition," which features a significantly reduced scale in response to ongoing regional conflict. The fair will host 50 galleries—a sharp decline from the 120 participants in 2025—with a strategic focus on regional representation, as nearly two-thirds of the exhibitors hail from the Middle East. To compensate for the smaller commercial footprint, the event will deepen its ties with local institutions like the Sharjah Art Foundation and Alserkal Avenue through expanded collaborative programming.

Has A.I. Solved the Mystery of This El Greco Painting?

New research using artificial intelligence has challenged the long-held belief that El Greco's altarpiece *The Baptism of Christ* was largely painted by his son and workshop assistants. A machine-learning model called Patch, developed by researchers at Western Reserve University, analyzed the painting's microscopic surface texture and found underlying connections suggesting El Greco himself painted the majority of the work, with only a small region at the bottom attributed to other hands.

peter zumthor's david geffen galleries open at LACMA as a sweeping glass-and-concrete arc

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) has officially opened the David Geffen Galleries, a massive glass-and-concrete structure designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Peter Zumthor. Elevated nine meters above the ground and spanning Wilshire Boulevard, the 275-meter-long building replaces several older structures to house the museum’s permanent collection. The inaugural installation, developed by a team of 45 curators, abandons traditional chronological displays in favor of a geographic framework organized around four major bodies of water: the Pacific, Indian, and Atlantic Oceans and the Mediterranean Sea.

Strong sales and cross-market demand define Art Basel Hong Kong opening

Art Basel Hong Kong opened with robust sales and high energy, signaling a strong recovery for the Asia-Pacific art market. Blue-chip galleries reported several seven-figure transactions early on, including a $4 million Picasso at Bastian and a $3.8 million Liu Ye painting at David Zwirner. The fair's debut of the digital-focused 'Zero 10' initiative and a significant presence of regional collectors underscored a diverse appetite for both postwar masters and contemporary digital works.

At Art Basel Hong Kong, More Collectors Are Buying With Purpose

Art Basel Hong Kong 2026 opened with a renewed sense of optimism, featuring 240 galleries and a significant emphasis on the Asia-Pacific region. The VIP preview saw a surge in attendance primarily from regional collectors across mainland China, Taiwan, Korea, and Southeast Asia, signaling a robust recovery for the local market. While international travel remains a factor, the fair's success is increasingly driven by a localized ecosystem of younger collectors and long-term public investments in cultural infrastructure like the M+ museum.

Comment | The dissolution of Antwerp's museum of contemporary art should serve as a warning to all

The Flemish ministry of culture has ordered the closure of M HKA, the museum of contemporary art in Antwerp, Belgium, and the transfer of its collection to S.M.A.K. in Ghent. A planned €130m new building for M HKA, ready to break ground, has been cancelled. In response, artists and cultural workers have launched a "Museum at Risk" campaign, occupying the museum's entrance and pressuring city councillors, while international artists like Emilia Kabakov and the estate of Christian Boltanski are demanding the return of their works.

Princeton University Art Museum graduates to expansive new home

The Princeton University Art Museum (PUAM) is opening a new 146,000-square-foot facility on October 31, doubling its previous exhibition and education spaces. The original 1880s building, which underwent multiple additions before being demolished in 2021, could only display about 2% of Princeton's 117,000-object collection. Designed by Adjaye Associates with executive architect Cooper Robertson, the new three-story museum features nine interlocking pavilions, 80,000 square feet of exhibition space, classrooms, and a grand hall. Curators have rethought the installation to move away from rigid geographic and chronological categories, instead emphasizing cross-cultural and cross-media pairings, such as placing Andy Warhol's Blue Marilyn (1962) alongside a 14th-century Italian Virgin and Child.

Grand Rapids Art Museum’s big David Hockney exhibition is worth the day trip from Detroit

The Grand Rapids Art Museum (GRAM) has opened "David Hockney: Perspective Should Be Reversed," billed as the largest-ever retrospective of the British artist's prints. Featuring some 170 works across two floors, the exhibition spans six decades of Hockney's career, from early Xerox experiments to recent iPad drawings. The show is drawn from the collection of Jordan D. Schnitzer, a prominent Portland-based collector and philanthropist, and his Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation. It opened on May 31 and is organized into five thematic sections including "Portraits of Self and Others" and "Tradition and Innovation."

A colorful Takashi Murakami exhibition is coming to Cleveland

The Cleveland Museum of Art is presenting an expanded version of Takashi Murakami's exhibition 'Stepping on the Tail of a Rainbow,' originally shown at The Broad in Los Angeles in 2022. The show fills the Kelvin and Eleanor Smith Foundation Exhibition Hall and Gallery with Murakami's vibrant paintings and sculptures, including early drawings, self-portraits, and new works unseen by American audiences. A highlight is the Yumedono project, a re-creation of the Dream Hall at Hōryū Temple in Nara, Japan, created in collaboration with the team from the FX series *Shogun*. Curator Ed Schad emphasizes the exhibition's exploration of how art can address crisis, healing, and escapist fantasy after shared historical trauma, with loans that dialogue with classical Japanese artists like Ogata Kōrin, Kitaōji Rosanjin, and Itō Jakuchū.

Spring Gallery Night MKE: 7 Art Exhibits to See

Milwaukee’s art scene is celebrating its seasonal renewal with Spring Gallery Night MKE, a city-wide event featuring over 60 participating galleries across neighborhoods like the Third Ward and Walker’s Point. The weekend-long program highlights diverse local talent through curated exhibitions, including Var Gallery’s "30x30x30" creative marathon, a Surrealist-inspired group show at Portrait Society Gallery, and the expansive MIAD Senior Exhibition featuring over 200 graduating students.

Required Reading

This week’s roundup of essential art reading highlights a diverse range of global initiatives, from the development of a new arts center in Compton by formerly incarcerated painter Mr. Wash to a mural project for displaced children in Lebanon led by artist Abed Al Kadiri. The report also covers a guerrilla projection protest at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where activists criticized the institution for laying off staff members of color despite a massive endowment, and a poignant look at medical students graduating amidst the ongoing crisis in Gaza.

"There are no minor or feminine arts." Domitilla Dardi explains this in her new book

“Non esistono arti minori o femminili”. Ce lo spiega Domitilla Dardi nel suo nuovo libro

Domitilla Dardi's new book "Cucire Universi" (published by Einaudi) presents a counter-history of design, focusing on techniques traditionally dismissed as "feminine" and "minor"—such as sewing, ceramics, cooking, and knitting. The book argues that these practices have been systematically undervalued by official art histories, yet have contributed significantly to technologically advanced research fields. Dardi uses real historical figures like Emily Dickinson to illustrate how women's creative and scientific talents were channeled into these marginalized domains, and she calls for overcoming the dualistic view that separates art from craft.

The Synthesis of Poetry and Violence: Inside the New Exhibitions at the Pinault Collection in Venice

La sintesi tra poesia e violenza. Ecco come sono le mostre alla Pinault Collection di Venezia

The Pinault Collection has unveiled its 2025 exhibition program across its two Venice venues, Palazzo Grassi and Punta della Dogana. This year, the institution opts for a multi-artist approach rather than a single-artist takeover, featuring Michael Armitage and Amar Kanwar at Palazzo Grassi, alongside Lorna Simpson and Paulo Nazareth at Punta della Dogana. The exhibitions focus heavily on global perspectives, spanning from Kenya and India to Brazil and the United States, addressing contemporary social tensions through diverse media.