Pedro Friedeberg, the Mexican surrealist artist and designer, has died at age 90. He was best known for his iconic "Hand Chair," a functional sculpture shaped like a hand that became a symbol of 1960s and '70s pop culture and design, as well as for his intricate, fantastical paintings of impossible architectures.
The New York Times has traced the whereabouts of a distinctive blue-and-white vase featured in the 1958 film 'Bonjour Tristesse,' directed by Otto Preminger. The vase, which played a prominent role in the film's set design, was discovered to be a piece by French ceramicist Georges Jouve and had been quietly residing in a private Los Angeles collection for decades.
The K-pop group BTS performed two songs from their new album 'ARIRANG' in the main lobby of the Guggenheim Museum in New York. The private, phone-free event for about 150 invited fans featured the tracks "SWIM" and "2.0," with leader RM performing seated for one song due to an ankle injury.
Somali artists, cultural workers, and organizations have published multiple open letters and statements expressing concern over the Somalia Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. The pavilion, announced in March for the 2026 edition, is titled 'SADDEXLEEY' and features Somali-Swedish artist Ayan Farah, Somali-Danish poet and filmmaker Asmaa Jama, and Somali-British writer Warsan Shire, curated by Stockholm-based Mohamed Mire and Italian project manager Fabio Scrivanti. Critics, including the Somali Arts Foundation and the queer collective Warbixinta Cidda, allege that the pavilion was organized without meaningful consultation of artists and organizations based in Somalia, and object to the appointment of an Italian co-curator given Italy's colonial history in Somalia. An anonymous open letter further alleges intimidation and coercive pressure against critics, and demands Scrivanti's removal, calling for a boycott if demands are not met.
Deborah Levy’s latest novel, *My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein*, follows a first-person narrator who travels to Paris to research the American writer and collector Gertrude Stein. The narrative slips between the early twentieth century and the autumn of Donald Trump’s 2024 reelection, using stream-of-consciousness prose and liquid metaphors to blur past and present. The narrator’s research into Stein’s role in shaping modernity becomes a vehicle for exploring her own sense of helplessness and lack of agency in a hyperconnected, war-weary present.
Sung Tieu, who is co-representing Germany at the 61st Venice Biennale alongside Henrike Naumann, responds to a questionnaire from ArtReview about her plans for the German Pavilion. She describes her inspiration as her mother and childhood home, a site built for foreign contract workers in the GDR that later became a refuge for the diaspora. Tieu states that her work relates to the Biennale theme "In Minor Keys" through the lens of Gehrenseestrasse, a concrete record of collective memory. She also expresses skepticism about the Biennale's importance, noting that the German Pavilion's fascist architecture compels artists to work against it, and that national pavilions reveal how much work remains in undoing nationalism.
ArtReview published a questionnaire response from Bugarin + Castle, the artist duo representing Scotland at the 61st Venice Biennale (2026). Their exhibition, titled "Shame Parade" and curated by Mount Stuart Trust, explores charivari—medieval public shaming rituals involving sound, costume, and cross-dressing. The work draws on the artists' research into how noise and music have been used as tools of control, with particular attention to the Filipino legal definition of charivari as a punishable public disturbance. The exhibition includes sculpture, print, moving image, and a musical score created with Manila-based band Kalye Teresa, and is housed at the Olivolo, Castello pavilion.
Rafał Zajko's exhibition 'The Egg Egg' at Arsenal Gallery in Białystok, Poland, brings together 50 works from the past decade across two floors of a former power station, organized into nine 'acts'. The show features modular installations like 'Funny Games' (2025), a set of pastel-colored platforms on wheels with ceramic reliefs, and monumental sculptures such as 'Sisyphus' (2025), a suspended ceramic bobbin evoking textile factory tools. Performances by Agnieszka Szczotka, including 'Song to the Siren' (2026), activate works like 'Amber Chamber III Echo' (2025), blending archaism, futurism, and themes of labor and technology.
Sam Jacob's essay in ArtReview uses the upcoming Baz Luhrmann film 'EPIC: Elvis Presley in Concert' (2026) as a springboard to explore the cultural and technical implications of digital restoration. The film, a spinoff from Luhrmann's 2022 Elvis biopic, draws on 59 hours of previously unseen footage from Elvis Presley's 1970 and 1972 Las Vegas performances, recovered from Warner's Kansas salt-mine archive. Using Peter Jackson's Park Road Post technology—including Machine Assisted Learning (MAL) for demixing audio and video—the damaged, fragmented material has been digitally scanned, reconstructed, and enhanced to 4k resolution with 12-channel sound, presented in IMAX cinemas.
Artist Andreas Angelidakis will represent Greece at the 61st Venice Biennale in 2026 with a project titled 'Escape Room'. He plans to split the Greek Pavilion in two, referencing the National Schism in Greek history, and will create an immersive experience that explores the building's dual identities as a national symbol and an exhibition space, set to the soundtrack of Frankie Goes to Hollywood's 'Relax'.
Colombo’s skyline has undergone a radical transformation into a forest of glass and steel towers, epitomized by projects like the Lotus Tower and Port City. This rapid urbanization, driven by a state ambition to create a 'world-class city' following decades of civil war, has resulted in the displacement of local neighborhoods and the burial of historical layers under new infrastructure.
India has announced its artist lineup for the 61st Venice Biennale, featuring Alwar Balasubramaniam, Sumakshi Singh, Ranjani Shettar, Asim Waqif, and Skarma Sonam Tashi. The national pavilion, located in the Arsenale, will showcase a diverse range of installations that explore themes of architectural memory, environmental sustainability, and the physical processes of nature. From Tashi’s recreations of Ladakhi homes using recycled materials to Singh’s spectral thread-based architectural fragments, the works collectively examine the fragility of heritage and the shifting relationship between humans and their environments.
The Colectivo Los Ingrávidos, an anonymous film collective based in Tehuacán, Mexico, has been named the winner of the 2026 Schering Stiftung Award for Artistic Research. The group will receive a €15,000 prize, a solo exhibition at Berlin's KW Institute of Contemporary Art featuring a newly produced work, and a publication.
The article is a first-person dispatch from Rojava, a Kurdish-majority region in northeastern Syria, where the author meets artists and fighters living and working on the front lines against jihadist groups. It focuses on artist Diyar Hesso, who has exchanged his camera for a rifle, and YPJ fighter Hevi, who articulates the necessity of armed self-defense for women facing a genocidal enemy. Their stories illustrate the impossible choice between artistic creation and survival in a war zone.
San Francisco's Vaillancourt Fountain, a Brutalist concrete structure at Embarcadero Plaza since 1971, caught fire on Wednesday morning as workers used blow torches to disassemble it. The fire ignited rubber tubing and debris inside the sculpture's cantilevered arms, producing smoke that forced the temporary evacuation of nearby paddle board courts. The fountain is being removed to make way for a $32.5 million redevelopment of the plaza and playground into a five-acre park.
The Gwangju Biennale has announced the title and theme for its 2026 edition, which will run from September 5 to November 15. The title, 'You Must Change Your Life,' is taken from a Rainer Maria Rilke poem. Artistic director Ho Tzu Nyen stated the event will focus on 'change' and 'practice,' exploring art's transformative power through a curated selection of works from 45 artists and collectives, the smallest cohort in the event's history.
M+, Hong Kong's premier art museum, has signed a multi-year strategic partnership with Paris's Centre Pompidou. The agreement, signed on May 15, 2026, by Centre Pompidou President Laurent Le Bon and M+ Museum Director Suhanya Raffel, covers joint curatorial research, exhibition development and sharing, co-commissions and artwork displays, and collection exchange. A major co-curated exhibition will be presented at both venues, with a series of jointly developed exhibitions staged at M+ from 2027 onwards, featuring works from both institutions' collections.
L’artista Pietro Roccasalva senza tregua: genealogia di un motivo resiliente nella mostra a Milano
Italian artist Pietro Roccasalva presents a new body of work at MASSIMODECARLO’s Casa Corbellini-Wassermann in Milan, titled "Io ti saluto luce, ma con nervi offesi." The exhibition features a series of paintings characterized by dense stratification, featuring recurring motifs like a disheveled child, a bride with a tennis racket, and metamorphic animals. These works function as visual deposits where cultural references and personal iconography overlap, creating a theatrical dialogue with the gallery’s historic architecture.
Tutta la poesia del cielo in mostra nel grand hotel di Roma per ricordarci la nostra stessa complessità
Artist Giovanni Ozzola has opened a solo exhibition titled 'Il Cielo Dentro' (The Sky Within) at the Galleria Continua's space within The St. Regis hotel in Rome. The show features works centered on the sky as a metaphor for the vastness both outside and within the human experience, exploring the tension between internal and external horizons through light and abandoned architectural spaces like bunkers.
Elliot and Erick Jiménez, twin photographers from Miami, have debuted their first museum exhibition, 'El Monte,' at the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM). The immersive installation transforms the gallery into a hybrid chapel-forest, drawing conceptual inspiration from Cuban ethnographer Lydia Cabrera's seminal 1954 book of the same name, which explores Afro-Cuban spiritual traditions. The artists present staged photographs featuring anonymous 'shadow figures' adorned in paint and costumes, creating archetypal representations of spiritual forces.
Sung Tieu, a Vietnamese-born German artist, is the subject of a critical feature in Frieze that examines her work's engagement with difficulty—both in terms of the complex political and historical themes she tackles and the challenging formal qualities of her installations. The article highlights her recent projects, including works shown at the Venice Biennale, which address issues of surveillance, migration, and Cold War legacies through meticulous research and unconventional materials.
Andrew Durbin reviews national pavilions at a major biennial, contrasting a vacuous US presentation with incisive and moving installations from Britain and Germany. The review critiques the lack of meaningful content in the US pavilion while praising the depth and emotional resonance of the British and German contributions.
Artist-poet Arch Hades has opened a major solo exhibition on the Grand Canal in Venice, running concurrently with the Venice Biennale. The collateral show features monumental paintings and immersive sculptures that delve into themes of loss and vulnerability as part of a broader meditation on the human condition.
The City of Santa Monica has officially opened the Santa Monica City Gallery, its first municipal art space, located within the Bergamot Station Arts Center. The gallery launched with the inaugural exhibition "Case Study: Adapt," which showcases architectural models designed by students and professional firms to address housing needs for families displaced by the 2025 California wildfires. The venue is designed to host a rotating schedule of exhibitions, artist residencies, and selections from the city’s permanent Art Bank collection.
第10回マックスマーラ・アート・プライズ・フォー・ウィメン
The 10th Max Mara Art Prize for Women has been awarded to Indonesian artist Dian Suci, marking the first time the prize has been held in Asia. Suci was selected from five finalists for her project "Crafting Spirit: Cultural Dialogues in Heritage and Practice," which examines the intersection of religious craftsmanship traditions and capitalist systems. The prize is organized in partnership with the Museum MACAN in Jakarta. Suci will undertake a six-month residency in Italy, followed by solo exhibitions in 2027 at both Museum MACAN and Collezione Maramotti in Reggio Emilia.
Adam Golfer, the director of the short film "Camille Henrot: In Movement," reflects on the process of creating the documentary. He describes following the artist Camille Henrot over a full year in New York and Paris, capturing her wide-ranging creative process from sketches to paintings, model-making to large-scale sculptures, and the evolution of her film work.
Mumbai-based contemporary artist Pooja Bhansali is making her debut solo exhibition, "Grid & Garden," at Jehangir Art Gallery in Kala Ghoda. The show features works that blend painting, textile, and sculpture, using materials like herringbone tweed, silk brocade, and wool felt on custom wooden structures. Series include "Wave Grid," "The Golden Realm," "The Beehive Series," and "Water Garden Triptych," exploring themes of structure, fluidity, nature, and luxury.
Studio SALES in Rome presents "Concetto Pozzati. 50 years later," an exhibition revisiting the artist's 1976 retrospective at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni. Organized in collaboration with the Archivio Concetto Pozzati, the show focuses on Pozzati's experimental work from the 1970s, featuring four large canvases from the original exhibition alongside works on paper displayed using plexiglass. The pieces, some unseen since 1976, explore mixed techniques like spray painting and screen-printing, highlighting a period when Pozzati moved away from his signature style.
Meriem Bennani, a New York-based artist known for her shape-shifting practice of videos, installations, and immersive environments, gained viral fame during the COVID-19 lockdown in March 2020. She co-created the animated series '2 Lizards' with fellow artist Orian Barki, which depicted surreal, humorous conversations between anthropomorphic reptiles navigating the first weeks of the pandemic in New York City. The series, posted on Instagram, resonated widely and led to eight episodes. Bennani's broader work, including 'Life on the CAPS' (2018–2022) and 'Mission Teens' (2019), blends digital animation, live-action footage, and cultural critique, often exploring themes of diaspora, post-colonialism, and migration through dystopian, supernatural narratives.
Artist Pablo Delano has brought his provocative installation, “The Museum of the Old Colony,” to New Britain, Connecticut, a region with a significant Puerto Rican population. The exhibition utilizes enlarged archival photographs, historical texts, and consumer goods to document the United States' colonial relationship with Puerto Rico since 1898. By juxtaposing derogatory 19th-century media captions with images of mass sterilization, military enlistment, and the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, Delano challenges viewers to confront a legacy of systemic racism and exploitation.