The Barbican Art Gallery in London is presenting a major retrospective of Colombian artist Beatriz González, marking her first solo show in the UK and her largest-ever exhibition in Europe. The exhibition spans six decades of her work, from the 1960s to the present, showcasing her roles as an artist, curator, art historian, and educator.
Astrup Fearnley Museet in Oslo presents "Grammars of Light," a major exhibition featuring immersive works by Cerith Wyn Evans, Ann Lislegaard, and P. Staff. The show includes architecturally scaled video projections and luminous sculptures made from repurposed consumer, medical, and industrial lighting, transforming the museum's galleries into sensory environments that challenge perception.
Fatinha Ramos, a Portuguese artist and illustrator based in Antwerp, describes her work as 'visual activism,' creating richly layered illustrations that give voice to minorities and address social issues. She collaborates with major clients including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Tate, Scientific American, the Anne Frank Museum, and MoMA, which commissioned her to illustrate an essay about being compared to Frida Kahlo. Born with osteogenesis imperfecta (brittle bone disease), Ramos spent much of her childhood in hospitals, where drawing became an escape. After 12 years as an art director in advertising and publishing, she now focuses on her own practice, which challenges stereotypes around disability, climate crisis, sexism, and racism. She is currently working on a graphic novel and a series of anatomical glass sculptures based on brittle bone disease.
American artist Beeple (Mike Winkelmann) has installed an interactive piece titled "Regular Animals" at Berlin's Neue Nationalgalerie, featuring robot dogs with hyper-realistic silicone heads modeled after Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Andy Warhol, Pablo Picasso, and Beeple himself. The dogs roam the gallery and "poo" printed AI-transformed images of their surroundings, with each dog's output reflecting the worldview of its human figure—for example, the Picasso dog produces Cubist-style images. The work, first shown at Art Basel Miami Beach 2025, includes QR codes on prints that grant access to free NFTs.
Art Basel Qatar has appointed Iraqi curator Wassan Al-Khudhairi as artistic director for its second edition, scheduled for January 28–30, 2027, in Doha. The fair will be themed “between / بين,” exploring states of betweenness and fluid cultural encounters, and will feature a scaled-up Special Projects sector with large-scale, site-specific works, alongside solo gallery presentations. Al-Khudhairi, a specialist in modern and contemporary Arab art, previously served as founding director of Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha and held curatorial roles at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis.
Curator and writer Reuben Keehan has been appointed artistic director of the forthcoming Kontempo – Center for Contemporary Art in Manila, a new institution developed by the Ayala Foundation. Keehan will relocate from Australia, ending his 15-year tenure as curator of contemporary art at Brisbane’s Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art. In other career moves, Manuel Rabaté has become CEO and director of New Delhi’s Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, bringing over 25 years of museum leadership including his previous role as inaugural director of Louvre Abu Dhabi. Additionally, the Kochi Biennale Foundation has named board member and Mumbai-based artist Jitish Kallat as president of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, succeeding Bose Krishnamachari who resigned in January.
The Whitney Biennial 2026, the 82nd edition of the longest-running survey of American art, opened with a stripped-down, self-referential title and no subtitle, reflecting a moment of national self-questioning. The exhibition features 56 artists, duos, and collectives, with highlights including Agosto Machado's shrine sculptures dedicated to friends lost to AIDS, Emilie Louise Gossiaux's tender works about her guide dog London, and Michelle Lopez's apocalyptic video projection *Pandemonium*. Machado, a longtime downtown New York artist and caregiver, died shortly after the biennial opened, and his ashes are to be mixed with those of Marsha P. Johnson and spread in the Hudson River.
Berlin im Kunstfrühling
The Monopol podcast "Kunst und Leben" previews the upcoming Gallery Weekend Berlin, taking place from May 1 to 3. Editors Elke Buhr and Silke Hohmann share their personal watchlist of must-see exhibitions, including shows by Daniel Buren and Lawrence Weiner at Konrad Fischer, Candice Breitz at KOW, Heimo Zobernig at Nagel Draxler, and Jorinde Voigt at Mercator Höfe. The episode also covers performances, tattoo art on moving cars, tapestries, robot dogs, and tips for navigating the weekend.
A rediscovered portrait of Prince Rupert, long attributed to the studio of Anthony van Dyck and later to Jacob Huysmans, sold for CA$217,250 ($153,000) at Heffel Fine Art Auction House’s Spring Sale on May 21, more than double its low estimate. New research identified the work as by Peter Lely, court painter to King Charles II. The painting had belonged to the Hudson Bay Company for centuries and was part of a court-approved sale of the company’s collection following its 2024 bankruptcy. The 80-lot sale also saw a record for E.J. Hughes’s "Coastal Boats Near Sidney, BC" (1948), which sold for CA$5.7 million ($4.1 million), and strong results for Group of Seven artists Arthur Lismer, A.J. Casson, and Lawren Harris.
The UK government is exploring a proposal to charge admission fees for foreign tourists at national museums in England, sparking widespread opposition from cultural institutions. The idea was raised in a review of Arts Council England by Labour peer Margaret Hodge, who suggested digital ID checks could enable such a system, though she noted it would bring in less than £10 million and may not be worth the hassle. Museums like the Royal Armouries have condemned the plan as undermining universal access and projecting a lack of generosity, while the Cultural Policy Unit warns it would be logistically complex and ideologically problematic given the colonial origins of many collections.
New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani visited MoMA PS1's recurring survey exhibition "Greater New York" alongside New York State Representative Claire Valdez. PS1 director Connie Butler shared the news on Instagram, posting images of the politicians smiling and raising their arms near an installation by Palestinian American photographer Dean Majd. Majd's work features photographs of communities in New York and the West Bank, including a portrait of Mahmoud Khalil, an Algerian Palestinian activist detained by ICE. The exhibition, which runs through August 17, includes 53 artists and focuses on themes of urban decay, infrastructural failure, and survival.
This travel guide explores the cultural landscape of Northwest Arkansas, focusing on the upcoming 114,000-square-foot expansion of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, set to open June 6, 2026. The author recounts a road trip from Little Rock to the Ozarks, visiting the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts (with its new Studio Gang-designed building), dining at Coursey's Smoked Meats, and encountering a white supremacist billboard in Harrison, while also highlighting Thorncrown Chapel by E. Fay Jones as a transcendent architectural stop.
Sotheby's has launched a new exhibition initiative called 'In Residence' at its Breuer building on Madison Avenue, starting with a presentation of three paintings by Spanish master Joaquín Sorolla from the collection of the Hispanic Society Museum & Library. The inaugural show, titled 'In Residence: The Hispanic Society Sorollas,' opened Monday and runs through June 1, featuring works including 'Sea Idyll' (1909), 'Louis Comfort Tiffany' (1911), and 'Señora de Sorolla in a Spanish Mantilla' (1902). This marks the first partnership between Sotheby's and the Hispanic Society, and the first edition of a broader program inviting museums to stage focused exhibitions inside the Breuer building, which previously housed the Whitney Museum and the Met Breuer.
The 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair has returned to the Starrett-Lehigh Building in Chelsea, New York, featuring over 20 galleries from Africa and the diaspora, with a special focus on Brazil and Afro-Brazilian perspectives. The fair, running through Sunday, includes first-time participants from Lagos, São Paulo, Nassau, and New York, and highlights five standout booths: Sulette van der Merwe's surrealist paintings at Blond Contemporary, Modou Dieng Yacine's Senegalese wrestler-inspired works at 193 Gallery, Ekene Ijeoma's Black Forest Library community project, Rommulo Vieira Conceição's aluminum works at Aura, and the curated section "Brazil Beyond Brazil" featuring 10 artists selected by Igor Simões.
Jordan Eagles presents "Bases Loaded," a solo exhibition at Brooklyn's Pioneer Works that explores his lifelong fandom of the New York Mets through works made with donated blood and medical waste. The show features three bodies of work: large-scale reproductions of New York Post covers about the team, cast-resin sculptures of home plate filled with blood and family artifacts, and T-shirts given to blood donors at the Mets ballpark that Eagles cropped and splashed with blood from HIV-positive gay men, arranged by color into orange and grey factions.
A Lucas Cranach the Elder painting, *Cupid complaining to Venus* (1526–27), once hung in Adolf Hitler's Munich apartment, according to a report by the Art Newspaper. The work was identified in a 1940s photograph published in a 1978 furniture catalog and later in a 2023 article by art historian Birgit Schwarz, who confirmed Hitler's ownership via a 2006 discovery of an album at the Library of Congress. After World War II, American journalist Patricia Lochridge took the painting from a warehouse in Berchtesgaden and smuggled it to the US. The National Gallery in London acquired it in 1963 from A. Silberman Galleries, which falsely claimed it came from the 1909 auction buyer's heir; it had actually been purchased from Lochridge.
A rare photograph from the early 1940s reveals that Lucas Cranach the Elder's painting *Cupid complaining to Venus* (1526-27), now a masterpiece in the National Gallery, London, once hung in Adolf Hitler's private Munich apartment. The image, previously published in Germany by provenance expert Birgit Schwarz, appears for the first time in an English-language publication. The painting was acquired by the National Gallery in 1963 from E. and A. Silberman Galleries in New York, which provided a false provenance. It had been taken from a warehouse of recovered art in 1945 by American journalist Patricia Lochridge, who smuggled it into the United States.
An artwork looted by the Nazis from the renowned Goudstikker collection has resurfaced in the home of descendants of Hendrik Seyffardt, a notorious Dutch SS collaborator. The painting, *Portrait of a Young Girl* by Toon Kelder, was discovered by art detective Arthur Brand after a family member contacted him, revealing that the piece had hung for decades in the home of Seyffardt’s granddaughter. Brand traced the painting to a 1940 auction where part of the looted Goudstikker collection was sold, and lawyers for the Goudstikker heirs have confirmed the work was stolen and called for its return.
Richard Lewer has won the 2026 Archibald Prize, Australia's most prestigious portraiture award, for his portrait of Pitjantjatjara elder, traditional healer, and senior artist Iluwanti Ken. The $100,000 prize was announced at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, with the judging panel selecting the work unanimously from 59 finalists. Lewer, a six-time Archibald finalist, painted Ken life-size against a yellow ochre background, capturing her quiet authority and role as a working artist. The Wynne Prize for landscape painting was also awarded to Gaypalani Waṉambi for *The Waṉambi tree*.
Poland's entry for the 2024 Venice Biennale, titled *Liquid Tongues*, is an audio-video installation by artists Bogna Burska and Daniel Kotowski. The work centers on a performance by the Chór w Ruchu (Choir in Motion), which includes both hearing and deaf performers, with much of the content filmed underwater in a Warsaw swimming pool. Presented across two screens in the Polish pavilion, the installation draws inspiration from whale song to explore alternative modes of communication, using spoken English and International Sign. The project builds on a previous performance at Warsaw's Zachęta National Gallery of Art and was developed in close collaboration with curators Ewa Chomicka and Jolanta Woszczenko.
Photographer Pieter Henket describes the creation of his portrait "La Mujer" (The Woman), part of his series "Birds of Mexico City." The image features Ixchel Paz, a young Mexican woman wearing a lucha libre wrestling mask, captured in a dignified pose on the first day of the project. Henket explains how the series evolved from an earlier project, "Birds of New York," which celebrated young people in New York during the first Trump administration. After the pandemic, he traveled to Mexico City with his husband Roger Inniss, collaborated with stylist Chino Castilla and his team, and encouraged subjects to express their identities through costume and culture.
The article recounts the author's experience viewing Caravaggio's *Seven Acts of Mercy* (1607) in its original chapel in Naples, where the painting's crowded, dramatic composition directly mirrors the chaotic streets of the city, revealing its sacred meaning through context. In contrast, the author describes Caravaggio's *Flagellation of Christ* (1607), moved from the church of San Domenico Maggiore to the Museo di Capodimonte for security reasons, as a painting "marooned"—its spiritual purpose broken, reduced to a mere object for aesthetic appreciation.
Artist Dries Verhoeven has transformed the Dutch pavilion at the Venice Biennale into a bunker-like space by covering its iconic glass-and-steel structure with metal shutters. Inside, visitors experience a gradually darkening environment and a raw vocal performance by 13 rotating performers, intended to evoke desperation and confusion about contemporary global crises. The work critiques the modernist ideals of openness and optimism embodied by the pavilion, designed by Gerrit Rietveld in 1953.
Natasha Tontey's new installation "The Phantom Combatants" at the Ateneo Veneto in Venice reimagines the story of Len Karamoy, a woman who was part of the CIA-funded Permesta resistance movement in North Sulawesi, Indonesia (1957-1961). The 22-minute film, commissioned by the LAS foundation and Amos Rex, features absurdly muscular mutant warriors and draws on Indigenous belief systems, video games, Indonesian soap operas, and B-movie aesthetics to explore themes of autonomy, resistance, and historical perspective.
Pedro Reyes's new sculpture 'Tlali' (2026), a four-meter-tall Olmec-inspired volcanic-stone female face installed at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Lacma), has sparked criticism in Mexico. An open letter signed by nearly 80 cultural figures, published on the art criticism site Cubo Blanco, alleges the work is a new version of a 2021 project that was canceled after backlash. That earlier project, 'Tlalli', was meant to replace a Christopher Columbus statue on Mexico City's Paseo de la Reforma but faced opposition from over 300 cultural figures who argued a male, non-Indigenous artist should not represent Indigenous women. The site later became the 'Glorieta de las Mujeres que Luchan', an anti-monument against gender violence.
Researchers Karen L. Davies and Hassan Ugail used artificial intelligence facial recognition to analyze two Hans Holbein drawings from the Royal Collection Trust. Their study, published in npj Heritage Science, suggests that a portrait previously labeled as Anne Boleyn actually depicts her mother, Elizabeth Howard, while a drawing cataloged as an unidentified woman is the true likeness of Anne Boleyn. The findings challenge long-held identifications based on 18th-century inscriptions and align more closely with contemporary descriptions of Boleyn as slender with dark hair.
Researchers at the University of Bradford have used artificial intelligence to analyze preparatory drawings by Hans Holbein the Younger in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle. The AI model, which previously identified a forgotten Raphael painting, suggests that a drawing long believed to depict Anne Boleyn actually shows her mother, Elizabeth Howard, while another drawing labeled "Unidentified Woman" likely portrays Anne Boleyn herself. The findings, published in Heritage Science, are based on biometric analysis of facial features, bone architecture, and proportional relationships, offering quantifiable evidence to resolve long-standing scholarly uncertainty about the sitters' identities.
Henrike Naumann, a German artist known for using secondhand furniture and design to explore political extremism and consumer capitalism, is profiled in ARTnews. The article recounts her first US exhibition, “Re-Education” at SculptureCenter in New York in 2022, where she created installations referencing the January 6 Capitol attack, juxtaposing Federal-style office furniture with a Flintstonian mancave and chairs arranged by ideological subtext. The show gained unexpected attention when German media covered it, linking her small hometown of Zwickau with New York, and she later visited Thomas Hart Benton’s murals at the Met to understand American power and aesthetics.
Fiona Pardington has created a new series of human-scale photographic portraits of native New Zealand birds, many of which are extinct or endangered, using taxidermy specimens from regional museums. The series, titled "Taharaki Skyside," will be exhibited at the Aotearoa New Zealand pavilion at the 2026 Venice Biennale. Pardington, who has Māori and Scottish ancestry, incorporates the birds' eyes with superimposed historical landscapes to evoke their lost habitats and spiritual significance as intermediaries between human and divine worlds in Māori culture.
The Guardian's weekly entertainment guide highlights two major art exhibitions opening in May 2025: 'Aleksandra Kasuba' at Tate St Ives (2 May to 4 October) and 'Zurbarán' at the National Gallery, London (2 May to 23 August). The Kasuba show is the first UK presentation of the Lithuanian American artist's proto-immersive 'spatial environments,' featuring early paintings, mosaics, and installations focused on utopian social harmony. The Zurbarán exhibition presents a blockbuster survey of the 17th-century Spanish Baroque master, known for his intense religious subjects and dramatic chiaroscuro.