The V&A East Museum is set to open in Stratford, London, marking a significant milestone for the East Bank cultural quarter. This £135m project joins the V&A East Storehouse and other major institutions in a transformed area of East London, aiming to attract younger and more diverse audiences through accessible art and design collections.
Sotheby’s Paris achieved a landmark result for its modern and contemporary art sale, totaling €35 million ($41 million) and surpassing its high estimate. The auction was headlined by two Claude Monet paintings that had been hidden from public view for roughly a century, including 'Vétheuil, effet du matin' (1901), which sold for €10.2 million ($12.1 million), setting a record for the artist at auction in France.
Artist Lorna Simpson has significantly reduced the asking price for her Brooklyn home and studio, located at 208 Vanderbilt Avenue in Fort Greene. Originally listed for $6.5 million in August 2025, the 3,300-square-foot townhouse is now priced at $5 million following months on the market. The property, which features a double-height great room and floor-to-ceiling windows, was custom-built in 2006 for Simpson and her then-husband, artist James Casebere.
MoMA PS1 has launched the sixth edition of Greater New York, its signature quinquennial survey featuring 53 artists living and working across the city's five boroughs. Marking the institution’s 50th anniversary, this iteration was organized entirely by the museum’s internal curatorial staff rather than outside contributors. The exhibition moves away from the introspective, surrealist themes of the pandemic-era 2021 edition, focusing instead on the social fabric of the city and the systemic challenges facing its residents.
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) has announced a partnership with the high-end grocery chain Erewhon to open a café within its new Peter Zumthor-designed building, the David Geffen Galleries. Scheduled to open to the public on May 4, the outpost will be located in the W.M. Keck Plaza and will offer the brand's signature organic snacks and viral $20-plus smoothies. The collaboration is currently framed as a seasonal residency lasting through the summer.
The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has announced its 101st class of fellows, awarding 223 scholars and artists across 55 disciplines for 2026. Selected from a pool of nearly 5,000 applicants, the new cohort includes prominent visual artists such as Sonya Clark, John Miller, American Artist, and Kota Ezawa. The fellowships provide significant financial grants to individuals who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts.
Brooklyn’s historic Green-Wood Cemetery has unveiled the 'Green-House,' a $34m welcome and education center centered around a meticulously restored 1895 Victorian cast-iron greenhouse. Designed by Architecture Research Office (ARO), the facility includes classrooms, research archives, and dedicated gallery spaces. The project transforms a formerly dilapidated commercial florist shop into a modern gateway that connects the 478-acre National Historic Landmark to its surrounding urban neighborhood.
Two major museum projects have reached completion as London’s V&A East prepares for its public debut and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) unveils its new $700m David Geffen Galleries. V&A East opens with a focus on community-driven programming and its inaugural exhibition, 'The Music is Black: A British Story,' while LACMA’s long-awaited Peter Zumthor-designed building begins member previews amidst ongoing debates regarding its scale and cost.
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is set to open its new $724 million David Geffen Galleries, designed by Swiss architect Peter Zumthor. The massive concrete structure, which spans Wilshire Boulevard like a bridge, represents a twenty-year effort led by director Michael Govan to create a non-hierarchical, single-level museum space. The building's design features eight massive pavilions supporting a sprawling 110,000 square foot gallery floor, intended to house the museum's diverse permanent collection in a transparent, fluid environment.
Photographer Albert Scopin has released a new book through Kerber Verlag documenting his residency at New York’s iconic Chelsea Hotel between 1969 and 1971. The collection features rare, intimate portraits of the hotel's legendary inhabitants, including a young Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe before their rise to global fame, alongside long-time manager Stanley Bard and avant-garde figures like Vali Myers and Holly Woodlawn. Scopin’s lens captures the 'creative chaos' of the era, from the art-filled lobby to the eccentric private quarters of residents like composer George Kleinsinger.
The Victoria and Albert Museum has unveiled the first look at its new V&A East outpost in London’s Olympic Park, showcasing a collection that emphasizes diversity, global exchange, and the integration of art into daily life. The inaugural displays feature a wide-ranging mix of objects, from Althea McNish’s vibrant Caribbean-inspired textiles and Vivienne Westwood’s punk designs to a talismanic shirt inscribed with the Qur’an and a Japanese screen documenting colonial encounters. While the museum's public-facing branding focuses on community engagement, the actual curation offers a sophisticated, open-ended exploration of how different cultures influence and define one another.
The Metropolitan Opera and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) have launched a rare cross-disciplinary collaboration centered on the life and work of Frida Kahlo. The project features a new operatic production at the Met, complemented by a specialized exhibition at MoMA conceived by the opera's set designer to provide visual and historical context.
Major museums across the United States are preparing to launch a diverse array of exhibitions for the spring season. Highlights include a comprehensive Marcel Duchamp retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, an exploration of Etruscan civilization at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, and a major fashion-focused exhibition at the Phoenix Art Museum.
Taiwan is undergoing a significant cultural transformation with the opening of several major municipal art institutions, including the New Taipei City Art Museum, the Taoyuan Museum of Fine Arts, and the Taichung Green Museumbrary. The latter, designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architects SANAA, represents a new hybrid typology that merges a public library with an art museum within a sprawling urban park. These institutions are characterized by striking contemporary architecture and a mission to balance international prestige with deep-rooted local art histories.
The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has announced its 101st class of Guggenheim Fellows, awarding grants to 223 individuals across 55 disciplines. Among the 30 fine artists selected for the 2026 cohort are Brooklyn-based conceptual artist American Artist, textile artist and educator Sonya Clark, and interdisciplinary artist Allison Janae Hamilton. Each fellow receives a financial stipend designed to provide the creative and intellectual freedom necessary to pursue their work without restrictive conditions.
Erste Details zum deutschen Pavillon
The German Pavilion at the upcoming Venice Biennale will present an exhibition titled "Ruin," featuring works by the late Henrike Naumann and artist Sung Tieu. Curated by Kathleen Reinhardt, the exhibition explores historical ruptures and the lingering effects of political and social voids following German reunification. Tragically, Naumann passed away shortly after completing her contributions, and her studio team is now working to realize her final artistic vision for the prestigious international stage.
Schon 100.000 Besucher in Kölner Kusama-Ausstellung
The Museum Ludwig in Cologne has reached a significant milestone, welcoming 100,000 visitors to its Yayoi Kusama retrospective within just four weeks of opening. The exhibition, which features 300 works ranging from early childhood drawings to contemporary installations, has proven to be an unprecedented draw for the institution, surpassing the director's initial expectations for attendance speed.
L’histoire vraie du faussaire de César actuellement dans une série documentaire sur Canal+
The French documentary series on Canal+ explores the life of Éric Piedoie Le Tiec, a prolific art forger who flooded the market with thousands of fake works. Based in the French Riviera, Le Tiec specialized in creating pieces "in the style of" modern masters like Raoul Dufy and César Baldaccini. Following César's death in 1998, Le Tiec partnered with Jean-Charles Villa to mass-produce fake "compressions" using industrial car crushers, exploiting the artist's rising market value and lack of a definitive catalogue raisonné.
Alexander Calder, génial sculpteur de l’air et de la couleur célébré à la fondation Vuitton
The Fondation Louis Vuitton is hosting a major celebration of Alexander Calder, the American sculptor who revolutionized 20th-century art by introducing movement and play into the medium. The article traces Calder's formative years in Paris starting in 1926, where the young engineer-turned-artist gained avant-garde fame with his 'Cirque Calder'—a miniature circus of wire and fabric figurines. This period marked his transition from traditional painting to his signature 'drawings in space,' featuring wire sculptures of figures like Josephine Baker that projected dancing shadows and captured the kinetic energy of the era.
L’art vu par… Louise Bourgoin
French actress Louise Bourgoin discusses her deep-rooted connection to the visual arts, stemming from her studies at the Beaux-Arts de Rennes. She reflects on her first art purchase in the Czech Republic, her obsession with line drawing, and how the abstract works of Mark Rothko have informed her acting performances. Bourgoin also reveals her upcoming project: illustrating a children's book written by Arthur Dreyfus, set for release in September.
À Genève, la renversante leçon d’histoire de l’art de John M Armleder
The Musée d’Art et d’Histoire (MAH) in Geneva has unveiled its sixth "carte blanche" exhibition, curated by the influential Swiss artist John M Armleder. Following in the footsteps of figures like Ugo Rondinone and Wim Delvoye, Armleder was invited by museum director Marc-Olivier Wahler to mine the institution's vast collection of 800,000 objects. The resulting show defies traditional museum hierarchies by juxtaposing fine art with decorative objects, such as silver-topped corks and musical instruments, alongside Armleder's own prolific output of multiples.
Art Dubai has announced a streamlined "special edition" for its 2026 iteration, featuring a reduced roster of approximately 75 exhibitors. Scheduled for May 15–17 at Madinat Jumeirah, the fair is pivoting toward a regional core, with 60 percent of participants hailing from the Gulf and Southwest Asia. To address economic pressures and regional instability, the fair is implementing a novel risk-sharing financial model where booth costs are partially tied to sales performance.
Art Dubai has announced a significantly scaled-back 20th-anniversary edition, reducing its exhibitor list by 57 percent following regional conflict and logistical disruptions. Originally scheduled for April, the fair has been postponed to May 15–17 at Madinat Jumeirah and will now feature only 50 galleries, with a heavy emphasis on regional participants. To support dealers during this period of uncertainty, organizers have implemented a "risk-sharing" booth fee model where galleries pay a percentage of sales capped at their original fee.
American artist Liza Lou discusses her recent shift in practice, moving from her famous large-scale bead installations to a new body of work that fuses oil painting with glass beads. After years of collaborative work in South Africa and focusing on monochrome tones, Lou has returned to a solitary studio practice in a windowless warehouse in the San Fernando Valley. This new phase is defined by a "headlong love affair with colour," inspired by the hallucinatory palette of the Mojave Desert and a transition from logical drawing to a more intuitive, freestyle process.
Art historian Winnie Wong’s new book, *The Many Names of Anonymity: Portraitists of the Canton Trade*, investigates the lives and legacies of 18th and 19th-century Chinese artists who produced works for Western traders under the Canton system. These artists, often dismissed by history as mere copyists or left anonymous in museum "tombstone" labels, created complex works that blended European techniques with Chinese traditions. Wong challenges the reductive category of "Asian export art," proposing instead the term "Canton trade painting" to better reflect the unique atmosphere of cultural exchange in Guangzhou.
Artist Nicola Turner has unveiled a site-specific installation titled "Time’s Scythe" within an 18th-century chapel at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. The work features massive, creature-like forms made from hand-stitched recycled wool and horsehair that appear to crawl and surge through the building's architectural openings, spilling from balconies and wrapping around the exterior.
Victoria Miro is hosting the largest exhibition of Paula Rego’s drawings to date, curated by the artist’s son, Nick Willing. Spanning from the 1950s until her death in 2022, the show features intimate pencil sketches, pastels, and ink drawings that reveal the foundational narratives of her career, including her early childhood sketches, her fierce opposition to the Salazar dictatorship, and her advocacy for women's rights.
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) celebrated the opening of its new David Geffen Galleries with a star-studded gala that raised nearly $11.5 million. The event brought together architect Peter Zumthor, museum director Michael Govan, and a high-profile mix of Hollywood celebrities, artists, and major donors. The $720 million building, Zumthor's first major project in the United States, marks the culmination of a decades-long development process and is set to open to the public next week.
Gagosian Beverly Hills has announced the first exhibition of Frank Gehry’s work since the legendary architect’s death in December. Opening May 14, the show pivots away from his architectural legacy to focus on his sculptural practice, specifically his animal-themed works. Highlights include the stainless steel sculpture "Bear with Us" (2014), on loan from the Gehry family, alongside his signature fish and snake lamps and late-career copper sculptures.
Artist and illustrator CK Reed provides a visual and narrative account of the inaugural Neighbors Boutique Art Fair in Chicago. Founded by Mirka Serrato and curated by Jonny Tana, the fair transformed a historic residence on Astor Street in the Gold Coast into an intimate, domestic exhibition space. The event focused on a "non-conforming cultural proposal," deliberately platforming underrepresented communities and galleries within a setting that prioritized human connection over the typical commercial whirlwind of larger fairs.