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Selections from actor Gene Hackman's personal collection, including artworks and film memorabilia, were sold across a series of auctions at Bonhams in New York from November 19 to December 4. The three sales collectively realized $3 million, with all 400-plus lots finding new homes. Highlights included a Milton Avery painting that fetched $508,500, a Richard Diebenkorn etching that sold for $419,600, and Hackman's Golden Globe awards, with his trophy for *The Royal Tenenbaums* bringing in $51,200. Hackman, who died in February at age 95, was also an artist himself, having studied at the Art Students League of New York and maintained a studio in Santa Fe.

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A judge at London's Kingston Crown Court sentenced Larry Fraser to 13 months in jail for stealing a Banksy print of the iconic *Balloon Girl* image from Grove Gallery in September 2024. Fraser, who pleaded guilty, used a hammer to break a glass door and stole the print in 36 seconds, hoping to pay off a drug debt. The Metropolitan Police's Flying Squad recovered the artwork within days after Fraser and accomplice James Love stashed it on the Isle of Dogs. Love was acquitted by a jury, claiming he was unaware of the theft until after the fact.

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François-Xavier Lalanne's functional sculpture "Ostrich Bar" (1965) sold for €11.1 million ($12.5 million) at Sotheby's Paris on May 20, far exceeding its €3–4 million estimate after an 11-minute bidding war. The piece, one of only six ever produced, features two porcelain ostriches gripping a metal shelf with a central egg for ice cubes; it was the artist's personal favorite, kept in his bedroom for over four decades. The sale took place within Sotheby's Important Design sale curated by model Betty Catroux.

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Estonian rapper and provocateur Tommy Cash sparked controversy at the 2025 Eurovision Song Contest in Basel, Switzerland, with lyrics that parodied Italian stereotypes, leading Italy to call for his disqualification. Despite finishing third, the incident has drawn renewed global attention to Cash, who has long been a boundary-pushing figure in European art and music. Artnet News resurfaced a 2022 interview with Cash, born Tomas Tammemets in 1991, who describes himself as an artist working across music, fashion, and installation projects, blending post-Soviet visual language with high and low culture references.

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The nonagenarian Colombian fiber artist Olga de Amaral, now 92, is the subject of a major retrospective at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, following its debut at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in Paris in 2024. The exhibition, on view through October 12, 2025, features works spanning her entire career, from the 1950s to the present, and includes pieces that blend ancient and futuristic aesthetics, often incorporating gold shimmer and woven density. Curated by Marie Perennès and Stephanie Seidel, the show highlights Amaral's pioneering role in textile art, a medium historically marginalized as craft rather than fine art.

German artist Georg Baselitz dies aged 88

German artist Georg Baselitz has died at age 88, as confirmed by the Thaddaeus Ropac gallery. Known for his expressive paintings and sculptures, Baselitz rose to prominence in the 1960s after a scandal over sexually symbolic works led to a high-profile court case. He pioneered painting canvases upside down from 1969 onward, a technique he used to grapple with German history and collective guilt. His work spanned six decades and included notable sculptures, such as a wooden figure at the 1980 Venice Biennale that appeared to perform a Nazi salute, which he later clarified was inspired by an African artifact. Baselitz achieved international acclaim in the 1980s and became one of Germany's highest-priced living artists, alongside Gerhard Richter.

Concrete sun tunnels and shimmering pools of water: the monumental land art of Nancy Holt

Nancy Holt (1938-2014), a pioneering land artist known for her monumental work *Sun Tunnels* (1976) in the Utah desert, is the subject of a new exhibition at the Goodwood Art Foundation in Sussex. Titled *MOONSUNSTAR EARTHSKYWATER*, the show is the first UK retrospective to bring together Holt's photographic works, films, poetry, indoor installations, and outdoor pieces, including *Hydra's Head*, a constellation-inspired installation of six circular pools in a chalk quarry. The exhibition highlights Holt's recurring motifs of circles and systems, tracing them from her early concrete poem to her large-scale cosmological works.

New US exhibition explores power of monuments – with help from Rocky

The Philadelphia Museum of Art has opened a new exhibition titled "Rising Up: Rocky and the Making of Monuments," which uses the iconic Rocky Balboa statue as a focal point to explore the power and meaning of monuments across two millennia of boxing and celebrity culture. Curated by Paul Farber, co-founder of Monument Lab, the show features ancient sculptures, 19th-century works, images from boxing's golden age, and contemporary pieces by artists including Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Glenn Ligon. The Rocky statue, placed on the museum's steps in 1982, attracts an estimated 4 million visitors annually, rivaling the Statue of Liberty.

Dean Sameshima review – did the neighbours really not know? The extreme LA sex clubs hidden in plain sight

A new exhibition at Soft Opening in London presents Dean Sameshima's "Wonderland" series, photographs taken in the mid-1990s that document the exteriors of queer sex clubs and bathhouses in Los Angeles's Silver Lake neighborhood. The images, shot in a stark, formal style during daylight, capture the unremarkable facades of these clandestine spaces, with only descriptive titles hinting at the activities within.

The Prototype of an Artist

Der Prototyp eines Künstlers

Timm Ulrichs, the self-proclaimed "Totalkünstler" (total artist) known for his boundary-pushing performances—tattooing himself, locking himself inside a hollowed boulder, and running naked in thunderstorms—has died at age 86 in Berlin. A pioneer of Land Art, Body Art, concrete poetry, and endoscopic imaging, Ulrichs created works that anticipated later artists like Isa Genzken, and was invited to Documenta 6 in 1977. Despite his prolific output and influence on younger generations, he often lamented being overlooked by the international art market compared to peers like Georg Baselitz and Gerhard Richter.

Katherine El-Salahi, anti-apartheid activist, anthropologist and publisher, 1945–2026

Katherine El-Salahi, an anti-apartheid activist, anthropologist, and publisher, has died at age 81. Born Katherine Levine, she studied at Cambridge and SOAS before joining the clandestine group London Recruits in 1970, carrying out leaflet bomb propaganda and running guns into South Africa. She later became instrumental in the career of her husband, Sudanese painter Ibrahim El-Salahi, organizing his landmark 2013 retrospective at Tate Modern, building his archive, and securing gallery representation with Vigo Gallery.

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Ching Ho Cheng (1946–89), a Chinese-American artist who described himself as working "with paper, instead of on it," is the subject of a revival of interest, including a current solo show at Bank gallery's New York outpost featuring his airbrushed gouache works from the mid-to-late 1970s. Cheng, who lived and worked in Suite 903 of New York's Chelsea Hotel, created spiritual, experimental works ranging from psychedelic paintings to torn-paper pieces and monumental oxidized sculptures, before his career was cut short by AIDS-related complications. His papers at the Smithsonian Archives of American Art were digitized in 2024, and his work will be included in a group show at the Whitney Museum of American Art and a major institutional retrospective at the Addison Gallery of American Art in 2027.

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Greek authorities arrested an abbot from the historic Mega Spilaio monastery in Peloponnese following a months-long undercover sting operation, charging him with trafficking Byzantine icons and other antiquities. Six defendants were arrested on Monday for their alleged involvement in an attempt to sell 14 looted Byzantine icons and two gospels for €200,000 ($235,000), with connections to auction houses in Germany and Cyprus. Separately, the Almaty Museum of Arts (ALMA) opened in Kazakhstan as the country's first private museum dedicated to modern and contemporary art, showcasing over 700 artworks from the collection of auto and real estate tycoon Nurlan Smagulov. A major Yoshitomo Nara painting, 'Haze Days' (1998), is heading to Christie's London with an estimate of £6.5-8.5 million, and the Museum of Women's Art (MOWA) opened in China as the first art institution dedicated to women artists.

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Yu Nishimura, a Japanese painter born in 1982, is experiencing a rapid rise in the art world, marked by major gallery shows in New York and Paris in 2025, a record auction price of $711,200 for his work "thicket" (2020) at Sotheby's, and an upcoming institutional exhibition at Lafayette Anticipations Foundation in Paris in 2026. His paintings, which blend landscape, still life, and figuration with layered washes and melancholic tension, have attracted representation from David Zwirner, Sadie Coles HQ, and Galerie Crèvecoeur, with collectors and institutions increasingly drawn to his quiet, introspective style.

Next stop – infinity! My transcendental experience on Japan’s ‘art island’ guided by its master Lee Ufan

The article profiles Korean-born artist Lee Ufan, who turns 90 next month, and his transcendental art on Japan's Naoshima island. It describes his upcoming major shows: a retrospective in Venice coinciding with the Biennale, and an exhibition at Dia Beacon in New York. Lee, a key figure in the Mono-ha movement, creates works like the steel arch "Porte Vers l'Infini" on Naoshima that engage with nature and perception. The piece traces his career from early violent, resistant sculptures involving cracked glass and boulders to later meditative paintings and installations.

Remembering Desmond Morris, James Hayward, and Flo Oy Wong

This week's obituaries mark the passing of several significant figures in the visual arts. They include British surrealist painter and zoologist Desmond Morris, known for his 'biomorph' paintings and experiments with chimpanzee art; West Coast monochrome abstractionist James Hayward, who developed a cult following for his thickly painted canvases; and Chinese American artist Flo Oy Wong, a foundational storyteller of Oakland's Chinatown and the Asian American experience. Also remembered are assemblage artist Aldwyth, Ethiopian painter and educator Behailu Bezabih, Anglo-Irish conservator and designer Alec Cobbe, Bangladeshi art director Tarun Ghosh, and New Mexico painter Michael Hurd.

Marcel Duchamp Was the Messenger of History

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York is launching the first comprehensive U.S. exhibition of Marcel Duchamp’s work in over 50 years. In an interview regarding the opening, renowned scholar Thierry de Duve discusses the artist's enduring legacy, from his infamous readymades like "Fountain" to his complex, labor-intensive works like the "Large Glass." The exhibition seeks to reconcile Duchamp’s identity as both a conceptual provocateur and a meticulous craftsman.

Artists Set Islamic Futurism Into Motion

A growing movement of artists is exploring Islamic Futurism, a framework that draws from Islamic philosophy, visual traditions, and speculative practices to imagine Muslim futures. Artists like Zarah Hussain, Ibrahim El-Salahi, and Soraya Syed are working across mediums—including light installation, digital animation, painting, and classical calligraphy—to reinterpret historical forms for contemporary and future contexts.

10 exhibitions you can still see after Berlin's Gallery Weekend

10 Ausstellungen, die Sie auch nach dem Gallery Weekend in Berlin sehen können

The Monopol editorial team highlights ten standout exhibitions from Berlin's Gallery Weekend, including Jiyoon Chung's installation "Dead End" at Anton Janizewski, which uses subtle triggers to explore perception and anxiety; Giorgio Griffa's retrospective at Walter Storms Galerie, featuring his poetic abstract paintings on raw linen; Walid Raad's narrative-driven show at Galerie Thomas Schulte, referencing the Lebanese civil war with a crashed VW Beetle and bomb graffiti; and Thomas Demand's new works at Sprüth Magers, printed on copper plates to create a shimmering aura. The article provides a curated tour of these shows, many of which remain open after the weekend.

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The Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, has acquired Jean Siméon Chardin's 1760 painting *The Cut Melon* directly from the descendants of Baroness Charlotte de Rothschild. The work had previously sold for $30.3 million at Christie's France in June 2024 to Italian investor Nanni Bassani Antivari, who failed to pay, leading Christie's to sue him. The museum, which was the underbidder at auction, announced the acquisition on Wednesday, and the painting goes on view Thursday in the Louis I. Kahn building.

Georg Baselitz (1938-2026)

Georg Baselitz, born Hans-Georg Kern in 1938, has died at age 88. The German painter and sculptor, who changed his name in 1961, built a career on aesthetic dissent. Expelled from art school in East Berlin, he first gained notoriety with a 1963 exhibition at Galerie Werner and Katz in Berlin, where two works were seized for obscenity. His signature gesture—inverting his images, beginning with "Der Wald auf dem Kopf" in 1969—became his most recognizable trademark, shifting focus from subject to the act of painting itself. Baselitz also produced significant sculptures, often carved with a chainsaw and axe, and his work was the subject of major retrospectives at the Centre Pompidou (2021-2022) and the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris (2011-2012).

A mind-bending Spaniard, an imagistic Puerto Rican and a lush Latvian – the week in art

This week's art roundup from The Guardian features a major exhibition on Spanish painter Francisco de Zurbarán at the National Gallery in London, described as a mind-bending and revelatory show with loans from the Prado and other top museums, positioning him alongside Goya and Picasso. Other highlights include Gilbert & George's tribute to their late homeless friend at their London centre, outdoor sculptures by Lynn Chadwick at Houghton Hall, thickly built-up paintings by Angel Otero at Hauser & Wirth Somerset, and abstract works by Latvian sculptor Daiga Grantina at Warwick Arts Centre. The article also covers a new Banksy statue in central London depicting a man marching with a flag, and a Masterpiece of the Week feature on Guido Reni's 'Saint Mary Magdalene'.

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Sculptor Alma Allen has officially joined Perrotin, a move that follows his high-profile departure from former galleries Mendes Wood DM and Olney Gleason. The transition comes as Allen prepares to represent the United States at the 2026 Venice Biennale with the exhibition "Alma Allen: Call Me the Breeze," curated by Jeffrey Uslip. The artist reportedly split with his previous representation after they opposed his acceptance of the Biennale commission under the current political climate.

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Artnet News compiled a roundup of 2025 interviews with celebrities whose creative work intersects with the visual art world. Sharon Stone turned to portrait painting after her mother's death, creating a series of works channeling historical and personal figures. Adrien Brody exhibited new works at Eden Gallery in New York, discussing how his acting career supported his art practice. Director Yorgos Lanthimos held his first photography exhibition at Webber Gallery in Los Angeles, while Alejandro Iñárritu created a multisensory installation at Mexico's LagoAlgo to mark the 25th anniversary of his film *Amores Perros*. Actor Lili Taylor performed in an artist lecture by Suzanne Bocanegra centered on a Renaissance tapestry from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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Takashi Murakami’s latest exhibition at Perrotin Los Angeles, titled “Hark Back to Ukiyo-e: Tracing Superflat to Japonisme’s Genesis,” marks a significant return to his academic roots in Nihonga (traditional Japanese painting). The show features 24 compositions, including four monumental canvases that took over three years to complete, blending Edo-period woodblock aesthetics with 19th-century Impressionism and contemporary Pokémon imagery. The artist describes this body of work as a reflection on the non-linear nature of time and the physical manifestation of memory.

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The US Department of State confirmed that Mexico-based artist Alma Allen will represent the United States at the 2026 Venice Biennale, opening next May. Jeffrey Uslip will serve as curator, and the commissioning institution is the American Arts Conservancy (AAC), with its executive director Jenni Parido as official commissioner. Allen, who has had only two museum solo shows in three decades, was approached directly by Uslip in October after the State Department had already approved him. The selection process broke from tradition: the National Endowment for the Arts was not involved due to time constraints and staffing transitions, and a prior proposal by artist Robert Lazzarini and curator John Ravenal fell through after negotiations with the University of South Florida’s Contemporary Art Museum collapsed. Allen’s pavilion, titled "Call Me the Breeze," will feature about 30 works exploring elevation and transformation, framed by the State Department as furthering the Trump Administration’s focus on American excellence.

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Matt Bangser, a longtime director at Blum gallery (formerly Blum & Poe), will join Art Intelligence Global (AIG) as senior director on September 8. Bangser spent 16 years at Blum overseeing global sales and securing major estates like Robert Colescott, and previously held senior posts at Van de Weghe Fine Art, Phillips, and Christie's. His move follows the closure of Blum's Los Angeles and Tokyo galleries last month, when founder Tim Blum announced he was leaving the traditional gallery model. AIG co-founder Amy Cappellazzo said Bangser's experience across galleries, auction houses, and artist studios made him a rare hire.

2025 Art21 at the Movies

2025 Art21 at the Movies

On October 8 and 10, 2025, Art21 hosted its second 'Art21 at the Movies' event in New York. The two-day program featured film premieres, artist talks, and screenings at venues including the Metrograph and the Museum of Modern Art. It highlighted artists from the 'Art in the Twenty-First Century' series and included discussions with filmmakers and curators.

Must-see Van Gogh exhibitions in 2026

Several major Van Gogh exhibitions are scheduled for 2026 across Japan and the Netherlands. In Nagoya, the Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art hosts "Van Gogh's Home: The Van Gogh Museum" (January–March), featuring 24 paintings and five drawings from the Amsterdam museum. Amsterdam's Van Gogh Museum presents "Yellow: More than Van Gogh's Favourite Colour" (February–May), exploring the color yellow through Van Gogh's Sunflowers and works by other artists. A touring exhibition from the Kröller-Müller Museum, "The Grand Van Gogh Exhibition," travels from Kobe to Fukushima and Tokyo with 37 paintings and 20 drawings. The Kröller-Müller Museum itself plans "All Van Goghs" (September 2026–January 2027), reuniting its entire collection for the first time since 1984. Den Bosch's Noordbrabants Museum examines Van Gogh's influence on Jan Sluijters in "Jan and Vincent: About Light" (October 2026–February 2027). Several ongoing exhibitions continue into early 2026, including "Van Gogh and the Roulins" and "Captivated by Vincent" at the Van Gogh Museum, and "Van Gogh and the Potato" in Den Bosch.

Artist and Filmmaker Steve McQueen Wins $172,000 Erasmus Prize

British artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen has been awarded the 2024 Erasmus Prize by the Dutch Praemium Erasmianum Foundation. The prize includes a cash award of 150,000 euros (approximately $172,000) and a specially designed booklet featuring the script of the 16th-century scholar Desiderius Erasmus.