Artemisia Gentileschi's 17th-century painting 'Lucretia' sold for €1.88 million ($2 million) at Dorotheum's Old Master sale in Vienna, more than double its high estimate. The work, previously unseen in public, was acquired by an Australian collection, continuing a trend of strong auction results for the Baroque artist.
Christopher Knight, the Pulitzer Prize-winning art critic for the Los Angeles Times, is retiring after a 45-year career in criticism, including 36 years at the newspaper. His final day is Friday. Knight, one of the few remaining full-time art critics in American journalism, was praised by colleagues for his encyclopedic knowledge and razor-sharp assessments. He won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 2020, notably for a series of articles that harshly critiqued the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's (LACMA) proposed redesign by architect Peter Zumthor. He also received a lifetime achievement award from the Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation in 2020, and the College Art Association's Frank Jewett Mather Award in 1997. Before his journalism career, Knight worked as a curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego and consulted for the Lannan Foundation and the Smithsonian Institution's Archives of American Art.
The article profiles artist Vaginal Davis and her exhibition "Magnificent Product" at MoMA PS1, which opened shortly after the author visited. Davis, born in 1961, is described as a transformative figure who repurposes fragments of popular culture—from classic Hollywood to gay porn—to create immersive, queer alternate realities. The show includes works like *The Wicked Pavillion* (with *Fantasia Library* and *Tween Bedroom*, both 2021) and a collaboration with Jonathan Berger titled *Naked on my Ozgoad: Fausthaus—Anal Deep Throat* (2024–ongoing). Davis's practice is characterized by a playful, femme-centered critique of mainstream culture, centering Black women and inverting traditional gazes.
P. Staff's current exhibition at David Zwirner in New York transforms the gallery's Upper East Side townhouse into a haunting, body-centric experience. The show features a new video titled *Penetration* (2025), split across three floors, depicting a person with a laser beamed at their bare stomach, alongside sculptures with wood spikes under latex drapes and ambient sounds of a beating heart. The installation evokes a dread of having a body, with jaundiced yellow window films and disjointed sensory elements creating an uncomfortable, dysphoric atmosphere.
Martin Beck has created a new body of artwork inspired by the *Environments* series of LPs, which debuted in 1969 and featured long-duration nature sounds and aural abstractions. The works are on view at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut, through October 5, and include wall works, video, and an exhibition design that explores how the records were marketed as lifestyle accessories and productivity aids. Beck first encountered the series through a friend's lecture at Columbia University and became fascinated by its blend of utopian vision and commercial hype.
The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York has acquired and put on display a capsule from the demolished Nagakin Capsule Tower in Tokyo. The capsule, designated A1305, is the centerpiece of a year-long exhibition titled "The Many Lives of the Nakagin Capsule Tower," which also includes archival materials such as photographs, models, films, and recordings. The tower, designed by Kisho Kurokawa and completed in 1972, was a landmark of the Metabolism movement, featuring 140 prefabricated modules. After years of decline, it was demolished in 2022, but 23 capsules were salvaged, with 16 finding homes in institutions including MoMA.
Louise Bonnet, a Los Angeles-based painter known for her cartoonish yet sophisticated depictions of the female nude, discusses her latest work ahead of two major exhibitions. Her two-person show with Elizabeth King, titled "De Anima," opens at the Swiss Institute in New York, focusing on shared approaches to figuration that balance objecthood and liveliness. Bonnet also created a new series for the next edition of the SITE Santa Fe International biennial, opening in June. In an interview with ARTnews editor Emily Watlington, Bonnet explains her shift to tighter cropped compositions emphasizing routine gestures like tying shoelaces or fastening bras, inspired by World War II British spies and films like Rosemary's Baby.
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*.
The acclaimed Venezuelan electronic musician Arca, born Alejandra Ghersi, is transitioning into the visual arts with her first institutional exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London. Titled "Angels," the body of work consists of visceral, heavily textured paintings created using a chaotic mix of oils, acrylics, melted plastic, and latex. Ghersi turned to the physical medium as a therapeutic response to professional burnout, using the permanent nature of painting to process personal trauma and reconnect with the raw creative enthusiasm she felt before her music career became a global profession.
Conceptual artist Ann Hamilton has debuted a new series of large-scale scanner photography installations at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Moving from her signature immersive environments to high-resolution digital captures, Hamilton utilizes a flatbed scanner to document the tactile qualities of various objects and figures, enlarging them to billboard proportions to emphasize the intimacy of touch.
Art21, the nonprofit documentary platform behind the PBS series *Art in the Twenty-First Century*, is celebrating its 25th anniversary and the 12th season of its Peabody Award-winning series. In an interview with *CULTURED*, Executive Director and Chief Curator Tina Kukielski discusses how the organization has evolved from its early days in 2001 to embrace digital platforms like YouTube and TikTok, producing over 575 films featuring more than 300 artists. The organization also offers educational programming through Art21 Educators and makes its archive freely available to a global audience of five million.
Singaporean artist Amanda Heng, now 74, is representing Singapore at this year's Venice Biennale with her exhibition titled *A Pause*, featuring a site-specific installation and durational performance. Known for her decades-long performance *Let's Chat* (1996–), in which she cleans mung bean sprouts with participants to foster casual conversation, Heng transforms everyday domestic gestures into feminist acts. Her work reclaims the body, labor, and relationships as sites of personal autonomy. She was part of the pioneering, male-dominated generation of Singaporean contemporary artists in The Artists Village, but left due to its hierarchical structure to pursue collaborations with women artists and further studies.
Miriam Cahn presents a new exhibition, "STILL LEBEN," at Galerie Jocelyn Wolff in Paris. The show features a recent body of work, produced largely in the past few months, which marks a distinct shift from her previous focus on the human body and overt brutality. The new pieces center on objects, everyday domestic situations, and interiors, exploring what the artist terms 'le ménage' (housekeeping).
Intervista al grande scultore Charles Ray che a Los Angeles si mostra in due diverse gallerie
Charles Ray, the renowned American sculptor, opened two simultaneous solo exhibitions in Los Angeles on April 18, one at Matthew Marks Gallery and the other at Jeffrey Deitch Gallery, located about a mile apart. The Matthew Marks show features three new works, including "Junk 2" (2026) and "The Animation of Pandora" (2026), while the Deitch exhibition presents three older iconic pieces such as "Firetruck" (1993), "Pepto-Bismol in a Marble Box" (1988), and "Table" (1990). Ray, who has lived in Los Angeles for four decades, is known for his meticulous, slow-working process and his exploration of the human body and everyday objects at altered scales.
Calvin Tomkins, the legendary New Yorker writer who chronicled the contemporary art world for over six decades, has died at the age of 100. Joining the magazine's staff in 1960, Tomkins became the preeminent profiler of his era, translating complex aesthetic shifts and avant-garde movements into accessible, witty, and insightful prose. His career-defining focus on art began unexpectedly in 1959 with a chance interview with Marcel Duchamp, sparking a lifelong fascination with the creative process.
Artist Danny Cole, known for previous public stunts like covering the Hollywood sign's O with a giant cow, has launched 'Everybody's Album,' a project aiming to hack the Billboard 200 chart. The plan involves recruiting 100,000 people to each record one second of audio, paying them with a Shopify gift card that can only be used to pre-order the album, thereby exploiting chart metrics. With help from influencer Anthony Po, who has millions of followers, they have already secured 80,000 participants.
Austrian artist Valie Export, a pioneering feminist performance and media artist, died on May 14, three days before her 86th birthday. Her death was confirmed by Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery. Export, born Waltraud Lehner in 1940, rejected traditional domestic roles and adopted her iconic all-uppercase name from a cigarette brand. She created guerrilla-style performances and films that directly confronted the male gaze and patriarchal society, often using her own body as a medium. Key works include “Genital Panic” (1968), in which she walked through a Munich cinema in crotchless pants, and “Tapp und Tastkino (Tap and Touch Cinema)” (1968), where she invited strangers to touch her bare breasts through a stage strapped to her chest.
Mary Frank, an artist in her early 90s known for mythologically rooted sculpture and works on paper, is the subject of a focused exhibition at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects in New York. Curated by Steven Harvey, the show presents 11 sculptures in wood, bronze, and ceramic from 1958 to 1985, alongside five works on paper, including a monotype and an oil-on-paper piece. Frank’s work, influenced by her study with Martha Graham, centers on self-sustaining female figures that embody agency, tenderness, and survival, often rendered in ceramic slabs or carved wood.
Artist Steve DiBenedetto presents a new body of work in his solo exhibition, "Spiral Architect," at Derek Eller Gallery. The show features 17 paintings ranging from large-scale canvases to intimate works, all characterized by a restless movement between abstraction and figuration. DiBenedetto utilizes a process-heavy technique of adding, scraping, and reworking oil paint to create dense, visionary landscapes filled with octopi, cellular forms, and Rube Goldberg-esque machinery.
David Novros’s latest exhibition at Paula Cooper Gallery showcases his "portable murals," intricate multi-paneled paintings that challenge the traditional concept of art as a mere object on a wall. Utilizing oil and murano on canvas, Novros assembles monochromatic, L-shaped, and horizontal panels with precise intervals that incorporate the gallery wall into the composition. These works are designed to be experienced kinesthetically, responding to shifting natural light and the viewer's physical movement through the space.
German artist Georg Baselitz has died at the age of 88. According to Galerie Thaddeus Ropac, he passed away peacefully on Thursday. Born Hans-Georg Bruno Kern in 1938 in Deutschbaselitz, Saxony, Baselitz fled East Germany in 1957 after political repression and academic conflicts. His first solo exhibition in West Berlin in 1963 was shut down due to scandal, and works were confiscated. He became internationally known in the late 1960s for his radical upside-down painting, a signature inversion that destabilized pictorial logic. He also created an extensive sculptural body of work. Key career milestones include representing Germany at the Venice Biennale in 1980 alongside Anselm Kiefer, multiple Documenta appearances, the Praemium Imperiale in 2004, and election to the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 2019. Major late-career exhibitions included "Nackte Meister" at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna in 2023.
EJ Hill's new endurance performance, "Yearning for an Absolute" (2025), is on view at 52 Walker in Tribeca through September 13, 2025. For the duration of the exhibition, the 40-year-old Black queer artist kneels every day, all day, within a red velvet enclosure, referencing Catholic devotional practices, saintly mortifications, and his own history of durational works like "Excellentia, Mollitia, Victoria" (2018) at the Hammer Museum's "Made in LA" biennial. The installation also includes red leather kneelers for sale, framed kneeler pad paintings marked with the artist's indentations, and a neon rectangle reminiscent of Dan Flavin's church installation.
Dans l’atelier d’Abdelkader Benchamma, cartographe des mondes invisibles
French-Moroccan artist Abdelkader Benchamma is preparing for his upcoming solo exhibition, "Signs and Wonders," at Galerie Templon in Paris. Working from his sun-drenched studio in Montpellier, Benchamma has transitioned from his signature black-and-white ink drawings to large-scale canvases that incorporate celestial blues and earthy mineral tones. The new body of work draws inspiration from 15th and 16th-century manuscripts, specifically the Kitab al-Bulhan and the Book of Miracles, creating a "giant book" of visual narratives that blur the lines between abstraction and figuration.
Laura Footes, a British artist living with chronic illness, opened her solo exhibition “Anamnesis” at Shrine NYC in early December 2024. Her paintings feature translucent, ethereal bodies in hallucinogenic landscapes, exploring themes of entrapment, escape, and the porous, temporal nature of the body. Footes, who has Crohn’s disease, draws on her hospital experiences and was discovered by Tracey Emin in 2022 after Emin saw her work on social media. Emin later mentored Footes at TKE Studios in Margate and curated her solo show “A Healing Dream” at Carl Freedman Gallery in late 2024.
Galerie Buchholz in New York is presenting "Projects for Outside — ISA USA," a solo exhibition by the influential German artist Isa Genzken. Running from March 11 through April 25, 2026, the show focuses on Genzken's outdoor proposals and large-scale sculptural projects, documenting her career-long engagement with public space and urban architecture through a comprehensive selection of works.
Arghavan Khosravi's solo exhibition "What Remains" opens today at Uffner & Liu in New York, presenting a new body of sculptural paintings that fuse Persian architecture with Christian altarpieces. The works explore women's fight for equality under censorship and religious dogma in Iran, featuring figures restricted by domestic objects, hinged shutters, and suspended cords, with fragments of limbs or faces visible. Key pieces include "Suspended" (2026), "Bearing" (2026), and "The Whisper" (2026), running through July 2.
The Contact Photography Festival, Canada's largest photography event, opens Friday in Toronto with over 160 exhibitions across eclectic venues including artist-run centers, commercial galleries, cafes, and a laundromat. Highlights include a towering portrait by Haitian-born artist Thandiwe Muriu on Spadina Ave., and a multi-site exhibition by Turner Prize-nominee Sin Wai Kin, featuring billboards and a two-channel video titled 'The Time of Our Lives.' The festival lost its long-time lead sponsor Scotiabank in 2024, resulting in a reduced budget and less public programming, but organizers remain committed to championing lens-based art.
The New Museum's latest exhibition explores the evolving definition of humanity through the lens of technological advancement and ancestral wisdom. The show juxtaposes the anxieties of modern machine labor—exemplified by Simon Denny’s Amazon worker cage—with Indigenous epistemologies and animist traditions that offer alternative ways of inhabiting the world. By featuring artists like Jaider Esbell and Santiago Yahuarcani, the exhibition highlights how hybridity and relationality can resist the rigid hierarchies of Western modernity.
Major museums across the United States are launching significant exhibitions in 2026, including retrospectives of Frida Kahlo in Houston and Nick Cave in Washington, D.C., and a landmark show on sculptor Edmonia Lewis in Salem. These shows are part of a broader cultural moment, with many institutions mounting exhibitions to coincide with the nation's 250th anniversary, aiming to reframe art historical narratives and highlight previously overlooked artists.
The article highlights several must-see exhibitions in Seoul during Frieze week. Adrián Villar Rojas transforms Art Sonje Center with his immersive exhibition "The Language of the Enemy," featuring large-scale installations from his ongoing series "The End of Imagination" that strip the museum to a primordial state. At Gallery Hyundai, Kang Seung Lee and Candice Lin present a two-person show "Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me," exploring queer histories and colonial legacies through drawing, embroidery, and experimental materials. Meanwhile, sculptor Hyun Nahm debuts a new body of work at Whistle in "Nest in the Field," moving away from his signature tower forms to angular iron-powder sculptures shaped by magnetic fields.