On April 29, a large statue attributed to Banksy appeared on a plinth at Waterloo Place in London's St James's district. The work depicts a man in a suit stepping forward with a flag covering his face, bearing the artist's signature. Banksy later claimed the piece on Instagram, sparking crowds and speculation.
Victorien Bornéat has published a manifesto arguing that French cultural democratization policy, rooted in André Malraux's vision of making masterworks accessible to all, has failed. He cites budget cuts by regional presidents Laurent Wauquiez and Christelle Morançais, police raids on bookshops like Violette and Co, and statistical studies showing that working-class audiences still do not spontaneously attend theaters, museums, or opera. Bornéat contends that the policy's emphasis on direct confrontation with canonical works ignored the need for cultural codes and institutional literacy, creating an exclusion that politicians now exploit for electoral gain.
Sous pression, le jury de la 61e Biennale de Venise exclura les pavillons russe et israélien du palmarès
The 61st Venice Biennale, titled "In Minor Keys" and running from May 9 to November 22, 2026, has been embroiled in political controversy after organizers decided to reinstate the Russian pavilion, which had been excluded since Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Under pressure from the European Commission, which threatened to suspend a €2 million grant, the jury announced it will exclude artists from the Russian and Israeli pavilions from winning prizes, citing that leaders Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu face International Criminal Court charges for crimes against humanity. The Russian pavilion will remain closed to the public but open for VIP press previews, while the Israeli pavilion stays open to the public. Italian Culture Minister Alessandro Giuli has refused to attend the opening ceremony in protest.
Pour la 61e Biennale de Venise, une quête de beauté malgré un monde troublé
Koyo Kouoh, the Swiss-Cameroonian curator who was set to become the first African woman to direct the Venice Biennale, died suddenly on May 10, 2025, at age 57, just weeks before the opening of the 61st edition she had conceived. Titled "In Minor Keys," the exhibition at the Giardini and Arsenale will proceed posthumously based on her detailed directives, featuring 111 artists including Laurie Anderson, Wangechi Mutu, and Kader Attia, with a focus on beauty, resilience, and radical emotional connection amid global turmoil.
Un album démembré de Gerard van Honthorst (1592-1656) : dessins inédits et reconstitution d'un corpus
An article in La Tribune de l'Art presents a significant expansion of the known corpus of drawings by Dutch Golden Age painter Gerard van Honthorst (1592-1656). Following the 2014 exhibition of twenty-seven drawings identified by the author, this study adds thirty-two more sheets—twenty-two of which are previously unpublished—as a preliminary step toward reconstructing a dismembered album. The research, conducted with direct observation and advanced imaging techniques (digital microscopy, ultraviolet, raking light), aims to restore the album's original order and shed light on the role of drawing in Honthorst's workshop and creative process.
The California African American Museum presents 'Willie Birch: Stories to Tell,' a sweeping retrospective spanning over five decades of the artist's career, from the late 1960s to the present. The exhibition features Birch's paintings, papier-mâché sculptures, charcoal drawings, and installations, all rooted in his exploration of Black cultural memory, community life in New Orleans, and what he calls 'retentions'—fragments of African heritage persisting across generations. Organized chronologically, the show highlights Birch's evolving visual language and his commitment to storytelling as a form of social practice.
Armineh Negahdari, a Bordeaux-based artist, presents her first institutional solo exhibition in France at the Fondation Louis Vuitton's Open Space series. Titled 'What Color is Your Sky Today?': The Becoming of the Image, the show features a new body of drawings that use charcoal, pastel, and oil paint to explore unstable morphologies between human, vegetal, and animal forms. The works resist narrative closure, emphasizing drawing as an event rather than representation, with lines that accumulate, falter, and begin again. The exhibition is on view at Gallery 8 until 30 August 2026.
Andrew Durbin reviews the national pavilions at the Venice Biennale, contrasting a vacuous US presentation with incisive and moving installations from Britain and Germany. The review highlights the thematic and emotional depth of the British and German pavilions while critiquing the lack of meaning in the US entry.
The United States Pavilion at the 61st Venice Biennale features sculptor Alma Allen's exhibition "Call Me the Breeze," which opened with no clear funding just ten days prior. Unlike previous pavilions supported by major foundations like Ford and Mellon, Allen's show relies on a $375,000 US government contribution and public donations via the American Arts Conservancy. The selection process was unconventional: the State Department, which took over after Trump's NEA budget cuts, imposed restrictions on DEI policies and required proposals promoting "American exceptionalism." Curator Jeffrey Uslip directly approached Allen without a formal proposal, leading the artist's two galleries—Olney Gleason and Mendes Wood DM—to drop him when he accepted the commission.
Bristol's Upfest, Europe's largest street art festival, has returned for 2026, transforming the city into an open-air gallery. Organizers say 150 new murals will be created across Bedminster and the city center over 17 days, with five world-renowned artists—Inkie, Insane51, My Dog Sighs, Melo, and HazardOne—redesigning Quakers Friars into Quakers Art Lane. The festival, running until 31 May, includes workshops, walking tours, panel discussions, and interactive spaces, and is expected to draw over 80,000 visitors.
Aleshea Harris has adapted her award-winning 2016 play 'Is God Is' into a feature film, marking her directorial debut. The story follows twin sisters with burn scars who, summoned to their mother's deathbed, learn their father caused their disfigurement and are urged to seek revenge. The film stars Kara Young, Mallori Johnson, Vivica A. Fox, Sterling K. Brown, and Janelle Monáe. Harris brings her playwright's precision to the screen, using avant-garde typography and captions inspired by a 1964 edition of Eugène Ionesco's 'The Bald Soprano' designed by Robert Massin, with title design by Teddy Blanks.
Wallace Chan, a Hong Kong-born sculptor and jeweler who once lived as a Buddhist monk, is presenting his latest exhibition “Vessels of Other Worlds” at the Chapel of Santa Maria della Pietà in Venice on May 8, coinciding with his 70th birthday and the Venice Biennale, followed by a show at Shanghai’s Long Museum on July 18. The exhibition features three monumental titanium sculptures standing seven, eight, and 10 meters tall, evoking religious oil vessels, and explores themes of birth, growth, and rebirth through the demanding medium of titanium, which Chan describes as the material closest to eternity.
The Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) will present a major exhibition from its collection at Christie’s London this summer, running from July 16th through August 21st at Christie’s King Street headquarters. Titled “The Meeting Ground: Scenes from the KNMA Collection,” the exhibition marks the first time Christie’s annual exhibition series has been dedicated to a South Asian institution, featuring works from the New Delhi-based museum’s holdings.
Jackson Pollock's painting *Number 7A* (1948) sold for $181.2 million at Christie’s in New York, shattering the previous auction record for the Abstract Expressionist artist by nearly three times. The evening sales also set new auction records for Mark Rothko and Constantin Brâncuși, and realized over $1 billion in a single evening, only the second time in auction history that threshold has been crossed.
Assouline has released a new collector's book titled "Basquiat: The World of Jean-Michel," a 348-page volume featuring over 200 artworks and archival photographs of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Priced at $1,400, the book is part of the publisher's Ultimate Collection of large-format, hand-bound volumes, and is organized thematically into six chapters covering Basquiat's depictions of heads, New York City's influence on his work, his use of silkscreens, and spiritual themes.
The 2026 Venice Biennale's main exhibition opens this week, curated by Koyo Kouoh—the first African woman to hold the role—who was announced in 2024 but passed away suddenly in 2025. The article highlights six artworks that define her curatorial vision, which connected the international art world to artists and institutions from Africa and the Global South.
The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles, co-founded by filmmaker George Lucas and businesswoman Mellody Hobson, has announced its inaugural exhibitions. The ambitious survey will feature over 1,200 works from a founding collection of more than 40,000 objects, including pieces by Thomas Hart Benton and Jessie Wilcox Smith. The museum is housed in a 300,000-square-foot building designed by Ma Yansong of MAD Architects with Stantec.
A large statue mysteriously appeared in central London earlier this week and has been confirmed as the work of the street artist Banksy. The piece, bearing the artist's signature, depicts a suited man carrying a flag that obscures his face as he walks off a plinth. It was installed in Banksy's signature guerrilla style at Waterloo Place in St. James's, near statues of Edward VII and Florence Nightingale.
Kunsthalle Friart Fribourg presents "Passages," a group exhibition running from March 14 to May 17, 2026. The show features works by Nat Faulkner, Solomon Garçon, Keta Gavasheli, Gaylen Gerber with Leah Ke Yi Zheng, Hervé Guibert, Nour Mobarak, Henrik Olesen, B. Ingrid Olson, Anastasia Pavlou, Matthew Peers, Cora Pongracz, Pope.L, Ariana Reines and Oscar Tuazon, Dieter Roth, and Sava Sekulić. The exhibition is documented with 51 images and a floor plan, with photos by Cedric Mussano.
Manuel Segade, director of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, is interviewed as part of a series for International Museum Day. He discusses the museum's role as a space historically tied to critique, conflict, and negotiation with tradition, emphasizing the need to preserve the world's complexity. Segade advocates for institutions that can speak on multiple levels, from introductory lectures to para-academic research, and stresses transforming internal structures toward more horizontal and interdependent models.
Juan José Santos's book "Museo hechizo" (Metales Pesados, 2025) challenges the perceived neutrality of the Western museum, presenting it as an institution shaped by colonial logics of classification, extraction, and representation. The essay centers on the concept of "lo hechizo"—understood as both artisanal precariousness and disruptive enchantment—and explores small, community-based Latin American museum experiences that operate from precarity, reciprocity, and care. Santos argues that the museum is a space of conflict where voices, narratives, and ways of constructing history are contested, and he proposes thinking of the museum through its minor, situated, and alternative forms in Latin America.
Sol Henaro, director of the Museo Universitario del Chopo in Mexico City, argues in an interview for Artishock Revista that museums must resist neoliberal pressures to accelerate production, spectacularize content, and convert cultural experience into immediate consumption. She advocates for the museum as a space of plurality, deceleration, and critical thought, emphasizing the need for horizontal, careful practices that allow for dissent and coexistence. The interview is part of a series on International Museum Day featuring directors from Latin American and Ibero-American institutions.
Kunsthaus Glarus presents "Bildersaal," the first institutional solo exhibition by Swiss artist Nolan Lucidi (b. 2000, based in Basel). The installation combines videos and objects to explore male homosexual desire drawn from literature, art history, and personal experience, while also interrogating formal language and claims to authority.
From February 7 to June 7, 2026, MARTa Herford presents a dual exhibition dedicated to Lois Weinberger (1947–2020) and Katinka Bock (born 1976). The show explores poetic phenomena beyond human control, where materials react, spaces shift, and natural forces leave their traces both inside the museum and beyond.
Mousse Magazine reports on the exhibition “Magnanrama. Portraits, Networks, and News of Nathalie Magnan” at Villa Arson in Nice, which celebrates the life and work of Nathalie Magnan (1956-2016). Magnan was a media theorist, filmmaker, cyberfeminist, educator, webmistress, hacktivist, and interdisciplinary figure who navigated the internet and the high seas, contributing to the history of thought, technology, feminism, and LGBTQI+ struggles. The show presents portraits, networks, and news related to her legacy, positioning her as a mediator and artist despite her reluctance to use that term.
The Disobedience Archive, a mobile video archive initiated by Marco Scotini in 2005, is presented in dialogue with Raqs Media Collective at the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Zürich. The archive contains over one hundred documentary and art films at the intersection of art and activism, documenting forms of resistance, social struggle, and collective self-organization.
Giorgia Garzilli presents her solo exhibition “Everything’s coming up roses” at Spazio Libero in Stockholm. The show features a large painting installed across two arches, depicting an exhausted figure lying on the floor in a moment of aftermath—after giving a speech, playing poker, or closing an important deal.
The Malta Biennale 2026, titled "Clean / Clear / Cut," launched on March 11 and runs through May 29, transforming historical sites and cultural landmarks across Malta and Gozo into venues for contemporary art and critical dialogue. The biennale is under the artistic direction of international curator Rosa Martínez.
Pinacoteca Agnelli in Turin will present "Walter Pfeiffer: In Good Company," the first institutional survey in Italy dedicated to the Swiss artist's photographic work, running from April 30 to September 13, 2026. The exhibition features over one hundred photographs spanning from the 1970s to the present, exploring themes of artifice, desire, and the everyday.
Nørrebro Teater in Copenhagen is hosting its first major contemporary art exhibition, "In the Presence of Others," featuring works by Marina Abramović, Laurie Anderson, and Miranda July. The show focuses on the artists' engagement with sound and will be staged throughout the entire theatre building.