Texas's art landscape is increasingly defined by its robust circuit of annual juried exhibitions, which serve as vital entry points for emerging artists. These recurring events, such as Lawndale’s The Big Show and Craighead Green Gallery’s New Texas Talent, provide a platform for artists to have their work reviewed by guest curators, museum professionals, and gallerists, often leading to formal representation or solo exhibition opportunities.
Romania is set to hold a re-run presidential election on May 4, 2025, after the original election was annulled due to allegations of Russian interference favoring far-right candidate Călin Georgescu. With Georgescu barred, another far-right candidate, George Simion, leads polls, sparking protests and online debates over nationalism, LGBTQ rights, and foreign relations. The political turmoil has affected the art scene, with gallery founder Suzana Vasilescu reporting a standstill in art sales and tension among collectors, though the scene remains resilient. Upcoming events like the RAD art fair and Art Encounters Biennale are proceeding, but art professionals express vigilance against potential nationalist pressures.
Iran's cultural heritage sites, including several historic palaces, have sustained severe damage during the recent conflict. The Golestan Palace in Tehran, specifically the Hall of the Marble Throne, and the Chehel Sotoun and Ali Qapu Palaces in Isfahan have suffered extensive destruction to their intricate mirror-mosaic decorations, painted ceilings, and structural elements.
An international research team has confirmed the rediscovery of the lost city of Alexandria on the Tigris in Iraq. Founded by Alexander the Great, the city was a major trading hub until the 3rd century CE. Its location was identified through a combination of historical research, aerial photography, and recent non-invasive surveys using drones and magnetometry, which revealed the city's planned layout under difficult security conditions.
A wave of independent, artist-run galleries is emerging across North Texas, operating out of unconventional spaces like houses, lofts, and apartments. Notable examples include PRP (Permanent Research Project) in a little white house in Trinity Groves, Nature of Things in a Deep Ellum loft, and 2 BED 1 BATH in an Oak Cliff apartment. These venues often face precarious funding and zoning issues, yet they persist, with some like 500X operating since 1978 and PRP for a decade. Recent exhibitions have addressed themes such as the treatment of bodies in visual culture and political commentary, including a protest show after the University of North Texas shut down an exhibition critical of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Cartwright Hall in Bradford, UK, is hosting a South Asian-themed exhibition titled (Un)Layering, co-curated by Walia and Salima Hashmi. The show has drawn new, diverse audiences to the museum, with a 40% increase in visitors compared to the previous year, driven by the exhibition's cultural resonance and community outreach efforts.
This article announces the first comprehensive U.S. exhibition on Raphael, titled "Raphael: Sublime Poetry," which offers an immersive look at the artist's meteoric career through drawings, paintings, prints, and tapestries. It traces Raphael's journey from his birth in Urbino in 1483, through his training under his poet-painter father Giovanni Santi and later Pietro Perugino, to his rise as a peer to Leonardo and Michelangelo in Florence and his final decade as the favorite artist of the popes in Rome, where he was celebrated as the "prince of painters."
Los Angeles museums are marking Earth Month with a series of exhibitions and events focused on sustainability and environmental consciousness. Highlights include the Hammer Museum’s exhibition, "Several Eternities in a Day: Form in the Age of Living Materials," which features works by 22 artists using organic substances like avocado, cochineal dye, and volcanic rock. Meanwhile, the Fowler Museum is hosting an immersive look at the indigenous rice cultivation practices of the Ifugao people in the Philippines.
The New Museum Los Gatos (NUMU) has launched ArtNow 2026, its largest juried high school exhibition to date, featuring 97 student artists from 36 schools across Santa Clara County. Selected from over 600 submissions, the featured works respond to the theme "Before / Between / Beyond," exploring concepts of identity, heritage, and the future. The exhibition process is designed to mirror professional standards, requiring students to submit artist statements and undergo a rigorous selection process by a panel of arts professionals.
The Portland Art Museum is hosting the first major museum retrospective of Yoshida Chizuko (1924–2017), a pioneering Japanese modernist painter and printmaker. The exhibition features over 100 works, including early oil paintings, monotypes, woodblock prints, lithographs, and mixed media pieces, many never before exhibited. It traces her career from avant-garde abstraction in the 1940s and 1950s through op art and photoetchings in the 1960s and 1970s to nature-inspired late works, and includes a planned major acquisition from the Yoshida family estate.
Musician Jack White is set to debut his first solo visual art exhibition, titled ‘These Thoughts May Disappear’, at Damien Hirst’s Newport Street Gallery in London. Running from May 29 to September 13, the show will feature a diverse array of mediums including sculpture, furniture design, and large-scale installations, many of which are constructed from reclaimed industrial materials and hardware remnants.
I 10 migliori padiglioni da vedere alla Biennale d’Arte di Venezia 2026. La top ten di Artribune
Artribune presents its top ten must-see national pavilions at the 2026 Venice Biennale, which features a record 100 participating countries. The article highlights standout projects including Greece's escape room by Andreas Angelidakis critiquing nationalist populism, Belgium's participatory dance installation by Miet Warloop, and Canada's greenhouse-like pavilion by Abbas Akhavan exploring colonial botany. The Biennale, curated by Koyo Kouoh under the theme "In Minor Keys," is marked by last-minute jury resignations leading to public voting for the Golden Lions, as well as protests over the participation of Russia and Israel.
Palestinian-American artist Jordan Nassar is preparing for a September exhibition at James Cohan gallery, creating a mosaic based on Roman-Byzantine floor decorations displayed at Tel Aviv's international airport. His new works incorporate darker tones—black, gray, deep red, green, and blue—reflecting the escalating crisis in Gaza and the West Bank. The embroidery pieces are made collaboratively with women in the West Bank, though shipping delays and tariff uncertainties have complicated production.
Constellations Warsaw 2026, a group exhibition curated by Galerie Max Mayer, opened at Galeria Wschód in Warsaw from April 10 to May 16, 2026. The show features works by artists Nicolás Guagnini, Cudelice Brazelton IV, Tobias Hohn, and Stanton Taylor, presenting a constellation of contemporary practices across 20 exhibition images.
The group exhibition "Containers Love Disorder" at Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen brings together seven artists and collectives active in Switzerland: Michèle Graf & Selina Grüter, Dominic Michel, Mathis Pfäffli, Matthias Sohr, Kelly Tissot, Paulo Wirz, and the collaborative project La Bibliothèque des Ready-Mades, initiated by Anaïs Wenger. The show explores strategies of arrangement, classification, and situatedness through a range of works.
Bel Ami gallery in Los Angeles has opened a new exhibition titled "Everything looks dark now," which takes its name and conceptual framework from Anton Chekhov's play *The Seagull*. The show features a diverse group of artists whose works collectively explore themes of melancholy, reflection, and existential uncertainty, mirroring the atmospheric and introspective mood of Chekhov's text.
Adrian Ghenie's exhibition "Roman Campagna" at a Paris gallery presents a series of paintings and charcoal drawings that subvert the romantic cliché of an artist's transformative encounter with Rome. Ghenie populates landscapes inspired by the Appian Way with grotesque, alien-headed figures hunched over smartphones, urinating on monuments, or weeping at sunsets, using brown and grey tones punctuated by bright colors. The works reference Francis Bacon and William S. Burroughs, and include direct allusions to Bacon's reinterpretation of van Gogh's self-portrait, as well as a copy of a Pompeii mosaic. The show also features large charcoal drawings on paper that reveal Ghenie's process of constructing his contemporary, alienated figures.
The PinchukArtCentre has opened a new exhibition titled "Still Joy — From Ukraine Into the World" as part of the official parallel program of the 61st Venice Biennale. The show, which opened on May 7 at Palazzo Contarini Polignac and runs through August 1, features works by over 20 international and Ukrainian artists exploring joy as an act of resilience and humanity. Central to the exhibition are testimonies from Hlib Stryzhko, a marine veteran who returned from Russian captivity, which are transformed into sculptural elements. Notable works include a protest performance by Yurii Hruzinov at the Russian pavilion, a video installation of Kyiv rave parties by Malashchuk and Khimei, and installations by Future Generation Art Prize laureates Ashfika Rahman and Zhanna Kadyrova.
Yvon Lambert, the legendary French art dealer and collector, reflects on his lifelong relationship with art and literature in an interview for TLmag41: The Art of Collecting. He recounts buying his first painting at age 14, opening his Paris gallery in the 1960s, and later donating a major portion of his collection to the French State, now housed at the Collection Lambert in Avignon. After closing his gallery in 2014, he shifted focus to an artist's bookshop, now run by his daughter Eve Lambert. The conversation, led by Sibylle Grandchamp, explores Lambert's early influences, his father's passion for literature, and the family's shared love for art books.
A diverse array of international photography festivals and exhibitions are scheduled for May 2026. Key events include Bieler Fototage in Switzerland, focusing on vulnerability as a social condition; Photo London, which is relocating to the Olympia and introducing new curated sections; Hard Copy New York at the ICP, exploring photocopied imagery; Fotofestival Lenzburg, an open-air exhibition in Switzerland; and several other events across Europe and the US.
Tang Contemporary Art in Hong Kong is presenting the exhibition 'Come Closer,' featuring works by artists Arik Levy and Zoé Ouvrier from May 15 to July 5, 2026. The show explores themes of intimacy, vulnerability, and the relational space between viewer and artwork, inviting audiences to engage deeply with pieces that address memory, the body, and identity.
The group exhibition 'To Paint Is To Love Again' at Crèvecoeur gallery in Paris explores the theme of artistic freedom, play, and a childlike approach to creation. The article examines this through the lens of Henry Miller's writings on painting, the influence of Jean Dubuffet's Art Brut, and the practices of contemporary artists Whitney Clafin, Sadie Benning, and Françoise Lapeyre, who incorporate found objects, toys, and a 'Sunday painter' ethos into their work.
Turkish artist Bedri Baykam has launched a major solo exhibition titled “Baykam on Picasso: Les Demoiselles Revisited” at Piramid Sanat in Istanbul. Following its debut at Galerie S/Beaubourg in Paris, the show centers on a multi-layered reinterpretation of Pablo Picasso’s 1907 masterpiece, "Les Demoiselles d’Avignon." The exhibition features a mix of paintings and immersive installations, including a conceptual Turkish bath and historical recreations of brothels in Paris and Istanbul, all designed to bridge the gap between Western modernism and Eastern influences.
The Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg Center is launching a new exhibition titled "Artistic Generosity and the American Artist Abroad," showcasing four decades of American art commissioned for U.S. embassies worldwide. Opening April 7 at the Irene and Richard Frary Gallery, the show features site-specific commissions, prints, and photographs from the Foundation for Art and Preservation in Embassies (FAPE) collection, including works by Frank Stella, Ellsworth Kelly, and Julie Mehretu.
The Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg Center is set to launch a new exhibition titled 'Artistic Generosity and the American Artist Abroad,' showcasing four decades of American art commissioned for U.S. embassies. Opening April 7 at the Irene and Richard Frary Gallery, the show features works from the Foundation for Art and Preservation in Embassies (FAPE) by renowned artists including Sam Gilliam, Ellsworth Kelly, Julie Mehretu, and Martin Puryear. Highlights include never-before-seen maquettes by Don Gummer and the late Frank Stella, alongside a replica of the Declaration of Independence donated by David M. Rubenstein.
A wave of new and relaunched satellite art fairs is debuting in Los Angeles to coincide with Frieze Los Angeles, offering lower-cost alternatives for galleries and artists. Newcomers like the Indianapolis-based Butter Art Fair, the photography-focused Show LA, and the New York-centric Enzo Art Fair are positioning themselves as intimate, artist-centric, or zero-fee options. These ventures aim to capitalize on the influx of global collectors while bypassing the high overhead costs associated with major international fairs.
Savannah artists are creating new exhibition spaces in small, unconventional venues to counter the city's lack of affordable studio and gallery space. Following the closure of several local galleries, nonprofit Arts Southeast has been fostering resilience, with new spaces like Cute Tomatoes Gallery, Pocket Space (hosted by Norwood Gallery), and Camaleon opening in 2025. These artist-run initiatives feature rotating shows, including a group exhibition of 19 female artists at Norwood Gallery and a multidisciplinary venue at Camaleon directed by SCAD graduate Alex Mendi.
Nine emerging galleries from around the world are showing in the Positions sector of Art Basel Miami Beach 2025, a dedicated platform for up-and-coming exhibitors. The article profiles several of these gallerists, including Allann Seabra and Ian Duarte of Verve in São Paulo, and Mauricio Aguirre of N.A.S.A.L. in Mexico City and Guayaquil. They discuss their gallery's growth, key milestones such as artists participating in the 36th Bienal de São Paulo, and their hopes for gaining international exposure and deepening understanding of their local art scenes.
Gretchen Andrew, a former Silicon Valley software engineer turned artist, has created a series titled "Facetune Portraits: Universal Beauty" that critiques unattainable beauty standards perpetuated by social media and AI. Using images of Miss World contestants, she employs the apps Facetune and Body Tune to digitally alter the photos, then works with creative robotics company Matr Labs to produce oil paintings. An oil paint printer creates the original image, and an XY-axis drawing robot adds brushstrokes based on discrepancies between the original and AI-modified versions, resulting in unsettling portraits that highlight the 'scars' of digital manipulation. The series won the Acquisition Award at Untitled Art Miami Beach and has been shown at Hope 93 gallery in London and Heft Gallery in New York, with a major institutional acquisition pending.
Phillips’ Evening Sale of Modern & Contemporary Art achieved a total that more than doubled the previous year's auction result, driven by strong demand for works spanning the 19th to 21st centuries. The sale opened with three lots exceeding their high estimates, including record prices for Lee Bontecou's rare 'Untitled' (1985-2001), which set a new record for any two-dimensional work by the artist after nearly five minutes of bidding. Other records were set for Pat Passlof, P.S. Krøyer, and Joseph Yaeger. Top lots included Andy Warhol's 'Sixteen Jackies' ($16.2 million), Claude Monet's 'La Route de Vétheuil, effet de neige' ($9.9 million), and Jackson Pollock's 'Untitled' ($9.2 million). The sale also featured works from The Collection of Ambassador John L. Loeb, Jr., which achieved a combined $8.4 million, with two Vilhelm Hammershøi works acquired by prominent institutions.