Singapore Biennale 2025 Review: Divorced From Reality
The 8th Singapore Biennale, titled 'pure intention', features artworks like Gala Porras-Kim's picnic blanket sold in migrant-worker shops, intended to blur lines between art and daily life. The exhibition, curated by SAM staff, deliberately explores contradictions in artistic intention and challenges notions of purity and power through over 80 artists' works.
British artist Poppy Jones has seen a meteoric rise in market and institutional recognition over the past year. Her enigmatic still lifes, created by mono-printing photographic images onto found materials like silk and suede, have resonated with collectors, leading to a major jump in searches on the Artnet Price Database and auction results that have tripled estimates, with her record now over $60,000.
The Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art (Virginia MOCA) has inaugurated its new, expanded facility on the campus of Virginia Wesleyan University. The opening is anchored by a major solo exhibition titled "The Pursuit of Happiness" by acclaimed contemporary artist Nina Chanel Abney, alongside a group show, "Seamless: Art and Design." Abney’s exhibition features her signature large-scale, vibrant, and emoji-inspired works that explore the complexities of the American Dream, identity, and power structures through a lens of both visual seduction and narrative ambiguity.
The 2026 Whitney Biennial features artists using technology to explore themes of surveillance, data extraction, and the unsettling blur between human and machine. Works like Cooper Jacoby's AI-generated piece, which scrapes data from deceased individuals' social media, and Isabelle Frances McGuire's 3D-scanned witch figures, confront the ethical and existential implications of biometrics and digital quantification.
The article is a critical review of Daniel Heller-Roazen's new book, 'Far Calls: On Omens, Slips, & Epiphanies.' It examines the book's central thesis, which explores the historical and philosophical concept of a 'spiritual ear'—the interval between speaking and hearing where language escapes its intended meaning, giving rise to omens, slips of the tongue, and epiphanies. The review traces Heller-Roazen's genealogical investigation from ancient divinatory practices to modern psychoanalysis, highlighting his argument that linguistic accidents hold prophetic potential.
Yang Fudong has opened his largest solo exhibition to date, 'Fragrant River,' at the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing. The show features over 30 works and eight hours of video, including major new installations like the five-channel 'Young Man, Young Man' and the furniture-and-video piece 'Breastfeeding,' which immerse viewers in scenes from the artist's hometown of Xianghe.
Cartwright Hall Art Gallery in Bradford has launched a new exhibition of Pre-Raphaelite masterpieces paired with contemporary reflections from the local LGBT+ community. Members of the Equity Partnership charity collaborated with museum staff to reinterpret 19th-century works by artists such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Ford Madox Brown, and John Collier through the lens of lived queer experience.
Berlin-based illustrator Olaf Hajek creates dense, uncanny compositions that blend nature, culture, and magic, drawing inspiration from Surrealist icons like Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo. His work emphasizes ambiguity, using superimposed florals and figures, dramatic scale shifts, and a tension between decay and renewal to develop a universal visual language from diverse cultural influences.
Brett Goodroad at Crèvecoeur, rive gauche
San Francisco-based artist Brett Goodroad presents a solo exhibition titled "Bells" at Crèvecoeur’s Rive Gauche location in Paris. The exhibition features a series of new paintings that showcase Goodroad’s signature style of fluid, gestural abstraction and figurative ambiguity, documented through an extensive digital archive of installation views and individual work shots.
Trautwein Herleth in Berlin is hosting a solo exhibition of works by the late Belgian painter Raoul de Keyser. The presentation features a selection of the artist’s signature abstract compositions, characterized by their tactile surfaces, muted palettes, and the subtle tension between formalist geometry and organic forms.
Artist Anna Clegg has opened a new solo exhibition titled "Hustlenomics" at the Schiefe Zähne gallery in Berlin. The show presents a new body of her paintings that engage with the life cycle of images in contemporary culture.
Whitestone Gallery Seoul is hosting "A Swimming Soul," a group exhibition featuring emerging artists Lee Juyoung, Kisho Kakutani, and Yudai Takeuchi. Running from April 18 to May 24, 2026, the show utilizes the metaphor of a swimming fish to explore themes of youth, uncertainty, and the drifting nature of modern existence. Each artist presents a unique visual language to address the ambiguity of reality, from Lee’s blurred urban reflections and Kakutani’s obstructive "noise" layers to Takeuchi’s exploration of the liminal space between consciousness and sleep.
Curator Yasmin Sarnefors challenges the traditional boundaries of portraiture in the exhibition 'What Faces Do Not Say,' which features artists from Africa and its diaspora. Moving away from the expectation of physical resemblance, the show explores identity through ambiguity, memory, and the use of archives, landscapes, and abstract gestures. By presenting works that obscure or transform the human face, the exhibition highlights the psychological and political dimensions of how individuals are perceived and represented.
The major retrospective ‘Out of Place’ at ART AFRICA showcases over 200 images by South African photographer Jo Ractliff, spanning four decades of her career. The exhibition traces Ractliff’s evolution from her early 1980s street photography to her mature, atmospheric landscapes that examine the scars of colonialism, apartheid, and regional conflicts in Southern Africa. By focusing on the 'afterlife' of violence rather than the events themselves, the collection highlights her unique ability to capture how history sediments within the physical terrain.
Resonancias Desde El Abismo Artistas Uruguayos
The exhibition 'Resonancias desde el abismo. Prácticas artísticas entre presiones y frecuencias extrañas' (Resonances from the Abyss. Artistic Practices Between Pressures and Strange Frequencies), curated by Fabiana Puentes, opened at the Centro Cultural de España in Montevideo. It features works by eight Uruguayan artists—including Guadalupe Ayala, Karina Flores, and Sofía Córdoba—working across sculpture, video, sound, and installation. The show uses the extreme, dark, and high-pressure ecosystem of the ocean abyss as a conceptual framework to explore artistic practices that resist immediate interpretation and conventional systems of reference.
Artists Charlie Kirkham and Robert Walker are set to debut a joint exhibition titled "The Cost of Love" at the Rugby Art Gallery and Museum this May. The showcase features contemporary paintings that reimagine classical mythological figures—such as Narcissus, Apollo, and Adonis—to explore psychological themes of desire, transformation, and vulnerability. While both artists maintain a focus on technical rigor and the human figure, the works shift away from traditional storytelling to focus on the emotional tensions of modern life.
Renowned Belarusian musician and writer Liavon Volski has debuted his first solo painting exhibition, titled "The Forest Hears, the Field Sees," at the Museum of Free Belarus in Warsaw. The exhibition features 11 conceptual works characterized by misty landscapes and surrealist elements, each inspired by traditional Belarusian proverbs. The opening event was a multi-sensory experience, incorporating fog machines and a musical performance by Volski to complement the atmospheric nature of the canvases.
Conduit Gallery in Dallas is hosting "Dynamatic," a solo exhibition by Brooklyn-based artist Kendall Glover featuring sculptures and textiles produced within the last year. The show highlights three distinct series: large-scale tubular steel sculptures, experimental bronzes cast from rattan and thread, and a collection of silver-leafed crocheted works known as "Quasars."
The article 'Photography Is...' from Glasstire is a conceptual piece that presents the title as a prompt, leaving the definition of photography open-ended. The text consists solely of the title and source, functioning as a minimalist statement or an invitation for reader interpretation.
The Spring Arts Guide 2026 highlights several major exhibitions opening in the Washington D.C. area, ranging from local photography to expansive collection surveys. Alan Sislen’s 'AMBIGUITY' at Multiple Exposures Gallery explores architectural abstraction, while the National Museum of Women in the Arts hosts 'Making Their Mark,' a traveling exhibition of the Shah Garg Collection featuring luminaries like Howardena Pindell and Joan Semmel. Additionally, the National Museum of African Art presents 'Here: Pride and Belonging in African Art,' a landmark show centering queer voices within the African diaspora.
The Art Institute of Chicago has partnered with the Tuscany-based sculpting studio Ten X to create two marble reimaginations of a rare 8th-century Tang dynasty Bodhisattva. The original limestone sculpture, a centerpiece of the museum’s Asian art collection, has been missing its left arm since it was acquired in 1930, leaving its meditative gesture a mystery. Rather than attempting a traditional restoration, curator Dr. Tao Wang commissioned two distinct versions that explore different historical possibilities for the figure's hand placement based on extensive cross-cultural research.
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Three major American art surveys—the Whitney Biennial, MoMA PS1’s Greater New York, and the Carnegie International—are set to define the artistic landscape of 2026. Early analysis of the artist lists reveals a significant overlap in curatorial interest for figures like Taína Cruz, Akira Ikezoe, and Jonathan González. These exhibitions appear to be moving away from rigid thematic structures in favor of "mood and texture," reflecting a broader institutional retreat from definitive political or social statements.
This week's episode of HBO's *Industry* features a watercolor of Neuschwanstein Castle signed "A. Hitler," reflecting the real-world market for Adolf Hitler's amateur paintings. The show uses the artwork as a symbol of inherited wealth and moral ambiguity, mirroring actual auction sales—such as a 2015 Nuremberg sale where a group of Hitler watercolors fetched roughly €400,000, with one version of Neuschwanstein selling for €100,000 to an anonymous Chinese buyer. These works continue to circulate legally in Germany as long as they omit Nazi symbols.