The Cy Twombly Foundation is presenting six rarely seen early works by Robert Rauschenberg at Gagosian's new Upper East Side gallery in New York. The exhibition includes a fragile 1950 assemblage of twigs and glass, a cyanotype made with his then-wife Susan Weil, a 'Black Painting' from around 1952, and a 1961 assemblage, offering a unique glimpse into a period of the artist's output that he largely destroyed.
The 2026 IFPDA Print Fair concluded at the Park Avenue Armory with record-breaking attendance of over 21,000 visitors and robust sales across various price points. This edition marked a significant pivot for the fair following its formal expansion to include drawings dealers, rebranding as the International Fine Prints and Drawings Association. Notable sales included a sold-out edition of Cecily Brown etchings at Two Palms and six-figure works by David Hockney and Rashid Johnson at Galerie Maximillian.
The article highlights five under-recognized artists whose exhibitions are on view in New York this season, focusing on Domenico Gnoli at Lévy Gorvy Dayan and Raquel Rabinovich at Hutchinson Modern and Contemporary. Gnoli, an Italian painter who died in 1970, is known for his pallid, claustrophobic depictions of everyday subjects, while Rabinovich, who died at 102 in January 2026, created somber minimalist paintings exploring silence and withholding. The piece notes that New York galleries often use the pre-fair period to showcase less prominent artists of great promise.
This week's art roundup from The Guardian highlights a range of exhibitions across the UK, including Bruce Asbestos's 'Bootleg Shreg 2' at Exeter Phoenix Gallery, a playful show featuring a green ogre that parodies copyright rules. Other notable shows include Roy Oxlade's primitive paintings at Alison Jacques, May Morris's craft legacy at Lady Lever Art Gallery, a 30-year anniversary group show at Timothy Taylor, and Alan Charlton's monochrome grey works at Annely Juda Fine Art. The article also features an image of a naturally sculpted rock on Kangaroo Island, a review of the Turner Prize nominees, and a masterwork analysis of Vermeer's 'The Guitar Player' at Kenwood House, which was stolen in the 1970s and recovered with the help of a clairvoyant.
Tate Britain has announced the four nominees for the 2026 Turner Prize: Simeon Barclay, Kira Freije, Marguerite Humeau, and Tanoa Sasraku. The shortlist was revealed during a press conference broadcast online. An exhibition of their work will open at the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (Mima) on 26 September, with the winner announced on 10 December. The winner receives £25,000, while each runner-up gets £10,000. The jury, chaired by Tate Britain director Alex Farquharson, praised the diverse range of work spanning installation, performance, and sculpture.
Lee Ufan, the South Korean artist and founding member of the Mono-ha movement, is being honored with a major solo exhibition at SMAC San Marco Art Centre as an official Collateral Event of the Venice Biennale, marking his 90th year. Simultaneously, a new display of his painting and sculpture opens at Dia Beacon in New York State, and his first show in Portugal opens at Casa e Parque de Serralves in July. In an interview with The Art Newspaper, Ufan discusses his artistic journey, his rejection of the artist's hand, and the influence of seeing a Barnett Newman exhibition at MoMA in 1971, which led him to develop his signature From Point and From Line paintings that use repeated marks to express the passage of time.
ARTnews has published a guide to 10 exhibitions in Venice worth seeing during the 2026 Biennale, beyond the central show "In Minor Keys" curated by the late Koyo Kouoh and the national pavilions. Highlights include a major survey of Lee Ufan at the San Marco Art Centre (SMAC Venice), organized by the Dia Art Foundation and curated by Jessica Morgan; "Helter Skelter: Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince" at Fondazione Prada, curated by Nancy Spector; and "Strange Rules" at Palazzo Diedo, conceived by Hans Ulrich Obrist with Mat Dryhurst and Holly Herndon, introducing the concept of "Protocol Art." Other venues include the Gallerie dell'Accademia, Pinault Collection, Berggruen Arts & Culture, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, and a three-night-only performance at Teatro Goldoni.
Paul McCarthy, the 80-year-old American artist known for his transgressive critiques of consumer culture, has opened a new exhibition titled "SS EE Saint Santa Eva Elf" at Hauser & Wirth in Paris. The show features large-scale drawings and a six-channel video installation created during filmed performances with his long-term collaborator, German actress Lilith Stangenberg, who plays the Elf. McCarthy revisits his iconic Santa Claus motif, portraying him as a dark, psychotic figure—the "god of capitalism and consumption." The exhibition also includes earlier drawings made with Stangenberg at Bowman Hal gallery in Madrid. The interview reveals that McCarthy's home and studios in Los Angeles were destroyed by wildfires, resulting in the loss of art, drawings, notebooks, and books, and the cancellation of a planned London show.
Two rare photographic albums taken by art critic Gustave Coquiot in 1922 have been acquired by the newly established Van Gogh Academy in Auvers-sur-Oise, France, and are now on display. The images capture many of the sites in Arles that Vincent van Gogh painted in the late 1880s, including the Yellow House, the Langlois Bridge, and the Rhône riverbank. Several of these locations were later destroyed during World War II or by modernization, making Coquiot's photographs valuable historical records of Van Gogh's original subjects.
Zoe Leonard, a celebrated conceptual artist whose work will appear at the Venice Biennale next week, has left Hauser & Wirth—a global gallery with 14 locations—to join Maxwell Graham, a smaller New York-based gallery known for spare conceptual presentations. Leonard will continue to be represented by her longtime galleries, Cologne’s Galeria Gisela Capitain and Milan’s Raffaella Cortese. Maxwell Graham staged its first Leonard exhibition last year with “Display,” featuring photographs of historical objects in museums. Leonard is the second artist to depart Hauser & Wirth in the past year, following George Condo’s exit in November.
The artist Michael Armitage opens a monographic exhibition titled 'The Promise of Change' at Venice's Palazzo Grassi, featuring 46 large paintings and nearly 100 sketches that survey his past decade of work. At 42, Armitage is the youngest artist to receive a solo show at the palazzo, which is owned by François Pinault and has previously hosted Albert Oehlen, Luc Tuymans, and Marlene Dumas. The exhibition highlights Armitage's fusion of East African and Western European artistic influences, drawing on his upbringing in Kenya and his training at London's Byam Shaw School of Art, the Slade, and the Royal Academy.
On April 28, 1966, The New York Times published a review by conservative critic Hilton Kramer of the Jewish Museum's exhibition “Primary Structures,” organized by curator Kynaston McShine. Kramer, disdainful of contemporary art, described the 42 American and British artists as rejecting personal expression and subjective inflection, yet he acknowledged the show as the first comprehensive glimpse of a style that would define the 1960s. The exhibition featured then-little-known artists including Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Walter De Maria, Robert Morris, Anne Truitt, John McCracken, Larry Bell, Robert Smithson, Judy Chicago, Philip King, Michael Bolus, and David Annesley, and is now recognized as the ur-survey of Minimalism—a term McShine deliberately avoided.
Gagosian is opening a new ground-floor flagship gallery at 980 Madison Avenue in New York, moving from its former upper-floor space in the same building. Designed by Caplan Colaku Architects, the 12,000-square-foot, two-level space consolidates three storefronts into a continuous layout with restrained materials like Portland Taupe stone and brushed stainless steel. The inaugural exhibition pairs a major Marcel Duchamp show with six early works by Robert Rauschenberg on loan from the Cy Twombly Foundation, coinciding with a Duchamp retrospective at MoMA and referencing a 1965 Duchamp exhibition held in the same building.
An exhibition titled "Van Gogh, Influencer: Legacies in Motion" has opened at the Château of Auvers-sur-Oise, the village near Paris where Vincent van Gogh spent his final 70 days and died by suicide in July 1890. The show, running until 3 January 2027, features nearly a hundred works by artists influenced by Van Gogh, including Léonide Bourges, Charles-François Daubigny, and Léo Gausson, though no original Van Gogh paintings are included. Curated by Wouter van der Veen, the exhibition explores visual parallels and stylistic contrasts between Van Gogh’s iconic works—such as *Church at Auvers* and *Wheatfield with Crows*—and those of his contemporaries and followers.
Gagosian has opened a new 2,275-square-foot ground-floor gallery at 980 Madison Avenue in New York, relocating from its longtime sixth-floor space after 37 years. The move was prompted by Bloomberg Philanthropies' acquisition of the building in 2024, which displaced several fine art tenants. The inaugural exhibition features works by Marcel Duchamp and Robert Rauschenberg, and the space was designed by architect Jonathan Caplan with advanced lighting by Dot Dash.
The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) has launched a major solo exhibition dedicated to Marcel Duchamp, marking the artist's first comprehensive survey in New York City in over 50 years. The exhibition explores Duchamp’s revolutionary impact on modern art, featuring iconic works and archival materials that trace his history from the 1913 Armory Show to his later years in New York. The opening is complemented by a broader "Duchamp spring" in the city, including a forthcoming exhibition of his readymades at Gagosian.
Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills has opened an exhibition titled "Frank Gehry" showcasing the architect's lesser-known sculptural works, including fish lamps, a crocodile, snakes, and a stainless steel bear. Curated by Deborah McLeod, a personal friend of Gehry, the show celebrates his non-architectural creations that explore animal forms and light, with pieces like the 7-foot-long "Bear With Us" and fish lamps using LED bulbs. The exhibition serves as a tribute following Gehry's death in 2025 at age 96.
This week's art roundup from The Guardian features a major exhibition at Towner Eastbourne titled 'Comrades in Art: Artists Against Fascism,' which examines how artists, poets, and intellectuals used their work to resist the rise of extremism in 1930s Europe, drawing on the history of the Artists International Association (AIA). Other highlights include 'Hidden: Photography and Displacement Under the Khmer Rouge' at The Wiener Holocaust Library in London, a show of early Netherlandish drawings at the British Museum, Katharina Grosse's colorful installations at White Cube, and a flower-themed survey at Kettle's Yard. The image of the week is Sylvia Sleigh's 1963 portrait 'The Bridge (Johanna Lawrenson),' part of a new exhibition of the Welsh artist's work. The article also covers news items such as Lydia Ourahmane's Venice Biennale installation, a Holbein portrait mystery, a restored stained-glass window by Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris, and Anish Kapoor's call to exclude the US from the Venice Biennale due to 'politics of hate.'
A new exhibition at the Princeton University Art Museum, titled "Photography as a Way of Life," celebrates the photographers who helped establish art photography as a serious movement from the 1940s to the 1970s. The show features works by Minor White, Aaron Siskind, Harry Callahan, and others, including images by Ming Smith, Donna-Lee Phillips, and Walter Chappell. The exhibition runs until September 7 and highlights how these educators and artists transformed photography's role in both the art world and higher education.
Raghu Rai, the renowned Indian photographer known for capturing his country's post-independence history through singular, enduring images, has died at age 83 from cancer. Rai's career spanned six decades, during which he documented events from the 1984 Bhopal gas disaster to the Bangladesh war of independence, and photographed figures including Indira Gandhi, Mother Teresa, and the Dalai Lama. He joined Magnum Photos in 1977 after being invited by Henri Cartier-Bresson, and worked as a staff photographer for the Statesman and as picture editor for India Today.
Angel Otero, a Puerto Rican artist based in Somerset, discusses his emotional collaboration with musician Bad Bunny on the stage set "La Casita" for his 31-show residency in Puerto Rico. Otero's new solo exhibition at Hauser & Wirth Somerset features large-scale, semi-abstract paintings that draw from his childhood memories in Santurce, San Juan, including motifs like a pink vanity cabinet, birdcages, and a turbulent sea. His signature technique involves applying paint skins—dried sheets of oil paint on Perspex—to canvas, creating layered, sculptural surfaces. The show includes a diptych based on a photograph of Otero and his grandmother, marking his most figurative work to date.
Six years after Christo's death, Gagosian London will realize a monumental installation he designed in 1968 titled "Air Package on a Ceiling," originally conceived for the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia but never built due to technical constraints. The plans and a detailed scale model were discovered by studio manager Lorenza Giovanelli in 2018, hidden inside a hollow plinth in Christo's studio. The work, a vast internally illuminated suspended form resembling a cloud, will fill a 16-meter-long, 10-meter-wide space at Gagosian London, descending just above head height, in collaboration with the Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation.
A journalist recounts a stressful visit to the Royal Academy with her toddler, where a toy pig was thrown toward a Kerry James Marshall painting. This incident serves as the catalyst for a new series exploring the compatibility of small children and art galleries, addressing the anxieties parents face regarding museum etiquette, accessibility, and the fear of damaging artworks.
This week’s art roundup highlights several major exhibitions across the UK, including a floral-themed survey at Kettle’s Yard featuring artists from Henri Rousseau to Lubaina Himid. Other notable openings include Billy Childish’s expressionistic California desert paintings at Carl Freedman Gallery, Katharina Grosse’s site-specific installations at White Cube, and Steve McQueen’s new photography book, 'Bounty', which explores the colonial history of Grenada through its flora.
Swiss art dealer Bruno Bischofberger, who catalyzed the famous collaboration between Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, died on May 9 at age 86. His death was announced by his namesake gallery, which he had operated since 1963. Bischofberger played a pivotal role in introducing US Pop artists to Europe, representing Warhol and Basquiat, and commissioning collaborative works that led Warhol to return to painting after a two-decade hiatus. He also represented European artists like Francesco Clemente, Enzo Cucchi, Gerhard Richter, and Jean Tinguely, and his idiosyncratic ads graced Artforum's back cover for nearly four decades.
New York Art Week 2026 brings a major convergence of art events across the city, including several prominent art fairs such as Frieze New York, Independent New York, TEFAF New York, and NADA New York. The week also features gallery openings spanning from Tribeca to the Upper East Side, as well as auction previews ahead of key sales at Sotheby’s, Christie’s, and Phillips.
ArtReview's editors have curated a list of 11 must-see exhibitions worldwide for May 2026, excluding Venice. Highlights include Audie Murray's solo show at april april in Pittsburgh, featuring works made with her own hair and breast milk; Delcy Morelos's monumental earthwork 'origo' at the Barbican Sculpture Court in London; and Bold Tendencies' 20th anniversary season in Peckham, titled 'Euphoria', with new commissions across multiple disciplines.
The Adelaide Salon, a new arts organization founded in 2024 by Pascal Dowers and Paulina Anzorge, is staging a ticketed contemporary art event at Brighton's Royal Pavilion on 30 May, featuring live art and performance. This follows the organization's earlier exhibitions at their home in Adelaide Crescent and a current takeover of the Founders Room at Brighton Dome with the exhibition Act O (until 25 May), part of the Brighton Festival. The salon aims to revive Brighton's art scene after notable losses, including the 2023 closure of Brighton University's Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA) and the withdrawal of Arts Council funding at Fabrica gallery.
The spring Islamic and Indian art auctions in London, held at Sotheby's and Christie's in late April, achieved strong results despite geopolitical tensions. Sotheby's Arts of the Islamic World & India sales totaled £14.8m, while Christie's Art from the Islamic and Indian Worlds sale and the Mary and Cheney Cowles collection brought in £17.6m. The top lot was a rare 14th-century Mamluk gilded glass bowl from the Toledo Museum of Art, which sold for £5.5m—a new auction record for Islamic glass. Other highlights included a 17th-century Mughal astrolabe that sold for £2m at Sotheby's, setting a record for an Islamic scientific instrument, and strong sales of Iznik ceramics from two old English collections.
Six days after Georg Baselitz's death, his dealer Thaddaeus Ropac opened "Eroi d'Oro" ("Heroes of Gold") at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice. The exhibition features the final paintings Baselitz made before he died in April at age 88. In a prerecorded film, Baselitz calls these works his "last paintings," intended as a summation of his six-decade career. The large-scale, gold-ground paintings depict thin, ink-like figures of himself or his wife Elke lying horizontally, floating in undefined space. Baselitz connected the gold grounds to Fayum mummy portraits, Sienese altarpieces, and Byzantine icons, using them to absorb space and create a shadowless, eternal condition.