Christie's is auctioning Vincent van Gogh's early painting 'A Girl in a Wood' in Hong Kong on March 27, with an estimate of $1.3m-$2.6m. The work, recently redated to August 1883, is being offered directly in Asia, bypassing major Western previews, to target Chinese collectors.
A rare, inscribed lithograph by Vincent van Gogh, 'At Eternity's Gate,' resides in the collection of the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art. The work, one of only seven surviving examples, was acquired in 1975 by Farah Pahlavi, the wife of the Shah of Iran, for the museum. It passed through notable hands, including those of US Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, before arriving in Tehran just before the 1979 Iranian Revolution.
The third edition of Abidjan Art Week recently concluded in Côte d’Ivoire, featuring extended gallery hours, bus tours, and exhibitions across diverse neighborhoods from the administrative Plateau district to the working-class area of Abobo. The event saw a significant expansion this year, with the number of participating galleries more than doubling and featuring artists from across the continent, including Cameroon, Mali, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
The Louvre maintained its position as the world's most-visited museum in 2025, drawing approximately 9 million visitors according to the Art Newspaper's annual ranking. The Vatican Museums and the National Museum of Korea in Seoul followed closely, rounding out a top ten list that includes major institutions in London, New York, and Shanghai. Overall, about 200 million people visited the top 100 museums globally, a figure still below the pre-pandemic 2019 peak of 230 million.
The Asian art landscape is undergoing significant shifts, headlined by the launch of Hive Art Fair in Seoul, which introduces a fee-free booth model focused on B2B corporate collaborations. Major institutional moves include the appointment of Melissa Chiu as the new director of the Guggenheim Museum and the opening of the Black Gold Museum in Riyadh. Meanwhile, the Hong Kong Museum of History has reopened with a controversial thematic revamp that emphasizes Chinese heritage over colonial history.
The latest edition of Expo Chicago has reinforced its reputation as a curator-centric fair, with more than half of its booths dedicated to curated or thematic sections. Under the leadership of new director Kate Sierzputowski, the fair integrated institutional voices directly into the floor plan through sections like 'Embodiment,' curated by Louise Bernard of the Obama Presidential Center. This strategic focus on curation and local institutional ties resulted in strong early sales, including works by María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Torkwase Dyson, and Ambreen Butt, with several pieces acquired by American institutions.
The 2026 edition of Expo Chicago marks a strategic shift under the leadership of new director Kate Sierzputowski, featuring a leaner roster of 130 galleries at Navy Pier. The fair has introduced a more spacious layout and a new curatorial role, filled by Essence Harden, to deepen institutional ties and scholarly rigor. Notable participants include local mainstays like Monique Meloche Gallery and Gray, alongside international exhibitors from South Korea, South Africa, and Nigeria, as well as high-profile New York newcomers like Karma.
The Art Newspaper's 2025 survey of the world's 100 most visited art museums reveals a strong but uneven recovery from the pandemic, with total visits reaching over 200 million. New museums in the Middle East, East Asia, and major Western cities have been major hits with the public, driving significant attendance.
The National Gallery in London has selected Japanese architect Kengo Kuma to design a major new wing as part of its ambitious £750m "Project Domani." Kuma, known for the Tokyo Olympic stadium and V&A Dundee, beat out high-profile competitors including Norman Foster and Renzo Piano. The expansion will occupy a site near Trafalgar Square currently housing a hotel and office complex, and is supported by record-breaking £150m donations from both the Julia Rausing Trust and the Crankstart foundation.
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) has announced that its highly anticipated David Geffen Galleries will officially open to the public on April 19, 2026. Designed by Pritzker Prize–winning architect Peter Zumthor in collaboration with director Michael Govan, the new facility features a horizontal, elevated design that spans Wilshire Boulevard. The structure will house 26 galleries on a single level, representing the culmination of a nearly two-decade redevelopment project.
The article previews a major new video installation by artist and filmmaker Isaac Julien, titled "Once Again... (Statues Never Die)," which will be presented at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. The work engages in a complex dialogue with the museum's founder, Albert C. Barnes, and his historic collection of African sculptures, exploring themes of colonialism, modernism, and representation.
Berlin-based Singaporean artist Ming Wong premiered a new film, *Dance of the Sun on the Water | Saltatio Solis in Aqua*, at London's National Gallery. The work, created during a residency, reimagines Saint Sebastian as a queer, shape-shifting figure, with Asian performers of multiple genders enacting the martyrdom amidst the museum's collection of historical paintings of the saint.
The exhibition "Women Artists of the American West: Colorado and Utah: 1885–1935" at History Jackson Hole spotlights seven forgotten female artists, including the adventurous mountaineer and painter Helen Henderson Chain. Curated by the founders of the Paris-based nonprofit AWARE, the show uncovers the lives of women who documented the Rocky Mountains and local communities while navigating the restrictive social norms of the late 19th century. Through paintings and photographs, the exhibition challenges the traditional, male-dominated "heroic" narrative of Western expansion.
Iranian artist Kamrooz Aram is currently experiencing a significant institutional and commercial moment, with his work appearing in three major exhibitions across two continents simultaneously. Critic Aruna D’Souza highlights Aram’s ability to synthesize Islamic visual idioms with Western abstraction, creating a painterly language that transcends cultural hierarchies and treats historical narratives with a unique lightness.
Artist Leah Ke Yi Zheng's exhibition "Change, I Ching (64 Paintings)" at the Renaissance Society in Chicago presents a series of oil and acrylic paintings on silk, each depicting one of the 64 hexagrams from the ancient Chinese divination text, the I Ching. The artist physically altered the gallery's architecture to control light and create a specific viewing rhythm, synthesizing materials and techniques from Chinese ink painting traditions with Western geometric abstraction and oil painting.
Art Dubai has released a revised exhibitor list for its 2026 edition, which was rescheduled to May 15–17 following regional instability caused by the US-Israel war in Iran. The fair will feature 50 galleries at Madinat Jumeirah, down from its original roster after approximately 75 participants—including major Indian and Western galleries—withdrew due to scheduling conflicts and logistics. To support those remaining, the fair has introduced a flexible fee structure where galleries pay a percentage of sales capped at the original stand cost.
The Reina Sofía museum in Madrid has installed Dumile Feni's 1967 drawing 'African Guernica' directly opposite Pablo Picasso's iconic 'Guernica' painting. This pairing is the centerpiece of the museum's new annual exhibition series 'History Doesn’t Repeat Itself, But It Does Rhyme,' which aims to place works from different cultural contexts in dialogue with Picasso's masterpiece.
Hyperallergic's April newsletter features a roundup of the best April Fools' jokes from the art world this year, compiled by staff writer Rhea Nayyar. The issue also highlights critic Aruna D'Souza's meditation on the work of abstract painter Kamrooz Aram, who is having a prominent year with appearances from Mumbai Art Week to the Whitney Biennial.
Kamrooz Aram is the subject of multiple major exhibitions in early 2026, including a solo show at Alexander Gray Associates in New York, a presentation at Nature Morte in Mumbai for Mumbai Art Week, and a significant inclusion in the 2026 Whitney Biennial. The artist, known for his work with the grid, uses painting to explore the connections between Western modernist abstraction and non-Western decorative traditions, particularly from Western Asia.
The 22nd edition of SP-Arte has opened at São Paulo’s Oscar Niemeyer-designed pavilion, featuring over 180 galleries and design studios. While global art markets face a period of recalibration, the Latin American sector—and Brazil in particular—is reporting significant growth, including a 21% year-on-year increase in sales for Brazilian dealers according to the latest Art Basel and UBS report.
The 60th Venice Biennale, titled "Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere," has opened to a polarized reception. Curated by Adriano Pedrosa, it is the first Biennale led by a Latin American curator and heavily features artists from the Global South, Indigenous creators, and queer artists, marking a significant departure from the Eurocentric focus of past editions.
On Curating Carnage
The Berlin-based art journal *OnCurating* published a September 2025 issue titled "Let’s Talk About… Anti-Democratic, Anti-Queer, Misogynist, Antisemitic, Right-Wing Spaces and Their Counter-Movements." The article critiques this publication, arguing it uses the language of feminism, anti-racism, and anti-Semitism as a political tool to unconditionally support Israel and demonize the Palestinian cause, thereby aligning with German state policy and a specific strain of leftist thought known as Antideutsch.
Michael Armitage is the subject of a major solo retrospective at Palazzo Grassi in Venice, marking his largest exhibition in Europe to date. Organized by the Pinault Collection, the show features monumental paintings that blend African identity, local Kenyan chronicles, and mythological narratives. Armitage’s work is noted for its physical scale and its ability to transform the chaos of human affairs into a syncretic epic, utilizing traditional materials like Lubugo bark cloth to ground his contemporary subjects.
Joan Mitchell’s diptych "La Grande Vallée VII" sold for HK$137 million (US$17.6 million) at Sotheby’s Hong Kong, setting a new record for the most expensive work by a female artist ever sold at auction in Asia. The 1983 masterpiece, part of a celebrated 21-painting cycle dedicated to a grieving friend, led a successful Modern and Contemporary Evening Auction that saw a 100% sell-through rate for its 54 lots. Other notable results included a Mark Rothko canvas that more than doubled its low estimate and significant sales for works by Sanyu and Zao Wou-Ki.
The Turkish-Jordanian modernist Fahrelnissa Zeid is the subject of a new solo exhibition titled "Immersion" at Dirimart London, curated by art historian Adila Laïdi-Hanieh. This marks the artist's first gallery solo show in the United Kingdom this century, featuring several works from her estate that have never been publicly exhibited. The selection spans various periods of her career, highlighting her transition from monumental geometric abstractions to her late-career expressionist portraits.
A growing movement of artists is exploring Islamic Futurism, a framework that draws from Islamic philosophy, visual traditions, and speculative practices to imagine Muslim futures. Artists like Zarah Hussain, Ibrahim El-Salahi, and Soraya Syed are working across mediums—including light installation, digital animation, painting, and classical calligraphy—to reinterpret historical forms for contemporary and future contexts.
The Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London has admitted to removing maps and images from two exhibition catalogs following censorship demands from a Chinese printing firm. Documents revealed that C&C Offset Printing flagged content in the catalogs for the exhibitions "Music Is Black" and "Fabergé: Romance to Revolution" as violating Chinese law. The censored items included a 1930s map of British trade routes and a photograph of Vladimir Lenin, which the printer claimed could not be produced under Beijing’s strict regulations.
London’s Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) has come under fire following reports that it altered exhibition catalogues to comply with Chinese government censorship. To reduce production costs, the museum utilized printers in China, which are subject to Beijing’s General Administration of Press and Publication (GAPP) regulations. Consequently, the museum removed historical maps and an image of Vladimir Lenin from publications for the "Music is Black" and "Fabergé: Romance to Revolution" exhibitions after they were flagged by Chinese authorities.
The exhibition "Seeds of Exchange" at London's Garden Museum highlights a 1773 botanical collaboration between British amateur plant hunter John Bradby Blake and Cantonese painter Mak Sau. Centered on Blake’s unpublished "Flora Sinensis," the project attempted to systematically catalogue Chinese flora, including the Camellia japonica, through detailed watercolors that blended Western objective illustration with Chinese artistic expertise. These works served as the primary medium for introducing Chinese plant species to the West long before live specimens could survive the journey.
The National Gallery in London has appointed Tokyo-based architect Kengo Kuma to design a new £350 million wing as part of its ambitious £750 million "Project Domani" expansion. Kuma, known for the V&A Dundee, beat out high-profile Pritzker Prize winners Renzo Piano and Norman Foster for the commission. The project involves the demolition of St. Vincent House to create 15,000 square feet of new exhibition space dedicated to 20th and 21st-century art, along with new pedestrian zones and a roof garden.