Mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton’s rendition of Jake Heggie's “Winged Victory: We’re Through,” vividly captures the song’s humor and energy.

The 61st Venice Biennale is just around the corner, and you can already tell it’s going to be a charged, eventful edition. That may be less about the art on display than the haywire world around it. Will protests overshadow the art inside the national pavilions? Will the main exhibition In Minor Keys, conceived by the late Koyo Kouoh, rise to the moment or shy away from it? We will have to wait and see.And see we will, as I will be reporting to you from the biennale with our editor-at-large, Hrag Vartanian, and other colleagues. Meanwhile, enjoy Hrag’s spirited roundup of the major exhibitions and events taking place in Venice in May and beyond. Also, don’t miss his online conversation with artist Jeremy...

Memory, language and inheritance fracture and converge in Of Walking on Fire. That which cannot be said is the exhibition’s most resonant force. Absence is not positioned as lack, but as an active, shaping presence – one that structures how histories are carried, distorted and reimagined. The project turns on a central question: what is communicated – and what is withheld – across generations. Here, memory is neither stable nor complete, but porous, prone to erosion and reinvention. The work emerges as a survey of the fragility of how stories are communicated – or withheld – across generations. This foregrounds silence as both rupture and residue. In this terrain, images operate as gestures toward...

Litterbugs: a micro-world where plastic waste mimics insect life
 
Litterbugs explores the curious overlap between two conditions that usually go unnoticed: the quiet disappearance of insects and the steady accumulation of plastic waste. By bringing the two together, Henk Loorbach’s project reframes them as parallel micro-worlds, one fading, the other expanding, both embedded in everyday surroundings.
 
The series consists of insect-like figures assembled from found plastic fragments collected from beaches and urban environments. Bottle caps, straws, fishing line, and other discarded objects are cut, combined, and reconfigured into small, hybrid creatures. Rather than fully disguising their origin, the...

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The project was completed just in time for the NFL draft and the Carnegie International

Researchers from Cairo University and the Technical University of Munich (TUM) have located two air-filled spaces within Giza’s Menkaure pyramid that hint at a possible secret entrance. Their findings were published in the academic journal NDT & E International. The Menkaure pyramid is the smallest of the three main pyramids on Cairo’s Giza plateau. Built for the Fourth Dynasty ruler Menkaure, it was completed in the 26th century BC. It was excavated between 1906 to 1910, but has not been fully explored since then. The structure is distinguished from its two larger neighbors by having been partially clad in red granite blocks, rather than white limestone. An unusually smooth area on its eastern facade has...

At the puritanical core of the United States, artist Xandra Ibarra's performance in the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) Boston shattered the nude woman’s historical designation of beautiful as an art object, but vulgar in the flesh.In her staging of “Nude Laughing” (2014–), Ibarra appeared at the museum exactly as the title suggested last Thursday, April 16, astonishing those onsite and scandalizing the museum's digital following in the days after. Hundreds of commenters volleyed arguments back and forth about the legitimacy and obscenity of the artist's performance on the MFA Boston's Instagram post. The event was a highlighted program in Subvert, Repair, Reclaim: Contemporary Artists...

Between the sea of sky-blue high-rise windows and the traffic funneling toward the Lincoln Tunnel, a large sandstone Buddha stands tall on the High Line, inviting Manhattan to embrace a moment of tranquility.Tuan Andrew Nguyen's “The Light That Shines Through the Universe” (2026), the park's fifth site-specific commission, was selected from nearly 60 proposals. It was recently installed at West 30th Street and 10th Avenue, and is on view through Spring 2027. The 27-foot-tall sculpture stands out from its contemporary surroundings not only because of its warmth and timeworn quality, but because it resurrects a critical piece of destroyed cultural heritage — the Bamiyan Buddhas.  “This...

Proudly regional, but with global ambitions, the 20th edition of Sweden's largest commercial art event sees 54 dealers gather in a new venue

This weekend Gagosian is opening a new flagship at 980 Madison Avenue’s ground floor with shows by Marcel Duchamp and early works by Robert Rauschenberg. The new space, designed by Caplan Colaku Architects (CCA), moves the gallery from its former upper-floor perch in the same building to street level, consolidating three former storefronts into a continuous, two-level layout totaling more than 12,000 square feet. Floor-to-ceiling steel doors align with the facade, creating what feels like a gradual transition from the bustle of Madison Avenue into the gallery’s more quiet interior. For CCA founder Jonathan Caplan, the project was less about expansion than control. The architecture was tightly calibrated...

Julia Stoschek, one of the world’s top art collectors, is closing down the Berlin venue where she has displayed her extensive holdings of time-based art for the past decade. Since 2016, the 3,000-square-meter exhibition space in the former Czech Cultural Center has hosted some 22 exhibitions and numerous public programs, as well as welcomed some 450,000 visitors. It will close its doors at the end of October 2026. The Stoschek Foundation will retain its Düsseldorf venue, which has been open since 2007.  Stoschek will also focus more on international presentations of her collection, such as the recent exhibition “What a Wonderful World: An Audiovisual Poem” in Los Angeles, organized by guest curator Udo...

The world’s first museum of AI arts, Dataland, is set to open to the public on June 20th. Conceived by new media artist Refik Anadol and his partner, artist and cultural researcher Efsun Erkiliç, the Los Angeles-located institution has been under construction for over two and a half years. Its flagship location will be within […]

James Hayward in his painting studio in 2015 (photo by and courtesy William Turner)Abstract painter James Hayward died last week at the age of 82. It was a great fortune to know him, own one of his paintings, feast on his famous tri-tip, share a joint and a glass of good red wine (he was a connoisseur), and listen to his inexhaustible wellspring of anecdotes.As much as Hayward was legendary as an LA painter, he was equally known for his magnetic personality, sense of ribald humor, unfiltered commentary, and inspired storytelling. Highly regarded among his fellow artists, his early hard-edge paintings eventually led to his signature “monochromatic abstractions,” the term he preferred to describe his oil and...

The construction of the Berlin Modern Museum, a planned extension of the Neue Nationalgalerie, has been delayed until 2030, Monopol reports. The postponement is due to significant moisture damage found in the foundation, floors, roof coverings and exterior walls which comprise the building’s shell, as well as microbial contamination found elsewhere in the structure.  The […]

The Judd Foundation has named Alexandra Cunningham Cameron as director of design, a newly created role. She will begin in the position on April 27. As director of design, Cameron will oversee the nonprofit foundation’s Donald Judd Furniture LLC, a company established to fabricate Donald Judd’s furniture designs to his original specifications. Currently, Judd Furniture produces more than 70 designs, which are available for custom order. According to a press release, Cameron will guide Judd Furniture’s “product development, operations, and strategic growth,” while also leading “design initiatives that situate Judd’s work within cultural and design conversations with a focus on Judd’s writings and...

Maybe it’s because I got my first iPhone when I was 11, or maybe it’s a sign of the digital times, but seeing a photograph framed on a wall always stuns me. Even more arresting to me is a room full of physical photographs — vintage, rare, or contemporary — outside of a narrow museum or gallery setting. This year’s iteration of the Photography Show, held by the Association of International Photography Art Dealers (AIPAD) at the Park Avenue Armory, brought 82 image exhibitors to its main floor in an overwhelmingly varied display.Among the most trafficked booths on opening night, Wednesday, April 22, was that of Jackson Fine Arts, which displayed tender works portraying female tweenhood by Sally Mann...

The Metropolitan Opera in New York is pursuing multiple funding options, including the sale of the iconic Marc Chagall paintings that have hung in its lobby for sixty years, following the collapse of a multimillion-dollar funding agreement with Saudi Arabia. Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, told the New York Times that the Saudi government […]

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In 2026, a museum dedicated to AI art feels inevitable. And on June 20, one will open in Los Angeles. DATALAND—tag line: Where human imagination meets the creative potential of machines—was announced in the fall of 2024, and will open in the Grand LA, a mixed-use complex in downtown Los Angeles designed by Frank Gehry. DATALAND was co-founded by Refik Anadol, the digital art pioneer who came to fame in 2022 thanks to his wildly popular generative art installation Underpervised in the lobby of the Museum of Modern Art, and Efsun Erkılıç, a painter and art producer. Both artists are Turkish, but have lived and worked in LA for years; they co-founded Anadol’s studio in the city in 2014.  “LA is the...

“Whistling has become the lingua franca of the streets”

The Julia Stoschek Foundation has announced that it will close its Berlin outpost at the end of October, following a decade-long run there. The Düsseldorf-based nonprofit, which houses one of the world’s largest collections of time-based art, opened the Berlin space in 2016. The branch welcomed more than more than 450,000 visitors during its run […]

miniature crane drives the needle in love hultén’s vinyl player
 
Love Hultén reimagines the record player as an intentionally overbuilt, semi-absurd machine where sound is no longer just played but actively performed. Commissioned for Rebin Shah, the piece replaces the conventional tonearm with a bright red crane that physically navigates the vinyl surface, shifting the act of listening into a tactile, almost theatrical operation.
 
A slanted aluminum control panel introduces a set of chunky, color-coded buttons and rotary dials that feel closer to a control console than a hi-fi deck. In crane mode, the user manually steers the needle left, right, up, and down, effectively ‘driving’ the playback...

“Play is how we give permission,” says Vitor Freire, co-founder of the Amsterdam-based studio Imagination of Things. “Permission to challenge what’s fixed, rehearse what doesn’t exist yet, and close the distance between people who wouldn’t otherwise meet.” Freire and co-founder Monique Grimord take play seriously and, in a new project, their studio created a vast repository of 169 artworks, designs, games, and more that have offered an unexpected encounter with imagination and joy. From Rael San Fratello’s award-winning “Teeter-Totter Wall” to the healing Wind Phone project to a 12-foot puppet walking the world, Unruly Play is a multi-decade archive of participatory projects, public spaces,...

paf atelier turns cinema into an introspective environment
 
At Milan Design Week 2026, designboom collaborates with Paf atelier to present Cinema of Dreams inside the ROOM FOR DREAMS takeover at ME Milan Il Duca. Conceived by Christopher Dessus and his studio, the installation frames cinema as an environment where space becomes the medium through which images, bodies, and imagination intersect.
 
Paf atelier constructs what Dessus describes during our conversation as ‘a space of dreams,’ a place where visitors can ‘be in connection with the ideas’ and reflect on ‘the optimism and the new possibility of the new generation.’ Anchored within the intensity of Milan Design Week, the project...

Gearing up FOR MILAN DESIGN WEEK 2026
 
Milan design week 2026 is just around the corner, and designboom returns with it to guide you through this year’s most exciting events, exhibitions, and must-see installations! From April 20th to 26th, 2026, the world’s biggest design event is set to transform the streets of Milan into a celebration of creativity and promises an electrifying mix of design, architecture, and innovation spread across the city.
 
To make sure you don’t miss a thing (and know where to go!), we have once again curated a selection of must-see events, talks, exhibitions, and experiences that will ensure you leave Milan full of powerful new insights and lasting impressions. Chief among...

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In this week's episode, Ben Luke discusses an exhibition commemorating the 40th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, learns about Paula Rego's interest in Norwegian expressionist Edvard Munch, and explores a floral still life by Gluck featured in a new group exhibition at Kettle's Yard in Cambridge.

Two exhibitions open in Auvers-sur-Oise, the last stop on the artist’s journey

Gregory Spears’s Sleepers Awake mystifies and delights at Opera Philadelphia.

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Led by a mesmerizing Anthony Roth Costanzo, Satyagraha at the Paris Opera dispenses with historical particularities for something for more elusive.

A strong revival of Eugene Onegin at the Metropolitan Opera and a recital by Benjamin Bernheim offered the chance to hear "Kuda, kuda" twice in two days.

When we consider that enormous metropolises like New York City and Chicago have only come into being within the past few hundred years, it’s impossible not to stand in awe of ancient cultural sites that have existed for millennia or geological features that expose millions—even billions—of years of the planet’s natural history. For Navid Baraty, the contrasts and tensions of contemporary urban life and timeless landscapes merge in otherworldly photographs. Baraty’s series The Time Between juxtaposes cityscapes with dramatic terrain, from desert dunes to snow-capped mountains. The project revolves around images in which two distinct digital photographs converge in a composite, drawing on the film...

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Led by Turner Prize winner Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Earshot utilises audio as a tool for research and advocacy

samsung explores human side of tech for milan design week 2026
 
‘Design, at its core, is an act of love,’ asserts Mauro Porcini, President and Chief Design Officer at Samsung Electronics, in an interview designboom. At Milan Design Week 2026, Samsung brings this vision to life through an exhibition that reimagines the human side of tech in our lives. The brand invites Design Week visitors into an exhibition where technology is a warm, living participant in the human experience. By centering the space on the human side of tech, the exhibition reframes technology that enables more expressive, meaningful ways of living.
Mauro Porcini explains Samsung Design Open Lab at Milan Design Week 2026
 
 
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This prompt of "favorite art song performance" seems just about as broad — and almost silly — a question as asking a painter what their favorite color is.

Tate Modern’s programme is a global cultural barometer – less a sequence of shows than a continuous reconfiguration of how contemporary art is experienced, narrated and absorbed. The recent Tracey Emin: A Second Life survey sharpened this direction, folding autobiography into institutional scale with an intensity that blurred confession and spectacle. It sat in productive tension with earlier landmark presentations such as Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Rooms and Olafur Eliasson’s The Weather Project, both of which recalibrated perception itself as curatorial material. More recently, El Anatsui’s expansive material assemblages and A World in Common: Contemporary African Photography have extended this...

“I started doing photography as a way to express things I don’t understand or to convey a message I’m having a hard time explaining,” Austn Fischer says. “I often work in quite a backwards way, knowing exactly what I want to arrange in front of the camera but struggling to understand the significance in my life until I am able to reflect on it after.” The Wisconsin-born, London-based photographer taps into fashion as performance, considering how our garments, style, and gestures convey parts of our identities. Contrast is key in Fischer’s work, and it emerges through unusual pairings like lace ruffs atop athletic garb or an angular, black gown with a dainty, horse-shaped wire armature. Whether...

“What I am advocating for is a type of grace,” says Matthew Hansel. “Both in the way we see ourselves and in the way we see others. I am celebrating the impossible mix of contradictory things that make us human, including the parts of ourselves we hide from the world.” Hansel’s tour of our hidden […]
The post Matthew Hansel’s Hidden Demons first appeared on Hi-Fructose Magazine.

The act of painting is often seen as a solitary pursuit; we picture the artist alone in a studio, working through compositional puzzles and experimenting with materials of their own choosing. For Dima Rebus, the process is collaborative, although she may or may not know the other participants. In her large-scale works, the London-based artist adds new meaning to “watercolor” as she incorporates water samples collected from strangers around the globe. In her series Floaters, Rebus processes these crowdsourced units by freezing them with watercolor pigments, which she then allows to melt across the substrate, creating abstract color fields. She then adds figures and elements of landscape, often with a fluid,...

Silk has been crafted in Vietnam for centuries, where it’s treasured as a lightweight, luxurious fabric used in traditional garments and art. For Kenny Nguyen, who was born in Ben Tre Province and is currently based in Charlotte, North Carolina, the material provides the foundation for vibrant, large-scale wall works that combine elements of weaving and tapestries, garment production, painting, and sculpture. Using thousands of hand-cut strips of silk, Nguyen draws on his background in fashion design, employing techniques such as pinning, weaving, sewing, and layering to create what he describes as “deconstructed paintings.” Each work is created around a kind of imaginary body, its creases and undulating...

Today, Tate Britain announces the four artists who have been shortlisted for the Turner Prize 2026. It’s one of the most anticipated moments of the creative calendar, spotlighting artists for outstanding exhibitions or other presentations of their work. One of the world’s best-known awards for the visual arts, the Prize aims to promote public debate around new developments in contemporary British art. Since it was established in 1984, it has brought early recognition to artists such as Anish Kapoor, Antony Gormley, Damien Hirst, Grayson Perry, Lubaina Himid, Rachel Whiteread and Steve McQueen. This year’s shortlist is just as compelling, featuring Simeon Barclay, Kira Freije, Marguerite Humeau, and...

By Jorge Rodriguez-Jimenez Gustavo Rimada is showing his third solo show and largest to date at Thinkspace Projects. The show, titled “Rhythmic Sequence,” brings together his masterfully vivid acrylic paintings and his newly found love for ceramics. Offering mugs with faces that both haunt and delight, Rimada, who was born in Mexico and raised in California, is blending his Mexican heritage and his California lifestyle to create bold and culturally stunning works of art. Rimada’s ceramic work...

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Today, we’re celebrating Earth Day, an annual event that promotes environmental protection. First celebrated in 1970, the movement annually mobilises 1 billion people across 190 countries towards taking positive climate action. The 2026 theme is Our Power, Our Planet, reflecting the fundamental truth that “environmental progress doesn’t depend on any single administration or election. It’s sustained by daily actions of communities, educators, workers and families protecting where they work and live.” It’s an admirable aim, often reflected in the work of artists and creatives around the world. We’re spotlighting five exhibition that highlight the beauty of our environment, as well as the urgent...

Ai Weiwei needs no introduction. For more than three decades, the artist has occupied a singular position at the intersection of aesthetics and activism, reshaping the possibilities of contemporary art through an unwavering commitment to political truth. Works such as Sunflower Seeds (2010) and Remembering (2009) have become touchstones of 21st-century practice, confronting mass production, state violence and collective memory with both poetic restraint and monumental force. His 81-day secret detention by Chinese authorities in 2011 marked a defining rupture — one that transformed personal experience into a sustained artistic inquiry into surveillance, control and resistance. Since then, Ai has continued...

To celebrate the cult movie director’s 80th birthday, we bring you our interview with John Waters from Hi-Fructose Isssue 69. You can still get a copy in print of this issue here. Happy Birthday to The King of Puke! ABOVE: Portrait of John Waters, photo by Greg Gorman, © Academy Museum Foundation Early on in the […]
The post Happy 80th Birthday to The Pope of Trash: An Interview With John Waters first appeared on Hi-Fructose Magazine.

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By Katherine Kesey In the last few years, Los Angeles's Melrose Hill neighborhood has quickly become one of the city's most walkable arts districts. This past Saturday night, there were nearly ten coordinated openings, and I attended almost all of them. Taken individually, the shows were equally captivating. Together, they were a warm and exciting medley of passionate color, lighthearted mystery, and wry humor. Hannah Tishkoff, Beyond Love There is No Belief. 2026. Acrylic, oil, and pennies...

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For our fourth annual Photo Awards, supported by Format, we selected 5 winners for the following categories: Colour, Nature, Portrait, Street, and Student. It is our pleasure to introduce the winner of the Nature category: Sophie Altemus.
Born and raised in Los Angeles, Sophie Altemus is a photographer currently studying at Oberlin College in Ohio. Working primarily in the realm of snapshot photography, she carries a camera with her everywhere she goes.
This year’s awards were sponsored once again by Format, an online portfolio builder specializing in the needs of photographers, artists, and designers. With nearly 100 professionally designed website templates and thousands of design variables, you can...

In the forest nothing stands still. Time layered through thoughts and feelings, leaves kicked and crunched as we walk. The trees talk to each other, sending mycelium messages, carbon gifts, and warnings of drought or illness. From ancient wisdom to popular culture, it’s all here.
If a tree falls in the forest and there’s nobody there to hear it, did it make a sound? Of course it did. And if Jo Stapleton was there to capture the moment, there would be a visual symphony of light, shape and form to follow.
Published by Shutter Hub Editions, this beautiful collection of 100 images by Jo Stapleton is an expressionist photographic account of her interactions with trees, forest and woodland, later remembered and...

In a world not so unlike our own, during a time not that long ago, a mother wolf sits comfortably upon an abandoned tree stump in a clearing in the woods. Surrounded by carefully rendered flora and fauna, the creature is positioned upright with impeccable posture and human-like mannerisms. Her hind legs are crossed at […]
The post The Drawings of Femke Hiemestra Depict Fairy Tales with Looming Consequences first appeared on Hi-Fructose Magazine.

By Kristine Schomaker The work hits immediately. Not one piece — all of it, simultaneously. Large sculptural assemblages covering the walls, a freestanding sculpture in the middle of the room, a piece suspended from the ceiling. The whole gallery feeling like its own solar system, each work a satellite orbiting something enormous and unspoken. Last night, four humans splashed down in the Pacific Ocean after flying around the Moon for the first time in more than fifty years. Artemis II...

ABOVE: “Spatial Awareness”, 54″ x 250″, hand-knit with wool, 2025, photo by Chris Rettman From her dining room table in Oklahoma City, Kendall Ross knits brightly colored, intricately patterned sweaters and vests—some so large that referring to them as wearables is a bit misleading. Her textile pieces are often emblazoned with diary-like messages that speak […]
The post Kendall Ross Comments Directly on the Craft Vs. Art Debate first appeared on Hi-Fructose Magazine.

In 2019, Kayla Mahaffey reached a turning point with her art. The Chicago-based artist had a solo show at Line Dot Editions in April of that year. Titled Off to the Races, the series of paintings centered around children ready to hit the road. Some sat with their growing legs crouched in tiny cars or […]
The post Child’s Play: The Paintings of Kayla Mahaffey first appeared on Hi-Fructose Magazine.

San Juan Capistrano Library #1 Amir Zaki No Dust to Settle Diane Rosenstein Gallery April 4 - May 9, 2026 by Jody Zellen The saying "waiting for the dust to settle" might refer to when things will calm down and return to normal. It could be said that "the dust never settles" and there is no state of definitive calmness because everything is in flux, both in life and in art. This might be taking the personal into account by reading too much into the title of Amir Zaki's current exhibition, his...