SHAKIRA BUILDS HER OWN MACONDO IN MADRID
 
Why settle for a stadium when you can build a town? For her Madrid residency, Shakira has taken over the 185,000-square-meter Iberdrola Music venue in Villaverde, transforming it into Macondo Park, a temporary cultural landscape designed by Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG). Conceived as an alternative to the conventional concert arena, the site combines a stadium for more than 50,000 spectators with colorful pavilions, markets, food, art, fashion, cinema, and children’s spaces — an entire world constructed around the shows rather than merely behind the stage.
 
Unlike an existing stadium, where attention converges on a single performance, the purpose-built environment...

Two visitors to the Louvre in Paris were arrested Saturday after they installed two paintings in the Salle des États, which houses the Mona Lisa, according to a report by Agence France-Presse that cited police sources. According to police, they stuck two paintings (each measuring about 11.8 by 15.7 inches) onto the walls of the Salle des États with sticky tape. One painting showed one of the suspects wearing a suit of armor, while the other showed the two with a woman. The Mona Lisa, which attracts crowds from opening to close, was not damaged in the incident. The two visitors were not identified by first name and last name initial, as is common in France, but only as German nationals. They were first...

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nick cave’s soundsuits: when the body becomes the stage
 
Imagine a sculpture that does not sit on a plinth, but moves through a train station, a street, or a crowded hall. Its surface rattles with every step, its scale alters the silhouette of the person inside, and its elaborate construction makes the wearer almost impossible to identify. This is the basic proposition of Nick Cave’s Soundsuits: the garment becomes an environment, and the body becomes its architecture.
 
Cave made the first Soundsuit in Chicago in 1992, following the Rodney King beating and the acquittal of the police officers involved. The event left him thinking about racial profiling, vulnerability, and what it meant to be perceived...

Opera San José opened its season with a new production of Don Giovanni that embraced the opera’s challenges with youthful abandon, even as it was sometimes felled by them.

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forest of timber walls replaces a conventional room sequence
 
House of Wall Forest in Tokyo, Japan, by IGArchitects explores how the spatial clarity and structural presence commonly associated with reinforced-concrete architecture can be translated into timber construction. Rather than using timber to create a conventional sequence of rooms, the house is organized around a series of structural walls. These walls simultaneously define space, carry the building, guide movement, and frame views. The spaces emerge between and around them, creating a continuous sequence rather than a collection of enclosed rooms.
all images by Ooki Jingu
 
 
a strong timber framework opens the house to changing uses
 
The...

Int. Home – DAY… interior design by Movie Directors
 
At the end of September, film director Luca Guadagnino and designer Stefano Baisi will release a line with Zara Home that includes nearly 200 sumptuous pieces of interior décor, from squiggly couches that recall Italian Radical Design to tableware that feels snatched from an Italian villa. Through this collection, there is a chance to bring a bit of the energy of Queer, Call Me by Your Name, Challengers, or one of the director’s many other films into a domestic space.
 
This meeting between interior design and film is not a new one. The visually seductive worlds of David Lynch, Wes Anderson, and Wong Kar Wai have inspired the likes of hotels, home...

By Lacey Argus Sovern, a nonprofit art gallery and healing justice center in Los Angeles, sticks out like a vibrant castle in the midst of the harsh greys of urban Los Angeles. The bright shades of pink and elaborate designs that adorn its concrete walls draw you in, as if calling you to explore the treasures within. The gallery's current showing is Into the Pluriverse, running from June 25 through October 8, 2026. Into the Pluriverse is a group exhibition inspired by the Zapatista term...

Finally, finally, a change to see Massenet's Hérodiade, albeit in concert from, though I long for a day when the Met or the Lyric Opera of Chicago would give us a staged performance.

At a cafe named Anti Cafe — though it looks like any other cafe — a man is writing dozens of cards by hand, sealing them inside pretty little envelopes, and stacking them in a pile on the table. After half an hour of observing him from the next table, I finally ask, “Are those wedding invitations?” “Nope,” he replies.“Birthday party invitations?”“Nope.”“So what are they for, if you don’t mind me asking?”“Just letters to my friends to show them how much I appreciate them,” he discloses with an air of self-satisfaction. “Oh, that’s so beautiful,” I say with my hand on my heart, feeling sincerely touched. But as I leave the cafe, I begin wondering if that guy is okay. Down...

the audience enters the choreography
 
Inside Tate Modern’s South Tank, the performance begins as guests entered the room. A pale felt surface covered the floor, with benches following the circular concrete wall and individual seats scattered closer to its center. Lying across the floor was a pleated garment shaped after one of the paper cut-outs in Henri Matisse’s The Snail (1953). Then a performer began lifting sections of felt to reveal more clothing underneath.
 
Presented on September 16th, 2026 as the second edition of HOMME PLISSÉ ISSEY MIYAKE’s OPEN STUDIO, the evening placed the audience directly inside the structure of the dance. Performers approached individual guests and invited them to...

Visits to Olney Gleason, Garth Greenan, David Zwirner, and more during New York's first week of fall openings

Six of the fall's new crop of gallery openings at Lomex, Maxwell Graham, Theta, David Peter Francis, Ellie Rines Gallery, and Ulrik

A fast-moving cloudburst swept through Florence on September 17, dropping nearly two inches of rain in the span of an hour and sending water cascading into the Uffizi Gallery and the historic Palazzo Pitti, sparking concern regarding the masterpieces within. At the Uffizi, rain seeped through a skylight of a gallery housing a clutch of […]

The massive burial site containing human remains and rich offerings likely belonged to Chimú elites

Taryn Simon’s ambitious show at the Guggenheim Museum, Father Country I Do Love You, begins with two text panels. One recounts a story told to her by her father, of an intelligence officer he met in Bangkok who died under mysterious circumstances — either eaten by a tiger, or kidnapped by the Chinese. It goes on to talk about her father’s penchant for taping his prized photos in plexiglass box frames. “Each came with a dramatic tale — delivering suitcases of cash to generals in Cambodia, yakuza threatening to break his arm in a door, having tea with his kidnappers in Lebanon, and starting the Thai stock exchange. I never got the full story,” reads the text.The second panel features Simon’s own...

A herd of 40 life-sized buffalo puppets migrated through Lower Manhattan today, September 18, plodding through Bowling Green, Federal Hall, the World Trade Center, Chinatown, and several other historical sites along their trail. On the second and final leg of its procession, Return of the Buffalo: Tatanka Owe Akupi (Lakota for "buffalo trail home") will also hit downtown Brooklyn tomorrow, September 19.Theater writer and director Amir Nizar Zuabi created the project with descendants of the Lenape, the original Indigenous inhabitants of New York, and Lakota elders, whose deeply sacred relationship with the mammal dates back thousands of years. “We just followed the elders’ lead in who they wanted involved,...

A celebrity in his own right who also created riotous portraits of many famous and powerful people, Max made images that became inseparable from the legacy of the Summer of Love and countercultural movement

One of the most intimate windows into an artist’s practice is their studio. While some creatives thrive on methodical organization and tidiness, others reach their flow state amid a cluttered chaos where dozens of ideas unfold at once. Whether at one end of this spectrum or somewhere in the middle, these spaces offer unique perspectives on both the artist and the masterpieces that emerge from their confines. Forthcoming from Phaidon, Another View: The Vibrant World of Contemporary Black Artists invites readers into 20 distinctive studios. Celebrating some of the most prominent artists working today—such as Nick Cave, Nina Chanel Abney, Hank Willis Thomas, Carrie Mae Weems, Kerry James Marshall, and many...

Naomi Beckwith, the curator of the forthcoming edition of Documenta, said some artists had already declined to participate in the exhibition because of Germany’s stance on Israel’s war in Gaza. Documenta, which is staged every five years in Kassel, Germany, is one of the most prestigious recurring art exhibitions in the world. But ever since the controversy that faced the last edition, in 2022, the show has faced bitter criticism, with many alleging that politicians’ accusations of antisemitism at the exhibition were born of an attempt to crack down on pro-Palestine art. The controversy has also impacted Documenta 16, whose entire curatorial selection committee resigned en masse in 2023. Beckwith, the...

When Getty photographer Brendan Smialowski captured a photo on Wednesday night of Air Force One after landing at Joint Base Andrews, outside Washington, D.C., it showed president Donald Trump in a red baseball cap reading a placard that seems to read “Kennedy Center DEMOLISHED.” This led to an emergency Thursday filing by Joyce Beatty, Democratic US Representative for Ohio’s Third Congressional District and an ex officio trustee of the Center, asking the federal judge in the ongoing Kennedy Center case “to make crystal clear that its order prohibits demolishing the structure.” On Wednesday, Trump said, “For me to go and fix it and subsidize it, I think the Trump administration should have...

Alex Strada’s Public Address opened in the Bronx on Monday, September 14, bringing handwritten testimonies from over 400 New York shelter residents and frontline staff to a dozen locations across the borough.Using log entries from workshops held across New York City shelters, Strada, public artist-in-residence with the NYC Department of Homeless Services and Department of Cultural Affairs since 2022, translated these messages onto aluminum signs from the Department of Transportation. Visible on street corners, parks, and other high-traffic areas, the long-term installation debuted in Manhattan in October 2025 and will have appeared in all five boroughs by March 2027."My hope for this project is that it...

New archaeological discoveries at Tell Al-Abqain in Beheira are revealing details about life within the ancient Egyptian fortress, the country’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities announced on Wednesday. According to the ministry, they also underscore Tell Al-Abqain’s importance as a military stronghold during the New Kingdom period (1570–1069 BCE), when it was established to protect Egypt against incursions by Libyan tribes. The finds, made by an Egyptian archaeological mission, include a residential complex, stelae, and, most intriguingly, the possibly ceremonial burial of a horse. In a statement, Egypt’s minister of tourism and antiquities Sherif Fathy emphasized that the discoveries not only shed...

The Moderna Museet in Stockholm named Cédric Fauq as its next curator of contemporary international art, to start in the role on December 1. He is currently the chief curator and head of programs and collections at Capc Musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux, and he worked previously as a curator at Paris’s Palais de Tokyo and Nottingham Contemporary in England. Credits of Fauq’s in Bordeaux include the group exhibition “Blackground: murmures des mornes,” “Rammellzee Alphabeta Sigma (Side B),” and Trevor Yeung’s “Garden of the Nine Suns.” He was a member of the Turner Prize jury in 2023 and teaches at HEAD in Geneva and Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. In a statement, Moderna Museet...

The Wreck of the Unbelievable is a strangely infectious, if uneven, little play about obsession that takes on the fantastical premise in which renowned artist Damien Hirst is dead and is survived by a gay lover named Shape (smartly played by playwright Sleth), who greets theatergoers sprawled, ass up, on a disheveled mattress reminiscent of Tracey Emin’s “My Bed” (1998). The production makes it clear that Hirst is very much alive and straight, to the best of our knowledge, but the idea makes for a weird wormhole into the nature of infatuation and the costs of being an artist who craves the good stuff — fame and fortune.The off-off-Broadway play runs over 80 minutes, though it could easily clip 15 to...

Measuring 28 feet wide and seven feet tall, two monumental wooden relief sculptures anchor Beyond Silence, a new exhibition at GRAY Chicago featuring works by Catalan artist and sculptor Jaume Plensa. The broad works—titled “Julia” and “Maria”—were created as part of the artist’s recent series, Beyond Silence, which shares a name with the show. The two paneled pieces transform the gallery’s open exhibition space with their rigid angles, creating a structured rhythm to complement the subdued contours of the faces they depict. As a result, a conversation arises between Plensa’s signature overarching motifs, such as the human figure, use of architectural materials, and the perception of space....

Madrid’s Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza (MNTB) will expand into a second venue to house more than 360 works of contemporary art, which have been donated or are on loan from the TBA21 Collection. In 2002, the philanthropist Francesca Thyssen-Bornemisza founded the TBA21 Foundation for her personal collection of contemporary art, which is described as being “at […]

Serpentine pendant VELIKY NOVGOROD, RUSSIA—A copper-alloy pendant dated to the eleventh century was unearthed in northwestern Russia’s town of Staraya Russa, Live Science reports. The pendant bears the image of a possible Christian warrior-saint carrying a spear and shield on one side, and a Medusa-like figure with snakes on the other. Four similar pendants dated to between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries have been found in the area. “The main characteristic of the serpentine pendant is its combination of images that are incompatible, from a strictly dogmatic standpoint,” said Sergey Toropov of Novgorod State University. He suggests that the warrior on the newly unearthed pendant represents the...

HANOI, VIETNAM—Vietnam News reports that rescue excavations in north-central Vietnam’s Lam River basin have recovered artifacts from two vaulted tombs at the Ru But brick tomb site. The site was discovered when a local resident started to plant trees in the area last spring. According to Nguyen Van Anh of Vietnam National University, both of the structures were made with low-fired red or grey rectangular bricks in varying sizes. A few of the bricks were decorated on their narrow edges with checkerboard patterns, rosettes, and X shapes. Each tomb was made up of a burial pit, an entrance passage, and a burial chamber. Based upon these characteristics, Anh has dated the tombs to between the fourth and sixth...

The Moderna Museet has named closely watched curator Cédric Fauq as its new curator of contemporary international art. Fauq arrives to the Stockholm institution from CAPC Musée d’Art Contemporain de Bordeaux, in France, where he is currently chief curator and head of programs and collections. “It is a pleasure to welcome Cédric Fauq to Moderna […]

Ossuary, Odirmon, Uzbekistan SAMARKAND, UZBEKISTAN—According to a Greek Reporter article, an excavation at the site of the ancient city of Odirmon in southern Uzbekistan has uncovered an altar and an ossuary. Odirmon, which features defensive walls, roads, and a rectangular citadel, was occupied from the third century B.C. to the third century A.D. Researchers led by Sanjar Abduraximov of the Samarkand Archaeological Institute and Uzbekistan’s Cultural Heritage Agency said that the altar and ossuary have not yet been dated. The altar and evidence of burning were found in a room with a brick floor. The walls of the room were covered with a clay plaster that had been reapplied several times. These repairs...

The Rio fair brings together 76 galleries as an upcoming presidential election and a new generation of collectors shape the market

As the auction house continues to celebrate 40 years of operating in Asia, its exciting line-up of September sales offers renowned global artists alongside those with strong markets in the region

Artist Engineering Hardware is a new system that aims to reduce damage during transport and installation by eliminating direct contact with works of art

Walk into the first gallery of the group exhibition Thresholds at the Haggerty Museum of Art, and you’ll encounter dozens of hand brooms installed in long rows. Scraps of ribbons, cords, and braids in a vast array of colors and textures bind the small tools together, with raw branches from a fallen tree jutting from the top. Made during a participatory workshop this past July at Lynden Sculpture Garden, the sweepers are what artist Daniel Minter calls a “talisman, tool, and object of remembrance.” Minter has long considered the spiritual dimension of the items we use in daily life. The broom, for example, has been an ongoing topic of inquiry as he questions what it means to cleanse and care for one’s...

The Royal Opera House's Don Giovanni comes without an instruction manual — but features a fine lothario in Gordon Bintner.

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Kübra Çetin’s Website

SPLIT, CROATIA—Croatia Week reports that one of the 16 inhumation burials recently unearthed in the western necropolis at the ancient city of Salona, the capital of the Roman province of Dalmatia, held the remains of a person who had been placed face down in the grave. Researchers from the Croatian Conservation Institute and the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts also recovered three glass bottles and a small glass vessel from this grave. One of three unguentaria, or perfume bottles, buried with the deceased had been crafted in the shape of a date. Twelve other burials held cremated remains that had been placed directly into the earth. Ceramic urns were used to hold cremations in another three burials,...

Artifacts recovered from a Soviet gulag in Kazakhstan include a uniform button, a bullet casing, and a label dating to 1951 from a lamp used to illuminate the fenced perimeter. PILSEN, CZECH REPUBLIC—Radio Prague International reports that archaeologists from the University of West Bohemia and the group Gulag.cz have examined the site of a Soviet gulag in Kazakhstan. More than 20,000 people had been held in the camp. “We focused on the area around the town of Zhezkazgan, where there was a steppe camp, the so-called Steplag, after the Second World War, from 1948 to around 1956,” said Štĕpán Černoušek of Gulag.cz. “It was a special camp for political prisoners,” he explained. The team members have...

Italy’s South Tyrol province, which borders Switzerland and Austria in the Alps and is home to some of Central Europe’s most dramatic mountains, lives up to its geographic position as a borderland. Italy annexed the region in 1919 following World War I, prior to which it was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Many people are German-speaking, and in many ways, their cultural traditions and ancestry lean traditionally toward Austria more than Italy. At the outbreak of World War II, the Fascist Italian regime built a series of fortifications along the country’s northernmost border. Construction was halted at the onset of the war, and the military controlled what had been completed until 1993. For Vincenzo...

With San Francisco Opera's orchestra on strike and bass Andrew Potter retiring at 43, Miles Greenberg sees opera's ethics and economics of impracticality at a breaking point

I guess it’s no secret here that I LOVE contemporary operas.

Dear Reader, The New York Times recently asked dozens of 10-year-olds what the world will be like in 2050. Some are hopeful: a woman will finally be president of the U.S., people will be more kind, and everyone will have a pet fox. Others, though, feel as if they’ve been plucked straight from a dystopian hellscape: world wars, monarchic rule supplanting voting, embedded brain sensors that send your thoughts straight to an app, and the end of human civilization entirely. Whether optimistic or not, these children mention A.I. again and again. In their futures, it’s an inextricable fixture of life. A.I.’s exponential growth has accelerated fears about its power, prompting numerous executives and...

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Benjamin Styer’s Website
Benjamin Styer on Instagram

Kosuke Ajiro
GR gallery is pleased to present Excavation Record I – Sayonara, the first solo exhibition in the United States by Japanese artist Kosuke Ajiro. The exhibition introduces Ajiro’s distinctive practice through the figure of the archeologist, who ventures into a whimsical and enigmatic imagined realm known as the “Kingdom of Sally.” Across the exhibition, each work reveals a fragment of this mysterious world, uncovering earthbound creatures and curious details before opening onto a vast, fantastical expanse. Moving between the familiar and the otherworldly, Ajiro’s works invite the viewer on a journey of mystery, magic, transformation, and discovery. As the story gradually reveals itself,...

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Michael Francalanci’s Website
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Raphaël Gaultier on Instagram

 
Right now, it’s more important than ever to celebrate the natural world and preserve the biodiversity and habitats around us. Enter FLORA: our latest photobook, which celebrates growth, resilience and organic beauty in flowers, trees and plant life.
In 100 images, photographers around the world share what they see, from much-loved gardens and atmospheric woodland to eye-catching blossom, daffodils, cacti, and a glimpse of cowslips and gorse in hedgerows. It’s not just about the countryside – urban nature shots are also in the mix.
If you feel more relaxed after looking at floral images, you’re not alone. A Japanese scientific study, published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology (2020), found...

By Jody Zellen Eileen Cowin's thoughtful, intimate, and arresting retrospective Between Panic and Paradise prompted me to take Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida off the shelf. His complex reflections on the essence of photography resonate with Cowin's exhibition. Cowin stages intimate private moments and frames them with precision and exactitude. Blending reality and fiction, she seeks to document the emotional connection that forms with her subjects — be it her family, herself and her twin...

For three decades, Harriet Mena Hill has been a resident of South East London. This area is known in the art world for its schools, such as the esteemed Camberwell College of Arts. But Hill and others who lived there for some time remember it as a historically working-class and, at times, impoverished area of […]
The post Harriet Mena Hill Brings Crumbling Concrete Back To Life first appeared on Hi-Fructose Magazine.

By Barbara Patterson Trans femme artist Pau Pescador's latest exhibition, Amor Prohibido, at Tyler Park Presents explores the volatility of becoming visible in a public space that criminalizes the existence of queer people. As anti-transgender legislation increases and security technologies evolve, the visibility of gender-nonconforming individuals becomes more precarious. A 2015 report by the National Institute of Standards and Technology describes how "intruders" in gender-segregated areas...

Marigold Santos’s spectral forms are as layered with detail as they are with metaphor. Swirling amid marbled backgrounds in a feverish dance, they serve as critical examinations of cultural injustice. Their textures materialize their celestial properties as they become fierce teachers of colonial violence, problematic histories, and forgotten ancestry. Covertly, her haunting figural silhouettes aim […]
The post Celestial Stance: The Art of Marigold Santos first appeared on Hi-Fructose Magazine.

By Betty Ann Brown "What is Art, monsieur, but Nature concentrated?"—Honoré de Balzac "Art distills sensation and embodies it with enhanced meaning."—Miguel de Unamuno Hiroko Yoshimoto's paintings concentrate nature into radiant and dynamic beauty, distilling visual sensation into poetic and environmental significance. Throughout the 2020s, Yoshimoto has worked on two series of paintings about nature: Biodiversity and Of Infinite Variety. Both series are based on observation of the natural...

By Julie Faith There is something strange about returning to a place you once knew well after being away for a long time. You recognize the architecture before you recognize what the years have done to you. As I passed through the gate at Corey Helford Gallery, crossed the lot, and headed up the stairs, I felt ridiculously, wonderfully giddy. Kid-in-a-candy-store giddy. I have been away from the gallery and much of the Los Angeles art world, but somewhere between the gate and the stairs, I...

 
Exploring the people, places, and cultures that shape cities around the world, The City Series showcases images that respond to place not as a fixed subject, but as an idea shaped by experience, observation, and interpretation.
100 images of the city. Welcome to Cambridge.
Published by Shutter Hub Editions, and with a foreword by Alice Ryan, this beautiful collection of 100 images of Cambridge is a portrait of the city through the eyes of international photographers.
Order THE CITY SERIES: CAMBRIDGE here.
   
The photographers featured in THE CITY SERIES: CAMBRIDGE are: Zaklina Anderson, Robert Barcia, Viktor Barkhatov, Catherine Breslin, Tara Bucklow, Tiina Burton, Alison Carter, steven chandler, Alice...

Skeletons, tombstones, and serpents. These are just a few of the iconic images pre-v ailing throughout the works of Morgan Sorensen—all relating to the themes of struggle, sadness, pain, and death. While anyone might agree that these graphic designs would all make for killer band T’s, there’s quite a bit of depth surrounding the artist’s […]
The post Future Relics: The Art of Morgan Sorensen first appeared on Hi-Fructose Magazine.