dreamlike spaces that shift under pressure
 
Numen / For Use is a design collective working across Europe and internationally, known for building inhabitable installations from tape, netting, and tensioned textiles. Their projects turn existing spaces into elastic environments that shift under the presence of the body.
 
Stepping into one of these installations, the ground gives slightly, the surface pulls back, and the surrounding volume adjusts in response. Movement leaves a trace for a moment, then disappears as the material resets. That exchange between body and structure is at the core of the studio’s work. Space is continuously re-shaped by those moving through it, and leaves the impression of a...

Ittai Gradel, the Israel-born Danish gem expert who alerted the British Museum to the theft of thousands of antiquities from its collection after he discovered them for sale on eBay, died on April 28 of renal cancer. He was sixty-one. Days before his death, British Museum officials visited him in hospice and presented him with […]

Converge 45, a citywide triennial in Portland, Oregon, has announced the theme and the 28 participating artists for the exhibition’s upcoming edition, launching August 27. New York–based curator Lumi Tan has titled this iteration of the art festival “Here, To you, Now,” borrowing a phrase from Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1985 science-fiction novel Always Coming Home. The novel focuses on the Kesh people, who have survived an ecological disaster and “prioritize the impermanence of spoken language, insisting that meaning is always remade in the moment: Here, to you, now,” according to a release. The choice to look at Le Guin is intentional as the late author was based in Portland, as such more than half of...

Artificial intelligence has made it incredibly easy to create pointed visuals in response to crises in real time, but the resulting videos and images have little poignancy or staying power

A new special-edition passport features the president's likeness and signature. (all images courtesy US State Department)United States passports will display a portrait of a sitting president for the first time in the nation's history.US State Department Spokesperson Tommy Pigott said in a statement to Hyperallergic that the agency would release a "limited number" of passports prominently depicting President Trump's face and signature in commemoration of the country's 250th anniversary later this year. The move is an audacious escalation of the president's attempts to tag public resources with his name and likeness. Late last year, the White House added “Donald J. Trump” to the...

In the fall of 2018, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Gabriela Rangel, and Asad Raza curated the exhibition Lydia Cabrera and Édouard Glissant: Trembling Thinking for the Americas Society, which I reviewed for this publication. Focusing on artists who made work addressing Martinician writer and philosopher Glissant and Cuban writer and activist Cabrera’s meditations on identity, the exhibition deepened my knowledge of the former’s inspirational thinking. It also made me aware of his friendships with artists from Europe, Africa, and the Americas, including Roberto Matta, Wifredo Lam, Etel Adnan, Irving Petlin, Antonio Seguí, Öyvind Fahlström, and Jack Whitten. When I learned of the current exhibition The Earth, the...

George Herms, one of the founders of the West Coast Assemblage movement, passed away on Friday, April 24, at age 90. Herms worked across disciplines, but was best known for his sculptures and collages that transformed found materials, rusted metal parts, and cast-off debris into poetic representations of impermanence, suffused with pathos and oftentimes humor.“Herms’s work always has a sense of the sacred, a respect for the dignity of what remains,” gallerist Craig Krull told Hyperallergic. “His contributions to fine art, as well as to the deeper and more profound art of life, include an uninhibited sense of freedom, an ability to throw off the constraints and shackles of society, a soulful awareness...

Auction houses and galleries alike spend acres of time thinking about how to appeal to young collectors, and according to a new report from Artnet, innovative thinking is paying off: online-only auctions attributed to Sotheby’s, Christie’s, Phillips, Bonhams, and Artnet Auctions raked in $423.9 million in 2025, an 8% increase from 2024. The average price […]

a soft robot that replaces AI control with touch and presence
 
POCO is a soft robotic companion developed by designer Mehrnaz Amouei that examines alternative relationships between humans and artificial intelligence. The project focuses on interaction models based on presence, responsiveness, and clearly defined limitations, rather than systems that interpret or direct emotional states.
 
As AI increasingly operates within personal and emotional contexts, questions emerge around dependency, interpretation, and control. POCO addresses these concerns by proposing a relational framework in which the system functions alongside the user without assuming authority. Instead of diagnosing or guiding behavior, the...

Howardena Pindell, "Untitled #123" (2024) (all images courtesy Sotheby's)The Yale School of Art is partnering with Sotheby’s to host an auction benefiting scholarships for students in its Master of Fine Arts program, a collaboration that speaks to larger questions of affordability in higher arts education. The 13 lots will go under the hammer on May 15 as part of Sotheby’s Contemporary Day Auction in New York, including works by Richard Prince; Josef Albers, who was chair of the school’s Department of Design from 1950 to 1958; and notable School of Art alumni Mickalene Thomas, Do Ho Suh, and Barkley L. Hendricks. Estimates range from $5,000–7,000 to $500,000–700,000. Yale’s notable two-year...

Ittai Gradel, the Danish gems specialist and art dealer who uncovered that some 2,000 objects had been stolen from the British Museum’s collection, died on April 28 at age 61. BBC News reported that he died of renal cancer shortly after receiving a medal from the museum in honor of what its director, Nicholas Cullinan, called his “very significant contribution.” Initially dismissed by the museum, Gradel’s investigation made international headlines and ultimately led to the resignation of then-director Hartwig Fischer in 2023. An expert in engraved gems of the Greco-Roman world, he alerted the British Museum in 2021 to what he believed were precious objects from its collection being sold on eBay. He...

Every month, we share opportunities for artists and designers, including open calls, grants, fellowships, and residencies. Make sure you never miss out by joining our monthly Opportunities Newsletter. Scenerium 2026 Art Award: Exhibition, Publication, Sales, and Global PromotionFeaturedWhere will your art take us? From landscapes and seascapes to cityscapes and imagined worlds, Scenerium 2026 invites artists worldwide to capture the essence of place and turn it into a visual journey. Through natural scenes, urban energy, and visionary environments, this juried opportunity celebrates art that draws viewers in and places them inside the world you create. Selected artists receive a smart online exhibition, Artsy...

The Council of the European Union announced on April 23 that it is formally sanctioning Mikhail Piotrovsky, the long-time director of the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. The reasons given are that Piotrovsky is “a close associate of Vladimir Putin” and that “he has actively supported and justified Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine.” The news was first reported by The Art Newspaper. According to the Hermitage Development Foundation, Piotrovsky succeed his father, Boris, as director of the state-run museum in 1992, which is around the time he met Putin. He has a background in Arabic studies and archaeology, and studied at Leningrad State University and the University of Cairo. When...

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During Janne Sirén’s tenure at the Western New York institution, its global influence and physical footprint expanded significantly

ANXIETY, DEPENDENCE, and above all vulnerability: These are the themes of this year’s officially themeless Whitney Biennial. In the catalogue, curators Drew Sawyer and Marcela Guerrero report that they began with the question, “How should this exhibition feel?” They then sought “to compose a set of moods that resonate with the turbulent existential weather of […]

In Memoriam is published every Wednesday afternoon and honors those we recently lost in the art world.Raghu Rai (1942–2026)Indian photojournalist who captured the nation's milestonesWidely known as India's most celebrated photojournalist, he photographed Mother Teresa, the Dalai Lama, and Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, among many other notable figures, for a number of newspapers. He was a protégé of Henri Cartier-Bresson, who nominated him to join Magnum Photos in 1977. He served on the jury for World Press Photo in the 1990s, and he won the Padma Shri award, one of India's highest honors, for his photographs of the 1971 war between India and Pakistan. "A photograph has picked up a fact of...

On Tuesday, a father-daughter duo from New Jersey pleaded guilty to creating and selling over 200 works of counterfeit art falsely attributed to iconic artists including Andy Warhol, Picasso, Fritz Scholder and Banksy; the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Eastern District of New York said in a statement. Erwin Bankowski, 50, and Karolina Bankowska, 26, admitted that […]

Finnish art historian Janne Sirén will step down as director of the Buffalo AKG Art Museum after thirteen years in the role, the Art Newspaper reports. Sirén will depart in October and return to Europe; the museum’s board of directors will begin searching for his replacement this summer. “Dr. Sirén’s accomplishments are unique,” said Alice […]

In the richly detailed linocuts of Eduardo Robledo, festive ceremonies, spiritual motifs, and dream-like interactions unfurl. The Mexico City-based artist was born and raised in the southern borough of Xochimilco, which is famous for its canals—vestiges of a huge Aztec water transport system still used today for bringing goods into the city. This area and its time-honored customs provide a bounty of inspiration for Robledo. Community and celebration are at the heart of his work, as creatures and figures converge in enigmatic, sometimes ritualistic choreographies. Traditional motifs like skulls and skeletons, which represent remembrance, joy, and an acceptance of the cycle of life and death, interact with...

a contemporary portico for a 12th-century church in angers
 
Kengo Kuma’s new facade for Saint Maurice Cathedral in Angers, France, has been completed, with a ceremony held on April 9th to celebrate the project’s opening. Set against the 12th-century stone mass of the church, the new intervention introduces a pale, monolithic portico that stands just forward of the historic portal, establishing a clear spatial threshold between city and interior.
 
From a distance, the addition reads as a low, rectangular volume punctuated by a sequence of deep arches. These openings align with the cathedral’s existing bays, though their geometry is simplified into a continuous rhythm. The structure stretches across...

Alongside Donald Trump’s face, you can expect to soon see a piece of American art history on your US passport. As reported yesterday by Fox News, Trump’s State Department has revealed a limited-edition passport for the nation’s 250th anniversary that will feature John Trumbull’s 1817 painting Declaration of Independence. Contrary to popular belief, the 18-foot-long painting does not depict the signing of its titular document but merely the presentation of a draft of it Congress in 1776. (Fox News, which had the exclusive on the new passport design, itself erroneously reported that the painting represents the signing of the Declaration of the Independence.) Some 42 of the Declaration of Independence’s...

Giorno Poetry Systems, a nonprofit organization founded by the artist and downtown New York scenemaker John Giorno in 1965, has launched a new need-based grant program inspired by a decade-long AIDS Treatment Project that Giorno oversaw in the 1980s and ’90s. The new Treat a Stranger Grant awards $4,545 each to a group of 12 artists: Samiya Bashir, Malcolm-X Betts, Pe Ferreira, Mercy Kelly, Agosto Machado, Puppies Puppies (Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo), Gavilán Rayna Russom, Jacolby Satterwhite, Keioui Keijaun Thomas, Christopher Udemezue, and two who chose to remain anonymous. (The funds for Machado will be given to his estate following his death last month, after the selection process was complete.) The...

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Ai Weiwei’s return in maxxi L’Aquila is shaped by reconstruction
 
Ai Weiwei reflects on cities marked by trauma with a sense of familiarity, arriving in MAXXI L’Aquila as it continues its long recovery from the 2009 earthquake. The artist notes the ‘tremendous effort to rebuild and reconstruct,’ aligning the ongoing transformation of the city with his own practice, which often engages with sites of destruction and renewal. Although initially invited to contribute a public sculpture, Weiwei signals this exhibition as part of a longer-term relationship with the city, suggesting a return already in motion.
 
On view from April 29th to September 6th, 2026, Aftershock is curated by Tim Marlow and...

inside Peter Rutti’s vision for DLR Group’s evolving integrated design
 
‘Integrated design empowers the company’s work, acting as a creative catalyst that engages individual expertise early to drive true collaboration,‘ asserts Peter Rutti, Chief Design Officer at DLR Group, in an interview with designboom. In a deep dive of the integrated design firm’s philosophy, the act of creation is revealed as a shared risk and reward, where the traditional boundaries of architecture dissolve into a harmonious symphony of voices. Rutti explains that his primary role as Chief Design Officer is to ensure design empowers every facet of the company’s work, acting as an inclusive process that welcomes everyone...

Sylvia Trotter Ewens  
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
 
Sylvia Trotter Ewens’s Website
Sylvia Trotter Ewens on Instagram

Nostalgic for bass month, Parterre Box offers excerpts from two young basses to watch: Giorgi Manoshvili and Patrick Guetti.

From rivers and oxbow lakes to crop-field patchworks and mineral sediments, Landsat has seen it all. A program of NASA and USGS, the satellite initiative has documented the Earth’s surface since 1972, making it the longest continuous record of our planet’s ever-evolving landscapes. And to mark Earth Day 2026, the organizations launched a playful way to interact with some of their findings collected over the past five-and-a-half decades—a name generator. Using the tool is simple: type in your name, or any word, and Landsat returns it in the form of vertical snapshots of a wide range of terrain. Just like we see with composites of Mars, for instance, scientists have digitally enhanced some images to...

New technologies used in archaeological research provide insights into how climate change has long-changed empires and societies

In Kashmir, India, there are three stages of winter: Chillai Kalan, Chillai Khurd and Chillai Bache. The first is The Great Cold, occupying mid-December to the end of January, when the weather is at its harshest and temperatures drop below freezing. Snowfall is a common occurrence. The second is the Small Cold, when things warm up slightly but the weather can still be biting, followed finally by The Baby Cold, characterised by intermittent sunshine and melting ice. This annual progression towards spring is the focus of a new book from Magnum photographer Sohrab Hura (b. 1981). Snow documents the artist’s repeated visits to the Indian-administered region over a five-year period, recording its passage...

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Andrew Cranston talks to Ben Luke about his influences—from writers to musicians, and, of course, other artists—and the cultural experiences that have shaped his life and work

The Putin ally has been a vocal supporter of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine

Hans Hotter masterfully captures the poignancy of this sublime Brahms Lied.

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The opening of V&A East Storehouse signals a recalibration in how institutions might live with their collections, not as static reservoirs of heritage but as permeable, operational spaces of encounter. Set within the wider emergence of V&A East, the Storehouse reframes access as a continuous condition rather than an occasional event, dissolving the distance between storage, study and display. It arrives at a moment when museums are increasingly asked to perform not authority but to open their infrastructures to forms of public legibility that were once hidden. Its arrival also invites comparison with the Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, where transparency and verticality have already recast the...

C’è qualcosa di profondamente antiretrospettivo nella mostra dedicata a Agnès Varda, e non è un paradosso, ma una precisa presa di posizione. Pur presentandosi come la prima grande retrospettiva italiana consacrata alla sua opera fotografica, l’esposizione evita con decisione la forma celebrativa e lineare per articolarsi piuttosto come una costellazione di materiali che restituiscono la natura mobile e refrattaria della sua pratica.
“Agnès Varda. Qui e là, tra Parigi e Roma”, installation view at Villa Medici – Accademia di Francia, Roma, ph. © Daniele Molajoli, courtesy Villa Medici – Accademia di Francia
Il punto di partenza dichiarato – la Parigi del dopoguerra e il cortile-atelier di...

Inside the cavernous former train station that now houses Hamburger Bahnhof, 400,000 wooden cubes stack and topple into piles. Conceived by Lithuanian artist Lina Lapelytė and commissioned by Chanel, “We Make Years Out of Hours” is a large-scale installation that invites the public to remake structures from these 10-centimeter blocks made of pine and spruce. Lapelytė often combines sound and performance and collaborates with both professionals and novices. This participatory work continues the artist’s interest in collective making and caretaking, particularly as it relates to shared authorship and how we might amend and reshape what currently exists. A trio of weekly performances on Tuesdays,...

“We live with so many hard things,” says Sheila Hicks, “that we’re crying for softness.” The pleasure, simplicity, and tactile qualities of textiles ground a new film from Louisiana Channel, which explores the ways in which fiber art remains both evocative and relevant in this increasingly digital era. “7 Artists on Soft Sculptures” weaves together a variety of distinct approaches to textiles. Nick Cave describes incorporating found plastics, toys, metals, fringe, and more into elaborate suits that mask the wearer’s identity, while Icelandic artist Shoplifter shares her obsessions with brightly dyed synthetic hair, which she transforms into immersive installations. And Kaarina Kaikkonen offers...

What do you want in abstract painting – materiality, gesture, content of some sort? Cristallina Fischetti gives you all three

By Nancy Spiller Alec Egan's painting "Dawn House," in his show "The Groundskeeper" at Vielmetter Los Angeles, is tender, serene, and calm — a lavender and peach sky sheltering the triangular top of a house flanked by two palm trees and the tip of a cypress. In its companion painting, "Night House," the sky takes a sinister turn with layers of dark blue, sunset orange, and a roiling strip indicative of flames mixed with what might be smoke. It hints at something of what Egan, his wife, and...

Summer dressing for babies sounds simple, fewer layers, lighter fabrics and it’s done. But ask any parent who has dealt... Read More

Filipa Ramos will curate the 2027 edition of the Lofoten International Art Festival, bringing her ecological and multispecies research to the Arctic biennial.

Frieze New York 2026 reveals a major line-up of solo booths, dual presentations and curated gallery sections

Lisson Gallery and Matthew Marks present a major Ken Price exhibition in London, showcasing the artist’s groundbreaking ceramics, sculpture and works on paper.

Barbara Hannigan mesmerizes as both a brilliant vocalist and a proficient opera conductor in a double bill of Strauss and La voix humaine with the New York Philharmonic.

Classical sculptures meet traditional studio portraiture in the work of Åsa Johannesson. The artist’s long-term project The Queering of Photography, turns both traditional genres on their head. The experimental work investigates the complex relationship between queer identity and photographic representation. The artist creates formal, yet playfully subversive images of human figures, Roman statues and studio props to challenge and reimagine how identity and desire are represented. The project evolved from a series of interconnected works – Looking Out, Looking In; Frame; Figural, Figurative; Turn; and Skin – spanning performative black-and-white studio portraits, studies of Roman statues and studio...

While refined, Lisa della Casa sings "Four Last Songs" deeply alert to the text and with effortless vocalization that sounds fresh and spontaneous.

In Diana Markosian’s latest body of work, intimacy is framed as an unstable condition, continually reconstructed through absence, repetition and emotional residue, where love persists beyond its apparent ending in altered, shifting forms. Relationships appear less as fixed narratives than as structures in motion, shaped as much by what has disappeared as by what remains visible. Replaced, now on at Gallerie d’Italia, organises emotional experience through cycles of return in which memory functions less as retrieval than ongoing re-authorship. Photography and film work together to stage this instability, allowing scenes to reappear in subtly altered emotional registers, as if slightly out of alignment with...

C’è sempre, entrando in una mostra, un momento quasi automatico, e in fondo un po’ ridicolo nella sua prevedibilità, in cui ci si ritrova a chiedere che cosa si abbia davanti, che cosa sia davvero ciò che si sta guardando, come se fosse ancora possibile, oggi, ottenere da una domanda del genere una risposta stabile, qualcosa che non si dissolva nello stesso istante in cui prende forma.
Andrea Capucci, “In forma di amore”, 2026, terracotta invetriata, 30 × 40 cm. Courtesy Galleria Antonio Verolino, Modena
A questo si aggiunge, con sempre maggiore evidenza, una sorta di disturbo percettivo del visitatore, quella compulsione a voler capire l’arte prima ancora di averla guardata, come se la...

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...

Matthew Walton is an emerging artist based in Toronto. He holds a B.A.A. (Hons.) in Animation from Sheridan College. His mixed-media practice combines drawing and painting, often merging the human form with a distinct graphic sensibility. The result is figurative compositions that strike a distinct textural contrast between softness and hardness. Embracing gestures and mannerisms once repressed, his work is also a celebration of authentic self-expression.
Froot Loops features Matthew’s mixed-media-work-on-paper series highlighting the quiet charm of everyday queerness. Each piece reimagines a separate mundane moment, transformed by Matthew’s bold, graphic approach to figuration and his vibrant technicolor...

Opera Baltimore concludes its season with a piercing semi-staged production of Pelléas et Mélisande.

Il nuovo programma di residenze artistiche presso l’associazione culturale Alchemilla a Bologna, quest’anno curato da Giulia Giacomelli e Gabriele Tosi, si pone come dispositivo di dialogo tra l’interiorità isolata, accogliente e protetta del palazzo storico di Bologna e l’alterità del mondo che lo circonda, aprendo lo sguardo verso la scena artistica bolognese e la contemporaneità complessa e destabilizzante del nostro tempo. Tre sono le artiste coinvolte nel programma delle nuove residenze, della durata di due mesi, nei quali ciascuna troverà modo di affrontare una prima fase di ricerca individuale seguita da una seconda nella quale si creerà un contatto e un dialogo con la scena artistica...

Shifting Crossroads. Beirut Contemporary fornisce una panoramica dell’attuale scena artistica libanese. Personalità riconosciute sul piano internazionale, come Mona Hatoum e Simone Fattal, dialogano con giovani artisti e proposte frutto della ricerca di Nicole Saikalis e Matteo Bay che, con lo scopo di promuovere una visione aperta e interconnessa del contemporaneo, hanno fondato nel 2024 la Saikalis Bay Foundation.
AA.VV., “Shifting Crossroads. Beirut Contemporary”, installation view at Circolo, Milano, ph.  Andrea Rossetti, courtesy Saikalis Bay Foundation
Shifting Crossroads è una mostra che si colloca non solo in un momento di crisi globale, segnato dalla guerra e dalla deriva totalitaria della...

C’è una cosa che succede quando entri in un archivio. Non è subito evidente. Prima senti l’odore, una specie di polvere che non è solo polvere, è tempo compresso, è il peso specifico di tutto ciò che qualcuno ha deciso di non buttare via. Poi vedi le scatole. Le cartelle. I faldoni. E capisci che sei circondato da qualcosa che nessuno guarda, ma che esiste con una precisione ossessiva, catalogato, numerato, conservato, come se ogni carta fosse l’unica prova rimasta che certe cose sono accadute davvero. Dayanita Singh negli ultimi dieci anni ci è entrata in questi archivi, in Italia. E ha fotografato.
Dayanita Singh, “Mahmoodabad”, 2025 © Dayanita Singh/Archivio
Non è una cosa scontata. Singh...

Kelsey Shwetz  
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
 
Kelsey Shwetz’s Website
Kelsey Shwetz on Instagram

Harry Adams, Protest Car, 1962, inkjet print, Courtesy of the Tom & Ethel Bradley Center at California State University, Northridge. © Harry Adams. All rights reserved and protected. Ray Francis, Genie, 1971, gelatin silver print, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund, 2023.91.3 Photography and the Black Arts Movement, 1955–1985,’ currently on view at the Getty in Los Angeles, is a seriously powerful collection of work. Curated by Philip Brookman and Deborah Willis, it brings together “150 examples tracing the Black Arts Movement from its roots to its lingering impacts, from 1955 to 1985.” We spoke with Mazie Harris, assistant curator at the Getty, about how this exhibition came to be and why...