an unfamiliar object in plain sight
 
At the center of a Tokyo residence dubbed After Image, Japanese practice ULTRA Studio inserts a black cylinder. Large, opaque, and repeatedly present within the field of view, it seems designed to remain impossible to ignore.
 
The architects imagine the opposite happening over time. As the residents move around the home each day, developing familiar habits and becoming used to partial views of the house, the cylinder may gradually fade from conscious attention. ULTRA Studio compares it to the nose, which remains within our vision while the brain learns to look past it.
After Image | image © Yurika Kono
 
 
when the familiar returns to view
 
Across the city,...

Yayoi Kusama, whose obsessive repetitions of dots and nets became a means of expressing infinity, leaving an indelible mark on contemporary art worldwide, died on August 14 of multiple organ failure at a hospital in Tokyo. She was 97. Her death was reported on Thursday by Kyodo News and later confirmed by her David Zwirner Gallery, her longtime representation. “It’s been one of the great privileges of my professional life to have been able to represent Yayoi Kusama’s extraordinary art for the last fifteen years,” wrote David Zwirner in a statement. He continued, “The last time Kusama visited New York, a city where she lived for many years, was in 2013. During that visit, she opened the first of many...

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The Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College has named Kim Conaty, the chief curator of the Whitney Museum in New York as its next director. She will begin in the role on October 27. Contay has spent nearly a decade at the Whitney, joining in 2017 as curator of drawings and prints. She was promoted to chief curator in 2024. During her tenure at the museum, she organized exhibitions on Edward Hopper, Mary Corse, and Ruth Asawa. Contay becomes the eighth director to assume the top position and succeeds John Stomberg, who retired earlier this month after a decade in the role. He oversaw the institution’s $50 million expansion, which doubled its footprint and opened in 2019.  “The Hood Museum stands out as a...

Rock photographer Justin Thomas is suing painter Elizabeth Peyton for allegedly copying his 1995 photo of Oasis’s Liam and Noel Gallagher in her work Earl’s Court (Liam + Noel) (1996). Thomas filed suit in the Southern District of New York against Peyton, David Zwirner Gallery, and Sotheby’s, where the painting was sold in May for $1.92 million. Thomas, who now lives […]

On Monday, a German court in Hamburg convicted an unnamed brother and sister of money laundering in a case regarding the unlawful sale of ancient Egyptian artifacts. The suspects were ordered to turn over $37 million, as well as pay fines totaling over $105,000. According to prosecutors, the male in the case has supposedly been […]

Sir Stephen Fry, Sharon Stone, Prince Harry, and Nobel Peace Prize winner Oleksandra Matviichuk are among the public figures taking on guest curator roles for “Postcode Ukraine: Diary of a Volunteer,” a fundraising exhibition of photographs by British, Kyiv-based artist Mark Neville. The show is slated to open on September 11 at Westwood Contemporary in Los Angeles and documents everyday life in Ukraine during Russia’s full-scale invasion. Neville’s photographs focus on volunteers, families, and communities living through the war.Each guest curator has selected a photo from the exhibition and written a short reflection on why it resonated with them. The group also includes actress Alyssa Milano,...

Rita Flores, a former member of the protest art collective Pussy Riot, alleged in an interview on Monday that members of the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation (FSB) had recruited her to spy on dissident artists. In the interview, which was conducted by Flores’ lawyer for Port Media—a website established by exiled Russian […]

Taiwan’s pavilion at the 2026 Gwangju Biennale has had its name restored after a dispute in which the Gwangju Biennale Foundation listed the Taiwanese artists under the acronym NTMoFA, a designation for its organizing institution, the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts. The name “NTMoFA Pavilion” first appeared earlier this month on a poster advertising the exhibition, and many viewed […]

Attorneys for the Trump administration in an August 24 court filing warned that the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC, would have to be “taken down” if the president’s plan to close the building for a two-year overhaul is blocked. According to the New York Times, Justice Department officials in a twenty-one-page filing […]

A former employee of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art has filed a class action complaint against the institution over a 2025 data breach that he claims has compromised sensitive visitor and employee information, including Social Security numbers. The complaint accuses LACMA of acting negligently by waiting nearly a year to inform its staff of the breach and seeks unspecified damages, as well as a court-ordered assurance of stronger security measures.  The lawsuit, reviewed by ARTnews, was filed Tuesday in the Superior Court of the State of California by Adam Piron on behalf of “all persons” whose information was compromised by, what the complaint describes as, LACMA’s failure to protect the personal...

Big blonde hair, a pink outfit, and a toothy smile. Dolly Parton’s image appeared on cake mix boxes, film posters, magazine covers, and paintings. In the wake of the country music legend’s death on Tuesday, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, took to Instagram to remember the “queen of country.” The Smithsonian Institution shared three images that belong to the collection of the National Museum of American History. The first is of Parton in a pink dress against a painted backdrop featuring a columned house and parrot, which served as the back cover of her 1978 album Heartbreaker. The second image is a black and white photograph of the...

For Xanthe Burdett, the boundary between humans and nature is thin, malleable, and always in flux. The Devon-born, London-based artist works largely in a palette of greens, layering leaves and vines atop faint figurative silhouettes. Invoking mythology and ancient cosmologies, her paintings suggest that people and plants are not only interconnected but also intrinsically one. Beginning with a sketch, Burdett employs the Renaissance-era cartoon method of transferring her drawings to canvas, which involves layering a substance like charcoal between the preparatory composition and the substrate and tracing the initial linework. After, the artist adds various greenery until she’s reached a lush density. “They...

Welsh music photographer Justin Thomas is accusing painter Elizabeth Peyton, David Zwirner Gallery, and Sotheby's of copyright infringement on his 1995 photograph of British pop star brothers, Liam and Noel Gallagher of the British rock band Oasis.In an August 20 lawsuit filed in the Southern District of New York, Thomas's attorney, Terry Parker, calls Peyton's painting, "Earl's Court (Liam + Noel)" (1996) a "slavish copy" of the 1995 photograph, according to court documents first covered by the legal blog Copyright Lately and reviewed by Hyperallergic. Peyton's painting resembles a zoomed-in portion of Thomas's photograph, which captures the notoriously feuding siblings and Oasis...

Margarita Konovalova, who went by the alias Rita Flores as a member of the Russian punk feminist band and anti-Putin artist collective Pussy Riot, recently claimed that she was coerced into spying on other dissident artists for the last three years by the Russian national security service (FSB) after they threatened her and her family's lives. Having fled Russia with the help of her lawyer earlier this month, Konovalova spoke freely about her experience for the first time in an exclusive interview with an independent news outlet for dissident Russian journalists called Port Media. She explained that after an FSB officer raided her apartment in February 2023, she was detained and threatened into...

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"Heracles and Omphale" (1st century CE) (© Photographic Archive, National Archaeological Museum; all images courtesy Dallas Museum of Art)An exhibition of artifacts from Pompeii and neighboring towns petrified by the ancient eruption of Mount Vesuvius is set to make its United States debut at the Dallas Museum of Art this December. Stucco reliefs, marble sculptures, frescoes, mosaics, and domestic wares are among more than 160 preserved objects included in Journey Through Pompeii: Masterpieces from the National Archaeological Museum of Naples, which the Texas museum announced on Wednesday, August 25.“The works in the exhibition have been a source of fascination and inspiration for centuries,” the Dallas...

The Casa Nacional de Moneda in Potosí, famous for its silver objects, coining machinery and colonial paintings, will undergo repair of its roofs and stonework

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Myriad myths and symbols are wrapped up in our captivation with cats. In ancient Egypt, the animals were revered as divine protectors, personified by the deity Bastet. In Japan, it’s hard to walk by shops without seeing a maneki-neko waving from the window. And superstition says that if a black cat crosses your path, it may be bad luck. Although depending who you ask, it could mean good luck… did you happen to notice which direction it was walking? For artist Minyoung Kim, who centers black felines in her eccentric compositions, the fascination comes down to “the contrast between how ordinary and how weird they are,” she tells Colossal. Kim taps into the paradoxes, such as how the animals can be...

In the vibrant 1760 painting “Taking of the toll (Dana-Lila),” Radha, the Hindu goddess of devotion, arrests a rattled Krishna for stealing toll money from his maiden companions, the gopis. Scholars believe that the work is similar to two other paintings based on a drawing model from a workshop, but they are uncertain about the place of origin. Formal analysis reveals that “Dana-Lila” most likely came from the 18th-century kingdom of Chamba, which then was home to at least 16 established artist families. Chamba, along with Kangra, Nurpur, and others in India, is located where the Himalayas meet the plains of Punjab in the state now known as Himachal Pradesh, together comprising the Pahari region.The...

circularity cabin begins with its eventual dismantling
 
A planned road expansion in Zushi, Japan, gave the Circularity Cabin an expiration date from the start. Local rules require structures in the affected area to be easy to dismantle, so Takaaki Fuji + Yuko Fuji Architecture and AREANO designed the two-story house as something that can move with its residents. Its timber frame can be taken apart by hand, transported, and assembled again elsewhere, which allows the circular structure to outlast the plot it currently occupies.
 
Standard timber sections available from Japanese home centers form most of the structure, joined with bolts and screws instead of permanent connections. The components stay small...

In Memoriam is published every Wednesday afternoon and honors those we recently lost in the art world.Marijke De Roover (1990–2026)Belgian performance artistThe Belgian artist drew on queer and feminist theories, exploring love, social hierarchies, and institutional power in performances that combined references to karaoke, Disney movies, and memes. She showed at institutions such as Centre Pompidou, the National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens, ARCADE in London, and more. "Marijke was a great talent," Nieck de Bruijn, founder of Upstream Gallery in Amsterdam, which represented the artist, told Hyperallergic. "Her unique position in the field of queer and feminist performances brought important issues...

THE PLANK FACTORY OPENS UP INDUSTRIAL ARCHITECTURE
 
Emerging from the dense landscape of Stanley Park in Vancouver, Luca Fontana’s Plank Factory proposes a mass timber innovation hub where manufacturing is treated less as something to hide and more as something worth watching. The project turns the typically closed industrial building inside out, combining production facilities with public circulation and positioning the factory as both working infrastructure and a showcase for the material being made within it.
 
A sequence of intersecting pitched roofs stretches across the complex, spanning long, open naves designed to accommodate large-scale timber manufacturing machinery without unnecessary structural...

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More than 65,000 images by photographers in 121 countries presented a staggering challenge for the jurors of this year’s Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition. Of these entries, 100 were selected for the prestigious contest’s shortlist, showcasing the world’s diverse creatures and their habitats. The top images also demonstrate an array of realities across a number of categories, from animal behavior to portraits to photojournalism. Viewers are treated to the beauty and tenderness of inter-species cooperation and also confronted with the poignancy of family and the sometimes troubling impacts of human intervention. Ernest Porter (South Africa), “Mutual Friends,” Manyeleti Game Reserve,...

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Tommy Keith  
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
 
Tommy Keith’s Website
Tommy Keith on Instagram

From Warhol to Annie Leibovitz, the late Dolly Parton was an inspiration to artists over her long career

The artists and curator behind the pavilion had said its name was changed to NTMoFA without their consent, while the biennial says it had been agreed in January

Richard Tuttle 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

what happens to waste in space?
 
For astronauts aboard the International Space Station, dealing with waste is a constant logistical challenge. Some discarded materials are collected and packed into cargo vehicles, which later burn up during reentry, while resources such as water and air are continuously recovered and reused. As missions venture farther from Earth, the ability to simply discard materials becomes increasingly limited, making the recovery and reuse of resources more important.
 
This makes space an interesting place to examine the circular economy. A spacecraft is a small, controlled environment in which resources are limited, resupply is expensive and storage space matters. The systems...

SPATIAL INNOVATION THROUGH ARTISTIC EXPRESSION
 
Celebrating how art and architecture shape city life, My Archischool announces the winners of the 2026 International Youth ARCHIDESIGN Competition. The awarded projects rethink everyday urban spaces. Instead of keeping ideas on paper, they bring culture and artistic expression straight into the streets. From art galleries to floating restaurants, these projects show how smart building design can revive public areas and bring new life to local communities.
organic arches and transparent glass vaults define this coastal art gallery and waterbird sanctuary | all images courtesy of My Archischool
 
name: Bird Haven
designer: Audrey Mok
level: Senior
 
 
MY...

This Strauss is demented in the best way possible.

In Leslie Wayne’s exhibition The Unintended Blues, large-scale paintings may a first read as photographs. Melting icebergs in the Arctic Circle, the island of Manhattan, harbor construction projects, and coastlines around the U.S. that are vulnerable to rising sea levels take center stage. The closer one approaches, however, the more fluid the imagery becomes, as some shapes and shorelines appear nearly abstract. These latest works follow Wayne’s series titled This Land Is Your Land, in which trompe-l’œil paintings of airplane windows depict aerial views of the American West based on photos the artist snapped while in flight. For The Unintended Blues, she expands this idea beyond the frame and turns her...

The monumental painting was recently deinstalled from the US embassy in the Dominican Republic, with ambassador Leah Campos calling it an example of “globalist and woke ideologies”

From the Tanzanian grasslands around Mount Kilimanjaro to the ever-evolving icy realm of Antarctica and beyond, Swedish photographer Björn Persson captures the majesty of the natural world and its wild denizens. His bold, tonal style of portraiture taps into the drama of running giraffes and a stoic American bison in profile, but he also homes in on family-centric moments as a lioness plays with her cubs, for instance, or a coalition of cheetahs perch calmly atop a knoll. Persson’s emotive photographs meander between intimate, tender vignettes to striking and powerful demonstrations of brute strength and presence. In many cases, the animals look directly at the viewer, as if we’re being stalked. Others...

Julia Bullock on ten years of living with the life and artistry of Joséphine Baker before Paris performances of Perle Noire: Meditations for Joséphine

They should sell pay-per-view tickets to this like WWE.

Lasciata alle spalle una torre medievale dell’XI secolo e qualche palazzo cinquecentesco della Serenissima, sperso tra la speculazione edilizia degli anni Sessanta, a pochi passi dalla ottocentesca piazza Erminio Ferretto (intitolata a un partigiano morto nella guerra di liberazione dal nazifascismo) nel centro storico di Mestre, oltrepassato il duomo di S. Lorenzo, attraversato un restaurato cortile con porticato settecentesco, per studiato contrasto sorge il Museo del Novecento M9 (progettato dallo studio di architettura tedesco Sauerbruch Hutton, studio che aveva vinto il concorso internazionale indetto dalla Fondazione di Venezia per la riqualificazione di quell’area urbana), museo  ideato e proposto...

Ibrahim Rayintakath  
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
 
Ibrahim Rayintakath’s Website
Ibrahim Rayintakath on Instagram

Pitch be damned.

The Glen Most people have experienced a “thin place” even if they don’t necessarily realize it or give it a name. When I learned about them a few years ago, I was able to recall some of these places from my own past, even though I didn’t know the terminology at the time. I’m currently listening to The Story of King Arthur and His Knights, and the knights are forever leaving the comforts of Camelot to seek adventure. On their journeys, they often come across places in the woods where the atmosphere changes, time takes on a different quality, and the boundary between the ordinary and the otherworldly becomes uncertain. When I saw the work of photographer, film, and television director Lev L. Spiro, I...

Tra tutte le edizioni di Documenta, quella che si tenne nel 1972, dal titolo Interrogare la realtà – Mondi dell’immagine oggi, apriva una significativa riflessione sui linguaggi dell’arte contemporanea, il mondo reale e le sue rappresentazioni. Il titolo che il curatore Harald Szeemann scelse per la manifestazione risulta quanto mai contemporaneo, permettendo di consideralo come una valida prospettiva per scoprire lo studio dell’artista Luca Valerio (Fondi, Latina, 1966). È evidente come Interrogare la realtà – Mondi dell’immagine oggi presupponga una ricerca artistica che presenta elementi riconducibili all’arte concettuale, quindi caratterizzata da un rigoroso controllo formale e...

Bayreuth’s AI-powered “Ring 100010110” marred a first-rate cast and orchestra with nightmarish visuals and horrid dramaturgy.

Hyper Reality è il titolo-tema dell’undicesima edizione del Festival curato a Forlì da Vertov Project. Prologo alla Fondazione Dino Zoli con la mostra collettiva Interference, che riunisce dodici artiste internazionali nel segno dell’interferenza come forza generativa. Forlì torna a essere una Babele di stimoli e visioni, grazie a Ibrida Festival Internazionale delle Arti Intermediali: l’undicesima edizione, dal titolo-tema Hyper Reality, è in programma dal 17 al 20 settembre. Prologo essenziale e complementare sarà la mostra collettiva intermediale Interference, che dall’1 settembre all’11 ottobre metterà in dialogo le ricerche radicali di dodici artiste internazionali.
Elena Bellantoni,...

La fotografia ha da lungo stabilito la propria autorità su ciò che Roland Barthes ha denominato il ça a été: la traccia di un momento reale fisicamente impressa sull’immagine. Una fotografia indica. Jiayue Wang è un’artista cinese che lavora attraverso fotografia, installazione e immagine in movimento, interrogandosi su ciò che una fotografia inizia a perdere nel momento in cui viene scattata. La sua prima mostra personale in museo, After the Image, di recente tenutasi al Rugby Art Gallery and Museum, ha spinto questa domanda fino alle estreme conseguenze, esplorando ciò che un’immagine diventa una volta che non può più assolvere la sua supposta funzione di testimoniare il reale.
Jiayue Wang,...

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Il 23 novembre 1962, in una chiesa sconsacrata nel centro di Copenaghen, Alison Knowles eseguì Nivea Cream Piece for Oscar Williams. Una fotografia di quella sera è oggi al Museum of Modern Art di New York. Nella stessa serata Dick Higgins interpretò il Drip Music di George Brecht salendo su una scala – un’invenzione esecutiva che gli interpreti ripetono ancora oggi. Era la prima delle sei sere del Festum Fluxorum, il secondo festival Fluxus della storia dopo quello di Wiesbaden, pianificato da George Maciunas e organizzato sul posto da Arthur Köpcke, dalla sezione danese della società di musica contemporanea e da Knud Pedersen, che dentro quella chiesa teneva la propria biblioteca d’arte.
Vista...

Lou Benesch  
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
 
Lou Benesch’s Website
Lou Benesch on Instagram

 
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...

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By Betty Ann Brown "The idea becomes a machine that makes the art."—Sol LeWitt Dean De Cocker creates richly conceived, exquisitely crafted, and visually delightful artworks that shuttle between abstraction and conceptual representation. He has long been drawn to machines, from bicycles to motorcycles, cars to airplanes, and formal echoes of these devices appear in his current body of work, exhibited at the Visual Arts Center in the small Central California town of Visalia. Welcome to the...

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.

The body is an obsession for Monica Piloni. Whether it’s a hollowed face in the Samieses series or the eerie dolls depicted in “Ilegais”, a majority of Monica Piloni’s sculptures confront the human form. And while consistently returning to the body may seem confining to some, it’s a pursuit marked by liberation for the Brazilian […]
The post The Disconcertingly Honest Self-Portrait Sculptures of Monica Piloni first appeared on Hi-Fructose Magazine.

This article originally appeared in Hi-Fructose issue 42, which is sold out. See Matthew Grabelsky’s new solo show at Thinkspace gallery here.  Matthew Grabelsky had studied tradition in Florence, lived in the cultural nuclei of Europe, but hadn’t yet found the idea that would set him apart as an artist living in the twenty-first century. […]
The post Human/Nature: Animals Go Underground In the Paintings of Matthew Grabelsky first appeared on Hi-Fructose Magazine.

By Victoria Thomas Photographer and ceramic artist Catherine (Cathy) Opie first shocked and rocked the fine art world with her self-portraits during the late 1990s. Today, her decades of work — often termed confessional — now serve as context for the far more enigmatic Holding Blue installation, on view at Regen Projects through July 3. The Los Angeles-based artist identifies as a leather dyke, lesbian cowboy, an elder, and as "Mama Cathy," with a mustachioed male alter-ego named Bo. Opie is...

“Danger” is a word often associated with the candy-colored work of Los Angeles artist Kristen Liu-Wong. Her feminine tableaus, often rendered in a bright blend of acrylics, paint pen, and marker, have particularly veered into more menacing territory in recent years. “The world is a dangerous place,” Liu-Wong says, in a June interview. “I don’t […]
The post Dont Tempt Me: the Art of Kristen Liu-Wong first appeared on Hi-Fructose Magazine.

On paper, Nathan Reidt’s creatures sometimes reveal themselves through a fog of graphite. He may begin with a “vague, circle-y shape” and shade areas. “Then I just stare at it for a long time and wait for something to pop out and refine that a little and stare at it.” The Philadelphia-based artist explains by […]
The post Personal Growth: the Art of Nathan Reidt first appeared on Hi-Fructose Magazine.

By Betty Ann Brown "Beauty comes from the balance between two and three dimensions, between abstraction and representation — I seek the equilibrium behind changing appearances."—Henri Matisse Jill sykes by Eric Minh Swenson Jill Sykes creates beautiful paintings of botanical phenomena. Like Matisse, she translates three-dimensional objects into two-dimensional images, occupying the territory between abstraction and representation to achieve balance and equilibrium. From a very early age,...