sordo madaleno sinks arte abierto baja into los cabos
 
At Ánima Village in Los Cabos, a long ramp slips away from the plaza and drops four meters into the ground. The descent leads to Arte Abierto Baja, a 180-square-meter open-air gallery designed by Sordo Madaleno for large-scale sculpture and site-specific installations. Above, the mixed-use development continues around terracotta pavilions and planted squares. Below, the architecture reduces itself to tall walls, rough concrete and open sky.
 
The 17-meter ramp is partly covered, keeping the arrival compressed until the gallery opens at its base. Walls rise more than five meters around the space, enough to give large works a real sense of enclosure...

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HUBARCH COOLS DOWN BAZILIO OPTICS BOUTIQUE
 
For Bazilio Optics Boutique, Hubarch works with a restrained palette of pale blue and white, then interrupts it with a single flash of red. Set on the ground floor of a residential building, the 100-square-meter store occupies a raw, open shell framed by two oversized windows and a glazed entrance. The existing openness gave the studio a useful starting point: plenty of morning light, few spatial obstacles, and room to give the optics brand an architectural identity of its own.
 
Rather than filling the interior with competing gestures, the design keeps almost everything deliberately quiet. Pale blues wash across walls and textured plaster, while the exposed...

S+DLH AND VASTO SELECT OBJECTS TO LIVE INSIDE ARCHITECTURE
 
Madrid-based studio SIERRA+DELAHIGUERA (S+DLH) joins forces with Barcelona’s VASTO Gallery for Capsule 04 · Selected to live inside architecture, an exhibition bringing together contemporary art, collectible design and objects from the studio’s own archive. Installed at S+DLH Gallery on Calle Orellana in Madrid, the project looks beyond the usual art-versus-furniture divide, instead considering how objects, artworks and architecture can comfortably occupy the same room — without anyone needing to stay on their designated pedestal.
 
The exhibition marks the beginning of an ongoing collaboration between S+DLH and VASTO, the Poblenou-based...

Sliman Mansour died in Jerusalem on August 24, 2026, age 79. (photo Wiki Palestine via Wikimedia Commons CC-BY-SA-3.0)Sliman Mansour, a renowned Palestinian painter who chronicled over six decades of his country’s fight for liberation, has died in Jerusalem at age 79. Mansour’s family announced the news in an Instagram story post on Monday, August 24, following an earlier announcement that the artist was in “critical condition.” The cause of death has not yet been made public.“To the world, he leaves behind a life filled with beauty, memory, and a legacy that will continue to live through all those he touched," the artist's family wrote in an Instagram story post. "But to us, we lost a father,...

French newspaper Le Monde has published allegations of sexual and professional misconduct against Marseille museum president Pierre-Olivier Costa, sourced from a confidential report compiled by France’s General Inspectorate of Cultural Affairs (IGAC). Costa, who is the president of the Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilisations (MuCEM) in Marseille, was suspended from his post in June […]

Even though September and the fall publication flurry are inching closer, mentally, I’m still in June — colorful, lush, sun-soaked June. My camera roll from this summer takes me right back to those euphoric weeks of New York City victory (Knicks in five!) and languorous time outdoors. Eight decades earlier, Helen Levitt captured the kernel of that same city spirit: children playing, subway shenanigans, and playful sidewalk chalk drawings.Hers is one of several bodies of work at the heart of new and recent photo books, evergreen companions of sorts. Check out our list of favorites this month, including titles on Nuyorican photographer Sophie Rivera and Walter Chandoha’s absolutely precious trove of some...

Rita Flores, in a new video interview, claims she was pressured by FSB agents who threatened to kill her family

Joy Machine is thrilled to present The Peace of Wild Things, a duo exhibition by Chicago-based American artist Emmy Star Brown and San Jose-based Korean artist Danym Kwon. This is Brown’s second exhibition at Joy Machine and Kwon’s third. Drawing its title from Wendell Berry’s often-quoted poem, The Peace of Wild Things is a return to wonder through disparate yet complementary practices. For both Brown and Kwon, color and layering become a means of self-discovery and a way to tap into the emotions, dreams, and memories that might not surface otherwise. Their practices diverge in notable ways—Brown works abstractly, while Kwon turns to surreal representations of care and domestic life—but when...

Unknown photographer’s portrait Maria Martins (undated) (all images courtesy Abbeville Press)In Marcel Duchamp’s enigmatic last artwork, a nude woman lies sprawled out in a field. According to Francis M. Naumann, the figure in Étant donnés (1946–66) is based on Maria Martins, the Brazilian sculptor who was Duchamp’s model and first true love. In Impossible: The Love Affair Between Marcel Duchamp and Maria Martins, and the Artwork It Inspired (2026), the historian draws a clear line from the artists’ little-known liaison to Duchamp’s mysterious magnum opus, arguing that Martins spurred his final two decades of artistic creation.The book takes its name from Martins’s arresting 1946 bronze...

Estonian artists are banding together and donating 124 artworks for a charity auction to raise emergency funds following a bank scam that defrauded the Estonian Artists’ Association (EKL) of nearly €700,000 (about $816,400), reports local media outlet ERR News. Artworks from the association’s own collection, which include pieces by established Estonian artists, will also be added to the auction taking place from October 8—10 at ARS Art City, preceded by an exhibition opening on September 18. On May 15, the EKL learned that scammers, acting through their chief accountant, defrauded their Swedbank and SEB bank accounts of nearly $800,000 in government subsidies via an elaborate scheme disguised as...

The FBI repatriated some 48 illegally trafficked cultural artifacts to the Egyptian government at a ceremony last Friday in Los Angeles. Among the artifacts were carved figures, amulets, and tomb equipment; they date variously to the Pharaonic, Roman, and Coptic periods, thus spanning from 3,100 BCE to the 9th century CE. “These handed-over artifacts represent an integral part of the history and cultural heritage of Egypt and its people, and we are very glad and honored to bring those home,” Egyptian ambassador Hossam Eldeen Aly said in a press release. “Egypt looks forward to more constructive and solid bilateral cooperation in the cultural field and beyond.” The tip came from the owner, who contacted...

A horse named Champagne is the star of a new public mural in Michigan commissioned by the Detroit Institute of the Arts (DIA). Wrapping around two exterior walls of the mane-tenance barn in the animal's home in Waterford Township, “Champagne's Chateau” was commemorated on Saturday, August 22, with a ribbon-cutting ceremony and meet-and-greet with Champagne herself.One of eight murals that will be debuted across the Detroit metro area this year as part of the DIA's Partners in Public Art Program (PIPA), the work is installed in Waterford's Hess-Hathaway Park, a 165-acre community park comprised of trails and an "animal exhibit farm" housing horses, chickens, goats, sheep, peacocks, and...

The Smithsonian Institution's board will meet next Monday, August 31, to vote on housing the National Museum of the American Latino (NMAL) in the Smithsonian's recently reopened Arts & Industries Building, as reported in the Washington Examiner and confirmed by the New York Times. The move would allow the fledgling museum to move forward in the face of the Trump administration's threats to defund the project altogether. Establishing the NMAL in the historic Arts & Industries Building would allow the Smithsonian to bypass congressional approval, which was an initial requirement under the original plan to build out a new space for the museum on or near the National Mall, because those parcels of...

An experiment born from ecology and the space age
 
In 1991, eight people entered Biosphere 2, a vast glass enclosure in the Arizona desert designed to test whether humans could live inside a materially closed ecosystem. Conceived by Space Biospheres Ventures as both an experiment in ecological engineering and a possible prototype for long-duration space habitation, the complex brought rainforest, savanna, desert, ocean, agriculture, laboratories, and living quarters under one envelope. What happened inside over the following two years was an unusually revealing account of how ecological, architectural, technological, and human systems become entangled when there is nowhere else to go.
exterior view of the...

The European Union Agency for Law Enforcement Cooperation (Europol) today issued a so-called spotlight report revealing concerning trends in museum crimes across the continent. The report, whose contents are summarized at intelligence and regulatory tracking platform Insight EU Monitoring, comes on the heels of last October’s high-profile broad-daylight jewel theft at the Louvre in Paris as well as a spate […]

The FBI’s Los Angeles Field Office returned forty-eight Egyptian cultural artifacts to their country of origin in a repatriation ceremony last Friday, the organization announced in a press release. The ongoing investigation into the objects, which is being conducted alongside analysis from the Egyptian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, has determined that the suspected trafficker of […]

A stolen Pablo Picasso etching has been returned to a Milwaukee art dealer eight years after its theft, the Associated Press reported. The artwork is one of 30 known Torero prints by Pablo Picasso dated to 1949, and belonged to Bill DeLind of DeLind Fine Art Appraisals in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. At the time of its theft in 2018, it was valued between $35,000 and $50,000. Today, it likely meets the high estimate, according to the report.  Swiped from the DeLind Fine Art Appraisals under mysterious circumstance, the artwork resurfaced thanks to Milwaukee landlord Tim Dertz. He found the print hanging in the apartment of an evicted tenant, with “tons of dust across the top of it”, he told local television...

The Smithsonian’s board of regents is set to meet on August 31 to discuss the possibility of designating a building that it already owns as the new home of the National Museum of the American Latino in Washington, DC, per reports. Choosing to house the forthcoming museum in the Arts and Industries Building would enable the Smithsonian to […]

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wittman estes revisits le corbusier’s idea of the minimum cell
 
On Washington’s Blakely Island, Wittman Estes has built a 400-square-foot guest house around an architectural question that goes back much further than the current tiny-house boom. The studio cites Thoreau’s Walden Cabin alongside Le Corbusier’s Cabanon, the compact retreat completed at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin in 1952. The latter offers the more specific design lineage.
 
Fondation Le Corbusier describes the 15-square-meter Cabanon as an ‘archetype of the minimum cell,’ a tiny timber interior developed according to the proportions of the Modulor and compressed around the essentials of a summer retreat.
 
Wittman Estes takes that...

The Kvareli Foundation for Contemporary Art, a private institution founded by Georgian businessman and collector Jemal Inaishvili, will open to the public on October 31. Located in Kvareli, in the Kakheti region of eastern Georgia, the foundation is devoted to the preservation and exhibition of Georgian contemporary art, as well as to its study and […]

To receive Morning Links in your inbox every weekday, sign up for our Breakfast with ARTnews newsletter. Good morning! Diego Maradona’s infamous “Hand of God” soccer ball has sold for £2.5 million ($3.4 million) at auction. After scammers stole nearly €700,000 ($816,600) from Estonia’s Artists’ Association, artists donated 124 works to an emergency auction. Canada’s Indigenous Art Center says 111 works from its federal collection of more than 5,000 Indigenous artworks are unaccounted for.  The Headlines GOAL DIGGER. Diego Maradona’s infamous “Hand of God” soccer ball has sold for £2.5 million ($3.4 million) at auction, 40 years after the Argentina captain used it to score one of...

The Kherson Regional Art Museum in Ukraine is the latest casualty in Russia’s ongoing war with the country. A Russian strike last Thursday set off a fire at the institution, Reuters reports. The State Emergency Service of Ukraine said that there were no casualties, but the museum’s building and artwork took a big hit as firefighters tried to put out the fire. According to a report by United24, the Ukrainian government–run platform, the fire destroyed the museum’s historic plasterwork, parquet flooring, furniture, and books, as well as the building’s electrical and heating infrastructure. The State Emergency Service of Ukraine and Kherson Regional Art Museum did not immediately reply to a request...

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Mackenzie, who was made a peer in July, previously led various performing arts festivals and theatres in the UK and abroad, and was most recently director of arts at the British Council

Drawn to the juxtapositions of urban spaces and desolate regions alike, photographer Luca Battaglia illuminates the distinctive characteristics of places. “I do not claim—nor do I ever say—that I am an architectural photographer,” he says in a statement. “When asked, I say that I am a photographer of places, of voids.” From the expanses of the American Southwest to images of New York City that revel in quietude rather than its signature boisterousness, built environments are a well of inspiration. In his ongoing series Ticket non remboursable (“non-refundable ticket”), Battaglia creates bold portraits of carousels in city squares and parks across Europe. The advent of these iconic amusement...

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The Light in Durham—formerly the Durham Light Infantry Museum and Art Gallery—has reopened following £17m redevelopment

Meticulously cut wooden panels, semi-precious beads, and layered thread and cordage transform into intricate geometric reliefs by Nosheen Iqbal. The Dallas-based artist draws on her background in product design and illustration to create chromatic works that tap into craft, nature, and ancestry. Taking inspiration from her Pakistani heritage and the immanently ornate forms of Islamic architecture and ornament, Iqbal combines wood, which she might associate with building, with textile-related media like fiber and beads. The resulting compositions are elegant meditations on the power of pattern to connect us to culture, family, and familiarity. “Sarghoshiaan” (2025), wood, cotton fiber, and semi-precious...

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Ibrahim Rayintakath’s Website
Ibrahim Rayintakath on Instagram

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Without proper written agreements, consigners sometimes find themselves in a protracted and costly process

Pitch be damned.

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.

One of my great moments at the Met.

Through vivid sculptural paintings, Los Angeles-based artist Estefania Ajcip peers in on the fractures families face when split apart. Ajcip spent much of her childhood in Guatemala, while her father worked in L.A. and missed pivotal moments of her youth. In a new body of work titled Folded Memories, the artist contends with this adolescent experience, extrapolating her recollections into poignant compositions filled with a longing for connection. From birch plywood, papier mache, small LED lights, and acrylic, Ajcip constructs a surreal world in which childhood grief and dreams converge. She often works from family photos, pulling scenes and objects from her home and pushing them into a fantastical realm....

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,...

The board of regents will discuss opening the institution inside the historic Arts and Industries Building on the National Mall—a move that could circumvent congressional approval, and president Trump

At ICD Brookfield Place in Dubai, a vibrant collection of smiling inflatables sprouts from a vaulted ceiling, creating a suspended pool party of colorful forms. The spirited installation is titled “Under the Sun” and the latest project by duo Craig & Karl. “We wanted to capture the warmth, vibrancy, and joy of summer—distilled into one space and experienced from within the expansive summer garden atrium. A way to bring the season indoors,” the pair write about the project. Included in the installation are hot-weather staples like flowers, beach balls, inner tubes, and of course, a radiant sun. The immersive work is a new installment in Craig & Karl’s Mateys universe, populated by a vivid array of...

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To make a success of the Empress in Frau ohne Schatten, it is not enough to be a fine singer and a great actress.

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...

Though, really, the young artists of the Merola Opera Program were more than alright in their annual showcase.

Il corpo è stato uno dei grandi dispositivi attraverso cui la modernità ha costruito immagini, identità e gerarchie dello sguardo. Per secoli il corpo femminile è stato soprattutto una superficie sottoposta alla rappresentazione: osservata, idealizzata, frammentata secondo codici estetici definiti dall’esterno. Intimate Anatomies, la mostra presentata da Hauser & Wirth a St. Moritz, propone una prospettiva diversa: indagare l’instabilità della presenza fisica e la sua resistenza a ogni definizione definitiva.
Cathy Josefowitz, Maria Lassnig, Carol Rama, “Intimate Anatomies”, installation view at Hauser & Wirth St. Moritz © Estate of Cathy Josefowitz / © Maria Lassnig Foundation / © Archivio...

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Lou Benesch’s Website
Lou Benesch on Instagram

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Masanori Ushiki’s Website
Masanori Ushiki on Instagram

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,...

By Victoria Thomas There's something about a hanging. Whether legal or not, the visual experience seems mythic, supernatural, theatrical, and ritualistic, versus the efficiency of a swift kill. If local authorities greenlight the killing, it's called a hanging. If they don't, the hanging is extrajudicial, and it's called a lynching. Anyone with even the scantiest grasp of American history will know that our country has a sordid romance with lynching — a romance which persists. And unless...

By Betty Ann Brown Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, February 22–June 28, 2026 Every moment is an organizing opportunity, every person a potential activist, every minute a chance to change the world.—Dolores Huerta The Royal Chicano Air Force (RCAF, originally the Rebel Chicano Art Front) was an art collective founded in Sacramento in the early 1970s. The visual art members, who focused on printmaking and murals, collaborated with writers, musicians, performers, and teachers. Together, they...