LAUFEN’S RENEWAL AT MILAN DESIGN WEEK 2026
 
At Milan Design Week 2026, the Swiss bathroom specialist LAUFEN didn’t just launch new products; it stages a quiet revolution. Under the dual themes of ‘Experience Tomorrow’ at Salone del Mobile and ‘When Time Becomes Material’ at LAUFEN space Milano, the brand is moving beyond mere aesthetics to explore how materials — and the way we manufacture them — shape daily rituals.
 
From the world premiere of a glass-steel hybrid to a collection designed for the quiet dignity of later life, LAUFEN’s latest chapter is a masterclass in purposeful renewal.
’When Time Becomes Material’, curated by Konstantin Grcic | all images courtesy of...

My favorite Verdi performance is Claudio Abbado Don Carlo opening of the Scala.

When the State Archives of Venice opened to the public as an exhibition venue for the first time in its history last week, artist Dayanita Singh wasn’t sure whether people would come. "We couldn't afford PR," she shared with Hyperallergic Editor-at-Large Hrag Vartanian, noting how she mounted her “photo-pillars” without institutional funding, relying instead on the "friendship economy.” Lo and behold, visitors did come, a testament to Singh’s singular approach to image-making and the living archive. Watch and read Vartanian’s interview with the artist and glimpse into her latest show. Don’t miss the latest installment of Beer With a Painter with cartoonist-turned-painter Keith Mayerson, and...

Mahdizadeh Tehrani, from Iran’s ministry of culture and Islamic guidance (MCIG), has said that the country is still negotiating to show at the event despite Biennale organisers announcing it would not participate

Stefano Boeri’s design for milan’s future knowledge district
 
At the center of Milan’s rapidly evolving MIND Milano Innovation District, Stefano Boeri Architetti proposes a different kind of civic infrastructure through the Ambrosian Monastery, conceived as a place where a single architectural landscape shields spiritual life, interfaith dialogue, and scientific thought.
 
Commissioned by the Archdiocese of Milan and presented at the historic Chiaravalle Abbey, the project establishes a symbolic bridge between the monastic traditions that once shaped the territory around Milan and the contemporary culture of research, innovation, and urban transformation, defining MIND today. The monastery, located at...

HOME APPLIANCES REPURPOSED INTO DESIGN ITEMS
  V-ZUG, known for high-quality, Swiss-engineered household appliances from ovens and hobs to dishwashers and washing machines, is facilitating a transition for its machinery from active utility to a second, quieter life as domestic furniture. Rather than allowing decommissioned units to enter standard recycling streams where material value can be lost, the ‘Repurpose’ initiative reimagines discarded components as a lasting presence within the home. By diverting these materials from traditional disposal, the rapid energy of laundry care is distilled into stationary, functional objects.
V-ZUG launches its Repurpose Products | all images courtesy...

The history of photography has long been shaped by what is seen and, crucially, by what is omitted. New Woman, New Vision. Women Photographers of the Bauhaus enters this contested terrain with force, assembling an expansive body of work that feels at once familiar and newly charged. Bringing together approximately 300 photographs, the exhibition reframes the Bauhaus not as a closed chapter of modernism, but as an evolving site of authorship, experimentation and erasure. It is less a recovery project than a recalibration, asking viewers to look again at images they may think they know. In doing so, it exposes the fragility of the canon itself. What emerges is a complex picture of photographic modernity. From...

Contemporary art from the Asia Pacific arrives in London with the force of something already long in motion. Rising Voices: Contemporary Art from Asia, Australia and the Pacific brings together more than 40 artists from 25 countries, assembling over 70 works that span sculpture, photography, painting, ceramics, weaving and body adornment. Many of these works have never been shown outside the region, and their presence at the V&A immediately shifts the terms through which visibility is negotiated. What unfolds is a profound encounter with interconnected and evolving cultural systems across one of the most diverse regions in the world. Australia, Asia and the Pacific together account for roughly 60 percent of...

Atelier L Translates the Pour-Over Dripper into a Coffee Pavilion
 
Atelier L designs the Kurasu Pop-Up at Taikoo Li Sanlitun in Beijing as a compact coffee pavilion organized around the geometry of the pour-over dripper. Developed for Kyoto-based specialty coffee brand Kurasu, the project translates elements associated with coffee preparation into a pair of architectural volumes that mediate between interior ritual and urban interaction.
 
Located within Taikoo Li Sanlitun, the temporary structure occupies a footprint measuring approximately 8 meters in length and 3.5 meters in width, with a maximum height of 3.5 meters. The design introduces a ‘dual vessels’ concept derived from the form of Kurasu’s...

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Air de Paris, the Paris gallery known for its punk ethos and for its prescient and enduring commitment to cutting-edge Conceptual art, will close this week amid bankruptcy proceedings, Cultured magazine reports. The gallery presented more than four hundred shows during its thirty-six-year run. Its last exhibition was a group show titled “Oh What a […]

The Cultural Landscape Foundation, a Washington D.C-based nonprofit focused on education and advocacy, has sued the Trump administration over its controversial makeover of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, arguing that federal officials failed to follow legally required review procedures before coating the basin in a bright blue surface.  Filed Monday in federal court in Washington, D.C., the lawsuit seeks to halt work on the project through a temporary restraining order or preliminary injunction. The group argues that the Interior Department violated the National Historic Preservation Act by moving ahead with major changes to one of the nation’s most recognizable memorial landscapes without the...

Check out our top picks from the many exhibitions taking place across the city

An installation by the sound artist Hans Rosenström at Four Freedoms Park uses the human voice to meditate on space and freedom

The Chinese artist presents a new iteration of his gunpowder paintings at Tefaf New York

A special section at the fair seeks to deepen visitors’ understanding of “the largest Black country outside the African continent”, says curator Igor Simões

inside yuko mohri’s shifting world of noise, circuits, and chance
 
Following her acclaimed presentation at the Japan Pavilion during the 2024 Venice Biennale, Japanese artist Yuko Mohri returns with Entanglements, her most extensive solo exhibition in Europe to date. Presented at Centro Botín in Spain, the exhibition transforms the Renzo Piano-designed arts center into a living network of sound, movement, energy, and improvisation. Across kinetic sculptures, self-playing instruments, leaking systems, and delicate electronic circuits, Mohri invites visitors into environments shaped as much by humidity, dust, air, and chance as by the artist herself.
 
Originally developed at Pirelli HangarBicocca and...

XUE TAN is a curator, producer, and writer from Hong Kong. The chief curator at Haus der Kunst in Munich since June 2024, Tan works with artists on commission-based exhibitions, most recently with Cyprien Gaillard, Ligia Lewis, Ei Arakawa-Nash, and Koo Jeong A. She was a cocurator of the Fifteenth Shanghai Biennale, “Does the Flower Hear […]

Air de Paris, a leading French gallery, will close its doors and declare bankruptcy after 36 years in business, the gallery’s cofounders, Florence Bonnefous and Edouard Merino, tell Cultured.  Bonnefous says the gallery owes money only to the landlord and the bank, not her artists. The gallery is closing, per Cultured, due to its “fragile” finances as well as the founders’ health (Bonnefous suffers from Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease, and Mennino also has unspecified health issues). The gallery worked with artists including Trisha Donnelly, Joseph Grigely, Pati Hill, Pierre Joseph, Allen Ruppersberg, Lily van der Stokker, Mona Varichon, and Amy Vogel, all of whom were included in its farewell...

Frieze, Independent, NADA, Future, oh my! Welcome back from Venice, art world — it’s fair week in New York. Read below for this week’s offerings (and there are many; don’t say I didn’t warn you). Stay tuned for our coverage of the more major of the bunch.What a season it’s been. Can you believe that everything from the New Museum reopening to the Whitney Biennial and MoMA PS1’s Greater New York — not to mention The Met’s Raphael exhibition and MoMA’s Duchamp show — happened in the last couple of months? This is the last push, I promise. Memorial Day’s right on the horizon. But if you need that change of pace sooner, we’ve also got a guide to what to see Upstate this month, written by...

The controversies beleaguering this year’s edition of the Venice Biennale continue to pile up: of late, Somali artists and cultural organizations are voicing concern that the Somalia pavilion does not adequately showcase artists and art organizations based in the country, and that the involvement of an Italian cocurator is overtly colonial. Somalia is one of […]

Archaeologists excavating at the Ancient Egyptian city of Oxyrhynchus, near modern El-Bahnasa, announced the discovery of a papyrus containing lines from Homer’s Iliad on the abdomen of a Roman-era mummy. The papyrus dates to the late Roman period, around the fifth century CE, about 1600 years ago. Over 1,500 papyri quoting Homer’s works survive today, but only an extremely small number were placed in burials. Why would a Romano-Egyptian want to take Homer with them to the afterlife? In November and December, the Spanish Archeological Mission of the University of Barcelona and the Institute of Ancient Near East Studies (IPOA), headed by Maite Mascort and Esther Ponce Milado, uncovered several Greek and...

VENICE — For the first time in its history, the State Archives of Venice has opened its doors to the public to showcase an art exhibition by Dayanita Singh. The Indian “off-set artist,” as she calls herself, has long been unsatisfied with the limitations of the photograph placed on a wall. Instead, she’s explored more dynamic formats that use serialization, custom frames, and book objects. ARCHIVIO, located in Campo dei Frari square in the San Polo neighborhood, welcomes Venice Biennale visitors into a treasure trove of documents that date back over a millennium, including wills, contracts, and other official records that safeguard the rich history of one of the world’s most storied cities. “I...

The streetwear brand Hurley, which is known for surf and swim apparel, has released a capsule collection inspired by Keith Haring, one of the most recognizable and oft-licensed American artists. The collection includes cotton T-shirts, board shirts, bucket and trucker hats, bathing suits, and sweatshirts for men and women, with prices ranging from $28 (a black mesh trucker hat featuring one of Haring’s blue dancing figures astride a two-legged figure that looks like some kind of dolphin/human hybrid, standing in the waves) to $100 (a reversible one-piece women’s bathing suit featuring dancing daisies on one side and an allover flower print on the other). Haring died of AIDS-related causes in 1990, at age...

There’s a whole choreography surrounding art: the bodily habits of spectatorship, the invisible labor of maintenance and care, and the ways artists are expected to present themselves to make it professionally. Across performances, participatory projects, and interventions, artist Maia Chao approaches the museum less as a neutral space than as a structure that quietly trains behavior and participation. Later this week, as part of the programming for the 2026 Whitney Biennial, Chao will activate the seventh-floor galleries with her performance "Being Moved." Chao’s projects frequently echo the canonical gestures and concerns of institutional critique. “My Business (Cards)” (2017) invokes Adrian...

Throughout her illustrious 32-year career, Pacita Abad (1946-2004) traveled to more than 60 countries. Myriad experiences ultimately introduced her to a wide range of techniques, materials, and relationships, shaping the artist’s practice over time. Movement provided an enduring source of new ideas and inspiration, and as she put it, “For me, traveling is my art school.” In the spring of 1998, Abad visited Yemen. At the time, the country was still in recovery following the Yemeni Civil War, which took place four years prior. Grounded in her rigorous political engagement and the instabilities experienced in her native Philippines, Abad reflected on the immutable significance of cultural practices and...

Entering the main exhibition of the 2026 Venice Biennale, “In Minor Keys,” from the Arsenale, the first artwork one encounters is a poem. “If I must die / you must live / to tell my story,” the poem by Palestinian poet and professor Refaat Alareer begins. Those lines became a rallying cry for the pro-Palestine movement after Alareer was killed in Gaza by an Israeli airstrike in December 2023, and have since achieved a ubiquity that once seemed all but impossible for a poem in the 21st century. For “In Minor Keys,” the poem acts as a kind of benediction or, perhaps, a statement of purpose. The last edition of the Biennale opened just seven months after October 7; this edition is truly the first to...

GRONINGEN, THE NETHERLANDS—Phys.org reports that a shell midden dated to between 6,300 and 5,970 years ago has been discovered on Velanai Island in northern Sri Lanka by a team of researchers led by Thilanka Siriwardana of the University of Groningen and his colleagues. It had been previously thought that northern Sri Lanka was not occupied until the arrival of pastoralists from India in the fifth century B.C. because of its limited vegetation, lack of fresh water, and scarce raw materials for making stone tools. Analysis of the shell midden, however, indicates that prehistoric hunter-gatherers on Velanai Island relied heavily on mollusks, but also consumed sea bream, deer, wild boar, dugongs, and dolphins....

CHICAGO, ILLINOIS—Stone tools uncovered at the Lingjing archaeological site in central China have been dated to 146,000 years ago, or about 20,000 years earlier than previously thought, according to a statement released by the Field Museum. “People often imagine creativity as something that flourishes in good times,” said Yuchao Zhao of the Field Museum. “Finding out that these stone tools were made during a harsh Ice Age tells a different story. Hard times can force us to adapt,” he said. The new dates were obtained by measuring the ratio of uranium and thorium in calcite crystals in animal bones found alongside the stone tools. Because the small amount of uranium in a calcite crystal slowly...

Museums and other arts institutions in Cleveland, Ohio, have a financial support structure that might surprise you. Some of the biggest visual arts presenters, as well as much smaller organizations, get money each time someone in Cuyahoga County, of which Cleveland is the county seat, buys a pack of cigarettes. According to the New York Times, Cleveland “is thought to be the only place in the country” where such a tax supports arts organizations, and the paper reports that via the nonprofit Cuyahoga Arts and Culture, the levy has supported the arts to the tune of $270 million since it was put into effect in 2007. The organization has given out some 4,000 grants to 485 nonprofit organizations, while, in the...

“Zero 10,” Art Basel’s relatively new global initiative dedicated to platforming digital art, has a curator for its third edition at Art Basel in Switzerland: Trevor Paglen, an artist, geographer and author best known for his artistic engagement with themes of surveillance technology. Paglen will curate the wide-ranging program alongside digital art strategist Eli Scheinman, […]

With a stained glass window, light filters through to illuminate narrative scenes or geometric patterns, but it’s primarily the window itself that draws our attention. For Lesley Green of Bespoke Glass, these vibrant compositions certainly aren’t limited to these traditional apertures. “One of my personal obsessions is trying to convince people to hang glass on the wall instead of in the window, so you can really experience the pure color and texture of the glass,” she tells Colossal. Bespoke Glass creates a wide range of aesthetic and functional forms, conceived for both residential and commercial interiors. Some are designed to be screens or separators, such as behind a bar or between tables in a...

Copper alloy collar found at an illicit whisky still site in Ben Lawers National Nature Reserve, Scotland KILLIN, SCOTLAND—According to a Herald Scotland report, National Trust for Scotland archaeologists, assisted by volunteers, recovered a piece of copper alloy from a stone structure in Highland Scotland’s Ben Lawers National Nature Reserve that may have been used to distill whisky in secret to avoid paying taxes that had been levied beginning in the 1780s. The researchers suggest that the copper part is a piece known in Gaelic as An Gearradan, or the collar connecting a still to its lyne arm, which controlled how much vapor returned to the pot and therefore controlled the flavor of the finished product....

Riding the coattails—or perhaps it would be more apt to say the gown trails—of the monumental retrospective exhibition in 2023 in Paris at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, the Brooklyn Museum is about to open the striking new edition of Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses. Building upon the previous presentation’s emphasis on the way fashion meets art, this show also includes recent collections like Sympoeisis, reaffirming Iris van Herpen’s one-of-a-kind approach to sustainable, sculptural couture. Van Herpen is known for her elaborate dresses that incorporate high-tech processes and materials, such as laser-cutting and Plexiglas, while also embracing the rhythms and patterns of biological and...

As we enter the summer months, there’s a universal desire to get outside. The trees are green, flowers are in full bloom and the sun is shining well into the evening. These five exhibitions are bringing contemporary art into nature, placing sculptures in dialogue with the environment. Each one offers visitors the opportunity to witness art outside of the confined of white walls and gallery spaces, getting up close to creativity on a monumental scale. Major names like Yayoi Kusama, Lynn Chadwick and Henry Moore take up new space, whilst Nic Nicosia and Nicola Turner transform familiar museums into new experiences. Lynn Chadwick Houghton Hall, Norfolk | Until 4 October Houghton Hall presents a new exhibition...

The purely musical performance preserved here is thrilling, ratcheted to a higher intensity than the Deutsche Grammophon studio recording

In Artforum’s May issue, Harmon Siegel revisits the magazine’s 1967–71 essay series “Problems of Criticism,” which featured contributions from critics including Clement Greenberg, Barbara Rose, Max Kozloff, and Rosalind Krauss.The final installment was Krauss’s “Problems of Criticism X: Pictorial Space and the Question of Documentary,” a response to what she calls the problem of non-falsifiability in criticism.   In […]

For a little more than two decades, Bavarian photographer Markus Brunetti has scoured Europe for its most impressive basilicas, monasteries, duomi, and other striking ecclesiastical landmarks. Working closely with collaborator Betty Schöner, with whom he travels around the continent in a firetruck that has been converted to a photo lab, the pair snap thousands of images of each structure in meter-by-meter detail, often over the course of several years. Through a meticulous editing process that includes layering and arranging each shot into composite images, Brunetti creates precise, high-resolution views of the facades that we never experience in real life. Perspective is skewed so that the ornate temples and...

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Photos and microscopic views of roughness contrast on chert artifacts from the site of Nauwalabila I, Australia ARNHEM LAND, AUSTRALIA—According to a Phys.org report, Patrick Schmidt of the University of Tübingen and Peter Hiscock of the University of Queensland reanalyzed stone tools from two archaeological sites in Australia’s Northern Territory. It had been previously thought that heating rocks as part of the knapping process began in Australia about 40,000 years ago. Heat-treating the minerals helps the process along, Schmidt said, by forming new atomic bonds in the rocks. “This leads to the loss of pore space, allowing better force transmission when a fracture runs through the material. In terms of...

TOKAT, TURKEY—Hürriyet Daily News reports that mosaics dated to the second century A.D. have been uncovered in north-central Turkey. The images feature a female figure and Greek inscriptions meaning “luxury” and “abundance.” First uncovered in 2025 through an illegal excavation in Zile, the mosaics were subsequently brought to light during rescue excavations conducted by experts from the Tokat Archaeology Museum, said Alper Yılmaz of Ondokuz Mayıs University. “When we evaluate them within their architectural context, it is clear that they were part of an important structure in Roman social life,” he added. The mosaics will be preserved in place when the excavation is completed. For more on...

By Melanie Chapman Let the Art (and the Artist) Speak for Itself Outside of the art world, painter Celeste Dupuy-Spencer may not yet be as familiar a name as Jean-Michel Basquiat or Vincent Van Gogh, but to those who followed her artistic growth over the past ten years, she was on her way. Perhaps therein lay the problem. For those who knew Celeste personally and/or had the opportunity to work with her professionally, there is still a profound sense of loss permeating most conversations...

In ballpoint pen on found fragments of philosophical and historical texts, Habib Hajallie delves into the emotional realm of memory, connection, and loss. The Kent-based artist often celebrates Black cultural figures and beloved family members, along with examining his own personal experiences as a British man of Sierra Leonean and Lebanese heritage. In his current solo exhibition, Black & Blue at Larkin Durey, Hajallie grapples with the devastating stillbirth of his daughter and the “indescribable emotions that sit beneath language,” says the gallery. For this show, the artist deliberately switched from using black ballpoint ink to blue. As he made these works, Hajallie also reflected on the loss of his...

The 61st edition of the Venice Biennale, In Minor Keys, curated by the late Koyo Kouoh (1967-2025), is now open. It will run until 22 November at the Giardini, the Arsenale and in various locations around the city. Here is Aesthetica‘s run-down of 10 standout national pavilions to discover this year – paying attention to timely themes such as communication, connection, ecology, identity and legacy. Swiss Pavilion | The Unfinished Business of Living Together In April 1978, an episode of the Swiss public programme Telearena aired. The live broadcast debated the “problem of homosexuality”, and, whilst controversial, marked one of the first occasions when individuals from the LGBTQ+ community gained a...

To celebrate the 100th anniversary performances of Turandot at the Met starting next week, Patrick Dillon gives a listen to seven versions of "Signore, ascolta!" for Perspectives on an Aria.

Vivacious performances outweigh a host of odd directorial choices in the Washington National Opera's West Side Story

Liberation, modernism and the politics of self-determination form the conceptual spine of Architects of Liberation: Modernism in Western Africa, an exhibition opening this July at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It examines how architecture became a critical medium through which newly independent West African nations articulated sovereignty, identity, and futurity in the decades following colonial rule. Rather than treating modernism as a neutral or imported style, the exhibition frames it as a charged and adaptive language, refracted through the urgencies of nation-building and rapid urban transformation. Across Benin, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal and Togo, architectural...

Victoria de los Ángeles has always been my Violetta of choice, a portrayal that never ceases to move me.

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By Coral Pereda Serras Among established and other art spaces in Melrose Hill, sits 1028 N. Western Ave., home to Western Avenue Collective artists studios. This 1922 building hosts 22 artist spaces among which is El Nido, an artist-run curatorial and research space by VC Projects. El Nido, borrowing from its Spanish name, is nested in this distinctly LA courtyard and through "Photography Into Sculpture: An Homage and An Update," emerges as a portal into the imagined memories of a Victorian...

ABOVE: Installation view, Jeffrey Gibson, boshullichi / inlvchi – we will continue to change, Kunsthaus Zürich, 2025, photo by Franca Candrian, Kunsthaus Zürich Jeffrey Gibson was far more open about the act of dreaming and the beliefs that make-up spirituality than I expected. I started our conversation saying that I like to keep things loose, […]
The post Jeffrey Gibson: More Colors than The Eye Can See first appeared on Hi-Fructose Magazine.

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Orpheus Acosta’s Website
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At some point, I realized I didn’t want to choose between the past and the present. I was interested in allowing them to coexist,” says baroque-style painter Nieves González, who distorts trappings of traditional portraiture to exalt modern day women. Her recent portrait of British pop star Lily Allen, for example, places contemporary attitude—and fashion—within […]
The post Baroque-style Painter Nieves González distorts trappings of traditional portraiture to exalt modern-day women first appeared on Hi-Fructose Magazine.

By Lorraine Heitzman Erik Otsea's show, Clever Animals & Static at Alto Beta is a menagerie of a different sort. His tabletop ceramic sculptures are quirky but solemn hand-built industrial shapes that suggest machine parts found in abandoned factories or as models for obscure patent applications. They conjure Soviet-style brutalist architecture and futuristic inventions, all simple geometric forms that hint at a bygone time when we believed that life could be improved through industry. So...

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By William Moreno The painter constructs, the photographer discloses. Susan Sontag, “On Photography” William Camargo’s current exhibit of twenty-four plus works, dated 2019 through 2025, reads as a mini survey, with photographic images and installations thematically placed throughout the modest gallery. It’s his largest showing of works to date. Early in his career, the Anaheim native considered fashion and product photography, photojournalism and conflict reportage, finding the latter...