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...

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 […]

After seven years in Zurich, Galerie Philipp Zollinger will cease operations, its founder announced today on Instagram. “I have always believed in hoping for the best while preparing for the unexpected,” Zollinger said in a statement. “A few months ago, I wrote to you about resilience and flexibility. At the start of this year, I was prepared to once again invest the time, energy, and conviction required to push the gallery forward. I wanted to believe in a recovering market and a path toward growth.” However, Zollinger continued, “it has become increasingly clear that the global landscape offers little more than continued instability,” adding that the “conditions necessary” to sustain and grow...

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...

The New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA) presents the 12th edition of NADA New York, the non-profit organization’s annual art fair championing galleries at the forefront of contemporary art. The fair will be held from May 13 to 17, 2026, at the Starrett-Lehigh Building in West Chelsea.The 12th edition will bring together over 121 galleries, art spaces, and non-profit organizations spanning 15 countries and 46 cities — from Tbilisi and Tokyo to Mexico City and Philadelphia — with 45 NADA Members and 51 first-time exhibitors including Brigitte Mulholland (Paris), The Address (Brescia), FORGOTTEN LANDS (Christiansted), Central Server Works (Los Angeles), and Post Times (New York).BA Thomas, “Disco” (2026),...

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...

Janne Sirén, the director of the Buffalo AKG Art Museum in Upstate New York, will depart his post in October after more than a decade, opening up yet another top role at a US art institution. Sirén oversaw the museum as it expanded dramatically in 2023, adding another building to its campus that doubled the AKG’s square footage. The expansion, which cost $230 million, was well-received, both within the art press and by locals, who flocked to the museum. The AKG reported that, in the year following the reopening, the museum received 340,000 visitors, a record for the institution. But Sirén’s leadership has more recently come under scrutiny in the local Buffalo media. His departure was announced by the...

This spring, the American Folk Art Museum (AFAM) presents Self-Made: A Century of Inventing Artists, a major exhibition that takes a critical look at the historical definition of the “self-taught artist” in the United States through the unique lens of authorship, agency, and self-representation. Spanning the early 20th century to today, the show features 90 works around three key strategies: self-portraiture, alter egos, and autobiography. Self-Made is the first sustained museum exploration of artistic self-fashioning by artists who worked outside conventional art-world systems, including those historically excluded due to race, gender, disability, and other deviations from normative power structures. 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
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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

WEAVING CONNECTION BETWEEN MATERIAL, STRUCTURE AND CULTURE
 
PITAKA launches Weave the Next — Weave Our World, a global call to action to the creative community to express their understanding of the world from natural patterns to future imagination. The brand, founded in 2015, recasts weaving as a design language that connects material, structure, and culture. This initiative marks a new chapter in collaborative material exploration, woven aesthetics, and product design, welcoming creators to submit their visions between April 24 – May 25, 2026. PITAKA integration of aramid fiber and weaving techniques | all images courtesy of PITAKA
 
 
INNOVATION THROUGH  STRUCTURAL INTEGRITY & CULTURAL...

Gradel’s investigations led to the revelation that 2,000 objects from the British Museum‘s collection had been stolen or damaged

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

In a twist that sounds straight out of our annual April Fools edition, the American Arts Conservancy — the nascent MAGA-studded nonprofit commissioning this year’s US Pavilion at the Venice Biennale — is fundraising for the exhibition via a “Donate” button on its website. In fact, there’s a lot that’s curious about the financing for Alma Allen’s pavilion. Staff Reporter Isa Farfan has the story.Personally, I encourage you to skip the pavilion donation and get a Hyperallergic membership instead. For less than 10 bucks, you’ll support our work and get access to exclusive members-only events, like today’s virtual conversation with artist and MacArthur grant winner Jeremy Frey and Hyperallergic...

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the city as a controlled hallucination
 
The contemporary city does not begin with planning. It begins earlier, in spaces where experience is tested. Before infrastructure takes form, environments are staged, adjusted, and refined through controlled settings. Early amusement parks such as Coney Island operate as compact worlds where fantasy, technology, and mass culture converge into spatial experiments, early prototypes of urban life. They construct immersive environments where illusion is organized, movement is scripted, and experience is engineered. What appears as escape already functions as a model.
 
The shift from world fairs to amusement parks marks a transition to continuous spatial systems....

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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...

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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...

In the past, donors to the United States Pavilion at the Venice Biennale have proudly announced themselves as patrons of the contemporary art world’s most prestigious event. This year, however, under the thumb of the Trump administration’s State Department, the funding for Alma Allen’s national pavilion remains unusually opaque. Unlike the numerous sponsors that publicly backed Jeffrey Gibson’s monumental 2024 US Pavilion, including the Ford and Mellon foundations, no organizations or individuals have yet to claim any direct funding ties to Allen’s exhibition. Instead, the American Arts Conservancy (AAC), the year-old nonprofit tapped to execute the 2026 pavilion, is fundraising for the exhibition...

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,...

Arts Collective will open a new arts center in Northampton, England on May 1st with an exhibition from Northamptonshire-born artist Rose Finn-Kelcey. The planned complex is the result of a £5.2m renovation of Northampton’s municipal offices and town hall annex, and will include 17 artist studios, several community spaces, and a new gallery.  The central […]

The organizers of the Vancouver Biennale have appointed Brazilian artist and documentary filmmaker Marcello Dantas senior curator of the event’s 2027–29 iteration, the Art Newspaper reports. Dantas is currently art director at immersive museum Ster Ik in Tulum, Mexico. He recently cocurated, with Maya El Khalil, the 2024 iteration of Saudi Arabia’s Desert X AlUla. […]

“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...

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...

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.

Growing up in the Australian Outback, where he first picked up a camera as a teenager to document his surroundings in the bush, Jon McCormack developed a keen eye for the beauty and subtleties of nature. Throughout his career, he’s stepped foot on all seven continents. Yet the idea for his new book, Patterns: Art of the Natural World, emerged from a period of quieter reflection. Like many of us during the pandemic, McCormack’s travels were limited to his immediate area. He began visiting the same spots repeatedly and “discovered a new way of seeing, using photography to reveal the hidden harmony and symmetry of the natural world,” says a statement. Patterns, forthcoming from Damiani Books, draws upon...

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  
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
 
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“What I am advocating for is a type of grace,” says Matthew Hansel. “Both in the way we see ourselves and in the way we see others. I am celebrating the impossible mix of contradictory things that make us human, including the parts of ourselves we hide from the world.” Hansel’s tour of our hidden […]
The post Matthew Hansel’s Hidden Demons first appeared on Hi-Fructose Magazine.

By Jorge Rodriguez-Jimenez Gustavo Rimada is showing his third solo show and largest to date at Thinkspace Projects. The show, titled “Rhythmic Sequence,” brings together his masterfully vivid acrylic paintings and his newly found love for ceramics. Offering mugs with faces that both haunt and delight, Rimada, who was born in Mexico and raised in California, is blending his Mexican heritage and his California lifestyle to create bold and culturally stunning works of art. Rimada’s ceramic work...

Dorian Tocker  
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
 
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To celebrate the cult movie director’s 80th birthday, we bring you our interview with John Waters from Hi-Fructose Isssue 69. You can still get a copy in print of this issue here. Happy Birthday to The King of Puke! ABOVE: Portrait of John Waters, photo by Greg Gorman, © Academy Museum Foundation Early on in the […]
The post Happy 80th Birthday to The Pope of Trash: An Interview With John Waters first appeared on Hi-Fructose Magazine.

Nahanni McKay  
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
 
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By Katherine Kesey In the last few years, Los Angeles's Melrose Hill neighborhood has quickly become one of the city's most walkable arts districts. This past Saturday night, there were nearly ten coordinated openings, and I attended almost all of them. Taken individually, the shows were equally captivating. Together, they were a warm and exciting medley of passionate color, lighthearted mystery, and wry humor. Hannah Tishkoff, Beyond Love There is No Belief. 2026. Acrylic, oil, and pennies...