samsung explores human side of tech for milan design week 2026
 
‘Design, at its core, is an act of love,’ asserts Mauro Porcini, President and Chief Design Officer at Samsung Electronics, in an interview designboom. At Milan Design Week 2026, Samsung brings this vision to life through an exhibition that reimagines the human side of tech in our lives. The brand invites Design Week visitors into an exhibition where technology is a warm, living participant in the human experience. By centering the space on the human side of tech, the exhibition reframes technology that enables more expressive, meaningful ways of living.
Mauro Porcini explains Samsung Design Open Lab at Milan Design Week 2026
 
 
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This prompt of "favorite art song performance" seems just about as broad — and almost silly — a question as asking a painter what their favorite color is.

The art world Olympics — that is, the Venice Biennale — is just about two weeks away. Today, the awards jury announced it will not be considering artists from countries that are charged with crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court: namely, Israel and Russia. Read Staff Writer Rhea Nayyar’s report below. In the meantime, bookmark Editor-at-Large Hrag Vartanian’s guide to the intricate and sprawling exhibition — he explains the ins and outs of the event more clearly than anywhere I’ve seen, and this year’s seems like a particularly promising edition. In news, satellite imagery confirms that Azerbaijan has demolished a prominent church in Artsakh in a continuation of its...

fondazione dries van noten takes shape on the grand canal
 
Dries Van Noten inaugurates its foundation in Venice, establishing a new cultural platform dedicated to craftsmanship as a living, evolving language. Housed within the historic Palazzo Pisani Moretta, Fondazione Dries Van Noten opens with its first presentation, The Only True Protest Is Beauty, running from April 25th to October 4th, 2026.
 
The exhibition borrows its title from American songwriter Phil Ochs, reframing his statement into a spatial and material investigation. Here, beauty is approached as tension rather than resolution, an encounter that unsettles as much as it attracts. Curated by Dries Van Noten himself, the presentation unfolds...

SICIS SHOWS ITS UNIQUE IDENTITY DURING MILAN DESIGN WEEK 2026
 
During  Milan Design Week 2026, SICIS thrills the crowd with a series of evocative environments throughout the city, following the concept of ‘Impossible to Ignore’. Positioning artistic mosaics as the centerpiece of their exhibition space at Salone del Mobile, the brand creates a scenographic focal point for a coherent furnishing proposal. Meanwhile, for the Fuorisalone circuit, the immersive installation ‘ELEMENTS. Jewel and Design, Beyond Form’ at the Milan showroom, combines art and industrial vision into a journey developed around the four primary elements: Air, Fire, Earth, and Water.
Amaro armchair | all images courtesy of...

Gasworks awards Earshot a three-year Studio Bursary, supporting its pioneering work using sound as evidence in human rights investigations.

David Bowie: You’re Not Alone at Lightroom London transforms immersive exhibition into a powerful, multi-sensory journey through Bowie’s life and work.

bamboo and tea waste shape upcycled chess table by reEDIT
 
At Milan Design Week 2026, circular design studio reEDIT makes its European debut with The Upcycled Gambit — Bamboo & Brew Chess Table Set, an installation that reframes the chessboard as both object and social infrastructure. Exhibited at Isola’s No Space for Waste exhibition, the project draws from the everyday scenes of Xiangqi games that take place across Hong Kong’s streets, where play becomes ritual and public space becomes a site of exchange. Installed at Fabbrica Sassetti, the work translates this collective memory into an inhabitable object. A chess table and stool set invite visitors to gather, sit, and engage, echoing the informal...

S-AR reinterprets a chapel through thin concrete walls
 
Set within a garden in Santiago, Nuevo León, Mexico, the Oratory Chapel by S-AR is conceived as a small-scale structure that reinterprets a previous chapel once located on the same site. The project reuses elements from the earlier construction, establishing a spatial and material continuity between past and present.
 
The chapel is defined by two reinforced concrete walls, each 8 cm thick, set at varying heights along a diagonal. These walls support a thin concrete slab of 6.5 cm, forming a narrow, tunnel-like space. The construction follows a regular formwork modulation, while openings left within the wall system allow light and air to pass through,...

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...

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This vast, visionary new building on the Los Angeles County Museum of Art campus flaunts strengths in displaying antiquities

This marks a return to Vancouver for the Brazilian curator Marcello Dantas, who organised a Vik Muniz project in the city as part of the biennale’s 2013-15 edition

In a landmark move, Taiwan’s National Culture and Arts Foundation has revoked the National Award for Arts given to artist Sakuliu Pavavaljung in 2018 and instructed him to return the NTD 1 million ($32,000) prize following his conviction on sexual assault charges, Art Asia Pacific reports. Established in 1997 and administered by the Taiwanese government, the award is one of the nation’s most prestigious honors bestowed to artists. Sakuliu was one of seven artists recognized in the award’s 20th edition, announced in 2017, in the visual arts category. At the time, the foundation praised his multidisciplinary practice, which draws on Indigenous Paiwan culture.  Controversy erupted following Sakuliu’s...

Lynda Roscoe Hartigan (photo Alex Paul, courtesy PEM)Art Movements, published every Thursday afternoon, is a roundup of must-know news, appointments, awards, and other happenings in today’s chaotic art world.Smithsonian American Art Museum Names New DirectorLynda Roscoe Hartigan, currently executive director and CEO of the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, will lead the Washington, DC, institution at a crucial juncture. In the Trump administration's push to sanitize the telling of United States history, the museum's exhibition on race and sculpture was specifically targeted in the president's notorious executive order threatening funding for the Smithsonian Institution. Last...

Collector Justin Sun is suing World Liberty Financial, the Trump family’s memecoin company, claiming that the company illegally froze his holdings of tokens, reports NBC News. In July 2025, Hong Kong–based Sun bought $100 million worth of the coin, $TRUMP, which would soon thereafter be traded on TRON, the blockchain Sun founded in 2017. Sun had already, as of May, sunk $75 million into World Liberty Financial coins, $WFI. At the same time, Sun was being sued by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) “for the unregistered offer and sale of crypto asset securities, for defrauding investors by manipulating the price of his own cryptocurrency with fake transactions called ‘wash trading,’ and for...

The World Press Photo foundation has awarded its top honor to Separated by ICE, a harrowing image of two young girls clinging futilely to their father’s shirt as he is detained. Taken by independent photojournalist Carol Guzy in a hallway of New York’s Jacob K. Javits Federal Building, one of the few U.S. federal buildings where photography is permitted, the photograph has come to symbolize the human cost of President Trump’s immigration crackdown. The annual contest recognizes the most impactful photojournalism and documentary work produced over the past year: Separated by ICE, shot for the Miami Herald in August of 2025, was selected from 57,376 entries submitted by more than 3,000 photographers...

The art world Olympics returns for another season of political drama and nationalist angling for domination. This is one of the only times that the grotesque machinations of the global art ecosystem come into full focus, as artists no longer hide behind vague, theoretical ideas like “liminal spaces” and the world of art is splayed out for all to see.The Venice Biennale is the world’s first art biennial, and it’s the reason your obnoxious art friend and that one culture vulture you know says “BI-en-NAH-le” and not “biennial” like most other humans to refer to cultural events that take place every two years. The Italian term has become the lingua franca of global art snobs — with the exception...

The Venice Biennale is upon us, returning for its 61st edition. Thousands will pour into the Italian city for the opening of one of the art world’s most prestigious events—barring a few interruptions—since 1895. When it closes in late November, more than 800,000 people will likely have attended (if last year’s record–breaking numbers are any indication). Awards will also be given and rising new stars in contemporary art identified. Though the Venice Biennale is one of the most known in the world, replete with a rich history and an engaging mythos, it has also seen a number of changes since it began. The 61st edition will be on public view May 9 to November 22, 2026. Below, are the answers to some...

What is believed to be a council house built more than 1,000 years ago sheds light on how Maya systems of governance shifted

A unique assemblage of fifteen mirrors that were custom-made for the legendary fashion designer Yves St. Laurent and his onetime lover and brand co-founder Pierre Bergé sold at auction at Sotheby’s for $33.5 million this week.  The bronze and copper mirrors were crafted by French sculptor and designer Claude Lalanne, and this new high auction […]

A heart-wrenching image of a tearful family torn apart by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has won the 2026 World Press Photo Award’s top prize. The contest, started in 1955, spotlights leading photojournalism and documentary photography. This year’s 42 global winners were chosen from a pool of 57,376 photographs by 3,747 photographers across 141 countries.The Photo of the Year, “Separated by ICE” by American photojournalist Carol Guzy for the Miami Herald, was captured after an immigration court hearing in New York amid President Trump’s broader crackdown.“I’ve been following families to put a face on the consequences of government actions and rhetoric,” Guzy said in a video...

Ides Kihlen, the beloved Argentinian abstract painter whose first solo exhibition came at age 85, died on April 14 at age 108. The news of her death was announced by Galería Via Margutta in Córdoba, which has represented the artist since 2012.From her early arts education as a teenager, Kihlen remained committed to her dual love of painting and music throughout her nine-decade career. Bolstered by a daily routine that entailed painting from the moment she woke up and playing the piano after sunset, her approach to art-making was lyrical and often guided by the unconscious. “I used to half-close my eyes, trying to block my thoughts as if meditating, and then attempt to compose the picture I had...

Art aficionados who have not visited a certain Norwegian chocolate factory will be able to see a series of paintings by Edvard Munch for the first time starting in May, when the Munch Museum in Oslo opens a show focused on the artist’s little-known public works from 1923.   An exhibition titled “Edvard Munch and the Chocolate Factory” will feature large-scale paintings temporarily relocated to the museum from a manufacturing center for Freia chocolate, for which Munch created the so-called Freia Frieze for the factory’s canteen in the later years of his career. “At the time, Freia—Norway’s most iconic chocolate brand, both then and now—was seen as a progressive company which prioritised the...

Brazilian-born curator and educator Thiago de Paula Souza has been named curator of the Eighth Athens Biennale, set to take place next spring. The São Paulo-based de Paula Souza, who is currently a member of the artistic committee of NESR Art Foundation in Angola, is known for his interest in artistic practices centered around the […]

The jury for the 2026 Venice Biennale announced on Thursday that it would not consider the contributions of any country whose leaders are currently charged with crimes against humanity for the Golden and Silver Lion awards. This, as Artnews points out, takes Israel and Russia out of the running; however, the fact that the nations […]

Officials at London’s Tate Britain and Teeside University’s Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (MIMA) today named Simeon Barclay, Kira Freije, Marguerite Humeau, and Tanoa Sasraku as the four artists shortlisted for the forty-second annual Turner Prize. Work by the quartet will be on display at MIMA from September 29, 2026, to March 29, 2027, with […]

“I started doing photography as a way to express things I don’t understand or to convey a message I’m having a hard time explaining,” Austn Fischer says. “I often work in quite a backwards way, knowing exactly what I want to arrange in front of the camera but struggling to understand the significance in my life until I am able to reflect on it after.” The Wisconsin-born, London-based photographer taps into fashion as performance, considering how our garments, style, and gestures convey parts of our identities. Contrast is key in Fischer’s work, and it emerges through unusual pairings like lace ruffs atop athletic garb or an angular, black gown with a dainty, horse-shaped wire armature. Whether...

“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.

The old nightlife template still has a pulse, though it is no longer enough on its own. A dark room... Read More

Initial cost-cutting measures have seen some excellent journalists laid off—will new owner Andrew Wolff manage to turn the business around?

Crowdsourcing first impressions of the David Geffen Galleries

The Turner Prize 2026 shortlist has been revealed, with four artists exploring sculpture, performance and installation in a major exhibition at MIMA.

The Design Museum stages the first major retrospective of NIGO, charting his influence from Harajuku streetwear to global fashion culture.

The act of painting is often seen as a solitary pursuit; we picture the artist alone in a studio, working through compositional puzzles and experimenting with materials of their own choosing. For Dima Rebus, the process is collaborative, although she may or may not know the other participants. In her large-scale works, the London-based artist adds new meaning to “watercolor” as she incorporates water samples collected from strangers around the globe. In her series Floaters, Rebus processes these crowdsourced units by freezing them with watercolor pigments, which she then allows to melt across the substrate, creating abstract color fields. She then adds figures and elements of landscape, often with a fluid,...

Before her one-woman La voix humaine with the New York Philharmonic, Barbara Hannigan talks to Kevin Ng about her career, her artistry, and whether or not there's a voice on the other line.

The New York Gilbert and Sullivan Players's vivacious music making compensates for uninspired storytelling in their staging of Utopia, Limited.

Silk has been crafted in Vietnam for centuries, where it’s treasured as a lightweight, luxurious fabric used in traditional garments and art. For Kenny Nguyen, who was born in Ben Tre Province and is currently based in Charlotte, North Carolina, the material provides the foundation for vibrant, large-scale wall works that combine elements of weaving and tapestries, garment production, painting, and sculpture. Using thousands of hand-cut strips of silk, Nguyen draws on his background in fashion design, employing techniques such as pinning, weaving, sewing, and layering to create what he describes as “deconstructed paintings.” Each work is created around a kind of imaginary body, its creases and undulating...

While I like both Erna Berger and Maria Stader's versions, Erna Berger brings more drama to the rendition.

Today, Tate Britain announces the four artists who have been shortlisted for the Turner Prize 2026. It’s one of the most anticipated moments of the creative calendar, spotlighting artists for outstanding exhibitions or other presentations of their work. One of the world’s best-known awards for the visual arts, the Prize aims to promote public debate around new developments in contemporary British art. Since it was established in 1984, it has brought early recognition to artists such as Anish Kapoor, Antony Gormley, Damien Hirst, Grayson Perry, Lubaina Himid, Rachel Whiteread and Steve McQueen. This year’s shortlist is just as compelling, featuring Simeon Barclay, Kira Freije, Marguerite Humeau, and...

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...

Grainy textures and gestural lines characterize the lush compositions of Tania Yakunova. Collaborating with a range of commercial and editorial clients, the Kyiv-born illustrator harnesses the visual impact of bold shapes and vibrant color palettes to convey brand narratives and inexpressible feelings. Bare feet planted in dandelion-strewn grass and a greenhouse-style figure housing flowers attempting to burst from the glass cages, for example, conjure Yakunova’s homesickness, since she left her native Ukraine for London in 2023. The artist’s distinct expressions translate across mediums, whether working in hand-built ceramic sculpture, painting, or digital and graphite illustration. Keep an eye out for...

Spikes, fans, florets, waves, and other characteristics of marine creatures continue to shape the work of Lisa Stevens. The Bristol-based artist’s vibrant practice revolves around ceramic sculptures inspired by sea urchins, coral, nudibranchs, and other underwater organisms. Each piece is unique, with numerous colorful glazes and textures, and they often take on a fantastical quality, incorporating hybrid features that conjure associations with celestial objects, anatomy, and other facets of nature. Find more on Stevens’ Instagram, plus watch clay sculpting tutorials on YouTube. Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as...

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Dorian Tocker’s Website
Dorian Tocker on Instagram

Rosa Feola, still scheduled for a run of performances as Violetta in New York this spring, is the subject of this week's Grand Tier Grab Bag.

Today, we’re celebrating Earth Day, an annual event that promotes environmental protection. First celebrated in 1970, the movement annually mobilises 1 billion people across 190 countries towards taking positive climate action. The 2026 theme is Our Power, Our Planet, reflecting the fundamental truth that “environmental progress doesn’t depend on any single administration or election. It’s sustained by daily actions of communities, educators, workers and families protecting where they work and live.” It’s an admirable aim, often reflected in the work of artists and creatives around the world. We’re spotlighting five exhibition that highlight the beauty of our environment, as well as the urgent...

Ai Weiwei needs no introduction. For more than three decades, the artist has occupied a singular position at the intersection of aesthetics and activism, reshaping the possibilities of contemporary art through an unwavering commitment to political truth. Works such as Sunflower Seeds (2010) and Remembering (2009) have become touchstones of 21st-century practice, confronting mass production, state violence and collective memory with both poetic restraint and monumental force. His 81-day secret detention by Chinese authorities in 2011 marked a defining rupture — one that transformed personal experience into a sustained artistic inquiry into surveillance, control and resistance. Since then, Ai has continued...

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.

Street photography has long occupied a paradoxical space within the history of image making – at once documentary and deeply subjective, anchored in the real yet charged with the fleeting architecture of perception. Its most enduring practitioners operate in the charged interval between chance and intent, where composition is not merely arranged but discovered in motion. The genre thrives on attentiveness to the ordinary – the flick of a glance, the choreography of bodies in public space, the accidental poetry of urban life. Within this field, the question is never simply what is seen, but how seeing itself is structured: through proximity, timing, and an instinctual responsiveness to the world unfolding...

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Nahanni McKay’s Website
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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...

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John Sanderson’s Website
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For our fourth annual Photo Awards, supported by Format, we selected 5 winners for the following categories: Colour, Nature, Portrait, Street, and Student. It is our pleasure to introduce the winner of the Nature category: Sophie Altemus.
Born and raised in Los Angeles, Sophie Altemus is a photographer currently studying at Oberlin College in Ohio. Working primarily in the realm of snapshot photography, she carries a camera with her everywhere she goes.
This year’s awards were sponsored once again by Format, an online portfolio builder specializing in the needs of photographers, artists, and designers. With nearly 100 professionally designed website templates and thousands of design variables, you can...

In the forest nothing stands still. Time layered through thoughts and feelings, leaves kicked and crunched as we walk. The trees talk to each other, sending mycelium messages, carbon gifts, and warnings of drought or illness. From ancient wisdom to popular culture, it’s all here.
If a tree falls in the forest and there’s nobody there to hear it, did it make a sound? Of course it did. And if Jo Stapleton was there to capture the moment, there would be a visual symphony of light, shape and form to follow.
Published by Shutter Hub Editions, this beautiful collection of 100 images by Jo Stapleton is an expressionist photographic account of her interactions with trees, forest and woodland, later remembered and...

In a world not so unlike our own, during a time not that long ago, a mother wolf sits comfortably upon an abandoned tree stump in a clearing in the woods. Surrounded by carefully rendered flora and fauna, the creature is positioned upright with impeccable posture and human-like mannerisms. Her hind legs are crossed at […]
The post The Drawings of Femke Hiemestra Depict Fairy Tales with Looming Consequences first appeared on Hi-Fructose Magazine.

Nicholas Moegly  
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
 
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