Naru Hiko Reframes Familiar Scenes from Japan’s Parks
 
Through simplified colors and forms, Naru Hiko’s oil paintings reframe familiar landscapes across Japan, focusing on the ordinary elements found in parks and residential neighborhoods. The paintings draw from walks through everyday public and residential spaces in Japan. Benches, traffic cones, fences, and playground structures become recurring subjects, bringing attention to objects and architectural elements that often go unnoticed within the urban landscape. Blue Forms | all images ©Naru Hiko
 
 
The artworks depict Benches, Fences, and Playgrounds
 
Rather than reproducing these scenes literally, artist Naru Hiko simplifies and reconstructs...

Every year on September 11, New Yorkers pay tribute to the victims of the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center — and to the wounds of the weeks and years after. That period was defined by grief, rebuilding efforts, and, almost immediately, a vicious campaign of Islamophobia and surveillance whose effects reshaped the world as they knew it. Iraqi-born artist Wafaa Bilal recalls, “I sensed at once that the comfort and security Americans had long taken for granted were gone.”Bilal is one of several artists from Muslim, South Asian, and Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA) communities whose lives were indelibly altered by the United States’s weaponization of the 9/11 attacks to pass the PATRIOT Act...

The Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation on September 10 named the eight recipients of its 2026 Rabkin Prize for arts journalists. Each will receive an unrestricted grant of $50,000. Established in 2017, the honor recognizes the contributions of journalists writing about the visual arts for a general audience and has distributed $4.1 million since its inception. Writers are nominated […]

Art Movements, published every Thursday afternoon, is a roundup of must-know news, appointments, awards, and other art-world happenings.Speed Museum Names New DirectorKathleen V. Jameson is returning to the Speed Museum, where she spent a formative period of her career, as its new director. A scholar of American art and photography, Jameson comes to the Kentucky institution from the Mint Museum in Charlotte, North Carolina, where she established the first digital media program. Her three-decade trajectory is stacked with roles at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the James A. Michener Art Museum in Pennsylvania; and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, among others. “Returning to Louisville and...

Emerging Caribbean-American artist Michael Richards was in his studio on the 92nd floor of the World Trade Center's North Tower when the first plane crashed into the building 25 years ago, leaving no survivors above the 91st floor. The 38-year-old artist's remains were never recovered from Ground Zero, but his voice reverberates through time with the survival of his prescient, incisive sculptures that link aviation to Black freedom.In acknowledgment of the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, the Brooklyn Museum has installed “Free F'All” (1997), the only work by Richards in its collection, in the lobby for public display. “Richards's career was cut so short, so it's...

Qatar Museums has announced that Doha will welcome a permanent pavilion devoted to Gerhard Richter this autumn. The building will occupy the city’s MIA Park, outside the Museum of Islamic Art. It is being designed by Richter himself, in collaboration with Selldorf Architects, the firm behind the recent renovations of New York’s Frick Collection and London’s National […]

building a home in the virtual world
 
Before exploring a virtual world, players start by building a house. In Minecraft, the first night can mean quickly putting together a shelter from whatever is nearby, while in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, players arrive on an empty island and slowly fill it with houses, gardens, paths, and furniture. In The Sims, building and arranging a home has always been part of the game. Different games, same habit: make a place, then come back to it. As games have become larger and more social, those places have taken on a life of their own. Players spend hours decorating houses, meeting friends, hosting events, or simply hanging around. In some VR worlds, people even sleep...

Olivia Wilde plays Erika Tracy, a contemporary art superstar-slash-sociopath (is there a difference?) in the super-fucked-up love story that is I Want Your Sex (2026) — and “fuck” is an operative word in this movie, because she’s also a dominatrix. Cooper Hoffman, playing Elliott, her schlubby and somehow-already-balding 23-year-old gallery assistant, becomes her plaything; “consent” here is both sexual and artistic (and both, I ought to warn you, are violated). It’s a caricature of the art world more than an actually incisive critique — "You know I hate criticism, especially when it’s accurate,” Erika breezes at one point. But it’s definitely funner that way, with hilarious but...

LONDON — Tschabalala Self’s “Lady in Blue” was unveiled today as the latest sculpture for the Fourth Plinth on Trafalgar Square in London, perhaps the most famous public art commission in the United Kingdom. At nearly 17 feet tall, donning a glamorous turquoise dress and statement jewelry as she takes a purposeful step forward, the towering figure is Self’s largest sculpture to date.Born and based in New York, Self is best known for her joyful depictions of Black women rendered in paint, fabric, and collage elements. Fabricated from bronze, her Fourth Plinth sculpture is patinated with Lapis Lazuli, a vibrant blue pigment made by grinding the semi-precious stone. Prized since antiquity, the color...

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With stops in Texas, Iowa and Nebraska, the display of the complete Epstein files and works by the artist Maria Farmer hopes to make people think about the sex-abuse case more deeply

Reworking a 1960s Madrid apartment around everyday use
 
Located in Madrid’s Imperial neighborhood, this 48-sqm apartment was renovated by Alessio Lamarca and Marta Ciabattini around the everyday routines of its future occupant. Instead of beginning with a predetermined aesthetic, the architects considered how the home would actually be used: where bags are placed on arrival, how the kitchen is used, where time is spent, and which spaces and objects are part of daily life. The approach informed both the layout and the scale of individual elements. The original apartment had three bedrooms, a living room, a separate kitchen, and one bathroom. Its condition had remained largely unchanged since the 1960s, with...

A new permanent pavilion devoted to the artist Gerhard Richter will open later this fall in Qatar, in MIA Park outside Doha’s Museum of Islamic Art. The building was designed by Richter himself and is being constructed in collaboration with Selldorf Architects, the firm led by art-world design favorite Annabelle Selldorf (whose credits include the Frick Collection, the Art Gallery of Ontario, galleries David Zwirner and Hauser & Wirth, and many more). “Doha Pavilion has been designed by Gerhard Richter as a free-standing work of art and architecture housing a distinct body of his paintings and sculpture,” according to a press release issued by the Qatar Museums group behind the project, which will open...

Kathleen V. Jameson has been named the new director of the Speed Art Museum, in Louisville, Kentucky. She officially began her role on Tuesday. Jameson specializes in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American art, with additional expertise in photograph and works on paper. Before coming to the Speed, Jameson served as executive director of the Michener Art Museum in Doylestown, […]

American artist Tschabalala Self has unveiled Lady in Blue (2026) on the Fourth Plinth in London’s Trafalgar Square. Her sculpture, cast in bronze and patinated with lapis lazuli blue—a pigment used in in north Africa, the Middle East, and Europe since antiquity—will remain in place for two years. The monumental Lady in Blue depicts a young Black woman striding forward with […]

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In Mesoamerican folklore, the jaguar is a prominent nagual, a being with the power to morph into an animal. Moving from one realm into another allows this hybrid creature to act as a spiritual guide through unknown territories. For Anna Ortiz, the jaguar is also a fitting metaphor for entering into a mythic borderland. Drawing on her Mexican-American heritage, the artist renders remote landscapes through limited, yet vibrant palettes. Ortiz favors subtle shifts in tone and saturation, painting jungle terrain in shades of blues, greens, and pinks. The focused palette emphasizes the fantastic world we’ve entered into, one that appears variable and as a manifestation of myth. “Inundada” In her new body of...

The Black Schoolhouse takes shape in New Orleans’ Seventh Ward
 
The Black School has created The Black Schoolhouse, a 185.8-square-meter community arts center in New Orleans’ historic Seventh Ward that brings creative education, cultural exchange, and neighborhood resources together under one roof. Located at 1660 N. Roman Street, the center is shaped by an 18-month design process with local residents and incorporates climate-resilient strategies alongside references to Black architectural traditions and local cultural memory. The Schoolhouse is scheduled to open to the public on October 10th, 2026, marking The Black School’s 10th anniversary.
 
The Black School developed the project through...

All eyes are on the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi as it prepares for opening on December 11 after two decades of delays. The cost of the project has neared $1 billion and the country is getting excited for what’s to come. Just last month, the museum named Valerie Hillings as the institution’s inaugural director, where she will oversee the largest branch in the Guggenheim’s four-country museum network. In a short interview with the German culture magazine Monopol, Noura bint Mohammed Al Kaabi, minister of state at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the United Arab Emirates, said that she’s proud that artists from the region and the Emirates are not “merely featured as supporting actors, but are at the heart of...

Maurizio Cattelan, the provocateur sculptor famed for duct-taping a banana to a wall and calling it art, has returned with his latest exhibition, a much-hyped show at Berlin’s Neue Nationgalerie. It’s billed as a survey, but in typical form for Cattelan, who once did a Guggenheim Museum retrospective in which many of his sculptures were strung together and hung in the center of the rotunda, the exhibition is something funkier than that. The genesis of the show is equally funky. Cattelan, who was born in Padua, Italy, and is now based between New York and Milan, is this year’s winner of the Preis der Nationalgalerie, an award that has historically gone to artists with some connection to Berlin. That makes...

The historic voyage of the Bayeux Tapestry to London’s British Museum has been a popular sensation, with VIPs like the UK’s King Charles and French president Emmanuel Macron attending a reception to welcome the famed 11th-century embroidery. Tens of thousands of people vied for tickets. The fragile artwork was allowed to travel only after the French supreme court tore up a lawsuit aiming to stop the loan and a painstaking French study said it would be safe to undertake the trip. It has now emerged that Belarus-born billionaire Igor Tulchinsky, who supported the history-making voyage, to the tune of £5 million ($6.8 million), according to Middle East Eye, also supported a yurt in a community center in...

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What may be the largest ancient Roman wall mosaic ever found has been open to the public for limited viewing. Roberto Gualtieri, the mayor of Rome, unveiled the 1st-century CE mosaic, along with a fresco discovered at the same time, in the city this week. The artworks were first identified during excavations in the 1990s at the Baths of Trajan, located on Oppio Hill near the Colosseum, but never fully uncovered until now. Dedicated by Roman emperor Trajan in 109 CE, the baths were an enormous leisure complex that extended over 15 acres and featured areas for cultural activities and sports as well as bathing pools. Occupying an underground gallery beneath the baths, the mosaic measures 33 feet high and over 50...

By Jody Zellen Eileen Cowin's thoughtful, intimate, and arresting retrospective Between Panic and Paradise prompted me to take Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida off the shelf. His complex reflections on the essence of photography resonate with Cowin's exhibition. Cowin stages intimate private moments and frames them with precision and exactitude. Blending reality and fiction, she seeks to document the emotional connection that forms with her subjects — be it her family, herself and her twin...

Gerhard Richter turns painting into architecture with a permanent Doha pavilion dedicated to his Strip works.

Strip paintings translated into three dimensions
 
A Gerhard Richter painting can begin with a photograph and end as something far more experimental. In Doha, one of those studies is becoming a building. The German artist has designed a permanent hexagonal gallery pavilion for MIA Park that takes the visual system behind his Strip paintings and expands it into a space visitors can walk inside. Realized with Selldorf Architects, Doha Pavilion: Gerhard Richter will open on November 20th, 2026, beside the Museum of Islamic Art.
 
Its six exterior walls are wrapped in repeating printed patterns derived from Richter’s 2011 artist’s book Patterns. The source goes back another year, when Richter digitally...

Tschabalala Self’s Lady in Blue has been unveiled on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square, bringing a monumental vision of... Read More

A decade ago or so, parents were finding loom bands in the couch cushions and underfoot during a craze for the analog toys. Kids made bracelets and other items, and in the vein of LEGO and other build-your-own entertainment, YouTube creators provided tutorials for elaborate projects. The toy fad may have waned, but for artist Hannah Beuchler, the small, colorful rubber bands proved an accessible material for an inventive application. At a glance, Beuchler’s works appear like expressionist paintings, with gestural brushstrokes and carefully chosen colors. But our senses are piqued by the unusual texture, and upon closer inspection, we observe thousands of loom bands in vibrant relief. Loom band detail...

A not-so-comprehensive guide to Berlin Art Week, where diaspora, migration, memory and belonging emerge across the city.

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The bronze sculpture will move permanently to a private foundation in Fornebu, Norway after its two-year stint in Trafalgar Square

The Musée Jacquemart-André will show works by the Venetian master, who was revered by artists including Fragonard, Cézanne and Delacroix

This year’s leading prize for US art writers also honours The Art Newspaper contributor Julia Halperin

Charles Asprey has shown courage and imagination by donating works to the tiny and remote Pier Arts Centre, instead of one of the UK’s prestigious London-based institutions

David Hockney’s Serpentine exhibition attracted nearly 300,000 visitors, setting a new attendance record for the London gallery.

NORITO, Teaspoon Projects and s t a r c h join forces to open Flatmates 37, a new collaborative art space in Fitzrovia.

I bordi della fotografia coincidono con gli infissi di una finestra divisa in sei quadri. La finestra è aperta su un paesaggio coperto di un velo spesso di bruma, sotto il quale si distinguono i contorni soffusi e mesti di un complesso industriale. Sul luogo dello scatto, quella bruma la chiamano caìgo: una veste di umidità impenetrabile, che aggiudica al paesaggio l’aspetto di una residenza di fantasmi. Sul luogo dello scatto, in effetti, non c’è nessuno. Nel 1997 quando Vincenzo Castella realizzava #3205 Venezia Marghera, il complesso petrolchimico di Porto Marghera già s’avviava alla dismissione. Di quel luogo restano solo un lungo commiato silenzioso e nostalgia densa al punto del visibile....

The Freelands Foundation has awarded £100,000 (approximately $135,000) of unrestricted funding to three organizations annually for the next five years, totaling £1.5m (roughly $2 million). The recipients are Wolverhampton Art Gallery, selected for its youth art incubator; Burton Futures, an educational outreach project from the North Devon gallery Burton at Bideford; and Signal, an arts charity in the remote town of Barrow-in-Furness […]

As deep swells from an offshore hurricane were further empowered by king tides in Southern California over the past several days, residents experienced firsthand the impacts of human-generated climate change. Erosion is an innate process along coastlines, where waves and wind constantly shift the sand and gnaw away at bluffs. Infrastructure projects and residential development over the last several decades have also meant changes to the natural coastline, and beaches are regularly refilled with tons upon tons of sand. Even so, in just a couple of days, some of the region’s beaches virtually disappeared. This example is just one in an increasing array of low-lying places where our oceans, which continue to...

Although Karla Wong has always been passionate about drawing, it was her degree in law that ultimately spurred her current practice. The Mexican artist spent her adolescent and early adult years in Oaxaca, where she attended university and eventually became a forensic and witness sketch artist for the local justice department. Rendering a figure’s likeness based solely on a description is a deeply imaginative process and one that continues to inform the artist’s practice today. In Journeys of Being on view now at Chicago’s Intuit Art Museum, Wong presents a vibrant body of work that entwines her Oaxacan roots with her Chinese heritage and experiences as a trans woman living between the U.S. and Mexico....

Although there’s no official count, the amount of World War II bunkers, battery platforms, defensive bollards, and other structures found along European coastlines probably number in the tens of thousands. Bunkers were typically made of concrete, and several thousand are located along what’s known as the Atlantic Wall, an extensive coastal network of defenses built by the Nazis between 1942 and 1944 in anticipation of attacks by Allied forces. Disused now for decades, they’re a blight on the landscape, but one that The Wa sees as a blank canvas for something much more playful and bright. In his series A Kid Could Do It, The Wa transforms otherwise nondescript structures into jubilantly youthful drawings,...

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Aby Warburg chiamava Nachleben – sopravvivenza – quel fenomeno per cui certe forme, certi gesti, certe configurazioni visive non muoiono mai del tutto: riemergono a distanza di secoli, migrano da un contesto all’altro, si reincarnano in immagini in apparenza estranee alla loro origine, portando con sé una carica energetica che il tempo non riesce a disinnescare. È a questo concetto, tanto seducente quanto elusivo, che la nona edizione di Grenze – Festival Internazionale di Fotografia e Arti Visive aggancia il proprio progetto, in programma a Verona dal 18 settembre al 18 ottobre 2026 a cura di Simone Azzoni e Francesca Marra.
Marjolein Blom, “Shelves”, 2024 (work in progress), courtesy the...

Ci sono luoghi che sembrano appartenerci prima ancora di essere stati abitati. Li riconosciamo nella disposizione di una finestra, nella luce che attraversa una stanza, nella presenza di un tappeto o di un vaso di fiori. Qualcosa in quelle forme precede il ricordo e lo fa affiorare senza consegnargli un’immagine precisa. I dipinti di Quentin James McCaffrey nascono dentro questa zona incerta, dove familiarità ed estraneità si incontrano e ogni ambiente custodisce la traccia di un’esperienza possibile.
Quentin James Mccaffrey, “Landscape with Sunbeam”, 2026, oil on canvas over wood panel, 16 x 13 in. Courtesy Alison Jacques ® Quentin James McCaffrey, ph. JSP Art Photography
La nuova mostra da Alison...

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C’è un’accezione dell’interferenza che il senso comune tende a scartare, bollandola come rumore da eliminare: quella, di matrice fisico-ingegneristica, per cui due segnali quando si incontrano invece di sommarsi generano un terzo pattern imprevisto, che non apparteneva a nessuno dei due. È da questo significato tecnico, e non da quello colloquiale di guasto o disturbo, che muove Interference. The image is never just an image, la collettiva a cura di Francesca Leoni e Davide Mastrangelo (Vertov Project) che dal 2 settembre anima gli spazi della Fondazione Dino Zoli di Forlì come prologo all’undicesima edizione di Ibrida Festival delle Arti Intermediali (17-20/09/2026).
Rä di Martino, “Fx Dream”,...

Siamo tutti coscienti che l’epoca nella quale viviamo non è più quella della libertà selvaggia o primitiva: quei tempi sono finiti, quegli spropositi si sono esauriti. La nostra epoca è quella della complessità e la complessità si vede nel dettaglio o nella somma di dettagli. Ecco perché pensando alla storia della rivista Juliet, e che ha visto un dialogo pluriennale tra migliaia di immagini e di artisti, mi fa venire in mente l’idea del “dettaglio”.
Copertina realizzata dall’artista Luigi Ontani (acquarello su carta) per il n. 29 di Juliet, dicembre 1986. Courtesy collezione Juliet; David Bowes, “Poika (Boy)”, 1995, pittura su tela, cm 41 x 33. Foto di Alessio Curto, courtesy collezione...

For three decades, Harriet Mena Hill has been a resident of South East London. This area is known in the art world for its schools, such as the esteemed Camberwell College of Arts. But Hill and others who lived there for some time remember it as a historically working-class and, at times, impoverished area of […]
The post Harriet Mena Hill Brings Crumbling Concrete Back To Life first appeared on Hi-Fructose Magazine.

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By Barbara Patterson Trans femme artist Pau Pescador's latest exhibition, Amor Prohibido, at Tyler Park Presents explores the volatility of becoming visible in a public space that criminalizes the existence of queer people. As anti-transgender legislation increases and security technologies evolve, the visibility of gender-nonconforming individuals becomes more precarious. A 2015 report by the National Institute of Standards and Technology describes how "intruders" in gender-segregated areas...

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Marigold Santos’s spectral forms are as layered with detail as they are with metaphor. Swirling amid marbled backgrounds in a feverish dance, they serve as critical examinations of cultural injustice. Their textures materialize their celestial properties as they become fierce teachers of colonial violence, problematic histories, and forgotten ancestry. Covertly, her haunting figural silhouettes aim […]
The post Celestial Stance: The Art of Marigold Santos first appeared on Hi-Fructose Magazine.

By Betty Ann Brown "What is Art, monsieur, but Nature concentrated?"—Honoré de Balzac "Art distills sensation and embodies it with enhanced meaning."—Miguel de Unamuno Hiroko Yoshimoto's paintings concentrate nature into radiant and dynamic beauty, distilling visual sensation into poetic and environmental significance. Throughout the 2020s, Yoshimoto has worked on two series of paintings about nature: Biodiversity and Of Infinite Variety. Both series are based on observation of the natural...

By Julie Faith There is something strange about returning to a place you once knew well after being away for a long time. You recognize the architecture before you recognize what the years have done to you. As I passed through the gate at Corey Helford Gallery, crossed the lot, and headed up the stairs, I felt ridiculously, wonderfully giddy. Kid-in-a-candy-store giddy. I have been away from the gallery and much of the Los Angeles art world, but somewhere between the gate and the stairs, I...

By Victoria Thomas Altadena-based artist James Griffith greets me at his studio, located in a refurbished 1920s firehouse diagonally across the street from the gleaming silver lagomorph of the restored Bunny Museum, by saying "Hi, I just started putting a galaxy in the armpit of a penguin." Great cities announce their identities through their monuments. New York City has the Statue of Liberty, St. Louis the Gateway Arch, Chicago the Cloud Gate, Philadelphia the original LOVE sculpture. And...

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.