Researchers working at Tel Abu Saify, an archaeological site in Qantara East, near the eastern bank of the Suez Canal in Egypt, have uncovered new evidence linking the site to a lost city known as “Masen.” Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities announced the finds on August 15, and the news was first reported in Ahram. Mohamed Abdel Badie, head of the Egyptian Antiquities Sector at the Supreme Council of Antiquities, said the discoveries “provide further evidence of the site’s changing functions and its strategic importance.” The most noteworthy find, according to Hisham Hussein, who oversaw the archaeological mission, is a large sandstone lintel that is broken into two pieces and inscribed on...

Mary Heilmann at the opening of 303 Gallery: 35 Years on July 18, 2019, in New York City (photo Sylvain Gaboury/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images)Mary Heilmann, a pioneering abstract artist who enjoyed a late-career renaissance after achieving global acclaim in her late 60s, died on Long Island on Friday at the age of 86. The Bridgehampton and Manhattan-based painter had suffered complications from a fall, according to a statement from her studio. Originally a ceramicist, Heilmann shifted course to painting after moving to New York, crafting off-kilter, geometric compositions that put an irreverent spin on hard-edged abstraction. She adopted a technique that allowed neon-bright colors to drip across her...

The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego has announced that its next director and chief executive will be Brett Littman. He will begin in the role in October. The fifth director in the institution’s 85-year history, Littman succeeds Kathryn Kanjo, who departed the MCA San Diego after 15 years in January to lead the newly merged UC Irvine Langson Orange County Museum of Art. Littman was chosen after a six-month national search. “Brett is a visionary museum leader whose experience spans some of the country’s most respected contemporary art institutions,” MCA San Diego board president Maryanne Pfister said in a statement. “His ability to balance artistic ambition with organizational leadership, combined...

Archaeologists working in northern Italy excavated “remarkably well-preserved” bronze artifacts from a well dating back to the ancient Etruscan city of Kainua. As reported by Heritage Daily, “Bronze figures buried at the bottom of an ancient well for nearly two and a half millennia are now emerging with their metallic lustre still present, as archaeologists have unearthed evidence of ritual activity at one of Italy’s most important Etruscan sites.” The excavation, undertaken by the University of Bologna and the Ravenna Archaeological Group, led to the discovery of two bronze statues of female figures and an “extremely rare” bronze bowl near the town of Marzabotto. Also found at the site were...

Cultural strategist Bryan Joseph Lee has been appointed deputy commissioner of New York City's Department of Cultural Affairs (DCLA), the agency announced today, August 17.Lee, who will work alongside DCLA Commissioner Diya Vij, enters the post with extensive experience centering marginalized communities' access to and perspectives in performing arts throughout his career. Through his Harlem-based agency CNTR ARTS, Lee has spent the last five years as a consultant and creative producer for several arts organizations, ranging from the With Love Project and the Ghetto Film School to the Lincoln Center and the Brooklyn Arts Council.The news comes just six weeks after NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani approved...

Entering Dean Millien’s high-ceilinged Bushwick studio, I found the artist watching a Marcel Duchamp interview on his laptop, surrounded by a menagerie of his aluminum foil animal sculptures. When I asked him why, he told me about his recent visit to Duchamp’s current retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. “Seeing his work helps my mind,” he said. “Great artists give me an idea of where I should go. I always trust myself as an artist, but I like to see how others have grown in the past.” While Millien’s background as a self-taught artist might differ from that of figures like Duchamp, his recent inclusion in MoMA PS1’s Greater New York is proof that the need to make art exists beyond the...

The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD) has announced Brett Littman as its new director and CEO. From 2018 to 2023, Littman served as director of the Noguchi Museum in Long Island City, New York. He succeeds Kathryn Kanjo, who left after nine years in the role to become the inaugural director of the  UC Irvine Langson Orange County Museum. Littman has operated […]

Known for his large origami-style works, Sipho Mabona turns his attention to a deeply personal object in a new series: the calabash. The hollowed, dried gourd is native to tropical Africa and utilized across the continent as a bottle-like vessel for food and beverage. In The Calabashes We Never Drank Amasi From, Mabona translates his familial connection to the functional fruit into vibrant patterns made from recycled milk cartons. “The starting point for my audiovisual series of works is my childhood memories of my late father’s stories about his own childhood in the rural Eastern Cape of South Africa,” he says. “One memory that was especially close to his heart, and which he often told my siblings and...

Two Swedish-American buyers are suing London’s Alison Jacques gallery, accusing breach of contract over the sale of three works by the Swedish-born artist Monica Sjöö, whose estate Jacques represents. The estate and the gallery say that Marie St. Germain, the adviser to Yoed and Natasha Anise, misrepresented the couple ahead of the purchase; they also claim that they believe the Anises would not be promising stewards of the artist’s works, the Art Newspaper (TAN) reports. The Anises, who paid £264,000 (about $358,000) for three paintings from the 1990s, split their time between Stockholm and Austin, Texas, and operate a tech company.  The paintings in question had been included in a retrospective...

On the back of a major restructuring in June, two senior Pace Gallery executives have left the organization. Amelia Redgrift, Pace Gallery’s chief communications officer, and senior sales director Danielle Forest resigned, and sources told ARTnews that both have secured high-level positions elsewhere in the arts and culture sector. The revelation follows a round of […]

A pair of reinforced concrete walls of 8 cm in thickness, of variable height diagonally, hold up a slab of 6.5 cm, forming a kind of tunnel.

This October, a brand-new contemporary art platform dedicated to showcasing the work of artists from Southeast Asia will debut in Kuala Lumpur. Called ART KL, the initiative, which is the result of a collaboration between Richard Koh Art Advisory and the art consultancy firm Art Anonymous, will be staged at A Place Where (APW), which […]

Clingy, thick-hot summer air followed me into Uffner & Liu gallery on a recent Friday afternoon. But as soon as I reached the top of the gallery’s stairs, I found myself pulled into a more temperate realm. Standing on the top step, peering through a steel grid covering Isabel Horgan’s egg-tempera painting “Mirage” (all works 2026) like the mesh of a fence, my eyes traced a light-dappled path into a verdant forest clearing. A lone figure clad in a spotless white gown appears to be digging, searching for something unseen. This enigmatic, fairytale-esque scene could have been plucked from any number of historical eras, were it not for the gas pipes poking up in the foreground. So begins Marooned.The...

Antonello da Messina, "San Gregorio Polyptych" (1473) (image courtesy Museo Interdisciplinare Regionale via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0)Thieves made off with four major paintings by Renaissance artist Antonello da Messina in under five minutes in a heist at the Museo Interdisciplinare Regionale (MuMe) in Sicily on Saturday night, August 15.

Four works by 15th-century Italian Renaissance painter Antonello da Messina were stolen from the Museo Regionale di Messina (MuMe) on August 15. The theft took place during a religious procession known as La Vara, conducted each year in the city of Messina in Sicily to celebrate the Feast of the Assumption.  The thieves took a […]

Last Friday, officials in the Italian Carabinieri police force announced that the organization had recovered three paintings by Paul Cézanne, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Henri Matisse, all of which were stolen from the Magnani Rocca Foundation in March. The artworks stolen from the museum—located around 12 miles from the city of Parma—included Cézanne’s watercolor and pencil […]

From mysterious lights and malevolent mists to ghosts and spirits like the Diné’s skinwalkers, the desert has long spawned myths and tales of the supernatural. The American West, in particular, is characterized by its vast canyons, plateaus, and mountains, along with the rugged individualism of its inhabitants who make their lives in a landscape many would deem inhospitable. It’s also not difficult to imagine how the atmospheres of powerful monsoons, the unrelenting sun, or the light of a full moon may conjure the uncanny. Wiley Wallace, who is based in Phoenix, harnesses the magic of the desert in glowing acrylic paintings featuring crystals, enigmatic energy forces, starlight, and specters. His current...

Architecture is born from the need to establish a relationship between human beings and the world around them. Before it is shelter, it is a way of constructing a place: a space capable of orienting the body, organizing experience, and making visible relationships that often remain hidden in daily life. It was from this understanding that the São Jorge Lookout emerged.

Thieves have dealt a Sicilian museum a harrowing loss, stealing three of the five surviving devotional panels painted by Renaissance master Antonello da Messina. The assailants broke into the Regional Museum of Messina, also known as MuMem, on Saturday evening, as the port city celebrated the Ferragosto national holiday. Evading the museum’s security system, they took three wood panels that once composed a six-piece altarpiece known as the Polittico di San Gregorio, a seminal work within da Messina’s oeuvre and art history. A fourth, smaller work, depicting the Virgin and Child attended by a Franciscan monk on one side and Christ on the other, was also taken. “It is an extremely serious and significant...

Five pieces by the Brazilian artist Candido Portinari, taken in the same heist last December, remain missing

The fair will move to Dongdaemun Design Plaza for its 2027 edition as its current home is redeveloped

There came a point when I began to see serpents everywhere. The vision of serpents began timidly, with the faint pencil outline of the canopy that defined the site where Alessandro Arienzo, my partner, and I were to design a Serpentine Pavilion. It was then sharpened by the photograph of a crinkle-crankle wall that Alessandro came across online. Soon, I found myself longing for more.

Inspired by both the 20th-century funk art movement in the Bay Area and the visual language of the country of her birth, Iraqi-American artist Maryam Yousif merges ancient cultural heritage and contemporary playfulness in vibrant ceramics. Born in Baghdad, she immigrated to the U.S. when she was young and is currently based in San Francisco. Over the past several years, Yousif has developed her signature Habibti figures, which encapsulate the Arabic endearment for “sweetheart” or “darling,” each adorned with a dress of flowers, landscapes, and other shapes. Many of the works shown here were recently on view in the artist’s solo exhibition at The Pit titled Above Earth, Under The Rays of the Sun,...

American Bach led a stirring rendition of Handel's Ode for St. Cecilia’s Day, full of big questions and even bigger musical highlights.

The commission was clear: to design a singular dwelling, a future house and a true home. The plot itself, however, presented as an ordinary urban lot, regular and flat, without distinguishing features, facing a car-friendly street and set within a hybrid urban landscape, seemingly disordered and shifting depending on one’s point of view.

The TP-LINK LXD project redefines circulation as habitable ground, a one-kilometer continuous landscape that lifts the ground plane and wraps it around three buildings, transforming movement into shared social and ecological space.

The heist, which included several San Gregorio altarpiece panels, occurred on Saturday while the town was celebrating Assumption Day

A Californian through and through, but based in New York for most of her life, she took lessons from ceramics, design, Post-Minimalism, hard-edged abstraction and more, synthesising them into something wholly her own

I could not wrap what’s left of my mind around the concept of “filth and dementia” in opera

Likely reassembled in modern times, the skull was returned by the Netherlands following a grassroots campaign; it will go on display at a community museum in Oaxaca

Philippe Sly is sublime as Messiaen's Saint François D’Assise in Salzburg, though Romeo Castellucci's production could brush up on its catechism.

Renée as Thaïs finding salvation while trudging through the parched Egyptian desert in off-the-shoulder La Croix atelier.

Whether on walls or in boxes, the frisky foxes of Annatomix’s murals and mixed-media sculptures bring vibrancy, playfulness, and just the right amount of cunning. The street artist is known for her vivid geometric animal murals evocative of origami, where planes of color and bold shadows make the animals pop from brick surfaces and wooden containers alike. “I am particularly fond of foxes because I find them so relatable,” the artist tells Colossal. “Sacred to some, vermin to others. Wrapped in mythology and misunderstanding. Fond of trash and screaming into the void.” Although the shapes are simplified, the artist summons animated expressions and dramatic movement. “Longbridge Foxes” (2023)...

In the introduction of a new book titled Great Women Photographers, Fiona Rogers writes, “If ‘greatness’ has long been defined by visibility and remembrance, then the continued documentation and celebration of women’s photographic practice is not only relevant but essential.” The forthcoming title spans a multitude of photographic works from 68 countries and covers nearly 200 years of history. It’s the fourth volume in Phaidon’s series of books commemorating influential women in the artistic sphere, with previous installments focusing on distinct creative mediums such as painting and sculpting. Alex Prager, “Eve,” 2008. Image courtesy of the artist, Alex Prager Studio, and Lehmann Maupin, New...

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Masanori Ushiki’s Website
Masanori Ushiki on Instagram

San Francisco goes baroque with performances of Handel's Alcina, Tolomeo, and Rinaldo.

Caleb Stein  
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
 
Caleb Stein’s Website
Caleb Stein on Instagram

Le sculture di Anna Maria Maiolino (Scalea, 1942) si accumulano. Si ammucchiano per ripetizione e sono costruite da gesti infiniti e dal tatto. Ma questi piccoli gesti quotidiani non sono solamente pratica artistica: visualizzano come la vulnerabilità e la sensibilità, il tatto e la cura, possono essere un atto di resistenza. La Galleria Ovale del Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (MAAT) di Lisbona, Portogallo, racchiude queste sculture create con modalità ripetitiva. La mostra si intitola Poetic Earth. Alcune delle opere sono state realizzate decenni fa, altre sono state create in situ, proprio in questo spazio a forma di foglia.
View of the exhibition “Anna Maria Maiolino. Poetic Earth”,...

Ci sono artisti la cui carriera coincide con una lunga ricerca e altri che, raggiunta una determinata soglia, sembrano aver trovato una lingua tanto riconoscibile da poter attraversare qualsiasi soggetto senza modificarne realmente la struttura. È una condizione rara, che appartiene a quei pochi autori il cui immaginario ha ormai assunto la forma di un universo autonomo, capace di assorbire temi, epoche e narrazioni mantenendo pressoché intatta la propria grammatica. Osservando Le Alchimiste, il mastodontico progetto concepito da Anselm Kiefer per la Sala delle Cariatidi di Palazzo Reale, a Milano, a cura di Gabriella Belli, la sensazione è proprio questa: non quella di assistere a una svolta, quanto...

Leonie Bo  
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
 
Leonie Bos’s Website
Leonie Bos on Instagram

La pittura contemporanea ha spesso trasformato il ritorno in una narrazione di recupero: un’interruzione superata, una perdita convertita in nuova possibilità. When the Sun Shines Again, la prima grande personale newyorkese di Guimi You presso Lehmann Maupin, usa questa struttura per metterla in crisi. La mostra osserva ciò che accade quando il gesto artistico emerge da periodi di sospensione, quando il fare pittura si intreccia con la cura, l’attesa e forme di vita che tradizionalmente rimangono fuori dalla storia della produzione.
Guimi You, “When the Sun Shines Again”, installation view at Lehmann Maupin New York. Photography by Studio Kukla, courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul...

Knokke Art Fair è una delle fiere d’arte più antiche al mondo e la più longeva tradizione internazionale sulla costa belga, un luogo speciale dove l’arte emoziona, giovani e anziani, curiosi ed esperti. Che sia ammirata tra le solenni mura di un luogo deputato o all’aria aperta (con una scultura site-specific), l’arte suscita emozioni, stimola la riflessione e invita al dialogo.
Vista esterna della location di Knokke Art Fair, edizione 2026
Knokke Art Fair è un evento del tutto indipendente, incentrato sulla qualità basata su un’accurata selezione che si svolge prima dell’apertura della fiera, ed è organizzata da Alexander Tuteleers. In questo luogo, il tempo sembra essersi fermato in...

Fino al 30 novembre 2026 il Parco Archeologico di Pompei ospita la mostra Philip Colbert in Pompeii: Pop Mythology. La mostra, curata da Cesare Biasini Selvaggi, espone oltre trenta sculture monumentali dell’artista britannico tra le quali protagonista assoluto è l’astice antropomorfo, alter ego dell’artista e ormai suo marchio riconoscibile.
Philip Colbert, ph. courtesy of the artist studio
Le opere di Colbert sono progettate per risultare subito leggibili e perfettamente compatibili con le aspettative della comunicazione social. Molti lavori si distinguono per l’uso di colori saturi, monumentalità, ironia pop e kitsch con citazioni della classicità ridotte a segni facilmente riconoscibili e nel...

By Betty Ann Brown "The idea becomes a machine that makes the art."—Sol LeWitt Dean De Cocker creates richly conceived, exquisitely crafted, and visually delightful artworks that shuttle between abstraction and conceptual representation. He has long been drawn to machines, from bicycles to motorcycles, cars to airplanes, and formal echoes of these devices appear in his current body of work, exhibited at the Visual Arts Center in the small Central California town of Visalia. Welcome to the...

Xiao Hua Yang  
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
 
Xiao Hua Yang’s Website
Xiao Hua Yang on Instagram

Skeletons, tombstones, and serpents. These are just a few of the iconic images pre-v ailing throughout the works of Morgan Sorensen—all relating to the themes of struggle, sadness, pain, and death. While anyone might agree that these graphic designs would all make for killer band T’s, there’s quite a bit of depth surrounding the artist’s […]
The post Future Relics: The Art of Morgan Sorensen first appeared on Hi-Fructose Magazine.

The body is an obsession for Monica Piloni. Whether it’s a hollowed face in the Samieses series or the eerie dolls depicted in “Ilegais”, a majority of Monica Piloni’s sculptures confront the human form. And while consistently returning to the body may seem confining to some, it’s a pursuit marked by liberation for the Brazilian […]
The post The Disconcertingly Honest Self-Portrait Sculptures of Monica Piloni first appeared on Hi-Fructose Magazine.

This article originally appeared in Hi-Fructose issue 42, which is sold out. See Matthew Grabelsky’s new solo show at Thinkspace gallery here.  Matthew Grabelsky had studied tradition in Florence, lived in the cultural nuclei of Europe, but hadn’t yet found the idea that would set him apart as an artist living in the twenty-first century. […]
The post Human/Nature: Animals Go Underground In the Paintings of Matthew Grabelsky first appeared on Hi-Fructose Magazine.

By Victoria Thomas Photographer and ceramic artist Catherine (Cathy) Opie first shocked and rocked the fine art world with her self-portraits during the late 1990s. Today, her decades of work — often termed confessional — now serve as context for the far more enigmatic Holding Blue installation, on view at Regen Projects through July 3. The Los Angeles-based artist identifies as a leather dyke, lesbian cowboy, an elder, and as "Mama Cathy," with a mustachioed male alter-ego named Bo. Opie is...

“Danger” is a word often associated with the candy-colored work of Los Angeles artist Kristen Liu-Wong. Her feminine tableaus, often rendered in a bright blend of acrylics, paint pen, and marker, have particularly veered into more menacing territory in recent years. “The world is a dangerous place,” Liu-Wong says, in a June interview. “I don’t […]
The post Dont Tempt Me: the Art of Kristen Liu-Wong first appeared on Hi-Fructose Magazine.

On paper, Nathan Reidt’s creatures sometimes reveal themselves through a fog of graphite. He may begin with a “vague, circle-y shape” and shade areas. “Then I just stare at it for a long time and wait for something to pop out and refine that a little and stare at it.” The Philadelphia-based artist explains by […]
The post Personal Growth: the Art of Nathan Reidt first appeared on Hi-Fructose Magazine.

By Betty Ann Brown "Beauty comes from the balance between two and three dimensions, between abstraction and representation — I seek the equilibrium behind changing appearances."—Henri Matisse Jill sykes by Eric Minh Swenson Jill Sykes creates beautiful paintings of botanical phenomena. Like Matisse, she translates three-dimensional objects into two-dimensional images, occupying the territory between abstraction and representation to achieve balance and equilibrium. From a very early age,...

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

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

It is credited with ‘democratising photography’ on a global level – and now Shutter Hub is making its most democratic move yet. As of this month, the organisation will pass into the control of the community it was built for, in what founder Karen Harvey MBE describes as ‘a logical next step: to make things more equitable we need multiple perspectives.’ The announcement follows Karen’s decision to remove paid memberships last year, making Shutter Hub ‘fully open-access and available at no cost to all’. It’s a typically altruistic move from the social entrepreneur: also the founder of Toiletries Amnesty, the award-winning NGO. She was made an MBE in 2024 for services to people living in hygiene...

The week of Art Basel is for me the most compelling moment in the city, and this year it reaffirmed its position as the most closely watched annual event in the international art calendar.

The City Series by Shutter Hub is an ongoing publishing project exploring the people, places, cultures, and contradictions that shape cities around the world. Rather than documenting a location as a fixed subject, the series invites photographers to respond to a city as an idea: something experienced, observed, imagined, and interpreted through the photographic eye.
For its second edition, we turn our attention to London in partnership with Battersea Power Supplies, a new museum and gift shop celebrating Battersea Power Station. We invite photographers from across the globe to contribute to a major publication celebrating one of the world’s most photographed, complex, and ever-changing cities. We want to see...

For an artist to return to painting after life‑altering injury is to witness the human spirit at its most unguarded. In such a moment, understanding the forces that carry you back to the page becomes all‑important, and in Joel Bradish Nichols’ case, the answers lie in the people and pursuits he had cherished. In a coma for months after a near‑fatal accident, his re‑emergence into artistic practice becomes inseparable from a narrative of devotion and determination — a surrounding spiritedness...

By Tabea Martin ‘Me Myself’ brings together four artists — Anna‑Lena Ruff, Debora Schultheiss, Tabea Martin, and Eva Schick — whose works move across differing styles and energies yet find in this art space an unforced coherence. I sense a shared thread of observation and inner dialogue, and a contemplation of natural female presence. The exhibition is currently showing at the Anja Edith Brinckmann Galerie, Basel. From here, the individual narratives invite a closer reading. By Anna-Lena...