healthcare space design by ZAHA HADID architects
 
A consortium led by Zaha Hadid Architects has been selected to design the new Malpensa Hospital in Lombardy, Italy. The project will unite the existing hospitals of Gallarate and Busto Arsizio into a single medical campus serving the area between Milan and Varese. Commissioned by the Lombardy Regional Health Authority, the project is conceived as a contemporary healthcare environment for a population approaching one million residents.
 
The winning team led by Zaha Hadid Architects with RINA, Studio Plicchi, WSP, STI Engineering, and BC Building Consulting brings together architectural design with engineering and healthcare planning. The proposal responds to...

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Taichung Art Museum by SANAA opens to the public
 
SANAA’s Taichung Art Museum, part of the newly completed Taichung Green Museumbrary, opens today, December 13th, 2025 in Taiwan. The project integrates the city’s central library with a metropolitan art museum, establishing a combined cultural facility that presents a new institutional model.
 
The Taichung Green Museumbrary sits on the northern edge of Central Park, a 67-hectare green space within the 254-hectare Shuinan Trade and Economic Park, formerly a military airport decommissioned in 2004. Positioned at the heart of this redevelopment area, the project has been described as Taiwan’s most significant cultural initiative of 2025. SANAA’s design...

Transformable and wearable shelter garment with tent
 
Shelter Wear presents a wearable outer garment that transforms into a livable tent with sleeves that double as backpacks. Created by Tokyo-based fashion student Yoon Myat Su Lin, the design concept originates from her memory of an earthquake in Myanmar, where many people were suddenly displaced and left without safe, temporary shelter. That moment stayed with her, forming the basis of a garment that functions beyond being streetwear. 
 
Instead of looking at fashion as just a form of creative expression, she channels practicality, asking how a wearable object can support someone during a crisis. At the center of the project is a simple idea: clothing is...

Maria Balshaw, who has led London’s Tate group of museums since 2017, has announced that she will step down as director in spring 2026. Balshaw, who previously served as director of the Manchester Art Gallery and the Whitworth Art Gallery, was the first woman to lead the organization, succeeding Nicholas Serota, who helmed Tate for nearly three decades. […]

The artefacts, most dating from the 4th century BC, include a terracotta statue of a woman and elaborate red-figure vessels

The HeadlinesCALLING TIME. The director of Tate in London, Maria Balshaw, will step down in spring 2026 after nearly a decade in the role, the institution said in a press release. Balshaw, who joined in 2017 after leading Manchester Art Gallery and the Whitworth, succeeded Nicholas Serota following his 29-year tenure. She called her time at Tate a privilege and said the institution is well positioned for new leadership. During her directorship, Balshaw oversaw major exhibitions including “Van Gogh and Britain,” “Yoko Ono,” and “Sargent and Fashion.” Her final project will be a large-scale Tracey Emin survey at Tate Modern next year. Tate highlighted Balshaw’s efforts to diversify the collection...

TIME Magazine announced that its 2025 Person of the Year is the collective “Architects of AI.” But Chicago-based illustrator Jason Seiler's representation of a handful of those honored for the magazine cover has generated more ire than the selection itself. While none of us are happy to see Elon Musk's face associated with the award for the second time, many are taking aim at Seiler's reimagining of one of the most famous historical photographs in the world. “Lunch Atop a Skyscraper,” taken in 1932 by an unknown artist, depicts 11 construction workers seated along a steel beam, part of the skeletal framework of what we now know as 30 Rockefeller Plaza, suspended some 850 feet (~259m) in...

The CEO of a Canadian national stepped down on Thursday following a special commissioner’s determination that she had mistreated staff throughout her decade-long tenure, using slurs and misogynistic language to refer to senior leadership. “In early December as the board was gaining a better understanding of the report—its timing, content and the expectations of government—the board confirmed CEO Marie Chapman’s decision to retire, and effective today, she has stepped away from her role,” Cynthia Price Verreault, chair of the Museum of Immigration at Pier 21’s board of trustees, wrote in a letter to stakeholders and staff on Thursday. The Office of the Public Sector Integrity Commissioner released...

Joan Semmel’s paintings of contorted women — sometimes realist, sometimes surreal or abstracted — are mesmerizing and beautiful, but they are also disturbing. When her work is framed as such, the focus is typically shifted to the viewer: It unsettles because we’re used to media depictions of young, taut bodies, or it forces us to confront our own relationship with beauty standards and aging. I think that flattens her work. These paintings are far weirder than they get credit for.The 16 paintings in the one-room exhibition Joan Semmel: In the Flesh at the Jewish Museum constitute a sampling of various series from her half-century career, with a section in the center dedicated to works the artist...

Sylvia Snowden in 2024 (photo by Nick Singleton, courtesy White Cube)Sylvia Snowden has a curiosity about the human condition that begets active, engrossing paintings. Her canvases hover delicately between figuration and abstraction, evoking abundant movement and energy. Standing before the artworks feels electric — like something in you is being activated, previously suppressed emotions riled to attention.Snowden and I met in November, after her solo exhibition opened at White Cube New York. On the Verge gathers 20 of her paintings across two floors, on view through December 19. Our conversation began with her affinity for color and its potency, a lesson from childhood imparted by her beloved mother, who...

LONDON — Who was Lee Miller? There were two of her, really.One was the photographer featured in a current retrospective at Tate Britain, who was born in New York in 1907, moved to Paris in 1929, and then to London. She went to Europe in restless pursuit of the desire for others to believe in everything she had to offer — her multiple gifts as an artist, for example.The other was a model. Modeling in New York in the 1920s was her opening gambit. She had the looks and poise to succeed and her talents were quickly recognized. She arrived in Paris in the flapper era — sinuously tall, her hair close-cropped. My goodness, that wonderful androgynous look! She seemed made for the part — and the historical...

Outside an entrance to the Second Avenue subway station in Manhattan's East Village, commuters and passersby are confronted with an artwork portraying Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers detaining the Statue of Liberty.Longtime New York City street artist Doug Groupp, who uses the moniker Clown Soldier, created “Attack on Liberty” on November 26. The black and white spray-painted work binds immigration crackdowns to an erosion of civil liberties more broadly. Reached by Hyperallergic, Groupp said he was paid $120 to create the work, but declined to state by whom."It visualizes a fear shared by millions: that the values we claim to stand for — justice, sanctuary, and freedom — are...

“Toward the Light: Artists for the Ali Forney Center,” an exhibition at David Zwirner gallery in New York, was only on view at the gallery for four days, but during that short time, it raised $950,000 for the Ali Forney Center, a nonprofit that runs a 24-hour drop-in center for queer youth and offers assistance with housing, education, job training, and medical care. Its curator, art adviser Stephen Truax, initially had the goal of raising $350,000, slightly more than was raised at last year’s benefit exhibition. He more than doubled that amount. The previous two iterations of this event were co-organized with Sotheby’s auction house, and were smaller in scope, with six works by six artists available...

What do you want to express that you feel you can’t in everyday life? That’s the question composer and producer Max Cooper posed to his audience in hopes of unearthing some of the hidden parts of our shared emotional landscape. In return, he received more responses than expected, many of which tapped into passionate displays of pleasure and pain. “It was like finding a secret window into our collective psyches,” he writes. These submissions spawned a tender project in collaboration with musician Félix Gerbelot and animator Masanobu Hiraoka. A multi-part endeavor spanning an album and digital installation, On Being opens with a poignant music video. “It started from the sound of Felix Gerbelot’s...

The Taichung Green Museumbrary—new contemporary art museum and public library complex in Taichung, Taiwan, that may count as the first institution ever to have a portmanteau for a name—opens tomorrow. The long-awaited institution houses both the Taichung Art Museum and the Taichung Public Library, both of which will be connected by a roof garden known as the Culture Forest. “This integrated design reflects the museum and library’s vision of learning as a shared, living practice,” Yi-Hsin Lai, the inaugural director of the Taichung Art Museum, told the Art Newspaper. The complex, set within the city’s 165-acre Central Park, is on the site of a former military base and airport. The Museumbrary was...

After years of negotiations starting with a visit by the late Pope Francis in 2022, the Vatican repatriated a wealth of Indigenous cultural treasures that were unveiled this week in a warehouse belonging to the Canadian Museum of History. The institution in Gatineau, Quebec—around a 2.5-hour drive west of Montreal—is currently storing the 62-object handover while Indigenous elders and experts take stock of each piece and investigate its origins. As reported by the Canadian Broadcasting Company (CBC), Vancouver Archbishop Richard Smith, representing the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops, said at a news conference on Tuesday, “We recognize that reconciliation is not a single event but a long...

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An unwavering desire to play with scale, permanence, and fragility recurs in Rebecca Manson’s practice. The New York-based artist (previously) is known for magnifying the minuscule and preserving fleeting lifeforms in porcelain, a material regarded for both its resilience and delicacy. These dichotomies emerge through dynamic sculptures of butterflies and moths that drape down walls and across floors in dramatic displays. Each wing is comprised of tens of thousands of small, hand-crafted pieces Manson and her team refer to as “smushes.” Layered into undulating compositions, these individual pieces mimic the lush texture of scales and the protective patterns of disguise some species use to hide from...

The Pakistani-British artist rose to fame in the 1990s with her “concise humour and profoundly understated visual language”

At Art Basel Paris, “the art world seemed to be staging a rally for art created by flesh-and-blood people”

At 51, Maryam Rohani Vakili is exploring the symbolism of Iranian doors and knockers in increasingly abstract ways. They've been experimenting with layering, texture, and color, especially red and turquoise, to express the tension between memory, silence, and identity. The studio feels vibrant and alive with this dialogue between tradition and contemporary abstraction. They're also deeply engaged with a smaller ongoing project, Care & Share, where they create tiny traditional ceramic shoes....

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Humour, lessons for artists, dark fairy tales, light, words, and William Morris

When designer Pedro Neves was an undergraduate student, he attended an advanced seminar during which students were charged with creating an alphabet using modular elements. “As someone with minimal experience with type design, I was struck by the excitement of generating letterforms simply by using pre-existing modules,” he says in a statement. Little did he know that the assignment would spur an international participatory and educational project. In his faculty role at the University of Illinois Chicago’s School of Design, Neves organized a graduate course emphasizing modularity for letterform design and typographic compositions. LEGO turned out to be an ideal system, comprising individual elements...

MVRDV embeds a civic pavilion within the hills of Pujiang
 
MVRDV completes Pujiang Platform, a timber event pavilion and viewing structure embedded into the hills east of Pujiang, southwest of Chengdu, China. Conceived as an architectural extension of the terrain itself, the 414-square-meter pavilion uses earth-covered timber arches to reconstruct the silhouette of a hill that was previously flattened, while framing panoramic views toward the growing town below and the Qionglai Mountains beyond.
 
Set within a landscape that is rapidly transforming as Pujiang develops into a new sustainable town, the project aims to offer residents and visitors a place for gatherings, ceremonies, and civic use, and to do...

This spring's Talk of the Town is craving your operatic dominance and your submissions by January 15.

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From raunchy Tom of Finland merch to a sponsorship deal for a Victorian loo—here are some of the arty items that have caught our eye this season

Ben Luke talks to the architecture critic and Gehry biographer Paul Goldberger, to the FLAG Art Foundation's founder and to Rebecca Shaykin, curator at New York's Jewish Museum

Tate has announced that Maria Balshaw will step down as Director in Spring 2026

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Handowin He’s Website
Handowin He on Instagram

In recital for the Los Angeles Opera, tenor Ben Bliss makes the case for the next stage of his career.

Reporting from concurrent openings at Asia's legacy biennials

Ceramics are one of the oldest artforms, with evidence of pottery dating back to prehistoric times and archaeological examples found... Read More

Among the works most finely attuned to this shifting landscape is Floating Soil by SSG Collective.

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Taichung Green Museumbrary, located in Taiwan’s second largest city, Taichung, will officially open to the public tomorrow, Saturday 13th December

Camille Walala and the language of color in the public realm
 
Bold blocks of color and chunky geometric forms define The Walala Lounge, Camille Walala’s permanent public installation in downtown Bentonville, Arkansas. Spread across the streets of the market district, the project transforms benches and planters into oversized sculptural steel elements, using saturated hues and graphic contrasts. Curated by justkids, the pieces work collectively to establish a visual cadence along the street, transforming moments of rest, waiting, and gathering into shared encounters with form and color.
 
Walala describes the project as an opportunity to move beyond surface-based work and into shared, physical...

Christmas kitsch is great fun, of course, but Christmas can be just as wonderful without it, as this great singer proves.

This winter, Tate St Ives presents a major new exhibition from Lithuanian-born artist Emilija Škarnulytė, best-known for moving-image works that blur the boundaries between documentary and the imaginary. The show features films and immersive installations that explore the fluidity of time and the invisible systems shaping contemporary life. The building’s size allows Škarnulytė’s work to unfold as a fully immersive environment. Architectural structures in the gallery will invite visitors to view a single film from a series of different perspectives and scales, from the macro to the micro. Here, Škarnulytė foregrounds the ways mythology and technology can intertwine as a transcendental force. Each...

Bart Nelissen is a visual artist whose work explores how we make sense of an increasingly overwhelming digital world. In his Aesthetica Art Prize-shortlisted series Datascapes, Nelissen takes cloud-like digital images and breaks them down into small geometric fragments – tiny squares that act like pieces of data. He layers and recombines these fragments, building new visual structures that reveal hidden patterns, echoing the human effort to find meaning in the chaos of information that surrounds us. Nelissen is fascinated by our instinctive drive for progress and our belief that innovation and technology can solve the problems we face. At the same time, he critically examines the darker side of...

Avvicinarsi all’atmosfera della mostra Rivers and Rooftops, la prima personale di Alfie Caine da Massimo De Carlo London, è come sfogliare una cartolina d’infanzia ritagliata e ricomposta: il cornicione di una casa, la strada che scende verso il mare, la tovaglia con le arance tornano alla memoria, familiari ma rinnovati da una cromia che li rende apparizioni sospese, lucide e insieme sottilmente irreali. Alfie Caine, formatosi nell’architettura e poi ritrovatosi alla pittura, lavora con lo spazio come fosse materia prima del desiderio; le sue tele non registrano soltanto un luogo, ma lo costruiscono come una condizione del sentire.
Alfie Caine, “Rivers and Rooftops”, 2025. Installation view,...

Frank Gehry, a towering figure in the worlds of architecture and design, died at his home in Santa Monica, California, on December 5, after a brief respiratory illness. Over the course of his eight-decade career, Gehry altered the look of modern cities with his ebulliently sculptural public buildings, becoming one of the best known and […]

The Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (CCS Bard), in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, has named curator, writer, and educator Hamza Walker the winner of the 2026 Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence. The honor, presented annually since 1998, recognizes “outstanding curatorial achievements of individuals bringing innovative thinking, bold vision, and dedicated service to the field of exhibition-making,” per […]

The UC Irvine Langson Orange County Museum has named Kathryn Kanjo as its new director. Kanjo, who for nine years has served as director and CEO of the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, will be the first leader of the institution, formed this past October when the University of California, Irvine, took over the Orange County Museum of Art and […]

It’s somehow been more than a year already since we launched Colossal’s new site design, and it’s spectacular to hear your feedback about how you peruse and use the site. Whether you click on things of interest in our newsletters or encourage your students to explore thousands of articles about artists, nature, science, and visual culture, we want you to keep coming back—and learning—again and again. That’s why we’re continuing to build out the Colossal Art Glossary! This month, we’ve added 10 new entries: Activist Art Bauhaus Brutalism Community Art / Social Practice Dutch Golden Age painting Land Art / Environmental Art Magical Realism Tondo Vanitas WPA / Federal Art Project Teachers...

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From sequins, glass beads, rhinestones, plaster, paint, and more, Jorge Mañes Rubio sculpts new narratives from ancient tales. Drawing on the motifs of Spanish illuminated manuscripts, as well as family heirlooms and pop culture, the artist explores the relationship between past and present, reinterpreting religious imagery into unexpected forms like beaded basketballs and other functional objects. One recent work, “La Noche que Desvela una Luz sin Medida,” fashions a black safety glove used by motocross racers into a form that evokes a medieval gauntlet. It’s embellished with flame motifs, twisted cord, glass, and tiny medallions that the artist’s great-grandmother collected at monasteries across...

Gulfshore Opera's vigorous production of Carmen answers a familiar question.

It would be difficult to find a better description for Ambroise Thomas’s newly-recovered Psyché, recently heard in a new recording from Palazzetto Bru Zane, than the one uttered by her suitors: "Charmante Psyché!"

Head of Research at Framer Framed Emily Shin-Jie Lee reflects on how ‘Shapeshifters’ rethinks museological conventions, foregrounds opacity and care, and gathers artists whose practices challenge inherited colonial frameworks. Installation view of ‘Shapeshifters: On Wounds, […]

A landmark recognition for the neurodivergent artist whose dynamic sculptures and drawings reshape contemporary abstraction The winner of the Turner Prize 2025, Nnena Kalu, in their exhibition at Cartwright Hall. The winner was announced at […]

A single oak tree can support more than 2,300 species: lichens clinging to bark, birds nesting in branches, butterflies drifting through leaves and a vast underground network of fungi. In Of the Oak, now open at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, acclaimed collective Marshmallow Laser Feast (MLF) makes this extraordinary biodiversity visible. They have created a “digital double” of Kew Gardens’ majestic Lucombe Oak – one of its oldest trees – using LiDAR, radar and CT-scanning. The resulting immersive video and sound experience is as enchanting as it is educational, showing how energy and carbon flow into the soil, whilst aiming to inspire a renewed connection with the natural world. The piece now travels...

 
From 19 January – 02 April 2026, we’ll take over four floors of the ARB building with work by 120 photographers from around the world, transforming the space and covering the walls with hundreds of images printed by our favourite newspaper print partners Newspaper Club. As an added bonus for 2026, the last two weeks of the exhibition will also see it featured as part of the Cambridge Festival.
© Nicola Di Nella
The selected photographers exhibiting in the Shutter Hub OPEN 2026 are:
Stewart Alexander, Rachel Hope Allan, Alessandro Ascenzi, Chris Avis, Wendy Bagnall, Madina Baymirzaeva, Jan Beesley, Alan Bennett, Sarah Bird, Susan Bittker, Ana Blumenkron, Rick Blumsack, Anton Bou, Victoria Braithwaite,...

Bringing together works that orbit around the sun as image, index, and metaphor, curator Murtaza Vali offers a compelling lens on ten years of experimentation at 421. SUN™ becomes an elemental archive through which the […]

Crossover, la mostra di Anastasia Sosunova curata da Chiara Nuzzi presso ICA Milano, è un laboratorio per la decifrazione e risemantizzazione di codici visivi stratificati e complessi. Temi macroscopici quali la religione, il crollo del blocco sovietico, dei suoi stati satelliti e il conseguente avvento del mito borghese-capitalista, si fondono con fattori microscopici della narrazione storica, come il dato autobiografico e il folklore locale. Attraverso una prospettiva che unisce lo studio delle immagini all’etnologia e all’antropologia, Sosunova elabora una narrazione entro cui si muovono tradizione ed economia di mercato, folklore e produzione, valore culturale e valore monetario, “amore, fanatismo,...

At 72, Elaine Carr is painting with gratitude. They lean towards more positive themes now. Their paintings tend to be a composition of beautiful colors that most times seem animated. Known for their bold colors and sometimes playful themes, Elaine's paintings are colorful compositions of still life, landscapes, and portraiture. They're primarily self-taught, having painted since childhood, but now in their retirement years they paint with a goal of creating works that evoke good emotions....

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Joshua Dudley Greer’s Website
Joshua Dudley Greer on Instagram

The Turner Prize, established in 1984 and named after the radical Romantic painter JMW Turner, has long reflected the shifting currents of British contemporary art. Each year, the award spotlights those pushing the boundaries of creativity, urging audiences to reconsider both the art world and our modern society. Previous editions have brought early recognition to the likes of Damien Hirst, Lubaina Himid and Laure Prouvost. Now, NNena Kalu joins that illustrious list. The artist was named as the 2025 winner in an awards ceremony in Bradford last night. It makes Kalu the first artist with a learning disability to receive the renowned accolade. The jury commended Kalu’s “bold and compelling work”, praising...