Scientific research shows that rather than a victim of invasion, early medieval Britain was a cultural melting pot

With a new show in Vienna, the artist explains that her work is “about creating the perfect amount of openness for others to become open too”

stacked volumes shape central courtyard at Block Kindergarten
 
Block Kindergarten by SoBa Architects is located in Kunshan, Jiangsu Province, China, within a dense urban environment defined by residential towers and municipal infrastructure. Positioned east of Hongqi Road and north of Zhenchuan Road, the 9,012-square-meter campus is planned as a 21-class kindergarten and responds directly to the site’s spatial constraints through a combination of enclosed architecture and layered landscape design.
 
High-rise housing surrounds the site to the north and east, while a substation, waste transfer station, and emergency medical center occupy the southern edge. In response to these conditions, the project...

in tilda swinton’s performance, garments become living archives
 
Tilda Swinton unfolds a faded pink cardigan in front of the audience at Onassis Ready in Athens. It belonged to her father. She still wears it. Nearby sits a kilt still covered in the white hairs of one of her Springer Spaniels, which has since passed. Olivier Saillard, the French fashion historian guiding the performance, listens as the British artist wonders aloud whether a museum would preserve the traces of fur still clinging to the kilt. Saillard answers no. The hairs should remain. ‘I don’t want to clean this kilt,’ Swinton says. Across A Biographical Wardrobe, the artists treat clothing as emotional evidence.
 
Presented as part...

Alla Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, la prima personale istituzionale italiana di Lenz Geerk, Theatre of the Mind, si presenta come un dispositivo percettivo in cui la pittura regola le circostanze dell’apparizione. La mostra elabora un campo in cui sagoma, spazio e tempo non si danno simultaneamente, ma come scansioni differite, in cui la visione arriva sempre leggermente dopo il proprio accadere. Nei dipinti di Geerk non si dispiegano rappresentazioni semplici. Figure, oggetti e situazioni coesistono in configurazioni instabili e gli elementi non tendono a una sintesi, ma rimangono in uno stato di connessione irrisolta, in cui ciò che affiora non coincide mai davvero con ciò che si compie.
Lenz...

New auction records were set for Pollock, Rothko, Brancusi, Rothko, Miro and Neel

icex and elle decor italia’s fourth appartamento spagnolo
 
Interpreting the contemporary habitat is a priority for architects and designers worldwide. Amid shifting trends, stylistic blends, and the revival of different techniques, contemporary interior design brings together materials, textures, and colors to transform the user experience. Within the domestic realm, a series of realities, tensions, and activities unfold, with design serving as a strong foundation and support system to meet the needs of its inhabitants. During Milan Design Week 2026, ICEX and Elle Decor Italia presented the fourth edition of Appartamento Spagnolo — a spatial framework created to showcase contemporary Spanish interior...

Between the rhythms of global capital and the architectures of digital life, meaning today is produced in spaces where the physical and the virtual are no longer distinct but mutually constitutive. Labour, identity, memory and desire circulate through systems of automation, simulation and networked communication that reshape how experience is felt and represented. Within this condition, contemporary art becomes a site for testing the limits of perception itself – a way of registering how subjectivity is formed under technological pressure. It is here that the work of Cao Fei finds its urgency, staging a world in which utopia and exhaustion, play and infrastructure, coexist in uneasy proximity. Her practice...

Anouska Samms claims a dress she has IP over is included in the museums' costume art exhibition without any credit to her

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In an age defined by the incessant circulation of images, photography has become less a discrete medium than an ambient condition. Pictures arrive and depart with such velocity that looking is often reduced to a kind of reflex – a flicker of attention rather than sustained encounter. The photograph, once anchored in the idea of duration, now behaves like a surface of perpetual present tense, endlessly refreshed and endlessly displaced. However, within this saturation, photography festivals have become increasingly important as counter-temporal spaces – environments in which images are slowed, recontextualised and recharged through proximity, scale and sequence. They function as temporary architectures of...

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Layered ceramic textures evoke erosion and fractured ice
 
pølaire by louve. presents a series of sculptural ceramic forms informed by erosion, melting ice, fractured surfaces, and polar landscapes in transformation. Constructed in stoneware, the collection investigates material conditions associated with fragility, tension, and gradual disappearance through a process of layered surface treatment and hand-built construction.
 
The sculptures draw from the visual characteristics of sea ice, frozen terrain, and eroded geological formations. Cracked textures, uneven edges, and dense material accumulations produce forms that appear suspended between stability and collapse. Each object develops through...

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Whenever I’m stuck in a reading rut, I find that art books of any kind are the only ones that can rescue me. This time, it’s Kory Stamper’s True Color, a transfixing story about the man who originated Merriam-Webster Dictionary’s definitions for colors. A begonia, for him, was “bluer than fiesta, and bluer and stronger than sweet william,” and scotch gray was “duller than mermaid.” What a mind.Hers is just one of the captivating titles on our summer art reading list, complete with fiction, catalogs, photo books, and a graphic novel about stories themselves. Check out the full pile below, and let me know what you’re reading this summer by replying to this email. Titles, and tips for digging...

The artefact is a rare surviving work created by the artist Mayuy more than 1,000 years ago

A year ago, Luis Emilio Romero was living off the Jefferson L train stop in Bushwick, trying to concentrate on his oil painting despite the constant thrum of activity outside his door.But the Jersey City native lucked out when he was accepted in December to the Monira Foundation’s highly competitive residency program at Mana Contemporary in Jersey City. Now he paints intricate, textile-influenced patterns as the light streams into his basement studio with no distractions.“I love it here,” Romero told Hyperallergic during Mana’s Spring Open Studios this past weekend. My paintings imply a meditative spiritual process, and I need a space that is calm. I can just be here and continue building my...

Like a slo-mo Off-Off-Broadway chorus line or targets in a shooting gallery, six painted, heavy, jigsaw-cut plywood panels riffing on the cartoon character Popeye sway an understated dance number, small motors whirring gently behind. In this posthumous exhibition at PPOW, artist Martin Wong’s strange, hybrid take on the classic cultural icon metamorphoses Popeye into architectural forms as much as humanoid figures, painted as curving brickwork, variously weathered. There’s a kind of sociable quality to Wong’s retakes that softens both the brick and the insistent phallic exaggerations he makes of Popeye’s bulbousness. In Wong’s hands, Popeye’s hammy palms, nose, elbows, and even oversized earlobes...

The French government announced Monday morning the team of architects who have been selected to overhaul the Louvre in Paris, concluding a protracted selection process marked by staff strikes and the lingering investigation into the jewel heist.  The Paris office of STUDIOS Architecture will lead the project, which includes the creation of new galleries and a new lobby. The firm, an international collective founded in 1985 with offices in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Toronto, and Washington, D.C., has previously worked on a number of high-profile designs in the arts and culture sector: its recent portfolio includes the well-received renovations of the Frick Collection in New York and the Sainsbury...

Over 100 staff members across departments at the Seattle Art Museum (SAM) have announced their intention to unionize in a recent letter to the Director and CEO Scott Stulen and the museum board, urging leadership to voluntarily recognize the union by Wednesday, May 27. Going by Seattle Art Museum Workers United (SAMWU), the employees have affiliated with Washington Federation of State Employees/AFSCME Council 28, which also represents workers at the Tacoma Art Museum, as first reported by the Seattle Times.Dated May 13, the SAMWU letter to the museum was signed by 59 current employees working in visitor experience and memberships, collections care and art handling, curatorial and exhibition projects, events...

vollebak alters emotions with new sonic jacket
 
Over the past few years, conversations around technology and the body have become increasingly shaped by ideas of optimisation. Devices monitor sleep, stress, productivity, recovery, and movement. The body is treated as something to measure, improve, and regulate. At the same time, a quieter countercurrent has started to emerge across design, fashion, and contemporary culture. One that values sensitivity over performance and emotional attunement over efficiency. Within that shift, softness becomes less an aesthetic than a way of relating to the world through feeling and sensory awareness.
 
Vollebak’s new Sonic Jacket sits within that territory. Known for...

Outside the New Museum's recently unveiled building, the flailing arms and large pink breasts of Sarah Lucas's new public sculpture, "VENUS VICTORIA" (2026), tower over the endless flow of traffic on Lower Manhattan's Bowery.“Mom, why are they all standing there?” a toddler asked a woman hurriedly pushing a stroller near the artwork on Friday, May 15. "They're looking at the sculpture," the woman replied, interrupted by another unsatisfied, tiny-voiced, “Why?”"Because they think her titties are interesting," she responded, laughing and whisking the child past the work.The subversive feminine figure, perched angularly atop a dusty washing machine in bright yellow high heels, will...

Nathaniel Mary Quinn still sounds a little stunned by the whole affair: Last fall, the painter was in the kitchen of his Brooklyn brownstone when he got on a three-way call with Mick Jagger and producer Andrew Watt. By the end of it, he had agreed to make the cover art for Foreign Tongues, the Rolling Stones’ new album, due out July 10.  “I’m standing in my kitchen talking to Mick Jagger,” Quinn told me last week over the phone, “It was surreal.” The resulting image, an unsettling but magnetic composite portrait that folds together the faces of Jagger, Keith Richards, and Ronnie Wood, now sits at the center of the Stones’ global rollout for the record. Quinn also redesigned the band’s famous...

The National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, has reinstated mention of Donald Trump’s two impeachments in a new wall text accompanying his portrait in the institution’s gallery of American presidents. The museum had earlier sparked an uproar by scrubbing all reference to the events as the Smithsonian, its parent institution, came under intense scrutiny from […]

Sotheby’s New York logged a big win last Thursday with the $85.8 million sale of Mark Rothko’s Brown and Blacks in Reds, 1957, a sterling example of the painter’s singular style. This is now the second-highest price the artist has ever fetched at auction. The top spot belongs to his 1961 painting Orange, Red, Yellow, […]

In a distraction-free “dream lab,” Zendaya has carte blanche to create a new wardrobe in a short, stop-motion film written and directed by Spike Jonze. The advertisement, which announces a clothing line the actor co-created with apparel brand On, merges dance and playful optics as she maneuvers through some otherworldly trial and error. You might also enjoy Jonze’s mind-melting dance video for Apple featuring FKA twigs. Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Zendaya Taps into the Creative Process in a Quirky Ad Directed by Spike Jonze appeared first on Colossal.

Two high-profile museums—Hong Kong’s M+, a contemporary art museum that opened in 2021 in a building designed by Herzog & de Meuron facing Victoria Harbor, and the Centre Pompidou, Paris’s National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, which closed last year for a long-planned renovation of its Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers building—have announced a five-year partnership, beginning next year. The plan was announced at M+ on May 15 and reported by the South China Morning Post. Representatives from both institutions were on hand, including M+ director Suhanya Raffel, Pompidou president Laurent Le Bon, and French Consul General Christile Drulhe. The following day, Le Bon and Raffel participated in a...

Rene Matić was named the winner of the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize, one of the most prestigious honors in the field. They received the £30,000 ($40,250) prize for their exhibition “AS OPPOSED TO THE TRUTH,” which closed at CCA Berlin in February. Matić, who is based in London, works across photography, sculpture, sound, poetry, and film to examine social dynamics of race, gender, and intimacy through the lens of national symbols (flags are a recurring motif). Their practice includes an excavation of British subculture, including the “rude boy,” a fashion and ideological formation that emerged in the aftermath of postcolonial resistance movements. Part photography, part sculpture,...

Opened less than five years ago, M+, Hong Kong’s museum of modern and contemporary art, has just announced a multi-year partnership with the Centre Pompidou in Paris, which houses the largest modern art museum in Europe. The Pompidou, which has been closed since last year to undergo renovations that will be completed around 2030, will […]

Hours before a $100 million sculpture by Constantin Brâncuși is to come to auction, Pace Gallery announced that it had taken global representation of the Romanian modernist’s estate. Pace, one of the biggest galleries in the world, added Brâncuși to its roster as a retrospective for the artist continues to travel the world. Organized by the Centre Pompidou in Paris, which debuted the exhibition in 2024, the retrospective is currently on view at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin and arrives later this year at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Brâncuși is among the most beloved European modernists. His work is prized for its simplicity: He crafted a bird from an arc of marble, a sleeping head in...

Christie’s and the Arts Council Collection celebrate 80 years of the Collection bringing together works by David Hockney, Sonia Boyce, Peter Doig

More than one hundred employees at the Seattle Art Museum (SAM) on May 13 announced their intent to unionize in a letter delivered by organizers to museum director and CEO Scott Stulen, the Seattle Times reports. The staffers, who are spread across more than twenty front- and back-end departments, are organizing under the name Seattle […]

The Hayward Gallery to present a major solo exhibition by acclaimed American artist and activist Nan Goldin: You Never Did... Read More

Ibiza has long been associated with beaches and nightlife, but for a different kind of traveler it reveals itself as... Read More

On a day pretty much like any other, a girl named Prue is out in a park with her baby brother when the unthinkable happens: he’s swept off by crows and taken into a mysterious forest known as the Impassable Wilderness. Joined by her classmate Curtis, Prue ventures into the magical, sylvan realm where animals have developed a complex society of their own. The search for Prue’s missing sibling plots the course for an epic adventure that is the heart of the young adult novel Wildwood. Soon, the story lights up the big screen. The forthcoming feature-length film is based on an original story by Colin Meloy—the lead singer of The Decemberists, for the fans out there—and illustrated by Carson Ellis, who also...

The Courtauld Gallery will present Hepworth in Colour, the first exhibition dedicated to Barbara Hepworth’s use of colour

Sculpture in the Garden: The Storytellers transforms Worcester College’s historic grounds into a five-act sculpture exhibition

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Uluru stands at the heart of Australia’s “Red Centre.” The sandstone monolith, rising 348 metres above the desert, has stood for 550 million years. The natural wonder is a symbol of Aboriginal land rights and a source of spiritual connection with the continent. Artist Bruce Munro (b. 1959) visited the site in the 1980s. The trip, which began as part of a journey around Australia, marked a turning point in both his life and artist trajectory. The location inspired Field of Light, an installation of 50,000 solar powered stems, which illuminates an area the size of seven football fields. The piece, first opened in 2016, was intended to be a one-year exhibition, but has since received 750,000 visitors...

I have very few opportunities to see real-life opera divas, but when Natalie Dessay chose to debut her first Traviata at Santa Fe, there was no way I was going to miss it.

Si entra subito nel cuore del tema centrale osservando le immagini del fotografo colombiano Felipe Romero Beltrán: Bravo è il titolo del progetto che esplora il dramma dell’attraversamento del confine tra Messico e Stati Uniti, costituito dal fiume nel titolo, il Rio Bravo. Eppure, non vediamo figure umane nell’atto di passare il guado, ma soprattutto oggetti, sedie, materassi, pentolame, cortili senza persone, reliquie religiose, e luoghi che ci fanno capire che qualcuno da lì è passato. Come uno spettro. Fantasmi del quotidiano è il leitmotiv della XXI edizione del Festival della Fotografia Europea, realizzata con la curatela di Walter Guadagnini, Arianna Catania, Tim Clark e Luce Lebart.
Felipe...

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...

C’è qualcosa di controcorrente, nel senso migliore del termine, in una manifestazione che occupa un intero weekend per parlare di terracotta. Eppure, Buongiorno Ceramica!, giunta alla sua dodicesima edizione il 23 e 24 maggio 2026, è una delle poche occasioni in cui il termine “diffuso” – spesso abusato dal lessico delle arti contemporanee – riacquista una misura concreta e verificabile. Sessanta comuni italiani, più di cinquecento eventi, due giorni: la ceramica esce dalle vetrine, scavalca i recinti delle fiere specializzate e torna a occupare la strada, i cortili, le botteghe aperte come fossero stanze di una casa provvisoriamente condivisa.
Bottega ceramica a Montelupo Fiorentino (Toscana),...

The air held a real charge that night in SF's War Memorial Opera House.

The English soprano, famed for her interpretations of twentieth-century composers like Strauss, Britten, and Poulenc, as well as Mozart and operetta, died yesterday only a few days after announcing that she had a terminal cancer.

The Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize, established in 1996, celebrates exhibitions and publications that have made “a significant contribution to photography in the past 12 months.” It’s a major moment in the cultural calendar, and, over the years, has spotlighted seminal names such as Arthur Jafa, Deana Lawson, Lorna Simpson, Richard Mosse and Susan Meiselas. This year’s winning artist is Rene Matić, for the exhibition AS OPPOSED TO THE TRUTH, at CCA Berlin, Germany, which ran from November 2024 to February 2025. The show, as Shoair Mavlian, Director of The Photographers’ Gallery and Chair of the Jury, describes, comprised “raw and honest photographs” that “bring a story of...

Erin Morley, Lawrence Brownlee, and Malcolm Martineau put on a jolly good show at the 92nd Street Y.

This is one of those rare performances that makes you believe that everything Verdi was greater Way Back When.

This season, photography exhibitions across Europe and the US are using image-making, installation and archival practice to confront some of the defining questions of our time: who controls representation, how technology reshapes tradition, and what it means to preserve identity under political and social pressure. From Amsterdam to Phoenix, artists are examining the tensions between truth and fiction, resistance and erasure. Presented at Huis Marseille, Fondazione Prada, Kunsthalle Bremen, Fotografiska Stockholm and Phoenix Art Museum, these exhibitions approach urgent contemporary issues with intimacy and ambition. Yumna Al-Arashi: Body as Resistance  Huis Marseille, Amsterdam | Until 21 June ...

All’interno del programma di 480 Site Specific, nello spazio di EDICOLA480 con la direzione artistica di Massimiliano Bastardo, il dipinto I secondi soldati di Gabriele La Torre – pittore palermitano, nato nel 2003 – si impone come un’immagine in apparenza semplice che, a uno sguardo più attento, rivela una costruzione percettiva instabile e stratificata. L’olio su tela lavora su un immaginario immediatamente riconoscibile, quello dei soldatini di plastica, ma ne sovverte la funzione narrativa, trasformandolo in un campo di tensione sospeso tra memoria, ripetizione e dislocazione.
Gabriele La Torre, “I secondi soldati”, olio su tela, 100×85 cm, 2026, ph: Danilo Donzelli Photography, courtesy...

Activist, educator and artist Mary Lovelace O’Neal, whose monumental, richly hued lampblack paintings expanded abstraction’s possibilities, died on May 10 in Mérida, Mexico. She was eighty-four. Despite a fruitful career spanning six decades, Lovelace O’Neal was known primarily as an “artist’s artist” until recent years, when she began to achieve international acclaim. Informed by flatness, […]

Fusing elements of Persian architecture with Christian altarpieces, Arghavan Khosravi grapples with the structures and ideological strictures that shape our lives. The Iranian artist has long reckoned with women’s fight for equality, particularly amid censorship and religious dogma in her native country. Through vibrant gradients that radiate across her sculptural paintings, Khosravi entices the viewer into urgent, ongoing conversations about resistance and control. Opening today at Uffner & Liu, What Remains presents a dynamic new body of work that captures moments of tension and strife. Figures, in Khosravi’s works, are often restricted and tethered to domestic objects and space, and critically,...

In Everything Now All At Once at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, the title says it all. Dozens of works from the likes of Nick Cave, Ai Weiwei, Nina Chanel Abney, Wangechi Mutu, and many more represent a slice of the contemporary art world in which globalism and diversity are at the fore, and the lessons of the past inform how artists imagine the future. Interestingly, the pieces are also decidedly analog, especially noteworthy as these works—alongside a few other multimedia and photographic additions—have been made throughout the era of light-speed technological advances. Painting and sculpture, in particular, have long been treated as the nexus of “high art” in the Western canon. The...

Typically gravitating toward dreamy palettes of soft blues, grays, and oranges, Scottish artist Andrew McIntosh opts for a sanguine red in a new body of work. The crimson paintings continue McIntosh’s otherworldly landscapes that cast familiar forms like mountains and valleys in a strange, uncanny light. Glowing orbs float among the craggy terrain and veil the scenes in mystery. “These works sit somewhere between memory and invention—familiar landscapes interrupted by something I don’t fully understand,” the artist says. “Whitney” (2026), oil on linen, 170 x 130 centimeters On view at School Gallery, these bold pieces comprise the artist’s solo exhibition, I Hope This Transmission Finds You...

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Presso Fondazione Sabe per l’arte a Ravenna, la mostra Molteplice senza disordine curata Enrico Camprini espone tre artisti di generazioni diverse che si confrontano e si pongono in relazione con lo spazio espositivo creando una sintesi che ragiona sul dialogo tra il luogo espositivo e l’atmosfera creata dalle opere.
AA.VV., “Molteplice senza disordine”, veduta della mostra, Fondazione Sabe, Ravenna, 2026. Foto di Daniele Casadio, courtesy Fondazione Sabe per l’arte
Le opere degli artisti coinvolti si confrontano in sguardi che si ibridano e si influenzano a vicenda. Alice Cattaneo invade lo spazio espositivo con l’opera site specific Se questo margine è di tempo, che si allarga sulla...

By Lacey Argus It's easy to miss the bite-sized rainbows orbiting around the travertine surfaces of The Getty Center's Main Entrance. Some people breeze by them, eager to visit the various galleries that lie just beyond them. Others dash through them as they rush into a crowded bathroom line. Some briefly glance upward at the towering glass light prisms suspended from the atrium enclosing the space. But not children. If you spend an afternoon amongst these rainbows, you're sure to notice...

W hen we connect over Zoom, Hrafnhildur Arnardóttir, aka Shoplifter, is in Bentonville, Arkansas preparing to unveil Xanadu, a large-scale, outdoor installation at Format Festival. “It’s going to be like an alien forest that people at the festival roam around in and space out,” says Arnardóttir of the installation, consisting of ten poles ranging in […]
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