Arts

Arts

His exhibitions were titled 'Normal Life' and his paintings were titled 'Untitled'. There were a few exceptions with small subtitles, but the pattern was mostly consistent. This may seem simple at rst glance, but it comes from his intention to step back and keep a certain distance from his work. This attitude also appears in the way he paints gures without tying them to specic people, allowing anyone to see themselves in them.

Outside an abandoned building in New Zealand's second-biggest city, a sign reads slightly haunted but manageable. In the middle of a busy shopping strip, pedestrians are warned to keep to a 2.83km/h walking speed. In another part of the Christchurch, one piece of signage declares simply don't. The baffling boards are not an overzealous new council initiative, but a piece of art designed to play with the way we take authority and signage so seriously.

I started dancing when I was three years old, after asking my mom for ballet lessons as we walked past a studio. From then on, all I wanted to do was dance. That love eventually led me somewhere I, as an introvert, never expected: Hong Kong Disneyland. It started in 2017, when Hong Kong Disneyland held an audition at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts in Singapore, where I was studying for my diploma in dance.

MarieEve Proteau is a Canadian painter based in Austria, known for dreamy, surreal portraits of women whose faces and bodies are partially hidden by plants, hair, veils or patterned shadows. After earlier experiments painting on unconventional supports like retro TV sets, she now focuses on acrylic on canvas and wood panels, using soft gradients, tropical foliage, snakes, tattoos and reflections to explore identity, vulnerability and the parts of ourselves we conceal.

When Marjorie Prime premiered a decade ago, its technology felt abstract and futuristic. Today, it feels incremental. Artificial intelligence is no longer a novelty; it is fluent, responsive, and embedded in daily life. What once played as a cautionary what if now lands as a question of habit: not whether we would use such technology, but why we already do.

Based in France, Roberto Ricci is a self-taught comic artist who works in publishing, video games and movies, as well as in teaching. He's particularly inspired by Metal Hurlant authors, and his latest clients include Dark Horse Comics and Activision. He works in a wide variety of mediums, but particularly likes traditional mediums like ink, watercolour, acrylic and gouache. Below he shares three examples of his work.

Walking along the quayside and crossing the Gateshead Millennium Bridge, they pointed out landmarks to Phoebe as they went: the Tyne Bridge, the Glasshouse International Centre for Music. They arrived, eventually, at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, where Harold Offeh's exhibition The Mothership Collective 2.0 was showing (it's on until 18 January). The show is described as a sci-fi playscape for collaborative encounters and made up of different zones.

Deep in the forest of Salta, Argentina, I watch a group of women in long floral skirts expertly wield machetes. Metal blades as long as my torso whizz through the dry air to make a clearing among the treacherous spiked palo borracho trees, and colossal cacti with finger-length needles. Slowly, methodically, they wrangle the chaguar, another perilous plant, and peel the sharp spines from its sword-shaped leaves with their bare hands.

As you remake New York into a better home for all those forgotten by the politics of our city, a place where working people and immigrants truly feel the power that belongs in their hands, remember this: Arts and culture are the very vehicles through which we express the power to shape our destinies. We must ensure that every member of our communities can actively participate in artistic and cultural creation and access affordable, local arts programs.

If you need any further proof that the world has gone topsy-turvy, look no further than the theft of an icon of the baby Jesus from a nativity scene in Grand Place in the Brussels city center in late November. The nativity scene is the work of German-born artist and designer Victoria-Maria Geyer, who constructed the figures in the scene of Christ's birth not out of wood, as is traditionally done, but out of recycled textiles with faces consisting only of black and brown patchwork with no identifiable features.

The Italian-born, London-based artist Enrico David first attracted attention in the late 1990s with his large-scale, immaculately executed embroideries featuring masked figures striking extravagant poses. Many of these works were bought by Charles Saatchi and exhibited at the collector's eponymous gallery in a 2001 group show titled New Labour. Soon afterwards, though, David changed direction and began producing the enigmatic, psychologically charged sculptures of mutated humanoid forms for which he is now better known.

When considering Miguel Arzabe 's bold, woven works, it's unsurprising that he begins by painting two abstract pieces. Vibrant fields of acrylic spread across his canvases before they're sliced into long strips and reconfigured. Resulting are dynamic compositions that meld art historical traditions with Arzabe's Bolivian heritage, drawing on longstanding Andean imagery and weaving practices.

How do you map time in three dimensions? Cannupa Hanska-Luger's new exhibition at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska asks that question in a choir of material tones, locating both harmony and discordance in Indigenous futurity. Dripping Earth (until 8 March 2026) is an ambitious undertaking, ushering viewers under water, over land and through the magma-hot center of historical turmoil.

Using only her memory and a hyper-vivid imagination, Laura Footes paints intuitively when conjuring complex, dreamy scenes from her life. There are no photographic source materials or preliminary sketches when working in the studio; instead, she relies on the raw emotions and mental images that spring forth when recalling her past. The artist's paintings are rendered fluidly in oil paint to depict extremely personal spaces and scenes, all smartly softened and blurred to let viewers enter her life and mind.

Every year sees increasing interest in Vincent van Gogh, and this is a truly global phenomenon. The Dutch artist is now a megastar in East Asia-in China, Korea and Japan. Here, we review the Van Gogh year in 2025. The big surprise of the year was news that the Van Gogh Museum may have to close its doors unless the Dutch state provides more money to help look after its buildings.

For the 321st anniversary celebrations of the founding of Chiayi City in Taiwan, MVRDV has completed a temporary timber pavilion housing an exhibition on manufacture, craft, and construction with wood. Located across from Chiayi's city hall, the Wooden Wonders pavilion encloses a square courtyard, with the shape of its perimeter structure informed by deep research into the city's timber construction heritage.

In the survey, 45% of artists reported that they earned less from their practice in 2025 than they did last year. (image of Gustav Klimt's "Death and Life" (1915) public domain CC0 BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons , edit Lakshmi Rivera Amin/ Hyperallergic) Findings from a new survey for artists report that 56% of participants are working through debt. That statistic climbed to 59% for those with gallery representation and museum shows under their belt.

The vibrant medium of glass takes center stage in Clearly Indigenous: Native Visions Reimagined in Glass. Featuring more than 100 glass art pieces created by 29 Native American and First Nations artists, this exhibition at the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian in New York also includes works by leading glass artist Dale Chihuly, who first introduced glass art to Indian Country as an instructor at the Institute of American Indian Arts.

Often I'm thinking about the problem of articulating a surface in such a way that it forces the eye to move over the painting in a particular way. The eye can get blocked at junctions: elbows, knees, ankles, etc. So I look for paths that run across the form in order to connect them. I often deviate from anatomical accuracy in order to generate compositional tension. There are also details that command the eye with psycho(sexual) compulsion: lips, ears, nipples, fingertips, eyes etc. I will use the bulges and indentations of musculature as an inflection point to modulate the impact of those signifiers.

Rooted in the American Midwest, Heartland merges the surreal with the everyday in a new series of paintings created in the artist's family garage amid the central Iowa landscape where Schaeuble lives and works. The exhibition takes its title from the term "heartland," first coined by British geographer Sir Halford Mackinder to describe the fertile core of central Eurasia-believed, by him, to be the key to global dominance.

For most of 2025, we were either watching one of the playwright's comedies or bracing for one. In June, we had almost simultaneous productions: Taylor Mac's "Prosperous Fools" (an update of "Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme") and Jeffrey Hatcher's fizzy adaptation of "Le Malade Imaginaire." And, this fall, one version of the comedy "Tartuffe" (at the House of the Redeemer) had barely closed before New York Theatre Workshop premièred its own.

The Union flag that led Nelson's fleet at the Battle of Trafalgar could be bought by a UK museum after an export bar was imposed following its sale at auction. The Union Flag flew from the Royal Sovereign, the ship that led the British charge at the Battle of Trafalgar, and still features burn marks and splinters inflicted during the battle. It was recently put up for sale and sold for £450,000.

I didn't listen to my family as a child when they told me to avoid becoming the bearer of bad news. As part of Hyperallergic's News Team, I've spent much of the last year writing about the impact of President Trump's policies on the most cherished arts and cultural organizations in the United States, including the Smithsonian Institution, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), and the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS).

She transformed ready-made objects, such as an umbrella, into heartrendingly human objects tinged with absurdist humor. "In addition to the acceptance of trying and falling short," Devon Van Houten Maldonado wrote in a review of her work for Hyperallergic, "Floyer's work asks: What are we trying to get right? How do we know what's right?"

"My report provides a clear path, with a range of new initiatives that cover everything from new funding models to fundamental systems reform, that will enable ACE to strengthen its key, positive role in sustaining a world-class creative sector for the future," Hodge says in a statement. In the wake of various culture wars over the past 15 years, Hodge stresses that "the government must maintain and strengthen the arm's length principle at all levels of government to ensure that arts funding is protected from politicisation".