#contemporary-art

#contemporary-art

Dad Gets Tattoo So His 6-Year-Old Daughter Wouldn't Feel Different Man Spent $13,000 To Turn His Apartment Into A Baked Beans Museum "Strength": Street Artist Painted 3 Murals On A Local Hospital As A Tribute To Spain's Health Workers Colombian Makeup Artist Creates Mind-Boggling Optical Illusions Artist's Gorgeous Mural on Sunken Ship Changes with Tide Levels Chris Keegan by Cosmic Creatures "The Traveler Saga": Explore The Beautiful Outworlds And Creations With Gorgeous Concept Art Of Tyler Smith

I don't know what you want to know, says Anne Imhof, three-quarters of the way into our interview. Her cautious smile, between curtains of jet black hair, changes into a sceptical pout. I have just quoted a headline at Imhof, one of Germany's most important contemporary artists, that described her 2025 New York show as a bad Balenciaga ad.

The artists José Parlá and Claudia Hilda, his wife, live in a former fire station in Fort Greene surrounded by memories of Cuba, which Parlá's family fled in 1970 and where Hilda lived until recently. "There's a lot of magical realism here, a big mix of Cuban traditions and religion," says Parlá, pointing to an icon of la Caridad del Cobre, the island's patron saint, in the kitchen. "We cannot move her!"

Join us on Thursday, January 29, 6-9 PM for the opening reception of Tabi Tabi Po: Come Out with the Spirits! You Are Welcome Here, featuring the work of renowned artist Cece Carpio. Through Indigenous oral traditions and narratives, both autobiographical and imagined, this landmark exhibition highlights the power and necessity of storytelling. As a cultural, political, and relational practice shared across cultures, storytelling brings attention to the sacred and often overlooked spaces essential to understanding how all things come to be.

The Courtauld has announced plans for two new contemporary art galleries and a reading room at London's Somerset House, supported by a £10m gift from the Blavatnik Family Foundation. The donation brings the Foundation's total support for the institution to £20m. The Blavatnik Contemporary Galleries are expected to open in 2029 as part of a wider campus redevelopment, costing £82m. This redevelopment will also involve the construction of a new Blavatnik Reading Room inside the Courtauld's remodelled library.

First in a Chinatown mall beneath the Manhattan Bridge and then in a nondescript third-floor room nearby, Francis Irv exhibited a heady, multigenerational mix of artists from the United States and Europe, variously established, obscure, and on the rise. Megan Marrin showed alluring paintings of 1960s celebrities (replicas of photo souvenirs shaped like clothes hangars) last fall. Win McCarthy placed bricks, plastic takeout containers, and bedding on the floor in a charged, melancholic 2024 exhibition.

While the local scene blows up for SF Art Week and the FOG Art + Design Fair, the folks at Minnesota Street Projects have got their own thing going on: "a new free alternative art fair showcasing the best established and emerging contemporary art galleries in the Bay Area, alongside long-standing Bay Area galleries." That includes Marrow Gallery, presenting new work from Stephanie Robison (so cool!), Hiroshi Sato, Mercy Hawkins, Mae Aur and Ronald Hall.

We also hope you had a lovely MLK Day! There's always a risk that even the most powerful legacies can be hollowed out into just a date on a calendar. But it's during these trying times that cultural institutions can help bring the urgency of that history back to life, revealing how it continues to shape and undercut our lives.

This year's recipients, who come from ten different countries and a range of disciplines, are Álvaro Urbano, Ambrose Akinmusire, Andrea Peña, Ayoung Kim, Bárbara Sánchez-Kane, Emeka Ogboh, Marco da Silva Ferreira, Pan Daijing, Payal Kapadia and Pol Taburet. Apart from representing the visual arts, they include a jazz trumpeter (Akinmusire), filmmaker (Kapadia) and a dancer (Da Silva Ferreira, a former elite swimmer who won Portugal's version of the reality television show "So You Think You Can Dance" in 2010 and is now an established choreographer).

After 13 years leading the Kochi-Muziris Biennale in India, the artist and curator Bose Krishnamachari will step down from his roles as president of the Kochi Biennale Foundation and member of its board of trustees. In a statement, Krishnamachari cited "pressing family reasons" for his decision. His departure is not expected to impact the sixth edition of the biennial, For the Time Being, which opened last month and will run as scheduled until 31 March.

For the first time in its 62-year history, the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art will present a survey of artists living and working in Connecticut. Today, Tuesday, January 13, the institution named the 40 participating artists in the inaugural Aldrich Decennial. The exhibition, Aldrich Decennial: I Am What Is Around Me, which is expected to recur once every decade, will open on June 7 and run until January 10, 2027. A complete list of artists is included at the end of this article.

Alexander Basil has created a cosmos. His instantly recognizable style and established color palette implicate the subject matter in a process of calm and sure scrutiny. Central to this cage is the familiar figure that reappears, on a quest through daily life. The protagonist is both the subject and object of reflection that morphs in and with his surroundings, travelling worlds beyond the room he finds himself in.

Running from 15 January to 22 February, the as-yet-untitled show includes works from across four decades of Ai's career. Among them are his large-scale Lego works based on famous artworks, including versions of Surfing (After Hokusai) and Water Lilies, a reinterpretation of Monet's triptych of the same title. To mark his India debut, he will also show new Lego works based on Pichwais, intricate cloth paintings depicting devotional Hindu subjects, as well as homages to the country's storied Modernist painters V.S. Gaitonde and S.H. Raza.

Nigerian American photographer Mikael Owunna's life-size, shimmering images of ancient deities in outer space set the tone for "UNBOUND: Art, Blackness and the Universe," MoAD's stellar exploration of the African diaspora in the eternal and the infinite. "UNBOUND," which runs through Aug. 16, 2026, is MoAD curatorial chief Key Jo Lee's most ambitious exhibition to date. Over three floors, she presents an African diaspora that is "unbound" from earthly and chronological conceptions of diaspora.

And at Santa Clara's Triton Museum of Art, there's not one but four exhibits opening in January, ranging from slashed-and-bleached abstractions to uncanny paintings of suburbia that hearken to Edward Hopper and David Lynch. That latter show, opening Jan. 10, comes from South Bay artist Jonathan Crow who grew to fame with drawings of U.S. vice presidents wearing octopuses on their heads.

Kathleen Goncharov, a longtime curator who served as the United States Commissioner for the 50th Venice Biennale, has died at the age of 73. The news of her passing was announced by a group of friends and her partner, poet and artist Charles Doria. She died of natural causes in her Boca Raton home on New Year's Eve. Goncharov is remembered as a doting friend, a champion of artists, and a gifted and intuitive curator.