Artsy

Maurizio Cattelan, the Italian provocateur known for his art world stunts and pranks, is taking confessions from sinners in the United States. The Confessional, the artist’s latest performance artwork, asks the guilt-ridden to call a hotline and divulge their wrongdoings to the artist. The hotline, which opened on April 2nd and can be dialed by anyone in the U.S. at +1 601-666-7466, will remain open through April 22nd. Cattelan will choose a number of confessions to be livestreamed on April 23rd

MAMA DEE, 2025 Eniwaye Oluwaseyi Zidoun-Bossuyt CNALB 2, 2026 Ramon Enrich Cadogan Gallery In this monthly roundup, we spotlight five stellar exhibitions

Entering the “white cube” of a contemporary art gallery is like entering a liminal state. Artworks appear to float free of context, stripped bare from the noise of the outside world. Though the term itself entered the art world lexicon in 1976 with critic Brian O’Doherty’s three-part Artforum essay titled “Inside the White Cube,” the proliferation of these spaces runs concurrent with the rise of modern art. Vienna’s Secession Building was one of the first major sites to incorporate white walls i

Raja Ravi Varma’s Yashoda and Krishna (ca. 1890s) sold for ₹1.67 billion rupees ($17.9 million) at the Saffronart auction in Delhi on April 1st, becoming the most expensive painting to sell at auction by an Indian artist. It was sold to pharmaceutical billionaire Cyrus Poonawalla, founder of the Serum Institute of India. (All figures include fees.)Yashoda and Krishna portrays a tender scene in which the Hindu deity Krishna hugs his foster mother, Yashoda, as she milks a cow. The young Krishna st

Jeff Koons and French spring water brand Evian have unveiled a new water bottle collaboration. The announcement, made April 1st, is genuinely not an April Fool’s prank.To celebrate the water company’s 200th anniversary, Koons designed a specialty bottle featuring images of his iconic “Balloon Dog” sculptures. Evian, the luxury water brand founded in 1827, released still and sparkling varieties of the collaboration. Both bottles read “200 Years Young: Jeff Koons” beneath the logo. The still versi

American sculptor Melvin Edwards, known for his Minimalist works that incorporate industrial materials to confront and interrogate the history of violence in the United States, died in Baltimore at 88 on March 29th. His gallery, Alexander Gray Associates, confirmed his passing. Edwards is perhaps best known for his “Lynch Fragments,” a series of steel sculptures that use metal chains, pipes, barbed wire, beams, and hooks to evoke the history of social, physical, and geopolitical violence. The ti

For nearly 50 years, Japanese artist Hajime Sorayama has developed a singular practice with his “Sexy Robots” at the center. These chrome-plated women figures feature impossibly smooth, reflective bodies that mirror viewers and their surroundings. The artist first rendered them in painstaking airbrush, then began sculpting them in mirror-polished aluminum and stainless-steel sculptures. In the mid-2010s, he made them life-sized via digital modeling and collaborations with engineers and productio

Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (1937), considered one of the Spanish artist’s masterpieces, might travel to the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in 2026. This week, Catalan-language newspaper Ara reported that the Basque regional government petitioned Spain’s Ministry of Culture to authorize a loan for the painting, to commemorate the 90th anniversary of the bombing of Guernica, or in Basque, Gernika. If approved, it would be the first time the painting has left Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid since 1992. The Bas

The group exhibition “Let Us Gather in a Flourishing Way,” on view at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum in Buffalo, New York, through September 6th, explores how contemporary Latinx artists have reshaped and subverted traditional painting genres in recent years. Their aesthetic innovations respond to shifting cultural narratives, government policies that demonize the Latinx diaspora, and their long exclusion from mainstream art history. The show features 58 artists who approach painting as a flexible l

A masterful tableau by American painter Joan Mitchell sold for HK$137.4 million ($17.6 million) at Sotheby’s modern and contemporary evening sale in Hong Kong on Sunday, March 29. The sale marks the top lot sold across the Hong Kong spring auctions in Hong Kong at Sotheby’s, Christie’s, and Phillips, and is the most expensive work by a woman artist sold at auction in Asia. All prices include fees. The painting, La Grande Vallée VII (1983), sold a few hairs above its low estimate of HK$110 millio

The art market is in a period of transition. 2024 was a difficult year for auction houses, followed by a slow but sure recovery in 2025. Collectors with works to sell have gradually begun to readjust their expectations, but the auction houses are under pressure to deliver results. As a consequence, all buyers at auction need to think smartly about the value of the works being sold at auction and carefully review sources such as estimates quoted by auction houses. Here, I share some notes to keep

On March 22nd, thieves broke into the Magnani Rocca Foundation outside of Parma, Italy, stealing works by Henri Matisse, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Paul Cézanne. Italian officials confirmed the robbery on March 30th, as reported by the New York Times.The stolen works included Renoir’s Les Poissons, an Impressionist painting of three fish on a platter; Cézanne’s Tasse et Plat ⁠de Cerises, a still life of a plate of cherries; and Matisse’s Odalisque on the Terrace, which portrays a nude woman play

A new gallery dedicated to Ruth Asawa’s artworks will open in San Francisco this spring. Her family foundation, Ruth Asawa Lanier Inc. (RAL Inc.), announced that the gallery will be located within the Minnesota Street Project in the city’s Dogpatch neighborhood. The first show, which opens on May 9th, will be titled “Ruth Asawa: Untitled.” Asawa is best known for her ethereal loop-wired sculptures, which use industrial wire to create suspended forms. Born in Norwalk, California in 1926, Asawa sp

The 13th edition of Art Basel Hong Kong concluded on March 29, drawing over 91,500 visitors (1,500 more than the reported figure from 2025) across its five-day run at the Convention and Exhibition Centre. The record attendance underscored the city’s resilience as an art-market hub amid a complex geopolitical landscape. This position was further cemented by a landmark five-year contract between Art Basel and the Hong Kong government, guaranteeing the fair’s exclusivity to the city within the regi

Rocky is going the distance. A statue of the fictional boxing hero, first brought to life by Sylvester Stallone in 1976, has been moved from its longtime perch outside the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA) into the building ahead of a major new exhibition. “Rising Up: Rocky and the Making of Monuments” features 150 works by more than 50 artists to explore the changing role of monuments throughout 2,000 years of art history. The show will run from April 25th to August 2nd. The Rocky Balboa statue

In Ball Watching (1997) by the British painter Hurvin Anderson, a group of boys stand on a patch of grass by a lake. The sky is a hazy blue, the water a vivid turquoise. The green beneath them, as they face away from the viewer, contrasts with the dark gravel behind, isolating them in what feels almost like their own tropical island.Anderson returned to this scene repeatedly between 1997 and 2010, turning a 1983 photograph he took in the overgrown Handsworth Park in Birmingham, U.K., into an emo

With K-pop dominating headlines—especially following K-Pop Demon Hunters’ win for best animated film at the 2026 Oscars—the genre is now making art world inroads. Beloved K-pop boyband BTS performed their new single, Swim, at the Guggenheim Museum in New York for a segment on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon this past Wednesday. The performance celebrated the release of BTS’s 10th studio album, ARIRANG, which was released on March 20th—six years after their last album. The recording shows the

GQ tapped American artist Rashid Johnson to photograph Jay-Z for its new special global issue, which was released on March 24th. The photoshoot accompanies a major interview with the musician and art collector, tied to the 30th anniversary of his debut album, Reasonable Doubt.Johnson is known for exploring Black American life through an extensive body of work that ranges from photography and painting to large-scale installation. For this photoshoot, which captures Jay-Z in contemplative poses, J

Paired together, the terms “art fair” and “beach” can still conjure images of scattered stalls brimming with tourist art or factory-made craft mementos. To be sure, two decades into Art Basel Miami Beach, quality has long since planted itself in the sand. Still, in the serious art world, jet-set leisure locales tend to be dismissed as either unserious or too far removed from art market epicenters to matter. But these assumptions are changing. What’s emerging instead is a splashy new shift: As co

The Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden has announced the first eight acquisitions to be installed in its renovated outdoor sculpture garden. These include works by Mark Grotjahn, Raven Halfmoon, Lauren Halsey, Izumi Katō, Liz Larner, Woody De Othello, Chatchai Puipia, and Pedro Reyes. Japanese photographer and architect Hiroshi Sugimoto of the Tokyo-based New Material Research Library is responsible for the sculpture garden’s redesign, which will reopen in October.The eight work