The Grand Palais in Paris unveiled an enormous exhibition focusing on the final 13 years of Henri Matisse's life and work, featuring abundant examples of his celebrated gouache cut-outs.
We don't eat batteries. They take away the water; they take away life. This pronouncement, in Spanish, appears in a photograph that the artist Tomás Saraceno sent via WhatsApp last month from Salinas Grandes, a high-altitude salt flat in northern Argentina. There, in one of the world's largest lithium reserves, the artist is working alongside 11 Indigenous communities to build El Santuario del Agua (The Water Sanctuary), a monumental work about the global energy transition.
For the Escarrias-petite sisters of African descent born ten months apart in Cali, Colombia-commercial photography was in their family DNA. Their parents established a studio in their hometown that was overseen by their mother after their father's early demise. The siblings learned the family trade, and when they fled the country's civil war in 1958, they quickly reestablished the studio in Buenos Aires.
Sand Art is a game by Kory Jordan and published by 25th Century Games for two to four players ages 10 and up. It takes about an hour to play, and has you collecting resources and then coloring in a bottle, making art in a bottle out of sand, in case the name didn't give away the plot. Gameplay Overview: Sand Art has you gathering and mixing sand, which is used to fill your bottle.
Now, he celebrates his first major presentation in Latin America, in congruence with Mexico City Art Week 2026 and ZSONAMACO, showcasing on an ideal stage inside one of the city's most architecturally layered interiors. Titled The Resident, the site-responsive installation, created during a residency at the Diez Company house, transforms the historic showroom into an immersive tableau where more than 50 works negotiate the boundaries between collectible design, contemporary art, and spatial theater.
An exhibition of Wifredo Lam is about as safe a bet as the Museum of Modern Art can place and still plausibly say that it's a bet on expanding the canon. The Cuban artist is one of the most famous painters of the 20th century, featured in almost every single key show about Surrealism. MoMA acquired his famous painting The Jungle in 1946, a few years after he made it.
From figures with multiple legs and noodles for arms to frolicking trees, Paco Pomet summons the absurd. Known for his uncanny oil paintings rendered mostly in monochrome and enlivened by colorful details of overly stretchy limbs or celestial objects, a sense of nostalgia greets surreal scenarios. The artist often derives his imagery from vintage black-and-white photographs, adding an absurd dimension to history.
I was intrigued by the similarity between two paintings recently featured in the Guardian: the Ecce Homo as restored by Cecilia Gimenez (Cecilia Gimenez, famed for Monkey Christ' mural mishap, dies at 94, 30 December) and Tete de Femme by Pablo Picasso (1m Picasso portrait up for grabs for 100 in charity raffle, 31 December). Perhaps Cecilia's work is in need of a reappraisal. Steve Shearsmith Beverley, East Yorkshire
"The new venue has allowed us to develop the experience of the fair-it lends itself to being more of a destination," Brett W. Schultz, the co-founder and director of Material, tells The Art Newspaper. The fair features over 70 exhibitors this year, with an especially strong contingent of Mexico City galleries that, like Material, have been around for a little over a decade.
OSCAR MURILLO (b. 1986, La Paila, Colombia) has developed a multifaceted and challenging practice that spans painting, collaborative projects, video, sound and installation. Through each body of work, the artist probes ideas of collectivity and shared culture, demonstrating a commitment to the power of material presence alongside complex meditations on contemporary society. A focus on the social dimension that sits on the border between performance and events is also central to Murillo's practice.
This is the site of the Florida state historical marker commemorating Arthur Lee McDuffie, a Black insurance broker and former US Marine whose 1979 beating death at the hands of Miami police ignited one of the most consequential uprisings in the city's history. A plaque unveiled in February 2024 at the site of his attack finally acknowledged the violence that fractured McDuffie's skull and the community-wide outrage that followed.
This year's theme, 'New Directions,' ties the fair to the legacy of John Coltrane and Miles Davis, treating jazz as a working method rather than a metaphor. It's a balance of structure and freedom, shaped by listening to galleries, to collectors, and to the wider moment we're living through. The move to the South Wing at Allianz MiCo reinforces this approach with a more compact, layered layout that sparks encounters across works, media, and generations,