#raul-torres

#raul-torres

"We're constantly striving to strike a balance between work that respects academic rules of composition, established visual codes and good readability, with something more spontaneous, adventurous, playful, even naive."

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.

At first glance, this curatorial oversight is hardly surprising. After all, Picasso was an atheist and Communist supporter whose ever-shifting practice seemed to chafe against centuries of religious art. Indeed, in a well-known episode from the 1940s, Picasso personally confronted Henri Matisse for accepting the Vence chapel commission.

In 2025 the Prado, which is home to such masterpieces as Velazquez's Las Meninas and Hieronymus Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights, was visited by 3,513,402 people, an increase of more than 56,000 from the previous year. Visitor numbers have risen by more than 816,000 over the past decade. While some museum bosses would be toasting such a success, the Prado's director, Miguel Falomir, is treating it with caution. The Prado doesn't need a single visitor more, he told a press conference on Wednesday.

If you've walked around any of France's cosmopolitan cities in recent years, you're sure to have come across some stunning murals. Painted onto the side of buildings, in hidden corners, and just about anywhere an artist can paint, street art is booming. We're not talking old-school graffiti here, hastily sprayed names on walls, and anti-social stuff like that. Today's street art is commissioned by city or town councils and created by prominent street artists from around the globe says Suzanne Pearson.

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.

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.

Taking over the colourful Casa Gilardi, Luis Barragán's last commissioned residence, built for the advertising executive Francisco Gilardi in the mid-1970s, the German artist Gregor Hildebrandt transforms the house's stylish rooms with an ever-expanding exhibition of his enigmatic works across various media. Known for transforming outmoded analogue recording media-including audio cassettes, VHS tapes and vinyl records-into paintings, sculptures and large-scale installations, the Berlin-based artist's conceptual works explore themes of memory, nostalgia and the physical representation of intangible sound and sight.

"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.

Artist Ayelet Gal-On does not just paint; she builds, layering oil, acrylic and plaster on canvas. Gal-On's signature subjects for "Taken by the Wind, Swept by the Light," her upcoming solo exhibition at Gallery 9 in Los Altos, are white dresses that appear to hang on a line, defying the stillness of the canvas. "I love the process of playing with color," says the artist.

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

In her manifesto, Borderlands/La Frontera, Anzaldúa presents what she calls a new mestiza consciousness, which advocates for ambiguity and moves "toward a more whole perspective, one that includes rather than excludes." Groundbreaking when it was published in 1987, this theory pushed queer, feminist, and cultural scholars to consider how identity is both fluid and informed by several overlapping factors. It also helped to lay the groundwork for branches of study like ecofeminism,

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.

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.

"The four large-scale canvases that constitute the core of ' Misfits' maintain the fundamental elements of the artist's visual lexicon while radically reconfiguring compositional structure and spatial organization. These works advance a design freedom that is simultaneously forceful and controlled, achieving a balance between expressive intensity and formal restraint. As such, the series marks a decisive moment in Nuñez artistic evolution and possibly an initial step toward a more profound and transformative reorientation of his practice."

These paintings reveal the layers of history that undergird modern Los Angeles. Yaanga Lies Under the 101 imagines the city's earliest Tongva inhabitants as they made their home on the land that, in the modern day, runs beneath the Hollywood Freeway. Campos's process mimics this archaeological layering: each canvas begins with a screenprinted underlayer that is then painted over in acrylic, and then once again layered with screenprinted details.

Regina Silveira has spent the better part of three decades considering the relationship between media and meaning, particularly as it relates to Latin America. First presented in 1997, "To Be Continued..." features 100 black-and-white reproductions of photos, newspaper clippings, propaganda, advertisements, and more. Silveira nests each image into an oversized puzzle piece, which cuts off faces and scenes to leave fragments of pop culture icons, flora and fauna, and even the occasional mugshot spliced next to one another.

The artist is known for his absurdist paintings of animals with overly long legs, contorted bodies, or myriad mutant-like heads or limbs. They're often set amid woodlands or meadows evocative of 18th- and 19th-century academic landscape paintings or depictions of formal hunts. Instead, both domesticated and wild animals graze as normally as they would without dozens of heads or udders attached in unnatural places around their bodies.