$35 million Picasso painting leads sales at Art Basel 2026. https://ift.tt/ur5Tag8

Art Basel kicked off on Tuesday, June 16th, with an invite-only VIP preview. This year, the flagship Swiss fair is hosting 290 galleries from 43 countries and territories.

As collectors, advisors, and curators filled the VIP day, multi-million dollar sales were quickly reported by galleries at the fair.

The leading transaction of the day was Hauser & Wirth's sale of Pablo Picasso's Le peintre et son modèle dans un paysage (1963), at an asking price of $35 million. The gallery said it had sold 35 works by 4 p.m. local time, making it one of the fair's strongest early performers.

“The first day of Art Basel 2026 has been stellar for Hauser & Wirth, as strong a first day as we’ve ever had,” said gallery president Iwan Wirth.

Gagosian, meanwhile, placed Willem de Kooning's No title (1984) with an important private collection in Asia for a high seven-figure sum, while GRAY sold David Hockney's Studio Interior #2 (2014) for $8.5 million.

Dealers also reported active institutional buying across Europe, Asia, and North America. Isa Genzken's Untitled (2018) was sold by Hauser & Wirth, Galerie Buchholz, and David Zwirner for €1.2 million ($1.39 million) to a European museum and Galerie Georges-Philippe & Nathalie Vallois sold Niki de Saint Phalle's Blue Obelisk (1992) to a private museum in France for “over” €1 million ($1.16 million).

Demand for women artists, particularly from the mid-20th century, also proved strong. Thaddaeus Ropac sold Helen Frankenthaler's Sudden Wave (1982) for around $3 million, White Cube placed Lynne Drexler's Untitled (1960) for $2.5 million, and Pace Gallery sold Lynda Benglis's Power Tower (2019) for $1.4 million. Meanwhile, New York dealer Berry Campbell reported sales of works by Mary Abbott, Judith Godwin, and Pat Passlof.

This year's edition also introduced Basel Exclusive, a new initiative encouraging galleries to reserve significant works for their first public presentation at the fair. Early successes included Almine Rech's sale of a Picasso painting in the $6 million–$6.5 million range and Sprüth Magers's placement of a John Baldessari work for $500,000.

Check back for our full sales report on Monday. In the meantime, we share some leading sales reported at the VIP day of Art Basel 2026.

• In addition to the Picasso sale, Hauser & Wirth sold Cy Twombly's On Returning from Tonnicoda (1973) for $5 million, Sperlonga Drawing (1959) for $2.5 million, and Louise Bourgeois's Les Fleurs (2009) for $2.5 million.
• In addition to Hockney's Studio Interior #2 (2014) for $8.5 million,Chicago gallery GRAY sold a 2011iPad drawing from Hockney's “The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate” series for $650,000 and Kenneth Noland's No End (1961) for $2 million.
• Almine Rech sold a Picasso ceramic priced between $350,000 and $450,000. The gallery also reported sales of works by Serge Poliakoff, Martha Jungwirth, Ha Chong-Hyun, Leonora Carrington, Javier Calleja, Ji Xin, Youngju Joung, and Taryn Simon.
• Thaddaeus Ropac’s sales included Pierre Soulages's Peinture 146 x 97 cm, 31 janvier (1954) for “more than” $3 million and Helen Frankenthaler's Sudden Wave (1982) for “around” $3 million. The gallery also sold works by Lucio Fontana, Georg Baselitz, Alex Katz, and Robert Rauschenberg.
• Sprüth Magers sold Josef Albers's Homage to the Square: Between 2 Scarlets (1962) for €2.5 million ($2.9 million) to a U.S. private collection. Additional sales included works by Donald Judd, Jenny Holzer, Rosemarie Trockel, Cyprien Gaillard, and John Baldessari, whose Basel Exclusive presentation sold for $500,000.
• White Cube sold Doris Salcedo's Untitled (2008) for $1.25 million. In Unlimited, it also sold Tracey Emin's Knowing My Enemy (2002) for £1.25 million.
• Brussels dealer Xavier Hufkens sold a sculpture by Louise Bourgeois for $2.2 million.
• Yares Art sold Helen Frankenthaler's Gliding Figure (1961) for $2 million, Joan Mitchell's Untitled (1958) for $1.2 million, and Larry Poons's Toccata Mambo (2014) for $190,000.
• David Kordansky Gallery’s sales were led by Jonas Wood’s Nintendo #4 (2026) for $1.5 million
• In addition to the Benglis work, Pace Gallery’s sales were led by Robert Longo's Untitled (Gerhard's Forest) (2026) for $750,000.

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This Young Paris Gallery Is Succeeding by Refusing to Play by the Rules https://ift.tt/Bu2kF5Z

In six short years, Ketabi Bourdet has grown from a nomadic gallery into one of Paris’s most ambitious young spaces.

It has outgrown its home in upscale Saint-Germain-des-Près, is expanding into a second space in a new cultural hub in Pantin, France, shows at major art fairs globally, and was the instigator of Maze Design Basel, which has immediately become Basel’s most prestigious design fair.

The gallery began in 2020 as Ketabi Projects, run by Charlotte Ketabi-Lebard, who had just left her post as sales director at French stalwart Galerie Nathalie Obadia. Her first move was an exhibition for painter Inès Longevial at the Grands Serres de Pantin—a former factory being converted into a multiuse space—which drew 10,000 people over two weeks.

After her second show, for French artist Idir Davaine in mid-2021, Ketabi-Lebard gave birth to her second child. Unable to work from home with a newborn and a toddler, she took up a desk at the recently opened gallery of her friend Paul Bourdet, who had left his job as a sales director at Laffanour | Galerie Downtown at the start of COVID to go solo and deal in 1980s French design.

“When you work next to somebody,” Ketabi-Lebard said, “you start talking about who your clients are, the way you work, the art you sell.” We clicked in some way, and we were bringing a new perspective to what the other was doing. She found her own space—22 Passage Dauphine, located in the courtyard tucked away in a passageway in the heart of Saint-Germain-des-Près—in the summer of 2021, and Bourdet was with her “every step of the way,” she said: attending meetings, overseeing the conversion of what had been medical school classrooms. When the gallery opened four months later, they had already decided to merge.

The original pitch was simple: “championing young artists on one side and defending historic 1980s designers on the other,” Ketabi-Lebard said.

La vie dans les plis, 2024
Audrey Guttman
Ketabi Bourdet

Cakewalk, 2024
Jo Fish
Ketabi Bourdet

At launch, this included Longevial and Davaine, alongside artists Audrey Guttman and Julien Saudubray, and primarily works by Philippe Starck on the design side. The roster has since expanded to include emerging artists Jo Fish and Arthur Lemonier, as well as mid-career artist Mie Olise Kjærgaard, and the estates of Guy de Rougemont and Robert Wilson, whose first show since his death in 2025 is currently on view at the gallery.

“We ended up realizing that we had found this kind of line where we really liked to champion these artists who weren’t really appreciated the way they should have been.”

A gallery showing both art and design was unheard of in Paris at the time. “Everybody told us we were insane,” Ketabi-Lebard said of the French art establishment.

But the model has shaped which artists they take on: de Rougemont, for example, was celebrated in France as a designer, but was also an académicien, meaning he was recognized both by the state and his peers as a painter of renown. Yet only a relatively small public audience realized he was also a serious painter. “I think the world is evolving and you can’t really put artists in boxes anymore like you used to,” Ketabi-Lebard said.

This work has paid off, opening doors that stay shut for a lot of young galleries. In 2024, Ketabi Bourdet began showing at TEFAF Maastricht, where most other dealers are older and more established. The gallery will also debut at Frieze Masters this year in London, in similarly rarefied air to TEFAF. “I think the difference between us and all these young galleries that started at the same time as we did is that, now, because we sell this historic work, we have access to these incredible fairs,” Ketabi-Lebard said.

That access, combined with characteristic opportunism, led to the idea that has become Maze Design Basel. Last year, the design fair Design Miami decided to cancel its Basel edition, which typically takes place during Art Basel week.

Seeing as it was too late to apply to another fair, Ketabi-Lebard decided to show in Basel anyway. She dreamed, literally, of the church where Perrotin gallery held its annual party, woke up, and called to ask the price. She booked it without consulting another gallery. “I was like, ‘OK, I’ll just make it work,’” Ketabi-Lebard said. She then rang the major Parisian design dealers—several of whom had stopped showing at Design Miami Basel over cost—and assembled a fair.

After a successful first edition, Maze Design Basel is expanding with a tent in front of the church this year, adding almost 10 galleries to a lineup that includes Jousse Enterprise, Galerie kreo, and Salon 94.

The sky caves in, 2025
Mie Olise Kjærgaard
Ketabi Bourdet

Untitled, 2024
Arthur Lemonier
Ketabi Bourdet

This entrepreneurial instinct is also behind the expansion in Pantin, a suburb just northeast of the Paris boundary. The Grands Serres de Pantin, near where it mounted its first show, is becoming a new development that will include office space, restaurants, and a concert hall, opens in October and has invited the gallery to curate and show in its dedicated art space.

For the gallery, this has come at an opportune time. Rising running costs make it harder to sell works at entry-level prices, and the new space, with a show every two to three months, gives Ketabi Bourdet room to platform its emerging artists to a different audience. “By doing a show in Pantin, we know for sure that the collectors who will come are the young collectors,” Ketabi-Lebard said. Many of them, she noted, already live nearby, having been drawn to the neighborhood over the past decade. “Now we have a second space that will be like a young Ketabi Bourdet,” Ketabi-Lebard said. “It’ll be fun.” Such is how a small gallery grows up.

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8 Artists to Follow If You Like Anish Kapoor https://ift.tt/hqIaMWU

Anish Kapoor is renowned across the world for his light-absorbing and reflective artworks that probe the limits of perception. For more than four decades, his paintings and sculptures have employed a wide array of materials to explore how we experience color, space, and scale.

Institutions across Europe are celebrating Kapoor’s distinctive approach this summer. Through mid-October, the Hayward Gallery in London is presenting a major retrospective of Kapoor’s practice, encompassing paintings and sculptures from across his career as well as colossal new installations. Further large-scale exhibitions of his work are simultaneously being held in Venice at the Palazzo Manfrin, which houses the artist’s foundation, and in Duisburg, Germany, at the Lehmbruck Museum.

Born in Mumbai in 1954, Kapoor moved to London to attend art school in the 1970s, the heyday of the “New British Sculpture” movement. His early works—geometric forms covered in vibrant powdered pigment—showcased his unique take on postminimalist abstract sculpture, as well as a burgeoning interest in the interplay between materiality and perception which continues today.

In 1985, Kapoor began experimenting with concave wall-bound “voids,” mysterious cavities which, rather than empty, appear full of negative space. This shape became a starting point for him to explore two extremes of illusion—reflection and its opposite, absorption. Both inside the gallery space and outdoors, Kapoor started executing beguiling mirror-like pieces out of polished metal which distort the space around them. He also pushed the limits of the light-absorbing qualities of dark pigment, even controversially purchasing exclusive artistic rights to “Vantablack” in 2016. (Known as the world’s “blackest black,” the material captures 99.96 percent of visible light.) Kapoor’s interest in the relationship between form and space has also led to visceral paintings and site-specific installations, such as a massive block of red wax which the artist famously spread through the galleries of the Royal Academy of Arts in London.

Kapoor is one of the most influential artists of his generation, and his preoccupation with perception has challenged artists across the globe to explore the spatial and material boundaries of their work. Here are eight artists who, like Kapoor, encourage us to reconsider with fresh eyes the physical and psychological experience of viewing art itself.

Simon Hitchens

B. 1967, Sussex, England. Lives and works in Somerset, England.

Casting a Shadow Over The Cambrian, 2022
Simon Hitchens
Anima Mundi

British artist Simon Hitchens creates monumental sculptures which push the boundary between presence and absence, reminiscent of Kapoor’s signature exploration of dualities. Indeed, Hitchens was directly inspired by Kapoor: in the 1990s, he even worked as an assistant carving stone sculptures in Kapoor’s studio.

Hitchens’s “Shadow” series are black concrete casts of the shadows cast by ancient boulders. Many of these works incorporate cave-like voids and polished reflective surfaces, echoing Kapoor’s manipulations of material surface and perception. “My sculptures subtly investigate the essence of the things we perceive: the physical world, nature, and our place within it,” Hitchens wrote in an artist statement.

A work from his “Shadow” series, Bearing Witness to Things Unseen (2025), was included in the 2025 edition of Frieze Sculpture, the annual outdoor display in Regent’s Park, London, that coincides with the U.K.’s biggest art fair. He is currently working on a controversial 180-foot-tall monument to Queen Elizabeth II in the north of England, which has generated substantial media interest.

Shirin Abedinirad

B. 1986, Tabriz, Iran. Lives and works in Utah.

Dilemma, 2022
Shirin Abedinirad
Coalition for the Homeless Benefit Auction

Shirin Abedinirad is a U.S.-based Iranian artist whose large-scale mirror installations evoke Kapoor’s colossal optical illusions. She seeks to unite the natural world with ancient spirituality through reflective, site-specific land artworks which take the shape of architectural structures from the Ancient Near East, such as ziggurats and pyramids.

Like Kapoor’s disorienting sculptures, Abedinirad’s installations warp the environment around them by utilizing polished stainless steel to challenge human perception. The reflective surfaces of her works dissolve boundaries between earth, viewer, and sky, as well as serving a deeply symbolic purpose. “For me, the use of mirrors is integral to creating a paradise; mirrors give light, an important mystical concept in Persian culture,” Abedinirad explained on her website.

Recently, Abedinirad was an artist-in-residence at Kates-Ferri Projects, New York, which hosted a solo exhibition of her practice in April 2024. This year, she is completing a residency at the Watermill Center, in Water Mill, New York. Her works have been installed in public spaces across the world, including in the Central Desert of Iran; Golden Spike National Historical Park, Utah; Grand Rapids, Michigan; and Treviso, Italy.

Josiah McElheny

B. 1966, Boston, Massachusetts. Lives and works in New York City.

Studies in the Search for Infinity, 2011
Josiah McElheny
Graphicstudio USF

The Center is Everywhere, 2012
Josiah McElheny
White Cube

Josiah McElheny’s glass and metal sculptures also employ mirrored surfaces to disrupt spatial reality. The New York–based artist often uses mirrors to construct optical fields that appear to extend without limit, trapping viewers and sculptural forms in endless reflection.

McElheny shares with Kapoor an interest in how specific materials can unsettle our perception of space and evoke a sense of infinity. McElheny’s practice tends to explore the nature of reflection through serial arrangement and repetition, as opposed to Kapoor’s emphasis on monumental scale and density. In both cases, however, the artworks destabilize the viewer’s perception through movement and shifting vantage points.

McElheny studied at the Rhode Island School of Design and apprenticed with master glassblowers for nearly a decade. He has exhibited widely, with his most recent solo show at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2024).

Armen Agop

B. 1969, Cairo, Egypt. Lives and works in Pietrasanta, Italy.

Armen Agop, who is currently representing Egypt at the 2026 Venice Biennale, sculpts black granite into abstract forms which exude a remarkable stillness. Like Kapoor, he has a deep interest in the void as an infinite depth and space of contemplation, rather than emptiness.

Born in Cairo to an Armenian family, Agop is now based in Pietrasanta, Italy, and draws inspiration from intersections in these cultural traditions. Pietrasanta is a historic town known for its marble sculpture workshops, while the artist’s use of black granite is a reference to ancient Egypt, which cherished the material for its durability. The result of a slow, labor-intensive carving process, Agop’s sculptures are intended to be experienced as meditative traces of time and are informed by Pharaonic spirituality’s emphasis on cosmic harmony and permanence.

Agop’s works are held in several institutional collections, including the Saudi Arabia Museum of Contemporary Art; Mathaf, Doha; Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah, U.A.E.; and the Egyptian Modern Art Museum, Cairo.

Unyimeabasi Udoh

B. 1996, Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Lives and works in London.

The London-based, Nigerian American artist Unyimeabasi Udoh shares Kapoor’s interest in absence and voids. Their work explores the tensions between visual form and meaning, drawing attention to the shapes and symbols that underpin everyday experience.

For “No Vehicles,” a new body of work that is currently on view at Alma Pearl, London, Udoh transformed road traffic signs into monochromatic abstractions. These pieces take the shape of the empty circle with a border, which serves as the official symbol to indicate that vehicles are prohibited on a specific street in the U.K. Made with cold wax medium, pigment, and iridescent glass beads, however, the “No Vehicles” works have no didactic purpose and instead evoke the sensory qualities of Kapoor’s “voids.” Like Kapoor, Udoh is concerned with how viewers perceive and create meaning from absence.

Since completing their MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2019, Udoh has had solo exhibitions at several contemporary art spaces in London, including Piccalilli, Kip, and Night Café.

Torkwase Dyson

B. 1973, Chicago. Lives and works in Beacon, New York.

Blues 2 (Bird and Lava), 2026
Torkwase Dyson
Pace Gallery

Torkwase Dyson’s towering sculptures explore geometry, environment, and architecture. Like Kapoor, she is concerned with how space is perceived by the body, yet her work also insists that spatial experience is never neutral—especially for Black and Brown people.

Dyson’s work is composed of curvilinear and rectangular sculptures derived from architectural spaces that enslaved people in the U.S. adapted to escape slavery. Gesturing to waterways, attic spaces, and wooden crates, Dyson transforms strategies of resistance and liberation into powerful abstract forms.

The New York–based artist is currently included in the 2026 Carnegie International and the 2026 Venice Biennale international exhibition. Dyson’s multipart solo exhibition at the Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria, will open in October 2026.

Jeppe Hein

B. 1974, Copenhagen. Lives and works in Berlin.

Rotating Mirror IV, 2018
Jeppe Hein
MARUANI MERCIER GALLERY

Twisted Geometric Mirror I, 2016
Jeppe Hein
Galería RGR

The Danish artist Jeppe Hein creates large-scale interactive sculptures and environments which, like Kapoor’s site-responsive works, use reflection and movement to explore the illusory possibilities of materials.

Hein is perhaps best known for his reflective installations, which frequently take the form of mirrored labyrinths, kinetic structures, and monumental polished surfaces that fold the surrounding environment back onto itself. Visitors drawn to Kapoor’s Cloud Gate may find a resonance in Hein’s Balance of Time (2023), a rotating stainless-steel sphere suspended above a Copenhagen rooftop, for example. Its mirrored surface continuously refracts the cityscape and warps the viewer’s perspective.

Hein’s sculptures and immersive environments can be found in museums and public spaces across the globe. He is currently based in Berlin.

Stella Zhong

B. 1993, Shenzhen, China. Lives and works in New York City.

Like Kapoor’s monumental sculptures, Stella Zhong’s recent body of work is concerned with how scale shapes perception. Zhong experiments with large differences in size, from tiny sculptures to large, gallery-filling forms.

Accumulate into a New Star (2026), the centerpiece of her recent exhibition at Trautwein Herleth, Berlin, is an enormous cylindrical sculpture measuring nearly 20 feet long and over 13 feet wide. Coated in matte black paint, the work reduces form to its most elemental state: a surface that absorbs light and heightens sensory awareness. Dwarfing the viewer, the sculpture warps our perception of the space around it, evoking the disorienting pull of a black hole and recalling Kapoor’s own investigations into spatial illusion.

Before her exhibition at Trautwein Herleth, Zhong was included in group exhibitions at Para Site, Hong Kong; The Power Station, Dallas; Leeum Museum of Art, Seoul; and SculptureCenter, New York.

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7 U.S. Museums Where You Can Watch the FIFA World Cup 2026 https://ift.tt/0LGEewT

No Player Shall Gain an Advantage, 2026
Curtis Talwst Santiago
Uffner & Liu

Now that the New York Knicks have finally won the NBA Championships, sporting attention across the U.S. can turn fully to the FIFA World Cup 2026, which got underway on Thursday, June 11th, and runs through July 19th.

Spanning 16 cities across the U.S., Mexico, and Canada, with 48 nations competing across 104 matches, the World Cup is in full swing. Artsy has already polled art world figures for their tournament picks and curated a collection of World Cup artworks for purchase, but the crossover doesn’t stop there: some of the U.S.’s most beloved cultural institutions are getting in on the action.

Galleries, theaters, and lawns are just some of the museum spaces being turned into unexpected and delightful watch party venues this summer. Whether you’re passing through via their permanent collections or want to add a bit of cultural finesse to your football fandom, here are seven museums showing games throughout this World Cup.

Guggenheim Museum

New York

Dates: select matches on Friday afternoons

Frank’s, the pop-up bar tucked inside the Guggenheim’s Wright restaurant, is screening select World Cup matches on Friday afternoons throughout the tournament. The space is freely accessible with museum admission.

It’s a civilized way to watch the game: a drink in hand under the gaze of Frank Lloyd Wright’s spiral rotunda (the bar is named after the architect). At the same time, the museum is also showing Zidane, the 2006 portrait film of the French legend by Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno, on continuous loop in the Peter B. Lewis Theater through July 19.

American Museum of Natural History

New York

Dates: select matches only

The American Museum of Natural History has gone all-in on the tournament with its “World Cup, World Cultures: Celebrating the Community and Science of Sport” programming series.

Watch parties (check which are showing here) are free with admission on the big screens in LeFrak Theater, Cullman Hall of the Universe, and the Global Sports Pavilion in Futter Gallery, running for the course of the tournament. The museum has also launched the “Goal Zone,” an interactive play space with digital simulators where you can test your striking and goalkeeping skills.

Hammer Museum

Los Angeles

Dates: select matches only

UCLA’s free museum in Westwood is hosting live screenings of 16 World Cup matches on big screens in its indoor-outdoor courtyard, running June 24th through mid-July.

Admission, as always, is free, with seating on a first-come, first-served basis. Between matches, you can wander the galleries, grab something from the café, or just linger in one of L.A.’s most underrated outdoor spaces. An RSVP via its website is recommended but doesn’t guarantee entry, so arrive early.

Dallas Museum of Art

Dallas

Dates: May 30 to July 19, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.

The Dallas Museum of Art has turned its Eagle Family Plaza into Sideline, a pop-up café running through July 19th. The matches aren’t screened here, but at the Klyde Warren Park fan zone just steps away. The offering is summery in spirit: dirty sodas, soft-serve margaritas, loaded ice cream sundaes, lawn games, and music.

It’s not technically a watch party, but it’s the closest possible crossover between a world-class museum and live matches.

Whitney Museum of American Art

New York

Dates: Select matches only

The Whitney is pairing live match screenings with its flagship Biennial—an exhibition designed to take the temperature of American art—which, fittingly for a World Cup summer, features plenty of international artists as well as those from the U.S. Free Friday nights (5–10 pm every Friday) will also bring in DJ sets inspired by the nations competing in the tournament, cocktails, and terrace views over the Hudson. (Check here for screening details).

The museum is also running a citywide scavenger hunt in collaboration with artist Anastasia Inciardi, with a limited-edition soccer ball print waiting for anyone who completes it (check here for details).

Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History

Santa Cruz, California

Dates: select matches only

Santa Cruz’s Museum of Art & History has transformed its iconic outdoor red ball sculpture into a giant soccer ball for the summer, and the watch parties inside match the bombastic spirit.

The museum is hosting multiple matches—including Spain v. Cape Verde on June 15th, Argentina v. Austria on June 22th, and the World Cup final on July 19th—with complimentary popcorn and hands-on art activities for all ages at each screening.

El Museo del Barrio

New York

Dates: World Cup Final, July 19th

In East Harlem, El Museo del Barrio is showing the end of the tournament. The museum screened the opening match in collaboration with its neighbour, Africa Center, on June 11th, and will screen the final on July 19th at El Museo itself.

The galleries are set to transform into a watch party from 1 to 7 p.m., free and family-friendly, with art activities and a set by DJ Pablo Romero. The event takes place at the same time as “Sophie Rivera: Double Exposures,” the museum’s first survey dedicated to the groundbreaking photographer. In its courtyard, through September, artist Ronny Quevedo’s large-scale soccer ball sculpture—one of 25 public artwork installations across the city for the tournament—makes for a fitting backdrop.

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Decoding the Art Historical References in Olivia Rodrigo’s New Album https://ift.tt/DdAtn8B

Last week, pop star Olivia Rodrigo’s new album you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love made its eagerly anticipated debut. The 23-year-old singer’s third album is widely read as chronicling the rise and fall of her romance with actor Louis Partridge across 13 standard tracks.

Last week, Rodrigo’s album caught the art world’s attention when the singer revealed she had commissioned artist Chloe Wise to create original cover art for the album. The limited-edition collectible vinyl features Wise’s oil painting Carve our names (2026), which shows Rodrigo clad in a pink babydoll dress and menacingly holding a switchblade in her hand.

The collaboration is just one of the album’s art world crossovers. In fact, art historical references are dotted throughout the album’s visuals if you take a closer look, from suggestions of Edgar Degas’s dancers and Édouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe in the music video for “stupid song” to allusions to Frida Kahlo in “the cure.”

Fans were quick to point out the album’s particular fascination with French aristocratic frivolity. The album’s standard cover, shot by hipster-era icon Ryan McGinley, shows Rodrigo sailing high into the air on a playground swing, wearing the same pink babydoll dress and black platform Mary Janes.

Luncheon on the Grass (Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe), 1863
Édouard Manet
Musée d'Orsay

With its flirty insouciance, the image offers an obvious parallel to the famed Rococo painting The Swing (1767–68) by Jean-Honoré Fragonard. That playful painting shows a young woman in magnifcent pink ruffled gown being propelled on a swing by one man. A second glance reveals that the seemingly innocent image is anything but. The woman’s paramour is hiding in the bushes near the swing, looking up her petticoats. She casts one slipper into the air as she swings upwards. She is, one might notice, seated upon a small cushion.

In an interview with late-night host Jimmy Kimmel, Rodrigo said the photograph, which shows the singer nearly entirely upside down, took over two hours to capture. She also shared that she was seated on a small cushion for the duration of the shoot.

Superfans of the pop star were quick to notice that Rodrigo’s ex-boyfriend, Louis Partridge, recently posted a photograph of The Swing, on view at the Wallace Collection in London, on social media. Given that the painting is considered famous for its sexual innuendo and suggestion of erotic intrigue, the Instagram post fueled new speculation about the end of the couple’s relationship.

The Swing is not the only reference to French courtly life, either. The music video for Rodrigo’s song “drop dead” was filmed in the opulent Château de Versailles, the royal palace of the French monarchy. Directed by Petra Collins, the filmmaker and photographer known for her dreamy girlish aesthetic from the 2010s, the music video pictures Rodrigo in chunky baby blue headphones and a Chloé ensemble of a dusty blue babydoll top, ecru bloomers, and white knee-high socks.

In “drop dead” Rodrigo sings, “You’re lookin’ like an angel on the walls of Versailles.” While we can’t be sure which angel Rodrigo means exactly (Baroque putti can be found on frescoes throughout the palace), visitors to Versailles are on the case.

Filming in Versailles is a rare occasion and Rodrigo likened the experience of the nine-hour overnight shoot to the 2006 film Night at the Museum. The music video certainly has cinematic inspirations, most obviously Sofia Coppola’s hugely influential film Marie Antoinette, starring Kirsten Dunst. The 2006 film, which was also shot in the halls of Versailles, imagined the luxurious layabout lifestyles of the French court set to contemporary music, not ulike Rodrigo’s.

Other landmark films earn nods, too. One unforgettable sequence shows Rodrigo dashing and dancing through Versailles’s halls. The scene is a reference to French auteur Jean-Luc Godard’s 1964 Bande à part. In the film’s most famous scene the three central protagonists gleefully run through the Louvre. That memorable scene was also recreated in Bernardo Bertolucci’s steamy 2003 film The Dreamers.

Not all Rodrigo’s art allusions are locked in the 18th century, however. In the music video for “the cure,” Rodrigo plays a nurse looking to cure ailing hearts. Throughout the course of the video, however, the nurse herself begins to unravel and red strings spool out of her fingertips. Harper’s Bazaar noted the painting’s similarity to Frida Kahlo’s harrowing self-portrait Henry Ford Hospital (1932), which pictures the Mexican artist in a hospital bed, her red veins unfurling from her naked body to objects around her.

Kahlo returned to similar imagery of veins in her striking painting The Two Fridas (1939), which shows the artist twice—once in colonial Spanish dress and once in Indigenous Mexican attire—both connected by red veins.

While Rodrigo’s album laments the disappointments of her relationship with Partridge, Kahlo famously painted The Two Fridas in the aftermath of her divorce from her husband, Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, after his devastating affair with Kahlo’s sister Christina (Rivera and Kahlo would later remarry). It was a time of heartbreak but also success for the artist who traveled to Paris for an exhibition of her work organized by Surrealist André Breton that same year. It was also at this point that the French government purchased her self-portrait titled The Frame (1939), ultimately making her the first 20th-century Mexican artist to have a work enter The Louvre. The Two Fridas became emblem of Kahlo’s fractured identity, a theme Rodrigo grapples with throughout her new album.

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Frida Kahlo–inspired murals to open across London, celebrating new Tate Modern show. https://ift.tt/zo08Bs9

Fridamania is set to sweep across London this summer. As Tate Modern prepares to open its major exhibition “Frida: The Making of an Icon” on June 25th, six large-scale public murals inspired by Frida Kahlo’s life and work have been unveiled across Bankside, where the Tate Modern is located. The works mark the centerpiece of a citywide celebration of the artist’s enduring legacy.

Each of the murals is the work of an emerging artist under the age of 25 as part of “Beyond Boundaries,” a collaboration between Better Bankside and Tate Collective. The murals tap into different aspects of Kahlo’s complex identity, including her Mexican heritage, feminist ambitions, queerness, and her experience of disability. Installed on walls, railway arches, and public spaces throughout the neighborhood surrounding Tate Modern, the murals will remain in place for several years.

The participating artists include Amy Almeida, Eddie Donaldson, Milena De Rosa, Helena Samarasinghe, Gloria da Silva, and Sharoola.

The murals are one part of a wider public art program celebrating the iconic Mexican surrealist, coinciding with the Tate Modern exhibition. Other city-wide programming includes ¡Frida Icónica!, a large-scale installation by artist Alejandra Ballesteros featuring traditional Mexican papel picado. Contemporary artists have also reinterpreted Kahlo’s 1940 Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird, and these public artworks will be on view at locations from Piccadilly Circus and Blackfriars.

The public enthusiasm for “Frida: The Making of an Icon” has been unparalleled. More than 35,000 tickets have been sold ahead of the exhibition’s opening, according to the Tate, making it the highest pre-selling exhibition in the museum’s history. The exhibition will mark the first major London show focused on Kahl since “Frida Kahlo: Making Her Self Up” opened at the Victoria & Albert Museum in 2018.

“The extraordinary demand for Frida Kahlo is testament to the enduring power of her story and her work,” Catherine Wood, Tate Modern interim director, said in a statement. “Positioning Frida as an artist for 21st-century London, we will offer audiences multiple entry points into her world—from the intimate space of the gallery to the shared experience of the public realm.”

Organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, in collaboration with Tate Modern, “Frida: The Making of an Icon” will run through January 3, 2027.

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Our 5 Favorite Artworks Under $10,000 from Liste and Basel Social Club 2026 https://ift.tt/myrDbUR

This week, Basel is coming alive with contemporary art. Anchored by Art Basel—one of the biggest moments of the international art world calendar—this week in the Swiss city promises a dense concentration of art on view. Most of these are even within walking distance of each other (read our guide to Art Basel Week to get up to speed).

While Art Basel doesn’t open to the public until Thursday, June 18th, several fairs are already up and running. Here, we share some choice artwork selections from Liste and Basel Social Club.

Liste Art Fair Basel

Through June 21st

Messe Basel, Hall 1.1, Maulbeerstrasse / Riehenring 113, CH–4058

Art Basel’s steady satellite fair, Liste, is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year. Known for its focus on cutting-edge emerging artists and galleries (early participants have included future powerhouse dealers like David Zwirner), the fair returns to its regular spot in Messe Hall 1.1, a stone’s throw from Art Basel.

Fiker solomon

Becoming What we Wear, 2026

Presented by: Afriart Gallery

Price: $6,000

At Afriart Gallery’s arresting solo booth of works by fiker solomon, Becoming What We Wear (2026) is one of several densely layered tapestries that practically vibrate off the wall. The Addis Ababa–born, Kampala-based artist builds her surfaces from yarn, sisal, raffia, and beadwork, combining materials chosen as much for their symbolic weight as for their texture, evoking labor, nature, and the beauty of the everyday. Here, cascading fringes of natural fiber give way to vivid fields of blue and green, part-abstract composition and part-ghostly garment.

Perhaps surprisingly, solomon’s recent practice begins with taking photos. She moves, observes how her clothing responds, and photographs the result. The shapes her fabric makes by folding, stretching, and shifting become the foundation for artworks that explore how clothing relates to identity. Indeed, Becoming What we Wear itself is shaped like a garment waiting to be worn.

Ju Young Kim

The Light Was Still On Behind the Curtain, 2026

Presented by: max goelitz

Price: €5,400 ($6,268)

On VIP day, max goelitz’s booth was making visitors pause before they entered: a floor-to-ceiling translucent strip curtain, the kind found in airport service corridors or cold storage warehouses, bisects the space, dividing it into a public and a private half.

Titled “Holding Lounge,” the presentation by Korean artist Ju Young Kim transforms the booth into a transit zone, complete with what appears to be a baggage conveyor running through the center. It’s an environment designed to evoke the in-between: the anonymous, semi-public spaces of air travel where strangers briefly share a destination before dispersing.

The Light Was Still On Behind the Curtain (2026), a wall-based sculpture, is mounted in the corner. The work, a bolted metal casing, is similar to a “bulkhead light” used on planes, and emits light through a wire grille. Art Nouveau–style florals decorate the lamp’s glass blue glow. A light built for routine service operations becomes something intimate, even tender, an object carrying, as Kim herself put it, “an atmosphere of care, routine, and hidden operation.”

Mackerel Safranski

The Narration of Night, 2024

Presented by: A-Lounge Contemporary

Price: CHF2,500 ($3,151)

The Narration of Night, 2024
Mackerel Safranski
A-Lounge Contemporary

In sculptures and paintings at the booth of Seoul gallery A-Lounge Contemporary, Korean artist Mackerel Safranski explores themes of death and the body. The Narration of Night (2024) is typical of the artist’s ongoing “Room Tone” series, which depicts moments of presence and disappearance with careful tension.

Here, a solitary figure in dark blue holds something red, raw, and ambiguous up toward her face, while three glass lanterns glow behind her and a pocket watch hangs in the shadows. The mood is somewhere between folklore and horror; the figure’s empty eyes stare blankly at the winged shape between her hands.

Safranski, who draws on a personal history of living with an eating disorder, constructs her paintings from literary sources, news, and everyday observation. The works on view here masterfully hold dread and tenderness in the same frame.

Basel Social Club

Through June 20th

Erdbeergraben 1, 4051

Launched in 2022 as an “alternative” art fair, Basel Social Club has staged editions in open fields, a former mayonnaise factory, and now, an abandoned office. This highly curated, artist-first fair swaps traditional booths for a mazy, four-story experience where art fills unexpected crevices, alongside an onsite gym, indoor golf, and a book fair, among other surprises.

Max Keene

Combo, 2026

Presented by: Pangée

Price: $1,500

Around an unsuspecting corner in a fair venue full of surprises, a selection of paintings by Canadian painter Max Keene—presented by Montreal gallery Pangée—offers a moment of unexpected stillness. Combo (2026), a watercolor-and-wax work on paper over panel, depicts a loose arrangement of bottles on a pale, dusty ground, rendered in muted greens and hazels. Layers of wax blur the forms, giving them the quality of something glimpsed through smeared glass, or scanned too slowly.

That last reference is intentional. Keene’s source material is images made with office equipment, such as scanners and copiers, and the aesthetic created by that process carries into the painting. The bottles are rendered with a flattened, slightly drifting quality of a scanned image and the wax layers add a further blur, as if a document has been copied one too many times.

It’s a fitting contribution to the fair’s “Office” theme, which invites artists to explore the meaning of labor, rest, and time in an era of digitalization and remote work.

Laurian Popa

Broken chair, 2026

Presented by: Jecza Gallery

Price: €7,000 ($8,104)

Broken chair, 2026
Laurian Popa
Jecza Gallery

Laurian Popa’s painting Broken chair (2026) is hard to walk past. Presented by Romanian gallery Jecza in a darkened first-floor room, a painting with a deep crimson ground reveals a chair seat leaning against a wall with its scattered, splintered legs and loose fragments lying strewn across the floor below. The word “INVISIBLE” is faintly inscribed across its surface, hinting at a tension of an object present in its parts, but its purpose already gone.

Popa, who works as both a painter and theater set designer, brings a scene-maker’s instinct to his canvases. Everyday objects are isolated, recomposed, and stripped of their original function until they become what gallery director Andrej Jecza calls “enigmatic presences”—objects “broken from the usual context,” stripped of function and placed somewhere between observation and imagination.

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