Uffizi Galleries in Florence announce $57 million transformation. https://ift.tt/FJQ7VIR

Florence’s Uffizi Galleries have announced a two-year, €50 million (roughly $57 million) transformation of the Uffizi Gallery, Palazzo Pitti, and Boboli Gardens, which the institution has described as an operation “without precedent” in scope.

Uffizi director Simone Verde unveiled the plans this week, saying the roughly 40 individual projects will allow the museum to “present an even better image to the world than it does today,” according to a statement reported by The Art Newspaper.

Rather than closing the museum, the work will proceed in stages so visitors can continue to see the storied collection throughout construction. With the revamp, the Uffizi is rethinking how it presents its holdings, and galleries are being reorganized chronologically and geographically. The museum’s star attractions will also receive more devoted space. The museum has already offered a preview of that approach with its redesigned rooms devoted to Sandro Botticelli, where The Birth of Venus (1486) and La Primavera (1477) now face each other in new hermetically sealed cases meant to improve both conservation and viewing conditions.

Other planned work includes a new introductory exhibition space on the history of the collection at the Uffizi, budgeted at €2.4 million ($2.8 million), along with a lighting overhaul in the Palatine Gallery and new air-handling systems and accessibility upgrades across the complex. At Palazzo Pitti, the largely unused “Piano degli Occhi,” a 1,000-square-meter space on the palace’s top floor, will be converted into new exhibition galleries for €4.9 million ($5.7 million). In the Boboli Gardens, the 17th-century “amphitheatre” and the Fountain of Neptune will undergo a €3 million ($3.5 million) restoration.

Half of the budget will come from ticket sales, and half from the Italian government’s culture ministry, The Art Newspaper reported, with the various projects initiated or planned since Verde took over the Uffizi’s administration in 2024. Additional elements have already been completed include the restoration of the Flemish Masters rooms, which reopened in July 2024. A spokesperson for Verde told the publication that finished projects were included in the announcement “out of a sense of seriousness, to avoid triumphalist communications before concrete results had been achieved.”

The transformation follows other recent changes across the complex. These include a new entrance at Palazzo Pitti that opened in July and the reopening of the Vasari Corridor, the elevated Medici passageway connecting the Uffizi to the Pitti across the Ponte Vecchio bridge, after an eight-year restoration completed in December 2024. The Uffizi separately announced a €50 million ($57 million), eight-year masterplan for the Boboli Gardens in 2022, focused on climate resilience and accessibility, distinct from this new initiative.

The investment underscores the challenge facing one of the world’s most visited museums: preserving centuries-old architecture and masterworks by Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian, and Caravaggio while accommodating millions of visitors each year.

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Our Favorite Artworks under $2,500 at Foundations https://ift.tt/5ckXhMO

Every art collection starts with one work—and Foundations 2026, Artsy’s annual showcase of emerging art, is the perfect place to start. Here, you’ll find original paintings, photography, sculpture, and prints by more than 240 rising artists at over 85 galleries worldwide, all priced to put a first artwork—or a new addition to a growing collection—within reach.

Buying your first piece doesn’t need to be complicated. It can be as simple as finding a piece that stops you: a color that matches a memory, a subject that makes you laugh, a texture you want to live with. After all, art is, and should be, intensely personal.

Here, our team has combed Foundations for the works under $2,500 we can’t stop thinking about.

Under $1,000

Vanessa McKernan

Embrace, 2025

Presented by Abbozzo Gallery

Price: $850

Embrace, 2025
Vanessa McKernan
Abbozzo Gallery

If I’ve learned one thing in this life, it’s that there’s nothing better than a hug when things get tough. This exquisitely colored painting by Canadian painter Vanessa McKernan captures an embrace that fully conveys why they can be so transporting. Resting in each other’s arms, the two central faces—parent and child, perhaps—have their eyes closed, their expressions intimate and peaceful. Between the expressionist figures in the center and the floating orange flowers, I find the whole scene immensely calming: something from a dream in which everything works out okay in the end.

McKernan is based in the Ottawa Valley countryside, where she says the surrounding nature influences her work. Personally, I can see the influence of Pierre Bonnard in her color choices, as well as in the abstract gestures toward greenery in the background.

—Josie Thaddeus-Johns, associate director of content

Under $2,000

Maremi Andreozzi

Genevieve Estelle Jones, 2026

Presented by Adah Rose Gallery

Price: $1,200

Genevieve Estelle Jones, 2026
Maremi Andreozzi
Adah Rose Gallery

Featureless silhouettes are the subjects of Maremi Andreozzi’s series “A Life Well Lived.” Genevieve Estelle Jones (2026) is one such protagonist. Even though the painting’s face doesn’t have eyes to catch yours, you can still feel her stare. I quickly discovered that Jones was an amateur woman naturalist in the 1800s, often called “the other Audubon,” referring to the famed American conservationist. Andreozzi lifted details from existing portraits of Jones—the perfect collar, the dangling earrings—and dropped them into this surreal portrait. The silhouette is surrounded by symbols of what Jones was all about: crisscrossing twigs and delicate bird eggs accompany her silhouette, a nod to her overlooked legacy. I chose this work because I love all things Victorian, and Genevieve Estelle Jones is a reminder that there’s always a surprising figure or fact (the more obscure the better) that can light up my day.

—Sydney Gelman, copywriter

Maja Sisse

Trout Circle, 2024

Presented by Galleri Zeuthen

Price: $1,750

Trout Circle, 2024
Maja Sisse
Galleri Zeuthen

I’ve always had a soft spot for sculptures that play with our sense of perception. That’s why I was immediately drawn to Trout Circle (2024) by Danish artist Maja Sisse, on view in Galleri Zeuthen’s Foundations presentation. Three ceramic trout chase one another nose-to-tail, forming a near-perfect ring, enmeshed in what could be a synchronized swimming routine. Their wide, glassy eyes and slightly gawky expressions make the whole arrangement feel as though they might break formation at any moment.

What I love most is Sisse’s handling of the ceramic surface. Mottled blues, greens, creams, and rusty browns give the fish the weathered look of something dredged from the bottom of a river, while the carefully rendered scales and fins give each one a wonderfully tactile presence. Caught in this circle, these trout seem destined to keep following one another forever. It’s the kind of sculpture I’d happily let swim circles on my shelf.

—Arun Kakar, senior art market editor

Under $2,500

House of Goblin

Yon Oak, 2025

Presented by Cob

Price: £1,500

Yon Oak, 2025
House of Goblin
Cob

I was drawn to this perfect ceramic sconce, an outlier among the works in Foundations, for the way it marries form and function. Shaped like an oak leaf with fluid, biomorphic lines—reminiscent of 20th-century artist Jean (a.k.a. Hans) Arp—it feels timeless and a little strange, spare yet whimsical. I’ve only just learned about House of Goblin, the English artist collective behind it, whose hand-built ceramics merge utilitarian and sculptural approaches. They source many of their glaze materials from natural sites across the U.K.; here, glazes interact, as a matte, mossy green gives way to a bubbly texture, like a pale minty foam.

The title adds another layer of charm: Yon Oak references Alfred Tennyson’s 1889 poem “The Oak,” which follows a tree through the seasons as a metaphor for aging and the strength we gain over time. It’s a lot for one small object—and still, it’s a lovely perch for a candle.

—Casey Lesser, director of content

Polina Osipova

Arrow from archives, 2025

Presented by JO-HS

Price: $2,500

Arrow from archives, 2025
Polina Osipova
JO-HS

I first learned of Polina Osipova from a video of the artist operating Pearl Mechanism 2 (2020), a whimsical contraption she’d made with strings of pearls. The video was mesmerizing, delightful, and the perfect introduction to her nontraditional practice.

Born in Russia, Osipova now lives and works in London, and she had a solo exhibition, “A Living Inheritance,” with JO-HS in New York earlier this year. Osipova comes from a Chuvash family, a Turkic ethnic group with a long, complex history in Russia and Central Asia, whose culture and language were shaped by Mongolian, Arabic, and Persian influences.

Arrow From the Archives (2025) is emblematic of her most recent works and based on this heritage. Here, the artist transforms imagery from family photographs into childlike objects. She uses embroidery and needlework from Chuvash traditions as a way of stitching her ancestral knowledge into these works. I particularly like Arrow From the Archives because its plush softness is counterbalanced by the sharp point of the arrow. The bow and arrow are objects of childhood imagination, as well as of protection.

—Katie White, senior staff writer

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5 Artists on Our Radar in August 2026 https://ift.tt/Rb90v8L

No hay sol en el Verano, 2026
Almo Talud
Eric Firestone Gallery

Summer Bloom, 2026
Alex Maceda
Half Gallery

“Artists on Our Radar” is a monthly series focused on five artists who have our attention. Utilizing our art expertise and Artsy data, we’ve determined which artists made an impact this past month through new gallery representation, exhibitions, auctions, art fairs, or fresh works on Artsy.

Alex Maceda

B. 1989, San Francisco Bay Area. Lives and works in New York City.

Downward Dog, 2026
Alex Maceda
Half Gallery

Artist Alex Maceda draws from her Filipina heritage and devout Catholic upbringing in her small-scale biomorphic paintings. The artist has likened these works to domestic shrines or altars, intended for meditative purposes. Now in “Sun Salutations,” the artist’s first solo exhibition with Half Gallery, on view through August 13th, Maceda takes inspiration from transcendental women artists such as Hilma af Klint and Agnes Pelton who pursued spiritual dimensions through artmaking.

Maceda lived and worked for a time in California’s Joshua Tree, finding, like many other artists before her, serenity in the solitude of the desert. In “Sun Salutations” the sunburnt colors of that landscape are on full display in 10 joyful paintings rendered in the dawn-like hues of yellows, pinks, and reds. The show’s title refers to the yoga sequence of poses traditionally performed at sunrise, synchronizing the breath with movements to awaken the body and build internal heat. She seeks a similar rhythmic alignment through her artworks.

Maceda holds an MFA in painting from the New York Studio School (2026), an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business (2018), and a BA in classical studies from Dartmouth College (2011). She has had solo exhibitions at Herron House (2024); Dorado 806 Projects (2024); Upper Market Gallery (2024); and 29 Palms Art Gallery (2023). This year, her works have been featured in the group show “Austin Friends Fair” at Half Gallery and “Disappearing Boundaries” at Harper’s.

Almo Talud

B. 1985, Miami. Lives and works in Medellin, Colombia.

Viaje al Guamo, 2026
Almo Talud
Eric Firestone Gallery

Artist Almo Talud paints folkloric scenes that consider Latino identity through a queer lens, offering masculinity, memory, and fantasy. The artist was born in Miami, but grew up in the small city of Manizales, Colombia. His paintings depict men in celebratory moments, dressed in colorful attire and surrounded by horses. The images draw from his childhood memories, but challenge dominant patriarchal culture that surrounded him through his use of soft hues and thin lyrical marks of acrylic paint and pastel.

“I approach memory as a living material, imprecise, mutable, and charged with affection,” the artist has said. “Within this process, error, distortion, and formal synthesis become essential tools for revealing deeper layers of identity.”

Talud completed his secondary education in Bogotá, and then moved to New York, where he studied at the Art Students League of New York for four years. His works are inspired by self-taught artists, such as the Colombian artist Noé Léon. Talud’s work was recently on view in the group exhibition “General Assembly” at Eric Firestone Gallery and was also presented by the gallery in a two-artist installation with ceramics by Torben Gammelgaard at NOMAD Hamptons 2026.

Tony Dongfang Zhao

B. 2002, Beijing, China. Lives and works in New York.

Tower, 2026
Tony Dongfang Zhao
C24 Gallery

Drive My Car, 2025
Tony Dongfang Zhao
C24 Gallery

New York–based artist Tony Zhao paints vignettes of daily life, cropped to focus on minute details—empty seats on a train, a bracelet around a wrist, a light fixture. These seemingly mundane scenes take on a filmic quality in his oil on canvas compositions, thanks to his considered framing and his constrained, brooding color palette. Currently, his work is on view in the two-artist exhibition “Contact Points” at New York’s C24 Gallery through September 4th.

Born and raised in Beijing, Zhao received his BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2024. Before that, he worked as an independent curator and educator at UCCA Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, where a group exhibition of his own work was held in 2020. He also had a solo exhibition, “Lake House,” at A/W Space in London in 2024, and has been included in group shows at Union Street Gallery in Chicago and Gelman Gallery in Providence.

Heidi Howard

B. 1986, New York City. Lives and works in New York City.

Self- Rauschenberg Pink Periwinkle, 2026
Heidi Howard
David B. Smith Gallery

Bonnard Redon Bouquet, 2026
Heidi Howard
David B. Smith Gallery

New York artist Heidi Howard grew up surrounded by creativity as the daughter of avant-garde composer Earl Howard and installation artist Liz Phillips, shaping the way she approaches artmaking. Known for her still lifes, en plein air landscapes, and particularly her portraits, Howard sees art as inextricably tied to daily life. Before painting a portrait, Howard typically gets to know her model for months or even years, developing an understanding of their personality and aesthetics. She most often paints these portraits in person, in her home, even cooking meals for her models after the session is finished. Her paintings are characterized by their Dayglo palette, dancelike brush strokes, and embrace of irresolution.

In recent years, Howard’s practice has expanded beyond the confines of the canvas to include site-specific wall paintings, indoor and outdoor sculpture. Her work is currently on view in “Pistil Forms,” a duo exhibition with Esteban Cabeza de Baca at David B. Smith Gallery, the pair’s second collaboration at the gallery, following 2024’s “Night & Day Dreams.” Howard has also exhibited at Wave Hill Garden and Cultural Center, the Queens Museum, the Hunterdon Museum of Art, James Cohan Gallery, and Gaa Gallery, and has held residencies including the Terra Summer Residency, the Rauschenberg Residency, Carrizozo AIR, and Palazzo Monti. Her first monograph, Colors make us do vibrant deeds!, launched in 2024.

Michael Bühler-Rose

B. 1980, New Brunswick, New Jersey. Lives and works between New York City and Mysore, India.

Lichtenstein Brushtroke (Flowers), 2025
Michael Bühler-Rose
New Discretions

USM, Summer '26 (01), 2026
Michael Bühler-Rose
Halsey McKay Gallery

Artist Michael Bühler-Rose brings the Renaissance technique of wood intarsia and inlay to contemporary art, using the intricate medium to create deeply personal works that memorialize individual collections such as stacks of books, ritual paraphernalia, and print boxes.

Since his teenage years, Bühler-Rose practiced Vaishnavism, a branch of Hinduism devoted to the god Vishnu, and has devoted himself to the study of Sanskrit. Simultaneously, he was involved in the punk and hardcore music scenes in the Northeast. At 17, Bühler-Rose first traveled to India, becoming a Hare Krishna, renouncing his earthly possessions. Now, 25 years later, living as a layperson, the artist’s works reflect upon the value of objects in our lives and their role in ritual, image worship, religious practice and as art objects.

As he told Another Magazine, his work draws “parallels between the artist as priest, art object as a deity, the gallery as a post-Enlightenment temple, and the installation of the artwork as a ritual.”

Right now, Bühler-Rose’s work is currently on view in “Halo in a Haystack,” at Halsey McKay Gallery in Easthampton, his first solo exhibition with the gallery. These works are inspired by the Studiolo of the Ducal Palace in Gubbio (1478-82), a wooden study, intended for meditation and study, now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The studio is filled with illusionistic books, instruments, armor, and curiosities rendered through the art of the inlay technique intarsia. In the show, the artist focuses on one of his long-ago forfeited possessions: a copy of Halo in a Haystack, the debut LP by the New England hardcore band Converge, which has now become a sought-after collectors item.

Bühler-Rose’s work has been gaining new attention of late. Earlier this year, he presented a solo booth with Brussels’s Stems Gallery at Independent Art Fair. In 2024, he opened the solo exhibition “I Want Your Skull,” with New Discretions. His works have also been featured at NADA Miami 2025, NADA Miami 2023, NADA Miami 2022, and Future Fair 2022 with that gallery.

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Yoshitomo Nara to present two-gallery New York exhibition at David Zwirner in October 2026. https://ift.tt/iXPj1Tn

David Zwirner has announced a solo exhibition of works by Japanese artist Yoshitomo Nara, spanning the gallery’s two Chelsea locations at 537 West 20th Street and 533 West 19th Street in New York. Opening in October 2026, the show will be Nara’s first solo presentation with David Zwirner since it took on representation of the artist last November and his first major solo exhibition in New York in nearly a decade.

The exhibition brings together new paintings and drawings, recent sculptures, and early works selected by the artist, tracing four decades of the artist’s practice. His childhood encounters with nature, folklore, and children’s stories in rural northern Japan, alongside a self-built radio that introduced him to popular music, have shaped a visual language he has developed since the mid-1980s. His signature figures, rendered with large heads and wide eyes, were recognized in the 1990s as carriers of raw emotion with the spirit of punk music. Over time they have become cultural touchstones, functioning for many viewers as mirrors of their own vulnerabilities.

New paintings at the gallery’s 20th Street location demonstrate a significant development in Nara’s color palette, with more muted, nuanced tones and increasingly diffuse brushwork. A second group of works introduces a new technique for the artist: figures sketched in colored pencil, then developed with washes of translucent acrylic. Large-format monochrome drawings made with industrial oil-based paint sticks, meanwhile, show the range of his two-dimensional practice. Early works from the 1980s, also featured in the show, will provide a historical counterpoint.

At Zwirner’s 19th Street location, 13 bronze heads from 2024—enlarged 10 times from palm-sized clay prototypes—will be on view. Coated in white urethane paint, the monumental sculptures recall the snow “monsters” of Nara’s childhood winters.

Nara has seen a string of major museum shows over his career. Most recently, a major solo exhibition of the artist was shown at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Spain, as well as Museum Frieder Burda, Baden-Baden, Germany, and the Hayward Gallery, London.

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Ms. Lauryn Hill has curated a new commission by Lauren Halsey on London’s Piccadilly Lights. https://ift.tt/fz2uRj6

Rapper and singer-songwriter Ms. Lauryn Hill has curated a new site-specific commission by Los Angeles artist Lauren Halsey for Piccadilly Lights, the digital billboard overlooking London’s Piccadilly Circus, timed to the U.K. debut of Hill’s Diaspora Calling! music and arts festival.

The commission, a short animated film drawing on the imagery and symbols of the global African diaspora, played on the screen on the night of August 5th for a one-night-only presentation, ahead of the festival. The project was realized in close dialogue with London-based curator Lisa Anderson. Hill and her former Fugees bandmate Wyclef Jean stood in the circus surrounded by fans. “The crowd was captivated,” Hill told the Associated Press. Jean called the moment “surreal.”

The unveiling comes as Diaspora Calling! marks its 10th anniversary and travels outside the U.S. for the first time. Hill launched the festival in April 2016 at Brooklyn's Kings Theatre, opening with a gallery co-curated with MoCADA, Nader Haitian Art, and the Haiti Cultural Exchange, and a concert featuring Machel Montano, Stephen “Ragga” Marley, and Mr. Eazi, among others. She has described the project as a way of foregrounding “a resounding collective voice” across the African diaspora rather than a single narrative.

The anniversary performance will take place Friday, August 7th, at the National Bowl in Milton Keynes, hosted by Dave Chappelle, with Hill and Jean performing the Fugees’ “The Score” in full for its 30th anniversary, alongside sets from Erykah Badu, YG Marley, Zion Marley, Giggs, and Fireboy DML.

For Halsey, the Piccadilly Lights commission extends a run of major public projects. Her monumental sculpture park “sister dreamer,” presented by the Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND) and curated by Christine Y. Kim, has been on view in South Central Los Angeles since March, with support from the Mellon Foundation and backers including LeBron James, Brad Pitt, and Larry Gagosian, whose namesake gallery represents Halsey.

In 2023, she realized a rooftop commission for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and in 2024 she presented work as part of the 60th Biennale di Venezia. Halsey has also had solo exhibitions at the Serpentine in London (2024), the Seattle Art Museum (2022), the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2021), and the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris (2019).In 2020, she founded the Summaeverythang Community Center, which distributes free produce in South Central Los Angeles.

Following Friday’s concert, Diaspora Calling! is expected to continue expanding internationally; Hill told the AP she hopes to stage further editions.

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Meet the Gallerist Bringing World-Renowned Artists to a Tiny Greek Island https://ift.tt/soXvb9C

On a rocky outcrop on the small Greek island of Antiparos, a waist-high bronze statue of a rabbit sits on the edge of a turquoise infinity pool. Wearing a large, tented skirt, it faces the windswept Aegean Sea from the terrace of a private home. The scene could be from a Greek dream right out of the Odyssey; except the artwork, inspired by Japanese animism, is by renowned artist Leiko Ikemura.

Good Rabbit (2018–24) is one of several works by major international artists gathered in this remote Cycladic setting for “Melting Beauty,” a summer exhibition organized by Thea Montauti d’Harcourt Lyginos, founder of Geneva gallery L’Appartement. The surprisingly remote location of Antiparos, Greece, is a nod to her Greek husband and years of family summers on the island. Like her gallery in Geneva, the choice of location doubles down on Montauti d’Harcourt Lyginos’s philosophy of using residential spaces for art exhibitions.

Placing art in a domestic setting

Inside the house, a patchwork seascape by Sean Scully hangs opposite a 5-meter-long mural by Amy Sillman. A gigantic raw-canvas triptych by Martha Jungwirth occupies the living room; paintings by younger artists appear in the kitchen and bedrooms. Right next to the archaeological site of Despotiko, the house is in an out-of-the-way spot for a show of such high-profile names; others include Yinka Shonibare, Joan Snyder, Kennedy Yanko, and Liliane Tomasko under the fluid theme dreamed up by curator Craig Burnett.

Destination art shows are hardly new in the art world. Mega-gallery Hauser & Wirth has a permanent space in Menorca, Spain, for instance, while DESTE Foundation, an art organization run by Greek collector Dakis Joannou, has staged projects on nearby Hydra for well over a decade. More recently, galleries have become increasingly interested in meeting collectors where they are vacationing, whether at new art fairs in Ibiza and Saint-Tropez, or through pop-ups like this one, which runs through August 31st. During the exhibition’s opening days, the gallery directors, artists, and collectors dropping in suggested that its approach was working.

Everyone, it seems, wants to be part of the dreamy Greek island lifestyle, including artists. Snyder, the acclaimed American painter, for instance, created one of her “Pond” works specifically for the show, drawn in by Burnett, with whom she’s worked for years.

“It sounded intriguing to be in a show in Greece that [Burnett] was curating,” she said. “Of course I said yes.”

Artworks on the theme of “Melting Beauty”

Deep Pond, 2026
Joan Snyder
L'Appartement

Deep Pond (2026) is a muddy taupe square with a sticky acrylic void at its center. It’s dotted with tiny collaged green and pink blobs. For curator Burnett, it encapsulates the concept of “Melting Beauty.” Throughout the show, he explained, he chose works that seem in the middle of disintegration to evoke the sensual qualities that are so present in the Greek landscape beyond the residence’s borders. “It really suits the setting in terms of the title of the show—in terms of melting, the sense of liquefaction, but also the sense of the sensuality of emotion,” he said.

Alongside the renowned names are several rising artists. A painting of flowy female figures byKonstantina Krikzoni fills the kitchen while Amorelle Jacox’s gauzy symbolist canvases hang in the master bedroom.

“The show is invested with this kind of feeling of eros,” Burnett said, pointing to a copy of Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Man. In the book, Schiller contrasts “melting” beauty, which relaxes our minds, with the taut, rigid kind, which energizes us. A small, tabletop sculpture by Kennedy Yanko, made using her signature paint-skin and metal technique, offers a case in point. Its pink, folded form slumps sensually on its plinth, unexpectedly elegant.

L’Appartement’s first off-site

The island project makes more sense in light of Montauti d’Harcourt Lyginos’s career. She began at Sotheby’s in London, before moving to Geneva to work for Gagosian. When she established her own gallery in the Swiss lakeside city in 2024, she set out to create the kind of space she'd always wanted to visit: somewhere welcoming, with the feel of an apartment.

“I never envisioned this sort of multinational white cube, with many spaces around the world,” she said. “That was never the ambition.” Instead, she wanted a place where visitors could sit down and talk—something she felt Geneva lacked. On Antiparos, she’s translated that vision into a real home.

But why this specific island home? For Montauti d’Harcourt Lyginos, that connection starts with her name. “Thea” means goddess in Greek—a name her mother gave her, inspired by her love of ancient Greece. Then she married a Greek man, and the tie deepened. For the past decade, the family has spent its summers around the Aegean: Antiparos and nearby Paros as well as Schinoussa. “It’s really my second home,” she said.

When the opportunity arose to stage an exhibition in a newly built private residence on Antiparos, she didn’t hesitate. The island, she noted, already had the right audience.

“Historically, Antiparos always brought a very artsy crowd,” she said, adding that major gallerists Eva Presenhuber and Dominique Lévy both have connections to the island. It’s a haunt for Hollywood names, too: Tom Hanks and Sofia Coppola both vacation there.

But the gallerist isn’t sticking around beyond summer. Montauti d’Harcourt Lyginos is already considering another off-site project, this time in Turin, Italy. “I’m 100 percent Italian,” she said with a grin. But that will be at least two years before that happens.

Wall Sky Blue Grey, 2026
Sean Scully
L'Appartement

Flirt, 2024
Arlene Shechet
L'Appartement

Her first off-site exhibition taught her that such projects require more time than expected—most importantly to allow artists to create new commissions. The gallery may have escaped the white cube, but it has not escaped the logistical challenges of mounting an international exhibition.

After all, “Beautiful things are difficult, right?” she said, smiling.

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Ethiopian Painter and Artsy Vanguard alum Tesfaye Urgessa joins White Cube. https://ift.tt/MlTFDZB

White Cube has announced representation of Ethiopian painter and Artsy Vanguard alum Tesfaye Urgessa. The gallery will present his work at Frieze Seoul 2026, where his painting Fiber of grace (Schutz) 2 (2025) will be on view, ahead of his debut solo exhibition at White Cube Hong Kong, opening September 9, 2026.

Urgessa lives and works between Addis Ababa and Nürtingen, Germany, and was the first artist to represent Ethiopia in its inaugural national pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2024. His first solo museum presentation in Asia is currently on view at Red Brick Art Museum in Beijing, through August 9, 2026.

Describing himself primarily as a draughtsman, Urgessa begins each day with drawing before turning to painting on his studio floor, working with a long brush to build densely populated compositions in which bodies appear pressed against one another, at times enmeshed with their domestic surroundings.

His visual vocabulary draws on Ethiopian iconographic traditions and German Expressionism, as well as Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, whose work he has studied closely. He attributes this breadth to a formative encounter with European art after relocating to Germany to study at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Stuttgart, an experience that also brought him into contact with forms of racial and social difference new to him. Migration, familial relations, and community are recurring concerns in his work, shaped in part by his wife’s work with newly arrived migrants.

In 2023, Urgessa was selected in The Artsy Vanguard, the annual selection of the most promising artists working today. “I want my figures to have almost an emotional vulnerability,” he told writer Emily Steer in an interview.

The White Cube Hong Kong exhibition will bring together new paintings and works on paper made over the past year. Urgessa’s works are held in institutional collections including the Brooklyn Museum, New York; Castello di Rivoli, Turin; and the Uffizi Galleries, Florence.

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