Picasso painting valued at $1.1 million to be raffled in $120 charity draw. https://ift.tt/K9RX7IF

A third edition of the international charity raffle “1 Picasso for 100 Euros” has been launched in support of Alzheimer’s research. The program allows participants to purchase a €100 (about $117) ticket for a chance to win an original work by Pablo Picasso, which is valued at €1 million (about $1.1 million), with proceeds benefiting Fondation Recherche Alzheimer, a French research foundation.

Ticket sales opened on November 24th and are available exclusively through the raffle’s official website. A total of 120,000 tickets will be sold worldwide, and the draw is scheduled to take place on 14 April 2026 at 6 p.m. at Christie’s in Paris, under the supervision of a bailiff, and will be streamed live online.

The artwork to be awarded is Tête de femme (1941), a gouache-on-paper portrait of a woman. The piece comes from the collection of Opera Gallery, which is a partner in the initiative, and will be transferred to the winner following official validation after the draw. The work was painted during a tumultuous period between Picasso and Olga Khokhlova, his first wife. Olivier Picasso told the New York Times that it was conceived during an “extremely complicated [time] for my grandfather.”

The “1 Picasso for 100 Euros” concept was first realised in 2013, raising €5 million (about $5.8 million) for the preservation of the UNESCO-listed city of Tyre, in Lebanon. The first painting raffled was an early work on paper titled L’Homme au Gibus (1914). A second edition, organised in 2019, sold over 51,000 tickets across more than 100 countries and raised more than €5 million (about $5.8 million) for the humanitarian organisation CARE. The painting for the second raffle was Nature Morte (1921), an oil painting on canvas.

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Late Painter Joyce Pensato’s Dark, Subversive Cartoons Finally Get Their Due https://ift.tt/pHZRdYq

In 1992, a friend brought Joyce Pensato a rubber Mickey Mouse head scavenged from a garbage dump. Struck by the eerie expression of the toy, Pensato began painting and drawing it obsessively, stripping the Mouse of his cheer and reducing him to a few abstracted forms. In the resulting drawing, Untitled (1992), Mickey is barely a character at all, just two bulbous ears, a skull-like snout, and vacant, gazing eyes.

Over her career, Pensato spent decades dragging America’s cartoons into the abyss. Mickey’s cheerful grin disappears, Batman’s mask melts, and Felix the Cat looks startled and uneasy. These icons are rendered in quick, forceful strokes and thick drips of enamel. Using mostly black, white, silver, and gold, she took the shine of pop culture and ran it through her raw, expressive mark-making practice. The final images feel possessed: apparitions devoid of cheer, revealing something painful within.

Now, six years after her death at 78, ICA Miami has mounted the most ambitious presentation of Pensato’s work to date. On view through March 15, 2026, the eponymous retrospective assembles more than 65 works—from 1970s Batman drawings to her late-era, towering enamel paintings. The show offers the clearest view yet of a painter who saw the darkness of the cultural unconscious lurking behind pop’s cheeriest icons.

“Joyce Pensato” unfolds through a series of character-driven rooms that map Pensato’s obsessions. The exhibition opens with the 30-foot-long drawing Take Me to Your Leader (2018), a sprawling work featuring multiple warped versions of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. “Just walking into the room, it’s like a punch in the stomach,” Gean Moreno, curator of programs at ICA Miami, told Artsy. “It’s going to be super powerful, and as you go through, the intensity builds.”

Early life

Born in Brooklyn in 1941, Pensato first came to painting through an early interest in commercial art. She studied at the Art Students League before transferring to the New York Studio School in 1973. There, under the guidance of Mercedes Matter, she was pushed to pursue her gestural, image-driven approach. Around this time, she created her first charcoal drawings of comic-book characters—Spider-Man and Batman—some of which appear in the show.

Pensato’s first oil paintings carried hints of Joan Mitchell’s influence: muscular brushwork and flurries of color. Untitled (1980), featured at ICA Miami, leans toward landscape-like abstraction, built from broad fields of blues, yellows, and greens. But by 1990, she realized “the color was not working for me,” as she told the Brooklyn Rail.

By the early 1990s, she abandoned her vivid palette in favor of black-and-white enamel, a material Christopher Wool urged her to try. This shift marks the moment her voice fully clicked. In Untitled (Donald) (1991), Donald Duck emerges as a stark white silhouette against a black abyss, an apparition appearing to slip away into darkness.

How Joyce Pensato collected images

Pensato’s studio became a kind of reliquary, piled with toys and dolls rescued from dollar stores and sidewalks: a plush Cartman from South Park, a giant stuffed Bugs Bunny, and countless plastic Mickeys. These objects found their way into the paintings, distorted through vigorous brushstrokes and dripping enamel paint as she furiously reworked these characters.

In I Must Be Dreamin’ (2007), for instance, Felix the Cat appears less mischievous and more like a creature staring back at the viewer in shock. Elsewhere, Batman (1994) presents the hero as a blacked-out shape emerging from the dark, a presence built from shadows. Here, Batman absorbs post–Cold War paranoia into the silhouette of a vigilante protector.

Toward the end of the show, several artworks feature characters from The Simpsons, a family shaped by globalization and media saturation. Marge in Hell (2008), one of the show’s most disturbing images, depicts Marge possessed, her blue tower of hair resembling a tornado. By ripping these characters from their clean-lined origins, Pensato exposes the anxieties of American life that these cartoons were invented to soothe. Eyes bulge, outlines buckle, teeth emerge where smiles once sat. Familiar themes are turned into feral images.

“So much of the work comes from these strong, powerful gestures,” said Alex Gartenfeld, director of ICA Miami. “The visual complexity follows instantly in the drips—they’re an extension of the gesture itself. You feel both the physicality of the mark and the pull of gravity at the same time, which makes it seem like the artist is still right there. And because the enamel stays glossy and wet-looking, it’s as if the painting was made yesterday.”

Painting Mickey Mouse

Mickey Fried Up, 1990
Joyce Pensato
Hollis Taggart

Mickey Mouse is Pensato’s greatest muse. The earliest version featured in the show is Mary Ann’s Bambi (Mickey) (1989), a haunting charcoal drawing of the mouse. She painted nearly every version of him, from the early prototypes to the streamlined corporate star.

This show opens with a room devoted to Mickey that doubles as a timeline of Disney’s rise. Though it was unintentional, Pensato documents the industrialization of animation and the dominance of a single brand, as the image of Mickey unified into what we know today. “If you scratch just a little beneath the surface,” Moreno said, “there’s a whole regimentation of the industry of animation—it actually starts becoming a factory in the way American capitalism has built the factory, too.”

One work, Mr. Movie Star (2007), suggests polished celebrity, yet Mickey’s form appears worn down and partially eroded. The contradiction underscores how mass production can hollow out an icon’s meaning.

A long-overlooked legacy

Recognition came slowly for Pensato. She showed intermittently at group shows in New York, but it wasn’t until she was in her 60s that she had her first major New York solo show in 2007 at Petzel Gallery.

Pensato’s images grab you instantly: the scale, the energy, the strangeness of familiar faces pushed too far. But there’s more beneath the surface, an undercurrent of what she experienced in the world channeled through these cultural icons. “If you look at it straight on, you see this expressive gestural painting with all the psychological charge it has, that’s absolutely correct,” Moreno explained. “But if you take a little side step and you start looking at the social landscapes that these characters come from, then the second dimension totally opens up.”

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$31.4 million Lalanne Hippopotamus Bar is now most expensive design work ever sold at auction. https://ift.tt/ZsrPlod

French designer François-Xavier Lalanne’s Hippopotame Bar, pièce unique (1976) sold for $31.4 million at Sotheby’s on December 10th. The sale smashed its pre-sale high estimate of $10 million, setting the highest price for the artist at auction and the highest price achieved for a design work at auction. All prices include fees.

The final price was the product of a 26-minute bidding battle at the New York auction house, with seven bidders participating. This work confirms the growing popularity of design.

Hippopotame Bar, pièce unique was part of the Schlumberger Collection, belonging to French-born oil heiress and longtime Houston resident Anne Schlumberger and her family. Schlumberger commissioned the work in 1976, making it one of Lalanne’s earliest and most significant explorations of the hippopotamus form. This intimate collaboration yielded the only example executed in hand-wrought copper. Schlumberger died in April 2025.

François-Xavier and his wife, Claude, are often referred to as Les Lalanne, a design duo known for their whimsical, surreal sculptural furniture and fanciful bronzes. Blending animal forms with natural motifs, their work turns everyday use into playful artworks. The design duo gained recognition gradually. In the 1980s, they only caught the attention of the French. However, by the 2000s, the designers had finally gained the attention of international collectors, and that interest continues to rise today.

François-Xavier’s previous artist record was held by Rhinocretaire I (1964), another sculpture containing a bar, which was achieved. $19.4 million at Christie’s in 2023. In June, a similar piece came close to the record, when Grand Rhinocrétaire II (2003) fetched $16.4 million at Sotheby’s. This followed a sale dedicated to the designer, which fetched $59 million at Christie’s in October 2024.

Claude’s auction record is held by Très grand choupatte (2014), which sold for €4.9 million ($5.3 million) at Christie’s in 2023.

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Why 2026 Is a Pivotal Year for the Art Market, According to Massimo De Carlo https://ift.tt/7A8nYTS

A Perfect Day, 1999
Maurizio Cattelan
MASSIMODECARLO

It was only October, but Massimo De Carlo, founder of the gallery named after him, was already reflecting on how the year had gone. “2025 was a resetting year,” he said. After what he calls a “bad” 2024, the eminent dealer has spent recent months fine-tuning how his gallery operates to be “less dependent on the volatility of the market and the volatility of relationships.” The real verdict, he argued, will come in 2026, when it should be clearer whether the market challenges are structural or “occasional.” Are collectors totally recalibrating their buying behaviors, or is the recent slowdown a cyclical dip?

It is a typically pragmatic stance from the dry-humored dealer who, in the almost four decades since founding his gallery, has watched the art market pendulum swing with as much speed as the fortunes of his beloved soccer team, AC Milan. Since he founded his Milan gallery in 1987—after a detour through pharmacy studies and an early love of avant‑garde music—De Carlo has witnessed the art market undergo several permutations. One of Italy’s most influential art dealers, De Carlo represents more than 60 artists, including Maurizio Cattelan (who famously taped him to a wall in 1999) and Rudolf Stingel. His gallery now operates branches in Hong Kong, London, Paris, and an office in Seoul, as well as its original location in Milan.

For De Carlo, part of the current recalibration in the market is cultural. The trade grew used to “easy years,” he noted, and “lost…the perception that the art market is capricious.” His gallery’s answer has been to tighten ties with those who matter most: artists, collectors, and institutions. The more those relationships are cultivated, he said, the less the business is buffeted by “volatility.”

This effort is not about rethinking the gallery’s ethos, which is marked by a familial atmosphere. “We were never a corporate gallery,” he said, noting that artists were the key to his business. He used the analogy of publishers, where “the brand is made by the writers.” Today, he combines decades‑long artist relationships with a restless curiosity for new talent, with young names such as Diane Dal-Pra and Ludovic Nkoth joining the gallery in recent years. “Everything we did, we did for the artists,” he said.

Sleeping Beauty I, 2025
Ludovic Nkoth
MASSIMODECARLO

This extends to the gallery’s approach to programming. Each exhibition should be a “specific experience,” he said. He points to the range of shows in the London gallery, which occupies a charming floor of an 18th-century Mayfair townhouse. Recently, the gallery has mounted a refined Peter Halley presentation, before switching tack completely to showcase work by the young painter Lenz Geerk: an apt demonstration of the variety in its program.

De Carlo also likes to switch things up in his other galleries. In Paris, the gallery’s storefront—Pièce Unique—acts like a street‑level vitrine. Although there was originally a brick wall facing the street, the architect Kengo Kuma refitted it with a single sheet of glass, collapsing the threshold between city and gallery, turning a small room into a public moment. “It’s like a niche into the street where you can see art,” he said. In October, the space was the subject of much chatter during Art Basel Paris, when it opened Scandi artist duo Elmgreen & Dragset’s October 2025 (2025), a striking, hyperrealistic, life-size sculpture of a gallery assistant slumped forward over a large desk. “Gallery spaces can influence the possibilities of a show,” De Carlo said. “The gallery in that moment is a kind of producer.”

The gallery’s precise approach to artists and programming has been a constant throughout the art market’s twists and turns. Today, De Carlo believes the market is becoming “more serious, with collectors and trends that are less hysterical.” Practically, that means less speculation and more time for collectors to consider purchases. His preferred indicator of success is “more artworks that go directly from the wall of the gallery to the wall of the houses of the collectors,” rather than into storage. Before COVID, he said, too many pieces disappeared into warehouses. If the current market cycle is slower but more deliberate, it could be healthy, aligning commercial interest with the conviction and desire to live with art.

But the future is also dependent on the economy, which will have to create the right conditions “to support our vision and the vision of the audience.” De Carlo described himself as a “well‑informed pessimist,” not because he expects the worst, but because the only approach is to see risk clearly and keep moving. “I always say that a pessimistic person is an optimist with a lot of information,” he said.

His view of Milan, the city that formed him, illustrates this realism. The city’s advantage, he says, is its cultural density: design, fashion, food, and a surprising concentration of institutions and private foundations—Fondazione Trussardi, Fondazione Prada, the Triennale Design Museum, the Pirelli HangarBicocca—within a bikeable radius. “The concentration of all those things makes the city very exciting,” he said.

Yet he doesn’t expect the recent buzz around its art scene—with new galleries opening and wealthy residents drawn in by Italy’s attractive tax regime—to alter local market taste, yet. Milan is “a city that is still linked to some very old values.” He noted that many Milan collectors are most interested in 20th-century Italian artists like Lucio Fontana, Enrico Castellani, and Piero Manzoni, and movements such as Arte Povera. “It’s still a city that is not really completely connected with what’s going on in the future,” he noted. “I do not think that one or two galleries will change this, but it is important that they think that there is a possibility, and this makes Milan more attractive.”

As for the future more broadly, De Carlo sees “two landscapes:” one is “hell;” the other is “who knows what.” He paraphrased a famous quote, “Once you are in hell, go on.” “This is the exciting part of the business,” he said. “We are in a difficult situation, but we have to go on.”

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Nan Goldin’s “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency” gets first U.K. show at Gagosian. https://ift.tt/LCchuMg

Gagosian will open an exhibition of 126 photographs from Nan Goldin’s “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency” at its Davies Street gallery in London on January 13th, 2026. The presentation will mark the first time the complete series has been shown in the United Kingdom. It also aligns with the 40th anniversary of the photobook’s publication.

Now 72, Goldin is an American photographer known for documenting the queer community during the AIDS crisis with raw, diaristic images that capture nightlife and the complexities of relationships. Her work is celebrated for shifting photography toward more personal and candid forms of expression.

Goldin worked on “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency” from 1973 to 1986. The photographs examine relationships and gender through images taken of Goldin’s personal life. The work has come to define the downtown New York community in which it was made, as well as evoking the realities of addiction and the challenges of LGBTQ+ life at the time.

“I don’t select people in order to photograph them; I photograph directly from my life,” Goldin said in a press statement. “These pictures come out of relationships, not observation. They are an invitation to my world, but now they have become a record of the generation that was lost.”

Goldin first developed this project as a slideshow of images, playing along with a soundtrack. This artwork was first presented in New York nightclubs before being published as a book by Aperture in 1986. It is currently in its 23rd printing.

The Gagosian exhibition will open during a period of significant international focus on Goldin’s work. A major retrospective devoted to her moving-image work, “This Will Not End Well,” is currently on view at Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan through February 15, 2026, before traveling to the Grand Palais in Paris from March 18 to June 21, 2026. Goldin’s Stendhal Syndrome (2024) installation is on view at the Vancouver Art Gallery through April 12, 2026.

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Stacey Gillian Abe Reclaims Indigo Blue in Tender Paintings of Women https://ift.tt/mybjgh3

The loss of a family member can have a remarkable impact on the life of an artist. A case in point: Stacey Gillian Abe was deeply inspired by her late grandmother. In Namirimu (2025), the artist depicts her own experiences of grief and loneliness: A figure sleeps against a pale background, almost empty except for some ghostly strands of wild grass. But most of all, it is her beloved grandmother’s “comfort and warmth” that Abe wanted to capture in these paintings. “Although she didn’t walk much, her presence was invaluable,” Abe said. “She was a sociable and kind woman. If you were new to the area, you would assume she was the chairlady of the local council. People came to see her every day just to spend time with her.”

Abe was born in the West Nile region of Uganda and graduated from Kyambogo University in 2014. She has since worked across painting and photography while showing at galleries including Lévy Gorvy Dayan and Jeffrey Deitch. Her peaceful and sumptuous paintings are now on view at a new show at Unit in London called “Garden of Blue Whispers.” Portrait of My Grandmother 1 (2025), for example, shows the family matriarch gazing powerfully, one hand softly clutching golden material that hangs over her shoulder. In The Garden 1 (2024), a nude figure with cloven hooves lounges across a silky expanse of fabric. Dry Season 2 (2025) depicts a woman’s face close up. With fine foliage growing over her features, she turns to the viewer with eyes drowsily half closed. In this, Abe’s second show in London with Unit, the artist continues her practice of depicting women with indigo-blue skin, while widening her interest to the nature that she grew up with.

Portrait of My Grandmother 1, 2025
Stacey Gillian Abe
Unit

The Garden 1, 2024
Stacey Gillian Abe
Unit

The paintings are intended to summon Abe’s memories of the seasonal changes in her home village. As strong winds and rain activate the parched land, they bring new scents and sounds, from grasshopper rhythms to the smell of damp earth. “The scent of soil when the first rains of the wet season hit the ground; the process of gathering white ants from termite mounds after a long night of rain; and those extremely cold nights following an extended dry season are just a few examples of the small pleasures of life,” says the artist, who is now based in Kampala, Uganda. “I am certain that I will never be able to find or experience these things in the city.”

Birth of Vanessa (2025), for instance, contrasts a bare and sand-colored landscape with a few flowers that burst through the earth around her central figure, while Dry Season 1 (2025) depicts a few intricate green threads beginning to grow from an otherwise featureless ground. Across the paintings, her figures are nude or dressed in delicate summer clothes, suggestive of a heated atmosphere as they lie in open natural space.

Elsewhere in her paintings, there are subtle moments capturing the deep connection between human and animal lives in her village. For example, in The Garden 3 (2025), the figure’s hooves and furry lower legs meet with fleshy thighs. This surreal aspect of the body is intended to evoke her memory of seeing cow hoofprints in wet soil.

The Garden 3, 2025
Stacey Gillian Abe
Unit

The Farmer's Daughter 3, 2025
Stacey Gillian Abe
Unit

Throughout her practice, Abe’s figures are depicted with their skin an indigo blue, an ongoing motif following a 2020 photo self-portrait series titled “Indigogo.” In this series, the artist painted herself head-to-toe in the color, a response to the historical link between the valuable dye and the slave trade. “My curiosity was sparked by the discovery of indigo dye and its importance as one of the currencies used to buy and sell Black slaves,” she said. In her paintings, her subjects’ skin is rich and deep, this historically loaded color tapping into the artist’s desire to liberate the Black body. In works such as The Garden 2 (2023), the women she depicts seem utterly at peace, serene, and almost asleep in their natural surroundings.

The artist avoids controlling the exact shade of her subjects’ bodies, which imbues them with individuality. “It is a hue that lies in the middle of the color spectrum, and I’ve not nailed a layering technique to achieve the indigo you see at the end of each finished painting. The skin tone of each subject feels distinct to them.” She also integrates hand-embroidery into her work, a technique passed down through three generations. Termite Mound (2025), for example, includes delicate embroidered gold leaves and pink flowers that seem to glow from the surface. They wrap around the shoulders of her protagonist, a delicate addition to the painting that connects the natural with the ethereal.

Flowers in Sepia, 2025
Stacey Gillian Abe
Unit

By directly depicting her grandmother, summoning the environment that surrounded her, and including techniques passed down, Abe creates a tender image of the experiences that have shaped her. “Writing this love letter to my grandma and honoring her as a matriarch in my family just makes me miss her more,” she says. “But even in that emptiness, I can cling to the countless memories I have of her.”

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Nnena Kalu wins Turner Prize 2025. https://ift.tt/bWVApif

Nnena Kalu, known for her rhythmic and boldly colored abstract work, has won the 2025 Turner Prize, the top award for contemporary artists in the United Kingdom. The news was announced on December 9th during a ceremony at the Bradford Grammar School in England. Kalu is the first neurodivergent artist to win the prize.

“This is a major, major moment for a lot of people,” Charlotte Hollinshead, Kalu’s artistic facilitator, said in an acceptance speech. “It’s seismic. It’s broken a very stubborn glass ceiling.…Nnena’s career reflects the long, often very frustrating journey we’ve been on together…to challenge people’s preconceptions about differently-abled artists.”

The London-based artist will receive £25,000 ($33,000). The jury recognized Kalu’s work from two 2024 exhibitions: Drawing 21 (2021), a work on paper featured in “Conversations,” a group show at Liverpool’s Walker Art Gallery; and Hanging Sculpture 1 to 10. Barcelona, an installation that was featured in Manifesta 15 in Barcelona.

Born in Glasgow in 1966, Kalu is celebrated for her vivid, tactile approach to sculpture and drawing. She works with repurposed materials—VHS tape, fabric, rope, and paper—to build cocoon-like forms through repeated wrapping and binding gestures. Her layered works on paper bear similarly energetic marks.

A longtime resident artist at ActionSpace (a London-based studio for disabled artists), Kalu has recently gained wider recognition. Kalu has mounted plenty of solo exhibitions in recent years, including “Creations of Care” at Norway’s Kunsthall Stavanger in 2025 and an eponymous show at London’s Arcadia Missa in 2024, to name a couple.

The other artists shortlisted for the 2025 Turner Prize were Rene Matić, Mohammed Sami, and Zadie Xa. Those artists will each receive £10,000 ($13,500). The Turner Prize exhibition, featuring all four artists, will remain on view at Bradford’s Cartwright Hall Art Gallery through February 22, 2026.

The Turner Prize was founded in 1984, named after J.M.W. Turner. Last year, Jasleen Kaur won the prize, with shortlisted artists including Pio Abad, Claudette Johnson, and Delaine Le Bas. Notable past winners include Lubaina Himid in 2017, Steve McQueen in 1999, and Anish Kapoor in 1991.

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