National Portrait Gallery acquires Harley Weir’s portrait of Charli XCX. https://ift.tt/lRXQZ3Y

The National Portrait Gallery in London has acquired a portrait of pop star Charli XCX by British photographer Harley Weir. The photograph, which was shot in 2024, will be added to the museum’s collection this week. The untitled work shows the singer leaning against a wall in a white crop top and unbuttoned black jeans and is now on view in the gallery’s History Makers Now space, which spotlights figures who have shaped contemporary culture.

The image became one of the defining pictures of Charli’s Brat era, the 2024 album that turned her into a mainstream phenomenon on the strength of its candor and “debauched swagger,” as the BBC described it. The acquisition was funded by a gift from the Bukhman Foundation.

“Harley Weir has developed a distinctive photographic language that combines intimacy with a powerful sense of presence,” said Brandei Estes, the gallery’s senior curator of photographs. “We are delighted to acquire this striking portrait of Charli XCX, which captures one of the defining cultural figures of her generation.”

The acquisition arrives the same week Charli released her eighth album, Music, Fashion, Film, built around chopped-up guitar samples and distorted melodies that find her reflecting on fame and artistic identity in Brat’s aftermath.

Portraits of pop stars have been grabbing headlines recently. In March, the National Portrait Gallery acquired West End Girl (Lily Allen) (2025), a painting by Spanish artist Nieves González that doubled as the cover art for Allen’s album of the same name. Charli herself was previously the subject of a portrait by painter Issy Wood, commissioned for the November 2025 cover of Vanity Fair.

Beyond music, Charli has been expanding into film, with recent roles in the Polish drama Erupcja, the ensemble film Sacrifice alongside Anya Taylor-Joy and Chris Evans, and the mockumentary The Moment, based on the release of the Brat album. She is set to headline the Reading and Leeds festivals in the U.K. next month before a North American tour in the fall.

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Georgia O’Keeffe Ghost Ranch paintings to go on display in the U.K. for the first time in 2027. https://ift.tt/4eXqS2o

The Courtauld Gallery in London will open “Georgia O’Keeffe: Ghost Ranch” in October 2027, an exhibition of nearly two dozen works that explore how the American artist’s New Mexico property shaped her painting practice. Most of the works have never been exhibited in the U.K., according to the Guardian, which first reported the news. Only six of the roughly two dozen paintings in the exhibition have been previously exhibited in Britain, it revealed.

Ghost Ranch, a remote property in the high desert north of Santa Fe, became O’Keeffe’s summer home starting in 1934, when she began renting a room on the 21,000-acre estate before eventually purchasing it. “As soon as I saw it, that was my country,” she once said. “I’d never seen anything like it before, but it fitted to me exactly.”

Dr. Karen Serres, senior curator of paintings at the Courtauld, told the Guardian that O’Keeffe’s relationship to Ghost Ranch remains under-recognized in Britain despite its centrality to her work. “Ghost Ranch was such an important part of her life, and it illuminates a large part of her art in general,” Serres said, pointing to works like Red and Yellow Cliffs (1940) and Gerald’s Tree I (1937) as direct responses to the surrounding landscape.

The show also arrives against a history of uneven critical reception to O’Keeffe in the U.K. In 1993, a Hayward Gallery exhibition drew dismissive reviews from British critics, and more recently, the reception to her 2016 Tate Modern show was largely framed around disputing assumptions that her flower paintings depicted female genitalia. “She’s known as just this formidable female artist,” said Serres. “But actually seeing her work, understanding what she’s about, I don’t think we are there yet.”

The Courtauld exhibition follows a fresh wave of attention to O’Keeffe elsewhere. The Detroit Institute of Arts opens “Georgia O’Keeffe: Architecture” on September 11th, an exhibition of nearly 40 works examining her engagement with the built environment, from Manhattan skyscrapers to New Mexico adobe structures, anchored by Stables (1932), which is owned by the museum. On October 3rd, Hauser & Wirth inaugurates its new Palo Alto gallery with “Calder | O’Keeffe,” the first exhibition devoted to the artist’s decades-long friendship with Alexander Calder, developed with the Calder Foundation and the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. A documentary about the artist, directed by Academy Award– and Emmy Award–winning filmmakers Paul Wagner and Ellen Casey Wagner, was also released earlier this year.

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Legendary Gallerist Claes Nordenhake on Artists, Arguments, and 50 Years in the Art Business https://ift.tt/05iaVIT

“As a young gallerist, I was a cleaner, a security guard, an interiordesigner, a carpenter, a courier, a warehouse manager, and a stock clerk,” said Claes Nordenhake, the Swedish art dealer whose eponymous enterprise, Galerie Nordenhake, celebrates its half-century this year.

Over five decades, the business has grown from a modest space opened in 1976 in Malmö on the southern coast of Sweden, showing contemporary art—favoring Minimalist, often conceptual, works—into a powerhouse brand with galleries in Stockholm, Berlin, and Mexico City.

Talking to Artsy from his Berlin branch, Nordenhake’s stocktake of his early duties doesn’t end there. Starting out, he was obliged to be a photographer, philosopher, business strategist, psychotherapist, and a divorce counselor, he explained. He could be a “sympathetic drinking buddy” one day and an “arrogant bastard” the next. And, when the occasion allowed, he was an art dealer.

Roots in Malmö

Nordenhake was born in 1948 and grew up in the Skåne region of southern Sweden, where his family owned several quarries celebrated for their Ebony Black granite—a material highly sought after by artists such as Isamu Noguchi and Max Bill. “Coming from a rather conventional business family, sort of a bourgeois upbringing, the artists that I encountered offered another different view on life,” he noted.

And there was art at home. “My old man had a collection of mainly Swedish artists, but at some point, he got absolutely fascinated by Lucio Fontana. He had three paintings: one red, one white, and one blue. Fontana in the 1960s was like the ultimate avant-garde.”

Green Felt Piece, 1983-84
Robert Morris
Galerie Nordenhake

Wandrelief, 1988
Ulrich Rückriem
Galerie Nordenhake

Nordenhake initially trained as a lawyer but quit his studies to pursue his interest in art. I suggest that Malmö in the 1970s could hardly have been a center of Conceptual art. “No, for sure. But the advantage of Malmö was that it was very close to the rest of Europe,” Nordenhake explained. “I would drive my car, and if I left Malmö in the morning, I would be in Cologne in the afternoon or evening. It would take the same time from Malmö to Stockholm.”

He targeted a “cosmopolitan” clientele. “There were maybe five collectors who were interested in international art and wanted to be part of that scene,” he said. “I was convinced of certain things. I was very interested in Concrete art…and I made these few collectors follow my interest.” He kept costs low—“hand to mouth”—and acquired a reputation for showing monochrome paintings by internationally renowned artists such as Robert Mangold, Alan Uglow, and Marcia Hafif, as well as Minimalist sculptures by Robert Morris and Ulrich Rückriem.

Closer to home, he championed the work of the Swedish modernist painter Olle Bærtling. “He was absolutely exceptional,” recalled Nordenhake.

“He was working with colors that, I mean…the blue would never be the blue of the sky, the green never the green of the grass. They were sorts of fields of energy.”

How Nordenhake expanded its footprint

The business moved to Stockholm in the mid-1980s, when Nordenhake was offered a “sensational space” in the Royal Academy of Fine Arts building. “I’m sure there were a lot of discussions in the gallery about whether one should let the enemy into the house?” he said, laughing, referring to the inclusion—or contamination—of a commercial gallery in a museum context. The rooms allowed him to present larger sculptures, including works by Richard Serra.

In 2000 he opened in Berlin, when the city had become a magnet for both artists and gallerists taking advantage of the low rents for studios and a sense of zeitgeist. “I thought it would have been easier,” he recalled. “It was an experiment to come with three kids and my wife and move the entire family. I come from a shit-kicking little town in southern Sweden, so I have no experience of big cities.”

At the time, Berlin’s reputation as an artistic hotbed following the fall of the Wall was more than a cliché, said Nordenhake, at least to begin with. “From 1990 to 2010, even a young artist could find an apartment and a studio rather easily,” Nordenhake said. Collectors would visit from abroad to experience the scene.

Rents rose over the subsequent years, and the tone shifted. But Nordenhake has helped to foster a collegiate atmosphere among the city’s galleries. In 2005, he co-founded (with Max Hetzler) the first Gallery Weekend Berlin, which, two decades later, now includes some 50 participating galleries and has become a template copied in major cities around the world.

Nordenhake opened a third gallery in 2018 in Mexico City, on the suggestion of his former intern, Toni Sadurní Viñas (the gallery’s current director). “Mexico City is the new Berlin,” he declared. “

At the beginning of this century and until recently, Berlin was a place where artists, even young artists, could afford both a studio and an apartment. Which is still the case in Mexico City.” And, he noted, the general public appreciates its artistic heritage, “from the pre-Columbian artifacts to Frida Kahlo and the muralists. Art means something for Mexicans.”

Lessons from 50 years in the art trade

Is it easy to work with artists over a long period? “I would say usually no. But of course, there are always exceptions,” he smiled. The artist-gallerist relationship is similar to a “marriage,” he said, with all the “conflicts” that implies. And being a gallerist is a work in progress. “You learn stuff,” he noted, adding that his opinion on artists’ work can change over time. “I’m much more generous than I used to be. My art world has gotten bigger.”

“Contemporary art is a notoriously slippery commodity in which to do business,” said Philip Hook, author of Rogues’ Gallery, a History of Art and its Dealers. “Very few art dealers remain at the forefront of the avant-garde beyond one generation.” Claes’s son, Sten, is now a director at Galerie Nordenhake, offering a future path for a gallery that needs exceptional mental and commercial agility to continue interpreting the ever-changing new.

This is illustrated by the gallery’s 50th anniversary group exhibitions, staged across its three locations, showing artists from its past and present roster, from Bærtling’s last known painting, Ksard (1980), to newly commissioned works by Lap-See Lam (winner of the prestigious Lise Wilhelmsen Art Award last year).

And while he is aware of the challenges—both commercially and intellectually—Nordenhake stated that “curiosity is the most amazing driving force. I’m a traveling salesman and a schoolteacher.” Just two more professions to add to his list.

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The New York Knicks’ NBA championship trophy to be displayed at the American Museum of Natural History. https://ift.tt/2Mecl89

The New York Knicks’ 2025–26 NBA championship trophy is getting a museum moment.

Formally known as the Larry O’Brien Championship Trophy, the championship award is going on view at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), as part of the exhibition “For the Win: Objects of Sports Excellence.” The trophy will be unveiled at the museum on July 27th. “For the Win” will be on view through January 3, 2027.

Designed by Tiffany & Co., the trophy depicts a regulation-size basketball entering a net, cast in sterling silver with gold vermeil and weighing about 30 pounds. It bears the name of every NBA champion since 1947 and takes its name from Larry O’Brien, who served as the league’s commissioner from 1975 to 1984.

The trophy’s arrival marks a full-circle moment for “For the Win,” which opened in May. Among its roughly 70 objects—spanning 15 sports and nearly 150 years of athletic history—is a basketball-shaped fob presented to former Knicks head coach Red Holzman after the team’s 1973 championship, its last before this year’s win.

“When we opened ‘For the Win,’ Red Holzman’s 1973 Knicks championship fob was the piece that connected this city to its basketball past,” said guest curator Vikki Tobak in a statement. “Now the NBA’s Larry O’Brien Trophy arrives with the Knicks’ names freshly engraved on it, and that circle closes in a way we never could have planned.”

AMNH president Sean M. Decatur framed the trophy’s arrival as part of a broader moment. “This championship has given New Yorkers an extraordinary moment to celebrate together,” he said, calling the trophy “a powerful symbol of athletic achievement.”

Other highlights in “For the Win” include one of Jesse Owens’s gold medals from the 1936 Berlin Olympics, the NFL’s Vince Lombardi Trophy, and the New York Liberty’s 2024 WNBA championship trophy. Tobak curates the exhibition in partnership with Rich Kleiman, the CEO of the sports entertainment company Boardroom, and with Kate Kiseeva, associate curator in the Museum’s Division of Physical Sciences.

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MFA Boston to host exclusive U.S. Pierre-Auguste Renoir exhibition in February 2027. https://ift.tt/siBLbed

Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette (Bal du moulin de la galette), 1876
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Musée d'Orsay

The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston will be the only U.S. venue for “Renoir and Love,” opening February 28, 2027—a once-in-a-generation exhibition co-organized with the Musée d’Orsay in Paris and the National Gallery in London, and billed as the first show devoted specifically to the theme of love in Renoir’s work. It is also the museum’s first major Pierre-Auguste Renoir exhibition in more than four decades. The show will bring together 40 paintings from collections around the world and will be on view through June 13, 2027.

“Renoir and Love” centers on the two decades between the mid-1860s and mid-1880s, a period the museum considers the height of Renoir’s output, when the artist turned repeatedly to themes of friendship, family, and flirtation rather than the moralizing or anecdotal subjects favored by some of his Impressionist peers. The exhibition argues that Renoir’s scenes of gardens, cafés, and theaters were among his greatest masterpieces. .

Highlights include Dance at Moulin de la Galette (1876), on loan from the Musée d’Orsay, shown alongside its companion painting, Dance in the Country (1883), also from the d’Orsay, and the MFA’s own Dance at Bougival (1883). Also on view are At Renoir’s Home (1876), which depicts the sociability of the artist’s studio, and Madame Monet and Her Son (1874), which points to Renoir’s friendship with fellow Impressionist Claude Monet.

The show also arrives amid renewed market interest in works by Renoir. In November 2025, a previously unseen 1890s Renoir depicting the artist’s son and his nanny, Gabrielle Renard, sold for $2 million at Drouot in Paris after being out of public view for a century. This May, Bonhams auctioned 21 additional paintings from Renard’s personal collection, many never before exhibited. Renoir’s auction record remains $78.1 million, set by Dance at Le moulin de la Galette at Sotheby’s New York in 1990.

The exhibition arrives in a city with a complicated history with the artist, however. In 2015, protesters calling themselves Renoir Sucks at Painting picketed outside the MFA Boston, arguing the museum should remove his work from view..

This exhibition hopes to reframe the Impressionist’s work for a new generation, focusing on Renoir’s unique emotional connection to themes of modern love and friendship.

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5 Art Habits That Can Help You Live Longer https://ift.tt/KjGEQJD

We all know the classic doctor-recommended tenets of healthy living—from getting our daily 10,000 steps to eating our “five a day.” Maintaining these habits can help us live longer, healthier, and happier lives.

But recent research has uncovered a new regimen that may help keep our bodies healthier as we age: engaging in the arts.

A University College London (UCL) study into epigenetic aging—the biological deterioration of our cells caused by changes in how our DNA is regulated over time—found that creative and cultural activities may affect aging in a way comparable to physical exercise.

The study defined arts engagement broadly, from singing, dancing, and painting, to visiting exhibitions, museums, and heritage sites.

Observing #71, 2023
Matt Lambert (b. 1982)
Gallery Different

The findings add to growing interest in art as a health-promoting behavior. Some countries, including the Netherlands and Greece, have even prescribed art for conditions such as depression and cardiovascular disease.

But UCL’s study is the first of its kind to show such a connection between the arts and biological age. “There is a growing body of work demonstrating that arts engagement is a health-promoting behavior,” said Daisy Fancourt, the lead author of the study and the head of the Social Biobehavioural Research Group at UCL. “ We should promote creative engagement just like we promote 10,000 steps a day or five-a-day of fruits and vegetables.”

The research is part of a £3.5 million ($4.7 million), seven-year program led by UCL and funded by the Wellcome. As that work continues, Fancourt offers five practical ways to make art part of a healthy-aging regimen.

Make creativity a regular habit

Sleepless creativity, 2021
Aldona Jablonska Klimczak
Art Nou Millenni Gallery

The UCL research has shown that, overall, the more often people engage in the arts, the lower their biological age may be.

In one test, epigenetic aging was 0.8 years lower in people who engaged with the arts weekly and 1.02 years lower among those who did so monthly, compared to those engaging once or twice a year.

“Regular, sustained engagement is key,” said Fancourt. She recommends approaching creativity “little and often” so that it becomes part of everyday life.

That might mean spending a few minutes drawing or painting, doing 10 minutes of crafting, taking photographs during a walk, or listening closely to a concert. The activity does not need to be ambitious or time-consuming to count.

2. Start small with achievable goals

Look, 2015
Rebecca Doughty
The Schoolhouse Gallery

Fancourt warns against “bingeing on art.”

“Just as with crash food diets, you should avoid making major changes to your art ‘intake’ straight away,” she said. “Don’t feel you need to start dozens of new artistic hobbies or sign up to daily art classes, as big behavioural adjustments rarely last. “

Instead, set small, achievable goals for creative tasks that fit naturally into your daily routine.

It can also help to schedule artistic activities for times when you tend to feel stressed, sad, tired, or lonely. Like exercise, engaging with art can lift both mood and energy levels, Fancourt says.

“In the same way that we structure our food intake to recharge our batteries, you can use art, music, reading, and culture to help regulate your energy or mood,” she told Artsy.

3. Mix up your art diet

June Picnic, 2024
Claire Cushman
Artemis Gallery

McAmerica, 2025
Nicole Santiago
First Street Gallery

How often you engage with art matters, but variety may be important too.

Fancourt’s study found an association between younger biological age and participating in a diverse range of cultural and creative activities.

Much as we are encouraged to eat a variety of fruits and vegetables, we may gain more from the arts when we vary what we consume and create.

“Each type of arts activity has different effects on us cognitively, emotionally, and physiologically,” Fancourt said. “You should mix up your watching, making, listening, and creating.”

Try combining active and receptive experiences. You could visit a gallery one week, attend a concert the next, then spend an afternoon painting, photographing, or making something by hand.

4. Turn online discovery into real-world engagement

White dog side view working at window with office plant, 2026
Scott Reeder
Saenger Galería

Digital platforms have made it easier than ever to discover artists, explore exhibitions, and encounter art from around the world. But Fancourt suggests that, where possible, online engagement should be a starting point rather than the whole experience.

“Viewing art on our phones or laptops or participating virtually in activities can dilute some of the health benefits of the arts,” she said.

Use digital tools to find artists, galleries, fairs, and exhibitions that interest you, then look for opportunities to experience art in person—whether by visiting a local show, attending a live event, or spending time with a work you own. “Make your daily arts engagement real, not virtual, for maximum effects,” Fancourt said.

5. Give art your full attention

At the Museum I, 2020
Toni Hamel
Oeno Gallery

Mindfulness—the practice of maintaining awareness of our thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations, and surroundings—can be difficult amid the demands of everyday life. But Fancourt says being fully present is an important part of getting the most from an artistic activity.

“Take time to savor the experience,” she said. “Whatever creative activity you’re doing, spend some of the time trying to think of nothing other than the art and being entirely present. Resist the urge to multitask.”

Put your phone away while visiting an exhibition. Listen to a piece of music without checking your email. When painting, crafting, or reading, focus on the colors, textures, sounds, and emotions of the experience rather than trying to complete another task at the same time.

The aim is not simply to fit more art into your day, but to pay attention to it when you do.

…It’s never too late to begin

Barnett Newman: Vir Heroicus Sublimis/MoMA (Man, Heroic and Sublime), 2023
Joe Fig
Cristin Tierney

According to the UCL study, the “associations between leisure and epigenetic ageing became more prominent in adults from mid-life.”

This means that “the relationship between arts engagement and biological aging becomes larger and more important as we get older,” Fancourt says.

So it’s never too late to improve your health through the arts. By making art engagement regular, manageable, varied, physical, and mindful, you may be adding more than enjoyment to your life—you may also be supporting healthier aging.

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The Whitney to stage major Roy Lichtenstein exhibition in October 2026. https://ift.tt/j3nBeMz

This fall, the Whitney Museum of American Art will open “Roy Lichtenstein: Like New,” a survey of more than 130 works tracing the artist’s career from the early 1940s through the 1990s, opening on October 11th.

Organized by curator Meg Onli with artist Alex Da Corte as guest curator, the exhibition moves beyond Lichtenstein’s Pop-era surfaces to focus on his preoccupation with how images are copied, enlarged, circulated, and altered as they travel. Spanning painting, drawing, collage, prints, sculpture, and film, the show promises a fresh look at one of the 20th century’s defining names.

Notably, the exhibition will reunite all eight works from Lichtenstein’s 1962 debut at Leo Castelli Gallery for the first time. The exhibition also includes recreations of three murals, among them a nearly 96-foot-long iteration of Greene Street Mural (1983), and an outdoor presentation of Girl in Window (1964) realized by Da Corte.

The checklist draws on Lichtenstein’s best-known paintings, including Look Mickey (1961), Drowning Girl (1963), Happy Tears (1964), and Artist’s Studio ‘The Dance’ (1974). The Whitney show also features artists who absorbed Lichtenstein’s ideas about copying and authorship, including Louise Lawler, Richard Pettibone, and Sturtevant.

The exhibition frames Lichtenstein’s images as newly relevant in an age of digital cropping, filtering, and reposting. It will argue that the artist understood that pictures are unstable well before digital circulation made that condition universal.

“Like New” arrives amid a broader wave of institutional attention to Lichtenstein. The Dallas Museum of Art and the Nasher Sculpture Center are jointly presenting “Roy Lichtenstein in the Studio” through mid-August, while the Guggenheim Museum’s “Guggenheim Pop” remains on view through January 2027.

Timed tickets for “Like New” are on sale now; member previews run October 8th through 10th ahead of the public opening.

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